Fourth Sunday after Trinity, 5 July 2020
Lectionary Readings for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity
Zechariah 9: 9–12
Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey. He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim
and the warhorse from Jerusalem; and the battle-bow shall be cut off,
and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea,
and from the River to the ends of the earth. As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you,
I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit. Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope;
today I declare that I will restore to you double.
Romans 7: 15-25a
I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Matthew 11: 16-19, 25-end
“But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not mourn.’ For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.”
At that time Jesus said, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity
During the long period of Exile in Babylon, from 597 BC, the people of Israel lost their pattern of worship in the Temple. Deprived of the temple ritual upon which their very identity had depended, they still, yet, had the Torah, the Book of the Law, which they had been allowed to take with them during their deportation. And so it was the Law that they cherished during that time of waiting; it was the Law that became the centre of their life in exile. After they returned it was the Torah that came to replace the Temple. It was the Law, the Torah, that emerged, then, as the soul of Judaism, and its correct interpretation came to be entrusted to a set of what we might call “lay lawyers,” or non-priestly specialists in the law. As the power of the discredited hereditary priesthood weakened in the chaotic conditions of the Return, these lawyers, these loyalists for the law, came to be seen as its protectors, its guarantors. Their name was the Pharisees.
The safeguarding of the purity of the Law was the driving force behind the later Maccabean revolt, 167-160 BC, a rebellion against the threat of Hellenization. Although the Temple was still the national shrine, and the ancient office of the Temple priest still carried great authority, the ones who made up this priestly caste, the Sadducees, became locked in a struggle for power with the Pharisees.
The Pharisees considered that they had separated themselves from all uncleanness by their meticulous observance, not of the Temple cult, but of the Law: Be holy, for I am holy, God said in Leviticus 11:44. They were the ones who knew what the Law was, and how it was to be observed in daily life. To be legalistic is to be like the Pharisees of Jesus’s time. They were known for their strict accuracy in their interpretation of the Law and their scrupulous adherence to it. They were the best of the best at this. They were the holiest of the holy.
And this sets the stage for the words of Jesus that we hear today. The Pharisees were his adversaries, but they were also his audience. Despite the fact that their legal training had hardened their minds and hearts, even then, even then, they had the opportunity, the possibility, to hear what Jesus had to say.
Jesus says to the Pharisees: you observed John the Baptist—-he called out to you; he addressed you; he warned you to repent and be baptized with a baptism of repentance. But you did not listen, and you refused to be baptized by him. And now you are observing me—-what I do and how well I keep the Law. I am calling you to a life of celebration of the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God, here in your midst, in my very person, and you will not hear my words, you will not dance with me!
You are not attuned to either means of God speaking to you, the invitation to mourn or to the invitation to rejoice. Why? Why are you stopping your ears?
The Pharisees didn’t know what to think of Jesus, because he didn’t seem impressed by their holiness. He didn’t try to be like them, or join them, or hold them up in his own teachings as models of the way you should live.
Instead, elsewhere in Matthew Jesus actually speaks to them like this:
You brood of vipers! How can you speak good things, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. (12:34)
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth. (23:27)
This is strong language. Can you imagine saying this to anyone you know?
The Pharisees were Jesus’s audience, then. The audience, now, is us. Jesus invites us, now, to join him in his dance of life and love. Of fuller life and endless love, for all of creation. It is in this spirit that He invites us to live. Will we, can we, respond yes?
What set Jesus apart from all the prophets and priests and proclaimers before him was not only the words he said, but how he said them.
He had a powerful charism, the charisma of truth. And this gave him the empathy to feel what others feel, to love them as they were, to will the good for them, the good that God wills for us all.
We are not Jesus’s adversaries; we are his followers: we want to be like him.
But we will have to see ourselves as He sees us, and think about how we live.
This quality of empathy, of being able to feel what others feel, is a precious gift. If we have wanted this, if we have cultivated, this quality of being, we will have grown into the kind of person who is able to see others as Jesus saw them, as full of endless flowering, capable of endless good. We will be able to respect, and love, and help others as Jesus calls us to do.
Hardness of heart in our own day is perhaps only selfishness, I think: a blindness, a refusal both to listen and to see as Jesus saw. It is what it means to be a Pharisee now.
We have been through an almost-unreal time of national, and international, mourning, as we have cut ourselves off from one another in order to escape this world-ravaging pandemic. We are still going through this. It has elicited from us a sense of profound
empathy, I think, with those whom we have never met, in far parts of our earth, who are going through this same experience of isolation and of suffering. For many, this has even demanded the mourning of someone known and loved and lost. This beautiful response of empathy, of concern, and of care for our fellow human beings has surely changed us for the better. I know that I pray differently, now. And I think I even see, and speak to, people, with a greater attentiveness, a greater care.
I think that this shared experience of the past few months has also changed the church. Our church buildings have been closed and locked. I think that it is time, now, for the church to emerge as a powerful visible symbol of hope—-even a symbol of rejoicing. It is time for the church to advertise itself, to say: we are the bearers of the hope and the joy that Jesus the Christ brings to all who hear his words and accept his invitation. We always have been, but here we are, now, for you. This is a place to come to listen to words of great healing. The Christian way of life is a life lived in looking at others, looking out for others, looking for the greatest good in others. This is what empathy means.
And it is most powerfully exercised, this quality of empathy, in community. Both as a potential and as a reality. The church of Jesus Christ has received this charge, from Jesus Christ himself, to minister to the lonely, the lost, the suffering, in a way that never judges, but only heals. This is what we celebrate!
The Pharisees could not respond to the signs of the times, because nothing in their lives had prepared them for what Jesus was asking them to do, to join him in the dance.
But we, also, have this great invitation, this great charge, this great possibility, this great new period that awaits us, of re-engaging our broken and suffering world in Jesus’s dance of love and light and never-failing hope.
May we not be afraid to declare who we are, and in whose name we dance.
Amen!
The Rev’d Dana English The Church of St. George’s Campden Hill, London July 5, 2020