Dionysus versus the Crucified

Sermon at the Solemn Liturgy, Good Friday 2011

Isaiah 52:13-53:12

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

The Passion according to John

First, some words which are not from the Bible:

“This [Christian] universal love of men is in practice the preference for the suffering, underprivileged, degenerate: it has in fact lowered and weakened the strength, the responsibility, the lofty duty to sacrifice men.

“The species requires that the ill-constituted, weak, degenerate, perish: but it was precisely to them that Christianity turned as a conserving force; … this pseudo humaneness called Christianity wants it established that no one should be sacrificed.

“When lesser men begin to doubt whether higher men exist, then the danger is great! And one ends by discovering that there is virtue also among the lowly and subjugated, the poor in spirit, and that before God men are equal – which has so far been the [greatest] nonsense on earth!

“When Nero and Caracalla sat up there, the paradox arose: ‘the lowest man is worth more than the man up there!’ And the way was prepared for an image of God that was as remote as possible from the image of the most powerful – the god on the cross!”

Those are the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, from his final book The Will to Power. Nietzsche was unquestionably a great genius, perhaps the most influential philosopher of the 19^th Century. He was the first thinker to set out systematically the idea that human beings construct themselves, that there is no higher law or morality to which we must make reference than our own wills. This does mean, as Nietzsche clearly saw, that the strong must triumph over the weak, and that care for the vulnerable and downtrodden is an obstacle to our own self-construction, to the exaltation of the ego.

Nietzsche saw, very clearly, that the Christian gospel was opposed to all that, and he despised it. Our modern militant atheists want us to accept a kind of bland general human niceness, a humanist morality which makes no reference to God. Nietzsche saw that this was impossible. Human beings, left to their own devices, freed (as he would have said) from the restraints of morality and the Christian Gospel, do not behave like that. No, the strong triumph, the weak must be eliminated, and we must embrace this. It is our human destiny!

Nietzsche’s perception was indeed profound. He observed very accurately how human beings behave, and affirmed that as the standard and norm to which we must aspire – or perish.

Of course, this is as old as time, and the Bible described it very well before Nietzsche did. It all began in the Garden of Eden, in that mythological time-before-time whose symbols speak to us of the deep origin and tragedy of our human identity.

Adam and Eve were at peace, in harmony and love, until the serpent came slithering between them. A tree became the object in a gambit of imitation and desire, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The serpent whispered, suggesting that the tree was desirable, and that God was a rival wanting to keep it for himself.

That desire became Eve’s, and Adam’s. They took and ate. But the knowledge of good and evil that the tree conferred was a slippery, deceitful thing. It was a knowledge that differentiated, which apportioned blame. It was a knowledge in which what I know is that I am good and the other person is evil. And the other person knows the same about me, in reverse.

So Adam blamed Eve, and Eve blamed the serpent. But their desire was identical, copied from one another. The imitation of desire sparked off rivalry, conflict, suspicion, and the illusion of difference between rivals whose desire is, in fact, the same.

The whirlwind of desire that was touched off in Eden rapidly escalated. In one generation, it gave rise to the murderous rivalry of Cain and Abel. Four generations later, it was out of control, devastating the whole human race. In Genesis 4 we meet Lamech, the first man who thought he needed to have two wives. Lamech vows, “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold!”. Now we have very well established Nietzsche’s theory that there are great men, who command their own destiny, and lesser men, who can be eliminated.

In the vivid language of myth this tells us the whole human tragedy. The imitation of desire is a necessary fact if we are to enter into human consciousness and attain true maturity. But it is also our undoing. It leads to rivalry and conflict. A group or society which becomes locked in imitating its own desires can be consumed with mutual rivalry to the point of self destruction. Then a scapegoat, an outsider, can be blamed and expelled by the group in order to restore their own unity and peace. It leads to human sacrifice, literal and metaphorical. And always that deceitful knowledge of good and evil tells us that the outsider is different from us, evil, cursed, deserving death. A “lesser” human being.

Does not the High Priest Caiaphas say this exactly? “It is better to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” And the crowd with one voice, with one desire, shouted, “Crucify him!”

But the Garden of Eden was only the start of the story. Before it all went wrong, deeper than our tragic human flaw, everything that God created was very good. The murderous storm of rivalry sparked off in Eden does not alter the fact that God created the universe, and created it with a purpose, created in love, created that it might all find its fulfilment in him.

God could not permit that the purpose of his love should be unfulfilled. And love contrived a redemption greater than the fall.

God entered into the midst of our human condition, into that long history littered with human sacrifices, into a whole world conditioned by the false knowledge that the murderers, that is we, are good and our victims are evil. Love brought God to us, love brought God to empty himself and take the form of a slave. In the upper room he knelt before his disciples, teaching them the law of love. On the cross, we see what Divine love looks like when it meets the violence and sin it has come to defeat. On the cross, God shows his love for the human race by becoming our victim.

And this turns our whole way of being human upside-down. Because if we see that the man on the cross is actually God, then it is no longer possible to think of the victim as an evil outsider who deserved what he got. It is no longer possible to think that the strong and powerful who put him there are good and in the right. Our self-constructed goodness is overturned. And God, the God on the cross, is suddenly revealed in all the victims there have ever been. Christianity really does wish to establish that no-one should be sacrificed. It does indeed seek to overcome the illusion that the scapegoat, the outsider, is different from us, is a “lesser man”.

So the cross is both our judgement and our salvation. It is judgement, because it reveals to us what we have been. It reveals the violence and falsehood of the whole way of being human by which we have been running the world. The way that Nietzsche called “the will to power” and that the Church has always called sin.

And the cross is salvation, because ultimately it is a revelation of love. The love of God for the poor, the weak and the despised. The love in which God seeks us out, undoes our violence, and invites us to find ourselves at last.

The office hymn for Matins in Passiontide expresses this in rich theological poetry:

God in pity saw man fallen,
Shamed and sunk in misery,
When he fell on death, by tasting
Fruit of the forbidden tree :
Then another Tree was chosen
Which the world from death should free.

Thus the scheme of our salvation
Was of old in order laid ;
That the manifold deceiver's
Art, by art might be outweighed ;
And the lure the foe put forward
Into means of healing made.

The tree of the cross brings us full circle. It is planted beside a garden. It stands just outside that gate of Eden which closed on us long ago in our deep origin as human beings.

The tree of knowledge of good and evil, that slippery knowledge that deceives, is no more. It has been replaced by the tree of the cross, the tree that finally tells us the truth about ourselves, and that tells us, even more, that we are loved.

Love is the way back into paradise. Love is creation restored and completed by the creator who has come to us for this. We know this, because the scapegoat, the outsider, the “lesser man”, has been raised from the dead. He reigns in triumph, from the tree of the cross, from his throne in heaven. In him, all the victims there have ever been are vindicated by God.

His name is Jesus. He is the Lamb once slain, the Divine Victim who dies no more, the true High Priest and King. And he lives, and loves, and saves, for ever and ever. Amen.

Sermon Maundy Thursday 2011

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

1 Corinthians 11:23-26

John 13:1-17, 31b-35

This week’s Church Times had an article in which the writer complained that the Church in our own day concentrates too much on worship and so has too vague an idea of the jobs the Church is supposed to be doing. The writer listed these jobs: the Church is to make disciples of all nations; to preach the Gospel; to call people to repentance; to continue Jesus’ work of teaching, feeding and healing. And so on.

Now this is quite true as far as it goes. The Church should indeed be doing these things. But it worries me that there is so much focus on doing things in the Church today. The emphasis is all on human activity. It is as though we think the Church exists simply as an agency to promote moral improvement, or as a branch of social services. Current talk about the “Big Society” will only encourage this trend.

Today’s Gospel reading tells us something far deeper than this. The Church, the community of Christ’s disciples, is not first of all about doing anything. It is, rather, about being. And about being in love. Everything that the Church does flows from that.

John’s Gospel begins with the magnificent Prologue we read on Christmas day, “In the beginning was the Word”. That is an announcement of the supreme revelation of God in Jesus. The Word is God’s creative principle bringing everything into being, and the Word has become flesh as Jesus and lived among us. God has come to us in Jesus to make himself known.

That revelation, great as it is, is not complete in John Chapter 1. It continues to unfold through John’s Gospel, adding more detail and more depth. How does God make himself known? What does it mean to say that God is in Jesus? Tonight, in the intimacy of the upper room, Jesus with his disciples enters upon the last stage of that revelation, the revelation of Divine love. What has brought God into the world is not power but love. Jesus has come from the Father to share the Father’s love with humankind.

So Jesus, the eternal Word made flesh, takes off his robe and puts on a towel to wash his disciples’ feet. He is taking the role of a slave, the most menial servant. This is God “emptying himself” as St Paul says in Philippians. This is how God wants to be known. This is how God’s love manifests itself.

The washing of feet has been called by some of the ancient Fathers “the Sacrament of Christ”.  Not that it is a particular sacrament of the Church, but rather that it is in the older meaning the sacramentum, the mystery of Christ, the sign which shows what the mission of Christ is all about. God has come into the world to serve, to share his love, and to make us clean or pure.

Jesus says to his disciples that they are “clean”. Jesus does not mean outward cleanliness, of which the foot washing is only a sign. Nor does he mean that the disciples can make themselves clean by some kind of moral self-improvement. No; to be clean or pure is to be in a spiritually purified state, free from sin. And this is God’s gift. Only God can make us clean. This is the meaning of the foot washing: we have to allow Jesus to do it for us. God humbles himself before us so that we can be humble enough to allow him to make us clean.

Our pride gets in the way of course, as it did with Peter. We don’t want God to be a slave, and we don’t want to submit ourselves to his slavery. We protest that we can manage by ourselves! And then what a sorry mess we make when we try. God has found that the only way to overcome our pride is to make himself as humble as possible before us.

Now we reach the heart of the mystery of the person and work of Christ. God makes us clean and pure so that we can share his life. And that life is love. Jesus gives us a new commandment, “Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

We miss the full meaning of this if we think that Jesus is simply telling us to imitate what he has done. Jesus has loved us with the love of God who empties himself and takes the place of a slave. We are to love one another with that same love. We cannot imitate God from our own resources. Rather, we are to love one another with the love with which God loves us.

We can only do this by finding our true selves, our true identity, in God. Our being is God’s gift, not something we construct for ourselves. Our love is God’s gift too, God’s own love in which we find ourselves.

Before Jesus gives his command to follow his example and to love as he loves, he first explains the foot washing to Peter: “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” In other words, you have no part in me. You will not find yourself in me, unless I make you clean.

Jesus cleanses us from sin so that we can enter into the mystery of God revealed in him. When we discover ourselves in God’s love, then we are able to love as God does. We love with the love in which God has found us. It is by living in Christ, living the new life that he gives, that we come to ourselves in love. It is only then that Jesus says to the disciples, and to us, do as I have shown you.

At the Last Supper Jesus established his church in the essential form that it will have until the end of time. Every particular church community celebrating the Eucharist stands in succession from that first community of the Apostles to whom the Lord gave his command to do this in memory of him. The Apostles’ teaching and fellowship has continued in every generation in the work of mission and evangelism. Christians down the ages have sought out and served those in need.

But none of this comes from ourselves. It all flows from the love of God made known to us in Jesus. It is Jesus himself who continues his work in his Church. Jesus has purified us from sin so that we can find ourselves in the life and love he shares with the Father. It is that love, communicated to us by the Holy Spirit, which works itself out in our lives and in the life of the Church in the world. It is by being in God’s love that we are able to do God’s work in the world.

The first priority for the Church in this age as in any other is not to be worried about what we should do. Our priority is to remain abiding in Jesus, to continually discover him in us and ourselves in him. As St Paul says in Galatians, “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me”. The work of the Church is not the effort of a human group, but something that rises from the secret and inexhaustible depths of divine life which is God’s gift to us, the love in which God has found us, and in which we find our true selves.

Sermon at St Mary Magdalene’s East Ham, Lent 3 2011

The Samaritan Woman at the Well

Exodus 17:1-7

Romans 5:1-11

John 4:5-42

Last June I had the great blessing of going on my first ever pilgrimage to the Holy Land, in company with some of my fellow clergy from the Edmonton area. The Holy Land in June is hot. The sun stands almost overhead at noon, and there is very little shade.

However, we were assured when we arrived that we would have an air conditioned coach with all mod cons to carry us around, and the driver had a great ice box at the front of the coach which would be full of bottles of water that we could buy on board. So the first day we piled on to the coach and set off into the furnace-like heat of the day.

When we’d gone a little way it transpired that something in the Middle Eastern supply chain hadn’t quite joined up. There was no water on the coach. Those few clergy who had been wise virgins and brought along their own supplies looked a little smug, while the rest of us started to experience mild symptoms of panic. You realise what thirst really means when you are in an intensely hot dry climate and you don’t know when you’ll next be able to have a drink. You realise that what you want is not a nice cup of tea, not even a gin and tonic, but water, pure clear refreshing water. In the event our crisis didn’t last long, and the first time we saw a kiosk laden with bottled water everyone descended on it like a flock of gulls.

Having felt the heat of the Judean summer I can really appreciate the force of today’s story from John’s Gospel. “Give me a drink” is not a request made simply for the purpose of illustrating a moral message. It is about real need and desire. But 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.

The life that God gives, which we call eternal life, is completely different from the biological life of the body. It is of the Spirit. It comes from beyond us, as God’s gift. We must be “born from above” as Jesus said to Nicodemus in last week’s gospel.

Today’s story follows the journey of the Samaritan woman, and indeed that of all her village, into belief, into 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. The woman whom Jesus talks to turns out to have had five husbands, and the man she is with now isn’t her husband. Her complicated relationship history seems to have made her something of a social outcast, shown by the fact that she goes to the well in the heat of the day, alone, rather than early in the morning with the other women of the village.

Now we might think therefore that this woman has been living a loose life, that it’s her fault. 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. It’s much more likely that this woman was 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 created.

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.

So 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, if you like, 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.

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.

In this Eucharist we feed on the deathless life of God, given in Jesus, who liberates us from our death-bound desires. That life is poured out for us without ever being diminished. By living from that source of life we too are enabled to live eucharistically. We can live in thankfulness 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.

Sermon at Parish Mass Lent 2 2011

Genesis 12:1-4a

Romans 4:1-5, 13-17

John 3:1-17

Last week in the Lent Group we were looking at two pictures, one of which was Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus, which hangs in the National Gallery. Caravaggio uses the technique of chiaroscuro, light and shadow, to enliven the scene and draw us in. Last week at St Paul’s I mistakenly said that chiaroscuro meant “darkness and shadow”, but of course that wouldn’t work at all, it would result in something very dreary and indistinct. But use light and shadow and the whole composition comes alive. The picture becomes very vivid, we can imagine ourselves as part of the scene. And the light brings out what is true, the deeper meaning of what is being presented.

So too in John’s Gospel. Nicodemus came to Jesus by night. John’s gospel sets this whole scene at night, in darkness, a device which John uses more than once to illustrate the contrast between the light of God, which has come into the world in Jesus, and the darkness which endures where humanity refuses to receive him, or has yet to come into the light.

Nicodemus is hesitant. Has he come on his own account, or has he come as a representative of the Pharisees, to make discreet unattributable enquiries under cover of darkness? His position is one of partial faith, symbolised by the darkness in which he meets Jesus – he recognises that God is in some way at work in Jesus, because he has seen the “signs” that he has given, the miracles he has worked. But so far that is all that Nicodemus has seen, and Jesus wants him to see beyond external appearances. So Jesus says, “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above”. We have this image of Nicodemus sitting in the dark, and Jesus saying to him, you don’t yet see.

There’s a pun in the Greek in what Jesus says, the phrase translated “born from above” can also mean “born again”.  And Nicodemus only gets the second meaning, being “born again”, and he doesn’t understand how that can happen. “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”

Now, in terms of the life of the flesh, biological life, this is incomprehensible. But the “birth from above” that Jesus is talking about is the birth of the spirit, a new kind of life altogether.

John’s Gospel uses two different words which are both translated into English as “life”: psyche, which means biological life, the life which is inevitably limited, contained and conditioned by death; and zoe, which means the life that God lives. It’s always zoe which is meant when we see the translation “eternal life”. The life that Jesus offers is the life that God lives. And it is the birth into that life that he is talking about when he says, “you must be born from above” and “born of the Spirit”.

So the life that God lives, eternal life, which is what Jesus promises us, is not the same as biological life stretched out for ever. It is quite different, the life born of the Spirit, from above, which only those who are born of the Spirit know.

Nicodemus should have known this, because it is promised in the Jewish scriptures which he taught as a leader and teacher in Israel. But as yet his mind is closed. He is still in the “night” of not yet understanding and receiving the life from above. But don’t worry, we will meet him again in John’s Gospel, in the Passion reading on Good Friday, and then it will be during the day, by which time he is definitely a believer.

The life from above which Jesus gives us is the light of God shining into the darkness of this world. And that light has come because God loves us. We’ve heard today what is arguably the most famous verse in all the Bible, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

One of the themes that linked the two paintings we looked at last week was that of God giving his life to us in Jesus. Giving his life in the midst of our human mendacity, fear, violence and betrayal. All those things which somehow are bound up with our biological life in what the Church calls “original sin”. It was just the same at the last supper. It was in the same night that he was betrayed that Jesus took bread and said, take eat, this is my body which is given for you.

The light shining in the darkness reveals the truth: God’s love breaking in to our sinfulness. God shows his love by offering us his life. And that life is something that we must receive as his gift. It is not ours by nature and we cannot create it ourselves. It comes to us from outside, from above, drawing us out of ourselves and into the life and love of God.

That life is offered to all. God longs for all people to receive it. But we can reject it if we wish. We can stay with the life we construct for ourselves, the life of fear, violence and betrayal, the life bounded by death. And our choice is its own judgement. Our gospel passage today goes on to say, “And this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.”

God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. But because love has to be free in order to be love, the world cannot be forced to accept that love. The possibility of refusal remains. But the light shining into the darkness always reveals what is true. Whether we come to the light or reject it, we will see in that light what our choice has made of us. And that judgement is in itself a call to repentance.

But we are gathered here as those who know the birth from above. In our baptism we have been born of water and the Spirit. God has infused his life into us. That life is sustained and grows deeper as we live the life of grace in the Church. We are fed by God’s life in Jesus in the Eucharist. Our sins after baptism are forgiven through the sacrament of reconciliation, or by the acts of contrition and love that we make on a daily basis. In our life of prayer and reading the scriptures we breathe God’s breath, God’s Spirit.

Even in the life we live here and now, we are already beginning to share in the life of God. Some of the texts in our service books say this, for example “The Body of Christ keep you in eternal life” which is one of the alternative forms for distributing Holy Communion. We are already in eternal life, what remains is to grow deeper, to live ever more fully in the life of God.

That life is the light that breaks through into our darkness, both exposing our sinfulness and bringing us forgiveness. It is the life that brings us the new birth from above, transforming us with God’s love so that we too can bring his life and love to others.

The Sign of Jonah

Homily for Wednesday in the first week of Lent 

(And, finally, an explanation for the name of this blog...)

Luke 11:29-32

“Just as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so the Son of Man will be to this generation.”

What kind of sign is the “Sign of Jonah”? When Matthew’s gospel reports this saying of Jesus it provides an explanation, because Matthew doesn’t like loose ends and does like using Old Testament texts to shed light on Jesus. So Matthew says, “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.” So the Sign of Jonah becomes the sign of the Resurrection.

Certainly that’s an aspect of the Sign of Jonah, but Luke leaves it more open than Matthew. In fact the Sign of Jonah has many meanings. As we heard in the reading from the Book of Jonah itself, the main Sign that Jonah gave to the city of Nineveh was that he preached, “Forty more days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” And the people of Nineveh believed, and repented, and the city was not overthrown, after all.

So the Sign of Jonah is in the first place the sign of preaching, and believing, and repentance.  And this is in fact exactly how Jesus begins his own mission.

There is another way in which Jonah was a sign. Jonah’s story begins with him running away from the call of God, and in an extraordinary scene he’s on board a ship which gets caught in a violent storm, and the crew draw lots to see who is to blame, who has offended the gods. And they discover it is Jonah, and throw him overboard, whereupon Jonah is swallowed by the fish, and the storm ceases.

So Jonah is also the sign of the scapegoat, the one whose apparent death restores peace and order to the little community of the boat once they have decided he was to blame and thrust him out. Which is if you like a type of what happened to Jesus on Good Friday, when he was thrust out of the city and killed by people who thought he was a blasphemer, under God’s curse, and a threat to their own society.

So the Sign of Jonah is the Sign of preaching, of repentance, of the scapegoat, and of the resurrection. In all of these ways, Jesus will fulfil that sign. And although this Sign has these four different aspects, it is still one sign. What Jesus preaches is the Kingdom of God becoming real in the world through his death and resurrection.

The gospel is preached to us and we are called to repent, because the death and resurrection of Jesus has exposed how complicit we are in the way the world makes victims and scapegoats.  But much more than that, it has revealed the generosity and love of God who longs to lead us from the old way of sin and death to new life in Christ.

In these days of Lent we seek to live more deeply the call to repentance we heard on Ash Wednesday,

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel.

Through that repentance we join ourselves to the Sign of Jonah, the Sign of Jesus, the dying and rising of Christ, through which we, and we pray this great city in which we live, will be saved.

Bible Study on 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10

Bible Study for the Kings Cross Ecumenical Fellowship, 16 March 2011

2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10

So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

As we work together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain. For he says,
‘At an acceptable time I have listened to you,
   and on a day of salvation I have helped you.’
See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation! We are putting no obstacle in anyone’s way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labours, sleepless nights, hunger; by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honour and dishonour, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.

(Notes to introduce discussion)

The title for this week’s session on the CTBI website is “Order and Disorder”. There is a lot of material there, and we’re only looking at one of the suggested readings. But one of the things that the resource material says is that “order turns to disorder in an imperfect world”. Actually, what I’d like to suggest, considering St Paul and this reading, is not that the fallen world is disordered so much as differently ordered. It has its own kind of order which Paul is here exposing and undermining.

We don’t know if Paul was familiar with the Beatitudes, but there is a parallel between what he says in this passage (2 Cor 6:6-10) and what Jesus has to say in Matthew 5:1-12:

‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

‘Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

The Beatitudes are a proclamation of the Kingdom of Heaven, and specifically of how the Kingdom is ordered. And the Kingdom of course is not an abstraction or something located in a future we have yet to reach; it is God’s reign becoming real in Jesus, God in Jesus acting in history in the world. All of the Beatitudes describe God’s reign as it is being revealed in Jesus. Jesus is pre-eminently the one who is poor in spirit, who mourns, who is meek, who is persecuted, and so on.

And all of the Beatitudes reveal the priority of the victim and the outsider. It is in these that the order of the Kingdom is found. And the point of the Beatitudes is that this is radically different from the way in which the world orders itself.

You may have heard of the Catholic anthropologist René Girard. According to Girard, human society is ordered according to the imitation of desire (“mimesis”). I desire what Fred desires. And this can lead me and Fred into rivalry. Rivalry can lead into violence, which is itself a desire which gets imitated. Rivalrous desire can spread through and threaten the whole of a society. A society which is in conflict regains its unity by focussing outwards on a scapegoat. It protects itself from its own violence by finding a substitute victim. An outsider who can be conveniently blamed becomes the focus of the Society’s violence, so that the violence gets displaced outside a boundary of exclusion. According to Girard, this is the mechanism of violence which has controlled human society from the beginning. And because sacrifice and scapegoating get disguised in religious imagery, people think that this is what God is like, that this is what God wants.

Girard is one of those people who has had one big idea. That one idea doesn’t of course tell us everything, but his theory has caught the attention of many Bible scholars. Once you are aware of the sequence:

Mimesis > Rivalry > Conflict > Scapegoating > Restoration of unity

You start to see it all over the place in the Scriptures.

And Jesus overturns this way of ordering the world by becoming its victim. He becomes the outsider, the excluded one, hanged on a tree and so, according to the law, under the curse of God. Which I think is what Paul means when he says that God “made him to be sin who knew no sin”. But Jesus is, in fact, the reign of God becoming real in the world, and that reign is made known on the outside of the boundary of exclusion that human society constructs to protect itself from its own violence.

The truth of this becomes apparent in the Resurrection. Jesus can preach the priority of the victim in the Sermon on the Mount, because God will vindicate the victim in the Resurrection. The Resurrection is the definitive breaking through of the order of God’s Kingdom into the order of this world.

Which brings us back to St Paul. All of Paul’s teaching needs to be understood from the perspective of the Resurrection, which was the breakthrough of the vindicated victim into his life. Paul had been perfect according to the law, had persecuted the Church of Jesus Christ and made any number of victims. He had very much lived according to the order of this world, the human society which protects itself from its own violence by scapegoating the outsider and interpreting this as the will of God. And then Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus and was completely turned around. His whole world was shattered and he had to begin again, learning what God is like in Jesus, the risen victim. His conversion was so radical that Paul’s whole life became a testimony to the way God orders things in Jesus and overcomes the order of this world, as Paul puts it, “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus [sets us] free from the law of sin and of death” (Romans 8:2).

Which is I think why St Paul says that the afflictions he is suffering are the way in which he is an ambassador for Christ, the way in which he makes the appeal to be reconciled to God. They are not incidental things which happen to him while he is proclaiming his message, rather they are absolutely integral to what that message is. Paul is identifying himself with Jesus, the outsider, the excluded one, the victim, the risen one. We go to Jesus “outside the gate” (Hebrews 13:12-13) because paradoxically that place of rejection is the place of reconciliation, because that is what God’s kingdom, God’s order, looks like when it meets the order of this world.

Lent Group for Lent 1 2011 – “The Sacrifice of the Mass”

Notes for the Lent Group (the presentation was followed by discussion)

At every Mass the celebrant says,

“Pray, my brothers and sisters, that this our sacrifice may be acceptable to God the Almighty Father.”

To which everyone replies,

“May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands, for the praise and glory of his name, for our good and the good of all his Church.”

What I’d like to explore in this session is what on earth we might be talking about when we say these things. We’ll be looking at two paintings which in different ways explore what happens when violence and the Eucharist come up against each other.

The last supper was a scene of betrayal. Jesus was about to be given up to death, and the supper was the set-up for a lynching. Judas had already given away the location of Jesus, and the route he would take to the garden after supper, where the temple guard would be waiting for him. At every Mass the celebrant, re-enacting the words and actions of Jesus, begins, “in the same night that he was betrayed”. The Eucharist was instituted as Jesus’ last act before the oncoming darkness of violence and murder.

It was at that moment that Jesus made his greatest act of love. He gave us himself. A few hours after the supper, he would no longer be free, and would no longer be in control of what happened to him. At the supper, he was still free, he could still just about have escaped and gone off to live quietly in obscurity for the rest of his days. But he chose to stay and give his life, freely, as an act of love. Before they were taken from him by force, he gave his body and blood. This is my body which is given for you.

The Jesuit theologian Maurice de la Taille argued that the essence of Christ’s sacrifice was found in the institution of the Eucharist. The supper was Christ’s oblation, that is his offering of himself, made while he was still free to do so. It was as it were the contract by which he bound himself to the death of the cross where the sacrifice was completed.

To whom did Jesus give himself up? To whom was the oblation offered? Jesus said, “This is my body which is given for you. This is my blood which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.”

I’d like to suggest that the sacrifice of the Mass has nothing to do with a victim offered to placate an angry God. In his life and teaching Jesus consistently rejected any such idea. He quoted the psalms and the prophets who said that God wanted mercy, not sacrifice, the knowledge of God, not burnt offerings. He overturned the tables in the temple, not because he objected to trade, but because they were an essential part of the sacrificial system. He did so saying that the temple was to be a house of prayer for all nations. God did not want, did not require, the wholesale slaughter of animals that went on there.

According to the catholic anthropologist René Girard, ancient cults of sacrifice have their origin in violence, rivalry and fear. They are a way in which society protects itself from its own violence by finding substitute victims. A society which is in conflict regains its unity by focussing outwards on a scapegoat. According to Girard, this is the mechanism of violence which has controlled human society from the beginning. And because sacrifice and scapegoating get disguised in religious imagery, people think that this is what God is like, that this is what God wants.

Jesus undermined that idea, and consciously placed himself in the position of our scapegoat. He subverted the murder that was coming his way by giving his life freely and forgiving his murderers. He was raised from the dead, not to exact revenge, but to bring forgiveness and new life to all. His death and resurrection is God’s life and light breaking through into our darkness and violence. It is humanity meeting God’s utterly generous, vivacious alive-ness, and being transformed. It is the life of Jesus given for us, not to propitiate an angry deity. And this is expressed, lived out, in a unique way through the Eucharist.

Every Eucharist takes place in this world, in some way or another amid the gathering clouds of human betrayal, violence and murder. And every Eucharist is the breaking in to that of God’s utterly vivacious alive-ness, the generosity that is completely free of rivalry and violence. The sacrifice of the Mass is God giving himself to us in Jesus, subverting and overturning the way in which human beings demand sacrifices and victims.

Last year in his homily for the feast of Corpus Christi, Pope Benedict said that the priesthood of Jesus was not the same as that of the priests in the temple. In fact, his sacrifice was “completely the opposite” of theirs. He concluded:

“It is divine power, the same power that created the incarnation of the Word, that transforms extreme violence and extreme injustice into a supreme act of love and justice. This is the work of the priesthood of Christ, which the Church has inherited and extends through history, in the dual form of the common priesthood of the baptised and the ordained priesthood of ministers, so as to transform the world with the love of God.”

http://visnews-en.blogspot.com/2010/06/prophetic-priesthood-of-christ-and.html

It is that possibility of the transformation of the world from violence to love which we will explore in these two paintings.

Ramon Casas i Carbó (1866-1932)

Corpus Christi Procession leaving Santa Maria del Mar, Barcelona 1896-98. Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya.

(Image source: Wikipedia)

Barcelona in 1896 was part of a Spain in which a repressive government protected vested interests, one of which was the Church. Revolutionary groups had carried out a number of bombings and assassinations in Barcelona, culminating in the attack on this Corpus Christi procession. 12 people were killed. No-one knows who was to blame, but  anyone suspected of being an anarchist or revolutionary was rounded up and confessions extracted under torture. Several died under torture, five were executed, and 61 people who were acquitted were nonetheless sent to a penal colony. The so-called "Montjuic Trials" caused outrage around the world. Protest in Barcelona itself had to be subtle, but Casas, by the mere fact of painting and exhibiting this picture after the trials, was making a powerful statement.

So this is no mere street scene, but an image fraught with tension and impending violence and revenge. The dresses of the first communion girls look as though they are dissolving, about to be blown away. The group of men in the middle ground holding torches for the procession look as though they could be lighting fuses on bombs. And you have in the front and all around the Guardia Civil on horseback, figures of state authority and repression.  They appear again in another painting by Casas, The Charge, which shows mounted Guardia mowing down an unarmed demonstration. As has often been the case in the polarised history of Spanish politics, the Church and its clergy with some noble exceptions tended to side with the forces of repression, and indeed were complicit in the scenes of torture and "confession" which were a reaction to the equally outrageous and unjust acts of terrorism.

And yet this is a Corpus Christi procession, the Body of Christ about to be caught up in this storm of murder and revenge, the very scapegoating from which Jesus seeks to free us. That Body still given, freely, divinely, even into a situation where it is about to be betrayed once more. We are perhaps too used to images of Judas at the last supper, the first treacherous priest about to betray Jesus. He fails to shock us any more. This image of the Body of Christ caught up in violence in which some of his priests, too, will be complicit, brings home the darkness of that first betrayal into which Jesus, nevertheless, gave himself, the light of the world that the darkness cannot overcome.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) 

The Supper at Emmaus, 1601. The National Gallery, London.

(Image source: The National Gallery)

Caravaggio had a troubled life. He was passionate, jealous and violent. He’d killed someone in a brawl, been imprisoned, escaped and was on the run from a death sentence when he caught a fever and died. Some of his paintings show the dark and troubled side of his character. Beheadings which are all too vivid, perhaps from his reflecting on the possible fate that lay in store for him while he was in prison. Sexual desire bound up with death, sensual bodies already tinged with the green of decay.

And yet he painted this. In fact he painted this scene twice, and this is the earlier version which is in the National Gallery. He uses chiaroscuro to make the scene come alive and draw us in. It is the risen Jesus making himself known in the breaking of bread, after the disciples on the road had failed to recognize him while he explained the scriptures to them. Jesus does not look like conventional portrayals of him. Caravaggio used rough working men as models which scandalized some, but which helps to bring out the enigma of Jesus’ appearance here.

To me this is a hopeful picture. Caravaggio, for all his violence and sin, draws us into this scene and I can only think that he does so by seeing himself there too. It is a scene of recognition, of the possibility of redemption, the meeting with the Divine victim, risen from the death we inflicted, and offering us freely the life we thought we had to take. It says to me that violence and sin need not be the final word on Caravaggio’s life. Or on ours.