St Wilfrid, Haywards Heath eucharist 10.2.21

Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile… it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come… evil things come from within, and they defile a person. Mark 7:18, 21, 23

As a priest committed to the Daily Office I am regularly brought up short when I am able to go to the monastery at Crawley Down since they say the Psalms much slower than I do in my private devotions. Through sharing their Office I recognise how much I say prayers ‘to get through them’ rather than to be fully present to God. I slow down on my return!

Left to myself my prayer easily goes off the rails and becomes self oriented. In his earthly ministry Jesus made a point of challenging self-satisfied religion as in this incident in Mark Chapter 7 following accusations that his disciples hadn’t washed before dinner as the purity laws required. Mark is handing on the story to Gentile Christians who in his day were engaged in a similar conflict over the degree they should take on Jewish practice. 

It’s not the food going into us that matters so much as the words and deeds that come out of us. How brilliant a capacity Jesus has of turning things on their head!

Jesus knew our nature through and through. His challenge to ritual law doesn’t extend to the core commandments of God but gives a reminder to examine spiritual practices lest they get disassociated from the call to obey God and become ends in themselves, and that can be true of joining in a streamed weekday eucharist!

Our Lord saw the heart of the human problem as being the human heart. Our relationship with God is from the heart, from deep within, or else it is a formality.

Melvyn Bragg once asked Rowan Williams what God meant to him. Here’s the answer he gave: ‘God is first and foremost that depth around all things and beyond all things into which, when I pray, I try to sink. But God is also the activity that comes to me out of that depth, tells me I’m loved, that opens up a future for me, that offers transformation I can’t imagine. Very much a mystery but also very much a presence. Very much a person’.

Seeking God is a business of committing trustfully to him as the depth beyond all things, to see the world as no longer a flat surface but to descend to the goodness at the heart of all things and be impacted. To be caught up into something utterly mysterious and countercultural which is divine reality. 

Saying our prayers, attending the eucharist, reading our Bibles, serving our neighbour and reflecting regularly upon our need for God are expressions of that quest.