View or print as a PDF

Christmas 2
3/1/2021

Ephesians 1:3-14
Psalm 147
John 1:6-18

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

---

‘No-one has ever seen God; the only Son who is close to the Father’s heart has made him known’ (John 1:18)

Arguably there is no more crucial a text for our day than this. Why do I say that? Because it begins by stating the conviction shared by an increasing number of our contemporaries. Convinced that “No-one has ever seen God”, inevitably leads them to their next requirement: “so, prove God to me”. And what they have in mind as demonstration will invariably conjure up God in the shape of a monarchical “Zeus”.

Proof, of course, is a language mistake with regard to God. What this text offers instead is a test. After the negative: “No-one has ever seen God”, then the positive: the only Son who is close to the Father’s heart has made him known’.

Let me come at it in a more abstract, even if, I hope, an interesting way. Our text takes the form of what is called a chiasmus. A chiasmus comes from the Greek alphabet letter X. We are familiar in everyday speech with a chiasmus. One example is the observation that: ‘we eat to live, not live to eat’ – most of us are likely to agree with a statement like this, except those, of course, for whom the weekly Good Food section in The Age is sacred scripture.

“We eat to live not live to eat” is a chiasmus: ab::ba – not to be confused with a Swedish singing quartet. Our text also unfolds in this abstract way as a chiasmus. It goes like this: first, a problem in the negative: “No-one has ever seen God”. Then a distinctive Son/Father relationship is offered as a resolution of the problem. After which, the positive conclusion follows: God is now known.

I can sense your delight: why has no-one ever told me about a chiasmus before!

Now, for the gospel of John, we are far from finished with this chiasmus. For the next 20 chapters following this prologue declaration, the entire drama of salvation will unfold as the way of “making known” this Father/Son relationship. For the next six months, every Sunday will take shape around this unveiling, including especially Trinity Sunday. To this end, the drama itself will culminate in a decisive disclosure: the incognito Christ will appear to Mary in the garden. Incognito, because at first she presumes that he is a gardener. The crucial revelatory moment only comes when she hears Jesus speak her name: Mary. Names, of course, offer recognition, so the naming now becomes mutual:

‘Do not hold me… but go to my brothers and say to them:

‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’. Mary has a name – and now God has a name filled with content.

The disclosure of this name to Mary now leads to a concluding missionary chiasmus – which echoes the chiasmus at the beginning of the Gospel: “Go and say….: I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’. And the point? The previously “unknown” God of the first chiasmus comes out of hiding – and God is known.

Can we now see why all this is so important today? Because it begins with the mantra of the agnostic and atheist: that ‘no-one has ever seen God’. But then it offers the drama of salvation by way of solution with its revelation of the unique language of the Gospel, Son/Father, and all that that has entailed. With this conclusion, the problem is resolved, and a face is sufficiently drawn in a mutual knowing of Father and Son in what we call Holy Spirit. Only now is God  recognised and named. In other words: God is now possible – not as a beginning – but as a warranted conclusion.

If God comes as a conclusion, and not a presupposition, then this is surely good news for a culture which assumes that “you first have to believe in God to be a Christian”. To which comes the retort: “I don’t believe in God”, which obviously closes off any further conversation – about anything else of substance really.

This text overturns all the assumptions of the culture. It demonstrates that God appears as a conclusion to a history. God is not a prescribed formal presupposition.

There is nothing new about this: it has been true from the beginning. Abraham, for example, left Ur of the Chaldees acting, we might say, not because of a solid presupposition, but on a hunch – that in that going Yahweh would take shape for the people as a blessing to all the nations of the world. And so, it proved. So, too, for Moses in the Egyptian exodus: the going confirms the reality of the initiating divine promise in the problematic journey via flood and desert to an unanticipated land ‘flowing with milk and honey’.

It is hard to envisage anything more radical than our chiasmus to subvert the hackneyed refrains of atheists, that God is nothing more than ‘an imaginary friend’, a figment of religious imagination, an unconvincing pre-supposition.

On the contrary, this text brings God out of hiding – who would have thought to look for God on the breast of Mary, God at a carpenter’s bench, God on a fisherman’s boat, God on a cross?

But just here today we encounter a major cultural dilemma. Access to this gift of God’s coming to expression as Father and Son has now become a problem not experienced by previous generations: there is a cultural antipathy to presumed patriarchal language, and a refusal to call God “Father”, just as Jesus has to be renamed as “Child” rather than Son. To speak of God as “Father”, it is said, and Jesus as “Son”, is simply a human patriarchal projection, now well and truly passé.

But God addressed by our text as ‘Father’ has nothing to do with the patriarchal language of the surrounding culture of the day, and certainly not for all subsequent patriarchal cultures.  It is of the first importance to understand that the God of our text is a God beyond all patriarchy, and so is beyond all matriarchy as well. Why? Because Yahweh has no consort. Unlike every other then-competing male and female deity, Yahweh is unique in having no feminine partner. For this reason, the God of Jesus is a God beyond gender. This means that if we take this text seriously, then we encounter the name “Father” as the conclusion of an unfolding drama. It is not a patriarchal imposition, now outmoded.

The reason why God is ‘Father’ is because he is the Son’s originating vocational source. This means that if there were no Son, there would be no Father. And because the Son’s Father has become our Father, therefore the Son’s God, has become our God.

“Do not hold me, but go to my followers and say: I am ascending to my Father and your Father, my God and your God’. With this en-fleshed chiasmus, the radical answer to the problem posed at the beginning has come true:

‘No-one has ever seen God: The Son who is close to the Father’s heart has made him known.’

Here, indeed, is surely a text for our times, not to speak of a mandate for the contemporary mission of the Church. But first, we have to tell the atheists: we agree with you: “No-one has ever seen God”. And then, we show them the Trinity!

View or print as a PDF

Christmas 1
27/12/2020

Galatians 4:4-7
Psalm 147
Luke 2:22-40

---

In a sentence
We are truly ourselves in the time we have when we receive it as a gift from God

In the next few days, our calendars will mark ‘New Year’s Day’ – that most gloriously pagan of the various holydays we mark throughout a year.

The paganism here is in the linking of human possibilities to the patterns of the natural order. In this understanding, our experience of the world and our opportunities within it are a function of how the world moves. The western festival of New Year takes its energy from the northern hemisphere’s experience at this time of the year. The long winter has historically been a period of hardship and scarcity which presented a major threat to survival. With the passing of the winter solstice comes the increase of daylight, sunshine, and the return to production of food for the coming year. The New Year festival celebrates that we have survived another ‘death’ – another winter – and look forward to the coming abundance, encouraging the gods to keep the wheels turning so that we might not be stuck in seasonal or spiritual winters. In this way of thinking, our lives are subject to a law of cycles and natural processes.

While modern technology goes a long way to disconnecting us from the patterns of the seasons, we retain today a significant intuition that there is at least the possibility of change which comes with the end of one year and the start of a new one. Most modern people would be aghast at the suggestion that they should order their lives according to the astrology sections of the tabloid media, yet our thoughts about the New Year are not far removed from just this. As the earth swings once more through the ‘same’ space it occupied 365¼ days ago, we pause to reflect and to utter the closest things to secular prayer we can: a wish for others that they have a ‘Happy New Year’ and a few New Year’s resolutions prayed not to the gods but to ourselves.

What we have heard in our brief reading today from Paul’s letter to the Galatians contradicts both old paganism and our sentimental retention of a few of its vestiges in our New Year celebrations. When it comes to the question of our being subject to time, Paul proposes an understanding very different from the cyclic filling and emptying which seizes our imagination so strongly at this time of the year. For Paul, the fullness of time is not a cyclic recurrence but a singular event: ‘when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law…’ Time is filled not in an eternal return of filling after emptying but in a single fullness.

And yet it is also the biblical witness that this singular event is not located where we might most expect – as an end-of-time fulfilment of all things. The distinction is sometimes drawn between the cyclic time of general human religious imagination and the directional time of the biblical imagination, but this doesn’t quite reflect the biblical witness. The end of all things to which Jewish apocalyptic thought looked gives way to Jesus himself now being the end – the goal of all things – and this not when the world’s final tick has tocked but in the very midst of history.

Biblical time does not, then, march on towards a final arrival of God, as if the later we are born, the greater the chance that we will be alive in the final apocalypse. Biblical time, rather, revolves around a central moment. It is not where the hands on the clock point which matters so much as that they are fixed at a central point around which they move. Every time, then, is equally close to God’s filling of all time with Jesus, just as every hour, minute and second on a clock is the same distance from the axis around which the hands move. If it is necessary that our clocks and seasons go around and around, every moment in each season is nevertheless hinged upon God in Jesus at the centre of the clock face.

God is present to every moment, then, not because God is stretchy enough to extend the whole length of time’s arrow, stretching from creation to Jesus to us here and now. God is present to every moment because it is only from the axis of God that we can truly know the time in the first place – what kind of time it is we live in.

We might, then, dare to rework Paul a little bit here: not so much ‘when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law…’ but ‘the fullness of time has come: God has sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law’. In this way not only does all time look forward to the birth of Jesus – Paul’s fullness of time ‘had’ come – but all time looks back to the birth of Jesus: the fullness of time ‘has’ come.

For all the possibilities we think the New Year brings, our sense that we have here a new beginning (again!) reveals how we are trapped by those things which build up with the old, unrolling year and cause us to yearn for the New Year, with the new possibilities it seems to promise, as if hope comes with warmer days or the accumulated passage of time.

For Paul, however, the time is not a matter of past and future – of old and new – but a matter of enslavement and freedom. The enslaved soul notices only the numbers on the clock, wanting it to be one time rather than another. The free soul takes each moment as an extension of God into her own time and space. She knows the freedom which comes from receiving her time directly from God: now is the time God meets her, not a moment ago, not in the next moment. There was not more of God or of her a year ago, and there will not be more in a year’s time.

All time is marked by God: this is the meaning of redemption. In this God’s timing, today is what tomorrow will be, and also the day after that: not the next day to which we have been given but the next day which God has given to us – redeemed and renewed, a free space in which God meets us to see what we will do with it. Imagine what tomorrow might be if it were not merely what today seems to demand that tomorrow be. This is the freedom of the children of this God: every day, new, with God.

By the grace of God, may the newness of the coming year be found in that we are again blessed with the gift of the Spirit of Jesus his Son, that we might know ourselves again as his children, that in the freedom of God himself we might discover the time of our lives. Amen.

(A much re-worked re‑presentation of a sermon
preached at MtE on December 28, 2014)

View or print as a PDF

Christmas Day
25/12/2020

Isaiah 9:2-7
Psalm 96
Luke 2:1-20

---

In a sentence
The defining ‘this’ which is the context of our lives is not what is now happening to us but Jesus himself: we are all in him together

In this most unexpected of years, we have worked up a full oratorio of choruses and chants around the theme of Covid-19. One of the most happily sung among these has been, ‘We’re all in this together’.

By this refrain we remind each other that a virus is indiscriminate, so that we can’t tell who will be next. For it not to be me who is next, I have to act so that you are not next. ‘We’re all in this together’ means that we must cooperate ‘to get through it’. The good sense in this is obvious enough to most of us, and not particularly surprising.

Perhaps less obvious is that we don’t usually tell ourselves, ‘We are all in this together’. Most of the time, we are not ‘in this together’; most of the time we don’t recognise much we have in common ‘to get through’. We are usually – at least on the larger social scale – not ‘in this together’ but rather competing against each other. We compete for university placements, for partners, for jobs, for parking spaces. Colonists compete with indigenous peoples. New refugees compete with old refugees. Cities compete with rural communities. Nations compete with nations. The poor compete with the slightly less poor. Not so long ago, competition was especially fierce around toilet paper, which was unexpectedly revealed to be one of the previously unrecognised cornerstones of modern society. The church, of course, is scarcely immune to this infection.

Competition is not quite everywhere, of course. There’s a little less of it between friends and lovers and within the household, and we are sometimes startled by acts of kindness outside those safety zones. Yet, like our vulnerability to a virus, we are all also nevertheless continually subject to the struggle of all against all (Hobbes, Leviathan).

More insidiously than with a virus, however, we are not merely subject to competition; we also participate in it. A better strategy – or perhaps just the good fortune of having won more often before – sees me step up to bid the highest at the auction for my new home. Getting up earlier sees me at the front of the line on the Boxing Day sales, like gladiators who’ve trained hard to earn a longer sword or wider net. If I work harder, I might pick more bulls than bears, winning more from the losses of others.

Curiously, the virus has made the well-being of the usual winners dependent upon the well-being of the typical losers. Universal cooperation has displaced competition for a while. But competition again lurks around the corner: Who has the best vaccine? And who will pay for it? Who should get it first? And is it, perhaps, best, if others have it first, ‘just in case’? Calculation and strategy in the game of life, all oriented towards not losing.

Outside of the immediate space of Covid-19 and similar ‘war footings’, we are not much ‘in this together’ because, in a world of winners and losers, what you are ‘in’ can be very different from what I am ‘in’. The only thing we are really in together is the competition itself and those social, political and legal conventions which legitimate how society operates and so are powerless to alter it.

If this account sounds rather pessimistic, it matters today in this place because our not being ‘all in this together’ is scarcely new While, in some respects, Augustus, Quirinius, Joseph and Mary, and Rome, Syria, and Bethlehem are thousand of years and miles away, we still recognise many aspects of their stories. An imperial census is an emperor in competition with his people. To hear that ‘there was no room in the inn’ is to know that Joseph and Mary were in that race but lost. There is nothing new under the sun.

In the midst of all that is ‘the child’, strangely anonymous among the names of other persons and places around him. We have learned what his name will be (1.31) but he is yet to receive it (2.21). All around this child, of course, swirls the language of salvation but this also is strange to us today, for what is it from which we would be saved – from which we would all be saved? Do winners need to be saved? To have won is to imagine that God’s kingdom has already come. If around this child there were a universally relevant message of salvation, it would offer salvation from something to which we are all subject. The virus is an obvious candidate but we don’t need a god to do what will probably happen with time anyway.

A more likely thing from which we might be saved at Christmas is the struggle of all against all which creates winners and losers. Salvation is salvation from such things as this. It is not that competition does not touch Jesus. The religious authorities see in him a serious opponent. The poor jostle for access to his healing hand and his disciples calculate for positions of honour in his kingdom or for time to sit at his feet. His family competes with the crowds for his attention. Even on the cross, those with whom he is crucified compete for his attention.

Yet, for all of this, Jesus is himself no competitor. His success does not hinge on another’s failure. He is ‘in this together’ with us, but does not contribute to the struggle even as he is subject to it. Of itself, this might be a remarkable moral achievement but the morality is not the point. It is good for Jesus if he has lived fully without taking advantage of others but bad for us if we are, therefore, to achieve the same.

We sometimes speak about the ‘God with us’ of Christmas in this way – as if God comes to show us the way, and we are to follow. This is a little better than the account of a God who comes among us as a kind of comforter, more or less to suffer with us, but not much better. Certainly, salvation is not something more for us to do.

We get to something more helpful if we take up again the Covid chorus, ‘We’re all in this together’ but sing it now with a very different meaning. Now the ‘this’ is not some passing condition like the health crisis or the next ‘affects everybody’ moment but Jesus himself: ‘we are all in this – this one – together.

Jesus is now not an answer to whatever question we happen at the moment to think is the most important. Rather, Jesus now poses a question about our fundamental situation: What is the context which truly defines us? What is our true condition?

The answer of Christmas – of the gospel itself – is that we are most ‘in’ Jesus himself, and not this or that passing experience, however pressing, painful or exciting it may be. It often does not feel this way. Pain and excitement are highly distracting. In each case, we mistake what hurts us or excites us as immediate – as direct, as sheer us-and-it.

But if our true context is not what is happening in front of us but all these things in God-in-Jesus, then he becomes something like an underlying harmony to everything which happens. Those we love – and sometimes lose – are not ‘immediately’ ours, not ‘directly’ ours. They are mediated by Christ, they are ‘in’ Christ, just as we are. If this is true, they are never solely ours because they belonged first to Jesus, and they are never lost to us because they remain in him, as we do.

It is so with all things. Jesus is given as the theme which threads through and holds together every key, every melody and discord. ‘We are all in this together’ locates us not in some particular time or place, some particular condition or crisis. The ‘this’ is Jesus himself: we are all in this one together.

This is to say that what happens to him is what happens to us. What happens to Jesus is God himself – ever calling, ever-present, ever restoring. Christmas is not so much a divine rescue mission as a radical clarification of who and where we are: children of God in Jesus, from God and towards God.

To believe this is to be freed from the drive to compete for as much life as we can win. And it is to be opened up to one another and to God, in all things, in thanksgiving and praise.

May such openness and praise be ours today, and always.

View or print as a PDF

Advent 3
13/12/2020

Isaiah 61:1-4,8-11
Psalm 126
John 1:6-8, 19-28

---

In a sentence
The shape our relationship with God takes in our time and place is ever-changing but what does not change is the possibility of that relationship and the steadfast love of God upon which it rests.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have several times to make a connection between the ‘advent’ of God – the approach of God – and what confronts us here at Mark the Evangelist concerning our buildings.

This has not been to put an argument for any particular future, although some preferred futures seem now to be closed to us. The point has been more to clarify the context in which we find ourselves. It is easy to be disoriented by the changes around us, to the extent that we respond to the wrong thing. Whatever our response to these challenges, let us at least be clear about the heart of the matter and respond to it and not to something secondary!

What is before us – to borrow from Isaiah this morning – are ‘the ancient ruins’, the ‘former devastations’ (61.4). Isaiah’s call here is to rebuild, to re-establish – something which his own people were able to do for a while, even if it doesn’t appear possible for us.

Israel’s ‘for a while’, however, is important. They finally lost also what had been rebuilt. While language of a future restoration of the city continued, it became a sign for the relationship with God which continued despite the loss of the former glory of Jerusalem and its temple. The city did not last but the prayer did, as those praying and the God to whom they prayed continued in a relationship of mutual address.

Our life with God, then, takes no predetermined or guaranteed shape. Ours is what the Uniting Church’s Basis of Union calls the condition of having no ‘continuing city’.

In our psalm today, the poet remembers, ‘When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream’ (Psalm 126). The restoration is celebrated, yet the reason for this remembering is that now the people’s mouths are no longer filled with laughter; rather, they now sow in tears, looking to reap again in joy. ‘Restore us, O Lord,’ is now their prayer.

What is constant throughout the story of God’s people is not where they are or what they are doing but the dynamic of turning away or turning towards God, perhaps even God’s own turning towards and away.

We might want to rage against this – there’s more than a little of that in the Psalms! – but whether we like it or not will not change the reality.

‘Restore us, O Lord,’ is the prayer of the people, of course, when things are not going well.

But ‘Restore us, O Lord’, should properly also be the prayer of the people when everything seems to be going very well and we are tempted to mistake good luck for divine blessing. The church has had a lot of good luck which, if read as God’s blessing, casts our present experience as God’s turning away. If that is our situation, there is nothing we can do about but pray with the psalmists, Turn back, O Lord.

But even if God is not the reason we are confronted with these challenges as a congregation – or whatever things face us in our personal lives – to know that we have no continuing city is not to have nowhere to live, it is just to be aware God takes root in a people within the sweep of history – not in a location, not in a style of being church, not even in any particular congregation.

The restoration for which the psalmist prays is a restoration to joy. Joy is a contentment which springs from the sense that our future is in God, despite what the indicators around us might be.

And if we are confident that our future is in God, then so also is our present and every step we must take towards that future.

In our personal and our corporate lives, then – indeed all things – let us take upon ourselves Isaiah’s garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit, and step with confidence into our promised future with each other, in God.

View or print as a PDF

Advent 2
6/12/2020

Isaiah 40:1-11
Psalm 85
Mark 1:1-8

---

In a sentence
Though our lives are fleeting, we are God’s home

Many of you will know that George Frideric Handel’s Messiah begins with the first five verses of our reading from Isaiah today:

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God…Speak tenderly to Jerusalem…make straight in the desert a highway for our God…Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low…Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.

The libretto breaks away from Isaiah for a few other quotes from the prophets before returning again to verse 9 of today’s reading:

…lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, ‘Here is your God!’

The oratorio starts where it intends to finish: with the manifestation of the glory of God.

What is interesting is what Handel – or, rather, his friend Charles Jennings, who selected the texts – leaves out. In particular, he leaps over verses 6-8 in his quotes from Isaiah:

⁶ A voice says, ‘Cry out!’ And I said, ‘What shall I cry?’ All [flesh (Heb)] is grass, its constancy is like the flower of the field. ⁷ The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the LORD blows upon it; surely the people are grass. ⁸ The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.

Those who have been part of the Old Testament study groups over this year have again and again seen that what a particular scriptural writer includes or excludes from the text speaks about what the writer assumes to be the nature of God, creation and God’s people. This is the case also for writers of non-scriptural texts, even – perhaps even especially ­– when those writings are quoting Scripture and so favouring some passages over others.

The omission of Isaiah’s stark declaration that ‘surely the people are grass’ shines a light on what Handel thinks is essential here. It would not be unreasonable to read the whole of his Messiah as a theology of glory: the God of glory comes in response to the poverty of the human being. Perhaps Handel omits those verses about the transience of human existence because he understood this poverty to be the question to which God’s power and glory is the answer. ‘Comfort, comfort my people’ – it matters not that you are grass, for God comes to heal and restore.

There must be some truth to this. A story of salvation only makes sense when there is something from which a person or people needs to be saved. Yet, whatever Handel himself may have intended, we can do better than the mere ‘power’ of God to save, and we can do this by reclaiming those few verses from Isaiah 40 which he omitted.

The term which helps here is ‘flesh’ (v.6, which is sometimes translated ‘people’, which appears in v.7): All flesh is grass, its constancy is like the flower of the field. Noting ‘flesh’ here helps because it tells us something about the glory to be manifest as the story unfolds. Of course, as Handel’s Scripture selections continue, they tell the story of an anticipated saviour who appears in the person of Jesus, is rejected, crucified and raised from the dead. Human frailty is the problem to which the providence of God, the unswerving commitment of Jesus and divine resurrecting power are the answer.

Yet, what we might miss here – and what is crucial to a specifically Christian account of God – is that transient flesh is not just the problem to which God responds; it is also the way in which God responds. God’s glorious work here – Jesus himself – is ‘made’ of grass which withers, of flowers which fade, is mere flesh.

This shifts us from a theology of glory to what we might call a theology of mystery. This mystery is that the glory of God is carried by what will wither and pass away. John’s gospel puts this together for us: the Word became flesh, and we have seen his glory (John 1.14). This glory is not in spite of the flesh; it is the presence of God in flesh, the flesh and the Word still being themselves.

It is not now a problem that all flesh is grass; it is simply just the case. The mystery – the wonder – hidden here is that God bothers at all with what is transient. The mystery is that what is transient actually matters in any way to God. The fleeting blooms and fadings of the world – including ourselves – are not something God overcomes. God embraces the transient world. The mystery of our existence is that the withering and fading world merits the interest of God – that we might be right to imagine that we really matter.

A theology of glory which focusses on God’s power to save begins with the fading flower’s own concern to be beautiful again. The question, ‘Who can save me from this body of death?’, desperately seeks an answer. Fading is the problem to which restoration is the solution. We decide – on our own terms – that we matter, and we look to God to ‘condescend’ to make a difference.

But that coming-along-side which is God’s drawing near to us ought to surprise us more. For it is not God ‘visiting’ us but God coming home, the shepherd finding his truth in the sheep.

This matters in our personal and corporate lives. Personally, a theology of mystery – a faith which holds that this is a God of small things – allows the small to be small, allows the plain and the mundane their share in God’s glory. Being – sheer being ‘here’, doing what we do –has its proper glory. Other visions of what is glorious – especially when we think they are divinely inspired – can reduce to a mere shadow the glory of God. The crucifixion of the Lord of glory is the proof of this: a distorted human perception of glory washing out the mysterious presence of God in the humility of Jesus.

Corporately, the same dynamic applies. As we consider our lot here at Mark the Evangelist and the challenges our property has presented to us, we see the glory of the church of days gone by, and it matters to us that we no longer reflect that glory. Our future will be, on such a scale, rather humbler.      Will it, then, be any less glorious? Some may think so, within the church and without. But the glory to which we are called is that of obedience and faithfulness; there is no promise about the future other than that God will be there, as a shepherd is present to his flock.

There is indeed glory in the story of God’s people, in the story of God’s Christ – Handel is right here, and we are right to join in on the choruses with gusto!

Yet is it a genuinely mysterious glory, which merits also hushed tones. It sees divine strength through human weakness. It finds signs of God in oppressed peoples, in refugees, in the hungry and the imprisoned. The glory of God is not a power wielded from above us to lift us up but a power exercised within us to fill us out – us and all the world. As one of the early teachers of the church put it – God becomes flesh that flesh might become divine.

This is God’s promise, wherever we find ourselves. All flesh is grass, and that is enough.

If we believe this promise, ours is the freedom to step boldly into whatever future might await us.

View or print as a PDF

Advent 1
29/11/2020

Isaiah 64:1-9
Psalm 80
Mark 13:24-37

---

In a sentence
Faith perceives that God is the heart of all we desire, and trusts that God will realise this God-shaped longing

With a passion strange to many of us, the prophet cries to God: Come, save, restore. ‘O that you would tear open the heavens and come down’ (64.1). ‘Save us, Lord, from our enemies’ (64.2), ‘save us from ourselves’ (64.5).o

The implication in that cry, of course, is that God is absent, or has turned away, or hidden Godself from the people (64.5,7). This being the case, we are alone. More than just alone, we are stalled until God should be revealed again, until the sky which divides heaven and earth is torn and not so much God’s will as our own desire for healing is met on earth, when heaven comes to restore us.

The prophet expresses deep longing, deep guilt, utter helplessness and confident hope in our text today. If we seek honesty in our own lives, we might learn from him here. For we are those for whom it is easy to shake off responsibility or take it on too seriously. We are those for whom it is easy to fall into despair or to entertain dreams and visions of utopian futures we can’t achieve but which we will at least pursue until they crush us or others. The prophet expresses the complexity of living into the next step when it cannot be the same as the step we have just taken and we can’t know it is the right step but doing the right thing is at stake.

This challenge is beginning to press in on us here at Mark the Evangelist as we come to the conclusion of a long period of reflection on what to do about the condition of some of our buildings here in North Melbourne. The conclusion to which the church council has come is that we cannot sustain our presence here and that, by implication, the sale of the property is the next big step in the life of the congregation. We might well pray at this point ‘O that you would tear open the heavens, Lord, and fix this all up for us.’

If we were ask of Isaiah what to do here, part of the answer would be that we understand our situation. The prophet knows what the people are able – and not able – to do. We too need to get our heads and our hearts around this. The work done over the last 7 years, in particular, has been oriented towards such an understanding. For those of us who prefer the future to be rather like the past, the outlook is not good. Yet, it is also seemingly unavoidable. We do ourselves no favours in denying this, in laying blame, or in simply ‘wishing’ it were not so and hiding ourselves away. We would trivialise the experience of those people in exile to whom Isaiah wrote if we compared our lot to theirs but it is similar at least in the sense that neither staying where we are nor going back are options for us.

In some respects, this aspect of our situation is easy: we can’t purchase what we can’t afford and so – to the extent that our future is about what we can afford – we must ‘buy’ something other than these buildings. There seems to be no decision required here as to whether we can extend our past at Curzon Street into a future at Curzon Street; that looks to be more or less determined for us by the balance sheets. We must ‘simply’ understand that this is the case and, by the grace of God, become reconciled to it.

There will be disappointment here but we mustn’t let it wither into cynicism. The cynic is frozen in her disappointment and in the dream which is now lost. In contrast, the prophet expresses no cynicism but rather hope – remembering the surprise God has been to the people in times past. He looks forward to God’s coming and a new future for the people by looking back to when God ‘did awesome deeds we did not expect’ (64.3). In the same way, the church looks forward to God’s future presence by looking back to God’s having already come. Advent is not about God still being on the way, as if God is now very, very much overdue. Advent is a season of Easter and so Advent remembers a coming of God which gathers up all divine arrivals, past and future.

How God comes to the world is shown in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. This means that Isaiah’s prayer in our text today can be read as pointing towards Jesus, although not quite in the way of ‘foretelling’ something yet to come. For it is also the case that every prayer for the coming of God uttered since Jesus points back to him as a kind of ‘reverse prophecy’. It is, then, perhaps better to say that God’s presence to the world in Jesus points back to Isaiah, and forward to us, and beyond us into the future which awaits us. As Isaiah puts it – what we think we see and hear and perceive is always this God (64.4).

This shift – that God is the deepest desire in all our desires – shifts us radically in our perception of our situation. We can no longer allow that our circumstances dictate who we are; we are not our buildings, we are not the way-we-have-always-done-it; the church is more than her comfort zones, more than we have yet heard, perceived, seen.

This is to discover that there is nothing radically new in what confronts us now at Mark the Evangelist. It might be disappointing, it is certainly inconvenient and will most likely be more hard work but, in the light of the gospel, it is not new. We are reminded here that we are – and properly have always been – clay in the potter’s hand, the work of God, and not the work of our own hands, as much as we have come to love that work.

If this is the case – if there is nothing radically new in what confronts us – then we are not deciding to divest property with the sense of loss that might entail but deciding towards the God we do not yet perceive, have not yet seen or heard but who we believe to be the mystery of all that we are.

By the grace of God, it may perhaps become the case not so much that we ‘have to’ sell all our buildings but that we want to, for we long to see a little less darkly through the glass which obscures our vision of God, and of our true selves.

This is the God who shakes yesterday’s foundations – the foundations of good order – by raising from the dead a crucified blasphemer and identifying himself with one who had no place to rest his head except against God’s own heart.

It is the beating of that heart which raises the dead. It is the beating of that heart which, Isaiah has seen, causes mountains to shake (64.1-3). And it is the beating of God’s heart which causes also the shaking of the foundations of God’s own church(!). God has done this.

This means that what lies ahead of us at Mark the Evangelist is what was ahead of those who built this place right back at the start: an opportunity to see God tear open the heavens by tearing open us and our history, revealing where God has been among us and assuring us that God will be in our midst in whatever happens next.

It is simply for us, in a spirit of communion with God and with each other, to pray though our working together: come, Lord; excite, open up, tear heaven and earth and piece them together in a new creation, even us.

God can, and wills, to do this. And so we have nothing to fear.

View or print as a PDF

Reign of Christ
22/11/2020

Daniel 12:1-4a
Psalm 100
Ephesians 1:15-23
Matthew 25:31-46

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

---

It is fitting on this last Sunday in the Liturgical year that each of our readings should be about ‘endings’. But a warning. The nuances that the word ‘end’ throws up are crucial. One meaning of ‘end’ is that of a simple chronological termination. The parable of the sheep and the goats is certainly an end in just this sense, coming as it does for Matthew as the concluding words of the teaching of Jesus.

But there is another, and much more significant, sense of the word ‘end’. And that is, ‘end’ as the disclosure of ultimate meaning, a final illumination. Such is this parable. But we will soon discover that it will be only an apparent ultimate disclosure. We say ‘apparent’ because we will confront a dramatic reconfiguring of the precarious status of the sheep and the goats when the next three chapters unfold.

I fear that if your experience is anything like mine you will have heard in your lifetime any number of sermons on this text. Perhaps some were not as edifying as they might have been. This is a text much loved by preachers and even by secular humanists as a piece of ethical teaching urging concern for victims of famine and other oppression – food, drink, clothing, prison visits and the like.  We are at home here, and God forbid that we should deny their necessity for the needy, even though we surely do not need any persuasive text for such altruism.

But the problem is that this is not the real concern of the parable. Rather, its point is to establish that in the unlikely figure of Jesus, the accredited precursor of a final judgment of all history is being revealed. This is why we hear that “all the nations” shall be gathered before him, and “he will separate, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats…” We might take cheerful note in passing of what may well escape us: that it is the nations who are being separated, not individuals.

Perhaps it all becomes clearer when we take account of a text composed some two hundred years earlier than our parable – the book of Daniel, which is chronologically one of the last books of the Hebrew scriptures to be written. Since Matthew is writing a gospel for Jewish, not Gentile, Christians, he finds this text of Daniel to be inescapable, anticipating as it does the decisive end point of Israel’s chequered history. So, Daniel writes:

“At the time of the end, many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt”. For Matthew, ‘sheep and goats’ puts an earthy spin on this ambiguous horizon.

Assisted by our parable, some later unrepentant Christian theology continued to endorse this original Old Testament ‘fall of the curtain’. It called this divisive allocation a ‘double predestination’: the ushering in of a final determination of those who are ‘in’ and those who are ‘out’. The point, however, is that although Matthew retains this dual destiny, he understands that this hitherto predicted time of the end is about to take place in a quite unanticipated way.

Matthew’s first modification of Daniel’s expectation is to assert that ‘the end’ will not be a separation beyond history; it will be decided in the present everyday time and place of mundane food, drink, clothing, visitation. To this end, the entire human community frolic in this apparently disarming rural sheep and goats environment. The imagery of the parable is seductive. During the daytime, sheep and goats are all mixed. But in the evening light, even though sheep are white and goats are black, they are indistinguishable to every onlooker – except of course to the Shepherd. The parable obviously intends to confuse all of us. We are all equally indistinguishable in the living of our lives. Which is why, incidentally, the same Matthew’s Jesus tells us to our healing: “Judge not that you be not judged”. The point is that, for Matthew, the bewildering fate of sheep and goats has become an illustration of Daniel’s life or death ‘last day awakening’.  But now there is a specific criterion: acceptance or rejection in the present of all that Jesus has been, and has taught, in his ministry.

The tragedy is that generations have turned all this into ‘a Last Judgement’ at the day of individual death. In Medieval times its accompanying grotesque imagery of flames and pitchforks has rightly ceased to be at all compelling. It is equally plausible that even ‘judgement’ as a concept has now met the same contemporary demise. At the very least, it is almost certain that, when we hear the word ‘judgement’, we are likely to have in mind imagery which takes its origin from the world of the ancient Greeks, by way of Egypt.  What did these ancients believe? They thought of judgement awaiting life’s end as a set of scales, weighing up the good and the bad.  So powerful is this image that it is difficult for us not to imagine that Jesus is offering the same fate at the end – pass or fail, sheep or goat. This is scarcely good news! Who knows which side of the balance will carry the day? Have I done enough? Am I a sheep or am I goat, or perhaps even more poignantly, is he or she a sheep or a goat?

Jesus certainly concludes his teaching with division.  But see how our notion of judgement is about to be transformed as the next three chapters unfold when, from this point on, we travel with this ‘teacher of the end’ on the way to his end at Golgotha.

And with just this emerging catastrophe, we come to the second and crucial modification of the end which Matthew employs. For it is in what is about to unfold in Jerusalem that true judgement will be enacted, remembering that the word Jerusalem means ‘vision of peace’. Not with the Greeks, at some uncertain human end, not even with our imperfect distribution of food, drink and clothing. But right there, and right now!

Who would have supposed that two planks of wood will replace a set of scales as the instrument of judgement? And that the One hanging on it will be the same Judge of the parable – who is now himself here being judged? And that means: judged in our place; a king of the nations crowned – with all their thorns – on a cross. A Son of man coming to sit on this throne; glory camouflaged as helplessness; an end, inaugurating a new beginning.

What is being revealed here is not only that shepherd and sheep have become one, but – even more inconceivable – that on this despicable ‘throne’, the Lamb of God has effectively been transformed into – of all things – a goat. And with this transformation, only here, and only now, will the word ‘judgement’ usher in a radically ‘other’ world – now not a dark, threatening, future world of an individual ‘in or out’ or ‘up or down’ destiny, but a shining world of cosmic forgiveness, the Easter of creation for all the nations, the final restoration of all things.

In a few minutes we will be invited to confess together these words in the Creed: “He will come in glory to judge the living and the dead”. What image will you entertain? Will you see a set of scales, or will it be two pieces of timber?  That is to say, will you have rejoiced that hanging there all double predestination weighed on a set of scales is over and done with? That in the crucified Christ this single judgement to life has already been enacted?

Centuries ago the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, stretched out our history’s protracted interval between ‘then’ and ‘now’ when he proposed that “Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world”. This arresting declaration simply affirms this one predestination to life, now moved back from some insecure future beyond – precisely in order to hang everything for all time with the crucified One as the Judge judged in our place: on a death that brings life; forgiveness for the healing of all the nations; a crucified Lamb for the sake of all goats.

The truth is that most people today have no idea what it is to be Christian – not only because they stop reading at Chapter 25 with Jesus “the teacher”, but, even more disastrously, because the Greeks have won. So, let this last day of the Christian calendar speak to us all. It says simply this. The whole journey which began at Advent, now coming to a close, has been about getting rid of Greek judgement. To this end, and to mix the metaphor, let ‘scales’ literally fall from our eyes as we take today’s Epistle to heart. And as a prayer of the Church, may it become not simply a domestic petition, but a universal intercession on behalf of the fractured – already judged – nations of our world:

“I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ will give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the (founded) hope to which he has called you.”

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 24
15/11/2020

1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Psalm 123
Matthew 25:14-30

---

In a sentence
The ‘talent’ the church is given to exercise is grace, which is to yield grace-fullness in us

As over the last couple of weeks, so also today the basic lesson of our gospel reading is, ‘Be prepared’. The suggestion is that God has in some way been absent and will return unexpectedly, and with God’s return comes the day of reckoning, or judgement. The three slaves seem to represent our two basic options while the master is away – to be fruitful with what is left to us, or not to be fruitful.

Once again, then, a moral understanding of the parable is possible. Believers are called to the living of a good life. Where we have an abundance, we are to share. Where there is despair, we are to be sources of hope. Where there is doubt we are to bring faith; where there is hatred, love; where there is injury, we are to bring pardon. We are, then, to give away more, and to receive more, in God’s special economy of grace.

But those who are now accustomed to hearing my sermons will have noticed that I usually acknowledge and then set aside the moral dimensions of readings like this one. This is not because the moral dimensions are unimportant, but because the basic moral compass of the Scriptures is not usually that much different from the moral compass of any society. What the Scriptures value in generosity, honesty, forgiveness, kindness, gentleness, self-control and so on, are also valued in the wider society.

This is to say that, for the most part, we already know what is required of us morally – whether we are believers or not. ‘Don’t waste your talent’ is what the footy coach or the music teacher says to a gifted but lazy student, as much as God might say it so a distracted community of faith. Labouring the point in preaching would be too much a waste of an opportunity. For while anyone can read the parable in this way, the community of faith which gathers to read it is not ‘anyone’. We are Christians. This is not simply Jesus the wonderful teacher we hear addressing us in this parable, but Jesus the wonder – the Jesus who has died, who is risen, and who will come again as the means of the grace of God to us. Jesus is the one who makes sense for us of the kingdom of God, who embodies in his own experience our judgement by God, and so who is the key to our understanding of how we stand before God.

This requires another way of hearing these parables. And so, last week we heard the call to be ready but also saw that Jesus himself can be seen to be the wise bridesmaid who awaits the coming of the bridegroom, and can be seen even as the oil given to us to burn as we await the approach of God. This is what we might call a christological reading, which yields a very difficult result from the important but more narrowly moral reading. A christological reading is not a ‘natural’ or ‘ordinary’ reading; it is more like an allegory of an allegory. We can read these texts in this way because, with the coming of Jesus in death and resurrection, they cease to be texts like others – simple moral teaching – and become texts about Christ himself – a revealing of the means of grace.

So, what does a christological reading of this parable of the three servants look like? It helps to begin by noting a problem in translation. The translation of the central word we have heard this morning is ‘talent’. The Greek word is in fact ‘talanton’, and is simply transliterated into English. The original meaning, however, was not our contemporary sense of ‘skills’ or ‘gifts’ or ‘abilities’, but ‘a thing weighed’ and, by extension, a quantity of money (silver or gold being weighed out to the required amount). Our modern translation, then, as the ‘parable of the talents’, can distract us by suggesting that the parable is about what we know today to be ‘talents’. The parable, however, only suggests that each of the slaves is given a measure of something with which they are then to do something more. A moral reading considers that something to be our gifts and abilities, our intellect or our money, or whatever it seems that we have in some special measure.

But if we read this as the church, so that the parable is now specifically about believers, the question is: What is the specific ‘talent’ the church has? What is it which is given to us in some special measure? To this it must be answered: the gospel of the grace of God in Jesus Christ; or the intimate and childlike knowledge of God as Father, as Jesus himself knew God; or the gift of the Holy Spirit – all different ways of saying the same thing. And now the parable becomes something quite different from a simple reading about using our gifts and abilities wisely. Now it asks – in what measure have you been given grace, and what have you done specifically with this grace?

One possible reading of this parable, given its context of polemic between Jesus and the Pharisees and the way in which Jesus has charged the Pharisees with hypocrisy in various ways, is to see the Pharisees (and the religious establishment in general) as figured in the person of the third slave. That is, the grace which has been given them has yielded nothing – recall the charge Jesus makes that the Pharisees have received and rightly taught the law given to Moses, but have not themselves yielded the appropriate fruit of the grace in the gift of the law – humility and servanthood, as distinct from the self-exaltation which he names in their practice of righteousness (Matthew 23.1-12). The Pharisees’ response to God’s grace is contrasted in Matthew’s gospel with the response of others to grace – the meek, those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness (see Matthew 5.1-13). Those who would seem to be outside the reach of God have, because of that distance, received a greater abundance of grace and, Jesus suggests, have yielded even more grace in their now richly graced lives. This is in contrast to those who already had ‘enough’ of the grace of God and yet who have done nothing with it. They have not understood what they have been given and so neither recognise the gift of God or what it should yield when they receive it.

Now, if we don’t read these parables only as moral encouragement, we also don’t read them as history lessons. The story of Jesus and the Pharisees, and Jesus’ charges against the Pharisees, are only important if their story is also our story. As Gentiles, we are the first two slaves, given a particular abundance of grace, which yielded the further grace we see as the rise of the church with its gospel of God’s love for all. But, as now the religious establishment, we are also the third slave, prone to self-satisfaction, prone to mistake what is simply given as in fact a right, prone to mistake our election as God’s people as a sign of our specialness or righteousness.

It is to these dangers that the parable speaks: the talent you have is the grace which is Jesus Christ. In what way is that grace yielding grace in your lives? In what ways do we model the forgiveness which we claim is ours in Christ? In what ways is the abundance which is God’s for us reflected in our relationships with each other? These are rather abstract questions, but they will soon become very concrete for us here at Mark the Evangelist as we begin to ask about our property and our mission: what precisely have we been given, what its value is, and what might we be able to do with that? To think about these things as ‘grace to become yet more grace’ might free us up to imagine even greater possibilities than might otherwise have been the case.

We return here, in a sense, to the moral question, yet now it is not simply about doing the right thing but about the share we have in God’s work of grace. For we do not gather for worship to declare that we are good, but to be ‘made’ good by the gift of God’s grace, and then to take up a share in that work of making good in God’s ‘absence’. The proof of our right standing before God is not moral righteousness but that special kind of righteousness which comes with being adopted as the children of God, and then growing into our own particular God-likeness. This righteousness is not earned, it is given, and it is not then a possession but a thing to be used, a thing to affect the world, a thing to change relationships.

To receive grace is to become grace‑full – to become ‘gracing’ towards others; we might recall here the parable of the unforgiving servant – himself being forgiven an enormous debt but unable to forgive a friend a very small amount (Matthew 18.21-35). The grace of God is not ours it if does not make us the grace of God, make us those who do what God does, in such a way that it would be as if God were not ‘absent’ at all, as the parable of the master who goes abroad suggests.

What might the world – or even the just the church itself – be like if it did not think to wonder at the absence of God because God’s people were sufficient grace that God’s absence was not noted?

To be the people of God is to do as God does, to become a means of grace to each other and to the world around us. This is the proof (or the test) of our righteousness: whether or not it yields righteousness in others, the very thing God has given us.

By the grace of God, may we be found to pass that test in the day of reckoning, that the words ‘well done, good and faithful servant’ may be heard by our ears, and we may enter into the joy of God.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 23
8/11/2020

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Psalm 78:1-7
Matthew 25:1-13

---

In a sentence
When God comes, it is to put to death death’s fearful hold on us and set us free for life

 

In the gospel today we hear an allegory of the arrival of God and the day of judgement. The bridegroom comes to collect his bride. The bridesmaids wait for him but he is delayed and some of them miss him because they are unprepared for the wait. The lesson is clear: ‘Be prepared, for you know neither the day nor the hour’ of God’s coming. Yet, whereas Jesus himself and certainly his early followers clearly expected an arrival of God somewhat analogous to the arrival of the bridegroom in the parable, we today have been waiting long enough now that we no longer expect God to arrive in this way.

We have not, however, quite dismissed the usefulness of parables like this one. For there is something else which approaches undeniably and unavoidably, and in a way quite like God’s approach. This thing is our biological death. As with the approach of God in the parable, so with our death: it is inevitable, but we know neither the day nor the hour (except, perhaps, in some cases of suicide). We can lay down certain probabilities at certain times, of course, but the angel of death is fickle and we just don’t know when she is going to come. Given that today God doesn’t seem likely to arrive like the bridegroom, but death does, there is an almost universal tendency in popular Christian thinking to equate our deaths with the moment of God’s judgement, such that in the instant that we fade from life here we appear before the throne of God for judgement. Whereas in the parable it is God who is moving, we are now the ones moving; by dying, we are brought to the day of judgement. Our parable then becomes a source of the familiar ‘hit-by-a-bus’ approach to evangelism: repent and believe, not because God is about to return but because you might be run over on the way home, and then have to face God, for it is when you die that God finally ‘gets’ you, when God unexpectedly but undeniably arrives in your life.

While we must reject this attempt to scare people into the fold, there is some truth in the idea that God and death come at the same moment. Yet it is not that God arrives with judgement when death comes. Rather, it is the other way around: when God arrives, death comes with him. This might seem surprising, for one thing ‘religion’ is supposed to be interested in is ‘life after death’, whether resurrection or re-incarnation. That is, ‘religion’ is held to equate an interest in God with the overcoming of death.

But there are two senses in which the arrival of God brings death.

The first sense is that, when God comes as God, when God comes as creator or, we might also say, when God reigns in our lives, we become truly the creatures we were intended to be. The simplest way of speaking of this is to say that we become truly God’s creatures when we acknowledge and live with God as creator. The important point here for our theme of death is that what distinguishes the divine creator and his creatures is mortality. Creatures ‘run out’ in a way that the creator does not. When God is truly God, we are truly mortal. So the coming of God is the coming of mortality.

Of course, we will die whether or not we acknowledge God. We have to say further, then, that when God comes God brings a revelation of our true mortality and a reconciliation to it: we are only creatures and not gods, and that’s OK.

The first sense in which we die when God comes is, then, that God’s presence makes us our true selves, which includes our mortality.

To fill this out, we have to turn to the second sense in which God’s arrival brings death. This has to do with the fact that the coming of God is not simply the arrival of an absent friend, but the arrival of the moment of judgement. This judgement is both a measuring and a setting right of what is found to be wrong. The judgement finds that we don’t much care simply to be creatures; mortality is painful, and we go to great lengths to keep it at bay, to deny this aspect of our true being. These lengths are the extent of our failures to love and serve. ‘Sin’ is the catch-all term for what we do to avoid death and the limitedness of being human.

These two senses in which God’s approach brings death are not limited to the moment of our biological death. We can become more creaturely and less constrained by death before we die, if it is the case that God has already approached us, and continues to.

And it is in the death of Jesus that we believe that God has come to us. Jesus’ life – including the way he died – was a kind of ‘death to death’ – a dying to the power which death exercises over most of us, in fear. Jesus’ life, then was the living of truly human, truly creaturely life. Of course, Jesus dies the death of any creature; one way or another he was always going to die if he was truly one of us. But he lives and dies without the fear of death. He lives in such a way as to deny death’s power over him, a power which robs the rest of us of our true freedom and our true humanity.

What might our lives look like if we did not fear rejection, being unsafe, dying young? Jesus lived reconciled to his humanity, seeing God and not his impending death as the thing to be feared. The way he lived, and so the way he died, denied death its fearful hold on us. In him, then, we have seen a perfected human life. ‘Perfection’ is now not ‘doing the right thing’ – in the sense of moralist achievement. Rather, perfection is living to the very end under God’s reign – which blesses our mortality – and not under the shadow of death, which curses it.

Returning to our parable of the coming of the bridegroom, Jesus is now himself the wise bridesmaid who properly awaits the groom’s arrival. He is the one who knows what is required, what the wait will be like, is prepared and so endures to the joyful moment when God comes.

The meaning of the parable, then, is not merely that we must – by ourselves – wait for the coming of God. Jesus is, rather, how we are to wait: looking not to our own efforts and securing our own survival but receiving the achievement of Jesus as our own. Jesus himself is the reserve of oil we are to burn as we await the approach of God and, with God, the fulfilment of our true selves.

To wait by the light of Jesus is to allow our experience of death to become like his by allowing our experience of God to become like his. This is just what we symbolise in our baptism – that what Jesus has endured and achieved is offered in God’s grace also to us. As he died, so do we die in our baptism that, as he now lives, so might we. As unprepared, imperfect and worthy of condemnation as we often might be, we are not left in the dark if Jesus himself is the inexhaustible fuel which burns in our lamps.

There is a moral dimension to the parable – that we are vigilant during the dark hours, that we are living in such a way that corresponds to the life of Jesus himself. Fearlessness in the face of death is the source of all acts of kindness and justice, advocacy and generosity. For such things call us to make a sacrifice of ourselves which we now can make because, by the grace of God, we are lamps filled with the oil which is Jesus, oil which never runs out.

Let us, then, seek this oil that we might keep burning, the light of Christ, and give thanks to God for the gift of such light and life.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 22
1/11/2020

1 Thessalonians 2:9-13
Psalm 34:1-10, 22
Matthew 23:1-12

---

In a sentence
Humility is letting go of self-righteousness and allowing that, whatever good we might do, our place with God is already guaranteed

Given how the Pharisees are portrayed in the gospels (however fair that might have been) it is perhaps surprising that Jesus here commends to us their teaching: they are the contemporary mouthpiece of Moses and so, as the teachers of the law of God, they are to be heard and respected.

At the same time, Jesus charges that they don’t practice what they preach. This is not that simple hypocrisy that says one thing and does something else – teaching not to steal, but themselves stealing. Any particular Pharisee might have failed in this way but, as a group, they were upright and moral people and, for the most, beyond reproach when it came to doing the ‘right’ thing.

Jesus criticises them, rather, for their exaltation of themselves – their interest in being seen to have observed the law, and this in pursuit of the reward of high status in their community.

What is at stake here is the purpose of the law. Jesus accuses the Pharisees of acting as if the purpose of the law was to secure a strong standing before others and before God. Whereas it is usually the case in human society that those who achieve great things are honoured for their greatness, Jesus inverts the whole thing: ‘the greatest among you will be your servant’. The law is not set aside here but it teaches now a radical humility. What the properly righteous know in their observance of the law is not social exaltation but servanthood, a humbling of self before God and others.

And yet it is not as simple as the simple saying of it might suggest. Matthew finishes off this teaching from Jesus with a summary which indicates what can be expected: ‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.’ In this seemingly straightforward statement is revealed the real difficulty of Jesus’ teaching here – the problem of humility being linked to an exaltation.

If, as the gospels presume, our basic human desire is for a share in the peace and freedom of the kingdom of God, then it is very difficult not hear Jesus advising us to seek to be humble in order that we may enter God’s kingdom.

To see the problem here we might ask ourselves the question, Am I humble enough? To answer the question ‘Yes’ is to make the Pharisees’ mistake, holding that I have achieved true or sufficient humility to have ‘earned’ God’s reward. That being the case, I know that I must answer this question, ‘No’, for surely to say No is more humble than to say Yes.

But this won’t help me either, for what I am now trying to do is manipulate the teaching of Jesus. Clearly, it is ‘more’ humble to deny my humility, and by this means I might imagine that I can fool God into exalting me. Just as there are many people who strive after great things in order to be noticed and exalted in the eyes of others or even of God, there are many who adopt the posture of a ‘servant’ because it can also be a very effective way of securing control over a certain part of the world, a way of proving to us, to others and to God our worthiness of God’s ‘gift’.

This dynamic leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that there is no standing before God on the basis of choosing to be great or choosing to be humble. Serving others in genuine humility is both absolutely required and quite impossible, once we’ve actually heard this teaching of Jesus and turned it into just another law – being humble gets us right with God.

The problem here is the temptation to self-righteousness. Whenever I ask the question of myself, Am I ‘good enough’, or whenever we defend someone else with the argument that they are ‘good enough’, we fall into the deep moralism which consistently confounds our ability to hear the gospel. The call to be good is, of course, loud and clear; there is no softening of the demands of the law. The Pharisees and the scribes sit in the place of Moses and the commands of God they teach are good and right. Do these things!

But the temptation to assess myself or others as ‘good enough’ is almost irresistible, and it is this which Jesus challenges here.

Even if we who believe can find a way to resist it on our part, many of us will baulk when it comes to those we love but who do not believe. We tell ourselves that surely they are good enough, humble enough. For all our talk about justification by grace through faith, and not by our good works, when push comes to shove we take moral offence and fall back on just these good works: surely they – and we also mean surely we – are good enough for God to accept us.

But now we see how talk of grace contradicts humility as a ‘method’; humility does not earn points with God but must be tied up with grace, with the gift of God.

Humility is not a moral method; it is an openness to God’s gift. While still striving to live rightly, humility releases us from anxiety about social conformity, from being seen to be right. Humility declares that God loves me apart from what I do, and it asks you to love me in the same way.

This is very hard. It is difficult to let go of what others think because what others think is a major engine to how communities operate. It is in our personal lives, in our news reports and in our politics.

The gospel, then, reveals what we do not want to hear: that we are all Pharisees, in the sense that Jesus criticises. We need to relax a bit in our critique of those upright and moral men who clashed with Jesus so long ago because the reason we still listen to those stories today is that they are our stories – it is Jesus’ criticism of us we have heard today.

The gospel concerns the judgement of God: guilty of self-righteousness, of self-satisfaction, seen from the perspective of grace already received. The gospel does not distinguish between good and bad, between Christians or Muslims or Buddhists or atheists. It distinguishes, on the one hand, the self-righteous – the children of Adam who presume to judge what is good and what is bad (themselves included) – from, on the other hand, those who receive their righteousness as a gift: those Jesus would make his sisters and brothers, the communion of saints.

Let us indeed seek to live upright, righteous, God-honouring lives, and call others to do the same: do justice, love mercy.

But let this be done in humility, and for humility’s sake: the humility which does not presume to know about our own righteousness but which reflects that God already loves and accepts us, and will love and accept those we live with and serve.

Then we will be living the law, serving our neighbour, and honouring the God who calls us to just such a life and makes that life possible: do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly within the grace of God.

To this God be all glory and honour, now and forever. Amen.