On reading the Bible the right way round

Sermon at the Easter Vigil, Saint Peter le Poer, 19 April 2014

Genesis 1:1-2:4a

Genesis 22:1-18

Exodus 14:10-end, 15:20-21

Romans 6:3-11

Matthew 28:1-10

I expect I’m not the only person here who like detective stories: Hércule Poirot perhaps, or Inspector Montalbano.

It’s very gripping reading the stories and trying to work out who dunnit. That can be a challenge. There are of course lots of clues scattered through the story, but many of them are misleading and there are also distracting leads and red herrings.

It’s usually only in the last chapter that we find out who dunnit, when all the clues come together and are explained. And in a well written detective story, we don’t just find out who dunnit at the end. We also quite often find out, for the first time, what was done. That what seemed to be an accident was really a slice of victoria sponge laced with arsenic, or that the person we thought was the butler is really the long lost cousin and heir of the estate.

At the end of the story all kinds of things come into the light, hidden relationships, secret motives, concealed identities. All of them explain who dunnit, and why. They were there all along in the story, but we didn’t see them for what they were, we didn’t understand what they meant, because we didn’t know what the end of the story was.

If you re-read a detective story knowing what the end is, suddenly everything becomes clear. It’s almost as though you’re reading a different story. The end of the story changes everything that happened before, as well.

Well, as with detective stories, so with the Bible. The end of the story changes the whole story, and nothing will make complete sense unless we read it in the light of the end. The key to understanding the Bible is to read it the right way round, and that is to read it backwards. We have to start at the end to find out what the rest of it means.

What is the end of the Bible story? We have just heard it. It is Jesus, the victim, raised from the dead. The Resurrection changes how we see Jesus and how we read the Bible. And because the Bible is the story of humanity as well as of Jesus, the resurrection changes our story too. It is the end of the story which changes the story of everyone.

The Resurrection changes everything, because up until now humanity has lived as if the end of the story was death. Death has seemed to be the ultimate reality defining human existence. Not just putting an end to life, but tarnishing every moment of it. Life is limited, it will run out, grab what you can, while you can, and make sure no-one else takes it from you. And so humanity has been living from the beginning in rivalry and fear and violence.

This has even tarnished all our ideas about God. Our death-bound existence and our fear have been projected on to the heavens, and enacted in cults of sacrifice, ritual violence and exclusion. This is exactly what happened to Jesus – he was put to death for blasphemy, a religious offence, by people who had not yet begun to imagine that there could be no death in God.

But the Bible actually has been trying to tell us the true story all along. The God who is entirely light and life and love is there on every page, and stands out clearly if we read the Bible from the end, that is, in the light of the Resurrection.

If we read a story like that of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac, from the end, in the light of the Resurrection, then we will see it truly. The victim is innocent, God does not deal in death, and Abraham’s testing is about seeing whether he will emerge from the old imagination of a god bounded by death into the new imagination of the true God who is utterly vivacious loving generous life.

Of course if we read it the wrong way round we will get into all sorts of muddles. If we think that Abraham and Isaac is the key by which we are to understand Jesus, then we will end up with odd ideas such as thinking that God requires death as a punishment for sin and so he killed Jesus instead of us. But read the Bible the right way round, from the end, read Jesus as the key to interpreting Abraham and Isaac, and you will not end up with that story.

Because the end of the story changes the whole story. The structures of violence that have been running the world since the beginning turn out to be not where God is. In fact, God has come among us in Jesus to liberate us from them.

In the resurrection account from Matthew the guards stand for that old way of living, bounded as they are by fear and death. What are they? Soldiers, armed men, standing guard over a dead man, to make sure he stays dead. What could be more absurd? But that is the story of humanity, focussed on the fear of death, using violence to keep death in its place, that is, with someone else.

But the earthquake which shakes them – it is the same word – is a seismic change in our understanding. Suddenly everything is seen the right way round. The guards become like dead men. Humanity, as long as it is focussed on death, is dead. But Jesus, the dead man, is not there, because he has been raised. And the angel says, “do not be afraid”.

Death and fear are no more. The new reality, the true story, bursts into the world. Jesus, the victim, is raised from the dead, and is where God is. God is transparently, radiantly alive, and there is no death in him. And Jesus has been taken completely into that ultimate reality. Not alone, but as the new and representative human, so that where he is we might be also.

The end of the story changes the whole of the story. It changes, for a start, the people we want to victimise and cast out. The people who have wronged us, the people who have made us afraid, the people we hate for dark reasons we can’t even fathom. We can’t do that any more, because that place of the outcast is where Jesus is!

But it changes too our own story. All the stuff that’s gone wrong in our own lives, the history of sin and failure, wrong turnings, wasted opportunities, broken relationships, regrets. Now, those aren’t the story any more. The risen Victim is the story, and his story is our new story.

Jesus has opened for us the new imagination of God in whom there is no death. He has opened the way to the Father who is utterly different from anything we had imagined, whose love draws us into his own overflowing deathless life. The end of the story changes the whole story, for each one of us, here and now, as it has for believers down the ages, and will do to the end of time. Alleluia, Amen.

Sermon at Parish Mass, Lent 5 2014

Ezekiel 37.1-14

Romans 8:6-11

John 11:1-44

The later career of Lazarus, after his resurrection, is sadly not mentioned in the Bible. But Holy Tradition is usually quick to fill in such gaps, and Lazarus is no exception.

According to the Eastern Church, he had to flee a plot to kill him a second time in Judea and went to Cyprus, where St Paul and St Barnabas ordained him first Bishop of Kition. His episcopal stole was presented to him by no less than the Virgin Mary, who had woven it herself. When he died there after a thirty year extension of life, he was buried in a tomb over which the Cathedral of Larnaka was eventually built.

But according to a rival Western tradition, Lazarus, Mary and Martha were expelled from Judea for preaching Christianity, and put into a boat without sails or oars. A miraculous wind blew them to Provence where Lazarus became the first Bishop of Marseille, and founded an order of knighthood. There he was eventually beheaded by the Emperor Domitian and buried in a cave, though his body was later taken to Autun, or, possibly, to Vézelay.

But, whether Lazarus ended his second career in Cyprus or in France, he died again. His return to life from death in today’s gospel story is temporary.

But we read about it because it is a sign. John’s Gospel is big on signs. The miracles that Jesus works, in John, are described as ‘signs’. Now signs always point beyond themselves to something greater. We are not meant to become fixated on the sign, but to realise what it signifies. So, the first sign given by Jesus in John’s Gospel was the changing of water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana. And the point of that was not the wine, which was temporary: when it was all drunk it was gone. That miracle was a sign of the new wine of God’s life in the wedding feast of the Kingdom, the richness of life in the Spirit, something that will not end.

So, today, the raising of Lazarus, who will die again, is a sign of something greater. It points to the resurrection of Jesus, who will not die again, because he has passed into the eternal life of God. Death has no more dominion over him. The description of the tomb and burial of Lazarus, bound with cloths in a cave with a stone over the entrance, just like Jesus, call this to mind.

But more than this, Jesus himself tells Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life”. The resurrection that the raising of Lazarus points to is not just something that happens to Jesus, it is Jesus himself.

The “I am” sayings are another big feature of John’s Gospel – those sayings where Jesus says “I am” – the Good Shepherd for example, or the True Vine, or, today, the Resurrection and the Life. There are seven “I am” sayings in John, just as there are seven signs, and they are part of the message.

The “I am” sayings recall the name of God disclosed to Moses from the burning bush: “I am who I am”, or possibly, “I will be who I will be”. Moses had asked the name of God, and that was the answer he got. Which is not really a name, not even a noun, but more like a verb. This is a profound mystery. This God is not like the gods of the nations, who can be understood, depicted or defined. This God exists of himself, without a cause, without explanation, beyond names and forms. God is pure act, said St Thomas Aquinas. God is not so much a thing that exists, as the act of existence in itself.

So when Jesus says, “I am”, we hear the self-existent God who revealed himself to Moses speaking also in Jesus. God spoke once from a bush that was on fire but not consumed, a sign of God’s limitless life, life that does not destroy or use up. Now God speaks in Jesus of that same life.

God, speaking in Jesus, is revealed as Resurrection and Life. God is not just life, but resurrection, continually pouring out, continually creating and making new. According to St Paul in Romans, God “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist”.

Only God can do this. Only God, the self-existent continual creator, can call into existence things that do not exist. And raising the dead is the supreme example of this.

And in today’s story God in Jesus speaks this word of resurrection right here and now. Martha says, “I know that my brother will rise again in the resurrection on the last day”. This is true, and it is still true, wherever Lazarus was buried the second time, he will rise again. This reading has comforted many people at the funerals of their loved ones, and offers a sure and certain hope, as the prayer book puts it. Martha is looking forward, in faith and hope, to a future in which she is not yet present.

But Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life”. I am. Present tense. Here and now, God is present, God is doing a new thing, God is calling the dead into life. And the raising of Lazarus is a sign of that.

Jesus tells us that it is in the nature of God that God is resurrection and life. And this same God is acting and speaking in Jesus. The Act of existence in itself, on which the universe rests, is resurrection and life. There is no death in God, no destruction. The bush that Moses saw was on fire but not consumed. And God in Jesus is united with our human nature without our humanity being overwhelmed or destroyed.

In Jesus humanity is raised to God, to union with the Divine, without ceasing to be human. The resurrection of Lazarus is a sign of this spiritual resurrection: humanity, body and soul, raised into God who is Spirit. In the resurrection of Jesus we see this completed, as Jesus in body and soul is taken into the Divine. But it is a truth that begins to be present even now, even in our own lives.

The reading we heard from Ezekiel speaks of this figuratively. The prophecy of the dry bones was addressed to the Jewish people in exile in Babylon, and its literal meaning is about them being restored to the land of Israel. But in the spiritual sense it speaks of an interior reality: “I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act, says the Lord.”

Our own soil, our own ground, is the ground of our being, the mysterious depth where God speaks the word of our existence and calls us into being, as only God can. Our deepest self is the point where the human person opens to God who is Spirit, and the two are one.

When Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life”, he is saying that in him this is fully present and realised. He is the human person who is entirely open to God. He is entirely filled with the Act that is resurrection and life. So that Jesus says and does what the Father says and does. He and the Father are one.

But by the gift of the Spirit, this truth and this hope are opened to all humanity. Jesus speaks what is the Father’s will for all people: resurrection and life. Not just on the last day, though that is true, but here and now, in this present moment. God gives his Spirit to well up in our hearts like a spring of living water, the source of resurrection and life pouring out within us.

How can we drink of this water? How can we know resurrection and life? Jesus says, believe in me. That is, open your heart to a living relationship with Jesus, the source of life, the Word of our being. Cultivate that relationship in prayer and sacrament and through loving service to those in need. Cultivate it by repentance, that is, by turning away from everything that would hold us back from receiving that gift.

Believe in Jesus, and God will be glorified in you, for that is what God wills, to pour himself out in love and life and generosity. For the “I am” of our own existence is the “I am” that only God can speak in us. And, speaking in us, he fills us with his glory without overwhelming or destroying us, for he is resurrection and life, and in him is no death or darkness at all.

Sermon at Parish Mass Lent 4 2014

1 Samuel 16.1-13

Ephesians 5.8-14

John 9.1-41

Note: I'm greatly indebted to James Alison for his treatment of John 9 in "Faith Beyond Resentment", notes and links on which are available here

In Matthew, Mark and Luke there are many stories in which Jesus heals blind people, but they are usually short and to the point. John is different. He takes a long time to tell us this story and the conversation that follows. And this is because this story is making a big point about creation and sin.

Firstly, creation. In Genesis we are told that the Lord God made Adam out of the clay of the ground. And that’s a pun because in Hebrew clay is “adamah”. In today’s story Jesus does what the creator does. The man born blind has always been without sight. He hasn’t finished being created yet. So what Jesus does is to make some clay, some “adamah”, and apply it to the man’s eyes to complete his creation.

And Jesus does this on the Sabbath, which changes its meaning. The Sabbath in Genesis was when God rested after completing creation. But Jesus is saying, creation is not yet complete, or perhaps, it has been damaged and needs to be repaired. So the creator goes on creating. As Jesus says elsewhere about healing on the Sabbath, “the Father goes on working and so do I”.

Secondly, sin. The word “sin” runs right through this story, and it’s batted back and forth like a ping pong ball between Jesus, the Pharisees, the disciples and the man who is healed. But what happens by the end of the story is that Jesus has taken that word “sin” and turned it round, changing its meaning too.

It happens like this. At the beginning, the disciples ask: “who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Their assumption is that sin is a defect in you that causes you to be punished and excluded. So therefore this man or his parents must be sinners, for this to have happened. But Jesus says they’ve got it all wrong. Neither this man nor his parents sinned. Instead, “he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him”. That is, the work of creation.

So, Jesus heals him. And this causes the Pharisees a huge problem, because Jesus does this on the Sabbath day. To do any work on the Sabbath is a sin. This is a problem for the Pharisees because someone who works on the Sabbath is clearly a sinner, doing a bad thing – the Bible says so. But the blind man has been healed, which is a good thing. How can a sinner do something good?

The Pharisees are agitated about this because it threatens to undermine their identity. Their security as a group depends on them knowing who is a sinner – other people; and who is righteous – themselves. What Jesus has done undermines the whole basis on which they define themselves over against others. It’s significant that we are told “they were divided”; their stability has been undermined.

So what they do is to try and restore the distinction between the righteous and sinners. Firstly, they try to show that there was no miracle, the man had not in fact been blind. This would remove the problem for them. But this doesn’t work – the man keeps insisting that he was indeed blind, and his parents back him up.

So their second tactic is to try to show that what had happened, which appears to be good, is in fact evil. Jesus must be a sinner, so he must have produced this healing by evil means such as magic. The man who had been blind must be made to admit this, and all will be well. Up to now they are quite sympathetic to this man. It’s not his fault after all that Jesus played a trick on him and gave him his sight. All he has to do is agree with them, and he too can be accepted in their group, the closed group of the righteous.

But the man, in a brilliant piece of rhetoric, demolishes their argument. “Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”

So the final tactic of the Pharisees is to get rid of the man himself. He, too, must be a sinner, like Jesus. “And they drove him out.” So here are the Pharisees definitely sticking with the idea that sin is a defect that excludes you.

But at the end of the story, Jesus talks about the blind seeing and those who see becoming blind. And the Pharisees say, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” And Jesus says, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see’, your sin remains.”

With this Jesus redefines sin. Sin is not a defect that excludes you, whether it is being blind or anything else. Sin is thinking that you see, when you don’t. Or, in this story, which is about creation, it is thinking that your creation is complete and perfect, when it isn’t. Sin is when you construct your own righteousness, and think you have no need of God to touch you and heal you and make you complete. And constructing your own righteousness means defining yourself over against other people, as the Pharisees do.

So sin is not a defect that excludes you. It is, instead, participation in the mechanism that excludes. Sin is the accusing finger pointed at others, rather than the people that finger is pointing to.

Now there are many ways in which groups of the righteous try to define themselves over against other people. It is somewhat ironic that the Church gives us this gospel reading this weekend, when the first same sex marriages have been celebrated in England. Some Christian groups have been quite loud in their protest. But they have a problem. It seems to them that the Bible says that these relationships are wrong. But here are relationships that seem to embody good things like love, faithfulness and commitment.

Now, this is an issue on which Christians have different opinions. The preacher’s role is not to tell you what to think, but to help us all as we read and reflect on scripture together. Today’s reading shows us two approaches when something good happens where it is not expected. There is the approach of the Pharisees, who say that however good it appears to be that a blind person has been healed, the Bible clearly says that this was done in a sinful way – on the Sabbath – so therefore it is wrong. And there is the approach of Jesus, who says “my Father goes on working, and so do I”.

But as always there is a twist in the tale, which can catch us out if we are not wary. If sin is not a defect that excludes you, but participation in the mechanism that excludes, then we must be on our guard that we don’t fall back into it in a new way. For example, if we start defining ourselves over against people who think they are righteous because they read the Bible differently from us.

Yesterday afternoon I was coming back to church after visiting some people when I was stopped by a man in the street, waving a Bible, determined to get his message across. He told me that he had spoken to twelve people that day, and “they’re all going to hell”. And as I extricated myself from this encounter I caught myself thinking, “Oh I do wish you had gone to preach in someone else’s parish”. And then I came back to today’s Gospel reading, to finish this sermon, and realised what I had done. Which was, in my mind, to drive this man out in the same way as he was doing to people he thought were sinners.

As with so many other stories in the Gospels, we need to read this and see ourselves both as the excluded and as the people who are doing the excluding. In other words, we have to stop saying that we are not sinners, and instead recognise the need we have, in solidarity with everyone else, for God in Jesus to complete the work of our creation, and make us whole.

If we have received the grace of God, by which we are saved and made whole, then we are being freed from the need to cast anyone out. The same grace that saves us is available for everyone, which fills us with a true compassion for all humanity, for all the Pharisees and the hypocrites and the accusers and the casters out. Because they are us, and to be redeemed in Christ means to imagine them being redeemed in Christ, too. 

Sermon at Parish Mass Lent 3 2014

Exodus 17:1-7

Romans 5:1-11

John 4:5-42

We are spending a few weeks in Lent in John’s Gospel, and this week’s story follows on from last week’s encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus, who came to him by night. These two stories form a contrasting pair, but they have the same message at heart.

Nicodemus was very much an insider, part of the Jewish establishment, respected. Nevertheless, he came to Jesus “by night”, which in John is a metaphor for unbelief. Nicodemus could not understand Jesus’ talk of needing to be born “from above”. Perhaps he thought his own natural birth into a position of security and importance in society was enough.

This week Jesus meets the woman of Samaria, by day, in fact at midday, and she and all her village come to believe. But unlike Nicodemus, this woman is an outsider. She is a Samaritan, of a different race and religion to the Jews. She is, moreover, a woman, in a patriarchal society she would not expect that any Jewish rabbi would speak to her. But she seems to be also something of an outsider to her own people, perhaps because of her complicated relationship history, having had five husbands and now being with a man who is not her husband.  Instead of going out to draw water at dawn, with the other women of the village, she goes in the heat of the day, and alone.

Her concern is water, which she is looking for in the sun-drenched heat of the day. But Jesus speaks of water which wells up to eternal life. To both the woman and Nicodemus Jesus is speaking about life which is a gift from beyond us, not earthly life but the life of the spirit, the life that God lives, eternal life.

But this is not some kind of dreamy idea for those who like that sort of thing. It is not just for those who think of themselves as ‘spiritual’. It is about our deepest human need and desire. What Jesus wants to explore is the deepest desire of human beings, what we most fundamentally need. What we most deeply need is not the water that will leave us thirsty again, but the water that wells up to eternal life.

In today’s story the Samaritan woman and her village discover what they most deeply need and desire: the life that God gives. That life is not like water that will leave us thirsting again, because it is inexhaustible. God pours himself out for us without ever being diminished.

Water, of course, is necessary for the life of the body, our biological life. But that will not last for ever; it is a life which is limited and conditioned by death. And water itself is a limited resource, when you use up what you’ve got, it’s gone. And because it’s limited it can be a cause of rivalry and conflict, as it was in the reading from Exodus. As it may be, perhaps, in the future in some parts of the world as climate change causes more deserts to appear.

So the water the body needs, in this story, stands for the desires which cannot ultimately satisfy us. Those desires which are limited and bounded by death and so are the cause of rivalry and conflict.

The death-bound nature of this kind of desire appears in other ways in this story. We’ve already noticed that the woman is to some extent excluded by the other women of her village. Some perhaps might think she has been living a loose life, with those five husbands and now with a new man. But in a patriarchal society such as this, women had little say over what happened to them. It was men who decided who women would marry and men who decided to divorce their wives when it suited them. So perhaps this woman has been the victim of the rivalrous desire of a number of different men. She is now a social outcast because of the conflict that their desire has generated.

Jesus’ perception of her history leads to the exposure of a deeper rivalry. The woman says, “Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you (plural) say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.”

Here is the age-old conflict between the Samaritans and the Jews cast in terms of a rivalry about God. And Jesus’ answer shows how this talk about God is really just a disguise for another desire bound up with death, a desire for something limited which cannot satisfy. God is not like that, says Jesus. God is spirit, breath. God is the life from beyond us which is without limit. All those who worship God worship in spirit and in truth. How foolish it is to be in rivalry over God. As if there might not be enough to go round.

Jesus delivers us from our rivalrous death-bound desires, the desires which can never satisfy, by giving us the life which God lives. The life which gushes up like a spring of water to eternal life. The life which is not diminished in giving itself.

Which I think is what St Paul is talking about in today’s passage from Romans where he says that we will be saved through Christ from “the wrath”.  Paul in the Greek doesn’t actually say “the wrath of God”, just “the wrath”; the words “of God” were added by the translator who for some reason thought they should be there. (The King James Bible, in this instance, gets it right.)

“Wrath” in Greek is orge. “Orgy” comes from the same word. It speaks of desire which is never satisfied, desire out of control, desire collapsing in on itself in a spiral of self-destruction. Wrath is the flip side of our death-bound desires, what those desires do to us if we are not saved from them. Our desires are fixed on what will never satisfy us, and so we experience wrath, rage, frustration. Because we are seeking life, true life, eternal life, where it can never be found.

But Jesus is saving us from “the wrath”. His gift is eternal life, the life God lives, which we receive as his gift because we cannot construct it for ourselves. We must allow him to liberate us from our death-bound desires so that we can be born from above and live according to God’s deathless desire, God’s desire which will satisfy us eternally because it is entirely without limit and without rivalry.

The life of the spirit is given to all who seek, because God is already present in our hearts as the ground of our being, the word of our creation. All who seek God in spirit and truth will know this spring of living water, which is at the heart of the prayer and meditation of all great spiritual traditions.

Jesus enters this story as the Messiah, the fulfilment of the spiritual desire and longing of the Jewish people. That is expected, if you read the prophets. What is not expected is that he comes as the fulfilment for the Samaritans as well – a different religion. Jesus is the universal Messiah, God coming to us in fulfilment of all human hopes and longings. In the Church this gift is received and grows in a new way through sacramental signs, the grace of baptism and the Eucharist.

Towards the end of today’s Gospel Jesus introduces another image of the life that he gives, the food that his disciples know nothing about. Jesus will enlarge on that later in John’s Gospel in his teaching about the Eucharist: Jesus himself is the bread come down from heaven; the bread that he will give is his flesh for the life of the world.

As the people of baptism we are reborn in the life-giving water that Jesus gives. As the people of the Eucharist we feed on the deathless life of God who liberates us from our death-bound desires. Through the life that God gives we too can live in self-giving love rather than rivalry, because we receive our life as a gift rather than grasping it as a possession. We too can pour ourselves out for others without fear of being diminished because we know that the true source of our life is not in ourselves but is God’s gift.

Jesus said, “The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” Lord Jesus, give us this water, so that we may never thirst. Amen.