“ I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself
more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgement.”
This time of year is a time
when, for many young people the chickens come home to roost. Over the last week
or so A level and GCSE results have come out, and as ever there have been
scenes of young people in tears of delight or of disappointment as they have
opened the fateful envelopes to find out what the examiners’ judgment is of their
work.
Of course, it’s not just students
who feel the weight of judgement. Most jobs include some sort of appraisal,
formal or informal, annual or ongoing. People may be judged on how many sales
they’ve made, how many patients they’ve treated, what their customer
satisfaction rating is. Even Jesus, in
our Gospel reading, wants to know what judgements people are making about him.
He reveals a surprising judgement on Peter too. Much to Peter’s surprise Jesus
sees in him a rock-steady character which no one else seems to have recognised
so far.
Often, of course, the
judgements that are most crucial are the ones we make of ourselves. We are
often our own harshest critics, comparing our bodies against those of models or
sporting heroes we see in the media, our families with others at the school
gates, our lives with those who seem so much more certain and sorted out than
we are. We’ve all got an “inner critic” asking
“what do people think of me? “ “what do I think of myself?” “Am I doing
ok, or just kidding myself?” “Am I a good enough parent, child, spouse, friend worker,
Christian…?”
That inner voice may be
negative, but it can also be falsely positive too, convincing us that we are
fine and that all is well, when really it isn’t. We are shocked and indignant
when someone else points out a failing we need to deal with. It’s a tricky
business coming to that “sober judgement” Paul talks about.
Paul has a particular
situation in mind when he makes this comment in his letter to the Romans. He’s heard that divisions have broken out
between the Christians in Rome. Some had Jewish backgrounds, others had Gentile,
non-Jewish backgrounds. Each group thinks they are better than the other.
Jewish Christians assumed that they ought to have the biggest say in shaping
the church. After all, Jesus had been Jewish, and they shared with him that
deep knowledge of the scriptures and traditions that had shaped him. But the
Gentile Christians had embraced the good news that God was doing something new,
and they believed that their voices counted for just as much as those of the
Jewish Christians.
To complicate matters, a few
years before this letter was written, all the Jewish people, including the
Jewish Christians, had been forced to leave Rome by the Emperor Claudius.
That
meant that the Gentile Christians, the ones who didn’t have all that Jewish
heritage behind them, were left to cope as best they could. And guess what? They
did just fine – that’s how it seemed to them anyway.
When
the Jewish Christians came back a few years later, they found that these
Johnny-come-lately Gentiles were disregarding all their treasured rules. They’d begun to shape a Christian community of
their own, and they thought it was all the better because it had cast aside its
Jewish roots. God was done with all that history, the Gentile Christians said.
Judaism was old hat. Why would God be bothered if you ate pork? Hadn’t Jesus put
an end to all that nit-picking?
The Jewish Christians and the
Gentile Christians were locked into a war of words with each other, each
thinking they had it right, and the others were missing the point.
Throughout the letter, Paul
comes back to this tension between them again and again. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”, he says. Neither Jew nor Gentile is
perfect. God is making a new creation,
but it’s one in which Jews and Gentiles are equally valued. Here in chapter 12 he tells these warring
groups that whether they like it or not, they are now one body. Everyone brings
something unique and valuable.
“Get down off your high
horse!” says Paul to both groups. Learn to see yourselves as God sees you, as people
with gifts, people he loves, but also people who are flawed and incomplete, people
who need others to find the fullness of life God intends for us all.
It’s good advice. Like most
good advice, it’s not exactly rocket science. The interesting question is why
we find it so hard to live like this, to come to that “sober judgement”, that
realistic reflection on ourselves which would enable us to see ourselves and
others clearly. We puff ourselves up or
pull ourselves down. We hide from others and we hide from ourselves. We treat
others as less than they are, so that we can feel bigger.
So how can we find the
courage to look in the mirror honestly and acknowledge what we see there?
Paul gives us some more clues
if we have eyes to see them. Notice how, in this passage, he talks about the mercies of God, the
grace of God, the will of God, the gifts of God. We aren’t
just one body, according to Paul. We are one body “in Christ”. What’s he
trying to tell us? It is that first and foremost, we are God’s children, God’s
creation, people who belong to God, not to ourselves. The gifts we are so proud
of aren’t really ours, they are God’s, which he has given to us. The failings
we berate ourselves for are just evidence that God’s work in us isn’t finished
yet, not a sign that we are intrinsically bad. Or maybe it is even just that
we’re trying to be people he never meant us to be. He may not have created us to
be Olympic athletes or scientific geniuses or supermodels, so why do we judge
ourselves harshly for failing to reach those goals?
Present yourselves as a “living sacrifice” says Paul to these
warring Christians. Sacrifice was a familiar part of their world, in a way
which it isn’t to us. Essentially, though, when you sacrificed something in the
ancient world you were acknowledging your relationship to the god you
sacrificed to, your dependence on him. “All
things come from you, and of your own do we give you” said the Bible, words
we repeat when we offer the bread and wine of the Eucharist.
So Paul tells the Roman
Christians that the only way they can come to a healthy sense of themselves is
by acknowledging that they don’t belong to themselves anyway. They belong to
God. They are God’s possessions. The gifts of the Gentile Christians, their
insights, their ideas, which they think are so brilliant and necessary, aren’t
theirs at all. They come from God, who is working through them. And that means
that the gifts, insights and ideas of the Jewish Christians are also God’s too.
Neither group needs to push their own agenda aggressively to silence the other.
It’s quite the contrary. They need to listen to each other, so that they can
hear God’s wisdom in all its completeness.
We don’t have to be anxious about
what we can and can’t do, what gifts we have and haven’t got. We don’t have to
pretend to be something we aren’t. God is doing his work, in his way.
The image Paul uses of the
body is a good and helpful one, not least because bodies aren’t fixed, static
things, machines that can only do one task in one way. Bodies can do all sorts
of different things, in all sorts of different ways, to meet all sorts of
different circumstances. What has your body done this week? Gone for a walk?
Baked a cake? Hugged a friend? Played with a child? Thought an interesting thought? (Brains are
part of bodies too!) Bodies can adapt and learn, and often have to. Most bodies
are, or will be, disabled in some way at some time in life, either permanently
or temporarily. Illness and injury may limit our bodies, but every body can be
a blessing, to us and to others, in what
it can do, whatever that is. Stephen Hawking’s body is almost completely
paralysed, and yet, look at what he has achieved.
That’s a very timely message
for us here at Seal Church. Several significant people have moved on, or
shortly will, from Seal Church over this summer. We’ve lost the Harvey family
with their move to Hadlow. We’ll soon be losing Stephen Bloxham, who has shared
his many gifts with us so generously over the past 8 years or so - musical,
community building, fundraising . As ever, there are members of our
congregation who aren’t able to be as active as they would like to be because
of illness. And each year, there are some we lose through death. “How will we manage?” people ask me,
whenever we have these significant losses to our little church family. “I have no idea”, is the honest answer,
but I am sure that the God who gave those people to us in the first place is
still at work here, and that he’s providing the gifts we need to do what he
wants to. Things may change. They may not be as we expect or are used to. But if
we trust God, welcome others and open our eyes and our hearts to what he is
doing in our community we will end up with a church that is alive with his
life, whatever it looks like!
One commentator on this
passage said, “God doesn’t want something from
us, he wants us”*. We were created by
God. We are his children. When we present ourselves to him as “living sacrifices,” all we are doing is
putting ourselves back where we belong – in his hands. And that is all we need
to do. This, says Paul, is our “spiritual
worship”– the only kind of worship that can really heal us where it matters,
straightening out our distorted judgements and enabling us to see ourselves and
one another as the beloved people we really are.
Amen
*Ben Witherington: Paul’s
Letter to the Romans p.85
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