Catholic Contextual urban Theology, Mimetic Theory, Contemplative Prayer. And other random ramblings.

Sunday 8 April 2012

Sermon at Parish Mass Easter Day 2012


Acts 10:34, 37-43
Colossians 3:1-4
John 20:1-9

I’d like to invite you to close your eyes for a moment and imagine all the colours of the rainbow. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Now try to imagine a colour you’ve never seen, an eighth colour. A colour that isn’t in the spectrum you know.
Difficult, isn’t it? Similarly, could we imagine a perfume we’ve never smelt, or music, if we’d never heard it? Can you imagine life outside the womb, until you are born?
Today, the disciples run to the tomb, and they start to experience something they have never experienced or imagined before. Something they were not even capable of imagining, until they actually experienced it.
“He saw and believed. Till this moment they had failed to understand the teaching of scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”
Everything we have read in the Gospel, up to now, was written because of what we read today. It is the resurrection which enables the story to be told. Throughout the gospels the disciples fail to understand Jesus until the resurrection enables them to imagine something they had never experienced before.
It was impossible to imagine a crucified Messiah, until the Messiah had risen from the dead. It was impossible to understand how the whole world was in slavery to sin and death, until the God in whom there is no sin or death bursts in upon that world. It was impossible for the disciples to know how much they were governed by the fear of death, until they experienced a reality in which death simply does not exist. It was impossible for the disciples to know their own complicity in violence, denial, betrayal, until the man they had denied came back to them from death breathing love and forgiveness.
As we heard on Friday, Jesus on the cross cried out, “It is accomplished!”. Jesus has finished the work the Father sent him to do. This is the work of creation, the work to restore and complete all things as the Father wills them to be. And the culmination of the work of creation is union with God. Jesus confers on those who believe “the power to become children of God”, as John announces in the prologue to his Gospel.
In a sense, in John’s Gospel, on the cross the story of Jesus is complete. He has done what he came to do. With the resurrection, the story of the disciples begins. The story of Mary Magdalene, Peter, the Beloved Disciple, Thomas. All of them, in different ways, come to faith. All of them have been imprisoned in an imagination bounded by death, and all of them are called by the risen Lord from out of that prison. They come to believe. They come to be children of God in whom there is no death.
Before the resurrection, in John, Jesus talks about his relationship with the Father as something that only he participates in. He speaks of “the Father” or “my Father”, addressing the disciples as people who are, for the time being, outside that relationship. There is no Lord’s Prayer in John, he does not teach them to pray “our Father”.
But Jesus does promise that the disciples will come to share that relationship. “In my Father’s house”, says Jesus, “there are many dwelling-places… If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”
In his High Priestly Prayer at the Last Supper he has prayed that his disciples might be one, not in a functional sense of being part of the same organisation, but in the way that Jesus and his Father are one: “may they all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
When Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”, he is saying that he is the way by which his disciples, too, will come to call God “Father”. He is the way by which they will be included in the life that he shares with his Father, the life in which there is no death.
So, when the Risen Lord meets Mary Magdalene outside the tomb, he says, “Go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God”. For the first time in John’s Gospel, Jesus’ Father is our Father, too, his God is our God, too. We are no longer servants, or even friends, but brothers and sisters.
Jesus through his death has gone to the Father, and now lives the limitless, unconditioned, deathless life of the Resurrection. By the power of his resurrection, we too can become children of God, we too can call God “Father”.
The old imagination of a life conditioned by violence and fear and bounded by death has gone. Christ is risen, and that changes everything. Christ is risen, and that makes it possible to believe. Christ is risen, and that makes it possible to imagine what we could never have imagined before: that in the Father there is no death, no violence, no darkness at all. The Father is utterly vivacious, deathless self-giving love. And the Father calls us through Jesus to share in his life.
With the first disciples, the resurrection enables us to believe. To believe in Jesus, God’s Son. To believe in God the Father who raised him from the dead. To believe in the Spirit, who is God’s life, bringing creation into being, breathing in our hearts. Belief is belief in, not about. Belief is relationship. In a while we shall say the Creed together as we prepare to renew our baptismal promises. The Creed is not a tick chart of statements that we have to agree to. It is a description of the relationship we are in. The relationship of the Church, God’s people redeemed by the resurrection, with and in God who is Trinity.
And then like the first disciples, we shall meet the Risen Lord. He is risen to the unconditioned, boundless life of the Father, and makes himself known in bread and wine, the endless inexhaustible extension of his risen presence in all the world until the end of time.
We have met him, and we believe. We have met him, risen from the dead. He feeds us with his life, the life he shares with the Father, in whom there is no death. He is the way, the truth and the life. Through him we come home to the Father’s house, our Father’s house. In him we are freed from the old order of sin and death.
Jesus has completed the work he came to do, the work of our creation. After the seventh day, when God rested from his work, the eighth day has dawned, the day of resurrection, the day of new creation, the day that will never end.
God has burst into our lives from the empty tomb, to give us what we could never have imagined or foreseen: the deathless, vivacious, utterly loving life of God our Father. Now, and for ever. Alleluia, Amen.

Sermon at the Solemn Liturgy Good Friday 2012




Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9
The Passion according to John

“It is finished.”
So says Jesus, the last word he speaks from the cross in John’s Gospel. What does this mean? Is Jesus simply saying that it’s all over, is he relieved that death, finally, is at hand to end his sufferings? Sometimes, after the death of someone who has suffered much, we find comfort in the thought that their suffering is over. That is not wrong.
But is that all there is to what John is saying here? John, of all the gospel writers, is the most rich in symbolism, in hidden depths of meaning. What is finished is the task that the Father has sent Jesus to do, and we know this because Jesus has already many times spoken of its completion.
When Jesus met the Samaritan woman at the well, after he told her that he would give living water, he said, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.”
Later, he said to those who criticised him for healing on the Sabbath, “The works that the Father has given me to complete, the very works that I am doing, testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me.”
Then, at the Last Supper, in the high priestly prayer, he prays to his Father, “I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.”
What is finished is the Father’s work, the work of the creator, which Jesus has come to complete. This work consists of bringing everything into being, giving life, and glorifying the Father.
It may seem strange to think that the work of creation might not be complete. But only if we think of creation as an event in the past, something like the “big bang” setting everything into motion. But that is not the scriptural idea of creation at all.
Creation is the principle by which everything exists moment by moment. It is the dependence of everything on the will of God.
In the biblical vision, creation is something continually coming into being, striving in its own birth-pangs to come to the completion willed by the Father.
What is that completion? It is union with God. It is entering into the life that God lives, which we call eternal life.
This takes us right back to Christmas morning, and the prologue of John’s Gospel, in which the mission of Jesus is announced: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being… He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.”
Jesus, the Word of the Father, has come into the world to complete the work of creation, to put right all that is wrong, to heal the sick, to raise up the fallen, to give life, to give power to become children of God. Jesus has come from the Father so that we, too, can call God Father.
So the cry of Jesus on the cross, “it is finished”, is not a statement of final relief, still less of despair. It is a cry of triumph and exaltation. It recalls the words of God over creation at the beginning and the end of the Bible.
In Genesis, we are told, God finished the work of creation, and blessed it, and rested from his work. And at the end of the book of Revelation there is that glorious vision when the new heaven and the new earth have appeared and the new Jerusalem has come down from heaven to be home for all peoples. And Jesus says, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. Those who conquer will inherit these things, and I will be their God and they will be my children.”
But how is it that the work of creation can be completed on the cross, in what seems like a shameful act of violent destruction?
For the author of John’s Gospel, what is truly taking place on the cross is not defeat, but victory; not shame but glory. Many times Jesus has spoken of his death as his glorification. Why? Because it is his return to the Father.
What is taking place is the spiritual reality foreshadowed by the Rite of Atonement in the temple. This is referred to in the reading from Hebrews that we heard this morning, which tells us that Jesus is “the supreme high priest who has gone through to the highest heaven”.
In Rite of Atonement, which took place once a year, the High Priest offered a sacrifice for the sins of Israel and then went into the Holy of Holies, the place where God symbolically dwelt, to intercede for the people.
So Jesus, returning to the Father, has offered once for all his self-giving sacrifice for sin, and entered the heavenly sanctuary where God dwells, to make intercession for us and for all of creation.
So this is indeed the completion of his work, his return to the Father. The death of Jesus is his glorification, his exaltation.
The Rite of Atonement in the temple was at its heart a symbolic enactment of God restoring his creation. Jesus has in his person achieved what the Rite of Atonement pointed to. As the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, he has passed into the true heavenly sanctuary, through his sacrifice of self giving love, and in so doing has achieved the eternal perfection of all he is sanctifying.
But of course that is not the end. We could not realistically believe that creation had been restored by the death of Jesus if his body had stayed in defeat in the tomb.
The glorification of Jesus is not a nice idea, floating somewhere in the heavens above but not connecting with us down here. It would mean nothing if the rest of the human race remained in slavery to sin and death. But that glory cannot be contained, and will come bursting from the tomb.
The Church lives in the light and power of that victory. Every day, including today. We only celebrate “Good” Friday because of the resurrection. But in the cycle of the liturgy, for the time being, we wait. Hidden from our sight, our High Priest has passed to the Father and completed the work of our redemption. But it is his resurrection that enables us to share in his victory. In but a little while, we shall acclaim him with shouts of Easter joy. Today, we wait at the cross, outside the tomb. Christ has won his victory, and the victor’s triumphant return will not be long.

Sermon at Parish Mass Maundy Thursday 2012



Exodus 12: 1-4 [5-10] 11-14
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-17, 31b-35

We began this week with the crowds, outside in the sunshine, acclaiming Jesus as King and Messiah, as he entered Jerusalem to the waving of palm branches and shouts of “Hosanna!”
What a contrast that is with tonight’s intimate scene of the upper room. Now it is night; Jesus and his disciples are wary: the temple police have put out an arrest warrant and Jesus is being hunted. The acclamation he received Palm Sunday must have seemed revolutionary – indeed it was, but not in the way Jesus’ opponents think. They think of him as a rival within their understanding of power, a danger to their established order.
But the acclamation of Palm Sunday, with its Old Testament references, indicates that Jesus is King and Messiah in an unexpected, subversive way. He is King without violence, revealed in humility. He is a Messiah who will include all people, not exclude the stranger. He is a priest who will do away with sacrifice. All of this seems contradictory to the normal human way of thinking. But this is because it is God’s rule, God’s kingdom of love, breaking in to the human kingdoms of death and oppression and fear, and overturning them.
All of this takes concrete form this night.
The context is the Passover, the defining story of the People of God called Israel. A people saved by God and with a destiny to bring salvation to the nations. But a people saved – so it seems – through sacrifice, their identity bound up with the death of the firstborn in Egypt and the sacrificial rites in the temple. God, it seems, delivers his people, but at the cost of violence inflicted elsewhere.
But Jesus as we have been seeing is the law in person, the dwelling place of God among his people. He is in his person the definitive revelation of God. Jesus is the key to a new interpretation of the law and prophets.
The Passover Lamb of old was slain to avert the wrath of the destroying angel in Egypt, so that the angel of death would “pass over” the homes marked with the lamb’s blood.
Now Jesus, at the Passover meal, gives his disciples a memorial of his death, to make it effective for ever. What better thing could he choose for this than the sacrificed lamb, lying there on the table? But he does not.
Instead, at this supper Jesus substitutes the Passover lamb with a piece of bread, which becomes his body. The sacrifice is set aside. In place of the substitute victim of the lamb, Jesus takes his own death and turns it around. His life, which was to be taken from him by the violence of others, becomes a gift, a free offering, in love, this is my body given for you. Bread and wine are transformed into his body and blood, for the people who will be his body, his life, in the world. Betrayal and murder are transformed into love.
Now who is it who experiences the death of the first born? It is the only begotten Son of the Father, who takes that death upon himself, in an offering of self-giving love. The Passover is reinterpreted, the sacrifice subverted: God is on the side of the victims, all of them, liberating them from death.
And at this supper Jesus gives his command of love and his example of humble service. This is what the new people of God is to be like. Unlike any other revolutionary movement in history. A community which is to be the perpetual transformation of violence and betrayal into love. A community continually brought into being through the Eucharist.
For this Jesus consecrates himself as a priest, the priest who will do away with sacrifice by his offering of himself. The priesthood of Aaron, with its sacrifices of animals, is ended. The priesthood mysteriously signified by the Old Testament figure of Melchizedek is established. Melchizedek came to meet Abraham, bearing bread and wine. He is a priest without a sacrifice, and is described as the King of Peace – both contradictions, to our normal way of thinking. But both describe Jesus. Both describe the new way that God is bringing to birth this night. Jesus is indeed the great high priest – but in a completely different way to the priests in the temple.
The Last Supper discourse in John goes on for many chapters, and concludes with what is called the high priestly prayer of Christ. This is a prayer in which he consecrates himself and his disciples, to be this new priesthood. And in John, the disciples are all who love Jesus and keep his commands. Jesus confers on the whole church a priesthood and a kingdom which are an extension of his own.
John does not make a distinction between disciples and apostles, all are equal in this consecration.  But John does not describe the institution of the Eucharist. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul do. In that narrative it is the apostles who receive the command to “do this in remembrance of me”, and who by that command received the power to do so. The power to consecrate and offer the Eucharist, the real participation and making effective of Christ’s once-for-all offering of himself. From the first it was the apostles and those they ordained who ordered the worship of the Church, ensuring the continuity of each generation with the apostolic tradition.
These two aspects of priesthood are not contradictory. The church as a whole is a priesthood and a kingdom, chosen and consecrated by Christ. The priesthood of the ordained ministry, in succession from the Apostles, is a particular representational sign of the priesthood of the whole church. It acts as a sign of continuity linking each particular Eucharistic community to that first gathering in the upper room. Thus the church appears as one visible historic community, a true body, which is nonetheless complete in all its parts.
In each Eucharistic gathering the church is made present and real, the new people of God, the kingdom of peace and the priesthood which changes sacrifice into love. It is that community, and none other, which is to change the world. In each Eucharist our violence and betrayal, and that of the world, is taken up and transformed into love. In each Eucharist our rivalry and desire for domination are humbled and transformed into service.
This is no mere calling to mind events of the past, but is the means established by Jesus by which the world will enter the kingdom of God. That begins anew at every Mass. Tonight, it begins with us.

Sermon at Parish Mass Palm Sunday 2012



Mark 11:1-10
Isaiah 50:4-7
Philippians 2:6-11
Mark 14 & 15

We are now two months away from the extended weekend of celebration for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. I don’t know if there are any street parties planned where you live. Here in the parish of Old St Pancras there will be a thanksgiving service at St Mary’s Somers Town, and similar events will be taking place up and down the country, not least in St Paul’s Cathedral of course.
And I expect we’ll hear Handel’s wonderful anthem, “Zadok the Priest”, which was written for the Coronation of George II in 1727 and sung at every Coronation since. The words of course are: “Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet anointed Solomon King. And all the people rejoiced and said, God save the King.”
What the anthem doesn’t say is what Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet did next, which is that they put King Solomon on a donkey, to be precise, King David’s mule, and led him into Jerusalem, because his anointing took place outside the city.
Whatever form the Jubilee celebrations take, locally or nationally, I don’t think any of them will feature the Queen getting on a donkey. A gilded state coach is more likely, or at least a Bentley. Just occasionally Her Majesty ventures onto trains as well. But donkeys seem to us to be a decidedly un-royal mode of transport.
Not, however, in the Bible, as we have seen. And when Jesus gets on a colt, which is a young donkey, the crowds recognise immediately the Royal claim that is being made, and they go wild and start acclaiming him as their king.
Mark’s account of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, which we heard before the procession this morning, is short but packed with detail, as Mark usually is. In the space of ten verses there are at least six different claims that Jesus is Messiah and King.
Apart from King Solomon, there is the prophecy in Zechariah which Matthew and John, but not Mark, mention in their accounts of Palm Sunday:
Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!
Lo, your king comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
So, riding a colt is a sign that Jesus is claiming kingship of Jerusalem; but we see immediately that it is a strange kind of kingship, one marked by humility. A colt, a little donkey, is about the lowliest animal that anyone could practically ride. So it is a sign which both proclaims kingship and subverts the idea of domination based on power and strength. Zechariah’s prophecy is about a King who will destroy the weapons of war, who will bring an end to violence and instigate the reign of God’s peace.
But there are other Old Testament donkey references, too. Mark’s account tells us that the colt was tied up. Of course, it would have been anyway, to stop it wandering off, so why does Mark go to the trouble of mentioning it? Well, at the end of the Book of Genesis, as Jacob lies dying, he utters mysterious prophecies about his descendents, the twelve tribes of Israel. Of Judah he says:
The sceptre shall not depart from Judah,
nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet,
until tribute comes to him;
and the obedience of the peoples is his.
Binding his foal to the vine
and his donkey’s colt to the choice vine.
So a tied up colt is a reference to the Messianic King who will descend from Judah in the line of David. Even in that little detail Mark is telling us more about who Jesus is claiming to be.
Also, we are told that the crowd spread their clothes before Jesus. And in the Second Book of Kings the same thing happened after Elisha anointed Jehu as King of Israel following the disastrous reign of Ahab and Jezebel. So Jesus is proclaimed as a righteous king, whose reign will be of a different kind to the corrupt and violent rulers currently in charge of Jerusalem.
Even the way that Jesus gets hold of the colt tells us something. It isn’t given to him; he requisitions it. “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately as you enter it, you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden; untie it and bring it.” In the ancient world, requisitioning means of transport was a royal prerogative, and the mere fact of doing it was making a royal claim.
And the crowd respond with cries of “Hosanna” and “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord”. “Hosanna” was originally a word of prayer and acclamation used by the priests in the temple rituals, and “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord” is from Psalm 118, originally a blessing uttered by the priests over pilgrims on their arrival in the temple.
But by the time of Jesus both of these had acquired Messianic overtones. They were greetings, not just for anyone, but for the long awaited Messiah.
Mark’s Gospel doesn’t hold back on making the point. In his entry into Jerusalem, Jesus is abundantly, almost excessively, being acclaimed as King and Messiah, the long awaited ruler who will bring in God’s Kingdom of justice and peace.
And so Holy Week opens. And it is the key to understanding the whole of what happens in Holy Week. From the Last Supper, through Good Friday, to the resurrection, Jesus is King and Messiah, and is showing what that means.
He is King, without violence, a King revealed in humility and service, the King of Peace. He is the Lord’s anointed ruler, the Messiah – but anointed with ointment for his burial. Anointed as the Priest who will put an end to sacrifice by his offering of himself. And he is the King who will conquer death by his own death, and reveal his kingdom through the resurrection.
As we follow the great events of this greatest of weeks, we will see all these aspects of Jesus. Holy Week is an opportunity for us to draw close to Jesus once more, to acclaim him as King, Priest, and Messiah. It is an opportunity for us to be conformed more closely to him in his suffering and death, that we might share in his resurrection. And it is an opportunity for his Kingdom of justice and peace and self-giving love to be made more real in our lives.

Sermon at Parish Mass Lent 5 2012


Jeremiah 31:31-34
Hebrews 5:7-9
John 12:20-33

124 days to go! Have you got tickets? Have you rented out your spare room for £900 a night? Have you worked out how you’re going to get on the underground or the buses, or drive around avoiding the VIP lanes? Can you can work from home, or change your hours? Have you stockpiled the food you might need in case the shops run out?
Of course, I’m talking about the Olympics. We don’t know quite what the impact is going to be like on the normal life of this city but no-one can say that we’re not being told to get ready. The whole world, it seems, is going to arrive on our doorstep. And I’m sure we will make everyone as welcome as we can.
Our experience this summer is probably going to be a little bit like being in Jerusalem at the Passover, at the time of Jesus. The temple in Jerusalem was the one and only place of ritual sacrifice in Judaism and everyone who could would try to be there for the Passover celebrations. The city was routinely so crowded at Passover that people had to sleep camped out in the surrounding districts, places like the Mount of Olives.
And it wasn’t only Jews who came for the festival. There were Greeks and Romans who found in Judaism something that their ancestral pagan religions lacked, truth and meaning, a foundation for life based on a relationship with the living God. They mostly didn’t formally become members of the Jewish faith, because of official discouragement and the obstacle, for men, of circumcision. But they attended the synagogues and the festivals in Jerusalem, kept the commandments, and became known as “God fearers”.
So in today’s reading from John’s Gospel we have some Greeks who have come to Jerusalem for the Passover. And this scene is in fact on Palm Sunday, just after Jesus has entered Jerusalem. Sometimes our readings get out of step with the liturgy, mainly because so much happens in the last week of Jesus’ life in the gospels that we can’t fit it all into one week of Mass readings.
Anyway, here are some God-fearing Greeks come for the Passover. But something unexpected happens: they ask to see Jesus. The reason they ask Philip about this is probably that he has a Greek name and came from a Greek speaking town, Bethsaida. “We want to see Jesus.” And seeing doesn’t simply mean looking at Jesus, it means they want to know, to understand, to believe. Jesus turns out to be the focus of attraction which draws them, even more than the temple and the Passover. They have come for one thing, and found something greater.
And it is this which prompts Jesus to say, “Now the hour has come”. Up until now in John’s gospel on a number of occasions we are told that Jesus’ “hour” had not yet come. And that “hour” is both his death and his glorification, which in John are the same thing.
The fact that Gentile nations are now coming to Jesus is the signal that his death and glorification are at hand, so that Jesus says, “when I am lifted up from the earth, I shall draw all people to myself”.
This attractive power of Jesus, his glorification which draws in all nations, is the signal that the prophecy in Isaiah 60 is fulfilled:
Arise, shine; for your light has come,
and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
For darkness shall cover the earth,
and thick darkness the peoples;
but the Lord will arise upon you,
and his glory will appear over you.
Nations shall come to your light,
and kings to the brightness of your dawn.
Now this is truly an inclusive teaching. “Inclusive” is perhaps a word which is used so much that it is in danger of losing its meaning, but it is the right word here. “I shall draw all people to myself.” Not some, but all. No distinction of race or nation, or anything else. Which is exactly what Isaiah tells us to look for. Indeed some manuscripts have “I shall draw all things to myself”. Everyone and everything will be drawn to Jesus.
And everyone will be drawn to Jesus because he will be crucified. The death of the Messiah is his glorification, and is that which will draw in all people. And the sweep of two thousand years of history since then seems to bear this out. The Church of the crucified Messiah is planted in every nation, and day by day more and more people find themselves drawn to this unique and compelling figure, even in spite of the way his Church so often fails to reflect him.
That figure is the Man on the cross whom we know to be innocent. He is the victim who is revealed as God, on the receiving end of the violence which is revealed as our own. As we have been seeing in our Gospel readings through Lent, Jesus progressively does away with the dark forces in human life which demand sacrifices and exclude victims. Those dark forces are personified as the “Prince of this world”, and the cross is the judgement on those powers: it reveals that they are wrong, and is the means by which they are defeated.
The cross is not God demanding sacrifice, but doing away with it, by substituting himself for the victims of our violence. It is the revelation of Divine love, the revelation that there is in God no darkness at all.
The light, the glory, of God shines forth from the man on the cross, and all peoples are drawn to that light. God is love, and wants us to live in love. That is the truth. That is the deep truth behind the universe, the word through whom all things exist. Love.
Humanity has lived its conscious existence down the ages in a desperate fear, the fear that the deep meaning of everything is death, and that this has to be warded off as long as possible by deflecting that death elsewhere.
The light of the cross shows instead that the deep meaning of our existence is love. By seeing Jesus we come to know him, to believe, to live with his life. In seeing Jesus we know that we are forgiven and loved. In seeing Jesus, we are set free from the old order of sin and death and made new in him. Made new in the vision of love which is the deep truth of who we are.
The Olympics have got nothing on this. To be sure, half the world will descend on our city, for a few weeks. And in a few years it will all be forgotten. But not Jesus. “When I am lifted up from the earth, I shall draw all people to myself.” The light of the love of God shines steadily from the cross, and hour by hour new souls are finding their way to him. He is drawing us. He will draw others. All the nations will gather to him, will come to his glory.
Now is the hour for the Son of Man to be glorified. Amen, Lord Jesus, draw us to your light, draw all people, and glorify your name in all the world. Amen.

Sermon at Parish Mass Lent 4 2012


2 Chronicles 36:14-16, 19-23

Ephesians 2:4-10
John 3:14-21

“God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
That is said to be the most famous verse in the Bible; Gideon Bibles in hotel rooms give it in dozens of languages. But it is also one of the most revolutionary texts as well, and perhaps we don’t notice that so much because we are so familiar with it.
The conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus in chapter 3 of John’s Gospel is told as part of John’s grand announcement of the person and purpose of Jesus. As Duncan was telling us last week, this began with the great prologue, “In the beginning was the Word”, and continues with the call of the first disciples, the wedding at Cana, and the cleansing of the Temple.
Through all these stories John is telling us that Jesus is the definitive revelation of God. He is the light come into the world, the light of God in whom there is no darkness at all, as the first letter of John says.
What is revolutionary about this is that it undoes the way that humanity has been used to thinking about God from the beginning.
Most ancient cultures seem to have imagined God or the gods as being larger versions of themselves. More powerful, but just as tricky, deceitful and violent. Just pick up any book of Greek or Aztec myths for examples. The gods needed to be bargained with. You had to earn their favour, perhaps by killing enemies, or by offering animals in sacrifice. If you didn’t, the gods might curse you by sending a plague or by ruining your crops.
But myths and sacrificial rituals disguised a grim reality. Ancient societies were riven with dangerous rivalrous desires which threatened self-destruction. Sacrifice and myth were an unconscious way of diverting that violence onto expendable substitute victims.
And because this was bundled up with people’s intuitions of the Divine, people came to imagine that this was what God was like. God or the gods had to be bargained with and appeased. God was wrathful and demanded sacrifices.
But the Jewish people had seen beyond this. The law of Moses sought to restrain sacrificial cults and violence by imposing ethical conduct, the ten commandments. And the prophets through the centuries had spoken of a God who wanted justice, not sacrifice. A God who spoke of new beginnings when his people had gone astray, and who promised that through them salvation would come to the whole human race.
John in his Gospel is saying that Jesus is the completion and the fulfilment of that revelation. In Jesus what was promised by the prophets has arrived.
And Jesus reveals that God is entirely about love. “God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son.” There is no talk at all of bargaining, or sacrifices, or wrath, or curses. Here we are, helpless sinners, and God has come to meet us where we are, freely and of his own love giving himself to us. Asking nothing in return except that we receive the gift.
And when Jesus talks of being lifted up on the cross, as the serpent was lifted up by Moses, he is saying that it is through the cross that this gift of God will be made known to all. By being lifted up he will be exalted, glorified.
The cross represents all the sacrifices and expendable victims that humanity thought God required.  Remember, it was the religious people who put Jesus to death, because they thought he was a blasphemer and under a curse. When Jesus is lifted up on the cross, he places himself at the heart of the violence that we thought God wanted, and does away with it. The cross is the revelation of God’s love. It is God’s subversion of our demands for sacrifice.
So when Christians use the word “sacrifice”, as we do in the Mass, we are saying something revolutionary: the “sacrifice” of Christ is God’s offering of himself to us, out of his love, not our offering something to God to persuade him to like us.
The Father does not condemn the world. Not at all. Nor does Jesus. And yet there is condemnation, as we have read. “Whoever does not believe is condemned already.” But this is not God’s doing. If we refuse to come into the light of God’s love, then we choose to remain in the darkness of the old sacrificial way of thinking, trapped in rivalrous desires which end up only in violence and death. Our choice is its own judgement.
But our choice cannot change the nature of God, cannot change the offer of God’s love, which still remains. God is patient, and repentance is always possible.
To turn to Christ, to repent, is not a one-off choice, like ticking the box for an insurance policy. Repentance means turning around, changing our whole mindset. It is a process of transformation. And it issues in a changed life.
St John says that if we live by the truth then we come into the light, and it will be plainly seen that what we do is done in God. And the letter to the Ephesians this morning says that God’s work in us results in us living the good life as he means us to.
Living a good life is not at all about trying to persuade God to like us. That is an idea that belongs in that old sacrificial mindset. God loves us first, our acceptance of that gift then opens us up to live according to his love. St Paul says, “it is by grace you have been saved, through faith; not by anything of your own, but by a gift from God”.
This is our good news, our Gospel. God loves us. Anyway. Regardless of who we have been. And God gives us his Son that we might be transformed, and live according to his life. That is good news for us, and it is good news for everyone, without exception.
“God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”