Blood and hypocrisy

Tuesday, July 11, 2006 -- Week of Proper 9 (Benedict of Nursia)

"Morning Reflections" is a brief thought about the scripture readings from the Daily Office of Morning and Evening Prayer according to the practice found in the Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church.

Morning Prayer begins on p. 80 of the Book of Common Prayer.
Evening Prayer begins on p. 117

An online resource for praying the Daily Office is found at www.missionstclare.com
Another form of the office from Phyllis Tickle's "Divine Hours" is available on our partner web site www.ExploreFaith.org at this link -- http://explorefaith.org/prayer/fixed/index.html

Discussion Blog
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Today's Readings for the Daily Office (p. 973)
Psalm 5, 6 (morning) // 10, 11 (evening)
Numbers 35:1-3, 9-15, 30-34
Romans 8:31-39
Matthew 23:13-26

From the earliest days there is a Biblical conviction that life is in the blood. Whenever life is taken wrongly, the blood itself cries out from the ground to the God of justice. Wrongful death pollutes the land.

Today we read some of the provisions for dealing with the need to cleanse the people and land after wrongful death. There is care to provide cities of refuge to protect someone from revenge should they commit unintentional manslaughter. And "no one shall be put to death on the testimony of a single witness." But the ethic of early Israel demands that blood be avenged by blood, death by death. If the death was intentional murder, the person would be tried by the congregation, and if convicted, the sentence would be carried out by the "avenger of blood," presumably a designated member of the victim's family. If the death was accidental, the person who caused the unintentional manslaughter will live in a refuge city until the death of the high priest.

We hear echoes of this tradition in Paul's lyrical proclamation at the end of Romans 8. Christ is the great high priest whose blood and death overcomes all sin, violence and death. "Who is to condemn?" Nothing can "separate us from the love of Christ." Not even death and blood. His is the death that liberates humanity from the cycle of death and revenge, sin and punishment.
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Reading the series of woes against the scribes and Pharisees brings a couple of things to mind. "But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them." A friend visited the Bible Fellowship Church a couple of weeks ago and was telling about the multi-sensory experience of hell. With sounds and images and words the teaching was about the horrors of hell and about the God who was going to send every human being there. The only way out, it was implied, was to join their church.

I've written before about the strangeness of a religion that proclaims that Jesus died to save us from God. I've written before about the anemia of reducing religion to a transaction.

In Christ we see revealed the nature of God not as the avenger of blood, but as the vulnerable love which absorbs violence unto death and gives back only life. Jesus shows us the life that liberates humanity from the cycle of death and revenge, sin and punishment.

While reading the series of woes I also thought of my of hypocrisy and my church's hypocrisy as we "strain at gnats" and make distinctions that sound as strange as the third woe in this list. They hypocrites say "who ever swears by the sanctuary is bound by nothing, but whoever swears by the gold of the sanctuary is bound by the oath." Last Sunday I found myself explaining the strange difference between "public" and "private pastoral" rites and the difference between "marriage" and "blessing." That strange conversation came to mind when I read "for you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith." No church has a monopoly on hypocrisy.

"Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? ...No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, or angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Lowell

P.S. Today is the feast of St. Benedict. His balanced rule offers sane wisdom for living in community. I'm recalled to the Benedictine promises of obedience, stability and conversion of life.


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The Rev. Lowell Grisham
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Fayetteville, Arkansas