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Friday, 9 May 2025

eternal contrast

 



SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN
and at St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER 

(May 11th) 2025

 

READINGS

 

Psalm 23

Revelation 7: 9-17

John 10: 22-30

 

Before I begin exploring the shepherding metaphor that Jesus plays with, as he speaks to his disciples no doubt, but speaks primarily to the sceptical, on-looking religious hypocrites, standing nearby, waiting to trap him ... before all that I think we have to glance at the perilous dangers of the Book of Revelation.

I must advertise that, on Thursday, now our Lenten studies have morphed into Easter studies, and have become Thursday studies not Wednesday studies so that yours truly can spend a little more time lying on the Otago beaches sipping pina coladas, on Thursday, if you wish to know more about the sayings in the Book of Revelation and elsewhere, the studies are both informative and enjoyable. Or at least so I'm told. Or told myself. I hope they are.

Biblical sayings that are somewhat icky to a modern mind, sayings about washing in blood, need explanation, need translation, need to take their own Doctor Who journey from 1st century eastern Mediterranean cultures, especially Jewish culture, to the cultures of downtown or up country Kiwiland. 

So yes, I recommend an excursion to our Wednesday Lenten studies now happening in the Easter on a Thursday. Thursday at 10:00, in the Saint Paul’s cottage … in which we will dip our toes once more into Anne’s book about atonement, and perhaps even into my book on the Book of Revelation. Just saying! 

There are apocalyptic passages throughout the scriptures and to understand them in our own era we need to be licensed! In saying this I've ignored 500 years of post-Reformation history/ But to traverse these passages, while avoiding the land mines, we need training. 

Sorry Martin Luther, John Calvin and others, but to the unwary these passages can be emotionally and psychologically destructive. Like a Maserati or Lamborghini they are dangerous weapons in the hands of the unskilled or unthinking.

So we leave the Book of Revelation alone for a while. We may pick up hints of it on Thursday, those of us who gather. But now let’s turn instead to Jesus’ careful conversational ploys as he speaks to a crowd who embody religious hypocrisy, and are listening to him only in order to trap him. 

And let me say in passing, the moniker “the Jews,” which has been so destructive through two thousand years of Christian history needs, like icky apocalyptic passages, to be treated like a land mine. Any person who converses in order to outmanoeuvre, bamboozle, trap, or oppress co-conversationalists is never going to be a bearer of Christ light.

This cannot but bring me back to John and his carefully crafted gospel account. Bishop Kelvin, in a gospel conversations made clear that we need to locate this scene of Jesus in the temple both geographically and chronologically, both in space and time.

Throughout John’s account of the Jesus story he uses powerful metaphors. One of the most powerful is that of light entering into and overcoming darkness. While that metaphor is not directly used here it provides several clues as to what is going on. Jesus is undertaking the difficult task of confronting spiritual hypocrisy, spiritual darkness. Shining a light of truth. I am the Good Shepherd, he said, famously, in the passage just before this. 

The scene takes place at a time and location when the mind of Jewish people was much focused on release from dark passages, restoration from dark moments in their own history. If you were to take a trip to Darwin, which as many of you know is one of my favourite places on earth, and made your way to the Anglican cathedral, you would find incorporated into a relatively modern and architecturally tropical cathedral one much older structure. It is a wall, all that remains of a previous cathedral. That building which survived being hit by a bomb and by looters during the bombing of Darwin in 1942, was destroyed sometime after midnight mass in 1974 as cyclone Tracy re-flattened the city. The wall was incorporated into the building that rose from that rubble, just as one small section of the first temple was incorporated into the second temple in which Jesus was standing. Solid, unshakeable remnants, continuity of the new with the old.

Sadly incidentally, the Anglican cathedral in Napier, destroyed by earthquake was not significantly incorporated into the building that rose from its rubble – and indeed that architecturally brutalist building is now threatened by post Christchurch earthquake bureaucracy. But perhaps that’s another story. Whether the sorry sight of the Christchurch cathedral is another story is yet another story! It seems to me imperative that something of the old, now crumbling, pigeon infested cathedral be incorporated into a new thing, a new place of promise, rather than being like-for-like rebuilt as a monument to human myopia. But I digress again. Perhaps. 

If the onlookers were seeking to trap Jesus then he gave them plenty of material. It can only be surmised that he did this on purpose, forcing them to embrace their own hypocrisy. He set out by likening himself to the great King David, depicting himself as a shepherd in ways that could not fail to resonate with those well versed in the Hebrew scriptures. 

Well versed of course does not necessarily mean well attuned to. It is often said that the devil knows the scriptures well, and while I do not believe in a physical devil I do believe in the power of the demonic to twist and disfigure goodness in the service of evil. Adolf Hitler knew only too well how to impress the Christians of Germany in the 1930s.

Jesus went further still. Not only did he claim the status of King David, he went on to claim greater status. “I and the father are one." In Matthew’s gospel account you will find  at least two occasions widows observing Jesus rend their garments, a sign of abject horror. John reserves that gesture to the soldiers executing Jesus who instead rend his garments. But had Matthew been telling of this scene he undoubtedly would have had the religious hypocrites flamboyantly rending their garments in a dramatic show of their piety. 

The sort of pious pretentiousness that one might exhibit by holding a Bible upside down on the steps of a church proclaiming a deep love for its message while practising the opposite in almost every public pronouncement and action. Let, as the writers of apocalyptic were wont to say, let the reader understand, the listener hear.

The claims of Jesus would not be with us today if they had not been authenticated first by the beyond comprehension event of the resurrection and second by the authenticity of his appearances post-Easter to those very same followers who, the women excepted, had let Jesus down so badly. Their lives were turned around. They became embodiment of authenticity, embodiment of integrity. They demonstrated the depth to which they had come to know the shepherd who had confronted religious hypocrisy and in incomprehensible ways defeated its darkness.

My hunch is that the religious hypocrites went away that day feeling pretty smarmy and self satisfied. Yes again they had trapped this troublemaker, building up a dossier of reasons for which to execute him. Jesus was more interested in the eternal contrast he would draw, at great risk to himself, between hypocrisy and integrity.  

It is a testimony to the truth that we speak of Jesus with love and awe today while the perpetrators of evil, though repeated in every generation disappear into the dark murky backwaters of history. May we stand in the light, to stretch a metaphor, as sheep beckoned and transformed by the Christ of the cross.

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