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1 Corinthians 15:1-11
Matthew 28:1-10

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ForeWord

Over the last month or so, I’ve been pushing a little on the question of relevance – what “relevance” means – and this in connection with the miracles in the biblical stories, of which we might consider the Easter Resurrection the greatest. Where is the miracle, the word, which relieves?

When it comes to talk of miracles, and not least the Resurrection, the question which arises in any sensible person’s mind almost straightaway will be something like, “Did it really happen? “ Yet, however hard we might think it is to answer this question satisfactorily, it is at least as hard, actually, to ask it properly, honestly.

Consider this: if you were a sceptic – and perhaps you still are – who somehow came to be convinced of the “fact” that Jesus rose from the dead, what difference would it make to you? I suspect that it would probably not make much difference at all.

And the reason is, to put it rather bluntly, that we are much less interested in the facts than we think we are. Consider the following “facts”. It is established pretty much incontrovertibly that smoking is very bad for you, that drinking to excess is very bad for you, that narcotics and prescription drug addictions are very bad for you, that sexual promiscuity exposes you to all sorts of health risks, that driving too fast gets people killed, that too much salt, fat and sugar wreaks havoc with our health, that “the house always wins”, that predators of children get caught, that philanderers are exposed, that if we kill our enemies their children will want to kill us, that if we don’t do it now it will cost more later, that unrestrained consumption cannot be sustained, that we are running out of oil, and that we are facing significant and possibly even catastrophic climate change. Among other things.

And yet, such things being as well established as they can be, we continue to smoke, drink, treat our bodies as garbage disposers, gamble, speed, betray, kill, procrastinate, consume and burn as if what we know about these things, in fact, is not the case. What we know as a “fact” doesn’t necessarily, or even often, make a lot of difference to how we act. Rather, we live “wishfully” – blindly – as if it won’t happen to us, or maybe only wanting it not to happen to us, imagining that our wish will change the order of things, if deep down we would admit all the while that it certainly won’t.

My intention here is not to moralise on human stupidity but simply to illustrate that it’s no easy thing to ask an honest question about the proclaimed resurrection of Jesus, or about any resurrection we ourselves might enjoy. If irrefutable data on the effects of smoking or eating rubbish or procrastinating or killing our enemies don’t convince us to change our behaviour, then do we really imagine that a “proof” of the resurrection of Jesus is something even worth pursuing? What difference do we imagine it would make?

Strangely, then, though it seems the obvious thing to wonder about, the mere fact that something like the resurrection might have happened is likely to be neither here nor there for people like us who don’t take facts all that seriously. We are less logical and rational than we might imagine, which matters when logic and rationality are the reasons usually given for dismissing the resurrection.

Or, perhaps more accurately, we are very often thoroughly rational, according to the way of thinking which most has us in its grip. The question is, what kind of thinking is it which pretends to trust science and logic to tell us most about ourselves or the world, and yet ignores the results of that research and continues in destructive behaviours? Our willingness to live dangerously in spite of what we know suggests that ours is, in fact, fundamentally a death-denying world-view. But if in this way we do deny death’s approach by risking or wasting our lives and resources, then it should scarcely surprise us that we are not interested in serious talk of resurrection. We live as if we don’t need resurrection, for death itself no longer concerns us. We’ve not felt the anxiety at which talk of the resurrection is directed, or the anxiety which it ought to produce. And this is also to say that the more common “No” answer doesn’t really mean anything either, if we aren’t able to take seriously a “Yes” answer on the Resurrection.

I’ve picked up a scriptural text today which is actually from next year’s Easter Day readings, from St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Here, Paul is at pains to assure the Corinthian church of the Resurrection, and appeals to the testimony he has heard in the tradition and also to his own later encounter with the risen Jesus, which he measures as of the same reality as those encounters of the original disciples. But I’m interested today in the reason Paul gives for outlining this: “so that you don’t believe in vain” (v. 2), he says, to which we’ll return after hearing the passage…

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(1 Corinthians 15. 1-11)

Word: Proclamation

Paul speaks of “…[the gospel] through which you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you – unless you have come to believe in vain” (NRSV). One scholar (Anthony Thistelton) has put to this little line a sense which is especially useful for the task of thinking about thinking about the resurrection of Jesus: “…unless you believed without coherent consideration”. Coherent consideration is not the kind of process we’ve just described: wanting to establish the facts without any intention to do anything about them. This is incoherent consideration.

But, as we’ve already suggested, the incoherence is not only the failure to take the idea of resurrection seriously; it’s the failure to take death seriously. We are basically death-deniers. Despite the established facts relating to what we do, we live our lives in such a way as to imply that death isn’t really there. (This was part of the problem Paul wanted to address at Corinth). We don’t really think that our abuse of our bodies by way of what we put in them will make a difference in the end, else we’d act differently; we don’t really think that our consumption of resources will make a difference to us or the environment in the end; we don’t really think that the impact of our lifestyle upon others in our society or on the other side of the world matters that much. If we did think that such deathly things mattered, we’d stop, or at least try to change direction, or at the very least confess that we are stuck and can’t really do anything to change ourselves or the lot of others. This would be honest, and would open up the question about whether there might be something important in resurrection-talk which would meet precisely our daily experience of death in all its little manifestations.

We remarked on Good Friday that the cross and Easter Day are not Question and Answer, but are two forms of the same thing: the triumph of life over death. This triumph is as much on Good Friday’s cross as in Easter’s Resurrection. To believe in the resurrection as a contradiction of death, then, is also to believe in the cross as also a contradiction of death – a contradiction of death’s power to determine us. To believe in the Resurrection of Jesus is to believe in the cross, is to commit to a life which refuses death any continuing dominion.

This is why it’s hard to ask a serious question about the Resurrection: because if the answer were Yes, it would require us to change, and to take seriously the death around us and to which we are subject and committed.

If talk of Jesus’ resurrection were to be anything that is truly interesting – truly worth saying Yes or No to, then our question about whether or not it “actually” happened would really be neither here nor there, or at least not the place where we must begin. In our approach to the question about the resurrection of Jesus – if we are to be honest – perhaps we should start with ourselves. We should ask not “Did it happen? “, as if the answer would actually make a difference. Rather, we should ask: do we not need the Resurrection of Jesus to happen? Do we not need such a thing to expose the truth about ourselves and the way we live – in the presence of death and yet denying it? Do we not need a call to a life which is not simply a covering-over of our impending death but an incomprehensible shattering of that death and the insidious hold it has on us, even as we refuse to acknowledge it? Do we not need to be prompted into “coherent consideration” and sensible thought about what it means truly to be human – honest, alive and free?

I confess that I do, at least, because most of the time I live as if life doesn’t really matter, which is to say: that it is not much different from the death I do not acknowledge either. Resurrection faith is hard not because I find it hard to believe that a dead man could stop being dead but because I find it hard to believe – perhaps even really to want to believe – that I am already dead and so in need of raising. Because when we “add” the cross to the Resurrection, we discover just this: that we deny death because we are subject to it, and so are in need of resurrection.

And so, for the sake of making sense of the life we live and the death we will die, we declare: Jesus is risen – to the glory of God and that we might truly be ourselves. And now the truly hard word of Easter is put. This hard word is not that we must believe in impossible things like resurrection, creation out of nothing and the release of captives, but that we must become impossible things like these. To confess the Resurrection of Jesus is to commit to becoming women and men who embody all this – who live the Resurrection and don’t merely “believe” it.

How do we do that? There is no “how”. That’s the point. It’s the miracle of life, which comes from nowhere. It is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes (Ps 118).

Let us then let go, rejoice and become the good news: Jesus is Risen. Alleluia.

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Song of Songs 5:2-8
Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9

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ForeWord

Every love song is on its way to becoming a psalm.

The biblical Psalms are songs of longing and devotion and celebration. They express the richness of love, the incompleteness of love, the longing for love. This is, of course, a love for God, seeking God’s own love, but it doesn’t take much tweaking to turn a modern love song with its laments and lustings and celebrations into psalm material.

What the Psalms grasp after, what every love song seeks, we might call the Hallelujah. “Hallelujah” is the cry which rejoices in the arrival of the miracle. The Hallelujah is about life out of death, the lost now found, love consummated. The whole of the biblical story, Psalms and all, is oriented toward this “Hallelujah”.

Our readings today speak of longing, of suffering, and of the Hallelujah. Two of our texts are scriptural. One comes from the Song of Songs, which is not quite psalmic but the woman who speaks here could be us in our longing for God, or God in God’s longing for us (and copping a beating instead). From the letter to the Hebrews, we hear of God’s co-suffering with us in Christ, and in Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” we hear what has become something of a secular hymn of lament and celebration.

Let us listen for God’s word in our hearing of these texts…

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Songs 5. 2-8; “Hallelujah”, Leonard Cohen; Hebrews 4. 14-16; 5. 7-9)

Word: Proclamation

If the longing for life and love is the longing for a Hallelujah, when it comes to the events we gather to mark today and the next few days, where is the Hallelujah to be spoken, shouted or sung? Where, in what we recall in this season, is the miracle? What elicits the Hallelujah?

Where we think the miracle is depends on what we think the problem is that needs to be overcome. And it’s difficult, given what we usually think miracles to be, not to imagine that Easter’s miracle is the Resurrection. Is this not the Hallelujah moment? “Christ the Lord is risen today, Hallelujah!”, we sing. So the hymns go, and properly so, rightly understood.

Compared to the proclaimed Resurrection, Good Friday’s crucifixion seems depressingly mundane, played out again and again in a million different ways ever since, and still now. Good Friday is the psalmist’s pained cry, and the abandonment and beating of the lover in what we heard from the Songs, and Christ’s own experience as sufferer. To find the Hallelujah in the Easter Resurrection is to imagine that the problem to be overcome is the death of Jesus, and this as somehow symbol and inclusive of our own death. Good Friday seems to be the psalmist’s lament, the lover’s agony in separation, and Easter seems to be the ecstasy of love’s consummation.

On this reading, the cross is the question to which the Resurrection is an answer as love’s “victory march” to the jubilant Hallelujah. This resonates, of course, with our strong desire to be somewhere else, with our feeling that, in one form or another, and wherever we happen to find ourselves, there’s too much death here. In circumstances like this, “Christ is risen” feels like code for the “out” we desperately want.

And yet.

And yet, to see Jesus only as victim is to make him too much like us in our experience of being victims of this or that heavy oppression. Indeed, Jesus suffered as we have, as we heard from the letter to the Hebrews this morning. But this is, paradoxically, a miraculous suffering. And it is miraculous in the same way as the miracle of the Resurrection is miraculous: in both cases, the power of death over us is denied. Jesus dies, of course, and in that sense, death holds sway; Jesus is mortal. But his willingness to die, his refusal to deny the claim on him by the God who sent him, the refusal to fear death more than he fears that God – this is the death of death and hell’s destruction. Jesus’ refusal to deny the truth of God’s claim upon his life is the declaration that death shall have no dominion over him, even though he dies. The miracle of Good Friday is Jesus’ refusal to negotiate with death, to engage in death’s economy, on death’s own terms.

And whatever the Resurrection of Easter Day is, it doesn’t exceed this Good Friday miracle. This means that Good Friday and Easter are not one thing followed by another, as a question is followed by an answer. Good Friday and Easter are parts of the same thing or, better, they are the same thing done twice, done differently. The Resurrection is no reward for dying, no reversal of death. The Resurrection is rather a repeat, a recapitulation, a summarising of the cross. Easter asks, “Did you see that? Did you see what Jesus just did?”, and Easter affirms, “He just overcame death; he just triumphed over the power death has over you.” Easter does this, too, of course, and this is the point: Good Friday and Easter Day do the same thing: they both signal the overpowering of death, the end of death’s dominion, the end of death’s determination of us. The divine achievement in the Resurrection does not supersede or outshine the human achievement on the cross. They, rather, coincide.

But now, of course, the tone of the Hallelujah changes. The Hallelujah is not merely Easter’s major lift, because it needs to capture the minor key – Friday’s cold and broken Hallelujah. What other kind of Hallelujah could it be? But the point is that it is still a Hallelujah. It doesn’t matter which we hear, the holy or the broken; “Hallelujah” it is, and remains.

The fractured love of Good Friday, the cost of refusing to yield to weaponised death, and the passion, the sin and the guilt this reveals – this all asks of us a holy, if broken, Hallelujah. Holy, because it is everything that needs to be said; broken, because we don’t quite know how to say it, or to live it. We hanker for the warm and bright Hallelujah of a God ahead of us in Resurrection, rather than the colder and darker Hallelujah of a God with us in crucifixion.

But if we declare, as will be sung later, that we know that our redeemer lives, the “where” of this life is as much on the cross as in the resurrection appearances and wherever “heaven” might be. This hard but liberating word of Good Friday is where Cohen ends up in his almost-a-psalm:

…even though it all went wrong
we’ll stand before the Lord of Song
with nothing on our tongue but Hallelujah.

To live and move and have our being with a crucified God is not to be waiting for a happy ending. It is to be holy, if broken, here and now.

This is good, and so this Friday we call Good: Christ, the Lord, is crucified today. Hallelujah.

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Lent 5
22/3/2026

Psalm 130
John 11:1-44

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In a sentence:
Most strangely, we are told this story of a miracle, so that we might stop “believing in miracles”. We are rather to become a miracle.

Last week, I began and ran with the notion that miracles are pointless. This was rightly contested. My point should have been more precisely put: stories about miracles are pointless, to the extent that they are accounts of marvellous things which others once “received”, told so that we might believe that such marvellous things might happen to us.  Faith is not believing in miracles.

Miracles, whether such things happen or not, matter to us because they constitute the power to be somewhere else. A miracle is transport to a different reality – a reality where I’m not sick, where she’s not dead, in which the exam has been cancelled or where our team has finally won a premiership. In our imagination, miracles are about what we’ve lately called “relevance”. They are about relief: a restoration to life in greater fullness. The prayer for a miracle is always a prayer for life in the face of the very real presence of death and all his friends. If we think less about miracles today, it’s because we have found other means to this kind of relief; the power to perform miracles in the way of the magic trick has given way to social and mechanical technologies which do what once we prayed to the gods that they would do. It’s partly for this reason that the miracle stories of the Gospels are strange to us today. We would love such things to break into our lives here and how, but most of us have already ruled out the possibility of such delight and made ourselves responsible for delivering the good things we long for.

Last week we heard the story of the miraculous healing of a man born blind; this week it’s the raising of the dead Lazarus. This is perhaps the greatest of all the miracles recounted in the Gospels, apart from the resurrection of Jesus himself, which should be bracketed out as something in a category of its own.

In both stories, the Evangelist John goes into considerable detail. This is itself remarkable; it’s clearly not enough in John’s mind simply to say, “And while he was in Bethany, Jesus raised a man who had been dead 4 days”. This would have been enough if the point were just to say that Jesus could do such things. Rather, the miracle is recounted with all the interactions of the actors and their interpretations. It seems that the raising of Lazarus is not quite the central takeaway of the story.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 11:1-44)

Word: Proclamation

From one perspective, and at the risk of saying something absurd, there is nothing particularly relieving – relevant – in the raising of Lazarus, in itself. It would be, of course, a surprising and remarkable thing to happen, but Lazarus will die again. Grief has given way to joy for a while, but Martha or Mary or someone else will again stand outside Lazarus’ tomb and grieve, perhaps all the more so because of this miracle’s limited effect. If all that happens is that Lazarus is resuscitated, then our concern for relief from death is only postponed. This is surely nice, but death’s shadow lingers still.

John’s point in telling the story is deeper. Lazarus is not the only one raised in the story. Just as important as a man who lived and died might live a little longer is that life might be breathed into those dead who are still breathing, entombed in a dark world. Martha is such a one, as is Mary, and as are we. The reported raising of Lazarus catches our attention, but the raising is not the main point of telling the story. Just as miraculous is the possibility that faith might be resurrected in Martha. Just as Lazarus is roused from ‘sleep’ (v.11f) so also is Martha called to faith. They are, in the story, co-hearers of the same word: “Come out”. The story is told, then, not to suggest that we will believe in Jesus all the more strongly if he should raise one of our dead. The point is that we – still living – are dead with Lazarus, and Jesus would raise even us, here and now.

And so we need to be explicit about another thing. Lazarus comes forth, not as a basis of Martha’s faith, not as a reason for her belief, as if her belief were that Jesus could do such cool stuff. The raising of Lazarus is rather the illustration of what it means to confess properly Jesus as ‘Messiah’, and ‘Son of God’, and ‘the one coming into the world’, as Mary did earlier in the story (v.27). Or to put it differently, the point of the story is not that, by raising Lazarus, Jesus proves to Martha that her doctrines about him are true. If that were the point then it merely leaves us with nothing but a story about what happened to someone else, and implies that we couldn’t come to belief without a similar spectacle. Rather, and most strangely, we are told this story of a miracle, so that we might stop “believing in miracles”. “I am the resurrection”, Jesus says, not “I will be raised.”

It’s interesting – even surprising – that, despite the lament of Martha and her sister, we don’t hear of their response to the raising of their well-dead brother. Perhaps it’s obvious, at the personal and emotional level. Yet the whole exchange has not been about grief and joy, not about a particular loss and restoration, but about unbelief and belief. Jesus rebukes Martha when she protests at the opening of the stinking tomb: ‘Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?’ There is a promise made here to the faithful, along the lines of last week’s lesson: ‘believing is seeing’ (which is not ‘seeing is believing’).

But we should push this a step further: believing is not affirmation that there “is” a God or that Jesus could do glorious and miraculous things. To believe is to become the glory of God. The human being unbound by death – whether our own or the death of someone or something we love – such a person is ‘the glory of God’. And so Jesus says the very odd thing: ‘Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die (11.25f)’. The hearts of such faithful ones will one day stop beating, but such death is as nothing(!) to those who are truly alive before death finally arrives. This is the miracle which is hardest of all to believe in: the possibility of life in the midst of death, the possibility of life even though Lazarus has died. This is hard to believe because when Lazarus dies, so also do his sisters, Martha and Mary. We are part of each other in that way, such that the death of those we love is an amputation, a laming, a marking of our continuing lives with death.

The story of Lazarus addresses just this: what are we to do with the death that is ever in our midst, and debilitates us so? The answer is not, “Believe in miracles”. The answer is, “Be Lazarus”. Strange as it seems to say it, the “faith” which matters in the story is that of the dead Lazarus himself. He is the first one to make a faithful response to the call of God in Christ, awakening from his ‘sleep’. As one raised from the encumbrances of death, Lazarus is the true believer. His faithful response to Christ’s command models what should be Martha’s, and our own response: to rise, to shine, to bask in the glory of the God who calls us forth, and to become that glory in a world which cries out desperately, ‘Lord, if you had been here, he…she…we would not have died.’

We are not to be Martha, waiting for a miracle. We are to be Lazarus, the miracle, the glory of God.

Sleepers, awake; Stop. Being. Dead. And become the glory of God, which is the Body of Christ alive, dead and alive again.

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Lent 4
15/3/2026

John 9:1-42

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ForeWord

A thesis to consider: were Jesus among us today as he was among the Judeans in Palestine 2000 years ago, any miracles he might perform now would be pointless. By this, I don’t mean that he didn’t then or couldn’t now perform miracles. I mean that, even if he did, here and now, they would be irrelevant, and irrelevant in the sense we considered a couple of weeks ago: they wouldn’t help, wouldn’t relieve.

For us with our generally modern and scientifically informed minds, the notion of miracle poses a particular problem: the violation of what we now call the “natural order”. We’ve already banished God from the world we inhabit, so that faced with the claim that a miracle has occurred, our response will typically be that the observation is wrong: what looked like a miracle was, in fact, not one at all. There is something we didn’t notice or take into account. A dead person raised was not really dead; a blind or lame person healed was simply released from a psychosomatic condition by a clever therapist.

Even if we can’t imagine why something has happened, we don’t then conclude that, indeed, God has been active. We are more likely to assume that our theories about how the world works are not yet extensive enough to account for what we’ve seen. There are yet more mysteries to be penetrated, equations to be written. Far from being a crisis which causes us to rethink our banishment of the miraculous God, what we can’t explain often causes great excitement, indicating new understandings to be discovered. We deal with the amazing and the unexplained by deferring understanding until more comprehensive theories are developed.

Responses like this suggest that it would be a waste of God’s time for God to bother with miracles these days because we have built-in means of explaining them away. We are very, very hard to impress. Or perhaps more to the point, we quite simply have no means of even processing the notion of a miracle, because our world is such that God can’t disturb it. In this, we imagine that we’ve outgrown the credulity of those who went before us, who believed that God can and does wilfully disrupt the natural order.

Perhaps we are right about this, we moderns. But this does not mean that we’ve dealt with the miracle stories, or at least all of them. What we don’t entertain is the possibility that if the miracles did “really” occur as described, they wouldn’t tell us anything useful.

That a miracle might have happened and be recognised but then dismissed by those most likely to believe in miracles seems to be what happens in our Gospel text today. Taken from John’s Gospel, the story illustrates John’s scepticism regarding miracles: his scepticism that seeing such things is required for believing. Quite the opposite unfolds in the story: although close to incontrovertible proof of a miracle is established, it has no effect on the critical observers.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 9.1-41 )

Word: Proclamation

Of course, the people who feature in this story were not modern scientific thinkers. But neither were they fools. The Pharisees in the story are rightly sceptical of the report of a blind man’s sight being rectified. Yet neither can they deny that something miraculous has happened.

Yet, while they cannot deny the extraordinary report, this alleged miraculous work of God – as a “work” – has occurred on the Sabbath, mandated to be work-free. We must forget here that we have heard from Jesus in another gospel tradition – that “the Sabbath was made for human beings, not human beings for the Sabbath”. John’s Jesus appeals to no happy humanism to justify working on the Sabbath. Jesus gives no justification for his healing on the Sabbath. And so, while the apparent miracle points towards Jesus, its performance on the Sabbath points away from him. This is the tension the Pharisees feel.

The question, then, is not, Did Jesus do this? This is already established. The question is, Does Jesus’ having done this prove him righteous or unrighteous? We must feel the jolt here, given how we usually hear accounts of miracles. The modern mind asks questions like “Did it really happen?”, as if an affirmative answer to this would be self-explanatory. But the proposal of this story is quite the opposite: knowing that it happened doesn’t tell us anything about what it means. The miracle by itself is, in this sense, “irrelevant”. This is an instance of what becomes more explicit later in the Gospel, in the well-known story of “doubting Thomas”, where Jesus declares against Thomas’ insistence on seeing: “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed”. Seeing doesn’t tell us what we need to know (or, in a different sense, what we should really be seeing).

Put differently, the miracle which matters is not what we could call the “magic trick”. The miracle is the seeing which the trick makes possible. The miracle is only the lens, through which we might or might not choose to look. The miracle is not the magic, but that some people come to see, even if most do not.

At the end of the story, we hear Jesus say,

³⁹‘I came into this world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.’ 

This undercuts just about anything we have learned about what miracles are “for”. Are they not supposed to attract our attention? Impress us? Make us believe in Jesus or whoever performs them? Do we not wish that we could perform miracles, so that others would see and come to faith? Yet, Jesus says, “I came into this world…[that] those who do see may become blind”. Eyes which cannot – or refuse – to see, are as much part of what Jesus reveals as the possibility that the closed eyes might be opened.

⁴⁰Some of the Pharisees near him heard [him] and said to him, ‘surely we are not blind, are we?’ ⁴¹Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see’, your sin remains.

The magic trick now falls into the background; it is only the occasion for a deeper reflection, almost a ruse to make a different point. This lesson sits within shifting meanings of sight and sin. The man’s blindness represents no sin but rather his readiness for belief. His blindness is what he does not yet know, which is the identity of the one who heals him. The appropriately blind here – to say a strange thing – are those who wait to have their eyes opened, which means here, those who wait to know who Jesus is. Over against these, the sinful are those who do not know that they are blind, and so who refuse to allow that they need healing, and so who cannot recognise Jesus.

The story, then, makes rather a pessimistic point: it is as difficult to see the presence of God in the work of Jesus as it is for a man born blind to begin to see. Though the Pharisees eyes and ears – and perhaps ours too – are physically open to see and hear everything that can be physically seen and heard, they don’t see or hear beyond the physical. And so the story is only in a passing way about a rectification of the eyes of a man whose eyes did not work. We should notice here not eyes which now register light but eyes which register the presence of God in Jesus, which the eyes of the Pharisees cannot see in the miracle they cannot deny.

The story began with Jesus saying that the man had been born blind “so that God’s works might be revealed in him”. Superficially, this is a deeply troubling declaration, as if God kills in order to raise to life again. But, in view of what we’ve said about what then unfolds, God doesn’t render him blind in order then to heal him. Death is not a method for God. Rather, the man becomes an occasion for making an unsettling point: we would not know what God looked like, even if he were standing right in front of us. This is the pathos of the Pharisees’ objections. And so Jesus says to them – and, again, perhaps to us – If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see’, your sin remains. Most strangely, then, if the healed man represents the believer, faith becomes a waiting-to-see, an acknowledgement that we do not yet see.

But if there is a pessimism here about our ability to see, it is met with the promise that eyes can be opened: that those born and living with what we might hesitatingly call ‘spiritual’ blindness can be healed even of that most dehumanising of conditions: seeing with only our own eyes and not as God sees. The not-seeing of faith is the beginning to see as God sees.

The strange thing this story proposes is that the blind man was, in his blindness, closer to God than those whose eyes worked properly. Faith is a kind of innocence which knows and yet does not. Faith is a humility which is open to being taught. Faith is a realisation of the gift of freedom which comes from not having to know all things, not having to see all things, not having all things reduced to certainty about what could and couldn’t be so.

The miracle is not the trick which breaks the rules and which, against the rules, which we must try to believe. The miracle is that there are no rules. And so the miracle is that we don’t need miracles. This is the meaning of creation, of grace.

With a God like this, we are – as we are – miracle enough. The trick is actually believing this.

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Lent 3
8/3/2026

Exodus 17:1-7
Psalm 95
Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-42

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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The story of the woman at the well is timeless. It tells of a world of racial enemies and the myths that feed their prejudices against each other – pure tribalism. It tells of the political tensions between the genders. It tells of religious bigotry. It is really very modern. Our news broadcasts and newspaper editors feed us these things as a daily diet. We are all too familiar with what happens when one ethnic group moves in on the territory of another group. We know about indigenous people’s resentment of invasion, and the colonists’ resentment of their resentment. We know of stolen land and stolen children. We are told about the struggle of refugees and the resistance they find in the lands that they escape to. We know of the struggle of women to win equal status in society’s structures. We know of the stigmatism that is dumped on people that do not conform in their societies. We know about the church taking a lashing from secular humanism. We know of the devastating conflict that can flow from fundamentalism in any religion – the religious justification of hate.

At another level it is timeless too. It tells of the weariness of travel (Jesus was tired out by his journey) and the grind of daily chores (give me this water so I won’t need to come here to the well every day).

It is all strangely familiar and timeless, but it is also far enough away for us to have some questions about the details. What lay behind the antagonisms and prejudices of that time and place?

In the story of the woman at the well we are talking about open hostility between racial cousins. They avoided each other like the plague. The Jewish historian, Josephus, reveals that people of the Northern Kingdom who had not been carried off into exile permitted Alexander the Great to build them a temple on Mount Gerizim. When the southerners returned from exile, they rebuilt the Jerusalem temple and jealously regarded it as the only legitimate shrine for the worship of God. Josephus says that the Gerizim temple was destroyed in 128 BCE. According to the conversation between the woman and Jesus, the heart of their 150-year-old dispute lay in their love for their respective places of worship – a sentiment we can relate to.

It is typical of John’s story-telling that there is more than one level of meaning. Often, he will insert a character who misunderstands what is going on. The account of Nicodemus visiting Jesus is an example of this. He couldn’t understand Jesus’ concept of being born again. The woman at the well is presented with two levels of meaning. She struggles to understand what Jesus is talking about. Jesus explains the mysteries for her and for us.

Let’s unpack the story. The central symbolic motif is water. Jesus was thirsty and asked for water. The woman with the bucket raised all the human anomalies we have been remembering — how is it you, a Jewish man, ask water of me, a woman and a Samaritan – aren’t you afraid of catching Samaritan girl germs.

Jesus’ reply moved the discussion onto the new plain – if you knew who I am you would ask for water from me without any fear of catching Jewish boy germs, because what you would catch would well up in you into eternal life. The woman hasn’t moved into this new plain of talk and just thinks Jesus was getting a bit above himself – do you think you are greater than Jacob who gave us this well?

Returning to Jesus’ plain of debate the answer was that the problem with Jacob’s well is that one drink doesn’t quench all your thirst. It took a bit more toing and froing before both Jesus and the woman were relating on the same plain of conversation – but they get there because the woman started to connect what Jesus was saying with the things of God — might this man be the promised one, the Messiah?

A woman of Sychar in Samaria went to the well to find water. She met Jesus and got found out. ‘Go and get your husband,’ said Jesus. ‘But I don’t have a husband.’ she replied. ‘You have had 5 husbands, and he whom you now have is not your husband.’ replied Jesus. ‘How did you know’, she said. ‘Are you a prophet?

A woman went to find water and was found out by Jesus. She went to tell the people of her city. A prophet had found her. He had told her everything about herself. Could he be Messiah? Faith in Jesus had been kindled, and she had gone to tell others who came to see and came to faith themselves. As they said – they believed because of her testimony. Jesus stayed two days and many came to believe on the testimony of their own encounter with Jesus. The story ends with the Samaritans knowing that Jesus is the saviour of the world.

I would like to focus on two things that John’s story is saying. The first is about how the Samaritans came to faith in Jesus. A particular point is made about how faith began by virtue of the woman telling the town about Jesus, but then they came to encounter Jesus for themselves.

I think we all know the best known of all children’s hymns, Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. The editorial committee of AHB changed one word in this hymn. At number 166 reads Jesus loves me, this I know, and the Bible tells me so. I am sure this was done in recognition that faith in Jesus does not only come from third person testimony. God’s love is revealed in Christ through the mystery of personal encounter by the power of the Spirit of God.

The second strong message of John’s story is that Jesus is the point of reconciliation. At the feet of Jesus, old enemies and antagonists converge. They are still Jew and Samaritan, still male and female, but on the plain on which the discussion about living water was held, the old never-to-be reconciled found a common place, a unity.

There is a danger in just leaving that idea sit there. It is not enough to say that we find our unity in Christ. Being reconciled to God is a nonevent if there is no commitment to being reconciled to one another. I have divided the conversation Jesus had with the woman into two plains of meaning. The two plains must be connected. Spirit and flesh are part of the same realm. Those who are reconciled to Christ are committed to reconciliation among all for whom Christ died.