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Easter 4
25/4/2021

Acts 4:1-13
Psalm 23
John 10:11-18

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In a sentence
There is no salvation without reconciliation – the reconciliation of real persons in real disputes; this is what God promises.

‘^{Acts 4.12}  There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.’

That name, of course, is ‘Jesus’.

Here, perhaps, we find the heart of all objections to Christian faith, whether against doctrine or biblical testimony or Christian ethics. To modern ears, Peter’s declaration seems to be about as exclusive as could be made: only here, in the name of this one person among all persons of history, is salvation to be had.

And so the desire to discard this declaration, or at least soften it, is strong, whether it be from our concern for the ‘salvation’ of those good people who don’t believe – perhaps even members of our own family – or our rejection of the idea of salvation altogether and the triumphalism of those who consider themselves saved and others damned.

What the various objections share is a concern about the exclusivism implicit in this announcement. The problem is that the name of Jesus is not common to all people. The implication seems to be that only those who come into contact with the name ‘Jesus’, and then have believed on it, only these receive ‘salvation’. If salvation is tied to one such event – as the name ‘Jesus’ suggests – this is, at the very least, unfair. Historical events and persons are common only to those who come into contact with that event or its ‘downstream’ history, and not everyone will have that contact. How much better it seems to us that, whatever salvation is, everyone has equal access to it.

But we ought to give a little thought to what ‘saved’ might mean. The history of religion has delivered us a notion of salvation deeply coloured by the negative: we are saved from something. That something is, broadly, ‘damnation’: the wrath of God and associated hellfire, in the various versions of various religions. But salvation is properly also – even predominantly – salvation for something.

We are saved for what we are saved as: we are saved as human beings to fulfil our very humanity. Put more simply, to be saved is to be made fully human or, as is more the case for us, the process of being saved is one of becoming more fully human.

If Jesus is somehow the means of this, it is hard to see how he is of use to those who do not – and could not – know him because of his historical particularity. And so we seek other things we think make us human, or more fully or valuably human. The most common appeal here is to one form or other of moral achievement. When we feel moved to say something like ‘all religions are really about love, and even atheistic secularists are really about love too’, we are asserting that salvation is not about what we know – the name of Jesus or whatever – but about what we do. For, while people will always know different things because of their different histories, they all have to act in relation to each other and, we presume, all know what it means to act ethically or lovingly in their own situation. Surely, then, salvation is about being the right kind of person – being human in the right way – for everyone surely has the opportunity to be that. In this way, no one is implicitly excluded from at least the possibility of salvation; we include everyone.

Yet, a strange irony now emerges from the broader sweep of Peter’s preaching. We object to the declaration of Jesus as the way to God because it seems to exclude so many people but, in fact, the Jesus Peter proclaims is the excluded Jesus. The words which come just before today’s problematic text run like this, referring back to the lame man healed in the preceding story:

^{Acts 4.10}… let it be known to all of you, and to all the people of Israel, that this man is standing before you in good health by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead. ¹¹ This Jesus is ‘the stone that was rejected by you, the builders; it has become the cornerstone.’

It is only then that we hear the disturbing assertion,

¹² There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name…by which we must be saved.’

It is not simply the name Jesus presented here as the means of salvation, as if it were like the magic spells we considered last week. The name refers to particular events in which the specific people to whom Peter preaches are implicated: this Jesus ‘whom you crucified’, ‘rejected by you’. The reason Jesus is the only means of salvation for these people is that he is their victim – the one they have excluded – now presented back to them in a reconciling offer of forgiveness.

If Jesus is the means of their salvation, and their salvation is a turning to a fuller humanity, then this fuller humanity has to do with overcoming the exclusion: a reconciliation to their victim. Salvation comes only with the reconciliation of oppressors and victims, the overcoming of exclusion.

Thinking about salvation in this way, we have also re-thought the problem to which Jesus might constitute an answer – what it is from which we are saved. While we might be troubled by Peter’s declaration as a verse plucked from its setting, the full context of the verse suggests that perhaps the thing we all have in common with each other – if not yet the name Jesus – might be the fact that we all have victims, that we all exclude.

We here today cannot be guilty of the crucifixion of Jesus. Indeed, may whom Peter addressed in his sermon would not be directly responsible either. But we can learn from the preaching of Peter to those who were guilty what it would take for forgiveness truly to be discovered in our lives, with our particular guilts and afflictions. Salvation begins with a repenting – a turning towards our victim and a receiving of forgiveness. Salvation has to do with reconciliation – not ‘merely’ to God in the abstract but to each other, concretely.

Today, of course, is ANZAC Day, on which we recognise many things, if perhaps not sufficiently what it signals about the victims we make or are of each other and the need for difficult reconciliation war creates. The following is a poem from the American writer and poet Hermann Hagedorn, published in 1917, which conveys a vision of salvation as post-war reconciliation, under the title ‘Resurrection’.

NOT long did we lie on the torn, red field of pain.
We fell, we lay, we slumbered, we took rest,
With the wild nerves quiet at last, and the vexed brain
Cleared of the wingèd nightmares, and the breast
Freed of the heavy dreams of hearts afar.
We rose at last under the morning star.
We rose, and greeted our brothers, and welcomed our foes.
We rose; like the wheat when the wind is over, we rose.
With shouts we rose, with gasps and incredulous cries,
With bursts of singing, and silence, and awestruck eyes,
With broken laughter, half tears, we rose from the sod,
With welling tears and with glad lips, whispering, “God.”
Like babes, refreshed from sleep, like children, we rose,
Brimming with deep content, from our dreamless repose.
And, “What do you call it?” asked one. “I thought I was dead.” 
“You are,” cried another. “We’re all of us dead and flat.”
“I’m alive as a cricket. There’s something wrong with your head.”
They stretched their limbs and argued it out where they sat.
And over the wide field friend and foe
Spoke of small things, remembering not old woe
Of war and hunger, hatred and fierce words.
They sat and listened to the brooks and birds,
And watched the starlight perish in pale flame,
Wondering what God would look like when He came.

‘Resurrection’, by Hermann Hagedorn (George Herbert Clarke, ed.,  A Treasury of War Poetry.  1917)

If there is the slightest critique which might be made of Hagedorn’s vision, it is what we might read into the last line – ‘Wondering what God would look like when He [comes]’, as if God has not already come in the vision.

For, what Hagedorn has already recounted – the reconciliation of victims and oppressors, of those who revel in war and those who just want to go home, of the innocent and the guilty; the reconciliation of the German and the French, and the Australian and the Turk; the reconciliation of the Bolsheviks and the Czarists, the Americans and the Japanese; the reconciliation of the Nazis and the Jews, of the Israelis and the Palestinians, of needy refugees and the blind eye; the reconciliation of the Aborigines and we colonists – all of this is what God ‘looks like when He comes’: the reconciliation of the living and the dead.

There is no salvation without justice, no justice without peace, no peace without reconciliation, no reconciliation without grace.

To say that Jesus’ name marks salvation is not to exclude anyone. It is to draw to our attention what about us is excluded by others, and what about others we exclude. In one excluded man’s grace towards those who cast him out, we see the beginnings of a reconciled humanity.

To declare that salvation is found in Jesus is not arrogantly to exclude an abstract person in some distant time or place who could not possibly know Jesus’ name. It is humbly to preach and seek reconciliation wherever we can with the real and tangible people who are part of our lives.

There is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved but the names we would rather we did not know. These will save us, or we will save them. Salvation is reconciliation of what we have divided and separated.

This is what it is like when God comes.

A number of elements of this sermon have been drawn from Rowan Williams’ very helpful study, Resurrection: interpreting the Easter gospel, Morehouse, 1994 [1982].

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Easter 3
18/4/2021

Acts 3:1-19
Psalm 4
Luke 24:36b-48

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In a sentence
The miracle at the heart of faith is that God makes sense of us for our own understanding, and calls us to renewed life.

The events at the Easter-heart of the Christian story seem to beg to be ‘made sense of’. How can we comprehend a resurrection or any purported miracle around Jesus?

Yet, while the desire to make sense is a natural one, we must recognise its limitations. This is not to say that we ought to allow ourselves to be ‘unsensible’ or irrational. It is more a question of what makes sense of what. What will bring us closer to the heart of Christian experience is entertaining the possibility that these biblical texts might ‘make sense’ of us, might comprehend us

The story of the man miraculously healed in our Acts reading today is another ‘need to make sense of’ passage in the Easter account, reflecting as it does the ongoing impact of Easter and Pentecost.

While there is a lot of scepticism these days (and, even back then!) about miracles, even those who stand as a matter of principle against any purported miracle retain an interest in the idea of miracles. The credulous and the sceptic alike, we all would that someone enter our lives and declare, ‘in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk!’ or ‘be poor no longer’ or ‘be lonely no more’, and not only declaring this, of course, but the miracle then taking place. This is a story we would all love to believe for the relief it seems to promise.

However, as we ponder the idea of a miracle, we must be mindful of what the miraculous is not: miracles are not magic. Magic has to do with the possession of a certain knowledge about the way the world works and, so, possession of knowledge about how things might be manipulated. If you know the correct incantation and say it in the right way, then you can bring about what you desire. And so in the Harry Potter stories, for example, the young witches and wizards are gradually inducted into the mysteries of their craft: the words which must be said, and how they must be said. We see them struggle to get their Latin phrases right, and to wave their arms in the right way, in order to make happen whatever the spell is supposed to effect. In this, magic is much closer to modern scientific technique with the potential of its descriptive formulas than it is to biblical miracle.

On a magical understanding, Peter knows the magic word – ‘Jesus Christ’ – and the lame man is healed. (A little later a magician named Simon even offers to pay the apostles if they’ll teach him the ‘magical’ gesture by which the Holy Spirit was imparted to new believers ([Acts 8.9-23]). Yet, neither Peter nor Luke are interested in magic. If there is a tendency towards a magical interpretation of miracle stories like this, it is in us and not in the story itself that the magic is found. Such a magical understanding appears in us when we find ourselves thinking that, if only we knew the right words to pray, and if we prayed them with an appropriate air of authority or with the right degree of sincerity, or with the right amount of faith, or if we could find someone else who can do that for us … if only we knew the spell, we too could do what Peter did.

Yet, closer attention to the story contradicts this reading. Whereas our interest here is most likely to stem from the possibility (or the impossibility) that we too might share in such a healing, Peter is interested in communicating the possibility of the forgiveness of sin. He makes no implied promise of the healing of our bodies; the healing of the lame man is almost incidental to the point of the passage. Recall here what we said last week about the secondary status of the resurrection of Jesus itself: the resurrection is not the main event but a sign pointing to something else – in fact, a sign that also points to matters of judgement and forgiveness.

Peter declares not, ‘Repent and turn to God so that you may all walk again, or see again, or stand up straight again, or be healed of your sadness’, but ‘Repent … and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out.’ The big news in the story is not that God acts in the name of Jesus to enable a lame person to walk again, but that God acts in the name of Jesus to forgive sin.

The introduction of the theme of forgiveness here disrupts the magical reading of the miracle. Magical thinking, with its the desire to know how to make this or that happen, is not just about what we might be able to do but is also about how we understand ourselves. To want to change things magically is to demonstrate that we don’t think of ourselves as part of our problems. Magic doesn’t change us in ourselves but changes others or the world: my love potion is given to change you, not me. Magic is a tool in our hands for shaping what is outside us.

But Peter’s preaching is directed at a different target. With the charge of sin and offer of forgiveness, Peter opens up the thought that we ourselves need to be changed. To be guilty of sin is to have a share in the reason for what is wrong. ‘Sin’, as an idea, gathers us into the problem, makes us a part of the problem.

The difficulty of the miracle now shifts. In terms of where we started, the hard text we seek to make sense of now offers us a new sense for ourselves. The crowd respond to the showy miracle, but Peter wants to show them themselves.

This is a bigger shift than we might think.

It is as difficult to believe that I might need real change as it is that the lame could walk again in this way. Pressing further, it is as difficult to learn and understand what might need to be done in me as an individual or in us as a community as it is for a dead man to stop being dead.

It is much easier to make sense of something – to know it on our own terms – than to be made sense of – to know ourselves on another’s terms, especially if that ‘other’ is one whose knowledge of us cannot simply be dismissed.

The death and the resurrection with which Easter faith is concerned is not the lame man’s disability and healing or even the death and resurrection of Jesus himself; it is the death which is in the people – the capacity to ‘kill the Author of life’, Peter says (3.15) – and the possibility of their rising from that in repentance (3.19). Jesus dies and rises, that we might die and rise too.

To proclaim Jesus as risen is not to believe in magic; it is to declare ourselves to be under judgement. And yet, miraculously – here is the miracle – to proclaim Jesus risen is also to declare that we are within reach of forgiveness by the sheer grace of the one who brings the charges against us.

We will hear more about these charges next week. But, for now, the point is the need to entertain not the abstract idea of a miracle but the concreteness of the repentance to which the miracles point. It is only when we let go of making sense of Easter on our own terms, and let the story speak to us of things we don’t yet know, that a rethinking – itself a kind of re­pentance – becomes a real and close possibility. And with that comes the possibility of a life lived with new understanding, vigour and hope.

This life is what the people of God – and all people – deeply desire: hearts once crippled now having cause to run and leap and praise God (3.8).

This life is what the gospel of the risen, crucified one makes possible, by making more profound sense of us than we yet have made on our own terms.

Jesus dies and rises that we might, too.

So let us die, and rise, and walk and leap in love and praise.

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Easter 2
11/4/2021

Acts 4:32-35
Psalm 133
John 20:19-31

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Imagine that tomorrow morning’s news bulletins reported six new locally-acquired COVID-19 infections in Melbourne today; and that then, on Tuesday, there were ten more; and, on Wednesday, another 25. This being the case, we would be right to guess that next week’s worship service would be pre-recorded and that we would need to re-stock our mask supply!

In a way which, 18 months ago, would have been unimaginable to all except infectious disease epidemiologists, we all now know the signs of an approaching community lockdown. Rising infections from unidentified sources mean a tight constraining of community movement: if this – rising infections – then that – isolation.

Yet, if tomorrow we read a well-corroborated report of the return to life of a person previously quite dead, it would have almost no meaning for us whatsoever, in the sense that almost nothing would change in our going about our daily routines. Our contemporary thinking is that the dead can’t rise. This means that, even if we are wrong about this, we have no framework for understanding what ‘risen’ might mean. If the resuscitation of a well-dead person could be established, it would quite simply be meaningless. By this I mean that talk of a resurrection would have no application for us: it would not signal what we should do next.

In Jesus’ time, this was not the case. While our way of thinking about ourselves and our world is such that the dead don’t rise because they can’t, many of his generation held also that the dead don’t rise, but that they can. This difference is what makes the New Testament proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus at least possible: the dead can rise – or God can raise them, even if God usually doesn’t do so. And, of course, the New Testament declares: now one has been raised.

But there is more to resurrection than this in the New Testament. The notion of resurrection was an element of apocalyptic thought. This arrived late in Jewish thinking and was attractive because of the kinds of problems we have recently seen developed in Job (and also in Ecclesiastes and the Psalms): the world as it stands is unjust, and it seems that God must also, then, be unjust. ‘Apocalyptic’ concerned itself with the ‘apocalypse’ – literally, the ‘revelation’ of what has been hidden (Greek: apo [from/out of], kalypt­o [hide]). What will be brought out from hiding is the righteousness of God: God’s inherent righteousness in God’s setting right what is wrong. God will judge the world, and reveal righteousness in the process. Resurrection matters here because the judgement is of the totality of history, including those who have already died, and we cannot hear the judgement of God if we are dead.

This judgement – the revealing of where righteousness resides – is the heart of the matter, and not the rising. This is to say that ‘resurrection’ – often thought by us to be the central notion – is a subordinate idea in apocalyptic thinking. Resurrection is like the money we need to have in our pocket in order to buy our lunch. The money is not the point – the lunch is.

To say, then, that a person has been raised from the dead, is to say that this process has begun: the end of the world has begun, with ‘end’ now meaning not termination but completion, goal, final purpose. God is about to do what needs to be done to set things right – to set us right, to set the world in the way it should be.

If this is what we expect – as first-century Palestinian Jews – what are we to do if a resurrection signals that the judgement is imminent? We are to turn from what is not right to what is right.

And this brings us to the potentially terrifying passage we have heard from Acts this morning. We read to this point of the unfolding ramifications of Jesus’ resurrection and the gift of the Spirit that thousands of people have believed the preaching of the apostles. And now we hear, ‘for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need’ (4. 34f).

Of course, this will likely only be terrifying for those who have lands or houses, and if the implication of Luke’s telling us this is that we should do the same, even now. We have already decided this latter is not the case if we have heard this passage before and not done as they did! (And that we need not do so is suggested in the story which immediately follows – the death of Ananias and Sapphira, not for failing to sell their property ]they did sell it] but for lying to the community about the proceeds).

In fact, in view of other aspects of the New Testament witness (later, for example, Paul plans to take up a collection among the Gentile churches for the poor Jerusalem believers), we might conclude that the sale of these assets is a naïve and harmful response to the resurrection, assuming that they did as the text tells. But we must be careful here. We are not the judges of these first believers, least of all if we judge them as an act of self-defence.

As we have just outlined, their belief in the resurrection of Jesus entailed also a conviction that the final resolution of the tensions of history was imminent. In their selling and sharing, a belief about the true nature of the world, now about to be revealed, takes concrete and specific shape here and now: ‘there [will not be] a needy person among them’. They ‘believe’ by ‘acting’. As the apostles have been testifying with great power, so also do these new believers also testify to their conviction with great power: with economic and social action which reflects the promise in the apostles’ preaching.

It might seem that it was easier for them to let go of their things because they expected not to be needing them much longer; this was indeed likely part of their thinking, and was still in Paul’s mind 25 years later (see his teaching on marriage, ‘in view of the impending crisis’, 1 Corinthians 7). Yet, it was not so much easier as clearer to them how to testify to the resurrection and the impending judgement it signalled. There being no tomorrow changes our sense of what matters for today, and we declare that there will be no tomorrow by acting like it is the case.

But what does resurrection faith look like for us, who have every confidence that tomorrow will come? A general policy of selling, dispersing and casting ourselves onto the generosity of others looks like irresponsibility.

About this, three things…

The first thing is that our resurrection faith – like theirs in Acts – will ‘look like’ something. Faith in this God takes a recognisable, lived shape in this world. The believed word only makes sense when it is reflected in a life which corresponds to what is believed. If our beliefs do not make sense to us, it is likely because our actions don’t resonate with them. That we are forgiven will only ‘feel’ true to the extent that we live like forgiven people, and forgive others. Resurrection-talk only makes sense when the power of death in its many forms is seen to be pressed back in our lives and relationships.

The second thing is that our resurrection faith – like theirs in Acts – will ultimately be seen to have taken the ‘wrong’ shape. There is no pre-determined set of self-evidently righteous actions for expressing Christian belief or, if there is, we can’t know what it is. What is justified is so from God, and not because we got the formula right. It was once the right thing to do, to sell possessions and share the proceeds. It was once the right thing to do, to build 900-seater churches with towers. These were appropriate forms for the expression of a resurrection faith – and indeed may be again in the life of any individual or community.

The third thing is that God nevertheless looks to us to see what shape our resurrection faith – like theirs in Acts – will take. If we cannot know beforehand what we ‘should’ do, then God cannot know either. If there is any requirement God has, it is only that God’s people not look like they are dead. To us, in age and in youth, in health and infirmity, in darker times and lighter, when alone or in company, God commands: Don’t look dead.

To the church as a whole, confronted by wide-ranging changes and challenges around its place in the community, Don’t look dead.

To us as a congregation, anticipating a differently shaped future, Don’t look dead.

How we act – how we appear to ourselves and to others – is what we believe ourselves to be and testifies to what we think will come of us. The gospel is that Jesus is risen, and that we are being raised with him. This will only make sense if we don’t look dead, if we – and others – see in us that the worst of death is behind us and that before us is only deeper, richer life.

To recite the creed of the church, with its central theme of creation out of nothing, of life out of death, is to declare ourselves equipped and ready for the task of living and enlivening.

Let us, then, receive this life, live it, and give it.

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Easter Day
4/4/2021

Job 38:1-18
Psalm 118
Mark 16:1-8

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In a sentence
The resurrection is the surprising Jesus simply being consistent.

Preamble to the sermon

There is a textual-come-literary question as to whether Mark intended to end his gospel at 16.8. The textual question arises from the fact that the oldest manuscripts end at v.8, while other manuscripts have one or both of the two shorter endings included in our Bibles. The literary question is whether there is enough evidence internal to Mark to settle the textual question: could Mark conceivably have meant to end his gospel here, or has his ending been lost and replaced by the other two endings? Perhaps these questions matter less than might first seem. Indeed, the question of where Mark intended to end is important for assessing his literary stature – even genius. Yet, in the end, it is not Mark who is the subject of the gospel but Jesus. Even if there were originally a couple of concluding ‘pages’ now lost, we would still have to make sense of these few verses as they stand – the ‘terror’ and ‘fear’ in response to the report of the resurrection, in particular. This is the assumption of our treatment of the passage in what follows.

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Following chapter upon chapter of Job’s crying against God, God finally speaks: ‘Who is this who darkens counsel by words without wisdom?’

The stage is set, God has announced his intention: now comes the divine wisdom.

And what we get is Shock and Awe: no engagement, no argument, nothing that looks like the wisdom which Job and his friends have wrestled to uncover. Chapter upon chapter now of rhetorical questions from the divine whirlwind. And Job, filled with the fear of the Lord (cf. 28.28), will be crushed and will repent in dust and ash.

Today’s gospel reading is not different:

‘So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid’

Shock and Awe.

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When we pose a question about the reported resurrection of Jesus, we usually consider ‘resurrection’ before considering Jesus. For reasons which seem obvious to us, the possibility of resurrection is considered independently of anything else the gospel says about Jesus. We understand life and death as natural categories, apart from Jesus: we are alive, we have seen the death of others and fully expect to ‘be’ dead ourselves one day. A report of a resurrection is only a radical violation of our lived experience of the natural world, on these terms.

Yet, it is alien to the New Testament to separate life and death as natural phenomena from what is said about a person as a historical phenomenon. We might say that, instead of adding resurrection to Jesus, the New Testament adds Jesus to resurrection. Instead of saying something unnatural about Jesus, the New Testament says something historical about resurrection. And what is important to keep in mind here is that ‘historical’ here does not first mean ‘what actually happened’. It means human cultural, social and political existence. The New Testament adds the cultural, social and political existence and action of Jesus to ‘resurrection’.

This means that what the New Testament says about Jesus, it says about resurrection. Here Mark’s Gospel is particularly illuminating. The word ‘discombobulation’ comes to mind from a close reading of Mark. Mark’s Jesus is surprising, confusing, even shocking. We hear, throughout, of what we’ve come to call the ‘messianic secret’: the active suppression of premature attempts to understand – and so to ‘box’ – Jesus with prepared labels. Against this, the secret enables that Jesus be heard and observed before labels can be applied, so that the labels are ultimately changed in their application to him. Jesus warps the world and its expectations: ‘Christ’, ‘Lord’, ‘Son’ are twisted around him to become something quite new.

Of central importance here is that ‘risen’ is one of these labels. ‘Jesus is Lord’, ‘Jesus is the Son’, ‘Jesus is the Christ’ and ‘Jesus is risen’ are all the same kind of affirmation. ‘Resurrection’ is an idea bobbing around in the cultural soup alongside other religious and political ideas. To say that Jesus is risen, then, is not a statement about nature applied to what is otherwise a cultural, social and political identity. Jesus – and all that he has said and done – is now added to ‘resurrection’, so that resurrection becomes warped and twisted into something new. Jesus is the surface from which the expectations of ‘resurrection’ are echoed, and they come back to us re-accented, in the way that a foreigner accents words familiar to us but which we are now not sure that we’ve heard correctly.

What Jesus does and says, and what is done to and said about him, are then, not a collection of independent affirmations but are ‘of a piece’: a single, seamless garment. To tear that garment into teachings here, miracles there, is to do violence to the integrity and identity of Jesus as the New Testament presents him. Jesus has no parts.

So too, then, is the response of the women to the tomb of a piece with the responses of Jesus’ friends and enemies as a whole, throughout Mark’s account: surprise, disorientation, discombobulation everywhere. The resurrection is no more – or less – problematic than ‘sell all your possessions and follow me’ (10.21) or ‘whoever divorces and remarries commits adultery’ (10.11f) or ‘the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified’ (10.33). Jesus the Discombulator: At. It. Again.

We are, of course, very tempted to pick and choose between this and that bit of the story, because the crosslight of Jesus illuminates dark places in all of us. And, more than tempted, we simply do pick and choose – whether it is this or that teaching from Jesus we don’t like or this or that element of the Creed. In this is manifest our own fears and terrors – not so much in response to the proclamation of the resurrection per se but to the claim that everything which matters has its substance here, in the seamless Jesus who asks – and is – too much, and so about whom too much is said: he is risen. Shock and Awe, terror and fear.

To return to the specific question of the resurrection: we only begin to comprehend the proclamation of the resurrection when we see that the gospel has no ‘parts’. The gospel and the Jesus it proclaims are of a piece.

Jesus has no parts. The Jesus who is the beloved Son is the one who rails against God’s abandonment, is the one who is said to be risen, is the one we will become around the Table.

Jesus has no parts, that we might have no parts – we who divide ourselves into body versus soul, male versus female, doubt versus faith, conservative versus progressive, today versus yesterday, Job versus God; we who are fractured within and without, and who tear and spill God into parts along the way.

So partitioned are we and what we do, that integrity astounds and confuses.

What is the meaning of the terror of the women as they run from the tomb after having heard the amazing, disorienting declaration that he is risen? ‘Bloody Jesus. He’s at it again. Discombobulating. Won’t. Even. Stay. Dead.’

The resurrection is just Jesus being consistent: his life and death and life are one.

But this consistency runs in two directions – or perhaps many directions. If the resurrection is just Jesus being consistent, then we need not consider it to be the last thing he does. It is possible – on the basis of consistency – that the resurrection is the first thing Jesus does, the defining thing which gives colour to all else said about him.

If Jesus is ‘of a piece’, we can go further: his story begins everywhere: in the resurrection, in the crucifixion, in the confrontations, in the teaching, in the desert temptations; in Job, in the exile, in David, in the Exodus, in grace after the way back into the Garden is barred, in the creation of order out of chaos. Jesus begins, even, today with us – in our gathering around a table which is not ours but his, which gathering brings together as one what is not consistent but lumpy and skewed and divided: us ourselves. A little more resurrection fear and trembling as a grateful people extends its hands to receive its Christ would not be out of order.

The resurrection is Jesus before us and against us in the same moment, as is the cross, as is the proclamation of the kingdom and the call to repentance.

This is what we need, and it is the gift of God.

Shock and Awe: God and us, of a piece.

Come, says God. All is prepared.

Christ is risen.

Jubilate Deo.

Alleluia.

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Good Friday
2/4/2021

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

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‘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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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‘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”.

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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

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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.