What Jesus Says About Facing Pressure, Matthew 10:24-39 (Ordinary 12 Trinity 3 Year A)

A music magazine I read has a column every month where it asks three musicians various questions, including what was the first record they ever bought, and where?

Well, how about you? For me, if you exclude the set of Freddie and the Dreamers singles my aunt and uncle gave me when I was about five, it would be that I spent a token I was given as a Sunday School prize. It was a compilation album by someone I would no longer wish to admit to having liked – Rolf Harris.

When I got to my early teens and began serious record collecting, one of my first purchases was also a compilation album: Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits.

The thing about compilations is that they pull material from various stages of a musician’s career, and the only thing that gives them continuity is the performer in question.

What we have in our passage today is like that. It seems to be a compilation of different parts of Jesus’ teaching; all put together in one place by Matthew. The nearest equivalent passages in other Gospels like Luke do not appear all together, as they do here.

What holds them together? Well, the ‘artist’ is Jesus – obviously! If there is anything more, it is about discipleship under pressure. Jesus knew his followers would be put under pressure for their loyalty to him. Even if the pressures we face on our faith aren’t quite the same, there is still a lot here to help us stay faithful when the difficulties come.

The first pressure is fear.

Fear and Phobia free stock photo from Public Domain Pictures.

In verses 24 to 31, Jesus talks about those who are like Beelzebul, the devil, and who therefore implicitly make trouble for us. But he says, if you’re going to fear anyone, fear God – yet he cares for us more than the sparrows, and he numbers every hair on our heads.

If we trust in our heavenly Father, it puts our earthly fears in perspective. Whatever happens to us, we are safe in his hands. I know that’s easier said than done at times, but it is a truth and a hope to cling onto when times are dark.

Yesterday, we celebrated just one such person at Midhurst. Pauline had been the church treasurer until earlier this year, when she was given a terminal diagnosis with cancer. While she made what she could of time with her family in her final weeks and months, there was one thing she told me more than once. And I know she told others, too.

She said, I am not worried about where I am going. I trust in the Lord, and I am safe in his hands.

And as I listened to her saying that there was no anxiety in her voice. She truly believed that. Cancer could have imbued her with fear. But she knew Jesus. And that changed everything.

Now like I said, for some of us, this is still easier said than done. It may take us a while to work through the shock of bad news. Not all of us can flick a switch and have instant peace. Some of us will take a little journey before we get to that point of acceptance and peace. I think I am one such person. And so I am preaching as much to myself as to you on this. We may have things to grieve before we can feel the peace.

But that doesn’t change the fact that this is a destination Jesus offers to all his disciples. Whatever threatens to make us afraid, God is ready and willing to give us his gift of peace. For whatever happens to us, we belong to him. As the Apostle Paul told the Romans, nothing can separate us from the love of God that is ours in Christ Jesus our Lord.

We can also be afraid when something unjust is perpetrated against us. That is the sort of thing the children of Beelzebul can do. That is why Jesus reassured his disciples that ‘there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known’ (verse 27). In other words, God will expose these people.

I don’t know whether you’ve been on the end of unjust accusations, but I have. I can think of at least two occasions when church members who had taken a dislike to me then tried to make false Safeguarding allegations against me. It took me a while to realise that God was still with me, and that I had justice on my side. But it was true. God is bigger than our fears.

The second pressure is shame.

Woman wearing black long-sleeved shirt. Public Domain image at PickPik.

³² ‘Whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven. ³³ But whoever disowns me before others, I will disown before my Father in heaven.

In other words, don’t be ashamed of Jesus. There will be plenty of social pressure to disown him or play down our commitment to him and our love of him.

In our society, it’s often more about the risk of mockery. Like the time when I was on the bus going home from school with other friends, and one of them, Clifford, said sneeringly to me, ‘I hear you had a spiritual experience last weekend.’ (I had been away on a circuit youth weekend.) I played it down.

But in other societies today or in the time of those first Christian disciples, it was much more serious. I am currently reading the autobiography of John Lennox. If you haven’t heard of him, John Lennox is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University. He holds three doctorates and is also a committed Christian. He has become a doughty defender of the Christian faith in the public arena and is well-known for having debated leading atheists such as Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens.

However, what is much less known about him is the amount of his spare time in between teaching at both Cardiff and Oxford universities he gave to travelling to Eastern Europe before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He and others provided education in Maths, science, and Christianity to people there.

In one story of those trips that he tells in the book, he talks about a Christian family in the former East Germany that he met. The children of the family were thrown out of school at the age of fourteen for continuing to profess faith in Jesus. No more education for them, as a punishment for their faith. No access to anything other than the most menial of jobs. But they were not ashamed of Jesus.

We know how so many of those first disciples held to their faith in Jesus when confronted with the pressure to deny him and be ashamed of their faith. So, what kept them, and those young East German Christians, loyal when they could have had an easier life if they had denied Jesus?

Surely, it was knowing just how much Jesus had done for them, how much he loved them, and how much it had already cost him to do so. Do we always keep that at the forefront of our minds? If I had done that, maybe I wouldn’t have clammed up on that bus trip. Maybe some of you wouldn’t have given in to social pressures, either, if you regularly remembered that Jesus loved us to the point of death.

The third and final pressure is a bit of a shock: it’s family.

Family silhouette on seashore during sunset. Public Domain image at PickPik.

In verses 34 to 39 Jesus says that he will divide family members against each other, and you aren’t worthy to be his disciple if you don’t love him more than you love your family.

Well! Isn’t the church supposed to be pro-family? Aren’t we the ones who care about marriages not only surviving but thriving? Aren’t we the ones who preach faithfulness and a strict sexual ethic? Aren’t we the ones who put on parenting courses so that children will be raised well? We’re pretty invested in the institution of the family.

But Jesus here is not addressing people who undermine the family, who promote the easy break-up of relationships, and the idea that you put your own happiness ahead of that of your spouse. No: he is saying something different from what we typically campaign about. He is telling us that even our families can become idols. Family life can trump commitment to God.

And it’s true. How many times today do family events mean that we don’t come to worship? How about what happens when a young person from a non-Christian family shows an interest in faith? It’s not unusual for their family to put pressure on them not to get too committed. Out come all the stories about religious cults.

Jesus has an important point here. Yes, elsewhere he teaches about the sanctity of marriage and all those things. But here he warns us never to put anything above our commitment to him, not even our families. It doesn’t mean that we neglect those we love, but it does mean that our family relationships must never compromise our radical commitment to Jesus.

I understand the pull of this temptation. I waited longer than most for the right woman to marry, and then to become a father. I moved my day off to Saturday to make it easier to have family time. Hence, I still have to ask myself: is Jesus still the most important person in my life?

I know a married couple who became Christians in adult life, a few years into their marriage. One day, one of them said rather nervously to the other, ‘I’m sorry, but there is someone else I love more than you.’

I wonder whether the other spouse thought they were about to hear the confession of an affair.

But then the first spouse continued. ‘His name is Jesus.’

How do we show our loved ones that Jesus is number one in our lives? Or do we only express any dedication to Jesus within the space that our family members allow us?

We need to remember the old saying: Jesus is a capitalist. He only believes in takeover bids.

And that’s right. That’s why we call him ‘Lord.’ We cannot call him Lord and then put someone else or something else higher in our lives than him.

Maybe family is not where we feel that temptation. But for some of us, it is. And if it’s not family, who or what else is it that we are enticed to elevate to a greater priority than Jesus? Do we need to do some re-ordering of our lives?

Conclusion

Is it any wonder that these verses conclude with Jesus reminding us that we need to take up our cross and follow him?

The Cross shows us the extent of his love for us, and hence why it puts our fears into context.

The Cross is where not only sin but also shame is dealt with.

The Cross is the price Jesus paid for us all. Does he not deserve to have our first, our highest, and our greatest loyalty?

June 21, 2026 0

Expecting The Trinity And Getting Jesus, Matthew 28:16-20 (Trinity Sunday Year A)

Matthew 28:16-20

The Most Holy Trinity, St George’s Church, Guke near Pljevja – Montenegro on Wikimedia Commons. CC 4.0.

I can guess what many of you are thinking. It’s Trinity Sunday, and in this reading, we’ve heard about disciples being baptised in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And in our act of worship, we’ve had another reading, which ended with reference to the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. So you may have deduced from all of this that you’re getting another mind-bending annual sermon on the Trinity.

But no. I have preached about the basic meaning of the Trinity before. Years ago, I even preached a whole sermon series about the Trinity. I’m not sure what I would say this year that is different, if my aim were to explain the Trinity.

The scholar Ian Paul observed that this is the one Sunday of the year when preachers tend to depart from expounding the Bible readings for the day to preach on a theological idea, albeit one that is so important it distinguishes Christianity from all other faiths.

However, I am going to take up the challenge to expound the Gospel reading. Sure, it mentions the Trinity, but the focus of the passage is Jesus. We’re singing hymns about the Trinity today, but we’re concentrating on Jesus and his greatness.

Firstly, let’s focus on faith in Jesus:

I Could Be Meaner But Jesus Said No at GearEternal. CC 4.0.

¹⁶ Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. ¹⁷ When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted.

Matthew doesn’t give us any of the resurrection appearances. It may well be that he was running out of space on the scroll on which he was writing his Gospel, and so he had to compress things at the end.

But he tells us this story after both the women have found the empty tomb and believed, and the soldiers have chosen money and silence rather than faith. It’s a choice that comes before many of us when we meet with the risen Lord and the claims he makes on our lives.

There is even a split among the disciples here: some worshipped, but some doubted. Jesus doesn’t banish the doubters but reveals more of himself and lets them stay in the company of those who do believe, so that they may come to a point of surrender and faith.

The other day, I read the story of a Muslim man who had read the Gospels and been persuaded that what Jesus offered was far better than Islam. Realising the danger, his family quickly sorted out the prospects of an arranged marriage to a beautiful young woman, and a job in a prestigious company in a lucrative profession. All this he could have, if he just continued to recite that there was no god but Allah and that Muhammad was his prophet.

But he could not deny what Jesus offered. He declined the marriage and the job offer and went with Jesus. He took up his cross as he followed him and his family rejected him.

If Jesus is risen from the dead, then it makes all the difference in the world. This man knew that.

And this challenge is for us. What does it mean for us truly to put our faith in the risen Lord and worship him? What has it cost us? Are there things we have given up or even lost by virtue of trusting him? Have we recognised him as our risen Lord, or is our faith a hobby? Have we been glad to welcome him for all the comforting things such as the way this reading ends – ‘And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age’ – whilst being reluctant to bow the knee in worship? Do we recognise that such worship is more than singing a few hymns we like but is in fact an act of homage?

So – what does our faith in the risen Jesus look like? What does it involve? Have we paid a cost by choosing him against other attractions in the world?

Secondly, let’s focus on the identity of Jesus:

Jesus Christ, Son of God at Wannapik. CC 3.0.

Here, I’m putting together a few things in the reading. ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me’ tells us something about his status. So does including him as ‘the Son’ in the baptismal formula of ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’: Jews would have seen a reference to the Father and to God’s Spirit as identifying divinity, so putting Jesus in among that also tells us about Jesus’ identity. Finally, what sort of being could say he was with his disciples to the end of the age?

I suggest that if you add up all these things, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Jesus is claiming divine status for himself. He is more than a rabbi. He is more than a prophet. He is the Son of God, a title which in Jewish thought does not make him junior to the Father but equal with him.

What does this mean for us? Well, for a start this immediately plugs back into what we were thinking about in the first point. Jesus’ divine status is the very reason that we have faith in him and worship him. We bow down, give homage, and profess loyalty to the Son of God. It makes sense that all authority is his, and therefore our calling is to follow what he says.

This is why Tom Wright said that the message of the Resurrection is not, ‘Jesus is raised from the dead and so we can go to heaven.’ Instead, it is, ‘Jesus is raised from the dead and we have a job of work to do.’

For the Resurrection and then the Ascension mean that first of all, God the Father has vindicated everything Jesus did and said in his mission before his crucifixion. He has underlined it. He has affirmed it. There is a big tick beside all of it. And secondly, given that the Son of God is now reigning at the Father’s right hand until every enemy is put under his feet, we join in the project of aligning with his will. As we do that, we express our membership of his coming kingdom now. The job of work we have to do because Jesus is raised and exalted is to co-operate with the Holy Spirit in the will of God. We build for his kingdom by being his junior partners in the great task of making all things new. We do this, because of who Jesus is. He is the Son of God, back from the dead to reign.

Do we truly believe this is who Jesus is? If we do, then let us stop to consider this question: what are we doing to participate in his kingdom project of making all things new? Where are we involved in the renewal of people and of this world? Can we answer that? If not, then let us pray until we have an answer. And when we have the answer, let’s start putting it into practice.

Thirdly and finally, let’s focus on the mission of Jesus:

Copyright Andreas F Borchert on Facebook. CC 3.0.

¹⁹ Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰ and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.

There are a lot of verbs in that sentence. But one of them is the main verb, and it isn’t obvious in most English translations. You might think it’s the first verb, ‘go,’ but you’d be wrong. More literally, we would translate it as ‘going.’

No: the main verb is ‘make disciples.’ We make disciples by going, baptising, and teaching.

What is a disciple? As I said at the Lindford Bible Study on Thursday night, a helpful replacement word for disciple might be ‘apprentice.’ An apprentice is someone who learns, but who specifically learns on the job.

Therefore, we are not merely called to persuade people to believe in God and in Jesus. We are called to persuade people to become apprentices of Jesus.

To do that, we need to go. It will not happen if we stay within the comforting walls of the church family. We need to go where people are. Jesus didn’t merely teach and heal in the synagogue. He did that, but he also went out into the fields to where people lived and worked. It is why we need to find our place of service in the world as well as in the church. For that is where we shall look to be witnesses to Jesus in our words and our deeds.

We shall also need to baptise. We must rid ourselves of sentimental ideas that baptism is wetting the baby’s head, or little more than a rite of passage, or something that must be done if that child is to be able to have a church wedding when they grow up. Baptism is when we initiate someone into the ways of Jesus and plunge them into that life. Baptism is a revolutionary new beginning in an apprenticeship with Jesus.

And we shall need to teach – but not abstract theory. Remember, Jesus said we are to teach people to obey everything he has commanded. When you hear it like that, the idea of the apprentice makes sense. This is less about teaching people to memorise the maps on the inside covers of their Bible. It is more about learning the ways of Jesus on the job, in everyday life. You do not need to be an academic theologian to teach discipleship. You just need to be able to model for someone how to live the Christian life.

I wonder what would happen if we remodelled our church life according to this commandment of Jesus. I think we would have fewer church meetings, because we were busy in the world shining the light of Jesus there. Our main non-Sunday meetings would be those that supported us in that task.

I wonder also how many would or could be released into that ministry of showing newer disciples what it means in real-life practical terms what it means to follow Jesus. We need to identify and empower those who can teach by example. Although actually, that should be all of us to a greater or lesser extent.

Conclusion

So – you were expecting the Trinity and you got Jesus. Maybe to talk just about him is less intellectually challenging, but it is still very challenging for our life and our faith.

Has our faith in him cost us? Do we bow before him as Son of God and participate in his kingdom plans to renew all things? Do we put disciple-making as a major priority in our lives and in the church?

These are true tests of our faith in our risen and ascended Lord.

May 31, 2026 0

Jesus’ Farewell Message, John 14:1-14 (Easter 5 Year A)

John 14:1-14

Last Supper by Steve Evans on Flickr. CC 2.0.

When you say farewell to people, do you not want to say the important things? When I left one circuit, knowing that too many people wanted growth but without paying the cost of change, I preached on Jesus’ words to the invalid man by the waters of Bethesda in John 5: ‘Do you want to get well?’

To a church that was forever behaving in a juvenile way, I preached on Paul’s words to the Colossians about presenting everyone mature in Christ. I entitled the sermon, ‘Grow Up!’

When I left the last circuit to come here, I was aware of all the disappointment that not everything had worked out as I or church members had hoped. I chose words from Jeremiah 8: ‘The harvest has passed, the summer has ended, and we are not saved.’

This is not a farewell sermon. But it is a sermon based on some verses from what we call the ‘Farewell Discourses’ in John’s Gospel. Starting near the end of chapter 13 and running to the end of chapter 16, Jesus uses the Last Supper to teach his disciples important truths for what they will soon experience.

We have just a few verses from the Farewell Discourses this morning. But they include some of the most beloved and most challenging of Jesus’ words in this section of Scripture. What does he teach his disciples here? And what does that teaching say to us today?

I’m going to focus on three elements in this passage, and I’m going to call them Place, Path, and Prayer.

Firstly, Place:

Jesus talks in verses 2 and 3 about going to prepare a place for his disciples – words we love to read at funerals with a sense of comfort and hope.

You may be used to older translations that referred not to the Father’s house having ‘many rooms’ but ‘many mansions’. These words have been taken up in hymns and gospel music:

However, don’t you think it’s a little strange to imagine many mansions inside one house? ‘Mansions’ is not the best translation. Our version said ‘rooms’, which would make sense inside one house. It’s actually the word for a lodging, perhaps a temporary lodging, and it’s the basis for another English word – not mansion, but monastery. Which is quite different!

If it’s a temporary lodging it might refer to our resting-place in the presence of God in between our death and future resurrection. If we don’t put too much emphasis on the ‘temporary’ part, then the important thing is that Jesus is preparing our place in the house of the Lord.

And that is a place of the closest fellowship and relationship. Look at all the emphasis in these verses about Jesus living in the Father and the Father living in him, and how we go to be with Jesus.

So what is Jesus promising here? When he departs, he will prepare a place for us in the closest possible fellowship with him, God, and one another. All those experiences of feeling distant from God? Gone. All those dark nights of the soul? Gone, and only light. All those times of fractured relationships with people in this life? No more. This is the richness of his promise here.

Or – put it this way. One day, not so long ago, Debbie and I were driving back to the manse and she said something like, ‘Not long now and we’ll be home.’

I replied, ‘I still find it hard to call this manse home. Not in the sense that I feel settled: I still don’t. But if I call the manse home, I do so for one reason: because you are there.’

Our eternal dwelling – our room in the Father’s house – is home. And it’s home like nowhere else. Because Jesus is there.

And to add something else briefly: when we were looking for a dog to buy, we first of all considered rescue dogs. Looking at the websites of various organisations including the RSPCA, we would see image after image of appealing canines. Often the accompanying text would say, ‘This dog is looking for their forever home.’

And that expression ‘forever home’ lodged itself in my mind. For we too have a forever home, one that Jesus will have prepared.

Secondly, Path:

I Am The Way by Patrick Oben at Deshen Ministries. CC 4.0. (Note: if you follow the link, you will find that Patrick Oben was ordained by Benny Hinn, someone I explicitly do not endorse. However, I still value this image.)

Here I’m going to tackle Jesus’ statement in verse 6 that is so controversial in our day:

I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

This is what we call an exclusive claim. It’s not popular in a society where we want to be inclusive. Thus, people tell stories like the one of the different blind men feeling an elephant, reporting apparently contradictory things about its nature from the thick legs to the trunk to the ears to the tusks, and this is taken as an argument for all religions having something true to say about God.

There is just one problem with it, and it’s a fatal one: what if God has opened blind eyes and revealed himself to people? It’s our claim he has done this supremely in Jesus.

We still treat people of other faiths with dignity, for they, like all human beings, are made in God’s image. But whatever things we agree on, there are too many fundamental contradictions for them all to be true. To claim that would be like saying that the person who believes two plus two equals six has as valid an insight as the one who says two plus two equals four.

When Jesus says he is the way, that is a statement both about how we gain access to God and also about how we live in the light of that. The access that Jesus provides is because of where he is going: this is his Farewell Discourse, remember. He is going to the Cross, and by that will open up access to the Father.

But there is more to Jesus being ‘the way’ than that. As the scholar Ian Paul says,

in its Jewish context the idea of ‘way’ also includes wisdom for right living, the halakah.

Jesus as the way is also giving us the pattern of life to live in relationship with the Father once we have received that access to the Father through the Cross. The Cross brings us to the Father, and the Cross maps our path for the life of discipleship.

Now you still may say, that’s all very well for those who have heard the message of Jesus, but what about those who haven’t? Apart from that being an incentive to us to speak more about our faith to others, I would suggest the Bible gives us examples of people who did not hear the faith as either Christians or Jews would understand it, but who were accepted by God because they responded to whatever light they had received.

One would be Job. There is hardly anything distinctively Jewish about the setting of Job. There are no real signs of his connection with the descendants of Abraham. But he wrestles with God and responds as he knows how.

Another would be the mysterious figure called Melchizedek in the book of Genesis. We only know he is ‘priest of Salem’, but he appears out of nowhere to bless Abraham and receive gifts from him and then disappears.

So, the path is Jesus and his Cross, both in access to God and a pattern for life. Those who through no fault of their own do not hear are judged appropriately by our merciful and just God.

Thirdly and finally, Prayer:

Faith by Kai Stachowiak at Public Domain Pictures.

We have some more challenging words in the final three verses of the reading:

¹² Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. ¹³ And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. ¹⁴You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.

Let’s set some ground rules here. Asking anything in Jesus’ name doesn’t mean just anything. ‘In my name’ is not a magic formula to tack onto the end of a prayer. It means we are asking with the authority of Jesus and in line with his will.

Therefore, we can immediately rule out the idea that this is carte blanche to ask for this, that, and anything. This is not where we can ask God for riches. The so-called ‘prosperity gospel’ where it is taught that if God has not given you health and wealth in response to your prayers then you do not have enough faith is a pernicious lie.

Asking anything in Jesus’ name is about kingdom requests. Jesus is promising that when we ask him to supply what we need for the work of his kingdom, he will do it. This should be the primary focus of our petitions and intercessions in prayer. That may involve praying for money and material things, but we don’t ask for them as an end in themselves, only insofar as they further the kingdom of God.

And if we read back to where these three verses began, with another challenging word, about those who believe doing even greater things than Jesus, then that too will be about things that advance God’s kingdom.

Specifically, we should set these words in the wider context of John’s Gospel. There are two other places where Jesus refers to ‘greater things’ or ‘greater works’. One, in chapter 1 verses 50-51, is about the vindication of Jesus as God’s Chosen One. The other, in chapter 5 verses 20-21 and 24-29, connects ‘greater works’ with Jesus giving eternal life to people.

Therefore, while we shouldn’t rule out asking God for the miraculous – he can and will do great wonders from time time – it’s likely that the main meaning in the Gospel is about seeing more people bow the knee to Jesus and find life in his Name.

And for me, this raises a question about the content of our prayer life. How much are we praying for the greater works of Jesus in raising spiritually dead people into the gift of eternal life? It’s not that our other prayers are bad: it’s absolutely right that we should pray for justice, peace, healing, the relief of poverty and hunger, and the like. But are we missing out the greater works of bringing people into eternal life with Jesus now?

Maybe preachers like me need to be more explicit about this when leading prayers of intercession on a Sunday. But maybe also we all need to be praying daily for the Holy Spirit to lead people we know and love to discipleship in Jesus Christ. Let’s add the names of two people we know to our own prayer lists this week.

Conclusion

Remember, this is part of Jesus’ Farewell Discourse. He is concentrating on matters important to him. And if they are important to him, they should be to us, too.

Let us be encouraged by the good news of our eternal place in the close presence of God and the community of his people.

Let us be centred on the path of Jesus: that the Cross brings us into God’s presence, and the Cross shapes our own path in life.

And let us be challenged to pray for the greater works of the Holy Spirit in bringing people into the risen life of Christ.

May 3, 2026 0

Where is the Hope in the Slaughter of the Innocents? (Matthew 2:13-23, Christmas 1 Year A)

Matthew 2:13-23

Peter Paul Rubens, The Massacre of the Innocents; Wikimedia Commons, CC Licence 4.0

Sometimes, Christians tell stories of miraculous answers to prayer where they are saved from a disaster. Around the time of 9/11, I heard one about a Christian who should have been on one of the planes that crashed into the Twin Towers, but whose circumstances changed unexpectedly and they missed the flight.

Here is one I read recently, from a respected pastor:

I remember once almost booking a trip to Prague. I’d planned it perfectly—a romantic getaway for Vicky and me. My finger hovered over the “Book Now” button, but something in my spirit said no. It didn’t feel right. I hesitated and didn’t book it. Weeks later, there was a massive explosion in the very square where we would have been staying.

Admittedly, that pastor is making a different point, about how God sometimes says ‘no’ because he is preparing something better for us. But I still read the account and wondered about who might have been present at the site of the explosion.

And something like this is one of the concerns we bring to the disturbing account of Herod the Great’s order to kill babies and toddlers in Bethlehem, whereas Jesus, Mary, and Joseph miraculously escape.

How are we going to tackle this troubling story? It naturally falls into three acts: the escape, the slaughter, and the return. These will be our guide to the flow of the story and what Matthew is saying.

Firstly, the escape:

Just as he did when Mary fell pregnant by the Holy Spirit, Joseph hears an angel of the Lord in a dream, and they escape to Egypt. That would have been financially easy for well-off Jews of their day, but it was certainly not a preferred option[1]. And while it is debatable whether Jesus’ family was poor, they were certainly not wealthy, so this was not an easy decision.

And yes, that makes Jesus, Mary, and Joseph refugees, something we might remember in today’s fevered politics of immigration. The fact they returned later does not negate that, as some have tried to claim.

Right from the beginning, then, pain and suffering cast their shadow over the life of Jesus. It will also be so for his followers.

In doing so, Jesus is like Moses, who was also rescued from certain death as a baby at the hands of Pharaoh. It is one sign that Jesus will be the One greater than Moses, who was prophesied.

That gets further underlined when Matthew, as he does so often and especially in the birth stories, quotes Scripture as being fulfilled. In verse 15 he cites Hosea 11:1,

Out of Egypt I have called my son.

In other words, he makes a parallel to the Exodus, which again was led by Moses. And just as in Old Testament texts such as this one Israel was called God’s son, so now Jesus is supremely God’s Son – not only because of the virginal conception by the Holy Spirit, but also because Jesus will fulfil all that Israel was meant to be, but failed to be, due to sin.

Even – and perhaps especially because – suffering and injustice are at work, what we see here is that Jesus’ ministry of salvation is being foreshadowed, maybe even beginning, in his infancy. The One greater than Moses, the True Israel, will lead his people through and from suffering to salvation. In the midst of the darkness, the light of Christ is shining.

Is that not reason to praise God? Even in this darkest of stories, God is working his purpose out.

And if God has preserved us through trials, are we listening to know what our place in those purposes is?

Secondly, the massacre:

There is a lot to say here. There are those who think the story didn’t happen, and that Matthew made up this story to fit with the fulfilment of a Scripture. However, if that’s what he did, then that makes Matthew a pretty awful person, and I don’t think that’s sustainable on the tone of the rest of his Gospel.

The big objection is that there is no historical record of the ‘slaughter of the innocents.’ All sides agree that it is consistent with Herod’s vile character. We know he had family members whom he regarded as political rivals killed. We know he even arranged for a number of nobles to be executed on the day of his own death, so that there would be grieving in the land. He obviously knew that few would grieve his own death.

But the reality is, horrible as it sounds, that the killing of male babies and toddlers in Bethlehem was probably political small fry in comparison to all his other atrocities. The violent acts that get reported by ancient sources like Josephus tend to be ones of national importance. This would not have been so, especially given that working from our best estimates of Bethlehem’s population at the time, probably around twenty youngsters in an insignificant town were slain[2].

That is still twenty too many, and it is still unbearably wicked. And I am working from the assumption that Matthew has given us an entirely plausible account.

Building on that, this is not the only place in Scripture where we see a juxtaposition of deliverance for some but suffering for others. To give one other example, when persecution breaks out against the early church in the Acts of the Apostles, many are imprisoned, Simon Peter is freed from his cell by an angel, but others are executed.

Many years ago, I heard a story about a massacre of some missionaries, who lived together in a compound. Many were killed, but others escaped. The survivors returned to their homeland, where a memorial service was held. As you can imagine, people struggled there with the fact that some were murdered but others were not. A speaker at the memorial service said, “God delivered all the missionaries. He delivered some of them from suffering, but he delivered others through suffering.”

The slaughter of the innocents is the most graphic telling of why Jesus needed to come. This is the level of wickedness in our world. Human sin and depravity is such that we will even not spare the most vulnerable and the most innocent for the sake of our own comfort, status, or financial gain. It is just as true today. While some abortions do happen because of serious medical complications and other distressing reasons, there are others that happen because of couples who are unwilling to make the financial sacrifices necessary to raise a child. If the Assisted Dying Bill gets successfully through Parliament, there will be elderly people in this country put under emotional pressure to end their lives so that greedy relatives can get their hands on their inheritance sooner.

Make no mistake, the slaughter of the innocents is not just something terrifying that happened two thousand years ago. Parallels are still happening today. And they will continue until people bow the knee to Jesus.

For Jesus is God’s remedy for all the violence and hatred in the world. Jesus, who escaped suffering here, would one day go to the Cross where he would absorb the sin of the world for all of us.

God had planned this from the beginning. God had created this world out of love, but love is something that takes risks, including the risk of rejection. God knew from the outset that it could and would go wrong, and that a rescue plan was needed. That is why Revelation speaks of Jesus as ‘the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world.’

Even here, there is hope. For when Matthew looks for an appropriate Old Testament text, he finds one in Jeremiah 31 that imagines the matriarch Rachel weeping in her grave as the exiles are marched off to Babylon. That sounds relentlessly bad, doesn’t it? But in that chapter, the disaster of the Exile leads to God’s rescue plan. For it climaxes in the promise of the New Covenant. And for Christians, that means Jesus.

Even in the darkness, God’s light in Christ is still shining. May we remember that.

Thirdly, the return:

Once again, Joseph has an angelic visitation during a dream. What a man Joseph was, for being open to God speaking to him. We laud Mary for her example of discipleship in agreeing to carry the Messiah in her womb, but Joseph deserves praise, too. He is an example of true faith to us as well.

When the family returns, Joseph also shows he is astute. Not Bethlehem, because although Herod is now dead, his son Archelaus is in charge of that area. He was every bit as bad, if not worse, than his father[3].

Joseph opts for Nazareth, where according to Luke he and Mary came from. It was politically insignificant, a small settlement of about five hundred people[4]. There is no way the sophisticated urban elites from Jerusalem would have ever had Nazareth on their shortlist for the upbringing of the Messiah.

But if the town was inconsequential to them, it certainly wasn’t to God. In his eyes, Nazareth was spiritually significant – something Matthew makes clear with a quotation that is a wordplay[5]. That quotation, ‘He will be called a Nazarene’, in verse 23, does not appear anywhere in the Old Testament. However, it was a common practice to make Hebrew puns by what was called ‘revocalising’ a word, which basically meant putting in a different selection of vowels. The best theory is that Matthew has revocalised the Hebrew word ‘nezer’ to make ‘Nazarene.’

If he has done that – and I think he has – then ‘nezer’ is the word for ‘branch’ in the prophecies that the Messiah will come from the ‘nezer’ or ‘branch’ of David’s line. The Messiah growing up in obscure Nazareth? Oh yes. What is insignificant in the world’s eyes is significant to God.

Now if that is true, what about those of us who do not live in our great metropolis or indeed in another major city today? Who cares about these places? God does. Let others write off the places we live in. God doesn’t. He cares about them and has plans for them.

For our part, let us be open to God’s leading in the places where he has called us to serve him. Let us be modern-day Josephs, attentive to the voice of God in our lives, especially in the Scriptures.

People who know their Methodist history should get this. We make a lot of the fact that John and Charles Wesley grew up in Epworth in Lincolnshire. For many years, we even had a publishing house named after Epworth. But who would have heard of Epworth were it not for the Wesleys? God had other ideas, just as he did for Nazareth.

What does God want to do here, and who does he want to raise up as his servants in this place, who might even go on to have a wider influence for Christ?

Let us be on the lookout.

[1] Craig S Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p109.

[2] Keener, p111.

[3] Keener, p113.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Keener, pp113f for this and what follows.

December 28, 2025 0

Sermon: King’s Cross, Luke 23:33-43 (Last Sunday Before Advent, Feast of Christ the King, Year C)

Luke 23:33-43

Christmas Pudding Flames: Wikimedia Commons

Last Monday, our daughter went to visit my sister to continue a family tradition. Every year, they meet to make the Christmas puddings together. It’s a tradition that began when my Mum and my sister used to make them. Even when Mum was confined to a care home in the last six months of her life, my sister took the Christmas pudding mix into the care home for her to stir. After Mum died, my sister invited our daughter to continue the tradition with her. They follow an old family recipé.

Yes, today is what has historically been called ‘Stir-Up Sunday’, the stirring of the Christmas pudding mix linked to the traditional Collect prayer for today:

Stir up, O Lord,
the wills of your faithful people,
that they, bringing forth the fruit of good works,
may by you be richly rewarded;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.[1]

But in the last hundred years – in fact, this year is the centenary – the Last Sunday Before Advent has been given a new and better name: the Feast of Christ the King. An initiative of Pope Pius XI to emphasise the reign of Christ in the wake of increased atheism and secularism after World War One, I think it’s an excellent name.

Why? Because the last Sunday of the Christian Year (which begins again on Advent Sunday) should be the climax of the Christian story. Our God reigns – no contest – in the life of the age to come. It’s where we’re heading. It’s our controlling vision for life.

And so I want to reflect on Christ our King today.

Firstly, Jesus is King at the Cross:

Earlier this year, our nation was stunned when a six-figure crowd marched through London for the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally led by the far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson. Many people commented on the number of Christians and people with overtly Christian symbols, chanting Christian slogans, on the march. ‘Christ is King!’ they shouted. Some were dressed in mock-ups of Crusader uniforms. Alarmed at the spread of Islam, particularly in its militant form, they seemed to view a return to what they saw as the traditional religion of this nation as a way of subjugating Islam and Islamic terrorism. It was a view that seemed to want to impose Christianity by force. Is that the way Christ is King?

It’s very different from what Luke tells us. For sure, it’s what the religious authorities wanted from a Messiah. To them, Jesus couldn’t possibly the Chosen One, because here he was, nailed to a Cross, dying a shameful death as a convict:

‘He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!’ (verse 35b)

The Roman soldiers saw it similarly. They were used to enforcing the emperor’s will violently:

³⁶ The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, ³⁷ and saying, ‘If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!’ ³⁸ There was also an inscription over him, ‘This is the King of the Jews.’

And yet he was King of the Jews. And not just of the Jews. Here is the enthronement of King Jesus, not on a battlefield taking the blood of his enemies but shedding his own in the conquest of sin and of evil forces.

Had we read from Colossians 2 rather than Colossians 1 for our first reading, we might have come across these verses:

¹³ And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, ¹⁴ erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. ¹⁵ He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.

The Cross is an exercise in disarmament. Forgiveness takes away the power of shame that evil forces have over us. Jesus reigns, not through violence but through suffering love.

Is that something for us to remember in our Christian witness? Surely it is. When the world doesn’t like what we say, we don’t cower in silence but neither do we force it on people. Instead, we witness to Christ by a love that is willing to endure hardship and even suffer to be faithful to him.

Secondly, Jesus is King in Heaven:

Hear again some of the words of the penitent thief:

⁴² Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ ⁴³ He replied, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’

Jesus has the authority to welcome the penitent thief into Heaven. He reigns there, too. After his Ascension he will return there to reign at the Father’s right hand.

Right now, Jesus reigns from Heaven. He is King there. To be sure, as I have said before, not everyone acknowledges that, any more than criminals acknowledge the laws of our land passed by Parliament and enforced by the Police. That doesn’t change the sovereignty of Parliament in our nation.

The evangelistic call is to acknowledge Jesus as King. Again, as I’ve said before, ‘good news’ in the Roman Empire was the announcement of a new Emperor on the throne or of that Emperor’s armies conquering other nations. We call people to recognise who is on the throne of the universe, and to swear allegiance to him.

And it also means that if this is our message, it is one by which we are to live. Remember that earliest Christian creed: ‘Jesus is Lord.’ It is a challenge for you and for me to live under the teaching of Jesus, because he is Lord (or King).

If you’re anything like me, you will almost immediately know some areas of your life that do not currently conform to the commands of Jesus. Maybe you are battling in those things, wrestling between the will of Jesus and what you want.

But this is important for our witness. The world soon notices when we who proclaim God’s will in Jesus are not living like that. It’s why we are often called hypocrites.

Sometimes we believe the enemy’s lie that satisfaction in life is only found when we concentrate on gratifying our desires. It is as if God is some kind of cosmic spoilsport who just wants to make us miserable. Yet is it not actually the truth that real fulfilment comes from adopting the ways of Jesus, even when they are costly? Is it not a wider application of the principle that it is more blessed to give than to receive?

What are the parts of our lives where we sense Jesus is whispering to us by his Spirit and calling us to walk in his ways, acknowledging him as King? Will we finally believe the Good News that true contentment is found in the kingdom of God and not in self-centredness?

When the world sees Christians living like that, there is often a sneaking admiration for such people. Such Christians as these often earn the right to speak about Jesus, and their words carry weight.

CS Lewis wrote in his book ‘Mere Christianity’:

Human history is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

When we live under the reign of Jesus, we point to this better way.

Thirdly and finally, Jesus is King for eternity:

Verse 43 again:

He replied, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’

Paradise. What’s the significance of that word here? I’m going to quote the New Testament scholar Ian Paul:

The language of ‘paradise’ would have made sense to a non-Jewish audience, but it was also used by Jews to refer either to an intermediate state in the presence of God as well as to our final destiny in a renewed heaven and earth. It is worth noting that the Greek translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint, LXX) constantly translated the Hebrew for ‘garden’ with ‘paradise’, so that God planted a ‘paradise’ in Eden for the first human in Gen 2.8. For anyone aware of this, Jesus’ promise to the thief is of the restoration of all things.

Jesus’ promise to the penitent thief holds not only for the immediate context when he reigns despite opposition, but right into eternity, when God has made all things new, when the redeemed live in the new creation and worship in the New Jerusalem.

For this is the climax of God’s reign in Jesus: that he will so rule over all things in goodness and love that they will be made new. Sin, suffering, and death will be no more. People will live in fully reconciled relationships with God and each other. There will be peace and justice.

This is where we’re heading as disciples of Jesus. This is our direction of travel. The destination sign on the bus says, ‘New Jerusalem.’ That’s why I said in the introduction that today is the climax of the Christian Year. For this is where the mission of Jesus is taking us.

And if that is the case, then we live accordingly now. We build our lives, relationships, and values based on what God will bring in under his benevolent rule. We don’t lord it over one another, because there is one Lord and Saviour who is over all of us. As the Colossians 1 reading today said, he is over all things and is head of the church.

Anyone who does try to lord it over others is not fit for the kingdom of God. That’s why many of our American friends have been protesting against Donald Trump at the ‘No Kings’ rallies – not merely to protect the American constitution but because Christians say Jesus is Lord, and when they see Trump not merely exercising authority but lording it over people and dismantling any accountability through Supreme Court decisions, that is contrary to the Gospel.

We may not face temptation on that level, but we can be enticed into acting as big fish in small ponds. The church is not the place to climb the greasy pole but to kneel and serve, because Jesus is Lord, and will be for all eternity.

Conclusion

Sometimes, I like to talk about the Local Preacher whom my church youth group adored. Alfred John Evill was born in 1902 and was therefore a toddler when the Welsh Revival of 1904 happened. He preached like the revival was still going on.

He didn’t pick the most modern of hymns, but he was the most challenging preacher – which we loved. But he said one important thing about the fact that his sermons were challenging.

“I never challenge you without first challenging myself.”

Today’s sermon has been challenging. It has brought me up short as I wrote it, thinking about my willingness to practise suffering love, the areas where I fall short of acknowledging Jesus as Lord, and my commitment to serve.

May God grant me – and may God grant you, too – the grace to affirm in both words and deeds that Jesus is King.

[1] Methodist Worship Book, p560

November 23, 2025 0

A Sermon for Remembrance Sunday: God’s Manifesto (Revelation 22:1-5)

Revelation 22:1-5

Remembrance Day Free Stock Photo – courtesy Public Domain Photos. Creative Commons Licence 1.0 Universal.

I don’t know whether congregations dread certain Sundays of the year, but I can tell you for sure that preachers do. Remembrance Sunday is one of them. Being planned on this day is the preaching equivalent of what football fans call a ‘hospital pass’: the ball is played to you, but you know an opponent will clatter into you.

For this is a day when whatever you say, there is a high likelihood someone will disagree passionately with you afterwards. You can upset the pacifists and the patriots. Once, as a young minister after I had tried to expound the Beatitudes on this day, a highly opinionated church steward dismissed my efforts by saying, “There’s only one thing to say on Remembrance Sunday, and that is that war is pointless.”

And fundamentally, today is a civic and political day rather than a Christian festival. So you can always upset people politically. You might take the opposite view to someone. Or just saying anything political will annoy those who think the church should stay out of politics.

Well, the Gospel does have political implications, because Jesus is Lord of all creation, and that includes the political sphere. So, we will have something to say about moral and ethical issues. We will have something to say about political leaders who flagrantly contradict God’s Law.

But what we will not do is come up with particular political policies. Those are rightly the realm of the politicians, political advisers, and civil servants with their different rôles to come up with.

What we preachers will do is paint the broad brush-strokes of God’s love, God’s will, and God’s good plans for creation, so that we may live accordingly.

And that, for me, is where our reading from Revelation 22 comes in. Jesus said, ‘The kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the Good News.’ Well, here is part of John’s vision about the fulness of God’s kingdom. These verses tell us where we are headed and the kind of society the kingdom of God will be. Therefore, they guide us in how we live today in anticipation of that time. They indicate how we are to live in the midst of a world that contains hatred and violence, pointing instead to God’s kingdom.

That’s why they form something of a manifesto for Christians on Remembrance Sunday.

Firstly, life:

¹ Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb ^2a down the middle of the great street of the city.

This part of the vision is inspired by Ezekiel 47, where the prophet sees water coming out from the temple of God and coursing through the land, bringing life in its waters and on its banks wherever it flows. True life and the renewal of the world come from God.

It is not just physical life, but life in every sense, given by God who is Spirit, for in the New Testament the water of life is a way of speaking about the Holy Spirit.

If we want a world and a community where life in all its fulness comes, then we remember that is the promise of Jesus. It is one of his gifts. It can be received from him. He said, ‘I have come that they might have life, and have it more abundantly.’ The trouble with the church, as one preacher said, is that we think Jesus said, ‘I have come that they might have meetings, and have them more abundantly.’

Life in all its beauty and fulness is on offer from God. If you give your life over to Jesus and receive the Holy Spirit, then what you should expect is not to become some spiritual robot, but rather to become more fully human than you’ve ever been. You can expect all your gifts, talents, and passions to flourish like never before, because you are connected to the Source of all life, and all that is good.

It’s significant that in the Roman Empire, if a waterway flowed through the middle of a city like the river of the water of life does here in the New Jerusalem, it wouldn’t be a river. It would be an open sewer.[1] Do not look to the empires of this world for life, be those empires political systems, economic powers, or military might. Of themselves, they will only lead you to the open sewer.

Instead, the Christian God Manifesto is life: life in all its beauty and richness, available through Christ and empowered by the Spirit.

Let’s offer that. And let’s live like it’s true.

Secondly, healing:

^2b On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

Now I know that taken literally this is a bizarre image, seemingly describing one tree that stands on both banks of a river. But remember this is a vision. Treat it a little bit like dream language.

And let me point you again to the river of the water of life in Ezekiel 47. Everywhere it goes, as I said, life flourishes in its waters and on the banks. That happens here with the tree of life that we first met in the Bible in the Garden of Eden.

Biblically, the tree of life was taken to represent God’s wisdom, in verses about wisdom such as Proverbs 3:18, which says,

She is a tree of life to those who take hold of her;
those who hold her fast will be blessed.

But God’s wisdom, although always available, has been scorned. Now, however, as the water of life does its work in the New Jerusalem, it flourishes. In the kingdom of God, the wisdom of God prevails over the foolishness of the world.

Is it not the foolishness of the world that has so often led us to wars and conflict? But in the kingdom, God’s wisdom puts a stop to that.

For whereas in Ezekiel, the tree of life healed God’s people, now says John, the tree of life is for the healing of the nations. The Gospel offer of God’s wisdom is a universal offer. Come and find healing and peace in Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace.

Oh, to be sure I’m not being simplistic and saying, be converted and everything will be fine. It’s not just a case of being forgiven. For in response to the healing of God’s forgiving love in Christ we need his wisdom to live differently. It needs to be lived out.

And there is our challenge. For too often the world looks at the church and does not see a community that has been healed by the wisdom of God. Rather, it sees one full of foolishness and in-fighting. They see us easily duped by politicians, from American evangelicals falling for Donald Trump to British mainstream churches, where every social pronouncement skews in a left-wing direction. They see us fighting too, tearing one another apart at times.

So to offer this second strand of the God Manifesto, we have some changing to do.

Thirdly, restoration:

³ No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him.

No more curse? John’s vision is sending us back to the Garden of Eden again, only this time not to the beauty of the Tree of Life, but to the consequences of Adam and Eve’s sin.

For God tells them that sin leads to a curse over every part of life. The link between humans and the rest of creation is damaged. The joy of childbirth is infected with pain. The beauty of the male-female relationship is damaged by male domination. The realm of work becomes one of frustration rather than fulfilment. Life ends in the dust of death. Is this the beauty of creation? No.

But in the New Jerusalem, ‘No longer will be there be any curse.’ All that is broken is put right. Relationships are restored. The abuse of power is replaced by the spirit of serving one another. What once seemed futile is now worthwhile.

This, then, is another element of the God Manifesto: a thorough-going restoration that applies across the whole of creation from the physical world itself to human relationships. This is God’s vision. This is what we proclaim.

And therefore it is also what we as the Church are called to live out as a sign of that coming kingdom. We are here to nurture reconciled relationships. We are here to treat the earth with kindness. We are here to alleviate pain and to bring meaning to our everyday work.

Most of all, we are here to say that this all flows from a restored relationship with God, where not only are our sins forgiven, we then with gratitude shall live to serve Jesus Christ, who redeemed us. To repeat the second half of verse 3:

The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him.

As with every element of this God Manifesto that proclaims a different and contrary reality to that of war and destruction, this is something the church needs both to preach and to live. If we truly believe what we say we believe, then our calling is to live it and thereby show the world by our actions that it is true.

Conclusion

There is so much more I would love to say about these verses. But here is how I want to draw this vision to a conclusion.

It’s common today when talking about what is right or wrong to say, ‘Make sure you are on the right side of history.’ It’s a dodgy saying that assumes everything in the world is becoming increasingly better from a moral point of view, even though it’s self-evident that things are getting both better and worse.

But there is a God way of being on the right side of history, and it is to embrace this vision. It is to say, here in Revelation we have the blueprint of God’s eternal destiny for all those who will say ‘yes’ to him in Christ.

If we want to be part of God’s eternal Manifesto of life, healing, and restoration, then we need to do two things. We need to ‘publish abroad’ these truths in the church and in the world. And we need to live out their truth in our lives as a witness.

[1] Ian Paul, Revelation (TNTC), p359.

November 9, 2025 0

Keeping The Wrong Company, Luke 15:1-10 (Ordinary 24 Year C)

Luke 15:1-10

Back in prehistoric times when I was training for the ministry, one of our tutors told us that we should be at our desks every morning at 9 am with our shoes on. I’m sure I wore out some carpet by wearing shoes rather than slippers in my first manse.

I used to follow that pattern at first. But in one appointment, I was rarely (if ever) at my desk at 9 am. For at this point, we had young children going first through pre-school and then on to primary school. These were at the top of our road, and Debbie and I made a point of building relationships with the other parents.

We didn’t always make it back by the sacred hour of 9 am, and sometimes there would be phone messages from church members who had an expectation of me being there for them at that time.

Christ and a Pharisee. Wikimedia Commons CC 1.0

I think of those church members when I read about the Pharisees and teachers of the law in today’s reading. They thought I was mixing with the wrong people, because to them I was their private chaplain, just as the religious leaders thought Jesus was mixing with the wrong sorts, and that this reflected badly on his character. Their attitude was rather like the saying that you know a person by the company they keep.

Yet it was Jesus’ vocation to be with ‘tax collectors and sinners’. He uses the two parables we heard (plus what follows – the Parable of the Prodigal Son) to lay out why this was so important.

And if it were important for Jesus, it is also important for us. If we are to renew our commitment to following him, then we need to understand why he did this, and then get on with doing it ourselves.

Now the parables have a lot in common. They both (all) speak about finding what is lost and rejoicing. Bringing, or bringing back those who are lost from the love of Jesus into that love and into his family is a high priority for Jesus.

It is not always a high priority for us. We like to run our Sunday services, have a few nice midweek activities, make sure there’s enough money in the kitty to keep the building in good order, and that’s quite enough.

But not for Jesus. Each of these parables has something important to tell us about why he spends so much time outside the synagogue with ordinary (and even disreputable) people for the sake of God’s kingdom. So let’s look at what we pick up from the Parable of the Lost Sheep and the Parable of the Lost Coin.

Firstly, the lost sheep

As you know, we were proud as anything a couple of months ago when our son graduated with a Maths degree from Cambridge. And when people asked us where he got his love of Maths from, I said that it had always been my subject at school. It was later that I developed my interest in Theology.

I have always loved numbers, even if I have not concentrated on Maths for decades now. And there is something about numbers in these parables. A hundred sheep, ten coins, and two sons. In relation to the lost sheep parable, I was reading the New Testament scholar Ian Paul this week, and he cited another scholar, Mikeal Parsons, from whom he learned this:

Counting on one’s fingers (flexio digitorum) was very commonplace in the Roman world, and was in fact seen as an indispensable skill for the educated (See Quintilian Inst 1.10.35). Up to 99, you would count on the left hand, but for three-digit numbers from 100, you would count on the right hand. In an age that preferred the right to the left, Luke’s Jesus is telling us that the whole flock is out of kilter as long as the one is missing—and the whole flock is ‘put right’ when the one returns. No wonder there is so much rejoicing!

The flock is not complete and whole while the lost sheep is missing. And we, the church, are also not whole and complete while there are lost people still to be brought into the orbit of God’s love in Christ, or former sheep to be coaxed back.

Lost Lamb by Roberto and Bianca on Flickr. CC 2.0

To put it another way, the Body of Christ is missing a limb while a lost person is still lost. We cannot stay as our own private association, just enjoying one another’s company or even saying dreadful things like, ‘As long as this church sees me out I’m happy.’ That is to take the opposite attitude to Jesus. The church was not founded by Jesus to be a religious club. It was founded to be his junior partner, working for the kingdom of God. It has an outward focus.

A few years ago, I saw a job advertised for a chaplain at an Army rehabilitation centre for soldiers who had lost limbs in military service. An admirable organisation, I am sure, helping soldiers to adapt and to get on with the fitting of prosthetic limbs.

I fear, however, that the church has spent too much time simply adjusting to living without certain limbs and to be content with the absence of many people. Certainly, much of the institutional leadership has set an agenda which is little more than the management of decline.

You may have come into the church because someone invited you to try it. I can think of someone I know who now attends church because she was invited by her elderly neighbour to try it when she was heartbroken over a relationship breakdown. The elderly neighbour said, I think Jesus might be able to help you in your sorrow.

All this requires us to have friends and relationships outside the church. And it means loving those people. It means being ready for the appropriate time to say something gentle and clear about our faith to them.

I am not asking anyone to go door-knocking. But I am asking that we look for those moments when we need to take a little bit of courage and speak about our faith to people outside the church. Jesus is missing them, and the church will be more complete when they find faith.

Secondly, the lost coin

Ever since the Covid pandemic accelerated the move in our society towards cashless ways of making payments in shops, our family has been divided in our attitudes. One of us occasionally pays by a contactless method but really regards cash as king. Another usually pays by contactless on their phone but keeps a small amount of cash. Another pays by contactless on their phone, and a fourth pays by contactless on their watch. I’ll leave you to guess who’s who!

You might think that in Jesus’ time cash was king when you hear the Parable of the Lost Coin, but actually coins were less common in their use. Kenneth Bailey, a New Testament scholar who spent most of his life in the Middle East, said this:

The peasant village is, to a large extent, self-supporting, making its own cloth and growing its own food. Cash is a rare commodity. Hence the lost coin is of far greater value in a peasant home than the day’s labour it represents monetarily.[i]

Ian Paul suggests that the woman’s ten coins in the parable are either family savings or possibly the dowry her husband gave her on marriage. Dowry coins were often worn by the wife either around the neck or on the forehead.

When you understand this, you realise that the loss of this coin is a catastrophe. She hasn’t mislaid a 5 pence piece. Something profoundly valuable has gone.

The Lost Coin by On Borrowed Time on Flickr. CC 2.0

What would it be like for me? It would be like me losing my wedding ring. It is not the most expensive item I own, but I do regard it as my most valuable possession, for what it represents. Earlier this week, when our elderly and grumpy cat bit my hand and I had to have a tetanus shot and strong antibiotics, I was told at the Urgent Treatment Centre that I had to remove my wedding ring in case my hand swelled up. I was careful to put the ring somewhere safe.

Those who are lost from the church and faith in Jesus are therefore to be seen as immensely valuable to Jesus. It doesn’t matter whether they are former Christians or never-been Christians, Jesus values them hugely. Sometimes we are very dismissive of judgmental of people outside the church, and of course some of them can be hostile to us, but the Jesus who tells us to love our enemies puts a high value on them. They are precious to him.

Like us, they are made in God’s image. Like us, they are loved so much by God that Jesus died for their sins. They are treasured by God.

Before he wrote worship songs, Graham Kendrick was a Christian folk singer. One of his most popular songs from that period of his life was called, ‘How Much Do You Think You Are Worth?’

The first verse says this:

Is a rich man worth more than a poor man?
A stranger worth less than a friend?
Is a baby worth more than an old man?
Your beginning worth more than your end?

It goes on to consider various ways in which we might or might not value human life highly. Then it comes to a climax with these words:

If you heard that your life had been valued
That a price had been paid on the nail
Would you ask what was traded,
How much and who paid it
Who was He and what was His name?

If you heard that His name was called Jesus
Would you say that the price was too dear?
Held to the cross not by nails but by love
It was you broke His heart, not the spear!
Would you say you are worth what it cost Him?
You say ‘no’, but the price stays the same.
If it don’t make you cry, laugh it off, pass Him by,
But just remember the day when you throw it away
That He paid what He thought you were worth.

Every single person outside the church is valuable to God. The neighbour who annoys you. The child who keeps kicking his football at your fence. The greedy businessman. The politician whose policies you hate. The sex worker. The drug dealer. All these, as well as the ones we find it easy to like! The Cross tells us how much God values them.

And – while they are missing from God’s family, not only are they incomplete, so is the church.

It’s time to expand our networks, increase our love, and let faith prompt our courage.

[i] Kenneth Bailey, Poet & Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes: A Literary Cultural Approach to the Parables in Luke, 1983, p 157

September 14, 2025 0

Begin With The End In Mind, Revelation 21:1-8 (Easter 5 Year C)

Revelation 21:1-8

Have you ever heard the saying, ‘Begin with the end in mind’? A novelist may have a beginning point and also know the end of the story but then has to work out how to get the characters from that beginning point to the end. We do something similar when planning a journey. Our sat-nav knows where we are, and we enter the place where we want to end up. It would be ludicrous just to set out on our travels with a vague hope that we will arrive at somewhere good. We begin with the end in mind.

But do we apply the same principle to the life of faith? I believe we should. A good, clear, healthy vision of the end of all things will guide us as we wonder how to live now.

And the book of Revelation does something like that for its readers. While I don’t believe it was written only to be decoded in our day with details that correspond to our world political situation, it does give a vision of the end that enables its readers to live faithfully now. I accept the common theory that Revelation was written for persecuted Christians, perhaps in the late first century. As they struggled to know how to live as Christians when under pressure and facing suffering, Revelation gave them a vision of the end, which enabled them to calibrate their lives right where they were.

We may not live our lives of faith in Jesus under the same level of stress that they did, but we too need to live with the end in mind. If we don’t, our lives will drift aimlessly, like heading out on that journey with no idea where we’re going.

Our passage today tells us about the end in verses 1 to 5 and then shows how we live with the end in mind in verses 6 to 8. So first of all we’re going to think about the end, and only then secondly are we going to think about how we begin.

Firstly, then, the end:

What is the end that we are to have in mind? As I said, it is described in verses 1 to 5, and to understand it I want us to think about a sandwich[1]. A sandwich has bread on the outside, top and bottom. Then just inside that, we have the butter on each slice of bread. Finally, in the middle, we have the filling.

Verses 1 to 5 are like that. The bread on the outside are the statements about things being made new. So on the top we have the new heaven and the new earth in verse 1 and on the bottom, we have God saying that he is making everything new in verse 5.

This bread of newness is buttered with the ‘No longer’ statements. The top slice is buttered with the statement at the end of verse 1 that ‘there was no longer any sea’ and the bottom slice is buttered with verse 4, where we hear

He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death” or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.

What, then, is the tasty filling? It is that God and his people will dwell together in the holy city, the New Jerusalem, as found in verses 2 to 3.

The making of all things new, eventually leading to the renewal of the entire heavens and the earth, began with the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and that’s why it’s appropriate to read this passage in the Easter season. When God raised Jesus from the dead, while he was recognisable, his resurrection body clearly had new powers, as we see from the times when he suddenly appears and disappears before the disciples. In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul tells us the resurrection body will be animated by the Holy Spirit.

We, then, are anticipating living in a new creation where everything is recognisable but has new powers and does not decay.

The butter on the bread is the ‘no longer’ statements, which show that in this new creation, suffering will be ended. Imagine you are a persecuted Christian in the first century and you hear that in the world to come ‘there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain’ – all the things you have gone through as either you have been tortured or your friends and loved ones have suffered and even been killed at the hands of the authorities.

And add to that the mysterious – to us – vision that ‘there was no longer any sea’ in verse 1. I suspect this alludes to the fact that the sea was a place of terror for ancient people, and that also earlier in Revelation one of the evil beasts had arisen from the sea. So if there is no longer any sea it’s not that H₂O has been abolished: it is that in the new creation, not only is suffering gone, but the cause of suffering is no more. Evil will no longer have its way.

So at the end we have all creation renewed. It is identifiable but now no longer subject to decay but exhibiting new power at animated by the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, suffering and all that causes it has been given its marching orders.

But it gets better. Because the filling in the sandwich, the very centre and heart is the fact that we will dwell together with God. This is what everything is leading up to: creation – including us – is remade, suffering and its causes are banished, all so that the redeemed can live with God with no handicap. Such will be the new creation that, as Augustine of Hippo, the great thinker who inspired the new Pope, put it, everything will mediate the presence of God.

That is the great vision Revelation 21 gives us. That is the end. It is the end we keep in mind when we begin to live the Christian life now.

So secondly, let’s turn to the way we begin:

For now, by the vision we can see that both creation and new creation are accomplished. As God looked on his initial creation and said it was good or it was very good, so he has looked on his new creation and said, ‘It is done.’ (verse 6)

Now, we have a choice in the way we begin our journey with the end of the new creation, drained of evil but filled with the presence of God in mind.

God offers us the free gift of the water of life if we are thirsty (verse 6). Biblically, the water of life is the gift of the Holy Spirit. Our thirst will only truly be quenched by the Spirit of God. It is the Holy Spirit who leads us on in the direction of the end. I mentioned Augustine of Hippo earlier, and one of his prayers puts it neatly:

Breathe in me, O Holy Spirit, that my thoughts may be holy.
Act in me, O Holy Spirit, that my work may be holy.
Draw my heart, O Holy Spirit, to love what is holy.[2]

The way to get on the route from wherever we are beginning to God’s great end is to open ourselves to the Holy Spirit, and to all the Spirit wants to do in our lives. Paul says in Galatians we are to ‘walk by the Spirit’, the Spirit leads us on the journey from where we are now to the destination God has for us in the new creation and in his presence. The Spirit prepares us for such an existence, purifying our motives and transforming our lives, making us more into people who will be in harmony with God’s new creation where suffering and evil are gone.

To set ourselves on this route from our starting place to the end is what will make us ‘victorious’ in the word of verse 7. In other words, we will not bow down to the evil forces of this world that seek to get us to deny our faith in Jesus and our allegiance to him. The Spirit of God is offered to us so that we may persevere in following Jesus. Or to put it another way, when my least favourite Christmas carol ‘Away in a manger’ ends with the words ‘And fit us for heaven to live with thee there,’ the way God fits us for our destiny is by the work of the Holy Spirit.

The other choice is to reject all this and say, actually, Lord, I don’t want to live in your beautiful new creation where evil has had its marching orders and we live close to you in your presence. For those who choose the lifestyles described in verse 8 – ‘the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practise magic arts, the idolaters and all liars’ – are by their very lifestyle saying no to God’s new creation. These are examples of practices that will be extinguished there. Hence, there is nothing harsh and vindictive about the fate of the depraved being ‘the fiery lake of burning sulphur’ (verse 8). It is ‘the second death’ and this is the natural consequence of choosing against the beautiful end God has planned, designed, and promised.

That probably isn’t most or even all of us. But the tricky challenge we face is that sometimes we want the beautiful destination God has for us but we’d like to compromise – everything in moderation as it were, even sin. We can do a bit of cowardice, not always confessing our faith. We can be unbelieving if there are parts of the faith that don’t suit us. We can make concessions to the sexual standards of society. Magic arts? Well, I certainly think of those Christians who read their horoscopes. I see idolatry in the devotion of some Christians to Donald Trump or to the acquisition of wealth.

Some of us want it both ways, but Jesus doesn’t allow us that option.

Don’t get me wrong, I know we are all far from perfect, not least me. But there is a difference between on the one hand setting our sights on the presence of God in his new creation but slipping up from time to time, and on the other hand wanting to hoover up the blessings of God while not wanting to change our lives out of gratitude for all he has done for us.

So as we approach Ascension and then Pentecost, when God pours out his Spirit through the ascended Jesus, let us examine ourselves. Are we imperfect followers of Jesus who desire the ways of God as well as the blessings of God? Or do we simply want to have our cake and eat it?

Pentecost will be an ideal time to avail ourselves of the living water, the Holy Spirit, so that we can indeed live with the end in mind.

[1] This is my version of Ian Paul’s description of the chiastic structure of verses 1 to 5 in his TNTC on Revelation, p338f.

[2] Lectio 365 morning prayer, 16h May 2025, adapted and modernised from https://www.loyolapress.com/catholic-resources/prayer/traditional-catholic-prayers/saints-prayers/holy-spirit-prayer-of-saint-augustine

May 18, 2025 0

The Sign of Water Into Wine, John 2:1-11 (Second Sunday in Ordinary Time)

I’m still not completely shot of the sinusitis, so this is another repeated sermon. In this case, it’s from six years ago, and hasn’t previously appeared on the blog.

John 2:1-11

I have long wanted to write a book, and perhaps the easiest to write would be the ministry equivalent of the old James Herriot ‘All Creatures Great And Small’ vet tales. Over a long course of time in the ministry, you can gather all sorts of tales, and few areas are more fruitful than what are formally called ‘rites of passage’, or more informally ‘hatch, match, and despatch’ – baptisms, weddings, and funerals.

Having had Sarah Steele’s wedding here yesterday, my mind would easily go to several stories:

My first ever wedding, where my nerves affected my preparation, and just as I was catching up the bride arrived early
The fourteen bridesmaids who arrived on a bus
The Catholic wedding I was asked to register, which was so calamitous in so many ways that I became convinced Father Ted was a real person
The wedding where my address was interrupted by a drunk guest, who was promptly told by the bridegroom, ‘Shut up, I’m listening!’
The Star Wars actress whose wedding I conducted last March at Weybridge. OK, she only had a minor part in the last Star Wars film, but don’t ruin a good story for me!

And more, of course, that were memorable for a host of reasons.

Maybe the wedding at Cana was the most memorable one in history, though. This is more than a miracle story. All the miracles in John’s Gospel are more than miracles. As this account concludes:

¹¹What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

It’s not just a miracle, it’s a sign. A sign of Jesus and his glory. But in what ways?

Firstly, it’s a sign of resurrection:

2 On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there, ²and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. ³When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, ‘They have no more wine.’

Those opening words ‘On the third day’ should be a hint. For even though in this part of his Gospel John is apparently narrating a week in the life of Jesus, the words ‘on the third day’ have additional suggested meaning for Christians, especially since that came at the end of the narration of another week, Holy Week. If you think I’m stretching a point, then note this passage from Isaiah:

On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare
    a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine –
    the best of meats and the finest of wines.
⁷On this mountain he will destroy
    the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
⁸    he will swallow up death for ever.
(Isaiah 25:6-8a)

In the words of Professor Richard Bauckham (and yes, I’m biased, because he was my research supervisor),

Here the provision of the finest wine is linked with the abolition of death.[1]

Here in the second chapter of John is a sign of what we shall see in the second to last chapter: the resurrection of Jesus. John is hinting at what is to come. Jesus will reveal his glory in his resurrection, and his disciples will believe in him because of it. Peter and John will believe. Doubting Thomas will believe. Before any of the men believe, Mary and the women will believe.

If you want to see the glory of Jesus, see the One who in vacating his tomb conquered death. This is glory: he has defeated the last enemy for himself, and this points to the time when he will abolish death for all.

Dr Paul Beasley-Murray, a retired Baptist minister friend of mine, wrote an article the other day in which he reflected on four books he had recently read about death and dying. He included some quotes from some of the books, which happen to illustrate how the glory of resurrection hope transforms the way Christians look at death. All the people I am about to quote are themselves Christians (including the vicar!).

From John Wyatt, Emeritus Professor of Neonatal Paediatrics at University College London:

If our hope is in the power of medical technology to overcome every obstacle, we are doomed to ultimate disappointment. What is worse, this kind of hope may stand in the way of godly acceptance of God’s will for the last phase of our life, impeding the possibility of strengthening or ‘completing’ our relationships in a healthy and faithful way.

From retired Anglican vicar Martin Down:

I know of no real remedy for fear of any sort other than faith… It is God alone who can both say to us ‘Fear not’ and give us good reason not to fear.

And finally from retired oncologist Elaine Sugden:

Rather than think about loss of hope, think instead of purpose and opportunity.

Because of the resurrection, we are people of hope. And that brings glory to Jesus.

Secondly, this story is a sign of intimacy between Jesus and his people:

³When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, ‘They have no more wine.’

⁴‘Woman, why do you involve me?’ Jesus replied. ‘My hour has not yet come.’

⁵His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’

Now at first this exchange might just sound like an almost amusing account of a mother – and a Jewish mother at that – who knows how to get her son to do what she wants him to do. (Although did Mary know Jesus would turn water into wine? I don’t think so. I’m sure she was surprised, too.)

But it’s much more than that. Who was responsible for supplying the wine at a Jewish wedding two thousand years ago? The answer is, the bridegroom. So by giving Jesus the problem that the wine has run out, Mary gives Jesus the rôle of the bridegroom. That is probably why he replies, ‘My hour has not yet come.’ His own great wedding feast – the wedding feast of the Lamb and his bride, the Church – has not yet taken place. It is to happen at the end of all things as we currently know them.

What we have here, then, is another part of the great image that runs through Scripture in which God’s love for his people is depicted in marital terms. In the Old Testament God woos his people with love, but she is unfaithful, and divorce language is used. But Jesus, the Bridegroom Messiah, washes his bride clean with his blood at the Cross, and will marry her to be with her for ever in the new heavens and new earth.

It’s not surprising, then, that in the rest of his Gospel John records Jesus using the intimate language of mutual abiding to describe the relationship between him and the believer. Jesus abides in the believer, and the believer abides in him. Jesus goes so far as to say this is what his own relationship with the Father is like[2].

The glory of Jesus here, then, is in the closeness of the relationship that he wants to have with his disciples. It’s a great deal more than celestial chumminess. Rather, having come and lived among people in the Incarnation, as John describes in his first chapter, Jesus wants not only to live among us but to share life with us: the joy and the mess, the simple and the profound.

The glory of Jesus is this: however majestic the Second Person of the Trinity is, he wants to share life in relationship with his church and with each of his disciples. Is it not remarkable – no, astonishing – and wonderful that this is what he wants for you and for me and for us?

Do not be afraid, but by all means be amazed. Be thrilled and be grateful!

Thirdly, this story shows the glory of Jesus in his abundance:

⁶Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from eighty to a hundred and twenty litres.

⁷Jesus said to the servants, ‘Fill the jars with water’; so they filled them to the brim.

⁸Then he told them, ‘Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet.’

Stone jars were not subject to the Jewish purity laws. Unlike clay jars, they could not become impure and therefore have to be smashed. A priestly family, or at any rate a household concerned with ritual purity, would use them as working jars. They were also large, and expensive to make, because they had to be carved out of one large stone. But in the long run they were cheaper, because they could be reused, unlike clay jars. That meant that probably only the better-off families could afford them.

But the main thing here for our immediate purpose is that they were large. Connect this with these observations about wine (bearing in mind how much wine was made in the miracle) by a theologian called Andrew Wilson:

In the scriptural imagination, however, and particularly in the prophetic tradition, wine represents abundance, shalom, hope and new creation. It embodies blessing: “May God give you of the dew of heaven and of the fatness of the earth and plenty of grain and wine” (Genesis 27:28, ESV); and happiness: “wine to gladden the heart of man, oil to make his face shine, and bread to strengthen man’s heart” (Psalm 104:15). It speaks of love: “we will extol your love more than wine” (Song of Songs 1:4); and bounty: “then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine” (Proverbs 3:10).

Jesus makes so much wine in the six large stone jars. And he doesn’t make supermarket plonk, he makes fine wine:

‘Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.’ (Verse 10)

Undoubtedly, we have a picture of the glory Jesus will reveal at the end of all time, in the new creation, when blessing and abundance will flow to his people and all will have plenty and be satisfied. This isn’t the so-called ‘prosperity gospel’, where if you truly have faith you will be healthy and wealthy now, but a promise of the End that Jesus will sometimes show glimpses of now when he blesses us in this life. And when he does bless us in this life, we respond with thanksgiving rather than hoarding, and with offering what he has blessed us with for the good of others.

We look forward, then, to the glory of Jesus when he puts all things right in creation, makes everything new, and blesses abundantly, not grudgingly.

But we also respond now, so when we witness those whose lives are not characterised by abundant living, we know as Christians we must pray, speak out, act, and give. It may be poverty. It may be famine. It may be injustice. It may be disease. Our call is to witness to the coming abundance of blessing, and to show that the present way of things is not the will of God.

All of which draws us to the conclusion where we note what the passage says about our response and how that may enable the glory of Jesus to be seen.

There are a couple of threads about response in the passage. One is about obedience to Jesus:

⁵His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’

⁶Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from eighty to a hundred and twenty litres.

⁷Jesus said to the servants, ‘Fill the jars with water’; so they filled them to the brim.

The co-operation of the servants in obedience to his command enables Jesus to show his glory.

The other is about faith, and it’s back to where we began:

¹¹What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

Put these two threads together and you have ‘Trust and obey’. If I’d known exactly where my studies of the passage were going to lead me this week when I picked the hymns, then ‘Trust and obey’ would almost certainly have been the next hymn. But it isn’t, because I didn’t realise that at the time.

However, ‘trust and obey’ are the ways we respond to the glory of Jesus and co-operate with his ways so that others may see his glory. When we encounter the glory of Jesus, as the disciples did at Cana, then the right response is to believe in him.

And when we do believe in him, the appropriate way of showing that is to obey him, so that others too may see his glory in the promise of resurrection, a relationship of intimacy, and and the gift of abundance.

Indeed – let us trust and obey.

[1] Richard Bauckham, Gospel Of Glory, p182.

[2] Ibid., pp9-13.

January 19, 2025 0

What Is The Ascended Jesus Doing Now? Acts 1:1-11, Hebrews 1:1-4 (Easter 7, Sunday After Ascension)

Acts 1:1-11 and Hebrews 1:1-4

When George Carey was Bishop of Bath and Wells, he was once asked to perform the reopening of the Post Office in Wells. However, they didn’t tell him all the arrangements.

He turned up, and it was Ascension Day. There he found a hot air balloon, and the plan was for him to ascend in it while the assembled throng sang the hymn, ‘Nearer, my God, to thee.’

Whether the ancient Jews believed that heaven was spatially directly above us is disputed. Some scholars believe their understanding was more akin to heaven being like a parallel dimension to our existence but usually invisible to us. Put like that, it sounds a bit like science fiction, doesn’t it?

But the key aspect in the description of the Ascension that we have in Acts chapter 1 is not simply the being taken up (which is quite a vague expression) but also that ‘a cloud hid him from their sight’ (verse 9). Yes, the ‘taking up’ is reminiscent of Enoch and Elijah going directly to heaven in the Old Testament, but the cloud also has Old Testament connotations, for clouds were sometimes a sign of God’s direct presence. Think of the Exodus, where the Israelites were led by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.

So the Ascension tells us that Jesus has left this existence and is now in the direct presence of God in heaven.

But what is he doing now? I want to take you around a few New Testament references today to answer that question.

Firstly, he is resting:

After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. (Hebrews 1:3b)

He sat down. That sense of satisfaction when a job is finished. You’ve probably done that after completing something at home. Put the kettle on, make a brew, and put your feet up. He sat down. Even Jesus.

And so he should, because his mission on earth was complete. John’s Gospel records that just before he died on the Cross, he cried out, ‘It is finished!’ (John 19:30). And ‘finished’ here doesn’t mean, it’s over, I’ve failed, that’s it, it means quite the opposite. It means, ‘It is accomplished.’ Jesus has completed everything his Father sent him to do. His suffering and death opened the way to God’s presence. He was vindicated in the Resurrection. It’s done. Big tick!

When we celebrate the Ascension, we rejoice that Jesus has done everything necessary to bring us into fellowship with the God Who Is Trinity. There is nothing we can do or need to do to add to it, for we do not earn our salvation. Jesus has done it all, and now offers it as a gift, which we receive with the empty hands of faith.

I once had a couple start worshipping at a church I served, and they asked about becoming church members. I visited them, and they wanted to know if they were good enough to be accepted as members. I wish I’d picked up on that language at the time, because they turned out to be very judgmental people – especially the husband. If you’re forever trying to earn your salvation, you either become hugely self-critical, because you can never live up to your own standards, or you become hugely critical of others, always taking them to pieces.

And indeed, to try to earn salvation is effectively to say to Jesus, you didn’t need to die on the Cross. Which one of us dares to look Jesus in the eye and say that? But it’s what we do when we try to earn our own passage to heaven.

Instead, rejoice that Jesus has sat down. He has done it all. Receive his wonderful gift!

Secondly, he is sending:

‘For John baptised with water, but in a few days you will be baptised with the Holy Spirit.’ (Verse 5)

In a few days the Father would send the Holy Spirit through Jesus upon the disciples. Now of course we’ll think about that next week at Pentecost, so at this point I want to focus on the words ‘in a few days.’

Yes, it’s true that we no longer have to wait for the gift of the Holy Spirit. When we turn our lives over to Jesus Christ, the Spirit comes into our life. Indeed, even to get to that point the Spirit has already been prompting us. But again, that’s for next week.

What about those occasions when Jesus promises something good but it’s a long time coming? We’re not used to that in an instant society. We like fast broadband, Amazon Prime with next-day delivery, twenty-four hour news channels where political spokespeople are expected to react immediately to the latest gossip rather than take the time to be considered and reflective.

Is there something to be said for Jesus to temper his sending with waiting? Could it be that our demand to have everything now has made us immature, like overgrown children, saying, in the words of the Queen song, ‘I want it all, I want it all, and I want it now’?

Jesus does indeed send us good things, but he may well make us wait. For in the waiting for what he sends he has work to do in us, forming us and shaping us into more mature disciples.

Even the psychologists agree that the ability to delay gratification is a sign of maturity. But Jesus knew that long before the rise of psychology!

Is there something we have been praying about for a long time? To the best of our knowledge, does it sound like something the Jesus of the Gospels would approve of? If it is, then I encourage us to keep praying, even if we have been disheartened. Let him use the time before it is fulfilled to prepare us and shape us.

As someone who had to wait longer than most to find a wife, I speak from experience. But she was worth waiting for. And what Jesus sends to you will also be worth waiting for.

Thirdly, he is praying:

Later in the Epistle to the Hebrews we read these words:

Therefore he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them. (Hebrews 7:25)

Over time, I have known a few people who promised to pray for me daily. Most of them are now dead. They included my parents, and a wonderful elderly Local Preacher. I only know of one person who prays for me daily now.

Actually, there’s a second. I know that the ascended Jesus is praying for me. He ‘ever lives to intercede for [us].’ You can’t do better than that! Jesus is praying for his people!

Someone I know once had a conversation with some Catholic friends and asked them why they prayed to Mary. They replied, ‘Because she’s human, so she understands.’

This seemed rather sad to my friend, who realised that her Catholic friends were so fixated on the divinity of Jesus that they had forgotten his humanity.

Her response to them was, ‘Why go to the mother when you can go straight to the boss?’

We can go straight to the boss. He is already praying for us.

Have we ever thought of asking Jesus to pray for us? Because his answer is ‘yes.’

What about those times when we really don’t know what to ask for in prayer? Could we pray, ‘Jesus, I have this issue, and I don’t know the right way to pray about it. I’d love you to guide me in the right way to pray and the right things to ask, but would you also pray to the Father about it for me, please?’ It seems to me that this would be a perfectly biblical approach to take and is far better than simply stating our request and just tacking on the end the words ‘If it be your will.’

Fourthly and finally, he is reigning:

‘He sat down’ not only hints at Jesus resting after completing his earthly work, it is also an act of authority. A Jewish rabbi sat down in the synagogue to teach – as Jesus himself did in the Nazareth synagogue in Luke 4. A king or an emperor would sit down on a throne. And Jesus here sits down ‘at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven’ (Hebrews 1:3).

But how do we understand him to be reigning when so much continues to be wrong with his creation? Allow me to answer that by talking about The Lord Of The Rings.

If you saw all three three-hour movies, you may remember that the final film comes to a climax with victory at the battle of Minas Tirith, and the ring that caused all the trouble being cast into the fires of Mount Doom. After that, most of the heroes board a boat to The Undying Lands, whereas Samwise goes back to the peace of The Shire. It’s just as we would want it.

But that’s not how the original trilogy of books end. There, after the battle is won at Minas Tirith and the ring is destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom, we come to a penultimate chapter, entitled ‘The Scouring of the Shire.’ In it,

the Hobbits come back to the Shire to find it under the thumb of Saruman and Wormtongue. It’s an Orwellian nightmare of jobsworths, ruffians and snitchers. Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin join forces with Tom Cotton and his family to throw off the Orwellian oppressors and collaborators and MtSGA (Make the Shire Great Again).[1]

The decisive victories have been won, but there are still skirmishes to be had with evil. Can you tell what I’m about to say?

For Christians, the decisive victories have been won at the Cross and the Resurrection. Christ is now reigning at the Father’s right hand. But we still have battles with evil, because not all will bow the knee to Christ in this life, even though the Father has elevated him above all earthly authorities. J R R Tolkien, a devout Catholic, knew this when he wrote The Lord Of The Rings.

Just as in the United Kingdom we have a constitutional monarch on the throne and an elected government in office yet not everyone obeys the laws of the land, so the ascended Christ is on the throne of the universe but not everyone obeys him.

The day will come when everyone will see him and all will bow the knee to him, whether willingly or otherwise. In the meantime, this truth gives us tasks to do. One is to proclaim the good news that Jesus is on the throne of the universe and call people to give their allegiance to him. The other is to demonstrate that truth as we build for God’s kingdom.

In conclusion, I hope you can see how rich and important the doctrine of the Ascension is. Although only Luke mentions the actual event, so much of the New Testament refers to it and builds on it. One scholar even called it ‘The most important event in the New Testament’[2].

But most of all, I hope we can appreciate together what Good News the Ascension is. Jesus who rests, sends, prays, and reigns is in all these things rooting for us.

[1] James Cary, The Forgotten Feast: The Ascension and The Scouring of the Shire

[2] Ian Paul, Why is the Ascension of Jesus the most important event in the New Testament?

May 12, 2024 0

Tag: Ian Paul

What Jesus Says About Facing Pressure, Matthew 10:24-39 (Ordinary 12 Trinity 3 Year A)

Expecting The Trinity And Getting Jesus, Matthew 28:16-20 (Trinity Sunday Year A)

Jesus’ Farewell Message, John 14:1-14 (Easter 5 Year A)

Where is the Hope in the Slaughter of the Innocents? (Matthew 2:13-23, Christmas 1 Year A)

Sermon: King’s Cross, Luke 23:33-43 (Last Sunday Before Advent, Feast of Christ the King, Year C)

A Sermon for Remembrance Sunday: God’s Manifesto (Revelation 22:1-5)

Keeping The Wrong Company, Luke 15:1-10 (Ordinary 24 Year C)

Begin With The End In Mind, Revelation 21:1-8 (Easter 5 Year C)

The Sign of Water Into Wine, John 2:1-11 (Second Sunday in Ordinary Time)

What Is The Ascended Jesus Doing Now? Acts 1:1-11, Hebrews 1:1-4 (Easter 7, Sunday After Ascension)

Tweet Tweet