SERMON PREACHED AT THE
CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS (NT)
SUNDAY, MARCH 25th 2012
(FIFTH SUNDAY IN LENT)
Readings:
Jeremiah 31.31-34
Psalm 119.9-16
Hebrews 5.5-14
John 12.20-33
I confess to fighting degrees of depression – albeit not often approaching any clinical form of the disease – from time to time as I engage in conversation with colleagues and others engaged in theological discourse. It seems to me that, over the last decade or two, a reformation every bit as significant as that of the fifteenth century, if thank God considerably less dramatic and bloody, is ransacking the Christian community.
There is a sense in which there has never been a time at which Christianity has not faced cataclysmic crossroads, choosing its path between various manifestations of Scylla and Charybdis, the mythological rock and a hard place. The great upheavals that I mentioned in passing a week or two back, spearheaded by figures like Paul, Augustine, Luther and Barth, have been moments in which the Church – guided I would suggest by God’s Spirit – has been dragged back onto the straight and narrow after dalliances with various forms of corruption. Augustine, for all his myriad faults, saw the place of God’s gracious forgiveness at the heart of the gospel, and knew that the community of Christ had therefore to be the place for the sinful to turn and find again – centuries later we might modify his thought and say again and again – to find the welcoming, restoring arms of Christ. Luther saw the centrality of the Cross – as Paul had before him – and recognized that there can be no way to manipulate the heart of God. Barth – who seems to me to be as relevant today as he was 80 years ago – saw that a God that is slowly remoulded to fit a national identity, a tribal god, is simply unable to speak to the deepest malaises of human sinfulness and social decrepitude.
Today the church seems to be torn between two temptations. On the one hand I find a kind of rigorist exclusivism, constantly proclaiming a message that there is no place for you in the body of Christ if you are too gay, or too illiterate, or, paradoxically too literate, or too uncertain or too left or too right. I find churches that reduce faith to a kind of feel-good ecstasy, laughing and prancing and waving and falling over in carefully induced and stage managed frenzies, often with very little intelligent reference to scripture or tradition. I find churches, not least in the Anglican Communion, in which ‘right belief’, a cerebrally correct interpretation of the scriptures, is a prerequisite to full acceptance and participation, and which try to manipulate the wider communion to be recreated in their own image.
In a wild swing of the pendulum I also see churches – as I have hinted in recent weeks – that relativize the scandalous Jesus away to nothingness. It is as though, in reaction to the exclusivist claims of the other extreme, these churches and their teachers have felt that the way to connect, to be relevant to the needs of contemporary society, is to do away with the awkward demands Jesus makes of us, demands ‘to fall into the earth and die’ or to ‘hate their life in this world’ or to ‘take up their cross and follow me’, and to turn him into the ultimate guru of niceness – however we define that. Karl Barth saw the dangers of that, for if we recreate Jesus in the image of our own ideas (and we will all occasionally lapse into that trap) then we are left not with the God of the Cross but an infantile longing, the extension of our own individual, collective or even national psyche. Such a God will not critique us any more than the Jesus of the falling Phenomenon: one Jesus will appeal to the social right, nurturing a highly individualistic feel-good escapism, the other Jesus will appeal to the social left, ignoring demands to strive for personal transformation-by-faith.
“Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” But we must look for him not in the comfortable places that suit us, but in the unexpected and unsettling places. Paul saw it in Corinth: ‘we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles’. The Jews (at least as Paul portrays them) has generated prerequisites to the encounter with God – the ‘am I not pretty enough’ syndrome. The Greeks had generated a nice, intellectually rewarding but personally unchallenging God, but not one who would interfere with and challenge human lives. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, as the French say: the more things change the more they stay the same.
So where do I stand? Of course we all like to believe stand in the right place, and I can only plead that there is an awful lot of history on the side of a form of faith that steers its way between temptations either to make God inaccessible – the God of the good enough, smart enough, doctrinally sound enough – or so broad as to be indistinguishable from any other passing deity or fad.
For it seems to me that when we cry out those words “Sir, we wish to see Jesus” then we have to expect to see Jesus. We encounter not a political leader reshaped in the image of our favourite issues but the provocative Christ whose revealing of the heart of God will always end up on the Cross of Golgotha. We do not find a Jesus of the Country Liberal Party or a Jesus of the Labor Party, or a Jesus of the Greens Party. We find a Jesus who may well be as concerned about the eradication – he might call it death – of 75 unborn children a week in Darwin Hospital as he is about the rising sea levels that threaten to obliterate low-lying Pacific nations, or about the international collusion that ensures that no nation speaks out about the slow, silent genocide that is going on just north of us in West Papua. We find a Jesus who worries only about our personal sexual moral integrity neither more nor less than he worries about our financial integrity. We find a Jesus who is a product of an invaded and colonised tribe in the Middle East, but we find at the same time a Jesus who is author of the universe, who flings the starts across the heavens in and through and beyond time.
This same Jesus challenges us to proclaim, in all our life, the values of the Reign of God that he himself exemplified in his remarkable and short life as a mendicant teacher, challenging the might of the corrupt Roman Empire and the corruption of his own Jewish religion. We are challenged, however much a cliché it might be, to exercise the ‘what would Jesus do’ lifestyle that he calls us to. Sometimes it isn’t easy, and sometimes we will get it wrong … but it is to that challenge that he is calling us, it is to witness to that challenge that he is, as John puts it, lifted up for all to see, and it is to proclaim that challenge that we too are called – called and empowered by the Spirit of God.
TLBWY
Saturday, 24 March 2012
Sunday, 18 March 2012
three-legged plutonian monotreme redeemer?
SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS (NT)
SUNDAY, MARCH 18th 2012
(FOURTH SUNDAY IN LENT)
Readings:
Numbers 21.4-9
Psalm 107.1-3, 17-22
Ephesians 2.1-10
John 3.14-21
If I were working for Saatchi and Saatchi, or one of the world’s great advertising agencies (and Saatchi and Saatchi have been engaged with I think dubious credibility but undoubted tongue-wagging success to advertise the gospel for one infamous New Zealand church) then the famous words of John 3.16 would create something of a stumbling block to my message. We blithely read them out or hand them around on supposedly evangelistic tracts and cards, yet I am left to wonder if in out contemporary society they do not produce a highly adverse effect, what in broadcasting terms we used to call a ‘switch-off factor’. For, excuse me, but if I may place God in a dock, then infanticide or at least the surrender of a child to be executed is not on the whole considered to be the ideal model of perfect parenting.
Some of our friends will tells us that we are not to judge God by human standards, but excuse me? If God is to convey the depth and breadth of divine redemptive love to human beings then that communication has to resonate with the limitations of human experience. God could of course have sent a green hairy Martian or a three-legged plutonian monotreme to redeem us, but that, by and large, would not resonate with my experience of the universe or, I suspect, yours. And while Jesus of Nazareth has and does to a large extent resonate with human experience, a loving father sending his son to be executed simply doesn’t.
Unfortunately, as heirs of the Reformation, of Calvin, and even of the great St Anselm, we tend to read or hear such texts as John 3.16 through the filters of centuries’ accumulated language of blood sacrifice. You will have heard Anne already reminding us that so-called penal substitutionary atonement is but one of many metaphors used by New Testament writers to described the mechanisms of salvation wrought in the Christ-event. ‘Penal substitutionary atonement’ is that very pervasive view that Jesus died to pay – either to God or to the devil – a ransom for human sin. PSA, as it is often called for shorthand convenience, is more or less the belief that God killed or allowed Jesus to be killed as an act of retribution for the sins of the world in defence of divine holiness.
It is indeed a metaphor that appears throughout the New Testament, as the writers strived to find vehicles by which to convey the miracles of incarnation and salvation. It is one of many metaphors, and is not to be jettisoned – I for one will sing with gusto those moving words of Fanny Crosby, “Who yielded His life an atonement for sin, And opened the life gate that all may go in”, but I do so not because they are a profound summation of the gospel, but because they feel good, set to an evocative tune, and are a reasonable-if-flawed rendition of one aspect of the Good News we share.
But these images convey one aspect only. The language of God’s surrender of his Son to sacrifice is pregnant with the story of Isaac, in all its chilling psychological implications. It is a useful metaphor, though it was probably a more useful metaphor in the bloody world of first century justice, when life was cheap and infant mortality, if not infanticide, was rife. The pain of a parent for a lost child is immeasurable, as some of you will know: the metaphor serves simply tp suggest ‘even to that extent does God open divine being to pain and suffering in the work of achieving our redemption’. God is not a child abuser, and the image is severely flawed if misinterpreted, misapplied. It has been pointed out to me by a friend that a more helpful way to understand the metaphor is to imagine the sorrow of a father watching his only son embarking on a journet to war - in Afghanistan, for example. This is helpful and certainly reaches back into the sorrow-saturated feeling of a narrative of giving an only son. But it is not altogether the way we have heard it through the centuries of filters, through the interpretive filter of Abraham and Isaac proiding us with a narrative of substitutionary slaughter on Golgotha.
This became the foremost image of God’s redemptive work in bloodied times. The opponents of God – catholics to protestants and protestants to catholics, and anabaptist extremists to both – were tortured or executed with abandon as Christian zealots found permission to abuse and execute in theirmisreadings of scripture. Literature of the time makes it clear that retribution was the order of the day – and such a pattern carried on down to the days of the flogging parson of Sydney and beyond. But we are, now we are no longer in bed with the state, beginning at last to read our scriptures with Spirit-filled eyes, and to hear once more the authentic voices of the earliest witnesses of Jesus.
Time and again, for example, John places emphasis not on the punitive death of Jesus but on his being ‘lifted up’ – like Moses’ rod in the wilderness (which is why of course we link these readings in liturgy) as an example of a life lived in totality to God’s standards of righteousness and justice (righteousness and justice are shades of the same primary colour in the Greek and Hebrew texts, though translators have often made jaundiced slections in providing English words). But they are not all Jesus exemplifies: he exemplifies love, hope-bringing compassion, inclusion and embrace. Proclaimers of righteousness, justice, love compassion, holiness, inclusion, embrace: these figures in history will always open themselves up to the risk of execution, for society on the whole prefers its conscience to be left un-pricked. So in that way at the very least God ‘gives up his only son’ – whatever the word 'son' means in the context of Godness – to engender hope, belief and redemption. But all our words here are metaphor: Jesus is not a son like Abraham’s Isaac or your sons or my sons (except insofar as he was a son to Mary). God gave up – but we can never really understand what God gave up, how God gave up, what that surrendering entailed deep in the heart of the community of the triune God.
Jesus was exposed by his own life choices to be the example par excellence of all it means to be fully human, fully just, fully righteous, fully compassionate, fully holy, fully compassionate. This, as I have said, did not mean Jesus was mere example, for there are many examples. Jesus is the ultimate embodiment of all that humanity is called to be (and cannot be, without his infiltrationn of human lives). For all our faults, Jesus invites us to be captured and transformed in his embodiment of love, hope, compassion, justice – and something we call eternal life. Jesus invites us to be transformed and to be agents of transformation of those around us. I borrow from former bishop of Bathurst Bruce Wilson the phrase ‘rumour resurrection’. Jesus can, if we allow him to invade our lives, empower us (beyond our normal means) to rumour resurrection, to rumour all that Jesus stands for.
The social transformation as well as the personal transformation aspects of the life of Jesus can be embedded in our being – if we let them. It is to that that we are called: Jesus the example in whom by the power of the Spirit we are invited over and again to participate. Jesus the embodiment of all that is godly, prepared to share that embodiment with us. In him we are invited not to condemn, but to attract: in him we are invited to invite others into resurrection hope in all its present and future dimensions. In him we are invited to be participants in the light that cannot be quenched by all the darkness we see each time we turn on our news media, or each time we engage too deeply in the labyrinthine dimensions of our own fallibility.
John is implying that in Christ we can at last add our amen to the psalmist’s words ‘in our darkness there is no darkness to you oh Lord, the deepest dark is as bright as the day’.
TLBWY
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS (NT)
SUNDAY, MARCH 18th 2012
(FOURTH SUNDAY IN LENT)
Readings:
Numbers 21.4-9
Psalm 107.1-3, 17-22
Ephesians 2.1-10
John 3.14-21
If I were working for Saatchi and Saatchi, or one of the world’s great advertising agencies (and Saatchi and Saatchi have been engaged with I think dubious credibility but undoubted tongue-wagging success to advertise the gospel for one infamous New Zealand church) then the famous words of John 3.16 would create something of a stumbling block to my message. We blithely read them out or hand them around on supposedly evangelistic tracts and cards, yet I am left to wonder if in out contemporary society they do not produce a highly adverse effect, what in broadcasting terms we used to call a ‘switch-off factor’. For, excuse me, but if I may place God in a dock, then infanticide or at least the surrender of a child to be executed is not on the whole considered to be the ideal model of perfect parenting.
Some of our friends will tells us that we are not to judge God by human standards, but excuse me? If God is to convey the depth and breadth of divine redemptive love to human beings then that communication has to resonate with the limitations of human experience. God could of course have sent a green hairy Martian or a three-legged plutonian monotreme to redeem us, but that, by and large, would not resonate with my experience of the universe or, I suspect, yours. And while Jesus of Nazareth has and does to a large extent resonate with human experience, a loving father sending his son to be executed simply doesn’t.
Unfortunately, as heirs of the Reformation, of Calvin, and even of the great St Anselm, we tend to read or hear such texts as John 3.16 through the filters of centuries’ accumulated language of blood sacrifice. You will have heard Anne already reminding us that so-called penal substitutionary atonement is but one of many metaphors used by New Testament writers to described the mechanisms of salvation wrought in the Christ-event. ‘Penal substitutionary atonement’ is that very pervasive view that Jesus died to pay – either to God or to the devil – a ransom for human sin. PSA, as it is often called for shorthand convenience, is more or less the belief that God killed or allowed Jesus to be killed as an act of retribution for the sins of the world in defence of divine holiness.
It is indeed a metaphor that appears throughout the New Testament, as the writers strived to find vehicles by which to convey the miracles of incarnation and salvation. It is one of many metaphors, and is not to be jettisoned – I for one will sing with gusto those moving words of Fanny Crosby, “Who yielded His life an atonement for sin, And opened the life gate that all may go in”, but I do so not because they are a profound summation of the gospel, but because they feel good, set to an evocative tune, and are a reasonable-if-flawed rendition of one aspect of the Good News we share.
But these images convey one aspect only. The language of God’s surrender of his Son to sacrifice is pregnant with the story of Isaac, in all its chilling psychological implications. It is a useful metaphor, though it was probably a more useful metaphor in the bloody world of first century justice, when life was cheap and infant mortality, if not infanticide, was rife. The pain of a parent for a lost child is immeasurable, as some of you will know: the metaphor serves simply tp suggest ‘even to that extent does God open divine being to pain and suffering in the work of achieving our redemption’. God is not a child abuser, and the image is severely flawed if misinterpreted, misapplied. It has been pointed out to me by a friend that a more helpful way to understand the metaphor is to imagine the sorrow of a father watching his only son embarking on a journet to war - in Afghanistan, for example. This is helpful and certainly reaches back into the sorrow-saturated feeling of a narrative of giving an only son. But it is not altogether the way we have heard it through the centuries of filters, through the interpretive filter of Abraham and Isaac proiding us with a narrative of substitutionary slaughter on Golgotha.
This became the foremost image of God’s redemptive work in bloodied times. The opponents of God – catholics to protestants and protestants to catholics, and anabaptist extremists to both – were tortured or executed with abandon as Christian zealots found permission to abuse and execute in theirmisreadings of scripture. Literature of the time makes it clear that retribution was the order of the day – and such a pattern carried on down to the days of the flogging parson of Sydney and beyond. But we are, now we are no longer in bed with the state, beginning at last to read our scriptures with Spirit-filled eyes, and to hear once more the authentic voices of the earliest witnesses of Jesus.
Time and again, for example, John places emphasis not on the punitive death of Jesus but on his being ‘lifted up’ – like Moses’ rod in the wilderness (which is why of course we link these readings in liturgy) as an example of a life lived in totality to God’s standards of righteousness and justice (righteousness and justice are shades of the same primary colour in the Greek and Hebrew texts, though translators have often made jaundiced slections in providing English words). But they are not all Jesus exemplifies: he exemplifies love, hope-bringing compassion, inclusion and embrace. Proclaimers of righteousness, justice, love compassion, holiness, inclusion, embrace: these figures in history will always open themselves up to the risk of execution, for society on the whole prefers its conscience to be left un-pricked. So in that way at the very least God ‘gives up his only son’ – whatever the word 'son' means in the context of Godness – to engender hope, belief and redemption. But all our words here are metaphor: Jesus is not a son like Abraham’s Isaac or your sons or my sons (except insofar as he was a son to Mary). God gave up – but we can never really understand what God gave up, how God gave up, what that surrendering entailed deep in the heart of the community of the triune God.
Jesus was exposed by his own life choices to be the example par excellence of all it means to be fully human, fully just, fully righteous, fully compassionate, fully holy, fully compassionate. This, as I have said, did not mean Jesus was mere example, for there are many examples. Jesus is the ultimate embodiment of all that humanity is called to be (and cannot be, without his infiltrationn of human lives). For all our faults, Jesus invites us to be captured and transformed in his embodiment of love, hope, compassion, justice – and something we call eternal life. Jesus invites us to be transformed and to be agents of transformation of those around us. I borrow from former bishop of Bathurst Bruce Wilson the phrase ‘rumour resurrection’. Jesus can, if we allow him to invade our lives, empower us (beyond our normal means) to rumour resurrection, to rumour all that Jesus stands for.
The social transformation as well as the personal transformation aspects of the life of Jesus can be embedded in our being – if we let them. It is to that that we are called: Jesus the example in whom by the power of the Spirit we are invited over and again to participate. Jesus the embodiment of all that is godly, prepared to share that embodiment with us. In him we are invited not to condemn, but to attract: in him we are invited to invite others into resurrection hope in all its present and future dimensions. In him we are invited to be participants in the light that cannot be quenched by all the darkness we see each time we turn on our news media, or each time we engage too deeply in the labyrinthine dimensions of our own fallibility.
John is implying that in Christ we can at last add our amen to the psalmist’s words ‘in our darkness there is no darkness to you oh Lord, the deepest dark is as bright as the day’.
TLBWY
Friday, 16 March 2012
Biffing inkpots at the devil
SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS (NT) SUNDAY, MARCH 4th 2012
(SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT)
Readings:
Genesis 17.1-7, 15-16
Psalm 22.24-32
Romans 4.13-25
Mark 8.31-38
When I first went off to theological college in Melbourne I was soon made aware that in the history of biblical theology the letter of St Paul to the Romans was the engine room. Truth to be told, coming from a sort of low church charismatic background I wasn’t particularly aware of theological engine rooms – my tradition preferred collections of texts far removed from their biblical, let alone their historical context, bandied about either in wars of condemnation of those outside the community of faith, or in mutual admiration exchanges within the community of faith. I doubt it had ever occurred to me that biblical texts had a historical context, and, while I had from time to time engaged in ‘studies’ of a biblical book even that was only in order to improve our arsenals of love or hate.
To be fair I’m being unfair, but only by exaggeration, not utter misrepresentation. But as I set about my first year of theological studies – one of the most bewildering years of my life – I was quickly given the impression in all three disciplines (actually I couldn’t tell the difference between them at that stage, not being the sharpest sandwich in the chandelier) of church history, systematic theology and biblical studies – that the letter to the Romans was the engine room of faith.
And to be honest I’ve never got it. I love Paul, and have spent not only many doctoral years but many more preaching years wrestling with his texts. I have found plenty to admire in his calm and dispassionate Letter to Head Office, as I have sometimes come to think of it, but on the whole have found myself far more inspired by his racy, livid, passionate or loving letters to the churches that he founded, especially the letters to Corinth. So when I find a passage like that read to us a few minutes ago I think ‘yup, that’s nice, fairly clear, let’s move on’. Abraham believed against all odds, Abraham had faith, so should we, let’s move on. For Augustine, for Luther, for Karl Barth the emphasis on faith alone was a staggering revelation: we cannot earn our way to God.
Augustine, Luther and Barth were all reacting against religious cultures which in various ways had begun to teach other than the obvious. Luther had observed a misguided but monopolous (another invented word) Roman Catholic Church selling indulgences to enhance salvation. While some Pentecostal preachers have locked themselves in expensive prayer towers demanding money (a prayer tower now, ironically, sold to Roman Catholics) very few people these days are trying to grease the palm of God or God’s Church in order ‘to get to heaven before they close the door’ (as Dylan put it). And yes, when Barth was a young man the national churches of Germany, England and elsewhere were giving the impression that God was a national god, and that salvation was all about being respectively English enough or German enough or Russian enough to earn God’s favour. But on the whole, outside some complex aberrations again usually in fundamentalist churches, I know of few sermons extolling that kind of nationalistic theology. No: the Corinthian correspondence and its emphasis on the exclusive claims of the cross of Jesus Christ: that has always been – at least since my first year in theological college – the heart of my missiological war chest.
Christ, and him crucified, as Paul puts it. All other sermonising, and indeed all other justice-proclaiming, love-rumouring action in God’s world, is icing on the soteriological (salvational) cake. Christ, and him crucified, is the basis of faith. I have long joined those who argue that we are, as it were, ‘saved’, ‘redeemed’ not primarily by our faith in Christ but by the prior faith and faithfulness of Christ as he made his way to Good Friday and to Easter. ('But that's just stupid', asseverated one of my Moore College trained colleagues, demonstrating that stable's readiness to engage with rational thought and edifying conversation). The construction in Greek is the same: 'faith in', 'faith of'. I see our faith as a response to his faith, our love as response to his love, our hope as response to his hope, and all these as a response to the prior grace that is made known to us in Jesus the Christ. Christ, and him crucified: this is the basis of faith, of works, of all of life on the Way of the Cross to which he calls us.
In Jesus the Christ and in no other. This is not in a one sense an exclusive claim that says God cannot be at work in the lives of adherents of other faiths or none – that by and large is none of my business. It is to say that for us who have been touched by Jesus, touched in scripture, touched in sacrament, touched in fellowship, touched in prayer and worship, there is no other way. Jesus makes exclusive claims on your life and on mine: I came preaching Christ and him crucified. This is why Mark – who was probably influenced by Paul, reminds us of Jesus’ stern rebuke to Peter. Get behind me Satan: get behind me anyone, anything who would try to distract me from the walk to Jerusalem and the shocking events of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday, Jerusalem and the equally shocking but hope-bringing, darkness conquering event of Easter Day.
For us as Christ-bearers there is a challenge not to relativize Jesus away until he becomes no more than a useful avatar of niceness. Strangely that was what Karl Barth above all saw, but Luther and Augustine, in more complex ways too. There are many useful avatars of niceness: yours will differ to mine, but mine include John Donne, William Wordsworth, Mohammed, Gautama Buddha, Kevin Rudd, Jose Ramos-Horta and Moses – to name just random some. None of these is the eternal, exclusive, death-transcending Incarnation of God’s redeeming love. That is Jesus the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus of the Cross and Empty Tomb. To him and his exclusive demands we are called again this and each day of our living journey. Anything else, anyone else making prior claim on our lives is a Satan to whom (unless we are Martin Luther, who preferred to throw inkpots) we demand ‘get behind me’, get away, get lost.
TLBWY
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS (NT) SUNDAY, MARCH 4th 2012
(SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT)
Readings:
Genesis 17.1-7, 15-16
Psalm 22.24-32
Romans 4.13-25
Mark 8.31-38
When I first went off to theological college in Melbourne I was soon made aware that in the history of biblical theology the letter of St Paul to the Romans was the engine room. Truth to be told, coming from a sort of low church charismatic background I wasn’t particularly aware of theological engine rooms – my tradition preferred collections of texts far removed from their biblical, let alone their historical context, bandied about either in wars of condemnation of those outside the community of faith, or in mutual admiration exchanges within the community of faith. I doubt it had ever occurred to me that biblical texts had a historical context, and, while I had from time to time engaged in ‘studies’ of a biblical book even that was only in order to improve our arsenals of love or hate.
To be fair I’m being unfair, but only by exaggeration, not utter misrepresentation. But as I set about my first year of theological studies – one of the most bewildering years of my life – I was quickly given the impression in all three disciplines (actually I couldn’t tell the difference between them at that stage, not being the sharpest sandwich in the chandelier) of church history, systematic theology and biblical studies – that the letter to the Romans was the engine room of faith.
And to be honest I’ve never got it. I love Paul, and have spent not only many doctoral years but many more preaching years wrestling with his texts. I have found plenty to admire in his calm and dispassionate Letter to Head Office, as I have sometimes come to think of it, but on the whole have found myself far more inspired by his racy, livid, passionate or loving letters to the churches that he founded, especially the letters to Corinth. So when I find a passage like that read to us a few minutes ago I think ‘yup, that’s nice, fairly clear, let’s move on’. Abraham believed against all odds, Abraham had faith, so should we, let’s move on. For Augustine, for Luther, for Karl Barth the emphasis on faith alone was a staggering revelation: we cannot earn our way to God.
Augustine, Luther and Barth were all reacting against religious cultures which in various ways had begun to teach other than the obvious. Luther had observed a misguided but monopolous (another invented word) Roman Catholic Church selling indulgences to enhance salvation. While some Pentecostal preachers have locked themselves in expensive prayer towers demanding money (a prayer tower now, ironically, sold to Roman Catholics) very few people these days are trying to grease the palm of God or God’s Church in order ‘to get to heaven before they close the door’ (as Dylan put it). And yes, when Barth was a young man the national churches of Germany, England and elsewhere were giving the impression that God was a national god, and that salvation was all about being respectively English enough or German enough or Russian enough to earn God’s favour. But on the whole, outside some complex aberrations again usually in fundamentalist churches, I know of few sermons extolling that kind of nationalistic theology. No: the Corinthian correspondence and its emphasis on the exclusive claims of the cross of Jesus Christ: that has always been – at least since my first year in theological college – the heart of my missiological war chest.
Christ, and him crucified, as Paul puts it. All other sermonising, and indeed all other justice-proclaiming, love-rumouring action in God’s world, is icing on the soteriological (salvational) cake. Christ, and him crucified, is the basis of faith. I have long joined those who argue that we are, as it were, ‘saved’, ‘redeemed’ not primarily by our faith in Christ but by the prior faith and faithfulness of Christ as he made his way to Good Friday and to Easter. ('But that's just stupid', asseverated one of my Moore College trained colleagues, demonstrating that stable's readiness to engage with rational thought and edifying conversation). The construction in Greek is the same: 'faith in', 'faith of'. I see our faith as a response to his faith, our love as response to his love, our hope as response to his hope, and all these as a response to the prior grace that is made known to us in Jesus the Christ. Christ, and him crucified: this is the basis of faith, of works, of all of life on the Way of the Cross to which he calls us.
In Jesus the Christ and in no other. This is not in a one sense an exclusive claim that says God cannot be at work in the lives of adherents of other faiths or none – that by and large is none of my business. It is to say that for us who have been touched by Jesus, touched in scripture, touched in sacrament, touched in fellowship, touched in prayer and worship, there is no other way. Jesus makes exclusive claims on your life and on mine: I came preaching Christ and him crucified. This is why Mark – who was probably influenced by Paul, reminds us of Jesus’ stern rebuke to Peter. Get behind me Satan: get behind me anyone, anything who would try to distract me from the walk to Jerusalem and the shocking events of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday, Jerusalem and the equally shocking but hope-bringing, darkness conquering event of Easter Day.
For us as Christ-bearers there is a challenge not to relativize Jesus away until he becomes no more than a useful avatar of niceness. Strangely that was what Karl Barth above all saw, but Luther and Augustine, in more complex ways too. There are many useful avatars of niceness: yours will differ to mine, but mine include John Donne, William Wordsworth, Mohammed, Gautama Buddha, Kevin Rudd, Jose Ramos-Horta and Moses – to name just random some. None of these is the eternal, exclusive, death-transcending Incarnation of God’s redeeming love. That is Jesus the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus of the Cross and Empty Tomb. To him and his exclusive demands we are called again this and each day of our living journey. Anything else, anyone else making prior claim on our lives is a Satan to whom (unless we are Martin Luther, who preferred to throw inkpots) we demand ‘get behind me’, get away, get lost.
TLBWY
Wednesday, 7 March 2012
exit, trial and return
SERMON PREACHED
AT THE
CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS (NT) SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 26th 2012
(FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT)
Readings:
Genesis 9.8-17
Psalm 25.1-10
1 Peter 3.18-22
Mark 1.9-15
Mark spends very little time telling us details of the phase in Jesus’ life that we have come to know as ‘the temptations’. Consistent with his characteristic urgency, he sends Jesus into the wilderness, has him in some way ‘tempted’ (I prefer the word ‘tried’) and then returns him to us and to our world. We must not read Mark through the subsequent eyes of Matthew and Luke: this brief exit, trial and return is all we need to know. Other characters in the two sentence drama are Satan, wild animals, and angels. Luke and Matthew’s profound and symbolic expansions we will explore in future years. For now we have Jesus, a trial in harsh straits, success, and return.
In ancient stories the hero is often tested. To say this is not to say that Mark was making up a story, as some biblical theologians tend to imply. Rather it is to say that as they told the Jesus story the evangelists utilised the most powerful images available to them. If Jesus is to be understood as the hero of all heroes, the man who is beyond humanity yet utterly immersed in humanity, then hero narratives of trial and triumph are a fairly useful means to get a point across. Was Jesus tempted, tried, trialled? Undoubtedly. To undertake the public ministry he undertook, even without its dark implications of forth¬coming agony and death, must have been a constant trial and temptation to give up, to return to the quiet solitude of the carpenter’s shop. ‘Can we start again, please’, sings the lovelost Mary in Superstar, but it may well have been Jesus who again and again wrestled with those words: can I start over? I was quite good at woodwork – can I go back to the workshop?
Indeed most heroes of humanity must have wrestled with demons of temptation. A Martin Luther King, in all that I have read of him, was constantly tormented by demons inviting him to return to the quiet life. So too a Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Nelson Mandela, no doubt a Rowan Williams (who I am quite happy to name in the same sentence): in fact, on a smaller scale I am certain many of us can think of better things to do on a Sunday morning than to drag ourselves along to worship a God who surely can be worshipped just as well at home. In fact why do we – why don’t we stay home? Oh for a dollar or ten for every person who assures me you don’t have to go to church to be a Christian. Never mind that that is a whole other, fatuous argument! To know Christ is, in most circumstances, to want to worship him within that flawed body of his, the community of faith. But that to some extent is another story.
Or is it? I may not, as a follower of Christ, find myself wrestling with the big decisions faced by a Dietrich Bonhoeffer or a Nelson Mandela, and I very much doubt that my Christlight would shine brightly enough to withstand the trials that they faced. Paul assured the Philippians they would not face trials too great for them to endure (with God’s help), and in a passage a little before our Petrine passage today the author of Peter urges his audience to ‘rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials’. Over and again, some 30 times, Paul or his descendants in faith urge their audiences to undergo inevitable trials as corollary of faith, so that the New Zealand Prayer Book is absolutely correct when in one of its Great Prayers of Thanksgiving, the one we borrowed on Ash Wednesday, it reminds us that we are ‘called to suffer’.
Which is why, if our faith is lolling around in a comfort zone, it may well mean that we are not where we should be on the Way of the Cross. Admittedly as a western Christian community, collectively, our trials are less likely to be trials of victimization and persecution: ours are, and have been for a decade and a half now, more likely to be trials of marginalization and ‘pillorization’, if I may coin a word. We are more likely, so far, to be mocked out of the corridors of power in our society than to be executed. We are, nevertheless, beginning to join Jesus in a journey into a wilderness, with wild animals, with Satan, and yet with angels.
Our response as the body of Christ seems to be a floppy vacillation between the temptation to turn Christianity into a Hollywood spectacle, singing flaccid love songs to Jesus and asking him to ensure our personal prosperity and well-being, on the one hand, or on the other to relativize Jesus to such an extent that he appears no different to Gautama Buddha, Kevin Rudd, or the fairy under the prickly pear. Either way – and there are many variations of a theme of flaccidity – we are not withstanding the temptations or trials (the Greek word is the same) – into which the Spirit is leading us in the twenty-first century. We prefer, it seems, our pancakes to our ashes.
Lent is an opportunity to look deeply and critically within. If we are to take seriously our vocation to be Christ-bearers in the twenty-first century then we need to check whether our place of encounter with Jesus is the armchair of faith or the brutal, discomforting scandal of a crucified God. Almost every New Testament writer told their audience that the journey with Christ would be one of trials and temptations: it may be that our greatest temptation is to relativize our Saviour to such an extent that he’s no longer worth getting out of bed to worship. It may be that our greatest temptation is to turn our faith into a cosy club of like-minded people. There are countless ways, some dramatic, and some prosaic, that we will encounter Satan in our wilderness, but it is only when we cry out to the Christ who has been there that we will find him leading us out of darkness into Easter light.
First, though, we must enter our Lenten journey. To that end I repeat the invitation I made on Ash Wednesday:
Brothers and sisters in Christ: since early days Christians have observed with great devotion the time of our Lord’s passion and resurrection. It became the custom of the Church to prepare for this by a season of penitence and fasting.
At first this season of Lent was observed by those who were preparing for Baptism at Easter and by those who were to be restored to the Church’s fellowship from which they had been separated through sin. In course of time the Church came to recognize that, by a careful keeping of these days, all Christians might take to heart the call to repentance and the assurance of forgiveness proclaimed in the gospel, and so grow in faith and in devotion to our Lord.
I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance, by prayer, fasting, and self-denial, and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word.
FRED’S PASS (NT) SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 26th 2012
(FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT)
Readings:
Genesis 9.8-17
Psalm 25.1-10
1 Peter 3.18-22
Mark 1.9-15
Mark spends very little time telling us details of the phase in Jesus’ life that we have come to know as ‘the temptations’. Consistent with his characteristic urgency, he sends Jesus into the wilderness, has him in some way ‘tempted’ (I prefer the word ‘tried’) and then returns him to us and to our world. We must not read Mark through the subsequent eyes of Matthew and Luke: this brief exit, trial and return is all we need to know. Other characters in the two sentence drama are Satan, wild animals, and angels. Luke and Matthew’s profound and symbolic expansions we will explore in future years. For now we have Jesus, a trial in harsh straits, success, and return.
In ancient stories the hero is often tested. To say this is not to say that Mark was making up a story, as some biblical theologians tend to imply. Rather it is to say that as they told the Jesus story the evangelists utilised the most powerful images available to them. If Jesus is to be understood as the hero of all heroes, the man who is beyond humanity yet utterly immersed in humanity, then hero narratives of trial and triumph are a fairly useful means to get a point across. Was Jesus tempted, tried, trialled? Undoubtedly. To undertake the public ministry he undertook, even without its dark implications of forth¬coming agony and death, must have been a constant trial and temptation to give up, to return to the quiet solitude of the carpenter’s shop. ‘Can we start again, please’, sings the lovelost Mary in Superstar, but it may well have been Jesus who again and again wrestled with those words: can I start over? I was quite good at woodwork – can I go back to the workshop?
Indeed most heroes of humanity must have wrestled with demons of temptation. A Martin Luther King, in all that I have read of him, was constantly tormented by demons inviting him to return to the quiet life. So too a Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Nelson Mandela, no doubt a Rowan Williams (who I am quite happy to name in the same sentence): in fact, on a smaller scale I am certain many of us can think of better things to do on a Sunday morning than to drag ourselves along to worship a God who surely can be worshipped just as well at home. In fact why do we – why don’t we stay home? Oh for a dollar or ten for every person who assures me you don’t have to go to church to be a Christian. Never mind that that is a whole other, fatuous argument! To know Christ is, in most circumstances, to want to worship him within that flawed body of his, the community of faith. But that to some extent is another story.
Or is it? I may not, as a follower of Christ, find myself wrestling with the big decisions faced by a Dietrich Bonhoeffer or a Nelson Mandela, and I very much doubt that my Christlight would shine brightly enough to withstand the trials that they faced. Paul assured the Philippians they would not face trials too great for them to endure (with God’s help), and in a passage a little before our Petrine passage today the author of Peter urges his audience to ‘rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials’. Over and again, some 30 times, Paul or his descendants in faith urge their audiences to undergo inevitable trials as corollary of faith, so that the New Zealand Prayer Book is absolutely correct when in one of its Great Prayers of Thanksgiving, the one we borrowed on Ash Wednesday, it reminds us that we are ‘called to suffer’.
Which is why, if our faith is lolling around in a comfort zone, it may well mean that we are not where we should be on the Way of the Cross. Admittedly as a western Christian community, collectively, our trials are less likely to be trials of victimization and persecution: ours are, and have been for a decade and a half now, more likely to be trials of marginalization and ‘pillorization’, if I may coin a word. We are more likely, so far, to be mocked out of the corridors of power in our society than to be executed. We are, nevertheless, beginning to join Jesus in a journey into a wilderness, with wild animals, with Satan, and yet with angels.
Our response as the body of Christ seems to be a floppy vacillation between the temptation to turn Christianity into a Hollywood spectacle, singing flaccid love songs to Jesus and asking him to ensure our personal prosperity and well-being, on the one hand, or on the other to relativize Jesus to such an extent that he appears no different to Gautama Buddha, Kevin Rudd, or the fairy under the prickly pear. Either way – and there are many variations of a theme of flaccidity – we are not withstanding the temptations or trials (the Greek word is the same) – into which the Spirit is leading us in the twenty-first century. We prefer, it seems, our pancakes to our ashes.
Lent is an opportunity to look deeply and critically within. If we are to take seriously our vocation to be Christ-bearers in the twenty-first century then we need to check whether our place of encounter with Jesus is the armchair of faith or the brutal, discomforting scandal of a crucified God. Almost every New Testament writer told their audience that the journey with Christ would be one of trials and temptations: it may be that our greatest temptation is to relativize our Saviour to such an extent that he’s no longer worth getting out of bed to worship. It may be that our greatest temptation is to turn our faith into a cosy club of like-minded people. There are countless ways, some dramatic, and some prosaic, that we will encounter Satan in our wilderness, but it is only when we cry out to the Christ who has been there that we will find him leading us out of darkness into Easter light.
First, though, we must enter our Lenten journey. To that end I repeat the invitation I made on Ash Wednesday:
Brothers and sisters in Christ: since early days Christians have observed with great devotion the time of our Lord’s passion and resurrection. It became the custom of the Church to prepare for this by a season of penitence and fasting.
At first this season of Lent was observed by those who were preparing for Baptism at Easter and by those who were to be restored to the Church’s fellowship from which they had been separated through sin. In course of time the Church came to recognize that, by a careful keeping of these days, all Christians might take to heart the call to repentance and the assurance of forgiveness proclaimed in the gospel, and so grow in faith and in devotion to our Lord.
I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance, by prayer, fasting, and self-denial, and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word.
Saturday, 3 March 2012
The Scandal of Particularity
SERMON PREACHED
AT THE
CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD,
FRED’S PASS (NT)
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19th 2012
(SEVENTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY ~ TRANSFIGURATION)
Readings:
2 Kings 2.1-12
Psalm 50.1-6
2 Corinthians 4.3-12
Mark 9.2-9
Although I did not grow up in the circles of Christian youth and its culture of youth camps – I thought Christianity was for the fond and silly! – I later came to learn of the great culture of romantic attachments that formed at such camps. I learned too of the parallel wisdom that relationships begun in the melting pot of camp life – the hurly burly of life on the spiritual mountain top – could often come a cropper when faced with the humdrum realities of everyday life. Even as an adult – given that Anne and I met at a Canberra conference, the grown-up version of a camp – I knew it was wise to exercise a rhetoric of suspicion before accepting the wisdom of long term planning for a relation begun on the mountain top. In our case we had little choice: I lived in Adelaide and Anne in Brisbane. Canberra was a safe place to meet, I guess.
Underlying that camp-ethos is the recognition that the mountaintop is not the place to establish the deep foundations of (relatively) stable relationship. The artificialities of the camp may be the place where love is born, but it most reach deeper into normalities if it is to be what the New Testament writers might call an ‘abiding love’. To some extent – perhaps a major extent – this applies no less to our relationship with Jesus. The excitement of conversion experience, for those who have entered faith by that door (and in fact that must be all of us, for even slow growth into faith is conversion!) – wears of, and the drudgery of human existence continues most of the time. George Herbert, of course, implored that God might make ‘drudgery divine’, but even that did not imply that life’s every moment could be a pinnacle experience. ‘Come down Oh love divine’, we sing, not ‘beam me up, Scotty’. God in Christ and Christ in his Spirit enters human existence, in all its banality, rather than scooping us up into the hype and adrenaline of peak experience (even if some styles of Christian teaching and worship suggest otherwise). Jesus and his chosen inner few experience a mountain top experience, but they must come down.
I am incidentally uninterested in arguments that arise between more or less liberal and more or less conservative (the labels are meaningless) interpreters at this point. Did Jesus, with Peter, James and John, experience something inexplicable and otherworldly on a Palestinian mountain? Or does Mark generate a symbolic narrative, almost a parable, to demonstrate both the incomprehension of the inner sanctum and the need to come down from the heights and turn, as Luke puts it, ‘resolutely’ to Jerusalem. As it happens I see no reason to doubt Mark’s story, but the point remains the same twofold point: we cannot live lives of faith in the unreality of pinnacle experience, and we cannot experience the height and depth and breadth of divine redemptive love until we have seen its fullness revealed in the depths of Good Friday despair. Anything less than turning resolutely to Jerusalem and crucifixion is ersatz, phoney redemption, a good-time God who remains removed from the depth of human realities of loneliness, despair, hopelessness. Anything less than turning resolutely to Jerusalem and crucifixion is unable even to redeem the main malaises of the West (or global north as we now inexplicably call it), the malaises of boredom and listlessness, what the French philosophers call ennui. Jesus turns away from the mountain not only to redeem ‘the refugees on the unarmed road of flight’, but all the ‘countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse’, even you and me.
But Mark places the story in such an inconvenient spot. Moments before Jesus has uttered those peculiar and awkward words Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” And he said to them, “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”
These are awkward words on at least two bases. Was Jesus wrong in his expectation that some around him would ‘see the kingdom of God … come with power’? Biblical scholars bend over backwards to try and sort that one out, using more methods than I would dare to list in a brief Sunday morning sermon. Was the Transfiguration that follows ‘the kingdom of God … come with power’? Was he referring to the Resurrection – is that ‘the kingdom of God … come with power’? Was he referring to the forthcoming ‘birth of the Church’, which we will acknowledge at far-off Pentecost, as ‘the kingdom of God … come with power’? God knows I hope not, though I do believe that, in all its failings, the church is a hint of the Kingdom yet to come. Was Jesus simply wrong – in which case why does Mark bother to tell us what he said? They are difficult questions, and sometimes we need to sit with them to find an even remotely satisfactory answer. I personally thing we are being pointed to the depth of Good Friday – and its Easter authentication – and these are the themes we will journey through this Lent.
The other words are awkward, too. Scholars call it the ‘scandal of particularity’: Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father. Isn’t Jesus just another embodiment, another avatar of the possibilities of human love and justice lived to the full? While I do not believe that non-believers are destined to some fiery hell or even non-existence I think that as a Christ-proclaiming community, coming down from our mounts of transfiguration, we must always embrace that scandal of particularity. Jesus may be an inconvenience at time, and it would be so much easier, as many if not most of my more liberal friends do, to lump him together with all those other good men and women: Buddha, Moses, Confucius, Ché Guevara, Aung Sung Suu Chi, whatever, whoever. But in the end I think not: as we with Jesus turn to Holy Week and Jerusalem, a Lent-time away, we with Jesus turn to Holy Week and Jerusalem. It is with the particular, scandalous man of the gospels that we come down from the mountain and set our feet through Lent and Holy Week to Easter hope for all.
TLBWY
FRED’S PASS (NT)
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19th 2012
(SEVENTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY ~ TRANSFIGURATION)
Readings:
2 Kings 2.1-12
Psalm 50.1-6
2 Corinthians 4.3-12
Mark 9.2-9
Although I did not grow up in the circles of Christian youth and its culture of youth camps – I thought Christianity was for the fond and silly! – I later came to learn of the great culture of romantic attachments that formed at such camps. I learned too of the parallel wisdom that relationships begun in the melting pot of camp life – the hurly burly of life on the spiritual mountain top – could often come a cropper when faced with the humdrum realities of everyday life. Even as an adult – given that Anne and I met at a Canberra conference, the grown-up version of a camp – I knew it was wise to exercise a rhetoric of suspicion before accepting the wisdom of long term planning for a relation begun on the mountain top. In our case we had little choice: I lived in Adelaide and Anne in Brisbane. Canberra was a safe place to meet, I guess.
Underlying that camp-ethos is the recognition that the mountaintop is not the place to establish the deep foundations of (relatively) stable relationship. The artificialities of the camp may be the place where love is born, but it most reach deeper into normalities if it is to be what the New Testament writers might call an ‘abiding love’. To some extent – perhaps a major extent – this applies no less to our relationship with Jesus. The excitement of conversion experience, for those who have entered faith by that door (and in fact that must be all of us, for even slow growth into faith is conversion!) – wears of, and the drudgery of human existence continues most of the time. George Herbert, of course, implored that God might make ‘drudgery divine’, but even that did not imply that life’s every moment could be a pinnacle experience. ‘Come down Oh love divine’, we sing, not ‘beam me up, Scotty’. God in Christ and Christ in his Spirit enters human existence, in all its banality, rather than scooping us up into the hype and adrenaline of peak experience (even if some styles of Christian teaching and worship suggest otherwise). Jesus and his chosen inner few experience a mountain top experience, but they must come down.
I am incidentally uninterested in arguments that arise between more or less liberal and more or less conservative (the labels are meaningless) interpreters at this point. Did Jesus, with Peter, James and John, experience something inexplicable and otherworldly on a Palestinian mountain? Or does Mark generate a symbolic narrative, almost a parable, to demonstrate both the incomprehension of the inner sanctum and the need to come down from the heights and turn, as Luke puts it, ‘resolutely’ to Jerusalem. As it happens I see no reason to doubt Mark’s story, but the point remains the same twofold point: we cannot live lives of faith in the unreality of pinnacle experience, and we cannot experience the height and depth and breadth of divine redemptive love until we have seen its fullness revealed in the depths of Good Friday despair. Anything less than turning resolutely to Jerusalem and crucifixion is ersatz, phoney redemption, a good-time God who remains removed from the depth of human realities of loneliness, despair, hopelessness. Anything less than turning resolutely to Jerusalem and crucifixion is unable even to redeem the main malaises of the West (or global north as we now inexplicably call it), the malaises of boredom and listlessness, what the French philosophers call ennui. Jesus turns away from the mountain not only to redeem ‘the refugees on the unarmed road of flight’, but all the ‘countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse’, even you and me.
But Mark places the story in such an inconvenient spot. Moments before Jesus has uttered those peculiar and awkward words Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” And he said to them, “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”
These are awkward words on at least two bases. Was Jesus wrong in his expectation that some around him would ‘see the kingdom of God … come with power’? Biblical scholars bend over backwards to try and sort that one out, using more methods than I would dare to list in a brief Sunday morning sermon. Was the Transfiguration that follows ‘the kingdom of God … come with power’? Was he referring to the Resurrection – is that ‘the kingdom of God … come with power’? Was he referring to the forthcoming ‘birth of the Church’, which we will acknowledge at far-off Pentecost, as ‘the kingdom of God … come with power’? God knows I hope not, though I do believe that, in all its failings, the church is a hint of the Kingdom yet to come. Was Jesus simply wrong – in which case why does Mark bother to tell us what he said? They are difficult questions, and sometimes we need to sit with them to find an even remotely satisfactory answer. I personally thing we are being pointed to the depth of Good Friday – and its Easter authentication – and these are the themes we will journey through this Lent.
The other words are awkward, too. Scholars call it the ‘scandal of particularity’: Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father. Isn’t Jesus just another embodiment, another avatar of the possibilities of human love and justice lived to the full? While I do not believe that non-believers are destined to some fiery hell or even non-existence I think that as a Christ-proclaiming community, coming down from our mounts of transfiguration, we must always embrace that scandal of particularity. Jesus may be an inconvenience at time, and it would be so much easier, as many if not most of my more liberal friends do, to lump him together with all those other good men and women: Buddha, Moses, Confucius, Ché Guevara, Aung Sung Suu Chi, whatever, whoever. But in the end I think not: as we with Jesus turn to Holy Week and Jerusalem, a Lent-time away, we with Jesus turn to Holy Week and Jerusalem. It is with the particular, scandalous man of the gospels that we come down from the mountain and set our feet through Lent and Holy Week to Easter hope for all.
TLBWY
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