SERMON 29 August 2004
Readings:
Jeremiah 2: 4-13
Hebrews 13: 1-8, 15-16 Luke 14: 1-14
In the name of God, who calls us to virtue.
Every Friday morning those of us who gather for Morning
Prayer, say together the opening canticle of the Friday Morning liturgy. As with
so much of the Morning and Evening Prayer services in our Prayer Book, it is an
extract from Scripture, in this case from the 10th chapter of the
Letter to the Hebrews. It goes like this:
‘We have complete freedom to go into the most holy places
by means of the death of Jesus. He opened for us a new way, a living way,
through the curtain, through his own body. Since we have a great high priest set
over the household of God, let us draw near with a sincere heart and a sure
faith, with hearts that have been made clean from a guilty conscience, and
bodies washed with pure water.’ (Hebrews 10: 19-22)
There are fewer clearer statements of the implications of
Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. Using the image of the holiest of the
holies in the temple, an area screened off from ordinary human gaze by a
curtain, this beautiful passage expresses with great economy the shift from the
old order to the new. The old temple ritual stipulated that only the high priest
could enter the holiest of holies, and he only after elaborate rituals to ensure
his ceremonial purity. Jesus gives all members of the household of God the
freedom to stand in the presence of the glory of God.
It is grace, God’s free gift to us, that we can do this.
It has nothing to do with our merit, or lack of it. This was a complete
revolution in understanding. The Jewish understanding of salvation was
intimately linked to keeping the Law. The Pharisees, for example, believed that
if only a certain number of people kept the Law perfectly, then God would send
the Messiah and the world would fall under God’s rule. But that is not the
Christian understanding. We stand before God, loved and redeemed, not by our own
actions but by God’s.
Which leads to the inevitable question, why virtue? What is
the point? Why bother? Why not just do what we want, knowing that, somehow,
Jesus has already made it all right with God? Should we all perhaps join with St
Augustine in his prayer ‘Give me chastity and continence, Lord, but not
yet?’
Today’s Gospel reading seems to suggest that the pay back
for some seemly humility is that you will be elevated to a place of honour
anyway. I suspect that most of us have done this sort of calculation at some
time or other. ‘If I just sit quietly here rather then pushing myself forward,
they will all think how modest I am and make a fuss of me.’ Better to run the
risk that you will be ignored than to face the humiliation of being sent further
down the table.
The reading goes on to encourage people to look beyond
their self-interest and to be generous to people who can apparently offer them
nothing in return. Such actions will be rewarded by God, the text tells us. This
seems to set up a competition for divine brownie points along the lines of
‘try to do something for people who can’t pay you back because then God will
pay you back later’. Just imagine the chaos this could lead to if we all tried
to find people who couldn’t return our generosity just so that we would have a
credit balance. This is a travesty of the practice of generosity, flowing from a
desire to be in right with God rather than from genuine compassion and
thankfulness for one’s own abundance.
Surely true generosity moves beyond giving things of
various kinds and also includes the capacity to receive humbly and graciously from others, rejoicing in their
kindness. These passages were almost certainly intended to open the readers’
eyes to the virtue of giving when there will be no obvious reward
- the promise of later reward, however, rather undermines the point.
Call me old-fashioned, but I am deeply uncomfortable with
the notion of doing good because of the reward it will bring – whatever that
reward might be: other people’s good opinion, God’s good opinion. Virtue
then becomes a calculatedly rational way to achieve an end, to get something for
yourself.
This stance permeates our teaching of morals, and our understanding of the
function of morality in society. Children are taught to be good by rewarding
them when they are good, whatever we have determined good to mean in the
particular context, and punishing them when they are bad.
But surely there is something more to it all than this. Are
we totally corrupted by our own desires? Is there no true altruism? No genuine
disinterested giving of self for others? Is, for example, the action of a mother
sacrificing herself for her child merely the triumph of the selfish gene
ensuring its own replication? Is the action of fire-fighters or police
endangering themselves as the go to rescue people who have no connection with
themselves simply folly, careful calculation of risks or a desire for
self-aggrandisement?
The noted French Protestant theologian and killjoy John
Calvin would probably have thought so with his claim that ‘everything
proceeding from the corrupt nature of humanity’ was ‘damnable’.
Such a jaundiced and cynical view of human nature stands,
however, in stark contrast to the biblical assertion that we are made in the
image of God. Fallen we might be, but nonetheless there remains the mark of God
in our beings.
At its heart, true virtue is, I believe, to do with loving
God. Why do good? Not so that we can get something out of it but because it is
an expression of love to God. Virtue is the practical outworking of love, it
aligns us with the organising principle of the universe. To live virtuous lives
– and I mean virtue here in the fullest sense, not simply a sexual sense –
is to give praise to God. It is when we do this that we are most truly human,
most truly alive.
Blame the Olympics but the only analogy I could come up
with was a sporting one. If you have ever played tennis or squash you probably
know the feeling of hitting a ball on the sweet spot of the racquet. It is as if
everything has lined up perfectly – the angle of your arm, the position of the
racquet, the point of contact with the ball.
We don’t have to live good lives to win God’s good
regard, we live good lives because we love God. There may be other beneficial
spin-offs, such as the good regard of other people, but there may not.
There are many parts of the New Testament that give us
guidance on how to live well. Today’s reading from Hebrews is one of those –
encouraging us to love each other,
to be hospitable, to remember prisoners and torture victims, and then,
apparently moving seamlessly on from torture to marriage (what was he thinking
about!), to honour our closest, most intimate relationship. There is no shortage
of advice in sacred writ. But the issue here is motivation, rather than the
specifics of what we do or don’t do. Does our desire to live a godly, virtuous
life flow from a love of God, from a wish to be rewarded or from fear of the
consequences if we don’t?
We do have true freedom in God – what shall we do with our freedom? As we stand in the presence of God, shall we stand face on, praising God, or with our backs to God, intent on our own pursuits? Amen.
Sarah
Macneil