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I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared
You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men
Can you think of somewhere you went on holiday as a child and the later, after years or even decades passed, visited again? Sometimes that can be a happy experience - revisiting a place you loved and remembering what it was like. But sometimes it can be rather disheartening. The unspoilt village street is full of souvenir shops, the beach dotted with kiosks and covered in litter. The beauty and peace of the place that made people want to come there in the first place has been lost in the hustle and bustle of the tourist trade. It's shocking and sad. Jesus, making an appearance in first one and then the other of the two stories we have just read, might be forgiven for having the same feeling.
Now - stop a minute - Jesus appears in both our stories? Yes. But this point merits some elaboration. The story of Jacob wrestling with God might be just a figure of speech, a metaphor for deep thought and prayer from which he emerges a changed man. This way of understanding it would have made more sense two thousand years ago. After all, the whole of the Old Testament is about beating into the heads of the people of Israel that God is immortal and invisible. You can't see God, let alone wrestle with him. Surely then when Jacob says he has seen God face to face he must mean he has seen an angel; or he has wrestled with God in the depths of his soul; or something else not quite literally what he says.
But looking at that story from a Christian point of view, it looks more literal. We do indeed believe God is immortal and invisible. But we also believe he became mortal and visible in Jesus. As Jesus says of himself in John's Gospel, "anyone who has seen me has seen the Father". And we also know that Jesus, the man, is God eternal. As John says of him, "he was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made". Jesus, then, is God in the aspect that we can see face to face. Just as the people in the Gospels could meet God face to face in Jesus, so could Jacob. After all, you notice that Jacob names the place where he wrestles with God "Peniel". This word means "face of God". If he'd been struggling with God in his innermost soul, might he not have called it "dream of God"? So when we read this mysterious story in Genesis we are warranted in believing it is the story of Jacob meeting Jesus himself - the word made flesh.
Fast forward two thousand years to first century Palestine. Jesus walks among the people of Jerusalem, all of them claiming descent from the very same Jacob with whom he wrestled at Peniel, the Jacob whom he named Israel, from whom they all take their name. Descendants of a man who saw God face to face. And now look at them. Entrusted with an intimate relationship with God: but preoccupied with trivialities.
Of course, this happens all the time. Something good starts. But in order for it to spread, to become good for everyone, not for a select few, it changes. That's necessary and inevitable and not always bad. If only a few people had cars, we wouldn't need so many driving rules. And sometimes driving rules are annoying and waste time: who has not wanted to drive through a red light when there's no traffic coming the other way? But we need the rules because it makes it work for everyone, not just a few. Or take another example. You start off with something pure and simple like the Ten Commandments. But then you find there are many cases where you can't tell what you should be doing. What does it mean to honour my father and my mother? Do I have to buy them a bungalow, or can I just send them birthday cards? So a tradition develops, surrounded by prayer and an earnest desire to know God's will, but drawing on the experience of the ages as well.
Whether this is good or bad, depends on whether the tradition goes on being attached to its roots, or whether it splits off and becomes an end in itself. Does their tradition connect them to God, or does it stand between them and God? What Jesus is saying in our Gospel passage is, it gets in the way. Over the centuries the tradition putting God's will into action in daily life has become more and more elaborate. Now they need all the hours in the day to keep up with the tiny little observances - ceremonial washing, eating the right food, special ceremonies for washing kettles - and they have no time for what the Law is about.
For example the legal tradition of the time let you make your earnings an offering to the temple - that's what this word "Corban" means in our Gospel passage. If you did that you'd devoted them to a higher good, and this got you off the hook of using them to make provision for your aged parents. But of course there were all sorts of loopholes and wrinkles (I used to be a merchant banker, so I know how this works) that let you get the money back later. So you'd stuck to the letter of the law. But your parents were still on their uppers, in flat contravention of the commandment to honour your father and your mother.
This is a theme Jesus repeats again and again. In Matthew he says "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them." In Luke "Woe to you Pharisees, because you give God a tenth of your mint, rue and all other kinds of garden herbs, but you neglect justice and the love of God." Or earlier in Mark the Pharisees bring a man with a shrivelled hand to him on the Sabbath. What will Jesus do? Will he keep to the strict detailed tradition about what you can and cannot do on the Sabbath? No he will not: not because he is here to abolish the law but because he has come to fulfil the law. He asks, "Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?" and he heals the man.
Now it's important to say that I have the warmest respect for Jewish faith and practice. Many of the Pharisees then, and their descendants in Orthodox Judaism today, devote themselves to knowing God and loving him with all their soul and strength. The tendency to become mired in tradition is a general human trait, not a Jewish failing. It was perhaps particularly blameworthy in the people of Israel, but only because of their special mission. Few of us have not been guilty of this failing one way or another. That said, when we read our passage from Genesis and then this evening's Gospel, one thing is clear: when Jesus came back to Israel two thousand years after he wrestled with Jacob, things had changed for the worse.
And this raises an obvious question for us here and now. Can you, as Rolf Harris says, see what it is yet?
The question is, is Jesus going to be pleased with what he sees if he walks into our church today? Two thousand years ago it was simple and immediate. We preached Christ crucified. We all like sheep have gone astray; God became man in Jesus, and died in our place to save us, and rose again. But have we in the two thousand years since, fallen away from the essence of our faith?
I beg you not to think me one of these tedious fundamentalists who thinks everything that happened in the last two thousand years a waste of time, and wants to re-constitute the church exactly as described in the book of Acts. No. The wisdom of the ages is immense and valuable, and God has spoken to and shaped his church in every one of those twenty centuries. The beauty and solemnity of our liturgy and ritual and buildings can be one of the most profound ways of glorifying God.
Nevertheless, some parts of our tradition may serve to separate man from his creator. To find one form of worship congenial over another is right and proper. But to take think our way is better than any other may lead to error. I don't wish to particularise too much. For the most part I'd simply like to set for all of us the challenge of considering whether any part of our religious ritual is getting between us and the Lord. Are the stained glass or the preaching or the flowers or the music all ways for us to reach God? Or has any of them stagnated, and become an end in itself.
There is one respect though, in which I would like in concluding to be specific. You notice that a lot of what Jesus criticises in the Pharisees is their obsession with practices that cut them off from others. For example the detailed laws about what you can and can't eat, don't just make life hard for the Pharisees themselves, they make worship of the living God much harder and less congenial for those brought up outside the tradition. Now in our own time, it's noticeable that for every person who comes to church here on a Sunday there are thirty or forty people in Fulbourn who stay away. Our Bible readings today pose the question, is there anything we could change about our way of doing things that would make it easier for some of the three or four thousand people who don't worship regularly to come in the door?
Obviously we must never adulterate the truth on which we take our stand, for otherwise there would be no point their coming here at all. And we should not feel we have to give up forms of worship that lift our own souls to the Lord: we need to worship too. Having said all that, it is worth asking whether there is anything at all in our forms of worship, times of services, the way we sit together or don't sit together, the hymns we sing, the clothes we wear, anything which, if we changed it, would help others come closer to God, without our having to move further away.
If we don't satisfy ourselves on this point, we run a grave risk. The risk is that Jesus comes and sits with us at evensong next week - as he might, and as we must devoutly wish that he would - but afterwards he says to us, as he said to the Pharisees,
"These people come near to me with their mouth
and honour me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
Their worship of me
is made up only of rules taught by men."