14 June Matthew 9:35 - 10:8
I read a lot, and sometimes I need to think something over before its importance becomes clear to me; then, of course, I can’t remember exactly where I read it. That happened to me a fortnight or so ago, when I read something that suddenly seemed very relevant to today’s gospel. It’s a complicated argument, but I’m not going to hold back. You can take it.
First proposition: Jesus Christ is not created, he is “begotten, not made”. A bishop called Eusebius of Nicomedia, in Bithynia, caused uproar at the Council of Nicaea in 325 when he tried to suggest that Jesus came along after God. Orthodox bishops pointed to the start of the Gospel of John to prove him wrong, and then there was a punch-up (there were several at Nicaea) during which his speech was torn up. The council declared that there was never a time when Jesus was not; that is, he existed alongside or within God from the very start of time. And that is still conventional Christian teaching.
But then you have to ask why. Why was Jesus created in the first place? God doesn’t do anything for no reason, so why did he do it? What is Jesus for? We know why we have a Creator, and we know that the Holy Spirit exists to help faithful men and women, but why do we need Jesus? To save us by exhibiting God’s love is a good answer. So, if he existed from the start, he had that purpose from the start, so God always knew that Jesus would have to be sent some day. With me so far?
That visit to us ended with the Ascension. It was unreasonable to expect Jesus to live here eternally. So, in God’s plan, what happens when Jesus is gone? And the answer to this, as we see in Acts and the Epistles, is that we need people to make a church through which the Holy Spirit can continue to work. Thus Jesus found twelve disciples, young men, and took them with him as he toured the cities and villages, preaching, teaching and healing. This leads us to a key lesson; that we achieve more outside the church than we do inside. We need to get out into the world to spread the word.
There is another lesson coming up. Jesus saw the crowds and said that they were sheep without a shepherd. I am not wise in the ways of sheep, but I doubt if they realised that they lacked a shepherd. They just carried on eating grass and living for the moment – a bit like so many people today. And that is our great opportunity. The potential harvest has never been so great.
But then Jesus identified a problem to his disciples. ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few’. What would Jesus say if he were here today, I wonder? The potential harvest has never been greater, so many people know nothing of God, and the labourers have never been fewer. Not only that, but all too often the response to a decline in numbers has been to take away some labourers, or make them part-time. And here’s a giant paradox.
In our Truro days, the Diocese made the bishops’ diaries available to all. You didn’t need to be too acute to realise that we had organised the bishops’ diaries so that they spent nearly all their time meeting people who were already Christians. Spreading the Gospel has to be a local job; and for that, we need more labourers.
Our rotas are thinning. We need more people to read Lessons, to lead our intercessions, to serve the Chalice during communion. Please think about whether you could do any of these things, because they keep the worship lively. Yes, I can do it all myself; no, you would be bored out of your skulls if I did, every week! But we also need more churchwardens and PCC members. I’m not asking for any commitment now, but next spring it would be good to welcome some new blood. Talk to me about what is involved; it is not as frightening as you think.
Most of all, spread the Gospel in the hours when we aren’t at church. Invite people along at the very least. Sit with them when they’re new and don’t know what is going on here. I can’t cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers or cast out demons. But I can proclaim the good news: the kingdom of heaven has come near. Proclaim it with me. Please think about the role you could play in gathering in that harvest. For the harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few.
7 June Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
I don’t think we’re meant to have favourite bits of the Gospel, but if pushed I will admit that this is very high on my list. Our Gospel this morning takes two pieces of Matthew 9 and places them side by side. If the compilers of the Lectionary have done this, it means that they see a connection between the two passages that should command our attention; but actually there are four stories here; there is the calling of Matthew, the questioning of the disciples, the death of the daughter of the leader of the synagogue and the healing of the woman with a flow of blood. And there are multiple connections.
I think the first part speaks for itself. Jesus is clearly a commanding figure, because Matthew does not hesitate when he is called. I don’t suppose tax-collectors got many invitations then. Maybe they don’t now, either; I admit I’ve never invited one to dinner. But in the Roman empire they had an awful reputation. The Romans farmed taxes. That is, they sub-contracted their collection. They would look at a district like South Cleley and calculate how much tax might be due. Let’s say for the sake of argument that it comes to a thousand pieces of silver. They would then put the collection out to tender. I might offer 850 pieces. I pay them the 850, and I collect as much of the thousand as I can, and I keep the difference. I have the law behind me, so I can threaten and bully those who don’t pay, and I might recalculate the tax owed and discover that actually they owe 1100 pieces, and there is very little the population can do about it. No wonder tax collectors get a bad reputation.
Sometimes people suggest that Jesus was criticised because tax collectors were unclean, but that isn’t really the point here. After all, rabbis often note that everyone eats with unclean people sometimes, because nobody can know the state of purity of everyone in the room. But Jesus is with the tax collectors because he wants them to change, and he can’t move them to repentance if he doesn’t talk to them. In effect he is telling the Pharisees “you don’t need my company; these men do.”
Now we come to the third element, and let me note in passing that the tangled nature of these stories makes me think that this is a true account. If they were made up, surely they would be tidier, less jumbled.
They are interrupted by a leader of the synagogue who asks Jesus to lay his hand on his daughter, who has just died. The leader thus shows great faith in Jesus; he does not say “She might live” but “She will live”. Jesus responds to his faith, gets up and goes. Note that the man rushed in, despite all those sinners. Some things are more important than purity laws, even in those days.
As he goes through the crowd, Jesus is followed by a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years. I want you to pause there to imagine what her life was like. The women here can perhaps imagine how she felt. She would be anaemic. I think she would be permanently tired and weak. I expect that she would be depressed too; a period that never stops must be very debilitating.
But she is also socially crippled. A woman is unclean until her period has stopped for 24 hours, then she has a ritual bath. If her period starts again before its due time, she is unclean until it has stopped for a week. She is zavah. During that time nobody can eat with her, nor eat food that she has touched. They cannot sit on a cushion that she has sat on. They cannot take anything from her hand. They cannot hug her. And this poor woman has had that for at least the majority of twelve years. But she has faith, faith that just touching Jesus’ cloak can heal her. So she does, and Jesus feels it. He knows who has done it and he tells her ‘Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.’ And this is why I love this passage.
You see, generally when Jesus heals someone he makes little of it, and sometimes even instructs them to say nothing. But that won’t work for this woman. She has to be declared to be clean, or people will go on shunning her. Only Jesus and she know that she is healed, and the normal process of proving you are no longer zavah is humiliating. You have to submit to sleeping on a white towel which other women will inspect every day for a week. They will check your bedding and your clothing, and they will report publicly on what they have found. But Jesus, a respected teacher, simply declares her healed. It is not enough that she is made whole; she has to be pronounced whole by one who knows. Jesus not only heals her, he heals her in the way she needs to be healed. Given that degree of understanding of women’s lives, it is not surprising that so many women became followers of Jesus.
Then Jesus goes on to the house where the dead girl is, and shoos away the flute-players and wailers – Jewish custom required two flute-players and one wailer at every death, even of the poorest person. This was so important that they were even allowed to employ non-Jewish flute-players if that was the only option. But they are not needed if the girl is not dead, and when he takes her hand, she rises.
So what ties the stories together? Two are about the need to redeem even the worst sinners; two are about response to true faith; and they also remind us that Jesus has a special concern for the outcast, and so should we. The story of the woman with a flow of blood reminds me that we need to put ourselves in the position of those who need our help. I can barely imagine what her life was like; perhaps the women here can. And if they can, I bet they wouldn’t like it.
31 May Matthew 28:16-20
“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations… Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” Do you see a theme here?
When I was a boy, the Catechism was all the rage. Someone would fire a question at us, and we had to repeat a specified answer. Sunday School really was a school. Somewhere along the line that fell out of fashion; well, perhaps that was a good thing. There are better ways to teach children. But somehow a generation grew up for whom feeling and sentiment, heart rather than head, was the key to the Christian faith. We were invited to sing happy songs and enjoy the warm feeling that being a friend of Jesus brings.
There is nothing wrong with that as one component of coming to faith, but, just like a taxi driver, we still need “the knowledge”. If you climbed in a black cab and asked to go to Euston Station, and the driver invited you just to feel how lovely and cosy you feel in his cab but admitted that he didn’t actually know how to get to Euston, you might feel that was an unsatisfactory relationship. More seriously, you might decide to have nothing more to do with black cabs.
The need for teaching is, I hope, obvious. No doubt if you think hard you can bring to mind good Christians who had some funny ideas of their own. Some of them may even have been priests. A major part of the work of a minister is to teach the faithful. We try to do this through homilies and sermons, but also through the systematic reading of scripture. The traditional offices of Mattins and Evensong – Morning and Evening Prayer if you prefer – were the method by which the church ensured that the bible was read through and explained. It seems to me that churches that neglect these are not serving their people well, so expect a bit more attention to these over the next five years. Bible reading is important but so is the teaching element. Think of the Ethiopian man whom the apostle Philip encountered in Acts 8:30-31.
So Philip ran up to the chariot and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’ He replied, ‘How can I, unless someone guides me?’ And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him. Reading and teaching go together.
I arrive here with a clear instruction to teach the faithful, so far as lies within my power; and you, in turn, will teach others. That way we multiply the message like the best kind of chain letter. And the aim is simple; it is that when asked ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’ the person replies ‘Yes!’