I wonder what we should believe. I don’t mean in terms of the faith – that has been handed down to us, and we have the Bible and the church fathers to go back to if we encounter a new situation in which to apply it. People like to moan about the church ‘changing’ but it has remained astonishingly the same for two thousand years, just applied to a whole variety of contexts, all of which it makes sense of and informs. I mean in terms of people and what they tell us and even what we see – pictures are doctored or fabricated completely, news can be fictitious, either through design or incomprehension, and there is, terrifyingly, often no way of knowing if what we see, hear or indeed smell is real, the latter in the case of supermarkets who pipe in the smell of fresh bread around the bakery section when, often, nothing is baked there at all. It is sometimes asked of patients by psychiatrists ‘do you see or hear anything which nobody else seems to’ – but now, I would hesitate to tell the truth, because AI and social media is quite capable of showing you ultra tailored content which nobody else sees and which is often entirely fictitious. Let your ‘yes’ be a ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ be a ‘no’ might well be the best advice the readings today gives us, and it is the ridiculing of faith and Christianity which has led us to this point, and the church, to her eternal shame, apes the monument to its own decline that so often threatens to consume us.

So what do you believe? Who do you believe? Do you really think that Farage will be better able to rearrange the deckchairs than Starmer or Johnson have been, or to resolve issues that, when thought through and not painted onto roundabouts, are a perpetual stalemate until the world order is changed and the fantasy of a world united under anything but Christ has finally been discarded – there is nothing except faith that will save us, and people seem to be realising that. But it has to be true faith, lived fully and understood and taught well, not the fantasy of a man in the sky or pet hamsters in a heavenly park.

I think this hope in a time of doubt may be a good starting point for understanding those strange words of Jesus in today’s Gospel, “I tell you solemnly, till heaven and earth disappear, not one dot, not one little stroke, shall disappear from the Law until its purpose is achieved.” The dots and strokes are the vowels of the Hebrew alphabet, the language of the Jewish scriptures, the Old Testament. The basis of Hebrew writing is just the consonants – but the vowels are needed for the words to make a sound. Furthermore, the Jewish Scriptures, in which the Law is contained, are to this day sung in Jewish services. Reading was not enough – singing is needed for the full sound to be present. And really to sing, we have to believe in and be truly present to the words and the music. We need to be open to their deepest meaning. We need to let the words abide in us, disturb us, change us.

So this is not Jesus imposing the Jewish Law on the first Christians in all its details. It is Jesus taking us to the heart of the Law of God, the observances of which (such as abstaining from pork) were signs only relevant to a particular time and place. Jesus confronts us with the terribly destructive effect unjust anger can have. He challenges us with how we look at others: do we look at them in love, rejoicing that this child of God exists, or do we ultimately see them as simply for our use? Do we take with our hands what we need, or whatever this consumer that is me happens to want at this particular moment? Is our yes really yes and our no really no?

This is obviously a huge challenge, and Jesus uses deliberately shocking language about tearing our eye out or cutting off our hand if they cause us to sin. And of course, often we’re thoughtless rather than malicious, but thoughtlessness is damaging to those who we are not thinking of, and love is never thoughtless.

Perhaps this is why St. Paul, in today’s second reading, is critical of the wisdom of his age, just as we should be of the apparent wisdom of our own age, when we see where it is leading us. In the verses just before the ones we hear today, Paul says to the people of Corinth – a smart, upwardly mobile place – that when he came to them, he did not use “lofty words or wisdom” to proclaim the mystery of God, but rather decided “to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified”. This is the only hope for our time now when Satan has so changed society and the world as we see, hear and smell it that we do not know what is true and what is false. Hold therefore to your faith, prepare for Lent on Wednesday with joy and the firm resolve to move closer to God and to let your yes be a yes and your no be a no, so that people may see God in us and, in the end, the world may be saved – not saved from war or terror, not saved from bombs or division, but saved through faith and the unswerving knowledge that the cross gives us – death is not the end. There is a ‘yes’ that resounds through history, and it is the ‘yes’ of the cross, the ‘yes’ that says God loves us, and through death, we find life. Say yes to it. And say no to everything else.