SERMON The Rt Rev Dr Rowan Williams, Chair of Christian Aid There’s quite a lot, in the readings we’ve heard, about ‘righteousness’ – the promised king will govern in righteousness, the name of the long-awaited saviour will be ‘the Lord is our righteousness’. But it’s not, these days, a word we use very much except in a rather negative sense. ‘Righteousness’ suggests ‘self-righteousness’, a condescending and judgemental attitude. Even when we talk about ‘righteous anger’, for example, there is a slightly uncomfortable feel to it; it seems to be about laying hold of the moral high ground. It feels a bit ‘weaponised’ as we say these days. But when the Jewish prophets talked about ‘righteousness’ and ‘justice’, the word they used in Hebrew was a word with a very different sound to it. It would have brought in associations with ‘truthfulness’, ‘appropriateness’, a right and fitting relationship with reality. Being ‘righteous’ was being connected with God and God’s world in a way that truly fitted with what God was and what the world was. That’s surely why Jesus, in St Matthew’s gospel, says that those who are hungry and thirsty for ‘righteousness’ are blessed. Human beings long to be properly related with the world they’re in; no-one wants to be permanently out of sync with reality. And the deeper that passionate hunger for true and faithful relationship, the more our lives are open to God, the more we are blessed, fortunate, at home with things and with ourselves - even if that hunger for righteousness drives us to suffer and take risks. It’s nothing to do with any kind of stampede to the moral high ground. For us to be righteous, in the sense in which the Bible uses it, is for us to grasped by the truth, for us to fall in love with reality – God’s reality and the world’s – and to ask how we might learn to be more truthful, more real, more in touch with what is actually in front of our noses. And that may help us see what that odd title, ‘the Lord is our righteousness’ might mean. The life of Jesus is a life completely shaped by the truth. He is gazing without interruption at the mystery of the love from which he comes, the love of the God he calls Father; and so he sees the reflection of that mystery wherever he looks around him on earth. He sees the need, the guilt, the pain of human beings; and behind and within it he sees the beauty and dignity of human beings, so that the pain and guilt appear for what they are, a terrible stain on the glory of women and men created to reveal the divine image. If we are living in the neighbourhood of Jesus, living in his Spirit, living as members of his Body, the community of his followers, we are gradually opening up to seeing what he sees.
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