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Pentecost 24
12/11/2023

Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25

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Only a god like the God of the crucified Christ can resolve the tension many of us experience as beneficiaries of a violent colonial history.

Only a god like the God of the crucified Christ can make a gospel Yes out of the violent No of history’s tragedies, including colonialism.

This is because the violence of colonisation is the violence of the crucifixion. And if the substance of salvation can wear the form of the cross, the healing yet to come can wear the vestments of colonial history.

The burden of my sermon today is how this might be so…

The colonising God
Consider the terrifying words of Joshua to the Israelites: “…the Lord drove out before us all the peoples, the Amorites who lived in the land.”

Did God do this? Did the “God of love” command and enable the violent displacement of the Amorites (among others) in favour of the Israelites? The moral answer required by modern sensibility is a resounding No, God did not.

But it’s not that easy, if the Scriptures matter for our sense of God.

It’s not that easy because the “gift” of this land in fulfilment of the promise to Abraham is central to the Old Testament’s confession of the faithfulness of God. From Abraham through the Exodus to the occupation, in the prophets and then in the Exile, and again in the post-exilic Restoration, possession of this land is a central measure of God – a proof of God’s faithfulness. And, of course, in the New Testament, St Paul makes not a little(!!!) of Abraham’s trust in the promise of God with respect to descendants and the deliverance of Canaan.

This matters to us here and now, of course, because as for the Israelites so for us: our land, too, is bloody. And so we find ourselves seemingly in need of these texts because they sign God’s faithfulness, while also being fully aware of the moral problem: everything non-indigenous Australians have is had at enormous cost to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples. While we wonder about the possibility of doing theology “on” stolen land, the scriptural text theologises the stealing: God did this.

Death as method
We can make the problem more concrete by asking, Does God kill for God’s own purposes? Is death a method for God, a means to divine ends?

This opens the question up to include now the crucifixion of Jesus – the colonisation of a single body. The cross is the quintessential scriptural moment at which human and divine violence coincide. The human violence is obvious: a man is killed. The divine violence appears as an overlay on that death, with talk of ransom and sacrificial exchange hinting that God purposed Jesus to die.

But do God’s purposes require killing? Did God kill the Amorites for the sake of the Israelites or kill Jesus for everyone’s sake? No, God did not, although we can’t say this merely because we imagine that ours is a God of love. “Love” versus “not‑love” at this point simply moralises the problem, and this can’t make sense of the way the Bible circumscribes love with the language of divine violence. St John tells us that divine love is God sending “his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10). We can’t happily lean on the scriptural authority of John’s “God is love”, without accounting for his interweaving of love with death.

Death and the free God
We must indeed say that God doesn’t kill or demand killing – of Amorites, Jesus or indigenous peoples. But this isn’t merely because God is love; God doesn’t kill because God doesn’t need to. Killing is method – a means to an end. We have means and methods: if this sacrifice, then that benefit – and we have found that blood can be a very effective lubricant. Because God also has purposes, it is almost irresistible to conclude that God must need means. Thus, God drives out the Amorites in order to fulfil the promise, and kills Jesus in order to save us. In this way, death now appears as a means to God’s ends.

But this over-reads the scriptural text and under-reads Christian confession. God does will and does purpose, but needs no means by which to achieve that will. More specifically, God has no need that we do a particular thing for God’s will to be fulfilled, certainly not that we kill. This is the importance of the doctrine of creation out of nothing. Creation out of nothing is about the freedom of God, such that nothing has to be in place “in order that” God can do God’s thing. God’s power to create out of nothing is the meaning of grace and the possibility of the resurrection of the dead. God is unconstrained by prior conditions. God does not kill because God doesn’t need anything to die for his purposes to be realised.

Why, then, do the Scriptures cast God as one who kills to save or to punish?

Death is not a method for God, but it is for us. We fight our way into places not ours, or fight our way out of places in which we are trapped. This is Palestine and Ukraine and our own colonial history right up to this moment, and countless other instances besides. This is the normal – even the natural – way of the political animal.

And by simply not having drowned under our history of violence, we survivors today find ourselves afloat upon a sea of blood: the blood of soldiers who died in wars we didn’t fight, of indigenes in colonisations we can’t undo, the lives of slaves on whose back we have built our lives, and so on. The human being is many things, but it is this also.

The question is whether God can work with this, whether the nothingness of human brokenness is the kind of nothingness out of which God creates.

– – – – – – –      Selah     – – – – – – –

The sinful form of forgiveness: the “happy sin”
An answer is found if we turn to the marvel – and the moral shock – of Christian confession, with its understanding of the dynamics of forgiveness.

The cross, of course, is central to this dynamic. In particular, it matters that the cross is intrinsic to a particular experience of forgiveness. An extrinsic account of forgiveness holds that the cross doesn’t need to know what sin I have committed. I might be an adulterer, a murderer or a thief, but in any case the cross is invoked as a catch-all means of reconciliation to God. An intrinsic account of forgiveness is one in which the cross is part of the sin I have committed. This means that, in its first moment, the cross saves only those who, 2000 years ago, rejected the presence of God’s kingdom in Jesus. The crucial(!) point here is that the sign of God’s blessing is cross-shaped because the crucifixion of God’s kingdom is the sin to be overcome. Put more simply, forgiveness cannot – ever – forget. Forgiveness cannot forget because to forget the sin would be to forget that I have been forgiven. And I would lose myself as a new creation.

It is this which leads us into the moral jolt of forgiveness and reconciliation: any deep experience of forgiveness looks back on the particular sin as the “cause” for the present blessing: I know the blessing of reconciliation now “because” I sinned. And so, in fear and trembling, the church has sometimes spoken of the felix culpa – the happy, lucky, blessed fault. So unlikely, so unanticipated, so impossible is the vision of God had in this experience of reconciliation, that it becomes possible to imagine that God’s hand must have been in the very fault itself – possible to see God’s hand in our sin, so that we might see God and ourselves more clearly.

This is slightly overstated, but only slightly. None of this works at the level of morality, of course, which is why Paul rejects the conclusion that we should abound in sin in order that grace might abound (Romans 6:2). The idea of a blessed fault only works on a reading of the cross as sinful human violence which God has made a blessing. It’s God’s hand, and not ours, which makes this reading possible. Just as the Psalms are our words to God made into God’s Word to us, so also is the cross a pious act against a blasphemer made into a healing revelation of our own blasphemy. In the Eucharist, the body broken “for us” is only so because it is the body broken by us. How could we have known that there is a God who works like this without the cross? Surely, the Scriptures conclude, God must have destined the Son to die for us; surely God “did” the cross.

This is the strange, and disquieting, but evangelical logic of the Scriptures, by which the light does not merely contradict the darkness but comprehends it, making the darkness its own. Our darkness is never darkness in God’s sight (Psalm 130:12).

Canaan as the cross
The Scripture’s theologising of the bloody acquisition of Canaan can’t be reconciled morally, but it can be heard through this dynamic of sin-shaped forgiveness. The sin is the violent dispossession, but the blessing is the experience – or cultural memory – of having been slaves and, impossibly, freed from slavery and, impossibly, finding our way to and settling into a new homeland. So unlikely is this to have happened that it must have been God who did it – from the Plagues, to the drowned Egyptian charioteers, to surviving the desert, to settling in green pastures beside still waters. How could it not be that the Lord drove out the Amorites before us?

But God is no killer on this reading, even if perhaps the scriptural writers probably believed she was. This reading requires, rather, that the blessing comes in spite of human violence even if in the shape of that violence. And this is dependent principally upon a reading of the cross as a sin-shaped means of grace.

God and our history, beyond morality
Now, if we find some truth in all that, what does it tell us about our own contemporary experience of colonisation – and I mean here particularly, the experience of those who have benefited from the dispossession? Is it possible that we might come to an experience of forgiveness and reconciliation which must wonder whether God’s hand was in the violent processes of the colonisation of this land, in a way comparable to what I’ve proposed for the taking of Canaan?

This is a ghastly question at a moral level, and the moral answer is No, and rightly so: God did not kill by the colonist’s hands; what happened to create modern Australia has no moral justification. Yet it did happen; death is a method for us. And we are stuck – colonisers and colonised alike. It can’t be undone because there is no proper recompense for blood in strictly moral terms. Blood stains deeply, and it can’t be washed out.

But the gospel is that the God we are dealing with here is not a moral agent in the world, and doesn’t deal with us according to our moral achievement or failure. God’s interaction with our history is not a moral matter but a matter of the nature and possibility of forgiveness, of the willingness to remember and the requirement not to forget, and of discovering ourselves as worthy of judgement but blessed nonetheless.

Whatever might be the conflicting hopes and fears of the broader Australian community, the colonially complicit church hopes in a God who will reconcile in such a way that it will seem that things had to happen as they did, horribly wrong as they were.

The church can hope this only because the violence of colonisation is the violence of the crucifixion of Jesus – our colonisation of his body.

The church can hope this only because if the substance of salvation can wear the form of our crucifixion of the Lord of glory, so it can also wear the tragedy of colonial history.

This is the gospel for the coloniser who cannot undo the colonisation.

– – – – – – –      Selah     – – – – – – –

What is missing in all that I’ve said this morning, of course, is the perspective of the Canaanite, of the crucified, of the colonised; the perspective of the Israeli woman enjoying a weekend music festival and of the Palestinian boy whose hospital collapses on top of him. I have addressed primarily the condition of the violent and their beneficiaries – those of us who have blood on our hands. Nonetheless, the victims of violence can also be addressed through the dynamic of the cross because the victim and the victimiser are two different types of nothingness, out of which God can create. It’s just that that would be another too-long, too dense sermon.

None of what I’ve said justifies violence or injustice. None of this lightens the moral demand for redress. The gospel is not a political program. My concern here is confession – confession of sin and confession of faith as to what we can expect from God. As interested as we must be in we should now do, I’m speaking here about what God will do.

If there is horror in what I’ve said, it must be not only in the possibility that colonialism might be destined to be found a blessing, but perhaps more profoundly in relation to the place of the cross itself in our account of God. A God who has a “use” for a crucifixion must surely be a terrifying God, and yet we confess just this God to be marvellous, and because of the crucifixion. God is marvellous because nothing should come back from a crucifixion, much less the crucified himself, showing us the marks cold steal leaves in flesh but speaking words of peace.

And can anything come back from colonisation or a lost referendum, or from murder or rape, or from suicide or bereavement or a terminal diagnosis? That is, can anything good come back from such brokenness and loss?

In terms of our moral measures of the world, it is an indeed an impossible thing we confess: history – all that we have done and has been done to us – is to be made the province of God, the form of God’s grace‑d presence to us, re-creation out of nothing.

– – – – – – –      Selah     – – – – – – –

Can it be?
As I struggled to bring all this to some sort of conclusion, the words of a perhaps-too-familiar hymn came to mind, which I had never quite felt in the terms I’ve outlined this morning:

…can it be that I should gain
An int’rest in the Savior’s blood?
Died He for me (!?!), who caused His pain?
For me (!?!), who Him to death pursued?

It’s a rollicking good song to sing but perhaps this verse at least is better whispered than belted out, for it indicates the shocking proposal of the gospel: that my victim will become my salvation.

Can it be that the crucified God will make a gospel Yes out of the violent No of history’s tragedies?

Whatever else the church might say in our wrestling with our history and with every other tragedy besides, we must – in fear and trembling – say that if we confess the crucified Jesus to be Lord, then we confess also that God can draw the reconciliation of all things out of the nothingness of human sin and violence.

Whatever moral good we must yet do to acknowledge the sins of the past and mitigate their continuing effect, these works will not justify us and we delude ourselves if we think we can make it good. Blood stains deeply, and can’t be washed out.

But we are a people of the gospel. To take an image from the Seer of Revelation, we confess that with the God of the crucified Christ, Blood. Washes. White.

Can any other God do this?

“…put away then the other gods that are among you,” Joshua said to the people, “and incline your hearts to the Lord.”

 

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Prayer of response

We bless you, great God,
for you have created and sustained us
and all things
for your own name’s sake,
that we might glorify and enjoy you forever.

And yet we confess that, in thought, word and deed,
we fail to bring you glory.

Forgive us when, wittingly or not,

our lives are lived at the cost of others,
and we refuse to know the need for forgiveness…

Forgive us when, mindful of our failures,

we imagine that we can make good
with this or that gesture,
and we refuse to know the cost of forgiveness…

Forgive us then, when we withhold forgiveness,

and lack generosity and mercy;
or refuse the consequences of being forgiven
and lack justice and sacrifice…

Gracious God,

you bring your people home from despair
and gave them a future of freedom and plenty.
Do not let us rest easy with injustice,

or wallow in our inability to heal ourselves,

but bring us home to justice, sharing, and compassion,
in the realm you promise all the world
This we ask in Jesus the Christ,

who became sin and salvation for us. Amen.

 

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Three related sermons:

Salvation’s sinful form (John 3:14)

https://marktheevangelist.unitingchurch.org.au/15-march-salvations-sinful-form/

The God of COVID-19 (Isaiah 53:10)

https://marktheevangelist.unitingchurch.org.au/5-april-the-god-of-covid-19/

God is a resurrecting avenger (Revelation 16)

https://marktheevangelist.unitingchurch.org.au/3-july-god-is-a-resurrecting-avenger/

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Easter 2
16/4/2023

Acts 2:14a, 22-23
Psalm 16
John 20:19-31

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In a sentence:
Whatever resurrection life looks like, it does not leave our history – us – behind

Identifying the dead
The fan of the TV murder mystery knows that an essential part of many of those stories is identifying the dead body. By this we confirm that the deceased is the person we think she is.

When we identify a living person, it is by recognising her face or voice. If we know her very well, we might even recognise her by smell or the feel of her skin. That is, we identify the living by sensory means, by what we naturally are, as perceived by sight, sound and touch.

When we identify a person who has just died, sight is the only sensory means left. The detective pulls back the pall, and the face is recognised. Often in the murder mystery, however, the story is more complicated than this. The trauma to the body or years in a shallow grave means that seeing doesn’t tell us much. Our senses fail us here or, perhaps better, the natural, sensory being of the person who died fails us because what remains can’t tell us who this is.

And so, where the person’s natural appearance is no use, the investigator turns to ‘history’ – to what the person did or was done to him. Now it’s about tattoos and scars, dental records and prostheses, or the remnant of a train ticket found nearby. These are historical ‘additions’ to the natural person, the unique marks our particular experience of life adds to our natural embodiment.

Thomas and the marks of crucifixion
Each year on this Sunday we hear John’s account of the appearance of Jesus to the disciples, in the absence of Thomas. Thomas, who begins in doubt, soon makes one of the strongest declarations about Jesus in the Bible: ‘My Lord and my God.’

We have all wondered with Thomas and then wondered at Thomas and his credulity. Our problem is that he apparently has Jesus standing in front of him, but we have the story of Jesus standing in front of him – natural Jesus, perceived by the senses of sight and hearing and touch. And the story doesn’t seem to be enough for us. Thomas and the other disciples seem to have it easier than we do.

But let’s look at the details of the account and, in particular, at how Thomas comes to his extraordinary confession. We all know that Thomas insists on seeing Jesus’ wounded hands, feet and side. This seems to be a gross materialism – ‘Let me hold him, and I’ll believe he’s here’.

Yet, we don’t usually note that this is also how the other disciples identified Jesus:

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. (20.19f)

When Thomas says, ‘Show me the marks’, he asks for nothing more than what the other disciples have already had. Thomas doesn’t want to see ‘Jesus’ in some ‘There you are, old chap’ kind of way; he wants to see the marks of crucifixion. It could only be the risen Jesus if those marks were there.

This is very odd. Thomas and the others knew what Jesus looked like and sounded like and so could identify him by his natural features in the normal, sensory way. Yet it is by the marks of crucifixion that they identify him. This is to say that what Jesus ‘looks like’ – his natural person – doesn’t matter here. What matters is nothing natural – nothing sensory – but only the traces of Jesus’ story – his hi-story – summed up in the wounds in his hands, feet and side. Jesus is what he did and what was done to him. It is the (hi-)story which matters, the human and social dynamics which Jesus embodies and is.

Resurrection as the recovery of the cross
If this is true, something very strange happens to resurrection-talk. If Jesus is what was done to him, the rising of Jesus is the rising of just that – the rising of what Jesus did and of what was done to him. The rising of Jesus, then, is not merely the breathing-again of a dead man but the rising of the cross: the recovery of the cross as the heart of the matter. The resurrection is not ‘once-dead friend Jesus’ who comes back to life as some proof of life after death; the resurrection is the return of the crucified – the return of the cross. We are not, then, to believe in the resurrection but in the cross. It is the cross which is the scope and completion of Jesus’ work (‘it is finished’, John 19.30); the cross is the ‘load-bearer’ here, as we said last week.

This is not just neat theology; it makes a difference in real and specific human experiences and contemporary challenges. Some of you have read the op-ed piece I wrote last week, linking this interpretation of Thomas’ experience with the proposed indigenous Voice to Parliament. I won’t say anything more about that this morning.

But we can also connect Thomas with the fact that we (as a congregation) are here today in this particular place because we are about to move away from 170 years of one way of being, into something very different.

The raising of the wounded church
It might be (just a little) overdramatic to speak of our congregation’s present and immediate future as being a matter of death and resurrection. (It’s probably more like an amputation, which is bad enough!). But we do symbolise something of the wounds of the whole church in its current condition in broader society. It is not only the state of the property at Curzon Street which sees us having to move; if we were still the community which built those buildings, we would also be able to take care of them. But we’re not that community anymore, and maintenance and insurance and other overheads have pushed us into deficit budgets. The crisis of UMC aside, we were (are) in serious trouble. We should use it carefully, but dying is a useful metaphor for understanding many – perhaps even most – Christian communities in Australia today. The possible exception here might be recent, more successful migrant-based churches and a few Pentecostal megachurches. However, even many of these might yet be found just to be running late for their own funerals.

Whatever we think has caused this, the wounds in the Body of Christ are deep. And the question is, what would a resurrection look like? All we can say about this is that a resurrected Body of Christ – tomorrow’s church – will bear the marks of its suffering and rejection, and yet, those marks and wounds will not debilitate. The risen body of Jesus – marked as it is – is no longer on the cross and no longer wrapped in tight linen bindings. So also it will be for the Body of Christ which is the church, and this is the hope with which we contemplate our future.

We are everything which has brought us to this point. And our future can only be one that catches us up and carries us forward, history and all. The promise of this place, then, is not a sudden burst of new people coming in, filling this space in no time and out-shining all that has gone before. The church does not believe in flash-in-the-pan, won-the-lottery, dropped-out-of nowhere miracles. This is what we think Thomas and his friends got – a sight and sound spectacular. And yet, such a spectacle would prove nothing. So what if one dead person once rose from the dead? Quite seriously – so what? ‘Do you believe because you have seen?, asks Jesus, as if to imply, ‘What kind of belief is that?’

The church does not believe in miracles like this. It believes, rather, in the story of a history of a transformation of death: a scarred but living and strong body of Jesus, which then become the scarred but living and strong Body of Christ – even the church.

If we were to come here – and this has not yet been decided – it would be so that we might be both the congregation we have known and the congregation God might raise us into. Any future of the church is not simply a cutting itself free of its history of success and failure. The church’s future is a carrying-forth and transformation of all that. If we come here, and if this is in the hope of anything in any sense like resurrection, then we must both remember everything and also look to see it all transformed.

‘Do you believe because you see?’, Jesus asks us. No, we believe because we hear that history’s tragedies are just the nothingness out of which God creates a future with the world, a future with us.

The risen Jesus bears the marks of sin and death, and yet lives. His risen life, and ours, is one of memory and hope.

Our life is memory and hope.

 

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Epiphany 2
15/1/2023

Isaiah 53:1-7
Psalm 40
John 1:19-51

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

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He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.  Isa. 53:7. NRSV

The next day, [John the baptizer] saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, ‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!’             Jn 1:29 NRSV

Our two readings this morning are linked by a single vivid image, a lamb waiting at an abattoir. It is John the Baptist who makes the link and today’s Gospel follows on from last week’s.^[1]

You may remember Matt Julius’ arresting title, ‘The wrong baptism’ where he rightly drew our attention away from Jesus’ baptism (which St John does not actually describe) to the baptism of Jesus on the cross. [Since we will talk about two Johns this morning, the gospel writer will be ‘St’ and the other, mostly ‘the Baptist’]

John the Baptist, named for his profession not the denomination, is such a strange figure. He has already opted out of normal society, an ascetic, perhaps connected with some of the communities we know lived in the desert beyond Jerusalem. He also stands between the biblical Testaments, the last prophet – and, as St John makes him – the harbinger of a new chapter in God’s dealing with humankind, the Forerunner (as Orthodox Christians call him).  He reached back into the Jewish tradition to quote the prophet Isaiah and his moving four poems or songs about another strange figure called ‘the suffering servant’. He too was cast out, and as the fourth song (today’s reading) says,

‘cut off from the world of the living, stricken to death for my people’s transgression’ (Is. 53:8)

You can see why the first Christians, all raised in Judaism, saw a close portrait of their crucified Lord. The figure of the ‘Lamb of God’ is its focus.

St John began his Gospel with the image of the ‘Word’, the ‘Logos’, but he now takes up the Baptist’s ikon and repeats it no fewer than three times – but what does it represent?

If you read all of chapters 42 to 53, you will find no single answer. The Servant of God, of which the Lamb is one image, is seen as a representative man, a leader perhaps, a messiah, perhaps, or a remnant of the faithful Israel, guided by God’s promises, or a kind of ambassador to other nations on God’s behalf (which, by the way, is a common task of a biblical servant, as it is of a deacon). Modern Judaism, I learned from reading commentaries by modern rabbis, choose the communal image, God’s chosen people, Israel. In Isaiah’s time, they were an exiled nation with its temple in ruins and its culture cut off from its sources. The Servant is not one man, he is Israel.

We heard from St John this morning about the interrogation by some pharisees from Jerusalem, to whom the Baptist denied that he was the Messiah, nor Jeremiah who would return to announce the messiah, nor a prophet – like Isaiah. The John verses are the Baptist’s attempt to distinguish himself and his ministry from that of Jesus.

There is a subplot here which need not detain us. Both Johns are addressing two communities – the followers of the Baptist and the disciples of Jesus. The Christians were wary that the baptism story looks as if their Lord Jesus submitted to John and was thus somehow less than him. But John was executed and in time his disciples chose to follow Jesus or withered away.

And there were two baptisms, John’s in water, Jesus’ with fire and the Holy Spirit.  St John is careful to add the Baptist’s testimony that he saw the Holy Spirit ‘remain’ over Jesus at his baptism (1:32).

The next day he sees Jesus in the street and proclaims to the crowd, ‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!’ quoting Isaiah – and we will sing it again before this service is over.

Now, Christians believe that it was the mission of Jesus to ‘take away the sins of the world’. But Isaiah’s servant was to take away the sins of Israel. The revolution announced in the Second (or New) Testament is that God’s promises are open to all humankind, to the ‘Gentiles’ as well as to God’s beloved first people.

But what happens when we name Jesus as ‘the Lamb of God’?

St John believed that Jesus’ death on the cross took place on the day when the lambs were being killed for Passover. No other gospel makes that connection. St Paul calls Jesus ‘our Passover Lamb’ (1 Cor 5:7). I asked myself what the Jewish tradition thinks of the lamb of isa. 53. They insist that the Passover Lamb was not a sacrifice. It is the story of origins for Jews. On the eve of Exodus, the whole nation prepared itself for a hard and dangerous journey from slavery to freedom. The lambs were for a meal to sustain them, to be eaten in a hurry.  Blood was sprinkled on their doorposts as a sign to protect them. None of this is ‘sacrifice’ in its normal meaning.

The other major penitential event in the Jewish Year is the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. In its background story (Levit. 16:7-22), two goats were selected; one was sacrificed, and its blood poured on the altar; the other, over which the priests listed the sins of Israel, was driven out without further ceremony into the desert where it died, hence our ‘scapegoat’.  But the goat associated with Israel’s sin was not the goat which was sacrificed.

Sacrifice is a word in the Christian vocabulary, but it needs to be very carefully used. Jewish sacrifice, for ordinary people like Joseph and Mary, was concerned with such things as doves and pigeons; the more serious, national rituals took place in the Temple, and with its destruction in AD 70, all animal sacrifice ceased, and since then Jewish understanding of sacrifice has been spiritual and ethical. They are horrified at the thought that the death of a human being could achieve these purposes.

From the earliest centuries, philosophers have offered ’theories of Atonement’ – to make sense of death of the innocent Jesus. The most popular for Protestants – though there are Catholic equivalents – is called ‘the Penal Substitutionary’ theory, which holds that the primary purpose of Jesus’ death was to satisfy God’s justice. It was a brutal payment to God for others’ wrongdoing. Many modern Christians reject this theory because it is morally offensive. And something of it remains in other theories and is kept alive in conservative Christianity. (This was the doctrinal dividing point between the Student Christian Movement and the evangelical Union in the 1960s.)

I should now solve all these mysteries for you, but I cannot. This sermon is an unfinished symphony.

Certainly, our present era has a major challenge in articulating our faith in categories both true to the biblical tradition, and meaningful in our contemporary contexts. We cannot follow our mediaeval ancestors in wholesale but uncritical borrowings from either Testament. It is a task we preachers attempt every time we speak, and in the end, we stand dumb before the ‘Mystery of faith’.

Let me add some comments which need to be explored if I were to complete my sermon (some of these have been added post-preaching!).

The image of the lamb of God appears elsewhere in the scriptures. Some (e.g. Calvin) have seen Jesus’ silence before Pilate and Herod as a parallel to the Lamb/servant‘s innocence. In Revelation, the lamb is also a lion overcoming God’s enemies; the martyrs are dressed in white garments ‘washed in the blood (!) of the lamb’ (7:14). In eucharistic and liturgical history, the bread is called ‘the lamb’, and the Agnus Dei is sung while the bread is broken after the Great Prayer and before Communion.

Are any of these uses tied to a sacrificial understanding of Jesus? Well, yes, but not in a penal substitutionally way! Christ died for us, yes, but is its meaning to be found in the blood of his execution, or from the whole of his incarnation, teaching, healing and in his constant communion with and obedience to the Father? The hours in Gethsemane seem to be a critical point here. The Lamb of God image has anchored our attention on the death of Jesus. In Isa. 53:7, after the lamb is mentioned, the parallel analogy is of a sheep before its shearer, i.e. not faced with death. I do not wish to remove death and suffering from Jesus or his work of salvation, but I want to release it from a narrow interpretation.

The graphic on today’s order of Service is of a mosaic of the 6^th C AD in the church of San Vitale in Ravenna. It is situated at the top of the vault in the dome, supported by four angels and the background is of stars and flowers of paradise – but there are no wounds or blood.  That is the main way Christian artists have portrayed it. There is another strand where the lamb is pierced in the breast and blood spurts out in an arc, sometimes into a chalice; obviously that comes of a catholic piety and goes beyond the meanings I believe are justified.

We believe that Jesus/the Lamb rescued us from the debt we owe God. I want to take ‘on the cross’ as a summary of his whole ministry. His ‘work’ is done, but ours is not, and we live and work through the hope based in Jesus’ unique victory: as a human being in communion with his Father, he broke through the barriers which prevent us from being who God wants us to be. That was the otherwise impossible task the Lamb was prepared to take on.

We need to live within the paradox set for us by John the Baptist, who baptised Jesus but knew there was another baptism.  That baptism, which we share, makes us members of the body of Christ and heirs of his promises, ‘through the water of rebirth and the renewal by the holy Spirit’ to life eternal in Christ.

[1] I also chose the Fourth Song from Isa. 53, which is where the image appears.

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Easter 2
28/4/2019

Acts 5:27-32
Psalm 118
John 20:19-31

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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How was Thomas to know that the end of the story could change? Everyone knows that when a person is dead and buried, that is the end of the story. Friends and loved-ones will go on with their lives changed but it will not include the living presence of the deceased. How was Thomas to know that the Jesus story would not end like all other human stories?

Thomas is the archetypal sceptic. John’s gospel sets Thomas up as the sceptic on behalf of all the sceptics in the church through the whole life of the church.

It is a dramatic device that helps to draw us into the story. Sue and I recently saw an opera that had a changed ending. A character in the drama expressed the emotions of the audience on our behalf. Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg traditionally finishes with the girl standing looking adoringly beside her man as he succumbs to the sickeningly nationalistic arguments of the chorus and accepts the invitation to join the Singers in order to strengthen the domination of their culture. In a recent production of the opera the girl, without a word said (or sung) indicates her distain for what is being argued and her man’s compliance with the invitation. Instead of joining the cast in their adulations, she storms off stage. As the arguments to join the singers unfolds the audience grows in its understanding of why this opera was so loved by Hitler. The heroine’s reaction expresses the horror of a modern post World War II audience and makes it known on our behalf.

Thomas is the dramatic sceptic on behalf of us all. He will not believe that Jesus is alive until he sees him and touches the wounds by which he was killed. Time for a trivia question. How do we know that Jesus was nailed to the cross? Answer: because Thomas mentioned the marks of the nails in his hands. This is the only time in any of the gospels that nails are mentioned in connection with Jesus’ crucifixion. It was usual for the crucified to be with attached by rope. The Life of Brian is the best evidence for this.

So, Thomas stands as the representative sceptic to the resurrection. He does not explore any of the common conspiracy theories as to why the disciples thought they were seeing the Lord. They make intriguing reading – they include the idea that there was a quick substitute made at Golgotha, or that he only seemed to die. My favourite suggests that he was resuscitated and moved to the south of France with Mary Magdalene. No, Dan Brown did not invent that conspiracy.

So, how does John’s dramatic device work in his story of Thomas? Mary Magdalene told disciples that the stone had been rolled away. Peter and the Beloved Disciple inspected the empty tomb and then went home. Mary stayed in the garden and met who she thought was a gardener. Some art work I have seen recently explains her mistake. Jesus is depicted carrying a spade – very helpful. At the sound of her name she recognised the Lord. Mary is the first witness to the resurrection, and she tells the disciples. The same day Jesus appeared to the disciples and showed them his hands and side and breathed the Holy Spirit upon them.

So far belief has been dependant on seeing the risen Lord. It is not enough for Thomas to be told by the disciples. Belief for Thomas will require the same evidence as the others had. Seeing Jesus and the marks of crucifixion – the signs that the one who was dead is alive.

John the evangelist is starting to come to the pointy end of his gospel. If there is one purpose for his telling the story of Jesus that stands out above all others it is that the world should believe. The other gospel writers have a similar purpose, but John mentions the purpose at every opportunity. The word ‘believe’ arises nearly 100 times. That is why this part of the story is a pointy end. The circle of believers is opening out.

John courageously raises the possibility of doubt. In the late 1970s John Westerhoff, an American Christian Educationalist, visited Melbourne. One of the things he advocated was that the church tends to be in too much of a hurry to confirm and or baptise its members too young. He advocated that there should a be rite of passage for adolescents in which they are enrolled as catechumens and given permission to doubt, and that this rite should be celebrated on the feast of St Thomas.

In John’s story he grapples with the issue of doubt. But, more importantly, he deals with the issue of belief, of coming to faith. The intention of Thomas is that he will be the man of action. He will see Jesus. He will put his finger in the nail prints. He will put his hand in the spear wound. But faith is a gift of God not a human accomplishment. It is a gift to the first disciples who saw and touched and to those who follow who say they cannot see and touch Jesus.  In the event all the action is initiated by Jesus. Thomas looks and does not touch. Artists have led us astray on this point too. In some he conducts a gruesome forensic inspection. That is not how John tells it.

Thomas encounters the risen Christ and makes his monumental proclamation. No one has seen the situation in quite the same way as Thomas does at this moment. Yes, in Mark and Matthew the centurion acknowledges Jesus as God’s son, but in John it is Thomas who makes the credal statement, ‘My Lord and my God’. This is the pointy end because it ties right back to where John started – ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ Thomas is given the insight the one they all called ‘Lord’ is God.

Faith is Christ as Lord and God is not my accomplishment. It is given me in the church. It is in the church among other believing and doubting Christians that I discover Jesus alive. It is in the church with all its complicated structures, its petty disputes, its incompetence, its scandals, with all its signs of antichrist, nevertheless the Spirit of Jesus who taught love and forgiveness in the face of hate and vengeance, who touched the contaminated with compassion, who gave sight and insight and life, and who did this on a backdrop of complicated structures, petty disputes, incompetence and scandal.

The living light of Christ blazes precisely because he is set on a dark canvass. The resurrected life of Christ is set right up against the crucified death of Jesus. For me it works like art. In order for the artist to depict a bright image there must be dark shadow. Take a look at how artists depict light particularly in art depicting sunlight, just how much and how dark the shadow is. Without shadow, the eye cannot perceive that the sun is shining.

We await a day when the light of Christ will be perfectly perceived in a place where our perceptions will not need shadow or death.