The Thoughts of Our Hearts
Sermon at 8 am and 11 am at Portsmouth Cathedral on 29th August 2021 | Angela Tilby, Canon of Honour
‘For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts..’ (Mark 7.21 KJV)
‘It is what comes out of a person which defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come…’ (Mark 7.20b-21 NRSV)
What are those evil intentions, those evil thoughts that Jesus speaks of in this morning’s Gospel? He provides a pretty unflattering list: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. ‘All these evil things come from within and they defile a person.’ (v23)
So based on those words I can only assume that in front of me are a whole range of people entertaining, well, in the order given by Jesus let’s start with your long term pornographic fantasies, and then there’s you, planning on claiming a bit extra on the expenses, and you, quietly plotting how you might contrive for your mother-in-law to meet with an accident, and you, contemplating those those cash payments that you might just forget to declare to the inland revenue, and you, feeling so cross with your other half that you have started dreaming of what it would like to be with someone else, and then there’s that delicious (if entirely untrue) piece of gossip you can spread, and you, sore because your much-hated colleague has just had a pay rise. All very petty, some of it dangerous, some if it embarrassing, some of it material for the therapist.
Many of us might assume we are just not like this. We don’t have evil thoughts. Or, perhaps we feel bad about ourselves already and we don’t need it rubbed in further. Perhaps we have enough shame and guilt to deal with and we don’t need any more, perhaps we simply crave affirmation rather than condemnation.
The word Jesus used for intention or desire is dialogismoi, from which we get the word dialogue. Jesus was saying, I think, that the human heart is not full of spontaneous love and goodwill to all. It is in fact but a site seething with discontent, a bubbling cauldron of fantasy. There’s a true connection between the heart as the pump that drives blood round our bodies and the heart as the seat of uncontrolled emotion. For don’t we feel all sorts of arousal in our chest: passion, fury, frustration? Our pulse quickens with rage, fear or desire, and the stress of it all really can affect the health of the heart.
Later Christian ascetics worked on this teaching of Jesus and came up with theories about what they called the passions and how they might be healed by prayer. Now today passion is a good word. No one writes a CV without saying that they are passionate about this or that aspect of the job they are going for. But the root of the word passion is suffering, as when we apply it to the suffering of Jesus, and the idea behind that is that we are passive in the face of these strong impulses that bubble up and take us over from within.
These spontaneous emotions and thoughts do not seem to belong to the rational creatures we believe ourselves to be and so we tend to disown them, to censor them out, to repress them below the level of our awareness. But they don’t go away. They pop
into our minds often at the least appropriate moment. And if not examined and sifted we become victims of our own inner violence as much as those on whom we let it out. Nothing is sadder or more pathetic than the ‘lifer’ in prison whose unexamined fury eventually led to the murder of his or her partner. They are often such nice people. But even they, I suspect, are in a better state towards God than those of us who justify our outbursts by denying them, by living from false innocence, or worse, projecting our own inner violence on to others. You know the kind of remark we tend to make when someone ‘gets their come uppance’. ‘She deserved it…he had it coming’. ‘Judge not, said Jesus, that you be not judged’. And the Gospel message here seems to be that it is better that we judge ourselves than that that we label and condemn others.
We have become a bit more aware recently of how whole societies can develop unjust prejudices against people based on their gender, appearance or accent. And we now seem to be entering a time when people whose ideas are distasteful to us can be cancelled, or written off as unacceptable, as though some people are simply too wicked to count. (Not us of course, we are always the right thinking, innocent individuals, we are the pure in heart who need no repentance). Not so, says, Jesus.
Many years ago I met the Greek Orthodox nun Mother Thekla. She was the spiritual adviser to the composer John Tavener and she was of Russian origin. She was once investigated by MI5 who through she might be a spy. She told me about her training in the religious life and the spiritual teaching she had received. She said and I quote because I wrote it down:
‘I was taught the meaning and work of repentance, that is, the growing into the attitude, in spite of every lapse until death – which recognizes the failure within oneself, not even as much in the sin committed, as in the very being.’
She was, I have to say, one of the most irreverent, canny, disturbing people I have ever met. She was challenging, but she was also full of humour and an unexpected gentleness. On one level she was a slightly eccentric old woman. But at the same time she radiated something beyond this world. The years spent in discovering the roots of sin in her very being had not made her sour or judgmental, but kind. When you know something of your own inner depths you are no longer shocked at the mistakes of others. You can approach them with compassion.
So I think what Jesus is asking us to do is to challenge our innocence. It is our sinfulness which draws out God’s mercy, not our pretence at goodness. Purity of heart is not something we simply have, but something we need to be given because none of us are as innocent as we think. Once we begin to realise that within us is not a good person or a whole person, but a mess, we are on the path to true liberation. And so that prayer which Church of England people know, which we often say at the start of the Eucharist:
‘Almighty God unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid…’ You know how it goes on:
‘Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee and worthily magnify thy Holy Name: through Christ or Lord’.