Article
- Date:
- Sunday 14th July 2024
Year B, The Seventh Sunday after Trinity - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint
- Service:
- Parish Eucharist
- Readings:
- Amos 7.7-15
Ephesians 1.3-14
Mark 6.14-29
Looked at practically, there is hardly anything more useless than a human head, even to cannibals! But there it is, on a platter, the bonus payment for a stripper. King Herod's residual saving grace is that he knew the reality of the futility. What forced his hand was not a matter of state but a matter of personal prestige, a matter of keeping up appearances. The executed John had been preaching against Herod's unlawful, so-called marriage, to Herodias, his brother's wife; but even today, in democracies with mass media, and social media, the powerful rarely suffer for their infractions. Herod could have ignored John; he would probably have been better off if he had.
Amos, in our Old Testament Reading, was much more dangerous, making a frontal attack on the rule of King Jeroboam in a period of political turbulence when the Kingdom of Israel was on the verge of obliteration from a foreign power. But on this occasion Amos was lucky.
And so, our Old Testament and Gospel readings deal with the trivial and the powerful and the connection between the two: we could say, with some justification, that the more powerful we are the more we are captivated by the trivial. If the big things are taken care of, we can obsess over the small things.
Many social scientists have opined that a society that has conquered the evil of want will use their surplus resources for creative ends. They quite properly cite the artistic efflorescence of the Italian Renaissance made possible by the generation of surplus wealth but I fear this is a glorious exception to the general rule that almost all surplus wealth accrues to those who already have too much and whose patronage of the arts is nugatory.
Then, if we examine our own lives, from day to day, after we have secured the means to live, what do we do with our surplus time and money?
We might be vaguely worried about a world gone wrong, we might ask ourselves as we drop a tin into the food bank why food banks exist, we might agonise whether or not we should respond to a beggar but, I fear, the answer is that the majority of us just want to be left alone, never to be assailed by the cutting criticisms of Amos or John.
As a member of the choil I attend more funerals than most and what never fails to surprise me is the manner of our lives. Is it really enough to be a good parent, a faithful employee and an avid sports fan? Are we content that our goodness should be so internalised?
The conventional riposte is contained in our reading from Ephesians, which clearly sets out our sacred inheritance in the love and power of God. This contrast puts our earthly triviality into perspective, it fosters the familiar, almost compulsory, cliche, that earthly pursuits are trivial. So they are; but this stark contrast does not fully express the proper link between the two. Our divine inheritance does not simply depend on loving God and getting on with the trivia of our earthly lives as separate strands of our lives; loving god and neighbour cannot be separated, they are entwined. We cannot do one without the other.
Thus, returning to Amos and John, we are obligated as Christians to discern the important from the trivial. This does not mean, as Puritans of old thought it did, abandoning the arts and pleasures, good fellowship and ease from the trials of life, but it does mean putting our pursuits into perspective, of being honest with ourselves about the real worth of things. How often do we set our hearts on something that is of transient value? How often do we become committed to an objective that turns out to be transient or even illusory? How often do we get worried, or even Panicky, about something that turns out not to matter.
We can easily dissociate ourselves from the egotistical barbarism that demands the head of a holy man on a platter: our manner of getting our own way in matters small and great is much less overt, much more subtle. People like us need to be careful not to offend.
To sum up: everything has a price in money or time. We must be careful not to spend too much of either on things that are not worth it. This means thinking more and reacting less. It means praying and consciously aligning our Christian values with the evens of our daily life; it means subjecting our behaviour to the scrutiny of our Scriptures.
Although there are some places in the world where people lose their lives for our faith, we are not likely to be asked to suffer that fate; but we should expect of ourselves that we make sacrifices, giving up the trivial in favour of the eternal.