One of the words I’ve been
very aware of over this last year is the word “household”. Covid regulations
have decreed that there have been things we can only do in household groups. That’s
been hard on some who live alone, though it has been possible to form “support
bubbles” – extended households if you like. It’s been hard on some who live with
others too, if there are tensions or abuse within the household. Whatever size
and shape our household is, though, we’ve been stuck with it, and maybe that’s made
us notice its blessings and drawbacks afresh, the effect we have on each other,
the connections – and disconnections – which shape our lives.
We’ve been interconnected in
a wider way too. Neighbours have helped one another, communities have looked
out for each other. But we’ve also had to deal with the dilemmas about how far
to curtail individual freedoms for the sake of the common good. We’ve been reminded
that none of us can live for ourselves alone. No man is an Island, entire of
it self; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.” as
John Donne put it in the 17th century.
In the world of the Bible
people often had to face the same dilemmas we do. How could they live together
as a community? It was a question that was especially pressing for the ex-slaves
Moses had led out of Egypt on their long trek to their new home in the Promised
Land. Slavery had shaped their whole lives, the way they saw themselves, their dreams
and expectations, or rather the lack of them. What was the point of dreaming if
you were someone else’s possession, theirs to do what they liked with? But freedom
sometimes felt tougher than they expected, as they trekked around the desert. Again and again, they looked back to Egypt. “At least there we had food to eat - leeks
and garlic and cucumbers and melons, Now there is only manna! If this is
freedom, you can keep it !” they said. At least slavery was familiar. Whose
household did they belong to now? And what should that household look like?
In our Old Testament Reading,
we heard the answer to those questions in the shape of the list of rules which
we now call the Ten Commandments. “I am
the Lord your God” they start. These people belong to God – he is the head
of this household. Why? Because “I
brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” That’s
the household they had been part of – the house of slavery - but now God declared that they will be his household,
his family. That’s why the Ten Commandments start with God. We’re not
free-floating individuals, they remind us. We can’t be. We depend on one
another, on God’s good earth and its fruitfulness, and ultimately, therefore,
on the God who gave it to us. That’s something we are becoming painfully aware
of as we see the effects of climate change and ecological devastation.
The commandments go on to remind
us that God can’t be reduced to the size of a convenient idol that we can kid ourselves
we own or control. We can’t treat him, or his name, as a lucky charm or magic
formula as if we had the power to make him do our bidding. Keeping the Sabbath
day, too, reminds us that we are in God’s hands, not he in ours. We can rest
because God is in charge, not us.
When we know this, the rest
of the commandments – those instructions not to murder or steal or commit
adultery or bear false witness or covet what is not ours – fall into place. If
we are God’s children, members of his household, then so is everyone else; they
deserve to be treated with respect and care.
One of the distinctive things
about these Jewish commandments was that they applied to everyone equally; rich
or poor, powerful or powerless. In the legal systems of many of the nations
around Israel, the punishments for murder or stealing or adultery were
different for different social classes. A rich man who killed a poor man might
have to pay a fine to his family. A poor man who killed a rich man would be
executed. In Israel it wasn’t so. There was one law for everyone. Of course, it
often didn’t always work out that way – it often still doesn’t – but it was an
important principle, and one which our own legal system still preserves.
So, the Ten Commandments aren’t
just a list of dos and don’ts. They are about identity and belonging. They tell
us who we are, because they tell us whose we are, and we forget that at our
peril.
By the time of Jesus, the household
of God had built for itself a literal house, the Temple in Jerusalem. It was the
symbolic centre of their faith and of their nation, the place where they came
together into God’s presence. It should have been the embodiment of that way of
life which treated everyone equally. But we are all flawed and fallible, and it’s
clear from today’s Gospel reading that all was not well in this particular
family home.
Scholars argue about what,
specifically, so enraged Jesus as he stormed into the Temple with his whip of
cords. It may have been the fact that the stalls he overturned had almost certainly
been set up in the Court of the Gentiles, the only place in the Temple which
was open to everyone, including those who weren’t Jewish. Their place to pray
had been stolen from them. They had been excluded. The selling of animals and
the changing of money may also have placed a disproportionate burden on those
who had very little, especially if the prices had been hiked and the exchange
rate manipulated. The Temple was, as Jesus put it “my Father’s house”, a place
where God’s people – all people – should have been able to feel at home, part of
the household, equal members in it, but that wasn’t so, and Jesus was furious.
Whose house was it? Whose
household was it for? Did it belong to the Temple authorities? Did it belong to
the traders? Or did it belong to God, the God who had brought his people out of
the “houses of slavery”, places where people were exploited, and where some
lives counted while others didn’t? This isn’t a story about whether it’s right
to sell things in church. It’s a story about what it means to say we are God’s
people, what kind of household that means we should be building and how we
should live in it together.
Households, as I said at the
start, may come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. They may be wonderful, loving
places, or places of struggle and pain – or both at the same time. But these
readings remind us that our truest household is the household of God, a household
which embraces all humanity, all creation, in which everyone is precious. St Paul
said that God is the one, “from whom every family in heaven and in earth takes
its name” (Eph 3.15). God calls us to learn to live as part of his household, and
to find in it the perfect freedom he wants for us all, which is seen not in rugged
independence – go it alone, grab-what-you can and the devil take the hindmost –
but in lives that are shaped by the knowledge that we belong to him and because
of that we belong to one another too.
Amen
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