A Homily by the Very Revd Michael J Pitts for Proper 24
Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
17th September 2006
At St George Place du Canada
Proverbs 1:20-33
James 3:1-12
Mark 8:27-38
As I begin, I want to make a few comments on the events of the past week. Monday forced on us recollection, not only of the events of five years ago in New York, but of all that has flowed from that in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the world. We may also have thought of the events of this summer in Israel and the Lebanon. Then on Wednesday, we heard of the tragic shooting in Dawson College. I think we are still too close, particularly to this most recent event, for a full theological consideration, but I want to share with you my preliminary thoughts. Once again I have been brought to reflect that the veneer of civilisation, which enables us to live together in human relationship, is very thin indeed and very vulnerable. Once it is broken, by an individual, or by a society, then, as we say, all hell breaks loose. If our liturgy each week is a taste of heaven, then what is going on in our world today is a taste of hell. How we relate the two is a task for which we need to muster all the power of theology and homiletics available to us, as we seek to make sense of our situation and try to offer meaning to those around us.
The compilers of our lectionary are providing us at present with a complex diet. Our readings from Hebrew Scripture have been drawn from that part of our writings which we refer to as the Wisdom Literature. The Greek scripture readings are from the letter of James, and our Gospels have been following the story of Mark’s Gospel.
At first this may have seemed each week to be a disparate, perhaps even incompatible juxtaposition, but as I have delved into them, I find they have offered much food for though and meditation around themes which lie along fault lines (to use a geological metaphor) which run through our whole Jewish-Christian tradition.
Let us begin with the readings from Hebrew Scripture. Two weeks ago, we read a passage from the Song of Solomon. This week, as last, we are dipping into the book of proverbs. These, along with Job and Ecclesiastes are part the wisdom literature. This tradition has always been somewhat marginal in Scripture, and some of the writings only just made it into the Canon, while others were excluded. In the Christian Canon, you will find that there are certain of these books included in the Old Testament in Roman Catholic Bibles, while in Protestant Bibles, they will be either omitted completely, or printed in a separate section called the Apocrypha. What makes up our Bible is not quite as clear cut as we sometimes think.
The wisdom literature contains many different kinds of writing, starting with simple proverbs, and collections of instructions for good living, which often read like Emily Post. But it also contains collections of wise sayings, stories and poems reflecting on the meaning of life, like the book of Job, and dissertations on the importance of education, as in today’s reading. It also contains the Song of Solomon, which despite many wonderful attempts to interpret it spiritually in the history of hermeneutics, and many beautiful musical settings like that of Healey Willan, is actually an erotic love poem. But across all of this variety, the underlying theme is that of the importance of human reason and intellect. In cross cultural terms, the development of the Wisdom tradition is parallel to the development of philosophy in Ancient Greece.
To this we shall return, but for the moment let us look at the Letter of James. Like the wisdom literature this work has always been a little marginal to the hermeneutic tradition. Martin Luther referred to it as an Epistle of Straw. Among the Greek Scriptures, it represents one side of a great division in the early church. Although, as we have it, it is a later document, it seems to be part of an early tradition which originated in the Jerusalem Church, led by James the brother of Jesus. It is a tradition which emphasised the Jewishness of the Christian way. As part of this it emphasises the importance of right conduct.
Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers [i]
What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? [ii]
How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire. And the tongue is a fire. [iii]
On the other side of this great divide are the churches of what is now Asia Minor and southern Europe, led by Paul.
Paul wrote to the church in Galatia:
If justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing…Did you receive the Spirit by doing the works of the law, or by believing what your heard? [iv]
And to the Christians in Rome he wrote:
Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God. [v]
To the church at Philippi he wrote:
[I want to] be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. [vi]
Now we return to the lectionary and look at Mark. Mark is the earliest of the canonical gospels, and gives form to what the word Gospel means, the good news of Jesus Christ. But in telling the story, Mark does not give us an emaciated stained glass window Jesus. Mark’s Jesus tells the scribes:
Isaiah rightly prophesied about you hypocrites… [vii]
He told the Syrophoenician woman:
It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs [viii]
And to Peter he said:
Get behind me, Satan [ix]
As in Paul, faith is a key idea in Mark, but faith for Mark is slightly less intellectual, somewhat more visceral than for St Paul. It includes a personal relationship with Jesus, a persistence which we see in the story of the Syro-Phoenician woman, and a deep trust, even if the evidence is not all there, which we see in Peter’s response to Jesus’ question:
Who do you say that I am? [x]
Another fil rougue of Mark’s Gospel is the total incompetence of the twelve, their failure to understand what Jesus is trying to tell them. The people who “get it” in Mark are always the people on the margins, Gentiles or the sick or those excluded from the community by the purity laws. Just as an aside here: when Matthew takes up Mark’s story of the confession of Peter he adds some words to Jesus’ reply:
Blessed are you, Simon, Son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father in heaven. [xi]
Faith in the gospels is not a human quality but a gift of grace.
So in our readings of today and recent weeks, we find faith and works on the one hand and faith and philosophy on the other. We have therefore the precursors of dialogues and battles which have continued in the church right to the present day.
In the third generation of the followers of the way, they found it necessary to have ways of explaining the faith to outsiders. One of the earliest ways was to speak of the Risen Jesus in terms of the Wisdom of God, especially drawing on passages of the wisdom literature where wisdom had been personified, as in our reading today. But as the faith spread more and more into Graeco-Roman culture, the next generation left behind purely Jewish interpretation and began to depend more and more heavily on the use of Greek philosophy with which to explain things. Out of this amalgam arose the Nicene and Athanasian creeds. Faith and philosophy were wedded.
Fast forward now, through the dark days following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, to the Middle Ages. The great Greek philosophers had all but been forgotten in the West, but their texts had been preserved in the Islamic Tradition, translated into Arabic. Intellectual contact between Islamic and Christian Scholars led to a re-discovery and re-translation of the texts, which then led to the work of Thomas Aquinas, in which he combines Christian theology with Aristotelian philosophy. His work remains to the present, the standard of Theology in the Roman Catholic Church.
Fast forward again, to the Reformation. The continental reformers had two things with which they were dealing. One was the corruption of the medieval western Church. The other was a new found interest in the Bible, now available in vernacular language and in print. As they read the Bible, one theme jumped out at them: faith. To cut a long story very short, they purged from the past both works and philosophical reason, both of which they believed had lead the church astray. They came up with the banner Sola Scriptura, Sola fide, sola gratia, solus Christo, soli Deo Gloria. Scripture, faith, grace and Christ were to be the centre from now on. Except in the Church of England – the origin of the Anglican communion. After the wars and bloodshed caused by the first century of reformation, the English church tried to be a place where everybody could be at home (including both Catholic and Puritan). The watchwords of the English tradition, quite different from the Lutheran and Reformed traditions, became Scripture, Tradition and Reason. [xii]
Fast forward again to the 21st century. Two particular things now exercise both the Anglican Church and the world wide church. One is a tendency to strip the reformation banner of four of the five solas, and leave only one, Sola scriptura, only Scripture. The second and major matter is that since the reformation and Richard Hooker, reason has take on a whole new content. For the reformers, whether they rejected or accepted reason, reason was Aristotelian deductive reasoning from first principles. But now it is a vast body of knowledge resulting from the inductive reasoning of scientific method. Even those Christians who have accepted the validity as a path to truth of that body of knowledge, have only begun to scratch the surface of what it actually implies for our faith. These two features of Christian faith lie behind, I believe much of the debate, dialogue or acrimony in our church today.
What I have tried to show is that the things which are dividing us today, have always been what I called fault lines in the Christian tradition, and we find them, as we have seen, right in the scriptures themselves, and right in the readings of our lectionary in this after-Pentecost season. But the things which divide the church today, and the acrimony of that division, cannot surely be part of what, at the beginning, I called a taste of heaven. They have much more in common with the forces of division, war and violence in the world. If we are to speak of heaven in our present time, if we are to offer meaning in this puzzling world, I could only hope that the church could live it in our life as well as in our liturgy.
[i] James 1:22
[ii] James 2:14
[iii] James 3:5b-6a
[iv] Galatians 2:21, 3:2b
[v] Romans 5:1
[vi] Philippians 3:9
[vii] Mark 7:6
[viii] Mark 7:27
[ix] Mark 8:33
[x] Mark 8:27-30
[xi] Matthew 17:17
[xii] This is often attributed to Richard Hooker. It does not actually appear in his writing, but it does summarise his position in “On the laws of Ecclesial Polity”.