The Old Testament lesson today is a stirring, and in many ways, humorous story. Whenever we are called together to pray all together in one place, in large numbers, I always think of this story with the prophets beating their chests and banging their drums and making a dreadful din. I know they were addressing Baal rather that Yahweh, but it is worth asking whether it would have made any difference to the God we worship if such large numbers of noisy people would have stirred him to action any more than the solitary, faithful voice of Elijah the prophet. I’m inclined to think that numbers and noise don’t make any difference at all to our God – for this God, I believe, hears the smallest voices of the least significant people and responds in love. Noise and self importance do not impress God Large numbers of noisy super-spiritual Christians will not impress any more than one solitary person who, knowing their unworthiness and sin, turns to God for help.
Which brings us to today’s Gospel story – the story we know as ‘The Centurion’s Servant’. Normally speaking, officers of the occupying Roman army were not loved by faithful Jews in the time of Jesus. Translated into more recent times this person would have been regarded in a similar to a Nazi soldier in occupied France or Poland during WW2 – the enemy. This gentleman seems to have been a little different in that he comes commended by the Jewish Elders – a bit like our Bishops – who said this man was a friend as he had funded the building of synagogues. I’m not sure how this happened and am inclined to think the Centurion was taking big risk in supporting the Jews who were under occupation. We know that the various governors of the time, including Herod, were trying their best to keep the Jews under control. Encouraging them in their religion seems an odd way of going about this. All we can say is that this was highly unusual.
Perhaps even more unusual was the man’s care for his slave. Slaves were owned – they were possessions – their worth was counted in the language of cash, not the language of love. Here the text is a little unclear for although this is expressed in terms of value – a slave whom he valued highly – it seems highly unlikely that the Centurion would have approached Jesus saying ‘if this man dies its going to cost me’. I can’t imagine Jesus responding to such a request without a very sharp question and answer session. So we conclude that what is being expressed is the Centurion’s valuing of his slave as a fellow human being – someone who was loved – valued in a very different way to the price the salve might have fetched in the market place where slaves were bought and sold.
However this unlikely scenario arose, although the Jewish leaders felt that this man was a worthy recipient of of Jesus’ love, the centurion himself disagreed. ‘I am NOT worthy’, he says to Jesus ‘to have you under my roof’. To me this is the line that defines our approach to prayer. How dare we gather in large groups, thinking well of ourselves and telling God what to do. Rather our approach should be humble which somehow suggests the absence of a lot of noise. There is nothing wrong with a collective approach to God – indeed we do this each week in our prayers of intercession read by one person on behalf of us all. I feel the approach of our hard working intercessors is just right – we approach God with the needs of the world in our hearts, and ask, in humility, for God’s response to the need and suffering we name. Humility is the key. We cannot earn God’s response by our worthiness, rightness, of volume. Rather we reach out by the love and concern we carry in our hearts – as the Centurion did – for others. Not for God to prove we’re on the right side and everyone else is wrong, not for God to do as he or she is told, not so we can prove that our faith is better than the faith of others.
Rather, what we express is our own helplessness, the love we carry – a reflection of God’s love, and our our need. We do not deserve God’s help – we ask for help because we believe in our unworthiness and in God’s love.
In a few week’s time we will be voting in the European Elections, in which immigration is a hot topic. It is not universally accepted that we can translate our beliefs as Christians directly into politics. But if we follow Jesus’ command to build God’s Kingdom ‘on earth as it is in heaven’ then I think that there is an overlap – our faith and our politics are joined seamlessly. This story, then, has something to add to our thoughts and reflections about current hot topics. We should remember, then, that, had we had a walk on part in today’s Gospel reading, we too would have been outsiders. It is easy for us to forget that Jesus was not an Englishman, not even a European – he was, if anything, what we might call an Arab – someone from the east – someone very different from us, who didn’t look much like us and who spoke a different language.
Besides clues as to how we might approach God in prayer, this story demands that we consider Jesus’ (and therefore, for us, God’s) love for ‘foreigners’, outsiders, people different from ourselves. This story prefigures the later explosion of the Jesus movement – essentially a small Jewish sect – into the world of Gentiles – foreigners – us. The events of Pentecost, in which the Good News was heard by the nations of the world in their own language, were the beginning of this outward moving, outward looking shift. After this there were years of wrangling amongst the Apostles and members of the early church, about whether people who wanted to be Christians needed to become Jews first. What was eventually decided was that there was no need for this, for God welcomes all, as Jesus demonstrated when he answered the prayer of an enemy of Israel and healed the slave of a Roman soldier. Christianity became an inclusive religion – welcomed were strange an exotic characters such as the Ethiopian Eunuch, slaves, the wives if the political elite, and gentiles like us. The children of converts were baptised before they were old enough to answer for themselves: this is why the Church of England baptises the children of believers. The Church was a richly inclusive place and the intention was always to do things in such a way that the Kingdom would come in the world – not in the church.
This is our heritage. This is how we came to know of God’s love – by inclusiveness, acceptance of the stranger. How might we express this as we vote in a few weeks time. That’s up to each one of us to decide according to our conscience, and according to the faith handed down to us who are strangers unworthy of God’s love.
Rev’d Anne Morris
CProper4
