Article
- Date:
- Sunday 1st October 2023
Year A, The Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint
- Service:
- Parish Eucharist
- Readings:
- [passage=Ezekiel 18.1-4,25-32/]
Matthew 21.23-32
From the time of their sojourn in the desert, the children of Israel lived under a terrible theological delusion: that their earthly condition related directly to their faithfulness to YWHW. Conversely, then, the worse off they became, the worse their behaviour must have been, so that by the time of the 6th Century exile in Babylon, Jeremiah and Ezekiel were beside themselves with hysterical condemnation of the unfaithfulness of the Children of Israel such that, among the worst instances, powerless and therefore innocent women were raped by the Assyrians as a punishment for unfaithfulness to the will of YWHW. Needless to say, the theory is not symmetrical: the Chosen people did not fare better when they behaved better.
This reciprocal way of thinking inevitably became absorbed in Christianity such that, in spite of the massive influence of Saint Augustine, the most important theologian in Western Christianity during the Middle Ages, who placed primary value on faith in God rather than human conduct, contractual morality persisted. At the Reformation Martin Luther revived Saint Augustine's idea that it was faith in God that counted, not human conduct; but it was not long before reforming Protestants were burning miscreants as enthusiastically as Catholics were.
And so, in our own day, in spite of a strong theoretical emphasis in Protestantism on the importance of faith in God, there is an overwhelming tendency to relate behaviour to outcome; but whereas in the time of Ezekiel the outcome was earthly, in our era behaviour is related to salvation. So it is that the gay, or the heretic, or the non-believer, or the simply different will be damned.
This brief history of the consequences of morality and immorality shows how two fundamental Christian concepts have become hopelessly entangled. We were created to live a holy life in obedience to God, loving 'him' in thankful worship and each other in sacrificial action. That is why we are here; but such good conduct in life has nothing whatsoever to do with whether we are saved by the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. When we dispute with each other about the merits of human conduct this is a discussion about the holy life and not a discussion about who will be saved. I labour this point because I have frequently heard this highly questionable doctrine preached within these very walls. Nobody, neither Pope nor Prelate, scholar nor enthusiast, knows who will be saved because nobody knows the scope of God's mercy; but I think it is reasonable to say that it is impossible to imagine any act we may do which could justify eternal damnation.
Throughout the history of Western Christianity the linkage between private morality, predominantly sexual, and the enjoyment of eternal life, has been a cynical mechanism of religious leaders to control the lives of the faithful, from the gleaming marble of the Vatican to the swamp chapels of Alabama the story has been the same. Even in the Church of England, so long laudably reticent in moral matters, there has been a strident tendency in the last quarter of a century to discuss the terms of exclusion, as usual revolving around sex and gender issues, far removed from the great evils of our 'collective indifference to, and even our implicit connivance with, injustice.
The benighted Israel, particularly the women, had precious little control over their circumstances; if there were malefactors, they were the ruling class not the common people. All they could do was keep The Law and pay the Temple tariff when they broke it. But we are different; we are articulate, wealthy and powerful; many of us sit on committees and affect the lives of others; both as civically empowered citizens and spiritually empowered by the death and Resurrection of Jesus, we have a higher calling but that is, in the words of Saint Paul, to build people up and not pull them down. Most people know when they have fallen short; most people do their best within a tangle of contradiction; most people need encouragement and not condemnation. I profoundly disagree with the obsession in our prayer books and hymnals with the notion that we are, above everything else, sinners. We are no such thing. We were made to exercise free will which inevitably leads to wrong choices but we cannot be blamed for the way we were made.
So when we read the Old Testament Prophets we have to be very careful not only to understand what they were saying in their own situation but whether and how that applies to the Christian life in the 21st Century; and in this respect I will end with three brief points: first, the Christian ethical context primarily concerns the collective and not the individual, and this is because Jesus, contrary to our instincts, ranked the community over the family and the family over the individual; secondly, living the holy life depends on our motive and our capacity for sacrifice, not on external appearance and our capacity for condemnation; and, finally, we should be united and not divided by things that we find difficult because Christ's Church is a community of the willing not the perfect, striving to do better but knowing that the best will never be anything like good enough. That is our condition; that is the condition of all of us, for which we are properly entitled to mutual compassion.