Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity by Fr Jack

The Exodus 17.1-7
St Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians 2.1-13
St Matthew 21.23-32

How true it is of our own spiritual lives, as it is for the people of Israel today. Their journey, the journey, is the image of our lives - from death to life, from Slavery to freedom, from Eden and apple to Heaven and Christ. We’re reminded again of the richness of Scripture as the language of life: the imagery that interprets and speaks of the human reality. It is true on the macro and the micro.

And today, Moses is leading the people from horrific slavery to freedom, and all they can do… is complain; quarrelling among themselves. Typical!

It is a truthful image of my own spiritual life. When I am poorly I complain to God of my headache, my pain, whatever. And as soon as I am well, I forget all of that, and complain to God about something else! It’s ridiculous!

And to some extent that will always be the case, but also, we can work on these rather superficial instincts. St Paul is helping the Philippian Church with this today in the second lesson.

Compare the first and second lessons, Philippians and the Exodus: they are both communal and personal, as we are too. In Exodus they are moaning of their own condition, and squabbling amongst themselves: communal and personal. St Paul speaks to the Early Church in Philippi of seeking generosity and love and compassion as the hallmarks of their community, and the condition of each person’s state.

But St Paul’s words are neither a first century self-help text, or a socio-moral tract. St Paul seeks for us as a community and people to be the best version of ourselves not through rigour or schooling or self-preoccupation, not through rules and regulations, but through relationship. A relationship with God that defines and creates us.

And here we uncover something that is fundamentally true, and a really important principle of Christian life, and it is reflected in what’s going on in Exodus and St Paul’s Letter to the Phillipians today. We see in this the two things that I’ve already established - that these Scriptures are a truth-telling lens providing imagery that century after century interprets and speaks of our human reality. And also that that lens is both personal and communal. And what does that truth-telling, illuminating personal and communal lens show us here? Well amongst other things, that the Christian life is not a matter of wearing the correct straitjacket.

It is not a matter of having the right controls (such things will only get us so far). St Paul calls it ‘the law’, of course. Instead, (what St Paul calls grace) is a matter of being in relationship with God such that God’s being fills us to the brim, and spills over into every part of us and everyone else. It’s about relationship. The glory and power and love, the humility and goodness, obedience and joy, and all the other things that Paul writes of today is the fullness of God revealed in Christ. A fullness that we are invited to wallow in, be pickled in, filled by, to overflowing.

In baptism this life has been given to us, in Holy Communion we feast and fill our bodies with this life, in prayer and worship and scripture and service we fill the bucket of you and me with this life. So that what fills us, and flows through us to others is the grace and fullness of the person of Christ.

You see how in this the Scriptures show reveal in us the personal and communal dynamic we spotted in Exodus and Philippians, orientated in this truly Christian way of understanding life. Not Christianity as a collection of well-intentioned school rules, but a relationship with God that utterly defines us; of course it does, because it fills us, as it fills the whole universe with God’s creative, redeeming life.

Moses will, of course, give the Hebrew People the law - the Ten Commandments from Mount Sinai. And we will spend hundreds of years and hundreds of pages of the Old Testament working out that these things cannot save us.

But, even in this moment of law-giving, when Moses comes down the mountain, his face is so bright, shining with the reflective glory of God, because of his closeness to God on Sinai, that he has to veil his face to not blind the Hebrews. Even at this most legal moment, it’s not law that shines out, but glory, relationship. Being filled and overflowing.

And that’s why Jesus is banging His head against a brick wall today in the Gospel. The religious leaders (like me) want to fixate on the minutia. And they are not only obsessed with legal purity, but also their reputation and the mob. Not an attractive combination.

And Jesus simply refuses to play that game. Instead, Jesus invites them into the Kingdom. It’s like he says: ’Guys, it’s not about this twisted logic that has internal coherence perhaps, but has lost all grounding in God. It is about the Kingdom of God - it is about the God of the universe who is standing before you and inviting you to understand that life is not a debate, but a love song! That religiosity is not a contract negotiation, not an exercise in regulation or compliance, nor a political game; it is a relationship’.

A relationship that changes us forever, literally. In which we are filled to the brim and overflowing. The prostitutes and the tax collectors, get it, Jesus says. So, as a community and on a personal level, our aim this week, inspired by the Scriptures, is to be more like prostitutes and the tax collectors? I’m being slightly naughty there, but, actually, yes. They understood Jesus’ mercy, His love, the life-changing relationship He had come to invite them to. Glory, not school rules.

So friends, strait jackets and self-help can’t save us, however well intentioned. Because finding our lives in the story of Scripture, personally and communally, filled with Christ at this altar, living in Christ and overflowing with His life is (in the truest sense of the word) what being alive truly means, for each of us and everyone around us.