St Richard, Haywards Heath Mount Sinai & Mount Calvary 15.3.23

In 2020 I visited the William Blake exhibition at Tate Britain in London and among the exhibitions was this sketch of Moses receiving the Law made around 1780. 

Blake, famous as author of the poem Jerusalem our unofficial English anthem, captures the contrast between Christ and Moses in his poem ‘The Everlasting Gospel’:

"Jesus was sitting in Moses Chair/They brought the trembling Woman There 

Moses commands she be stoned to Death/What was the sound of Jesus breath/

He laid his hand on Moses Law/The Ancient Heavens in Silent Awe/

Writ with Curses from Pole to Pole/All away began to roll"/

In today’s eucharistic readings we focus on the gift of God’s Law through Moses fulfilled in Christ. In Deuteronomy 4 we heard how keeping the Law among Jews would lead to other nations applauding them as a godly people. Our Lord in the Gospel passage from Matthew 5 insists he has not come ‘to abolish but to complete’ the Law and the Prophets. He goes on to say the one ‘who infringes even one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be considered the least in the kingdom of heaven’. 

It is important to see the severity of this Gospel passage in context. It follows the key teaching of the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount which summarises the Law of Moses in the commandment to love God and to love your neighbour as yourself. St Matthew’s Gospel is addressed to Jewish Christians so it emphasises the continuity between Moses and Christ with both going up a mountain to teach. Blake’s impressive figure of Moses receiving the Law up in the clouds of Mount Sinai is fulfilled by Christ both on the Mount of Beatitudes and Mount Calvary. ‘The curses roll from pole to pole’ on account of Our Lord’s conquest upon the Cross of the power of sin which defeated the Law of Moses again and again in the experience of God’s people. When they brought a woman caught in adultery Jesus in Blake’s words ‘laid his hand on Moses Law’ as he breathed in the Spirit and asked who would cast the first stone. Such a radical challenge to the religious authorities condemning sin but loving the sinner prepared the way for Our Lord’s execution. His death and resurrection overcame sin through the power of God as well as useless condemnation of powerless sinners. We are saved by that gracious power not by dutiful allegiance to Law.

The good news of Christianity does not abolish the Ten Commandments but goes to the heart of what it means to obey them. When we see our obedience to what is right as a response to God’s love shown to us in Christ it flows in a new way empowered by the Holy Spirit. That tenth commandment - you shall not covet - is against a transgression of the heart impossible to counter without the grace of the Holy Spirit. In the Sermon on the Mount Our Lord reveals the heart of human disobedience rests in the human heart with its envy, greed and lust. After teaching this Our Lord released the grace for us to cleanse and mould our hearts so as to more perfectly love God and neighbour. This grace comes at immense cost to himself, dying in our place as sinners so as to live in our place by the Holy Spirit. This is the centre of Lenten devotion.

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, because by your holy Cross you have redeemed the world.

 

Lent 3 Presentation Church, Haywards Heath 4th March 2018

Lent's a time to get the main things the main things and the scripture set for the third Sunday of Lent is a good starting point for this.

We have the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament reading from Exodus and Our Lord's cleansing of the Temple in the passage from St John's Gospel Chapter 2

Reflecting on these two passages we find a reminder that Christian faith engages both mind and heart.

To receive the word of God we need open hearts as well as open ears.

You can read the Ten Commandments or teach them, memorise what’s right and wrong but the main thing’s to live right. If we read on in the book of Exodus we see the disobedience of the Israelites so that God says in Psalm 95 'for forty years I was wearied of these people and I said 'their hearts are astray, these people do not know my ways'.

Today’s Gospel of the cleansing of the Temple is seen in the spiritual tradition as a pointer to the righting of wayward hearts as in this prayer familiar to some of you maybe as a Saturday night prayer of preparation for Holy Communion: Cleanse our consciences we beseech you, almighty God, that our Lord Jesus Christ, when he come to us in the most holy sacrament, may find in our hearts a dwelling place prepared for himself.

Our two readings, first and last this morning, can be seen as reminders that study of God’s word is a matter of applying mind and heart.

I wonder when you last read your Bible devotionally, or took away your pew sheet for further reflection?

Though we can’t be in Church day by day - some come with me and Fr David on Thursday morning - we can receive spiritual nourishment midweek from Bible reading. It’s worth praying for the Holy Spirit to give us an appetite, a hunger for God’s word to make this a more natural discipline.

At her Coronation the Queen was presented with a Bible with these words: ‘Here is the most valuable thing this world affords’. Its value isn’t in itself but in its being ‘read, marked and inwardly digested’.

Christians believe the Bible can’t be mistaken as it presents the good news of Jesus to honest seekers of the truth.  As the Bible says of itself in 1 Timothy 3:15 ‘the sacred writings are able to instruct... for salvation through Jesus Christ’. This witness to God’s salvation is the principal function of the Bible as the truth teller it is.

Reading scripture brings us one to one with God in Jesus if both heart and mind are engaged. Many people’s initial encounter with the Bible are fruitless because they’re dealing with it without repentance and as less than it is - the word of God in human words. They – we – need ongoing cleansing of the temple of our hearts. We also gain from bible reading notes available online as well as from Bible Reading Fellowship (you might not know it but I’m March’s New Daylight author with a series on Jerusalem).

Like the Ethiopian court official whom St Philip helped to understand the Bible in Acts chapter 8, people very often need a human guide to get into scripture. We can also help one another read the Bible one to one, and as a local priest I’m always delighted to help in this.

Study for Christians – of the bible and the lives of the saints - stands alongside prayer and action in forming us up to be more fully what we’re meant to be.

Former US President Theodore Roosevelt claimed that ‘a thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education’. Moving from the fourth, third and second-best courses in our lives to the best forward course links to studying not just how we see ourselves but what others including God have to say about us and taking that into our hearts.

How do you see your sins? Pale gas – pride, anger, lust, envy, gluttony, avarice, sloth – weaknesses that ruin the world around you including your friendship with God and neighbour?

The sins we mourn in Lent are weaknesses indulged, but, let me put it in another more positive yet dreadful way. Sin is not just weakness but the misuse of strength. Money and power are strengths employed both to hurt and to heal. Think of the damage caused by the misuse of strength in the Middle East, money markets or the internet?

When you stand before God for judgement will the use of your strengths be weighed, as hurtful or helpful to the world? The great value of the Christian faith is its challenge to seek God’s guidance in weighing up your gifts and applying them in the best way, which is to God’s praise and the service of others.

You and I have been gifted with time and talents to build God’s future.

This is the day that the Lord has made says the Psalm writer. So is tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

May God take and use the gifts that abound in this worship gathering and employ them in a manner not fourth-best, or third-best or second-best but in the way he knows best – and may you and I find and keep on that way as we study scripture and the lives of the saints.

We’re approaching the Lord's Table and as we do so we recall that image in the Gospel of the cleansing of the temple applied to our hearts.

If the heart is a well the tongue, for example, is a bucket that draws from that well. Words of affirmation and encouragement are drawn out of a clean well. Words that are dismissive of others come out of the well of an unclean heart.

Conversely, thinking of receiving Jesus in Word and Sacrament into ourselves, that flow deep inside can only be welcomed through holy attentiveness and expectancy upon the Lord.

It is in purity of heart that we become Biblically literate. No amount of reading God’s words in the Bible of whatever translation can lead to application of those words and the transformation of our lives without inner cleansing from the Holy Spirit to dispose us rightly to Scripture.

It is the cleansing of the thoughts of our hearts by the same Spirit that leads us to the eucharist in its fullness as a sacrifice of praise, the offering of our souls and bodies in union with Jesus as a living sacrifice.

It is by the conscious putting aside of pride, anger, lust, envy, gluttony, avarice and sloth that we make space for the gift of the body, soul and divinity of Jesus in the sacrament of his body and blood.
You don’t put honey into a vinegar jar.

Cleanse our consciences, therefore, almighty God, that our Lord Jesus Christ, when he come to us in the most holy sacrament, may find in our hearts a dwelling place prepared for himself.