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

Sunday 6 April 2014

Sermon at Parish Mass Lent 2 2014



Genesis 12:1-4a
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
John 3:1-17

We have just heard what some say is the most famous verse in the Bible. And indeed, if anyone were to say to me, “I’ve only got time to memorise one Bible quotation, which should I choose?”, I would recommend John Chapter 3 Verse 16:
“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” 
But of course the Bible is more than just one verse, and Christianity is more than just a religion of the book. It is a religion of a Person: Jesus. That Person is God’s complete revelation of himself. It is that Person who speaks to us through the Bible with all its different kinds of writing from various times and situations. It is as though we see the face of Jesus throughout the Bible, but through a lattice of different kinds of style and workmanship.
So there is a lot in the Bible that leads up to the full revelation of God in Jesus, a lot that prepares the way. We see something of that in today’s readings, because there is a progression that runs through them.
In Genesis, going back to the dawn of human history, Abraham is called by God and believes. He is called to leave. To go on a journey, he knows not where. He is called from beyond, out of the society and the home that he has known. Even in today’s world his call might seem daunting, but to an ancient society it is incomprehensible apart from faith. It is almost taboo to leave your ancestral home. It is a call which truly comes from outside.
But here we see the beginnings of the Church. The Church, “ekklesia” in Greek, means those who are “called out”. The Church is the community formed by God’s call to come out of their old way of living and seek the new life that God offers. In the Church the call of Abraham continues.
Abraham has to leave behind more than just the place where he had lived to set out into the unknown. On that journey he finds he is also called to leave behind old ways of thinking. He is called to leave behind an idea of life bounded by death: although he and his wife are very old, God promises him children, indeed, he will have more descendants than the sand of the seashore. He is called to leave behind a culture of ritual violence, when the Lord intervenes to prevent the sacrifice of Abraham’s son Isaac. In all this Abraham has to follow in faith to a place he does not know. From a human perspective this is risky, even foolhardy. But it is God’s initiative and God proves himself faithful. When God calls, we can trust God and follow.
Now there was a promise made to Abraham, a promise of blessing. “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed”. St Paul in the letter to the Romans tells us what this blessing is: grace through faith, available to everyone. Abraham’s descendants are all who live by faith, all those who have heard God’s call to leave behind what they know and follow in faith. Thus all the families of the earth are blessed in Abraham.
But what is the goal of this journey of faith? In our Gospel reading today Jesus tells Nicodemus, it is the life “from above”, the life of the Spirit.
There’s a pun in the Greek in what Jesus says, the phrase translated “born from above” can also mean “born again”.  And Nicodemus only gets the second meaning, being “born again”, and he doesn’t understand how that can happen. “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”
In terms of the life of the flesh, biological life, this is incomprehensible. But the “birth from above” that Jesus is talking about is the birth of the Spirit, a new kind of life altogether.
Eternal life is the life that God lives, life without limit, giving itself without ever being diminished. And this is what Jesus promises us. Eternal life is not biological life stretched out for ever. It is the very life of God given to us by his Spirit, raising us to union with him.
The life of the Spirit which blows where it wills reflects the journey of Abraham, go to a land that I will show you. The spirit brings freedom to follow in the adventure of faith. There is no map! And this life is offered to all, it is entirely God’s gift, given out of love for the world.
And the world stands utterly in need of that love, that gift of new life. The world is still in the place that Abraham left behind, fixated on sacrifice, violence and death. The world God loves is the world which is so centred on death that it will crucify the Lamb of God.
When Jesus is crucified it is as if the whole of human history draws together into a point at that moment. All the ways in which humanity has gone wrong from the beginning are there on Calvary, nailing the victim to the cross. And the victim nailed to the cross forgives his murderers, and in them everyone and everything. God in his love for the world gives himself on the cross, placing himself at the centre of our darkness and sin.
And having given himself to us in our darkness, he can also give himself to us as life. Jesus was raised from the dead, and our death-bound human culture was broken right open so that God’s new life could come flooding in. The theologian James Alison has written: “It was not just that God loved his son and so raised him up, but that the giving of the son and his raising up revealed God as love for us”.
When we say (with John’s Gospel) that the Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world, we don’t just mean that individual sins are forgiven. It is the whole human condition, everything that humanity has been from the beginning, that is caught up in God’s love, and forgiven and made new. A new beginning if offered to all: instead of being trapped in our death-bound desires, Jesus enables us to be caught up in the desire of God for the world, which is love.
Jesus is the completely transforming encounter with God who is love for us. In him humanity is called out of its old death-bound imagination to share the life of God.
This is God’s gift to us. We do not need to strive for it, we cannot earn it. It is offered to everyone, no exceptions, whoever you are and whatever your life has been. The new life of the Spirit is “from above”, from beyond us. God’s call comes to us to leave behind our old way of living and to follow in faith. And all we have to do is believe his promise. The land that he will show us is eternal life, the life that God lives, his love given for us and to us so that we might love eternally. God’s promise did not fail for Abraham, it did not fail for Jesus. It will not fail for us.
We, the Church called out from the world, are part of that same call, that same story, that same promise. God is faithful. He keeps his promises. And he so loved the world, and you, and me, that he gave his only Son, so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

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