PENTECOST XVII

• Proverbs 31:10-31 and Psalm 1  • 
• Wisdom of Solomon 1:16-2:1, 12-22 or Jeremiah 11:18-20 and Psalm 54  • 
• James 3:13 - 4:3, 7-8a  • 
• Mark 9:30-37

The words ‘childish’ and ‘childlike’ are very similar, yet there is a huge and important difference in their meaning. It is a difference that takes on special significance in the context of this week’s readings. Both the Old Testament and the Epistle continue the theme of previous weeks – the nature of wisdom, its importance and its elusiveness. How easy it is to mistake what is truly wise, for what is ‘worldly wise’ – ‘wisdom' as James puts it, that 'does not come down from above’.

Christ Blessing the Children, Nicolaes Maes (1652-53)

The Gospel for this week also takes up an earlier theme – the inability of the disciples to fathom Jesus’ warning that the ‘prophet’ they have followed for three years, and to whom they have more or less given over their daily lives, is going to be betrayed and killed like a criminal. That much, perhaps, they could have grasped, albeit with the deepest reluctance, but that this was necessary was more than they could understand.

This conversation about violence and death, oddly, provides the background to the touching moment when Jesus takes a child in his arms. How are the two things connected? The answer is that real spiritual understanding has a childlike quality about it.

In First Corinthians St Paul contrasts wisdom with childishness. Here, in this passage from Mark, Jesus makes a certain kind of childlike innocence a pre-requisite for understanding God’s purpose of salvation. Now, centuries later, we are in a position to see and to understand what the disciples at this stage in the Gospel story could not. But it is no less difficult for us than for them to strip away all the assumptions and presuppositions that we bring to hearing the Word of God. Children in their innocence often (though not always) have a kind of honesty and simplicity that makes them open to the wonder of things. Rightly, the process of growing up requires us to put away childish things. But it also brings with it the risk that we will lose the childlike openness to wonder which is a condition of wisdom, and become 'worldly wise' instead.

HOLY CROSS 2012

• Numbers 21:4b-9 and Psalm 98:1-5 or Psalm 78:1-2, 34-38 •
• 1 Corinthians 1:18-24 •
• John 3:13-17

CloistersCross 12th century Museum of Art, New York

Legend has it that in 326 AD, during a pilgrimage she made to Jerusalem, Saint Helena, the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, discovered  the True Cross of Jesus . She ordered a church to be built at the site of the discovery. On Sept 14 635 AD a portion of the Cross was carried into the newly consecrated 'Church of the Holy Sepulchre'. Since that time Sept 14  has been a red letter day in the Christian Calendar. Holy Cross Day invites us to meditate on the deeply mysterious fact that God chose an instrument of tortured death to be the means of salvation. 
The Cross provided Isaac Watts with the central image of possibly the most famous of all Christian hymns

• When I survey the wondrous cross
  On which the Prince of glory died,
  My richest gain I count but loss,
  And pour contempt on all my pride.

  
  

  Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
  Save in the death of Christ my God!
  All the vain things that charm me most,
  I sacrifice them to His blood.

  
  

  See from His head, His hands, His feet,
  Sorrow and love flow mingled down!
  Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
  Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

  
  

  His dying crimson, like a robe,
  Spreads o’er His body on the tree;
  Then I am dead to all the globe,
  And all the globe is dead to me.

  
  

  Were the whole realm of nature mine,
  That were a present far too small;
  Love so amazing, so divine,
  Demands my soul, my life, my all.

  Isaac Watts (1674-1748)
   

PENTECOST XVI

Lamp of Wisdom -- statue in Waterperry Gardens, Oxford UK

• Proverbs 1:20-33 and Psalm 19 or Wisdom of Solomon 7:26 - 8:1  • 
• Isaiah 50:4-9a and Psalm 116:1-9  • 
• James 3:1-12  • 
• Mark 8:27-38

This week’s three readings are linked by an unmistakable purpose; they all issue stern warnings. The Gospel even expressly describes Jesus as ‘sternly’ ordering  the disciples not to tell people that he is the Messiah. This is somewhat strange, though. Has he not just invited them to name him in this way, and aren’t they supposed to be spreading the Good News of his Messiahship?  So why the stern warning? The answer becomes almost immediately apparent. Jesus does not want the disciples proclaiming him to be the Messiah until they fully understand what that means, and Peter’s response to the prospect of Christ’s sufferings and death shows very clearly that they do NOT understand. The famous instruction about Christian discipleship -- ‘To save your life, you have to lose it’ -- is given partly to correct this deep misunderstanding.

‘Losing your life to save it’ is a paradox that lies at the very center of the Gospel. There is no saying of Jesus that warrants closer attention. In the context of this week’s other warnings, however, our attention is being directed to a more general lesson. The Old Testament lesson warns us about the costs of seeking wisdom only after our own foolishness has led us into disaster, while the Epistle of James warns us about the special danger attached to setting ourselves up as teachers -- that we 'will be judged with greater strictness'. The talents that are most effective in imparting wisdom and teaching the truth are the very same talents by which we convince ourselves, as well as others, of things that are in fact false and foolish.

Taken together, the message is this. Be sure you really know what the Christian Gospel truly teaches, especially if you set yourself up to teach it. Being sincere and well intentioned in what you believe and what you tell others is not enough. Sincerity and error often go together.

This is a message that runs strongly counter to contemporary opinion. Nowadays the ideas of truth and wisdom have generally abandoned in favor of personal sincerity and good intentions -- a doctrine that contemporary Christians sign up to as readily as non-Christians. But today’s lessons say to all of us – You have been warned! This is not enough.

 

PENTECOST XV

Icon of the Syrophoenician woman

• Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23 and Psalm 125 •
• Isaiah 35:4-7a and Psalm 146 •
• James 2:1-10, (11-13), 14-17 •
• Mark 7:24-37

The Gospel for this week includes a very puzzling exchange between Jesus and a Gentile woman. Having heard of his fame, she asks him to heal her daughter. He replies – oddly – that bread for children shouldn’t be given to dogs. She responds by saying that even dogs get crumbs. This appears to be the right answer, because Jesus commends her, and her daughter is healed. But what is it all about? The answer is this: an indispensible context for Jesus’ ministry is the faith handed down from Abraham. And the principal audience are the people who share that faith -- the Jews. They are the ‘children’ who are to be fed first. The Gentile woman understands this, and accepts her ‘underdog’ status, but nevertheless she sees that she, and her daughter, need God’s blessing too – and she has the courage to ask for it. This combination of insight, humility and longing is what commends her to Jesus.

It is something of the same attitude that James is advocating in the Epistle. This Sunday’s passage contains the much quoted line ‘faith without works is dead’. It is a thought that modern Christians who feel more comfortable with ethics than theology readily endorse. Yet it was this very same line that made Martin Luther loath the Epistle of James, because it so easily leads to faith in God being replaced by faith in human good deeds. Set alongside the Gospel passage, however, we can interpret it a little differently. Between what we say and what we do, a gap can open up. So our actions and attitudes are the most convincing evidence of what we truly believe.

The reading from Proverbs for this Sunday says: ‘The rich and the poor have this in common: the LORD is the maker of them all’. If we believe that every human being – Gentile as well as Jew -- stands in need of God’s redeeming grace, and that without it everyone is pretty much a broken vessel, then the distinctions of wealth, social status, ethnic origin and education will be things we hold in relatively little regard. Holding this belief, however, is not simply a matter of saying so when asked. What James in another passage calls ‘true religion’ must embody this belief in actions as much as in words.

PENTECOST XIV

El Greco -- St James

• Song of Solomon 2:8-13 and Psalm 45:1-2, 6-9 •
• Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9 and Psalm 15 •
• James 1:17-27 •
• Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

It is relatively rarely in the Lectionary that the connection between the Epistle and the Gospel is quite so clear as it is on this Sunday. The subject of both is the concept of ‘defilement’, what it is and why it matters. ‘Defilement’ is not a term we use easily, nowadays, partly as a result of the fact that we live in a much less religious world than previous generations did. Yet something like this concept is hard to dispense with. How are we to capture the particularly loathsome nature of child pornography or the vandalizing of graves, except with language that goes beyond customary moral concepts of right and wrong, and captures something of the revulsion that the idea of ‘defilement’ expresses?

At the same time, we know that human beings easily create merely conventional taboos. The violation of these is a ‘defilement’ that then licenses contempt and oppression against those who do not, or will not conform to them. It is this conventionalism that Jesus condemns in this week’s Gospel passage. Such people, he says, treat ‘human precepts’ as though they were fundamental ‘doctrines’, and thereby ‘abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition’. They venerate mere codes of action, when what matters is the heart and spirit from which our actions spring.

In the Epistle, James extends the thought to make us more circumspect in this regard. Moral outrage is simply anger; it ‘does not produce God’s righteousness’. Religion ‘pure and undefiled’ requires ‘meekness’  -- which is to say humility in our judgment of others, and a close watch on our own sincerity.

PENTECOST XII

Jesus teaching in the Temple  James Tissot (1836-1902)

• 1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14 and Psalm 111  • 
• Proverbs 9:1-6 and Psalm 34:9-14  • 
• Ephesians 5:15-20  • 
• John 6:51-58

The Gospel for this week continues the theme of the previous week as it elaborates still further the symbolic image of ‘the bread of life’. In these verses, the image of wine is added. Both symbols figure very prominently in John’s Gospel, and relate unmistakably to the distinctive Christian rite of Holy Communion. This rite seems to have been well established among the followers of Christ at a very early stage, and since it is likely that John’s Gospel was composed somewhere around six decades after the death of Jesus, it is seems certain that it was written in full knowledge of this fact.

What this shows is that the Eucharist did not arise from a new theological doctrine or creed. Rather, its celebration had a power to speak directly to the deep spiritual needs and hopes of people. The struggle to understand its mysterious nature flowed from an immediate acknowledgement of its significance, as it. has always done and continues to.

With unusual literary skill, the fourth Evangelist weaves the teachings of Jesus with their essential Jewish background, and his subsequent Crucifixion and Resurrection, into a remarkably unified narrative. It is one that has provided Christians over two millennia with an indispensible source of insight into and reflection upon the central practice of their faith.

The other Lectionary readings for this week point out a further important connection. References to bread and wine occur in the short passages from Proverbs and Ephesians. Together they alert us to the fact that the Eucharist is not simply a distinctive religious ritual. It is intimately connected with living life wisely.

PENTECOST XI

The Bread Line -- Grigorij Grigorjewitsch Mjassojedow (1872)

• 2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33 and Psalm 130  • 
• 1 Kings 19:4-8 and Psalm 34:1-8  • 
• Ephesians 4:25-5:2  • 
• John 6:35, 41-51

Jesus said, “I am the bread of life”. Taken in isolation, and stripped of its familiarity, this seems an exceptionally strange utterance. What can it mean? The Gospel for this Sunday selects a few verses out of a longer passage which really needs to be read as a whole, since it provides the context within which this strange claim is to be understood. Earlier in the chapter, Jesus chastises the people who have been pursuing him. This is the same crowd of “five thousand” that was miraculously fed from a few loaves and fishes. Jesus rebukes them because they had seen this, not as a spiritual sign, but as a marvelous source of free food.

It is against this background that he makes his assertion, and goes on to contrast the “bread” he has to offer, not just with the free bread the crowd was seeking, but with the manna that saved the Israelites from starvation in the wilderness. The key difference, we might say, is between the means to sustain life, and the source of life itself. It is a deep spiritual error to mistake the bread our bodies need with the “bread” that “endures to eternal life”.

This is a mistake that can be made with the best of intentions. The reference to Jesus as the bread of life is sometimes invoked in connection with Christian action for the alleviation of poverty and destitution -- as it is with the inclusion of Mjassojedow's picture of 'The Bread Line' in the Vanderbilt Library page for this week of the Lectionary. This is an indisputably worthy cause. Yet, the spiritual life that Jesus offers is needed by, and available to the poor no less than the prosperous. Wealth is no guarantee of salvation, everyone agrees. But conversely, being on the breadline is no insurmountable obstacle to it. Everyone needs to remember the Mosaic injunction with which Jesus repels the devil – “Man does not live by bread alone”.

John’s Gospel takes the thought further. There is a quite different kind of bread for which we ought to hunger, and it is to be found supremely, and uniquely, in Christ Jesus. Prosperity matters, but not as much as 'the riches of his grace'.