When it was announced in one of my previous appointments that I was due a sabbatical, the only reaction from my senior steward was, ‘What’s he going to bring back for us?’ There was no concern that it might be beneficial for me, or that I might need it.
It was rather like the ‘What’s in it for me?’ question that we often find in wider society. Politicians know how significant that question is, and so when elections come around their manifestos are packed with promises to the voters about what they will do for them, rather than casting a vision of a better society.
And ‘What’s in it for me?’ is very much the attitude of the crowd that has hunted down Jesus and his disciples after they tried to escape across the water when Jesus knew they wanted to make him king by force. That’s what Jesus tells them their motives are:
26 Jesus answered, ‘Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.
I’m not going to deny that there are many benefits that come from following Jesus, but the crowd were only following Jesus in a geographical sense. They weren’t following him as their Teacher, let alone their Lord and Saviour. They were in it for themselves.
And if we’re honest, sometimes our words and actions as Christians betray similar attitudes. ‘I didn’t get much out of that service this morning,’ say some people – completely missing the point that worship is an act of giving, not getting.
Instead, Jesus says this:
29 Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’
But is that good enough for the crowd? No! They want a sign like manna from heaven (verses 30-31), despite what they witnessed with the feeding of the five thousand. There’s just no pleasing some people!
Which I guess is the point. Jesus hasn’t come to please people, any more than ministers have. Sometimes when strangers discover what my work is they say to me, ‘It must be hard trying to please everyone.’
My response is, ‘It isn’t my job to please everyone.’
You get the impression that no matter what Jesus says, this crowd has little intention of becoming disciples. In fact, were you to skip to the end of the chapter you’ll find that apart from Jesus’ inner circle, nearly everyone bails on him.
And Jesus lets them go. He doesn’t soften his message for them. He doesn’t redesign his message around their ‘lived experiences’. That’s something today’s church would do well to ponder.
So what does it mean ‘to believe in the one [God] has sent’ (verse 29) and to feed on Jesus, ‘The bread of life’ (verse 35)?
Well, let’s eliminate one very basic, minimal thing. Believing in Jesus is not simply about believing he exists. Jesus is right in front of the crowd – they know he exists – so it can’t be that.
It’s something more. It’s believing in him in the sense of trusting in him – and trusting in him to the extent that we entrust our very lives to him. What does that involve?
Firstly, it’s going to involve trusting in his teaching, and that’s quite a radical step to begin with. So much of Jesus’ teaching cut across the norms of his day and that’s every bit as true, if not more so, today. Loving God and loving our neighbour ahead of ourselves? Forgiving people that our society freely calls ‘unforgivable’? Serving others instead of lording it over them?
Oh sure, when we see other people living selflessly, we applaud and we nominate them for an honour from the Queen, but to think that we should all do this – isn’t that a bit much? We’ll let these other noble people do the good acts vicariously for us.
But if we believe in Jesus and his teaching, we won’t make excuses like that.
Secondly, it’s going to involve trusting in his kingship, which is very different from the kingship that the crowd imagined. No military ruler killing his enemies here.
Instead, Jesus spoke language about being lifted up as if on a throne – you find this in John 12:32:
‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’
But he is referring to his death on the Cross! That is where he will be enthroned as King of Israel and King of all creation.
Believing in Jesus means trusting that his Cross is what changes the world. The Cross is where notice is served on the powers of evil. The Cross is where our sins are forgiven, and we begin the journey of living a new and different life.
Thirdly, it’s going to involve trusting in his love, because all that I’ve mentioned so far about the teaching of Jesus and of his Cross indicate what an upside-down approach to life he brings. Does he have our best interests at heart when he calls us to self-denial? How exactly can his death serve as the turning-point of history?
I believe Jesus knows that what he asks of us is the opposite of what the world broadcasts, but he invites us to look at all he has done for us and then answer the question as to whether we will trust him.
In particular, he reminds us of all he has done in giving up the glory of heaven to take on human flesh among the poor, and in going to the Cross for us.
All this is for us to trust in his love for us and hence also trust in his teaching and his kingship.
And with that relationship comes all the blessings we long for. They don’t come by us grabbing all we can have for ourselves with the ‘What’s in it for me?’ mentality.
By trusting ourselves into Jesus’ hands we gain more than bread to feed our stomachs: we gain the very Bread of Life, Jesus himself (verse 35).
Early in the pandemic my wife received a letter inviting us to take part in monthly testing for COVID-19 on behalf of the Office for National Statistics. Whenever you’ve seen reports about the ONS data, we’ve been part of that.
More recently, testing has become much more frequent than monthly for many people. Our kids had to take twice-weekly tests to attend their Sixth Form colleges on site. We ministers in my Methodist circuit have talked about self-testing before taking services and other appointments.
And testing is a major theme in today’s reading:
5 When Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming towards him, he said to Philip, ‘Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?’ 6 He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do.
But to my mind that’s just the first of three tests in the passage. All three tests are tests of faith in Jesus, but in different ways.
Today, I’d like to explore those three tests of faith to think about how Jesus tests our faith in him.
Firstly, faith goes beyond our understanding:
7 Philip answered him, ‘It would take more than half a year’s wages to buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!’
8 Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, spoke up, 9 ‘Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?’
It’s hard to be cruel about Philip and Andrew. They survey the scene, gather the evidence, and come to a conclusion.
Now I’m a big fan of evidence, logic, and reason. I’m quite an analytical person. But if this story had stopped at this point, it would have been tragic.
And sadly many church stories or individual Christian stories stop at a similar point. Jesus starts challenging them and the response is, ‘But we can’t do it.’ It all shuts down there. We can’t do it. End of.
It’s true that Philip and Andrew couldn’t sort out the problem. It’s true that Christians and churches on their own can’t do what Jesus calls them to do.
But the issue is this: what is Jesus saying? What does Jesus want to do?
Because for all the value of reason, logic, and evidence-gathering, the ultimate question here is Jesus saying, ‘Do you trust me enough to do what I say?’
When we do, then amazing things happen. When we don’t, we drift into spiritual decline.
Secondly, faith goes beyond our preferences:
14 After the people saw the sign Jesus performed, they began to say, ‘Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.’ 15 Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself.
You can see the preferences and the preconceived ideas going on in the people here. ‘We have just been miraculously fed. A king feeds his people. We want and need a king, especially one who will get rid of the Roman occupying forces. Let’s make Jesus king.’
But as we know with hindsight, Jesus refused that idea of kingship. The kingdom of God is different.
Sometimes we have our own preconceived ideas of Jesus, too. And those preconceived ideas are often based on what we would prefer to believe. So I’ve been in a service where I’ve read a passage from the Gospels in which Jesus says some tough things, only for someone to tell me afterwards, ‘Jesus wouldn’t have said anything like that.’ The trouble is, they’ve got a fantasy Jesus in their minds, one that won’t disturb their comfortable little worlds, one who conveniently agrees with them on sensitive subjects.
One of the most common forms of this fantasy Jesus is believing he loves us as we are (which is true) but forgetting that he loves us too much to leave us as we are (thus avoiding challenging things like the way Jesus challenges us to be transformed). It’s all the benefits of the Gospel, but none of the responsibilities.
The only real faith in Jesus is one where we accept and worship him for who he is, and where we are willing to come under the authority of his teaching, not our wishful thinking.
The crowd missed out on the real Jesus. Let’s make sure we don’t.
Thirdly and finally, faith goes beyond our fears:
Now we move onto the story of Jesus walking on the water.
19 When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus approaching the boat, walking on the water; and they were frightened.
Well, who wouldn’t be frightened by such an out of the blue experience? I’m sure I would be.
And even if we haven’t had strange supernatural experiences like that, it’s also true that in whatever way Jesus starts to come close to people, many become frightened like the disciples did.
Why is that? I think many of us become so conscious of our sins and failures when Jesus comes close that all we can think of is to say, ‘Please stay your distance!’
It’s like we want just enough Jesus to be sure our sins are forgiven, but not so much Jesus that we can’t cope. Because in our hearts we know that the fluffy fantasy Jesus I talked about in the last point doesn’t exist.
C S Lewis captured the feeling in this famous passage from ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’:
“Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion.” “Ooh” said Susan. “I’d thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion”…”Safe?” said Mr Beaver …”Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
And so it’s no wonder that when the disciples are frightened to see Jesus walking on the water towards their boat, what we read next is this:
20 But he said to them, ‘It is I; don’t be afraid.’ 21 Then they were willing to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the shore where they were heading.
Let our faith overcome our fear of Jesus and welcome him close, because he is good. His presence makes a difference to the disciples with their boat reaching shore immediately, and he will make a difference to us, too.
Could it be that one reason we don’t see so much of Jesus’ power in our churches is that we don’t want him to come too close to us? Maybe it’s time to choose faith over fear.
So let’s wrap with a summary:
Jesus tests our faith, because alongside all our gifts of reason we still need to trust him.
He tests our faith so that we put our trust in the real Jesus, not some fantasy Saviour.
And he tests our faith so that it wins out over fear of him, he draws closer to us, and we begin to see amazing things happen for the kingdom of God.
So let’s not run away when Jesus tests our faith. He tests us so that our faith grows and the kingdom of God extends.
In my O-Level Physics class there once came an occasion where our teacher set us a problem for homework that none of us could solve. When my parents saw me struggling with it my Dad decided to write a letter to the teacher, asking him why he had set homework that none of the pupils could do.
In response to that letter the teacher phoned my Dad. He explained that all we needed to do to solve the problem was go back to the first principles we had learned in that topic.
When I heard that, I learned an important life lesson. Always go back to the first principles.
There is something of ‘first principles’ in our reading from 2 Corinthians. It’s a strange selection of verses in the Lectionary – but hey, what’s new there? But even despite that and the fact that we’re reading these verses out of context, we can pick up on some first principles. Because like my old Physics teacher, the Apostle Paul also always went back to first principles.
So today we are going to think about some of the First Principles of the Gospel. What are the first principles Paul talks about here, and how do they affect the way we live?
Number one first principle is that we live by faith, not sight.
Paul tells us that in the life to come we shall be at home with the Lord and shall see him, but right now we are away from home and do not see him, so we have to live by faith, trusting in the God whom we do not yet see. But when we do see him, he will call us to account for all that we have done while away from home (verses 6-10).
What does that mean for us? To live by faith means that we trust that even though we don’t yet see God, one day we shall. And in the meantime, we are to live as those who know we shall see God one day. That’s what living by faith is here: trusting that we shall meet God face to face in the life to come, and letting that reality direct the way we live now. The Gospel promise of meeting God face to face one day is meant to change us on this day.
So for one thing, living by faith means that we consider our attitudes and our actions now. Would we act the way we do if we had to live our every moment before the visible face of God? How does the fact that we shall one day see him face to face affect how we live today? What would we be happy doing in that knowledge? What would make us ashamed?
For another thing, we know that the Lord has entrusted us with resources, gifts, and talents in this life. So another part of living by faith is to consider how we use these things. From the abundance of creation to our natural talents, how would we use these if we were doing so before the face of God? How would we use our brain, our artistic abilities, our work skills, our homes and gardens, our possessions? The answers to questions like these will show how much we are living by faith – or not, as the case may be.
We often restrict the expression ‘living by faith’ to those Christians who have to trust God to supply their financial needs. I have no quarrel with that: I have had to do that at times. But Paul tells us to expand our vision of living by faith, because he tells us here that all Christians live by faith. How are we going to live now, knowing that we shall one day see God face to face?
Number two first principle is that Christ’s love compels us.
Paul talks about the love of Christ being a compelling motive in the Christian life, and he links it to his death on the Cross. If you hadn’t heard the whole reading but were just hearing his letter read out in public for the first time you might have thought that the link from the love of Christ to the Cross was going to be the forgiveness of our sins through the Cross. But it isn’t.
Of course, it’s true that Christ’s love brings us forgiveness through the Cross, but Paul makes a different point here. His punchline comes in verse 15:
15 And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.
Christ’s love compels us, because his example shows us that we are to live for Jesus and for others, not primarily for ourselves.
That’s why a church that gets hung up on just wanting the things that the members themselves like is an unhealthy church: it’s not modelled on Christ’s love.
In fact, were I to choose a church to be part of based on my own preferences it almost certainly wouldn’t be the Methodist Church. There are so many things in Methodism that I find tedious, frustrating, or annoying. But God called me to serve here. He loves me in Jesus, and calls me to return that love in the context of Methodism.
You may know the famous comment of Archbishop William Temple, when he said that the church is the only institution that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members. It’s not a perfect statement, but it does capture some of this idea: Christ’s love means we live for him and for others.
Each and every one of us needs to be asking ourselves, how am I imitating the love of Jesus by serving him and serving others?
Number three first principle is the new creation.
16 So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here!
Following Jesus makes us treat people differently, says Paul. But it’s that final verse where I need to give you this week’s episode of Bible Trivia.
‘If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation,’ said many older translations. Some newer translations say, ‘If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.’ That’s bit different.
So which is it? Is it that the convert is a new creation? Or is it that conversion promises the general new creation of all things?
If you go back to the Greek you’ll see why we have this problem. It’s ambiguous. A literal translation would be, ‘If anyone is in Christ – new creation!’ For us English speakers there are missing words. To translate it into English, we have to add words. Whether we opt for ‘the person is a new creation’ (favoured by those Christians who emphasise personal conversion) or ‘there is a new creation’ (favoured by those who care about the environment and social justice) depends largely on our existing theological preferences.
But what if the words ‘If anyone is in Christ – new creation!’ are deliberately ambiguous and cover both of these possibilities? I think both are true biblically.
When we are united with Christ, God makes us new by his Spirit, and starts a work of holiness and healing in us that will not be complete until glory. He calls us to co-operate with his Holy Spirit in this work.
But our union with Christ also shows God’s project to make the whole creation new, just as he makes us new. He is not content to leave the world as it is and calls us to join with his Spirit in the renewal of all things.
So he will send us into the world both to call people to conversion and to make a social difference.
Therefore, if any of us prefers personal piety to social justice, we have sold the Gospel short. And if any of us is willing to campaign for social justice but not seek personal conversion and holiness, then we too have diluted the Gospel.
To sum up, the three Gospel first principles we’ve looked at today all lead to transformed lives and transformed society. When we live by faith, not by sight, we live as if we were doing so in the presence of God, and that surely changes our actions and our priorities.
Christ’s love compels us through the Cross to live for him and for others, rather than for ourselves.
And the new creation is both personal with our conversion and our journey of holiness but also social as we anticipate God making all things new.
Each of us needs to ask: in what way is the Gospel changing me? And in what ways am I serving the kinds of change God longs to see in his world, as a result of the Gospel?
Having begun the ‘Worship in the Wilderness’ series on Ash Wednesday, we move now to the First Sunday in Lent and a theme where we look at the good God can bring out of our wilderness experiences.
When we speak of having a ‘wilderness experience’, we don’t tend to mean something good. A wilderness experience is a time when life is hard and discouraging, when we feel far from good and unable to gain spiritual nourishment. Nothing grows. We hunger and thirst but are not satisfied.
It’s not good.
Would you consider it strange, then, to hear this week’s title: ‘A Spirit-Led Journey’?
‘At once the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness’ (Mark 1:12) says Mark of Jesus. It’s just after his baptism, and at that wonderful experience the Holy Spirit has descended on him. ‘like a dove’ (Mark 1:10). According to Mark, being sent into the wilderness is every bit as much an experience of the Holy Spirit as that of the dove and the voice from heaven.
In fact, as I’m fond of pointing out when preaching on the temptations of Jesus, to say the Spirit ‘sent’ Jesus out into the wilderness or ‘led’ him there does not reflect the full force of the Greek. Perhaps it’s our British fondness for understatement, but a more literal translation would be, ‘At once the Spirit threw him out into the wilderness.’
The Greek word is ekballo. The ‘ballo’ part is where we get our word ‘ball’. So think of a sports competitor hurling a ball a long distance, and you have some idea of what Mark is saying here. Imagine a fielder in cricket running round to stop a ball going for four, and then hurling it back to the wicket-keeper.
So the Holy Spirit has very forcefully taken Jesus into the wilderness to face temptation. And as Jesus resists that temptation, he wins key battles that that refine and strengthen the calling he has had affirmed at his baptism.
And that may be the first reason why some of our wilderness experiences are Spirit-led journeys: they are training exercises.
You may have seen television documentaries that follow prospective recruits to elite military outfits like the SAS, where the candidates are put through a series of tough, uncompromising, and even distressing experiences. Those who overcome are further on the journey to selection.
And for us, when the Holy Spirit leads us into a bleak place for a training exercise, we are being refined for when we face future battles. If we win victories over difficulty in a wilderness experience, we may be more ready for the trials of life later so that we can overcome them by faith in Christ for his glory.
You will not become an elite soldier by watching Netflix episodes from the comfort of your sofa. Nor will you grow in spiritual strength as a Christian if all you have is an easy life. So sometimes the Holy Spirit removes our comforts and prepares us for what is to come.
That’s one way to see the disciplines of Lent, such as giving up certain things. Our lack of those creature comforts for a season can be a way that the Holy Spirit trains us in the way of Christ.
A second reason why a wilderness experience can be a Spirit-led one can be found in our reading from Deuteronomy 8. It’s about learning humble dependence on God.
2 Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. 3 He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. 4 Your clothes did not wear out and your feet did not swell during these forty years. 5 Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you.
Who or what do you really want, God asks us. Do you want me, or do you want an easy life? Learn to depend on me, he says, and to listen to my word, because that is where you will find life.
It’s not about us. It’s about God. Things may seem fine and dandy when we have plenty of good things to eat (‘bread alone’) but we need to learn the lesson that our priorities are not the same as those of the rest of the world.
Remember what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6, when he told his disciples not to worry about food, drink, and clothes:
32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
For me it was the experience of living without a guaranteed income for my first three years as a student when I didn’t qualify for Government grants. I learned as time after time people gave money that enabled me to study and to live.
Again, a Lenten discipline of giving up something may help us cultivate this humble trust in God. It may also be that the experience of being deprived of many good and valuable things through the coronavirus pandemic has done something similar.
God wants our trust, and sometimes he takes us to the wilderness to find it.
A third reason why a wilderness experience can be a Spirit-led journey can be found in the prophecy of Hosea. In the book, and I’m particularly concentrating on chapter 2 here, Israel is compared to an adulterous wife who is always running after other lovers than her husband. In particular, one of her ‘lovers’ is the false god Baal.
But God wants Israel to know that he is the source of all good things, such as grain, wine, and oil. So what will he do?
At first it is severe. Israel will lose her crops of grain, wine, wool, and linen, making her metaphorically exposed before the world. Her festivals will stop, and her vines and fig trees will be ruined.
It all sounds like devastating punishment.
But the thing is, it doesn’t stop there, with Israel in a new but figurative wilderness. For what is the next thing God says?
14 ‘Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her. 15 There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. There she will respond as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt.
This is the third way in which a wilderness experience can be a Spirit-led journey: God brings us back to himself when we have gone far from him.
In other words, when God takes away things from us in the wake of our walking away from him, it’s not the final punishment. Instead, he is removing items from the scene so that all we have is him. He wants us to see him and him only, so that our love for him may be rekindled.
It is a severe form of mercy, but mercy it is. God removes our idols and in doing so shows they have no power. ‘Who will you worship?’ he asks us. And better that he asks us that now than later when it will be too late.
So in conclusion, I haven’t specifically chosen to give up anything for Lent this year. But maybe sometimes the Holy Spirit makes the choice for us. He leads us into the wilderness and removes props from our lives as he trains us to be stronger spiritually for future battles. He takes away our creature comforts so that we may depend on Christ. And he gets rid of our idols so that we may devote ourselves wholeheartedly to our God and Father.
How is the Spirit leading you in the wilderness right now?
I wrote and recorded this week’s video a week ago, so it was before last night’s announcement by the Prime Minister that England is being placed in another lockdown from Thursday coming.
Joshua 3 has been significant for me for a long time as a guide to how we face new challenges in life. And we certainly need that help right now.
I hope this helps you, too. If it does, please share this on your socials.
Continuing this week with those pesky Israelites. In Exodus 17:1-7 they’re still moaning about God. Except they’ve upped the ante. Now it’s a full-blown quarrel.
It’s one thing bringing our pain to God, it’s quite another to quarrel with him. How do we avoid the spiritual danger of hardening our hearts against God? Here are my thoughts.
I mention a song during the talk – ‘Land of the Living’ by Bryn Haworth. You can listen to it below and you can buy it here.
When I was growing up, my grandmother lived with us. The only time she watched anything that could loosely be called sport was on a Saturday afternoon at 4 pm. That was when ITV’s World Of Sport showed wrestling. Never mind the fact that the bouts were blatantly staged and fixed, Nanna (and Mum) used to enjoy shouting at Mick McManus and Jackie Pallo when they got up to their devious tricks.
Jacob’s wrestling bout with the mysterious stranger at Peniel in Genesis 32:22-32 is very different. This isn’t cheap entertainment. This is a new revelation of God to Jacob, every bit as significant as the encounter he had at Bethel with the dream of the staircase to heaven.
Today I preach at one of the churches in our circuit that isn’t in my pastoral charge. It gives me an opportunity in the sermon to use one or two favourite pieces of material when it comes to today’s Lectionary Gospel reading, and to make the odd point that will be familiar to long-term friends or readers. Still, whether you recognise some of the content or not, I hope you enjoy this sermon.
Pass The Peace by Vrede Van Utrecht on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
A friend of mine had a book of cartoons about the different approaches Christians have to sharing The Peace at Holy Communion. In one of the cartoons, a worshipper approaches another man, only to be rebuffed from sharing The Peace with the words, “No thank you, I’m C of E.”
In our reading today, the risen Jesus says, “Peace be with you” three times to his disciples. They don’t reject the offer of peace like the “No thank you, I’m C of E” man, in fact I’m sure they need it – one of the things that has struck me repeatedly this Easter season is just how scared the disciples were. Not just at the thought of arrest by the authorities, but the genuine fear they experience when they encounter the angel, the empty tomb and finally the risen Lord himself. They need peace!
But I am also struck in this reading – and it’s one of my favourite passages in the Bible – how the repeated gift of peace is accompanied each time by another gift.
The first gift is joy. The first time Jesus appears behind locked doors, says “Peace be with you”, shows them his hands and side, and ‘then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord’ (verses 19-20).
Not only is this a favourite passage, I also have a favourite story that I love to tell. It concerns the first Christian missionaries to the Inuit people of the Arctic. They were translating the Bible into the local language, but hit a problem when they came to these verses, and in particular, ‘Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.’ Their difficulty? There was no Inuit word for ‘joy’ and its related words. What could they do?
Running Huskies by Tambako The Jaguar on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
One day, a missionary went out with the Inuit hunters and their dogs. Upon return, the hunters fed the dogs with meat, and the missionary observed the evident happiness of the dogs as they tucked into their feast. He thought, “There’s a picture of joy. I’ll ask them what their word is for that.” As a result, the first Inuit translation of John’s Gospel reads at this point, ‘Then the disciples wagged their tails when they saw the Lord’!
Jesus is alive. He brings peace. That fills us with joy. Normally you cannot miss the sense of joy at Easter, can you? We have been through the self-sacrifice of Lent and the ever darkening shadows of Holy Week, only for light to burst forth on Easter morning and fill our hearts with joy.
Why are we joyful? Biblically, it isn’t that this is the ‘happy ending’ to the story – in fact, this is more like the beginning than the end. Nor is it only the promise that there is life after death and that we shall be with him forever after death. And as someone who lost his own mother just two months ago, believe me I don’t belittle that hope.
We are joyful because the resurrection shows God’s new world. As the Father has made his Son’s body new by the Spirit, so he is making all things new. It is the first event in the work of new creation. It is the foretaste of the new heavens and the new earth. You could say it is heaven on earth. Rejoice! God is not leaving things as they are. The resurrection says otherwise.
Look at it from the disciples’ point of view, before you get to any subsequent New Testament scriptures that make this point, such as Revelation 21. Think about how those good Jewish disciples expected the resurrection of the dead to happen at the end of history as we know it, when everyone would be raised back to life, either to blessedness for the righteous or judgement for the wicked, as Daniel 12 taught them. Well, suddenly this end time event has happened in their midst – a resurrection! Therefore God is bringing heaven to earth, and this is reason for great joy.
Let us also rejoice this Easter, because the life of heaven is coming to earth. We do not have to wait until death to experience at least a foretaste of God’s kingdom.
The second gift is mission. The second ‘Peace be with you’ is a preface to Jesus saying, “As the Father sent me, so I send you” (verse 21), and is followed by his [prophetic? Proleptic?] gift of the Holy Spirit (verse 22).
San Francisco – Mission District: Mission Street by Wally Gobetz on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
Mission makes sense after joy. We cannot keep quiet about the joy of knowing that God is bringing heaven to earth. God isn’t simply doing this for us, he is doing it for the whole world. It must not only be the subject of Joy, it must also be shared. Resurrection people are good news people.
And furthermore, it makes sense to talk about mission only after having received the peace of Christ. For how many of us get nervous about mission? It is a challenge, but Jesus offers us peace so that we may exercise the gift of mission.
But – what is this mission? Is it the much-feared door-knocking and button-holing? Before we make assumptions, let’s remember how Jesus described it. ‘As the Father sent me, so I send you,’ he said. Which begs the question: how did the Father send Jesus? And for that we have to go back from John 20 to John 1, to a verse we often read at Advent or Christmas, but which we need to hear all year round: ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ (John 1:14).
In other words, Jesus’ mission was not hit and run, however much he sometimes moved from place to place. It involved being with and living in the midst of the people to whom he was called. His life was visible to them, as well as his words and mighty deeds.
Likewise, we are not called to hit and run mission. We are called to costly involvement with the people among whom we live. We are meant to be present for the long haul. We are meant to be known for the kind of people we are as a result of our faith, sharing God’s love unconditionally, so much so that people want to know what it is that makes us tick. And that gives us the opportunities to talk about Christ. Most mission, Jesus style, is among our neighbours. If we know the peace of the risen Christ, then it is a natural act of gratitude to pay it forward by pouring our lives into the communities where we are situated, demonstrating God’s love and looking for the chance to speak about the One who leads us this way.
Not only that, our peace-based mission is exercised in the same power as Jesus. Here he tells his disciples to receive the Holy Spirit. We’ll put aside this morning the question of how we relate this command to receive the Spirit with the delay until Pentecost in Luke’s writings, for which there are various explanations. But let us note that this is another case of doing mission just like Jesus himself. His public ministry did not start until he received the power of the Holy Spirit at his baptism. Similarly, we are to seek the Spirit’s power in order to engage in his mission. There will be no signs of heaven coming to earth through our ministry in our own strength. We too must rely on the Holy Spirit. Too often we look for the latest techniques in order to revitalise our churches. These are dead ends. The only revitalisation will come from the life of God himself, and that means looking to the Spirit.
The third and final gift of peace is faith. When Thomas is present a week later, again Jesus turns up suddenly in their midst out of nowhere. Again, the disciples need to hear his greeting, “Peace be with you” (verse 26). This time, what follows is the invitation to Thomas to check him out and to believe.
Love And Trust by Mike Baird on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
It is of course from this story that we get the nickname ‘Doubting Thomas’. He has said that he will not believe unless he examines for himself the wounds of the crucifixion in Jesus’ body.
But why do we regard Thomas as worse than the other male disciples? Is he really so different from the other apostles who doubted the women’s initial report of the resurrection according to the other Gospels? They too wanted strong evidence. I think my father was the first person to say to me that Thomas had had a rough deal from the church over the centuries, and I am inclined to agree with that assessment. The other men had no reason for a superiority complex: they had held the same attitude.
I don’t therefore see Jesus being any more censorious with Thomas than he was with any of the other apostles. He has just offered peace, after all. Yes, he points to the greater blessedness of those who believe without seeing him, but he still gives Thomas the gift of faith. And if early church tradition is to be believed, then although we don’t read of Thomas in the Acts of the Apostles, he most likely founded Christianity in India, where to this day there is a denomination named after him – the Mar Thoma Church.
I suspect that if we compared notes among us as a congregation, we would find a wide range in our experiences of faith. Some of us may find faith quite easy and serene, and others only find deeper faith after much wrestling with deep questions. And some of us individually oscillate between serene faith and questioning faith in different phases of our lives. The good news of peace from the risen Christ is that he invites us all on the journey of faith and trust in him, whether that comes easily to us or only with much struggle. The resurrected Lord comes to all his disciples, those who find it easy and those who don’t, with the gift of his presence and the bestowal of his peace. Just because you or I may be wrestling with some deep questions about God does not preclude us from the gift of his peace.
And because Christ still offers his peace to those who think they are bumping along the bottom of belief, that very gift can make the difference which allows faith to flourish and to be exercised with boldness. If the traditions about Thomas going to India are true, then maybe that is what happened to him. Did the peace of the risen Christ invigorate his faith, not only in the Upper Room but for the rest of his life? It is certainly possible for him, and it is for us, too.
As we conclude, then, let’s come full circle back to our ‘No thank you, I’m C of E’ man. There are people in our churches who don’t like The Peace. Maybe some present today are uncomfortable. But regardless of what we think about it as a formal practice, we cannot receive and keep the peace of Christ as solitary Christians. Since his peace brings joy, that most naturally overflows to others. Since his peace leads us into mission, that leads us to share Christ’s peace in word and deed with others. And as his peace leads us to deeper faith, we observe that is something that cannot solely be exercised in isolation.
This Easter season, then, let us say ‘Yes please’ to the risen Christ’s gift of peace. And may it enable our lives as disciples to grow and flourish to the praise of his name in the church and in the world.
For many years now, one of my favourite quotes has been the late John Wimber‘s statement that ‘faith’ is spelt R-I-S-K. So it was a pleasure this morning while watching the live stream of the HTB Leadership Conference was to hear Archbishop Justin Welby say that ‘The church should be a safe place to do risky things in the service of Christ.’ How appropriate after that, then, to find myself listening to Esther Alexander‘s song ‘The End of the Land’, where she sings,
Is this the end of the land here
Or the beginning of the sea?
(You can listen to the song and download it here.)
Perhaps that’s our dilemma. We are more scared by being at the end of the land than we are by being at the beginning of the sea. What will it take for us to change, and why would we change? Too many churches want to change in order to save their skins. ‘We must reach out in order to keep this church going.’
Heaven help us. Really.
Welby also said this morning, ‘We cannot live for our cause to win, we have to live for his cause to win.’ May it be so.
Big Circumstance 