James Crocker's Homily (3 March 2011)

James Crocker, first year graduate theologian here at Oriel, delivered an excellent homily at last night's Choral Eucharist on our reliance upon God.  Please have a look...

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readings: James 5:1-6 & Mark 10:46-52

Tonight I’d like to set up a parallel, and then draw a contrast between the rich as described by James, and Bartimaeus, the blind begger, in Mark’s Gospel. I’d like for us to consider what the real difference between them is, and I’m going to suggest that the difference is that one of them realizes something that is generally true of life, which the other misses completely, that our security and joy does not ultimately lie in our own efforts.

In the passage from James, we see the brother of Jesus, and the very first leader of the church, echoing the prophets of the Old Testament in condemning wealth and power in the strongest terms. However, despite his strong language, it is clear that he is not simply condemning wealth for its own sake. Even though the New Testament often implies that “wealth can be a particularly strong obstacle to Christian discipleship,”[1] in and of itself wealth is simply passive and can be used for good or for evil.

In order to get to the bottom of James’ denunciation, we need to examine the text more closely. What is it that he actually condemns the rich for?

First, ‘Your riches have rotted…their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire.’[2] Of course, we know that gold and silver don’t actually corrode, but that isn’t the point. The point is that they have been gathered up and left in reserve – imagine someone stockpiling grain which then rots, and is of no use to anyone. I think that is the image we’re working with here, but applied to the riches that James’ targets have actually gathered. Rather than using their riches for good, to clothe and feed the poor for example, they have kept them as insurance for their future. This is why he says ‘you have laid up treasure in the last days.’ This is a warning very similar to Jesus’ parable in Luke 12 – a man has filled up his barn with grain, and he has still more, so he decides to tear down his barn and build bigger ones, thinking that in this way he will be secure for many years, and can simply lie back and enjoy life. Jesus says, ‘But God said to him, “Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.’

In fact, James has already made this point. The section we are looking at is written as a parallel to the section which immediately precedes it, where James says that it is foolish to be so confident about all of our plans for the future, in verse 15 of the previous chapter he says ‘you ought to say “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.’ In this way James, following Jesus (and, incidentally, the book of Ecclesiastes) shows us that planning for our future security can be foolish if we are not mindful of our own transitory nature.

The other two specific charges of James are intimately related: ‘Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and…have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and self-indulgence. [in short] you have murdered the righteous person.’

The social context which James is writing into had a great disparity between rich and poor. If a poor farmer could not meet his tax burden or his debts, he would end up having to sell his smallholding to a rich landowner, and then hope to be hired as a day laborer, even on the land which used to be his. These day laborers would be paid at the end of each day because that is literally all they would have, and without it their families would go hungry. There is recognition of this problem in the Old Testament law – in Deuteronomy 24 is written, ‘you shall not oppress a hired servant who is poor and needy…You shall give him his wages on the same day, before the sun sets (for he is poor and counts on it), lest he cry against you to the LORD, and you be guilty of sin.’ This is undoubtedly what is in James’ mind as he writes this. The wealthy people that he is writing about have disobeyed this law, and in contrast to the desperate situation of the defrauded laborers, are living in luxury, but ultimately under judgment. ‘You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter.’

So we can say that ‘the hoarding of wealth is wrong not just because it demonstrates utterly false priorities, it is doubly sinful because it deprives others of their…lives.’[3]

We will now turn to consider the story of Bartimaeus. He was a blind man who sat outside the city of Jericho begging. There are some striking details in his story in Mark. He calls Jesus by the messianic title ‘Son of David’. This is interesting because other than the demon-possessed and Peter, Bartimaeus is the only one to call Jesus by a messianic title. It is part of Mark’s acute sense of irony that as Jesus is surrounded by his disciples and a large crowd who follow him, it is only a blind man who sees that he is the savior of Israel. Understanding this, Bartimaeus cries out to him ‘Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me!’ The crowd tells him to be quiet, but he can’t be stopped. Jesus stops and calls him, and when Jesus calls, he throws off his cloak and goes to Jesus. Some commentators suggest that beggars of his day would spread their cloak out around them to collect money given to them, so by throwing off his cloak, Bartimaeus is perhaps leaving behind all his worldly possessions at Jesus’ call.[4]

Jesus asks Bartimaeus what he wants, and Bartimaeus asks only for his sight. Jesus responds like this: ‘Go your way, your faith has made you well.’ What does it mean that his faith has made him well? That he believed Jesus could do it? That he saw that he was the Son of David? Maybe that he left everything he had behind to approach Jesus? Or something else? That’s not really what I want to focus on actually. Rather I’d like to consider his response to Jesus. Jesus tells him to go his way, and yet Mark notes that ‘immediately he recovered his sight, and followed him on the way.’ Through his faith, Jesus’ way became Bartimaeus’ way.

To sum up, I’d like to make the contrast between the rich one and Bartimaeus even more explicit. The rich are rich, Bartimaeus was not. Yet the rich James is talking about save in order to cling to absolute self-reliance, and steal from the poor in order to support their own lavish life style. Bartimaeus, at the suggestion of Jesus threw aside his worldly goods and received his sight as a blessing which not even the richest person could buy, and followed Jesus on the way. The rich one relies on himself, but ‘riches provide no spiritual benefit in the present, nor do they give grounds for hope’[5] in the future. Bartimaeus relies on Jesus, and is made complete.

What does this mean for us? We need to ask ourselves, do we resemble the rich, or Bartimaeus? Do we try to pretend that God is not real, that our only hope lies in ourselves, and as a result harm others in the pursuit of some sort of vain security, or passing pleasure? Or do we rejoice in God’s revelation of himself and of his love for us in the savior, Jesus, and so let go of our selfish and vain pursuits?

I suspect for most of us, and certainly for myself, it is the former. We are consumed by worry about our futures, about jobs, about funding, about all kinds of social activities, and family worries, and I will not deny that these are important. However, when this worry becomes stronger than our faith in God, we can be, as the rich in James are, doubly sinful, forgetting our true priorities, and willing to harm others, or even to withhold help, all for our own benefit.

Of course, most of us are not rich, but we still life a life of privilege. We should not forget God’s specific blessings to us in allowing us to be here studying or working in Oxford. This is why we thank God for our benefactors in the College prayer, and why we also pray that God would help us to use the benefits which they have given to us rightly – we should realize that we are responsible to God for how we use our time here in Oxford. And I suppose if you remember nothing else from tonight, I would hope that next time you hear the college prayer the words will perhaps have a greater weight of meaning to them.

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[1] Douglas Moo, The Letter of James: An Introduction and Commentary. (Leicester: IVP, 1985), 160.

[2] Scripture quotations taken from the English Standard Version.

[3] Moo, 162.

[4] Morna Hooker, A Commentary on the Gospel According to Mark. (London: A&C Black, 1991), 253.

[5] Moo, 161.

Celebrating the Gospel in English (27 February 2011)

To conclude this term's sermon series, Gospel and Culture, I spoke this past Sunday about the ways God  uses our own language both to bring us closer to His Word and to each other in discerning it.

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readings: Isaiah 45.18-25; John 7.37-end

Sometimes I am inclined to ask myself if I really am ‘my brother’s keeper’.  Or, for that matter, if there is indeed such a thing these days as ‘manna from heaven’.  As I voice these doubts, it might occur to you, oh, ‘How are the mighty fallen!’ to which I might respond that it was ‘out of the mouths of babes’ that I came to learn that there is ‘nothing new under the sun’.  Now this, I grant you, might be seem a bit ‘holier than thou’, such that one would do well to ‘turn the other cheek’ or perhaps instead ‘fight the good fight’.  This, however, could prove a problem if one doesn’t ‘suffer fools gladly’, for as we all know, ‘the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’.  I might just get out by ‘the skin of my teeth’, but after all, it’s ‘by their fruits ye shall know them’.  And so on and so on and so forth.

At the first Choral Evensong of this term, I began our sermon series Gospel and Culture by suggesting that whether we’re aware of it or not, our culture remains saturated in Christian language and Christian categories of thought.  And there is perhaps no more obvious example of this than the variety of metaphors, images and expressions derived from the Bible that continue even to this day to leave their imprint upon our use of English.  And not just any Bible, but a particular version of the Bible, the one known as the Authorised Version or the King James Bible.  As many of you will already know, this year marks the 400^th anniversary of the King James, and we here at Oriel will add to countless other commemorations happening around the country with our own event here in College next term.  But why, you may be wondering, should we be making such a fuss about the anniversary of a Bible translation?  Here it may help to remember that for people across Europe in the sixteenth century, being able to read the Bible in their own language represented the ability to experience God’s Word directly, rather than second-hand through clergy schooled in the Latin Vulgate.  And while the King James was not the first Bible translation into English and in many ways is indebted to its predecessors, nonetheless it symbolizes the settlement of nearly a century of conflict in both the English Church and the State.  As an act of political, religious and scholarly consensus, then, the King James was and is a formidable achievement.  Yet for all this, we are still left asking the question, what exactly is it that 400 years later we today are being asked to celebrate?  Few if any would now regard reading the Bible in our own tongue as remarkable, and translations of the Bible proliferate in an astonishing variety of forms.  Ironically, then, I would suggest that what we are really celebrating when we celebrate the King James Bible is not that we can read the Bible in English but rather that the Bible has the power to read us and to do so in terms we can understand.  For when we celebrate the Gospel in English, we are in fact celebrating what, very loosely speaking, is ‘English’ in the Gospel.

Now, in making in this claim, let me hasten to add that in no sense am I advocating a chauvinistic reading of scripture, as though there were something fundamentally better or different about the Bible in English than when it appears in any other tongue.  Rather, it’s a recognition that when any of us reads scripture, regardless of our cultural context, we are listening for God’s voice through the medium of human language, and the process of doing so inevitably shapes us.  We listen for words that will help us make sense of what we may already be thinking or feeling, even as God may be using those same words to try shape those thoughts and feelings in new ways.  If we are reading the Bible creatively and attentively, then, it seems to me that our reading functions as a kind of symbiosis between our words and God’s meaning.  God reflects back to us in words that are particular and resonant for us the universal meaning of the Good News in Christ.  It may have been this that the poet George Herbert, himself also very much a product of the culture that produced the King James Bible, it may have been this Herbert was getting at when he wrote of the Bible that ‘in ev’ry thing / Thy words do finde me out’ and ‘make me understood’.  Who is to say that it is not part of God’s own work to take up the very beauty and power, as well as the humour and strangeness, of the English Bible to awaken us to His presence in the lives we are living here and now? 

            That this might be possible would seem to place an enormous burden of responsibility on those whose work it has been over the generations actually to translate the scriptures into various languages.  What if they’ve gotten something badly wrong, what then?  Be it in the specific work of translation or the more general act of interpretation, what unforeseen consequences might there be for the community of faith if the Bible were to be mistranslated or misconstrued?  But here it may be worth turning to another figure in the Anglican firmament, the great Elizabethan divine Richard Hooker, who even before the King James Bible even appeared, insisted on the absolute importance of reading scripture aloud in church as part of the divine service.  Hooker’s defence of this practice against those who would leave Bible reading up to individuals was rooted in his belief that only as a community can we hope to discern the scriptures’ wider meaning (V.19.5).  We read them aloud as a form of worship, because we are acknowledging that no one of us alone can possibly make total sense of them and God teaches us through others’ contribution to the process of discernment.  Reading them together, then, not only guards against error, either in translation or interpretation, but also affirms the coherence of the worshipping community.  Only if we listen together do we have any hope of discovering God’s meaning together, of sharing the language in its richness, and in turn, of speaking that language richly and coherently to the world. 

            Yet as both of our readings from scripture remind us unambiguously, it is first and foremost God who speaks, and it is we who are called to listen and to keep listening for God’s Word to us.  ‘I have not spoken in secret,’ declares God in the Book of Isaiah, ‘I the Lord speak righteousness, I declare things that are right’; and again, ‘I have sworn by myself, the word is gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and shall not return’ (45.19, 23).  This is the universal reality, that God originates Truth and leaves it to spread and blossom upon the countless tongues of the earth.  In our reading from the Gospel of John, Jesus makes his offer of salvation in terms of the same scriptural tradition, even as he challenges his listeners to receive it with fresh ears and with a different accent (7.38).  Yet what we also witness in this episode is how culturally-conditioned ways of reading scripture sometimes get in the way of its wider meaning, rather than serve to open it up or clarify it.  And so Jesus’ opponents use scripture as a weapon against him rather than as an opportunity for shared discernment (vv.41-4).  Perhaps the most striking statement in the whole passage is actually made by the officers of the Temple, who, when asked why they haven’t already arrested Jesus, respond simply: ‘Never man spake like this man’ (v.46).  The living Word will indeed make itself known regardless of our human efforts either to promote or silence it, and it is only those who finally stop talking long enough to listen who may yet hear something new and transformative in what has always been there.

            And so might well we celebrate our Gospel in English, knowing it promises to mould and teach us in ways we cannot anticipate, even when the words and images and stories are all reassuring in their familiarity.  For in our responses to it, it has a way of reflecting back to us our own assumptions, our own deeper feelings about ourselves and each other.  And in this, the cultural specificity of our approach to God is precisely the place where God promises to surprise us the most.  Here a cadence or a turn of phrase, an alliteration or an abrupt ending, can sometimes suggest to us a universe of meaning where on a previous encounter we had noticed only a grain of sand.  And to multiply this potential in accordance with the fullness of the community is to see at once how varied God’s Word may be, as well as to appreciate how it may reinforce what already binds us together.  For language is what we have, and it is what God has always used to make his Word known to us.  So we continue to listen, may we have both the courage and patience to discover what faithful people in all tongues and all cultures have always found to be the case: that ‘never man spake like this man’.