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Advent 1
28/11/2021

Jeremiah 33:14-16
Psalm 25
Luke 21:25-36

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In a sentence:
God arrives before death, that we might not die too soon

Not many people wake up in the morning knowing that today is the day they are going to die. Perhaps people condemned to execution know this, or suicides. But even then, there are stays of execution and changes of heart. Inevitable as it is, death nevertheless catches almost all of us by surprise.

Much of our lives are spent keeping death at bay, something at which we have become increasingly successful. Most of us, most of the time, can live without worrying too much “just now” about dying, even if the odds of our greeting death increase with each day we haven’t died.

Perhaps surprisingly in all of this, death is not unlike God: a limit to our being, present mostly as a horizon, arriving in its own time. No one wakes up thinking that today is the day God will finally arrive. Sometimes people gamble on this, usually under the spell of a charismatic cult leader, but disappointment here has been universal. Faith holds that God is, like death, inevitable – ultimately unavoidable – and also that, like death, God is unpredictable. You will meet your maker, like the unexpected thief in the night.

In today’s text and many like it, this scenario is described in terms of first century apocalyptic thought. This thinking included the conviction that God’s arrival was imminent: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place,” Jesus says (Luke 21.32).

We can’t believe this now, at least not in the sense we suspect Jesus and his first hearers believed it. It is entirely possible they believed this in the same way that a suicide bomber believes, or with the true-believer conviction of the staunch defender of “freedom” and “democracy”. This way of thinking was in their blood: this generation will not pass away until all this has taken place.

We can’t believe these texts in that way, not least because that generation has well and truly “passed away”. But we are clever and find a way. Noting the similarities of God and death, we collapse the inevitability of God into the inevitability of death: God arrives when death arrives. Or, as we’re more likely to put it: when we die we go to heaven (or the other place). This mostly works, although now it is not heaven coming to earth (for which we pray each week) but us going to heaven (or not). Or, more profoundly, instead of God coming with the threat of death – which is surely implied in these terrifying texts: now death brings God

Yet, death which brings God is precisely our problem. We kill or are killed, discriminate, alienate and stigmatise because it makes someone feel safer, which we imagine is what God wants for us. We deny others what they need because we feel closer to God when we hold on to our stuff. We are unfaithful or unreliable because the relationships and commitments we already have seem not to bring God with them, se we prefer others.

If God arrives when death comes, then a culture of death already enjoys the presence of God, already is God’s kingdom – surely, the kingdom of a horrific God.

But perhaps we reject the seemingly obsolete “this generation” of our text too quickly. Maybe the point here is that God is “more” inevitable than your death – if one thing cannot properly be more inevitable than another. It’s not death you have to worry about, but God. At least, this is what we ought to want – the coming of God and not death; it is, again, the meaning of “thy kingdom come”.

We pray “your kingdom come” because we are already in the presence of death. Our deathly ways do not bring God, at least, not this God. With this God, death is real but is not a means to good things. Death is not a method for God.

The world is such that death always comes too soon. This is not that we stop breathing prematurely but that death presses in on us in the form of fear, worry, hatred, law, oppression, possessions; or death presses in when we employ it to cause these things in others.

We sometimes speak of “realised eschatology” – the notion that the promised gifts of God begin to be available before the end of all things. But there is also a “realised thanatology” – a realised social, personal, political “death” – which arrives before our biological death. Faith seeks God’s early arrival because death has come among us too soon.

We read these strange and seemingly out-of-date texts today because they pose a question: Does the arrival of God coincide with the end of life, or its beginning? And then, when does God arrive? What we think the answers to be here can be seen in how we live. We do well to ask ourselves, Is the world more alive now because of the way I have lived today?

If God’s coming is the beginning of life then, in a deathly world like ours, God’s arrival marks the beginning of death’s of own death. Something new is in our midst.

Rejoice, Jesus says, not because you have dealt enough death to usher in your own little interpretation of God’s kingdom but because the world is less deathly now that something of God’s kingdom of life has begun to take shape in your lives.

And suffer, Jesus says, not because death oppressed you but because you refuse to let it deny the life which God’s kingdom promises.

The apocalyptic mind declares that God comes before death, and that this is good news for all who say No to struggling under death before its time.

It is in an outlook like this, and life-affirming actions which resonate with it, that our redemption draws near. Stand up, Jesus says, and raise your heads: God is coming, your redemption is drawing near.

So, live and bring life.

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Reign of Christ
21/11/2021

Revelation 1:4b-8
Psalm 93
John 18:33-19:5

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In a sentence:
The true human life is lived not in seeking to escape the limitations of life but to find life – and God – within them

“Here is the man”, Pilate proclaims to the masses who cry out for Jesus’ blood.

Whatever Pilate means, for the gospel writer these words mean more than “Look at this fellow!”  John wants to say – “Look, here is the human being. Gaze upon this one, and see what it means truly to be human.” But how is this beaten wreck of a man really what the true human being looks like? What is true humanity?

Perhaps some of you have seen the movie The Truman Show (1998). On the surface, the film is an entertaining comedy with the usual happy beginning, sudden descent and final rise again to life. Symbolically, however, the film is a clever anti-religious statement about true humanity or, at least, about what constrains us as human beings and what we need to do to be free. The name of the central protagonist is essential: Truman, or “True Man” or “True Human Being.” (Truman’s surname – Burbank – is the name of the district in which such film studios as Disney and Warner Bros. are found).

In the story, the young Truman gradually becomes aware that he’s living in a contrived world. We, the viewers, know that everyone else in Truman’s life is an actor, and that his whole life is being viewed on television by the outside world. When Truman finally realises that something is horribly wrong, he makes a run for it – not knowing where he is running to – only to bump into the edge of the enormous dome which encapsulates his world. There he is addressed from on high by the director of “The Truman Show”. The director’s name “just happens to be” Christo, and his voice booms god-like from the sky via the weather sound system. Christo invites Truman to stay and live out the lie for the pleasure of the millions of viewers who’ve watched his progress since he was born.

But Truman – the True Human Being – decides instead to see what life is like without Christo – without God, we are to understand. And in the story, of course, he can; there’s another, bigger world out there. Truman exits the false world and leaves behind the Christo who has been his limitation, stepping forward into what might be a brave, new world.

The film is a parable of how our society has thought that it has found the measure of God, and that it ought to cut itself loose from God. Truman sees and leaves the untrue people and the false director-God behind. But more importantly, we are invited to do the same. We cheer for Truman as he throws off the tyrannical meddling in his life. We see that it is the right thing to do, for he has been subject to a lie, and he will only find his full humanity by shrugging off what has been holding him back.

But there is a storyteller’s trick at play here. While Christo is God in the story, it is we who have the God’s-eye view of everything in Truman’s life. We stand above Truman and Christo. We see everything and judge that Truman only becomes True-Man – genuinely human – when he turns his back on the god-figure who has been in control of his life. We cannot but judge in this way because we are made to think we see everything. Truman – the true human being – must break free from Christo, the god who keeps his world small.

All this, however, is rather a cheap shot. In the film, Christo is God and Truman is us. As Truman breaks free, so do we. In the gospel, however, Christo is Pilate and the religious authorities and us, and Truman is Jesus. The power is not with a god but with the authorities, and Jesus is constrained by them. The difference is now that there is nowhere Jesus can go. There is no other world in which there are no constraining powers. The film would have us believe that after Truman steps out of his little world, it is into the real world – a place free from Christo-like constraints and powers and crucifixions.

The true human being – Jesus or any of us – can’t escape the world as Truman does. The lie in the film is that Truman escapes not from the limiting god in the sky but from the realities of historical living. Problems on the ground are blamed on the heavens: “Imagine there’s no heaven…above us only sky,” a gentle, wistful song invites us. The implication is that if heaven were imagined away, the earth would be healed.

Of course, heaven has today largely been imagined away, at least as a public thought; there remain only the little heavens in the minds of individuals.

And nothing has changed. With a heaven “out there” no longer capturing the public imagination, heaven has been bought crashing down to earth. It is no longer above us in a religious space but ahead of us in political time. And so the crucifixions continue because heaven and its gods were never really the problem. It is not the gods who place Jesus in the power of Pilate and ultimately on the cross. Jesus simply doesn’t fit and so is squeezed out, pressed towards oblivion.

Yet Pilate’s “here is the man” is made by the gospel writer to be the ironic opposite of what Pilate seems to intend. Perhaps Pilate mocks Jesus, but the evangelist mocks Pilate’s inability to see what is in front of him – that Jesus is more human than we are.

Jesus’ humanity is in his reconciliation to having no heaven to escape to Truman-style, as we wish to escape. It is in his refusal to deny what he holds true for the convenience of an easier ride – Christo-style – as we do. Jesus’ humanity is in that, whether his life is joy or suffering, it is as one who knows himself the child of God: I am God’s, and God is mine.

On this day each year, we take Pilate’s mocking in this morning’s reading and contradict him to declare in faith that Jesus is “king”. But, in this, we don’t make him a Christo in the sky, pulling the strings in our lives, doling out pain and suffering on us like on rats in a laboratory, watching to see what we will do next.

To say that Jesus is king is to say that he lives the life of the true human being – the woman, the man who has but one life, in this world and no other: a life lived for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health; in youth or advanced old age; gay or straight; under democracy or dictatorship; as citizen or alien.

Jesus is Lord and King when our lives are lived as his was: looking not for a heaven to escape to, but living the prayer that God’s kingdom come, here and now, in the midst of what we have to deal with. It is only here and now that we can become children of God.

Let us, then, seek the coming of this kingdom in all things so that, in all things, we might with Jesus become God’s kingdom.

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Pentecost 25
14/11/2021

Daniel 12:1-3
Psalm 16
Mark 13:1-14

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In a sentence:
God is revealed in the person of Jesus and continues to be revealed in the lives of God’s people

“Not one stone left upon another…”

I confess that last month’s earthquake made me wonder whether our calculations might have been simplified a bit here at Curzon Street: not one brick left upon another! But still it stands!

Yet, had it tumbled down, similarities between that destruction and the prediction in today’s reading would only be superficial. For us, a collapse might mean sadness and but perhaps also relief. For Jesus’ disciples, it was a matter of horror: how could such a thing come about?

The terms in which Jesus speaks here are classicly apocalyptic. Apocalyptic thinking anticipated an in-breaking of God’s righteousness in answer to the unrighteousness of the world. The apocalypse of God – literally, the revealing of God – was the manifestation of God’s glory, a manifestation which would lead to a judgement and a setting right of wrongs. Very often, this final consummation of all things was to be preceded by a breaking down of social and political order, of which the predicted destruction of the Temple in today’s reading would be a dramatic sign.

Of course, we don’t need apocalyptic thought to recognise that all things come to an end. We have enough historical and personal awareness to know that everything ends. But our text is not about the way of all the earth, by which we reasonably expect there will come a day without Google or Netflix, the United States or China. Jesus makes a prediction which disrupts even this expectation. He points not to earthquakes or entropy or the dialectical mechanisms of history but to the rattling of the world with the approach of God.

It’s not entirely clear, then, whether the approach of God is a good thing or bad. “When will these things be?” the disciples ask. Such a question asks about “managing” God’s approach, about being placed as well as possible when God gets here, about becoming a small a target. Jesus speaks elsewhere of the approach of God as being like the coming of a thief in the night, with an implied warning: be ready at all times. We usually focus here on the suddenness – the unpredictability – of God’s otherwise welcome return, but perhaps the activity of the thief should not be dismissed too quickly. For the approach of God is not without threat: the thief comes to take what we value. God is also a challenge to what we value.

And how does God approach? What does God look like when God comes? As the rest of Chapter 13 unfolds, Jesus speaks of the persecution of believers before God finally arrives. The world does not like what it sees in these ones – in the disciples of Jesus. This is because they are not how they should be: they are not as we are, for that is our ultimate measure of others. I persecute one in whom I do not like what I see, in whom I do not see myself.

I can relate to this. There is an old man who hides in the mirrors at our place and who jumps out to frighten me whenever I pass by. Perhaps something similar happens at your place? And perhaps one grows used to this? Whatever the case, such mirrors are the engines of persecution. When we look at each other, we expect to see something of ourselves. You, if you are in radical difference from me, should not be here – you black person, you asylum seeker, you infidel.

The tribulation Jesus describes is, then, what happens when God comes close in the person of believers. It is not suffering in general but the suffering which God brings when God affects people. This suffering is what happens when the world cannot bear what it sees when it looks in a mirror: we do not recognise ourselves, believer, when we look at you. You look like Jesus, but Jesus didn’t look enough like us.

It is the presence of God in the persons of believers, then, which are the cause of the tribulations, the wars and rumours of wars. The apocalypse, then – the revelation of God – is not God’s response to the evil in the world; it is the cause of the strife.

The revelation of God disrupts the settled world. This is obvious in the more dramatic apocalyptic texts. Yet, the crucial revelation in the Bible is not the end-time apocalyptic overturning of all things but the life and ministry of Jesus. For the New Testament, Jesus is the apocalypse of God. Jesus is what the glory of God looks like in the world.

Perhaps this is acceptable to our moral sensibilities, at least through those parts of the gospel when Jesus is doing and saying Godly things. But Jesus is also crucified, which looks like a negation of God’s glory but is in fact its intensification: the glory of God is the crucified Jesus. Or, in terms of apocalyptic thinking, the crucified Jesus is God’s apocalypse, God’s self-revelation. Nothing else in all the horror and splendour of New Testament apocalyptic matters more than this: the crucified Jesus is the revelation of the glory of God.

The cross, of course, is a kind of “negative” glory, in the way that old film-based photography produced an image of “reversed” colour. We can discern in a photographic negative what the image is but it is both exact and shockingly distorted. It is both us and not us – our ghost. The cross is God’s glory in negative – God’s glory as God sees it, God’s glory in the form of the world. We cannot yet see the glory in it. But in the light of the resurrection – the light of the Father’s love – the cross becomes the apocalypse: we see God in Jesus, even crucified.

This is not a new thought. The glory of God, wrote the 2^nd Century bishop Irenaeus, is a human being fully alive. What God reveals – God’s apocalypse – is just this: a human being fully alive in whatever circumstances – suckling at the breast, learning in the synagogue, teaching in town squares,  dying on a cross. Or crossing a dangerous sea to safety, struggling to hold a marriage together, grieving the loss of a life’s love, wondering about that old face in the mirror. We, too, are material for the apocalypse of God.

The ancient controversies about the humanity and divinity of Jesus, which lead to the cascading of affirmations about him in the creeds – God from God, light from light, of one being with the Father, begotten not made… – these are not about theological minutiae. They are about whether the world in which we live – the world which we are – can be a revealing of God’s glory. Can God be here, Now, in a crucifying world, or a warring one, or a burning one?

It may be that what we see or are living looks little like God’s glory. We may have lost the Temple, the standing, the resources, the energy, the youth, the time, the companions. Or, perhaps in other ways we have these and imagine that these are signs of God’s proximity.

Yet, do not be led astray: these things are not the end. Only God is the end. And so God is our beginning, now. The glory of God – human beings fully alive – is possible in all things.

Let us then, in Jesus, live towards that possibility:

becoming the apocalypse of God.

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Pentecost 24
7/11/2021

Ruth 3:1-13
Psalm 146
Mark 12:38-44

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In a sentence
In the midst of all that goes on in the world, God is also ‘going on’, making of our lives surprising new possibilities.

Something not immediately obvious in the story of Ruth is that God is pretty much absent from the narrative.

God is invoked for blessing, is blamed for Naomi’s tragedy, and is praised and thanked at the end. But God is not active in the story in the way typical of the other biblical narratives: God doesn’t say anything or do anything (the allusions to such action in 1.6 and 4.14 notwithstanding).

God’s part in the story is less as protagonist than as ‘context’. God is a frame within which the players in the drama do their thing, is the space within which Ruth and Boaz and Naomi live and move and have their being.

The effect of this is to render what actually happens in the story less important than it might first seem, or at least to shift how the action is important. Today we have heard something of what led to the marriage of Boaz and Ruth and, ultimately, to the birth of Obed and a link to one of the central stories of the Old Testament – the story of David. Yet if God is more context than agent in the story, then the purpose of narrating Ruth’s marriage to Boaz and the birth of their son becomes less clear.

If God were portrayed as directly active in the book, then the story would be more clearly one of the blessing of God on everyone still standing at the end. This is perhaps the typical reading: Ruth and Boaz are blessed because their devotion and loyalty is something good. God responds to the need and character of the tragic Naomi, the loyal Ruth and the righteous Boaz.

Yet, a little more cynical reading could recast Naomi as the embittered schemer, Ruth as gullible – or perhaps even as seductress – and Boaz as a good-hearted old fogy who can’t believe his luck. We are far enough away culturally from the historical context that we can’t be at all confident we understand what is going on between Ruth and her mother-in-law, or between Ruth and Boaz on the threshing floor, or in the negotiations for Naomi’s plot of land. It’s almost impossible not to impose our own social experience and expectation on the story.

But this narrows the possibilities of the text. Would the lesson of the book as a whole change if Naomi, Ruth and Boaz are rather more morally ambiguous figures? The climax of the story would seem to be the birth of the child and its link to David. But the point cannot be that Ruth’s loyalty and openness to the God of Israel ‘earned’ her this connection to David, or even brought David forth. David had six other great grandparents whose stories we do not know. We have no guarantee that the story of each great grandmother and great grandfather of David was just as virtuous as we’ve been given to imagine that Ruth and Boaz were. And so, we’ve no guarantee that their link to David is a reward for their goodness. If the author did understand Ruth to have been rewarded for her devotion, we cannot.

This is not to say that goodness doesn’t matter but it is to say that goodness is not where the story starts. In Ruth’s story, as people go about doing what people do – grieving, promising, reaping and gleaning, scheming, seducing, annexing, marrying, giving birth – God gets on doing what God does. If it were the case that Naomi did scheme to manoeuvre Ruth into Boaz’ bed, that a simple Ruth just did what she was told and that Boaz then ran a ploy to secure her and her inheritance as his own – and then the baby was born – none of this change the context within which it all happened. They have done their thing, and God is doing God’s thing. The identity of the baby is the sign of God’s hand over what we think and do, however we are motivated. By God’s hand, the anointed one will emerge from within our midst, though we cannot see him coming.

To put it differently, whatever seems to be going on in the world – for better and for worse – God also is ‘going on’ in the world. In the book of Ruth the lives of a few of us are given to us as the very life of God, the lifeblood of God. It is in and through these live that God lives and moves and has his being. We – virtuous or not – are God’s context.

This is the scandal of the incarnation: that the shape of our life could be the shape of the life of God. The devotion of Ruth to Naomi with which the story begins – Ruth’s ‘cleaving’ (1.14, AV) to Naomi – this is how God is with us: where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge… To speak of Jesus as both human and divine is not to say anything about the ‘stuff’ of which he was made, but to say that the life of God and the life of the world are properly bound together in this way. The life of God looks like the life of a human being, and the life of a human being is how God chooses to be.

This is the promise upon which we are to build our lives – that God makes us God’s own. What we are and do is and is done in the God who brings forth from our imperfect lives the anointed one, the christ in its various guises: David the forerunner, Jesus the incarnate Son, and the motley crew called, amazingly, Christ’s own Body – even us here today.

Sometimes it will look as if this happens because of us. Too often, we must confess, it will happen despite us. But always and everywhere it is for us that God creates out of us – surprisingly – as if out of nothing (‘ex nihilo’…).

And so, today, we baptise.

Today, we take a piece of the world – one of us – and make of it a piece of God, a member of the Body of Christ.

Today, we glimpse what Ruth did not but what she nevertheless was: a human life becoming the life of God, and God’s life becoming ours.

Thanks be to God.

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All Saints Day
31/10/2021

Hebrews 12:1-3
Psalm 24
John 11:32-44

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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Tomorrow is All Saints Day – a feast day of the church whose earliest mention is in the writings of Ephrem Syrus who died in 373CE. By 407 it was celebrated on the first Sunday after Pentecost which is where it is still observed in Orthodox churches. The Western church moved it to 13 May 609 and then to 1 November by Pope Gregory IV prior to 844. It became a very handy day for remembering all the saints for whom there were no special days assigned.

The celebration of All Saints has come into Protestant consciousness relatively recently. So what is our expectation of observing All Saints Day. It is always on 1 November, and yet many churches pull into the nearest Sunday (as we have today). It doesn’t warrant a special civic holiday like Christmas. So what is expected of us in this celebration?

One place to look could be in the minds of those who determine the readings for the day in the three-year ecumenical lectionary. This gets a bit complex if all the readings – Hebrew Scriptures, Psalms, Epistles and Revelation, and the Gospels. Let’s keep it simple and consider the Gospels. In the year of Matthew, the reading is the Beatitudes. In the year of Luke, the reading is the Beatitudes. But in the year of Mark, which gospel does not have any beatitudes, the reading is the raising of Lazarus in John’s gospel with particular emphasis on the family and Jesus mourning his death.

We could surmise that the lectionary compilers would like the church to focus on those who mourn. The Beatitudes announce blessings on those who mourn, those who weep, and John tells of the family in mourning. So it is that on this celebration we remember those whom we mourn. For many of us that will include those whose lives of faith in Christ has impacted on our own lives and faith. It is a good time for a congregation to gather in memory and thanksgiving, those from among us who have died during the past year, since the last All Saints Day.

There is a reading that would be included in the lectionary anthology for All Saints if I were the compiler of the three-year lectionary – Hebrews 12 ‘Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses…’. How could it have been left out of our lectionary? Maybe because the focus is on us – the gaze of the witnesses is on us, not us on them. Maybe because of the horrific list of sufferings the witnesses endured at the tail end of chapter 11. Indeed, these witnesses are martyrs. The Greek for witness is μάρτυρας (martyras). English translations of the New Testament never render this as ‘martyr’ but this is an occasion when it would be appropriate. A good time to remember that witnessing to the good news of Jesus Christ is a risky business.

I am a volunteer coordinator of an icon school. One of my tasks is to lead iconographers in a reflective meditation on an icon. As we contemplate the icon of a saint I tell the story of the saint, listing the virtues and quoting the words for which the person is venerated by the church. I will often then ask two questions – “As you look upon this image of this saint, what do you see? As this saint looks upon you, what might he or she see in you?” This provides, I hope, an invitation into self-examination in light of the virtues of the saint.

My questions are prompted by our Hebrews reading. The text evokes a word picture. The scene is an athletics arena – ‘… let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us…’ – the ancient athletes stripped of their clinging clothing. The witnesses are in the stands watching. They are looking at us as we run. And what might they see? The writer of the letter instructs that the cloud of martyrs will see the runners (Hebrews 12:2) ‘looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.’

I guess this holds the clue as to why the cloud-of-witnesses text doesn’t get a go in the All Saints lectionary. It is not about the witnesses who have gone before. It is about us. Because the witnesses witnessed and are looking at us, we who are running the race are to respond as people, who like them, are faithful to Jesus. The text kind of deflects the attention away from the saints that this celebration invites us to remember. Yes, but I would hope that this celebration is not just a focus on the loved ones gone before, to assist our grief, to remind us to be grateful of our inheritance from them. Each Christian celebration is to evoke a change in us – to draw us on in faithful obedience.

Yes, we look to the saints, our own cherished ones who have lived among us and who are now dead. We remember with thanksgiving the examples of faith in Christ that they set us, but their example surely prompts a response from their inspiration to examine our own faith journey. How is our race running? The cloud of witnesses, the cloud of martyrs reminds us that for the saints in the letter to the Hebrews, the race of faith was perilous. Looking to Jesus and choosing the way of faith is perilous as it was for the cloud of martyrs. It is a call to lay aside the sin that clings to lay aside greed, to lay aside seeking power advantage, to lay aside motives of political expediency. ‘[L]ooking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith…’

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Pentecost 22
24/10/2021

Psalm 126
Mark 10:46-52

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In a sentence
With Bartimaeus, we have need of our eyes being opened, to see that God sees – and loves – us.

As with all miracle stories in the Bible, so also with the healing of blind Bartimaeus: we should not be too distracted by the miracle itself. Even if things happened exactly the way in which they are told in the gospel, the story is not told simply that we might believe that Jesus once healed a blind man. Today’s reading asks not whether we believe Jesus once brought sight to a blind man but whether we see clearly ourselves.

This is the second healing of a blind man in Mark’s gospel. In both cases, the healing takes place just before a revelation of Jesus’ hidden identity. The miracles are not simply about seeing; they are about seeing Jesus.

Immediately following the first healing of a blind man (Mark 8.18ff), we hear Jesus declared to be God’s anointed king (Messiah-Christ) and then of the qualification of this kingship by the cross. Immediately following today’s story of Bartimaeus, Jesus enters Jerusalem riding on a donkey, a traditional way in which Israel’s king would enter the city (cf. Zechariah 9.9). This sign of kingship will be qualified now not by the prediction of the cross but its realisation. Eyes are opened to see a king, if, strangely, a crucified one.

Kings are as foreign to us today as are the miracles of the Gospels, but the king is just a contemporary sign Mark uses to identify Jesus. Bartimaeus cries out and his is sight restored, and what he sees is Jesus. The text’s question to us, then, is not whether we can believe that Jesus could fix a blind person’s eyes but, Are we blind to Jesus?

This is not an easy question to answer, for implicit here is that if we don’t see Jesus, then we don’t see ourselves properly. This is then a strange blindness: we might not know that we are blind.

The possibility of not knowing we are blind is not simply a ‘religious’ proposal. In our social discourse today, there are raging outings of blindness – of those blind to their own violence, privilege, cultural appropriation, racism, or whatever. We seek to unveil what is hidden, what has been blended into the background and so is overlooked. Or we seek to resist its unveiling.

In this political opening of eyes, however, there is deep accusation. We shake each other awake: ‘Can’t you see?’ It is our guilt we are to see: the effects of our blindness on others.

With Bartimaeus, however, there is no accusation. If Bartimaeus had his eyes opened, the healing is an answer to the problem he knew he had but was not his fault. Even if we wonder whether such a thing could happen, we understand what would be happening if it did. An honest answer is given to an honest question.

If the story is about our blindness to our blindness, things are different. Now the healing reveals the problem: that we have been living with our eyes wide shut. A serious question is put to what where our certain answers. Yet, there is still no accusation here, no guilt. Miracle stories are about what we cannot do for ourselves, and this is no less the case when the miracles are metaphors: it takes God’s healing power to reveal this kind of blindness, too.

And the healing is not a one-off. To have our eyes opened – to see something of God and ourselves in Jesus – is not the end of the matter. Bartimaeus does a strange thing when his eyes are opened. Instead of running home to see his family for the first time in years(?) or anything else a just-re-sighted person might do, he ‘follows Jesus on the way’.

To have our eyes opened to our blindness is to learn that we do not know when we are blind. If seeing is first seeing Jesus, then keeping Jesus close – following Jesus – is the way to see clearly who we are and what is happening around us.

Of course, this is not merely ‘looking’ at Jesus. Religious adoration is not the point, at least not here. To see Jesus is to see him seeing me, affirming what I can become, whoever and wherever I am. Having our eyes opened will mean different things for each of us. The rich and the poor are blind in this way, but differently so, and seeing will mean different things. And so also for the young and the old; for the parent and the child; the wife and the husband; the white and the black.

We all know that we don’t know, can see that we can’t see, and it is usually the case that there is nothing we are able to do about it but act in ignorance, step out blindly, and see what happens. And this delivers us the world we live in today.

The cry of those who find themselves in these circumstances is not different from that of Bartimaeus. We need to see more clearly: Son of God, have mercy on me. See me, that I might see.

Our story today assures us: God does see us, and gives us a vision of ourselves through God’s own eyes, that we might begin to walk God’s way.

This is the beginning of our healing, our waking up, our being made new.

May Bartimaeus’ prayer for healing be ours, that God might heal us.

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Pentecost 21
17/10/2021

Psalm 91
Mark 10:35-45

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In a sentence
Our serving others begins with God’s serving us

Most of you are probably familiar with the story of The Invisible Man – whether from the original book by H G Wells or one of the many film adaptions. As superpowers go, invisibility is pretty high on the many people’s most-desired list. In the stories, the invisible man can move, infiltrate and steal, can be spy, voyeur and even violator with almost absolute freedom. This freedom from detection is the attraction of the power. To be able to see but not to be seen is a power almost divine in its possibilities. It is so, of course, only for the one who is invisible. The most recent adaptation of the story (2020) is a gripping horror movie from the perspective of she who is stalked by an invisible man.

The reading we have heard this morning is a familiar one to most of us, as is its interpretation. Let’s, then, render it a little less familiar by proposing that what James and John seek here is the freedom of invisible men – now a freedom from God. They seek to see as God sees, undetected themselves, rather than be seen by God.

This will surely strike many as an odd proposal, for it is almost the reverse of the typical reading! Those who know this reading know that it’s about the contrast between a certain kind of glory and servanthood. The two disciples ask to sit at his left and right hand in the heavenly court – to be glorified with Jesus and to be seen to be glorified. And Jesus turns their attention from seeking elevation to kneeling in service. The story seems to have a simple moral message: don’t big-note yourself but rather be helpful to others. This is an important moral message, and one we might forget at least in this or that particular situation; it’s good to be reminded of it. Chances are there is more we could do for someone nearby who would really appreciate our help. Give that help.

Yet, there is nothing morally surprising about what Jesus says. We have talkback radio and social media to remind us of these obligations to each other, criticising those who are too full of themselves and lauding those who sacrifice for others’ benefit.

On this moral reading, Jesus’ (the Son of Man’s) servanthood seems to be revealed here as an example for us to emulate: ‘I, Jesus, have come to serve and not be glorified; you do the same’. But if this is all Jesus says, he becomes largely irrelevant for the point. If I have a particular respect for Jesus – as James and John certainly did – then it might motivate me to hear that Jesus is a servant and I should be one too. But if the story is a common moral requirement hung on Jesus, then the passage is really only important as ‘humility for Christians’, which is the same as ‘humility for atheists’ except that atheists don’t have to bother with Jesus to get the point.

Yet there is more than an important moral point to hear in this exchange. Jesus is more than a moral exemplar: the Son of Man…came to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. Here we move past mere helpfulness. A ransom is paid not for those in need of help but for those in captivity, held hostage, imprisoned. The service Jesus brings doesn’t assist us but fundamentally liberates us. Jesus serves in that he – God, if you like – sees us and our need, and acts to change these. We are seen, and what is seen is that we are not free.

Let’s look back now to James and John. The moral reading of their request is that they aspire to be glorified and to be seen to be glorified, sitting left and right of Jesus in the heavenly court. But we can find deeper meaning in their request. The effect of their sitting left and right of Jesus is that they no longer look at him but out to whatever Jesus sees. They ask, then, to see as Jesus sees, rather than to be seen by Jesus. They seek to be – with some imagination! – undetected invisible men – unseen by the Jesus whose gaze is properly forward and not to the left or right.

This is not now mere self-importance; it is ignorance of self. The Son of Man comes to serve you, James and John, and to ransom you. Our gospel passage begins not with the moral imperative to serve which rings so loudly in our activist ears but with but a fundamental gift: the Son of Man serves by ransoming, by setting free: God has detected us. With God, being seen – and our knowing ourselves to be seen – is the meaning of salvation. Sitting at his right and left, James and John would not meet the gaze of Jesus, would not know that he sees them too. They would not know that they too are detected, judged and forgiven.

In the story, Jesus declares that he has no say over who sits left and right of his throne. But we need to push this further. Of course, there is no throne or heavenly court – we’re in the realm of metaphor here. But to retain the metaphor and refine it, we should now say not that we cannot know who will sit at Jesus’ left and right but that in fact there are no seats to Jesus’ left or right. We are all before the throne; no one is to the side or behind. For this is where we must be if we are to be seen, and to know that we are seen, and accepted.

For this is how we are served: in being seen by God, and knowing that God sees us, and knowing that God’s gaze sets us free.

And this is how we become servants ourselves – seeing those we did not see before, not as mere features in our lifescape but as people like us, whom God also sees, not least with our eyes.

And then we move to serve as Jesus serves, in order to ransom those who are captive.

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Pentecost 20
10/10/2021

Amos 5:6-7, 10-15
Psalm 90
Mark 10:17-31

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In a sentence
Our future is not in what we can imagine but what God has already given us

Consider the following from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

‘God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. Those who fashion a visionary ideal of community demand that it be realized by God, by others, and by themselves.

They enter the community of Christians with their demands, set up their own law, and judge the fellowship and God himself accordingly… They act as if they are the creators of the Christian community, as if their dream binds people together.

When their ideal picture is destroyed, they see the community going to smash. So they become, first accusers of the fellowship, then accusers of God, and finally the despairing accusers of themselves.’

There is violence in all this drive to make changes. Bonhoeffer again:

…Those who love their dream of a community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of the community, even though their intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and faithful. (Life Together, SCM 1954, 17f)

If I see the goal, if I know what must be done to achieve it, and if I have the means to pull it off, I will work to bring the vision to reality. And I may well do this ‘no matter what’. This is the logic of the suicide bomb, the engine of domestic violence, the rationale for nuclear warhead stockpiles. I will believe my vision to be the vision – God’s vision – and that will require my all, and yours.

Yet, it is not the exercise of our power to influence which brings the kingdom of God, but God himself and, whatever God does among us, it is not violent.

To bring this home, let’s recall that we as a congregation are seeking a vision for the future. Some of us dream of what we have, or have had. Some of us dream of what new thing might yet be. In either case, we are visionaries looking to the left or the right, forward or backward, up or down.

Yet, what if Bonhoeffer is right: what if God does hate visionary dreaming? Is this the kind of visioning we’re presently encouraging? What does this mean for our planning, given that we must plan, that we must have some vision of our future?

In our gospel reading this morning, a man approaches Jesus and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. To this well-lived life Jesus adds just one more requirement: give away all that you have, and come and follow me. This is more than the rich man can bear, and he leaves, ‘grieving’.

This is one of those ‘squirmy’ readings which makes uncomfortable those of us who also have many things, but we won’t focus on that discomfort today. With Bonhoeffer in our ears, we will rather consider the rich man’s vision: the vision of ‘eternal life’. By itself, the desire for eternal life is not yet a problem. But the man links his desire to the question, ‘What must I do?’ In this, he assumes responsibility for achieving his most profound need, so that when Jesus ups the ante and names the thing which ‘can’t’ be done, the man’s vision and hopes are shredded. Even the disciples are horrified.

The problem here is the vision of being rewarded by God for the good work we have done: ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ While we earn wages, we do not earn an inheritance: inheritance comes by virtue of being a son or daughter. Not what you do, but what you are, is the grounds for inheriting. With this man’s particular vision and his presumption that its fulfilment is about the choices he makes, what he needs most is lost, and he himself is also lost.

We can’t avoid asking and answering the question ‘What shall we do?’ And when we ask this, we kind of mean what is the right thing to do? What shall we do ‘in order to inherit eternal life’? This is the question of the rich man standing before Jesus – and it is not yet a bad question. But it turns bad when we attach to it a concern for being rewarded; with talk of reward (or punishment) we enter into the realm of anxiety and fear. To do the right thing is to win and find peace; to do the wrong thing is to lose – ourselves and the things we value – and here resides the anxiety and fear.

Yet Christian faith is not about being at peace in the knowledge that we have done the right thing. Of course, as human beings, we must decide: we must do something. But the heart of the matter is not in this.

While life might require that changes are made and that we make decisions about those changes, there is nothing we can do to change what we most basically are. The question which matters, then, is not what we will do, but what are we? By what spirit do we live? Where is the true source of our life? Is there any fixed thing in our lives which cannot be assailed, whatever might besiege us, whatever decisions we make?

The answer of the gospel is Yes. We are children of God, and so all that matters is already ours as inheritance. It is not ours to earn or achieve, not ours by virtue of being ‘right’ in our vision. We must indeed yet make decisions about our future, but we also hear that God has already given us adoption as his children. This is ‘eternal life’, and its concrete outworking for us is freedom to live as part of a community which is never destined to be a particular shape according to a specific vision. There is nothing to be done to inherit the fullness of life; it is already ours through Jesus the Son and it has less a specific shape than a particular relationship: unity around Jesus, under God. Christian discipleship – in all the things we do and say, in the visions we form and the choices we make – is simply a matter of orbiting together more closely to Jesus.

It is, then, by the grace of God that our dreams and visions of this or that grand community will fail and be cast aside by God, for our dreams are limited by our poor imagination. God breaks such futures on the sharp rocks of his grace so that ‘What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived’ – the things God has prepared for those who know themselves to be his – so that these things might become ours.

What happens next for us can only be good if, at its heart, it is the expectation that God will be there with us.

Let us, then, be prepared to allow that, whatever the future holds for us as a congregation – or in our individual lives – we need not fear it and so need not seek to control it, for the future belongs to the God in whose Son our lives are hidden and held safe. If we desire that future, we will find that else we need has been added to us.

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Pentecost 19
3/10/2021

Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12
Psalm 26
Mark 10:2-16

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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

Our reading today from the Gospel of Mark the Evangelist, like our Gospel reading from last week, comes from a section of Mark’s Gospel which gives us a sort of loose collection of Jesus’ teachings. It’s kind of like the story is about to get to the good bit — where Jesus actually goes to Jerusalem to be arrested, tried, and crucified — but there’s still a couple of teaching moments that need to be squeezed in at the last minute. So it feels like we get a bit of a mishmash: last week we heard something about a rogue exorcist, and the risk of being cast into hell. And today we have heard a teaching about marriage and divorce; and then a teaching about needing to receive God’s kingdom like a child.

However, rather than being simply a collection of last-minute teachings before Jesus’ passion, I want to suggest that this section of the Gospel aims to prepare us for the road ahead. Jesus has before him a road which leads to death, and as our teacher it seems this is a road we too must follow. To quote the German martyr and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “When Christ calls a person, he bids them come and die.”

The Gospel of Mark, while it is the shortest Gospel, doesn’t actually tell the life of Jesus in the most straightforward way. Mark at times repeats stories or teachings which the other Gospels don’t. Often the stories which are retold from Mark in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are actually shorter in their retelling. And then on top of that Mark sometimes seems simply to repeat himself.

In this transitional section of Mark Jesus predicts more than once that he must go to Jerusalem, be handed over, and die. As often as Jesus repeats this prediction, the disciples fail to understand it. Instead of heeding the foreboding words of their teacher the disciples instead challenge and rebuke Jesus, becoming distracted by fighting amongst themselves over who is greatest among them. Rather than the disciples taking the stark warning from their teacher as a sign to pay closer attention, we see instead the disciples repeatedly getting in the way of Jesus’ work. Last week, the disciples tried to get in the way of someone sharing in Jesus’ work of freeing the world from demonic forces; and today they try to keep away the children Jesus wishes to embrace and bless.

Setting today’s reading into the context of discipleship — and context is everything — allows us to see in Jesus’ teaching not only wise counsel, but a deeper lesson about what the path of following Christ is in fact about.

The question about the lawfulness of divorce is, in reality, a non-question. While there was some debate in Jesus’ day among the Pharisees — the forerunners of later Rabbinical Judaism, who like Jesus sought to teach their students how to interpret and apply the tradition they had received– While there was some debate among the Pharisees about how liberally or restrictive the law relating to divorce should be interpreted. What exactly should the threshold for divorce be? The question of whether men had the right, under Jewish law, to divorce women was not really at issue. Men had the right to divorce their wives; and there was little women could do about it.

While it can seem strange to modern ears, shaped by the ongoing struggle of feminism for women’s autonomy, what Jesus offers in seeming to rule out divorce is actually a subversion of the presumed rights of men. In heightening the seriousness and responsibility of marriage, Jesus makes clear that women cannot be discarded as though they simply do not matter. Men must hold onto the responsibility to provide for women who would otherwise struggle to sustain themselves in a society dominated by men.

Against the received tradition in which men had rights and little responsibilities, and women had little to no rights at all, Jesus seeks to assert the status, dignity, and equality of women. And Jesus makes this assertion not by a technical reading of the law, but by reclaiming the world that creation ought to be: the world that is in fact more true than the one in which we live, because of our hardened hearts.

So while we might take some clues from the subversive teaching Jesus offers here, when we think about the rights of women in our quite different context. We should also be attentive that what is at issue in Jesus’ teaching is the concern for the empowerment of women who have no rights, and the reclaiming of a world in which those without status are restored to full dignity and respect.

This is the theme which ties together the teaching about divorce and Jesus’ teaching about children. While children today are celebrated as joyous gifts, as signs of hope, protected by child labour laws, and a UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. In the context of the first century children had no legal rights of their own: excluded from participation in public life, or that of the synagogue, until they became “children of the commandment” at their “bar Mitzvah.” Much like women, the example of children represents those who were deemed to have no status in Jesus’ day. They were under the rule of their father. With no rights to freedom, only obligation.

In these two teachings Jesus is pointing to the focus on those without status in his broader redemptive work. This is what ties together Jesus’ movement from claiming that the world is one in which women without rights must be treated as equal, to the claim that we must welcome God’s Kingdom as though we were like children. God’s work is among the lowly, whom Christ embraces, empowers, and restores. And so we must see the disciple’s jostling for greatness as a cautionary tale, and allow ourselves to be led down the path Jesus must tread: the path that leads to Jerusalem, and ultimately the cross.

When, in our reading last week, Jesus talks about being cast into “hell,” using the word Gehenna: which refers to the Valley of Hinnom, just outside Jerusalem. Jesus is talking about a place you can visit, a place which was associated with ancient child sacrifice, and which in Jesus’ day was likely a rubbish dump — perhaps a smouldering cesspit. In other words, Jesus was talking about the place where the trash goes when it is taken out of Jerusalem. Jesus is talking about the place that it is cursed because it was believed to have been the site where children were sacrificed and discarded.

And so, when Jesus offers a vision of the world which upsets the presumed rights of men over women, when Jesus embraces the child, and offers harsh teachings which come with the threat of being cast onto the cursed rubbish heap, Jesus is trying to get his disciples to understand the path he is on. The seriousness of his call. Jesus is trying to get his disciples to see, to get us to see, that his way towards Jerusalem is for those who find themselves without status, those who are at risk of becoming refuse. Jesus goes to become one among the many who are discarded, who find themselves in hellish places, who go where the trash goes when it is taken out of Jerusalem.

Jesus is concerned with the discarded many of his day, and those of every day: in Myanmar, Afghanistan, Yemen, Tigray; refugee camps dotted throughout the world; the poor in slums waiting for the pandemic to come; and so many more. While we should certainly hear in this passage a lesson and guide about marriage, and how we should treat vulnerable children. We should, at the same time, hear here the faint echo of Jesus asserting a claim about the world his own saving work will bring. For Jesus the way to the trash heap, for us a path to a renewed order of righteousness and love: that goes through death and beyond it.

And so let us hear as Jesus’ disciples the challenge he gave to his first disciples:

If we are concerned with greatness in God’s Kingdom, let us not be concerned with ourselves. Let us have the same mind that was in Christ, who emptied himself, and took on the form of a servant.

Let us recall that we are the students, and our teacher is found willingly with the little ones, the disregarded, the broken, the maimed, the blind: those who have no rights. Let us seek out ways we can help those who are struggling — having slipped through the net of love which ought to bind us together.

Let us welcome all who work against the hellish places, where those who are refuse and rejected are sent. May we offer prayers and actions for displaced peoples in refugee camps, in warzones, in the midst of oppression.

And may we do this, not because we are good … but in contrition, knowing that we are still students of Christ’s way, still seeking to find our teacher who goes ahead of us to be with the afflicted. We do this because we have become children: lowly ourselves, obliged to others.

‘Everyone,’ — Holy Scripture says — ‘will be salted with fire.’

May we find in our own afflictions the teacher who embraces us like a child

May we find in the afflictions of others the willing one who lifts us out of our stumbling

May we find, and see, and hear the Good News:

In Jesus God reaches out in love, going before us, to bear the struggles we can no longer bear — binds the broken-hearted, gathers us in mercy, stands with us for justice: enacts a new order of righteousness and love. And though the fiery, hellish places seem never to be quenched, the risen ones resists, and resists and overcomes even death.

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Pentecost 18
26/9/2021

Numbers 11:24-29
Psalm 124
Mark 9:38-50

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

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Who speaks for the Church? Our texts tell us this has been a problem from the beginning. We have just heard John the jealous disciple: “We tried to stop him because he was not following us”. To which Jesus replies: “Don’t stop him!” Or much earlier, Joshua, a dedicated “law and order” administrator, blurts out attempting to silence “unregistered” prophets: “My Lord, Moses: Stop them!” To which Moses responds: “Are you jealous…?”

According to our text, then, the word of Jesus is unequivocal: “Those who are not against us are for us”’ Recall, however, that we are told elsewhere that Jesus can also say: “Whoever is not with me is against me” (Matthew 12.30). Only a blinkered flat earth rationalist will shout: “Another contradiction. The Bible is riddled with them”. To which the rejoinder must be: Context is everything!

So, what do we make of the Gospel today?  Who speaks for the Church? Who is truly a disciple? and What can disciples expect?

‘Teacher, we saw a man who was driving out demons in your name, and we told him to stop, because he doesn’t belong to our group’.

So, there we have it. The disciple censures the stranger because he was ‘not following us’. Note that: not following you, but not following US! So, it’s clear what the real problem is: the disciples don’t want to be followers, they want to be the ones followed. When this happens, party spirit becomes inevitable. The history of the Church might well stand as testimony to the exercise of such self-appointed guardians.

A mentor of mine used to say that church union became a problem the moment Jesus called his second disciple. This is not an exaggeration. Before the ink is dry we hear: I am of Paul. I am of Apollos. I am of Cephas. I am of Christ (1 Cor 1:12f). So the Pastoral Epistles try to solve the problem. Let’s have bishops, presbyters and deacons! But this is hardly more successful. Which Bishop? Alexandra or Antioch? Rome or Constantinople? Rome or Canterbury? Geneva or Canterbury? Canterbury or Wesley? Wesley or Booth? Stop them! Or closer to home, for its first 20 years the Uniting Church had a Doctrine Commission. No longer. Now it is Consensus. So, who speaks for the Church?

Today, as we know, it is not so much institutional denominations that stand over against one another, but factions within denominations: self-styled conservatives, progressives, liberals, fundamentalists, charismatics, social justice exponents – we know the list. Stop them!

No wonder Luther’s dying words are reputed to have been: “We’re beggars that’s for certain!”

So, “Who speaks for the Church?” is always a real question. And the answer? If we want to think properly about the Church, we will have to think first of all about Jesus himself. That means the requirement to resist party spirit. Against ‘exclusive brethren’, whether understood literally or figuratively, the definitions of belonging must ultimately be fluid. This is the first burden of today’s text.

And the second is this: the breaking of solidarity may well occur from outside pressure. It’s clear as the text unfolds that apostasy – rejection of the faith – has a long history from the very beginning. Here it is apparent that external persecution was causing some members of the church, not only to defect from the faith, but also to betray other members. For Mark’s community then the question understandably was: ‘How is this fracturing of the Christian community to be handled?

In graphic images, he tackles it by offering four parallel penalties undoubtedly repugnant to the squeamish: first drowning – literally adopted, recalling the same Luther’s remedy for re-baptizing Anabaptists – then selectively, the removal of eye, hand, and foot to prevent a prospective casting into “hell”.

If it all sounds pretty awful, cheer up: context is everything!  First, this confronting word “hell” is not what we might imagine. Here it is a regrettable translation in the text of the Greek word “Gehenna”. Gehenna is the name of a ravine in South Jerusalem. In the 1^st century, the purpose of Gehenna was understood metaphorically. Although it was permanently ablaze as a place of fiery judgement for defaulting individuals, the crucial factor to grasp is that this destination was only temporary. Presumably it serves as forerunner to the later concept of purgatory. In any case, it was certainly only later in the Graeco-Roman period, and under Persian dualistic influence, that the bizarre permanent terminal imagery we associate with the word “hell” emerges – hell as a fiery alternative permanent destination to “heaven”.

The next penalties – the amputation of limbs, or the removal of an eye, obviously sound extreme. But the truth is that, in the first century, and still today in some Muslim communities, amputation of the offending member is in fact a liberalizing of punishment for capital offenses. Instead of losing an entire life, much better to lose only a part of the body. In any case, we can be confident that these vivid images were best understood metaphorically, the real point being that, in seeking the health of the whole community, expulsion, not execution, may well be the antidote to betrayal.

To this end, we are offered two remedial images – those of salt and fire. In the then practice of medicine, salt and fire were used to close amputation wounds. Drastic severance of eye, hand and foot obviously required prompt and decisive healing agents, otherwise death would be immediate. Knowing this, the whole passage surely looks quite different. ‘Everyone will be salted with fire’ we’re told. That’s the remedy for amputated limbs. That’s the remedy for apostasy: radical healing.

The point is that whatever we make of today’s text, one thing is clear: then, certain safeguards were required. Faith matters. It comes at a cost. There is a destiny at stake. Amputations, fire, and salt are a permanent scenario.

But salt has another function too. It is a healing remedy in a deeper sense. The injunction: ‘have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another’, is a recalling of the fact that in the Old Testament, salt is a symbol of the covenant. To share salt with others means really to share fellowship with them.

Today’s gospel reminds us, then, that being church is to experience both internal as well as external pressure. For this reason, to live as Church is like riding a bicycle. When you come to obstacles you have to dodge them – or you’ll fall off. This means that there is healing for all who metaphorically might consider themselves to have lost hand or foot or eye.

Today we can take comfort in the promise that the salt rubbed into wounds, though painful, is actually redemptive – not only in the reminder that Jesus said it would be like this, but that he himself lost not simply limbs but the whole of his being. The potential culling of limbs in our case is merely the start of what for him meant a final radical deprivation of life.

Yet the gospel is that we do not have the last word at all. For this dead one is sovereign Lord over all murderous, vindictive hearts: Where we fracture, he heals; whom we are against, he is for; in place of death he offers life.

So – despite the scary graphics – the Gospel today leaves us with real encouragement for a problematic future:

“Be salted with fire … and be at peace with one another”.