Both the letter of James and what Jesus says according to
Mark’s account, are calls for integrity.
Jesus was hard on conventional religiosity – pointing out the real
difference between insisting on rituals like ritual washing before eating and
yet having little love or compassion in their hearts.
Jesus quotes Isaiah and says “ These people honour me with
their lips but their hearts are far from me” and calls religious people like
that “hypocrites” which of course is Greek for actors – people simply playing a
role.
In my experience the very emptiest of religion can be the
most ritualistic where you know there is no spiritual heart and is a triumph of
form over substance. In another rhetorical flourish Jesus called the Pharisees
who approached religion in this way “Whitewashed tombs” meaning that everything
is pretty and well ordered and respectable on the outside but is dead on the
inside. You could say with some justification that Jesus hated religion, but
what he means is more nuanced because what he actually railed against was unspiritual, empty, religious forms.
And Jesus’ brother James takes up this thought and runs with
it. James himself and the Jerusalem church he led clung much more closely to
traditional Judaism and its outward forms and Mosaic law than did Paul (who
himself was of course an ex-Pharisee), but despite that or perhaps because of it James recognises all too
well the inherent danger of rites and rituals and beliefs themselves becoming
detached, cast adrift from our actual lives and the way we live them and the
way we relate to people and treat them.
James famously goes that one step further of course and in a
way quite shockingly says that no matter what you say you believe in, it is
completely useless until it is enfleshed in your life. And even further than
that the implication of the last verse of the reading from James today is that
in many respects he doesn’t care what doctrines you believe – because pure and
undefiled religion lies in how we treat the vulnerable and weak.
“Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive
themselves” (v.22)
It is the lack of integrity in religion that people really
hate. From the really major and obscene things like priests abusing children,
to simply talking about love and acceptance and welcome and then refusing to
offer someone the communion bread because they don’t belong to our club or are
deemed in some other way unacceptable.
Going back to Jesus he says “In vain do they worship,
teaching human precepts as doctrines. You abandon the commandment of God and
hold to human traditions”. That should make us all shake when we read out our
doctrinal statements - I’ll say no more.
What is the commandment of God that Jesus accuses the
Pharisees of abandoning? Well it forms part of the start of every Communion
service. Jesus maintains that the entire law and the prophets – that means the
entire body of scripture – the commandment of God - can be summed up as “Love
God, and love your neighbour as yourself”
The teaching from both readings today – from Jesus and his
brother – is show a little integrity. Integrate
the inner and outer you. What we do should be an accurate reflection of
what we say we believe. There has to be an alive spirituality underpinning the
rituals otherwise we run the risk of becoming a whitewashed tomb – looks and
sounds good but is actually dead inside.
None of us are perfect, least of all me, so if our goals in
terms of our actions are still a fair way off from our talk, which is likely
(!) we should at least though be “on the way” to integrating the two and we do
this through Spiritual practice.
Nurturing a lively spirituality which is a relationship with
the divine and integrating that into our lives was the premise of the
Spirituality days we held here at Gainford. Not an optional extra for people
interested in mysticism but according to Jesus the heart and soul, the beating
heart of true religion.
