disclosing new worlds

James 1: 17-27 NRSV text
Mark 7: 1-8, 14-15, 21-23 NRSV text

Christians, Jews and Muslims are “People of the Book” – that is, we all, in different yet ultimately similar ways, live according to God’s revelation within a set of scriptures which we believe are normative for faith and conduct. This means that we cannot escape the burden and responsibility of interpretation. It is a task that is necessary for at least two reasons: firstly, there is no obvious single way of reading the texts we regard as scripture, despite assertions to the contrary, and secondly, Truth is always contextual (which is to say that it is hammered out in a dynamic “conversation” with the concrete circumstances of the community of faith.

Faithless interpretation
Within the Reformed tradition, we find two attempts to avoid the complexity of the interpretive task. The first is the reformers’ doctrine of the Perspicacity of Scripture – the notion that the meaning is plain to the faithful reader. Actually, it’s more accurate to say that it is the way in which this has been understood that is the problem, because that is certainly not how it was intended to function! It’s important to understand the context and meaning of what the reformers were saying. The driving force was to make the bible accessible to ordinary readers. The scriptures were translated from Latin into the vernacular. Over against the teaching office of the Roman Catholic Church, the reformers wanted to assert “the right of private interpretation”. While in practice this was often taken to mean that everyone became the sole arbiter of truth, the intention was to free the interpretation of scripture from the stranglehold of a corrupt Church. The Church needed to be under critical scrutiny by the bible in order to be reformed. In practice, the (mistaken) notion that every individual can and should read the bible in whatever way seems appropriate, and that all such ways are equally valid, has bedevilled the Church ever since. The root of the problem lies in the excessive post-Enlightenment individualism, in which the individual has no necessary connection with a believing, reading community. It is faithless because God addresses us not only as individuals but as a whole world! God’s self-revelation addresses how we make our world – our faith, our politics, our economics. The community of faith is meant to live out the truth of the gospel collectively, not simply in some radicalised private, individual, inner world of the self.

The second attempt is the fundamentalist option, which says that we must “simply” be prepared to take the “literal” sense of scripture. This is underwritten by a raft of assumptions, the most important of which is the inerrancy of scripture. If the bible is the Word of God, the assumption goes, it must necessarily be free of “error”. There is no room in this view for contradictions between different parts of the biblical canon. The bible is assumed to speak with one voice – the Voice of God. God’s revelation is given through human intermediaries, but they function more as God’s scribe receiving divine dictation than creative theologians who have anything of themselves to contribute. Consequently, the bible may be approached like a divine encyclopaedia, pronouncing on every necessary subject. We don’t have to interpret the bible, merely consult it! Any attempt to “avoid” the “plain meaning” of scripture is evidence of faithlessness.

The fundamentalist option is a latecomer in biblical interpretation, despite the assumption that it is “the way that it has always been done”. It grew out of the 19^th century Princeton school, with B.B Warfield. In its contemporary form, it is actually profoundly faithless: it refuses to take the bible as it is, but seeks rather to impose an artificial schema on it. It goes something like this: “If a book is to be the Word of God, it must be free of error and contradiction, otherwise it cannot be the Word of God”. In other words, it’s a question of facts. If it can be shown that the bible does, in fact, contain errors, then the whole edifice falls like a house of cards. If the bible cannot be trusted on its statement that the world was created 6,000 years ago over 6 days of 24 hours each, then the bible cannot be trusted on anything! The fundamentalists therefore find themselves embroiled in endless controversies about “facts” and “history”. What is faithless is the notion that the bible is actually up for question as the Word of God! Theoretically, the fundamentalists regard the bible as potentially no more important than any other book! That is why countless former fundamentalists have that “all-or-nothing” experience, and, in rejecting fundamentalism, find themselves rejecting both faith and the bible. For the Christian community of faith, the bible is not referred to as the Word of God because it can be squeezed into a formula or be shown to conform to certain criteria: it is the Word of God because it is the way in which God communicates! That is not open to (faithful) question: it is what it means to be within the Christian community of faith!

What the bible is, therefore, is what being “the Word of God” means. And a faithful, informed, searching reading of the bible finds itself grappling immediately with the interpretive task. We are compelled to engage in that conversation between the world of the texts, the tradition, and our own, contemporary context. It is a process – of formulation and reformulation in different contexts – that we see within the canon of scripture itself. And it is controversial! It is risky. It means making value judgements. It means changing what we once said, and saying something new – not simply saying the old things in new ways, but sometimes throwing out the old in favour of something that we believe and trust is more true. We see that, for instance, in the post-exilic re-reading of the tradition. And we see it right here in today’s gospel passage and in the selection of today’s epistle.

Purity laws and food: what was the problem, anyway?
Something very radical is going on in Mark’s gospel. Mark’s own context is the conflict between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. What is the status of the Law – particularly the Holiness Code? Note the structure of the narrative at this point: we have just had the feeding of the five thousand Jewish males. Jesus has crossed the lake to the Gentile side, where we will encounter the Syrophoenician woman as an example of faith in a discussion about healing within the metaphor of feeding (7:24ff). and where four thousand Gentile males will be fed (8:1ff). The parallel feedings are a clear indication that the Bread that Jesus offers is for all – both Jews and Gentiles. Sandwiched (sorry – no pun intended!) between is the debate with the Pharisees and scribes (who are significantly on Gentile territory) about the purity laws to do with food and washing. The text is multi-layered: it reflects the disputes between Jesus and the upholders of the tradition of his day, but also the post-Easter, post-Gentile mission situation of Mark’s community. It also forms a vital part of Mark’s presentation of Jesus as the Liberator who frees people from the chains of the purity system that declares them unclean and unfit for God.

What exactly is the issue here? We’re used to washing hands before meals – it’s simply good hygiene! The complaint by the Pharisees and scribes here, however, is not about coming to the table with grubby hands! It’s about ritual contamination. And here, Mark takes the exaggerated, “super-holy” version of keeping the Levitical laws about purity in regard to food. The tradition on this point held that touching food with unclean hands rendered that food impure. But that was a “second-degree” impurity: eating impure food could not contaminate a “pure” diner. The problem was liquid. Unclean liquid was “first-degree impurity” stuff, that, if present on food, would contaminate both the food and the eater. The “tradition of the elders” that Mark refers to here was thus a super-scrupulousness that sought to avoid even the remotest possibility of contamination through hand washing.

A new view of holiness
So what makes Jesus radical at this point? Jesus, in v19, not only declares all foods clean but effectively says that they were never unclean! In other words, he’s saying that the “tradition” got it wrong. He’s scathing about “the tradition of the elders” – a phrase that contrasts the tradition with the Law of God (which is why he quotes Isaiah). Whereas the Pharisees and scribes saw their tradition and the Law as one and the same thing, Jesus accuses them of substituting human precepts for the Law.

Jesus, you will remember, is in the business of building a messianic community that is non-exclusive. He refuses the categories of exclusion that were used to draw the “we/they” boundaries: class, “race”, wealth, and religious purity. Jesus’ special contempt for the “human precepts” is reserved for the ways in which the ability to exclude operated as a “gate”, with the religious leaders as the gatekeepers. It was a means of power – the power to exclude. What was intolerable for Jesus is that exclusion from the social and religious life of the community easily translated into apparent exclusion from the life of God. Archbishop Desmond Tutu always used to say that the tragedy of Apartheid (exclusion) was its ability to persuade [black] children of God that they were not, in fact, children of God!

In this passage, Jesus takes on the purity system. He refuses the notion that ever-vigilant scrupulousness (holiness) is the appropriate response to God. This is not because Jesus isn’t concerned about God’s holiness; rather, it is because of his radical reinterpretation of divine holiness. God’s “holiness”, for Jesus, is seen in God’s compassionate love that welcomes rather than excludes, is gracious rather than judgemental, and embraces the excluded, the despised, the marginalised and the unloved. This is the “holiness” that ought to characterise any true concern for the proper worship of God. And, if anything – even divine Law – leads to a conflict of purity vs inclusion, inclusion wins every time! True worship (note again Jesus’ citation in v7) is seen in compassionate inclusiveness. If there is any doubt about how we ought to act and decide, we must let these be our compass-bearing.

Dealing with the tradition: a spectrum of possible responses
What happens when a changed context requires a re-evaluation and re-appropriation of the tradition? This is precisely what is happening here. What, then, is the status of what has gone before? And, to raise the stakes just as high as they can go, what is the status of what God has said in the past? Again, this is the conflict in which Jesus is engaged.

And look at how radical his answer is! He could have taken the conservative line, cited Leviticus and said: “This is what God has said, and it remains unchanged. We have no right even to ask the question in the first place!”

Alternatively, he could have taken a revisionist position: “This is what used to be, but now the old way no longer applies. It is not that it was bad, or deficient, or wrong: it has been superseded by something new, better and more appropriate to the changed context”. Interestingly, this is pretty much the position that Matthew and Luke both take.

Jesus, however, takes a third, radical option, which is to say that what has been believed in the past is quite simply wrong! Importantly, it is wrong because they have failed to understand God. Had they done so, they would have realised that the God whose kingdom is such Good News – especially to the poor and excluded – could never have intended a system that created poverty and exclusion. Therefore what has appeared to be divine Law and has been taught as divine Law – and can be justified as divine Law by appeal to “It is written …” – is in fact mere human precept, obscuring the true divine Law.

This is clear from vv 14-15. Jesus explains to the crowd that the problem isn’t contamination, but the evil that is within. Impure food passes through the system. What really does damage is the evil that is inside a person, is intrinsic to them, and cannot be got rid of either through ritual cleansing or even going to the toilet! You can’t flush these out of the system! They live inside – and they really defile!

Jesus’ option, in other words, is to set aside scripture on the grounds that it does not tell us the Truth about God! That is both radical and faithful. It is radical because it is extremely uncomfortable. We don’t find it too difficult … on this issue, because the question of obedience to the purity laws has long since to be a burning question for us. We find it quaint and anachronistic. It threatened to split the earliest Church, though! But what about our own burning questions? How uncomfortable are we, for instance, at the possibility of setting aside biblical pronouncements about homosexuality on the same grounds as Jesus uses here? I want to return to that issue in a moment, but first, I want only to note that Jesus’ option is faithful because it does justice to the nature of the bible itself. We do not believe that biblical “inspiration” is the same thing as dictation! The bible was not dictated verbatim from the mouth of God. Rather, God’s Spirit inspired the writers. Unsurprisingly, therefore, what we have is a record of faith. This is what people believed – genuinely and faithfully. But genuine and faithful belief itself is not a guarantee that we have got it right – something we have seen over the debates about slavery, the ordination of women and Apartheid! Instead, it is inspiration – the conviction that the bible genuinely contains the self-revelation of God – that compels us to engage in the risky struggle of interpretation. Jesus had to do it – so do we!

A slightly different model (James 1: 17-27)
We begin a study of the epistle of James this week. James, the brother of Jesus, was the leader of the Jerusalem Church. He was a theological conservative. In the debate over whether Paul’s Gentile converts needed to become Jews (Acts 15), James was Paul’s opponent. Look at Galatians 2. This is no mild disagreement, but a vitriolic dispute! Paul is positively venomous in his condemnation of Peter, James and the “Judaisers”. The presence of the epistle in the canon is the record of a fundamental conflict within the earliest Church about how to cope with tradition in the light of what is new in Jesus Christ.

Paul is radical. Without wishing to over-egg the pudding, it is important to state that Paul saw the implications of what God has done in Jesus Christ as setting aside the Law. This isn’t the time and place to go into exactly what Paul means; suffice it to say that he sees salvation in Christ as ushering in a new creation – a different order of things in which the Law is redundant. Paul was accused of being antinomian as a result.

James sees it differently. Jesus, for him, makes a better understanding of the Law possible. It enables people to fulfil God’s intention for the Law. James, then, is unsurprisingly characteristically “Jewish”, but with a Christian “spin”. His audience is the Jewish Christian Church, peopled by believers steeped in the Jewish faith. His emphasis is on the continuity with all that has gone before, rather than discontinuity. Nevertheless, it is important to note that (a) he is in deliberate, conscious debate with Paul over how to interpret the scriptures and (b) they disagree – profoundly!

It’s interesting to tie up what James says about defiling with today’s gospel passage – particularly in relation to the tongue. We know how destructive that can be in Christian communities! And, in Jesus’ terms, it is the destructive, community-shattering words that equate to the evil within that defiles.

However, for the moment, I wish only to note the way in which the very texts of the New Testament face us with the intractable problem of controversy and conflict in seeking to interpret scripture and understand God.

Bringing it all back home
Those of you with a developed musical taste (!) will recognise the Dylan album title here! I want us to grapple seriously with the implications of today’s gospel passage by asking the question of what application this might have to the sexuality debate that churches are currently facing (even if they’re avoiding it). This is the equivalent of the debate over ritual purity at meals, with as radical and far-reaching implications – and the same temperature-raising capacities!

Once we accept that there is a need to interpret (rather than merely consult) the bible if we are to get some access to what we believe God’s will might be, we are faced with at least 3 possible ways to go – all of which might justifiably claim to be “biblical”! I want to stress that they can all lay claim to being biblical, because the discussion about sexuality has, at least in the United Reformed Church, been sabotaged by accusations and counter-accusations about “not taking the bible seriously”, when in fact, the issue is about biblical interpretation.

We could take the conservative option, that says, “Leviticus calls it an abomination! That is the Law! That is God’s opinion, and we have no right to deviate from it at all”. Those of us who take this option have a barrage of texts at our disposal. It is quite clear that homosexuality is viewed with outrage and horror. It is condemned. And, if reading the bible faithfully means finding the burden of the textual evidence, the case is open and shut.

A second, revisionist option, says that the biblical treatment of homosexuality takes place within a context that bears little or no resemblance to today’s context. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah, for example, is not about homosexuality: it is about the abuse of hospitality through homosexual rape by “straight” men. This option says that we cannot sort out the matter by appeal to biblical texts: we understand far more about human sexuality than can be gleaned from the texts and need to make judgements on different grounds than textual ones on the subject. So, for example, the fact that God clearly calls homosexual people into ministry (at least, clearly does so by every canon and criteria we currently use to discern a call) means that we cannot assume that homosexuality is itself a disqualification for ministry.

A third, radical option says that we ought to judge the issue by what includes and what excludes. Because the blanket condemnation of homosexuality leads to exclusion, it shows that we are wrong if we assume that the texts that condemn it give us an indication of the mind of God. On the contrary: they are “human precepts”, uncritically equated with the divine will, and need to be set aside because they were never right in the first place! And the warrant for this approach is none other than the Markan Jesus himself!

The priority of compassion
Mark presents us with a Jesus who is alive to the deep-seated human tendency to exclude people who are “different”. The most effective way to do so is to declare them “unclean” – beyond the pale. Jesus makes a messianic community out of these excluded people first – on the grounds that this reflects the will and heart of a God who is primarily compassionate and loving, and whose “holiness” is expressed not in disapproval but in loving welcome. Ironically, Mark goes on immediately to show us that Jesus himself was not immune to this tendency, as we will see next week with the story of the Syrophoenician woman! May God bless us all as we wrestle with the biblical texts, day by day and week by week! And may God keep giving us the courage to persevere!

Amen.

2 Samuel 18: 5-9, 15, 31-33 NRSV text
Psalm 130 NRSV text
Ephesians 4: 25-5:2 NRSV text
John 6: 35, 41-51 NRSV text

“The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (1:17). Here is John’s programmatic statement about the difference that Jesus makes. John’s Jesus reveals the Father as “full of grace and truth” (1:14). Jesus is the means by which we receive “grace upon grace” (1:16). Outside of Jesus, it is impossible to know that this is what the Father is like, because it is so counter-intuitive. “Law” makes sense to us; grace doesn’t. We can live with a system of “just deserts”, but passionate, forgiving love in the face of face of flagrant rebellion (such as David shows for his son, Absalom in today’s reading from 2 Samuel) flies in the face of everything we know and indeed want to know about God. Nothing in the system of Law (according to John) prepares us for so radical a revolution in our understanding of God. It is totally unacceptable. And if it is the case that we are to believe something so strange about God – something that so fundamentally alters our way of believing, relating and living – then it is a truth that has to come from God alone. Hence John goes on to say, “No-one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (1:18).

I start here – right at the beginning of the gospel – because we need to understand what John is doing in his presentation of Jesus. It matters enormously if we are to understand the role of “the Jews” in the Fourth Gospel. John’s gospel has played a pivotal role in the tragic history of Christian anti-Semitism. It has been the justification for the persecution of Jewish people by Christians as “Christ-killers”. It has been a disgusting and anti-Christian history. We are clouded by its existence – both in terms of deserved guilt and horror at what has been done to Jewish people in the (supposed) name of Christ, but also by the paralysis it exerts right at the moment over our ability to distinguish between anti-Semitism and the effective condemnation of Israeli policies in the Middle East.

Opposition to Jesus: the role of “the Jews” in John’s gospel
It is “the Jews” who are “complaining” (far too soft a translation!) about Jesus’ statement, “I am the Bread of Life – the bread that has come down from heaven and which gives life to the world”. The Jews represent the Law that was given through Moses, and the understanding of God which is unable to see grace and love at the heart of the Divine. John, of course, draws the distinction far more sharply than it should be. To characterise the Old vs New Testament as a “conflict” of Law vs Grace is unsustainable. The Law was understood and experienced as grace (you have only to read Psalm 119 to see that clearly). John is using a narrative device to make a point that is nonetheless true: Jesus effects a decisive break in the understanding of God. There is a genuine novum here – a converting newness which makes it possible to recognise continuity with the past only from the new vantage point.

Just think for a moment about the traditional Nine Lessons and Carols service we have every Christmas. We read the Old Testament as though they presented a “prophetic script” for Jesus. They’re not! We can look back to see “previews” of a suffering Messiah, but we must not imagine that these were understood this way in the past! When Jesus came as the suffering messiah, he stood “messiahship” on its head!

This, in a sense, is precisely what John labours so carefully to tell us via the narrative devise of “the Jews”. This is why John’s Jesus goes on and on about having come “from above”; from “the Father”. The revelation of God as a God of grace and love is the truth about God, but it’s one that is incredibly difficult to accept. The only grounds for accepting such a radical departure from the past is the testimony of Jesus himself: he has come from the Father as a Witness to testify to this truth. And his testimony is trustworthy because he is talking about the Father whom he knows – intimately!

Of course, it is not enough simply to accept what Jesus says – what he claims. The question is, “Is this guy on the level? How can we be sure that he is who he says he is? How can we risk believing him? Because what’s at stake is absolutely fundamental! If this is the Truth, everything alters – who God is, how we relate to God, what God is doing in the world and how we are supposed to live!” This is the significance of the “signs” in John’s gospel – the miracles that make clear who Jesus is (as Jesus explains in the accompanying “I am” sayings). That is why opposition to Jesus is opposition to the God whom Jesus reveals. “The Jews”, in other words, represent resistance to grace and truth. They represent those who have vested interest in a world of just deserts – those for whom the present is “okay” and for whom grace – blessing and inclusion of the “unworthy” and “have-nots” – presents a real threat. We ought not to underestimate the drive to justify reasons for not changing – even by theological means! We saw it in the Afrikaner insistence that Apartheid was God’s will for South Africa, and the blindness to God and the truth of grace and justice that results. It is the same sort of resistance that John evokes through the device of “the Jews”.

Note how John constructs his narrative in this regard. Each sign (the wedding at Cana and the healing of the official’s son in Capernaum) is followed by a major Jewish festival (Passover in 2:13; “a festival of the Jews” in 5:1). In each case, Jesus “goes up to Jerusalem”. In other words, the signs bring Jesus into conflict with the established religious traditions. The point is that “the Jews” fail to understand the festivals as pointing towards the God whom Jesus proclaims: rather, they have interpreted them in a way that makes it impossible for them to recognise the truth of what Jesus is saying – the truth of grace.

That is John’s narrative formula. Go back and read chapter 5 for a moment – it’s key to understanding what is happening in John’s account. We’re deep in synoptic territory – this, after all, is John’s take” on the synoptic tradition, rather than a totally different one – and the context is a dispute over Sabbath-keeping. Jesus heals a lame man on the Sabbath, and as a result, “the Jews started persecuting Jesus” (5:16). Jesus immediately raises the stakes: “This isn’t just about me – it’s about what God is doing! This is about the work of my Father! God is at work here – through me!” “The Jews” get the point! The opposition immediately cranks up several notches: now they are actively seeking to kill Jesus (5:18).

This leads to a solemn statement by Jesus (Amen, amen, lego humin”) about the authority of the Son (5: 19-29). Significantly, it is about resurrection. God is the God who wants to give life – even to the dead! It is a question of eternal life – the Life of God that cannot be quenched or thwarted by death. This is what God intends for the world, and God has brought it about through Jesus (cf 5:30-47). And before we are too hasty to accuse John of being radically dualistic about Law and grace, note vv 39-47 particularly! “Moses wrote about me!” What Jesus means is that it is possible to see that the God whom he calls Father – the God of grace – is truly the same God who gave the Law! However, like Paul, John (and Jesus?) appear to believe that the Law’s intention for grace is thwarted by sin, so that we are doomed to “get God wrong” – unless and until we look at Jesus! In other words, unless and until we read the signs correctly. This is the immediate context for the story of the feeding of the five thousand men.

“Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me”
Here in chapter 6 – the feeding miracle – John tells us that “the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near” (6:4). This sign doesn’t take place in Jerusalem, nor does Jesus go up to Jerusalem for a confrontation with “the Jews”. This takes place in the wilderness, because John presents it as the true celebration of the Passover. It is Eucharistic (remember?), because it pulls together both the wilderness feeding in the Exodus narrative and Jesus’ giving of his “flesh for the life of the world”. That is the true meaning of the sign. Jesus is the new and true Passover. He will give his “flesh” in the same manner as the Israelites lived because they were fed by manna from heaven. Jesus is the true manna from heaven! He is God’s gift of Life, just as the manna in the wilderness was.

Let me stress yet again, though: it’s all a matter of being able to read the signs! Have a look at my posts on Pentecost 8 and 9. It is possible to see the signs and misread them – to see Bread of Life as only a perpetually full stomach. Recognising the truth requires discernment and openness to God. John stresses this in 6:42. “The Jews” reckon they’ve got Jesus sussed! They know everything of significance there is to know about him – his family history. Now, of course, there is a very deliberate irony here: Jesus is not Joseph’s son, but God’s son! This is precisely the point Jesus goes on to make. But there is another point here, too: the “we know who he is” is a desire to control Jesus – to make him manageable. It is to slot him into a box that we can cope with and to blunt the threat and challenge of his otherness – particularly, to bunt the threat, challenge and invitation from God that he makes present. There is an integral connection between being unable to read the signs and a refusal to read them.

This is what Jesus is talking about in vv 43-46. It’s akin to the synoptic “Those who have eyes to see will see, otherwise they’ll remain blind” motif. John’s Jesus puts it the other way around: “No-one can come to me unless they are drawn by the Father”. This sounds very predestinarian: God only chooses only certain people, so that he fact that some respond and some don’t can therefore be explained by the choice of God. That isn’t John’s theology. His point is that the Father is seeking to draw all people through Jesus. The fact that some come to Jesus and experience him as the Living Bread is a sign that they are open to God’s revelation and invitation in Jesus. They respond to Jesus because they see in him the character and saving action of God.

“Grace is no way to run a kingdom!” (2Samuel 18)
There are two ways (at least!) to read and preach the story of David and his son, Absalom. It begins in chapter 13 – and it’s quite a read! One way is to see it as part of the “It started out so nice” dynamic of David’s reign (and many thanks, by the way, to those of you who responded to my request for help to find Rodriguez!): David’s reign starts out with huge promise, and quickly falls apart because of the flaws in David’s character. David may have been a great warrior king, but he was a useless administrator! He failed to provide justice at the city gates – in other words, to ensure that grievances and disputes could be settled (which was his job). Absalom was able to exploit this and gather dissent support against David. David is also a pretty poor husband and father! He’s remarkably indulgent of his children (and indeed of all forms of rebellion!): rather than act swiftly and strongly, he vacillates and is reluctant to grasp nettles. And Absalom is the original “spoilt child”. We leave David weeping bitterly for his son at the end of chapter 18. In fact, he’s utterly neglecting his responsibilities to the troops who have fought for him and supported him so faithfully – something that Joab has to take him to task for in the next chapter.

So one way of reading these texts is to stress David’s failures. For all his promise, and for all that God does for David, David is weak. He’s an example of the sort of Christian leaders who give Christianity such a bad name (as Peter Pay pointed out in his comment on Pentecost 8). And there is no doubt whatsoever that these sorts of failure of leadership are serious! They cause enormous harm and damage, and the scars remain with individuals and congregations for years to come.

But there’s a second emphasis here, which I find myself drawn to by today’s gospel reading. It’s the emphasis on grace. For all his failings, we see David as a father who will not give up on or disown his wayward, rebellious, murderous son. What more does Absalom need to do to provoke David into disowning him utterly? Why should we mourn this beautiful, treacherous, partricidal (is there such a word??) young man, whose capture is such a wonderful example of poetic justice? Aren’t we with Joab and the others, who are so incensed with Absalom’s evil that they ignore David’s weakness and put him to a well-deserved death – a death demanded by justice and law? What an utter waste of love, emotion and human life David’s grief and weakness for Absalom has proved! He’s lost Israel’s support, had to flee his city and go on the run, lost all his dignity, lost the lives of many of his men … it’s been a disaster! If only David had been able to see past his own (unreasonable) love for his son, this whole sorry mess could have been avoided!

Hmm! Can’t help being reminded here about the story of the Lost Son (mistakenly called the parable of the Prodigal). It’s a parable of grace – about the totally unreasonable, undignified, unjust and utterly ridiculous love of the father for a son who wants him dead! Whereas this parable ends happily ever after (from the father’s point of view, not from that of the elder – faithful – brother!) and the son who was dead is now alive, the story of Absalom ends up with the inconsolable grief of a father who has lost his son irretrievably.

In other words, we can see in David’s very weaknesses – his love for his son, his reluctance to punish rebellion and execute his enemies, his refusal to stand on royal dignity – a mirror of God’s own gracious and loving passion for the world. One of the problems about grace is that it seems to demean God. It makes God so soft … so undignified … so … ungodlike! Philip Yancey, in his book, What’s So Amazing About Grace?, characterises God as “a lovesick Father”. He’s right! There’s something pathetic and distinctly un-admirable about lovesickness. It provokes derision and scorn, however sympathetic we might feel. Our instinct is always to try and talk people out of that sort of love: “It isn’t good for you!” But that’s surely precisely the point about grace! And for those who do have eyes to see, and ears to hear, it’s the most glorious, joyous invitation to Life! It converts. And, says John, however unpalatable that may be, it’s the truth about God!

The grace that makes a difference (Ephesians 4:25-5:2)
If it is truth that converts, says Paul, then its power is seen concretely in changed lives. The Lectionary carefully omits 4:17-24 – presumably because it appears to support and unsupportable characterisation of “us” and “them”. “Us” is the Christians, who are good people; “them” is the non-Christians, who are as bad as it’s possible to be. Now of course, Paul is using “the Gentiles” in much the same way as John uses “the Jews”. He’s no more saying that every Gentile (non-Christian) has “lost all sensitivity and abandoned themselves to licentiousness, being greedy to practise every kind of impurity” (v19) than John is saying that every Jew was fiercely resistant to Jesus and thirsty for his blood! It’s a stereotype – a way of highlighting the difference that faith in and discipleship of Jesus is supposed to make.

Having made it, he then goes on to the verses in today’s readings. Lies, bitter, grudge-holding anger, thieving and evil talk are out. They belong to an old life and an old set of values. These are the “old ways”. They are destructive. They prevent true community. We all know what they bring: bitterness, wrath, anger, wrangling and slander, and all sorts of malice” (v31). Paul’s focus is communal. Christianity isn’t about people becoming “nice” – it’s about transformed individuals within transformed communities!

The communal bit is the most important. For Paul, the most unmistakeable and indisputable evidence – “sign” – of the Holy Spirit’s reality was the Church as communities in which Jews and Gentiles could live together as brothers and sisters without tearing each other apart and killing one another! What’s radical about this is that Gentiles just weren’t supposed to be “in”! Everything they ahd ever known about God suggested that they were decidedly “out”. Yet God, in Christ and through the Spirit, was creating a new, radically inclusive community.

Paul isn’t talking here about an appearance of community, but community as a reality. The verdict of Church history is rarely on Paul’s side – at least in glaringly significant cases! Christians have murdered and killed each other over baptismal and communion practices, the owning of slaves, territory, power, forms of church government, politics, food, resources, race, gender, nationality, philosophy … the list is both grim and endless! And today the Church is hell-bent on tearing itself apart over the issue of human sexuality! I remember (with honour and affection) Michael Vasey, an evangelical Anglican who came out as a homosexual and wrote a superb book about homosexuality and the bible. This godly man received death threats from his so-called “brothers and sisters in the Lord”!

We mustn’t read passages like this one as in some sense “gently pastoral injunctions to niceness”! Paul was writing in a context in which divisions and opinions were strongly held and bitterly divisive. And nothing divides like faithfully-held theological convictions! Then the struggle to win an argument takes on apocalyptic proportions: it is the struggle for the very Truth of God! We in the United Reformed Church would do well to heed that as the moratorium on the sexuality issue comes to an end.

Yet we have been looking at John’s gospel, where we are confronted head-on with precisely such a struggle for the Truth of God! And the greatest truth, we are told in Jesus, is that God is a God of grace. Enough “evil talk” and slander. Enough of making out that people who see things differently over these issues in church life are somehow less Christian, or blinded to truth, than we are! This is to grieve the Holy Spirit of God.

How might we find our compass bearings, then, when the issues seem far from clear-cut and faithful people are so faithfully divided over them? How do we proceed, if there is a sense in which truth matters? The guidance we see in Jesus is this: people matter! We human beings are quick to draw boundaries that God refuses to draw. We like to draw them and patrol them – faithfully and fiercely! Yet, if we are to be led by the Spirit, we ought to concentrate on nearness. “Put away the things that exacerbate division!” says Paul. Instead, “be kind to one another, tender-hearted, and forgiving one another! After all, that is how God in Christ treats us!” Let’s have our debates. Let’s strive to find agreement, and to discover more of the truth of God in it all. But let’s refuse the old stereotypes! Let’s refuse the safety of old arguments with their well-defended walls that keep us apart form one another and reinforce our sense of “us” and “them”. Instead, let’s draw near to one another, with eyes to see and ears to hear, in the scary and fragile faith that God in Jesus will turn out to be different and far more gracious than we ever imagined possible.

Amen.