Third Sunday Lent 97

Third Sunday Lent 1997

A Question of Depth

Maybe I’m simply convincing myself, but I’ve found the proposal I made about Lent being a time of deepening one’s self fairly useful so far, even given, as I said a couple of weeks ago, the ambiguities of those depths. I think you can still use the notion of deepening helpfully, and it works surprisingly well with these three readings today because it is possible to use that perspective and say that what’s going on in all three of these readings is about a question of depth and, above all, depth in regard to religious matter. Just like there can be superficial anything else, there can be superficial religion. So I just want to quickly go through the three readings and suggest what the perspective of depth offers to them.

The first reading, which is the so-called Ten Commandments, is very straight- forward: if you’re religious you go do these things. Well, no... The Commandments certainly have function, and I suppose they continue to function as an external norm to which we have to adhere in one way or another, or make vigorous efforts to try to adhere to them, but that’s not what the Commandments are at all. As the Jews understood it, the Commandments are simply part of a response of a god who wants to act in every possible instance against the violence that we human beings work on each other. The Jews believed that God worked on their behalf in liberating them from Egypt and so they constructed these Commandments. Most of them were already in place all over the Ancient Near East, but what the Jews did was set these things in the context of a human response of gratitude to this god who wants nobody to violate anybody else. And so merely talking about external norms, no matter how noble, misses the point and doesn’t begin to address the religious depth of these words. What they are talking about is whether we take each other seriously as human beings, and it is out of that that we can talk about all this stuff: honour your father and mother, murder, adultery..., whatever. It is not just a matter of God, as so much of the fundamentalist literature has it, being the manufacturer of the Ten Commandments, or the manufacturer’s directions for proper usage... That’s not it at all; that is a profound trivialization of the religious depth of these things. Religion can be trivialized, and it is regularly trivialized, but Lent is exactly about helping us to move beyond that. The issue becomes a little more complicated in this passage from Corinthians where Paul talks about the Greeks wanting wisdom and his fellow Jews wanting signs.

Paul had to struggle during a lot of his life against people who had all kinds of religious accreditation in the congregation in Corinth because there was a whole bunch of missionaries who came from Jerusalem with letters of recommendation from Peter, James, and John, the Big Three, and they could flash those things and do miracles, and speak eloquently, and these signs were supposed to be persuasive. But Paul says: "no, no, no, you can be overwhelmed with all that stuff," and then the question is about what kind of religiosity emerges from that. Of course he counters that with the weight of the Cross which the rest of Lent will give us a chance to think about and pray over. But the notion of some kind of religious glitz, or some sort of seemingly religious wonderfulness out there is what overwhelms me, and, rather than touching upon my freedom, liberating me, and enabling me to respond from the deepest places in me, it leaves me with some sense of being overpowered. That’s the problem with the Jews; the problem with the Greeks, of course, was that they were big into wisdom. What’s wisdom?--Wisdom is some great insight into life that I can carry around in the top of my head, and then build my life along the lines of it, and then be okay to get through the Stoics, the Epicureans, the great Greco-Roman philosophical conditions... The Greeks loved that stuff: "nothing in excess," the stoics would say, "conform yourself to the laws of nature..." If you know all that stuff, and if you do all that stuff, then you have life licked. The interesting thing is that you don’t have to be connected to anybody at any depth in that system. You just go around with this beatific smile on your face because you are in the know, and you don’t have to worry about anybody else. It is as if there is a great inner gyroscope that is going to clearly direct your action, and you don’t really have to be attentive to the world and the people that inhabit that world if you have that kind of wisdom. It is precisely, to anticipate this business of the Cross, in responding to the immediacies of the people and the situations in the world that brings us to the Cross, and no amount of wisdom and no number of miracles will be a substitute for that, and if you live life in terms of wisdom or signs, you are living religiously superficially.

It is fairly obvious in this business of John. What is the issue here?--Well, scholars are mixed... They had to have sheep and cattle and doves in the temple, and they had to have money-changers at Pass-over because Jews came from all over the Empire and they needed to buy those things in the local currency. All that stuff was appropriate and Jesus was apparently not worried about that. What was worrisome was the sense that if these religious activities are performed in some kind of mechanical way, then that makes one religiously authentic.--It doesn’t... "Religion is either a matter of the heart," as Rabindranith Tagore , the great Hindu poet, used to say over and over, "or it is nothing." And so Jesus was presumably saying, but there is a whole bunch of things going on here, that all religiosity is inadequate and needs purging, even the noblest feelings. The assumption being that all religious activity can be used as a technique to avoid real transformation and direction for my heart.

So I hope that it is useful, because, as I said last week, all of us have to resist running our lives on automatic pilot, whether it is in our lives, or in the classroom, or in our jobs, in order to simply get by in the world so that we don’t really have to look at who is there or what is going on because everything has somehow been prearranged, preunderstood, and predigested... Out of this business of depth in these readings we get another aspect of what depth means: it means my availability to my world at every moment so that nothing, no matter how wonderful, can substitute for my real attentiveness to what is going on here and now. I can be touched, rejoiced, or frightened by it so that I can, in other words, respond to it.

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