Assumptions

Sheffield Cathedral. Evening Prayer with Hymns (Trinity 17) – 22.09.13                          Readings: Ezra 1; John 7.14-36

Last Wednesday evening I was sat on the number 52 bus from the city centre to Hillsborough. After about two stops a young man sitting a few seats away struck up a conversation with me. To avoid him speaking rather loudly I moved closer to him and, from then until I got off the bus at my stop in Walkley, I did my best to respond to a barrage of questions and challenges about religious belief. God, angels, the afterlife, and judgement were just some of the topics raised by the young man, even before reaching Crookes.

He seemed to have a very clear picture in his own mind of God as an aloof being intent on punishing people; a God who somehow needed to be appeased by our good deeds, and who threatened people with eternal punishment for disobedience. I did my best to respond by pointing to the very different picture of God that we see in Jesus, but there is a limit to just how much theology can be explored in the course of a single bus journey.

Reflecting on that brief encounter, what seemed apparent was that the young man carried with him a whole set of assumptions about God that he had picked up along the way. And this set of assumptions impacted significantly on how he saw everything else. God as a cold, dispassionate judge was a picture certainly to the fore for him.

Of course, all of us have our own images and impressions of God, formed from what we have been taught about God and as a result of our life experience. In that sense, and because God will inevitably be more than we can imagine or comprehend, there will always be some extent to which human beings make God in our own image. The important thing, however, is that we remain aware of doing that, and open to having that distorted image of God corrected by looking at the life and teaching of Jesus.

In our second reading from John’s gospel, we see this process of taking assumptions about God for granted, as the opponents of Jesus clash with him. The words and actions of Jesus do not fit their template of how religious people should behave. They want Jesus to conform to their assumptions rather than allow their assumptions to be challenged by Jesus.

John tells us that around the middle of the Festival of Booths, Jesus went to the temple and began to preach. His listeners were astonished by his teaching. This was something completely unexpected. In order for someone to teach with authority, they would normally have been associated with a rabbi as a mentor, but this was not the case for Jesus. He did not meet their expectations and challenged their assumptions.

When questioned about the source of his wisdom Jesus pointed to God as the one from whom his teaching was derived, and challenged his listeners by saying that anyone whose resolve was to do the will of God would recognise his teaching as such. And then there comes an interesting twist that sometimes goes unnoticed when we read this passage from John. It involves mention of the rite of circumcision.

Now it is important to remember that a little earlier on in John 5 is the story of Jesus healing on the Sabbath, something for which he received scathing criticism for breaking the religious law. This would have been fresh in the minds both of Jesus and his listeners. The point he makes about circumcision is this.

He reminds those who, as he describes in verse 19, were ‘seeking to kill him’ that the law about circumcision was given not, in fact, by Moses but by the patriarchs who preceded him. That certainly would have been a reminder to the crowd of the extent to which Jesus knew the scriptures. The law stated that male children were to be circumcised on the eighth day after their birth. Inevitably this would mean some being circumcised on the Sabbath: one law thus being broken – the Sabbath law, in order to keep another – the law of circumcision.

There is also an implicit contrast made by Jesus between circumcision, essentially a mutilation of the flesh, and the healing that Jesus carried out on the Sabbath which restored a man who had been ill for years to wholeness. As Jesus puts it:

‘If a man receives circumcision on the Sabbath in order that the law of Moses may not be broken, are you angry with me because I healed a man’s whole body on the Sabbath? Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgement.’ (John 7.23-24)

This throws the crowd into confusion. The words of Jesus are compelling. All that he says and does seems so right and yet they struggle to reconcile it with all the assumptions about God that they have inherited through their tradition. Some think he must be the Christ, others disagree, holding to a popular belief that no one would know where the Christ came from – yet in Jesus’ case they knew very well that the was the son of a carpenter from Nazareth. Too much commotion in the temple precincts then result in the authorities seeking to arrest Jesus.

What we see here is the clash between what was the conventional wisdom about the nature of God that was held by the people of Jesus’ day, and the radically different revelation of God’s nature that was made manifest in the life and teaching of Jesus.

Many of those who opposed Jesus were not bad people; they simply could not accept that their assumptions about God needed to be informed and challenged by Jesus, rather than the other way around. It was too big a leap for them to make.

So back to my encounter with the man on the bus: I hope that his assumptions about God as a stern figure to be feared were disturbed by our meeting, and that my brief conversation with him en route to Walkley might have been a small step in helping him to look at the person of Jesus and see in him the reflection of God’s true nature. I may never know but live in hope that it might be so.

And for each of us, it is always a good thing for us to take a step back, reflect on the assumptions that we carry around about God, and remind ourselves that it is not by relying on those assumptions but by looking at the life of Jesus that we come to know what God is really like.

__________________________________________________________________

Please note that any advertisements carried on this page are the responsibility of WordPress and not linked in any way with the author