Fourth Sunday In Lent: Worship In the Wilderness – A sacrificial Journey

I’m back from my week off. This Sunday, the fourth in Lent, is also observed as Mothering Sunday, but the theme in our series is ‘A Sacrificial Journey’ and uses Isaiah’s passage about the Suffering Servant.

If you’d like some worship material on the third Sunday in Lent from this series, I know other churches are using this material and a quick search of YouTube or Google should find you something.

In the meantime, here is this week’s video and then the text of the talk.

Isaiah 52:13-53:12

We come this week to one of the most extraordinary passages in the Old Testament. I can understand why many Christians view this as a direct prophecy of Jesus’ death for the sins of the world. It is the last of the so-called ‘Servant Songs’ in Isaiah. It is clear that Jesus used these as models for his ministry. And while many Jews could easily have seen the earlier Servant Songs as ones fulfilled by a prophet, this one blows the doors off that with its talk of a human being (as opposed to an animal sacrifice) taking the sins of the world. Whatever it meant at the time – and it must have meant something to its first hearers – it’s hard not to see its ultimate fulfilment in the life and death of Jesus.

And in fact that’s my first observation here: the Suffering Servant goes against the surrounding culture. Here is not the victorious warrior Messiah that Israel came to believe in. Nor is this the mighty military commander in which Babylon placed so much trust. (This prophecy belongs to the time when Israel was toward the end of her exile in Babylon.)

And nor does it sit comfortably with our culture in some ways. Due to our Christian heritage we may have come to recognise and even applaud those who give at great cost, even the cost of their own lives for the sake of others. In the last year we might think of NHS staff who put themselves at great risk for COVID-19 sufferers, caught the disease themselves, and died. However, even that is slightly different from Christian understandings of vicarious suffering, and we’ll come onto that in a little while.

No, the way in which this challenges our culture is early on in the passage, with the descriptions of Jesus’ appearance:

his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being
and his form marred beyond human likeness (52:14b, c)
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. (53:2c, d)

The Suffering Servant (ultimately Jesus himself) would not fit into today’s glamorous celebrity culture. The media operators would tell him he had a face for radio, not TV.

There are sections of the Christian church where it seems important for their leaders to be photogenic. All this shows is a surrender to our shallow culture. It’s no coincidence how in those churches the attractive pastors sometimes seem to think they can take advantage of this, and a scandal ensues.

But before we get smug, we should realise how we cave in to this vacuous approach as well. I have certainly known circuits where people openly went more to church when there was a good-looking preacher. And I don’t say that out of sour grapes because the preacher in question wasn’t me! It genuinely concerns me. How prepared are we to get beyond style and appearance to substance?

My second observation, though, is this: the Suffering Servant comes alongside the culture.

Really? Yes, because despite what I’ve just said Jesus still has compassion for a sinful and suffering world.

He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. (53:3a, b)

‘A man of suffering, and familiar with pain.’ In older translations we may know the words ‘A man of suffering’ as ‘A man of sorrows’, as in the great hymn, ‘Man of Sorrows.’

Jesus, the man who enjoyed dinner parties and weddings became the man of suffering and sorrows. He always knew it would be so. He identified with human sin and suffering right through to an ignominious and tortuous death on the Cross.

Before I met and married Debbie, some of you know I had a broken engagement. When that happened, two friends of mine turned up on my doorstep one lunchtime and said they were taking me out to lunch. It turned out that one of them had also had a broken engagement before she met her husband. That identification and experience meant more to me than those who simply, like Job’s comforters, came up with their clever theological explanations of the hurt I was feeling.

When we suffer, Jesus, the very Son of God, knows. That’s a basis for comfort. When the world suffers, Jesus knows. That’s a basis for commending him to others.

And with him, it is more than ‘I understand what you’re going through,’ because Jesus the Suffering Servant has come through the worst of suffering to resurrection.

In our world there has been a lot of talk about the need for hope over the last year. We have placed our hope in science, and of course we are being blessed by the fruits of scientific labour in the vaccination programme. We rightly laud the scientific teams, the companies, and the universities that have produced the vaccines.

But ultimately our hope isn’t in anything human like science. It’s in the Suffering Servant risen from the dead. Science is a gift of God, but it isn’t itself divine. It will do a lot of wonderful things for us, but it can’t always save us.

On the other hand, if as we believe Jesus went through that unimaginable suffering and was raised from death, then faith in him gives us an indestructible hope. What a message we have for a troubled world!

My third and final observation is that the Suffering Servant transforms the culture.

⁴Surely he took up our pain
    and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
    stricken by him, and afflicted.
⁵But he was pierced for our transgressions,
    he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
    and by his wounds we are healed.
⁶We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
    each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
    the iniquity of us all.

Israel knew where her transgressions and iniquities had landed her: in exile in Babylon. And she had no peace with God. Away from Jerusalem and the Temple which gave their lives meaning and significance, they were in a place of despair.

There is a sense in which all people are in exile from God’s presence due to our transgressions and iniquities. Some like to pretend it’s not true. Others just don’t realise. But Jesus the Suffering Servant invites us to hear the voice of his Father calling the prodigals home, because Jesus in his death has dealt with that which has sent us away from the Father’s presence.

It is what Martin Luther called ‘the divine exchange’. In terms of this passage, Jesus takes our pain, suffering, punishment, and affliction, and we receive his peace and healing. Why would anyone turn down an exchange like that?

More than once I have heard a psychiatrist say that if only their patients or clients could know they were forgiven, then many beds would be released on psychiatric wards. What Jesus offers through his suffering is totally and utterly transforming.

Imagine if that were extended across our society and we were no longer a culture where we talked about other people’s ‘unforgivable’ actions. Imagine our politics and our media having healthy disagreements without having to demonise the other side. Imagine a world where those who make honest failures are not turned into social pariahs or media villains. Imagine a nation where a broken and hurting royal family didn’t have to deal with their differences and pain through television interviews and press releases. Imagine more marriages staying together, because the forgiveness of one spouse prompts change in the other.

All this and more is why I say that Jesus the Suffering Servant can transform a culture. It begins with the forgiveness he brings us through his suffering, and as we receive that we offer it to others not just as a message but in our own actions.

This is the journey of Jesus that we mark during Lent. It’s a suffering journey. But it’s one which brings substance, hope, and transformation to the world.

How are we going to travel on that journey with him?

March 14, 2021 0

Second Sunday in Lent: Worship in the Wilderness – A Simple Journey

This week we consider how the spiritual disciplines Jesus used in the wilderness are ones we can use to put him first in our lives.

Luke 4:1-13

One of the regular moans I always used to hear in churches was older people complaining that younger people lacked discipline. It used to be accompanied by comments regretting the abolition of National Service. Well, the latter is fading into distant memory now – even I am too young to have been ‘called up’.

But what strikes me is that a place where we really could do with more discipline is in the Church. I would say that discipline is a required characteristic of a Christian disciple. I say that because Jesus in his life exhibited serious discipline. And we are called to imitate him.

Nowhere is the discipline of Jesus more apparent than in the story of the wilderness temptations. On a day when in our series we’re thinking about the simplicity of the wilderness journey, I want to show you how spiritual discipline is at the heart of that simplicity.

Those who teach about spiritual disciplines such as Richard Foster and the late Dallas Willard talk about ‘disciplines of engagement’ and ‘disciplines of abstinence’. The disciplines we see in Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness are very much disciplines of abstinence, where he puts aside something for a season to concentrate on God.

Here, then, are three disciplines of abstinence that helped Jesus focus on his Father and which also help us to focus on our God.

The first, then, is simplicity itself.

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness (verse 1)

Jesus leaves behind civilisation with all its trappings to go to a stark place where he will concentrate on his Father. In church history, we’ve seen the Desert Fathers, monks, and nuns, and especially hermits, do something similar.

Sometimes the cares of this world and its trappings get in the way. People make demands on us. Possessions distract us. Money worries or tempts us. It can be good to put these things to a side for a limited period to focus on prayer. And by doing so we are making a radical statement: ‘Lord, you are more important to us than money, work, and possessions. You are Number One in my life.’

How do we do it today? It can be helpful as part of our simplicity to travel to somewhere else so that we don’t have those material distractions in front of us. There aren’t too many deserts around here, but we have plenty of heathland.

For those of us who have a smartphone, then it is probably a good idea to turn off all the notifications and perhaps put it on Airplane Mode.

Clear your diary for a few hours, or a whole day if you can. Get as far away from material clutter as you can. Take a Bible. Listen to God and read the Scriptures. Pour out your heart to God about all things large and small. Have a notebook so that you can write down your impressions of what God says to you in your conversation.

Amazingly, you will still have distractions! Your mind will run off on all sorts of tangents. At that point, it is worth remembering the Apostle Paul’s example when he said ‘We take every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ’ (2 Corinthians 10:5). Do that either by writing down the thought in your notebook so that you can return to it at a better time or turn the thought into prayer.

The second discipline of abstinence for a simple journey is solitude.

It’s apparent from the story that Jesus went alone into the wilderness. Leaving the Jordan also meant leaving people behind.

Solitude is different from loneliness. Solitude is where we lay aside the distractions of people (even loved ones) with their requests, requirements, needs, and demands, to put God first and foremost in our life. Solitude is thus a clear choice, whereas loneliness is more something that happens to us, and is usually experienced as something unwanted and not chosen.

We have experienced a lot of aloneness this last year due to the pandemic. Some of us have experienced that as deeply unwanted loneliness. Others of us, especially those of us who get energised by being alone, have managed to make it into an experience of solitude, even solitude with God.

The last thing I want to do in talking about this is to diminish the sense of loneliness that many people have experienced in the last year. But I do want to challenge those of us who love our social lives and maybe even like to be the centre of attention. For the discipline of solitude is one that says we are willing temporarily to put aside the people who energise us and the people we love to concentrate on our Father in heaven. Solitude is a time when I confess that I am not the centre of the universe and I am not to be everyone’s centre of attention. Rather, our God is to be the centre of our attention. The act of prayer in solitude is thus an act of worship, acknowledging that God the Father is on the throne, not me.

Yes, as I said, you may need to have your smartphone with you when you go off for your time with God in case there are family emergencies, but the discipline of solitude is there to emphasise by physical act that our God comes first before every single other person, even those we love the dearest.

A married couple I know only committed themselves to Christ and to Christian faith in their adult life, several years after they had married. The point came when, a few years after becoming Christians, one day the wife confessed to the husband: ‘There is someone I love more than you.’

After the shocked silence she added, ‘It’s Jesus.’ Her husband was thrilled.

I am not suggesting we neglect our loved ones. But relationships have been so elevated in our society to the point where people expect their spouse or partner to provide for their needs in a way they can’t, namely in a way that only God can. We need to redress that imbalance, that idolatry. Solitude with God is one way of doing that.

The third discipline of abstinence practised by Jesus in the wilderness is, of course, fasting.

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, ²where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.

This is the one we expect to hear about in Lent. It’s the discipline on which all our ‘giving up something for Lent’ is based. And although these days that has also been turned around into a positive idea of taking up something good for Lent, I suggest that taking up something rather misses the point of giving up something.

For one thing, maybe we want to take up something because we can’t face giving up something. If we recognise that tendency, we should be concerned.

But for another, taking up something overlooks the whole idea of disciplines of absence, which is to say that God is more important to us than our possessions, than people, and – in the case of fasting – food.

That’s why fasting is connected so much to prayer in the Bible. When we fast and pray we are saying to God, you matter more to us than even the food that keeps us alive. And what’s more, it is more important to us to hear you speak and see you do something about this issue we are bringing to you in prayer.

Now I am aware that there will always be people for whom it is medically questionable to fast. I am not going to ask anyone to do something that their doctor would say was inadvisable or dangerous.

But fasting does say something important to a society like ours that is so obsessed with consumption. Because of that, I do support the idea of extending the notion of fasting from food to other things. What has gained too much of our affection in place of God and needs to be put back where it belongs? Do we need to fast from Netflix or Spotify? What is that thing of which we say, ‘I can’t get enough of this,’ and which therefore needs putting back in its place below the throne of God by fasting from it?

To conclude, the purpose of spiritual disciplines is to cultivate in thought and action the core Christian confession that Jesus is Lord. The disciplines of abstinence we have thought about today are ways of doing that.

This is not about being a killjoy. And it is not about expecting everyone to become a hermit. It is about pursuing disciplines that put created things and people in their right place under the reign of Christ, and cultivating those disciplines so that they become ingrained as virtuous habits in our lives.

May God grant us the grace to live a disciplined life of love and faith in his Son.

February 28, 2021 0

First Sunday In Lent: Worship In The Wilderness – A Spirit-Led Journey

Having begun the ‘Worship in the Wilderness’ series on Ash Wednesday, we move now to the First Sunday in Lent and a theme where we look at the good God can bring out of our wilderness experiences.

Deuteronomy 8:1-5, 15-18

Mark 1:9-13

When we speak of having a ‘wilderness experience’, we don’t tend to mean something good. A wilderness experience is a time when life is hard and discouraging, when we feel far from good and unable to gain spiritual nourishment. Nothing grows. We hunger and thirst but are not satisfied.

It’s not good.

Would you consider it strange, then, to hear this week’s title: ‘A Spirit-Led Journey’?

‘At once the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness’ (Mark 1:12) says Mark of Jesus. It’s just after his baptism, and at that wonderful experience the Holy Spirit has descended on him. ‘like a dove’ (Mark 1:10). According to Mark, being sent into the wilderness is every bit as much an experience of the Holy Spirit as that of the dove and the voice from heaven.

In fact, as I’m fond of pointing out when preaching on the temptations of Jesus, to say the Spirit ‘sent’ Jesus out into the wilderness or ‘led’ him there does not reflect the full force of the Greek. Perhaps it’s our British fondness for understatement, but a more literal translation would be, ‘At once the Spirit threw him out into the wilderness.’

The Greek word is ekballo. The ‘ballo’ part is where we get our word ‘ball’. So think of a sports competitor hurling a ball a long distance, and you have some idea of what Mark is saying here. Imagine a fielder in cricket running round to stop a ball going for four, and then hurling it back to the wicket-keeper.

So the Holy Spirit has very forcefully taken Jesus into the wilderness to face temptation. And as Jesus resists that temptation, he wins key battles that that refine and strengthen the calling he has had affirmed at his baptism.

And that may be the first reason why some of our wilderness experiences are Spirit-led journeys: they are training exercises.

You may have seen television documentaries that follow prospective recruits to elite military outfits like the SAS, where the candidates are put through a series of tough, uncompromising, and even distressing experiences. Those who overcome are further on the journey to selection.

And for us, when the Holy Spirit leads us into a bleak place for a training exercise, we are being refined for when we face future battles. If we win victories over difficulty in a wilderness experience, we may be more ready for the trials of life later so that we can overcome them by faith in Christ for his glory.

You will not become an elite soldier by watching Netflix episodes from the comfort of your sofa. Nor will you grow in spiritual strength as a Christian if all you have is an easy life. So sometimes the Holy Spirit removes our comforts and prepares us for what is to come.

That’s one way to see the disciplines of Lent, such as giving up certain things. Our lack of those creature comforts for a season can be a way that the Holy Spirit trains us in the way of Christ.

A second reason why a wilderness experience can be a Spirit-led one can be found in our reading from Deuteronomy 8. It’s about learning humble dependence on God.

²Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. ³He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. ⁴Your clothes did not wear out and your feet did not swell during these forty years. ⁵Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you.

Who or what do you really want, God asks us. Do you want me, or do you want an easy life? Learn to depend on me, he says, and to listen to my word, because that is where you will find life.

It’s not about us. It’s about God. Things may seem fine and dandy when we have plenty of good things to eat (‘bread alone’) but we need to learn the lesson that our priorities are not the same as those of the rest of the world.

Remember what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6, when he told his disciples not to worry about food, drink, and clothes:

³²For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. ³³But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

For me it was the experience of living without a guaranteed income for my first three years as a student when I didn’t qualify for Government grants. I learned as time after time people gave money that enabled me to study and to live.

Again, a Lenten discipline of giving up something may help us cultivate this humble trust in God. It may also be that the experience of being deprived of many good and valuable things through the coronavirus pandemic has done something similar.

God wants our trust, and sometimes he takes us to the wilderness to find it.

A third reason why a wilderness experience can be a Spirit-led journey can be found in the prophecy of Hosea. In the book, and I’m particularly concentrating on chapter 2 here, Israel is compared to an adulterous wife who is always running after other lovers than her husband. In particular, one of her ‘lovers’ is the false god Baal.

But God wants Israel to know that he is the source of all good things, such as grain, wine, and oil. So what will he do?

At first it is severe. Israel will lose her crops of grain, wine, wool, and linen, making her metaphorically exposed before the world. Her festivals will stop, and her vines and fig trees will be ruined.

It all sounds like devastating punishment.

But the thing is, it doesn’t stop there, with Israel in a new but figurative wilderness. For what is the next thing God says?

¹⁴‘Therefore I am now going to allure her;
    I will lead her into the wilderness
    and speak tenderly to her.
¹⁵There I will give her back her vineyards,
    and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
There she will respond as in the days of her youth,
    as in the day she came up out of Egypt.

This is the third way in which a wilderness experience can be a Spirit-led journey: God brings us back to himself when we have gone far from him.

In other words, when God takes away things from us in the wake of our walking away from him, it’s not the final punishment. Instead, he is removing items from the scene so that all we have is him. He wants us to see him and him only, so that our love for him may be rekindled.

It is a severe form of mercy, but mercy it is. God removes our idols and in doing so shows they have no power. ‘Who will you worship?’ he asks us. And better that he asks us that now than later when it will be too late.

So in conclusion, I haven’t specifically chosen to give up anything for Lent this year. But maybe sometimes the Holy Spirit makes the choice for us. He leads us into the wilderness and removes props from our lives as he trains us to be stronger spiritually for future battles. He takes away our creature comforts so that we may depend on Christ. And he gets rid of our idols so that we may devote ourselves wholeheartedly to our God and Father.

How is the Spirit leading you in the wilderness right now?

February 21, 2021 0

Ash Wednesday Video Worship: Worship In The Wilderness – A Secret Journey

Here is an act of worship for today. This launches our ‘Worship in the Wilderness’ series from Engage Worship.

There is, however, no script below this time, since preparing an extra act of worship this week has constrained my time for producing that.

The next service in the series will appear on Sunday morning, God willing.

February 17, 2021 0

Transfigured Jesus, Transfigured Lives (Mark 9:2-9): Worship for the Last Sunday Before Lent (Transfiguration SundaY)

This is the last of our Epiphany/Ordinary Time themes before Lent kicks off on Wednesday. I shall then be following the series ‘Worship in the Wilderness‘ from Engage Worship throughout Lent. If you want to follow that devotionally, you can buy a book to go along with it.

Mark 9:2-9

Our set reading from Mark’s Gospel takes quite a leap this week from last week. For the last few weeks we’ve been in the beginning of the first half of Mark, looking at the early ministry of Jesus.

But this week we jump to the beginning of the second half of Mark’s Gospel. Just before this reading, the first half has come to a climax with Simon Peter confessing that Jesus is the Christ. However, his understanding of that proves to be deficient, when he reacts adversely to Jesus’ first prophecy of his forthcoming suffering and death.

Peter has the right words, the right creed if you like, but not the right understanding. He appears not to be alone, because Jesus teaches the whole crowd about his suffering and also the suffering that his followers will face.

Then he prophesies that some of those present will not taste death until they have seen the kingdom of God come with power (verse 1).

I go into this detail, because Mark clearly links today’s story with that episode in his opening words: ‘After six days’ (verse 2). If Peter and any other disciples cannot understand the link between who Jesus is and how his mission will be carried out through words and arguments, then the experience of a dramatic divine encounter may do the trick.

As a scholar named James Edwards writes,

In Peter’s confession Mark teaches how disciples should think about Jesus (8:33), and in the subsequent transfiguration narrative he allows them to behold his true nature.[i]

If theological argument won’t work, then perhaps experience will.

Firstly, the Transfiguration is a story of divine revelation. Mountains were often places in the Bible where God said or did something special, and all the more if – like this one – it was described as a ‘high mountain’ (verse 2). Specifically, this account is reminiscent of Moses going up Mount Sinai to meet with God and receive the Law. Even the six-day gap between this story and the previous one may echo the six days Moses spent at Mount Sinai with God.

All this, then, should prepare Peter, James, and John for a word of revelation from God. Frightened as we know later on they are (verse 6) – and no surprise at that – the clues are there for them as devout Jews to recognise that they should prepare for a revelation from heaven itself.

Sometimes I wonder how prepared we are to hear from God. Is it because we bumble along from the day to day without tuning ourselves in that we rarely hear from him? Is it that so often God has to interrupt our daily routines in an attempt to catch our ears? Might it be that we could tune ourselves in, ready for when he wants to reveal something to us?

This is why I bang on from time to time about our use of the spiritual disciplines, such as personal Bible reading and prayer. These practices get us used to the voice of God. That voice will not always speak something big and dramatic as in today’s story, but as a baby learns soon to recognise its parents’ voices, so we need to do the same with God. The more we practise the spiritual disciplines, and the more we look and listen for the signs of his presence in our routine duties.

Secondly, the Transfiguration is an account of divine glory.

^2b There he was transfigured before them. ³ His clothes became dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them.

Think back to Christmas for a moment. Maybe not this last Christmas specifically, but the Christmas season generally.

Specifically, think back to singing ‘Hark! The herald-angels sing’ and that line, ‘Veiled in flesh the Godhead see.’ God coming in human flesh meant that we were shielded from the dazzling brilliance of God’s glory. It is almost too much to bear, rather like the way we warn children not to gaze directly at the Sun.

But here at the Mount of Transfiguration, all the layers that protect sinful humanity from encountering the divine glory are stripped away.

Despite the faltering description, v. 3 succeeds in conveying that the transfiguration is so complete that Jesus’ clothing as well as his person is transformed. …
The diaphanous garments and brilliant face of Jesus signify total transformation and suffusion with the divine presence.[ii]

Jesus reflects the presence of God every bit as much as Moses did on Mount Sinai, if not more so. God hasn’t spoken his revelation yet, but he is showing up.

So again, Peter, James, and John are being called to attention. What they find themselves in counts. It’s important.

Not every Christian has dramatic experiences of God, but most of us would talk about times in our lives when God has seemed especially close. Sometimes those seasons of closeness and almost tangible presence are there to comfort or reassure us through a hard time, but on many other occasions, like the Transfiguration, God is not simply wanting to give us a spiritual thrill, he is wanting to transform us more into people who reflect his glory.

I simply want to ask whether we are open to that.

Thirdly, the Transfiguration is a narrative of divine supremacy, and specifically of Jesus’ supremacy.

⁴ And there appeared before them Elijah and Moses, who were talking with Jesus.

Why Elijah and Moses? There have been various theories, but the important thing is this: the way this is worded originally gives an indication that they are not equals with Jesus: ‘they hold an audience with Jesus as a superior.’[iii] They appear and they disappear. There is no command to listen to them. They are ‘representatives of the prophetic tradition that, according to the belief of the early church, would anticipate Jesus.’[iv]

Jesus is superior to both of them. Their lives and ministries pointed ultimately to the fulfilment of God’s plans in Jesus. And Jesus is not merely a prophet, as religions like Islam would have you believe.

Jesus is more than our Friend and our Brother. He is more than the celestial lover that some hymns and worship songs portray. He is more even than Saviour. He is Lord.

Peter, James, and John here are learning that Jesus isn’t just a wonderful rabbi. He’s even more than Israel’s promised deliverer. They owe him their allegiance.

And so do we.

Fourthly, the Transfiguration speaks to us of divine presence.

⁵ Peter said to Jesus, ‘Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters – one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.’ ⁶ (He did not know what to say, they were so frightened.)

Poor Peter. He and his friends are scared out of their wits. What comes out of his mouth is something that would be worthy of a typical pious Jew. He wants to build shelters, or tabernacles, and the Jews looked forward to a time when God would build a new tabernacle or dwelling for his presence on earth to replace the old one that Israel had had in the wilderness.[v]

But what he doesn’t yet grasp is that the new tabernacle is here already. Jesus is the new tabernacle. He is the presence of God on earth.

So Jesus is more than one who is ranked higher in God’s ranks than Elijah and Moses. He is the presence of God on earth. That is enough to blow the fuses in the mind of a devout Jew. It is why many learned Jews rejected Jesus.

But when you meet Jesus, you meet God. Later Christians would look at all the biblical data and formulate the doctrine of the Trinity, but here is one major sign of how Jesus expanded and exploded traditional Jewish beliefs about one God, the chosen people, and the messianic hope.[vi]

Jesus, being God who came in human flesh to earth, is the climax of God’s plans. And as such, we see everything through the light of him. We interpret our hopes and dreams in the light of Jesus. We interpret the Scriptures in the light of Jesus. We frame our very lives in the light of Jesus.

When we realise that God has been present on earth through Jesus and that he is still present through his Spirit, how does that change the way we live?

Because it should.

Fifthly and finally, the Transfiguration speaks to us of divine vindication.

⁷ Then a cloud appeared and covered them, and a voice came from the cloud: ‘This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!’
⁸ Suddenly, when they looked around, they no longer saw anyone with them except Jesus.

You may recall that a voice from heaven spoke to Jesus in similar terms at his baptism: ‘You are my beloved Son, I am well pleased with you.’ Here, the words are similar, but they are not addressed to Jesus. Instead, God the Father speaks to Peter, James, and John: ‘This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!’

They were to listen to all that Jesus had told them. Doubtless – and most importantly – that referred to his prophecies of his coming suffering and resurrection, which had offended Peter so much.

No: the voice from heaven tells the disciples that what Jesus has said is right and true. You must take it on board, even if you don’t understand it.

When we make Jesus out to sound so much like us, with similar views to us, similar ethical standpoints, similar political views, and so on, then we no longer have Jesus, we have an idol. Jesus will always say and so things that go against the things we cherish. But because of his divine nature, we are the ones who need to change.

And here, that’s just what the Father expects of Peter, James, and John. Put aside your objections to the Cross. Put aside your assumptions that you know better.

And that’s a very fitting place for us to end this week’s reflection, especially as we prepare to enter Lent on Wednesday. The Transfiguration calls us to a life where we increasingly conform our will and our ways the will and the ways of Jesus, who has the right to do this, as God who came to Earth. And whose journey to Earth led to the Cross.

We start that journey again now, and as we go into Lent.

[i] James R Edwards, The Gospel According To Mark, p261.

[ii] Edwards, p263, p264.

[iii] Edwards, p265.

[iv] Edwards, p265.

[v] Edwards, p266.

[vi] ‘Monotheism, election, and eschatology’ in NT Wright’s words.

February 14, 2021 0

The Seven Last Words From The Cross

Here is an extended meditation/talk I gave a couple of days ago for Holy Week.

I want to take as a theme this year the sayings of Jesus on the Cross. I shall offer some brief thoughts on each of them, because between them they give us a picture of the Gospel message.

Father forgive them, for they do not know what they do
Who killed Jesus? I worked with a Jewish woman who told me how she grew up facing taunts of ‘Christ killer’. I said that was unfair, as the Romans as well as the Jewish authorities were implicated in the death of Jesus. Here, as Jesus pronounces these amazing words, he has Roman soldiers at his feet.

In showing that both Jews and Gentiles were co-conspirators in the execution of Jesus, the Gospel writers tell us that the whole world is guilty of causing this, the greatest injustice of history.

However, in Jesus offering forgiveness to his tormentors, it equally means that his Good News is open and available to all. All have sinned – no exception – but also, the Gospel is for all – no exception.

There is no-one here who is beyond the forgiving love of God. It doesn’t matter what you are ashamed of, it doesn’t matter what you can’t forgive yourself for, Jesus offers you forgiveness from the Cross.

For there is no-one in the world who is potentially beyond the reach of God’s love in Christ. People we like, and people we despise. People we think are deserving, and people we consider unworthy – because all of us are unworthy, not only those who have done what is socially unacceptable, as opposed to those of us who – in our eyes – are basically good, but have only committed minor foibles. All of us are sinners in the sight of God, all of us are in need of forgiveness, and that forgiveness is open to all of us. He died for our friends and our enemies. Housewife and paedophile, businessman and war criminal, Jesus offers forgiveness.

Is that scandalous? Yes, to some. But this is love. This is mercy. This is grace. And without it we’re all dead.

With this, we remember our humble status, yet our loved status. As the forgiveness of God on Christ lifts us from our knees to our feet, so we also recognise his love for others and treat friend and foe alike with dignity.

Today you will be with me in paradise
In this second saying, we see the grace and mercy of God in Christ exemplified. You remember the story. Jesus is crucified in the middle of two criminals. As in life, so in death, he is in the midst of the world of human sin. And just as in the world, the responses to Jesus are mixed. One is mocking, the other is longing.

Mockery gets you nowhere – a sobering thought for our culture today. But to the plaintive, desperate cry, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,” the heart of Jesus responds in love: “Today, you will be with me in Paradise.” The thief knows no Scripture, he hasn’t taken confirmation classes, and he has no chance to avail himself of the sacraments, but the cry for mercy is enough.

But what and where is Paradise? I grew up opposite a park, and within the park was a walled-off rose garden, with a separate door for entry. In a similar way, the biblical scholar Paula Gooder points out that ‘paradise’ is not in the Jewish usage some luxury beach with white sand. Rather, it is a Greek word, derived from a Persian once, referring to an enclosed garden. It therefore does not strictly equate to ‘heaven’, but Gooder suggests an enclosed garden within Heaven. Many Jews believed that after Adam and Eve’s sin, the Garden of Eden had been sealed up from humankind until the end of time, when it would be opened to humanity again. So when Jesus promises paradise now to the penitent thief, he is promising a return to Eden within Heaven, and thus a sign that the kingdom of God is coming. The thief had asked to be remembered when Jesus came into his kingdom, and thus Jesus indicates that his kingdom is closer at hand than might have been expected.

So this mercy is more than forgiveness: it is the promise of being part of God’s kingdom, his new creation, his restoration of the universe to the way it was meant to be. It is more than wiping the moral slate clean, it is invitation into the intimate presence of God.

Woman, behold your son. Behold your mother
I guess we all know those people who remarkably think of others in the middle of their own suffering. Jesus was all that and more. Even before the Cross, during Holy Week, he gave words of comfort and hope to his disciples, knowing they were going to face terrible grief. He promised that he was going to prepare a place for them, that he would come back for them and that he was the way to that place.

Now, here he is, hanging on the Cross, and there is Mary his mother. Joseph is certainly dead, otherwise there is no need for him to think, as the eldest child, about arrangements for his mother’s care. But this is especially awful. Surely no parent should have to watch their own child die.

Some of the most heart-rending funerals I have taken over the years have been precisely such deaths. I remember a dear friend who died at the age of 41 from breast cancer. Not only do I recall the grief of her husband and that of her two children who were primary age at the time, also fixed in my mind is the pain of her elderly parents. She died in November. She had already bought and wrapped Christmas presents for her children, gifts she would not see them open. But she planned for them.

Jesus plans for his mother in the midst of suffering for the sins of the world. He matches her up with ‘the disciple [he] loved’ – whom I take to be John.

And how much more moving that he does this, given that during his public ministry he had been ambivalent about biological family. He had said that his true family were those who did the will of God.

Perhaps this points up the theme of the Cross. It exemplifies the fact that what Jesus is doing here, he is doing not for himself but for others. It makes me ask myself how much I am willing to go through suffering for others, and to remain focussed n others while I do so.

Furthermore, perhaps we can take this as indicating how through his death Jesus would create a new family of God, one that gathers around the Cross. That is what makes us God’s family today: nothing less than Christ’s atoning death for us. Nothing else gives use Christian unity within a church or with other churches: only the Cross does that. It is what we need to emphasise time and time again.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Is the hardest of all the words from the Cross? It appears in Matthew and Mark. To draw out some meaning, I want to concentrate on its setting in Mark. I believe these words fit a wider pattern that you see in the second half of Mark’s Gospel, as the shadow of the Cross becomes ever darker.

Three times Jesus predicts the Easter events – in chapters 8, 9 and 10. On each occasion he goes into great length about how he is going to be betrayed, suffer at the hands of the religious leaders and be killed. Then he adds a brief statement that he will rise again. The events of Jesus’ betrayal, suffering and death are then told in some considerable detail by Mark, but he has only eight verses about the Resurrection.

In other words, we have a pattern that gives great attention to unjust suffering but then just has a small note of hope with the Resurrection. Could the words, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ fit this scheme? I think so, and here is why.

The words are not original to Jesus. They are the opening words of Psalm 22, where David is struggling with unjust suffering. For twenty-one verses he emphasises this. But the final seven – the last quarter of the psalm – look forward with hope. When Jews quoted the first line of a Psalm, they usually had in mind the whole Psalm. It was rather like the way we quote a song title – we have the whole song in mind. So we should take seriously Jesus’ expression of desolation from God, it isn’t simply that he felt abandoned. However, he knows there is hope. There is much darkness, but there is a little light.

This would have made sense for Mark’s first readers, who were almost certainly Christians in Rome suffering under Nero’s persecution. Their pain needed to be taken seriously, and they needed a little glimmer of hope, without it going over the top into a cheap triumphalism.

Can this help us and those we love when we are struggling? I believe it can. When we face pain and agony, when perhaps this also has an effect upon our spiritual lives, we need people alongside us who can take the reality of that dark experience seriously, and not belittle it. Yet we also need a word of hope. Not someone who comes alongside with such a relentless cheerfulness that they are plain annoying, nor someone who is a Job’s comforter, explaining how it is all doubtless caused by our sin. We need the quiet, gentle promise that light is coming. All this is in a suffering Jesus who rose, and who spoke of his own God-forsakenness on the Cross.

I thirst
This is a poignant, if not ironic, saying, coming as it does in John’s Gospel. Back in chapter 4, John records Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well. He promises her that she will never thirst again – he means in a spiritual sense.

Here, though, the One who made that promise is himself thirsty. Crucifixion has dehydrated him. Someone offers him a sponge dipped in sour wine, on a hyssop branch.

The detail of the hyssop branch is unlikely to be accidental, especially for a writer like John, who loves imagery and symbolism. The hyssop was used in the Passover … and John records Jesus’ death as synchronising with the Passover. A branch of the hyssop herb was dipped in the blood of the lamb and daubed on Israelite door posts to indicate to the Angel of Death that he must not inflict his terrible plague of slaughter there. So, for the Christian, hyssop is used to strengthen Jesus as he offers his blood as the Lamb of God, saving his people from death.

Not only that, I wonder whether another meaning might have any significance here? Jews believed the bitter and sweet aroma of the hyssop plant could repel evil spirits. I’m not suggesting, obviously, that such a claim is true, but could it be that we have a symbol here of Jesus’ conquest of evil forces on the Cross? Some New Testament passages speak of the Cross as a victory over the forces of evil, for example: Colossians 2 arguably contains such an image. Forces and spirits that work by fear are conquered by love. Those that work by brute force are defeated by apparent powerlessness.

Certainly, Jesus thirsts. Not only does he thirst physically, he thirsts for righteousness and the victory of redeeming love.

Now if ‘I thirst’ indicates some kind of victory at the Cross, then we might ask whether there are any other signs of triumph at Calvary. I believe there are, and they become apparent in the final two sayings of Jesus as he hung, dying.

Father, into your hands I commit my spirit
Jesus may have been forsaken by God, but in these words from Psalm 31, he expresses a word of trust as he anticipates reunion with his Father. He will be vindicated – we shall see that in the Resurrection. He models for us the trust we may have when we draw near to death. Even Christians sometimes feel fear as death approaches, or even as ageing takes its course. It is said that William Williams, the author of ‘Guide me, O thou great Redeemer’, feared death and was unsure of God’s love for him. The theory goes that this explains the final verse of that hymn:

When I tread the verge of Jordan,
Bid my anxious fears subside;
Death of deaths, and Hell’s destruction,
Land me safe on Canaan’s side.

Perhaps we sing, with Paulus Gerhardt in ‘O sacred head, sore wounded’,

Be near me Lord when dying,
O show thy Cross to me.

For when we see the Cross and hear Jesus committing his spirit into the Father’s hands, we know we are in a safe place.

A further thought here: Jesus is in control of his own destiny here. He chooses this moment to give up his spirit into the Father’s safe keeping. Others may have thought they were in charge of events, but they weren’t.

More than that, this is not a request on Jesus’ part, it is an announcement. He has decided to do this. Strangely, somehow, he is still running the show. This is another reason to place our trust in him, even at the bleakest of times.

It is finished
Saying that something is finished may not sound like a word of triumph. It’s over. It’s the end. All gone. Nothing left. It might in those terms be what you expect from someone whose life is about to end in an unjust way. It’s all gone pear-shaped. Down the pan. Finito.

But what Jesus says here is far from despairing. It’s a word of victory. ‘Finished’ here more means ‘accomplished’. It’s about the fulfilment of purpose. I have achieved what I set out to do. Strange as it may sound, it is as if Jesus has a sense of satisfaction as he dies. Mission accomplished! He has drunk the cup of suffering. He has absorbed the sins of the world. He has conquered the powers of darkness, taking all they could throw at him and turning it back on them, much like in a judo contest, where you take what your opponent throws at you and you use it against him. The cry from the Cross is a shout of triumph; the cry from Hell is a howl of anguish.

Darkness may cover the land on Good Friday, and the disciples may disperse in despair. But what they do not see at the time is Jesus turning in his report to Heaven, and the Father saying, “Well done!”

There is a saying you may know that originated in black majority churches: ‘It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming.’ We can leave Good Friday in doom and gloom, and there is a place for that. Yet even in the bleakness of Jesus’ death, the ear of faith hears words of victory that give hope: it is finished. All is accomplished. The work of the Messiah, the Suffering Servant is done, and in a couple of days God will confirm it. He will pit a great big tick by the work of Christ in the form of the Resurrection.

This Easter, do not be afraid to walk into the darkness. Because we are walking towards the light.

March 29, 2013 0

Sermon: The Temptations Of Jesus In The Big Story

Luke 4:1-13

During my first sabbatical, I went on a creative writing course. The timing was rather iffy – it was a couple of weeks before Debbie was due to give birth to our daughter, our first-born. I was allowed to sit in the seminars with my mobile phone on the desk, switched on. The one occasion it rang was on a morning when I knew Debbie was seeing the midwife, and I rushed out to answer the call. Other participants on the course said I was as white as a sheet – although surely budding writers could have come up with a more original image!

Fortunately, baby Rebekah was too busy inside the womb enjoying Debbie’s cravings for Cadbury’s Crème Eggs to consider a minor inconvenience like birth. And so I got through the whole week, learning from writers who specialised in a wide range of fields, from journalism and radio to – er – romantic fiction. (Not quite my favourite genre of literature.)

But it was the romantic novelist whose input stayed most with me, and I say this not only as a man (who would not like such books) but also as someone who rebelled against the teaching of English Literature at school. Far too girly and nothing like as useful as science, I thought then.

No: the romantic novelist taught us some important elements about how to tell a story well. You had to have an introduction which got you into the problem that the story was to solve. Most of the book was about the tension of trying to resolve the problem. Finally, it is resolved and at that point you finish the story quickly rather than stringing it out. She also introduced us to the ‘back story’ – that is, the lives of the characters before their appearance in the story.

I share all this, because when we come as we always do at the beginning of Lent to the account of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness, we often speak of it as a story in its own right. However, it is not. The signs are there at the beginning and end of our reading. We begin with Jesus returning from the Jordan (verse 1), which tells us this is following on from what we have just read, and we end with the devil departing from Jesus ‘until an opportune time’ (verse 13).

In other words, this is an episode, not the whole story, and it has clear connections with what surrounds it. So this morning I want to explore the temptations within the big story of Jesus and the Gospel. We’ll take four key elements of the episode and set them in a bigger context.

Firstly, I want us to consider the role of the Holy Spirit in the episode and the bigger story. Our reading begins with Jesus ‘full of the Holy Spirit’ yet ‘led by the Spirit in the wilderness’. Is that what we expect the Spirit-filled life to look like – a wilderness time? The relationship so far between Jesus and the Spirit has been warm. He has been conceived by the Holy Spirit, and he has just been baptised in the Jordan, where the Spirit has descended upon him. Yet for all these positive experiences of the Holy Spirit, now Jesus finds that the same Spirit leads him in the wilderness, that is, in a bleak and parched place.

What’s more, Luke’s language is forceful. ‘Led by the Spirit’ is a rather weak translation, and it makes us think of the sometimes fuzzy or sentimental ways in which Christians say they ‘feel led’ to do something. But the word Luke uses means ‘to be thrown out’. It conjures up the hurling of a ball – say, like a cricketer fielding on the boundary and vigorously flinging the ball back to the wicket-keeper. Jesus is ‘flung’ by the Spirit in the wilderness.

How can this be so? How can the wilderness be in the purposes of God? Isn’t the Holy Spirit the ‘Comforter’? Don’t we just expect warm, glowing experiences of God when the Spirit is present in fullness?

Apparently not. Wilderness experiences can be just as much a part of the Christian pilgrimage as the dizzy, thin-air ecstasies of the mountain-top. To get the Israelites from Egypt to the Promised Land required a time in the wilderness. When Israel rebels some centuries later and is unfaithful to the Lord by worshipping idols, the prophet Hosea says that God will woo his people in the wilderness. It can be in the wilderness seasons of our lives that God strips things away from us so that our devotion to him is renewed. The comfortable things on which we rely, the good things which we have elevated too highly in our lives – these he puts aside for a season so that we may remember who our first love is.

Perhaps that is one of the purposes of a Lenten exercise – to consider again the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ as being worthy of devotion before and above all else. How dangerous it is when faith becomes corrupted into a hobby.

And that leads us to our second theme, namely that of self-denial, seen in the way Jesus fasted during the forty days (verse 2). Those of you with good memories will remember the days of an annual event in churches called ‘Self Denial Week’. For one week, we lived differently. Now I think those events can be helpful, but only if they are signs and symbols of a wider commitment to self-denial. Jesus didn’t simply fast for forty days and then think, “Great, now I can get back to self-indulgence.” Nothing of the sort. He rebuffs the first temptation to turn stones into bread (verse 4). He refuses to worship the devil (verse 8), because that will subvert all he has come to do. He will not go for the spectacular show-off event of diving off the Temple like a religious stuntman (verse 12).

Why? Because all three temptations go against his core mission, which is based around denying himself in order to love and serve others. This is what he came to do. Oh, we see plenty of evidence that Jesus enjoyed life. Religious killjoys can take no true inspiration from him. However, from the Incarnation to the Cross, his is a life and ministry of self-giving.

Does this have an application for us? Although people are having to be more careful financially in the last five years, it is apparent that our culture is based not on self-denial but on self-fulfilment. We are our own gods. Our politicians encourage our belief that the economy must always grow. As one Christian website put it the other day,

Every day, we are bombarded with the message that equates the “good life” with the “goods life.”

And whatever difficulties we are facing, the fact remains that we live in the wealthiest county in this country. At my first staff meeting in this circuit, one of my colleagues asked this question: ‘Is the Gospel against Surrey?’ Because it might be. And it might be that part of our witness involves self-denial.

Thirdly, I want us to dwell on that repeated title for Jesus, Son of God. Twice the devil begins a temptation with the words, ‘If you are the Son of God’ (verses 3 and 9). If? Jesus has just had a profound experience of the Holy Spirit at his baptism where he has heard a voice from heaven referring to him as God’s Son. The work of the Spirit in his conception is a sign that he is the Son of God, according to Gabriel at the Annunciation. If he is the Son of God? He is the Son of God! The wider, big story is there in those words!

Yet here is the attempt to undermine the core of the story. If. It’s like the snake in Eden asking, “Did God really say …?” Here is an attempt to slice the ground from under the feet of Jesus, just as the enemy does with us. Just enough of a voice to make us disbelieve what God has said and done. That’s all it takes.

Now for us it can’t come in terms of ‘If you are the Son of God’, because none of us can be Son of God in the unique way Jesus is. But the devil can do it in a way relevant to us. ‘If you are a child of God’; ‘If you are a Christian’, and so on. It can be in the form of, ‘Are you really a child of God? Are you sure that God loves you? Someone like you? If you were a real Christian, you wouldn’t have done that.’ Does that sound familiar? Subtly we have been switched from focussing on the love and grace of God to majoring on our failures.

So beware of that voice – not a still, small voice but a quiet, insidious voice. Jesus at his baptism had not simply been reminded of his unique divine status, he had been reminded that he was loved with an everlasting love before he had even set out to begin the ministry for which he had come. And God wants each one of us to know that we too are loved with no strings attached. He loves us first. He loves us because he loves us. This is the foundation of anything and everything that we can do in a spiritually healthy way as Christians: knowing that we are loved unconditionally by the Father.

Fourthly and finally, battle is joined over the Scriptures. Every time Jesus is tempted, he squashes the attack with his Hebrew Bible: ‘It is written’ (verse 4); ‘It is written’ (verse 8); ‘It is said’ (verse 12). The devil cottons onto this, and even tries quoting Scripture in the final temptation (verses 10 and 11).

Again, we need to see this as a thread in this episode that is seen in the bigger story. The early chapters of Luke’s Gospel have been stuffed full of quotations and allusions from the Hebrew Bible. The coming of Jesus the Messiah is the central event in the biggest story of them all, the story of God’s redeeming love. Not only that, I believe Jesus is very intentional about the particular verses he quotes in response to the temptations. I don’t think he sits there simply thinking, “What verse would be good to use here?” Every verse he cites comes from Deuteronomy, a book centred on Israel’s own wilderness experience. He sees the temptations in the framework of the bigger story, too. It’s the devil who can’t quote anything that parallels the big story that is going on here. His quotations come from elsewhere in the Scriptures, they are random quotations, fine in their place, but irrelevant to notion of God’s people and God’s Son in the wilderness.

Perhaps this illustrates the dilemma we can face as Christians. We know the Bible is our source book, our supreme insight into God’s ultimate authority in Jesus Christ. Yet we also know how it can be misused, and have probably done so ourselves, unwittingly at times. Sometimes we have been Pharisees, quoting Scripture rigidly, and hurting people with it.

I believe that if we set ourselves to follow not only a disciplined, regular reading of Scripture but also disciplined methods of doing so, we shall have more of a chance of using Scripture spiritually and responsibly. It will not be for everyone to use the academic disciplines that preachers and ministers deploy, but there are age-old, tried and tested methods known in Christ’s church. Yesterday at Addlestone we had a half-day of prayer, and during that time I taught two of them. One is called Ignatian Bible Reading, which involves a sanctified use of the senses and the imagination. The other is called Lectio Divina, where we read the text, meditate on it, pray through what it is saying to us and then seek to live out the text. The great spiritual writer Eugene Peterson has said of Lectio Divina that it is

A way of reading that intends the fusion of the entire biblical story and my story.[1]

And if indeed the temptations of Jesus are an episode in the bigger story of redemption, then would it not be good in all that we do this Lent to seek to find where our story fits into the big story of God’s saving love in Christ?

[1] Eugene H Peterson, Eat This Book, p 90.

February 16, 2013 1

Lent, Holy Week And (Heading For) Easter

Last week, I was asked to give an extended talk to a midweek group on this theme. This is the text I had before me when I gave the talk.

I have a series of questions for you this afternoon. Here are the first two. Can you eat chocolate in Lent? And if so, when?

To answer these vital questions, I bring you to another question: how many days are there in Lent? If you answered ‘forty’, then I invite you to count the number of days from Ash Wednesday to Easter Day (for Easter Day is when Lent ends). The answer you will come to is ‘forty-seven’.

So what happened to the so-called forty days of Lent? Well, they are still there if you exclude the Sundays. And that’s the clue to my initial question about eating chocolate in Lent. Sundays were never regarded as fast days. They were still feast days. Hence, if you have given up chocolate for Lent, you can still eat it on Sundays.

I think this illustrates the muddle we get into about Lent. We utterly confuse the beginning and the end of Jesus’ public ministry. The forty days of fasting make us think that it commemorates Jesus’ time of testing in the wilderness immediately after his baptism. But the way that time ticks down near the end, with Passion Sunday two weeks before Easter and Palm Sunday a week before, makes us think instead about the end of Jesus’ public ministry. Which is correct?

The answer is that Lent is connected to Easter. In the early Church, baptismal candidates would be baptised on Easter Day, and Lent was their season of preparation. It was similar for those who wanted to be readmitted to the life of the Church after excommunication. Both groups needed a period of reflection and repentance. Eventually, however, the Church came to see that a season of reflection and repentance would be good for everyone. No Christians are exempt from the need to examine themselves before God, and giving over a particular time of the year for everyone seemed to be a good idea. It doesn’t change the fact that this is something we need to do all year round, it’s just that sometimes dedicating a specific time to this underlines it. Similarly, every Sunday is a celebration of the Resurrection – that’s why we worship on a Sunday and not on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath – but we still give particular stress to the Resurrection itself on Easter Day and in the Easter season that follows.

This, then, is why we give things up for Lent – not to mimic Jesus’ fasting in the wilderness but for another reason. Fasting is the giving up of something good for a season in order to dedicate that time especially to God. If we give up something in Lent, it is for this self-examination in the power of the Holy Spirit. Churches may try to reflect this in the tone of their Lenten worship. Liturgical churches will omit the Gloria in Excelsis during this time, they will have no flowers in the sanctuary and they will avoid hymns that include the word ‘Alleluia’. How this sits with the idea that Sunday is still a feast day, I have never been sure. It also requires a tricky navigation in order to reflect a sense of discipline but not of dreariness. At its best it provides a suitable contrast for what is to come on Easter Day, although when we get to thinking about Good Friday in a few minutes, I shall want to pose some questions about how we regard the darkness of that day.

But let us now move onto Holy Week, which we begin on Palm Sunday. I cannot think of Palm Sunday without remembering a neighbouring Anglican church which always brought a donkey into worship on that day. The reason I cannot forget – and was not allowed to forget while I was there – is that the donkey had a name. He was … Dave the Donkey. You can imagine the comments.

Traditionally, we see the Triumphal Entry as the beginning of the week which led to Jesus’ death, and this has been held in the Church since the fourth century AD. However, there is no certainty in Mark’s Gospel, the first Gospel to be written, that Mark understood Palm Sunday to begin that week. It comes in chapter 11 of his account, but he doesn’t mention the Passover until chapter 14. Nevertheless, it is fitting in that the way Jesus enters Jerusalem on a donkey ramps up the tension between him, the religious leaders and the power of Rome. In his recent book ‘Simply Jesus’, Tom Wright calls the clashing of these three powers ‘The Perfect Storm’, and that is what we are about to face in Holy Week. We can have all the fun we like, waving palm branches and singing ‘Hosanna’, but the reality is that the conflict is being ramped up, and the subtext of Palm Sunday is that this is going to end badly for someone. Blood will be spilt. It happens that because we know the rest of the story, we know whose blood it will be. But if you were in that crowd when Jesus rode in on the donkey, you probably wouldn’t have seen that, just as his disciples couldn’t understand his repeated prophecies that he would be betrayed, suffer, die – and be raised from the dead.

But let us move on from Palm Sunday, without immediately doing what many Christians do, which is jump over several days. If we’re lucky, we’ll only jump to Maundy Thursday with the Last Supper and the washing of feet. Some will at least jump to Good Friday. Many, though, take leave of absence until Easter Day itself, missing out the unpleasant, gory parts of the story. It’s why in the Lent Course this year we’ve tried to reflect on some of the incidents while Jesus was in Jerusalem during that final week, as the tension increased.

It’s common in more Catholic circles to take a particular journey with Jesus leading up to the Cross, a journey you will have heard of – and perhaps experienced – called The Stations of the Cross. Some churches have icons depicting the story, as did an ecumenical church I served in Chelmsford. Some dramatise it – my first experience of the Stations was to walk around the streets of the City of London, seeing actors perform the story. As a crowd, we walked with the action. In one previous appointment, I joined with the local Anglican and Catholic clergy in each taking a meeting once a week in Holy Week to explore the Way of the Cross.

This, though, comes after Maundy Thursday, with its encircling darkness. You feel the discrepancy between Jesus and his disciples. They aren’t picking up all he has warned them about, so much so they are still arguing about status and greatness and looking forward to a good Passover meal. All the time, Jesus knows what is coming. The betrayal happens, you get those evocative words in John’s Gospel, ‘And it was night’, and the lights go out. We’ll be reflecting that here in our Maundy Thursday service when this year we follow the Tenebrae tradition. Candles will be extinguished, one by one, until finally all is dark.

At least, I keep calling it ‘Maundy Thursday’, but there is an argument for it being Tuesday. There are a couple of days missing from the sequence of the Gospels in Holy Week, and one possibility is this: could all the trials Jesus faced really have taken place in one night? It might also explain the problem with night-time trials, which were illegal.

But whether the trials drag over forty-eight hours or are compressed into one night, Jesus is arrested in Gethsemane after one of the most powerful scenes in the Gospels for showing how much he identifies with us. Not only does he identify with our sin at his baptism and on the Cross, we recognise his full humanity in the Garden as he wrestles in prayer with the suffering that is to come.

All that goes, though, and off he is taken to trials that are a mixture of stitch-up and political expediency. Pontius Pilate is in a weak position, politically. Although he has all the power of being the imperial power’s official representative, he had previously offended Jewish sensibilities about the Temple. The Jewish leaders had sent a delegation to Rome to complain about him, and now he knew that one further false step could lose him his job. So although at first he resists their requests, ultimately he cannot deny their pressure. The loser, in human terms, is Jesus.

And now off he goes, on the Way of the Cross, the Via Dolorosa. Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ, may have horrified many, but it did not spare any detail as to the true nature of first-century Roman floggings, torture and execution. Many prisoners died just from the flogging. But Jesus carries his cross beam, the visual sign to all who watch that he is a condemned man.

He is on his way. It is his great journey. It reminds us, amongst other things, that we have not ‘arrived’ spiritually. So often we talk about faith as if now we have found Jesus Christ we have arrived. But we haven’t. It’s like that wonderful U2 song ‘I still haven’t found what I’m looking for’, where Bono affirms his belief that Jesus died for his sins but still insists he hasn’t found what he’s looking for. Why? Because he’s still on the journey. He hasn’t come to the fullness of God’s kingdom yet.

And neither has Jesus. The climax will be the Cross. In the eyes of the world, he will be humiliated there. In his own estimation – and his Father’s – he will be enthroned there. When he is ‘lifted up’ he will draw all people to himself.

This is the wonder of the Christian faith. What the world considers shameful we say is glorious. Our Muslim friends have a big issue with the Cross. The Qur’an can be read as denying that Jesus died on the Cross, but that he was snatched away and someone else died there instead. They have a terrible problem with the idea that Jesus would have to endure this. Indeed, if he did die on the Cross it is for them one further strike against the idea of his divinity, because surely God would not be humbled and humiliated like that.

Yet the Christian says yes, that is precisely what happened, and that is the wonder of the Christian faith. Our Lord was even willing to taste the worst humiliation in identification with humanity at its basest in order to bring salvation. Our account of God is not about One who is remote from suffering and evil, it is about One who is deeply involved with blood-stained hands in fight against it.

All of which brings me to two contrasting stories. See what you think of these.

Story number one: I am in a vestry before a Good Friday service. The steward prays for me before the service. The whole tone of his prayer is about how Good Friday is the worst day of the year. He seems to miss the word ‘Good’.

Story number two: I am an enthusiastic young twenty-something Christian, and I am at the annual joint Free Churches Good Friday service in my home town. It is being held at the Baptist church, but my Methodist minister is speaking. He introduces a worship song that was popular at the time. It begins with the lines, ‘I get so excited, Lord, every time I realise I’m forgiven.’ The congregation sings it – like a dirge. Michael, my minister, berates the assembled throng for this. “Can’t you understand on Good Friday the joy of being forgiven through the Cross?” he asks.

How do you respond to those two stories? Had the church steward missed the heart of the Gospel? Was my minister belittling the sufferings of Jesus? Somehow we have a difficult tension to hold together on Good Friday – both the sorrow for our sins which took Jesus to the Cross, and yet joy that he was willing to do that for us. Like so much of life, we have to live with tension. It’s like the question of the tone you set for a funeral. Is it to grieve, or is it – as is more and more requested these days – a celebration of the deceased’s life? Grief or celebration? Actually, I think you need both at a funeral.

And the greatest tension – or paradox – is on the way at this point, the tension between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Some major on one, but not on the other, yet we have to hold to both. One of the greatest theologians of the last fifty years, a German called Jürgen Moltmann, says we need to speak both of ‘The Resurrection of the Crucified One’ and ‘The Cross of the Risen One’.

But in terms of our own lives, we are awaiting our own empty tombs. We shall die and await the great resurrection of the dead. We live in that time between Good Friday and Easter Day. We live on that one day we so rarely mark in the Christian calendar, because we are too busy getting ready for Easter morning. We live in Holy Saturday. (Not Easter Saturday, by the way, because Easter only starts when the Resurrection has happened.) Holy Saturday is that time when Jesus is still in the tomb. That is where we spend a lot of our lives. Suffering is real. It takes its toll. Prayer seems unanswered, and God’s great deliverance has still not come. It’s quite appropriate that Holy Saturday this year is when one of our church member’s ashes will be buried in Bisley churchyard. She awaits her great deliverance, her resurrection after her suffering.

And so I won’t move on in this exposition of the season to talk too much about Easter itself. We’ll have plenty of opportunity here on Easter Day and in the succeeding weeks, when we are going to delve deeply into the meaning of the Resurrection. We’re going to close these reflections at Holy Saturday, because it is where many of us exist. Often we are in that cold tomb, with grave clothes wrapped tightly around us.

Pete Greig, the founder of the 24-7 Prayer movement, wrote a wonderful book about his experience of … unanswered prayer. While all the wonderful stories of answered prayer were happening as 24-7 prayer burgeoned around the world, his wife Sammie suffered a brain tumour. Greig puts his reflections on that experience in a book called ‘God On Mute’, and he shapes a spirituality around Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Day. He has this to say about Holy Saturday:

No one really talks about Holy Saturday, yet if we stop and think about it, it’s where most of us live our lives. Holy Saturday is the no-man’s land between questions and answers, prayers uttered and miracles to come. It’s where we wait – with a peculiar mixture of faith and despair – whenever God is silent or life doesn’t make sense.

As we turn to explore the silence of God, we are compelled to address the problem of unanswered prayer more literally than we have done so far, examining the times when God simply doesn’t reply to us when we pray. It’s not that He’s saying ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘not yet’ to our prayers; it’s that He’s not saying anything at all. We pray and pray but God remains silent.

But … Sunday is coming. And we can eat chocolate.

April 4, 2012 5

Talk: People At The Cross – Caiaphas

All Age Caiaphas Talks 110327

Click the link above to see the two short talks I am giving this Sunday about the rôle of Caiaphas in the death of Jesus. The first talk (slides 1 to 11) is based on John 11:45-53, where Jesus is seen as a threat to the privileged status of the religious ruling classes in their cosy relationship with Rome. The second talk (slides 12 to 17) comes from Matthew 26:47, 57-66 where at the trial Jesus’ confession of deity (‘Son of Man’) leads to a display of misplaced religious zeal. So it all religious zeal wrong, or is there a better way?

The talks are necessarily short, coming as part of all age worship, and on a Sunday when we are holding our AGM after the service. I am well aware there is much more that could be said.

March 25, 2011 0

Sermon: Reasons For Self-Denial

Philippians 3:17-4:1

Have you given up anything for Lent? Some of my friends have denied themselves the usual chocolate. Another has started an annual practice of giving up Facebook.

But if you had asked this of my wife some years ago, she would have given you a strange look. She came to faith and had her early Christian formation in a Baptist church. When she met me, she found the practices of the Methodist Church strange. I must admit that as someone who has been in Methodism since the womb, I still find it strange!

And one practice Debbie had never encountered before was Lent. The day she asked me what Lent was, I couldn’t believe I was hearing what she said. Surely everybody knew what Lent was? It’s been part of my background all my life! Indeed, except for when Easter Day occurs on the very latest day in the year that it can, my birthday always falls within Lent. Thankfully, I’m allowed to feast on my birthday – according to my rules, anyway!

Now the reading from Philippians seems a good one for Lent. Not that the earliest Christians practised it, but it is a passage that explores the importance of self-discipline. Now while Debbie’s home church was lower than low – calling baptism and Holy Communion ordinances, not sacraments – I’m sure they too would have endorsed the importance of self-discipline in the Christian life. And at Lent or any other time, that is a critical part of our discipleship. It’s also – as we shall see – an area where we can be a counter-cultural witness in our world today.

Implicit in Paul’s teaching here are various core Christian reasons which provide the foundations for living a life of self-discipline to the glory of God. It’s those beliefs I want to explore today.

We begin at the Cross. Christians always have to begin at the Cross, and Paul does so here.

For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. (Verse 18)

Paul sees that a root cause of self-indulgence is not taking the Cross seriously. The Cross is not merely the place where I am forgiven – so that I can keep living however I like and then return for the next batch of forgiveness. The Cross is the model for our discipleship. What Paul teaches here is consistent with Jesus telling aspiring disciples to deny themselves, take up the Cross and follow him.

Christianity, then, is less about what I can get and more about what I can give. So much of our conversation, even in the Church, is peppered with the assumptions of consumerism. Does this church suit me? Did the worship feed me? Does it have what I need? It’s very me-centred. But the Cross says we have to take a different approach. And disciplines of self-denial and self-discipline are those which call us back to the Cross. They are not preventing ourselves becoming fat, they are about tuning ourselves into the wavelength of the Cross.

So a week ago, when there was a news story reporting the development of a new low-fat chocolate bar, where the fat particles are replaced with water, air or gels, the Daily Telegraph was wrong to call it the ‘Chocolate bar that can be eaten during Lent’. The point of self-denial isn’t about losing weight, it’s about a sign that we will walk the way of the Cross. As one person put it,

Lent is supposed to be concerned with spiritual discipline and self-denial, not a handy way of losing a bit of weight. If the new low-fat chocolate tastes as good as an old-fashioned one but doesn’t pile on the pounds, then where’s the self-denial?

So we approach Lenten disciplines of self-denial not as some kind of belated New Year’s Resolution to get ourselves in shape; we embrace them as a sign that we accept the Cross will shape the way we live.

The second Christian building-block in Paul’s teaching is worship. Hear verse 19 again:

Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things.

‘Their god is their belly.’ Who do we worship when we are self-indulgent? Ourselves. This comment of Paul’s tests what we truly believe worship to be, because it’s a question of allegiance. Does my stomach deserve my ultimate allegiance? I need to feed it, but when it becomes my god, something has gone badly wrong.

This, then, is about how we understand worship. Much as I enjoy worship with a band, featuring a lot of contemporary songs, and other people love their hymns, how dangerous it is when we end up worshipping worship. And we forget what worship is. The main New Testament word translated ‘worship’ means ‘to move towards and kiss’. However, the ‘kiss’ envisaged is the ‘kiss of homage’, like that offered to a monarch, and even still kept in a symbolic and ceremonial way in our society when a new Prime Minister or bishop is appointed. They have to go to ‘the Palace’ to ‘kiss the hands’ of the sovereign.

Worship is not in the first place about the good feelings and the positive experiences. It is about declaring our allegiance to Jesus Christ, the King of Kings and Lord or Lords. When we deny ourselves as a spiritual discipline, we do so not to torment ourselves but to affirm that God’s will comes first in our lives. We are to indulge his will, not our appetites. We ‘do not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God’, and so our worship is seen by taking God’s word seriously and putting it into practice as a priority. When we do that, our god is not our belly. Instead, we give ourselves in devotion and worship to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

As we come to our third and final foundation, you could say this is a question of past, present and future. A past event – the Cross – shapes our behaviour now. Our present activity – of worship – needs to be rightly directed to God. So thirdly and finally, that leaves a future component – the kingdom of God.

But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself. (Verses 20-21)

Jesus is coming, says Paul, and our minds are set on him rather than ‘earthly things’ (the worship point again). But Paul goes further: what Jesus will do when he comes also leads us to consider our behaviour now. When Paul says, ‘He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory’, he is making a reference to the Resurrection. Jesus’ own ‘body of humiliation’ was transformed into a ‘body of glory’ in the Resurrection. You will remember that the risen Jesus was identifiably the same man who had been crucified (once the disciples’ eyes had been opened), but his body was also somehow different (remember how he appeared in their midst in a locked room, and how he disappeared from sight after the meal at the end of the Emmaus Road journey).

So, says Paul, we are in for transformation, too. When Jesus comes again and renews heaven and earth, he will raise us up and renew our bodies, just as his was. This will be an expression of his reign in his kingdom, for he will do it ‘by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself’ (verse 21b).

If you’ve followed me thus far, one thing you will understand is that our bodies matter to God. They are important to him. The great future of God’s kingdom is a physical one. The idea often trumpeted that our body is just a shell and that the real person is the invisible soul simply doesn’t match the New Testament’s teaching. Our bodies are part of God’s good creation. Yes, they are imperfect and they decay (what Paul calls here the ‘body of humiliation’) but God does not intend to discard them, he will renew them at the resurrection of the dead.

What does all this have to do with our Lent theme of self-denial? For one thing, it reminds us that self-denial is not about self-hatred. It is about self-discipline, and that’s a whole lot different. When we deny ourselves, we are not doing so in order to torture ourselves, like Filipino Christians being nailed to crosses as acts of devotion. It is more that we are training our body for better use in the service of God. It is why in 1 Corinthians 9 Paul uses the image of an athlete training to compete in the ancient Olympics. So too our self-denial is an act of training: we are getting ready for the Great Games themselves in the Kingdom of God.

In other words, self-denial is a positive action. It is about love for God and his ways. It is part of building for God’s kingdom.

In fact, it is something we practise in other areas of life. I remember one particular aspect of our marriage preparation. We sat in the lounge of the manse where the minister friend who was to marry us lived. I recall how awkward he felt about having to ask some of the standard questions to two people he knew. I was one of his circuit colleagues!

One question in particular stuck with me. he talked about the promises in the marriage service where the man and the woman say they will honour one another with their bodies. Now I guess many couples think that when they say, ‘With my body I thee worship’ or some modern equivalent, it is really a coy, veiled reference to sex. But our friend had a different take. He looked at me and said,

“Dave, how are you going to look after your body for Debbie’s sake?”

Well, as someone who has put on a stone in weight since marriage, it may well be I haven’t honoured that as well as I should have done!

But perhaps the point stands. And perhaps it helps us see that while we naturally accept we would deny ourselves for our loved ones, how much more we might do so for the love of our God?

In conclusion, I can’t tell anyone whether they should give up anything for Lent and if so, what. But I can invite us all to examine ourselves and ask, is my life being conformed to the Cross or are there areas where I need to deny myself in order to make that more true? I can invite us to look at who or what we worship, to see whether our priorities need correcting by self-denial. And I can put before us all the hope of resurrection to enquire whether we need to deny ourselves out of love for God and his ways, by building for his kingdom.

February 27, 2010 2

Tag: Lent