Sunday 29th October 2017
(Lev. 19:1-2, 15-18; 1 Thess. 2:1-8; Matt. 22:34-46)
In the Rule, St Benedict says that prayer should be short and pure, unless it is prolonged under the inspiration of divine grace, and I was musing this week whether this also apples to preaching. By which I mean, given the readings for today, unless one is in receipt of divine grace, it is difficult to find anything original to say about our Lord’s response to the Pharisee. Most of us will have heard ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind’ and ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’ time and time again throughout our years as churchgoers. So I will endeavour to be short in what I say, though I’m not sure if it will be pure, as I can’t quite work out what that would be in relation to preaching.
If as Jesus says these two commandments arewhat all the law and prophets depend upon, then I suppose we all know well enough that the first is telling us that we need to love God with every fibre of our being, though if we have any self-knowledgeat all we know that this is easier said than done. Just as we probably have the same feeling about being told that we need to love our neighbour as ourselves. How many times have we had the nagging thought, ‘What even him or her?’ It is this second commandment that I will try to say something about, because it seems to me that there is one thing it might be useful to talk about and that is there can be some ambiguity in the Scriptures, to say the least, about who we are called upon to see as our neighbour.
This is illustrated by the passage we heard from Leviticus, from which Jesus of course quotes the commandment to love our neighbour. In it, the Lord is telling Moses that his people must not render unjust judgement. Perhaps oddly to our ears these days, God is saying that we should not show partiality to the poor, just as we must not defer to the great, but that with justice we must judge all our neighbours, and that the basis of this judgement should be that we love our neighbour as we do ourselves. Yet tucked away in that passage is the ambiguity, as God tells the Israelites that they should not hate in their hearts anyone of their kin. And that raises a question that still affects us today – are our neighbours just our kin, are theyonly those people who we find acceptable because they are just like us?
Anyone who has ever read the Book of Joshua knows that the Israelites don’t seem to have looked upon the Canaanites and the other tribes in the land as their neighbours – they certainly didn’t show any love towards them. Yet throughout the Hebrew Bible there is another vision, a desire to push beyond the confines of the tribe. A vision that calls for hospitality to be shown to the strangers and aliens in the land. A vision that culminates in the work of many of the prophets where they see the tribes and nations of the world coming to Zion so that they can pay homage like Israel does to the one true God and Creator of the universe.And this same ambiguous dialectic between inclusion and exclusion – about who is our neighbour - is also present in Christianity. We have all met Christians who seem rather keener to exclude than include, people who have very clear ideas about just who their neighbour might be, and it usually ends up being someone just like them.
For the past few weeks, the lectionary has been giving us these passages from Matthew’s Gospel, which are the series of discourses given by Jesus after his arrival in Jerusalem, but before he begins his final journey to the cross on Calvary. Some of these discourses are teachings to the disciples, others like this one today are presented as being a response to the Pharisees, while others are answers to the Sadducees. They seem to be quite a mixed bag, from what we might describe as Jesus’s greatest hits like what is the greatest commandment, or rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s as we had last week, to those passages that are distinctly more obscure. For instance, like the parable about the wedding banquet we had a couple of weeks ago, when the first lot of guests don’t turn up and are then rejected, so that the kingsends out his servants to bring in anybody they can find to the party, including one poor chap who isn’t dressed right, perhaps becausehe didn’t expect to be there in the first place, but who is subsequently bound and thrown out into the outer darkness, where there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth. I’m sure I’m not alone in having to admit that I’ve always found this to be a head-scratcher.
But it is perhaps worth noting in Matthew what is the last of these discourses he records before he moves on to his account of the betrayal of Jesus and the last supper. The final parable Matthew gives is the one about the Son of Man coming at the Last Judgement, where he says to those at his right hand that they have a place in his Kingdom, because they fed him when he was hungry, gave him something to drink when he was thirsty, welcomed him when he was a stranger.In this parable, Jesus is identifying himself with the least among us, with those who are hungry, thirsty and outcast, and warning that how we treat them is how we will be treated at the last. I don’t think that it is reading too much into Matthew’s intentions to wonder whether we do not also have in this final parable a reminder of who it is that we are to see as our neighbour. That despite what Leviticus might seem to be saying, it is in the weak, the defenceless, the outcast that we are to see our neighbours, and in whom by implication we should see ourselves, by remembering that we can also be poor and despised. That we can see in them more clearly what humanity should be than we can in the strong, the arrogant and the powerful.
And if we return to today’s Gospel, and recall the question Jesus then asked of the Pharisees, we have an indication that how we treat the vulnerable does not just help us see who our neighbours are, but also gives us an insight into God. Jesus asks the Pharisees who they think the Messiah is, and then whether he can just be a son of the house of David. We perhaps might find the exegesis of Psalm 110 that Jesus give rather forced – the business about ‘The Lord said to my Lord’ – but unusually for the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew is giving us here a clear indication that in the Messiah, God will not just be acting in an unprecedented way, but that he will in some way actually be present. That he will no longer just be the God accompanying Israel on its journey, but he will be in the Messiah making that journey himself, and experiencing all its pain and suffering as he travels along the road with us. If this is the case, then that final parable of the Last Judgement seems to be saying to us, that in how we treat the weak and the vulnerable and the despised, we will see in fact the true character of our relationship to God.
In many of the other parables of these final discourses, the message seems to be that we need to be ready, that we need to be awake, and perhaps what we need to be ready for, is to be awake to see the opportunities we have in our lives to serve the vulnerable, and through them God, by realising that they are really no different from us. Unfortunately though, far too many Christians throughout history have appeared to be more like the king in the other parable. They in fact spend all their time at the wedding banquet sniffing about looking for those who aren’t dressed quite right, who they can then take great pleasure in throwing out into the outer darkness. Some of our more fundamentalist brothers and sisters in the various different forms of Christianity seem to be more preoccupied with fantasying about all those who will be wailing and gnashing their teeth at the last, than in insuring that there will be anybody else at the banquet.
This past week in the refectory, we have been hearing about the life, death and witness of Fr Christian de Chergé and his fellow monks at the Trappist monastery at Tibhirine in Algeria. Fr Christian and his colleagues lived in rural Algeria among an overwhelmingly Muslim population, and attempted to be a witness to Christ, not through seeking converts, but by showing their love for their neighbours by trying to be there to help and serve them without asking for anything in return. They sadly lost their lives during the brutal civil war that wracked Algeria in the 1990s and which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. While the Trappists were kidnapped by the rebel forces, it is, I think, still uncertain whether they were murdered by the rebels, or were killed in a botched rescue attempt by the Algerian army. But the point is that the Trappists stayed in this desperate situation, not because they were looking to proselytise anybody, but because they wanted to be good neighbours to the villagers among whom they had lived and worked for decades. They wanted to do something to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and welcome the stranger in the situation in which they found themselves. A form of witness to Christ that I suspect those of our brothers and sisters more intent on deciding on God’s behalf who should be cast into the outer darkness would not understand.
Yet all Fr Christian and his brothers were doing is what Paul said to the Thessalonians at the end of the passage we also heard today. The Trappists cared for their neighbours, and so were determined to share the Gospel of God with them, and they did this by sharing their own selves, because their neighbours were very dear to them. In fact in that apparently throwaway remark in his letter, Paul does indicate something very important about sharing the Gospel of God. Of course, it perhaps doesn’t help us to see that because Paul begins with a characteristic bit of hyperbole that one may find exasperating or endearing depending upon one’s temperament, because while he may not strictly be flattering the Thessalonians, he is clearly rhetorically buttering them up. But he is undoubtedly right that to love your neighbour, to share the Gospel of God, you have to be willing to share your self, to show to the people you are ministering to, that this ministry is not about domination, but about love – love for the other as they really are and not how we would like them to be.
Of course, as I said at the beginning, it is something of an understatement to say this isn’t an easy thing to do, and so we must be ready to love God, and pray for and wait upon those inspirations of divine grace that St Benedict talked about. But we also have to remember that according to Jesus himself the second greatest commandment is to love your neighbour as yourself, and so it might be helpful in spotting whether it really is God’s grace moving among us, that we shouldalways remember the quicker we consign one of our neighbours to the outer darkness, we may also be consigning God and ourselves to it as well.
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