Is not this what I require of you as a fast?
Ordinary Sunday 5, 10th February, 2002
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden
Assistant Priest and Archivist, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
Is not this what I require of you as a fast – to loose the fetters of injustice, to untie the knots of the yoke, to snap every yoke and set free those who have been crushed? Is it not sharing your food with the hungry, taking the homeless poor into your house, clothing the naked when you meet them, and never evading a duty to your kinsfolk? (Isaiah 58: 6-7)
One of the lectures in English in my first year as an undergraduate was taken by a brilliant lecturer who offered some remarkable insights into a tragedy that had already received so much comment from others that you would have thought it difficult to find anything new to say: Shakespeare's Macbeth. As I recall, he began his lecture by warning us that Macbeth was not the kind of play to generate any kind of jokes that were effective; it was far too intense for anything like that – and then proceeded to deliver the one amusing line that he did know. For some reason, I can recall the argument of the rest of the lecture (something I cannot say about most of the lectures I attended that year), but I don't recall the joke. Perhaps I should phone him (he is still alive and well) to see whether he recalls it.
This comment leads me directly to this morning's Old Testament lection from Isaiah. For quite different reasons, but like Macbeth, its basic matter is far too demanding in its seriousness to make any kind of humour appropriate. So this morning there will be no lightening of the mood; I am asking for concentrated attention, without any sugar coating of the homiletic pill.
We can of course read the passage from Isaiah just as it stands, as at once an ethical insight and a strongly worded demand concerning the appropriateness of what we would now call social justice. But, unlike many who advocate fair dealing for others – a good and reasonable thing in itself – Isaiah doesn't do this from the perspective of political action, but bases his appeal, and its rightness, on an insight into the nature of God. It is because unjust dealings between human beings are counter to something in the divine that they are, in the end, unacceptable. Now I don't intend to ask how we apply these kind of insights to situations in which we, or our nation, are involved. Last week, at the service for the commencement of the legal year, Father Brennan addressed some of the obvious areas in an eloquent and legally authoritative fashion.
But there are other ways of approaching that passage from Isaiah and the insights it contains. As we are already on the verge of Lent, it is easy to point out that this passage discusses what constitutes a genuine fast. It offers us all some uncomfortable challenges, which is what we all in some way need, no matter how much we might like to think otherwise.
At the surface level, it insists on a distinction between formalism and a deeper level of religious life. In the verses that precede our reading, Isaiah makes two criticisms of fasting as he observed it among his contemporaries. Firstly, it was understood in terms of denial – self-mortification with the imposition of ashes and sackcloth. Jesus was to follow in an established tradition of radical criticism when he told his followers not to see self-mortifying acts as the core of fasting, and further, encouraged them to do the opposite. All of that we will hear in Ash Wednesday's gospel. Isaiah insists that real fasting involves something much more positive – a replacing something negative with something positive. And he identifies the positive with the equalising of all kinds of inequities and the making right of injustices.
Secondly, he criticised the overall behaviour of those who identified fasting with self-mortification. The employers still abused their workforce; people performed acts of self-denial, but could still indulge in physical violence against others. Abstinence from food or comfortable clothing was not accompanied by abstinence from violence and destructive behaviour.
Isaiah calls for at least two things, both of them demanding. The first is a vision that sees beyond the surface and probes more deeply; that insistence is one that is not unique to Isaiah. It occurs in the teaching of all truly great probers into human motivation and the conscience – including those unwavering analysers of the keys to ethical behaviour, Socrates and Jesus. Their relentless peeling off of surface layers to expose what subsisted beneath created a degree of discomfort in many of their contemporaries that was one of the contributing factors in the trial and execution of both of them. Probing below the surface, insisting on truthfulness, is something which is done at risk by those who insist in following such a path. When we read Isaiah's comments on his contemporaries, we must beware of thinking that the churches have been free of such failings. One only has to look at the groups (mainly, but not exclusively, of men) who have been responsible for choosing leaders – whether for small parishes or major sees, from popes to obscure country clergy – to find evidence over and over again of leaders who have been chosen on the basis of the surface appearance, or of their conformity to a narrow range of criteria, by others who were either incapable of discerning what might be below the surface, or who were unwilling to probe. Leaders so chosen have generally failed to deliver in one way or another. And when church members, as much as Isaiah's contemporaries, have not cultivated sufficient insight to see below the surface, however they might eventually regret their choices, it is in the end a reflection of their own shallow or narrow perceptions and expectations.
Secondly, Isaiah calls for a consistency, and integrity between what is within us and the way we act. For each of us, this poses a daily challenge, not so much because we are deeply unwilling to try to make our actions somehow conform with our intentions, but because as time passes, we increasingly become aware of being restricted in our choices. Most of us are hindered at some point by an area in ourselves that is deeply resistant to any change; an older style of spirituality spoke of besetting sins, ways of approaching people or situations that we feel some real dissatisfaction about, and to which we revert, no matter how much we resolve to abandon them. Often they surface, not in terms of dramatic or highly obvious failings – sometimes it is the large and weighty baggage we can carry that is more easily cast off in one final dramatic struggle – but in the things that persist below the surface, and come out in quieter, more subtle ways; in various forms of complacency, self-indulgence, or destructive behaviour towards others: these are more dangerous, the true besetting sins. It is one thing to say that we must not despair but embrace a degree of self-acceptance when we find that, decades on in life, we are still not greatly advanced in dealing with some of the things that we recognised as our weaknesses much earlier; but we are neither invited, nor allowed, to abandon the effort to create a consistency between the life that we aspire to, and the life we actually live. One of the keys remains the factor I identified last week, the importance of the decisions we make about the disposition of our wills.
All of this is challenging and discomforting enough. But there is one final additional thing: the result of our accepting such challenges is not guaranteed to be a quiet life, the feeling good of some New Age spirituality, or anything of the sort. With increased sharpening comes greater perception, but also greater vulnerability. Jesus' words from this morning's gospel about being a light for the world are frequently quoted. Elsewhere, in St John's gospel, Jesus speaks of Himself as the light of the world. Though these two sayings occur in different gospels in quite different contexts, there is a kind of inner logic that connects them. We are called to imitate Jesus, or reflect his life. If He is light, this is what we are, in some sense, also called to be. And it can sound positively comforting, not only having a light, but being called to be a light: that, I suspect, is one of the reasons why it is so often quoted, appearing on cards accompanied by photographs of sunrises, lighthouses, or candles emitting gentle warm glows. But I don't think Jesus was offering us some kind of 'feel good' saying or understanding of our vocation at this point. Because there is a saying that occurs in this morning's gospel after the frequently quoted one; one that immediately suggests something more challenging. A town that stands on a hill cannot be hidden. Cities on hills in Jesus day, and for centuries to come, in both east and west, were often walled, because their obviousness made them targets sooner or later for attack.
For us, the kind of relentless stripping away of appearances, the attempt to sort out the real from the illusory, and to create an integrity between our belief and our actions, is not some seasonal activity, but a life-long pursuit. But there is one positive note on which I want to end. The vulnerability which is a consequence of all of this is not primarily a vulnerability to attack, though this can happen, but an openness to God, ourselves and others: the vulnerability of exposing and offering what we have and what we are. It is nothing less than a sharp surgery of the soul to prepare us for that wholeness and integrity which is the state which God originally intended for us.
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