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Christmas Day
25/12/2020

Isaiah 9:2-7
Psalm 96
Luke 2:1-20

In a sentence
The defining ‘this’ which is the context of our lives is not what is now happening to us but Jesus himself: we are all in him together

In this most unexpected of years, we have worked up a full oratorio of choruses and chants around the theme of Covid-19. One of the most happily sung among these has been, ‘We’re all in this together’.

By this refrain we remind each other that a virus is indiscriminate, so that we can’t tell who will be next. For it not to be me who is next, I have to act so that you are not next. ‘We’re all in this together’ means that we must cooperate ‘to get through it’. The good sense in this is obvious enough to most of us, and not particularly surprising.

Perhaps less obvious is that we don’t usually tell ourselves, ‘We are all in this together’. Most of the time, we are not ‘in this together’; most of the time we don’t recognise much we have in common ‘to get through’. We are usually – at least on the larger social scale – not ‘in this together’ but rather competing against each other. We compete for university placements, for partners, for jobs, for parking spaces. Colonists compete with indigenous peoples. New refugees compete with old refugees. Cities compete with rural communities. Nations compete with nations. The poor compete with the slightly less poor. Not so long ago, competition was especially fierce around toilet paper, which was unexpectedly revealed to be one of the previously unrecognised cornerstones of modern society. The church, of course, is scarcely immune to this infection.

Competition is not quite everywhere, of course. There’s a little less of it between friends and lovers and within the household, and we are sometimes startled by acts of kindness outside those safety zones. Yet, like our vulnerability to a virus, we are all also nevertheless continually subject to the struggle of all against all (Hobbes, Leviathan).

More insidiously than with a virus, however, we are not merely subject to competition; we also participate in it. A better strategy – or perhaps just the good fortune of having won more often before – sees me step up to bid the highest at the auction for my new home. Getting up earlier sees me at the front of the line on the Boxing Day sales, like gladiators who’ve trained hard to earn a longer sword or wider net. If I work harder, I might pick more bulls than bears, winning more from the losses of others.

Curiously, the virus has made the well-being of the usual winners dependent upon the well-being of the typical losers. Universal cooperation has displaced competition for a while. But competition again lurks around the corner: Who has the best vaccine? And who will pay for it? Who should get it first? And is it, perhaps, best, if others have it first, ‘just in case’? Calculation and strategy in the game of life, all oriented towards not losing.

Outside of the immediate space of Covid-19 and similar ‘war footings’, we are not much ‘in this together’ because, in a world of winners and losers, what you are ‘in’ can be very different from what I am ‘in’. The only thing we are really in together is the competition itself and those social, political and legal conventions which legitimate how society operates and so are powerless to alter it.

If this account sounds rather pessimistic, it matters today in this place because our not being ‘all in this together’ is scarcely new While, in some respects, Augustus, Quirinius, Joseph and Mary, and Rome, Syria, and Bethlehem are thousand of years and miles away, we still recognise many aspects of their stories. An imperial census is an emperor in competition with his people. To hear that ‘there was no room in the inn’ is to know that Joseph and Mary were in that race but lost. There is nothing new under the sun.

In the midst of all that is ‘the child’, strangely anonymous among the names of other persons and places around him. We have learned what his name will be (1.31) but he is yet to receive it (2.21). All around this child, of course, swirls the language of salvation but this also is strange to us today, for what is it from which we would be saved – from which we would all be saved? Do winners need to be saved? To have won is to imagine that God’s kingdom has already come. If around this child there were a universally relevant message of salvation, it would offer salvation from something to which we are all subject. The virus is an obvious candidate but we don’t need a god to do what will probably happen with time anyway.

A more likely thing from which we might be saved at Christmas is the struggle of all against all which creates winners and losers. Salvation is salvation from such things as this. It is not that competition does not touch Jesus. The religious authorities see in him a serious opponent. The poor jostle for access to his healing hand and his disciples calculate for positions of honour in his kingdom or for time to sit at his feet. His family competes with the crowds for his attention. Even on the cross, those with whom he is crucified compete for his attention.

Yet, for all of this, Jesus is himself no competitor. His success does not hinge on another’s failure. He is ‘in this together’ with us, but does not contribute to the struggle even as he is subject to it. Of itself, this might be a remarkable moral achievement but the morality is not the point. It is good for Jesus if he has lived fully without taking advantage of others but bad for us if we are, therefore, to achieve the same.

We sometimes speak about the ‘God with us’ of Christmas in this way – as if God comes to show us the way, and we are to follow. This is a little better than the account of a God who comes among us as a kind of comforter, more or less to suffer with us, but not much better. Certainly, salvation is not something more for us to do.

We get to something more helpful if we take up again the Covid chorus, ‘We’re all in this together’ but sing it now with a very different meaning. Now the ‘this’ is not some passing condition like the health crisis or the next ‘affects everybody’ moment but Jesus himself: ‘we are all in this – this one – together.

Jesus is now not an answer to whatever question we happen at the moment to think is the most important. Rather, Jesus now poses a question about our fundamental situation: What is the context which truly defines us? What is our true condition?

The answer of Christmas – of the gospel itself – is that we are most ‘in’ Jesus himself, and not this or that passing experience, however pressing, painful or exciting it may be. It often does not feel this way. Pain and excitement are highly distracting. In each case, we mistake what hurts us or excites us as immediate – as direct, as sheer us-and-it.

But if our true context is not what is happening in front of us but all these things in God-in-Jesus, then he becomes something like an underlying harmony to everything which happens. Those we love – and sometimes lose – are not ‘immediately’ ours, not ‘directly’ ours. They are mediated by Christ, they are ‘in’ Christ, just as we are. If this is true, they are never solely ours because they belonged first to Jesus, and they are never lost to us because they remain in him, as we do.

It is so with all things. Jesus is given as the theme which threads through and holds together every key, every melody and discord. ‘We are all in this together’ locates us not in some particular time or place, some particular condition or crisis. The ‘this’ is Jesus himself: we are all in this one together.

This is to say that what happens to him is what happens to us. What happens to Jesus is God himself – ever calling, ever-present, ever restoring. Christmas is not so much a divine rescue mission as a radical clarification of who and where we are: children of God in Jesus, from God and towards God.

To believe this is to be freed from the drive to compete for as much life as we can win. And it is to be opened up to one another and to God, in all things, in thanksgiving and praise.

May such openness and praise be ours today, and always.

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Advent 3
13/12/2020

Isaiah 61:1-4,8-11
Psalm 126
John 1:6-8, 19-28

In a sentence
The shape our relationship with God takes in our time and place is ever-changing but what does not change is the possibility of that relationship and the steadfast love of God upon which it rests.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have several times to make a connection between the ‘advent’ of God – the approach of God – and what confronts us here at Mark the Evangelist concerning our buildings.

This has not been to put an argument for any particular future, although some preferred futures seem now to be closed to us. The point has been more to clarify the context in which we find ourselves. It is easy to be disoriented by the changes around us, to the extent that we respond to the wrong thing. Whatever our response to these challenges, let us at least be clear about the heart of the matter and respond to it and not to something secondary!

What is before us – to borrow from Isaiah this morning – are ‘the ancient ruins’, the ‘former devastations’ (61.4). Isaiah’s call here is to rebuild, to re-establish – something which his own people were able to do for a while, even if it doesn’t appear possible for us.

Israel’s ‘for a while’, however, is important. They finally lost also what had been rebuilt. While language of a future restoration of the city continued, it became a sign for the relationship with God which continued despite the loss of the former glory of Jerusalem and its temple. The city did not last but the prayer did, as those praying and the God to whom they prayed continued in a relationship of mutual address.

Our life with God, then, takes no predetermined or guaranteed shape. Ours is what the Uniting Church’s Basis of Union calls the condition of having no ‘continuing city’.

In our psalm today, the poet remembers, ‘When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream’ (Psalm 126). The restoration is celebrated, yet the reason for this remembering is that now the people’s mouths are no longer filled with laughter; rather, they now sow in tears, looking to reap again in joy. ‘Restore us, O Lord,’ is now their prayer.

What is constant throughout the story of God’s people is not where they are or what they are doing but the dynamic of turning away or turning towards God, perhaps even God’s own turning towards and away.

We might want to rage against this – there’s more than a little of that in the Psalms! – but whether we like it or not will not change the reality.

‘Restore us, O Lord,’ is the prayer of the people, of course, when things are not going well.

But ‘Restore us, O Lord’, should properly also be the prayer of the people when everything seems to be going very well and we are tempted to mistake good luck for divine blessing. The church has had a lot of good luck which, if read as God’s blessing, casts our present experience as God’s turning away. If that is our situation, there is nothing we can do about but pray with the psalmists, Turn back, O Lord.

But even if God is not the reason we are confronted with these challenges as a congregation – or whatever things face us in our personal lives – to know that we have no continuing city is not to have nowhere to live, it is just to be aware God takes root in a people within the sweep of history – not in a location, not in a style of being church, not even in any particular congregation.

The restoration for which the psalmist prays is a restoration to joy. Joy is a contentment which springs from the sense that our future is in God, despite what the indicators around us might be.

And if we are confident that our future is in God, then so also is our present and every step we must take towards that future.

In our personal and our corporate lives, then – indeed all things – let us take upon ourselves Isaiah’s garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit, and step with confidence into our promised future with each other, in God.

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Advent 2
6/12/2020

Isaiah 40:1-11
Psalm 85
Mark 1:1-8

In a sentence
Though our lives are fleeting, we are God’s home

Many of you will know that George Frideric Handel’s Messiah begins with the first five verses of our reading from Isaiah today:

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God…Speak tenderly to Jerusalem…make straight in the desert a highway for our God…Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low…Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.

The libretto breaks away from Isaiah for a few other quotes from the prophets before returning again to verse 9 of today’s reading:

…lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, ‘Here is your God!’

The oratorio starts where it intends to finish: with the manifestation of the glory of God.

What is interesting is what Handel – or, rather, his friend Charles Jennings, who selected the texts – leaves out. In particular, he leaps over verses 6-8 in his quotes from Isaiah:

⁶ A voice says, ‘Cry out!’ And I said, ‘What shall I cry?’ All [flesh (Heb)] is grass, its constancy is like the flower of the field. ⁷ The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the LORD blows upon it; surely the people are grass. ⁸ The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.

Those who have been part of the Old Testament study groups over this year have again and again seen that what a particular scriptural writer includes or excludes from the text speaks about what the writer assumes to be the nature of God, creation and God’s people. This is the case also for writers of non-scriptural texts, even – perhaps even especially ­– when those writings are quoting Scripture and so favouring some passages over others.

The omission of Isaiah’s stark declaration that ‘surely the people are grass’ shines a light on what Handel thinks is essential here. It would not be unreasonable to read the whole of his Messiah as a theology of glory: the God of glory comes in response to the poverty of the human being. Perhaps Handel omits those verses about the transience of human existence because he understood this poverty to be the question to which God’s power and glory is the answer. ‘Comfort, comfort my people’ – it matters not that you are grass, for God comes to heal and restore.

There must be some truth to this. A story of salvation only makes sense when there is something from which a person or people needs to be saved. Yet, whatever Handel himself may have intended, we can do better than the mere ‘power’ of God to save, and we can do this by reclaiming those few verses from Isaiah 40 which he omitted.

The term which helps here is ‘flesh’ (v.6, which is sometimes translated ‘people’, which appears in v.7): All flesh is grass, its constancy is like the flower of the field. Noting ‘flesh’ here helps because it tells us something about the glory to be manifest as the story unfolds. Of course, as Handel’s Scripture selections continue, they tell the story of an anticipated saviour who appears in the person of Jesus, is rejected, crucified and raised from the dead. Human frailty is the problem to which the providence of God, the unswerving commitment of Jesus and divine resurrecting power are the answer.

Yet, what we might miss here – and what is crucial to a specifically Christian account of God – is that transient flesh is not just the problem to which God responds; it is also the way in which God responds. God’s glorious work here – Jesus himself – is ‘made’ of grass which withers, of flowers which fade, is mere flesh.

This shifts us from a theology of glory to what we might call a theology of mystery. This mystery is that the glory of God is carried by what will wither and pass away. John’s gospel puts this together for us: the Word became flesh, and we have seen his glory (John 1.14). This glory is not in spite of the flesh; it is the presence of God in flesh, the flesh and the Word still being themselves.

It is not now a problem that all flesh is grass; it is simply just the case. The mystery – the wonder – hidden here is that God bothers at all with what is transient. The mystery is that what is transient actually matters in any way to God. The fleeting blooms and fadings of the world – including ourselves – are not something God overcomes. God embraces the transient world. The mystery of our existence is that the withering and fading world merits the interest of God – that we might be right to imagine that we really matter.

A theology of glory which focusses on God’s power to save begins with the fading flower’s own concern to be beautiful again. The question, ‘Who can save me from this body of death?’, desperately seeks an answer. Fading is the problem to which restoration is the solution. We decide – on our own terms – that we matter, and we look to God to ‘condescend’ to make a difference.

But that coming-along-side which is God’s drawing near to us ought to surprise us more. For it is not God ‘visiting’ us but God coming home, the shepherd finding his truth in the sheep.

This matters in our personal and corporate lives. Personally, a theology of mystery – a faith which holds that this is a God of small things – allows the small to be small, allows the plain and the mundane their share in God’s glory. Being – sheer being ‘here’, doing what we do –has its proper glory. Other visions of what is glorious – especially when we think they are divinely inspired – can reduce to a mere shadow the glory of God. The crucifixion of the Lord of glory is the proof of this: a distorted human perception of glory washing out the mysterious presence of God in the humility of Jesus.

Corporately, the same dynamic applies. As we consider our lot here at Mark the Evangelist and the challenges our property has presented to us, we see the glory of the church of days gone by, and it matters to us that we no longer reflect that glory. Our future will be, on such a scale, rather humbler.      Will it, then, be any less glorious? Some may think so, within the church and without. But the glory to which we are called is that of obedience and faithfulness; there is no promise about the future other than that God will be there, as a shepherd is present to his flock.

There is indeed glory in the story of God’s people, in the story of God’s Christ – Handel is right here, and we are right to join in on the choruses with gusto!

Yet is it a genuinely mysterious glory, which merits also hushed tones. It sees divine strength through human weakness. It finds signs of God in oppressed peoples, in refugees, in the hungry and the imprisoned. The glory of God is not a power wielded from above us to lift us up but a power exercised within us to fill us out – us and all the world. As one of the early teachers of the church put it – God becomes flesh that flesh might become divine.

This is God’s promise, wherever we find ourselves. All flesh is grass, and that is enough.

If we believe this promise, ours is the freedom to step boldly into whatever future might await us.

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Advent 1
29/11/2020

Isaiah 64:1-9
Psalm 80
Mark 13:24-37

In a sentence
Faith perceives that God is the heart of all we desire, and trusts that God will realise this God-shaped longing

With a passion strange to many of us, the prophet cries to God: Come, save, restore. ‘O that you would tear open the heavens and come down’ (64.1). ‘Save us, Lord, from our enemies’ (64.2), ‘save us from ourselves’ (64.5).o

The implication in that cry, of course, is that God is absent, or has turned away, or hidden Godself from the people (64.5,7). This being the case, we are alone. More than just alone, we are stalled until God should be revealed again, until the sky which divides heaven and earth is torn and not so much God’s will as our own desire for healing is met on earth, when heaven comes to restore us.

The prophet expresses deep longing, deep guilt, utter helplessness and confident hope in our text today. If we seek honesty in our own lives, we might learn from him here. For we are those for whom it is easy to shake off responsibility or take it on too seriously. We are those for whom it is easy to fall into despair or to entertain dreams and visions of utopian futures we can’t achieve but which we will at least pursue until they crush us or others. The prophet expresses the complexity of living into the next step when it cannot be the same as the step we have just taken and we can’t know it is the right step but doing the right thing is at stake.

This challenge is beginning to press in on us here at Mark the Evangelist as we come to the conclusion of a long period of reflection on what to do about the condition of some of our buildings here in North Melbourne. The conclusion to which the church council has come is that we cannot sustain our presence here and that, by implication, the sale of the property is the next big step in the life of the congregation. We might well pray at this point ‘O that you would tear open the heavens, Lord, and fix this all up for us.’

If we were ask of Isaiah what to do here, part of the answer would be that we understand our situation. The prophet knows what the people are able – and not able – to do. We too need to get our heads and our hearts around this. The work done over the last 7 years, in particular, has been oriented towards such an understanding. For those of us who prefer the future to be rather like the past, the outlook is not good. Yet, it is also seemingly unavoidable. We do ourselves no favours in denying this, in laying blame, or in simply ‘wishing’ it were not so and hiding ourselves away. We would trivialise the experience of those people in exile to whom Isaiah wrote if we compared our lot to theirs but it is similar at least in the sense that neither staying where we are nor going back are options for us.

In some respects, this aspect of our situation is easy: we can’t purchase what we can’t afford and so – to the extent that our future is about what we can afford – we must ‘buy’ something other than these buildings. There seems to be no decision required here as to whether we can extend our past at Curzon Street into a future at Curzon Street; that looks to be more or less determined for us by the balance sheets. We must ‘simply’ understand that this is the case and, by the grace of God, become reconciled to it.

There will be disappointment here but we mustn’t let it wither into cynicism. The cynic is frozen in her disappointment and in the dream which is now lost. In contrast, the prophet expresses no cynicism but rather hope – remembering the surprise God has been to the people in times past. He looks forward to God’s coming and a new future for the people by looking back to when God ‘did awesome deeds we did not expect’ (64.3). In the same way, the church looks forward to God’s future presence by looking back to God’s having already come. Advent is not about God still being on the way, as if God is now very, very much overdue. Advent is a season of Easter and so Advent remembers a coming of God which gathers up all divine arrivals, past and future.

How God comes to the world is shown in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. This means that Isaiah’s prayer in our text today can be read as pointing towards Jesus, although not quite in the way of ‘foretelling’ something yet to come. For it is also the case that every prayer for the coming of God uttered since Jesus points back to him as a kind of ‘reverse prophecy’. It is, then, perhaps better to say that God’s presence to the world in Jesus points back to Isaiah, and forward to us, and beyond us into the future which awaits us. As Isaiah puts it – what we think we see and hear and perceive is always this God (64.4).

This shift – that God is the deepest desire in all our desires – shifts us radically in our perception of our situation. We can no longer allow that our circumstances dictate who we are; we are not our buildings, we are not the way-we-have-always-done-it; the church is more than her comfort zones, more than we have yet heard, perceived, seen.

This is to discover that there is nothing radically new in what confronts us now at Mark the Evangelist. It might be disappointing, it is certainly inconvenient and will most likely be more hard work but, in the light of the gospel, it is not new. We are reminded here that we are – and properly have always been – clay in the potter’s hand, the work of God, and not the work of our own hands, as much as we have come to love that work.

If this is the case – if there is nothing radically new in what confronts us – then we are not deciding to divest property with the sense of loss that might entail but deciding towards the God we do not yet perceive, have not yet seen or heard but who we believe to be the mystery of all that we are.

By the grace of God, it may perhaps become the case not so much that we ‘have to’ sell all our buildings but that we want to, for we long to see a little less darkly through the glass which obscures our vision of God, and of our true selves.

This is the God who shakes yesterday’s foundations – the foundations of good order – by raising from the dead a crucified blasphemer and identifying himself with one who had no place to rest his head except against God’s own heart.

It is the beating of that heart which raises the dead. It is the beating of that heart which, Isaiah has seen, causes mountains to shake (64.1-3). And it is the beating of God’s heart which causes also the shaking of the foundations of God’s own church(!). God has done this.

This means that what lies ahead of us at Mark the Evangelist is what was ahead of those who built this place right back at the start: an opportunity to see God tear open the heavens by tearing open us and our history, revealing where God has been among us and assuring us that God will be in our midst in whatever happens next.

It is simply for us, in a spirit of communion with God and with each other, to pray though our working together: come, Lord; excite, open up, tear heaven and earth and piece them together in a new creation, even us.

God can, and wills, to do this. And so we have nothing to fear.

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Reign of Christ
22/11/2020

Daniel 12:1-4a
Psalm 100
Ephesians 1:15-23
Matthew 25:31-46

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

It is fitting on this last Sunday in the Liturgical year that each of our readings should be about ‘endings’. But a warning. The nuances that the word ‘end’ throws up are crucial. One meaning of ‘end’ is that of a simple chronological termination. The parable of the sheep and the goats is certainly an end in just this sense, coming as it does for Matthew as the concluding words of the teaching of Jesus.

But there is another, and much more significant, sense of the word ‘end’. And that is, ‘end’ as the disclosure of ultimate meaning, a final illumination. Such is this parable. But we will soon discover that it will be only an apparent ultimate disclosure. We say ‘apparent’ because we will confront a dramatic reconfiguring of the precarious status of the sheep and the goats when the next three chapters unfold.

I fear that if your experience is anything like mine you will have heard in your lifetime any number of sermons on this text. Perhaps some were not as edifying as they might have been. This is a text much loved by preachers and even by secular humanists as a piece of ethical teaching urging concern for victims of famine and other oppression – food, drink, clothing, prison visits and the like.  We are at home here, and God forbid that we should deny their necessity for the needy, even though we surely do not need any persuasive text for such altruism.

But the problem is that this is not the real concern of the parable. Rather, its point is to establish that in the unlikely figure of Jesus, the accredited precursor of a final judgment of all history is being revealed. This is why we hear that “all the nations” shall be gathered before him, and “he will separate, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats…” We might take cheerful note in passing of what may well escape us: that it is the nations who are being separated, not individuals.

Perhaps it all becomes clearer when we take account of a text composed some two hundred years earlier than our parable – the book of Daniel, which is chronologically one of the last books of the Hebrew scriptures to be written. Since Matthew is writing a gospel for Jewish, not Gentile, Christians, he finds this text of Daniel to be inescapable, anticipating as it does the decisive end point of Israel’s chequered history. So, Daniel writes:

“At the time of the end, many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt”. For Matthew, ‘sheep and goats’ puts an earthy spin on this ambiguous horizon.

Assisted by our parable, some later unrepentant Christian theology continued to endorse this original Old Testament ‘fall of the curtain’. It called this divisive allocation a ‘double predestination’: the ushering in of a final determination of those who are ‘in’ and those who are ‘out’. The point, however, is that although Matthew retains this dual destiny, he understands that this hitherto predicted time of the end is about to take place in a quite unanticipated way.

Matthew’s first modification of Daniel’s expectation is to assert that ‘the end’ will not be a separation beyond history; it will be decided in the present everyday time and place of mundane food, drink, clothing, visitation. To this end, the entire human community frolic in this apparently disarming rural sheep and goats environment. The imagery of the parable is seductive. During the daytime, sheep and goats are all mixed. But in the evening light, even though sheep are white and goats are black, they are indistinguishable to every onlooker – except of course to the Shepherd. The parable obviously intends to confuse all of us. We are all equally indistinguishable in the living of our lives. Which is why, incidentally, the same Matthew’s Jesus tells us to our healing: “Judge not that you be not judged”. The point is that, for Matthew, the bewildering fate of sheep and goats has become an illustration of Daniel’s life or death ‘last day awakening’.  But now there is a specific criterion: acceptance or rejection in the present of all that Jesus has been, and has taught, in his ministry.

The tragedy is that generations have turned all this into ‘a Last Judgement’ at the day of individual death. In Medieval times its accompanying grotesque imagery of flames and pitchforks has rightly ceased to be at all compelling. It is equally plausible that even ‘judgement’ as a concept has now met the same contemporary demise. At the very least, it is almost certain that, when we hear the word ‘judgement’, we are likely to have in mind imagery which takes its origin from the world of the ancient Greeks, by way of Egypt.  What did these ancients believe? They thought of judgement awaiting life’s end as a set of scales, weighing up the good and the bad.  So powerful is this image that it is difficult for us not to imagine that Jesus is offering the same fate at the end – pass or fail, sheep or goat. This is scarcely good news! Who knows which side of the balance will carry the day? Have I done enough? Am I a sheep or am I goat, or perhaps even more poignantly, is he or she a sheep or a goat?

Jesus certainly concludes his teaching with division.  But see how our notion of judgement is about to be transformed as the next three chapters unfold when, from this point on, we travel with this ‘teacher of the end’ on the way to his end at Golgotha.

And with just this emerging catastrophe, we come to the second and crucial modification of the end which Matthew employs. For it is in what is about to unfold in Jerusalem that true judgement will be enacted, remembering that the word Jerusalem means ‘vision of peace’. Not with the Greeks, at some uncertain human end, not even with our imperfect distribution of food, drink and clothing. But right there, and right now!

Who would have supposed that two planks of wood will replace a set of scales as the instrument of judgement? And that the One hanging on it will be the same Judge of the parable – who is now himself here being judged? And that means: judged in our place; a king of the nations crowned – with all their thorns – on a cross. A Son of man coming to sit on this throne; glory camouflaged as helplessness; an end, inaugurating a new beginning.

What is being revealed here is not only that shepherd and sheep have become one, but – even more inconceivable – that on this despicable ‘throne’, the Lamb of God has effectively been transformed into – of all things – a goat. And with this transformation, only here, and only now, will the word ‘judgement’ usher in a radically ‘other’ world – now not a dark, threatening, future world of an individual ‘in or out’ or ‘up or down’ destiny, but a shining world of cosmic forgiveness, the Easter of creation for all the nations, the final restoration of all things.

In a few minutes we will be invited to confess together these words in the Creed: “He will come in glory to judge the living and the dead”. What image will you entertain? Will you see a set of scales, or will it be two pieces of timber?  That is to say, will you have rejoiced that hanging there all double predestination weighed on a set of scales is over and done with? That in the crucified Christ this single judgement to life has already been enacted?

Centuries ago the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, stretched out our history’s protracted interval between ‘then’ and ‘now’ when he proposed that “Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world”. This arresting declaration simply affirms this one predestination to life, now moved back from some insecure future beyond – precisely in order to hang everything for all time with the crucified One as the Judge judged in our place: on a death that brings life; forgiveness for the healing of all the nations; a crucified Lamb for the sake of all goats.

The truth is that most people today have no idea what it is to be Christian – not only because they stop reading at Chapter 25 with Jesus “the teacher”, but, even more disastrously, because the Greeks have won. So, let this last day of the Christian calendar speak to us all. It says simply this. The whole journey which began at Advent, now coming to a close, has been about getting rid of Greek judgement. To this end, and to mix the metaphor, let ‘scales’ literally fall from our eyes as we take today’s Epistle to heart. And as a prayer of the Church, may it become not simply a domestic petition, but a universal intercession on behalf of the fractured – already judged – nations of our world:

“I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ will give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the (founded) hope to which he has called you.”