Dear Parishioner,

Jesus is cross. fact he’s been cross all week, if you’ve been listening to the week-day readings which have given us Matthew’s version of this Sunday’s Gospel from Mark. He’s cross (and don’t believe all the nonsense about him always even tempered, he really isn’t, and he tells jokes as well) because he can’t stand how people, and that means us, use words not to express but to cover their thoughts and intentions. The scribes and Pharisees endorse a complicated system of rites that are meant to ensure that we are at rights with God, but which seem to serve mostly as a cover for what they really want; they say it’s all about God, but what they do suggests it’s all about them. Now, externals do matter; what we see, what people appear to be, how thy look and speak etc. But that essential pre-judgement quickly hardens into prejudice, and what we swiftly observe becomes all we are ever willing to consider about someone.

Yet, if considering only the outside of a person isn’t enough, we can also go astray if we think only about the inside. Long ago, in the Good Old Days (which often enough were not especially good, and the customs they valued not particularly old either)  I was taught, or at least came to believe, that I was an immortal soul in a perishable body, and that it was my soul that mattered, while my body was at best a convenience and frequently an actual hazard. Now, this is a common, popular idea, with an ancient tradition behind it, but it is not what Christians believe, is it? We believe in the Resurrection of the Body, a strange, almost inexplicable idea, but which urges us to understand that we are complete, whole people, not a secret inside and an all too easily summed up outside.

Often people say to me that they can’t stop judging others, and it is true that instant condemnation comes easy to us and is then honed by endless repetition in our thoughts. But the way to deal with this is to try a bit of empathy, to think ourselves into what might be going on inside others, and not to just listen endlessly to our own self justifications. If someone is acting badly in our opinion, we should ask ourselves why we think this happens and not be satisfied with explanations that exculpate ourselves and quickly condemn others. St Benedict calls it Obedience, the act of trying to work out what someone really needs from us, and why. But if we don’t bother, if we think bad thoughts, bad acts will soon follow, for our insides and outsides are connected, are, in fact, different aspects of the same thing.

Why is Jesus cross? Because he cares. He cares that we harm ourselves by dividing our insides from our outward expressions. He wants us not to hurt each other, and not to hurt ourselves.

Abbott Martin