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Lent 4
19/3/2023

Psalm 23
John 9:1-42

In a sentence:
To be seen by God is to be freed from the things we think we see

For the modern, scientifically-informed mind, a miracle constitutes a very particular problem: the violation of the ‘natural order’.

Faced with the claim that a miracle has occurred, the first modern response will typically be that the observation is wrong: what looked like a miracle was, in fact, not one at all. So, for example, a blindness or lameness ‘miraculously’ healed is explained as the releasing of the person from a psychosomatic condition through clever therapy. Certainly, some of the miracles attributed to Jesus have been accounted for in this way, casting him as a gifted therapist (in the modern sense).

If no particular explanation can be given for the miracle, we don’t immediately conclude that, indeed, God has been active. Instead, we are more likely to assume that our theories about how the world works are not yet extensive enough to cover all observed phenomena. This is no great crisis and is often the cause of great excitement as new scientific questions are opened up. In this way, we deal with the amazing and the (currently) unexplained by simply deferring understanding until more comprehensive theories are found. An apparent miracle would speak to the modern mind less about God’s power and more about our ignorance of the deeper workings of the world.

The point here is not to argue that miracles do not or cannot happen. For our present purposes, we can be happily agnostic about this. The point is that it would almost 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!

Of course, the people in our focus text from John are not modern scientific thinkers. This does not mean, however, that they were fools. The Pharisees are the lead sceptics in the story, and they are rightly sceptical: the blind man’s story is not easily believable. Yet their investigation leads to them being unable to deny that something has happened which has all the feel of a miracle. To them, as would not be necessary for the modern mind, this implies the presence of God in or through the one who has done this.

Yet there is another dimension to their reading of this particular miracle which we do not usually feel today. While they cannot deny that something extraordinary has happened – and that this might well be a sign of God’s own presence and activity – it seems that this alleged work of God has occurred in a way which violates God’s own command. This is the reason for the controversy around Jesus’ having done this on the Sabbath.

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.’ In John’s account, Jesus appeals to no happy humanism to justify what he has done. In fact, he quite simply does not justify what he has done. Whereas in the other Gospels Jesus often engages in arguments and proofs of his point with his opponents, in John’s gospel we don’t hear these arguments so much as simply see the disorienting impact Jesus has on those who meet him; their ‘sense of sense’ is undermined. There is no justification given here for Jesus’ healing on the Sabbath but only the confusion of the Pharisees, echoing Nicodemus’ exclamation a couple of weeks ago, ‘How can these things be’? The miracle points towards Jesus as important, but its performance on the Sabbath points away from him.

Part of the reason Christians might not feel what the Pharisees feel is that we have heard this story. We ‘know’ what the Pharisee does not know: the perspective of the gospel, that Jesus is in the right and they are not. In the same way, we know what the woman at the well did not know (last week, John 4), and what Nicodemus did not know (two seeks ago, John 3). They all effectively ask ‘How can it be?’ regarding things which seem easy for us. We ‘know’ of the wind-like character of the people of the Spirit (which Nicodemus did not). We know of worship in spirit and truth (which the Samaritan woman at the well did not), and we know about the Sabbath in Jesus’ teaching, which the Pharisees seem not to know. It is given to us who read these stories and have been formed by them to ‘know’, to ‘see’.

Yet all of this brings us to a consideration of where today’s Gospel text ends.

³⁹Jesus said, ‘I came into this world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.’ ⁴⁰Some of the Pharisees near him heard this 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.

Do we, in fact, see – simply because we have the benefit of having overheard Jesus’ clash with the Pharisees? Can we know? In a relative sense, this must be the case. We go to a mechanic because he knows cars, to a doctor because she knows bodies, and to accountants because they know money. But in the gospel story, the knowing and seeing are of the absolute variety: the knowledge of God and so the true knowledge of ourselves. In this instance, the Pharisees’ knowledge of God cannot accommodate Jesus because he exercises a freedom which seems to violate God’s command: he makes no ‘sense’. And because of this, nothing of what they know and by which they make judgements about the things of God amounts to anything. Your sin remains, Jesus says: you say you see, but you do not see, and so God is lost to you.

There is a kind of pessimism to be read from this story: 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 their eyes and ears are open to see and hear everything that can be seen and heard, they do not see and hear.

The man who is healed in the story is, in fact, healed of two things: that which ailed him alone – his blindness – and that which he and Pharisees suffered in common: not seeing who Jesus was. His eyes begin to work as they should, and he sees the ‘Son of Man’ (9.35-37). Our reading today is only in a passing way about the healing of the eyes of a man whose eyes did not work. For the thing to see here is not eyes which now register light see but the presence of God in Jesus, which the eyes of the Pharisees both see and cannot see.

If there is a kind of pessimism in this story 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. To be beginning to see as God sees – this is faith. Faith begins with knowing that we have been seen. And so faith is a kind of innocence which knows and yet does not, a humility which is open to being taught and so realises the gift of a freedom which comes from not having to know all things because God knows us, sees us and loves us. This is the true and life-giving ‘human condition’. Our condition is, properly, not what we think we see. It is not the great changes, the seemingly overwhelming challenges or the apparently insurmountable injustices. These matter, of course. But to see only things is to be limited and constrained.

To be seen by God in that space, however, is to be freed. What is the Sabbath when God is at stake? What is Curzon Street or the fraught nature of life together or the frailness of human bodies and minds? What is death or life, angels or rulers, things present or things to come, powers, height, depth, or anything else in all creation? Nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8.38f).

For God. Sees. Us, so that we might see and not be afraid.

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Lent 3
12/3/2023

Romans 5:1-11
Psalm 95
John 4:5-42

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

God, may my words be loving and true; and may those who listen discern what is not. Amen.

I recently sat in on a liturgy class. I was there to help facilitate a discussion on contemporary issues in liturgy within the context of the Uniting Church — as often happens in the best classes freewheeling discussion ensued. One of the questions that was posed was what to make of the Uniting Church President’s prayer at the death of the Queen.

I confess I had mixed feelings about the Queen’s death, and so opted to disengage from much of the mourning rituals, and reflections on her life and what she represented (both positive and negative). Nevertheless, when put on the spot, what to say?

The question came from the perspective of someone formed in a non-western context where their country has been shaped by colonisation. And accompanying this colonisation the suffering, oppression, and violence which always accompanies colonisation – and the blind eye turned to unspeakable violence.

I remember their question framed by this comment:

“When I came to Australia I did not join the Anglican Church, because I opened the Prayer Book and there was a prayer that said of the Queen, ‘may her enemies be vanquished.’ … I am her enemy.”

This is not the too often simple rejection of the Western led order of the world offered by some on the political left. This is a visceral, lived insight: some of the greatest tragedies in this person’s country happened during my parents’ lifetime.

When we pray we direct ourselves towards God. We seek after God’s presence alone. A Rabbi I once heard even described communal prayer as being “alone together.” Sat or standing before God to express our deepest selves, to express truths so deep that we must borrow the best words of our tradition, lest we simply offer sighs too deep for words. And yet whenever we pray the whole world is gathered together: we bring ourselves, and we ourselves are a bundle of the histories which have shaped us and shaped our world. The most honest prayers lay bare the world before God.

And so, it is right to ask what social, and political assumptions frame the words we pray.

This sermon is not the answer I gave in class, but perhaps it can be a contribution to taking the concerns of every one of our sisters, brothers, and siblings in the Church seriously. I am only beginning to learn that the questions asked by many in our minority cultural communities are vital for the life of the Church, because they free us from the ways our majority culture can narrow our vision of God.

What does it mean to say “Glory” in the Christian tradition? What does it mean to pray that someone may rest in peace, and rise in glory?

“We are justified by faith, we have peace with God … we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. … we boast in our afflictions … affliction produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint … God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” (Rom. 5.1-5)

In Romans chapter 5 the Apostle Paul gathers up the argument he has been making in the preceding 4 chapters. From tracing how deep the problem of sin truly is — so deep it infects everything, shapes everyone, so deep down it’s in the water table! To the gracious release that only Christ can offer us through faithfulness. All of this is gathered together in the short verses from the beginning of Romans 5, which then point to the next turn in the argument.

Paul’s point seems to be to take seriously the completeness of Jesus Christ’s salvific work, while recognising the gap between the proclamation of salvation and our tangible experience of it. If Jesus’ death has in fact released the world from the bondage of sin, then why is so much in the world still clearly marked by sin and its effects?

We might phrase this question in another way: how do we hold to the hope of resurrection when there are crucified bodies all around us?

For Paul we begin to answer this question when we recognise that the salvation achieved by Jesus Christ is not first and foremost about God’s abandonment of a world marked by suffering. Rather, salvation is our release from being shaped by the forces of sin and death, and so that we are new people in the midst of a suffering world which God is redeeming. What we inhabit is not a magical solution to all the world’s ills, as if every problem can simply be ignored or wiped clean, without the hard work of reconciliation and healing. Rather, we inhabit a new situation in which God is revealed in and through the suffering of the world, as the one who will never abandon the least or the last. We are in a new situation in which we are shaped by the outpouring of the Spirit which is transforming each of us, and the whole world.

What, then, do we boast in? We do not boast in ourselves, marked as each of us are by the painful histories of ourselves as individuals, our families in their complexity, our wider society, and the degradation of the world itself. We boast instead, says Paul, in affliction, in suffering. Not because affliction and suffering are in themselves good: by no means! We boast in affliction because it recalls us to solidarity with each person who suffers, and the whole suffering world. We boast in affliction if and when it recalls the solidarity which Jesus himself lived on behalf of all of humanity, and all of creation.

This is glory. Glory is the cross. Glory is the gathering of the whole wretched world in the afflicted person of Jesus, who represents humanity to God and receives righteousness and justification on our behalf.

So it is that to receive the glory of God means sharing in the suffering of Christ which puts on display God’s love for a wretched world. Let me be clear: when we speak of a wretched world we can never mean a world which is bad and which God seeks to abandon, a world in which we should think of ourselves as worms. When we speak of a wretched world we speak of a world in which everything is marked by a march towards death, where from our first waking moments we enter cycles of trauma, where we live in stolen land, where we are shaped by anxieties, insecurities, abuses, and disregard. What Christ gathers into himself is this world beset by tragedy, and embraces it so thoroughly that the tragedy ceases, and yet we who are formed in and by this tragedy do not cease.

This is the glory of God: who embraces the affliction of the world and forges from it a new humanity, bound together by bonds of love and not animosity. This is the glory of God: who invites us into the afflictions of the world so that we too become agents of transformation and new life. This is the glory of God: that the hard edges of the world might be cast aside, and yet not a single soul can be left out or abandoned.

Glory is being bound to each other, being stitched into the tapestry of love which gathers all of the troubled world into a new beginning. This new beginning, this rising in glory is the ongoing work of living into what is true:

We have been justified by faith, we have peace with God. May we boast in sharing in the afflictions of the world, for this is true glory, and the redemption of the cross.

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Lent 2
5/3/2023

Romans 4:1-5,13-17
Psalm 121
John 3:1-17

In a sentence:
God doesn’t ‘make sense’ to us but of us – giving us a new sense of ourselves, and Godself.

There are times in John’s gospel when Jesus sounds a little like that kind of politician who is not interested in the question of an interviewer but avoids the question to make a point which enlarges himself or diminishes an opponent.

Jesus doesn’t need to enlarge or diminish in that way, but that kind of mismatch of question and response occurs all the time in John’s gospel. Seemingly intelligent people say seemingly sensible things to Jesus, and he responds with something which gives the impression that he’s not heard the question. This gives the Jesus of John’s gospel a surreal feel; in Jesus’ interactions with others, everything goes a little bit Dali.

What John is getting at is this: the gospel’s talk of the kingdom of God makes no sense. This is not to dismiss the gospel but simply to describe it. Nicodemus is a ‘teacher of Israel’ – a theologian. Theologians specialise in making sense of God, investigating and describing the patterns of God. The theologian seeks order, a place for at least most things, and most things in their place. What matters here, and what John challenges, is a particular kind of ‘making sense’ which tries to fit the things of God into a system of thinking and being which is already in place. Whether we imagine ourselves to be theologians or not, we imagine that God should ‘make sense’, by which we mean that God should fit somehow into the world as we know it.

Jesus contradicts this assumption. While the Nicodemus in all of us looks for God’s predictability, Jesus offers an image of God as Spirit, playing on a double meaning in the Greek: the word translated as ‘spirit’ could also be translated as ‘wind’. And so he says to the theologian, then and now, ‘God is spirit, and so God is as orderly as the wind’.

Interestingly, if we leave the Nicodemus bits out, Jesus makes better sense:

Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above. … no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. … The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

This is the kind of thing a ‘spiritual’ person might say: a nice little metaphor about rebirth and some suitably vague and new-agey remarks about spirituality implied in the blowing of the wind, with a characteristically religious contrast between spirit and flesh.

It is probably fair to say that our usual way of approaching this text and others like it is to leave Nicodemus out and focus on the religious affirmations Jesus makes. Consider what is most familiar to us about this passage: ‘you must be born again’, ‘for God so loved the world that he sent his only Son’, etc. We typically receive these bare affirmations about our relationship to God without any reference to the confused Nicodemus, who hasn’t got a clue what it all means. By extracting these sayings from the context of Nicodemus’ confusion, we are given the impression that what Jesus says is an easy thing, as if it were clear what that might mean to say, ‘You must be born again’ (or ‘from above’ – another possible translation) – as if it were clear what it would look like, what we should do.

Leaving Nicodemus out leaves out the strangeness of all this and so obscures the unsettling nature of the gospel.  If we are to benefit from what is said here between him and Jesus, we have to be Nicodemus in the story. This passage of scripture will be God’s word to us when it does to us what Jesus did to Nicodemus – when it confounds us, confuses us, upsets us.

The upsetting thing Jesus presents to Nicodemus here is, most fundamentally, God’s sovereign freedom. God is not to be made sense of because God – this God, at least – cannot be tied down, as one cannot tie down the wind. But the point here is not simply to disorient us and certainly not to mystify us. God’s freedom is proclaimed so that we might find ourselves becoming free – ourselves coming to rebirth out of the wind-like Spirit. That God is free and sends the Son to save, means that we might become free too. God is God, not to cast away but to draw closer, not to condemn but to save, not simply to dislocate and to upset, but to relocate and reset.

If, then, God’s being and action make no sense to us, it may yet make sense of us. But this takes time. We grow into the freedom of the children of God. No doubt, Nicodemus leaves Jesus confused. But Jesus is not finished with him, just as he will not be finished with any among us he might confuse or upset. Nicodemus will appear again in the middle of the gospel as a tentative supporter of Jesus before the religious council, of which he is a member (7.50f). And he will appear a last time after the crucifixion, bringing burial spices and helping to bear Jesus’ body to the tomb (19.39-42). Nicodemus, who in our present passage is described as having ‘come to Jesus by night,’ is described in his final appearance as the one who had ‘at first come to Jesus by night’. Nicodemus has developed a new sense of sense, which is as different from the old sense as day is from night. From that first secret and tentative approach to Jesus under the cover of darkness, Nicodemus finally appears publicly as one who has come and seen, and has watched, and followed. From the astonishment and denial of his first encounter, Nicodemus himself becomes astonishing before his fellow Jews, having moved finally to see value even in devotion to the broken body of Jesus.

God’s engagement with us is that we might be re-sensed as Nicodemus was. This re-sensing is not simply an intellectual thing; it is not limited to our perception of ourselves, or God, or the world around us. It concerns also our lives as ethical, social and political creatures. This ‘Godsense’ will look like nonsense to everyone who imagines they have already worked everything out. Ten years ago it seemed to most of us to be nonsense that the best course of action would be to sell our property and go into the future without our own buildings. ‘How could such things be?’ It is not clear what ‘born again’or ‘born from above’ actually looks like. If we could only have that time over! Godsense sees more freedom in the world than we expect to, or are willing to. Of course, the step we are now taking is not really a free one – we’ve run out of options and energy. Be that as it may, we might still look forward to what Godsense could make possible in whatever new world we find ourselves. It is not nonsense that the future might be different from the past, that things might be done differently, that directions can be changed, and we still be safe in the process.

So also for our personal lives: the gospel proposes to each of us a new sense of sense for ourselves and the lives we’ve been given to live. As we open ourselves to the surprises and contradictions Jesus brings, we open ourselves to be gradually transformed into something we were not at all expecting, but nonetheless discover to be good.

This is what we call a miracle, and it is the promise in the gospel: a new sense of sense. A new future. And new self with the renewing God.

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Lent 1
26/2/2023

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7
Psalm 32
Matthew 4:1-11

In a sentence:
The one temptation in life is to fear death in all its guises; in Jesus we see the freedom of denying death this power over us

Our readings this morning are part of a tale with two beginnings.

Adam and Eve and their apple, and the temptation of Jesus, are arguably the first things which ‘happen’ in each of the Old and New Testaments. And there is a clear correspondence between them – Eve in the Garden, conversing with the serpent and Jesus in the wilderness being challenged by the devil. The stories are strongly mythical but no less engaging for that, and part of that engagement is the similarities and differences between them. Perhaps the most apparent difference is that if the First Couple and Jesus undergo the same testing, Jesus comes out looking somewhat better than the other two!

What are we to make of that difference? A moral reading sees something heroic in Jesus’ achievement. He reveals himself to be strong enough to resist temptation where Eve and Adam were not. For their failure, they are excluded from the Garden and die. And yet this is pretty much what happens to the good Jesus, despite his success. This means that if we read these temptations as moral testing, Jesus’ experience contradicts any notion that moral success makes us safe: goodness doesn’t preserve us.

Experience might already have taught us this, but the success of Jesus in resisting the temptations presents a problem with morality, in view of how he dies. This is the problem of theodicy. Theodicy asks about the justice of God: how can God be just if good people like Jesus suffer and die as he did? In the particular case of Jesus, tradition has found an answer which is deep in the Christian psyche: Jesus came in order to die. With this twist, the death of Jesus is no longer an affront to the justice of God but is, instead, God’s own act: God ‘sends’ the Son, a ‘ransom’ for many. This is usually understood in terms of a sacrificial economy: Jesus is a sacrifice which does more than other sacrifices have done. How sacrifice was thought to work in Hebrew tradition is far from clear in the Scriptures, but that tradition is nevertheless used to interpret the death of Jesus, with the typical understanding being that God sacrifices Jesus. On this understanding, Jesus’ triumph over the devil in the temptations proves that he is like an unblemished offering presented at the Temple: perfect, and so a worthy sacrifice to offer against so great a need.

Nonetheless, this kind of sacrificial understanding doesn’t really work for us. Our occasional modern talk of sacrifice – the mother who sacrifices herself to save a child, or the sacrifices of soldiers in war – don’t touch upon the same thing. For sacrifice adequately to explain for us how the death of one good person saves many un-good ones, we would have to come to faith in the old sacrificial system before we could believe in Jesus. For us today, this would be like taking sides against Paul in the circumcision debates (Galatians 2) – become a circumcised Jew first, and then Christ will be a benefit to you. Apart from that, we might also wonder why, if God is truly all-powerful, he cannot simply forgive, without killing Jesus. Theories about God’s utter holiness and the magical saving effect of blood to break through holiness into forgiveness can’t make this question go away.

Jesus’ achievement in the face of these temptations is undeniably a sign of his being and character. But we must also see that, in view of the cross, if he is a new beginning, even this demonstrated righteousness does not avert the cursed life and death to which Adam and Eve are consigned. This new beginning to the tale of God and the world does not quite undo the old beginning. So far as we can see, the deathly effects of the First Couple’s apple-munching continue, even in the person of Jesus, said to be the “Son of God” (‘If  you are the Son of God…” the devil mocks). Our heartfelt ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ misunderstands the human condition: goodness is not salvation from this life. Goodness and innocence do not insure against suffering. This dismal conclusion is what sacrificial theories of Jesus’ death try to avoid but, for the reasons we’ve already considered, these theories don’t get us over the line these days, if they ever did.

We need another way of thinking about the ministry of Jesus from the temptations to the cross. So let’s try this: the ‘fact’ that even this righteous one dies is a call to us to be reconciled to death. This brings both the first and second beginnings of this tale into the very centre of who we are, what we do, and what we expect to come – here and now. Given how the story is told, we cannot but conclude that Jesus – at least – was reconciled to death. This doesn’t mean he was happy about it; ‘take this cup away from me…’, he prays in Gethsemane. But it does mean that death did not get in the way of him living the life-in-all-its-fullness of a child of God. Death did not force Jesus’ hand. In the first beginning of this complex tale, Adam and Eve desire to ‘be like God’. The distinction between them and God is, in the story, cast as the difference between a God who knows Good and Evil and the human beings who do not but desire to. But this is also the difference between a God who doesn’t die and human beings who do. To be ‘like God’ is not to die, not to be a creature. Unlike Jesus, these two ‘grasped’ at being ‘like God’ (Philippians 2), and yet they die nonetheless.

Yet their death – and ours in the same way – is a corruption of death. No longer is death merely part of what they are as not-God creatures. Death is now something to be feared – a power to be avoided or wielded. In the scene which follows what we’ve heard today, they hide from God for fear of judgement (for they are naked and judge this in themselves). This kind of fear of God, and the pain death will now become, are two sides of the same coin.

It’s within this reality that the second beginning of the story takes place: death has become a power to which people are subject, an horizon we know is there and work constantly act to keep away from. Fear of death and its many friends overshadows life, dividing and separating what God had joined together. Fear of death motivates invading armies and counter-offensives, causes us to lash out at each other after a hard day, and makes us greedy. Fear of death causes righteous people to crucify a righteous man.

In contrast, Jesus’ responses to the devil show that he doesn’t fear dying of hunger or the ‘death’ of failing in his ministry. Rather, he continues to live the life of a child of God. His path to the cross is no suicidal relishing of death, but simply the refusal to seek immunity to death. Jesus refuses to allow death to be a motivation. The life of a child of God is freedom not to be God, and a reconciliation to this as freedom:  creatureliness means that we are not immune to death.

Someone once said that the Jesus who calls us bids us ‘come and die’. This death is not suicide; it is a kind of ‘death to death’. In its own strange way, of course, death frees us from from all ties; this is what we mean when we say, ‘Rest in Peace’. But before this, in the life we are still living, to die ‘to’ death is to be set free from the tie of death, from the fear of it, from the willinginess to inflict it on others.

On this reading, the crucifixion is not the failure of goodness to bring us the reward of life. The crucifixion is Jesus’ refusal to fear death, and so is his refusal to be motivated by it. On this reading, the crucifixion is not Jesus passively sacrificed like a coin spent in some economy of salvation. The crucifixion is the triumph of a human being living in the shadow of everyone else’s fear of death. He dies because he does not fear death. The cross is Jesus’ own death-to-death throughout the whole of his life, demonstrated in a ‘real’ death.

In the same way, Jesus’ response to the temptations is a choice for life in the midst of invitations to fear death. This new beginning contradicts the first beginning, in which avoiding death by becoming like God seemed such a good idea.

To hear this tale with two beginnings opens up the possibility of a third beginning – indeed as many third beginnings as there are people who fear death in all its guises, whether the death which is the cessation of our breathing or the death which is some other constraint on life.

The ‘No’ of Jesus in the temptations is a reconciliation to the reality of death but a choice nevertheless to say ‘Yes’ to a life of free and open humanity. It is No to the shadow of death and a Yes to the light of life. It is a No to isolation and a Yes to mutuality. It is a No to hard justice and a Yes healing grace. It is a No to the gaslighting ‘if you are a Child of God’ and simple, source-of-all-life reception of God’s Child-making embrace in all hardship and all joy.

Jesus’ No to the devil’s life-sapping temptations is a No to fear and a Yes to the life God has given us to live.

We are Adam and Eve in the Garden, and Jesus in the wilderness, tempted to say Yes to fear.

But, faced with the choice, let us – in Jesus – say Yes to God, Yes to life.

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Transfiguration
19/2/2023

2 Peter 1:16-21
Psalm 99
Matthew 17:1-9

In a sentence:
The Transfiguration of Jesus invites a transforming of our sense for – and living of – the lives we have been given to live

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father;
through him all things were made.

(Nicene Creed)

This is rather a mouthful, and a contested one. We don’t recite the Creed each week but we do often enough; and when we don’t say it, it is nevertheless implied in the alternative affirmations of faith, and in other parts of the liturgy.

Where a protest is raised – in the world and often enough in the church – the objection is usually that the confession makes the world too big and God too small. Is God so small as to be identified with Jesus in this way? The objection is not new, which is why the middle bit of this ancient confession of faith is the longest: it’s here that God and the world collide. We have the Creed because of this apparent smallness of God in Christian confession.

Something of this tension between God and the world is reflected in the account of the Transfiguration we’ve heard this morning. By itself, the Transfiguration is not easily accessible. What happens here, why Elijah and Moses are there, why it occurs at this point, its fleeting strangeness – all of this compounds the sense of our distance from the reported experience. Are we simply to ‘believe’ the text and assert that Jesus did glow-up like this for a moment, with heavenly sound effects to complement the light show? What does it all add to our understanding of God? The disciples themselves had no idea what to make of what happened. A hint is given that Easter will make sense of it all, but this doesn’t help if we continue to wrestle to make sense of Easter itself.

Most of you have heard dozens of sermons on the Transfiguration, the last 19 of which here at MtE you can find on our website. I’ll try not to repeat all that this morning! Today we’ll come at it this way: taking as given some mystical experience, let’s consider the divine voice which offers commentary. The voice declares that Jesus is the Son – God’s special one – and that we should take notice of him. What would it mean to say that small and ordinary Jesus is such a presence of the fullness of God?

The first thing we would have to say is that, if Jesus were this presence, we wouldn’t be able to tell by looking at him at any other time. Peter, James and John get a glimpse of something new, but once they get talking they might wonder whether it wasn’t just a dream interrupted by lightning and thunder. Most of the rest of the time, Jesus is just a chap amid a group of men and women, milling about the place, as probably happened from time to time in those days. Perhaps Jesus is wise, and charismatic, and courageous, and committed to his cause, but that describes anyone with their wits about them. Jesus doesn’t look special.

We are told that the disciples’ response at the time was ‘fear’ or, as the Greek word could also be translated, ‘amazement’. This makes sense in terms of the shock at what happens, as a sudden flash of light makes us blink, or a loud noise makes us jump. Yet we are told the story not to know their response but to share it. What if this were true? If Jesus intersects with God in this way, what then for us?

To grasp the extent of this question – the moral extent, we might say, but also what it might mean for our sense of everything – we must keep in mind that it is not merely ‘a’ connection of Jesus to God which flashes forth for a moment. It is the connection of the crucified Jesus to God. The crucifixion (as an event) is still just a possible future at this point of the story, but for the Gospel writer and we who think about Transfiguration on this side of Easter, Jesus is the crucified, discarded one. Listen, the voice from heaven now commands, to the one you abandoned and crucified. This one is my Son, my beloved and my delight. And not so much listen to his ‘words’ – to this or that saying. Listen rather to the Word he is as the collision of the depths of human experience with the whole of God. The Transfiguration is light shining through the cross; (it does not ‘look’ like the resurrection of Jesus but is the meaning of the resurrection itself).

This, then, is not a warm-and-fuzzy, nearer-my-God-to-thee mountaintop experience. Not merely Jesus is transfigured. If it is the crucified Jesus – the sign of the most distant from God parts of the world – if it is this one who is transfigured – then even those things in the world which seem far from God are now pulsing with the possibility of bearing God. The world is now not as we have known it. And not only the world but God also is transfigured. God is shown to be willing to ‘own’, to live into, to die with and to pass through the darkest of human experiences, in the cross.

The Transfiguration, if it happened, says what doctrines of incarnation and atonement and resurrection and consummation would say if they were true: God is the mystery of the world, the hidden beginning, means and end of all that we are. We forget this in the midst of doctor’s appointments and overseas trips, between the birth of grandchildren and reports of wars in faraway places. We forget it when we’re angry that some justice has not been done, and when we’re glad to have received a windfall. We forget, when someone is trying to scam us on the telephone, and when we catch a hint of jasmine on the breeze. To forget God is not to be irreligious but to mistake some part of the world for less than it is – as just a thing which happens. For what it truly is is the possibility of the free and freeing presence of God, making possible the enjoyment – and the suffering – of all that we are and have and can be, without turning those things into God. To say that the big God is met in the small Jesus is to say not merely that this God can be found, but that God wills to be found, in all the small (and big) better-and-worse things of our life.

Jesus is God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made… in order that we might be, too – here and now in our little part of everything.

If we wanted to say why Christians gather like this today, we might say that we gather to be reminded that we have forgotten. We have forgotten that God is the God of small things, even the God of crucified things. We have forgotten, and so we have feared, and we have lashed out, and we have pushed away because we have thought we can’t afford to love or forgive or hope. We have forgotten what life and the world can be. The Transfiguration is not a thing which just ‘happened’. It is a thing which can happen – the discovery of God which transforms the world around us: Here. Now. You. Me. In God.

‘…a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved and my delight. Listen. Comprehend. Believe. Live.”’

‘When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by amazement.’

What else could they do with such news ringing in their ears? Now everything would have to change…