The Oxford Martyrs

On 16th October, the church calendar invites us to remember Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer, English protestant martyrs, burnt at the stake in Oxford on this day in 1555. If you go to Oxford you can see the Martyrs’ Memorial, erected to Ridley, Latimer and Thomas Cranmer (who was executed in 1556), near to the spot where the executions took place. The memorial itself looks like a church spire coming out of the pavement, meaning that tourists are sometimes told that the rest of the church is underground.

The Martyrs’ Memorial

The Martyrs’ Memorial was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, and completed in 1843, nearly 300 years after the events it commemorates. Oxford at this time was the centre of the Tractarian movement where key figures like John Keble, John Henry Newman and Edward Bouverie Pusey were calling the Church of England to embrace its catholic heritage, rather than the Reformation celebrated by the Memorial. Subscribing to the costs of the memorial – or not – became a shibboleth, a way of determining whether someone was a protestant or a closet catholic.

Gentle Jesus?

In Luke 11.47-end, Jesus rails against the religious leaders of his day who claimed to honour the prophets of the past. Instead, Jesus says, they would have been just as quick to kill the prophets as their contemporaries were. He doesn’t mess about, does he? Gentle Jesus, meek and mild? As if!

Jesus is all love and compassion with those who know their brokenness. But with those who put themselves forward as religious leaders, he is unstinting in his forensic deconstruction of their religious hypocrisy. He is having a meal with a Pharisee who notices that Jesus doesn’t perform the ritual ablutions before eating. Jesus points out that all the hand-washing in the world won’t get rid of a callous heart or a dirty mind. Religious people think that some outward show of piety is all that is required. Jesus says that an inward change of heart is what God is looking for. Jesus says it’s like washing the outside of the cup, leaving a month’s worth of mould on the inside. Or whitewashing a tomb to disguise the decay within. Religious people put some money in the collection plate with one hand, and with the other, they’re embezzling a fortune! Religious leaders pile burdens on others they themselves cannot carry. And they don’t lift a finger to help.

The Trouble with Religion

The trouble with religion is that it tends to make us sure of ourselves, and dismissive of others. And that is dangerous. In Luke 18:9-14 Jesus gives us the story of the Pharisee and the Tax-Collector. Luke notes that Jesus

“told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.” (Luke 18:9)

In it, the religious paragon, the Pharisee, approaches God with self-righteous self-confidence while the tax-collector, knowing himself to be nothing more than a miserable sinner, can hardly bring himself to look up and address God. The Pharisee’s prayer is full of bombast:

“God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax-collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.”

Well done! You know you’re doing good. And so does everyone else!

But the tax-collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”

We know, because we’ve heard it before, that it is the penitent tax-collector rather than the self-confident religious man, who goes home in the right with God. And we think, “Thank goodness we’re not like that Pharisee!” And in that moment, we are.

The Trouble with Pointing the Finger

That’s the trouble with lambasting religious hypocrites, when we do it. It’s all very well pointing to the ‘moral failure’ of a Rory Alec (co-founder of God TV, who has left his wife and is living with another woman). But, as the old saying goes, when you point the finger at someone else, there are three fingers pointing back at yourself.