St George's Cathedral, Cape Town

A sermon preached by The Reverend Bruce W. B. Jenneker in the Cathedral Church of St George the Martyr in the City and Diocese of Cape Town

on the 22nd Sunday of the Year, 30 August 2009

Once, when I was on the road travelling, I stumbled on a scene of dramatic conflict. An enraged mother was berating her young son. I was on a long drive and had stopped at a filling station for all the usual reasons. I had bought a cool-drink and was walking around the precinct stretching my legs, when from behind some trees I heard the sounds of the heated altercation. My curiosity was sparked and I peered through the hedge that separated me from the raging woman and the young boy. He was perhaps eight or ten years old. She was declaiming a seemingly unending list of all the wrongs the boy was perpetrating - 'Take that cap off, if I have told you once I have told you a thousand times,' she railed. 'Tuck in your shirt; tie your shoelaces, stand up straight, why were you speaking with you mouth full of food and using your fingers to push those chips around on your plate, you don't need mustard and tomato sauce and chutney.' The list went on and on and on - each horrendous infraction declaimed with wild flaming eyes and accusing finger. And each indictment was followed with the terrifying refrain: 'If I have told you once, I have told you a thousand times.' The boy recoiled. Shivering with self-disgust, tears of remorse streaming down his cheeks, he cried out, 'Mummy there are too many rules, there are just too many rules for me to get them all right.'

In the gospel story read to us this morning, Mark recounts a very similar clash between Jesus and the Pharisees about food and eating. "Why do your disciples flout the traditions and the elders,' they challenge Jesus, 'Why do they not observe the rules of decency and propriety?' Just in case we don't understand what's going on here, the evangelist lists for his foreign and uninitiated readers some of the rules: 'The Pharisees and all the Jews,' Mark informs us in n aside, 'Do not eat unless they give their hands a thorough ceremonial washing, observing the tradition of the elders. When they come from the marketplace they do not eat anything unless they wash it. And there are also many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups, pots and bronze kettles.' [Mark 7:3-4].

In his insightful book, Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus, Marcus Borg, the contemporary New Testament scholar, presents a compelling study of this question for the ministry of Jesus. Borg argues that in the time of Jesus the quest for holiness was the dominant cultural dynamic in the Jewish homeland. Called to be the People of God, chosen out from among all tribes and peoples, the Jews were God's people, set aside for God's glory, a royal priesthood, a holy nation. They understood holiness as purity; to all intents and purposes holiness and purity were synonyms. Since holiness was the vocation of Israel, and holiness was purity, the society in which Jesus lived and moved was by definition scrupulously concerned with what was clean and what was unclean, what was acceptable and what was unacceptable, what was decent and proper and what was corrupt and offensive. This scrupulosity resulted in the establishment of rigid purity codes maintained by severe taboos and carefully circumscribed social boundaries.

Fifteen long chapters of Leviticus specify in minute detail clean and unclean foods, purity rituals after childbirth or menstruation, regulations for skin infections, contaminated clothing or polluted furniture, prohibitions against contact with a human corpse or a dead animal, laws regarding bodily discharges, agricultural guidelines about planting seeds and mating animals, decrees about lawful sexual relationships, keeping the Sabbath, forsaking idols, to mention only a few.

For the first century Pharisee everything all around was loaded with impurity, freighted with contagion, and uncleanness was contagious. Whoever had any contact with anything unclean became unclean themselves, completely and entirely - soiled, polluted, contaminated. The person seeking holiness was perpetually at risk, marooned in a sea of effluence and toxicity. Only the most meticulous and painstaking alertness and conscientiousness could prevent the fatal infection. Those who would be holy, had to be constantly on their guard in a threatening and dirty world, protecting their vulnerability by taboos that outlawed people and relationships, places and events, food and things. Uncleanness is contagious.

Jesus inaugurates a new paradigm. He is not made unclean when he dares to touch the leper, it is the leper who becomes clean. The touch on the hem of his robe by the haemorrhaging woman does not pollute Jesus, it cleanses her and makes her whole. This new paradigm is rooted in Jesus' experience and understanding of God. God is love and it is the love of God that brings the universe into being. God is love and t is the love of God that animates all things, bringing all things to birth, nurturing their passages and seasons. God is love and it is the love of God that tenderly watches over God's creatures, providing, caring. protecting, blessing.

According to Borg, one of the most conspicuous and controversial aspects of this radical new paradigm is its table fellowship. In a society constrained by taboos and fenced in by dietary prescriptions, Jesus, 'ate with tax collectors and sinners,' to use a frequent New Testament phrase. Norman Perrin, another important New Testament scholar, called this table fellowship 'the central feature' of Jesus' ministry. Moreover, according to the Jewish scholar Geza Vermes, 'it is this commitment to an inclusive table fellowship that differentiated Jesus more than any other from both his contemporaries and his prophetic predecessors.' [Vermes, Jesus the Jew]. Jesus took his stand among the pariahs of his world, despised by the respectable. Sinners were his table companions and tax collectors were his friends - indeed one of his disciples was a tax collector. It was precisely this table fellowship which provoked the hostility of his opponents: "Why do your disciples flout the traditions and the elders,' they challenge Jesus, 'Why do they not observe the rules of decency and propriety?' Jesus' actions were at best a dangerous and subversive flouting of the status quo and at worst the ultimate blasphemy - the sabotage of holiness.

Jesus' actions – his ministry of healing, preaching and teaching – are all rooted in his experience of God as loving creator, caring father and nurturing mother. It is his understanding of God as compassionate that defines his gospel. God's people are called to be holy as God is holy and in the gospel of Jesus Christ the holiness of God is God's compassion. In the ministry of Jesus it is compassion that becomes the norm for Israel's development, not a sterile, aloof, protected purity. Jesus radically transforms the quest for holiness. To be holy is to be compassionate as God is compassionate.

Allow me to mention yet another scholar who makes a significant contribution to this meditation on the politics of Jesus and his deliberate shifting of the spiritual paradigm from ritual purity to human compassion. Gary Wills in his book What Jesus Meant presents Jesus as a radical egalitarian who saved his harshest criticisms for those who wanted to exercise spiritual authority by condemning and outlawing others. Jesus regularly dismissed religious rituals, mocked external purity, and violated social taboos to demonstrate that God's lavish and indiscriminate love never excludes people because they are unclean, unworthy, or unrespectable: 'No outcasts were cast out far enough in Jesus' world to make him shun them,' writes Wills.

What I learn from these scholars about Jesus and the Christian way of life is that Jesus turned the purity system with its sharp social boundaries on its head. In its place he substituted a radically alternate social vision. The new community that Jesus announced is characterized by interior compassion for everyone, not external compliance to a purity code, by egalitarian inclusivity rather than by hierarchical exclusivity, and by inward transformation rather than outward ritual. Jesus deliberately replaces the 'Be holy, for I am holy' of Leviticus [19:2], says Borg, with the call to 'be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.' [Luke 6:36]. 'No outcasts' writes Gary Wills, 'were cast out far enough in Jesus' world to make him shun them - not Roman collaborators, not lepers, not prostitutes, not the crazed, not the possessed.' In Jesus, the human face of God's compassion, everyone is loved, everyone is chosen, no one is excluded, no one is forgotten, no one is left behind. To live this radical compassion, this is our calling and our mandate, it is our quest for holiness.

We have kept a Month of Compassion, and the challenge that comes to us on this last Sunday of that month is not just that we commit ourselves to be aware of those who are in desperate need, nor merely that we expend ourselves for their benefit, sharing our time, our efforts and our money with them. No the challenge to which we are called is the classic spiritual virtue of the Imitatio Dei – the imitation of God. We are called not to keep days and months of compassion, we are called to be compassionate as God is compassionate. The Greek of the New Testament knows several words for compassion. They fall into two groups. One cluster means merciful, graciously and gratuitously helpful, kind. The other is a more visceral word referring to the kind of love that turns your whole being upside down, churning up your bowels, tightening your stomach, pulsing in your temples and racing your breath. This more visceral word, emotive and almost hysterical, is the one Jesus uses all the time.

Strange it is that 2000 years after our Lord's deliberate shifting of the paradigm, his brave and bold inauguration of the gospel of compassion and justice for which he lived and died, strange it is that we are still caught in the grip of our propensity for laws over love, our following the letter of the law rather than its spirit. The uncleanness of sex makes us reject gays and lesbians, the offensiveness of poverty keeps us out of the townships and informal settlements where most of the people of our city live. The scandal of homelessness provokes a blindness in us that shuts out the destitute and neglected people on our streets. The untidiness of fair labour practices and the potential chaos of just remuneration for work make us wash our hands in self-protection and self-righteousness. But those of us who bear Christ's name and sit at his table are called not to have clean hands, but loving hearts. We are not called to be smug in our fulfilment of the law, but extravagant in random and frequent acts of lavish and unconditional love. May Christ, our compassionate Lord, kindle in our hearts the compassion that makes us loving as God is loving.

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