6th Sunday after Pentecost, June 26 2016
2 Kings 2.1-14; Psalm 77; Galatians 5.1, 13-25; Luke 9.51-62
St Andrew’s Scots Memorial Church, Jerusalem
“To share an island with the English is the lot the Almighty has assigned to the Scots and the Welsh.” This is how the late Ian Henderson begins his little book Scotland: Kirk and People. I have to say that some days it’s easier than others.
On Thursday, people in the United Kingdom voted 52% to 48% to leave the European Union. It was, said one commentator, “perhaps the largest shock to European politics since the fall of the Berlin Wall”.
Many of us had feared this might happen. But waking up to the results on Friday morning, people both within and without the UK were profoundly shocked. Jonathan Freedland spoke for more than himself when he wrote in the Guardian:
“We have woken up in a different country. The Britain that existed until 23 June 2016 will not exist any more… This is not the country it was yesterday. That place has gone for ever.”
As the recriminations began, the prime minister, David Cameron, announced his intention to resign, and several Labour MPs called on the leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, to do the same.
Large majorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to stay in the EU. In Gibraltar, even the Barbary apes voted to remain. England and Wales voted to leave more narrowly, but given the size of their populations, their vote was decisive.
The Scots will try to stay in Europe, with or without a second referendum on independence from the UK. Northern Ireland may try to do the same. The alternative there may well be the re-imposition of a hard border with its Irish neighbours to the South, reviving the fundamental constitutional questions that divide Protestant and Catholic communities in Ulster and jeopardizing a hard-won and jealously guarded peace.
But the most significant division revealed by the referendum is not between a pro-European Scotland and Northern Ireland and an anti-European England and Wales, but within England itself – a split between the cosmopolitan voters of London and other large English cities and the “left-behind” voters in small towns and the countryside. Over the last several decades, the dwellers in these towns and rural areas have been hardest hit by the politics of Westminster, even more than those of Brussels, politics that have threatened their jobs and their homes and their dignity while they enriched the elites. On Thursday they took the chance to hit back, and who can blame them – even if their wrath might more appropriately have been directed at the UK government than the European Commission?
Where we go from here is, it seems, unclear even to those who led the campaign to leave. Some very fancy footwork will be needed to avoid it all ending in tears.
*
The first point I want to make, the point I’ve been illustrating in the story so far, is well made by the English historian EP Thompson:
“We cannot define who ‘we’ are without also defining ‘them’ – those who are not ‘us.’ Throughout history, as bonding has gone on and as identities have changed, the Other has been necessary in this process. Rome required barbarians, Christendom required pagans, Protestant and Catholic Europe required each other.”
We do not know who we are until we know who the other is.
On Thursday we saw that, for the time being at least, Britain requires Europe and Scotland requires England as their necessary others. In like manner, and coming closer to home, we may say that Israel requires the Palestinians and the Palestinians require Israel.
We do not know what we are for until we know what we are against.
*
But the Christian point in all of this is that Jesus Christ is against this whole way of thinking.
He is like us in knowing what he is for and what he is against. But he is quite unlike what we ordinarily are in not being for one group of people and against another. Rather, he is for one way of being human and against another, false, way.
“Enter through the narrow gate,” he tells us in the Sermon on the Mount. “For the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” (Matthew 7.13f)
A little later in Luke’s Gospel, when he is asked, “Who is my neighbour?” – Who is part of my in-group and who part of my out-group, who is one of us and who is one of them? – Jesus answers by turning the question on its head. The true question is: Who acts as a neighbour? Who acts in a neighbourly fashion? And he illustrates and illuminates this true question by telling a story of two respected members of his hearers’ in-group and one who is emphatically on the an outside, a Samaritan, all of whom act clean contrary to conventional expectations.
“Who is one of us, and who is one of them?” Don’t think like that, says Jesus. We are all members one of another.
And right across the European Union, liberal cosmopolitans like myself will now need to find a way of understanding “left-behind” voters in “left-behind” towns and to find, together, a better way forward.
*
If we were reading today’s Gospel in the run-up to Holy Week, we would read it as all about Jesus, setting his face to go to Jerusalem. Reading it after Easter, and Ascension, and Pentecost, when the Spirit is already given, we must read it as mostly about us: about what it means for us to follow Jesus on the way to Jerusalem.
*
For the last few Sundays, we’ve been reading the folk tales about the prophets Elijah and Elisha that we find in the book of Kings. These stories were well known in Jesus’ day, and in Luke’s, but Jesus quietly subverts them. When the prophet Elijah is faced by opposition from the prophets of Baal, he calls down fire from heaven against them (1 Kings 18). When James and John propose the same treatment for the Samaritan village that refuses to welcome them, they are firmly rebuked.
*
To one of those in today’s gospel reading who step up to follow him, Jesus says that foxes (or perhaps originally jackals) have holes where they can lie up in the daytime, and birds of the air have places to roost as they migrate; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.
The Son of Man: that looks like a title, and for Luke it was. (If you were following along in the church Bibles, you will have seen and perhaps noticed that “Son” and “Man” are capitalized.)
But originally, in the Aramaic that Jesus of Nazareth spoke, it wasn’t a title. It was an Aramaic idiom: a way of referring to himself while also referring to a group larger than himself.
In this case, he was telling the bright-eyed follower: I have nowhere to lay my head, and if you follow me, neither will you – a point that was obviously true in the case of those who followed him on the dusty roads of Galilee, and on to the road to Jerusalem, but that is true in different ways of all of us who seek to follow him.
To be human as Jesus was and is human, to be a “son of man” as he was and is, is to be taken outside of our ordinary, everyday, selves. To be changed. To be transformed. The doors of our self-imposed prisons spring open. “For freedom Christ has set us free.”
*
It is easy to hear the words and miss the meaning. When, for example, Jesus says, “Let the dead bury their dead”, this is not an argument against burial. If, when I was a parish minister back in Scotland, I had quoted these words to those coming to request a funeral service, I would have quickly found myself out of a job.
All of the sayings in the second part of the reading have a single purpose: to tell us to be single-minded. If we are serious about following Jesus, then let’s do that. Let’s not try to ride two horses at the same time. Let us say to Jesus what Elisha says to Elijah: “As the LORD lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you.”
*
The choice Jesus offers us is between two different ways of life: one that we may choose and, left to ourselves, do choose, another that is pure gift, the gift of the Spirit with the fruits of the Spirit. It is a choice between being conventionally human and being truly human.
“Follow me,” says Jesus.
But he does not ask us to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. We can enter through the narrow gate only because he has gone there before us. He has come up to Jerusalem to die as the Son of Man at the hands of sons of men. He has come up to Jerusalem to die as the one true human being at the hands of the untrue human beings that, left to our own devices, all of us are, so that dying and rising he may set us free to be ourselves.
Sources
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, John Bunzl, eds., Psychoanalysis, Identity, and Ideology: Critical Essays on the Israel-Palestine Case (Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer, 2002)
Maurice Casey, Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian’s Account of his Life and Teaching (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2010)
Rob Ford, “Older ‘left-behind’ voters turned against a political class with values opposed to theirs”, The Guardian, June 25 2016
Jonathan Freedland, “We have woken up in a different country”, The Guardian, June 24 2016
Ian Henderson, Scotland: Kirk and People (London: Lutterworth, 1969)
EP Thompson, Beyond the Cold War (London: Merlin, 1982)
NT Wright, Twelve Months of Sundays: Reflections on Bible Readings, Year C (London: SPCK, 2000)