Sunday 5th November 2006TRINITY XXI
Fr David Cherry
Deuteronomy 6 : 1 – 9 ; Hebrews 9 : 11 – 14 ; Mark 12 : 28 – 34
Those final words of Jesus to the scribe: Thou art not far from the kingdom of God.
Well you’ve heard the commandment of God. Get on with
it. Need anything more be said? Love God above
everything else. Love my neighbour as much as I love
myself. But I’m not doing it very well. Are you?
The God of the new culture of grace and mercy and peace is there for those who are outsiders.
What is a commandment for?
Timothy Radcliffe in What is the Point in Being a Christian? writes:
Of course we need rules and commandments, just as a pianist needs
scales. But they are only there to teach us freedom, and to
remind us of what we most deeply desire.
The Ten Commandments are not an external constraint on our freedom:
they tell us who we are. If I feel myself being carried away by a
sudden desire to murder the Prior, then ‘Thou shalt not
kill’ reminds me that I am his brother, and I do not really want
to kill him, much. I would only feel remorse if I did.
Regret is being sorry for what one did in the past. Remorse is
discovering that one never really wished to do it at all.
Spontaneity is the fruit of being single-hearted.
The desire of God is that we live fulfilling lives, in touch with our true desire, knowing the purpose for which we were made.
One can think of one’s heart as a compass knowing due north, but
we are knocked off course, deceived by covetousness, - envy, disordered
desire which leads to destruction of a our own peace and peace between
neighbour. All the while we have the God-given capacity to chose
God our Creator and live in harmony with one another.
The book of Deuteronomy as a whole can be seen as an instruction manual
to liberate God’s people from covetousness. So these
prescriptions are to help us discover what we truly want; and they
precede the proscriptions about covetousness:– If you Love the
Lord your God with all of who you are, your desire will be
re-orientated towards God rather than towards things –
anothers’ wife, house, field, oxen and so on…
Commandments are to help us reorientate our desires, to desire God and the welfare of our neighbour .
So our scribe comes to Jesus in today’s gospel. He is
impressed with the answers that Jesus has been giving in the previous
verses. What has been happening? Remember there is a debate going
on in jewish society at the time of Jesus – the Pharisees believe
in the Resurrection from the dead and the Sadducees don’t.
The Sadducees were those who only accepted the first 5 books of the
Bible, the Pentateuch. They believed that Moses, God’s friend,
had written them and had said nothing about the resurrection from the
dead and therefore it must be wrong. For them, the only way to
live on after your death is to live on through your children.
So they come to test Jesus and ask : if you’re following
Moses’ law about a brother marrying his brother’s widow, in
heaven – at your so-called resurrection of the dead - whose wife
will this woman be? They’re following their own
logic, a sound enough point to bring.
Jesus doesn’t go there. He replies with two points.
The first is to ask them why they don’t know the
scriptures. Haven’t you read in the Book of Moses (i.e.
Exodus) what God says at the burning bush to Moses: I am the God
of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. The point of
course is that none of them were alive and yet God says he is their
God! They do not know the power of God, he tells them.
“He is God, not of the dead, but of the living. "
And then Jesus says : “You are very much mistaken.”
This mistaken-ness is not about getting a point of interpretation
wrong, or missing the point. It is a matter of being wrong in a
deeper sense. Being mistaken, living in a mistaken way; living
from a deep place which is actually in need of being re-oriented
towards life rather than, resignedly, towards death. A culture
that is based on covetousness – disordered desire – is a
culture which is ultimately based on a death. A competitive fight
to the finish. The Sadducees are saying this is how it has always
been. How could it be different? It’s common
sense. Jesus is telling them – God is not the God of such a
culture and that they are mistaken to think and to live in this
way.
And for ‘they’ - we read ‘we’. We
are deeply mistaken in the way we live, deeply disordered in our
desires. We are fundamentally disordered in the way we operate.
So our scribe is beginning to get it. It is beginning to sink in,
to dawn on him. You can hear it as he repeats Jesus words
allowing this new culture of the resurrection to possess him. It
is true says the scribe, to Love God and to love our neighbour is what
the Law is about and then adds – it is more important than
‘whole burnt offerings’ and sacrifices. The
culture of death is dying in him.
The kingdom that Jesus is inaugurating is not founded on violence and
expulsion, on fatwahs and scapegoats in order to keep the people pure.
Remember Salman Rushdie and the Satanic Verses. The Ayatolla
believed that Allah the all merciful, the all just exercised his mercy
and justice by killing off those who threatened God’s elect (and
most religions function like this to some extent) But this is not
the God of the living, the culture of death which humans have made of
God’s Law.
These final chapters as we end the year of readings from St
Mark’s gospel presage his going up to Jerusalem to die and reveal
the resurrection life, that new life which is founded, lived out and
exhibited in a new community, the New Israel, the
Church. After this – Mark tells us – no
one dared ask him any more questions – they had to see what he
would do.
The God of the new culture of grace and mercy and peace is there for
those who are outsiders. We – the whole mistaken human race
– are the beneficiaries of such love and invited to find
ourselves re-orientated towards the true God. This happens
to us as we expose ourselves to the true God.
Here we, that Church, celebrate the Law of God. We ask that our
God of the living may free our hearts to desire him more and to love
our neighbour as those who are just as mistaken as we are. In the
words of the epistle to the Hebrews this morning: ‘to purify our
consciences from dead works to serve the living God’
We pray that in Communion mistaken hearts may be healed of fear and
find ourselves not far from the kingdom of God. Amen