Sermon: Eucharist - 20 Feb 2011

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford

Preacher:: Victor Stock
Date:: Sunday 20th February 2011
Service:: Eucharist
Readings:: Matthew 5: 38-48

‘You have learned that they were told “Love your neighbour and hate your enemy”, but what I tell you is this: love your enemies and pray for your persecutors.”’ This sounds at first as if Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel is reversing a Jewish commandment. But ‘Love your neighbour’ is the command in the 19^th chapter of the Book of Leviticus. The context is the congregation of the people of Israel. Neither here nor anywhere else in the Old Testament is a commandment to hate one’s enemy, so where Jesus got that from, we just don’t know. It was probably the tabloid press of the day, the man in the street. The man in the street gives us a lot of wisdom to live by: ‘Hate your enemy – we don’t want those aliens here, those migrant workers, those foreigners, those people – they’ve always been against us. If you knew what I know about …’ etc. That kind of language we know all too well.

But here in Matthew there is a reiteration of Christ’s teaching, breaking through the limitations imposed on the objects of love, breaking the cycle of hatred and violence. ‘Love your enemies, pray for your persecutors, only so can you be children of your Heavenly Father’. And note: ‘who makes his sun rise on good and bad alike’. This is how the world is, in other words. The sun doesn’t only rise on the just, thank goodness, or you and I would be in Stygian darkness for most of the time.

On Tuesday and Wednesday the Bishop’s Staff Meeting took place at Farnham Castle. Some of you will know that within living memory Bishops of Guildford lived in Farnham Castle. Unimaginable now! With its Norman chapel and its new chapel where Lancelot Andrewes worshipped, its great hall, its keep, its extensive grounds, its vast rooms – how terribly cold and unmanageable it must have been, within living memory. But when we got our usual Bishop’s Staff Meeting business out of the way, we spent our time looking at the Bible. We were asked to talk about our favourite Bibles, the Bibles we use, and why. Then, the Dean gave a talk on ‘How does the Bible affect one’s everyday life’. This was meant to be uplifting, of course. For example, I read the 5^th chapter of Matthew and resolve to be nice to everybody every day and in all circumstances, and as soon as I find myself being short-tempered or having unkind thoughts or uttering a sarcastic comment, quick as a flash St Matthew’s Gospel and the 5^th chapter come to mind, and I behave in a saint-like, indeed Christ-like way. Well, who am I kidding?

What I in fact talked about was the way in which cathedrals use the Bible more than any other church. We have public readings from Holy Scripture, not according to our particular favourite passages or prejudices, but from the Lectionary which the Church lays down, six times every day. I said that this reiterated use of the whole scriptural text became a kind of back-drop, the scenery, the context for life. Problems there are, of course, with so much Scripture, and it was the Evangelical Archdeacon of Dorking who confessed that there might be sometimes even, he dared to say, too much Bible, and we certainly feel that here in the Cathedral. More, we sometimes feel the Bible we read out in public is inappropriate. The other day at Evensong we had a particularly graphic description of the boiling of various entrails as laid down in the Book of Leviticus, more like a Heston Blumenthal cooking programme than anything suitable for reading in front of children at Choral Evensong. But there you go.

The Dean of Winchester, an Old Testament scholar has a collection put together over many years of Arcadian, Samarian, Mesopotamian, Assyrian, Babylonian pots and figurines, shards, seals – it’s impressive. When our group of local deans: Chichester, Portsmouth, Winchester, Rochester, Guildford meet, which we do in each other’s houses, when we’re at Winchester I feel we are in touch with what in chronological time is a remote world, the world that produced the Hebrew Bible, or what we call the Old Testament.

It was the Bishop of Dorking who pointed out in our discussion that very little of the teaching of Jesus is new; Jesus re-presents, re-packages, makes more attractive and immediate the teaching of the Hebrew Prophets and the Hebrew Law. So it is with this morning’s 5^th chapter of Matthew, it’s not a reversal of a teaching that somehow the Jews were told to hate their enemies, they never were. Jesus is clearing up a common misunderstanding.

Clearing up common misunderstandings is at least what preaching on the Bible should be about. So, one of the things I spoke about on Wednesday morning was the chronology of Scripture. If you imagine that the nave represents the 2,500 or so years of Old Testament history, the period covered by what we call the Old Testament, and the inter-testamental period takes us up the steps (because there’s a bit of a gap between the last book of the Old Testament and the first book of the new) which gets us onto the floor of the Quire where the nave altar is, just here, then the space between the nave altar and the Sanctuary, even that would be slightly too long for the tiny period of the New Testament – the New Testament covers only about 60 years. Then, if you put together these steps up to the nave altar and the space between the nave altar and the West Door as representing biblical time, you’d have to go, well, I suppose right across England and possibly the Atlantic to get back to the beginnings of human history, millennia upon millennia before anyone could write anything.

So, with the biblical literature there’s a context, and the 5^th chapter of Matthew is Matthew’s understanding of the teaching of Jesus about breaking through limitations and breaking the cycle of hatred and violence. Many biblical and rabbinic teachings point in the same direction as the teaching of Jesus. First then, when we think about the Bible, we’re talking about a comparatively short period of human history that its books covers, taking no account at all of the almost unimaginably long journey of humankind since the physical creation of this particular planet. At the same time we’re dealing with something absolutely other than time, the timelessness of the difficult teaching that we should love our enemies, thus breaking the cycle of violence.

This brings us to the courage of the Muslim community in Egypt as they stand alongside their Coptic Christian neighbours. It brings us to the heroic work of justice-building and peace-making in the Holy Land, where each such move exacts an enormously high price. Just glancing at Egypt and the Holy Land, just those two alone, illustrates the absolute relevance of the 5^th chapter of Matthew for human flourishing. If we are to be God’s children, the cycle of hatred and violence must be broken, and the only way to break it is by loving our enemies.

The Bishop’s Residential Staff Meeting was an encouragement, and encouragement matters. So much of our life in the institutional Church is spent in committees, the committees that have met here in the Cathedral and continue to meet about the successor to our Administrator, who retires in the summer, the committee preparing for short-listing and interviewing the week after next for Jonathan Frost’s successor as University Chaplain, immensely complex and time-consuming, an appointment made by both the University and Cathedral. Then the Board meetings, letters and applications involved in our Golden Jubilee Patrons scheme, let alone the immense amount of hard work that has gone on in the last year, headed up by the indefatigable Sub Dean to produce the programme for our Golden Jubilee. And I haven’t mentioned the Cathedral Council, the College of Canons, the monthly Chapter, the Community Committee, the Finance Committee, and that’s just here in the this Cathedral Foundation. So for the Bishop’s Staff to take their eye for a moment off appointments and benefices, ministerial reviews, the care of the clergy, the problems and difficulties of parishes, schools, hospitals and prisons in our care, and to turn back into the great stream of biblical narrative, and ask questions of a fundamental kind: ‘How does the Bible affect my life today?’ was encouraging.

We need to encourage one another because our calling is a noble one, and loving our enemies comes not from nature but from grace, without grace we are simply incapable of Christian discipleship, in Guildford Cathedral, let alone amidst the demands and the terrors of life in those holy lands, from which our Bible emerged.