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Good Friday
10/4/2020

Matthew 27:11-26
Psalm 22

Reflection by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

Good Friday rather silences me. Everything about it raises questions, and profound matters worthy of a lifetime’s contemplation.

Since the age of 19, when the World Record Society put out a disc of it, I have listened to Bach’s St Matthew Passion on Good Friday afternoon. It was years before I realised its origin, which is in the pre-Reformation custom of chanting a whole Gospel Passion twice in Holy Week. In our ecumenical days, the Uniting Church has re-adopted it.

Bach was a convinced son of the Reformation. But as a boy he knew about these Passions, and since they are simply the text of scripture, he had no objection to them. But he made some clear Reformed changes. The biblical words were chanted, with every word matched to a syllable of music (that is missed in English). It was in German, the vernacular, not in Latin. It was set for use in a congregation, not a concert, so there are chorales – congregational hymns – which Lutherans today sing. The pastor would add prayer, and there was Good Friday worship.

I think the Passions need a bit more work on them for contemporary worship. But as Bible reading used to be part of every Protestant’s home life, reading the story of the Cross is a good and holy thing to go on doing! I want to suggest that you choose a Gospel and read last week of Jesus’ life up to his burial, sometime over this weekend.  It can take as long as you want, but Mark’s is the shortest. You can take breaks, if not for a chorale, for a cuppa.

Each evangelist has a distinctive perspective. Mark emphasises the isolation of Jesus: betrayed, God-forsaken and denied by the disciples, mocked and tortured by his enemies. It has been said of Luke, that he ‘transposes the passion from the key of tragedy to the key of pathos’. It is a martyrdom of a man who deeply loves his fellow human beings and cries for their forgiveness.  John paints a picture of a royal figure, transcending the cross. God’s glory is never far away. Matthew also sees a royal figure, but a royalty which shows itself in humiliation and humility.

Contemplating the cross is not a comfortable thing to do. We have all seen gory mediaeval crucifixes in the Catholic churches we have visited in Europe, and devotions based on the bleeding Christ have been used for centuries. Of course, Protestants have their equivalent, but ours are verbal crucifixes.

Think of Isaac Watts’s incomparable hymn, When I survey the wond’rous Cross:

3. See from his Head, his Hands, his Feet,
   Sorrow and Love flow mingled down!
   Did e’er such Love and Sorrow meet?
   Or Thorns compose so rich a Crown?

And from the recently rediscovered verse and its vivid image,

4. His dying Crimson, like a Robe,
   Spreads o’er his Body on the Tree;

There are many ways of telling the Passion story, and hymns are one.

It is interesting that a very favourite old hymn has survived our unsentimental age, even into Together in Song, from which many oldies and goodies have disappeared: There is a Green Hill far away.  Too sentimental and childish? you may think, by contrast with the noble Watts. Let me attempt a brief defence.

It was a hymn for children. It is a Passion narrative, and the key elements are there. Cecil Frances Alexander (1818-95) actually lived by a walled city – ‘without a city wall’ she might have said – but she herself later changed it to ‘outside’ in case it confused the children! She was the wife of the Church of Ireland bishop of Londonderry. That should make her a raging evangelical, but the preface to her Hymns for Little Children (1848) was written by the notorious Dr Keble, leader of the High Church Oxford movement.

[The words are on screen]

1. In fact, it was part of a project to write a children’s hymn for each of the sections of the Apostles’ Creed. All things bright and beautiful was for ‘creator of heaven and earth’, and Once in Royal David’s City ‘born of the virgin Mary’. This one is for Good Friday.

‘There is a green hill far away outside a city wall…’ Her Irish readers would know about green hills.  Would it have helped to observe there was no hill at Calvary? Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine had the land around the tomb cut away so as to be seen. But in four lines, she sets the scene for her context. She is more in the spirit of Luke than John, but that is part of our rich biblical inheritance.

2. The second verse ponders the mystery of the cross, ‘We may not know, we cannot tell what pains he had to bear…’ The passion of Jesus, though impossible to imagine, let alone explain, calls us to faith: ‘we believe it was for us’ – ‘for us and for our salvation’ as the creed says.

Verses 3 and 4 contrast the innocence of Jesus with the evil done to him. The big words are all there: ‘forgiven, saved, sin’ and opening heaven’s gate. You might think that ‘to make is good’ is a bit lame, but it ought not to be that way: the world at the moment is only managing because there are people who are good. What words would you use? It is a tremendous challenge to every preacher. How can we express our faith that on that Godly Friday, something happened to the power of sin and death?

5. And her last verse simply calls for a response. Does anyone want to question that ‘dearly, dearly has he loved’? (The word has two meanings.) Is that not the message of the entire Bible? It is wonderfully modest: so ‘we must love him too’, ‘and try his works to do’.

True, there are greater Easter hymns, for adults, and for our day. And there are worse hymns for children than Mrs Alexander’s. Even in a single congregation, our understanding is at many levels. We all start as children and deepen our understanding as we learn more of life and love and suffering and death. Perhaps we should revisit it at times as little children.

Bach understood the role of human emotion in faith. For me, the most moving moment in the Matthew Passion is the word from the cross, which in all translations remains in the Aramaic of Jesus: Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani, and then, echoing the King James Bible, ‘which is to say, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”.’

Many are asking that question now, because this death-dealing, devilish disease, like the plagues of old, is silently and swiftly changing everything, and we can do little about it, except to wait. The cry of dereliction is heard in our day.

So what do God’s Easter People have to say? Can we at least remember the last word from the cross, a single word in the Greek: tetelestai, lamely rendered in English, ‘It is finished’, but better, ‘It is accomplished’.

But we must wait ‘three days’ to discover once more, how Jesus’ prayer was answered.

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Passion Sunday
5/4/2020

Isaiah 52:13-53:13
Psalm 31
Matthew 27:11-26

In a sentence
Nothing is outside of God’s power to be used to reveal God’s nature as love for us, even what is evil.

If someone were to assert that God caused COVID-19 and the crushing effect it is having around the world, the obvious response of God’s good people would likely be a very strong, No.

Let us then consider another similar proposal, the response to which is a little less obvious because it is made by the prophet Isaiah in our text today: ‘…it was the will of the Lord to crush [the Servant] with pain…’ (v10; cf. 4f).

There is no getting around the assault of this verse on our modern sensibilities, and probably not just modern ones. What has such divine sadism to do with ‘the God of love’ we believe we know from elsewhere? Must we not reject Isaiah here for God’s sake? For this is surely more than any theology of divine compassion can accommodate.

And yet this confronting assertion, and the tone of the whole the passage (and of several of the other Servant Songs), is there on the scriptural page and features historically as a significant key to the interpretation of the passion of the Christ (This text is, for example, set for Good Friday each year in the Revised Common lectionary).

It is too easy, then, simply to dismiss Isaiah here because we do not understand him. We must ask, Does this text understand anything which we don’t, yet? Likely it does.

To reject the text for the reasons just acknowledged would be to miss the relationships which are in play here – in the first instance, the general relationship between a god and its people.

We have noted before (particularly in the first sermon) that a central theme in this second half of Isaiah is the absolute sovereignty of the God of Israel over all things. This leads to a central conundrum in Scripture: how can the people Israel be so thoroughly crushed if its God is proclaimed as all powerful? Gods and their people are usually related in such a way that a god’s power is shown in the prosperity of its people. If a people is decimated – as was the people Israel – its god is proven to be weak, or nothing (see, for example, the tensions in Ezekiel 20.8f, 14, 22 and 36.22f, 32, as well as Isaiah 48.9-11)? The gods are, after all, generally a making-divine of ourselves. The humiliation of the people is the humiliation of their god. How can Israel’s God be sovereign when Israel is dragged away into exile?

The only resolution of this is the one the Scriptures take up: if God is sovereign, and has a Servant, and then the Servant of God is crushed, this must be because God ‘caused’ the crushing – even willed that it be so. It may seem to us a perverted logic – and we use the word ‘cause’ very carefully here – but nothing else will make sense of the situation if God has no rivals and yet God’s people suffer. (We might think here of God’s permitting that the righteous Job suffer – Satan has to ask permission of God to afflict Job). Is God powerless to prevent the suffering of the people under, say, the Assyrians or the Babylonians? All the prophets cry, No: the Assyrians and the Babylonians are tools in God’s hand.

On the face of it, this is harsh, at the very least.

And yet a miracle unfolds out of it. In fact it is the miracle of the Scriptures. It is the miracle of the creation itself, the miracle of the Exodus and the Restoration from exile, the miracle of the Resurrection. There is a miracle here because gods should die with their people. The story of Israel’s God should have ended in the sixth century BC. The crushing end of the Servant should be the crushing end of the Servant’s God. Yet this God ‘survives’ the death of the Servant in rejection, exile, and crucifixion.

It is, however, a survival through death. For even this God is not immune to death. God, too, ‘dies’ – ceases to be God – when the Servant is lost, in the peculiar way that a father ceases to be a father when his son dies, and a wife ceases to be a wife when her husband dies. In this sense, the relationship between God and the Servant is God, so that the end of the Servant is the end of God.

And yet. This. Is. No. Ordinary. God. (Is perhaps not ‘a god’ at all). The ‘and yet’ – as we saw last week – is the heart of the matter: and yet, God comes through this death.

What does ‘coming through’ or ‘surviving’ death mean for God? It means that whatever God was before the death of the Servant, God still is now, after that death. It means that if God had a Servant – and this ‘having’ of a Servant was integral to who God is – then God must still have a Servant. This is the meaning of any talk of ‘resurrection’ of God’s Servant. Something like a resurrection of the Servant is hinted at in Isaiah – although the text is quite opaque here and resurrection is not really an Old Testament concept – and resurrection is, of course, central to Christian confession about Jesus. (For the possible ‘resurrection’ of Isaiah’s Servant, contrast ‘tomb’ in v.9 with v.11 ‘he shall see light and v.12 ‘he shall divide the spoil’).

But resurrection-talk refers us now not merely to God’s ‘power’ to undo death – a ‘trick’ God manages against nature – but to God’s very being. The Servant is as much raised for God’s sake as for the sake of the one raised. In fact, we can be stronger here – the Servant is raised for God’s sake, period. The dead have no ‘sake’, no desires, no lack; this is what ‘dead’ means. Resurrection is no reward for righteous suffering, no compensation for a hard life. Resurrection is a gathering to God, a ‘completion’ of God according to God’s own plan. Gods die when their servant peoples are lost. This God is no different, except that this God rises again, and therefore we must rise.

We can put this in classical trinitarian terms by saying that the Father cannot continue to be the Father after the crucifixion if the Son is not restored to life. In fact we can see now that the doctrine of the Trinity is a way of answering the question of the Old Testament: How is it possible that God can lose God’s Servant – that God can, in that way, die – and yet continue to be God?

It is, then, not that God ‘can’ raise the dead but that God ‘must’ raise the dead – or at least one of them – if God is to remain Godself. The absolute sovereignty of God is not abstract free power (whatever that would actually be) but the power to be what God has promised to be and so ‘is’ – the God of this Servant.

Let us pause for a moment to notice what has happened. With a bit more insight into the theological dynamic with which Isaiah is working, we have moved from what, on the face of it, is the ghastly proposal that God ‘willed’ the suffering of the Servant, to the resurrection gospel.

In view of all this, we might reconsider our opening assertion, now as a question: Did God cause the coronavirus and the crushing effect it is having around the world? The answer now might be not an unqualified ‘No’ but, ‘Maybe, depending on how “big” we think God is, and on how “small” we think God is’. This is because Isaiah’s God is so big that only God could ‘cause’ such pain to God’s own Servant, and is so small that the suffering and death of the Servant is God’s own suffering and death.

Selah

We can – and must – push further by asking how we ourselves are caught up in the good news of the God-Servant relationship. What has what happens between God and God’s Servant got to do with what is happening between God and us, now? Put differently, how are we related to God’s Servant, that we might be healed, as the Servant is? This hinges on the identity of the Servant, an identity which is built out of two relationships.

The first relationship is that between the Servant and God. This is what we’ve just been considering: the inextricable mutuality of God and God’s Servant, to the extent that the one is lost without the other.

The second relationship which forms the identity of the Servant is that between the Saviour-Servant and Servant Israel. This is the ‘flickering’ we have seen between the one who is the Saviour-Servant and the many who are Servant Israel. This flickering is not an imprecision around the Servant’s identity but constitutes it. If we ask ‘which’ of the two Servants is crushed according to the will of God, the answer has to be ‘both’, or the one in the other. If we ask which of the children of God is hung on the cross, the (capital C) Child or all the children of Israel – even all humanity – the answer is ‘both’. The Saviour-Servant ‘points to’ Servant Israel and vice versa; Jesus ‘points to’ us, and we to him. This pointing-to is a mutual ‘containment’: we are within each other. What does God see when looking at Jesus? Us. And what does God see when looking at us? Jesus.

To ‘believe’ in this God is to hold that, in the end, God cannot tell which of the Servants – the Saviour or the People – God is addressing. As Christ was once hidden in our humanity, and God’s address to him was God’s address to us, so now are we hidden in Christ’s humanity.

The hope of the church is that when God looks at us and looks at God’s righteous Servant, he cannot tell us apart. Our hope is that when God raises the one God loves in order to raise herself, God raises the many – even us: one for all, all in one.

Selah

What does this mean for our impious question, ‘Did God cause the coronavirus and the crushing effect it is having around the world?’? On Isaiah’s terms, as we have unpacked them, and only – ONLY – on those terms, we might have to answer not a strong ‘No’, not a cautious ‘Maybe…’ but – in fear and trembling – ‘We hope so’.

For this to be our hope is to say that our hope is in a God whose future is a future with us, and in a God who has no rivals – not even death itself. Faced with what is insurmountable, our only hope is a God who takes all obstacles and threats – even death – into Godself, and does this in such a way as to become the source and goal of all things, even these.

To declare, as we did a couple of weeks ago, that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God, is not to say merely that God blasts away all threats but that all such things are taken up by God and worked towards God’s healing purposes.

This does not change the suffering of God’s servants, righteous or unrighteous; we might still be crushed with pain. The ‘not yet’ remains.

And yet, the God we have described is a God with us, even ‘by’ us, and in all things for us: a God so small as to suffer all things with us, a God so large as to make all things God’s own, so large as to make all things – even great suffering – means of bringing us home.

To talk of a resurrection wrought by this God, then, is not merely to look forward to a happy release from all which binds us. It is to expect to look back and see that, from the beginning to the end, as cause and purpose, God was in everything with us all the way along.

Let us, then, open our eyes, that – from the perspective of a Servant crucified and risen – we might begin to see this, even now in all this.

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Lent 5
29/3/2020

Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Psalm 130
John 11:1-26

In a sentence
God’s promise is that all that which limits us – spiritually, physically, politically – will be healed; until that time, faithful living bears what is not right in the world and looks forward to God’s fulfilment of this promise.

There is a lot going on in our reading from Isaiah this morning, only a small part of which we’ll be able to address closely in this time together.

We begin by picking up something we noted a couple of weeks ago. This is the ‘flicker’ the prophet allows around the identity of the ‘Servant’ who features in the readings we have been considering over the last month. We saw how the Servant is sometimes the people – ‘Servant Israel’ – and sometimes an individual distinct from the people but nevertheless deeply connected to them – the ‘Saviour-Servant’.

We can detect hints of this again in today’s text. If we replace the pronouns which appear to refer to the individual Saviour-Servant so that they now refer to Israel, we get the following from one section of the passage:

^53.2 For [Israel] grew up before [the Lord] like a young plant,
and like a root out of dry ground;
[It] had no form or majesty that we should look at [it],
nothing in [its] appearance that we should desire [it].
³ [Israel] was despised and rejected by others;
a [people] of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;
and as one from whom others hide their faces.
[Israel] was despised, and we held [it] of no account.

This ‘works’ as an account of Israel’s own experience: a people chosen for no value it had in itself other than God’s own call to it, a people raised up out of nothing, a people overrun, afflicted and dismissed by the nations.

We noted last time how this flickering from the Saviour-Servant to Servant Israel is important for Isaiah and also, ultimately, for our understanding of how God works with us in Jesus.

I bring this to mind again because there is another important ‘flickering’ in today’s reading: between illness and disease on the one hand, and sin and unrighteousness on the other.

Verse 4 in today’s translation (NRSV) ran,

⁴ Surely he has borne our infirmities
and carried our diseases;
yet we accounted him stricken,
struck down by God, and afflicted.

But, in a modern Jewish translation, the text reads:

⁴ Yet it was our sickness that he was bearing,
Our suffering that he endured.
We accounted him plagued,
Smitten and afflicted by God (JPS Tanakh translation)

Those who know this passage well ‘know’ that it is about how the sin of the people is overcome by the afflictions of the Saviour-Servant: ‘he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors’ (53.12). Yet there is a flickering here between the suffering from disease and the suffering brought about by guilt and transgression which is also present in the fuller passage.

We are greatly tempted to read the reference to sickness and plague as ‘metaphorical’. This is the way many modern translations prefer to slant the references to ‘disease’. But why exactly do we do this?

One reason is that we reject – rightly, and with the righteous sufferer Job – any notion that illness and suffering are reliable indications of personal sin. Against this, we hold that a person must not be reduced to what happens to her; that the sick person does not ‘deserve’ to be sick because of her sin.

And yet here in Isaiah sickness is a least a ‘sign’ of sin – something which appears where we might expect sin to appear.

Perhaps another reason we treat sickness as ‘only’ a metaphor for sin is that we hold physical illness to be more ‘real’ or tangible than sin – almost too bodily to stand for sin. Yet the text does not hesitate here. Isaiah flicks happily between sickness and sin as if they were the same kind of problem, as if the one had something to do with the other.

Of course if this is what Isaiah is doing then it matters for us here and now, quite directly and existentially. For today we ‘gather’ remotely for the first time on account of a plague which has fallen on the world. Reading this text in this context, we have to ask, ‘Has the Servant’s being ‘wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities’ (v5) got anything to do with the suffering that afflictions like COVID-19 (or any other plague) bring?’

The answer to this question would have to be ‘No’ if disease and sin are ‘only metaphorically’ related in this passage. If illness is merely ‘borrowed’ as an analogy to illuminate what it means to be a sinner and is not really about the meaning of sickness before God, then what the Saviour-Servant experiences has very little to do with what COVID-19 might do to us. For if the biblical text will not allow it, our modern minds certainly won’t allow that the unhappy accident of a new virus springing from genetic mutation has anything to do with sin.

But hesitation to bring sin and sickness at least into ‘dialogue’ with one another requires that we do a violence to ourselves. It requires that we separate what ails us ‘physically’ from what ails us ‘spiritually’. It tempts us to imagine that we can be ‘fixed up’ spiritually even as we still suffer physically, because sin and sickness are cast as problems in different unconnected parts of ourselves. A common manifestation of this way of thinking is talk about the ‘now-and-not‑yet’ nature of our salvation: the ‘now’ is that God already forgives us completely (‘spiritually’) and the ‘not‑yet’ is that our health or mortality or even our politics lag behind in the process, still to be ‘fixed’.

Yet the Scriptures will not divide us into ‘spiritual’ and ‘physical’ like that. If the ‘physical’ is incomplete or still ailing, so also is the ‘spiritual’. Instead of ‘now-and-not-yet’ the Scriptures tend more towards ‘not-yet, and yet…’ (to which we’ll return in a moment).

What holding sin and sickness together might speak to us is that, if we continue to be afflicted by plagues, so we continue to be afflicted by sin. If we continue to sin, so we continue to be afflicted by plagues. This is not to say that the one ‘causes’ the other. Abstractions of cause and effect are not the point here. The point is that the human being is a spiritual and physical whole. If we dare to separate out the spirit or the soul for a moment, whatever happens to it happens to the body, and vice-versa. Letting illness ‘stand’ for sin, and sin ‘stand’ for illness, keeps us whole, even in our alienation from the fullness of life.

It is this wholeness – or its absence – which most deeply ails us. We are divided. We can treat the interior while the exterior suffers or decays; we can treat the exterior while the interior languishes. We can favour the now at the expense of the future; we can languish in the now for a future which may never come. We would have to say that it seems impossible not to divide ourselves against ourselves in this way.

And this division within ourselves flickers back and forth with the division between ourselves and God. This brings us to the heart of the work of God’s Servant in Isaiah.

The Saviour-Servant in Isaiah reveals the ‘not-yet, and yet’ of living faithfully in a world of divisions. His afflictions are the ‘not-yet’, whether in sickness and disease or in being abused by others. In sickness he is divided from himself; in oppression he is divided from common humanity. The world is not right, and the Servant’s experience is evidence of this.

But his posture in this suffering is the ‘and yet’: ‘This is ghastly, and yet I still know who is God’. This is pain, and yet it is not the end of all things. This is rejection, and yet God embraces me. This now is the not-yet, and yet God’s tomorrow is coming.

The triumph of Isaiah’s Servant is not what God does with the Servant’s faithfulness but his very faithfulness itself. Infected by the sin-sick world, he is brought to death. But he dies denying that death is the last word, affirming that division from self and other will be overcome, affirming that he will be – in God – whole.

The miracle is that God takes the Servant’s faithfulness and makes it our own.

In the same way Jesus dies on a cross, the lines of which divide the world horizontally and vertically. Signalling our division from each other and from God in this way, the cross becomes the final word about our condition: separation left and right, up and down, within and without. This is as ‘not-yet’ as any talk about wholeness and reconciliation could be; such things are not even in sight.

And yet. And yet the miracle is that God takes the dividing lines of the cross and makes of them a sign of God’s power to create from nothing. God makes of Jesus’ outstretched arms a span which holds together what the ‘horizontal’ divisions between us separate. God makes of the stretch between the crown of thorns and the nail in Jesus’ feet a span holding together the ‘vertical’ division between us and God.

In this way, as with the Servant, God makes a reconciliation of Jesus’ own faithful ‘and yet’ in the face of all of which afflicted him. For Lent is the ‘not yet, and yet’ of Jesus.

This righteous one – the Servant of God, makes many righteous (v.11) – by carrying our disease and bearing our iniquity, by identifying with us in an intercession which prays, ‘Yes God, they are sin and disease, and yet…’

Praise be to God that the prayer of the Servant is heard.

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Lent 4
22/3/2020

Isaiah 50:4-11
Psalm 130
John 11:1-25

In a sentence
The Servant’s faithfulness is a confidence that, in all things, he is held by God, and this frees the servant for love even when he is being made to suffer.

The fear unfolding around the COVID-19 pandemic is, in part, fear of the widespread suffering and death it threatens to bring. This is the fear of the loss of things we love – people we love.

In fact, in this instance, significant loss is already being realised even before any such death touches us personally. Fundamental to being human is our embodied relationality – the physicality of our being-in-relation with others. Without this we are not ourselves.

Yet a virus weaponises human social being against us. And so, in the absence of a vaccine or antidote, we are forced to battle this threat by denying it what makes it` strong: the centrality of our bodies to our relationships with each other. In order to defend ourselves and those we love we isolate ourselves from each other. And yet we lose something of ourselves and them in this process. Even before anyone dies, then, the virus brings about a kind of death-in-diminishment.

What we fear here is the loss of what we love – the deaths of people who matter to us, the isolation from those who are a part of us.

There is, however, another fear which has manifest itself in response to the threat of the virus. We see the signs of this fear in the empty shelves in our supermarkets. Those empty shelves are not merely about greed or irrational thinking. They are a sign of the fear that, in all this, we might actually be alone.

If the fear of death and social isolation is the fear that we might lose what we love, the run on supplies reveals a fear that we might not be loved, that there is finally only me-and-mine on whom I can depend in the struggle to survive.

Thomas Hobbes characterised human social existence as ‘a war of all against all’. This might seem a little dramatic as a characterisation of recent toilet paper shortages, but that is only because of the robustness of our supply chain and the strength of our institutions. Hobbes argued we need such things to protect ourselves from ourselves, and we have learned from him. We have been able to set the ship upright again because the ballast in our political economy is so substantial. But this can blind us to what was indicated in the temporary imbalance: I feel safer if my pantry is full rather than having to rely on you to give to me from yours when the need arises. I’m not sure you love me that much, that God loves me that much or that ‘the system’ which is our economy and society loves me that much.

Our lives, then, are caught up in the threat that we might lose what we love – by the virus or any other means – and in the fear that we might not be loved, that we might be alone in our suffering.

Our reading from Isaiah this morning describes one whose experience of threat and suffering differs from ours in form but not in substance. He too is faced with the loss of things loved: the loss of freedom, the loss of dignity, the charge of unrighteousness. In this way, he knows the pain of death, and possibly also has an understandable fear of it. In this he is not different from us.

But this pain does not lead to doubt that he is loved. Whatever happens to the Servant – and it is bad enough – he declares, ‘I have not been disgraced.’ This is because it is not what happens to him which is the measure of who he is but rather the God who claims him: ‘It is the Lord God who helps me; who will declare me guilty?’ (v.9). This in no sense justifies or even alleviates what the Servant suffers. But there is something here starkly different from what we have seen around us lately, and not only lately.

The prophet makes this point explicitly:

Who among you fears the Lord
and obeys the voice of his servant,
[the servant] who walks in darkness
and has no light,
yet trusts in the name of the Lord
and relies upon his God? (v.10)

The implied answer to the question, ‘Who among you,’ is, ‘no-one’: no-one walks in darkness and – despite this – holds that they are still loved. But Isaiah is not being pessimistic here.

Only love itself – the refusal to compete for survival – overcomes the fear that we are alone. When the prophet doubts, then, that there are any who honour the way of the Servant, any who dwell in darkness without despair, it is not quite to accuse. It is to see something new in the relationship between God and the Servant.

The Servant’s suffering does not lead to despair, does not cause him to doubt that he is loved. And so the Servant does not compete with others in order to survive, There is no ‘war against all’ which is necessary for him to engage in, because survival is not the point – his relationship to God is: love is the point. Survival – mere survival – is always ultimately lonely because it finally pits us against each other. Yet the defining mark of the Servant is that he is not alone, and it is out of this that he has life.

This is something new, and it brings us back to what we noted in passing in our first reflection on these Servant Songs. There we saw a strange juxtaposition in Isaiah of the way the Servant suffers and the creative power of the sovereign God. What this means becomes clearer today. The Servant is a true creature of God because, despite what happens, he remains the Servant of this God. This unbroken relation, in which the Servant is servant of this God and God is God of this servant, is precisely what creation is: the binding of God and creature together so that the one cannot be itself without the other.

Creation happens in the faithfulness of the Servant, in his trust that in all things God is his and he is God’s. This is a creation from the chaos and void of competition and the struggle of all against all for mere survival. In its absence we are left, as the prophet so graphically puts it: to ‘walk in the flame of our own fire’ (v.11).

But in the creative spark which is God’s faithful Servant, a different kind of fire is kindled. This is the fire of love in the freedom of one who knows that he, she, is loved.

We can tighten the law to protect ourselves from each other, but fear will out, as will the chaos it brings. The law does not create, does not bring life. The law does not set us free from our fears but only suppresses them.

Yet where there is love, we are fully alive even should we suffer or die (cf. John 11.25f).

Perhaps you recognised some of the phrases in the Isaiah reading this morning, more familiar in St Paul’s borrowing:

If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is [Servant!] at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.

Naming the space of that community as one in which ‘we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered’ (v.36), Paul continues:

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, [or disease,] or nakedness, or peril, or sword? …

The answer to this is the same as the answer to Isaiah’s question, but now it is clear gospel: ‘No-one’ can separate us from this.

And so, Paul declares, ‘in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

For though we may have good grounds to fear the pain that death and separation can bring, it remains the case that

³⁸…neither death, nor life,
nor angels, nor rulers,
nor things present, nor things to come,
nor powers,
³⁹nor height, nor depth,
nor anything else in all creation,
will be able to separate us from
the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord,
the resurrection and the life.

When this is our confession,
every moment is alive with God,
as love:
the beginning of a new creation.

Let us then, even out of the depths, lift up our hearts.

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Lent 3
15/3/2020

Isaiah 49:1-7
Psalm 95
John 4:5-26

In a sentence
God identifies so closely with us in Jesus that happens to us happens to Jesus, and what happens to Jesus happens to us

Those of you who take delight in horror movies will know that ‘the flicker’ is an important cinematic device for creating unease in that kind of story telling – the flickering awareness of a presence revealed in a flash of lightning then disappearing, or the spirit caught in the corner of an eye but not visible to closer attention, or the fleeting hint of something hidden under a normal surface.

In the first of our reflections on the Servant Songs of Isaiah we noted that it is important to look closely at the details of the Songs, for they have the potential to disrupt too easy a reading Isaiah through received Christian tradition.

One of the things such close attention reveals is a flicker in the identity of the ‘Servant’ who features in them. This is clearer in today’s text, in which we hear first an account of the calling of the ‘Servant’, who is identified as the people Israel (v.3), as elsewhere in Isaiah. Yet the text then shifts to describe a Servant who is not Israel but apparently an individual who is commissioned ‘to bring [Israel] back’ to God (v.5). This flickering or slippage of identity of the Servant – now what we might call the Servant Israel, now the Saviour-Servant – takes place several times in Isaiah, apparently quite deliberately. (In what follows we’ll use ‘Servant Israel’ and ‘Saviour-Servant’ to distinguish between Isaiah’s two apparent uses, while trying to keep them as close together as we can)

The traditional reading of the Servant Songs pays little attention to this difficult double-reference. The figure of the Saviour-Servant has typically been used to interpret Jesus along the lines that Jesus experiences and brings about the kinds of things that the Saviour-Servant does. That is, as the Saviour-Servant seems to do, Jesus comes from God to save Israel, and the world, appearing not unlike a ‘currency’ in an economy of salvation: a transaction takes place in which Jesus is ‘spent’, and we are saved as part of the bargain.

It is easy to read this economy of salvation back into Isaiah, so that the suffering and rejection of the Saviour-Servant also becomes a price paid on behalf of the people, perhaps after the fashion of a sacrifice made to win reconciliation with God. The Saviour-Servant and Jesus, understood in this way, mutually support each other.

But such a transactional economy of salvation gets in the way of what Isaiah might help us to see with his flickering of the identity of the Servant between the individual and the whole people. Isaiah reveals two things, one the flip-side of the other.

First, the Saviour-Servant suffers what Servant Israel suffers. The Saviour becomes the thing to be saved – becomes Israel – rather than being a price ‘paid’ for it. This means that the Saviour not only suffers ‘for’ Israel, but the suffering is what Israel itself suffers. The Saviour bears what Israel is already bearing.

Important here is that Israel is a community humiliated in exile. The words applied today to the Saviour-Servant – ‘deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, the slave of rulers’ (v.7) – describe exactly Servant Israel’s own situation. Its humiliation has been the sign to Israel of its own failure and punishment from God. The Saviour-Servant, then, does not undergo any further humiliation God might require for reconciliation; the Saviour ‘re-enacts’ or embodies the suffering and humiliation of Servant Israel. As it watches the Saviour-Servant, Israel sees itself: ‘he’ is, in his suffering, what ‘we’ are. He suffers not as a payment to free us from our suffering. It is our suffering he suffers – he suffers as we do.

But, second, the converse also applies: if Isaiah helps us to see the Saviour in the form of suffering Israel (who is to be saved), he also causes us to see Israel in the Saviour. That is, what happens to the Saviour-Servant happens to Servant Israel as well because the Saviour-Servant ‘is’ Servant Israel. By seemingly confusing the two, Isaiah declares that what the Saviour-Servant experiences will be the experience of Servant Israel.

The crucial thing is that the Saviour experiences an exaltation after the time of rejection and alienation (vv.8f). This is the gospel in Isaiah: unfaithful and failed Servant Israel will be lifted up with the suffering but faithful Saviour-Servant. Because of the identification of the one with the many, the many can pull the one down but the one can pull the many up.

Why does this matter? There is one point I want to draw from this for our appreciation of the ministry of Jesus, and the crucifixion of Jesus in particular.

Isaiah’s Saviour-Servant does not suffer for the people, as if his suffering does something to win God back over; his suffering is not a transaction. This is also to say that he doesn’t suffer because of the people – because they have done something to him. Isaiah’s Saviour-Servant suffers with the people. The Saviour suffers because the people suffer.

This matters for reading the crucifixion of Jesus, if Isaiah’s Servant helps to understand the work of Jesus. Under Isaiah, the crucifixion becomes not a suffering for the people (a suffering in our place) or even a suffering because of the people (which we have caused). The crucifixion is a suffering with the people.

This is an unexpected reading of the cross – or an unexpected addition to our other readings. It is to say that if to be crucified is to be Godforsaken (as Jesus cries from the cross, Mark 15.34), then we who find ourselves Godforsaken are, in this sense, already also crucified. Put differently, the crucifixion of Jesus is a sign of our existence: alienation from God. Jesus does not do something ‘for’ us on the cross so much as simply ‘does us’. Alienation – the heart of the meaning of the crucifixion – is our normal way of being.

As with the ‘flickering’ identities of the Servants in Isaiah – now Israel, now the Saviour, now Israel… – when we look at the cross we are to see the same kind of flickering: now Jesus, now us, now Jesus, now us again.

The gospel in this is that our suffering, our Godforsakenness, is not the measurement of what we are. The measurement of what we are is our identity with Jesus on the cross and Jesus beyond the cross, the identity of the many with this one. The crucifixion is Jesus’ own share in what we are and suffer. And so the resurrection is not his elevation only but the elevation of all to whom he is connected – even us.

Some of the old iconography of the church portrays it beautifully, in which the death of Jesus as not merely his stopping breathing but his full entry in the realm of the dead, so that his resurrection is not merely his being raised but his hauling back into life all whose suffering and death he shared. We share in the Saviour’s death because the Saviour has shared in our death. If this is true, then what happens next to him is what will happen also to us.

Our experience of this miracle is always as a flickering, although not for the unease of the horror movie but for hope. This flickering is at the centre of our life as Church. As we gather each week around the Communion Table it is as the Body of Christ, and yet it is our bodies, and yet it is the Body of Christ, and yet…

To glimpse such a flicker, such a momentary transfiguration of the world, is perhaps as important now as it ever has been, in a time when our mortality and the possibility of widespread suffering looms so large, and we might succumb to the fear that what is happening to us is our only measure.

Yet because God identifies in Jesus with all that we are, and makes of us all that Jesus is, there is finally nothing to fear other than that we might not hear the call of Jesus – God’s Servant – in today’s text,

saying to us alienated prisoners, ‘Come out’,
saying to us who are isolated in darkness, ‘Show yourselves’ (49.9).

Now we catch only a flicker in the corner of our eye but then we will see face to face, and God’s image will settle. And that image will be us, hidden in Christ, in God.

This is how God serves us.

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Lent 2
8/3/2020

Genesis 12:1-4a
Psalm 121
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
John 3:1-17

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

Our daughter came home from school one day to announce that her science teacher had taught her that the gestation period for humans is 32 weeks. Her mother, who had trained as a midwife and had confirmed the generally accepted period of 40 weeks through 3 pregnancies told our daughter the teacher must have got it wrong. When my opinion was sought, I said I thought it felt more like about 9 months but what would I know. The next day our daughter returned to announce that her science teacher still insisted that the gestation period for humans was 32 weeks and not 40 as her midwife mother and veteran of 3 pregnancies imagined. The next day our daughter took her mother’s midwifery book with her finger firmly planted on the number 40 vis a vis the weeks of normal human gestation. How was he going to get out of this one? Her teacher remained adamant. He declared that her mother’s midwifery book was old and out of date.

Mind like a steel trap – that man – a bit like Nicodemus who went to see Jesus in John chapter 3. Their conversation was about birth too. Nicodemus could cope with the idea of being born. What stretched his mind beyond credulity’s limit was the idea of being born from above. This was to present a concept so new that it would not fit into any ideas he had carried up to that point. He was being asked to cope with an impossible world image.

A thousand sermons have been preached about Nicodemus with explanations of what being born again might mean – about why he might have come by night and so forth. All I want to say today is that Nicodemus came to Jesus and Jesus challenged him to think in radically new and impossible ways about how life under God works. In matters of faith it will be OK to think in black and white for a while, OK to live in a cause and effect understanding for a time, but at some point it will cause you trouble.

The story of Nicodemus presents the ever present problem for the church — how to tell its ever new and always impossible story of salvation to a world that cannot think in metaphors and stories and effects sometimes coming before causes and ever so many shades of grey, for whom poetry is language that cannot convey truth.

Finally Comes the Poet, Brueggemann’s book on preaching, divides the world of spoken and written language into two – poetry and prose. The title of his introduction, ‘Poetry in a Prose-Flattened World,’ forewarns the reader of the content of what is coming and something of the feelings the writer has about prose. His feelings of irritation with prose lie in the conviction that prose predominates as the language that attempts to convey the truth. It attempts to answer every question, talk every issue to a standstill. The world that confines itself to the language of prose is affected by its desire to nail every point down, leave no question unanswered. It promotes in our world a technical way of thinking. When we take this language into conveying the truth of the gospel we find that it ‘has been flattened, trivialized, and rendered inane.’[1] Mysteries become problems to be solved, miracles have rational explanations to be discovered. Prose is the language of the Enlightenment, a movement that still penetrates deep into our Post Modern culture. The church’s preaching is to address the world that is dominated by engineers, inventors and scientists and the language of prose will not be satisfactory in that address. Brueggemann quotes Walt Whitman:

After the seas are all cross’d (as they seem already cross’d,)
After the great captains and engineers have accomplish’d their work,
After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the geologist, ethnologist,
Finally shall come the poet worthy that name,
The true son of God shall come singing his songs.[2]

The preacher and the prophet come singing these songs. These are the songs that take their hearers beyond thought to emotions, beyond what is, to a vision of what might be. The poet’s speech does not replace prose. Human endeavour will have its go first, but it will necessarily come to a wall that must be addressed by another language.

Putting into words the miracle of coming to faith, and, even more miraculous, continuing and growing in faith is pretty near impossible. Especially so in a world that relies more and more on scientific exactitude. Norman Young, one of our most esteemed theologians, and Jim Brown, a scientist who, coincidentally, developed advances in the science of human reproduction. Both devout Christians. They would argue, the theologian insisting that there are aspects of knowing about God that remain a mystery, and the scientist insisting there must eventually be answers to all the questions, even the ones about God. Jim wanted scientific language to explain what only poetic language could reveal.

We rely on the language of metaphor or  symbol and simile, of talking about rebirth when we do not refer to the events of a natal delivery room, when we light a candle, not because there is a power failure but because we want to say that we can see what cannot be seen with eyes, or we are seen and known and loved by the one who cannot be seen or fully known.

Jesus spoke to Nicodemus about being born when he had already been born many years since, and he spoke to him about not dying when it was perfectly clear that his body would one day decay in the ground. At one level the language of faith is nonsense —

John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

— you see? It’s nonsense, but it is life giving and God loving nonsense, the kind of language that makes golden sense in the Kingdom of God.

[1]              Walter Brueggemann, Finally Comes the Poet, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), p. 1.

[2]              Walt Whitman, “Passage to India,” 5:101-5 Leaves of Grass (New York: Mentor Books, the New American Library, 1954), p. 324 cited in Brueggemann, Finally Comes the Poet,  p. 6.

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Transfiguration
23/2/2020

Luke 11:29-32
Psalm 99
Matthew 17:1-9

In a sentence
The ‘sign of Jonah’ points to the same thing as does the Transfiguration: that God infuses the world with God’s own presence; this is God’s gift and call.

Over the last month we’ve been splashing around in Jonah, all without much direct reference to Jesus.

One of the obvious ways in which Jesus might seem to be connected to Jonah is the ‘three days and nights’ which Jonah is said to have spent inside the great fish, which beg to be compared to the ‘three days’ by which the New Testament counts the time between the death and resurrection of Jesus. Indeed, at least according to St Matthew, Jesus himself seems to make this link (Matthew 12.40):

For just as Jonah was for three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.

As obvious as that connection is, we must also say that it is not very interesting, as it makes the link only in the coincidence of the number days and nights (despite problems with Easter’s ‘three’ days and nights) and, perhaps, in that the both the fish and the tomb are things ‘cavernous’.

If not very interesting, it’s also odd that Jesus seems to link the fish with his death and resurrection. His reference to the ‘sign of Jonah’ comes in response to a demand for a miracle to prove his authority. Having just denied the request for such a miracle, he then seems to promise an extraordinary miracle – that he will be raised from the dead. This self-contradiction – if that is what it is – is strange indeed. The only thing which would make it not odd is if what Jesus means is that his three days in the heart of the earth, and his resurrection, will be a hidden thing – just as Jonah’s time in the fish was something no one else witnessed.

Such hiddenness as the link between Jesus and Jonah is much more interesting than a simple correspondence between the days in the fish and the days in the tomb, for if Jesus’ time ‘in the heart of the earth’ – and his coming out of that time – are hidden, then he says that the miracle his opponents can expect will not look like a miracle. The miracle you get you will not recognise. We noted a couple of weeks ago that the sin of the people of God is often that we do not recognise a miracle when it happens.

This un-spectacular nature of the ‘sign of Jonah’ is reflected in Luke’s version of what Jesus says about Jonah, as we have heard today. In Luke the ‘sign of Jonah’ is not the three days in the fish or the tomb but rather the seemingly more mundane and even very troubling conversion of Nineveh. Nineveh heard what Jesus’ opponents do not: the word of the great God in the words of little Jonah.

Jesus effectively says to his opponents, of himself: ‘Can you not see what you are looking at? All miracles are a distraction; the word of God comes to you in this very ordinary exchange, here and now. Believe, as did Nineveh.’

We have seen this right through the story of petulant little Jonah, the necessary vessel by which God would claim – and does claim – the Gentiles.

And we see it also in the seemingly quite contradictory story of the Transfiguration. It seems to contradict the ordinariness of day-to-day Jesus because it looks as if the veil is pulled back for a moment for us to see the ‘real’ Son of God, shining bright with divine glory, under the veneer of flesh and blood. We might hear this reading of the Transfiguration confirmed in the booming voice from heaven, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased…’

But…perhaps the voice did not ‘boom’ – the text doesn’t say. Perhaps the voice whispered those words: ‘This is my Son, the Beloved…’, with a shift of emphasis reflecting the different tone. Perhaps the disciples fell to the ground not for fear of the voice of God, overwhelming in its thunderous majesty, but for fear of what it said: ‘Here is the sign of Jonah, and yet greater than Jonah; here is Word-in-Flesh. I, God, ‘look like’ this.’

The sign of Jonah points towards the God who has being by joining to the flesh of the world, who is ‘incarnate’. Suddenly Jonah is a Christmas story, and the fish a manger. Jonah himself was not ‘accidental’ flesh; God persisted with stubborn Jonah not for Jonah’s sake but for God’s own sake – Jonah is integral to God’s work being done.

That God might need the world in this way – that God ‘looks like this’, like flesh-and-blood Jesus – is harder to believe than any miracle of the magic-trick variety. To put it in the starkest terms of the New Testament, the sign of Jonah and the Transfiguration – the incarnation of God – reveals Jesus’ descent to the Deep of the cross to be the glory of God. (This is a theme of John’s gospel, for which the being ‘lifted up’ to the cross is both crucifixion and enthronement).

Matthew’s saying that the Son of Man will spend three days and nights in the ‘heart of the earth’ (Matthew 12.40) then comes to be less about time in the tomb and more about God in our very midst: we and our world are the ‘heart of the earth’ within which Jesus spends ‘three days and nights’. Risen and dying and preaching and teaching, Jesus is God’s presence in the heart of us.

This is the content of our hope: that, in the belly of Nineveh, in the midst of death, in our lives just as they are, God might be found. And God is not merely found in this ‘heart of the earth’ but it realised as God’s own home. The Peters of the world need make no ‘dwelling’ for God in holy places (Matthew 17.4); God is doing that Godself in all places.

That is the thing for which we hope, and it is the thing to which we are called: to become what we are, God’s true dwelling place, to hear the word directed to those disciples on the mountain, and to us – listen! – and to respond with joy.

Let us, then, become what we have been created to be – the very dwelling place of God, Christ’s own body, that we and those whose lives we touch might know the rich humanity God intends us to be.

A Prayer of Confession in response to the sermon

We bless you, O God, for out of desire to love and enjoy us you have created and sustained us and all things.

And yet we confess that, in thought, word and deed, we have fallen short of the glory for which we were made.

Forgive us when we postpone obeying your call to life as we await some satisfying proof that how we already are is not better.

Forgive us when the next thing you ask of us is not spectacular enough for our sense of our own importance.

Forgive us, then, those things large and small which go undone: the time not spared for one who needs it, the gift we do not give, the anger which we could have checked, the effort we could have made.

O God, who before the passion of your only begotten Son revealed his glory upon the holy mountain:  Grant to us that we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance, may be strengthened to bear our cross, and be changed into his likeness from glory to glory.

Just so, gracious God, have mercy on us…

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Epiphany 6
16/2/2020

Jonah 2:1-10
Psalm 130
Matthew 5:21-37

In a sentence
The miracle of Jonah is a life which is lived in the midst of a broken world, confident that in all things we belong to God, and God to us

The 2005 movie ‘Mr and Mrs Smith’ is an action comedy about a ‘somewhat’ troubled marriage. At one point Mr Smith remarks that Mrs Smith seems to think their story will have a happy ending. She replies, ominously, ‘Happy endings are just stories which haven’t finished yet.’

When does a story finish? We finished the story of Jonah last week with Chapter 4, noting that it ends neither happily nor tragically but with an open question along the lines of, Will Jonah become a miracle?

We skipped over Chapter 2 on our way through and now return to it at the end of our own telling of the story. There is logic to this. Scholars lean towards the conclusion that Chapter 2 was not part of the original narrative. For one thing, the story stands very well on its own without Jonah’s prayers inside the fish and, for another, the prayer itself – suggesting that Jonah now ‘gets it’ – contradicts how Jonah later behaves: as if he didn’t ‘get it’ at all.

It is possible that whoever inserted the prayer did so quite clumsily, not understanding what he was doing. Yet this doesn’t change the fact that what we have as Scripture includes Chapter 2, to be considered as part of the whole.

What the scholarly insight might allow us to do, then, is to read Chapter 2 as the last thing written and so, in this sense, the ‘end’ of the book. Chapter 2 then becomes the what-Jonah-should-be conclusion to the story, even as it appears in the middle. And this is how we’ll treat the chapter today – as an ending in the middle, and as something of a happy ending, at that, despite how his unfinished story then continues.

Chapter 2 is a psalm with many echoes of other psalms in the Old Testament. And it looks just like Jonah might pray, with its references to the engulfing waters of the deep. Yet the themes of the wave and the deep are found in other psalms as well, where they are clearly metaphorical and not at all fishy. This is say that the watery bits in Jonah’s prayer are themselves metaphorical and not really about being under the sea in the belly of a great fish.

The Scriptures are shot through with the metaphor of the watery deep. Genesis begins with God bring order to wide and deep chaotic waters; watery chaos wipes away all but the Ark and its inhabitants, the Exodus is a way through the Red Sea which only God could effect. Similarly, the Jordan must be tamed in order to reach the Promised Land and, bringing these waves upon waves to a kind of fulfilment, the symbol of drowning occurs again when Jesus is baptised into our humanity and we into his.

The metaphor of the deep takes the universal human fear of dangerous waters to makes it human need and fear per se. Chapter 2 begins with Jonah crying out from the guts of the fish, and from his distress, and from the ‘belly of Sheol’ – the shadowy underworld of the dead. The important thing is that these are all the ‘same’. The belly of the fish is the distress, is Sheol. And these are the same as Jonah-in-Nineveh (Chapter 3), and Jonah in the heat of God’s grace after the gourd vine dies (Chapter 4). The deep is Israel wandering in the desert, and then weeping by the rivers of Babylon. It is Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane and Peter’s bitter tears after the cock crows. The deep is the church in the Colosseum, the reformer at the stake and the Jew in Auschwitz. It is the diminishing and confused church of our era.

‘Out of the depths’ cries the psalmist to the Lord (130) or, more the point, out of the pain of being yours here and now. And this ‘being yours’ is also important; there are other sufferings and cryings-out, but here the problem is that which comes when God calls, and the promise of paradise takes shape as an experience of hell.

The thing about such fearful realities in our lives – whether in the specific vocation of God’s people or any dire circumstance – is not merely that they might frighten us. More than this, they have the capacity to overwhelm us in such a way as to leave us still standing, in a Jonah-like, dead-person-walking kind of way. We become colonised by fearful depths whose name is legion and from whom we cannot even distinguish ourselves (Mark 5).

To extend the metaphor of the belly of the fish, it is typical that the contents of the belly tend to become the belly, as is reflected in millions of bathroom mirrors across the nation every morning! The constant temptation before Jonah is that, in his fear and loathing, he might become fear and loathing itself – something ‘fearful’ in both (objective and subjective) senses of the word. Fearing and becoming fear are the depth from which we cry, are the ‘de profundis’ of God’s people (from the Latin version of Psalm 130.1 [=Psalm 129 in the Latin Vulgate]).

Yet Chapter 2 has Jonah pull back from that fate. We saw last week that the deep which threatens Jonah is the scorching light of the grace of God. Yet, Chapter 2 ends with ‘Deliverance belongs to the Lord’ – The Lord is the Deliverer. Spewed up on the beach, Jonah is the same but different, reconciled now not merely by the grace of God – which is easy – but to that grace and what it will cost him: living with, and loving, the enemy to whom God would be Friend.

Standing on the beach then, his confidence in God the Deliverer just uttered, would seem to be the ‘happy ending’ Jonah and we are called to be: reconciled and stepping out in the light, the miracle of Jonah.

Of course, it falls apart again. The judgement of the book of Jonah, then, seems to side with Mrs Smith: happy endings are just stories which aren’t finished yet.

And this is hardly good news. Or, it isn’t good news if ‘ending’ and ‘happy’ were what ‘it’ is all about, are what we are all about, before God.

The thing about the Scriptural sense for the end is that it is never an end in time: we never get there – not even when we are ended, as we all will be. The end of the world is not our end and is not the final tick of creation’s clock. And so the sign of the end cannot be whether we are happy or sad, cannot be whether our story ends with a comic lift or a tragic descent.

The end, for faith, is neither a moment nor a feeling about that moment.

The end, for faith is a person: ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end’ (Revelation 22.13). This is what Jonah confesses at the end of his prayer, and what God waits to hear again at the end of the book: ‘I am what I am in you’. In all things, we are hidden in Christ with God (Colossians 3.3).

We have heard it said that the ‘pursuit of happiness’ is one of the purposes of life, and indeed it is. But if a purpose of life, happiness is nevertheless not the measure of life.

Our lives are neither comedies nor tragedies. Our lives are simply our lives, and what matters in this broken world is not whether we died laughing but how the grace of God landed among us,

how we dealt with God,
our true end in the unfinished story
which is still us, unfolding here and now.

That God is the Deliverer is the good news – the ‘happy ending’ given before the end,
that we might see that there is no Deep which the love of God cannot fathom,
that there is nothing which can separate us from God’s love.

Everything is our because this God is ours.

We have no other ending.

In this is life, in all its fullness.

A prayer in response to the sermon

We bless you, O God,
for out of desire to love and enjoy us
you have created and sustained us
and all things.

And yet we confess that, in thought, word and deed, we have fallen short of the glory for which we were made.

Forgive us when our sense for you love for us is reduced to our present state of mind.

Forgive us when we refuse the cost of grace in the work of reconciliation with other which grace makes possible.

Forgive us, then, the anger which might have been openness, the disappointment which was really misunderstanding, the despair which springs from being closed to possibility, the unkindness which comes from greed.

O God, the strength of all who put their trust in you:
Mercifully accept our prayers;
and because in our weakness
we can do nothing good without you,
give us the help of your grace,
that in keeping your commandments
we may please you both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God,
for ever and ever. Amen.

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Epiphany 5
9/2/2020

Jonah
Psalm 117
Matthew 5:13-20

In a sentence
God is no weapon in the hands of the people of God but the means by which they will be reconciled to their enemies

Conventional wisdom holds that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Something of this sentiment, and its violation, is at the heart of our reading from Jonah today.

We’ve just heard of a third striking miracle in the story of Jonah: after the miracle of the fish and the miracle of Nineveh, now the miracle of the vine or ‘gourd’.

This third miracle is perhaps the strangest of the three. Jonah has already settled under a shade he has made for himself, waiting to see what will happen to the city. Yet we’re told that the vine grows and gives him shade from the heat, even though he’s already sitting in the shade. If the fish has a purpose in keeping Jonah alive, the purpose of the vine does not seem quite to be to give shade.

The vine’s purpose seems more to be that it should die, that it should irritate Jonah and so that it should open the way to the final exchange about Jonah’s commitment to the vine: ‘You are concerned about the bush’, God says, ‘for which you did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night.’

But this doesn’t quite work, either: God’s account doesn’t seem to address the real situation. It is not that Jonah laboured which is the problem but that he is now again (despite the booth he built himself) exposed to the sun.

On the face of it, the story seems a little confused. More than that, it also seems overworked. Grumpy Jonah could have been as easily chastised for his angry response to God’s forgiving ways without the credibility of the story being further undermined with another whacky miracle.

To find sense in all this, we must see that we do not have here a mere miracle, something which pops up and simply must be taken on face value. The appearance of the vine is something beyond mere divine power and does something beyond merely provoking a response. The vine embodies a truth about God, Jonah and the Ninevehs of the world.

Let’s see how this might be so.

While Jonah gets angry about the vine, what he has really been angry about is God’s reconciliation with the Ninevites. We’ve noted before the extent of the hatred Israel held for Nineveh. It is, then, is ‘very displeasing to Jonah’ that God ‘repents of the evil’ (KJV) intended for Nineveh.

But this suggests that what was pleasing to Jonah was that Nineveh had it coming from God: my God is the enemy of my enemy. And, if we take the writings of a prophet like Nahum at face value, Jonah was right here: God had a controversy with Assyria.

So the vine fits neatly into the story when it is the both the great comfort and then the great distress of Jonah: when it is the wrath of God and then the mercy of God, for those whom Jonah hates.

‘You are concerned about the bush’, says God, ‘for which you did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night.’ My wrath has risen, and fallen away. But it is my wrath; what business is this of yours?

And there is the religious shock in the story of Jonah. God asks of Jonah, ‘What of my business is your concern, except you yourself?’ Or, in terms of the conventional wisdom with which we began: ‘What about my friendship with you makes me the enemy of your enemy’?

The gods of the nations – even the gods of those who imagine they have no gods – are always the enemy of my enemy. This is one of the principal purposes of a god: to defend me, to be the proof or the form of my righteousness in relation to others. My god is the enemy of my enemies simply because they are my enemies; God must be against them. I pray to my god in order that she might reduce you, or I invoke a power I believe in – perhaps some purportedly secular political correctness – in order to chastise you.

But in the story of Jonah, and as a recurring theme in the Scriptures, we see a different divinity in action. This One is not – because ours – thereby against those we are against. This God is never part of an arsenal.

The vine is God’s wrath for Jonah’s enemies. Jonah takes it to be a shield to protect him from the burning heat of God’s passion for those who do not even know their right hand from their left. The vine shields him from the blinding light which is forgiveness for those who ‘know not what they do’. And then God takes that shield away. The withered vine is the epiphany of God’s scorching grace – scorching, that is, for Jonah as he sees his enemies embraced by God.

The grace of God – that God ‘repents’ in this way – is the central problem which the book of Jonah addresses and is the meaning of this final miracle but there is another closely-related problem, what we might call the ‘political’ significance of such a repenting God.

What does life look like when our God is not the enemy of our enemies? What should we do if the righteousness in which we would hide will not shield us from our enemies but instead befriends them – makes them sisters, brothers?

We can, of course, trade such a God – such a righteousness – for another. And this where the book of Jonah ends. Though we’ll come back to it for another week or two, we’ve heard the end of the story today, and it is no ‘happily ever after’. The story concludes with an open question. Indeed, it is a request for judgement – our judgement on God: ‘Should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who know not what they do?’

We know what the answer should be: Yes, Lord. The ‘friend we have in Jesus’ must also be the friend of my enemies. To be able to answer in this way would be to become the fourth – untold – miracle of the book of Jonah: the conversion of Jonah himself.

Do we want such a miracle performed, for all the humility and grace it might cost us?

Let us look to grow into the kingdom of heaven through a righteousness which exceeds that of Jonah.

And, in this way, may we become a miracle: a friend to our enemies, our Friend’s friends.