Week 15 Monday (Year 2)

Readings: Isaiah 1.10-17; Psalm 50; Matthew 10.34-11.1

Even God, it seems, and especially God, gets tired of religion. It would be difficult to find a more powerful critique of religious practices than the one which God himself inspires in the prophet Isaiah in the first reading. Sacrifices and chanting, festivals and assemblies, seasonal celebrations and ordinary prayer, all the panoply of religion: it is all distasteful and unwelcome when it is done by people whose hands are full of blood. 

It is not blood from the sacrifices, however, but the blood sucked out of those who have been exploited by the people who then present themselves as religious. 'Make justice your aim', the Lord says, 'redress the wronged, hear the orphan's plea, defend the widow'.

It is a frequent refrain from the prophets of the Old Testament, taken up again in the New - 'what I want is mercy, not sacrifice' - and carried on into the life of the Christian church - in the Letter of James, for example, and in the writings of Fathers of the Church such as John Chrysostom.

Against that background it becomes easier to understand the teaching of Jesus in the gospel reading. If justice is the aim then we know from our own experience that there will be trouble. The sword of justice, the cutting edge of integrity and concern for the poor, the challenge to power and to money - this never goes down well, a mission guaranteed to bring the sword rather than peace. 

But we must listen and we must review our own treatment of the poor. There is a temptation to, once again, spiritualise it, turn it into something religious, to say that it is of course really Jesus himself who is the poorest of the poor and how am I treating him? But he calls us back to concrete decisions and actions: the good Samaritan, the Last Judgement scene. You must take up your cross and follow after him. 

You must be ready to give a disciple a cup of cold water - that sounds manageable, perhaps a reprieve when we feel guilty about our service of the poor: I have at least done one kind act for a disciple. So perhaps there is hope for us after all, if we have not lost completely a sense of compassion, however faint, for our brothers and sisters.

But the stark warning still stands: cut out the religious nonsense because it is nonsense as long as we are without compassion, as long as we are aiming at something other than justice. Only with that as our aim will we not lose our reward even if it is only small acts of kindness that we can manage.