Jesus had a fine eye for the telling illustration that makes us smile and lodges his point securely not merely in our minds but in our hearts. Often the effect depended on massive exaggeration, as when he compared the difficulty we rich folk face in getting into the kingdom of heaven with the struggle a camel might have to get through the eye of a needle. Tonight’s illustrations were not quite so extreme, but they nail the point pretty effectively just the same. He begins by dismissing the ritual significance of washing hands before eating, as well as washing the vegetables that come from the market. Such behaviour was even more necessary then that it is to-day, but sensible health and safety does not need to be elevated to the status of a doctrine.
Jesus goes on to make a more serious point about the risk that religious practice may actually conflict with God’s will. The particular abuse to which Jesus was here drawing attention was the practice of Corban, under which the Pharisees encouraged faithful Jews to devote the produce of their land to the upkeep of the Jerusalem Temple, even when this might mean they were unable to meet the needs of their elderly parents. It was wrong to prioritise the Temple’s need for money over the commandment to honour your father and mother. The form of religious observance was getting in the way of the substance – the loving care due to parents in their old age. Jesus sums up his teaching on these points in the very earthy image of what makes people really dirty – it’s not what comes out of the body, but what comes out of the heart, where we cherish and incubate evil thoughts and plans. That’s where the focus of our concern needs to be.
Tonight’s gospel does not go on to suggest what we might do about the evil in our hearts, but for the past three weeks we have been reading at evensong the story of Jacob which shows what God can do. Jacob and Esau were twins, but very different. Esau the elder twin grew up to be the outdoors type, hairy skinned and a skilled hunter, bringing home delicious game for his father’s table. Jacob, the younger brother, was a smooth-skinned farmer, his mother’s blue-eyed boy, jealous of his brother’s seniority, and none too scrupulous about how he might come out on top. One day when Esau comes home famished from his hunting, prepared to give his brother anything he asks if only he will give him something to eat, Jacob seizes the opportunity to demand his birthright, that is to say to win the formal right to precedence, and Esau gives it to him. Later, he tricks his blind father on his death bed into giving him his blessing and the major portion of the family inheritance. Not that such trickery does Jacob much good. Esau is understandably so angry that Jacob has to flee the house and the country with nothing but the clothes he stands up in. He goes back through the desert to his mother’s family, where his uncle Laban gives him work, and promises him the lovely Rachel in exchange for seven years labour on the farm. Jacob agrees, but in the drunken euphoria of the wedding feast he is tricked into marrying her elder sister Leah instead, and has to serve another seven years for Rachel. When he wants to return home to Canaan, he has to strike another complicated bargain with uncle Laban in order to take his share of the herd with him, and even then he has to make a dash for it when it looks as if Laban will resile on the deal. We begin to see where Jacob’s mother might have been schooled in the sharp bargaining that she in her turn had taught Jacob to use. But he has learned his lesson, and despite much provocation he now remains scrupulous in honouring the undertakings he has given.
We pick up the story tonight as Jacob, having made good his escape from Laban, is nearing home. Learning that Esau is coming to meet him with 400 men, he is understandably concerned that his brother may still resent the behaviour which drove him into exile, and may now be preparing to meet him with force. But the Jacob who returns is a very different man from the Jacob who fled some 15 or 20 years earlier. On that first night in the desert, away from home, in the wild environment which had always frightened him, he had been overwhelmed by the dream of a ladder reaching up to heaven with angels continually going to and fro. From that moment he had known that God was with him, watching over him despite everything he had done. The Jacob who returns is no longer the weak man, cheating to get ahead. It is in his heart that he has been changed, as he has learned to listen to the voice of God, as he has learned to put his trust in God’s promises and to bet his life on the outcome. Moreover, just as he has learned to put his trust in God’s love for him, so he has learned to love the brother whom he had grown up cheating. The gifts he has sent ahead of him are not so much a bribe as a truly generous peace offering from one who recognises that he has wronged his brother in the past, who knows that he cannot undo what he has done, but is now ready to risk the generosity of his love.
In the hymn we shall sing in a few minutes, Charles Wesley focuses Jacob’s journey through life in this one critical moment – and perhaps that is fair enough, since it was only at the moment of his return that Jacob’s long journey into faith was finally put to the test, and confirmed with the granting of his new name – Israel. Charles Wesley understood what such a journey might mean, for he and his brother John had been through difficult times too before finally coming to a mature understanding of the love which had sustained them on their journey and was now at long last revealed. One way or another, it’s a path which many of us have to tread as our response to God’s love prompts the faltering steps of our faith, and each step of faith opens to us a new perception of God’s love.
When asked recently to record a wish for my youngest grandchild, who was being welcomed into the circle of her parents family and friends, I wrote that I hoped she would never cease to seek the truth. I went on to wish for her that the pursuit of Truth would not close her heart to the call of Faith, nor the call of Faith close her mind to the pursuit of Truth. Goodness knows what she will make of all that when she is old enough to read it, but the tension between the comforting assurance of faith and the nagging doubt of honest enquiry is something we all have to live with, like the limp with which Jacob went forward that morning to fulfil his destiny in the land to which God had called him.
As we respond in our hearts to the love with which God reaches out to us, we go forward, as Jacob did, with this song in our hearts:
Come, O Thou Traveller unknown,
Whom still I hold, but cannot see …
Wrestling I will not let thee go
Till I Thy name, Thy nature know.
The morning breaks, the shadows flee,
Pure universal Love Thou art;
To me, to all, Thy mercies move,
Thy nature and Thy name is Love