after the siren blows

 

SERMON PREACHED AT MELBOURNE GRAMMAR

LENT 3 (February 26^th, 1989)

 

Been beat up and battered ‘round
Been sent up, and I’ve been shot down
You’re the best thing that I’ve ever found
Handle me with care

Reputations changeable
Situations tolerable
Baby, you’re adorable
Handle me with care

I’m so tired of being lonely
I still have some love to give
Won’t you show me that you really care?

Everybody’s got somebody to lean on

 

Often when I have a few days to spare I will take myself for either on my motorbike or in my car out into the Outback of South Australia or New Southy Wales and explore some of the lonely roads available to me there. It is a way of renewing my batteries – and that of whichever vehicle I take – after too much running around, too much pressure. I usually return greatly refreshed, at the same time glad to be back with my family, but sad to return to the city, with all its smell and bustle.

Often after one of those trips someone will ask me whether I was lonely, alone out there in the wilds of inland Australia.

The question always surprises me. I admit that I have sometimes taken my dog with me, but I have done so more for security than for company. I have often felt utterly alone out there under the stars or the desert moon, but never lonely. There is a great difference.

On the other hand I have in life felt lonely. Take for example the moment when in an inter-house or inter-school cricket match a key player has lobbed a sitter of a catch in your direction and you have dropped it, and you trudge slowly back to your mark. Well the moment at a party when you realise that all your friends have paired off with a girl but you are not sure that you have the same get up and go. Or your friends may not care that you are there at all. Or more recently in life, the moments when I have walked into a hotel bar and realised that I am the only person not covered in tattoos, or perhaps the only person not wearing a tie.

Those are the moments of loneliness. Lonely in a crowd, they call it. The greatest one of all was when I was cox of my school VIII and we had finished and won the national championships, for which we had trained all season. Suddenly I realised that these people with whom I had trained hundreds of kilometres were no longer thrown together with me as my friends, and I ran the risk of being utterly alone. They might no longer need or want me. Lonely in a crowd.

Some members of that crew I have not seen for ten years now.[That was 1989 ... we've caught up many times since]

Then they spat in his face and hit him with their fists.

Others said as they struck him, 

“Prophecy to us, Christ …  who hit you then?”

 

It was the experience of Jesus also to be lonely, actually lonely and rejected by all his closest followers. Lonely in a crowd. Worse than dropping a catch, he was betrayed to death by one of his closest friends, a friend who no longer agreed with the way he was running, as it were, his campaign. And in tonight’s reading we hear of him being deserted even to die alone. Some desertion! In a matter of hours he would cry from the grizzly, fly-blown cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Yet that is precisely why I’m prepared to be a Christian. Somewhere in the tragedy that we will remember on Good Friday is the gospel, the good news that Christians have held dear ever since the first Easter. For as Christians we believe that the experience of Jesus is at the same time the experience of Father and Spirit, and that in some mysterious way all Godhead have experienced the pain of dying alone, after rejection on a fly-blown cross.

If this is true, and of course no one can conclusively prove that, but if this is true then the Jesus Christ of Christianity has something to offer not only to the beautiful people, but to the lonely people, the broken people, the disfigured people, even the normal people.

As we prepare for the second great silly season, the season of Easter eggs and more glossy wrapping, it is this that I would ask you to remember: the founder of Christianity, who was no meep, was prepared at the same time to be both God and to be utterly, utterly lonely.

 

 

then you can cut it down

 

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, RINGWOOD EAST
SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT (26^th February) 1989

 

Yackatoon Cross

READINGS

Isaiah 55:1-9

Psalm 63:1-8

1 Corinthians 10:1-13

Luke 13:1-9

 

It may bear fruit next year; if not then you can cut it down.

In the early church converts to Christianity spent up to three years undergoing a process of preparation for admission to the church, preparation for admission to the sacrament of baptism that marks the beginning of the Christian journey.

It was in that same era of Christian history that the period in the church year that we know as Lent came to take its present shape. Lent came to be the period not only for the preparation of all the faithful for the celebration of Easter, but also the crisis, the last desperate sprint in the preparation of candidates for baptism.

In that time this third Sunday in Lent came to be the particular time for reflection on God’s call to his people to repentance. It was the time to remember the disobedience of God’s people of Israel in the desert and in their subsequent pilgrimage. But it was also traditionally a time to remember God’s forgiveness, his seemingly inexhaustible ability to love his wayward children. It was time to remember and to reflect on the compassion of Yahweh, as we have done this morning.

Yahweh is tenderness and pity; 

slow to anger and rich in faithful love. 

                                       (Ps. 103:8)

 

It was a time also to remember the errors of the early church. What better way to remember them then to turn again to Paul’s repeated entreaties to the Corinthian church, repeated calls not to distort or abuse the gospel he himself had taught them. And at the end of three years of preparation and soul searching, the candidates knew only too well their weaknesses, their potential for failure.

I watched last week one episode of the ABC series on women in the army. I was left with a deep sense not only of the brutality of the army, but of the tragedy of failure within such an unforgiving system, the tragedy faced by those who were simply unable to keep up, that the demands of the system placed on them.

Thankfully God is more forgiving than the army. For we all will fail. We will fail simply because we are a part of a human race that has failed, part of a world that fails. We will sin. We will ourselves commit acts of sin, and we will continue to participate in the tragic sins of a fallen world.

But we will also, as we are soon to do in this liturgy, turn again to God to seek and receive his forgiveness.

How many times? Seventy times seven.

We must forgive our neighbour an infinite number of times, precisely because we have likewise been forgiven an infinite number of times.

It must also be remembered that an essential part of Christian belief is that there will come a time when there will be no further opportunities for repentance.

He will come in glory to judge the living and the dead 
and his Kingdom will have no end.

There must come a time when our death or the end of history as we know it brings us face to face with our failures, a time when excuses no longer prevail. There must be in our faith that the God who is all loving and all knowing is also the God who will ultimately judge his people by their lives, by their readiness to proclaim a gospel of love by their deeds and their words.

The responsibility for us as Christians is great. We must find ways in which to alleviate the human suffering that is the visible result of a sinful world. We must find God’s strength to rise above our own tendency or vortex towards sin. We must find ways effectively to proclaim the Christ event, the good news of Good Friday and Easter Sunday, proclaim it to the world. By this we shall be judged.

It is with this question in mind that at this point in our journey through Lent we must turn and seek once more the forgiveness of God for our sins, as individuals, and for our sins as part of a tragic and fallen world. For the tree that is left standing one more year will, if it does not bear fruit, eventually run out of reprieves, and be cut down.

For that reason, when we say our confession together in a few moments, let us remember that we are not recalling before God our own sins only, but in the first person plural, remembering the sins of the whole world, and as a royal priesthood offering them to God for forgiveness.

Let us therefore at this time in Lent be most critically tuned to our failings and to the failings of this world, and seek that God may breathe forgiveness into us.

 

gutslog

 

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY RINGWOOD EAST
SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT (19^th February) 1989

 

READINGS

Genesis 15:5-12, 17-18

Psalm 27:10-18

Philippians 3:17-4:1

Luke 9:28-36

 

 

 

What is this bizarre and seemingly surreal experience of which we have read today? What were the disciples, Peter, James and John, doing with Jesus on the mountain? What did they experience there, this experience so out of the ordinary that the gospel writers struggled to find words to identify it?

To begin unpacking these questions we must first place this passage, this account of the event we know as the Transfiguration of Jesus, back within the context of the events given to us by the gospel writers. If we go back a handful of verses from these events, we find that Peter has just made his momentous confession of faith. Jesus has asked the disciples “Who do people say that I am?” and followed that question with the more telling, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter has responded rightly, “You the Christ of God.”

Although Peter is right, Jesus is not happy with his answer. Jesus alone knows that the meaning of his “Christhood” or “Messiah-hood” cannot be made clear until after the terrible event of Good Friday, the event of the Cross. So Jesus attempts to persuade his followers that the way in which they must follow him is the way of suffering and misunderstanding, far, far removed from the course of glorious victories and good times that they have in mind.

If anyone would follow me let them deny themselves, take up their cross daily, and follow me.

                                              (Luke 9:23)

The events of the mountain take place chronologically a few days later – six or eight, depending on whether you read Matthew and Mark on the one hand, or Luke on the other. Chronologically they take place a few days later, but in terms of the narrative, they take place immediately. And so it is by way of an explanation of his earlier words that Jesus takes his closest disciples with him to the mountain.

What mountain? Again we must speak symbolically here. In Luke’s usage a “mountain” or other high place is a symbol for a state of proximity to God. In Luke 6:12 Jesus ascends into the hills to pray alone. The experience is the same here, except that on this occasion he allows his disciples to accompany him on his journey to the inner depths of God.

A little less than a year ago I was standing in the desert two or three hundred kilometres south of Alice Springs. The temperature was pushing up towards 40°C and I was alone in a basin, with not even a trace of wind. There was not a sound to be heard. It is in those moments that we become a powerfully aware of our spirituality, of our vulnerability and seeming insignificance, and yet of the undeniable truth that we are thinking, feeling, spiritual creatures. We are alive, with all the potential that entails. We can care, we can love, we can, if we choose to, sing praises to the Creator that I believe placed us in this universe.

It was an awe-inspiring moment.

A couple of years ago I sat with a man and his family in hospital as he finally gave up a brief but brutal battle with cancer and slipped away into death. It was the early hours of New Year’s Day, and as I sat there holding the hands of the man and his grieving wife and daughter an enormous sense of peace descended on us all, punctuating the sense of sorrow.

It was an unforgettable moment.

I told these stories because I believe each of us will experience from time to time the sense of stillness and peace that is the signature of God’s presence with us. It is an experience not unique to Christianity, but it is most certainly an occasional part of the Christian experience of God. A sunrise or sunset, a powerful moment in a piece of classical or rock music, a moment of enormous sensuality: each can be a moment akin to the mountain experience of transfiguration.

In their moment of proximity, with Jesus, to God the disciples could not grasp the central truth that Jesus sought  to teach them. The overwhelming knowledge that they were with the long-awaited Messiah of God as he sought God in prayer proved to be too much for them. The blinding discovery that this charismatic carpenter from Nazareth was the Son of God, the Chosen One, was too much. The wanted to seize the moment, to make it their own, to fossilize themselves, Jesus, and the moment so that it might never be lost – or at least lost to them. The Romantic poet Keating well knew that vain hope.

      Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal – yet do not grieve;

      She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss

Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair.

 But it is not enough to remain frozen on a Grecian urn. It is not possible to remain immobile on the edge of the Simpson Desert. The family of the dead man, and their pastor, must leave the hospital room and pick up once more their lives. Neither we nor the disciples can stay on the mountain of transfiguration.

It is then that Jesus’ words of a few days earlier ring true. It is then that we adopt the ghastly reality of the Cross and the sheer hard gutslog of true Christianity, and come down from the mountain. We too must come down from the mountain and turn our face towards Jerusalem and towards Good Friday.

Christianity can be no easy option, opting out of the brutal facts of life and death.

It is to face that truth that we must now accept the discipline of Lent. With that discipline in mind we must journey with Jesus and the disciples down from the mountain towards the tragedy of Good Friday.

Only then will we be prepared to grasp and to eternalise the joy of Easter. The joy of the coming of the light into the world. The joy of the resurrection and the hope of meaning that it brings to our lives.

TLBWY

new journeys

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH

ORDINARY SUNDAY 5 (February 5^th) 1989

(My first sermon as vicar of Holy Trinity, Ringwood East)

 

Readings

Isaiah 6:1-2a,3-8

Psalm 138:1-5,7-8

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

Luke 5:1-11

 

 

 

When I prepare a couple for their child’s baptism, I often find myself pausing over an explanation of the word “sin.” It is a word that we are able to use all too readily in church circles, one that with practice rolls all too easily off our tongues. We too easily forget that in the so-called “post-Christian era” it may have little or no meaning to our neighbours.

So I explore the meaning of the word, especially in the context of the baptismal rejection of “the devil and all his works,” by referring to Paul’s poetic lament within his letter to the Romans.

For I do not do the good I want,

but the evil I do not want

is what I do.

                         (Romans 7:19)

 

The scholars dispute Paul’s reason for placing that claim in his letter, for elsewhere he claims perfection as to the Law. But the experience of involuntary failure is one to which we all relate. 

We do not need to remember as far back as the atrocities of Idi Amin’s Uganda to see the effect of sin in the world. We would do well to remember that the perpetrators of Hitlerian atrocities are, when scratched beneath the skin, mere human beings the same as you or me. And we know in our own lives the experience, if less atrocious, of failing to do as we should, or of doing what we should not.

When all is said and done, “sin” is a universal human experience, a kind of volition towards the dark side of human nature that lurks within each of us.

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

There is, strangely enough, a sense in which we might take comfort from that. Not a comfort that allows us to become blasé about the tragic sufferings of the world, but a comfort that reminds us that the attempt to drive ourselves to perfection is a futile one. God owes us no favours.

I say that this morning because each of the central characters in each of our readings, Isaiah, Peter, James, John, and Paul, is experiencing a call by God Each responds to that call only after recognising their insufficiency for the task ahead. “My grace,” says God, “is sufficient.” Or, to put it another way, “Yes, you are unworthy, but by the very fact that I have chosen you, and by that fact alone, you shall be made worthy in my sight.”

I remember well the first time I began to reflect on the possibility of entering ordained priesthood, of accepting a vocation. I was hitchhiking in the North Island of New Zealand when I was picked up by a slightly drunk, lapsed Catholic, returning from a day at the races. Almost bitterly he lamented the failure of any of his sons to enter into the priesthood. 

I became as it were his son that day, entering on to the road that brought me to the door of Holy Trinity this morning. But I too knew of my inadequacy for the task ahead, and I still do. I too with Isaiah disclaim any pretence to worthiness, crying out, “what a wretched state I am in … for I am of unclean lips.” I still do. But that knowledge of inadequacy throws me constantly back to the effectiveness and empowerment of the Spirit, the one who remains with us always.

As a community of faith that is something we all share in common. There is a sense in which, by virtue of our baptism, we are all ordained. We are all set aside by our baptism to become instruments of the love of God in the world. The same is true of Troy and Morgan who are to be baptised this morning. We are called to a ministry, a vocation, to offer pleas for this world in our prayers. We are called to that ministry together, as a team, to cooperate towards the proclamation of the Kingdom initiated by Jesus. The Kingdom of love.

There is a song sung in some churches that summarises these thoughts masterfully.

We are poor but we brought ourselves,

the best that we could. 
We are yours, we are yours.

 

We are indeed impoverished, and I do not mean materially. As such we are called not to rely on our own merits but on those of our guide, the Spirit who empowers and equips us.

The onus is on us to find continually our talents and to find ways in which we might exercise them in our community in the service of the gospel. As we do that, and do it together, we shall be surprised by the results achieved by Christ in our community working in and through us.

burning fire

 SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH

ORDINARY SUNDAY 4 (January 29th) 1989

 (my final sermon at St John’s, East Bentleigh)

 

Readings

Jeremiah 1:4-5,17-19
Psalm 71:1-2,3-4,5-6,15,17
1 Corinthians 12:31—13:13 
Luke 4:21-30

 

“But passing through the midst of them, he went away” (Luke 4:30)

In the temple, Jesus has just stood up and for the first time in his ministry “gone public” about his identity. If you were to place this week’s gospel reading in context you would find that it follows on from that which we read last week, the passage in which Jesus returns to bis home town of Nazareth and begins to expound the scriptures amongst his geographically closest neighbours.

The Spirit of the Lord has been given to me, for he has anointed me.

 

The passages should never be separated. The claim made by Jesus following the reading from Isaiah is that the longing of the people of God for a Messiah, to bring good news to the poor, is fulfilled in him. Last week[1] I claimed that to be the shortest of sermons. This week we discover that it was no more than the dramatic opening to an exposition of scripture which “won the approval of all” and which had the gathered people “astonished by the gracious words that came from his lips.” And so it is that we have heard read today the kernel of what I have called his sermon.

 But if you were to turn to Luke’s account of the gospel you would find that these events do not take place until after Jesus has experienced and, as it were passed the test that we know as the temptation in the wilderness.

Any attempt to understand what Christ is telling us must be put in the perspective of his life. Whatever we might understand by the story of the temptations, it is clear that Luke is telling us that the Messiah’s money is where his mouth is; that his proclamation of good news to the poor and liberation to the oppressed must be seen in the context of his own experience of human suffering and of the temptation to play silly human power games.

Mark, in his gospel account, stresses the same element. Never does he allow anyone to identify Jesus as the Son of God until they come to understand that it is precisely and exclusively in the tragedy of Good Friday and the consequent joy of Easter Sunday that Jesus’ sonship becomes authentic.

Jesus goes on to tell us more about his vocation, including the prophesy that he will not be understood by his hometown people. His provocative comments upset the locals, and in a radical about-face that foreshadows the events of Palm Sunday and Holy Week, they seek to kill him. It is at this point that Jesus makes his miraculous and seemingly effortless escape. So what is Luke telling us by connecting these events?

Luke, like Mark, is adamant that the teachings of Jesus about himself cannot be understood except in the light of the events of Good Friday. Eduard Schweizer puts it this way:

Jesus’ mysterious magical departure is not to be explained psychologically; for Luke it is a sign pointing already to Easter. Human beings have no power over him; when he dies at their hands, it is because that is God’s will. They cannot stand in the way of his work but must advance it: he goes on to Capernaum.[2]

 

The question we must continue to ask, though, is “so what?” So what if both Mark and Luke have this obsession with Jesus’ suffering?

The answer is not difficult to discover, and it is an answer consistent with all our readings today. In our other readings today we read first of vocation – in this case the calling of the prophet Jeremiah – and then of the universal human vocation to love.

Weaving these threads together, from the calling of the reluctant Jeremiah, to Paul’s masterful and eloquent hymn to love, to the provocative commencement of Jesus’ public ministry, is the connecting preparedness of the central characters to put their faith and their relationship to God into dynamic action.

If I give away all that I possess, piece by piece, and if I even let them take my body to burn it, but am without love, it will do no good whatever.
                                                                                                                (1 Cor. 13:3)

 

It is my prayer that as a people of God we can learn to put our money firmly where our mouth is. We will fall short – we always will. We will be torn between priorities, and always will be. We will enter the dangerous zones of misunderstanding and alienation – Jeremiah certainly did – and suffer at times the depths of doubt of God and of ourselves. But the message of the Incarnation is that it is precisely in the depths of hell and despair that God’s selfhood, God’s nature, is revealed. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” cry both the Psalmist and Jesus. It is in the darkness that the light shines.

It is to the darkness that we must allow our faith to lead us, so that we too with Jeremiah may exclaim,

For these things I weep;

            my eyes flow with tears;

for a comforter is far from me,

            one to revive my courage;

my children are desolate, for the enemy has prevailed.

                                                                        (Lamentations 1:16)

 

For it will be when we experience the despair of knowing and loving and serving God with our whole selves that we will find the surety of knowing God to be all in all. That discovery is known by Jeremiah, by Paul, by Jesus. By Jesus above all. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

It is my prayer that we too might know it. Then,

It I say, “I will not mention him,

            or speak any more in his name,”

there is in my heart as it were a burning fire

            shut up in my bones,

and I am weary with holding it in,

            and I cannot.

                                          (Jeremiah 20:9)

 

May God be with you and burn within you.  

---

[1] See previous blog post, “One Body.”

[2] Eduard Schweizer, The Good News According to Luke, (trans. David E. Green, London: SPCK, 1984), 91.

One Body

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH 

ORDINARY SUNDAY 3 (January 22^nd) 1989

 

 

READINGS:

Nehemiah 8: 2-4, 5-6, 8-10

1 Corinthians 12: 12-30

Luke 1:1-4, 4:14-21

 

There are many stories, repeatable and unrepeatable, about rivalries between various parts of the body, and contests to demonstrate supremacy. Whatever version of the story we choose, the implication of the story is always the same: no part of the body is redundant.

Modern science of course would tell us that this is not strictly true. Limbs and even some organs can be removed without impairing or threatening life, and tonsils and appendix redundant whether they remain or are removed. But Paul’s central thesis remains unchanged: we are all members of one body, incorporated into or added onto that body by virtue of our baptism.

And from that observation I wish to emphasise just two things. The first is the need within a body, in this case the body of Christ, for all members to pull weight, while the second is the interconnectedness of all people within the body. Where one part hurts or is strained, so all are affected.

1.        It is a truism in every community that there is always a core of people who take it upon themselves to shoulder the greatest burden of work within that community. That it is true of the church is both inevitable and yet a source of great sadness to me. It is inevitable because, though we are a baptised and forgiven people, we are also a sinful people, marred in our humanity by all the classic human failings, all the so-called seven deadly sins. But it saddens me because I believe the hitchhikers within the church are cheating on their more generous sisters and brothers, cheating by increasing enormously the load of those same few prepared to labour for Christ, and cheating themselves by missing the opportunity for love and koinonia that Christian cooperation and teamwork offers.

2.        It is also a truth that as Christians we cannot afford to neglect the connection between our lives and the lives of all humanity. We cannot see ourselves as a tiny and self-sufficient community, but must instead realise that we are connected by a vast web to every other community. By our baptisms we are grafted onto the death and resurrection of Christ, together with every baptised Christian. And by our birth we are grafted onto the vast web of human life, which Christ enters and, as it were, baptizes, takes into the being and nature of God in the ultimate expression of God’s love for and identification with humanity. For that reason, we pray for the church and the world. For that reason, we give of our resources to a missionary church and a suffering world. For that reason, we cannot afford to become limited in our outlook merely too Saint John’s or to Bentleigh, to Melbourne, to Victoria, or even Australia. We are, in the words of that dreadfully sloppy but well-meant song, “we are the world.” We are all members of humanity, and to all humanity we must be responsible.

 

It is with those notions that Saint Paul challenges us when he lays down the law. We are the body of Christ – his Spirit is with us. The world and all humanity is Christ’s, and through us he breathes peace into it. Let us be agents of his peace not merely in Saint John’s or in Bentleigh, but within God’s world.

good news why?

MEDITATION AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH

GOOD FRIDAY (April 24^th) 1987

 

 

I was recently asked by a boy of about twelve why today is called Good Friday. One of his classmates immediately provided the right answer – that the name was a corruption of the older name, “God’s Friday.”

But this very correct answer given by the second boy does little justice to the theological significance of the first boy’s question. Why is the tragic death of a cult hero executed in Palestine nearly two thousand years ago, “good news”? Because as Christians we accept the belief that Jesus is God, why do we claim that the death of our God on a cross, at the hands of corrupt humans, is “good”?

The Archbishop,[1] In his first mission address to us, spoke of a sermon that he had heard preached by a Christian clergyman, and lamented that it could have been preached by the adherent of any of the world’s great religions – let alone one of the world’s monotheistic religions. Sadly, I believe that far too much that is spoken from the Christian pulpit has nothing to do with the Christian gospel. Says St. Paul, “I preach Christ, and him crucified.” That is the Christian gospel, and any preaching that does not grapple with the events we recall today fails to stand up to Paul’s criteria.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ …

God from God, light from light,

true God from true God …

for our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,

he suffered death and was buried.

 

At the very centre of our faith are two seemingly incompatible beliefs about Jesus. He was (and is) God, and he was (and is) human. He was (and is) as St. Anselm put it, the deus homo, the God-man. There is no more difficult tension to maintain in our faith. To emphasise Christ as God at the expense of his being human is heresy. To emphasise Christ as human to the exclusion of his being divine is heresy. Both heresies have surfaced again and again in the history of our faith. But why are they heresies, why does it matter?

If Christ were merely divine then he cannot die for us. His death is not the same as our death. His suffering is not the same as our suffering. The great modern atheists pronounced that God had died, and that human beings must therefore take responsibility for their existence in a universe without God. Were God to have died in such a way, merely, that is, to have drifted out of human experience, then there is for us no good news. God’s death, if it is as the atheists metaphorically proposed, leaves us alone and defenceless in an unfriendly universe, responsible to work out our own salvation. We have only to remember Auschwitz and Nagasaki to recall how horribly wrong human nature can be. If this nature is all we have to trust for our salvation then our present, to say nothing of our future, is bleak.

Those of us who faithfully watched Paradise Postponed[2] over the past several weeks may remember another powerful symbol of what came to be known in theological circles as the “death of God.” Dear old Simeon Simcox sincerely saw the Christian gospel in terms of the human drive for a better world, a world of equality between classes and races – and the sexes. Commendable though Simeon’s dreams and life were, he died knowing that his dream had failed, that God had not ushered in the age of equality he longed for. God had failed, and for Simeon’s son was effectively dead.

This though is not the good news death of God we come to recall today. Christ’s death is not good news if he is merely a divine hero, seeking to improve the world on our behalf. Were that the case, his death was in vain, for our world remains, as we can see only too clearly, enmeshed in sin.

Similarly, if Christ is merely human, we have no good news by which to make this Friday “good.” We may greatly admire in our century Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, or even John Lennon,[3] all who in their own ways sought to transform this world into a better place. Shocked as we might be by each of their tragic and unnecessary deaths, their lives have not ultimately changed society. Racism still survives, despite Martin Luther King’s great dream; the social evils Kennedy sought to eradicate continue, the colonial exploitation against which Ghandi spoke reemerges in new forms, the utopia of which Lennon sang to his generation is still as far away as ever.

But Jesus is the God-man. In his death both God and humanity are somehow mysteriously entwined, and humanity is provided with an answer to the problems of this world and of this life.

An answer? Does the death of Jesus provide an answer to the problem of human suffering? If God exists, we will constantly be asked, why is there suffering in the world? I believe our faith does have an answer to that question, but today we have a more urgent question still to answer: does so-called Good Friday provide meaning to life in the face of Nagasaki and Auschwitz, in the face of cancer, Aids, the road toll?

If Christ is God, then in the events of Thursday night and Good Friday suffering becomes an integral part of the experience of the godhead. God, as revealed to his people in the Old Testament, was never unmoved by suffering, but had never himself physically suffered. Emotionally, as the parent of a miscreant nation, but never physically. He is never the unmoved “God Out There” of the philosophers, but neither is he incarnate amongst his people, sharing physically in their plight. But in the incarnation, in becoming flesh of God in Christ, a new dimension is added to the experience of God, and to the relationship of God to humanity.

For the nails that pierce Christ’s hands are piercing God’s hands. The whips that scourge Christ’s back scourge God’s back. The vinegar offered to Christ is offered to God. The excruciating loneliness and sense of utter rejection experienced by Christ on the cross, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me, is likewise the experience of God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, as they in perfect union experience utter separation from God the Son. For the communication between. Father, Son, and Spirit is such that the pain of one is the pain of three, the joy of one is the joy of three, God is one in three.

Human experience then, is absorbed into the experience of God. God becomes present not only on Golgotha, but in all experience of human suffering: in Auschwitz, Nagasaki, in AIDS, cancer, starvation.

Where is God when it hurts? If God is merely “out there,” distant, unmoved, the God of the philosophers, then God offers no solution to pain. If God is merely the unmoved mover, then he is not the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ, not the God who makes this Friday Good Friday. Such a distant God is an impostor, and I for one want nothing to do with him. Were the God of Christianity this distant God I would rejoin the atheists, for even well intended humans provide more hope for the world than an unmoved, distant God.

But it is the Christian belief that God was in Christ. That the man on the cross in pain, hanging between two hardened criminals, is God on the Cross. The reason why we believe this is to be celebrated on Sunday.

To that day we look forward with longing. But let us first remember that the death and suffering that we shall all experience, you and I, is also part of the experience of the God who we have come to love and serve.

And therein lies the good news that makes this otherwise very black Friday Good Friday.

Now to him who suffered and died, and who was buried, who conquered, who was, is, and ever shall be God, we all honour and glory now and forever. Amen.

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[1] David John Penman (1936-1989) was Archbishop of Melbourne from 1984-1989.  

[2] Based on a novel by John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed aired on BBCTV and the ABC over 11 episodes in 1985.

[3] I admit I was not a fan of John Lennon, but the elder daughter of my training vicar was!