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Reign of Christ
23/11/2025

John 19:1-16

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ForeWord

“Jesus Christ”

The expression “Jesus Christ” doesn’t make sense in the way that it once did.

I don’t mean by this that fewer people are familiar these days with Christian language and commitments than once was the case. I mean that the expression “Jesus Christ” once meant something which it no longer can – at least for us in the secularised modern West.

To most of us most of the time, Jesus Christ is the name of a person. It is, however, properly the contraction of a short sentence: Jesus is the Christ. It is the meaning of this that is problematic. This is because we don’t really know anymore what a Christ is, apart from the biblical story, within which its meaning was clear to most of the original actors. And because that meaning was clear, it was also clear that the expression “Jesus Christ” sets two incompatible things alongside each other: the idea of the kingly Christ, and the history of the crucified Jesus.

We can, of course, still understand this contradiction in a formal sense. But we no longer feel its meaning. This is not simply because we have shifted to a different kind of political system where kings don’t matter so much. It is because the connection between our political systems and our wider understanding of the world has changed.

Up to Jesus’ time, and for the next 1500 years or so, kings were not merely political figures, in our modern sense. They were participants in the cosmic order, and representatives of that order. The king was king on earth because God was King in heaven and earthly kings served as signs of that divine order. The world is as it is because God has ordered it so. The earthly king was the sign of that highest-to-lowest integration.

Kings no more

But we don’t live in that world anymore – a world in which mundane things participate in and represent divine order. Our sense of the world and ourselves is self-contained. Kings can no longer represent divine order; they are just “there”, or not.

To speak of Jesus as the Christ, then, is not to say anything very significant within this worldview. It will necessarily be sentimental, with an air of nostalgia. It is certainly not an expression that could move the modern heart, because we don’t feel the contrast being drawn in any moving way. If the contrast would once have been understood and the cause of either rejection or wonder, in the modern world, it’s just one more thing we can take or leave. Kings and queens today are more like celebrities, with whom they share the cover of the kinds of magazines you can pick up at the supermarket checkout. Once the world was disconnected from heaven, kings and queens were destined to become social media influencers.

What, then, might it mean to confess Jesus as king, as reigning, today?

For some orientation around this, we pause to hear again from the Gospel according to St John – today from the appearance of Jesus before Pilate. There are two kingships at play in the story. One involves a real king in the older integrated sense — the Roman Emperor, the fear of whom is part of what sways Pilate against Jesus. The other – I think – less real kingship, in the normal sense of “real”, is Jesus, who has previously said that his kingdom is “not from here (18.36) – not a kingship like the Emperor’s.

Listen for the two presentations Pilate makes of Jesus as he presents him to the howling crowd, and the language Pilate uses – the language John the Evangelist uses – to tell us something about the kind of thing Jesus is.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture: (John 19.1-16)

Word: Proclamation

Behold the human

Pilate presents Jesus twice to the crowds. The first time, Jesus has been scourged and is mockingly dressed as a king, with robe and crown of thorns in the merest semblance of a king. But here Pilate says not “Behold, your king” but “Behold, the man” or, given the Greek here, more likely, ‘”Behold Man, Behold the human”. The reduced humanity of Jesus is contrasted with the imperial kingship Pilate represents.

And this is not a mere “Here he is” but here you are – all of you: behold the human. Know your place. This is how the “king of the Jews” fits into the big picture, or doesn’t.

The second presentation invokes kingship again: “Here is your king,” now dismissed by the crowds with “Only the Emperor is king.”

It’s easy to imagine that what is going on here is a kind of moral failure – that those to whom Jesus was sent reject him and have him executed by claiming allegiance to the Emperor. We are quite capable of such commitments of convenience, of course, claiming some unpleasantness as necessary to rid ourselves of responsibility for it.

But morality is too narrow a framework for understanding what’s at stake here. Something deeper is at play. While the modern separation of earth from heaven – and so the loss of any justification of old-style kingship – is generally said to have begun somewhere in the vicinity of the Renaissance, in fact, it’s already underway here, in Pilate’s presentations of Jesus. Jesus has already told Pilate that his kingdom is not from this world.

But this does mean that Jesus’ kingdom is somehow “spiritual” rather than the worldly one of the Emperor. Jesus’ kingdom is not a somewhere-else, spiritual thing, in parallel with this one or still to come. The contrast Jesus draws is the contrast of the seemingly unnecessary, dispensable human – “Behold the human” – and the cosmic necessities of the Empire – “No king but Caesar, therefore crucify him”.

This is not easy, but it is important. In Pilate’s world, everything happens for a reason. He is the agent of Caesar, who represents (or even is) the divine order. If he says or does anything in Caesar’s name, it rests on the deep logic of the world – its integration with divine things. The king and what the king does represent God and what God wants done. This is how worldly kingship works: everything which happens is part of the divine order, the divine plan.

But John presents Jesus as something different. He only borrows the language of king, to crawl inside it and hollow it out for something else. Jesus is not an alternative monarch, as one might prefer Elizabeth II to Charles III. He is so different as to be unrecognisable as a king. Those who mock him are not, on their own terms, wrong. How could this captive peasant be in any sense “king”? Pilate and his soldiers know what a king should look like, because they have a particular idea of what the gods are like, whom the king represents or embodies on earth.

But John embraces this incongruence. We’ve seen elsewhere how the cross is (for John’s Jesus), both the rejection of Jesus and his coronation. His not-kingliness is his kingliness. Something similar is happening here. True kingship is not being identified with something “spiritual” hovering around somewhere, but with the vulnerable and reduced Jesus.

To put it differently, if the old-style kings of the world represent the divine order, Jesus doesn’t “represent” anything. He just is, not as the sign of some distant or deeper thing, but precisely what we see – a human being who, standing before the world’s self-understanding, contradicts that world at its very heart. The question that matters is not whether Jesus is king. The only question is whether God is there too, in the un-kingly Jesus. With what, we might say today, does God “identify”?

In the end, John is not interested in kings, but notes only that kings are one of the ways we get ourselves and God wrong. To say that Jesus is king is to say that kings are not what we thought they were. The world – political or otherwise – does not “represent” God. Our problem with the kingship of Jesus these days is, then, not that our worldview has shifted, but that it took 1500 years for that worldview to begin to catch up with the gospel and, for the most part, we still aren’t there, to the extent that we continue to try to establish this or that king, Jesus included.

And so we can easily elevate Jesus in the wrong way – as if he were an alternative representation of God. But there is a better, more gospel way of understanding the “kingship” of Jesus. He does not represent a divine ordering of things, and so is not constrained by that order, or his God similarly constrained. Jesus is “king” in that he knows that he still belongs to God, even as anything like order is crashing down around him. Jesus is “king” in that God embraces him.

“Behold, the human being”, Pilate commands, and it is God who obeys: there he is, Jesus, one of my children, I see him, God thinks. And for this God, to see, to regard, is to own, is to create. Jesus is not king because he is a particular part of a divinely ordered cosmic machine, but is king because he is seen and has a place in the heart of God. Pilate has been put in place in order to do particular things; Pilate is constrained. Jesus is not, has no particular thing to do but to be the Child of God. Pilate’s truth – as we saw last week – limits him; the truth of Jesus sets free.

This is the difference, the not-of-this-worldness of Jesus’ “kingdom”. The kingdom of Jesus is a kingdom with no kings, an ordering not on the model of a machine but springing from the gaze, the embrace, of God.

Monarchs, all

And, as it is for the human being Jesus, so it is for the human being that each of us is, here and now. The human, pastoral significance of the kingship of Jesus is not that he is our boss, rather than some monarch, president or other despot – and a “nicer” king at that. To be “in Christ” is to be ourselves kings and queens (or whatever), and this because God sees us “in Christ”, as God sees Jesus.

We are not required to “be” anything – certainly not to represent something about the divine order. We are to be ourselves. Our life is possible because God hears and obeys the command: Behold, the man … the woman … the child … the beggar … the billionaire … the young one … the sad one … the sick one … the near-dead one. God obeys, sees, and claims them – us – as God’s very own.

There is no divine order to which the world conforms, through kings or any other means. There are, rather, as many divine orders – or re-orderings – as there are those of us whom God sees and re-creates between blinks.

For Jesus to be “king” is for all things to be elevated under the gaze of God. To confess that Jesus is king is to commit ourselves to live without fear of circumstance, but to let our circumstance be the form in which we will encounter God, be embraced by God, become our true selves. Let us, then, with Christ rise and reign into life, living towards demonstrating a world which has no need of kings or queens because, with this God, it all matters, it is all seen and valued.

Behold the human being, God says. See yourself, as I see you.

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Pentecost 23
16/11/2025

Psalm 25
John 8:31-38

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ForeWord

You can’t handle the truth

Some of you will have seen the 1992 film, A Few Good Men – a courtroom drama turning around the accidental death of an American Marine. Two other soldiers have been charged with the death of their colleague, and their defence hinges on whether they had acted on orders to administer an irregular disciplinary action, which then went wrong, or whether they had acted of their own volition.

The film is best known for an iconic scene at the culmination of the drama – an exchange between the lead defence attorney and Colonel Jessup, the gnarly and powerful commander in charge of the military base on which the Marine died.

The courtroom exchange between the defence attorney and the colonel increases in heat until the attorney demands, “I want the truth!”. And then comes the withering response which launched a thousand memes – something of a controlled explosion delivered in a way that perhaps only Jack Nicholson could: “You can’t handle the truth!”

Jessup then begins to lay the truth out for consideration: “…we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns.” And he continues, pointing out a few inconvenient truths about what it takes to mount the defence of such walls.

As a courtroom drama, of course, the whole story is about finding the truth – the truth surrounding the Marine’s death. It’s in the context of that enquiry that the colonel lays out his confronting account of the truth of his own existence, a truth he sees even the defence attorney relies upon for his own existence and well-being.

The movie poses a dilemma about conflicting truths. And yet, at the same time, the opposing parties both hold to the same kind of truth; both have the same sense of what kind of thing a truth is. It’s this I want us to consider briefly today. My concern is less what the truth is – as a given we can state and analyse – than what kind of thing it is – how it operates and affects us.

Handling the truth

Truth is a central theme in John’s Gospel, and many of us will recognise some of the key occurrences of the notion:

^1.17 “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”;

^4.24 “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth”;

^14.6 “Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life’”;

^16.13 “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth”;

^18.38 “Pilate asked [Jesus], ‘What is truth?’”

What is true, and what truth is and does, is a key concern in John. And so, let’s pause for a moment to hear another well-known truth-saying from John’s tenth chapter. In particular, listen for what Jesus says the truth will do for those who grasp it…

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 8. 31-38)

Word: Proclamation

The truth that constrains

There is a stark difference between truth in the account of the colonel from the film and as it appears in the gospel. For the colonel, and indeed most of the time more generally in the wider world, the truth is something which constrains and restricts: “…we live in a world that has walls…”; a dropped apple falls with an acceleration of 9.8 meters per second per second; you owe the bank $452,567. The truth is non-negotiable fact, expecting a prescribed response.

In the case of Colonel Jessup’s truth, walls constrain. Of course, they protect and so to some extent liberate anyone within the walls, but the walls limit the freedom of anyone outside of them. And the need to defend the walls leads to the kind of moral compromises no one really wants to have to acknowledge. A price has to be paid, sacrifices have to be made. In the case of the narrative of the film, it seems that one such sacrifice – even if unintended – was a young man’s death, the death of one of our own. The cost of truth-as-constraint can be very high.

My interest here is not quite what is the truth – the fact – but what kind of thing the truth is, how the fact is received. For the colonel, whatever the particular truth is, it is a constraint which requires certain things be done, however distasteful. He invokes “honour”, “code” and “loyalty” as indicators of how the moral actor – each one of us – is constrained. These are all very much binding words, words to do with limitation. This is how one is required to act. Under truth-as-constraint, actions are pre-determined.

And there is, of course, much such truth around us, and necessarily so. If life is to be secure and predictable enough that we can sleep soundly at night, there are many things which must be done. Our manipulation of the world depends upon a basic if-then predictability to which we must conform for peace of mind.

The truth that liberates

At the same time, this is not the only, or even the definitive sense of “truth”. As we’ve heard from Jesus, truth is not only – if at all – constraint: “…the truth shall set you free…”. The truth will not bind or limit you, but will liberate. At the very beginning of John’s Gospel, we heard that “[t]he law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (1.17). The “grace and truth” here are not two things but one. By itself, law binds: there are walls, barriers, rules which must be observed. But grace breaks such bindings and barriers. Mercy is a setting aside of what “must” happen – of hard, pre-set truth – so that something else, indeed something fundamentally new and unexpected, can happen. Grace doesn’t deny the barriers are there, but acts as if they are not.

Grace is not the “truth”, in the sense of a new kind of limitation or requirement. Rather, we get closer to what’s offered here if we say that grace truth-s – makes true. Truth as limitation, as binding and constraint, cannot release and remain itself. Such truth is always negotiated, always subject to an arrangement of give and take, of exchange, of if-then relationships. Again, such controlled exchanges in nature and in society are a crucial part of a liveable world. But if that is all the world is – walls to be acknowledged and defended, rank and status to be observed, rights to be demanded, obligations to be met – then we are but cogs in a machine built for nobody-knows-what purpose, doing things simply because they “have to” be done.

Colonel Jessup imagines himself and those under his command to be just such cogs in the confining machinery of human politics. There is nothing to be done but maintain the dividing walls. There is nothing to be done but to destroy the enemy. There is nothing to be done but what we have always done, according to the truths by which we came into being and which, perhaps, we perpetuate in our every action.

Alongside this is laid an alternative. No argument can finally be made for the alternative because arguments leverage constraint and necessity – this because of that. And so the “alternative truth” Jesus declares is genuinely different. A truth which sets free – truly, newly free – sets argument aside and, as it were, begins again.

This is the proposal, the invitation, the gift of Jesus: that it doesn’t have to be like this. Our next action is not – or doesn’t have to be – predetermined. Or, what is the same thing, there is no final judgement to fear if we act, and act wrongly.

Once again, as seems always to be the case in John, love lurks in the background here. While Jesus hangs this truth-as-liberation on observing his word, the word he gives he characterises as the “new commandment” – to love as he has.

And we must then ask again, how did Jesus love? He loved without necessity. This is what we see in the optional, unnecessary cross. The cross is not forced. It is a consequence of his actions, but it need not have been; the response to Jesus’ teaching and actions is out of his hands. But those who crucify him are not free in the way Jesus promises. “We live in a world that has walls”, High Priest Caiaphas effectively says – anticipating Colonel Jessup – and so this has to be done (cf. John 11.50).

But Jesus’ love is not forced. He is not constrained by a requirement to love. It is gift, invitation rather than command, seeking reception but not conditional upon it.

To recall another saying of Jesus we heard a few weeks back, what will set us free is not of the world but can be in and for it. Such liberating truth will sometimes reveal a constraint or obligation as unnecessary and life-denying. Sometimes, mere obligation will be transformed into loving service. In either case, a new experience of God, the world and ourselves is at hand.

Let us, then, not be weighed down by the weight of the world. We are not built for such a load.

Let us, rather, lift up our hearts, seeking Christ – and becoming with him – the truth which sets free.

And all God’s people say…Amen.

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Pentecost 22
9/11/2025

Psalm 135
John 1:1-5, 10-14, 16-18

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ForeWord

Softening the hard thing

In her 2017 book, Doughnut Economics, economist Kate Raworth remarks that there is a graph in economic theory which is rarely drawn: the graph that projects growth into the extended future. This graph is hardly seen because everyone knows that we live within a closed system with limited resources, so that the kind of growth politicians (and many of the rest of us) like to see portrayed in graphs can’t continue forever. Every economist knows there is a plateau coming, or even a cliff. But no economist – and certainly no politician – knows what to do about it. So, let’s not think about it and, just as certainly, not put it in a graph.

But we do know there’s an issue here. And so the compromise, Raworth notes – or rather, the wilful self-delusory step – is the invocation of adjectives to qualify growth. We will still work towards growth, but it will be good growth: “sustainable” growth, “equitable” growth, “balanced” growth, “inclusive”, “resilient” or “green” growth. None of these addresses the big, hairy problem that has everyone on edge in the first place – growth is growth, and it can’t go on forever. But it looks a little less growth-y when we attach the right words to it, and the optics matter enormously in modern politics.

The God of many adjectives

But my interest today isn’t so much the problem of growth in economic thinking as the type of problem it is. Raworth’s observation reminded me of recent developments in churchly God-talk. In a Synod meeting a couple of years ago, I was particularly struck by the way the prayers groaned under the weight of a whole lot of words which, once upon a time, didn’t need to be said. The use of adjectives was especially obvious. The word “God” was often apparently felt to be insufficient – “O God…”. Rather, it seemed better to say, “O good, gracious, all-powerful, all-merciful, all-suffering, all-loving God”. There is a fair bit of adjective-creep in public prayer in some quarters these days. (Listen for it even in my own prayers today!)

And there’s a good reason for this tendency, at least superficially. The problem with invisible things – invisible hands or invisible gods – is that they are…invisible. All-embracing ideas are like this. And so, we throw something over them to give at least some outline and sense of what we are dealing with.

The connection between economic language and God-language here is not merely accidental. Economic language is the determining language of our common life in late Western capitalism. As God once was, economics is now at the heart of how we understand and order ourselves and our world. The economy stands as god, economists as theologians, politicians as priests, GDP is the measure of righteousness, and mortgage holders, self-funded retirees and national debt take turns as the political priests’ sacrificial offerings to the economy. Were theology to return to Melbourne’s secular universities, it would be most usefully located in the economics department. (That is a serious proposal: the God problem is not a “religious” problem but a deeply human one, corresponding to life together in our oik-onomy).

The growth economy and God are equally broad and encompassing things which are, for us, ideas somehow at the heart of the matter – necessary ideas, but also impossible, elusive, not-quite-unutterable.

And so we dress our ideas – colour them, qualify them – to make them seem less the problem they are. We stitch together a few adjectival fig leaves for both the invisible God and the simultaneously impossible but necessary growth economy. We do this because perhaps there really is nothing in our deepest ideas and, if they are left naked, we might see deeply disturbing things which cannot be unseen.

Naming the issue

All ideas – as ideas – suffer from this problem. They are not so much too big to fail as too big to be right. So far as the idea of God goes, the simplest solution is to dispense with the idea of “a” god and replace it with a name. The primary names the church has are the Old Testament’s “Yahweh” (Exodus 3 and passim, which appears in English translations as “the Lord” in small capitals), and the New Testament’s “Father”, which Jesus uses for the one who sent him. Both of these are indispensable, but not without problems.

The thing about names, and what distinguishes names from ideas, is that they are specific. A name denotes a shape – the shape which is given by a story. A name has content in a way that an idea does not. “Donald Bradman”, “Donald Trump” and “Donald Duck” are not three takes on the idea of Donald, but three unique identities, histories, and consequences. The name indicates what is at play – what is given shape and content by the story the name refers invokes.

But the name I’m interested in today is not “Yahweh” or “Father” with their particular possibilities and problems. Rather, I’m interested in the name Jesus – the particular Jesus-of-Nazareth Jesus who features in the Gospel stories and church confession. Whatever we believe personally about this name, its work in the biblical narrative is to be the concrete, specific place where the idea of God becomes unique, storied.

The first eighteen verses of John’s Gospel are an introductory statement of what readers will encounter in the text. For all the details of the story, central is the extension of the idea of God to what Jesus says and does, and is said and done to him. Let’s pause for a moment to hear part of that introduction to John’s Gospel, listening particularly for the last verse: “makes him known”.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 1.1-5, 10-14, 16-18)

Word: Proclamation

Exegeting God

“No one has ever seen God”. This is the “beyond”, the impossible, the unseen unthinkable we indicate with the label “God”. Within Jewish and even most pagan thinking, God had never been an idea. But modern minds think in secularised Greek mode, and our heads are full of ideas.

And so this is how we’re likely to hear, “No one has ever seen God” – as referring to the intangibility and ungraspability of God.. But, John says, the Word, the Only-Begotten, this one has “made [God] known”, or literally in the Greek, “exegeted” God. To exegete something is not to explain it but to unpack it —literally to “lead out” of it. Jesus, as it were, is the leading out of God into what feels like the non-God space, perhaps as one might pull a thread. Each story, each conflict, each word and teaching is such a thread. The hidden God not exposed but here and there implied; the distant God brought near; the shapeless God formed.

Jesus himself is this exegesis, this leading-out. Who has seen me, Jesus says elsewhere in John, has seen the Father (John 14.9). And so, strangely, there is no need for any adjectives to attach to “God” but Jesus himself. The god we are concerned with is not “the merciful” or “the loving” or “the Creator” god, but the Jesus-god. This is what our trinitarian confession grasps after – what God must be like if the crucified Jesus is God’s only worthy adjective.

Faith thinks about God – and, for that matter, about the economy – in this way. To say, as the church does, that Jesus is “the Christ” or “God” is to attach to those all-embracing ideas the details of one life lived. So also for the economy. If Jesus is God, Jesus is the Economy in the same way. And if this is starting to sound quite nonsensical, that’s just the point. Kate Raworth’s argument about economic growth is precisely that it’s a wilful and nonsensical reduction of the economy, and yet we are committed to it, perhaps even to the destruction of the world we inhabit. From the perspective of Christian faith, to say that Jesus is God, or the Economy, is to say that neither God nor Economy mean what we think or hope they mean.

Christian faith commits, rather, to something more concrete, specific – to something more human. Christian faith proposes the life of Jesus, not so much for “salvation” (another vague idea) as to affirm that a human life can indeed be the presence of God, even in a world like this. God, and the economy, can be that small and still be what they fully are.

One of the extraordinary things about John’s presentation of Jesus is the intimacy of the relationship he has with God. Jesus “exegetes” God not by providing information. God is “drawn out”, is present, in Jesus in the way that a friend’s spouse is present in that friend even when the spouse is not in the room, or a parent is present in a child even when the child is by himself, or (negatively), the way a traumatic upbringing is present even at the end of a long life.

This kind of intimacy is the gift of the gospel, an intimacy which changes our sense of what we are and so what matters in the life we’ve been given.

Christian faith has no “idea” about God. Rather, the believer finds herself exegeted, drawn into a new experience of life, a new assessment of what is happening around her, a new sense of how to be, and of what to do.

God meets us in the nitty-gritty of lives, not in our grand visions and plans, our wishful thinking or dismissal of inconvenient details. The Jesus-God is the Jesus-Human. And the invitation of this God is an invitation to be exegeted, drawn out of what we are into what God has created us to be: not a small part of a grand project, but a grand project, despite our smallness.

Jesus makes God known, that we might know ourselves anew.

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Pentecost 21
2/11/2025

Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4
Psalm 119:137-144
2 Thessalonians 1:1-4: 11-12
Luke 19:1-10

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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I don’t think I am racist or sexist. I certainly try not to be. And yet I must admit that I am conscious of race and gender differences whenever I am relating to another person. I am aware of the different things appropriate to my speech and behavior according to the other or others in any interaction. Do we not do this all the time. Are we not particularly aware of this as we are bombarded by news local and international conflicts fueled by human racial, political and religious differences.

The Melbourne scholar, Brendan Byrne, offers a startling new reading to this story about Zacchaeus. In his commentary on the gospel of Luke called The Hospitality of God Fr Byrne’s reading of the text suggests that Zacchaeus was not a bad man who became good, but that he was always a good man who was sadly misunderstood. The whole problem lies in the tense of the verbs..

This is not the conventional view. Digby Hannah’s children’s hymn gives the traditional view – “There once was a man as mean as could be; if he could take two then he’d try to take three. Then one day he took Jesus for tea: and Jesus helped him to change.”

Luke tells how Jesus was passing through Jericho and there was a large crowd. Zacchaeus, chief tax collector, and known around town as shorty, wanted to see Jesus because everyone else was taller than him. No one was going to make way for Shorty the tax collector in a crowd seeking to see and hear Jesus who proclaims God’s salvation. If he was to get a look-in, he must abandon any self-dignity. He climbed a tree. This was not the behaviour of a man who aspires to stature and wealth. This was a man desperate to see salvation.

Jesus stopped under the tree and called Zacchaeus down because he was to stay at his house that day. To the chagrin and horror of the good people of Jericho the visiting celebrity chose hospitality from Shorty the tax collector. Tax collectors were sinners because they worked for the Romans, the occupying force.

Zacchaeus hurried down and made a marvelous speech. Zacchaeus said: (here comes the problem with the tense of the verbs) the translators say “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.”

Naturally that makes sense to have the speech using the future tense – Zacchaeus has been a rotten cheating tax collector and when he was brought face to face with Jesus he changed and made retribution for his past. He will do the right thing to make amends.

Brendan Byrne reminds his readers that the speech in Greek is not future tense at all, but present tense. “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I give to the poor; and if I defraud anyone of anything, I pay back four times as much.” It is as if the translators have joined with the socially prejudices Jerichoites and judged Zacchaeus to be a cheating swindler because he worked for the wrong administration.

This tense change leaves a more open interpretation possible. For centuries the translations have forced a particular interpretation. The way Luke tells the story another interpretation is possible. If Zacchaeus is telling Jesus what his business practice has always been then we are not meeting a bad tax collector, but an ethical and generous tax collector. If this is the case then the hostility of the good citizens of Jericho is based on prejudice. He works for the wrong company so he can’t be worthy of our society.

Luke concludes the story by reminding his readers that the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost. Our traditional reading of this story suggests that Zacchaeus’ lostness lay in his cheating. Another reading of the story suggests that his lostness may have sat in being ostracised by the prejudice of his community. He could not know the assurance of God’s acceptance of him while his society with its religious leaders, its God people, would not convey their acceptance.

This amounts to a brutal rebuke of all who hold prejudices. Luke has Jesus remind them that Zacchaeus is also one of God’s elect, a son of Abraham. This alternative reading of the story raises new considerations, the possibility that God’s word reaches deeper into our prejudice-ridden society.

We don’t need to get too excited about the different possible interpretations of this point raised by the tense of the verbs in Zacchaeus’ speech. Was he bad and he had a wonderful conversion or was he good and badly misunderstood? What really matters is what Jesus said about him. Jesus received Zacchaeus into the community of the Kingdom, not because of his conversion nor because he may have been good all along. Jesus announced, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham.

Zacchaeus may be a tax collector, but it does not stop him coming within God’s covenant relationship as a descendent of Abraham. But neither does it stop the tax collector hating community who were lost in their prejudices. The argument that assures Zacchaeus of salvation must hold good for all.

Luke makes a lot of the status of being descendants of Abraham. For him it is a touch stone of being worthy of God’s favour. He had Jesus argue that the crippled woman he healed on the Sabbath was a daughter of Abraham and therefore worthy. He had John the Baptist denounce the self-righteous who claimed their decent from Abraham as their right to God’s favour when he declared that the stones that surrounded them could be raised up as descendants of Abraham.

This all presents a problem for those of us who are not descendants of Abraham. Thank goodness we have St Paul to argue our case. To the Galatians he points out that God honoured Abraham’s faith and that it is by faith that we are saved. To the Thessalonians Paul wrote, ‘we always pray for you, asking that our God will make you worthy of his call and will fulfill by his power every good resolve and work of faith,  ¹² so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ. (2 Thessalonians 1:11-12).

There is a consistency in all this. Salvation for Zacchaeus, salvation for the crowd that ostracized him, salvation for the Galatians and the Thessalonians, salvation for us in our prejudice ridden societies belongs to the people of God by the grace of God declared and availed in Jesus.

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Pentecost 20
26/10/2025

Psalm 65
John 17:11-17

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ForeWord

Something must be done

Our most recent “Quarterly Conversation on the Quarterly Essay” – looked at Marian Wilson’s “Woodside versus the Planet”. Wilson recounts the processes towards extending fossil fuel extraction permissions for the energy company Woodside, in the context of growing concern about climate change.

There are no real surprises in the Essay, including the not particularly encouraging conclusion that the “next three years are crucial”, but we live in a world in which are continually made the kinds of compromises Wilson describes in the Woodside saga.

A couple of leading reasons present themselves as to why we might act with respect to climate change. One is the perceived necessity of preserving nature as it is. With all its creatures great and small, the world is bright and beautiful, and must be preserved for its own sake. A second reason is that we depend on the world for our own survival. No healthy world, no human future (and we have an interest in a human future). An extension of this concerns the human generations that will follow us, who could be significantly affected by what we do (or don’t do) now.

Behind both of these concerns, of course, is the assumption that we can make a difference here. The expected climate changes are not natural effects; they are the result of human action, human decision. This is why we think climate action matters: we have acted to cause this, now we must act to mitigate it. Natural processes involve no decisions and so have no moral element. But this looming crisis seems to be a matter of decision, and so is experienced as a moral imperative.

But, now being moral, the question ceases to be “scientific” or “rational” or even “natural”. We are now in the realm of balance and interpretation: a question not of the necessities of nature but of risks of action and accountability.

This becomes clearer if we shift from the possible extinction of beautiful but dumb creatures to the plight of future human generations. Less predictable weather patterns, higher temperatures and rising sea levels could adversely affect, displace, or kill hundreds of millions of people. What responsibility do we have towards them?

The easy answer is at least “some” – we have some responsibility. Many would say that we have much more than just this. But why does this not move us to radical action, even if just for the sake of our future selves?

A failure to love

The answer is that we do not love the people of the future as we love ourselves. Perhaps it’s surprising that love might appear here, although less so when we consider that this is a question of moral action, which action is always finally about love.

We have done so poorly in responding to a crisis which has been looming for more than 40 years because we are lousy lovers, especially outside of our closest connections. The difficulty we might have in sympathising with future generations and moderating our actions to improve their prospects is precisely the same difficulty we have here and now in acting sympathetically towards those around us. We are afflicted here and now by contempt and violence, ideological and economic divisions, loneliness and oppression, for the same reason that climate futures look bleak: the lack of respect for the other, the poverty of our efforts at love. We do not love others – present, or to come – as we love ourselves.

Now, that’s pretty bleak, pessimistic even. But, bleak or not, is it correct? Because if it is right, we are about as likely to act successfully in the future interests of the bright and beautiful creation as we are to act successfully to bring peace with justice in our own time, here and now. (And where is that peace? )

This is not to suggest that there is nothing to be done about climate change, or that what action we might take would be pointless. It is to say that, to the extent that what needs to be done depends on human moral agents like us with our limited capacity to love each other as we love ourselves, we will not do enough to avert a major environmental catastrophe. Things are going to get a lot worse, climate-wise. And, in view of what we are – as evidenced by our collective action – there is little we can do about that getting worse.

As pessimistic as this sounds, it’s closer to the mark to speak here of gospel realism. This realism hears a command to love across 2000 years (and more) as a new word, because we are not yet good lovers, despite how many times we have heard the command to love. The new problem of climate change is the old problem of love.

And, as we’ve seen before, the old problem of love – as a problem – is shown in the appearance of love in the Gospels in the guise of a command. The problem in the struggle with climate change is the problem Jesus addresses in his great prayer for his disciples (John 17), and at the heart of his moral teaching: love one another, as I have loved you. That we need to hear the command to love is the bad news here – and why we’ll likely not act according to the threat of climate change. The good news is in the “as I have loved you” – that we have been loved in a particular way, which is where the good news begins.

The long defeat

What are we to do with the gospel’s uncomfortable realism about our moral capacity, in the face of the very pressing moral imperatives, not only of climate change but also the many other encroaching powers which reduce us to less than the glory of God? Is nothing to be done? Is it all hopeless?

That depends on what we think “hope” is. Towards an answer, we must keep in mind that the biblical testimony has always been pessimistic about us. But this has also been part of the gospel, part of its good news. Things are no more hopeless now than they ever were. Hope just isn’t what we usually think it to be – the hope that we can win, that we can save ourselves, whatever we think “win” or “save” might mean here.

In another piece on climate change I read earlier in the year, I came across a notion from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth sagas: the notion of the long defeat. The long defeat refers to a struggle against the odds in a losing battle – a defeat which is long precisely because of the struggle and which is inevitable because of the kind of world we’re in. The life of the long defeat is one in which you know you are going to lose, and yet you fight on anyway. Why? Because that struggle is the form truth’s light takes in a dark world. The struggle will yield victories along the way, but the challenges will continue. What victories we might manage, are only temporary.

On that happy note, let’s pause to hear again part of a passage we visited a couple of weeks ago, within which Jesus draws a distinction between being in-and-of the world, and being in-but-not-of the world.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 1711-19)

Word: Proclamation

In the world.

We’ve already thought a bit about what Jesus had to say in our text today – being in-and-of, or in-and-not-of the world. The point there was that generative AI tools are in-and-of the world, and so lack any novelty; they produce more of the same.

But we can come at the passage from a different direction, beginning with the “in” the world. Jesus prays for the novel – for what is not “of” the world but jis still in the world. The disciples might – might – change, but the world does not. And what of the world does not change? The world’s need for the command to love, given its continued failure to love.

The shape of this general condition is the experience of Jesus himself: Jesus struggles and finally succumbs to the unloving world. Jesus is finally defeated, on the cross. A reading of the cross as defeat is much stronger in Mark and Matthew than in John (or Luke), and we’ve seen how John twins the defeat with victory, making the cross itself in-but-not-of the world: the cross is more than defeat. (Paul is clearly here, too).

But it is still a defeat; God is rejected, the resurrection notwithstanding. And then prays precisely that this experience – his experience – be the experience of the disciples. This sharing he calls “a sanctification in truth”.

And what is this “truth”? It’s not a doctrine, not a list of credal statements. It is a way of living in a defeating world. It is Jesus’ own way of living: in the midst of death, life in all its fullness. The of-the-world defeat still looms but the gospel refuses to allow it to be understood on the world’s own terms.

And so the defeat, in Jesus’ terms, is “not of this world”. It is not tragic. It speaks something new. John’s word for this new thing is “love”, a love-in-the-midst, : a local, temporary, re-ordering “of the world” into something not-of the world.

Perhaps the work of love stands for a while, perhaps it is fleeting. Whatever the case, the imperative is the same: not “save” the world but “love”. Be human in the midst of inhumanity, because the inhumanity will continue.

Love has failed; long live love.

Discipleship – being friends and followers of Jesus, loving despite unlove – is about having cool heads in a hot world. It is the willingness to struggle against the long defeat. The world is going to need love, and heads, like this.

Let us, then, play our part in love’s work. And all God’s people say … Amen.

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Pentecost 18
12/10/2025

Psalm 111
John 17:6-8, 13-19, 22-24

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ForeWord

The AI-generated sermon
I was at a church committee meeting a couple of weeks ago, the kind of meeting that has an opening “devotion”.

The colleague leading the reflection began by observing the increasing presence and usefulness of “artificial intelligence” (AI) in our lives, and then asked what this might mean in a churchly world of smaller congregations, fewer trained ministers, and so on. To demonstrate what might be possible, she declared that her reflection had been totally written by an online AI text generator.

As those of you who have used these online tools might already suspect, the generated material was in fact very impressive. It was clear that the machine had “read” the Gospel text, and no small amount of commentary and sermon material based on it. The teaching was along the lines of what you would expect to find in a devotional resource or a general homiletical guide on how one might preach on that particular text, with a moral or spiritual lesson presented at the end. The output was the kind of thing we’ve heard others do with the same material.

At the same time, precisely because we recognised it, there was also something rather prosaic about the analysis of the text and its application to our context. It lacked freshness. And there is a reason for this. To overstate it just a bit, this kind of program – a so-called Large Language Model text generator (LLM) – works by summarising pretty much everything that’s ever been written about a particular subject. And so, these machines work by telling us what is already known. We might not know that we already know it, but it is part of us, nonetheless, to the extent that we are part of the same world and discourse.

Now, I’m not really concerned here with whether or not one “should” use AI in this way – to write devotions at meetings or write sermons. There was nothing inherently wrong with what the machine had generated. The risk it presents is not that it might be wrong (although it could be that, too). The real risk is that it might just be boring, the summary of a whole lot of things we have heard before, which we already know. (The most interesting thing in the presentation at the meeting was a remark the leader made about the reading before we heard the AI-generated stuff – interesting because it drew attention to a part of the text usually eclipsed by the standard and familiar focal points. )
John’s Gospel might not be the most obvious source for thinking about the limits of Large Language Model text generators. But, having in mind what we’ve just said about what those machines do and the kind of stuff they produce, let’s now listen to some selected verses from John, with an ear for what Jesus says about being “in but not of” the world.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 17. 6-8, 13-19, 22-24)

Word: Proclamation

Being of-the-world

Our condition is, generally, that we are a product of everything that was ever said or done up to this moment. This is more obviously the case when we consider our immediate personal experience. We are the product of our family, our language, culture, and education. But each of those is itself the summation of a vast number of actions and words which preceded them in history. Every one of us is the smallest tip on the most massive but hidden iceberg.

LLM text generators tap into that deep subsurface of our being. Any question we ask of them has already been asked and answered. You might not yet know the answer – which is why you asked the question of the AI – but you recognise the answer because of what else you know about the wider context of your life. The answer “makes sense”, as we say, because we’ve been there, thought that, and the machine, in a way, just reminds us of what we’ve forgotten. (There are shades of Socrates’ midwifery here, for those who know of that).

This relationship between what we are and the whole world of words and events which have created us is part of what Jesus speaks about in our passage from John this morning. Several times, he draws a distinction between being “of the world” and not of the world. “Of the world” is what LLM text generators do. What they produce impresses us because we recognise it: this is how such things are said, described, properly structured. An AI-generated sermon on a scriptural passage sounds like all the other ones we’ve heard. That sermon, then, is “of the world”. Our computers have the capacity to do all this very, very, very quickly and, because processing speed is a characteristic of intelligence, AI looks particularly intelligent. But whether the work is done quickly or slowly, it remains a reconfiguration of something which is already in place. What is produced is in the world – obviously! – but also of the world. The limitation of AI is that it brings us nothing new; what it produces is, quite literally, mundane.

Being not of-the-world

But Jesus speaks of something else – what is in the world but not of the world. Perhaps more clearly, he poses the possibility of the radically new. “In” the world and “of” the world is more of the same – as in the case of AI-generated texts. In the world but not of the world is the presence of the new. Jesus speaks here about this kind of newness.

Yet it’s one thing to see that this is what Jesus poses; it’s another thing to conceive how such newness might be possible. Can anything be radically new in this way? This question arises not because our text prompts it. It’s in the text because our deepest desires are about precisely such newness, about the possibility of starting over, about the clean slate. But how could we possibly get to there – to the profoundly new and restorative – from here, mundane as we are? We are as constrained by our icebergs as AI is.

Not surprisingly, John’s response to this desire is “Jesus”. But we need to hear this in a new way. “Jesus is the answer” is a tired trope. John doesn’t present Jesus as answer-to-question but as new in place of old, as outside in the inside.

Shifting from in/of language, John hints at the excess in Jesus when Jesus speaks of his having been with God “before the foundation of the world”, another impossible thought – that Jesus had time before time. But John has to strain the language in this way to speak about the possibility of something new happening, something which could not have been predicted. This unpredicted thing is the appearance of Jesus himself, who, beginning before time, is more than time contains, is more than just “of the world” and so is the presence of something not mundane but “new”.

Now, if you’re keeping up with all this, congratulations! I’m trying hard not to present a “heard it all before”, AI-style sermon! What we desire, need, is the newness Jesus presents, and not more of the same. Can there be something new in this way?

The possibility of the new: prayer

The possibility of something new can’t be separated from how such newness might be realised among us. When we ask “Can? ” we also ask “How? ”: how could such a thing be, to quote old Nicodemus again (John 3), for the umpteenth time in our reflections on John.

For a thought about this, let’s note one last thing about our reading today. Jesus is not teaching here, is not giving moral instruction, is not arguing. He is praying.

Prayer – for ourselves or for others – is always for the impossible, for that which has not yet been observed or experienced and so which cannot be predicted. Prayer seeks what cannot be generated out of the world itself, what is not mundane. Prayer asks for an occurrence within the world of something which is not worldly: in, but not of, the world.

AI can write prayers because it can read our liturgies, which are simply the product of all the church has prayed through the ages. It predicts what a prayer would be in a given context. But AI will never pray, at least not the AI we have now. It only knows the “of” the world, and not the “not of”.

But prayer is not about reconfiguration of the parts we already have, of all we have already prayed. It is not about what, by earnestness or cleverness, we have earned. Prayer is about gift. Or, in older churchly terminology, prayer is about miracle.

It is for such a miracle, such a gift, that Jesus prays. “May they have what we have, Father”, he prays. And this for no “thing”, shiny and new in our midst for honour and adoration. The prayer of Jesus is for a new kind of relationship, and so a new community. “I pray for them, that they might be new as I have been new, that they might enjoy what we enjoy, Father”.

And this is not a withdrawal from everything in the world but rather for its enrichment. This strange newness, not-of-ness, is for the life of the world.

Whether or not we imagine Jesus is the answer is the wrong place to start. The Jesus we usually think of here is merely “of” the world, an answer on the same terms as the question, and that isn’t going to get us anywhere new.

The crucial question is whether what Jesus talks about, and is said to have been himself, is important. Is the human just more of the same, merely “of the world”, or are we really only ourselves when we exceed all that has been, when we are not “of the world”? And if the latter, what might it take to see and feel the new and the fresh?

This is the concern of faith, and why we come together each week like this: the desire, the possibility and the way of becoming something new, fresh and enlivening, in and for the world.

Most of our lives, most of the time, are about where we have been and how that limits what we can be. Faith – at least, faith in a God like this – looks for more. This more is God’s call to us, and God’s gift when we respond. Let us, then, open ourselves to this new, this excess, this more.

And all God’s people say…

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Pentecost 17
5/10/2025

Psalm 42
John 13:1-35

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ForeWord

Last week, we recalled the genre of comedy, noting among other things that a comedy is not necessarily a funny story. It is, rather, a story that follows a particular narrative arc, opening at a comfortable emotional level before the protagonist is pushed into some uncomfortable situation, before a final resolution of some sort. Most of the stories we tell are comedies, even if most of those stories are not necessarily very funny.

But today I want to pick up on the concept of “funny”, and to come at this from some reflection on what we do when we laugh.

What’s so funny?

Why do we laugh? The obvious answer is that we laugh because we’ve seen something funny. But then we have to push the question a little harder; what is it that makes something funny?

When we watch a movie intended to be humorous, we laugh at the point at which everything goes wrong. The funny thing is that the protagonist finding herself in some difficult situation. We laugh at her vain attempts to get herself out of that situation and the silly faces that she draws as her situation gets worse and worse despite her best efforts. In a humorous story, laughter is our response to the trough in the comedic arc.

And so, the laughter stops once things begin to settle again. That final settlement might well be a place of relief, but it’s no longer a place of laughter. We might be happy there, but we don’t laugh because we’re happy. We’re happy because we have laughed and no longer need to. What makes us laugh – what is funny – is displacement. Someone is suddenly and unexpectedly where they should not be. Our laughter points to that being out of place, to that being wrong, and we stop laughing at the end because the wrongness has been resolved, and we anticipate “happily ever after”.

There is, then, something slightly sadistic about laughter. The object of the laughter – the displaced protagonist – is not the one laughing. It is we who watch them. There’s nothing that the protagonist wants to laugh about when he or she is at the bottom of the trough. She doesn’t know she’s living a comedy and fears the tragedy of never getting out again. Laughter, then, is one of our responses to suffering.

This, I think, is unexpected and provocative. But laughter gets still more interesting. We know very well that laughter is contagious but it’s not the case simply that we laugh because somebody else laughs, like catching a cold.

Laughter is invitational. It proposes a community. By noticing that something is going wrong, we invite others also to notice the wrongness, and so we create a space within which a certain sense of normality is implied. This normality is stated negatively in laughter when we see something outside of that zone: “Hey, look at him – ha ha”. Joining in laughter is not catching a cold, it is expressing agreement – “Yeah, that’s pretty weird”. Laughing with others creates community over against that weirdness.

Funny as exclusion

This is why laughter can hurt – it’s socially exclusionary. It is inherently critical and exclusionary, although of course in varying degrees. There is a place for the gentle and good-natured gibe, but the nature of laughter as invitation to community also operates in more malicious circumstances, where laughter indicates mockery. Mocking laughter invites us not only to notice that the funny person is outside the group’s norm, but to reject him because of this. We laugh here because he is not one of us, and the laughter marks this outsideness. Mockery makes fun of – makes funny – a black person in a white space, a woman in a male space, a captive in a free space, a native in a colonial space, a poor person in a rich space, a short person in a tall space, an awkward person in a graceful space, or a saint in an unholy space. We know all these tropes from our comic stories, funny or not.

We might wonder then, if it is a reconciled and inclusive place, whether there is any laughter in heaven. Laughter would have to be something else if there were to be.

So, with all that in the back of our minds – the dynamics of laughter and its connection to inclusion and exclusion from a community – let’s listen to a passage from John’s Gospel about community and the laughable Jesus.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 13.1-25)

Word: Proclamation

The laughable Jesus

As is usual in John, a lot’s going on in the passage we’ve just heard, but there are two things we might notice today in connection with comedy and community.

First, the funny thing – the odd, wrong thing – which happens in the story is that the rumoured messiah takes the role of the servant. No one bursts out laughing, of course; it is more a case of shock, as Peter expresses. Jesus is funny – in a funny peculiar, rather than funny ha-ha, kind of way. And this peculiarity, this outsideness, is something all the disciples see, as all Jesus’ opponents have already seen. (Judas the betrayer is woven through this story, and while we don’t know his internal motivation, his actions are consistent with a mocking rejection of the ministry Jesus has exercised.) The community of disciples has in common that what Jesus does is not common but is strange. In terms of the comedic arc, Jesus is here at the low point, has fallen from the messianic perch, from normality, from his place in the community. This is the cross.

But, as we noticed last week, though Jesus has bottomed-out here, the arc of the story doesn’t do the natural comedic thing. He isn’t persuaded by Peter, and so doesn’t stand up straight, apologise and get on with being a proper messiah. And if this humility is the equivalent of the cross, there comes here no equivalent of a resurrection fix, swung in to salvage the moment now that Jesus has lost his mind.

Rather, Jesus pushes further into the humiliation:

What I have done down here in the lowly place is odd, strange, funny, mockable. And you are to do and become this as well. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another – love such as I have shown you.

This is not a call simply to do what Jesus did. It is a call to be strange, as Jesus was. It is an invitation to be remarkable by not avoiding the humiliation of the comedic protagonist who then desperately wants to get up and out again, but by becoming intentionally displaced. This displacement has something to do with the oddness of the command to love we considered a few weeks ago. And so the imperative here is not to be “loving”, in a moral sense, but to enter into an ethic of strangeness.

The community of the laughable God

More pointedly, the call to discipleship is a call to be laughable, in the mode of the laughable God – the God who does weird, ungodly things. The thing about the gods is that they are all about order and appropriateness, insideness and outsideness. The gods define and guarantee the nation, or the religion, or the class, or the race or the gender, or whatever. And so the gods tell us what to laugh at, in the mocking and exclusionary sense.

The God of the gospel, however, is laughable, is the definitive outsider who does strange things. This God kneels to wash our feet, is mocked under a crown of thorns and a purple robe, is crucified outside the city.

Love is strange. In a world like ours, specialising as it does in mockery and exclusion, love which reaches further than the community of the local gods. And to be of this particular God – a disciple of Jesus – is to be learning to be as Jesus himself was. “As I have loved you” means “Remarkably”, “Strangely”, “Laughably”.

But things are twisting now, so that what was laughable and excluded becomes the means of community and inclusion. A new kind of community is proposed, in which being laughable – being different, being outside, being less than others – is embraced.

Laughter is now being transformed, rehabilitated. Instead of the laughter of the many which expresses oneness by marking the outsider, the wrong, Jesus’ action is a Laughter-of-One which proposes a community, a oneness, a normality, which is not yet there.

Because it is properly always particular, love always isolates – always laughs. Yet this is a laugh which does not exclude but embraces the funny other, the lost, the not-fitting, and gathers them in. And so, unlike with the other strong, mocking gods, this laughable God’s laughter creates a new kind of community and calls us to laugh with him, to laugh as he does, to laugh into being what does not yet exist – the community of peace and justice which comes from loving as Jesus loved us.

Laugh, Jesus says, as I have laughed you.

And all God’s people laugh, Amen.

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Pentecost 16
28/9/2025

Psalm 23
John 5:19-25

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ForeWord

There is an old joke about asking for directions, which comes in many versions but generally runs something like this: a city slicker finds himself out on the back roads in some sparsely inhabited part of the countryside, trying to find the church at which his cousin is being married that afternoon. Exasperated, he pulls up to ask directions from an old farmer he sees leaning on a fence. Hearing where the cousin wants to go, the farmer responds, “If that’s where I was wanting to be going, I wouldn’t be starting from here. ” The local then proposes how the visitor might get to the point from which one should begin such a journey.

The reason for telling the joke is fairly obvious, and it’s often told to mock the Irish or some other national identity. But if we look past the mockery, we can see something of ourselves in the lost cousin – having a very strong sense that we should be somewhere else, but also having no idea how to get there. We knew where we were, but now we don’t, and we want to know again.

We’ve noticed before that this sequence of good-bad-good-again reflects the literary form of the comedy. A comedy is not just a funny story – not even necessarily a funny story. It’s a story the arc of which moves from a happy beginning through a troubled middle into a happy – often happier – resolution at the end.

In a comedy, the good guys ultimately triumph, no matter how catastrophic the odds. And the vast majority of stories we tell are comedies, as distinct from bad-guys-win tragedies which never rise out of the catastrophe. We see the comedic in the children’s classic, in the latest easy-watch rom-com, the smash hit sci-fi action flick, and even in your average horror movie.

The joke about the yokel farmer’s directions has the city slicker stuck in the middle of a comedy. But he doesn’t know this, doesn’t know whether he’ll get to the wedding on time. And this is one of the problems with recognising the genre of a comedy. Our stories generally follow the comedic arc, so that in the end at least someone survives and lives happily ever after. But, as we live our own lives, even if we imagine that they might be comedies, we don’t know how or in what way our story will be positively resolved. In the middle – and pretty much the whole of our life is spent “in the middle” – it feels like it might yet turn out to be a tragedy.

We’ve also noticed before that comedy is very much the genre of the biblical narratives. Consider the stories of Ruth, or Abraham and Sarah, or of Israel taken into exile and then restored it again. Even the book of Job follows the comedic arc. More broadly, the whole biblical narrative moves from the paradisial Garden of Eden, through the struggle of fallen human life, to the promised reconciliation of all things in the book of Revelation. And, within all of that, is the story of the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus, which also appears to follow the comedic arc.

When I spoke a few weeks ago about the reference a Christian funeral makes to a “second story” within which ours is placed, this indicated the greater divine comedic arc within which we live our own personal story. And that is all very good and true. But along the way, our lives are mostly lived in that trough between the happy and joyful promise we were at our beginning and the promised eternal life at our end, whatever that looks like.

And, in this middle, we find ourselves very much in the situation of knowing where we want to be, but not being in the right place to start from to get there.

(With all that in mind, let’s hear a short passage from John’s gospel in which Jesus speaks to the where and what of our life and action)…

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 5. 19-25)

Word: Proclamation

“. . . whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me”, Jesus says, “has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life. ”

I suspect that our hearing of this declaration typically falls on the first part: that we need to hear and believe Jesus. This is true. But what comes at the end of the declaration is unexpected: not that there “will” be life for the believer, but rather that the judgment has already been set aside. The one who hears and believes has already crossed over from death to life. Such faith doesn’t secure a future but effects a new present.

The strangeness of this is not unlike the strangeness we’d hear had our yokel farmer told the lost fellow that he was already where he wanted to be, when that was clearly not the case. How can “here” be “there” when it doesn’t look like there? In the terms in which Jesus speaks, how can what feels here and now like the comedic trough be its elevated resolution? How can the uneternal now be eternal life?

In this connection, we also noted a couple of weeks ago that the resurrection of Jesus didn’t “add” anything to him. Jesus’ death was not an incompleteness; he was as much king upon the cross as he was when risen from the dead.

This is why Jesus can say that eternal life is already present to those who understand the gospel. If there is nothing to be added to Jesus beyond his death, there is nothing to be added to us either if, like Jesus, we are doing the works of the one who sent us. Now is enough to be whole. Unlike the lost cousin on his way to the wedding, we are already precisely where we need to be. By the word of Jesus, the eternal life typically held over until some distant future becomes a possibility here and now.

Jesus says this to those of us whose experience of day-to-day life is probably closer to being lost on the way to a wedding: feeling that we are not where we need to be, or want to be. And the incompleteness in this is made worse by the feeling that we need to be somewhere else in order to begin to become ourselves. There are no signs to tell us where we are or where to go. We don’t know whether the serial killer is still in the house. We don’t know whether we should go through with our convenient engagement for marriage, or let it be swept aside by the new and disruptive love interest which has suddenly appeared. We don’t know whether our fairy godmother will arrive in time to lift the witch’s curse. We don’t know what the good is we should be doing. This is what it feels like to be told we’re living a comedy when we’re still only in the troubled middle.

And it’s this experience that Jesus addresses: “who hears and believes my word has eternal life”. To believe Jesus is to hear that you are already where you need to be.

The gospel has much less to do with the promise at the end of all things than with the promise which might be realised within the uncertain, messy middle of all things. The gospel is concerned with the fullness of the here-and-now life Jesus once lived, and the continuing presence of Jesus’ word so that we might also live here-and-now in the same kind of fullness. That word doesn’t point beyond the life we live but directly to it. Eternal life is less what happens tomorrow than what happens today. And what happens today is not what we do to bring about or earn ourselves a happy tomorrow. It is testimony to the truth of human being: fullness of life is for now, whatever our circumstances , not later.

There is, then, a kind of collapsing, or reaching back, of the comedic ending into the unhappy middle, so that there will sometimes be something quite unfunny about the comedy of the gospel. Sometimes it looks and feels like a cross.

But the cross is now not the triumph of the tragic but the refusal of life to give up, a testimony to a different way of seeing.

And so the struggle is no less the truth, no less a fullness of life which contradicts its uncomfortable form to declare: God is already here, in the messy middle. Eternal life, then – the life of a different time – is a life we can live now, a life which can make our times different.

This is God’s call to us, and God’s gift.

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Pentecost 14
14/9/2025

Psalm 98
John 15:1-17

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ForeWord

If there is any place where we might expect that love could most confidently be taken to be present, it is surely at a wedding. And yet, we begin today by noting something about the standard Marriage Service which is both surprising and deeply significant.

I hadn’t noticed it myself until preparing a particular wedding 15 or so years ago. Wedding preparation includes meeting with the couple a few times before the day to discuss the nature of marriage, what will be done and said on the day, and so on. This often involves tweaking the vows a bit for personal preference, within some set limits.

When I received back from the bride-to-be one of the service drafts I’d sent her, there was something unfamiliar in the suggestions for the vows that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. And then I saw it: she had inserted a couple of lines by which the couple would express how much they loved one another, or something to that effect.

Why not? , you might ask. But this was novel at that point in the service, and the penny dropped on what I hadn’t seen before: the Marriage Service doesn’t care whether the people standing at the altar love one another. This is the case in both the broadly catholic “religious” service of the Uniting Church and in the civil service used at the State Registry Office. The only question asked of a couple about their being present on the day is whether they have come willingly, which is not the same thing as “Do you love one another? ”

Of course, in a modern liberal society, we expect that, if there is a wedding, there are no shotguns in sight and that the wedding has been convened because of the couple’s affection for one another.

But the Marriage Service itself doesn’t ask about that. The substantial question put to the couple is not, Do you love? but Will you love? This is a place for promise-making rather than stating what is presently the case. Affection might still be expressed in any particular service, but it’s not prescribed. Whatever is at the heart of the wording of the traditional “religious” and “secular” marriage services, it is not affection.

Perhaps that seems rather a subtle distinction to make, given that, in societies like ours, couples tend to turn up at the altar based on their affection for each other. But it’s worth noting here that the Marriage Service could work just as much for a traditional arranged wedding as for a modern “romantic” wedding. It’s neither here nor there, so far as the Service itself is concerned, whether the marriage originates in romance or arrangement. What matters is the promise, and therefore the implicit command to love.

This bizarre notion – that we might be commanded to love one another even on that occasion – runs quite counter to our modern sense for what a wedding is about. But my concern today is not wedding vows but the simple strangeness to our ears of a command to love. Perhaps the wedding service is the only place we hear that command today in the secular world, if indeed we can hear it against the background noise of self-interpretation, self-love and exclusion of the other, which seems to be growing louder around us.

How can we be commanded to love? We return to this after listening for God’s word in a hearing of a passage from the Gospel according to St John.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 15:1-17)

Word: Proclamation

“This is my commandment, that you love one another”.

Clearly, the love at stake here is not the love we feel. It is not that kind of love that is our natural resonance with another person. Affectionate love, of course, is central to our being. Romance, family, friendship – these “felt” loves are as essential to us as they are inevitable.

But Jesus claims there is a love which is not natural, which is not innate, which is not an expression merely of what we feel or want. That claim must, therefore, come as a commandment, as something which contradicts what we think is normal or natural.

Yet, there’s a world of difference between what we are commanded not to do and what we are commanded to do. “Do not kill”, “Do not commit adultery” and “Do not lie” require that we recognise the other without requiring any recognition of our connection to that other. A “Do not” commandment is how we keep our distance, and an investment towards not being mistreated in return. “Do not” is generic: Do not kill means do not kill anyone.

But the command to love is not generic; it is specific. “Do not”. If we are not to lie to anyone, we are to love some particular one. The command is not to love “everyone” or “humanity” but some particular person, in front of you. “Love one another”, Jesus says. This is direct and personal: love that one there.

If this were easy, it wouldn’t be commanded. And sometimes we just can’t do it, even when everything began so well. There’s nothing to be said for getting judgmental here. And the imperative to love can be manipulated to force people to stay unwillingly in life-threatening relationships, which is also misses the point. Such ruptures of what was love show just how hard love is, and how the command to love understands our faltering capacities for love.

Perhaps all this is obvious, or at least familiar. But the question is, can such a commandment be heard today? What is a call to love in the midst of assassinations, inflammatory presidential blustering and gleeful anticipations of death penalties? What is the command to love while occupations continue and racism flaunts on our streets? We cannot help but be sceptical here. Can love really be a serious political option?

It can, but only if the work of politics is reconceived. Politics, particularly in its law-making and -enforcing mode, finds it easy to say what love doesn’t look like. This is what the “Do not” commandments are for, and a developed society like ours has thousands of them.

The politics of love would be entirely different. “Do not” is open-and-shut easy: he did it, or he didn’t.

But the work of love is hard to pin down, harder to identify. It is gift and invitation and response. And we don’t really know when it is done. Or how long it lasts. And so the command to love continues to be stated. “Do not steal” speaks to the opportune moment. “Love one another” speaks to the next moment, and the next, and the next.

We know when we’ve got the “Do not” right or wrong. But love both succeeds and fails at the same time. Even if it’s rebuffed, love has been right. And when it’s received as right, there is yet more love to be done.

The “Do not” commands are about quantities that can be counted – what has or hasn’t been done. The command to love is a quality, a value, a means of being present. “Do not” commands keep us safe for a while – if we have enough of them – like a heavy lid on a pot threatening to boil over. The command to love turns down the heat.

And is this not what we need – a turning down of the heat?

And do we not have a part to play in this?

And so, stop counting the rights and the wrongs, and hear the command: love one another.

Love one another. In the home. At the workplace. On the roads. In the shopping centre. In the Parliament. In the Church and the Mosque and the Synagogue. In the council meeting. In the university. On the tram. In the café. In the library. At the concert. In the park. In the queue. Even at the football.

Love. One. Another.

There is no other way out of all this.

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Pentecost 13
7/9/2025

Psalm 1
John 12:27-36

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ForeWord

Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council is probably not a name any of you have ever had reason to invoke.

That said, some of you will have fond memories of having read or listened to the radio play versions of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which the Vogons feature, and which opens with the destruction of Earth to make way for an intergalactic highway.

The end of our world is announced with the arrival of a fleet of bulldozing spaceships. A line which has fixed itself in my mind ever since I first read the book describes the sight of these “huge as office blocks, silent as birds” ships: The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.

Quoting more fully:

The great ships hung motionless in the sky, over every nation on Earth. Motionless they hung, huge, heavy, steady in the sky, a blasphemy against nature. Many people went straight into shock as their minds tried to encompass what they were looking at. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.

The striking thing about this last sentence is that it’s both immediately clear, and then immediately not so clear, what is meant.

Clearly, bricks don’t hang in the air, if we take “brick” and “air” to mean what they usually mean. And a spaceship, in this description, corresponds to a brick. But it is clearly also not-brick, because if the air is just air, the spaceship should fall.

It matters here that the ship doesn’t hang in the air in the way a helicopter might. The noise a helicopter makes indicates how hard it is trying not to be like a brick. And, presumably, there would be a technological explanation for why the spaceships don’t do what bricks do. But this is not the point. The point is the “blasphemy against nature”. The ships don’t “fit”. They have no meaning in the sense we’ve considered before: we can’t “locate” them. And yet they are there, in such a way that we have to speak about their “thereness” as something sheer. They are wrongly, but starkly and strongly, “there”. And this sheer thereness corresponds to the shock of the news: the world is about to end.

My interest in all this is not the possibility of space travel or how advanced alien tech might be. I want instead to compare Douglas Adams’ description of those cosmic bulldozers to the crucifixion of Jesus.

Admittedly, this is a connection you’ve probably not thought much about until now, so let me fast-track you into it. An apparent difference between Jesus and the spaceships is that Jesus hangs in the air (on the cross) precisely the way a condemned criminal does. There is no surprise here. Seen it all before. People get crucified, and this is what it looks like.

If we think about the cross these days, it’s typically in terms of the suffering it entailed and so the “price” Jesus paid. But there’s not a lot of this in John’s Gospel. Disrupting once more our normal sensitivities, John doesn’t quite do suffering. He’s not dispassionate; he is just doing something else. (We might note in passing here that Jesus asks, ”…what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. ”)

Our Gospel text today has Jesus speaking of his being “lifted up”, in an apparent reference to his crucifixion. But, for John, this is not merely a crucifixion. While Jesus is made to hang there in the way that condemned criminals typically did, this lifting up also has Jesus hanging there strangely, in the way that bricks don’t.

But, before we go any further, let’s pause for a moment to listen for the Word of God in the hearing of the Scriptures…

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 12. 27-36)

Word : Proclamation

Jesus speaks several times in John’s gospel of being “lifted up”. The expression is one of John’s many wordplays.

The lifting up is clearly a raising in the ghastly mode of a crucifixion. But the term also has overtones of a different kind of elevation. In particular, this elevation can also be a coronation.

And this changes dramatically what we are invited to see. The cross is now not a place of suffering or some saving transaction. The cross is here more like a throne upon which is “seated” (hangs) the king.

But, as an elevation, a coronation, the point is not quite that a king is crucified, whether intentionally or accidentally. To the extent that the crucifixion is a coronation, Jesus becomes king in the process of crucifixion. And so, on this reading, Jesus’ death upon the cross becomes the high point of the story, the point at which he comes to himself, rather than merely the point at which his executioners reject him.

But now a strange question presents itself. If the cross is indeed the high point of the story, what then of the resurrection? We have to say that the resurrection is no longer necessary for the story to be true or complete, although it’s essential if we are to know that the cross is the high point. We’ve seen this once or twice in our Gospel of John reflections over the last few months. The story peaks at the cross, but no one will know this unless something happens to give us a different way of seeing the cross, which is the work of the resurrection.

But if the cross is the climax of the story – the point at which Jesus becomes king – then the crucifixion is no longer a familiar tragedy but is suddenly deeply anomalous. Jesus, like those cosmic bulldozers, hangs “motionless, heavy, steady in the sky, a blasphemy against nature” – against everything by which we have measured what is right and what is wrong, what is divine and what is worldly, what is life and what is death.

Here, as with the arrival of Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz with all his bureaucratic planet-destroying efficiency, is the end of the world, the revaluation of all values, a kind of blasphemy against what had been true until that moment. The cross is the least human, least kingly, least Godly of places. But it’s here that Jesus is declared to be the one in whom God reigns: the “king”.

This is not merely neat or even profound “theology”. Faith doesn’t interpret the stories of Jesus to make sense of them. Rather, out of those stories, faith interprets the world to make sense of it. The cross is to our sense of ourselves and our world what a suspended brick would be: a blasphemy against our typical ordering of things and, so, a new thought, a new vision.

How Jesus is, is how we are to be. The Christian – or, better, the properly and truly human being – will be strange like this, will be blasphemous like this, will surprise and shock.

The cross is what it would be like for all the guns and the bombs just to stop, without explanation. It is like the soldiers just packing their gear into their jeeps and going home, not because the war is over but to make the war over. The cross is the stunned, brick-in-the-air-like silence which such an impossible thing would require – before the ecstatic, jubilant, shout-out-loud joy.

The cross is like living as if death were not there, lurking, fearsome.

The cross is mercy which shatters the shackles of hard justice.

The cross is all such impossible things, hanging in the air in much the same way that a brick doesn’t, inexplicable, and utterly glorious. In the midst of death’s dismal order, this has the power to draw all people, to see and to marvel that such things could be (Nicodemus, again! ).

This is our faith. And to hold this faith is to hear that this is what we ourselves are to become: such impossible things, such unexpected blasphemy against the natural but oppressive order of the world – the light of the glory of God in a humanity fully alive, contradicting the reign of death.

This is our gift, our calling, and our prayer.

And all God’s people say…