A Sermon for Palm Sunday (05/04/20): A Political Drama - Part 2

The second of my Palm Sunday sermons picks up the theme of the second gospel reading for the day, Matthew 27:11-26. It also makes quite extensive reference to other parts of the Holy Week narrative. So you might also like to look at: Matthew 21:12-17, 26:47-68

A Political Drama - Part 2

Matthew 27:11-26

The events of Good Friday bring to a climax the political drama that began the preceding Sunday, Palm Sunday. What was begun on that day plays out to the drama of the trial that takes place early on Friday morning. What brought things to this point was Jesus’ ministry in the city during the days in between. On Sunday the citizens of Jerusalem had known very little about Jesus. He had arrived with the excitement of the crowds coming for the festival. The crowds announced him as:

"The one who comes in the name of the Lord."

They were convinced that Jesus is the one who is going to bring about God’s reign on earth. Or at the very least they were convinced that he is a prophet. Since, when the crowd was asked directly:

"Who is this?"

They responded:

"This is  the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee."

The peasants from Galilee were sure this was the one, but peasants are easily fooled. The smart, urbane citizens of Jerusalem were more sceptical, they would need convincing.

In those few days between Sunday and Friday, Jesus spent his time in and around the Temple.  All that the people of Jerusalem would come to know of Jesus, and everything that they might use to assess him, happened here. Very quickly Jesus made it plain what he was about. From beginning to end Jesus’ ministry has proclaimed the imminence, the immediacy, the closeness of God. His preaching could very nearly be summed up in a single sentence: 

"Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near."

It all comes down to the nearness of God and how we should respond to that reality. Fundamentally Jesus’ message is one of how close God is to human beings. Therefore he was deeply opposed to everything and everyone who stood in between, who got in the way of people’s access to God. The Temple was the physical embodiment of God’s presence with his people. But it had become an obstruction. Standing in the middle of the Temple, Jesus, blending the words of the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah had declared:

"My house shall be called a house of prayer but you are making it a den of robbers"

Jesus’ accusation, which is leveled against those in charge of the temple, the Priests, and his actions there, clearing the temple of the commerce which benefited the Priests, are what make this a political drama. If you believe, as the descendants of Abraham do, if you believe that there is one God who rules over everything. And that God is deeply concerned with how people live with one another. God is political. Since politics is merely the science of people living together in large numbers. Then speaking about or for God is always political. And it is always about the nature of power and authority. Jesus challenges the self-appointed and self-perpetuating elite and their claim to stand between the people and God. He challenges the wealth and power they have acquired by placing themselves in that position. Jesus’ offer of unmediated access to God in him, the closeness of the kingdom, will always undermine the authority of any group of people, or any institution that claims a position between the children of God and the Father, which is any group which claims authority over any community of people. 

This is what the citizens of Jerusalem have seen of Jesus. There is an inevitable confrontation coming, between Jesus and the Priests. They are on a collision course. The citizens of Jerusalem know there is going to be a fight. And they probably already know that they will have to choose sides. As always the presence of Jesus creates a crisis where people have to choose. That is judgement.

In contrast to the citizens of Jerusalem, the Priests already know a good deal about Jesus. They cannot resist the authoritarian impulse to know all the goings on in their domain They have been observing Jesus since soon after he had fed 5000 in the middle of nowhere. They had known for some time he had the power to bring people to follow him.

The drama had been brewing for a while even before last Sunday. The collision happened overnight on Thursday.

Jesus was in a garden praying.  When the the Priests exercised their earthly power. They continued their politics by other means, brute force. Which just shows how little they really understood about Jesus. Jesus in the end came quiet as a lamb. He stood before them to answer their charges. But they were having trouble pinning anything on him. After all there really is no law against doing good Eventually they did find two witnesses who provided the necessary testimony that agreed.

“This fellow said I am able to destroy the Temple of God and in three days rebuild it.” 

The priests anger is understandable. The accusation is that Jesus threatened the base of the Priests’ power. The conflict remains an essentially political one. The Temple needs the priests. Though actually, as it so often turns out when it comes to those in power, the reality is the reverse: The priests need the temple. No temple - no institution - no one is needed to maintain that institution - no priests. And it's not like it hasn’t happened before. This after all is the Second Temple. The first, the original, the slightly less spectacular one that Solomon had built, had been destroyed more than 600 years ago. And the outcome of that was? The emergence of the synagogues, first in Babylon and afterwards everywhere where the Children of Israel were scattered. A different institution, with different politics, and a different leadership, an alternative power base. The Priests were already jealous of the authority of the scribes who ran the synagogues. And many of them were Pharisees whom the Priests loathed. The priests were certainly not prepared to risk leaving all the authority to the scribes in their synagogues.A threat to the Temple was a threat to their power, a political threat.

But Jesus had promised to rebuild it! Even if the priest believed that Jesus could - and they almost certainly didn’t - this if anything would have been worse. That would make the new Temple his, not theirs. Their ministry, even though it would continue, would depend on him. Their power therefore would be subject to his. We may not like it but the gospel comes down to authority. Who speaks for God? Whose voice must but heard and acted upon as people work to live together in a large number? Which voice determines our politics?

Finally the priests get what they are looking for. Jesus incriminates himself.Having remained silent through all the false and distorted testimony, Jesus at last makes his claim to authority:

“From now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.” 

Jesus announces himself as the one who shares God’s authority. And as the one who establishes God’s reign in the world. This has essentially been the whole content of Jesus’ ministry up to this point - for those with the eyes to see it. It is this claim of Jesus to rule which Christians accept, and which make him and his teaching our politics. But it is the claim which gets Jesus killed!

Much as they want rid of Jesus, the Priests are shrewd enough politicians to recognise that it would not be good for them to take the blame for destroying someone so popular. The action of rash, thoughtless leaders would have been to give into their anger, take Jesus out and have him stoned to death there and then. That is after all the penalty for blasphemy.But they know how to spin the story. They can take Jesus to Pilate. They can dress the accusation up in a way that Pilate would understand, and in a way that would leave Pilate with no choice.

Jesus stands before the governor who asks him:

"Are you the king of the Jews"

Pilate’s question reveals the subtle change that the Priests have made in the accusation against Jesus. In the journey between Caiaphas’ house and Pilate’s headquarters the charge has shifted from being apparently theological to something more explicitly political. The change is from claiming to be the Messiah, to claiming to be King. Though of course the two may amount to being pretty much the same thing. The Priests know Pilate would not understand who the Messiah might be. But they also know he cannot ignore anyone who claims to be a king. The charge which is made against Jesus before Pilate is political in the most obvious way. Within the Empire the source of all authority is the Emperor. Only the Emperor can make someone a king. Claiming to be a king is to deny the authority of the Emperor. And truth be told Jesus is guilty of that charge. Jesus’ presence in the world does deny the authority of all earthly rulers. But Pilate can only hear this as an explicitly political accusation. An accusation which he cannot fail to take seriously. Pilate and the Emperor above him are no less jealous of their power than were the Priests or anyone else who ever held power in the world. Jesus is accused of the most political of crimes, treason. Which is a crime which those in authority always treat with more seriousness than even murder.

Pilate though is confused. He sees in Jesus nothing that justifies the charges made against him. He is frustrated by Jesus' refusal to offer a defence.

“Do you not hear the accusations they make against you?” 

But Jesus does not not speak. He could only speak the truth. But how could the truth be heard in this place of lies. The truth will set you free, but liars could only hear it as self-incrimination. What Pilate and the powers of this world practice as justice is not just at all. It still all comes down to politics. And what is a crime and who is guilty of that crime is always decided by politics. “Justice” is merely the fig leaf that conventional politics places over its naked use of power. And in this courtroom it really is little more than an arbitrary assertion of power.

Now at the festival the governor was accustomed to release a prison for the crowd, anyone who they wanted. 

This is really powerful evidence that justice under this system has nothing to do with fairness, or protecting society, or even punishing wrongdoing. It is about demonstrating who has power. The governor can detain or release whoever he wants. It is quite arbitrary. But what he does do is use his power towards a political objective. He uses it to appease the crowd. And those in power fear the crowd. The Priests were afraid of the crowd who came into Jerusalem with Jesus. Pilate has reason to fear the crowd of Jerusalem’s citizens gathered in front of his headquarters. Pilate offers that crowd the choice between two men called Jesus;  One from Nazareth, who is called the Messiah, The other a notorious criminal, who is called Barabbas. Jesus and Barabbas don’t matter to Pilate. He sees neither of them as a real threat. Pilate is not directly the victim of Barabbas’ crimes, whatever they are. And Barabbas possesses no power to change the established order of the world. Jesus, as far as Pilate is concerned, is even more powerless, he is nothing more than a dreamer and a fantasist. It really makes no difference at all to Pilate which one is released and which one dies. So long as everyone recognises that it was always in Pilates control. Pilate believes in the absolute power of the system he is part of to control the world All he has to do is assert that power. And demonstrate to everyone that there is no alternative. 

Pilate leaves the decision to the crowd. At this point the crowd stands at a crossroads. The choice which they have is a real one; To  acquiesce in the politics of the world as it is, to accept that there really is not alternative to that politics, or to open themselves to the possibility that God’s kingdom might indeed be very close. It is the choice which is created by Jesus' presence in the world that is faced by every gathering of people who in their very being together find they must practice politics. The politics of the world? Or the reign of God through his Son Jesus the Messiah? A politics of power and the almost arbitrary use of violence? Or the peaceable Kingdom of Christ. That crowd, on that Friday morning, made the wrong choice When Pilate asked:

"Which of the two do you want me to release for you?"

The crowd replied:

"Barabbas!"

The man of violence is released The innocent is condemned to die. Jesus dies because of the politics of the world. His death condemns the way in which human beings have chosen to organise themselves. And particularly the way humans have chosen to organise themselves apart from the loving concern God has for all people. The climax of the political drama that has been playing out between Palm Sunday and Good Friday is Jesus’ condemnation to death.

Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem had present the city with a set of political questions:

Who will lead this people?

What kind of leadership will they provide?

What kind of people will they be?

What is the destiny of this people?

By Friday the citizens of Jerusalem were ready to give their answer, whether they realised what they were doing or not. They decided that it would be the conventional politics of the priest, the governor and ultimately the Emperor, those who wielded the power of this world, which is in the end always death

They decided that there was no alternative than to accept being ruled over by coercion and violence.

They decided - as their ancestors had decided before them - to be a kingdom like all the other kingdoms of the world

They decided - though they couldn’t know it at the time - to have their city destroyed and to become another footnote in history

This political drama is a tragedy which reveals the failure of the power of this world to speak the truth or do justly But this is not the end of the story. The politics of the world stands condemned. But the world awaits God’s answer.

Amen.

A Political Drama - Part 2 by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

A Sermon for Palm Sunday (05/04/20): A Political Drama - Part 1

The lectionary offers two gospel readings for the 6th Sunday in Lent. The first is the obvious one, the account of Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the second is the Passion Narrative. So for Palm Sunday I have two connected sermons. The first, here, on the Triumphal Entry and the second, later, on Jesus' trial.

A Political Drama - Part 1

Matthew 21:1-11

Palm Sunday flowers by Sylvia Fairbrass

The triumphal entry into Jerusalem is the opening act of a political drama that will play out in the coming week. The events of Holy Week revolve around a number of questions. These questions are essentially political in nature:

Who will lead this people? 

What kind of leadership will they provide? 

What kind of people will they be? 

What is the destiny of this people? 

We would recognise these as “political” questions. They form part of the discussion that lies behind the politics of any and every body of people who gather themselves together with a shared identity for a common purpose. These questions apply to any nation, just as they apply to the people of God.

Overall, throughout his ministry, Jesus has been quite reticent about the claims he has made of himself. The most obvious he has been is to have spoken of himself in the third person using the enigmatic title: the Son of Man. But now his claim has become bold, it becomes obvious. Jesus makes a very explicit claim to lead the people of God. Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is a claim to leadership and it is a kind of acted manifesto. It is his declaration before the nation of what he offers to them. Riding into a capital city is a very explicit claim to authority. The one who rides into a capital city claims to rule from here and over all the people whose lives are focused on this place. Jerusalem is home to the temple to the only true and living God. In claiming authority here, Jesus claims authority over all who look to God.

But Jesus’ entry is more than a claim simply to rule, it also portrays the character of his rule. Jesus rides into Jerusalem but he does so on a donkey. First of all this is the boldness of his claim. He wants the people to recognise an allusion to a promise made to them by God. A promise which Matthew helpful reminds us of in his recollection of the event:

“Look your king is coming to you humble and mounted on a donkey” 

A promise made by God that their true leader would come to them in this fashion. Jesus could hardly be more blatant in announcing himself Lord over God’s people How can you have a triumphal entry and yet remain humble at the same time? You do it by riding on a donkey. The point is that it is not a horse. Triumphal entries were a familiar event in the ancient world.They were displays of power. Conquering Roman Emperors rode back into Rome display their strength of their military force and bringing with them the spoils of their victory. Or victorious generals entered conquered cities, surrounded by their army mounted on their war-horse, to further humiliate those they had vanquished. A donkey is not a horse. The contrast is a deliberate one. Jesus claims to rule. But his rule will be the opposite of that of emperors and conquering generals. Their rule is legitimated only by overpowering force. There is no coercion in Jesus’ claim to rule. Jesus’ claim to authority is not that of conquest. He doesn’t simply destroy and replace one tyranny with his own reign. He makes a moral and spiritual claim to authority among God’s people. Jesus' authority is based on his access to the truth, his insight into what is really happening.

Time and again Jesus is shown in the gospel knowing things that others don’t and can’t know. This insight is one of the characteristics that mark him out as distinctive and special to those who meet him. As Jesus approaches Jerusalem we glimpse this again. Jesus grasps the world and its working and understands people with unmatched clarity. So he can send disciples into a village and know that what he needs will be available for him there. It is divine insight. Jesus sees the world and its people as God sees them. The prophets were prophets because they were given glimpses of the world as God sees it. Jesus possesses that vision for himself. Just rule can only be established by complete knowledge of all the circumstances in each situation that arises. It is Jesus alone who possesses that knowledge. There is no coercion to Jesus’ rule. His authority is established on the truth. And those who recognise the truth respond to Jesus’ claim to rule.

And the crowd does respond. They answer Jesus’ claim with recognition and acceptance of that claim: "Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord." The crowds with Jesus aren’t all, explicitly, his followers. This isn’t simply the crowd of fisherman and tax-collectors and outcasts, the cleansed lepers, the walking lame, the hearing deaf, the seeing blind, and women, who have followed Jesus everywhere he has gone. These people haven’t come to Jerusalem because of Jesus. They have come for the same reason anyone would go to Jerusalem. To be with God. They have come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, the great festival of liberation. They are people who have come from all over - out of the countryside to be here. They are the ordinary folk. To use Jesus’ own phrase they are “the salt of the earth.” They are the humble, the faithful and the pious. They are the people amongst whom all of Jesus' ministry has taken place. So in another sense, they are his people. And they are the people on whom the burden of rulers weighs heaviest.They are the ones who would answer those those political questions:

Who will lead this people? Someone else.

What kind of leadership will they provide? A just and kindly one.

What kind of people will they be? To be people like us at our best, a community of mutual love and support.

What is the destiny of this people? To live life and life in all its fullness.

They are people who want change. People who have a reason to want to see a transformation in the way the world is ordered. They want that new direction that will take them away from the oppression and deprivation they experience into a community that frees them from economic and social burdens. They know what Jesus is about, even if they aren’t formally his followers. They have been witnesses to everything Jesus has done so far. They have seen his deeds of power. They have heard him teach about the Kingdom. And now they see yet another sign from Jesus, that confirms what they had longed and hoped for from him. He rides into Jerusalem. On a donkey. They know the prophecy. They know what this means. He has come to claim the throne of David:

"Hosanna to the Son of David." 

They are caught up in the excitement of the moment. They find expression in the hope of the reestablishment of an ancient kingdom. But their hope goes far deeper than than that:

"Hosanna in the highest heaven"

Hosanna is a word that loses something in the lack of translation. We lose sight of what it means. So we lose sight of what the crowd is asking from Jesus. Hosanna means, “Save, please.” The crowd are calling on Jesus to bring about salvation. They call on Jesus to establish the Kingdom that brings about heaven’s reign on earth. They call for the transformation of the world that they long for. This is what they want to see happen and they can see that their hopes could be about to be fulfilled. Jesus is the leader they want.

A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road.

They acclaim Jesus and give him the “red carpet” treatment.They are looking for him to transform them into that holy nation that knows no king but God.

Passing through the gate into the city itself the crowd perhaps could have expected the story to end there. Immediately the Kingdom of God established for them and everyone else right there. But this is not a fairy story. As we observed, this is a political drama. And there is no drama without opposition. To begin with opposition to Jesus in Jerusalem is not obvious, but it will quickly emerge. The citizens of Jerusalem observe the arrival of the crowds and their excited mood.

When he entered Jerusalem the whole city was in turmoil asking, “Who is this?”

In contrast to the people from the countryside, Jesus is as yet unknown to the citizens of Jerusalem. But his arrival has an unsettling effect. They see the crowd, its energy, its excitement. And they sense its desire for change. And at its centre they see someone who they don’t know.

Who is this?

Jerusalem hasn’t heard Jesus speak? Jerusalem hasn’t seen Jesus’ deed of power? They know nothing about him? But what they do know is that they are happy with the way things are. The fundamental contrast between the crowd and the citizens of Jerusalem is their desire or lack of it for the revolutionary change that God’s kingdom will bring about. It is this opposition which creates the drama in the story. It is what determines people’s reception of the Gospel. It is what determines how the rest of Holy week plays out. The citizens of Jerusalem have something to lose. They have wealth. They have prestige. They have power. And because they have these things and they are afraid of losing them they dislike disruption and they resist change. One thing people with wealth and prestige and power love above all is order. Order means their position is secure. Disruption threatens what they have. The reign which Jesus is announcing and the crowd is demanding is one based on justice and on truth. But the citizens can’t accept such a reign because it exposes the fact that their position in society is based on falsehood and injustice. The citizens of Jerusalem and especially the Priests at it centre claim that the way things are, are the way God intended them. Their wealth is a sign of God’s favour. Their prestige is so that they may be an example that others may aspire to or be judged by. And their power, is power which God gave them to use as they please. The drama which plays out in the following days is a contest between truth and justice claimed by people with no power against the falsehood and injustice of those in power. And we already know how such dramas always seem to turn out!

Amen.

A note of thanks to Sylvia Fairbrass, from Normanby, who made the flower arrangement and provided the photograph at the start of this page. She says: "This arrangement at home is my attempt to tell the story for Palm Sunday using materials from the old railway path and my garden as I am self-isolating. The arrangement is made up the following:Gold Heart & Variegated Ivy, Lawson Cyrus, Pussy Willow, Euonymus, Purple Everlasting Wallflowers, Rosemary in flower, Orange Broom, Yellow Wallflowers, Green Hellebore, White Piris Bells. 3 Purple fir cones donated by my neighbour Jacki Severs represents collaboration of churches. Did you spot the following? Purple candle, Sacrificial lamb, Ass /Donkey the final Journey, 30 pence in Silver coins, Bread & Wine last supper."

A Political Drama - Part 1 by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

A Sermon for the 5th Sunday in Lent (29/03/20): If you had been here

If you had been here

John 11:1-44

Both Martha and Mary say the same thing to Jesus when he arrives in Bethany a few days after their brother’s death:

"Lord if you had been here my brother would not have died."

Their response is a natural human one in the face of tragedy and heartache. Perhaps their response could be identified as the first of the stages of grief that we now sometimes acknowledge: denial. The initial shock of loss is so heavy that the first response is to ignore and deny that anything has happened. The pain is too difficult to bear, so anyone would want to go on as if nothing has happened.

“No, it can’t be so, it can’t be!”

Of course reality bites. The reality of loss cannot be avoided for very long. The funeral is arranged. The curtains close. Our loved ones are laid to rest. Mary and Martha have seen the stone rolled over the entrance of the tomb with their brother Lazarus inside. So in addition to their denial there is perhaps two others of the stages of grief now also present:

"If you had been here."

In their first words to Jesus there is both a hint of “anger” and of “bargaining.” Martha and Mary still both want things to be different from the way they are. There is still denial. They want their brother alive and not dead. Perhaps there is just a hint of anger in “If”.

“It might have been so different, but you weren’t here. . . like you should have been.”

But also they are still trying to imagine a reality which is different from the one they are experiencing. They imagine a different sequence of events in which Jesus is already in Bethany when their brother becomes poorly and Jesus’ presence allows him to recover. And by imagining it they tried to bargain with reality that it might actually be so.

Of course in all this both the sisters demonstrate something else. Their faith in Jesus. No he hadn’t been there. But if he had. . .

What is very clear is that both Martha and Mary believe that Jesus makes a difference. That his presence is an answer to sickness in the world. And if he is an answer to sickness then he is an answer to evil, that in their world-view, lies behind sickness. And they are, of course, right! And we share with them the same belief. Jesus makes a difference. That our lives, the world, reality, the universe, are all better because of Jesus’ presence in them and because of our trust in him. Things, we trust, will turn out for the best because of Jesus.

But there is a limit to Mary and Martha’s hopefulness. A limit to possibility. A limit to our hope. That limit is death. “Where’s there’s life there’s hope” they say.  And death seems to bring that hope to an end. Lazarus is dead, so all hope and possibility is, for him, gone. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger said of death: “the ultimate possible possibility will not be outdone.” Which is typical of a philosopher to say something essentially simple in a complex way. He means, “we all die.” Or more precisely, “the last thing that could possibly happen to us, death, will definitely happen to us.” And the finality of death, for many, renders all that went before in life meaningless, absurd. All that effort, all that striving, just for it in the end to dissolve in death. With that thought in mind perhaps Mary and Martha are sliding toward the next stage of their grief: depression. From Mary and Martha’s perspective what seems especially true of the brother now, all the possibilities for him, other than this one, being dead, have been exhausted. They believe in Jesus. But even they cannot see how he can reverse the finality of death. So they can only cling to their counterfactual, their denial, anger and bargaining and depression:

"Lord if only you had been here, our brother would not have died."

But Jesus says to Martha:

"Your brother will rise again"

Which to me sounds like the conventional reassurance that one gives to a friend or an acquaintance in their grief. At first sight what Jesus appears to offer the kind thought that any Jewish believer who trusted in God’s promises for the last day might offer. Perhaps we wouldn’t put it quite like that. Maybe we would say something like: “He’s gone to a better place” It is the sort of thing you say, in the face of tragedy, when words seem altogether inadequate; but this is the best that we can do. It is a kindly meant thought. And we sense that it is true, even if we can’t explain how. Though I’m not altogether convinced that it necessarily helps.It is at best a bit of a cold comfort. Martha replies:

"I know that he will rise again on the last day."

Perhaps Martha likes and respects Jesus too much. Maybe she accepts the kindness that Jesus’ words intend. So she doesn’t finish that sentence out loud:

“I know that he will rise again on the last day, but what good is that to me now!

“I know that he has gone to a better place, but I don’t want him in a better place. I want him here with me!”

Maybe that she doesn’t finish the sentence out loud suggests that she has already reached the last of those stages of grief: acceptance.

The thing that troubles us the most about this story, I think, is the delay. At the beginning of the story Jesus receives the news that his dear friend Lazarus is ill. So ill indeed that he looks like he’s going to die. Mary and Martha’s words take on a certain sharpness:

". . . if only. . ."

Because we know that Jesus delays for two days before setting off for Bethany. The explanation that is most often given. Is that Jesus delays to make sure that Lazarus would be dead by the time he got there. To make his intervention all the more dramatic. A resurrection rather than a healing. Which makes Jesus look guilty of a particularly callous sort of showmanship. He makes Lazarus suffer death and his sisters’ loss and grief, just to make a point. Yes the pain was greater and so the joy and relief at the end was greater still. But really?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wondered, “Why does Christianity have to make people feel bad before it can make them feel good?” And actually we know Jesus isn’t a callous showman.

I don’t know why, but I don’t think that before now I had ever done the simple arithmetic in relation to Jesus’ delay. Jesus delays two days. When he gets to Bethany Lazarus has been dead already for four days. Jesus could have only arrived two days earlier than he did. Therefore he would still have been two days too late. Indeed it’s quite probable that Lazarus was already dead by the time Jesus heard the news of his illness. The delay makes no difference. But it does demonstrate one thing. Jesus’ trust in God is greater than that of Mary and Martha and probably ours. Jesus knows he has no need to rush.

God’s love and God’s action are such that God never needs to rush. In our impatience, hemmed in by death, we tend to want to get everything done now. And it is our impatience that most often undoes our best intentions and creates so much of the mess we find ourselves in. God has no such constraint. God is not limited in that way. God’s ability to act, unlike ours, extends beyond death. Perhaps one of the things that our belief in God sometimes overlooks is that God is the God of time. God always has time. God will always be able to work good for those who trust him. That was dramatically so for Lazarus and his sisters. And remains so for us.

Martha replies to Jesus:

"I know that he will rise again on the last day."

And Jesus almost replies:

“No, not on the last day, when I say he will rise again, I mean right here, right now.”

Dying, on this occasion, was not for Lazarus, the ultimate possible possibility. It was not the last thing that was going to happen to him. Jesus assures Martha:

"I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me even though they die will live and everyone who believes in me will never die."

Of course very few experienced that in the way that Lazarus experiences it.  We have only heard about the widow of Nain’s son and Jairus’ daughter. Maybe there are a few others. But the difference Jesus’ presence makes is far more profound than Mary and Martha at first believed. The presence of Jesus provides a fundamental change in the meaning of life and death. For those who trust in him the ultimate possible possibility is outdone. Dying is not simply the last thing that will happen to us that undoes everything that went before. Resurrection, or eternal life, are not indefinitely postponed to the last day. They become a quality of living in the present. That, at the very least, shares the quality of trust and patience which Jesus displays. That recognises that death does not end the good that God can do for us. And so death need not be a constraint, a limitation on how we act here and now. The hope which that brings allows us to act with the love and trust that God wants us to act with. It allows us to escape our harmful impatience. And allows us to know that none of it will be lost because of our trust in Jesus. Beyond Mary and Martha’s grief there is the joy of resurrection. We share with Martha her confession of him:

Yes, Lord, I believe you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world

Amen.

If you had been here by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

A Sermon for the 4th Sunday in Lent (22/03/20): Sign and Judgement

Since we are, for the moment, unable to meet together and listen to a sermon, here is a sermon for you to read. It is for the 4th Sunday in Lent and is based on the set Gospel reading. Please read the gospel passage before reading the sermon and feel free to comment. I hope this will be of some use whilst we aren't worshiping together but are having to find new ways of worshiping and new (old) forms of devotion, like reading sermons. I intend to post a sermon for each Sunday while we are unable to meet.

Sign and Judgement

John 9:1-41

Jesus says:

As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world

And then he heals the blind man:

He spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam.”

The man does as he is told and:

He went and washed and came back able to see.

The gift of sight is one of the clearest signs of the in-breaking of the Kingdom. It is one of those things which will happen as God’s rule is being established. It goes along with those other clear signs: restoring hearing to the deaf, enabling the lame to walk, releasing the captives, proclaiming good news to the poor,  and raising the dead to life. All signs which Jesus does and which establish that God’s kingdom is being established in and through him. Giving sight to the blind is a particularly telling sign. It is an acted parable of the broader work the kingdom does. Work that enables those who receive it to “see” the world and God’s place in it truthfully. It is a metaphor for the kind of transformation that will take place in all people as God’s kingdom comes. But at this point, as something Jesus does for this man, it is also significant. Restoring sight to the blind is the quintessential “act of God.” It was universally understood that blindness is irreversible. So it is impossible to make the blind see without the direct intervention of God. That Jesus can do this, and does do this, is the strongest evidence to those who witness it, that God is at work in and through Jesus.

But God and the kingdom are never quite that straightforward. We think it would be very comforting, very reassuring, to be given unequivocal and undeniable evidence of the presence and action of God. Of course it never happens that way. Even something as obvious and self-evident as giving a blind man sight merely provokes a discussion. Even the people who knew the blind man best question what has happened: 

The neighbours and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” Some were saying, “It is he.” Others were saying, “No but it is someone like him.”

Much as we might like conclusive proof of God’s presence and action. Such proof is not, and indeed cannot be given. Even when God’s saving action is most clearly displayed, there is always room for some other explanation. There is always room for doubt and even outright denial. God at work in Jesus never ends the discussion, but always presents us with a challenge and a choice. And this is where God’s judgement lies.

Perhaps the most unsettling thing about the gospel is that it is religious people who have the greatest difficulty in accepting it. When that challenge and choice arise, when the moment of judgement comes, those who already think they know most about God find themselves on the wrong side. The neighbours have seen what has happened to the blind man and even they dispute among themselves, but when word reaches the Pharisees. . .

As happens time and again between Jesus and the Pharisees, what Jesus does creates for the Pharisees what might be called “cognitive dissonance.” What the Pharisees are seeing and what they “know” to be true don’t match. Some of the Pharisees said, 

“This man is not from God, for he does not observe the Sabbath.” 

But others said, 

“How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?”

They can’t fit what Jesus does into their established understanding of the world and how God works. And this is always the problem for religion. It always ends up narrowing its participants’ understanding of God. The minute any religion attempts to define what God is like, or what God wants, something of the totality of God is lost. God lies beyond religion’s ability to describe or even to recognise the full reality of God. This is not just true of the Pharisees, though their religion does seem to have suffered quite badly from this. The Pharisees had put their God in a box. A box defined by strict observance of the regulations laid down by the law given to Moses. They attempt to do something quite laudable. They try to turn everywhere the followers of God are living into a temple for God, by applying the temple’s regulations everywhere. But rather than expanding knowledge of God and making God more accessible, their religion has the opposite effect. They make God small enough for them to recognise and manage and to some extent to control. Cynically we might suspect it is self-interest that makes them gatekeepers of access to God. Though again the Pharisees are far from the only ones who are vulnerable to that accusation. 

As so often happens the disagreement between the Pharisees and Jesus is identified in his attitude to the Sabbath. The Sabbath is so central to the law and so central to the Pharisees’ definition of what God is like and what God wants and how God acts that, as far as they are concerned, anyone who doesn’t act as they act in relation to the Sabbath cannot possibly have anything to do with God. The paradoxical, contradictory outcome of religion is that it sometimes leads religious people to deny the obvious activity of God! Because Jesus does not fit in with their small definition of what God is like and how God can act, they cannot recognise what God is doing in Jesus, even when it is an absolutely self-evident sign of the Kingdom like giving sight to a blind man!

The Pharisees do their very best to make the facts fit their theory. Their efforts very much line up with the attempts of other religious people before and since who have tried to deny that God is at work in someone other than themselves. Their first strategy is to deny that Jesus was responsible for what has happened to the (formerly) blind man. The man was brought to the Pharisees and they began to ask him:

How he received his sight.

They are sure that since Jesus is a sinner and therefore God cannot act through him there must be another explanation for the blind man receiving his sight. They try to find where it is that God has acted, despite Jesus rather than because and through Jesus. To those who want to find it there is always another plausible explanation to what God does, other than accepting that God is at work in the world. But on this occasion they can’t find such an explanation. The man is stubborn in his insistence on the story he is telling and in giving Jesus the credit. He says, 

“He is a prophet.”

One of those plausible alternative explanations might be that this is simply a case of mistaken identity. No miracle has taken place. It is simply that one man has been mistaken for another. A man who can see has been switched for a different man who was and is blind. So in their search for a different explanation, one that does not involve them acknowledging what Jesus has done, they call in the man’s parents.

“Is this your son, who you say was born blind?”

It does feel rather like the Pharisees are clutching at straws, casting around for any explanation other than the obvious one. The man’s parents though rather sit on the fence. They can’t deny that this is their son, what kind of parents would do that? Or that he was born blind, after all they have lived with his disability all his life. But they are unwilling to step into the argument between the Pharisees and Jesus. Those who claim to know God and choose to act as gatekeepers for access to God can wield a great deal of power. We are tragically aware of just how much power religious leaders can exercise over people’s lives, and how that power has been abused. The man’s parents are afraid of the Pharisees who question them and with good reason. The Pharisees can cut them off from the synagogue. They can damage the man’s parents, socially, economically and spiritually. So the parents dodge:

“We know that this is our son, and we know that he was born blind; but we do not know how it is that he now sees”

Another of the curious paradoxes of religion is that it can even make us deny our actual, real lived experience of God, when that experience doesn’t fit what religious authorities are telling us it should be.

Faced with the impossibility of denying that a miracle has occurred the Pharisees demand:

“Give glory to God!”

They are entirely right. It is God and only God who deserves the glory, for this and everything else. They are not wrong in insisting that only God can restore sight to the blind. They know as well as we do that this miracle is as clear a sign as you can get of God’s action and God’s reign. But their religion, their fixed, and their self-interested understanding of how God can act forces them to deny that God can act apart from them. Their religion blinds them as it so often blinds religious people, to God acting in a new and unexpected way. The Pharisees, because of what they think they know about God, cannot accept that God is acting in and through Jesus:

“We know that this man is a sinner”

That is their tragedy, and the tragedy of so much religion.

The magnificent irony of the healing of the blind man is that it reveals who it is who has been blind all along. Jesus says of himself:

“I came into this world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”

Perhaps we are least comfortable with Jesus when he starts talking about judgement. But since we’re religious people, and maybe we claim to be able to “see,” we should be!

Jesus is Good News. Jesus brings salvation, the kingdom of God. He brings it in the form of sight for the blind. He brings it in the form of restoring hearing to the deaf, and enabling the lame to walk, releasing the captives, proclaiming good news to the poor, and raising the dead to life. But in doing those things he always also sets up judgement. Do we recognise and acknowledge the new thing that God is doing, Or deny it? Judgement is always passed on ourselves by our response to what God does. Hearing what Jesus said about himself and how he brings about judgement the Pharisees were compelled to ask:

“Surely we are not blind are we?”

We know the answer to their question.

Dare we ask it of ourselves? 

Amen.

Sign and Judgement by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.