My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
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Sometimes a biblical text doesn’t seem very encouraging for a preacher, or indeed for those who are hearing the sermon. The prophet Isaiah has God’s Word place an abyss between God and us, what we understand and do: as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
And St Paul, putting the fear of God into the prideful Corinthian church, doesn’t help: All were baptised … all ate the same spiritual food and all drank the same spiritual drink. Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them.
So, let’s see how we get on.
In today’s Gospel Jesus responds to the news. Like most news headlines it is sensational and bad – Pilate mingling the blood of worshippers with their sacrifices, and Galilean worshippers at that – news tinged with fear.
Jesus emphatically does not smooth away these fears.
He recalls another disaster, those killed in the fall of the tower of Siloam.
The first news item is of the danger in how tyrants behave;
the second is of everyday danger – accident or, more likely, human negligence.
How are we to judge these matters?
Can we find a reason why these people died? And not others? And not us?
It is how our human minds normally work.
Thornton Wilder’s short novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, is structured around just this instinct – Br Juniper narrowly avoids stepping onto the bridge before it collapses, and he subsequently looks into disaster, asking how five particular people were there then to experience it, what God means by this.
Those talking with Jesus hope he will say the victims died because they were sinners, conspicuously bad sinners. Human judgments – our judgments – work like this, trying to weigh things up to a nicety, as if doing so could make the world understandable, intelligible, safer.
We try to stand back, to see from afar, as if we were not involved. And we fail to realise that our reasoning, including our moral reasoning, is implicated in all our instincts for self-preservation.
This mention of Pilate’s crimes in Luke’s gospel comes in the context of considering how we judge or fail to do so.
Jesus has just asked, Why do you not know how to interpret the present time? And why do you not judge for yourselves what is right?
Many people are having to do so.
Is it right to take up arms to defend your home, your country? For Christians to fight other Christians to do so? There is a consideration of this in the Tablet this week. It was a matter of grave concern to our late brother Timothy and his university friends in the years leading up to the Second World War.
Our own news yesterday turned to questions of judging, with the call by Gordon Brown and others for a new international tribunal to prosecute war crimes. Perhaps we need it. Perhaps the blood being shed now in the Ukraine, the lives being maimed and lost, demands clear and strong judgment, however compromised we may recognise ourselves to be.
What does Jesus say? Jesus, who will himself stand before Pilate; Jesus whose blood Pilate will spill unjustly; Jesus who when that moment comes will not act on self-preservation; Jesus who will summon Pilate and the chief priests to see that they put themselves in question when they question him.
What does Jesus say? He says – in this gospel given to us to hear in Lent – he says, Repent.
Repent – that is: turn from the excuses with which you order the world to your own advantage. Turn from your self-sufficiency. Listen to Another.
Incline your ear and come to me; listen, so that you may live, in the words of the Book of Isaiah.
And Jesus goes further: he gives us a story, a parable.
The man with the fig tree who finds no fruit on it, the man who encounters frustration of his desires, angry and rejecting …
and his gardener, who humbly counsels patience, who will work to save the fig tree and who holds out hope.
Jesus shows us in this parable the divine qualities.
The man with the vineyard can judge according to his own vexation
or he can turn to another and learn qualities which he has overlooked.
My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
Can human beings be furnished with a means of comprehending the ways of God?
Can we ever make right judgment?
Those currently writing theology essays may readily agree that we lack the faculty to understand God’s ways.
And it is reasonable to think we can never do so: –
we are finite – we have a beginning and an end, and the limits of a body;
we’re contingent – we’re the product of genes and relationships and an environment over which we have had no say;
and we’re time-bound – we cannot see all at once things as they come into being and grow and pass away.
And yet …
we are expected to follow God’s ways,
and to follow requires us to understand, to judge aright.
It is clear that doing so will be different from our normal compromised human effort.
It will mean entrusting ourselves, our judgment, to Another – listening to that Other, to God, to true hope as we are met by it in the risen Christ.
Buying wine and milk without money and without price.
These words from Isaiah will come round again soon as a reading in the Easter Vigil.
We listen to God, gardener of our souls,
and in doing so, we turn, repent and are given a faculty of understanding and of judgment that is His and is a gift to us,
a faculty that embraces patience and suffering and hope.
Or, in the words of today’s collect:
mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross,
may find it none other than the way of life and peace. Amen.