2nd SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY (YEAR A ? PROPER 5) S. Margaret?s Budapest
The prophets of the OT often acted out their messages from the Lord God to his people in ways that today sometimes seem amusing, sometimes bizarre. Jeremiah commonly did this, directed mainly at the people of Jerusalem. But they were in deadly earnest, and more often than not there is a message there for us too. Jesus did it too, most notably when he acted out the prophecy that Messiah would enter Jerusalem riding on a donkey. He was saying to everyone who was willing to see, that Messiah had come to God?s people. This morning we are introduced to the prophet Hosea. He carries this to extremes. He was a prophet sensitive to his perceived call. In obedience he takes
a wife of harlotry
(quote) and marries the prostitute Gomer. She bore three children, apparently none of whom had Hosea for a father, and then took off. But Hosea searches her out and brings her back publicly as his wife. It is all an acted out allegory of how God deals with his people, Israel, who had given themselves to foreign Canaanite gods, and practices contrary to God?s will. But his mercy is such that he seeks them out and in forgiveness takes them back to himself. This is the unifying theme of the whole of the book of Hosea. It is the story of the divine compassion and redeeming love of God for his people that we all need to hear. In the passage for today Hosea says that if Israel will but return to the Lord he will heal her sickness and revive her, as the showers late in the season bring fresh life to the fields. What God really wants is for people to come to know him, and be steadfast in love. Ritual is meaningless on its own. That was the experience of Hosea in his walk with God, the living God, who is the same yesterday, today and for ever. In his mercy he still seeks the return of his people.
In the reading from Romans, S. Paul has a similar message for the people of God of a later age, now bringing Jesus into the picture. He says that the promise of a glorious future for God?s people (i.e. Abraham and his descendants) cannot be tied to the Law of Moses. Here S. Paul understood
descendants
to mean Christ first, and then the Church with both its Jewish and its Gentile members. The promise of a glorious future was that promise to Abraham that he would be the father of a great nation to whom all the other world nations would turn (Gen. 17: 5, 18:18, 22:17ff.). The reality of God?s promises is that they are kept: and faith is the belief and confidence that they are kept. But this all means nothing if enjoyment of the promises is limited to those who keep the 613 commandments of the Law. It means nothing because every single human person cannot help but break the Law. Thus the enjoyment of the promises is dependant on faith on the part of humanity and sheer goodness and generosity on the part of God. God is the guarantee of the promises; faith ensures that all the descendants of Abraham, i.e., those who have a faith such as his, whatever their race, share in these promises. Now, the OT record of Abraham shows him not to have always led a life of great sanctity, so why is his faith so highly regarded? Abraham?s faith consisted in his taking God at his word, and believing in the creative power of God to bring about the seemingly impossible. Abraham was no longer capable of parenthood, and Sarah never had been; but God had promised them children, and that was enough. It was faith of this quality that made Abraham acceptable to God in spite of his many sins and weaknesses. In the same way it was the faith of King David that made him acceptable to God in spite of his many sins and weaknesses. It is faith like this that makes us acceptable to God in spite of our many sins and weaknesses. In Hebrew usage barrenness is literally deadness ? so the faith of Abraham allowed God to bring life out of death by means of the birth of Isaac. We believe that through the faith of Jesus, God was able to bring life out of death by the raising of the Lord from the dead. Christ was delivered to death through our sin, and raised from death for our justification. The preposition is the same in both clauses. He died because death is the inevitable result of human disobedience: he was raised because God?s purposes meant new life for a renewed humanity.
Are we sometimes surprised that Jesus chose as one of his disciples the tax-collector Matthew, a man whose occupation was despised, a collaborator with the occupying power whose job was to fill their coffers at the expense of his own people? Would he not have done better to have drawn into his circle someone of proven worth, whose respectability and position in the community would perhaps have attracted others? That is the way of the world. And why did he have to jeopardise his position further by his frequent contacts with tax-collectors and sinners, people who were outside the Covenant of the Law? Why he even ate with them. This was all a real source of upset to the pure-minded Pharisees, who saw all this and could not understand. It seemed like coming to terms with the enemy! But this coming to terms with the enemy is in reality coming to terms with God. If Jesus makes friends of the questionable people, if he makes them feel at home with him, it is because there is a common bond between misery and mercy. Love came to show mercy to sinners, to heal the illness of their sins. It is a question of love; only love can achieve these things. When Jesus calls someone to repentance according to the gospel, it is he who loves first. By his grace the unloveable becomes lovable, and suitable for his purposes; provided of course that such a one gives themselves to it. That is why it is important that the stranger should find acceptance in our midst.
This Gospel was written quite some time after the resurrection of Jesus. The Church already had an active life. So it is inevitable that the Gospels will sometimes reflect the theological and practical concerns of the early Church. Jewish Christians were asking themselves as to whether by coming into contact with pagans and people outside the Covenant generally, were they not going to be made unclean themselves according to the Law? By recalling the Lord?s example this Gospel of Matthew was anticipating the question ? a question that faces us too in a somewhat different way ? we who yield so easily to the temptation to seek our sanctification among
respectable
people, and so easily join the righteous, pharisaical criticisms of others. Perhaps the culturally different, the religiously different, those who have not had the educational or financial advantages that we have enjoyed. God alone knows where the righteous and the sinners are to be found. But where there is acceptance and mercy, there also is salvation to be found.
But to come back to the question of faith. The faith of Jairus, a representative of those Jews to whom the Law was supreme, whose twelve year old daughter is at the point of death; the faith of the suffering woman whose life, along with her blood, has been seeping from her for the past twelve long years, and who incidentally is outside the Law because her condition makes her ritually unclean, such should be our faith in its confident simplicity. These two stories are dovetailed together in order to make just one point. The woman who is haemorrhaging, who furtively touches Jesus? cloak in the hope of a cure, has a naive, indeed almost superstitious faith. Jesus does not condemn that: rather he helps her to approach him in a personal way and so transforms her gesture into an action which saves and brings peace. Greater faith, even to the point of folly, is that of Jairus who has only his faith to set against the defeatism of those around. For them it is only too clear that no one can do anything against death. For Jesus though, death is simply a sleep, through which faith opens out on to a morning of resurrection. He was not denying that the girl was dead, just as he used the word sleep in relation to the raising of Lazarus who had been clearly dead for four days. Jesus is teaching us graphically that death need not be the end. It is the gateway to that completion of the fullness of life which in the Lord we can begin to live in the here and now. Those wonderful words of S. Paul in his letter to the Ephesians seem appropriate:
Wake up from your sleep, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine upon you
(5:14).