Looking in the mirror : Trinity 13

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James 1.17-end, Mark 7.1-8,14-15,21-23

In 1895, a scientist called Wilhelm Röntgen discovered a strange phenomenon – a form of radiation which could pass through human flesh and make a picture of the bones inside it on a photographic plate. The very first picture he took was of his wife’s hand, though she was obviously in two minds about the whole business. She looked at the image of her skeletal fingers and said, rather grimly, “I have seen my death”.

Röntgen didn’t know what these mysterious rays were, so he just called them X-rays - x for unknown, - while he tried to come up with something better.  But the name stuck, and the rest is history, and I expect most of us have benefitted from his discovery at some point. What struck me, though, was how recent this all was. We now  take x-rays for granted, along with endoscopes and various forms of body scanners, but just 125 years ago the only way you could see inside the human body was by cutting it open, which is a bit drastic. It was easier to see the stars and the planets than it was to see what lay under your own skin.

And if seeing the insides of our bodies is a challenge, seeing the inner world of our souls can be even more difficult. Often, we find we are strangers to ourselves. We’re hijacked by emotions we don’t understand and unconscious biases. We say and do things we didn’t mean to. We claim that “we don’t know what got into us” or that some action was “out of character”, because we don’t recognise ourselves in what we do. Other people point out things about ourselves that should have been obvious to us.  We need other people to listen to us – counsellors, psychotherapists, priests – because we find it so difficult to listen to ourselves. We go off on great journeys “in search of ourselves”, despite the fact that we are right here with ourselves all the time anyway. 

The ancient Greeks had a list of sayings that were precious to them, wisdom they thought was essential. They inscribed them on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The first and most important was ‘gnothi seauton’ – know yourself. They knew, as we know, that the person it ought to be easiest to know, is often the one who is the greatest mystery to us – ourselves.

James, who wrote the letter from which our first reading came, obviously felt the same way. He talks about people who look in a mirror, but turn away and forget what they saw, going away no wiser about themselves than they were before.  But why would that happen? Why do we find it so hard to know ourselves, to see ourselves honestly, outwardly or inwardly?

I guess it’s because we don’t like what we see, and we don’t think there’s anything we can do about it. If we look in a mirror and think we look terrific, we’ll be quite happy to carry on looking and rejoice in what we see. If we look in a mirror and notice that we’ve got a smudge on our faces, we’ll at least be grateful we spotted it, because we know we can wash it away. But if we see something in us which we don’t like and can’t change we’re hardly likely to want to linger or dwell on it. It’s the combination of self-disgust and helplessness which is so destructive, whether it is our outward or inward self we are looking at.  

James says that the problem arises from being hearers of God’s word, but not doers. We hear about the generosity of our loving God, he says, who has given us a new birth, the possibility of something different, but we don’t really take that knowledge in and trust it and let it change us into the new creatures we are meant to be.

In the Gospel reading, Jesus denounces the Pharisees and scribes who are nit-picking about his disciples’ behaviour. He calls them “hypocrites”. “Hypocrite” was the ancient Greek word for an actor. Actors wore masks in the classical world, not like the ones we are so used to now, but masks which denoted what character they were playing. So, a ‘hypocrite’ was literally a play actor. We can do all the things which our society expects of respectable, worthy people , says, acting the part, wearing the mask of a good person – in this case, by observing the traditional rituals around washing – but we can’t play-act forever. The mask will slip and what is in our hearts will eventually seep out, sometimes in profoundly damaging ways.

If you watched the news of the shootings in Plymouth a week or so ago, you may have seen the video which the killer, Jake Davison, made in the run up to the killings. It was terribly sad. He looked straight into the camera – another sort of mirror really – and he spoke about how  much he hated himself and how hopeless he felt about his life. He was convinced that no one loved him and that no one ever would love him, and that seemed to have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s hard to love people who don’t love themselves.  He was convinced too that there was nothing he could do to change the situation. Eventually that feeling hardened into the bitterness which fuelled his slaughter of six innocent people. If only he’d known, really known, deep down, that you don’t have to have the face of a film star or the body of an athlete to be loveable and loved, maybe the outcome would have been very different, for him and for those whom he killed. 

Sometimes people are suspicious of time spent on self-reflection (there’s another word which reminds us of mirrors.). They write it off as “navel-gazing” and treat it as self-indulgent. But both James and Jesus tell us that our inner world, what goes on in the depths of our hearts, shapes how we behave, for good or ill, so it is vital that we pay attention to it.

But we need to do so in the light of the knowledge that however we feel about what we see, God loves us. We may not be able to change ourselves in the way we’d like, but God’s love, that deep love that nothing can destroy, can set us free from our own harsh self-judgement .

James uses a curious phrase in his letter. He encourages us, as we look into the mirror, to look also into the “perfect law, the law of liberty”. Law and liberty might not seem like obvious bedfellows. Laws can seem restrictive, the opposite of freedom. But James puts the two words together for a reason.

We can’t be sure who James was, except that he was an early Christian leader. There’s a credible argument that he may even have been one of Jesus’ brothers, a prominent leader of the church in Jerusalem. But whoever he was, he’s obviously Jewish, and steeped in the Judaism in which he grew up. And whenever we hear a Jewish biblical author speak about liberty and law in the same breath, we can be pretty sure they have a specific story in their minds.

It’s the story of the Exodus, of God rescuing the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt, a story all about liberty, but also one in which law is central, because the people of Israel, those ex-slaves, didn’t really have a clue at first how to handle the new freedom they had. They’d never had the chance to make decisions about how they would live. That’s why, as they wandered in the wilderness, led by Moses, God gave them his laws, summarised in the Ten Commandments, to shape them into a new community, a new nation, in which they could learn to live together as God’s people.   

The law God gave them wasn’t meant to be a harsh arbitrary imposition, a demonstration of his power, but a delight, a constant reminder that God cared about them and wanted them to thrive. For many Jewish people, then and now, that’s exactly what it was and is. But if we lose sight of the love with which those rules were given, keeping them can very easily become mere performance. James says that we need to welcome the “implanted word” – God’s life within us. Without that the laws and rituals and traditions we cling to become deadening instead of life-giving, crushing and restricting us instead of allowing us to find the true freedom which comes from being the people God meant us to be. 

Today’s readings challenge us to look in the mirror and see ourselves clearly, not in self-condemnation, but in the light of God’s love, the God who, as our collect reminds us, was “in Christ reconciling the world to himself”, making whole his creation, bringing together all that we have driven apart. In Christ he does not just draw people together with one another and with him, but with themselves too, making us whole people, enabling us to live with integrity, inward and outward, body and soul, for our own sake and the sake of those around us too.

Amen

Born of a woman: The Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary

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 Gal 4.4-7, Luke 1.46-55

 

“When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman”, says St Paul to the Galatians. Today, August 15, is the feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the woman of whom Christ was born.  In the Roman Catholic Church it’s the feast of her bodily Assumption into heaven, which some Catholics believe happened without her actually suffering a physical death. The Church of England, like the Eastern Orthodox Churches, has never held that belief, but nonetheless we celebrate her life and ponder her influence on this day.

 

St Paul’s words are the earliest mention of Jesus’ mother in the Bible – his letters were written a decade or so before the first of the Gospels. But this is all Paul says about her, that Jesus was “born of a woman”. He doesn’t name her or tell us anything about her. There are no stories of angels, mangers, shepherds or wise men and certainly nothing about a Virgin Birth. He doesn’t say anything about her other than that she existed, that Jesus had a mother, just like everyone else. That’s Paul’s point. Jesus was “born of a woman”. He wasn’t some unearthly superhero swooping in with special powers to save the day. And the fact that he was born of a woman proved it. He became part of our human family, so we could know that we were part of the family of God, able to cry out ‘Abba, Father!’ with the same confidence as he did.

 

The Gospel writers tell us a bit more about Mary, but only a bit. Mark’s Gospel, the earliest of the four, only mentions Mary by name once, when a sceptical crowd from Nazareth says dismissively “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?”, ramming home Jesus’ ordinariness and suggesting some scandal around his birth, since he’s called the son of his mother only, and not his father. Matthew’s Gospel tells some stories of Jesus’ birth, but it’s Joseph who’s the focus, not Mary – she doesn’t say a word during the whole Gospel. It’s her vulnerability that Matthew wants us to notice, and therefore the vulnerability of God’s plan, which seems to hang on a very thin thread. When the Angel tells Joseph – not her - that she’s bearing God’s child, will he believe the angel, or abandon her, or even have her stoned for adultery?

John’s Gospel, written late in the first century, tells just two stories in which Mary features – the Wedding at Cana, when Jesus turns water into wine, and the story of her standing near the cross, with John, when Jesus entrusts them to each other as a new family. But John never uses her name. She’s only ever described as “the mother of Jesus”. To John, like St Paul, she’s the proof that the Word has really been made flesh, “born of a woman” as Paul put it.

 

It’s only Luke who really lets Mary speak, who gives us any sense of her as a person with her own voice and ideas. He tells us of the Angel Gabriel’s annunciation to her, of her visit to her cousin Elizabeth, soon to be mother of John the Baptist, of Jesus’ birth and the visit of the shepherds, of Simeon and Anna and their recognition of Jesus; events that leave her “pondering” what it all means. Luke tells us about the time the twelve year old Jesus went missing in Jerusalem, and of Mary giving him a piece of her mind when she and Joseph find him – eventually – in the Temple. Luke, like Matthew and Mark, later tells a story about how she comes with Jesus’ brothers to try to persuade him to give up his mission and come home. Eventually she gets it though, and at the beginning of the book of Acts, also written by Luke, we’re told she’s present when the Holy Spirit comes on the disciples, at the birth of the church. All that pondering has borne fruit. It’s still a rather slender foundation for the significance she acquires later in Christian tradition, though, but at least she has a voice, and a distinctive one at that.

 

The passage we heard in today’s Gospel reading, the words traditionally called the Magnificat, are Mary’s song of praise when she hears that she will bear God’s Son. She doesn’t celebrate the thought of having a dear little baby to cuddle, or someone to carry on her name, or someone to care for her in her old age, though. She isn’t rejoicing in what this child will do for her, but what he’ll do for everyone, overturning the status quo, lifting up the lowly, putting down the mighty, ushering in God’s kingdom. Her willingness to say yes to God will change the world.

 

Whatever the Gospel writers did, or didn’t, say about her, though, her importance soon started to grow. In AD 431, at a gathering of Church leaders in Ephesus, Mary was given the title “Theotokos” – literally the “God-bearer”. It was still really more about Jesus than about her. If Jesus was truly human, as the Council of Ephesus wanted to insist, then he had to have a truly human mother. Mary mattered in the same way all mothers matter. Whether they are good or bad, present or absent, loved or resented, or a complex mixture, without them none of us would be here. Without Mary, God would not have been born into the world in the person of Jesus.

 

But from then on devotion to her grew and by the Middle Ages it had reached fever pitch. Mary was everywhere. Devotions based around her, like the Rosary, developed. Hymns were composed to her. Legends grew up around her, like that of her bodily assumption into heaven. Visions abounded. It almost seemed that she was more popular than Jesus himself – and perhaps she was for some people.

She was seen as a powerful intercessor, more powerful than other saints, but more accessible too. Maybe she was the mother everyone wished they had, and surely, they thought, God would listen especially to her. You’ve got to listen to your mother, after all…

 

All this horrified the Protestant Reformers. They saw practices focussing on Mary as dangerous distractions from the direct relationship between God and his people. In the violent struggles that swept the Church in the sixteenth century, devotions to Mary were swept away, statues broken, rosary beads outlawed. They tried hard to put Mary back into her rather small place in the Bible but she had a place in people’s hearts that couldn’t be denied.

 

Perhaps it’s because she is such a shadowy figure in the Gospels that she holds such fascination for us. We can project onto Mary whatever we like. She can be the beautiful maiden, innocent and protected from the world, to be adored from afar, even though we have no idea what she actually looked like or what her early life was like. She might have been a plug ugly back-street urchin abused or living rough for all we know. She can be that perfect mother, the mother no actual mother ever manages to be, with endless patience and never a cross word. She can be the revolutionary heroine, speaking up for the poor, inspiring courage and hope. As I have said, there is really very little to go on in the Gospels, so how we see her probably tells us more about ourselves than about her.

 

But when you strip away all the projections, what we’re left with for certain is back where we started - the woman of whom Jesus was born, the “Theotokos”, the God-bearer. Whatever else we think of her, she tells us that this is how God chooses to make himself known in the world, through an ordinary human woman. She reminds us that this is how God continues to make himself known, through human beings, women, men, children – people like us – who’re also invited to be “God -bearers”. Mary reminds us that we’re all called to join her in helping God’s Word become flesh, expressing his love in ways that are real and tangible. That’s needed as much now as it ever was, in a world where a young man can feel so unloved and hopeless that he slaughters his own mother and random strangers before killing himself, in a world where refugees find themselves homeless and despised at their moment of greatest vulnerability, in a world which we are threatening to destroy through relentless over-consumption. Mary’s “yes” to God’s call invites us to say “yes” too, and become “Theotokoi”, God-bearers, with her.  

Amen

Food for the journey

1 Kings 19.4-8, John 6.35.41-51

“It is enough!” says Elijah in despair in today’s Old Testament Reading. And I expect we all know how he feels. “It is enough!” We’ve probably all thought that at points over the last 18 months as we have slogged through this pandemic, with all its ups and downs, hopes of returning to normality, disappointments as those hopes are dashed, as plans had to be changed and changed again. “It is enough!” But of course, the virus doesn’t care about how we feel, or when our patience happens to have run out. It is just doing what viruses do, trying to replicate itself.

 It wasn’t a virus that was causing Elijah’s despair, but his enemy was just as relentless, and just as heartless. Elijah had fallen foul of King Ahab, the king of Israel and his wife, Queen Jezebel, who was from the neighbouring country of Phoenicia, whose name has become a byword for wickedness. According to the Bible they were as bad as each other, a power-hungry, corrupt, cruel couple, but Jezebel had also brought with her the worship of the Phonecian God Baal, and thousands of his prophets and priests and was imposing this on the people of Israel.

 This story we’ve heard today is the aftermath of a great contest between Elijah and the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, when they and Elijah had prayed to their respective Gods to send down fire from heaven to burn up the sacrifices they’d offered. Elijah won, and as he triumphed, he called on the people of Israel to kill Jezebel’s prophets. God hadn’t told him to do this, but he did it anyway, perhaps thinking that that would be the end of all his nation’s problems.  

 But he had underestimated Jezebel. She probably didn’t care much about the deaths of her prophets in themselves, but she couldn’t bear losing face. She sent out the command for Elijah to be hunted down and killed in his turn. Elijah, sensibly, ran for his life, far out into the desert, where he hoped no one would find him. Eventually though, he ran out of running, and the reality of his situation came home to him. After all he’d done, it had come to this.

 It is enough! he said. 

 He sat in the meagre shade of a solitary broom tree – no more than a scrubby bush really - and waited to die, something that wouldn’t have taken long in that inhospitable climate. He thought he had been called to do a great thing for God, but in the end, he hadn’t achieved anything at all, except a lot of pointless death and destruction, collateral damage in a war he now realised he had no hope of winning.

 But God had other ideas. Elijah sank into an exhausted sleep, but when he woke he found that he wasn’t alone. An angel was with him, with water and a cake of flatbread, telling him to eat. He ate, and slept and woke again, and there was more food, and the instruction of the angel to “get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.”

Elijah did as he was told. What else could he do? And he went on, “in the strength of that food” we are told, for forty days and nights  - it must have been some cake - until he came to another mountain, Mount Horeb, where he met with God and heard his “still, small voice” speaking to him with words that would encourage him on into the next part of his ministry.

 Elijah had two dramatic mountaintop experiences: on Mount Carmel and Mount Horeb, but they don’t make complete sense without this bit in the middle, the bit where Elijah thinks it is all over for him, and he wants it to be too. The bit where he hasn’t got a clue what is going on and has started not even to care. The bit where it all seems too much like hard work, too long a road, with no idea where it will lead him. The bit where he has had enough. But also the bit where he discovers that God won’t give up on him even though he seems to want to give up on himself.

God believes in him. God provides for him. God gives him bread and water, without which no one can live. God gives him rest and the presence of an angel to watch over him. There are no demands, no tricky questions, no expectations, just acceptance that this is how it is at the moment. God is just kind to him, in very basic, practical ways. If you’ve ever been in the sort of state Elijah’s in here, you’ll probably know how important kindness is– the meal someone brings round, the text or email asking how you are, the offer of help which enables you to rest, to sleep, to take time out simply to breathe for a while. The angel who comes to Elijah doesn’t offer a magic wand. He doesn’t offer to go and destroy Jezebel. He just brings the kindness of God into the situation and that changes everything.

 We should never underestimate the importance of kindness.

It can literally be a life-saver, because kindness says “you matter to me” and if we know we matter to someone, and especially to God, we’re encouraged to believe we might matter to ourselves too.

 It’s not just the cake, the water and the sleep that give Elijah hope, of course. It’s also the message the angel gives him the second time he comes to him. “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.”

What journey is this? 

As far as Elijah was concerned his journey was over. His life was over, dragging to a sorry close out here in the desert. But God tells him that there is a new journey ahead of him, another chapter to his story, purpose for his life.

 We looked at this episode a few weeks ago in our Good Book Club Bible study, and we found ourselves wondering what the cake and the water might have been for us as we have slogged on through this pandemic, how we have found the rest we needed, who the angels were for us. It was important, we decided, to notice these things, because just like Elijah, our journey isn’t over yet, and we need to have our eyes open to the food God sends to strengthen us.

 The people who encountered Jesus during his ministry were reminded often of stories like this one of Elijah, stories of God’s provision for people when all seemed lost. They saw the same loving care in him, and sometimes the same miraculous gift of food and drink. Today’s Gospel passage follows on from the miracle of the feeding of the 5000. Many of those who ate the bread and fishes Jesus gave them probably didn’t realise where all that food had unexpectedly come from; they just rejoiced that they were full up for once. But some, says Jesus, realised that he wasn’t just offering bread for a day, but living bread that could feed them for eternity, his own life, his own self. Their eyes had been opened by this miracle to the presence of God, his grace - unmerited, unearned love – which would take them through whatever life threw at them, whether it was triumph or disaster.

 The same offer is open to us as God comes to us, day by day, in his word, in prayer, in the loving kindness we receive from others, and give to them too. If we have eyes to see him, we can discover his goodness, nourishing us and giving us hope that will sustain us eternally, with plenty to share with others too.

 Amen