Take one thing away, and the total effect can often be spoiled for many of us. It doesn’t need to be a big thing even, but its removal is sufficient to make us wonder why we ever bothered. Being given a bowl of whitebait but learning there is no accompanying shaker of cayenne pepper for example or driving a vehicle that won’t go over seventy miles an hour or watching a horror film without the scary music – it’s all there, but something is missing which somehow makes it all work. Many people feel the same way about Church I think – whether they want the music, or incense or stained-glass windows, or whatever it might be that makes it all work for us – there is nothing wrong with those things not being there, but it might make the experience somehow lacking for us. This would, generally, be wrong of course, although perfectly natural, for we can get hooked on the externals of a thing rather than the thing itself. Does anyone actually like neat gin, or do we need the tonic and ice and lime to make it the way we like it? Well, today let yourself feel sorry for the Pharisees and scribes. Jesus tells us they are interested in externals and have set aside the commandments of God to cling to human traditions, but it would have been hard for them to see things from his perspective, and not only because they are fixated on one aspect of the package of faith alone.We may decry some of the details of the traditions described in the Gospel as merely human additions – and to tut inwardly at Kosher dietary law, or to think it a human external, but we too might count our calories, cut off the fat, look for natural cooking oil, choose only perfect vegetables and want our fish to be organic, so food choices are hardly a thing alien to us. But the general pattern, the idea that certain foods make you unclean, that food must be prepared in certain ways and not others, and even that it must be eaten in certain ways, are part of the Jewish Law, as well as our own preferences.That Law, the Jews were fiercely proud to have received from God Himself. We get a piece of Scripture teaching adherence to the Law, and even pride in it, in our first reading. It is by keeping this Law which embodies the wisdom and understanding of God that the Jews will come to hear the nations round about exclaim, ‘No other people is as wise and prudent as this great nation.’ This Law forms the Jews as the great nation that they are and makes them visibly the people of God. They are defined as themselves and as people of God by adherence to the law. So, when the disciples do not keep to the traditions, and when Jesus does not chastise them for it, but rather criticises these Jews who expect the disciples to wash their hands, and even more when he goes further and categorically states that nothing which goes into a person can make them unclean, this is all very shocking. It must have seemed that he was rejecting his very Jewishness, and to be praising careless, unreligious people over those who keep the law of His Father. It’s a problem, and as I said last week, must have made Jesus seem disappointing and hard to follow for most people, including His own disciples.We, with the gift of hindsight so common in Biblical study, realise that we are living in a clearly defined New Covenant, when these rules have been replaced, but at the time of the Gospel, when they were actually being rewritten and replaced, things were not at all clear cut, and this must have seemed a very challenging teaching.Well, what is wrong here? What externals are being removed and why? Is it the Gin or the Ice, the Whitebait or the Cayenne? The Pharisees think, with good cause, that they know the will and plan of God, partly (and convincingly) because he seems to have given it to them, as we read in the first reading, but on the other hand they certainly have held and begun traditions that are stricter than required – well, nothing particularly bad in that yet, we all do as much from time to time. But they criticise and look down on others who do differently, and in doing that forget the love they ought to have for their neighbour, one of the central points of the Law – and more importantly, their love for neighbour extends only to other Jews (other people like us, we might say), and that is notably about to change.We need to learn to love the law of God. Because within it is found the will and heart of the Father and the revelation of the Son and the ongoing gift of the Spirit, but the law of God is itself to love, and so like the Pharisees, we need to keep alert to the extraordinary discovery of the disciples which is that the Law is, at the heart, a way of revealing God to us, that it holds at its heart a mystery, a mystery which is further revealed in the ongoing and ever new work of the Church. The Pharisees looked to a fulfilment of the Law but they could not grasp that the fulfilment would be in the person of this unlikely man who would bring so much challenge and change – that is the lesson they had to learn, that no matter how sure we may be of what we practice in our faith life, He may ask us to sweep it all away if the love is not visible.
Doing things that we don’t particularly want to do is one of the markers of a civilised society I think, and the lack of doing so is one of the signs of the fragmentation of society which we now witness. Trying to be nice to people who, for one reason or another, seem to enjoy being unpleasant to us is maybe one example, giving away the things we value, be it time, money or possessions is another. Many of these small things, once accomplished, peculiarly can make us feel better, or even good, about the whole thing, like leaving the Dentists or landing gently and easily after a parachute jump – there is always the fear things may not go the way we hope, but on the whole, our fears are unfounded, and we might even begin to look forward to the next time – or in some cases, maybe we learn that some people, places and things are simply toxic to us and are best avoided, which is a perfectly reasonable outcome as well. We move forward or backward, but we move, because we have the ability to do so.Our faith, as we have it now, and as we hope to pass it on in the future, is the product of those who have come before us and what we are doing right now, and our faith story is often about having to make a decision to go forward, or backward and I think this movement is beautifully described in the readings today.In the first reading, Joshua gathered all the tribes together at Shechem: he had led them in a military campaign which had been strikingly successful and he had divided up the land among the different tribes, and now he gathers them to make the biggest decision which they will ever make. This reading is most certainly uncomfortable for us who have learned about Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Cambodia and Srebrenica and who are troubled by the situation of Palestinians in the Holy Land today; we have learned sensitivity to The Other, to those who are maybe not us but to whom we have at least some ancient family ties, from the same scriptures which contains this reading, and we now hear how the people of Israel were challenged to renew their commitment to God. We have won, you have bene given your land, now you must choose. And the choice is: were they going to move into the future with the God who had brought them out of Egypt and into the promised land, or were they going to choose the old gods of their ancestors or maybe the local gods of the land they had conquered? Were they going to be comfortable with their ethnic gods or the local gods, or were they willing to follow the uncomfortable, challenging but loving God who had disturbed their peace as slaves in Egypt, who had travelled with them through the desert, who had given them a new identity as landowners in Shechem? The rest of the Old Testament is the story of their response to that question; and so is our own life as Christians today, as these people chose in such a way that we also follow. The temptation is always to make ourselves a comfortable god who will bolster our own ideas; the challenge and the offer of the gospel is to follow the living, disturbing God of life into a future we cannot control. We have our land, our inheritance, now we must decide how to use it, and decide to purge it of idols. Jesus upset many of his followers by the language he had used about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, and about offering a food which was better than anything Moses could offer. It was too intimate an offer, and too challenging to the inherited ideas of Jesus’ Jewish listeners who had chosen with Joshua to follow the God who signally did not say these things. Their inheritance and idols of status and power rejects the word of the Son. Their temptation was to see God as the ethnic God of a particular people their God, who had given them land and power, and they could not accept that this God might be present among them here and now, in dusty Galilee; it seemed too close, not spiritual enough, not distant enough – because though we want a comfortable god who fits in with our ideas, we want this god to be a decent distance away; in the temple, safe and secure.But we are told; It is the spirit that gives life, The flesh has nothing to offer.The flesh, in the sense of the human mind, cannot accept that God gives us his flesh to eat; the truly spiritual person discovers in this earth the presence of the intimate and disturbing God who takes us beyond our limited, comfortable and distant picture of God; the spiritual person we are called to be meets this God in the here and now, in the challenges and disappointments and hopes of our humanity, in life and death, in sickness and health, in times of plenty and times of want, which is maybe why the faith is harder to transmit to a society which keeps themselves fed and warm while others starve and freeze. Peter recognizes that this is the only way: this challenging, disappointing and hope-bearing person, whom he and his friends are following, is the way to life. He may not make life comfortable or easily understandable; he may be the death of us; but there’s nowhere else to go. He has the message of eternal life, and it is hard to hear.
Maybe we missed it the first time, so Mark, evangelist of few words, repeats it, just in case – let us go away to a quiet place and be by ourselves. It didn’t work out, and maybe that is a telling lesson for us all, by the time they got to the quiet place, there was a not very orderly queue forming, waiting to see Jesus. We have gone from the desert of the temptation to the Jordan valley of the Baptism, back into the desert, and still, the people are crowding in. The desert is where many things are learned and it is where the sheep are likely to get lost. The prophets spoke about the need for a new kind of shepherd. In today’s first reading, Jeremiah says that God will set shepherds over them who will care for the sheep. Ezekiel says that God himself will come to seek out and to look after the straying sheep. The same desert, where the lost sheep wander, and from which they need to be rescued, is also where Israel will learn again what it means to be faithful to her Lord. Is Jesus here setting a trap for the Apostles in order to teach them something about teaching? Just before this, in sending them out two by two, he had not told them to teach or to preach, but to call people to repentance, which comes naturally first, before anything else – if you want to be near me,, if you want to hear me, then repent first. Hard lessons! Leading them away to a desert place by themselves brings them slap bang into the middle of human distress: a great throng awaits them, whose need evokes in Jesus the divine compassion. Jesus sets about teaching them many things and then says to the Apostles, ‘you give them something to eat’. Their impotence is clear for all to see. They do not know what to do. They are unable to meet the needs of the people and have nothing to offer. They cannot be the teachers they want to be. They cannot be the shepherds the people need, they are as dependent on Him as the crowds, and that was no doubt a body blow to their egos. So what is going to change for them? They are, and continue to be, very poor quality disciples, as they go on to lose faith, betray Him, deny Him, ask for better seats near Him and all the rest of the stuff that we hope for ourselves but are destined not to get – what we yearn for is equality with each other in Christ, but the way we picture it may be with some a little more equal than others, maybe. They have to learn the lesson of the Cross, as do we. That is what changes them – that and the descent of the Holy Ghost, that forms them into effective witnesses, and agents of change. Jesus is the ‘righteous branch’ foretold by Jeremiah who makes peace between Jew and Gentile. He did this by preaching peace to those who were far off and peace to those who were near, the second reading says (Ephesians 2:17). That peace, shalom, is made up of wisdom, justice and truth. What made his preaching effective when the preaching of so many others remain ineffective? It is because his is ‘a love-breathing word’. The lesson he enacts on the cross contains the power of its own being learnt, because in dying he ‘breathed forth his spirit’, the spirit of truth who leads those who follow him into all truth, the spirit of love poured into human hearts. The lonely place where the scattered sheep are finally gathered is around the cross of Jesus, not this desert today, but a greater, more capacious desert wherein we all can find a home. The lonely place where ‘many things’ are learned is at the foot of the cross of Jesus. The lesson is about love and truth — but not just as ideas, as realities. Love in practice. The healings that Jesus performs after the Gospel today point to how the kingdom of God upends the economy of this world. When Jesus and his apostles land, the people, as noted above, rush about “the whole region,” bringing the sick to wherever Jesus is. “And wherever he went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the marketplaces, … and all who touched him were healed” (Mark 6:56). The word “marketplace,” agora, refers to a public space in which legal hearings, elections, and debates took place, in addition to the buying and selling of goods. Thus the marketplace was the political and commercial centre of a city or town. By healing the sick, the weakest and most vulnerable members of a community, in this space, Jesus is subverting the economy of this world through the very inauguration of God’s kingdom. While the marketplaces of the world belong to the rich and powerful, in the kingdom of God this most political and commercial of spaces is occupied by those with the least. In the age to come, Jesus proclaims, “many who are first will be last, and the last will be first”. That age is now breaking into this age; we who seek to live God’s kingdom here and now must follow Jesus’ subversion of worldly power and wealth, and to find our seat at the foot of the cross.
‘Go away, seer, flee to the land of Judah. Earn your bread there and prophesy there’.A bleak response to Amos in today’s first reading, from Amaziah the priest of Bethel, in the blessed land of Israel all those years ago. Amos was a tender of sycamore trees – although why sycamore trees needed tending, we do not know, it is thought that maybe some kind of alcoholic beverage could be made from the sap – but as he undertook this most oblique and unusual of jobs, God called him to be a prophet and so off he went, filled with a message given him by God and filled, no doubt, with trepidation. Maybe he took some of his sycamore schnapps with him for Dutch, or Judean, courage.Amos went off to undertake this great work as a second-class citizen. The people were split into two parts, the rich Northern Kingdom of Israel ruled from Bethel, and the poor South, ruled from Jerusalem and governed by priests of the line of King David and Amos was from the South, and went to the North, who clearly did not want to hear him, but God had called him, and so he spoke. God has called him, the lion of Judah has roared from the midst of Jerusalem, and in that noise of battle and inequality, Amos walks into the centre of Bethel and speaks of social justice and the downfall of the royal dynasty of that Kingdom. The Sycamore dresser speaks to Kings and denounces the false weights and measures in the marketplace, denounces the contempt the courts have for the poor and weak and denounces the way that refugees were treated. And nobody wishes to hear his voice, but God has sent him, and as long as there is injustice on this earth, God will continue to send people to denounce it, and to live in a way and fashion which denounces it more eloquently than the words even of Amos could. In the Gospel today, Jesus, that same God who called Amos, sends out his disciples to do what Amos was sent to do – to preach and practice repentance, living a simple life and taking not even a spare tunic with them for the journey. This simplicity of life is a sign of the message of the love of God and the spirit of conversion we are called to- and that is to drive out evil, heal the sick and form a new community of believers, changing continually to accommodate as many as will hear the message and join. This new community is of course us. We have got so many things wrong, even to the point of owning many, many tunics, you might think, but not so. These tunics are those worn by our forebears, who we honour and remember by wearing them now, a sign of continuity and faith. These buildings are built to house the community they built – and can be abandoned just as easily if God sends us elsewhere, as He sent Amos and the Twelve. Today we celebrate the beginning of this new phase in the ministry of Fr Josh, a Priest now and forever. Someone whose calling has been recognised by the Church of God who has seen the mark of God within him. This sets him apart for one specific aspect of the work that Christ Himself left us, which is the celebration of the Holy Mass. We are commanded to love and to do this in memory of me, and love brings us to this table and we are fed by the love that flows from it. Priests are called to give themselves to God. Our hands must be open to allow whatever He gives us to fall from them, and they are there to hold Christ Himself and let Him fall, like heavy raindrops after the drought, into the furrows which He has already ploughed. We are called to speak the words which summon the deity – in complete faith that in sacramental signs which may be invisible, but in physical signs of love which are overwhelming – that He hears and answers. For this is my body, here on the altar, here in the church, and more importantly, outside the Church, waiting to be enfolded into this love and this hope. We are called to lead. There is no doubt about that. But we are called to travel in community, as something of an outsider because we never truly belong anywhere, our home is not here, but love will tie us to the people we are sent to serve, and serve we must, because every tidal wave of arrogance and self-importance, every torrent of hatred and division, every wall of injustice and oppression will be torn down by the simple proclamation of the word of God and by the testimony of His Holy Church – which needs priests who will also purge it of abuse, angst, uncertainty and the demons of pride and self-importance. We rely on Christ alone, and so we will often fail in the eyes of the world but each failure will be an opportunity to love, and to become even more a child of God, to allow Him in His eternal love to teach us our true worth as His adopted children. All of us are equal in the sight of God, and all of us have different callings in that equal love, and it is a hard calling. Do not be afraid to rest, to seek for help, to shake off the dust from under your feet if need be – for the dignity of the message we bring is such as demands respect, lest it be tainted by the evils of this world, lest we be tainted by the evils of this world. And know, dear brother, that the devil knows your name with the same familiarity that God Himself does, and that the ancient enemy will also wish to call you, because at the altar we stand between chaos and eternity, between light and darkness and as you believe in the light, so also you know that there is the darkness. The devil can only lie, but his lies sound so much like the world that it can be confusing to differentiate the two. But you are no longer your own man, you are God’s, and His love will keep you safe if you trust in Him alone. He has called you this far, and He will call you home one day. There are no more sycamores to dress, there are no more taxes to collect, there are no more boats to look after, a new day has come to you, the day you were born to see, and there is new work to be done. Heal the sick, anoint the dying, announce the Good News of our salvation, live lives acceptable to the great office and trust now given to you, and do so with complete joy and hope in your heart, and may you live the rest of your life according to this new beginning. ‘’Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity’’.
