It is a constant
temptation to ‘cherry pick’ the Bible, picking out the texts and stories that
we like. Sometimes we edit the texts and stories for the bits we like, removing
anything we find awkward or difficult.
A sentence in today’s
gospel reading is a good example. How often have we heard it quoted, ‘where two
or three gather in my name, there am I in the midst of them’. It is a beautiful
thought. The immediate context is that of praying, asking the Lord for something
that we want and for which we ask together. But pull back the focus even
further and we see that the full context is the fraught one of church
discipline. If a brother sins … firstly have it out with him in private. If
that makes no difference bring two or three others with you. And if it still
does not work then bring the matter before the church. If the person is still
recalcitrant expel him from the community. For where two or three are gathered
in my name …
Our first thought might
be that ‘Jesus could never have said that’. It must have come from the early
Church community, a voice suggests, as it began to struggle with the realities
of human nature, as the novelty began to wear off and the real world began to
bite within the group of believers. But to listen to that voice may simply be
because we have ‘cherry picked’ our way to a particular image of Jesus that
omits all the difficult sayings and sharp edges, that keeps only the texts more
easily accepted, that fit our picture of a Jesus who thereby becomes just a bit
too nice, just a bit unreal.
Some of the issues
facing Jesus, and the apostles, as they began to establish the new Israel are those
that faced Moses as he sought to build the first Israel. In one case as in the
other there are difficulties in the community, in human relations, questions of
justice and injustice, the influence of the deadly sins of pride and envy, lust
and anger, and all the rest. How is one person to judge all these things? We
know that Moses asked for help from God with precisely this problem and was
given elders or assistant judges to help him in his leadership of God’s people
(Exodus 18). In matters of justice particularly it is better protected where decisions
are made by more than one person and wiser where responsibility for them is
carried by more than one person.
Nevertheless Moses
died alone. There is a deep poignancy in the account of his death which we hear
in today’s first reading. From Mount Nebo he is allowed to survey the whole of
the promised land but is not allowed to cross over. He dies, buried in a tomb
whose location is quickly forgotten (how could it happen: perhaps like Elijah
he was taken up into heaven?), and his spirit passed to Joshua. No death in the
Old Testament can compare, no eulogy comes close. There has been no prophet
like Moses, nobody whose works compare with what he did.
Until now, that is. Now
Jesus, the carpenter’s son from Nazareth, has been revealed as ‘the prophet
like Moses’ (Deuteronomy 18) and as a prophet even greater than Moses. Many
texts in the gospels show this. Returning to today’s gospel reading, for
example, and the comparison between the first Moses and the new Moses, it is
immediately clear that Jesus makes claims that would have sounded exaggerated
even on the lips of Moses. Where two or three are gathered ‘in my name’, he says,
there am I in the midst of them. We cannot imagine Moses, the guardian of the holiness
of God’s name, making any such statement. Likewise we cannot imagine Moses describing
the authority and power delegated to the people in the way Jesus does: ‘whatever
you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, whatever you loose on earth will be loosed
in heaven’. God and God’s people have been brought closer than ever through the
teaching and work of Jesus, into a sharing of life beyond anything Moses could
have imagined.
On the face of it
today’s gospel reading speaks of the authority of the community. But through it
we also see the face of Jesus more clearly. He is the one who delegates this
authority to them – ‘who is this’, we
might say, ‘who not only forgives sins himself but feels entitled to delegate
this power to a human community’? He is the one who encourages his followers to
pray to God ‘in his name’. ‘What need have we of further witnesses’, we might
be tempted to say, ‘when we hear such blasphemy from his own lips’?
Rather than cherry
picking the treasury of the Bible it is far better to engage with the texts as
the Church presents them to us in the liturgy each day. There is always
something to be seen, something to be learned, even if it is not immediately
obvious. Often what is to be seen and learned is gained not just by looking at
the text, or part of it, but by remembering the context and by struggling with its
difficult aspects. And often so much more is learned where the Bible text is
thought about and prayed over by two or three gathered in His name. For each of
us has received His Spirit who teaches us everything and leads us into the
fulness of the truth Jesus came to reveal.
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