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Reign of Christ
23/11/2025

John 19:1-16

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ForeWord

“Jesus Christ”

The expression “Jesus Christ” doesn’t make sense in the way that it once did.

I don’t mean by this that fewer people are familiar these days with Christian language and commitments than once was the case. I mean that the expression “Jesus Christ” once meant something which it no longer can – at least for us in the secularised modern West.

To most of us most of the time, Jesus Christ is the name of a person. It is, however, properly the contraction of a short sentence: Jesus is the Christ. It is the meaning of this that is problematic. This is because we don’t really know anymore what a Christ is, apart from the biblical story, within which its meaning was clear to most of the original actors. And because that meaning was clear, it was also clear that the expression “Jesus Christ” sets two incompatible things alongside each other: the idea of the kingly Christ, and the history of the crucified Jesus.

We can, of course, still understand this contradiction in a formal sense. But we no longer feel its meaning. This is not simply because we have shifted to a different kind of political system where kings don’t matter so much. It is because the connection between our political systems and our wider understanding of the world has changed.

Up to Jesus’ time, and for the next 1500 years or so, kings were not merely political figures, in our modern sense. They were participants in the cosmic order, and representatives of that order. The king was king on earth because God was King in heaven and earthly kings served as signs of that divine order. The world is as it is because God has ordered it so. The earthly king was the sign of that highest-to-lowest integration.

Kings no more

But we don’t live in that world anymore – a world in which mundane things participate in and represent divine order. Our sense of the world and ourselves is self-contained. Kings can no longer represent divine order; they are just “there”, or not.

To speak of Jesus as the Christ, then, is not to say anything very significant within this worldview. It will necessarily be sentimental, with an air of nostalgia. It is certainly not an expression that could move the modern heart, because we don’t feel the contrast being drawn in any moving way. If the contrast would once have been understood and the cause of either rejection or wonder, in the modern world, it’s just one more thing we can take or leave. Kings and queens today are more like celebrities, with whom they share the cover of the kinds of magazines you can pick up at the supermarket checkout. Once the world was disconnected from heaven, kings and queens were destined to become social media influencers.

What, then, might it mean to confess Jesus as king, as reigning, today?

For some orientation around this, we pause to hear again from the Gospel according to St John – today from the appearance of Jesus before Pilate. There are two kingships at play in the story. One involves a real king in the older integrated sense — the Roman Emperor, the fear of whom is part of what sways Pilate against Jesus. The other – I think – less real kingship, in the normal sense of “real”, is Jesus, who has previously said that his kingdom is “not from here (18.36) – not a kingship like the Emperor’s.

Listen for the two presentations Pilate makes of Jesus as he presents him to the howling crowd, and the language Pilate uses – the language John the Evangelist uses – to tell us something about the kind of thing Jesus is.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture: (John 19.1-16)

Word: Proclamation

Behold the human

Pilate presents Jesus twice to the crowds. The first time, Jesus has been scourged and is mockingly dressed as a king, with robe and crown of thorns in the merest semblance of a king. But here Pilate says not “Behold, your king” but “Behold, the man” or, given the Greek here, more likely, ‘”Behold Man, Behold the human”. The reduced humanity of Jesus is contrasted with the imperial kingship Pilate represents.

And this is not a mere “Here he is” but here you are – all of you: behold the human. Know your place. This is how the “king of the Jews” fits into the big picture, or doesn’t.

The second presentation invokes kingship again: “Here is your king,” now dismissed by the crowds with “Only the Emperor is king.”

It’s easy to imagine that what is going on here is a kind of moral failure – that those to whom Jesus was sent reject him and have him executed by claiming allegiance to the Emperor. We are quite capable of such commitments of convenience, of course, claiming some unpleasantness as necessary to rid ourselves of responsibility for it.

But morality is too narrow a framework for understanding what’s at stake here. Something deeper is at play. While the modern separation of earth from heaven – and so the loss of any justification of old-style kingship – is generally said to have begun somewhere in the vicinity of the Renaissance, in fact, it’s already underway here, in Pilate’s presentations of Jesus. Jesus has already told Pilate that his kingdom is not from this world.

But this does mean that Jesus’ kingdom is somehow “spiritual” rather than the worldly one of the Emperor. Jesus’ kingdom is not a somewhere-else, spiritual thing, in parallel with this one or still to come. The contrast Jesus draws is the contrast of the seemingly unnecessary, dispensable human – “Behold the human” – and the cosmic necessities of the Empire – “No king but Caesar, therefore crucify him”.

This is not easy, but it is important. In Pilate’s world, everything happens for a reason. He is the agent of Caesar, who represents (or even is) the divine order. If he says or does anything in Caesar’s name, it rests on the deep logic of the world – its integration with divine things. The king and what the king does represent God and what God wants done. This is how worldly kingship works: everything which happens is part of the divine order, the divine plan.

But John presents Jesus as something different. He only borrows the language of king, to crawl inside it and hollow it out for something else. Jesus is not an alternative monarch, as one might prefer Elizabeth II to Charles III. He is so different as to be unrecognisable as a king. Those who mock him are not, on their own terms, wrong. How could this captive peasant be in any sense “king”? Pilate and his soldiers know what a king should look like, because they have a particular idea of what the gods are like, whom the king represents or embodies on earth.

But John embraces this incongruence. We’ve seen elsewhere how the cross is (for John’s Jesus), both the rejection of Jesus and his coronation. His not-kingliness is his kingliness. Something similar is happening here. True kingship is not being identified with something “spiritual” hovering around somewhere, but with the vulnerable and reduced Jesus.

To put it differently, if the old-style kings of the world represent the divine order, Jesus doesn’t “represent” anything. He just is, not as the sign of some distant or deeper thing, but precisely what we see – a human being who, standing before the world’s self-understanding, contradicts that world at its very heart. The question that matters is not whether Jesus is king. The only question is whether God is there too, in the un-kingly Jesus. With what, we might say today, does God “identify”?

In the end, John is not interested in kings, but notes only that kings are one of the ways we get ourselves and God wrong. To say that Jesus is king is to say that kings are not what we thought they were. The world – political or otherwise – does not “represent” God. Our problem with the kingship of Jesus these days is, then, not that our worldview has shifted, but that it took 1500 years for that worldview to begin to catch up with the gospel and, for the most part, we still aren’t there, to the extent that we continue to try to establish this or that king, Jesus included.

And so we can easily elevate Jesus in the wrong way – as if he were an alternative representation of God. But there is a better, more gospel way of understanding the “kingship” of Jesus. He does not represent a divine ordering of things, and so is not constrained by that order, or his God similarly constrained. Jesus is “king” in that he knows that he still belongs to God, even as anything like order is crashing down around him. Jesus is “king” in that God embraces him.

“Behold, the human being”, Pilate commands, and it is God who obeys: there he is, Jesus, one of my children, I see him, God thinks. And for this God, to see, to regard, is to own, is to create. Jesus is not king because he is a particular part of a divinely ordered cosmic machine, but is king because he is seen and has a place in the heart of God. Pilate has been put in place in order to do particular things; Pilate is constrained. Jesus is not, has no particular thing to do but to be the Child of God. Pilate’s truth – as we saw last week – limits him; the truth of Jesus sets free.

This is the difference, the not-of-this-worldness of Jesus’ “kingdom”. The kingdom of Jesus is a kingdom with no kings, an ordering not on the model of a machine but springing from the gaze, the embrace, of God.

Monarchs, all

And, as it is for the human being Jesus, so it is for the human being that each of us is, here and now. The human, pastoral significance of the kingship of Jesus is not that he is our boss, rather than some monarch, president or other despot – and a “nicer” king at that. To be “in Christ” is to be ourselves kings and queens (or whatever), and this because God sees us “in Christ”, as God sees Jesus.

We are not required to “be” anything – certainly not to represent something about the divine order. We are to be ourselves. Our life is possible because God hears and obeys the command: Behold, the man … the woman … the child … the beggar … the billionaire … the young one … the sad one … the sick one … the near-dead one. God obeys, sees, and claims them – us – as God’s very own.

There is no divine order to which the world conforms, through kings or any other means. There are, rather, as many divine orders – or re-orderings – as there are those of us whom God sees and re-creates between blinks.

For Jesus to be “king” is for all things to be elevated under the gaze of God. To confess that Jesus is king is to commit ourselves to live without fear of circumstance, but to let our circumstance be the form in which we will encounter God, be embraced by God, become our true selves. Let us, then, with Christ rise and reign into life, living towards demonstrating a world which has no need of kings or queens because, with this God, it all matters, it is all seen and valued.

Behold the human being, God says. See yourself, as I see you.

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Pentecost 23
16/11/2025

Psalm 25
John 8:31-38

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ForeWord

You can’t handle the truth

Some of you will have seen the 1992 film, A Few Good Men – a courtroom drama turning around the accidental death of an American Marine. Two other soldiers have been charged with the death of their colleague, and their defence hinges on whether they had acted on orders to administer an irregular disciplinary action, which then went wrong, or whether they had acted of their own volition.

The film is best known for an iconic scene at the culmination of the drama – an exchange between the lead defence attorney and Colonel Jessup, the gnarly and powerful commander in charge of the military base on which the Marine died.

The courtroom exchange between the defence attorney and the colonel increases in heat until the attorney demands, “I want the truth!”. And then comes the withering response which launched a thousand memes – something of a controlled explosion delivered in a way that perhaps only Jack Nicholson could: “You can’t handle the truth!”

Jessup then begins to lay the truth out for consideration: “…we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns.” And he continues, pointing out a few inconvenient truths about what it takes to mount the defence of such walls.

As a courtroom drama, of course, the whole story is about finding the truth – the truth surrounding the Marine’s death. It’s in the context of that enquiry that the colonel lays out his confronting account of the truth of his own existence, a truth he sees even the defence attorney relies upon for his own existence and well-being.

The movie poses a dilemma about conflicting truths. And yet, at the same time, the opposing parties both hold to the same kind of truth; both have the same sense of what kind of thing a truth is. It’s this I want us to consider briefly today. My concern is less what the truth is – as a given we can state and analyse – than what kind of thing it is – how it operates and affects us.

Handling the truth

Truth is a central theme in John’s Gospel, and many of us will recognise some of the key occurrences of the notion:

^1.17 “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”;

^4.24 “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth”;

^14.6 “Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life’”;

^16.13 “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth”;

^18.38 “Pilate asked [Jesus], ‘What is truth?’”

What is true, and what truth is and does, is a key concern in John. And so, let’s pause for a moment to hear another well-known truth-saying from John’s tenth chapter. In particular, listen for what Jesus says the truth will do for those who grasp it…

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 8. 31-38)

Word: Proclamation

The truth that constrains

There is a stark difference between truth in the account of the colonel from the film and as it appears in the gospel. For the colonel, and indeed most of the time more generally in the wider world, the truth is something which constrains and restricts: “…we live in a world that has walls…”; a dropped apple falls with an acceleration of 9.8 meters per second per second; you owe the bank $452,567. The truth is non-negotiable fact, expecting a prescribed response.

In the case of Colonel Jessup’s truth, walls constrain. Of course, they protect and so to some extent liberate anyone within the walls, but the walls limit the freedom of anyone outside of them. And the need to defend the walls leads to the kind of moral compromises no one really wants to have to acknowledge. A price has to be paid, sacrifices have to be made. In the case of the narrative of the film, it seems that one such sacrifice – even if unintended – was a young man’s death, the death of one of our own. The cost of truth-as-constraint can be very high.

My interest here is not quite what is the truth – the fact – but what kind of thing the truth is, how the fact is received. For the colonel, whatever the particular truth is, it is a constraint which requires certain things be done, however distasteful. He invokes “honour”, “code” and “loyalty” as indicators of how the moral actor – each one of us – is constrained. These are all very much binding words, words to do with limitation. This is how one is required to act. Under truth-as-constraint, actions are pre-determined.

And there is, of course, much such truth around us, and necessarily so. If life is to be secure and predictable enough that we can sleep soundly at night, there are many things which must be done. Our manipulation of the world depends upon a basic if-then predictability to which we must conform for peace of mind.

The truth that liberates

At the same time, this is not the only, or even the definitive sense of “truth”. As we’ve heard from Jesus, truth is not only – if at all – constraint: “…the truth shall set you free…”. The truth will not bind or limit you, but will liberate. At the very beginning of John’s Gospel, we heard that “[t]he law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (1.17). The “grace and truth” here are not two things but one. By itself, law binds: there are walls, barriers, rules which must be observed. But grace breaks such bindings and barriers. Mercy is a setting aside of what “must” happen – of hard, pre-set truth – so that something else, indeed something fundamentally new and unexpected, can happen. Grace doesn’t deny the barriers are there, but acts as if they are not.

Grace is not the “truth”, in the sense of a new kind of limitation or requirement. Rather, we get closer to what’s offered here if we say that grace truth-s – makes true. Truth as limitation, as binding and constraint, cannot release and remain itself. Such truth is always negotiated, always subject to an arrangement of give and take, of exchange, of if-then relationships. Again, such controlled exchanges in nature and in society are a crucial part of a liveable world. But if that is all the world is – walls to be acknowledged and defended, rank and status to be observed, rights to be demanded, obligations to be met – then we are but cogs in a machine built for nobody-knows-what purpose, doing things simply because they “have to” be done.

Colonel Jessup imagines himself and those under his command to be just such cogs in the confining machinery of human politics. There is nothing to be done but maintain the dividing walls. There is nothing to be done but to destroy the enemy. There is nothing to be done but what we have always done, according to the truths by which we came into being and which, perhaps, we perpetuate in our every action.

Alongside this is laid an alternative. No argument can finally be made for the alternative because arguments leverage constraint and necessity – this because of that. And so the “alternative truth” Jesus declares is genuinely different. A truth which sets free – truly, newly free – sets argument aside and, as it were, begins again.

This is the proposal, the invitation, the gift of Jesus: that it doesn’t have to be like this. Our next action is not – or doesn’t have to be – predetermined. Or, what is the same thing, there is no final judgement to fear if we act, and act wrongly.

Once again, as seems always to be the case in John, love lurks in the background here. While Jesus hangs this truth-as-liberation on observing his word, the word he gives he characterises as the “new commandment” – to love as he has.

And we must then ask again, how did Jesus love? He loved without necessity. This is what we see in the optional, unnecessary cross. The cross is not forced. It is a consequence of his actions, but it need not have been; the response to Jesus’ teaching and actions is out of his hands. But those who crucify him are not free in the way Jesus promises. “We live in a world that has walls”, High Priest Caiaphas effectively says – anticipating Colonel Jessup – and so this has to be done (cf. John 11.50).

But Jesus’ love is not forced. He is not constrained by a requirement to love. It is gift, invitation rather than command, seeking reception but not conditional upon it.

To recall another saying of Jesus we heard a few weeks back, what will set us free is not of the world but can be in and for it. Such liberating truth will sometimes reveal a constraint or obligation as unnecessary and life-denying. Sometimes, mere obligation will be transformed into loving service. In either case, a new experience of God, the world and ourselves is at hand.

Let us, then, not be weighed down by the weight of the world. We are not built for such a load.

Let us, rather, lift up our hearts, seeking Christ – and becoming with him – the truth which sets free.

And all God’s people say…Amen.

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Pentecost 22
9/11/2025

Psalm 135
John 1:1-5, 10-14, 16-18

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ForeWord

Softening the hard thing

In her 2017 book, Doughnut Economics, economist Kate Raworth remarks that there is a graph in economic theory which is rarely drawn: the graph that projects growth into the extended future. This graph is hardly seen because everyone knows that we live within a closed system with limited resources, so that the kind of growth politicians (and many of the rest of us) like to see portrayed in graphs can’t continue forever. Every economist knows there is a plateau coming, or even a cliff. But no economist – and certainly no politician – knows what to do about it. So, let’s not think about it and, just as certainly, not put it in a graph.

But we do know there’s an issue here. And so the compromise, Raworth notes – or rather, the wilful self-delusory step – is the invocation of adjectives to qualify growth. We will still work towards growth, but it will be good growth: “sustainable” growth, “equitable” growth, “balanced” growth, “inclusive”, “resilient” or “green” growth. None of these addresses the big, hairy problem that has everyone on edge in the first place – growth is growth, and it can’t go on forever. But it looks a little less growth-y when we attach the right words to it, and the optics matter enormously in modern politics.

The God of many adjectives

But my interest today isn’t so much the problem of growth in economic thinking as the type of problem it is. Raworth’s observation reminded me of recent developments in churchly God-talk. In a Synod meeting a couple of years ago, I was particularly struck by the way the prayers groaned under the weight of a whole lot of words which, once upon a time, didn’t need to be said. The use of adjectives was especially obvious. The word “God” was often apparently felt to be insufficient – “O God…”. Rather, it seemed better to say, “O good, gracious, all-powerful, all-merciful, all-suffering, all-loving God”. There is a fair bit of adjective-creep in public prayer in some quarters these days. (Listen for it even in my own prayers today!)

And there’s a good reason for this tendency, at least superficially. The problem with invisible things – invisible hands or invisible gods – is that they are…invisible. All-embracing ideas are like this. And so, we throw something over them to give at least some outline and sense of what we are dealing with.

The connection between economic language and God-language here is not merely accidental. Economic language is the determining language of our common life in late Western capitalism. As God once was, economics is now at the heart of how we understand and order ourselves and our world. The economy stands as god, economists as theologians, politicians as priests, GDP is the measure of righteousness, and mortgage holders, self-funded retirees and national debt take turns as the political priests’ sacrificial offerings to the economy. Were theology to return to Melbourne’s secular universities, it would be most usefully located in the economics department. (That is a serious proposal: the God problem is not a “religious” problem but a deeply human one, corresponding to life together in our oik-onomy).

The growth economy and God are equally broad and encompassing things which are, for us, ideas somehow at the heart of the matter – necessary ideas, but also impossible, elusive, not-quite-unutterable.

And so we dress our ideas – colour them, qualify them – to make them seem less the problem they are. We stitch together a few adjectival fig leaves for both the invisible God and the simultaneously impossible but necessary growth economy. We do this because perhaps there really is nothing in our deepest ideas and, if they are left naked, we might see deeply disturbing things which cannot be unseen.

Naming the issue

All ideas – as ideas – suffer from this problem. They are not so much too big to fail as too big to be right. So far as the idea of God goes, the simplest solution is to dispense with the idea of “a” god and replace it with a name. The primary names the church has are the Old Testament’s “Yahweh” (Exodus 3 and passim, which appears in English translations as “the Lord” in small capitals), and the New Testament’s “Father”, which Jesus uses for the one who sent him. Both of these are indispensable, but not without problems.

The thing about names, and what distinguishes names from ideas, is that they are specific. A name denotes a shape – the shape which is given by a story. A name has content in a way that an idea does not. “Donald Bradman”, “Donald Trump” and “Donald Duck” are not three takes on the idea of Donald, but three unique identities, histories, and consequences. The name indicates what is at play – what is given shape and content by the story the name refers invokes.

But the name I’m interested in today is not “Yahweh” or “Father” with their particular possibilities and problems. Rather, I’m interested in the name Jesus – the particular Jesus-of-Nazareth Jesus who features in the Gospel stories and church confession. Whatever we believe personally about this name, its work in the biblical narrative is to be the concrete, specific place where the idea of God becomes unique, storied.

The first eighteen verses of John’s Gospel are an introductory statement of what readers will encounter in the text. For all the details of the story, central is the extension of the idea of God to what Jesus says and does, and is said and done to him. Let’s pause for a moment to hear part of that introduction to John’s Gospel, listening particularly for the last verse: “makes him known”.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 1.1-5, 10-14, 16-18)

Word: Proclamation

Exegeting God

“No one has ever seen God”. This is the “beyond”, the impossible, the unseen unthinkable we indicate with the label “God”. Within Jewish and even most pagan thinking, God had never been an idea. But modern minds think in secularised Greek mode, and our heads are full of ideas.

And so this is how we’re likely to hear, “No one has ever seen God” – as referring to the intangibility and ungraspability of God.. But, John says, the Word, the Only-Begotten, this one has “made [God] known”, or literally in the Greek, “exegeted” God. To exegete something is not to explain it but to unpack it —literally to “lead out” of it. Jesus, as it were, is the leading out of God into what feels like the non-God space, perhaps as one might pull a thread. Each story, each conflict, each word and teaching is such a thread. The hidden God not exposed but here and there implied; the distant God brought near; the shapeless God formed.

Jesus himself is this exegesis, this leading-out. Who has seen me, Jesus says elsewhere in John, has seen the Father (John 14.9). And so, strangely, there is no need for any adjectives to attach to “God” but Jesus himself. The god we are concerned with is not “the merciful” or “the loving” or “the Creator” god, but the Jesus-god. This is what our trinitarian confession grasps after – what God must be like if the crucified Jesus is God’s only worthy adjective.

Faith thinks about God – and, for that matter, about the economy – in this way. To say, as the church does, that Jesus is “the Christ” or “God” is to attach to those all-embracing ideas the details of one life lived. So also for the economy. If Jesus is God, Jesus is the Economy in the same way. And if this is starting to sound quite nonsensical, that’s just the point. Kate Raworth’s argument about economic growth is precisely that it’s a wilful and nonsensical reduction of the economy, and yet we are committed to it, perhaps even to the destruction of the world we inhabit. From the perspective of Christian faith, to say that Jesus is God, or the Economy, is to say that neither God nor Economy mean what we think or hope they mean.

Christian faith commits, rather, to something more concrete, specific – to something more human. Christian faith proposes the life of Jesus, not so much for “salvation” (another vague idea) as to affirm that a human life can indeed be the presence of God, even in a world like this. God, and the economy, can be that small and still be what they fully are.

One of the extraordinary things about John’s presentation of Jesus is the intimacy of the relationship he has with God. Jesus “exegetes” God not by providing information. God is “drawn out”, is present, in Jesus in the way that a friend’s spouse is present in that friend even when the spouse is not in the room, or a parent is present in a child even when the child is by himself, or (negatively), the way a traumatic upbringing is present even at the end of a long life.

This kind of intimacy is the gift of the gospel, an intimacy which changes our sense of what we are and so what matters in the life we’ve been given.

Christian faith has no “idea” about God. Rather, the believer finds herself exegeted, drawn into a new experience of life, a new assessment of what is happening around her, a new sense of how to be, and of what to do.

God meets us in the nitty-gritty of lives, not in our grand visions and plans, our wishful thinking or dismissal of inconvenient details. The Jesus-God is the Jesus-Human. And the invitation of this God is an invitation to be exegeted, drawn out of what we are into what God has created us to be: not a small part of a grand project, but a grand project, despite our smallness.

Jesus makes God known, that we might know ourselves anew.

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Pentecost 21
2/11/2025

Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4
Psalm 119:137-144
2 Thessalonians 1:1-4: 11-12
Luke 19:1-10

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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I don’t think I am racist or sexist. I certainly try not to be. And yet I must admit that I am conscious of race and gender differences whenever I am relating to another person. I am aware of the different things appropriate to my speech and behavior according to the other or others in any interaction. Do we not do this all the time. Are we not particularly aware of this as we are bombarded by news local and international conflicts fueled by human racial, political and religious differences.

The Melbourne scholar, Brendan Byrne, offers a startling new reading to this story about Zacchaeus. In his commentary on the gospel of Luke called The Hospitality of God Fr Byrne’s reading of the text suggests that Zacchaeus was not a bad man who became good, but that he was always a good man who was sadly misunderstood. The whole problem lies in the tense of the verbs..

This is not the conventional view. Digby Hannah’s children’s hymn gives the traditional view – “There once was a man as mean as could be; if he could take two then he’d try to take three. Then one day he took Jesus for tea: and Jesus helped him to change.”

Luke tells how Jesus was passing through Jericho and there was a large crowd. Zacchaeus, chief tax collector, and known around town as shorty, wanted to see Jesus because everyone else was taller than him. No one was going to make way for Shorty the tax collector in a crowd seeking to see and hear Jesus who proclaims God’s salvation. If he was to get a look-in, he must abandon any self-dignity. He climbed a tree. This was not the behaviour of a man who aspires to stature and wealth. This was a man desperate to see salvation.

Jesus stopped under the tree and called Zacchaeus down because he was to stay at his house that day. To the chagrin and horror of the good people of Jericho the visiting celebrity chose hospitality from Shorty the tax collector. Tax collectors were sinners because they worked for the Romans, the occupying force.

Zacchaeus hurried down and made a marvelous speech. Zacchaeus said: (here comes the problem with the tense of the verbs) the translators say “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.”

Naturally that makes sense to have the speech using the future tense – Zacchaeus has been a rotten cheating tax collector and when he was brought face to face with Jesus he changed and made retribution for his past. He will do the right thing to make amends.

Brendan Byrne reminds his readers that the speech in Greek is not future tense at all, but present tense. “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I give to the poor; and if I defraud anyone of anything, I pay back four times as much.” It is as if the translators have joined with the socially prejudices Jerichoites and judged Zacchaeus to be a cheating swindler because he worked for the wrong administration.

This tense change leaves a more open interpretation possible. For centuries the translations have forced a particular interpretation. The way Luke tells the story another interpretation is possible. If Zacchaeus is telling Jesus what his business practice has always been then we are not meeting a bad tax collector, but an ethical and generous tax collector. If this is the case then the hostility of the good citizens of Jericho is based on prejudice. He works for the wrong company so he can’t be worthy of our society.

Luke concludes the story by reminding his readers that the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost. Our traditional reading of this story suggests that Zacchaeus’ lostness lay in his cheating. Another reading of the story suggests that his lostness may have sat in being ostracised by the prejudice of his community. He could not know the assurance of God’s acceptance of him while his society with its religious leaders, its God people, would not convey their acceptance.

This amounts to a brutal rebuke of all who hold prejudices. Luke has Jesus remind them that Zacchaeus is also one of God’s elect, a son of Abraham. This alternative reading of the story raises new considerations, the possibility that God’s word reaches deeper into our prejudice-ridden society.

We don’t need to get too excited about the different possible interpretations of this point raised by the tense of the verbs in Zacchaeus’ speech. Was he bad and he had a wonderful conversion or was he good and badly misunderstood? What really matters is what Jesus said about him. Jesus received Zacchaeus into the community of the Kingdom, not because of his conversion nor because he may have been good all along. Jesus announced, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham.

Zacchaeus may be a tax collector, but it does not stop him coming within God’s covenant relationship as a descendent of Abraham. But neither does it stop the tax collector hating community who were lost in their prejudices. The argument that assures Zacchaeus of salvation must hold good for all.

Luke makes a lot of the status of being descendants of Abraham. For him it is a touch stone of being worthy of God’s favour. He had Jesus argue that the crippled woman he healed on the Sabbath was a daughter of Abraham and therefore worthy. He had John the Baptist denounce the self-righteous who claimed their decent from Abraham as their right to God’s favour when he declared that the stones that surrounded them could be raised up as descendants of Abraham.

This all presents a problem for those of us who are not descendants of Abraham. Thank goodness we have St Paul to argue our case. To the Galatians he points out that God honoured Abraham’s faith and that it is by faith that we are saved. To the Thessalonians Paul wrote, ‘we always pray for you, asking that our God will make you worthy of his call and will fulfill by his power every good resolve and work of faith,  ¹² so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ. (2 Thessalonians 1:11-12).

There is a consistency in all this. Salvation for Zacchaeus, salvation for the crowd that ostracized him, salvation for the Galatians and the Thessalonians, salvation for us in our prejudice ridden societies belongs to the people of God by the grace of God declared and availed in Jesus.

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Pentecost 20
26/10/2025

Psalm 65
John 17:11-17

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ForeWord

Something must be done

Our most recent “Quarterly Conversation on the Quarterly Essay” – looked at Marian Wilson’s “Woodside versus the Planet”. Wilson recounts the processes towards extending fossil fuel extraction permissions for the energy company Woodside, in the context of growing concern about climate change.

There are no real surprises in the Essay, including the not particularly encouraging conclusion that the “next three years are crucial”, but we live in a world in which are continually made the kinds of compromises Wilson describes in the Woodside saga.

A couple of leading reasons present themselves as to why we might act with respect to climate change. One is the perceived necessity of preserving nature as it is. With all its creatures great and small, the world is bright and beautiful, and must be preserved for its own sake. A second reason is that we depend on the world for our own survival. No healthy world, no human future (and we have an interest in a human future). An extension of this concerns the human generations that will follow us, who could be significantly affected by what we do (or don’t do) now.

Behind both of these concerns, of course, is the assumption that we can make a difference here. The expected climate changes are not natural effects; they are the result of human action, human decision. This is why we think climate action matters: we have acted to cause this, now we must act to mitigate it. Natural processes involve no decisions and so have no moral element. But this looming crisis seems to be a matter of decision, and so is experienced as a moral imperative.

But, now being moral, the question ceases to be “scientific” or “rational” or even “natural”. We are now in the realm of balance and interpretation: a question not of the necessities of nature but of risks of action and accountability.

This becomes clearer if we shift from the possible extinction of beautiful but dumb creatures to the plight of future human generations. Less predictable weather patterns, higher temperatures and rising sea levels could adversely affect, displace, or kill hundreds of millions of people. What responsibility do we have towards them?

The easy answer is at least “some” – we have some responsibility. Many would say that we have much more than just this. But why does this not move us to radical action, even if just for the sake of our future selves?

A failure to love

The answer is that we do not love the people of the future as we love ourselves. Perhaps it’s surprising that love might appear here, although less so when we consider that this is a question of moral action, which action is always finally about love.

We have done so poorly in responding to a crisis which has been looming for more than 40 years because we are lousy lovers, especially outside of our closest connections. The difficulty we might have in sympathising with future generations and moderating our actions to improve their prospects is precisely the same difficulty we have here and now in acting sympathetically towards those around us. We are afflicted here and now by contempt and violence, ideological and economic divisions, loneliness and oppression, for the same reason that climate futures look bleak: the lack of respect for the other, the poverty of our efforts at love. We do not love others – present, or to come – as we love ourselves.

Now, that’s pretty bleak, pessimistic even. But, bleak or not, is it correct? Because if it is right, we are about as likely to act successfully in the future interests of the bright and beautiful creation as we are to act successfully to bring peace with justice in our own time, here and now. (And where is that peace? )

This is not to suggest that there is nothing to be done about climate change, or that what action we might take would be pointless. It is to say that, to the extent that what needs to be done depends on human moral agents like us with our limited capacity to love each other as we love ourselves, we will not do enough to avert a major environmental catastrophe. Things are going to get a lot worse, climate-wise. And, in view of what we are – as evidenced by our collective action – there is little we can do about that getting worse.

As pessimistic as this sounds, it’s closer to the mark to speak here of gospel realism. This realism hears a command to love across 2000 years (and more) as a new word, because we are not yet good lovers, despite how many times we have heard the command to love. The new problem of climate change is the old problem of love.

And, as we’ve seen before, the old problem of love – as a problem – is shown in the appearance of love in the Gospels in the guise of a command. The problem in the struggle with climate change is the problem Jesus addresses in his great prayer for his disciples (John 17), and at the heart of his moral teaching: love one another, as I have loved you. That we need to hear the command to love is the bad news here – and why we’ll likely not act according to the threat of climate change. The good news is in the “as I have loved you” – that we have been loved in a particular way, which is where the good news begins.

The long defeat

What are we to do with the gospel’s uncomfortable realism about our moral capacity, in the face of the very pressing moral imperatives, not only of climate change but also the many other encroaching powers which reduce us to less than the glory of God? Is nothing to be done? Is it all hopeless?

That depends on what we think “hope” is. Towards an answer, we must keep in mind that the biblical testimony has always been pessimistic about us. But this has also been part of the gospel, part of its good news. Things are no more hopeless now than they ever were. Hope just isn’t what we usually think it to be – the hope that we can win, that we can save ourselves, whatever we think “win” or “save” might mean here.

In another piece on climate change I read earlier in the year, I came across a notion from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth sagas: the notion of the long defeat. The long defeat refers to a struggle against the odds in a losing battle – a defeat which is long precisely because of the struggle and which is inevitable because of the kind of world we’re in. The life of the long defeat is one in which you know you are going to lose, and yet you fight on anyway. Why? Because that struggle is the form truth’s light takes in a dark world. The struggle will yield victories along the way, but the challenges will continue. What victories we might manage, are only temporary.

On that happy note, let’s pause to hear again part of a passage we visited a couple of weeks ago, within which Jesus draws a distinction between being in-and-of the world, and being in-but-not-of the world.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 1711-19)

Word: Proclamation

In the world.

We’ve already thought a bit about what Jesus had to say in our text today – being in-and-of, or in-and-not-of the world. The point there was that generative AI tools are in-and-of the world, and so lack any novelty; they produce more of the same.

But we can come at the passage from a different direction, beginning with the “in” the world. Jesus prays for the novel – for what is not “of” the world but jis still in the world. The disciples might – might – change, but the world does not. And what of the world does not change? The world’s need for the command to love, given its continued failure to love.

The shape of this general condition is the experience of Jesus himself: Jesus struggles and finally succumbs to the unloving world. Jesus is finally defeated, on the cross. A reading of the cross as defeat is much stronger in Mark and Matthew than in John (or Luke), and we’ve seen how John twins the defeat with victory, making the cross itself in-but-not-of the world: the cross is more than defeat. (Paul is clearly here, too).

But it is still a defeat; God is rejected, the resurrection notwithstanding. And then prays precisely that this experience – his experience – be the experience of the disciples. This sharing he calls “a sanctification in truth”.

And what is this “truth”? It’s not a doctrine, not a list of credal statements. It is a way of living in a defeating world. It is Jesus’ own way of living: in the midst of death, life in all its fullness. The of-the-world defeat still looms but the gospel refuses to allow it to be understood on the world’s own terms.

And so the defeat, in Jesus’ terms, is “not of this world”. It is not tragic. It speaks something new. John’s word for this new thing is “love”, a love-in-the-midst, : a local, temporary, re-ordering “of the world” into something not-of the world.

Perhaps the work of love stands for a while, perhaps it is fleeting. Whatever the case, the imperative is the same: not “save” the world but “love”. Be human in the midst of inhumanity, because the inhumanity will continue.

Love has failed; long live love.

Discipleship – being friends and followers of Jesus, loving despite unlove – is about having cool heads in a hot world. It is the willingness to struggle against the long defeat. The world is going to need love, and heads, like this.

Let us, then, play our part in love’s work. And all God’s people say … Amen.