I desire mercy, not sacrifice

+ A few weeks ago I discovered an interesting long read in the Guardian – a publication, I am sure, with which members of the congregation at St Mary the Virgin are completely unfamiliar!

It was an excerpt from a memoir by Polly Toynbee called An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals. And if the extract is anything to go by, it seems to be a journal of a kind of existential crisis in which the writer comes face to face with the horrendous realisation that she suffers from the appaling affliction of being congenitally and terminally – gasp – upper middle class.

In vain, Polly tells us, “I hunted hard for any redeeming twig of a working-class branch of my family tree, without success.” Although, I note that in the following paragraph she can’t resist opening with a pointed assertion that she attended a – quotes – “middle-ranking girls’ boarding school,” as if the fact that the boarding school was only “middle-ranking” might take her at least part of the way to her earnestly desired proletarian redemption.

The fact that Polly Toynbee had no more choice about who her parents were than any of the rest of us does not seem to provide any relief whatsoever. It is as if her painful obsession with her own privilege seems to be the only way in which she can make atonement for what otherwise seems to have been just a reasonably nice life.

Now, as you can probably tell, I don’t share her instinct that we should spend much time beating ourselves up about things over which we have little control – such as who our parents are – but I do think that her relentless focus on class is interesting, because it reveals some of the concerns, the anxieties, and the hermeneutics of relatively affluent, relatively well-meaning, and perhaps relatively English people, and how they – or perhaps how we – might view the things that matter to them. Or, in other words, how we might read and misread the Gospel in North Oxford.

The Gospel passage we are given today is a good example. Ask people who did Jesus spend his time with in these kind of stories, and we often come back with a class-based answer: the poor, the marginalised, those on the edges of society – and, we add knowingly, people didn’t like that!

But perhaps this way of doing it has more to do with our own insecurities than it does with the actual actions of Jesus. Because in today’s reading when we do hear something about who Jesus is spending time with, class just isn’t really the issue.

Today Jesus engages with the leader of a synagogue, someone presumably of major local status, who not only has a senior role in a religious institution, but is sufficiently socially distinguished that a big crowd and professional mourner flue-players can be expected to show up for the funeral of his young daughter in an age of routine child mortality. We hear of a woman whose haemorrhages make her ritually unclean, but whose social status is irrelevant and unrecorded. And then, most significantly of all, perhaps, we have the tax-collectors and the sinners.

In today’s reading, it’s just not the poor we are talking about. In the case of tax-collectors, that fact should be apparent by the name itself. These are people who make a pretty penny by subcontracting tax collection from the Roman empire. These people are unpopular, they are socially ostracised, they are, in many cases, exploitative, corrupt, and morally debased.

And it seems to me that if we don’t really take the specifics of this seriously, if we blur them about by talking about readings like this euphemistically as Jesus meeting the marginalised, we lose the edge of this Gospel narrative entirely. Because if what we imagine going on in stories like this is Jesus doing some charity work – which is something everyone basically approves of – then we have something cosy and comfortable, and something we might like, from time to time, to imitate.

But actually here we have something far more challenging. This is Jesus sitting down, and eating, and chatting with people who are wrong, who are public enemies, people who Jesus himself calls, in the moral sense, sick.

Now of course, unlike charity work, this isn’t something Jesus gets praised for, there’s no OBE for him at the end of this, or pat on the back at the club, or “good chap” credentials. No, it’s something for which Jesus gets criticism, which at best is bewilderment and laughter and at worst rebuke and violence. Because, of course, they assume that if he’s with these guys he is one of them.

But what is so interesting to me about Jesus’ response to this criticism is that he doesn’t even try to pretend that these people with whom he is eating are anything other than what they are. He doesn’t try to say, “they’re not that bad really these people”. Nor does his response sound like one of those public statements we’ve become so familiar with of late:

At the time I sat down at dinner in the house, I was completely unaware of my companions’ background in collecting taxes, nor, when I asked them did they disclose this information during our meeting. Since being made aware of these serious allegations I have cooperated fully with the Pharisees’ investigation and will make a further statement in due course.

No – Jesus knows what he’s doing and is quite open about it: they are “the sick”. And so, in our story today what Jesus does is engage with, share with, and positively and politely engage with people he knows are not only misguided but serious moral wrongdoers.

And Jesus not only does this but offers this behaviour to us as an object lesson: go and learn what this means: I desire mercy, not sacrifice.

And that message, I believe, is truly revolutionary – today, perhaps, more so than it has been for many years.

Because at first, we might like to say defensively: “well, thank goodness I’m not like those dreadful Pharisees. I don’t get hung up on fussy bits of religion, I have lots of friends who aren’t Christian, I don’t stick to lots of religious rules – I’m not even in Church every Sunday for heaven’s sake!”

But that is completely to miss the point, because Jesus is making a point that is much less narrowly religious. What he’s pointing his finger at is our love-affair not with religion, but our love-affair with righteousness. Our desire to be seen as “one of the good guys,” our desire to be proudly “on the right side of history”, our desire to cultivate our own personal “good optics”, our desire to win the applause of our own social and social-media echo-chambers.

Now, of course, none of these thing in themselves are necessarily bad. But they are all terribly self-obsessed, as these days – consciously or subconsciously – we pour so much of our precious energy into cultivating our own aura of righteousness, polishing our own halos, and ensuring that nobody unpopular, or even worse, problematic should risk attracting criticism towards us by infringing the boundaries of our own personal exclusion zone of popular respectability.

You see, if you read Jesus just as a well-meaning and right-thinking charity worker, you aren’t really letting him challenge you enough. We all know we should serve those in need, and we all know we don’t do it enough, and need to do it more. It’s not exactly controversial.

But what is controversial, what is challenging, the reason in the Gospels that Jesus doesn’t attract a round of applause, and a good citizenship badge, and a squeaky-clean reputation, is that he is prepared to spend less time worrying about looking good and more time with the actual business of being good. And that means plunging into the controversies, and the difficult company, and the risk of being mistaken for a wrong-doer even when we are trying to do our best.

This story, for me, is a call to stop wasting our energies on worrying about being so pure, to stop obsessing about ourselves, to stop worrying about whether any of our relatives ever had a drop of working class blood, or whether we went to a middle-ranking or top-ranking boarding school, or whether we always say the right things, or have the right friends, or are seen with the right people, or get loads of “likes”, or have the right opinion about everything in less than 280 characters – and just get stuck in with the messy business of trying to do just some little bit of good in this world.

Because, as I can’t believe I’m alone in thinking, this world has just had enough of self-regarding and performative “sacrifices” and is in desperate need of some mercy. This world is sick and it needs not more witty commentators or astute critics but more physicians.