Sermon, Magdalen, 4th Sunday before Advent 2017: Micah 3: 5-end; Matthew 24: 1-14
The reading from Micah concerns the false prophets of his day. He talks about prophets who, he says, cry ‘Peace’ when they have something to eat; but declare war against those who put nothing in their mouths. They give messages of encouragement and reassurance to people who treat them well, who are hospitable, who feed them; but they give messages of doom to people who do not flatter them, who are not necessarily hospitable, who do not feed them. They are seers, he says; and diviners. They bring perversion, so that Jerusalem’s rulers give judgement for a bribe, its priests teach for a price, its prophets give oracles for money. They will, Micah says, bring ruin on the city.
I think we live in a world with our own false prophets, our own seers, our own diviners. They aren’t religious figures, who are not very prominent in our culture, so much as political ones, and media voices. Some will tell the truth, as they honestly see it, they are as honest as they can be; others, I fear, are influenced by who pays them, and who feeds them, and who flatters them. I have been very struck by the totally different ways of interpreting the same events to be found in different media recently – different news outlets, different publications reporting on the same events have utterly different interpretations. Maybe it’s always this way; but my suspicion is there is more contrast at the moment than usual. I also suspect this derives from the situations we find ourselves in – and I suspect it derives from the fact that the very voices who take such opposed positions to each other are themselves responsible for the creation of the challenges we face. Some politicians, some media outlets have legacy issues with the most difficult problems of today: they created them, and they are desperate for people to approve what they have done.
The business of being human is always prey to the influence of seers, of diviners, of false prophets and pundits. Loud voices, confident opinions, the self-assured, have tended to do well whether it’s science we’re talking about, or politics; and flattering and feeding them just brings more success. Jesus’s approach to teaching and to getting his message across contrasts strikingly. Firstly, he’s not interested in being flattered and he’s not out to curry favour. Sure, he wants people to believe him, in fact he wants people to believe in him, and he believes that by doing that they will come to know God. He wants people to see the truth in his words, and to find freedom through that truth. But his approach is uncompromising – if people are offended by what he says, even if everyone is offended by what he says, so be it.
But: he listens. Jesus’s approach is not one-sided, blasting out a message loudly enough that he will be believed, or saying things carefully calibrated to make as many people as possible believe they are hearing what they want to hear, so that they will bolster him with their approval in turn. Jesus listens. If you answer back to Jesus, he hears you, and he modifies his teaching if that’s right. Jesus says: it’s not right to give the children’s food to the dogs. The Canaanite woman replies: ah yes, but even the dogs eat what falls from their master’s table.
Jesus listened, and he observed carefully – and he saw that the world could not and should not continue to be the way it was. He saw in the powers of his world an inability or a refusal to listen to what was being experienced and spoken about by people on the margins of power, on the margins of society, on the margins of acceptability. He also saw in the people at those margins great signs of hope – and when they spoke the truth, he had the humility to recognise it. As Jesus came up against the powerful for the last time at the end of his life, he knew he needed to communicate with redoubled force – and today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel reflects that. He is speaking of the things that cause fear, that suggest an end to order and reason and kindness and truth and peace. But he contrasts them with the people in whom he has faith, the ones who endure quietly to the end and continue to proclaim the good news of God’s kingdom throughout the world, as he says, as a testimony to all the nations. The ones who are the truthful and true prophets.
As always, Jesus gives us a pattern to imitate: to be unafraid of telling the truth as we see it, but to listen to what people say in return; and in the face of things that cause fear and that suggest the end of things as they are, a firm trust in the people, often on the margins of power, of society and of acceptability, who will ensure – though they may not realise it – that order and reason and truth and kindness and peace are maintained, and grow stronger. Amen.