Good Friday 2005
Introduction
Good Friday commemorates an atrocity: the taking of a human life. In an essay written in 1931 George Orwell writes of how, during his time in Burma, he was required to participate in an execution. As the prisoner was being led to the gallows Orwell noticed how the condemned man stepped to one side to avoid walking through a puddle on the ground, and that simple act had a profound impact on Orwell. He wrote:
It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying; he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working — bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming — all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned — reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone — one mind less, one world less.
Today we commemorate a life being destroyed, an execution. And as we’ve just heard in the passion reading that life was destroyed, not in “a sudden snap” but in a long slow process of dehumanization and torture. A process designed to deter others from acting as this man had acted, from doing what this man had done. And because it was designed to deter it was designed to be as horrible as men could make it. Because the more horrible it was the greater its value as a deterrent.
So this death had a clear purpose and a clear message; don’t do what this man did, or this is what will happen to you. It’s a message which the powerful have used against the powerless since time immemorial; don’t threaten our power, don’t question our authority or you will be destroyed. And yet, amazingly, that is not the message and the meaning that Christians have attributed to the cross down through the years. Amazingly the meaning which Christians have attributed to the cross has been the total opposite of those intended by Jesus’ Roman executioners. Far from speaking of submission to power and oppression, for Christians the cross speaks of liberation from oppression. Far from speaking of death and futility for Christians the cross speaks of life and hope.
Right from the very beginning this has seemed to outsiders a bizarre attitude to take to something so horrible. St Paul speaks of the cross as “…a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” and yet he say “to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
Down through the centuries Christians have used different pictures and metaphors to try to explain why it is that the cross is, for us, not a symbol of defeat but one of victory. This afternoon I’m going to examine some of those pictures, some of those metaphors. But before I do I want to issue a warning, and that is to beware of mistaking the picture for the thing itself. Ultimately, we know that through the cross Jesus has won new life and new hope for the world. How that new life and new hope has been won is in the end a mystery. The pictures can point to ways of understanding that mystery but they do not explain it.
So on to the pictures.
1. Christ the Victor
The first picture is that of a field of battle. This is a picture which was dear to the hearts of the earliest Christians as they explained Jesus death as being the final act of a lifelong battle against the cosmic forces of evil.
In the Old Testament there is the well known story of David and Goliath. David goes to take supplies to his brothers who are serving in the army of King Saul. As he visits them on the front line there emerges from the ranks of the enemy a giant figure who challenges the army of Israel to send out a champion to fight him in single combat. The outcome of the fight will decide who wins the battle. When no-one from the army of Israel is willing to fight the giant David steps forward to face him. The odds seem overwhelming but David’s courage and tenacity win the day and the giant is slain. So victory is secured for his people as he becomes their champion.
The earliest Christians saw the death of Christ like this. Human beings stand powerless and fearful in the face of our enemies – sin and its consequence death. But just as all seems lost a champion steps forward to battle in our place. On the cross Jesus meets those enemies face to face and battles with them like David fighting Goliath or like Gandalf battling with the Balrog in Lord of the Rings. Though death seems to gain the upper hand it is defeated and Christ rises from the tomb as victor. In this picture Christ fights for us the battle we were to weak to fight for ourselves, and wins for us the victory we could have never gained through our own strength. And we share in his victory because he has fought on our behalf.
So let’s take time to reflect on this picture? What are the battles that Jesus must fight so that you may share in his victory? What battles of yours does he fight on the cross, and where do you need his victory today?
2. The Ransom
The second picture comes from the slave market. It sees what Jesus did for us on the cross is that his death was in some way a ransom which was paid to set us free. This kind of language is used in many some of the more well known hymns that are sung on this Good Friday. For example, from the hymn “When I survey the wondrous cross” we have the lines “There was no other good enough to pay the price of sin.”
In the ancient world it was possible through ones own fault or through misfortune to fall so low that one had no option but to sell oneself into slavery. For such a person there could be no future save that of a life drudgery lived at the whim of the slave owner. Unless, that is, you were bought by a friend who set you free.
I’m sure many of you will have heard the phrase, ‘sold down the river.’ It comes from the time when slaves were bought and sold in Africa. Very often these were not captured directly by the white or Arab slave traders but were sold by other Africans to be transported ‘down the river’ and across the ocean to slavery in the Americas. Hence the phrase, ‘sold down the river’ meaning a betrayal.
In this picture we have as human beings sold ourselves into slavery by giving in to sin. We’ve sold ourselves down the river and our only hope is that a friend will by us back and set us free, and in Jesus we have such a friend. His death was the price paid for our freedom, our salvation.
So again let’s take time to reflect. What is it that holds you prisoner? What is it that enslaves you? From what do need to be purchased back before you sell yourself down the river?
3. Satisfaction
A third picture is that of the law court. There can be no doubt of the guiltiness of the accused, he has freely admitted his guilt and declares that he regrets his crimes and seeks to live a new and better life. All that remains now is for sentence to be passed. But instead of words of condemnation the prisoner finds himself being set free. The judge says, your crimes carry consequences which someone must bare, but I will carry them for you. You can go free because I have paid your fine; I have served your sentence.
In this picture the punishment born by Jesus on the cross is seen as a punishment you and I deserve for our sins. This is a difficult picture for some people because it looks as though God is inflicting suffering on the only human being not deserve it, his sinless son. It’s vital, if this picture is not to become as one author has described it, a tale of ‘cosmic child abuse’ that we recognise that in Jesus God walked among us. That it is not God inflicting punishment but God absorbing it.
So another time for reflection: What guilt do we carry, that we need not carry, because Jesus has carried it for us? How do we punish others or ourselves when we need not do so because Jesus has born our punishment?
4. The one who stands in it with us
One final picture, or rather not a picture this time but simply a way of thinking about the cross. On the cross Jesus stands with us in the depths of what it means to be human.
In his letter to the Christians at Philippi Paul tells of the way in which Christ emptied himself in order to enter our humanity.
Jesus, he says, was in the form of God, but did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited. He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death -- even death on a cross.
When I was a child in Sunday School I remember singing songs about how Jesus had been a child like me, but because of the cross there part of our humanity that we can’t point at and say Jesus experienced what it was like to be like me. And because as Christians we maintain as central to our faith that Jesus is God, we can say God knows what it’s like to be like me. And to say those words not in despair as some might say them but to say them as words of hope, and as a source of hope.
God knows what it is like to be like us, and so God knows what it is like to be like those we love. Many of us will know what it is like to see someone we know unjustly abused. Many of us will know what it is like to see loved ones in pain. Many of us have had the experience of being beside someone in the as they move slowly towards death. Because of the cross we can see that Jesus is with them, God is with them – not providing an easy escape as we so often wish he would but there alongside them plodding down the dusty road to Calvary carrying his cross, as they carry theirs.
So as we pause for reflection now let’s think of those who carry their crosses today, and of the cross that we may carry too? Let’s recognise Christ alongside us, walking with us to Calvary.
Conclusion
The cross as the place where the ultimate battle between good and evil took place, the cross as the place where the ransom was paid which purchased our freedom and salvation, the cross as the place where the consequences of our sin were faced on our behalf, the cross as the place where we meet God in midst of what means to suffer as a human being. All these are pictures, and if they don’t work for you then there are many others. No one picture exhausts the meaning of what Jesus did for us but each can provide an insight, illuminate a facet, of the one amazing truth:
That God so love the world that he gave Jesus his Son to die for us. That God himself entered all that it means to be human so that we might share in His eternal life.
Friday, March 25, 2005
Friday, March 11, 2005
The 5th Sunday of Lent 2005
Jesus said to her,
‘I am the resurrection and the life.
Those who believe in me,
even though they die,
will live,
and everyone who lives and believes in me
will never die.
Do you believe this?’
John 11.25,26
“Them bones, them bones, them dry bones.” It’s a quaint song, one that you might teach your children or grandchildren. It’s not a song you’d see as being subversive or revolutionary – which just goes to show how wrong you can be.
The song is based on the vision of Ezekiel which formed our first reading today. Ezekiel was someone who spoke out God’s message at a time when his nation seemed beyond hope. The Babylonians, the superpower of the day, had conquered their land, destroyed their temple and deported the population, leaving their cities as empty ruins. It is in this situation that Ezekiel has his vision of the valley of dry bones. In a heightened state of awareness Ezekiel sees a valley full of corpses, so dead that the flesh has fallen away from them leaving just the bones. And God asks him, “Can these bones live?” The answer is obvious, and yet Ezekiel does not give the obvious answer. Instead he acknowledges that even in a situation as seemingly hopeless as this one there is still the possibility that it can be transformed by God. “Can these bones live?” “O Lord God, you know.” And instructed by God Ezekiel speaks to the bones and the bones come together, flesh grows over them, breath enters into them and they stand “a great multitude”.
The message that Ezekiel is given to draw from this vision is this. That although things look hopeless for Ezekiel’s nation it is still possible for God to transform their situation and, says Ezekiel, he will. They will be brought back from their land of exile, and their nation will be restored.
Now to the African slaves in America this seemed like a picture of there own situation. Like Ezekiel’s people they had been taken from their homes as captives and deported to a distant land. Like the situation of Ezekiel’s people, their situation looked utterly hopeless. And in that situation, like Ezekiel’s people, they found hope in the God who can transform hopeless situations. So they sang a song of transformation about the bones joining together and dead coming to life, knowing that it spoke it hope when no hope seemed possible.
One can imagine the slave owner looking on complacently as these human beings, whom he regarded as possessions, sang what he must have regarded as a comic song, unaware that they sang of his downfall and their own vindication and liberation.
God gives hope when hope does not seem possible. God gives life when all possibility of life seems to have gone.
Lazarus is dead, there can be no doubt of that. Some scholars suggest that the mention of the fact the he has been in the tomb for four days is meant to emphasise the reality of Lazarus death. There was apparently a superstition amongst the Jews of this time that the soul hung around the body for three days after death but by the fourth day had gone from it. Others simply take the text at face value. By the fourth day, in the hot Mediterranean climate decomposition would be well underway. However we read this there could be no doubt that Lazarus was dead. The situation was hopeless.
And yet into this hopeless situation comes hope, as Jesus arrives. The tomb is opened, Jesus speaks and the dead man lives.
In one sense this is a unique event. Whilst there are other reports of the dead being raised, both in the Bible and in later Christian experience, such events are very rare and I personally would regard those reports from outside the Bible with a great deal of scepticism. I know there are people who have prayed beside the bodies of their dead loved ones firmly believing that that person will be raised from the dead. I have never yet heard a convincing account of this happening. But I have heard of people who have moved on from the depths of grief to find new hope. In this sense what happens in this story is typical of what Jesus does. He gives hope when all seems hopeless and life where no life seems possible.
And that is true for us too. Today Lent moves into higher gear. We begin to focus more intently on the cross and the suffering of Jesus, on what is called his passion. From the earliest days Christians have believed that Jesus death on the cross is more than simply the suffering a good person and an example of how such suffering can be born. Christian’s believe that Jesus death has in some way transformed our situation so that we may experience new life and new hope because of him. There are many ways that people have sought to explain how that was accomplished. Some of those explanations are more satisfactory than others and none seems completely adequate. I’m going to look at some of those pictures when I speak on Good Friday, but I warn you none of them are completely satisfying explanations. They are like pictures attempting to portray a reality beyond depiction. They have value and point to the thing they describe, but they are not that thing.
That thing is the fact that Jesus death gives us new hope and new life. When everything seems lost, when all seems hopeless Jesus tells us “I am the resurrection and the life.” And then he challenges us, as he challenged Martha long ago, “Do you believe this?”
‘I am the resurrection and the life.
Those who believe in me,
even though they die,
will live,
and everyone who lives and believes in me
will never die.
Do you believe this?’
John 11.25,26
“Them bones, them bones, them dry bones.” It’s a quaint song, one that you might teach your children or grandchildren. It’s not a song you’d see as being subversive or revolutionary – which just goes to show how wrong you can be.
The song is based on the vision of Ezekiel which formed our first reading today. Ezekiel was someone who spoke out God’s message at a time when his nation seemed beyond hope. The Babylonians, the superpower of the day, had conquered their land, destroyed their temple and deported the population, leaving their cities as empty ruins. It is in this situation that Ezekiel has his vision of the valley of dry bones. In a heightened state of awareness Ezekiel sees a valley full of corpses, so dead that the flesh has fallen away from them leaving just the bones. And God asks him, “Can these bones live?” The answer is obvious, and yet Ezekiel does not give the obvious answer. Instead he acknowledges that even in a situation as seemingly hopeless as this one there is still the possibility that it can be transformed by God. “Can these bones live?” “O Lord God, you know.” And instructed by God Ezekiel speaks to the bones and the bones come together, flesh grows over them, breath enters into them and they stand “a great multitude”.
The message that Ezekiel is given to draw from this vision is this. That although things look hopeless for Ezekiel’s nation it is still possible for God to transform their situation and, says Ezekiel, he will. They will be brought back from their land of exile, and their nation will be restored.
Now to the African slaves in America this seemed like a picture of there own situation. Like Ezekiel’s people they had been taken from their homes as captives and deported to a distant land. Like the situation of Ezekiel’s people, their situation looked utterly hopeless. And in that situation, like Ezekiel’s people, they found hope in the God who can transform hopeless situations. So they sang a song of transformation about the bones joining together and dead coming to life, knowing that it spoke it hope when no hope seemed possible.
One can imagine the slave owner looking on complacently as these human beings, whom he regarded as possessions, sang what he must have regarded as a comic song, unaware that they sang of his downfall and their own vindication and liberation.
God gives hope when hope does not seem possible. God gives life when all possibility of life seems to have gone.
+++
This message of hope when hope seems impossible, life when all possibility of life seems to have gone is, of course, implicit in the story of Jesus and Lazarus.Lazarus is dead, there can be no doubt of that. Some scholars suggest that the mention of the fact the he has been in the tomb for four days is meant to emphasise the reality of Lazarus death. There was apparently a superstition amongst the Jews of this time that the soul hung around the body for three days after death but by the fourth day had gone from it. Others simply take the text at face value. By the fourth day, in the hot Mediterranean climate decomposition would be well underway. However we read this there could be no doubt that Lazarus was dead. The situation was hopeless.
And yet into this hopeless situation comes hope, as Jesus arrives. The tomb is opened, Jesus speaks and the dead man lives.
In one sense this is a unique event. Whilst there are other reports of the dead being raised, both in the Bible and in later Christian experience, such events are very rare and I personally would regard those reports from outside the Bible with a great deal of scepticism. I know there are people who have prayed beside the bodies of their dead loved ones firmly believing that that person will be raised from the dead. I have never yet heard a convincing account of this happening. But I have heard of people who have moved on from the depths of grief to find new hope. In this sense what happens in this story is typical of what Jesus does. He gives hope when all seems hopeless and life where no life seems possible.
+++
But giving that hope is costly. John makes it clear that the raising of Lazarus is, for the Jerusalem authorities, the last straw. Confronted by such a powerful miraculous act they must either accept that Jesus is who he says he is, and worship him, or do away with him. And they choose the latter. The cost of new life for Lazarus is Jesus death on the cross.And that is true for us too. Today Lent moves into higher gear. We begin to focus more intently on the cross and the suffering of Jesus, on what is called his passion. From the earliest days Christians have believed that Jesus death on the cross is more than simply the suffering a good person and an example of how such suffering can be born. Christian’s believe that Jesus death has in some way transformed our situation so that we may experience new life and new hope because of him. There are many ways that people have sought to explain how that was accomplished. Some of those explanations are more satisfactory than others and none seems completely adequate. I’m going to look at some of those pictures when I speak on Good Friday, but I warn you none of them are completely satisfying explanations. They are like pictures attempting to portray a reality beyond depiction. They have value and point to the thing they describe, but they are not that thing.
That thing is the fact that Jesus death gives us new hope and new life. When everything seems lost, when all seems hopeless Jesus tells us “I am the resurrection and the life.” And then he challenges us, as he challenged Martha long ago, “Do you believe this?”
Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, ‘Surely we are not blind, are we?’ John 9.40
Introduction
Some time ago some concern was expressed by the charity the Royal National Institute for the Blind about the way blindness was often equated in Christian worship with being unspiritual. You only have to look through the hymnbook to find examples of this. One hymn that I remember singing in the church where I grew up began:
Lord, I was blind I could not see
in thy marred visage any grace.
Or, more familiarly:
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
was blind but now I see.
The danger in this kind of language is that there is one factor which is very different between physical and spiritual blindness. No one chooses physical blindness and no one can be blamed for being physically blind. Spiritual blindness is, however, something that people may well have a choice about, and those who choose to be spiritually blind have no one to blame for the consequences but themselves.
Exposition
Today’s gospel reading is another of the long passages from St John’s gospel which the lectionary sets before us during this season of Lent. For me it is one of the most vivid and captivating stories in the gospels. The dialogue between Jesus and the blind man, Jesus and the authorities, and then the blind man and the authorities is just so real, and the way that in which the blind man who can now see stands up to the bullying of the authorities is so engrossing that when I hear the man say “Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from and yet he opened my eyes” I just want to punch the air and shout “yes!” It’s a wonderful story, not only because it shows that Jesus is on the side of the outcast and disregarded but it goes further than that and shows the outcast and disregarded standing up for Jesus. It must have been a story which brought great encouragement to the early Christians as they sought to stand up for Jesus.
And that, really, is the context in which we need to read this story. It was written down at the time when Christianity was becoming a separate faith from the Judaism in which it had had its origin. Christians, like the blind man in the story, had been expelled from the fellowship of the synagogue and with that expulsion had lost the legal protection that Roman law gave to the Jewish people. Jews and Jews alone, in the Roman world were exempt from sacrificing to and worshiping the Roman gods. When Christians lost their status as part of the Jewish community they became subject to the expectation that they would participate in pagan rites. When they refused to do so they were persecuted and harassed. It’s a reflection of this situation that the word ‘Jews’ becomes in John’s Gospel the label applied to those who oppose Jesus; this despite the fact that Jesus, his disciples and almost everyone else we encounter in the gospels were Jewish. To Christians it was obvious that Jesus was the long awaited Jewish messiah. They must have agonized over the question why the Jewish people themselves could not see this. For St Paul in the letter to the Romans this blindness is seen as part of graciousness in that it allowed the inclusion of non-Jews among God’s people. For John, however, it seems to have been much more a wilful act on the part of some of the Jewish teachers not to see who Jesus was. The closing words of the Gospel reading today, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, “We see”, your sin remains” imply that the particular teachers that Jesus is confronting in this passage have chosen not to see who Jesus is. They have been faced with a choice, they’ve seen a man set free from a condition which has restricted and narrowed his life, and they refuse to see in this the hand of God.
What Jesus does in this passage is not to draw a parallel between physical and spiritual blindness but in fact to contrast them. The physically blind person may actually be able to have greater spiritual perception than those who have had no such disability.
Application
There is a challenge in this for us and I believe that it is one which is especially relevant to us today. If God starts to do things which don’t fit in with our preconceived ideas will we refuse to see his hand at work? Now the danger here is that anyone can claim that what they are doing comes from God and that it is God acting in a new way. The bible is clear gives us a way to test this. The acts of God bring forth good fruit – that is, where we see human lives enhanced, where we see the oppressed liberated, where we the oppressor cast down, there we can see God at work.
Introduction
Some time ago some concern was expressed by the charity the Royal National Institute for the Blind about the way blindness was often equated in Christian worship with being unspiritual. You only have to look through the hymnbook to find examples of this. One hymn that I remember singing in the church where I grew up began:
Lord, I was blind I could not see
in thy marred visage any grace.
Or, more familiarly:
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
was blind but now I see.
The danger in this kind of language is that there is one factor which is very different between physical and spiritual blindness. No one chooses physical blindness and no one can be blamed for being physically blind. Spiritual blindness is, however, something that people may well have a choice about, and those who choose to be spiritually blind have no one to blame for the consequences but themselves.
Exposition
Today’s gospel reading is another of the long passages from St John’s gospel which the lectionary sets before us during this season of Lent. For me it is one of the most vivid and captivating stories in the gospels. The dialogue between Jesus and the blind man, Jesus and the authorities, and then the blind man and the authorities is just so real, and the way that in which the blind man who can now see stands up to the bullying of the authorities is so engrossing that when I hear the man say “Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from and yet he opened my eyes” I just want to punch the air and shout “yes!” It’s a wonderful story, not only because it shows that Jesus is on the side of the outcast and disregarded but it goes further than that and shows the outcast and disregarded standing up for Jesus. It must have been a story which brought great encouragement to the early Christians as they sought to stand up for Jesus.
And that, really, is the context in which we need to read this story. It was written down at the time when Christianity was becoming a separate faith from the Judaism in which it had had its origin. Christians, like the blind man in the story, had been expelled from the fellowship of the synagogue and with that expulsion had lost the legal protection that Roman law gave to the Jewish people. Jews and Jews alone, in the Roman world were exempt from sacrificing to and worshiping the Roman gods. When Christians lost their status as part of the Jewish community they became subject to the expectation that they would participate in pagan rites. When they refused to do so they were persecuted and harassed. It’s a reflection of this situation that the word ‘Jews’ becomes in John’s Gospel the label applied to those who oppose Jesus; this despite the fact that Jesus, his disciples and almost everyone else we encounter in the gospels were Jewish. To Christians it was obvious that Jesus was the long awaited Jewish messiah. They must have agonized over the question why the Jewish people themselves could not see this. For St Paul in the letter to the Romans this blindness is seen as part of graciousness in that it allowed the inclusion of non-Jews among God’s people. For John, however, it seems to have been much more a wilful act on the part of some of the Jewish teachers not to see who Jesus was. The closing words of the Gospel reading today, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, “We see”, your sin remains” imply that the particular teachers that Jesus is confronting in this passage have chosen not to see who Jesus is. They have been faced with a choice, they’ve seen a man set free from a condition which has restricted and narrowed his life, and they refuse to see in this the hand of God.
What Jesus does in this passage is not to draw a parallel between physical and spiritual blindness but in fact to contrast them. The physically blind person may actually be able to have greater spiritual perception than those who have had no such disability.
Application
There is a challenge in this for us and I believe that it is one which is especially relevant to us today. If God starts to do things which don’t fit in with our preconceived ideas will we refuse to see his hand at work? Now the danger here is that anyone can claim that what they are doing comes from God and that it is God acting in a new way. The bible is clear gives us a way to test this. The acts of God bring forth good fruit – that is, where we see human lives enhanced, where we see the oppressed liberated, where we the oppressor cast down, there we can see God at work.
Saturday, February 26, 2005
The Woman at the Well - John 4.5-42
Introduction
It will not have escaped your notice that the Gospel reading this morning was quite long. This week and for the next two weeks our Gospel readings will be taken from John’s Gospel and will each consist of a fairly long story of Jesus encounter with an individual and will tell of the way in which that encounter transforms the life of the individual concerned and draws from Jesus teaching about who he is and what he is doing.
Next week we will be hearing of Jesus encounter with a man born blind and the week after we will hear the story of Lazarus, who has died. But this week we have the story of Jesus and the Woman at the Well.
Exposition
Jesus is travelling up from Jerusalem to Galilee and he is taking the short route which passes through the land of Samaria. Many Jews would have taken a detour around Samaria because there was a great of animosity between the Jews and the Samaritans. Despite the fact that Jews and Samaritans both worshiped the God of Abraham and sought to follow the Law of Moses they the Jews despised the Samaritans, considering them to be unclean, and of course this hatred generated a similar response from the Samaritans towards the Jews. The roots of this mutual contempt lay back hundreds of years in history but, as with so many places on earth today, this historic prejudice was the controlling factor of their behaviour in the hear and now.
This prejudice had no hold on Jesus, however. So, with his disciples he takes the shortest route home and finds himself passing by the ancient well near Sychar, a well whose origin was attributed to Jacob – the common ancestor of both the Jews and the Samaritans. He remains by the well whilst his disciples go get food, and while he is waiting there, at noon when the sun is at its hottest, a woman comes to draw water from the well.
Now, many interpreters point out that it is quite strange that the woman should come to the well in the middle of the day. It was not strange that the woman should come to fetch water, fetching water was considered ‘women’s work’, but it was heavy work and normally it was done in the cooler parts of the day – the morning and the evening. There might be many reasons why this woman would come to the well outside the normal times but one of those reasons might well be that she was coming at time when she hoped no one else would be there. That she was someone who, even in her own community was despised and outcast and who was coming at this time to avoid the looks of contempt, the cutting remarks and perhaps even the physical violence she would draw if she came at time when others were around.
Why might she be so despised? Well, we find out later in the story that she is a woman who has had five husbands and is now living with a man who is not her husband. When we hear that we tend to think of her as a ‘femme fatal’, an Elizabeth Taylor type figure who discards one man after another as she gets fed up with them but, of course, that is to entirely misunderstand the situation. She could not possibly have been such a figure because under the Jewish law, which both the Jews and Samaritans kept, women had no right to divorce. There are only two possibilities here, one is that she had been widowed five times, the other is that she had been divorced by her husbands – and in the this context this meant that effectively she had been discarded. And that this had happened, no once but five times, over and over again. And, because a woman in this context had no rights even to her own children and could not survive without a male protector, she had taken up with a married man as her only way of survival. She must have considered herself the lowest of the low and certainly those around her in her small village community would have thought of her in that way.
And then she encounters Jesus. Normally a male Jew at this time would not begin a conversation with even the most respectable of women unless he was related to her. To begin to speak to a strange woman, and a Samaritan woman as well, was unheard of. Her initial thought must have been that she was being propositioned. However, the conversation does not develop as she expects and soon this woman who has been used and despised by every man she has ever met finds herself discussing theology with a Rabbi. And to this outcast woman Jesus discloses the secret that he is the Messiah. No other person in the Gospels is given this information by Jesus. Everyone has to work it out for themselves. This outcast woman is the only one to whom Jesus unequivocally gives this information.
And it transforms her. This woman, who is creeping out to the well in the heat of the mid-day sun in order to avoid the company of others because she is so ashamed of who she is, now goes running back to the village shouting out at the top of her voice “Come and see a man who has told me everything I have ever done!” By the time we come to the end of the story the woman is accepted and valued by her neighbours who all share together a common belief in Jesus.
Application
One of the things we love to do as human beings is to draw lines in the sand. To place others on the other side of those lines and regard them as beyond the pale, contemptible. Jesus dose not do this. Jesus does not see the label, he sees the person, and the person other people reject is just the person that he will use to bring his love and care to others. He himself is prime example of this, despised and rejected on the cross he brings salvation to the whole of humanity. Over the next few weeks we will hear again and again the phrase that he quotes from the old testament “The stone that the builders rejected has become the keystone” – that stone that holds everything together.
In a world and church where the voices of intolerance and exclusion are becoming louder and more powerful this is a lesson we who seek to be faithful to Jesus must learn, and learn well. That those you despise and exclude and put down are exactly the kind of people we find Jesus among and if we ignore them we ignore him, if we exclude them we exclude him, and if we reject them we reject him.
Jesus is found amongst the outcast, the marginalised and the rejected, and if we listen to their voice we may well hear them crying “Come and see a man who has told me everything I have ever done!”
Introduction
It will not have escaped your notice that the Gospel reading this morning was quite long. This week and for the next two weeks our Gospel readings will be taken from John’s Gospel and will each consist of a fairly long story of Jesus encounter with an individual and will tell of the way in which that encounter transforms the life of the individual concerned and draws from Jesus teaching about who he is and what he is doing.
Next week we will be hearing of Jesus encounter with a man born blind and the week after we will hear the story of Lazarus, who has died. But this week we have the story of Jesus and the Woman at the Well.
Exposition
Jesus is travelling up from Jerusalem to Galilee and he is taking the short route which passes through the land of Samaria. Many Jews would have taken a detour around Samaria because there was a great of animosity between the Jews and the Samaritans. Despite the fact that Jews and Samaritans both worshiped the God of Abraham and sought to follow the Law of Moses they the Jews despised the Samaritans, considering them to be unclean, and of course this hatred generated a similar response from the Samaritans towards the Jews. The roots of this mutual contempt lay back hundreds of years in history but, as with so many places on earth today, this historic prejudice was the controlling factor of their behaviour in the hear and now.
This prejudice had no hold on Jesus, however. So, with his disciples he takes the shortest route home and finds himself passing by the ancient well near Sychar, a well whose origin was attributed to Jacob – the common ancestor of both the Jews and the Samaritans. He remains by the well whilst his disciples go get food, and while he is waiting there, at noon when the sun is at its hottest, a woman comes to draw water from the well.
Now, many interpreters point out that it is quite strange that the woman should come to the well in the middle of the day. It was not strange that the woman should come to fetch water, fetching water was considered ‘women’s work’, but it was heavy work and normally it was done in the cooler parts of the day – the morning and the evening. There might be many reasons why this woman would come to the well outside the normal times but one of those reasons might well be that she was coming at time when she hoped no one else would be there. That she was someone who, even in her own community was despised and outcast and who was coming at this time to avoid the looks of contempt, the cutting remarks and perhaps even the physical violence she would draw if she came at time when others were around.
Why might she be so despised? Well, we find out later in the story that she is a woman who has had five husbands and is now living with a man who is not her husband. When we hear that we tend to think of her as a ‘femme fatal’, an Elizabeth Taylor type figure who discards one man after another as she gets fed up with them but, of course, that is to entirely misunderstand the situation. She could not possibly have been such a figure because under the Jewish law, which both the Jews and Samaritans kept, women had no right to divorce. There are only two possibilities here, one is that she had been widowed five times, the other is that she had been divorced by her husbands – and in the this context this meant that effectively she had been discarded. And that this had happened, no once but five times, over and over again. And, because a woman in this context had no rights even to her own children and could not survive without a male protector, she had taken up with a married man as her only way of survival. She must have considered herself the lowest of the low and certainly those around her in her small village community would have thought of her in that way.
And then she encounters Jesus. Normally a male Jew at this time would not begin a conversation with even the most respectable of women unless he was related to her. To begin to speak to a strange woman, and a Samaritan woman as well, was unheard of. Her initial thought must have been that she was being propositioned. However, the conversation does not develop as she expects and soon this woman who has been used and despised by every man she has ever met finds herself discussing theology with a Rabbi. And to this outcast woman Jesus discloses the secret that he is the Messiah. No other person in the Gospels is given this information by Jesus. Everyone has to work it out for themselves. This outcast woman is the only one to whom Jesus unequivocally gives this information.
And it transforms her. This woman, who is creeping out to the well in the heat of the mid-day sun in order to avoid the company of others because she is so ashamed of who she is, now goes running back to the village shouting out at the top of her voice “Come and see a man who has told me everything I have ever done!” By the time we come to the end of the story the woman is accepted and valued by her neighbours who all share together a common belief in Jesus.
Application
One of the things we love to do as human beings is to draw lines in the sand. To place others on the other side of those lines and regard them as beyond the pale, contemptible. Jesus dose not do this. Jesus does not see the label, he sees the person, and the person other people reject is just the person that he will use to bring his love and care to others. He himself is prime example of this, despised and rejected on the cross he brings salvation to the whole of humanity. Over the next few weeks we will hear again and again the phrase that he quotes from the old testament “The stone that the builders rejected has become the keystone” – that stone that holds everything together.
In a world and church where the voices of intolerance and exclusion are becoming louder and more powerful this is a lesson we who seek to be faithful to Jesus must learn, and learn well. That those you despise and exclude and put down are exactly the kind of people we find Jesus among and if we ignore them we ignore him, if we exclude them we exclude him, and if we reject them we reject him.
Jesus is found amongst the outcast, the marginalised and the rejected, and if we listen to their voice we may well hear them crying “Come and see a man who has told me everything I have ever done!”
Saturday, February 05, 2005
Introduction
Last Sunday we celebrated Candlemas, which in the Churches calendar markes the end of the celebration of Christmas and the turn towards Lent, Holy Week and Easter. We have turned from looking back to the manger to looking forward to the cross and beyond it the empty tomb. Because Easter is very early this year we have only this one Sunday before Lent begins this coming Wednesday, Ash Wednesday.
Every year the readings set for this the Sunday before Lent point us to that mysterious and startling event recorded in the first three Gospels which we call the transfiguration. Jesus, accompanied by the inner circle of his disciples (Peter, James and John) climbs a high mountain in the north of Galilee and there something happens. In his disciples eyes he appears to shine with a dazzling light and a voice like the voice which was heard at Jesus baptism declares “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him.”
Exposition
So what is happening here? One of the dangers of the way we read the Bible in church is that we can read isolated passages and miss out on the important insights we can gain by knowing what happened just before the event we are looking at and what happens afterwards. To properly understand what is going on in this passage we need to know what happened before it. In each of the Gospels in which the story of Jesus transfiguration appears it is immediately preceded by a conversation which Jesus has with his disciples. He asks them who people say he is, and they come up with a number of answers reporting what other people have said about Jesus. Then Jesus turns the question on them, “But you,” he said, “who do you say I am?” It is Peter who answers, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus praises Peter for his insight, but then goes on to explain that what that means may not be quite what the disciples are expecting. “From then onwards Jesus began to make it clear to his disciples that he was destined to go to Jerusalem and suffer grievously … and to be put to death and to be raised up on the third day.” From this point forward in the gospels every step that Jesus takes will be a step nearer the cross as he journeys towards the great confrontation which lead to the crucifixion.
So at this point it has just become clear to the disciples exactly who Jesus is. He is the Son of God, the long awaited Messiah, he is the one who will suffer and through whose suffering the world will be saved. Now, up on the mountain top, that which the disciples have come to believe in there hearts becomes visible to their eyes. They look on Jesus and they see in him God’s glory shining out.
Take good note of the order in which this happens. First they believe and then they see. Most people say “Seeing is believing” but often in the Christian faith you cannot see until you believe. There is an old Christian slogan which goes ‘Fact, Faith, Feeling’. It means that when we come to God we accept the facts about him, we build our faith by trusting in those facts, not in how we feel. We may or may not feel any different because we are trying to follow Jesus, that doesn’t make any difference to the facts.
So what can we learn from this story?
For me this story teaches me the importance not just of looking at things but of looking through them. The hymn writer George Herbert wrote:
Teach me, my God and King,
in all things thee to see;
and what I do in anything
to do it as for thee.
A man that looks on glass,
on it may stay his eye;
or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,
and then the heaven espy.
In other words, you can look at something and see it simply as it is externally or look through it and see the spiritual reality which it holds. Another poet, Gerald Manley Hopkins, wrote this:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Hopkins was able to look through a world seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil to find it still charged with the grandeur of God.
Application
At the time of the transfiguration Peter, James and John saw through the outward appearance of the human Jesus to see the glory of his divinity. As Christians we must become people who don’t just look at the things we see but through them to spiritual realities which lay within them.
Let me give you some examples.
Let’s start with Jesus. He can be just a figure from history, a character in the pages of a book or we can see through that to the living Lord who fills life with meaning and significance.
Then there’s our church. A group of largely elderly people who meet together once a week, or an outpost of heaven, agents of Gods love and signs of his presence.
Or our worship. A boring ritual consisting of some repetitive prayers and some poorly sung hymns or a sacrifice of praise made in presence of Angels and Archangels and all the company of heaven. The most important act that a human being can carry out.
Or our neighbor. An irritation and a nuisance or a beloved child of a heavenly Father.
Or ourselves. Poor specimens of fallible humanity or Children of the heavenly Father who loves us and is well pleased with us.
The answer is, of course, both. It depends on whether you just look on the surface or look through to the reality beyond.
Last Sunday we celebrated Candlemas, which in the Churches calendar markes the end of the celebration of Christmas and the turn towards Lent, Holy Week and Easter. We have turned from looking back to the manger to looking forward to the cross and beyond it the empty tomb. Because Easter is very early this year we have only this one Sunday before Lent begins this coming Wednesday, Ash Wednesday.
Every year the readings set for this the Sunday before Lent point us to that mysterious and startling event recorded in the first three Gospels which we call the transfiguration. Jesus, accompanied by the inner circle of his disciples (Peter, James and John) climbs a high mountain in the north of Galilee and there something happens. In his disciples eyes he appears to shine with a dazzling light and a voice like the voice which was heard at Jesus baptism declares “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him.”
Exposition
So what is happening here? One of the dangers of the way we read the Bible in church is that we can read isolated passages and miss out on the important insights we can gain by knowing what happened just before the event we are looking at and what happens afterwards. To properly understand what is going on in this passage we need to know what happened before it. In each of the Gospels in which the story of Jesus transfiguration appears it is immediately preceded by a conversation which Jesus has with his disciples. He asks them who people say he is, and they come up with a number of answers reporting what other people have said about Jesus. Then Jesus turns the question on them, “But you,” he said, “who do you say I am?” It is Peter who answers, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus praises Peter for his insight, but then goes on to explain that what that means may not be quite what the disciples are expecting. “From then onwards Jesus began to make it clear to his disciples that he was destined to go to Jerusalem and suffer grievously … and to be put to death and to be raised up on the third day.” From this point forward in the gospels every step that Jesus takes will be a step nearer the cross as he journeys towards the great confrontation which lead to the crucifixion.
So at this point it has just become clear to the disciples exactly who Jesus is. He is the Son of God, the long awaited Messiah, he is the one who will suffer and through whose suffering the world will be saved. Now, up on the mountain top, that which the disciples have come to believe in there hearts becomes visible to their eyes. They look on Jesus and they see in him God’s glory shining out.
Take good note of the order in which this happens. First they believe and then they see. Most people say “Seeing is believing” but often in the Christian faith you cannot see until you believe. There is an old Christian slogan which goes ‘Fact, Faith, Feeling’. It means that when we come to God we accept the facts about him, we build our faith by trusting in those facts, not in how we feel. We may or may not feel any different because we are trying to follow Jesus, that doesn’t make any difference to the facts.
So what can we learn from this story?
For me this story teaches me the importance not just of looking at things but of looking through them. The hymn writer George Herbert wrote:
Teach me, my God and King,
in all things thee to see;
and what I do in anything
to do it as for thee.
A man that looks on glass,
on it may stay his eye;
or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,
and then the heaven espy.
In other words, you can look at something and see it simply as it is externally or look through it and see the spiritual reality which it holds. Another poet, Gerald Manley Hopkins, wrote this:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Hopkins was able to look through a world seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil to find it still charged with the grandeur of God.
Application
At the time of the transfiguration Peter, James and John saw through the outward appearance of the human Jesus to see the glory of his divinity. As Christians we must become people who don’t just look at the things we see but through them to spiritual realities which lay within them.
Let me give you some examples.
Let’s start with Jesus. He can be just a figure from history, a character in the pages of a book or we can see through that to the living Lord who fills life with meaning and significance.
Then there’s our church. A group of largely elderly people who meet together once a week, or an outpost of heaven, agents of Gods love and signs of his presence.
Or our worship. A boring ritual consisting of some repetitive prayers and some poorly sung hymns or a sacrifice of praise made in presence of Angels and Archangels and all the company of heaven. The most important act that a human being can carry out.
Or our neighbor. An irritation and a nuisance or a beloved child of a heavenly Father.
Or ourselves. Poor specimens of fallible humanity or Children of the heavenly Father who loves us and is well pleased with us.
The answer is, of course, both. It depends on whether you just look on the surface or look through to the reality beyond.
Saturday, January 29, 2005
Introduction
Today we mark a turning point in the Christian year. Today’s celebration marks the ending of the Christmas season and the beginning of our looking towards the keeping of Lent, the marking of Holy Week and the celebration of Easter. Today is the celebration of the presentation of Christ in the Temple, a celebration also known as the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or Candlemass.
Exposition
So what is it that we celebrate today?
In the Book of Leviticus in the Old Testament we are told that a Jewish woman who has given birth to a male child should remain separate from her everyday life for forty days after the child’s birth. After the forty days are over she is to come to the temple and make an offering to God before resuming her normal life. For those who can afford it the offering is to be a pigeon and a lamb, but for poorer people two pigeons will suffice. In our Gospel reading today we hear of how Joseph brings Mary to the temple to make that offering forty days after the birth of Jesus. We can imagine the couple nervously entering the great temple in Jerusalem; Joseph watching carefully over Mary as she carries her baby in her arms, just another young couple coming to fulfil the laws demands.
To the temple officials it would have been just another routine moment. And yet this was a moment which had been anticipated for generations. The child that Mary carried in her arms was not just another child but the long awaited Messiah whose coming had been predicted by the prophets. More than that, in this child the God to whom this temple complex was dedicated had come in flesh amongst his people. Isaiah had spoken of a child who would be Emmanuel, God-with-us, and now in Mary’s arms that God-with-us had come at last to his temple.
As I’ve said, it was a moment which had been long anticipated. When the temple had first been built, at the time of its dedication, God had come in power and glory and filled the temple with his presence. The temple history, written in the books of Chronicles in the Old Testament, tells us “the temple was filled with the cloud of the glory of the Lord” (2 Chron 5.13).
However, before that temple was destroyed about four hundred years later the prophet Ezekiel writes of way in which God’s glory leaves the temple so that the temple becomes simply an empty shell. When the temple had been rebuilt fifty years later God’s glory did not return to it. But prophets continued to promise that one day that glory would return. So in our Old Testament reading today Malachi states “the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple”.
And when that moment came it came unobserved by those who were charged with the care and maintenance of the great house of God. Yet it did not go completely unobserved. There were in the temple a number of elderly people who spent their days in the temple offering their lives to God in prayer and worship. One of those was a man named Simeon. He was so close to God that he heard God speaking to him, and God had promised him that he would not die before he had seen the Messiah. When he saw the baby Jesus he took him in his arms and praised God for him. There was a prophetess too, named Anna and she too recognized the glory of God in tiny child and spoke of him to others who were looking out for him. For those who made the time, whose eyes were open God’s glory had come among them, the words of the prophets had been fulfilled and a new era had dawned. But for most of the crowds in that Temple it was business as usual. They were too important, to busy or too distracted to recognize their God in this tiny unnoticed child.
Application
And what of us? We live in a franticly busy world where there is so much to do and so much to distract us. Even when we come into Church there are friends to talk to, meetings to arrange, and information to be exchanged. We just can’t spare the space and time to recognise that Christ is among us. Yet he is. Unnoticed and un-remarked he is present in our worship and present in our daily lives if only we will make the space and time to notice him.
Today we mark a turning point in the Christian year. Today’s celebration marks the ending of the Christmas season and the beginning of our looking towards the keeping of Lent, the marking of Holy Week and the celebration of Easter. Today is the celebration of the presentation of Christ in the Temple, a celebration also known as the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or Candlemass.
Exposition
So what is it that we celebrate today?
In the Book of Leviticus in the Old Testament we are told that a Jewish woman who has given birth to a male child should remain separate from her everyday life for forty days after the child’s birth. After the forty days are over she is to come to the temple and make an offering to God before resuming her normal life. For those who can afford it the offering is to be a pigeon and a lamb, but for poorer people two pigeons will suffice. In our Gospel reading today we hear of how Joseph brings Mary to the temple to make that offering forty days after the birth of Jesus. We can imagine the couple nervously entering the great temple in Jerusalem; Joseph watching carefully over Mary as she carries her baby in her arms, just another young couple coming to fulfil the laws demands.
To the temple officials it would have been just another routine moment. And yet this was a moment which had been anticipated for generations. The child that Mary carried in her arms was not just another child but the long awaited Messiah whose coming had been predicted by the prophets. More than that, in this child the God to whom this temple complex was dedicated had come in flesh amongst his people. Isaiah had spoken of a child who would be Emmanuel, God-with-us, and now in Mary’s arms that God-with-us had come at last to his temple.
As I’ve said, it was a moment which had been long anticipated. When the temple had first been built, at the time of its dedication, God had come in power and glory and filled the temple with his presence. The temple history, written in the books of Chronicles in the Old Testament, tells us “the temple was filled with the cloud of the glory of the Lord” (2 Chron 5.13).
However, before that temple was destroyed about four hundred years later the prophet Ezekiel writes of way in which God’s glory leaves the temple so that the temple becomes simply an empty shell. When the temple had been rebuilt fifty years later God’s glory did not return to it. But prophets continued to promise that one day that glory would return. So in our Old Testament reading today Malachi states “the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple”.
And when that moment came it came unobserved by those who were charged with the care and maintenance of the great house of God. Yet it did not go completely unobserved. There were in the temple a number of elderly people who spent their days in the temple offering their lives to God in prayer and worship. One of those was a man named Simeon. He was so close to God that he heard God speaking to him, and God had promised him that he would not die before he had seen the Messiah. When he saw the baby Jesus he took him in his arms and praised God for him. There was a prophetess too, named Anna and she too recognized the glory of God in tiny child and spoke of him to others who were looking out for him. For those who made the time, whose eyes were open God’s glory had come among them, the words of the prophets had been fulfilled and a new era had dawned. But for most of the crowds in that Temple it was business as usual. They were too important, to busy or too distracted to recognize their God in this tiny unnoticed child.
Application
And what of us? We live in a franticly busy world where there is so much to do and so much to distract us. Even when we come into Church there are friends to talk to, meetings to arrange, and information to be exchanged. We just can’t spare the space and time to recognise that Christ is among us. Yet he is. Unnoticed and un-remarked he is present in our worship and present in our daily lives if only we will make the space and time to notice him.
Friday, January 21, 2005
Sun 23rd January Epiphany 3 AM
Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is close at hand.
Isaiah 9.1-4
Psalm 27.1,4-12
1 Corinthians 1.10-18
Matthew 4.12-23
Introduction
I’m sure you will all have heard the story which tells of a motorist lost in some rural part of the country who asks directions of a local, only to be told, “If I were going there I wouldn’t start from here”. But of course the joke is that any journey that you make has to start from “here” wherever here happens to be. It might be wonderful to imagine that you were somewhere better or more convenient but imagining changes nothing. The journey begins when you set out, and the place where you are has to be the place you set out from.
Exposition
In our Gospel reading today we hear of Jesus setting out to begin his ministry. As he sets out he begins in a particular place, with a particular message and with a particular group of people with him.
1. The place were he begins his work is Galilee, the northern part of the old Promised Land. Galilee was a mixed community of Jews and Gentiles who more or less lived separate lives in separate communities. This area of the Promised Land had been the first lo loose its independence to conquerors from the north and for this reason was called Galilee of the nations. Isaiah had prophesied that this land which had been the first part of the holy land to loose its independence would also be the first part to see the liberation which God would send. So Jesus began his ministry, not in the great centre of the Jewish faith at Jerusalem but in the marginal country to the north. He starts of with the people on the edge.
So that’s the first lesson to learn from today’s readings Jesus starts off with the people on the edge – the unexpected people. And that is always the way God works. If you want to see God at work today then the place to look is at the people on the margins, the places you wouldn’t expect to see him at work. And if you experience yourself as being marginalised and shut out then know that you are in the place where God works and he may well be seeking to do some work through you.
2. Jesus begins his ministry with a particular message. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand”. It’s the same message we heard John the Baptist proclaiming just a few weeks ago.
What does that message mean? Well firstly, it is a message about God’s rule. What Matthew calls the kingdom of heaven and the other Gospel writers call the kingdom of God is not a geographical kingdom in the sense in which we speak of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It’s not an area of land but the rule of God exercised over people. When in the Lord’s Prayer we pray that God’s kingdom will come and ask that his will should be done we are actually asking for the same thing in two different ways, that God should rule over the people of the earth so that they think and act in the way he wants them too. So Jesus message is that the time is close at hand when the will of God will be done and people will affirm their loyalty to him.
In order to get ready for that day people need to Repent. The word ‘repent’ does not mean “feel guilty”. God does not want us to feel guilty. The word ‘repent’ means to “turn around” and stop doing the things that you shouldn’t be doing and start doing the things you should. Feeling guilty is life destroying. All too often people feel guilty about things they should not feel guilty about whilst feeling nothing at all about the things in their life that need to change. Repentance is life giving. It means taking a good long look at who you are and where you’ve gone wrong and asking God’s help to be different from this day forward.
So Jesus message is that the time is coming close when God will act decisively in human lives bringing them to acknowledge his rule; and that now is the time to get ready for that by changing your life with God’s help and seeking to think and do the things he wants you to think and do.
3. Finally Jesus sets out with a particular group of people. Matthew tells us how he calls Peter and Andrew, James and John. They don’t seem to have been particularly special people; just ordinary working men who Jesus comes across and calls. Of course later on they will do remarkable things. As Jesus tells them they will change from catching fish to catching people for God. But the reason they are able to do these marvellous things is not because there is anything intrinsically special about them but rather it is because Jesus has called them and they have responded to his call.
There is another lesson for us to learn here. You don’t have to be someone special to serve Jesus – you just have to respond to his call. Jesus calls every single one of us to follow him as his disciple. Jesus doesn’t just want us to be church goers for a couple of hours a week. He wants us to be his disciples 24hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Not giving him some of the time we can spare but all that we have and all that we are. Then he will do remarkable things with us and in us as he did in and with Peter and Andrew, James and John.
Application
Jesus started off his ministry in the marginal villages of Galilee amongst the people living on the edge. All too often the Christian Church has been primarily concerned with the people at the centre of things, the rich, the powerful and the comfortable. We need to look again at the people on the edge of our society and discern how God is working amongst them, and if we perceive ourselves as being marginalised and powerless then we need to ask how God is working amongst us.
Jesus began with a message “Turn around for God’s rule is about to begin”. We need to turn around from the things in our lives which are not right before God so that we are ready for the rule of God.
And lastly, Jesus called ordinary people to do extraordinary things and those people were able to do those things because they responded to Jesus call. Jesus calls each one of us, to do remarkable things through us so that others may come to accept his rule and know his love.
Isaiah 9.1-4
Psalm 27.1,4-12
1 Corinthians 1.10-18
Matthew 4.12-23
Introduction
I’m sure you will all have heard the story which tells of a motorist lost in some rural part of the country who asks directions of a local, only to be told, “If I were going there I wouldn’t start from here”. But of course the joke is that any journey that you make has to start from “here” wherever here happens to be. It might be wonderful to imagine that you were somewhere better or more convenient but imagining changes nothing. The journey begins when you set out, and the place where you are has to be the place you set out from.
Exposition
In our Gospel reading today we hear of Jesus setting out to begin his ministry. As he sets out he begins in a particular place, with a particular message and with a particular group of people with him.
1. The place were he begins his work is Galilee, the northern part of the old Promised Land. Galilee was a mixed community of Jews and Gentiles who more or less lived separate lives in separate communities. This area of the Promised Land had been the first lo loose its independence to conquerors from the north and for this reason was called Galilee of the nations. Isaiah had prophesied that this land which had been the first part of the holy land to loose its independence would also be the first part to see the liberation which God would send. So Jesus began his ministry, not in the great centre of the Jewish faith at Jerusalem but in the marginal country to the north. He starts of with the people on the edge.
So that’s the first lesson to learn from today’s readings Jesus starts off with the people on the edge – the unexpected people. And that is always the way God works. If you want to see God at work today then the place to look is at the people on the margins, the places you wouldn’t expect to see him at work. And if you experience yourself as being marginalised and shut out then know that you are in the place where God works and he may well be seeking to do some work through you.
2. Jesus begins his ministry with a particular message. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand”. It’s the same message we heard John the Baptist proclaiming just a few weeks ago.
What does that message mean? Well firstly, it is a message about God’s rule. What Matthew calls the kingdom of heaven and the other Gospel writers call the kingdom of God is not a geographical kingdom in the sense in which we speak of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It’s not an area of land but the rule of God exercised over people. When in the Lord’s Prayer we pray that God’s kingdom will come and ask that his will should be done we are actually asking for the same thing in two different ways, that God should rule over the people of the earth so that they think and act in the way he wants them too. So Jesus message is that the time is close at hand when the will of God will be done and people will affirm their loyalty to him.
In order to get ready for that day people need to Repent. The word ‘repent’ does not mean “feel guilty”. God does not want us to feel guilty. The word ‘repent’ means to “turn around” and stop doing the things that you shouldn’t be doing and start doing the things you should. Feeling guilty is life destroying. All too often people feel guilty about things they should not feel guilty about whilst feeling nothing at all about the things in their life that need to change. Repentance is life giving. It means taking a good long look at who you are and where you’ve gone wrong and asking God’s help to be different from this day forward.
So Jesus message is that the time is coming close when God will act decisively in human lives bringing them to acknowledge his rule; and that now is the time to get ready for that by changing your life with God’s help and seeking to think and do the things he wants you to think and do.
3. Finally Jesus sets out with a particular group of people. Matthew tells us how he calls Peter and Andrew, James and John. They don’t seem to have been particularly special people; just ordinary working men who Jesus comes across and calls. Of course later on they will do remarkable things. As Jesus tells them they will change from catching fish to catching people for God. But the reason they are able to do these marvellous things is not because there is anything intrinsically special about them but rather it is because Jesus has called them and they have responded to his call.
There is another lesson for us to learn here. You don’t have to be someone special to serve Jesus – you just have to respond to his call. Jesus calls every single one of us to follow him as his disciple. Jesus doesn’t just want us to be church goers for a couple of hours a week. He wants us to be his disciples 24hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Not giving him some of the time we can spare but all that we have and all that we are. Then he will do remarkable things with us and in us as he did in and with Peter and Andrew, James and John.
Application
Jesus started off his ministry in the marginal villages of Galilee amongst the people living on the edge. All too often the Christian Church has been primarily concerned with the people at the centre of things, the rich, the powerful and the comfortable. We need to look again at the people on the edge of our society and discern how God is working amongst them, and if we perceive ourselves as being marginalised and powerless then we need to ask how God is working amongst us.
Jesus began with a message “Turn around for God’s rule is about to begin”. We need to turn around from the things in our lives which are not right before God so that we are ready for the rule of God.
And lastly, Jesus called ordinary people to do extraordinary things and those people were able to do those things because they responded to Jesus call. Jesus calls each one of us, to do remarkable things through us so that others may come to accept his rule and know his love.
Friday, January 14, 2005
16-01-2005
Ardleigh Green Baptist Church
Psalm 96
Ezekiel 2.1-3.4
Galatians 1.11-24
The prophet Ezekiel lived at time when, for his people, the world must have seemed to be falling apart. Ezekiel was born somewhere around the year 632 BC. His family were hereditary priests in the great temple which had been built by Solomon in Jerusalem and from his early years Ezekiel would have been trained to take on the family responsibilities. When he was about twenty six years old the land of which he was a part lost its political independence and came under the rule of the regional superpower of that time, the land of Babylon and in the year 597 BC about ten thousand of the leading citizens of Jerusalem were deported to Babylon to live out their lives in exile. The idea was to remove the people who gave the nation its unique identity so that it would be absorbed into the single identity of the empire and give up any ideas of independence and rebellion.
Ezekiel seems to have been amongst the 10,000 who were deported. As his book opens we find him in Babylon, beside the river Chebar. The book opens with a vision of the power and majesty of God who then goes on to call Ezekiel to a new ministry. He has been trained to be a priest but God calls him to the ministry of a Prophet – someone who will proclaim God’s message to his people. It will not be an easy task for Ezekiel to undertake. The people to whom he is sent will be stubborn and defiant. They will not listen to the words Ezekiel proclaims to them. Nevertheless, says God, Ezekiel is be persistent in his proclaiming of what God has to say. “Tell them what I say”, says God, “whether they choose to listen or not”.
Ezekiel then has a vision of a scroll from God. It is not a very cheerful book, on both sides a written “lamentations, groanings and woes”. The scroll seems to represent the message from God that Ezekiel is given to deliver to the people and Ezekiel is told to eat it. By eating the scroll Ezekiel takes the message from God into himself. The message becomes a part of who he is. And despite the discouraging nature of the contents of the scroll Ezekiel finds that it tastes “as sweet as honey”.
For the next twenty years and more, Ezekiel carries out his prophetic ministry amongst the exiles. For much of that time the message that he proclaims is one of unremitting condemnation. It is truly a message of “lamentations, groanings and woes”. Whilst the people seemed to believe that “it would all come out right in the end” Ezekiel amongst the exiles proclaims the same message that Jeremiah is proclaiming at the same time in Jerusalem. The message that there is worse to come; the city will fall and it’s temple be laid waste. This will happen, says Ezekiel, because the people have failed to listen to God and act according to his will.
These messages and visions of judgement fill almost the whole of the first half of Ezekiel’s book. Then in Chapter 25 there is a change. A first the message continues to be one of judgement but now it is aimed, not at the people of Judah but at the nations around them. Seven nations which seem to have taken special delight in Judah’s destruction are themselves warned that is not just Judah that God will judge but them too.
And then, in the final part of the book of Ezekiel we get a different message. This is a message, not of judgement, but of hope and restoration. God’s judgement is not for the destruction of his people but for there cleansing and one that has been accomplished there will renewal and restoration. In this part of the book we have the well known vision of the valley of dry bones. The message is clear – the situation may appear to be hopeless but God’s power can restore even when all hope seems lost.
In these chapters, chapters 33 to 48, Ezekiel tells of God’s concerns in two areas. The first is the area of leadership. Up until now the nation has been lead by people who have put their own interests first but now, God says, he raise up new rulers who will rule after God’s heart. They will take care of the people and nurture them. Indeed, God says, he himself will be the shepherd of his people to seek out the lost, bind up the wounded and care for them. Christians have seen in this promise a prophecy of the coming of Christ.
Ezekiel’s second great concern towards the end of his book is for worship. In the early part of his book Ezekiel sees God’s glory abandon the temple and leave it an empty shell. In the latter part of the book Ezekiel foresees the rebuilding of the temple and the renewal of its worship.
Towards the end of the book of Ezekiel comes one of my favourite passages in the Bible. In a vision Ezekiel stands near the entrance of the rebuilt temple in Jerusalem and sees a stream of water flowing from it. As the stream flows away it becomes broader and deeper. Wherever the water flows it brings life and healing. On its banks grow trees whose fruit is good for food and whose leaves bring healing. Eventually the stream, now a broad river, empties itself into the stagnant waters of the Dead Sea. Those waters are transformed, made fresh and filled with life. It is a vision of the power of God to transform a stagnant and dying world and bring new life and hope.
The Book of Ezekiel is one of the more difficult books of the Bible but it is a book which is of great value to us. There are lessons for us to learn from Ezekiel’s life and we can prophet by them.
Firstly for example, Ezekiel was a man who had his life planned out. He was to be a priest in the temple. But God had a different plan for him. We need to be careful not to ask God to bless our plans but rather to seek to do what he wills, which may be very different from anything we would plan for ourselves.
Secondly, Ezekiel reminds us of the need to stubborn and hard-headed in pursuing God’s will. The message we have to proclaim will probably not be a popular one. We must proclaim it all the same.
Finally, Ezekiel speaks to us of the hope and life the God’s message means for stagnant and dying world.
Ardleigh Green Baptist Church
Psalm 96
Ezekiel 2.1-3.4
Galatians 1.11-24
The prophet Ezekiel lived at time when, for his people, the world must have seemed to be falling apart. Ezekiel was born somewhere around the year 632 BC. His family were hereditary priests in the great temple which had been built by Solomon in Jerusalem and from his early years Ezekiel would have been trained to take on the family responsibilities. When he was about twenty six years old the land of which he was a part lost its political independence and came under the rule of the regional superpower of that time, the land of Babylon and in the year 597 BC about ten thousand of the leading citizens of Jerusalem were deported to Babylon to live out their lives in exile. The idea was to remove the people who gave the nation its unique identity so that it would be absorbed into the single identity of the empire and give up any ideas of independence and rebellion.
Ezekiel seems to have been amongst the 10,000 who were deported. As his book opens we find him in Babylon, beside the river Chebar. The book opens with a vision of the power and majesty of God who then goes on to call Ezekiel to a new ministry. He has been trained to be a priest but God calls him to the ministry of a Prophet – someone who will proclaim God’s message to his people. It will not be an easy task for Ezekiel to undertake. The people to whom he is sent will be stubborn and defiant. They will not listen to the words Ezekiel proclaims to them. Nevertheless, says God, Ezekiel is be persistent in his proclaiming of what God has to say. “Tell them what I say”, says God, “whether they choose to listen or not”.
Ezekiel then has a vision of a scroll from God. It is not a very cheerful book, on both sides a written “lamentations, groanings and woes”. The scroll seems to represent the message from God that Ezekiel is given to deliver to the people and Ezekiel is told to eat it. By eating the scroll Ezekiel takes the message from God into himself. The message becomes a part of who he is. And despite the discouraging nature of the contents of the scroll Ezekiel finds that it tastes “as sweet as honey”.
For the next twenty years and more, Ezekiel carries out his prophetic ministry amongst the exiles. For much of that time the message that he proclaims is one of unremitting condemnation. It is truly a message of “lamentations, groanings and woes”. Whilst the people seemed to believe that “it would all come out right in the end” Ezekiel amongst the exiles proclaims the same message that Jeremiah is proclaiming at the same time in Jerusalem. The message that there is worse to come; the city will fall and it’s temple be laid waste. This will happen, says Ezekiel, because the people have failed to listen to God and act according to his will.
These messages and visions of judgement fill almost the whole of the first half of Ezekiel’s book. Then in Chapter 25 there is a change. A first the message continues to be one of judgement but now it is aimed, not at the people of Judah but at the nations around them. Seven nations which seem to have taken special delight in Judah’s destruction are themselves warned that is not just Judah that God will judge but them too.
And then, in the final part of the book of Ezekiel we get a different message. This is a message, not of judgement, but of hope and restoration. God’s judgement is not for the destruction of his people but for there cleansing and one that has been accomplished there will renewal and restoration. In this part of the book we have the well known vision of the valley of dry bones. The message is clear – the situation may appear to be hopeless but God’s power can restore even when all hope seems lost.
In these chapters, chapters 33 to 48, Ezekiel tells of God’s concerns in two areas. The first is the area of leadership. Up until now the nation has been lead by people who have put their own interests first but now, God says, he raise up new rulers who will rule after God’s heart. They will take care of the people and nurture them. Indeed, God says, he himself will be the shepherd of his people to seek out the lost, bind up the wounded and care for them. Christians have seen in this promise a prophecy of the coming of Christ.
Ezekiel’s second great concern towards the end of his book is for worship. In the early part of his book Ezekiel sees God’s glory abandon the temple and leave it an empty shell. In the latter part of the book Ezekiel foresees the rebuilding of the temple and the renewal of its worship.
Towards the end of the book of Ezekiel comes one of my favourite passages in the Bible. In a vision Ezekiel stands near the entrance of the rebuilt temple in Jerusalem and sees a stream of water flowing from it. As the stream flows away it becomes broader and deeper. Wherever the water flows it brings life and healing. On its banks grow trees whose fruit is good for food and whose leaves bring healing. Eventually the stream, now a broad river, empties itself into the stagnant waters of the Dead Sea. Those waters are transformed, made fresh and filled with life. It is a vision of the power of God to transform a stagnant and dying world and bring new life and hope.
The Book of Ezekiel is one of the more difficult books of the Bible but it is a book which is of great value to us. There are lessons for us to learn from Ezekiel’s life and we can prophet by them.
Firstly for example, Ezekiel was a man who had his life planned out. He was to be a priest in the temple. But God had a different plan for him. We need to be careful not to ask God to bless our plans but rather to seek to do what he wills, which may be very different from anything we would plan for ourselves.
Secondly, Ezekiel reminds us of the need to stubborn and hard-headed in pursuing God’s will. The message we have to proclaim will probably not be a popular one. We must proclaim it all the same.
Finally, Ezekiel speaks to us of the hope and life the God’s message means for stagnant and dying world.
Monday, January 10, 2005
Assembly at St Edwards School
Monday 10th January, 8:50am
Theme “Love”
I like films that make you feel good. One of my favourites is a film called Forest Gump which tells the story of a man with learning difficulties (in earlier years we would have said he was mentally handicapped). Forest grows up in America in the 1950’s & 1960’s and somehow seems to get himself involved in all the significant events of that time. We learn that it is was Forest that taught Elvis Presley his distinctive way of dancing and Forest who alerts the world to the fact that President Nixon is a crook.
Throughout the film Forest has an ongoing friendship with a girl named Jenny. Unlike Forest Jenny is of normal intelligence and it first it seems like it is she who is the one who is taking care of Forest but as the film progresses we find that more and more it is Forest who takes care of her. She is battered, exploited and used by everyone she meets with the sole exception of Forest. She spends most of her life searching for love without realising that she has it in Forest. He alone really cares about her and when she is discovers that she is dying of AIDS it to Forest she turns, and he is the one who cares for her through her last days.
Towards the end of the film, after Jenny has died, we hear Forest talking and he gives what seems to be a summery of what the film is really about. “I may not be a cleaver man”, he says, “but I know what love is”. And we who watch the film realize that this simple man somehow seems to have got things right where more complicated people miss the point.
---
I’ve been asked to talk to you today about love, and it’s a big subject. A man named C.S.Lewis wrote a book in which he outlined four different meanings for the word love. Love he said can mean sexual attraction, it can mean friendship, affection and finally the kind of love that God has for his people.
One of the problems that we have when we talk about love is that people mix up the different kinds of love. The think that love is something that happens to them, a feeling, but it’s not really like that.
One day a man came to Jesus and asked him what the most important rules were that we find written in the Bible. Jesus told him that the most important rules were that we should love God and love our fellow human beings. Now if love is just a feeling Jesus words make no sense at all. It is as ridiculous to command someone to feel love as it is to command them to feel hungry or happy or tired. You either are or are not hungry, or happy or tired and someone ordering you to be any of those things can make no difference to whether you actually feel them or not. The same would be true if love were just a feeling, no matter how emphatically you commanded it orders cannot change the way someone feels.
What orders can change is the way someone acts. And that makes sense of what Jesus is saying. He is not saying that we feel in particular way but that we should act in a particular way. If we are ordered that we should love God above all things it means that we should act as though God were the most important person in our lives and give him the first place in all that we do. If we are ordered to love our fellow human beings in the same way as love ourselves it means we need to act as though their needs were just as important as ours, to act towards them as we would like them to act towards us.
---
In the film, Forest seems to understand this despite the fact that he’s not a cleaver man. Poor Jenny spend most of her life missing this truth. And the sad thing is that in doing so it is herself that she hurts most of all.
So let me leave you with this thought. Love is not a feeling but an attitude. You can’t change your feelings but you can change the way you act. If you took seriously the command to love God and to love other people how would that change the way you acted?
Let us pray:
O Lord, who has taught us
That all our doings without love are nothing worth,
Send forth Your Holy Spirit
And pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of love,
The very bond of peace and of all virtues
Without which, whoever lives is counted dead before You.
Grant this for the sake of Your only Son,
Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Monday 10th January, 8:50am
Theme “Love”
I like films that make you feel good. One of my favourites is a film called Forest Gump which tells the story of a man with learning difficulties (in earlier years we would have said he was mentally handicapped). Forest grows up in America in the 1950’s & 1960’s and somehow seems to get himself involved in all the significant events of that time. We learn that it is was Forest that taught Elvis Presley his distinctive way of dancing and Forest who alerts the world to the fact that President Nixon is a crook.
Throughout the film Forest has an ongoing friendship with a girl named Jenny. Unlike Forest Jenny is of normal intelligence and it first it seems like it is she who is the one who is taking care of Forest but as the film progresses we find that more and more it is Forest who takes care of her. She is battered, exploited and used by everyone she meets with the sole exception of Forest. She spends most of her life searching for love without realising that she has it in Forest. He alone really cares about her and when she is discovers that she is dying of AIDS it to Forest she turns, and he is the one who cares for her through her last days.
Towards the end of the film, after Jenny has died, we hear Forest talking and he gives what seems to be a summery of what the film is really about. “I may not be a cleaver man”, he says, “but I know what love is”. And we who watch the film realize that this simple man somehow seems to have got things right where more complicated people miss the point.
---
I’ve been asked to talk to you today about love, and it’s a big subject. A man named C.S.Lewis wrote a book in which he outlined four different meanings for the word love. Love he said can mean sexual attraction, it can mean friendship, affection and finally the kind of love that God has for his people.
One of the problems that we have when we talk about love is that people mix up the different kinds of love. The think that love is something that happens to them, a feeling, but it’s not really like that.
One day a man came to Jesus and asked him what the most important rules were that we find written in the Bible. Jesus told him that the most important rules were that we should love God and love our fellow human beings. Now if love is just a feeling Jesus words make no sense at all. It is as ridiculous to command someone to feel love as it is to command them to feel hungry or happy or tired. You either are or are not hungry, or happy or tired and someone ordering you to be any of those things can make no difference to whether you actually feel them or not. The same would be true if love were just a feeling, no matter how emphatically you commanded it orders cannot change the way someone feels.
What orders can change is the way someone acts. And that makes sense of what Jesus is saying. He is not saying that we feel in particular way but that we should act in a particular way. If we are ordered that we should love God above all things it means that we should act as though God were the most important person in our lives and give him the first place in all that we do. If we are ordered to love our fellow human beings in the same way as love ourselves it means we need to act as though their needs were just as important as ours, to act towards them as we would like them to act towards us.
---
In the film, Forest seems to understand this despite the fact that he’s not a cleaver man. Poor Jenny spend most of her life missing this truth. And the sad thing is that in doing so it is herself that she hurts most of all.
So let me leave you with this thought. Love is not a feeling but an attitude. You can’t change your feelings but you can change the way you act. If you took seriously the command to love God and to love other people how would that change the way you acted?
Let us pray:
O Lord, who has taught us
That all our doings without love are nothing worth,
Send forth Your Holy Spirit
And pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of love,
The very bond of peace and of all virtues
Without which, whoever lives is counted dead before You.
Grant this for the sake of Your only Son,
Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Saturday, January 08, 2005
The Baptism of Christ
9th January 2005
Matthew 3.13-17
The Bible readings for second Sunday of the new year always tell the story of the baptism of Jesus by his relative John the Baptist.
John the Baptist has always been one of my favourite characters from the New Testament. Matthew tells us earlier on in his Gospel that
"John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins."
When I was a young man I was one of nature’s scruffy people and John's wild clothing and wild life style had a very strong appeal for me. It seemed to exemplify a special sort of freedom and of course that is exactly what John was all about. John's message was a call to freedom.
----
In the Gospel according to St Mark we read that John proclaimed "a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins". In other words that John was teaching people to come and be washed in the river Jordan as a sign that they would give up and turn away from the things in their lives which were not right. Josephus, who was a Jewish historian who was born around the time that Jesus died on the cross, tells us a little about John the Baptist. He makes it clear that the baptism John administered was symbolic. That what he was really calling for was a change of heart, and that the rite of baptism itself was an enacting by an outward washing of the washing of the heart which had already been achieved by repentance.
This means that baptism as practiced by John is different from Christian baptism. We know that the early Christians did not view baptism by John as being the same as being baptised as a Christian. In the book of the Acts of the Apostles we find at least two occasions when followers of Jesus come across people who have been baptised by John and tell them that, although John’s baptism is good, it is not the same as Christian baptism and that they need to be baptised again in the name of Jesus.
The difference between John’s baptism and Christian baptism seems to have been that John’s baptism was a sign of something that the person being baptised had done. They had repented, they had turned away from their sins and now they being washed outwardly to show that they were now inwardly clean.
Christian baptism, on the other hand, is nothing to do with what we have done. It is a sacrament, a sign of something God has done. There is a sense in which John had a much more optimistic view of human nature than Christianity does. John suggests that a human being can decide to turn around and can do it, can in effect save themselves. Christians would maintain that human beings can only turn around with God’s help. That they cannot save themselves but that they need a saviour.
This is why, as Christians, we baptise infants who are too young even to realise what is going on. If our view of baptism was that of John the Baptist then baptising a baby would make no sense at all. Firstly, the baby would not be able to come to a rational decision to turn around and change its life, and secondly, most of us would, I think, find it very hard to see what that baby would need to be turning away from – that at just a few weeks old it would not yet have had the opportunity to commit any sins to repent off.
But Christians don’t see baptism in the way that John did. For Christians baptism is about being incorporated into God’s people, becoming part of a community, the world wide community of God’s people which we call the Church.
So Christian baptism and John’s baptism are not the same things, and that leaves us then with one big question. Why was Jesus baptised by John? Christians maintain that Jesus alone lived a perfect life in which there was no sin or wrongdoing from which he needed to turn away. That Jesus alone had no need of repentance. So why did he seek John’s baptism? This seems to have been a question which was on Matthews mind when he wrote the passage we read as our gospel reading today. He tells us that John tries to stop Jesus from being baptised and says to him, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” Jesus reply is, ““Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”
I don’t claim to understand exactly what that enigmatic reply means but I think it means that Jesus was doing it out of obedience to God. That it was God’s will for him to identify himself in this way with those who did need to repent. So it is that as Jesus submits himself to be baptized by John, as he identifies himself with human beings who need to turn back to God, God proclaims his delight in Jesus “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
----
I’ve said that John’s baptism and Christian baptism are not the same thing, and they are not but there is a connection between them. In being baptized by John Jesus was identifying with humanity, he was in a sense joining himself with us. In our baptism we are joined with Jesus. When we are baptized God says to each one of us “You are my child, whom I love and with whom I am well pleased.” Baptism is a sign of our acceptance by God. I believe in the practice of infant baptism but in many ways I count myself fortunate that I was baptized as an adult. I remember the service and it was a significant time for me. For those who have been baptized as infants it can seem a distant event rather disconnected from any present faith you might have, but it is not. Your baptism is sign that God has loved you accepted you from the moment of your conception and that he has been at work in your life from long before you knew. Value your baptism and celebrate it for by it God says to you, “You are my child, whom I love and with whom I am well pleased.”
Matthew 3.13-17
The Bible readings for second Sunday of the new year always tell the story of the baptism of Jesus by his relative John the Baptist.
John the Baptist has always been one of my favourite characters from the New Testament. Matthew tells us earlier on in his Gospel that
"John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins."
When I was a young man I was one of nature’s scruffy people and John's wild clothing and wild life style had a very strong appeal for me. It seemed to exemplify a special sort of freedom and of course that is exactly what John was all about. John's message was a call to freedom.
----
In the Gospel according to St Mark we read that John proclaimed "a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins". In other words that John was teaching people to come and be washed in the river Jordan as a sign that they would give up and turn away from the things in their lives which were not right. Josephus, who was a Jewish historian who was born around the time that Jesus died on the cross, tells us a little about John the Baptist. He makes it clear that the baptism John administered was symbolic. That what he was really calling for was a change of heart, and that the rite of baptism itself was an enacting by an outward washing of the washing of the heart which had already been achieved by repentance.
This means that baptism as practiced by John is different from Christian baptism. We know that the early Christians did not view baptism by John as being the same as being baptised as a Christian. In the book of the Acts of the Apostles we find at least two occasions when followers of Jesus come across people who have been baptised by John and tell them that, although John’s baptism is good, it is not the same as Christian baptism and that they need to be baptised again in the name of Jesus.
The difference between John’s baptism and Christian baptism seems to have been that John’s baptism was a sign of something that the person being baptised had done. They had repented, they had turned away from their sins and now they being washed outwardly to show that they were now inwardly clean.
Christian baptism, on the other hand, is nothing to do with what we have done. It is a sacrament, a sign of something God has done. There is a sense in which John had a much more optimistic view of human nature than Christianity does. John suggests that a human being can decide to turn around and can do it, can in effect save themselves. Christians would maintain that human beings can only turn around with God’s help. That they cannot save themselves but that they need a saviour.
This is why, as Christians, we baptise infants who are too young even to realise what is going on. If our view of baptism was that of John the Baptist then baptising a baby would make no sense at all. Firstly, the baby would not be able to come to a rational decision to turn around and change its life, and secondly, most of us would, I think, find it very hard to see what that baby would need to be turning away from – that at just a few weeks old it would not yet have had the opportunity to commit any sins to repent off.
But Christians don’t see baptism in the way that John did. For Christians baptism is about being incorporated into God’s people, becoming part of a community, the world wide community of God’s people which we call the Church.
So Christian baptism and John’s baptism are not the same things, and that leaves us then with one big question. Why was Jesus baptised by John? Christians maintain that Jesus alone lived a perfect life in which there was no sin or wrongdoing from which he needed to turn away. That Jesus alone had no need of repentance. So why did he seek John’s baptism? This seems to have been a question which was on Matthews mind when he wrote the passage we read as our gospel reading today. He tells us that John tries to stop Jesus from being baptised and says to him, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” Jesus reply is, ““Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”
I don’t claim to understand exactly what that enigmatic reply means but I think it means that Jesus was doing it out of obedience to God. That it was God’s will for him to identify himself in this way with those who did need to repent. So it is that as Jesus submits himself to be baptized by John, as he identifies himself with human beings who need to turn back to God, God proclaims his delight in Jesus “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
----
I’ve said that John’s baptism and Christian baptism are not the same thing, and they are not but there is a connection between them. In being baptized by John Jesus was identifying with humanity, he was in a sense joining himself with us. In our baptism we are joined with Jesus. When we are baptized God says to each one of us “You are my child, whom I love and with whom I am well pleased.” Baptism is a sign of our acceptance by God. I believe in the practice of infant baptism but in many ways I count myself fortunate that I was baptized as an adult. I remember the service and it was a significant time for me. For those who have been baptized as infants it can seem a distant event rather disconnected from any present faith you might have, but it is not. Your baptism is sign that God has loved you accepted you from the moment of your conception and that he has been at work in your life from long before you knew. Value your baptism and celebrate it for by it God says to you, “You are my child, whom I love and with whom I am well pleased.”
Saturday, January 01, 2005
Epiphany Sunday
2nd January 2005
Evening Service
Psalm 98, 100
Baruch 4.36 - 5.9
John 2.1-11
Believe it or not the Church of England has rules about how to order its services. One of those rules states that "In any year where there is a second Sunday of Christmas, the Epiphany may, for pastoral reasons, be celebrated on that Sunday." I mention this in case any of you are wondering why we have used, in all our services today, the readings and theme set for the day after the 12th Day of Christmas when it's actually still only the ninth day of Christmas. For Pastoral reasons, whatever that means, we are celebrating the Epiphany today instead of next Thursday.
The word Epiphany means a revelation. A showing forth. A Manifestation. In the ancient world a monarch would, every so often, travel around his kingdom so that his subjects could see him in all his glory. He would wear his finest robes and his richest jewels and be surrounded by his most splendid courtiers and troops so that his subjects could behold his glory and be overwhelmed by it. Such viewings of the monarch were call "Epiphanies". In the Eastern Church that term came to be used for the feast which celebrated the birth of Jesus a feast which was kept on the 6th of January. In the west the birth of Jesus was celebrated, as you know, on the 25th of December so the Epiphany came to be celebrated as a feast of the way God had revealed himself to the world in Jesus. Over time three different incidents from the life of Jesus came to be associated with today because all of them grouped around this theme of God revealing himself through Jesus, showing his power and glory. An ancient prayer from the Divine Office, the daily prayer of the Church puts it this way:
"Three wonders mark this day we celebrate:
today the star led the Magi to the manger;
today water was changed into wine at the marriage feast;
today Christ desired to be baptised by John in the river Jordan to bring us salvation, alleluia.”
This morning our readings concerned the Magi, the Wise Men. This evening our readings are about the Wedding Feast at Cana in Galilee where Jesus changed the water into wine in the first of the miracles recorded in the Gospels. The third of events associated with today, the Baptism of Jesus, we will be looking at in our services next week.
---
So this evening our focus is on a miracle. It's a familiar story to most regular Church goer's, and even those who don't regularly go to church will probably have heard mention of it during the wedding service when we are told that Christ is spiritually present with us at every wedding just as he was physically present at the Wedding at Cana.
I've actually been to a wedding which must have been similar in some ways to the Wedding the Jesus attended. It wasn't a Christian or Jewish wedding, it was a Sikh wedding but it had much the same form as wedding would have had in Jesus day. It started with a party at the bridegrooms house in the evening. The party went on late into the night and then Bridegroom and his friends went to the home of the bride to collect her from her parents and take her to the temple where the marriage service would take place. Then, after the marriage service, there was even more partying, dancing, eating and (this being a Sikh wedding and the consumption of alcohol not being forbidden by the Sikh faith) a great deal of drinking going on late into the night and indeed into the next morning.
Well, Jesus is at just such a wedding and the party is going roaringly well when disaster strikes. The wine runs out. Many commentators speak about the shame this would have brought on the families of the young couple. Some suggest that one of the families involved must have been in some way related to Jesus because Mary seems to take responsibility for the problem, and she seems to expect that Jesus will feel responsible too. And Jesus acts. There are six enormous jars for the water which the guests have used to wash themselves according to the Jewish rites of purification. Jesus orders them to be refilled and the water becomes wine. Wine which is better than the wine which was served before, so that the the steward in charge of the feast tells the bridegroom "you have kept the good wine until now."
---
It's a lovely story, but of course it's more than that. John records this story not just to entertain or interest us but because this story teaches us about Jesus. It is a story in which all the details are of significance.
Jesus is at a wedding. Throughout the gospels one of the pictures that is used for the kingdom of God is that of Wedding feast.Do you remember how I told you the bridegroom would come to the bride's house to fetch her. In the Gospels, and throughout the New Testament, that is a picture of Jesus coming to fetch his people. So, for example, we have the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids who are waiting with the bride for the arrival of the bridegroom. So by telling this story John is hinting to us that the in Jesus the bridegroom has arrived.
Then there are those six stone jars. Some people suggest that the number six indicates incompleteness. That the rites of purification for which they were to be used were not really able to purify. Later on in his ministry Jesus would argue with those who lived to keep things outwardly clean and pure whilst inwardly they were filled with corruption.
Then there is the New Wine which Jesus brings. Again, elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus speaks about his relationship with his disciples in terms of New Wine which cannot be put into old wine-skins. In other words you can't confine the relationship which Jesus has with his people within the strictures and rites of religion.
And the best wine is saved till last. With the coming of Jesus something better has arrived than there was before. So much so that the New Wine makes the old taste sour and unpalatable.
---
I'm certain that all those things are in John's mind as he records this story for our edification. But before I finish this evening I want to try to do something which is actually impossible to do, which is to go back beyond John's telling of the story to the actual event itself and ask what was going on when Jesus actually performed this miracle. I say that it is impossible to do this because we only have John's account of this event to base our thinking on and any other approach is pure speculation on my part. One possibility is, of course, that John made up the story and that it has no historical basis; that it is a teaching story from the early church intended to make the points I've already outlined without any historical basis. But I don't believe that that's the case. I believe that behind the story is a historical event which actually happened. And so I want to ask, "Why did Jesus do it?" Why did he intervene in this obscure domestic disaster at village wedding?
And it seems to me that the answer has to that he did so, not to make some spectacular teaching point but simply because he cared. Here were people in trouble, Jesus had the ability to do something about it, so he did.
---
And that gives me a problem, because we cannot worship God on this Sunday without coming to him with some big questions. On Boxing Day there was an earthquake of Indonesia which launched a tidal wave across the Indian Ocean. Early reports spoke of 11,000 dead and then, through the week, each time the news has been turned on the numbers have increased until now they stand at over 150,000 people dead with many, many thousands threatened by disease and by the destruction of their homes and livelihood. Unlike many of the evils which confront us in today's world there is no way that blame for this event can be laid at the door of human beings. It was what the insurance companies would call "an Act of God". And the question I have to ask myself is "where was the caring God that Jesus shows us in this story on Boxing Day?" And I have to say, I don't have an answer to that question except that I cannot believe that he was absent and I cannot believe that such suffering accords with his will. All week I have in my mind that question which Abraham asks of God in Genesis Chapter 18, "Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?"
And, as I say, I have no answer.
What I will do is to say that in the face of such suffering there are many, and I count myself among them, who will maintain that it is better to continue to assert that here is a God who loves and cares than to give way to despair and hopelessness. To continue to maintain that the picture of God we get through looking at Jesus, who revealed him in his Epiphany on earth, represents the truth about what God is like. And that it is better to maintain this, not because it is the easy option but because it is the hard one; the demanding one. You see if God cares then he calls on us to care too. The people of the world have responded with incredible generosity to the needs of those who have suffered in recent days but so much more is needed. Each of needs to do our part, to give how ever little or much we can afford to do our part.
The story of the Wedding at Cana speaks to us of Jesus ability to transform situations. I believe that he still does but that he calls on us to work with him in doing it.
Evening Service
Psalm 98, 100
Baruch 4.36 - 5.9
John 2.1-11
Believe it or not the Church of England has rules about how to order its services. One of those rules states that "In any year where there is a second Sunday of Christmas, the Epiphany may, for pastoral reasons, be celebrated on that Sunday." I mention this in case any of you are wondering why we have used, in all our services today, the readings and theme set for the day after the 12th Day of Christmas when it's actually still only the ninth day of Christmas. For Pastoral reasons, whatever that means, we are celebrating the Epiphany today instead of next Thursday.
The word Epiphany means a revelation. A showing forth. A Manifestation. In the ancient world a monarch would, every so often, travel around his kingdom so that his subjects could see him in all his glory. He would wear his finest robes and his richest jewels and be surrounded by his most splendid courtiers and troops so that his subjects could behold his glory and be overwhelmed by it. Such viewings of the monarch were call "Epiphanies". In the Eastern Church that term came to be used for the feast which celebrated the birth of Jesus a feast which was kept on the 6th of January. In the west the birth of Jesus was celebrated, as you know, on the 25th of December so the Epiphany came to be celebrated as a feast of the way God had revealed himself to the world in Jesus. Over time three different incidents from the life of Jesus came to be associated with today because all of them grouped around this theme of God revealing himself through Jesus, showing his power and glory. An ancient prayer from the Divine Office, the daily prayer of the Church puts it this way:
"Three wonders mark this day we celebrate:
today the star led the Magi to the manger;
today water was changed into wine at the marriage feast;
today Christ desired to be baptised by John in the river Jordan to bring us salvation, alleluia.”
This morning our readings concerned the Magi, the Wise Men. This evening our readings are about the Wedding Feast at Cana in Galilee where Jesus changed the water into wine in the first of the miracles recorded in the Gospels. The third of events associated with today, the Baptism of Jesus, we will be looking at in our services next week.
---
So this evening our focus is on a miracle. It's a familiar story to most regular Church goer's, and even those who don't regularly go to church will probably have heard mention of it during the wedding service when we are told that Christ is spiritually present with us at every wedding just as he was physically present at the Wedding at Cana.
I've actually been to a wedding which must have been similar in some ways to the Wedding the Jesus attended. It wasn't a Christian or Jewish wedding, it was a Sikh wedding but it had much the same form as wedding would have had in Jesus day. It started with a party at the bridegrooms house in the evening. The party went on late into the night and then Bridegroom and his friends went to the home of the bride to collect her from her parents and take her to the temple where the marriage service would take place. Then, after the marriage service, there was even more partying, dancing, eating and (this being a Sikh wedding and the consumption of alcohol not being forbidden by the Sikh faith) a great deal of drinking going on late into the night and indeed into the next morning.
Well, Jesus is at just such a wedding and the party is going roaringly well when disaster strikes. The wine runs out. Many commentators speak about the shame this would have brought on the families of the young couple. Some suggest that one of the families involved must have been in some way related to Jesus because Mary seems to take responsibility for the problem, and she seems to expect that Jesus will feel responsible too. And Jesus acts. There are six enormous jars for the water which the guests have used to wash themselves according to the Jewish rites of purification. Jesus orders them to be refilled and the water becomes wine. Wine which is better than the wine which was served before, so that the the steward in charge of the feast tells the bridegroom "you have kept the good wine until now."
---
It's a lovely story, but of course it's more than that. John records this story not just to entertain or interest us but because this story teaches us about Jesus. It is a story in which all the details are of significance.
Jesus is at a wedding. Throughout the gospels one of the pictures that is used for the kingdom of God is that of Wedding feast.Do you remember how I told you the bridegroom would come to the bride's house to fetch her. In the Gospels, and throughout the New Testament, that is a picture of Jesus coming to fetch his people. So, for example, we have the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids who are waiting with the bride for the arrival of the bridegroom. So by telling this story John is hinting to us that the in Jesus the bridegroom has arrived.
Then there are those six stone jars. Some people suggest that the number six indicates incompleteness. That the rites of purification for which they were to be used were not really able to purify. Later on in his ministry Jesus would argue with those who lived to keep things outwardly clean and pure whilst inwardly they were filled with corruption.
Then there is the New Wine which Jesus brings. Again, elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus speaks about his relationship with his disciples in terms of New Wine which cannot be put into old wine-skins. In other words you can't confine the relationship which Jesus has with his people within the strictures and rites of religion.
And the best wine is saved till last. With the coming of Jesus something better has arrived than there was before. So much so that the New Wine makes the old taste sour and unpalatable.
---
I'm certain that all those things are in John's mind as he records this story for our edification. But before I finish this evening I want to try to do something which is actually impossible to do, which is to go back beyond John's telling of the story to the actual event itself and ask what was going on when Jesus actually performed this miracle. I say that it is impossible to do this because we only have John's account of this event to base our thinking on and any other approach is pure speculation on my part. One possibility is, of course, that John made up the story and that it has no historical basis; that it is a teaching story from the early church intended to make the points I've already outlined without any historical basis. But I don't believe that that's the case. I believe that behind the story is a historical event which actually happened. And so I want to ask, "Why did Jesus do it?" Why did he intervene in this obscure domestic disaster at village wedding?
And it seems to me that the answer has to that he did so, not to make some spectacular teaching point but simply because he cared. Here were people in trouble, Jesus had the ability to do something about it, so he did.
---
And that gives me a problem, because we cannot worship God on this Sunday without coming to him with some big questions. On Boxing Day there was an earthquake of Indonesia which launched a tidal wave across the Indian Ocean. Early reports spoke of 11,000 dead and then, through the week, each time the news has been turned on the numbers have increased until now they stand at over 150,000 people dead with many, many thousands threatened by disease and by the destruction of their homes and livelihood. Unlike many of the evils which confront us in today's world there is no way that blame for this event can be laid at the door of human beings. It was what the insurance companies would call "an Act of God". And the question I have to ask myself is "where was the caring God that Jesus shows us in this story on Boxing Day?" And I have to say, I don't have an answer to that question except that I cannot believe that he was absent and I cannot believe that such suffering accords with his will. All week I have in my mind that question which Abraham asks of God in Genesis Chapter 18, "Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?"
And, as I say, I have no answer.
What I will do is to say that in the face of such suffering there are many, and I count myself among them, who will maintain that it is better to continue to assert that here is a God who loves and cares than to give way to despair and hopelessness. To continue to maintain that the picture of God we get through looking at Jesus, who revealed him in his Epiphany on earth, represents the truth about what God is like. And that it is better to maintain this, not because it is the easy option but because it is the hard one; the demanding one. You see if God cares then he calls on us to care too. The people of the world have responded with incredible generosity to the needs of those who have suffered in recent days but so much more is needed. Each of needs to do our part, to give how ever little or much we can afford to do our part.
The story of the Wedding at Cana speaks to us of Jesus ability to transform situations. I believe that he still does but that he calls on us to work with him in doing it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)