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Song of Songs 5:2-8
Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9

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ForeWord

Every love song is on its way to becoming a psalm.

The biblical Psalms are songs of longing and devotion and celebration. They express the richness of love, the incompleteness of love, the longing for love. This is, of course, a love for God, seeking God’s own love, but it doesn’t take much tweaking to turn a modern love song with its laments and lustings and celebrations into psalm material.

What the Psalms grasp after, what every love song seeks, we might call the Hallelujah. “Hallelujah” is the cry which rejoices in the arrival of the miracle. The Hallelujah is about life out of death, the lost now found, love consummated. The whole of the biblical story, Psalms and all, is oriented toward this “Hallelujah”.

Our readings today speak of longing, of suffering, and of the Hallelujah. Two of our texts are scriptural. One comes from the Song of Songs, which is not quite psalmic but the woman who speaks here could be us in our longing for God, or God in God’s longing for us (and copping a beating instead). From the letter to the Hebrews, we hear of God’s co-suffering with us in Christ, and in Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” we hear what has become something of a secular hymn of lament and celebration.

Let us listen for God’s word in our hearing of these texts…

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Songs 5. 2-8; “Hallelujah”, Leonard Cohen; Hebrews 4. 14-16; 5. 7-9)

Word: Proclamation

If the longing for life and love is the longing for a Hallelujah, when it comes to the events we gather to mark today and the next few days, where is the Hallelujah to be spoken, shouted or sung? Where, in what we recall in this season, is the miracle? What elicits the Hallelujah?

Where we think the miracle is depends on what we think the problem is that needs to be overcome. And it’s difficult, given what we usually think miracles to be, not to imagine that Easter’s miracle is the Resurrection. Is this not the Hallelujah moment? “Christ the Lord is risen today, Hallelujah!”, we sing. So the hymns go, and properly so, rightly understood.

Compared to the proclaimed Resurrection, Good Friday’s crucifixion seems depressingly mundane, played out again and again in a million different ways ever since, and still now. Good Friday is the psalmist’s pained cry, and the abandonment and beating of the lover in what we heard from the Songs, and Christ’s own experience as sufferer. To find the Hallelujah in the Easter Resurrection is to imagine that the problem to be overcome is the death of Jesus, and this as somehow symbol and inclusive of our own death. Good Friday seems to be the psalmist’s lament, the lover’s agony in separation, and Easter seems to be the ecstasy of love’s consummation.

On this reading, the cross is the question to which the Resurrection is an answer as love’s “victory march” to the jubilant Hallelujah. This resonates, of course, with our strong desire to be somewhere else, with our feeling that, in one form or another, and wherever we happen to find ourselves, there’s too much death here. In circumstances like this, “Christ is risen” feels like code for the “out” we desperately want.

And yet.

And yet, to see Jesus only as victim is to make him too much like us in our experience of being victims of this or that heavy oppression. Indeed, Jesus suffered as we have, as we heard from the letter to the Hebrews this morning. But this is, paradoxically, a miraculous suffering. And it is miraculous in the same way as the miracle of the Resurrection is miraculous: in both cases, the power of death over us is denied. Jesus dies, of course, and in that sense, death holds sway; Jesus is mortal. But his willingness to die, his refusal to deny the claim on him by the God who sent him, the refusal to fear death more than he fears that God – this is the death of death and hell’s destruction. Jesus’ refusal to deny the truth of God’s claim upon his life is the declaration that death shall have no dominion over him, even though he dies. The miracle of Good Friday is Jesus’ refusal to negotiate with death, to engage in death’s economy, on death’s own terms.

And whatever the Resurrection of Easter Day is, it doesn’t exceed this Good Friday miracle. This means that Good Friday and Easter are not one thing followed by another, as a question is followed by an answer. Good Friday and Easter are parts of the same thing or, better, they are the same thing done twice, done differently. The Resurrection is no reward for dying, no reversal of death. The Resurrection is rather a repeat, a recapitulation, a summarising of the cross. Easter asks, “Did you see that? Did you see what Jesus just did?”, and Easter affirms, “He just overcame death; he just triumphed over the power death has over you.” Easter does this, too, of course, and this is the point: Good Friday and Easter Day do the same thing: they both signal the overpowering of death, the end of death’s dominion, the end of death’s determination of us. The divine achievement in the Resurrection does not supersede or outshine the human achievement on the cross. They, rather, coincide.

But now, of course, the tone of the Hallelujah changes. The Hallelujah is not merely Easter’s major lift, because it needs to capture the minor key – Friday’s cold and broken Hallelujah. What other kind of Hallelujah could it be? But the point is that it is still a Hallelujah. It doesn’t matter which we hear, the holy or the broken; “Hallelujah” it is, and remains.

The fractured love of Good Friday, the cost of refusing to yield to weaponised death, and the passion, the sin and the guilt this reveals – this all asks of us a holy, if broken, Hallelujah. Holy, because it is everything that needs to be said; broken, because we don’t quite know how to say it, or to live it. We hanker for the warm and bright Hallelujah of a God ahead of us in Resurrection, rather than the colder and darker Hallelujah of a God with us in crucifixion.

But if we declare, as will be sung later, that we know that our redeemer lives, the “where” of this life is as much on the cross as in the resurrection appearances and wherever “heaven” might be. This hard but liberating word of Good Friday is where Cohen ends up in his almost-a-psalm:

…even though it all went wrong
we’ll stand before the Lord of Song
with nothing on our tongue but Hallelujah.

To live and move and have our being with a crucified God is not to be waiting for a happy ending. It is to be holy, if broken, here and now.

This is good, and so this Friday we call Good: Christ, the Lord, is crucified today. Hallelujah.

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Lent 5
22/3/2026

Psalm 130
John 11:1-44

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In a sentence:
Most strangely, we are told this story of a miracle, so that we might stop “believing in miracles”. We are rather to become a miracle.

Last week, I began and ran with the notion that miracles are pointless. This was rightly contested. My point should have been more precisely put: stories about miracles are pointless, to the extent that they are accounts of marvellous things which others once “received”, told so that we might believe that such marvellous things might happen to us.  Faith is not believing in miracles.

Miracles, whether such things happen or not, matter to us because they constitute the power to be somewhere else. A miracle is transport to a different reality – a reality where I’m not sick, where she’s not dead, in which the exam has been cancelled or where our team has finally won a premiership. In our imagination, miracles are about what we’ve lately called “relevance”. They are about relief: a restoration to life in greater fullness. The prayer for a miracle is always a prayer for life in the face of the very real presence of death and all his friends. If we think less about miracles today, it’s because we have found other means to this kind of relief; the power to perform miracles in the way of the magic trick has given way to social and mechanical technologies which do what once we prayed to the gods that they would do. It’s partly for this reason that the miracle stories of the Gospels are strange to us today. We would love such things to break into our lives here and how, but most of us have already ruled out the possibility of such delight and made ourselves responsible for delivering the good things we long for.

Last week we heard the story of the miraculous healing of a man born blind; this week it’s the raising of the dead Lazarus. This is perhaps the greatest of all the miracles recounted in the Gospels, apart from the resurrection of Jesus himself, which should be bracketed out as something in a category of its own.

In both stories, the Evangelist John goes into considerable detail. This is itself remarkable; it’s clearly not enough in John’s mind simply to say, “And while he was in Bethany, Jesus raised a man who had been dead 4 days”. This would have been enough if the point were just to say that Jesus could do such things. Rather, the miracle is recounted with all the interactions of the actors and their interpretations. It seems that the raising of Lazarus is not quite the central takeaway of the story.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 11:1-44)

Word: Proclamation

From one perspective, and at the risk of saying something absurd, there is nothing particularly relieving – relevant – in the raising of Lazarus, in itself. It would be, of course, a surprising and remarkable thing to happen, but Lazarus will die again. Grief has given way to joy for a while, but Martha or Mary or someone else will again stand outside Lazarus’ tomb and grieve, perhaps all the more so because of this miracle’s limited effect. If all that happens is that Lazarus is resuscitated, then our concern for relief from death is only postponed. This is surely nice, but death’s shadow lingers still.

John’s point in telling the story is deeper. Lazarus is not the only one raised in the story. Just as important as a man who lived and died might live a little longer is that life might be breathed into those dead who are still breathing, entombed in a dark world. Martha is such a one, as is Mary, and as are we. The reported raising of Lazarus catches our attention, but the raising is not the main point of telling the story. Just as miraculous is the possibility that faith might be resurrected in Martha. Just as Lazarus is roused from ‘sleep’ (v.11f) so also is Martha called to faith. They are, in the story, co-hearers of the same word: “Come out”. The story is told, then, not to suggest that we will believe in Jesus all the more strongly if he should raise one of our dead. The point is that we – still living – are dead with Lazarus, and Jesus would raise even us, here and now.

And so we need to be explicit about another thing. Lazarus comes forth, not as a basis of Martha’s faith, not as a reason for her belief, as if her belief were that Jesus could do such cool stuff. The raising of Lazarus is rather the illustration of what it means to confess properly Jesus as ‘Messiah’, and ‘Son of God’, and ‘the one coming into the world’, as Mary did earlier in the story (v.27). Or to put it differently, the point of the story is not that, by raising Lazarus, Jesus proves to Martha that her doctrines about him are true. If that were the point then it merely leaves us with nothing but a story about what happened to someone else, and implies that we couldn’t come to belief without a similar spectacle. Rather, and most strangely, we are told this story of a miracle, so that we might stop “believing in miracles”. “I am the resurrection”, Jesus says, not “I will be raised.”

It’s interesting – even surprising – that, despite the lament of Martha and her sister, we don’t hear of their response to the raising of their well-dead brother. Perhaps it’s obvious, at the personal and emotional level. Yet the whole exchange has not been about grief and joy, not about a particular loss and restoration, but about unbelief and belief. Jesus rebukes Martha when she protests at the opening of the stinking tomb: ‘Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?’ There is a promise made here to the faithful, along the lines of last week’s lesson: ‘believing is seeing’ (which is not ‘seeing is believing’).

But we should push this a step further: believing is not affirmation that there “is” a God or that Jesus could do glorious and miraculous things. To believe is to become the glory of God. The human being unbound by death – whether our own or the death of someone or something we love – such a person is ‘the glory of God’. And so Jesus says the very odd thing: ‘Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die (11.25f)’. The hearts of such faithful ones will one day stop beating, but such death is as nothing(!) to those who are truly alive before death finally arrives. This is the miracle which is hardest of all to believe in: the possibility of life in the midst of death, the possibility of life even though Lazarus has died. This is hard to believe because when Lazarus dies, so also do his sisters, Martha and Mary. We are part of each other in that way, such that the death of those we love is an amputation, a laming, a marking of our continuing lives with death.

The story of Lazarus addresses just this: what are we to do with the death that is ever in our midst, and debilitates us so? The answer is not, “Believe in miracles”. The answer is, “Be Lazarus”. Strange as it seems to say it, the “faith” which matters in the story is that of the dead Lazarus himself. He is the first one to make a faithful response to the call of God in Christ, awakening from his ‘sleep’. As one raised from the encumbrances of death, Lazarus is the true believer. His faithful response to Christ’s command models what should be Martha’s, and our own response: to rise, to shine, to bask in the glory of the God who calls us forth, and to become that glory in a world which cries out desperately, ‘Lord, if you had been here, he…she…we would not have died.’

We are not to be Martha, waiting for a miracle. We are to be Lazarus, the miracle, the glory of God.

Sleepers, awake; Stop. Being. Dead. And become the glory of God, which is the Body of Christ alive, dead and alive again.

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Lent 4
15/3/2026

John 9:1-42

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ForeWord

A thesis to consider: were Jesus among us today as he was among the Judeans in Palestine 2000 years ago, any miracles he might perform now would be pointless. By this, I don’t mean that he didn’t then or couldn’t now perform miracles. I mean that, even if he did, here and now, they would be irrelevant, and irrelevant in the sense we considered a couple of weeks ago: they wouldn’t help, wouldn’t relieve.

For us with our generally modern and scientifically informed minds, the notion of miracle poses a particular problem: the violation of what we now call the “natural order”. We’ve already banished God from the world we inhabit, so that faced with the claim that a miracle has occurred, our response will typically be that the observation is wrong: what looked like a miracle was, in fact, not one at all. There is something we didn’t notice or take into account. A dead person raised was not really dead; a blind or lame person healed was simply released from a psychosomatic condition by a clever therapist.

Even if we can’t imagine why something has happened, we don’t then conclude that, indeed, God has been active. We are more likely to assume that our theories about how the world works are not yet extensive enough to account for what we’ve seen. There are yet more mysteries to be penetrated, equations to be written. Far from being a crisis which causes us to rethink our banishment of the miraculous God, what we can’t explain often causes great excitement, indicating new understandings to be discovered. We deal with the amazing and the unexplained by deferring understanding until more comprehensive theories are developed.

Responses like this suggest that it would be a waste of God’s time for God to bother with miracles these days because we have built-in means of explaining them away. We are very, very hard to impress. Or perhaps more to the point, we quite simply have no means of even processing the notion of a miracle, because our world is such that God can’t disturb it. In this, we imagine that we’ve outgrown the credulity of those who went before us, who believed that God can and does wilfully disrupt the natural order.

Perhaps we are right about this, we moderns. But this does not mean that we’ve dealt with the miracle stories, or at least all of them. What we don’t entertain is the possibility that if the miracles did “really” occur as described, they wouldn’t tell us anything useful.

That a miracle might have happened and be recognised but then dismissed by those most likely to believe in miracles seems to be what happens in our Gospel text today. Taken from John’s Gospel, the story illustrates John’s scepticism regarding miracles: his scepticism that seeing such things is required for believing. Quite the opposite unfolds in the story: although close to incontrovertible proof of a miracle is established, it has no effect on the critical observers.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 9.1-41 )

Word: Proclamation

Of course, the people who feature in this story were not modern scientific thinkers. But neither were they fools. The Pharisees in the story are rightly sceptical of the report of a blind man’s sight being rectified. Yet neither can they deny that something miraculous has happened.

Yet, while they cannot deny the extraordinary report, this alleged miraculous work of God – as a “work” – has occurred on the Sabbath, mandated to be work-free. We must forget here that we have heard from Jesus in another gospel tradition – that “the Sabbath was made for human beings, not human beings for the Sabbath”. John’s Jesus appeals to no happy humanism to justify working on the Sabbath. Jesus gives no justification for his healing on the Sabbath. And so, while the apparent miracle points towards Jesus, its performance on the Sabbath points away from him. This is the tension the Pharisees feel.

The question, then, is not, Did Jesus do this? This is already established. The question is, Does Jesus’ having done this prove him righteous or unrighteous? We must feel the jolt here, given how we usually hear accounts of miracles. The modern mind asks questions like “Did it really happen?”, as if an affirmative answer to this would be self-explanatory. But the proposal of this story is quite the opposite: knowing that it happened doesn’t tell us anything about what it means. The miracle by itself is, in this sense, “irrelevant”. This is an instance of what becomes more explicit later in the Gospel, in the well-known story of “doubting Thomas”, where Jesus declares against Thomas’ insistence on seeing: “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed”. Seeing doesn’t tell us what we need to know (or, in a different sense, what we should really be seeing).

Put differently, the miracle which matters is not what we could call the “magic trick”. The miracle is the seeing which the trick makes possible. The miracle is only the lens, through which we might or might not choose to look. The miracle is not the magic, but that some people come to see, even if most do not.

At the end of the story, we hear Jesus say,

³⁹‘I came into this world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.’ 

This undercuts just about anything we have learned about what miracles are “for”. Are they not supposed to attract our attention? Impress us? Make us believe in Jesus or whoever performs them? Do we not wish that we could perform miracles, so that others would see and come to faith? Yet, Jesus says, “I came into this world…[that] those who do see may become blind”. Eyes which cannot – or refuse – to see, are as much part of what Jesus reveals as the possibility that the closed eyes might be opened.

⁴⁰Some of the Pharisees near him heard [him] and said to him, ‘surely we are not blind, are we?’ ⁴¹Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see’, your sin remains.

The magic trick now falls into the background; it is only the occasion for a deeper reflection, almost a ruse to make a different point. This lesson sits within shifting meanings of sight and sin. The man’s blindness represents no sin but rather his readiness for belief. His blindness is what he does not yet know, which is the identity of the one who heals him. The appropriately blind here – to say a strange thing – are those who wait to have their eyes opened, which means here, those who wait to know who Jesus is. Over against these, the sinful are those who do not know that they are blind, and so who refuse to allow that they need healing, and so who cannot recognise Jesus.

The story, then, makes rather a pessimistic point: it is as difficult to see the presence of God in the work of Jesus as it is for a man born blind to begin to see. Though the Pharisees eyes and ears – and perhaps ours too – are physically open to see and hear everything that can be physically seen and heard, they don’t see or hear beyond the physical. And so the story is only in a passing way about a rectification of the eyes of a man whose eyes did not work. We should notice here not eyes which now register light but eyes which register the presence of God in Jesus, which the eyes of the Pharisees cannot see in the miracle they cannot deny.

The story began with Jesus saying that the man had been born blind “so that God’s works might be revealed in him”. Superficially, this is a deeply troubling declaration, as if God kills in order to raise to life again. But, in view of what we’ve said about what then unfolds, God doesn’t render him blind in order then to heal him. Death is not a method for God. Rather, the man becomes an occasion for making an unsettling point: we would not know what God looked like, even if he were standing right in front of us. This is the pathos of the Pharisees’ objections. And so Jesus says to them – and, again, perhaps to us – If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see’, your sin remains. Most strangely, then, if the healed man represents the believer, faith becomes a waiting-to-see, an acknowledgement that we do not yet see.

But if there is a pessimism here about our ability to see, it is met with the promise that eyes can be opened: that those born and living with what we might hesitatingly call ‘spiritual’ blindness can be healed even of that most dehumanising of conditions: seeing with only our own eyes and not as God sees. The not-seeing of faith is the beginning to see as God sees.

The strange thing this story proposes is that the blind man was, in his blindness, closer to God than those whose eyes worked properly. Faith is a kind of innocence which knows and yet does not. Faith is a humility which is open to being taught. Faith is a realisation of the gift of freedom which comes from not having to know all things, not having to see all things, not having all things reduced to certainty about what could and couldn’t be so.

The miracle is not the trick which breaks the rules and which, against the rules, which we must try to believe. The miracle is that there are no rules. And so the miracle is that we don’t need miracles. This is the meaning of creation, of grace.

With a God like this, we are – as we are – miracle enough. The trick is actually believing this.

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Lent 3
8/3/2026

Exodus 17:1-7
Psalm 95
Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-42

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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The story of the woman at the well is timeless. It tells of a world of racial enemies and the myths that feed their prejudices against each other – pure tribalism. It tells of the political tensions between the genders. It tells of religious bigotry. It is really very modern. Our news broadcasts and newspaper editors feed us these things as a daily diet. We are all too familiar with what happens when one ethnic group moves in on the territory of another group. We know about indigenous people’s resentment of invasion, and the colonists’ resentment of their resentment. We know of stolen land and stolen children. We are told about the struggle of refugees and the resistance they find in the lands that they escape to. We know of the struggle of women to win equal status in society’s structures. We know of the stigmatism that is dumped on people that do not conform in their societies. We know about the church taking a lashing from secular humanism. We know of the devastating conflict that can flow from fundamentalism in any religion – the religious justification of hate.

At another level it is timeless too. It tells of the weariness of travel (Jesus was tired out by his journey) and the grind of daily chores (give me this water so I won’t need to come here to the well every day).

It is all strangely familiar and timeless, but it is also far enough away for us to have some questions about the details. What lay behind the antagonisms and prejudices of that time and place?

In the story of the woman at the well we are talking about open hostility between racial cousins. They avoided each other like the plague. The Jewish historian, Josephus, reveals that people of the Northern Kingdom who had not been carried off into exile permitted Alexander the Great to build them a temple on Mount Gerizim. When the southerners returned from exile, they rebuilt the Jerusalem temple and jealously regarded it as the only legitimate shrine for the worship of God. Josephus says that the Gerizim temple was destroyed in 128 BCE. According to the conversation between the woman and Jesus, the heart of their 150-year-old dispute lay in their love for their respective places of worship – a sentiment we can relate to.

It is typical of John’s story-telling that there is more than one level of meaning. Often, he will insert a character who misunderstands what is going on. The account of Nicodemus visiting Jesus is an example of this. He couldn’t understand Jesus’ concept of being born again. The woman at the well is presented with two levels of meaning. She struggles to understand what Jesus is talking about. Jesus explains the mysteries for her and for us.

Let’s unpack the story. The central symbolic motif is water. Jesus was thirsty and asked for water. The woman with the bucket raised all the human anomalies we have been remembering — how is it you, a Jewish man, ask water of me, a woman and a Samaritan – aren’t you afraid of catching Samaritan girl germs.

Jesus’ reply moved the discussion onto the new plain – if you knew who I am you would ask for water from me without any fear of catching Jewish boy germs, because what you would catch would well up in you into eternal life. The woman hasn’t moved into this new plain of talk and just thinks Jesus was getting a bit above himself – do you think you are greater than Jacob who gave us this well?

Returning to Jesus’ plain of debate the answer was that the problem with Jacob’s well is that one drink doesn’t quench all your thirst. It took a bit more toing and froing before both Jesus and the woman were relating on the same plain of conversation – but they get there because the woman started to connect what Jesus was saying with the things of God — might this man be the promised one, the Messiah?

A woman of Sychar in Samaria went to the well to find water. She met Jesus and got found out. ‘Go and get your husband,’ said Jesus. ‘But I don’t have a husband.’ she replied. ‘You have had 5 husbands, and he whom you now have is not your husband.’ replied Jesus. ‘How did you know’, she said. ‘Are you a prophet?

A woman went to find water and was found out by Jesus. She went to tell the people of her city. A prophet had found her. He had told her everything about herself. Could he be Messiah? Faith in Jesus had been kindled, and she had gone to tell others who came to see and came to faith themselves. As they said – they believed because of her testimony. Jesus stayed two days and many came to believe on the testimony of their own encounter with Jesus. The story ends with the Samaritans knowing that Jesus is the saviour of the world.

I would like to focus on two things that John’s story is saying. The first is about how the Samaritans came to faith in Jesus. A particular point is made about how faith began by virtue of the woman telling the town about Jesus, but then they came to encounter Jesus for themselves.

I think we all know the best known of all children’s hymns, Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. The editorial committee of AHB changed one word in this hymn. At number 166 reads Jesus loves me, this I know, and the Bible tells me so. I am sure this was done in recognition that faith in Jesus does not only come from third person testimony. God’s love is revealed in Christ through the mystery of personal encounter by the power of the Spirit of God.

The second strong message of John’s story is that Jesus is the point of reconciliation. At the feet of Jesus, old enemies and antagonists converge. They are still Jew and Samaritan, still male and female, but on the plain on which the discussion about living water was held, the old never-to-be reconciled found a common place, a unity.

There is a danger in just leaving that idea sit there. It is not enough to say that we find our unity in Christ. Being reconciled to God is a nonevent if there is no commitment to being reconciled to one another. I have divided the conversation Jesus had with the woman into two plains of meaning. The two plains must be connected. Spirit and flesh are part of the same realm. Those who are reconciled to Christ are committed to reconciliation among all for whom Christ died.

 

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Lent 2
1/3/2026

Genesis 15:1-6
Psalm 121
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17

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ForeWord

In one of our Lenten study groups this week, the question was asked about the continuing relevance of Christian faith: why do so many no longer consider Christian faith to be “relevant” to their lives?

There is a bit of a thing in the church sometimes which seeks to dismiss relevance as an appropriate criterion for thinking about faith, but it is kind of important. It helps here to know that when we ask about relevance, we are in fact asking about relief. The two words are very closely related: something is relevant to me to the extent that it relieves a tension or perceived threat. Relevance is not about affirming me or any position that I might take on an issue; it’s about what might be necessary for me to improve the life that I am living. Something is relevant if it helps; it is irrelevant if it does not.

To the extent that this is true, it answers our enquiry about why so many people find Christian confession irrelevant: it quite simply does not seem to help. And our lives are full enough with worries and things to do without adding to them things that just don’t help. Important here is what we think it is against which we struggle, and for which something like faith (or maybe just having more money) might seem to be helpful – relieving – or not.

Our Lenten study (Sam Well’s Power and Passion) is a study of the political dynamics around the trial, sentencing and execution of Jesus. Last week we considered the figure of Barabbas. Most of you will recall that the Roman governor, Pilate, offered Barabbas as a get-out-of-jail-free swap for Jesus, although the crowd chose Barabbas over Jesus.

Wells assumes that Barabbas is a member of the Zealot movement which struggled violently against the Roman occupation. Wells locates the Zealot revolutionism as one possible response to the presence of the Romans, but there were other options. Collaborationists like the royal family and the tax collectors found another way, enjoying a certain safety at the cost of their compatriots. Reformers saw the presence of the Romans as divine punishment, and sought a return to basics in religious practice; the Pharisees fall into this group. The Essenes represented another approach, that of withdrawal into a separate, pure, holy space.

Recognising these different political factions and positions helps us to understand what’s at stake in many of the exchanges and conflicts in the Gospels. The opposition to Rome, and to Jesus himself, taps into these stances. But collaboration, reform, withdrawal and revolution are not how we deal with political oppression only. Oppression is just one form of the more generalised concept of suffering, and each of those four responses to the Roman presence in Palestine in Jesus’ time could be made to any source or threat of suffering in our lives at any particular time.

We have life-denying forces operating around us with the potential to impact upon our lives negatively all the time and, in response to these, we can take stances very much like collaboration, puritan withdrawal and rebellion. And in each case, we understand our response to be one of relevance, or relief. If we can’t remove the oppressive influence or threat – if we can’t get rid of our metaphorical Romans – the next best thing is to find a way of living with it, and this is a matter of discovering what offers the most relief. What is relevant – what brings or promises relief – might be getting the right education, or moving to the right suburb, leveraging market forces, escaping into drink or drugs, short-term-till-love-runs-out relationships, or consuming triple-choc-chip ice-cream by the bucket. All such things are “relevant”, relieving in some way; we do such things because they “help”.

If this is what relevance means, it brings us to a different assessment of the relevance of Christian confession. To say that it seems to be irrelevant to most people today is to say that other things are thought to be more relevant, to bring greater relief, when it comes to considering the kinds of challenges, threats, and oppressive influences that are operating all the time around us. What is turning to God in prayer in contrast to escaping into binge-watching a whole Netflix season in one night? What is the promise of eternal life compared to a gold-level health insurance policy? At the same time, what is binge-watching but withdrawal, an insurance policy but collaboration? The world Wells describes is our own world, even if ours looks a little less “religious”.

But Wells’ critique of zealotry is that while it senses that something is badly wrong with the oppression, the revolutionary solution is too narrow. The insurrectionist wants simply to overthrow the government and replace it with a different government, imagining not least that violent means can secure non-violent ends. For all of the change that our various revolutions and democratic elections have attempted in our societies over the last two thousand years, not very much has changed. We recognise our situation and our options in the situation and options of Jesus’ time. We still struggle to identify what is relevant, what will bring relief.

And we would have to say this of the other responses to the suffering going on around us, whether collaboration with the powers, or personal reform, or withdrawal. In each of these responses, we end up reinforcing the problem, rather than coming to grips with its true nature and what it might take to overcome it – what it might take to live justly within an ineluctably unjust world. And I’m sorry for saying “ineluctably” here (because, who says that! ? ), but I just couldn’t think of a better word: it is the “can’t get out of it” which is important. We can’t get out of the system with its many sufferings and threats by means of collaboration or reform or withdrawal or violent overthrow. The burden remains.

And this finally brings us to our focus Scripture text today, taken from Paul’s letter to the Romans. Behind this text is Paul’s concern to emphasise that there is nothing we can do to relieve ourselves of our fundamental burdens, and he draws on the experience of the patriarch Abraham, who impresses God not by what he does, but by his “faith”

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: Romans 4.1-5, 13-17)

Word: Proclamation

Up to this point in the letter, Paul’s been at pains to demonstrate how everyone is under oppression, although his interest is not the oppression of the Romans in Palestine, or geopolitical oppression at all. The oppression he describes is the oppression of sin. By sin, he means an alienation from God, which is just as much an alienation from ourselves. And the pressing question is, What is it that can relieve us in these circumstances? The simple answer, and the common one, is broadly “the law”. The solution to sin is not sinning – is doing the “right thing” – as the very idea of law seems to suggest might be possible.

But Paul has also worked very hard to demonstrate that the law doesn’t help here; it’s part of the problem. We are forced into continual vigilance, acquiescence, or anxiety about where we stand before God. When you start with sin, you end with sin. This is similar to the outcome of the various responses that Sam Wells describes could be made to the oppression of the Romans, or more generally to any oppression we might experience. To collaborate, or to withdraw into self-reform, or to withdraw altogether from the oppressed space into some holier place, or to look for violent revolution – each of these allows the oppression to determine what the relief looks like. And so it’s never quite relief, none of these responses is ever quite relevant; we take the oppressive thing with us.

Paul’s point is that while the law might be pertinent to the question of sin, it is not relevant. And it’s because of this that he clings to the concept of faith, which he does see as properly relevant, relieving. Faith is not here the fairly shallow conviction that God exists; Paul’s interest is in what relieves – what is relevant – and God’s mere existence doesn’t relieve anything. Put differently, the question is, What sets Abraham free? Because Paul’s account of Abraham is an account of a relieved man.

What sets Abraham free, or relieves him, is nothing that Abraham himself does. Most of us know that Paul contrasts faith and action in his thinking about salvation. But the contrast between faith and action is that the faith is so large, we might say, that faith is basically what God does, and not what Abraham does. We might push the language to breaking point here by saying that God faiths Abraham. Abraham’s faith is as much something which happens to him as it is his own act.

In the passage we’ve heard this morning, Paul says this in three different ways, each an overlapping description of the kind of God we have according to what this god does: first, this is the God who justifies the ungodly; second, this is the God who raises the dead to life; and, third, this is the God who calls into being things which do not exist.

Justification, resurrection, creation: these are all substantially the same thing. One looks like moral forgiveness, another looks like a nature miracle and the third looks like a theory about the beginning of all things but, in each case, what is happening is a radical undercutting of the conditions already in place in order that life might be experienced, in order that relief might be known.

Relief is not a thing we do, not a method, not a process, not a response in terms of the system. Justification of the ungodly sets the rules aside, abandoning the self-help game; the dead have no capacities, let alone to raise themselves; and the nothing from which we are created has no potential to bring us forth. In each case, what oppresses – sin, death, nothingness – is set aside as irrelevant. There is no life, no relief, here. Faith is seeing this dynamic: that nothing comes out of sin, death and the void by our own power; we cannot make ourselves whole.

The question of relevance, then, is a question of how adequate the relief is we work up for ourselves, compared to relief which comes from the kind of faith Paul speaks of. Or, to put it as a statement, Christian faith is not relevant to many of us because we are pursuing the wrong kind of relevance. And I mean many of us, because we are here today for relevance, but we are here for relief from the types of relevance the world proposes. We are here because life demands of us collaboration with darkness, constantly requires of us that we be better, tempts us to run away from it all, or just to smash what is in our way. We see this all around us all the time, and we know there’s no lasting relief in any of it. The next thing we do on these terms will not save us, make us whole, set us right.

We can’t make ourselves, Paul says. We must rather receive ourselves, as if raised from the dead, as if created again out of nothing. Only this will relieve, will bring rest – a table set in the presence of treat and danger, as one of the psalmists once sang.

Come to me, Jesus once said. Come, those who are weary from carrying heavy burdens, for I am relev-ant. Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in spirit, and you will find relief for your souls.

Justification, resurrection, creation: this is God’s gift in an unjust, dying, nothing-ed world.

Whatever else life might demand of us, let us receive this gift, that we not be overwhelmed, and that we might become to others a small glimmer of light, of relief, in the darkness.

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Lent 1
22/2/2026

Genesis2:15-17, 3:1-7
Psalm 32
Romans 5:12-19
Matthew 4:1-11

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

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I am grateful to be invited to preach. It’s now been 65 years, and as I prepared for today, I suddenly remembered that when I began, the biblical text we heard was from King James Version, 1611. Preachers also prayed in that language.  Most of us had a lot of it by heart in its language and I still can’t quote a modern version accurately.

So the unexpected blessing of this invitation was to prepare the texts which you have heard read according to very latest, but academically respectable, English version – because it is important that the translation be accurate to the original language and carefully put into the language of our world and our culture without distortion of what the authors wrote.  We don’t need it in American, which is a distinct kind of English, nor do we want it to be angled to the favoured theology of the interpreter.

That is why, early in its history, the Uniting Church formally recommended the use of the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) of 1989. It was updated in 2021 and I used that.  There was the New English Bible which excited us all in the 1960s, but its update, the Revised English Bible of 1989 failed to catch on (except for me!).

But to illustrate. Comparing translations of our so-well-known Genesis reading, the conversation between Eve and the serpent. Today you heard Eve reply to the Devil’s prompt,

“God has forbidden us to eat the fruit of that tree [the tree of good and evil] or even to touch it; if we do, we shall die.” ⁴ But the serpent said to the woman, “Of course you will not die,⁵  for God knows that as soon as you eat it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil.”

Their eyes were opened. The shock of being naked was not Victorian modesty, but the realisation that their unseen embodied selves faced an unexpected long human life of a kind they had not imagined.  They covered themselves up, perhaps not out of modesty but because they weren’t quite ready for it.

By contrast, Jesus’ confident response to the devil’s wiles was:

“Out of my sight, Satan! Scripture says, ‘You shall do homage to the Lord your God and worship God alone’”.

All three of Jesus’ ‘tests’ turn on the same act (temptations are tests, after all). It was Adam and Eve’s test too: to seek salvation in our human selves, without God; to think that experiencing evil would be an advantage.

The new translations make it a lively conversation and not a ‘sacred’ text for pious people. And of course, we know that the stories in the first five books of the Bible were handed down by being told and heard by word of mouth for centuries before being written down and edited and translated into fresh tongues.

And I love what follows:

⁶ The woman looked at the tree: the fruit would be good to eat; it was pleasing to the eye and desirable for the knowledge it could give, so she took some and ate it; she also gave some to her husband, and he ate it.

Her reasoning is revealing: it looked good (well, it was from God’s own garden!) but – it also promised some ‘benefit’ to the takers. That double reasoning plays a major part in sin of all kinds. There are consequences in a choice. And forget about laying blame on Eve: they both – as Paul writes, they together ‘sinned as Adam did by disobeying a direct command’.

If you read ahead, you will meet the consequences of ‘The Fall’.

I once interviewed Rabbi John Levi for the Christian Television Association in front of Arthur Boyd’s vivid painting The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden (1947) which was no Eden – located in the wild Australian bush. We talked about the setting, and I retold the Genesis story for our unbelieving audience, and John stopped me. He said, ‘You know what’s a very Christian interpretation?’ And he explained that for Jews, this chapter is not primarily understood as a story of man’s fall, but as the context of the first commandment – ‘Go forth and multiply’ (Gen. 9:7). It was about grace, not sin. And law as grace.

II.

I sometimes wonder if that’s why Paul wrote as passionately as he does in Romans about the great contrast between sin and grace – and again the translation is so uncluttered and clear:

¹⁶ The gift of God is not to be compared in its effect with that one man’s sin; for the judicial action, following on the one offence resulted in a verdict of condemnation, but the act of grace (Jesus’ self-offering on the cross), following on so many misdeeds, resulted in a verdict of acquittal.

He even says it twice:

¹⁸ It follows then, that as a result of one misdeed was condemnation for all people, so the result of one righteous act is acquittal and life for all.

I fear that good news has not always been echoed in Christian preaching.

And listen to today’s psalm (32), in a modern version:

Happy the pardoned,
whose sin is cancelled,
in whom God finds
no evil, no deceit.

It is an official Catholic version, and its heading reads,

‘A joyous hymn of thanksgiving for God’s forgiveness. Sin concealed is a burden of misery; sin confessed frees from harm.’ (ICEL)

Rabbi Levi himself remarked, ‘If there is a Fall in this story, it is a fall upwards!’  A whole theological movement, Creation Spirituality, followed that view in the 1960s, led by a Dominican Friar, Matthew Fox. He opened the way to liberation theology, environmentalism and to reconsiderations of human sexuality – and is still popular as ‘Green Theology’.  It has produced some fruitful (!) ideas. It was also produced some dead ends. It tends to forget sin and evil and their effects.

The late Francis McNab once boasted that his congregation had not ’used those outdated prayers of confession for years.’ There is a popular view among those who have left the Church that we only speak of sin. If our critics never experience our worship, they will never know our equal insistence on grace. e.g., in our liturgies of healing and personal reconciliation (sometimes called Confession) in Uniting in Worship 2, the last words said are: ‘You are free! Go in peace in the name of God.’

There is a danger in replacing biblical language with psychological; grace cannot be reduced to therapy.

III.

But curious language can sometimes provoke us to think. I was reminded of one of the teasing sayings of that 14^th English saint, Julian of Norwich, in her Revelations of the Divine Love. We all know her ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’, but we don’t all know what went before it.  She wrote, ‘Sin is behovely’.

It’s yet another old English word, meaning ‘necessary ‘or even ‘fitting’, but Julian is not saying ‘Sin is inevitable’. She means that sin has its uses: it can turn the mind, the heart, the spirit, to God.

Julian is struggling with an old question, one St Augustine wrestled with. If God is in, and is the cause of all things, where did sin come from? Why did Jesus have to suffer the cross? Julian’s very questions lead her to the Good News: it is through God’s passion that God’s love is revealed. The sheer magnitude of God’s love would not have been made visible without human sin. The parallel old saying is ‘O happy ‘fault’, or ‘O blessed Fall that gained for us so glorious a Redeemer’.  It is a paradox, a mystery, if you like, and much more needs to be said and most theology is an attempt to say it.

Sin is behovely. But knowing that, all shall be well, indeed, ‘all manner of thing shall be well’.

Thanks be to God.

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Transfiguration
15/2/2026

Matthew 17:1-9

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ForeWord

A funny thing happened on the way to church this morning! In fact, it happened on Monday when, thinking about coming to church this morning, I sat down to have a look at the readings set by our lectionary for today. The “funny” thing was this: hearing a quiet voice speak within: “Oh no, not the Transfiguration. Again”.

Part of this response had to do with the fact that I’ve been doing this for 25 years or so, and there’s a limit to how many imaginative things might be said about the Transfiguration. But there was another dimension to my response. Why do we even bother to give such regular thought to the Transfiguration?

Of course, the story does relate some extraordinary happening, and it is found in documents that are important to the church. To that extent, we need to be able to make something of the Transfiguration. But the very nature of the story is such that our usual treatment of it is what we might call a process of “interpretation”: we seek to interpret the story.

That might seem an obvious thing to have to do when confronted by such a strange story, but it’s worth considering what we are doing when we interpret. Interpretation implies that there is something about the story which is problematic and which we need to sort out. We read that Jesus was transfigured, and we wrestle with the text until it makes sense. What we mean by “ making sense” is a kind of taming of the text. This is all the more the case when it comes to miracle stories, which this one seems to be. Miracles don’t fit, so we have to make them something else.

But what if the story is not given to us in order to be interpreted? What if the story is itself an interpretation of us? That is, what if the story is given as part of a proposition that we are ourselves the problem? If this is the case, then the Transfiguration of Jesus says as much about us as it does about Jesus himself.

Having in mind that expectation of what the text might be doing, let’s now hear once more the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: Matthew 17. 1-9)

Word: Proclamation

I said a moment ago that the Transfiguration of Jesus is as much about us as it is about Jesus himself. I don’t mean here what is sometimes drawn from the story, that we’re all a bit like the figure of Peter, with his confused stumbling and fumbling in response to Jesus. There is probably some truth in this but there’s another level at which the story is about us.

The central element in the story is not the apparent miracle. It is the voice from heaven. Or more to the point, it’s what the voice says, what it points to. The miraculous transformation of Jesus would be ambiguous – even meaningless – without some accompanying text, but what the voice says doesn’t need the shiny miracle; it doesn’t even need to be loud. And what the word says, illustrated by the miracle, is that everything which matters is just here, in this ordinary Jesus. This is the surprise, the shock, the miracle of the story.

We have here not an account of some amazing event alongside all the other miracles Jesus is said to have done. The story doesn’t even declare that Jesus is somehow bigger or better than us in the way we normally understand that comparison. The story simply declares the presence of God in the very ordinary Jesus: “This is my son”. We tend to imagine voices from heaven to be booming and overwhelming, just as Jesus is said to have suddenly exploded in light, but the miracle is not the dazzling brilliance or the booming voice from heaven. The miracle is what the voice declares: this one, this ordinary human in his fleshy createdness, this one embodies everything. Here, in this ordinary one, is the truth. Here, hanging on the cross, is the truth. Here is divine pleasure, divine expression: in the human Jesus.

We are not to see Jesus transfigured; we are to see through it. The Transfiguration marks Jesus as the coincidence of earth and heaven, the heavenly kingdom come and done, as earth. The point of the story, then, is not that the transfigured Jesus is strangely out of place. The point is that Jesus fits precisely here. And the follow-on from this is that it’s the surprised Peter and the other disciples who do not fit. Though Peter wants to build a place to put Jesus into, Jesus is already fit for location; it is Peter who is wrongly in the world.

And now, with Peter, we see that the story is about us as much as about Jesus. The text interprets us: you are surprised at Jesus, surprised at the proposal that in his ordinariness is the coincidence of God and all things. The glory of God, one of the old sages said, is the human being fully alive. If Jesus is lit up with divine glory, it is because his humanity itself is deep, pure, and glorious.

This might change our idea of salvation. The common notion of salvation is very much one of being saved from something – perhaps a salvation from sin and judgment, and likely consignment to hell. We are saved, that is to say, from the world and its ways, and are now oriented toward another world yet to come. On this reading, Jesus comes, or is sent, in order to die, in order to make an exchange to secure this other place for us and finally carry us over into it.

But an alternative reading of the life and death of Jesus is that he comes not in order to die but in order to live. Or, we might say, he comes to relocate heaven for us in the here and now. On this reading, the Transfiguration is not a foretaste of the coming resurrection after Jesus dies; it is a declaration to Peter and the other disciples that here and now, in the tangible and fleshy reality of Jesus, is the presence and reality of God. Or to put it rather more pointedly: here, now, in this one, is heaven: This is my son, the beloved. See him. Listen to him. Be as he is.

Our problem is not that we don’t see flashy displays of God’s presence in the world around us. Our problem is that we think that that’s what we need to see for God to be present to us. Blessed are those who have not seen, but heard and understood. We might even dare to wonder whether Jesus really was transfigured or whether, for a moment, Peter and the others understand what they are dealing with. It doesn’t really matter. The gospel would still be the gospel without the Transfiguration story.

And so the question is, what is the gospel? And, alongside this, if the gospel is “good news”, what is the bad news the gospel answers?

The gospel reveals the possibility of a life free from fear, a life which doesn’t turn the world into either a Godless place, or make it into God. The bad news here is that we do fear what we should not, that we do banish God, or worship the world.

The gospel is that God – and so our fullest, richest humanity – is neither a long way off nor an occasional, local, miraculous flash. Reconciliation with God comes with reconciliation with the requirement that life not be put off to some after-death renewal but be lived to its fullest here and now.

If we must come around to the Transfiguration every year, it’s not for comprehensiveness’ sake – that we cover all the high points in the story on a regular basis. It is because the gospel is about us ourselves being changed. Not transfigured – not made to look different, but changed as we are, in our awareness of what and where we are, of who and whose we are, even now.

The glory of God is a human being fully alive. Jesus was always this, even despite the Transfiguration. The gospel is that we might be it, too.

Let us, then, see and listen to what and how Jesus is, that our lives here and now might be lived from glory into greater glory.

And all God’s people say, Amen.

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Epiphany 5
8/2/2026

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

Sermon preached by Daniel Broadstock

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Last year, as part of a trip to France and Italy, my wife and I spent the best part of a week in Paris. Known traditionally as ‘the City of Light’ – I was ready for quite a dazzling experience.

Now, while the centre of Paris is immensely charming, and the Eiffel Tower does glitter very prettily in the sky at night, I confess I didn’t find Paris to be especially luminous in comparison to the other modern cities I have visited. The streets are lit with the same warm light that I can find in the alleyways of Melbourne.

It may well be now that the younger, scrappier, neon cities of South East Asia can lay claim to being ‘Cities of Light.’

I have since discovered that Paris’ designation as the ‘City of Light’ of course predates the global electrification that that has illuminated the world in the last fifty years. Originating in the Enlightenment, of which Paris was a cultural centre, the title gained extra currency when the city became an early adoptee of 50,000 gas streetlights in the 1820s, and then further with the advance of electrical street lighting in the late 19^th century. Visitors from France’s interior and from elsewhere in Europe could be genuinely amazed by a gleaming city of fireflies that never went out. We underestimate the extent to which we are the beneficiaries of a revolution of light.

Yes, Paris gained its nickname in a much darker world.

Jesus’ world was a darker world, still.

Not dark in the intellectual, cultural, or moral sense. The ancients still have a good deal to teach us about how to think and reason, but dark in the literal sense.

Creating light in the imperial dominion of Judea was an expensive and laborious act. It required firewood or oil, and had to be tended, fed, monitored, and maintained. Public light was far less common. Cities streets were dark, shadowy places. Rural highways were lit only by the moon. Light and heat were jealously guarded, protected, and consumed. The movement of torches upon the street giving sign of armed Roman patrols.

A darker world is a more dangerous world. Crime flourishes under darkness, as does corruption. Darkness shrouds perception and conceals all manner of sins. In the darkness it is all too easy to lose your way. Light here is a precious commodity, a necessary precondition of truth, safety, and freedom. Darkness impedes my travel, my study. It exposes me to danger. It enables my enemies to move undetected around me.

How much more urgently attractive then, must Jesus’ command have been that we be people of light. That we be the light of the world. The light, the city on the hill. That we uncover the light that we have, concealed beneath a bushel, that we release it, that it may become a public light, a public good, that others may follow to find their way.

In a dark world, literally and figuratively, says Jesus, be a light.

I wonder what comes to mind, when you think of that bright city, that light upon the hill.

It sounds very grand, very momentous. It stands, solid and gleaming, like a bulwark against the world.

I’m conscious that, in our particular Australian context, the light on the hill is not always a benign phenomenon. Sometimes the light on the hill is bushfire.

We’ve allowed too many people to experience the light of Christianity as bushfire. As something dry, destructive, and violent. One glimpse of it and they are testing the direction of the wind, and getting out their evacuation plan.

It seems to me the United States, who had also taken the city on the hill as a seminal image of its national identity, has made a terrible parody of this in itself. In many parts of the world, the light of America’s coming is the light of the bomb, and the promise of American liberty is regarded as a contemptuous irony. It’s not enough to cast a light – a bushfire casts a great light, as does a detonation, as does a mob with torches and pitchforks.

The prophet Isaiah, while not rooted in the same context, seems cognizant of this same danger. The context for this prophetic word is the abandonment of the exile. Shocked into repentance by the catastrophe that had befallen them in the destruction of Jerusalem, the Jewish people adopted a series of fasting practices to atone for the sin and weakness that had brought down such a calamity upon their heads.

But spiritual practices can all too easy disguise a complacency. For him, to be people of light can only be founded in the fire of justice:

If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.

What good is spiritual practice that is not oriented towards mercy and liberation. It is no more than a growling belly. An empty play of devotion.

For Isaiah, the work of justice is light’s fuel in a dark world. Heap together the materials of justice, the fuel of justice, and the greater the fire you will burn. Heap together the fuels of liberation, and the fire you burn will be a clean one, incinerating chains, burning away debris, and casting light in dark places. You will shine like the noonday.

I was listening this week to the Christian prayer and meditation app, Lectio 365, and on one occasion they took an opportunity to commemorate the anniversary of the actions of the Civil Rights leader Rosa Parks. But in doing so, the gave an important warning:

Rosa Parks was an ordinary, everyday person who just needed a seat on a bus. It is vital, they said, that we hold on to the ordinariness of people like Rosa Parks. If once we allow them to be mythologised, to be elevated beyond the normal, mortal plane, we strip them of their power. It is only because Rosa Parks is ordinary that she matters. Because if Rosa Parks can do it, then I can do it. If Rosa Parks can make this fast, this fast to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke, then it is also within my power to make this fast. Rosa Parks does not possess some God-given uniqueness that excuses me from following her example, or from taking my lead from any ordinary act of justice that I am witness to in the world.

The light of sainthood, the glow of Isaiah’s fire is cast from ordinary candles. Just plain wax. It was only because the darkness around Rosa Parks was so deep that her little light shone such a great distance.

Above all, of course, Jesus is the light of the world. His light shines in the darkest places, in the desolation and hopelessness of the cross, in the abyss of state violence and terror, in the shadow of mob violence and vengeance and petty vanity. In the pit of failure and disaster. The city that Jesus builds is on the hill of Calvary.

And that is why the resurrection is so dazzling, because the eye that is accustomed to darkness is always blinded by a sudden great light.

We don’t have to have any unique gifts. Rosa Parks didn’t. We don’t have to be a lighthouse, towering over the landscape. We need only be a campfire – a place of warmth, safety, and welcome, that pushes back the boundary of the darkness, that lights the way, that offers a place for other travellers to sit and rest.

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Epiphany 4
1/2/2026

Matthew 5:1-12

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ForeWord

Background music

The soundtrack of a movie is an essential part of the experience of watching a film, so much so that it’s quite a strange experience to watch a film with the soundtrack stripped out. The experience feels empty because the soundtrack tells us how to feel about the action we see on the screen, intensifying the excitement, fear or sadness of the twists and turns of the story.

This is probably most powerfully illustrated when you watch something which has the wrong soundtrack associated with it. If you’re into falling down rabbit holes in places like YouTube, you can find mock movie trailers of Mary Poppins which splice scenes together against a new soundtrack to recast it as a horror movie (Scary Mary, perhaps? ), or which take The Silence of the Lambs, recut and re-music it into a Beauty and the Beast romance between the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter and the young FBI investigator Clarice Starling.

The music tells us what kind of thing we’re seeing. (The soundtrack is not always musical, of course; certain types of commentary voice-overs can do a similar kind of work, if perhaps usually more directed to our thinking than our feelings).

I raise all of this to propose that we are ourselves experiencing the world according to a particular soundtrack. We have known something of this now for a long time. The deep dive into the human psyche which began with Freud’s depth psychology discoveries from the end of the 19th century has revealed to us how much about what we are is not obvious to us. Just as the protagonists and antagonists in a movie don’t know what music is being played as the story unfolds, so also is there a kind of silent soundtrack informing how we experience the world and those around us.

Better to understand ourselves, then, the question becomes, What is the soundtrack according to which the action of our lives is being interpreted? And is it the right soundtrack? And what might it mean or feel to change the soundtrack, if that seems a good idea?

With those questions in mind, let’s listen to our reading today from Matthew, from the beginning of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: the well-known Beatitudes. And as you listen, consider the strangeness of these announced blessings – their contradiction of what is expected. For this contradiction is not unlike action observed according to the wrong soundtrack, and Jesus’ announcement is the reinstatement of the right one.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(—> Hearing: Matthew 5.1-12)

Word: Proclamation

Discord

These purported blessings, the Beatitudes of Jesus, strike us as jarring, at least as statements of what is clearly the case. The poor in spirit are not very likely candidates for coming into possession of the kingdom of heaven. The meek are not very likely candidates for inheriting the world. Mercy is risky or interpreted as weak. Purity of heart looks like foolishness in an everyone-for-themselves world. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness are rarely satisfied or slaked. According to the soundtrack which tells us how to experience our lives in the world, those whom Jesus names here as blessed don’t look as if they are living life against the background of cheery four-chord major key settings.

And so, if we are going to take them seriously, the Beatitudes require that we hear them as an alternative soundtrack, against which to observe and experience the world around us. Jesus proposes here a kind of recasting of our story like Scary Mary: same action, totally different experience: your condition is not a curse, but a blessing.

But one of the criticisms made of the Beatitudes, particularly those of Matthew when contrasted to those of Luke, is that they seem somewhat pacifist. Why does Jesus address the poor in spirit, the meek, and the hungry and thirsty, and not those who oppress them, are filled with pride, and do not share what they have with the needy?

At one level, a fair answer is that he does this elsewhere. But then we have to account for why Jesus speaks this way here.

The reason is not a comfortable one, at least at first. Jesus addresses those who are somehow “less” than the “more” of the world because the gospel does not expect very much to change in response to the ministry of Jesus. Things might change – people might be moved to act in ways which relieve the burdens others carry – but this might also not happen. Many people in faraway places have long suffered, sometimes for the whole of their lives, under oppressive powers and regimes within which the hope of any change in circumstance is pretty slim, and yet with Jesus’ announcement of blessing in their ears. And not only in faraway places. If not quite by overbearing political or social oppression, most of us most of the time are subject to powers which diminish our humanity. These powers can be oppressive personal experiences we cannot forget, the way the colour of our skin or the gender of our bodies is read, or the political and economic forces which drive our particular world.

If we wanted to measure the impact of Jesus’ inversion of values here, we’d have to admit that there is still a lot of inversion to happen, and that it won’t likely happen soon. And, because of this, it’s tempting to shift the location of the blessings to a distant future, beyond what we presently experience and feel.

But, then and now, Jesus speaks not to the future but to people standing around him and their immediate experience of themselves in the world. And so if Jesus does not speak in such a way to change the dynamics of what is happening around us – to change the action – he speaks to change the soundtrack: to change our experience of that action.

We don’t live in a world which values poverty of spirit, which rewards those who suffer, who do not self-promote, who are not strong enough to realise justice for themselves, who sacrifice their own interests in modes of mercifulness and peacemaking.

The blessedness of incompleteness

But the strange, contradictory beatitudes of Jesus propose a different reading of our experiences. Blessing – wholeness, righteousness – is not for the proud and the self-righteous, who typically triumph. Self-satisfaction is not the measure of wholeness. Indifference to injustice is not the way to fulfilment.

Rather, Jesus calls us here to courage. He calls us to live in contradiction of the prevailing colourings and soundings which value life-denying, freedom-limiting priorities. And so, strangely, the Beatitudes are as much about incompleteness as they are about fulfilment. Your incompleteness is a blessedness because you are seeing and feeling that the world is not ordered rightly, because you long for the whole and not the part.

The blessed are those who continue to struggle against what oppresses, what denies life, what closes off futures. Blessed are you if this is your way in the world.

And so Jesus announces this contradiction of the old soundtrack to give courage, calling us to keep at it: keep at the hunger and thirst for a broader justice, for a purer righteousness, for a true peace.

Don’t give up, don’t cease to struggle for life, for spirit, for freedom for all. For this is blessedness. And it is only by such blessed, incomplete ones as these – as you – that the world can know itself to be incomplete, and begin on the path to blessing and wholeness.

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Epiphany 3
25/1/2026

1 Corinthians 1:18-31

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ForeWord

“Light will win”

Last week, many around the country observed a National Day of Mourning in response to the terrorist shootings at Bondi just before Christmas. The theme of the day, proposed by the Chabad community which suffered the attack, was “Light will win”.

This is surely a profound assertion. It is a statement of extraordinary scope: that the long arc of the moral universe bends towards justice (M L King, Jnr). It is, indeed, a god-sized declaration and so a very difficult one. The problem is this: what is the light we imagine will shine through here? And what is the darkness over against which this light will prevail? Perhaps this seems obvious. The darkness is precisely that manifest in the murderous intent of terrorists. And the light is what prevailed before the darkness arrived.

We see this understanding operating in the Prime Minister’s statement, made a month after the attack. The scene is set: The attack took place in an “iconic” spot in our “beautiful” country, with babies and their “doting grandparents” present. In response to the danger and tragedy was the “valour” and “remarkable, selfless courage” of the responders. The tragedy is cast as a “stern test of our national character”, in response to which test light shone forth in cooperation and mutual care.

This is all true, of course – the contrast of a community festival by the beach with the screams of terror, the contrast of the bravery of unarmed people against the violence of armed men. We recognise what the Prime Minister grasps after here.

But the problem is the PM’s confidence that he knows what the light is, that the light was shining brightly before the gunman struck, and that it will shine again, and all the more brightly for what the government intends to do in response to the disaster. Australia Felix – happy, fortunate, iconic, beautiful, relaxed Australia – is Australia Lux, Australia the Light.

Darker lights

Thinking this way, we risk playing into a deep sentimentalism in our response to crises like this, which shake our easy confidence that things are OK, that we are safe. Sentimentalism is the failure, or even the refusal, to see the bigger picture.

The idyllic scene of families coming together for a communal celebration is one with which we are all very familiar, and so its disruption with the sound of guns and screams of distress is a horror the rest of us might just be able to begin to grasp. But there are other things going on in the world behind what we see, and in darker corners of Australia the Light. Today, the Sunday before Australia Day, has for a few years now been designated by the Uniting Church as a Day of Mourning. This is in recognition that all the light most of us see around us shines within the darkness of the process and the continuing impact of the colonisation of this land. Our inability, at a national level, to hold this tension was indicated in the Referendum a couple of years ago. Did we not tell ourselves then, sentimentally, “Don’t mention the war(s)”? And we could list any number of other moral contradictions at play, in our political, economic and personal lives, outshone by whatever light we prefer to see.

To acknowledge the darkness in our light, of course, is not intended in any way to diminish the horror or the suffering of those targeted at Bondi or who had to respond to the catastrophe. The issue here is not whether that attack was darkness. The question is, What is the light? And what could it mean to say that “light will win”? The kind of analysis the Prime Minister has offered has to do with a faint, dim light – the light to which our eyes are already accustomed. We need more than that.

To think about all this differently, we’ll turn now to St Paul and what he had to say to the Corinthian church, a community pretty sure it knew what the light was, and against which knowledge Paul wrote in his letters to them.

(Today’s reading is actually from next week’s lectionary readings; I wasn’t paying enough attention when I began preparation this week and started working on them before I realised. I don’t think God will mind too much, and I hope you won’t either! )

As you listen to what Paul writes, note what he says about strength and weakness, wisdom and foolishness, and the importance he places on these contrasts for understanding God’s work in the crucified Christ.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: 1 Corinthians 1. 18-31)

Word: Proclamation

Filtered light

In what we’ve just heard, Paul is at pains to emphasise that if, viewing the cross, we look for power, we see weakness; if we look for wisdom, we see foolishness. Or to connect this to what we’ve just been considering, to see Christ crucified is not to see anything that looks like light.

And this, Paul asserts, is the way into understanding the order of things with this God. To look at the crucified Christ is to see not light but something rather more like darkness. Or, at least, this is what it seems when we bring our understanding of strength and wisdom to bear on what happens on the cross.

The Prime Minister’s statement on the events at Bondi speaks of the light we seek in terms of our wisdom and strength when confronted by darkness. Such things matter, of course, but they are not yet “light”. Paul would happily assert that “light will win”, but his sense for the light comes from the experience of God in the cross: the cross is the light which will win.

The crisis at Corinth was one of communal division. “We see the light” was not the literal slogan of the various parties against each other, but it sums up the dynamic pretty well. This misplaced confidence led to jealousy and competition, sexual immorality and the exclusion of the poor. The light perceived by each party was such that they could not see each other.

I spoke earlier of a “dim” light, but the intensity is not quite the point. A better metaphor is that of coloured glass, which stops us from seeing things as they “properly” are in clear, white light. To declare that “light will win” – if we mean it seriously – is to say that there will be a time when there are no more filters, a time when – as Paul says elsewhere (1 Corinthians 13) – we will see not as in a glass, darkly, but as God sees us.

If we mean seriously that “light will win”, it becomes now rather an uncomfortable proclamation. Not seeing some things because they’ve been filtered out can be pretty convenient. Or, to put it differently, a little darkness can go a long way. It does not go too far to say that, while we spend a great deal tending to our fear of the dark with laws and security measures of all sorts, we fear just as much the bright and clear light.

And this is why Paul insists that the cross be at the centre of our understanding of God and of ourselves. Our light – the light by which we think we see: our strength and wisdom – is filtered. We see, but we don’t see enough. This means that, if we were to depend solely on what we see, we would soon be lost. When Paul joins God to the crucified, he joins God to one who has no light, no power, no wisdom. And yet, this one – the crucified – is claimed to be the closest to God. God views and values outside of our own measurings.

In this way, Paul sees our humanity not as on a spectrum, along which we are each placed somewhere between dark and light, for condemnation or praise. Before God, we are not distinguished by strength or weakness, by wisdom or foolishness. Whatever power or effectiveness there is in the crucified Jesus, it doesn’t correspond to wisdom or strength or light. Jesus’ value is simply in God’s claiming of him despite all his apparent emptiness.

The God who sees in the dark

The bad news here is that we get light – rightness – wrong. But the good news is that God can see in the dark. And it is God’s capacity to see – God’s gaze – which is Jesus’ value, and ours. For what God sees is us, groping around, trying to feel our way to safety, or perhaps even hiding in the dark, thinking we can’t be seen. And God’s response is…mercy. Because what is our helplessness and fear, compared to the nothingness of the cross, which God has already blessed?

The Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard said something which can be paraphrased like this: “O, the blessed assurance of knowing that, before God, I am always in the wrong”. As pessimistic as that sounds, it is in fact profoundly liberating, because it restates just what Paul has said: your wholeness, your value, is not your own sense of righteousness but God’s determination to count you right. We are not what we see by our own light, for better or for worse. We are not our own judges. By the grace of God, we are more valuable than even we sometimes imagine.

This is not to say that we don’t do anything in response to the darkness, that we don’t act to make safe or to limit danger when we see it. We don’t dismiss outright any fault in ourselves or others; mercy is only mercy where there is fault identified and acknowledged.

But Paul’s identification of God with the cross relieves us of the temptation to judge, whether to accuse others or to defend ourselves. The cross opens us to light we cannot see.

And so the light which will win doesn’t radiate from some vision of our perfect selves, to which we are already closely aligned. The light which will win will burn more brightly than we imagine. And, just because of this, it will reveal to us things we might not want to see. The light which will win will expose things about Australia Felix and the felicity of our individual lives that will be painful and costly.

But anything less than such truth-telling under bright light would just be a program for more of the same: more injustice, frustration, violence and tragedy. The light will have won when we confirm that we have no light of our own, nothing according to which we can properly boast before God or each other, and so when we have begun to live with a humility, openness and love that doesn’t measure others but serves them.

God deals with us not according to how strong or wise or enlightened we imagine ourselves to be.

God deals with us according to a different light – a light which does not draw assuring distinctions but is love for one, and love for all.

This is how God has dealt with us; let us deal with each other in the same way, that the light might indeed win.