A Sermon for Trinity 13

Deuteronomy 4.1-2, 6-9 | Psalm 15 | James 1.17-end | Mark 7.1-8, 14, 15, 21-23 

Sermon preached at St Bene’t’s Church, Cambridge, on 29 August 2021 

Recently, my daughter Sophia and I visited the Fitzwilliam Museum to see the ‘Human Touch’ exhibit. Ironically, and much to her disappointment, we weren’t actually allowed to touch any of it. But we enjoyed roaming the dimly-lit rooms, admiring the paintings, drawings, and sculptures. Sophia is ten months old, so she’s still developing her taste for fine art—she mostly likes to watch people. But I was struck by the pieces to which she did gravitate, because they weren’t what I expected. She completely ignored a giant, brightly colored painting covering one of the walls, instead smiling at a medieval manuscript lying open behind glass. There was a strange video of a hand playing on a loop, which I found unsettling, and she found delightful. 

 Art is a training ground for the imagination because our engagement with it is always constructive, not just receptive. We carry with us particular frames of reference which bring, or fail to bring, pieces of art to life. Sophia and I undoubtedly carry with us dissimilar frames of reference, which makes her an ideal companion for such outings.

The role of our imagination in perceiving art is most obvious on a visual level. We see a two-dimensional painting in light of a 3-dimensional world which is not itself visible in the painting. Our imagination interprets the flat image in light of a whole that is not present therein, but makes sense of it. When we view art, we are being invited not just to see, but to ‘see as’. We don’t just see two splatters of paint, we see the negative space between them as hands coming together, fingers entwined.

One of the central purposes of the Torah, the law of Moses, is to shape the imagination of the people of Israel. It transforms their ability to form mental pictures of themselves and of the world, and to conceive alternative ways of being from that of their neighbors. Moses himself notes that keeping these statutes and ordinances diligently will cause the surrounding nations to say “surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!” Those who keep the law show themselves capable of discerning something about the world that others miss. Above all, they discern the presence and agency of the God of their ancestors, who created the heavens and the earth, and brought them out of Egypt. They don’t just see the world, they see it as God’s good creation; as that which finds its source, ground, and end the one who is love itself.

Much like a two-dimensional painting, the Torah depends on a whole that is not itself present in the law, but makes sense of it. It evokes questions about what truth, goodness, justice, and God himself must be like, if these are the commands by which he has instructed them to live. When the wisdom of Israel manifests itself to the surrounding nations as justice, it is evidence that they have grasped the whole which makes sense of their law—their imagination has been shaped to see the world with a hidden depth of intentionality. At the same time, when it shows itself to be unjust, it is a sign that they have disregarded that which gives meaning to their statutes and ordinances. 

In Mark chapter 7, Jesus encounters a group of pharisees whose focus is to extend the purity of the temple into the home in ways that will create even stronger boundary markers between Jews and Gentiles, emphasizing their distinction not only by what they eat, but also how they eat. What we take away from this exchange, and others like it in the gospels, is that the Pharisees’ amplification of the law is unjust, serving to exclude and disenfranchise people.

Extending purity rituals while ignoring and perpetuating injustice is like extending the lines out from the edge of a painting without ever stepping back to see what it depicts. My favorite piece from the exhibit was a pencil sketch, splashed across with charcoal shading at various angles. Out of the dark center of the piece emerged two hands, reaching out and holding on to one another. It is hung in a thin pine frame with a large matte. The expert shading around the edges is beautiful, but if it were extended to fill the entire matte, the hands at the centre would lose their proportion, and the hopefulness that their emergence from the charcoal evokes would be swallowed by the expanse of black and grey that would newly surround them. If we start extending the edges of art works, especially without grasping what they depict, we both distort them and entirely miss their meaning.

In Mark’s gospel, Jesus has just fed five thousand people on a hillside and then walked on water, commanding the wind and the waves. For those with ears to hear, these actions recall the two events that preceded the original giving of the law: the crossing of the red sea, and God’s provision of bread in the desert. Rather than perceiving the action of God in Jesus’ ministry—the new Exodus which so many had hoped and prayed for, for generations—the Pharisees see a threat to their power. The deeper frame of reference, which gives meaning to the law, has been set at odds with the law itself by those who failed to let it reshape their imagination. The Pharisees could only imagine the law issuing in more laws. They cannot fathom that food laws could serve the purpose of setting apart a particular people for a time, so that through them, God himself might share a meal with Jews and Gentiles, men and women, pharisees, prostitutes, and tax collectors. To be fair to them, we Christians often cannot fathom this either.

Jesus’ criticism of the scribes and pharisees in this passage has frequently been understood to suggest that Judaism is about works while Christianity is about faith, or that ‘tradition’ is a distraction from relationship with God. But God himself gave Israel the law and Christ passed down traditions to his disciples that we carry on today. The passage Jesus quotes to the Pharisees is about God’s refusal to accept worship when the worshippers are actively disregarding him. In his original promulgation of the law, Moses noted that by observing it diligently, other nations would be able to see how near Israel is to God. And like the gift of the law, so its fulfillment in the gift of baptism does the same.  

We who die with Christ and are raised to new life in the Spirit form a people who not only partake in peculiar practices and rituals, but do those things that we might learn to see the world with a hidden depth of beauty. The difference is that the law could shape the imagination, but it could not transform the heart. And, as Jesus says, it is that which comes from within the human heart that defiles us. “We know that our old self was crucified with [Christ],” writes Paul, “so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to it.” In Christ, by the work of the Spirit, our very hearts are transformed. And as a result, we find new paths open to us for our wisdom to manifest itself to the world as justice. As James puts it, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”