of the Lord – Jesus, the vessel that contains all wisdom, and all else besides.
Elijah’s multiplication of meal and oil, like Jesus’ remarkable multiplications and transformations, was not just a matter of providing for people in need. It was a sign of hope, of new creation, at a time of famine and drought. More: as Jesus himself would indicate in Luke 4, it was a sign that God was at work beyond the borders of Israel. New life was bursting out all over the place. But it took faith to see it. ‘Make me a little cake first.’ Now there’s a challenge.
Proper 1
Isaiah 58.1–12
1 Corinthians 2.1–16
Matthew 5.13–20
Isaiah’s stinging rebuke contains the seeds of the Sermon on the Mount. True piety must be part of the outward movement to share your blessing with the world. Fasting is useless if injustice goes unchecked. Look after the poor, and your light will rise like the dawn. God will be present when you call him.
Jesus’ challenge to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world was not simply an agenda for his followers at the time or the Church of the future. It was a direct Isaianic challenge to the Israel of his day. They were called to be the light of the world. God’s purpose for Israel was that through them he would bring his justice and mercy to bear upon the nations. The city set on a hill, unable to be hidden, is Jerusalem, where the nations would come to learn God’s law.
Yet Israel in Jesus’ day was refusing this vocation. Of course there were many wise and devout Jews; but the nation as a whole, as Josephus records, was bent not on bringing God’s light to the pagan world but on bringing it God’s swift judgement, especially that part of it that was currently ruling the Middle East with casual brutality. Understandable, but unfaithful.
Jesus’ call is far more than a set of abstract moral lessons. It is a summons to Israel to be Israel, while there is still time. This is what the law and the prophets pointed to. And if Jesus’ way meant abandoning some of the interpretations (Pharisaic or whatever) which at the time seemed part and parcel of the law, so be it. The call to the higher righteousness corresponds to Isaiah’s summons to an outward-looking piety in which Israel will at last be God’s people for the world.
In one sense, the call was unsuccessful. Capernaum, Chorazin, Bethsaida – the towns around the Mount – by and large resisted Jesus’ bracing challenge. The early Church took it up again later. But in the meantime it was Jesus himself who followed his own programme. He became salt for the world around. He acted as the light-bringer to the nations. He became, when all others had rejected him, the one set on a hill who could not be hidden, embodying in himself what Jerusalem was meant to be but had not been, drawing all peoples to himself. The sermon was an agenda which Jesus himself carried out.
That is why his death was the defeat of the powers. The rulers of the world wouldn’t have crucified him if they had known what they were accomplishing: they were signing their own death warrant. From now on, true power comes, as Paul discovered, not through the wisdom or force of the world but through the gospel of Christ and him crucified. If the Spirit is at work through this gospel, law and prophets alike will look on and declare that this is what they had in mind all along.
Proper 2
Deuteronomy 30.15–20
1 Corinthians 3.1–9
Matthew 5.21–37
A real choice with real consequences. The great temptation today is not so much to cast off all moral restraint – few would actually advocate that, though many act from time to time as though that were the norm – as to imply that there are so many different ways of being human, and of being Christian, that our choices in this life are not that important, and that God will sort it all out in some great (and at present unknowable) future.
This view is often coupled with a clever parody of the Sermon on the Mount. What matters, says Jesus, is not so much that you don’t commit murder, adultery and the rest, but that your heart is right. God is looking (as in Deuteronomy; this isn’t a Christian innovation over against a Jewish background) for an obedience which goes through and through a person, resulting in an integrity between heart and action. But today, with romanticism and existentialism as our hidden teachers, we ‘naturally’ think that, as long as we are acting from the heart, what we do outwardly doesn’t matter so much. ‘His heart’s in the right place’ is usually said as an excuse.
We apply this selectively, of course. Nobody excuses murder on the grounds that it was most sincerely meant. But it goes unnoticed elsewhere that the antithesis between outward and inward observance is never meant, in either Testament, as a way of abolishing the commandments themselves. It is a way of saying that the truly mature, integrated follower of Jesus will be someone for whom it is no longer a moral effort to keep the commandments. They will do so because they deeply want to. That, I suspect, shows what a steep mountain most of us still have to climb.
But, to recapitulate, the choices are real. It won’t do to say, ‘But we thought we were supposed to do what came naturally.’ Not to choose – to go with the flow, whether of the insidious pressures from around or the whispered suggestions from within – is still to choose, namely, to choose to disobey. Part of growing up as Christians is to realize that a tough choice is being asked of us. Jesus, after all, didn’t say ‘If anyone would come after me, they should go with the flow and do what comes naturally.’ The next part is to pray for that change of heart, that total reform and redirection from within, through which alone that obedience can become, as we say, second nature. That, according to both Deuteronomy and Jesus, is the way of life.
One sign of maturity and integration within a Christian community will lie, as Paul knew only too well, in its attitudes to its leaders. Going with the flow of natural instincts had produced personality cults in Corinth, a sure sign of spiritual immaturity. The Church is called to grow beyond what comes naturally to humans, and to embrace instead what comes as the fruit of the Spirit and faith.
Proper 3
Leviticus 19.1– 2, 9–18
1 Corinthians 3.10–11, 16–23
Matthew 5.38–48
There are two basic mistakes people make about the command to love your neighbour as yourself. The first is to forget the last two words. We aren’t told to love our neighbour with all our heart, mind, soul and strength; only God has that absolute claim. We are to love our neighbour no more, but no less, than we love ourselves.
This will vary according to whether we are naturally selfish people, who pamper ourselves, or of an ascetic temperament, rebuking and restricting our fleshly desires. It might be fun, for a while, to be loved by the first sort of person as they loved themselves; the second sort, obeying the commandment, might be uncomfortable neighbours.
But here the second mistake
