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Good Friday
2/4/2021

Job 23:1-17
Psalm 22
Mark 15:25-39

‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’

Early in our reflections on Job, we saw that Jesus’ question from the cross is precisely Job’s complaint: why have you abandoned me? And, like Job’s question, the question from the cross longs, yearns, cries for resolution.

For neither Job nor Jesus is this a question about the power of God. It is instead a question about justice. We have heard from Job this morning,

² ‘Today…my complaint is bitter;
his hand is heavy despite my groaning.
³ O that I knew where I might find him,
that I might come even to his dwelling!
⁴ I would lay my case before him,
and fill my mouth with arguments.
⁵ I would learn what he would answer me,
and understand what he would say to me. (Job 23.2-5)

Job is relentless: Let God justify himself. He allows no dualistic release from the tension in this, as if he must await the outcome of a struggle between a good god and an evil god. He models no punch-pulling pietism. Job is simply honest. Job believes that God has the power to overcome evil, and so the justice of God’s actions must be questioned. Where are you, God? Why do you not come with power, to set right what is wrong?

What would the power to overcome evil look like?

The gospel holds that such power looks like Jesus. This is not because he is the heroic saviour who will spend himself as a saving currency in his death on the cross. Jesus is God’s power simply because everything that Jesus says and does is intended to be effective. His confrontations with the powers active in the world are no mere prelude to the ‘main event’ of the cross. These confrontations are the prophetic word, uttered as a call to repentance – uttered in expectation of repentance. Jesus’ word is God’s power to overcome evil. The ministry of Jesus seeks to bring righteousness.

From this perspective, the cross is quite simply a disaster: the failure of God’s righteousness to find a home in us. (This failure Job also knows.)

But now, a question towards deeper understanding: if Jesus has been the prophet of God’s righteousness to this point, is what he utters on the cross still a prophetic word?

This is difficult, but – for Christ’s sake – let us not be timid. The charge of the prophet against the world now becomes a charge against God. To this point, Jesus has asked us, Why have you abandoned God? Now the charge is, God, why have you abandoned me? This takes us by surprise in the Gospel itself, although it is not new in the Scriptures. Job’s double defence of himself against the injustice of his friends and the injustice of God is the same kind of thing, as is the psalmist’s crying out against enemies and the delay of God.

The surprise of this charge against God ought to give us pause. It is not enough that we resonate with the sentiment, as we might with Job’s version of the question. ‘Where are you, God?’ is something we ask, of course, but do we expect it of Jesus? The messianic secret is now open: Jesus is ‘the Son’. He has just acknowledged the coming ‘cup’ of suffering, and committed to it (14.36). We don’t resolve the question by recognising that there’s a difference between knowing that this is going to hurt – that the cup is there – and it actually hurting – tasting the cup. The cry from the cross is on the lips of the Christ. What we see here, then, is not merely that physical pain shapes theology. Pain does inform theology, which is why we have Job and the Psalms in the Scriptures.

But, as it tells what Jesus does and what happens to him, the gospel is always concerned with who he is. It is not merely that he cries out which matters here; it is as the Son, as God’s prophet, that Jesus cries out.

Whom does God’s prophetic word address from the cross? This word is directed to God. The prophet speaks to God a word continuous with that he has spoken to his disciples and to the religious authorities and to those in the streets and byways of Palestine.

How does the prophet prophesy to God?

Christian confession knows that to speak to Jesus is to speak to God, but we only half know this. We know it in the way that delivers Jesus as a ‘human face’ for God, that makes God more ‘accessible’ to us: Jesus is ‘easier’ than God. This is how the children’s talk goes, and not a few sermons.

But this confession is much more profound. If our speaking to Jesus is our speaking to God, it is because for Jesus to speak to us is also for him to address God. When Jesus addresses us, he addresses God. This is not because we are divine but because when the Son speaks, he always ultimately addresses the Father. Only something like a trinitarian logic will make sense of Mark’s portrayal of Jesus here. More precisely, only a trinitarian account of creation – of ourselves in relation to God – will make sense of Mark’s Jesus, with his cry from the cross. What such an account would reveal is that there is no ‘parents’ retreat’ to which the Father and the Son can withdraw to get us – the ‘kids’ – out of their hair for a few minutes (oh, for such a thing!). There is no direct Father-Son conversation across the dinner table without interruption and discord darting back and forth across the other way (oh, oh, oh, for such a thing!). We are ever in God’s midst. God does nothing which does not involve us. There is no divine action in which we are not the cause or the means or the purpose of what God does. The prophetic word – at its harshest and at its most poignant – is directed both to us and to God, just as Job’s harsh case against his friends is his poignant case against God.

God is the end – the goal – of all things,s including God’s own word. Jesus’ cry from the cross, then, does not contradict who Jesus is and what he has done to this point. Rather, his cry intensifies his ministry. He addresses God now not ‘through’ us but as us – as one of us.

Jesus cries out as Job, who asks our suffering questions. And he cries out as Job’s friends who, having mocked him at the foot of the cross, finally discover that they have misunderstood God, for they have been so caught up in their knowledge of righteousness and sinfulness that they had nothing more to hear from God.

Jesus – God’s word to us – speaks our word to God. The sad song of God’s searching after us one evening in the Garden – Adam, Eve, where are you? – finds its harmony in our responding word in Job and Jesus one afternoon outside Jerusalem: God, where are you?

The answer to both these questions is, On the cross: in Jesus-as-Job, in Jesus the Son.

In this double word – Jesus: God’s word to us as our word to God – all things are reconciled in the only way they can be, in a world like ours, with a people like us, who reject the gift of God and ask for it again.

In this, the rule of God finally draws near: the reign of God among a people who would crucify God for God’s sake, and their own.

There is no resolution such as Job’s cry or the cry of Jesus on the cross would seem to seek, considered apart from who God is and who we are, together on the cross.

The cross is where it ends, but also where it begins again.

Repent, then, O Job – re-imagine yourselves and God – and believe the good news: the kingdom of the God we would crucify is come near, in that crucifixion.

In this way, God is finally ours, and we are God’s.

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Lent 5
21/3/2021

Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 51
John 12:20-33

In a sentence
In baptism we take on the humanity of Jesus, and God’s love of him, as our own

In our reading from John’s Gospel this morning, some people approach one of the disciples and ask, ‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus’.

Gathering as we will soon around the baptismal font, what do we wish to see?

We will see a child – a vital energetic boy, who may or may not co-operate with what we are going to do him! We will see in him innocence – for the most part! – possibility, promise, hope. We will see his parents and their love and devotion to him.

Now consider, instead, that we were gathering today for the baptism of a middle-aged woman. Her couple of marriages – and a few other marriage-like ‘arrangements’ – haven’t quite worked out. She has said and done quite a bit she regrets, has hurt many of those who loved her, and her possibility, promise and hope have largely been exhausted.

Such a person would have much in her past to overcome; for little Finn, what might have to be overcome is still in the future. For Finn, what is going to happen today will be without his permission and quite beyond his comprehension. For our imagined woman, a baptism would be thoroughly intentional and with at least some modicum of understanding. She would speak for herself; today, others will speak for Finn.

It would seem that two such people are far enough apart in their history, their present reality and their prospects as to make their baptisms entirely different things. For what has infant possibility got to do with middle-aged actuality? What has open promise got to do with proven disappointment? What has innocence got to do with guilt? What has the non-belief of an unwitting infant got to do with the belief of a consenting mature adult?

We must be able to answer questions like these because the baptism of a lively infant and the baptism of a weary mature woman are the same. The water does not know whether we are young or old, and the prayers do not know whether we are innocent or guilty.

We must, of course, each be some of these things. We will be strong or weak, poor or rich, young or old, ill or healthy, wise or stupid.

But baptism is there for all of us, regardless of what we see in the mirror. We might say that, when we are in baptismal mode, we are all innocent, regardless of what we have done, or that we are all guilty, regardless of what we have done: we are – each of us – young and old; we are – each of us – promise and disappointment.

This is to say, then, that there is an important sense in which baptism is not about us at all – at least, not about us as we imagine ourselves to be. As we request baptism, do our preparation, make our plans, gather into this space, pray the prayers, splash the water and make our commitments, what is glaringly obvious to us is just us, we who are gathered here today.

But, finally, to get here and understand where we are, is to find ourselves equalised, levelled. It is these days only the most Christianly ‘religious’ people who are baptised but religion is not the point here. The point here is to say something about humanity – the humanity of the religious and non-religious – in all its height and depth, its richness and its poverty. We say to the one baptised – surely, a most strange thing – ‘You are human’. This is not because he is young, and healthy, and white, and has likely landed in secure social and economic station in life. Someone, of course, has to be these things, just as others are other things. But whatever we are – white or black, straight or gay, old or young, poor or rich – these things do not define us, do not set our outer limits. We exceed all that we appear to be. This exceeding – this ‘more’ – is our connectedness to each other.

I am not myself only – you are part of me. If we wanted to tell the human story properly, we would have to tell the story of everyone who ever lived. We cannot do that, of course. This is, in part, because there are too many stories to tell. Yet, more poignantly, it is also because we don’t really believe that all those stories have the same merit; some are less human than we. This is what we proclaim when we allow male to dominate female, white to dominate black, Christian to dominate Jew, Israeli to dominate Palestinian, rich to dominate poor. In these dynamics, we declare that our humanity is not extended by the other but diminished.

We cannot tell the story of everyone, and we also don’t want to.

To this inability and hesitation, baptism is an answer. In baptism we set in place one story ‘over’ every story. This is not the story of the person baptised – not today Finn’s story, just as it was not mine when I was baptised or any of yours when you were baptised. The one story we tell is that of Jesus. Instead of telling his story alongside mine and yours and everyone else’s in a hopeless attempt to be comprehensive, we tell his story and join ours to his, one baptism at a time.

Why the story of Jesus? Because of what is said of him in the Scriptures: he is the one both closest to God – the Son, the image of God – and as far from God as one can be, in death by crucifixion. He is the one-for-others whose very humanity is for and by his connections to his friends and his enemies, and he is also the one rejected because he is too dangerous to tolerate or to be friend of. Jesus is the one who extends us, and also the one who threatens our sense of our humanity, who does not extend us but would diminish us. Jesus is everything and nothing.

We began by asking, What has infant possibility got to do with old-aged actuality? What has open promise before us got to do with proven disappointment behind us? What has innocence got to do with guilt? What has the non-belief of an unwitting infant got to do with the belief of a consenting mature adult?

What has everything to do with nothing? To ask questions like these is to have in our mind that this or that characteristic is more worthy, more valuable, more human. Our faith contradicts this: it is not enough to see only those things we think matter the most.

‘Sir’, those old Greeks asked, ‘we wish to see Jesus’. Why? Because to see him is to see the fullness of human being – the everything and the nothing – in the form of just one of us. And it is not simply to see this breadth but to see it embraced by God. The cross is the depth of what we can do – the nothing – and the height of what God can do – everything.

God’s arms around Jesus, if we are joined to him, are God’s arms around us.

To see Jesus in God’s arms is to see ourselves there.

As we gather to baptise, this is what we should wish to see.

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Lent 4
14/3/2021

Job 24:1-17
Psalm 107
John 3:14-21

In a sentence
Moral righteousness can only limit and deny; God’s righteousness heals and creates.

The news has lately been filled with allegations of sexual harassment and abuse even within the highest house in the land. These reports are sad additions to the many horrific stories we have heard over the last few years. Victims – typically victims of powerful men – have begun to find their voice and, in the main, these voices are surely to be believed.

In all of this, we hear an echo of Job’s complaint about the way of the unjust in the world: the thief, the murderer, the abuser and the powerful act under cover of darkness: ‘deep darkness is morning to all of them; for they are friends with the terrors of deep darkness’ (24.17). The darkness, of course, extends beyond the dark of night. It can be behind the locked door of the school counsellor’s office or beyond the barbed wire of the concentration camp. It can be a detention centre on a distant island or mere social convention: the darkness which is our hesitation to talk openly about certain things.

The more recent voicing of Job’s complaint has led to increasingly loud calls for inquiries and commissions and investigations, has led to the demand for light. Strong and bright daylight is to be brought to bear to reveal what has been done in the dark, and by whom.

Such a seeking of light is not new to us. In the last generation, we have sought light via a significant inquiry into the separation of indigenous children from their families, royal commissions into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, into trade union governance and corruption, into child protection and youth detention, into banking and financial service, into aged care quality and safety, and into the exploitation of people with disability. And an inquiry into wrongs against Aboriginal people in Victoria is about to begin.

Not to put too fine a point on all this, we are experiencing a radical disruption: an exposure of works wrought in darkness which challenges assumptions about how the world does or should work. And many of us find ourselves blinking against the sudden light.

In our reading from John this morning, Jesus uses light and darkness to characterise the contexts within which people live and act:

And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.

For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.

But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.

Yet John’s account of light and darkness in his Gospel goes beyond the necessary but merely moral illumination of our formal investigations and commissions into the dark places in our midst. For the Gospel, light is not quite the ‘answer’ to darkness, not its moral opposite.

In the opening verses of John’s Gospel, we hear of the coming into the world of a light which the darkness does not overcome, extinguish or comprehend (1.4f). Yet, it not as straightforward as might first seem, to say that the light is not overcome.

We are to understand, of course, that the light is Jesus, which becomes more explicit later in the gospel (John 8.12; cf. also John 9 and the theme of blindness). But what are we make of the crucifixion? Does the darkness – if ever so briefly – overcome the light at this point? The easy answer is, Yes. We might imagine Jesus to be like one of those trick candles which, once blown out, flickers back after a couple of seconds. The darkness pulls Jesus under, so to speak, but he holds his breath and wriggles free and resurfaces. The overcoming of the light here is only fleeting and so, perhaps, doesn’t count.

But John would push us deeper here. At the beginning of our Gospel reading today, Jesus invokes an old story from Israel’s history about a bronze serpent lifted high on a pole as a sign by which people might be saved. The details needn’t bother us here today except that Jesus now likens himself to that serpent and its saving powers. The ‘lifting up’ of Jesus now, however, refers to the crucifixion and yet not only the crucifixion. Several times in John’s Gospel, the phrase ‘lifted up’ is used to denote both the cross and a flag-waving social, political and religious elevation – a kind of enthronement (cf. 8.28, 12.31ff). These two types of ‘lifting up’ coincide in the one moment: Jesus is ‘enthroned’ on the cross.

To jump a couple of steps and to compress into a single statement what this means for Jesus as the light, we might say that Jesus becomes the light in the crucifixion. The light which is Jesus and the darkness of the cross cannot be simply – morally – separated. The light which is Jesus is not merely ‘against’ the darkness. It is a ‘dark’ light, a light shining out of the dark cross. The darkness does not – even in the crucifixion – extinguish the light because the crucifixion is the light claiming the darkness, not so much washing it away as ‘un-darking’ it, putting it to work now not as darkness but as light.

Contrast this now with the necessary but merely moral work unfolding in the – entirely justifiable – outrage around us. Our exposés and inquiries and investigative commissions are in defence of those who, we might say, have been crucified by powers exercised in darkness. It doesn’t go too far to characterise the sexual harassment of a subordinate in this way, or the bloody backblock decimation of indigenous communities. Crucifixion was no mere execution. It was precisely about dislodging someone from their own self-perception into our own perception of them and does not require wood or nails to be effected.

But, as important as it is that we illuminate the dynamics of power and the real abuse which happens in our midst, identifying the crucified Jesus as the light of the world reveals something quite different from what can be revealed by the floodlights of moral outrage.

The moral light will reveal fault. It will reveal where power lies, who has it, how they have abused it. The moral light, however, can only condemn, demand restitution and regulate the lighting of more lamps so that the dark can’t provide cover again, at least in that place.

The dark light of the gospel doesn’t do this. The bright light of our justice brings condemnation but the dark light of the gospel does not: ‘Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him’ (John 3.17). The dark light of the gospel is concerned not with the dark but with what people do in it. It is concerned with the reality that we find the dark ‘useful,’ and with our capacity to seek out and create dark places. The light of the world ends up on the cross, and this is the judgement of the world: that darkness prevails among us. Moral indignation will not overcome this, whatever real good it might do for those subject to the darkness of others.

The light on the cross never leaves the darkness of the cross behind. The saviour – even risen from the dead – is always the Crucified One, always a dark light: a light which shines from dark things. God does not banish the darkness but works it into light. Like the bush in the old story, the cross burns with brilliant light but is not consumed; this light is always ‘crosslight’.

And so, crucified and risen, Jesus is the light of the world, not as a threat to dark places but their hope. The promise is not of a world morally erased, of persons morally cancelled, but of hearts transformed.

Put differently, we could say that, whatever else heaven might be, it is populated with agile cripples, the seeing blind, the rich poor, forgiving victims, forgiven perpetrators, holy blasphemers: all, in their own particular way, illuminated darkness, the risen dead. What is dark, debilitating, discriminatory, diseased and deathly – whatever marks us as victims or perpetrators – these things are the nothingness out which God creates, the grave out of which God resurrects.

This is the word of the cross, its foolish wisdom, its strong weakness, its scandal – its moral scandal. Our developing culture of cancellation is the sign that we cannot create out of nothing, bring life out of death. The light which is the cross is the sign that God can.

And more than can; God will create us.

For if the darkness of the cross is our own darkness – if it is, as we considered last time, we-in-Job who are crucified – then so also is the light of the cross our own: the light which God will make us to be.

It is in this light that we are to work, to live and to love: eyes being opened to the darkness, and looking to see it transformed by the grace of God.

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Lent 3
7/3/2021

Exodus 20:1-17
Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
John 2:13-22

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

Introduction

Our old friend, Professor Howard Wallace, used to remind both faculty and students that the psalms were not just another reading in the menu which the lectionary sets forth. In congregations like ours which regularly sing a psalm, it’s easy to think of it as a stepping-stone between the First and the Second Testaments, and to give it little thought.

Please listen again to the Ten Commandments, and to St Paul’s wonderful epistle, but today I’m with Howard, and I will stay with the psalm.

Sermon

‘Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
be acceptable to you, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.’
(Ps. 19:14)

Many preachers have begun our sermons with that verse, the last in this beautiful and well-loved psalm. But it is more challenging than it seems: on what grounds would I assume that my words might be acceptable to God? Because a rock was a safe place, out there, exposed on the mountain before my enemies; the redeemer is the kinsman who pays the price of my release from slavery. These are the sinner King David’s images of the God on whom he depends for life and liberty.

The text of this familiar psalm in today’s service sheet will be new to you; when something is too familiar, it loses its impact, so I hope you may see some new things today. It comes from a new translation made by an official group of the Roman Catholic church, and I find it very fresh.

The psalmist begins by holding up two of the gifts of God, gifts which require a humble and grateful response: God’s creation and God’s law.

As a boy I used to go out at night into our backyard and look at the stars. In a small town in the Goulburn Valley in the 1940s, you could still see them. I was then – and still am when I manage to escape the urban light – utterly awed by the sight. You feel you are looking through a veil of lights to the infinite depths of space.

Pope Paul VI once began a homily – in French: ‘Le silence éternal de ces éspaces infinis m’effraie’.’ ‘The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me’. I think it was at the time that the astronauts first tramped on the moon. It’s a thought, a pensée, of the French philosopher Pascal. The psalmist, however, is not frightened; the sight opens his eyes and ears to the Creator.

‘O burning sun with golden beam/and silver moon with softer gleam’., and ‘fresh-rising morn, in praise rejoice/and light of evening, find a voice’ as the praise of St Francis put it. The psalmist invites us to learn ‘the genius of God’s work’.

It begins with the silence: ‘without a word, without a sound, without a voice being heard, yet their message fills the world, their news reaches its rim’. There will be a Word, as St John reminds us, a word heard and seen and touched by humankind, but the morning light enlightens us and is its herald.

Pope Francis says in his beautiful encyclical Laudato Sí, ‘It is [the humble conviction of Christians] that the divine and the human meet in the slightest detail in the seamless garment of God’s creation, in the last speck of dust of our planet’ (#9). To look up is to look down at the earth we stand on, the earth which sustains us, the fragile earth on which everything living depends, and which today is under terminal threat – by us. ‘Day carries the news today, night brings the message to night’, but humankind has not looked or listened.

Of course, we don’t look at the Sun, but we observe its movement, as the psalm says – look beyond the sun to that vast blue dome. It is a magnificent canvas, an open marquee within which the sun makes its daily journey; its edges set the limits of its travel – for the limits of its power and purpose are set by God. The life-giving God launches the sun each day with the boldness of the bridegroom leaping from bed on his wedding day, of ‘an athlete eager to run the race’.

But this is not about stargazing and certainly not about looking at the sun, but as an ancient Mesopotamian poet put it, we are invited to read ‘the silent writing of the heavens.’ We’re also to feel it: ‘nothing on earth escapes its heat’. And think how often Jesus looked to the heavens, the waters and the earth for the lessons they taught.

So much for the first half, which may well have begun life as a separate poem, but someone joined it to the next one, the one about the law of God, the Torah. Christians might miss how Jews regard the Law unless we have the chance to be present in a synagogue on the Sabbath at the moment when the scroll is taken from the Ark, laid on the shoulder of the happy person honoured to carry it, and the congregation stands and sings – and dances. Everyone crowds to the aisle end of their row, and many reach out to touch it with their prayer shawl as it passes.  It is an ecstatic moment.

There is a slight relic of this tradition of our forebears in the procession into church with the Bible, which is intended to be a welcome to God’s Word, to indicate, in good Reformed terms, that everything that follows is a response to that Word. I sometimes wish we were a bit more excited about it!

So now we may join in the paeon of praise the psalmist heaps on God’s law. It ‘revives the soul’, it ‘guides the simple’, it ‘delights the heart and sharpens the vision’. Laws, rules, commandments, all have their uses, for the learned and the simple, when they speak of Good News. That is how Jesus applied the Law. ‘Let the children come’, ‘the sabbath was made for humankind’, ‘this temple I will rebuild in three days’, his answer to the question, ‘Who is my neighbour?’, all the parables. Even ‘Take and eat’ is a command. Such laws taste good, ‘richer than honey, sweet from the comb’.

But more: ‘Keeping them makes me rich, they bring me light; yet faults hide within us, forgive me mine’. We have failings we recognize, and we have ‘unwitting sins’, ‘hidden faults’ which we do not see. The writer prays, ‘Keep my pride in check, break its grip’, a direct and clear-minded, honest confession!

But – do Christians have quite such an exalted view of the Law? Let me remind you of what the Uniting Church’s Basis of Union says of the law as the Church uses it:

#17 …The aim of such law is to confess God’s will for the life of the Church; but since law is received by human beings and framed by them, it is always subject to revision in order that it may better serve the Gospel. 

We have not always held or practised such a godly, Christian understanding of our law, in church or society.

Thomas Cranmer did when he set the Ten Commandments to be read before the confession in his Book of Common Prayer:[1] they were meant to bring you to your knees – and we tend to hear them in that way; not so our father John Calvin: he placed them after the Confession and after Assurance of Forgiveness, for he saw the commandments as a guide to right living.

And, in any case, if they came from the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and are read in his Spirit, these laws are comforting, strengthening, guiding words, bringing order to the chaotic tribes on the edge of the desert, touching every part of community life. We have discovered, in recent decades, as Jews and Christians have begun to talk to each other again, that for both of us, God’s law is grace.

So, we end where we began, with the psalm’s final prayer:

Keep me, thought and word, in your good grace.
Lord, you are my Saviour. You are my rock.

[1]  In his second, more Reformed attempt, in 1552.

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Lent 2
28/2/2021

Genesis 17:1-5,16-17
Psalm 22
Romans 4:13-17
Mark 8:31-35

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

‘Jesus called the crowd, with his disciples, and said: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, and take up their cross and follow me”.

******

The first requirement of a text like this is to remind you that I am preaching to myself. Many may find this observation ludicrous, certainly those absent from what we are about to engage with. Perhaps even you who are present! But trust me – preachers must always be seeking to be convicted by their own words. This means that for the next few minutes you are simply being invited to overhear the conversation that this text has been having with me, not just by way of preparation in recent days, but for virtually an adult lifetime.

We read this text in the season of Lent. Lent has long been a time for denial. But what has to be denied? One answer has been a symbolic yielding of something we take as normal, and actually like, even something as banal as giving up chocolate. The problem, you see, is that despite what we “give up”, self-consciousness remains. “See what I am giving up” we will be saying to ourselves, possibly even happy to share our deprivation with others.

The point is that we are not called to DENY the self. We are called to deny THE SELF.  Nothing could be more offensive to the contemporary spirit of the age than to deny the self.  We are obsessed with it. We feed it; we clothe it; we educate it; we bring it to church – or not; we take it on holiday; we exercise it; we medicate it; many tattoo it.  Deny it? The whole thing’s absurd. We can all give something up; what we can’t readily do is to give ourselves up. So, in the face of this text, everything we think we want comes crashing down. No self left, only death, figuratively if not literally. Not to put too fine a point on it, Jesus is simply saying: Game over.

Therefore, if any text requires a crash helmet for a preacher, as well as potential hearers, this is it. It simply reduces us all to nothing. We could, in other words, just pack up now and go home – a risky invitation for a preacher to make, since you might do just that. And because of the burden of this text, I certainly would need to be first out the door.

But there is a let-out: “If”. This tiny word: “If”: “If any want to become my followers….”  We can breathe again. “If” means that it’s possible to say: “I don’t want to follow”. The vast majority of our contemporaries have so decided. These are surely the crowd that Jesus has in front of him. And presumably he is on side with this defiance. “If” says it all. “If” is simply saying: “If denial of the self is too hard, then go away. You are not ready for what I have to offer”.

Stupefaction on our part, surely!  How can this be since, if we have learnt anything, it is that Jesus loves everyone willy-nilly, consequently assuming that everyone is some sort of closet disciple? But this text, with its fluid boundary between crowd and disciples, poses the serious question as to which are which. It contradicts our common assumptions. It invites us to imagine our Church notice boards saying, instead of “Everyone Welcome”. something like: “If you’re not serious, go away”. A proposal, in any case, which is entirely superfluous in the culture we inhabit.

If you think that I can’t be serious, Peter has just been told precisely to do that. The question then is pertinent. Even if not quite as extreme as “go away”,

what does: “Get behind me, Satan” imply?  To be called Satanic by anybody is certainly confronting, indeed decidedly offensive, especially in Peter’s case by his presumed Mentor, and, what’s more, in the hearing of a surely astonished crowd.

What had Peter done to deserve such a dressing down?  He had made an apparently trivial but fundamental theological blunder. Despite his orthodox confession, ”You are the Messiah”, he simply got the point of it all wrong. He assumed that Messiahship meant the evasion of self-denial – even for a Leader. Well, Peter may have taken the hit, but he is not alone. For immediately we are told: “Turning, and looking at his disciples, Jesus rebuked Peter. So, he’s not a solitary individual; the crowd as well as disciples are as one, we’re all being looked at; we are all likely to get Lent wrong. But there is still time.

“Get behind me” may look like “Go away”, but it is actually a call to radical discipleship, to get Lent right. “Get behind me” really means “Walk behind me”, or better still, “Imitate me as you walk beside me”. Like Good King Wenceslas’ servant, the command is simply the offer of renewed time to tread the master’s steps. For us, of course, it will not be snow but likely deep sand that will be our metaphorical impediment.

The point is that the world looks different when we fall in behind. This morning we have been offered a clue as to this monumental difference. It is this. When God comes to Abraham and Sarah their known self disappears. “No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham”; and: “As for Sarah your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name”. The reality of God’s coming means that names are changed, and names are changed because selves are changed. In like manner, Saul became Paul, Simon became Peter. Note, then, the wonderful irony of this name change right here. Prior to this exchange, Simon had already become Peter, the so-called rock, because he had already accepted discipleship. But he got that original call, and therefore his name, wrong. Consider the risk, then, as the cross is signed on the forehead of the baptismal child to accompany the question: “What name do you call your child?

When God comes, names are truly conferred and the known self is transformed. This is why the little word “if” is so crucial – absolutely crucial – crucial, crux, cross! “If” goes with Cross. As the known self is being dissolved, two signs are being realised; the first sign is that the cross is being taken up; the second, that we are learning what it means to follow. Two different metaphors offering the promise of life.

What do we make of the cross? It had only one meaning in the Roman Empire – a political and military punishment inflicted on those who had no rights – slaves, violent criminals, those whose elevation had to be suppressed to safeguard law and order in the State. Here taking up the cross was specific; the individual not only had to carry his own cross to the place of execution, but as the ultimate humiliation, he had to be naked.

If we do not know what the cross might possibly mean for us, then nakedness does the job. In this we have been helped over the past twelve months by the world’s experience of intermittent mask wearing, bringing home to everyone as it does how little control we have over our lives. Behind the mask: Who am I? and Who are you?  The imposed camouflage of mask-wearing has paradoxically exposed the human experience of all the other camouflages we invariably adopt throughout our lives. As the mask strips to the bone all the self-images we have constructed, it helps us to understand what might be involved in experiencing the nakedness of the Cross.

This is why the third calling after that of self-denial, and taking up the cross, is simply: “Follow me”. The command is compelling in its simplicity. Almost 60 years ago, I found myself at the airport in Geneva. It was the early days of Jumbo jets. Here was this huge gleaming cylinder in which 300 selves – a virtual crowd – had given themselves up to the airline’s power, strapped in, all facing the same way, and hoping to arrive unscarred at their destination. But for now, no-one is going anywhere. Then along came this tiny tractor, driven by its equally tiny driver, with a large sign on the back that read: “SUIVEZ MOI: “Follow me”. What a splendid metaphor for the impossibilities of our text! Here we are, in the great bundle of life, all strapped in going nowhere with our improvised camouflages, until, like the miniscule tractor, God comes in front saying simply: “Follow me”. And then we can take off – mask-less possibly for the first time in our life. That this invitation might be accepted is why we must be told:

“If anyone wants ……”;        “If anyone ……”;       “If ……”

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Lent 1
21/2/2021

Job 42:1-6
Psalm 25
Mark 1:9-15

In a sentence
In Jesus the experience of Job is shown to be God’s very own.

One of the reasons the book of Job has been held in such high regard for the last 2500 years is that we see ourselves in him and his experiences. This is undoubtedly the right thing to do.

By contrast, we don’t identify so directly with the figure of Jesus. We know – faithful confessors of the faith that we are! – that Jesus is ‘one of us’, that he ‘became truly human’, as we will later recite in the Creed. Yet, Jesus is still experienced as rather distant from us-in-Job, at least in the telling of the story.

We began our reflections on Job by drawing a connection – and quite a strong one – between Job and Jesus. This connection is suggested, in part, by what we called the comic narrative arc reflected in the fall and rise of their two stories. Beyond that, there are many things said about Job, which happen to him or which he does, which have clear echoes in the ministry of Jesus. Observing the intercommunication of Job and Jesus is the main reason for looking to Job in this Lenten season.

But if there is this association, what are we to do with our differing experiences of these two figures?

The perennial interest Job generates for us has to do with the sense that, despite its clear historical location, his is a contemporary story. What he experiences and says could be said by any one of us. Job is a person not only of his own time but also of ours. Job’s tale recurs right down through history to the here and now of our very own lives.

By contrast, Jesus is not typically experienced in that way. What happens to us here and now is less something which happens to Jesus than it is something with which Jesus might ‘help’ us. It doesn’t go too far to say that we tend to experience Job as with us, whereas Jesus is cast as in some way ahead of us. We sit with Job but we are to follow Jesus.

And yet, perhaps Job is less with us than at first we imagine. We resonate with the pained righteousness of Job’s ‘Why me?’, but much stranger to us is where Job ends up. By this, I mean not the ‘unrealistic’ restoration of Job at the very end of the book but his humble repentance, as we’ve heard it today.

Can we who love Job because he asks our questions still love him when, in the face of the mighty God of the whirlwind, he acquiesces and repents in dust and ashes? ‘I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear’, Job says, ‘but now my eyes see you’.

What!?

I suggested last week that the restoration of Job’s former abundance at the end of the story might be more problematic than the divine game which caused his suffering. Yet perhaps Job’s repentance is more problematic than his restoration, not least because it is the climax of the story.

Does not Job now move ahead of us in our suffering? Are we not now called to follow, to set aside Job’s rage in ourselves and repent with him? Is not Job’s strange answer to God to be our answer as well? And if Job’s response is not enough for us, does not Job, who was so familiar, now become strange? If we previously felt that Job was with us, as distinct from the Jesus who is ahead of us, Job now looks rather Jesus-like: no longer where we are but somewhere out in front.

Jesus out-in-front is who we seem to meet in our Gospel reading today. This is the beginnings of Jesus’ ministry, marked with his programmatic, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’ On our comparison of Jesus and Job, this declaration and command could be the word of Job’s God out of the whirlwind, which brings about Job’s own repentance. We might say, then, that Job rises to Jesus’ call to repent and believe – that his repentance is the repentance for which Jesus calls.

This is difficult. And if Jesus is ahead of us, and Job leaves us behind to follow him, where does that leave us who feel we can’t ‘repent’ with Job?

If Jesus is already out ahead of us, and Job has now also moved ahead Jesus-like, we are nevertheless not left alone. What becomes apparent when we continue to press the relationship between Job and Jesus is that, if it is the case that Job in his repentance moves away from us, Jesus moves towards us. Or, we might say, Jesus begins to become more Job-like.

‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’. This is about as distant from us as Jesus could be. Yet, with ears still ringing from that divine embrace, Jesus is then ‘driven’ into the desert of human experience, culminating in the cry from the cross: ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ Is this not the reverberating echo of the whole lament of Job? Is not Jesus now become Job? Job, in whose suffering and questionings we see our own, now suffers on the cross. This is to say that Jesus’ journey to the cross is our own journey to the cross, the filling out of our own Job-like existence.

And yet, Jesus is not only us-in-Job. He is also the Son, the Beloved, and no less so because of the crucifixion. The cross, then, becomes a convergence of our Job-like experience of suffering with God’s own experience of suffering in the Son. We ‘coincide’ with God on the cross.

These are not easy thoughts, and if you’re having trouble following them, so am I!

But if we are to take ourselves seriously – including our resonance with Job – and to take also the story of Jesus seriously as a culmination in God’s story, these are the kinds of things we are pressed to think.

These are no simple thoughts because what we are unpacking here are not steps towards an ‘explanation’ of who we are and why we might reasonably expect a happy ending for ourselves, now or in some afterlife. We will not discover a logical key which opens up resurrection and leaves Job and the cross behind, as both the end of the Job and Easter might seem to do.

Technically, what we have here is a ‘mystery’ – not a problem to be solved but a sheer givenness, in this case the coincidence of God and human being on the cross, and the revelation there of God’s convergence with us, the coming near of God’s reign in the place of godlessness. Mysteries are for contemplation, not for solving.

Job on the cross of the divine Son is not an argument but an occasion for pause. There are no clues in the world to unravel them for us; they are rather clues for unravelling the world. Repentance – whether that of Job or that which Jesus calls for, is not the outcome of a careful argument. Nothing has been proven, not by God’s response to Job out of the whirlwind or even by the miracles of Jesus as responses to those who ask the questions of need. And we might also say in passing that our suffering proves nothing with respect to God, surely one of the clearest things Job’s story has to tell us.

But still the unprovable mystery is asserted: our story and God’s story converge. They converge in the cross but also – just because of this – they converge in the resurrection. This life-in-connection-with-death is the basis of the proposal of last week – that the life of the Christian is a to be lived as if it were a comedy, as if what we see now is but passing, as if there is a deeper secret we know about our whence and hence. This does not give ‘meaning’ to what suffering might be ours now – or to what joy – but it sets our experience in a broader vision.

To repent and believe the good news is to hold that, in all things, God convergences on us – whether our hearts are lifted in this or that joy or weighed down with this or that pain or grief. Jesus’ path to the cross is his path to us, the path of the LORD which is – in the words of our psalm today – always the path of steadfast love and faithfulness.

Steadfast love and faithfulness is God’s gift, and God’s call.

Let us, then, receive God coming to us on this path, in repentance and faith, with Job and all the saints.

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Transfiguration
14/2/2021

Job 1:1-12
Psalm 126
Mark 9:2-9

Jim Carey is not everyone’s favourite actor but what he does he does well – playing the part of the happy-all-is-well punter whose life is suddenly sent into tailspin, as any theatrical comedy begins.

Consider the opening scenes of one of his movies Mr Popper’s Penguins. The hopeful innocence of the young Popper gives way to the charismatic confidence of a New York developer, who seals a difficult property purchase and sets himself up for partnership in the firm. There’s a grey cloud here and there on the horizon but nothing Popper can’t handle until there arrives at his door a couple of crates from his just deceased father: 6 live penguins in a New York apartment.

And so the downward spiral begins, with disaster following crisis following catastrophe until, by some unexpected means, balance is restored and so too is the protagonist.

Compare this now to the beginning of Job

¹There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job… ²There were born to him seven sons and three daughters. ³He had seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, five hundred donkeys, and very many servants; so that this man was the greatest of all the people of the east. ⁴His sons used to go and hold feasts in one another’s houses in turn; and they would send and invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them. ⁵And when the feast days had run their course, Job would send and sanctify them, and he would rise early in the morning and offer burnt-offerings according to the number of them all; for Job said, ‘It may be that my children have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts.’ This is what Job always did.

With the right soundtrack and a sufficiently silly grin on his face, the start of the book of Job could be the start of Mr Popper’s penguins. Then begins Job’s own downward spiral. A conversation in the heavenly court sees the floor drop out from under Job’s happy, secure life, and down he goes. He spends quite a while in the depths before his life is finally restored.

There is nothing at all funny about what happens to Job, but the story as a whole itself is comic, in that it follows the same narrative arc as any comedy we might see in a theatre. As Popper’s life is shaken to its roots by a flock of penguins but is then restored at the end with a reconciliation to all which has happened to him, so also is the life of Job. If there is one thing we might take away from this series of reflections on Job, perhaps it could be that the book of Job is a comedy.

Of course, it is almost offensive to speak of Job as a comedy, given what we usually associate with comedy and what Job himself experiences. Must we not take seriously what he experiences, and what many of us have experienced, or are experiencing right now?

Indeed, but the point of noting the comic structure of the book is not to dismiss what happens to Job; it is to set it in context. The comic narrative arc is the basic story structure of the Scriptures themselves. Last week we heard something of the beginnings of Jesus’ public ministry, according to St Mark.

As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John… That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons… And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’ He answered, ‘Let us go on to the neighbouring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.’ And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

This could be the start of the book of Job, or another Jim Carey movie! Jesus is on the field and kicking goals. And, of course, the gospel then follows the comic narrative arc – from the joyful heights of Jesus’ early ministry to the depths of the cross to the even greater height of the resurrection.

In fact, the whole sweep of the Scriptures follows the same pattern, from the creation story of Adam and Eve through the expulsion from Paradise and the long struggle back to the promised restoration in the book of Revelation. The Bible as a whole is a comedy, and so are the leading stories within it. There are – of course – great depths of suffering and loss and despair in the Scriptures, but there is never really tragedy – that narrative arc which also falls but never rises again. Where things are looking catastrophic, irony is in play: not tragic finality but the confidence that there is more going on than meets the eye.

Recognising the comic structure of Job will not make all the tensions in the text go away. Indeed, if we were to take seriously the history of attempts to come to grips with the book, we should not expect that we will resolve these tensions in a few sermons, or ever.

But to see the comic structure of the story, and its correspondence to the comedy which is the whole Scriptural narrative, is to open up possibilities that might have been hidden from us. That the book moves in the same way as the rest of the Scriptures reveals that Job does not stand alone. The book is part of a larger whole: contributing to it, drawing from, reflecting it.

At the heart of that scriptural whole, from a Christian perspective, is Jesus of Nazareth. Today is Transfiguration, and each year the Gospel reading highlights on this day a strange revelation of the identity of Jesus to his disciples upon a mountaintop. Learning that they must see Jesus in the light of the law and the prophets, the disciples hear from the heavens comes the declaration and directive, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to him.’

This declaration is not far from Job. ‘Have you considered my servant Job?’ God asks the Accuser. ‘There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil.’ The correspondence between the comedy of Job and the comedy of the gospel make the end of Job’s story and the Resurrection of Jesus the same kind of thing. Job and Jesus are ‘kind of’ the same figure.

And so Job’s story is not told as mere history about what happened to happen to one person. As we read his story, reflecting as it does the comic arc of all of the Scripture, we are invited to allow his story to be our own. For many of us, this is easy enough, at least that part of the story in which we are first happy and then suddenly we are not.

And this brings us to what is perhaps even more confronting than the bargain God strikes with the Accuser to attack Job: the very end of the story and final restoration to Job of even more than he lost at the beginning. This is confronting because we know that this is not the usual way of things.

And suddenly the nature of faith is revealed in a new light.

We can imagine that we were blessed and we know that we are suffering – as did Job. But we don’t – ‘really’ – expect things to get better; what happened to Job in the beginning and in the course of his suffering feels like ‘knowledge’ but what happens at the end feels like ‘belief’. It seems we know that life is struggle, yet we ‘only’ believe that all will be resolved.

Job’s happy – ‘comic’ – ending, then, challenges us with the same question at the heart of Christian conviction, the question of faith itself: Do we hold our lives ultimately to be tragedies or comedies?

Not to put too fine a point on it, Christians are comedians. This is not a reference to how funny we might happen to be to each other or to the rest of the world. It is a reference to how we are to read our world and our lives in it. There is no shortage of the passingly tragic, breaking our hearts and the hearts of others. And there is no guarantee that any one of us will die happy and content, whatever else the end of Job’s story seems to imply.

The comedy of Christian existence is found in the confidence that there is more going on than we can see. When we sit down to watch a funny movie we know, whatever happens along the way, that everything will be happily resolved. If it is a good comedy, then we have no idea how it will resolve until the end; we know only that it will. We might take a perverse pleasure in the grimaces and groans of the protagonist but we might also – were it possible – assure him that it will be OK. For the antics of the comic actor are less about the immediate discomfort than they are about what it means: will not my life be tragedy, for surely this catastrophe is insurmountable?

We have heard that all the world is a stage; if that is the case, faith expects the show to be a comedy. In view of that expectation, faith acts against the hopeless and tragic narratives which clamour to have us play our sad part.

We align our lives neither to the tragedy of approaching death nor to a bland steady state of eternity but to the promise in Job and Jesus.

‘There once was a man in the land of Uz named Job’. There once was a man in Nazareth. And somewhere between these two the promise realised in both their lives is a woman in Melbourne, and a child in Cairo, and a man in Beijing: you and I.

Have you considered my servants, God asks the Accuser? They are my Beloved, all.

I have made them, I love them, and I will restore them as mine and myself as theirs. And then will our mouths be filled with laughter, and our tongues with joy.

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Epiphany 5
7/2/2021

1 Corinthians 9:16-23
Psalm 147
Mark 1:29-39

In a sentence
God gives more, and looks for more, than our rights and responsibilities

As governments have sought to respond to the coronavirus threat over the last year, the precarious balance between our rights and our responsibilities has been very much to the fore.

Shifting somewhat that balance from how it has been struck in modern liberal democracies, the virus has seen a noticeable re-weighting of our responsibilities over against our rights. In places where this has not been the case – where governments have vigorously upheld the right of their citizens to pretend that the virus will respect our freedoms as modern women and men – the cost has been enormous.

This balance will likely tilt back the other way soon enough. Whatever the case, it is important that talk about rights and responsibilities is fundamentally legal in character. The attempt to balance my rights with yours – my rights with my responsibilities – takes on the character of a a social contract in which we appeal to certain explicit or implicit understandings of what is required of us and guaranteed to us. Contracts – including social ones – reflect an economy of exchange. My responsibilities serve your rights; your rights imply corresponding responsibilities: this is balance without excess. When it is struck, balance without excess is predicable, and boring.

And this brings us to St Paul, the apostle of excess.

Paul says of his preaching: ‘If I proclaim the gospel, this gives me no ground for boasting, for an obligation is laid on me, and woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel!!’ (9.16). This is all responsibility, laid on Paul by God for the benefit of others. This responsibility, however, is balcanced by the responsibility of his hearers to provide him a living.

This is all well and good. Even if we think that hearing the gospel is no desirable thing and that paying evangelists is even less desirable, we know the logic of exchange and can follow Paul’s argument to this point. Yet Paul is not really interested in spelling out how the rights and responsibilities of preachers and their communities should be balanced. Rights and responsibilities are natural components of human existence, and not yet the more deeply Christian ethic Paul goes on to describe. Christian existence does involve rights and responsibilities, but you don’t need to be a Christian to assent to them. If this were all Paul has to say to us, then the gospel is simply a particular set of rights and responsibilities – a particular set of laws, but thoroughly legal in form, nonetheless.

Paul is under obligation to God to preach, and he does. The crucial point, though, is that although he has this responsibility and the corresponding right to claim an income from it, he does not claim money for his work. He points beyond the merely contractual requirements of rights and responsibilities to a possibility of truly good and surprising news: news which is not legally necessary but catches us unawares and, so, news which is liberating. For the good news is concerned not with what is due, but with over-payment, with what is in excess of what is due, with the delivery of more than is legally required.

In the first instance, this means for Paul the exercise of ministry without claiming the payment it is his right to claim. But he goes further.

God has embraced Paul as he is and sent him with a commission to preach as he is, and so Paul can rightly expect of others that they accept him as he is. Yet, for the sake of the gospel, Paul becomes as they are, that there may be as few obstacles as possible preventing them from receiving the gospel: to the Jews he is as a Jew; to the Gentiles, he is as a Gentile; to those under or outside the law, he becomes as one under or outside the law.

Yet, Paul is not merely being helpful or accommodating here. He turns his way of relating to others into the gospel itself. In another place he exhorts his readers: be as Jesus was, who, although he possessed all the rights of God, did not think them things to cling to but set them aside, taking on the form of a servant, humbling himself to the point of giving up any claim on himself – symbolised by the cross (Philippians 2).

This Paul also does, God’s work shaping the way Paul himself works. Becoming all things to all people is not a missionary strategy, although we quickly turn it into that. The point is not that evangelism works best if we become like those we seek to evangelise. The point is that evangelism is excessive service, responsibility which does not claim its right. Evangelism then becomes not the delivery of information but the very expression and embodiment of the gospel itself – a giving of self in loving service – an excess of what might justly be required. The message becomes the medium. The word about love looks and feels like love.

In his closing remark in our passage this morning, there is one final dynamic Paul reveals about his work: ‘I do all this on account of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings…’ (v.23). ‘I do this, so that I may share in the blessings of the gospel…’ Not only does Paul embody, or realize, the gospel in the way he relates to those who have a ‘right’ to hear the gospel. Paul also experiences the gospel himself through his excessive and unbalanced service to them. Faith arises out of action. Belief arises from love. And not only the faith of those we serve, but our own faith.

There are clues here for churches like ours. Our Synod’s Major Strategic Review sprang from a concern for sustainability, realised through strategy. Yet sustainability is an ecological concept, ecology being a profoundly ‘legal’ space of predetermined cause and effect in natural law. Strategy is a military concept, again the realm of cause and effect: the day is won by bigger guns, cleverer plans and sneakier commandos. Strategy unto sustainability is a commitment to balance and not to the excess of the gospel. What the strategy seeks to sustain might be important, but it cannot bring the good news we so desperately need.

We too, as a congregation, have to resolve how to move into the future: what to do with the enormous resources at our disposal? The temptation will be strong to keep strategy and sustainability to the fore in our thinking. Yet the gospel is excessive, and so is the mission to which it calls us. Mindful of rights and responsibilities, our future is also one of casting of ourselves in trust in the one who looks and waits to see what we will choose, and promises to work with even that.

While we must be as clever and careful as we can as we make these plans, it would be well to understand that in fact we are as much ‘forcing’ God’s hand as reading it. This would be an appalling thing to say were it not that this God can take our worst excesses – even the on-balance conclusion that we must crucify the Lord of life – and make of them something life-giving.

The empty economy of right and responsibility cannot bring us life, but only a precarious balance and, with it, anxiety: have we got the equation right? The good news about Jesus tells instead of an excess of love which is undeserved and unbalanced and – just so – is pressed down and flows into a cascade of hope.

Paul finds himself caught up in this gospel current. Drawn into it, he uses its force and power as the means of reaching others, and yet that same force again swirls him around, shifting, buffeting, cleansing and empowering for more such work. This is our calling, and the promise which carries it to us. Tomorrow is not the next thing we do, the next necessary step; it is where God is taking us, and where we will next meet God.

Let us, then, allow ourselves to be caught up in the excessive grace of God and begin to learn to become a little excessive ourselves.

Re-worked from a sermon
preached at MtE, 2015           

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Epiphany 4
31/1/2021

1 Corinthians 8:1-13
Psalm 111
Mark 1:21-28

In a sentence
Freedom is always properly freedom to love and to lift each other

If there is one question which is taxing the best minds of the church in this day and age, it is not the question about whether we ought to be eating meat which has been offered idols. The impact of the gospel has been such that we have pretty much relegated such matters to a forgotten past.

Yet, as foreign to us as those old arguments might be, there is a very close relationship between how Paul approaches the dispute and how we ourselves might deal with problems of difference in our midst as a faith community, as a denomination, or in our wider society. For Paul is interested in the nature of the freedom we have in the gospel, and the consequences of this nature for our exercise of that freedom.

The Corinthians understood themselves to be a people freed by the gospel. Yet their understanding of this freedom was badly skewed, and this was the reason for much of what Paul writes about throughout the letter.  As he often does in this letter, this morning’s reading has Paul apparently quoting back to the Corinthians a saying of their own: ‘all of us have knowledge’. It’s a seemingly innocuous statement, but its purpose here is to justify the practice of eating meat offered to idols. ‘All of us has knowledge’ implies, ‘We know that the idols of heathen worship are nothing, so we may safely eat meat sold from the temples without compromising our belief in Christ; faith in Christ has revealed to us which among the gods matter, and which do not.’

Perhaps surprisingly, Paul has no problem with this. He sees that the gospel does give such freedom. But at the same time he knows that not all Christians are equally free to enjoy the fruits of what they now know. Some Christians – quite probably those who were once regular participants in the temple cults – are unable to get out of their heads the thought that, by continuing to eat sacrificial meat, they are relapsing back into their previous beliefs.

Paul’s response to this situation, on behalf of these so-called ‘weak’ believers, opens up a new dimension on the character of the knowledge and freedom Christians have in the gospel. While there is no ‘in principle’ gospel-objection to taking advantage of the cult to get your meat, there is a local social or communal one. The knowledge and the freedom we have in the gospel is never a knowledge and freedom for us as individuals but for us as we stand together before God in Christ. Paul’s challenge to the Corinthians shifts our attention from the freedom which comes from knowing about God or the world to the freedom which arises from, and gives rise to, love.

If all we know is that we are free to do this or that thing, that is not enough, not the ‘necessary knowledge’. To ‘know’ is merely to be expanded – ‘puffed up’ Paul calls it. The richer possibility is to know, and yet to put aside knowledge and the freedom it might bring in order that another might not fall.  This Paul calls love – that which knows and yet does not allow what it knows to become a distraction for one who knows less. In more tangible terms: love knows that meat offered to idols is only meat. But love is prepared to treat the meat as contaminated by the cult in order not to destabilise the faith of some so-called ‘weaker’ believer who can’t get it out of her head that it’s tainted by the idol. Love abandons its freedoms. Love enslaves itself to the weaker one in order that together we might be strong. ‘Therefore’, Paul declares, ‘if food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall’.

As we’ve already observed, whether we ought to eat meat sacrificed to idols is not a question which taxes our minds much these days. But Paul’s principle applies far beyond that problem. Whether in the church or out of it, the call is to an exercise of freedom which is the freedom to deny ourselves some of our liberties in the gospel, in order that the humanity of others might be enriched. In the church and in the wider world the variety of possible accommodations of the weaknesses of others is a great as the number of human relationships. Still the call is the same: ‘take care that your liberties do not become somehow a stumbling block to the weak’.

Of course, there are a thousand objections and qualifications which come to mind whenever a preacher generalizes in this way about how we ought to treat each other – whether the preacher is St Paul, or the one to whom you are subject. Fundamentally, we object to how easily an ethical system like this can be manipulated and abused by the hysterical or the tyrannical. God is not unaware of these problems, and even a preacher might sense that it’s dangerous ground. But that doesn’t make the call to deny ourselves go away. Hear the call, and seek to live it in your lives, with all the ambiguities which come with any commandment.

For the problem with commandments is not that they might be abused in their application, but that it is impossible to be confident that we’ve actually met them. Sooner or later we may say a loud ‘No’ to the puritanical ascetic or to the loose libertine; but we will never know just when enough is enough.

Which is also to say, we never really know when God does the same for us, because it is God’s dealings with us which is the basis of the ethic Paul describes here. Though God in Christ could have chosen freedom from the world, he joined himself to a world which neither particularly looked for him nor welcomed him. Paul speaks elsewhere of Christ as the one who had no sin, and yet became sin that we might become righteousness. That is, in his baptism into the highs and lows of human life, Jesus put aside his freedoms in order to be ‘for us’. He does not merely become human but allows himself to be thoroughly marked by human brokenness, to the point of becoming that brokenness himself, on the cross… It is only thus that brokenness itself is broken, in that God took it into himself, allowing himself to become something new – the crucified God, truly God even to those who cry out, ‘Our God, our God, why have you abandoned us?’ Our lives together are godly to the extent that they reflect, not God’s ‘moral’ perfection, but that perfecting liberty of God which is not afraid to be limited and made a little dirty, if perchance it might mean that some will be healed.

Knowledge of our freedoms merely puffs us up in our own little worlds, but loving towards the freedom of others builds us all up.

By the liberating power of the Spirit, may God’s people ever more closely reflect in themselves the freedom of his Son to lay down our lives for others, and to take them up anew by his power!