Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 15 2015

Isaiah 50.4-9a

James 3.1-12

Mark 8.27-38

A little bit about geography, again. In last week’s reading from Mark’s gospel Jesus went to Tyre and the region of the Decapolis, and we needed to understand that those were Gentile places to get what Mark was trying to tell us about inclusion and the need of all human society for conversion.

This week it’s the same. Jesus takes the disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi. As with last week this is a journey into Gentile territory. But Caesarea Philippi was not just any old Gentile town. It was an in-your-face celebration of pagan gods and the Roman Empire. Built around an ancient cave sanctuary of Pan, the horned god of nature and wildness, by the time of Jesus it was full of temples and shrines, cults and priesthoods serving the gods and offering sacrifices before their images.

It was also a place of luxury villas, in a cool valley watered by a mountain river, where the rich spent the summer. Philip II, the son of Herod the Great, had named it “Caesarea Philippi” in honour of the Emperor Augustus and himself, and had put up the biggest and newest temple of all, in gleaming white marble, dedicated to Caesar. The Emperor, a mortal man who lived in Rome, was worshipped at Caesarea as a god.

To devout Jews, Caesarea was culturally alien and religiously shocking. But it was here that Jesus brought his disciples to ask them the crucial question: ‘Who do people say that I am?’ By asking that question there Jesus shows what is at stake. The disciples are faced by a choice, a decision: what is it that is ultimately true about the world?

On the one hand, there was everything that Caesarea stood for: the worship of created things, above all of Caesar. In the Roman Empire might was right, and anything that you could achieve by power and force was permissible. There was no higher authority. The weak and the poor didn’t count.

But if Jesus is the Messiah, God’s anointed leader, then the Roman Emperor is not. If Jesus is the Messiah, then the one he called “Father” is the one true God, the creator of all things, and him alone must we serve. If Jesus is the Messiah then his law is the highest authority: the law of love and compassion, especially for the poorest, the weakest, the most marginalized.

In this choice there is no middle ground. It is one or the other. So when Peter says to Jesus, “you are the Messiah”, he is making a bold and risky statement of faith. He is rejecting Caesar’s claim on the world, and choosing to follow Jesus as God’s true anointed leader. And he was doing that right there where Caesar was worshipped as a god.

Even so, Peter’s faith has not yet led him to understanding. He sees that Jesus is the alternative to Caesar. But he does not yet see how very different those alternatives are. So when Jesus tells the disciples that he must – must – “undergo great suffering, and be rejected… and be killed”, this to Peter is just nonsense. Peter imagines that if Jesus is to oust Caesar from his place of authority, then he has to operate in the same way as Caesar, only more powerfully. He has to be a stronger “strong man”, and conquer Rome by force.

But Jesus is the love of God in person, come into the world, not to condemn the world, but so that the world might be saved. The world needs saving, because the world is deeply resistant to love, deeply ordered against God’s purposes and law. The world, in the words of St Paul, is in slavery to sin and death.

Love, come into the world, can only win the victory and remain love by freely suffering what the world inflicts. Love has come to bear in his own person the consequences of sin, so that the world might be freed from sin. But love would cease to be love if it fought back in the way the world fights. And this means that love, in the world as it is, must follow the way of the cross.

And so, too, must those who follow Jesus. If we have made the choice to follow Jesus and not the powers of the world, then we are choosing to follow in his path of rejection and suffering and death. But we do so in faith that by sharing in Christ’s sufferings we will also share in his resurrection. Or, to put it another way, it is by dying to ourselves that Christ will come alive in us, so that in the end we can say with St Paul, “it is no longer I who live, but Christ in me”. This is the pattern that is marked on every Christian life, the truth that every person lives who has made the choice to follow Jesus. The way of the cross, which is none other than the way of life and peace.

This marks the whole of our lives. In Baptism we are adopted in Christ as children of God. That means that all of what we are is taken up in Christ and offered to the Father. And because we are in Christ, who is the Father’s beloved Son, we too are recognised by the Father as his beloved children.

This means that there is no part of our lives that is not Christ’s. We are his, claimed by him as his own, washed by him in the waters of baptism, buried with him in death and raised in him to new and eternal life. That is our identity as Christians. Death and resurrection is the pattern of the life of Christ, and the pattern of our own lives in him.

So in all things, great and small, we are called to follow Jesus, and not Caesar – or his modern equivalent. We don’t have temples to the Emperor any more but there is plenty of worship of created things. We are led to assume that anything we can do, we may do. The power of the world wants to be taken for the ultimate reality, with all its political structures and markets and the forces that drive out the weak and poor. So to follow Jesus is still the way of the cross, still the path of dangerous resistance to the way the world wags.

For some of our brothers and sisters in Christ in the Middle East at the moment, that can quite literally be a choice between their loyalty to Jesus Christ, and staying alive. For us the choice may not seem so stark. But the way of Jesus, the way of love and self-giving, is something that should permeate all our daily lives and decisions.

For example, in how we notice and care for the poor and the marginalized. In standing for justice against oppressors and bullies. In being kind to others, especially when that’s an effort. In how we use our money. In our personal relationships, in how we seek the other’s good and deny ourselves. If we have authority because of our role at work or in our family, let us remember that authority in Christ is to serve, and never to exalt ourselves against someone else.

Seen from that perspective, every day is full of choices, small but significant, to follow the way of the cross. We can go one way and seek self-exaltation and our own satisfaction whatever the cost to others. Or we can go the way of Jesus, the way of love and self-giving. That is the way of the cross, even in little things, because it always costs us something, always involves self-emptying. But dying to ourselves is what enables Christ to come alive in us. To die to ourselves and live to Christ is to choose what is ultimately true about the world. And that way alone is the way of life and peace.

Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 14 2015

Isaiah 35.4-7a

James 2.1-17

Mark 7.24-37

I’ve been enjoying a lovely couple of weeks on Lake Maggiore in northern Italy. It’s a delightful place for a holiday and I doubt if anyone would wonder why people go there. But if instead I’d spent two weeks in, say, Frinton, there may perhaps be some who would scratch their heads and ask why. Some destinations are obvious, some more surprising.

This is what confronts us at the beginning of today’s gospel reading. Jesus went to the region of Tyre. Why? If we were familiar with the geography of the gospels this would be surprising, because Tyre was a Gentile city, well outside the Jewish regions that had so far been the focus of Jesus’ ministry.

Now we may need to remind ourselves that this scene follows on from last week’s encounter with the religious authorities from Jerusalem. So this is a real contrast. This is an excursion from the centre to the edges, indeed beyond the edges of Israel. Almost as though Jesus is testing the extent of his calling, the remit of the Messiah. Is he called to Israel only, or to all the world?

And as there is a contrast in scene, so also there is a contrast in the response of those Jesus encounters. The religious authorities from Jerusalem had sought him out to put him to the test, and had taken offence at him and rejected him – even though all he had done was quote the scriptures that they should have known very well.

But in Tyre a Gentile woman comes to him in a strange house, in Gentile territory, and bows before him. This is very compromising both for her and for Jesus, breaking the social taboos of her own culture. But she comes in faith. Unlike the religious authorities, she does not take offence at Jesus even when he uses the very rough language of the time that referred to Gentiles as “dogs”. And if his response to her can seem to be a test or a challenge, her reply to him seems to confirm him in what he was exploring – whether his vocation was to the Gentiles as well.

It is worth noting that this is the only exchange between Jesus and another person in which he concedes the point. In all the exchanges with the religious authorities who reject him Jesus comes out on top and shows them how they are wrong. Here, alone, Jesus gives way to someone else. And the person talking to him is a Gentile and a woman – so this is very significant.

On returning he comes by way of the Decapolis, that is, a group of mixed population towns in Galilee. We need to remember how multicultural Galilee was at that time. Here he performs another healing miracle. And all think well of him.

Earlier in his gospel Mark had told a pair of healing stories set in Jewish territory – the raising of the daughter of Jairus and the healing of the woman with a flow of blood. Both of those crossed lines of purity and included the excluded. With today’s two Gentile healing stories Mark shows that the same principle of inclusion has to be brought to bear in societies outside Israel as well.

So this is not about contrasting Jewish and Gentile society as though one was purity obsessed and exclusive and the other open and inclusive. Quite the reverse: both societies tended to define themselves by who they excluded, and both societies needed to be converted, to discover God’s generous love that reaches out to all.

Jewish society, it is true, had the advantage of the law and the prophets, but Jesus shows that outward observance of the law is not enough: righteousness and justice, compassion and love, need to come from the heart. And Gentile society, even without the law and the prophets, could still arrive at the same understanding. Outside the revelation of God to Israel there was still an intuitive knowledge of God that could lead people to seek Jesus – even when he tried to stay hidden.

Human society, whether it be Jewish or Gentile, tends to organize itself against the way God works by setting up barriers of exclusion and defining itself in terms of insiders and outsiders. In Jesus God shows his preferential option for those whom human society casts out: the poor, the unclean, the outcast and the marginalized.

The apostle James enlarges on this in his letter. “Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?” This is a radical new understanding which God’s people are to enact in the life of the Church. In place of exclusion, the barriers of purity, class, caste and sex, God’s people are to live from the compassion and love that has found them and saved them. They are to live in such a way that others are drawn in to that same compassion and love. Faith that God is turning the world the right way up in Jesus is to be expressed in works that bear witness to that faith.

We do not need to look far to see the need for compassion in our world today. The desperate plight of migrants, the tragic pictures of a dead child on a beach in Turkey, have brought home to us how much human society is still ordered by exclusion, defining itself by who is on the outside, the victims who are cast out and sent away. We may feel helpless in the face of such tremendous suffering. But the church is speaking out, and, more importantly, acting to make a difference. In many of the places where refugees are arriving it is Christians who are providing for their most immediate needs. And even where we are not, as it were, on the front line the churches have been speaking up, providing a voice of conscience and compassion in our national life.

Last week the Archbishop of Canterbury issued a statement on the present crisis. He acknowledges that it is hugely complex with no easy answers, but he seeks to encourage political leaders across Europe in a joint response, as well as commending immediate help for those most in need. He reminds us, in his words, that “As Christians we believe we are called to break down barriers, to welcome the stranger and love them as ourselves and to seek the peace and justice of our God, in our world, today.”

That is part of the mission that Jesus came to fulfill, and that he entrusted to his Church. We may feel that there is little we can do personally about the terrible violence in the Middle East and the crisis it has caused. But we can pray; we belong to the one universal church, and some of our brothers and sisters are labouring on the front line and need our prayers. With them also we pray for all who are in need and for an end to oppression and violence.

But we can also make a difference by living differently, as St James tells us in today’s epistle. Our faith is something that ought to appear in our works, that is, in how we live. All societies are in need of conversion, our own no less than those of the first century that Jesus encountered. And as we live in a democracy we can play our part in forming and informing public opinion and social policy. The role of the Church in our society can be compared with the yeast that leavens the whole loaf, making a difference in the society around us. With all people of good will, we can help ensure that compassion and welcome do not become strange concepts in our city and our nation.