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Easter Day
9/4/2023

Colossians 3:1-4
Matthew 28:1-10

In a sentence:
We do not know where we are or what we are until God turns our understanding upside down.

Resurrection and magic
The delight in watching a performing magician is seeing something which doesn’t ‘compute’: the white rabbit pulled out of the empty hat or the pretty assistant who, apparently having been sawn in two, can still wriggle her toes.

The conjurer knows the art of surprise by distraction. Crucial for her act is that we are tricked into focussing on something other than the crucial move. This is particularly the case with sleight of hand, by which the magician draws our attention to one hand while the other does the real work. If we have only our eyes to trust, we have to testify that the card ‘magically’ appeared where it could not have been, or the coin we have just seen has disappeared. Of course, we don’t think this is ‘real’ magic, so we immediately wonder, ‘How did she do that?’

Most of us experience the Resurrection stories of the Gospels like this. We ‘see’ the Resurrection by hearing the stories: this is the rabbit out of the hat. And as with the magician’s trick, so with a purported resurrection, we might wonder, ‘How did he do that?’ Is it possible that the dead can be raised?

Asking ‘How?’ at least allows that something special might have happened after Jesus died. But, as far as most of us are concerned, we don’t think too seriously about this: there is really no trick to see here. It’s perhaps a nice story, but it’s ‘only’ a story, somewhere between straight deception or a sincere account from deluded witnesses.

Miracles and distraction
The story of Jesus’ resurrection of Jesus, like the other miracle stories in the Bible, looks to us to be just a magic trick, which is to say that it seems to be nothing at all. We know there is no ‘real’ magic, no control of the world by will. Magic is only skilful manipulation, visible or hidden.

But the miracle stories are not intended to be accepted as magic. A few weeks ago, we considered an account in John’s Gospel of the bringing of sight to a man born blind. We saw that a problem with ‘nature miracles’ is how distracting they are. As that account unfolds, it becomes clear that the story is not about the good luck of one person who happened to have his eyes magically opened. It is about that man coming to see who Jesus was and, at the same time, the failure of others to see the same thing, despite the overwhelming evidence. The miracle story reveals not that there is a God who does magic but the possibilities of the human heart: from the seedling faith of the healed man to the barren ground of those who opposed Jesus despite the evidence.

To see only the miracle is not to see very much at all. This applies even to resurrections, which brings us back to our reflection on Good Friday. There we considered the significance of Easter for Good Friday. Good Friday needs Easter to tell us who Jesus is, making possible language like ‘messiah’, ‘son of God’, and ‘lord of glory’ for the one who dies on the cross. Good Friday matters because this one, revealed by Easter to be Lord and Messiah, dies. This is not any old crucifixion.

Not any old resurrection
But now we might turn things around to consider the importance of Good Friday for Easter. Easter needs the crucified man Jesus for us to see the sleight of hand under the distracting miracle.

In saying, ‘Jesus is risen,’ we naturally let the emphasis fall on the ‘risen’, for this is surely where the magic is: dead people don’t usually stop being dead.

But Easter is not any old resurrection; it is not the resurrection of ‘someone’ in general. In affirming ‘Jesus is risen,’ the emphasis falls most of all on the ‘Jesus’: not ‘Jesus is risen’ but ‘Jesus is risen’. This is because the real surprise is who is raised: as a despised, rejected and crucified man, Jesus is the last person we should expect God to raise.

To get the emphasis wrong is to mishear the gospel’s declaration. At the first hearing – and for many us, at second, fifth and twentieth hearings – the Easter story sounds like Jesus dies as a man but rises as a god. But taking Easter and Good Friday together reveals the gospel’s sleight of hand: the God dies, and the man rises. Easter Day reveals that it was God hanging on that cross, while Good Friday reminds us that it is a despised and rejected human being who is raised from the dead.

There are a lot of footnotes which scream to be inserted at this point, but there’s more devil than God in the details.

The central ‘takeaway’ is that Easter is not concerned with the question of life after death, and so not with the ‘idea’ of our continuation after our hearts stop beating. Easter is concerned with the switch: a god is crucified, and a broken person is raised. This movement is a radical shaking up of expectations, revealing that most thinking about the Cross and Resurrection is like watching the wrong hand and being deceived.

The magic hand in which we are held
God does not seek to deceive us here, of course. It is a self-deception because we hear the story according to our own sense of what matters and is possible, and not God’s.

On Friday we reflected on why, of all the endings of all the lives lived in all of history, we might concern ourselves primarily with the end of Jesus’ life. We might ask the same question now of the resurrection: of all the risings which might perhaps happen, why does this one matter? These are, in fact, the same question: what has the life and death and life of Jesus got to do with any of us?

The answer is given in our short text this morning from Colossians (3.1-4). There Paul speaks of us as having our being not in ourselves, but of our being in Christ: your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ is revealed, so too are you.

This is true magic: our lives filled out, made whole, justified in the life of another.

Up to this point it is as if, in living our lives, we have performed a magic trick on ourselves, misleading even ourselves to look at the wrong hand. And we open that hand and see all the things we have done and all the things which have been done to us, and we think that what we hold there is all we are.

Dying as gods to live as creatures
But there is another hand which holds the secret of the trick we are. Scarred but strong, this hand holds us as we hold all we have been and desire to be. We are hidden in this strong hand, completed and made whole there, enclosed within Christ.

For this to become our reality, the gods we desire to be have to die so that we might emerge again from our tombs as human beings, re-imaged – re-imag-ined – in the humanity of Jesus. God dies on Good Friday so that a true humanity might rise at Easter. This humanity is created not to be divine but to be creaturely, not for fear but for love, not for selfishness but for service, not for self-justification but for grace and gift.

By sleight of hand God catches us, like a falling coin, to reveal in the end that we were looking in the wrong place.

‘He is not here!’ laughs the smiling magician, ‘and you should not be either. You are looking in the wrong place. He is risen and gone head. Run, and catch up to him. And all that is his will be yours’

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Good Friday
7/4/2023

Isaiah 52:13-15
John 18:33-19:16

In a sentence:
More than life after death, the gift of God is life before death: life which knows the tragic but overcomes it

So long ago

Good Friday – the Good Friday – seems now to be ‘so long ago.’ Why, of all the places we might turn to in this modern age for reflection or insight, should we turn to this place?

This question is not just a matter of time. A few years ago, the broadcaster SBS had a line in its advertisements, “Six billion stories, and counting”, later updated to “Seven billion”, and we’re now at eight billion. Considering on top of this the 100 billion or so other human beings who have lived, the narrowing of our interest to one dismal Friday two thousand years is the strangest of things.

Of all the endings of all the lives in all of history, why consider just this one?

Good Friday is only interesting if Jesus himself is interesting, and a certain kind of interesting. He is arrested and executed because the authorities find him interesting in problematic ways. To these, Jesus’ crucifixion was the death of an enemy. He was interesting to the crowds and the disciples in a different way. For these, his death was the death of a friend or a hope. These experiences are familiar and play out daily in nursing homes, on country roads and in Ukraine’s smashed villages and towns. As the story unfolds, this is ‘all’ Jesus is to those around him, and Good Friday is just plain tragic in the way human life can be.

Who are you?

‘Are you a king?’ asks Pilate of the accused Jesus, standing before him. ‘Where have you come from?’ That is, ‘Who are you’? Pilate can only understand these questions on his own terms – are you a king like Herod or the Emperor? This is fair enough, but any answer on these terms is almost irrelevant to why Jesus’ death might matter. Kings and emperors also die. At this point in the story, the end of Jesus is like the end of the rest of us: a lament, a death notice, a newspaper obituary. This is simple tragedy if, in Jesus’ case, tragedy in one of its nastier realisations.

Easter and the tragedy of tragedies

It is sometimes said on Good Friday that we shouldn’t jump too quickly to Easter, skipping over the pain and suffering of the day to what seems to be the happy ending. But we can’t keep Easter out of the picture here because Easter shifts the story beyond mere tragedy. Easter doesn’t ‘undo’ Good Friday, but it answers Pilate’s question, now on God’s own terms; Easter reveals the identity of this crucified one.

If Easter tells us anything which matters, it tells us who died, and we focus on this death among all deaths today because of this identification. And this is because Easter reveals that the bad news of Good Friday is worse than we first imagined. The bad news is not merely that tragedy continues to unfold, but that good people have crucified the ‘king’, the ‘son of God’, the ‘messiah’, the ‘lord of glory’. The bad news is that this tragedy is the tragedy of all tragedies. It doesn’t get any worse than this.

The God who does not look away

Easter, then, does not exceed or cancel Good Friday but points back to the cross as the true load-bearing event. The weight of Easter is here: today, Friday.

And what is that weight?

At the risk of wandering into the realm of exaggeration – but only just so – Easter faith is the conviction that the God of all things died on Good Friday. To believe in the resurrection of Jesus is to believe this: that this death, among all deaths, is the one which matters. For, here, God dies and all the world with him.

This is, of course, impossible (or, at least, without a good trinitarian theology, which might make it sustainable). To say ‘God died’ feels like an over-reach which is very difficult to allow. The mere saying of it can only be mystifying (which doesn’t hurt, from time to time). But we can wonder what would be the case if it were true, and what light such speculation might see.

If this is the death that matters among all deaths – the tragedy of all tragedies – and yet Easter follows, then we can say that on Good Friday God sees us. God sees us, becomes us, feels us in all our tragedy.

And, on the strength of the peace declared in the risen Jesus, we can also say that God, having seen us, did not look away.

God sees us and does not look away. God sees that we are tragic and does not look away. God sees you and does not look away. To look away would be to cringe before tragedy, finding it too much to bear, and so refusing to see or hear.

We know tragedy. We have been and caused tragedy, and we know the ease of looking away.

But God sees and doesn’t look away. And it is this sustained gaze which brings life. God’s gaze denies the tragic – not denying the suffering but denying its final power.

God looks, to deny that the last word will be death.

God refuses to turn away from seeing the deep and the void of the worldly inevitability of crucifixions and firing squads and genocides, of abuse and neglect and exploitation.

God sees, and this is the beginning of the end of tragedy because, from the perspective of Easter, we begin to see with God’s eyes.

Tragedy’s deathly grip weakens for us when resurrection’s light reveals our part in the dark and broken world and we can see, and repent, and become ourselves a new beginning to the end of tragedy.

‘Who are you?’, Pilate asks, and we ask with him, suspecting that the tragic is all there is to know. We have to listen for a night, and a day, and a night to hear Jesus’ answer:

‘I am the death of death, and hell’s destruction.

Open your eyes, and live’.

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Lent 5
26/3/2023

John 11:1-45

In a sentence:
More than life after death, the gift of God is life before death

Over the last few weeks we have watched as different characters have bumped into Jesus, and made their responses. Today, we meet two sisters, friends of Jesus, who grieve for their dead brother. We easily identify with the sister Martha, who has the most to say in the story. We know what is it like to lose someone we have loved. We know that pathos-filled longing: if only Jesus/God/whoever had been here, this might not have happened. Believers also know what it’s like to have the religious words for the occasion but for those words not to make a lot of sense in the context of loss and grief.

Like us, Martha made her confessions of faith: Jesus is the ‘Son of God’, ‘Messiah’ and ‘the one coming into the world’. The piteous edge is also here, as if Martha knows what she should say to Jesus because he is Jesus, but also knows that it doesn’t really hang together.

And yet, although she doesn’t even seem to think that she could have her brother back again, he is raised. Unlike for us, her faith-words become real in her being able to embrace Lazarus again. If this is how it happened, then we may rejoice for Martha, but our situation and ability to believe is not made any easier. We have similar doctrines to those Martha confesses which, as mere words, are easy to parrot and yet often have about them an air of unreality. Yet it seems that, in addition to those doctrines, we here and now have added the apparent invitation to believe what happened to Martha. What was doubtless a marvellous thing for Martha’s faith becomes, for us, just another thing we have to believe. Good news which is someone else’s good news is not really all that good for us! Martha’s abundance here is a scarcity to us. Do we not long for such miracles now?

And yet, at the risk of absurdity, there nothing particularly marvellous about the raising of Lazarus in itself, in one way of looking at it. Of course, it would be a surprising and remarkable thing to happen! But Lazarus will die again; indeed a plot by the religious leaders against Lazarus’ life is recounted in the next few verses. Grief has given way to joy, but only for a while. Martha or Mary or some other will again stand outside Lazarus’ tomb and grieve.

If all that happens is that Lazarus is resuscitated, then it is not enough. John’s point in telling the story is deeper. For the raising of Lazarus is not something for us to ‘believe’ as a sheer fact about a past event. Those extraordinary words, ‘Lazarus, come out’, are the same words which were spoken in last week to the man healed of his blindness: ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’ (9.35). They are the same words spoken in the week before to the Samaritan woman by the well: ‘those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty’ (4.14) They are the same words spoken to Nicodemus (the week before that): ‘You must be born from above’ (3.6).

But there’s a difference here, in that while Jesus is turned towards the stinking tomb, he speaks as much to Martha as he does to the dead man. The lectionary epistle reading which complemented last week’s gospel ended with a quote, possibly referencing Isaiah 60.1:

‘Sleeper, awake,
rise from the dead
and Christ will shine on you’

Jesus’ words to the dead man, ‘Lazarus come out’ are just these words, yet spoken not only to Lazarus but also to Martha: ‘Awaken and rise, for Jesus shines upon you as the Christ’. More important than that 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. We are distracted by the reported miracle of the raising of Lazarus, but that (like last week) is not the main point. Just as miraculous is the possibility that faith – and not just orthodoxy’s correct religious words – might be resurrected in Martha. As Lazarus is roused from ‘sleep’ (v.11f) so also is Martha called to faith. They are, in the story, both addressed with the same word. The story is told, then, not to suggest that we will believe all the more strongly in Jesus 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.

And so we need to be explicit about one further thing. Lazarus comes forth, not as a basis of Martha’s faith, not as a reason for her belief, but as the sign of what it means to come to confess Jesus as ‘Messiah’, and ‘Son of God’, and ‘the one coming into the world’, as she 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.[1] If that were the point then the point would be pointless(!), for it leaves us with nothing but a story about what happened to someone else, and implies that we couldn’t come to belief a without similar spectacle.

It is interesting – and even surprising – that, despite the lament of Martha and her sister, we don’t actually hear of their response to the raising of Lazarus. Perhaps it is obvious, at the personal and emotional level. Yet the whole exchange has not been about grief and joy, not about loss and restoration, but about unbelief and belief. Jesus rebukes Martha when she protests at the opening of the 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 – ‘believing is seeing’ (which is not ‘seeing is believing’).

But we should push this a step further: to believe is not simply to see that glory, but more significantly to become, the glory of God. The human person unbound by death – whether our own or the death of those we love – such a person is ‘the glory of God’. This is what Jesus means when he declares, ‘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. It is the same Jesus who challenges Martha as calls out to Lazarus, and this challenge and call are the same – Sleeper, awake; stop being dead, for Christ shines upon you.

Lazarus, then, becomes the archetypal person of faith by making the faithful response to the call of God in Christ, awakening from his ‘sleep’. Lazarus is the true believer. His faithful response to Christ’s command models what should be Martha’s, and ours: to rise, to shine, to bask in the glory of the God who called us forth, and to become that glory in a world which cries out desperately, ‘Lord, if you had been here, death would have had no sting.’

Sleepers, awake; stop being dead, and become the glory of the God, which is the Body of Christ alive, dead and alive again.

[1] It’s worth noting that immediately following the undisputed ‘fact’ of the raising of Lazarus there is not only belief but also unbelief – not in the resuscitation of Lazarus but in Jesus – which results in a renewed vigor in the plot to kill Jesus. At the same time, v.46 goes on to speak of ‘many of the Jews’ who saw what happened subsequently coming to faith. The miracle is apparently the catalyst of their believing. Nevertheless, the miracle which is offered to us today is not the event which might stand behind this story but faith in the declaration that Jesus rouses life in the living dead.

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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.