A Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent (28/02/21): Take Up Your Cross

Take up your Cross

Mark 8:31-38

Jesus has taken his disciples away from Galilee, into gentile territory. He has led them away from the press of the crowds and the busyness of his mission. You might almost call it a retreat, a time to take stock and reflect. He ask his disciples two questions:

First: Who do people say that I am?

And then: Who do you say that I am?

Jesus receives satisfactory answers to both of them. The people have a high opinion of him. They see in his ministry something that calls to mind the great moments of their history. They are moments that give them cause for hope and expectation in the present. And the disciples, they are seeing something more than this. In Jesus they are seeing the one who God is sending to bring about those hopes and expectations. Peter, always first to speak, puts this into words:

"You are the Messiah."

In a way this is the highpoint of Jesus’ mission. This is the moment when, to the disciples, anything seems possible. They can feel that the movement that they are part of is about to become a mighty wave that will come crashing down on the Romans, and the Chief Priests and on the established order. They will sweep everything away, and establish God’s kingdom over Israel

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.

But already Jesus can see where his mission must lead. He sees what the disciples cannot see. He sees that the outcome of his mission will not be the one that Peter and the other disciples are expecting. It will not be the outcome that all of Israel has been longing for. It is not that this outcome is not possible. It is not that Jesus cannot turn his band of followers into a victorious army that would drive out the Romans and sweep away the corrupt and corrupting politics and religion of the Chief Priests and the scribes. It is not that he can't but that he won’t. Because to do so would be to reject the mission that God has given him.

Jesus' announcement that the end of the journey he is on is rejection and death is not a realisation of failure. It is not fatalism about an inevitable defeat. It is the recognition that the path to the victory that he is looking for can only lead through rejection and the cross. At the heart of the temptation which Jesus refuses to succumb to is to meet the world on the world’s terms. He resists the temptation which has existed for God’s people from the start, the temptation to turn God’s reign into just another of the kingdoms of the world. Jesus refuses to overcome the evil that exists in the world by the methods that evil itself uses. Jesus knows that the attempt to bring about the kingdom by the violent destruction and overthrowal of the established order would not lead to the kingdom of God.  Even if Jesus and his followers succeeded it would be the establishment of another human kingdom, which would soon come to resemble the regime it had overthrown and would be just as temporary. We might read about it in a history book. But we wouldn’t be trying to shape our lives around what Jesus had done!

Peter, again, as always is first to speak:

He took Jesus to one side and began to rebuke him.

Peter’s reaction is natural. It is hard to accept that someone you love and admire will suffer. It is hard to accept that what you are giving your life to will not produce the obvious signs of success: like power and prestige. It is hard to abandon long held assumptions about what is right and good and how the world should be. Peter’s error is to think that the kingdom of God can be established in the same way as all the other kingdoms of the world, which in the end means power, and force and violence. Peter succumbs to the temptation which Jesus is resisting. Jesus’ rebuke to Peter seems harsh:

“Get behind me, Satan!”

That is no way to speak to a friend, especially one who is deeply concerned about your well being. Yet Satan is precisely who Peter is at this moment. Peter voices the same temptation which Satan put before Jesus at the very beginning. He offers the temptation; to think that God’s will could be done using anything other than God’s methods. It is the temptation to think that it is possible to resist the world’s violence and sin without becoming a victim to them. Peter’s reaction reveals what and how he is thinking. He is literally setting his mind on human things. He is measuring success and failure on purely human terms, rather than allowing his thinking and speaking and acting to be shaped by divine things. He is not measuring success and failure on the basis of faithfulness to God’s will. 

Following Jesus is about how minds are set. It is the move away from thinking in terms of the world’s measures and values, and the world’s methods, and the move towards setting them instead on God’s vision of the world and on faithfulness to God’s way of bringing that vision to reality. Which is why when Jesus makes his invitation to be his disciples he says:

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me.”

Jesus draws our attention to the contrast between following him, setting our minds on divine things, and acting for ourselves, setting our minds on human things.

For those who want to save their life will lose it

It is natural to want to save our own lives. A desire and instinct to protect ourselves is completely normal. We want to control our circumstances and determine our outcomes. We want to make the world the way we want it to be. But that attempt to gain and maintain that control is ultimately self defeating. There is the song: If I ruled the world: “If I ruled the world, everyday would be the first day of spring.” Well I’m not sure about that as a choice. Personally if I was going to have that much control I’d go for: "everyday would be the best day of summer." And there we already begin to see the problem. Each of us have conflicting visions of how the world should be. The result of both trying to rule the world would be a war between the advocates of springtime and the supporters of summer. And the wars which humans do fight are for causes that are hardly less vain.

But it is easy for us to think that things would be better if we had a little more control, if we could force the world to be a bit more to our liking Except that is futile. Firstly: we almost certainly couldn’t achieve it. And secondly even if we could it is self-defeating. It would take brutal violence to bring it about. It certainly wouldn’t be lasting. And in the midst of it all we would lose ourselves. Actually none of us I think are trying to rule the world. But most of us are trying to control the little bit of the world that is around us, with often the same sort of consequences, just on a smaller scale. Jesus leaves us with a proverb:

For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life.

As much as we might gain in this life, and it won’t be the whole world, it won’t be worth the cost of our true selves. That gain would always be temporary, like everything human, limited by our finiteness and our mortality. And there is nothing that we could gain that we could buy back our lives and our true selves with!

Jesus’ offer always seems like a difficult sell. "Take up your cross and follow me." Effectively he says, "Come and die with me!" The cross at one level is the symbol of the world’s power. At the time it symbolised and demonstrated the Empire’s ability to dominate, by wielding the power of death. Jesus’ willingness to take up the cross is his demonstration of God’s grace, the grace which identifies with the victims of the power of this world. Jesus accepts the cross to show not only that God reigns, but also how God reigns. Jesus sets his mind on divine things, accepting that the world will reject and destroy him for it. The cross is the consequence of setting your mind on divine things. It is a consequence of choosing to shape your life around the will of God. The contrast between the divine and the human is the difference between the attempt to control and dominate the world (or our tiny part of it) and the acceptance of the cross. The acceptance of the cross as an expression of God’s grace, his desire to love us and have us love him, without destroying us in the process Taking up our cross is to accept Jesus’ call to reject the world’s methods, and to seek the kingdom by following him in deeds of compassion, hospitality alongside truth telling. Taking up your cross is following Jesus into an identification with the victims of the power of this world, to stand alongside the poor, the marginalised and the outcast. Those who do that may suffer loss. They may even suffer the loss of life that Jesus himself suffered. But Jesus reminds us:

“Those who lose their life for my sake and for the sake of the gospel, will save it”

The answer which we can give to the question: What can you give in exchange for your life is: The cross!

In a word of judgement Jesus says:

“Those who are ashamed of me 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.” 

“Ashamed” seems to be a curious way of putting the rejection of Jesus and his mission that some have demonstrated. The contrast is between “shame” and “honour.” Jesus’ word of judgement calls us to “honour” him. To honour Jesus is to accept that both his claim: as Son of Man/Messiah, and his method: the cross, are true. To honour Jesus is to live in the way he lived. It is accepting what looks to the world like “loss” and “defeat” as part of the price that comes with accepting God’s kingdom rather than trying to build another human one.

Amen.

Take Up Your Cross by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 

A Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent (21/02/21): God's Hero in the Conflict between Good and Evil

 

God's Hero in the Conflict between Good and Evil 

Mark 1:9-15 

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptised by John  in the Jordan.

This is the beginning of the Gospel, the story that Mark has to tell. Up to this point what he has written has been prologue, introduction. The ministry of John the Baptist is scene setting.  Now we have come to the main event. The way in which Mark begins telling the story makes clear what kind of story it is that he is telling. The gospel story is a story of cosmic struggle. It is the most basic story of the all. It is a story of the struggle between good and evil. And the baptism of Jesus announces him as the hero of this story. He is the one chosen and sent by God to carry on this struggle. He is the one empowered with the Holy Spirit to engage in the conflict between good and  evil. 

As he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.

In a vision Jesus sees the boundary between the world of human affairs and the realm of God's rule torn open. God in him is now engaged directly in that struggle. The coming of the Spirit upon him, in the same way as it hovered over the water at the  creation, gives him the means to conduct that struggle. Jesus now grasps the identity that has been his from his birth. He the hero in this story.  The very voice of God speaks from heaven and confirms that he is indeed the hero of this story:

“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” 

Jesus sees the heavens opened. He feels the Spirit rest upon him. He hears the voice of his Father. He is now ready to begin.

The telling of stories is basic to human existence. Telling stories is one of the things that makes us who and what we are. Stories shape the way we see and respond to the world.  Stories help us to navigate through life. The stories we tell are key to our moral understanding.  And it is the stories of the conflict between good and evil that are are most fundamental.  There are many such stories. They crop up all over the place. And some are very influential indeed, though we might not necessarily recognise it. Hearing them we might be tempted to respond: “Oh  that's just a story for children.” Or: “It's only entertainment.” 

Both the Harry Potter series of books and films, and Dr. Who on television or the constant diet of crime stories in film and on television are good examples of story telling  cycles whose central them is that same conflict between good and evil. 

But not all of these stories are the same. We are encouraged to accept the stories where good wins out, often only in the very end  after a long struggle and many reversals. We are encouraged think that all stories where good wins in the end are positive. But that fails to recognise that how good wins in the end is of critical importance. Because that is the dimension of the story telling that shapes our outlook and our behaviour. Most good vs. evil stories that are told in our society/culture, including Harry Potter and  Dr. Who or any number of crime thrillers and lots more besides, are shaped around what has been called “the Myth of Redemptive Violence.” In the stories shaped by this myth, evil is destroyed by force. Evil is overcome by using essentially the same methods that evil itself uses. These are stories where the hero comes to resemble the evil that they defeat. This means that they are ambiguous, like Dr Who, and often tragic figures, which Harry Potter certainly is.  Or at the most extreme the can become outcast, like Clint Eastwood's character in the Dirty Harry movies. They are stories of ends justifying the means.  Except that means have a habit of subverting ends. Or, when it comes to violence, it tends to become an end in itself. The myth of redemptive violence is an illusion.  It is false. There is no escape from the cycle of violence which such stories encourage. Each victory of good over evil is achieved only at the cost of creating a new evil. We only have to look away from fiction for a moment to where the Myth of Redemptive  Violence has been played out in the real world, in recent years in places Iraq or in Afghanistan and more widely in longer history, to recognise it is a fallacy. The Myth of Redemptive Violence and the stories that are built around it are corrupting and corrosive. Does that mean I think we shouldn't read Harry Potter or watch Dr. Who. No, I don't. But I do think we have to be aware and be careful how we read and watch. We have to become what has been called resistant readers and resistant viewers. We need to start seeing those  stories in a critical or even negative light. We need to Become resistant to those other stories and resistant to being shaped by them. We need to avoid being seduced by the offer of a swift and satisfying victory of the forces of good over the forces of evil by any means possible. Resisting and escaping from the grasp of the Myth of Redemptive Violence is in large measure of what being a disciple is about.

 

We tell the Gospel story as the decisive alternative to those other stories. Jesus is the hero of the gospel. But he is a different kind of hero. He is not the kind of hero who is reshaped by the evil  that he is fighting against. And this is the decisive difference between the gospel and the Myth of Redemptive Violence. 

And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.

Jesus emerges from the waters of baptism and is straight away driven, hurled (the word is the same as the one used to describe the casting out of spirits), he is driven by the  Holy Spirit into the wilderness. Mark's account of the temptation is very brief, but it sets the tone of the rest of the story, it establishes the kind of hero that Jesus is going to be.  In a way this scene tells us what the gospel is about and how Jesus is going to go about bring the story to its conclusion. Jesus is pushed out into the place where the confrontation between good and evil is most raw. The wilderness is the place where this conflict is at its most elemental. For us, in our everyday lives, the struggle between good and evil is wrapped in ambiguities. Our choices are almost never clear cut, if they exist at all. Everything is blurred by our other commitments, loyalties and affections. Out there under the unrelenting glare of the sun Jesus confronts the forces of chaos in their purest most undiluted form. Jesus confronts the threats to human existence as Satan and the wild beasts. And Jesus wins. He wins where in a sense where an earlier hero, Adam had lost. The new human hero Jesus succeeds, where the previous representative of our race had failed.  But his victory is not of the kind that the Myth of Redemptive Violence wants to suggest is  possible. Jesus doesn't destroy evil, because he could not do so without becoming like evil himself. His victory is of a different sort. At this point we do recognise that evil remains. It continues throughout the rest of the Gospel. And that conflict between good and evil is still our present reality. That said, however, even at the beginning of the Gospel has Jesus has already won a decisive victory over evil.  His victory is not that he destroys evil, but that he does not give in to it.  The other Gospel writers, Matthew and Luke, spell out the individual temptations greater detail and at greater length. Mark, almost by omission, establishes that Jesus has not been deflected or subverted from his purpose by his encounter with the reality of evil. Jesus' victory is that he remains unchanged, uncorrupted by the evil he is struggling  against. This is the fundamental contrast with the myth of redemptive violence Christ's victory is real. It leads us somewhere. It shows us that there is an alternative to the corruption and despair that is the consequence of the cycles of violence and evil that we so often have to live with. Jesus' victory is faith, patience and endurance in the face of evil. Faith is his continued trust in the providence of God. He has that unshakeable belief, confidence, that God only works good for those who trust him. Jesus' faith is that he continues to believe and act upon what was revealed to him in his  baptism. He continues to trust in the goodness of God's will, in spite of the fact that it takes him to a place  of difficult confrontation, the wilderness, and indeed in the end it will take him to worse, the cross. 

It is that faith, that trust in the providence of God which enables him to be patient and to endure. Jesus is patient. He has all the power in the universe at his disposal. He is the hero of this story. He is the chosen one of God, empowered by the Spirit, but he doesn't attempt to shortcut God's will. He is patient. He doesn't attempt to throw down evil there and then. His power, when it is used, will instead be directed only towards doing good, healing those who are sick and setting the oppressed free. He doesn't attempt to win his victory by any other way than by trusting God. Instead he is patient and he endures Jesus endures the symbolic 40 days in the wilderness. He simply outlasts evil's assault against him. We read this story especially at the beginning of Lent because in it Jesus demonstrates  the qualities which Lent commends to us. 

After his time in the wilderness Jesus returns to the world of the everyday to carry on the  struggle in a different way: 

Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is  fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent and believe in the good news.” 

He emerges from the wilderness with his mission, which continues to this present moment. By his call to repentance he calls us let go of and reject the other stories we might tell to or for or about ourselves. The call to repentance is the call to take God's side and to use only methods in the conflict  between good and evil. It is the call resist the temptation to think that ends justify the means. It is the call trust instead the victory Jesus has won and the promise which Jesus makes. 

Jesus announces that God's rule is at hand. Evil will vanish at the end, and there will only be good. That is the hope which will sustain us against evil and help us to resist other tellings of the  story of the conflict between good and evil. It is a hope that sustains the patience and endurance in us which will enable us to overcome evil without coming to resemble evil ourselves. 

Amen. 

God's Hero in the Conflict between Good and Evil by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 

A Sermon for the Sunday before Lent (14/02/21): The Mount of Transfiguration and Mount Calvary

The Mount of Transfiguration and Mount Calvary 

Mark 9:2-8 

From the cloud there came a voice, 

“This is my Son, the beloved, listen to him.” 

You could wonder, why wasn't the transfiguration enough? All that is needed to be known about Jesus is put on display there. In a way everything is summed up right here. He is clearly God's Son.  Such a scene should leave no doubt  And therefore, since he is who has all along appeared to be, his teaching should be accepted. He should be trusted and obeyed to lead his people back to God, and to establish God's reign in the world. Job done. There it is, all the gospel that needs to be proclaimed.

 

Six days later Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led them up a  high mountain by themselves and he was transfigured before them. 

Peter and James and John, these ones at least, as representatives of all the  followers of Jesus are permitted to see for themselves the inner reality of Jesus. They are shown what we might call, "his true self." It is displayed before them. Here at the top of the mountain where it is reckoned the boundary between heaven and earth is at  its narrowest, it is clear that Jesus is so filled with the divine presence that his features are  changed. The brightness of God shines through him so that his clothes glow with a whiteness no bleacher could achieve on earth.  What was the merest of reflections  when it came to Moses, though still too bright to look at, is in Jesus his real substance. Jesus possesses not just a reflected glow of God's nearness but very brightness of God itself. If you are with Jesus you are with God. If you meet Jesus you have, for all useful purposes, met God. And the voice of God speaks from the cloud to confirm this. Jesus is given the divine seal of approval: 

“This is my Son,

"This is the one who is special to me and to my purpose.

"The beloved;

"The one in whom I am well pleased. 

"Listen to him!

For when he speaks I speak.” 

Here is confirmation directly from God of the conclusion that Peter had already arrived at  those six days earlier.  And it is given in the presence of those who had spoken most clearly for God in ages past: Moses the law giver and Elijah the prophet.  God declares that the voice which we should listen to is Jesus'. When Jesus commands, we should obey. When Jesus promises, we should hope. Moses and Elijah speak the truth about God. But rather than in Moses and Elijah, the focus of the source of knowledge about God,  God's will, God's intentions for humans is relocated in Jesus. Now is the time of Jesus. All that needs to be said about Jesus is already said here on this mountain. He is God's Son, to whom we must listen and respond. 

Couldn't it have been possible for Peter James and John to have come down that  mountain and tell the other disciples what they had heard and seen? Wouldn't it have been possible for them to confirm that what they all already suspect to be true is the truth? Jesus is the Christ, the Holy one of God. Could they not have convinced the other disciples that the power of God to save  really does reside in Jesus?  And could not the disciples fanned out from the foot of that mountain and carried  the Good News through out all the world from there? The good news that the reign of God is established in Jesus,  because Peter and  James and John have seen that is it is so on the Mount of Transfiguration. Couldn't the Acts of the Apostles have followed directly on from Mark chapter 9? Except that we know that it doesn't! 

Mark's gospel is barely half done. And we know the rest of the story. We know that Jesus is arrested, rejected by those in power and is killed. Not even Peter and James and John, who had seen for themselves who Jesus really is, who accompanied him as he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, not even they could stay awake and listen with him. And even they, who had been to the mountain top with him, fled when the  soldiers and the mob came with their torches and their clubs to take Jesus away. And far from sharing God's love for Jesus, Peter denied ever having known him,  three times, before that night was over. The transfiguration is not enough. Religious experience, the mountain top, is not enough to turn even the best of  human hearts decisively to God.

 

But it is not as if God didn't already know that!  The transfiguration was never meant to be the end of the Gospel and the beginning of the Church. Six days before Jesus took Peter and James and John away on their own and up  the mountain. Six days earlier Peter, speaking first what the other disciples were already thinking, had arrived at the conclusion that Jesus is the Messiah. And it was from that point that Jesus began to teach them quite openly what was  going to happen to him in the end:

"The 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."

Almost a week before the Transfiguration Jesus was already telling them that he  would be handed over to those in power, who would reject, abuse and finally kill  him that this all was necessary, part of the way which God must act, before finally he would  rise again vindicated. Then and only then could the Good News be preached to the ends of the earth.  The Mount of Transfiguration is not a first attempt to establish the church which falls short. It is not a tragic failure that leads to the Mount of Calvary. Far from it; the cross, from the very beginning, forms part of God's, sovereign, gracious,  divine plan. It is so, because “religion,” human beings climbing up the mountain towards God,  is not enough to deal with what separates them from God. Religion, in the sense human striving towards God, is not enough truly and decisively to turn human hearts to God. 

But Calvary doesn't negate the Transfiguration. They are not in contradiction with one another. They are both true. And together they provide a fuller picture of the ways of God and how God seeks to bring human beings to him. What the transfiguration does do is throw the crucifixion into sharper relief. 

A mountain is an obvious place to meet God. The place where the distance between earth and heaven is shortest. That is as true of Calvary as it is of the Mount of Transfiguration. But a mountain is also an obvious place for a public execution. It can also be where the power of the powerful can be graphically displayed to the powerless. It can be a place where everyone can see and no one can fail to get the message; Who is in charge and what happens to those who resist. 

But the true nature of Jesus is as fully displayed as it hangs on the cross as it is  glowing with the brightness of the glory of God. Indeed there is no contradiction  between these two scenes. God graciously joins the powerless on the cross to overcome the oppression of  the powerful and the cruelty and death which they wield. It is right that Jesus should be joined by Moses and Elijah. The saints who spoke for God in the past and who God loved so much he spared  them experience of death. For he most of all Jesus speaks the word of God and is the beloved of God. But it is also right that Jesus should be flanked by two dying criminals who cry out in fear and desperation. For it is their voice that God also hears and heeds. And whilst Moses and Elijah were carried straight into heaven, God does not spare his own Son death, even death in its most acute and bitter  form  the criminals death on a cross.  So desperate is human need and so urgent is God's desire to close the gap  between humans and himself that he will do quite literally anything and  everything, short of stealing our freedom to reject him, to accomplish it. 

It is good to hear God speak the truth in the shadow of a cloud But it is better, when the sun is blotted out and the world is darkened by the  wickedness that humans can do, that that same truth can be testified to in a human voice. When seeing all these things, like the centurion at the foot the cross we can say: 

"Truly this man was God's Son." 

Perhaps the Transfiguration should be enough. But it isn't. What it does do is reveal more sharply what is enough. The Good News that is the Cross 

Amen. 

The Mount of Transfiguration and Mount Calvary by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 

A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany (07/02/21): All Things to All People

All Things to All People

1 Corinthians 9:16-23

I have become all things to all people.

This is one of St. Paul’s most famous declarations about himself. Talking about his work as an apostle he famously declares that he has done all that he can to get close to the people he is trying to share the good news with, even becoming like them with he’s with them.

Woody Allen made a film in 1983 called "Zelig." It is a fake documentary about a character that Allen himself plays. In series of newsreels which purport to be from the 1920’s we see Zelig in a variety of situations where he becomes like the people he is with. At one points he is with a group of orthodox Jews and suddenly he is transformed, he has a long beard and the earlocks, and he is wearing a black kaftan and a large hat. Zelig yearns for approval so strongly that he physically changes to fit in with those around him.

St. Paul is not Zelig. What he is and what he does is not some kind of neurosis. He is not so embarrassed about himself that he does anything and everything he can to fit in and not be noticed. That is not at all what Paul is up to.

What Paul does is an evangelistic strategy. Indeed pretty much everything which Paul says or does is part of his evangelistic strategy. What he does, he does to win people over with the Good News.

It has been often said that: "the chief obstacle to belief in God is other believers in God." Perhaps Paul was conscious of that thought. And he does the very best he can to get out of the way of his message. Paul mixes with all kinds of people, so he says:

To the Jews I became a Jew, in order to win Jews

Perhaps this was easy for him. This was his natural state. This is what Paul had been brought up as. But Paul also often states that his commitment to Christ has set him free from the restrictions of Jewish culture. He is no longer bound be the law. He doesn’t have to be Jewish anymore. But when he is among Jews he becomes like them. He does his very best not to offend Jewish sensibilities. He tries not to allow his freedom to offend their opinion. He does not do this to fit in. But to give himself the time and space to receive a hearing for his message. If he charged in amongst people committed to a Jewish way of life, amongst those who were living out Jewish cultural conventions, and he flaunted his difference from them, they would stop listening to him even before he had opened his mouth. So among Jews Paul became like a Jew.

On the other side of the great cultural divide which Paul works with:

To those outside the Law I became as one outside the Law

This move was the most difficult that the early Christian evangelists had to make. They had to move out of the security of the Jewish communities the grew up in and were all part of. They had to go and address the wider world, everyone who was not Jewish and who were indifferent or even hostile to Jewish ways of life and Jewish faith commitments. There was much in how Jews lived and the kind of religion they practiced that offended the cultural expectations of everyone else in the ancient world. But Paul freed by Christ from the restrictions of Jewish culture doesn’t have to demand that his cultural sensibilities be accommodated. Paul the evangelist has learned to put up with all those things that would have rubbed Paul the Jew up the wrong way. And again he does so not simply to fit in, but give himself the time and the space to receive a hearing for his message. This was especially important when he was speaking to people who were not necessarily predisposed to listen to what someone like him had to say. So among Gentiles Paul became like a Gentile

This strategy of Paul's extended even among the beginning-Christians who his message had already touched:

To the weak I became weak

Obviously most of those that Paul found himself speaking to were new Christians. They had just moved out of the wider society and cultures they had been part of and into the strange new world of the Church. And typically their understanding of Christianity was quite narrow, even as their first flush of commitment to it was very intense. If Paul was as free as he new Christian faith allowed him to be he could easily offend those whose place in the faith was not as secure as his. He doesn’t do anything that might confuse or upset new believers. Or anything that would make them lose their new found faith. Once more this is only so that the new believer can give him the time and the space to hear what he has to tell them. So as we might now expect among new believers Paul became like a new believer.

Paul can do this because he knows that those cultural patterns, those social ways of being, all those ways that people behave with one another, all the habits and opinions that groups of people share, Paul knows none of them make a difference to the gospel. They are just the circumstances which people find themselves in. They are happenstance into which he and we must speak the gospel. In contemporary terms we might put it (as I find I often do) something like: "If you want to say something radical, dress conservative." If you have a message, you should try your best to not let you, the speaker, get in the way. As a student I preached in a church somewhere in Lancashire. At the end of the service an older lady came up to me and said: “I was so pleased. . . so pleased. . . so pleased. . . ”  As you can imagine I was anticipating some compliment about the quality of the worship I had just led, or the excellence of my sermon. “I was so pleased that you were wearing such shiny shoes!” Which felt like a terrible let down. But on reflection, how easy it would have been for something as trivial as unpolished shoes to get in the way of that lady’s listening. And indeed her comment suggested that it often had!

Paul strategy is not giving in to the cultural conventions of the world. It is not merely assimilation, to that would be to have become like Zelig. It is not losing our separate identity as Christians. It is recognising that the message of the gospel is radical. It is strange and often hard to hear. People’s cultural sensibilities are less important to us than their getting the good news, as Paul puts it:

I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some

This is the most important thing to Paul. And it may be the key to reading everything that he writes. Paul of course, as carefully as he is avoiding offending, the Jews, and the Gentiles, and the weak of his own day, just as quickly can give offence to those who live now. This applies, among other things, to Paul’s instructions to women. I had a great-aunt who always spoke of St. Paul through gritted teeth as “that man Paul” for this very reason. He did say that : Women should cover their heads. And that: Women should not speak. And also that: Women should never have authority over men. Unfortunately these and other pieces of advice which he gives, pieces of advice have been taken as holy writ. It is assumed that Paul's words demand the kind of punctilious obedience which he as a Pharisee had once given the Law. Some read Paul as if he were establishing a new kind of law in place of the one he says the gospel has abolished. And it is assume then that it applies to Christians in all places at all times in every circumstance. But remember:

I have become all things to all people

Everything that Paul does, he does to get the gospel a hearing. Paul knows that among the people the Good News creates there is neither male nor female. But he also knows that the wider society he lives in thinks that women should know their place. He knows that if the church publicly practices the liberty that it truly possesses it will give such offence that no one will listen. The church will be dismissed as either troublemakers or as insane. So for the sake of the gospel Paul suggests then that women (for the time being) retain their conventional position and their traditional roles. But Paul almost certainly would give the opposite advice to us. In a society where the equality of women is broadly (if not universally accepted) to prevent women playing a full public role in the life of the church would cause such offence that the message of the Church could be dismissed. And indeed we know that it often is, on exactly those grounds. In order to get the Good News a hearing we do indeed have to become all things to all people.

The contemporary way of putting this is to say: "We must speak to people where they are." We do have to be alongside people, to know and understand them, to be able to speak in such a way that we don’t put them off before we get to the important stuff. In this we probably have an advantage over Paul. We are a lot more like our neighbours than Paul was to many of the people he was trying to bring the Good News to. But we still carry our church culture with us. Often we assume that our experience of church is the gospel. Everything we do; the hymns, the prayers, the sermons, the building, the social activities, all of it, we assume is essential to the gospel. And that to become a Christian requires becoming like us! It was that kind of thinking in the 19th century that meant that missionaries took Rugby and Cricket and Football, as well as a lot of less benign things with them when they took the good news into the wider world, and why they often erased indigenous cultures as they went. Becoming all things to all people is not simply to become assimilated to the culture or the society we find ourselves in. The gospel is meant to make a difference. But that difference is not to make all people to become like us. People are meant to be changed by the good news. It may not make them become like us. It may not even make them people we are comfortable with. But then neither Paul nor we are Zelig, with a desperate neurotic need to fit in. All we need to do is give the gospel enough time and enough space to receive a hearing So that like Paul:

I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings

Amen.

All Things To All People by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0