Bratton Clovelly, Ash Wednesday, 13/2/2013
There are occasions when a gospel message seems to fit perfectly with the times we live in; and sometimes that feels like a very unfortunate thing.
In today’s reading the message of Jesus appears to be telling the disciples to keep their faith indoors, not to let it show out on the street so that others can see it.
Which is how we tend to like it in our society today - because we’re keenly private people, we like nothing better than to go into our room and shut the door on the outside world.
So, thank you Jesus, for providing us with justification for our quietist faith, which doesn’t display itself outdoors, doesn’t share itself with others. Thank you Jesus for helping us ease into another Lent where private prayer is the thing, for more than anything else in the world we treasure our privacy.
I’m very uncomfortable with this; and I’ll tell you why. It’s because of a news story from last year which I only caught up on this week. The Telegraph described it as ‘one of the most agonising stories of what might have been’:
... the case of the 22-year-old Nottingham law student who boarded the last bus home after a night out, found herself 20p short of the £5 fare, and spent eight minutes – documented on CCTV footage – pleading with the driver to let her on or wait while she went to a cash machine. He refused, and she had to disembark alone at 3am and telephone her mother to pick her up. In the intervening period she was abducted, raped and brutally beaten by a 19-year-old man, Joseph Moran. [1]
Like the journalist reflecting on this event I am disturbed by the bus driver’s unyielding application of the fare-taking procedure ‘[which] outweighed his moral duty to a vulnerable young girl’. But equally disturbing to me is the behaviour of the other passengers on the bus, ‘not one of whom stepped up and offered to make up the pitiful shortfall in cash’ so that the young woman could take that late journey home in safety. Why did no one on the bus give that student 20 pence?
Perhaps they were too drunk or sleepy to think at all, or they didn’t wish to annoy the driver by intervening, or they even felt a small, mean-minded pleasure at watching a dispute unfold and a young girl duly “punished” for a very slight error in not having the correct change. No doubt the passengers would want someone to help their own daughter, sister or mother in the same situation. Yet none of them was moved to help this woman.
Why? because “Don’t get involved” has become the mantra of our age, a phrase which manages to imply that inaction is the wisest option in all situations. Of course, sometimes it is sensible to keep quiet... but as this story shows, there is a price to be paid when law-abiding people decide not to “get involved”. [2]
I hope you can see now why I’m uncomfortable with a message that our faith should be kept indoors, that it should not show out on the street so that others can see it. I hope you can see why I’m unhappy that we might interpret Jesus’ words to justify a quietist faith, which doesn’t display itself outdoors, doesn’t share itself with others. This news story is in one sense extreme, but in another sense it is an everyday tale of life today; so let us not delude ourselves by thinking that those passengers on the bus are not like us: because they are, just like us.
If we ease into another Lent where private prayer is everything, then we ought to be aware that the privacy we treasure has consequences in society, some of them as terrifying as the consequences of the bus driver and passengers’ refusal to help that girl, each of them as potentially destructive to our community.
But if Lent is for anything then surely it is for our returning to familiar passages of scripture like the one we've just heard, and taking a closer look, taking a deeper view, being prepared to have our lazy and inaccurate interpretations of it overturned. Christ’s is a gospel which surely stands for love and liberation - which are outward-facing; Christ’s is a gospel which is to do with our approaching and giving ourselves to others. It must not be reduced to inward-looking privatised piety.
So, look again at this passage from Matthew and we soon realise that what Jesus is doing is pointing out the difference between empty and meaningful ritual, between on the one hand an act of prayer which has lost its purpose because it is all outward show, and on the other hand an act of prayer which is stripped back to the very basic, and essential and life-giving, simple conversation between a person and the Father.
Think about this and we realise that Jesus is not promoting a recipe for detachment, but for our committing ourselves to getting closer to God, developing a deep and meaningful relationship with God in prayer. And when we then take a wider view of Jesus’ own ministry we notice that his life had a rhythm which went like this: deep private prayer with the Father followed by intense involvement with the people outside, repeated over and over again. Meaningful ritual, in which what he gained from his time alone with the Father, inspired what he did in his time among the people.
Translate this to our situation, and we begin to see different possibilities emerge. Had the bus driver been at prayer with the Father before he began his shift, asking for help with all the situations ahead of him, I suspect that his judgement would have been different when faced with the girl with £4.80 in her hand and a £5 fare at 3.00 in the morning. Had one or two of the passengers been people of prayer, perhaps they’d have prayed, secretly, whilst listening to the woman pleading with the driver, and maybe that act of prayer would have prompted them to get out of their seat to help.
This is the sort of approach to prayer which Jesus modelled in his life. A prayer which has a personal intensity so that the Father is able to energise, encourage, enable the one who prays; a prayer which has a public integrity because when it becomes visible it does not show itself in empty displays of ritual but in acts of love and liberation which make a difference in the world.
More than anything else in the world we treasure our privacy; Jesus did too, but Jesus equally treasured engagement with others outside. This Lent I encourage you to treasure this sort of private prayer, to cultivate your relationship with the Father, who longs to help and encourage you to make a difference out there in the world. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Notes
[1] Jenny McCartney, A shameful retreat by the British, www.telegraph.co.uk, 9 Jun 2012
[2] Jenny McCartney, A shameful retreat by the British, altered
Comments