Deliverance and renewal in Christ

 Exodus 19:2-6a ‘You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’

Romans 5:6-11 ‘If we were reconciled by the death of the Son, much more shall we be saved by his life.’

Matthew 9:36-10:8 ‘Jesus called to him his twelve disciples and sent them out.’

 

Today’s first reading and Gospel both speak of a movement.

The movement is from a desert place to the promise of refreshment and life.

In Exodus that’s a physical deliverance, and in the Gospel that is a spiritual deliverance.

It’s the movement of life before we know Jesus Christ to life in Christ.

It’s the movement of salvation which St Paul says:

we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

God’s pattern is one of deliverance and renewal: deliverance from the power of darkness and renewal through life in His presence.

When we are in the wilderness, or in thrall to things that are spiritually corrosive or dangerous, then God will bear us on eagles’ wings and bring us to himself.

It is in this pattern that he delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.

It is in this pattern that he sees the crowds who are harassed and helpless, ‘like sheep without a shepherd.’

Sheep without a shepherd lack direction, they don’t know where to find good pasture, they fall into ditches and cannot get out, they are vulnerable to predators.

That is the human condition without the Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ.

In Exodus the people who were extracted from Egypt were formed into a people, into a nation, whose first allegiance is to the Lord.

They are told that they will be a treasured possession, and they will be formed into ‘a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’

This priestly people will offer prayer and spiritual sacrifice to the Lord: this echoes the words of the first letter of St Peter addressed to the Church:

…you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light. (1 Peter 2.9)

Jesus knows that the human condition needs men and women acting in His Name to be a royal priesthood, a holy nation to aid the movement from darkness into his marvellous light.

The Apostles are the first men called to that task.

The tools they are given are the tools that are needed to get to the heart of things, tools that are powerful.

Society has various tools that can help people feel better but never ultimately lead them to salvation.

Politics is a tool for society, but it is ultimately about the ‘art of the possible’ and that does not give us meaning.

Health and wellbeing is a tool to boost people but even the fittest people can be harassed and helpless.

Work is a tool for purpose, but not everyone has it and many people are in work that does not fulfil them.

So Jesus gives the Apostles tools and power that no one else can give.

This is authority over unclean spirits, the power to heal disease and every affliction.

How often do I hear people say they are harassed and helpless, although they usually use phrases like, ‘I am just so tired’, ‘I’m running on empty’, ‘I’m tired in a way sleep can’t fix’.

Jesus sees that need, knows that need, and respond to that need in the only way that will restore, refresh and renew.

That movement is from darkness to light, slavery to freedom, life without Christ to life in Christ.

The Apostles will do that by being the Church; and we will do that by being a holy people built on the witness of those men and the power given to them.

Look around Waddon: what do you see?

I see lives in need of Christ.

And here, in this church, I see people who Christ can use to save and to heal, I see labourers being called to the harvest.

What are the tools we’ll use in this mission?

Those tools include, but are more than, social action; include, but are more than, local and national politics; include, but are more than, health and wellbeing.

Ultimately the power comes when we take up and embrace the commission of Jesus Christ first given to the Apostles:

And proclaim as you go, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. You received without paying; give without pay.

Fed by Christ’s word and sacraments, committing our lives to the Good Lord, who wills our good and not our harm, who gives us a future with hope, is the way we move from death to life in all its abundance.

Lord, give us this bread always!

 

Go and learn what this means

Hosea 6.3-6 ‘I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice.’

Romans 4.18-25 ‘Abraham grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God.’

Matthew 9.9-13 ‘I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.’

 

‘Go and learn what this means…’ (Matthew 9.13)

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Today’s gospel reading reveals the deep logic of salvation, what Jesus came for: the mission and purpose of the Son of God:

I came not to call the righteous, but sinners. (Matthew 9.13b)

We heard the call of Matthew; the carping of the Pharisees because Jesus gathers sinners - people who are spiritually broken and sick - and eats with them; and the commission to go away and learn what the Lord says through the prophet Hosea, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice’.

Every day Jesus calls; he calls you and me from the things that preoccupy our lives, all those things that can obscure the deeper call to be children of God, to be his disciples.

Through the hubbub of jobs, family life, preening self-image, assertion of autonomy, still Jesus calls, calls men and women, calls you: ‘follow me’, come, follow me.

Matthew heard the call and responded to it.

Matthew’s preoccupation was his lucrative job.

Tax officials in antiquity were not the upstanding people they are today: as collaborators with the despised Roman occupiers, the local tax collectors were part of a corrupt regime, siphoning off sweeteners and kickbacks.

Yet it was the Matthews of this world who were invited to sit and dine with Jesus:

…as Jesus reclined at table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were reclining with Jesus and his disciples. (Matthew 9.10)

In the gospels the catch all phrase ‘sinners’ meant a whole collection of people who violated the Covenant, be that through sexual immorality, financial impropriety, mistreatment of other people.

Jesus does not say that they are all fine, and that he accepts them just as they are.

No.

He acknowledges their sickness, that they are not whole, they need a physician, a healer.

Similarly, the Pharisees, who appear to themselves at least, to be totally sorted and right with God and the Covenant show themselves to be spiritually sick too.

None of us relishes a diagnosis when it comes to our health – physical or mental - but we generally accept that a doctor or health care professional will know how to diagnose the sickness and prescribe the right medicine.

The Pharisees could see the sickness of the ‘sinners’ but they could not see their own.

They need the physician, the doctor, as much as the sinners Jesus sits down and eats with.

Remember that you can appear to be a totally sorted, strong, beautiful, successful person and still be spiritually sick, in need of forgiveness and salvation.

The Pharisee in you and me needs to acknowledge that we’re no more superior to the people we look down on.

We all must wean ourselves off the pernicious habit of thinking we have it all right and that only people who think like us are right, the righteous.

The first step of returning to health, and accepting the prescribed treatment will work, is to acknowledge that there is a problem in the first place.

If I don’t acknowledge I have a problem, then I will never act so as to be healed.

When I have a headache, I take paracetamol; when I sin, do I see it as spiritual sickness, and, if I do, what healing medicine do I need for my soul?

Now, the Pharisees want to be right with God; they know that there is such a thing as spiritual health, as much as physical and mental health.

What the Pharisees miss, as much as the ‘sinners’ and many people today, is that Jesus comes to bring health of body, mind and spirit: that is truly holistic, and it is the precursor to holiness.

And it is holiness that the Pharisees seek which is good and right, yet there is a ‘but’ hovering.

Seek holiness, a good relationship with God, but acknowledge your own sickness too.

And that is why Jesus says them, ‘Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ (Matthew 9.10)

Sacrifice without mercy is like a body without breath: it is dead.

Sacrifice and mercy are not mutually exclusive; they are intimately related.

The challenge the prophet Hosea issues, echoed by Jesus, is that the first step to mercy is not to point the finger at others to declare them sinners, but to start with the acknowledgement of one’s own sinfulness and lack of superiority over others.

That’s why in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says:

So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. (Matthew 5.23,24)

The sacrifice, the offering, is wonderful and important, but it must come with the balm of mercy, reconciliation, forgiveness.

After all, Jesus will have known the text from the book of Sirach, ‘He who has mercy offers sacrifice.’ (Sirach 35.4)

Allowing mercy to shape and determine our lives is the prescription that Christ the Physician gives.

St Paul, who began life as a Pharisee, got all this when he wrote:

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. (Romans 12.1)

Jesus did not die on a Cross because people were basically okay but got a few things wrong here and there.

He died on the cross, a sacrifice for sin, to save us, to heal us, to make us holy: the healing remedy is to seek His mercy, on your knees in confession of your sins, and to reveal his mercy, in loving service to your neighbour, especially those you find distasteful and uncomfortable.

At the end of every Eucharist we are commissioned with the words, ‘Go in the peace of Christ’.

We might also hear that as, ‘Go in the mercy of Christ’.

As you go remember, ‘Christ came not to call the righteous, but sinners.’

That’s you and me, as much as ‘them’ out there!

Corpus Christi: A heavenly perspective

 Deuteronomy 8:2-3, 14b-16a ‘He fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know.’

1 Corinthians 10:16-17 ‘Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body.’

John 6:51-58 ‘My flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.’

 

The LORD rained down upon them manna to eat

and gave them the grain of heaven.

So mortals ate the bread of angels;

he sent them food in plenty. (Psalm 78.24,25)

 

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We use the word ‘perspective’ in a variety of ways.

Perspective can mean an attitude or opinion: my perspective on this is such and such.

Perspective can also be the way we see things clear sightedly: we need a sense of perspective so that things don’t get disproportionate so that they skew reality.

And perspective is a technique in art and design that makes three-dimensional objects on a flat surface appear to have depth, distance, and a realistic spatial relationship to the viewer.

Corpus Christi, today’s feast, the day of thanksgiving for the institution of Holy Communion is a day to get a sense of perspective: to see clear sightedly into the ways of Christ and not let polemic and distortion obscure our sight of Him; to have perspective enable us to see the depths and beyond the superficial; to have our minds converted so that we can say, ‘my perspective is that Jesus Christ is the Bread of Life who I receive in the sacrament of the Altar.’

The crowds of our Gospel reading lack all those forms of perspective when it comes to Christ, the Bread of Life.

They are us, until we can make our own the words of the hymn:

Thee we adore, O hidden Saviour, thee,

Who in thy Sacrament art pleased to be.

The crowds are not willing to have perspective.

They cannot put Christ’s teaching, that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood, in perspective.

They need to make some connections.

They have seen the five thousand fed, with bread to spare, but fail to make the connection that God fed the Israelites in the wilderness.

They have already heard John the Baptist declare Jesus to be the ‘Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world’, but fail to make the connection that blood of the sacrificial Lamb will be shed.

Because they can’t put it in perspective, so they squabble, ‘how can this man give us his flesh to eat?’

They need the perspective that Jesus gives.

Eating and drinking the flesh and blood of the Son of Man is how his continues to give us his life.

Christ is now risen, ascended and glorified, so how is He in us and we in Him, other than through his Sacrament as we eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood?

But we need the perspective too.

Christ instituted the Eucharist, the enduring Sacrament and sign of His presence with his people in their wilderness, on Maundy Thursday, at the heart of the intensity of Holy Week.

With everything else going on – the washing of feet, the abandonment of Jesus by the disciples, the prayer of Gethsemane, his betrayal and arrest – it is hard to get a sense of perspective of what this supper means.

Maundy Thursday was 63 days ago, so how do we put things in perspective now?

St Paul gives a clear sense of perspective in 1 Corinthians.

This is a sacred meal, not an aide memoire.

So we need a sense of perspective, the ability to see the depth of the sign.

The Eucharistic bread looks ordinary enough, but it is so much more: the bread and the wine that is presented, prepared and then consecrated according to Christ’s command is in fact a participation in His body and blood.

That sense of perspective also helps us see that what fed the Israelites in the wilderness: the fine, flaky manna fed them in one sense, but what really sustained them was the very life and power and presence of God.

There the people are told, that ‘man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.’

After a day manna went rancid; our loaves of bread go stale and then mouldy; God’s word - and Jesus is the Word Made Flesh - is what gives life, what sustains, what nourishes.

It is this sense of perspective, of reading the depth of the sacramental sign, that St Thomas Aquinas has in his Eucharistic hymns, written for this feast.

They express how we are invited to see beyond the externals to a depth of perceiving, a perspective, a vantage point that only the eye of faith can give:

Faith, our outward sense befriending,

Makes the inward vision clear.

(Tantum ergo in Pangue lingua gloriosi corporis mysterium)

It is from the perspective of being a member of the Body of Christ, the Church, that we behold the Body of Christ in the Eucharist.

The final perspective we are given is of the banquet of heaven.

What the Israelites tasted is fulfilled in the Eucharist and that leads us to the banquet of heaven.

This move from the earthly altar to the heavenly is beautifully captured by St Alphonsus Liguori in a Eucharistic hymn:

Beloved Lord in heaven above,

there, Jesus, thou awaitest me;

to gaze on thee with changless love,

yes, thus I hope, thus shall it be:

for how can he deny me heaven

who here on earth himself hath given?

Here is all the perspective we need:

The LORD rained down upon them manna to eat

and gave them the grain of heaven.

So mortals ate the bread of angels;

he sent them food in plenty. (Psalm 78.24,25)