Christ is risen?

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH

EASTER 2 (April 17^th) 1988

 

 
They offered him a piece of grilled fish, which he took and  ate before their eyes

 

 

This morning, and throughout the season of Easter, we made the joyful affirmation, “Christ is risen,” and responded as one voice, “He is risen indeed.”  Why? What do we mean when we make this claim? Or do we just say it because it’s a nice thing to say and it is in the book anyway?

Constantly we find the accounts of Jesus’ post-Easter appearances in the New Testament emphasising peculiar little details about the nature of Jesus’ resurrection body. If we analyse all of these little comments made by the New Testament authors a clear consensus begins to emerge. Jesus was different in appearance to what he had been up to and including the crucifixion, but he was nevertheless quite definitely human. He was able to be touched, to be held, and, in our passage today, even to eat.

Why do the writers of these accounts bother to make these little details known? It was certainly not in order to win more people over to the teachings of the new found Christian faith, for any good Greek was likely to scoff at any suggestion that God should want to raise more than merely the spirit of his chosen servant, would want Jesus to appear to his followers as any more than a ghost.

Quite clearly, then, the New Testament authors included these hard to swallow details about the body and bodiliness of the risen Christ because they saw them as central to the Easter message, central to the Christian faith.

The question I want to ask is, “do we?”

I suspect that were a survey to be done on Christian belief, and the questions were asked, “do you believe in the immortality of the soul?”, many if not most Christian believers would reply, “Yes.” Certainly at most funerals I attend such a belief is often expressed by mourners, and the ubiquitous Masonic rituals affirm belief in the immortality of the soul rather than the distinctively Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the dead.

Is there a difference, or am I simply splitting hairs? I believe there is a difference, and that it is of great importance for our living out of Christian faith. For at the basis of this question is the underlying question, “did Jesus rise?” and its corollary, “Is there a distinctively Christian hope in the face of death?”

When I attend or take a funeral I say this prayer:

Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust:

in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,

who died, and was buried, and rose again for us,

and who shall change our mortal body

that it may be like his glorious body …

 

In saying that prayer I am expressing the distinctively Christian belief that death is a mere interim, and that the person who we have lost is one with whom we shall be reunited, body and soul, at the end of what we know as time. I am not merely looking forward to a time when my spirit and that person’s spirit shall be reunited, but to a future bodily resurrection.

The belief in the immortality of the soul is an ancient Greek belief that pre-dated Christianity by some centuries. It is not the belief and the Good News for which Jesus lived and died. And, furthermore, I believe that if we are to be consistent and true to the essentials of our faith we cannot hold to a belief in the immortality of the soul. It stands in contradiction to Christian teaching, and is mutually exclusive with Christian belief in the resurrection of the dead.

I do not want to make the claim that I am right and those who hold to belief in the immortality of the soul are wrong. I can make no such claim. I do want to say, though, that they are separate beliefs, and that if we say “Amen” to the Christian creeds by which we affirm belief in “the resurrection of the dead,” or “the resurrection of the body,” then we cannot be a part of any doctrine that affirms no more than belief in an immortal soul.

When Paul and other early Christians proclaimed to the non-Jewish world that Jesus rose bodily from the grave, and that because he had in that way conquered death so his people likewise would be freed to rise bodily from the grave – at the end of time – his hearers would have laughed. No god-fearing Greek could ever accept such a doctrine, because Greeks believed that all matter is essentially evil, and that the body is no more than a prison in which the immortal soul is temporarily housed.

But Paul was saying something radically different. He was saying that God would recreate the bodies of his people, the bodies in which we live and die, and that we shall be bodily raised from death, body and soul together (if we can separate the two), and never again taste separation and death.

Handel grasps the all of this doctrine in The Messiah when he sets Paul’s words to music.

The trumpet shall sound and we shall be changed,
the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised ...

incorruptible.

 

This means that whenever I officiated a funeral I believe – though I cannot altogether explain the mystery – but I believe that the person who has died will at the end of time be raised bodily and dwell in that as yet unattainable form in the nearer, intimate presence of God and God’s people.

Underlying these claims is an even more basic belief central to Christian and Jewish belief alike: God created and saw that it was good. If we hold to a belief that maintains less than the resurrection of the body, then we are denying the goodness of the creation that God has designed and brought into being.

Says one major theologian,

Body and soul are both originally good insofar as they are created by God; they are both bad insofar as the deadly power of the flesh has hold of them. Both can and must be set free by the quickening power of the Holy Spirit.[1]

 

He goes on to say,

Deliverance consists not in a release of soul from body but in a release of both from flesh.

Cullmann here uses the word “flesh” in the way that Paul does, not to mean “body,” but to mean “fallenness” or “sinfulness.” We shall be raised incorruptible.

The reason I stress this is twofold. In the first place it is important that we know and understand the teachings of our faith. If Christianity has not a distinctive set of beliefs then we may as well hand over to the civil celebrants for our weddings and funerals, or join perhaps the Hare Krisna sect, or the Mormons. But if we do believe something distinctive then we ought to know what it is.

But secondly I maintain we should know as Christians how to face the question of death. How should I as a Christian face my death? We know in the light of Good Friday that we cannot sidestep the issue, so how should we grapple with it? And how should I treat the world and the body in which I live, especially in the light of the belief that Jesus saw fit to dwell likewise in this world and in a human body?

The answer is that I should face death with enormous hope. The hope that I and indeed all who God loves shall indeed be raised anew, shall be re clothed in a glorious body as Jesus was, and shall dwell together with God in incorruptible bodies and unpollutable love. And I believe too that I should love and enjoy all that I experience of this creation, this body and this world in which I live, for this as a foretaste of the inexpressibly beautiful re-creation that lies ahead.

Again, I do not want to claim that this doctrine, this belief in the resurrection of the body, (and the coming re-creation of creation, for Christ is only the first fruits of all that is to come), is better than any other, non-Christian doctrine, or that it offers any greater hope to the dying or to the bereaved. But I do want to emphasize that it offers a distinctly Christian belief.

The fact that men [and women] continue to die no longer has the same significance after the resurrection of Christ. The fact of death is robbed of its former significance. Dying is no longer an expression of the absolute Lordship of Death, but only one of Death’s last contentions for Lordship. Death cannot put an end to the great fact that there is one risen Body.[2]

 

Christ, of course, the first fruit of all creation. Christ is risen! When we affirm that, as we have all done here this morning, we affirm also our belief that he has made possible the resurrection of the body for all who are in him. Christ is risen, and we have the witness of his first amazed followers that he ate with them, walked with them, that they touched him and conversed with him. We do not have that opportunity, though we are, I believe, able in a very real sense to do precisely that in the Eucharist in which we are about to share. Christ is risen, and in that faith we are able to go on to face life and death in the shore hope that no thing cannot separate us from the love of God or of those we love in God.

Christ is risen!

---

[1] Oscar Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? London: Epworth, 1958, 35.

[2] Oscar Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?, 40-41.

that empty tomb

 SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH

EASTER DAY (April 3^rd) 1988

 

 

 

It happened just a week later. Fletcher was demonstrating the elements of high speed flying to a class of new students. He had just pulled out of a dive from seven thousand feet … When a young bird on its first flight glided directly into his path, calling for its mother. With a tenth of a second to avoid the youngster, Fletcher Lynd Seagull snapped hard to the left, at something over two hundred miles per hour, into a cliff of solid granite.

It was, for him, as though the rock were a giant hard door into another world. A burst of fear and shock and black as he hit, and then he was adrift in a strange, strange sky, forgetting, remembering, forgetting …

Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

(Pan: London: 1970. 85-86)

 

There can be no new life without death. It is that tension that we must hold in our faith each year, and particularly as each Easter comes around. And, in an attempt to maintain that truth-tension some of you have, over the past forty days of Lent, journeyed with Jesus towards the cross. If you have been following Richard Holloway’s book^[[1]] you will have paused at the Stations of the Cross, dwelling at each station on the cost to Jesus of our salvation. If you have observed during Lent some form of abstinence, it will have served to remind you that there can be no salvation without cost. But whatever our discipline has been, we must be reminded again and again of the cost to our Lord of the glorious festival that we celebrate today.

Jesus turned and set his face resolutely towards Jerusalem. He knew something of what lay ahead for him there. He spoke to his followers of the pain he was soon to face, and of the death that awaited him. His disciples were puzzled for here was the one who was to be their king speaking to them of suffering and death. Judas was so confused by this seeming contradiction that he eventually realized that the only way he could continue the revolutionary energy Jesus had originally generated would be to betray him. This talk of suffering and death seemed to Judas to be contradictory to the cause of liberation and freedom. I suspect there is something of Judas in each of us.  Judas simply wished to reap the benefits that he saw the Messiah Jesus to be offering, without recognising the cost.

Peter was no different. When Jesus first foretold the suffering that lay ahead of him, Peter rebukes him. Yet “Get behind me, Satan” (Mark. 8:33) was the harsh response of Jesus.

Why? So often I have struggled with that passage. Why is Jesus so harsh, so rude, to one of his closest followers? Yet the answer is staringly obvious: there can be no joy without sorrow, there can be no hope without despair, no resurrection without the crucifixion. We long for easy answers to the questions of life, and especially to the question of death. But Christianity offers no easy, cheap answer. Jesus, even before his arrest in the Garden, knew clearly that there could be no easy answer. So he journeys resolutely on towards his death, knowing that only in death can life be made meaningful, that only in suffering can new life be offered.

How we would love to sidestepped that scandal of death. We live in a society that pleads to remain forever young. Yet two and a half centuries ago the biting satirist Jonathan Swift exposed that lame hope for the con that it is. In the acerbic satire Gulliver's Travels the hero, Gulliver, encounters a race amongst whom dwell a mutant form of human being, whose mutation expresses itself with the curse of immortality. The curse of immortality? Gulliver, too, poses that question, only to discover that such immortality is a curse because it is death that the mutant Struldbuggs sidestep, not the ravages of ageing. Says Gulliver, with masterful understatement,

the reader will easily believe … my keen appetite for perpetuity of life was much abated.

 

Life and death are, and must be, inseparable.

Sadly, so many religious enthusiasts claimed to provide an easy answer to the seemingly tragic fact of death. So many, like Judas, like Peter, want to acquire the blessings of Easter, the resurrection, without first experiencing the horrors of Good Friday. We as Christians so often open ourselves to the criticisms of the great atheists that we cling to our piety, our faith, only in order to avoid the bleak fact that we are mortal, that each of us shall die. For even Fletcher Lynd Seagull, in my opening quotation, had to pass through the granite wall of death in order to pass on to new life.

And that is perhaps the tragedy of the chocolate Easter egg and the Easter Bunny. We have allowed these two quite profound symbols of the mystery of the resurrection to be raped by commerce, to be turned into a tragic parody, to be turned into trivia. The egg should be a powerful symbol of new life, a reminder of the potential of humanity in Christ to burst out of the shackles of the grave into resurrection life. And even the rabbit: rabbits’ habits unknown only too well. The rabbit therefore can stand as a symbol of the regeneration that the Easter hope provides us. Yet we have allowed these symbols to become symbols of life without first taking to heart the significance of the cross on the hot cross buns we ate on Friday. There can be no regeneration, there can be no bursting out of the grave, without first undergoing the scandal of death. If we are not to lose altogether the significance of our commercialized symbols of Easter then we must baptize them, proclaimed them as significant only in the whole context of the Christian gospel. For the hope of the Resurrection there is the terrible cost of death.

The Resurrection is never an evasion of death, it is consequent upon death, it only comes when we have plumbed the depths.

(Richard Holloway, The Way of the Cross, 118).

 

The Easter egg can have no meaning unless its shell is destroyed. There is no new life unless the beauty of the egg is shattered. Or, to use another traditional Christian symbol, there can be no bright morning star until we have passed through the darkness of the night.

In the end there can be no proof of the Christian truth-claim that Jesus is risen. We were not there to stand alongside the women at the unexpectedly empty tomb and to hear the declaration, “He is not there, he is risen.” Tennyson, the great English poet, echoes these words in his mammoth work “In Memoriam,” in which he mourns the death of his close friend Arthur Halem.

He is not here; but far away

      The noise of life begins again,

      And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain

On the bold street breaks the bleak day.

                                                 “In Memoriam”, vii.

But the resurrection message of Easter is more even than the knowledge that our lives go on despite the loss of those we love, or that the causes for which Jesus lived and died can be continued in successive communities. Those, too, are truths, but hardly the gospel.

For there is good news. It can never and must never be proved, but for me I find in Easter the great hope that enables me to attend and to officiate at funerals, to minister to the bereaved and to the dying, and to face my own inevitable death with greater confidence than would otherwise be possible. For in the message of Easter I hear the good news that we have a God who loves us, and who has created for us an existence far greater than that we presently experience. Who, in the Resurrection of his Son, opens for us a way to experience that internal awareness of his love beyond the limitations of our future grave. In Easter there is no way out of death, but the hope for a beyond.

I am ascending to my Father and to your Father, to my God and your God.

                                                                                                   (John 20:17)

 

In the light then of this glorious morning I can face life. I can face suffering, I can face tragedy, I can face death. For, while Jesus does not remove from us the tragedy of death, he transforms that tragedy into a symbol of hope. Christian faith must never side steps suffering and death, but reveals God in the very heart of tragedy and leads us on into inexpressible ecstasy.

And so this Easter let us join with Paul in that glorious hymn,

O death, where is your victory,

      O death where is your sting?

Thanks be to God who gives us the victory,

      through our Lord Jesus.

 

 

---

[1] Richard Holloway, The Way of the Cross.

proclaim ... hope

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN
and St Peter’s, Queenstown
SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER
(April 26^th) 2025
 
Readings
Revelation 1: 4-8
Psalm 150
John 20: 19-31

 

 

It’s easy enough to be a part of a liturgical Christian tradition without realizing the extent to which our readings are set not by some personal whim of the preacher, but by some clever people who have worked out a scheme by which we are exposed to as much of the scriptures as we can fit into a three-year cycle of readings. It is fact one of the factors that has kept me immersed in liturgical Christianity, for as one who preaches I have limited opportunity constantly to inflict on you my pet, self-aggrandizing or edifying passages of scripture.

But the pattern the lectionary readings follows, the shape of the church year, is largely based on the chronology of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, rather than that of John. To some extent that doesn’t matter, but it is why we find this scene from John appearing twice in our year, once in the Easter season, once at Pentecost.

Because John conflates the resurrection, and the appearances of the Risen Lord, with the coming of the Spirit. Or maybe Luke, who the lectionary tends to follow, separates them. We can’t tell. Our Tardis cannot take us to those early days in Jerusalem. And while the biblical writers had their own reasons in their own contexts, and the collators of the texts had theirs, centuries later, the critical issue is the gift that the Spirit of Pentecost, the Spirit of Resurrection, brings us. And that is the gift of the experience of the Risen Lord. Not by sight, or by the touch that Thomas sought, but by powerful moments of spiritual encounter. In liturgy, fellowship, in sacrament, and in a different way in nature, creation,  we can from time to time feel the impact of the presence of the Risen Christ.

And we are called to take the gifts that experience gives us, and take them out into the communities into which God has placed us, called us, and proclaim them by our lives, our actions, occasionally our words.

By these aspects of who God is making us, we are called to proclaim, as Paul put it, faith, hope, and love, elements often powerfully countercultural to the  world around us. Other gospel ingredients, too: proclaim justice. Proclaim reconciliation. Proclaim joy. All countercultural in a world that will gravitate always to chaos, gloom, darkness.  That is why we have a photo of children decorating a cross … youth, golden colours, even the shafts of sunlight which have nothing to do with us but everything to do with a God who flings sunlight across universes, all these are bearers of the hope that is in the defeated Cross of Roman torture, the cross of evil. The cross of evil turned bizarrely, impossibly, into the cross of inextinguishable light, and hope and love. The God who resurrects, despite all darkness.

And yes, as every evangelical will rightly remind us, we are called to open ourselves up to, to receive, once and then again and again, the Risen Lord of that Cross into our lives, out actions, our thoughts.  Some of enacted that on Easter Day in a service that includes renewal of our baptismal vows. But we do it every time we make eucharist, as we confess our “not good enoughness,” and hear the priest murmuring God’s words of reconciliation.

Of course these are impossible things to believe, harder still to explain. Harder than impossible. How many impossible things was Alice challenged to believe before breakfast? We are called to believe many more. And we are called to believe just one. Christ is Risen.  For us, with us, in us, and us in him.

So we seek God’s help to be a people proclaiming that hope by our lives and our attitudes.

God, who we see

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S EAST BENTLEIGH

MAUNDY THURSDAY

(THURSDAY  31^st March) 1988

 

Where are you Lord? Sometimes it seems I battle on for weeks and months, there have been years, without the feeling of your presence with me. I have yelled in the darkness “Come to me” and all I hear is the echo of my own voice fading in the night. Where are you Lord? It would be so much easier if there were at convenient times a sign, my own private pillar of cloud by day or fire by night that I could follow in the knowledge that you, Lord, were there. Sometimes I see a rainbow and my heart leaps, until the voice of rationalism within me explains that it is, after all, only the spectrum of white light passed through a prism.

Is it only I, Lord, who cries out to see your face? “Sir, we would see Jesus,” requested some Greeks of the disciples. And Thomas, even poor doubting, human Thomas, at least got to place his hands into the wounds of the risen Lord so that he could know for himself that the resurrection was no fairytale. Where are you now Lord, so that I may touch your wounds?

I wonder if your chosen people, the Jews, ever cried – or cry – out to find you in the darkness. Isn’t it strange, even those who did have the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night as they wandered through the desert rebelled and deserted you. Is it so strange that I should cry out and doubt you in the deserts of my life?

And what of the later Jews? Or of the Jews today? They will be celebrating Passover this week. As they celebrate, each household will believe the events of the original Passover to be recreated and made present in their home. They will know again the slaying of the first-born sons of the Egyptians and the merciful passing over of their own first-born. They will know again the passing through the Reed Sea and the closing of the waters behind them, their escape with God’s help from their pursuers. They will know again the joy of salvation, of liberation from oppression. All those years. All those centuries. So long a time has passed since those events of the Exodus and yet they continue to celebrate, continue to re-create and to re-joice in the event today as though they were there.

And in a sense they were.

Even Jesus celebrated the Passover. Matthew, Luke and Mark tell us that the Last Supper was the Passover meal. John sets that final meal on the night before the Passover, and we must accept and understand that each author had his reasons. But certainly Jesus as a Jew and as the first-born son in a Jewish household would have participated in, and, after the death of Joseph, presided over the celebration of the Passover. Is it an accident that John tells us that Jesus knew that he had to “pass over” from this world to the father”? It’s uncanny. That was the night that poor, misguided Judas betrayed him. And Jesus washed the disciples’ feet that night. My goodness, he must have known what was about to take place. And Jesus somehow seemed to know that his own passover  had come, his passing over from life to death, and in him the passing over of the world from death to life.

The disciples must have wondered what was going on that night. John tells us that Jesus is saying that it is an act of perfect love to wash the feet of a sister or a brother. God is love. Does God wash feet? When Mother Teresa cradles the grimy body of a dying child in Calcutta is that a taste of love, a taste of God? And Jesus also seems to be saying at the Last Supper that one must be washed by him in order to be a part of him. Is that a reference to baptism?

Ah, if I could but see and talk with Jesus. There would be so much that I would ask him. Then surely I would weep, knowing fully my blindness and my shortcomings, confessing my doubts and my more than occasional despair. It’s strange, too, how traditionally this day, Maundy Thursday, has been a time of readmission of penitents back into the folds of the church. Many, countless people must have wept tears of grief and joy on this day as they re-entered the communion from which they were estranged. They must feel a little like the prodigal son, returning to the father in shame, only to receive the fatted calf, and to be clothed in the best of jewellery, clothes, and shoes.

I suppose every time we see an act of forgiveness like that we see something of the face of God, something of the loving nature of God?

And there’s another thing, too. It is from communion from which those estranged from the church are barred. John doesn’t tell us, but our reading from Paul does, and so too the accounts of Matthew, Mark and Luke: on that last night with his disciples Jesus took bread, and blessed it, broke it, and distributed it amongst his disciples, and took wine and did likewise. He called it a memorial. A memorial of him. It’s funny that he uses the same word that the Jews use of the Passover celebrations.

More than merely remembering the events, but actually making them present, making them happen again whenever and wherever you participate in them. Does that mean that every time a priest in our midst re-presents those actions of Jesus that we can really know Jesus in our midst? That we can truly see Jesus? No wonder that Paul tells us that each time we perform these actions of taking, blessing, breaking and giving that we are proclaiming the death – and I guess too the resurrection – of Jesus to the world. Could it be that the very Eucharist itself – or Lord’s Supper, or Holy Communion, or Mass, it doesn’t measure what we call it – could it be that the very Eucharist itself is an act of evangelism, a telling to the world that Jesus is risen, that he is alive, that he is Lord?

So then, in the washing of feet, in the reconciliation of penitents, in the Eucharist, do we not see Jesus? And does not Jesus himself say that whoever has seen him, whoever has seen the Son, has seen the Father? No wonder the centurion cries out, “Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief”!

Where are you Lord? Sometimes, yes, I will feel you there beside me. But most of the time I do not. And yet I cannot leave you because I see your face. I see your face each time I see an act of love like the washing of feet or the cradling of a dying child, or the healing of a broken body. I see your face each time I see a person forgiven or know the remarkable power of forgiveness in my own life. And – and for me this above all – I see your face each time a priest takes bread, blesses it and says your words “this is my body,” and takes a cup and blesses the wine, saying your words, “this is my blood”, and each time I and others present answer “Amen.” Yes, I thank you Lord that when I cannot feel you I can see you.

Blessing and honour and glory and power are yours for ever and ever. Amen.

God, who suckles us

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S EAST BENTLEIGH

SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT

(SUNDAY 13^th March) 1988

Please note: the photos in this blog post were taken 37 years after the sermon was written and preached, at the consecration of Dr Anne van Gend, and her installation as Bishop of Dunedin, March 29, 2025. These were events I could not have foreseen in 1988, nor imagined I would have any connection to them. 

In our series of Lenten study sermons, we have been travelling with our Lord from the dreadful scourging that he received at the hands of Pilate’s henchmen towards the seemingly tragic and utterly lonely death on the cross. Last week Debra [Saffrey] reminded us of the moment when Christ stumbled on his pain-filled journey towards Golgotha. This week we turn our attention in one sense away from Jesus and dwell for a moment instead on that group who remained faithful to him when all others had fled; the band of frightened, sorrowing, but determined women. But in thus turning our attention away from Jesus we shall, I believe, discover new depths – or be reminded of truths we may have forgotten – concerning our Lord.

As I picture that poignant moment near to the end of the life of Christ I picture also another group of sorrowing but determined women that I have seen myself, and seen recently. Some of you may have been following the excellent series Women on Women that has been screened on Channel 2; last Thursday the documentary “The Fully Ordained Meet Pie” was shown as part of that series. The documentary covered the fight of women to be ordained, and, towards the end showed footage of the last General Synod at which the Ordination of Women to the Priesthood was narrowly defeated in the patriarchal House of Clergy. As the women left the auditorium weeping and singing “we shall be ordained,” they must have known all too clearly the pain of the women who remained faithful to Jesus even on the cross, when all others had fled. We may in the next few minutes find another connection between these two groups of mourning women.

Legend has it that at one stage, as Jesus staggered beneath the weight of his cross, a woman who has become known to posterity as “Veronica” offered her headcloth to Jesus so he could wipe away his sweat and blood. While there is no biblical evidence for this scene, which has become one of the fourteen Stations of the Cross, and while fundamentalists might sneer at it, it is a highly possible incident. Certainly, Luke records another incident where Jesus turns to a crowd of weeping women following him and says,

Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me,

but weep for yourselves and for your children.

                                                                (Luke 23: 27-28)

 

Just who that group of women were, and whether they were weeping specifically for the plight of Jesus, or whether for the hideous spectacle that presented itself each time a criminal was crucified, we cannot tell. Whatever the case, the compassion of Jesus towards the women is remarkable. For Jesus lived in a culture that scorned women, a culture that treated women as property, that divorced women at will, and that remained terrified of the female body. Jesus turns even in his pain, and has compassion on the women, as he has done so often in the gospel narrative. It is, it seems, women who see most clearly into the heart of Jesus. In Mark’s account of the gospel it is the women who first received the good news of Easter and who are commissioned to proclaim that news first to the disciples and then to the world.

In terms of modern psychology, we might say that Jesus appears to have responded to women from the depths of his own femininity. It is a widely held belief that none of us can claim to be utterly masculine or to be utterly feminine in our psychological makeup, but hold together within our psyche elements of both. The Orientals in their mysticism speak of Yin and Yang, while Jungian psychology speaks of the animus and anima, our masculine and feminine aspects. It is in a society where we are not able to hold those opposites in tension within us that we find enormous and subtle evil; the male dominated culture of ancient Rome, and most of the known ancient world, is an example of all that can run amok when the balance is lost, and where creativity, sensitivity and nurturance become forgotten irrelevancies.

But whatever is within Jesus at any point in the gospel record is within the deepest being of God, Father, Son, and Spirit. We scratch with great inadequacy to find ways in which to express this truth in words, but we must in the end affirm the simple truth that if both man and woman are created in the image of God then the being of God must incorporate both what we call masculine and what we call feminine. The ancient biblical writers saw that truth only too clearly.

In my favourite New Testament passage our Lord cries out as it were with the pain that only a parent can know,

Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you. How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood but you would not!

                                                                                                   (Matt. 23: 37)

The same image is frequently used of God the Father in the Old Testament literature:

How precious is thy steadfast love, oh God!

The children of men take refuge in the shadow of thy wings.

                                                                                                   (Ps. 36:7)

The imagery is feminine – the pain or heartache of parenthood is certainly within the experience of God, but so too is that specific experience that Joyce Nicholson refers to as “the heartache of motherhood.” [[1]]

Some of you may at this point be wondering what I am driving at, what kind of a statement I am wanting to make about our triune God. I do not wish to say to you that God is Mother – not exclusively. Jesus, in the Garden of Gethsemane, cries out in his anguish,

Abba, Father, all things are possible to thee.

                                                                (Mark 14: 36)

There can be no doubt that he saw his relationship to God as an intimate one of Son to Father. But neither do I want us to go away with the misconception that we may see and speak of our God as exclusively masculine. God, Father, Son and Spirit, is masculine but is so much more. God, Father, Son and Spirit, is feminine, but is so much more. God, Father, Son and Spirit, dare I say it, is androgynous, and is so much more.

The women around Jesus at his otherwise isolated end were there, I would suggest, precisely because they had discovered in him a kindred spirit. It is fascinating that mystical-feminist women and men have often turned to speak of Jesus with great sisterly affection. Many mediaeval mystics speak of being suckled by the risen, wounded Christ, and the mystical Julian of Norwich, saint, was probably the first woman to produce a complex theology of the motherhood of God. We must equally be open to explore that notion.

And it is for precisely this reason that I believe we must strive on towards the ordination of women to both priesthood and the episcopate, the vocation of bishop. The argument should have little to do with contemporary feminist consciousness, but everything to do with the nature of the God we love and serve. If deacon, priest and bishop are called specifically to be a sign of God’s presence in our midst, and are signs of different aspects of the personality of God, then we cannot afford to go on presenting an exclusively masculine image of God.

What, then, has this to do with Lent, and with the journey of our Lord from the scourging to the cross? I believe that if we read sensitively and perceptively our gospel we will constantly find our image of God to be broadening. I am relatively conservative. I do not (yet) want us to begin addressing our God as mother, though many do, and I too may one day decide that it is a necessary corrective to our masculine imagery of God. But I do want us to realize increasingly that the Jesus who we proclaim to the world reveals to us a God who is the God who gives us birth – and rebirth – and who is so much more vast than we can ever wholly realize.

And so, as we with Jesus trudge towards Golgotha, let us realize the significance of the fact that it is the women who are now the only ones faithful, and that it is precisely the women, despised by society, who have been most closely touched by Christ-love.

And let us give thanks to our God, Father, Son and Spirit, who creates, suckles, nurtures and defends us throughout our lives.

Amen.

---

[1] Joyce Nicholson, The Heartache of Motherhood. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1983.

you do what you can

 

THOUGHTS SPOKEN AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT 

(and Annual General Meeting Day)

(April 6^th) 2025

 

Readings

Isaiah 43:16-21

Psalm 126

John 12: 1-8 

 

This is the feast of St AGM, so let me do no more than float a few ideas.

It’s kind of appropriate that, when our treasurer delivers to us a review of finances and a forecast budget, that we find a nameless woman. Nowhere does it say she is a prostitute, though that has become misleading folklore, and perhaps not unhelpful, for Jesus makes it clear that his redeeming love reaches to every nook and cranny of society.

What is this woman doing? As scandalous in her own century as it would be in our own, she is, as, dare I say it, the treasurer of Jesus’ own gang makes clear, profligate. A sheer, unbudgeted waste of money. I feel faintly absolved, for I emphasize from time to time, a) that I have zero, squilch, nada and nil understanding of money (which, though, makes me admire treasurers deeply), and b) God is not restricted to our strategic plans. A mess on the floor of someone’s house was not in the strategic plan launched by Jesus at the beginning of his public ministry.

We are incidentally left with that awkward capitalist manifesto with which John ends this scene. The poor you will have with you always. Is this an excuse to ignore all social justice? To fleece the vicar’s pocket more and more ornately as a sign of devotion to God? Nice idea, but prosperity gospel is a distortion. Let’s go there another time, but no, I can’t ask you to feather my nest as an act of devotion.

So … so what? This woman breaks all the rules, all the protocols of a carefully manicured gospel in this pivotal passage of John’s skilfully crafted account. Why?

Maybe Jon Bon Jovi was saying something similar when in the midst of the hell of 2020 he wrote

Although I'll keep my social distance
What this world needs is a hug
Until we find the vaccination
There's no substitute for love
So love yourself and love your family
Love your neighbor and your friend
Ain't it time we loved a stranger?
They're just a friend you ain't met yet

 

Or perhaps we can borrow from another, similar passage, Mark 14. There too a woman – not a bloke but a powerless and disregarded woman – performs a profound act of love, anointing Jesus. “Leave her alone, she has done the best she can,” says Jesus. You do what you can, to express love.

On this Feast of St AGM, on this 5^th Sunday of Lent, we are reminded that this is our task. As we observe our diminishing role in society, as we watch our dwindling resources, as we see the increasing difficulty of keeping parishes and dioceses afloat, we are called to do but one thing. We have encountered the radiant love of God revealed in Jesus and in our fellowship with those who love him. Surely we are called to pour out of our best, to surrender our safety nets and our nets of human strategy and find the craziest, beautifullest, most deeply human way to use what God has given us as an expression of our gratitude and love in return. You do what you can.

 

 

contradictions of the cross

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S EAST BENTLEIGH

SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT

(SUNDAY 28^th February) 1988

 

 

We move today to what we might call our second Station of the Cross, our second reflection of the significance of Lent. Today we have to reflect on the moment that the bloodied Jesus lifts the beam of the ruthless, vicious instrument of his imminent death, the cross.

But I want to take us our text this morning a verse from our Old Testament reading.

My son, God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering.

For I believe there is a fundamental link between the vivid story of Abraham and Isaac, which has so tantalised artists and authors down through history, and the events of the cross on the skull-shaped hill beyond Jerusalem, Golgotha.

There are many links of imagery, links that fascinated the theologians of the early church – for example the connections between the young Isaac struggling under the weight of wood that was to be the instrument of his sacrifice and Christ struggling beneath the weight of his cross. But these are, I believe, less important than the connection between what we might imagine to be the feelings of the father, Abraham, as he leads his son to apparently inevitable death and the feelings of God the Father as Jesus the Son heads to his own lonely death.

Imagine the pain in the heart of the man Abraham as he spoke those words to his puzzled son. Imagine the desperate hope in his heart that somehow all this would work out alright and the boy’s life could be miraculously spared.

For God the father of the son Jesus there can be no such hope. For Jesus there can be no other culmination of a life spent exposing the civil and religious hypocrisy of his time. The Son Jesus is, of course, the lamb as well, and there can be no other option.

With this in mind let us return to the moment that Jesus lifts up his cross and sets out for the place of crucifixion.

Pilate, the bewildered consul, has bowed to the demands of the raucous majority who have cried out for the blood of Jesus. By bowing it to the wishes of the Pharisees he has averted a riot, yes he has also risked appearing to be a walk over for the whims and fancies of these strange and powerful religious leaders. And so, having quite literally washed his hands of the whole troublesome affair, he attempts one mast and puerile joke at the expense of the Jews. He places a sign at the head of the cross announcing,

Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.

 

He knew how scorned the town of Nazareth was, making his jocular claim almost a contradiction of itself,

Can anything good come out of Nazareth? (John 1:36).

 

Perhaps on the other hand he simply saw how tragic and deflated this man now seemed to be, this once charismatic leader, this tall poppy, now bruised, bleeding and with seemingly no remaining followers. Or perhaps he saw this mocking gesture, as a way to end any militaristic dreams of a Jewish uprising against Rome. Here for all to see was the end of one pathetic specimen who had claimed to be the Messiah-King of the Jews.

Whatever Pilate saw before him,  we must ask ourselves the question, “So what?” Is this man now staggering out of the city of Jerusalem merely another humanitarian inspiration? Is this so-called King of the Jews merely a good man who held high ideals but who in the time of crisis was no more or less than a Mahatma Gandhi, a Martin Luther King, a Steve Biko? Is there a difference?

What is the meaning of the Cross?

There can be no doubt that in one very real sense there is no difference between Jesus, Ghandi, King and Biko. The deaths of all these men are testimony to the way in which the rich and powerful treat the powerless who dare to challenge power. Each man, Jesus, Ghandi, King and Biko, and countless others besides, is whether knowingly or otherwise participating in the concern of God “to set at liberty those who are oppressed.” But there is a fundamental difference, a difference ultimately discernible only by the eyes of faith.

For by faith we make the claim that the cross that Jesus carries out of the city of Jerusalem is not the final word in the relationship between Jesus and the world. It is not merely that the cause of Jesus continues after his death, as some theologians have been understood to claim, for if that were all there would again be no difference between Jesus on the one hand and Ghandi, King and Biko on the other.

The difference that we believe in faith is that the life of the very man Jesus continues, defeats death, and thereby pronounces a new word of liberation that is not merely political but is political as well as being far, far beyond the realms of politics. Christ then, as he takes up his cross, takes up not only the instrument of his death, but the instrument of God’s great irony, the instrument by which God transforms death into life.

Of this there can be no rational proof. It is only by faith that we can affirm the exciting belief that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God. But having made that leap in to the language and thought patterns of faith, we can then make the further affirmation that God makes himself known to humankind precisely and only in Jesus, and particularly in Jesus as revealed in the events of the cross which he is now taking up and carrying to the hill of crucifixion.

It is the Cross which stands at the heart of all that Jesus stands for, and it is the Cross which is the inevitable outcome of his teachings. It is then in the Cross that we find God revealing himself to us:

You do not know me, nor do you know my father. If you did know me, you would know my father also                                                                                 (John 8:19).

 

When we know and accept for ourselves Jesus and all the ramifications of the cross he is now carrying we accept the will and the love of the Father. While we may or may not affirm or continue the works of other great liberators of history without ultimately affecting our relationship with God, that is not the case with Jesus. By the cross we stand or fall.

The irony of the cross haunts human history. It is the utter reversal of the ways of the world. It is the absolute abnegation of power by the one who had access to absolute power.
                                                                (Richard Holloway, The Way of the Cross, 37)

Saint Paul puts this in another way.

While Jews look for miracles and the Greeks look for wisdom, here are we preaching a crucified Christ, to the Jews an obstacle they cannot get over, to the pagans madness, but to those who have been called … a Christ who is the power and wisdom of God.
                                                                (1 Cor. 1: 22-24)

 

I wonder if Christians have ever really grasped this message, or whether the Cross is too stupid for us, too, to grasp?

The Cross can never be pretty. It can never be merely decorative. Although we used to speak of the comfortable words of Christ we must never understand the gospel as comfortable in the modern, lounge suite sense of the word. Christianity if it is to be Cross-centred, can never be a religion that leaves us secure in our existing state, but one that must constantly pummel and torment us into new stages of faith and humanness. The comfort that the Cross does provide is the mysterious truth that it is precisely in suffering that our God makes himself known. Where pain is there God is also.

And that is why I chose the verse from Genesis as my text. In fact the writers of that passage in Genesis were probably writing the story in order to persuade their people to turn away from human sacrifice to the less ghastly option of animal sacrifice. Yet there is nevertheless in the passage a powerful image of relevance for us. For the symbol of the steadfast, obedient, but inevitably suffering, grieving Abraham can stand for us as a reminder of the suffering, grieving God, Father, Son and Spirit, as Jesus picks up his cross and trudges towards the place of the skull.

There is of course more to the gospel than Good Friday, more to the gospel than the scandalous event we know as the Cross. But until we have grasped the terrifying concept that the Cross in all its bitter pain lies at the heart of our faith, until we have grasped the Cross, we cannot begin to experience the glorious resurrection that we celebrate at Easter and every time we participate together in the Eucharist.

Says Richard Holloway,

it is the weakness of God we see on the Cross, the weakness of God that reverses and contradicts the strength of the world.

Let us learn to take on our shoulders the contradictions of the Cross.