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Easter 2
24/4/2022

Revelation 1:1-11
Psalm 148
John 20:1-18

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

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If the curiosities of calendars interest you, the latest date on which Easter ever falls would be tomorrow. This year we have coincided with Ramadan and with Passover. It’s interesting that we now notice such things. But the two families of the Christian Church do not mark Easter on the same date, for reasons I won’t give now; though this year we couldn’t be closer – a mere week apart. Today is Orthodox Easter. In my ecumenical days, I often attended both Easters in the various cultures and languages. So, we join our Orthodox neighbours in the cry Christ is risen!

The descriptions of worship in the Book of Revelation often remind me of Orthodox worship. At the front of every Orthodox church there is the iconostasis, the icon-stand, a wall of portraits; the worshippers are standing on the floor of heaven, surrounded by the saints. There are vestments, candles, incense, and exquisite choral music – but no organ or other instruments. There are cultural reasons behind Orthodox liturgy, including living for centuries under repressive regimes (like the Ottoman and the Soviet) and it is true that Orthodoxy never had a Reformation.

Revelation chapter 4 paints us the picture:

‘… at once I was in the spirit, and there in heaven stood a throne, with one seated on it!… around the throne are twenty-four thrones and seated on them are twenty-four elders, dressed in white robes, with golden crowns on their heads… and in front of the throne burn seven flaming torches which are the seven spirits of God’ …

In our own plain building, which has its own beauty, we may not have the furnishings of heaven (and we don’t!), but we do take care that our liturgy is ordered and theologically true to our Church’s doctrine; we take care in our preaching and in our prayers; we use space and colour and movement, and we even use ikons – in our own way. I’m sure that one reason for our weekly pattern of word and sacrament is that we add an action and symbols to the words. I’m glad we do: it is faithful worship. But I do wonder why no-one else in the Uniting Church wants to follow us?

It seems that John ‘the Divine’ (in the sense of a theologian) knew all these churches, all within 30 to 80 km inland from the island of Patmos. Many are close enough to be visible to each other across the plain of western Turkey. He names seven of them for whom he has a particular concern: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamon, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and the notorious Laodicea. They must have had tiny congregations and no buildings, and John’s about to do a thorough presbytery review of them, but he sees them through the prism of the glory of God and the Orthodox created a tradition in that light. It is truly iconic.

This is what the Risen Christ said to them in John’s vision:

‘Grace to you and peace from Him who is and was and who is to come… and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the rule of the kings of the earth.’

‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’, says the Lord God.

His vision is of the Christ in majesty, to whom he gives several titles. The first is ‘the faithful witness’ – that is, the witness which Jesus faithfully gave to the nature of God, of God’s love and grace, ‘for no-one knows the Father but the Son’ – and the whole of the Gospel of John is built around that.

Then ‘The firstborn from the dead’, by whom we have been ‘freed from our sins by his blood’ and who has opened the gate of heaven to all. This is expressed in the ikon on today’s service order. The Risen Christ grasps Adam and Eve by the hand, and with them all humankind, and rescues them from the realm of death, into the kingdom of the Father.

The Greek word for him is the ‘Pantocrator’, the All-powerful; but Easter has taught us again, that God’s power is not as other users of power are: it is ‘crucified power’.

Those of us mourning the death of our friend Wong Tik Wah, Methodist Bishop in Malaysia, five days ago, rejoice in this hope of belonging to the ‘first born’.

I leave President Putin, Russian Orthodox Christian by his own claim, to ponder what it means that Christ Jesus is already ‘the ruler of all the kings of the earth’ (1:5) as we pray that God’s kingdom will come in its fullness. And the ‘mighty will be brought down from their thrones and the lowly lifted up’ (Lk 2:52).

Finally, is the calling to the church – the people of God – ‘to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father’ (1:6). Here is the origin of that most characteristic of Protestant claims, that we, the baptized, are a ‘priesthood of all believers’. John of Patmos did not know how explosive this biblical word would become in Christian history in the west! We have often arrogantly have used this as a weapon against churches with a different practice of priesthood.

It is hard for them as for us to take an old word and give it a new, or recover an old, meaning. All agree there is one priest in the Christian tradition and only one: Jesus Christ himself, the anointed one. Any other people with the title do so because all the baptized are priests. We all have ministries. That does not mean there are not formative tasks to be done in the church which might be characterized by the word ’priest’ and by ordination.

A priest, biblically speaking, is a servant of God, who has responsibility for the true worship of God. It is not his own worship which is of importance, but that of the whole people with whom he stands. John of Patmos is precisely saying that our worship is shaped by the God we worship, and how we live our lives, and how we love our neighbour. There are gifts required for this task, which the Spirit gives for every part of the church’s life. In the church, Edward Schweizer said, ‘there is no superiority or inferiority, but only joy in one another’s gifts.’ Some are called by the church to the building up of the body and the equipping of the saints (Ephes. 4:11).

The second element is of equal importance. The kind of God we worship also determines our mission or rather, God’s mission. It too is a ‘crucified’ mission, not, as the Japanese theologian, Kosuke Koyama point out, a crusading one. It is self-sacrificial. It is service. In the mission of this God, every act of compassion and generosity, every act of justice, will express the love of God on the ground, as it were, giving God the glory.

‘Grace to you and peace from Him who is and was and who is to come… and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the rule of the kings of the earth.’

‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’, says the Lord God.

May our worship and our lives always reflect his.

To Whom be glory in the church for ever. Amen.

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Easter Day
17/4/2022

1 Corinthians 15:19-26
Luke 24:1-12

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In a sentence:
Resurrection life is a life of eyes-opened love for each other

In 1789, Benjamin Franklin wrote to Jean-Baptiste Le Roy concerning progress on the new Constitution for the United States:

Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

(In fact, Franklin’s observation was probably drawn from an earlier source). That last part has entered into conventional wisdom: nothing in life is certain but death and taxes.

Christian confession adds to this sardonic observation the following: while we might think death and taxes to be two things, we live as if they were one. For this to be clear, we must see that taxes have to do with our responsibilities to each other, the claims we make on each other, and it is these which place death-like limitations on what we can be or do. In her full moral claim on us, the other person is our limit, our end, and so our death. Death and taxes – our end and our moral accountability – coincide.

This might seem a strange place to begin our reflections on Easter Day, when we might expect to hear a clear word about resurrection. Yet, surely, a clear word about resurrection requires a clear word about death. If resurrection is somehow an “answer” to death, we have to get death right for that answer to be worth hearing.

Today’s reading from Paul comes from his great “resurrection chapter”, perhaps a strange place to look for ideas about death. On a surface reading, Paul seems to be arguing the case for the resurrection of Jesus, and our resurrection with it. I suspect, however, that what is really at stake is the timing and meaning of death. The pointer to this “hidden agenda” is that the Corinthians seem to have believed in resurrection already. Theirs was a richly blessed church:

^1.5 …for in every way you have been enriched in [Christ Jesus], in speech and knowledge of every kind…⁷so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The Corinthians had a strong sense that the kingdom had come, that they had been set free from the bondage of death. And yet, they jostled each other for priority in the community, took each other to court, were confused about obligations in marriage, argued about rights against responsibilities, and overlooked the needs of the materially and spiritually poor in their midst. It’s worth remarking that this letter contains two of Paul’s best-known passages: his teaching on the mutuality of church members with its notion of the church as Christ’s unified Body, and his “love” chapter, most favoured at weddings and funerals. As communal and love-oriented as these chapters are, we have them precisely because of the absence of the loving mutual responsibility they describe.

To recall where we began, we could characterise the Corinthians as having given up on “taxes”. Resurrection life is, for them, the overcoming of that death which is the limitation of self in responsibility for each other. Death is here social obligation: the constraints the bodies and needs of others place on us. The poor person makes a claim against our use of resources, the indigenous person against our colonising intent. The Israeli makes a claim on the Palestinian and vice-versa. The refugee makes a claim on an economic system they’ve not (yet) contributed to. Being present to us in this way, the other threatens to be the death of us.

The Corinthian church saw this sense of death overcome in what was effectively a decision not to see the presence and needs of others. Resurrection – life in freedom – is here a closing of our eyes. Their exclusion of the poor from the Lord’s table was a closing of their eyes; rejecting the spiritual objections of the weaker believers among them was a closing of their eyes. Closer to home, “terra nullius” was a closing of eyes. “Haven’t got time” is a closing of eyes. “Just a woman” is a closing of eyes. They and we overcome death’s claim on us and so are resurrected in this way: sweeping aside what feels like deathly obligation by closing our eyes.

If this is what has been happening in Corinth, then Paul’s “resurrection chapter” is strangely out of place if all he wants to do is to assert and defend the resurrection of Jesus (and our own). But, given what the Corinthians understood resurrection language to imply for their “common” life, Paul’s recurring phrase – “raised from the dead – should likely be read with the emphasis not on “raised” but on “dead”. His concern here is not, first, resurrection, for this is accepted if misunderstood. His concern is instead with the when and the meaning of death, and his message to the Corinthians is, you still have some serious dying to do.

For the Corinthians, to be dead is to see and feel the claims of others, and to be risen is no longer to need to see the other, no longer to have to “pay taxes” (so to speak), no longer to have real responsibilities towards each other. Their life together reflects this – for they do not see each other properly – and they think this to be resurrection. Here it becomes clear that an interest in death and resurrection is no mere “religious” infatuation but has deep moral consequences.

And so Paul insists on an entirely different sense for death and resurrection: to be dead is not to see but no longer to be seen. Death is “the last enemy” which “hides” us from each other and, in a way, from God. The death of Jesus is not that, like the Corinthians, he closed his eyes to us but that we closed our eyes to him. He is cast out, relegated to the worthless, a stone the builders rejected.

And so, for Paul, to be resurrected is to be seen again. When the church confesses that Jesus is risen from the dead, it says that God refuses to let us keep our eyes closed to Jesus. Perhaps it is not for nothing that Paul favours the word “appeared” rather than “raised”, in his apparently traditional account of Easter:

…Christ died … ⁴and … was buried, and … was raised on the third day …, ⁵ … [and] he appeared to [Peter], then to the twelve. ⁶Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. ⁷Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. ⁸Last of all, as to someone untimely born, he appeared also to me…

To be raised from the dead is to be seen again.

Death is not seeing and feeling the imperative to act morally, as the Corinthians seemed to think and rejected. Death is closing our eyes and ears. Death is declaring Sovereign Borders so as not to see, and keeping detention centres out of public view. Death is covering our ears to the painful claims of indigenous peoples on the beneficiaries of colonisation.

In such decisions, Paul asserts, we mistake the means of death as the means of life. And so, again, we see how theories of death and resurrection are no mere religious additions to otherwise secular life. Affirmations of death and resurrection are active all around us. With the commencement of election season, we have entered into 5 or 6 weeks of sound-bite sermons about what should or should not be seen, what will or will not be raised to life.

Christian talk about resurrection has to do with the opening of our eyes to see each other, and the extent to which we are ourselves seen.

We are not good at this. We don’t see well, and so we are poor lovers. We need constant reminding that we are mutually-sustaining members of a common body, that only love finally endures. For now, we see only as if through a glass darkly, and so our testimony to the resurrection is itself dark and blurry. The last enemy – the death which darkens our vision – is not fully overcome for us. But when it is, we will see as God sees us: clearly, face-to-face. Heaven is being seen in all that we are and need and can be, and resurrection life is seeing ourselves seen.

To confess that Christ has been glimpsed in resurrection is to expect that we also will rise, scales fallen from our eyes. In the meantime, faith is learning to open our eyes – learning to see and love – and heaven begins to take shape among us.

To misquote Charles Wesley, for an interpretation of the verse of the last hymn we will sing today:

Soar we now where Christ has led,
following our exalted Head;
made like him, with open eyes:
ours the cross, the grave, the skies.

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Related sermons

5 April 2022 – Open your eyes

3 April 2022 – Jesus is the life, and the death

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Good Friday
15/4/2022

Numbers 5:1-10
Matthew 27:24-26,32-54

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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

We have learnt over the past two years that the world is filled with fragile bodies.

The pandemic and war; fires and floods; famine and drought.

Set against this is the chronic call of justice for marginalised people, whose bodies continue to be bound, imprisoned, and disposed of.

And the call too on behalf of the Earth’s own fragile body: the natural order stands on the precipice of catastrophe; all the world’s experts unable to tame the insatiable drive of death pushing us over the edge of a cliff.

We have learnt that our bodies do not end at the boundary of our skin.
My body extends out to what I aspirate, and to what I discharge.
Bodies have become news items, with regular reports of case numbers, death rates, and sewage detections of viral particles.

Our common humanity has been revealed as a common fragility in the face of an ambivalent natural order, and forces of death which hold our common life in their grip: ambivalence, greed, hatred, prejudice, self-entitlement, trauma.

Fragile bodies captive to the forces of death become corpses.

Into this contemporary experience we are in this place to hear again the story of the corpse of God. We hear this story in a year where we have had to navigate the risk of disease; where we have lost loved ones – some without the grace of a final touch. Even today we may be in aching bodies; aware that as we gather for worship to hear the sounds of scripture and song, around the world others hear the sounds of gunshots and bombs.

Fragile bodies captive to the forces of death become corpses.
And corpses defile.

Hear these words from the law:

“… put out of the camp everyone who is leprous, or has a discharge, and everyone who is unclean through contact with a corpse; … put out both male and female, putting them outside the camp; they must not defile their camp, where [the Lord] dwells among them…” (Num. 5:2-3)

In the framework of the ancient Jewish law, the Torah, the holiness of God must be set apart from the defiling forces of uncleanness. These sites of uncleanness remind us of the constant spectre of death which looms over humanity. Leprous skin that evokes the paleness of corpses, discharges which mark our life force leaving our bodies, and above all corpses themselves. The power and holiness of the living God cannot stand the presence of these spectres of death. The source of life can have only umbrage with death.

So it is that the Rabbi Jesus, who is called the Holy One of God, is led out of the camp, towards the cross … to the place they call the skull … to become a corpse.

“This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.”

This is the defiled one, whose corpse will surely become a defiling presence —
unable to stand in the presence of the living and holy God.

As he is becoming a corpse Jesus calls out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Set outside the camp alone, Jesus gives up his Spirit – breathes his last: his life force discharged from his body.

The Holiness of God must be set apart from the defiling forces of uncleanness: the spectres of death. The source of life can have only umbrage with death, seemingly even with the corpse of God’s own beloved child.

Holiness stands against death.

And yet … At that very moment … At the point of death itself … As the Holy one of God has his very life snuffed out, his fragile body crushed and beaten, pierced and bloody …

Time collapses in on itself.

Is this not the Holy One who healed those with leprous skin?
Is this not the Holy One who cast out the presence of evil spirits?
Is this not the Holy One who healed the woman with the discharge of blood, the One who raised even the dead?

At the point of death the holiness of God explodes out from the cross itself
The curtain in the temple that kept uncleanness out tears, no longer able to keep the holiness in
The world captive to the forces of death has its foundations shaken
The corpses of saints in their tombs are imbued with new life

The world is cracked open by the wooden stake of the cross driven into its heart
The sources of defilement are met face to face on the cross and there defeated
Holiness turns and goes on the attack, and uncleanness and its death-like pall must go on the retreat

All are released from the bondage of sin

Fear not the captive forces who keep us bound in death
Fear not the un-making powers which erode the earth
Fear not the fragility of bodies caught in the bonds of oppression
Fear not the spectre of death

For everything is being made holy
Death cannot hold the holy in its grip, but holiness and life and love and the divine breath of God are exploding out into the world

Everything is being made holy,
everything is being made holy,
everything is being made holy.

God will never, ever leave us.
God can never, ever leave us.
There is a new creation: and the Holy One of God in the midst of death is re-making this world as holy

And those in Ukraine whose corpses litter streets are holy
And the queer ones who pray to be different or be dead, they are holy
And the trans kids whose bodies have become objects of political rancour are holy
And black lives bound and imprisoned unjustly are holy
And refugees are holy as the years of their life eek out in indefinite detention
And the disabled bodies who are disregarded as invalid are holy

Until we see the corpses rise to life we must see the presence of the Holy working in those who beckon us to a more just world.
Holiness draws all things into the loving life of God: everything is set apart for God’s purposes of love and mercy, peace and joy, justice and truth.

Hear these words from Anglican Trans* Poet Jay Hulme:

Holy! Holy! Holy!

If God is everywhere, then everywhere is holy,
everything is holy, everyone is holy.
The blaspheming tongue – holy.
The maze of streets – holy.
The broken street light that flickers at 2am
to welcome home the dying – it too, is holy.

The homeless are prophets and saints
as much as these bones and fragments.
Treat them with reverence and love them
for they are as holy as any other.
I am holy. You are holy.
The spit that flecks your lips as you curse out a stranger
is disgusting, but holy.

We are disgusting, but holy.

When we leave strangers to die
we are leaving the holy.
When we abandon the lost
we abandon the holy.

Take your neighbour in hand,
lead them to a crowded [ED],
see the doctors pull on their gloves;
the gloves are holy.
The hospital is holy.
The cracked linoleum and buzzing vending machine;
Holy! Holy! Holy!

To save a life, is holy.
All life is holy.

Lord, even death can be holy,
when a person is ready to go.

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… today we tell the story of the corpse of God, which does not defile, but is re-making the world to be holy, holy, holy. We tell the story of the fragile body of God whose holiness emanates out for the sake of the world, and against the forces of death.

Truly this is God’s son
Truly this is God’s law
Truly this is God’s life for the world.

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Funeral of Suzanne Yanko
5/4/2022

Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18
1 Corinthians 13:8-13

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When we gather like this at a time like this, it is to tell not one story but two. The one is the story of our experience of each other, of which we have just heard a little today (and it is always too little). This is our experience of Suzanne. The other story is the story of God’s experience of us, to which we now turn.

These two stories are intertwined in a relationship which can be treated in all manner of ways. Today, taking the lead from what we have heard from the psalmist and St Paul, we’ll consider this intertwining through what it is to know and to be known, to see and to be seen, to love and to be loved.

Psalm 139 is one of the most intimate passages of the Jewish Scriptures, in which the poet marvels at his very self and at God’s knowledge of that self.

¹ O Lord, you have searched me and known me.

¹³ …For it was you who formed my inward parts;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
¹⁴ I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Alongside the poet, we heard from St Paul, who is not often accused of poetry! Yet if not aesthetically, he poetises to present a particular grammar of our being, the way in which things should be made relative to each other:

I know, but only in part; yet I shall know even as I am now fully known.

This is part of Paul’s famous “love” chapter, more often heard at weddings than funerals – which is to say that it is easily sentimentalised. But Paul is never sentimental. He writes to a community with a poor track record in the love stakes, and he is wrestling with the difficulty of day-to-day love in the light of the perfected love he believes God has shown: Now I know, I see, I love, only in part; then (in what we might vaguely call “the life to come”) I will know fully, in the way that I am fully loved and known by God even now in my imperfect knowing.

To leave it there would be merely to have presented some mystical subtlety, and perhaps a mystifying one, at that. But, with some work, we can bring all this home as the very heart of what makes us tick, and what has brought us together here today.

In a gathering like this it seems obvious that we focus on our knowing and seeing. We knew Suzanne and we tell the story of what we saw in her.

What is less obvious and less likely to be reflected upon is that Suzanne knew us and that, with her death, that knowledge is ended, and we are diminished. We say sometimes of those who die that they were “a part” of us. But this can be sharpened. They have sustained us in their knowledge of us and love for us.

These days, we are taught that we are free agents, active subjects, doing what we wanna do, being what we wanna be! But in reality, we are truly ourselves, not to the extent that we know and love as we would like, but to the extent that we are known and loved as we need. To put it too strongly, but also surely correctly: others’ knowledge and love of us creates us and sustains us. If you doubt this, consider a conversation with someone who has survived all his family and friends and now knows the living death of not being known, not being seen. Or perhaps ask an asylum seeker in a country which tries very hard not to see them.

If it were indeed the case that being known and loved matters as much as knowing and loving, it might turn our lives around. For it would come to be that the well-being of others rests on our knowledge of them, our love of them. Every breath we take would be less to prolong our own life than to make it possible for us to continue to enrich the lives of others. The life which is remembered at our own funeral would then be less the experiences we collected, and more our having been experienced as a source of life and love, a kind of co-creator of those who gather after our death to remember us.

We are here today because Suzanne has been such a co-creator of each of us in her knowledge and love of us, in her seeing us.

Yet we are imperfect lovers – imperfect creators – partly because love is not always easy and we would rather not, and partly because we are mortal and our capacity to love simply runs out.

St Paul wrote precisely because of this. Yet he looks forward to when we will see and love each other as God sees and loves us – comprehensively, perfectly.

To be seen in this way might feel a little creepy to us who live in an age tending towards almost ubiquitous surveillance. But to say that God sees us is not to say that God is “watching” us. God’s gaze does not monitor but sustains.

That God sees us is good news if being seen, and known, and loved, is the source of all life.

This is all the church means when it speaks of a “life to come”. With us, love and knowledge come to an end. But with God, they do not. And so, in God’s unfailing and life-giving knowledge of us, we do not end, either.

If we die, it is but the blinking of God’s eye,
and then we will be seen,
and known,
and loved
again.

Until such time, open your eyes, and see, and love.

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Lent 5
3/4/2022

Psalm 126
John 12:1-8

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In a sentence:
Jesus is given as our “whole” – our life and death, lived within God. And so we are free.

Today’s story of the anointing of Jesus by Mary is one of the most disorienting passages in the New Testament. The story confuses us because we easily identify with what Judas says, however sincere he may have been. And, in this, we stand against Jesus. Yet, we stand against Jesus because of the very things we’ve heard from him about love, self-sacrifice and “being there” for the needy. And so we find ourselves at a point of crisis: what do we owe to the poor, and what to Jesus?

One way of addressing the undecidable “Jesus or the poor?” question is to turn what we do for the poor into what we do for Jesus: “Inasmuch as you do it to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do it to me” (Matthew 25). This is an important part of Christian theology and ethics, but it doesn’t seem to be what is said to us through the story we’ve heard this morning. Jesus delineates starkly between himself and the poor as beneficiaries: you always have them; you do not always have me. There is here an impossible “either/or”.

The fact that this feels like a moral conflict should signal a warning. Morality anxiety is about justification, and moral resolutions present us with the attractive possibility of self-justification. If we can resolve how Jesus can justify Mary’s extravagance, we have guidance for determining the limits of our own acts of devotion and mercy. Our questions here seek to understand whether we can or must do the same as Mary did. We are anxious for the secret of making the right decision and knowing it to be right.

But we will not find such a secret in Mary’s anointing of Jesus, for there is no anxiety here (or perhaps only Judas or, in another version of the story [Luke 10.38-42], Martha, is anxious). Indeed, we know very little of Mary’s motivations, although we imagine that she is the one with whom we are to identify in the story. Yet, whatever is going on for her, it is only as Jesus himself interprets the anointing that what she does finds unexpected justification: “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”

With this comes a shift from our moral dilemma with its contrast of what the poor need and what Jesus needs, to a comparison of what the poor do not have and what the disciples will soon not have. And now we come to the scandal of the text itself, which is not the one that usually bothers us: “You do not always have me” – the disciples’ impending loss of Jesus – is more important than the other “not haves” in the world. Or, more specifically: the death of Jesus is more important than all other deaths.

This will bring us to something John’s gospel does not say but might have said. The Jesus of John’s gospel is full of “life”. The gospel begins with, “In him was life…” (1.4). Just prior to this morning’s episode, Jesus declares, “I am the resurrection and the life” (11.25). Before that, “I have come that they might have life, in all its fullness” (10.10). Later in the gospel, we hear, “I am the way, the truth and the life” (14.6). Life is presented in this gospel as being at the heart of what Jesus is or brings.

And yet, in the anointing at Bethany we have something else assigned to Jesus: death itself. The gospel declares, “You imagine you know life”, but then invites, “Look at Jesus”. In the same way, today’s story says: “You imagine you know death, but look at Jesus”. The true scandal of this text is not the wilful extravagance that sees a year’s wages spent in a matter of moments, which we are not sure we could justify. The scandal is instead that the death (“burial”) of Jesus warrants such extravagance. What justifies Mary’s prodigal act is that it points to Jesus’ death. If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it is that this testimony takes precedence over our actions and concerns for the world. Pointing to the death of Jesus matters more than pointing to all other deaths we experience and might respond to.

This is, undoubtedly, one of the most shocking things in the New Testament – perhaps the most shocking. Imagine, for example, how our expectations of a funeral might change if not the death of the deceased, but the death of Jesus, were the most important thing to consider there. Imagine, indeed, what our lives might then look like.

To say that Jesus’ death is the most important of all deaths is to say that his death is not representative of some “class” of death we experience. It is not the death of the innocent, or the death of the zealot or agitator. It is not death by accident or misunderstanding, or the death of the infirm or elderly. It is not the death of a scapegoat or a sacrifice. His is not a death like ours.

Jesus’ death is not “a” death but death itself.

A lot of people – including in the church – have a problem with the language of the resurrection, and this is understandable. To understand the first proclamation of the resurrection you really need to be a reforming first century Jewish apocalpyticist, which most of us are not. And so resurrection language quickly muddies the waters hereabouts.

But the gospel point can also be proclaimed with reference to Jesus’ death, which we think we can better understand. We can demote resurrection language somewhat by focussing on Jesus’ death as the defining death of us all. He defines death, not because his death was particularly ghastly, but because of what death on a cross represents. Crucifixion was an intentional casting-out of the victim by his executioners, and an invitation to God also to cast the crucified one out. Crucifixion has the social, religious and political intention of being the mother of all deaths.

And this is precisely what Jesus says his death is when he contrasts his death with the living deaths of others: those deaths are always with you, but I am not. My death is different.

To take up the resurrection from this perspective, we can now say that to believe in the resurrection of Jesus is to believe in his death. We don’t believe in his death by forcing ourselves to accept some sacrificial economy by which Jesus is “payment” securing our relationship to God. To believe in the death of Jesus is to identify with it – to see it as my own death. There, I am crucified, I who fret over what is mine versus what is yours, over what God wants versus what I want; I who fret over worship versus mission, over when I’ve done enough and when I am justified in stopping. Or, we might say, I who am lost in the struggle between life and death. The effect of this struggle is that of being lost, of having no firm foundation, no sure reference point.

Jesus’ death is not so much the cessation of his heart’s beating. It is more the death of the lost: the death which is rejection, separation, loneliness, desolation and invisibility – and all this finally, even before God. This is the death that springs from Judas-like arrogance and hubris, fear and loathing, self-delusion and ignorance. Jesus’ death, then, is what we all experience in ourselves and cause in others. Densely put, Jesus’ death comprehends us.

This means that what we do – our life and death – is now caught up in what God does – the life and death of Jesus. We are not one story but two: our own and, with that, the story of Jesus. Growing in grace is the process of the life and death and life of Christ coming to take shape in our lives and deaths.

To make this a little more tangible, we can say that growing in grace is learning to let go of our breath. In anxiety, we hold our breath – literally and metaphorically – waiting to see what will happen next. Judas gasps at what Mary does, her pouring out her life’s work for no apparent benefit. To grow in grace is to release our breath, to release our spirit. This is, literally, to ex‑spire to “out spirit” (Latin: ex‑spiritus, “out-spirit”). We can only breathe out, or ex‑pire, with confidence if we expect then to breathe in again – literally if we expect to to in‑spire, “in‑spirit” again (Latin: in-spiritus, “in-spirit”).

What else could resurrection be but this? Now, in our daily ex‑pirings and in‑spirings, and in the last day, when all creaturely ex‑piry is met with God’s in‑spiry? When we see no longer through a glass, darkly, but face to face: the life and death of Jesus made ours, con‑spiriters with him?

None of this solves our dilemma about “what to do”, when that question presents itself to us. But if what we have considered together this morning is true, then what we do matters less than we imagine.

Leave her alone, Jesus says to the torn, anxious, gasping Judas in us all, for she has seen my death and my life, and she can breathe out so because she sees that, whatever happens next, all will be well – all manner of things will be well.

A much-improved version of a sermon
preached at MtE, March 13, 2016!