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Epiphany 6
12/2/2023

Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Psalm 119:1-8
Matthew 5:21-26

In a sentence:
What the contemptuous world needs (now, and always), is deadlock-breaking love.

Some of us have been meeting over the last year to consider The Quarterly Essay, as each issue comes out. Last September’s issue was an analysis by Scott Stevens and Waleed Aly of the rise of ‘contempt’ in modern politics. The authors note the intensifying shrillness of ‘cancel culture’ on the left and corresponding antagonism on the right, and the apparent inability to communicate across those lines other than by verbal grenades lobbed out of ideological trenches. The November issue contained substantial correspondence in reply to Stevens and Aly’s arguments, filling out the spectrum of thought about contempt, justice and power in society today.

What has the gospel to say into a culture of contempt?

“You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times,’ [Jesus remarks], ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment’. But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.

This is, by the way, not quite the gospel – it is the law – but it would seem to have something to do with our present experience of deep antagonism in society and politics. Jesus’ saying comes from the Sermon on the Mount, which both intensifies the received legal tradition of Israel and re-casts it. Here, and in the verses which follow, Jesus presses past a mere external observance of the letter of the law (that internet trolls usually don’t actually kill people they hate) to a problem with the spirit (that internet trolls would be happy if someone else killed the people they hate). And this applies, of course, also to those of us who are not internet trolls but still have a capacity for the kind of anger, hatred and contempt for others Jesus indicates here.

Jesus’ solution to the problem of contempt would seem – at first blush – simply to be, ‘Stop it; don’t do that!’. This is fairly straightforward advice, if not easy to implement. The very fact that Jesus says thinking murderous thoughts is the ‘same’ as murder suggests the likely impossibility of finally obeying this commandment: contempt cannot be expunged.

In Aly and Stevens’ analysis of contempt, and in the various responses to their proposal in the next issue, the assumption is quite the opposite. The question asked is, If this is how our society and politics are working, how do we fix them? (And we must ask this question, of  course!) The question leads into analysis of the nature of democracy and its inherent tensions, and the challenges of balancing rights and responsibilities in human relationships. Not surprisingly, the dualism of the right-responsibility debate means there’s no open-shut case which doesn’t look like an indefensible prioritising of one over the other, and this is all the more obvious from the responses to the Essay. As we might expect, those responses are variously at odds and in agreement with each other and with Stevens and Aly, sometimes quite vigorously and, here and there, with a least a little contempt creeping into the debate about how to moderate contempt in public debate. It’s all pretty cacophonous!

The problem here is that everyone is at least a little bit right, which is to say positively what Jesus has said negatively in our short reading this morning – which is that everyone is at least a little bit wrong. What do we do with that intractability, that inability to pull together in the same direction? The usual approach, and that taken by most of the contributors to The Essay’s discussion, is analysis. A kind of moral calculus is developed from given principles. In this case, background principles include ‘democracy’ and corresponding notions like ‘civility’, with concerns about justice and peace being motivating principles: how can we tweak the system to address injustice and unpeace?

One solution – entertained at the edges in this conversation – is revolution. This isnot a tweaking but an overthrow of the system, expecting the revolutionary violence to be outweighed by the anticipated justice which follows. History has known this experiment. Another solution, often just as violent, is the strong monarchic political hand which doesn’t have to honour democracy but can simply crush the unjust, although it often mistakes the just for the unjust. Because neither of these is an option for contemporary Western societies, attention turns to tweaking: let us better understand ourselves as denizens of democracy, and moderate our behaviour according to a deeper sense of democratic being and, in this way, move towards broader justice and more profound peace.

This is a laudable intention, and we cannot but commit ourselves to such work. Civil and divine law requires this of us. And yet, it will not work. As pessimistic as that is, its justification is pretty much all of history up until a few moments ago. Between the sayings of Jesus and today, there are almost 2000 years. Yet, between what he says and what we say today, there is but the time we require to take an intervening breath. When everyone is a little bit right, and so a little bit wrong, no social or moral calculus will lead us out of the messiness of life together. This is because the condition of being human is not a problem to be solved; it is a mystery to be negotiated. Mysteries are things which are there and can be seen and touched and experienced but can’t be comprehended or managed or directed. If we know that we ought not to hold in contempt, or to lust, or to covet, or to be jealous, we still can’t help but be like this sometimes. We might be able to keep it to ourselves, which helps a little, but this doesn’t make the possibility of murder or adultery or theft go away.

So, what will help here?

Only a miracle.

This is a problem, of course, because we don’t believe in miracles these days – we don’t really believe in them, as much as we long for such rupturings of what we expect to happen next. Part of the problem is that our sense of what a miracle might be is runs along the lines of turning sticks into snakes, walking on water or fast-tracking sick people back to health. These kinds of things, of course, are part of the biblical story, but they distract us.

The miracle which matters, and the miracle which our society and politics desperately needs, is the appearance of the saint. We can scarcely hear even this suggestion without scoffing, not least in the churches if even more loudly in the wider world. But this makes the proposal no less correct. Saints are peace-oriented, justice-creating rule-breakers. They are not ‘holy’ in the sense that they never think contemptuous, salacious or envious thoughts. But neither is the possibility of acting for a peacing justice limited by those failings. Saints are those who simply choose to ‘do justice and love mercy’ with all the humility and grace they can muster. And they do this despite the circumstances, despite what the system says might be the minimum required or the maximum allowed. Saints, then, are not necessarily civil or polite or democratic. They are truth-tellers and truth-doers.

If ‘saint’ is too hard a word to re-habilitate for modern politics, then perhaps ‘love’ might be admissible. Interestingly, it is the word with which Stevens and Aly conclude their response to their critiques.

‘Is it really too much to suggest’, they ask, ‘that the commitment to see one another as equals, and therefore as equals in a shared project which depends on cooperation, compromise, frankness, remorse, forgiveness, reciprocity and mutual education, requires a devotion for which the only word is love?’

‘Love’ has the advantage of being a more secular word than ‘saint’, although with the disadvantage that we often dilute it to almost vacuity. Aly and Stevens propose a strong, politically engaged sense of love, and imagine that we might have to be such lovers. Yet the political crisis they seek to address is that many (at every point of the political compass) seem deaf to the call. And so the call to love is either pointless – in that it doesn’t move us along – or it is incomplete: the imperative to love also requires the indicative of love, which is that such love will die for love’s sake. That is, we must see the cost of heeding this call to love. Saints – if we persist with this label for such lovers – have a tendency to die for their saintliness. If this death is not a crucifixion or a drive-by shooting, it is at least the ‘aspirational’ death-to-self which is personal sacrifice for the greater good. And because such love involves some kind of death, it is necessarily irrational: it resists balanced analysis and comprehension.

Contempt can only be overcome by lovers prepared to die at some level, and prepared to die not only for a ‘cause’ but, ultimately, for the ones who hold them in contempt – for they ‘know not what they do’. This is what a moral and political calculation cannot propose, although it’s the meaning of Jesus’ own death and the death to death to which all potential saints are called.

And who is called to die this life-enabling death to death? This question bedevils the conversation and the responses to the original Essay. The answer is, Everyone. Not everyone will heed the call, of course, which is the original problem: the resistance of contempt to the command to love. Yet the resistance of others is not our concern now. Our problem is whether we ourselves believe that the death of contempt can be overcome by a life of love.

Can saints make a difference? Can the ‘somethingness’ of love overcome the nothingness of death? This is what is at stake in the church’s talk about resurrection: whether or not life and love will not only overcome and transform death and contempt. Overcoming is easy – revolution and power politics can do this. Transforming is the challenge.

Those great lovers among us – our saints, ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ – are a test, a probing, a proving, of just such a possibility. These saints manifest a love unknown towards a future unknown, and we so desperately need them because the futures we think we know are nothing to look forward to.

Let us, then, pray for peacemakers like this.

And let us pray that more of them might arise.

And, while we wait for that prayer to be answered, let’s do our best to be a little more saintly ourselves.

Because what the world needs now – as ever – is love.

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Epiphany 5
5/2/2023

Isaiah 58:1-12
Psalm 112
1 Corinthians 2:1-5
Matthew 5:13-20

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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

“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” (Mat 5.11)

The call in the Gospel to be salt and light picks up from this final blessing of the beatitudes. Each of the blessings of the beatitudes are not simply present gifts, but function also as future promises:

The poor are blessed and shall receive the kingdom of heaven
Those who mourn shall receive comfort
The hungry shall be filled
To the pure God will be visible

Running through the blessings from the beatitudes is not simply gift, but a sense of fullness that is arriving with Jesus himself; Jesus who offers this new way of life to those who follow the Anointed One. There is an eschatological dimension to the blessings which lead into today’s reading: that is, a dimension that is about God’s definitive intervention in the world to gather up all of history into a new order of righteousness and love. (Perhaps it’s worth noting that the Greek here translated as “blessing”, ‘makarios,’ can mean something like happy, fulfilled, and joyous, not merely “blessing.”)

It is in the context of this hope in hope itself, the context of hope in the fulfillment of hope, that we hear today’s Gospel reading.

Whatever we might say about the meaning and usage of salt in the ancient world (one commentary lists no less than eleven possible meanings for the metaphor of salt!), we are called to be the salt of the earth. There can be no limitations set on the scope of God’s redemptive work: it is the world, the whole world which God seeks to embrace in the saving work which Jesus’ teaching and ministry announces. So too does the reference to a light for the world, and a city on a hill recall us to the great expansive reach of God’s saving plans in Christ.

And yet here we begin to see one of the challenges with proclaiming with such confidence that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is good news to and about the whole world. If this good news speaks to the world, then it speaks against that other Gospel: that Gospel of Rome, which spoke of military might and victory. Gospel was originally a term for military triumph; triumph which ultimately emanated from the city Cicero called, “a light to the world”: Rome.

Part of what ought to make the original audiences of this sermon nervous – whether those who heard Jesus’ teaching during his ministry, or those who first heard these words recorded in the text of Matthew’s Gospel – what ought to make them nervous is that the teaching of Jesus has direct political implications. It can be very difficult for us, in contemporary Australia, to understand what is at stake in what Jesus seems to be teaching.

If Jesus really is the Messiah, who brings fulfillment of the prophetic utterances of Jewish hope;
if Jesus really is proclaiming the definitive intervention of God, to gather up history and fundamentally change the world as it was known;
if Jesus really is suggesting that the whole world is the domain of Christian discipleship;
then Jesus is consigning his followers to direct confrontation with Roman authorities. Jesus is signing the warrant of oppression for the communities that will be formed in his name. He not only looks forward to his own death upon a cross, but the deaths of hundreds, thousands, of Christians under the Roman persecution – and the various persecutions throughout history, and which continue today.

It’s here that some assumptions about the dynamics of power and authority in Jesus’ historical context need some revision. It has become almost cliche to talk about the Pharisees and Sadducees as the religious authorities wielding power to ultimately send Jesus to his death. Across history Christians have perpetuated the idea that the legalistic Pharisees, Sadducees, and Scribes misunderstood God’s gracious love, and instead contorted the law to maintain their place of power in ancient Judea.

Now, while it was true that Pharisees, Sadducees, and Scribes held positions of relative power within the Jewish communities of the ancient Roman empire, it should always be remembered that they were leaders within an otherwise oppressed community, within an occupied territory. In other words, while the religious leaders of Jesus’ day did indeed have power and influence, much of this power and influence existed within a broader context of disempowerment for the Jewish people as a whole.

This broader understanding of the power dynamics of the ancient Jewish community ought to give us pause when we move too quickly to condemn the religious leaders of Jesus’ day for their lack of understanding or faithfulness. In our Gospel reading today the righteousness of these religious leaders even becomes the standard for measuring the righteousness of Jesus’ own followers. Perhaps the point Jesus is making is that for all the disagreements Jesus has with the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Scribes, they are the ones who are the visible manifestation of the Jewish community. They are the ones who must negotiate the complex relationship with capricious Roman officials; they are the ones who have sought to keep a dispirited, dispossessed people faithful to God’s law.

Now this, of course, does not mean that the religious leaders are free from culpability: the Sadducees had a reputation for cooperation with the Romans, not all of which was for the benefit of the Jewish people as a whole; and all of the Gospels record quite heated disputes between Jesus and Pharisees.

Nonetheless, what Jesus seems to be aware of in his teaching is not only a new kind of religious ethos for a self-contained community. Jesus seems to be aware that his teaching implies a direct confrontation with the ways of the world. Not simply because his religious ethic is unpopular, but because he is the Messiah who fulfills the expectations of Jewish hope and brings the arrival of God’s Kingdom. While understood in different ways, this was the same hope held by the religious leaders, who sought to see this fulfillment of hope through engaging the messy, complex world of leading an occupied people.

For this reason it needs to be made abundantly clear, then, that what Jesus offers us in his own proclamation is not a repudiation of the law, not an impudent rejection of the religious leaders and their complex negotiations with Roman power. Rather, Jesus offers us in his proclamation the gathering up of Jewish hope, and a new way forward.

Jesus is saying:
Nothing will pass from the law, indeed that same God who the law draws us to is now calling us through and beyond this law. That same God is calling us to see that law fulfilled. That same God is offering us both gift and fulfillment. That same God is meeting us in the complex, risky world in which we stake our lives on the way to the Kingdom of Heaven.

For us today, 2000 years removed from unjust occupation in Judea, this can seem somewhat alien (though, of course, perhaps it shouldn’t, with the ongoing plight and violence in modern Palestine). We, in this room, are unlikely to be called upon to stake our lives on the way to the Kingdom of Heaven. And yet, we are still recipients of this same call; still part of this same secret thread which weaves its way through the whole world and all of human history.

Our call is no less cosmic in scale: we are called to gather up the history of hope for the world and carry it forward. We may no longer do this in ways which seem as visible as the past, and yet we should not therefore diminish the scope of God’s redemptive work. The world is the domain of God’s salvation.

What we continue to learn as we move out into the world is that this redemptive work is not always something we carry with us. We often find the Spirit out there ahead of us. We are often called into the messy, complex work of negotiating the different forces which shape the Church and its relation to the world – sometimes needing to take a backseat to how others teach us about the Kingdom of Heaven. In this too we are to be lights that shine on the secret ways God’s will is working out in the world.

The call today is to be salt and light. This is a call which gathers up the hope of the oppressed, which carries the cry for justice into the whole world. The call to be salt and light is the call to highlight where the world needs promise, and where the world experiences fulfillment – even in small and secret ways.

And in all things we proclaim with confidence that the world needs the God who has been faithful since the beginning, and is faithful still.

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Epiphany 4
29/1/2023

1 Corinthians 1:18-31
Psalm 15
Matthew 5:1-12

In a sentence:
God’s ways in the world call our ways and confidence into question, seeking from us humble action towards justice.

With his claims for a foolishness which is wisdom and weakness which is strength, Paul seems to be going all paradoxical and mystical, rendering these notions self-contradictory nonsense, with little offered to replace them.

At stake here, however, is not mystification but the question of the freedom of God. The Corinthian church was divided and confused, as most communities are! Paul’s concern is that God is taken to justify that confusion. The division arises from the exercise of a particular sense for wisdom and power – that which traces its source and legitimacy back to God. The way of the world – the order of the Corinthian Christian community – is justified by direct lines to God. Turned around the other way, the argument becomes not merely that our ordering of the world is like God but that God is like our ordering of the world.

Paul’s inversion of wisdom and power, then, is not about mystifying these notions but about God’s freedom: you can’t read God off the order of the world. God is not constrained by the way that we do things.

…God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

The ‘boasting’ here is not about how handsome, smart or otherwise godly I might be, but a celebration of the gift of God. Boasting about myself is precisely a claim to godlikeness, and it is this which is the source of human division – the appeal to a righteousness outside of the present relationships in which I find myself, which sets me free from responsibility for you. It is this lack of responsibility for the other which divides the Corinthians, and us today.

Paul’s ‘boasting in the Lord’ sounds to modern ears like an unnecessary otherworldliness, but it stands as a challenge to all the concrete worldliness-es – the wisdoms and powers – we usually exercise. In particular, it stands against all claims that there is a system which will work things out for us, a set of necessary steps we need to take to set human being right. If there were such a system, we’d have to admit that we have yet to discover it after thousands of years of effort.

The current debates around the Parliamentary Voice are a case in point. Increasing recognition of our complicated and violent colonial history, continuing need in aboriginal communities and general goodwill on the part of the majority of Australians are not enough to show us a way forward. The reasonable desire for a clearer communication of what is intended, mixed with cynical political tactics from some opposition parties, mixed with division within the indigenous community, mixed with the possibility of compassion fatigue, risk aversion and self-interest in the voting populace, all amount to anything but clarity as to what is to be done to undo some of the injustice of the past and the present. The same could be said for the numerous other challenges in the social, political and economic spheres whirling around us. These spaces are filled with social and political slogans which are both right and wrong at the same time. They are right in that they name an injustice, and wrong in that they imagine that those injustices can properly be made just. The justification of this claim – that the injustice cannot be rectified – is the experience of history itself: we have not seen it happen in any final way. This recognition is not new. It is not for nothing that old Israel opted for apocalyptic thinking. This embodied the notion that if there is going to be any experience of final justice, it must come from outside the dynamics of normal history. Apocalyptic thinking is not an escape from life in the world but a recognition of the world’s unresolved problem: when will injustice be overcome?

The question then becomes, how are we to live under such circumstances? And this is a question of how to live together, because dropping out of circulation is easy, denying as it does that the other is part of me and I part of her.

Paul’s answer to the question of justice seems weak, given the scale of what confronts us in contemporary social and political division. This answer is crystallised later in his first letter to the Corinthians, in his famous ‘love chapter’ (chapter 13). The apparent weakness of this response springs not least from the context in which we normally hear Paul’s appeal to love: in weddings. There, Paul’s thoughts on love are heard as an account of what the marrying couple themselves already experience. In modern marriages (weddings), we commit because of our experience of love. This is the presence of a kind of justice, so that there is no call for what Paul is actually doing in that chapter – commanding an unloving couple to love each other. Such a command might make sense in an arranged marriage but not in our modern marriages, at least not to the beginning! Paul’s love chapter, then, is reduced to what we feel about people we already love, which has little to do with those from whom we are alienated, which was his own situation.

And so, love becomes a weak political proposal. What does love look like now, in relation to Australia’s colonial history? This is precisely the question. But if, with Paul, there is to be no boasting save in the Lord, then there can be no all-encompassing answer – no proposal that love only looks like the Parliamentary Voice, or a treaty, or one of the less novel approaches to the problems of indigenous experience in Australia. Any one of these is as full of possibility and risk as the other because, for all the good which might still be done, the injustices we want to address here can only ever be partially addressed. And they can only be partially addressed because, at heart, human beings are fanatics for this or that wisdom or power which ultimately excludes and denies. The tone of modern politics is nothing if not fanatical.

This is not intended to be pessimistic but realistic. To commit to some political action (such as the Voice or a treaty) is not to have solved the problem. There is no righteous deed which does not need constant re-negotiation. Justice is a continual balancing act or perhaps, in our direct experience, an inbalancing act.

Paul’s ‘boasting in the Lord’ is not, then, the confidence that with God everything is clear and in good order, much less that the present order is God-ordained. This was the claim of the happier Corinthians, who were confident they had settled into God’s way. To ‘boast in the Lord’ is to delay claims about the achievement of righteousness while at the same time acting towards justice. It is to hear a call to justice and to turn towards that voice within the messy now of human life together, where it will always be the case that we can do better. It is to debate and to work for justice, but also to be ‘above’ arguments about any final solution. It is to be broken and whole in the same moment, in a way which denies neither the need for our action nor the unearned gift of God.

Faith in the God of the crucified Jesus is recognition that we are not, in history, ever finished – not ever righteous. The closest we come to completion is in the person of Jesus, who is himself defined by the ambiguity of the cross – that confusion of human and divine judgement which, Paul declares, turns our sense for power and wisdom upside down, and should shake our confidence that we see clearly.

Paul’s attempt to dislocate our confidence – that we see and comprehend truly – is an invitation to humility. In society and politics, humility is much lauded but rare. What looks successful and gains attention is the exercise of wisdoms and powers which lift you above me. What distinguishes humility from this is that it is not deluded: it claims no extraordinary and unambiguous power or value but acts according to justice, and looks to see what the next just action might have to be.

This is the life of faith to which Paul calls the Corinthians, and us: to do justice, love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God (Micah 6.8). In the broadest of our politics and the most intimate of our relationships, let this be how we are there for each other: with a wisdom which is ever more open to deeper love, and a strength which comes from God’s own persistent faithfulness.

By the grace of God…

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Epiphany 3
22/1/2023

1 Corinthians 1:10-18
Psalm 27
Matthew 4:12-23

In a sentence:
The power of the cross is that it “levels” us, given as our common situation before God

Paul’s account of the situation at Corinth is sadly familiar. With our Protestant and Catholic, liberal and conservative, high church and low church, traditional and contemporary, exclusive and open communities, the problem Paul names remains today, if now on a much larger scale.

Yet it’s noteworthy that we don’t hear in Paul’s response such simple encouragements as “Love one another” or “Do try to get along”. He sees that the issue runs much deeper than simple moral failure. What is at stake is not a social, moral, psychological or motivational deficiency but is specifically theological; it is a failure to identify correctly what is at the heart of Christian life and so of human life more generally. Christian division, then, is a crisis in doxology: a crisis in the correct praise of God.

Because of this, Paul casts these divisions in the light of the cross:

“I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one can say that you were baptized in my name. … For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.” [NRSV]

The “power of the cross” to which Paul refers is its function as the great leveller of humankind. Power and wisdom are how we distinguish and rank ourselves in relation to one another: stronger, smarter, richer, older, prettier, or whatever. But such divisive power and wisdom dissolve away if the crucified Christ is the reference point for all the meaning, power and wisdom the world needs. If the thing which matters most – the “thing” we call “God and Father” – identifies itself with the rejected and outcast human being Jesus of Nazareth, then no rankings in human knowledge and ability will impress God. God is “happy” with the nothingness of the cross. The saving power of the cross, then, is not that it adds something to us to make us better, wiser or stronger. The power of the cross is that it takes something away.

What is taken away are the additions we are tempted to make to Christ himself, marked by one of the most potent and problematic of theological concepts. This concept is the little word “and”. The “and” appears as a supplement to the crucified Christ. Fellowship at Corinth revolved around Christ “and” – Christ “and” Paul, Christ “and” Peter. If you did not have the same “and” as your neighbour, it becomes less clear that you are truly one with each other. At the Corinthian communion table, it was Christ “and” having food to eat – having no food to bring to the meal meant no real participation in the fellowship of the Lord’s supper (1 Corinthians 11). In civil society, it was Christ “and” the law courts (1 Corinthians 6); common Christian conviction was not thought to cover how to deal with disputes between believers. Again at the table, it was Christ “and” maturity – the “mature” in faith feeling free to eat meat which had been offered to idols, the apparently “immature” being greatly troubled by this, perhaps even to the point of losing faith (1 Corinthians 8, 10). A similar confusion arose around speaking in tongues in that community (1 Corinthians 14).

So it went in that church, each issue a manifestation of the same problem: community built on the kind of power and wisdom which is “added” and so which some have and some do not. What more I have raises me above you: Christ “and”…

Paul’s correction is that each of the “ands” we append to Christ has to be subject to the levelling effect of the cross. The cross unites by levelling. It marks the lowest common denominator among us – godlessness – and, from there, opens up the power of grace which builds upon nothing. Our calling is not to be clever, not to be wise or powerful. It is not, that is, to accumulate as many “ands” as possible. Our calling is to be faithful and to trust the one who has determined that the cross, and no other “helpful” addition we can imagine, will be the way by which God is effective in us and in the world.

What does this mean for us? It means that we are free before God. If the word of God in the Crucified is an assault on all things by which we would supplement ourselves or Christ, so also is it a liberation from the need to supplement ourselves before God. If I don’t have to be right in order to have the fullness of God in Christ, I need not be anxious about whether or not I’m always doing the smartest thing. And if anxiety is stripped out of our work, then our work approaches something more like play – be it our work as individual persons or our work as a Christian community. We can try this or that – not because it’s the cleverest thing, but because we are free to do so in Christ, the wisdom and power of God.

In our personal lives, we are free to do it differently – start a business, retire early, get a divorce, give away a lot of money, buy a puppy, or whatever. In our common life as a congregation, we are free to experiment – playing with worship styles, or times, or locations, or mission investments, or whatever. In the next couple of weeks, this is just what we’ll be doing as we begin conversations with the theological college about what relocating into a partnership with them might look like. In all that, we need to keep in mind that the college is a mere “and” to us, and is not the gospel promise itself – is not any kind of salvation for us. And we have to ensure that the college sees us in just the same way. If it doesn’t work, whatever we might lose we don’t lose that which is most basic. We don’t lose what binds us to God and is the possibility of our being truly bound to each other: the Christ who died by our wise and powerful hand and yet who graciously returns to us to speak of a different wisdom and a different power.

The crisis with which Paul begins at Corinth is human division, but the response is the grace-full heart of the gospel. The church is called to unity not because unity and love are “good things”. We are called to unity because what we have in common in Christ exceeds all things that distinguish us from each other. Our human wellbeing is not secured by our own efforts and allegiances, but by the God who names us as his own, giving us himself and a common humanity by seeing us in the Christ we rejected. God sees us through Jesus. If we are in the Christ who is rejected, we are in the Christ whom God raised to life. This is grace.

There is, then, no place in the reign of God for division through merely worldly and selfish preferences and concerns. We are called out of ourselves to discover our lives hidden together with Christ in God.

Let us, then, open ourselves to this grace and, little by little, ever become something of this grace to those around us.

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Epiphany 2
15/1/2023

Isaiah 53:1-7
Psalm 40
John 1:19-51

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.  Isa. 53:7. NRSV

The next day, [John the baptizer] saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, ‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!’             Jn 1:29 NRSV

Our two readings this morning are linked by a single vivid image, a lamb waiting at an abattoir. It is John the Baptist who makes the link and today’s Gospel follows on from last week’s.^[1]

You may remember Matt Julius’ arresting title, ‘The wrong baptism’ where he rightly drew our attention away from Jesus’ baptism (which St John does not actually describe) to the baptism of Jesus on the cross. [Since we will talk about two Johns this morning, the gospel writer will be ‘St’ and the other, mostly ‘the Baptist’]

John the Baptist, named for his profession not the denomination, is such a strange figure. He has already opted out of normal society, an ascetic, perhaps connected with some of the communities we know lived in the desert beyond Jerusalem. He also stands between the biblical Testaments, the last prophet – and, as St John makes him – the harbinger of a new chapter in God’s dealing with humankind, the Forerunner (as Orthodox Christians call him).  He reached back into the Jewish tradition to quote the prophet Isaiah and his moving four poems or songs about another strange figure called ‘the suffering servant’. He too was cast out, and as the fourth song (today’s reading) says,

‘cut off from the world of the living, stricken to death for my people’s transgression’ (Is. 53:8)

You can see why the first Christians, all raised in Judaism, saw a close portrait of their crucified Lord. The figure of the ‘Lamb of God’ is its focus.

St John began his Gospel with the image of the ‘Word’, the ‘Logos’, but he now takes up the Baptist’s ikon and repeats it no fewer than three times – but what does it represent?

If you read all of chapters 42 to 53, you will find no single answer. The Servant of God, of which the Lamb is one image, is seen as a representative man, a leader perhaps, a messiah, perhaps, or a remnant of the faithful Israel, guided by God’s promises, or a kind of ambassador to other nations on God’s behalf (which, by the way, is a common task of a biblical servant, as it is of a deacon). Modern Judaism, I learned from reading commentaries by modern rabbis, choose the communal image, God’s chosen people, Israel. In Isaiah’s time, they were an exiled nation with its temple in ruins and its culture cut off from its sources. The Servant is not one man, he is Israel.

We heard from St John this morning about the interrogation by some pharisees from Jerusalem, to whom the Baptist denied that he was the Messiah, nor Jeremiah who would return to announce the messiah, nor a prophet – like Isaiah. The John verses are the Baptist’s attempt to distinguish himself and his ministry from that of Jesus.

There is a subplot here which need not detain us. Both Johns are addressing two communities – the followers of the Baptist and the disciples of Jesus. The Christians were wary that the baptism story looks as if their Lord Jesus submitted to John and was thus somehow less than him. But John was executed and in time his disciples chose to follow Jesus or withered away.

And there were two baptisms, John’s in water, Jesus’ with fire and the Holy Spirit.  St John is careful to add the Baptist’s testimony that he saw the Holy Spirit ‘remain’ over Jesus at his baptism (1:32).

The next day he sees Jesus in the street and proclaims to the crowd, ‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!’ quoting Isaiah – and we will sing it again before this service is over.

Now, Christians believe that it was the mission of Jesus to ‘take away the sins of the world’. But Isaiah’s servant was to take away the sins of Israel. The revolution announced in the Second (or New) Testament is that God’s promises are open to all humankind, to the ‘Gentiles’ as well as to God’s beloved first people.

But what happens when we name Jesus as ‘the Lamb of God’?

St John believed that Jesus’ death on the cross took place on the day when the lambs were being killed for Passover. No other gospel makes that connection. St Paul calls Jesus ‘our Passover Lamb’ (1 Cor 5:7). I asked myself what the Jewish tradition thinks of the lamb of isa. 53. They insist that the Passover Lamb was not a sacrifice. It is the story of origins for Jews. On the eve of Exodus, the whole nation prepared itself for a hard and dangerous journey from slavery to freedom. The lambs were for a meal to sustain them, to be eaten in a hurry.  Blood was sprinkled on their doorposts as a sign to protect them. None of this is ‘sacrifice’ in its normal meaning.

The other major penitential event in the Jewish Year is the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. In its background story (Levit. 16:7-22), two goats were selected; one was sacrificed, and its blood poured on the altar; the other, over which the priests listed the sins of Israel, was driven out without further ceremony into the desert where it died, hence our ‘scapegoat’.  But the goat associated with Israel’s sin was not the goat which was sacrificed.

Sacrifice is a word in the Christian vocabulary, but it needs to be very carefully used. Jewish sacrifice, for ordinary people like Joseph and Mary, was concerned with such things as doves and pigeons; the more serious, national rituals took place in the Temple, and with its destruction in AD 70, all animal sacrifice ceased, and since then Jewish understanding of sacrifice has been spiritual and ethical. They are horrified at the thought that the death of a human being could achieve these purposes.

From the earliest centuries, philosophers have offered ’theories of Atonement’ – to make sense of death of the innocent Jesus. The most popular for Protestants – though there are Catholic equivalents – is called ‘the Penal Substitutionary’ theory, which holds that the primary purpose of Jesus’ death was to satisfy God’s justice. It was a brutal payment to God for others’ wrongdoing. Many modern Christians reject this theory because it is morally offensive. And something of it remains in other theories and is kept alive in conservative Christianity. (This was the doctrinal dividing point between the Student Christian Movement and the evangelical Union in the 1960s.)

I should now solve all these mysteries for you, but I cannot. This sermon is an unfinished symphony.

Certainly, our present era has a major challenge in articulating our faith in categories both true to the biblical tradition, and meaningful in our contemporary contexts. We cannot follow our mediaeval ancestors in wholesale but uncritical borrowings from either Testament. It is a task we preachers attempt every time we speak, and in the end, we stand dumb before the ‘Mystery of faith’.

Let me add some comments which need to be explored if I were to complete my sermon (some of these have been added post-preaching!).

The image of the lamb of God appears elsewhere in the scriptures. Some (e.g. Calvin) have seen Jesus’ silence before Pilate and Herod as a parallel to the Lamb/servant‘s innocence. In Revelation, the lamb is also a lion overcoming God’s enemies; the martyrs are dressed in white garments ‘washed in the blood (!) of the lamb’ (7:14). In eucharistic and liturgical history, the bread is called ‘the lamb’, and the Agnus Dei is sung while the bread is broken after the Great Prayer and before Communion.

Are any of these uses tied to a sacrificial understanding of Jesus? Well, yes, but not in a penal substitutionally way! Christ died for us, yes, but is its meaning to be found in the blood of his execution, or from the whole of his incarnation, teaching, healing and in his constant communion with and obedience to the Father? The hours in Gethsemane seem to be a critical point here. The Lamb of God image has anchored our attention on the death of Jesus. In Isa. 53:7, after the lamb is mentioned, the parallel analogy is of a sheep before its shearer, i.e. not faced with death. I do not wish to remove death and suffering from Jesus or his work of salvation, but I want to release it from a narrow interpretation.

The graphic on today’s order of Service is of a mosaic of the 6^th C AD in the church of San Vitale in Ravenna. It is situated at the top of the vault in the dome, supported by four angels and the background is of stars and flowers of paradise – but there are no wounds or blood.  That is the main way Christian artists have portrayed it. There is another strand where the lamb is pierced in the breast and blood spurts out in an arc, sometimes into a chalice; obviously that comes of a catholic piety and goes beyond the meanings I believe are justified.

We believe that Jesus/the Lamb rescued us from the debt we owe God. I want to take ‘on the cross’ as a summary of his whole ministry. His ‘work’ is done, but ours is not, and we live and work through the hope based in Jesus’ unique victory: as a human being in communion with his Father, he broke through the barriers which prevent us from being who God wants us to be. That was the otherwise impossible task the Lamb was prepared to take on.

We need to live within the paradox set for us by John the Baptist, who baptised Jesus but knew there was another baptism.  That baptism, which we share, makes us members of the body of Christ and heirs of his promises, ‘through the water of rebirth and the renewal by the holy Spirit’ to life eternal in Christ.

[1] I also chose the Fourth Song from Isa. 53, which is where the image appears.