SERMON
PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN
and St
PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
FIFTH SUNDAY
OF LENT (18thMarch) 2018
READINGS:
Jeremiah
31:31-34
Psalm
51:1-12
Hebrews
5:5-10
John
12:20-33
In another place and another time I was frequently
confronted by otherwise arguably normal clergy foaming at the virtual mouth and
expostulating wildly whenever mention was made in any form of the blood of
Jesus. As we sang the classic hymn "Glory Be To Jesus" a few moments ago I wondered yet again: is such powerful, if dark imagery to be excised from the vocabulary of Christianity? Are we to consider Christians so obtuse that we cannot de-mythologise, break open the powerful metaphors of our faith?
As we approach the pointy end of the most solemn time of the
Christian year we will traditionally be exposed to much liturgical prayer and
hymnody that takes us deep into the language of blood sacrifice and an
abandoned, suffering Son of God. Do we therefore close our eyes, look the other
way, read innocuous poems about being nice and having nice attitudes to each
other?
Or do we engage with the scriptures of our faith and what
they actually do tell us?
We could risk knowing to the depth of our souls that the original
authors found the concept of a suffering, dying saviour every bit as
challenging and offensive as their twenty-first century successors do. Yet our
predecessors in faith wrote these things anyway. They did so knowing that such imagery was offensive, foolish, a stumbling block, as Paul poignantly reminded his correspondents in Corinth. Are we, in our cosy, articulate, middle class cathedrals and churches, better than Saint Paul?
They did so because they believed that in the events we
follow over these next two weeks hope was born for humanity and creation. To
tell any lesser story is to eviscerate the gospel, to disembowel Good News
until it becomes no more than a lame fairy tale. Weak words, weak and watered
down pseudo-gospel words, disemboweled words of nothingness are not the Good
News of Jesus Christ.
Watered-down words are as evil as the toxic words of
escalation so beloved of a different wing of Christianity. That wing is a huddle of the Chosen, that sees the words of Jesus as excluding outsiders, providing excuse to hate those who do not look, speak, act or live as the
speakers think people should. Such words are exemplified by many US and US-influenced
fundamentalists.
Politicians, exemplified by Leslie Gibson, who last week mocked
a teenage survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School as a “skinhead
lesbian.” The words of exclusion and hate can never be the Gospel of Jesus
Christ.
Bland and toxic words alike words leave us in a world in which cycles of hatred
escalate unchallenged. The escalation of toxicity needs no explanation: you bomb my city and
I’ll bomb your city with a bigger bomb. As it happens the much-maligned Jewish
law of an eye for an eye was designed to correct precisely that
escalation.
As a corrective though, Jesus suggested, it did not go far enough. The
stories we encounter this week tell of a deeper corrective: if you attack me
then I will enter your deepest fears and there offer comfort, hope and succour.
The birth, life, teachings, suffering, death and resurrection – and the future
coming that you will address in far-off Advent – these moments of Jesus demonstrate
the extent to which divine love enters and transforms the human condition.
These moments begin what Jeremiah referred to as a new covenant relationship,
written on human hearts.
That passage of Jeremiah follows the bitter scene of Rachel
weeping for her children in Ramah. Hers is pain known to every parent who has
outlived a child. Hers was pain that is one of the deepest sorrows of the human
condition. In Hosea we find it is God’s own tears that are falling, while
humanity continues to worship itself and its own imagined importance.
Jeremiah’s words of hope follow portrayal of sorrow because
it is precisely to the deepest darknesses of being human that God enters in the
event of Jesus of Nazareth. In Hosea, Jeremiah and the New Testament, indeed
throughout Scripture, the entrance of God into human darkness – even cosmic
darkness – is always an undeserved, unmerited act of grace.
God becomes enfleshed in suffering. Psalm 51, that
Christians used to articulate the suffering of Jesus, is another, powerfully
poetic expression of the depth to which God in Christ descends. Glimpses like
Jeremiah’s covenant amidst bitter weeping, the Psalmist’s “my God my God, why
have you forsaken me?", and some would say even the self-restricting act of
creating humanity in the first place demonstrate the depths of God’s love. God
enters human darkness. God enters the darkest stories of our news cycles. God
weeps.
And there the story does not end.
Because, as our Hebrews author and John alike hint, we,
unlike the poor disciples, can glance ahead to Easter Day. We can even, in
hope, glance to that glorious day, the Dies
Irae beloved of Haydn, Liszt, Mahler and others, the day told of in the mysterious
Book of Revelation and elsewhere. For, based on their (and our) encounter by faith with the day of resurrection, the early Christians and their successors
have been daring enough to believe in that Other Day. Then all shall be
revealed and all shall be healed. And all this despite the growing sickness of
our planet, economic foreboding, and a general sense that humanity is doing its
best to destroy all things living.
John and the Hebrews author alike speak of the glorification
of God in Christ. This is when language breaks down, for there is no language
to communicate that which is beyond language. This is when, as Charles Wesley
put it, we stand, “lost in wonder love and praise.”
But if we denude the biblical witnesses of the brutal
language used to convey the depths of suffering to which God’s love descends
then we destroy the Gospel. If we do that then we are left on Easter Day with
only mumbled meaningless mutterings about nice things: daffodils in spring, chocolate
bunnies (however nice they may be), and the well-being or mindfulness or good
intentions of Jesus going on after his death.
And if that, like the message of some expostulating ersatz
Christians, is all we have, then we as Paul said are more to be pitied then all
people.
In the next two weeks we will enact a journey with Jesus.
Then, on Easter Day we, and all those who we love and pray, for can burst out of
the tomb of suffering and despair and meaninglessness. We can burst out of the
tomb of economic and ecological and personal and universal collapse. We can gasp
our stuttered amazement at the birth of hope for all who ever have and ever
will have wept. We can sing our amens and that word we don’t say in Lent. We
can fill our hearts with joy for all who have ever cried out “my God, my God,
why have your forsaken me” – even God, when God has cried that out – for those
words are not nor ever will be the final words in God’s dealings with Creation
and its humans.
TLBWY
