Sermon preached at St Edward’s Church, Cambridge, at Mattins on Quinqagesima Sunday 2006 by Fraser Watts, Vicar-Chaplain

Last Sunday morning Alan Cole reminded us of how Jesus wept over Jerusalem as he approached it. Jesus would no doubt weep over many of our modern cities too. It is significant that he wept over the city, not just over the individual people in it, but over the city itself. It was a reaction to the collective life of the city, to the social and political life of Jerusalem, as well as to the personal lives of the individuals living there.

It is a reminder that the Bible is very much concerned with collective life. The Old Testament prophets, like Amos, denounced society as a whole, not just the bad eggs in it. They saw the whole Israelite people as having slipped into a way of life that flouted God's commands. They condemned the self-indulgence they saw around them, giving priority to luxuries and trivial indulgences.

Alongside that, there was the failure of the Israelite people to take proper care of one another. There was a collective failure of neighbourliness. Neighbourliness was a very important concept for the people of the Old Testament. It was central to God's Commandments that they should care for their neighbours. They had ceased to do so, and Amos condemned them for that.

Jesus broadened the concept of neighbourliness. Remember that the well-known story of the Good Samaritan is told in response to the question ‘Who is my neighbour?’ The story makes at least two points. One is that neighbourliness is giving practical help. It is the Good Samaritan who does that; he is the neighbour. The other point of the story is that neighbourliness is not a matter of social or tribal grouping, nor a matter of religious status. Neighbourliness transcends such things. By normal standards, a Samaritan would not regard a Jew as his neighbour, but Jesus is encouraging us to show neighbourliness to those who we would not normally think of as our neighbours. For Jesus, a neighbourly society is a much broader matter than simply being kind and helpful to the people next door.

Another related Old Testament theme is righteousness, or justice. In the Old Testament lesson we heard this morning Amos is railing against all the iniquities of Israel. You can almost see him standing on his soapbox in the market place and letting rip. But the lesson ended with one of the great verses of the Old Testament,

‘Let justice roll on like a mighty river, and righteousness like a never failing stream.’

Righteousness, essentially, means treating other people right. God is righteous; he treats people right. His people should be righteous too; they should treat each other right. They should treat each other with justice, with integrity, and with compassion.

Crucially,

this involves overcoming the tendency to allow our treatment of people to be based on externals that are not important to God. How we treat people depends all too much on their status. The New Testament lesson told this morning makes several points that bear on this theme.

When we are invited to a meal, we may be inclined to get above ourselves. We may make for a place reserved for people of high status, but find ourselves having to move down. Don't imagine that your own status is greater than it is, Jesus is telling us. Next, Jesus urges us to invite people to our meals who are in no position to repay our hospitality. Finally, he tells a story about a great feast where the people initially invited all fail to come, and the host sends out for the most unlikely people, the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame, so that the feast would be full.

As so often, the Bible is making its points forcefully by exaggerating them, but I think one of the key points here is that we should not be over-impressed by status in our dealings with people. We should extend neighbourliness to those us who we may regard as having little status in society.

How are we to build a society with neighbourliness, righteousness, and justice? Partly, this is a matter of how each of us, as individuals, treats the people we come into contact with. There is a sense in which society is the sum of the individual people in it. If individual people treat each other well, that will be reflected in society as a whole.

But we need to recognise that it goes the other way too. How people behave in society, how society treats its disadvantaged members, depends on how we organise society as a whole. The creation of a welfare state in the middle of the last century was a major step forward towards establishing a neighbourly society that was determined to ensure that the poor and disadvantaged were properly cared for. It was an expression of the biblical dream of neighbourliness. Enough time has passed now for us not to need to attach much importance to which political party introduced the welfare state; it is now something that all political parties recognise as important, something to build on.

But alongside social structures that ensure that people are well treated, we still need individual people who are willing to show neighbourliness. It can be tempting to want to leave it all to the State, so that we never need to get our hands dirty ourselves. There is a Jewish story about a Rabbi who asked the synagogue only to consult him when some new matter came up. On one occasion, they sent for him and told him about a new scheme to make a collection to which everyone would contribute, and which would enable the poor in the village to be cared for. The Rabbi said, ‘What is new about that? People are always looking for ways in which they can salve their consciences about the poor without having any direct contact with them.’

Much of the biblical dream of a righteous society is summed up in the idea of peace, ‘Shalom’ in the Old Testament. Shalom is a big idea. It is much bigger idea than the corresponding Greek word in the New Testament, which had to be expanded in its meaning to capture something of what Christians meant by peace. It is much bigger than our English word ‘peace’. Peace, shalom implies wholeness, health security, well-being and salvation. It is the ultimate dream of society, and beyond what we can build for ourselves. It is a gift of God. God’s kingdom, the Kingdom of heaven is about a society that has shalom, peace.

What should we do about all this as we approach Lent? We should be taking stock, not just of our individual shortcomings and failings, but of the wider failings of society as a whole to exemplify God's peace and justice, God’s shalom.

We should be resolving to take steps this Lent, not just to improve our inner spiritual discipline, but to building a society based on peace and justice, God’s shalom

That calls for both prayer and action. It calls for action in how we treat the people we come into contact with, and action as citizens within our democratic processes.

It also calls for prayer, for linking hands with God, sharing in his yearning for a society in which there is peace and justice, a society that fulfils the dream of Amos,

‘Let justice roll on like a mighty river, and righteousness like a never failing stream.’