Words of Moses from the Old Testament reading for today: the people of Israel are to teach their children the statutes and ordinances of the Lord, and also – as Deuteronomy expresses it – 'the things your eyes have seen'; the things that we know about God from our personal experience. The words are part of a wider call that Moses makes to the people when he urges them to choose life. Choose to follow God's ways, and teach them to your children – choose life.
As we are looking to the start of the new Sunday School term, it's a good time to think about what we make known to our children and young people. When teaching them about the things of God, it's easy to fall into one of two traps. Either to make nothing known, or to adopt the attitude of the pharisees and insist on too much, or the wrong things, as we heard in the gospel passage.
The pharisees do have a bad press in the New Testament. But many of them were truly trying to live holy lives. In their reverence for God as pure and holy, they had set up a refined system of religious acceptability. A system with religious categories of 'clean and unclean'. It was a way of telling the difference between things, or people, or places, that were sacred or godly and those that were defiled or ungodly.
When Jesus criticized this preoccupation with 'clean and unclean', he was finding fault with the pharisees' basic understanding of God. Their distinction between clean and unclean defined what was 'in' and what was 'out' with regard to God's favour. Those who were 'out', the unclean, were pushed to the outer fringes of society, they became outcasts – often for life. Jesus questions these purity codes and he called people to move from outward ritual to genuine devotion to God. Like Moses, he called them to choose life. Jesus' message is that God does not accept or reject us on the basis of outward ritual. God looks at the heart.
The teaching of Jesus is very liberating, but also very demanding. We can't sit back in the comfort of a careful set of religious rules and regulations. A 'do this and we'll be ok' approach does not work. What we need is a commitment to a living relationship with our living God.
And yet throughout history humankind has managed to get it wrong. Perhaps not in quite the same way as the pharisees, but we still get it wrong as individuals, as a community, as a society. We fail to 'choose life'.
Some 40 years ago – you can tell I'm old! – there was a television play 'Son of Man'. It was very avant garde at the time. The author Dennis Potter included an impressive scene. It's not taken from the gospels, it's purely imagination.
But Jesus and his disciples happen across the execution of some criminals; they had been crucified. They arrive just as the bodies are taken down and the crowd is dispersing. Jesus and his friends are appalled by what they've seen. Jesus, touched by the cruelty of it all, goes and puts his arms around the cross. As he stands there he begins to run his hands over the wood, the way a carpenter does. This is a good piece of timber....
And he says words to the effect: 'Just think, God gives the seed, it goes into the soil, God feeds it, gives it sun and rain – and it grows, year after year. When it is a tall tree, it's cut down. We could use it to make good things – tables, chairs, useful things. But what do we make? A cross!'
Humankind so often takes God's good gifts and uses them for evil, for death – and fails to choose life.
We read about it all the time: landowners who could grow food crops to bring life to their people, choose to grow drugs that bring death; nations where the people live in poverty, spending their income on armaments; forests destroyed causing flooding, famine and the spread of deserts. Even admitting that the situations are very complex, it doesn't take great wisdom to see what the outcome will be. So why do we do it? Why do human beings choose death and destruction – as they follow the god of our society – the god of greed and grab.
It may be a mystery as to why humanity is so perverse. But the real mystery is not – why does humankind invariably take good timber and make a cross. The real mystery is – how does God take a cross and make it the means of life?
The symbol of cruelty and hatred, suffering and death becomes the symbol of life triumphant over death, good vanquishing evil, love victorious over hatred, and forgiveness for the unforgivable. The mystery of God's grace.
That is what our children and our children's children need to learn from us – they need to see a community of people who live by the grace of this God – God who reaches out to sinful, suffering humanity to bring life, the life that we so often fail to choose for ourselves.
Make it know to your children and your children's children. Choose life. Amen.
Adèle Kelham