27th Sunday

27th Sunday

We are members of each other

Is. 5.1-7; Phil. 4.6-9; Mt. 21.33-43.

The three readings make a kind of curious ensemble. The first and third readings are obviously like bookends. This metaphor, that goes all through the scriptures of the Hebrew bible and the New Testament, of Israel, of the Jews, as God's vineyard plays itself out in Isaiah and this little parable from Jesus. The problem, of course, is the same problem that the prophet Isaiah and Jesus complained about, namely, people doing violence to each other. These references to bloodshed, in Isaiah, and all this bloodletting in this little parable from Jesus, as well.

But they are a funny kind of set of bookends because between them you have this seeming island of peace and tranquillity. "Don't worry about anything. And everything that you request be made to God. Peace of God which surpasses all understanding, guard your hearts. And whatever is pleasing, commendable and excellent...." It's so nice and elegant. And how does that fit? Well, I'd like to take some time this morning to see how these things might be connected.

It is important to remember that when Paul wrote to the Philippians he was in jail and fully expecting to be killed for preaching the gospel, for behaving in a way, just as Jesus did, that upset all kinds of people. In other words, the violence and the terrible disintegration of the human family that we see in Isaiah and the parable from Jesus, also underlie this seemingly placid surface of Paul's words to the Philippians.

So all this sweet talk about the peace of God, and not worrying about anything, does not come cheaply. And this is, of course, what I think is the whole point of this exercise, even if you take all this wonderful stuff...whatever is pure, honourable and just, pleasing, commendable. This, by the way, is the standard litany of virtues that any good Roman citizen would have recognized from Stoic philosophy. But the interesting thing is the way Paul can absorb all that aristocratic gentility into a world that is marked by profound violence. And then, that he can distil, out of that combination, this marvellous vision of the peace of God which surpasses all understanding.

This text is one of my favourites. Every time that I had to preach a sermon for a graduation and I could pick my own text, I always picked this. "Whatever is true, honourable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent, worthy of praise..." That's great stuff. Before I knew more about Paul and his letter to the Philippians, it meant for me and for most of us today, a kind of self-preservation. I look for the noble and elegant life. I look to be in line with nature and the way things are really supposed to be in whatever source of nature might be. But what happens with Paul is a radical shift of that in a couple of extraordinarily important ways. That is, Paul will say that this self-perfectibility now is only adequate for the Christian in so far as it joins us to each other. So, we have a radically different horizon over against which we hear all this stuff. This is an amazing kind of shift. Because I'd like to know, I'm interested in what's noble and honourable although even today those words sound funny to our ears. So we might change the language to: whatever is cool. whatever is decent. Whatever is awesome. Whatever is self-fulfilling. The thought is the same. But somehow Paul makes this enormous leap of imagination. Because he can somehow combine that all elegance with the fact that life, for the Christian, is going to involve bloodshed. The shedding of our own blood. Suffering. The cross. Here is then, an extraordinarily different constellation of things. Because I can be quite content thinking of all the self-help and the self-perfection stuff. Bookstores have rows and rows and rows of books about how to achieve that. I can do that without any thought of anyone else and certainly without any thought of suffering, except maybe the self-discipline that I have to endure in order to sensitise myself to whatever is self-fulfilling or cool and all the rest of it.

So there is something wonderful that emerges in this. First of all, as all kinds of other people have pointed out, this passage is one of the great testaments to Christian humanism. To be a Christian is to be fully human. To be fully human is to be absolutely devoted to all these ennobling things... honourable, just, pure, commendable, excellent etc. etc. But unlike everybody else and certainly unlike the Stoic understanding all these must pass through the alembic of the cross. They have to be distilled out of the painful effort to break open my eyes and my heart to the reality of everybody else, above all, to the poor, above all, the marginalized, above all, those who suffer. So that the transformation is not apart from all this good stuff, these noble aims, but rather raises them, but first of all, relativizes them, so that they are not an end in themselves: my self-perfection. Rather, they are essentially shared. They become parts of a whole new kind of life which Paul, will describe in another place when he says that, "We are members of each other." Or, if you remember in last week's reading in that famous hymn earlier in the liturgy to the Philippians, where he would say : "Make my joy complete. Be of the same mind. Be in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing of selfish ambition or conceit but in humility regard others as better than yourself. Look each of you not to your own interest but to the interest of others." No Stoic would sit still for that.

But that's what he's saying to us. And of course the cross is that great transitional moment whereby all of this wonderful human stuff is not abandoned but transformed.

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