Article
- Date:
- Sunday 5th February 2023
Year A, The Fifth Sunday before Lent - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint
- Service:
- Eucharist
- Readings:
- Isaiah 58.1-9
Matthew 5.13-20
On the whole, reading the Old Testament from end to end is repetitively depressing; at the top level, the Lord and his Chosen People make Covenants and then the People break them; at the next level down, from the Book of Judges to the close of the 2nd Book of Kings, the people and their rulers are unfaithful and meet with disaster, the Lord relents, and then the process repeats itself, to such an extent that by the time of the break-up of the Kingdom of Judea the People are so consumed with their own guilt that they think they deserve the worst that God through their enemies can visit upon them; indeed, the vengeance they think they deserve is so unspeakable that there are some bits of Jeremiah and Ezekiel that are well nigh unreadable and can only have been written by people in a state of complete breakdown.
To that extent, the Old Testament is a harrowing story about deeply damaged people trying desperately hard to come to terms with an abstract God, torn between the assurance of the sacrificial system and a set of legal tariffs and a succession of prophets who just wouldn't stop fulminating; which is why it's such a comforting experience to close the book of Malachi and open the Gospel of Matthew.
The major theme of the prophets, represented in our reading today from Isaiah is that ceremonial Church, no matter how elegant, is worth nothing unless it is twinned with a practical love of justice. This is a recurrent theme rooted in the legislation in the book of Deuteronomy on the treatment of the poor and of immigrants and given new expression in our Gospel passage from the Sermon on the Mount.
God's exasperation, voiced through his Prophets is obvious enough but we are not blessed with such irritants. I cannot think of an Old Testament prophet who would get through the door of a Church, let alone get into a pulpit. We are sadly unchallenged and therefore sadly self satisfied. It isn't so much that we are the established Church as that we are the establishment, the people in power, the people that make the rules.
So how are we doing in the area of practical justice. it seems to me that there are three really important issues which we should be discussing but which don't get enough attention: first, after centuries of Church support for the well off, how are we doing on social justice advocacy for the poor of our own land and the poor of the world? Secondly, as an environmental catastrophe looms, how seriously are we taking it? And, thirdly, how are we to square the pacifism of the Sermon on the Mount with the Church's support for the war in Ukraine?
Practical justice, it turns out, is tough in two very different ways: first, it requires study, thought and prayer. And, secondly, it will almost certainly involve individual and collective sacrifice. Every time I listen to the Intercessions I say to myself: "It isn't enough to ask The Lord to do this or that good thing; most of what is going wrong in the world is the result of human weakness or failure, so what we have got wrong we have to put right." I don't mind, for example, asking the Lord to give us the strength and resolve to bring about social justice but I wouldn't dream of asking God to bring about social justice.
So as we worship, particularly in the context of the beautiful language of the Book of Common Prayer, we must not think that that is sufficient and we must certainly guard against being so taken in by the language that that is all we do. Over the centuries since Saint Paul wrote about the Eucharist that was going wrong in Corinth, our worship has tended to become, particularly since the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, ever more doctrinal and divorced from the messy world outside. If we took away the Intercessions from our Eucharistic services, how many prayers would we say for the world, for the poor and for peace? This is not to decry doctrine in any way but it has to be a spur to the establishment of God's practical justice and this must be rooted in the Trinity: in the Father who made everything so that we might be free to love 'him' and each other; in the Son, whose life and teaching gives us concrete guidance about what justice requires; and in the Spirit who is always with us but who doesn't get enough of a look-in.
We may in reading Isaiah pity the poor Chosen People who were bound to fail, who just didn't stand a chance, who were led into perdition by rigid observance, poor leaders and excoriating prophets and who, quite unnecessarily, took the guilt upon themselves which properly belonged with the powerful but, then, history never changes in one respect, that no matter what the crisis may be, it's the poor that pay.
Let me end on a more encouraging note. I firmly believe that our sort of people could do much better for the world and ourselves if we only found sufficient time to do three things: to pray, mostly in listening mode; to study the problems we face with a view to devising solutions; and, linked to that, to get outside our intellectual comfort zone where we might learn about ideas which are not in our own tool-kit. It isn't really much to ask of ourselves that we should, say, watch a couple of hours less television and go exploring. WE are the best educated society that the world has ever known and yet we seem to be intellectually and emotionally paralysed.
What each of us does may appear to be futile in the face of our many crises but if we all behave more responsibly the impact will be massive.