FOURTH SUNDAY IN LENT (5th March) 1989
READINGS
Joshua 5:2-12
Psalm 34:1-10
2 Corinthians 5:14-21
Luke 15:1-32
If one were at the same time both a priest and a sadist, one
of the more cruel tricks one can play is to ask a senior girl in a co-ed school
to read in chapel the reading we heard as our Old Testament reading this
morning. Rather than inciting mirth and jocularity the ploy tends instead to
bring down on the congregation a form of hush, an embarrassed silence. It is an
unusual effect to experience in chapel at a co-ed or any school.
Actually, it is rather a surprising effect. I managed to
pass through years of church boarding school before I realised that such rites
as circumcision existed, and still more before I discovered what the rite
involved. Still more time passed before I learned that such things were
mentioned in the Bible.
For ten years of childhood and adolescent exposure to
Christianity I heard only clinically censored and hermetically sealed versions
of the scriptures. The harlots and the seductions, the genital rites of passage
and other apparently un-Anglican moments were carefully excised, leaving only a
cotton wool god and a cotton wool people of god. It was to be even more years
before I learned of some of the even more atrocious and male-initiated practices
carried out in the name of Christianity to placate the male distrust of
womankind.
I tell you all this because I believe it is far too easy to
ignore the earthiness of our Judaeo-Christian heritage. Our history is not all
clad in sandals of gold, and during Lent we would do well to remember that.
Before pointing the finger at the Ayatollah Khomeini’s condemnation of Salman
Rushdie, abominable though it is, we should remember that it is only a few
weeks since Christians were slashing the screens of cinemas that showed The Last
Temptation of Christ. That too showed intolerance and irresponsibility in
the name of God.
There were probably very good reasons for the origins of the
rite of circumcision among the people of the Middle East. The ritual was
predominantly a puberty rite among the nomadic tribes of that region. The Jews
adopted it as a rite of infancy. But whether we believe it to be a rite handed
down by God to Moses or an already existing rite of medical significance that
accrued religious meaning, it was certain to have had pragmatic beginnings.
But what was the point of this form of barbarism? Unless we
are avid readers of James Bond we don’t have to be clever to realise that
circumcision is a very ineffective form of religious advertisement. The Jews
were a prudish people. The great shame of Christ was not merely that he was
crucified – hung up on a tree – but that
he would have almost certainly been hung naked on the Cross. It is a fact that
our sculptors manage conveniently to forget. To the Jew, public nakedness was a
shame beyond comprehension. No Jewish man paraded his circumcision in the bath
houses of Rome. And any advertising executive will tell you that a form of
advertising seen only by a man’s wife or wives is an ineffective use of
resources.
So what significance could this seemingly unnecessary rite have
had in the relationship between God and the people of God? The simple fact was
that the Jewish man (and I do not mean woman!) knew as he stood naked
before God that there was an unerasable contract, a covenant between them. In
the same way as when he stood naked before his wife he knew himself to be
contracted to her, for as patriarch of a family he knew that he was responsible
before God for them.
And so, before God alone he would stand, reminded of his
failure, and in need of God’s forgiveness. He had a choice: to make amends to
God, or to ignore God. We always have that choice.
Penitence, then, is as much a private and personal act as
the procreative act. For that reason, I have no time for the public penitential
displays of the Jim and Tammy Bakkers of this world. I have no time for long
and dramatic testimonies. I have no time for passionate beating of breasts by
over-zealous Anglo Catholic priests, “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”
Or, as James Joyce would have it, “may he colp her, may he colp her, may he
mixandmass colp her.” (Finnegans Wake, 238). Such displays are a parody
of penitence.
I know my sin. I know my participation in a world of sin.
And I seek and know the forgiveness of God, God who in Christ revealed the very
nature of God as being prepared to be utterly shamed by and for us. The God who
knows our naked selves is naked before us on the Cross.
So our penitence, to which we are called this Lent, must be
a private act. No ostentatious statements about our giving up of wine, women,
or sugar. But instead a wrestling with God in the privacy of our hearts, the
circumcised nakedness of our hearts, knowing our participation in sin and in
the sin of a fallen world. Even if we had, as I hope we will in future years,
undergone the imposition of ashes, we would provide a cloth so that our acts of
penitence were not paraded beyond the context of our worship. Before God alone
we repent. Before God alone, male and female alike, we must expose the
circumcision of our hearts. Our Lenten liturgies remind us of that
responsibility.
Sadly, though, as Anglicans we tend to be too used to being
penitential. For centuries we have spent our time on our knees, imploring the
forgiveness of God for the sins we have committed, acknowledging and bewailing
our most manifold sins and wickedness. It would be remiss of us to forget our shortfallings,
but at the same time we must never forget the miracle of Easter, the miracle of
God’s forgiveness. We must not neglect to celebrate the Easter faith that
proclaims mercy, pardon and deliverance to us, and which pronounces the
wonderful if unmerited sentence of eternal life.
So I urge you to continue your disciplined observance of Lent.
But I want you also to sneak a look ahead to the other side of Easter, to the
time when we with Christ burst forth from the tomb of sin and penitence and
death and shame, to the time when we burst out and advance into the community
with the glorious news, “He is not here, he is risen,” the message that was
carried out into the world by those first women on the first Easter morning.
With Saint Paul, and with those first women, we must proclaim to the people of
Ringwood,
For our sake God made the sinless one
a victim
for sin,
so that we might in him become
the righteousness of God.
A repentant people, privately, we must be. But, following
Easter, we will have a task to do. That task is to discover and to act on the
discovery of how we might best proclaim, in liturgy and in evangelism, Christ
to the world. The Christ of Easter.
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