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Easter 6
25/5/2025

Psalm 67
John 2:13-22

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The housing crisis will likely kill us all (a thought to which I will return!).

The housing crisis in Australia featured as one of the central issues in our recent federal election, with the major parties making the kinds of funding promises they hope voters will not recognise are likely to make matters worse.

My interest today is not to propose any solution to the problem, but to unpack a bit how we think about this (and other) challenges we face. I remarked a moment ago that this was “a” central issue in the lead-up to the election. Putting the matter this way might be the real problem: that we think this to be a single issue, treatable in isolation from other pressing concerns which we think about in the same, isolated kind of way.

How might we think about this differently, speak the problem in a new way?

It has long been observed that there are things which can be said in one language that are difficult to say in another. This is sometimes the motivation people have for learning different languages: books are different in their original languages, and we can even find that we are ourselves different when we speak a language other than mother’s tongue.

With respect to the housing crisis, it would help us to speak a little Greek. In fact, we need just one Greek word – a word buried in a group of English words that designate the biggest challenges we face not only as a society with a cost-of-housing problem but also as humankind as a whole. That little Greek word is oikos, which means “house” (not surprisingly!). In the English words of interest today, the Greek oikos has morphed into the letters E-C, which form the first part of economy, ecology, and ecumenism. These are, more literally, oikonomy, oikology, and oikumenism. Literally, they mean something like the rule (Greek nomos) of the house, the plan (Greek logos) of the house, and the house inhabited (Greek menō, “abide” – etymology guessed).

This is to say that what we call “the housing crisis” is connected to the biggest crises pressing in on us: the perpetual financial crises of our economy, our looming eco-environmental challenges, and ecumenism (generalised from its narrow ecclesial application to local social and wider geo-political relationships). These are all “housing” issues, having to do with where, how and with whom we live.

The house, understood most generally as the space we inhabit, is fundamental to human being. And each house is related to or within every other house, so that any “housing crisis” is a crisis of how we are connected to our systems of production and exchange, our environment, and our social and political relationships. The scarcity of resources, the rising seas, and the wars that threaten to kill us are all “housing” crises. We can’t house ourselves locally because we can’t live appropriately in the broad inhabited world.

And this brings us, finally, to our text from John’s Gospel today: “Zeal for my Father’s house”. This is a classic Gospel text. On an “obvious” reading, the point seems to be, Don’t make the temple into a place for exchange which takes advantage – money-changing, profit-making and rent-seeking. This is a “holy” place, within which only certain words and actions are appropriate.

Those of us who know the story well also know well this understanding of its meaning. But it’s much less helpful a reading than it first seems. This is because it fails to take the next step to ask, Well, where should the money-changing, profit-making, and rent-seeking take place? Is God less annoyed about rapacious economics outside the temple than inside of it?

This is to ask, what does “my Father’s house” refer to? Does the demand for sanctity and holiness relate only to the temple, to the partitioned “religious” space? Does the contaminating marketplace within the temple threaten God with a housing crisis, displacing God from the “holy” place? Or does God have a broader accommodation than this, outside the temple as well as inside?

This bumps us out of mere moral thinking. Moral thinking is always about location in time or space – what I do when or where. Our text today seems to pose a moral question of the “where” kind: what can I do in the temple? An example of the “when” dimension of morality is the prohibition of adultery: No, you can’t have sex with him/her/them when you’re married to someone else (cf. Romans 7.1-3). Morality divides the world into different times and places.

To imagine the temple to be one place and the world to be another is to say there are different moralities operating in those two spaces. This is the problem with the standard reading of the cleansing of the temple, and why the housing crisis will probably kill us all. We imagine that Jesus’ attack upon the temple is about where God lives and what is required when in the presence of God, as if there were places where God is not present. The holy oikos (house) doesn’t really touch upon the wider oikonomy, oikology or oikumenics which constitute the rest of our lives.

And so also for the housing crisis: we treat it as if what has precipitated the crisis in affordability and availability of an oikos is different from the wider economic, ecological and ecumenical crises. But recognising the “house-ness” which operates across the whole of our being makes all places the “same”: all connected, all affecting each other, all sharing in the same problematic.

We don’t have enough houses to live in because we don’t live appropriately in the one house we’ve been given: this world with its exchanges and communities and environment. There are money changers, profit-makers and rent-seekers in God’s worldwide temple. Honesty requires that we admit that we are often enough these ourselves. We are a house divided against itself, and so there are not enough houses. This is the heart of our housing crisis: the assumption that my house has nothing to do with yours, that God’s house is just another building on the street, that the many spaces of the world are more important in their difference than the one space we co-inhabit.

While Jesus’ attack, then, looks to be focussed only on a single place, it has to do with everything, everywhere, all at once. This is not zeal “for my Father’s house” but zeal for my Father’s world. And this is what will get him killed.

And us, too. If – to moderate slightly my sensationalist headline – the housing crisis per se won’t kill us, we will all die in the midst of a housing crisis, whatever Mr Albanese or anyone else manages to achieve, because our economic problems are ecumenical and ecological ones: we don’t know how to live together with justice and peace.

I remarked to some colleagues recently that my preaching seems to be getting a bit “darker” as time goes on. By this, I mean that I’m increasingly aware of the risk of saying stupid things – stupid in the sense of not taking reality seriously. Faith and unfaith alike too often happily skate along sentimental surfaces as if the ice were not paper-thin and the world below not dark and cold. Faith, at least, should not do this; let us leave that to those who believe lesser things.

But political pessimism about what we might be able to achieve is what the gospel would call realism: God’s house – the world – has been made a marketplace, the abundance of the earth has been filtered through the economics of scarcity, and our common humanity has morphed into a competition for survival.

The bad news of the gospel is that the one through whom the world came into being as God’s own home has himself come into the world and been rejected. This is God’s true housing crisis: not that worldly things would push God out of the temple, but that the world itself refuses to be God’s temple. And so God is pushed out of the temple of the world onto a cross. The bad news of the gospel is that our homelessness unhomes God.

The good news of the gospel – as John’s Gospel puts it – is that God claims the cross as a crown (cf. Joh 12.32); even here, homeless, God reigns. There is no pushing God out of the world because there is no “outside” of the world; there is only God, in whom all things have their being in God (1.3).

And so the resurrection has to happen, because God insists that the world continue as God’s own home, because God insists that even at our lowest ebb – the crucifixion of Christ – we know ourselves as God’s own.

God insists on being light in the darkness, life in the midst of death, home for the homeless.

One light,

one life,

one home

for one family in God.

God’s zeal is for this.

Let our zeal be for the same.

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Easter 5
18/5/2025

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

Sermon preached by Elika Schaumkel

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When I crossed the familiar shores of Tonga to embrace a new land, I felt like a small canoe sailing great, uncharted waters. Being a fisherman’s daughter, the ocean was my heritage and teacher. My father didn’t just talk to us about the sea, which was for him both a source of livelihood and a lifelong lesson in adapting to the elements and accepting any fate they brought. The ocean has no fences, it invites all who would dare to sail upon it, he used to say. Trust its size; it reflects God’s infinite love.

This knowledge conditioned me for the uncertain, instructing me to share my heart with new circumstances and individuals. Just like the ocean allows all rivers to its embrace; when we love and hold others in our hearts without questioning, we transcend the shackles of unfamiliarity and fear. This acceptance voyage mirrors the course that the early church had to chart, as God guided them to an ever-greater embrace of humanity.

During easter season is a time to reflect and rejoice as we ponder the triumph of Christ over the grave and the life-changing impact of His resurrection. Today, as we reflect on Acts 11:1-18 and John 13:31-35, I wish to draw our attention to the word “Acceptance” a theme that shines through the two passages: “Acceptance” and its deep relationship to the kind of love Jesus is reminding us to embody and to cross all the “boundaries” that have kept us away from one another.

Peter also talks about a visionary experience from God that had caused him to violate Levitical law by eating with non-Jews (Acts 11:1-18). His divine vision, though it contradicted his cultural and religious mores, also was the means to introducing him to God’s larger story of acceptance into his people. The way that Peter is led to Cornelius, a gentile centurion, and the coming of the Holy Spirit, is the story of how a human centre can switch from exclusion to inclusion. Initially, it was resisted by the Jewish believers, but it was the door thrown open wide to the Gentiles.

In John’s Gospel (13:31-35), after Judas’ exit from the Last Supper, Jesus addresses his disciples regarding the extent of his love and his glorification through the cross. He gives

them a “new command”: “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” Jesus makes love the distinctive badge of his followers and holds them to a standard of acceptance and mutual caring.

The Acts and John passages focus on this revolutionary idea of love and acceptance. Its acceptance in Acts is reflected when Peter himself realises God’s love does not play favourites. This was an important step in transcending cultural and religious barriers to include all in the family of God as demonstrated in the baptism of Cornelius and his family.

In Jesus, love becomes the commandment, the basis of a community built and defined by self-giving. The love of Jesus demonstrated by his sacrifice, sets a pattern for us, both in how we treat people and in what we tolerate.

Today, these references invite us to reconsider our borders and openness to others. In a world so often defined by social barriers and cultural chasms, we should seriously consider if our congregations reflect this radical hospitality modelled by the first generations of God’s people. Acceptance is not passive, and it is not tolerance; acceptance is engaging in approaches to destroy the walls of racism, religion, and culture.

Acts challenges to welcome those who are different from us, calling us to see God’s presence in the development of relationships. But for us to get out over the walls we’ve built, and to recognise that others are created by God in the same form as we are, as Peter recognised that about Cornelius, we must be willing to break the limits of our comfort zones, and to trust God is with us in the journey.

John is urging us to love as deeply and genuinely as Christ himself does – love that moves, forgives, and unites. Both as a church and as individuals; are we willing to make friends in these uncomfortable places?”

The good news in both passages is that God’s love is always bigger and wider and deeper… and more amazing than we think it is. The Resurrection gave the apostles the power and it gives us the same power to tear down dividing walls. In love and acceptance, we do actually ‘obey’ Jesus’ command and manifest God’s kingdom here on earth. Both Peter’s vision and Jesus’ command expose a divine acceptance, revealing a God who is actively reaching towards every human heart.

As we absorb these truths, I invite you to ponder on these urgent questions:

• How can we actively work to break down prejudices that impede acceptance?
• Are we willing to be like Peter, ready to stretch past our culture and religion and welcome others?
• How can we make sure our love stays vibrant, sacrificial, and reflective of Christ’s example?

Perhaps by opening our hearts as wide as God’s embrace, love all people and welcome them, and declare that we will break down any boundaries from now on through radical love. Let us be an Easter people who practice revolutionary love, living our faith as one that beholds the divine even in the eyes of others.

Amen.

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Easter 4
11/5/2025

John 2:13-25

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Our life begins again with the cold, hard love of God. (I’ll come back to this! )

“Many believed in his name because they saw the signs that he was doing.”

Is this the reason that the government of Anthony Albanese has been re-elected with such an overwhelming majority, that “many believed in his name because they saw the signs that he was doing”?

This is a half-serious question – even more than half serious! As we noted last week, ours is a world in which we are constantly seeing signs, fitting them into frameworks of meaning and determining whether or not to trust them. Despite most conviction to the contrary, “believe” and “trust” are not religious acts. They are social and political – deeply human necessities. We are always engaging with signs and committing ourselves because of them.

Of course, the dynamics of politics and voting are complex, and it’s not quite clear what signs the Prime Minister was making or how they were understood by those who voted for his government. But politics is very much about signalling: “See what we have done”, “Hear what we promise to do”.

Last Sunday, our interest was in meaning, which we took to be a matter of location. Something has meaning when it is located within the way we experience the world. The crowd in the reading placed the signs – located them – and so they placed Jesus also. And we might note here in passing the challenge the religious authorities throw at Jesus after his attack on the Temple economy: What sign can you show us for doing this? , which is, again to recall last week, a question of how Jesus “fits”.

So also with our politicians. They become meaningful for us when their signs (or at least the promise of signs) are meaningful to us and how we think the world is, or should be, or shouldn’t be.

But unlike how it works in the political system, the belief of the many in Jesus because of the signs he has been doing is balanced by Jesus’ own scepticism: “Jesus on his part would not entrust himself to them because he knew them. ” The word the Greek text uses for Jesus “trusting” himself is the same word which it uses for the crowd’s “belief” in Jesus, so that we could then translate the Greek something like this: Many believed in Jesus’ name because they saw the signs that Jesus was doing, but Jesus himself did not believe in them. That is, Jesus and the crowd disagree about the signs he is making.

Perhaps this is obvious, but less obvious is that it’s quite different from what takes place in our political processes. The politician must necessarily cast herself as one with those who have voted for her; we “believe” in her, and she implicitly believes in us. Our voters and our elected representatives agree on what the signs mean. In more extreme political systems, such as those tending towards fascism, it becomes necessary that there is an even closer identity between the political leadership and the populace than mere mutual belief and trust. Vladimir Putin is Russia, Donald Trump is America, and Viktor Orbán is Hungary. In such places, it is not so much that the opposition is excluded; it is that the opposition is unnecessary: everything is order, such is the agreement of the people and the leader, such is the mutual trust, such is the sense for the signs.

The crowd’s belief in Jesus is this type of identification, and Jesus’ unbelief in the crowd is the rejection of this identity. A little later in the story, we will hear,

When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world. ” 15 When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.            (6. 14f)

“Jesus, Jesus, he’s our man! He’ll Make Judah Great Again. ”

But crowds, of course, are fickle. The turn of the story in the Gospels testifies to this, as does the strange quiet that has doubtless descended in the kitchens of the Dutton, Bandt and Daniels households, among others. We might wonder whether the signs change, or the framework of meaning within which we try to locate them changes, or whether it’s we ourselves as interpreters who change. Whatever the case, we with our signs and meanings are highly unpredictable, and it’s here that our signings and believings part company with those of Jesus.

Because if the scriptural text expresses scepticism about our capacity to attribute meaning correctly and about our shifting allegiances, the same text nonetheless insists on God’s persistence with us. If Jesus does not believe in those who believe in him on their own terms, he nonetheless loves them.

For the many, trust and love are equated, so that we can only love those we trust. But for God, lack of trust is not grounds for lack of love.

Last week we heard that the world “did not receive him” and today that “he knew what was in everyone”. By themselves, these are dismal declarations about the human being, but only if we read them by themselves. Because the point of these observations is not to emphasise the darkness in the world but the persistence of the light: the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it (1. 5). Despite our wrong reading of the truth, still that truth persists with us. God’s unbelief – untrust – in us is no barrier to God’s active, persistent love.

And so, to emphasise out the contrast, we might risk putting it this way: God’s love is a “cold” love. If warmth describes the affection of the electors and the elected, of lovers who recognised and trust each other, then the love of God in Jesus is “cool”, cold.

But it is no less love for that coolness. Cold love is the love which comes before trust, the love which loves another despite herself, the love which is not reciprocated on love’s own terms.

Warm love generates itself out of the positive feedback of fire for fire. This is nature’s love, and it matters deeply because it’s the love that keeps the world turning, if only as a wheel on a cobblestone road.

Cold love is not natural. It is the love which is commanded.

It is the love which is not yet reciprocated and might have to suffer misunderstanding and rejection.

It is the love that persists not for its own sake, as warm love often does, but first for the sake of the beloved.

Cold love matters because warm love’s turning of the world is often cruel and towards darkness, and the fires of warm love are easily extinguished.

But it is the gospel, and it is the reason we are here today, that cold love sees and acts, persists and overcomes.

If we mistake the signs God makes, God just keeps making them. And making them. And making them.

This is love, John says elsewhere:
1 John 4. 10…not that we loved God but that God loved us.
And loved us
And loved us
with a love as hard and unwelcome as the cold of a tomb,
until the love which affronts us like death proves itself, in fact,
to be the source of life in all its fullness.

If God in Christ knows us, knows what is in us, this is not the bad news of exposure under harsh light but the good news of a love hard enough to undergo anything, durable enough to overcome anything.

Jesus comes not to condemn us but to love us, to death.

This is the cold, hard, persistent love by which our life begins again, in which we have our meaning, and with which we are sent into the world: to love as God has loved us.

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Easter 3
4/5/2025

Psalm 30
John 1:1-13

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Most of you probably noticed that I set some homework for this morning, as preparation for what I want to do with our Gospel reading for today. The homework was to look at an editorial in The Guardian on Good Friday, the editors having succumbed to the seasonal temptation to express an opinion about the Christian Easter confession.

I suspected at the time that the editorial was probably good ground for a sermon, as some of the best sermons are those that respond to silly things that seem to be entirely reasonable and rational.

Just in case “the dog ate your homework”, a quick summary: the article proposed an answer to the “ultimate question” – the meaning of life – and this for all those who can’t anymore cop the Christian answer. The problem with the article is that it doesn’t wonder about the meaning of meaning, and so it finally offers a solution which simply restates the problem.

Meaning has to do with location. This is not simply the coordinates of a thing. It is how a thing fits into what matters to us. Most of the time, our perception of what is going on around us is highly selective. We only see what matters. As you walked into this space this morning, there were a thousand things you might have noticed, but you only noticed a few – that the place was laid out as it usually is, who was in it to say hello to, and whether anyone was sitting in your seat.

If anything unusual crosses our view, either we simply don’t notice it or, if it asserts itself and demands our attention, we process it in terms of what we already know, for better or for worse. That is, we find a way to locate the new thing among our old things, and so give it a place. It’s in this way that meaning is location. The meaning of things has to do with their location within our particular story of the world.

This is not all that remarkable, but it helps us to see the pathos of The Guardian’s question about the meaning of life. This is not about how we attribute meaning to some new encounter “out there”. It asks rather, what is the system of meaning itself by which we can experience the world around us? Put differently, a question about the meaning of life admits that we who ascribe meaning to things by locating them in a wider picture have lost the picture. And, in the process, we have lost ourselves and now are just one more thing bobbing around in a sea of possible meanings, wondering whether there is such a thing as an ocean. To ask with Kenneth Williams (in The Guardian piece), “Oh, what’s the bloody point?”, is to declare, I don’t know what story I’m in; I don’t know where I am.

We all recognise the pathos of this, and most of us probably feel it; Christian faith doesn’t make us immune here. The experience of meaninglessness, as an experience of displacement, is almost endemic. Ours is a “post-era” that understands itself to varying degrees to be post-Christian, post-patriarchal, post-colonial, postmodern, post-truth, even post-human. If you find yourself wondering whether or not you’re a racist, or what a man or a woman is, or suspecting that these “were and always will be” the sovereign lands of the Wurundjeri people, or maybe even why we don’t now have a hung parliament in Canberra, you’re experiencing a loss of meaning – a “post”-induced loss of location. Our era has rendered us “psychic” refugees: dislodged in our hearts and minds, if not literally forced to flee our homes.

Having lamented this meaninglessness and that it cannot sing Easter Alleluias, The Guardian’s conclusion is to restate the problem, only now as the solution. The article proposes that we just have to live a “fitting” life, and that a “life well lived has its own logic”.

Yes, indeed!

But the very crisis of meaning is the crisis of not being able to “fit” things. What is a fitting life? – This is the question with which the article began. The crisis of meaning is precisely a crisis of being turned back upon ourselves to construct our own story, and our lacking the wherewithal or the references to do it. And this crisis forces us, for sheer sanity’s sake, either to withdraw into binge-watching other people’s lives or to construct lives with their “own logic” – lives, that is, of competing and conflicting ideas about what “well-lived” actually means. Such a half-brained solution to so serious problem is just more fuel to the fire.

For the problem is a real one. An un-storied human is a dead person walking; this is the meaning of crucifixion. And if “a life well lived” is no solution, it’s because the problem is not understood. And so neither are Easter Alleluias in The Guardian’s understanding a solution.

And this brings us, finally(!), to our snippet from John’s Gospel today, for it touches upon the crisis of meaning, then and now.

[Jesus the Word] was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. (John 1.10f)

He was in the world, and the world had its being through him, yet the world could not place him. Jesus arrives as himself the “location” of the world, as its meaning, as that which gives us our orientation and place. What then occurs does so between our inability and our unwillingness to recognise this.

Yet, to those who could place him, the text continues, he gave “power to become children of God” – power, that is, which locates us, power which brings meaning. But the word “power” here is misleading. The Greek text has a word which is usually translated “authority”, although not in our version just here. Because we typically equate power and authority, a distinction between the two seems a bit pedantic. But power and authority are better distinguished. A bulldozer has the power to stop traffic by virtue of simple physics: it’s big and heavy, and there’s no getting around it. A petite police officer, however, while having no physical advantage over moving traffic, has a uniform that indicates her authority to call a halt, and the cars still stop. Authority has to do with agreement, with location and with meaning. An authorised police officer has been author-ed into the lore of the road – she has been written in.

To those who did receive the Word, John says, that Word “authorised” them – wrote them in – as children of God. To believe in Jesus, on John’s understanding, is to have found yourself written into the story, to have been located, to have been made meaning-ful.

The Christian meaning The Guardian purports to “envy”, then, is not the promise of a postmortem eternal life which, by its very nature, dislocates us from here to some future time.

The true “meaning of life” in Christian faith comes from being authored by the Wordly God. Most of John’s Gospel has to do with the dislocation of meaning – “How can these things be?” cries the exasperated Nicodemus, the “teacher of Israel”, the expert in meaning (John 3.4,10).

To be authored as children of God is to be storied in the story of Jesus himself. This includes Easter’s resurrection glory, but also Good Friday’s glory of the cross. It includes the gift of love’s embrace but also the hard command to love. It includes the promise of meaning but also the disorienting upheaval of a rebirth.

The meaning of life is a question we ask when we’ve lost our story, when we’ve lost ourselves. And there’s no finding our way home again on our own, there is no “fitting” into what has no shape.

But it’s another story – now our story – if when we are lost someone comes looking for us. We are then the found, and this is where our story begins – precisely as those found, and not as the lost.

To have been found, to be written in as loved; this is the meaning of our lives: lost but now found, dead but now alive.

And so we are called to love as we have been loved, precisely because love is the only way anyone has a meaning and place which accords with what they are: those destined to be authored as the meaning of God.

Love then. Love and love. This is our meaning. And God’s.

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Easter 2
27/4/2025

Genesis 3:1-10
Psalm 32
Mark 16:1-8

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Another week, another violation of a ceasefire, another woman dead because a man thought she crossed a line, another despairing suicide. So it seems to go. For the most part, these things wash over us, for we are accustomed to the presence of death.

On any ordinary day, of course, our own failures or excesses are generally much less dramatic than all that. Yet here too we are constantly assimilating and normalising human frailty and failure.

In Christian thinking, human weakness has generally fallen under the catch-all category of “sin”. Sin has encompassed simple “naughtiness” at the trivial end of its spectrum, through to total depravity at the oppressive end.

But, in the book many of us considered in our recent Lenten studies, theologian Rowan Williams beautifully undercuts this too-easy moralising of sin: “Our failures are all about our wanting to be somewhere else”.[1] Sin is about our unwillingness to be true to where we are and to do the things which are demanded of us here; our problem is we are too often simply unable to be “present”. Marital infidelity seeks to be “somewhere else” than with this person and what he or she needs or can give. “Just one more episode” shifts us into another place where there are no phone calls, visits, or housework awaiting our attendance. Comfort food and escaping into retail therapy are very much our strong desire to be elsewhere.

By such means, we strike a bargain in life by which we settle for a shrunken world and experience, what Williams calls “peace before light”. This is a peace in which we escape into a relatively safe space by denying inconvenient truths about ourselves in the world. It is a kind of peace, in the sense that we survive. But it’s not an illuminated or liberated life.

Another week, another broken ceasefire, another buried truth, another crucifixion. So it seems to go.

The responses of Jesus’ friends to his arrest and crucifixion – their desertion of him in particular – can also be seen to be assimilations and rationalisations. They too wanted to be “somewhere else”. We can imagine the confused self-justifications of those who had been so close to Jesus and so bravely imagined that they would stick with him: I had to do it. I couldn’t stop them. It was only enough that I could save myself.

And then comes the sad existence of the mere survivor. Now it is done, is passed, can’t be changed. And so I must find a way to live with myself. Life without truth. Peace without light.

There is tragedy in the way we grow accustomed to living with the corpses of missed opportunities – things taken from us or things we have denied ourselves because we have not been able to be where we are, because we have missed the moment out of a desire to be somewhere else. Peace before light.

But what if the corpse of one of our missed opportunities were to move? What if that which we have somehow managed to put to death for ourselves refuses to remain dead but rather returns to us? What if our dead refuse to confirm our version of how we have come to be where we are, why we are justified in our failures, why we had reason to be afraid, why it we though it necessary to deny what we truly believe?

Were one of our buried failures to move, to return to us, then a new possibility emerges: peace after light. This light would be a piercing one, cutting through every shade of grey, causing us to squint for its brilliance. To borrow language from Mark’s gospel this morning, this is a light which would see us to turn and flee from the tomb, “for fear and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid”.

Why this strange response to what is supposed to be overwhelmingly good news?

[1] Rowan Williams, Christ on trial: how the gospel unsettles our judgement. (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2003), p.133.

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Easter Sunday
20/4/2025

Isaiah 25:6-9
John 20:1-10

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“A certain flock of geese lived together in a barnyard with high walls around it. Because the corn was good and the barnyard was secure, these geese would never take a risk.

One day, a philosopher goose came among them. He was a very good philosopher, and every week they listened quietly and attentively to his learned discourses. ‘My fellow travellers on the way of life,’ he would say, ‘can you seriously imagine that this barnyard, with great high walls around it, is all there is to existence? 

I tell you, there is another and a greater world outside, a world of which we are only dimly aware. Our forefathers knew of this outside world. For did they not stretch their wings and fly across the trackless wastes of desert and ocean, of green valley and wooded hill? But alas, here we remain in this barnyard, our wings folded and tucked into our sides, as we are content to puddle in the mud, never lifting our eyes to the heavens which should be our home.’

The geese thought this was very fine lecturing. ‘How poetical,’ they thought. ‘How profoundly existential. What a flawless summary of the mystery of existence.’

Often the philosopher spoke of the advantages of flight, calling on the geese to be what they were. After all, they had wings, he pointed out. What were wings for, but to fly with? Often, he reflected on the beauty and the wonder of life outside the barnyard, and the freedom of the skies.

And every week the geese were uplifted, inspired, moved by the philosopher’s message. They hung on his every word. They devoted hours, weeks, months to a thoroughgoing analysis and critical evaluation of his doctrines. They produced learned treatises on the ethical and spiritual implications of flight. All this they did.

But one thing they never did. They did not fly! For the corn was good, and the barnyard was secure!” (Søren Kierkegaard)

(Hold that thought!)

The difference between Easter and Good Friday is not the difference between life and death.

The difference between Easter and Good Friday is not the difference between now and some distant, promised future.

And the difference between Easter and Good Friday is not the difference between a question and an answer.

Good Friday and Easter do not differ in any such way, despite how often we hear them contrasted like this. The difference between Good Friday and Easter is just the mode in which they say the same thing. To speak of Good Friday and Easter is to extend an invitation to answer a question: What is the nature of the time in which we live?

On Good Friday, we saw Jesus’ refusal to take seriously the time-telling of Pilate and the other worldly powers. These had determined that now is the time of death’s shadow, and our lives should be ordered accordingly. But Jesus refused to be untrue simply because of the threat of death. In this, his death was a triumph and no simple moral catastrophe. The cross indicated in its opposite Jesus’ sense of the times as alive.

The Resurrection similarly re-reads the time of the world, which

brings us to our text from John today, and in fact just the first few words in the Greek: “…on the first day of the week”. In this seemingly harmless little detail we can read the whole significance of the Easter event. Early in the morning, while it was still dark, the news of the resurrection begins to break. Or, more profoundly, in that still-darkness of this particular “first day”, God says once more, Let there be light.

This particular “first day of the week” – is the first day of the new creation, when again the chaotic deep and void are disrupted by divine order, when death is shown to have been defeated as a life-denying power and shadow over human life. With the resurrection of Jesus, the times change: our experience of the nature and potency of our time changes.

This is the equivalence of Good Friday and Easter: Jesus’ freedom on Friday is now revealed as our own possibility, if we would accept it. The Resurrection is no mere “nature” miracle – no mere display of divine power over natural death. It is a vindication of the Jesus whose death looked like the triumph of barnyard fear, which makes the resurrection less a natural miracle than a social and political judgement. The point of the proclamation of the Resurrection is not that anyone might have been raised from the dead, but that Jesus was risen – a re-assertion of the one who was discarded. Jesus’ refusal to acquiesce to the life-denying, death-imposing powers is vindicated: the one who is said to have been raised is declared – in that raising – to be one who died innocently and unjustly, but also freely and without fear of death.

The event of Jesus’ resurrection, then, is not simply the undoing of the death anyone of us might die. It shines a light back on him and says, Die like this – which is not to say, Go and get yourself crucified, but rather, Live not in the shadow of death.

This is to say that Easter doesn’t present to us a problem about whether or not the dead can rise; this is just too abstract, too preliminary. Easter rather presents a question: “What time is it?” Is it the time of death and decay, or the time for life?

Or, to put it differently, together Good Friday and Easter pose a stark and real challenge: Do we believe that anything truly new is possible? Because if the dead no longer stay where we put them, everything is up for grabs.

“It was the first day of the week…” It is today the first day of the week, not because it is Sunday but because a new kind of day has dawned – the day of the new creation, a time alive with possibility. And so, in a sense, every day becomes that first day of the week because in the new creation all days are now days on which we might hear that Christ is risen; all days are now days in which, if we would allow it, we too might be drawn into the light of the new creation; all days are now days in which hope might be lived and rejoicing might be heard.

It is usually the case that, under the threat of death, of failure, of loss, we search out places where the corn is good and the barnyard is secure.

But, in Good Friday’s Easter and Easter’s Good Friday, all that belongs to Jesus is given to us: the cross, the grave, the sky.

And so the new time of Easter is the possibility that we might fly.

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Good Friday
18/4/2025

Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9
John 18:28-38a

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Over the last week or so, when I probably should have been doing holier things, I’ve enjoyed revisiting the first season of the British TV series “Cobra” on SBS – a story in the “political thriller” genre.

The precipitating crisis in the story is the impact of solar flares on electricity infrastructure, but the real crises are in the human drama which unfolds around the natural disaster. To begin with, there are not enough replacement transformers to fix the network in one go, so the government must decide who stays in the dark. This, of course, becomes a politically charged decision and so subject to judgment and eventually leads to violent civil uprisings. In the meantime, an immigrant detention centre is compromised, spilling dangerous detainees into the countryside, raising the xenophobia setting to “Shrill”. Then comes the otherwise unconnected death by drug overdose of the friend of the Prime Minister’s daughter, his daughter having provided the drugs. The dynamics of reputation and privilege now enter the mix, the daughter being a “privileged white woman” whom (it’s presumed) the establishment will seek to protect. In another thread in the story, the PM’s formidable Chief of Staff is wrong-footed by the unexpected return of a long-lost lover, for whom she falls again, only to discover that he is now an underworld hitman – not a good look for the Prime Minister’s most trusted confidante. And, of course, being set in the UK, the Prime Minister is constantly under threat of being undermined by enemies in his own party.

Though obviously not quite our own story, all this is “a day in the life” of any one of us. If not solar radiation, it’s failing health; if not a drug overdose, it’s rising interest rates (or falling rates – it doesn’t really matter); if not falling in love with a hitman, it’s the surreal world of the promises of candidates in election season.

In more theological or faith terms, the political thriller and our own stories are instances of what the Bible calls “flesh” – the world in its antagonised orientation away from God and its disorientation within itself – a kind of crush. Within this tense space, we grasp after a sure hold, or test the ground for something solid which won’t fall out from under us as soon as we transfer our weight. In this, and again in more explicitly faith terms, we each seek a kind of transcendence: a foundation, a coherence, a lodestar. We draw from our personal reference points what we must now do. We leverage what we hold to be true, to be reliable.

And this brings us, finally, to our Gospel reading this morning, another political thriller. In the thick of it, Pilate asks Jesus a question about transcendence: “What is truth?” – What is it (if there is any such thing) above us or below, before or after, which gives sense, meaning and security to what we do and say and are?

It’s not clear how seriously Pilate asks the question; it has the feel of sneering, cynical disappointment – Truth? What is that?! – as if he imagines the transcendence of the Roman Empire to be the only truth that matters. But so far as the gospel-writer is concerned, the exchange is deeply ironic. The reader sees what Pilate does not: that Jesus himself is the answer to the question: Jesus himself is “the truth”.

By itself, this might be amusing if not very illuminating. But the Gospel-writer John has more to say to fill this out.

The cross is less of a catastrophe in John than in the other Gospels. In Matthew and Mark, we hear Jesus’ Gethsemane prayer against the price of the faithfulness, and then the cry of dereliction from the cross. There is nothing glorious about the crucifixion there. But in John, we hear instead that Jesus will not try to pray the cross away because being “lifted up” onto the cross is also a coronation, a glorification of Jesus. The truth is not merely rejected or even crucified by mistake; the crucifixion is truth’s moment. It is here, on the cross, that the character of truth is revealed. To state it a little wrongly but in helpfully stark terms: for John, Jesus must be crucified if Pilate is going to have an answer to his question. It is the crucifixion which presses the revelation of the truth to its utmost.

This is not easy to get our heads around. But we can put it another way, almost as strange: John presents the cross as the one, transcendent thing – as that which is over, or under, or before, or at the end of all things. As abstractly theoretical as that sounds, it means that the worst Pilate can do to Jesus – and indeed, it is a terrible thing – does not affect the truth of Jesus; rather, Pilate’s violence reveals the truth Jesus is.

We reach for transcendence out of the desire to overwhelm what opposes or threatens us. We look for a lever which will move the seemingly unmovable; we grasp after More in the face of what seems to be Too Much: power, cunning, strategy. And so finally Pilate, finding himself firmly stuck in the middle of his own political thriller, reaches for that transcendence which is the state’s monopoly on violence, and overwhelms, and Jesus is sentenced to death and dies. Jesus dies as he does because Pilate is overwhelmed by the threat he is to Pilate’s own world.

But to say another strange thing, the “real” death of Jesus is not the crucifixion. It is that he has already died to the threats arrayed against him. Jesus died as he does because – unlike Pilate and the rest of us – he is not overwhelmed by the threat of death. Jesus’ own crisis is not that he might be crushed but that he might choose something less than faithfulness to what is true – that he might choose something less than free humanity in the God who does not threaten to overwhelm but sets free from all fear.

This is to say – again, very strangely – that Jesus’ death on the cross is not merely something he suffers. It is something he achieves. The cross is Jesus’ own transcendence of the fears and untruths arrayed against him. In this way, the crucified Jesus is the truth itself.

The bad news in all of this is that ours is and remains a crushed world. We are overwhelmed, and overwhelming. We live our lives as if they were political thrillers with their unpredictable twists and turns, and as if we don’t know how the story is going to end.

But friends, spoiler alert: We. All. Die. In. The. End.

But this is only bad news if we are not reconciled to it. If we do believe it, then the question about truth is not what transcendence we can leverage against the threat of death, but how are we to live the life we have?

What is truth?, Pilate asks.

Jesus answers,

Death.

Has.

No.

Dominion.

Pilate, you have nothing to fear.

Mine is the Way,

the Truth,

the life.

I live,

die and

live again

that you might know the truth

and that the truth might set you free.

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Lent 5
6/4/2025

Philippians 3:4b-14
Psalm 126
John 12:1-8

Sermon preached by Andrew Gador-Whyte

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I don’t need to remind you that we are living in a fairly grim time for political discourse. There have always been political shouting matches and claims to moral superiority. But what’s somewhat different at present is the degree to which political voices are pursuing moral certainty over and against the other, and the violence we have witnessed in that. It’s the level of incommensurability of our political identities. Incommensurable, that is to say, unable to be at the same table.

Nothing is gained by engaging in platitudes, by telling each other to grow up and start talking. We’re in deeper mire than that, we are living from different premises, we are locked in something we cannot get ourselves out of by our own efforts.

We in the church are implicated in this seeming disintegration of a common language. And yet, we are the Body of Christ. That is, we are people belonging to this world whose life together is to be a sign of God’s kingdom coming into being in exactly this kind of world. A world that has been pursuing a righteousness of its own at the expense of trust. And a world in need of a joy that can only be created in it by confrontation with the Other. In confrontation with One who suffers at its hands and in solidarity with it.

In Philippians, Paul is encouraging his community at a time of their suffering and his imprisonment. Others might see these things as a sign of failure. But for Paul, it’s even possible to see their suffering and his imprisonment as a sign of their belonging in the Body of Christ, their fidelity to their vocation, and their solidarity with the Crucified one.

And through imitation of Jesus Christ, through solidarity with him, and by means of his love that the Spirit creates in us, it is even possible that their lives may come to be marked by joy – a joy that not even imprisonment or state-sanctioned violence can take from them.

The joy Paul is speaking about it is the fruit of relationships and consciences ordered towards self-giving, the fruit of minds formed by the serving logic of the Crucified.

Life in community as the Body of Christ means having our faculties of reason and logic radically reoriented by confrontation with the Crucified God. Paul has described this as the Mind of Christ, something that is to characterise the community as a whole. And by grace, and through our relationships, we are enabled to grow in virtue – in purity of intentions, in responsibility to our neighbour, in absolute commitment to the world Christ has redeemed.

In Philippians, some in the community seem to be seeking circumcision. In a predominantly Gentile community in a Roman colony, it might have been about seeking the legal protections afforded to Judaism in the Empire.

Whatever the reason, for Paul, Gentiles seeking circumcision represents a kind of failure of trust. It seems to represent a search for moral certainty and moral achievement. And for Paul, this confidence in our own moral security is at the expense of learning to live with confidence in Jesus Christ.

Paul contrasts seeking this confidence in the flesh, this ‘righteousness of my own’, with a confidence in our belonging in Christ. This is our confidence that the Crucified continues to identify with us in his resurrection life.

What we strive for, like the athlete in Paul’s metaphor, is a life of knowing Jesus and imitating Jesus. Because we trust God has been adopted us, we no longer need to try to prove our worth: to ourselves, to our neighbour, to God.

Whenever we try to prove our moral worth, there are always vertical and horizontal implications. From a vertical point of view I am failing to trust God’s unconditioned desire to accept us. From a horizontal point of view, because I have set up a standard of right I need to prove to myself, I also end up judging or excluding my neighbour.

To know Christ is to accept my neighbour as accepted by Christ, not because of her moral goodness. To know Christ is to accept myself as one incorporated into this community despite my moral failing.

To strive towards this goal is to seek a renewed life of obedience and holiness, a life of serving the Crucified One in the world, in our neighbour. But there is no longer anything ‘behind’ our strivings. What we strive for is to know Christ in eternity: the prize is only Christ.

Life in the Body of Christ is a growing into solidarity with the suffering Christ, whom we also recognise in the suffering of our neighbour. Our baptised life together is a life of learning to trace the way to Golgotha liturgically with our own steps. And we do so always in the knowledge that our fidelity can become a hospitality to the stranger. God enables our lives to be an invitation to the stranger to join in to that liturgical procession.

The motivation we are all in the process of unlearning is the desire for moral security over and against our neighbour. The motivation we are all beginning to learn, in imitation of Christ and one another, is joy.

Joy is the simplicity of acting in response to an encounter with the living Christ. Joy is living in the knowledge that the Crucified one has returned to us in forgiveness. There is no absolute moral certainty to be found here, no certainty that we have acted rightly and not been found wanting. The joy that animates our life together is only the certainty of faith, the certainty that Christ is in our midst and does not refuse to eat with us.

Joy is being confronted by the forgiving victim who calls us by name. It is the joy of first being forgiven, and that forgiveness then illuminates how we have spent a lot of our lives trying ‘to be right’.

When Mary anoints Jesus’ feet, she does so out of joy in the unconditioned love of God, who in Jesus has borne her sorrow at her brother’s death and raised her brother to life. In reply to Judas’ outrage, Jesus doesn’t provide a moral justification at all. What Jesus recognises in her is an authoritative response of joy, a joy that has been created in her by the Other’s love. The logic of her action is not moral, but rather, liturgical.

As the Body of Christ, we are given as bread for a hungry world, and what this means is that our life together can be a hospitality to a world that does not always recognise its hunger. We are invited to be formed in a life of service, unselfish prayer and discipline, action in solidarity with Christ in the world. And we take up that invitation, in order that our life together may begin to create space for those outside also to be pierced by an encounter with the risen Crucified One.

We strive to know Christ, in order that our life together may reveal to others that they are invited into the freedom of trusting Jesus, and reveal to them how much they too have been living out of a desire to be right.

And our city, our culture is in dire need of this kind of joy. We have to be willing to offer this city and this world that kind of hospitality. The Eucharist places us in a new solidarity with those with whom we simply cannot agree to disagree. Our ordinary refusal to divide the table despite our conflicts can be an example, an invitation, and an act of hospitality to this kind of world.

At this table we can trust Christ to mediate between us, to make us audible to one another. Here Jesus places us in solidarity with the stranger, even the enemy, the peace we cannot create for ourselves. Here we can become the kind of people who anoint the feet of our ideological enemies, the kind of people who welcome the other as though welcoming Jesus Christ. And Christ enables this difficult solidarity to be an act of solidarity with him in his sufferings, and a sign of his resurrection life in our midst. Amen.

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Lent 4
30/3/2025

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

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Let us imagine that I owe EEEE $10,000, and that I’m happy about this – partly because I needed the money, and partly because I know what I now need to do, and can do, which is pay back the loan. And, in due time, I repay EEEE according to our agreement – at a very fair interest rate – and we are done. This is what an “economy of exchange” looks like – a simple engagement in which “this” is exchanged for “that”, obligations are met, and we both know that the transaction has come to its end.

Now imagine that NNNN gives me $10,000. I’m now very happy, because he doesn’t want repayment; this is a real gift and he just wants me to enjoy it. And I do enjoy it.

A week later, I bump into NNNN at café when we both front up for our morning coffee. And he is his normal friendly self, acting as if nothing has happened. But I wonder to myself, Should I offer to buy his coffee for him? After all, $10,000… And so I do offer, but he smiles and refuses. He pays for himself, takes his coffee and goes his way. And I think, What was all that about? Should I have insisted? Was he testing me?

I worry about this, because I am an exchange economy cynic. I know how these things really work.

A week or so later, I notice that NNNN is talking with EEEE at a table in the café, but he happened to be looking at me just as I saw him. And he smiles and turns back to his conversation. But I wonder, Why is he looking at me? What’s with that smile? Does he want something? Are those two comparing notes on their $10,000 loan and gift? I’m now feeling quite unsure about where I stand.

A week later again, NNNN and I pass each other in the supermarket, and he smiles again and says Hi, and continues to where he was going.

And now you’re really starting to freak me out, man. What do you want? And why are you everywhere I go? What can I do to get you off my back? It was so much easier with EEEE. I knew where I stood. I knew what I had to do. And it’s over. I don’t owe her anything. But NNNN… Will you please stop smiling at me?

What we’ve been imagining here reveals something of the difference between an economy of exchange and an economy of gift, and this is interesting because Jesus’ parable of the man and his two sons splashes around in this difference.

“Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands. ”

The Prodigal invokes the “economy of exchange”. He realises that he might be able to trade his labour for food and shelter in his father’s house. Of course, we all know how the story unfolds: before the exchange can even be proposed, the father enacts the economy of gift, and receives the son back with open arms. And so we’ve become accustomed to speaking here of the father’s “forgiveness” of his son and to extend this allegorically to a word about divine “grace”. This, then, becomes grounds for celebration and the singing of doxologies or whatever – on the presumption that the parable tells us God can do the same for us.

But perhaps we celebrate too loudly, too quickly.

Because grace is harder than it seems. We might not notice this because the difficulty of grace kicks in at just the point where the parable ends, a problem which has to do with what it is like for those of us who live in economies of exchange to shift to life in a gift economy. That shift is not easy.

The economy of exchange is straightforward. We know where we stand. It might be uncomfortable sometimes, if I don’t have enough to trade or to pay my debts. But it is clear where I stand. I know it, and you know it. And we can usually “work something out” if I can’t pay my way. “Tell you what, Dad, how about I serve as one of your hired hands? ”

But the economy of gift is a different matter. You don’t know what to do next. What does God want? By which we mean, what is the “then” which follows from God’s gift, God’s grace understood as having an “if” – if I forgive you, “then”… What do we exchange for salvation?

Good Protestants that we are, we know the answer here is “nothing”; this is what grace means.

But what we do next often contradicts this. While we celebrate God’s gracious gathering of us home, we then return to the graceless economy of exchange, back to salvation by works. We imagine that the Prodigal must now get up early the next day and drudge out to work with his older brother. This is the payment for his forgiveness, because forgiveness has now become the possibility that he who previously did not impress God might now be more impressive. The forgiven Prodigal cannot sleep-in the next day, because that would hardly be impressive in view of the gift he has received.

In this way, we turn grace into something like the “reset” button on a video game. Each time we play, we get a little further into the game but fail, and then reset and start again, and again, and again – O Glorious Reset Button, Gracious Source of New Life – until finally we can get all the way through the game and no longer need the reset button.

Grace now becomes what we rely upon until such time as we hear God’s “Well done, good and faithful servant”, now having impressed God all “on my own”.

But the gospel is not that God has a reset button by which we are made loveable again, and by which we might once more try to prove ourselves to be loveable. The gospel is that we do not need a reset because God doesn’t need one, because God’s love for us is not the result of what we do – not the result of what we do. And so, in astonishment, and in fear and trembling, we are made to declare the impossible: we do not need a reset button, because it does not matter what the recipients of grace do.

It. Does. Not. Matter. What. We. Do.

It does not matter in the sense tha, while it might be clear what the wrong thing to do is, it is not clear what the “right” thing is

But what then does faithfulness – the next thing we do – actually look like if indeed God’s grace is truly unconditional? More to the point – to acknowledge the anxiety grace can bring – how can I justify what I do as a forgiven person, if God has not stipulated a condition or two I can point to?

And this brings us to the problem with grace. If it doesn’t matter what we do, we have to guess what to do next, because there are no conditions to grace. There is no “now you must” which follows from God’s “I forgive”, because there is not “then” which follows God’s “if”, because there is there is no “if” with this God.

For those of us who just want to know what we should be doing in exchange-economy mode, this is an almost terrifying freedom. We have to decide. We have to take a risk. For the most part, we prefer to be like craftspeople who know the proven methods and techniques of our craft and simply apply them in some new situation: if this type of wood, then that kind of cut; if this colour thread, then that place in the weave. “If, then; if, then; if, then”. No risk.

But grace transforms us from mere craftspeople into artists who create things which even God hasn’t imagined, regardless of the wood, the thread, or the circumstances. In a gift economy, nothing is determined before it happens: there is no “should”. And so, our “works” of righteousness become more like experiments in righteousness, or even just play; our speech becomes more like poetry; and so our actions become a most unexpected raising of the dead.

And this is why NNNN keeps smiling at me. He’s not messing with me, not wondering whether I know what he expects me to do with his gift. Rather, he’s wondering himself what I’m going to do with it, because he doesn’t know: there was no condition attached to the gift, there was no specific obedience upon which the gift rested. What happens next is – by the grace of NNNN – up to me.

But NNNN does know – as God does – that if I have received his gift as a true gift – if I have understood God’s grace – then I could do anything with it, because it doesn’t matter what happens next, because what happens next cannot change the fact that

neither death, nor life,
nor angels, nor rulers,
nor things present, nor things to come,
nor powers, nor height, nor depth,
nor stupidity, nor laziness, nor miscalculation,
nor anything else in all creation,
is able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus the Gift.

Upon this affirmation rests the strange, disorienting freedom of the children of God. The shape of faithfulness to the gift of God is not prescribed because faithfulness is freedom itself.

God says to you, Child, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. (15. 31)

It is all gift.

Let us see, then, what surprising thing we can do with that.

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Lent 3
23/3/2025

Isaiah 55:1-9
Psalm 63
Luke 13:1-9

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In an online article this week, the Ethics Centre’s Simon Longstaff remarked upon a couple of the more cynical modes of political self-promotion available to our parliamentary representatives. These are appeals to the voter’s self-interest though either fear or greed.

Of these, greed is probably the less effective, perhaps not least because most voters are doing reasonably well already, or because we’re less confident that politicians are reliably able to tweak the economy in our favour.

But fear can work very well. “Vote for me, and I will protect you from… [insert deep fear here]” – asylum seekers, woke city millennials, housing density increases in your area, fluoride in your drinking water, or whatever. Protection from threats like this – if “protection” is the right word – are often possible with the stroke of pen; observe the political style of a particular president across the Pacific.

Vote for me, and I will keep you safe. This works, to the extent that there is sufficient fear in the electorate.

The interesting thing about this political method for our thinking this morning is how close it seems to what Jesus says in today’s gospel reading. After hearing of a couple of local political and natural disasters, Jesus remarks – Do you think your prospects are any better? “I tell you…unless you repent, you will all perish as they did”. This sounds more than a little like, Unless you vote for me, you’re all going to die.

Certainly, many Christians have read such texts in just this way – whether in fear for their own well-being or as a weapon with which to threaten others. The proverbial fatal encounter with a bus after leaving the evangelistic meeting comes to mind: what will happen to your soul if you are run over by a bus on leaving today, unrepentant?! Jesus looks here like he might have made a pretty good politician of the cynical type.

And yet, even if this is what Jesus does mean here – or what Luke thinks he means – the Scriptures know more broadly that the promise will not be honoured. The books of Job and Ecclesiastes are not persuaded that goodness amounts to long and prosperous life. But even more central to Christian faith is the problem of Jesus’ own experience, because he himself suffers what is described in this troubling little text: his blood is “mixed” with his sacrifice when upon him falls all the towering weight of religious and political opposition.

This is to say that the “unless” – unless you repent – and the “perish as they did” cannot mean that simply repenting will see these threats resolved. And so “repent” must be less straightforward than simply “confessing all my bad stuff”, and “perish as they did” is much less straightforward than just dying young.

The problem with the politics of fear – and the religion of fear – is that it fights fire with fire, leaving us only with … fire – the fire of fear.

To relate to anything in the mode of fear is always to be fearful of that thing, even as we imagine ourselves to be protected from it. If we truly fear the judgement of God, then we will wonder whether everything we have done to protect ourselves is yet enough. This is because the protection is precisely what we ourselves have constructed, and it will likely be about as reliable as the kinds of protections many of our politicians promise us. To hear that we should repent is fine, but have I repented of everything which matters? Have I missed something? What if God really knows me better than I know myself? – surely a truly terrifying thought here, if I believe what Jesus says. How can I repent of what God knows but I do not?

And so, on the simplest – and probably most common – reading, our text today should strike horror into everyone who takes it seriously. Who could possibly be saved? Who could be confident that they repented of everything? The fear of God which demands repentance creates the fear that I have not repented enough, not repented of everything I should have. And so the fear of God begets the fear of God. There is nothing liberating or good-news-y about this.

How then could what Jesus says here be true? What could repentance mean, which makes sense of the fact that righteousness does not prevent suffering, but also calls us to a new, deeper, richer experience of ourselves and of God?

The thing of which we should repent is fear itself. It is fear the crowds bring to Jesus – Did you hear what Pilate did to those poor people? Did you hear about everyone crushed under the tower? And Jesus affirms their worst fear – that this is unpredictable, that they are no different from the others who got up in the morning and launched into their normal day but didn’t come home that night.

So, when Jesus says, “Unless you repent, you will perish as they did”, he cannot mean “Such things do not happen to the faithful”. For such things will happen even to Jesus himself, whom we see as the definition of faithfulness.

Rather, fear itself is the problem – the fear with which the crowds told the story, and so the fear by which they defined their place in the world. The possibility of dying “as they did” is not the possibility of dying early, but of dying under the cloud of the fear of death – of its unpredictability, its capriciousness, its finality.

And so, “Unless you repent, you will perish as they did” is not about how we might die; it is about how we are living. The right kind of “fear” of God does not keep death at bay, but it does keep death in its place. The right kind of “fear” of God refuses to live under the shadow of death, or any of death’s many friends. When Jesus says here “repent”, it is a call to repentance of a way of living which imagines that our lives are just about us – that our longevity is our importance. And so he calls us to repent of the fear which separates and isolates, to repent of the fear which causes us to judge others, to repent of the fear of judgement by others. These are the fears which a cynical leader magnifies and manipulates.

None of this is to say that we should not respect what is dangerous. Many who die young do so because they are foolish – which is to say, disrespectful of how the world usually works.

And neither does this soften what Jesus puts to the people in the text today. The fearless life is a difficult one, more so than any mere moral repentance we might make to try to keep God (and death) at bay. Our fears can be a kind of comfort to us because we are able to take control to protect ourselves from them, whether by building bigger walls or by trading with the powers which threaten us, so they’ll leave us alone.

Last week I finished the sermon with a passage from Matthew’s gospel, in which Jesus tells the people to “consider the lilies”. I didn’t prepare today’s reflection with that passage in mind, but it seems pertinent again, only today here it is in Luke’s variation on the same teaching:

²⁷ Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. ²⁸ But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith! ²⁹ And do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying. ³⁰ For it is the nations of the world that strive after all these things, and your Father knows that you need them. ³¹ Instead, strive for his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.

³² ‘Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. ³³ Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. ³⁴ For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

How we perish is not the question. The question is, how we live.

Unless we repent of the fears which constrain us, our living will be just a kind of continuous perishing: to live captive to the fear of death is to imagine that, in the end, God is death, that death is God.

But for those who live without fear, their death just happens to be the last thing they do. To recall from St Paul: “If we live, we live [in] in the Lord; if we die, we die [in] the Lord. So we whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.” (Romans 14.8).

So, lift up your hearts, Jesus says. And live.