“HOLIER THAN THOU”?

Sermon delivered on the Second Sunday after Trinity the 13th June 2010 by Fr Nicholas JG Sykes in the congregations of St. Alban's and of St. Mary's Church of England in the Cayman Islands in the service of the Holy Eucharist.

Scriptures:            2 Sam 11:26 - 12:10,13-15            Galatians 2:15-21                    Luke 7:36 - 8:3

 Luke 7:47  Jesus said, "I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little."

 

THE JEWISH SCHOOLS

Our Lord came into the world with a radically different revelation of God from what was being taught in the Jewish schools of His day. The schools taught that your adherence or otherwise to the laws of God and to the teachers' interpretations of those laws determined what sort of position you found yourself in on a scale with "sinner" at one end and "righteous person" at the other end. If you were at the "righteous" end of the scale, God loved you, but if you were at the "sinner" end, God rejected you. If you wanted God to love you, your business in life was to climb up the scale as well as you could.

 

RELIGION AND ETHICS

It should be made clear from the outset that there is a most positive thing to be said about this, and that is that there was a clear link between religion and ethics. A study of comparative religions shows that religion as such does not necessarily make this link: however, the people of Israel proclaimed that God was righteous and required men and women to live in righteousness too. The people of Israel should rightly be honoured for having been granted this revelation to bring into the world. That connection between religion and ethics and morality historically lies at the heart of western civilisation, because it was taken up into Christianity. We recall that Jesus said that he had not come to destroy the Law, but to bring it up to new standards. Accordingly, in my own student days it was a wonder to me how it was that the ancient religious concepts of the divine, from say Persia or Greece, could apparently be lacking in morality. However, in today's climate of thought also, the ethics of the day and our Christian heritage are being separated. The West's sources of ethics are increasingly in socially agreed codes and laws of conduct, purporting to be  “international standards”, but which have become a distorted version of them based on negative concepts of discrimination; and the result of this is that the older theologically based ethic is more and more being subverted and ignored. "Thus saith the Lord!" is giving way to "Thus saith the man-made law!" In addition to this, it is becoming standard ideological fare to consider the ethics of Christianity and its sources to be fundamentally flawed.

 

GOD THE LOVER

The prophets and law-givers of  Israel, however, firmly linked righteousness and religion. The Pharisaic schools of Jesus' time said that the divine would approach and approve the humanity that could display its righteousness according to the Law. Contrasting with this, the message of Jesus and the apostles was that the divine, through the mystery of grace, approached humanity to court it from its unrighteousness, and make of it a spotless Bride. The Kingdom of Heaven, as Jesus taught so often, was like a marriage banquet, and for that, God called those who saw themselves at the bad end of the scale. He called sinners to repentance. He approved those who came in repentance and gratitude that sinners though they had demonstrated themselves to be, He was receiving and forgiving them. An example of such a person was the “woman of the city” in our Gospel today.

 

FORGIVENESS AND THE THEOLOGICALLY BASED ETHIC

It is often assumed by religious writers that this "woman of the city" in S. Luke Ch. 7, was Mary Magdalene. Although Mary Magdalene is mentioned at the end of our Gospel reading today as one from whom seven demons had gone out, and as being with the Twelve in Jesus' company, there is no indication that this is the same person. Whether she was Mary Magdalene or not, to have been forgiven and rescued on this occasion and shown to be the object of God's love would not have eliminated the need on her part to fight against "the world, the flesh and the devil" in the following months and years of her life. God comes to save at the beginning of a process, and not just when we have already become good. It is the fact that He has received and forgiven us that gives us the hope and the love for Him that helps us to choose against sin subsequently. We have begun to see ourselves as His sons and daughters, and so to start to live out a theologically based ethic.

 

DAVID'S BETRAYAL OF THE LORD

The Old Testament does not shrink from telling of the unrighteousness of the righteous man David. David may have sung in the words of Psalm 7, "My shield is in God, who saves the upright in heart," but the tale that is told of him in our Old Testament lesson today is a sad and ugly one. First there is the selfish violation by a man of power of the marriage of one of his faithful soldiers. Then having committed adultery with the man's wife he was unable to conceal the consequences of his act except by arranging for the soldier's death in battle. Now in David we have already seen a heroic faithfulness to the Lord, but this episode occurs during a subsequent low point in his life. This is the man who slew the giant in the Lord's name, the man that was chosen by God and anointed by the prophet Samuel, the man that for religious reasons was so respectful to King Saul, and the one who after Saul's death had brought Jerusalem into the united kingdom of the twelve tribes, and so the story of his goodness and his mighty exploits can go on. Yet now this failure, beginning to set in train many domestic troubles, reveals that the David of great exploits was also the David that on this occasion, in the words of the prophet Nathan, "despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in His sight."

 

THE GOSPEL REMEDY

Clearly, David's earlier exploits of faithfulness to the Lord had not guaranteed to him automatic spiritual health. Righteous David could also come to say with horror and repentance, "I have sinned against the Lord." And no matter what we might be able to point to with satisfaction in our own past, we are all potentially or actually at the sinner end of the scale. This is something we must admit to if we want to receive and continue to receive the Lord's gracious approach to us. In thought, word or deed we have terribly fallen short of the glory of God. Yet our Gospel is that when we own this we are not rejected. Our remedy is to believe in Christ Jesus, as St. Paul proclaims in our second lesson today, in order to be justified by faith in Christ, and not by our own goodness. Even a mature Christian must believe as if he were no further on in his Christian life than he was when he first believed. He is as much in need of God's grace as he has ever been. "O wretched man that I am!", as the Apostle exclaimed as a mature believer.

 

THE LORD COURTS AND INVITES US

But as such, the Lord courts us by His grace and invites us still to the heavenly banquet, thus helping us on always in the present age in the new way of combating sin. Let us respond in faith to His enduring love, even in the way the woman of the city did, the way that Simon the Pharisee failed to find.