Gloria Dei vivens homo

This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now – choose life!

Elsewhere in the Scriptures – and annoyingly I can’t locate the place – it says: If you wish, you can keep the commandments: to behave faithfully is within your power. He has set fire and water before you; put out your hand to whichever you prefer. Man has life and death before him; whichever a man likes best will be given to him.” Very much in tune with today’s reading. We are being told uncompromisingly that we need not sin. That if we do sin, it will be our choice. And that is perfectly good theology. There has only ever been one person living on this earth who was unable to sin - though somehow, mysteriously, still maintaining complete freedom: Jesus Christ. But since he died to cancel out the sin of Adam (whatever that was) we are no longer somehow predisposed to sin, as so many of us were taught when we were young.

This is old-fashioned stuff, isn’t it, all this talk of sin. But while I would now probably disagree with almost everything I was taught about sin when I was young, I think we lose sight of its reality at our peril. We are responsible for our actions; that is the bad news. We are responsible for our actions: that is the good news. Jesus told us that without him we could do nothing – implying, at least, nothing good. True. But the point is that we are not without him. By and of myself my attempts at virtue are pretty feeble. But we do not have to act by and of ourselves. His grace is always there first; and if we think that the remnant of the fallenness in our nature, in league with the devil, is so strong as to make any free choice impossible, we are rather underestimating the power of that grace.

These passages of Scripture are about personal responsibility before God and the choice to take the grace he is offering. There have been times, and there still are places, where it has been considered that in order to please God all you need is to be a member of a particular group and to carry out certain ritual or liturgical practices. You must be a Muslim and you must pray a certain number of times a day facing Mecca. You must be a Roman Catholic and you must go to Mass every Sunday, refrain from eating meat on Fridays, and using contraception. You must be a Jew and you must keep the Sabbath strictly and ensure that you do not become ritually unclean. Well, you can’t be all these things, and which of them you are is largely dictated by where and when you were born. I remember a conversation a couple of years ago with a fellow St John’s Pisky in which we agreed that we were “woolly Anglicans” by choice and that we would go further than that: we were “passionately woolly”. It is so difficult, in an environment – whether work or political party or religion – where a particular set of beliefs and attitudes is expected or assumed, not to allow that environment to dictate one’s thought and behaviour. Hence “passionately woolly”, hence the positive choice of a way of seeking God that dictates as little as possible; and hence responsibility. If, for example, your environment is racist or sexist, you are tempted to abdicate responsibility as an individual and act in a racist or sexist way. We see that sort of thing in the gospel, though it’s not racism but a sort of frenzy caused by prescriptive institutional religion, whereby priorities are turned upside down and the rights of God and humankind are ignored. In that frenzy it seems perfectly reasonable to tithe mint and cumin, and leave the other, more important but less precise, commandments undone. I am sure that the priest and levite who passed by on the other side were moved by pressing religious commitments. The Samaritan didn’t happen to have that sort of religion, so he was free – to choose life. At this point I should say that the Jewish religion does not have that kind of wrong priority built into the system, although it does lend itself to it through the sheer number of its commandments. The Rabbis have always insisted that the saving of human life (whether Jewish or Gentile) comes before any of the commandments. But that wasn’t the climate in Jesus’ time, and it is so easily not the climate at any time in any religion.

Freedom is a problematic thing. I remember a song containing the lines: “Freedom is a word I rarely use without thinking of the time when I’m in love”. I’m not sure what that means in the context of the song, but what it means to me is that while we desire, or think we desire, freedom, there is something else far more precious and far more desirable, which is not compatible with complete freedom, and that is love. When we say we want freedom from these binding institutions (whether it’s a racist workplace or a crazed religious system) and when we say we want freedom to choose, what we are after is not exactly freedom: we want freedom to love, to act according to our love. It is a freedom to know that you must always put the object of your love first, and as St Thomas teaches, only God can be loved legitimately with such an unconditional love. So the freedom we want and need is precisely the freedom not to sin, the freedom to choose life. Paul knew only too well that law cannot give that freedom; all it can tell us is whether or not an action is a sin. The law cannot bring us to assume true responsibility. Only love can do that. When we love we are free to choose – always – the good of the loved one; we are bound; and we are responsible.

Paul was only echoing the Lord when he said that we were no longer under the Law. God forbid, as he said, that we should think that we are thereby free to sin. No: but we are free not to sin. And only in the context of that peculiar kind of freedom does it make sense to tell us that we are able to behave faithfully, that it is within our power to choose good, to choose life; that all we need do is stretch out our hand to the alternative we prefer. Our passage does not talk about conforming to a complicated and rigid set of rules. It talks about listening to the voice of God, and holding fast to him. To God, to him, to a person. To a person we love, a person we are in a relationship with. “The word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.” Moses said this, and he did not even realise that the word was God; certainly he never dreamt that the word would be made flesh.

As a default position we should keep the “rules” of whichever method we have chosen to serve God. However, it doesn’t do any harm to question them, and we should sit lightly enough to them to know that if it becomes clear that they are better abandoned, we are free to do so. We need to be free to choose life. It was true for the Jews, the first people of the word, to whom the word was a book. It is far more true for us, to whom the word is a person.

It is not easy. He never said it would be easy. But it is possible. With his grace it is possible. Freedom, responsibility, love – none of those things is easy. And the thing is, the lighter you sit to the rules, the less they will protect you, the less you can wrap yourself around with limits. Rules can be tough, but it is freedom, refusal to set limits, absolute readiness to move with the Spirit – that is what it really means to follow Christ and to become so like him that we become worthy of bearing his name.

A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.