As I was reading the news feed on my laptop yesterday, I came across a story about a couple of interviews the Prime Minister had given for BCC Scotland and BBC North East, in which he said that the recent rise in coronavirus infections was due to the lack of discipline and lack of attention to the rules designed to prevent infection, or at least slow-down the transmission rate of infection, that people had shown over the summer. In the BBC Scotland interview, the Prime Minister said that people had become complacent and blasé about the risks of transmission.
I don’t know whether you agree with that or not but personally, I think there’s a lot of truth in what the Prime Minister said because it was almost inevitable that people, some people at least, would start to act in this way. None of us want our lives to be restricted in the way they have been during the last few months and we all want things to go back to normal. And so, once the virus seemed to be coming under control, as it did in late Spring and early Summer, and the lockdown restrictions started to be relaxed, people were bound to think the worst was over, relax their guard too, and at least start to get back to something like a normal way of life.
In one of his interviews, the Prime Minister referred to this in terms of people’s ‘muscle memory’ fading. As I’m sure you all know ‘muscle memory’ refers to our ability to do things almost without thinking because we’ve done it so often or for so long. We often speak about this as ‘practice makes perfect’. The problem with that though, is that once we have done something regularly and for a long time, we can start to think we know all about it and can do it without really thinking about it, and so we don’t think about it, or don’t think enough about it at least. We don’t give it the attention we should, the attention it deserves. We become complacent and perhaps even blasé about what we’re doing. And so we start to make mistakes but, because we’re not really thinking about what we’re doing, because we don’t think we have to, we don’t correct our mistakes and those mistakes become part of our muscle memory. It’s not so much a case of our muscle memory fading but more of our muscle having a bad memory. And when that happens, we go from a situation where ‘practice makes perfect’ to one where familiarity has bred contempt.
That’s a problem we come across in all aspects of life, and not least in our lives as Christians. But then, Christians are not alone in that. It’s part of human nature and so it’s a problem for people of all faiths and none, and it was certainly a problem the Jews of Jesus’ day had, and it’s one of the issues Jesus addresses in the parable we heard in this morning’s Gospel.
In the parable, the landowner is God, the tenants are the Jews, the servants are the prophets, and the landowner’s son is, of course Jesus. The tenants had been put in charge of the landowner’s vineyard, just as the Jews had been given the law and the covenant. But just as in the parable where it’s clear the tenants hadn’t produced the fruit the landowner had expected, the Jews hadn’t done what God expected, and just as the tenants beat and killed those the landowner sent to collect the fruit, so the Jews had beaten and killed those God had sent, the prophets and they would beat and kill his Son too. The problem was that the tenants thought that the landowner’s vineyard ought to be theirs, and the attitude that comes across in the Scriptures is that the Jews thought that what God had given them charge of, was theirs by right. It’s an attitude that’s perhaps summed up in the Letter to the Philippians where St Paul speaks about his own Jewish heritage:
“If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness in the law, blameless.”
The sense of pride that Paul had in being a Jew leaps from the page in those words, but that seems to have been the problem. The Jews seemed to believe that it was enough simply to be a Jew because that made them one of God’s people. And they’d been God’s people for a long time, so they’d become complacent, as Jesus suggested when he admonished the scribes and Pharisees, the very people whom St Paul was so proud of calling himself:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.”
And the fruit that God wanted from them of course, were the very things they’d let slide and neglected, justice, mercy and righteousness. And they were so convinced that their practice of the minutiae of the law had made them perfect, that they’d treated both the weightier matters of the law, and those whom God had sent to remind them of those weightier matters, and of their obligation to produce those fruits for God, with contempt and ignored them, beaten them and killed them.
Jesus ends this parable by telling us what the punishment for these unfaithful tenants will be, that what they’d be given by God will be taken away and given to those who will produce the fruit God wants, and in his Letter to the Philippians, St Paul makes it clear that the way to do that, is by following Christ.
But if we want to be given God’s kingdom, we have to make sure that we don’t fall into the same trap the Jews seemed to have done. We have to make sure that we don’t become complacent, as many do simply because they come to Church or because they say they’re Christians. We have to produce the fruit God wants, and that means we have to practice what we preach. But we can’t allow ourselves to think that practice makes perfect, because none of us ever are, or will be, perfect when it comes to producing the kind of fruit God wants. So we have to constantly be on our guard against allowing our familiarity with Christ’s example and teaching to breed contempt for his example and teaching. We can’t allow ourselves to beat and kill the words and example of the prophets and saints, and Christ himself, because we’re so sure of ourselves and our ways that we ignore them and theirs. We have to constantly compare ourselves to them, and especially to Christ, and amend our ways and make sure that they conform to God’s ways so that our Christian muscle doesn’t remember badly or lose its memory completely.
The Prime Minister may well be right when he says that the rise in coronavirus transmission and infection is due to some people becoming complacent and blasé about the risk the virus poses, and a lack of attention to the rules designed to protect us from it. But, while coronavirus is a terrible disease and threat to our health, and something we should take very seriously, in the grand scheme of things, a far more terrible thing is the threat to our immortal souls if we don’t pay proper attention to the rules designed to protect them from harm. So let’s do our best to stick to those rules, and do our best to make sure we never become complacent or blasé about them.
Amen.
You will find the Propers for the 27th Sunday (Trinity 17) here.
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 