Differing from the tax collectors – 21 February 2014

...(God) makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? [Matthew 5: 45-47]

You just have to hope there are no employees of the Tax Department in your congregation.  This is part of the Gospel for next Sunday, every phrase of which, if we listen, stops us in our tracks.  Jesus points out the obvious, that the sun rises each morning for good people and bad alike, the rain refreshes, or floods, both the righteous and the unrighteous.  The first thing I notice is that, according to Jesus, this indiscriminate provision is something God chooses.  We might arrange it differently.  But God provides the sunshine and the rain irrespective of anyone’s worthiness.  Much the same can be said about calamities in life – they also seem to fall on both the righteous and the unrighteous.  This puzzled the Psalmist very much.  It is as though God may not be as interested as we are in whether people have deserved things or not.   

So that’s not very satisfactory.  Once upon a time, you could rely on a simple moral and religious code approved by God and at least understood if not always observed by people.  If you were righteous, you prospered.  If you were not, you got punishment.  If someone damaged you in some way, you exacted an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.  It had the virtue of simplicity, but as the scriptures note from time to time, it wasn’t always very efficient.  Inexplicably, good people could often suffer while evil ones prospered.  The Psalms and the Book of Job and other writings all confront this difficulty. 

But nevertheless that simple reciprocity remains a morality deeply believed to our own day, because it seems to be fair and make sense.  It didn’t satisfy Jesus.  You get on well with friends and amiable colleagues?  You enjoy meeting with like-minded people, your own kind?  As one American preacher puts it, you want a medal or something?  Jesus says that’s the way the heathen live.   Anyone can live that way.  There’s no special merit in it.   He asks, do you have someone you’re avoiding?  Do you even have enemies?  Do you keep to your own kind?  You want a medal or something?  That’s the way the tax collectors live, he says.

It is not that we are now to go forth and round up all the folk we have been avoiding.  It is that, so far as it lies with us, we choose not to build fences.  Robert Frost’s poem on Mending the Wall...

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down!

There are certainly no walls in our silence and stillness.  May that extend within us and around us, with all its risks, as the days and years go by.