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Easter 6
25/5/2025

Psalm 67
John 2:13-22

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The housing crisis will likely kill us all (a thought to which I will return!).

The housing crisis in Australia featured as one of the central issues in our recent federal election, with the major parties making the kinds of funding promises they hope voters will not recognise are likely to make matters worse.

My interest today is not to propose any solution to the problem, but to unpack a bit how we think about this (and other) challenges we face. I remarked a moment ago that this was “a” central issue in the lead-up to the election. Putting the matter this way might be the real problem: that we think this to be a single issue, treatable in isolation from other pressing concerns which we think about in the same, isolated kind of way.

How might we think about this differently, speak the problem in a new way?

It has long been observed that there are things which can be said in one language that are difficult to say in another. This is sometimes the motivation people have for learning different languages: books are different in their original languages, and we can even find that we are ourselves different when we speak a language other than mother’s tongue.

With respect to the housing crisis, it would help us to speak a little Greek. In fact, we need just one Greek word – a word buried in a group of English words that designate the biggest challenges we face not only as a society with a cost-of-housing problem but also as humankind as a whole. That little Greek word is oikos, which means “house” (not surprisingly!). In the English words of interest today, the Greek oikos has morphed into the letters E-C, which form the first part of economy, ecology, and ecumenism. These are, more literally, oikonomy, oikology, and oikumenism. Literally, they mean something like the rule (Greek nomos) of the house, the plan (Greek logos) of the house, and the house inhabited (Greek menō, “abide” – etymology guessed).

This is to say that what we call “the housing crisis” is connected to the biggest crises pressing in on us: the perpetual financial crises of our economy, our looming eco-environmental challenges, and ecumenism (generalised from its narrow ecclesial application to local social and wider geo-political relationships). These are all “housing” issues, having to do with where, how and with whom we live.

The house, understood most generally as the space we inhabit, is fundamental to human being. And each house is related to or within every other house, so that any “housing crisis” is a crisis of how we are connected to our systems of production and exchange, our environment, and our social and political relationships. The scarcity of resources, the rising seas, and the wars that threaten to kill us are all “housing” crises. We can’t house ourselves locally because we can’t live appropriately in the broad inhabited world.

And this brings us, finally, to our text from John’s Gospel today: “Zeal for my Father’s house”. This is a classic Gospel text. On an “obvious” reading, the point seems to be, Don’t make the temple into a place for exchange which takes advantage – money-changing, profit-making and rent-seeking. This is a “holy” place, within which only certain words and actions are appropriate.

Those of us who know the story well also know well this understanding of its meaning. But it’s much less helpful a reading than it first seems. This is because it fails to take the next step to ask, Well, where should the money-changing, profit-making, and rent-seeking take place? Is God less annoyed about rapacious economics outside the temple than inside of it?

This is to ask, what does “my Father’s house” refer to? Does the demand for sanctity and holiness relate only to the temple, to the partitioned “religious” space? Does the contaminating marketplace within the temple threaten God with a housing crisis, displacing God from the “holy” place? Or does God have a broader accommodation than this, outside the temple as well as inside?

This bumps us out of mere moral thinking. Moral thinking is always about location in time or space – what I do when or where. Our text today seems to pose a moral question of the “where” kind: what can I do in the temple? An example of the “when” dimension of morality is the prohibition of adultery: No, you can’t have sex with him/her/them when you’re married to someone else (cf. Romans 7.1-3). Morality divides the world into different times and places.

To imagine the temple to be one place and the world to be another is to say there are different moralities operating in those two spaces. This is the problem with the standard reading of the cleansing of the temple, and why the housing crisis will probably kill us all. We imagine that Jesus’ attack upon the temple is about where God lives and what is required when in the presence of God, as if there were places where God is not present. The holy oikos (house) doesn’t really touch upon the wider oikonomy, oikology or oikumenics which constitute the rest of our lives.

And so also for the housing crisis: we treat it as if what has precipitated the crisis in affordability and availability of an oikos is different from the wider economic, ecological and ecumenical crises. But recognising the “house-ness” which operates across the whole of our being makes all places the “same”: all connected, all affecting each other, all sharing in the same problematic.

We don’t have enough houses to live in because we don’t live appropriately in the one house we’ve been given: this world with its exchanges and communities and environment. There are money changers, profit-makers and rent-seekers in God’s worldwide temple. Honesty requires that we admit that we are often enough these ourselves. We are a house divided against itself, and so there are not enough houses. This is the heart of our housing crisis: the assumption that my house has nothing to do with yours, that God’s house is just another building on the street, that the many spaces of the world are more important in their difference than the one space we co-inhabit.

While Jesus’ attack, then, looks to be focussed only on a single place, it has to do with everything, everywhere, all at once. This is not zeal “for my Father’s house” but zeal for my Father’s world. And this is what will get him killed.

And us, too. If – to moderate slightly my sensationalist headline – the housing crisis per se won’t kill us, we will all die in the midst of a housing crisis, whatever Mr Albanese or anyone else manages to achieve, because our economic problems are ecumenical and ecological ones: we don’t know how to live together with justice and peace.

I remarked to some colleagues recently that my preaching seems to be getting a bit “darker” as time goes on. By this, I mean that I’m increasingly aware of the risk of saying stupid things – stupid in the sense of not taking reality seriously. Faith and unfaith alike too often happily skate along sentimental surfaces as if the ice were not paper-thin and the world below not dark and cold. Faith, at least, should not do this; let us leave that to those who believe lesser things.

But political pessimism about what we might be able to achieve is what the gospel would call realism: God’s house – the world – has been made a marketplace, the abundance of the earth has been filtered through the economics of scarcity, and our common humanity has morphed into a competition for survival.

The bad news of the gospel is that the one through whom the world came into being as God’s own home has himself come into the world and been rejected. This is God’s true housing crisis: not that worldly things would push God out of the temple, but that the world itself refuses to be God’s temple. And so God is pushed out of the temple of the world onto a cross. The bad news of the gospel is that our homelessness unhomes God.

The good news of the gospel – as John’s Gospel puts it – is that God claims the cross as a crown (cf. Joh 12.32); even here, homeless, God reigns. There is no pushing God out of the world because there is no “outside” of the world; there is only God, in whom all things have their being in God (1.3).

And so the resurrection has to happen, because God insists that the world continue as God’s own home, because God insists that even at our lowest ebb – the crucifixion of Christ – we know ourselves as God’s own.

God insists on being light in the darkness, life in the midst of death, home for the homeless.

One light,

one life,

one home

for one family in God.

God’s zeal is for this.

Let our zeal be for the same.

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Easter 5
18/5/2025

Acts 11:1-18
Psalm 148
John 13:31-35

Sermon preached by Elika Schaumkel

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When I crossed the familiar shores of Tonga to embrace a new land, I felt like a small canoe sailing great, uncharted waters. Being a fisherman’s daughter, the ocean was my heritage and teacher. My father didn’t just talk to us about the sea, which was for him both a source of livelihood and a lifelong lesson in adapting to the elements and accepting any fate they brought. The ocean has no fences, it invites all who would dare to sail upon it, he used to say. Trust its size; it reflects God’s infinite love.

This knowledge conditioned me for the uncertain, instructing me to share my heart with new circumstances and individuals. Just like the ocean allows all rivers to its embrace; when we love and hold others in our hearts without questioning, we transcend the shackles of unfamiliarity and fear. This acceptance voyage mirrors the course that the early church had to chart, as God guided them to an ever-greater embrace of humanity.

During easter season is a time to reflect and rejoice as we ponder the triumph of Christ over the grave and the life-changing impact of His resurrection. Today, as we reflect on Acts 11:1-18 and John 13:31-35, I wish to draw our attention to the word “Acceptance” a theme that shines through the two passages: “Acceptance” and its deep relationship to the kind of love Jesus is reminding us to embody and to cross all the “boundaries” that have kept us away from one another.

Peter also talks about a visionary experience from God that had caused him to violate Levitical law by eating with non-Jews (Acts 11:1-18). His divine vision, though it contradicted his cultural and religious mores, also was the means to introducing him to God’s larger story of acceptance into his people. The way that Peter is led to Cornelius, a gentile centurion, and the coming of the Holy Spirit, is the story of how a human centre can switch from exclusion to inclusion. Initially, it was resisted by the Jewish believers, but it was the door thrown open wide to the Gentiles.

In John’s Gospel (13:31-35), after Judas’ exit from the Last Supper, Jesus addresses his disciples regarding the extent of his love and his glorification through the cross. He gives

them a “new command”: “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” Jesus makes love the distinctive badge of his followers and holds them to a standard of acceptance and mutual caring.

The Acts and John passages focus on this revolutionary idea of love and acceptance. Its acceptance in Acts is reflected when Peter himself realises God’s love does not play favourites. This was an important step in transcending cultural and religious barriers to include all in the family of God as demonstrated in the baptism of Cornelius and his family.

In Jesus, love becomes the commandment, the basis of a community built and defined by self-giving. The love of Jesus demonstrated by his sacrifice, sets a pattern for us, both in how we treat people and in what we tolerate.

Today, these references invite us to reconsider our borders and openness to others. In a world so often defined by social barriers and cultural chasms, we should seriously consider if our congregations reflect this radical hospitality modelled by the first generations of God’s people. Acceptance is not passive, and it is not tolerance; acceptance is engaging in approaches to destroy the walls of racism, religion, and culture.

Acts challenges to welcome those who are different from us, calling us to see God’s presence in the development of relationships. But for us to get out over the walls we’ve built, and to recognise that others are created by God in the same form as we are, as Peter recognised that about Cornelius, we must be willing to break the limits of our comfort zones, and to trust God is with us in the journey.

John is urging us to love as deeply and genuinely as Christ himself does – love that moves, forgives, and unites. Both as a church and as individuals; are we willing to make friends in these uncomfortable places?”

The good news in both passages is that God’s love is always bigger and wider and deeper… and more amazing than we think it is. The Resurrection gave the apostles the power and it gives us the same power to tear down dividing walls. In love and acceptance, we do actually ‘obey’ Jesus’ command and manifest God’s kingdom here on earth. Both Peter’s vision and Jesus’ command expose a divine acceptance, revealing a God who is actively reaching towards every human heart.

As we absorb these truths, I invite you to ponder on these urgent questions:

• How can we actively work to break down prejudices that impede acceptance?
• Are we willing to be like Peter, ready to stretch past our culture and religion and welcome others?
• How can we make sure our love stays vibrant, sacrificial, and reflective of Christ’s example?

Perhaps by opening our hearts as wide as God’s embrace, love all people and welcome them, and declare that we will break down any boundaries from now on through radical love. Let us be an Easter people who practice revolutionary love, living our faith as one that beholds the divine even in the eyes of others.

Amen.

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Easter 4
11/5/2025

John 2:13-25

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Our life begins again with the cold, hard love of God. (I’ll come back to this! )

“Many believed in his name because they saw the signs that he was doing.”

Is this the reason that the government of Anthony Albanese has been re-elected with such an overwhelming majority, that “many believed in his name because they saw the signs that he was doing”?

This is a half-serious question – even more than half serious! As we noted last week, ours is a world in which we are constantly seeing signs, fitting them into frameworks of meaning and determining whether or not to trust them. Despite most conviction to the contrary, “believe” and “trust” are not religious acts. They are social and political – deeply human necessities. We are always engaging with signs and committing ourselves because of them.

Of course, the dynamics of politics and voting are complex, and it’s not quite clear what signs the Prime Minister was making or how they were understood by those who voted for his government. But politics is very much about signalling: “See what we have done”, “Hear what we promise to do”.

Last Sunday, our interest was in meaning, which we took to be a matter of location. Something has meaning when it is located within the way we experience the world. The crowd in the reading placed the signs – located them – and so they placed Jesus also. And we might note here in passing the challenge the religious authorities throw at Jesus after his attack on the Temple economy: What sign can you show us for doing this? , which is, again to recall last week, a question of how Jesus “fits”.

So also with our politicians. They become meaningful for us when their signs (or at least the promise of signs) are meaningful to us and how we think the world is, or should be, or shouldn’t be.

But unlike how it works in the political system, the belief of the many in Jesus because of the signs he has been doing is balanced by Jesus’ own scepticism: “Jesus on his part would not entrust himself to them because he knew them. ” The word the Greek text uses for Jesus “trusting” himself is the same word which it uses for the crowd’s “belief” in Jesus, so that we could then translate the Greek something like this: Many believed in Jesus’ name because they saw the signs that Jesus was doing, but Jesus himself did not believe in them. That is, Jesus and the crowd disagree about the signs he is making.

Perhaps this is obvious, but less obvious is that it’s quite different from what takes place in our political processes. The politician must necessarily cast herself as one with those who have voted for her; we “believe” in her, and she implicitly believes in us. Our voters and our elected representatives agree on what the signs mean. In more extreme political systems, such as those tending towards fascism, it becomes necessary that there is an even closer identity between the political leadership and the populace than mere mutual belief and trust. Vladimir Putin is Russia, Donald Trump is America, and Viktor Orbán is Hungary. In such places, it is not so much that the opposition is excluded; it is that the opposition is unnecessary: everything is order, such is the agreement of the people and the leader, such is the mutual trust, such is the sense for the signs.

The crowd’s belief in Jesus is this type of identification, and Jesus’ unbelief in the crowd is the rejection of this identity. A little later in the story, we will hear,

When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world. ” 15 When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.            (6. 14f)

“Jesus, Jesus, he’s our man! He’ll Make Judah Great Again. ”

But crowds, of course, are fickle. The turn of the story in the Gospels testifies to this, as does the strange quiet that has doubtless descended in the kitchens of the Dutton, Bandt and Daniels households, among others. We might wonder whether the signs change, or the framework of meaning within which we try to locate them changes, or whether it’s we ourselves as interpreters who change. Whatever the case, we with our signs and meanings are highly unpredictable, and it’s here that our signings and believings part company with those of Jesus.

Because if the scriptural text expresses scepticism about our capacity to attribute meaning correctly and about our shifting allegiances, the same text nonetheless insists on God’s persistence with us. If Jesus does not believe in those who believe in him on their own terms, he nonetheless loves them.

For the many, trust and love are equated, so that we can only love those we trust. But for God, lack of trust is not grounds for lack of love.

Last week we heard that the world “did not receive him” and today that “he knew what was in everyone”. By themselves, these are dismal declarations about the human being, but only if we read them by themselves. Because the point of these observations is not to emphasise the darkness in the world but the persistence of the light: the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it (1. 5). Despite our wrong reading of the truth, still that truth persists with us. God’s unbelief – untrust – in us is no barrier to God’s active, persistent love.

And so, to emphasise out the contrast, we might risk putting it this way: God’s love is a “cold” love. If warmth describes the affection of the electors and the elected, of lovers who recognised and trust each other, then the love of God in Jesus is “cool”, cold.

But it is no less love for that coolness. Cold love is the love which comes before trust, the love which loves another despite herself, the love which is not reciprocated on love’s own terms.

Warm love generates itself out of the positive feedback of fire for fire. This is nature’s love, and it matters deeply because it’s the love that keeps the world turning, if only as a wheel on a cobblestone road.

Cold love is not natural. It is the love which is commanded.

It is the love which is not yet reciprocated and might have to suffer misunderstanding and rejection.

It is the love that persists not for its own sake, as warm love often does, but first for the sake of the beloved.

Cold love matters because warm love’s turning of the world is often cruel and towards darkness, and the fires of warm love are easily extinguished.

But it is the gospel, and it is the reason we are here today, that cold love sees and acts, persists and overcomes.

If we mistake the signs God makes, God just keeps making them. And making them. And making them.

This is love, John says elsewhere:
1 John 4. 10…not that we loved God but that God loved us.
And loved us
And loved us
with a love as hard and unwelcome as the cold of a tomb,
until the love which affronts us like death proves itself, in fact,
to be the source of life in all its fullness.

If God in Christ knows us, knows what is in us, this is not the bad news of exposure under harsh light but the good news of a love hard enough to undergo anything, durable enough to overcome anything.

Jesus comes not to condemn us but to love us, to death.

This is the cold, hard, persistent love by which our life begins again, in which we have our meaning, and with which we are sent into the world: to love as God has loved us.

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Easter 3
4/5/2025

Psalm 30
John 1:1-13

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Most of you probably noticed that I set some homework for this morning, as preparation for what I want to do with our Gospel reading for today. The homework was to look at an editorial in The Guardian on Good Friday, the editors having succumbed to the seasonal temptation to express an opinion about the Christian Easter confession.

I suspected at the time that the editorial was probably good ground for a sermon, as some of the best sermons are those that respond to silly things that seem to be entirely reasonable and rational.

Just in case “the dog ate your homework”, a quick summary: the article proposed an answer to the “ultimate question” – the meaning of life – and this for all those who can’t anymore cop the Christian answer. The problem with the article is that it doesn’t wonder about the meaning of meaning, and so it finally offers a solution which simply restates the problem.

Meaning has to do with location. This is not simply the coordinates of a thing. It is how a thing fits into what matters to us. Most of the time, our perception of what is going on around us is highly selective. We only see what matters. As you walked into this space this morning, there were a thousand things you might have noticed, but you only noticed a few – that the place was laid out as it usually is, who was in it to say hello to, and whether anyone was sitting in your seat.

If anything unusual crosses our view, either we simply don’t notice it or, if it asserts itself and demands our attention, we process it in terms of what we already know, for better or for worse. That is, we find a way to locate the new thing among our old things, and so give it a place. It’s in this way that meaning is location. The meaning of things has to do with their location within our particular story of the world.

This is not all that remarkable, but it helps us to see the pathos of The Guardian’s question about the meaning of life. This is not about how we attribute meaning to some new encounter “out there”. It asks rather, what is the system of meaning itself by which we can experience the world around us? Put differently, a question about the meaning of life admits that we who ascribe meaning to things by locating them in a wider picture have lost the picture. And, in the process, we have lost ourselves and now are just one more thing bobbing around in a sea of possible meanings, wondering whether there is such a thing as an ocean. To ask with Kenneth Williams (in The Guardian piece), “Oh, what’s the bloody point?”, is to declare, I don’t know what story I’m in; I don’t know where I am.

We all recognise the pathos of this, and most of us probably feel it; Christian faith doesn’t make us immune here. The experience of meaninglessness, as an experience of displacement, is almost endemic. Ours is a “post-era” that understands itself to varying degrees to be post-Christian, post-patriarchal, post-colonial, postmodern, post-truth, even post-human. If you find yourself wondering whether or not you’re a racist, or what a man or a woman is, or suspecting that these “were and always will be” the sovereign lands of the Wurundjeri people, or maybe even why we don’t now have a hung parliament in Canberra, you’re experiencing a loss of meaning – a “post”-induced loss of location. Our era has rendered us “psychic” refugees: dislodged in our hearts and minds, if not literally forced to flee our homes.

Having lamented this meaninglessness and that it cannot sing Easter Alleluias, The Guardian’s conclusion is to restate the problem, only now as the solution. The article proposes that we just have to live a “fitting” life, and that a “life well lived has its own logic”.

Yes, indeed!

But the very crisis of meaning is the crisis of not being able to “fit” things. What is a fitting life? – This is the question with which the article began. The crisis of meaning is precisely a crisis of being turned back upon ourselves to construct our own story, and our lacking the wherewithal or the references to do it. And this crisis forces us, for sheer sanity’s sake, either to withdraw into binge-watching other people’s lives or to construct lives with their “own logic” – lives, that is, of competing and conflicting ideas about what “well-lived” actually means. Such a half-brained solution to so serious problem is just more fuel to the fire.

For the problem is a real one. An un-storied human is a dead person walking; this is the meaning of crucifixion. And if “a life well lived” is no solution, it’s because the problem is not understood. And so neither are Easter Alleluias in The Guardian’s understanding a solution.

And this brings us, finally(!), to our snippet from John’s Gospel today, for it touches upon the crisis of meaning, then and now.

[Jesus the Word] was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. (John 1.10f)

He was in the world, and the world had its being through him, yet the world could not place him. Jesus arrives as himself the “location” of the world, as its meaning, as that which gives us our orientation and place. What then occurs does so between our inability and our unwillingness to recognise this.

Yet, to those who could place him, the text continues, he gave “power to become children of God” – power, that is, which locates us, power which brings meaning. But the word “power” here is misleading. The Greek text has a word which is usually translated “authority”, although not in our version just here. Because we typically equate power and authority, a distinction between the two seems a bit pedantic. But power and authority are better distinguished. A bulldozer has the power to stop traffic by virtue of simple physics: it’s big and heavy, and there’s no getting around it. A petite police officer, however, while having no physical advantage over moving traffic, has a uniform that indicates her authority to call a halt, and the cars still stop. Authority has to do with agreement, with location and with meaning. An authorised police officer has been author-ed into the lore of the road – she has been written in.

To those who did receive the Word, John says, that Word “authorised” them – wrote them in – as children of God. To believe in Jesus, on John’s understanding, is to have found yourself written into the story, to have been located, to have been made meaning-ful.

The Christian meaning The Guardian purports to “envy”, then, is not the promise of a postmortem eternal life which, by its very nature, dislocates us from here to some future time.

The true “meaning of life” in Christian faith comes from being authored by the Wordly God. Most of John’s Gospel has to do with the dislocation of meaning – “How can these things be?” cries the exasperated Nicodemus, the “teacher of Israel”, the expert in meaning (John 3.4,10).

To be authored as children of God is to be storied in the story of Jesus himself. This includes Easter’s resurrection glory, but also Good Friday’s glory of the cross. It includes the gift of love’s embrace but also the hard command to love. It includes the promise of meaning but also the disorienting upheaval of a rebirth.

The meaning of life is a question we ask when we’ve lost our story, when we’ve lost ourselves. And there’s no finding our way home again on our own, there is no “fitting” into what has no shape.

But it’s another story – now our story – if when we are lost someone comes looking for us. We are then the found, and this is where our story begins – precisely as those found, and not as the lost.

To have been found, to be written in as loved; this is the meaning of our lives: lost but now found, dead but now alive.

And so we are called to love as we have been loved, precisely because love is the only way anyone has a meaning and place which accords with what they are: those destined to be authored as the meaning of God.

Love then. Love and love. This is our meaning. And God’s.

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Easter 2
27/4/2025

Genesis 3:1-10
Psalm 32
Mark 16:1-8

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Another week, another violation of a ceasefire, another woman dead because a man thought she crossed a line, another despairing suicide. So it seems to go. For the most part, these things wash over us, for we are accustomed to the presence of death.

On any ordinary day, of course, our own failures or excesses are generally much less dramatic than all that. Yet here too we are constantly assimilating and normalising human frailty and failure.

In Christian thinking, human weakness has generally fallen under the catch-all category of “sin”. Sin has encompassed simple “naughtiness” at the trivial end of its spectrum, through to total depravity at the oppressive end.

But, in the book many of us considered in our recent Lenten studies, theologian Rowan Williams beautifully undercuts this too-easy moralising of sin: “Our failures are all about our wanting to be somewhere else”.[1] Sin is about our unwillingness to be true to where we are and to do the things which are demanded of us here; our problem is we are too often simply unable to be “present”. Marital infidelity seeks to be “somewhere else” than with this person and what he or she needs or can give. “Just one more episode” shifts us into another place where there are no phone calls, visits, or housework awaiting our attendance. Comfort food and escaping into retail therapy are very much our strong desire to be elsewhere.

By such means, we strike a bargain in life by which we settle for a shrunken world and experience, what Williams calls “peace before light”. This is a peace in which we escape into a relatively safe space by denying inconvenient truths about ourselves in the world. It is a kind of peace, in the sense that we survive. But it’s not an illuminated or liberated life.

Another week, another broken ceasefire, another buried truth, another crucifixion. So it seems to go.

The responses of Jesus’ friends to his arrest and crucifixion – their desertion of him in particular – can also be seen to be assimilations and rationalisations. They too wanted to be “somewhere else”. We can imagine the confused self-justifications of those who had been so close to Jesus and so bravely imagined that they would stick with him: I had to do it. I couldn’t stop them. It was only enough that I could save myself.

And then comes the sad existence of the mere survivor. Now it is done, is passed, can’t be changed. And so I must find a way to live with myself. Life without truth. Peace without light.

There is tragedy in the way we grow accustomed to living with the corpses of missed opportunities – things taken from us or things we have denied ourselves because we have not been able to be where we are, because we have missed the moment out of a desire to be somewhere else. Peace before light.

But what if the corpse of one of our missed opportunities were to move? What if that which we have somehow managed to put to death for ourselves refuses to remain dead but rather returns to us? What if our dead refuse to confirm our version of how we have come to be where we are, why we are justified in our failures, why we had reason to be afraid, why it we though it necessary to deny what we truly believe?

Were one of our buried failures to move, to return to us, then a new possibility emerges: peace after light. This light would be a piercing one, cutting through every shade of grey, causing us to squint for its brilliance. To borrow language from Mark’s gospel this morning, this is a light which would see us to turn and flee from the tomb, “for fear and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid”.

Why this strange response to what is supposed to be overwhelmingly good news?

[1] Rowan Williams, Christ on trial: how the gospel unsettles our judgement. (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2003), p.133.