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Good Friday
29/3/2024

Philippians 2:1-11
Luke 9:44-48, 51-56

If we do not keep hold of the crucifixion, Easter Day becomes mere kitsch which has nothing to say to this broken world.

——

It is forty years since the appearance of Milan Kundera’s novel, The unbearable lightness of being. The book is the account of four lives set against the background of the 1968 Soviet suppression of the Czech Spring, although Kundera is less interested in this historical context than in the fact that his protagonists must live somewhere. How can we live in our particular Where? Should we fight for life or do we flee from it?

Kundera begins by asking about the “weight” our actions have, and whether it is better that they be heavy or light. Two possibilities present themselves. First, our actions gain substance by means of eternal return (after Nietzsche): weight and meaning arise from repetition in recurrence or constancy; this is the struggle for life, and holding it tight. The second possibility is that our actions can only be “light”, fleeting, once-and-never-again events which are then lost with the oblivion tomorrow ultimately brings. Kundera proposes that the lightness of our being is that it will soon be as if we and all we love never existed; the unbearability of this is that we must still exist in relation to each other, nonetheless.

The idea of an unbearable lightness has increasingly coloured my reflections on Easter and the thinking any Christian must do around the confession of Jesus’ resurrection. Is there not, for the sceptical but also for believers who are paying attention, an “unbearable lightness” about how Easter is often celebrated and proclaimed? This is not quite Kundera’s unbearable lightness but relates more closely to another concept in his book: “kitsch”. Kitsch is representation which hollows out the substance of the thing represented. Easter is susceptible to kitschification, to the extent that promises of resurrection locate our most authentic existence in a future world beyond this one. Kitschy Easter proclamation leaves this world behind. Whatever such a future might be, it tells us little about how to be in our fractured present.

Against this too familiar reading of Easter, the resurrection might better be taken to point backwards rather than forwards. That is, the true miracle of Easter is Jesus’ life up to and including the crucifixion. The path to the cross is the true miracle because the real shock in the Easter story is not that the dead might one day live again. It is rather that there are worse things than being crucified.

This is perhaps a little surprising, given the horror of death by crucifixion. Yet the lightness of the crucifixion here is not What it entailed but That it happened, despite the What. Contrary to atonement theories which require Jesus to be spent as some kind of salvific coin, dying as he did was not necessary but was the indirect consequence of a decision to live in radical openness to human (and divine) truth, undeterred by the potential lethal cost of such a life in a truth-denying world. Jesus came to live, not to die. On this reading, “worse than being crucified” seems to be, for Jesus, a life without openness God’s truth and its claim on our relationships with each other. When, then, as in our Gospel text this morning, Jesus “sets his face to go to Jerusalem”, it is with an openness to this living future in this world, and not with a commitment to escaping the world through the cross into an easier eternity.

This resonates on one level with Kundera’s interest in lightness of being. Not motivated by the desire to establish weighty institutional legacies or even simply to survive as long as he can, Jesus enacts an openness to truth and a fearlessness in the face of the horrific death which looms because of that freedom. Life is more than surviving. But for Kundera’s protagonist Sabina, who seems to represent what he himself holds to be true, the fleeting nature of our existence translates to life as flight; lightness is finally freedom from the entanglements of relational commitment and responsibility. Sabina’s truth is finally detachment – from others and so from meaning. Such a life has its own harsh authenticity, but it is finally as lonely as the sheer eternity of Easter kitsch is empty.

In contrast, while Jesus lived with a Sabrina-like lightness of being which did not fight for grandeur or survival, neither was his life flight from others into lonely solipsism or by escape to heaven. Precisely the opposite: as Paul described in our reading from Philippians this morning, Jesus takes the form not of a fleeing survivor but of a servant. This is a radical being for others which neither betrays nor abandons them. If it is such a one who is resurrected, so also is resurrected the possibility of a life that neither fights nor flees but proclaims and lives into an uncomfortable one-and-all social and political tension which could lead to a cross. An Easter resurrection which recalls the cross does not promise time with God someplace else; it promises the presence of God here and now in any life lived in openness to bearing the “unbearable” other.

The cross arises from a social and political ethic which does not destroy and does not abandon, and it is just this ethic which is raised on Easter Day, and not merely the individual Jesus, understood to have died a few days earlier. The heaven of Easter day is the heaven which led to Jesus being crucified.

This matters today because – contrary to the gospel of the risen crucified one – the struggles which wrack this world are precisely struggles for some heaven or another, each conceived as an eternity without the requirement that we bear this or that particular human other. Someone is always missing from our preferred heavens. And so those various eternities become visions for which we can justifiably crush and kill or abandon the other who won’t be in our heaven anyway: we want a heaven with no Israel to live with, or no Palestine; a heaven with no gays, or no fascists; with no difficult bodies but only easy souls; with no tangled histories but only tidy logic; a heaven with no appalling chauvinists or uppity feminists; no traffic, no stop lights, no waiting; we want a heaven with no differences to overcome and so, what all this could only finally mean: a heaven with no one else there. The heaven proposed by crossless Easter kitsch – and by every fight or flee social or political program – is finally an unbearably lonely eternity.

We need a better heaven than this. That better heaven will have something to do with a resurrected cross. An Easter which does not forget the cross speaks of the miracle we need: the revelation that our life with each other is bearable, and is not merely bearable but is the possibility of a joy worth dying for, though not killing for.

In our Lenten Studies text this year, Sam Wells writes that the kind of reconciliation we see in Jesus – and so salvation he brings – is one which “[holds] together profound but incompatible loyalties, [straddles] deep but rival relationships, [is] the battleground for terrible and uncontrollable enmities”. The proclamation of Easter cannot exceed this, for this is the nature of the one who is said to be risen, and this is what that risen one continues to do. The risen crucified one spans our incompatibility with each other, our rivalries, our enmities.

To return then to the question of Kundera’s book, “How should we live in our particular Where?” What has the Easter of the Crucified to say to this? Our life is to reflect not other-worldly Easter kitsch. It is to reflect God’s being with us in the midst of our fractured here and now.

We are to live with the understanding that this is the only place given to us to live, with these people and no others.

We are to recognise that life’s promise will only be realised in the form the other human being.

And we are to learn to bear the cross-shaped burden we can each sometimes be to each other, for their sake and so for our own.

This is the reconciliation, salvation and call of the Easter of the crucified Jesus.

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Lent 5
17/3/2024

Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 51
John 12:20-33

In our Lenten study book this year, author Sam Wells, remarks that we tend to invoke euphemisms when we find suddenly ourselves out of our depth – not “died” but “passed away”, not “going to the toilet” but “going to the bathroom”, not “a little bit stupid” but “not the full quid”. The euphemism refers to the presence of something that seems both necessary but also inappropriate to acknowledge – it doesn’t seem “proper” to bring that up here.

In our Gospel reading today Jesus speaks once more (cf. last week) of his approaching crucifixion as a “lifting up”: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (v.32; cf. also John 3.14f; 8.28). We know, of course, what he refers to – his impending crucifixion. And we know something of the horror a crucifixion was. So, is Jesus being euphemistic here, softening the blow for those he addressed, throwing a fig leaf over the embarrassing nakedness of God in the crucifixion? In churches which have crucifixes – representations of the figure of Jesus on the cross – there are not many without loincloths.

In fact, the “lifting up” is no euphemism. The evangelist John loves double meanings and the ironies which come with them. The Greek word here can certainly apply to being lifted up on a cross. But, at the same time, it can just as naturally be used for that kind of elevation which is an enthronement. A king’s coronation could be said to be his “lifting up”. The cross, then, becomes a throne, the crown of thorns truly a crown.

Yet the point is not now that Israel unknowingly crucified its king. The ambiguity of “lifted up” allows John to present to us Jesus as being both outcast and enthroned, being both crucified and made king, in the single “lifting up”. Not simply the king mistakenly or unknowingly crucified, Jesus becomes king in his very being crucified.

And so Jesus can also say in our text this morning, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (v.23), and to mean by this that the cross itself is the glorification (cf. also John 12.16; 13.31f; 17.7). The lifting up, the crucifixion, is the glory of Christ. (We might add here that the glory is not the resurrection. In the crucifixion we see something about the nature of God which the resurrection by itself cannot show). John presents a vision of God in which God’s glory – and so God’s very being – is tied up with his relationship to a people which falls short of his covenant call, to the extent that they (we) even crucify the Lord of glory.

When John says, then, that God so loved the world that he sent the Son, he is not speaking about the “size” of God’s love, as if God might have loved less or even more. Rather, the cross is the love: this is God’s presence to and for the world. How God loves is itself God. God is the glorification on the cross, God comes into view here.

This is not an easy thought to think, but it is crucial in a world which thinks God irrelevant because we imagine that God to be “out there” beyond us, or deep, deep within us. In either case, we don’t imagine that God is in the messy time and space in which we live, not in the times and spaces between us.

But against the God who is nowhere useful is the impossible proclamation that the greater the distance we place between ourselves and God – the more strained our relationship with God is – the more God is set free to be God. That is, God’s love for us is shown to be all the more remarkable when he exercises that freedom to overcome the distance, in order to be life and love for us. When St Paul says that where sin abounds, grace abounded even more, he says the same as John’s double reading of the cross: God makes shame into glory. This is not, of course, to justify or even promote sin(!); it is only to declare that God’s grace always outreaches human brokenness. (Children’s talk: God is very stretchy).

The God who is the cross, then, is no “idea” of God which we fill with other ideas like love or judgement, according to our need. God is no euphemism we are forced to invoke to refer to an embarrassing truth we wish we didn’t have to acknowledge or negotiate around. Rather, the God who is the cross is the very revelation of our condition. For, whatever else we might be, such a God as this reveals us to be those who would crucify God. Ours is the crucified God because this is the only God who has come close enough to us to be precisely our God, the God of those who are capable of crucifying each other, even of crucifying God.

The gospel, then, presents us with two possibilities.

The first possibility is the pessimistic conclusion that the cross is only the work of human hands. The story – the story of Jesus and of each of us – ends with the violent rejection of one who deserved better, and that story is simply tragic. The awful truth here is that it doesn’t get any better than this, but it might perhaps get worse. We need a mouth full of euphemisms to speak the truth here because it is more than we can bear.

The second possibility is that the cross is indeed the work of human hands, but that it is also the glory of God, in the terms we’ve described. This is to say that the cross is not tragic, is not the end of the story, but is the sign of how far God is able to reach – how “stretchy” God is – to embrace again those who have rejected God so profoundly. This would also be an aw‑ful – awesome – truth, but now one which must be said as clearly and directly as possible, so that we all might understand.

Faith – or unfaith – is a decision about these two possibilities. Can God reach us or not, regardless of how far away we run? Can God reach us, regardless of how far away we push the possibly that God might be reaching for us, whether in Jesus on the dusty roads of Palestine 2000 years ago, or on those same dusty today in cries of God’s children for justice and mercy, or in the quiet fears and loathings of our hearts?

Can God turn our tragic existence into God’s own glory, and so into our healing? Can our deathly ways with ourselves and each other become the glory of God?

The awful-awesome God of the cross calls for an awe-filled faith:

Yes. Yes. Yes.

God can do this.

And it is by this expectation that we will live.

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Lent 4
10/3/2024

Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 107
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21

Sermon preached by Daniel Broadstock

Friends, I’m so pleased to be with you again at Mark the Evangelist. Thank you for so much for your kind hospitality.

Friends, we are now well into the season of Lent, that period of the church calendar in which we wander spiritually with Jesus in the desert of discernment and reflection. At my home church at Brunswick Uniting we are thinking through Lent in terms of what we are turning towards and what we are turning away from. What parts of our life do we wish to be in greater abundance, filled with greater joy, growing with more vitality, more connected in our relationship to God? More connected in our relationship to the Holy Spirit and to Creation? Walking more closely in our discipleship with Jesus?

And what parts of our life are we aware of hard-heartedness? What are we holding on too tightly to? Where are we missing the mark? Where do our actions fail to match our words? Where are there oversights and unkindnesses and lapses and blindness. Where is the fruit growing, and where do the weeds need to be pulled up?

Human flaws and imperfections have been very much on my mind this week as I have been watching Nemesis, the ABC documentary on the Liberal Party in power. Has anyone else seen Nemesis? What did you think?

It’s a brilliant piece of political reporting as much as it is a compelling examination of human nature.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s filmed in three episodes, one for each of the Prime Ministers who occupied the office during the nine years of the previous Liberal government: Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, and Scott Morrison.

In classical literary theory there is a concept called hamartia, which refers to the fatal flaw of the tragic protagonist that ultimately sows their undoing. Most commonly, the hamartia of the ancient Greeks was pride or hubris, as they tempt the wrath of the gods by their unshakeable confidence in their own indestructability. Achilles is undone by his hamartia as he is shot through with an arrow at the sole point of his vulnerability. Icarus is brought crashing down to earth by his hamartia as the sun melts and sears away his wings of wax. King Midas gives in to his greed and watches as it consumes everything that he loves.

It’s hard not to watch Nemesis and see in the stories of those politicians this classical Greek idea of hamartia. Each of the three, so different in temperament and outlook and disposition, but each of the three ultimately undone by their own personal fatal flaws.

Many politicians past and present participate in the documentary, and almost without exception I was impressed by their honesty, reflectiveness, and willingness to admit error, even if there is plenty of the usual justification and legacy-protecting that always shadows this kind of auditing of the past.

The first of three: Tony Abbott. The ‘Mad Monk’, the convinced Catholic, the right-wing crusader, the ideologue, the boxer. Acknowledged by many of his friends for his personal decency, for his thoughtfulness, his genuine concern for First Nations peoples, his commitment. The most formidable opposition leader, the sharpest nose for blood in the water, the sloganeer, the disciplined one, the day-in-day-in-out on-message warrior. But also unable to hide his discomfort in modern Australia. Inflexible on climate policy. Stubborn in his defence of Australia’s colonial past. Old-fashioned. Seen as a bit too rough around the edges for leadership. A divisive figure.

The second: Malcolm Turnbull. The suave, pragmatic moderate. The favourite of the well-heeled affluent classes. Eloquent, forceful, supremely intelligent, uninterested in the culture wars. The tech entrepreneur, the financier, at home in the velvet world of international diplomacy and big-dollar donors. The great white hope of those who longed for conciliation, unification, for practical solutions to the problems of climate, immigration, and taxation that had dogged Australia for decades. But of the three, the most ill-at-ease in his party. Never one to suffer fools, and in compromising with the right-wing of his party divided himself again and again until there wasn’t much left.

The last: Scott Morrison. The middle-man, the consensus choice. The Stephen Bradbury perhaps. A formidable machine man who expected loyalty from those around him and brought together a party that seemed divided beyond repair. The Pentecostal, the man of faith, the hardline immigration minister and the dedicated family man. The Prime Minister who prayed for his colleagues and won the unwinnable election. But dogged by poor judgement calls and bad perceptions. Perceived as aloof and arrogant, and who never lived down his fatal holiday to Hawai’i.

Three Prime Ministers, three imperfect people. Each of them rising in glory and falling in disaster. Each of them failing to achieve at least in part what they had hoped.

In our reading today, John speaks of Jesus being ‘lifted up’. There is a deep irony in this expression because it describes Jesus’ crucifixion.  For Jesus, in being ‘lifted up’ there is exaltation and nobility, and even a kind of glory, but there is also pain, humiliation, and suffering. It is an unenviable honour that Jesus experiences in the way of discipleship. Perhaps our three Prime Ministers could relate in some way to this complicated ‘lifting up’. This is the pattern of our world. What goes up must come down. Victory is always swallowed up in defeat or death in the end. Our leaders burn brightly before they burn out. Our own achievements lose their sweetness with time and as we naturally turn toward the next thing.

As we’ve heard, John compares the ‘lifting up’ of Jesus to a story from the book of Numbers, in which the Israelites are thirstily enduring their long pilgrimage to the Promised Land of Canaan. Frustrated again by the Israelites hardheartedness and ingratitude, the story tells that God sends snakes among them to bite them, a reproof of their foolishness. But even in his rebuking, God offers them a way back into mercy and relationship. “Make a poisonous serpent,” says the Lord, “and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.”

And now John invites us to look upon Jesus and be healed. To look upon Jesus and live. To see him ‘lifted up’ in glory and sacrificing servanthood. To see that he is our way back. He is our sign of restored relationship and peace. He is our way to eternal life – or perhaps it would be better to say – our way to eternity’s life. God’s life. The eternal now that breaks in with God’s presence, that changes everything. That endures forever.

Jesus is lifted up, not for his own fault, but for the fault of the world. For the disordered, disconnected way that we live, in broken relationship with each other and with God. For we have all been bitten by the serpent. We all have our own hamartia, our own fatal flaws that lead us astray. Our world is filled with bleeding snakebites. The rise and fall of our leaders tells us that. The intractability of conflict and poverty tells us that. The failure of world leaders to find a ceasefire in Gaza tells us that. The whispering thoughts of unkindness and violence and idolism in our own hearts tells us that. We all have those things that we must turn further towards and those things that we must turn further from.

But John tells us: the Son of Man does not come into the world to condemn the world, but to save it. To shine the love of God. ‘God so loved the world’. A complete revolution of perspective for the ancient world. The ancient gods did nothing for nothing. The Roman gods might reward you or punish you. They might show you some special favour or put you in your place, but they would never, ever love you.

God loves the world. God loves the world. And this is how God moves toward the world in love. By lifting up the Son of Man. By breaking the patterns of worldly glory in their rising and falling. By leading us into joy that is not temporal. That does not pass away. That does not rise and fall with political fortunes. By offering us today and every day, a way back into loving relationship. Thanks be to God.

Look upon Jesus and be healed. Look upon Jesus and live.

Amen.

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Lent 2
25/2/2024

Genesis 17:1-10,12,15-19
Psalm 22
Mark 8:27-38

With the arrival of Jesus the messiah, almost nothing changes. But the “almost” matters.

Most of us know today’s gospel passage pretty well: from the lips of Peter, Jesus has just heard a declaration of his being the messiah, and now begins to speak of his approaching passion. And Peter rebukes Jesus, only to be rebuked himself.

Our familiarity with the story comes knowledge of how the exchange is to be understood, which runs something like this: the Jews expected the arrival of God’s messiah, but the idea that the messiah would suffer and be rejected as Jesus described was beyond the Pale. On this reading, the lesson is that the church now knows what the Jews then did not: that the messiah must suffer.

And yet this just creates another problem: why must the messiah suffer? No explanation is given in this immediate text, although other parts of the NT testimony and later Christian theological reflection attempt to provide a wide range of explanations – theories of the atonement, theories of how the death of Jesus brings salvation. Most of these involve sacrificial logic, constraints on God’s power to save without blood being spilt or some other price being paid, and so on. Yet all this tends to make the purported Christian understanding of the suffering messiah worse than Peter’s much neater, all-powerful saviour. Now, instead of a mighty God with a powerful messiah who is free to get in there and to set things right, the suffering messiah seems to have created the even greater problem of a God who is tied in knots by human sin and must go through the pain suffering of crucifixion to extract us – and himself – from the burden of sin.

Of course, we don’t actually hear what it is that Peter says to Jesus. Matthew’s account of this exchange gives a little more but doesn’t explain why Peter takes offence. The best indication of what was said, and why, is shown in Jesus’ response. Perhaps surprisingly, Jesus doesn’t reassert his forthcoming suffering and death in contradiction of Peter’s rebuke. Instead, he refers to the death of Peter and those others who would be his disciples: what will happen to Jesus will also happen to Peter himself.

Noticing this opens a new way of thinking about what is at stake here. Jesus effectively tells Peter: “Yes, as you have declared, I am the messiah. But nothing much is going to change. Persecution, suffering and death will continue – for me and for you.”

And so the crisis of the text is not that – or only that – the messiah will suffer and die; it is that Jesus’ disciples will experience just the same thing. Most bluntly, the crisis is that, with the arrival of Jesus the messiah, almost nothing changes. (Again – and we’ll get there in a moment – the “almost” is crucial.)

But what kind of messiah is this? What kind of salvation is this, which involves self-denial, taking up a cross, and following the seemingly impossible path Jesus walked? It doesn’t help to invoke resurrections at this point; the gospel is not about what might happen in 10, 25, or 60 years. The gospel is a word for the world as it is, here and now. And, though Jesus mentions that he will be raised, he doesn’t add this to his account of the disciples’ own experience. He simply says, it’s going to be pretty tough for me, and for you too. But there is life in that.

We might consider last week’s reflection here for a moment. There I spoke on the volume – the sound volume – at which divine voice spoke from heaven and of Jesus’ own proclamations. The point there was that God does not shout. But there is a difficult word about the cost of discipleship in our text today. I suspect most of us experience it as a shout, if only because on hearing it, we want to cover our ears with our hands. It is challenging and confronting, and in that sense loud. But if God doesn’t shout, and there is in all this a word from God, then it is not a loud word. It is uttered gently, as an observation on the lives we live and an invitation to reflect on what those lives might be. The heart of the Christian confession is not that Jesus died; it is that he lived. He lived with us, among us, so intimately connected to us that what we are killed him. And yet it is the living which matters and not the dying because, for Jesus, the form of his death just reflected the way he lived. It was fullness of life which resulted in his crucifixion.

And this brings us finally to the “almost”: With the arrival of Jesus the messiah, almost nothing changes. That is, there might be very little change in the form of life. Peter and the wider circle around Jesus already knew persecution and suffering and death. And we’ve seen that while Peter takes offence at the notion of a suffering messiah, this is in no small part because of the prospect of his own suffering continuing: what kind of salvation could this be?

To borrow from our Lenten study book this year, it is a salvation which gives the gift of “with”. Hardship need not but suffered alone. The gospel has Jesus with us: experiencing just what we experience, and yet experiencing it against a different background, in a different key. The gift of the gospel might be described thus (and strangely): we are now able to suffer because Jesus has suffered; we are now able to die because Jesus died.

That is surely a strange thought. Most people most of the time suffer and die without obvious reference to Jesus. The difference it makes that Jesus died – if Jesus is indeed the messiah – is that the suffering and death we endure now becomes resistance against death having the last word. Jesus calls us to refuse to live under death’s shadow, as he did. We are accustomed to saying in funerals something to the effect of , “in the midst of life, death”. This is true enough as a simple observation on the normal order of things. But the gospel is a different thought: in the midst of death, life. In the midst of death, not at the end of death, not as a one-day-overcoming of death, but surrounded by death, life.

Are we not already dying – literally and metaphorically? Because this is the case, the call to self-denial and taking up our cross is not a call to more death. It is a call to begin to live in the midst of death. This is salvation, the gift of Jesus: death put to death.

Let us hear then, his call:

“Lift up your hearts.

The kingdom of God is come near.

Repent, believe, and live”.