Sermon at Parish Mass, the Second Sunday before Advent 2015

Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, Francesco Hayez, oil on canvas, 1867.

Daniel 12.1-3

Hebrews 10.11-25

Mark 13.1-8

“There shall be a time of anguish, such as has never occurred since nations first came into existence.” So says Daniel in the Old Testament reading today. The people of Paris will be feeling that particularly today, as will many in Syria and Iraq and other places.

The Book of Daniel is a kind of Biblical writing called “apocalypse”, which means “unveiling”. It is about unmasking the spiritual realities at work in the world, something that Jesus himself did in his life, death and resurrection.

Today Jesus and his disciples have visited the Temple in Jerusalem, which in Mark’s gospel is part of the focus of that unveiling. What is the temple about? It is a cover, a veil, for the oppressive powers at work in Jerusalem. It is a place of sacred violence, both in the cult of sacrifice and in its exploitation of the poor. The Temple was hugely rich, a storehouse of money and commodities, but it never ceased devouring the substance of the poor, right down to a poor widow’s last coins. Jesus is opposed to that, wanting it instead to be a house of prayer for all nations.

More than that, it is the touchstone for all the simmering violence between the Roman occupiers and Jewish nationalists. It focused hatred and fear of the other, and the sacred casting out of the other which even enables you to kill them when you stop seeing that they are the same as you.

Jesus saw with clarity the tragic future of Jerusalem and its Temple. In the year AD 70 there was a rebellion by Jewish Zealots, religious fundamentalists who wanted to purify the land by driving out foreigners. They proved no match for the might of Rome and ended up besieged in Jerusalem. The resulting destruction and massacre of the inhabitants were terrible, as was the religious mania of the defenders who threw themselves into an orgy of death convinced that God was on their side. They were all killed, and Jerusalem and the Temple were completely destroyed.

So when Jesus says that the Temple will fall, this is electrifying and dangerous talk. Imagine if a radical preacher of our own day were to stand outside Whitehall, or the Bank of England, and say, ‘Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.’

I imagine the security forces would swing into action pretty rapidly if they heard that sort of talk. As indeed they did when Jesus said it. Because, after all, it sounds like a threat of violent revolution – at least if that is what we are expecting radical preachers to say.

But Jesus is different. His message has been, consistently, that he is destined to suffer and be killed, and that his followers must renounce violence and love their enemies. But the disciples are particularly slow on the uptake over this, as we have seen in many passages from the gospels.

So when the disciples come to Jesus privately to ask him more about the destruction of the Temple, we must expect them to have misunderstood. They ask, “when is all this going to happen, and what will be the sign”, they want to know when the starting gun for the revolution is going to be fired. But Jesus immediately says to them, “Beware that no one leads you astray!” He is correcting them. There will indeed be wars, and rising of nations against nations, and earthquakes, and famines. But, crucially, these are not the signs that the disciples are to look for. And, if anyone says that they are, they are being led astray.

This is absolutely central to Jesus’ message. The violent convulsions that engulf the world, the anguish that afflicts the nations, are not the signs of God.

God is not like that. And that is so difficult for the disciples to get their heads around because for millennia people have been imagining God in the shape of their own violence. This is what enables people to murder in the name of God, because they imagine a violent God who is on their side and opposed to their enemies. Under that false imagination of God even murder disguises itself as a holy act, a religious duty.

As we saw in last week’s Gospel, this is the normal state of humanity. It is part of what the Church calls “original sin”, the flaw in our nature that makes us all go astray. This false perception of God is part of that. And Jesus comes into that situation of sin and proclaims repentance and the Kingdom of God.

God, it turns out, is completely different from what humanity has supposed. God does not want to destroy us (or our enemies) for our sins, but to forgive us. Love, not violence, is the ruling principle of his Kingdom. God in Jesus has come to those who do not know him, who hate him, who in the end will reject him and kill him. Why? So that we can be forgiven. So that we can be reconciled, and brought back to friendship with God and with one another. So that we can come home and live in the love who made us for himself.

The Gospel blows open the sacred disguise that cloaks the heart of our own violence and shows us that it has nothing to do with God. This means that the Gospel enables us both to be completely realistic about the world, and at the same time to be hopeful.

We can be completely realistic, because Jesus does not pretend that the world’s violence is other than it is. He will be killed, Jerusalem will be destroyed. There will be wars and disasters and times of anguish.

But we can be hopeful nonetheless, because those evil things are not the signs of God. God in Jesus is doing something new. The Creator and the Redeemer are one and the same, the ultimate reality behind the universe is love, and that love will prevail.

Someone on the Today programme yesterday said that the most disturbing thing about the attacks in Paris was not the atrocities in themselves but the way it showed that fear of the other was becoming the defining reality of our age. This is where the hope of the Gospel can make a real difference.

Fear of the other chokes and poisons society. There will be, for example, Muslim neighbours of ours, peaceful and law abiding people, who may be experiencing that fear. Fear that they will be held accountable or looked at as enemies. Others will be afraid of the foreigner, of the stranger, of the refugee, of religious people, of anyone who is different.

The Gospel tells us the truth about this world of violence and sin. But it also tells us the better truth, the good news of God in whom there is no death or violence at all. This enables us to live without fear of the other or fear for the future. This is why we pray for the people of Paris, and strive to be good neighbours, and pray for our enemies, too.  Because there is a better truth, the truth of God in whom there is no darkness at all, the love who made us for himself and who, when we were lost in sin, came to save us in Jesus.

Sermon at Parish Mass, the Third Sunday before Advent (Remembrance Sunday) 2015

 René Girard 1923-2015
Photo by Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News

Jonah 3.1-5,10

Hebrews 9.24-28

Mark 1.14-20

It’s all feeling a bit November-ish, isn’t it? We are nearly at the end of the Church’s year. In three weeks, it will be Advent, and a new year will begin. You can plan to get your new year celebrations in early, and impress your friends with a Christian new year that they probably haven’t heard of.

But what is going on? We have been following Mark’s Gospel through the year, yet today we are back in chapter one, with the call of the first disciples. Why is this?

Well it is because the Church of England has invented something called the Kingdom Season, which runs from All Saints at the beginning of November to the feast of Christ the King at the end. The Kingdom is a vital strand in the teaching of Jesus and it’s good to focus on this as the year draws to a close. There are signs of this in the liturgy, some of the seasonal responses we make remind us of it, and the vestments and hangings in church are royal red rather than the green we have through ordinary time.

And so today we look back to the beginning of the Gospel, where Jesus first announces the Kingdom. “After John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’”

And this announcement comes into the ordinary life of the people of Galilee and changes everything. Simon and Andrew, James and John, hear the call of Jesus and immediately leave what they are doing and follow him. They are in the middle of their work, but they get up and leave everything, just like that. What must their fellow workers have thought of them? But this immediate response to Jesus is something we see again and again in Mark. Jesus changes things instantly. The normal course of life suddenly is overturned and nothing is ever the same again.

The Kingdom of God comes as the interruption of the normal. What is the normal? Mark tells us. “After John was arrested”, he says, to set the scene of today’s reading. That is, John the Baptist, arrested for denouncing Herod’s immoral behavior and thrown into prison, where we all know he will end up with his head cut off. That is the normal: the violence of the world against its victims. That is the scene into which Jesus steps with his proclamation of good news. And what is the interruption of the normal? Repentance. “The Kingdom of God has come near”, says Jesus, so repent. The urgency is such that, when you see it, you drop everything, because there is no time to waste.

Repentance means turning around, taking a new direction. And that means turning your back on the normal. It means forsaking the violence that is always bubbling just under the surface of the world, and always threatening to burst out and destroy us.

Is that too strong a thing to say? Look at Jonah, in our Old Testament reading. The message he was given to proclaim was simple: ‘Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’. But the message results in repentance, and the disaster does not happen. You have to realise how close disaster is, in order to turn away from it. You have to realise how immediately society is threatened by its own violence, in order to grasp the urgency of renouncing it. That is how the world is. The preaching of repentance shows us how near we are to disaster all the time, and at the same time how near the Kingdom of God has come to us, to save us, if we will but repent.  

Is that too strong a thing to say? We can hardly think that, today of all days. The disasters of war have made the last century an endless catastrophe for much of the human race, and look set to do the same for this century too. And these two centuries are not different from all the others that have gone before. This is the normal way of the world, and if we in Western Europe have been relatively unscathed by it for the last seventy years we need to realise how exceptional that situation is, and that we cannot count on it to continue.

The call of Jesus to repent is as urgent today as it ever was. The disaster that threatens to overwhelm us is lurking at the door, and that disaster is the violence of the human race, our seemingly endless capacity to cast out and destroy our victims.

Last week saw the death of René Girard. You may not have heard of him, but his influence extends far in Biblical studies and many preachers are indebted to him. Girard was one of the most influential and original thinkers of the last century. His work on human origins led him to the theory that violence is the foundation of human society, and exposed its intimate connection to the sacred. Human beings don’t just do violence, we make a religion out of it. Societies under threat recover their unity by uniting against a scapegoat, and this primal mechanism of violence gets mythologized and ritualized into sacrifice, the slaughter of an innocent victim to save the guilty who don’t know that they are guilty.

There’s a lot of that in the Bible, as we can see in today’s reading from Hebrews, which says that sacrificial victims have had to suffer from the foundation of the world, at the hands of the priests of this cult who continually offer blood that is not their own. In other words this sacred violence is foundational, part of the way the world is. It is the normal. But Jesus does things differently. “He has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself.” Jesus ends the age of the normal by his giving of himself, his voluntary suffering of the violence that the world has been inflicting from its foundation. Because he is the innocent victim raised to the heavens and seated on the throne of God, he has broken open the normal, the old order of sin and death, and made possible something new, which is the Kingdom of God.

God emptied himself in Jesus, identifying himself with the world as it is to save us from the world as it is. Jesus exposes the foundations of the world in its violence. He points the way out though his teaching. He suffers the violence of the world in total identification with all the human race. And through the resurrection he reveals God’s alternative order to the world, the non-violent superabundance of God’s life, the Kingdom of God. Jesus does not set up a new sacred, a new way of casting out, rather he overturns it and proclaims God’s Kingdom of radical inclusion. And he calls us to turn around and follow him into that Kingdom.

Remembrance Sunday shows us the normal, the foundations of the world, built on sacred violence. Into the horrors of the last century, and those of the century now unfolding, the call of repentance becomes more urgent still. The disaster is always waiting at the door. Repentance consists of turning around and living differently so that it might not be so. Each one of us is called by Jesus to repent, to renounce the violence of the human race, which is deeply embedded in all of us, and follow him into God’s Kingdom of life and truth in which there is no darkness or violence at all. “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

Sermon at Parish Mass, the Last Sunday after Trinity 2015

Jeremiah 31:7-9

Hebrews 5:1-6

Mark 10:46-52

“Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.” What way is that? It is the way to Jerusalem, and today’s gospel reading is nearly at the end of it. Jesus and his disciples have been making their way to Jerusalem for some time and Jericho is the last stop on the journey.

While they have been travelling together Jesus has three times predicted his death. He has told the disciples that he is going to Jerusalem where he will be rejected, and killed, and will rise again. And the disciples have consistently failed to understand, as we have seen over the last few weeks.

Jesus is the Messiah, God’s anointed ruler come to redeem his people, but that redemption is not going to be brought about by power or force or control. God’s redemption has nothing to do with the deadly rivalry by which people strive to be at the centre of things and fight their way to the top of the heap. Instead, mysteriously, God’s redemption is going to be brought about in weakness, in failure, by one who is rejected and killed. God’s redemption in fact will be the undoing of all our history of violent rivalry and the wreckage it has made of human life.

And the disciples have not only failed to understand that, they have gone on acting as though power and force and control were what mattered. They have gone on behaving within that mindset of rivalry and domination. Who is the greatest? Who will have the seats of power next to Jesus in his dictatorship?

So throughout this journey the disciples have really failed to see who Jesus is, what he is about. And at the beginning and end of the journey Mark’s gospel has two miracles, both of them the healing of blind men. The long story of the disciples failing to see is bracketed by stories of people being given their sight by Jesus.

And as we see in today’s story of Bartimaeus, the key to healing, to being able to see, is faith. Bartimaeus, because of his disability, is a marginal figure in society. He begs by the side of the road. And when Jesus and a large crowd go by, there are plenty of people who want to keep him there, who want to shut him out from their group. They scold him and tell him to keep quiet. But Bartimaeus calls out all the louder, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”

For the first time in Mark’s gospel that royal title is applied to Jesus. “Son of David.” God’s anointed king, the one who will bring about God’s promise of an unending kingdom of righteousness. And this will provide an opener to the next scene in the gospel, the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. Then the crowds will acclaim Jesus with the words “blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David”. But the first person to say this, the first person to see that Jesus is the Son of David, is Bartimaeus, the blind beggar at the side of the road.

It is the marginal, excluded figure who has the faith to see that Jesus is the Son of David. Jesus who will himself identify with the marginal and excluded in his own rejection and his death.

And Jesus called Bartimaeus to him. From the margins, he is called to the centre. And Jesus restores to him his dignity as a human person. Instead of simply doing something to him like a benevolent patron to an inferior subject, Jesus asks him, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ He makes him a partner in his own healing. And Bartimaeus says, ‘My teacher, let me see again.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Go; your faith has made you well.’

It is the faith of Bartimaeus which is at the heart of this story. His faith enables him to see who Jesus really is. That spiritual seeing results in his physical healing and brings him in from the margins, restoring him to the community of God’s people. And it is his faith which then leads him to follow Jesus on the way. The way which leads straight to Jerusalem, to the cross, to the tomb and the resurrection. Does Bartimaeus realise this? Does he know where he is going? Well, probably not. When Jesus was arrested, just a week after this scene, Mark tells us very starkly “they all deserted him and fled”. He doesn’t say “they all deserted him except Bartimaeus”.

But although Bartimaeus does not see what lies ahead, he has faith to follow Jesus. Like the other disciples, he is drawn to Jesus even though he might not understand what he is about. He has faith enough, he sees enough, to follow. And that is all that is needed.

The other disciples, too, are following Jesus in faith. Even though they misunderstand Jesus in many ways – as we know because we’ve been following their story.  They don’t understand where they are going, where the way of Jesus will lead them. But they are following anyway. And so they will get to where they need to be, in spite of everything they get wrong.

It is by following Jesus that they will come to understand Jesus, in the end. Once Jesus has risen from the dead and returned to them they too will see that Jesus, the Man on the Cross, rejected and killed, is indeed the Son of David, the Messiah. They too will find faith, and see, and be healed.

And that is the story of the disciples of Jesus ever since. It is our story, too. We find ourselves drawn to Jesus, the risen Lord who walks with his Church. If we look back over our lives can we identify moments of seeing, moments when we have realized that this Jesus is the one we need to follow? Can we think of moments of sudden and unexpected hope when we have sensed that Jesus has the power to transform the tragic history of sin in our own lives and in the world?  That this Jesus, risen from the dead, offers a new beginning that has no end? Those moments of seeing are real encounters with the risen Lord. They give us faith enough to follow in his way. But that doesn’t mean that we understand everything, or that we get everything right. But we don’t need to! Jesus does not demand that we understand everything from the outset. He calls us to follow in his way, and to trust him for where it will lead us.

As St Paul says, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. What we need is to see Jesus and to follow him. It is enough that we recognize that this is the Saviour. It is by following him that we will find out what he is about. It is by making the journey that we will be saved. Jesus did not ask any of the disciples to understand everything from the outset, and he does not ask us. He does not present us with a list of theological propositions that we have to agree to, before we can follow him. No. He calls us to follow as we are. And it is in following that we will be healed and saved, as was Bartimaeus. We too are part of today’s gospel. We too can place ourselves in this story, and make Bartimaeus’ prayer our own:

Jesus said to him, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ The blind man said to him, ‘My teacher, let me see again.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go; your faith has made you well.’ Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.