The Rectory Window

The sabbath was made for man (2:27) Rest seems to be the essential purpose of creation. When the philosopher or the physicist asks Why, one answer the theologian may give is To Rest. In the Bible, both at the beginning in Genesis 1 & 2 and at the end in Revelation 21, reality is completed with rest. And speckled across the middle, we find the promise of rest. Not leisure per se, for this may be less restful than work, but harmony, flow, peace, unadulterated love and the rest. So I'm assuming Jesus meant the traditions surrounding sabbath rest rather than rest itself.  The sabbath is designed to give us a taste of real rest, not to replace it. The absence of work is designed to give us space to escape the treadmill of functionality, of being valuable for something we achieve, of being useful. The presence of worship is designed to draw us to taste the greater reality of a spiritual world, not non-physical but super-natural. When these become rules, or traditions, or habits that ...

He entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread (2:26)  This left me wondering how we would feel if this happened today. It wouldn't do you much good of course as wafers are rubbish for nutrition but I suspect many would still be horrified.  We might wonder what is the modern equivalent. Using the church building as a pub? Letting the homeless sleep on the pew? Maybe even putting in comfortable pews just for that purpose. If the Victorians made our churches too big for comfortable worship, maybe we need to be more serious about following the example of David and turning the house of God into a home for the needy. I don't know how exactly, but it's certainly worth thinking about.

Have you never read? (2:25)  Of course they had. These were Pharisees, the keenest of the keen. They just had not realised what they were reading, had not realised its implications, had not allowed what they read to shake their prejudiced convictions. This is why my first question in any Bible study is, 'What surprises you?'. We all come to God's word with baggage, so every time we need to come ready to have it knocked off. If not we are like the Pharisees, who could not see Jesus clearly. I have just been sorting my library, clearing out unwanted books. On a second (or is it third) clear through, I started recycling some that I could never see anyone reading, and I got to one called Competing Convictions . I still don't know what it's about but a chapter on church decline caught my eye. In it Robin Gill notes that in the part of rural Northumberland he studied, at the turn of the 20th century, there were more seats available in churches than the total head of popul...

Why (2:24) When interviewing, Piers Morgan apparently splutters out lots of Ws, 'What, when, why, who, where?'. I've not ever really followed anything he does, though I hear his COVID reporting has rather improved his image, but I believe he has been known as a bit of a Mr Nasty at times, and the aggressive machine-gunning of questions would fit that image. The Pharisees are likewise not asking in a spirit of discovery. They want to catch Jesus out, and are happy to use any means.  I think it might be worth asking ourselves if we are prone to the same thing. Do we approach the stories in the Bible in a spirit of discovery or are we trying to catch them out? I've been reading Kitchen's The Bible in its World . It is very clear that most Old Testament scholarship of the last 100 years has been in the spirit of the Pharisees, trying to catch the text out. Kitchen, by contrast, treats the evidence in a spirit of discovery and something very different emerges. The ancien...

They began to pick (2:23)  It always intrigued me that no one wonders about the farmer in this story. They're in his field, picking his grain, and without his permission. Where has the farmer with his 4x4 and barking dogs got to I want to know? The reason is simple I discovered. In Hebrew tradition farmers left a certain portion of their crop for anyone in need to take away. The OT has this as an instruction not to reap right up to the edge of the field. You can find it in action in the book of Ruth. This had the double advantage of feeding the poor, and retaining their dignity, as they had to harvest the crop themselves, and maintaining healthy markets. Such practices are challenging to find, but we certainly need to find them today. 

Pour new wine into new wineskins (2:22)  I love fruit trees. Indeed I think my perfect garden would be an orchard with clearings set up so you can sit in the sun and eat. Fruit trees are mostly propagated by grafting the fruiting portion onto a dwarfing rootstock. The reasons are complex but it effectively combines vigour with fecundity.  This is most people's model of church growth,  I suspect. Keep the best of the old and graft in the best of the new. Take a traditional service and add fresh music. Take a well-trained institution and add fresh practices. It may well be a good model, but it intrigues me that it is not Jesus' model. For him both old wine and new wine are tasty, but if you try and graft the new into the old, it doesn't create vigour and fecundity, rather it wastes the wine and makes a stain on the floor. Now that's a challenging thought.

The new piece will pull away (2:21)  I think we may have a two-robin garden. It feels like the height of luxury to have a garden big enough to accommodate two robins but I don't know why else we might have two feeding at once on our back lawn. Robins are usually fearfully territorial as I'm sure you know and won't tolerate another robin in their patch except when breeding, and I hardly think this is the time for chick rearing. Our churches are often in a similar position. The traditional church and the new church find themselves coexisting in the same space. Many expect them to be in conflict, like birds fighting over the same worm, but often they find it a blessing to work together, to enjoy their differences, and to delight in their shared desire to worship God. 

On that day they will fast (2:20) (1/1/2021) As I write, the news is grim. Numbers of COVID cases are rising rapidly, especially across the South East, so that in about a month's time we will be hearing of six to seven hundred deaths per day. The cause of such a spike remain confusing as talk of a new variant is frightening but less than completely persuasive as one major study does not support the assumption that it is to blame. Somehow people are coming into contact with one another close enough to catch a virus, and in large numbers, in spite of all the restrictions. We watch crowded aisles in supermarkets, meet parents who rush to university to pick up their sick children, hear of beauty salons and pubs as the centre of outbreaks, note multi-generational child-care of school-age children and wonder if it is all our fault that the virus being transmitted.  While we cannot avoid normal human contact entirely without ceasing to be human, we could reduce it by being really careful....