Tag: Cross of Christ

Mission in the Bible 5: The River from the Temple (Ezekiel 47:1-12)

I’m back, although not fully recovered yet. So here is a slightly shorter than usual Bible talk. Please excuse the regular water-sipping in the video!

Ezekiel 47:1-12

If you ask most average Christians what the main purpose of the Church is, the most popular answer is, worship.

But in this life that is at best an incomplete answer. It may be true in the life of the world to come, but right now there is more than worship to do as the Church. There is mission as well as worship.

Look in our passage how the living waters, the river of God, ultimately coming to symbolise the Holy Spirit, may start flowing at the Temple in Ezekiel’s dream but they don’t remain there. They flow out to bless the surrounding world.

Let’s look at the flow.

Firstly, in the river beginning at the Temple, mission starts at the place of sacrifice.

Ezekiel’s dream or vision is of a rebuilt Temple after the return of Israel from exile in Babylon. It was the centre of worship and the place of sacrifice. Therefore, this vision says that sacrifice is not just about the benefits for the personal worshipper. It goes out and beyond.

As Christians, we see this most clearly in the Cross of Christ. His death ends all need for sacrifices for sin. It was the ‘one full, perfect, and sufficient oblation’ as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer puts it.

We receive the benefits of the Cross when we come to faith and when we confess our sins every week. It is comforting and healing to know that this is the sign of God’s enduring and faithful love for us, the love that anchors our lives.

But for Ezekiel, the river of life begins at the place of sacrifice. And for Christians, the Cross also means that God will pour out his Spirit, and when he does the benefits of Christ’s sacrifice will be seen as not merely for us but for the whole world. It is what happened at the first Christian Pentecost. The Spirit falls, Peter preaches the Gospel, people of many nations hear, and thousands profess faith.

The first thing to remember, then, is that our blessings are not for us alone. That’s why I can’t stomach attitudes to church that sound like consumerism: what’s in it for me? What do I get out of this, never mind anybody else? Perhaps one of the classic examples is the older person in a declining church who says, ‘All I care about is that this church is here to see me out.’ That is a selfishness that cannot sit in front of the Cross of Christ.

Secondly, also in the river beginning at the Temple, we see that mission is launched in worship.

The river of God, the water of life, the Holy Spirit, does not simply bring joy, refreshment, and power to worship. The river flows from the place of worship to the world.

Again, there’s a challenge to our consumer attitudes to church. Worship is not just a personal bless-up. Yes, there are times when God blesses us graciously out of his sheer love for us. And sure, we often come in great need of blessing ourselves. But worship is not fundamentally a ‘getting’ experience. It is a giving experience. And it takes us beyond Sunday, into Monday and on from there.

What happens on Sunday is part of what equips us for Monday. That’s why an organisation like the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity came up with something called ‘This Time Tomorrow’, where a church member is interviewed in the Sunday service, asked what they will be doing in twenty-four hours’ time, and how people might best pray for what they will be doing then.

Or come with me to an American church that has, over the exit from the building, put the words ‘Servants’ Entrance.’ We go out from worship on mission in the world, showing God’s redeeming love in our words and our deeds.

The Holy Spirit is always thrusting us out into the world with the love of God. In the Gospels, after Jesus has his amazing spiritual experience at his baptism, he next goes into the wilderness. Some English translations rather tamely translate the Greek to say that the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness, but it’s actually more forceful than that. In at least one of the Gospels, the writer literally says that the Holy Spirit threw Jesus out into the wilderness. The ‘throw’ part is related to where we get our word ‘ball’, and it makes me think of a cricketer in the field on the boundary, positively hurling the ball all the way back to the wicketkeeper with considerable force.

You and I have come to worship today for a purpose. Yes, we may need some blessing or comfort, but what we haven’t come for is, so to speak, just to be tickled by God. We have come to encounter the Holy Spirit, who will energise us for our daily witness in the world.

Thirdly, in the river flowing from the Temple, we see that mission is to transform creation.

The river gets deeper and deeper, even to the point where no-one can swim in it. And for someone like me who can’t swim at all in the first place, that’s scary!

But it’s scary in a good way. What we see here is the awesome power of God transforming creation. Take the reference to life teeming in the Dead Sea, where the extreme saltiness is usually a killer. I visited the Holy Land in 1989, and on the day we went to the Dead Sea, some of my friends got into the water and floated – I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of that there. But for me, the salt was so intense even in the air that my eyes stung and I couldn’t even look in the direction of the water to see my friends, let alone take photos on my camera. And I am a keen photographer.

That’s how salty it gets there. So for Ezekiel to see the salt water become fresh and be filled with fish and other creatures is an image of a miracle.

Then look at the trees on the riverbank, which bear fruit every month rather than every year, whose ‘fruit will serve for food and … leaves for healing’ (verse 12). Reading that from a New Testament perspective makes us think of the way this passage is an inspiration for the Book of Revelation, where trees line not a river but the Holy City, and whose ‘leaves are for the healing of the nations.’

Yes, there are marshes where nothing changes, just as there are many who are resistant to the Gospel of God’s grace in Christ that calls everyone to repentance and faith in Jesus. But overall what we perceive in Ezekiel’s vision is a foretaste of the day when God will make the new heavens and the new earth, where everything that is broken in creation is healed, where relationships with God and one another are reconciled, and where all pain, war, and suffering is abolished.

What does that mean for us? It means that our encounter with the Holy Spirit through the Cross of Christ and through worship throws us out into the world as bearers of God’s love in a multiplicity of ways. The Holy Spirit sends us to call people back to God through Jesus. The Holy Spirit sends us to be people who heal relationships. The Holy Spirit sends us to be people of peace, not violence. The Holy Spirit sends us to bring good news to the poor and the wounded. The Holy Spirit sends us to restore broken creation, not because we are afraid of what will happen to this planet, but because we are full of hope about God’s good intentions for his creation.

When we come to worship each Sunday, the presence of God equips us for these tasks. When we leave gathered worship each Sunday, we go as commissioned officers of God’s kingdom.

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Mission 1: God The First Missionary (Genesis 3:1-23)

Genesis 3:1-23

On Friday, an advert popped up in my Facebook feed for a company called Mission UK. You may think that’s interesting for a Christian, and especially suspicious for a minister who’s about to preach on the subject of mission, but then I looked at the picture. Mission UK sell … sleep powder. One enthusiastic customer had slept for seven hours straight for the first time in a long time, even sleeping through the loud noise of foxes outside.

They also sell ‘performance-based tea’ – whatever that is.

I just hope you are not going to sleep through this. Because I have an important question.

 ‘Who was the first missionary in the Bible?’ If I ask people that, I get a variety of answers, all wrong. Some say the Apostle Paul. Others say Philip the Deacon in Acts 8 or the Apostle Peter. Still others say, ‘Well the answer must be Jesus!’ A few might go back to the Old Testament and mention Jonah, who is the poster boy for how not to be a missionary!

No. The answer – and you will have guessed if you have seen the title of this sermon – is God. We find God as the first missionary here in Genesis chapter 3:

8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’

God comes looking for Adam and Eve. ‘Where are you?’ This is the missionary God taking the initiative as he comes to look for sinners.

Mission begins with God. He wants to bring fallen people back to himself. He wants people and all creation back under the reign of his kingdom.

That’s why we talk in the church about ‘The mission of God.’ Some people who want to sound clever use the Latin, Missio Dei, but since I never learned Latin at school I’ll stick with ‘The mission of God.’

A great Anglican writer on this subject, Dr Chris Wright, once said:

It is not the church of God that has a mission in the world, but the God of mission who has a church in the world.

Mission is in the very heart of God. It is not raising money to send overseas. It is not simply getting bums on seats. It is certainly not about just waiting for people to come to us. Especially it is not getting people in to do the jobs, otherwise the church will close. Nor is it about hiring our premises to outside organisations.

Mission is God’s heart for the world. Mission is God’s desire to bring everyone and everything under the reign of his kingdom, and it is our calling to participate in that with the help of the Holy Spirit.

So let us understand right from the start of this series that mission is not an optional extra for keen Christians who have an extra dose of enthusiasm. Mission is the church’s calling because it is God’s heart.

I labour this point because it’s so important. Mission is a God thing. That’s why every Christian and every church must take it seriously and make it a priority.

Here are three things from the passage that show the priority of mission for God.

Firstly, God takes the initiative.

God doesn’t come into the Garden of Eden because Adam and Eve have called out to him, telling him they’ve made an absolute pickle of themselves. Far from it: they are hiding (verses 7, 10, 11)! He doesn’t wait for any human initiative. He knows something is wrong, and he comes.

Like everything in the life of faith, God makes the first move. Everything we do in faith is only a response to him.

John Wesley had an expression for this. He referred to ‘prevenient grace.’ If that word ‘prevenient’ sounds a bit complicated, let’s just break it down. ‘Pre-‘ is to come before. ‘Venient’ derives from the French ‘venir’, ‘to come.’ God comes before. Prevenient grace means that God’s grace comes before anything else.

That’s what happens in the picture language of Genesis 3. God takes the initiative when human beings mess up. No wonder I said that mission is in his heart.

Some Christians like to say that mission is about finding out what God is doing and then joining in. Now that can be abused, because some will label anything they particularly like as being something God is doing. But if we look carefully, prayerfully, and biblically at the world we may discern where God is already at work and then we can respond.

So if mission is a God thing, our first response can be to pray, ‘Lord, where are you already at work in restoring people and creation under your kingdom? How can I serve you in that?’

Secondly, God comes to us.

In Genesis 3 God does not summon Adam and Eve to him. He comes to them in the Garden. He goes to where they are.

This is where a lot of our talk about mission is all wrong. We say, how can we be more attractive for people to come to us? But although mission will involve people eventually joining the church, we cannot sit here waiting for people to come to us. It just won’t happen in most cases, unless they already have a church background.

I suspect that a lot of the ‘How can we be more attractive so that people come to us?’ language is more because we are nervous or afraid and don’t want to rise up to the challenge that mission presents us to get out of our comfort zones. But that is our calling if we are to respond to the God of mission as the church.

After all, having recently celebrated Christmas, we should be aware of this principle of God coming to us in the birth of Jesus. My favourite Christmas Bible text is John 1:14:

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

Do you see? God came to us. Emmanuel, God with us. These are not just words of comfort, these are words of God’s mission. He came to us.

And John tells us that it’s the pattern we are to copy. For the risen Jesus said to his disciples in John 20:23,

As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.

God sent Jesus to us. Now Jesus sends us to others. We don’t sit on our backsides and wait for them.

I sometimes tell a story about a funeral I conducted about twenty years ago. An elderly church member died, and I went to visit her family, who were not churchgoers, to plan the funeral.

During that meeting when I asked them about the deceased’s life, they told me that church activities comprised her entire social life.

I think they thought I would be pleased to hear that, but I covered my true feelings. Because I was saddened. How can we spend all our time simply on church activities if we follow the God of mission who comes to us and who calls us also to go to people with his love?

How are some of us going to change our priorities? Because we need to.

Thirdly and finally, God provides the solution.

After God has questioned the man and the woman, he speaks first of all to the snake, secondly to the woman, and thirdly to the man about the consequences of sin being present in creation. The curse affects the relationship between animals and humans. It affects childbearing. It makes women subservient to men. It turns work into drudgery (verses 14-19). These things are not God’s best intentions for his creation.

But in the midst of this depressing description of what a world under the curse of sin is like comes one small but dazzling chink of light when God addresses the snake:

15 And I will put enmity
    between you and the woman,
    and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
    and you will strike his heel.’

The offspring of the woman will crush the snake. But the snake will strike where this offspring touches the earth – with his heel.

Christians have traditionally seen this as a prophecy about the birth of Jesus from Mary (the offspring of the woman) and the Cross (where Jesus crushes the power of Satan, but evil strikes him and kills him).

God is so passionate about his mission to redeem the human race and heal creation that he sends his only begotten Son to conquer the forces of evil and reconcile people to himself and to one another.

We do not save ourselves. It does not depend on us. It is all down to God taking the initiative, coming to us, and breaking the power of cancelled sin, as Charles Wesley put it.

It is not up to us to devise clever wheezes or flashy programmes. Our rôle is to respond to the God who moves first by proclaiming Christ crucified, even though the world finds that offensive and foolish. It is nevertheless the only remedy for a broken world. And it is all God’s work, not ours.

So as we set out on a New Year with renewed commitment to Christ, let us specifically renew our commitment to co-operate by the Holy Spirit with the God of mission.

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Covenant Service: Good News For Failures (Jeremiah 31:31-34)

Jeremiah 31:31-34

It’s that time of year when sign-ups to health clubs and gyms breed like rabbits. Yet in a few months’ time, many of the direct debits will still be going out from bank accounts, but a lot of the new fitness enthusiasts of January will have given up. The thought of ‘New year, new me’ will lie in tatters. Another set of New Year’s Resolutions will have failed.

Maybe that’s why I haven’t bothered with such resolutions for many years. I feel sure I’ll fail.

So much of life is made up of failures – cheerful thought, I know! – be they failures of good intentions or that much larger feeling that our lives themselves are a total failure. Not one of us is without our failures.

But on this first Sunday of the New Year, when we renew our covenant with God, and we traditionally become sombre and serious, wondering whether we can keep the solemn and intimidating promises we make, I want to preach Good News.

In my draft order of service, I simply called this sermon ‘The New Covenant.’ But now I want to give it a different title: ‘Good News For Failures.’ I want you to have a sense of hope from our reading in Jeremiah.

Yes, I know many people have Jeremiah down as a depressing and depressive prophet of doom. But if you read him closely, he preaches short-term doom but long-term hope. And that’s why we can have a theme of ‘Good News For Failures.’

I have two pieces of Good News from Jeremiah for Failures:

Firstly, God’s New Covenant means Failures Are Not Forgotten:

31 ‘The days are coming,’ declares the Lord,
    ‘when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel
    and with the people of Judah.
32 It will not be like the covenant
    I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand
    to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
    though I was a husband to them,’
declares the Lord.

Jeremiah has preached doom to Israel. He warned them that if they did not turn from their sins the king of Babylon would come and conquer them and take them into exile. They didn’t listen. They thought they could find political solutions to their troubles without changing their ways while continuing to sin.

It didn’t work. The Babylonian army turned up. At this point, a first tranche of Israel has been marched off into Babylon. They are away from the land, which was so central to their religion, because it had been promised to them by God. If they are away from their own land, then surely they are forgotten and rejected by God for ever.

Yet Jeremiah comes with this word and others that looks forward to the future. God has not finished with his people. They may have broken the old covenant, but he will make a new covenant.

And of course, that is what the coming of Jesus at Christmas is about. If you re-read the nativity stories you will see how many of the promises don’t simply look forward to Christianity and the Church (which is the way we often read them) but are promises to Israel. God has not forgotten and rejected his people. His own Son is bringing the promised new covenant.

Now we Gentile believers are grafted onto the vine which is the People of God, and so we too are inheritors of this same promise. When we fail, God has not forgotten us.

If we come to this Covenant Service this morning conscious of how much we have not lived up to our promise a year ago, we come to a God of grace who in Jesus Christ offers us yet another new beginning. Just as we confess our sins every Sunday morning together and receive assurance of forgiveness, so too year on year at this service we shall confess our sins before we renew the covenant and again receive God’s promise of a fresh start.

Every now and again, I come across people in church who believe that God cannot continue forgiving them. A few will even say they think they have committed ‘The unforgivable sin.’ However, Jesus said the unforgivable sin was blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, and if someone is sensitive to their sin then believe me that usually indicates they are also sensitive to the Holy Spirit.

No: to everyone who fails, I believe God invites us to look at Jesus on the Cross and see his arms stretched out wide – so wide they embrace the world, including us.

Those who are excluded from his embrace are those who exclude themselves not simply by sinning but by refusing to accept they have sinned, perhaps painting their sin as righteousness (often self-righteousness), and thinking they have no need to repent.

But to those of us who are acutely aware of our need to repent, God says, I have not forgotten you. I have not rejected you. Come back. You will find I am already waiting for you.

Secondly, God’s New Covenant Means Failures Have New Hope:

33 ‘This is the covenant that I will make with the people of Israel
    after that time,’ declares the Lord.
‘I will put my law in their minds
    and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
    and they will be my people.
34 No longer will they teach their neighbour,
    or say to one another, “Know the Lord,”
because they will all know me,
    from the least of them to the greatest,’
declares the Lord.
‘For I will forgive their wickedness
    and will remember their sins no more.’

Neatly for me, this gives me a chance to link back to my sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, when I looked at the relationship between Jesus and Moses. To recap part of it:

In the Old Testament, people were not saved by the Law but by grace. Keeping the Law did not save people, rather it was a response to having been saved. We can see this by the fact that God only gave Moses the Law for Israel after he had delivered them from Egypt.

Nevertheless, it was external to the people. It showed God’s righteousness, but it did not convey the power to obey it. On the other hand, the Christmas promise is that Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, and when Jesus returns to the Father that changes to the Holy Spirit, God within us.

Now link that with what Jeremiah records God as saying here. The external Law will be replaced in the New Covenant with everyone knowing the Lord. In other words, the New Covenant promises God’s indwelling of every disciple.

Not only that, we do not have to depend on priests to mediate between us and God – again, because everyone will know the Lord.

We don’t have to struggle to know God, we don’t have to struggle to know his law, and we are also enabled with divine power to do his will.

Yes, we shall still fail from time to time, and God in his mercy will forgive us and lift us up. But we shall also find God’s own strength when we truly want to obey his will.

The Old Covenant was good – it was very good – but the New Covenant is like that moment when you are driving in your car, gently accelerating, but then the turbo cuts in, and whoosh!

The New Covenant contains not only the Old Covenant promises of forgiveness, but the additional promises of God’s presence and power with us. This is God’s side of the bargain. This is his generous, grace-filled offer to every disciple of the Messiah.

So when we come to renew our promises today, I want us to realise that we are not coming to a severe God who is ready to stoke the flames of Hell the moment we let him down. He is the God of mercy and love who has provided everything we need through the Cross of Christ. Forgiveness comes there. The restoration of our relationship with God comes there. The gift of the Spirit follows.

If we remember that this is the nature of our God who calls us to reaffirm our covenant with him, then perhaps we shall be more ready to make those challenging promises.

After all, we’re not making a New Year’s Resolution, we’re responding to God’s grace.

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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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