From the Lectionary for 25 June 2023 (Proper 7A)

Matthew 10:26-33 (NRSV Updated Edition)

“So have no fear of them, for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered and nothing secret that will not become known. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light, and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, fear the one who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows. Everyone, therefore, who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven, but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven.”

Romans 5:12-15 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned— for sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who did not sin in the likeness of Adam, who is a pattern of the one who was to come. But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many.

Romans 6:1-4 (NRSV Updated Edition)

What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may increase? By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it? Do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we were buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life.

~

"“Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” In other words, don't be frightened of those who are out to get you, they will they won't it doesn't matter. What you really need to be afraid of is going along with them, believing it, allowing your soul to be destroyed as well, because then you're completely worthless, then you are cast into Gehenna.

...

"“So do not be afraid, you're of more value than many sparrows.” In other words, be able to trust the fact that you're loved and you'll be able to stand up to all this nonsense of those who are up to get you, those who make you frightened, those who seem to have locked you into a place of closed-ness where you can't get out. 

"And notice, this is not just something that's incidental to Christianity, this is what is absolutely the heart of Christianity: Jesus has come in our midst by going to his death, showing the lynch mechanism, the scapegoat mechanism, the human sacrificial mechanism up for what it is. He's in the midst of that, standing triumphant and saying: look it doesn't shut us down! Come and take part in the opening up with me.

"“Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven.” Learn to stand with the lynched one. It can't run them and it can't run you. If you're able to do that, you're automatically flying in heaven, you're no longer a caught sparrow being sold for a tuppence, you're a flying sparrow worth much much more. “But whoever denies me before others I also will deny before my Father in heaven.” That is, take part in the lynch mob, take part in that in the whispering, in the gossiping, in being the group that makes its goodness over against someone condemned, [and] you have taken part in the very reverse of what I'm all about. So no, stand free.

"That's the gracious gift even St Paul in the passage to the Romans [5:12-15] talks about, the same thing. The sin of Adam was one thing, some sort of disobedience to the law, but the free gift of the real Adam - the Adam of whom the first Adam was merely a type - the free gift is so much more than that. It was not really putting right a law, it was coming into our midst to undo the whole of the sacrificial mechanism by which we build ourselves up - including all its lies, its gossip, its fake accounts, its far too quick resolutions of things - to enable us to stand free and not to be frightened, to learn to speak freely, to think healthily and to be able to work out what this creation is that we are in and how we can best participate in it."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Sunday 12 in Ordinary Time Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=We1zx16qSKM)

~

"In Paul’s letters, the approach is not “do X, and then you will become Y,” it is rather, “Because you are finding yourselves X, so do Y.” ...

"The understanding is pretty clear: something happens that takes us somewhere quite new. As we find ourselves on the inside of the new life, allowing our imaginations to be rejigged, so the ways of behaving which flow from that new life become second nature to us, and we are able to ditch those which don’t flow from that new life. It is what we are becoming that is first, and the transformation of our behaviour which flows from that.

"This makes sense to me: it is as I discover myself on the inside of a new way of being that I discover the sense, and the richness, of different ways of behaving. And indeed, we find ourselves on the inside of discovering for ourselves quite why these new ways of behaving correspond to the richest and deepest loving intention for us of our Creator. In other words, there is something genuinely exciting about learning to be fascinated by a goodness we didn’t know.

"And this of course has been the whole burden of [what I want to share]: how it is that someone coming towards us, and into our midst, catches us by surprise and enables us to be turned into ourselves-for-each-other, something much richer and more zest-inspiring than we could guess while we thought we knew who we were."

- James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim, pp. 523-24

[Source of quote from James Alison's book Jesus the Forgiving Victim, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see also: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/proper_7a/]

From the Lectionary for 18 June 2023 (Proper 6A)

Exodus 19:2-6 (NRSV Updated Edition)

They journeyed from Rephidim, entered the wilderness of Sinai, and camped in the wilderness; Israel camped there in front of the mountain. Then Moses went up to God; the Lord called to him from the mountain, “Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob and tell the Israelites: ‘You have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now, therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.’ These are the words that you shall speak to the Israelites.”

~

Most of the time when I have heard the words, "priestly kingdom and a holy nation" in a church context, it has had somewhat of a triumphalist tone, as in, "Isn't it wonderful that *we* are set apart for God, that *we* are the special ones!"  I think this response quite misses the point, especially in light of the beginning of the sentence: "Indeed, the whole earth is mine..."  The setting apart of Israel (in this passage) was not to emphasise how special or wonderful they were, but so that they would be a 'priestly kingdom' among the kingdoms of the world, not considering themselves somehow superior to 'the Gentiles', but to serve them.

~

Matthew 9:35-10:8 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”

Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness. These are the names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon, also known as Peter, and his brother Andrew; James son of Zebedee and his brother John; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus and Thaddaeus; Simon the Cananaean and Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed him.

These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not take a road leading to gentiles, and do not enter a Samaritan town, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick; raise the dead; cleanse those with a skin disease; cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment.”

~

"Please notice that “heart of a shepherd” means being able to look at wolves in their sheepliness. It is not a question of us fearing that there are many people dressed as sheep who are, in fact, wolves, but, on the contrary, of being able creatively to imagine wolves as, in some, more or less well-hidden part of their lives, in fact, sheep, and to love them as such.

"Various times in the Gospel the word 'splangchnidzomai' crops up, which we usually translate as “moved with compassion.” Jesus was moved with compassion by this or that person or situation, or that the multitudes should be like sheep having no shepherd (Matt. 9:36). However the word is rather strong, and means a deep commotion of the entrails, a visceral commotion.

"This is what is so hard to imagine: as we become unhooked from our partisan loves, our searches, our clinging to reputation, with these formed in reaction to this situation or that, there begins to be formed in us that absolutely gratuitous visceral commotion, born outside all reaction, which the ancients called agape and which is nothing other than the inexplicable love which God has for us in our violence and our scandals. We begin to be able not only to know ourselves loved as human beings, but to be able to love other humans, to love the human race and condition."

- James Alison, Raising Abel, pg. 188

~

"The first thing we see about [Jesus] is that he's looking at them and he's gut-wrenched. He has an extraordinary sense of love for these people, he doesn't regard them as rioters or protestors or difficult people, people he needs to pacify in some way. No, he sees people who are harrased like sheep with a shepherd, and he longs for their building up and for their good.

"So his first reaction is not to send in some sort of force of order - judges, people who will sort them out, deal with their problems... and tell them to get on with it. No, it's very much more holistic than that. He seems to want to choose rather ordinary people to work in their midst alongside them, and his response, once he's been moved is to say, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” In other words, he's asking them to ask God for something. He wants the request to come from us. He can see what can be done, but it's not to be done from above, it's to be done by people from inside...

"Sending is when they become apostles, from the word 'apostela' meaning to send. He summons the twelve disciples and gives them authority over unclean spirits to cast them out and to cure every disease and every sickness. It's interesting his first reaction is not 'go out amongst them and sort them out, make them right, make them behave. No, it's an act of mercy, to see all the collapsed forms of in-between, what I call the in-between: the sick relationships - social, personal, interfamiliar, economic - all of the ways in which our in-betweens build us up and can imprison us. This is the world of evil spirits, of mental health problems, of profound psychic and psychosomatic sicknesses. This is people bent double, in ways that many many of us still are, and many many countries still are, by various forms of imprisonment tied into repetitive mechanisms of self-destructive behavior. All of this is part of us not flourishing.

"Again he sends people alongside them, people with ordinary names - we think of them as very important names because they are the Apostles, but these are ordinary people, this is Pete and Jim and Andy, Tom, and eventually of course the guy who will betray him: Judas. And so we're talking about a very low-key, very gentle sending into the midst of a group of people but who didn't know where they're going... All of these kinds of things he was seeing and then pointing people to go and move into that world...

"[H]e is wanting to build the humanity of the people not give them a specific religious instruction, so “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick; raise the dead; cleanse those with a skin disease; cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment.” In other words, they are to be very very vulnerable but never transactional - there is to be no quid pro quo, no payment, because that would be just to take part in the sickness of the society.

"There's this completely gratuitous element of the sending which involves vulnerability. And if you are sent and gratuitous and vulnerable, then you run the risk of being assailed by the various demons and bad things in the society, because all that comes to someone who's weak. But if you're able to stand and speak, that's when the demons start to go away, that's when people start to be set free. If you don't play tit for tat with that then people begin to sense what humanity looks like.

"So I think that this is a wonderful wonderful gospel for us at this time, and I would ask you to pray that we be given that heart, that gut-wrenched heart which Jesus had, and that we learn how to ask the Lord to send more laborers into the harvest and that we may become those laborers ourselves."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Sunday 11 in Ordinary Time Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVjyx4_oyTM)

[Source of quote from James Alison's book Raising Abel, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see also: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/proper_6a/]

From the Lectionary for 11 June 2023 (Proper 5A)

Hosea 6:4-6 (NRSV Updated Edition)

“What shall I do with you, O Ephraim?
    What shall I do with you, O Judah?
Your love is like a morning cloud,
    like the dew that goes away early.
Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets;
    I have killed them by the words of my mouth,
    and my judgment goes forth as the light.
For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,
    the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”

Matthew 9:9-13 (NRSV Updated Edition)

As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax-collection station, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him.

And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with Jesus and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.”

~

"Why do churches, ostensibly following a Messiah who broke bread with 'tax collectors and sinners', so often retreat into practices of exclusion and the quarantine of gated communities?  Why is it so difficult to create missional churches?  In seeking answers to those questions I had been thinking a great deal about Jesus's response to the Pharisees in Matthew 9.  In defending his ministry of table fellowship - eating with 'tax collectors and sinners' - Jesus tells the Pharisees to go and learn what it means that God desires 'mercy, not sacrifice'.

...

"[The] antagonism between mercy and sacrifice is *psychological* in nature.  Our primitive understandings of both love and purity are regulated by psychological dynamics that are often incompatible.  Take, for example, a popular recommendation from my childhood years.  I was often told that I should 'hate the sin, but love the sinner'.  Theologically, to my young mind (and, apparently, to the adults who shared it with me), this formulation seemed clear and straightforward.  However, psychologically speaking, this recommendation was extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to put into practice.

"As any self-reflective person knows, empathy and moral outrage tend to function at cross-purposes.  In fact, some religious communities resist empathy, as any softness toward or solidarity with 'sinners' attenuates the moral fury the group can muster.  Conversely, it is extraordinarily difficult to 'love the sinner' - to respond to people tenderly, empathically, and mercifully - when you are full of moral anger over their behaviour.

...

"These psychological dynamics help illuminate the events in Matthew 9, the tension between mercy and sacrifice.  And it also explains why this tension will be a constant and consistent temptation in the life of the church.  In the actions of the Pharisees we see how the experience of purity (the sacrificial impulse) had come to replace morality (the mercy impulse)...

"[Although] the experience of purity helps us understand morality, the metaphorical connection between the two is so deep that the experience of physical purity can come to replace moral action.  And, given that the church is awash in purity metaphors, particularly those churches who privilege penal substitutionary thinking, there exists a constant danger that the church exchange the private *experience* of salvation, being washed in the blood of the Lamb, for passionate missional *engagement* with the world."

- Richard Beck, "Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality", pp 1-3, 46-47

~

"[I]t seems to me that the key instruction of the New Testament with relation to moral discourse, and it is a doubly sacred instruction, for it is one of the very few places where Jesus quotes the Hebrew Scriptures with absolute approval — and he quotes it twice. The key instruction for those of us who are trying to make use of the religious word in some moral sense, and there is no moral theology that is not that, is:

“But go and learn what it means: ‘I want mercy and not sacrifice.’” (Matt. 9:13; see also Matt. 12:7, both quoting Hos 6:6)

"Please notice that this is now no longer an instruction just for the Pharisees, but is, so to speak, the program-guide for whoever tries to do moral theology. Being good can never do without the effort to learn, step by step, and in real circumstances of life, how to separate religious and moral words from an expelling mechanism, ... so as to make of them words of mercy which absolve, which loose, which allow creation to be brought to completion. And this means that there is no access to goodness which does not pass through our own discovery of our complicity in hypocrisy, for it is only as we identify with the “righteous just” of the story that we realize how “good” their procedure was, how careful, scrupulous, law-abiding, they were, and thus, how catastrophic our goodness can be, if we don’t learn step by step how to get out of solidarity with the mechanism of the construction of the unity of the group by the exclusion of whoever is considered to be evil.

...

"[...] I’d like to underline this: what the Christian faith offers us in the moral sphere is not law, nor a way of shoring up the order or structure of the supposed goodness of this world, much less the demand that we sally forth on a crusade in favor of these things. It offers us something much more subtle. It offers us a mechanism for the subversion from within of all human goodness, including our own. This is the same thing as saying that the beginning of a Christian moral life is a stumbling into an awareness of our own complicity in hypocrisy, and a becoming aware of quite how violent that hypocrisy is.

"Starting from there we can begin to stretch out our hands to our brothers and sisters, neither more nor less hypocritical than ourselves, who are on the way to being expelled from the “synagogue” by an apparently united order, which has an excessive and militant certainty as to the evil of the other. Let us then go and learn what this means: ‘I want mercy and not sacrifice.’"

- James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment, pp. 20, 26

[Source of James Alison quote, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see also: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/proper_5a/]

From the Lectionary for 4 June 2023 (Trinity Sunday, Year A)

John 3:16-18 (NRSV Updated Edition)

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned, but those who do not believe are condemned already because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”

~

"Today is Trinity Sunday. It's the Sunday when after all the build-up of the whole of the Easter story, everything is then combined, if you like, into the doctrine of the Trinity: the understanding that God is Father, is Son and is the Holy Spirit. And all this is God. This is the proper combination of these two seasons. I'm a Trinity fan. And so I'm delighted with this. But I should also say the Trinity Sunday is the day when ... we say quite reasonably that we know nothing about God, quite rightly. ...

"The trouble about that is that it leads to two things: people either talking much about a mystery, which means ultimately, in the way they talk about it, something incomprehensible, which is not really worth talking about; or something so distant and mathematical and that it can be talked about as if one were discussing an extremely distant galaxy about which we know very little but from which we can make various deductions. I want to say: no, not going down that route. I love the doctrine of the Trinity because I think it's true, and I think it tells us something about being on the inside of God. So that's what I want to explore with you today: the doctrine of the Trinity, the joy, if you like, of the Trinity, being the fullness of the account of how we are insiders in God, God in whom we live and move and have our being. So nothing about intellectual construction up there.

"What I want to say ... first of all [is] that the notion of there being God at all rather than something about which we know refers to a certain sort of finding ourselves on the inside of something. It means that everything we know, everything we see, everything around us: that's all real, it exists, and there's an outside to it. That's what the word God means, basically: there's an outside to everything. The outside to everything that holds it all in being. It is a symptom, if you like, of God. ... [T]he doctrine of God means: there's an outside, we are not trapped. Everything that is is not some blind trap, some sort of plot against us, some source of ... bizarre cruelty. There's an outside to everything that is. That is what we mean when we say 'God'.

"And our only access of course to that is as insiders: we have no direct knowledge of the outside, merely that there is one. That's what belief in God means. It means: I'm on the inside of something that is held in being by something far bigger than I. In principle, I need not know anything about it. But I do because the same outside chose to come into our world as a human - to show us that there's an outside to being human, that being human isn't a trap, being human isn't simply a series of distempered fights, squabbles over who is stronger, putting of each other in places of shame so as to destroy each other, and survival of the fittest.

"Being human isn't that, being human is something much more than that. And there's an outside to our understanding of being human, therefore something about which we need not be afraid. Jesus is, if you like the instantiation of there being an outside to being human, that it is possible to live and to die as a human, not run by death and its consequences, not run by the need to protect yourself, to defend yourself, but able to give yourself. There an outside to being human.

"But even more than that: there's an outside to all the passions and desires, the contagions, the rivalries, which run us, everything which works in-between us. There's an outside to the desire. The outside to desires what we call the Holy Spirit. It means that all our passions, all the ways we run each other in more or less cruel and awful ways, ... there's an outside to that. That's not actually reality. The reality is when we are able to go beyond that, to be taken into what's real. So the outside of everything that is, the outside of what it is to be human, and the outside of every form of relationality and desire, reaches us, is available to us from within. This is the extraordinary power of the Gospel.

"The power of the Gospel is: this is not an exercise in power as the world understands it. Which is why St. John’s Gospel wonderfully today tells us, “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.” All this is an exercise of love. God wants to show how much he loves the human creation, how much he loves the way we can build each other up, how much he wants us to be set free from fear and condemnation, from the sense that everything is closing down, that we’re trapped in something. That anyone who believes in Him starts to be able to say, “Yes, there’s an outside. Because there’s an outside, I can be free, I can feel free, I needn’t be run by it.” That is what it is to become a son or daughter of God, filled with the Spirit, finding that God is more intimate to us than we are to ourselves, as St Augustine says. He is able to move us from within, without displacing. Only the gentlest form of love can do that.

"So how do I bring this into a tiny little nutshell? God, the Creator of everything that is, not in rivalry with anything that is. But that makes it very easy for us to use and abuse the notion of God, unless God has a criterion for who God is. Well, God has a criterion for who God is, that criterion is Jesus. Jesus is God’s criterion for who God is. It’s how God lets us know who God is, what it looks like to live and die as God loves, as God is. It involves not hanging on - not hanging on to life, to possessions, riches, anything - but being able to give yourself away in love for other people. So that’s God’s criterion for God and we know that God’s criterion for God ended up crucified.

"So you might say, that’s nice enough, we’ve got God, we've got God’s criterion for God - alas no, as humans, ever since we stumbled into symbolicity there are no such things as simple facts. Everything has to be interpreted. It’s possible to look at Christ’s crucifixion and see it, as some people do, as a price paid to satisfy the vengeance of God, rather than seeing it as a sign of God’s love giving himself for us in the midst of our rage and violence. So a fact like the crucifixion without an interpretation doesn’t help us at all, because anyone can make an interpretation however they like, however perverse. So the Holy Spirit is God’s interpretation of God’s criterion of God.

"Please notice what we have: God, God’s criterion for God, and God’s interpretation of God’s criterion for God, each one of which is God. And the important thing is that each one of them: God, God’s criterion for God, and God’s interpretation of God’s criterion - are love. This is the astonishing thing, this is the Gospel: that there is an astounding power of love shown for us, just beyond, if you like, our grasp, but into which we are called. Which makes us capable of being participants in creation, in the opening up of reality. This is why, it seems to me, that the Doctrine of the Trinity is not an abstract statement. It’s what it looks like to live and move and have our being in the only God who is."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Trinity Sunday Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU5lEwrOEbk)