A question that quite often crosses my mind when I’m in church is this: why don’t more people come? Think what you get: marvelous music, a thoughtful and reflective break in the business of the week, not to mention the benefit of sermons that—even if they are not top of the chart as far as entertainment is concerned—nevertheless try to address the serious issues of life in a way that hardly happens anywhere else. Since it is all so plainly good for you, why isn’t everyone here?
My amazement is, of course, naïve. We all know why people don’t come to church: they have other priorities, they have never got into the way of doing it, they simply don’t believe. For many, not coming to church is simply a matter of being honest. But one factor which I am sure is important is that they see the church as presiding over a culture of prohibition. Many would, if asked, describe the church in terms of the things that we are assumed to be against—Sunday shopping, cohabitation, gay relationships and sex generally, most kinds of fun. Many people stay away from church because they feel that if they came in, we would disapprove of them. They think that to make themselves acceptable, they would have to give a lot of things up: out of the pub and into the pew, and keep well away from Kingston on a Saturday night.
Well, if they came, they might get a pleasant surprise. Coming here week by week, I don’t have the sense that great deal of disapproving goes on. I can’t remember the last time that I heard a sermon denouncing the wicked or celebrating the virtues of the elect. In the Church of England, our style is more a moderate self-depreciation. Yet the impression still lingers that we are in the business of condemnation, of reproof. People don’t expect to feel comfortable amongst us.
In part, of course, we are still paying the price for the many generations in which condemnation and reproof were the main stock in trade of the churches. But if you ask why people see Christianity in negative terms, in terms of giving up what makes up their lives, you have to look for deeper reasons. Put bluntly, people associate religion with loss. Become ‘religious’—as people put it—and you have to forego much of what makes life enjoyable or at least tolerable. Nor is this just a matter of sex and booze. Become religious and you forfeit the dignity of thinking for yourself; you abandon yourself to a doubtful mix of myth and sentiment; you lose the stature of an autonomous person, able to face the world out of your own resources. How can any self-respecting modern individual plead, weekly, that a man dead two thousand years ago should have mercy on them? Nor is this just a problem for those outside. We might ask ourselves: if we imagine living closer to the church, closer to Christ, do we not detect just the faintest fear that the price might be to high, that we might be asked to give up too much, more than we are prepared to give?
Loss is very close to the idea of sacrifice, and that is what Jesus is talking about in the passage that was read to us this evening. The Pharisees had spotted his disciples breaking the Sabbath law: they were picking ears of grain—that is, doing work—to feed themselves and, no doubt, to feed Jesus too. In his defense, Jesus refers to an episode when the future King David was being hunted by Saul. David is fleeing with a small band of followers, and he does two things that Jesus acknowledges as unlawful. First, he lies to the priest Ahimelech about what he is up to: he claims to be on a mission for the King. Second, he asks the priest for the consecrated bread to feed his men. It is as though someone came into this church and ate the reserved sacrament. What has been given to God is being taken back for a distinctly dubious purpose—to support David in his disloyalty to Saul.
Jesus’s choice of this story is—as often—quite clearly provocative. In the face of the Pharisees’ devotion to the law, he approves David’s unlawful action. There is at least the suggestion that feeding Jesus is comparable to feeding David. Worse, from the point of view of the Pharisees, Jesus suggests that he somehow transcends the law and all its requirements: as he says, “something greater than the temple is here.” That implies a rejection of the whole temple cult of sacrifice. He quotes Hosea: “I desire mercy and not sacrifice,” says the Lord.
What we have here is a radical questioning of what religion was assumed to involve. Those to whom Jesus was speaking took it as obvious that religion had to do with keeping rules and giving things up. Sacrifice—willing or unwilling—was at the heart of it. But here is Jesus telling them that they have misjudged the whole thing. In their insistence on rules and sacrifice, God’s true purpose, which is mercy toward human beings in their suffering lives, is being defeated.
That is the point of the healing story that follows. When Jesus is confronted in the synagogue by the man with the withered hand, he faces a test: will he obey the law, or will he again claim to stand above it? They ask him a trick question, if it is lawful to heal on the sabbath. If he says yes, he is condoning work, and the breaking of the law. If he says no, then so much for his earlier advocacy of mercy. Jesus replies equally cleverly: he asks them if they would save a sheep on the sabbath day. They know, of course, exactly what they would do: a sheep was a valuable piece of property. So the law is not an absolute for them, either. In that case, says Jesus, will you forbid me to save a human being? And he ends with a brutal piece of irony: “so it is lawful to do good on the sabbath.” That, to people who believed that the sabbath was all about doing good. As we might say, you can even be good on a Sunday.
So mercy is what reveals God’s nature, not loss or sacrifice: the mercy that feeds hungry soldiers, that heals a man’s withered hand. But the subtlety of what Jesus has to say comes through, not only in his irony—do we often think of him as capable of irony?—but also in the fact that sacrifice is still an issue. In asking the Pharisees to think less about sacrifice and the law, to worry less about prohibitions and giving things up, Jesus is asking them to make a sacrifice. He is asking them to sacrifice their idea of God’s will to the reality of what God actually requires of them. He is asking them to sacrifice something very precious—their commitment to the law as the code of a pious life—in favor of what the law truly represents, which is the mercy of God. He is telling them that “something greater is here”—mercy, kindness, God’s readiness to bend to the needs of his people. For them to understand that, a great sacrifice has to be made.
Yes, sacrifice is required of us all. Becoming a Christian does not leave us just as we were, with our previous instincts and habits untouched and unquestioned. Those outside, who hesitate to take that step, are right so far. But the important thing is to understand the kind of sacrifice that is involved. It is not a matter of denying, of signing up to some code of rectitude that will make us respectable in the eyes of others. It is still less about systematically disapproving of our previous behavior and that of others. The only useful sacrifice is to give up whatever holds us back from seeing God in his truth—as the mercy that Hosea spoke of, that Jesus made incarnate in our world. When we give up our presuppositions about what God is; when we lay aside whatever law has replaced the face of God in the world, then we lose nothing. But what do we gain through that sacrifice? We gain what Jesus offered the Pharisees: the freedom that comes from knowing God in his unqualified generosity toward us, not as a forbidder and denier but as one who wants us to live in freedom, in the true dignity of what it is to be human. Then our faith will show itself, not as a diminishment, but as fulfillment.
Few have put this better than the present Pope, at the end of his first sermon after his election last year. I close with his words:
‘Are we not perhaps all afraid in some way? If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to him, are we not afraid that He might take something away from us? Are we not perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something that makes life so beautiful? Do we not then risk ending up diminished and deprived of our freedom? … No! If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation. And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you … Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ—and you will find true life. Amen.’
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