Cana in Galilee | hughdbryant

Sermon for Mattins on 19th November 2023 at All Saints Church, Penarth

Bible readings: https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=567221698

When I led the team running the food bank in Cobham, Surrey, in the second richest borough in the country – I mean in the UK, not just Wales – the old saying about the political inclinations of Anglicans rang very true; you know, that the Church of England is the ‘Conservative Party at prayer’. I can see you bristling, because I’m no longer in England, and what holds good for the Church of England may well not carry sway in Wales; and also when I see our Labour MP and our Labour MS and our Labour Police and Crime Commissioner and our Labour Mayor, all happily ensconced in the congregation here at All Saints, I can’t help feeling that perhaps the political orientation of the faithful in the church in Wales might be rather different from how things are in the darkest parts of Surrey.

What, you may ask, has this got to do with the parable of the talents? ‘For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.’ In the Authorised Version, ‘…from him that hath not, it shall be taken away, even that which he hath’. Surely this is one of the toughest things which Jesus is supposed to have said; so tough that I wonder whether he really did say it.

But then if you look at Saint Mark’s Gospel, chapter 4, you’ll find that he said almost the same words, but not referring to a parable like the parable of the talents, just rather a version of the ‘golden rule’ to do as you would be done to. ‘…the measure you give will be the measure you receive with something more besides. For those who have will be given more, and those who have not will forfeit even what they have’. That’s what is in Saint Mark’s Gospel chapter 4 [4:25].

What made me think about these socio-economic issues was when I was ‘Googling’ these lines to see if there were any brilliant insights in the University of Google, and I found in the Quora app the response to the question, what does this saying of Jesus mean, and someone had given the answer, ’It means that God is a Republican. He clearly wants the already wealthy to be given more, and for the poor to have what little they have taken away.’

Surely that can’t be right. I can dare to discuss it, because it has been neatly transposed by Quora into an American context and the parallels between the Republicans and any UK political parties are, of course, not exact; so I don’t think that I am saying anything rude about British politics, if we just keep it at this academic level. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Did Jesus really approve of that?

There are even more puzzling things to tangle with if you look at the rest of the parable, because it looks like an invitation to, or at least an endorsement of, speculation. ‘You have to speculate to accumulate’, some people say, and the first two slaves did exactly that – and were successful.

It doesn’t say exactly what their trading activity was; whether they invested in making something or whether it was pure speculation, futures and options perhaps. Who knows? It does look a bit as though Jesus is attempting a Marxist analysis, that what he is talking about is capital, the uses of capital; and the third slave, the one who buried the talent in the ground, and got no credit for looking after it carefully, perhaps put into words a Marxist critique.

‘You were a harsh man reaping where you did not sow, gathering where you did not scatter seed.’ Perhaps he was a shareholder in one of the water companies, being paid in dividends the money which should have gone to improving the quality of the water so as to put Surfers against Sewage out of business. Or somebody like the Glazers, the brothers who took over Manchester United. They borrowed all the money needed to buy Manchester United, and having bought it they used the profits of Manchester United’s activities to repay the loans. ‘Unto him who hath, it shall be added’. And the season ticket prices went through the roof – ‘… from him who hath not, …’

But are we meant to think that the absent capitalist in the parable stands for Jesus or for God, and if so, does God approve? Does He approve of speculation, more than just keeping something safe that you’ve been given to look after? The capitalist says that he should have put it in a deposit account and got interest on it.

That’s quite a change from the usual Old Testament position in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. All condemn usury, which is lending at excessive rates of interest, to the detriment of the poor. It’s something that the Old Testament seems to condemn, but here Jesus seems to approve of the idea that somebody should benefit from the payment of interest on deposits.

And the poor slave doesn’t get any credit for keeping the capitalist’s money safe. He didn’t lose it; whereas the speculators could easily have lost it. Investments can go down as well as up, as the small print always advises. Perhaps what Jesus is trying to point up is that it is better to be active, to try to work hard rather than just to sit back and go with the flow.

The reading from Zephaniah has the same sort of theme. ‘I will search Jerusalem with lamps and I will punish the people who rest complacently on their dregs’. Another translation says, ‘I shall search Jerusalem by lantern light and punish all those who are ruined by complacency, like wine left on its lees. Who say to themselves, the Lord will do nothing neither good nor bad.’

These people are so comfortable that they don’t care about God. But their wealth will be plundered, their houses laid in ruins. They will build houses but not live in them. Think about the new Embassy Quarter in London near where the new American embassy has been built on the south side of the River Thames, where at night there are no lights in the buildings and the restaurants are closing, because nobody lives there.

Absentee speculators have bought up the flats. They don’t live there and they don’t let anyone else live there. Just imagine the effect on the housing crisis if the councils could house some of the people on the waiting list in some of those flats. It looks as though Zephaniah was another person in the Bible with at least some views which Karl Marx would recognise.

Altogether this is challenging teaching. Perhaps Jesus was just deliberately trying to make us think. In distinct contrast with the parable of the talents, there are the stories of Dives and Lazarus, or the Good Samaritan, about generosity or the lack of it; or turning the water into wine at the wedding in Cana in Galilee.

I don’t see that the apparent meanness of the parable of the talents really squares with the second great Command, to love one’s neighbour as oneself, so I think it must be a discussion piece, a deliberate provocation to the disciples to think hard about economics. Granted that Jesus made five loaves and two fishes go a long way, I still don’t see him as being terribly enthusiastic about zero sums – you know, what I gain, you lose.

What would Jesus’s take on it be today? Surely he would think that the gap between the rich and the poor is far too great. And I don’t necessarily think he would recommend aggressive speculation as a way of making money. ‘Render unto Caesar’ seems to me to be a clue. Progressive taxation might be on Jesus’s agenda today, I would have thought. ‘Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves,’ might be as far as He would go. But I don’t think that the widow, with her mite, was listening.

Sermon for the Third Sunday of Lent, 7th March 2021

John 2:13-22

‘My house is the house of prayer – but you have made it a den of thieves.’ The story about Jesus turning out the moneychangers and people selling animals and birds for sacrifice in the temple is one that we are all very familiar with, probably particularly the ‘den of thieves’. But you’ll realise that the version of the story which was our gospel today doesn’t actually contain those words, ‘den of thieves’. The ‘den of thieves’ version appears in all in all the other gospels, in Matthew, Mark and Luke [Matt. 21:12-17, Mark 11:15-17, Luke 19:45-48], but not in St John’s Gospel, which we read from today.

Here in St John’s account, Jesus ejected from the Temple all the various people selling things there, saying, ‘…you must not turn my father’s house into a market’ [NEB]. In St John’s Gospel, the people that Jesus kicked out of the temple were not thieves, but were simply people running a market, a shop – the word in Greek, το εμπορίον, is the same as our ‘emporium’ – running a shop in a place where they should not have done. Maybe that can give us an idea what Jesus thought about commerce and places of worship. So how should the church interact with the market?

I went once to a very interesting seminar on charity fundraising, and one of the speakers was the Revd Dr Sam Wells, whom I’m sure a lot of you will have heard on ‘Thought for the Day’ in the morning. He is the vicar of St Martin in the Fields in Trafalgar Square.

Sam Wells’ contribution to the seminar was all about the commercial activities of Saint Martin in the Fields. For example the church runs, and charges for, concerts, and they have a big restaurant in the crypt in the basement. Dr Wells was robustly in favour of his church’s commercial activities because, he said, it made it possible for them to do more charitable things than if they just had to rely on what people put in the collection plate. And I’m sure no-one thinks that St Martin’s is a den of thieves!

Perhaps we get a better idea what Jesus was driving at from the context of the story in the Bible. In St John’s Gospel this story of the cleaning out of the temple comes at the beginning of the gospel, immediately after the story of the turning of water into wine at the wedding in Cana in Galilee. In the other gospels the story comes right at the end just before Jesus’ trial and crucifixion.

Whereas, in the other three gospels, the ‘cleansing’ of the temple was taken as a provocation by the Jewish authorities, leading on to Jesus’ trial, in John’s account the emphasis is much more on the bit about rebuilding of the temple in three days, looking forward to Jesus’ resurrection after three days, with a sort of pun on the word ‘temple’, so that it’s not only the building, but also the physical body of Jesus, and his resurrection – the quintessential sign of his divine nature – that they are talking about.

The way that the first three gospels look at it, they emphasise the den of thieves, the corruption, the cheating; but in St John’s Gospel Jesus simply says you mustn’t be running a shop, any shop, in the temple. There is no suggestion in John’s account that the shopkeepers were ripping people off. It was just that commercial activity wasn’t appropriate in the temple.

If Jesus’ saying about pulling down and rebuilding the temple in three days was a metaphor, a metaphor for his own death and resurrection, was the chucking out of all the paraphernalia of animal sacrifice perhaps not also a metaphor, a metaphorical way of showing that God no longer needed to be appeased, bought off, by being given the carcasses of poor innocent dead animals and birds?

If we see God in that light, instead of a God to be feared, who has to be bought off by sacrifices, Jesus’ message is that after him, divine retaliation and retribution will not be the way forward, but that forgiveness and hope are the ways of the kingdom.

I don’t think we should picture the Temple with any old shops in it – surely these were special shops, just selling what you needed for the worship in the temple. It wasn’t a question of opening a branch of Marks & Spencer in a side chapel of the temple.

But even so, Jesus was passionately opposed to having those shops in the Temple. For him I think it was the whole question of values, and possibly false values, implicit in the idea of markets. Are markets really the only way which we have to reach a fair assessment of the value of something? Do you value things only because they have a certain value in the marketplace?

Take footballers, for instance. Footballers are exceptional in all sorts of ways, but one of them is that leading footballers have a very visible price tag. They are bought and sold almost like a commodity. We are not quite back in the world of the slave trade but, you know, people refer to each of the stars by reference to the cost of their last transfer. We say that a player ‘cost £20 million’. One of you, I’m sure, will be able to tell me immediately what David Beckham’s last transfer cost or what some of the current stars have cost their clubs. The other side of this, of course, is that when a footballer gets near the end of his career, he will get a free transfer. But – does that mean he’s not worth anything at all any more?

Is it right to value something or somebody highly only because they have a big price tag? Surely we’re not really talking about those kind of deals. Granted there are silly prices for exceptional things like football transfers, but still, surely it is all right to buy and sell ordinary things honestly for fair value. Or all right, provided you don’t have your shop in a place of worship.

Jesus doesn’t appear to have anything against people earning money, after all. There’s the story about the labourers in the vineyard (Matt. 20:1-17), getting the daily rate for the job irrespective of whether they have worked all day or just in the last hour. The argument was about how much they should be paid, not whether being paid at all was the right thing.

Because Jesus said that, if the one who works just for the last hour gets paid the same as the one who worked all the day, it shows that in his Kingdom the first shall be last and the last first – and so market values don’t work in heaven.

So what about the here and now? How should we value someone? Do I hear 1 per cent, for a nurse or a doctor? Or 40 per cent, for Dominic Cummings? What would our Lord say? What price would he put on those NHS angels?

But even though we might well say that doctors and nurses are worth more than any footballer, we need to remember the eternal truths about this. In this week’s Church Times, Dr Cally Hammond, the chaplain of Gonville and Caius, says, ‘Our relationship with God is not a financial transaction.’

She is surely right. You can’t buy your way to heaven in the Temple gift shop. Perhaps heaven is, like Kronenbourg – you know, ‘reassuringly expensive’. Or maybe not.

Hugh Bryant

The Parable of Zero Sums

Reassuringly Expensive?