10th Sunday After Trinity 24 August
Readings: Isaiah 58.9b-14; Hebrews 12. 18-29; Luke 13.10-17
Theme: Justice the Heart of the Law
Law for the Jewish people is the way that God guides them in his paths. It is a sacred reality that bridges the earthly and the heavenly in a journey which leads towards union with God. This form of union is an active one, an ethical and indeed political route towards the God who is both creator and saviour of all.
Our readings for today speak clearly of this God who is revealed to be the one who heals a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. The first reading from Isaiah is an earlier version of this ethical relationship between humanity and God and reveals that justice is the litmus test of what it means to follow God’s law. When we are just with one another, our “light shall rise in the darkness and our gloom will be like the noonday”. The second reading from Hebrews reveals Jesus to be the new mediator between God and humanity which effectively incarnates the law in the person of Jesus; the one who brings a new covenant to us through the sprinkling of his blood.
This theme of justice being at the heart of the law is one which goes right through the scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, and on this Tenth Sunday after Trinity it is good for us to take a moment to reflect on what justice has to do with our faith in God.
In the history of Christian spirituality there have been different traditions of how it is that human beings are drawn into the life of the blessed Trinity. In some traditions, originating from the Platonic schools of the early Church Fathers, this closeness is brought about through contemplation of the divine mysteries. This can take the form of removing oneself from the hustle and bustle of life so as to plunge deeply into the consciousness of the living presence of God which is at the ground of our souls. Such experiences of so-called ‘enlightenment’ are known in many different religious traditions and not only in Christianity. Buddhism and Hinduism are obvious non-Christian examples, but you can find similar accounts in all of the world religions and indeed of many of the native peoples of the earth. These experiences tend to render the person passive before the absolute transcendent mystery of God who surpasses the limited frontiers of our knowledge about reality. Darkness is often a term used to encapsulate such encounters, and one even hears of ‘a luminous darkness’ because these experiences though beyond our cognitive faculties leave us with a sense of having been visited by one much greater than ourselves.
Other traditions of Christian spirituality tend toward the active pole of human existence. These tend to be the traditions which focus on charitable works, such as helping the sick and the homeless and they tend towards a mysticism of activity in which God is to be found in the poor, the sick and the dispossessed. The charitable work of Mother Theresa is a famous example of this type of mysticism and it is probably in the living memory of most of us here today.
What is particularly interesting about this Jewish tradition of justice and the law is that for the community of Israel this form of mysticism was not simply ethical and mystical, it was also deeply political. This form of mysticism was a political mysticism in the sense that it united a whole community, a whole nation, to God in a special and intimate way. Such a mysticism is not simply about individual actions, important though these are, but it is also about collective or social action. The way that a nation behaves indicates whether it follows God’s law and so is just.
In these days of international conflict and violence it is good for us to reflect on this ancient Jewish tradition of justice at the heart of the law because it gives us a litmus test as to whether our nations are truly living under God’s law as manifest in the flesh of Jesus as loving justice. The extent to which a nation places its most vulnerable and fragile people at the centre of its concerns is the extent to which a nation can be said to be living under God’s law.
For us here on the Costa del Sol, this loving justice should impel us to consider how our presence is relating to the nation of Spain. As I am sure you have seen on your television sets and on the newspapers, there have been rising protests in Spain about foreign tourists and expats buying up properties and effectively pushing prices up in the housing market as shortages of supply have led to increases in demand. Such issues of housing in Europe and indeed the wider world are pressing issues for all countries today as young people struggle to get on the housing ladder and tragically young people, born in expensive neighbourhoods, can no longer afford to buy a house or a flat where they grew up. So, whilst for some rising house prices signal more capital in the bank, for others rising prices mean the retreat of the dream to buy a home for oneself and one’s family.
When we consider ourselves as people of faith, we should, therefore, do so with an eye to how this faith is manifested in our ethical and political actions. Are we truly living under God’s law? Does our faith impel us to question ourselves as to how closely we are following God’s justice?
The sign of a mature and healthy faith is that it allows such questions to trouble us. If we are not to be like the leader of the synagogue who condemns Jesus for healing the woman on the Sabbath, we should always be vigilant that our faith is not hypocritical, because it is easy to allow our belief in God to be detached from justice. Only when our faith proclaims justice will our prayer truly be an acceptable work, reverence and awe of God.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.