Readings:
Exodus 32:7-14; Psalm 106; John 5:31-47

Then Yahweh spoke to Moses, ‘Go down now, because your people whom you have brought out of Egypt have apostatised. They have been quick to leave the way I marked out for them; they have made themselves a calf of molten metal and have worshipped it and offered it sacrifice. “Here is your God, Israel,” they have cried, “who brought you up from the land of Egypt.” ’ But Moses pleaded with Yahweh his God… So Yahweh relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened.
Exodus 32:7-9, 11, 14

‘You study the scriptures, believing that in them you have eternal life; now these same scriptures testify to me, and yet you refuse to come to me for life… You have no love of God in you… How can you believe, since you look to one another for approval and are not concerned with the approval that comes from the one God?‘
John 5:39, 40, 42, 44

The Jews study the Scriptures in faith, yet they do not recognize Jesus, the fulfilment of the Scriptures, standing before them. John is not writing to let his readers know how wrong the Jews were, because most of his readers would have been Jewish: he is writing about spiritual blindness, which afflicts Christians and Jews alike.

It is of the nature of spiritual blindness that those afflicted by it are convinced that they are seeing clearly. They are like the man who got very drunk and sat on a wine glass. He treated his wounds before going to bed. Next morning he found the wounds were untreated, but there was a neat pattern of elastoplast strips laid across a mirror on the floor!

Jesus gives two causes of spiritual blindness, first, ‘You have no love of God in you,’ and second, ‘You look to one another for approval and are not concerned with the approval that comes from the one God.’

To be single-minded is generally considered a virtue: it may be a vice, if the single-mindedness excludes love. I heard of an experiment on students studying for ministry, who were visiting a hospital. They were told they were to do a memory test. Someone would read them a story in one room. They were then to proceed to another room, where they were to repeat the story as word-perfectly as possible. The story read to them was the parable of the good Samaritan. In the corridor between rooms there was a patient lying in pain and crying for help. The patient was ignored by the single-minded students. We are all liable to this loveless single-mindedness, which can appear in especially virulent form in religious people. ‘You who travel over sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when you have him you make him twice as fit for hell as you are’ (Matthew 23:15).

Loveless single-mindedness will bring us the approval, support and encouragement of all who are similarly afflicted. Surrounded by such support and approval, we shall not be concerned with the approval that comes from the one God. In their blindness the Israelites worshipped the golden calf. We do not have a golden calf, but market forces, a deadly virus, which slips into every aspect of life and soon takes over control, subjecting every human value to its inhuman dictates. There is no area of life impervious to its poison, neither learning, research, education, physical and mental health care, care of the planet, entertainment, leisure, communications. Both the singer and the song, must be regulated according to what are called ‘market forces’, which sound like some harmless objective criterion, but in fact are the poisonous growths of greedy hearts. The soul, not being quantifiable, does not count, and religion itself is being very successfully used to encourage the worship of market forces with the new gospel of prosperity. ‘Invest your money with the Lord Jesus and you will have a rich return, tenfold and a hundredfold.’ Yes, religion can be very profitable, and when it becomes so, it masks the face of God much more effectively than any atheist can ever do.

Prayer
Lord, give us eyes to see you, ears to hear you, and a loving heart to recognize you in everyone we meet. Save us from delighting in anything which does not bear the imprint of your love and goodness and deliver us individually and nationally from the idolatry of market forces. We ask you this through Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Amen.