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Saturday, 16 March 2024

Cloudy God, Fast God

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

& St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,

FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT (March 17th) 2024

 

READINGS

Hebrews 5: 1-10

Psalm 119:9-16

John 12: 20-33

 

[The wondrous thing about the small slice of the letter or, I suspect, sermon to the Hebrews that we have read from [at St. Peter’s] is that it can be made to mean almost anything. There is a long-standing tradition when persons are ordained of delivering them a congratulatory card, reminding them that they are “a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.” 

The "who/what" of Melchizedek aside, beyond a fleeting Hebrew Scripural mention, tbere is a truth in the cards doled out to neo-phyte clergy. Yes, in orthodox theology that are priest forever in some way, but they were on the day before their ordination as well. The English and Latin languages have done us a great disservice, for different Greek words for priesthood have slid into Latin and English usage, but I can safely say that it is the intention of the church that those of us who wear our collars back to front are not priests in any different way to the way in which you the people of God are priests, and that is the priesthood into which we are baptised.

We are of course baptised into Jesus and he fulfils the priesthood that the author of Hebrews is cryptically writing of. You and I in exactly the same way, regardless of our neck apparel, participate in that priesthood. There will be more of that on other occasions, but basically the unfortunate English word describing the “priesthood” into which I am ordained and you are not has nothing to do with the priesthood of Melchizedek.

But although I primarily want to talk about the gospel reading, and briefly at that, it is always worth checking the ways in which we can distort scripture. In the gospel reading the focus is the glorification of the true priest. There the word in Greek is hieros, from which we get hierarchy, the ordained priesthood with unfortunate collars is depicted by the  word presbuteros, from which akmost ironically we get the word Presbyterian. 

I remember well my head of seminary thumping the desk and exclaiming there must be no hieros, no hierarchy in the church.

But of course there is in our denomination. It’s just that there shouldn’t be. And I’ve made that clear as mud. Enough.]

What is of this glorification of which Jesus speaks? Very little in John’s account of the gospel is weightless, and  “glory” is one of his key words. John depicts a scene foreshadowing in which God extends divine relationship with the Jews to a relationship of God  with all people.

Most of us belong in that category.

It is outsiders who have come longing to see Jesus. It is to primaril them that Jesus addresses his thoughts on glorification.

“Glory” in the Hebrew scriptures was the sign and prerogative of God. Jesus begins talking to the Greeks about it in the context of prediction of his own suffering and death. Something very strange is going on. To the Greeks the concept of a God suffering was impossible. To the Jews, as we will see in Paul’s writings, the possibility of God’s death on what Paul calls a tree, a wooden cross, was obscene.

Jesus here sets out to identifies himself with God and God with impossibility, even obscenity.

We will be doing a lot of hard work in our liturgy over the next two weeks. Next week we will, though for most of the last 20 centuries the church has forgotten it, look at the way in which we have sought God in the wrong places. 

Certainly, yes, the Hebrew scriptures speak of the glory of God, the shekinah, in a pillar of fire by night and cloud by day, majestic and terrifying. As I was wonderfully reminded during my all too short sojourn in the Northern Territory, there is little that is more majestic than cumulonimbus clouds soaring tens of thousands of metres into the air. Bright light of any sort in the night sky, such as the terrifying grandeur of a volcanic eruption, or God forbid the towering inferno of a high rise building caught alight, are a deeply unsettling sight

Yet Jesus turns the gaze of the Greeks and Jews alike elsewhere. Next Sunday we will enact the desire to see him enter our world and overthrow corruption. If I can find some palm branches in time, we will at least symbolically cast them before his feet, as he comes to our place, comes as a conqueror. Then he will turn that our expectations upside down, for he will come in peace, and will continue in death.

Even the great passing miracle of the resurrection which we will finally encounter on Easter day will be something no newspaper of the time, no cameras, no human eye could capture. God is too fast to be captured, as the poet R. S. Thomas reminds us.

We have much work to do these next two weeks, as we journey towards the moment in which Jesus is lifted up from the earth and begins the whisper that he is drawing all people – people far beyond the boundaries that we like to set – to him.

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