Sermon Low Sunday 2013

Acts 5:12-16

Revelation 1:9-13,17-19

John 20:19-31

I’ve just finished re-reading, after many years, Mary Renault’s trilogy of historical novels about Alexander the Great: Fire from Heaven, The Persian Boy, and Funeral Games. The last is set after Alexander’s death, as the great empire that he built and the harmony of peoples he strived to achieve disintegrates in old feuds, greed, revenge and murder. And it seems as though the shade of Alexander and other dead characters is hovering behind the tragic events as they unfold. 

One of the motifs in the series is the common belief of the ancient world was that the dead needed to be treated carefully. They hadn’t ceased to exist but were in a gloomy underworld, which was nowhere near as nice as being alive, and they tended to be regretful and rather cross about it. And if you had wronged them in life, or neglected to offer the due sacrifices after their death, then you had reason to be afraid of them. 

And that of course is the basic idea underlying many ghost stories and supernatural thrillers in our own day. These seem to have a perennial appeal.

This idea of death perhaps reflects our human expectations. Revenge is a deeply buried instinct. If we could come back and haunt someone who had done us wrong, isn’t that just what we would do?

But today we have heard an account of the appearance of a dead man which completely undermines that expectation. The disciples in the upper room, like John on the Isle of Patmos, see Jesus. Jesus, who had been betrayed by one of his friends and handed over to the lynch mob. Jesus who had been killed, in public, in the full view of the crowd. He was dead and buried. Those were the definitive facts, decisively closing off, for ever, any further human possibility for this man Jesus. He was gone.

And they saw him. That group of disciples, friends who had run away or stood back, who had denied they knew him, failed to defend him. That group who were gathered in a locked room, in fear for their own lives, in case their association with the dead man should bring the same fate on themselves. They saw him.

He came and stood among them in the closed-in place of their fear, and said to them: “Peace be with you.” That first word of greeting undoes all their fear. The message of the risen Jesus is peace. And even as he shows them his hands and his side, the wounds of his death, there is no reproach, no blame, no hint of vengeance. His greeting is peace. And they are filled with joy. 

Jesus has not come back from death into this life, this old way of living. Rather, he has as it were emerged from death on the other side. He has passed into the eternal deathless life of the Father. Jesus, who died, is now entirely alive with the loving, vivacious, uncontainable life of God.

And Jesus comes to his disciples from beyond death to share that life with them. To give them the good news that beyond death there is not gloom, or fear, or vengeance. Jesus the Risen One is now the gateway to the life that the Father lives, eternal life, overflowing with love and forgiveness and joy. And he longs to share that life with his disciples, with all of us, with his Church in every age.

So Jesus gives to those disciples in the upper room his promised gift of the Holy Spirit. This scene is the ‘Pentecost’ of John’s Gospel, the gift of Divine life to the disciples, their empowering for the mission on which he is going to send them. So Jesus breathes on the disciples and gives them the gift of the Holy Spirit. 

He breathes on them. This is an act of creation. It echoes the second creation story in Genesis chapter 2, where we read that:

The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.

That first gift of the breath of life made inanimate matter into living beings. But that gift does not last for ever. Biological life, good and wonderful as it is, returns sooner or later to the dust from which it was made.

But in the resurrection of Jesus the new creation is revealed, and the new creation is eternal, because it shares the life of God. Once again the Lord God breathes on his people, but this time gives them the gift of the Holy Spirit, not the breath of biological life but the breath of God, God’s own life, eternal and indestructible. 

In John’s gospel it is Jesus’ dying and going to the Father that opens the way for the gift of the Holy Spirit. Jesus has burst through the great barrier of death that held humanity captive and so has opened the way to the Father. 

From now on, then, we are to live the life of the Spirit. We are to be dead to sin and alive to God in Jesus Christ. Of course that is not to deny the goodness of this present creation and this passing life. But it is transitory. It will come to an end. The life of the resurrection, life in the Holy Spirit, is eternal. In the Holy Spirit human nature, made from the dust, is lifted beyond itself and deified, made one with God. And that is God’s gift to us that will never be taken away.

But it is a gift with a purpose. The Holy Spirit was not given to that little group of disciples in the upper room so they could keep it to themselves! No, they are sent. Sent into all the world, to complete the work that Jesus began. “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

And that work, that mission, is peace, reconciliation, the forgiveness of sins. Because that is what the world so desperately needs. True peace cannot come about through a balance of terror, but only through the new life of the Holy Spirit. True forgiveness is a new beginning, a new creation, coming to us as a gift from beyond the worst that human beings can do. Jesus was the innocent victim betrayed and murdered and who comes back to his disciples from beyond death breathing forgiveness and love as a gift. 

From now on there is nothing that cannot be forgiven. There is no-one for whom there cannot be a new beginning. There is no-one who is outside the power of God’s new creation. There is nothing that is not included in the mission of the Church, which is to spread the peace and forgiveness that come to us from the heart of God. 

And if we are told “if you retain the sins of any, they are retained”, that does not give us permission to preach a partial gospel, or to exclude anyone from the good news. Is it not simply to say that from now on it’s up to us? That if we don’t go out and proclaim the forgiveness of sins, it won’t get done. 

“As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Peace, forgiveness, eternal life in the Holy Spirit. That is the message, the good news and the gift that we bear. And it is our unending joy in the risen Lord to live that life ourselves and to share it with those among whom we are sent.

Sermon Maundy Thursday 2013

Exodus 12: 1-4 [5-10] 11-14

1 Corinthians 11:23-26

John 13:1-17, 31b-35

Why is this night different from all other nights?

That question is asked at the Passover meal, the Seder, which was celebrated in Jewish homes throughout the world two nights ago. It is asked by the youngest child present. Why is this night different from all other nights?

And the oldest person present answers, bridging the generations, passing on the tradition. The different aspects of the Seder meal are pointed out, the things that make it special: unleavened bread, bitter herbs, the lamb bone recalling the sacrifices of old. The person answering explains the significance of these details, their meaning in the story of the Exodus, the liberation of God’s people from slavery in Egypt, long ago.

These things are said and done as a memorial. That doesn’t mean they are just a reminder of something that is now in the past, like a tombstone or a blue plaque. The Seder is a memorial which bridges the time between then and now, which makes the saving work of God in Israel’s past a present and effective reality for the people of Israel today. 

Christians understand that, or we should do. It is part of the heritage we have received. Christians are people from all races and nations who, through Jesus, have come to believe in God’s promises to Israel, and to share in Israel’s hope of salvation for all the world. We, too, can ask, why is this night different from all other nights?

This night also began in a meal, the Last Supper, when Jesus sat with his disciples and recalled the saving work of God in the Exodus from Egypt. But at the same time he was looking forward, to the new saving work of God, which was to be completed over the next three days in his own suffering, death and resurrection. The new saving work which was to encompass all the world, all times and places and people.

The writer HV Morton has described Jesus at the Last Supper as holding two historical threads in his hands and forming the link between them both. One is the Old Covenant, the Law and the Prophets, God’s promises to his people Israel. And the other is the New Covenant sealed with his blood, the Church of all nations, the community of the Eucharist, the mission and priesthood of the Apostles. There is both rupture and continuity between the old and the new, and Jesus holds both together.

And so Jesus gives a new memorial, the Eucharist, by which the new saving work of God will be made present and effective for all time. And he gives a new commandment, the commandment of love, and through washing his disciples’ feet shows what that means. 

The task of washing feet belonged to a slave or to the lowest servant. It was a job to be done by a person you didn’t notice.  Jesus shows his commandment of love by taking the place of the lowest and most marginalised. It is love shown through self-emptying service. It is love which shows us where the saving work of God is being achieved. Which is where we wouldn’t notice, if Jesus had not drawn our attention there by his subversive action. On the margins, among the vulnerable and the excluded and the despised.

It is John’s Gospel which gives us this account of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. Curiously, there is no account of the institution of the Eucharist in John’s Gospel, although that gospel is full of Eucharistic teaching about Jesus being the bread of life, about needing to eat his flesh and drink his blood. 

But John tends to comment on great mysteries by telling of external signs. The Eucharist and the washing of feet can be seen as different aspects of the same mystery of self-emptying love. The washing of feet shows us, through external signs, the inner meaning of the Eucharist.

Christ “emptied himself”, says St Paul in Philippians, taking the form of a slave. He emptied himself by becoming human, and taking our nature upon him. He emptied himself in service to others and in the end to sharing our death upon the cross. He empties himself still in the Eucharist, humbling himself under the forms of bread and wine, the servants of our body’s need.

Because the Eucharist is God’s gift of his life to us in Jesus, it makes us like him. By feeding on Christ we are transformed into him, so that he lives in us in the world. The sacrament of self-emptying love makes us self-emptying, fills our hearts with the love of Jesus, with which to love the world. So the Eucharist impels us to the work of service, to the washing of feet. The Eucharist takes us to the margins, to the forgotten, the victimised, the excluded. 

This evening Pope Francis is celebrating this Mass of the Lord’s Supper, not in his Cathedral or in any other of the great churches of Rome, but in a prison, a juvenile prison on the outskirts of the city. There he will wash the feet of young offenders. Through his words and actions in such a short time Pope Francis has reminded his own church, and Christians of other churches, of the true priorities of the gospel: to go out from the centre to a life of risky, self-emptying, loving service, on the margins. Because that is where Christ is, and that is where Christ calls us to be, too.

God has chosen and called us into his church, into the community of the Eucharist, to fill us and empower us with his love. Through his gift of himself to us we are caught up in that love - and it is love on the move. It is love pouring into the world, reaching to the furthest places, seeking out all, calling all home to the Father’s heart. 

To live Eucharistically is not simply to come to Mass often, though we should. It is to live a life transformed by the Eucharist into self-emptying loving service. The Eucharist is the new memorial, the New Covenant in Christ’s blood. It makes present and effective God’s saving work in Jesus, in us, and through us in the world. 

Why is this night different from all other nights? Because tonight Jesus gave himself under the forms of bread and wine, so that the world might live.

Why is this night different from all other nights? Because tonight Jesus girded himself with the towel of a slave and washed his disciples’ feet, to give them the commandment of self-emptying love. 

Poured out in love, given in service, Jesus lives in his Church, present and effective for all time, to reach out and to save all the world. That is why this night is different from all other nights.

Sermon at Parish Mass Lent 5 2013

Isaiah 43:16-21

Philippians 3:8-14

John 8:1-11

On Monday I went to the Courtauld Gallery to see the Picasso 1901 exhibition. Monday is cheap entry day at the Courtauld, there were lots of people there, and I could only get a timed ticket. So while I was waiting I went to look at the other collections. Among the canvases by Rubens, Cezanne and Monet there was a tiny panel painting by Brueghel the Elder in grisaille, which is a technique of painting in oils in monochrome. It depicted the scene from today’s gospel, the woman caught in adultery and brought before Jesus.

Brueghel’s painting shows the moment when Jesus bends down and writes with his finger on the ground. And although the accused woman is standing in the centre of the scene, the bystanders and her accusers are not looking at her, but at what Jesus is writing. And they are reacting with amazement, even astonishment. 

According to Brueghel’s version what Jesus is writing is, in Dutch, the words, “let the one who is without sin cast the first stone”. Now the gospel story doesn’t actually tell us what Jesus wrote, so Brueghel is guessing, and perhaps he just wanted to make sure that the scene was unambiguously identified. 

There have been other suggestions about what it was that Jesus wrote. Perhaps he was writing down the names of the woman’s accusers, or their secret sins, even the names of the people with whom they had committed adultery. But I think we need to attend to the text. This gospel passage thinks it is important to tell us that Jesus wrote with his finger on the ground, twice, but does not think it important to tell us what Jesus wrote. So perhaps it is the  simple fact of his writing that is significant.

This particular gospel passage hasn’t always been where it is now at the beginning of chapter 8 of John’s gospel. In some early manuscripts it is in other places in John, or even in Luke. It seems to have been a free floating story which moved around because people didn’t know quite where it fitted in the sequence of events in Jesus’ life. But it is surely an authentic reminiscence of Jesus, the merciful and forgiving Lord, the friend of sinners, who was always being opposed and tested by the Pharisees. 

And in the canon of scripture recognised by the Church it has ended up in John’s gospel. John, as we know, makes great use of symbolic detail, and places an emphasis on the Divinity of Jesus, on Jesus being God’s word in person in the world. And I think these help us to understanding this story. 

There may be a reference, for example, to the Prophet Jeremiah, who wrote 

O hope of Israel! O Lord!
   All who forsake you shall be put to shame;
those who turn away from you shall be recorded in the earth,
   for they have forsaken the fountain of living water, the Lord. 

That fountain of living water is something that Jesus has just referred to in the scene before today’s gospel, so perhaps here we are meant to see, in the woman’s accusers, those who have turned away from that water. Jesus writing on the earth may have reminded them of that text of Jeremiah.

But we are told quite specifically that Jesus writes with his finger on the ground twice. And in the Old Testament there are two scenes in which the finger of God writes.

The first scene is the giving of the ten commandments. In Exodus chapter 31 God is said to have inscribed with his finger the stone tablets of the covenant given to Moses. And one of those ten commandments of course is, “Thou shalt not commit adultery”. But in the gospels we see that Jesus himself is the lawgiver, indeed he is the Law in Person. And in Jesus we see that the finger of God has not stopped writing, and that the old law needs to be completed with the new law of forgiveness and love. 

In the Bible the Law is not seen as a kind of arbitrary code imposed on the world from outside. It is rather something that is written into the fabric of creation. The flourishing of human beings in community and in communion with God is something intrinsic to creation, it is at the heart of the way things are. To live according to the law is to live in tune with creation. 

And Jesus shows us that part of that law is forgiveness. The work of God as creator goes on. God is continually at work to restore, to reconcile, to forgive, to put right what goes wrong. And if we are to live according to the law, in tune with God’s creation, then we need to be forgiving. God’s will in creation is not condemnation but forgiveness, not accusation but grace, acknowledging our own need and God’s free gift meeting our need.

If we resist that law of forgiveness then we are resisting our own good. We will not be able to live in tune with the world, to flourish as God wants us to in community and in communion.

Which brings us to the second Old Testament scene where the finger of God writes: Belshazzar’s feast, that rather louche entertainment where the guests got drunk from the sacred vessels looted from the Temple in Jerusalem. And a ghostly finger appeared and wrote: mene, mene, tekel, parsin. Which the prophet Daniel interpreted as meaning: your days are numbered, you are weighed in the balance and found wanting, and your kingdom is overthrown. 

In today’s gospel reading there is a kingdom that is found wanting and overthrown: the kingdom of the accuser, that is to say, the kingdom of Satan, because that name means “the accuser”. The kingdom of Satan is the world ordered according to accusation and condemnation, the world in which scapegoats and victims are identified and cast out. And Jesus is saying, this is not the way the world should be, this is not God’s purpose in creation, this is not the Law.

And the accusers, one by one, give up and leave. Their kingdom is overthrown. And the woman finds herself now alone with Jesus, spoken to, and able to speak for herself at last. She is not condemned. In Jesus she has found grace and forgiveness. She has been saved from the kingdom of the accuser and has entered the Kingdom of God. 

And so Jesus tells her to remain in this state of grace, “go on your way and do not sin again”. She has been restored to harmony with creation and to communion with God. The law of forgiveness and love has found her and saved her, and now she is to live according to that law too.

Our whole life as Christians is the experience of being saved, of being restored to God’s purpose in creation. It is that experience of liberation, the joyful surprise of being snatched from the kingdom of the accuser and brought into the Kingdom of God, entirely through God’s gracious action in Jesus Christ.

But that does bring to us a challenge. Go on your way, and do not sin any more. It is for us to align our wills with the will of God, to choose to live according to God’s law, which is the pattern of life in all its fulness written into the fabric of creation. We are called to live in a way which respects and enables us and all our brothers and sisters to flourish. The path of Christ is a wholly new way of being in the world.

This is the meaning of the ten commandments. But it is also the meaning of the new law of forgiveness and love. It is to turn away from everything that destroys, from accusation and condemnation and self-righteousness. It is to love and forgive others as God has loved and forgiven us. To live according to God’s will is to attain our true freedom. Only so can we receive the fulness that God wills to share with us, which is nothing less than himself, his life and his Spirit shared with us and transforming us into the image of his Son.