Homily at Parish Mass Lent 5 2015

Jeremiah 31:31-34

Hebrews 5:7-9

John 12:20-33

Today’s Gospel reading is set in Jerusalem just before the Passover, the last Passover of John’s Gospel, when Jesus will be betrayed and crucified. It is city crammed with people who have come for the festival, and not only Jews. 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, 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. But something unexpected happens: they ask to see Jesus. And seeing doesn’t simply mean looking at Jesus, it means they want to know, to understand, to believe. Jesus is the focus of attraction who 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 will draw all people to myself”. This fulfils the prophecies of old, that the God of Israel would gather in the Gentiles, too, will make himself known as the one God and saviour of all humanity.

Now this is truly an inclusive teaching. “I shall draw all people to myself.” Not some, but all. No distinction of race or nation or gender or age or sexuality, or anything else. Indeed some manuscripts have “I will draw all things to myself”. Everyone and everything will be drawn to Jesus. His power of attraction reaches out to the whole creation.

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.

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 light, the glory, of God shines forth from the man on the cross, and all peoples are drawn to that light. Here is true power. 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. His power changes us and turns us around. 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.

“When I am lifted up from the earth, I will 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. His power of attraction has drawn us and millions more down the ages. He will draw others, through our witness and that of all his church. And like Philip and Andrew we can help others find their way to him, too.

Homily at Parish Mass Lent 4 2015

Numbers 21.4-9

Ephesians 2.1-10

John 3.14-21

We’ve heard what is perhaps the best-known verse in the Bible: John 3.16. This is part of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, who is struggling to understand and believe what Jesus is about.

John’s Gospel has already established that Jesus is the revelation of God, the Word, God’s expression of himself, made flesh and dwelling among us. With Nicodemus Jesus has spoken of the need to be “born again” or “born from above”, into the new life of the Spirit. But Nicodemus cannot understand this.

So Jesus takes him further. Jesus is the revelation of God, and this will be made known by his being “lifted up”, a phrase which refers both to his crucifixion and to his exaltation, his being raised to the glory of the Father. Then, all who look to him will be saved and have eternal life, the life of the Spirit, the life that God lives without limit.

Jesus’ being lifted up is the supreme revelation of God, because it is the supreme revelation of love. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. This is what Jesus has come to make known, and all who believe this will enter the Kingdom of God.

For John, to believe in Jesus is to accept to the revelation of God. It is to accept the invitation, indeed the summons, to enter God’s kingdom, the realm of the Spirit in which we are born from above. Those who believe in Jesus receive the Divine and imperishable life that makes us children of God.

To be born from above is to begin a new life, the life of the Spirit, a life born of God’s love. And those have received this life reflect it in their deeds. As Jesus says today, “those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God”.

For John, it is clear, believing in Jesus and doing good deeds go together. They are two sides of the same coin. Those who are born into the new life of the Spirit will live differently. Their deeds will reflect the love of God, made known in Jesus, in whom they have come to believe.

St Paul makes the same point in the extract from Ephesians we heard this morning. We are saved by God’s grace, that is, by God’s free gift. It is God who reveals himself to us in Jesus, God who summons us into his kingdom, God who gives us new birth as his children. But the fruit of this is good works, lives that express the love that has found us and saved us.

For John and for Paul the message is the same. Christians are not to be good because we are trying to buy God’s favour or earn salvation. Christians are to be good because this is part of the way God’s grace works in our lives.

This Lent we are looking at how we can be ambassadors for Jesus Christ, how we can make known the good news of God’s love. As a church we already reach out to our local community in various ways, and we also help those further afield. But today’s gospel challenges us to look at the connection between what we do and what we believe.

St Francis is supposed to have advised his followers, “preach the Gospel, and if necessary use words”. There is some truth in that. Our actions should speak to others of God’s love. But St Francis was speaking in a very different society from our own. Everyone around him knew the Gospel, and it was taken as read that the poor friars seeking to help the poor were living out their beliefs. They enacted the Gospel that everyone already knew.

We can hardly say that in our own society. There is widespread ignorance of the most basic Christian beliefs. People may notice the work churches do for the poor and marginalised. But they may just assume that Christians are nice or kind by temperament, rather than sinners like everyone else living transformed lives by the grace of God.

It has to be said too that many people’s experience of faith has been negative and damaging. People have been hurt and lives stunted by forms of religion that seem to have little to do with love. For some people talk of God only reinforces rejection and disapproval.

To preach the gospel today we do need words as well as actions. But we need to find the right words, ways of talking about our faith that will connect with people where they actually are.

So today in groups of two or three, could you discuss the points on the news sheet:
How is what we believe connected to the practical ways in which we seek to reach out to the world with God’s love? And where there are gaps (rather than if there are), can we think of ways of overcoming them? 

Homily at Parish Mass Lent 3 2015

Exodus 20.1-17

1 Corinthians 1.18-25

John 2:13-22

The cleansing of the temple is all four gospels. In Matthew, Mark and Luke it takes place in the last week of Jesus’ life, shortly before the crucifixion. But in John it happens at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. He has called the first disciples, and given the signs of the wedding at Cana and the cure of the Centurion’s servant, but the cleansing of the temple is his first public encounter with the religious authorities who will later condemn him to death.  

The scene is fraught with tension. The temple is the centre of the national cult of Israel. But Jesus’ idea of what it should be is radically different from it actually is, so different that it moves him to action in an outburst of anger.

What the temple should be, according to Jesus, is “his Father’s house”. The Greek word “house” here means not a private dwelling but an open house, a large place where all are welcome. The scene takes place in the court of the gentiles, a vast space which was supposed to be open to people of all races and languages to come and pray. The temple was seen as the dwelling place of God, with and for Israel, yes, but also with and for all humanity, and all should be welcome.

Instead, the court of the gentiles was crowded with market stalls selling animals. Why? Because the dominant function of the temple at the time of Jesus was as a place of sacrifice, that is the ritual killing of animals, which happened on an industrial scale, especially at the time of Passover, when this scene is set.

The animals were sold by traders licensed by the temple management, because they had to be certified ritually pure. A nice monopoly. And they could only be bought with official temple money, as roman coins carried the image of the emperor and an inscription calling him a god, which was regarded as blasphemous. So the temple authorities also regulated the exchange of money. Sacrifice had become a lucrative trade and the temple authorities had grown rich on it.

Now the Bible is a bit ambivalent about sacrifice. As is often the case, the scriptures seem to offer more of an argument than an answer. Mostly the Old Testament emphasises ethical behaviour and doing your duty to God and neighbour. The ten commandments, which we heard this morning, sum that up. And you’ll notice that there’s nothing at all in the ten commandments about sacrifice or ritual. Many of the prophets and psalms are very critical of sacrifice, saying that God had not asked for it and instead wanted people not to oppress orphans and widows and not to defraud labourers of their wages.

On the other hand there are books like Leviticus which prescribe sacrifices and rituals in great detail. So there are these different strands in scripture which seem to be in tension and to interrogate each other. But Jesus throughout his ministry seems to side with the prophets, so he is against oppressing the poor and weak and vulnerable, and he wants to include the excluded. At best he is indifferent to ritual and sacrifice.

But when that gets in the way, when ritual observance turns into an instrument of oppression, when it keeps people away from a living relationship with God, then he gets angry. As we see today. The temple should be a place of inclusion where all are welcome in the Father’s house, and human inequalities are overcome. Instead it has become a monstrous machine devouring the substance of the poor to increase the wealth and power of the aristocratic elite who run it.

Jesus’ anger is motivated not by any slight to himself or his own reputation. He is angry on behalf of the poor and excluded, he is angry that the gentiles are being kept away from Israel’s God who is their true God too. And his anger leads him to action to put right what is wrong.

So this morning what we are talking about is anger. So in twos or threes could you discuss please what makes us angry, and what we do about it. For instance, do we experience anger at injustice and wrong? Do we experience anger because we feel personally slighted or irritated by something? Are those the same? Can we use the energy that anger releases positively, to make a difference? How does this affect our attitude to conflict – are there conflicts we should avoid, and others we should not avoid?

Homily at Parish Mass Lent 2 2015

Genesis 17.1-7,15-16

Romans 4.13-25

Mark 8.31-38

As with last week, we are using the sermon slots in Lent for part of our Lent Course which we’ll be exploring in greater detail on Tuesday evenings.

In a moment we’ll discuss today’s theme, the foolishness of the Gospel.  To prepare for that I’ll say something briefly about today’s readings and unpack some of the things that are going on there. But then it will be over to you to discuss that in pairs or in threes, for you to think about how the Gospel message might apply to us here and now.

The foolishness of the Gospel is how St Paul describes the Christian message, the good news that we bear. But as Paul makes clear in 1 Corinthians, what is foolishness to the world is wisdom to God, and what is weakness to the world is power to God. Whether you see the Gospel message as wisdom or foolishness depends on how much you have learned to see the world and the Gospel from God’s perspective.

This has always been the mark of God’s calling to his people. Our first reading from Genesis told of Abram and Sarai, the physical ancestors of Israel, and, according to the reading from Romans, the spiritual ancestors of all who have faith in God.

Why? Because they had faith. Although they were nearly 100 years old and childless they believed God’s promise that they would become the ancestors of many nations. And Sarai conceived and gave birth to Isaac, the father of Jacob, himself the father of the twelve tribes of Israel.

God’s promise to them could easily have seemed foolishness. Indeed, when she first heard it Sarai laughed. But God’s promise was fulfilled, anyway. Faith enables us to see how God is working through human weakness and what seems to be foolishness.

St Paul in our reading from Romans draws a parallel between Abraham and Sarah and those who believe in Jesus. Just as Abraham believed even though he was “as good as dead”, and this was reckoned to him as righteousness, so also those who believe in Jesus, risen from the dead, will be reckoned as righteous because of their faith.

And faith in the resurrection is the challenge in today’s gospel reading. Jesus, as we saw in last week’s Gospel, is the one who will defeat the powers of oppression, accusation and exclusion that are at work in human society. And yet he says that he will undergo great suffering, and be rejected, and killed. How can he defeat the powers, if he is going to be defeated by them? This seems to Peter to be utter foolishness. But as yet Peter does not have faith in the resurrection. He does not see that the violent powers of the world can never be defeated by violence.

When Jesus rebukes Peter he goes on to say that his followers must “take up their cross and follow me”. At the time of Jesus, this was no figure of speech. It is much more scandalous than that. It is meant quite literally. Crucifixion was how the Romans got rid of political dissidents and trouble makers. At that time Jewish nationalists were saying that people should “take up the sword” against the Romans. But Jesus says instead that his followers must take up the cross, as though they were already defeated.

This indeed is the foolishness of the Gospel, the weakness of Christ. But it is God’s wisdom and power. Violent resistance to a violent world will only perpetuate violence. The only way out of the cycle of violence is to follow Jesus on the path of radical non-violence, trusting not our own swords, but God’s power to overcome evil with good and to bring life out of death. In the world as it is, this is the only path to the new life of the Resurrection. Nothing less than a new creation can free us from the violent disorder of the world that we call sin.

Now it’s your part. In twos or threes, could you please reflect on these readings and the discussion points in the news sheet:

·      Can you think of situations, locally or elsewhere in the world, where the faith of Christians has seemed weak and foolish, but looking back we can see how God was at work in that situation?

·      How does our faith change our attitude to weakness?