Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 15 2025

Amos 6:1a, 4-7

1 Timothy 6:6-19

Luke 16:19-end

 

“If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”

The gospels, from beginning to end, are the story of the Resurrection of Jesus. They would not have been written if the first disciples had not had the experience of Jesus, crucified and raised from the dead. Everything in them was written in that light. And they were written, some 40 to 60 years after the Resurrection, because the risen Lord was still a living experience transforming the lives of believers. People were still meeting Jesus and finding their lives changed by that encounter. Therefore, what he said and did in his lifetime mattered, and needed to be written down.

The experience of the Risen Lord was and is the most important fact in the life of the Church. The Church which wrote the gospels, and the Church which reads them. That’s us. For us, as for Christians in every age, meeting the risen Lord changes everything.

It changes where we see God at work. Not in the centres of power and wealth, but in the outcast, in the marginalised, in the victim who was rejected, cast out, crucified, buried. And who was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father. God is at work where the world thinks everything is over and done with, worthless, finished, and forgotten.

And that is the meaning of the parable in today’s Gospel. The story of a heedless rich man and a pious poor man, and how their situations are reversed by God’s judgement after death, was a well-known moral fable at the time of Jesus. But Jesus changes it. In his story, Lazarus is not obviously religious. It is his poverty and need, not his piety, that we are to notice. And then comes the twist in the tale: “neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” We see that this parable needs to be read, like the whole of the Gospel, in the light of the Resurrection. Because Jesus is, pre-eminently, the one who rose from the dead. 

The Resurrection changes how we understand God. The humble and meek are indeed lifted up, raised even from the death that human violence inflicted. The resurrection is God’s judgement on a society which survives by creating victims. But it is also God’s inauguration of a new society, of his kingdom. The old order of sin and death gives way as God exposes and reverses the extent to which we have been complicit in it. 

Jesus, like Lazarus, was counted as nothing by the world which rejected him and put him to death. The rich man simply didn’t see Lazarus when he was alive, or if he did just assumed that he was getting what he deserved. The rich man is someone who does not understand what God is like. Even in the afterlife of this parable, which is the truth about Lazarus and the rich man seen in the God’s light, he thinks that Lazarus is someone who can be ordered to come to him, like a slave, with a drink of water.

Today in our great city, it is too easy to ignore those who are on the margins. The poor, the homeless, the hungry, those with no opportunities, victims of people trafficking and modern slavery. Those who are excluded tend to become invisible. And in this one world, our global home, how easy it is not to see those who suffer from war, poverty and injustice, in our relentless exposure to calamitous news from distant places.

But for us who believe in the Risen Lord, who are being transformed by the power of his risen life, we cannot let our brothers and sisters be invisible. We cannot turn away. Because that would be to turn away from where God is at work, from those whom God most values. For the face of Jesus, the outcast and the Risen Lord, shines out most clearly in our brothers and sisters who are on the margins and most in need.

On the last two Sundays we have had two feast days, which meant that we departed from the readings from Luke’s Gospel set for those two weeks. But in fact the readings for those feast days, and for today, have a common message, which has even developed in a coherent way. 

On Holy Cross Day, we saw that the saving work of Jesus, in his death and resurrection, reconciles humanity with God and with one another, creating one new humanity in which there is no distinction of race, nationality or culture. On Saint Matthew’s Day, we saw that even people of the same race and nation, bitterly divided by politics and social position, could find a new unity, a new belonging together, in Jesus. 

Today, the story of the rich man and Lazarus teaches us to notice those who also belong, but whom we would not see, unless Jesus were walking with us on the path of discipleship, showing us his presence in those most marginalized and most in need. Our vision and understanding are enlarged to embrace all of humanity. All are called into the new reality of God’s kingdom. 

It is true that problems of exclusion and marginalization can have complex roots and we cannot ourselves personally solve all of them. But we can give of our surplus to those agencies that have the means to help. And we can build a better world by being citizens who see, and draw attention to, Jesus in the most excluded. Because the first in the Kingdom will be Lazarus and all the marginalized and ignored ones of the world, who in fact show Jesus to us most truly. Then even those who are comfortable and secure can find a place at the table alongside them, through God’s mercy, through learning to see.

The Church always looks to Jesus, and is constantly being taught by him, the risen Lord, the living reality in our lives. Jesus risen from the dead alone undoes the sinful ordering of human society and makes new life possible for everyone – for the poor and dispossessed at our gates, and even, if they can but believe, for the rich and powerful. Because, through God’s infinite love, the gate of mercy stands open even for them.

Sermon for the Feast of Saint Matthew, 21st September 2025

Proverbs 3.13–18

2 Corinthians 4.1–6

Matthew 9.9–13

 

Saint Bede, known as the Venerable Bede, was one of the great jewels of northern English monasticism in the seventh and eighth centuries. He wrote commentaries, histories and sermons, and had this to say about Saint Matthew in today’s Gospel reading:

“Jesus saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax office, and he said to him: Follow me. Jesus saw Matthew, not merely in the usual sense, but more significantly with his merciful understanding of men… He saw the tax collector and, because he saw him through the eyes of mercy and chose him, he said to him: Follow me.”

Jesus saw the tax collector through the eyes of mercy and chose him. Most people at the time of Jesus would not have looked at tax collectors with mercy. They were collaborators with the occupying Roman empire, collecting, or extorting, money for far-off Rome, backed up by Roman military force, and often adding their own mark-up to what they collected. Many people hated them with a passion. When we hear in the Gospels the phrase, “tax collectors and sinners”, as we did today, that is all the bad people lumped together. 

There were opponents of collaborators and tax collectors. People like the Zealots, a fierce political movement of religious nationalism that sought to incite the Jewish people to revolt and drive out the foreign Roman invaders. The threat of violence was never far away, and could be brutally repressed.

Obviously Zealots and tax collectors wouldn’t be seen in each other’s company. Except, when we read the lists of the Apostles, we see, amongst the others, Matthew the tax collector, and Simon the Zealot. 

It would seem that the only thing that these people had in common was that Jesus had looked at them through the eyes of mercy, and chosen them. That look, and that choice, was so powerful that it drew the first disciples immediately to Jesus, no matter who they were. No matter that they then found themselves, by the choice of Jesus, in the company of others, equally chosen, whom they would never normally have associated with.

The choice of Jesus creates a new reality in which irreconcilable opponents, even enemies, suddenly find themselves united. The attraction of Jesus overcomes every human division.

Last week, on Holy Cross Day, we noted that the Cross is the sign of reconciliation: the saving work of Jesus who reconciles humanity with God, and with one another. Our enmity is overcome, and one new humanity is created in Christ in which there is no barrier or race or nation or culture.

On St Matthew’s Day, we see people of the same race and nation who are nevertheless radically divided by their different social and political positions. And these too are drawn together in unity in the new reality created by Jesus.

And this is the beginning of a movement that is meant to spread. As Saint Bede says, further, on today’s Gospel:

“ ‘As he sat at table in the house, behold many tax collectors and sinners came and sat down with Jesus and his disciples.’ This conversion of one tax collector gave many men, those from his own profession and other sinners, an example of repentance and pardon. Notice also the happy and true anticipation of his future status as apostle and teacher of the nations. No sooner was he converted than Matthew drew after him a whole crowd of sinners along the same road to salvation.”

As we have often noted, the Church is not a club for good people, it is the community of forgiven people. The task of the Church is to draw after us a whole crowd of other sinners along the same road to salvation. 

And in this new community, following the way of salvation, all are united. All races, nations and cultures are drawn together in one new humanity in Christ. And the polarity of different political and social positions is also overcome, because Jesus looks on us all with the eyes of mercy and chooses us. The Church is therefore not only the community of forgiven people, it is also the union of people who are not like each other, not like me, except for this one thing: that Jesus has looked at us through the eyes of mercy and chosen us.

We live in a world which seems to be becoming increasingly polarised and divided. The echo chambers of social media amplify their own messages and drown out anything else. In this toxic environment disagreement is not far away from enmity, and violent speech gives rise to violent actions. 

In this world the Church needs to be a visible sign of reconciliation and unity. A sign that Jesus looks at every person through the eyes of mercy and chooses them. And therefore chooses them, and me, and all of us, to belong to a new reality in which our divisions are overcome. 

Of course, the Church must also be a sign of truth in a world that is forgetting how to tell the truth, for we follow Him who is the way, the truth and the life. The Church must challenge false narratives that undermine the God-given humanity and dignity of every person. The Church must call out and stand against messages of fear, hatred and exclusion.

But this also means recognising the truth of the person who is different from me, who radically disagrees with me. Not necessarily the truth of what they say, for the Gospel sets out a clear law of love that is contradicted by those who preach hate. But, certainly, we must recognise the truth of who they are, the dignity of human persons made in the image of God. People upon whom Jesus looks with the eyes of mercy, and chooses them. Just as he looks upon me and chooses me. And so gives us to each other, in the new belonging that he creates, and which it is the Church’s task to live and proclaim.

The Cross, the Banner of Another Country

 

Andrea di Bartolo (1360-1428) - The Resurrection. Walters Art Museum, Wikimedia Commons 

Sermon Holy Cross Day 2025

Numbers 21.4-9

Philippians 2.6-11

John 3.13-17

 

The Cross is known universally as the Christian symbol. It appears publically on churches throughout the world (although ours is awaiting replacement). Many Christians wear a small cross, or have one in their home. We make the sign of the cross on ourselves in our prayers. 

The Cross also appears on the flags of a number of nations and institutions that have a Christian heritage. We saw the Flag of St George and the Union Flag quite a lot yesterday. There was the usual exuberant celebration of the Last Night of the Proms, where clearly everyone is welcome under these waving banners. Rather more troublingly, we also saw flags, and indeed crosses, carried through our streets in an anti-immigration protest in an attempt to claim Christianity as some kind of cultural identity badge, with apparently no understanding of Christian teaching. The Church is one over all the earth, and Christian identity can never be conflated with any particular race or nation. 

What we now call the Flag of St George, a red cross on a white background, appeared in the Middle Ages, long after the historical Saint George, when it began to be used as a flag by a number of countries, of which England was a relatively late arrival. At around the same time, it appeared in art in depictions of the Resurrection, as a banner held aloft by the risen Christ. 

This gives us a clue to its symbolic meaning. The red cross, the colour of blood, symbolises the passion of Christ, his death, and the white stands for the new life of his resurrection. So, carried by the risen Christ, it is a symbol of the Paschal Mystery, the victory of the Cross through his death and resurrection.

This is the heart of the Christian faith, summarised in Philippians this morning. Christ has emptied himself to share our humanity, even to death, and therefore has been raised to the glory of God. It was necessary that the Messiah should suffer and so enter into his glory. Because God in Christ has shared our death, death has been defeated, and the resurrection revealed. Humanity, united with Christ, is raised with him.

The pattern of dying and rising is the shape of the Christian faith, and is imprinted on us by our baptism, in which indeed we are marked with the sign of the Cross. We died and were buried with Christ in the waters of the font, so that we might be raised with him to eternal life. 

The grace we received in the font at our baptism is renewed in our life from day to day. Yet we cannot avoid the Cross, we are marked with it. There is no resurrection without death. Repentance, the conversion of life to which we are called, is a continual dying to self that we might live to God. The sufferings and sorrows of life are not avoided or cancelled out by the resurrection, but are transformed, the light of the resurrection shines through the Cross.

The Cross is both the sign of reconciliation, and the mark of its cost. Reconciliation between humanity and God, first of all, and therefore also the reconciliation of all divided humanity. Colossians says “through Christ God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross”.  Ephesians says, “He is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us”. 

How the cross saves and reconciles us is a mystery, which is not a puzzle to be solved but rather a truth whose meaning can never be exhausted. In the Cross, we see the infinite love and mercy of God, who alone can save us, meeting the depths of human sin and division and need and the disaster of death, and overcoming them.

And this is for everyone. Colossians says, it is the reconciliation of all things. The Gospel says it is the lifting up of the Son of Man, so that “everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life”. The Cross reconciles us with God and with one another, creating one new humanity in which there are no boundaries of race, nation or culture. 

We should not therefore be ashamed of the Cross. What if some people misuse it as a symbol of culture wars or toxic nationalism? Christians know better, and it is our symbol. Here we have no abiding city, but we seek the City that is to come, as Hebrews says. Whatever flag may fly over us in our exile here on earth, the Church unites, in one, people of every race, nation and culture. And we look to the Cross as the banner of another country, in which we have our true citizenship, the City of God in which all peoples will be gathered into one new humanity in Christ. 

The Cross is the sign of Christ, the sign of salvation. It is God’s hope breaking through into human tragedy. It is death defeated and the resurrection revealed. It is the sign of reconciliation that overcomes all barriers of race and nation and culture. The Cross proclaims to all people, as Ephesians says: “You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and… members of the household of God.”

As Christians, we will best honour the sign of the Cross by living according to what it means. In lives of sacrificial self-giving love. In reconciling, because we have been reconciled. In welcoming, because we have been welcomed. In forgiving, because we have been forgiven. In faith that the worst this world can do can never equal God’s power to bring new life and hope. By always being ready to point to that hope amid the dreadful wreckage of human sin and death. It is through lives marked by the Sign of the Cross that we will best lift high the Cross, and the love of Christ proclaim, in a world that stands so much in need of that love.

Sermon for a Mass of Thanksgiving for a Civil Partnership

 Song of Solomon 8: 6-7

1 John 4: 7-12

John 15:12-16                                                  

 

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.[1]

There’s more to love than fluffy bunnies and Valentine’s hearts, as the Song of Solomon reminds us. Love is, “strong as death… fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame”. There is something wild, untamed, uncontrollable, about love. It’s a risky business.

And that is because love is in the business of finding us, getting to know us, and saving us. Saving us from the webs of illusion in which we humans find ourselves ensnared. The illusion, which is very dear to us, that we are the centre of our universe, creating ourselves and determining our own value. 

Whereas love comes at us as grace, unlooked for, non-negotiable, with the offer of a true identity which is mysteriously given and can only be received. Love is the army in the parable, coming against us with a superior force, requiring us to give up all our possessions, that is, all the ways in which we create and hold on to our false identities.

“Love one another”, says Jesus, in our Gospel reading, and John, in the Epistle. The challenge is not just to love other people, although that matters. Loving one another is reciprocal. It is mutual. It means that we have to be prepared to be loved, ourselves. And, in fact, we can’t know what love means unless we allow that to happen. “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that God loved us.”

Allowing ourselves to be loved can be the hardest part of all. So often we can engage in all sorts of transactional games, patronage, dispensing our bounty, and think that we are loving others. Unaware of how much we are bargaining and controlling all the time. It is only in learning to be loved ourselves that love breaks through the illusion of our self-sufficiency. Love alone can save us from the ultimate loss, which is the failure to accept that we are loved. 

John Donne, whose verse I opened with, knew a thing or two about our human resistance to being loved, and the pain of its overcoming. So too did George Herbert:

I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
                             I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
                            Who made the eyes but I?[2]

Love does this, comes at us, persistently, indefatigably, come what may. No wonder it is fierce, strong, a raging flame. 

But it is a strange fierceness. If love can find no other way of breaking through our illusions, than to come to us as a helpless baby, or to be shown to us as a rejected man dying on a cross, then that is what love will do. 

And it is a slow fierceness, wildly slow, because love has all the time in the world. It is the glacial erosion of our hardened hearts, grinding through the geological layers of our unawareness, uncovering the jewels that have lain hidden even to ourselves, until love found them out. 

For most of us, the experience of love, love that knows who we are through and through, and wants to be with us anyway, is mediated through the love of partners, friends, or family. 

For most of us, daily life with other people who will not give up on us, if we will allow that, is the path by which our illusions are gradually worn away. It is the conversion of life by which we are constantly drawn out from our obsession with ourselves. It is the commitment to stay with reality until we become real. 

We can leave it to the mystics to experience the overthrowing power of love by the direct union that most of us could not bear. Most of us are not Teresa of Avila. But even mystics, soaring aloft on the direct intuition of love beyond understanding, need their communities, the people who are under vows not to run away from them, no matter how bizarre they may become. 

Love, for most of us, is mediated by the person or community who will see who we are through all our illusions and guilt and shame, through the self-image that we create but know is false, and love us for who we are, anyway. And, in so doing, will show us who we are, in a way we could never have known by ourselves.

Your commitment to each other, in your Civil Partnership, is just this. It says that you are, to each other, the people you want to become real with. It points to the intention and shape of lives lived, to be lived, with each other and for each other. 

And because it is love that is bringing this about, your partnership does not create a closed-in space just for yourselves, but a place of hospitality and welcome, the mutuality of loving one another which has to flow out and make other connections, in which others too can find their place: those who are already part of your family, and the communities and relationships in which you share. Including those of us today who are with you in person or in spirit, giving thanks, celebrating, and supporting you, for you and with you in the great interwoven tapestry of mutuality and belonging that love creates. 

So this is a day of great joy, for all that it is wildly risky. Love is strong, fierce, a raging flame. But the risk is only to the false self, which must die anyway, for that is the meaning of the Gospels. 

May you discover who you are in your mutuality of loving one another, as everything that is not you is overthrown in love, mediated through the daily business of sticking with reality until you become real.

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
                             So I did sit and eat.

Fr Matthew Duckett
22^nd June 2024

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[1] John Donne, Holy Sonnets, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44106/holy-sonnets-batter-my-heart-three-persond-god

[2] George Herbert, Love III, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44367/love-iii

Sermon for the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, All Saints Houghton Regis

 

Byzantine Reliquary of the True Cross from Jerusalem, la Cattedrale di San Lorenzo, Genova
(Photo Matthew Duckett 2018)

Numbers 21.4-9

Philippians 2.6-11

John 3.13-17

 

Some of our well-known hymns have really exciting backstories. It was in the year 560 that Radegunde, Princess of Thuringia and Queen of the Franks, escaping from a dynastic murder plot at home, fled to the Bishop of Noyen, who ordained her a deaconess and professed her as a nun.

Being a Queen, she didn’t join someone else’s abbey, but built her own, at Poitiers, and persuaded her friend the Byzantine Emperor to give her a large relic of the True Cross, a fragment of the wood found by St Helena in Jerusalem a couple of centuries before. And she asked another friend, Bishop Venantius Fortunatus, to write some hymns for the occasion of its solemn reception. 

We sang one of those hymns at the start of Mass today, “The Royal Banners forward go”. Another one is also familiar in our hymnals:

Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle, sing the ending of the fray;
now above the cross, the trophy, sound the loud triumphant lay,
tell how Christ, the world’s redeemer as a victim won the day.

The dominant note in these hymns is triumph. The cross is lifted up in celebration as a standard of victory. Our word “trophy” comes from the ancient custom, after a battle, of decorating a convenient tree with the captured armour and weapons of the defeated foe. It was called the tropaion.

In these hymns of the sixth Century, which are gold mines of the theology of the early Church, the cross is hailed as the trophy captured from the enemy by the conquering hero, and displayed to prove that the enemy has been defeated.

How are we saved? How does the death of Jesus on the cross save the world? How has he defeated death? And the answer the early Church gives is not a definition, but poetry. Glorious facets of a glorious and wonderful mystery, the triumph of the crucified one. A mystery in the Christian sense is not a puzzle to be solved, or something we can know nothing about. It is rather, something we can never wholly know, a journey into depth and meaning that will never be exhausted.

This is why the New Testament talks about the death of Jesus using so many different images. It is paradox: the stone that the builders rejected has become the corner stone. 

It is sacrifice, which itself has different dimensions. Sacrifice is the surrender of a good thing in order that another good might come, Jesus giving his life so that we might live. But it is also in the strict sense an act of ritual violence which Jesus undergoes, becoming the scapegoat of humanity to take away our need for victims. 

Again, the death of Jesus brings about reconciliation, in St Paul’s words, by putting to death hostility – the hostility between Jew and Gentile, the hostility between humanity and God. 

Jesus himself describes his death as the new covenant, sealed with his blood, to reconcile humanity and God. He describes it as a ransom paid to free us from the captivity of sin. 

Elsewhere in the New Testament the death of Jesus is described as an example inviting imitation, identity with Christ through patient suffering and acceptance of God’s will. It is the debt owed because of sin paid on our behalf. The death of Christ is also our death, baptised in him we have died with him and been buried so that we might share his resurrection. 

Again, Christ is victor conquering the powers of evil through his death and resurrection, taking them captive and leading them in his victory procession – the imagery that Venantius takes up in his hymns.

In Hebrews, Christ is described as passing into the heavens through his death, so as to act as an advocate and intercessor, obtaining forgiveness for sins.

All of these scriptural images describe but do not exhaust the meaning of Christ’s death. And all of them lead us to the same truth, that by his death we die with him to our sins, and by his resurrection we are raised to life with him and in him. 

Attempts to define the atonement as a sort of mechanism, to set out how exactly it works, always fall short of the rich tapestry of images in the New Testament. To say, so some Christians do, that God had to punish human sin and so punished Jesus instead of us, does not reflect the richness of scripture and tradition. Worse, it leaves the Cross still in the enemy’s hands, its power of death not overcome, just diverted elsewhere.

But the New Testament message, celebrated in hymn and liturgy, is that the Cross has been seized from the enemy, and paraded by the conquering hero, who voluntarily suffered on it for our sake. The lure the foe put forward, to ensnare humanity into death, has become instead the pledge of life and resurrection. “Death, where is your sting? Grave, where is your victory” 

The Cross changes the whole way in which power is exercised in the world, and the meaning of human history. Hope shines forth where death once held sway. The Church celebrates the triumph of the Cross, in images, poetry, hymns and theology. Crosses are seen everywhere. And splinters and fragments of wood believed to derive from the original wood found by St Helena are still venerated throughout the world as the banner captured from the enemy, the sign of his defeat. 

If you think that’s a bit old fashioned, you might need to look again. At the Coronation in May, as the King and all the panoply of state and church processed into Westminster Abbey before the eyes of the world, they were led by a new processional cross, the Cross of Wales, which incorporates fragments of the True Cross, a gift from Pope Francis. Radegunde, Queen of the Franks and Abbess of Poitiers, would have known exactly what was going on, as the Royal banners forward went. All earthly power acknowledges and bows before the Cross of Christ. And to the Cross all people may look in hope for salvation. For the Son of Man has been lifted up, and being lifted up from the earth, he will draw all things to himself.

Power and Forgiveness

Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 14 2023

Ezekiel 33.7-11

Romans 13.8-14

Matthew 18.15-20

 

In today’s Gospel reading Jesus speaks once more about the Church, and the sort of community it should be. This is a theme in Matthew’s Gospel. Two weeks ago we heard Peter’s confession of faith and Jesus’ response, “on this rock I will build my Church”, “what you bind on earth will be bound in heaven”. But that can set up ideas of authority which can be misinterpreted, as Peter soon finds out when he tries to forbid Jesus from going to Jerusalem to be killed. 

Just before today’s reading, in a bit that is skipped over by the lectionary, the disciples argue about who in the community is going to be the greatest. In spite of Peter’s rebuke they still haven’t got it. And Jesus answers by setting before them a little child, a person who in the society of the time had no status and no rights. The community of the church is one in which authority is given for service, not for wielding power over others.

It’s important to bear that in mind when reading today’s passage. Jesus describes the church as a community in which things will go wrong, members will sin against each other. And that is really a joyful and liberating message, because it means there is hope for us all. The Church is not perfect but it is nonetheless the Church, the community of grace and forgiveness.

Jesus teaches about forgiveness and reconciliation in the Church. When things go wrong in any community they can quickly escalate, gossip and rumours leading to accusation, blame and conflict, scapegoats identified and cast out, people taking sides, entrenched against each other. 

The way the Church is to deal with sin is the reverse of this. Jesus’ teaching on what to do if your brother or sister sins against you is not about excluding that person, but about taking every possible means to keep them included. 

This process of forgiveness is communal, and intended to avoid escalation. First talk in private, then with two or three others, then the whole community. As a last resort, says Jesus, treat the offender as a gentile and tax collector. But gentiles and tax collectors are precisely the ones Jesus reaches out to in the Gospel! This is a process aimed at reconciliation, gathering together. And it also recognises that sin damages the community. Forgiveness is about healing the wounded community, as well as wounded individuals. 

And the Church is the community in which this is to become the reality, remaking humanity. The Church is not the club of good people, it is the community of forgiven people. The community which receives and practices reconciliation. 

But it is also the community that, still, gets things wrong. It is a community in which sin can be horribly damaging. The scandals of abuse that have been so grievous in recent years are not over, as recent news stories about “Soul Survivor” show. 

Abuse so often happens through the misuse of power. It may be that someone is in a position of official authority, and misuses that. Or it may be that someone has power in other ways, perhaps by having a very charismatic personality, or by being skilled at manipulation and control. 

In today’s Gospel Jesus describes a community in which someone who has been wronged can go and talk to the culprit in private to seek reconciliation. But we also need to remember Jesus’ teaching just before this passage. The community that can practice forgiveness in this way is a community in which everyone has the status of a child, and nobody exercises power over another.

It’s important to recognise that. Because situations of abuse are not like that. They arise from the misuse of power. And one of the ways in which the church has gone wrong is to misuse today’s gospel reading, and say to victims and survivors of abuse, “we are Christians, so you should forgive. Talk to the person who has harmed you in private and sort it out between you”. Advice which has led to further harm and continued abuse. 

To read this passage this way ignores its overarching message that forgiveness is about healing the community. Where one member suffers, all suffer. And where the community has been harmed through the misuse of power, the community needs to own that, and forgiveness has to include restorative justice. We should not ask individuals to forgive on their own when it is actually the task of the whole community and needs structural change. We should not expect individuals to stop hurting, if the community does not fix what hurt them.

This is why the Church must constantly be improving its commitment to safeguarding. Why there are safeguarding officers and diocesan safeguarding teams to refer concerns to, when they arise. 

The communal dimension of forgiveness is something that is part of the life of the Church. It is about restoring communities, as well as individuals, to wholeness of life. 

The Church is not the club of good people, it is the community of forgiven people. It is founded on grace, God’s free gift, not anything that we have earned or could earn. It is the community that believes in the forgiveness of sins, that receives the forgiveness of sins, that practices the forgiveness of sins. And this means a commitment to truth telling and justice as aa part of reconciliation, when the community itself has been harmed.

The Church is the community that includes and gathers together, that seeks out and brings in the lost. It is the community where even two or three can start to undo the rivalry, conflict and division that are the wounds of sin, by knowing that the Lord is there with them when they are gathered in his name.  

And it is the community that has to make forgiveness and reconciliation visible in the world, to bring hope to a divided and broken humanity. A humanity that needs to know that forgiveness is not only possible, it is freely offered to all as the gift of God in Jesus Christ. Which is why that must be lived out in the Church, first of all.

Sermon at Parish Mass, Advent 1 2022

 

 

The Taking of Christ - Caravaggio. National Gallery of Ireland.

 

Isaiah 2:1-5

Romans 13:1-end

Matthew 24:36-44

 

Happy new year – Church year, that is – and welcome to a new cycle in our Sunday readings, as this year we shall be mostly reading Matthew’s Gospel.

Now, be honest. When you start a new book do you ever sneak a look at the last pages to see how it ends? Because that’s what we did today. We started our reading of Matthew not at the beginning, but in Chapter 24. By this point in the Gospel we are already in Holy Week, and Jesus has entered Jerusalem in triumph. In just two days it will be the Passover and Jesus will be betrayed and crucified. In the section we heard today he is on the Mount of Olives, teaching his disciples privately about “the end”.

The end of what, exactly? In reading the gospels attentively, we can see that this is answered on more than one level. Jesus speaks of coming catastrophe, and cosmic signs, both in the immediate and the long-term time scale.

There is the catastrophe that is almost upon them, Jesus’s betrayal and death, which he has foretold, but the disciples have not understood. Then, further off, there is the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in great violence, which Jesus has also foreseen. Indeed, he has lamented the fate of Jerusalem, “if only they had known the way of peace”. Jesus is in person the Word of the Lord from Isaiah, speaking from Jerusalem, calling on his people to “beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks”.

But woven through these two themes Jesus also teaches the disciples that all things are transient, that both our bodily life, and the universe as we know it, will come to an end, and all will be brought into the light of God’s eternity in which all things will be seen in their true nature and value.

For all these things, says Jesus, you must be watchful and ready, staying awake, because you do not know when they are going to happen.

It will be like the days of Noah, says Jesus. That’s a startling image: the sudden flood that swept away those who were unprepared and unaware, leaving only Noah and his family. Just so, two people can be going about their ordinary business, working in the fields or grinding meal, and the disaster will snatch away one and leave the other.

First Century Judea was a police state, and the image of being snatched away unexpectedly was one that people would have recognised. If the authorities didn’t like you, they could come for you at any time. Which is exactly what happened. In the Garden of Gethsemane, the Temple police came in the middle of the night, Jesus was taken, and the disciples left behind – the first and most immediate fulfillment of the image that Jesus uses.

But the Greek for “left behind” can also mean “forgiven”, which brings out another layer of meaning. Jesus is taken and killed, voluntarily subjecting himself to the catastrophe of human violence. But through his self-giving death the disciples are forgiven.

Today we might think that the death of Jesus, and the destruction of Jerusalem, are in the past, and the end of the universe may be uncounted billions of years in the future. Does that mean that catastrophe is distant from us, that we can relax? No, says Jesus. Be ready, stay awake. And the gospel writers made sure to transmit his urgent message to future generations.

Out of catastrophe, God brings new life and new creation. Through the resurrection, Jesus entered God’s eternity, which does not make him distant from us, but more immediately present. In him, past and future are not distant, for he is the beginning and the end, the first and the last, Alpha and Omega. He is our end as much as our beginning. But, are we aware, are we awake? Do we know him as he stands before us in the present moment?

He is present in the Eucharist, the sacrament of his body and blood. He is the head and the true life of the Church, his body in the world of which we are members. More than that, he fills the universe, for as Colossians says “all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

Christ the first and the last comes to us in the present moment, in his sacraments, in his Church, in the creation, and in all who are his brothers and sisters in need; how we respond to him gives meaning and value to the present moment. Meaning and value that will not be lost when all things are gathered up at the end.

This season of Advent calls us to watchfulness, a renewed attention to Christ and the coming of his kingdom, not at some distant horizon but in the present moment. Because it is here and now that we are called to respond to Christ. He fills the present moment with his transforming power. Our response opens us to forgiveness and new life, even in the midst of catastrophe, new life that will endure when time has passed into eternity.

Advent is then a good time to renew the habit of attention to Christ in repentance, in prayer, and in deeper study of the scriptures. We do this so that the habit deliberately formed in prayer can pervade our daily lives, every present moment, and all that we do.

The shopping centres around us might think that it is already Christmas. But the stillness and pregnant waiting of Advent are here for us, and demand our attention. The long dark nights and short days invite us to contemplation. Because these days and nights are not empty but filled with the fullness of Christ, who waits for us in the present moment, seeking our attention, our conversion, and our love.

Now is the time to awake out of sleep, says St Paul, now is the moment to lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light. Because now is the present moment in which Christ waits for us in all his fullness.