The Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe

July 13, 2021  •  Tuesday of the Seventh Week after Pentecost

The Anglican Centre in Rome

Text: Matthew 11:22: “But I tell you, on the day of judgment it will be more tolerable
for Tyre and Sidon than for you.”

We learn through our studies that Matthew’s gospel is a message written for an early generation of Jewish Christians. Matthew’s audience was a group trying to explain its growing faith that Jesus was the fulfillment of God’s promise to the Jewish people in terms that were based on Jewish teachings, terms that would give them a sense of justification as they were living through the wrenching experience of being evicted from the synagogues that had been their faith home.

So we enter this story remembering that we are hearing an account written for a community whose worldview was greatly shaped by Jewish ideas, and for whom Jesus is a master teacher of those ideas. How then shall we hear the judgment he is issuing in our own day?

Let’s start with the five cities that are named by Jesus—Chorazin, Bethsaida, Tyre, Sidon, and Capernaum. To our ears, this can just seem like a travelogue of places Jesus was giving poor reviews to on Trip Advisor. But to the people for whom this Gospel was written, there was a sharp line dividing this list of places.

Chorazin and Capernaum were places very familiar not just to Jesus but to any Jewish person of the first century; they were in Galilee. And Bethsaida was very near to Galilee, just across the River Jordan at the northern end of the Sea of Galilee. Anyone who was part of the Jewish community would have thought of it as a Jewish town; it was, in John’s gospel, the hometown of three of the disciples—Peter, Andrew, and Philip.

On the other side of the line are Tyre and Sidon. They were, and are, towns on the Mediterranean coast, to the north of places where the Jewish communities lived. In those days they were part of Phoenicia, in the Roman Province of Syria; today they are part of Lebanon.

So in the ears of Matthew’s audience, when Jesus speaks these words he is speaking about us and them, about places that are within the Jewish world and places that are outside of it—and, we are meant to understand, outside the terms of God’s covenant. 

And there is the first problem for us; Jesus is saying that the places we regard as not part of our world, as beyond the boundaries of our community and outside the limits of our inclusion, may be acting more in line with God’s standards than our own communities are.

That turns out to be a theme in Jesus’s teaching—that the standard is not belonging but behavior, and that the behavior that most vividly reflects God’s love in the world is often seen in those we imagine to be less than, or beyond the limits, or outside our group. Samaritans. Tax Collectors. Publicans. The unclean. The poor. The uneducated. Gay people. Muslims.

But there’s something more here, something that preaches a vivid critique against our Western, consumerist culture of individualism and autonomy. And it is simply this: When Jesus is teaching Matthew’s audience in these terms—and therefore us as well-—he is saying plainly that sin is not merely a spiritual sickness at the level of individuals. He is saying that sin is a social phenomenon—a matter for whole cities, whole societies. 

And here is the most difficult news: Judgment comes, not just to us individually, but to us collectively. Our societies will be judged.

We struggle with this greatly in my own country. When the church raises a clear critique against the sin of white supremacy and the structural systems that perpetuate racism, the predictable answer is: Am I to be held responsible for the sins of my ancestors? How can you assign guilt to me, an individual, who had nothing to do with these things?

You might hear that and think, well, America is Tyre and Sidon to me. It is beyond the limit of what I think of as my community, as part of my spiritual universe. But just yesterday the Anglican Centre invited us all into a deeper consideration of a social sinfulness in which all of us are implicated—the devastation of our climate by our collective choices, the destruction we are causing when the individual choices we each make in our consumerist culture are aggregated at a social scale.

Minds, and hearts, and souls shaped by the Western experience have difficulty thinking in terms of collective destiny and collective responsibility. And that is no less true of places and leaders in parts of the world shaped through the experience of colonialism into a kind of subconscious individualism. We see this over and over in the corporatization of culture.

But we should not be surprised by this, because our God is a god in eternal community. We proclaim a God in Trinity, a God who is not only one God but God in three persons. And if that is the God we preach, then we should scarcely be surprised that salvation is a question not only of individual souls but of the societies humans create.

Anglicans are an international and cross-cultural church. We have a particular vocation to deepen our understanding and our teaching about the social dimensions of spiritual evil. 

Systems that destroy God’s beloved creation or deny the dignity of every human being, systems that still yield the trafficking of vulnerable people or permit the rot of corruption to weaken and destroy the civil order that best protects the weakest in society, these are present in our midst—and they are systemic sinfulness, because they corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. And they exist both within and across the places in which we work and witness to the Gospel.

The cries of those who are harmed and degraded by social sin are there night and day, if we have ears to hear. 

We are not that much different from the people for whom Matthew’s gospel was written. We still think in terms of “us” and “them,” as though social sin were some kind of spiritual European Cup.

When voices from the church begin speaking of the failings of our societies to live up to God’s dream for all humanity, very quickly the response is made—but it is so much worse in that other country! We are so much better than Tyre, or Sidon.

But that is a failure of moral imagination. After all, our Christian responsibility is not only to God; it is to God’s people. 

In his brilliant little book The Love That Is God, the American Roman Catholic theologian Fritz Bauerschmidt has described our task this way:

“I might think it is easier to love God whom I imagine vaguely as something somewhere that is everything good and lovable, than it is to love my grimy and annoying neighbor, who is so insistently there, in my face, making demands. 

“But that is because the god I claim to love is a fantasy of my own creation, not the grimy and annoying God who is there, on the Cross, making demands. I cannot love that God without loving my neighbor, because that God has become my neighbor.”

In God’s wisdom we have, each of us, been set within communities and cultures for the very purpose of bringing about the day that God’s will is done on Earth, as is in heaven. So let us always beware the selfish seeking of merely private, personal relationships with God,a god who is, after all, a community-in-Trinity. For God calls us as communities and cultures to reflect and make real the power of love to transform the world. Amen.