Category Archives: Sermons

19 May – Not a politically correct God

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Easter 5
19/5/2019

Acts 11:1-18
Psalm 148
John 13:31-35

In a sentence:
God does not merely call us to love, but makes that love possible

The whole of the New Testament is written against the background of an unflinching belief in the resurrection of Jesus, not simply as a thing which was now ‘believed’ but as a thing which made a difference to the way we live and experience each other and the world. ‘Jesus is risen’ is code for ‘the world is now a whole other new place”.

The book of Acts, from which we hear quite a bit each year after Easter, looks like a history of what happened next after Easter. Yet, more than this, it is history as an account of the kind of thing which would necessarily take place if it were the case that Jesus was risen from the dead.

We can see the difference between a mere historical account of what happens next and the theological, resurrection-informed experience of what happened in the details of our reading this morning – in particular in the unexpected way in which Peter defends what happened in the house of Cornelius.

The crisis is that Peter seems to have transgressed the hard boundary between Jew and Gentile: ‘Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?’ From the moral and ethical outlook of modern liberal western society it looks as if what Peter has done is ‘obviously’ the right thing. Most of us today hold that everyone should be treated equally, have the same rights, not be put down or otherwise mistreated, and so on.

Yet Peter does not offer a moral argument for his actions along these lines. Instead, he accounts for his actions by ‘blaming’ God. Speaking of his vision of being commanded to eat unclean foods, he quotes God:  ‘What I have made clean you must not declare profane.’ The reason for the breaking down of this barrier – that between Jew and Gentile – is not liberal ethics but divine command. Peter doesn’t know about the ‘brotherhood of man’ or any such thing; ‘God made me do it’ is the reason he gives for doing what we would consider simply to be the clear moral choice.

Now, there is nothing wrong with the moral ideals we have about everyone being equally human to everyone else. It is just that that is not what our text is about. The Cornelius incident is about what was thought to be a God-imposed distinction between Jew and Gentile now being overcome by God. And so the resolution of the dispute back in Jerusalem is not, ‘Ah, yes, of course the Gentiles are people too! How foolish of us!’ Rather, the Jewish Christians turn to the praise of God saying, ‘Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.’

In the election of Abraham and Sarah as patriarch and matriarch of the people of God there is actually nothing to suggest that God’s love for this people means God’s hatred or exclusion of all other peoples. In fact, just the opposite is found in the covenant with Abraham: ‘through you will all peoples be blessed’ (Or, ‘will all peoples bless themselves’, depending on the translation.)  But there had developed a very sharp distinction in the minds of the Jews by the time of Jesus, so that Peter could say to the Gentile Cornelius, ‘Even you yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile’ (Acts 10.28).

This distinction had taken on God-proportions, and its violation was understood to have consequences for a person’s standing before God (in terms of ritual cleanness). It doesn’t go too far to say that, for pious Jews of the time, God required of them their self-isolation from Gentiles – it had become to be understood to be divinely instituted. And so it would have felt to Peter that God was changing God’s own rule here: God was contradicting what had being held, and held for the sake of God.

And now we can see how this is an event which has to do with the resurrection of Jesus, and so with the power of God, and not simply with human ethics. For it was for God’s sake – as an act of piety – that Jesus was executed, because he was perceived to be a threat to the religious and political safety of the people. The resurrection, then, is God standing against God, God in heaven contradicting the God in our hearts, revealing that the two are not the same and that we are serving the wrong one.

When God pours out the Holy Spirit on the household of Cornelius the resurrection happens again: God raises the dead. Only, those who are raised are not just Cornelius but Peter and, later, the other believers back in Jerusalem. These are raised in the sense we know from Saint Paul, who describes this God as the one who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which did not exist. What ‘did not exist’ for Peter and the other Jewish Christians was that God’s work in Christ had anything to do with the Gentiles, for how could it? ‘It is unlawful for a Jew to associate with Gentiles…’

But now that Christ clearly did have something to do with the

Gentiles, a new beginning met with a new understanding and the dead were raised, eyes were opened, and God was glorified.

If we take away from the story of Peter and Cornelius only the message that God loves everyone and so we ought to too, then we render the story irrelevant because it tells us nothing most of us don’t already know. Perhaps more problematically, this seems to imply that such love is actually possible – that we ought to be ‘able’ to love each other, and so to usher in the kingdom.

But the Jewish Christians back in Jerusalem praise God for what Cornelius experienced, and we must take this with utter seriousness. The implication is not simply that we should be loving and accepting of each other but that such love and acceptance begins as a work of God.

This being the case, we might also note that the rather modern notion of ‘love and acceptance’ doesn’t really fit the story, or isn’t rich enough for the story. For the Gentiles are not given a mere welcome but a repentance: ‘… God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life’ (11.18). The love of God is that the loved are now free, or even ‘allowed’, to change. Their humanity is indeed recognised but so also its deficiencies; God’s ‘love’ is here the possibility of repentance, and not of mere ‘inclusion’.

So neither the Jews nor the Gentiles are the ‘good guys’ here, or the victims. Borrowing again from Paul, all have fallen short of the glory of God. This is the accusation, the ‘bad news’ of the gospel.

But the important thing is that the accusation is a diminishing echo which sounds after the ‘big bang’ – the moment of creation – the act of resurrecting grace which stands Peter and Cornelius and all they represent on an equal footing of being loved, forgiven and accepted by God.

And so it is, as we sang in our opening hymn, that we pray that we might love, and see whatever love we might manage as an answer to prayer – the acts of today’s apostles, working out the logic of the resurrection of Jesus, to the glory of God.

For the benefit of all God’s people, may this prayer be ever on our lips, and find its answer in the faithfulness of the God who keeps his promises by making it possible for us to love one another.

Amen.

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12 May- The Fifth Commandment – “Honour your father and mother”

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Easter 4
12/5/2019

Exodus 20:1-2, 12
Psalm 71
Mark 10:28-31

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

“I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of slavery”, (therefore)….
“Honour your father and mother”

It is entirely a happy coincidence that we have this text before us on what society calls Mother’s day. However, as we reach the halfway mark in the journey that the commandments unfold, this fifth offers us the chance to do something different from what might be expected on this secular occasion. Two preliminary observations deserve some thought.

The first has to do with its location. It falls between the commandments that have to do with the proper worship of God, and those that have to do with right conduct towards other people. Right conduct is certainly the case for the commandments to follow.  When we come to them, six, seven, eight and nine are now all enforceable by criminal and civil laws. But this fifth: “Honour your father and mother”, like the tenth: “You shall not covet”, is not legally enforceable. The interesting question then is this: does “Honour your Father and Mother” belong to the first table of the things that have to do with the proper worship of God, or is it the first of those that have to do with right conduct towards others? A further intriguing question follows: Should the commandments be read as occurring in order of importance? If so, then the commandment to honour father and mother is more important than not committing murder! Imagine that! We ought at least to be open to the possibility.

The second observation is that we need to remind ourselves that in the nature of the case this commandment is a word directed to adults, not children. What might it mean for adults to hear: “Honour your Father and Mother”? Perhaps what is at stake is best summed up by the difference between the word “authority” and the word “authoritarian”. Authority is a good word, authoritarian not so much. Authoritarian people are fundamentally insecure. “Do this because I say so”, or “Because I am wearing a uniform”.  Fathers and Mothers are not immune to the authoritarian mindset, not to speak of contemporary politicians. It’s a bit like the preacher’s text found in the pulpit with the marginal note: “Argument weak – shout here”. Authoritarian people shout.  “Authority”, on the other hand, is an innate gift. Some have it, others don’t; some have it in some matters, but not in others.

This commandment, then, like all the others, is about true authority, not a demeaning authoritarianism. This means that they are to be understood “gracefully” – as expressions of life, and love, and joy, and power, quite literally as grace: not as legalistic fiats, as might be supposed, given the clout of their divine origin. So here parents are to be honoured as those given the task of communicating the authority of God as the guarantee of a genuine freedom for their children.

This is why the fifth commandment offers a future promise: “that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God gives you.” Today Israel’s promise of a specific physical territory is unquestionably politically inflammatory. At the very least, we may well reflect that the only possible way to resolve the contemporary fate of the land of Israel/Palestine is this ancient promise of a grace – a grace now to be shared, rather than as an oppressive national self-possession.

At any rate, it is crucial to grasp that for the people of Israel, then and now, the community of faith and the social community are identical. The religious necessity of honouring parents is at the same time a cultural tradition. It was taken for granted, for ancient as well as modern Judaism, that fathers and mothers are to be human mediators of the promises of God to their children, with the consequence that parents are to be reciprocally honoured.

But not for long. As we heard in the gospel today, that given identity was radically, indeed explosively, called into question by Jesus,: “Truly I tell you,  there is no-one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake, and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age – houses and, brothers and sisters, mothers and children… In the midst of such radical disjunctions did you notice what is missing? Fathers. Why are there no fathers in this list? Because God has become the only necessary Father through the obedience of the Son.

What could be more iconoclastic in a patriarchal society than that! Now a true Son has emerged as the ultimate radical, reconstituting the whole Hebraic succession of generations of male and female parents and children. This means that this side of Easter, where we stand as Christians rather than as Jews, we literally have a new creation to explore, “a new land” to live in. Now that land is not just a piece of turf, but a world that is given to us from the hands of this paternally obedient Son.

But just here let us take the full weight of this revolution. In the gospel, the community of faith in him has been radically severed from the cultural community. Who would have imagined such a fulfilment of the Old Testament expectation of the promise: that here final authority is taken away from natural fathers and mothers? That is to say, “where God is”, parents and children by nature give way to parents and children by grace. That grace is a “Son”.

Now remembering that the entire people of Israel, male and female, were designated Yahweh’s “Son”, it is crucial that we understand that being a Son is not a gender word, but a theological designation. That is to say, in being a true Son, Jesus has at last accomplished what to that point was deficient by the whole people of Israel in enacting their “sonship”. This means that because the  “sonship” of Jesus is not a gender description, it is an inclusive possibility for both human daughters and sons. For this reason, a disciple of this Son, must renounce parental ties precisely because of the urgency of this promise. Parents who have understood this reformulation of the fifth commandment should be neither surprised nor resentful that this should be so.

But now we live in a society that increasingly celebrates not this theological disengagement envisaged by Jesus in the gospel, but rather an increasingly Western cultural disengagement from the Christian community that gave it its life. In varying degrees this has always been the case. But it is increasingly apparent that today the community of faith is in principle in the process of daily being severed from the wider society. This is inevitable when our contemporary culture insists that whatever “religion” might be, it must necessarily be a private matter.

The question then is pertinent. Has the original implication of the commandment any social future, not to speak of any radically reconfigured Christian form?  What sense can be made of the role of fathers and mothers in today’s culture – parents whose only purpose in the light of this commandment is to be mediators of a life-giving tradition: the promise and the mystery of the grace of God to their children?

Especially in our day do we face an even greater contemporary expression of the commandment’s distance from its foundation. Today we are required to recognise that we inhabit a culture neither envisaged nor comprehensible to that of our text, or indeed to that of every subsequent culture up to our present day. For example, what is the status or meaning of the commandment in the majority of Western societies that have made lawful same sex marriages where the duality of mothers and fathers is in principle rescinded?

In the same way, our text can make nothing of the provision for the bearing, or the adoption, of children to partners of same sex marriages. It is more often the case than not that in later life – when they become adults – such children are likely to want more than surrogate fathers and mothers. Will their search for their biological parents be a “faint echo” of the force of this ancient commandment: to honour father and mother?  Will they find themselves to be in a better or a worse position to receive the benefit of this commandment than the children of broken marriages, where fathers and mothers, though no longer living together, are nevertheless still in principle accessible to their children?

Perhaps it is too early to assess the implications of this change to the law that has now been enacted in Western cultures that were originally formed by the gender particularities of this commandment. At the very least, it now appears to make obedience to the commandment anachronistic in principle, if not seriously problematic.

Regardless of contested answers to this question, this fact is inescapable – that there can be no history if there are no mothers and fathers. And if there is no history, then there can be no God worthy of the name. Christians, then, must continue to hear the commandment’s ancient words of promise of parenthood in their original intention, no less as in their revolutionary reconstitution in the gospel.

To this end, we might well take to heart the declaration of the great third century Bishop of Carthage, St Cyprian, when he proposed: “You cannot have God as your Father if you do not have the Church as your Mother”.

If this be so, see how the commandment looks now:

“I am the Lord your God who brought you out of slavery”
(therefore) “Honour your Father and Mother”.

God and Church – a reconstituted Father and Mother – inextricably united as true source of healing in a now fragmented world. God as Father, Church as Mother: surely a climactic fulfilment of this fifth commandment.

So, remember this transformation when in our final hymn we will sing the lines: “Who from our mother’s arms – has blest us on our way” (TIS 106).

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5 May- The inversion of Saul

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Easter 3
5/5/2019

Acts 9:1-6
Psalm 30
John 21:1-19

In a sentence:
Conversion to Christ is an inversion of the world as we know and expect it to be

Saul’s Damascus road experience has long stood in the church as the archetypal conversion experience, looming large in the church’s imagination of what conversion is, at heart: sudden and ironic. Saul, the henchman of the religious authorities, suddenly finds himself in the employ of the enemy. But what does he now believe?

His new faith is summarised in what he declares to the surprised synagogue, ‘Jesus is the Son of God.’ To have become a Christian is to believe this.

I suspect that if there is anything which catches our ears in this six word sermon, it is not ‘Jesus’ but ‘Son of God’. This will be the case for believers and non-believers alike, although for different reasons. For those who consider themselves non-believers, the problem is ‘God’, to say nothing of ‘Son of God’. Among the various types of believers it is not ‘God’ but the ‘Son of’ which tends to cause a problem. These objectors might include Muslims, or Christian Unitarians, or Christians who are not Unitarian but wish that they were, for simplicity’s sake: God is a ‘simple’ concept which ‘Son of God’ seems to complicate unnecessarily.

For Saul what catches the attention is Jesus: ‘ “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” … “Who are you, Lord?”, … “I am Jesus…”.’

‘Son of God’ was an idea Saul knew very well, but to join ‘Son of God’ and ‘Jesus’ was to link apparently mutually contradictory terms. From this cultural and religious distance, we miss the contradiction and the scandal; it has become a merely ‘doctrinal’ point to assert or deny. ‘Son of God’ was originally a title of the king of Israel and so was easily transferred to the figure Israel came to expect from God, who would set right what was clearly wrong in the world. To suggest that a man who had been crucified was the Son of God was to say that God had failed. That is, God failed, unless something like a resurrection contradicted what was seen in the crucifixion. This would then be to say that Israel’s leaders had failed when they crucified him. Neither of these options was palatable, for obvious reasons. And so there is no godly place for either a crucified or a resurrected Jesus.

(It is in fact the same with most of the other titles used by Jesus – ‘Lord’, ‘Christ’, and so on. ‘Jesus is the Son of God’’, or ‘Jesus is Lord’, or ‘Jesus Christ’ are all contradictions-in-terms of the same order. They originally were addressed to the hopes and fears of the whole Jewish community. To fit ‘Lord’, ‘Christ’, ‘Son of God’ terms together with the crucified ‘Jesus,’ then, is like saying that black is white, or up is down – and believing this to make sense).

Saul, then, doesn’t simply come to have a new thing to believe about Jesus. Rather, if the crucified Jesus is the Son of God – the ‘king’ – then a serious shock is felt, with the effect that all things are now seen radically differently from how once we saw them. We could begin to imagine that God might be found in the brokenness of one of our discarded ones – the foundation of Christian ethics. God might be seen in the unclean person of the infidel. The whole, dirty world might be God’s. Thus begins the ministry of the Apostle to the Gentiles, and we are seated here this morning because of it.

Yet the contradiction between Jesus and ‘Son of God’ is scarcely an interesting one today. Who cares about the Creed? In the days after the resurrection – for the first few centuries even – the controversy between the synagogue and the church (and the academy, in a different way) was clear: accept the contradiction of terms, or not. After that, religious authority held sway on the identity of Jesus for a thousand years. Today, however, the average person in the street (and often enough, in pews) simply couldn’t care less: ‘Son of God’ is dead in the water.

Still, if we have no common sense of a messiah or anything comparable today – of which the nastiness of the election campaign is evidence enough – there are universally held values, of which our election campaigns are also evidence.

One of these values – very strong with us – is that we are, each of us, the most important person in the world, without reference to the importance of everyone else. This lurks everywhere. We see its effect in modern school principals living in fear of the next phone call from little Cklancy’s parents (now wondering why some other child was chosen for student representative), or in the very fact she is even called Cklancy, or in that her name is spelled with a K (granted, a silent K – you only pronounce the C). (At this point I ought to acknowledge that I’m called ‘Craig’ for similar kinds of individualist reasons, if now rather weak by comparison!) We see how important every individual is in the campaign propaganda requirement that everyone gets a tax cut in order to fund the increased services to which we have a right. We see it in the assumption that because I’ve got it I can spend it on anything I like. We see that I matter most in the otherwise contradictory rights to demand medical treatment for as long as I can breathe, or to demand that I be treated with death-dealing substances long before I would otherwise stop breathing.

The apparently ‘doctrinal’ question of whether or not Jesus is the Son of God seems to come nowhere near to this crucial engine of modern identity – the centrality of ‘I’. And yet, nothing ‘cruc‑ial’ – even such a godless thing as the individualism rampant in us all – is ever far from the ‘crux’, the cross (Latin).

If the shock Saul felt was the tying of the most important of things to the least important, then for us perhaps the shock of the gospel lies in the opposite: the separation of ourselves from the most important. To say, then, that Jesus is the Son of God, becomes saying that we are not divine progeny, to do and be as gods like to do and be. While the New Testament speaks occasionally of us as ‘children of God’, we are not directly so. Ours is only an adopted relation; only Jesus is a ‘natural’ Child. Jesus is the Child of God, and you and I are not.

To land it in relation to I-matter-most thinking: this is to say, Jesus matters more than you do. That Jesus lived matters more than that you have lived, and so also his death matters more than yours. The New Testament hints at this in its linking of Jesus to creation and salvation: this one is more important than all the rest, in the same way that the beginning and end are necessary for there to be a middle.

Saul went about the synagogues saying, ‘He is the Son of God.’ This can’t have meant very much to him at that early stage, other than that it turned his world upside down.

But evangelism does just this. It turns a world upside down. For some, this is immediately good news – ‘Jesus is Lord, and I don’t have to try to be’; this is the hallelujah of the broken-hearted. For others, it’s Saul’s punch-drunk, ‘Jesus is Lord? This is the disorientation of the proud, I’ve-got-it-all-together victim of God’s blinding love.

We might wonder what the world would look like – or even what the election campaigns might look like – if our political stars didn’t know that we know we matter most. Perhaps the struggle for the common good – which is surely somewhere close to the heart of our politics – would be articulated in a way to moderate our sense of need, rather than pander to it. Perhaps what always seems scarce might be shown to be more abundant than we’re usually told, if only others mattered a little more than we do. Perhaps our competitors, even our enemies, might begin to take on the form of ‘brother, sister.’ For Jesus, as the Son of God, matters most because such a Son of God as a crucified denotes one given for the life and well-being of others.

The church still says ‘Jesus is the Son of God’, even though it no longer has the cultural sense it did for Saul, but this is less a statement of a metaphysics than of the new order breaking into the world. To say ‘Jesus is the Son of God’ is simply to put him first, in order that we might come in a very close second.

To speak about Jesus in this way is to show forth a world
upside down, inside out,
back to front and,
for all that,
now just how it is supposed to be.

For the gift of such a renewing, re-creative word, all glory and thanks be to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, how and always. Amen.

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28 April – The Pointy End of John’s Gospel

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Easter 2
28/4/2019

Acts 5:27-32
Psalm 118
John 20:19-31

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

How was Thomas to know that the end of the story could change? Everyone knows that when a person is dead and buried, that is the end of the story. Friends and loved-ones will go on with their lives changed but it will not include the living presence of the deceased. How was Thomas to know that the Jesus story would not end like all other human stories?

Thomas is the archetypal sceptic. John’s gospel sets Thomas up as the sceptic on behalf of all the sceptics in the church through the whole life of the church.

It is a dramatic device that helps to draw us into the story. Sue and I recently saw an opera that had a changed ending. A character in the drama expressed the emotions of the audience on our behalf. Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg traditionally finishes with the girl standing looking adoringly beside her man as he succumbs to the sickeningly nationalistic arguments of the chorus and accepts the invitation to join the Singers in order to strengthen the domination of their culture. In a recent production of the opera the girl, without a word said (or sung) indicates her distain for what is being argued and her man’s compliance with the invitation. Instead of joining the cast in their adulations, she storms off stage. As the arguments to join the singers unfolds the audience grows in its understanding of why this opera was so loved by Hitler. The heroine’s reaction expresses the horror of a modern post World War II audience and makes it known on our behalf.

Thomas is the dramatic sceptic on behalf of us all. He will not believe that Jesus is alive until he sees him and touches the wounds by which he was killed. Time for a trivia question. How do we know that Jesus was nailed to the cross? Answer: because Thomas mentioned the marks of the nails in his hands. This is the only time in any of the gospels that nails are mentioned in connection with Jesus’ crucifixion. It was usual for the crucified to be with attached by rope. The Life of Brian is the best evidence for this.

So, Thomas stands as the representative sceptic to the resurrection. He does not explore any of the common conspiracy theories as to why the disciples thought they were seeing the Lord. They make intriguing reading – they include the idea that there was a quick substitute made at Golgotha, or that he only seemed to die. My favourite suggests that he was resuscitated and moved to the south of France with Mary Magdalene. No, Dan Brown did not invent that conspiracy.

So, how does John’s dramatic device work in his story of Thomas? Mary Magdalene told disciples that the stone had been rolled away. Peter and the Beloved Disciple inspected the empty tomb and then went home. Mary stayed in the garden and met who she thought was a gardener. Some art work I have seen recently explains her mistake. Jesus is depicted carrying a spade – very helpful. At the sound of her name she recognised the Lord. Mary is the first witness to the resurrection, and she tells the disciples. The same day Jesus appeared to the disciples and showed them his hands and side and breathed the Holy Spirit upon them.

So far belief has been dependant on seeing the risen Lord. It is not enough for Thomas to be told by the disciples. Belief for Thomas will require the same evidence as the others had. Seeing Jesus and the marks of crucifixion – the signs that the one who was dead is alive.

John the evangelist is starting to come to the pointy end of his gospel. If there is one purpose for his telling the story of Jesus that stands out above all others it is that the world should believe. The other gospel writers have a similar purpose, but John mentions the purpose at every opportunity. The word ‘believe’ arises nearly 100 times. That is why this part of the story is a pointy end. The circle of believers is opening out.

John courageously raises the possibility of doubt. In the late 1970s John Westerhoff, an American Christian Educationalist, visited Melbourne. One of the things he advocated was that the church tends to be in too much of a hurry to confirm and or baptise its members too young. He advocated that there should a be rite of passage for adolescents in which they are enrolled as catechumens and given permission to doubt, and that this rite should be celebrated on the feast of St Thomas.

In John’s story he grapples with the issue of doubt. But, more importantly, he deals with the issue of belief, of coming to faith. The intention of Thomas is that he will be the man of action. He will see Jesus. He will put his finger in the nail prints. He will put his hand in the spear wound. But faith is a gift of God not a human accomplishment. It is a gift to the first disciples who saw and touched and to those who follow who say they cannot see and touch Jesus.  In the event all the action is initiated by Jesus. Thomas looks and does not touch. Artists have led us astray on this point too. In some he conducts a gruesome forensic inspection. That is not how John tells it.

Thomas encounters the risen Christ and makes his monumental proclamation. No one has seen the situation in quite the same way as Thomas does at this moment. Yes, in Mark and Matthew the centurion acknowledges Jesus as God’s son, but in John it is Thomas who makes the credal statement, ‘My Lord and my God’. This is the pointy end because it ties right back to where John started – ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ Thomas is given the insight the one they all called ‘Lord’ is God.

Faith is Christ as Lord and God is not my accomplishment. It is given me in the church. It is in the church among other believing and doubting Christians that I discover Jesus alive. It is in the church with all its complicated structures, its petty disputes, its incompetence, its scandals, with all its signs of antichrist, nevertheless the Spirit of Jesus who taught love and forgiveness in the face of hate and vengeance, who touched the contaminated with compassion, who gave sight and insight and life, and who did this on a backdrop of complicated structures, petty disputes, incompetence and scandal.

The living light of Christ blazes precisely because he is set on a dark canvass. The resurrected life of Christ is set right up against the crucified death of Jesus. For me it works like art. In order for the artist to depict a bright image there must be dark shadow. Take a look at how artists depict light particularly in art depicting sunlight, just how much and how dark the shadow is. Without shadow, the eye cannot perceive that the sun is shining.

We await a day when the light of Christ will be perfectly perceived in a place where our perceptions will not need shadow or death.

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21 April – The wind blows where it wills – the vanity of the Christ

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Easter Day
21/4/2019

Ecclesiastes 8:6-8
Psalm 118
John 20:1-18

In a sentence:
The risen Jesus only confounds us because Jesus in his entirety confounded us

The stark world of Qohelet, the teacher in the book of Ecclesiastes, is not much different from our own, except in the brutal honesty with which he receives it.

Central to his account of life ‘under the sun’ has been the linked notions of ‘vanity’ and ‘chasing after wind’. On a first, fourth and tenth reading, these are clearly negative categories.

Yet reading him as we have – with the set gospel for each Sunday – they have emerged also with surprising positive connotations, even with significance for illuminating the gospel and the very character of God. On the first of these reflections on Qohelet I half-seriously tossed out the notion that bringing him into dialogue with the gospel might lead us to dare to speak of ‘the vanity of the cross’ which, by any other accounting, could only be impiety.

And yet that is where we have ended up – on Friday the vanity of the crucifixion and, today, the vanity of the Christ. What is crucial – literally, what ‘crux-ial’, ‘of the cross’ (Latin crux: ‘cross) – here is that for Qohelet, vanity is less a matter of vain emptiness and closer the literal meaning of the Hebrew, ‘vapour’ or ‘mist’. It is ‘ungraspability’ – pertaining to things which cannot be comprehended. The negative sense of this is the futile attempt to grasp the ungraspable world in pleasure, in wisdom or in work, in calculation or scheming.

But beyond this is a positive ungraspability: the very mystery of the world as God’s world, and so of God Godself. All that is and happens comes from God but it is not comprehendible how that is the case. God is just, and justifies, but the world is not and does not. Yet this remains God’s world, and we are given to live in it. This is ungraspability as a characteristic of the God-and-world thing itself. It cannot be denied, but just what and how it is cannot be said.

Something similar happens with ‘chasing after wind’. Negatively, this is the comic image of someone actually trying to catch the wind. But, positively, there is something at the heart of what we are which causes us to grasp after the wind, however comic that must be. We heard from Qohelet on Friday that God has put knowledge in us – the King James Version says, ‘he hath set the world in their heart, so that [none] can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end. (3.11). Chasing after wind is the necessary yet impossible thing: the felt need to grasp the ungraspable world and its ungraspable God.

It is, perhaps, not for nothing that the book of Ecclesiastes is framed by the compounded ‘vanity of vanities’ (1.2; 12.8): the world is ungraspable, and yet what else do we do but seek to grasp it? Vanity for vanity. Qohelet has to affirm and deny at the same time.

– – – – – – – – – –

We have heard this morning of Mary Magdalene, left behind in the garden by the tomb. Here she encounters – but does not recognise – the risen Jesus. It’s tempting – and typical – to imagine that grief obscures her vision, that she does not recognise Jesus because her eyes are filled with tears and the world is just a blur. But John doesn’t write history like this; psychology and physiology and physics – as we think about them – are nothing here. Mary not recognising Jesus is about him, not about her: he cannot be seen directly; he is ‘vanity’: vapour, mist, ungraspable, ablur.

The world is turned upside down not by vision but by a word: ‘Mary’. She is caught by the wind, and then comes the recognition: ‘Rabbouni’, or, Teacher (perhaps only coincidentally one of the translations English Bibles use for the name ‘Qohelet’…).

This is not yet what we might call ‘conversion’. Mary has heard and – now in that sense – sees something, but she has not grasped what has happened. She feels the wind, but has not grasped him. And there’s a sense in which she cannot: ‘Do not hold onto me’, Jesus tells her. It seems to her possible to grasp the risen Jesus – is he not just there, in reach? It is in this way that she ‘feels’ the wind.

But he resists. And this is not a ‘cringe’. Jesus does not fear her touch, as if she would contaminate him. And he is not in some way ‘charged’, that he might wound her if she touched him. ‘Do not hold me’ is ‘you cannot hold me’. Ungraspability – the best of Qohelet’s ‘vanity’ – is a characteristic of the risen Jesus and what he brings: ‘No one has power over the wind to restrain it’ (8.8).

This is not a ‘mystical’ thing – Jesus is not now special in a way that he was not before. This risen Jesus is the same Jesus she knew before, and the revelation in the garden is that Mary did not really know him before, as he might yet be known.

The story of the resurrection typically seems to us to present the problem of a violation of the times, to recall what we heard from Qohelet on Friday. The report of the resurrection troubles us because the time for living is over, and now death has its time: for everything there is a season.

We cannot come fruitfully to the resurrection from this perspective. It is sheer violation and is excluded by the prior conviction that time – or nature – can only unfold in one way, from a living Jesus to a dead one. We can imagine that there was a Jesus who said and did what is reported. We can imagine him being crucified. There are times for such things. But the risen Jesus eludes us, for such a risen Jesus is not so much ungraspable as impossible. If we start with a time for every purpose under heaven, we cannot get to the resurrection.

But the gospel itself makes a different case: it is not the times which give Jesus his possible shapes but Jesus who gives shape to the times. If, as the gospels assert, it was the same Jesus now risen who yesterday was dead and the day before still alive – then the dead Jesus and the once-Jesus before the cross are everything the risen Jesus is. There is no distinction: in the cradle, on the cross and under the crown as risen lord (cf. the Christmas carol, TIS 321), Jesus is the same miraculous thing. Incarnation at Christmas and Resurrection at Easter are separated only by that ticking of a clock which separates one happening from another. Time does not bind them, they are the bounds of time.

To say, then, ‘Jesus is risen’ is only to say ‘the Word became flesh’. But the ‘only’ is the clincher, the shock of Jesus’ ungraspability by Mary, or by us. ‘The Word become flesh’ seems to most believers to be easy in comparison to ‘Jesus is risen’. Yet there the great ‘Christmas-y’ prologue to John’s gospel means nothing without Mary’s confusion, her seeing that what is in front of her and cannot quite be grasped was always in front of her. It has now simply been displaced a little in time.

The ungraspability of Jesus-as-the-Christ – and now we dare to say, the ‘vanity’ of the Christ – is not his waft-y nature as a risen body or spirit. It is that he was ever the very presence of God, from the very first. What Mary thought she had seen before was just a shimmer on the surface of the real substance of Jesus. Now she is confronted with him as he has always been, and the difference between then and now is the difference between death and life.

‘You cannot hold on to me,’ the wind cannot be restrained. And yet this is good news because not holding, not grasping onto, not chasing after, yields all the gospel: Jesus goes where we cannot go, and the effect is that all that is his becomes ours: ‘my Father and your Father, my God and your God.’ The not-grasping of Jesus brings Jesus’ own eternity as our own.

And so Mary herself will begin to shimmer, and we with her. Those who are in such an ungraspable Christ are beginning to take flight.

This is the thought with which we ended on Friday: to be caught up by the unrestrained wind which is Jesus, is to fly. We will end the service today with the same thought from Charles Wesley,

Soar we now where Christ hath led,
following our exalted head;
made like him, like him we rise,
ours the cross, the grave, the skies.

Jesus is risen.

Life begins to shimmer.

Time being renewed so, there is nothing better to do, Qohelet tells us, than to eat and drink, and enjoy.

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19 April – Chasing the wind – the vanity of the crucifixion

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Good Friday
19/4/2019

Ecclesiastes 3:1-14
Psalm 31
Luke 23:13-33

In a sentence:
God makes the cross of Jesus into the unifying time of our lives.

‘For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die…’

With that confronting observation begins Qohelet’s famous account of what the world is like. It is an account of what is ‘the case’ with the world. We live in a world in which it seems that there is a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. People get married or are crucified, go shopping or get gunned down while at prayer – just as a matter of fact. Seeing that the world is like this does not in any sense justify this way of things. Qohelet only describes the way of things: the world as we experience it with up-times and down-times.

And he also does not do precisely what we are immediately tempted to do on hearing his poem, and more than tempted: Qohelet doesn’t ask the question, What time is it, now? We wonder, Is now the time for birth or death, for planting or for plucking up, for killing or for healing, for mourning or for dancing, time to defend or time to surrender? Is it a time to buy or to sell, to insure or to risk? It is a time to tighten or to liberate, a time to pay our debts or to borrow more? Questions like these are implicit in pretty much everything which appears on the pages of our newspapers or in dinner-table deliberations, indeed in the whole of politics at every level: What is the time? We can look forward to a lot of time-telling in the coming weeks of the election campaign…

To ask about the time is to ask about the responses required of us. The question about the times implies an ‘ought’, behind which always lurks some god or another, some sense for the order of things, or for the eternal (cf. 3.11). Our attempts to connect the times with eternity are what Qohelet elsewhere characterises as ‘chasing after wind’: the felt need to know where we are and how to act accordingly. This is in order to catch the elusive wind, in order to achieve the good and the right, in order to align ourselves to the true nature of things.

In various ways, Herod, Pilate and the religious authorities take a reading of the times. When they determine that it is a time to kill, it is not out of moral deficiency. So far as they can see, it is the right thing to do. Whether it’s Herod placating the Romans, Pilate placating the crowd or the religious authorities placating God, it is time to ‘pluck up’: ‘the wood is dry,’ toss it on the fire.

The crucifixion of Jesus is a reading and response to history with its times for this and times for that. As unpleasant as it is, it is time to kill, time to die. Sometimes we feel we can do no other. Deciding this – reading the times and acting accordingly – is how we seek to catch the wind. The crucifixion of Jesus, from this perspective, is no different from every other crucifixion, from every other choice for death. It is a calculation to catch the wind, to align ourselves to the order of things, to keep us safe. It is the ‘right’ thing to do.

All of this is to say that the church does not gather today or any other day to remember a crucifixion. Crucifixions are what happen in time – when the time is ‘right’ for such horrors, when the times ‘demand’ them. There have been thousands and millions of crucifixions and similar atrocities and tragedies.

We gather today not to recall a crucifixion but rather to contemplate ‘the cross’. The crucifixion of Jesus is just one more event in time but the cross of Jesus is not a mere time-bound event. The cross is not ‘in’ time but rather, as the hymn goes, the cross ‘towers o’er the wrecks of time’. Because of the peculiar light of Easter which shines back on Jesus’ crucifixion, the church sees in the cross of Jesus something which exceeds the ups and downs of history.

‘The cross’ is the crucifixion of Jesus taken to a whole other level. At this level, the distinctions we draw between life and death, between building and destroying, between love and hate, between peace and war, are blurred. The crucifixion, as something which ‘happened to happen’ is one half of these couplets and not the other; the crucifixion is death, destruction, hate, war.

But the cross is not just one half of these couplets, it is both halves. The godlessness of crucifixion becomes the glory of the divine Son; the sacrifice we make to placate God becomes God’s offering to reconcile us; the body we break becomes the body we are destined to be part of; the death we determine is necessary becomes the life God gives not out of necessity but as freely offered gift.

The world of many times – the world of anxiety-inducing oscillations of up-times and down-times – is a vale of tears. ‘Weep not for me,’ says Jesus; ‘Weep for yourselves, because you cannot tell the time. If they do this when the wood is green, what will they do when it is dry?’

This is the pathos in Good Friday: we cannot tell the time, else we would not have crucified the Lord of glory. This is mere crucifixion. All we can see here is death – a time to die.

The surprise is that the gospel in Good Friday is that God cannot tell the time, either. And so in God’s hands death can become a means of life, sin can become the shape of forgiveness, unbelief can open the path to faith. This is the cross. It is the word of the psalmist this morning: My times, O Lord – whatever they are – are in your hands, and this is enough (31.15).

The cross is liberation from the vicissitudes of time. A God who cannot tell the time, but who is truly God, is ready for anything.

The crucifixion of Jesus, as a reading of the signs of times, and as an attempt to save ourselves from each other and from God, is a mere vanity. We do not catch the wind.

But with a God who cannot tell the time, even our failure here is enough. God makes the cross of Jesus into the time of our lives. We do not catch the wind, but it catches us.

And, if we will but

spread our wings,

see

how we

will fly.

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7 April – Against ‘building the kingdom’

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Lent 5
7/4/2019

Ecclesiastes 5:1-20
Psalm 126
John 12:1-8

In a sentence:
We are not called to do God’s work, but to do and be as God has given us

We’ve heard from Jesus today what is perhaps the most scandalous thing he has to say in the gospels, at least to the ears of the modern, left-wing-ish liberal: ‘you will always have the poor with you’.

This, in fact, is heard in three of the gospels, with the exception of Luke who, perhaps because of his sense that the poor and the marginalised symbolise something central to God’s work in Jesus, omits at least this version of the story and these words, although he has a story which is similar in some respects (Luke 7). (We might note in passing that John’s remarks about Judas here are unique to him, and something of a distraction; in Mark and Matthew’s versions, it is the disciples as a whole who say what Judas says, without apparent ulterior motive).

The problem for us is that not always having the poor with us is one of the aspirational engines of modern liberal democracy, although we’d have to say, looking at the evidence, that Jesus has the right of it.

So far as our friend Qohelet is concerned, the poor don’t loom large as an explicit concern. He does lament the situation of the oppressed (cf. 4.1-3) but he comes at poverty more from the perspective of risk and unpredictability: the rich cannot know they will not one day be poor, the righteous might well be accounted unrighteous and the living might suddenly not be.

Both Jesus and Qohelet, then, are in the same place on this, even with their very different framings of the matter, and it is a place quite different from where our political efforts are typically centred.

But there are two further questions about charity raised by Jesus’ response to Judas: What is charity, and When is it? These questions arise from the contrast Jesus draws between ‘you will always have the poor with you’ and ‘you will not always have me.’

If we ‘always have the poor’, What then is the meaning or purpose of serving the poor? What is achieved if, like Sisyphus rolling a great stone up the hill only to see it roll down again, we will not see the end of poverty through our efforts? It is obvious that, in any particular instance, what we do will make a difference for that individual. This is truly wonderful but it is not our political dream: the eradication of need. Some answer to this question – to the ‘What?’ of charitable work – is important for us as we consider once again our motivations and intentions in auspicing Hotham Mission.

Related to this is the second question arising from Jesus’ word here: the ‘When?’ of charity. When do we ‘not have Jesus’, so that we are then to serve the poor? Jesus’ point seems to be that not having him is having the poor; that that is the time for charitable work. Yet this also is less straight forward than it might seem, for the ‘when’ of Jesus is always coloured by Easter. The resurrection speaks of a continuing presence of Jesus (something like what Matthew has Jesus say at the end of his gospel account: ‘I am with you always’). It is too simple – and just not correct – to say that Jesus is no longer with us. All of this indicates that what Jesus means here – what the relationship is between the worship of God and the service of those in need – is not as clear as we might first think it to be.

Elsewhere we hear from Qohelet that ‘there is a time for every purpose under heaven’, and wonder what time is it now: time for service or time to worship, time to work or time to ‘enjoy’? We’ll come to consider that text more closely on Good Friday (I think!) but the idea of a ‘time for everything’ throws over to us the pressing question of what time we find ourselves in, here and now. This is the urgent question of all politics. The cause of all human anxiety is that we might not be in the right time, doing the right thing for this particular time. Is it the time for worship or for service? Should a years’ wages of perfume be spilled on the ground or sold and the money given to the poor? What should we spend on accommodating the life of the congregation? How big a percentage of the church budget should Hotham Mission claim?

To all of this uncertainty and anxiety, a strange word from Qohelet: ‘With many dreams come vanities and a multitude of words; but fear God’ (5.7).

Vanities and multitudes of words are the ‘form’ of getting the time wrong and sustaining ourselves in the error of ‘many dreams’. It is Qohelet’s ‘chasing of the wind’ to misconstrue where we are and what we are doing. With a federal election looming, let us be prepared for a vain multitude of words!

But, while it is easy to slip into cynicism here, Qohelet is not cynical and neither is Jesus. They ‘merely’ call us to the truth. This is largely by negative means in the case of Qohelet and largely by positive means in the case of Jesus, but it is the truth nevertheless in both cases.

Jesus’ ‘You will always have the poor with you’ and Qohelet’s caution against vain dreams and words are statements of what is the case. There is no accusation here, unless we persist in vanity and fear not God but some lesser thing. There is no permission to passivity here with respect to the needs of the poor or, more generally, with respect to the need to work that we and others might live. These are to be held together, appropriately.

The gospels finally resolve the worship-service question by Jesus’ own self-identification with the poor. To turn to Jesus is to turn towards the outcast and oppressed, the seemingly godforsaken and all-forsaken. In the case of John’s account of Jesus, the cross of the godforsaken becomes the throne of the divine Son. To see the one is to see the other, if the ‘seeing’ is sometimes worship and sometimes loving service.

In the case of Qohelet, the ‘fear of God’ he commends matches his other principal commendation, heard again today: ‘it is fitting to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of the life God gives us’ (5.19). Qohelet’s ‘enjoyment’ of food and drink and each other is a refusal to allow the poverties of life under the sun to be feared. It is a refusal to be distracted from what is good and worthy and approved by God.

Only God is to be feared or, what is the same thing in Judaism and Christianity at least, only God is to be worshipped, only God is God. This is freedom from all utopias and visions, from all dreams and multitudes of words, ever threatening to crush us with the responsibility of making them real.

Our vocation, whether through a structure like Hotham Mission or in our quiet assistance of our next door neighbour, is not to usher in the kingdom. Our vocation is to know what time it is.

It is the time to live and to love for life and love’s own sake, and to leave the rest – whatever ‘the rest’ is – to God.

In this, may God ever keep us occupied with the joy of our hearts (5.20). Amen.

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31 March – Against wisdom (and foolishness)

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Lent 4
31/3/2019

Ecclesiastes 2:1-11
Psalm 32
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

In a sentence:
Not what we do, but what God has done, is the heart of the matter

Qohelet is traditionally identified as King Solomon, not least because he claims to have been king in Jerusalem and the book is clearly a work of considerable wisdom, for which Solomon himself was famous. There are, however, other hints in the book which undermine this identification. Whatever the case, our writer was certainly a person of considerable means, and so he resolves to ‘make a test of pleasure’. He performs great works, acquires slaves and beautiful things and people: ‘I kept from my heart no pleasure.’ Yet, for all, that he determines again, ‘all was vanity and a chasing after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.’

His efforts then continue beyond what we heard this morning, although now in a different direction: he turns from material indulgence to wisdom and work.

12So I turned to consider wisdom and madness and folly… 13Then I saw that wisdom excels folly as light excels darkness. 14The wise have eyes in their head, but fools walk in darkness. Yet I perceived that the same fate befalls all of them. 15Then I said to myself, “What happens to the fool will happen to me also; why then have I been so very wise?” And I said to myself that this also is vanity. 

17So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me; for all is vanity and a chasing after wind. 18I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me 19—and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish? … 22What do mortals get from all the toil and strain with which they toil under the sun? 23For all their days are full of pain, and their work is a vexation; even at night their minds do not rest. This also is vanity.

In the end, then, both profligacy and wisdom with serious hard work lead him to the same conclusion, to which he will return several times: all is vanity, and so

24There is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink, and find enjoyment in their toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God; 25for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment? 

What we have heard from Qohelet today has surprising parallels to Jesus’ parable of the two sons. In both there is extravagance, and hard work, and eating and drinking.

The parable is familiar to most of us – the irresponsible younger son who eventually comes to his senses, the waiting father who welcomes him home and the complaints of the older and hard-working brother about his father’s behaviour. The last time we considered this parable (March 3 2016), we noted that the two sons, despite who looks to be right and who wrong in the story, related to the father in the same way: according to an economy of exchange rather than of gift. Both are concerned with what the father owes them, the one hoping to earn a servant’s living and the other hoping to prove worthy of his inheritance.

The action of the father, however, reveals that – in Qohelet’s terms – each invests in a vain chasing after the wind. The foolishness of the younger son’s early behaviour is self-evident. Then he comes to his senses and wisely plots a course back to the safety of the family home, only to find that he has misread his situation. There is no folly in the behaviour of the older son but he employs much the same wisdom as his younger brother, which also indicates a misreading his own situation. In neither case do either receive what they think they are due, as their due, as an earned reward. The younger discovers that he need not earn his place with his father, and the older hears that he will inherit regardless of what he does.

The surprise here is that, despite their efforts, both in fact catch the wind, the ‘wind’ being here the father’s favour. Or perhaps, they are caught up in that wind.

And so we stumble upon a surprising amorality in the story of the two brothers, despite the strong moral overtones in the contrast between their behaviour and often drawn in reflections on this parable.

This amorality is in that, while wisdom is to foolishness as light is to darkness (as Qohelet admits, 2.14), both the foolish and the wise end up in the same place. A problem many have with Qohelet, and which will only be exacerbated in next week’s reflection, is that it’s not quite clear where right and wrong are located in the world as he describes it. More to the point, he questions whether we can actually locate them (cf. 6.12; 8.1,17). And, if that is the case, how do we orient ourselves towards the right, the good?

For Qohelet, this orientation occurs in what he calls ‘enjoyment’ – there is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink and find enjoyment in their toil, for this also is from God (2.24). This is not hedonism; it is life lived with a ‘serious lightness’. This is a hard-earned wisdom which allows that it might still be found, in the end, to have been foolish.

What this means, practically, is the pursuit of life ‘as if’ life depended on the pursuit, but knowing that it does not. It means hard work, loving service, costly sacrifice, careful consideration and refinement – in our relationships, in our discipleship, in our worship, in our studies and vocations. Qohelet calls us to a serious life, a ‘wise’ life.

But a life of serious lightness is all these things in the spirit of freedom – the freedom of those who already have what they work for.

What Qohelet sees we already have is life and God’s blessing on what we do (9.7). This he allows us to mark in the time of enjoyment, symbolised in the feast.

For Jesus’ parable today, the terms are different but the point is the same. The irresponsibility of the younger son and then his attempt to manipulate his father on the one hand, and the unhappy efforts of the older son on the other, are both shown to be far from the heart of things.

The heart of things is the father’s very own heart, which claims both of them regardless of what they do. This, too, is marked by a feast – to which the foolish and the wise both find themselves welcomed. The feast is the sign of the folly of those who are loved by God but do not yet know what that means.

While we are so concerned with what we are doing, the gospel draws attention to what has been done: we have been begun in the Father and completed in the Jesus the Son. All that remains in our meantime – in this life under the sun – is that we open ourselves to the Spirit for which we prayed in our opening hymn: the ‘blessed unction’ which is ‘comfort, life and fire of love’, which anoints and cheers our mortality, and teaches us to know our beginning and our end – here, in God.

And so we break bread and bless the cup, in order that we might begin to learn this lesson, to God’s greater glory and our richer humanity. Amen.

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24 March – On not dying too soon

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Lent 3
24/3/2019

Ecclesiastes 11:7-12:7
Psalm 63
Luke 13:1-9

In a sentence:
Death can kill us before we die; this is the ‘unrepentant’ life

I have wondered for some time whether there might be something to be said for an occasional sermon which reflected on ‘the art of dying’.

As morbid as that might seem as a theme, reflections on death – properly Christian reflections, at least – are not about dying in itself, but about life and its relationship to those deaths in our lives we can’t avoid, regardless of how hard we try to forget that they are already with us, or are coming.

Knowing what death is, and where it is, are important skills in the art of dying, and something of this knowledge is treated in this morning’s readings.

From Qohelet, we’ve heard a fairly straightforward exhortation: Make the most of it, because you’re going to die in the end.

If nothing else, Qohelet is starkly realistic about the fact of death. The offence of death, its ungraspability (‘vanity’) and its unpredictability (more vanity) are close to the centre of his thinking. Life is vanity, and then you die.

In this, Qohelet relentlessly strips away any illusions we might allow ourselves about death as we go about our seemingly lively lives. But this is not in order to glory in death. As we have heard, he still holds that it is better to be a living dog than a dead lion.

Qohelet would simply have us know what death is and where it is. So far as he can see, death has the last word. This being the case, he is concerned to know, What is that word – what is spoken – and when, precisely, is it uttered?

There is also a lesson about death in the gospel reading we have heard today, although it is less straightforward than it might first seem.

Jesus reminds the crowds of two recent news bulletins which must have horrified them in the same way we’ve been horrified by the recent outrage in Christchurch. The question is put: do you imagine that those people died in that way because they were worse sinners than anyone else? No, he says.

At this point, Jesus is in close accord with Qohelet, such as in what we heard from him last week:

‘There is a vanity that takes place on earth, that there are righteous people who are treated according to the conduct of the wicked, and there are wicked people who are treated according to the conduct of the righteous (8.14).’

Contradicting one stream of conventional wisdom thinking, Jesus and Qohelet say that we cannot conclude from when and how someone dies whether they were righteous, or not. Death is neither a sign of life nor a sign even of deathliness.

But then Jesus seems to contradict this: ‘but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.’ On the one hand, ‘perishing as they did’ is not a matter of repentance; on the other hand, it seems that Jesus then declares that it will be. This latter seems also to be the point of the parable of the unfruitful fig tree.

The only resolution here revolves around what might be meant by ‘perishing as they did’. The point would seem to be not that they died, but that they died unrepentant. Sin is not the cause of their death but colours it.

The warning, then, is not that buildings will fall on – or bullets will rain down upon – the unrepentant, but how tragic it is when death comes to the unrepentant. To ‘perish as they did’ would be too perish not knowing that there is something of which to repent, that there is something to lay aside, that there is a deathliness already in us, diminishing us.

One way of hearing such an account of an unrepentant death is as a call to ‘ticket to heaven’ repentance: ‘Repent now, lest you step out from this place and fall under a bus’. This is not what Jesus speaks of here, as large as the idea has been in the history of evangelism, as if sin has relevance only to what happens when we die and not to what is happening while we are still alive.

Qohelet helps again here. Unrepentance in Qohelet’s terms is not to understand our lot. It is to live vainly, emptily, oriented towards things which, in the end, do not really matter, which cannot be relied on and so which turn our lives into a chasing after wind. It is, in effect, to have died before death comes (cf. Ecclesiastes 7.17). It is for death’s last word to have been uttered too soon. The unrepentant life carries death with it, is death’s grip on us before we have died.

There is a poignancy in the illustrations Jesus uses here. A building is going to fall on him. Even more suggestively, his blood will also be mixed with that of the sacrifices.

If we imagined it were possible to be open minded about the moral meaning of the crucifixion, we’d have to say with Qohelet that there is nothing in the manner of Jesus’ death to tell us whether he was righteous or unrighteous, any more that Jesus allowed such a reading of those who died under the tower and under Pilate. To the dispassionate observer, Jesus just dies.

But the church is not open-minded here, for we consider the cross in the peculiar light of the resurrection. This is a peculiar light because it shines only on the cross. If that light makes us reconsider Jesus’ death, it makes us reconsider also his life: that he continued to do and to say and to be in the same way regardless of how much larger the possibility of a crucifixion loomed.

This was not a matter of ‘necessity’, in the sense that he ‘must’ die according to our traditional atonement theories. Jesus continues along the path on which he began because to turn aside from the likely outcome of a crucifixion would be to die before the building actually falls. This is the unrepentant life he calls us to turn from.

What then does repentance look like? It depends on what deaths we are already dying. But we get a general notion from Qohelet. His counsel this week – to enjoy the days of youth – may seem to some here to come a little late, but his point is what we emphasised on Ash Wednesday: it is vanity not to see that death comes, the ultimately vain, ungraspable thing: ‘all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again’ (3.20), vanity of vanities.

But it is vanity also to try to calculate death, and so let it darken the day before the night comes. To live in death’s shadow is not to live. It is to die too soon. This we heard in a different way last week:

for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them in their toil through the days of life that God gives them under the sun. (8.15)

The vanities of life – the misty vapours of chance and possibility, of work and reward, of life and death, the gamble on righteousness, the contradictions of justice – must not diminish the best that a human life could be, in a time and place.

In this sense, we might dare to say that Jesus on the road to Jerusalem is a life enjoyed.

Part of the art of dying is to set death in its proper place. When we do this, as Jesus did, everything else which happens – even our perishing – is life.

The lively kingdom of God draws near to displace the kingdoms of death; repent, then, and believe the good news.

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17 March – Chasing the wind

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Lent 2
17/3/2019

Ecclesiastes 8:14-17
Psalm 27
Luke 13:11-35

In a sentence:
We are not called to chase the wind but to become the wind

Human history – the sphere of decision and action – is the sum of our responses to the world as we see it to be, or imagine it to be, or as it has been described to us. The world works – or is supposed to work – in particular ways, and history is what happens as we anticipate and respond to that perceived order of things.

The problem is – as Qohelet and we know well enough – that things don’t always go as expected. And so, as an example from today’s text: there are righteous people who are treated according to the conduct of the wicked, and wicked people who are treated according to the conduct of the righteous. We don’t have to look far to confirm this. As a righteous response to what we have heard from God, we might go to prayer in the mosque, or the church, and find ourselves not in heaven but in hell.

This violation of what would seem to be the appropriate order is part of what Qohelet means when he names as ‘vanity’ our attempts to manage life. Such vanity is not a matter of stupidity or foolishness but has to do with the nature of things: ‘no one knows what is happening under the sun’, we have also heard from him today.

‘No one knows’ because the true order of things – which we never quite grasp – manifests itself among us with the character of ‘wind,’ which cannot be held still to be measured or calculated. And so history – our effort to discern the order of things and to secure ourselves – becomes a matter of ‘chasing after wind’, one of Qohelet’s favourite phrases.

Through Lent we’re reading Qohelet in dialogue with the set gospel for each Sunday to see how Qohelet illuminates the ministry of Jesus, and vice-versa. At first sight, the relationship between the two readings today might seem pretty obscure, but let’s see…

Jesus receives visitors from the Pharisees who carry a warning: King Herod seeks to kill you. In response, Jesus names Herod ‘that fox’ – the cunning one, the calculator, the strategist. As a ‘fox’ Herod suddenly looms large as Qohelet’s vain schemer – the one who thinks he or she knows the order of things and plots a future according to that knowledge. Herod’s calculation has measured Jesus and plotted a future without him. Again we might think of angry men with guns in a mosque.

What Jesus doesn’t do in response to Herod is enter into a reactive scheme of his own. Jesus has no plan. We heard last week of his temptation in the desert, in which he is offered a number of strategies for making his case as Messiah to the people – feed them with bread; impress them with miraculous demonstration; let the end justify the means. Each one of these would be in its own way the kind of vanity which Qohelet decries: an attempt to catch the wind.

To all of that Jesus answered no, and the same answer is implicit in his response to Herod. Rather than a counter-strategy, Jesus sends the messengers back to Herod: ‘Go tell that fox, I am the wind. I must be on my way, and he will not catch me until he can say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord”’.

The true order of the world which Qohelet names the wind is Jesus himself. Everything we chase after – everything which matters – looks like Jesus. Here is what we strive after and what we cannot catch. This is what we seek in our churches and our mosques and our synagogues, our universities and our stadiums and our shopping centres, in our sea changes and tree changes and mid-life crises. Whether we go to these places in order to ‘pray’ according to the pattern of that particular place, or go there to kill, in all this we are chasing the wind, trying to catch up with God, and so with ourselves.

What hope is there for us? Only the hope which is Jesus himself, one of us and yet the wind, tangible yet ungraspable, what we work so hard for and yet an unearned gift.

Qohelet’s answer to those who exhaust themselves chasing after wind is sometimes criticised as defeatist, a mere resignation in the face of life’s difficulties, even self-indulgent. We heard this morning:

I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them in their toil through the days of life that God gives them under the sun.

Read most positively, Qohelet’s ‘enjoyment’ is a letting go of our ever-frustrated attempts to catch the wind. It is a coming-to-terms with life as it just incomprehensibly is. In a world which runs in the way that Qohelet describes – from pillar to post, from prayer to cold-blooded murder – in such a world Qohelet’s ‘enjoyment’ amounts to becoming something like the wind itself – an incomprehensible contradiction of what seems to so many to be to be natural purpose of life: chasing what cannot be caught because we cannot grasp what is happening under the sun.

For the gospel it is the same, although we have a different way of saying it. The gospel draws links between the body of Christ which was Jesus’ own body before Herod and on the cross, and the body of Christ on the communion table, and the body of Christ which we are made to be as we receive him in the bread and the wine. To become entangled with Jesus, then, in the way that we are called to be, is not a matter of making sense of the order of the world, not a matter of chasing after wind. It is a matter of becoming, in him, the wind.

This is not a solution to the problems of life under the sun; ‘solutions’ (so-called) are a chasing after wind, as will be almost everything which is said in response to last Friday’s horror. Jesus is not a solution to the shocks which life sometimes presents but it is an answer to them.

Jesus must haste to Jerusalem because that is – vanity of vanities – where the prophets die. His mode of being does not solve the problem. The catastrophe of the cross, of the just being treated according to the conduct of the wicked, is not averted. But is catastrophe and not tragedy. Jesus has already died to Herod and Caiaphas and Pilate in his commitment to continuation on the path that God set before him, wherever it might lead. The cross is the sign that Jesus is no chaser after wind; he is the wind, the free one, despite everything which happens to him.

Jesus’ commitment is Qohelet’s ‘enjoyment’ – not hedonistic indifference but the embracing of a way of being which will strengthen us ‘in our toil through the days of life that God gives us under the sun’.

Do we not need such strength, to toil, to resist, properly to enjoy and to grieve, according to the season?

In our baptism, we entered into the death of Jesus himself – not simply the death he died on the cross but that death to chasing the wind which was the mark of the whole of his life.

Let us, then, look to Jesus not as yet another a chasing of the wind,
but that we might further grow into our baptism by learning the wisdom he is,
and begin to become for the world what he is becoming for us.

Posted in Sermons
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