Sermon 29th January 2017

Today, one of our Lay Readers, Simon Brindley, continues our study of the story of Jesus as told in the book of Matthew. The reading is from Matthew 9, 1-17.

Doctoring the sick

As some of you will know I have had a new job for nearly 3 years now, working for an organisation called the Financial Conduct Authority in Docklands, after the government closed my old office in a reorganization. It’s good but it is very different to the old place. It’s a much bigger organisation for a start. And in some ways it’s a stricter environment to work in.   One issue the FCA, as it is known, has to take very seriously is the way it handles the information it holds about the businesses and people it regulates. Here is an example:

The day before I arrived there the FCA issued a press release containing information about some serious action it intended to take in relation to historic bad practices in the insurance industry. This could have involved a lot of money being returned by the big insurance companies to ordinary people with insurance policies like you and me. The information was taken at face value by the businesses and investors who read it in the papers and a lot of money was wiped off the value of the shares in what are called listed insurance companies, and when I say a lot of money I mean £billions of pounds, because everyone thought those companies were going to have to pay back a fortune to customers they had treated unfairly. But the information in the press release in fact was partly wrong. It implied we were going to do something in a way that in fact we were not. It took the FCA longer than it should have done to correct its press release. Too many senior people were working from home or did not realize how serious it was quickly enough. It was corrected in the end and the share prices recovered, but for a while there was what you might call “chaos in the markets.” It was really serious. Lengthy and expensive enquiries followed and hearings of Parliamentary committees. Some of the most senior FCA people had to leave. Even the Chief Executive was badly wounded by this careless disclosure of misleading information and was sacked a year or so later.

And, partly because of the risk of that sort of thing happening again, there are very tight rules in my office about handling information. Documents are marked “Controlled Distribution” (that means only people whose names are on a particular list can see it) or “Highly Sensitive Information” (that means if it leaks out at the wrong time there could be chaos in the markets and you might get the sack! Got to be very careful indeed with those ones!!).  Or they might be marked “Urgent – for immediate attention!” if something needs to be looked at immediately. And everyone at the FCA is now even more careful about the way we handle the sensitive information we see every week.  We have all seen what can happen if we are not really careful….

In everything he is saying and doing, in the passages we are hearing from Matthew’s gospel over these few weeks of sermons, Jesus, it seems to me, is shouting out for people to take notice. It is like everything he is doing and everything he is saying is marked “Urgent! For immediate attention!” or, “Highly important information!” And there are a number of reasons for thinking like this:

The over-arching reason, it seems to me, is that Jesus is so different to anyone that people had seen before talking or teaching about God. This was a highly religious society. Their beliefs were absolutely fundamental to everything they did every day – and no doubt there were many, many genuinely good and holy people in that society – but, whatever the situation had been before, Jesus stood out a mile because he was so different. And there is no doubt whatsoever that this is one thing that Matthew is trying to tell us:

-       “the crowd was amazed at the way he taught”, Matthew has already written in Chapter 7, verse 28, “he wasn’t like the teachers of the Law; instead he taught with authority.”

-       “what kind of man is this?” Matthew has already written in Chapter 8, verse 27, “even the wind and the waves obey him!”

-       and here today in Chapter 9, verse 7, when the people saw what Jesus did and said as the man who has been paralysed for years simply gets up and goes home, “When the people saw it, they were afraid”, writes Matthew in Chapter 9, verse 7, “and the people praised God for giving such authority to men.”

In what he says, in his power over the natural world and in his power over illness and disease, Jesus is radically different to anything the people had seen before because he acts and speaks in a very new and different way and he does so powerfully and he does so with real authority. It’s as if Matthew is stamping all over his gospel, “Urgent and important! For immediate attention!!”  “You must listen to what I am trying to tell you about this man…..!”

And you can see this difference and newness and power and authority in each of the three sharp scenes that plays out ,one after another, in today’s reading:

-       first the paralysed man is healed. Now in those days people thought illness was a direct result of sin so Jesus tells him, with authority, that he is forgiven and when the teachers nearby say to him “You can’t do that!” “Only God can do that!” in effect Jesus tells them, “Yes I can” and anyway, I don’t mind quite how I put it to this man, because what I am actually telling him is to get off his bed. And the man gets up, rolls up his mattress and walks home;

-       then Jesus walks past a hated tax collector, a man called Matthew (and possibly the writer of the gospel himself), hated because he was on the road side in his grubby little booth, taking money from the people to pay the Roman occupiers and probably keeping a whacking big cut for himself. But instead of just walking past, ignoring him or sneering at him or cursing him, like just about everyone else, Jesus speaks to him and tells him to follow him. And he does it with such authority, to this hated outcast of society, that he too gets up immediately, no debate, no questions, no arguments and follows after Jesus. And what do they do next? Do they go off, the two of them, to give a carefully considered public seminar on the moral choices facing His Holiness the Emperor’s Revenue and Excise Duties Mid-ranking Customer-facing officials?  No! They head off to Matthew’s house to get something to eat! And a load of other tax collectors hear about this man, who may just be able to show them a way to deal with their hated existence, and join them for the meal. And a whole pile of other outcasts of the society of the day (we aren’t told who they are but you can imagine who they might have been: beggars, the diseased, prostitutes, the dirty, the homeless) head there too and there is a Big Feast. “What on earth does he think he is doing?” ask the religious leaders to Jesus’ disciples, “Doesn’t he realize he will get contaminated?!” and Jesus cuts right through their religious rules and their piety, shows it up for the shallowness it can bring and gets right to the heart of true religion. Show people kindness, show them mercy, don’t you realize they are just as valuable as you are?” Who ever told you that God looks down on what you call the dregs of society? No, He doesn’t. He loves them and respects them and wants to see them healed and restored. Your religious rules about sacrifices will mean nothing if you forget that.

Whatever your views might be about the circumstances or moral choices of anyone that your society looks down on, it seems to me that Jesus is saying here, show them love first. If you don’t, anything you might try to debate or discuss or say about their choices will come with no authority;

-       Then, finally, the debate about fasting. Going without food for the day would have been part of religious practice in those days on many occasions over the year as people looked backwards to celebrate key moments in their history. “So why don’t your lot do it?”, ask the followers of John the Baptist. We do and we’re part of this new movement. Is it not still key to our religious observance? Is this not what God wants us to do??................     Listen, says Jesus, looking forward to his own death, there will be a time for that when I am taken away, but what you really need to understand now is that everything has changed. I am not merely patching up the old with some new add-on ideas. That won’t work. No, everything is new and you need to change too. The new wine of the Kingdom will be poured into you but you too will be radically changed, you will be made new. Then we can work together.

Before I suggest one way in which we can look at all these stories and the similar stories of Jesus’ ministry in these chapters of Matthew’s gospel I just want to think for a moment about this idea of authority, because whenever Jesus speaks or acts it is this that the people all seem to notice. There is something about the way in which he works, something about his actions and his voice that command attention. And here are a few scenarios that have seemed to me, in things I have seen or heard in just the last few weeks, to hint at what real authority can feel like:

-       So I am reading the BBC website a week or two back and I see a clip about 4 girls from the Mulberry Comprehensive girls’ school in East London, at least two obviously Moslem, remembering their visit a year or two ago from the First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, and how incredibly impressed and inspired they were by her about what women could achieve and about what black and minority ethnic women could achieve and about what women from relatively poor backgrounds could achieve, given half a chance. And watching the video of that visit it is clear the speaker undeniably speaks with authority. I look out at you and see myself she says, you are just like I was 30 years ago. And if I can do it, so can you. I have been there, I really do understand, I am not distant, I am not elite;

-       I am sitting in a church one lunchtime from work a week or two back listening to a former prison chaplain talking about his ten years at Brixton prison and talking about the tenderness you find between prisoners who will look after each other as well as the widespread anger of alienation. And he tells us about a hardened former serious criminal who he asks to speak in the chapel about his own faith and the difference it has made to him. I can’t do that sorry says the former criminal at first because every time I speak the name Jesus I start to cry.  And the former chaplain speaks compellingly and compassionately and realistically but with authority about working in jails because he has been there for ten years and seen it all, not theoretically, not remotely, but genuinely;

-       I hear about the tragic early death of the vicar’s daughter from Ealing, Jill Saward, who was raped in a brutal attack on her home and family some 30 years ago and I am reminded of her incredible ability to forgive the perpetrators and her passionately effective work for decades to change the way that society and the legal system deals with the victims of sexual violence and I see the authority of someone who inspires forgiveness because she has been there, no theory or dogma but reality;

-       And then finally I am visiting a Christian friend in hospital and the nurse tells me on the way out how impressed she is with how my friend deals with her troubles.  She goes to church doesn’t she, asks the nurse….I want to go to that church some time. Because she has seen, it seems to me, something of the authority that comes with someone whose faith really does make a difference to the way they live and deal with what life throws at them.

This is all the authority, I think,  of putting your money where your mouth is, of actually identifying with those less fortunate than yourself, of taking tough decisions when you and your life and your values and your future are really on the line.

And Jesus, it seems to me has all of this. And in large measure.  He is maybe the shining example of practicing what you preach of sacrificial love. But in his case there is more. What Jesus offers, it seems to me, is much more than the human authority of good and inspiring actions and of genuine living. He demonstrates and claims authority over illness, he is prepared to claim authority to forgive sins. He claims to have come for a purpose and He asks people to follow him and they do. He says he is the bridegroom at a wedding feast and we do not suspect him for one moment of grandiose posturing. Because Jesus brings the authority of heaven, the authority given to him by his Father.

So no wonder it is as if these documents have written all over them “Highly urgent!” “Highly important information”; “Marked for immediate attention!”

Because Jesus’ impact is not just on the individuals in these stories, the paralysed man, the hated tax collector and the disciples of John the Baptist, as important as that is for each one of them. What we are being shown I think is his Godly nature. And not just that but we are being given signals to what is to come. Jesus speaks and the paralysed man is raised up from his bed; Jesus speaks and the hated tax collector is raised up from his hated lifestyle; the day will come when Jesus is to be taken away.  In the language used we are being shown pointers to his death and his being raised up, pointers to his own resurrection.

And so the response I suggest that is being asked of us is not just to applaud the way he deals with the outcasts, not just to try to think how we might copy that in our own lives. It is, I suggest, to ask what this same Jesus Christ might actually be saying to me.  Speak to me Lord, speak into my own paralysis, speak to me Lord into the darknesses and uncertainties of my own lifestyle and my own choices.  Show me again this new and different life you call me to, show me again what it means to follow you as my Lord and my God.  I can sense and I can begin to see your authority in my life, from its beginning to its end. Come and make me new and fill me with your new wine.  Lord, call me again today…

And this message is not marked Controlled Distribution (that is the one only for the few names on a list). It is for the Immediate attention of all of us…

Amen