Teaching by Frances Flatman on next weekend's Readings :-
We live in a time when it is increasingly important to read the scriptures and interpret them very carefully. Some Old Testament texts, read literally or only in fragments, can appear to support violence against other races; but if we read the whole text we can see that much more is required of us. All of our texts for today are about loving our neighbours. The implications of this are significant. It need not mean that we find others lifestyles convivial or understandable, yet we are called to see all everywhere as sharing in a common humanity and treat them with grace and outreach, as did Jesus whose acquaintances included tax collectors – thugs doing the work of Rome, or prostitutes, not to mention the extremely unattractive lepers and those with dementia.
Our Reading from Exodus, (22:21-26) significantly part of the earliest Covenant Code of Israel made at Sinai, is very clear on the ruling that Israelites do not molest strangers, widows and orphans. ‘You lived as strangers in the land of Egypt.’ It speaks of how to loan money correctly, and how to behave as the more powerful towards others over items taken in pledge – cloaks which must be returned on a nightly basis. Significantly we end with, ‘If he cries to me, I will listen, for I am full of pity.’ God, the Code makes abundantly clear, is always a God of compassion and grace directed through us his creatures towards the needy and the underdog. Significantly throughout the Code, we find it addresses the fraught issue of how we are all to live together in harmony. It recognises that this is not an easy thing, prone to violence as we all are, and needing to have before us the continual reminder that our own survival and that of others, foreigners is at stake. The frequency with which this issue occurs in the Old Testament witnesses to the Israelites consistent failure in this respect – it is probably the hardest lesson humanity as a whole must learn and practise.
In our Gospel from Matthew, (22:34-40) and a little further on as we approach Jesus’ passion in Jerusalem, with yet more debates between the Lord and the chief priests, Sadducees and the Pharisees, we enter into debate over the question of which commandment was seen as the greatest, as Law-righteous Pharisees try to trap Jesus. As there were 613, this was clearly a widely debated issue. But Jesus, in line with many Jewish scholars of the time, simply collated a whole lot together placing God first and neighbour second. We have to remember that Jesus was a Jew, and his great wish was to take Judaism on from its futile longing for a military messiah who would crush the Romans and bring Israel to universal power, which anyone who knew the might of Rome in the first century could work out was a forlorn hope, bringing ever more violence and destruction on his people. His understanding of the kingdom of God on earth relied on Jewish willingness – in God’s image, as Jesus consistently did to reach out to all those sources of repression, Centurions in the occupying forces, powerful pagan foreign nations such as Tyre and Sidon with their vast trading potential, not to mention Gaza with its great trade over the Mediterranean and down into the Persian Gulf, Arabia, and even out east. Jesus calls on Jewish Law to justify his approach, enfolded in the prime directive to love (agape in Greek) as the fulfilment of the law both towards the Lord God – our primary call - and then here on earth to neighbours wherever they may be; for it is in others that we fundamentally reflect the grace and outreach of God himself. This is found first in his creation of the world, and secondly in his sustaining of it. Without such whole hearted commitment we all of us quite simply have no future. We perhaps should look at our invitation from the Father to live creatively in God’s world a bit like the Marshall Plan after World War 2 where a crushed and devastated Germany was brought back to life by the input of American money, not because they liked the Nazis but because they realised that defeat and hopelessness would only foster hatred and more outrage, as indeed led to the continuing of hostilities after the first World War.
Significantly, when Paul wrote his Letters to the Thessalonian Church (1 Thessalonians 1:5-10) he was speaking to converts from paganism, and seemingly those at the bottom of the pile in this eastern imperial capital and now thriving port and veteran centre. Our Christians there were decidedly second class in this new regime in Macedonia. It appears that some of this underclass took to the faith because the Roman elite in the city had pinched their local god, removing his cult to ‘better’ places and depriving the lowly of their deity. The story of Jesus as told by Paul, of someone who lived among the downtrodden, and whose outreach was fairly consistently towards them, attracted these poor to the faith. As a consequence, like Jesus, they followed his pattern of care and living for others (agape) taking the Gospel out to ‘All Macedonia and Achaia’, a lot of the northern and then central Greece. Clearly their poverty and low class was no impediment to the spread of the Gospel; indeed it appears to have enhanced and empowered their mission. Elsewhere in the Letter, we find that they, despite their poverty gained by working with their hands, so ordinary hard daily toil, as builders, leather workers like Paul, agricultural workers and so on; regularly sent money to Paul both for his personal support and during his imprisonment, and later sent money to the Church in Israel during a famine in Palestine. In 2 Corinthians you can read how Paul had to do a bit of arm-twisting to get money for this cause from the much richer Corinthian Church who had boasted of their willingness to give but backed out later!
We too are a people who are called to live according to the Bible, yet it is imperative that we Christians follow the pattern set by Jesus in his interpretation of those age-old teachings we find in the New Testament.
Familiarity with the life of Jesus, as reported in all four gospels, consistently demonstrates his rejection of violence and his compassion for those the elite rejected as ‘sinners’, here not so much a moral judgment as a class and social distinction based in the Old Testament. As you can read in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the Torah laws defined Israel by separatism, and cut them off from others they believed not conforming to their rules, be that food laws or attitudes to outsiders or even agricultural workers or those dealing with illness and death. We humans have taken to such divisions between ‘them and us’ like ducks to water. Reading and following the life of Jesus can be a salutary lesson in overcoming boundaries, for quite simply he didn’t have them, and Kingdom Life surely requires us to have a similar blindness to difference.
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