Preached at Holy Cross, Seend
Romans 14.1–12; Matthew 18.21–35
“another, who is weak, eateth herbs.”
When St Paul writes that the weak eat only vegetables, he isn’t acting like the ancient equivalent of a social media influencer from the manosphere, recommending that his followers stick to a fat-rich diet of red meat and bone broth. He’s actually referring to a controversy that divided the ancient Church in exactly the same way that gay marriage or women bishops divide the Church of our own time.
For St Paul, the question at hand was what Christians should and shouldn’t eat. In the pagan cults of the Roman Empire sacrificing animals to various gods at their temples was a big thing, especially on their holy days. Of course, a lot of the meat was consumed at big parties at the various temples, but some of it was given away, perhaps to the poor or just to buy goodwill, and some of it was sold on the open market. So, if you were tucking into a nice ham sandwich in a big Roman city, there was a fair chance the ham had been sacrificed to a pagan god.
So, some people in the early Church avoided eating meat, because they were worried it might have been sacrificed to pagan gods. For St Paul, that kind of scruple was a sign of having a weak faith. After all, pagan idols weren’t actually gods – they were just dumb statues, or figments of people’s imaginations, after all, so if you really had a strong faith that Jesus Christ was Lord, then why would you worry about a bit of chicken that had been sacrificed to Jupiter or whoever?
This had big social implications, because just as now, a lot of Roman socialising and commercial life was done over a meal. Business deals were struck at the dinner table. Men of social standing invited others to dine and accepted invitations. The Christians who refused to eat meat that might possibly have been sacrificed to pagan gods were cutting themselves off from respectable society and job opportunities.
So, the Christians who abstained from meat sacrificed to idols thought that the people who ate it were barely Christian at all, unwilling to make the slightest sacrifice for God, completely captured by the pagan society round them. The people who ate meat thought the abstainers had totally missed the implications of Jesus Christ dying for us, which freed us from the idea that breaking arbitrary laws about diet and washing could put us on the wrong side of God.
This might seem obscure, but it was a topic that divided the Church along the lines of whether Jesus was calling Christians to be a group of particularly holy people quite separate from the mass of people; or whether Jesus was calling Christians to be an integral part of society to better lead others to Him – very like, for example, a lot of Christian arguments about whether or not the Church should embrace same-sex marriage.
Indeed, the other great early Church controversy, circumcision, was also all about questions of identity, inclusion, and diversity that are just as lively in relation to different issues today.
Now Paul definitely came down on one side of this great division, but he affirmed that there were faithful Christians on the other side of the debate from him. Those who disagreed were still his brothers and sisters in Christ and it was not for him to pass judgement on them. Whatever side of the debate people took, Paul said, they should do so in the name of the Lord, and both sides should follow their different courses of action to give honour to the Lord.
St Paul’s Letter to the Romans does a lot to undercut our stereotypes of what Christianity is about and what it should be about, and perhaps no part of it more than the passage we heard this morning. Some part of us, deep down, still thinks Christianity is about following a set of rules so we can lead good lives and pass God’s holy test and get into heaven. Paul is saying something very different – that sincere Christians, genuinely living their lives for Christ’s sake, can come to very different conclusions about what the rules should be.
And here’s the big point, that none of us is good enough to get into heaven on our own merits. All of us will need to be forgiven. All Christians have much they need God to forgive them for. All Christians have moments when they fall far short of the high standards and principles they like to squabble about, certainly you and I, but also Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King and even, like, St Peter and St Paul and stuff.
That’s why we shouldn’t stand in judgement over our fellow Christians even when they have beliefs we find incomprehensible – like being opposed to two ladies tying the knot in Church. They’re still our brothers and sisters. We and they alike need God to forgive us a tremendous amount.
Could you put a monetary value on how much you owe God for the sins you’ve committed. Bet you’re horrified at the suggestion! But Jesus did that in this morning’s Gospel reading.
One slave owes another slave a hundred denarii. Do you have any idea how much that’s worth? It’s about twenty weeks’ wages for a working man. Let’s call it ten grand in today’s money. You’d have to be very rich not to miss that; for someone who isn’t well off, it’s a king’s ransom. So perhaps we can understand a little bit better why the first slave seized his fellow by the throat and put him in jail until he paid up.
But he had himself just been forgiven ten thousand talents by the king who is clearly that {pointing up} King up there. Do you know how much ten thousand talents is worth? Well, one talent was worth 6,000 denarii. Ten thousand talents would be roughly equal to the annual GDP of… Monaco. (I’m serious. I genuinely checked the numbers.) That’s how much Jesus says you owe God. It’s an unfeasible sum.
And you owe God that much whether you’re Left or Right, Black or White, vegetarian or live on pork chops. None of us is good enough for God, but each of us here this morning has been given the great gift of being called to follow Jesus Christ.
And that brings me to a final point, but there’s an easily missed theme in both of these readings about the need for us to have patience while God works his purposes out in God’s good time. God doesn’t punish the slave for wanting his ten grand back – the slave is punished for throwing his fellow slave in gaol rather than giving him time to repay. Forgiving someone seventy times seven gives them time to change their life. Both sides of the debate on what Christians should eat were enjoined to see one another as brothers and sisters while God slowly revealed His truth to them. So, we should be patient with our fellow Christians, our fellow debtors to God, while He slowly reveals His truth to us in our time.
At the end of all things God will judge us. Which sounds terrifying, but our passage from Paul concludes by telling us that every knee shall bow to Christ and every tongue confess that He is Lord; and Paul has already written in the same letter to the Romans, in a passage we had in church five weeks ago, that whoever confesses that Jesus is Lord will be saved. After we receive Communion, we will pray that God receives our worship this morning “not weighing our merits but pardoning our offences”; pray it full of confident trust in Him and in your salvation.
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 for evermore. Amen.