Revd Dr Lance Stone, Minister, Emmanuel United Reformed Church, Cambridge
Where did it all go wrong?
You may know the story about the great footballing legend George Best who was probably the greatest footballer ever produced by the United Kingdom, but who was largely regarded as having squandered his talent. On one occasion, when his career was on the wane, Best was ensconced in a top, luxurious hotel and a waiter brought a bucket of champagne up to his suite where he found him reclining with some gorgeous leggy blonde model. ‘So, Mr Best’, said the waiter. ‘Tell me. Where did it all go wrong?’
Where did it all go wrong? That might be the heading for our readings this morning from Scripture. Think for a moment about our verses from Deuteronomy and what is going on there. In this passage Moses is addressing the Israelites just at the point where they are about to cross over into the land that God has promised them. And Moses is giving them his final instructions. Moses is giving his last words of encouragement for he will not be going with them. Specifically he is about to remind them of the law that God has given them, known as the Torah and the blue-print by which Israel is to live its life. Moses’ message is simple. As he puts it in verse 1:
‘Obey these commandments, obey this law, so that you may live and go into occupy the land which the Lord the God of your ancestors is giving you.’
In other words this law which is being handed on is the key to life. Do this and you will live! Do this and you will be a just and righteous nation which experiences life as it is meant to be lived! But there’s more than this: not just ‘obey the laws and you will live’ but ‘obey these laws and you will be a sign and witness to the other nations of the world!’ Listen again to Moses:
‘Observe them carefully, for thereby you will display wisdom and understanding to the peoples. When they hear about all these statutes they will say, ‘what a wise and understanding people this great nation is! What great nation has a god close at hand as the Lord our God is close to us whenever we call upon him?’
In other words, when Israel’s life is ordered and patterned after God’s own law it tells a story to the nations. It tells a story about life with this God. And nations will look at Israel and they will say, ‘what a great nation! What a great God!
Well, that’s the big idea, according to Moses. That’s the plan – that Israel’s life should be something to be celebrated, that something of wonder and splendour and beauty should be revealed in the life of this people. In an often brutal and oppressive world people should look at this one nation and say, ‘Wow! There is something different! That’s how life should be lived!’
The problem is of course that this is a high risk strategy because it can all so easily all go wrong. And it did. You see, this law with which Israel has been entrusted, this law which is the key to Israel’s life, this law which is the key to its witness to the nations is something beautiful and liberating. It is something to be cherished and treasured and it should inspire in us devotion and zeal. Scripture is full of passages that extol the Law as God’s precious gift. And yet for all that it can so easily become something ugly and oppressive and deadly. It can so become something that deals death instead of life. And then of course it tells a different story to the nations, and it speaks of a different God. And so it did.
That is what we find in our reading from Mark’s Gospel today. It has all gone wrong. This is one of Jesus’ set pieces with the Pharisees, the baddies in the Gospel story. If the Gospel story were a pantomime, the Pharisees would be the ugly sisters, the scoundrels who we all boo whenever they come onto the stage. They are the nit-picking legalists who skew and distort God’s Law. They are obsessed with external things like hand-washing while Jesus is more concerned with what comes from the heart, the inner attitude. And for Jesus the Pharisees seem to exemplify how easily it can all go wrong, as this beautiful gift of the law becomes an instrument of tyranny. The frightening thing however is that the Pharisees were not evil people – far from it. Theirs was a zeal for God’s law that was second to none. They loved it with a passion as good Israelites should. They would sing psalms that exalted it. They wanted to see the whole of life aglow with the light of the Law, with every detail illuminated. And you could argue that Jesus’ stinging criticism of the Pharisees was harsh. Part of his gripe with them seems to have been that many of their rules and regulations were not actually found in the original law given by God. They were later additions, add-ons, human traditions that had been tacked on. But the Pharisees could argue – quite rightly – that any body of law requires new interpretations for new situations. It has to be living and supple. Indeed the whole premise of the Book of Deuteronomy is that God’s Law must be restated and reinterpreted to address new crises and eventualities. And the Pharisees could have argued that this was their deep desire.
Yet somehow, despite best intentions, it had all gone wrong and the Law had become deadly and oppressive. And now the life of the people of God was telling a different story. It was telling a story of a different God, a tyrant in fact and it seems that God’s high-risk strategy had back-fired.
You can’t help feeling a bit sorry for God actually, this God who has chosen to be bound to this people, binding the divine name with theirs. In fact you can imagine God not wanting to be identified with this people at all. I suspect that God has a T-shirt somewhere in a drawer and on it is written, ‘I’m not with them!’, and it must be a frequent temptation for God to wear it – not just in relation to Israel but also in relation to the Church. ‘I’m not with them.’ ‘Nothing to do with me!’
The problem, to be put in a nutshell, is that the worst is always the distortion of the best. When something supremely good and true and beautiful goes wrong, then it becomes supremely evil and false and ugly. C.S. Lewis once commented that God does not make demons out of fleas but out of angels. The corruption of the best is the worst and that is true of God’s Law and it is true of the Christian faith and it is true of religion in general as our atheist critics are not slow to point out. ‘Religion poisons everything’ as Christopher Hitchins puts it. The corruption of the best is the worst and sometimes that is still true of those, like the Pharisees, who are most zealous and passionate about God.
So how do we keep it from going wrong? How do we fulfil our calling to be a sign to the world, a blessing rather than a curse? There are no simple answers. Exhortations to zeal and commitment are not enough – that can simply intensify the poison. So how do we keep our religion on track? This is a question that James seems to be wrestling with in the passage we read from his letter and maybe he can help us. At the end of the passage he addresses the question of what is authentic religion and he says this:
‘A pure and faultless religion in the sight of God is this: to look after orphans and widows and to keep oneself untainted by the world.’
This, says James, is the key to a pure and faultless religion: ‘look after orphans and widows and keep oneself untainted by the world.’
So let’s unpack this a bit. Let’s start with the orphans and widows. That is a sort of short-hand for the marginalised, the defenceless, the vulnerable – those who don’t fit and who feel society’s cold shoulder. And James is saying, ‘look after them!’ ‘Keep close to them and let your faith be focused there.’ Well, that is simple enough. But what about keeping oneself untainted from the world? What’s that all about? Well, interestingly enough James seems to link this with looking after the orphans and widows, caring for the vulnerable. The two are closely connected here, and that’s important because it means that keeping untainted from the world does not mean living in some rarefied bubble of piety and purity. It does not mean isolating yourself, far removed and de-contaminated from the squalor and mess of the world. No. It is rather that caring for the vulnerable and marginalised has a purifying effect upon us. It clarifies our vision, shifts our perspective on the world. It re-focuses our vision. It readjusts and realigns our priorities. It reconfigures our perception and has a transforming effect upon us.
Maybe that is what made Jesus different from the Pharisees. Ironically, by immersing himself in the marginalised and excluded and allegedly becoming ‘contaminated’ he was able to see the world truly. From that perspective he could see the world through the eyes of God and so he was able to live and to teach the truth and interpret the Law and he could keep his faith on track. The Pharisees on the other hand, in their squeaky clean purity and for all their zeal and devotion, kept themselves away from the one place where they could really see the world as it was and the one place from which they could interpret the Law rightly. And that is why they got it so wrong.
There is not shortage of critics of Christianity and of religion in general in our world today, as we have to confess that much of what they say is true. Devotion to God, devotion to Gods’ Law, when it’s distorted becomes demonic. So how do we keep our religion pure and faultless? How do we interpret God’s Law? There are no easy answers or simple prescriptions. But here is somewhere to start. Look after the widow and the orphan. Keep close to the vulnerable. Put that in place and let the rest follow and you wont go too far wrong.
Amen.
