Sermon 10th March 2013

Today, our Vicar, Cameron Barker, continues our study of Luke. The reading is Luke 11, verses 37-54.

* Begin in a friendly way.

* Begin with praise and honest appreciation.

* Get the other person saying “yes, yes” immediately.

* Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.

* Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires.

* Make the other person happy about doing the thing that you suggest.

* Show respect for the other person’s opinion. Never say, “You’re wrong.”

* Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person.

* Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly.

* Let the other person save face.

* Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.

* Use encouragement. Make any fault seem easy to correct.

And how better to end such a series of quotes than with this absolute classic:

* The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.

You will likely have heard many of these eminently sensible pieces of relational advice before. Chances are they will have cropped up in a range of your conversations and readings. At least some of them may well be ingrained in your life: much of this could be how you live your life. But maybe you, like me, didn’t know that they are all collected in one place. I have certainly used its title often enough over the years; but it was only this week that I downloaded Dale Carnegie’s Golden Rule Book. And, thanks to that, we all now know exactly how to ... yes, “Win Friends and Influence People” – just like Jesus so clearly did!

Of course I’ve deliberately picked out all the ‘rules’ that Jesus broke in his encounter with the Pharisee who’d invited him to lunch. But we wouldn’t need any list of rules – social or otherwise – compiled in any society, or in any century – to know that Jesus wasn’t pulling any punches here: not in any way, or on any topic. If it wasn’t Jesus (who we know in our heads to be always meek, always mild, and terribly polite!), we might even say that he was going for the jugular here. So it’s best not to read the Message version, then, where each time Jesus’ words are rendered: “You’re hopeless, you Pharisees! Frauds!” Is this any way to win friends and influence people? Most of us would say that it’s not: but that didn’t stop Jesus!

Now, as you’d expect, there are good reasons for this encounter being included in the story. Those reasons apply primarily to the mission that Jesus had. And Luke then had his reasons for ensuring that such incidents were in his account. He wanted to keep this crucial dimension of the story very much alive as it unfolded, step by step, towards Jerusalem. For Luke, as for Jesus, unless this wider, bigger context was at least at the back of the reader’s mind, the rest of the story wouldn’t make sense. And so there are very good reasons for us not just to read, but to grasp the meaning of this encounter today. As Jesus’ disciples – which in Luke means that we are ‘followers on the costly way’, remember – our lives are to be just as shaped by this.

I realise that has the makings of a traditional 3-point sermon. We could 1^st explore the reasons Jesus had for doing this; 2^nd would be Luke’s reasons for telling us about it; and 3^rd are then the reasons that we need to learn from it. But what follows won’t quite be like that! Nothing in life is ever that neat or simple; and our calling is to engage with what is, in all its mess, and messiness. In that, as in all other things, Jesus himself is to be our example; and that not least applies here, I’d say. This is a classic example of Jesus engaging with the mess and the messiness of life as it exists, rather than as anyone thinks it ought to be. Having said that, we really mustn’t lose sight of the fact Jesus was being deliberately, overtly confrontational here.

As ever, a bit of context always helps to get us going. So, for those who are new, or haven’t been for a while, this Lent adults here are reading through pretty much all of Luke’s Gospel. We started on this particular version of the story of Jesus in the run-up to Christmas. We picked it up again afterwards, and got as far as Jesus choosing the first of his disciples as Lent began. From that point onwards the idea has been for each of us to take responsibility to keep up with the story between one Sunday and the next. Of course it’s never too late to join in, so do take the scheme of readings on paper from the back of church, or access it via our website. Each Sunday we’re having another 25-ish verse instalment, in the place where we happen to have got up to by then; and today that is to here, to this encounter.

In that sense it is ‘random’; but in another sense it is no co-incidence at all that we should have had this story today. Those who have been doing the daily readings well know that it’s far from the 1^st time that Jesus had bumped heads with this group of people. Back in chapter 6 there had been quite an argument about what could, and couldn’t, be done on the Sabbath. Jesus had then known exactly what he was doing when he had healed a man with a crippled hand on the Jewish holy day; and just what reaction he would get. That hadn’t made him any less confrontational at a supper with another Pharisee, in chapter 7. Again Jesus knew what they would think, and how they would react, when he said that a particular woman’s sins were forgiven; and he still did it!

It has all been quiet on this front since then: until now! But, as I’ve said, this dimension of Jesus’ life wasn’t ever too far beneath the surface. It was like a car-crash that was always waiting to happen, as it were: and Jesus didn’t often avoid it, it must be said. On this occasion it was the Pharisee who asked Jesus to lunch, after he’d finished a very interesting section of teaching. There’s nothing to suggest – as there is on other occasions – that this man was anything other than interested to find out more about Jesus. The simplest – and therefore the best – reading of this story is that Jesus wanted a confrontation! As a Jewish Rabbi he would have known exactly what was expected of him in that setting; he chose not to do it; and, when his host seemed only to have raised an eyebrow, Jesus tore into him: “You’re hopeless, you Pharisees! Frauds!”

Now just to be clear this wasn’t a hygiene issue. Before they ate, religious people – though that’s perhaps a misleading label – performed a ritual washing. It, like much else in 1^st Century Jewish Law was very carefully laid out in terms of exactly what and how to do. To give us a flavour of it, one commentary I read quotes the regulations on carrying anything on a Sabbath. A man may not do so “in his right hand or in his left hand, in his bosom or on his shoulder”. He may carry it “on the back of his hand, or with his foot or with his mouth or with his elbow, or in his ear or in his hair or in his wallet carried mouth downwards, or between his wallet and his shirt, or in the hem of his shirt, or in his shoe or in his sandal”! Get me a lawyer, please, somebody: or maybe I need a firm of them!

Lawyer-firms were what the Pharisees had in abundance in Jesus’ day, of course. Their job was to try and codify every eventuality that might ever occur, so that people would then know exactly how to obey the Law in those circumstances. It all added up to a huge burden being laid on the people who had to try and live their daily lives and get everything right all the time. Again Tom Wright is particularly interesting in his commentary on this. I can’t lay out his entire argument now, but it offers a very different take to the traditional line. For many years the Pharisees and teachers of the law have been lumped together as forerunners of people like me! We clergy are seen as the religious leaders who tell people what they can and can’t do, and therefore make life both difficult and unGodly. Not surprisingly, I prefer Wright’s understanding that today’s leaders are very unlike Pharisees and teachers of the law – in the sense that we are trying to help people to live out faith. Rather than doing too much laying down of laws, we are, I hope, about helping people to find ways to live as people of faith in whatever circumstances they may be facing.

The Pharisees in particular were far more overtly political than that – and were a social pressure group besides. Their agenda was manipulative, and aimed at forcing God’s hand. They believed that if Israel had enough people who lived exactly by the Law then God would have to appear, and take over. Of course their main aim was to get rid of the Romans; but surely God would need people to help run His kingdom; people like the Pharisees, they thought; so there was quite some jockeying for personal position going on too – all of which Jesus was less than impressed with: “You’re hopeless, you Pharisees! Frauds!” They weren’t about loving God, living out His radical Kingdom of freedom and justice, which Jesus had come to bring in. It was much more about self-gain, self-promotion; and in the process they contaminated people, led them away from God. Jesus said that they made people unclean, having the same impact on them as if they had come into contact with unmarked graves!

The lawyers were equally as bad, if not worse, Jesus said just as clearly. The detail is all there in the passage; and again the Message version has Jesus calling them ‘hopeless’ too. Tom Wright suggests that the lawyers were a bit like the Press today. They took on a self-appointed role as society’s guardian – in a legal rather than a moral sense – but didn’t feel bound by those rules themselves, let alone any need to help real people to live real lives. God didn’t feature much for them either – or not in any of the ways that Jesus meant. And here, then, was the crux of the whole matter. For Jesus it’s not about what it looks like on the outside. God has always seen through that, to the inside. Remember when God told the prophet Samuel to anoint David as King of Israel? It wasn’t how he looked, but rather because he was a man after God’s own heart. It’s in our hearts where we either love, and want to live for, God; or for ourselves. Of course Jesus wanted to influence people on this matter: it was, it is vital; but doing it may involve risking friendship, when you have to tell it as it is.

Jesus told it as it was; and many people of his time hated him for it! This passage ends with the Pharisees and the lawyers so mad at him that they poured over his words, to see if they had cause to arrest him for them. At this stage they were looking to stay within the law; but that changed as these fundamental differences between themselves and Jesus became ever more stark. As I said at the start of Lent, this is a journey that was going in one main direction: to the cross. That is the bigger wider context for Jesus – and so for Luke telling the story of Jesus as it was. Here, then, is the conflict that leads step by step to the logic of the cross. It’s the inevitable result of facing such a fundamental challenge to everything that you believe in and live for: you either admit you’re wrong, and change; or you kill to keep hold of what you already know.

That is how it was for Jesus: and that’s why Luke told it – because it’s integral to the story. This is what makes it all make sense, in a weird, non-sensical way. People so want to hold on to what they believe about God that they’d rather kill God than admit they’re wrong! But what about us, then? What’s God saying to you today? When He looks inside you, does He see love for Him, for His radical Kingdom of freedom and justice? Will you risk friendship for the sake of influencing people for Him? Or does He see someone who’s trying to look good on the outside but is actually positioning yourself for your own advantage? And which way will you go from here? On this decision-day, will you stay for lunch with the Pharisees and the teachers of the law? Or will you journey on with Jesus, on the costly way that leads to the cross? Let’s pray ...