Rev Helen preached this sermon on Wednesday 7 February 2024. Here it is for you again:
Sometimes it is hard to hold up the bible at the end of the gospel and say this is the gospel of the Lord, how do you reverence what we’ve just heard what a gospel! You need a lie down after that and to top it all there’s a list at the end and it’s a list and a half. How to defile or not to defile and we’re reading a list almost 2,000 years old and I agree with most of them, at least some of them still.
But it does beg the question doesn’t it. What do we do if we don’t agree with everything Jesus says and teaches or some of his actions. We are told that Jesus came to save humans and set them on the right tract to get to eternal life, that we should follow him and be his love in action. To be fair to Jesus many of his teachings set out a good pathway to live a good life. He taught us to love one another as he loved us, love God with all our hearts, soul and mind, to forgive those who hurt us and how he is the way the truth and the life – not one gets to God accept through him.
That’s all good but that same person also said this: from Luke Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brother and sister, yes and even life itself, can’t be my disciple. From Matthew Go nowhere among the gentiles and enter no town of the samaritans, but rather go to the lost sheep of Israel…it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs and this from John 8 about the Jews You are from your father the devil, and you chose to do your fathers desire. Can you imagine if someone said that today with the tensions in Israel/Palestine at the moment?
So what do we do with all this? Do you have to take the good and the bad? We can’t ignore it as it is all written in the same gospels. How do you navigate this situation? It’s not easy and that’s a fair way to think about it because sometimes your heroes do let you down. We live in an age of what is called ‘cancel culture’ one wrong word or fault and that’s it so do we cancel Jesus?
Perhaps what we could do, which I think might be a better way of looking at this and how society goes for this sort of thing as well, do we just have to accept that Jesus was human, humans get it wrong sometime and so did he. Did his thinking change or reform? Did he say something else that didn’t get recorded as it was seen as unimportant or didn’t fit that narrative of these communities who were recording the events of his life in his name? you are doing some mental gymnastics here and like I said it isn’t easy but it’s not impossible. One person I have found who really has helped me to put some of this in perspective is Amy-Jill Levine who is a Jewish scholar, and she wrote a book ‘The difficult words of Jesus’ and this is some of the advice she gives to help read into the more difficult things he says.
She reminds us, and I do think this is a detail that many overlook, is that these texts not only date from a different time and context to us but also a completely different culture. The bible was written 1st century CE in West Asia and we live in 21st century Europe, two very different places even 2000 years ago they were very different places, sometimes that needs to be remembered and understood when looking at these texts (that’s what the historian in me always thinks) and that’s what you have to take it as, some of this wouldn’t even be a primary source it was written to long after Jesus died. Another thing she said is, let’s imagine for a moment these are the actual words of rethinks in someone was sat there writing them down as they came out of his mouth, all we have is the words, we don’t have body language, tone of voice, rolling his eye etc…there is a lot we don’t know about the context of these words so maybe rather than looking at them in isolation, re think it a bit. There is actually huge gaps in these accounts of Jesus life, we don’t even know what he did for the first 30 odd years of it from birth to the start of his ministry, and we need to keep remembering that.
The key thing she says and to me this is the most important and (you’ll have to excuse this) something that Queen’s (the theological college I attended) drilled into me over the three years I was there is there is more than one way to read and interpret these texts. Is the bible meant to have the last word or did Jesus say these things to start a discussion, to have people think differently by calling out their behaviour, rethink things and allow that hope of redemption and things getting better, because that sounds like Jesus. This is something as a society we have gotten better at especially over the last 50 years or so. New voices are welcomed to read these passages and say what they means for them in their context and have this discussion around Jesus words here’s just a few of the ones we looked at while I was at theological college (I have a bookshelf full if any appeal) Black theology, Asian theology, African theology, feminist theology, womanist theology, LGBTQI+ theology, Queer theology, disability theology, Trauma theology, Class theology to be very British. I’ve got a fantastic book called the ‘Fuzzy Church’ how the church of the rich south of England is imposed on the North and how that identity shapes it, that speaks to me especially as an Oldhamer I have a voice and a right to be in the conversation. Sadly that hasn’t always been the case for many people in those groups I’ve just mentioned and their voices have been seen as unimportant but that culture is slow. Jesus wanted to start the conversation, maybe even told he’d got it wrong and if we can keep listening and hearing views it could help us to reinterpret these difficult things and make them easier.
For me personally, take this for what it is, Jesus was human and humans get it wrong and for me it just makes him more relatable as if he can then so can I as long as I learn from it, am able to admit it and remember times change, attitudes change and so must ours, perhaps his did to at the end of the day Jesus saved and forgave all of humanity when he died, even those he’d had a dig at during his life. Jesus told us to love each other as he had loved us and only by truly thinking about and understanding all the words he said, even the difficult ones can we really understand and not judge him off hand. Jesus came to save the world, not to condemn it and this needs to be read into all of this even if it can be difficult, we are his followers and his love in action and all that entails.
St Margaret's Church Prestwich 