Preached at Christ Church, Worton
Readings – 2 Corinthians 4. 13-5. 1 ; John 3. 1-17
“…we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.”
Cow parsley: in June, as common as muck, but a sign of life’s persistence; © Gerry Lynch, 24 July 2017.
Driving from Worton towards Seend the other day, I marvelled at the quantity of cow parsley in the hedges. The landscape is particularly thick with new growth when blossoming May gives way to bowery June. Yet I was struck by a rather sombre realisation. In just a few months, it will start to die back as we speed towards the dead, dark, weeks of December.
St Paul writes in this morning’s epistle reading that, “We are always being given up to death for Jesus’s sake.” Everything in this universe must eventually die. Not only living things, but, although we rarely think about it, the stars, and even the atomic particles which make up all matter, dead or alive. Their lifespan is almost beyond the human imagination, but is nonetheless finite. Indeed, science tells us that without the death of many stars over many billions of years, the complex elements which make up humans and all other living beings simply could not exist. Each of us too must eventually give way for new life. We are not meant to live forever, not in this universe, anyway—but as Christians, we have faith that Jesus Christ, the eternally living God, by dying opened the way to eternal life for us.
We human beings are indeed “clay jars”, as St Paul puts it: fragile creatures, with a limited lifespan, and far from perfect. Yet we are of such immense value that God gave Himself up to death for our sakes to give us the most valuable treasure possible, eternal life.
St Paul knew we were not meant to be perfect, any more than we are meant to live forever in our mortal bodies. Paul had once thought he was a particularly holy follower of God because he was so diligent in keeping all the rules which he found in Scripture. He forgot was that although God’s written word is indeed treasure, he was a clay jar. The vision of God he had on the road to Damascus was such a violent experience that it left him literally blind. Yet he considered it the most valuable experience of his life, one that taught this over-intense and rather self-certain man that it is a dangerous thing to be too sure you know God’s will.
In the churches Paul founded, he kept finding Christians making the same mistake he had made at such cost. This explains the sarcasm that is obvious in this morning’s Epistle: “so death is working us but life in you.” His Second Letter to the Corinthians is an attack on people who had emerged in the church in Corinth, who thought they could pass some sort of test to earn God’s favour.
Whatever treasure exists in our lives, and whatever power we see flow from our faith, are gifts from God, not things we have earned. When we forget that, and trust ourselves too much, we set ourselves up to be crushed and perplexed and driven to despair when we can’t live up to our unrealistic expectations, and even to do terrible wrongs in the name of a good God.
The Pharisees, who star in the morning’s Gospel reading, were inclined to do exactly that. They put incredible effort into applying Scripture to every part of their lives, but in doing so, they often failed to see the word for the trees.
Our Gospel reading consists of the last two of five stories which comprise the second chapter, and the early part of the third chapter, of Mark’s Gospel. So they’re quite early in Jesus’ public ministry. In them, Jesus argues with the scribes and the Pharisees about what Scripture demands. They finish with this sentence, “The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.” At this early stage, the Pharisees are already plotting to kill Jesus: Christ is like the cow parsley already doomed as it shoots up in June.
The Pharisees plotted to kill Jesus with the supporters of King Herod. The Herods were the political power family of Roman-occupied Palestine. They were Jews but they were, by any standards, very bad Jews. As a result, the Pharisees held the Herods in contempt. Yet, when they were confronted with this strange charismatic preacher from Galilee, the pious Pharisees were happy to conspire with the horrible Herods to have him murdered. The Pharisees, at best, couldn’t see the wood for the trees—people so obsessed with mining the Scriptures to find commands they bragged about keeping to the letter, that they had missed what God was actually trying to teach them through it.
That’s what all five of these stories of disputes between Jesus and the religious authorities in Mark’s Gospel are about—the danger of not seeing the forest for the trees when reading Scripture. We can get lost, for example, in arguments when it isn’t clear what Scripture permits and what is forbids. That’s at the root of the first of the stories in this morning’s Gospel. While everybody agreed that work was forbidden on the Sabbath, people didn’t always agree about what constituted work. Gleaning from the fields on the Sabbath was exactly such an issue of dispute. Because of this, sometimes Christians today who want to defend a consistency in Scripture which God didn’t grant, argue that Jesus’ followers weren’t in fact breaking any rules. But that’s not how Jesus responded. Instead, he repeated a story about King David – the great hero of the Jewish nation – breaking a rule for the greater good.
The point is that God’s laws are made for the benefit of humanity. God has no need to put us some through some sort of obedience test. When these laws conflict, as any set of rules inevitably do sometimes, Jesus is telling us in these stories to err on the side of doing good, especially to the sick and the poor and those considered outcast. It isn’t to say that the Sabbath isn’t important – our own society could badly with restoring a common day of rest for the vast majority. But we need to place the Sabbath at the correct level of importance – important indeed, but not overriding other demands of Scripture, especially around loving our neighbours as ourselves.
Today’s Gospel reading presents the ultimate contrast: Jesus breaks the letter of the law to bring life; the Pharisees pride themselves on keeping all the rules in Scripture to the letter, but find themselves plotting death.
If you’re going to ask me for some sort of coherent, comprehensive system for how we know we’re truly living as Christ commanded when principles seem to conflict, I can’t give you one. The clay jar that God gave me my treasure in doesn’t allow me to be too sure I know God’s will. But the treasure is great: eternal life, not as a prize for keeping the rules, but because Jesus Christ won it for me on the Cross. If we trust in this, then we can take this life on its own terms, despite the perplexity and despair it can bring us. We can’t expect to get everything right in this life; we can’t expect to live for more than a few score years if we are lucky. Yet life remains full of beauties and wonder like the new life that bursts from the hedges as May gives way to June. The wonders and beauties of this world, magnificent as they are, are just a foretaste of what is ours in the life to come, when we shall burst forth from these clay jars, like a butterfly emerging from the chrysalis of a caterpillar, and live in the nearer presence of God in a way so wonderful as to be beyond our understanding.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
