Sermon, Trinity Sunday 2012

Isaiah 6:1-8           

Romans 8:12-17           

John 3:1-17

Yesterday was a joyful day in the lives of two members of the congregation I serve at St Pancras Old Church. And it was a day of great joy for me as well, as I had the privilege of presiding at their marriage and celebrating their wedding Mass.

The marriage rite concluded, as it does, with the exchange of rings. And the words that are used at that moment are:

I give you this ring as a sign of our marriage. With my body I honour you, all that I am I give to you, and all that I have I share with you, within the love of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Some astounding things happen in church. Sinners become saints, bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. And those words that people say to each other at their marriage are also astounding.

At a marriage we name the mystery we celebrate today, God in three Persons, the Holy Trinity, incomprehensible, beyond all names and forms; and we locate our pledge of human love within that mystery.

Is this just mystification, spoiling a happy human occasion with obscure theological jargon? I don’t think so. Because the Trinity is about love. It is about the revelation that God is love, and that God calls human beings to enter in and share in that love.

Most people believe in God, of course, apart from a few eccentrics. That belief is expressed in many religions, but mostly in our own so-called secular culture by vague inklings and longings. “I think there is something more than this”; “I believe in someone watching over me”.

But we as Christians find that we have to believe in God, and that we have to talk about God as Trinity, because we are in a living relationship with Jesus of Nazareth. And it is that relationship that enables us to say that God is love, love come to us, love embracing us and enfolding us and carrying us home.

Because we are in that relationship with the risen Lord we are able to say something about God, and in essence it is this: God is whoever it is who loved Jesus and raised him from the dead. And all the formulations of doctrine through church history, the Trinity and the Incarnation, flow from that. God is whoever it is who loved Jesus and raised him from the dead.

The background to the God of Jesus, of course, is Israel. The God of Israel was not like the gods of the other nations that could be described, understood, depicted as statues. In the holy of holies in the Temple at Jerusalem there was no image of God, just empty space, a door into abyssal silence and infinite depth, the void beyond all things from which all things have their being.

And yet that depth, that incomprehensible mystery, called to Israel. That experience of God calling took many forms. It could be the rage against injustice and exploitation that rose unbidden in the heart of the Prophet Amos. It could be the “the sound of utter silence”, at which Elijah covered his face and was afraid. Or it could be a terrifying theophany, such as the vision in Isaiah today.

And then Jesus came among us, a human being who called God “Father” and said that the Father loved him. A human being who, moreover, said that he was the Father’s message of love, in person, sent into the world, as he says this morning in today’s Gospel.

Now for a human being to say that God the Creator loves him is to say something which seems to be impossible. Love, real love, can only happen between equals, in freedom, in a relationship of mutual self-giving.

We use the word “love” quite loosely of course. We might say that we love our cat, or the view from Fiesole at sunset, or a nice bottle of claret. But we are not in a relationship of mutual self-giving with those things. Even a cat cannot give back to us as we give to her, in equality and freedom.

Love, in the proper sense, is only possible between equals. So when Jesus the man says that God the Creator is his Father, and loves him, he is saying something astounding. He is saying that he and the Father are equals. He is saying that they give themselves to each other in mutual surrender and freedom. Jesus the human being is saying that he and the Father are both God.

So Jesus, the human being, is God come among us. And the reason why he has come among us is so that all human beings can come to call God “Father”. So that all human beings can enter into the love that the Father shares with the Son. So that human beings, in Jesus, can be partakers of the divine nature. And to enable this to happen he has sent his Spirit into the hearts of believers. Now this Spirit is sent from the heart of God, and therefore is also God, because everything in God is God, pure and simple.

Now as the church grew and spread, people thought and debated about what exactly this all meant, and how best to express it.

Some Christians argued that Jesus was not really God, only similar to God. But the problem is that this makes Jesus’ mission impossible. If he is not truly God, then the Father cannot love him – or us. He can be kind, merciful, compassionate, yes, but not loving, because he can only love his equal, in freedom and mutual self giving.

Some other Christians argued that Jesus wasn’t really human, just God in the appearance of a human, a vision or illusion. But if Jesus isn’t human, then we humans can’t be joined with him in the relationship of love he shares with his Father.

All of which led over the course of time to the Church saying that there is one God in three persons, and that the Son truly became human and is “of one substance with the Father”, as we say in the creed. And so the Church arrived at the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.

Language of course can be tricky, and words change their meaning. When the theologians centuries ago said “three persons” they didn’t mean what today we might mean, three individuals or three people. They meant that there are three relations in God, so that the heart of Divine life, the inside of God as it were, is infinite mutual self-giving love. God is not literally a father, or a son, or a breath of wind. These are metaphors which connect with things we do understand, and point to relations in God which are real and true, but surpass our understanding.

And in case you’re wondering if the language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is all a bit masculine for a metaphor, you might like to consider that the word “Trinity”, in Greek and in Latin, is feminine.

But whether the metaphor is masculine or feminine, the message, the good news, remains the same. God is whoever it is who loved Jesus and raised him from the dead. This same God has created us to enter into the relationship of self-giving love that we call the Trinity, and in union with Jesus, who is fully human and fully divine, has made that possible.

Love is the reason for our creation, and the goal of our existence. When that love came among us, and was rejected by being nailed to a cross, God refused to take that rejection as our final answer, and raised Jesus from the dead.

We are joined with the risen Jesus in faith. In our baptism we partake of his nature and are born again as children of God. In the Eucharist and through the scriptures he feeds us with his divine life.

The love of God which surpasses all human knowledge draws us, in Jesus, into God’s very life. The risen life of Jesus opens the life and love of God to all people. In Jesus we have received the Spirit of adoption by which we, too, call God “Father”.

And it is that Spirit, in the risen Jesus, who enables us to believe and confess and love one God, Father Son and Holy Spirit.

Sermon Easter 2 2012

Acts 4:32-35

1 John 5:1-6

John 20:19-31

North Korea, that eccentric and isolated state, caused alarm again last week by its plans to send up a rocket to put a satellite into orbit. Those plans were regarded by many as a cover for testing an intercontinental missile. Missiles are scary things, particularly when the people building them have atom bombs and are fixated by an ideology that most of the world regards as deranged.

In the event, however, the North Korean test failed, so perhaps its neighbours are now a little less agitated than they were.

This may seem a curious introduction to today’s Gospel, but there is a connection. The word “missile” is part of a family of words which share the same root. Others include mission, Mass, and missal, and all derive from the Latin for “to send”.

Sending is mission. And today the risen Lord appears to the disciples in the upper room, and sends them. But unlike the sending of a missile with its threat of hostility and violence, this is a mission of peace.

“Peace be with you. As the Father sent me, so I am sending you.”

As we have been seeing during Easter week, in John’s Gospel the resurrection is really the beginning of the story of the disciples. Mary Magdalene, Peter, John and today Thomas are brought into a new relationship when they meet the risen Lord. The meeting completes their journey into faith, liberating them from the various ways in which they have been in captivity to sin and death.

Meeting with the risen Lord enables them to believe and so enter into the life which Jesus shares with the Father in the Holy Spirit. The resurrection means coming to live in God in whom there is no death.

Today Jesus spells out more of what that means. The life of God is not something static and self-contained, but is super-abundant, inexhaustible, continually pouring itself out in the work of creation. God’s utterly vivacious loving alive-ness bursts out in all directions.

Jesus has been sent into the world, the Son of the Father, the eternal Word, to complete the work of creation, to bring all to perfection and to enable the creation to share the life of God. And the risen Lord has opened the way to the Father, so that we can enter in and live with his life. That means we also share in the movement of that life into creation. The resurrection draws us into the sending of the Son and enables us to become its continuation in the world. Those who believe in Jesus become part of God’s movement into creation to redeem creation.

That is what the church’s mission is. It arises from the heart of God and pours itself out into the world. It is a Divine movement that we receive and participate in. We are sent. The mission of the church is not something we devise ourselves. Just as Baptism and the Eucharist are things we receive and participate in, because they are part of that same sending, part of that same movement of God into the world. Baptism and Eucharist constitute the Body of Christ, his presence and his mission in the world. This is why one of the words for the Eucharist is the Mass, the “sending”. This derives from the dismissal at the end, “ite missa est”, go, you are sent, go in the peace of Christ. The Mass reconstitutes us as the sending, the mission, of God, bearing his peace into the world.

The mission that Christ gives us is peace, forgiveness, and witness to the risen Lord. Its purpose is to bring people into that relationship of faith in which we can say “my Lord and my God”, in which we receive and participate in the very life of God.

All churches are now supposed to have mission statements, a description of the work that we believe God is calling us to do in our particular context. That’s an important thing. For too long the idea of mission was synonymous with foreign mission, that is sending people to far flung corners of the world to preach the gospel to those who had never heard it. That is an important aspect of mission. But we must not forget that the church is God’s mission in the world, everywhere. Home and abroad. We are sent as the Church, here. We have a mission, here.

But mission statements must be how we interpret and live the mission we have received, not something we construct ourselves. Peace, forgiveness, witness to the risen Lord, and bringing people to faith, are the core. Without those elements whatever we do is simply not the mission of the Church. Social activism by itself, however good, is not what Christ was sent to do and not what we are sent to do.

There is a social gospel, but only because there is a gospel. Care for the marginalised and needy necessarily follows from the fact that there is Good News. The truth that God in Jesus has freed us from the old order of sin and death spills over into every aspect of life that is still under the sway of sin and death. The Gospel, necessarily, is about liberation for all. But it begins with the Good News of Jesus.

Sometimes I think we as the church need to recover confidence in the mission we have received, the movement of God into creation in which we are caught up. Occasionally, exceptionally, I come across churches or clergy who seem to be very busy doing all kinds of good things in the community, but who seem to lack confidence in the basic beliefs that ought to be motivating all this activism.

St Francis is supposed to have said, “preach the gospel and, if necessary, use words”. There is a place for that but it is perhaps a little over quoted. It can be too ready an excuse for those who are embarrassed about making up-front claims for faith. Faith does actually need words. Now we are not all speech makers, we are not all teachers, not all apologists for Christian doctrine. But as the first letter of St Peter says, “always be prepared to give an account of the hope that is within you, but do it with gentleness and respect.”

In one way or another, the answer to the question, “why do we care?”, comes back to the hope that is within us because Christ is risen.

We have met the risen Lord and been called by him, sent by him. He has drawn us into God’s mission, which is his own mission, to bring peace and forgiveness to the world. We are sent as witnesses of his risen life, to bring the world into the relationship into which he has drawn us, the relationship of love, peace, and forgiveness. The relationship in which we share the very life of God.

Because Christ is risen, because he has called us, he has sent us to bring all the world into the embrace of that relationship with him in which we say “my Lord and my God”.

Sermon at Parish Mass Easter Day 2012

Acts 10:34, 37-43

Colossians 3:1-4

John 20:1-9

I’d like to invite you to close your eyes for a moment and imagine all the colours of the rainbow. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Now try to imagine a colour you’ve never seen, an eighth colour. A colour that isn’t in the spectrum you know.

Difficult, isn’t it? Similarly, could we imagine a perfume we’ve never smelt, or music, if we’d never heard it? Can you imagine life outside the womb, until you are born?

Today, the disciples run to the tomb, and they start to experience something they have never experienced or imagined before. Something they were not even capable of imagining, until they actually experienced it.

“He saw and believed. Till this moment they had failed to understand the teaching of scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”

Everything we have read in the Gospel, up to now, was written because of what we read today. It is the resurrection which enables the story to be told. Throughout the gospels the disciples fail to understand Jesus until the resurrection enables them to imagine something they had never experienced before.

It was impossible to imagine a crucified Messiah, until the Messiah had risen from the dead. It was impossible to understand how the whole world was in slavery to sin and death, until the God in whom there is no sin or death bursts in upon that world. It was impossible for the disciples to know how much they were governed by the fear of death, until they experienced a reality in which death simply does not exist. It was impossible for the disciples to know their own complicity in violence, denial, betrayal, until the man they had denied came back to them from death breathing love and forgiveness.

As we heard on Friday, Jesus on the cross cried out, “It is accomplished!”. Jesus has finished the work the Father sent him to do. This is the work of creation, the work to restore and complete all things as the Father wills them to be. And the culmination of the work of creation is union with God. Jesus confers on those who believe “the power to become children of God”, as John announces in the prologue to his Gospel.

In a sense, in John’s Gospel, on the cross the story of Jesus is complete. He has done what he came to do. With the resurrection, the story of the disciples begins. The story of Mary Magdalene, Peter, the Beloved Disciple, Thomas. All of them, in different ways, come to faith. All of them have been imprisoned in an imagination bounded by death, and all of them are called by the risen Lord from out of that prison. They come to believe. They come to be children of God in whom there is no death.

Before the resurrection, in John, Jesus talks about his relationship with the Father as something that only he participates in. He speaks of “the Father” or “my Father”, addressing the disciples as people who are, for the time being, outside that relationship. There is no Lord’s Prayer in John, he does not teach them to pray “our Father”.

But Jesus does promise that the disciples will come to share that relationship. “In my Father’s house”, says Jesus, “there are many dwelling-places… If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”

In his High Priestly Prayer at the Last Supper he has prayed that his disciples might be one, not in a functional sense of being part of the same organisation, but in the way that Jesus and his Father are one: “may they all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”

When Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”, he is saying that he is the way by which his disciples, too, will come to call God “Father”. He is the way by which they will be included in the life that he shares with his Father, the life in which there is no death.

So, when the Risen Lord meets Mary Magdalene outside the tomb, he says, “Go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God”. For the first time in John’s Gospel, Jesus’ Father is our Father, too, his God is our God, too. We are no longer servants, or even friends, but brothers and sisters.

Jesus through his death has gone to the Father, and now lives the limitless, unconditioned, deathless life of the Resurrection. By the power of his resurrection, we too can become children of God, we too can call God “Father”.

The old imagination of a life conditioned by violence and fear and bounded by death has gone. Christ is risen, and that changes everything. Christ is risen, and that makes it possible to believe. Christ is risen, and that makes it possible to imagine what we could never have imagined before: that in the Father there is no death, no violence, no darkness at all. The Father is utterly vivacious, deathless self-giving love. And the Father calls us through Jesus to share in his life.

With the first disciples, the resurrection enables us to believe. To believe in Jesus, God’s Son. To believe in God the Father who raised him from the dead. To believe in the Spirit, who is God’s life, bringing creation into being, breathing in our hearts. Belief is belief in, not about. Belief is relationship. In a while we shall say the Creed together as we prepare to renew our baptismal promises. The Creed is not a tick chart of statements that we have to agree to. It is a description of the relationship we are in. The relationship of the Church, God’s people redeemed by the resurrection, with and in God who is Trinity.

And then like the first disciples, we shall meet the Risen Lord. He is risen to the unconditioned, boundless life of the Father, and makes himself known in bread and wine, the endless inexhaustible extension of his risen presence in all the world until the end of time.

We have met him, and we believe. We have met him, risen from the dead. He feeds us with his life, the life he shares with the Father, in whom there is no death. He is the way, the truth and the life. Through him we come home to the Father’s house, our Father’s house. In him we are freed from the old order of sin and death.

Jesus has completed the work he came to do, the work of our creation. After the seventh day, when God rested from his work, the eighth day has dawned, the day of resurrection, the day of new creation, the day that will never end.

God has burst into our lives from the empty tomb, to give us what we could never have imagined or foreseen: the deathless, vivacious, utterly loving life of God our Father. Now, and for ever. Alleluia, Amen.

Sermon at the Solemn Liturgy Good Friday 2012

Isaiah 52:13-53:12

Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9

The Passion according to John

“It is finished.”

So says Jesus, the last word he speaks from the cross in John’s Gospel. What does this mean? Is Jesus simply saying that it’s all over, is he relieved that death, finally, is at hand to end his sufferings? Sometimes, after the death of someone who has suffered much, we find comfort in the thought that their suffering is over. That is not wrong.

But is that all there is to what John is saying here? John, of all the gospel writers, is the most rich in symbolism, in hidden depths of meaning. What is finished is the task that the Father has sent Jesus to do, and we know this because Jesus has already many times spoken of its completion.

When Jesus met the Samaritan woman at the well, after he told her that he would give living water, he said, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.”

Later, he said to those who criticised him for healing on the Sabbath, “The works that the Father has given me to complete, the very works that I am doing, testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me.”

Then, at the Last Supper, in the high priestly prayer, he prays to his Father, “I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.”

What is finished is the Father’s work, the work of the creator, which Jesus has come to complete. This work consists of bringing everything into being, giving life, and glorifying the Father.

It may seem strange to think that the work of creation might not be complete. But only if we think of creation as an event in the past, something like the “big bang” setting everything into motion. But that is not the scriptural idea of creation at all.

Creation is the principle by which everything exists moment by moment. It is the dependence of everything on the will of God.

In the biblical vision, creation is something continually coming into being, striving in its own birth-pangs to come to the completion willed by the Father.

What is that completion? It is union with God. It is entering into the life that God lives, which we call eternal life.

This takes us right back to Christmas morning, and the prologue of John’s Gospel, in which the mission of Jesus is announced: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being… He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.”

Jesus, the Word of the Father, has come into the world to complete the work of creation, to put right all that is wrong, to heal the sick, to raise up the fallen, to give life, to give power to become children of God. Jesus has come from the Father so that we, too, can call God Father.

So the cry of Jesus on the cross, “it is finished”, is not a statement of final relief, still less of despair. It is a cry of triumph and exaltation. It recalls the words of God over creation at the beginning and the end of the Bible.

In Genesis, we are told, God finished the work of creation, and blessed it, and rested from his work. And at the end of the book of Revelation there is that glorious vision when the new heaven and the new earth have appeared and the new Jerusalem has come down from heaven to be home for all peoples. And Jesus says, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. Those who conquer will inherit these things, and I will be their God and they will be my children.”

But how is it that the work of creation can be completed on the cross, in what seems like a shameful act of violent destruction?

For the author of John’s Gospel, what is truly taking place on the cross is not defeat, but victory; not shame but glory. Many times Jesus has spoken of his death as his glorification. Why? Because it is his return to the Father.

What is taking place is the spiritual reality foreshadowed by the Rite of Atonement in the temple. This is referred to in the reading from Hebrews that we heard this morning, which tells us that Jesus is “the supreme high priest who has gone through to the highest heaven”.

In Rite of Atonement, which took place once a year, the High Priest offered a sacrifice for the sins of Israel and then went into the Holy of Holies, the place where God symbolically dwelt, to intercede for the people.

So Jesus, returning to the Father, has offered once for all his self-giving sacrifice for sin, and entered the heavenly sanctuary where God dwells, to make intercession for us and for all of creation.

So this is indeed the completion of his work, his return to the Father. The death of Jesus is his glorification, his exaltation.

The Rite of Atonement in the temple was at its heart a symbolic enactment of God restoring his creation. Jesus has in his person achieved what the Rite of Atonement pointed to. As the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, he has passed into the true heavenly sanctuary, through his sacrifice of self giving love, and in so doing has achieved the eternal perfection of all he is sanctifying.

But of course that is not the end. We could not realistically believe that creation had been restored by the death of Jesus if his body had stayed in defeat in the tomb.

The glorification of Jesus is not a nice idea, floating somewhere in the heavens above but not connecting with us down here. It would mean nothing if the rest of the human race remained in slavery to sin and death. But that glory cannot be contained, and will come bursting from the tomb.

The Church lives in the light and power of that victory. Every day, including today. We only celebrate “Good” Friday because of the resurrection. But in the cycle of the liturgy, for the time being, we wait. Hidden from our sight, our High Priest has passed to the Father and completed the work of our redemption. But it is his resurrection that enables us to share in his victory. In but a little while, we shall acclaim him with shouts of Easter joy. Today, we wait at the cross, outside the tomb. Christ has won his victory, and the victor’s triumphant return will not be long.

Sermon at Parish Mass Maundy Thursday 2012

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

1 Corinthians 11:23-26

John 13:1-17, 31b-35

We began this week with the crowds, outside in the sunshine, acclaiming Jesus as King and Messiah, as he entered Jerusalem to the waving of palm branches and shouts of “Hosanna!”

What a contrast that is with tonight’s intimate scene of the upper room. Now it is night; Jesus and his disciples are wary: the temple police have put out an arrest warrant and Jesus is being hunted. The acclamation he received Palm Sunday must have seemed revolutionary – indeed it was, but not in the way Jesus’ opponents think. They think of him as a rival within their understanding of power, a danger to their established order.

But the acclamation of Palm Sunday, with its Old Testament references, indicates that Jesus is King and Messiah in an unexpected, subversive way. He is King without violence, revealed in humility. He is a Messiah who will include all people, not exclude the stranger. He is a priest who will do away with sacrifice. All of this seems contradictory to the normal human way of thinking. But this is because it is God’s rule, God’s kingdom of love, breaking in to the human kingdoms of death and oppression and fear, and overturning them.

All of this takes concrete form this night.

The context is the Passover, the defining story of the People of God called Israel. A people saved by God and with a destiny to bring salvation to the nations. But a people saved – so it seems – through sacrifice, their identity bound up with the death of the firstborn in Egypt and the sacrificial rites in the temple. God, it seems, delivers his people, but at the cost of violence inflicted elsewhere.

But Jesus as we have been seeing is the law in person, the dwelling place of God among his people. He is in his person the definitive revelation of God. Jesus is the key to a new interpretation of the law and prophets.

The Passover Lamb of old was slain to avert the wrath of the destroying angel in Egypt, so that the angel of death would “pass over” the homes marked with the lamb’s blood.

Now Jesus, at the Passover meal, gives his disciples a memorial of his death, to make it effective for ever. What better thing could he choose for this than the sacrificed lamb, lying there on the table? But he does not.

Instead, at this supper Jesus substitutes the Passover lamb with a piece of bread, which becomes his body. The sacrifice is set aside. In place of the substitute victim of the lamb, Jesus takes his own death and turns it around. His life, which was to be taken from him by the violence of others, becomes a gift, a free offering, in love, this is my body given for you. Bread and wine are transformed into his body and blood, for the people who will be his body, his life, in the world. Betrayal and murder are transformed into love.

Now who is it who experiences the death of the first born? It is the only begotten Son of the Father, who takes that death upon himself, in an offering of self-giving love. The Passover is reinterpreted, the sacrifice subverted: God is on the side of the victims, all of them, liberating them from death.

And at this supper Jesus gives his command of love and his example of humble service. This is what the new people of God is to be like. Unlike any other revolutionary movement in history. A community which is to be the perpetual transformation of violence and betrayal into love. A community continually brought into being through the Eucharist.

For this Jesus consecrates himself as a priest, the priest who will do away with sacrifice by his offering of himself. The priesthood of Aaron, with its sacrifices of animals, is ended. The priesthood mysteriously signified by the Old Testament figure of Melchizedek is established. Melchizedek came to meet Abraham, bearing bread and wine. He is a priest without a sacrifice, and is described as the King of Peace – both contradictions, to our normal way of thinking. But both describe Jesus. Both describe the new way that God is bringing to birth this night. Jesus is indeed the great high priest – but in a completely different way to the priests in the temple.

The Last Supper discourse in John goes on for many chapters, and concludes with what is called the high priestly prayer of Christ. This is a prayer in which he consecrates himself and his disciples, to be this new priesthood. And in John, the disciples are all who love Jesus and keep his commands. Jesus confers on the whole church a priesthood and a kingdom which are an extension of his own.

John does not make a distinction between disciples and apostles, all are equal in this consecration.  But John does not describe the institution of the Eucharist. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul do. In that narrative it is the apostles who receive the command to “do this in remembrance of me”, and who by that command received the power to do so. The power to consecrate and offer the Eucharist, the real participation and making effective of Christ’s once-for-all offering of himself. From the first it was the apostles and those they ordained who ordered the worship of the Church, ensuring the continuity of each generation with the apostolic tradition.

These two aspects of priesthood are not contradictory. The church as a whole is a priesthood and a kingdom, chosen and consecrated by Christ. The priesthood of the ordained ministry, in succession from the Apostles, is a particular representational sign of the priesthood of the whole church. It acts as a sign of continuity linking each particular Eucharistic community to that first gathering in the upper room. Thus the church appears as one visible historic community, a true body, which is nonetheless complete in all its parts.

In each Eucharistic gathering the church is made present and real, the new people of God, the kingdom of peace and the priesthood which changes sacrifice into love. It is that community, and none other, which is to change the world. In each Eucharist our violence and betrayal, and that of the world, is taken up and transformed into love. In each Eucharist our rivalry and desire for domination are humbled and transformed into service.

This is no mere calling to mind events of the past, but is the means established by Jesus by which the world will enter the kingdom of God. That begins anew at every Mass. Tonight, it begins with us.

Sermon at Parish Mass Palm Sunday 2012

Mark 11:1-10

Isaiah 50:4-7

Philippians 2:6-11

Mark 14 & 15

We are now two months away from the extended weekend of celebration for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. I don’t know if there are any street parties planned where you live. Here in the parish of Old St Pancras there will be a thanksgiving service at St Mary’s Somers Town, and similar events will be taking place up and down the country, not least in St Paul’s Cathedral of course.

And I expect we’ll hear Handel’s wonderful anthem, “Zadok the Priest”, which was written for the Coronation of George II in 1727 and sung at every Coronation since. The words of course are: “Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet anointed Solomon King. And all the people rejoiced and said, God save the King.”

What the anthem doesn’t say is what Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet did next, which is that they put King Solomon on a donkey, to be precise, King David’s mule, and led him into Jerusalem, because his anointing took place outside the city.

Whatever form the Jubilee celebrations take, locally or nationally, I don’t think any of them will feature the Queen getting on a donkey. A gilded state coach is more likely, or at least a Bentley. Just occasionally Her Majesty ventures onto trains as well. But donkeys seem to us to be a decidedly un-royal mode of transport.

Not, however, in the Bible, as we have seen. And when Jesus gets on a colt, which is a young donkey, the crowds recognise immediately the Royal claim that is being made, and they go wild and start acclaiming him as their king.

Mark’s account of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, which we heard before the procession this morning, is short but packed with detail, as Mark usually is. In the space of ten verses there are at least six different claims that Jesus is Messiah and King.

Apart from King Solomon, there is the prophecy in Zechariah which Matthew and John, but not Mark, mention in their accounts of Palm Sunday:

Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!
Lo, your king comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

So, riding a colt is a sign that Jesus is claiming kingship of Jerusalem; but we see immediately that it is a strange kind of kingship, one marked by humility. A colt, a little donkey, is about the lowliest animal that anyone could practically ride. So it is a sign which both proclaims kingship and subverts the idea of domination based on power and strength. Zechariah’s prophecy is about a King who will destroy the weapons of war, who will bring an end to violence and instigate the reign of God’s peace.

But there are other Old Testament donkey references, too. Mark’s account tells us that the colt was tied up. Of course, it would have been anyway, to stop it wandering off, so why does Mark go to the trouble of mentioning it? Well, at the end of the Book of Genesis, as Jacob lies dying, he utters mysterious prophecies about his descendents, the twelve tribes of Israel. Of Judah he says:

The sceptre shall not depart from Judah,
nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet,
until tribute comes to him;
and the obedience of the peoples is his.
Binding his foal to the vine
and his donkey’s colt to the choice vine.

So a tied up colt is a reference to the Messianic King who will descend from Judah in the line of David. Even in that little detail Mark is telling us more about who Jesus is claiming to be.

Also, we are told that the crowd spread their clothes before Jesus. And in the Second Book of Kings the same thing happened after Elisha anointed Jehu as King of Israel following the disastrous reign of Ahab and Jezebel. So Jesus is proclaimed as a righteous king, whose reign will be of a different kind to the corrupt and violent rulers currently in charge of Jerusalem.

Even the way that Jesus gets hold of the colt tells us something. It isn’t given to him; he requisitions it. “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately as you enter it, you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden; untie it and bring it.” In the ancient world, requisitioning means of transport was a royal prerogative, and the mere fact of doing it was making a royal claim.

And the crowd respond with cries of “Hosanna” and “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord”. “Hosanna” was originally a word of prayer and acclamation used by the priests in the temple rituals, and “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord” is from Psalm 118, originally a blessing uttered by the priests over pilgrims on their arrival in the temple.

But by the time of Jesus both of these had acquired Messianic overtones. They were greetings, not just for anyone, but for the long awaited Messiah.

Mark’s Gospel doesn’t hold back on making the point. In his entry into Jerusalem, Jesus is abundantly, almost excessively, being acclaimed as King and Messiah, the long awaited ruler who will bring in God’s Kingdom of justice and peace.

And so Holy Week opens. And it is the key to understanding the whole of what happens in Holy Week. From the Last Supper, through Good Friday, to the resurrection, Jesus is King and Messiah, and is showing what that means.

He is King, without violence, a King revealed in humility and service, the King of Peace. He is the Lord’s anointed ruler, the Messiah – but anointed with ointment for his burial. Anointed as the Priest who will put an end to sacrifice by his offering of himself. And he is the King who will conquer death by his own death, and reveal his kingdom through the resurrection.

As we follow the great events of this greatest of weeks, we will see all these aspects of Jesus. Holy Week is an opportunity for us to draw close to Jesus once more, to acclaim him as King, Priest, and Messiah. It is an opportunity for us to be conformed more closely to him in his suffering and death, that we might share in his resurrection. And it is an opportunity for his Kingdom of justice and peace and self-giving love to be made more real in our lives.

Sermon at Parish Mass Lent 5 2012

Jeremiah 31:31-34

Hebrews 5:7-9

John 12:20-33

124 days to go! Have you got tickets? Have you rented out your spare room for £900 a night? Have you worked out how you’re going to get on the underground or the buses, or drive around avoiding the VIP lanes? Can you can work from home, or change your hours? Have you stockpiled the food you might need in case the shops run out?

Of course, I’m talking about the Olympics. We don’t know quite what the impact is going to be like on the normal life of this city but no-one can say that we’re not being told to get ready. The whole world, it seems, is going to arrive on our doorstep. And I’m sure we will make everyone as welcome as we can.

Our experience this summer is probably going to be a little bit like being in Jerusalem at the Passover, at the time of Jesus. The temple in Jerusalem was the one and only place of ritual sacrifice in Judaism and everyone who could would try to be there for the Passover celebrations. The city was routinely so crowded at Passover that people had to sleep camped out in the surrounding districts, places like the Mount of Olives.

And it wasn’t only Jews who came for the festival. There were Greeks and Romans who found in Judaism something that their ancestral pagan religions lacked, truth and meaning, a foundation for life based on a relationship with the living God. They mostly didn’t formally become members of the Jewish faith, because of official discouragement and the obstacle, for men, of circumcision. But they attended the synagogues and the festivals in Jerusalem, kept the commandments, and became known as “God fearers”.

So in today’s reading from John’s Gospel we have some Greeks who have come to Jerusalem for the Passover. And this scene is in fact on Palm Sunday, just after Jesus has entered Jerusalem. Sometimes our readings get out of step with the liturgy, mainly because so much happens in the last week of Jesus’ life in the gospels that we can’t fit it all into one week of Mass readings.

Anyway, here are some God-fearing Greeks come for the Passover. But something unexpected happens: they ask to see Jesus. The reason they ask Philip about this is probably that he has a Greek name and came from a Greek speaking town, Bethsaida. “We want to see Jesus.” And seeing doesn’t simply mean looking at Jesus, it means they want to know, to understand, to believe. Jesus turns out to be the focus of attraction which draws them, even more than the temple and the Passover. They have come for one thing, and found something greater.

And it is this which prompts Jesus to say, “Now the hour has come”. Up until now in John’s gospel on a number of occasions we are told that Jesus’ “hour” had not yet come. And that “hour” is both his death and his glorification, which in John are the same thing.

The fact that Gentile nations are now coming to Jesus is the signal that his death and glorification are at hand, so that Jesus says, “when I am lifted up from the earth, I shall draw all people to myself”.

This attractive power of Jesus, his glorification which draws in all nations, is the signal that the prophecy in Isaiah 60 is fulfilled:

Arise, shine; for your light has come,
and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
For darkness shall cover the earth,
and thick darkness the peoples;
but the Lord will arise upon you,
and his glory will appear over you.
Nations shall come to your light,
and kings to the brightness of your dawn.

Now this is truly an inclusive teaching. “Inclusive” is perhaps a word which is used so much that it is in danger of losing its meaning, but it is the right word here. “I shall draw all people to myself.” Not some, but all. No distinction of race or nation, or anything else. Which is exactly what Isaiah tells us to look for. Indeed some manuscripts have “I shall draw all things to myself”. Everyone and everything will be drawn to Jesus.

And everyone will be drawn to Jesus because he will be crucified. The death of the Messiah is his glorification, and is that which will draw in all people. And the sweep of two thousand years of history since then seems to bear this out. The Church of the crucified Messiah is planted in every nation, and day by day more and more people find themselves drawn to this unique and compelling figure, even in spite of the way his Church so often fails to reflect him.

That figure is the Man on the cross whom we know to be innocent. He is the victim who is revealed as God, on the receiving end of the violence which is revealed as our own. As we have been seeing in our Gospel readings through Lent, Jesus progressively does away with the dark forces in human life which demand sacrifices and exclude victims. Those dark forces are personified as the “Prince of this world”, and the cross is the judgement on those powers: it reveals that they are wrong, and is the means by which they are defeated.

The cross is not God demanding sacrifice, but doing away with it, by substituting himself for the victims of our violence. It is the revelation of Divine love, the revelation that there is in God no darkness at all.

The light, the glory, of God shines forth from the man on the cross, and all peoples are drawn to that light. God is love, and wants us to live in love. That is the truth. That is the deep truth behind the universe, the word through whom all things exist. Love.

Humanity has lived its conscious existence down the ages in a desperate fear, the fear that the deep meaning of everything is death, and that this has to be warded off as long as possible by deflecting that death elsewhere.

The light of the cross shows instead that the deep meaning of our existence is love. By seeing Jesus we come to know him, to believe, to live with his life. In seeing Jesus we know that we are forgiven and loved. In seeing Jesus, we are set free from the old order of sin and death and made new in him. Made new in the vision of love which is the deep truth of who we are.

The Olympics have got nothing on this. To be sure, half the world will descend on our city, for a few weeks. And in a few years it will all be forgotten. But not Jesus. “When I am lifted up from the earth, I shall draw all people to myself.” The light of the love of God shines steadily from the cross, and hour by hour new souls are finding their way to him. He is drawing us. He will draw others. All the nations will gather to him, will come to his glory.

Now is the hour for the Son of Man to be glorified. Amen, Lord Jesus, draw us to your light, draw all people, and glorify your name in all the world. Amen.