Teaching by Frances Flatman on next Sunday's Bible Readings :
Those familiar with the paintings of the Book of the Dead in Egyptian Pharaohs’ tombs will know that the god Anubis weighs each soul in a balance against a feather. Very few must have passed muster against such odds. In last week’s teaching we looked at the Christian understanding of being corporate; a community of responsibility one for another, but were instantly aware of the dangers of such oversight and its capacities for oppression. But, as our Gospel carries on, we see that this care is merely a metaphor for the quite unprecedented love of God for us. Let’s see how this valuation of things arose.
Our Reading from Ecclesiasticus (Ben Sirach) (27:30-28:7) comes significantly, from Egypt. Our translator, for he worked to translate the teaching of his grandfather C180 BCE, and who probably lived in Alexandria, produced the work, originally in Hebrew, in Greek. Clearly his ancestor was a devout follower of Jewish law, seemingly having gained a lot from Egyptian thought, and believed that only by a rigid following of it could any person become ‘right’ in the eyes of God. His work is in consequence a diatribe against all the things which set us apart from God, ‘sins’, estrangement from the divine, and he recalls the absolute necessity of righteous living. Pharisaic Judaism which intended every Jew to live in a state of purity all the time, and which became an exclusivist and excluding faith was clearly capable of tying the faithful into knots over scrupulosity for obedience at the cost of life and joy, with its miasmas of failure and degradation. By the time of Jesus, it would appear that many were excluded from worship, not always from moral digressions but from the effects of their occupations which rendered them ‘sinners’, unclean due to contact with proscribed animal products foreigners, and the sick who were contaminating. As we shall see, Jesus’ outreach to others simply could not contemplate such negative and crushing demands from the God he knew as Father, loving, merciful and non-condemnatory to his creation, which he knew full well to be incapable of such compliance.
Matthew’s Gospel (18:21-35) deals decisively with such an outlook, where Peter questioned Jesus on forgiveness and recited the need for fullness, expressed by the sevenfold forgiveness demanded by the law. Jesus simply rejects his belief by calling for eternal forgiveness, 77 being impossible to register, and goes on to demonstrate it with a parable deliberately aimed to illustrate the immensity of divine power and love, and our inability ever to achieve this standard of perfection, for our relationship with God is always entirely about his gift of himself. Jesus does it, as so often, with a witty reference to history, well known because of the enormity of the amounts required. When Carthage, an ancient Phoenician empire, lost the Second Punic War in the third century BCE Rome demanded war reparations to the amount of 10,000 talents, measures of bullion not coin. It would have taken 15 years for an average labourer to raise a single talent, so clearly the amount was way, way beyond the dreams of any one, slave steward as here, or free. It demonstrates the truly colossal wealth of Carthage that, given 30 years to pay they did it in 10 years! Jesus wanted his followers to grasp the significance of his understanding of God, who has no interest in the petty calculations of right and wrong which so bedevil all societies, and produces endless cycles of ‘them and us’; and which cut us off from the real purpose of the incarnation and God’s outrageous and incomprehensible love for his creation, and his will to include us ‘in’ his life, his being, not because of any goodness on our part but simply because he wills it. In comparison, Jewish law-righteousness, or any moral codes we invent, fade into insignificance. What we notice in our parable is the ridiculous appeal of the debtor with his cheery and quite unjustified claim of being able to pay – i.e. of being godlike - and then of being released from this unimaginable debt/sin/presumption, yet who in turn threw into prison one who owed him a paltry sum of 100 denarii, less than a year’s pay. Significantly it is the community of the slaves who complain to the master and get this set to rights. Our story then is about our entirely undeserved entry into the ecstatic joy of God, something Jesus knew to the full and died a human death to accomplish for us.
In Romans (14:7-9) we find Paul at work among his flock in the city of Rome with Christian groups some drawn from Judaism others from paganism, possibly Godfearers who could not become Jews due to the demands of the law, but who found in Jesus what they were seeking in belief which pagan gods could not provide. We have noted throughout Paul’s Letters how his missions to cities of the Eastern Mediterranean were dogged by hard-line Jews and how he fought to reject their teaching about how to join the Christian community which was to be within Judaism. Clearly there had come a point in which Paul, the hard-line Pharisee, became increasingly disillusioned with law-righteousness as the way the eternal life, and his meeting with Jesus on the Damascus road was the turning point. Thereafter the law held no role in salvation which resides entirely in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, God’s answer to our search for the divine. In Romans, the last of his teaching, we find its only place being to point out sin, categorically not to redeem. In our Reading, savagely abused by the Jerusalem Bible, we find v.7 ‘The life and death of each of us has influence on others.’ But Paul’s Greek says something quite different, turning things from a moral obligation on our part to a joyful acceptance of life in Christ with all its benefits. ‘None of us lives to himself and none of us dies to himself.’ That is, we belong elsewhere. For Paul, our entire being is about God’s involvement in us in and through the Son he sent into the world. This clearly had consequences. Were the Christian believers divided in Rome, as they had been over the question of eating pagan meat as in Corinth? Were there those as in Thessalonica who just sat back and awaited the Second Coming, opting out of the world? Paul, following the pattern of Jesus, insists on non-condemnatory behaviour and attitudes, tolerating differences where possible in the different communities, and calling for the generous and kind treatment of others. ‘Living for the Lord’ clearly meant living with the freedom and openness of Jesus, and no doubt this did call for some actions to be found unacceptable within the community, yet clearly he did not think in terms of exclusion but of the gentle reprimand and the freedom offered by Jesus to tax collectors and prostitutes, life changing and full of hope in communities similarly struggling as we do with our daily faults and failures; and who yet find ourselves continually stuck in the same position, longing to behave better but who through habit or circumstances find it difficult to change. ‘Alive or dead we belong to the Lord….(who is) Lord both of the dead and the living.’ Grasping and holding onto that promise is most likely the best most of us can do.
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