For the Gospel: John 14:1-14

Jesus said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves. Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.”

As our gospel reading for today begins, we are in the upper room with Jesus and his disciples on what it is to be the last night of his earthly life. And three things have just happened—three dreadful things. The first is that Judas, one of the twelve, has just left them and gone out into the night to betray Jesus. Second, Jesus has told the rest of them that he’s about to leave them, and that where he’s going, they can’t come. From now on, it seems, they are to be on their own. Third, Peter has protested at this and said he’s willing to lay down his life for Jesus, so why can’t he come with him? And Jesus in reply and has told Peter that before cock crows he will deny Jesus three times.

So this is not a happy moment. But it’s the moment when our gospel story this morning begins—a moment, surely, of disappointment and even despair. And that’s the moment when Jesus says, “Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, and trust in me.”

But how can they trust him? How can they believe in him? He’s just said he’s about to bail out! He continues, “In my Father’s house,” he says, “there are many dwelling-places. If it weren’t so, I would have told you.”

So why is he leaving them? “I am going to prepare a place for you,” he says. “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”

Scholars have been arguing for millennia about what exactly Jesus meant by all this, or even what the evangelist may have thought he meant. What are the “dwelling places”? And when Jesus says he will come again, is he talking about his resurrection appearances or his final coming in glory? I certainly don’t intend to try to answer those questions here. But even without answering them, we can surely see a general message in Jesus’ words that is clear enough. In essence he is telling them, “I know what I am doing. My departure is for a reason.”

“And,” he adds, “you know the way to the place where I am going.”

At which point Thomas, apparently, loses it.

“Lord,” he bursts out, “we don’t even know where you are going! How can we know the way?” We might reasonably flesh out Thomas’ question a little more: “We all know you’re in trouble with the authorities, Lord. By this time tomorrow you could be in a dungeon in Herod’s palace or at the Praetorium, or you could be hanging on a Roman cross. So what’s all this about us knowing the place where you’re going and therefore knowing the way?”

It’s a reasonable question. An honest question! And Jesus always takes reasonable questions seriously. So now he answers Thomas with words that have echoed down the centuries. How can you know the way? “I am the way,” he says, “the truth, and the life.”

“I am.” The Greek here is very precise. There is a pronoun, not required grammatically, which means that it is emphatic. I, in boldface type, so to speak: a choice of expression that requires Thomas to turn his attention away from thoughts or doubts or fears about what he may or may not believe to the one certainty, which at that moment is the person standing in front of him, the person of Jesus himself.

“I am THE WAY.” The evangelist’s Greek in the predicate is also precise. There is an article before the noun—which is not normal in Greek when a noun follows the verb “to be”. And what that means in this case is that the claim is absolute.[1] Not “I am a way”—I have a cunning plan, chaps, which might work!—but I am THE way—the appointed way, God’s way.

So the question for Thomas, the question for the disciples, the question for each one of us, has suddenly become very simple. “Do you trust me?” Jesus asks. “You want to know the way you should go, the way for life, the way even in death? I am the way.”

My neighbour, a seminarian, has to leave his house at the end of the month, and he doesn’t yet have a job. Now in what I’m about to say I certainly don’t mean to convey that he is being improvident or lackadaisical. He’s pursuing all proper channels, has some good prospects, and also has made sure that there is somewhere for his family to live for a while if the right job doesn’t surface in time. But he and his wife still face their imminent move amid a lot of uncertainty—and face it with impressive calm.

“You are like Abraham, setting out not knowing where he was going,” I said to him on Thursday. (If you want a neighbour who can provide you with a fairly useless biblical quotation to comment on your situation, I am probably your man.)

He smiled gently. “Yes,” he said, “I suppose we are.”

Then I went home and started to prepare this sermon. And I saw why he and his wife are so calm. In many senses, as the world counts knowing, they don’t know where they are going. They can’t see the way ahead. But they do know Christ. And he is their way. The rest is just a matter of details.

“You want to know the truth?” Jesus continues. “I am the truth.”

Not, of course, only truth as accuracy, precious and important though that is. (If we state something as fact, we should try to make sure that it is a real fact—something that some of our politicians seem to have forgotten lately.) But more than that! In a writer as Jewish as our evangelist, we are surely to understand the truth as the Hebrews understood the word emet—the truth you can rely on, the truth you can trust, the truth that will not let you down. There’s only one truth of which we can say that, and it’s the truth of God—which means, not a truth that you can learn about and then move on, but a truth that once found you must live with for ever, since there is nowhere else to go: the truth of the incarnate revelation of the Father, full of grace and truth.

“You seek life?” Jesus says. “Of course you do. Well, I am the life.”

“The life”—and again, the claim is absolute. This is the life behind all life, the life that God gives, the life of the Divine Breath, ruach elohim, the Spirit of God, as moving over the barren waters of chaos, when God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. That light, as St John has already told us in his prologue, is in Jesus the incarnate Word, and that light is the life of humankind.

So—Jesus Christ is “the way, the truth, and the life.”

“The way” where?

“The way” to the Father, of course! Our way to the One in Whom all other ends are summed up and fulfilled. He is the way, the true way, the only way, which means—“No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Now I hope I don’t need to point out that our Lord is NOT here saying, “No one comes to the Father unless they’re a Christian.” That, in fact, is precisely what he is NOT saying. (Can you imagine the one who was remembered as rebuking his disciples when they spoke ill of someone who wasn’t of their group, can you even imagine him saying that? Of course you can’t.) And the fact is, as Bishop Westcott wisely wrote in comment on this very passage, “It does not follow that everyone who is guided by Christ is directly conscious of his guidance.” Exactly. We Christians have the privilege of having the faith, the sacraments, the Scriptures, the creeds—those places and formularies where the guidance of God in Christ is promised. And we will be wise to make use of them! But as a truly catholic Christianity has always pointed out, that doesn’t mean that God is limited to those things. No—what we should hear our Lord saying here is essentially what he says elsewhere in the gospels, “By their fruits you will know them. Wherever you see the fruits of my presence—wherever you see compassion, grace, truth, love, faithfulness—be sure that I am at work, whether I am known by name or not.”

But meanwhile, what of those of us who do have the privilege of knowing who is the One who guides us? “If you know me,” Jesus says, “you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.” To know him—again, in a writer so Jewish as the fourth evangelist, we may be sure that the word is used in its full biblical sense. “To know” in the sense of “to acknowledge”—this is the Bible’s word to speak of Israel’s true relationship to God. “You shall know no other God but me,” God says to Israel through the prophet Hosea, and the prophet Jeremiah promises that in the days of God’s new covenant, “they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.” That promise, Jesus is saying, is fulfilled for those who follow him.

But then Philips says, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Heaven only knows what Philip thinks he’s asking for. A vision like Moses at Sinai? An out-of-the-body experience? An altered state of consciousness? Who knows? But notice how Philip has in fact changed the vocabulary. He is not speaking of knowledge, as his Lord spoke—the knowledge that can only come through relationship, commitment. He is talking, literally, of a show. Show us!!

Our Lord responds to what Philip’s has said, but also gently corrects his vocabulary. “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?” This is about relationship, Philip, not about show and tell!

What Jesus calls us to is a relationship with himself, and with God through him. We are to know him, to know his mind, always seeking the mind of Christ: and if we seek the mind of Christ, then we may be assured that we will be “shown” whatever we need—perhaps it will indeed be like Moses at Sinai, or perhaps it will just be the knowledge of his closeness to us in the daily round, the common task. But either way, or any other way, Our Lord himself assures us, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

Our Lord goes on to speak of himself as the Agent of the Father, using the rabbinic concept of the shaliach, or representative—that is, one who in the matter for which he is sent always to be accepted as the One who sent him. “The words that I say to you,” he says, “I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works.”

Then, finally, Our Lord touches on the power that is given to those who believe in him. “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.”  This is an extraordinary promise—and yet one amply fulfilled in the history of the Christian church, spread into every nation, to cultures and languages far beyond the conceiving or possibilities even for Our Lord in his incarnation. And yet even that is not the final promise: “I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.” This promise is not, of course, to be understood in isolation from the conversation that has preceded it.[2] It is not a blank cheque! It is a promise made in the light of all that conversation, which means that is made to us

as believers,

as those who earnestly seek the mind of Christ,

as those who will open their hearts to the Spirit that God is about to send,

for those who seek the mind of Christ and are open to God’s Spirit will be careful never to ask for anything trivial or contrary to God’s will. On the contrary, their prayer will always be the prayer of Our Lady, the perfect model for all disciples, as she cries joyfully, “Behold the Lord’s handmaid. Be it unto me according to thy Word.” Even in moments of stress, grief, or danger, when we may certainly pray for deliverance, still our prayer will be the prayer of Our Lord in Gethsemane—“Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done.”

Such prayer, we may be sure, will always be answered. And as God vindicated His Son, we too shall be vindicated by the One God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to Whom we now ascribe, as is most justly due, all might, majesty, dominion and power, now and forever. Amen.

 

[1] One case where the article may be found in the predicate after the verb “to be” is where (as in John 14.6) it indicates an individual or thing identical with the subject, so that the proposition is in fact reversible. We might equally well say, “The way [to the Father] is Christ,” and so on. See Maximilian Zerwick S.J. Biblical Greek (Rome: Pontificio Instituto Biblico, 1990) § 174.

[2] One might add that it is also not to be understood in isolation from what follows it—that is, the promised gift of the Paraklete, who is to guide us “into all truth.”

It’s appropriate that on this last Sunday before Palm Sunday and Holy Week we hear the story of what Saint John presents as the last mighty act of Jesus’ ministry—a mighty act that, according to the evangelist, not only glorifies the Father and leads many to believe in him, but also leads directly to the authorities deciding that he must die.

Let’s look a little more closely. First, we note that the sisters’ message to Jesus is modest. Obviously, it isn’t sent without the hope that he may do something, but it asks nothing, and it certainly doesn’t suggest what he ought to do. It simply lays the situation before him: “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” We’re reminded of his mother’s words to him at the beginning of the gospel, at the marriage at Cana, “They have no wine,” she says. Of course we may be sure that she, too, has her hopes. But she certainly doesn’t suggest to Jesus what he should do.

As with Mary at Cana, so here, Our Lord’s initial response seems disappointing. He says that what’s happening “is for God’s glory” and then stays “two days longer in the place where he was.” Why does he do this? The evangelist soon tells us: Lazarus has already died—presumably almost directly after the sisters sent their message—and Our Lord knows this: “Lazarus is dead,” he says to the disciples, in case there’s any doubt in their minds. (Although the evangelist doesn’t tell us how he knows it, I’m not sure that the suggestion made by some scholars that he’s learned it “supernaturally” is really necessary.[1]) Anyway, with the two days that Our Lord remains where he is, and then the two days that it takes him and the disciples to travel to Bethany, it means, as the Evangelist carefully points out, that when he arrives, “Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days.” Perhaps a point is being made: some rabbinic tradition said that the soul might hover near the body for three days, but after that there was no hope of revival or resuscitation.[2] In other words, it’s very clear that Lazarus is really dead.

Before Jesus even arrives at Bethany, first Martha, and then Mary, come to meet him. The way in which they are portrayed here somewhat reflects the way they are portrayed in Luke’s gospel. Martha is the busy one who gets there first and then organizes her sister Mary to go. Mary is the one who simply falls at his feet. Yet both make the same affirmation: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

To Martha he gives a response that is at once a statement of his identity, and a promise: “I am the resurrection and the life.” How right our Prayer Books have been always to place this text as the beginning of our burial liturgy! For this—the resurrection and the life—is what Jesus always is in relation to us. He is the resurrection in that if we put our trust in Him (as indeed Martha has done) though we indeed come, as do all, to the grave, yet we shall live: we shall not die eternally. And he is “life” because all who receive the life that he gives can never really die: because the life that comes to us through our relationship with Jesus is already eternal life—as He says later in his high-priestly prayer: “This is life eternal, to know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent.”[3] That’s our Lord’s response to Martha.

His response to Mary is to weep with her. “Jesus wept.”  It is, I’ve been told, the most quoted verse in the New Testament. I don’t know. Perhaps it is. And if so, perhaps for good reason. God knows, there is more than enough to weep over in our world!  So how important to remember that Our Lord weeps with us! That at the heart of God’s divinity there is sorrow for our sorrow! That, as the old hymn had it, “There is no place where earth’s sorrows are more felt that than up in heaven.” “In all their afflictions,” the prophet Isaiah said of Israel’s history, “God was afflicted.” And our Lord himself has told us, “not a sparrow falls to earth, but God knows”—and God cares. Surely it does not do away our sorrows to know that our Lord weeps with us. But it helps.

But our Lord does not only weep. He goes to the tomb with Mary and Martha, and there performs a mighty act.  “Come forth,” he says, and Lazarus comes.  “Unbind him,” he says, “and let him go.”  And so Martha and Mary see the glory of God, just as our Lord had promised them.

The story is told without fuss or elaboration—and we feel its power still, 2000 years after it was written.  It is, as we began by saying, appropriate that before we move to contemplate the Passion of our Lord, we hear of this mighty act. It’s appropriate for two reasons.  First because, at least in John’s view, what Jesus did here was a major factor in leading the authorities to decide that he must die.  And second, because it is a fitting prelude to the miracle of Easter itself, the resurrection of our Lord.  Of course it’s not a story of resurrection in the Easter sense. Our Lord rises, as Saint Paul reminds us, never to die again. Death has no more dominion over him.  The story of Lazarus being raised is not a story like that. Lazarus after being raised is still subject to this world of sin and death, and will die again. But, like other stories of God’s servants raising the dead in Scripture, it is a story reminding us that our God is not bound by death, indeed that our God is sovereign over death.  The Lord who raised Lazarus is the one whose own resurrection will be the gateway for us to everlasting life. The raising of Lazarus is a sign and pledge guaranteeing his power to fulfill his promise to Martha: “Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

[1] Barrett, John (revised ed.) 391.

[2] Eccl. R. 12.6; Lev. R. 18.1; cf. G. Dalman, Jesus-Jeshua [ET 1929] 220.

[3] John 17:3

“‘Is the LORD among us or not?’”

I’d like to day to spend a few minutes with you looking at the story from Exodus that was our first lesson—the story of that time in the desert when there was no water for the people to drink, and they were so angry with Moses that he thought they were ready to stone him.

“Is the LORD among us or not?”

Thus the storyteller sums up the Israelite’s fury.

“Is the LORD among us or not?”

Now of course the dominant testimony of Exodus and indeed, of the Bible as a whole, is that God was among them: always in Israel’s midst, guiding her and delivering her. But it is a part of the honesty and candour of Israel’s Scriptures that alongside that dominant testimony there runs another testimony—what Walter Brueggemann has taught us to call a countertestimony. And the countertestimony, simply put, is this: that it didn’t always seem like that.

One of the most disappointing moments for me in Brevard Childs’ always learned and sometimes wise commentary on the Book of Exodus is his discussion of this particular story. The whole point of it, he tells us, “turns on the gracious and surprising provision of God who provided water for his people when none was available.”[1] Really? The whole point? That certainly wasn’t how the Psalmist saw it in Psalm 95. The Psalmist saw it as a story about Israel’s heart being hardened, about rebellion. And although the Psalmist exhorts us to avoid such rebellion, even he doesn’t say there was no reason for it. And surely even a child listening to this story could see—and perhaps see better than a learned and pious biblical scholar determined at all costs (even at the cost of common sense) to defend God’s honour—surely even a child could see that one point of this story has to be that if God was guiding Israel through the wilderness—and let us note that the biblical text is very careful to tell us that it was “at the LORD’s command” that the people moved on “by stages” and so came to Rephidim where there was no water—then it was God who had got Israel into this mess, this situation where the children and the animals were dying of thirst. And it was that—not the provision of water from the rock, but the lack of water—that had led to the question, “Is the LORD among us or not?”

Certainly there was much in Israel’s life and history that was congruous with the lofty claims she made for her God. But there were also moments in her life as in ours when it looked as if God was letting her down, moments when life was inscrutable, moments when there seemed to be no connection, no match, between faith’s claim that God is faithful and God cares, and our actual experience. And it is one of the glories of our Scriptures that they make no attempt to hide this fact.  “O God, why have you utterly cast us off?” the Psalmist asks bitterly, “And why is your wrath so hot against the sheep of your pasture?” (Ps. 74.1). The prophet Jeremiah cries out: “Ah, Lord GOD, how utterly you have deceived this people and Jerusalem, saying, ‘It shall be well with you,’ even while the sword is at the throat!” (Jer. 4:10). And Our Lord himself upon the cross seems to despair: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

So my response to Brevard Childs’ commentary on this passage is this—Yes, it is in a sense true that the point of the story is the gracious and surprising provision of God, just as it is true that the point of the passion narratives in the gospels is the resurrection of Our Lord. But just as it is false and unfaithful to imagine that we, or even our Lord Himself, could come to Easter Day without going through Good Friday, so it is false and therefore unfaithful to deny the real experience of loss, confusion, and uncertainty that are expressed in this morning’s story as a whole, and in particular in the question that the narrator himself apparently sees as summing up the whole affair, “Is the LORD among us or not?” And it is equally false, and therefore unfaithful, however well or piously intended, to deny that there are times when we too share those feelings.

Lent—the spring season, the season of renewal and rethinking—is surely the right time to remember this. And perhaps never more so than this Lent, when so much seems to have changed for the worse from what we hoped for or even took for granted in Lent of 2016. I speak not merely of our personal lives and journeys, which inevitably have their downs and ups, their moments of darkness as well as of light. I speak rather of the world around us, of the state of society at large. Many among us are troubled and anxious by the way in which in this country and in Europe institutions and progress that twelve months ago we regarded as secure are suddenly under threat. Structures designed to prevent another European war are being recklessly undone; progress in bringing justice to the disadvantaged and in protecting our fragile environment is being reversed; honourable purveyors of real information and honest critique are openly reviled and insulted, while manifest liars are honoured, and our leaders openly rejoice not in truth but in “post-truth”—that is, in lies—plainly wanting us to forget that it is only the truth that can set us free. And all while spineless politicians who surely know better simply acquiesce. More than once in the last few weeks someone has quoted to me W. B. Yeats’ prophetic poem “The Second Coming,”

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

So—“Is the LORD among us or not?”

At which point on a Sunday morning one’s natural desire is to offer some word of consolation, to point to some sign that things are not really so bad as they seem. “Look here! Look there! See! God is working his purpose out, after all!” Or alternatively to offer some word of explanation, such as the hymn writer’s,

The flame shall not hurt thee. I only design

Thy dross to consume, and thy gold to refine.

—a thought that I suppose just about might seem satisfactory in connection with such ordinary trials and tribulations as come to all of us from time to time, but which when considered in light of the thousands of children who are at this very moment being killed, maimed, and traumatized in Syria, simply will not do.

All of which is a way of saying that the desire to console or to explain may actually in this particular case be a temptation to apostasy. Let us remember that according to Jeremiah it is false priests and false prophets who cry, “Peace, peace, when there is no peace” (Jer. 6.14, 8.12). So perhaps our Lenten call in 2017 is precisely to live with the enigma, with the silence, with the hiddenness of God. That is what the Israelites were called on to do in the wilderness when there was no water. That is what Our Lord was called on to do on Good Friday when it seemed that God had forsaken him. That is what thousands of Christians in Syria and Iraq and Africa are called on to do at this very moment in the face of persecution, violence, and lawlessness.

Of course we must continue to try to do our duty: to do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with our God, in whatever ways those general duties may present themselves to us in the ordinary course of our lives—but perhaps we must be willing to do so for no other evident reason and with no greater encouragement or consolation than this: that despite everything, these still seem to be the right things to do. And perhaps it is true, as C. S. Lewis claimed, that God is never more glorified, nor are we ever in this life closer to the divine glory, than when we look around us at a universe where the heavens are as brass and from which every trace of God’s grace seems to have vanished, and still obey.

In which conviction, like Abraham as St Paul described him, “hoping against hope” (Rom. 4:18), let us then confess our faith as the church has taught us.

We believe in One God…

 

[1] Brevard S. Childs, The Book of Exodus (Louisville, Kentucky: WestminsterJohnKnox, 1974) 308.

 

 

 

 

People in the Middle Ages* assumed that the sun went round the earth. Given what they saw every day, that was a perfectly reasonable assumption. Because we no longer share that assumption, we believe that our view of things is not nearly so limited as theirs was. Their universe, we say, was small and anthropocentric, whereas we now know how vast and complex things really are.

Actually, the medieval view of the universe was by no means anthropocentric. Quite the contrary! It was theocentric, and our planet earth was on the rim. When our forebears looked at the stars, the thoughtful among them did not regard themselves as looking toward “outer space,” but rather as looking inward toward the divine glory, of which they and their world were merely on the margins, the outside edge. [1]

Nor was their universe small. It was indeed as vast as it could be: which is to say, the thoughtful were perfectly well aware that they were surrounded by a creation that in its complexity and size transcended anything they could comprehend. If we do not believe that, we need only to read Dante, especially the Paradiso. It is true that the dimensions they envisaged for this universe turn out to be tiny in comparison with what we have learned about the reality in succeeding generations, but still those dimensions were vast—inestimably vast—by the standards of everything that they knew.

To say all this is not to say that we don’t know more about the universe’s vastness and complexity than did Dante and his contemporaries, it is merely a matter of setting the record straight. And indeed our greater knowledge is a truly an exciting difference between them and us. Such knowledge can lead us to new and renewed awareness of God’s grandeur and glory—as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin[2] and, among our contemporaries, Arnold Benz,[3] continue to show us.

That is the good news. The bad news is that for some, this new knowledge leads not to fresh appreciation of the creator’s greatness and glory, but rather to a view of the world around us that does not even rise to the dignity of being anthropocentric. For so long as we are content to exploit our planet and everything on it for our immediate comfort—or rather the immediate comfort of a privileged few—and in the process to jeopardize the wellbeing of every future generation, it can hardly be said with any accuracy that we are being anthropocentric. We are merely being selfish.

Interestingly enough, at this point, the debate becomes not a “science versus religion” argument, but rather a process in which those bent only on immediate profit resist not only religion’s command that God’s creation be respected but also the findings of science, claiming that the conclusions of the international scientific community and such groups as the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris are “as yet unproven,” and at times even attempting to account for those conclusions by invoking conspiracy theories of breathtaking unlikelihood and absurdity.[4]

Is it to comfort and sustain ourselves in this nonsense that we pretend that the idea of a divine creator is itself no longer sustainable? One contemporary writer dismisses belief in God simply by declaring that “the idea of a divine super-Self outside of or beyond the universe… boggles the mind”[5]—a declaration that he appears to think constitutes an argument. (Sir Thomas Browne was, alas, and remains, only too correct in his observation: for most people, “a piece of Rhetorick is a sufficient argument of Logick”!) Of course the declaration itself is correct, as the psalmist noted millennia ago: “such knowledge is too wonderful and excellent for me: I cannot attain unto it” (Ps. 139.5). The psalmist, however, was not so foolish or so arrogant as to think that because he could not conceive of something, therefore it could not exist. Looked at from another angle, what we have here is a classic example – even a caricature – of what Walter Ong has identified as “the tendency of the past few centuries to overspatialize the universe so that everything is reduced to models picturable in space, and what is unpicturable (‘unimagineable’ is often the term invoked) is discarded as impossible or unreal.”[6] Exactly.

In reflecting on the phenomenon of contemporary atheism I am frequently struck not only by a repeated failure of logic even in clever people (I think, for example, of the dismal muddle – by virtually any standards – that constitutes Richard Dawkins’ key fourth chapter in The God Delusion) but by something deeper – a disastrous failure of imagination, a destructive (destructive because inimical to thought) lack of any ability to deal in metaphor. I note, for example, that Dawkins’ overall approach to the Bible is virtually that of a fundamentalist – save, of course, that he holds the Bible to be wrong about matters of science.

To some extent, no doubt, Dawkins’ own upbringing and education must be held responsible for this. But we cannot hold religion itself – in which category I certainly include Christianity in its various forms – guiltless in the matter. Those who write about their experience of God invariably speak of that experience as enlightening, as freeing, and as a way to new truth. Those who write from an opposite viewpoint are, by definition, not writing of their experience of God (since they deny God’s existence) but of their experience of religion, which they have found oppressive, obfuscating, and untruthful. And alas, their critique always has some validity, since religion – and again, I must emphasize that I include Christianity, insofar as it manifests itself as a religion – religion, as a human phenomenon, frequently has been and is all these things. Hence the paradox: that religion is at once precious to God, for religion hands on the traditions, tells the stories, and says the prayers, yet it is also the enemy of God, for it also and often distorts all these things. If it is not our best that we do in God’s name, then quite often it is our worst. The synoptic narrative of Peter’s confession –

you are the Messiah…

blessed are you, Simon…

far be this from you Lord…

Get behind me, Satan! (Matt. 16.17, 23)

– is only too representative of both these aspects of religion as human phenomenon.

Here, certainly, is food for further thought.

In the mean time, at least we should say this: that it is not enough for us to encourage respect for creation and creatures simply on the grounds of good stewardship and the wise use of resources, although of course there is sense in that. It is not even enough to encourage such respect on the grounds of common decency: that we are surrounded by sentient creatures who are capable of suffering and we have no right to augment that suffering for our amusement, although that also is true.[7] But here we are faced with something deeper. And the Scriptures make that clear, if we will listen to them.

To be sure, the Scriptures were written by human beings and tell in particular a story of God’s relationship with humanity. To that extent therefore their narrative is centered on humanity. But again and again they remind us that this narrative is only part of a much greater narrative that involves all being. The Word, St. John tells us in his opening and definitive statement, “became flesh” (1:14). He does not say that the Word became Jewish, which would, according to his testimony, have been true. Nor does he say that the Word became human, which would also have been true. But he says, “the Word became flesh (sarx)”—and thereby indicates that it is not only Israel nor even humankind that is consecrated by the fullness of divine indwelling, but flesh—matter, dust, dirt, the stuff of earth and solar systems and galaxies and the universe.[8] “In him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17 cf. Heb. 1:3a): in the consecration of an atom, the universe is consecrated. So St. Paul, who sees God in Christ “reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor. 5.19), is also clear that he envisages that reconciliation for the entire created order: “for the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21, cf. Col. 1.20). Hence the church, according to the Letter to the Ephesians, while it is the new Temple, Christ’s body, is not to be understood as being those things apart from or in contra distinction to God’s good pleasure “to sum up all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth” (1:10).[9]

“As for me,” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin says to God in his prayer The Hymn of the Universe, “if I could not believe that your real Presence animates and makes tractable and enkindles even the very least of the energies which invade me or brush past me, would I not die of cold?”[10] Someone says to me, “What a marvelous sensitivity to God’s presence in all things this man had!” Had he? Or is it not rather the case that we are marvelously insensitive?

Saint Francis treated animals and even rocks more or less as he treated people. “How odd!” we say. Or are we not odd, in that we so often treat people and animals more or less as we treat rocks?

People in the Middle Ages were mistaken in supposing that the sun went round the earth.

We, I think, are mistaken in supposing that God does not encounter us in every part of Creation, in our failure to realize that we may and should encounter the Divine in rocks and stones and trees, in our refusal to see that the heavens display God’s glory and the firmament shows His handiwork.

Which mistake is likely to have the more serious consequences?

 

* A version of this paper was originally published in the Sewanee Theological Review; it remains the © of the University of the South and the author.

[1] C. S. Lewis,  The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962) 118-19. The whole book is, of course, a masterly introduction to medieval understanding of the universe. It was, as Lewis points out, a religious view, but not therefore necessarily a Christian religious view.

[2] See Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Le Milieu Divin (Paris: Editions du Seuill, 1957); ET Le Milieu Divin / The Divine Milieu (London: Collins / New York: Harper, 1960).

[3] See Arnold Benz, Die Zukunft des Universums: Zufall, Chaos, Gott? (Dusseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1997); ET The Future of the Universe: Chance, Chaos, God? (London: Continuum International / New York: Continuum, 2000).

[4] I am reminded of the tobacco companies’ endlessly repeated “it isn’t proved” refusal in the 1960s and ‘70s to admit the deleterious effects of smoking, although those effects and the connection of smoking to lung cancer were already obvious not only to unbiased observers but even, it now emerges, to their own research, and had been for decades. In the matter of theories, moreover, much of the demand for “proof” is a demand for a level of demonstration that is hardly possible or feasible. That does not mean that that a particular theory should not be taken seriously, and even acted upon. “In spite of inadequate data, a majority of researchers can often consent to endorse one theory. They do so not because they have colluded in the making of some secret deal, but rather because they perceive an overwhelming force of evidence in the observed findings. One should not underestimate theories because of their provisional nature” (Arnold Benz, Astrophysics and Creation: Perceiving the Universe through Science and Participation [New York: Herder and Herder, 2016]) 29-30.

[5] Roy W. Hoover in Gerd Lüdemann, William Lane Graig, et al. Jesus’ Resurrection, Fact or Figment?: A Debate Between William Lane Craig and Gerd Lüdemann, Paul Copan and Ronald K. Tacelli, eds. (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 127.

[6] Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica: or, Enquiries into Very many Received Tenents, and commonly Presumed Truths (1646) 1.3; Walter Ong S.J., The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1981 [1967]), 7.

[7] A friend of mine, a hunter, says, “There are only two justifiable reasons to kill an animal: one is that you are going to eat it, and the other is that you have good reason to suppose it is planning to eat you.” On all of which see further my post, “Firsts from a Couple of Small Islands,” published 24 June 2016.

[8] The “physical or natural order of things, as opposed to the spiritual or supernatural” (LS, σάρξ, cf. BDAG σάρξ, 2b, c, and 5).

[9] Let the reader note that while for the sake of convenience I indulge the present widespread prejudice against supposing Paul to be the author of Ephesians, I do not therefore endorse it. Ernest Best, at the end of a careful discussion of the question, admits (in a curiously tortured sentence) that “many of the objections to Pauline authorship are not individually capable of disproving it, but it is their cumulative effect which suggests another author.” In Best’s view, “the argument resembles… the successive blows of a forester felling a tree; the first few blows of his axe appear to make no impression but as he continues striking, the tree weakens and eventually falls” (Ephesians, [Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998], 36). The forester analogy is striking as a description of Best’s feelings in the matter: but it is not an argument. The fact, as Best has himself just shown us (Ephesians, 6-36), is that none of the alleged objections to Pauline authorship of Ephesians is actually conclusive. Contrast the scholarly caution of G. H. P. Thompson, The Letters of Paul to the Ephesians to the Colossians and to Philemon (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1967) 4-15; see also more recently, N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (London: S.P.C.K. / Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 56-61, 556-62.

[10] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymne de l’Universe (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1961); ET Hymn of the Universe, Gerald Vann, O.P., transl. (London: Collins / New York: Harper and Row, 1965). I am struck by the fact that Lucretius, who did not believe in gods or divinity or divine care for humanity. who thought of reality as simply atoms moving meaninglessly in a meaningless universe, was nonetheless struck with what Stephen Greenblatt calls “a poet’s sense of wonder.” And this wonder, “welled up out of recognition that we are made of the same matter as the stars and the oceans and all things else. And this recognition was the basis for the way he thought we should live our lives” (The Swerve [New York and London: Norton, 2011] 8). Alas, our modern Philistines appear to lack all sense of wonder, as, indeed, they appear to lack all imagination.

It had begun the week before.  Matthew, Mark, and Luke are agreed about that–the week before, with that never-to-be-forgotten conversation at Caesarea Philippi. Perhaps “conversation” was hardly the word for it.   It had been more of a quarrel, really, if we are to trust Matthew and Mark, although Luke, as is his habit, tends to gloss over that.

To tell the truth, it started well enough.   They stood together with Jesus in Caesarea Philippi, a little group of good Jews in the middle of a pagan town, surrounded by pagan idols, and Jesus asked them straight out, “What are they saying about me?   What’s the word on the street?”

So they told him. “They’re saying you’re a prophet—in the line of the prophets. They hear you telling us God is about to act.   Israel’s exile will be ended. Her sins are forgiven. All this pagan trash”—they waved at the idols—“will be cleansed from Israel. Yes, you’re a prophet. Some even think you’re John the Baptizer, back from the dead. That’s the word on the street.”

He nodded. “Yes. I see. And you, what do you think?”

There was a pause. They looked at each other. They were all thinking the same thing—but up till now, every time anyone actually said it, or anything like it, he told them to shut up.

But then Peter blurted it out anyway. “You’re not just a prophet, you’re the One who’s going to do it. You’re the Messiah.”

Jesus came back with his standard response, just as usual, “Don’t tell a soul.”   But he was very gentle when he said it—seemed quite moved, really, and they noticed he didn’t deny it. And for that moment everything felt wonderful.   It was really coming. The kingdom. God would return to Zion. Victory over the Romans! The land cleansed! A new beginning! He was the one. God’s One. The Messiah.

But then he drew them closer, and his eyes were not sparkling as they thought at first, but full of tears.

“Listen,” he said. “It isn’t going to be the way you think. The Son of man isn’t going to lead an army into battle to defeat the Romans. I can’t do that because that’s not what God does. I can only offer the world God’s compassion, God’s grace, because that’s what God offers. And because this is a world that is afraid of compassion, and crucifies love, I shall be mocked and scorned and finally crucified.   And only through that, the way of love, will I be vindicated, raised from the dead—because that’s God’s way.”

All that was bad enough. But there was worse to come.

“Listen,” he said, “if any of you really wants to be my follower, that means coming with me. It means taking up a cross like mine every day of your life: your cross, of course—no two are alike—but a cross, all the same, and following me. If you try to keep your life safe, I tell you, you’ll lose it.   But if you lose your life for my sake, you’ll find it.”

He paused, and then went on.

“You find the thought of a Messiah who is willing to suffer at the hands of sinners and pagans shameful? Humiliating? I tell you: that is God’s way. It has been God’s way with Israel. It has been God’s way with the world. As the prophet said, ‘All the day long, I have held out my hands to a disobedient and gainsaying people.’ If you are ashamed of that now, then you are ashamed of God, and in the end God will be ashamed of you. And I will be ashamed of you.”

Well, they were appalled. In some ways, they felt betrayed. Of course, they ought to have seen it coming. All those odd things Jesus had been saying, about “loving the enemy,” and “turning the other cheek,” and “if a Roman soldier compels you to carry his kit for a mile—as he is entitled to under Roman law, but no further—be generous, and carry it two.” It was all pointing in the same direction, if they’d cared to listen: but they hadn’t, they hadn’t drawn the conclusions. And now he had laid it out plainly, and they didn’t like it.

So a week passed. Not a pleasant week. According to John, who tells the story rather differently, it was about this time that some of those who had been disciples left and went back home. But the twelve didn’t leave, nor the women. After all, as Peter said, “Where else shall we go?”   So they stuck around. But there was a lot of muttering in corners, and it was not a happy time.

Well, not the women, it has to be said: they didn’t mutter. They just seemed to go on as before. Mary of Magdala—“fish-pickle Mary,” as Matthew used to call her, since that was how she had made all that money—and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward: they kept on paying the bills, and when the male disciples muttered to them, they just said, “Ask Mary, his mother!”

And then when they asked her, she just smiled and said what she always said, “Do whatever he tells you!”—which, as somebody pointed out (it may have been Thomas) sounded very wise and long-suffering and noble, but somehow didn’t seem to get you very far.

Anyway, the upshot of it all was that at the end of the week, in the evening, Jesus came up to Peter and James and John, who were sitting in a row looking depressed, and said, “Come and walk with me, lads. Come up into the hills.”

So they walked with him, on, up, into the twilight. At first it was pleasant, cool and gentle after the day.  But then the twilight deepened, and He began to walk ahead of them, quicker and quicker, and they could hardly keep up. Where was he going? What was he doing? It was darker than ever. They couldn’t see him. And now they couldn’t even see the path.  Come to think of it, this was typical of their whole time with him. They didn’t understand what he was doing, and by now it was pitch dark, and they were getting frightened. Someone had said there were mountain lions out on these hills. Didn’t he care about meeting a mountain lion? Oh dear God, just for once couldn’t he behave reasonably?

Then it happened.

The light.

He was the light.

Kneeling there ahead of them, shining and filling the ravine and the path behind and before and the whole sky like the sun, so that the stars disappeared and the birds thought it was morning and began to sing.

And in that moment they saw.

That he was after all, what Moses and Elijah and all the prophets had pointed to.

That what he would accomplish as he died in Jerusalem really would be a new exodus: not like the old exodus that liberated a single people from bondage that they might learn God’s ways, but a new exodus that would liberate the world from bondage, and them with it.

No wonder he couldn’t fight the Romans! He’d come to free the Romans, too!

And they heard.

The voice.

God’s voice.

In heaven.   And in their hearts.

“This is my son. Listen to Him. This is my beloved son, my Isaac, who like Isaac of old will be willing to be bound upon the altar of the cross rather than be unfaithful to me. And just as throughout all Israel’s history, whenever I have looked upon Israel, I have remembered the faithfulness of Isaac, so now, when I look upon all humankind, I shall remember the faithfulness of my Messiah, my anointed, my chosen one; from now on when I look upon humanity, I shall look upon it as found in him.”

So it was a new beginning, just as they’d hoped. But then, not just as they had hoped, for it was better! Deeper, wider, and sweeter! And nothing would ever be the same again.

Actually, in some ways it was the same again.

It would be nice to say that from that moment on the disciples understood what their Lord was doing and were able to support him in it. It would be nice, but it wouldn’t be true—not if we are to believe Matthew, Mark, and Luke. According to them, as the Lord set his face to go up to Jerusalem to die, the disciples continued to misunderstand, to complain, and to ask stupid questions: and when he was finally arrested, one of the twelve whom he had specially chosen as his apostles had betrayed him, and the others forsook him and fled, leaving the women alone to support him at the cross.

So nothing had really changed.

Or perhaps it had.

For it must be said that while the disciples continued to misunderstand, to complain, and to ask stupid questions, at least it was to him they complained, him they asked, and with him that they argued. And when the arrest came, the eleven fled, it was true—but they didn’t flee very far. Rather, they seem to have hung about, like a pack of cowed dogs, knowing they’ve done wrong, ears and tails down, but eyes still watching.

And so it was that when their Lord was raised from the dead, they were there to be met by him.

When the Spirit came, they were there to receive it.

And when the commission was given, they were there to accept it.

Even then, they didn’t become perfect. According to legend Peter was still vacillating on the last day of his life. But he got it right in the end, and became a martyr, and in the meantime he and Mary of Magdala and the others had gone skipping across the Greco-Roman world, lighting a flame in human hearts that has never been put out.

It was not, of course, any strength or quality in them that led to this. They were the first to say that. It was the strength and quality of the One they followed. “This is my beloved son. Listen to Him!” He was what they had seen him to be, that night on a mountain. He was Lord of life, Light of Israel, Light to the nations, God’s Messiah. He was what they had seen him to be, and because he was that, he was able, slowly, slowly, perhaps, but always surely, to make of them the women and men they were created to be, his saints, the lights of the world. He was transfigured before them: but what that pointed to in the end was not just his transfiguration but theirs. Not just his destiny, but theirs and ours. If you want to know what not just human destiny is, but our destiny, and that of humanity, and that of the whole creation, then look to the transfiguration of Jesus Christ. “I,” says our Lord, “when I am lifted up, will draw all to myself.” “In him,” says the writer to the Colossians, “God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth on in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.” That is our destiny! No exceptions, no exclusions.

So not surprisingly, the sparks those first disciples were able to light have not gone out, despite the fact that we human beings have often surrounded them and done our best to drown them with our pomposity and our stupidity and our cruelty and our self-righteousness. Still the darkness never overcomes the light, and the light continues to shine, down to this very day, this very hour, this very altar, your very hearts. “This is my son, my beloved, listen to him.” “This is my body, given for you.” “This is my blood, shed for you and for many.” “Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for you.”

 

So it seems that night on the mountain was a new beginning, after all.

 

 

 

 

 

For the Gospel: Matthew 5:1-12

I would like to spend a few moments this morning looking with you at the passage we just read for the gospel, the so-called “Beatitudes,” presented by Matthew as the prologue to Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount.” Surely it’s one of the most familiar passages in the gospel for all Christians: yet there are ways, I think, in which our understanding of it suffers precisely because of that familiarity.

It’s very clear the evangelist wants us to hear “the Sermon on the Mount” as a speech. What’s more, both the shape and subject matter of the Sermon show that we are intended to hear it as a certain kind of speech. Some time ago the University where I used to teach had a series of lectures called, “How then shall we live?” Well, that is exactly the kind of question the Sermon on the Mount answers. It’s a speech calling us to act in certain ways, to follow a certain style of life. It’s therefore an example of what ancient literary critics – critics contemporary with our evangelist – would have called a “deliberative” speech, because it was intended to influence our “deliberations” about what we should do.

Deliberative rhetoric, according to those critics, involved an appeal to at least one of two things: either to honour, or to expediency. That’s to say, someone who would persuade us to act must convince us either that the course they suggest is the right thing to do, or else that it is the prudent thing. Ideally, of course, they might persuade us that it is both.

Now here, for me, is the first surprising thing about the Sermon. I don’t know about you, but I should have expected Our Lord’s teaching on the way to live to depend mostly on an ethical appeal: “do this because it is right!” Therefore one of the immediately surprising things for me about the Sermon is that its form is not actually to appeal to honour at all, but to expediency. Our Lord does not actually suggest that the way of life he teaches is desirable because it is noble, but because it is intelligent. Consider, for example, how the Sermon ends – with an appeal that, like the “Beatitudes” themselves, is among the best known passages in the New Testament:

Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell – and great was its fall!

“Do what I tell you,” Jesus says, “and you will be safe. Ignore what I tell you, and you will experience disaster.” What could possibly be clearer than that?

What then of the Beatitudes? – “blessed are the poor in spirit,” and so on?

Well – the first thing to note is this – “beatitude” and “blessed” have become for us largely religious words, as when we speak of “the Beatific Vision,” or “the Blessed Sacrament.” But in Matthew’s Greek, the word that Jesus speaks at the beginning of the sermon (μακάριος), the word that we translate into English as “blessed” – that word is, actually, not a religious word at all.   In its normal sense it is actually a quite secular, this-worldly, even irreligious word: it simply means “happy,” “fortunate,” or even “lucky.” “How happy,” Jesus says. “are those who are reviled! How happy those who are persecuted!” In other words, at this point, too, Jesus presents us with what is formally not an appeal to our honour, but to expediency. “Live your life this way,” he says, “and you will be happy!” Live some other way, and, by implication, you will be miserable.

But that granted, surely we have a puzzle. Does what Jesus says actually make sense? Does not simple observation of the world as it is tell us that it is those who are well treated, not those who are persecuted, and those who are honoured, not those who are reviled, who are happy? So what does Jesus mean? Was the world he addressed somehow different from ours? In this respect, of course not! These beatitudes would have startled Jesus’ first hearers just as they startle us – and no doubt they were meant to.

Of course not all the beatitudes would have seemed so paradoxical. “Happy,” Jesus says, “are the poor in spirit” – which is to say, those who know they cannot go it alone, those who, as the New English Bible translated this verse, “know their need of God.” Many in Jesus’ audience – and not only Jews – would have agreed with him.   The very quality that makes Virgil’s Aeneas the ideal Roman hero (in contrast to, say, a Homeric hero, such as “crafty” Odysseus) is that Aenius is pius Aeneas, faithful in discharging his obligations both to those around him and to the gods. In other words, he doesn’t think he can go it alone. He fears the gods.

Again – “Happy,” says Jesus, “are the meek” – actually, at least in the sense which we moderns use the word, “meek” no longer gets the force of Jesus’ words very well, although it did so better in the sixteenth century. The word in Greek is praus, and it refers to a quality that Greeks, Romans, and Jews alike in the ancient world would have regarded as among the greatest of virtues: we might render it by a phrase such as, “gentle, disciplined calmness.” It is the quality of those who know who they are and are in control of themselves, and who act gently and compassionately even when they have just cause for anger and have the power to punish harshly.   It was a quality that the Greek philosophers commended in rulers; it was a quality for which Plato’s Phaedo praised Socrates (Phaedo 115d–117a); and it was a quality for which the Jewish scriptures praised Moses, who was, they said, in this sense more “meek” than any person upon the earth (Num. 12.3 LXX).

Again – “Happy are those who mourn.” On the surface that is false. Obviously, our Lord himself was not someone who always went about with a long face. If he was, how on earth did he come to get a reputation as “a winebibber” and one who (in contrast to John the Baptist) came “eating and drinking”? Why on earth did all those tax collectors and sinners and harlots keep asking him to their parties? Yet Jesus does seem to be saying here that the saints should mourn, at least some of the time. Why? The answer, if we reflect for a moment, is obvious enough. We should mourn because the righteous suffer and God has not yet put things right. We must mourn because God’s will is manifestly not yet done on earth as it is in heaven. We may put it another way – if we can watch the news on television, if we can seriously consider the woes of the world, and not mourn, there is evidently something wrong with us.

We may say the same kind of thing of at least five of the other beatitudes, of those who “hunger and thirst for righteousness,” of the merciful, the pure in heart, and the peacemakers. Of all we can say that properly understood, they do represent a true path to human wholeness and integrity, and therefore a true path to real happiness.

Still, however, there are those last two beatitudes. “Happy are those who are persecuted” and, “Happy are you when people revile you and persecute you!” How can that be? To be persecuted, to be reviled – these are not, after all, ethical qualities or qualities of character. So in what sense do they make us happy?

First, we should note the way in which they are qualified. It is not persecution on any ground that makes us happy, nor is it being reviled on any ground. Jesus does not say that we will be happy if we are reviled for being a pain in the neck. “Happy,” says our Lord, “are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake… Happy are you when people revile you … on my account.” What is envisioned is not simply hostility, but hostility brought on because of “righteousness,” that is, in the cause of God’s justice, and because of faithful obedience to God’s will. The truth is, Jesus says, to be reviled in such a way as this is to be reviled as the prophets were reviled – and, he might have added, it is to be reviled as he himself was reviled, so reviled that eventually we brought him to a cross. To be reviled for God’s cause is to be in the company of God’s faithful: more, it is to be in the company of the Son of God. To be reviled for God’s cause is therefore to be in the fellowship of Christ’s church.

And here, finally, we come to the real secret of the beatitudes, which is also the secret of the church: for the secret of the church lies in its hope, and the church’s hope is not in itself, but in God. So – the way of life that the beatitudes propose is finally expedient for us, not because of anything we see in the world, nor because of any particular character it may build in us, but because of what God will do.   The way of life that the beatitudes propose is finally expedient for us because it is God’s way, and God will not forever be mocked.

Therefore – “Happy are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven” – not just the Kingdom as we see it now, partial and fragmented by our sin, but Kingdom for which we pray, the Kingdom that God will bring, God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

Happy are those that mourn for the sorrows of the world – for they shall know God’s consolation.

“Happy are those who hunger and thirst for God’s righteousness,” because in the end, “they shall be satisfied.”

“Happy are the pure in heart” – that is, those whose vision is single, who have fixed their eyes and hope upon God alone – because they shall indeed find what they seek: “they shall see God.”

In that vision too, there will be paradox. In its light all other beauty and joy for which we longed, or even which we tasted, will turn out to have been only a promise; and yet, in its light, all other beauty and joy will find its meaning and be more precious than it could ever have been by itself, precisely because it is a promise of the true beauty, God’s beauty, by and for which the heavens were made.   God grant us purity of heart. God grant us to see God’s beauty, and to rejoice together in it. God grant us that happiness. Amen.

John the Baptist is back with us again this morning. He appears a lot during the seasons of Advent and the Epiphany, doesn’t he? Today we have part of St. John’s take on him—St. John, who always has a slightly different slant on things from the other three evangelists, and is always interesting.

“The next day,” John tells us—in the morning, that is, of a new day—the Baptist “sees Jesus coming towards him.” The evangelist’s choice of phrase is significant. He could so easily have said, “He saw Jesus walking by,” or something of that nature—as indeed he says later in this passage. But for this first encounter he says the Baptist saw Jesus “coming towards him.”

As always with John, the nuance is theologically significant. If we’ve been listening to his gospel, indeed, if we’ve been listening to the Scriptures generally, we should already know that God’s Word is always coming to the world, and the world can never overcome it. It came to the Patriarchs, to Moses, and to Israel’s other prophets. It came at the Annunciation—“the angel of the Lord brought glad tidings unto Mary, and she conceived by the Holy Ghost.” The initiative is always God’s.

And so it is here. The Word, the Word made flesh, comes toward the Baptist. And it is then, in the light of that prior gift, that the Baptist sees Jesus, and declares who he is in words that have by God’s grace been engraved by George Frideric Handel on the musical soul of the English speaking world: “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!”

But just what did he mean by that?

In asking ourselves that question we find ourselves faced with another of those knotty problems that the scholars and theologians have been arguing about almost from the beginning of Christianity. Did he mean that Jesus is the true paschal lamb – something that seems to be implied later in the gospel? (i.e. 18.28). Or is he thinking of Jesus as the victorious messianic ram that we find in some Jewish apocalyptic writings? (e.g. 1 Enoch 89:41-50). Or is he thinking of Jesus as the true ram for sacrifice that Abraham had said God would provide? (cf. Gen. 22).  These and other views all have their supporters, and for what it’s worth, if I have to choose, I incline to put my money on the last—it fits best with the “Jesus the beloved Son,” that is, Jesus, God’s Isaac, of the other gospels.

But that’s if I have to choose. And I’m not sure that I do. In such scholarly controversies as these, maybe we all run the risk of getting a little too heavy.

We are of course getting too heavy if we insist that the words can only mean one thing. That is a silly idea, dating more or less from the so-called Enlightenment, and would have been quite alien to the evangelist or those who first treasured his words. They would have understood that great words can mean lots of things, and the greater the words, the more they can mean. So even if my choice is right as the main idea in the evangelist’s mind at this moment, I certainly wouldn’t rule out the presence of the other ideas somewhere in the mix of his thoughts.

And in another way perhaps we are getting too heavy in that on the simplest level the force of the image is surely clear enough. A child could understand it – and perhaps a child can understand it best. Whoever has actually seen a lamb can get it. “Lamb” speaks surely of innocence—in virtually any culture. That this is “God’s lamb” speaks also of holiness, God’s holiness, now having its epiphany, its manifestation, to the nations.

And what does this Holy Innocent do?

He fulfills, John the Baptist tells us, our deepest desire – indeed, the deepest desire of the human race.

And what is that?

It is surely a world without sin and sin’s consequence, death. It is surely an end to alienation and fear. It is surely the gift of the joy of God’s presence! It is Eden restored, where the woman and the man are together and not ashamed, and where God walks with them in a garden in the cool of the day. Which of us, in the deepest level of our hearts, in those moments of insight when we have seen the uselessness of all the other things that we once thought might satisfy us, which of does not desire such things? Which of the world’s great faiths does not express our yearning for them – as Karl Barth observed when he said, “all human activity is a cry for forgiveness.”

And that, says the Baptist, that is the gift Jesus brings. He is God’s lamb, God’s innocent, who takes away the sin of the world, who puts things right. It is as simple as that. No one, perhaps, has put it better than St. Augustine, commenting on this very text in his unfinished contra Iulianum. Jesus takes away sins, he says,

“both by forgiving those which have been committed (among which original sin is included),

“and by helping us not to commit sins,

“and by leading us to the life where sins cannot possibly be committed.”

O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us! O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace!

So we will pray in a moment, before we receive Our Lord in His sacrament. And his grace and gift so abound that his mercy and peace are thus available for us, saving us and sanctifying us.

It is, of course, a dangerous salvation and a disturbing peace that comes to us in this way, at least in the short run.  “The peace of God it is no peace,” as the hymn says. I confess I find it a dreary hymn with a dreary tune, and I groan every time we have to sing it. Please forgive me, any of you who love it! But in this particular respect at least we may agree that the hymn is right.

If we expect God’s lamb to bring us peace and wholeness as the world reckons those things, we’d better think again. God’s lamb is more likely to bring us to places we would not have imagined, people we do not expect, and tasks we do not think we need. Just when we think we have mastered the Christian life, God’s lamb will blow our pathetic vision to pieces, and compel us to look at something new. And the new vision will probably not be safe, or comfortable – at least in the short run.

But that’s in the short run. In the long run, as Peter says later in the gospel, we have no choice. “Do you also wish to go away?” Jesus asks the twelve, somewhat later in the gospel. “Lord,” Peter answers, “to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. And we have believed and come to know that you are the Holy One of God” (John 6:68). And there’s the rub. To be a Christian is in one sense to be hooked. To be caught. There’s nowhere else to go. No wonder Our Lord first described those whom he would send in his name as “fishers of men”!

But as the angel said to Mary at the Annunciation, as the angel said to the shepherds on the first Christmas night, as the divine revelation, the divine Epiphany, always says to those who see it and are puzzled or disconcerted, “Fear not!”

“Fear not!”

For this is the way we were always meant to go. And though the road may lead us, as it led Dante, through Hell and Purgatory, its end will be Paradise, union with God and each other. “Those,” says Jesus, “who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day…   This is the bread that came down from heaven… Whoever eats my bread will live for ever” (John 6:54, 58).

O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world: grant us thy peace!

And now let us confess our faith…

“Then,” Saint Matthew tells us—that is, while John the Baptist was preaching—“Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan.” Jesus comes with a purpose: “to be baptized by him”—and so Matthew prepares us for the conversation that follows. It begins with John’s demurral: “John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’” How can he, the mere forerunner, possibly baptize the One who is stronger than he, whose sandals he is not worthy to carry?

But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”

Our Lord’s response is striking in at least two ways. First, because in Matthew’s gospel it’s the first thing Jesus says, and second because it’s unique to Matthew. All our other accounts of Jesus’ baptism tell the story without this conversation. Neither of those facts, however, means that Our Lord’s words are easy to understand. And as you’ll see if you look at any major commentary on Matthew, interpreters have been arguing about what they mean for more or less the whole history of Christianity.

This in itself may be a useful lesson for us. The fathers of the reformation used to say that the Scriptures had perspicuitas, or “clarity”: by which, at least when they were at their best, they did not mean that the Scriptures were easy, nor even that they always made sense to us, but that the effort to understand them, undertaken so far as one could in communion with the church and in faithfulness to her teaching, would always bear good fruit.

So then, in this second Sunday of the year of our Lord 2017, we take our own little shot at understanding.  “It is proper,” Our Lord says, that “in this way”—that is, by accepting John’s Baptism—he should “fulfill all righteousness.” What, then, is “righteousness”—or, more precisely, “all righteousness”?  We are to understand, I suggest, that whole area of justice and loyalty to one’s covenant obligation that is covered in the Old Testament by the Hebrew word tzadiq, a word that our English versions generally translate as “righteousness,” and which is used to refer to two different, though evidently related, things:

First, it is used of “God’s righteousness,” that is, the norm of God’s faithful behavior towards God’s creation, toward humankind and among humankind particularly toward those called to be God’s people.

Second, and as a result of that (since justice and loyalty are naturally reciprocal: you can’t be just or loyal alone) it is used of the proper norm for our conduct in response to God: our “righteousness,” that norm of human behavior which the prophet Micah summarized in simple practical terms as “to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).

What then does it mean that Jesus will “fulfill” this “righteousness”? —indeed, that he will, according to our text, “fulfill all righteousness”? The word “fulfill” (Greek: plēroō) is clearly special for Matthew. In connection with the actions of disciples, he uses other words, such as to “do” God’s will, or to “keep” the commandments. The word “fulfill” he reserves for Jesus alone: and surely we aren’t wrong, given this signal, to look ahead to Our Lord’s words in the Sermon on the Mount—words again that are to be found only in Matthew: “I have not come to destroy the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfill” (5.17), and also to bear in mind those several occasions when the evangelist speaks of a word or event in connection with our Lord as “fulfilling” Scripture (1.22, 2.15, 2.17, 2.23, 4.14, 8.17, 12.17, 13.35, 21.4, 26.56, 27.9)—using, again, the same word, plēroō.

So just how does Jesus’ accepting John the Baptist’s baptism—“a baptism of repentance,” even though Matthew clearly understands that Jesus in himself has nothing to repent—how does that “fulfill all righteousness”? It does so because undergoing the baptism of repentance joins Jesus with those who do have to repent—which is to say, it joins him with humanity, with us. Of course the baptism is not in itself “all righteousness.” But it is a part of that righteousness: a sign that Jesus is, to use another phrase about him that is, in this sense, unique to Matthew, Immanuel, “God with us.”

And God greets that sign, says the Evangelist, with a sign: “when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him.” Just as the Spirit of God brooded like a dove over the face of the waters in the Genesis creation story, so the Spirit of God broods over Jesus in this union of God with us which is, as Saint Paul will later put it, “a new creation” (2 Cor. 5.17, Gal. 6.15), an act of God as wonderful and mighty, in its own way, as the first.

But at what cost?

And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

In Greek these are the very words with which, in the Greek Old Testament, Abraham was told to take his beloved son Abraham and lay him upon the altar and kill him (LXX Gen. 22.2, 16). They are the words, again, that God will speak from heaven on the Mount of Transfiguration, as Our Lord is about to set his face to go to Jerusalem and death (Matt. 17.5). And finally “God’s son” is the title that will be attested as Jesus’ own on Calvary, on this occasion not from heaven, but by none other than the pagan soldier who has just crucified him, whose conversion through the cross will stand as first fruit of the gentiles (Matt. 27.54). That is how, being united with us even unto death on a cross, our Lord will finally “fulfill all righteousness.”

And what is that to us? A millennium or so before Our Lord was born at Bethlehem, King David sang, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.” Two millennia or so after, Austin Miles the Protestant hymn writer sang, “for he walks with me and he talks with me.”[1] Matthew’s portrait of Our Lord as Immanuel, God with us, is a declaration that both David and Austin Miles were right, that God chooses in Christ to be united with us in life and even in death. And of that faithful union of God with God’s people and God’s creation, our Lord’s uniting himself with Israel in its “baptism of repentance” was a sign: the sign that we celebrate today.

And now let us confess our faith…

[1] C. Austin Miles, “I come to the garden alone” (1913).

In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet Juliet is frustrated that her love for Romeo is forbidden for no other reason than that he belongs to her family’s rival family, and has their name:

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet!

She goes on to suggest Romeo should “doff” his name, which is, she says, “no part” of him, and in exchange he can have her!

Juliet is a well-educated girl, so she is surely aware that she is sharply taking one side in a debate about language that went on quite vigorously at the Renaissance. One view, which Juliet takes, is Aristotelian, that language is arbitrary and the meanings of words are arrived at by “custom.” The other, which is Platonic, is quite opposite. According to this, there is a profound relationship between what things are called and what they are. So, even if we all agreed that from this minute on we’d call a rose a splunk, it wouldn’t work. There’d be something about a rose that “splunk” just doesn’t get. “My love is like a red, red splunk”? I don’t think so![1]

In this matter, there’s no doubt that ancient Israel held to a view that, if not exactly the same, certainly resonates much more closely with the Platonic view than with the Aristotelian. Names mattered. What you called a thing was what it was.[2] And if you knew something or someone’s name, you had thereby a measure of power over them. That is why there is all that care over the name of God in the Bible. God’s name is not revealed to just anyone, and it is not to be spoken by just anyone. It is revealed to those who are to be called into a special relationship with God, to those who are his people. And in time, of course, this reverence for the Name of God comes to mean that it is simply not to be uttered.[3]

All of which brings us to today’s festival, “The Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ.”

First, let us look at the gospel, at Luke’s account of the shepherds’ visit to the manger. It is rather prosaic, after the splendor and the glory of the angels’ appearance, but it is carefully worded, nonetheless. The shepherds tell what has happened to them, and what has been told them about the child, and all are amazed—as well they might be. But it is surely Mary’s reaction that the evangelist wants us to note most of all: she “treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart,” as our NRSV translation has it. Actually, that may not be accurate. According one very thorough word-study[4] of the word translated “ponder” (Greek: συμβάλλω), what it means in contexts such as this is not so much “ponder,” as if Mary were trying to work something out, but rather, “understand”. Luke is telling us that Mary gets it! She interprets God’s intervention in her life clearly and correctly. And in this understanding she and Joseph move to the next step in the story, which is that after eight days the child is circumcised and given the name Jesus, “the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.”

What then is so special about this name? Saint Luke, unlike Saint Matthew, does not actually spell out a meaning for the name “Jesus”—that he “will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1.21). But Luke surely expects his readers to know who “Jesus”—that is, in its Hebrew form, the Old Testament’s “Joshua”—actually was: that he was the leader of his people, who brought Israel out of the wilderness and into the Promised Land. Luke expects us to know that, and to draw our own conclusions: that here is the new Joshua, who will lead us, as our Book of Common Prayer has it, “out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.”

But even when we have said that, we may well ask, how will this child have the power to do these things? Who has power over sin and death but God alone? And that is where we turn finally to the passage from Saint Paul’s letter to the Philippians that we heard earlier. Some think Paul himself wrote these words, some think that he was quoting a hymn that the Philippians themselves were familiar with. It really doesn’t matter—either way he thought that the words expressed what he wanted to say. He begins by pointing out that Christ Jesus “did not think equality with God a thing to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.” As Christina Rossetti puts it in the hymn that we shall sing in a few minutes—

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him

Nor earth sustain;

Heaven and earth shall flee away

When He comes to reign:

In the bleak mid-winter

A stable-place sufficed

The Lord God Almighty,

Jesus Christ.

But that was by no means the end of it! Following on Jesus’ being faithful even to the cross, Paul says,

God also highly exalted him

   and gave him the name

   that is above every name.

And what name is that? For Pharisaic Jew such as Paul there can be only one possible answer to that question. It is the Name of God.[5] That, Paul says, is the Name bestowed upon Jesus. And then, in clear and obviously deliberate allusion to passages in Isaiah where God declares that He the LORD alone is God, that beside Him there is no God, and that “to me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall confess” (Isa. 45.23), Paul says that all this—this bestowing of the Divine Name on Jesus—has come to pass,

so that at the name of Jesus

   every knee shall bow,

   in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

and every tongue confess

   that Jesus Christ is Lord.[6]

And this, Paul asserts, this confession of Jesus Christ as Lord is, “to the glory of God the Father”—that is, to the glory of the One God, beside Whom there is no other.

What then is all this to us? This bestowing of the Divine Name on Jesus, this declaration that the man from Galilee, is also, as the Nicene Creed puts it, “God from God, light from light, true God from true God”—what does it mean? Well, many things no doubt, but certainly this: that even as we acknowledge the divine majesty that the heaven of heavens cannot contain, so we also believe that when we finally face that majesty we shall encounter a person: one who was willing to be tempted and tested at all points even as we are, though without sin, yet a friend of sinners, a healer of the sick, who finally cared for us so much that to be one with us he was willing to endure the death of the cross.

His is the Holy Name we now confess, as we proclaim our faith:

We believe in One God…

 

 

 

 

[1] If anyone is interested, see Jonathan Hope, Shakespeare Language: Reason, Eloquence and Artifice at the Renaissance (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010) 1-39.

[2] “For the Israelites there is upon the whole no difference whatsoever between the idea, the name and the matter itself.” Again, “To know the name of a man is to know his essence. The pious ‘know the name ‘ of their God (Ps. 9,11; 91,14), i.e. they know how he is”(Johannes Pedersen, Israel, Aslaug Møller, transl., [2 vols.; London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press, 1926], I-II.168, 245).

[3] The Jewish Bible has the name יהוה, generally transliterated into Latin characters as YHWH. Faithful orthodox Jews not will not presume to utter this Name.  Instead, they use some other expression such as  הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא (hakadosh baruch hu: “The Holy One, Blessed Be He”), or השם (HaShem: “The Name). ‫

[4] W. C. van Unnik, “Die rechte Bedeutung des Wortes ‘treffen’: Lukas 2,19,” in Sparsa Collecta: The Collected Essays of W. C. van Unnik (3 vols.; NovTSup 29-31; Leiden: Brill, 1973-83), 1.72-91; see also Francois Bovon, Luke, Christine M. Thomas, transl. (3 vols.; Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002 [2002]), 1.92.

[5] I here reflect what is at present a minority view, although I believe it be correct. Among those holding it, however, see J. B. Lightfoot, Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians (London: Methuen, 1898), 113-114; Marcus Bockmuehl, The Epistle to the Philippians (Black’s New Testament Commentaries; London: A & C Black, 1998), 142-44; Richard Bauckham, God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1999), 34, 53-54.

[6] I cite the Old Testament translating from the Greek (Septuagint) version that Saint Paul was undoubtedly using.

“Fear not!”[1]  That, according to Luke, was the first word of the angel’s Christmas message to the shepherds. And as we listen to Luke’s story, following the decree of Caesar Augustus and all those other high imperial goings-on, it is also the first word of the Christmas message for us. “Fear not!”

But who is afraid at Christmas? And especially who among us, who are among the well-fed and well-housed people of the world, and are free to worship as we choose?[2]

Christmas for us is a time of celebration: a time for family and for children, a time for those who’ve been scattered to come together. And there’s surely nothing wrong with that. But what has fear to do with it?

What of those whose celebration of Christmas 2016 is not very different in spirit from the Yule celebrations of our pagan forebears, coming together for good cheer in the coldest and darkest days of the year to remind themselves that Winter would not last for ever and in time it would be Spring again? What of those for whom Christmas is simply about parties and eating and drinking and kisses under the mistletoe and having fun? Surely there is nothing wrong with that either. Why shouldn’t people give each other what comfort they may? But again, what has fear to do with it?

What of those like us, who gather in churches and listen to the Christmas story? Surely we are the most fearless and comfortable of all? We are those who know the stories and say the prayers. We listen to the words of the angel aware that the narrative is beautiful and it is part of our tradition. And again, there is surely nothing wrong with that. Why shouldn’t we enjoy a beautiful story? But again, what has fear to do with it?

One answer to all these questions is I suppose that we all carry our fears around with us, whether we admit it or not, or even know it or not. Deep fears, inescapable fears, fears from which not even our celebrations and our parties and our church assemblies can deliver us, though they may help us to evade or forget them for a time. We fear getting old and lonely. We fear losing our health and wits. Several people have told me lately how they fear for the future of our society and where those who lead it will take us. Worse still, we fear the secret darkness inside ourselves that no one but us knows about, and what that darkness might lead us to do. We fear the grave, which none of us will escape. In short we are, like the shepherds near Bethlehem, surrounded by darkness.

Is that, then, what the angelic “Fear not!” addresses? Is it the darkness and uncertainty of life that surrounded the shepherds and surrounds us?

Actually, it isn’t.

As St. Luke tells the story, it is precisely the opposite. Certainly he begins with the shepherds in darkness, “abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.” But in that situation they seem quite comfortable, even tranquil. Luke’s Greek, which might perhaps better be translated, “keeping the night watches” suggests ordinary folk working together, going about their business with quiet efficiency. (Various commentators suggest that Luke’s choice of phrase—φυλάσσοντες φυλακὰς—implies that the shepherds work in shifts to look after their flocks.)

But then!—“lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them”—and it is in that moment, that moment not of darkness but of light, not of emptiness but of glory, not of alienation and meaninglessness but of divine Presence, it is in that moment, the evangelist tells us, that they “fear with a great fear.” And that is the fear that the angel addresses—not their fear of this thing or that, within them or without, not their fear of the night or their fear of darkness, but their fear of God.

Fear of God is, say the Scriptures, the beginning of wisdom. Fear of God is the fear in comparison with which all other fears become trivial or meaningless. “If you know the right thing to fear,” the Chasidic rabbi told his student, “there is no need to fear anything else.” Or as Nicholas Tate and Nahum Brady put it in their hymn,

Fear Him, ye saints, and you will then / Have nothing else to fear.

So when the shepherds were filled with fear at the sight of God’s glory, they were not wrong in their reaction. On the contrary, they were right. They were awake. They were in health. For theirs was the fear, the one true fear, which is no sooner embraced than it is done away.

And that is exactly what happened.  “Fear not!” the angel said, and continued: “For see, I am bringing you good news of great joy: to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.” And in that word they could rejoice, and did rejoice, and forgot their fear, and went to Bethlehem to see the Christ.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And the end and completion of wisdom, as the shepherds experienced it, is joy, when that fear is itself cast out by confrontation with the perfect love and eternal mercy of God.

The gospel invites us to celebrate Christmas, as did those shepherds, in the fear of God, and in so doing, to be freed from fear: from that fear, and also from all those other fears, fear of life and fear of death, that we know only too well.

In the fear of God then, let us confess our faith, as the church has taught us:

We believe in One God…

[1] The seed for this little reflection came from my reading of Karl Barth, “’Be not Afraid’” in Barth, Christmas, Bernhard Citron, transl. (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1959 [1957]) 29-34. Originally published in 1929, it is one of a series of Christmas mediations by Barth that appeared in German newspapers from 1926-1933. “These articles,” as the translator Bernhard Citron points out in his preface, “are not timeless, for they have a definite ‘Sitz im Leben’ of the German nation during a period when the country went from the apparent prosperity and comparative peace of the mid-twenties rapidly through a period of depression, unemployment and threatening civil war to its surrender before Nazi dictatorship. However the message conveyed here is for all times and all nations, the message of true Christmas over against disbelief, wavering and sheer sentimentality” (op. cit. 5). I agree, and I commend this little volume to any among my friends and colleagues who occasionally find themselves wondering how to preach at Christmas.

[2] Even as I read through this on St. Stephen’s Day—the day of the first martyr—I can’t ignore the fact that I have just read on the BBC website of the present sufferings of Christians in North Korea (go to: www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-38404012), where simply professing Christianity, let alone preaching it, will bring you prison and hard labour if not execution; and I realize once again how lucky we are who live in societies where we are still permitted to to profess our faith without penalty.