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Pentecost 5
9/7/2017

Zechariah 9:1-12a
Psalm 145
Matthew 11:1-6, 16-19, 25-30

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“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

These are surely words we all hear gladly – the promise of an easy yoke and a light burden: rest for our souls. And yet the yoke which Jesus carries, the burden he bears – the yoke and burden he offers us – is the cross. How is it that this is an easy (or better translates, “kind”, or “good”) yoke and a light burden?

Our passage began with Jesus characterising “this generation”. Here he means not merely the people to whom he was speaking at the time, but all who share in a similar outlook. That outlook, whichever local form it might take, has its substance in a rejection of the kingdom of God as he preached it.

Jesus cites as evidence for this the rejection of both John the Baptist and himself. “John came, neither eating nor drinking, and you said he had a demon; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you called him a glutton and a drunkard”. It is claimed by their critics that John and Jesus don’t “fit”, don’t connect in with what it “obviously” a more appropriate way to do and to be.

But Jesus’ own critique reveals that this is more than a matter of John and himself not simply fitting some particular sense for appropriate behaviour and outlook. John and Jesus represent polar opposites, but neither fit. It is not a matter of the conservatives finding comfort in John but rejecting Jesus, or the liberals rejecting John but finding a kindred spirit in Jesus. There is nothing in the judgement of either John or Jesus which shows us therefore how we ought to be, except perhaps the grey, murky and dull option of “moderation”.

The not-fitting of Jesus and John is more fundamental than their not toeing this or that party line.

Jesus clarifies thus: God has hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.

When we think about our children, the temptation to sentimentality is strong. We love them, they love us; it is not for nothing that the image of God as embracing us as children is so strong in our religious desires and traditions.

But it is not sentimentality to which Jesus appeals here. The characteristic of little children important here is their inability to judge. Children simply receive. An infant does not know whether she is learning the right or wrong way to be, whether her parents are good or bad, whether she is born into privilege or deprivation. She simply is. And receives. And gives.

If I go much further we’ll end up in sentimentality again, because it is also important to grow and learn and mature and discern. What is “wrong” or incomplete about children can certainly be addressed in maturity; Jesus’ point here, however, is that what is wrong or distorted in maturity is present in infancy.

Again: the characteristic of little children important here is their inability to judge.

The inability to judge in little children reflects a kind of absence of knowledge – not knowing what is good or what is evil, but simply acting and being acted upon. It is for this reason that, even when they are being naughty, little kids are so gloriously free of guile, free of calculating shrewdness.

Important for understanding what is going on here is the Genesis apple-munching episode: the desire of Adam and Eve to know what is good and what is evil. And what is the first thing which happens when this knowledge is received? Self-awareness and fear:

…the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked;

Adam then relates to God:

I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.

What is going on here? God has already seen them – us – naked. This is doubtless an occasion of great mirth for God, but is also how we are created and is not a ground for judgement.

The knowledge of good and evil delivers the capacity to judge. But it becomes in our hands a loose cannon, firing wildly in all directions. It first victims are Adam and Eve themselves. They judge themselves as incomplete in their nakedness, and they judge God: that God will also be offended by them in their nakedness. This kind of knowledge brings only judgement and the fear of judgement. It is a knowledge which divides, distances, crucifies.

This is the whole of our human predicament: our judgement of each other, our judgement of God. The whole of the gospel is the converse: judgement itself judged.

If you were to look at John the Baptist and Jesus you would find them irreconcilable: on the one hand, the mad-eyed fanatic beyond the city wall, eating grasshoppers and shouting prophecies; on the other hand, the gentle healing touch brought bear among the city’s best and worst. Who could see the reign of God between these two extremes?

But this is precisely the labour and heavy burden from which Jesus offers us freedom in our reading today: the labour of having to see, to know – the labour of anxious knowledge and the burden of judgement which comes with it. The yoke and the burden which Jesus brings is a death to the hold these things have on us, an end to the ceaseless cycles of judgement and recrimination.

The sign, and the means, of this death is the cross of Jesus.

The cross is the sign because it reminds us that there is nowhere we can go where God’s love does not follow. Our judgement of Jesus – to the point of naming him God-forsaken on the cross – is not God’s judgement on him. The resurrection of Jesus is a vindication which points us back to the cross as a sign of the depth of God’s commitment to us.

And the cross of Jesus is the means of our death to the cycles of judgement because God allows that Christ’s cross also be our cross. Jesus’ refusal to know, to judge, to divide, to distance – even to the point of being “known”, judged, divided and distanced himself – is offered to us.

To come to Jesus is to come to the cross.

Here rest is found because here our propensity for judgement and our fear of judgement are themselves judged and put to death.

Here God takes from the wise and the intelligent who imagine that they know and see, and gives to us who are reborn as children in God’s own kingdom.

Such children know and see only that they belong to God, and God belongs to them.

In Jesus God offers us the light yoke and kind burden of having nothing to fear. In this is rest for our souls.

Thanks be to God.

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Easter 2
7/4/2024

John 20:19-31
1 John 1:1-2:2

Sermon preached by Daniel Broadstock

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Friends as we consider our text today, I am mindful that two occasions of cultural significance have occurred over the past week. The first is Easter Sunday – the ringing day of joy and disorienting triumph at the risen Christ’s conquest over death. The second is April Fool’s Day.

I wonder what these two days might have to do with each other. Perhaps more than we might imagine.

Were you fooled this week, friends? One great example of comic deception I saw this year was a post on social media by Jim Penman, the head Jim’s business empire (responsible for Jim’s mowing, Jim’s plumbing, etc) announcing the formation of Jim’s Political Party, offering a pragmatic, practical, common-sense platform to bring down housing costs and end the dysfunction on Spring St. Finally, a man to take a whipper-snipper to the weeds growing in our political system. Very amusing!

On the other hand, I have a friend who hates April Fool’s Day. She thinks pranks are mean-spirited and the tricks and stunts of the day to be tedious and annoying. So, all through April 1 she holds herself in a state of sceptical readiness – on her guard, alert and vigilant, determined not to be made a fool of.

In our text today, Thomas holds himself in a similar state of determined scepticism. He says the famous words: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” For this moment of disbelief, theological history has branded him Doubting Thomas.

Consider the resonance of those words. Thomas does not say that he ‘does not believe’. He is not professing an intellectual absence of belief. He is not a neutral agnostic. He is not a post-Enlightenment modernist, scorning the possibility of the miraculous subversion of nature’s laws. Thomas is not a philosopher or a physician. Thomas will not believe.

What’s going on here? We may lack conviction in all manner of things. But to refuse to believe – that is something different. There is more there than meets the eye.

It’s tempting to read the acts of the disciples as shallow theological parables. Vignettes, offering simple lessons of faith. Read superficially, Thomas offers a straightforward moral: trust God. Believe in Him. Persevere through doubt. Do not be troubled by what seems to you to be impossible, but hold fast to the promises of God.

Not necessarily a bad moral at all. Perhaps an encouragement that we need more than we realise.

But I remind myself that Jesus’ disciples are not fictional characters. They are real, historical human beings. Complex, contradictory, flawed. Subject to all kinds of influences, wishes, concerns, fears, and motivations. The Gospel writers have theological agendas in the way they include and frame their narrative, but there is flesh and blood behind the text.

Take Judas, for instance. He plays a simple role in our story. We need him to play his part in order to bring about the dramatic climax of Good Friday. But Judas too is only a man. Why does Judas betray Jesus?

The Bible suggests one explanation when it speaks of ‘the Devil’ entering Judas as he sits at the table with Jesus. Perhaps we can identify with that experience – moments of sudden, involuntary impulses to evil and to violence. Sometimes we recognise them, sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we resist them, and sometimes we give in. Perhaps Judas’ betrayal was a terrible moment of surrendered temptation. Sometimes people who have been convicted of violent crimes speak of this. An instant of almost demonic madness, in which everything is changed irrevocably forever.

Others have thought Judas an envious figure. Hovering always at the shadowy edge of Jesus’ brightness, perhaps he couldn’t bear any longer to be the second man. Jealousy has the power to drive us to places that we’d never have believed that we could go. Perhaps in the early hours of the morning, Judas would lie unsleeping, imagining himself as Messiah. Imagining the crown upon his own head. Hearing the hosannas cry out for Judas Iscariot.

Perhaps in the end it was not vice at all that drove Judas to Caiaphas, but frustrated longing. Some have seen in Judas a radical, a zealot. Maybe it was political liberation he longed for. The long-awaited uprising against Roman oppression with the Messiah, the new David, riding at the head of its army. Maybe Judas had grown tired of hearing about the Kingdom of God instead of the Kingdom of Israel. Maybe he is impatient with spiritual and moral teaching. Maybe he doesn’t want to love his enemy. Maybe he is tired of forgiveness. Maybe by leading those temple guards into the garden he hoped to waken Jesus from his slumber, that it would be the striking of the match, the first trumpet-call of a new and momentous age.

I wonder if something of this kind is taking place with our Thomas.

Doubt is so rarely a matter of indifferent scepticism. When Thomas says, ‘I do not believe’, that is not the voice of incredulity. That is the voice of pain. Those are the words of fear.  Thomas is afraid. Terrorised by that most painful wound of all – disappointed hope. For Thomas had already drunk too deeply from that cup. He had already surrendered his heart to that cross-shattered illusion. He had already wept too long for that buried fantasy. No, says Thomas. I will not endure that black agony a second time. I will not expose my heart again to the knife. I will not believe. My hopes are ash, and I will not suffer them to be reignited.

Disappointment is a terrible thing. When a long yearning for marriage goes unsatisfied. When paths that we thought would always be open to us are closed by age, or injury, or illness. When long-held, secret dreams and ambitions come to nothing. When a husband or wife with whom we expected to grow old just slips away.

The worst of it is that when once we have tasted the bitterness of disappointment we look sceptically at every cup that is then offered to us. We do not allow ourselves to trust in joy. There is a spectre that haunts our mind in the midst of hope. It arises like a ghost from the grave of past hopes long dead. And it whispers to us, ‘This is not real. It shall not last. Your joy will pass away and when it does it will subside with such a dreadful agony that you will wish that you had never known it.’ It is not a malicious thing really, but arises from a dark, self-protective corner of ourselves that knows that a heart that is entirely given may be entirely broken. For disappointment is not merely sadness. Disappointment humiliates us for having had the audacity to have been happy.

But in Jesus, the disciples’ hopes had seemed so secure, so safe. Surely this Nazarene was not one of those false saviours with each of whom Israel’s hopes had risen and fallen so pitifully. For with Jesus it was no longer a matter of hope. Their eyes had beheld his miracles and their ears had rung with his authority. The skies and waves themselves had seemed to shimmer and bend away from him in awe. And so Thomas had placed his fragile heart, whole and entire, at the feet of Jesus, sure that he would keep it safe. But then Jesus had borne it to Calvary and nailed it to the cross.

So when Peter came bursting into that room Thomas had no more heart to give. How could Peter do this to me again? How could he be cruel enough to raise a second seed of hope only to crush it beneath his heel. For if Jesus was not the one, then no one ever could be. If this good shepherd, this man whom earth and sky obeyed, this healer and exorcist, this prophet and teacher, if this man was not the Messiah, then our Messiah is never coming, and nothing will ever be good and true again.

But Thomas had merely glimpsed the beginning and mistaken it for the ending. For when Jesus strode from that empty tomb he carried Thomas’ poor heart in his hands like a delicate treasure. He had kept it safe through Hell and death and brought it out again to the sun. And in that darkened upstairs room, as Thomas touched the scars on his palms and felt his side, smoothed over with vulnerable grace, Jesus gave Thomas’ heart back to him.

May we be so bold as to open ourselves to the fear of disappointment. Not to make ourselves free of doubt, but to make ourselves vulnerable, and let the healed hands and feet of Jesus lead us again on the road of discipleship.

Amen.

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Easter Day
31/3/2024

Genesis 1:1-5
John 20:1-18

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With the resurrection of Jesus, God disturbs the peace which is our uneasy compromise with death.

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Early, on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb.

Early. It’s quiet, the early morning darkness, a quiet for quiet tasks: for thinking, for planning, for remembering, for tending to the dead. No matter how heart-rending it might be, death brings its own quiet and forces us to be still. Requiem in pace, we say to those who’ve died, Rest in peace, and quietness falls also on us who remain.

It had been a chaotic week for Mary and the other disciples, on top of all the movement, surprise, conflict, tension and misunderstanding of their tumultuous time with Jesus before that. The chaos now past, Mary’s quiet morning reflects the clarity and closure of death’s dismal order. Early in the morning, the fever of life is hushed.

But Mary approaches the tomb only to have her sad solitude shattered: “They have taken away my Lord…”. Three times she declares, I don’t know where he is. The tragic but reliable peace of death has been disturbed, and so also Mary’s reconciliation with death. “They have taken him away…”. Tell me where he is, and I’ll gather him back and hold him, and at least I’ll have again death’s calm.

When Jesus died, the dream of a life of peace died with him, but there remained the reliability of the dead.

At least I know where he is.

At least I can remember him in the quiet of the morning.

No one can take that from me.

But he is not there.

Tell me where he is, and I will go and get him so that he can be properly dead again, so that he and I can have at least death’s peace.

Sometimes, our compromise with death is pushed upon us – as for Mary, as for our own bereavements. Sometimes the compromise is the convenience of a death we choose to effect. If Mary had the calm after Jesus’ death forced upon her, death’s peace-by-crucifixion was chosen by Caiaphas and Pilate and the exclusive heavens they envisioned (see the Good Friday sermon!). This is death we seek as the means to some end, to some peace which requires that someone die. The peace we seek with distance and death is the quiet which comes when some onerous or terrible or dangerous thing is now past or put away. It is the dark peace which comes when the divorce papers are signed, when the life support is turned off, when the last of the evening’s lingering guests leaves, when I’ve put my enemy in her grave, when I’ve done what I swore I would never do, or just when I turn off the news bulletins because it seems everything is going insane.

None of this is really peace, of course; it is chaos subdued, suppressed, but still chaotic. This peace is not the reconciliation of enemies but a cutting away of the other, more or less violently.

Into this suppressed chaos, Jesus appears alongside Mary. Her first instinct is to do what any of us would likely do: she reaches for him (“Teacher”, “Lord”, “Love”) to grasp, to hold, never to let him go again: I know again where you are, who you are, what you are.

But his reappearance is no mere return of the one Mary thinks she lost, though she doesn’t understand this yet. The resurrection is going to be the possibility of Mary herself being renewed, but it’s not this yet. At this point, it is only Jesus who is risen; Mary is a mere observer of his dying and rising, and his appearance is outside of her, does not yet envelop her. All she knows is that her dreams were dashed in the death of Jesus, and now they seem to be restored, and she grasps to hold tight the Jesus she thinks she knew.

But Jesus insists, Don’t hold on to me. Let me go. This is not what you think. It is not only that I am returned to you; it is also that you will be returned to God. But for this to happen, you must see me as I am; you must see God as God is. Let me ascend to God so that you can see my cross in God’s own heart. It is not merely death which is overcome. It is your resignation to death which is comprehended, your reconciliation to it, your use of death for your own ends, Mary, Peter, Caiaphas, Pilate. All of this is overcome.

The resurrection shatters death as peace, death as resolution, death as flight or abandonment, death as a means to some end.

This resurrection – the resurrection of the Crucified – is a challenge to our memory, a question to our account of what we did or felt or wanted.

This resurrection is the visitation of the present by the past – the haunting of the present by the past.

This resurrection tells a fuller story, not allowing certain things to be forgotten or hidden away, but bringing them uncomfortably into the light. For there are not a few histories we want to forget, or which have been forgotten for us, or which we would suppress if they again came to light.

This resurrection is revelation not of only God’s power but of the full extent of our need, of our incapacity to speak the truth, to bear it, to know what to do with it.

This resurrection is the dead refusing to take death “lying down” but rather disturbing death’s grim peace with a word of truth: you have come to terms with the empty and void ways of the world, and with the terrible depth of the darkness, and there is no life in this.

But in this resurrection, our victim returns to us, yet not with accusing finger. He speaks our name and brings the urgent, hopeful question: Mary! Peter! Caiaphas! Pilate! Do you see now? Do you see that God has overcome even all this? Do not grasp tightly what you thought you had to be; let yourself rather be grasped by my Father and my God, your Father and your God. Reach for that resurrection into a life which has put death’s power behind it.

God meets us early, in the morning quiet, after our dealings with death, to disturb the uneasy peace death brings.

But God comes not only early, not only in the dark stillness. God comes on the first day of the week.

And God finds the world – finds Mary and each one of us – as if we were dead, entombed in that early, mortal stillness – formless and void, buried deep, deep, deep in darkness.

And God says, let there be light.

Alleluia.

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Lent 5
17/3/2024

Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 51
John 12:20-33

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In our Lenten study book this year, author Sam Wells, remarks that we tend to invoke euphemisms when we find suddenly ourselves out of our depth – not “died” but “passed away”, not “going to the toilet” but “going to the bathroom”, not “a little bit stupid” but “not the full quid”. The euphemism refers to the presence of something that seems both necessary but also inappropriate to acknowledge – it doesn’t seem “proper” to bring that up here.

In our Gospel reading today Jesus speaks once more (cf. last week) of his approaching crucifixion as a “lifting up”: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (v.32; cf. also John 3.14f; 8.28). We know, of course, what he refers to – his impending crucifixion. And we know something of the horror a crucifixion was. So, is Jesus being euphemistic here, softening the blow for those he addressed, throwing a fig leaf over the embarrassing nakedness of God in the crucifixion? In churches which have crucifixes – representations of the figure of Jesus on the cross – there are not many without loincloths.

In fact, the “lifting up” is no euphemism. The evangelist John loves double meanings and the ironies which come with them. The Greek word here can certainly apply to being lifted up on a cross. But, at the same time, it can just as naturally be used for that kind of elevation which is an enthronement. A king’s coronation could be said to be his “lifting up”. The cross, then, becomes a throne, the crown of thorns truly a crown.

Yet the point is not now that Israel unknowingly crucified its king. The ambiguity of “lifted up” allows John to present to us Jesus as being both outcast and enthroned, being both crucified and made king, in the single “lifting up”. Not simply the king mistakenly or unknowingly crucified, Jesus becomes king in his very being crucified.

And so Jesus can also say in our text this morning, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (v.23), and to mean by this that the cross itself is the glorification (cf. also John 12.16; 13.31f; 17.7). The lifting up, the crucifixion, is the glory of Christ. (We might add here that the glory is not the resurrection. In the crucifixion we see something about the nature of God which the resurrection by itself cannot show). John presents a vision of God in which God’s glory – and so God’s very being – is tied up with his relationship to a people which falls short of his covenant call, to the extent that they (we) even crucify the Lord of glory.

When John says, then, that God so loved the world that he sent the Son, he is not speaking about the “size” of God’s love, as if God might have loved less or even more. Rather, the cross is the love: this is God’s presence to and for the world. How God loves is itself God. God is the glorification on the cross, God comes into view here.

This is not an easy thought to think, but it is crucial in a world which thinks God irrelevant because we imagine that God to be “out there” beyond us, or deep, deep within us. In either case, we don’t imagine that God is in the messy time and space in which we live, not in the times and spaces between us.

But against the God who is nowhere useful is the impossible proclamation that the greater the distance we place between ourselves and God – the more strained our relationship with God is – the more God is set free to be God. That is, God’s love for us is shown to be all the more remarkable when he exercises that freedom to overcome the distance, in order to be life and love for us. When St Paul says that where sin abounds, grace abounded even more, he says the same as John’s double reading of the cross: God makes shame into glory. This is not, of course, to justify or even promote sin(!); it is only to declare that God’s grace always outreaches human brokenness. (Children’s talk: God is very stretchy).

The God who is the cross, then, is no “idea” of God which we fill with other ideas like love or judgement, according to our need. God is no euphemism we are forced to invoke to refer to an embarrassing truth we wish we didn’t have to acknowledge or negotiate around. Rather, the God who is the cross is the very revelation of our condition. For, whatever else we might be, such a God as this reveals us to be those who would crucify God. Ours is the crucified God because this is the only God who has come close enough to us to be precisely our God, the God of those who are capable of crucifying each other, even of crucifying God.

The gospel, then, presents us with two possibilities.

The first possibility is the pessimistic conclusion that the cross is only the work of human hands. The story – the story of Jesus and of each of us – ends with the violent rejection of one who deserved better, and that story is simply tragic. The awful truth here is that it doesn’t get any better than this, but it might perhaps get worse. We need a mouth full of euphemisms to speak the truth here because it is more than we can bear.

The second possibility is that the cross is indeed the work of human hands, but that it is also the glory of God, in the terms we’ve described. This is to say that the cross is not tragic, is not the end of the story, but is the sign of how far God is able to reach – how “stretchy” God is – to embrace again those who have rejected God so profoundly. This would also be an aw‑ful – awesome – truth, but now one which must be said as clearly and directly as possible, so that we all might understand.

Faith – or unfaith – is a decision about these two possibilities. Can God reach us or not, regardless of how far away we run? Can God reach us, regardless of how far away we push the possibly that God might be reaching for us, whether in Jesus on the dusty roads of Palestine 2000 years ago, or on those same dusty today in cries of God’s children for justice and mercy, or in the quiet fears and loathings of our hearts?

Can God turn our tragic existence into God’s own glory, and so into our healing? Can our deathly ways with ourselves and each other become the glory of God?

The awful-awesome God of the cross calls for an awe-filled faith:

Yes. Yes. Yes.

God can do this.

And it is by this expectation that we will live.

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Pentecost 18
1/10/2023

Philippians 2:1-11
Psalm 25
Matthew 21:23-27

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In a sentence:
We are true to our calling when our words and actions reflect our convictions

The divided self
In our gospel reading today, the elders and the chief priests demand of Jesus, By what authority do you do these things? (“these things” including the overthrowing of the temple marketplace). Rather than answering directly, Jesus poses a counter-question about the perceived authority of John the Baptist, now dead. Fearful of the consequences of answering honestly, the elders and priests are forced into a public and dishonest agnosticism: “…we do not know about John’s authority…”

The public nature of their refusal to know is critical. They know very well, of course, what they think privately but they dare not think this out loud. In this dishonest turn, the elders sever the relationship between their “internal” and “external” selves: what I am in myself and what I am in public are here two different things. My private self is created by my thoughts, experiences, emotions, desires, and so on. My public self is what I think I need to be to protect my private self. The elders and the chief priests defend themselves in their private beliefs by refusing to have a public opinion about John.

Most of us do the same. We can be different in ourselves from what we are in public. I don’t mean here to things that are properly personal and inappropriate for public spaces. I mean rather those circumstances when we find ourselves doing the kinds of calculations the chief priests and the elders do in response to Jesus: knowing what we think but sparing ourselves the grief which would come from speaking it, choosing to divide ourselves into two identities – the self I think I know and the self I show. God gives us each one face, and we divide it into two, each side looking in different directions, each ear listening for different things. Jesus’ challenge to the religious leaders (and to us) leads to a similar affirmation to what we considered a couple of weeks ago – that we are what we do in the dark. When we speak of a person as having integrity, we mean that she is in the light as she is in the dark.

Authority as integrity
The clash in our reading today is not quite about personal integrity but is about authority. The effect of Jesus’ response here is to assert that authority rises from a single voice, from both ears hearing the same thing. Jesus’ opponents – with most of us – know two authorities, while Jesus himself knows only one. Jesus’ authority is founded on the cohesion of his inner life and outer ministry.  In contrast, the priests and the elders – and we with them – are divided in themselves; they are spiritually “schizophrenic” (Greek: “divided mind”), subject to multiple voices. Our authority evaporates in our dissembling and deception, for we are shown to be divided.

Such dishonesty about myself before others arises from fear: I don’t trust the world with my true self. And perhaps this seems to be fair enough: the world is a dangerous place and a self-preserving instinct does not always deny God or our true selves.

Yet, dishonesty like this does not only arise from fear but also gives rise to fear, because no one really knows what’s lurking beneath the visible surface. We are what we do in the dark, and we have reason to fear what that is. This fear breeds dishonesty, duplicity and suspicion, and all this dissolves community.

In contrast, being the same in myself as I am in public gives rise to love and trust. This is not easy and is often dangerous. I have to put myself at risk by revealing who I am so that you can know what to expect from me when the relationship between public and private is pressed.

Now, all of this is very nice, but it’s just not how the world works. And so we suffer and find we cannot trust. The debates about the Voice at the moment, our constant preparation for war, our refusal to act decisively in relation what might be a looming climate catastrophe – these have to do with the absence of authority, the lack integrity.

The cross as authority
The touchstone in Christian confession for understanding this tension in us is the cross of Christ. The cross is Jesus subject to the effect of what is revealed in the debate about authority in today’s Gospel text. The religious leaders, divided as they are in themselves, reject the possibility that what Jesus says and does is integrated with God, and he is crucified. The cross marks the powerlessness of divine authority in the face of worldly power. And the story should simply end here – one more tragic effect of human fear and loathing. And it would, were it not for Easter – for the resurrection.

This is not to say that the resurrection is a happy ending for Jesus which promises us also that, whatever happens, we’ll end up smiling. That might be true but it’s not very interesting, because we have to live here and now, not there and then. The resurrection of Jesus is not a happy ending but the invitation to look again at the cross, now not as failure but as triumph.

The gospel sees the cross as the sign of Jesus’ authority – the sign of his integration of inner call and outer action. On the cross, Jesus remains true to his calling, which is not to be crucified but, in all circumstance, to be true to the God who sent him. This integrity with his calling, however, is not a “power”; it is authority as authentic being. Power, in the sense we usually mean, springs from the kind of division in the leaders as they avoid the truth in responding to Jesus. Our division of ourselves is an act of power – a manipulation – and this kills.

The cross is powerlessness; there are no two ways about it. In terms of worldly power, there is nothing to see in the cross but the tragic crushing – again – of the powerless. But the gospel is not about power but about authority and authenticity; on the cross, Jesus stays true despite the divided self of the world.

This hardly seems like good news. When Jesus calls us, someone said, he bids us, Come and die. Only those who lose their life will save it. Is this good news? It is only good news against the backdrop of two things we don’t often admit. The first is that we are going to die anyway, and the second is that the divided self of an inner heart hiding behind an outer façade is its own kind of premature death. In light of this, the question becomes, Where is true life to be found?

Authored by God
The gospel’s response is that true life is found in integrity. The cross is where Jesus triumphs in the face of evil by being true to the love of God. And so, for Christian confession, the cross is the authoritative event in human history. The resurrection is the evidence that true human being is possible even in a death on a cross (Philippians 2). And so it is here that true human being is authored. Here, God writes (with a “w”) what we are to be, for we are to live as if the world of duplicity and disintegration cannot keep God out.

Authority in Christian confession is anything which declares that God will be near even in death and decay.

God will be near when bombs explode and forests burn and referendums fail.

God will be near when she dies, and when the church doors close for the last time, and when the divorce papers are signed.

God will be near when the diagnosis comes, when the weight of shame threatens to crush, when  the money falls short.

By what authority does Jesus do what he does? Who “authors” him?

Jesus – rejoicing with his friends, clashing with opponents or gasping on the cross – is authored by God.

And so also for us. Our authority – our integrity – springs from being and doing what God calls us to be and to do. Our faith is true when it is matched in our actions.

This is what God honours.

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Mark the Evangelist Uniting Church @ St Mary’s, North Melbourne; 24/8/23

2 Corinthians 4:16-18
Psalm 121
John 10:11-15, 27-30

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

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 Jn 10¹¹ [Jesus said,] ‘I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.

And the verse before it, which we didn’t hear:

¹⁰ ‘I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.’

When we read John’s Gospel, we are aware that it has a different scope. As we say on one of our Uniting Church prayers at the Table, ‘In time beyond our dreaming, you brought forth life out of darkness, and in the love of Christ your Son you set man and woman at the heart of your creation.’ So begins the work of the Trinity of love.

And the stories he tells are not so much about events in Jesus’s life as reflections on the meaning of that life, that death, that rising in glory from the cross. They are, as he says, ‘signs… that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name’. (20:31)

One of the signs is Jesus’s testimony, ‘I am the Good Shepherd’.

You may like to have Norma’s ikon on the front of the service booklet where you can see it.

Between the 2^nd and 4^th centuries, it was the main image of God in human form, then it largely disappeared but is now universal. I suppose it was a familiar sight in ancient Palestine; indeed, there are statues from pagan times of a beardless youth with a lamb slung around his neck which might have provided a model. (Sheep in their time were smaller than ours!) I’m not good at dating sheep, but Norma’s one is, I think, still young, and Jesus – the mature Jesus with a beard – is holding it firmly.

The halo forms the shape of a cross around the head, and you can see the marks of the nails in his hands. ‘The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep’.

And since you’re looking, you can see the letters O and N, by which the icon-writers identified the principal figures. The O at the top is for ‘the’, and another O (Ω) hidden under the lamb on the left side, and N on the right, form the Greek word for ‘Being’, Existence Itself, and translates the Hebrew I AM – so there you have our text.

Jesus, after all, was not a shepherd, even when young, and on the whole in the Bible, shepherds get a pretty bad press. They may be wolves who attack the flock.  Ezekiel in particular goes to town, calling them thieves and robbers ‘who do not care for the sheep’.

But the addition of the adjective ‘Good’ to ‘Shepherd’ takes the matter right out of an agricultural context. The Roman and English traditions which paint Jesus cuddling a lamb with little children at his feet in a flowery field have missed the point. It is not meant to convey a family-friendly, sentimental image to make us feel warm inside.

At the centre of this passage is the One ‘who lays his life down for the sheep’. In all the references to shepherds throughout Scripture, none goes this far. This shepherd goes even beyond the mere ‘good’. And it is saying something else: this goodness is not human virtue; it is divine, it is of the essence of God. The combination of ‘shepherd’ and ‘good’ should have been a shock to its first hearers.

The evangelist is saying something important about Jesus. The human divisions and conflicts in the earlier verses are set aside. This shepherd knows his flock, and the word ‘know’ means to know intimately, knows every one of the flock and knows them thoroughly (or in the old use of the word, ‘throughly’, through and through). And the flock knows their shepherd, just as thoughly.

This is exactly how St John speaks of Jesus’s relationship to his Abba, Father. And he goes on to offer the same intimacy to us: ‘I know my own and my own know me, ¹⁵just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.’

And amidst of the babble and noise that surrounds us – more than a shepherd ever knew – we know him by his voice.

^2’7My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.’

I looked at dozens of Good Shepherd ikons in my preparation. They come in all shapes and sizes, all comfortably settled, half-awake, gazing nowhere.

This is where Norma’s ikon has a surprise.

This is a lamb that knows, knows her keeper (Ps 121) and knows she is held. Her eye is unwaveringly intent on the Good Shepherd. I think that is a detail unique to Norma’s ikon.

For he has heard her voice too and has come, picked her up and carried her, he, the holy One, the I AM.

‘I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.’ (John 10: 28)

‘So [as St Paul wrote] we do not lose heart.’ (2 Cor. 4:16).

Into that loving, life-keeping embrace, we entrust our beloved Norma.