Raising Doubts (Easter 6 Resurrection People 5) John 20:19-31

John 20:19-31

‘Doubting Thomas.’

In all the years I’ve preached on this story, I’ve encountered people with a variety of reactions to Thomas. There are those whose faith is so serene that they find it hard to comprehend someone with doubts. To them, faith is as natural as breathing.

There are others who quite understand him having questions, because although they believe, they too have plenty of questions for God.

Finally, there are those who think Thomas isn’t militant enough, and who would say it’s all a sham. They defer to outright unbelief.

To explore this today, I am not so much going to expound the passage as use it as an example of this theme about faith, doubt, and unbelief.

And that is going to require me to explore the subject in four phases.

Firstly, there is a difference between doubt and unbelief.

To help us see the difference between doubt and unbelief, consider the story in Mark chapter 9 when Jesus and his three closest disciples come down from the Mount of Transfiguration and encounter a father with a demonised son, whom the other disciples have not been able to heal.

Do you remember the exchange between Jesus and the distraught father?

21 Jesus asked the boy’s father, “How long has he been like this?”

“From childhood,” he answered. 22 “It has often thrown him into fire or water to kill him. But if you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.”

23 “‘If you can’?” said Jesus. “Everything is possible for one who believes.”

24 Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”

I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief. He has both belief and unbelief. This is doubt. A famous Christian thinker called Os Guinness wrote a book on doubt, and he defined doubt as ‘Faith in two minds.’

If we are doubting, we are struggling. We are being pulled both ways. We may want to believe but are finding it hard. It’s not that we refuse to believe.

Now while being in two minds is not a great place to be – the apostle James says that the one who doubts ‘is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind’ (James 1:6) and ‘unstable’ (James 1:7). But Jesus wants to bring stability and faith, so if we find it easier to believe, let us offer kindness and gentleness to those who doubt and give space for Jesus to bring them through to faith.

Secondly, some doubt or disbelieve because they positively believe something else.

This is a simple point to remember. If somebody says they don’t believe something, it’s because they actually believe something else that contradicts it or rules it out.

Thomas was a bit like that. He didn’t immediately accept that Jesus had risen from the dead, because like most Jews apart from the Sadducees he didn’t believe there would be a resurrection of the dead until the end of time. The Sadducees didn’t think there would be any resurrection at all!

If someone today says they don’t believe in the Resurrection, it may well be because they believe something else. That belief may be grounded in the idea that scientific laws are unchanging and unchangeable, and that resurrection is scientifically impossible.

If you tell some such people that their position is a ‘belief’, they may react negatively! For they tend to believe it’s a fact. ‘Beliefs’ are only for those deluded religious people. But it is actually an act of faith to say that you think the whole of life can be lived on the basis of scientific discoveries.

They tend to say that we can’t prove our faith beliefs, but I would say they can’t prove theirs, either. There is more to this world than science, much as we welcome its discoveries. Not everything can be tested by science. We need other disciplines, like history, which works differently from science.

There is a lot of life where we need trust and faith as well as proof. None of us goes into a marriage with the complete proof that the one we love is going to be kind, loving, and faithful to us for the rest of our lives. Instead, we enter into marriage on the basis that we have learned enough about that person to believe we can trust them.

Finally, on the specific issue of believing in unchanging scientific laws, of course it’s helpful to know that laws make for predictable behaviour. Imagine if gravity varied massively all the time.

But perhaps there is another way to see this consistency and reliability of scientific laws if you allow for the existence of God. And that is to see them, as I heard one preacher put it, as ‘descriptions of God’s habits.’ They tell us how God usually does things. The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that Jesus ‘sustains all things by his powerful word’ (Hebrews 1:3). But perhaps on rare occasions and for reasons known to his sovereign will the Lord occasionally changes his habits. That would permit the possibility of miracles. And if so, then we  have to be careful about making scientific laws the ultimate standard by which we judge the truth and falsehood of other claims.

Thirdly, some disbelieve for other motives that are not logical.

I can understand someone who has been brought up on the idea of unchanging and unchangeable scientific laws using that as a test for truth, although as I’ve just said I don’t think it’s as watertight as some think it is.

But we need to recognise that some people choose unbelief for other reasons. For some it is because they believe their faith in God let them down. They wanted God to do something in their lives or in the life of someone they love but it didn’t happen. Sometimes it’s because they had a rather Sunday School image of God, even in adulthood. Sometimes it’s the fault of the church that has told them that God will always heal.

It’s tragic, really. If people reject Christianity because they think it can’t explain suffering, they miss the fact that atheism can’t explain love and purpose in life. If all we have is evolution, then life is just continued incidents of purposeless survival.

We could help people grow into a mature faith if instead we encouraged a church where we believe in ‘the now and the not yet’, that Jesus may heal in this life but he may not. And if we combine that with learning from the Psalmists about the possibility of believing in God but still bringing our darkest problems and emotions to him, instead of having to prettify everything, and make faith always neat, tidy, and clean. It isn’t.

Another reason for disbelief, though, can be what amounts to outright rebellion against God. Certain atheists are on record as saying that not only do they not believe in God, moreover they do not want to believe in God.

Why? Because they want to be in charge of their own lives. They do not want to be answerable to someone else.

The thing is, belief in God can strike against personal pride. Whose life is it anyway? It’s my life. Except it isn’t.

In the same way, I’ve been told that surveys show that the more intellectual someone is, the less likely they are to believe in God. But this assumes that belief or unbelief is only a matter of reason and knowledge. When pride comes into play, everything gets distorted – just as Christians would expect, because it’s sin. And so the cleverer someone is, the more at risk they are from taking pride in their intellectual abilities.

And the Gospel strikes against that. They don’t like the call to repentance. We need to model what Paul said in Romans that it is God’s kindness that leads to repentance (Romans 2:4).

Fourthly, the ultimate solution is an encounter with Jesus.

What changed Thomas? It was an encounter with the risen Jesus. He appears again behind locked doors, this time with Thomas present.

And he shows himself sympathetic to Thomas’ concerns, inviting him to examine his wounds as he had requested.

But the encounter is enough. Thomas doesn’t even get as far as exercising his demands. He says, ‘My Lord and my God!’ (Verse 28)

Sometimes we come to realise that all the logical arguments, important as they are for buttressing our faith, are insufficient on their own. We need an encounter with Jesus. OK, it won’t be exactly the same as Thomas had, for we are among those ‘who have not seen and yet have believed’ (verse 29).

But he met us. That’s what matters.

It’s something to pray for when we know friends and loved ones who don’t believe. Pray that Jesus will meet them in a grace-filled holy ambush.

I was talking with an experienced evangelist about a teenage boy we both knew who felt he had intellectual reasons for unbelief. She said, ‘What he needs is an encounter with Jesus.’ I think she had a point.

I remember a story told by Bishop Festo Kivengere, one of the courageous Christian leaders who stood up to President Idi Amin of Uganda in the 1970s. Kivengere told how he was called to a football stadium where some prisoners were going to be publicly executed by firing squad. He was allowed to meet with the prisoners and pray with them.

‘But,’ Kivengere cried out to God, ‘what do I say to them? What will make sense to these men who are going to be executed at the whim of an evil dictator?’

‘Tell them about me. I’ll make sense,’ were the words he heard back from Jesus.

So that’s what he did and many of those men went to their unjust deaths knowing their eternal destiny was secure.

‘Tell them about me. I’ll make sense.’ That’s our calling.

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Restoring Work (Easter 5 Resurrection People 6) John 21:1-14

John 21:1-14

Christians are a little too good at times at keeping God in a box. One of the ways we do that is we put him in a church box. The only place we think we’ll encounter God is in a church setting.

But people who do that haven’t read the Gospels very carefully. Much more of the action with Jesus is not at the synagogue or the Temple but in daily life.

And if the Resurrection (and the Ascension) make Jesus present everywhere then we can meet him at the breakfast table, at the shops, and at our place of work, as the disciples did here.

How do we feel about that? Are there times when we would rather he wasn’t there? I remember a Christian businessman saying, ‘On Sundays, my priorities are first, God, second, my family, and third, my work. On Mondays, those priorities are reversed.’

Does this truth make us feel uncomfortable, or is it good news? If, like that businessman, we’re clearly uncomfortable with the prospect, reflect with me now, because actually, it’s good news that the risen Lord is present everywhere, including work.

Firstly, the risen Lord is present to guide our work.

Peter and the lads are experienced fishermen. By going fishing at night they have opted for the time commonly accepted to be the most productive for fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. Yet they catch nothing. Not even some plankton.

Why on earth – apart from desperation – would they take instructions from Jesus, who had been a carpenter, not a fisherman? What does he know?

Well, he must know something, because one of those little unexplained details of the story is that he has already got some fish and is cooking them on the beach!

Of course, as readers of the Gospel, we know he’s more than a carpenter, he’s the Risen Lord. Those pesky fish that Peter and his friends are trying to catch are part of the creation he oversaw.

And furthermore, in that creation the human race was assigned work as a good thing, for it was part of the stewardship of creation under God which is the human calling.

So it makes complete sense that the risen Lord is interested in the disciples’ fishing work. It isn’t inferior because it’s not overtly religious. It isn’t inferior because this is what several of them left to follow Jesus. It’s still valuable as part of what makes for a flourishing world as God designed it.

The same is true for us, whether we do paid work or whether we volunteer, whether we need the income, or whether in retirement we are free to dedicate our time to other causes.

Therefore our risen Lord has a genuine interest in our work, and that involves him guiding us in that as much as in any church decision. Our work is to be a matter for prayer as much as any other aspect of our lives.

Are there areas of our paid work or our volunteering where we are struggling? Have we thought that this was secular and not religious, and therefore not brought it to God? That would be a sad mistake.

You may be an employee or self-employed. You may be a business owner. Or you may be a student. Or you are using free time to make a difference as a volunteer. Jesus is risen and alive and cares about what you are doing. Don’t be afraid to involve him. He wants to be involved.

So bring him that staffing decision. Bring him that knotty problem your lecturer set. Bring him the moral issue you’re wrestling with. He is interested, and he is present to help.

Secondly, the risen Lord is present to give purpose to our work.

I once had a manager who was the sort of person who lived to work. This was a problem for most of her staff, who generally worked to live. The office was everything to Mrs Freeman, and she couldn’t understand those who didn’t see it that way.

Why were the rest of us different? Well, for a few, they had spouses who earned a lot more and so their earnings weren’t a life and death issue. But for many, it was because work was not a place of fulfilment but of frustration or tedium. It certainly wasn’t a fulfilling experience.

I think many people would identify with the latter group. We’ve replaced the Seven Dwarfs’ song ‘Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go’ with ‘I owe, I owe, it’s off to work I go.’

And as I’ve said to you before, I’ve had that same experience of frustration and tedium in the ministry just as I did in the office. Those who romantically look on at my work and think it must be some kind of uninterrupted heavenly bliss have never got close to a manse family.

I have also testified before that the Bible verse which just about kept me going during the worst of times was 1 Corinthians 15:58, the climax to Paul’s great chapter on the Resurrection, where he says that a great consequence of Christ being risen from the dead is that our labour is not in vain.

If you remember the sin of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, you will recall that when God finds them he pronounces various curses on them and the snake. One of those curses is that Adam will find work to be frustrating. The Good News of salvation in the Resurrection reverses this curse, just as it reverses our separation from God by sin.

We heard that promise when we also read Isaiah 65:17-25 in the service:

21 They will build houses and dwell in them;
    they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
22 No longer will they build houses and others live in them,
    or plant and others eat.
For as the days of a tree,
    so will be the days of my people;
my chosen ones will long enjoy
    the work of their hands.
23 They will not labour in vain,
    nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune;
for they will be a people blessed by the Lord,
    they and their descendants with them.

Surely Peter and his colleagues in the boat had a sense of this when they dragged their huge catch to shore. After the fruitlessness of the night, now their purpose was fulfilled. They had fish. They could sell fish. They could make a living.

Not everything will be put right now. The vision of complete fulfilment awaits the ‘new heavens and new earth’ of which Isaiah 65 and Revelation 21 speak. (Which implies, by the way, that there will be work to do in the life to come – but it will be fulfilling work.)

However, we can ask the risen Lord whose resurrection promises that coming new heavens and new earth to help us find purpose and meaning in what we are doing now. It may be the chance to serve. It may be creative management of the earth and its resources.

Sure, while sin lasts there will still be frustration. But as the new creation begins to poke through, the risen Lord will bring purpose and meaning to what we do. Let us ask him to make that clear for us.

Thirdly and finally, the risen Lord is present to bless our work.

One hundred and fifty-three fish! Bulging, over-filled, and heavy nets! This is clearly way more than a normal catch!

Over the centuries, various scholars have tried to find symbolic meaning or significance in the number 153, and maybe that’s not surprising, given the many layers of meaning we often find in John’s Gospel. However, those attempts have largely failed, and perhaps we just need to default to a simple explanation.

Somebody counted the fish. The risen Lord had blessed the work of his disciples’ hands.

In Ephesians 3:20 the Apostle Paul tells that prayer can lead to God doing

Immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us.

There is no reason to confine that promise to church work. Paul places no such limit. And this story shows that we can seek God’s blessing through the risen Christ in every part of life, including work such as paid employment, studies, and volunteering.

How significant might that be in the economic situation we are now facing? As prices increase at a rate we haven’t seen for thirty years, as manufacturers’ costs go up, and as household budgets get squeezed to the point where more families are having to make impossible choices, would this not be a great time to ask the risen Lord to bless our work?

So what are the needs of your employer, your educational institution, or your charity? Pray that the risen Lord will be present to bless.

Yes, let’s increase the range of people and causes that we pray God will bless. Not churches and the sick, but all sorts of elements in society. As you walk along the high street in the village, why not pray a blessing on the businesses? OK, there will be one or two whose business you will consider inappropriate for blessing, such as the betting shops, but why not pray that blessing?

The prophet Jeremiah told those Jews who were forcibly taken into Babylonian exile that they should ‘seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which [God] has carried [them] into exile’ (Jeremiah 29:7).

This makes for an interesting challenge: instead of complaining about our society, why don’t we instead pray blessing upon it through the risen Christ?

In conclusion, because the risen Christ is present everywhere to bless we need to get rid of our old sacred/secular divide. Jesus doesn’t see things like that. As one preacher once put it, ‘The only thing that is secular is sin.’

No, see the whole creation as the arena for our risen Lord to be at work, because his Resurrection is the first sign of him making that entire creation new.

And let that vision of the Risen One who transformed the fishing expedition of his friends be one that inspires us to pray and to believe that he also wants to transform our work, our studies, our volunteering, our work in our homes and families.

Because all of those are part of the creation he is renewing. Let’s join him in his work – in prayer and in action.

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Forming The People Of God (Church Anniversary Sermon) Genesis 28:10-22

Genesis 28:10-22

The other day our cat got trapped in Mark’s bedroom and weed on his duvet. Going up to the loft to find a spare duvet for him, I had to fight past a couple of blankets and several pillows. Thankfully, none of those pillows was a stone like Jacob uses in our reading (verse 11). Unlike him, I don’t think I would fall asleep easily on a stone pillow. Just how tired was he?

Now you may wonder why Jacob’s dream is a suitable reading for a church anniversary, and the answer comes in his naming of the place as Bethel (verse 19), for that means ‘house of God.’

Yet this is no house of God in the sense of a permanent building structure where God’s people gather to worship. Rather, it’s a site where God is at work in the formation of a people for his praise through the patriarchs.

And what we learn here about God’s formation of Israel applies in New Testament terms to his formation of the church.

Firstly, the people of God are formed by God’s initiative.

I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. (Verse 13)

It’s God’s idea to form a people for himself. The people of Israel were not just another nation that emerged from ancient history, and the Christian church is not merely a human institution. God took the initiative. Why?

For the salvation of the world. God’s choice of Israel and his election of the church is not just a case of choosing people for their own salvation whereas he doesn’t choose others. No! He chooses and makes his people for a purpose: we are chosen so that we are a light to the nations. God chooses us so that we reflect his light in the world and that others might be attracted to the Light of the World, Jesus himself.

Now we are used to understanding that in an individual way. Each one of us is a witness to Christ. But we also need to understand it together as the fellowship of the Church. As the community of Christ we are called to be a light to the nations, beginning in our local area and spreading as far as we may be sent by God.

The Christian Church is not an accident. An individual congregation like this is not an accident, either. God made the first move to create this community and call it according to his purposes, of shining his light in the darkness.

So if we are here by God’s initiative, it’s an important question to ask how we are shining the light of Christ here and beyond our walls.

If we can identify how we are shining the light of Christ to the wider world, then we are at least in some respects fulfilling our purpose as a church. But if we realise we are not doing so, then we have some hard considerations. Either we must find ways, or we must close, because we’re only a pretend church.

Secondly, the people of God are formed by God’s promise.

Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. (Verse 14)

There are things we need to do for the growth of God’s people to come. We cannot be passive. We must have intent if we are to grow. But before all that, the growth of the church is about God’s promise. He will make Israel ‘like the dust of the earth’, and Jesus famously promised that he would build his church. It all starts with God’s promise.

So are we seeing the growth of the church? Are people around the world hearing the Gospel through the Christian church? The answers to such questions are a very certain ‘yes’.

But what about us? So many of our churches are declining and aging drastically. Churches are closing all over the country. That doesn’t sound like God’s promise of a growing church, does it?

I think the fairest summary of the overall situation would be to say that in some places we are losing many of the battles against the spirit of darkness, but overall we are winning the war.

But even if that’s the case, we still have to grapple with our decline in contrast to God’s promise of growth. There are many reasons throughout history why churches decline and close. Sometimes, it’s because they are not sharing the Good News. Other times, it’s due to hostility in wider society against the Gospel. In some cases, it’s a bit of both. Or it could be something else, like being disunited so that we can’t demonstrate the love of God to the world.

If we are declining when God’s promise is for growth, we need an honest examination of why that is so. When we have identified why, we need to ask whether that reason can be reversed. If we are not sharing the Gospel, will we learn to do so? If we are disunited, will we be reconciled so that we can show God’s love to others? If we are in a hostile society, can we find ways of being a winsome witness to Christ despite that?

How we answer these questions help us decide what to do if – like many traditional churches in our culture – we are not seeing God’s promise of growth.

How will we respond in our churches?

Thirdly, the people of God are formed by God’s grace.

I could have begun with this point. But it’s also the theme behind the two other points about God’s initiative and God’s promise. The formation and development of God’s people is a matter of God’s grace.

After all, this is a story about Jacob. How come he’s travelling? He’s on the run after deceiving his twin brother Esau out of their father Isaac’s blessing. Esau wants blood. Jacob is hardly saintly.

Yet for all that, as the patriarch of the next generation, God is using him in his long term plans to form the people of God. Yes, this scheming, self-centred man! He’s not exactly the ideal material, is he?

However, when God intervenes in his life here via the dream at Bethel, Jacob responds with a vow that if God will provide for him and protect him, then the stone he lays will be the house of God and he will give a tenth of all he has back to God (verses 20-22).

In other words, grace transforms sinners.

One of my college lecturers said to me once, ‘Never forget that every church is a company of sinners.’ And when we look deeply at ourselves, isn’t that true? Like Jacob, we are unpromising material. We are not obviously saints in the making – at least not when left to our own devices.

But isn’t it also true that over the years we have seen God work changes in our lives as we have responded to all he has done for us in Jesus Christ? Has not the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus coaxed out a response from us to God’s grace?

No, we are not the finished article. We are not people who have got it all together. We are like broken pieces, glued together with gold, like the Japanese art of Kintsugi – and that’s what makes us beautiful.

For the world isn’t always attracted to the smooth operators who seem to have got it all together, whereas broken, fallible people like us who are utterly dependent on the grace of God are a more welcome proposition. We are more relatable.

So for all the challenges that this story is to us, ultimately it’s good news. As God’s initiative in forming the people of God calls us to be a light to the nations and as God’s promise of growth challenges us to face difficult questions if we’re not growing, in the final analysis it all comes down to grace.

And God’s grace is the most remarkable and wonderful thing, making beautiful creations out of broken people. While we believe that, and live out that truth, there is always hope.

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Resurrection People: Restructuring Imagination Luke 24:13-35 (Easter 3 Year C)

Luke 24:13-35

How do you see the world? For me, it’s through a pair of glasses.

In my case, the menu for a new pair of glasses contains a number of elements. The lenses are varifocal, so I can have distance vision through the top, I can read through the lower part, and I can do middle distance vision such as computer work through the middle. Sometimes I need an astigmatism correction. Then there are the helpful additions such as anti-reflective coatings and anti-scratch, since I rely on them everywhere except bed and the shower.

But there’s one other element I always pay for. I am a blue-eyed boy – literally – and like all blue-eyed people I am more sensitive to bright light. In my case, I’m particularly sensitive to things like bright sunlight. And so I have photochromic lenses, the ones that darken in bright light.

Now one of the things about photochromic lenses is that whether you have them in their grey version or their brown, they make the colours you see more saturated. If I take off my glasses, the world looks rather washed out in comparison to the way I am used to seeing it.

I even process my photos according to this way of seeing the world. Their colours are brighter and punchier than other photographers would make them.

What about Cleopas and his companion (who may well have been his wife and may have been called Mary)? How did they see the world? Well, they had been seeing it through the lens of believing that Jesus, whom they took to be a prophet (verse 19), ‘was the one who was going to redeem Israel’ (verse 21), but he has been crucified by the authorities (verse 20) so that’s all gone by the board. And now they are confused by reports from women friends that his body is no longer in the tomb (verses 22-24).

They don’t know how to see the world anymore. And that’s a bleak place to be.

All their hopes for this miracle worker from Nazareth had come to a climax when he had ridden into Jerusalem a week earlier signalling himself to be the Messiah, and acclaimed like a new King David, yes, surely he would set Israel free from the Romans and she would no longer be an exile in her own land.

And that hope, that imagined future, that vision of how things were to be, came crashing down in a matter of days. No wonder they’re despondent.

Sometimes we allow ourselves to see life through a vision that appears good and honourable, but which lets us down. It might be about our aspirations for our career, our family, or our children, only for work or a family member to take a wrong turn. I wouldn’t be the first minister to enter this calling with a vision for renewed and growing churches, only to be disappointed.

But the encounter that Cleopas and Mary have on the Emmaus Road with Jesus gives them a new way of seeing life. It’s a vision that won’t let them down. It’s a vision that will sustain them through joy and sorrow. It’s a vision that will inspire them as disciples of Jesus.

Firstly, we see life beating death. The ultimate enemy of the human race and indeed of all beings is conquered. We believe the gospel promise that Christ’s conquest of death in the middle of history guarantees ours at the end of history.

For Christianity, the essence of death is separation. The separation of the deceased from the living; the separation of the soul from the body. The essence of resurrection is reunion: the reunion of the soul with a new body animated by the Spirit of God, and the reunion of those previously parted by death.

That’s why at the funeral of a Christian we have this mixture of grief and hope, not just grief. We grieve our separation from the deceased, but we anticipate resurrection where we will be reunited and our bodies healed as the Spirit of God gives life to them. When we commit that person’s body at the funeral to be cremated or buried ‘in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life’, this is what we are anticipating. Not just life after death, but a a new quality of life after death.

In this life, it means we face the darkest of challenges with hope. Not that we go rushing after death and martyrdom, but we know that sickness, injustice, and tyranny will not have the final word.

So we don’t become cavalier about Covid, because this life God has given us is precious, but we do know that at its worst it cannot wreak  ultimate destruction.

And right now our Ukrainian Christian brothers and sisters do not become reckless about their lives for the same reason, but they face the shameless violence of Vladimir Putin in the knowledge he cannot ultimately win. Either the events of this life or the resurrection of the dead will mean final defeat for  account to Almighty God for his deeds.

So that’s our first new way of seeing that the resurrection brings, and it’s utterly transformational: we see life and death in a new way.

Secondly, we see hope beating despair.

In 1984, a painter named Gottfried Helnwein created a piece of art called ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams.’ It depicts four famous people in a diner. Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart are a flirtatious couple, James Dean is another customer, and Elvis Presley is the bartender. The theme is ‘emptiness’, because all four could have been said to have died senseless deaths: Presley from alcohol and prescription drugs, Bogart from alcohol, Monroe from drugs, and Dean from a tragic motoring accident. If the sort of dreams I described earlier have let you down and you feel empty, then the victory of hope over despair in the resurrection is for you.

We’ve talked a lot about the need for hope in our society over the last couple of years in the wake of the Covid pandemic. To a large extent millions of people have put their hope in science, and we are grateful for the remarkable work on vaccines. I certainly am: I am sure my recent bout of Covid would have been far worse without my three vaccinations.

Yet the hope our society has clung to in the face of the virus, while good, has not been ultimate hope. For that we need the resurrection, which shows that even death, the strongest of all the forces arrayed against us, does not have the final word.

And whether it’s Covid assailing us or the visions and dreams we’ve lived by letting us down, the only ultimate antidote to the despair they bring is the hope of the resurrection.

As I said earlier, I have known broken dreams as a minister. Church life has not generally become what I hoped and prayed it would. I guess my dreams were about some form of religious ‘success’, but of course that is not guaranteed to us and it is therefore not the solid hope that the resurrection is. Indeed, we might say that putting our hope in any vision and dream that is less than the resurrection is some kind of idol.

So what has kept me going when the experience of my calling has been dark? One Bible verse. It’s a verse that Tom Wright keeps coming back to in his wonderful book ‘Surprised By Hope’, and it’s the final verse of the Apostle Paul’s great chapter on the resurrection, 1 Corinthians 15. The climax of his argument about the resurrection is to say this:

58 Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labour in the Lord is not in vain.

The resurrection means that our labour in the Lord is not in vain. In the eternal economy of God, all that we do in the Lord’s service counts. We may not be able to see how it does right now, but the resurrection means those acts of faithfulness are not wasted. They are invisible building blocks in the cause of God’s kingdom.

So the resurrection says to us, keep going! Keep doing the Christian thing. One day we will see what God has built with it.

Thirdly and finally, we see the kingdom of God beating the empires of this world.

When God made Jesus’ body new in the resurrection, it was the sign that one day he would make all things new. It was the promise of the new creation, the new creation we begin to experience in ourselves when God begins to make our lives new when we come to him. And it climaxes in the great promise of Revelation 21 that God is making a new heaven and a new earth, with a new Jerusalem at the centre.

So that is where all this is heading. A new creation where there will no longer be any suffering. There will be no sickness, there will be no sin, whether personal immorality or social injustice. Relationships will be whole. There will be harmony among people. Everyone will have enough. This is the new order promised by the resurrection.

But what are we supposed to do? Some Christians particularly of past generations would have simply seen us as rather passively waiting for it to come about at the end of time. No wonder Christians were accused of ‘pie in the sky when you die.’ That is not the way.

No, this great vision of the fulness of God’s coming kingdom that we see in the resurrection inspires us to act now. Of course the kingdom of God has not yet come in all its completeness, but it is coming. It is on the way. Jesus said it had arrived with his coming.

And this is why it’s important to keep doing the faithful stuff, as I said in the last point. Each prayer for healing, each act of care for the sick, each action in support of transforming the lot of the poor, each act of reconciliation, each deed of compassion, each drawing of someone into the love of Christ is all part of the coming kingdom and a pointer to it.

It’s the resurrection and all that it promises that is our inspiration to live this way.

So – like Cleopas and Mary – may we allow the resurrection to change the way we see life. May we then live by that vision – where life beats death, hope beats despair, and the kingdom of God conquers the empires of this world.  

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Palm Sunday: A Different Kind of King, Luke 19:28-40 (Lent 6 Year C)

Luke 19:28-40

Earlier this week I was asking one of my churches whether we had a stock of palm crosses to give out for Palm Sunday. But not to worry if we didn’t, I told them, we could (in the words of one biblical scholar) call it ‘No Palm Sunday.’

You’ll note I didn’t say Napalm Sunday – although that might be a Scottish pronunciation!

Why ‘No Palm Sunday’? All four Gospel writers tell the story of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem in the lead-up to his death. But Luke, whose account we read, doesn’t mention the spreading of palm branches. It’s a detail he misses out. He talks about the crowd spreading their cloaks on the ground instead. Maybe we should wave coats instead of palm branches – what do you think?

Be that as it may, if you’re an experienced Christian you’ll know from sermons in the past how the way Jesus enters Jerusalem signals his claim to be the Messiah, and he signals that he’s not coming with an army but in humility. I’m going to assume those things this year rather than go over them again. Instead, I’m going to look at what Luke’s account tells us about how Jesus exercises his kingly status.

Firstly, King Jesus acts in power:

37 When he came near the place where the road goes down the Mount of Olives, the whole crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen:

You would expect a king in those days to exercise power. But the way Jesus uses his power is in the performing of miracles.

Most of the miracles the disciples had seen were healings. They had also seen him use his power and authority over the elements to calm a storm. In other words, King Jesus used his great power that demonstrated his kingdom as acts of compassion for people.

And the crowd don’t know it, but in the coming week they are going to see the power of their King in unexpected ways. His weakness in dying on the Cross will be an act of power to bring the forgiveness of sins. His raising from the dead will bring new life.

Jesus doesn’t use his power to push people around or humiliate them. He uses his kingly power in compassion.

What does this mean for us if we live under his reign? A couple of things: firstly, it means that Jesus has compassion for us. Yes, as King he has the right to tell us what he wants us to do. But he is not bullying us. And he takes note of our frailties. He helps us with our weakness to sin. He is there with us and to act for us in our trials and pains.

Secondly, we are called to reflect his compassionate power in the world. This is a key part of our witness to him. Where can I show compassion this week, Lord? How about making that a regular prayer?

It may involve offering sanctuary to Ukrainian refugees. It may be caring for a neighbour along the road. It may be praying for someone who needs the intervention of Jesus in their lives.

What is certain is this: if King Jesus uses his power in compassion, then his church acting in compassion in the community should not be an exceptional thing. It should be the norm.

Secondly, King Jesus comes in peace:

38 ‘Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!’

‘Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!’

Peace in heaven and glory in the highest. Those words should sound familiar to readers of Luke’s Gospel. They are so like the song of the angels who announced the birth of Jesus in Luke 2:

14 ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven,
    and on earth peace to those on whom his favour rests.’

It’s something the early church majored on. You only have to look at the way the Apostle Paul began his letters. The standard way to begin a letter in his culture was to greet people with the word ‘Grace’. He went one further. He began with ‘Grace and peace.’

But what kind of peace? I don’t think there are any limits. We cannot separate off peace with God from peace with our neighbours – remember the connection between giving and receiving forgiveness in the Lord’s Prayer.

King Jesus is riding into Jerusalem, whose very name means ‘City of peace’, to bring this all-encompassing peace. But what the crowd of disciples hasn’t realised is that the way he will bring that peace will be by what happens a few days later, as he is nailed to the Cross. In his death, God offers peace to us. And that costly peace calls us to be peacemakers with others.

This challenges churches to be communities of peace. If we believe the Gospel, we won’t necessarily agree on everything, but we will deal with our differences peaceably. We will have the joy of knowing that we are forgiven sons and daughters of the living God. And we will seek peace in our communities. I saw this in Knaphill a few years ago when two businesses were in serious conflict. Someone from the Baptist church offered their services as a mediator. It wasn’t successful – success isn’t guaranteed – but that person was living out the Gospel of peace.

So if you want to put Palm Sunday (or even No-Palm Sunday) into practice, go and make peace with somebody.

Thirdly and finally, King Jesus receives praise:

39 Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, ‘Teacher, rebuke your disciples!’

40 ‘I tell you,’ he replied, ‘if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.’

When our daughter was about three years old, she used to love to dance to the music of the hymns in church. She would dance in the aisle, or maybe up front next to me. One day she was dancing in an all age service when a grumpy man in his eighties bellowed at her to stop.

The Pharisees are still with us. If we become embittered or cynical we will be offended by joyful praise.

Ian Paul, whom I quoted at the beginning, says that there may even be a pun behind the comments of Jesus in the original speech. For eben, the Hebrew word for ‘stones’, is close to ben, the word for ‘son’. If the sons of Israel won’t praise then the stones will, says Jesus.

Stones? Inanimate objects? Maybe it’s poetry, in the same way that many Psalmists envisage the time when all of creation will praise its Maker – ‘the trees of the field will clap their hands’, and many other passages reveal this sentiment.

For Jesus is not just King over individuals: he is King over all of creation. When we Christians engage in creation care, we have much loftier ideals for the whole creation. It’s not just a case of ensuring that the earth survives, it’s a case of being good stewards and leading ‘everything that has breath’ to praise the Lord.

We know this crowd of disciples will be shocked later in the week when a different crowd is whipped up into a frenzy and demands the execution of Jesus. But the disciples will discover the healing power of the Cross, and the healing of creation in the Resurrection.

So what about us? Have we allowed ourselves to become so cynical like the Pharisees, perhaps through years of disappointment in the church and the Christian faith, that we are more like The Grinch than Jesus? If heartfelt praise offends us, then we have a heart problem.

If that describes any of us, then I offer the invitation to use Holy Week as a time to reset and to heal. Take time to get alongside Jesus as he teaches in the Temple, as he issues amazing rebuttals to his critics, and then as he is silent before most of his accusers and goes to his suffering on our behalf.

Then, when we have drunk deeply of that – and only when we have – let the joy and craziness of Easter morning touch your soul. Let the stones – and the sons and daughters – cry out.

So – Jesus is a very different king. For him, not the power of coercion but the power of love. For him, not peace enforced by the jackboot, but peace brought by his own suffering. For him, praise not coming from crowds bussed in and forced to parade but from those captivated by his self-giving love.

This king is worthy of our allegiance.

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Passion Sunday: Framed By The Cross, John 12:1-8 (Lent 5 Year C 2022)

John 12:1-8

You don’t have to be around my family long to find those of us who are passionate about photography. My daughter and I share a love for it, and it all began with my late father. He wanted to document his time doing National Service with the RAF and got the bug there. Belatedly, at the age of 21, I caught it off him. In his later years, few things gave him greater pleasure when we were with him than seeing our daughter’s latest photos.

So when Dad died, one of the things we spent some money from his estate on was a family portrait session at a studio we knew of in a nearby village. After the session, Debbie and I returned to the studio a week or two later to choose the photos we wanted.

But it wasn’t just about choosing the photos: we also had to pick frames for them from a selection we were offered. Some choices were easier than others: a portrait of our dog, who is predominantly black in colour, was paired with a black frame. It wasn’t always as straightforward as that, as we considered both the content of the photo and the colour of the wall where it would hang.

Our reading today has a frame. At the top and the bottom, the beginning and the end, we find the Cross of Christ. We have it in the beginning with the reference ‘Six days before the Passover’ (verse 1). For in chapter 19, as the Passover lambs die, so too will Jesus (John 19:14), the Lamb of God (John 1:29). Then near the end, Jesus says that Mary anointed him for his burial (verse 7). Who knows, perhaps she took what was left of the perfume she used here to the tomb.

The Cross frames our story. What Jesus has recently done for the siblings Lazarus, Martha, and Mary by raising Lazarus from the dead (verse 1) will be ratified by the Cross. Ultimately, it is the source of all our blessings.

And within that frame, we see in Lazarus, Martha, and Mary fitting responses to all that Jesus has done for them. The brother and his two sisters are all here examples of responding to the grace of God. They are examples of true disciples.

So in what ways do they respond to Jesus, and what can we learn from them?

Martha is first up in the text. John writes of her, ‘Martha served’ (verse 2).

This is very different in tone from Luke’s story of Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38-42), where we read that Martha was ‘distracted by serving’. Here it’s different. She is serving as her way of playing a part in honouring Jesus with this dinner.

Jesus had raised Lazarus back to life with no pre-conditions, but here is the natural response of someone like Martha. What can she do in gratitude? She can serve Jesus. On the surface it’s just a meal, but in John’s Gospel where even the most literal things are also symbolic, we see here an important spiritual principle for all of us.

We too have freely received from Jesus without any preconditions. He went to the Cross for us and offered us the forgiveness of sins. We owe him everything – and we cannot pay it. But we can offer to serve him in grateful response for all he has done for us. If we truly count our blessings we don’t merely end up writing a religious shopping list. Instead the cumulative effect of all those blessings is for us to say, ‘How can we show our gratitude?’

Serving Jesus is an obvious way to show our gratitude for the Cross and all it contains. And so we ask questions in prayer: ‘What do you need me to do, Lord? What would please you?’

Sometimes it will be obvious what we can do. There will be a presenting need. At other times we need to wait and seek God in prayer to know how he would like us to serve him. When the answer comes, it may be something we find pleasing or it may be something we find difficult.

It comes back to the Covenant Service, doesn’t it? ‘Christ has many services to be done. Some are easy, others are hard.’ For me, responding to the call to ministry was part of my way of serving Jesus in response to all he has done. Sometimes it’s rewarding and thrilling, but on other occasions it’s dull, depressing, or even frightening. But I carry on because this is a way in which Christ has shown me (and the Church) that I can serve him in response to his great love for me.

Can each of us name ways in which we are called to serve Christ in response to his grace and mercy to us?

Lazarus is next. ‘Lazarus was among those reclining at table with [Jesus]’ (verse 2)

‘Reclining at table’? Put out of your mind a typical dining table. In particular, stop thinking about Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper, where it looks like Jesus and the disciples are sitting down to a meal in the way we would.

Instead, remember that a Middle Eastern table was close to the floor. In order to eat, you would lie with your head near the table and your legs away, supporting yourself on your left elbow while using your right hand to take food. That is what ‘reclining at table’ was like.

And the point here isn’t that Lazarus is lazily enjoying the food and the company while the women slave in a hot kitchen. It’s more that this is a picture of intimacy. Perhaps on a day when we celebrate Holy Communion, intimacy at a meal table has special significance.

And so again, we have a response to what Jesus has done here. Jesus has brought his friend Lazarus back to life. In response, Lazarus wants to get close to him. You can imagine that Lazarus will be getting to know his friend Jesus better as they eat together.

We too can draw near to Jesus in response to all the wonderful things he has done for us. Don’t we want to know someone like that better? This is why we pray. This is why we read our Bibles. This is why we gather for worship. This is why we eat in his presence, not only in ordinary meals but also at the Lord’s Supper. It’s all about getting to know better the One who has been so full of love for us, sinners that we are.

Sometimes when a preacher reminds us to pray, read our Bibles, worship, and take the sacraments it sounds like a sergeant-major barking orders. But that isn’t the reason for doing these things. All these so-called ‘means or grace’ (or in other traditions ‘spiritual disciplines’) are there as ways of coming close to Jesus.

So I’m not going to harangue you today about your personal devotions. But I am going to say this: let’s ponder all that Jesus has done for us, and let that motivate us to use the means he has provided to come close to him.

Finally, the star of the show (well, apart from Jesus, of course): Mary. We know how Mary responds to all Jesus has done for her, Martha, and Lazarus:

Then Mary took about half a litre of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. (Verse 3)

If Martha responds by serving and Lazarus by intimacy, then Mary responds by giving. Her giving is generous and perhaps sacrificial. But it is so beautiful that ‘the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.’

That’s what true giving from the heart to Jesus in response to his love is like. There is a beauty about it. Mary is not paying a tax. Nor is she settling a bill. She is responding from the heart to the grace and mercy of Jesus. And everyone present can smell the fragrance.

Not only that, but we can also say her giving is prophetic. In the next chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus will wash his disciples’ feet. But Jesus’ own feet don’t get a wash. Not that he needed to be washed clean of sin, of course. But his feet have already been washed here by Mary, who has anointed him for burial (verse 7) after the Cross.

The one who doesn’t understand this is Judas, whom John tells us is a taker to the point of being a thief (verses 4-6) rather than a giver.

Now when Christians give, we do not ultimately give to the church, we give to Jesus. When we give, we do not pay a subscription that entitles us to benefits from the church, we give as an act of gratitude and worship because Jesus has done so much for us and our lives are framed by his Cross. Some of you will recall that’s why I never refer to ‘the collection’ in a service: I talk about ‘the offering.’

I know I’m saying this at a time when giving of the financial kind is especially hard. Inflation is at its worst for thirty years and is poised to get worse; and on Friday we saw our energy bills leap by 54%.

But nevertheless we can ask the general question about giving. And we ask it not in a way that is designed to inflict guilt on people: rather, we say, have we truly taken into our hearts and minds the lavish and outrageous grace of God in Christ who went to the Cross for us? Have we caught a vision of just how much God loves us? In gratitude, what can we give of our money, time, talents, possessions, indeed of our very lives?

Can we make the atmosphere fragrant with the scent of our giving?

So – Passion Sunday, when we start to see that the Cross of Jesus frames not just this reading but our whole lives: can we sense how broad and deep and high the love of God for us is in Christ?

And if we can, then like Martha can we show our gratitude in serving, like Lazarus can we show our love in drawing close to Jesus, and like Mary can we demonstrate our response to that love in generous giving?

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The Lost Sheep, Coin, and Son Luke 15:1-32 (Lent 4, Year C)

Luke 15:1-32

The Parable of the Prodigal Son is a wonderful story. Told on its own, it’s a heart-warming parable of the Gospel that speaks powerfully about God’s love.

Don’t worry, I don’t propose to question any of that!

But the key words there were, ‘Told on its own.’ Today, I deliberately put it in its context. When you do that, you see much more the purpose of the parable.

The Lectionary almost got it right. Had we followed that slavishly we would have read the first three verses but not the two shorter parables about the lost sheep and the lost coin. We would have missed the fact that the Parable of the Prodigal Son is the third in a series of parables. It is, as the NIV calls it, the lost son.

What, then, do we learn here about God? And what does that mean for us?

Firstly, God loves the lost. Through all three parables here we get a sense of God’s love for those who are lost and far from him. When the Pharisees and teachers of the law mutter, ‘This man welcomes sinners, and eats with them’ (verse 2), Jesus explains exactly why.

For Jesus, the lost are not the collateral damage we put up with so that we can devote our energies to the insiders in the community of God. They are a priority – so much so that he will do crazy things to reach them. What shepherd risks leaving ninety-nine sheep to find one that has gone astray? (Verse 4) The Good Shepherd does.

Could it be that one of our problems in the church is that we spend so much time on the ninety-nine inside the fold that we forget our calling to those lost from us? We agonise about why people don’t come to church and we despair at church decline, but which of us will take the radical steps to reorganise our churches along the principles of the shepherd in the Parable of the Lost Sheep?

If you want a sign of the sickness I’m talking about, then look for the reaction whenever somebody suggests a new initiative in the church which does things in new ways and goes beyond the existing members. Someone is sure to complain, ‘What about those we already have? Shouldn’t we be looking after them?’

It’s so infantile and selfish. How come these experienced Christians haven’t learned how to feed themselves spiritually?

The giveaway for me was one year when a church member complained to me in a letter about something. It’s so long ago I can’t remember what she was moaning about, but in the middle of the letter came the words, ‘First and foremost you are our minister.’ In other words, she who pays the piper calls the tune. We put money in the offering, and we therefore expect you to prioritise us. It’s a consumer attitude to religion. It isn’t a kingdom attitude, where we give for the sake of others.

These parables warn us clearly that if we just want things done for us in the church then we are like the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. Their faith had become so corrupted from God’s call to Israel to be a light to the nations that everything was centred on defining the in-crowd and concentrating on the in-crowd.

We have too many Pharisees in the church today. Look instead at the passion of the woman seeking her lost coin and the commitment of the shepherd looking for the lost sheep.

Look too at the father of the Prodigal, surveying the horizon for any sign that his errant son is on his way back, a son who by demanding his inheritance early was saying in the culture of his day, ‘Father, I want you dead.’

And see as that father does the undignified thing of running to his son, when the culture expected him to stand, face frowned and arms folded, waiting for the son to grovel. None of that. He is passionate for his lost son.

And look as well at the celebrations. The shepherd invites all nearby to celebrate, and Jesus says that’s a picture of heaven when a sinner repents (verses 6-7). The woman does similarly when she finds the coin and Jesus says that’s like the joy of the angels (verses 9-10). Presumably the party thrown by the father when the lost son returns is a parallel to them (verses 22-24).

Understand that this is how God feels about those far from him. Many of us have prodigals in our families. We have children who have not followed our faith, and it hurts to the core of our being. Some of them have gone off and done things in their lives that make us weep.

You may have had friends in the church who seemed deeply committed, whose faith you admired and whose friendship you valued. But one day they walked away. You didn’t have a clue what was going on under the surface. When they left the church you felt confused and bereft.

Know that in these parables Jesus spells out just how full of love and compassion for our friends and our children the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is.

With that knowledge I invite you to pray daily for the prodigals you know, remembering that God loves them so much he will send out his search and rescue mission for them.

And as well as ourselves individually and in families, how do we show this in the life of the church? What would it mean for us to re-order our priorities to reflect God’s love for those yet to know him rather than mainly putting on events that benefit us?

Secondly, God loves the Pharisees. One reason I wanted you to hear the whole context was so that you knew all these three parables are told in response to the moaning and groaning of the Pharisees and teachers of the law about Jesus hob-nobbing with lowlifes. They just don’t get the gospel of grace.

And yet these are people who saw themselves as defending the pure faith. I’ve probably mentioned before that the Pharisees started out as goodies, even though we see them largely as baddies in the Bible. Their movement began as a way of calling Judaism back to a pure, unsullied faith. It was a renewal movement.

But what happens when a renewal movement doesn’t meet its goals? What happens today when people who are passionate to renew the church don’t see things going the way they believe they should? Frustration sets in, and if they don’t guard their hearts they become embittered. They hold onto truth, but they forget grace, and so the pure well becomes poisoned.

What do people like that do? The sort of things the Pharisees did to Jesus. In their quest for purity and their failure to remember the grace of God, they hunt down Jesus and anyone like him who is a threat to what they see as the pure faith.

They do the same in the church today. Many ministers can tell stories of church members who have hounded them and resorted to underhanded tactics to undermine them or get them moved on. They think they’re serving a just cause, but they sink down to an ‘end justifies the means’ approach.

I know what I want to do when I encounter these people, especially when they threaten my livelihood and with it the home the church provides for us. There is a small number where I would have had the right to take them to court.

But the grace and mercy of God is so outrageous that he loves these people, too. How do I know?

It comes in the ending of the Prodigal Son parable. The elder son is clearly meant to stand for those Pharisees and teachers of the law. They are the ones who have been with the Father and had all his resources. But the celebrations of heaven and the angels just render them all the more angry.

Yet look at the tenderness with which the father in the story speaks to the older son:

31 ‘“My son,” the father said, “you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. 32 But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”’

‘Come and join the party,’ says the father. The invitation into the father’s joy couldn’t be plainer. God longs for those who have contended for the truth to do so in response to his grace. He doesn’t want them to give up a passion for truth, but he knows how distorted and damaging it becomes when it isn’t paired with his grace. It damages those who are attacked with the truth, and it damages the Pharisees, too.

And so today, for all of us who have been elder sons, defending the faith vigorously but somehow losing our first love, the same Father who welcomes home prodigals seeks to melt our hearts too with his love.

How are we going to answer the invitation? You’ll notice that the story of the lost son doesn’t completely end. We don’t get to hear how the older son responds to the invitation of the father.

Except we do know in reality. Since the older son represented the Pharisees, we know what he would have said: ‘I’m going to kill you.’

Each of us must write our own ending to the parable in our own lives. Whether we are a younger son or an older son, a prodigal or a Pharisee, will we say ‘Yes’ to the Father’s extravagant love for us and for all people, or will we throw it back in his face and find that in our defence of truth we have chosen death instead of life?

I pray we write a good ending.

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Self-Examination, Luke 13:1-9 (Third Sunday in Lent, Year C)

I’ve no idea what the compilers of the Lectionary were smoking when they put together the current set of readings. Last week we were in Luke 13:31-35, but this week we jump back to the beginning of the chapter!

Luke 13:1-9

Whatever their reasons, though, I hope to show you by the end of this reflection that the themes of today’s reading are eminently suitable for Lent.

“Jesus, what about those Galileans whose blood Pilate mixed with the sacrifices at the Temple?” (cf. verse 1)

It has a horrible contemporary ring, doesn’t it? Jesus, what about those mothers and babies in the maternity hospital at Mariupol that the Russians bombed?

And for many people who bring sincere questions about suffering to God, it may sound relevant too. The child who died of cancer. The husband and father who went off with another woman. The natural disaster that killed hundreds.

These are not easy questions for Christians who believe in a loving and powerful God. We begin to answer them by talking about God who in Jesus Christ entered unjust human suffering himself. But we may not come to a complete answer, and not everybody wants an intellectual answer, many simply want to be heard and held.

And those who think the problem of suffering trumps the existence of God are deluding themselves. If the existence of unjust suffering is a problem for believing in a loving, just, and powerful God, then the existence of love and purpose are problems for an atheist. How many atheists would push their beliefs to the limit by saying to a spouse, “I have electrical and hormonal responses to you,” rather than “I love you”?

Which brings us to the way Jesus responds to his questioners here. Had they genuinely been seeking God, then surely he would have responded differently. How do we account for his apparently harsh response unless it is that this is one of those trick questions from people who are not serious about following him?

His answer makes sense if that’s the case. Not everyone who asks questions about spiritual matters is serious about getting to a point of following Jesus. I once shared digs with an atheist colleague during a work training course. He told me his objections to belief in God. I did my best to respond, but at the end he said he wasn’t interested in changing his mind, he just wanted a good argument.

And so Jesus brings the conversation round to the real issue for those who ask deep questions for frivolous reasons. Repent. Jesus didn’t call Pilate to repent of his wickedness. He called his hearers to repent. And if the collapse of the tower at Siloam (verse 4) sounds horribly like a first century Grenfell, it’s not the architect or the builder he calls to repent but his listeners.

Let’s remember that Jesus came proclaiming the kingdom of God, and that when he did so, he characteristically said, “Repent and believe the good news.” The good news is that there is a new king on the throne and it’s not Caesar. We need to repent in order to conform to the ways of his kingdom.

Jesus was telling his hearers that Caesar didn’t have final control over Israel, and nor did the self-interested religious establishment. God was on the throne of the universe in his Person. There would be further good news at the Cross as this God conquered his enemies, the principalities and powers of evil. So, says Jesus, here’s the good news – but it’s only yours when you repent.

And that repentance is not a one-off act. It’s a lifetime of turning back to God, turning our lives bit by bit back to the ways of the kingdom Jesus proclaimed.

Today, we rightly want Vladimir Putin to change his ways. We abhor what he is doing – and so we should. But we must not let that distract us from the challenge Jesus issues to us, too: repent.

We are all far from the finished article. I hope and pray we can look back at our lives and see where Jesus has changed us already. But his words in today’s reading are such that our prayer needs to be something like this: “Jesus, I’m grateful for all the ways you have transformed my life. What’s next?”

Well, that could be challenging enough. But if Jesus has already given us what we might construe as a ‘negative’ challenge in the call to repent – give up certain things, strip things out of your life, and so on – he also has a ‘positive’ challenge for us. Be Fruitful.

We hear this in the brief parable Jesus tells about the unfruitful fig tree in the vineyard (verses 6-8). The fig tree hasn’t borne any fruit for three years, and the owner is persuaded to give it one more year by the gardener.

Some people observe that it’s strange to talk about a fig tree in a vineyard, but it did happen sometimes in the ancient world. The important thing here to remember is that Jews hearing about a vineyard will remember that in Isaiah chapter 5 that is the precise metaphor the prophet uses for Israel. The fig tree is someone dwelling among Israel, the people of God, who is not being fruitful.

We know Jesus had a lot to say elsewhere about being fruitful, not least in his ‘I am the vine’ passage in John 15.

But what kind of fruitfulness does Jesus expect of us? Not literal figs, I hope – I can’t stand them! It is of course a metaphor for the work of the Spirit in our lives individually and as God’s people. So Jesus expects churches to make more new disciples of him. He expects us to exhibit more Christlikeness as individuals and as a community. He expects us to make a difference in society as, in the words of Jeremiah, we ‘seek the welfare of the city to which [we] have been called.’

What if we used this as a report card on our church? Are we making new Christians? Is our love for God and one another increasing? Would our local community miss all the good we do if we suddenly vanished overnight?

I don’t know what you’d say, but for many churches today I suspect it might be quite a mixed report. New Christians? Few, if any. More love? Yes and no. Making a difference locally? Maybe, maybe not.

In the parable, the owner and the gardener agree to give the fig tree just one more year. If nothing changes, then they agree to cut it down. Could it be that a spiritual principle like this is behind some of the church closures we see in our time? I know there are other factors as well, but does Jesus actively close some churches because they are no longer fruitful for the kingdom of God?

I have to say, it wouldn’t surprise me.

What do we need to do in order to change and improve? Do we need to stop behaving as if the church is all about satisfying our own personal needs and tastes? I believe we do. Do we need to stop speaking to people in the church in ways we never would countenance in our families or at work? Sure. Do we need actively to structure our church life around an outward-looking focus rather than an inward navel-gazing? Yes, I think so.

So in conclusion, to come back to where I began by saying this reading had highly suitable themes for Lent, why did I say that?

Well, repentance is probably quite obvious. Lent is a time when we examine ourselves. Often that means we have to put right things in our lives where we have gone awry from the purposes of God. So yes, repentance is a Lent theme.

But so is fruitfulness. Because that too requires self-examination. And I hope I’ve shown that when it comes to fruitfulness, we not only need to examine ourselves as individual Christians, we need to do the same as churches.

Shocking, then, as this reading may be – it’s hardly Sunday School ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’ material – may the Holy Spirit use it that we all, both individually and together, may change for the better, for the sake of God’s kingdom as revealed by Jesus.

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