God godforsaken

 

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27^th, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 30

 

READINGS

Hebrews 7: 23-28

Psalm 34: 1-8

Mark 10: 46-52

 

I want us this week to set aside the well known passage in which Mark tells us of the blind man beside the road. I want to turn at last to the passages that we have been skirting around in our weekly readings from Hebrews. I do want to emphasise though in passing one important aspect to which we will return of the encounter between Jesus and blind Bartimaeus, and, to give credit where credit is due, to acknowledge that it was Mark, our Mark Wilson who brought to my attention the detail that Jesus asks this determined blind man what it is that he wants, rather than making the assumption that most of us probably make, that the man wants to have sight. Jesus does not impose himself on those he loves, cares for, and heal, and we might remember that it was only a week or two ago that Jesus watched sadly as the rich young man walked away. Jesus does not lasoo people and drag them kicking and screaming into his will.

We will in fact come back to that at the end, but let us glance first at the traditional high priest,  the model of high priest that forms the basis of the argument of the Sermon to the Hebrews, as the author seeks to remind her audience who Jesus is, and what our response to him should be.

The original high priest, Aaron, was appointed by his younger brother, Moses. It may sound like an act of humility on Moses’ part, but was in the text an act of timidity, a failure, which many of us can understand, to trust in God and God’s hand on his life. Nevertheless the high priesthood was established and soon, like that other Hebrew role of king, was corrupted. It seems that Aaron and his descendants faded somewhat from the scene as other forms of religious leadership and even civic leadership took over.

But from the very beginning the role of high priest was tainted and flawed, as we might say it was always going to be because the role of high priest was inhabited by human beings. 

You may not have noticed it but most of us are tainted and flawed.

The writer of Hebrews was writing for a Christian audience that was becoming complacent and nonchalant about its faith. She  set out to emphasise the unique nature of Jesus’ life and work, and to demonstrate that that defined him, amongst many roles, as uniquely a perfect, unflawed high priest precisely because he came from the heart of God, was eternal with God, was nothing but God except in so far, as Paul reminded us in Philippians, except in so far as he deliberately emptied himself of divinity to enter into the fullness of grottiness of human existence. I have touched on this before.

The significance of the emanation from God, the son of God, entering into existence is multi-fold. Jesus becomes, as the author emphasises, an unflawed high priest interceding for us deep within the heart of God. There are many ramifications of this that I simply can’t go into in so short a space of time.

However one which is somewhat under explored, though was thoroughly explored by my favourite theologian Jürgen Moltmann, is that the ascended Christ returns to the one he calls “Father,” returns to his previous state of oneness in Godhead, armed with the new experience of being embodied in all the flaws of being human. 

To put that a different way, he becomes aware of all those dimensions of temptation and sinfulness, except, as Matthew and Luke are keen to tell us in their stories of the temptation of Christ, except for the dimension of succumbing to temptation and acting from a heart of sin. Correct me if I’m wrong but none of us achieve that. It is for that reason, if I can put it this way, that he is able to return untainted into the heart of Godhead.

Time and timey-wimey travel beyond our comprehension here, but in simple terms, on a simple human timeline, something then is changed in the very heart of God. Apart from anything else as we find out on Good Friday, God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, God is exposed to the experience of separation from God: God godforsaken. We can never understand that, and let us not try. But it does matter and it is why I add here to trinitarian faith and I’m not a Jehovah’s witness, a Unitarian, a Muslim, even a devotee of the Grand Architect of the Universe, or other choices that focus on a God who remains outside our experience, an unmoved mover, far, far away.

As an aside, much though I love the song “From a Distance,” in which Mary Chapin Carpenter and other recording artists sing of a distant God watching us, trinitarian theology teaches that the distant God becomes human amongst us. Through the third person of the Trinity God enters into and transforms our being to a state in which we can enter into divine presence and divine eternity – but again let us not try to understand this rationally for it is far beyond human understanding.

What though does it matter that God in Christ through the Spirit has entered into our existence and even our individual lives? It matters very little at all unless we are willing to open ourselves up to the constant and ongoing invitation to Jesus to dwell in us, to renew us, to – to use a fancy theological term “sanctify,” or as the orthodox would say, “divinize” us through the process referred to in Anne’s recent book Restoring the Story  as “theosis.” Wesley explains it as “transformed from glory into glory, till in heaven we take our place.” There is though an onus on us to hand over again and again our lives to the transforming, redeeming love of Jesus.

That however leaves me with one other matter that I must touch on. And here I part company with many of my evangelical friends. For I emphasise in my life and my teaching that we are not “the saved” in some exclusive way, who will see our friends and loved ones, to borrow the title of a ghastly series of so-called Christian films of the 1970s, “left behind,” as God sets out to dispatch to hellfire those who have not made a confession of faith.

Not so. Like the Jewish people of old we are called to be a remnant who pray on behalf of and for those who do not share our faith. Those who are too busy, too sceptical, too rationalist, too unreached to share the love of Jesus that we are blessed with. Scriptures themselves refer to, in the promise to Abraham, the blessing that we have received as children of Abraham,  extending to the children and children’s children even to the 25th generation. That is metaphorical language and we don’t need to count up and down our family tree to see where our loved ones dwell. That is rich metaphorical language that says those who we love and pray for, that phrase I use at the end of each liturgy, are caught up by our prayers into the glorious hope and eternal love of God. This incidentally is a doctrine called christocentric universalism, and a doctrine to which I dearly hold, and which I believe dwells at the heart even of the teachings of Saint Paul.

Enough for now. Except to reiterate that those we love and pray for are absolutely caught up in the eternities of divine love. And except to emphasise that our responsibility is to remain faithful in prayer, in worship ending finding every way we can to enact and if necessary speak with words the good news of Jesus Christ and his resurrection.