Hear, O Israel...

This post is the written summary of a homily given at St. James Episcopal Church on October 11, 2020. It refers to the parable in Matthew 22:1-14 - the last of a triad of parables - known as The Great Banquet. The parable should not be taken in isolation, as it was not told in isolation. It is a summary of the metanarrative of the entire canon of Christian sacred texts including the whole of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament: The story of a distracted and stubborn people being continually called home by a faithful and patient Triune God. Therefore, I recommend that before you move into this reflection you first read Matthew 21:23-22:46 which forms a complete unit. In this way you will have the advantage of understanding for yourself how this parable upon which the Church meditates on this particular Sunday drives home Jesus's indictment of the religious establishment of which he was a part. This indictment was also intended for his own followers upon whom he charged the development of a reformed Judaism (later Christianity) that would be, unchecked and unguarded, just as vulnerable to the temptations of the temporal.

Despite our 21st century obsession with the individual - this parable is not about our personal salvation. Rather, it is an indictment of a failed system - of a failed religious institution. We tend to look at the failure of institutions in practical terms; loss of financial feasibility or a state of failed health in which the cancer of corruption has become so widespread, so pervasive and so profound a system is no longer able to function effectively. There are many examples of failing institutions in our world today - educational systems, governmental bodies, health systems, etc. But the institutional life of the Jewish temple, the Pharisaic Jews of Jesus' day did not fail necessarily in this way, but rather it failed in its fidelity to God. It failed to adhere to the Shema. Let us refresh our Jewish memory. The Shema in Jesus time was this: 

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deut. 4:6-9) 

The resulting corrupt nature of the religious institution Jesus dealt with was but the symptom of a far greater "sin" (missing the mark) - that of losing heart for God. 

When the Church, as an institution, and specifically, the congregations that are within it - fall away from God - fail in their fidelity to adhere to Jesus's carrying forward of the Shema (known to Christians as the Great Commandment) then the church loses its heart and thus its ability to assist the people in the process of awakening. Individuals cannot realize a radical reorientation of their life while remaining concerned with the preservation of anything temporal. There is no greater failing for the Church as a whole or for any individual parish. But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea. (Matt. 18:6) - Jesus is speaking to the failed religious institution of his day. 

The dire warning intended for religious bodies in this set of three parables holds within it a personal element in that individuals are the fabric out of which all human systems are made and have life. Therefore we are warned, in our own time and place, to hold our religious institutions to the highest standard - so that they continue to call people into a radical reorientation of life. If the people are not awakening to the knowledge of their higher selves they cannot be in the world but not of it - they only know how to be of the world - fully and completely identified with every temporal element of the physical plane - oblivious to a life of freedom and peace. As one of my teachers says: You are so free you can choose bondage... and you often do. But you don't have to.

When we read the Gospel of Matthew, the parables in particular, with this perspective in mind, we understand that as member of the body of Christ we are called daily to attend to the intimate relationship we have with the one Triune God... to write the name of God on our heart a thousand times a day... to hold a space for the Spirit to make itself known to us.... to feel our eternal nature tied to the eternalness of the divine. This we do first. And from this place of connection we are far more open to loving our neighbor, all our relations, not with the conditional love the world has trained into us, but the love of the divine. We cannot offer others what we do not yet know.  "So your first job is to work on yourself. The greatest thing you can do for another human being is to get your own house in order and find your true spiritual heart." (Ram Dass)

When we attend to our own spiritual well-being it enriches the whole Christian community. The things we care about shift. The attachments we hold to things that are passing away, pass away of their own accord. We experience a kind of freedom, at least some of the time. We feel joy, at least some of the time. And our houses of worship become expressions of peace.

Higher hanging fruit

This post is a reflection on one of the vineyard parables in the Gospel of Matthew, 21:33-46. This line in particular: "Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom."  Those for whom this warning is intended take caution: "When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them." Jesus is no longer speaking to the crowds of the Galilean countryside, he is in Jerusalem and his audience is thick with those of the Jewish authority who oppose him. 

In both the accounts of Mark and Matthew, Jesus is direct conflict with the head of the serpent, as it were. In Matthew the conflict is covered in chapters 21 and 22 which form a single unit. To observe it in its entirety in the format of a dramatic reading would be breath-taking.

The corresponding text in Mark is as follows. Note in particular Jesus' response to the "teacher of the law" when he "answered wisely":

 

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”“Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”  Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.

 

"....you are not far from the kingdom of God...."  The teaching is clear: there is nothing in all of religious life that is more important then these two commandments and they are are directly related to the kingdom. And religious bodies who pursue interests divergent from these commandments, in whom the fruits of the kingdom are absent, will be abandoned. 

 

While the Church now clearly understands supersessionism (Christianity as a replacement for Judaism which is understood in the light of the Gospels as a failed religion) as heresy, it is important to be faithful to the text in Matthew. That is to say, Matthew may well have envisioned that Judaism would indeed fade into the shadow of the growing sect of Christianity. Perhaps he did believe that God would take the kingdom from those he understood as so corrupt and incapable of fidelity to the Law, so undeserving of the privilege of bearing the Law, or that it would collapse from the weight of its own hypocrisy. We don’t actually know what Matthew believed.

 

But we do know the essence of this teaching: Regardless of the religious outer garment, those who create lives and institutional life based solely upon on these two commandments upon which all the rest of the law hangs are those who have access to the kingdom.

 

Let’s unpack that a bit.

 

Below I present some of my understandings of the Kingdom. They may not fit into your understanding or perceptions. I have no need to be right here. I simply offer a way of looking at the Kingdom so that it is accessible at some level and not perpetually out of reach.

 

I perceive that the Kingdom as a direction, not a destination.

I perceive that the Kingdom is a state we enter into, a kind of energetic flow into which we may merge and are carried, not a place we go or end up after we die should we be judged worthy.

I perceive that the Kingdom and the promise of eternal life are one in the same; accessible on the physical plane prior to death as well as continued after death.

I perceive that access to the Kingdom is wholly dependent on one’s openness to the development of higher consciousness or the experience of gradual awakening; to see beyond the forms of the physical plane and to enter into a reality defined by love – the likes of which cannot be fully experienced while tied to the attachments of the physical life.

I perceive the Kingdom as a something to attend to intentionally but not to force; that which one falls into gently that is matched perfectly with a corresponding falling away of worldly concerns folding into an encroaching, enveloping open-heartedness to everyone and everything in the whole of the cosmos.

And I perceive that one who awakens to the kingdom, or said another way, to Christ's consciousness or higher consciousness, begins quite naturally to live a life rich with the fruit of the kingdom: kindness, generosity, gentleness, responding in love in all circumstances and a marked lack of reactivity, antagonism, egotism, greed, fear of scarcity, fear of the future, fear of loss, the need to be right, etc. 

One of the marked signs of a life that is moving in the direction of the kingdom, that is merging into the flow of a higher consciousness, lives in a way that is in the world, but not of it. And it is a constant challenge for Christians to be wary of the trappings of the institution, to not fall into the trap of religious materialism, the fate of the pharisees. The danger is old, it was part of the Church's establishment.

 

In a recent entry in his long-running blog Fr. Richard Rohr (https://cac.org/freedom-in-the-desert-2020-09-29/) begins:

 

When Christianity became the established religion of the Roman Empire, something remarkable and strange took place. A whole set of people began to flock to the margins of the Empire to pursue God. They went to the deserts of Palestine, Cappadocia, Syria, and Egypt. This is the emergence of the ones we now call in a collective way the Desert Fathers and Mothers. These individuals in the desert sought to reflect more deeply on the Mystery of God and God’s will through work, prayer, and study of the Scriptures.

 

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) describes their movement this way:

 

Society—which meant pagan society, limited by the horizons and prospects of life “in this world”—was regarded by them as a shipwreck from which each single individual had to swim for their life. . . . These were people who believed that to let oneself drift along, passively accepting the tenets and values of what they knew as society, was purely and simply a disaster. The fact that the Emperor was now Christian and that the “world” was coming to know the Cross as a sign of temporal power only strengthened them in their resolve.* 

 

The faithful adherents of the two commandments upon which all else hangs, regardless of their religious affiliation, have had at their core a keen and healthy sense of suspicion around “passively accepting the tenets and values of … society [culture].”  I would add to that a healthy sense of caution around religious materialism as well. In other words, it is recommendable to hold loosely to the trappings of the church but hold fast to the teachings of Jesus upon which the very existence of the church is based. It is a bit like trying to speak about truth. It is corrupted the minute the first word is uttered.

In "Covid times" the church is grappling with many things. A recent article from the Church of England predicts the survival of the church - but its certain transformation as a result of the present cultural and existential crises. Perhaps, as existing trends quicken toward their destination we will move closer to the kingdom. Perhaps with every perceived loss of the familiar we will move deeper into Christ consciousness. Time will tell, and we will know by the fruit that is produced. 

*Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings from the Desert Fathers of the Fourth Century (New Directions: 1970, ©1960) 3. Note: Minor edits made to incorporate gender-inclusive language.