I found this article in the Christian Century courtesy of Maggi Dawn. It tells the story of six American Protestant theologians who have converted to Rome, to a large extent in frustration at liberal Protestantism. Maggi asks whether going Catholic is the answer, and for me it would not. But the metaphor ‘living in the ruins’ comes from one of the theologians who for a long time felt that however disgruntled he was in Anglicanism, his call was like that of Nehemiah in Jerusalem. This all assumes that God has led you there to be part of the rebuilding.

Anyone who knows me well is aware that I manage to exist in Methodism by being somewhat on the margins, even though it is the tradition in which I grew up. But my postgrad work in ecclesiology (and my long term interest in that doctrine) means that while I can probably find points of disagreement in all the traditions. The only one I entirely agree with is the Church Of Dave – and even that has adjusted its convictions at times!

Nevertheless, many of us do face the issues of ‘living in the ruins’. Like Nehemiah we need to know the call of God. Nothing else will sustain us. Earlier this year when he was still President of the Methodist Conference Tom Stuckey said he believed there was a new Pentecost coming for Methodism. It is precisely that kind of word many of us need to hear. And we probably need to hear it not only from people we trust but ‘for ourselves’. Coming as I do from the evangelical-charismatic part of the Church, I have been in the midst of a wider Christian culture that has been expecting ‘revival’ ever since the mid-1990s.

It’s that waiting without revival that led me to ponder the Old Testament texts that help Israel to live ‘in exile’ and see them as critical. But I’ve found them more useful for general Christian witness in the world than for survival (let alone thriving) in a denomination in which I find very little spiritual sustenance. Maybe I’m just not praying and listening well.

In some way linked to this, my main church at Broomfield will this coming weekend be having a Family Friendly Church Weekend with Mike Bossingham. This will be extremely important in deciding whether we rebuild, not in a material sense but spiritually and relationally. The odd prayer for us would be very welcome.

Technorati Tags: Christian+Century, Maggi+Dawn, ecclesiology, church

Here is tomorrow’s sermon.

Mark 7:1-23

Introduction
If you want to know the cause of the water shortage, I have the answer. It’s not July’s heat wave of not-so-blessèd memory. It’s not global warming.

It’s our daughter. No, at three and a half she isn’t old enough yet to be booking the bathroom for endless baths, showers and personal pampering. But ever since she learned to take herself to the toilet she has developed a fascination with washing her hands. Debbie says she has her first Obsessive Compulsive Disorder! If we’re not careful, the tap would drain our water tank and she likes to use enough soap to bathe an elephant.

And we have a Gospel story today about washing hands. But we would be very much mistaken if we thought this was a story about personal hygiene. It’s about ritual washing. It’s about Jesus having no regard for an oral tradition that had developed in Judaism to fill in the missing gaps where the laws given to Moses didn’t cover every eventuality:

‘In areas where the Law was silent the tradition was vocal, drawing the conclusions felt to be implicit in the mandates of the written code. The result was a vast legal complex … [that] was regarded as binding upon all Israel.’
[William Lane, The Gospel According To Mark, p245]

For disregarding this tradition, Jesus was in trouble. For undermining it, he was regarded as a threat. For rejecting the tradition – well, he was spiritually seditious.

So our story is one of conflict. But how might a dispute between Jesus and the God Police have anything to say to us? Let’s follow the story and see.

1. Charge
In mid-June Debbie and I were elated when our next door neighbours put up their house for sale. We have been progressively less elated every time we come back up the drive and still see the sign saying ‘For sale’ rather than ‘Sold’.

We were even less happy four weeks ago when the husband came knocking on our door. He had noticed oil marks on his precious drive when he came home from work that afternoon. They weren’t there when he left in the morning, he said. It must be our fault. How could he sell his house when we were making the place look like a council estate?

We knew it wasn’t us, but last week he complained to the circuit about us. He also told the circuit (not us) that he didn’t like the fact that we take our black wheelie bin out on Sunday night, not early on Monday morning. He has taken to moving it off the edge of the drive onto the pavement – in clear contravention of council instructions and in our opinion causing a dangerous obstruction for the elderly people who walk along our road to and from their residential home.

Perhaps he thought that a bunch of Christians would roll over meekly. If he thought that, he was wrong. We have rejected his allegations and our superintendent minister has supported our stance.

Well, Jesus didn’t roll over easily at the accusations thrown at him. He is challenged for his disciples’ failure to follow an oral tradition that was essential to the convictions of the Pharisees [ibid, p 247]. And as far as Jesus is concerned, they are hypocrites. You don’t roll over for hypocrites. If your obsession is with keeping up appearances by outwardly following tradition but don’t match that with a heart that is close to God [verse 6] then don’t expect Jesus to be quiet.

And the parallels are there in church life. How easy is it for us to major on minors and neglect what is of prime importance, namely our relationship with God (from which everything of worth flows)? Think about some of the contentious issues Christians sometimes argue about and you being to wonder whether Jesus might not have a few words for us. I think back with pain to my first appointment and remember some of the things that made me unpopular in certain circles:

I was told that only the minister was ever allowed to stand behind the communion rail (although this rule used to be miraculously suspended for the flower arrangers). There was a militant insistence that you didn’t kneel at the communion rail until everybody else was there – despite the fact that the church building was cramped and it took not so much communion stewards, more like traffic police to manage the flow of people returning to their pews and those going forward. You weren’t allowed to put nails in a wooden cross on Good Friday. You couldn’t pick hymns from anything other than Hymns And Psalms.  And you certainly couldn’t suggest ripping out the pews and making a worship area more flexible.

None of these objections, in my opinion, had anything to do with Gospel imperatives. But they had everything to do with promoting style over substance. Never once did any of those who raised their loud protests against me want to know more about prayer or about sharing their faith.

It’s altogether too easy to put on an impressive outward show. We can fool not just those around us, but we tell the lies so often that we end up deceiving even ourselves. But we cannot fool God. One day sooner or later we discover that the Jesus whom we assume endorses our religious activities in fact our most fervent opponent.

So let us ask searching questions about our priorities. Are they about nurturing the heart towards God and sharing God’s heart for a broken world? Or are they about maintaining structures and putting on a good show? Only one of these approaches will give pleasure to God.

2. Counter-Charge
Jesus goes on the offensive: ‘You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition,’ he says (verse 8). Not only that, ‘You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition!’ (verse 9). In the battle between human tradition and God’s commandments, God loses, says Jesus. And yet you claim you are his most faithful followers and representatives!

To prove his point, Jesus goes on to adduce a shocking case. The Ten Commandments say we should honour our parents. A particular expression of that is when they are elderly and infirm. Yet some in Jesus’ day diverted some money that would have helped their parents by dishonestly dedicating it to religious work.

So do we use our traditions to negate the commands of God, as Jesus charged the Pharisees? I know my father thought that, and once got in trouble with a superintendent minister for suggesting that Methodism placed more emphasis on ‘CPD’ [the Constitutional Practice and Discipline of the Methodist Church – our nearest equivalent to Anglican canon law]. Dad thought we had little moral superiority over the Pharisees whom Jesus condemned! Certainly at college we faced an exam in CPD but not in biblical or doctrinal matters. And Methodism can certainly get hung up on matters that are natural consequences of the Gospel at times. It was popular to say at college, ‘You can doubt the Virgin Birth, you can doubt the Resurrection, but God help you if you doubt infant baptism or feminism’.

But more seriously, do we invent traditions and practices in order to avoid the Gospel and commands of God? I don’t know that we’re always so blatantly devious as to invent a tradition like ‘Corban’ (verse 11), which sounds like a religious tax dodge. But I think we put other things in place so that we miss the imperative of the Gospel.

What do I mean? Well sometimes it’s about the expectations, atmosphere and culture of a congregation. The old criticism that churches can be little more than religious clubs is a serious allegation and it has a lot of truth behind it. We make for a lopsided church that is all about care for one another but has little active focus upon the world – except for the enthusiasts. I’ve heard it said that we shouldn’t concentrate on people outside the faith if it offends the faithful. Yet we have spent decades concentrating on the faithful and where has it got us?

We so fill our time with social activities that the ‘club’ epithet is altogether too well-deserved. We hide in perpetual business meetings. Or we duplicate within the church things that are done perfectly well outside but we prefer to go for the church version and stay in our little castle, behind the moat and with the drawbridge up. In all these ways and more we create a culture – our traditions – that helps us negate the commands of God.

All these reasons and more are why I called a year ago for a simpler structure for church. What we basically need in church life for the sake of the Gospel is fairly simple stuff. We gather on Sundays for worship and inspiration. We meet in small groups for worship, pastoral care, learning about the faith and mission. We hold such other meetings as are necessary for business and oversight. Beyond that there isn’t a lot we need. Most stuff beyond these bare necessities is extraneous and serves either deliberately or unwittingly to keep us away from the mission of God.

I believe Jesus calls us to a tough choice between the unhealthy traditional culture that strangles the spiritual life like a weed and a simpler, more radically prioritised vision of church that is set free to share in God’s mission and be faithful to the Gospel. Which way will we go?

3. True Defilement
Sometimes you can’t allow yourself just to be caught up in a perpetual argument. Not long ago I was being regularly attacked on the Internet by a militant atheist. For a while I answered his points, but eventually it became clear that an ongoing debate was going to be fruitless, because his attitude was arrogant and he had little desire to listen.

And it strikes me it’s a bit like that with Jesus in this story. He has his spat with the scribes and Pharisees, but after having answered their charge and countered with his own allegations, he turns away. In verse 14 he stops talking to them and starts addressing the crowd. Rather than being bogged down in a tedious argument, he uses the disagreement to make a teaching point to those who are listening and watching. In a way, he’s giving an answer to the scribes and Pharisees if only they would listen, too.

And his point is basic and stark: true spiritual defilement isn’t about failing to wash your hands in the same way that a priest would, nor is it about clean and unclean food. At best those are but outward signs of the inner state. And it’s the heart that matters. For there is the evidence of whether we follow the commandments of God.

‘It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.’
[verses 20-23]

Material purity isn’t the issue: moral purity is. It’s right through the Scriptures, yet it doesn’t seem to have been obvious to any of Jesus’ hearers – religious professionals, general crowd or his own disciples. You can keep all the religious rules you like and look good in the eyes of those who find such things impressive. But none of those rituals on their own will cleanse the pollution of the heart. And straightening out inner corruption is a much higher priority than how we wash our hands or what food we eat.

Or in our terms, you might say that living a winsome, holy life is the priority, rather than worrying about the rules of our denomination or putting on a good religious show that impresses only the shallow.

And it isn’t just about the big issues. Yes, we are to abstain from violence. We are to keep the marriage bed pure – Jesus’ prohibitions against both fornication and adultery mean he upholds a sexual ethic that maintains fidelity within the marriage covenant and celibacy outside.

But he also includes the everyday matters like ‘envy, slander, pride [and] folly’. And maybe these are the ones where our witness is most regularly compromised. In envy we look altogether too much like our consumerist world. In slander, we speak with sly digs, character assassinations and tawdry gossip that make us like small-scale versions of the gutter press. In pride and folly we forget our need of grace and that our boasting should only ever be of Christ.

The snag for me in the reading is that Jesus doesn’t propose an answer. That comes elsewhere in his teaching and in the writings of Paul, John and others. And it’s the usual basic Christian stuff about confession, repentance and co-operating with the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

But maybe Mark ends the story here deliberately to challenge us. The radical message of Jesus is that the ‘Keeping Up Appearances’ approach that makes us look like real-life Hyacinth Buckets is neither funny nor sad. It’s an outrage against the Gospel. He is challenging us to prioritise on the call to holiness and the mission of God.

Too much of our society today is all about surface and little about substance. What hope is there if we go down that road? Our world needs a radical, courageous and deep challenge from those of us who claim to be the disciples of Jesus to go below the surface and address the heart.

We need spiritual heart surgery, and so does our world.

Technorati Tags: tradition, Gospel, holiness, church, Jesus

Here is tomorrow’s sermon.

Mark 7:1-23

Introduction
If you want to know the cause of the water shortage, I have the answer. It’s not July’s heat wave of not-so-blessèd memory. It’s not global warming.

It’s our daughter. No, at three and a half she isn’t old enough yet to be booking the bathroom for endless baths, showers and personal pampering. But ever since she learned to take herself to the toilet she has developed a fascination with washing her hands. Debbie says she has her first Obsessive Compulsive Disorder! If we’re not careful, the tap would drain our water tank and she likes to use enough soap to bathe an elephant.

And we have a Gospel story today about washing hands. But we would be very much mistaken if we thought this was a story about personal hygiene. It’s about ritual washing. It’s about Jesus having no regard for an oral tradition that had developed in Judaism to fill in the missing gaps where the laws given to Moses didn’t cover every eventuality:

‘In areas where the Law was silent the tradition was vocal, drawing the conclusions felt to be implicit in the mandates of the written code. The result was a vast legal complex … [that] was regarded as binding upon all Israel.’
[William Lane, The Gospel According To Mark, p245]

For disregarding this tradition, Jesus was in trouble. For undermining it, he was regarded as a threat. For rejecting the tradition – well, he was spiritually seditious.

So our story is one of conflict. But how might a dispute between Jesus and the God Police have anything to say to us? Let’s follow the story and see.

1. Charge
In mid-June Debbie and I were elated when our next door neighbours put up their house for sale. We have been progressively less elated every time we come back up the drive and still see the sign saying ‘For sale’ rather than ‘Sold’.

We were even less happy four weeks ago when the husband came knocking on our door. He had noticed oil marks on his precious drive when he came home from work that afternoon. They weren’t there when he left in the morning, he said. It must be our fault. How could he sell his house when we were making the place look like a council estate?

We knew it wasn’t us, but last week he complained to the circuit about us. He also told the circuit (not us) that he didn’t like the fact that we take our black wheelie bin out on Sunday night, not early on Monday morning. He has taken to moving it off the edge of the drive onto the pavement – in clear contravention of council instructions and in our opinion causing a dangerous obstruction for the elderly people who walk along our road to and from their residential home.

Perhaps he thought that a bunch of Christians would roll over meekly. If he thought that, he was wrong. We have rejected his allegations and our superintendent minister has supported our stance.

Well, Jesus didn’t roll over easily at the accusations thrown at him. He is challenged for his disciples’ failure to follow an oral tradition that was essential to the convictions of the Pharisees [ibid, p 247]. And as far as Jesus is concerned, they are hypocrites. You don’t roll over for hypocrites. If your obsession is with keeping up appearances by outwardly following tradition but don’t match that with a heart that is close to God [verse 6] then don’t expect Jesus to be quiet.

And the parallels are there in church life. How easy is it for us to major on minors and neglect what is of prime importance, namely our relationship with God (from which everything of worth flows)? Think about some of the contentious issues Christians sometimes argue about and you being to wonder whether Jesus might not have a few words for us. I think back with pain to my first appointment and remember some of the things that made me unpopular in certain circles:

I was told that only the minister was ever allowed to stand behind the communion rail (although this rule used to be miraculously suspended for the flower arrangers). There was a militant insistence that you didn’t kneel at the communion rail until everybody else was there – despite the fact that the church building was cramped and it took not so much communion stewards, more like traffic police to manage the flow of people returning to their pews and those going forward. You weren’t allowed to put nails in a wooden cross on Good Friday. You couldn’t pick hymns from anything other than Hymns And Psalms.  And you certainly couldn’t suggest ripping out the pews and making a worship area more flexible.

None of these objections, in my opinion, had anything to do with Gospel imperatives. But they had everything to do with promoting style over substance. Never once did any of those who raised their loud protests against me want to know more about prayer or about sharing their faith.

It’s altogether too easy to put on an impressive outward show. We can fool not just those around us, but we tell the lies so often that we end up deceiving even ourselves. But we cannot fool God. One day sooner or later we discover that the Jesus whom we assume endorses our religious activities in fact our most fervent opponent.

So let us ask searching questions about our priorities. Are they about nurturing the heart towards God and sharing God’s heart for a broken world? Or are they about maintaining structures and putting on a good show? Only one of these approaches will give pleasure to God.

2. Counter-Charge
Jesus goes on the offensive: ‘You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition,’ he says (verse 8). Not only that, ‘You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition!’ (verse 9). In the battle between human tradition and God’s commandments, God loses, says Jesus. And yet you claim you are his most faithful followers and representatives!

To prove his point, Jesus goes on to adduce a shocking case. The Ten Commandments say we should honour our parents. A particular expression of that is when they are elderly and infirm. Yet some in Jesus’ day diverted some money that would have helped their parents by dishonestly dedicating it to religious work.

So do we use our traditions to negate the commands of God, as Jesus charged the Pharisees? I know my father thought that, and once got in trouble with a superintendent minister for suggesting that Methodism placed more emphasis on ‘CPD’ [the Constitutional Practice and Discipline of the Methodist Church – our nearest equivalent to Anglican canon law]. Dad thought we had little moral superiority over the Pharisees whom Jesus condemned! Certainly at college we faced an exam in CPD but not in biblical or doctrinal matters. And Methodism can certainly get hung up on matters that are natural consequences of the Gospel at times. It was popular to say at college, ‘You can doubt the Virgin Birth, you can doubt the Resurrection, but God help you if you doubt infant baptism or feminism’.

But more seriously, do we invent traditions and practices in order to avoid the Gospel and commands of God? I don’t know that we’re always so blatantly devious as to invent a tradition like ‘Corban’ (verse 11), which sounds like a religious tax dodge. But I think we put other things in place so that we miss the imperative of the Gospel.

What do I mean? Well sometimes it’s about the expectations, atmosphere and culture of a congregation. The old criticism that churches can be little more than religious clubs is a serious allegation and it has a lot of truth behind it. We make for a lopsided church that is all about care for one another but has little active focus upon the world – except for the enthusiasts. I’ve heard it said that we shouldn’t concentrate on people outside the faith if it offends the faithful. Yet we have spent decades concentrating on the faithful and where has it got us?

We so fill our time with social activities that the ‘club’ epithet is altogether too well-deserved. We hide in perpetual business meetings. Or we duplicate within the church things that are done perfectly well outside but we prefer to go for the church version and stay in our little castle, behind the moat and with the drawbridge up. In all these ways and more we create a culture – our traditions – that helps us negate the commands of God.

All these reasons and more are why I called a year ago for a simpler structure for church. What we basically need in church life for the sake of the Gospel is fairly simple stuff. We gather on Sundays for worship and inspiration. We meet in small groups for worship, pastoral care, learning about the faith and mission. We hold such other meetings as are necessary for business and oversight. Beyond that there isn’t a lot we need. Most stuff beyond these bare necessities is extraneous and serves either deliberately or unwittingly to keep us away from the mission of God.

I believe Jesus calls us to a tough choice between the unhealthy traditional culture that strangles the spiritual life like a weed and a simpler, more radically prioritised vision of church that is set free to share in God’s mission and be faithful to the Gospel. Which way will we go?

3. True Defilement
Sometimes you can’t allow yourself just to be caught up in a perpetual argument. Not long ago I was being regularly attacked on the Internet by a militant atheist. For a while I answered his points, but eventually it became clear that an ongoing debate was going to be fruitless, because his attitude was arrogant and he had little desire to listen.

And it strikes me it’s a bit like that with Jesus in this story. He has his spat with the scribes and Pharisees, but after having answered their charge and countered with his own allegations, he turns away. In verse 14 he stops talking to them and starts addressing the crowd. Rather than being bogged down in a tedious argument, he uses the disagreement to make a teaching point to those who are listening and watching. In a way, he’s giving an answer to the scribes and Pharisees if only they would listen, too.

And his point is basic and stark: true spiritual defilement isn’t about failing to wash your hands in the same way that a priest would, nor is it about clean and unclean food. At best those are but outward signs of the inner state. And it’s the heart that matters. For there is the evidence of whether we follow the commandments of God.

‘It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.’
[verses 20-23]

Material purity isn’t the issue: moral purity is. It’s right through the Scriptures, yet it doesn’t seem to have been obvious to any of Jesus’ hearers – religious professionals, general crowd or his own disciples. You can keep all the religious rules you like and look good in the eyes of those who find such things impressive. But none of those rituals on their own will cleanse the pollution of the heart. And straightening out inner corruption is a much higher priority than how we wash our hands or what food we eat.

Or in our terms, you might say that living a winsome, holy life is the priority, rather than worrying about the rules of our denomination or putting on a good religious show that impresses only the shallow.

And it isn’t just about the big issues. Yes, we are to abstain from violence. We are to keep the marriage bed pure – Jesus’ prohibitions against both fornication and adultery mean he upholds a sexual ethic that maintains fidelity within the marriage covenant and celibacy outside.

But he also includes the everyday matters like ‘envy, slander, pride [and] folly’. And maybe these are the ones where our witness is most regularly compromised. In envy we look altogether too much like our consumerist world. In slander, we speak with sly digs, character assassinations and tawdry gossip that make us like small-scale versions of the gutter press. In pride and folly we forget our need of grace and that our boasting should only ever be of Christ.

The snag for me in the reading is that Jesus doesn’t propose an answer. That comes elsewhere in his teaching and in the writings of Paul, John and others. And it’s the usual basic Christian stuff about confession, repentance and co-operating with the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

But maybe Mark ends the story here deliberately to challenge us. The radical message of Jesus is that the ‘Keeping Up Appearances’ approach that makes us look like real-life Hyacinth Buckets is neither funny nor sad. It’s an outrage against the Gospel. He is challenging us to prioritise on the call to holiness and the mission of God.

Too much of our society today is all about surface and little about substance. What hope is there if we go down that road? Our world needs a radical, courageous and deep challenge from those of us who claim to be the disciples of Jesus to go below the surface and address the heart.

We need spiritual heart surgery, and so does our world.

Technorati Tags: tradition, Gospel, holiness, church, Jesus

Whenever an opportunity has been nearby to walk a prayer labyrinth, my diary has prevented me. Now it is possible online:

Lost in Wonder

Link via the email list from Pray Without Ceasing.

Technorati Tags: prayer, labyrinth

Chris Erdman on why we still need preaching in postmodern Christianity, albeit a slightly different rôle:

odyssey: What “Emergent Preaching” Might Learn from the Synagogue

I love the idea that the preacher teaches the community how to read the texts – this seems to be the training rôle envisaged for Christian leaders in Ephesians 4.

As a by-product, the model espoused here has something for churches that don’t see their minister every week. (Ring any bells, brother and sister Methodists?)

Technorati Tags: preaching, postmodern, church, Methodist

Here is Sunday’s sermon. Once again it’s appearing here before I get to post it on my other website. I’m still catching up after holiday. Hopefully soon I’ll post this sermon and the last one there.

John 6:56-71 (link opens in new window)

Introduction
Around the middle of June Debbie and I felt like putting the bunting outside the house. Why? Because a ‘For sale’ sign went up outside our next door neighbours’ home. We had been warned by (my predecessor) Ken that the husband next door was not particularly pleasant, and not least to do with the fact that they own the drive that leads up to their house and our manse. Indeed Debbie had witnessed him swearing at our other next door neighbour over the position of a wheelie bin on the drive, all when our other neighbour was holding his small son in his arms.

Then one Monday evening three weeks ago the infamous Des knocked at our door. “Had your gardener been today?” he asked. “We don’t have a gardener,” I replied.

“I thought you did,” he continued. “Well, there are oil marks on the drive and they weren’t there when I went to work this morning so you must have done them. I’m trying to sell my house and you’re making it look like a council tip.”

Thanks for the compliment, I thought. The fact that manifestly neither of our cars was suffering an oil leak was immaterial.

“I’m going to complain to the church authorities,” was his parting shot. To which I responded, “Do what you like,” and went back indoors.

Debbie said Des was lucky he didn’t encounter her rather than me and immediately began wondering what we might do – perhaps put up a sign at the bottom of the drive saying, ‘Soup kitchen this way – all vagrants welcome’ or something similar. We certainly agreed that there was no way we would do anything to jeopardise the sale of his house!

So was Debbie with her confrontational style or me with my more tactful approach more like Jesus? If you look at the model of what most people in the church say about Jesus, the subtle, diplomatic model is more likely to win the day. But I suggest that Jesus is a lot more like the Debbies of this world than we may often wish to believe. Sometimes Jesus offends. He needs to offend for the sake of spiritual health.

And that is what happens in today’s Gospel reading. In fact I’ve even extended the Lectionary verses by two more at the end to get a fuller flavour of just how confrontational and even perhaps offensive Jesus is to some of his hearers.

Indeed the Gospel itself has from the beginning been offensive to many: ‘a stumbling-block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks,’ said Paul.

The offensiveness Jesus causes in our reading seems primarily centred upon people: himself, his hearers and one of his own disciples.

1. Himself
Throughout the whole conversation/disagreement with the crowd Jesus has made claims about himself that they have found offensive. He just won’t play their game. He’s fed the multitude. They want to make him king – their kind of king – by force. But he won’t have it. He escapes. When they catch up with him here in Capernaum he says they need to feed on his flesh and drink his blood. This is offensive language to Jews – drinking blood – and they miss his point that they need to believe in him and his forthcoming death.

Now Jesus ups the ante even further. Hearing the crowd say how hard his teaching is (verse 60 – here ‘disciples’ is used in a very general way rather than meaning those committed to him), he doesn’t soften it, he doesn’t try to meet them where they are, in fact he just gets more confrontational:

‘Does this offend you? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?’
(verses 61b-62)

If you’re offended by my dramatic language about the need to believe in me, just wait until you see my ascension. He is going to be seen as having heaven’s highest authority. Not only that, ascension language in John’s Gospel is tied in with talk about the Cross. So really at the heart of this, Jesus is saying, ‘You think I’ve made it difficult for you already with language that sounds like cannibalism and offending the ritual and dietary laws? Well just see what you make of a suffering Messiah.’

And Jesus has to be offensive here. There can be no detouring around the Cross. It isn’t an optional extra. It isn’t something where he or we can find something a little more satisfactory to those who find it unacceptable. The offence of the Cross is at the heart of the Gospel. This was the very thing that Paul said was ‘a stumbling-block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks’.

So where does that leave us? It first of all says something about our message. We cannot present a Cross-free account of the faith. The Gospel is Cross-centred. When we ape the world to the extent that we make Christianity sound like a religious self-help manual, we have missed the Cross. When we translate the message into a form that is a pale reflection of pop psychology, we have forgotten the Cross. When we reduce God’s mission to a marketing exercise or just a recruitment drive to put more bums on seats, we have left the Christ of the Cross out of our message and it is no longer the Gospel.

When we make the Cross of Christ central we criticise the whole notion that ‘I’ am the centre of the universe. We oppose the childish attitude that says life is just about fulfilling my needs. Furthermore we are not calling people to be a statistic, but a disciple. And in this sense ‘disciple’ doesn’t mean a casual enquirer, although we welcome all such people. Our concern is for people to become lifelong apprentices of Jesus.

So being Cross-centred affects the message we seek to communicate. But that message is not only about words and the convictions behind them; it is a message that is lived out. The word is fleshed out. In other words, while we may call people to meet Christ at the Cross, while we may proclaim his Cross to be the key to life, words are not enough. A Cross-centred message goes with a Cross-centred life. It means living the old adage that the letters of the word ‘joy’ stand for Jesus first, then Others, and finally Yourself. Our message will only have credibility if it is one that we live out.

2. His Hearers
So Jesus is offensive by pointing his hearers to the centrality of his forthcoming Cross. In what he next goes on to say he’s going to offend the expectations of many who listen:

‘It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But among you there are some who do not believe.’
(verses 63-64)

So what is he getting at – ‘It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless’? It’s not the first time in John’s Gospel that ‘spirit’ and ‘flesh’ are contrasted. It happens in the conversation with Nicodemus in chapter 3. ‘Flesh’ here is not necessarily used in the sense Paul sometimes does, meaning ‘the sinful human nature’, it simply means, ‘human beings’. So the contrast between spirit and flesh here is a way of saying that eternal life is only a gift of God. It is not something that humans can attain to on their own.

Right away we’re into another offensive statement by Jesus. Why? Because he is offending human pride. We’d love to get the ticket all by ourselves. It’s a popular belief. We know that God will judge but we like to think that if our goodness outweighs the opposite then God will let us in – it’s as if the pass mark for heaven is to exceed fifty percent. It has even been called ‘the English heresy’, since in one form or another this belief is traceable back to an English monk called Pelagius.

Strictly speaking, despite popular Christian belief, Judaism did not believe this. It knew that God had delivered the children of Israel at the Exodus and that his commandments were a response to his salvation, not a requirement. But it then became possible to slip into the idea that you somehow had to maintain your salvation by being good enough. It was as if you were saved by grace but continued by personal good works. And this was a trap the early church fell into in Galatia. If you read Galatians, especially chapter three, you will see they had done this.

But either of these is a terrible mistake – to practice either the English heresy that we can earn our salvation or the Galatian heresy that our good works keep us saved. And the problem with both is one of pride. It’s all on the basis of me and my efforts. I did this. So the glory does not go to God. His grace and mercy are quickly forgotten.

It happens in the church as well as in the world today. I have heard experienced church members say they were trying to be Christians. I have known people ask for church membership with the request, ‘Are we good enough?’

But Jesus says the spirit gives life, not the flesh. Life – eternal life included – is the gift of God. It is from the spirit. We are entirely in debt to God’s grace in Christ, revealed by the Holy Spirit. It stems, as I said in the first point, from the Cross. It is about God’s suffering love in Christ and as a Father reconciling us to him, to one another, to creation and to ourselves.

It’s time, then, to put away all our superiority complexes. Not that we don’t believe in the superiority of Christ but sometimes Christians become unbearably smug and insufferable. Our supposed holiness in the world becomes little more than a judgmentalism that looks down its nose at morally inferior beings. Even within the church some of us despise those other Christians who don’t quite ‘get it’ like we do.

But if the spirit gives life and not the flesh, then we are on a level playing field. There are no first and second class Christians, nor are Christians some kind of superior being in comparison to other humans. The level playing field is found at the foot of the Cross, where the only posture for anyone to adopt is to be on their knees.

3. His Disciples
So Jesus’ offensive statements about not being the military Messiah but the Bread of Life, about the centrality of the Cross and the necessity of grace end up thinning the crowd (verse 66). He asks the Twelve, ‘Do you also wish to go away?’ (verse 67) and gets a resounding vote of confidence from Simon Peter: ‘Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.’ (verses 68-69) Surely he is at rest now. No more conflict.

Wrong. The story ends with these (two verses that I added from the Lectionary selection) words:

Jesus answered them, ‘Did I not choose you, the twelve? Yet one of you is a devil.’ He was speaking of Judas son of Simon Iscariot, for he, though one of the Twelve, was going to betray him.
(verses 70-71)

Jesus knows right throughout John’s Gospel that Judas will betray him. So what’s going on here? Jesus seems to let Judas know he’s got his number. Yet Jesus won’t ultimately do anything about it in the way others might do if they possessed such information. It would be as shocking as our government having intelligence about a terrorist and not acting.

Yet Jesus doesn’t act – he’s not into political manoeuvring; he knows his destiny is to bring cosmic redemption through suffering; and so bizarrely it seems to us he allows a known ‘devil’ to remain in his inner circle.

Now at this point people get into all sorts of theories about not judging people in the church. They could lead off from what I said in the last point about not having a superiority complex and remembering we all need grace. So, for example, let even the most flagrant unrepentant sinner take the sacrament and just leave the consequences between them and their Lord. Yet other parts of the New Testament militate against this and make it look like just a way of avoiding painful conflict.

Isn’t it much simpler to say that this is one major example of Jesus knowing our inner hearts? We can kid other people. We can fool ourselves. We can put up a good front and look respectable. But ultimately there is no hiding place from Jesus. He knows our hearts and minds.

So why do we play pretend? Why do we put on masks? It’s worth reflecting on the old observation that we get our word ‘hypocrite’ from the word for the masks that ancient Greek actors wore?

 

Jesus seems to be shocking Judas, the Twelve and us with a reality check here. The way we carry on half the time is faintly ludicrous. Despite the centrality of the Cross and our need for grace, some of us do a better cover-up job than the slimiest politician or the slickest Hollywood make-up artist. We would rather project an image than be real, true – and therefore humble.

Worse than that, we so expect others to maintain an image that we strong-arm the weak, suffering and vulnerable into pretending everything’s fine when the one thing they really need to do is acknowledge that nothing much is OK at all.

The Cross and grace take us into truth, humility and reality. Will we go there – or will we desert or betray Jesus?

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