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LENT III, Year C: March 11 2007

What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6.8): the voice of Jesus

Lectionary readings: Psalms 63 1-9; Isaiah 55 1-9;Lk 13 1-9; 1 Cor 10 1-13

In our Lent course of sermons this year we are reflecting on the passage from Micah chapter 6 where the prophet asks the people of Israel 'with what shall I come before the Lord? Shall I come with sacrifices, and burnt offerings, rivers of oil?' No, he answers: and he reminds the people: what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?'. Micah sums up in a sentence the legal, ethical and covenant requirements of the faithful.

And through Lent we are examining what this means for us and how various people have responded to this. In Lent I Fr Andrew has dealt with an aspect of Paul's engagement with the justice of God at the altar receiving the bread and the wine is received which transforms and sets priorities for behaviour that are just; last week Fr Andrew preached on the OT prophets and their understanding of the justice of God and the consequences this must have for the behaviour of people within their societies. This week we are reflecting on the response of Jesus in the context of this passage from Micah.

In some ways it seems odd to think of Jesus, the Son of God, the Eternal Word who in the beginning was God and was with God, as responding to this. So much of our language and our thoughts are about how we respond to Him; what his Presence calls forth from us.

But obviously Jesus was both Man and God : and was brought up with the religion of his people , of their understanding of God and the special covenant they had with Him. Jesus was recognised by His people, save in his home town of Nazareth, to be a great teacher, a great expositer of the Scriptures. And so it is highly significant for us to note with what piece of scripture Jesus' public ministry began. In his home synagogue he is given the scrolls to read and he choses a passage from Isaiah:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. Because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind to let the oppressed go free to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour

And as he rolls up the scroll he says 'Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing'. His teaching provokes hostility as he emphasises the way in which God reaches out to those who stood outside the covenant: there were many widows in Israel, he told them, when there was a terrible famine in the time of Elijah – but God did not send him to the widows of Israel but to a gentile women in Sidon; there were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha, but none were cleansed of their leprosy except Naaman the Syrian – another one who stood outside the covenant. And having heard Jesus point to the actions of God in drawing close to those who stood outside the covenant, the people of Nazareth went to destroy him, so angered were they with what he was saying.

And in this teaching we see the priority that Luke gives in the ministry of Jesus to those who are outsiders; to those who stand outside the camp; to those who are on the margins. In those early chapters of Luke, the story turns to figures conspicuously on the edge of things- a childless aging couple Zechariah and Elizabeth; the yet to be married village girl who is to be the mother of Jesus; and all the characters around Jesus are on the margins: it is to shepards that the angel appears at the Incarnation – to people who could not give evidence in a court, so far outside the rules did they live : Luke tells us of the strange and lonely figures of Simeon and Anna in the Temple blessing the baby Jesus. And John the Baptist himself, condemns those standing within the covenant as a brood of vipers yet baptises tax collectors and soldiers.

And as Luke unfolds his account of Jesus's ministry we hear of more outsiders: Jesus in the pharisees house with the sinful woman who bathes his feet and anoints them with ointment. The Pharisee says: if this man was really a prophet he would know who and what kind of women she was who is touching him – she is a sinner'. We hear the parable of the good Samaritan – the people despised by Jesus's people. We hear of Zacchaeus, the dishonest tax collector climbing a tree to get a better look: astonished to find Jesus passing beneath and looking up: telling him to 'come down from the tree for I must stay at your house today': to the irritation of the crowd for he has gone to the house of the sinner.

The attention of OL is to those who stand outside and he goes out to be with them. To the disapproval of the crowd who have discounted that outsider from their community: who do not want that person inside the camp.

What does this mean? Does it mean , that Jesus can be said to have a bias to the outsider? ; does he have a 'bias to the poor' as Bp David Shephard entitled his book and asserted in the 1980's? Is Jesus' ministry primarily directed just to the poor and the marginalised? ; and does he seek to overthrow those with the power and the wealth? Luke's version of the Sermon on Mount has Him say ' blessed are the poor for your is the Kingdom of God; and woe to you who are rich for you have received your consolation.'

In Luke Jesus's ministry appears to show that God's transcendence is present in those who do not have a voice and with those who do not have any power to affect the world in which they live. God is with those who have been judged by the world as having lost any right to be included and counted.

But Jesus is not with them because they are especially virtuous. Zacchaeus is still a corrupt tax collector; the woman in the Pharisees house bathing Jesus's feet is a sinner; God is with them not because of their virtue, but simply because they are outsiders.

God is there with them because they are on the outside; But just because he stands with the outsider, we should not fall into the mistake of thinking that God therefore stands over and against and in opposition to those who are insiders. We should not be tempted to say that because God stands with those on the outside, he must be against the insider. To look at God in that way would mean that God was simply creating a new order of exclusion: God was turning out those currently inside the tent and so excluding them; and turning to those currently outside the tent and calling them in, to replace the lot that had just been ejected. To believe that is to believe in a God who is just as much about excluding as he is about including. And that seems to me not to be the message of the Gospel. We are called into a new way of dealing with each other that does not discount anyone; that does not exclude. We proclaim a Gospel of inclusion and affirmation for all.

Is not Luke's account of Jesus's ministry this: that God is in the connections that we cannot make with people; that Jesus lies in the gap that we have created between us and the person left out.

God appears in the situations that arise when we so badly managed our personal relationships, or our societies, or our churches, that someone is left out . Someones interest is discounted; someone's welfare is overlooked; someone's life is placed at less value in the scale of things than the life of the person with power and the influence. Jesus is in the gap between the powerful and the power less.

And as we are confronted with that gap and the presence of OL within the gap, we are drawn to an awareness of the existence of the gap: we are drawn to enlarge our world beyond the limited horizons of our own self interest; we lift our eyes beyond what immediately concerns us, and we see, perhaps for the first time, the person outside knocking on the window wanting to come in; we begin see, perhaps for the first time. the gap that exists between how I live my life here in Cambridge and how a person tries to live their life in Dafur . Christ stands within the gap and calls us to abandon our moral short sightedness. Christ calls us to grow into the 'intelligence of the victim' (to use a phrase of Rowan Williams) as a way of aligning ourselves with the Wisdom of God.

It means we must live so as to grow into the freedom that enables us to see things from the view point of the excluded and to grow with them into a common understanding within our lives in Christ. Surely those are the values of the Magnificat: not to place new structures in the place of old; not to erect new powers in place of the old powers, but to bring about a mutual transformation of all of us: a new way of thinking : a new economy of God. Power is made perfect not in anybody's strength but in weakness.

'... he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, he has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly'.

William Wilberforce 200 years ago when he started his campaign to abolish the slave trade, must have seen Christ standing in the gap between comfortable English society and those whose lives were blighted by slavery; he was drawn to Christ's presence in that gap and appealed to others in Parliament to lose their moral shortsightedness and pass the necessary legislation to abolish the trade. There were many who no doubt did not see the outsiders knocking on the window, but Wilberforce did through his Christian faith, and he expanded people's horizons so that they saw those people too.

For those who campaigned against Apartheid in South Africa, they pointed to the gap between those for whose interests that society was operated and those whose interests were discounted. They called people to see the gap and how it had to be changed.

These are easy examples: but Christ is in so many gaps around us that stand between us and those that we have excluded or those whom we do not see have been excluded. He calls us into those gaps. Perhaps it takes a Wilberforce to make us aware that there is a gap, that there are outsiders knocking at the window wanting to come in. But we are all called to broaden our horizons, to eliminate our shortsightedness and to embrace the outsider so that we be united in the Body of Christ, so that both we and those who stand outside are all changed.