Posts by Neil:
Easter 5 – St. Mary Magdalene Evensong – 6 May 2012
May 6th, 2012It is just as well that Easter, rather than being limited to just one day a year, is an entire church season spread over a number of weeks (here we are in week 5), because resurrection takes some time to get your head around. The passage we heard from Mark’s Gospel just now is generally regarded by scholars as an add-on, inserted later into the existing text. It obviously did not seem fitting to leave Mark’s Gospel ending – as it originally did – with a group of frightened women, who daren’t say anything to anyone once they had encountered the empty tomb. No – another section had to be tagged on, emphasising that Jesus appeared not only to the patron of this church, Mary Magdalene, but also to two people walking away from Jerusalem into the country, and to the remaining eleven disciples. And Jesus is also said to have told his followers to go into all the world and preach the Gospel to the whole creation, casting out demons, speaking in new tongues, and healing the sick. Then the departure of Jesus from the earth to the right hand of God had to be included also, whilst his followers went forth and preached everywhere, ‘while the Lord worked with them’ as the last verse of the passage puts it. All this in eight brief verses.
When studying novels for exams, I sometimes ask my students which type of story they prefer. Do they like a clear beginning, middle and – especially – end, where all the loose ends are tied up, and matters are firmly resolved? Or do they prefer something a bit less neat and tidy, where the reader has to fill in the gaps, or is left with ambiguity and a sense of not knowing? Of course, sometimes a definitive conclusion is desirable, but, with some stories, the element of ‘unfinishedness’ leaves a whole range of imaginative possibilities for the reader to pursue.
Personally, when it comes to Mark’s Gospel, I can’t help wishing those final few verses of chapter 16 had not been added on, however noble the intentions of the editor may have been. Because for those of us who may find the physical resurrection intellectually difficult, mysterious or incredible, the original ending of Mark’s Gospel leaves in its wake so much scope for the imagination. Rather than providing a glorious climax to the story, Mark brings his fast-paced Gospel account juddering to a halt with terrified women fleeing from the tomb, not daring to tell anyone what has happened. There is no Easter joy in this episode for them, and Mark spares them no blushes: they are alarmed, seized with terror and amazement, and they are afraid.
They had waited through the compulsory rest of the Sabbath, no doubt with exhausting emotion, to anoint the body and to lavish care on it, as a necessary part of their grieving – and now it is not there. Anyone who has mourned without a body to bury, or who is troubled by important things left unsaid to a dead person, will understand the awfulness of their situation.
If we enter Mark’s world, we cannot rush to the incontrovertible assurance of resurrection, but are forced to come to terms with a void in which faith is stretched to its limit. In his inimitable way, Mark tests any glibness in our confidence in the resurrection by confronting us with the perplexity of an empty tomb.
There is no easy way to encounter resurrection, and Mark does not rescue the women from their confusion. But, since he has been showing his readers perplexed disciples regularly throughout his Gospel, we perhaps shouldn’t be surprised. He has already told us that another woman anointed Jesus’ body for burial before his death, so these women are too late to do that. Instead, although they do not know it, these women inhabit a pivotal moment in history and theology, a moment in which, to use Gospel terminology, ‘the time is fulfilled’. As an Easter collect puts it, the old order of sin and death has been overcome by the mighty resurrection of God’s Son. In this new order, these women are in the wrong place, for the wrong purpose, with the wrong things in their hands. They are standing in the confined space of the tomb, the ultimate symbol of the old order, and somehow they have to be pushed out of it into the new. Once, at the beginning of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus had come to Galilee with the good news of God, and called his disciples. Now he is apparently going there again, and these women are to ensure the disciples get there, too. They are being re-called. It is time to leave the tomb behind.
Many things in human life remain unfinished, from symphonies, to books, to relationships, and Mark is very much the Gospel for people living with unfinished business. Once the emptiness of the tomb was established, there were indeed resurrection appearances, as we hear in other parts of the New Testament, especially from Peter and Paul. But Mark’s story ends without any tangible evidence for the disciples of Jesus’ resurrection. Perhaps Mark knew that seeing is not always believing: faith is an integral part of the resurrection equation.
It is quite sobering to reflect that everything that has happened subsequently in terms of the spread of the Jesus story was left in the hands of a small group of terrified women and those male disciples who had not even been brave or devoted enough to make it as far as the tomb early on that first day of the week. God’s good news did not depend on the disciples’ readiness, and, mercifully, it doesn’t depend on ours either. Instead, God’s potential for the new life which Easter signifies catches us up in the story wherever we are – and in spite of our doubts and fears.
God’s mighty resurrection breaks into a world of loose ends, unfinished business and frightened people. Mark is the Gospel for people who recognise themselves in that situation. We, too, are called to leave the confines of the tomb and whatever holds us back from faith, and follow where the risen Jesus leads, wherever Galilee may be found in our own experience. When it comes to Mark’s Gospel, there is no neat ending which answers all our questions and thereby solves the mystery. But there is a great deal of scope for living with the mystery and discovering what resurrection might mean in our experience, here and now. For the Lord is risen: he is risen indeed. Alleluia!
Easter Day – St. Matthias – 8 April 2012
April 20th, 2012If you find the physical resurrection difficult, mysterious or incredible, then Mark’s Gospel is for you. The empty tomb, on its own, is not good news. Like other empty spaces that once were occupied, it merely signifies that something is missing, possibly stolen or lost. Our instinctive reaction is a distressed lurch of emotions when we realise something is badly wrong.
Mark’s Gospel, the earliest to be written, makes no concessions: rather than provide a glorious climax to the story, he brings his fast-paced Gospel account juddering to a halt with terrified women fleeing from the tomb, not daring to tell anyone what has happened. There is no joy in this episode for them, and Mark spares them no blushes: they are alarmed, seized with terror and amazement, and they are afraid.
They had waited through the compulsory rest of the Sabbath, no doubt with exhausting emotion, to anoint the body and to lavish care on it, as a necessary part of their grieving – and now it is not there. Anyone who has mourned without a body to bury, or who is troubled by important things left unsaid to a dead person, will understand the awfulness of their situation.
The confusion brought about by the empty tomb and the untidiness of Mark’s abrupt ending are overlooked if we glide seamlessly from Palm Sunday, via a hot cross bun on Good Friday, to the resurrection appearances on Easter Day. But for those who have seen the entire story through – the desolation and despair of Maundy Thursday, the brutal violence and the painful death of Good Friday, and the emptiness of Holy Saturday – know that there was a tomb holding a mutilated body. If we enter Mark’s world, we cannot rush to the assurance of resurrection, but are forced to come to terms with a void in which faith is stretched to its limit. In his inimitable way, Mark tests any glibness in our confidence in the resurrection by confronting us with the perplexity of an empty tomb.
There is no easy way to encounter resurrection, and Mark does not rescue the women from their confusion. But, since he has been showing his readers perplexed disciples regularly throughout his Gospel, we perhaps shouldn’t be surprised. He has already told us that another woman anointed Jesus’ body for burial before his death, so these women are too late to do that. Instead, although they do not know it, these women inhabit a pivotal moment in history and theology, a moment in which, to use Gospel terminology, ‘the time is fulfilled’.
As an Easter collect puts it, the old order of sin and death has been overcome by the mighty resurrection of God’s Son. In this new order, these women are in the wrong place, for the wrong purpose, with the wrong things in their hands. They are standing in the confined space of the tomb, the ultimate symbol of the old order, and somehow they have to be pushed out of it. Once, at the beginning of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus came to Galilee with the good news of God, and called his disciples. Now he is going there again, and the women are to ensure the disciples get there, too. They are being re-called. It is time to leave the tomb behind.
Many things in human life remain unfinished, from symphonies, to books, to relationships, and Mark’s is very much the Gospel for people living with unfinished business. Someone once commented that his Gospel ends with a theological comma, rather than a full stop. Once the emptiness of the tomb was established, there were indeed resurrection appearances, as we hear from Peter and Paul. But Mark’s story ends without any tangible evidence for the disciples of Jesus’ resurrection. Perhaps Mark knew that seeing is not always believing; faith is an integral part of the resurrection equation.
So as we come this morning to the empty tomb, what do we expect to find? In some ways, it might seem easier if we found a Jesus lying there who is lifeless, wrapped up, reverently disposable, unchallenging, so that we don’t have to make any response to him at all. That way, Jesus becomes another piece of history that we take out, dust down, and glance at once a year, a bit like an old book on the shelf. But Easter Day makes all of that impossible. We don’t find a body. Instead, we find an empty space we cannot totally explain, but which opens up limitless possibilities. This empty space is mysterious, but it is also motivating. The stone has gone, albeit mysteriously, and the life of Jesus goes on. The attempt to confine him is futile: even stones over tomb entrances and locked doors in upper rooms cannot stop Easter happening. What’s the use of heavy stones when they can be rolled away? And what’s the use of locks and bolts when there is the possibility of walking through walls, or simply just appearing in the midst?
It is quite sobering to reflect that everything that has happened subsequently in terms of the spread of the Jesus story was left in the hands of a small group of terrified women and those male disciples who had not even been brave or devoted enough to make it as far as the tomb early on that first day of the week. God’s good news did not depend on the disciples’ readiness, and, mercifully, it doesn’t depend on ours either. Instead, God’s potential for the new life which Easter signifies catches us up in the story wherever we are and in spite of our fears, failures and regrets.
God’s mighty resurrection breaks into a world of loose ends, unfinished business and frightened people. Mark is the Gospel for people who recognise themselves in that situation. We, too, are called to leave the confines of the tomb and whatever holds us back from faith, and follow where the risen Jesus leads, wherever Galilee may be found in our own experience. For the Lord is risen; he is risen indeed, and, this very morning, life has triumphed. Alleluia!
2nd Sunday of Lent – St. Mary Magdalene – 9.30
March 4th, 2012Clashes with authority have featured widely in the news of the past week: the ongoing tragedy in Syria; the dismantling of the St. Paul’s protest camp; anti-Putin protests in Russia; Jenny Tonge’s comments on Israel; and Len McCluskey’s call for civil disobedience during the Olympics.
Regardless of your views about each of those, where would be without voices of confrontation, protest and prophecy? And how often are we those voices, rather than mere mutterers on the sidelines? In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus begins to talk about his forthcoming death. As he made clear to his followers, their allegiance to him would be no easy option: it could cost them dearly. For Jesus himself, it wasn’t just that there might be danger ahead: he intended to walk straight into it. The inevitable clash with the political, social and religious authorities made his death a certainty. Paradoxically, however, for Jesus, this was to be the way that led to a new kind of life, the influence of which would prove to be everlasting.
The death of Jesus has been crucial to Christianity from the very beginning. Paul, writing earlier than the Gospels, proclaimed the heart of the Christian message to be ‘Christ crucified’. All four Gospels climax with several chapters about the final week of Jesus’ life, and then the details of his death. This death is central not only to the whole of the New Testament, but is also highlighted in church liturgy, not least in this service of the Eucharist. Every time we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes in glory.
When I first began studying theology, one of the areas that really fascinated me was the distinction between the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus – often referred to as the historical Jesus on the one hand, and the Christ of faith on the other. Both are to be affirmed, but it is important to see how they differ significantly from each other. The pre-Easter Jesus refers to the historical figure of the past – a Galilean Jew, a flesh and blood human being, whose life had a beginning and an end, like all of us. This Jesus doesn’t exist any more: he is dead and gone. To say this is not to deny Easter, but it recognises that what Easter means is not that a flesh and blood Jesus still lives somewhere. The post-Easter Jesus refers to what Jesus became after his death in Christian experience, reflection and tradition. Whether it be your patron, Mary Magdalene, in the garden, Paul on the road to Damascus, the disciples on the road to Emmaus, or the apostles on the lakeside, it is beyond question that some of his followers experienced Jesus after his death, albeit in a radically new way. They had been alongside the pre-Easter Jesus as a human being, indeed as a remarkable human being, but nonetheless as somebody who could only be in one place at a time. After his death, they experienced him very differently. The post-Easter Jesus is no longer a physical figure constrained by time and space; he can appear anywhere, pass through walls, be unrecognised, and suddenly vanish. Experiences like these led to convictions that Jesus is not simply a figure of the past, dead and gone, but a living reality of the present. More than that, experiences of the post-Easter Jesus led to a second conviction that Jesus is not only somehow still with us, but is a divine reality.
The distinction between the pre-Easter and the post-Easter Jesus matters greatly, because when we don’t make it, everything that is said about the post-Easter Jesus is projected back on to the pre-Easter Jesus. That means that even as a human being, he had divine powers which meant he could walk on water, change water into wine, and raise Lazarus from the dead. That’s certainly the notion I grew up with, and I guess many of you did, too. But all of that would make the pre-Easter Jesus more than human and therefore not really human in the way we understand it.
The core of Jesus’ being was the ‘Kingdom of God’ which refers not to an afterlife, but to a way of living life in the present. This kingdom is the very model of justice, truth, righteousness and peace, but establishing it meant challenging the prevailing powers-that-be, eating with outcasts, associating with the ritually impure and those of dubious repute. So, at Passover, Jesus took this message to Jerusalem, the traditional centre of the Jewish people – but in his time it was ruled by a high priest and aristocratic class who owed their positions of power to Rome. There he engaged in subversive and provocative actions, such as entering the city on a donkey; criticising the Temple leaders for having made God’s house a den of thieves, collaborators with Rome and exploiters of ordinary people; squaring up to the authorities in a series of verbal conflicts, prophesying that Jerusalem and the Temple would be destroyed because they did not know the things that make for peace, and so on. Unsurprisingly, he was arrested and crucified, a Roman form of capital punishment reserved for those who dared to challenge imperial authority.
If Jesus is the decisive revelation of the character and passion of God, as his followers have affirmed from the beginning, what does his life tell us about God? In Jesus’ compassion for the marginalised, we see God’s compassionate and embracing character. In Jesus’ passion for the kingdom of God, we see God’s passion for a transformed world in which justice, righteousness and truth reign, and in which no one is an outcast. God’s character and passion as we see them in Jesus also have a confrontational dimension: they include the indictment of what gets in the way of the welfare and well-being of all people, and of all creation. I don’t know about you, but I struggle with the notion of Jesus’ death as a payment for sin, or as satisfying some requirement for blood on the part of a morally suspect Father God. However, it makes a lot of sense to me to speak of Jesus giving his life because of his love for others, and his passion for justice and a different and better kind of world – a world transformed. And isn’t that transformation what the followers of Jesus are also called to, in every age? Here is where the pre- and post-Easter Jesuses come together.
Poor old Peter! In Mark’s Gospel account, he had only just told Jesus ‘You are the Messiah’. Now, in the passage we’ve just heard, Jesus turns on Peter with some real aggression. But perhaps that was because Jesus thought that Peter risked losing sight of his vision of the kingdom. Perhaps Jesus was telling him, and perhaps Jesus continues to tell us, that a world transformed and, crucially, our own lives transformed, may cost us a great deal, maybe even everything. Paradoxically, however, it is in that sort of letting go, that sort of offering, that a new kind of life can emerge. Some might call it resurrection.
It’s quite a comfort to know that even the beloved Peter – Jesus’ right-hand man – was capable of missing the point, because I think I often miss it, too, not least when it challenges my own comfort. What things do we need to confront and do battle with today, in our own lives, in our society, in our world, so that peace, justice, truth and righteousness stand a chance, and the outsiders can become insiders? As one writer put it, the sorting out you are called to in Lent is analogous to inviting Jesus as a guest into your house. You may not mind him merely puffing up a few cushions, but what do you do when you realise he is intent on restructuring the whole house? You can’t throw him out, so you look around the house, find a suitable cupboard, clear it out, decorate it (sparing no expense), get a good strong lock on it – and put Jesus inside. Outside you can have a lamp and flowers, and each time you pass, bow reverently. So, you now have Jesus under control and he cannot interfere any more. Only one problem: we all know what happened the last time they tried to secure Jesus by rolling a stone over the entrance to his tomb…..and thanks be to God for that!
Sunday Next Before Lent – St. Mary Magdalene Evensong – 19 February 2012
February 19th, 2012We might not be in Rio de Janeiro or Sydney, but my advice is to make as much carnival as you can in the next couple of days – even if it only amounts to a couple of pancakes – because Lent begins later this week, and fasting, repentance, discipline, self-denial, not giving in to temptation – the things with which we have come to associate Lent – may not be a very joyful prospect. Much as I like George Herbert’s poetry, I find it quite hard to share the enthusiasm of one of his opening lines: Welcome, dear feast of Lent! except, perhaps, in the sense of Lent signifying the lengthening of the days. The traditional associations of Lent can conjure up an unhealthy obsession with ‘sin’, kill-joy religion, and an oppressive Puritanism which cramps the human spirit, and which often seems to condemn even legitimate pleasures. We know too much of the destructive effects of those brands of religion and preaching that induce guilt, and images of a God of ferocious judgement and insatiable moral demands – a God who seems to be more about applying the shackles and piling on the agony instead of a God who liberates, and who meets us where we are – warts and all.
In ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’, Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘I can resist everything except temptation.’ And he had a revered predecessor in the Christian tradition in the shape of St. Augustine, arguably the greatest and most influential mind of the church throughout its long history, who wrote of his time in what he called the ‘wilderness of his youth’, struggling with life’s carnal temptations. You’ve probably heard this famous line before: ‘Give me chastity and continence’, Augustine said, ‘but not just now.’ Let’s face it, temptation is part of everyone’s life, though it’s a pity that our modern understanding of the words ‘temptation’ and ‘sin’ have too often become associated with titillation, ‘sins’ that are – in the great scheme of things – relatively trivial. All of this a mask, perhaps, for the rather more significant sins it might be harder to face up to, either as individuals, or as a society or culture.
Although I sometimes think Lent can be used – or should I say abused? – to make us feel bad about ourselves, I don’t necessarily want to run away from the challenges its traditional associations set before us. A religion in which anything goes, a sentimental religion of constant sunshine, or a religion that doesn’t make real demands of its followers, surely has little or no cutting edge. It fails to speak to the reality of the human condition. Yes, sometimes life is wonderful and all seems right with the world. Indeed, on this Sunday before Lent, the church commemorates the transfiguration of Jesus, that mountain-top experience when Jesus’ closest followers saw a vision of his glory. But, special and memorable though these glimpses of glory are, life isn’t all lived on the mountain top. For many of us, the reality may more often be the testing, and sometimes dark and painful struggle, with the demands that life makes upon us, or that circumstances force upon us. These constitute the ‘times of trial’ from which the Lord’s Prayer asks that we might be delivered. They might well be termed our ‘wilderness moments’, and we often wonder if we will come out of them intact or, indeed, if we will come out of them at all.
The US President Calvin Coolidge dutifully went to church one Sunday and when he got home his wife asked him what the sermon was about. “Oh, it was about sin,” said Coolidge. “Yes, but what did the preacher say?” she persisted. “He said he was against it”, replied Coolidge. I suppose that one of the definitions of sin is, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it, ‘those things which we ought not to have done.’ But that doesn’t get us much further – what ought we not to have done? Most of us, I suppose, would think in terms of specific offences towards God or other people: lies; stealing; insults; rejection. Or, perhaps, those often ‘invisible’ sins like envy, malice or uncharitable thoughts. But all these specific ‘sins’ are signs of something broader and altogether more fundamental: that something is not right in our relationship with God, or with humanity, or with both.
Perhaps it is our tendency towards self-absorption that lies at the heart of so many human miseries. Some theologians refer to this as the ‘Fall’, the wilful turning away from God on the part of Adam and Eve. Now, few would argue that this is a good story, as well as a powerful and searching allegory on the human condition. But what seems to me a much more helpful explanation finds its origins in the theology of St. Irenaeus. This provides an alternative picture of a long and gradual process by which God forms his creatures into his own likeness through God’s own creative, limitless and self-giving love. Our ‘salvation’ consists not in the reversal of a wrong step thousands of years ago, but in a continuing story of becoming ever more God-like, informed and inspired by the Jesus who, Christians say, is himself the very image and likeness of God. The point about the divine love is that it is not foisted upon us; rather, it requires a response from those to whom it is offered. So perhaps the true nature of ‘sin’ lies in a resistance to that love, which is most likely to be encountered in the everyday events of human life and, above all, in our relationships with other people.
All this, of course, is easier said than done. It is tempting to leave it at the level of pious theory rather than striving towards making it a practical reality in our lives. Jesus spent forty long days in the wilderness doing battle with the idea that it is human power, glory and self-interest which really matter. He emerged with a clearer understanding of who he truly was and what he needed to do. In Lent, the church urges us to take stock; to de-clutter; to take a penetrating look at our own motivation, thought and action; to confront ourselves with who we are and what we are about; to open ourselves to the possibility that the wilderness experience may lead us towards transformation as well.
Some of us are natural activists and doers, but we must not allow our busy-ness to prevent us from some serious self-examination. Others are natural depressives, endlessly cast down by people and things, but we must not allow our perceived inadequacies to cloud our vision of what we might yet become. Most of us, I guess, find ourselves somewhere between the two. Either way, the journey into Lent is only partly individual and private, for it is also communal and public, as scripture, prayer, study, the church’s liturgies, and the companionship of our fellow church members who journey with us, guide and sustain us through the wilderness experience. The Lenten season, used wisely and effectively, will inevitably present us with various challenges, lead us into places we’d rather avoid, and probably make us feel uncomfortable. If we are serious about it, it will not leave us unchanged. The going may well be tough at times, so it might seem perverse to say I wish you a happy Lent. But I do wish you a realistic, meaningful and productive one, so that the process of transfiguration – transformation – may find expression in our lives, as it did in the life of Jesus.
Epiphany – St. Matthias – 8 January 2012
January 8th, 2012A few years ago, I spent Christmas week in Jordan. Like a trip to Israel many years earlier, it brought so much of the Bible to life, mainly because of the landscape: mountains; wilderness; the Dead Sea. One day, during one of those hair-raising jeep trips through the desert, we made a stop in a very remote and silent place, with only a few Bedouin and their camels for company. I felt I could almost see the wise men on their camels edging a little further towards their destination. But another experience was, if anything, even more vivid. It was the walk down into the rose-red city of Petra at night, with only flickering candles to light the way. Looking up and seeing what seemed like a million stars studding the deep, dark blackness of the night sky, again my mind’s eye went to the Magi following that special star, which has found a place in the imagination of all of us over the years. Matthew, the only Gospel writer to talk of the Magi, certainly knew how to tell a story.
I still remember, three or four years ago now, an article that appeared in ‘The Times’ which claimed that the Archbishop of Canterbury had dismissed the story of the three wise men as nothing but ‘legend’. Speaking live on radio, the Archbishop was quoted as saying, ‘Matthew’s Gospel doesn’t tell us there were three of them, doesn’t tell us they were kings, doesn’t tell us they where they came from. It says they are astrologers, wise men, from somewhere outside the Roman Empire, that’s all we’re really told.’ Anything else was legend, though the Archbishop did concede that ‘It works quite well as legend.’ Alongside this, he also called into question a literal approach to certain other aspects of the traditional Christmas story. It was, of course, in true journalistic style, presented as the Archbishop calling the Bible into question, and it opened the email floodgates, firstly to the literalists defending the factual accuracy of the scriptures, and secondly, to the secularists to whom all religion is legend in any case. It also provided yet another brickbat to hurl at the Archbishop who, apparently, didn’t believe what he should. Needless to say, as we have come to expect, the reporting of the story was incomplete, sensationalist and, to a large extent, disingenuous. The subtleties of the Archbishop’s responses were lost in the rush to create a good headline.
Rowan Williams’ remark that the story of the wise men ‘…works quite well as legend’ seemed incomprehensible to many. Now, we know that in society generally there is widespread ignorance of the Bible, including, dare I say it, among some churchgoers. A new, realistic sort of scriptural teaching might be able to address this problem – but only in part, because many people have little or no conception of bringing faith into the reading of scripture. Consequently, the one question that has come to obsess people is: Did it really happen? And, of course, that question can be applied to all biblical stories: the Garden of Eden; Abraham; Moses; the Exodus; exile in Babylon; the birth of Jesus, with shepherds and angels; miracles, and so on. The question that fails to get asked, far too often, is: What does the story mean? For doesn’t the history of literature indicate that there is no better way of communicating profound truths than by the telling of a good story, or finding resonance and meaning in a dramatic script, or in a poem?
So what of today’s Gospel and the wise men? The Bible may well have the status of sacred text, while ‘The Times’ does not. But it is not wrong to encourage readers to encounter the Gospels with the same rigour that is routinely applied to secular texts. Indeed, I would argue it is essential if faith is not to become fossilized, domesticated and sentimentalized, as so often happens with the entire biblical story of Christmas. What we really need to ask is: what does Matthew intend to communicate to his audience through this story?
Now, I know we sing ‘We three kings of Orient are.’ But they weren’t really kings. In today’s jargon, they might even be called ‘consultants’! Their expertise was in astrology; they knew the secrets of the stars. Because they could predict the future, those in power listened to them: just look at Herod’s worried interrogation of them. Notoriously, astrologers are still sometimes found close to government. Ronald Reagan’s Chief of Staff, Donald Regan, writes in his memoirs that he kept a colour-coded calendar on his desk, highlighted in green for good days, red for bad days, and yellow for ‘iffy’ days, as an aid to remembering when it was propitious or not to move the President from one place to another, or for him to speak in public, or to start negotiations with a foreign power. Apparently, this schedule was fed to him down the phone by none other than Nancy Reagan, whose authority was her personal astrologer. All rather alarming, don’t you think…?
The intellectuals of the ancient world, represented in today’s story by the Magi, dismissed such stuff as superstitious nonsense. For them, astrology was the closest thing they had to science, and they accused those who peddled superstition of exploiting the credulity of people – even if they were monarchs or emperors! We (who, of course, never glance at what the papers say our stars foretell) may well say the same about modern day astrologers – including those shot out of a cannon on ‘Strictly Come Dancing’.
The Magi of Matthew’s Gospel remain essentially mysterious figures. It seems they are far more equivocal and unsettling characters than those regal men riding their camels across our Christmas cards. There are so many layers of meaning to this story, so many symbols, that it is impossible to do it justice in a few minutes; it is a feast for the imagination. But let me leave you with just one reflection on it: Magi are those who, looking at the night sky, as I did in Jordan, or as you might, wonder what it all means. Most of us in cities don’t spend much of our time looking up into the sky: we suppose we have better things to do. In any case, clouds or light pollution often mar the view. But, if we did look up more, we, too, would surely ask what is being said to us.
The Magi bring their questions, as well as their gifts, to the crib. One of their questions is answered: they find the child they were looking for. But in his poem, ‘The Journey of the Magi’ (arguably the best commentary you could read on this story), T.S. Eliot suggests they return home with as many questions as they brought with them. Perhaps the biggest question of all was, ‘Were we led all that way for birth or death?’ Their journey, it seems, is not over – and nor is ours. But after the encounter with the Christ child, one thing is for certain: the journey of life can never be the same again. Now, even as we return to our own familiar territory, and to normal life, as January takes hold, we take a different route – just like the Magi.
Midnight Mass – St. John the Divine – 24 December 2011
January 4th, 2012Two different experiences of being in St. John’s this past week, one quite heavenly and the other decidedly earthly. The heavenly was sitting in the chancel on Tuesday night, listening to the last of Piotr’s Advent meditations, and contemplating the angels forming part of the exquisite artwork on the ceiling. The earthly was sitting at the back during last Saturday’s carol service, when a man came in very much the worse for drink (and probably other stuff besides) chuntering incoherently about one thing and another, including the uselessness of religion – though he didn’t put it quite as politely as that! Talk about the sublime to the ridiculous. I wasn’t quite sure I could go along with the writer of the NT Letter to the Hebrews at that point: ‘Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares’. Then again, perhaps the two scenarios were not so far apart…Actually, he eventually had to be escorted out, as he was disturbing people’s appreciation of the service, and some of his language was a bit ripe. But I reflected later that priests shouldn’t too often be in the business of excluding people from churches, and I did wonder if Jesus might have handled it differently.
Angels are busy beings, though, aren’t they? In Christian understanding, they are often portrayed as being messengers of God: they span the heavenly and earthly realms, and bring important news to ordinary people. They are heavenly insiders, but they communicate with people very often on the outside.
Now, contrary to what many people suppose, it is Easter, not Christmas, which is the primary Christian festival. But there are many things which link the two festivals. One of them is the fact that Jesus is born outside, just as he will later die outside. The door of the inn closes on the one about to be born, just as the gates of the city close on the one about to die. This opposition of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is present throughout the Gospel story. Jesus is rarely to be found inside, where it is safe and comfortable; he doesn’t identify himself with the social and religious parties of his day; there is no party to protect him or to promote his cause. Those who go to him must go ‘out’ to him, forfeiting the security which ordinary human associations – including families – provide. Some households briefly sheltered him, like that of his friends Lazarus, Mary and Martha. Perhaps they wanted to try to hold him inside for a bit, to curb his compulsion always to be on his way somewhere else. But the one who on this night, ‘pitched his tent’ among us, to use the imagery of John’s Gospel, can never make anywhere his permanent home. The Son of Man, with nowhere to lay his head, is always outside.
This tension between inside and outside is acute in the story of Jesus’ birth. He is born outside, where all who are unwanted and rejected must go. The ones inside the inn – essentially Jesus’ own people – do not receive him. They are comfortable and warm on the inside, but Mary, Joseph and Jesus are left out in the cold. We don’t know what time of year Jesus was born, but that we say he was born ‘in the bleak midwinter’ is certainly the truth about the nature of Jesus’ coming, whatever the date of the first Christmas. It was cold outside, whatever the temperature. The Welsh priest poet, R.S. Thomas, once wrote that, ‘the very word ‘Christ’ has that crisp sound so suggestive of frost and snow and the small sheets of ice that crack and splinter under our feet, even as the wafer is broken in the priest’s fingers.’ And, in a later poem, Thomas says of Christmas, ‘Love knocks with such frosted fingers.’
It’s cold outside. It is dark, too. We are told that the shepherds came to Jesus by night, though we do not know whether it was at night that he was born. But, as with the season, so with the hour. Night, like winter, befits his coming. The light shines in the darkness. Jesus made our night time his, as he made our winter his.
Jesus was born outside and it was outsiders who found their way to him. The shepherds’ home, such as it was, was the hillside, but their outside status was more than just a matter of where they lived. The shepherds of Jesus’ day, were, in Jewish terms, Sabbath-breakers, and therefore condemned by the religious. Not only that, but their contact with blood also made them ritually impure; they were widely regarded as dirty and smelly (a bit like their sheep), uncouth herdsmen, avoided by respectable villagers and regarded as vagabonds and thieves. They had no influence, no good reputation, and yet they received a personal invitation from the angels to go to Bethlehem and witness the birth of Jesus. The Magi, while of higher status, also journeyed to Christ, in their case out of the desert. Well, as T.S. Eliot tells us in his famous poem, they were never at home in their summer palaces, ‘with the silken girls bringing sherbet’…. Matthew’s Gospel contrasts these pilgrim people with the paranoid King Herod. Outside, they watch the stars and move forward; inside, all he can do is watch his own back and go nowhere.
Where is Jesus this Christmas – inside or outside? At Midnight Mass, we place the figure of the newborn Christ in the crib. We welcome him into our houses of prayer; we ask Jesus in. In some of our churches, like here at St John’s, his presence inside our four walls continues to be affirmed long after the crib is taken down. The gentle light always burning in the sanctuary says, ‘He is here; God is with us.’ So, has Christ come inside at last? Well, if he has, it is only to break down the barriers we still build, in church and society, between the included and the excluded, us and them, insiders and outsiders. The distinction between inside and outside was drawn when Adam was driven out of the Garden of Eden. But tonight, Christmas, signals its destruction. No more entering through the many courts of the Temple to get closer to the Holy of Holies. The Holy of Holies has come to us in our very ordinariness, to take up residence in the messiness of our everyday human life. As an unusual version of John’s Gospel I heard at one of umpteen carol services this season puts it: ‘the Word has moved into the neighbourhood’.
There’s nothing more we can plan or do now to make Christmas happen. It’s time to stop. It’s here. It’s time for the world of the angels to infiltrate our world. When things look bleak and uncertain, as they do for many this Christmas, don’t let anyone try to tell you that the things we celebrate in this place tonight are fluffy, sentimental nonsense or emotional crutches for weak-minded people. The angels come amongst us to announce that the Word has moved into our neighbourhood. Heaven comes to earth; God comes to inhabit our cold world alongside us. Whatever we think about others or about ourselves, the neighbourhood and everyone in it matters. Our concerns are the concerns of the divine, and the good news is that, because of the birth of this child, there are no more outsiders. Thanks be to God, and a very Happy Christmas!
Advent 4 – St. Mary Magdalene (11.30) – 18 December 2011
December 18th, 2011I realise most eyes are now focused on the birth of a boy next weekend, but today’s gospel reminds us of the centrality of women – Elizabeth and Mary – in the Christmas narrative. Mary, whom the church traditionally honours on this fourth Sunday in Advent, stands in a line of women who go all the way back to Sarah, the mother of the Jewish nation, who became pregnant when she was a pensioner. Also in the Jewish
scriptures – our OT – it was a group of women – Shiphrah, Puah, Miriam, and Pharaoh’s daughter among them – who all conspired together to prevent the infant Moses from being slaughtered. Then there was Esther, whose bravery saved the Jewish people from extermination, and the moving story of Ruth, whose love and loyalty brought back fullness of life to her widowed mother-in-law, Naomi.
And on into the NT, we find the poor widow, who gave Jesus a model for generosity; the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears, and gave him a model of love and devotion; the Syro-Phoenician woman who challenged Jesus to confront racism; Joanna and Susanna who put their homes at Jesus’ disposal; your patron saint, Mary Magdalene, the first witness to the resurrection, and so we could go on. The great biblical stories which are central to the seasons of Advent and Christmas, with all their theological and political significance, enhance the sense of specific people being caught up in God’s drama. These people find their lives turned upside down as their hearts are gripped by God’s mysterious presence, and they discover a sense of direction to which they have no choice but to be obedient. No individuals illustrate this reality more than Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, and Mary, the mother of Jesus. Theirs is a story of hope and of joy, of ancient longings for redemption on the part of the Hebrews, of a future that promises confidence and excitement. These two impossibly pregnant women – the barren wife of an aging priest, and an unknown virgin with no royal blood or important family connections – began a song of praise that has echoed through the centuries. Elizabeth’s baby leaps inside her, and Mary sings, ‘My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my saviour.’
I sometimes think that Mary is too often presumed to be the kind of person she probably was not. Our images of her have more to do
with Victorian statues and traditional Christmas cards than with the real woman. We have made Mary ‘mild’ – perhaps partly because the word rhymes with ‘child’! We have depicted her as eternally passive, though one read through the Magnificat, Mary’s song, soon challenges that notion. To see Mary as merely a passive, compliant woman is to underestimate, quite fundamentally, the courage, risk, determination and sheer gutsiness she exhibited all through what we know of her life. ‘He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, cast down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.’
In choosing Mary, God demonstrates that all women are called to an active role in the unveiling of God’s kingdom of true justice. Mary said her ‘yes’ to becoming pregnant with the one who would turn the tables of social exclusion, tip the scales in favour of the under-privileged, touch the untouchable, love the unlovable and forgive the unforgivable. Mary is nothing less than God’s deliverer to humanity. Only a woman could make it possible for God to break into the human experience, and give birth to the child we will celebrate next weekend, whose name is Immanuel, which means ‘God is with us’.
Theological and church history demonstrate the plain fact that women’s stories have often been airbrushed out of the picture. We owe a huge debt to feminist theologians who have helped to unearth them and reinstate them to their rightful place. As a male, it pains me to say that it is male-dominated cultures which have frequently ensured that women’s stories didn’t get told, or were sanitized, or were moulded to fit a particular feminine stereotype. I don’t know about you, but when I look back on those who have shaped my faith, it is often women who played the really essential roles. Not many of them are still alive, but what they did, said and lived will always stay with me. Today’s Advent gospel story reminds me of the indispensability of women in the crucial events of this coming Christmas – and all that symbolises theologically. The fourth Sunday of Advent, in particular, invites all of us to remember how much we owe to women.
And one final thought, moving from the human to the divine. In Western tradition, for most of church history, the notion of God having a
feminine side has been quite alien. God is more often perceived in terms of king, lord, or tough warrior than a nursing mother, which is why I welcome some modern liturgies which seek to broaden our understanding of the divine through using different imagery. One of the newer
Eucharistic prayers speaks of God as a mother who tenderly gathers her children. Actually, in scripture, there are both masculine and feminine connotations around the figure of God. But, perhaps most important of all is this fact. We 21st century Westerners can easily miss a point which would certainly not have been lost on 1st century Jews. That is that the Holy Spirit – the one who, in Jewish thinking, was present at
creation, and the one who brought life alive in the womb, the one we routinely refer to as ‘he’- was always, in both Hebrew and Aramaic (the languages Jesus knew) distinctly feminine. In short, from the beginning, ‘he’ was always ‘she’!
Advent 3 – St. John the Divine – 11 December 2011
December 18th, 2011On the third Sunday of Advent, we focus on John the Baptist, the prophet whose role was to prepare the way for Jesus. And traditionally, this is also Guadete Sunday, gaudete being the Latin word for ‘rejoice’. It finds its origin in some words from Paul’s Letter to the Philippians: ‘Rejoice in the Lord always’. This morning’s reading from 1 Thessalonians echoes the same call: ‘Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances’. What connections might we find this morning between prophecy and St. Paul?
Prophets are often credited with forecasting the future, but that is a rather narrow interpretation. There is a broader understanding of prophecy which articulates the reality of the present situation, while offering the chance to respond to current conditions in a new way. St. Paul urges Christian communities to rejoice and give thanks in all circumstances? Is it really possible to rejoice and give thanks, when the economy is as rocky as it is now, when the gap between rich and poor becomes ever wider, when jobs are on the line, when relationships go awry, when illness strikes, or when the struggles of old age beset us? There are, of course, brands of Christianity which demand that you do look relentlessly cheerful; that every word uttered should be positive and upbeat. Frankly, this approach is just exhausting and guilt-inducing, because we know life isn’t always like that and we don’t always feel that way. Nonetheless, we are left wondering: can we rejoice and give thanks even in difficult times, in the face of life experiences we find it hard to cope with? Well, it may be hard sometimes, but we might be able to find things to give thanks for, even in trying circumstances – for example, the support of those who help to share our burdens, which can mitigate, even if just a little, situations of darkness, desperation, or the feeling that God has abandoned us to our fate. Even so, on an individual level, it doesn’t seem realistic to be giving thanks every minute of the day.
The church, as a body, on the other hand, is always giving thanks in its daily round of worship. This morning’s psalm is just one example of this, with its refrain: ‘The Lord has done great things for us, and we are glad indeed.’ Like the passage we heard earlier from Isaiah, today’s psalm reflects Israel’s faith in hard times of destruction and exile. It celebrates what God has done for them in the past, but it also looks through the reality of present difficulties to a deeply rooted trust in God and to a new hope for the future.
The Book of Psalms, the hymn book of Israel, of Jesus, is also the first song book of the church, both in terms of date and in continuing significance. In the worship of the Church of England, we read from the psalms every day in the offices of morning and evening prayer. But the psalms are not all about praise: they come in many different moods, so that psalms of rejoicing or triumph appear alongside psalms of desolation, lament and penitence. As a now defunct Sunday tabloid newspaper used to boast, ‘all human life is there’. The psalms contain not only exalted devotion, but also human grumbling and the deepest and most difficult thoughts and feelings we harbour. The psalms, paradoxically, show a way to ‘rejoice always’ which does not evade the reality of the way things are, or the way people feel.
It is easy to rejoice when life is going swimmingly and God seems to be on our side. You might consider this could simply be the worship of the comfortable and well-off; those who can say with the psalmist, ‘the lot has fallen in a fair ground’. But, of course, we know life is not always like that. If the church sings only ‘happy songs’, ‘feel-good music’, there is a danger that it retreats into unreality. In fact, some of the psalms speak also to those going through the mill, or the valley of the shadow of death; those for whom life is tough, who think God has deserted them or is oblivious to their prayers, who wish only retribution on their enemies, who experience life as continuing chaos and hopelessness. They cling on to a belief in the triumph of God’s ultimate justice and righteousness only by their fingertips, because everything around them seems to contradict that vision.
One of the things I really appreciate about the Book of Common Prayer is that it takes us relentlessly all the way through the psalms, refusing to miss out those that are more awkward or unsettling. Using all the psalms gives us things to say which we do not always like, but this is surely preferable to focusing only on those psalms which are up-beat, positive and easy to recite. It is tempting to sideline psalms expressing lament, darkness, or disaster, or those which express hatred of others, loss of faith, or absence of God. But isn’t it an act of bold faith to insist that all such experiences of disaster and disorder are a proper subject to talk to God about? Nothing is out of bounds or inappropriate. It is important that we sing such songs in an age of denial and cover-up. They provide a healing honesty.
These psalms speak of a God who is present in, participating in, attentive to, the darkness, weakness and displacement of life. Isn’t this the kind of God whose coming we will celebrate at Christmas – weak, vulnerable, fragile, at risk, facing danger and uncertainty? One of the things we can surely say about the Book of Psalms is also one of the things we can say about the Christian religion: life is not all praise and alleluia. Some of it is, of course, and we rightly give thanks for those mountain top, life-enhancing moments. But life is equally a pilgrimage through the various darknesses that are equally part of our human condition.
One reason why we light candles in Advent is a recognition that the light is powerful only because of the depths of the darkness which surround it. It is through the darkness that we begin to glimpse the light. The candlelight may be fragile and vulnerable, subject to the draughts which seek to blow it this way and that, but it refuses to be extinguished. And more than that, the light will grow insistently stronger week by week until the light that enlightens everyone shines upon the morning skies. Even in our most profound adversity, we are inspired not to concede to the darkness, because that flickering flame will not be defeated. To extend Isaiah’s image, the ruins and devastations of our world, and those in our own lives, have the potential to be raised up, for nothing is beyond the scope of the light which is coming into the world. And that, surely, is sufficient to make real the sound of rejoicing and the voice of praise. Thanks be to God!
Remembrance Sunday – St. Mary Magdalene (Evensong) – 13 November 2011
November 15th, 2011‘Remember’ is one of those wonderful English words that can mean as little as ‘I have a vague memory’; or it can have the haunting quality of the murdered King of Denmark’s ghostly words to his son, ‘Hamlet, remember me’. It can give a sense of tradition to bonfire night ‘Remember, remember…’, when most of the sparkling children don’t (thank heavens) have much idea what the event commemorates. And it can have the solemn resonance of acts of remembrance like All Souls, just a few days ago, or the two minutes’ silence we kept this morning and on Friday, Armistice
Day.
Remembering is an acknowledgement of distance, and distance helps us see things in perspective, emotionally and historically. Our ability to look back at wartime leaders helps us see them as human beings with horrendous responsibilities, some of which they got wrong – bear in mind that Dresden Cathedral was reopened just a few years ago. But, sadly, such reflection on experience doesn’t seem to teach us much, for we go on hearing phrases like ‘fighting for peace’, ‘waging war against terrorism’, strategies that resort to violence in the name of non-violence, which have a terribly hollow ring. So the possibility that things will get better one day soon is, historically, probably not a horse to put your money on.
The early Christians believed that there would be a period of turmoil, battles, wars, earthquakes, famines, and bloody persecution – and these would be encouraging signs of the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God on earth. A time when faith would be tested, yes, but a time which would prove to be the birthpangs of the dawning of a new age of joy and victory. Well, that’s not quite how it worked out and, to be honest, we can’t just treat the continuing turmoil of life as a temporary blip by re-scheduling it historically into an unknown future. Human suffering, pain and violence are not like the dentist’s drill – a few more moments and the agony will stop. It doesn’t, as events of the past century have proved time and time again. It has gone
on and on, in Flanders fields, on the Somme, in Auschwitz, Korea, Vietnam,
Uganda, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, the Balkans, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Madrid, New York and London……. and there isn’t much evidence to suggest that things are going to change for the better any time soon.
But were those first Christians also wrong to believe that God would ultimately be victorious? And living in our kind of world, as Advent approaches, is there any way we can even begin to talk meaningfully of God as king, or Jesus as saviour? The only kind of answer I can point to lies in this word ‘Remember’. The power of remembering is no novelty for Christians, for remembrance is one of the most dynamic realities at the heart of our faith: ‘Do this in remembrance of me’. When
the bread is broken on the altar, we are not only calling the Last Supper to
mind, not only doing what Jesus commanded his disciples to do, but we are
entering into one of the most powerful and breath-taking mysteries of human
experience. For to ‘re-member’ is, in English at least, the opposite of ‘dis-member’ and the brokenness, the dismemberment of Christ on the cross, is the means by which we in our brokenness are made whole.
The outrageous Christian claim is that the world is healed, not by the strategies of generals and politicians, but by the self-giving love of God. And it is only that unique and profoundly Christian paradox that enables us to talk about the victory of God – which is like no other kind of victory. The triumph of the cross that Christians talk and sing about is not about happy endings; it’s not about clouds rolling away; it’s
not about the pain stopping. It is an altogether deeper order of experience – the
freedom that comes from the surrender of the will in Gethsemane; it is the eternal Easter hope that is only to be found in the deep and continuing darkness of Good Friday.
It is not reasonable to hope that God will spare us from the painful realities of life. If it can happen at all, it can happen to us. People who think that being a Christian makes life easier have clearly never read the Gospels properly. God’s way of defeating death is to enter its darkness. Our way of faithfulness will be a similarly messy engagement with the often unsatisfactory nature of living in this world, with its compromises and deals and moral uncertainties; but in the belief that God travels that road with us towards what may or may not be some kind of ultimate resolution. Our task is not to ask for ‘ease or still waters or green pastures’, however
appealing they sound, but to tread ‘the steep and rugged pathway rejoicingly’, positively, honestly, creatively, working with and alongside God as he lovingly, painfully – and, crucially, through us - weaves loose threads back into the tapestry of creation. Let our remembering today not only be an act of respect and regret for those who have died or been scarred by war, vital though all of that is. But let it also be the means by which the miracle of God’s love may take root in our lives, and then go on to make an impact on the world we inhabit.
When Christians meet together to break bread, that bread symbolises the pain and brokenness of the world, as well as our own brokenness. So let our prayer be that God will re-member us and make possible for us and through us – and for all creation – that peace and wholeness which the world, by itself, cannot give.
Trinity 14 – St. John the Divine – 25 September 2011
September 26th, 2011There’s quite a bit of arguing going on in today’s readings – and not for the first time in the Scriptures. First, we find God putting right the prophet Ezekiel for perpetuating the old notion that the sins of fathers are visited on their innocent children. No, says God, everyone must take personal responsibility for their own actions. To the charge that the way of the Lord is unfair, God counters that it is actually human ways that are unfair. Repent – turn your lives and your priorities around – so that you might live, because I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says God. The implication seems to be that the divine advice is to get a life rather than merely acquire a religion. A religion runs the risk of being divorced from everyday life and living, and potentially fossilising your attitudes and your actions. At its worst, it may imprison
you in a straightjacket of doctrine, creeds and texts, and confine you to the past.
Then today’s epistle. In the NT, much of Paul’s letter writing seeks to address divisions and arguments in the early Christian communities, urging them to have the same mind that was in Jesus. Don’t do anything from selfish ambition or conceit, looking only to your own interests, Paul tells the church in Philippi, but rather, in humility, put others first. Note that Paul does not say that others are actually better than we are: he just advises us to regard them as better. With this attitude, we won’t
look down our noses at others because of their ethnic, racial or national background. We won’t shake our heads condescendingly over the plight of the poor, or consider ourselves socially superior to rioters, looters, drug addicts or alcoholics. Equally, we won’t consider ourselves better than other Christians, or Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, agnostics or even atheists. That is because when we view others through the lens of humility, we see them as God sees them, as people of worth – indeed, as people of immense value and potential.
Thirdly, in today’s Gospel, we find Jesus in a tussle with religious leaders, part of a context of deepening conflict with those who were supposed to have said ‘yes’ to God’s ways already. When the elders question Jesus as to where his authority comes from (bear in mind he was perceived to be a threat to their authority) he turns the tables on them. At the risk of over-simplification, the parable of the two sons in the vineyard could perhaps be interpreted like this: the son who at first refused to obey his father and then changed his mind represents the tax collectors, prostitutes, and other sinners. The son who said he would obey his father, but then didn’t, represents the chief priests and elders. Jesus is here reinforcing a recurring theme in the Gospels, which is that the institutional religious leadership falls some way behind those routinely rejected by both religion and society when it comes to doing the will of God. In a nutshell, it’s not so much what you say you believe; it’s more about how you live. Or, as the proverb puts it: actions speak louder than words. This parable has echoes of Jesus’ earlier statement in Matthew during the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Not everyone who says to me Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.’ The elders of the synagogue were the religious
professionals, yet Jesus concludes they had singularly failed to do God’s
will. The church, not least its Gentile converts, were those who had originally said ‘no’ to God, but who had changed their minds. In New Testament terms, this changing of the mind may be linked with both repentance and conversion, a conscious decision to turn around both mind and life, seeking to replicate the example of Jesus.
We often restrict John the Baptist to Advent, as the forerunner of Jesus, but perhaps we should recall him more often, for John is the prophet in search of truth and justice, with a fearless disregard for the establishment. This, of course, makes him a target that is both feared and victimised. The two references to John in today’s Gospel remind us that his preaching pulled no punches, and observed no social boundaries. In
the eyes of the establishment, John was dangerous, principally because of what he said in terms of the need to repent. Jesus is similarly dangerous because of what he says and does. In both cases, words and actions indicate an identity that is deeply disturbing to religious institutions, if – then as now – they seek to take the place of God, and to forget human accountability to God. John the Baptist touches a nerve of truth in his hearers. He continues a vital ingredient in the preaching of the prophets: their relentless attention to the quality of worship in the Temple. Their vision is of a time when Israel’s worship of God will be matched by the exercise of justice in society. Only then will the glory of God be seen in their midst.
From the Christian perspective, John is the prophet who ushers in this convergence
between how you worship and how you live, and Jesus is the person in whom this is exemplified. John’s preaching had already evoked the message of justice and repentance, but it is Jesus, in his life and teaching, who embodies it. No wonder the chief priests were so edgy: the implication is obvious, for Jesus is usurping their place as the religious professionals, and doing so very publicly. The vital connection between worship and integrity is what lies at the root of today’s Gospel reading. It is also what Paul is striving for in his letter to the Christians in Philippi. Their
integrity as a church is founded on their likeness to Jesus: “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus”, he says.
In the contemporary spiritual search, the aesthetic aspect of worship can be one of the undeniable attractions of Christianity. It may be encountered in music, art, architecture, candles, incense, in the dignity of the Mass celebrated with awe and the use of antique, sacred vessels and vestments. All these have value, but we delude ourselves if we consider these things alone are a complete account of Christian faith.
For worship divorced from the practice of daily Christian living has no real purpose or value. It is ultimately what Christians do, not merely what they say they believe, that stands the best chance of convincing the world of the worth of a Gospel that is truly transformative in its power to revitalise human values and our relationships with God and neighbour. Jesus has harsh words for the religious institutions. He says: you had a chance to hear what John had to say about justice and righteousness, but you chose to remain fixed on laws and those things that secured your own status and power. He
confronts their lack of integrity directly, criticises their priorities, and extols the faith of the tax collectors and prostitutes who heard John’s message and changed their ways in the light of it. Once again, it is the outsiders who demonstrate a willingness to change, and who therefore get the point of the Gospel. In the end, it is not words, doctrine or tradition that matter the most. Historically, and still today, Christians can be justly accused of wasting far too much time and energy on all of that. It’s nothing new, but, as we all know, deep down, what really matters is how what we do here and now impacts on the way we live when we go out of the church door.