There is a change in tone and feel as Jesus arrives in Jerusalem fresh from the hopes and excitement of his teaching ministry in Galilee. The mood becomes increasingly confrontational. Jesus’ focus becomes one of avoiding the traps that are being set for him.

In the atmosphere of religious and political extremes that characterized Jerusalem under the yoke of Roman occupation, there is small wiggle room between blasphemy on the one side, and treason on the other. It’s into this double-bind space that a particularly, unholy alliance of Herodian (the royal party of collaboration) and Pharisee (the religious part of religious reform) factions seek to lure Jesus. The question is: is it lawful to pay the poll tax (a flat-rate personal tax) to Rome? If Jesus answers yes, he commits blasphemy – admitting that Caesar is a rival authority to God. If his answer is no, he commits treason – denying the authority and what’s more the divinity of the Emporer.

How will Jesus answer them? To answer yes, or no are both dangerous options. Yet, so too is any attempt to offer a middle way answer.  As we know only too well from contemporary American political debate, when an atmosphere of fear and mutual contempt characterizes a separation of competing political and religious world views, a moderate view pleases no-one.

One can only admire Jesus’ dexterity. With one question: whose, head is on the coin?  he draws both interlocutors into the trap they think they are setting for him. I imagine it’s one of the Herodians who produces the coin. To possess such a coin within the Temple precincts is in itself an act of blasphemy. Caesar’s head, a forbidden graven image, appears on the coin. However, it’s the inscription that encircles the head of Caesar that proclaims him as divine that goes to the heart of the matter. Jesus’ next move is to state that some things are owed to civil authority and some things are owed to God. It appears simple, honor your obligation to each and don’t get them mixed up!

Jesus answers by not really answering. His answer silences his opponents, but we are still left with the unanswered question: what does he really mean?

Separation of Church and State

The health of the American body politic rests upon several nice and neat separations connected with today’s Gospel reading. The most obvious is the separation of Church and State enshrined in the Constitution.  We are mostly, in agreement that: render unto Caesar  means an obligation to submit to the lawful exercise of civil authority. Therefore, although some of us question the right of the government to levy taxes, few of us refuse to pay them. We are less clear as to what: render unto God the things of God, means.  Why might that be?

Jesus, the Pharisees, and the Great Seal of the United States are all in agreement. Each affirms the truth of the motto on the Great Seal: In God We Trust. It’s an interesting aside to note that from 1782 until 1956 the motto on the Great Seal was : E Pluaribus Unam -out of many, one. In 1957 it was changed to: In God We Trust. Interesting to speculate on the reason for the change. But best not go there at the moment.

In other words, there is a legitimate distinction to be made between Church and State, but not between God and State. Yet here, as in most areas of our lives we play a subtle game of selective cognizance.

Ownership, allegiance, and accountability

There’s a nice story told about the Christian conversion of the Gauls. When the Christian missionaries led these Celtic warriors into the water for baptism, as the man was submerged under the water he raised his right arm up so that his arm and hand remained above the water.  The intent here is clear. The warrior was saying: my sword arm and hand do not belong to God and with these I reserve the right to kill and maim. 

Whatever the historical veracity of this story it reflects a common view today. While we may be made in the image of God and therefore everything about us belongs to God, our money at best – belongs to us, and at worst – to the Government. As I like to put it, we live as if our hearts belong to God, but not our wallets.

The heart of this Gospel encounter is not concerned with creating a clean separation between God and Mammon, or between civil and religious authority. The central issue concerns allegiance and ownership. To whom, or to what do we owe allegiance? Over which aspects of our life do we have a right to exercise ownership?

The way we choose to answer these questions reveals the kind of persons we long to be, as well as the kind of community we envision ourselves becoming?

Getting to the point

At St Martin’s, Sunday October 19th is when we launch our Annual Renewal Campaign (ARC).  The Church tells us that stewardship is more than what we do with our money. But we all have a sneaking suspicion that this is mere window dressing when the only time of the year we really address issues of stewardship is in preparation for setting the next year’s budget.

You don’t need me to tell you that money matters. It matters because like every other aspect of our lives money goes to the heart of our spiritual values. Episcopalians often have an impoverished thinking about our financial pledge. We see it as giving to the parish budget. How unsexy is that? Neither is it very spiritually fulfilling! We have a need to expect that our financial generosity will bear richer fruit. Through our giving we long for fruit that leaves us with a sense of having made a difference, and not simply kept the lights on.

So, let me reframe. Let me state that while stewardship is a year-long program of nurturing the life of our community, it commences with the conversation about our accountability before God in the area of financial responsibility. The Gospel we hear today invites us to see stewardship hinging upon the core issues of allegiance and ownership. While there is a practical connection between our ARC and next year’s budget, there is no spiritual connection between the two. This bears endlessly repeating!

There is a real synchronicity between our ARC and the Gospel of the day. Several questions occur at this point:

1. The main question is not how much do we need to give to meet next year’s budget? The question before us is to whom do we owe allegiance for everything that is good in our lives?
2. Do we view the use of money in relation to our primary allegiance to God, or is money, in effect our Celtic warrior’s sword arm?
3. Do we think our financial health and security are the fruit of our own achievement, or the grace-filled gift from God?

Jesus’ confrontation with the Herodians and Pharisees challenges our comfortable assumption that our money is the product of our own skillfulness, our own good luck, or our privileged ability to command a nice financial reward? Jesus challenges us to think about our primary allegiances. He also invites us to an encounter with gratitude as our response to God for the good things we have been given to enjoy.

The process

On November 16th, our ARC concludes with Ingathering Sunday. This is also the date the Bishop comes to install me as St Martin’s 12th rector.  Our theme between now and then is not how much do we need to give to next year budget. Our theme is celebrating our community’s rich human potential. We begin with an acknowledgement of gratitude to God for the many gifts, strengths, and qualities that already characterise our individual lives, and life together in our St Martin’s community.

As we celebrate these things, I invite us to enter into an intentional conversation together about gratitude and generosity. In the coming week you will all receive a communication from me in the mail. In it I explain in more detail how we might go about structuring our conversation about gratitude and generosity.

These conversations begin from an encounter with our a debt of gratitude to God. Drilling down to the next layer, I invite us to specifically reflect on three further questions:

1. Who are the persons who fill our lives with a joy and quality of life that brings us to our knees, overwhelmed by a deep thankfulness to God? A variation on this question might be for some of us, who have the persons been that have filled our life with a quality that continues to overwhelm us with a deep thankfulness to God?
2. What are the experiences, the events that have deeply shaped our lives, experience of grace and love given to us against all the odds of probability, that on contemplation bring us to our knees in thankfulness for the reckless generosity of God?
3. Reconnecting with these places of personal encounter with the generosity towards God, can we risk to share our experience of gratitude, inviting others to open to a similar experience in their own lives?

In conclusion

Jesus answers his opponents by implicating them in the tensions they seek to entrap him within. His answer silences them, but we are still left with the unanswered question: what does he really mean?

It is never an easy task to negotiate our way in today’s world amidst the many siren calls that offer attractive, yet fruitless allegiances. Today’s Gospel challenges us to consider how we displace God from the center of our sense of allegiance. Thinking of ourselves as the source of the good we enjoy, seeing ourselves as the ultimate authority is the best definition I know of blasphemy.

In my own life I note how an allegiance to fear, to power, or the complacency of success, continually tempt me. Jesus does not say that it is easy living in the tension between the things of Caesar, and the things of God. He simply warns us about the competing powers and influences vying to sway us, to capture our hearts, and ultimately to own us?  When we displace God as the focus of our allegiance we render ourselves vulnerable. Under the illusion of owning ourselves, we become vulnerable to being owned by competing worldly allegiances.

Jesus’ interlocutors in today’s Gospel go away amazed. I invite us to deepen our community’s financial stewardship conversation over the next weeks through a personal encounter with our experience of gratitude for God’s generosity. Who knows, maybe we too can become amazed by what we begin to glimpse ourselves being capable of.

I don’t know when bifocal spectacles were invented? I do remember when I was young seeing people with two pairs of spectacles – one for short and one for long sighted purposes. You sometimes still see the older style of bifocals -you know, the ones with the clear line across the middle, separating short and long sighted lenses. Most of us who are able to tolerate the initial disorienting effect until our vision adjusts are thankful for the invention of varifocal lenses. Varifocals enable the wearer to move seamlessly from short to long sighted zones in what otherwise appears to the naked eye to be one undivided lens.

I offer this as an analogy for reading scripture. This analogy is particularly useful in learning how to read the Gospels. The Gospels are the foundational narratives of the Christian Faith, in that they weave accounts of the earthly life and ministry of Jesus. From Gospel to Gospel, these accounts are similar, and yet quite different in emphasis. They spin the story of Jesus.

I feel we need to rehabilitate the word spin. We tend to use it pejoratively today because we live in a world where mass means of communication bombard us with catch phrases and sound bites, which it seems are often designed to obscure rather than clarify truth. Yet, when it comes to story, there is no objective independent story telling. There is only the story as a construction of experience. Stories make sense of the complexity of our experience of the world. It is this process of constructing meaning, rather than obfuscation that I mean when I use the word spin. 

All stories contain spin, even our own life stories, as I explored in my entry – If to err is human- so too is to forgive[1]. This is also true of all Scripture. We need a good pair of varifocal lenses, firmly planted across the bridge of our noses when we come to read the Gospel texts.

Through the close-up lens

Matthew 22:1-14 through the short-sight zone of our varifocals appears as a quite extraordinary tale. It assaults our sense of credulity at more than one point. In last week’s reflection- Might Jesus have been a Pharisee, I described the parable medium that Jesus used as his primary teaching tool as a story of the everyday life that suddenly whacks you in the side of the head. Today’s parable of the royal wedding feast not only whacks us in the side of the head, it delivers a punch or two to the gut.

The parable

It’s a story about a King who invites people to the wedding of his son. When he finds out that his selected guests have not only declined his invitation but they have killed the servants bearing the invitation. He retaliates by sending out the militia and not only killing them all, but devastating their city, as well. Now it’s not lost on us that the king is clearly a representation for God. So it’s particularly difficult for us when we read that God behaves vindictively to such devastating effect – whack!

The King then sends his servants out to invite anyyone they encounter in the streets, regardless of their station in life or the morality of their lives. Aahh, we sign in relief, as God seems to have recovered and is acting back in character. For over the last few weeks in the parables of the vineyard we have been presented with images of God as a reckless practitioner of generosity.

All seems well. The wedding hall is full to over flowing and a beaming King makes his entry only to discover that one of the guests has gained entry without the seemingly required wedding garment – where did that requirement suddenly spring from? The King a.k.a, God seems to lose it again and has the man cast out of the feast and condemned to outer darkness – i.e. damnation – whack, whack, punch! 

In short sight this is not a story that inspires in us much confidence in being able to safely predict God’s behavior. After all, our feeling safe as a condition for being able to trust one another rests firmly on our being able to reasonably predict one another’s behavior. We get really nervous when someone starts acting unpredictably, God included.

This leads me to the question: so is this parable helpful in any way? What on earth is Jesus’ point here? The moral of the story seems to be: be careful when refusing invitations, and if you do accept, make sure you have the right clothes for the party.

Through the long distance lens

As we lift our eyes towards the long-sight zone of our varifocals we begin to discern the outlines of a different story. To put it boldly, this original Jesus parable is being spun by Matthew for his own purposes.

Matthew is telling a related, but quite different story from the one Jesus tells in the context of his confrontation with the Temple authorities. It’s related in that we can still discern Jesus’ teaching, but this core teaching of Jesus is overlaid with the events and concerns that are dominating the lives of Matthew and his community.

Matthew’s story is that God invited his beloved Israel to his royal banquet, but Israel declined to come. Not only did Israel decline, but it acted violently towards God’s servants, a.k.a, the Hebrew Prophets, and ultimately towards the fulfillment of the prophets, Jesus himself. God punished Israel by sending the Roman Legions against Jersualem, killing and scattering its populace and laying waste to the great Temple. The Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 AD takes place a good 40 years after Jesus death. With hind-sight Matthew, writing around 90AD inserts this event into the original parable of Jesus with the line about the King’s retribution. This becomes clearer to us as we look at the text through our long-sight lens.

In Matthew’s story the guests at the banquet are now the rag-tag collection of odds and sods, forced into a new community as a result of being outcast from their community of origin, i.e. the fledgling Jewish Christians who are now outcast from their synagogues. This new community needs to construct its own story to help it make sense of the new situation it finds itself in. Matthew, in continuity with Jewish tradition is their scribe. Like all scribes throughout Israel’s history, his job is to reinterpret the faith story in the light of current events.

Matthew tacks onto the end of the parable about the royal wedding a quite separate story about the wedding garment. If this is original to Jesus, it must come from a completely different context and so its original meaning seems unclear. What Matthew intends it to mean however, is clear. Within this rag tag band of odds and sods, that is the emerging Church, while many differences must be tolerated, there are some fundamental standards that are to be enforced to ensue good order. The wedding garment is a metaphor for correct behavior.

What might correct behavior mean in Matthew’s community? Correct behavior in any community is more than obeying the by-laws and reflecting the socially accepted norms. Correct behavior is behavior that strengthens the bonds of affection, friendship, relationship, and commonality. Maverick and unpredictable behavior that sows seeds of discord and corrodes trust in the members of a community’s ability to communicate effectively with one another is the equivalent of being found at the banquet without the right clothes. Matthew is saying, in his new and vulnerable community this kind of behavior cannot be tolerated. I might add that no community, fledgling or otherwise, is able to tolerate for too long the behavior of individual members when it corrodes the bonds of relationship and trust.

Taking our varifocals off

Taking our varifocals off for a moment we now begin to reflect on the parable of the wedding feast and its appendix, the story of the wedding garment, from our own contemporary perspective.

When we interpret this parable within the wider message that Jesus teaches concerning the expectations of the kingdoms, what kind of story do we receive? This is a story about invitation and response to invitation. Like the Hebrew Prophets who precede him, Jesus issues God’s invitation for us to return to the covenant, which God established with Abraham and has renewed again and again throughout history. So when the king a.k.a, God, finds that those he longs to invite to his banquet decline, he reissues the invitation again and again. Maybe the original invitees do or don’t accept, but over time many who initially were regarded, or may have regarded themselves as not among the invited, with joy receive and accept the invitation.

The theological nature of acceptance

You and I are the recipients of an invitation to come into covenant with God, made new through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Like Matthew, we too are scribes of the Kingdom and in our interpretation of God’s invitation, the covenant with Israel has not been superseded. It has simply been extended so that it now include us. Perhaps we have not seen it that way?

The personal nature of acceptance

Perhaps we have assumed that we are not included in the invitation. Or perhaps we have taken our invitation so much for granted that we have neglected to actually accept. As we come into covenant with God, there is a clear sense that each party to the covenant bears an appropriate responsibility. When one party fails to discharge their responsibility then the covenant is rendered inoperable.

Jesus is saying to us that the primary expectation for the coming of the kingdom is that we will respond to God’s invitation and take up our responsibility to collaborate with God in the Kingdom’s coming. A fruit of that acceptance is the fostering of deep and meaningful bonds between us within the context of our community (ies). It is to us as a community that God speaks, and it is from and through us working together as a community that the expectations of the Kingdom will be advanced. Perhaps we have not understood it this way?

The banquet as a metaphor for the Kingdom

Having accepted God’s invitation to become co-creators of the Kingdom, it is important that our clothing reflects the gravity of our having been invited into covenant by God. At St Martin’s our response to God’s invitation means putting on our most festive clothes and throwing ourselves extravagantly into a celebration of our diversity, and the rich human potential of our members. We celebrate our enormous potential as a community to make a difference in one another’s lives. We celebrate with gratitude and thanksgiving the abundance of God’s generosity towards us. Through our celebration of our common life we work tirelessly to make a difference in the world around us, a world in desperate need of the celebration of the love of God.

Over the coming month, the month of our Annual Renewal Campaign, how might we as a community join together in affirming our acceptance of the invitation to come in covenant relationship with God? Might we not put on our wedding garments and celebrate with true joy our God’s generous invitation to make the Kingdom real in our own time? An invitation requires an acceptance to become effective. Let’s not overlook our responsibility to respond.

[1] https://relationalrealities.com/2014/09/13/if-to-err-is-human-so-too-is-to-forgive/

Jesus offers three parables concerning vineyards. Two weeks ago we explored in the sermon entitled Lord, do not give us our just deserts, the parable about the hiring and payment of workers in the vineyard. The storyline of this parable presents us with an interesting twist on generosity. We are shown that the generosity of God is somewhat reckless and makes no sense to us. It is in fact, an affront to our normal expectations of fairness. It turns our sense of justice upside-down.

Last week in the parable of the two sons concerning their father’s request to work in the family vineyard we explored our need to experience ourselves making a difference in the wider world. By accepting God’s call for us to enter into a collaborate participation within a parish community, we can make a difference in the world. You can read more at Making a difference.

Today we receive a further parable concerning the action of wicked tenants who through murder attempt to dispossess a vineyard’s rightful owner. Of the three vineyard parables this is the most challenging and difficult for us to interpret.

The parable as a story rooted in a social and economic context

Jesus has just arrived in Jerusalem having journeyed from Galilee. As it remains today, Galilee was the northern most province of Jewish territory. In the 1^st Century however, the population of Galilee was mixed. A largely, Jewish rural peasantry lived alongside a Greek and Roman urban commercial class. Together with the local Jewish aristocracy, the gentile commercial class owned large tracts of land, which they leased to be farmed by the Jewish tenant farmers. This constituted a traditional feudal economy.

An escalation in rural unrest swept the Galilean countryside as the feudal balance of privileges and obligations between landowner and tenant farmer came under threat from the increasing commercialization of farming, necessary to meet the growing food security needs of the Roman Empire. This situation, not unknown in our own day resulted in severe exploitation of the tenant farmers, who in many cases were being reduced to landless peasant laborers. The plight of the itinerant peasant laborers is clearly at the heart of Jesus’ parable of the workers in the vineyard.

The parable of the wicked tenants is a tale of the violent resistance of tenant leaseholders to a shifting economy, a shift that results in growing general unrest throughout the Galilean countryside. 

The parable as a story rooted in a conflict between power and authority

Having arrived in the Jerusalem Temple, Matthew shows Jesus embroiled in an escalating argument with the Temple authorities. The Jerusalem Temple was not only the center of Jewish religion, it was also an oppressive socio-economic institution that taxed and controlled the populace as a proxy of the Roman occupation. Jesus is directly challenging the corruption of religious authority through the influences of economic and social power.

In the vineyard parables, and especially in the parable of the wicked tenants, Jesus is asserting his claim to represent the Kingdom authority of God. The Kingdom of God is a concept at the heart of the Oral Tradition of the Jewish prophets. This tradition rails continually against the political corruption of the Law of Moses and the exploitation of power under the guise of religious authority.

Listen to another parable, Jesus says to the priests and scribes. By telling the story  as a story echoing the socio-economic tensions of the time, Jesus plays on their aristocratic outrage in the face of the affront to their rightful privileges posed by resistance of the populace. In this reading the Temple Authorities see themselves as the legal landowner. Yet, Jesus’ story also contextualizes a much older story that would be known to his hearers. Jesus echoes Isaiah’s vineyard parable set as the first reading of 17^th Sunday after Pentecost.

Parable genre

The parable is a form of story telling that lures hearers into a false sense of security. It invites them to identify with the familiar elements in the storyline so as to paint themselves in the best light. Just when they are comfortable it whacks them in the side of the head with a conclusion that is so counter intuitive as to seem outrageous.

Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants? They said to him, ‘He will put those wretches to a miserable death and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at harvest time’. Now Jesus whacks them. Have you never read the scriptures: … when the chief priest and the Pharisees hear this … they realized that he was speaking about them.

Matthew’s use of Jesus’ parable of the wicked tenants

Matthew adapts the parable to speak to his own context. For Jesus, this parable, along with all the parables he tells, but especially the vineyard parables, proclaims the expectation of the Kingdom of God. The expectation of the Kingdom reveals how God sees things within the context of the in-breaking of a new divine order. For Matthew the parable becomes a story about the Christian Church. Matthew and all the Evangelists conflate the Kingdom and the Church. To this day we inherit a long tradition of seeing the Kingdom and the Church as if they are coterminous. Jesus speaks only about the Kingdom.

Following Matthew’s lead, the Christian Church, conflating Kingdom and Church, has interpreted this parable as a parable of how God as the landowner has expelled the wicked Jewish tenants and given the vineyard to the new Christian tenants. God sends the prophets of Israel again and again to call the Jewish tenants to pay what they owe. Each time they kill the prophet. Finally, they kill the heir, i.e. Jesus. God punishes Israel by removing it from the tenancy.

This reflects the struggle of Matthew’s small and fragile Christian community against the powerful synagogues with their Pharisee rabbis. Matthew’s treatment is understandable within his context. Yet, from the end of chapter 21 and throughout 22, Matthew ratchets up an astonishing invective against the Pharisees. 2000 years of anti-Semitism flow from Matthew’s and the other Evangelists adaptations of the teaching of Jesus to their contexts.

This last week, our Jewish neighbors have been celebrating their High Holy Days, from Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the New Year. For Christians to receive this gospel with its overt anti-Semitism needs some further comment.

An astonishing assertion

Jesus’ argument is with the Temple Authorities, the priests and scribes of the aristocratic Sadducee party. By contrast the Pharisees represented a great religious reform movement that vehemently opposed the Jerusalem-based, Sadducee priesthood with its strangle-hold on power. 

There is considerable evidence to suppose that Jesus was himself, a Pharisee. Jesus sees the teaching of the Prophets, the Oral Tradition, as a complementary authority to the Law of Moses. This is also the Pharisee position. His teaching on the resurrection of the dead is a Pharisee teaching. His emphasis on the coming of the Kingdom of God is a Pharisee expectation. Even if Jesus was not actually a card carrying Pharisee, his view of the world was clearly aligned with theirs. Jesus clearly preaches and teaches within the great awakening that gives rise to the Pharisaic reform movement taking place in 1^st Century Judaism.

The 1^st century socio-economic tensions that Jesus echos in his teachings on the Kingdom of God finally boil over into series of Jewish rebellions against the Romans in the 60’s AD. The Jewish wars culminate in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70AD. With the end of the Temple there is an end of the priesthood. With the loss of the Temple and its power structure in Jewish society the Sadducee’s fade from history. The Pharisees become the movement that reconstitutes Judaism, a new Judaism that blossoms into the rabbinic movement that gives Judaism its shape today. This process is going on along side a similar process that is leading to the emergence of the Christian Church. Each movement reflects many common elements.

Within the time frame in which Matthew is writing the rabbis, who are codifying a reformed Judaism finally decide that it’s no longer judicious to tolerate the Jewish Christians within the broad tent of the synagogue. They expel the Christian Jews. Pharisaic Judaism and the young Christian Church, despite their clear similarities, now become bitter rivals. The animosity between Jew and Christian begins here in the final decade of the 1^st century. This is why Matthew slips the Pharisees in as allies of the priests and the scribes in their confrontation with Jesus. Matthew does so not because they were actually Jesus’ rivals, but because they are really his rivals, with whom he and his community are in tension. 

Our use of the parable of the wicked tenants

This is a parable that has been traditionally interpreted as pointing to God’s repudiation of his covenant with Israel. Yet, for me it is the parable that calls us as Christians to take a long hard at our complacency.

The ancient prejudice

Anti-Semitism is once again on the rise. We must not blindly accept the Gospel writers contextualization of 1^st and 2^nd Century Jewish-Christian conflict as the justification for the perpetuation of anti-Semitism. It is currently very difficult, especially for American Jewry to distinguish between the State of Israel and the religion of Judaism. Rabbi’s tread carefully along a tightrope they are bound to fall off at some point. They will either offend conservative members who conflate Israel and Judaism, or they will offend liberal members who feel strongly that a Jewish voice must be heard in critique of Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. Christians must not participate in a rise of anti-Semitism under the guise of a critique of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. If it’s not possible at the moment for Jews to always keep the two separate, there is no excuse for us failing to do so.

A selective deafness

We can be surprising deaf at those times when we separate Jesus’ clear teaching on the expectations of the Kingdom of God from the mission of the Church. The Church is not the Kingdom, though its charge is to be an agent of the Kingdom. As the Church we are called to work tirelessly in the vineyard of God’s Kingdom to advance the cause of justice in this world.

The Church frustrates the expectations of Kingdom when Christians fain hard of hearing, refusing to hear the radical message on social and economic justice that lies at the heart of Jesus’ teaching on the Kingdom of God.

Self-satisfaction

Our third sin is that of self-satisfaction and self-assertion. As Episcopalians we need to repent of our uncritical acceptance of certain social values as Christian values. The social values of the autonomous individual, strong and independent, tempt us into the sin of believing that we are the authors of our own salvation. The benefits of a secure and successful life are not the fruits of our own cleverness. They are the gifts from God for which the correct response is gratitude. Knowing our dependence on God’s reckless generosity, we take the gifts given us to enjoy, so that through self-giving and generous lives, we express our gratitude by working together to build the Kingdom God in our several generations.

The artwork I have been using for some time as the banner picture on my blogsite comes from a set of murals in Coit Tower in San Francisco. On a visit a couple of years back I was taken with the utopian feel, so characteristic of social and political art from the early decades of the 20^th century. As Fall has approached I have switched the banner from a busy urban street market scene to that of the countryside where we see a romantic image of the rural idyll at harvest time.

In the world of this picture we see clean and suitably attired men and women contentedly working at gathering-in the harvest. To our eyes it’s quite a gendered picture, yet it presents an image of a community working together in pursuit of the common good.

This picture is a depiction of human hope in a period of hopelessness as the long grinding years of the Great Depression wind towards their conclusion. In the darkest of days this picture captures the desire of our collective imagination. This is a dream of full and constructive employment. Men and women working in jobs that sustain order and provide the protection of livelihood. This is a vision of employment that generates the resources not only to meet the daily needs of individuals and their families, but is capable of generating the wealth a society needs for the preservation of social a sense of the common good.

For me, the murals of Coit Tower represent a very early and mid 20^th century dream. I note with some sadness that as the 20th century progressed the dream became tarnished and so it now seems not to be a 21^st century dream. This is a dream that becomes imaginable only as a result of the Industrial Revolution with its need for mechanized and organized labor.

The scene that unfolds for us in Matthew 20:1-6 represents the predominant picture of employment prospects prior to the Industrial revolution. For most of history the scene from Matthew is the norm. Men whose only resource is the hiring-out of their bodies in manual labor, gather at the break of each day on the off chance that they might be hired through a process of random selection. Being hired meant food on the table that day, not being hired meant hunger.

However, the parable of the laborers in the vineyard is, sadly, not a situation consigned to history. It’s a scene that is played out daily in our own time in countless Home Depot parking lots throughout cities like Phoenix, Arizona, and in small agricultural towns throughout Southern California and the South West. Here undocumented migrant workers almost exclusively from Central America, wait under the trees in the searing heat,  in the hope that a building contractor or farm foreman will offer a day’s under-the-radar employment.

At the heart of Matthew’s depiction of Jesus’ parable of the workers in the vineyard lies an ancient social tension between justice and love. I mention the plight of undocumented migrant workers only to indicate that in our own time we seem to be no better than our forbears at managing the social tension between justice and love.

Social stability and prosperity requires the exercise of justice. Justice is enshrined for our Western Societies in the concept of the Rule of Law. The Rule of Law sets out, governs, and adjudicates our social relations with one another.

Justice not only governs our external relations, it is also internalized within us in notions of what is fair and equitable. For this reason, we are confronted by the parable of the workers in the vineyard. It actually scandalizes us. We are scandalized by the notion that working all day under the hot sun is worth the same amount of remuneration as working only the last hour before sunset. The parable presents us with a situation we instinctively feel is unfair, unjust, and corrosive of good order in society. This parable presents us with an invitation that is deeply uncomfortable and disconcerting.

Firstly, the parable of the workers in the vineyard invites us to confront the selectivity with which we apply our sense of justice. We do truly, cherish notions of fairness and equity, here presented in the idea of a fair remuneration for a fair days work. Yet, we live in a society where people are not paid fairly or equitably in relation to the amount their labor contributes to the prosperity of an enterprise. We remain blind to the inequities that abound in a society where women routinely earn less than men for the same fair day’s labor. We choose to deny the reality that levels of low pay have an adverse economic effect in a society where the economic engine is dependant on consumer consumption. It seems that most of us content ourselves with limiting the application of our cherished notions of what is fair and what is just to the arenas of our own self interest, and others be dammed.

Secondly, this parable makes us deeply uncomfortable because it presents us with something that makes no sense to us. When faced with the actions of the land owner, I hear in my head the voice of that old tin-can computer in the 1970’s TV program Lost in Space endlessly reciting: it does not compute, it does not compute! 

We have journeyed over the summer through Matthew’s narration of the early and middle sections of Jesus’ ministry. Again, and again we have been presented with something that deeply upsets us, namely the reckless generosity of God. It’s bad enough encountering God in the image of a farmer who recklessly scatters the seed at planting. For us, whose thinking is so dominated by notions of economic productivity, the actions of God as the farmer appear as down-right crazy and negligently inefficient. To add insult to injury today we are confronted by the image of God as this landowner who similarly scatters his coin in the same way he scatters his seed. None of this computes in our way of thinking.

In society, and within our own thinking we are engaged in the struggle between justice, on the one hand, and love, on the other. Speaking personally, I don’t like the way the love of God seems to challenge if not obliterate the notions of justice by which I live my life. I don’t like the implications that love trumps just deserts, of love trampling over notions of worthiness and entitlement, proper reward and appropriate punishment. These are notions I hold dear and they support the fantasy that if I live virtuously according to the norms of justice I will be somehow rewarded and protected from the vagaries of chance happenstance. According to this way of thinking misfortune only happens to undeserving people.

The love of God scandalizes the worldview I tenaciously cling to for security. I suspect that the love of God scandalizes all of us. The realization of God as an indiscriminate and reckless lover disturbs our neat ordered little lives. If we allow ourselves to connect with our discomfort, we encounter an invitation to move beyond the way we reconstrict the higher concepts of justice to fit our need for clarity and certainty. Through facing-up to such an invitation we come to see that measured notions of fairness and equity are no substitute for the the generosity of love.

We favor regulated and constricted notions of justice to support us in the illusion that what we have is ours, the fruit of our own toil. We believe in our own virtuous, hard working entitlement. In the image of the generous land owner, God discomforts our secure assumption that we are the hard working laborers who have toiled from dawn to dusk. Do we not seethe with outrage when we see the lazy and the indolent given rewards they have not worked for?

We are disturbed by the reckless generosity of God only if we think we are among the deserving, those who are owed a reward commensurate with our hard work and responsible toil. But, what if our self confident self assertion of our own worthiness means nothing to God? What if it’s you and me that God has us in mind as the needy recipients of his reckless generosity? What then?

Matthew Skinner, Assistant Professor of New Testament at Luther Seminary in St Paul makes a timely comment when he says:

As we journey soon into the new beginnings of post-Labor Day autumn, what will it mean to deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow Jesus? More, certainly, than giving up a few things; more than suffering as part of the human condition; more than moving forward on new paths—peering into autumn’s transitions, we belong to one another. 

A recap in the Jesus storyline

Jesus moves from touring the borderlands between Jewish and Gentile lands. Here he has been confronting the generalized suffering of humanity through mighty acts of power and healing. This is the mid point of the Jesus storyline. From here Jesus turns his face towards the road to Jerusalem. He offers the disciples a prequel of what lies ahead. In a nutshell, the way ahead is one of conflict and death. The conflict begins immediately in the heated confrontation between Jesus and Peter.

Peter has rightly intuited Jesus’ identity as Messiah. In my last post: Who do you say that I am?, I explored what it looks like for us to move from a cognitive to an intuitive acceptance of our confession of faith that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God. In today’s gospel reading we see that despite Peter’s bold assertion of Jesus’ identity his view of what this means is conditioned and imprisoned within his Jewish cultural and religious worldview. Within this worldview the Messiah is the liberator king who will restore Israel to its rightful place in the world and therefore, Jesus’ words of suffering and death not only make little sense but also seem somewhat scandalous.

Jesus has to disabuse Peter in the strongest of terms – get behind me Satan!  The meaning of the name Satan is a personified reference to the general temptation for any of us to see the world only in worldly-cultural terms. Having rebuked Peter’s mindset Jesus now issues an unambiguous invitation to discipleship:

Anyone who wants to be a follower of mine must deny self, take up their cross and follow me! 

Alternative translation of the text

Some of you may be familiar with The Message – which describes itself as a contemporary rendering of the Bible – crafted to present its tone, rhythm, events, and ideas in everyday language. I commend to you its interesting translation of Matthew: 24-27:

Then Jesus went to work on his disciples. Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the driver’s seat; I am. Don’t run from suffering: embrace it. Follow me and I will show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to saving yourself, your true self.

Like a knife, the Message translation, slices away layer by layer our self-protections from the real meaning of Jesus’ call to denial of self. What self-denial means is to recognize that we are not the ones in the driver’s seat. Following Jesus is not about us exercising our free will from a Smörgåsbord of heroic choices.

We are so anesthetized by the traditional Biblical language exhorting self-denial and cross carrying. We pay lip service to it. We also moralize and /or spiritualize its meaning.

We moralize self-denial when we imagine ourselves as heroes personifying the virtues of fortitude, courage, or humility. Or, projecting these virtues into our spiritual heroes we conclude that these heroic virtues are not for the likes of us.

We spiritualize self-denial when we picture ourselves valiantly achieving control over our desires through delayed gratification, or some form of spiritual hair-shirt discipline. We spiritualize self-denial when we imagine it means embracing a life of suffering, a lying-down, inviting others to do their worst to us.

To moralize and or spiritualize self-denial is to individualize it as something we do through our own self-assertion. We imagine that we can triumph over our suffering. I refer anyone who might be interested for an excellent analysis of what Jesus does and does not mean by suffering to take a look at Matthew Skinner’s paper: Denying Self, Bearing a Cross, and Following Jesus: Unpacking the Imperatives of Mark 8:34[1] http://wordandworld.luthersem.edu/content/pdfs/23-3_Icons_of_Culture/23-3_Skinner.pdf 

A psychological angle on the text

In an attempt to explore Jesus’ invitation to self-denial, to take up our cross and to follow him, I want to draw from my experience in the world of dynamic psychotherapy[2]. Now I want to issue a warning here: undisciplined use of psychological analysis of biblical texts may damage your spiritual health. I am extremely cautious about submitting biblical passages and language to psychological interpretation. Psychological language, in my view, is generally overvalued in our popular discourse because it plays into our craving for explanatory solutions. Despite the Surgeon General’s warning on the bottle of wine about the harmful effects of alcohol, we know we are, nevertheless, going to drink the wine. Therefore, having stated my warning of the dangers of psychological interpretation of biblical language, I want to bring a psychological lens to bear upon the task of intuitively interpreting Jesus’ invitation to self-denial and cross carrying.

In his confession of Jesus as Messiah, Peter embodies the psychological concept of ego. Ego – ‘the I’ -was originally coined by Sigmund Freud to refer to a part of the personality whose function it is to mediate between the demands of our inner and outer worlds[3]. Thus, the ego is always culturally conditioned, as we see in Peter’s Jewish objection to Jesus’ prequel of his suffering.

As it was so for Peter, so it is with us. Through our ego we conform to the values of our world. Our worldly values promote self-assertion in the face of competition in a world of scarcity. They reward self-protection, self-promotion, and dangle before us the ultimate promise of self-fulfillment. Roberto Assagioli, an early follower and later critic of Freud, founder of the school of Psychosynthesis, more aptly termed the ego function as the survival personality – the part of us that ensures our survival in a world of competition between internal and external demands.

The call to self-denial

Jesus is calling us to disavow the way our cultural and societal formation limits our view of him. One way our culture limits us is through our over- identification with our ego or survival personality. Jesus is asking us to hand-over the direction-setting of our path in life, to God. To do this we have to become deeply countercultural.

My often used phrase: God’s dreaming of us into that which is yet to become known, captures in essence what this looks like. A different road opens up before us. We are now on the road of transformation. As the fear-driven grip of our over-identification with our individualistic ego loosens, this transformation results in us becoming, not only more closely aligned to God, but more connected to one another!

Winning and losing life?

This psychological approach now helps us to see why Jesus goes on to talk about winning and loosing our life. Once again, the translation in The Message cuts through our over-familiarity with the standard text:

What good would it do to get everything you want and to lose you, the real you?

What is the real you?  Psychologically, it goes by many different names depending on whose theoretical system (Freud, Jung, Assagioli) you are working within. A general term might be the real you is the true as opposed to the false you.

The concept of the true-self comes as close and psychology can come to the spiritual language of soul. It’s difficult to directly equate the two because direct equation across completely different discourses is not possible.  Nevertheless let me put it like this.  We have a soul and a personality, and they are not the same although they are interconnected. Jesus is saying that we can win at the ego game, the projection of ourselves according to the values prized by the world, and lose our soul, our sense of who we truly are being dreamed by God, into becoming.

So much of the conflict and violence (physical and systemic) we see in the world around us is caused by our ego-driven (individual and collective) self-assertion. Contrastingly, a direct result of giving up self-assertion enables us to make room in our lives for one-another – in Matthew Skinner’s words quoted above, we come to belong to (one) another. This is the principle upon which all community is based. Be under no illusion, such a giving up of ego imperatives will involve us in real suffering.

Our response to the invitation to discipleship

The popular cultural worldview of ego driven American Christianity is that it’s our individuality that matters. I am saved through my own self-assertion of the right faith formula. I live in right relationship with Jesus because of I possess the moral authority that flows from my personal assertion of faith. I exercise my moral superiority through sitting in judgment of others.

Episcopalians are Christians of the Anglican Tradition. The Anglican Tradition is a transmission of historic (catholic) Christianity that resists the focus on individual self-assertion, a chief characteristic of current culturally driven versions of Christianity. In our historic (catholic) transmission the emphasis is on community and membership within the community of faith.

We are saved through becoming members of the saving community of the Church. As members of the saving community, the spiritual journey is a journey we make in the company of others.

As Anglican Christians, Episcopalians believe that God does not speak to us as individuals, acting alone. As the Early Church Father Tertullian said: one Christian is no Christian. We believe that God encounters us through our membership of the Body of Christ in the world. God becomes knowable to us when we come together in worship at the Eucharist. God speaks to us as a community when we as individuals use our smart phones or tablets, on a daily basis, to plug-into electronic versions of morning and evening prayer. This form of prayer is called common prayer because it is the shared-action-prayer of the redeemed community we call the Church. Our governing authority in the Epsicopal Church is not a Confession of Faith that we all have to sign-up to. It is the Book of Common Prayer, which is a reorganization of the Bible for the purpose of the common worship of the people of God.

When Jesus invites us to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow him, he is not inviting us to embark on a solitary road of personal suffering, heroic or otherwise.  He is inviting us to join together to form his Body in the world. This is the saving community we call Church. We become disciples of Jesus through our baptism into, and life-long participation within the saving and cross-bearing community that is seeking to live in contrast to the individualized, ego-driven perspectives of our society. If you want to know what that looks like then revisit the five baptismal promises all Episcopalians make at every occasion of baptism http: episcopalchurch.org/page/baptismal-covenant

For Jesus, fidelity to God meant taking the path to the Cross. For Matthew and his community, discipleship meant risking persecution by standing together in opposition to the religious value system of Imperial Rome. For us, it is to stand together in opposition to our world’s valuing of isolated, ego-driven individualism.

St Martin’s in Providence is a community on a journey. We affirm each Sunday that we are a community of seekers, in search of that for which we most long. While our longing often remains inarticulate, Matthew: 16-21-26 sheds a little light on an aspect of it, i.e. our desire to find fulfillment in relationships in which we make room for one another.

Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the driver’s seat; I am. Don’t run from suffering: embrace it. Follow me and I will show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to saving yourself, your true self. The Message

Or in the words of Matthew Skinner I opened with:

As we journey soon into the new beginnings of post-Labor Day autumn, what will it mean to deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow Jesus? More, certainly, than giving up a few things; more than suffering as part of the human condition; more than moving forward on new paths—peering into autumn’s transitions, we belong to one another. 

[1] Mark 8:34 is the equivalent to Matthew 16:24-26

[2] Psychotherapy is the application of psychology to increase an individual’s range of emotional choices in the living of life. Dynamic psychotherapy is a broad designation encompassing a number of schools of depth psychology, which despite theoretical differences all accept that the area of focus in psychotherapy is on uncovering the roots of the dynamics of unconscious emotional conflicts that drive us to repeat the same choices over and over again; choices we are compelled to make even when we consciously realize how poorly they serve us.

[3] The ego’s function is to navigate between the conflict between our inner desire and constraints of the real world. Freud understood our internal world to be governed by what he called the pleasure principle and this comes into sharp conflict with our experience of an external world governed by what he termed the reality principle. The ego’s skilled function in negotiating between the internal world of our desire for pleasure and external worlds of social constraint ensures our survival and self-preservation, and success in the world.

Previously, is a word that evokes for me the TV program 24. In 24 each new episode begins with an authoritative baritone voice solemnly intoning Previously on 24. We then see a selection of edited highlights from not only the episode immediately previous to the one we are about to view, but highlights from a number of previous episodes. I have been watching each episode, feeling slightly ridiculous that I should be wasting my time with such predictable rubbish, although I do admire Keifer Sutherland’s incredible energy and tolerance for unspeakable pain. Although the storylines in 24 are far from complex, they are bewilderingly numerous. By beginning each new episode with a recap of the editors selected highlights from previous episodes the program makers are ensuring that we arrive at the correct interpretation of the plot.

Last week, or I might say previous in this pulpit, I suggested that in receiving the Gospel readings week by week requires of us an ability to listen to two parallel storylines, the storyline of Jesus, and the storyline of Matthew and the Matthean Church. As with so much in life, we have to develop bifocal facilities of vision, and in this instance, listening. My main purpose is to address verses 13-16 in this passage but I have to first make a detour from my primary purpose and comment breifly on 17-20.

Over the millennia, Christians have wrangled, often violently, over the meaning of the Jesus storyline in Matthew 16:13-20. These verses provide the Roman Church with direct scriptural authority for the assertion of Papal supremacy. The Magisterium, which is the term used for the teaching authority within the Roman Church does not often resort to the actual letter of scripture as authority for its impetration of the Catholic tradition of Christianity. Yet, here it is in bold black and white. Jesus says: your are Peter (the rock) and on this rock I will build my Church… and I will give you the keys of the kingdom.

The Churches of the Protestant Reformation, who do normally require the black and white words of scripture as authority for teaching go into an amazingly complex avoidance of the direct meaning of these words, because the denial of Papal Supremacy is what it was all about in those far off days of the Reformation. Catholics of the Roman variety love to taunt Episcopalians, who are also catholics, but of the Anglican variety, with: you remember old Henry VIII, who founded your church because he wanted a divorce – dirty old man? The conversation usually deteriorates from there-on.

I don’t want to get into whether Anglicans, and therefore Episcopalians recognize the supremacy of the Pope or not. The short answer is we do. The Bishop of Rome is the successor of the Apostle Peter, and because of this we recognize the special voice, which Tradition has accorded to the chief of the Apostles. Two of the significant titles claimed by the Pope accord with our understanding of his authority. These are: servant of the servants of God, and primus inter pares, translated as first among equals[1]. What we do reject is the politicization over the centuries of papal authority into that of an earthly, temporal prince, with the earthly power to enforce conformity.

If we employ my suggestion that there are always two storylines in the text, a Jesus storyline and an early church – in the form of a particular Evangelist – in this case Matthew storyline then let’s listen bifocally to Matthew 16: 13-20.

The Jesus storyline

Previously in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus after being rejected by his family and deeply hurt by the death of John the Baptist, in an attempt to get some alone time finds himself being pursued by the crowds. At the end of a long day he feeds 5000 of them with the meager rations on hand. After this he’s seen walking on the water in the midst of a storm that threatens to drown his disciples. He returns to the populated areas where he gets into an argument with the Pharisees over the kosher laws, and perhaps smarting from their stinging rejection he sets off for the borderlands where he is challenged by a foreigner and woman to boot. At first he rejects her unreasonable claims on him. Then the most astonishing thing happens. In the face of the woman’s challenge, Jesus seems to experience an expansion in his self-understanding and then rewards the woman for having great faith.

Pausing now to catch our breath in this hectic Jack Bower-like series of events we find Jesus has returned to solid Jewish territory, where for the first time one of his disciples, Simon echoing the salutation of the foreign woman recognizes him as Messiah. We breath a sigh of relief because finally, the inside people who should have known who Jesus was all along, now catch up with the understanding that an outsider has already beaten them to. In return for Peter’s confession of faith, Jesus seems to promote him to the status of rock upon which he intends his church to be built and entrusts him with the keys of the Kingdom.

The mention by Jesus of the word church gives us a clue that Jesus probably did not say this, or at least, not as Matthew reports it. Jesus comes to proclaim the arrival of the Kingdom of God. Building the church does not seem to be part of his understanding of what the arrival of the Kingdom of God means. However, building the church is very much at the heart of what Matthew understands the coming of the Kingdom to mean. The Jesus storyline gives us a chronicle of events, the meaning of which remains indeterminable in the sense of open to interpretation. Therefore we have to switch to the Matthew storyline to continue our exploration of events.

Matthew’s storyline

Matthew takes the chronicle of Jesus’ events and weaves them into a theological narrative. At the heart if this narrative lie the themes of inclusion and exclusion, of clean and polluted and the sources of defilement, of legitimate and illegitimate authority. These are all the issues of a growing community seeking to promote its own identity in a world that is hostile to it. These are the issues of a fledgling community seeking to weld itself together from Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus, hitherto separated by the mutual antagonisms of differences of race and religion.  Matthew reports the feeding of the 5000 and then a few verses on he reports the feeding of the 4000, not as a different eye witness report of the same event, but to indicate the movement of inclusion from the 5000 symbolizing the inclusion of Jews, to the 4000 symbolizing the inclusion of Gentiles, within the same dispensation[2].

Matthew sets Jesus’ return not simply to the Jewish territory of Galilee, but in particular to the city of Caesarea Philippi, that most Roman of cities symbolizing the quisling accommodation of the Herod family to Roman power and Greek culture. In yet another twist in the Matthean theme of insiders and outsiders, the head disciple finally understands Jesus’ identity, and this is set against the backdrop of Imperial Roman power. For Matthew and his community the issue of inclusion and exclusion has moved-on from Jew and Gentile, to a recasting of insiders and outsiders according to whether they can proclaim Jesus as the Christ, the son of the Living God. In this sense, while the antagonism between church and synagogue remains a pesky problem, for Matthew it is Roman Imperial power that symbolizes the ultimate rejection of Jesus.

The present-age storyline

Imagine Jesus standing before you and asking: who do you say I am?

When I sat on the Bishop of Arizona’s Commission on Ministry, after having interviewed a candidate until we had reduced them to a quivering nervous wreck, I would wait for the coupe de grace when the Bishop would nonchalantly ask the candidate: so who is Jesus for you? In those moments I would pray that the candidate would have the presence of mind to put aside the latest trendily, heretical opinion they’d picked up in the seminary and simply say: Jesus for me is the Christ, the Son of the Living God.

I whole heartedly echo Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. Yet what does this phrase actually mean for me? At the heart of Jesus’ identity lies a profound mystery that I cannot fathom. I am afflicted with the modern suspicion of mystery. My fear is that if something cannot be cognitively understood, can it really exist?

The history of Christianity reveals the struggle of the human mind to come to some intelligible answer about Jesus’ identity. Brian Stoffregan in his Textweek blog has listed some of the historical responses to the conundrum of Jesus’ identity[3].

Any cursory glance at this list of beliefs, over which early Christians slaughtered each other in droves, reveals how alive and kicking these so-called heresies remain present in our own thinking.

From cognition to intuition

As I see it, the task is to try to get behind the formulaic words in order to intuitively grasp the implications of believing that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Cognitively, I can’t begin to grasp how Jesus comes to be the Christ, the Son of the Living God. However, intuitively I experience the power of what is being implied by this confession of faith. I will try to summarize my intuitions:

1. I empathically connect with the yearning, so full of expectation of Isaiah and the whole of the prophetic tradition of Israel – a yearning for the change that can only accompany the in-breaking of God’s Kingdom.
2. Jesus is the Son of the Living God and this means that Jesus is part of the Trinity. The Trinity offers me an image of God, not as a solitary being, but as a community of persons. This encourages me to seek God within the intimacies of relational and communal experience. Jesus is important to me because he is the bridge between the community of God within the Holy Trinity and our participation in the community with God within our daily expectations of Kingdom of God.
3. I believe that in Jesus there existed two autonomous natures, one human and one divine. This is a lot for the rational mind to swallow. A review of the heresies shows the temptation has been to either combine these two natures or to deny one or the other. I believe in the two natures of Christ, not because it makes any cognitive sense to me. Even the New Testament is mixed on the question with Paul and Mark seeming to favor a form of adoptionism, i.e. it all happened at Jesus baptism. Matthew and Luke favor different virgin birth stories, while John alone emphasizes the Trinitarian origin of Jesus without further reference to events. Yet, I believe in the two natures in Christ because without this belief the chasm between God and humanity remains unbridged. In the person of Jesus, I believe God builds an unbreakable bridge between creator and creation. Across this bridge a two-way traffic moves as the creator comes to share the experience of the creation, and the creation is invited into the communal life of the creator.
4. I believe in the identity of Jesus as Son of the Living God because for me the consequences of not doing so are too terrible to contemplate. Robbed of faith I am defenseless against the forces of the nihilistic wilderness. This is my equivalent to Matthew’s Gates of the Underworld. The Nihilistic wilderness is for me symbolized in this statement by Timothy Simpson:

 We live in a cultural moment in which the religious impulse in community life is beating a hasty retreat. Every other month a new poll comes out showing a decline in religious belief, a decline on church attendance, a decline in personal religious practice and so on. Those secular polls are interspersed with bulletins from denominational headquarters about church closures, administrative down-sizing and other acts of retrenchment. We go to meetings of our parish councils and see the bills for shoring up our collapsing physical plants, while absorbing the treasurer’s report of the decline in per capita giving, all this after listening to a reading of the names of those saints—tithers all—who have been raised to the church triumphant since the last meeting. Having no idea how we’re going to make it into next year, we shuffle home from our meetings and watch the evening news, only to be told that there are crazy people chopping off the heads of our fellow Christians in other parts of the world. “How can this go on,” we ask ourselves. Timothy F. Simpson is Editor Emeritus of Political Theology.

5. My intuitive grasp of Jesus as Son of the Living God liberates me from carrying the burden of my personal failure to live-up to the moral, ethical, and emotional emulation of Jesus as a kind of superior avatar, a super-conscious, enlightened human being, like the Buddha. I am liberated from the pursuit of spiritual excellence through the intuitive knowledge that God meets me where I am, because in Jesus God meets me, and holds me within the experience of the muck and messiness, of the joys and sorrows that characterize my human existence.
6. I am so relieved that by the sweat of my own brow I do not have to haul myself up, rung by rung, on the ladder to heaven. I am filled with the joy of knowing that God embraces and enfolds me within the Kingdom, where I find my true identity as a child of God.

Any confession of faith is important, not because it suddenly opens our eyes to see and understand God more clearly, but because it opens us to the experience for which we so long, that of being seen, and being loved by God.

[1] It is from primus inter pares, that Anglicans derive our understanding of the role of an archbishop. Except in the case of the Episcopal Church, which mirrors the political structure of the US Constitution, and is led by a Presiding Bishop, an archbishop, who is referred to as a Primate, leads other churches of the World Wide Anglican Communion, referred to as Provinces. This is not a reference to biological genus but to the concept of the archbishop as primus inter pares. An archbishop is accorded a special authority as in the case of the Archbishop of Canterbury, which is rooted in the notion of being the first among equals in the college of bishops. Although not technically an archbishop, the office of Presiding Bishop enshrines this concept.

[2] For a fuller explanation of this got to my sermon blog for last week at https://relationalrealities.com/2014/08/16/tradition-and-transition/

[3] Ebionites Jesus was the son of Joseph and Mary. He was the Messiah, but he was not divine. Dynamic Monarchianism or Adoptionism Jesus was a unique man who was divinely energized by the Holy Spirit (at baptism) and called to be the Son of God. That Spirit left just before Jesus died.

Arianism “There was when he was not” = Jesus was not co-eternal with the Father. He was an intermediary between the Creator and the creation. (Today’s Jehovah’s Witnesses have adopted an Arianistic Christology.) Origenism or Subordinationism Christ is a divine being somewhat below the highest divine principle. He derives his existence from the highest divine level.

Nestorianism Jesus is split into two distinct persons: one human and one divine. Mary was not theotokos (“God-bearer”). The divine logos(“Word”) was not involved with human suffering and change. Christ could only be truly human if his humanity was not fused and overcome by the divine nature.

Chacedonian Definition or Orthodoxy (the “right” stuff) Jesus the Christ is one. He has two natures preserved in one prosopon (“person”) and in one hypostasis (“substance”). Both natures are unimpaired, “perfect” consubstantial with God and man. Christ was both pre-existent and born from the Virgin. Christ is eternal and dies on the cross. Monophysitism There is one person, one substance and one nature. The manhood of Christ becomes unimportant. He was God. Modalistic Monarchianism God was revealed at one time under the mode of Father, at another time under the mode of Son, and at another time under the mode of the Holy Spirit. Docetism This view begins with the Greek idea that matter is essentially evil. Jesus was not a real “flesh and blood” human. He just “seemed” to be human. He was a god appearing in human form.

Human beings cannot live without tradition. We use the word is two distinct ways. We speak of traditions with a small t, to refer to the conventions, by which we interpret Tradition with a capital T in response to the needs of the present time.

Personal recollection

I remember in my seminary days being part of a rather exclusive little group. We considered ourselves not only the arbiters of fine taste, but also the defenders of Tradition. We were rather preoccupied with the protocols governing both the dining hall and the chapel.

Our seminary, or theological college as such places are referred to in the Church of England, was the first of such institutions to be established in the early part of the 19^th century as the catholic revival[1] within the C of E sought to introduce a greater degree of spiritual formation into the preparation of men for Holy Orders. Being set up along the lines of a monastery, our community life revolved around the daily rhythms of eating and praying together. Our small group understood instinctively that the traditions governing the dining hall and the chapel shaped the identity and the feel of the community. We used the phrase: as is our ancient custom, to both invent and abolish practices we liked, or disliked.

The memory of this makes me smile with both amusement as well as embarrassment at the seeming pettiness of behaving in this way. Yet, what we were doing was simply trying to appeal to a wider sense of Tradition in order to identify who we thought we were in the here and now. We were reacting against what we felt were the loose and slovenly attitudes that had crept into the Church during the 1960’s, and 70’s. For instance, we were aghast that the then Archbishop of Canterbury, when Principal of the college in the late 1960’s had sold the dining silver and replaced many of the serving dishes with blue Tupperware. We revived or in some cases invented from scratch the customs of what appeared to us to have been a more dignified and tasteful past. In this way we were seeking to redefine the identity of the community we loved.

Reflections on the function of Tradition

Tradition with a capital T communicates and shapes a community’s experience of itself in the present by connecting it to the memory of what it has been in the past. However, Tradition also becomes a divisive thing, when in any society different constituencies in response to the pressures of contemporary issues come into conflict over how to interpret Tradition.

It’s all in the way Tradition is used. Whether we look at the history of the Christian Church or that of the American Republic, we see that conflict centers on how different groups appeal to Tradition either to justify, or criticize current practice.

The Bible supports the institution of slavery, the subordination of women, and the repudiation of homosexuality. Yet Christians have appealed to the teaching of Jesus on the primacy of love, and inclusion on the basis of faith, in order to challenge all three. In each age there is a cause célèbre that epitomizes the tensions of living with Tradition. In the 19^th Century it was the abolition of slavery. In the 20^th Century it was the emancipation of women. In the 21^st Century it is the inclusion of homosexuality and gender identity within the concept of faithful Christian identity, not to mention civil rights. Running through all periods is the continual tension within the Christian body between those who appeal to Tradition in support of the Church as the pillar of society, and those who appeal to Tradition itself as society’s harshest critic.

The US Constitution proclaims that all human beings (men) are created equal. Yet the 14^th Amendment was required to iterate that all men included black men. It took the 19^th Amendment to extend the vote to women. It required the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to put into fuller practice the Constitution’s bold proclamation.

My central point here is to say that the use of Tradition cuts both ways. It’s all in the interpretive approach. Each of us will have an intellectual and emotional predisposition towards Tradition. Some will want to view received Tradition, as evidence that ancient custom is fixed, coming to us out of the mists from an age before time and consequently beyond the challenge of any particular age. The purpose of my seminary memory was to remind myself that there was a time when I had an emotional need to view Tradition in this way. There are others who believe it to be the responsibility of each generation to interpret Tradition in the light of current circumstances so as to ensure that Tradition is continually renewed and able to speak to the needs of the present time. Paradoxically, this was also what I, and my seminary friends were doing. I suspect we all use a bit of both approaches as it suits, because our intellectual and emotional needs for Tradition are not always in perfect sync.

The Gospel

What is true of our experience seems to be also true for Jesus. In Matthew 15 we see tensions in play that are familiar to us from our own religious and political context. In the Gospels we always have two parallel storylines, side by side. There is the memory of actual events in the ministry of Jesus. Matthew records this collective memory of Jesus in a manner that also speaks directly to the experience of the community for which he is writing. In both storylines, as well as in our own time, we see the age-old struggle between different approaches to living in the tense space between Tradition and the here and now.

Interpretation of Matthew 15: the Jesus storyline

Matthew 15 addresses head-on the tensions in the Matthean community between those who are in and those who out. This largely Jewish Christian community has recently suffered the experience of exclusion from the synagogue. It appears they are also struggling with the issue of the inclusion of Gentile Christians within their community. Matthew, drawing upon the earlier record of Mark’s Gospel presents his community with a picture of the way Jesus challenged the uses of Tradition to justify the practices of inclusion and exclusion.

We see Jesus breaking with Tradition and thereby running afoul of the religious authorities, in this instance represented by the Pharisee Party. In Jesus day there was a major split between the Sadducees and the Pharisees within Second Temple Judaism The Sadducees were the priestly, arch-traditionalist group claiming that the only binding authority lay in the Law as Moses had delivered and recorded in the Torah.

Many Jews felt that this ossification of the Law was an imperfect instrument for addressing contemporary needs. The Pharisees addressed the inadequacies of the written Law by holding that the Oral Tradition of the Prophets was equally authoritative. To this Oral Tradition other ritual purity customs had been added which here are referred to as the tradition of the elders. It’s with these ritual customs that Jesus is taking issue. Religions develop rituals that identify those included and those excluded on the basis of clean and unclean. If you wash before prayer you are spiritually purified, if you don’t you remain unclean.

Jesus counters Pharisee criticism by drawing a different distinction. In place of the distinctions between external purity and external contamination Jesus refocuses the argument on the distinction between internal intention, and external behavior. Jesus echoes a more contemporary psychological understanding that the challenge to living a spiritual life emanates from within our internal world – our attitudes and intentions. Jesus uses the image of the human heart to refer to the internal world. Being right with God is not about what you eat and whether you wash or not before prayer. It’s about intention and the conflict between intention and desire. The list of behaviors he condems could be seen as the symptoms of unresolved internal conflicts between human intentions and desires.

Interpretation of Matthew 15: the Matthean storyline

With the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD, the Judaism of Jesus’ day, i.e. the struggle between Sadducee and Pharisee parties is ended. The Sadducee priesthood dies with the Temple and out of the ruins the Pharisee party emerges triumphant in the form of Rabbinic Judaism. Matthew and his community live on the other side of this cataclysmic event.

It seems to me that in Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees, Matthew sees his community’s struggle with the synagogue where the Rabbis, the descendants of the Pharisee movement have expelled the Jewish followers of Jesus. The Christian community is vindicated in no longer following the rituals of the traditions of the elders by the memory of Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees.

In verse 21 the focus shifts dramatically as Jesus journeys into the foreign territory of Phoenician Tyre and Sidon. It’s useful to notice that this section places Jesus outside the Jewish heartland. Jesus moves into the borderlands between Jewish and Gentile worlds. In Matthew’s presentation of the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Syrophoenician woman, he resurrects the archaic word Canaanite to identify her. Canaanite was a term from earlier Israelite history and would not have been used in Jesus nor Matthew’s time. Matthew’s point is to evoke the age-old nature of the struggle around inclusion and exclusion. The essential theological points in this dramatic action are as follows:

• For Canaanite Woman read hated foreigner, a mere bitch in the canine sense – dog being a phrase Jews used to refer to foreigners.
• Yet, she hails Jesus for the first time in the Gospel as Lord (kurios) and recognizes him as Messiah (Son of David). She alone is the first in Matthew’s Gospel to recognize who Jesus is, and she, a foreign bitch to boot.
• Jesus seems to follow patriarchal social convention. As a man he ignores being addressed by a mere woman in public.
• She continues to raise a ruckus. The disciples are embarrassed and just want to get rid of her. This is theological code for the spiritual blindness of the so- called insiders.
• Jesus finally forced to address her rejects her plea because she is not a Jew justifying his response with: it is not right to give Jewish food to foreigners  i.e.dogs.
• She outwits him by acknowledging her foreign status and offering a metaphor from the dinner table where the dogs scrounged for food that fell from the table. This she protests is reason enough for him should heal her daughter.
• Matthew indicates no pause in the exchange but one can imagine Jesus being rather stunned by her response. He now calls her a woman of great faith. Nowhere else does Jesus refer to anyone as possessing great faith. The implication here is that great faith is to be found only among those outside, among the excluded.

Commentators debate the psychological movement that takes place in Jesus during this encounter. Traditional commentators stick with the explanation that Jesus’ response is a test for the woman, and she passes. Personally, I am repulsed by the suggestion of Jesus and God continually testing me to see if I pass or fail. Therefore, I favor the more challenging suggestion that here we see Jesus in response to her challenge, learning and growing in his understanding of his mission. This is the moment when Jesus recognizes that his mission is not only to the lost sheep of Israel. In three chapters, 13, 14 and 15, Matthew presents Jesus moving from family and hometown rejection, to rejection by the religious authorities, to encounter with great faith in the Gentile territory. He seems astonished to find recognition here in foreign parts among those considered unclean and outside the dispensation of Israel.

It seems to me that in Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman, Matthew is exhorting his Jewish Christian Community to move beyond their racial prejudices and embrace the inclusion of Gentile believers.

Although the Gospel reading for Pentecost 10 ends here, Matthew drives home his point by ending the chapter with what looks like a repetition of the feeding of the five thousand from chapter 14. However, he changes the vital elements of what looks like a repetition of the earlier story to show that this is a new story. In the feeding of the five thousand, the number 5000 is a Jewish number representing the division of the Israelites into five cohorts as commanded by Moses. There were twelve baskets, 12 being the number of the Tribes of Israel. The scraps are collected in a kind of basket only used by Jews. At the end of chapter 15 only four thousand are fed, 4000 representing the four corners of the Gentile world. There are seven baskets, 7 representing the 70 Gentile nations. The scraps are collected in a type of basket used all over the Mediterranean world. The banquet of God is now extended to the Gentiles and those who were outside are now brought inside the Kingdom of God.

Conclusions to be drawn

• Tradition is always evolving and never fixed for all time.
• Conventions come and go as a means of interpreting and applying the Tradition to the needs of the Christian community in the present age.
• As human beings, we have a tendency to cling to our conventions. We mistake them for the entirety of the Tradition and not simply the interpretations of a previous generation.
• The Early Christian community remembered the moment when Jesus transitioned in understanding his mission. They remembered the moment he moved from a mission to Israel, to viewing his mission in the fuller terms of Isaiah’s prophecy of the Messiah calling all nations into the Covenant with God made originally with Abraham.
• This memory helped the Early Church to embrace the Gentile world paving the way for the inclusion of the likes of you and me into the Old Covenant, now made new.
• The abolition of slavery, the emancipation of women, the inclusion of gay and transgendered persons, the confrontation with systems that sustain the abuse of power that advantage the few at the expense of the many are not expressions of the spirit of our secular, humanistic age. They are signs of the People of God growing, painful step, by painful step, into the realization of the Kingdom of God.

[1] Commonly referred to as the Oxford Movement which sought to reinvigorate the Church of England’s spiritual disciplines and practices through returning to its ancient catholic spiritual and liturgical tradition, largely fallen into disuse during the 18^th Century church’s championing the intellect and reason both spirits of the Enlightenment.