Friday, 14 September 2012
15th Sunday after Trinity : Self denial first requires self-acceptance
I really had to wrestle with this passage. I hope you'll understand why when you read the Gospel section below!
Reading
Mark 8:27-38
Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.
Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
Address
I find it really quite hard to spend money on myself to buy something really decent. For most of my adult life it’s been a sense of buying something that’ll make do. It’s been the norm for us to have old cars and an old caravan to go away on holiday in, and I found it really difficult, back in early May, to actually buy a decent caravan, knowing that we’d be living and studying in it for more than three months.
The same goes for clothes. I’ve never bought expensive suits, or even expensive jeans or shoes, but I have to admit to myself that even though I might wish it was for some sacred reason, it’s not, not really. Buying cheap stuff for myself, if I’m honest, is symptomatic of not wanting to spend too much on me simply because my self-image is not brilliant. I tell you this not because it’s public confession time but because I think that in the Church of England there are plenty of us who are like this and maybe inside you know exactly what I mean.
We don’t think much of ourselves, but then we dress that up in self-denial and pretend that what we’re doing is carrying our own cross and being like Jesus. We make a virtue out of our own self-dislike, and the problem with that is that it blinds us to the many layers that we can learn and apply from what Jesus is saying here in what sometimes feels like a very difficult passage.
So the first thing that you need to take away from this is that God places a huge value on you. You are temples to the Holy Spirit and so She lives within you. Jesus’s second commandment is that you love others as you love yourself. Self-denial in the Jesus movement is not an excuse for having a poor self-opinion. I think you actually have to start from recognising your own value.
After all, what is there to be gained by denying something that you don’t value at all? That’s easy. How is that a worthy gift to God? So before we can even begin to deny ourselves, we have to value ourselves. Now the truth is that the best way to see yourself is not through your own eyes. Most of us see ourselves as insignificant and unimportant, excepting of course the one or two narcissists who might not like what they actually see if they were to look through another’s eyes at themselves!
But if you allow someone who loves you to show you what they see, and trust their image of you, that’s a good place to start. So before trying to deny yourself and pretending that’s holy, learn to value yourself, then you have something worthwhile denying. But of course there’s more since this is not about self-flagellation.
When we move on a little in the text, Jesus says this:
“For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?”
Before we look at the Gospel application of this, consider this. If you do value your life, there is a very real reason not to then try and save it, to hang on to it, and it is summarised in one word; transience. Everything is transient. Someone who is trying to save their own life is a little like the child on the beach who is piling more and more sand on to his sandcastle in an attempt to beat the power of the tide.
Life changes. What you have is yours only for a while, but more importantly, who you are should change to. And we shouldn’t be afraid of that change. One of the things I learned about while I was away was that in some Pagan communities they have rituals for what they call saging and croning. These are ways of recognising the transition into older age and valuing the wisdom you have grown and can impart to others.
Compare that with the ways in which we try hard to hang on to our youth. Consider the lengths that we will go to in our western culture to not change, to not grow old. If we are forever trying to stay the same then the one thing that can be guaranteed is dissatisfaction. We all grow older. With the growing older should come a welcoming of who we are becoming.
Unfortunately western culture doesn’t like that. It can’t sell beauty products, hair dyes, six-pack exercise routines and slimming plans to people who are comfortable in who they are becoming. Consumerism depends on us fighting change, fighting to stay the same, fighting not to get old. And Jesus says, “ For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?”
If we will accept ourselves and value ourselves for who we are now, and if we can continue to accept ourselves in who we are becoming, then imagine the release and the possibilities in what we can offer to our communities. Imagine how much light people would find in their community if they discovered people who were at ease with themselves and therefore able to accept others for exactly who they were, therefore enabling new people to accept themselves.
And so we come to the good news about what is in many ways a piece of scripture that we have to wrestle with. If we accept ourselves, and we accept each other, if we live in mature love, valuing people for who they are rather than dismissing them for being different from us, then the model of being willing to lay down our lives, of following the will of God, begins to make sense.
I firmly believe that we all have numerous callings in our lives, callings that will change as we move from one aspect of who we are to the next, as we age and mature. In accepting ourselves and accepting others, and in seeing the inherent value there, so we become naturally more willing to lay aside our own desires because that’s what spiritually maturing people do.
It is in the giving up of the desire to ‘Be’, to be someone that everyone looks up to, and instead accepting who we are in order that we find the strength and the willingness to lay that aside for the good of others. And if we don’t care what other people think of us, because we are secure in who we are, then we will affirm who Christ is and not deny him, because it simply won’t matter to us what people think of us for being followers of Christ.
Some of the critics of true Christianity see us as people who perpetually have to deny everything that makes us who we are, seeing us as life-denying. Sadly I think many Christians actually do live like that, and many branches of our religion have leaders who spend much of their teaching time telling people what not to do. How quickly we have forgotten that Jesus was criticised by other Rabbis because of the people he associated with and the parties, the feasting and drinking that he was a part of.
I think that following the way of Christ is life-affirming because in him we become who we are meant to be, and in accepting that, so we can lay down our own desires to be important and noticed because we realise that we are important, simply because we exist. Knowing that gives us the strength to lay our own wants to one side. Then we can really make a difference for others.
Wednesday, 8 August 2012
Fire, Air, Earth and Water
Been away for a while (can't believe it's April since I last posted. Still on Study Leave (since June) and here are a few thoughts in advance of Greenbelt.
FIRE
On a cold winter’s day, who can resist coming in to a house where the central heating has been on, the radiators are pushing out their dry heat, and it’s all warm and toasty... ...and sanitised. Maybe that’s why for so many of us we have opened up the chimney again and reset the fire place to take actual logs and when we come home, yes maybe the central heating is on, but what we really want is to put some of the logs on the fire and have something warm and orange, moving and seemingly alive heating the house. Who hasn’t, at some point in their life, been mesmerised by the dancing flames, alive, giving warmth, and yet inherently dangerous. Within the hearth they are kept safe, or as safe as we can manage. We think we’ve tamed fire, and that’s why it remains so dangerous.
Of all the traditional elements, fire is the one that we fear most. Earth we need. Air we need. Water we need. Fire we desire, (although you could argue that without the fusion fires of the sun we wouldn’t be having this conversation!) But of the four elements all animals need Earth, Air and Water; only humanity has mastered Fire. And with that mastery has come power. Some have even speculated that it was the ability of our distant ancestors to use fire to cook meat which gave our bodies access to greater energy reserves and which powered our evolution towards the sentience we now have. Fire is power. Fire can make us...
...but it can also destroy us. The lust for more Fire-power has led almost every great nation the world has ever seen to spend more money on armament than its people can afford. Imagine the difference it would make if some of the billions upon billions that were spent on armament were spent on health, food, education, on the renewing of our planet’s forests and woodlands, savannas and oceans. But Fire brings power, and humanity is seemingly always desperate to have more power than the next person or nation. Fire destroys though because Fire consumes. Whatever organic matter you put into the flames ends up the same eventually; blackened and reduced to carbon and trace amounts of whatever non-combustible elements were also present. This is ultimately the vision of hell, that Fire takes what was once alive and destroys it.
Hell is not an everlasting torment but a final destruction. How very ironic that the thing so many yearn for can reduce their dreams of power to ashes. Fire cannot be tamed in the end, but it can be used for good. Not only can it keep us warm but it can be used to refine precious metals. The heating process melts the metal, and being heavier than the dross, the slag, it sinks to the bottom of the cauldron allowing the worker to skim the worthless rubbish from the top. It can be a lengthy process of reheating and progressively refining the metal until what remains is pure and of high value. Only fire allows us to do this. Only fire can refine. It can be tempting when we are in the fire-filled challenges to cry out to God, ‘Why did you do this to me?’ Yet it seems more likely that, for the most part, the will of God is not to destroy us but to use what life throws at us as a fire to refine us. The little deaths that threaten to destroy us may actually be the makings of us.
That is not to minimise the suffering of the bullied and the abused. Nor is it to lay the blame at God’s feet for those things taking place as some great master plan he has for us. God is not cruel and cannot wish ill on those he loves. But he can use the fires of life to remake us so that we, too, can become like Fire itself, dancing, mesmerising, full of life and heat, bringing warmth to the lives of others, but not safe. Never safe... The refining is painful, but what do you hope to be at the end of it?
Is anything stopping you from becoming that?
Can you do something to change that?
AIR
Air, wind, breath, spirit... To the Hebrews and Greeks it was all one word, but it changed its gender with time. For the Hebrews this element was feminine. To the Greeks is was neuter. By the time the church had got its hands on her/it the Latin rendered she/it as he. I think the Hebrews were right. When Jesus told Nicodemus about the people born of the Spirit, the Greek renders it that Jesus also told him that we were born of the wind. That resonates with me because the wind blows where she wills. We can’t see her, we can see only the effects of her passing. The wind draws no attention to herself but seeks to affect change by her movement. Would that we were more like that. But instead we seek always to draw attention to what it is that we do. The wind is always invisible, yet we seek always to be visible. Her very invisibility is what makes her so hard to pin down, and maybe that’s why the Roman church made ‘her’ into ‘him’. The distinction in so many religions, both Christian/Monotheist and Pagan, is to think of the masculine as being the logical and well planned out, fully thought through and decided part of our duality. The feminine instead is mysterious (to men anyway!), more likely to be intuitive, guided by feelings, ‘blowing where she will’. Perish the thought that the church might attribute feminine aspects to God... But why? Or why not?
The earliest reference to the Spirit is Genesis 1:2 which says something like, ‘The Wind/Breath/Spirit of God hovered/brooded over the surface of the waters.’ The image is of a pregnant mother, sitting with her hand over her swelling belly, pregnant with possibilities, yet with none of them yet realised. Waiting, watching, wondering.
Is it blasphemous to imagine the Holy Spirit dreaming of our future as She prepared to bring us to birth? I think not.
So do you feel like a child born of the Wind, of the Air?
Do you feel ready to be, as Hildegaard of Bingen phrased it, ‘A feather on the Breath of God’?
Or are there too many things tying you down?
Some commitments we make for ourselves in a pact with God as we seek to grow a new future. But some we unwittingly take on until we discover ourselves to be like a shackled balloon, with the power to soar but with the tie-down straps keeping us firmly anchored in one place. Born again. Born from above. A child of the Spirit. A child of the Wind? Shouldn’t that mean we can be blown on the Air to somewhere new? So what’s stopping you?
EARTH
Every step that we take is dominated by the planet beneath us. When a baby is born its head must be supported for the first few weeks because the earth beneath exerts its pull and the newborn’s muscles are not sufficiently developed to resist. As the child grows she learns first to crawl and then eventually to defy the earth’s pull enough to stand on two tottering little legs. Eventually she will run and jump, and if she becomes an athlete she may jump very high. If she becomes an astronaut she will jump very high indeed. But eventually she will come back down and the earth will claim her again.
Even before she stirred in her mother’s womb the earth was exerting its pull on her for everything of which she is made comes from the earth and when she is finished with it, when she has finished running and jumping, it will all be returned to the earth. This is the way of things for humans. We may not necessarily like to call the earth our Mother as some religions do, although we may be content with that epithet, but everything that we physically are is made from the stuff of earth. And that is why Genesis gives the name of the first human as Adam. Adam literally means earth-man, dust-man, or dirt-man. That is what we are. But in our arrogance we so often forget this, treating the earth as something to be tamed when its wildness is life, or something to be raped even though the earth offers herself willingly. We have taken the command, ‘To have dominion...’ and turned it on its head and so where we were called to be stewards we have instead stripped, mutilated and destroyed. And now, now we have the arrogance to say, ‘We must save the planet.’
What a ridiculous and arrogant notion. The planet does not need saving. If we were to be wiped out tomorrow the planet would continue, and the sun would rejuvenate the damage we caused until there was no trace of us. And the earth, too, did not begin by itself.
Our universe was born with a multitude of hydrogen and helium. Everything else had to be forged in the hearts of stars as heavier elements were fused under intense pressure and heat before being thrown cataclysmically into the universe at the violent and explosive death of their stellar creator. This earth, and you and I, and everything we can see, are all stardust.
So what then is earth to us as an element? It is a reminder of our smallness and our arrogance. It says to us, ‘Jump as high as you like, I’ll always be there to pull you back down.’ And it says, ‘Put as much effort as you like into earning your high salary and your big house, and wasting your tiny minuscule life in the accumulation of financial well-being that will take all your energies and suck out all your creativity. Do it and remember that when you are finished I will have you again, just as I birthed you, lending you parts of myself to use for a few years, seeing what you could make of inert matter guided by your Creator. But I will have it all back because you are made of borrowed stuff and I will reclaim, of that there is no doubt.’
Earth may be mother, resource, solidity and reassurance, but she is also the one who reminds us of our mortality. We would do well to remember that the loan she makes of her elements is only for a short time in her terms, and when we have to pay her back will we have generated anything of value?
What do you value?
What do turn your energies to?
When the earth reclaims you, what legacy will you leave for another to build upon?
Who will be healed because you were here?
If you don’t like the answers to these questions, what can you do to change the direction of your life?
WATER
Water moves like it has a life of its own, yet of course it doesn’t. Water instead is an indicator of other forces at work. Put it in a glass and swirl it and the water will move, but put the glass down and eventually the water will become still as the energy you put into it is all used up. When it is still it’s indicating that no force is operating on it. Yet even at rest water is telling us that a force is actually still present, the force of gravity, pulling all of the fluid towards the earth creating a flat surface. Even at rest water is telling us something about its surroundings - it remains as an indicator.
At the opposite end of the spectrum from the glass is an ocean. Although sometimes calm the water is in ceaseless motion. Watching the tides reminds us that water is indicating the gravitational pull of the sun and the moon. Measuring how far the tide moves will even give us an indication of the positions of the sun and the moon relative to each other. In all of this, water remains passive, being moved around by forces beyond its control. And when it flows in a river, water can indicate for us a number of things. Most obviously it shows us which way is down hill as the gravity of earth relentlessly pulls the river along the path to the sea.
But the river does more than that. It shows us the state of the river bed. Watch water as it rolls lazily along the river and you soon notice that although the water is flowing, moving, tumbling, it is doing so in patterns that remain broadly the same. The peaks and troughs themselves don’t move; the water flows but the shapes it carves are the same. Water is again passively indicating what the land is like underneath the surface.
So what does water teach us from these things? Firstly it can serve as a warning. Water is always at the mercy of other forces. We may talk of the destructive and murderous force of the tsunami, but in reality the destruction was wrought by the earth moving. The tsunami was helplessly indicating another force. The water was passive. Water is always passive. It’s good for water to be like that, but not so good for you and I.
Yes there are times when it is appropriate simply to respond to other forces, but if all we ever are is passive, what good are we? So why do we fall into passivity? For many of us it is simply fear. Maybe we have been damaged in some way by others to the point where we cannot dare to speak out anymore. We don’t want to be passive, it’s just that all the fight has been taken out of us. If this is you then perhaps it is time to seek help and healing. If it just doesn’t seem worth fighting anymore, ask yourself why.
And maybe consider who else may be suffering because you’re not doing anything about it. At a time when we’re talking about saving paradise, whatever we mean by that, simply sitting around passively responding to other forces will accomplish little. The river teaches us something quite different, and again at the other end of the spectrum. Many of us, far from being passive, have become instead convinced of our own importance; of our own indispensability. But look again at the way the river flows. Look again in your imagination at the humps and bumps in the surface, at the little repeating eddies. We’re more like the water than the subsurface that shapes its flow.
Our time on earth is just fleeting and we cannot return back up the hill of the river of time. Instead we flow over the rocks of a place, being shaped by circumstances and the Lord, before moving on to the next place, and the next, with the sea an inevitability for us. Water reminds us, therefore, of our mortality and the importance of not clinging on to what we have now, but being prepared, when the Lord requires it of us, to flow on downstream to the next place he has prepared for us.
We can never go back; never repeat, but instead of mourning this loss of youth, loss of place, loss of ‘now’, we should remind ourselves that the flow may take us somewhere more exciting, or perhaps even more still. Water is passive in reality, but it can be active in our prayerful imagination if we allow it to be. What will the church be like in the future - passive or active? What role will you play in that, or do you want to just let it all flow over you?
FIRE
On a cold winter’s day, who can resist coming in to a house where the central heating has been on, the radiators are pushing out their dry heat, and it’s all warm and toasty... ...and sanitised. Maybe that’s why for so many of us we have opened up the chimney again and reset the fire place to take actual logs and when we come home, yes maybe the central heating is on, but what we really want is to put some of the logs on the fire and have something warm and orange, moving and seemingly alive heating the house. Who hasn’t, at some point in their life, been mesmerised by the dancing flames, alive, giving warmth, and yet inherently dangerous. Within the hearth they are kept safe, or as safe as we can manage. We think we’ve tamed fire, and that’s why it remains so dangerous.
Of all the traditional elements, fire is the one that we fear most. Earth we need. Air we need. Water we need. Fire we desire, (although you could argue that without the fusion fires of the sun we wouldn’t be having this conversation!) But of the four elements all animals need Earth, Air and Water; only humanity has mastered Fire. And with that mastery has come power. Some have even speculated that it was the ability of our distant ancestors to use fire to cook meat which gave our bodies access to greater energy reserves and which powered our evolution towards the sentience we now have. Fire is power. Fire can make us...
...but it can also destroy us. The lust for more Fire-power has led almost every great nation the world has ever seen to spend more money on armament than its people can afford. Imagine the difference it would make if some of the billions upon billions that were spent on armament were spent on health, food, education, on the renewing of our planet’s forests and woodlands, savannas and oceans. But Fire brings power, and humanity is seemingly always desperate to have more power than the next person or nation. Fire destroys though because Fire consumes. Whatever organic matter you put into the flames ends up the same eventually; blackened and reduced to carbon and trace amounts of whatever non-combustible elements were also present. This is ultimately the vision of hell, that Fire takes what was once alive and destroys it.
Hell is not an everlasting torment but a final destruction. How very ironic that the thing so many yearn for can reduce their dreams of power to ashes. Fire cannot be tamed in the end, but it can be used for good. Not only can it keep us warm but it can be used to refine precious metals. The heating process melts the metal, and being heavier than the dross, the slag, it sinks to the bottom of the cauldron allowing the worker to skim the worthless rubbish from the top. It can be a lengthy process of reheating and progressively refining the metal until what remains is pure and of high value. Only fire allows us to do this. Only fire can refine. It can be tempting when we are in the fire-filled challenges to cry out to God, ‘Why did you do this to me?’ Yet it seems more likely that, for the most part, the will of God is not to destroy us but to use what life throws at us as a fire to refine us. The little deaths that threaten to destroy us may actually be the makings of us.
That is not to minimise the suffering of the bullied and the abused. Nor is it to lay the blame at God’s feet for those things taking place as some great master plan he has for us. God is not cruel and cannot wish ill on those he loves. But he can use the fires of life to remake us so that we, too, can become like Fire itself, dancing, mesmerising, full of life and heat, bringing warmth to the lives of others, but not safe. Never safe... The refining is painful, but what do you hope to be at the end of it?
Is anything stopping you from becoming that?
Can you do something to change that?
AIR
Air, wind, breath, spirit... To the Hebrews and Greeks it was all one word, but it changed its gender with time. For the Hebrews this element was feminine. To the Greeks is was neuter. By the time the church had got its hands on her/it the Latin rendered she/it as he. I think the Hebrews were right. When Jesus told Nicodemus about the people born of the Spirit, the Greek renders it that Jesus also told him that we were born of the wind. That resonates with me because the wind blows where she wills. We can’t see her, we can see only the effects of her passing. The wind draws no attention to herself but seeks to affect change by her movement. Would that we were more like that. But instead we seek always to draw attention to what it is that we do. The wind is always invisible, yet we seek always to be visible. Her very invisibility is what makes her so hard to pin down, and maybe that’s why the Roman church made ‘her’ into ‘him’. The distinction in so many religions, both Christian/Monotheist and Pagan, is to think of the masculine as being the logical and well planned out, fully thought through and decided part of our duality. The feminine instead is mysterious (to men anyway!), more likely to be intuitive, guided by feelings, ‘blowing where she will’. Perish the thought that the church might attribute feminine aspects to God... But why? Or why not?
The earliest reference to the Spirit is Genesis 1:2 which says something like, ‘The Wind/Breath/Spirit of God hovered/brooded over the surface of the waters.’ The image is of a pregnant mother, sitting with her hand over her swelling belly, pregnant with possibilities, yet with none of them yet realised. Waiting, watching, wondering.
Is it blasphemous to imagine the Holy Spirit dreaming of our future as She prepared to bring us to birth? I think not.
So do you feel like a child born of the Wind, of the Air?
Do you feel ready to be, as Hildegaard of Bingen phrased it, ‘A feather on the Breath of God’?
Or are there too many things tying you down?
Some commitments we make for ourselves in a pact with God as we seek to grow a new future. But some we unwittingly take on until we discover ourselves to be like a shackled balloon, with the power to soar but with the tie-down straps keeping us firmly anchored in one place. Born again. Born from above. A child of the Spirit. A child of the Wind? Shouldn’t that mean we can be blown on the Air to somewhere new? So what’s stopping you?
EARTH
Every step that we take is dominated by the planet beneath us. When a baby is born its head must be supported for the first few weeks because the earth beneath exerts its pull and the newborn’s muscles are not sufficiently developed to resist. As the child grows she learns first to crawl and then eventually to defy the earth’s pull enough to stand on two tottering little legs. Eventually she will run and jump, and if she becomes an athlete she may jump very high. If she becomes an astronaut she will jump very high indeed. But eventually she will come back down and the earth will claim her again.
Even before she stirred in her mother’s womb the earth was exerting its pull on her for everything of which she is made comes from the earth and when she is finished with it, when she has finished running and jumping, it will all be returned to the earth. This is the way of things for humans. We may not necessarily like to call the earth our Mother as some religions do, although we may be content with that epithet, but everything that we physically are is made from the stuff of earth. And that is why Genesis gives the name of the first human as Adam. Adam literally means earth-man, dust-man, or dirt-man. That is what we are. But in our arrogance we so often forget this, treating the earth as something to be tamed when its wildness is life, or something to be raped even though the earth offers herself willingly. We have taken the command, ‘To have dominion...’ and turned it on its head and so where we were called to be stewards we have instead stripped, mutilated and destroyed. And now, now we have the arrogance to say, ‘We must save the planet.’
What a ridiculous and arrogant notion. The planet does not need saving. If we were to be wiped out tomorrow the planet would continue, and the sun would rejuvenate the damage we caused until there was no trace of us. And the earth, too, did not begin by itself.
Our universe was born with a multitude of hydrogen and helium. Everything else had to be forged in the hearts of stars as heavier elements were fused under intense pressure and heat before being thrown cataclysmically into the universe at the violent and explosive death of their stellar creator. This earth, and you and I, and everything we can see, are all stardust.
So what then is earth to us as an element? It is a reminder of our smallness and our arrogance. It says to us, ‘Jump as high as you like, I’ll always be there to pull you back down.’ And it says, ‘Put as much effort as you like into earning your high salary and your big house, and wasting your tiny minuscule life in the accumulation of financial well-being that will take all your energies and suck out all your creativity. Do it and remember that when you are finished I will have you again, just as I birthed you, lending you parts of myself to use for a few years, seeing what you could make of inert matter guided by your Creator. But I will have it all back because you are made of borrowed stuff and I will reclaim, of that there is no doubt.’
Earth may be mother, resource, solidity and reassurance, but she is also the one who reminds us of our mortality. We would do well to remember that the loan she makes of her elements is only for a short time in her terms, and when we have to pay her back will we have generated anything of value?
What do you value?
What do turn your energies to?
When the earth reclaims you, what legacy will you leave for another to build upon?
Who will be healed because you were here?
If you don’t like the answers to these questions, what can you do to change the direction of your life?
WATER
Water moves like it has a life of its own, yet of course it doesn’t. Water instead is an indicator of other forces at work. Put it in a glass and swirl it and the water will move, but put the glass down and eventually the water will become still as the energy you put into it is all used up. When it is still it’s indicating that no force is operating on it. Yet even at rest water is telling us that a force is actually still present, the force of gravity, pulling all of the fluid towards the earth creating a flat surface. Even at rest water is telling us something about its surroundings - it remains as an indicator.
At the opposite end of the spectrum from the glass is an ocean. Although sometimes calm the water is in ceaseless motion. Watching the tides reminds us that water is indicating the gravitational pull of the sun and the moon. Measuring how far the tide moves will even give us an indication of the positions of the sun and the moon relative to each other. In all of this, water remains passive, being moved around by forces beyond its control. And when it flows in a river, water can indicate for us a number of things. Most obviously it shows us which way is down hill as the gravity of earth relentlessly pulls the river along the path to the sea.
But the river does more than that. It shows us the state of the river bed. Watch water as it rolls lazily along the river and you soon notice that although the water is flowing, moving, tumbling, it is doing so in patterns that remain broadly the same. The peaks and troughs themselves don’t move; the water flows but the shapes it carves are the same. Water is again passively indicating what the land is like underneath the surface.
So what does water teach us from these things? Firstly it can serve as a warning. Water is always at the mercy of other forces. We may talk of the destructive and murderous force of the tsunami, but in reality the destruction was wrought by the earth moving. The tsunami was helplessly indicating another force. The water was passive. Water is always passive. It’s good for water to be like that, but not so good for you and I.
Yes there are times when it is appropriate simply to respond to other forces, but if all we ever are is passive, what good are we? So why do we fall into passivity? For many of us it is simply fear. Maybe we have been damaged in some way by others to the point where we cannot dare to speak out anymore. We don’t want to be passive, it’s just that all the fight has been taken out of us. If this is you then perhaps it is time to seek help and healing. If it just doesn’t seem worth fighting anymore, ask yourself why.
And maybe consider who else may be suffering because you’re not doing anything about it. At a time when we’re talking about saving paradise, whatever we mean by that, simply sitting around passively responding to other forces will accomplish little. The river teaches us something quite different, and again at the other end of the spectrum. Many of us, far from being passive, have become instead convinced of our own importance; of our own indispensability. But look again at the way the river flows. Look again in your imagination at the humps and bumps in the surface, at the little repeating eddies. We’re more like the water than the subsurface that shapes its flow.
Our time on earth is just fleeting and we cannot return back up the hill of the river of time. Instead we flow over the rocks of a place, being shaped by circumstances and the Lord, before moving on to the next place, and the next, with the sea an inevitability for us. Water reminds us, therefore, of our mortality and the importance of not clinging on to what we have now, but being prepared, when the Lord requires it of us, to flow on downstream to the next place he has prepared for us.
We can never go back; never repeat, but instead of mourning this loss of youth, loss of place, loss of ‘now’, we should remind ourselves that the flow may take us somewhere more exciting, or perhaps even more still. Water is passive in reality, but it can be active in our prayerful imagination if we allow it to be. What will the church be like in the future - passive or active? What role will you play in that, or do you want to just let it all flow over you?
Saturday, 7 April 2012
Easter Sunday - what the happy ending might mean for us.
Readings
Acts 10:34-43
Then Peter began to speak to them: ‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ—he is Lord of all. That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.’
John 20:1-18
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.’ Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went towards the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes.
But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ She said to them, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.’ When she had said this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?’ Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, ‘Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” ’ Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that he had said these things to her.
Address
Throughout my own spiritual journey and life as a priest I have met two kinds of people who call themselves Christians. On the one hand there are those who start from a position of self confidence. They are the ones who seem to be in the know and sure of where they stand. They know what is good and what is bad, what is permitted and what is forbidden, and they seem to be sure of their spiritual standing.
And I wonder whether that describes Simon Peter up until the small hours of Good Friday. He seemed sure of where the Lord was going, even though it earned him the rebuke, ‘Get behind me satan’. He had boldly proclaimed that he would follow Jesus even if it would cost him his life.
It wasn’t until he was actually confronted with the truth that his foundations were sand that he crumpled. It took a slave girl challenging him about being a disciple of Christ and his denial before he was broken.
And maybe another example of this kind of person was St. Paul. So sure was he of his spiritual viewpoint and the inherent wrongness of the spirituality of these new followers of the Way, these people who proclaimed a crucified Messiah, that he began to travel throughout Palestine in order to have them arrested.
It wasn’t until he was confronted with the truth on the road to Damascus that he, too, crumpled. It took Jesus showing him the depths of his arrogance for him to realise the truth.
So perhaps Peter and Paul are good examples for us of how we can be so self-confident of our spirituality and our place within God’s kingdom, and yet be so very wrong. These are the first kind of believers in God, the ones who start from a position of self-confidence.
And then there are the other type of believers, the ones who aren’t sure that they should really be there, that surely someone else more important, more self-confident, more at ease with Jesus should be taking the lead.
One example of that was the Samaritan woman at the well at Sychar, the woman who had lived with five husbands before the man she was currently living with when she encountered Jesus. Clearly she was lacking in self-confidence, having gone to the well to draw water in the middle of the day when it was so very hot and she could therefore be sure that there was no one else there to bully her.
Except Jesus was there, wasn’t he. And their encounter changed her so that she took her testimony to the whole town and many believed in Jesus because of her.
And then we get to the woman who is amongst my favourites of all the followers of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, as we remember her at this break of day. Mary’s not a big player in any of the Gospels. She doesn’t appear much, but we do know that she was someone who had been deeply troubled, out of whom Jesus cast several demons. Some have even referred to her as Mad Mary.
And what we find in this story is that in her bitterness and grief at the loss of perhaps the only man who had ever believed in her, she goes to the tomb for the sunrise, signalling the end of the Sabbath. In some accounts she’s there with others, waiting to anoint Jesus’s dead body, but maybe this story suggests that she was there on her own. Why? Perhaps because she felt she had nowhere else to go.
Grief makes us do strange things. But when she gets to the tomb she finds the stone has been removed. So what does she do? Remember, Mary is one of those without self-confidence, so she runs off to find someone important, Simon Peter and the beloved disciple. They come running back with her and do what? They confirm her story. The grave has been desecrated and the body stolen, and then they leave her, on her own, weeping.
No one stays to take care of Mary. And so she who has nothing, and has no self-belief, collapses in floods of tears. And it is she to whom Jesus reveals himself. She is the one, not the self-confident disciples, who is the first person to receive the good news that Jesus had risen from the dead. And she is the one who is told to go and tell the disciples that the Lord is risen.
And so the message to us is I think quite simple, and yet we miss it over and over again. Jesus chooses the ones without self-confidence to be the ones who proclaim the good news, and he does it over and over again. And they are the ones who have to learn to bear the responsibility for sharing the Gospel. Meanwhile the ones who think they know it all have to be humbled before they are ready to receive it, and ready to share it.
This seems to be a theme throughout the Bible, and it’s one that I cannot help but return to. Over and over again God chooses the weak to shame the strong, and he chooses the foolish to shame the wise. How many people who start from a position of self-confidence do you know who have become effective ministers of God’s love?
Then think about the ones you know who despair at their failures and who yet seem able to communicate over and over again the simplicity of the message that they have discovered God loves them. And for the self-confident there seems to be the need for some kind of crisis to show them who they really are before they are of any use as servants of the Gospel.
So if you come here today wondering at your own failings, faults and insecurities, looking around at the important people who seem to run the whole show, then welcome; welcome to you who are to be given the keys to the kingdom of heaven. But be prepared, because Jesus has a knack of saying to us, ‘Go now, and tell them that the Lord has risen.’ He is risen indeed. Amen
Acts 10:34-43
Then Peter began to speak to them: ‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ—he is Lord of all. That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.’
John 20:1-18
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.’ Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went towards the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes.
But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ She said to them, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.’ When she had said this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?’ Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, ‘Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” ’ Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that he had said these things to her.
Address
Throughout my own spiritual journey and life as a priest I have met two kinds of people who call themselves Christians. On the one hand there are those who start from a position of self confidence. They are the ones who seem to be in the know and sure of where they stand. They know what is good and what is bad, what is permitted and what is forbidden, and they seem to be sure of their spiritual standing.
And I wonder whether that describes Simon Peter up until the small hours of Good Friday. He seemed sure of where the Lord was going, even though it earned him the rebuke, ‘Get behind me satan’. He had boldly proclaimed that he would follow Jesus even if it would cost him his life.
It wasn’t until he was actually confronted with the truth that his foundations were sand that he crumpled. It took a slave girl challenging him about being a disciple of Christ and his denial before he was broken.
And maybe another example of this kind of person was St. Paul. So sure was he of his spiritual viewpoint and the inherent wrongness of the spirituality of these new followers of the Way, these people who proclaimed a crucified Messiah, that he began to travel throughout Palestine in order to have them arrested.
It wasn’t until he was confronted with the truth on the road to Damascus that he, too, crumpled. It took Jesus showing him the depths of his arrogance for him to realise the truth.
So perhaps Peter and Paul are good examples for us of how we can be so self-confident of our spirituality and our place within God’s kingdom, and yet be so very wrong. These are the first kind of believers in God, the ones who start from a position of self-confidence.
And then there are the other type of believers, the ones who aren’t sure that they should really be there, that surely someone else more important, more self-confident, more at ease with Jesus should be taking the lead.
One example of that was the Samaritan woman at the well at Sychar, the woman who had lived with five husbands before the man she was currently living with when she encountered Jesus. Clearly she was lacking in self-confidence, having gone to the well to draw water in the middle of the day when it was so very hot and she could therefore be sure that there was no one else there to bully her.
Except Jesus was there, wasn’t he. And their encounter changed her so that she took her testimony to the whole town and many believed in Jesus because of her.
And then we get to the woman who is amongst my favourites of all the followers of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, as we remember her at this break of day. Mary’s not a big player in any of the Gospels. She doesn’t appear much, but we do know that she was someone who had been deeply troubled, out of whom Jesus cast several demons. Some have even referred to her as Mad Mary.
And what we find in this story is that in her bitterness and grief at the loss of perhaps the only man who had ever believed in her, she goes to the tomb for the sunrise, signalling the end of the Sabbath. In some accounts she’s there with others, waiting to anoint Jesus’s dead body, but maybe this story suggests that she was there on her own. Why? Perhaps because she felt she had nowhere else to go.
Grief makes us do strange things. But when she gets to the tomb she finds the stone has been removed. So what does she do? Remember, Mary is one of those without self-confidence, so she runs off to find someone important, Simon Peter and the beloved disciple. They come running back with her and do what? They confirm her story. The grave has been desecrated and the body stolen, and then they leave her, on her own, weeping.
No one stays to take care of Mary. And so she who has nothing, and has no self-belief, collapses in floods of tears. And it is she to whom Jesus reveals himself. She is the one, not the self-confident disciples, who is the first person to receive the good news that Jesus had risen from the dead. And she is the one who is told to go and tell the disciples that the Lord is risen.
And so the message to us is I think quite simple, and yet we miss it over and over again. Jesus chooses the ones without self-confidence to be the ones who proclaim the good news, and he does it over and over again. And they are the ones who have to learn to bear the responsibility for sharing the Gospel. Meanwhile the ones who think they know it all have to be humbled before they are ready to receive it, and ready to share it.
This seems to be a theme throughout the Bible, and it’s one that I cannot help but return to. Over and over again God chooses the weak to shame the strong, and he chooses the foolish to shame the wise. How many people who start from a position of self-confidence do you know who have become effective ministers of God’s love?
Then think about the ones you know who despair at their failures and who yet seem able to communicate over and over again the simplicity of the message that they have discovered God loves them. And for the self-confident there seems to be the need for some kind of crisis to show them who they really are before they are of any use as servants of the Gospel.
So if you come here today wondering at your own failings, faults and insecurities, looking around at the important people who seem to run the whole show, then welcome; welcome to you who are to be given the keys to the kingdom of heaven. But be prepared, because Jesus has a knack of saying to us, ‘Go now, and tell them that the Lord has risen.’ He is risen indeed. Amen
Good Friday - Through their eyes part two.
Reading 1
Luke 22:39-46
Jesus Prays on the Mount of Olives
Jesus came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives; and the disciples followed him. When he reached the place, he said to them, ‘Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.’ Then he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and prayed, ‘Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.’ Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground. When he got up from prayer, he came to the disciples and found them sleeping because of grief, and he said to them, ‘Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may not come into the time of trial.’
Meditation
There are moments in life when we realise we have run out of choices. It could be the space between breaths as you see the car pulling out of a side road ahead of you, when your heart skips a beat as you see a child begin to fall off their bike, or the final breaths of a loved one. For Jesus those moments are drawn out, and the fate that he faces is beyond all that we can imagine.
He is Light from Light and he is choosing to let himself be extinguished purely because the Father has asked him to. The eternal one, through whom all things were made, was offering himself to be unmade, to taste death for us; for you, for me.
In our mortal lives the fear of death touches all of us without exception, particularly in the months after we’re bereaved. Yet we know we’re going to die, it’s a part of what it means to be human. But for the Son of God death is surely an impossibility.
And for the one who is perfect he is going to immerse himself in the depths of the worst humanity has to offer. In some way, beyond what we can conceive, he is going to allow himself to be connected up to everything that everyone ever as or will do wrong. Every petty thought, every perverted act, every dismal failure, he, the perfect one, will connect himself to that.
Is it any wonder that he sweated tears of blood? The humanity which he cradled in his divinity was about to accept the suffering of all humanity, and maybe of all creation. Think for a moment about the suffering you carry in your own self. Think of how unbearable it can sometimes be.
Remember the anger, pain and wretchedness that scar our lives from time to time? Remember how unbearable that can be for just ourselves? Jesus was being asked by his Father to take on not just yours, but everyone’s.
When we remember that, when we dwell on it and let its truth seep into it becomes easier to understand why the Son of God should be afraid. And it is also easy to understand his frustration with his disciples who seemed oblivious to the needs of the one they followed.
Reading 2
Luke 22:54-62
Peter Denies Jesus
Then they seized Jesus and led him away, bringing him into the high priest’s house. But Peter was following at a distance. When they had kindled a fire in the middle of the courtyard and sat down together, Peter sat among them. Then a servant-girl, seeing him in the firelight, stared at him and said, ‘This man also was with him.’ But he denied it, saying, ‘Woman, I do not know him.’ A little later someone else, on seeing him, said, ‘You also are one of them.’ But Peter said, ‘Man, I am not!’ Then about an hour later yet another kept insisting, ‘Surely this man also was with him; for he is a Galilean.’ But Peter said, ‘Man, I do not know what you are talking about!’ At that moment, while he was still speaking, the cock crowed. The Lord turned and looked at Peter. Then Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said to him, ‘Before the cock crows today, you will deny me three times.’ And he went out and wept bitterly.
Meditation
Peter, not you. Why did it have to be you? It could have been only more bitter to Jesus if it had been his mother herself. From the moment we saw the fear in your eyes when you told Jesus he could not be put to death, and he said those bitter words, ‘Get behind me Satan’, we knew that even you, with all your words and all your boldness, would fall.
It will be a long while before you forgive yourself this, yet even though the Lord’s words seemed cruel - to warn you of what you would do - it was necessary for you to go through this shame, to show you that you were not who you thought you were.
How else could he have shed light on your inner nature? The Lord could have let you go on for the rest of your life, believing in a false picture of yourself, seeing light where there was no light, seeing bravery where there were only empty words. But that would have been a greater cruelty, for you would never have faced the truth about yourself. The wound would have festered.
And how about us? What illusions do we carry around about our own importance? How does our picture of ourselves compare with everyone else’s? Remember the Lord’s words that the first will be last and the last first. Where do we naturally see ourselves as standing in this queue? How do we treat others that we think of as having a lesser social status?
Do we demean them? Do we look down on others, maybe just for poor driving or keeping us waiting in a checkout queue? Do we think of someone as a lesser human being if they’re fumbling around with something we understand easily. If so then it is likely that we are of the same mind as Peter, that we are ones who see ourselves as more important and better than we really are.
Only when we are honest with ourselves can we begin to understand our motivations and put to death Peter’s denial of the Lord within each of us.
And the Lord says to us, ‘When you deny me, I am looking for you. See my penetrating eyes. I know you. You have crumbled yet within you there is still the rock you can be. But first you have to know who you are. First you have to see yourself in the light.’
So the question is - do we see the world through Peter’s eyes?
Reading 3
John 18:33-19:3 - Mike
Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’ Jesus answered, ‘Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?’ Pilate replied, ‘I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?’ Jesus answered, ‘My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.’ Pilate asked him, ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’ Pilate asked him, ‘What is truth?’
After he had said this, he went out to the Jews again and told them, ‘I find no case against him. But you have a custom that I release someone for you at the Passover. Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?’ They shouted in reply, ‘Not this man, but Barabbas!’ Now Barabbas was a bandit.
Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged. And the soldiers wove a crown of thorns and put it on his head, and they dressed him in a purple robe. They kept coming up to him, saying, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ and striking him on the face.
Meditation
Have you ever felt manipulated? You know what the right thing to do is, but everyone wants to do the other thing. I wonder whether Pilate was scared? Or whether he just didn’t understand? The Jews believed in one God, a foreign idea to a Pagan ruler, and Pilate might long ago have given up trying to comprehend them. But this man standing in front of him was causing more public interest than he was comfortable with.
I imagine that Pilate would have called Jesus before him, expecting some kind of rabble rouser, someone pretending to greatness. Instead what he finds before him is a weary man who has been up all night being questioned by angry priests and yet who answers his questions with clarity, wisdom, elusiveness and mystery; a man whose innocence couldn’t be clearer if it was shouted from the rooftops. Pilate can see that there is no reason for him to take this any further and simply wants to be rid of this distraction.
But at the same time there is a sense that he worries what may happen if he doesn’t appease the Jewish leaders. He doesn’t want to execute Jesus, and in another of the Gospels his wife warns him of a dream she had about Jesus. Yet at the same time he can foresee trouble if he lets Jesus go, and in a volatile city, with a volatile people, at a national festival, he cannot be seen to lose control.
And so he does the easy thing and fobs the choice off on to the Jews themselves. Who do they want released, Jesus or Barabbas, the criminal. The crowd, egged on by the religious leaders, choose Barabbas and Pilate lets them have their own way, thinking that his conscience is clean. But is it?
How often, when faced with the right choice or the easy choice, do we take the easy way out? Pilate thought he’d avoid the guilt but I wonder, did he really? Or did this just had to the mounting dehumanising of his deepest self that the abuses of power bring to those who start with the best of intentions?
How often do we try and save face? How often do we not quite tell the whole truth because we’re scared of what people will think of us? How often do we mask incompetence with authority? Pilate asked the question, ‘What is truth?’ and if we’re honest we know the answer, but do we live up to it? Are we really people of truth? Are we really different from other people?
So the question is, do we live like Pilate in the world?
Reading 4
Mark 15:33-39
When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, ‘Listen, he is calling for Elijah.’ And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, ‘Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.’ Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’
Meditation
What have we done? We have killed God. Surely such a thing has never before been dreamt of, that a people chosen by their God should turn on him and kill him, and that God would allow them to do that. Why didn’t he destroy us? We killed God. We killed God and God let us do it.
With the soul of the universe wreathed in tears the Father can no longer bear to look upon his Son. We have drained him of all that he is. The humanity that he had taken on has become a stain too dark. The Father turns away, not because he is ashamed but because he fears for what the brightness of his love would do as he watched his Son carry the weight no one should ever have to carry.
And this work remained incomplete until the Father turned away from Jesus, for unless the Son was truly separated from the Father this work cannot be accomplished. Unless the Son truly tastes death there can be no life for us. And this pain of love casts a dark shadow over the land. The darkness in the depths of our hearts is like a bitter hunger that feeds on the separation, and humanity believes it finally has its triumph. But even though the Father turns away from his Son, it is only that he may turn us back from ourselves.
In this time between times, from the deepest darkness to the return of the light, when God allows humanity to do what it has always wished, finally to kill God, he will let us. Only when our anger at God, at each other, at ourselves, has been spent can we begin again. But you, O Son, surely this knowledge is too brutal, that even your Father must turn away from the Son of Man.
O my people, what have I done to you?
How have I offended you
How have I offended you?
Answer me! Answer me!
Holy God,
Holy and strong,
Holy and immortal,
Have mercy upon us.
ADDRESS
Throughout this week we have wondered again at what the crucifixion of Jesus means for us as we have pondered what it meant for others. As I said last Sunday, each time we come to this part of the year I see it with new eyes because the mystery of what Christ accomplished by dying for us transcends any systematic theology that we can attach to it.
This year, for me, it has hung on just a few verses squirreled away in the letter that St. Paul wrote to the Colossian church. Chapter 2: 13-15 reads like this:
And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.
If you’ve never read this letter, go away and do so as it is a hidden treasure. But for me, this week, St. Paul has captured in these words much of what we have seen. On Monday night we saw Simon the leper and Mary of Bethany. Through Jesus these two, who were the cast offs of society and religion, were instead included as friends of God.
On Tuesday we considered how Judas was confronted with his own jealousy of those who were in the inner circle around Jesus, and here we see what I have come to think of as ‘The Desolation of Light’. Everyone has a choice when confronted with Jesus. We can go with him but it means walking this path, of the selfless laying down of what we want, day after day, to do what God wants. That’s the way of the cross.
Simon the Leper and Mary could be a part of that because the Light exposed their desire to be a part of who Jesus was. But Judas, when exposed to the Light was made desolate by it. He could not lay down what he wanted for himself, and so was destroyed by the very light that he sought to snuff out by betrayal. At some point in our lives God confronts us with our true selves. He shines the Light on to us, and then we have a choice.
We can shed our own desires and walk in that path, or we can challenge it. Inevitably if we follow that second route it will leave us in a place of desolation because the Light of Truth is so powerful that we see ourselves for what we are. Judas refused the Light and killed himself because he could not bear what he saw.
Peter saw himself and dissolved into bitter tears when he realised what he had done, but he turned back from his desolation to restoration. Pilate’s wife had some idea of just how dangerous this light was going to prove to be and urged Pilate to step away from it. And the religious leaders, like those who are always concerned for their own reputations, were exposed for who they truly were.
As St. Paul put it, Jesus publicly nailed their motives to the cross, making an example of them for all the world ever to see, and their moment of triumph turned out to be desolation in the face of the Light of the World. For every one of us when we seek to be important for our own ends we need only to look at the public spectacle of the cross and be humbled.
And so it comes to us. And I think we have three choices, based on the different people with whom we have walked this Holy Week. For some of us we are like Simon the Leper or Mary of Bethany. We already feel wretched because people have expended energy in words or actions telling us how useless we are.
When we come to the Light of Jesus what we actually see is how God sees us, with eyes brimming with tears at what others have said about us or done to us. The first time we glimpse that, and see the tears God has wept over us, then we perhaps breathe out for the first time in years as we begin to understand that Jesus came firstly for us.
Or maybe we’re like the Peters of this world, desperate to follow Jesus but so concerned with our public status that we are unable to live out the challenge of the Christian way of laying aside the self. When the Light is shone on us, as for Peter, it is a light that causes desolation when the Light exposes our true nature to us, and presents us with a choice.
Will we allow ourselves to be restored and to change, or will we build up a wall of self-righteousness around us, preserving us from the Light of truth? Peter took the first action - the hardest way, but it was the second one which describes the path to utter desolation.
And that was the choice taken by Judas, Pilate and the religious authorities. So concerned were they with being in charge, with being in the right, that they could not permit the Light to touch them. And so instead of being a Light of salvation, of death and restoration, the Light of Christ showed them up for what they were really like and nailed their motives to the cross.
And so that is how it is. When we allow the Light of Christ to shine on us we can see ourselves as forgiven, or as sinful in need of forgiveness, or simply as those who will turn away from the desolation of discovering how much we really need forgiveness, and just walk in the other direction. Christ, by his life and by his death, calls us to lay aside our desires for the greater good of the kingdom of God, and asks us to follow him. Will we?
Reading 5
Matthew 27:59-61
When it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who was also a disciple of Jesus. He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus; then Pilate ordered it to be given to him. So Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn in the rock. He then rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb and went away. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were there, sitting opposite the tomb.
Meditation
And so we end, as is fitting, with Mary Magdalene, rendered powerless by the actions of men, waiting unknowingly to be remade into the first apostle, the one who will be sent to the other apostles.
What must it have been like for her? She was powerless. For maybe three years she had followed Jesus; been at his side, been a trusted woman, a trusted disciple. And then, at the end, after all she has done she is powerless, as a man about whom we have never heard comes and takes away the body of Jesus.
Those of you who have lost a close friend, someone on whom you depended, someone who in some way had set you free to become who you were always supposed to be, will have some inkling of how bereft she would have been. And so along comes Joseph. And he is well meaning and caring but somehow he just kind of takes over, quietly moving the women to one side.
Put yourself in Mary’s shoes. A man who perhaps you barely know, has the power to go to Pilate and ask for the body. And Mary feels powerless, no decisions for her to make. And he takes the body of Jesus to his own tomb, and Mary has no say in the matter. And he puts the body of Jesus in the tomb because he thinks that’s the right thing to do, and Mary can only watch as someone else takes charge of what, in her own mind, she should have been doing.
And then he just goes. He leaves. And Mary Magdalene and the other Mary just slump to the ground. It has all been done for them. They, unimportant women, though dearly loved by Jesus, were just shunted out of the way whilst men got on with doing all the important jobs.
We know what comes next. We know who Jesus chooses as his first witness to the resurrection, but Mary Magdalene, our Mary, knew nothing of that. She was simply powerless. And maybe that’s you. For the last week we have thought of all the mistakes that people made in their dealing with Jesus, of the sins and the betrayals. And Mary, Mary did nothing wrong.
She was just, as always, at the bottom of everyone’s pile. Mad Mary. Pushed to one side. Forgotten by everyone. Except she was not forgotten by the Lord. And if Mary’s story is your story, then neither are you forgotten. We are a part of the upside down kingdom where the first are last and the last first. Mary was last in everyone else’s eyes, everyone, that is, except God’s.
Luke 22:39-46
Jesus Prays on the Mount of Olives
Jesus came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives; and the disciples followed him. When he reached the place, he said to them, ‘Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.’ Then he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and prayed, ‘Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.’ Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground. When he got up from prayer, he came to the disciples and found them sleeping because of grief, and he said to them, ‘Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may not come into the time of trial.’
Meditation
There are moments in life when we realise we have run out of choices. It could be the space between breaths as you see the car pulling out of a side road ahead of you, when your heart skips a beat as you see a child begin to fall off their bike, or the final breaths of a loved one. For Jesus those moments are drawn out, and the fate that he faces is beyond all that we can imagine.
He is Light from Light and he is choosing to let himself be extinguished purely because the Father has asked him to. The eternal one, through whom all things were made, was offering himself to be unmade, to taste death for us; for you, for me.
In our mortal lives the fear of death touches all of us without exception, particularly in the months after we’re bereaved. Yet we know we’re going to die, it’s a part of what it means to be human. But for the Son of God death is surely an impossibility.
And for the one who is perfect he is going to immerse himself in the depths of the worst humanity has to offer. In some way, beyond what we can conceive, he is going to allow himself to be connected up to everything that everyone ever as or will do wrong. Every petty thought, every perverted act, every dismal failure, he, the perfect one, will connect himself to that.
Is it any wonder that he sweated tears of blood? The humanity which he cradled in his divinity was about to accept the suffering of all humanity, and maybe of all creation. Think for a moment about the suffering you carry in your own self. Think of how unbearable it can sometimes be.
Remember the anger, pain and wretchedness that scar our lives from time to time? Remember how unbearable that can be for just ourselves? Jesus was being asked by his Father to take on not just yours, but everyone’s.
When we remember that, when we dwell on it and let its truth seep into it becomes easier to understand why the Son of God should be afraid. And it is also easy to understand his frustration with his disciples who seemed oblivious to the needs of the one they followed.
Reading 2
Luke 22:54-62
Peter Denies Jesus
Then they seized Jesus and led him away, bringing him into the high priest’s house. But Peter was following at a distance. When they had kindled a fire in the middle of the courtyard and sat down together, Peter sat among them. Then a servant-girl, seeing him in the firelight, stared at him and said, ‘This man also was with him.’ But he denied it, saying, ‘Woman, I do not know him.’ A little later someone else, on seeing him, said, ‘You also are one of them.’ But Peter said, ‘Man, I am not!’ Then about an hour later yet another kept insisting, ‘Surely this man also was with him; for he is a Galilean.’ But Peter said, ‘Man, I do not know what you are talking about!’ At that moment, while he was still speaking, the cock crowed. The Lord turned and looked at Peter. Then Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said to him, ‘Before the cock crows today, you will deny me three times.’ And he went out and wept bitterly.
Meditation
Peter, not you. Why did it have to be you? It could have been only more bitter to Jesus if it had been his mother herself. From the moment we saw the fear in your eyes when you told Jesus he could not be put to death, and he said those bitter words, ‘Get behind me Satan’, we knew that even you, with all your words and all your boldness, would fall.
It will be a long while before you forgive yourself this, yet even though the Lord’s words seemed cruel - to warn you of what you would do - it was necessary for you to go through this shame, to show you that you were not who you thought you were.
How else could he have shed light on your inner nature? The Lord could have let you go on for the rest of your life, believing in a false picture of yourself, seeing light where there was no light, seeing bravery where there were only empty words. But that would have been a greater cruelty, for you would never have faced the truth about yourself. The wound would have festered.
And how about us? What illusions do we carry around about our own importance? How does our picture of ourselves compare with everyone else’s? Remember the Lord’s words that the first will be last and the last first. Where do we naturally see ourselves as standing in this queue? How do we treat others that we think of as having a lesser social status?
Do we demean them? Do we look down on others, maybe just for poor driving or keeping us waiting in a checkout queue? Do we think of someone as a lesser human being if they’re fumbling around with something we understand easily. If so then it is likely that we are of the same mind as Peter, that we are ones who see ourselves as more important and better than we really are.
Only when we are honest with ourselves can we begin to understand our motivations and put to death Peter’s denial of the Lord within each of us.
And the Lord says to us, ‘When you deny me, I am looking for you. See my penetrating eyes. I know you. You have crumbled yet within you there is still the rock you can be. But first you have to know who you are. First you have to see yourself in the light.’
So the question is - do we see the world through Peter’s eyes?
Reading 3
John 18:33-19:3 - Mike
Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’ Jesus answered, ‘Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?’ Pilate replied, ‘I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?’ Jesus answered, ‘My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.’ Pilate asked him, ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’ Pilate asked him, ‘What is truth?’
After he had said this, he went out to the Jews again and told them, ‘I find no case against him. But you have a custom that I release someone for you at the Passover. Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?’ They shouted in reply, ‘Not this man, but Barabbas!’ Now Barabbas was a bandit.
Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged. And the soldiers wove a crown of thorns and put it on his head, and they dressed him in a purple robe. They kept coming up to him, saying, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ and striking him on the face.
Meditation
Have you ever felt manipulated? You know what the right thing to do is, but everyone wants to do the other thing. I wonder whether Pilate was scared? Or whether he just didn’t understand? The Jews believed in one God, a foreign idea to a Pagan ruler, and Pilate might long ago have given up trying to comprehend them. But this man standing in front of him was causing more public interest than he was comfortable with.
I imagine that Pilate would have called Jesus before him, expecting some kind of rabble rouser, someone pretending to greatness. Instead what he finds before him is a weary man who has been up all night being questioned by angry priests and yet who answers his questions with clarity, wisdom, elusiveness and mystery; a man whose innocence couldn’t be clearer if it was shouted from the rooftops. Pilate can see that there is no reason for him to take this any further and simply wants to be rid of this distraction.
But at the same time there is a sense that he worries what may happen if he doesn’t appease the Jewish leaders. He doesn’t want to execute Jesus, and in another of the Gospels his wife warns him of a dream she had about Jesus. Yet at the same time he can foresee trouble if he lets Jesus go, and in a volatile city, with a volatile people, at a national festival, he cannot be seen to lose control.
And so he does the easy thing and fobs the choice off on to the Jews themselves. Who do they want released, Jesus or Barabbas, the criminal. The crowd, egged on by the religious leaders, choose Barabbas and Pilate lets them have their own way, thinking that his conscience is clean. But is it?
How often, when faced with the right choice or the easy choice, do we take the easy way out? Pilate thought he’d avoid the guilt but I wonder, did he really? Or did this just had to the mounting dehumanising of his deepest self that the abuses of power bring to those who start with the best of intentions?
How often do we try and save face? How often do we not quite tell the whole truth because we’re scared of what people will think of us? How often do we mask incompetence with authority? Pilate asked the question, ‘What is truth?’ and if we’re honest we know the answer, but do we live up to it? Are we really people of truth? Are we really different from other people?
So the question is, do we live like Pilate in the world?
Reading 4
Mark 15:33-39
When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, ‘Listen, he is calling for Elijah.’ And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, ‘Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.’ Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’
Meditation
What have we done? We have killed God. Surely such a thing has never before been dreamt of, that a people chosen by their God should turn on him and kill him, and that God would allow them to do that. Why didn’t he destroy us? We killed God. We killed God and God let us do it.
With the soul of the universe wreathed in tears the Father can no longer bear to look upon his Son. We have drained him of all that he is. The humanity that he had taken on has become a stain too dark. The Father turns away, not because he is ashamed but because he fears for what the brightness of his love would do as he watched his Son carry the weight no one should ever have to carry.
And this work remained incomplete until the Father turned away from Jesus, for unless the Son was truly separated from the Father this work cannot be accomplished. Unless the Son truly tastes death there can be no life for us. And this pain of love casts a dark shadow over the land. The darkness in the depths of our hearts is like a bitter hunger that feeds on the separation, and humanity believes it finally has its triumph. But even though the Father turns away from his Son, it is only that he may turn us back from ourselves.
In this time between times, from the deepest darkness to the return of the light, when God allows humanity to do what it has always wished, finally to kill God, he will let us. Only when our anger at God, at each other, at ourselves, has been spent can we begin again. But you, O Son, surely this knowledge is too brutal, that even your Father must turn away from the Son of Man.
O my people, what have I done to you?
How have I offended you
How have I offended you?
Answer me! Answer me!
Holy God,
Holy and strong,
Holy and immortal,
Have mercy upon us.
ADDRESS
Throughout this week we have wondered again at what the crucifixion of Jesus means for us as we have pondered what it meant for others. As I said last Sunday, each time we come to this part of the year I see it with new eyes because the mystery of what Christ accomplished by dying for us transcends any systematic theology that we can attach to it.
This year, for me, it has hung on just a few verses squirreled away in the letter that St. Paul wrote to the Colossian church. Chapter 2: 13-15 reads like this:
And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.
If you’ve never read this letter, go away and do so as it is a hidden treasure. But for me, this week, St. Paul has captured in these words much of what we have seen. On Monday night we saw Simon the leper and Mary of Bethany. Through Jesus these two, who were the cast offs of society and religion, were instead included as friends of God.
On Tuesday we considered how Judas was confronted with his own jealousy of those who were in the inner circle around Jesus, and here we see what I have come to think of as ‘The Desolation of Light’. Everyone has a choice when confronted with Jesus. We can go with him but it means walking this path, of the selfless laying down of what we want, day after day, to do what God wants. That’s the way of the cross.
Simon the Leper and Mary could be a part of that because the Light exposed their desire to be a part of who Jesus was. But Judas, when exposed to the Light was made desolate by it. He could not lay down what he wanted for himself, and so was destroyed by the very light that he sought to snuff out by betrayal. At some point in our lives God confronts us with our true selves. He shines the Light on to us, and then we have a choice.
We can shed our own desires and walk in that path, or we can challenge it. Inevitably if we follow that second route it will leave us in a place of desolation because the Light of Truth is so powerful that we see ourselves for what we are. Judas refused the Light and killed himself because he could not bear what he saw.
Peter saw himself and dissolved into bitter tears when he realised what he had done, but he turned back from his desolation to restoration. Pilate’s wife had some idea of just how dangerous this light was going to prove to be and urged Pilate to step away from it. And the religious leaders, like those who are always concerned for their own reputations, were exposed for who they truly were.
As St. Paul put it, Jesus publicly nailed their motives to the cross, making an example of them for all the world ever to see, and their moment of triumph turned out to be desolation in the face of the Light of the World. For every one of us when we seek to be important for our own ends we need only to look at the public spectacle of the cross and be humbled.
And so it comes to us. And I think we have three choices, based on the different people with whom we have walked this Holy Week. For some of us we are like Simon the Leper or Mary of Bethany. We already feel wretched because people have expended energy in words or actions telling us how useless we are.
When we come to the Light of Jesus what we actually see is how God sees us, with eyes brimming with tears at what others have said about us or done to us. The first time we glimpse that, and see the tears God has wept over us, then we perhaps breathe out for the first time in years as we begin to understand that Jesus came firstly for us.
Or maybe we’re like the Peters of this world, desperate to follow Jesus but so concerned with our public status that we are unable to live out the challenge of the Christian way of laying aside the self. When the Light is shone on us, as for Peter, it is a light that causes desolation when the Light exposes our true nature to us, and presents us with a choice.
Will we allow ourselves to be restored and to change, or will we build up a wall of self-righteousness around us, preserving us from the Light of truth? Peter took the first action - the hardest way, but it was the second one which describes the path to utter desolation.
And that was the choice taken by Judas, Pilate and the religious authorities. So concerned were they with being in charge, with being in the right, that they could not permit the Light to touch them. And so instead of being a Light of salvation, of death and restoration, the Light of Christ showed them up for what they were really like and nailed their motives to the cross.
And so that is how it is. When we allow the Light of Christ to shine on us we can see ourselves as forgiven, or as sinful in need of forgiveness, or simply as those who will turn away from the desolation of discovering how much we really need forgiveness, and just walk in the other direction. Christ, by his life and by his death, calls us to lay aside our desires for the greater good of the kingdom of God, and asks us to follow him. Will we?
Reading 5
Matthew 27:59-61
When it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who was also a disciple of Jesus. He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus; then Pilate ordered it to be given to him. So Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn in the rock. He then rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb and went away. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were there, sitting opposite the tomb.
Meditation
And so we end, as is fitting, with Mary Magdalene, rendered powerless by the actions of men, waiting unknowingly to be remade into the first apostle, the one who will be sent to the other apostles.
What must it have been like for her? She was powerless. For maybe three years she had followed Jesus; been at his side, been a trusted woman, a trusted disciple. And then, at the end, after all she has done she is powerless, as a man about whom we have never heard comes and takes away the body of Jesus.
Those of you who have lost a close friend, someone on whom you depended, someone who in some way had set you free to become who you were always supposed to be, will have some inkling of how bereft she would have been. And so along comes Joseph. And he is well meaning and caring but somehow he just kind of takes over, quietly moving the women to one side.
Put yourself in Mary’s shoes. A man who perhaps you barely know, has the power to go to Pilate and ask for the body. And Mary feels powerless, no decisions for her to make. And he takes the body of Jesus to his own tomb, and Mary has no say in the matter. And he puts the body of Jesus in the tomb because he thinks that’s the right thing to do, and Mary can only watch as someone else takes charge of what, in her own mind, she should have been doing.
And then he just goes. He leaves. And Mary Magdalene and the other Mary just slump to the ground. It has all been done for them. They, unimportant women, though dearly loved by Jesus, were just shunted out of the way whilst men got on with doing all the important jobs.
We know what comes next. We know who Jesus chooses as his first witness to the resurrection, but Mary Magdalene, our Mary, knew nothing of that. She was simply powerless. And maybe that’s you. For the last week we have thought of all the mistakes that people made in their dealing with Jesus, of the sins and the betrayals. And Mary, Mary did nothing wrong.
She was just, as always, at the bottom of everyone’s pile. Mad Mary. Pushed to one side. Forgotten by everyone. Except she was not forgotten by the Lord. And if Mary’s story is your story, then neither are you forgotten. We are a part of the upside down kingdom where the first are last and the last first. Mary was last in everyone else’s eyes, everyone, that is, except God’s.
Maundy Thursday : Church hierarchy - how did we get it so wrong?
Readings
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
John 13:1-17, 31-35
Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, ‘Lord, are you going to wash my feet?’ Jesus answered, ‘You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.’ Peter said to him, ‘You will never wash my feet.’ Jesus answered, ‘Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.’ Simon Peter said to him, ‘Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!’ Jesus said to him, ‘One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.’ For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, ‘Not all of you are clean.’
After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, ‘Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.
Jesus said, ‘Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, “Where I am going, you cannot come.” I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’
Address
The last time that I had the pleasure of taking Holy Communion to the residents of Mockley Manor, our local care home, there was a degree of excitement amongst the staff, to the extent that the care manager was beginning to pull her hair out with the way the staff were so distracted by their new arrivals. What could cause such disruption you might ask?
In the corner of the main sitting room, where we have our communion service, were two glass boxes. They were very warm and in one was a number of eggs and in the other were about half a dozen brightly coloured and very fluffy chicks. They were so sweet, drawing on everyone’s emotions with their ‘cheep cheep’ sounds.
And during the course of the service another egg hatched in the incubator and we were treated to the sight of another chick taking its first faltering steps into the world. Now you can see why there was so little work being done. The staff and residents were caught up in this miracle of new life and everyone was taking it in turns to hold and stroke these beautiful fluffy yellow chicks.
It’s hard to believe, when they’re that small and that cute, that very quickly they begin to turn on each other to form a social hierarchy where chickens of higher rank will quite literally peck those of lower rank, and from there we get the term, ‘Pecking order’. The dominant chicken pecks the one beneath who in turn pecks the one beneath and so on.
We feel sentimental about them because they’re all soft and fluffy, but the reality is that they are putting energy into deciding who is boss. And it’s not just the chickens. Have you ever watched closely when cows are herded from one field to another? There is a very clear pattern of hierarchy and dominance.
It’s established by the way two cows will approach each other. There will then be some form of threat followed by some form of physical contact and possibly even fighting. After that the pattern of dominance and subordination will have been established and will be observed in all forms of social interactions, and it is usually found that the dominant animals will lead the grazing and will often be first into the milking stalls where they produce more milk.
Being at the top of the chain is evidently good for them. And so it continues throughout the lives of all social animals; wolves with their alpha male and female, lions, chimps and of course, humans. Social hierarchy has a very clear reason for existence: it brings order and once you know where you are on the scale you know how to function there.
Which is fine if you’re at or near the top of the hierarchical ladder. Like the happy dominant cows who produce more milk, if we’re achieving well and rising up the social or employment scale, gradually becoming more dominant, then so we become more at ease and more content.
But to get to the top of a hierarchy means that someone else has to be pecked. Someone else has to be trodden on. There are only a limited number of places at the top, and if you want to be going up, then someone else must be coming down
And so we come to John’s account of the night Jesus was arrested, and what is so very significant about John’s narrative is that, in contrast with the other three Gospels which focus on the last supper, in John’s account there is no mention of bread and wine. None whatsoever! Of course we have no idea why that was exactly.
It may be that John was well aware of Mark’s account, there are certainly hints that was the case, and simply wanted to include something else to give a bigger picture. But I suspect there was more to it than that. John wrote a very detailed meditation of Jesus’s life and the prominence of this story of foot washing indicates its importance.
Jesus’s actions are deliberately chosen to completely upset the social ordering that humans, like all other animals, indulge in. He acknowledges that he is their Lord and their teacher. There is no false modesty but a simple honesty. He is quite clearly the dominant male in their hierarchy and they are there because they are following him.
And there are plenty of stories throughout the Gospels of how the disciples then fought amongst themselves to establish who was next in the pecking order. Peter, James and John would have been next since they were the ones with whom Jesus is recorded as having as his closest supporters, the ones he took with him when he wanted just a small group around him such as at the transfiguration.
Several times we hear of rows erupting about importance and so finally, on the last night of his earthly life, Jesus takes demonstrative action, and the writer, John, believes that what Jesus was doing was of such great importance to the infant church that he recorded this as the final sacrament rather than the Lord’s supper.
And so Jesus, the Lord and Rabbi, the one who was clearly at the top of the hierarchy, shed his outer robe, tied a towel around himself, and came to wash their feet. And you can see just how upsetting this was with Peter declaring that he could never let Jesus perform what was actually the menial act of someone who was a servant or a slave, someone who was right down at the very bottom of the social order.
And then Jesus tells them that this is what they must all do for each other, and in so doing the Son of God upsets the balance of all nature and calls us to step outside what comes naturally to us as animals. He has given us an example to follow that goes way beyond doing the shopping for someone elderly in the village, or putting a cheque in an envelope in response to a request from a good cause.
Jesus told us that we are to create a community of equals. The beliefs in being superior or inferior are not meant to be a part of the life of Christ’s church. Authority is redefined by a towel and a basin, and this is meant to be the normal practice for us, and I have to ask, is it?
On Friday evening I went to the installation of the new vicar at St. Patrick’s. Now I always feel awkward at these things, just as I did on this occasion, and in reading this passage I realise now why that is. Just as in my own installation here the service ran counter to the Gospel.
Firstly the clergy had special reserved seats right at the front. There were people standing at the back for the whole service - those who hadn’t got in early enough to find a seat, whilst we were treated as important guests, those at the dominant end of the church hierarchy, who had seats set aside for us with the best view. And of course we were all wearing robes, to show again our importance.
And then the priest, as it was with me here, is treated with great honour as a new leader, someone who has come to bring order and direction, and I find myself thinking, ‘What on earth are we doing?’
The very first action of a new priest should be to wash the feet of everyone present. The clergy should be the ones who are standing at the back, and the church cleaners, the ones who put out the rubbish for you and make sure there’s always loo roll in the toilet even though you don’t see them do it, they should be the ones at the front in the special guest seats.
How did we get it so wrong?
And it has happened over and again in ministry that when I have tried to move people into positions of responsibility I have had other people say to me, ‘Have they earned it?’ Of course they haven’t! That’s the whole point! That’s the Gospel, that the ones who are at the bottom don’t have to begin to assert some kind of dominance in order to get some kind of recognition and gradually work there way up.
That is anti-Christian. John gives this story such prominence in the life of Jesus that it must be a defining feature of what church life is like. Yes of course we will have people who are more able and gifted in some things than others. But it does not, in any way, make them more important.
This requires such vigilance in ourselves because we are animals of this planet. Our natural instinct is to try and live the patterns of dominance and submission that so many of us have been marked by in our lives so far, and Jesus says, ‘It must not be so amongst you. Love one another as I have loved you.’
So if Jesus, the Son of God, the hands through whom you were created, if he should wash your feet, then how much more should we wash each other’s feet. And when we are tempted to try and rise up the church social hierarchy, let us instead remember the image with God having a towel around his waist, and do our best to destroy all vestigies of that hierarchy as being of the world, the flesh and the devil.
It was not his way, and it must not be our way. You and I were sent as servants, to lay down our lives as he laid down his. Amen
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
John 13:1-17, 31-35
Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, ‘Lord, are you going to wash my feet?’ Jesus answered, ‘You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.’ Peter said to him, ‘You will never wash my feet.’ Jesus answered, ‘Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.’ Simon Peter said to him, ‘Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!’ Jesus said to him, ‘One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.’ For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, ‘Not all of you are clean.’
After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, ‘Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.
Jesus said, ‘Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, “Where I am going, you cannot come.” I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’
Address
The last time that I had the pleasure of taking Holy Communion to the residents of Mockley Manor, our local care home, there was a degree of excitement amongst the staff, to the extent that the care manager was beginning to pull her hair out with the way the staff were so distracted by their new arrivals. What could cause such disruption you might ask?
In the corner of the main sitting room, where we have our communion service, were two glass boxes. They were very warm and in one was a number of eggs and in the other were about half a dozen brightly coloured and very fluffy chicks. They were so sweet, drawing on everyone’s emotions with their ‘cheep cheep’ sounds.
And during the course of the service another egg hatched in the incubator and we were treated to the sight of another chick taking its first faltering steps into the world. Now you can see why there was so little work being done. The staff and residents were caught up in this miracle of new life and everyone was taking it in turns to hold and stroke these beautiful fluffy yellow chicks.
It’s hard to believe, when they’re that small and that cute, that very quickly they begin to turn on each other to form a social hierarchy where chickens of higher rank will quite literally peck those of lower rank, and from there we get the term, ‘Pecking order’. The dominant chicken pecks the one beneath who in turn pecks the one beneath and so on.
We feel sentimental about them because they’re all soft and fluffy, but the reality is that they are putting energy into deciding who is boss. And it’s not just the chickens. Have you ever watched closely when cows are herded from one field to another? There is a very clear pattern of hierarchy and dominance.
It’s established by the way two cows will approach each other. There will then be some form of threat followed by some form of physical contact and possibly even fighting. After that the pattern of dominance and subordination will have been established and will be observed in all forms of social interactions, and it is usually found that the dominant animals will lead the grazing and will often be first into the milking stalls where they produce more milk.
Being at the top of the chain is evidently good for them. And so it continues throughout the lives of all social animals; wolves with their alpha male and female, lions, chimps and of course, humans. Social hierarchy has a very clear reason for existence: it brings order and once you know where you are on the scale you know how to function there.
Which is fine if you’re at or near the top of the hierarchical ladder. Like the happy dominant cows who produce more milk, if we’re achieving well and rising up the social or employment scale, gradually becoming more dominant, then so we become more at ease and more content.
But to get to the top of a hierarchy means that someone else has to be pecked. Someone else has to be trodden on. There are only a limited number of places at the top, and if you want to be going up, then someone else must be coming down
And so we come to John’s account of the night Jesus was arrested, and what is so very significant about John’s narrative is that, in contrast with the other three Gospels which focus on the last supper, in John’s account there is no mention of bread and wine. None whatsoever! Of course we have no idea why that was exactly.
It may be that John was well aware of Mark’s account, there are certainly hints that was the case, and simply wanted to include something else to give a bigger picture. But I suspect there was more to it than that. John wrote a very detailed meditation of Jesus’s life and the prominence of this story of foot washing indicates its importance.
Jesus’s actions are deliberately chosen to completely upset the social ordering that humans, like all other animals, indulge in. He acknowledges that he is their Lord and their teacher. There is no false modesty but a simple honesty. He is quite clearly the dominant male in their hierarchy and they are there because they are following him.
And there are plenty of stories throughout the Gospels of how the disciples then fought amongst themselves to establish who was next in the pecking order. Peter, James and John would have been next since they were the ones with whom Jesus is recorded as having as his closest supporters, the ones he took with him when he wanted just a small group around him such as at the transfiguration.
Several times we hear of rows erupting about importance and so finally, on the last night of his earthly life, Jesus takes demonstrative action, and the writer, John, believes that what Jesus was doing was of such great importance to the infant church that he recorded this as the final sacrament rather than the Lord’s supper.
And so Jesus, the Lord and Rabbi, the one who was clearly at the top of the hierarchy, shed his outer robe, tied a towel around himself, and came to wash their feet. And you can see just how upsetting this was with Peter declaring that he could never let Jesus perform what was actually the menial act of someone who was a servant or a slave, someone who was right down at the very bottom of the social order.
And then Jesus tells them that this is what they must all do for each other, and in so doing the Son of God upsets the balance of all nature and calls us to step outside what comes naturally to us as animals. He has given us an example to follow that goes way beyond doing the shopping for someone elderly in the village, or putting a cheque in an envelope in response to a request from a good cause.
Jesus told us that we are to create a community of equals. The beliefs in being superior or inferior are not meant to be a part of the life of Christ’s church. Authority is redefined by a towel and a basin, and this is meant to be the normal practice for us, and I have to ask, is it?
On Friday evening I went to the installation of the new vicar at St. Patrick’s. Now I always feel awkward at these things, just as I did on this occasion, and in reading this passage I realise now why that is. Just as in my own installation here the service ran counter to the Gospel.
Firstly the clergy had special reserved seats right at the front. There were people standing at the back for the whole service - those who hadn’t got in early enough to find a seat, whilst we were treated as important guests, those at the dominant end of the church hierarchy, who had seats set aside for us with the best view. And of course we were all wearing robes, to show again our importance.
And then the priest, as it was with me here, is treated with great honour as a new leader, someone who has come to bring order and direction, and I find myself thinking, ‘What on earth are we doing?’
The very first action of a new priest should be to wash the feet of everyone present. The clergy should be the ones who are standing at the back, and the church cleaners, the ones who put out the rubbish for you and make sure there’s always loo roll in the toilet even though you don’t see them do it, they should be the ones at the front in the special guest seats.
How did we get it so wrong?
And it has happened over and again in ministry that when I have tried to move people into positions of responsibility I have had other people say to me, ‘Have they earned it?’ Of course they haven’t! That’s the whole point! That’s the Gospel, that the ones who are at the bottom don’t have to begin to assert some kind of dominance in order to get some kind of recognition and gradually work there way up.
That is anti-Christian. John gives this story such prominence in the life of Jesus that it must be a defining feature of what church life is like. Yes of course we will have people who are more able and gifted in some things than others. But it does not, in any way, make them more important.
This requires such vigilance in ourselves because we are animals of this planet. Our natural instinct is to try and live the patterns of dominance and submission that so many of us have been marked by in our lives so far, and Jesus says, ‘It must not be so amongst you. Love one another as I have loved you.’
So if Jesus, the Son of God, the hands through whom you were created, if he should wash your feet, then how much more should we wash each other’s feet. And when we are tempted to try and rise up the church social hierarchy, let us instead remember the image with God having a towel around his waist, and do our best to destroy all vestigies of that hierarchy as being of the world, the flesh and the devil.
It was not his way, and it must not be our way. You and I were sent as servants, to lay down our lives as he laid down his. Amen
Holy Week - Through the eyes of those who saw it - Part One
Monday of Holy Week
Reading
Mark 14:3-10
While Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head. But some were there who said to one another in anger, ‘Why was the ointment wasted in this way? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred days wages. and the money given to the poor.’ And they scolded her. But Jesus said, ‘Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.’ Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them.
Address
The first thing that this story tells us is that Jesus was a welcome guest in the house of an untouchable, a leper called Simon. Can you imagine how his disciples would have felt on edge? Who is the least popular person that you know? Who is the one that all the important people shun? That’s the house where you’ll find Jesus eating and drinking. Will you be there with him? And if so, will you be joining in, or will you be standing around the edge somewhere, hoping no one actually see you there?
Or maybe it’s you. It may be that tonight you sit here with the burden of being someone who at some point in your life was the one left on the outside. It is a burden which sits timelessly on the surface of our unconscious, waiting for a quite moment, when there are no distractions, to remind you of the times when you were the one that nobody wanted.
It’s a voice that can be unceasing and which can shape all that you do. Its words have the power to mould your actions - ever to appease others or maybe to confirm what they said about you.
What must it have been like for Simon the leper to have God to dinner?
In the midst of what you think of yourself, what kind of affirmation would that be?
How would you respond?
Maybe your response would be like the woman with the alabaster jar of ointment.
Imagine how long she had saved - almost a whole years wages.
Think of that. How much would that be to you?
So grateful was she for being recognised and valued, no longer someone’s rubbish, that she wanted simply to do something in return. She wanted to give something to God.
And in the midst of the male bluster, she was the one who quietly stepped in, and broke the top off her alabaster jar with a loud crack that would have silenced the room.
She understood what no one else did, that the end was very close. Through her eyes we see how to value Jesus. All that she had she gave to him.
Those are so like the words in our wedding service at the exchanging of rings. All that I am I give to you. All that I have I share with you. She was offering herself to Jesus with a responding love like that of a bride or a groom.
And so how about us?
If we don’t wish to give like that it is not because we are ungrateful.
It’s just that we haven’t yet realised the depths to which Jesus will go to reach us.
We haven’t yet seen him through her eyes.
May the Lord open our eyes to see that we owe him everything - all that we have and all that we are, for he comes still into our homes and into our lives with the words, ‘You are important to me. You are worth the life of God.’ Amen.
Holy Week - Tuesday
Reading
Luke 22:3-6
This reading follows on immediately from last night when Mary of Bethany anointed Jesus at the house of Simon the Leper.
Then Satan entered into Judas called Iscariot, who was one of the twelve; he went away and conferred with the chief priests and officers of the temple police about how he might betray him to them. They were greatly pleased and agreed to give him money. So he consented and began to look for an opportunity to betray him to them when no crowd was present.
Address
I always wonder about Judas. What must the last few days of Jesus’s life have been like through his eyes? I suspect that the reason that we are so fascinated by him is because he turned on Jesus after having lived, worked and ministered alongside him for three years. And so we worry that if Judas, who had actually been there and witnessed it with his own eyes could be turned, could get it so wrong, then what about us? If an eye-witness could lose faith then could it happen to me?
So what did Judas see in that last week? What finally made him turn on Jesus? Matthew and Mark link the story with last night’s narrative about Jesus being anointed by a woman at Bethany. It was as if that act of dedication and love was what finally inspired Judas to betrayal; that there was something which took place in his mind that spurred him on, and I find myself wondering if it was jealousy at the root.
And jealousy can quickly turn to contempt, and I wonder whether that was finally what took Judas over. I am pretty sure that he would have had his doubts about Jesus. There are some suggestions that his name, Iscariot, may have linked him with a group of assassins. Another possibly was that he came from the south of the country whilst Jesus and his closest associates were Galileans, from the north.
So right there we have grounds for Judas comparing himself unfavourably with others. It can be hard to fit in when you’re different and you start to look with jealousy on the leader and other followers who all seem to have so much in common. And so you need to protect yourself. What do you do? In your own mind you start to look less favourably on the leader.
If the leader doesn’t matter so much to you, then it doesn’t matter if you feel like you’re not on the inside of the group. Once you start to hold the leader in contempt you can feel more at ease and fool yourself that it really doesn’t matter. Except it does. Why else would it hurt so much to be on the outside?
I wonder if that’s what Judas did. I wonder whether, by the time he had got to Jerusalem for this final time, Judas had already decided he didn’t like what Jesus stood for simply because he was jealous, maybe of Simon Peter, James and john, or maybe of the attention that Jesus was himself getting. And once you have got yourself into that kind of mind set it is very easy to be tempted to try and rid yourself of the one who is causing you so much internal angst.
And then the woman comes and pours expensive anointing oil all over Jesus’s head. Judas sees not only the way she lavishes love on Jesus, but also the way he treats her tenderly, affirming that her story will be told whenever his story is told. Instantly she’s an insider, and the jealous root in Judas that he has allowed to blossom into contempt for Jesus and hatred for his followers who, to him, seem all to be on the inside, finally takes over and he decides to betray Jesus.
Could it be me doing the same thing? Could it be you?
I think that the biggest problem for us in our spiritual journeys is comparison. We look at other people and the relationship they have with Christ and we want to be like them. Or we see what they’re doing with their lives and we want to be like that. That jealousy is at the root of betrayal. And the Lord says to us, ‘Do not be concerned with how others live their lives. You have your own life, your own calling, your own direction with me. Walk the path that you share with me, not the path that someone else shares.’
So maybe Judas was jealous. And perhaps we should consider how we view the lives of others and remember that each of us has our own calling, and we should value what the Lord has called us to do rather than what he has called another to.
Reading
Mark 14:3-10
While Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head. But some were there who said to one another in anger, ‘Why was the ointment wasted in this way? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred days wages. and the money given to the poor.’ And they scolded her. But Jesus said, ‘Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.’ Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them.
Address
The first thing that this story tells us is that Jesus was a welcome guest in the house of an untouchable, a leper called Simon. Can you imagine how his disciples would have felt on edge? Who is the least popular person that you know? Who is the one that all the important people shun? That’s the house where you’ll find Jesus eating and drinking. Will you be there with him? And if so, will you be joining in, or will you be standing around the edge somewhere, hoping no one actually see you there?
Or maybe it’s you. It may be that tonight you sit here with the burden of being someone who at some point in your life was the one left on the outside. It is a burden which sits timelessly on the surface of our unconscious, waiting for a quite moment, when there are no distractions, to remind you of the times when you were the one that nobody wanted.
It’s a voice that can be unceasing and which can shape all that you do. Its words have the power to mould your actions - ever to appease others or maybe to confirm what they said about you.
What must it have been like for Simon the leper to have God to dinner?
In the midst of what you think of yourself, what kind of affirmation would that be?
How would you respond?
Maybe your response would be like the woman with the alabaster jar of ointment.
Imagine how long she had saved - almost a whole years wages.
Think of that. How much would that be to you?
So grateful was she for being recognised and valued, no longer someone’s rubbish, that she wanted simply to do something in return. She wanted to give something to God.
And in the midst of the male bluster, she was the one who quietly stepped in, and broke the top off her alabaster jar with a loud crack that would have silenced the room.
She understood what no one else did, that the end was very close. Through her eyes we see how to value Jesus. All that she had she gave to him.
Those are so like the words in our wedding service at the exchanging of rings. All that I am I give to you. All that I have I share with you. She was offering herself to Jesus with a responding love like that of a bride or a groom.
And so how about us?
If we don’t wish to give like that it is not because we are ungrateful.
It’s just that we haven’t yet realised the depths to which Jesus will go to reach us.
We haven’t yet seen him through her eyes.
May the Lord open our eyes to see that we owe him everything - all that we have and all that we are, for he comes still into our homes and into our lives with the words, ‘You are important to me. You are worth the life of God.’ Amen.
Holy Week - Tuesday
Reading
Luke 22:3-6
This reading follows on immediately from last night when Mary of Bethany anointed Jesus at the house of Simon the Leper.
Then Satan entered into Judas called Iscariot, who was one of the twelve; he went away and conferred with the chief priests and officers of the temple police about how he might betray him to them. They were greatly pleased and agreed to give him money. So he consented and began to look for an opportunity to betray him to them when no crowd was present.
Address
I always wonder about Judas. What must the last few days of Jesus’s life have been like through his eyes? I suspect that the reason that we are so fascinated by him is because he turned on Jesus after having lived, worked and ministered alongside him for three years. And so we worry that if Judas, who had actually been there and witnessed it with his own eyes could be turned, could get it so wrong, then what about us? If an eye-witness could lose faith then could it happen to me?
So what did Judas see in that last week? What finally made him turn on Jesus? Matthew and Mark link the story with last night’s narrative about Jesus being anointed by a woman at Bethany. It was as if that act of dedication and love was what finally inspired Judas to betrayal; that there was something which took place in his mind that spurred him on, and I find myself wondering if it was jealousy at the root.
And jealousy can quickly turn to contempt, and I wonder whether that was finally what took Judas over. I am pretty sure that he would have had his doubts about Jesus. There are some suggestions that his name, Iscariot, may have linked him with a group of assassins. Another possibly was that he came from the south of the country whilst Jesus and his closest associates were Galileans, from the north.
So right there we have grounds for Judas comparing himself unfavourably with others. It can be hard to fit in when you’re different and you start to look with jealousy on the leader and other followers who all seem to have so much in common. And so you need to protect yourself. What do you do? In your own mind you start to look less favourably on the leader.
If the leader doesn’t matter so much to you, then it doesn’t matter if you feel like you’re not on the inside of the group. Once you start to hold the leader in contempt you can feel more at ease and fool yourself that it really doesn’t matter. Except it does. Why else would it hurt so much to be on the outside?
I wonder if that’s what Judas did. I wonder whether, by the time he had got to Jerusalem for this final time, Judas had already decided he didn’t like what Jesus stood for simply because he was jealous, maybe of Simon Peter, James and john, or maybe of the attention that Jesus was himself getting. And once you have got yourself into that kind of mind set it is very easy to be tempted to try and rid yourself of the one who is causing you so much internal angst.
And then the woman comes and pours expensive anointing oil all over Jesus’s head. Judas sees not only the way she lavishes love on Jesus, but also the way he treats her tenderly, affirming that her story will be told whenever his story is told. Instantly she’s an insider, and the jealous root in Judas that he has allowed to blossom into contempt for Jesus and hatred for his followers who, to him, seem all to be on the inside, finally takes over and he decides to betray Jesus.
Could it be me doing the same thing? Could it be you?
I think that the biggest problem for us in our spiritual journeys is comparison. We look at other people and the relationship they have with Christ and we want to be like them. Or we see what they’re doing with their lives and we want to be like that. That jealousy is at the root of betrayal. And the Lord says to us, ‘Do not be concerned with how others live their lives. You have your own life, your own calling, your own direction with me. Walk the path that you share with me, not the path that someone else shares.’
So maybe Judas was jealous. And perhaps we should consider how we view the lives of others and remember that each of us has our own calling, and we should value what the Lord has called us to do rather than what he has called another to.
Saturday, 31 March 2012
Palm Sunday: Fact vs Mystery
Readings
Philippians 2:5-11
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
Mark 11:1-11
When they were approaching Jerusalem, at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples and said to them, ‘Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately as you enter it, you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden; untie it and bring it. If anyone says to you, “Why are you doing this?” just say this, “The Lord needs it and will send it back here immediately.” ’ They went away and found a colt tied near a door, outside in the street. As they were untying it, some of the bystanders said to them, ‘What are you doing, untying the colt?’ They told them what Jesus had said; and they allowed them to take it. Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it; and he sat on it. Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut in the fields. Then those who went ahead and those who followed were shouting,
‘Hosanna!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!’
Then he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.
Address
Have you been watching the planetary dance unfolding in our western skies these last few weeks? The planets Venus and Jupiter have been chasing each other towards the sinking sun whilst in the East Mars has been soaring into the heavens. And in the midst of them, this week, has been a bright new moon.
Now the moon is one planet that we know an awful lot about. We’re able to weigh it, and its mass is 7.3459 x 1022 kg, which is quite heavy. Its surface area is14,658,000 square miles or 9.4 billion acres, and it would take 4 days to drive around it by car, once you’ve built the motorway that is. We’ve even sent men there to visit and they’ve brought 382kg of moon rock back.
So apart from the earth it is the planet in our solar system about which we know the most. Yet not one of those facts explain why we look on it in awe every time it rises and shines in the sky. None of those facts explain why lovers find the moon so inspiring. None of those facts explain why some people refer to the moon as symbolic of a Goddess.
And that’s the difference between fact and mystery. Facts are interesting, and they might inspire you to want to know more information simply because you are of the kind of mind set that simply likes to know. But facts will rarely take you on any kind of inward journey. It is only mystery that inspires us to do that.
So today I want to talk with you about mystery and how Jesus used it. We’ll glance briefly at our New Testament reading, but for the most part we’re going to stay with Mark. What I want specifically to do is to challenge you about how you use mystery. We need to become aware that there is a time and a place for mystery and that in its place it can be a good thing.
But we also need to be aware that we have a responsibility to be straight talking too, when the time is right to do so, but with an awareness of what will happen when we do so. When we speak in those terms there are consequences - some good and some not so good.
You see the Gospel reading shows us the consequences for Jesus of when he, if you like, comes out. And we need to be aware that there are times and places where we need to say what we mean, and at the same time be aware that we may have to pay the price for doing so and, and this is the hard part, God may actually be requiring of us that we do indeed pay that price.
So let’s turn to the Gospel because in this section of Mark’s Gospel something completely new has happened. Up until now there has been something very significant about the miracle stories that Mark tells; something unique about his Gospel that we don’t find anywhere else. Over and over again Jesus does something that could draw attention to himself but he then instructs the people around him to tell no one.
There is an air of mystery around him. No one knows exactly who he is although many have their suspicions. Let me give you some examples. In Mark 1 Jesus starts casting out demons, but he won’t permit any to speak in verse 34 because they know who he is. In verse 44 he heals a leper and tells him to say nothing to anyone.
In chapter 3 verse 11 and 12 Jesus is confronted by evil spirits trying to shout out ‘You are the Son of God’, but he sternly silenced them. Again in chapter 7 we see him healing a deaf man and ordering him to say nothing, and the same thing happens again in chapter 8 when he heals a blind man in Bethsaida.
Now you can see a probable reason why he does this because a lot of the time his instruction to say nothing is ignored and it makes it hard for him to move around because everyone wants to see him, but nevertheless, for more than half of Mark’s Gospel this secrecy theme is quite clear. Jesus won’t say who he is and he won’t let the evil spirits declare who he is. He simply plays his cards close to his chest.
It is as if he cannot help but heal people because he wants to set the world right, or at least the parts of it he can touch. That internal imperative to love which is a mark of the Godhead drives him to try to relieve suffering. But he is also aware that if word gets out then he will simply be known as a healer when there is so much more he wishes to give.
The effect this has on human nature is to make us inquisitive. Some people will indeed have come to seek out Jesus because they had heard of the miracles, but many will come because they don’t know who he is or what drives him, but simply that there is something about him to which they are drawn. And Jesus himself won’t let on who he is. He simply lets them get on with trying to figure it out.
That is until the day we have come to call Palm Sunday arrives. And then it all changes, and it looks like Jesus may well have been planning this, that the act of making a statement about coming into Jerusalem has been on the cards for a while. Many people have speculated that Jesus had already arranged for the colt to be ready for when he needed it, so all he had to do was to send word via the disciples that it was time for the colt to be used.
Others believe it was another show of his miraculous knowledge about the world. But all that really matters is that now Jesus shows himself to the people of Jerusalem, their capital city, the centre of power. Jesus enters visibly this time, not in secret, and his actions and the actions of the crowd declare his regal yet servant status.
The words of the crowd leave little to the imagination. Hosanna means, ‘Save us!’ He is blessed because he is a descendant of David, a part of the regal line, and they were sure this meant the new kingdom was coming, and Jesus says nothing. On this occasion he allows himself to be defined, and he says nothing to the crowd to quieten them down. The secrecy of his earlier works is shed and the mystery fades.
And then what happens? Within just a few days he is crucified. Why? From an earthly perspective you could argue that it’s because Jesus didn’t live up to the expectations that they had of him, and that’s what happens when you let yourself be defined by others. It was inevitable that Jesus would be killed because this time he let the crowd define him, except they got it wrong.
So when he didn’t live up to their expectations they discarded him. It could have been different, of course. Jesus could have gone along with the crowds and become the kind of king they had wanted. But he didn’t. He carried on being the kind of King that he was, but because he didn’t fit with their definition of monarchy they allowed the jealous religious rulers finally to have their way.
And this is what happens when you allow something to be defined. As soon as it’s defined it’s no longer a mystery. That much is obvious. But what if you’re wrong with your definition? And what if a large proportion of people have accepted your definition? You the once a mystery has been defined it loses its power to change things in other ways.
That, I think, is a part of what Jesus feared throughout his ministry. If he allowed people to put him into a box then he would be strait-jacketed, no longer able to challenge people on a multitude of levels. He would simply be Jesus, the miracle man. Before long it would be a case of, ‘Do something new Jesus, we’ve seen it all before. We know who you are and we’re bored now’.
This is exactly what Christianity has done with the cross of Christ. Since the beginning we have tried to define what exactly Jesus did. But Jesus never told us. All he said was that when he was lifted up from the earth he would draw all people to him. He never told us how, just that his death and resurrection would draw people to him.
So for the last two thousand years we’ve treated it like a problem to be solved. A current interpretation is that sin deserves the punishment of death, and we’ve all sinned so we all ought to die, but God killed Jesus in our place. For a vast proportion of Christians that is exactly how the cross ‘works’. They have defined it, and in so doing have drained it of some of its power.
It is precisely because it is a mystery that the cross has such power. We cannot define exactly what Jesus did. That’s why every Good Friday I preach a new sermon about the cross, and I will again this week. Its meaning is wreathed in layer upon layer of mystery and there is always something new to explore.
So I believe mystery is vital. But also there is time for plain talking. In the events leading up to his death Jesus did a lot of plain talking. He stepped away from mystery and told it like it was and so they arrested him and crucified him, and it was necessary for our sakes that they did, but Jesus was still in control.
And that is what I meant when I said that at some points in our lives we have to step away from mystery but to be prepared to count the cost when we do so. For the most part, in our culture, it is better to share the Gospel in terms of a journey into God’s presence because then people will be inquisitive about making that journey. If we tell people what they can expect; if we define the mystery, they may be uninterested in exploring, and we may be wrong.
But sometimes we have to say the facts. Sometimes, and usually it is to do with issues of prophecy or justice, we have to simply state the truth. And like Jesus, we may be being called to accept the cost of our honesty. Mystery and fact walk hand in hand, one in light and one in shade. May God give us the wisdom to tell them apart and the courage to speak out when we must do so. Amen.
Philippians 2:5-11
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
Mark 11:1-11
When they were approaching Jerusalem, at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples and said to them, ‘Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately as you enter it, you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden; untie it and bring it. If anyone says to you, “Why are you doing this?” just say this, “The Lord needs it and will send it back here immediately.” ’ They went away and found a colt tied near a door, outside in the street. As they were untying it, some of the bystanders said to them, ‘What are you doing, untying the colt?’ They told them what Jesus had said; and they allowed them to take it. Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it; and he sat on it. Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut in the fields. Then those who went ahead and those who followed were shouting,
‘Hosanna!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!’
Then he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.
Address
Have you been watching the planetary dance unfolding in our western skies these last few weeks? The planets Venus and Jupiter have been chasing each other towards the sinking sun whilst in the East Mars has been soaring into the heavens. And in the midst of them, this week, has been a bright new moon.
Now the moon is one planet that we know an awful lot about. We’re able to weigh it, and its mass is 7.3459 x 1022 kg, which is quite heavy. Its surface area is14,658,000 square miles or 9.4 billion acres, and it would take 4 days to drive around it by car, once you’ve built the motorway that is. We’ve even sent men there to visit and they’ve brought 382kg of moon rock back.
So apart from the earth it is the planet in our solar system about which we know the most. Yet not one of those facts explain why we look on it in awe every time it rises and shines in the sky. None of those facts explain why lovers find the moon so inspiring. None of those facts explain why some people refer to the moon as symbolic of a Goddess.
And that’s the difference between fact and mystery. Facts are interesting, and they might inspire you to want to know more information simply because you are of the kind of mind set that simply likes to know. But facts will rarely take you on any kind of inward journey. It is only mystery that inspires us to do that.
So today I want to talk with you about mystery and how Jesus used it. We’ll glance briefly at our New Testament reading, but for the most part we’re going to stay with Mark. What I want specifically to do is to challenge you about how you use mystery. We need to become aware that there is a time and a place for mystery and that in its place it can be a good thing.
But we also need to be aware that we have a responsibility to be straight talking too, when the time is right to do so, but with an awareness of what will happen when we do so. When we speak in those terms there are consequences - some good and some not so good.
You see the Gospel reading shows us the consequences for Jesus of when he, if you like, comes out. And we need to be aware that there are times and places where we need to say what we mean, and at the same time be aware that we may have to pay the price for doing so and, and this is the hard part, God may actually be requiring of us that we do indeed pay that price.
So let’s turn to the Gospel because in this section of Mark’s Gospel something completely new has happened. Up until now there has been something very significant about the miracle stories that Mark tells; something unique about his Gospel that we don’t find anywhere else. Over and over again Jesus does something that could draw attention to himself but he then instructs the people around him to tell no one.
There is an air of mystery around him. No one knows exactly who he is although many have their suspicions. Let me give you some examples. In Mark 1 Jesus starts casting out demons, but he won’t permit any to speak in verse 34 because they know who he is. In verse 44 he heals a leper and tells him to say nothing to anyone.
In chapter 3 verse 11 and 12 Jesus is confronted by evil spirits trying to shout out ‘You are the Son of God’, but he sternly silenced them. Again in chapter 7 we see him healing a deaf man and ordering him to say nothing, and the same thing happens again in chapter 8 when he heals a blind man in Bethsaida.
Now you can see a probable reason why he does this because a lot of the time his instruction to say nothing is ignored and it makes it hard for him to move around because everyone wants to see him, but nevertheless, for more than half of Mark’s Gospel this secrecy theme is quite clear. Jesus won’t say who he is and he won’t let the evil spirits declare who he is. He simply plays his cards close to his chest.
It is as if he cannot help but heal people because he wants to set the world right, or at least the parts of it he can touch. That internal imperative to love which is a mark of the Godhead drives him to try to relieve suffering. But he is also aware that if word gets out then he will simply be known as a healer when there is so much more he wishes to give.
The effect this has on human nature is to make us inquisitive. Some people will indeed have come to seek out Jesus because they had heard of the miracles, but many will come because they don’t know who he is or what drives him, but simply that there is something about him to which they are drawn. And Jesus himself won’t let on who he is. He simply lets them get on with trying to figure it out.
That is until the day we have come to call Palm Sunday arrives. And then it all changes, and it looks like Jesus may well have been planning this, that the act of making a statement about coming into Jerusalem has been on the cards for a while. Many people have speculated that Jesus had already arranged for the colt to be ready for when he needed it, so all he had to do was to send word via the disciples that it was time for the colt to be used.
Others believe it was another show of his miraculous knowledge about the world. But all that really matters is that now Jesus shows himself to the people of Jerusalem, their capital city, the centre of power. Jesus enters visibly this time, not in secret, and his actions and the actions of the crowd declare his regal yet servant status.
The words of the crowd leave little to the imagination. Hosanna means, ‘Save us!’ He is blessed because he is a descendant of David, a part of the regal line, and they were sure this meant the new kingdom was coming, and Jesus says nothing. On this occasion he allows himself to be defined, and he says nothing to the crowd to quieten them down. The secrecy of his earlier works is shed and the mystery fades.
And then what happens? Within just a few days he is crucified. Why? From an earthly perspective you could argue that it’s because Jesus didn’t live up to the expectations that they had of him, and that’s what happens when you let yourself be defined by others. It was inevitable that Jesus would be killed because this time he let the crowd define him, except they got it wrong.
So when he didn’t live up to their expectations they discarded him. It could have been different, of course. Jesus could have gone along with the crowds and become the kind of king they had wanted. But he didn’t. He carried on being the kind of King that he was, but because he didn’t fit with their definition of monarchy they allowed the jealous religious rulers finally to have their way.
And this is what happens when you allow something to be defined. As soon as it’s defined it’s no longer a mystery. That much is obvious. But what if you’re wrong with your definition? And what if a large proportion of people have accepted your definition? You the once a mystery has been defined it loses its power to change things in other ways.
That, I think, is a part of what Jesus feared throughout his ministry. If he allowed people to put him into a box then he would be strait-jacketed, no longer able to challenge people on a multitude of levels. He would simply be Jesus, the miracle man. Before long it would be a case of, ‘Do something new Jesus, we’ve seen it all before. We know who you are and we’re bored now’.
This is exactly what Christianity has done with the cross of Christ. Since the beginning we have tried to define what exactly Jesus did. But Jesus never told us. All he said was that when he was lifted up from the earth he would draw all people to him. He never told us how, just that his death and resurrection would draw people to him.
So for the last two thousand years we’ve treated it like a problem to be solved. A current interpretation is that sin deserves the punishment of death, and we’ve all sinned so we all ought to die, but God killed Jesus in our place. For a vast proportion of Christians that is exactly how the cross ‘works’. They have defined it, and in so doing have drained it of some of its power.
It is precisely because it is a mystery that the cross has such power. We cannot define exactly what Jesus did. That’s why every Good Friday I preach a new sermon about the cross, and I will again this week. Its meaning is wreathed in layer upon layer of mystery and there is always something new to explore.
So I believe mystery is vital. But also there is time for plain talking. In the events leading up to his death Jesus did a lot of plain talking. He stepped away from mystery and told it like it was and so they arrested him and crucified him, and it was necessary for our sakes that they did, but Jesus was still in control.
And that is what I meant when I said that at some points in our lives we have to step away from mystery but to be prepared to count the cost when we do so. For the most part, in our culture, it is better to share the Gospel in terms of a journey into God’s presence because then people will be inquisitive about making that journey. If we tell people what they can expect; if we define the mystery, they may be uninterested in exploring, and we may be wrong.
But sometimes we have to say the facts. Sometimes, and usually it is to do with issues of prophecy or justice, we have to simply state the truth. And like Jesus, we may be being called to accept the cost of our honesty. Mystery and fact walk hand in hand, one in light and one in shade. May God give us the wisdom to tell them apart and the courage to speak out when we must do so. Amen.
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