or in the complete worship podcast here.
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
No comments:
Post a Comment