Sermon for Evensong on the first Sunday after Trinity at St Peter’s Church, Old Cogan, 2nd June 2024

Jeremiah 5:1-19, Romans 7:7-25 https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=584275767

Two different ways of looking at morality, what is right and good and how people understand God in relation to that morality. On the one hand you have Jeremiah, writing about the world before the sack of Jerusalem in 587BC, a long time before Jesus, and then on the other hand you’ve got St Paul, writing to the Romans in the light of Jesus, just after the time of Jesus, so within the first century AD. 

In Jeremiah’s world God is very definitely directly involved in life on earth. The Israelites have made a covenant, an agreement, with the Lord that they will respect him as the one true God, but they have been forgetting the covenant and worshipping another gods, behaving in a very immoral way, (albeit described very picturesquely, which you have to know about horses to understand).

Jeremiah the prophet is God’s mouthpiece, or at least he knows the mind of God. He says that God will act like a kind of super-parent, punishing bad behaviour in his children directly; if they carried on like that they would come to a sticky end. Indeed the Babylonians conquered the Israelites, destroyed the Temple, and took the Israelites off into captivity. ‘By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept’. ‘God will punish you,’ is Jeremiah’s message.

Father Etienne Charpentier, in his commentary on Jeremiah, says that this ‘God will punish you’, these prophetic sayings, ‘…may well shock us. They often present us with a God who threatens his people with punishment because they have sinned.’ He asks, ‘So are natural catastrophes, wars, human injustice, all punishment from God? We find such a picture of a vengeful God intolerable’. He suggests that it is not a question of God doing harm, but the prophets making sense out of the ups and downs of life – ‘… these events are less divine punishments than occasions for discovering the love of God which invites them to a new life’.

I’m not sure. It seems to me that Jeremiah’s idea of God belongs to that school who refer to ‘their God’, as opposed to their opponents’ god. That God will empower people to do certain things, often at the expense of or involving harm to, someone else. It underlines the problem, that God might seem to be doing bad things as well as good ones. But how can this be, if God is love?

Contrast that with St Paul’s letter to the Romans, where he suggests that the question whether or not people are doing evil or good depends on whether or not they are breaking the moral law, the Jewish law, the 10 Commandments and the law derived from it. 

Before the law, before Moses was given the tablets of stone, the people did not know what the law was and went on in blissful ignorance, but once they had the law then they knew the difference between good and evil, between right and wrong. St Paul seems to be arguing that there is no natural sense of right and wrong, no natural conscience in the way imagined by Thomas Aquinas, who himself based his philosophy on Aristotle. They thought that we have a sort of innate natural conscience and that people do not need to be taught in order to be able to tell right from wrong. 

St Paul understands right and wrong as being questions of the Jewish law, of sin. We tend to distinguish moral right and wrong from whether something is sinful or not. Atheists can and often do act perfectly morally, they do good, and they recognise good and evil, even though the concept of sin may not be something they recognise. 

St Paul sees sin as ‘the flesh’ as opposed to ‘the spirit’; bodily appetites versus the soul; versus heavenly, spiritual matters. ‘Spirit’, in Hebrew ‘ruach’, or Greek πνευμα, is the same word as ‘wind’. This is part of where the idea of God as Holy Spirit comes in. So if in general we think of ‘sin’ as being cut off from God, living away from God, St Paul links this with his concept of body and soul, of the flesh as opposed to the spirit.  He wrestles with a conflict inside himself. [Romans 7:14–15 (REB)]: ‘We know that the law is spiritual; but I am not: I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin.  I do not even acknowledge my own actions as mine, for what I do is not what I want to do, but what I detest.’

I really like this passage, in the same way as I like the story of Doubting Thomas. Paul knows what he ought to do, what is right and good: but he doesn’t do it. He explains this as being down to his ‘fleshly desires’. Earlier on he has used the example of the Commandment ‘Thou shalt not covet’. You can see how breaking that commandment will involve the opposite of spiritual things. You feel the need for that Hermès handbag or that Lamborghini, when really your mind should be on higher things.

But to me that just helps to make St Paul more credible. He isn’t just an impossibly virtuous person; instead he, and Doubting Thomas, are people like me. That for me is the takeaway from this part of his letter to the Romans, and not really the rather convoluted argument about the relationship between sin and the Jewish Law, the ten Commandments. 

I just don’t think that we see sin or moral good in terms of whether we are aware of the Ten Commandments or not. I suppose the argument is a bit reminiscent of the Garden of Eden, that before Adam and Eve knew the difference between good and evil, what they were doing was morally neutral.

But you could note, however, that perhaps the Fall, eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge, gave Adam and Eve a conscience. It wasn’t a question whether they knew the Jewish Law or not – the Ten Commandments hadn’t arrived at that stage, so they weren’t there to be broken. But that doesn’t mean that good and evil didn’t exist. It’s just that they didn’t know about it.

Another parallel between Paul’s ideas and the Garden of Eden is where he says that, before sin intruded, he was ‘fully alive’, but after sin came into the equation, ‘sin sprang to life and I died’. Adam and Eve were immortal before Fall, but subject to death as part of God’s punishment for their disobeying Him. ‘Dust you are, to dust you shall return.’[Genesis 3:19 (NEB)]

And the other big difference in the Christian understanding when compared  the Old Testament, Jeremiah’s, view is the clear promise that by God’s grace, through the operation of the Spirit, there is forgiveness for a repentant sinner. St Paul asks, ‘Miserable creature that I am, who is there to rescue me out of this body doomed to death?’ [Romans 7:24 (NEB)] At the beginning of chapter 8 of the letter, Paul answers his own question like this: ‘The conclusion of the matter is this: there is no condemnation for those who are united with Christ Jesus, because in Christ Jesus the life-giving law of the Spirit has set you free from the law of sin and death.’[Romans 8:1–2 (NEB)]

St Paul is like Jeremiah in that he feels close to God; he might even have said something about ‘Our God’, but I feel he sees things much more generously. ‘If God is on our side, who is against us? He did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all; and with this gift how can he fail to lavish upon us all he has to give?’ [Romans 8:31–32 (NEB)] When you are feeling down, just read Romans chapter 8. God will not punish you: He will bless you.