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Evensong, Trinity 17
Date: 30th September 2007
Preacher: The Revd Canon Dr Jonathan Draper
When I was growing up as a well-behaved son of a Baptist Minister in New England, almost everything we did revolved around the Bible, even what passed for jokes and insults. We children would say to each other witty things like ‘you are of your father the devil’ which is actually a line that comes from the bits left out of our NT reading from John’s gospel this evening. Or we would ask, ‘who is the shortest person in the Bible’ to which the answer is the author of our first reading this evening, ‘knee-high Miah’, though there is some dispute about this because there is a character in Job called Bildad the Shuhite, and as shoes in the OT were rarely more than sandals, he may actually win. But you can see how we would have had hours of good clean fun arguing about these things.
We could hardly have two more different readings than we have this evening, especially when, for reasons that have yet to occur to me, they are brought together. The reading from Nehemiah is set in the historical context of exile. Nehemiah, though Jewish, had received the rather exalted position of cup-bearer to Artaxerxes at his capital of Susa. Nehemiah’s story, of the re-building of Jerusalem and the difficulties he encountered, comes from the 5th century BC. Along with re-building and defending Jerusalem, Nehemiah worked with others to rid the land of foreigners, especially foreign women whom many of the men left behind had married. This, together with re-building Jerusalem at all, caused a great deal of friction with local leaders who were not also Jews. While not as great a theme as in its companion volume Ezra, blood purity is an important theme in Nehemiah too.
The reading from John’s Gospel seems to have little to do with Nehemiah unless you take the sort of single-mindedness Jesus requires of those who follow him as standing in that tradition of close and careful following of the law that characterises much of the OT. But the speech of Jesus here is extremely enigmatic. There are some wonderful, if misused, lines in it such as ‘you will know the truth and the truth will make you free’, or the phrase which still makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck when I hear it, ‘before Abraham was, I am’. This was just about as unequivocal a claim to be God as you could get in Jewish understanding, for not only was Jesus claiming to have existed before Abraham, but he used the name of God given to Moses, ‘I am’, which no-one was even meant to utter, to describe himself. Small wonder they took up stones to kill him.
These days I get quite uncomfortable when I read things like Nehemiah. These stories of brave and single-minded men, like Nehemiah, doing the will of God in the face of great dangers and tribulations used to thrill me as a child: I, too, wanted to be one of these great men, these warriors for God; I wanted to stand up for the poor against tyrants, I wanted to rid the land of false gods, I wanted cleanse the land of the enemies of God, the Ammonites, Moabites, Midianites and, above all, the Cananites and Philistines. But this is no longer my passion for the world is, I’ve come to see, a slightly more complex place than that, especially regarding the Middle East. The Ammonites lived in the area which is now around the Jordanian capital Amman, the Midianites were further north in what we would now call Syria, and the Cananites and Philistines lived in Palestine and particularly in the area we now call Gaza. The roots of contemporary conflict are very deep indeed and being God’s warrior today seems a much less godly thing to want to be.
The reason all that seems so much less godly to me now is that my understanding of God and of what God requires of us has changed. Because I understand God through the lens of Jesus I read the Bible differently. And while the words of the Bible, as it were, haven’t changed all that much since I was young, I think I now hear many more different voices when I read it. Where once I only heard the story of God told in God’s own words, I now hear many stories told by kings and priests, prophets and poets; I hear history, poetry and song, myth and magic. Discerning the voice of God in the Bible amid the noise of human passion is sometimes difficult and always provisional. As in the incarnation, however, God comes to us clothed in human form and born out of human struggle even, and perhaps especially, in the words of the Bible.
What God requires of us is in fact what he himself gives us: his own love embodied in human form, and embodying God’s love in our human lives is our calling too. Nothing is required beyond that, for we have seen the truth and the truth has set us free. Amen.