…and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.
I served my title curacy in a huge, sprawling parish in Portsmouth, which covered the North End of Portsea Island. There were 20, 000 residents, three church buildings, and the environment was relentlessly urban. There were few trees or green spaces. Instead there was street after street of charity shops and pound-saver stores, with small terraces and semi-detached houses whose facades often concealed poverty and disadvantage.
At least twice year one of our churches would host a dramatic production, a full-scale musical in the spring and a revue in the autumn. These attracted the participation of all sorts of people, young and old, churchgoers and visitors alike. They were significant community events which always drew audiences, but what fascinated me was their impact on those who performed in them. Take a child from very modest circumstances, with very modest aspirations, and put them in a spotlight, and the effect can be quite magical. I remember seeing inarticulate teenagers whose day to day interests did not extend much beyond their cigarettes, dead-end jobs, and the fortunes of Pompey FC being transformed by the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd. On stage, saying or (more often) singing lines written by someone else they would visibly blossom and flourish, gaining stature and confidence before the spectators’ very eyes.
Performance, particularly musical performance, does that to people. At Rowan Williams’s suggestion I’ve spent much of this week listening to Jacqueline Du Pre’s interpretation of Elgar’s Cell Concerto. I’ve been entranced by its power and intensity. It needn’t be Du Pre, though. It could be Leslie Howard or the choir of St Peter’s Eaton Square, for in this Eucharist we are blessed by the weekly offering of fine music and in almost any such offering we are bought face to face with a mystery which is theological as well as aesthetic.
In the offering of music we see a performer realizing the work of a composer. The performer is a human being with her own identity and integrity. As the composer’s work is realized the performer’s identity does not shrink or diminish. Rather, it is stretched and amplified. The performer sings or plays at the full extent of her powers and skill, bending every muscle and sinew, every attention and effort to the work, and she is thus fully, vigorously, vitally, alive. Yet the consequence of that power and skill, of that attention and effort, of that vigour and vitality, is that another is made present. The performer at the peak of her performance realizes perfectly, or close to perfectly, the work of someone else. The performer’s fullness of life is saturated with the vision of the composer.
The musical metaphor does what words cannot: it expresses what Christians hold to be true of Jesus of Nazareth, God’s only Son, our Lord. The history of the early Church from Pentecost onwards is the history of our forebears in faith trying to work out who their friend Jesus had been and who he was. They remembered a man who had been hungry and tired, who had wept and who had been angry. Yet they remembered too a man who had forgiven people’s sins and healed the sick, who had declared that God’s kingdom was at hand and had challenged the Jerusalem authorities. Above all, they knew that three days after his death he had been raised to life. So who was he?
For centuries the argument rumbled on, and thus it was that various beliefs about Jesus came to be approved, whilst others were identified as heretical. In time the community of the faithful decided that Jesus was not a divine being wrapped in a passing semblance of humanity; neither was he a mere mortal possessed of occasional heavenly powers. He was something more, something different, yet it was impossible to say exactly what. And thus it was that when the bishops met at Chalcedon in 451 they settled upon a formula for reconciling the irreconcilable. Jesus was fully divine: he was God of God, Light of Light, begotten, not made, and of the same substance as the Father. Yet he was also fully human: he was born of a woman, he suffered under Pontius Pilate, and he died a human death.
Fully human and fully divine: the Chalcedonian definition is a brilliant form of words which has been the cornerstone of Christian orthodoxy ever since. But the negotiations of those ancient bishops and the precision of their language can barely begin comprehend the subject it addresses. Perhaps music can; perhaps when we see and hear a great artist perform we can understand what Jesus is and who Jesus is. He is a man, raised as a carpenter’s son from Nazareth, with the identity and integrity of any human being. And yet his human life is a performance of God’s work, of God’s love. While he never loses that human integrity and human identity his humanity is saturated with divine life, just as is Jacqueline Du Pre’s with Edward Elgar’s. God’s life is made present in Jesus’s life; God’s life is brought to birth in Jesus’s life.
We share our humanity with Jesus. He is our brother. Yet our humanity is all too often an obstacle to God’s purposes. It stubbornly avoids the composer’s score and the conductor’s baton, and prefers instead its own elegies and its own codas. The result is discordant cacophony. Our discipleship of Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, calls us to hear heaven’s music and to give ourselves entirely to its realization on earth. Amen.
Sunday 17 February 2008,
2 of Lent.
Monday, 18 February 2008
Monday, 11 February 2008
Lent 1: maker of heaven and earth
I believe in God, maker of heaven and earth.
It’s not been a very good week for the Primate of All England. Following his lecture at the Royal Courts of Justice on Thursday Rowan Williams has been attacked by politicians of every hue and received death-threats and calls for his resignation, while that peerless band of seekers after truth who write and edit The Sun have called him a dangerous threat to our nation, and yesterday urged their readers to (quotes) ‘Bash the Bishop’ – an eloquent defence, if ever there was, of the tolerant democracy they no doubt they believe they are defending against creeping Islamicization. No doubt his critics would want him to confine himself to teaching Christian truths instead of getting us all to think a bit about the status of religious minorities (these two activities rarely being seen as complementary). No doubt they would be delighted to learn that our Lent series continues this morning to follow in his footsteps through the essential doctrines of the Creed.
Talking about faith with the young is one of the great privileges of the ordained life, although it is one of those privileges with which one would occasionally like to privilege someone else. Before I embarked upon said ordained life I used to appear before the Court of Appeal every so often, and, let me tell you, the confirmation class at St Peter’s School is a good deal more intimidating than their Lordships.
Their question of the week was ‘if God made the universe, who made God?’ Of course, it’s a very good question, although every time I told them that I felt like a shifty politician trying to evade his interrogator. It’s a question which has its roots in the habit to which I suggested we were prone when I spoke on Ash Wednesday. This is the habit of talking of God as one thing among the many things with which the universe is cluttered: the first thing, maybe, and the begetter of all the other things, ourselves included, but a thing nonetheless. Yet if God is the maker of heaven and earth, and if he makes them out of nothing, then he is not a thing at all. He cannot be explained or accounted for by the language which we deploy or within the rules which govern our existence. He is beyond our language, beyond our rules, beyond our universe: he is his own explanation, his own cause.
Such a God corresponds to the insights of science and does not necessarily conflict with them. Those insights tend towards the notion of a ‘first event’, a point from which the universe begins to expand. That point, Christian faith claims, is God’s reaching into the primeval nothingness in abundant and selfless love, and bringing forth a universe Those insights also disclose a universe which is a dazzlingly complicated web of different sorts and different networks of energy, yet which is also a web which holds and coheres. It holds and coheres, Christian faith claims, because it is still God’s creation, sustained in every minute by that same selfless love. As Rowan Williams puts it, ‘within every circumstance, every object, every person, God’s action is going on, a sort of white heat at the centre of everything’. It is, as he also says, a rather exhilarating thought.
It’s a thought which leads directly to a question which has not been asked by the confirmation class just yet but which can’t be far off. That is, if God is at the centre of everything, why do bad things happen? When it does get asked the questioner is unlikely to be impressed by the first limb of my standard response, which is to ask whether any answer could ever possibly be satisfactory. The devastation of hurricanes and floods and the ruthlessness of cancerous cells cannot be explained in any way that can reassure or quieten human sorrow. But when God creates out of nothingness he creates something that is not him, something that is different, a universe which can change and develop, a universe which must change and develop if it is to be any sort of universe at all. It is a universe of processes and events, and these sometimes clash with destructive effect, and sometimes catch other parts of the creation up in their destruction.
‘Aha’ the keen-eyed Year 5 pupil will interject, eager to put a supplementary. What about miracles, and what about prayer? For what appears to contradict entirely everything I have just said about the universe’s ordering are the Biblical accounts of God’s ready interventions in the its processes and events, interventions which distort what is natural and inevitable and ameliorate their consequences. Yet those interventions only do violence to the natural order if we take God out of the equation and forget that he is a part of and player in the natural order: the white heat at the centre of everything, remember. The white heat is not always effective to warm and cheer because the processes and events of the universe sometimes work against it. But at other times perhaps a very intense prayer, or an act or series of acts of great holiness and self-sacrifice can be effective, opening the world up to God’s action and giving him a little more freedom of manoeuvre.
To believe in God, the maker of heaven and earth, is not to enter a sterile debate about the historicity or otherwise of the early chapters of Genesis. Nor is it to engage in a futile wrangle with scientists about the mechanics of the universe and their beginnings. It is instead to believe something very profound about the world and our place within it in 2008, to see the energy of God’s love rippling below the surface of every thing, and to understand that the things seen and the things unseen within our world and within our lives are in his care, and that he will never shrink or shy away from them. Amen.
Sunday 10 February 2008,
First of Lent
It’s not been a very good week for the Primate of All England. Following his lecture at the Royal Courts of Justice on Thursday Rowan Williams has been attacked by politicians of every hue and received death-threats and calls for his resignation, while that peerless band of seekers after truth who write and edit The Sun have called him a dangerous threat to our nation, and yesterday urged their readers to (quotes) ‘Bash the Bishop’ – an eloquent defence, if ever there was, of the tolerant democracy they no doubt they believe they are defending against creeping Islamicization. No doubt his critics would want him to confine himself to teaching Christian truths instead of getting us all to think a bit about the status of religious minorities (these two activities rarely being seen as complementary). No doubt they would be delighted to learn that our Lent series continues this morning to follow in his footsteps through the essential doctrines of the Creed.
Talking about faith with the young is one of the great privileges of the ordained life, although it is one of those privileges with which one would occasionally like to privilege someone else. Before I embarked upon said ordained life I used to appear before the Court of Appeal every so often, and, let me tell you, the confirmation class at St Peter’s School is a good deal more intimidating than their Lordships.
Their question of the week was ‘if God made the universe, who made God?’ Of course, it’s a very good question, although every time I told them that I felt like a shifty politician trying to evade his interrogator. It’s a question which has its roots in the habit to which I suggested we were prone when I spoke on Ash Wednesday. This is the habit of talking of God as one thing among the many things with which the universe is cluttered: the first thing, maybe, and the begetter of all the other things, ourselves included, but a thing nonetheless. Yet if God is the maker of heaven and earth, and if he makes them out of nothing, then he is not a thing at all. He cannot be explained or accounted for by the language which we deploy or within the rules which govern our existence. He is beyond our language, beyond our rules, beyond our universe: he is his own explanation, his own cause.
Such a God corresponds to the insights of science and does not necessarily conflict with them. Those insights tend towards the notion of a ‘first event’, a point from which the universe begins to expand. That point, Christian faith claims, is God’s reaching into the primeval nothingness in abundant and selfless love, and bringing forth a universe Those insights also disclose a universe which is a dazzlingly complicated web of different sorts and different networks of energy, yet which is also a web which holds and coheres. It holds and coheres, Christian faith claims, because it is still God’s creation, sustained in every minute by that same selfless love. As Rowan Williams puts it, ‘within every circumstance, every object, every person, God’s action is going on, a sort of white heat at the centre of everything’. It is, as he also says, a rather exhilarating thought.
It’s a thought which leads directly to a question which has not been asked by the confirmation class just yet but which can’t be far off. That is, if God is at the centre of everything, why do bad things happen? When it does get asked the questioner is unlikely to be impressed by the first limb of my standard response, which is to ask whether any answer could ever possibly be satisfactory. The devastation of hurricanes and floods and the ruthlessness of cancerous cells cannot be explained in any way that can reassure or quieten human sorrow. But when God creates out of nothingness he creates something that is not him, something that is different, a universe which can change and develop, a universe which must change and develop if it is to be any sort of universe at all. It is a universe of processes and events, and these sometimes clash with destructive effect, and sometimes catch other parts of the creation up in their destruction.
‘Aha’ the keen-eyed Year 5 pupil will interject, eager to put a supplementary. What about miracles, and what about prayer? For what appears to contradict entirely everything I have just said about the universe’s ordering are the Biblical accounts of God’s ready interventions in the its processes and events, interventions which distort what is natural and inevitable and ameliorate their consequences. Yet those interventions only do violence to the natural order if we take God out of the equation and forget that he is a part of and player in the natural order: the white heat at the centre of everything, remember. The white heat is not always effective to warm and cheer because the processes and events of the universe sometimes work against it. But at other times perhaps a very intense prayer, or an act or series of acts of great holiness and self-sacrifice can be effective, opening the world up to God’s action and giving him a little more freedom of manoeuvre.
To believe in God, the maker of heaven and earth, is not to enter a sterile debate about the historicity or otherwise of the early chapters of Genesis. Nor is it to engage in a futile wrangle with scientists about the mechanics of the universe and their beginnings. It is instead to believe something very profound about the world and our place within it in 2008, to see the energy of God’s love rippling below the surface of every thing, and to understand that the things seen and the things unseen within our world and within our lives are in his care, and that he will never shrink or shy away from them. Amen.
Sunday 10 February 2008,
First of Lent
Friday, 8 February 2008
Ash Wednesday 2008: We believe in God the Father Almighty
‘We believe in God the Father Almighty’.
Tonight we begin our series of Lenten addresses exploring the doctrines of the Christian creeds, and doing so through the prism of Rowan Williams’s book, Tokens of Trust.
In the story of the bugging of a confidential conversation between a Member of Parliament and his imprisoned constituent there could be no more poignant illustration of the disintegration of our ability to trust one another. The disintegration of trust has many layers and the bugging story offers many layers for our suspicion to work at: terrorists, Muslims, politicians, the security services and the media.
Our suspicion is not simply that these individuals, groups and agencies are not quite on our side, that they are less than transparent or less than honest. It is, as Rowan Williams observes, that they are in fact likely to be working against us, serving their own interests and ignoring ours. This leaves us with an increasing sense of our isolation, adrift on a hostile ocean, where we can afford to trust only what we see and know for ourselves, directly.
This trend is of colossal significance for the Church, which opens its ancient statement of faith with the words with which I began: ‘We believe in God the Father Almighty’. When the Church invites us to declare our belief in God she is in fact asking us to declare our trust in God. We need to be very clear about this. Religion’s modern detractors may ridicule ‘the God hypothesis’, and too often religion’s defenders get drawn into a debate as intractable as it is interminable. But belief in God is not the same as belief in flying saucers. It is not intellectual assent to a proposition that there is something big ‘out there’. Belief in God is willingness to trust God or the possibility of God; willingness to give space to God and to the possibility of God; willingness to leave oneself open to God and to the possibility of God.
Nor, as an aside, is belief in God the same as belief in the existence of God. I rather enjoy agreeing with people who tell me that they don’t believe God exists. Existence is surely the condition of created things within the spatio-temporal universe. Existence is the condition of pews and books and kettles and cats. God is the source of existence, the one who brings existence out of nothing, the one through who all other things exist. We are getting God wrong if we line God up alongside other things, a thing existing, a thing amongst things.
But if trust is what the Church invites us to have in this God then why should we listen? We don’t trust our bishops. What is trustworthy about God?
Rowan Williams takes us first to Saint Paul’s convictions about Jesus Christ, which are that in his Son God has done what neither MI5, nor the Cabinet, nor the Daily Mail ever seem capable of doing. In Jesus God has revealed his purposes for the world and made them clear. His purposes are the peaceful unity of all created things, joined in one unending song of praise. If Jesus sets out a pattern of faithful self-giving to God then he thereby sets out a pattern for all God’s creatures. God does not have ulterior motives or hidden schemes. From eternity he has willed our unity in praise. We have nothing to fear; nothing to be suspicious of, nothing to hide from.
Indeed, argues Williams, God as the Creed conceives of God would be incapable of such ulterior motives or hidden schemes. For God is complete; God is perfect. He acts to create the world not because he needs to, not because he is lonely or somehow unfinished, but because of the overflowing abundance of his love. God’s creation is pure, unlimited gift. It cannot be a Trojan horse for dark schemes.
That is worth remembering, because ‘Almighty’ sounds dangerous. Our suspicious age mistrusts any power at all, and power that is advertised as unlimited is even less likely to command our attention and respect. Again, religion’s detractors ridicule the notion of an omnipotent power in the sky, arbitrary, unpredictable and unreliable, needing to be alternately praised and appeased by quavering subjects on earth below. The Creed’s presentation of a complete and perfect God tends against that caricature, of course, but so too does the very word ‘almighty’. The Greek word means ‘ruler of everything’ or ‘holder of everything’, and the implication, as Rowan Williams puts it is that: ‘there is nowhere God is powerless, absent or irrelevant; no situation in the universe in the face of which God is at a loss’. God’s almightiness means that God has unlimited power to be there, to be faithful to and for the world.
All of that is pretty convincing. This God – this sort of God – is worth trusting. But is this God – this sort of God – true? Rowan Williams’s answer poses us a challenge for Lent. He points to human individuals who have been ready, in his words, to take responsibility for God, people whose lives have spoken to others of the reality of God. They aren’t his examples, but I’m never able to get out of my head Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, the Anglican priest who took cigarettes to the men in the trenches of the Western Front; and Maximilian Kolbe, the Franciscan who went cheerfully into the gas chambers in place of someone who was too frightened. This age of suspicion and mistrust craves the authenticity of personal witness, and loves nothing more than the dramas of reality television. What might persuade this age that God is true is seeing the lives of other people and the worlds they inhabit and wanting our lives and our worlds to be a little more like theirs.
Lent invites us on a journey into the wilderness, a stepping-out in trust. Are we prepared to take responsibility for God the Father Almighty in these forty days? Amen.
Tonight we begin our series of Lenten addresses exploring the doctrines of the Christian creeds, and doing so through the prism of Rowan Williams’s book, Tokens of Trust.
In the story of the bugging of a confidential conversation between a Member of Parliament and his imprisoned constituent there could be no more poignant illustration of the disintegration of our ability to trust one another. The disintegration of trust has many layers and the bugging story offers many layers for our suspicion to work at: terrorists, Muslims, politicians, the security services and the media.
Our suspicion is not simply that these individuals, groups and agencies are not quite on our side, that they are less than transparent or less than honest. It is, as Rowan Williams observes, that they are in fact likely to be working against us, serving their own interests and ignoring ours. This leaves us with an increasing sense of our isolation, adrift on a hostile ocean, where we can afford to trust only what we see and know for ourselves, directly.
This trend is of colossal significance for the Church, which opens its ancient statement of faith with the words with which I began: ‘We believe in God the Father Almighty’. When the Church invites us to declare our belief in God she is in fact asking us to declare our trust in God. We need to be very clear about this. Religion’s modern detractors may ridicule ‘the God hypothesis’, and too often religion’s defenders get drawn into a debate as intractable as it is interminable. But belief in God is not the same as belief in flying saucers. It is not intellectual assent to a proposition that there is something big ‘out there’. Belief in God is willingness to trust God or the possibility of God; willingness to give space to God and to the possibility of God; willingness to leave oneself open to God and to the possibility of God.
Nor, as an aside, is belief in God the same as belief in the existence of God. I rather enjoy agreeing with people who tell me that they don’t believe God exists. Existence is surely the condition of created things within the spatio-temporal universe. Existence is the condition of pews and books and kettles and cats. God is the source of existence, the one who brings existence out of nothing, the one through who all other things exist. We are getting God wrong if we line God up alongside other things, a thing existing, a thing amongst things.
But if trust is what the Church invites us to have in this God then why should we listen? We don’t trust our bishops. What is trustworthy about God?
Rowan Williams takes us first to Saint Paul’s convictions about Jesus Christ, which are that in his Son God has done what neither MI5, nor the Cabinet, nor the Daily Mail ever seem capable of doing. In Jesus God has revealed his purposes for the world and made them clear. His purposes are the peaceful unity of all created things, joined in one unending song of praise. If Jesus sets out a pattern of faithful self-giving to God then he thereby sets out a pattern for all God’s creatures. God does not have ulterior motives or hidden schemes. From eternity he has willed our unity in praise. We have nothing to fear; nothing to be suspicious of, nothing to hide from.
Indeed, argues Williams, God as the Creed conceives of God would be incapable of such ulterior motives or hidden schemes. For God is complete; God is perfect. He acts to create the world not because he needs to, not because he is lonely or somehow unfinished, but because of the overflowing abundance of his love. God’s creation is pure, unlimited gift. It cannot be a Trojan horse for dark schemes.
That is worth remembering, because ‘Almighty’ sounds dangerous. Our suspicious age mistrusts any power at all, and power that is advertised as unlimited is even less likely to command our attention and respect. Again, religion’s detractors ridicule the notion of an omnipotent power in the sky, arbitrary, unpredictable and unreliable, needing to be alternately praised and appeased by quavering subjects on earth below. The Creed’s presentation of a complete and perfect God tends against that caricature, of course, but so too does the very word ‘almighty’. The Greek word means ‘ruler of everything’ or ‘holder of everything’, and the implication, as Rowan Williams puts it is that: ‘there is nowhere God is powerless, absent or irrelevant; no situation in the universe in the face of which God is at a loss’. God’s almightiness means that God has unlimited power to be there, to be faithful to and for the world.
All of that is pretty convincing. This God – this sort of God – is worth trusting. But is this God – this sort of God – true? Rowan Williams’s answer poses us a challenge for Lent. He points to human individuals who have been ready, in his words, to take responsibility for God, people whose lives have spoken to others of the reality of God. They aren’t his examples, but I’m never able to get out of my head Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, the Anglican priest who took cigarettes to the men in the trenches of the Western Front; and Maximilian Kolbe, the Franciscan who went cheerfully into the gas chambers in place of someone who was too frightened. This age of suspicion and mistrust craves the authenticity of personal witness, and loves nothing more than the dramas of reality television. What might persuade this age that God is true is seeing the lives of other people and the worlds they inhabit and wanting our lives and our worlds to be a little more like theirs.
Lent invites us on a journey into the wilderness, a stepping-out in trust. Are we prepared to take responsibility for God the Father Almighty in these forty days? Amen.
Fourth of Epiphany 2008
‘Aunt Ada Doom sat in her room upstairs…alone. When she was very small – so small that the lightest puff of breeze blew her little crinoline skirt over her head – she had seen something nasty in the woodshed’.
Baptized by John and steadfast in the face of Satan’s tempting, Jesus begins his public ministry. Matthew is in no doubt as to the significance of these days. They are full of prophecy, purpose and people: it is a beginning marked by prophecy, by purpose, and by people.
Hearing of John’s arrest Jesus relocates to Galilee and establishes a base for himself in Capernaum. Galilee had become known as ‘Galilee of the Nations’ or ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’ when, together with the rest of the Northern Kingdom of Israel it had fallen to foreign invaders in the early eighth century BC. That had changed. One hundred years before the birth of Jesus Galilee had been re-taken by the Jewish Hasmonean kings in the brief period of independence that they enjoyed before the Roman conquest. When Jesus went there he would have found a prosperous region of forty square kilometres, re-settled by cosmopolitan Jews, their faith re-established in the synagogues, many of which he was to visit.
But interesting as it may be to place Jesus into a historical context, what is more significant is the prophecy of Isaiah. This was that the Galilee of the Nations would be glorified; that the people who had walked in darkness would see a great light. Galilee was to be the springboard of the Messiah. So in going there Matthew wants us to understand that this is not just a matter of geography, it is a matter of history. Jesus is fulfilling the destiny outlined for the Christ. God is at work. When we relocate to the home counties we possibly realize some capital from an overpriced London residence, but when Jesus moves to Capernaum heaven holds its breath as divine power is on the move.
The exhilaration of these days is not confined to the skies, though. Jesus explodes into Galilee with single-minded purpose and unimaginable power. Finding two fishing families at work he calls them to follow him, and they do. Matthew uses the Greek adverb euqews, ‘immediately’, twice in almost as many sentences. Jesus calls and immediately the men obey. Jewish hearers would have detected another parallel with Israel’s glorious past. When the prophet Elijah calls Elisha to become his follower and successor Elisha too is hard at work, although he is ploughing with oxen. And it’s not just that his activities are agricultural rather than fishery-oriented. When Elijah calls him he asks to be allowed to kiss his parents and offer a sacrifice before coming. Simon, Andrew, James and John make no such requests. They leave their livelihoods, homes and families and follow the one who is calling. It seems that earth is in tune with heaven, caught up in common purpose. There is a palpable excitement at what is happening. A strange man is emerging into Galilee and other men are giving up everything to be with him.
Not do these days resonate with the prophecies of old; not only are they replete with purpose for the moment; they are also unequivocally people-centred. What is happening in Galilee is not a trend or a fashion. It is not what economists have devoted so much time to this week; it is not the sort of phantasm that can be conjured up by advertising executives to scare the gullible into buying a particular brand of deodorant. Real people are being swept along in a sudden tornado. Of course, the streets that surround us are not strangers to such events. In 193X Oswald Moseley paraded 500 Fascists in Eaton Square; forty years later the clean living Osmond brother rented a house here while their fans went wild with excitement. But the Galilean tornado brings healing and life rather than totalitarianism or best-forgotten teenage excess. With the new disciples at his side Jesus goes into Galilee, curing every disease and every sickness. This is not an idea. It is not what Aunt Ada thinks she saw in the woodshed all those years ago, the never-named thing which she has dwelt on and manipulated ever since. It is real, tangible, visible, effectual.
And its impact is such that when Paul reflects upon it a few years later in his letter to the Corinthians he is cautious about using words. Christ sent him to proclaim the Gospel, he writes ‘and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power’. Paul wants to utter aloud not words, but the cross. His gospel is not a message but an event, the earthly culmination of the tumultuous years begun in these tumultuous days in Galilee.
All this is encapsulated in the one phrase that the evangelists record Jesus uttering, the most effective sermon the world has ever heard, and probably the shortest (let the preacher understand): ‘the kingdom of heaven has come near’. There is no doctrine or exposition. It’s a simple claim that in the person of Jesus the divine has reconnected with the earthly; that those who stand in the presence of Jesus stand at the threshold of eternity; that those who look upon him look upon the author of all life and upon the one who will bring to perfection all life. Simon, Andrew, James and John knew it; the sick and diseased of Galilee knew it; years later Paul knew it. Do we, and in what way are we prepared to let it change us? Amen.
Sunday 27 January 2008,
Fourth of Epiphany,
Isaiah 9: 1-4;
1 Corinthians 1: 10-18;
Matthew 4: 12-23.
Baptized by John and steadfast in the face of Satan’s tempting, Jesus begins his public ministry. Matthew is in no doubt as to the significance of these days. They are full of prophecy, purpose and people: it is a beginning marked by prophecy, by purpose, and by people.
Hearing of John’s arrest Jesus relocates to Galilee and establishes a base for himself in Capernaum. Galilee had become known as ‘Galilee of the Nations’ or ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’ when, together with the rest of the Northern Kingdom of Israel it had fallen to foreign invaders in the early eighth century BC. That had changed. One hundred years before the birth of Jesus Galilee had been re-taken by the Jewish Hasmonean kings in the brief period of independence that they enjoyed before the Roman conquest. When Jesus went there he would have found a prosperous region of forty square kilometres, re-settled by cosmopolitan Jews, their faith re-established in the synagogues, many of which he was to visit.
But interesting as it may be to place Jesus into a historical context, what is more significant is the prophecy of Isaiah. This was that the Galilee of the Nations would be glorified; that the people who had walked in darkness would see a great light. Galilee was to be the springboard of the Messiah. So in going there Matthew wants us to understand that this is not just a matter of geography, it is a matter of history. Jesus is fulfilling the destiny outlined for the Christ. God is at work. When we relocate to the home counties we possibly realize some capital from an overpriced London residence, but when Jesus moves to Capernaum heaven holds its breath as divine power is on the move.
The exhilaration of these days is not confined to the skies, though. Jesus explodes into Galilee with single-minded purpose and unimaginable power. Finding two fishing families at work he calls them to follow him, and they do. Matthew uses the Greek adverb euqews, ‘immediately’, twice in almost as many sentences. Jesus calls and immediately the men obey. Jewish hearers would have detected another parallel with Israel’s glorious past. When the prophet Elijah calls Elisha to become his follower and successor Elisha too is hard at work, although he is ploughing with oxen. And it’s not just that his activities are agricultural rather than fishery-oriented. When Elijah calls him he asks to be allowed to kiss his parents and offer a sacrifice before coming. Simon, Andrew, James and John make no such requests. They leave their livelihoods, homes and families and follow the one who is calling. It seems that earth is in tune with heaven, caught up in common purpose. There is a palpable excitement at what is happening. A strange man is emerging into Galilee and other men are giving up everything to be with him.
Not do these days resonate with the prophecies of old; not only are they replete with purpose for the moment; they are also unequivocally people-centred. What is happening in Galilee is not a trend or a fashion. It is not what economists have devoted so much time to this week; it is not the sort of phantasm that can be conjured up by advertising executives to scare the gullible into buying a particular brand of deodorant. Real people are being swept along in a sudden tornado. Of course, the streets that surround us are not strangers to such events. In 193X Oswald Moseley paraded 500 Fascists in Eaton Square; forty years later the clean living Osmond brother rented a house here while their fans went wild with excitement. But the Galilean tornado brings healing and life rather than totalitarianism or best-forgotten teenage excess. With the new disciples at his side Jesus goes into Galilee, curing every disease and every sickness. This is not an idea. It is not what Aunt Ada thinks she saw in the woodshed all those years ago, the never-named thing which she has dwelt on and manipulated ever since. It is real, tangible, visible, effectual.
And its impact is such that when Paul reflects upon it a few years later in his letter to the Corinthians he is cautious about using words. Christ sent him to proclaim the Gospel, he writes ‘and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power’. Paul wants to utter aloud not words, but the cross. His gospel is not a message but an event, the earthly culmination of the tumultuous years begun in these tumultuous days in Galilee.
All this is encapsulated in the one phrase that the evangelists record Jesus uttering, the most effective sermon the world has ever heard, and probably the shortest (let the preacher understand): ‘the kingdom of heaven has come near’. There is no doctrine or exposition. It’s a simple claim that in the person of Jesus the divine has reconnected with the earthly; that those who stand in the presence of Jesus stand at the threshold of eternity; that those who look upon him look upon the author of all life and upon the one who will bring to perfection all life. Simon, Andrew, James and John knew it; the sick and diseased of Galilee knew it; years later Paul knew it. Do we, and in what way are we prepared to let it change us? Amen.
Sunday 27 January 2008,
Fourth of Epiphany,
Isaiah 9: 1-4;
1 Corinthians 1: 10-18;
Matthew 4: 12-23.
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