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Pentecost 6
21/7/2019

Hosea 1:1-10
Psalm 117
Luke 10:38-42

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In a sentence:
Our mercy requires God’s mercy

^1.2 When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, ‘Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.’ ³ So he went and took Gomer daughter of Diblaim…

The characterisation of God’s relation to Israel as a marriage and off Israel’s unfaithfulness to God as ‘whoredom’ are central to Hosea’s preaching. It is powerful language and, with our modern sensitivities to the power hidden in language, it is probably too strong for many of us today. As will become even clearer when we get later to chapter 2, the language of ‘whore/dom’ must be referenced with great care. We must seek to discover what Hosea reveals about ourselves and God without allowing for any abuse of how he chose to express it.

But our focus today will more on the usefulness of the marriage metaphor for Hosea. This is not a straightforward observation of human relationships which is then applied to the God-Israel relationship. To understand how marriage is presented we need insight into the local pagan religion which has so strongly tempted Israel. Central is the Canaanite interest in fertility – the fertility of the fields which sustain human life. The Canaanites are not alone in that interest, of course, but pagan religion links the way of the gods and the way of the world in a closeness we cannot approach today. For them, the workings of the world depend on the action of the gods; the gods themselves make the fields fertile in a manner which compares to human sexual intercourse. The gods and the land are ‘sexually’ linked in order to bring forth the abundance of the fields. We encourage this divine activity by modelling it in a kind of spiritual homeopathy: in the right context, our sexual activity encourages the fertilising of the land by the gods. In certain circumstances, then, human sexual intercourse becomes a religious activity – even a pious activity, a kind of ‘prayer’ (although presumably some of the faithful were not in it only for the prayer). In this kind of religion, temple prostitutes are not a corruption of piety but a requirement for it (cf. 4.13f). In this process, the land and its people are ‘married’ to the gods.

What Hosea does not do is dismiss all this as nonsense. Instead, he adopts this understanding of the link between the gods and the land. He does this in order to make sense to those he addresses, for this is how they think about the gods. To this extent, he agrees with them: our actions reflect and encourage the actions of God, if he disagrees about what the action of God is.

Hosea allows, then, the notion that God does something to the land – the people – and that the people are expected to ‘do’ the same something in order to encourage God to do it over again. This ‘something’, however, has no relation to fertility, with sex as the currency of exchange with the gods.

For what the God of Israel ‘does’ to the land and its people is not fertilise them but have mercy on them. This is heard in Hosea’s many references back to the Exodus. And so what the land – the people – are to do is also to have mercy (cf. 6.6). The reciprocation of the activity of God and the people is the same as in the pagan system. We need what God does, so we do what God does, to encourage God to do it again. The dynamic is the same but what is reciprocated is entirely different.

And it reflects a different sense for what we actually are. The pagan system turns the wheel of the seasons one more time around to where it once was and to which it will again return. Nothing really changes for us or the world. It is an existence of ‘eternal return of the same’.

Israel’s receiving and giving of mercy, however, has nothing to do with natural cycles. Mercy is unnatural – outside of what is necessary by law. It is a violation of what should happen. It is this breaking of expectation which creates history: the possibility of something which should not have been there given what has happened before. Mercy does not make the world go ‘around’; mercy moves the world on to something new.

It is this ‘something new’ which is disappearing from Israel. The failure of the people to reciprocate in mercy and justice leads to the withholding of mercy on the part of God. This turning away – this withholding of God’s mercy – is what is threatened in Hosea’s preaching, and this is how he and the survivors of the Assyrian onslaught interpret the fall of the northern kingdom.

But this is not merely a moral problem – something that Israel can simply rectify by starting again in mercy. Mercy no longer has value because the people do not encourage God toward mercy, and so God does not give mercy, and so the meaning of mercy is lost. With this, true history is lost, and we are back in the realm of necessity.

To see that this is no mere ‘theoretical’ matter we might glance sideways for a moment at the recent resolution of our Synod regarding ‘voluntary assisted dying’ (VAD) – something which, for the record, I consider to be bad idea. That much can only be heard as personal opinion but what comes next is more than that.

There are many things which could be said about the way our church has dealt with this but I’ll draw attention to just one. Read most charitably – and we must be charitable, because this brings us to where the resolution is strongest – read charitably, a community would affirm such a thing as assisted suicide by understanding it to be an act of mercy. This seems to be the rationale of our Synod in its allowing of VAD, although there’s not anything in the resolution to this effect and we have to read between the lines. Such a reading suggests that when a person is suffering greatly and has no prospect of recovery, facilitating her early death at her request is a matter of rendering aid, out of mercy. Honesty might require that anyone of us would feel the temptation to ask or assist if the circumstances were extreme enough, and perhaps even succumb to it.

But whatever any one of us might choose under such circumstances, that personal choice is less important than the framing of the issue by the Synod. For this framing effectively encourages what we have to call a Godless mercy. In affirming voluntary assisted dying in the way that it has, the Synod seems to declare that neither the ill person nor anyone who helps her has need of God as the bringer of mercy at that moment or in the aftermath. We might have need of the God who ‘comforts’ – if we believe in God – but that is as much as God seems to contribute here.

The point is that, on this understanding, we do not need to ask for mercy for having chosen or assisted in voluntary dying; the work – the grasping after death, or the putting to death – is held to be inherently righteous; God does not judge us here. (It would be unrighteous only if it contravened the legislation.)

Put differently, there is here no ‘fear and trembling’ before God as we reach out to contradict what seemed before to be God’s promise or command. God might require us to suspend ethics at some point but, should that happen, we will not have a Synod resolution to assure us. Fear and trembling – an utter casting of ourselves onto the mercy of God, even as we tell ourselves that it is right to do this – this is the only way in which we could act in such matters. This is the true leap of faith: living in the knowledge that God’s mercy is not guaranteed.

Yet against God’s freedom here our Synod resolution has made God part of a system: a guarantee. And so we have no need of justification by grace in VAD, for our actions are already sanctioned, kind of ‘pre-approved’. Whatever we might say about the sanctity of human life and injunctions not to kill, the mercy intended in the Synod’s resolution is Godless because there is no gospel in it. There is no gospel in the resolution because it does not allow that we can be wrong here.

In this reflection on VAD we have not wandered far from Hosea. The failure of Israel is not so much that it failed to be merciful, as if mercy were an end in itself. Rather it has failed to acknowledge and to seek mercy – the mercy it once sought and acknowledged. On the model of the pagan cult, Israel has failed to do seek what God gives by ‘helping’ God give it, and so God does not give it.

To recall our second reflection on Hosea 11, once divine mercy and forgiveness fade from the scene, so also does knowledge of sin – knowledge of sin, if not the sin and its effects themselves. There will still be moral and social breakdown – such as Hosea describes – but these things come to be seen as ‘necessary’, part of what is required to keep things ticking over. The surprising thing about sin is that it is always necessary so far as the sinner is concerned. A merciful God is not required for what counted is necessary, for there is no failure to forgive. But against this, on the day of judgement we will be better served by declaring, ‘Lord, the devil made me do it’ than ‘Lord, I had to do it.’

To link back to the VAD reflection, the Synod seems to have allowed that VAD might be ‘necessary’ in this way, and so sets anyone who chooses or assists in VAD outside judgement, as a matter of course. (The same assessment applies to those who choose not to opt for or assist in VAD; this too is righteous, of itself).

The problem here is not so much – or not only – an unaccounted-for contradiction of the command not to kill. [The contradiction is ‘un-accounted for’ because the resolution itself does not tell us why we might do this, other than that some believe we can]. The problem is the sanctioning of what I do or say apart from the justifying mercy of God – the fact that what I do is Godless: a mercy which does not seek mercy.

As we noted before, there is much more we might say around the VAD legislation but it’s enough for us to note from the Synod’s resolution that not much has changed between God and God’s people in the last 3000 years.

What, then, is the good news here?

We have seen that Hosea takes on the pagan system of encouragement of the gods, substituting mercy for fertility as what we most need from the gods. But the thing about mercy is that it is radically disruptive even of disruption. For, if we fail to seek mercy, will God then fail to be merciful?

^1.9 _…you are not my people and I am not your God.’ ¹⁰ Yet the number of the people of Israel shall be like the sand of the sea, which can be neither measured nor numbered; and in the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people’, it shall be said to them, ‘Children of the living God.’ ¹¹The people of Judah and the people of Israel shall be gathered together, and they shall appoint for themselves one head; and they shall take possession of the land, for great shall be the day of Jezreel.

This mercy against all expectation is a word which seems irrelevant to the sense for God’s grace and mercy implied in the Synod’s resolution, for the resolution allows no judgement which mercy might yet overturn.

Be that as it may, let us also keep in mind that the Word did not come to Hosea convict us of the sins of others. This reading of the Synod’s resolution at least serves to show how our very best intentions – and they are good intentions – can betray our best convictions: and so we can crucify the Son of God for God’s own sake.

In our best intentions we still need the mercy of the One whose very property is to be merciful. It is only then that we might begin to be merciful as God will be.

If our best effort today reveals that nothing much has changed since Hosea, we might wonder whether the prayer for mercy, for ourselves as well as for others, is more central to life with this God than we typically care to admit.

It’s not for nothing that this prayer falls in the very middle of our worship each week.

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Pentecost 5
14/7/2019

Hosea 4:1-3, 7-10
Psalm 51
Ephesians 5:21, 28-33
Mark 8:34-38

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

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“I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of slavery, (therefore)….
“You shall not commit adultery”

In our journey through the commandments it is worth recalling the way we have come. The first four, or perhaps five, commandments have to do with the being and character of the God of Israel. The promise: “I shall be your God; you shall be my people” inevitably implies how the covenant people are to live. That is what we have already heard in the demands of the previous commandments: what it is to have no other gods; to reject an idol; to honour the name of the Lord; to remember the Sabbath day; not to kill. That is to say, what is significant about the commandments is not merely their individual focus. The reason why each is to be obeyed is because the identity of the God of the covenant has first of all been established.

Therefore, each commandment illustrates the offer of a genuine freedom guaranteed by the covenant, not a new bondage. To isolate these commandments from this covenantal basis would be to make them into mere arbitrary assertions as to how people should behave. The fact that as a cold legalism this is how such injunctions are invariably understood readily gives rise to counter claims and contrary opinions, such as: “This commandment once made sense, but really not now in the modern world”.

To be specific, and given the inescapability of human sexuality, this seventh commandment concerning adultery appears to be one historically honoured as much in the breach as in the observance, and certainly no less in our day. Some weeks ago, an article appeared in The Age, by of all people a female Jewish rabbi, encouraging the potential value of a little bit of adultery. Although the article concluded by asking for reader response, there was none.  What does that silence signify? Presumably that the matter is of no real consequence to the wider society. Why, then, persevere with our undertaking?  One answer is that only if we can provide compelling reasons for taking account of anything that looks like a commandment is it conceivable that such considerations might gain a hearing in the contemporary climate.

To this end, each of the readings charts a profitable course for us to take. Hosea makes clear that moral confusion and disobedience in his day arise through religious apostasy. Because Israel has become faithless, there is no knowledge of Yahweh in the land. Despite his constancy, the people play the harlot in the attempt to forestall anarchy by making gods of the forces of nature. As night follows day, who the god is determines what the worshipper performs. In that religious culture, cultic prostitution existed in order to encourage the “gods” to be equally fertile by bringing rain, without which all is lost. For this reason, the commandment against adultery has real force in demonstrating the difference between Yahweh and the fertilising rain god Baal. When the prophets, as does Hosea, chastise the people for “whoring after false gods”, they use the word adultery because in that religiously pluralistic world loyalty to the one God is diluted, or adulterated. Again, and again the prophets show us how hard is the fight between the pure worship of Yahweh and the fertility rites of Baal and Ashtoreth, and of how idolatry and sexual license go together. For example, Jezebel, Ahab’s queen, is treated as “a whore’ for no other reason than that she introduced the worship of Baal into northern Israel. So, we are certain to miss the point if we restrict the matter of adultery merely to that of sexuality.

It is in this sense that eight centuries later Jesus describes the actual situation in which the world finds itself as an “evil and adulterous generation” seeking some sign. This description helps us to understand that adultery in the Bible refers in the first place more to theological irregularity than it does to sexual.

It is perhaps not made sufficiently clear that the word adultery is derived from the same root as the word “adulteration”. The word refers to corruption through association with an alien source – not the comedian’s play for laughs that adultery is associated with adults as infancy is with infants. Adultery always has to do with adulteration, with a breach of loyalty. That is why there is such a close connection between who God is understood to be, and what people believe is open to them in their dealings one with another.

But the difference between that world and our own is now considerable. Whereas the ancient texts link the religious and the sexual, we now live in the secularised Western world, where the self and its own future is detached from any redemptive context, and where religion is increasingly held in quiet or strident contempt. Because relationships become self-constructions, and because they are all we have, literally everything is expected of them.

In the final analysis, given the logic of the repudiation of the covenantal foundation of the commandment in favour of self-determination, the risk of adultery has to be inevitable.  With nothing to qualify the self, Jesus’ description of his own day as “an evil and adulterous generation seeking signs” assumes some force in our own technologically predatory society. While the serious minded are likely to espouse practical, if not theoretical serial monogamy, for many all that is left it seems is the frequently experienced insecurity, anxiety, and loneliness of the always at hand on-line search for the elusive encouraging “sign”.

Where God is not, compensatory “sign seeking” reveals how serious is the misunderstanding to think that today we are liberated from the ancient connection between human sexuality and faith in the God of the covenant.  But it is not just a case of their mutuality. It is how that mutuality is understood. In this respect, and with regard to marriage, Paul is saying something that otherwise would be exceedingly odd – that is, he makes marriage dependent on the love that Christ has for the church. Who would have thought that it is the Gospel that actually constitutes a marriage? That is to say, that the covenant of the natural – the relationship between husband and wife – is made dependent on the covenant of grace, the love that the Lord has for his church.

Once rooted in the Western tradition, secular society no longer understands this reversal, if indeed it ever did. It is not simply that marriage is able to be dismissed as “only a piece of paper”. It is that even if any connection at all is made between marriage and God, invariably it is to reverse this priority, and to make what the culture vacuously calls “religion” secondary to natural instinct. The problem is compounded when, as the increasingly hostile letters to the daily press reveal, it is apparent that the culture believes that “religion” should only be about religion, and not anything to do with the actual substance of what it means to be a human being. “Religion” thereby becomes merely a form of therapy if, or when, things go wrong, but only if one happens to be so inclined.

Inevitably, the culture must be incredulous of Paul’s insistence that it is Christ’s love for the Church that constitutes marriage. Perhaps we share that incredulity. Not surprisingly, therefore, where marriages are in difficulty it is as much likely to be due to an inadequate theology as to some manifestation of human incompatibility. What secular marriage guidance course helps rectify that? Is not the human condition to expect far too much of each other and ourselves in matters where we should not really expect much at all? And on the other hand, where we have every right to expect the gifts of God, just here in relation to human commitment, that we seldom seek them even if we knew that we can and should.

The Easter gospel of the vindication of the crucified One declares that this commandment has been so believed, and, consequently, has been truly lived in unadulterated faithfulness, even to death. This is what we affirm when the liturgy invites us to confess the faith of the Church, for example in the Nicene Creed, when we say “for us and for our salvation”.  And since this “us” of salvation is both public and universal in its scope, the commandment, too, has now become public truth, not just a private ethic for Jews and Christians.

In other words, continuing to live as do the people of the covenant in “an evil and adulterous generation”, the command: “You shall not commit adultery” has now become not only possible in principle, but actually achievable in practice. And that has to be good news.

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Pentecost 3
30/6/2019

Hosea 11:1-11
Psalm 107
Luke 9:51-60

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In a sentence:
Despite what we see, we are part of God’s work in God’s love

Everybody likes a story with a happy ending, and the preaching of Hosea is something of a happy ending story – at least, ‘on paper’. We have that story summarised for us this morning in chapter 11, in its move from covenant to betrayal to punishment to promised restoration.

The story begins with the touching intimacy God enjoyed with Israel, and they with him:

When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son…
…I was to them like those
who lift infants to their cheeks.^*
I bent down to them and fed them.  (11.1,4)

From there we hear of the betrayal – Israel’s turning away from God – and then of the judgement: the rage of the consuming and devouring sword.

The turning point of the drama is found in God’s coming to himself:

^11.8 How can I give you up, Ephraim?
How can I hand you over, O Israel?
…My heart recoils within me;
my compassion grows warm and tender.
⁹ I will not execute my fierce anger;
I will not again destroy Ephraim;
for I am God and no mortal,
the Holy One in your midst,
and I will not come in wrath.

And finally, there is a promised restoration:

^11.10 They shall go after the Lord,
who roars like a lion;
when he roars,
his children shall come trembling from the west.
¹¹ They shall come trembling like birds from Egypt,
and like doves from the land of Assyria;
and I will return them to their homes, says the Lord.

Here we have our ‘happy ending’.

And yet…for whom is it a happy ending? By the time of the promised return, the sword will have done its devastating work. Those who are crushed under the great weight of the Assyrians have no happy ending. And the text does not suggest that only the guilty – or the especially guilty – fall in this way, such that it is the less guilty who benefit from a change in the divine heart.

What, then, is actually promised here; what is the content of the happy ending for those who heard of it in advance and did not see it realised? The temptation is strong to ‘spiritualise’ the promise at this point. This we can do with the notion of a time and place outside messy history when all things are restored; we’ve come to call this ‘heaven’. Thus, while it might be the case that a few will experience some realisation of God’s promises in this world, those who don’t will experience it in the next. The idea of heaven is a way in which we can make personal the content of such promises as Hosea makes here, if they don’t quite reach us – personally – in time. ‘In the end’ comes to mean beyond the end. If I don’t survive the sword, heaven can still make me a beneficiary of the promise.

But this reading of the ending won’t do for Hosea. He sees the love God has for Israel, the judgement which is brought to bear on them, and the promised reconciliation as each being as real as the other. If God ‘really’ loves Israel here and now, and if there is a ‘real’ judgment here and now, then the promised return home is also ‘real’ in the same way.

But home-coming will not be realised for all who hear the promise. God promises to stand Israel back on its feet but it will not be all of old Israel. Again, it is not that the bad Israelites are gone and the good ones remain to start again. The promise is to no individual but to Israel as a whole: Israel as the object and the sign of God’s love.

This is to say that the divine promise is not here – and perhaps is not ever – quite about us as individuals: about you and me, here and now, isolated from the whole sweep of God’s life with creation. God is not a ‘solution’ to whatever here-and-now problem we have, is not a cure for whatever we think might ail us, is not a promise for this or that outcome in our lives.

Most of us know this, typically from bitter disappointment. But, just as typically, our disappointment springs from misunderstanding what God brings.

For, in fact, what God brings is ‘Israel’ and not merely any one of us as part of Israel (or of the church). Israel is the concrete and tangible object of God’s love – the subject of the divine covenant and of the prophets’ tirades. But Israel is also the not-yet fulfilled sign of that love, and so not quite any particular Israel or Israelite. ‘Israel,’ as the object of God’s love is us here and now, sometimes achieving, sometimes failing. Israel as the sign of God’s love stands where we want to be – this is the promise of coming to God and coming to ourselves which is not yet realised for us, and we look to see realised in others. Our healing is in theirs, who are yet to come.

This will become important later in our reflection on the Hosea’s call to justice and fairness but, for now, let’s note that it is not different from what we considered last week. There we saw that life comes from ‘overhearing’ an exchange which is not, in the first instance, quite about us. This week we see that, in God’s dealings with Israel – even for those within Israel itself – it is not quite about them, or us.

There is a drama unfolding, at the heart of which is Israel as object and sign of God’s love and commitment. Israel is central to the drama and so the story unfolds out of Israel’s engagement with God. But the principal protagonist is God. What brings God to the people in reconciliation is God himself. This we see in what we called earlier the ‘turning point’ in the drama unfolded in chapter 11. The saving moment is not the return home at the lion’s roar but when God remembers: when Israel was a child, I lifted him to my cheek.

The promised restoration of the community is a word not only to the community itself but to God. The tangible Israel to which Hosea preached is the object of God’s love; future, restored Israel is a sign, pointing to what must not be forgotten – most of all by God. To say that there will be a restoration of Israel is to say more about God’s future – that God will continue to be one who lifts a beloved child to cheek – than it is say something about the future of any one of us.

None of this is to say that what actually happens here and now doesn’t matter, or that we as individuals don’t matter to God. The rage of the prophets for justice and fairness in Israel is there precisely because the needs of any one of us matters.

But Israel – and, with care, the church with Israel – is part of something bigger than what it seems to be at any point. For the most part we see only ourselves, and promises sound mostly to be about an extension of ourselves. Yet God’s promise springs from coming to himself: ‘How can I give you up…?’ What is promised is the extension of God.

This has, perhaps, been a rather challenging reading of what is happening in Hosea’s 11^th chapter, and I suspect it still needs to be refined at a couple of places. But the point is perhaps well summarised in this way: the promise which God makes despite the felt presence of the consuming sword of Israel’s enemies is that God’s cause – which is Israel’s very reason for being – is not going to be lost in the disaster falling upon them. The promise is not that anyone of them will survive but that even after all that God will be the same God who began this adventure, doing the same things toward the same end, and that means there will still need to be an Israel to lift to the cheek.

The word of promise then – the thing which believers believe – is that God will triumph over – and for – God’s people.

Our lives are to be oriented toward that promise, that triumph, because the promise is that even we who do not see the promised land ourselves are part of what God is doing.

We do not know what God’s work will finally look like but our lives are a part of it, even now when it is not fulfilled. As we move further into Hosea we will see that this is what drives the call to justice and fairness in Israel.

Until then we turn to God’s turning to himself and hear him declare, ‘How can I give you up? I will not…’

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Easter 7
2/6/2019

Genesis 4:1-9
Psalm 71
Hebrews 12:18-19; 22-24
Matthew 5:21-22

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

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“I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of slavery, (therefore)….”
“You shall not kill”

To this point the commandments might easily be heard as if they had relevance only for a special people.  However, it is crucial to take account of the fact that from the very beginning the whole of creation is embraced in principle in the particular status which the Hebrew people enjoy. As early as the call of Abraham we hear that “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). Therefore, assumptions like the slick couplet: “How odd of God to choose the Jews”, is only half the story.  This apparently exclusive election actually anticipates that the blessing which Israel is called to embody will be universally celebrated. To this end, obedience of the commandments offers the promise: that the Gentiles are indeed destined to come to the light. In other words, the very existence of this chosen people is the mandate for their mission. They don’t have to do anything else but to live the covenantal promise as light to the world. Easily said, of course, given the way their history went, as does ours. If we wonder what mission means for churches today, here is a powerful precedent. The decisive matter is simply that if all of these commandments were to be obeyed, then the whole creation would receive new life.

This is the context for this sixth commandment: “You shall not kill”, which more accurately reads: “You shall not murder”. The distinction is important. It reminds us that the commandment is directed in the first place against violent, unauthorised killing. It forbids people from taking matters into their own hands, remembering that at the same time the law of Moses did provide elsewhere for both capital punishment and war. Military conflict between the nations, for example, often had as its object defence against an intolerable threat to human life.

Those who delight in taking a scalpel to the Bible observe this apparent inconsistency that the killing of people is not only reported in the Old Testament, but occurs often without any objection; indeed, it may even happen in specific instances in obedience to the command of God.  But it is equally clear that such apparently justified killing is an exception. It occurs only within the wider judgement of God penetrating human history and society. It is never something which can be contemplated in the spirit of human revenge.

We might readily conclude that all of this is really of little help in giving a clear answer to the enormously difficult ethical questions that confront us in such a changed social and religious situation. The distinction between killing and murder seems to be only of historical interest. It remains relevant, to be sure, for those who are tempted to take physical vengeance into their own hands, and for thugs who go about with flick knives or who carry shotguns in their cars to be fired off when the whim takes them. But most of us do not find this to be a real temptation to be overcome.

Much more pertinent in the recent past were the distressing and perplexing questions that confronted our society, and still remain in force in others, such as the conflicts about capital punishment, or the legitimacy or not of taking up arms in time of war. More specifically, in our own day the commandment has a bearing on two fundamental issues having to do with the beginning and end of life: abortion on demand, and assisted dying. It is telling to note the euphemistic language frequently employed when each is the subject of debate. Such new- speak suggests an awareness that there are darker realities hidden below the surface that require to be sanitised. Nevertheless, it would be foolish to disregard appropriate guidance in particular instances from qualified experts, perhaps as a first word, if not as the last. But these considerations are quite other than what is surely inconceivable from the standpoint of this commandment – the unrelenting shrill demand that “My body is my own”. One cannot imagine any clearer illustration of the death of God in our culture than this dogmatic assertion. The truth is that this commandment cannot have any future wherever the culture insists in principle that in any action bearing on the preservation, or yielding, of life, anything more than my individual decision needs to be considered.

But where a society still feels the need for such a commandment prohibiting killing, we might reflect on the fact that what is at stake here comes as a commandment.

“You shall not kill” is quite specifically a command of the God confessed to be the creator of life. This means that it is not a piece of human wisdom which human beings may feel free to modify according to inclination or prevailing circumstances. What’s more, because the prohibition against killing is understood to be a commandment of God, it follows that God is not to be made subject to his own law. That is to say, the commandment is not greater than the one who gives it. Since it is God, and not human beings, who is the creator and preserver of life, it follows that human life is not a kind of “second” god. This means that the commanded protection of life may conceivably in extreme circumstances consist in its surrender and sacrifice.

This was the agonising decision which dissenting Christians involved in the plot against Hitler in Nazi Germany had to wrestle with. In order to keep faith with the commandment, they had to break it in this literal specific case. The “many” prevailed over the “one” in order to honour the preservation of larger life. As practising Christians, those involved knew that human life is not sacred in and of itself. They came to do what they did, not out of some expedient disobedience of the commandment, but in obedience to a more immediate and costly word.

Which helps us as we come to the Gospel today. Here, the focus of the commandment is disconcertingly concentrated, potentially nailing each and every-one of us to the ground. We are confronted by its radical expansion: “You have heard that it was said to the people of old ‘You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgement’. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with brother or sister shall be liable to judgement …” (Matthew 5:2l-22).

It is significant that Jesus does not speak against killing as such, but rather radicalises the concept of murder: whoever is angry with another, and calls him or her a fool, incurs the judgement of the commandment in the same way as the one who in the simple sense of the term wilfully takes the life of another. Who can claim to be guiltless in the face of this expansion?

For most of us, the murderer is suppressed or chained, whether by the command of God, or by convention, circumstances, or fear of punishment. Yet if it is anger that is the ultimate problem, then the killer is very much alive in the cage, ready to leap out at any time. After all, Cain as we heard, was not an especially depraved type, but simply a man living in the heart of an ordinary family. What marks the difference between Cain and Abel is that Cain is not reconciled to God; he is, we might say, theologically unreconciled. And it is this anger that transfers to Abel, and so gives rise to murder. The point is that – incomprehensible though it be for contemporary society to grasp – anger is ultimately a theological problem.

Which explains why it is in the midst of this angry and murderous world, in which both God and humans are implicated, that a word of life and resurrection has been spoken, precisely by the Murdered One, “whose sprinkled blood, as we heard in the Epistle, speaks a better word than the blood of Abel”. The sprinkled blood of both was shed, not by “killer types”, but by ordinary people like ourselves. Perhaps it all comes to rest in the simple question of the black American spiritual: “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”

In the light of Jesus’ expansion of the ancient commandment, and of which his fate is deadly illustration, must we not give an answer like this to that simple but penetrating question: “I was there, and I still am”.

And if this be so, then the conclusion is surely inescapable.

It becomes impossible to imagine ourselves saying: “‘You shall not kill’ is at least one commandment I’m not tempted to break”.