The Archbishops' Sermon, Christmas Day 2011
All of us here know about the protest outside St Paul’s Cathedral and the Occupy protestors in many other parts of Britain, including the one held until recently in Cardiff outside the Unite offices. They are protesting, among other things, about economic injustice and the effect it has on the poorest members of our society.
St Paul Cathedral’s initial reaction was to close its doors and threaten legal action. Now it is easy for us all to be wise after the event but I wonder how we would have reacted if they’d camped in the environs of this cathedral? At least the authorities at St Paul’s did change their minds, opened their doors and welcomed the protestors in.
However, by initially reacting the way they did, they gave the unfortunate impression that what was happening inside the cathedral had very little to do with what was happening outside it. People could have drawn the conclusion from that, that the worship of God has no connection with the world or its concerns because God is literally and metaphorically above it. So God needs to be protected and guarded so that He is not tarnished by vulgar protests and disruptions because, after all, He is a Holy God.
That’s how the religious leaders of Jesus’ day regarded God. His chief characteristic was His holiness – a God set apart from His world and separate from everything that might be unclean and messy and unworthy.
So the emphasis is on the importance of dignified worship, carried out in church buildings with due reverence, awe and majesty which nothing must interrupt or disturb – the world kept at a respectable distance so that it doesn’t sully what is going on inside the sacred space. The holy must not be contaminated with the unholy, or the spiritual with the material or political.
But it is precisely this view of God’s holiness that Jesus shattered. He spent most of His ministry out of doors, not in synagogues or temple but preaching to ordinary people, attempting to relate ordinary everyday events to God. He saw everything within that world as having a connection to God such as treasure in a field, a lost coin, a lost sheep, a lost son. And He was born in a cowshed amidst the mess and smell of animals. God, in the midst of the warp and woof of real human existence; the link between holy and unholy, inextricably joined.
In Jewish society, of which He was a part, everything was built around a purity system where everything was classified as being either pure or impure, clean or unclean. Your job could make you impure if you were a tax collector or a shepherd. You were regarded as ritually impure because in the one case you were dealing with a foreign power and in the other with animals and to be impure made you untouchable. People who were maimed or chronically sick were seen as impure. To be poor meant that you were regarded as impure because wealth was seen as a blessing from God and poverty as a sign of His displeasure. Men were more pure than women because of child birth and Gentiles were just impure and unclean because they were not Jews.
The effect of the purity system in Jesus’ society was to create a world with sharp social boundaries between pure and impure, righteous and sinner, whole and not whole, male and female, rich and poor, Jew and Gentile. The centre of the purity system was the temple and the priests who upheld it.
Jesus however replaced the core value of purity with compassion because He regarded compassion not holiness as God’s dominant quality and so He criticised the system that emphasised purity and neglected justice and called Pharisees unmarked graves which people walk over without knowing it.
In other words, He called a group who prided themselves on their purity as a source of impurity since corpses were regarded as impure. For Jesus, purity was what came out of a person, rather than what went into a person. That’s why He said, "Blessed are the pure in heart". True purity was not a matter of external boundaries and observances, but of the heart.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is a criticism of the purity system. The priest and the Levite ignored the man who had fallen among thieves because they wanted to maintain their purity. Contact with death or illness was a source of impurity so they passed by in case they got contaminated but the Samaritan, regarded by most Jews as impure, acted compassionately in attending to the man left as half dead.
So Jesus touched lepers and haemorrhaging women and mixed with women and children. He went to a graveyard inhabited by a man full of unclean spirits who lived near pigs – another source of impurity. He ate with all kinds of people. In the world of Jesus, to share a meal with somebody implied acceptance of that person. It wasn’t a casual act, for no decent person shared a meal with an outcast. Compassion meant an inclusive community. Purity meant a closed one.
Jesus’ followers included women, which was totally radical for his period, because in a society governed by the purity system, Jesus also embodied a radically alternative social vision for women in his days were regarded as nobodies – they had few of the rights of men. They couldn’t be witnesses in a court of law, or start legal proceedings or divorce proceedings. They could not be taught the law and were veiled in public and did not go to meals outside the family. A woman’s identity was that of her father or husband yet Jesus was entertained by women at meals. He even allowed one to wash his feet and women to travel around with Him. Jewish men thanked God daily that they were not women.
Jesus shattered all these boundaries because He wanted people to be as compassionate as God. Whereas purity divided and excluded, compassion united and included.
What Jesus was really saying was that there is one world and it is God’s world and it all matters to Him for He created it and it all bears the stamp of His signature and we honour God, yes, through worship but also by loving our neighbours for they, like us, are made in God’s image. Through Christ, God has broken down the barriers which we humans erect, and has shown us His involvement in every aspect of life. That’s what incarnation means and that’s why Jesus began His ministry at Nazareth and said that He "had been anointed by God to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind and release for the oppressed".
On one level that sounds like a secular agenda but that’s Jesus’s interpretation of His prayer that God’s will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. Nor is it just a matter of changing our own lives to do God’s will – a personal morality. It is more radical than that – it means trying to change the structures of our society and world, overturning poverty, injustice and oppression.
That’s what one Welsh poet means when he writes: "The whole earth is consecrated ground".
Paradoxically, it is the Occupy Movement which has reminded us that in Jesus, the view of God, as a holy set-apart God, has been shattered forever, in the birth in a cowshed and death on a cross. When Jesus dies, St Mark tells us the veil of the Temple – meant to protect the otherness of God, for it divided the most holy part of the Temple (the Holy of Holies) where only the High Priest could go, and even then only once a year, from the rest of the Temple – was torn apart.
Therefore, St Mark tells us that the separation between pure and impure, clean or unclean, Church and world, religion and life are gone forever. And what God has joined together, we dare not tear apart and that’s what Christmas is really all about.