Twelve Months of Sundays. N.T. Wright
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the towns around the Mount – by and large resisted Jesus’ bracing challenge. The early Church took it up again later. But in the meantime it was Jesus himself who followed his own programme. He became salt for the world around. He acted as the light-bringer to the nations. He became, when all others had rejected him, the one set on a hill who could not be hidden, embodying in himself what Jerusalem was meant to be but had not been, drawing all peoples to himself. The sermon was an agenda which Jesus himself carried out.
That is why his death was the defeat of the powers. The rulers of the world wouldn’t have crucified him if they had known what they were accomplishing: they were signing their own death warrant. From now on, true power comes, as Paul discovered, not through the wisdom or force of the world but through the gospel of Christ and him crucified. If the Spirit is at work through this gospel, law and prophets alike will look on and declare that this is what they had in mind all along.
Proper 2
Deuteronomy 30.15–20
1 Corinthians 3.1–9
Matthew 5.21–37
A real choice with real consequences. The great temptation today is not so much to cast off all moral restraint – few would actually advocate that, though many act from time to time as though that were the norm – as to imply that there are so many different ways of being human, and of being Christian, that our choices in this life are not that important, and that God will sort it all out in some great (and at present unknowable) future.
This view is often coupled with a clever parody of the Sermon on the Mount. What matters, says Jesus, is not so much that you don’t commit murder, adultery and the rest, but that your heart is right. God is looking (as in Deuteronomy; this isn’t a Christian innovation over against a Jewish background) for an obedience which goes through and through a person, resulting in an integrity between heart and action. But today, with romanticism and existentialism as our hidden teachers, we ‘naturally’ think that, as long as we are acting from the heart, what we do outwardly doesn’t matter so much. ‘His heart’s in the right place’ is usually said as an excuse.
We apply this selectively, of course. Nobody excuses murder on the grounds that it was most sincerely meant. But it goes unnoticed elsewhere that the antithesis between outward and inward observance is never meant, in either Testament, as a way of abolishing the commandments themselves. It is a way of saying that the truly mature, integrated follower of Jesus will be someone for whom it is no longer a moral effort to keep the commandments. They will do so because they deeply want to. That, I suspect, shows what a steep mountain most of us still have to climb.
But, to recapitulate, the choices are real. It won’t do to say, ‘But we thought we were supposed to do what came naturally.’ Not to choose – to go with the flow, whether of the insidious pressures from around or the whispered suggestions from within – is still to choose, namely, to choose to disobey. Part of growing up as Christians is to realize that a tough choice is being asked of us. Jesus, after all, didn’t say ‘If anyone would come after me, they should go with the flow and do what comes naturally.’ The next part is to pray for that change of heart, that total reform and redirection from within, through which alone that obedience can become, as we say, second nature. That, according to both Deuteronomy and Jesus, is the way of life.
One sign of maturity and integration within a Christian community will lie, as Paul knew only too well, in its attitudes to its leaders. Going with the flow of natural instincts had produced personality cults in Corinth, a sure sign of spiritual immaturity. The Church is called to grow beyond what comes naturally to humans, and to embrace instead what comes as the fruit of the Spirit and faith.
Proper 3
Leviticus 19.1– 2, 9–18
1 Corinthians 3.10–11, 16–23
Matthew 5.38–48
There are two basic mistakes people make about the command to love your neighbour as yourself. The first is to forget the last two words. We aren’t told to love our neighbour with all our heart, mind, soul and strength; only God has that absolute claim. We are to love our neighbour no more, but no less, than we love ourselves.
This will vary according to whether we are naturally selfish people, who pamper ourselves, or of an ascetic temperament, rebuking and restricting our fleshly desires. It might be fun, for a while, to be loved by the first sort of person as they loved themselves; the second sort, obeying the commandment, might be uncomfortable neighbours.
But here the second mistake kicks in. We are not left without guidance as to how we should love ourselves. True, the lectionary does its best to shield us from the sterner parts of that instruction, as the omitted verses from 1 Corinthians 3 reveal. Verses 12–15 are vital and unique, speaking of the future judgement which will be passed, not on non-Christians, but on Christians themselves, indeed, on Christian workers. Paul uses imagery not just from house-building but from temple-building: he is, after all, building the new temple, the community in which God’s Spirit truly dwells. Sooner or later fire will test that building, and only the proper materials will last. Builders who have used wood, hay and stubble – jerry-builders who haven’t really taken the trouble to do properly the work to which they were called – will discover too late that it all goes up in smoke.
With warnings like this, a proper self-love cannot afford to be complacent. Self-respect, yes, as long as it doesn’t become an excuse for sloppy thinking or behaviour (‘this is just the way I am’); self-care, yes, as long as it is appropriate and not pampering or greedy. But above all, respect for one’s own outward-looking vocation: not, how can I feather my own nest, but how can I be true to what God has called me to be for his Church and world? And if that’s what self-love looks like, love of neighbour must be the same: neither an easygoing tolerance of everything a neighbour may do, nor a confrontational bossiness. Leviticus commands a string of practical measures which, culturally translated, give vivid clues to the true approach.
Matthew 5, in turn, suggests a cheerful, almost playful approach (granted that most neighbours today won’t strike us on the cheek or pressgang us into carrying military equipment for a mile). Jesus is not asking us to be doormats, but to find creative non-violent ways forward in difficult situations. Ultimately, both self-love and neighbour-love derive from love of God: the steadfast, devoted gaze at our creator and redeemer through which we discover the pattern for those made in his image. If we are called to be God’s holy temple, nothing less will do.
The Second Sunday Before Lent
Genesis 1.1—2.3
Romans 8.18–25
Matthew 6.25–34
The project was all set up and ready to go. Creation was more like a perfect studio than a finished painting; everything was there, paints, canvas, artist, and all. It had its own inbuilt rhythm and drama, its own sources and signs of life: notice the emphasis on the seed in vv. 11–12, and on the command to be fruitful in vv. 22, 28. Paradise it may have been, but it was just the start, the opening scene of the play.
Part of it seems play in a different sense. What sort of a skittish God makes giraffes and chilli peppers, sun and moon and sesame seeds? But the six-day sequence ends with solemn glory. Into the studio the creator places a working model of himself. These creatures are to carry forward the project, to paint the picture. They are to act out the creator’s intention, reflecting into the rest of the new-made world the play and the purpose, the very image and likeness, of their maker.
Has the lectionary turned over a new leaf? Do we really get the whole story? A glance at Lent indicates that