Teaching by Frances Flatman on next weekend's Bible Readings :-
Some years ago in the centre of Oxford as they were rebuilding part of the road; I tripped and to my horror not a single person came to help me up despite my injuries. Over the last couple of weeks, we in the UK have heard a lot about ‘whistle blowers’ and the price paid by those responsible enough to go, in this case, to hospital management with serious concerns over the behaviour of a nurse now convicted of the murder of at least seven babies. Others of us will have had similar experiences with the Police and the Church. Yet our scriptures continually exhort us precisely to take responsibility for those around us, not merely as good manners, or care, but as demanded by both Jewish and then Christian teaching. Our commitment to each other is in fact fundamental, part of our teaching on the ‘Common Good’, and is in no way secondary to our belief in Jesus or following the Commandments, for it is essential to our common humanity, the very stuff of Jesus’ own incarnation and hallowed by him. This applies to our behaviour to those closest, family and friends, and those we work with and our involvement in politics. Yet patently this does not require us to snoop or spy on others. Evidence from Calvin’s Geneva, something approaching a police state, or life under the Stasi, or today’s Russia, does not demand we betray others to arrest and torture and imprisonment. Something more balanced and thoughtful is demanded, and we find it very early on as we hear of Cain’s guilty and sarcastic retort ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’.
In our Reading from Ezekiel (33:7-9) we find precisely this picture. Israel was under the control of the Babylonians in the 6th century BCE, but had rebelled, turning to Egypt for its defence and a ‘better deal’. There came a point when inevitably this alliance fell apart and terrible reprisals were wreaked upon the nation, which included the sack of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 587 BCE. Ezekiel had stood out against this policy of any treaty with Egypt, probably having had opportunity to assess the relative clout of the two superpowers. He had fruitlessly warned the king and court of the danger of their broken vassalage to Babylon and the likely effects seen in the great dirge which fills the whole of the preceding chapter 32. The end result of their apostasy for the king and his family and court, as he had prophesied, were appalling as Ezekiel, writing from exile, makes clear in 33:21-22. There are times when telling the truth, even at great personal cost and to no avail, is the right thing to do.
Last week in our Reading from Matthew we had the account of the giving of authority by Jesus to Peter. Here today (18:15-20) we find that responsibility for the care of others passed on to the rest of the disciples and hence to every believer. Our teaching falls just after two of Jesus’ predictions of his passion and death (16:21 and 17:22), but followed closely by the disciples patently still stuck in power-mode as they have just asked Jesus who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. He places a small child, one of no status at all, in their midst and speaks of the cost to those who betray such trust. This part of the gospel is riddled with his warning against causing others to become a source of ‘scandal’ – in The Jerusalem Bible a ‘stumbling block’. And from this Jesus goes on to our passage warning the disciples of their responsibility within the Christian community for the behaviour of one another. First, one is required to confront wrong doing personally by speaking to the miscreant, and if this fails to take others and try again. And failing that, much more severe consequences follow, with expulsion from the Church. This is followed by the parable of the unforgiving slave who was himself forgiven a debt the size of an empire by his master, illustrative of our relationship with God, who forgives all. Clearly then Jesus’ kingdom is not one for wimps or the faint hearted! We all know how embarrassing and difficult it is to confront injustice or simply something like unkind gossip in our communities, yet our Gospel requires us to take this on fearlessly and with courage, regardless of the loss of friends or status or jobs, as an essential part of our Christian belonging. It is this that distinguishes us as Christians, the willingness to stand out from the crowd, to make a difference. Note, Jesus does not require we do this for all others, as in his day pagan lifestyle was so very different, and the ordinary pagan had no moral boundaries unlike Jews and Christians.
In Our Reading from Romans (13:8-10) Paul places all this responsibility within the context of love, here agape, that friendship and sense of community which was such a feature of the early church. In Paul’s thought, love encapsulates the whole of the Ten Commandments inherited from Judaism, since clearly it would have been impossible in his thinking to commit one of those sins and be a person of love. In this section of Romans, we have moved on and his thought is directed to how the Christian community must live, rather than the arguments which he dealt with before, namely the failure of the Jewish Law to bring salvation. Recognising that the majority of his converts in Rome were formerly pagans, who would have had no compunction about the sexual abuse of their slaves or visiting brothels; or who habitually went to watch beast slaughters and gladiatorial fights between men, often slaves; or who resorted to habitual domestic violence; or even exposed unwanted babies on dung heaps; or cheerfully cheated others out of inheritances and proper dues. He was fully aware of the difficulty converts had in living proper lives of caring for the communities around them. Those of the upper classes with careers in the army, or on municipal councils who acted as judges, were similarly placed in difficult positions when they did their duty to the state, and so could not keep the Christian way of love as they killed in war or executed criminals. The fact that by the late 70’s CE, members of the imperial house were executed as Christians, and a little later in Carthage members of a wealthy family could be thrown to the beasts for entertainment, is surely witness to how some coped with these dilemmas. Augustine’s writings from the 5th century are full of his experience of those who flouted this commandment to love by their various actions, and it is something the Church has never satisfactorily resolved. Simply trotting off to the Confessional is surely not the adequate response to a schema designed to change the world. ‘Love is the one thing that cannot hurt your neighbour, that is why it is the answer to every one of these commandments.’
Comments