Sermons
8th June 2008 - Trinity 3
Stories of the barbaric repression of women, unreconstructed ideas of religious purity, law triumphing over grace...but enough of the Church of England and its struggles over women bishops.
And you can see why it hasn’t been tried hearing today’s gospel. Jesus teaches his disciples on the mountain, and they must have thought that his head was in the clouds so impractical are his suggestions for how we should behave: ‘Do not resist an evildoer...turn the other cheek...go the extra mile’. The sayings have become proverbial but I wonder how often we try to put them into practice, and indeed whether we should. If we disturb a burglar in the house at night are we to offer assistance perhaps give him the keys to the safe or show him where the credit cards are kept? If we are mugged should we make sure that the mugger gets wallet as well as mobile phone? Should we cheerfully accept an unjust redundancy settlement?
Today’s gospel has two miracles to recount, one miracle told within the other like the layers of a Russian doll. And each time, in each miracle, Jesus is approached suddenly, unexpectedly. There is an urgent request from the leader of the synagogue to do something about his poor daughter lying dead at home, and just as Jesus sets off in response there is an urgent approach for healing from the woman with haemorrhages.
But human rights do not exist like some kind of Platonic ideal, nor are they are something innate to us, they are legal fictions invented for providing rules of engagement. They may be necessary, but they are also dangerously attractive. There will be no human rights in heaven, they will not be needed, and as Chesterton implies, the only reason they are needed in this world is because ‘Christianity has been found difficult and not tried’.
But if Christianity, if Jesus teaching about escaping the circle of revenge, is impossibly hard, what use is it to us?
Jesus teaches his disciples within the context of discussing the Jewish law. ‘An eye for an eye’ is from the book of Exodus and it is part of a legal practice which sought to limit revenge. Although it sounds barbaric to us –just think for a moment of carrying out this legal precept – its purpose is to prevent vengeance becoming vendetta, to prevent an escalation in violence. But Jesus makes the radical shift from what must have seemed a reasonable system of recompense – you take an eye therefore you lose one, you take a life therefore you lose your own – Jesus jumps from this to absolute non-retaliation. He says that if someone does you an injustice, you are not only to reject retaliation, you are to pray for the one who has wronged you. Jesus teaches that his followers should not insist on their personal rights, they should allow themselves to be exploited and hurt rather than hurting or exploiting others. But if, in real life, this cannot by most of us be lived out at an absolute level how can this teaching help us? Not surely by making us feel guilty by setting an unreachable target, that would seem unlike the God who is fully revealed in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. Perhaps it is a little more like that saying of Oscar Wilde ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking up at the stars’. If we have this absolute pattern of non-intervention and non-retaliation to look up to, we can learn the dangers of getting drawn in to the attractions of retribution, the dangers of getting into the habit of paying back aggression against us in its own coinage, the dangers of getting drawn in by the language of rights and restitution to an attitude that supposes we should seek tit-for-tat, what we are due, an eye for an eye.
Matthew splices up these stories in a rather satisfactory way. We set off with Jesus arising from the table he has shared with tax-collectors and sinners, leaving the Pharisees behind grumbling as usual and having been given a piece of the divine mind. So we set off in with Jesus only to be interrupted by the leader of the synagogue with his unlikely request for resurrection. And our minds rush ahead to the next part of that story to what will happen when jesus gets there, what is he going to do about this dead daughter?
What is he going to do with this request made in apparent faith from the leader who has been brought to his knees before Jesus in faith saying ‘come and lay your hand on her and she will live’? But as if that might not be enough for one day suddenly another problem another demand on Jesus’ time and mercy arrives, a woman pushing through the crowd to reach him, pushing forward in faith to come into contact with the object of her faith.