Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, 9 February 2014
Isaiah 58.1-12, 1 Corinthians 2.1-16, Matthew 5.13-20
Rev Páraic Réamonn, Auditoire de Calvin, Geneva, Switzerland
Buttercup was raised on a small farm in the country of Florin. Her favourite pastimes were riding her horse and tormenting the farm boy that worked there. Nothing gave Buttercup as much pleasure as ordering Westley around.
“As you wish” was all he ever said to her.
One day, she was amazed to discover that when he was saying, “As you wish,” what he meant was, “I love you.”
And even more amazing was the day she realized she truly loved him back.
So begins The Princess Bride, the film of William Goldman’s novel of the same name, probably my second most favourite film.
Heroes. Giants. Wizards. Villains. True love. Not just your basic, average, everyday, ordinary, run-of-the-mill, ho-hum fairy tale.
*
In many and various ways, God speaks to us – through the world God creates, through the whole of human history, through all the religious traditions of humankind, through the people God chooses to be a special people for the sake of all peoples, and last but not least by sending us God’s own Son to be Immanuel, God with us, and to die for us on a Roman cross.
What God means by all of this is that that God loves us.
But we, like Buttercup, are slow to understand. God finds it hard to get our attention; and even when God gets it, God finds it hard to keep.
Why is this? There can be many reasons.
*
Seven months from now, the Scots will vote on whether they wish to be again independent of the English, and the English are only now beginning to wake up and realise that they may actually say yes.
On Friday, the British prime minister made a passionate speech urging Scotland to stay in the Union; and hundreds of thousands of Scots decided instantly that if David Cameron wants them to stay, this is obviously the right thing to do…
I made that last bit up.
Writing in the Guardian yesterday, Jonathan Freedland quoted an email sent to him by a Scottish friend even before David Cameron opened his mouth:
“Today reminds me of an old joke,” his friend wrote, “about a pilot announcing that he’ll have to make an emergency landing in the sea. Panicked passengers ask the flight attendant where the life vests are. ‘Oh,’ says the flight attendant, ‘so now you’re interested.’”
It is the same with us and God, or it easily can be. As has often been said, when artillery shells are exploding all around them, there aren’t an awful lot of atheists in foxholes. But most of us, most of the time, don’t find ourselves in foxholes, and when things are going well with us, it is easy for God to skip our mind.
Writing from a prison cell in Nazi Germany seventy or so years ago, the Lutheran theologian and resistance leader Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrestled with this problem.
We live, he said, in a world where humanity has come of age, a world where more and more areas of human life come under human control. It’s a slightly paradoxical thought from someone sitting powerlessly in a Nazi jail awaiting execution, but we know what he means.
How, asked Bonhoeffer, do we preach the gospel to people in their strength and not just in their weakness? How, when everything in their lives seems to be going swimmingly, do we point them persuasively to a God who loves them and who wants nothing more than that they love God back?
Our churches have had seventy years to answer that question. We still don’t answer it very well.
*
And there can be other reasons.
Jesus of Nazareth tells us we can’t serve two masters, but that doesn’t stop us trying. We try to be faithful followers of Jesus, but we are also prone to sin, prey to the seductions of the world, the flesh and the devil.
This is old-fashioned language and for that reason may not speak to us. Or perhaps it is overfamiliar language and doesn’t speak to us for that reason. So let me put it in contemporary terms.
*
We can start with advertising.
We like to think we are mature, sophisticated people who have, as Bonhoeffer says, come of age. We are not easily persuaded by a flashy TV commercial to buy this car rather than that model, fly with this airline rather than that one, or choose this iPad rather than that Samsung tablet.
At least, I hope we’re not.
But beneath the plugs for particular products, advertising makes a more radical proposal. It proposes that we transform our lives by buying something more. It works to create desire. We are, it tells us, what we have; and we can never have enough.
If we state it so baldly, we can see advertising for the lie it is. But advertising is insidious. It gets under our skin, and we can find ourselves with a foot in two camps, trying to be faithful Christians but seduced into being eager consumers.
*
Now let’s think about celebrity culture.
Until recently, Scarlett Johansson, the 29-year-old Hollywood actress twice voted by Esquire magazine as the sexiest woman alive, was a celebrity ambassador for Oxfam.
Then she became the public face of SodaStream, which happens to have a factory in the occupied West Bank, in the illegal Jewish settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, built on land that originally belonged to Palestinian villages until Israel grabbed it.
Voices were raised, suggesting that this was to work both sides of the street, that Johansson couldn’t speak up for the poor and downtrodden while fronting for a company that in one part of the world was treading them down. And eventually Johansson made her choice: she opted for SodaStream.
Perhaps the best comment was made by Catherine Bennett in the Observer last Sunday. She quoted expert advice that “celebrities should be used with extreme care in charity campaigns, given the strong links between celebrity culture, consumer culture and the values of self-interest”. And she ended with a question:
“Whatever the peculiar problems of flogging products from the occupied territories, was Johansson significantly more convincing as Oxfam’s poverty envoy, when, as Moët & Chandon’s inaugural celebrity ambassador, her other duty was to champagne?”
Celebrities who front for charities sell us the same lie as advertising: that it’s possible genuinely to care for the poor and oppressed and at the same time to have it all. It’s a lie we are often too willing to buy. Our hearts are divided. We want to serve two masters.
*
Our reading from Isaiah this morning dates from a time when the leading families of Judah had returned from exile in Babylon to what was now the poor and insignificant Persian province of Jehud. The small struggling community was preoccupied with building a temple to replace that destroyed by the Babylonian empire – the same temple in which, centuries later, Jesus would pray. It was preoccupied, too, with codifying and observing the law it believed God had given, centuries earlier, to Moses. And in and through all this, it wrestled with how it could be what, implausibly, it saw itself called to be: a light to the nations.
Our reading from Isaiah answers that question in words that Matthew will echo:
Loose the bonds of injustice,
undo the thongs of the yoke,
Let the oppressed go free,
and break every yoke.
Share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
When you see the naked, cover them,
and do not hide yourselves from your own kin.
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn…
Then you will be something for the gentiles to write home about.
*
Corinth was a city on the south-western end of the isthmus that connects the Greek mainland with the Peloponnese. In Paul’s day, it was a Roman colony, many of whose inhabitants were discharged soldiers of the empire. It was part of a pagan culture that like to probe the mysteries of life, the universe and everything – a little like the new age thinking that today populates the shelves of our bookshops.
Writing to the small community of Jesus followers in Corinth, Paul teases them a little. Few of their neighbours would dream of looking for the secret of life in a place of execution outside a rebellious city in the Middle East; but that, says Paul, is precisely where we must look, if we are to understand anything of the mystery of God and the wisdom of God: to Christ crucified and risen. Only then can we be what God calls us to be.
*
Paul and Matthew are often seen as on opposite ends of a spectrum. Paul works mainly among gentiles – people like you and me – and the point on which he takes his stand and will not budge is that gentiles who become faithful followers of Jesus don’t have to become Jews.
Matthew – or so his gospel suggests – is a Jewish Christian, writing for a Jewish Christian community, most probably in Antioch in Syria, the third city of the empire. He is writing probably about ten years after the Jewish War, a bitter war that lasted four years, from 66 to 70 AD, and ended in Jewish defeat and the destruction of the second temple.
In the aftermath of that catastrophe, the Jewish community in Antioch and elsewhere wrestled with how it could be Jewish now it no longer had a temple to offer sacrifice.
The answer that came to prevail was to focus on the law given to Moses and develop it further to cover all the circumstances of life, down to the last detail. Judaism became a faith centred on this law.
Matthew and the other Jewish followers of Jesus of Nazareth had a different answer, an answer centred on Jesus. They march to a different drum. They are still part of the synagogue, but they are on the cusp of leaving it. They are still Jews, but they cannot follow where the leaders of the synagogue want to take them. The law, for them as for all Jews, is God’s gift to Israel and the world, and it is not abolished by Jesus; it is fulfilled in him.
But it is in him that it is fulfilled.
So Matthew strains every sinew to explain to his Jewish Christian community who precisely Jesus is and why this Jesus should be at the centre of their faith. And he tells them that the mantle of Israel has now fallen on them: that this tiny dissident Jewish Christian community is now to be what God’s people has always been called to be: salt of the earth, life of the world. One thing Matthew is not lacking is chutzpah.
*
Our readings today are addressed to different audiences in different places and times; but when we read them today they are addressed to us. We, this small congregation of English-speaking expatriates in Geneva, are called to be a light to the nations, to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.
If we are to be that light and salt, then we need not just the many and various ways in which God speaks to us. We need what God does to us.
As Paul reminds us, we have received not the spirit of the world – the spirit of self-interest and consumer culture – but the Spirit that is from God.
It is the Spirit God gives us that floods our hearts with love, turning us away from the seductions of the world. It is the Spirit of God that frees us from distractions and enables us to love God with an undivided heart. It is the Spirit God gives us that takes away our hearts of stone and gives us hearts of flesh.
It is the Spirit of God, speaking silently within us, that allows God finally to get and to keep our attention.
Sources
CK Barrett, A Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians (Adam & Charles Black, 2nd ed, 1971)
Catherine Bennett, “Scarlett Johansson and Oxfam: Is celebrity sponsorship a lost cause?”, The Guardian, February 2 2014
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (BBC & Penguin, 1972)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (SCM Press, 1953)
Jonathan Freedland, “If I were a Scot, I might vote yes to independence. As it is, I can only plead with them to stay”, The Guardian, February 7 2014
William Goldman, The Princess Bride (Ballantine, 1973, 1998); and the film of the same name
Robin Griffith-Jones, The Four Witnesses (HarperSanFrancisco, 2000)
Tom Wright, Paul for Everyone: 1 Corinthians (SPCK, 2003)