Category: Sermons

Reflections on harvest in the sea

1. Ascension

Mike asked me the other day when I was able to do coffees this autumn and I explained that ‘sadly’, in November, I can’t do coffees because my work is taking me to the Caribbean.  Mike, understandably, was practically sick in the font!

It’s true that I’m very blessed to have the most wonderful job that takes me to some fascinating places.  Not only does that sometimes get me out of doing coffees, but it gives me a first-hand glimpse into the extraordinary creation that is life in the ocean. 

For example, I’ve twice visited the Island of Ascension – an island just ten miles across, right in middle of the Atlantic, just south of the equator.  The second time I visited Ascension, my friend and colleague, Dr Judith Brown, a brilliant marine biologist who had lived there for years, said she wanted to take me to see something special.  So we walked for a mile or so across a deserted landscape, over lava crinkles and craters, until we came to a little pool.  Jude told me to look carefully in the pool which was full of sweet little shrimp.  Not just any shrimp, Jude explained.  These shrimp are completely unique and exist nowhere else in the world.  They are so rare that they don’t even have a name.  I gazed at them, quite mesmerised, by their own tiny world.

The ocean is full of as-yet-to-be-named or even discovered species.  There are between 230,000 and 240,000 marine species currently described and classified by science, but this is thought to be about a tenth of the total number of species in the ocean.  We know more about the solar system than we know about the deep ocean on our own planet.

• ‘And God created Great Whales’

Not only is the sea full of mysterious life – it plays a vital role in stabilising our climate.  It absorbs more carbon than all the earth’s forests and provides half the oxygen in the atmosphere.  Without the world’s oceans, the Earth would be 36 degrees warmer.  Each night, millions of creatures come up to the surface to feed on phytoplankton and then travel down into the depths during the day.  This ‘biological pump’ is vital for locking away carbon.  ‘And God created Great Whales’, is written in Genesis. Well just one of these majestic creatures can capture over 33 tonnes of carbon in its lifetime.

• ‘Dominion’

The trouble is that since industrialisation, a mass-scale removal of life in the sea has threatened the beautiful balance in the ocean.  When God said to man, ‘Have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth’, he surely meant us to be wise stewards of this extraordinary gift, rather than plundering it to the point of collapse. Human beings are warming the seas, filling them with pollution and rendering them more acidic.  But most of all, we are stripping them of the very life that supports us.

Industrial-scale overfishing means that small-scale fishers, like the ones Jesus advises to cast their nets on the other side of the boat, are left with empty nets and lost jobs.  It’s not that fishing is bad, it’s that destructive, wasteful, overfishing is bad.  A pair trawler in the Channel, with a net many times larger than this nave, can catch as much in a day than a small boat can catch in a year.

The result is that there are fewer and fewer fish in the sea. In the Celtic Sea cod stocks are down by 98% in the last decade.  So there are now 1/50^th of the number of cod and unsurprisingly, they find it hard to reproduce.  (A friend of mine, recently single, and living in rural Wales said that dating in Wales is similarly problematic!) 

In the Indian Ocean, fish aggregation devices or FADs, attract tuna underneath a wooden platform a little larger than this sound board above the font. Then a huge net encircles them, gathering them all up by the hundreds of tonnes.  Unfortunately, the fish who are attracted to gather under these floating devices are mostly baby tuna. So the future population is being annihilated.

In the Antarctic, the Norwegian krill fishery is scouring the sea for krill to be crushed for its oil.  But krill, as well as being a popular health product, is the main diet of those wonderful Great Whales, and recordings in Antarctica of their strange and beautiful song, reveal that the whales are rarely singing now.

• For those in peril on the sea

Perhaps most shocking is the way that human beings are treated far out at sea on these factory vessels. Human rights abuses are rife in the global seafood industry.  When we sing ‘for those in peril on the sea’, we should spare a thought for those who have been forced or trafficked to spend months, if not years, away from their families, working in miserable conditions.

• “Be of good courage, and he shall strengthen your heart, all ye that hope in the Lord”.

But I want to leave you with messages of hope. NGOs such as Blue Marine are making good progress in tackling overfishing and securing more protection for the sea.  I said I’d twice been to Ascension.  The first time I went there in 2017, its waters, an area nearly the size of France, were being fished by a longline fleet whose 80km lines of baited hooks were not only catching tuna, but sailfish, swordfish, sharks, turtles, seabirds.  This longline fleet also had a poor human rights record.  We persuaded the British Government and the Ascension Island Government to create a vast marine protected area around Ascension.  So the second time I went to Ascension five years later, I stood on the shore and looked at the horizon and knew that as far as I could see, times by about 75 (because of the curvature of the Earth) was completely free from industrial fishing.  Last spring, more green turtles nested on Ascension than any time since records began in the 1970s.

Through its ‘blue belt’ initiative, Britain has protected over four million square kilometres of ocean.  In December 2022, 196 countries committed to protect at least 30% of land and sea by 2030.  Political leaders around the world – particularly in the Caribbean, hence my very necessary visit – are making great progress in protecting 30% of their waters – and we are doing all we can to help them.  In January 2026, a global agreement was ratified to protect the high seas – the 2/3 of ocean beyond national jurisdiction – an extraordinary feat of international cooperation at a time when that is rather thin on the ground.

I personally get a lot of hope from my colleagues at Blue Marine; 70 brave, determined, thoughtful people, who dedicate every waking hour to trying to protect and restore life in the ocean through legal, education, media, science, investigations and policy initiatives.

But most of all, I get hope from ‘the wonder of His works’ – not only observed in the beauty and complexity of life in the ocean, but in the power it has to bounce back.

When an area, once scoured by trawlers, is left to recover, first the habitats come back, then the small creatures, then the apex predators, until, after a few years, it is once again teeming with life – God’s creation allowed to flourish as He intended.   

The vast and mysterious ocean, which covers nearly ¾ of our planet, is so exceptionally beautiful.  It is vital that we nurture it and maintain its precious balance – for the sake of all our futures.  To quote not God, but one of his best representatives on Earth, Sir David Attenborough: ‘If we save the sea, we save our world.’

Clare Brook, 20 September 2026

Further reading/watching:

The 2025 film OCEAN with David Attenborough

Blue Marine Foundation | Marine conservation charity

Ascension island: 445,000 sq km no-take zone

Stephen Fry and Theo James short film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDMW6fPB0JA

I was at a memorial service last week in Dorset for a very old family friend. She’d been a stalwart of the all the rural sporting pursuits. This was remembered in the lovely service. At the end the congregation turned to the west door of the church, which opened to the village and valley beyond in the bright autumn sunshine; the local beagle pack’s huntsman, in full attire sounded the “going home”. Two little beagles nearby looked up at him expectantly. Our friend was going home.

The huntsman’s uniform and the whole atmosphere was very striking.

What we wear is rather important. The robes we wear at the altar are earthly and partial symbols of a heavenly and sacred participation.

Today’s Gospel speaks of special garments.

The parable a confounding story of a King who gives a marriage party for his Son. All the invitations are sent, but the people asked don’t come. So, like in a similar parable, slaves are sent to invite others, presumably less grand guests, and they not only carry on with their daily lives regardless, but maltreat the messengers and kill them.

In the parable just before this, the workers in the vineyard had done the same thing.

In this parable rather than then sending the Son, the King retaliates and destroyed the murderers and burnt the city.

There have been those in the history of the Church who have allegorised this story and made every incident and aspect have a meaning.

We know there are a lot of stories about feasts and banquets and even generous fathers who love their sons.

Our parable gets more complicated now.

The slaves manage to gather in a party’s worth of guests, but not your ideal wedding reception. They come from the main street, and rather unthrillingly they include the bad and good alike!

The King does a magnanimous tour, checking that all is well. And horror! One guest, one guest, has not put on a wedding garment. “Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?” he asks rather ominously, and the man was “speechless”.

And then the King casts him into outer darkness, “where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.”

We need to remember the key point about this story is not the twists and turns, each detail is less significant than the invitation.

It is a judgment.

Once you get the invitation, it should be enough to know what it is you are getting.

That’s why the hapless guest is not so hapless. Once on his way to the wedding, he should have known to put in a garment, afterall, we are pretty sure they were supplied at the door!

You had dodge them as you came through the porch. He had not realised that the invitation was both free, and a crisis, a judgement.

There are so many other allusions to wedding banquets in the Hebrew Scriptures and throughout the NT.

When new converts were baptised in the early Church they were given new garments, reminiscent of the wedding robe in our story, and symbolised by christening robes, themselves an imitation of the robes of white the saints in Revelation wear before the throne; which is why we wear white at the altar.

God calls every one to his kingdom regardless. But he also expects all of them to live a life worthy of the call. From being called to being chosen there is a crisis, an invitation.

So, we come now to this eucharist, this foretaste of the heavenly banquet. We are all invited, regardless but we are also offered the chance to be transformed, to receive the body of Christ and to become what we eat – Christ’s body in the world.

Spare a prayer for meeting taking place in this church on Wednesday and Friday. On both days there will be Eucharists shared with Clergy from the French Protestant Church. 25 years ago exactly an Agreement with them was reached which recognised both a longstanding history of connection between us and them and a desire to continue in dialogue with them. Celebrations will continue at Lambeth on Wednesday evening. One of the most famous French-speaking Protestants of the 20th c, Brother Roger of Taize wrote the following, which speaks to today’s Gospel and to the talks which will follow here.

Come to this table, you who have much faith and you who would like to have more. You who have been to this sacrament often, and you who have not been for a long time; you who have tried to follow Jesus, and you who have failed. Come, not because you are strong, but because you are weak, not because you have any claim on heaven’s rewards, but because in your frailty and sin you stand in constant need of heaven’s mercy and help; come, because you love the Lord a little and you would like to love Him more; come, because He loves you and gave himself for you. Lift up your hearts and minds above your cares and fears. Come; it is Christ who invites us to meet him here.

In today’s world war continues and the financial markets are at present in turmoil.  Turmoil caused by war, the effect of AI on the American economy and the economic difficulties in Japan and other causes beside.  We can add to this the rising cost of borrowing and the burden of debt, felt most keenly in the third world.

An outcome of this uncertain time, which has borne fruit in a cost-of-living crisis, is anxiety and frustration that can lead people towards an intolerance of others and a culture of blame without due consideration of reasons for failure.

It is not easy, then, in our present time to stay with the teaching of today’s Gospel which is all about forgiveness. What this text is revealing to us is that however much you feel a person has done you wrong, God calls upon us to forgive that person not seven times but seventy times seven.  Then, having been forgiven, you must be willing to forgive also or you will incur the wrath of God.

In our troubled world this is a tall order but the alternative is an increasingly intolerant society that ridicules, humiliates and condemns others. Such intolerance will ultimately mean a fragmented society and the cracks have already begun to appear.

To avoid this fragmentation growing how to do we water the plant of forgiveness to ensure its growth?  One way is to imitate God by being compassionate.  In today’s Gospel reading the King is compassionate when he takes pity on the slave and forgives him his debt. This imitates God because there are many instances in the Bible when God shows compassion on his people.  In the Old Testament, God rescues Noah and his family and animals from the flood at a time when ‘the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth’.  God rescues Moses and the Israelites from captivity in Egypt when he hears their groans.  In the Book of Micah it is written that ‘God does not show his anger forever because he delights in showing clemency.  He will again have compassion upon us; he will tread our iniquities under his foot’. Compassion is demonstrated throughout the New Testament in the healing ministry of Jesus.

Another way is to be merciful.  In his letter to the Romans, Paul asks us not to judge one another because we all stand before the judgement seat of God and we will all be accountable to God.  We must not, as Paul writes, drag each other down. God’s kindness, he says, will lead us to repentance.  If we continue to judge one another there will be a hardness of heart that stores up anger and there is so much anger in today’s world.

This does not mean that we should not examine.  The law has its place in society as otherwise, as David Pawson writes in his commentary on Matthew,  we are left with too little discrimination. However, we are not judge but jury.

In the Beatitudes in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus addresses the crowds saying: ‘Blessed are the merciful for they will receive mercy’.  The title of the hymn that reads ‘there’s a wideness in his mercy that is wider than the sea’ reveals the limitless mercy of God that we need to imitate to help us work towards forgiveness.

Lack of mercy is where it goes terribly wrong when Jesus is brought to be tried by Pontius Pilate, Governor of Judea.  Pilate believes that Jesus has not done wrong, but mercy is not in his mindset.  He sees his job as keeping the people content to avoid unrest and so is willing to let them decide the fate of Jesus. Fortunately, for our salvation, this lack of mercy is turned on its head by Jesus when he cries out on the Cross ‘forgive them Father for they know not what they do’.  Here is forgiveness at its height.

Then there is prayer.  As we say in the Lord’s Prayer: ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’.  In this prayer we are confirming that we are dependent upon God’s grace for forgiveness of our sins.  We are saying that we are mindful of the need to be forgiven as well as those who have trespassed against us.

Compassion, mercy and their fruit of forgiveness all reflect the abiding love of God that we need to imitate in our behaviour towards each other.  We must love our neighbour as ourselves.  If we do this now in the difficult time think how beneficial that will be when the grass is green again.

AMEN

“Who do you say that I am?”  This is not just a question directed to the twelve, and a turning-point in their understanding of Jesus.  It is also a question for the Church in every age, and for each of us today. 

In its original context, Jesus began by asking what “people” in general had to say about him.  (“Son of Man” is a name he often uses when talking about himself.)  Their answers reflect the beliefs of the time.   

King Herod, having murdered John the Baptist, heard the same message spreading over the land, and in his superstition wondered if John had come back from the dead.  He had killed the messenger, but the message went on.  

There are prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures – our Old Testament – about the return of Elijah or one of the prophets as a forerunner to the coming of the Messiah, a theme much on people’s minds two thousand years ago.  In the account of the Transfiguration, which happened a week after today’s gospel, one of them asks Jesus, “Why does it say Elijah must come first?” and Jesus claims that Elijah has already come, which they understand as a reference to John the Baptist.   

“But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”  Many of their contemporaries were looking and longing for the Messiah – literally, “the anointed one”.  Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in the last century cast light on this, and there are also references not only in the gospels but in the Acts of the Apostles.  There was even a double expectation of a kingly Messiah and a priestly Messiah.  Jesus was both – but not as they expected.  A king who would not lead the nation into battle and restore the kingdom to Israel, but arrive in Jerusalem as the “prince of peace” – however conveniently many Christian rulers through the ages have chosen to forget that.  A priest not performing the sacrifices of the Temple to mediate between God and the people, but being himself both sacrifice and mediator. 

Peter goes beyond those expectations, in adding to “the Messiah” the title “the Son of the living God.” A bold assertion, seeing that this episode took place in Caesarea Philippi, the headquarters of the Roman occupation, where the title “Son of God” was ascribed to the Emperor.  Jesus did not use this title himself; others used it about him, from the demons in some of the healing stories, to the centurion at the foot of the cross, and Mark proclaims his gospel to be “the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” 

But who do you say that I am?  What do we say about Jesus? 

We say a lot about Jesus in the creed, which was an attempt to answer that question, in the fourth century, when Christianity was becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire and had to define itself more precisely.  There were, and are today, those who regard Jesus as a good man and a great teacher, perhaps even someone with gifts of healing, but are uneasy about the other miracle stories.  To them, any claim that Jesus was God seemed to be going against the central tenet of Judaism: “the Lord your God is one God.”  Then there were those who had no difficulty with the divinity of Jesus, but could not believe that God really walked on earth, eating, drinking, and even on occasion being merry with his friends.  Some even said that Jesus (like the angel Raphael in the book of Tobit) only appeared to eat and drink. 

But, to be an effective mediator, Jesus must belong to both sides: truly God and truly man. The formula that the church leaders came up with says more about the divinity of Jesus Christ: “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God”.  All it says about his humanity is that he “was incarnate” (“made flesh” as St John puts it in the introduction to his gospel) “by the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary, and was made man.”  The creed moves on to the crucifixion, burial, resurrection and ascension. 

The Nicene creed stands as a signpost in the life of the church – something to which we return, something with which we wrestle for understanding – but a signpost from the fourth century.  We have learned, from Christian theologians and hymn writers, and from the bible itself, other ways of thinking about Jesus.  One example, from hymn 467, How sweet the name of Jesus sounds: 
Jesus, my Shepherd, Brother, Friend, / My Prophet, Priest and King, 
My Lord, my Life, my Way, my End, / Accept the praise I bring. 
And another, from For all the saints: 
Thou wast their rock, their fortress, and their might, Thou, Lord, their Captain in the well-fought fight, 
Thou, in the darkness drear, their one true light. Alleluia! 

The Hebrew Scriptures have more than twenty references to God as Rock.  Jacob, Moses, Hannah, and David, all sang in praise of “God my Rock” which brings us to the second part of the gospel reading. Jesus answers Peter’s confession with the words ‘I say unto thee, That thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.’  Peter answered the question “Who do you say that I am?” and Jesus replied answering the unspoken question “And who do I say that you are?”  Or, more simply, “Who are you?” He was not simply making a pun on the name Peter, which means rock; he was inviting Peter, and all of us, to share in God’s work of giving us a firm foundation for life together. 

And here’s another question we do well to consider, as individuals, as members of this church, as members, in the words of our first hymn, of  “one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide earth”.  Who are you?  Who am I?  Who are we?  That’s the homework, and it could keep you busy for the rest of your lives! The readings which accompany the gospel give us some hints.  From Isaiah 51, we learn about the Jewish people in exile valuing their identity as children of Abraham (a phrase still helpful today as in working out the relationship between Jews, Christians and Muslims) and coming to understand God’s mission  not just to one nation but to all the peoples.  From Romans, Paul encouraged his readers to value the diversity of the individuals making up the community, the diversity of gifts God has given to each, and the diversity of contributions each makes to God’s work. 

Let us pray: 
Holy God, as we proclaim that Jesus is the Christ, help us to follow his way of service and love so that our lives may reveal your reign of justice and joy. Amen. 

Woody Allen once quipped: “More than any other time in history,
mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter
hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the
wisdom to choose correctly.”

That line exposes how many of us quietly view “the end.” The comic
voice often highlights what we are most anxious about. Ernest Becker
argued that underneath most human behaviour lies an existential
terror of mortality—a desperate effort to preserve our fragile selfimage
through what he called ‘immortality projects’—defensive
towers built to give us a sense of permanent significance.

What Becker identified in psychology, twentieth-century theologian
Paul Tillich diagnosed in time. Tillich took the ancient biblical
distinction between Chronos and Kairos and made it a cornerstone of
his theology.

Chronos is named after the Greek god who devoured his own
children—a vivid image of quantitative, tick-tock time. The present
moment is instantly eaten into the past. Left on its own, Chronos is
driven by existential anxiety, asking only: “How do I keep my life safe
and intact?” We see this anxiety in today’s Gospel through the elders,
chief priests, and scribes—the gatekeepers of status, religion, and
intellect who built systemic towers to preserve their control.
The breakdown of these constructs is inevitable. Where Becker saw
this collapse as the source of despair, Tillich understood it as the
necessary prerequisite for grace.

Last Sunday we saw this exact breakthrough in the verses
immediately prior to today’s reading. Before Jesus predicts His death,
He asks His disciples: “Whom say ye that I am?” Simon Peter
receives a kairos lightning bolt and declares: “You are the Messiah,
the Son of the living God.” Jesus then blesses Simon Bar-Jonah—
note how Matthew uses the Aramaic Bar-Jonah which means son of
a Dove—son of the Holy Spirit—“Flesh and blood hath not revealed
it.” Then Jesus grounds the moment, renaming Simon as Peter—the
bedrock upon which the Church will withstand the gates of hell.
Kairos pierces Chronos, and the crack lets the light in.
Yet the moment Kairos dawns, it demands a taste of death: a
refinement of our beliefs and the things we cling to.
“For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his
angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works.”
The taller the tower—the bigger the fall. We are like the rich man who
struggles to get through the eye of that needle. As St Paul reminds
us, “we reap what we sow.”

In our Old Testament reading today, God calls on Jeremiah to do
some refining: “if you extract the precious from the worthless, you
shall be as my mouth” If—as Jesus commands the rich man—you sell
all your possessions and give to the poor—diverting your mental
energy away from your immortality towers and pour it into the
uncultivated, empty spaces of your mind, then Kairos is really an
angel—a messenger from God’s mouth filling the vacuum.
We are at the very intersection of Chronos and Kairos—the threshold
of the Cross.

Matthew sets this moment in the Roman city of Caesarea Philippi, in
front of the ancient sanctuary of Banias. Looming behind them is a
massive rock cliff carved with shrines to Pan—the God of the Wild—
whose terrifying shouts induced sudden, irrational terror, giving us our
word panic. Adjacent to the cliff is a yawning cave spring known as
the ‘Gates of Hades’—a dark portal to the underworld.
Facing this birthplace of human panic and the abyss of death, Jesus
unveils His stark prophecy to the twelve: “He must go to Jerusalem,
suffer, be killed, and on the third day be raised to life.”
And immediately, Peter panics. (PAN-ICS)!
He takes Jesus aside and rebukes Him: “Never, Lord! This shall never
happen to you!”

It is no coincidence that J.M. Barrie named his famous character
Peter Pan—the boy who refuses to grow up or face mortality—living
in a fantasy kingdom called Neverland. Look at what Simon Peter is
doing at the cliff of Pan when he says, “Never, Lord!” He wants a
Messiah who will conquer without suffering, rule without dying, and
offer a kingdom without a cross. Simon Peter’s “Never, Lord!” is the
human urge to retreat into a Neverland of denial rather than face real
transformation.

Jesus calls him out sharply: “Get behind me, Satan! You are setting
your mind not on divine things, but on human things.”
We could see “Satan” as the personal ego—the adversary insisting on
self-preservation over divine growth. When Jesus says “Get behind
me,” He uses the exact Greek phrase for discipleship—”follow me”—
He isn’t banishing Peter; He is calling Faith back to its proper place—
behind the Spirit, not leading it.

Remember, in the wilderness, when Satan offered Jesus “all the
kingdoms of the world in a moment of time,” he was offering Jesus
the ultimate immortality tower—Now Jesus turns that invitation the
other way round.

A couple of weeks ago in our Gospel reading, we saw Jesus descend
into the pagan borderlands of Tyre and Sidon, where He encountered
the Canaanite woman. She is like the part of us that has no status or
self-righteous towers to defend. When tested, she didn’t panic or
argue. She claimed no rights, humbly accepting even the crumbs
under the table. She embodies “the poor in spirit.” In her radical,
empty-handed surrender—her daughter receives immediate healing.
Yet here at Caesarea Philippi, Peter’s defensive, masculine ego panics
the moment it’s self-made tower is threatened. Where the Canaanite
woman yields without a fight, Simon Peter retreats into denial.
So how do we find her courage to surrender—to pick up our cross
and follow Jesus through the threshold of fear?

In the 1990 film Jacob’s Ladder, Jacob’s guardian angel—Louis—
imparts this teaching:
“If you’re frightened of dying and you’re holding on, you’ll see devils
tearing your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then the devils
are really angels, freeing you from the earth.”
That is the exact psychological drama of Matthew 16.
When divine Truth demands that you let go of an old identity, your first
instinct is to cling tightly to it. And as long as you cling, surrender feels
like torment—like demons tearing your life apart. But the moment you
yield, you realise those forces weren’t destroying you; they were
stripping away what was never real to begin with.
This begins to explain the great paradox of verse 25: “Whoever wants
to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find
it.”

Standing before the dark caves of Banias, surrounded by the panic of
mortality, Jesus offers the alternative: “Some who are standing here
will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his
kingdom.”

The very threshold we feared as—an abyss going down—becomes
an open ladder ascending: our honest cry for mercy goes up and
Christ descends to meet us in the dark.

As we take up our cross and follow Jesus on this journey, divine love
removes the scales from our eyes, revealing that the place of our
greatest fear was always destined to be the birthplace of our
resurrection.

And in finding our true life, we can finally declare with Paul: “O death,
where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”
Amen.

In today’s Gospel reading we learn how Jesus walked on water to rescue his disciples, who were being tossed about in the boat that he had ordered them to get into to reach the other side of the Sea of Galilee which was Gentile territory.

Even though the disciples had just witnessed Jesus healing the sick and feeding the five thousand with loaves and fishes, it only took one moment of witnessing the divine ability to walk on water for them to doubt that they were looking at Jesus.  This doubt prompts Peter to seek assurance that it is Jesus by asking him to command him to walk on water. Jesus does so but when the wind blows and Peter begins to sink, he cries out to Jesus to save him.

This doubt of the disciples and Peter’s cry for help tells us that for the disciples their journey of faith was not filled with certainty but Jesus reprimands them for their uncertainty.  Reprimands them because doubt implies little faith.

Why, though, does God, our loving Creator, put the disciples to the test in a tempestuous sea?  It appears that, from time to time, God does put people to the test to reveal to him how strong their faith is. He put his son, Jesus, to the ultimate test of death on the Cross for our salvation and Jesus passed the test when he said to God: ‘not my will but thine be done’.

‘Thy will be done’ are words in the Lord’s Prayer and they are an affirmation that we trust in God’s purposes in heaven and on earth.  Here we find that trust is essential to faith in God and the promise of the kingdom to come.  The darker the situation we are in, the more our faith may be tested.  This accords with the statement made by Christopher Chapman in his book ‘Seeing in the Dark’ that God ‘does not want stable mediocrity’.  ‘We grow, he writes, through response to God’. This, he writes, ‘makes the relationship more intense’.  The challenge to the disciples then, and to us today, is to stand firm in faith, particularly when times are hard which they are for many people today.

Sometimes, imagery can help us.  If we liken the Church to a ship on the sea, we can think of ways to keep it afloat and encourage people to get on board.  Ways such as praying for God’s mercy and for the healing of the trouble spots in the world. Working to avoid the sea getting in because if it does, we cannot, as Alistair McGrath writes in his book ‘The Spirit of Grace’ sustain our life of faith. To stop the sea getting in, the current mission of the movement entitled ‘Save the Parish’, which began in 2021, is working to ensure that the church can prosper through use of funds which will help the clergy and worshippers to have fulfilling roles so they can fulfil God’s will in the cure of souls and sustain their worshipping communities.

When the ship is in stormy weather our faith should remind us of the lovely sentence in Psalm 77 that: ‘the Lord overcomes the waves of death’. In walking on water Jesus also overcomes the waves of death in his authority over nature that even the wind and waves obey him.

The journey the disciples make with Jesus across the Sea of Galilee has a purpose.  The other side is Gentile territory and the land there known as Gennesaret is where Jesus will heal the sick.  Here we find the link between faith and mission. We need to have faith in our journey because if we give up through lack of faith then our welcome, help and healing of others will not happen.  We need to keep going and encourage others to do so.

Sometimes, though, in our Christian life, we need to give ourselves the space to be alone in communion with God.  To reflect, meditate and be at peace away from the distractions of everyday life.  Today’s Gospel reading gives us an example of this aloneness when Jesus leaves the crowd and goes up the mountain to pray.

When we distance ourselves, it is not necessarily anti-social but can be a means to help others by having an overview of a situation.  Thus, Jesus is able to see from the mountain top that the disciples are in trouble in the boat and comes to save them.  Similarly, in today’s reading from the Book of Kings, when Elijah meets God at Horeb, God is not in the elements of earthquake, wind and fire but speaks through them.  In the hymn ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind’ we ask God to speak to us through the earthquake, wind and fire as ‘the still small voice of calm’.

So let us continue to seek that still small voice of calm so that we can keep the ship afloat that it may one day leave the harbour and sail on to the Kingdom of God.

AMEN

 

 

 

 

I don’t know if there are any Archers fans in the house. I am not a devotee but like for many people it’s been part of the background noise of my life with different members of the family over the years being ardent fans, and it being on at the sort of times of day one is chopping vegetables or washing up.

One storyline you may remember was Peggy Woolley’s desire to give £500,000 towards a legacy project for farming in Ambridge. It was nailbiting who would attract this grant, in the end it was neither her organic farming son, Tony, nor or her nephew David, but her great niece Pip who won the competition for a re-wilding project. In a dramatic twist in the story, Archer money did not remain in the family, Rex Fairbrother and Kirsty Miller, both of whom have history with members of the Archer clan now manage the rewilding project.

The characters have wrestled with competing visions of stewardship, inheritance and responsibility, discovering that caring for creation is rarely straightforward. Those fictional conversations are not unlike some very real debates taking place within the Church of England today, including at General Synod, where its members amongst other debates asked how our faith should shape our care for God’s creation; a question was raised about how 30% of the Church’s land could be given over to re-wilding. Some of the attendant disapproval reminded me of the debates in the Archers about 5 years or so ago when all this came up there. Beneath these practical questions lies a deeply theological one: what kind of world has God entrusted to our care, and what sort of stewards are we called to be?

It is no coincidence that today’s Gospel is also about a field.

Jesus tells of a farmer who sows good seed, only for an enemy to sow weeds among the wheat under cover of darkness. The servants are horrified when they discover the problem. Their instinct is immediate and understandable: “Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up?”

The master says no.

“Let both grow together until the harvest.”

That answer feels unsatisfactory. We need decisive and immediate action. We expect good to triumph visibly over evil. Yet Jesus insists that God’s kingdom often grows in ways that demand patience rather than haste.

The detail matters. The “tares” or darnel closely resembled wheat until harvest time. Pull them up too soon, and you would destroy the wheat along with the weeds because their roots had become intertwined.

The servants simply cannot see clearly enough.

Perhaps that is the point.

Our first reading from Isaiah comes from another time when appearances suggested that evil had won. Israel is in exile. Jerusalem has fallen. Babylon seems invincible. Yet into that despair comes God’s magnificent declaration:

“I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God.”

History, Isaiah is saying, is not ultimately written by emperors or armies. It belongs to God.

That same confidence is at the heart of Jesus’ parable. The weeds do not prove that the farmer has failed. Nor do they mean that the harvest will never come. They simply remind us that we are living in the middle of the story rather than at its end.

The Odyssey continuse to captivate us nearly three thousand years on. Nolan’s film is an astonishing evocation of the Greek epic, as faithful as any three hour film can be to 24 books of poetry. Odysseus’ long journey home is so much more than an adventure, let’s not mistake it for a Christian tale, but it has influenced our culture in myriad ways. One of many moving aspects is how the enduring love between Penelope and Odysseus contrasts strikingly with the other fractured marriages the Trojan war causes. There are echoes here of Norma’s new novel she will present to us later.

The Hero Journey endures because it resonates with living life without seeing the ending.

The Christian story is different from Homer’s in one decisive respect. Odysseus survives largely by his own cunning. The Gospel tells us that our hope rests not in cleverness but in God’s faithfulness. The Lord who declares in Isaiah, “I am the first and the last,” is the same Lord who promises that the harvest belongs to him.

That is why Jesus warns against rushing to judgement. Jesus reserves that final ingathering to God alone, well reflected in many harvest hymns.

We are called to keep sowing good seed. To nurture faith where we find it. To resist evil without imagining that we ourselves can finally separate wheat from weeds – in this life there is not a weed or sin free field.

In a world that demands instant verdicts, outrage and certainty, the patience of God can seem pretty scandalous. Yet it is precisely that patience which gives space for repentance, for growth and for grace.

The field is God’s, weeds and all. The harvest is God’s too, his alone to divide wheat from tares.

History is God’s, however much we try to conquer it.

Like the servants in the field, the enduring Archer farming clan in Ambridge, we labour faithfully without pretending to know everything. And like all pilgrims on a long journey home, we walk in hope, confident that the God who began the story will also bring it to its glorious fulfilment. Amen.

In today’s Gospel reading, we hear the parable of the Sower. Some seed fell on the path, where birds ate it. Some fell on rocky ground, where the shallow soil made it spring up quickly; but because it had no roots, it withered under the sun. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked it. Only the seed that fell on good soil produced an abundant harvest.

If we consider this story in human terms, what might it mean? It suggests that the beginning of life, and our earliest years, are crucial in shaping whether we flourish and help others to flourish too. When we are well cared for and our needs are met, we are like seed in good soil, given the chance to grow and thrive. This reflects the welcome Jesus gives to children.

A good beginning helps us become rooted and grounded. Children who are moved from pillar to post by adults have fewer chances to put down roots. Without the firm foundation of a stable environment, they are less able to cope when difficulties arise. Stability is the good soil that fosters growth and confidence in life.

Children who experience trauma may find it harder to hear and listen. Their minds are focused on survival rather than on the world around them. This is not beneficial because in today’s Gospel, it is written that hearing and listening are central to the Christian journey. Jesus teaches that those who hear the word of the kingdom and understand it are protected from the evil one, who would snatch it away. But if we are not rooted and grounded, we may receive the word with joy for a time and then fall away when trouble comes. Jesus also speaks of those whose lives are so crowded by worldly cares and the lure of wealth that the word is choked and bears no fruit.

Hearing and listening are therefore vital to our Christian journey: hearing and listening to the word of the Kingdom. Those who cannot hear physically can still receive the word through sign language, understand it, and respond in faith. Meditation and silent reflection also have an important place in our relationship with God.

This hearing and listening are given to us by Jesus as a choice that we make.  What may prevent us from making that choice is revealed in the Old Testament in the Book of Isaiah.  Here the prophet is saying that people do not listen because their hearts have grown dull, their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes.  So, they cannot be open to the healing power of God.

Perhaps in today’s world our hearts have been dulled by centuries of wars and crises, seemingly unsolvable problems and despair that we cannot prosper in a world afflicted by climate change, natural disasters and faltering economic systems.  How then, can our hearts be refreshed and illuminated?

One way is to be reminded of texts in the Bible that offer us hope for the future.  Isaiah writes that the word of God will accomplish its purpose and we will ‘go out in joy and be led back in peace; the mountains and trees will burst into song and the trees in the fields shall clap their hands’.  The cypress will come up instead of the thorn and instead of the brier there will be the myrtle.  These are the signs of the everlasting covenant of God with us.  God’s word will never return empty but will water the earth and give seed to the Sower and bread to the eater.  This, the prophet Isaiah says, is what we must listen to.

In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes that they must not lose heart because ‘even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day’. In his letter to the Romans, Paul tells them that creation will be set free from bondage to decay.  We will groan until redemption, but redemption is the end of our journey so we must keep going until then.  Echoing Paul’s letter to the Romans, a way to keep going is, as David Pawson writes in his Commentary on Matthew, ‘to put to death whatever in your old life is spoiling the new’.

In his book entitled ‘Listen and Live’ Colin Urquhart writes that we must ‘plant our seed of prayer with faith, water it with praise and thank God until you see the harvest’.

Both Old and New Testament writers, then, are offering us hope by encouraging us to renew ourselves and to hear and listen to the word of the Kingdom, which was made flesh in Jesus who, as John’s Gospel gives it to us, is the ear of wheat that died for us and produced many seeds. This hearing and listening will help us to keep going in troubled times and remind us of the light at the end of the tunnel which is the one true light of God.

 

AMEN

 

 

 

 

‘But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd’. This image of Jesus seeing the crowds that flocked to him, whilst he went about the cities and villages, as ‘fainting’ and ‘scattered abroad’ is vivid and strong. We only find it in the Gospel of Matthew, although for the most part in this passage the Evangelist follows the same account given in the earliest Gospel – of Mark, but somehow it resonates with the anguish we’re seeing expressed, and may be feeling ourselves, about the reaction to recent knife crimes, the violent demonstrations these have provoked, the ongoing debates about national security, about the control of social media over against the rights of the individual, and also in oversees conflicts which if anything seem to become more entrenched and unresolved, with far-reaching and possibly long-lasting effects on the world as a whole. ‘Fainting’, ‘scattered abroad’, or in a contemporary Bible translation, ‘harassed and helpless’, all seem quite apt terms in summing up how these ongoing issues affect us all.

But the really key term in the Gospel accounts of both Matthew and Mark together regarding Jesus’s compassion for the multitudes is: ‘as sheep having no shepherd’. This metaphor for humanity’s relationship with God (or the lack of it) is deep-rooted throughout the Hebrew scriptures and Psalms, and we hear Jesus apply it to himself in the Gospel of John: ‘I am the good shepherd’. We might feel some reserve about that image, as though it demeaned our human dignity; after all, in this individualistic age we like to think of ourselves as self-made women and men. But there it is in the text of the ‘Old100^th’ – I’m referring not to the great hymn paraphrase with which we opened the service, but the original 100^th psalm:  ‘Be ye sure that the Lord he is God; it is he that hath made us and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture’.

If we can swallow enough of our earthly pride to accept this metaphor, we come to see it not as making us abject, and without freedom or agency, but rather as fundamental to a thankful response to the gift of life from our Creator, and to the taking on of our human nature by his Son, and His standing alongside us.

The sheep-shepherd relationship, properly understood, actually gives us considerable agency and responsibility. The Old Testament prophets often condemned the leaders of the Israelites for failing in their duties to shepherd their people faithfully, and Jesus clearly felt the same about the Temple authorities of his day – that they left their sheep ‘shepherdless’. The covenant between the Lord God and the Israelites was not primarily about land and entitlement, but about their relationship with him, and their standing for him in the world. This was powerfully expressed in the passage we heard – about their being brought out of slavery, from Exodus earlier: ‘Ye have seen…. how I bare you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto myself… Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me….a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation’. This same wording would be taken up in the First New Testament Epistle of Peter to describe the role and calling of Christ’s Church.

The Apostles in our Gospel were sent out by Jesus, firstly with a sobering estimate of the vastness of their mission: ‘The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest’. He then instructed them: ‘as ye go, preach, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand”. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give.’ Following Jesus the Good Shepherd requires us to manifest the kingdom of heaven in our times and to strive to cast out the ‘devils’ and ‘unclean spirits’ of our day, reaching out with compassion to all who are ‘fainting’ and are ‘scattered abroad’.

Our Area Bishop, +Anderson, has set a commendable example in this responsibility. Himself a person of colour from a racial minority, he’s nonetheless willing to identify with the aching sense of abandonment felt by some who find themselves left-behind in our society and ‘talked-over’ in political debate. He’s written that many he’s spoken to who went on various recent marches and demonstrations (though admittedly before the riots that have made the news over the last week) came along because they needed ‘to connect’, and ‘wanted to belong’. He’s spoken of the need to find a way of dismantling what he calls ‘the exhausting “us” and “them” binaries of our current culture, and finally begin to live the “us” that God always intended’ – to realise our divine interconnectedness. He highlights the fact that the values of our Christian faith are not conditioned by this political world, making it uniquely positioned to ‘bridge this divide’, and he writes: ‘At a time such as this, the Church’s ultimate calling is to discover how, rather than mirroring the divisions of the world, we can truly become the healing, unifying presence for which this nation so desperately aches.’ So may we be alert and responsive to the need for labourers in this harvest.

 

Today’s Gospel reading begins with the call of Matthew, as told by St Matthew in his Gospel. Many people think it was a sort of signature.

Years ago, I did a class in the primary school in my previous parish on the call of the disciples, and I rather majored on Matthew’s call.

I made a lot of Matthew being a collector of taxes. I should have realised that 9 year olds (bless them) have not a clue what taxes are.

Anyway, I waxed lyrical about collecting taxes and Matthew at his seat of custom, and then I asked them to do a drawing.

As I went to look round the drawings they were doing, I noticed several of them had a man sitting at a stall with a whole cavalcade of black cabs. I should have realised, as many had fathers who were black cab drivers. The children thought Matthew was a collector of TAXIS!

The call of a tax collector, our Gospel writer, Matthew, for this year focuses our minds on calling, and this is what I would like to dwell on.

Ten days ago the Pope issued a significant teaching document on AI, artificial intelligence. Coincidentally there was a debate in the House of Lords on Friday on it as well, introduced by the Archbishop of Canterbury. You may remember Fr Matt Harbage, when he was here signalled that we needed to on the alert about the significance of what was coming, and now it is with us.

The Pope’s Teaching document Magnifca Humanitas has been recognised to be not just significant but seminal, and sits in a vital tradition, that of Christian Social thought.

Archbishop Sarah’s impressive speech on Friday, drew very much on this tradition too. I am remiss because I have not spoken enough about Christian Social thought, and there is much to mine in it.

Pope Leo’s choice of name is significant.

Leo XIII had the heart of his time as Pope a real interest in late 19^th society, and its best ordering. His Encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891 changed how Catholicism engaged with the world, economic systems and the workplace.

In the late 19^th c there was a convergence of thought in this area amongst Christians which was ahead of the ecumenical movement. Currents in Anglican Thought aligned naturally with Catholic social teaching. Someone called FD Maurice, Professor at King’s London, and later Charles Gore, Bishop of Oxford, founder of the Community of the Resurrection, were in precisely the same groove. The Roman Church picked up the ball and ran with it in the generation which followed.

Christian Social thought is not to be confused with Christian Socialism.

Christian Social thought centres on a Biblical understanding of humanity’s relationship with God and itself its main strands are:

• Human dignity
• The Common Good
• Solidarity
• Subsidiarity
• The preferential option for the poor – which is rooted in the Magnificat, Mary’s hymn at the start of Luke’s Gospel.
• The dignity of work and workers’ rights
• The care for creation

Magnifica Humanitas starts where Leo XIII started, with a full statement about fundamental human dignity. The human potential for divinity, made clear in the creation story, where we are made in God’s likeness underlines our destiny and beauty, and how nothing else created can take this from us.

Archbishop Sarah quoted a later Anglican Thinker in this field, arguably one of the greatest, William Temple, Archbishop during much of WWII, who :

“described a central occupation of Christian social thought as being ‘man’s dignity, tragedy, and destiny’.”[She continued] ‘I have spoken today of humanity’s inherent dignity, but it is our fallenness, the tragedy, which makes technology’s power so seductive and the risk of its abuse so often our story. In the Christian tradition, there is a call that overrides the lust for power – it is the call to service.

So what are we called to?

Matthew’s story reminds us that the Church exists because Jesus still says, “Follow me” to unlikely people like tax collectors or me and you.

Hosea’s words from the first lesson which Jesus quotes as the rationale for the call of Matthew, remain searching for every generation of Christians. “I desired mercy, and not sacrifice”.

God’s desire for mercy asks whether our worship, leads to compassion and the proclamation of human dignity. Jesus underlines the dignity of the outcast, honours those who are shamed and challenges those divided to cohere.

Perhaps the deepest lesson of these readings, as we contemplate calling, in a world of intricate complexity, is that mercy is not one Christian virtue among others. Mercy is participation in the very life of God. We show mercy because we have received mercy. Matthew could never forget that he sat at the tax booth when Christ called him.

Whether we collect taxes or taxis or the inanities and ephemera of this world, we are called to give them away, to serve others, and in showing mercy to seek to proclaim the one who confers upon each of us a sovereign dignity. He calls us to offer mercy not sacrifice, because his mercy is his sacrifice of himself.

 

 

 

On this day, Trinity Sunday, we rejoice in the Trinity of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Three in One and One in Three, holy, blessed, Trinity.

The Trinity is the triumph of light over dark, and good over evil.  In our liturgical cycle it is the culmination of all that went before; that is the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Yet the disciples who followed Jesus in his earthly life were not at that stage of rejoicing.  In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus commissions them to ‘go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’. In this passage there is a reference to the Trinity, but the disciples have a journey ahead of them in spreading the word and, as Matthew’s Gospel presents it to us, not all of them are sure about who Jesus is as he appears to them on the mountain of Galilee.  They doubt his authority and, aware of this doubt, Jesus gives a resounding response that all authority in heaven and earth has been given to him and this authority expresses itself in his commission to the disciples to baptize and teach the baptized to obey everything that he has commanded them.

There is a stern, rather military, quality in the tone of this commission. As such, it stands in contrast to the progression of appearances of Jesus that lead up to this commissioning.  This progression, as David Pawson writes in his Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, is a gentle one of the appearance of Jesus to Mary, then to Peter, then on the road to Emmaus, then to the eleven and finally to every tribe on earth.  The tone is quite severe, perhaps to ensure that the disciples will undertake the mission not just to the Jews but also to the Gentiles. The mood then softens in the assurance he gives them that he is with them always, to the end of the age.  This is the covenant that God will never desert his creation. It is rather like a parent saying to their child that they must do as they are bid, but their command is rooted in love; a love that is there for their child always.

Here we see authority as an expression of love. I believe that this is where things went a bit awry in the ‘be what you want to be, do what you want to do’ philosophy that took flight in the 1960s. There was a good intention behind that philosophy as it wanted to offer freedom of the spirit to everyone.  A freedom that says do not be bound by any rules but choose what you want to do when you want to do it. Yet I believe that this philosophy leads to a void in human affairs because it does not readily accept duty and service to others which can involve a certain self-discipline and working through difficult situations to produce good outcomes. That working through difficult situations involves service to mankind and that service is at the heart of the Christian faith. God served mankind by offering his Son’s death on the Cross for our salvation.  Jesus served mankind in his obedience to God’s will to the point of agonizing death, and we serve each other in our journey through life.  In the Commission, the disciples are told that their service will be, as the Jerome Biblical Commentary gives it, to carry on Jesus’s teaching ministry, lay the foundations for Christian education, theology and intellectual work.  None of this means a fanatical adherence to the rule book but rather a world ruled by love that manifests itself in helping each other along the road.

What authority does is that it allows for you to be challenged.  As Ian Boxall writes in his Commentary on Matthew, ‘Jesus challenges his followers to be in a  constant state of readiness until his coming at the end of time’. They must be alert to God’s will in the onset of the mission to all nations which is a shift from the mission to the Jews towards the time of the church. Boxall writes that this is so that the Gentiles can share with Jesus in the post-Resurrection of the church. He goes on to say that today’s Gospel reading reflects Matthew’s emphasis on the aftermath of the Resurrection in its effect on the disciples and the world.

If we look at this effect beyond the time of the Commission to the life of St Paul, we can read in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians a similarity with Matthew’s text in Paul’s farewell when he calls upon them to put things in order, listen to what he asks them to do and live in peace. He asks them to ‘love one another and greet one another with a holy kiss’. Here we see a gentler version of the Commission text but there is an instruction given by Paul for the Corinthians to follow. An instruction that is rooted, as the Commission is, in love.

Since love is the motivator for authority let us rejoice in that love that is the Trinity of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

 

AMEN

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Thursday, Ascension Day, I invited as our preacher the new vicar of St Saviour’s. Reflecting on the mystery of the Resurrection and the Ascension, he naughtily observed “It is little wonder that some clergy mysteriously arrange guest preachers around this time of year!” He was gracious enough to say that in his previous parish, he had done the same.

Philip looked at the Ascension as a letting go, the means by which the disciples – the Church – could allow the Jesus they had known to vanish from their sight, so they might keep him in their hearts, and so that the limitations of time and space might give way to the infinity of eternity.

At the risk of plagiarising his best lines, he quoted a poem I didn’t know, by C Day Lewis, Walking Away, as he contemplates his son Sean stepping into independence, remembering past partings:

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.

I would like to reflect on two slightly different thoughts relating to the Ascension. The first is betweenness and the second is doubt.

Let’s start with doubt. I am never quite sure what the definition of faith is, but I am pretty sure it’s not certainty, and I am sure too it’s not knowledge. St Paul is suspicious of knowledge “knowledge puffeth up”.

The Ascension, particularly in the space age – we’ve had men and a woman heading to the moon recently, there is a sputnik in the Benedicte window – is confounding if it actually means that Jesus went up to heaven.

Stupid thoughts crowd my unscientific mind: when did he stop going up, what happened behind the clouds, when they shrouded the mystery of his disappearance. It’s clear this is mystery talk, but it’s not made easier by today’s two readings.

Attentive readers of might have spotted immediately the puzzle. At the end of Gospel of Luke, the Ascension happens on Easter Day itself: Jesus leads his disciples out, blesses them, and is carried up into heaven. It is swift, seamless, immediate. But when we open the Acts of the Apostles, written by the same author, we are told that Jesus appears to the disciples over forty days, before ascending. The same event, the same author—yet told and even dated differently.

What are we to make of this?

Does it increase our faith? It certainly irritates mine – why can’t the Bible say what it means?

Doubt, scepticism, puzzling, being confounded – they are all alright.

The nature of the stories that are told in it, by different authors, with different backgrounds and audiences and purposes is to cajole, intrigue and puzzle, not only to provide pat-answers and satisfying solutions. The Resurrection stories are all a part of this. Not to tease or upset us, but to avoid proposition and over-simplicity. Life isn’t simple and we all know that – so faith – the most important part of life shouldn’t be simple either.

Scholars suggest that Luke is not contradicting himself but shaping the story for a reason. At the end of the Gospel, Luke compresses events—he “telescopes” resurrection, ascension, and worship into one radiant conclusion.

In Acts, he stretches the same reality out, giving us forty days of appearances, teaching, and preparation.

One is a liturgical ending, the other a missionary beginning.

In other words, the Ascension is told twice because it does two things. It is both an ending and a beginning.

The Sunday after Ascension has a particular place in the Church’s year. Christ has ascended; the Spirit has not yet been given at Pentecost.

The Gospel reading from Gospel of John gives us Jesus’ great prayer in chapter 17. He does not ask that they be taken out of the world, but that they be kept within it. They are to remain in that place of tension: between heaven and earth, between promise and fulfilment, between what has been accomplished and what is yet to come.

And so much of life feels like that, does it not? Waiting for a diagnosis, or waiting for healing. Living between grief and acceptance (I have been working with a family in exactly that situation). Holding together hope and fear.

Luke shows us that even the Ascension itself must be lived twice: once as fulfilment, once as waiting.

Jesus prays not for our escape, but for our perseverance. He promises the gift of the Spirit and although we celebrate Pentecost next week  we don’t have to wait until then to know its abiding presence with us. Week by week as we come together to receive the Eucharist, so the Spirit is outpoured on us in renewal of our Baptism and assurance of the presence of the Spirit with us.

So we are one with Christ “For they are thine, and all mine are thine, I come to thee Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are.

 

 

 

Laudabo Nomen Domini

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The Parting of Friends

The season between Easter and Pentecost can be a dangerous time for preachers. Throughout most of the year we can manage with stories, parables, miracles, perhaps the occasional sheep. But suddenly, in these few weeks, we are expected to explain the Ascension, the Holy Spirit, and then, just when confidence is beginning to fail entirely, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. It is little wonder that some clergy mysteriously arrange guest preachers around this time of year!

The trouble is that people often want diagrams. They want the mechanics of it all explained. What exactly happened on Ascension Day? Did Jesus literally rise upwards into the clouds? Where is heaven? How can God be Three and One? There is always a temptation to turn Christianity into a kind of theological engineering project, as though salvation depended upon getting the diagrams correct.

But the heart of the matter, the heart of our faith, is not a set of theological diagrams. We are not called simply to agree with statements about God, as one might assent to a proposition.  We are called to live within the reality those words are trying to express—to discover, from the inside, the transforming love of God in Christ. Faith is not standing outside the language and examining it; it is living within it, breathing it, allowing it to reshape us.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once warned against turning Christianity into a religion of the letter, as though discipleship were merely a matter of rule-keeping. The life of faith is something deeper, more demanding, and more alive than that.

So on this day, we do not need to imagine the Ascension as though it were a kind of celestial launch—Christ rising like a rocket into the upper atmosphere. That picture, vivid though it may be, misses the point. The question is not how it happened in a physical sense, but what it meant—what it meant for those first disciples, and what it means for us.

St Luke is the only Evangelist who gives us a full account. In his Gospel, he tells us that Jesus led his disciples out as far as Bethany, lifted his hands in blessing, and, in the very act of blessing, parted from them. And he continues in the Acts of the Apostles, writing that as they watched, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.

It is a strangely gentle ending. No thunder, no trumpets, no drama—just a blessing, and then absence.

In St Luke’s narrative the Ascension brings to a close that series of resurrection appearances which we have been reflecting on through these days of Easter: moments of sudden recognition and swift disappearance. Mary in the garden. The disciples on the road to Emmaus. Thomas in the upper room. Breakfast by the lakeshore. Again and again, Christ is present—and then he is gone.

These were not random encounters. They were a preparation. They were teaching the disciples how to discover a new kind of presence, a presence no longer bound by sight or touch.

Christ speaks to them not as distant followers, but as those he loves. There is, in this moment, something of the pain that we know and recognise in every deep farewell.

He knows what it is to part, to leave behind the companionship of shared meals and familiar voices. It is, at its heart, a parting of friends.

And yet, this is not an ending. It is a widening.

Until now, the disciples have known Christ in the flesh, in a particular place and time. Now they must learn to know him differently—to see him with a deeper sight. The relationship is not ended; it is transformed.

St Augustine put it with characteristic simplicity: he vanished from their sight so that they might keep him in their hearts.

But this transformation requires something costly. It requires letting go. The disciples must release the Christ they can see and hold, in order to receive the Christ who will be present everywhere. They must lose, in order to find. And that is never easy.

It is a lesson we recognise, if we are honest. Much of life is shaped by such moments—times when we are asked to let go of what is familiar, what is dear, what has sustained us, so that something new may be given. The child walking into school for the first time. The friend, moving away. The closing of one chapter, before the next is clear.

C Day Lewis captures it beautifully in his poem Walking Away, as he watches his son Sean step into independence:

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.

Love is proved in the letting go.

The Ascension is not Christ abandoning his disciples. It is Christ drawing them into maturity. This is the moment when they begin, at last, to stand on their own feet. This is the first time that they truly let him go. And in the letting go, they discover they have not lost him at all.

“Lo, I am with you always, even to the close of the age.”

And this is where the promise of the Holy Spirit comes into view. “When the Spirit of truth comes,” Jesus says, “he will guide you into all truth.”

The Spirit is not an external force, hovering at a distance. The Spirit is the very breath of God, given within us—working not just on the surface of our lives, but there in the depths of our lives. Not confined to the respectable, or well-ordered parts of ourselves, but reaching into all that we are.

The Spirit reconciles what we think we are with what we truly are. The Spirit exposes what fear would keep hidden, and gently draws it into the light. The Spirit liberates us—not into some abstract holiness, but into the glorious freedom of being fully alive before God.

And perhaps that is finally what the Ascension teaches us: that Christ is not absent from the world, only absent in ways we might have expected.

We spend so much of our lives longing for certainty, for visible signs, for God to stand plainly before us and remove the burden of faith. Yet the risen Christ departs from the sight of the disciples not to abandon them, but to deepen their vision. He withdraws from their grasp so that they may discover him everywhere.

Not only in moments of glory or religious intensity, but in bread broken and shared; in acts of mercy; in wounds borne patiently; in love that survives disappointment; in the lonely places where we thought heaven could never reach.

The irascible Welsh priest / poet R S Thomas spoke of God as the great absence in our lives, and yet it is precisely within that seeming absence that the soul learns to attend, to listen, to wait. The silence itself becomes inhabited. The emptiness becomes charged with presence.

The disciples stand gazing upwards into the cloud, but the angels gently turn them back towards the world. There is work to do now. Bread to break. Good news to proclaim. A kingdom to embody. That is where the Ascension leads us. Not away from the earth, but deeper into it. Not out of humanity, but into a fuller humanity.

And they go back to Jerusalem, St Luke tells us, not in despair, but with great joy.

Joy, because they have begun to understand that the love of Christ is no longer confined to one place, one voice, one body that can be lost again to violence and death. It has become vast as heaven itself, moving quietly through the world in the power of the Holy Spirit.

And so we too must learn the strange holiness of letting go. To trust that beyond what can be seen or possessed or controlled, Christ is still drawing near.

Not always in shining clarity. Perhaps more often in silence.

Not always in answers. Perhaps more often in longing.

Not always in certainty. Perhaps more often in trust.

Until, little by little, through prayer, and mercy, and suffering, and hope, the world itself becomes transformed by the presence of God.

 

Amen.

 

 

John 14 Jesus Promises the Holy Spirit

On this Rogation Sunday, it is fitting to hear these words from
Paul to the Athenians, “the God who made the world and
everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth.” (Rogation
comes from the Latin ‘rogare’ – to ask or beseech). If we were
in a more rural parish as I was last weekend, we might be
‘beating the bounds’ – walking the parish boundary – and
praying blessings on God’s creation and the crops that are just
emerging for as Paul goes on to say “he himself (that is God)
gives everyone life and breath and everything else.” What a
reminder of the nature of God with whom we have the privilege
to have a personal relationship; a relationship made possible
through the self sacrifice and resurrection of Christ,
remembered and celebrated at Easter just a few weeks ago.

At this point in Acts, Paul is speaking, having seen the promise
of the Holy Spirit we read about in our Gospel this morning
fulfilled. Jesus at that last supper tells the disciples “I will ask
the Father and he will give you another advocate to help you
and be with you forever – the Spirit of truth.” Paul has first-hand
knowledge of the outpouring of God’s love through the Holy
Spirit after his dramatic encounter with God on the road to
Damascus. He wants to share the joy of knowing God with
those Athenians who he perceived to be searching for a true
God.

People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very
religious.  For as I walked around and looked carefully at your
objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to
an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you
worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.”

His words could appear to us to be judgmental and perhaps
arrogant – especially in the context of our current experience of
living in a country where multiple faiths co-exist and intolerance
results in acts of hatred, persecution and even violence towards
the most vulnerable. Paul, we know had a fiery character –
exemplified both before and now after his encounter with God. I
admire his enthusiasm to share his personal experience and
the certainty of his faith even if I find his approach to be less
tolerant or curious than mine would be now.

My reality, which I am sure is not unique, is that I sometimes
feel uncertainty, doubt, and wonder where the Holy Spirit is. All
of these feelings are in tension with my faith in God. But this is
the reality of a living relationship with God.

So I find comfort and a path laid out in our Gospel and other
readings. In the Gospel written by John we are at a point in our
Easter journey, sitting at the last supper, with the early disciples
whose faith is about to go through the most enormous test; the
pretence of a trial and subsequent execution of Jesus which
would surely appear to be the end their transformative journey
which had started just a few years earlier.

And yet in the verses in 1 Peter, probably written almost 30
years after those momentous events of Easter, we see that the
journey before the disciples will forge a faith and trust in God
that they can not possibly imagine in those dark moments… vs
14 – “But even if you should suffer for what is right, you are
blessed. “Do not fear their threats[b]; do not be
frightened.”[c] 15 But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord.” How
different from the uncertainty in those early days following
Jesus death and resurrection.

What a great example we have then of faith in action, God’s
loving support poured out through the Holy Spirit and the
impact these disciples went on to make through their early
tentative steps with Jesus’ guidance, the growing confidence
after Pentecost and the evidence of Christs church on Earth
growing from those first 12 grains.

Where ever we are on that journey of faith, and like them – we
may not know where it will lead – let us remember to make
space to listen and acknowledge the continuing work of the
Holy Spirit through us, others and the whole of Gods creation.
As we go out of here, we may not be Beating the Bounds of the
parish but we can notice the beauty and joy in God’s creation
around us. It may be a bird, a child, an act of kindness, a wise
word – what ever it is that moves you, take a moment to
acknowledge and thank God.

From that point it is a smaller step to listen to those internal
stirrings, the still small voice of God, and to have faith enough
to act on them – an offer of help or support, even a smile can
have an impact that no except the other person and God will
ever know.

Paul points out “he (God) is not served by human hands, as if
he needed anything.” – we are not obliged to DO anything for
his benefit. Coming to church for example is not for his benefit,
but it is a chance for us to be still, listen and experience his
presence. [God takes delight in us spending time with him and
with each other… from Matthew 18, “where 2 or 3 gather in my
name, there I am with them”.] We are exhorted by Peter to
“always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks
you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this
with gentleness and respect, “that is to share generously and
gently our hope, joy and faith with those that are made curious
through our actions – the way we live our lives.
Thanks be to God

One of the features of the early, 1^st century Church we can’t have missed as we’ve heard the readings in our worship over these weeks of Eastertide is uncertainty. The disciples continued to meet together for prayer and fellowship, but firstly, they were chastened by the memory of their Lord’s brutal crucifixion and the experience of having failed him. Secondly, even after ‘the third day’, the gradual awareness that Christ was risen spread… yes, joy, but also startlement. His appearances in their midst wrong-footed them at every turn, and the mixed emotion this drew is summed up well by the Gospel writer St Luke who, after the risen Lord has appeared and shown them – and invited them to touch – his hands and feet, describes the disciples in a telling phrase: ‘And while they yet believed not for joy, and wondered…’ . But it’s the Gospel of Mark – generally thought to be the first to have been written – that seems to reflect this complex picture consistently throughout its pages.

The starting point of that instruction by Jesus in today’s Gospel from Mark is as he and the disciples are coming out of the Temple in Jerusalem. One disciple remarks on the grandeur of its buildings, leading Jesus to prophecy starkly that those same buildings will all be thrown down and destroyed (as indeed they were, by the Romans in the year 70). Later, when they all ask him when this will come about, and how they will know. Jesus prefaces his explanation by saying, ‘Take heed lest any deceive you’. Though Mark’s account of this prophecy is, as with many others of Jesus’ sayings, virtually duplicated by Matthew and Luke in their own Gospels, this practical realism  – even scepticism – is a characteristic of Jesus throughout Mark’s portrayal of him. In spite of its brevity (or maybe because of it), Mark has traditionally been the least popular of the Gospels because of its comparative terseness – with fewer of the recorded miracles and less of the conventional teaching included within it, its puzzling air of secrecy, and the repeated failure of the disciples to understand Jesus.  Scholars have suggested variously that his Gospel is written for a church which, in the wake of the rapid spread of the faith to the Gentiles recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, had perhaps become too intoxicated by success, and the sensational, and was now baffled again by failures and opposition as it came under persecution. Rowan Williams observes that the Greek word at the very opening of Mark (translated as ‘The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God’) can also carry the meaning of ‘the first principal’, which might imply a stripping-back to the foundations. In a commentary on Mark, Williams suggests that we are meant to identify with the confusion and bafflement of the first disciples – maybe to bring to our reading and hearing of Mark our own dismay at the state of the world around us and the disunity of the church in our own day.

The cross is of course central to all the Gospels, but particularly so in Mark – about one third of his is taken up with the events of the last week of Jesus’ life. Lord Williams invites us to imagine living as Christians in the trouble spots of the world now and what it might be like to read the Gospel of Mark there, and he writes:-

‘These are the sorts of people for whom Mark was writing; writing to reinforce a faith in the God who does not step down from Heaven to solve problems but who is already in the heart of the world, holding the suffering and pain in himself and transforming it by the sheer indestructible energy of his mercy.’

Throughout Mark we are reminded of the complete ‘otherness’ of the Way of Jesus Christ from the ways of the world, and we’re therefore discouraged from ever imagining that we completely ‘get it’. The economy we are invited to live by is not of some plan for growth and prosperity (however necessary such things may be in commerce and government), but simply that of the Spirit of God – the Holy Ghost. As we heard just now, even those about to face persecution were told: ‘take no thought beforehand what ye shall speak, neither do ye premeditate: but whatsoever shall be given you in that hour, that speak ye’. We may well wonder at the abundance of faith that would really take. ‘Premeditation’ may not be the solution, but Jesus made clear by his teaching and his own example that prayer is the currency of the divine economy. In the Gospel’s first chapter he strides into Galilee ‘preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God’, saying that the kingdom ‘is at hand’ and calling people to repentance. Before long he announces to his disciples ‘Unto you it is given to know the mystery of’ that  kingdom – a kingdom which is not of this world, in which repentance completely alters our perspective on living and changes our values. So it is that, when ‘he that shall endure unto the end’ is commended by Jesus at the close of this morning’s Gospel, that ‘enduring’ consists not in grimly bearing all that life deals to us and simply hoping for it to get better, but in praying daily for his kingdom to come and waiting on his Spirit.

 

 

 

From the First Epistle General of John: “There is no fear in love;
but perfect love casteth out fear…”

Welcome to St. Mark’s on Low Sunday. It is particularly good to have
your company following ‘the week of Sundays’ comprising Holy Week
through Easter Day. Also known as Divine Mercy Sunday, today’s
readings encourage reflection on the gift of Easter – the salvation that
flows from the risen Jesus Christ in a one and done act of radical,
transformative mercy.

Through the words of today’s gospel writer, John, we circle back to
Easter Day twice –the first time on the evening of Resurrection Day, not
to its dawning as the first day of God’s new creation that we celebrated
last week. That happy claim is one we can boldly make as a church,
supported by Old and New Testaments and generations of practice and
enquiry. We also learn in the passage that this same claim is precisely
what Jesus commissions his believers to share now he has risen to
breathe the Holy Spirit upon us “as my Father hath sent me, even so
send I you”. We are to carry forward his kingdom in the world, without
fear of the limit of death to our existence and without the torment of
unforgiven sin. To quote N T Wright, “The resurrection is the beginning
of God’s new project…to colonise earth with the life of heaven.” A
formidable theologian, Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, wrote
“The resurrection is not a happy ending… it is God’s act that transforms
the cross into salvation.” And as John vividly shows, the risen Christ
brings peace that banishes fear and launches us into the world with
hope and faith. What wonderful Easter gifts to give baby James Philip
Cook as we welcome him upon his baptism in Christ this morning.

For the post-resurrection gifts that Jesus bestows are monumental.
First, his presence and with it, his peace. Second, evidence of his
transfigured wounds, permanent witness of how suffering is transformed
by his love. Next, his commission to go forth, teach and baptise all
nations, and with it, the Holy Spirit to enable us to fulfil it with faith. And
finally, the authority to forgive sin.

But on that first resurrection evening, it could only be those most stalwart
in belief and versed in scripture who might have any comforting
thoughts. For they had experienced extreme trauma: gruesome
crucifixion followed by cosmic disruptions of daytime darkness, torn
temple veils, earthquakes at the time of death and the time of rising from
the tomb, freeing some of the dead to walk the city streets. John tells us
not all the remaining apostles were in that sealed room awaiting their
own liberation. At least one, Thomas, was notably elsewhere. Judas
had counted himself out. We might also expect some core followers,
including those Jesus chose before he went to the cross…most likely it
was a group no more numerous than we find ourselves this morning. As
such, the early church comprised of survivors and mourners huddled
together in the same state of shock we see amongst the bombed of
Gaza, Beirut, Haifa, Teheran, Tel Aviv, a 1500-year-old Byzantine
church in Nahariya. Little wonder the door is shut, locked, and bolted
against the brutal power of tyrannical authority they have so recently
seen in action. What if the soldiers and officials came for them, too?

But wait, what about the witness of Mary Magdalen, seen at the close of
our recent passion play, who features in all gospel accounts at cross and
grave, with other ministering women variously reported? She who
discovered a stone rolled back, an empty tomb, abandoned grave
clothes, and a terrifying angelic presence before her actual encounter
with the risen Lord? Then goes on in faith and fear to fulfil her
instruction to tell the disciples to meet their risen Lord in Galilee? For
that matter, what about Luke’s account of Jesus’ appearance to two
unnamed disciples on the road to Emmaus earlier in the day? Or
simply, Jesus’ predictions of his arrest and death during the final days of
his direct ministry on earth?

Apparently, it runs counter to human perception to accept that Jesus
could actually be alive after being so comprehensively put to death and
buried. Even when this is reported by trustworthy sources of many years’
acquaintance…people who lived, worked, travelled, worshiped with you.
Even when the risen Jesus suddenly appears in a locked room, an
objective correlative for the state of fear that isolates us from his mercy
and our salvation. It’s all too strange, unnatural, scary. But he keeps
coming back –for our predecessors and for us –in his resurrected body,
in his sacraments, his prayer and interventions, offering us his peace,
equipping us with the power of the Holy Spirit. That first Easter evening,
the room may have been occupied only with those of imperfect faith. The
ones who slept whilst he wept in Gethsemane. The ones that fled when
he was arrested. The one who betrayed and the one who denied may be
the most shocking, but all let their Lord and themselves down. The ones
just like us sitting together in this room today.

By the second Easter evening, Thomas had returned to Jerusalem and
his locked-down fellows to meet reports of the risen Christ with disbelief
unless he, too, saw him AND had a personal examination of Jesus’
wounds. Again, appearing in their midst, Jesus extended his peace to
all, offered Thomas exactly what he required, then gently recommended
belief over faithlessness. We are not told, but I doubt that the apostle still
needed to touch the scars of nail and spear, so taken aback by not only
the presence but by his lord’s awareness of his ‘special terms’ that he
declared “My Lord and My God”, an A-star summary of Christology. And
a transformation by faith.

The divine, living and risen presence appears like the far side of the
moon unless faith frees the human heart from earth’s gravitational pull.
Think of Christian faith as an eternally available Artemis II spacecraft,
with room for all to have safe passage beyond human limits and to see
reality in a totally different perspective. To quote John, “there is no fear
in love”. To which add that love is righteous stuff that reflects God’s
image in us. But perfect love is in another dimension that can dismiss
and triumph over fear entirely because Jesus Christ triumphed over
death on the cross to lift us to his salvation. Divine Mercy indeed.
AMEN.

This Easter, has its backdrop several unique items of news, on earth a concerning international conflict, closer to home, a new Archbishop of Canterbury, and in space a voyage to the dark side of the moon.

When I was 9 years old, Robert Runcie was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. I dared to ask my headmaster if I could be let off afternoon lessons to watch it. Disarmed, the Head collected me from double-geography, and joined me for most of it; nerdishly, I commentated, he smiled indulgently.

Fifty years on I watched again before rushing for the 16.30 train from St Pancras to Canterbury West, missing the end, to arrive at Kent University for the evening reception – the ecclesiastical version of the Oscars-after-party!

I was struck by a conversation I had with the cabdriver en route. He’d been watching the service, his enthusiasm obvious. “I used to love history at school” he exclaimed, “today I feel part of history, a woman Archbishop!” He was from Brazil he said. “We love the Archbishops here. They often leave the station and wave at us cabbies, we know them all.”

He was continuing the long tradition of locals honouring their resident Prelate. She is Metropolitan of All England, second in precedence only after the monarch, but his Bishop. It was lovely.

Archbishop Sarah’s inauguration took place in Passiontide, on the Feast of the Annunciation. Adjacent to Holy Week, Theologically Nativity and Passion are never far apart.

The mantle the Archbishop wears is a heavy one indeed. The clasp of the physical cope she had made when she first became a Bishop, is her nurse’s buckle, a reminder of the connection between her vocations.

One more vignette on this year’s journey to Easter. On Wednesday evening, it was a privilege to share the Seder, with Jewish neighbours, who invited us to join their celebration of Pesach. Passover is a lunar Festival. The first New Moon after the Spring equinox. These celebrations are nearly always in synch. Paques in French, Pasca in several languages, underlines that the Church regards this feast as the Christian Passover; something the word Easter does not underline for us in English.

For our Jewish friends and neighbours Passover has constellated to it so many traditions. One which is very poignant and not much discussed is eating fish or chicken, to avoid any associated with the blood libel, a cruel projection onto English Jews in medieval times.

In the Seder, with its foundational connections with the Eucharist, Christians are on familiar ground; the same but, oh so different too, and wonderfully so. The family tells again the ancient story of the Exodus; youngest and oldest have their roles, the generations converge. Time concertinas, past becomes present.

Given the world’s complexity, to be taken back to the foundational story of God’s disruption of tyranny and salvation of His people, and to share, for a moment its origins, was moving beyond words.

The resurrection, for St Matthew, most Jewish of the Gospels, is a moment of earthshattering disruption too. There is an earthquake, as in Matthew’s account of the crucifixion – they spell the same reality. There is a terrifying angel too, on Easter day, not unlike the one who greets Mary in Luke.

In Matthew’s Gospel from Herod at the beginning, to Pilate at the end, and the wilting soldiers at the tomb, Jesus’s life unfolds in the shade of tyrannical powers. Their paranoia leads them to stifle opposition – in Herod’s case, even when it’s just a baby.

The tomb is sealed, not a precaution, but an assertion: this story is over. And Easter is God’s answer: no it is not.

This Easter the Church has a re-set with Archbishop Sarah’s enthronement.

Reflection will chart the road ahead. Recognising the failures to safeguard the vulnerable; revisiting the compromise option for same-sex unions which united all voices in opposition to the proposals; and finding a way to foster a healthy environment for the future, are unenviable tasks.

The women at the tomb that first Easter were not asked to form a committee or refine a vision statement – thank God, we have had enough of those in the last 14 years! The angel gives them a commission.

“And they departed quickly… with fear and great joy.”

It is in going—not in complete understanding—that they become the first witnesses.

The stone is moved by the act of God, Jesus already having risen.

“Do not be afraid.”

Not because there is nothing to fear, we live in a world full of reasons to quake. The women are still afraid. But fear in Matthew no longer has the last word.

And as they depart, uncertain and fearful, on the way they encounter not an idea, not a programme, but a person. The risen Christ.

This Passover, with astronauts heading to the moon to explore its dark-side, while earth has its own that it struggles to bring into the light, let us have eyes to see the Risen Christ. Despite our fears, may we bear witness to him who is our light and our salvation.

On this day, Good Friday, when we remember and reflect upon the death of Jesus on the Cross, I am going to imagine that I am standing near the Cross and gazing in sorrow at the body nailed upon it. A body that is close to death.  It is the body of a man who has been severely flogged and whose head is bleeding from the Crown of Thorns placed upon it.  This tells me all I need to know about the acute suffering of Jesus on the Cross, a suffering that was given to us by God, through his son Jesus, to save us from the power of sin and offer us the promise of eternal life in his Kingdom.

While I stand by the Cross, I have a longing to see the face of Jesus which I cannot see because his head is drooped as life ebbs away from his body.  Such a vision would, I believe, give me a glimpse of the divine.

Emerging from this act of my imagination, I have studied texts written by a PhD student and authors of commentaries which affirm that we cannot in any event say for certain what Jesus looked like, either in face or body. The PhD thesis attempts to explain this absence in a variety of ways and I will mention a few.

One explanation is that Jesus is a boundless character for whom a physical description would not be apropos to his characterisation. Another is that physical descriptions in Jewish scripture are rare. This in contrast to the description given by ancient biographers of the physical appearance of kings, slaves and philosophers in the Graeco-Roman world. The author of the thesis writes that Jesus can be described as a king or a slave but not physically described as such because his kingdom was not of this world, and he is only a slave in the sense of being a slave on the Cross. He shares with philosophers a description of the simple attire that they wore but the ancient biographers were less concerned with the physiognomy of philosophers as the emphasis with them was upon their souls. Nor was the image of Jesus well known in iconographical representations as the evangelists lacked the motivation and capacity to manipulate the distinction of Jesus’ ‘public’ appearance and reality which was one of the main functions of kingly descriptions in ancient literature and, as the thesis gives it to us, a ‘kingly’ appearance might not have been able to convey the kingship of Jesus which was not of this world.

Can we then have any indication of what Jesus looked like?  We could make our starting point using the statement made by Pontius Pilate to the crowds when he presented Jesus, scoured and crowned with thorns.  He said ‘Ecce Homo’ meaning ‘behold the man’. This is a start, but it does not give us any indication of what Jesus looked like beyond the fact that he was a man. We do have a description of Jesus in Isaiah chapter 52 as having a ‘marred appearance’ beyond that of human semblance and his form beyond that of mortals’.  This dramatic description is given for Jesus as ‘the suffering servant’ and was popular amongst the Early Church Fathers but to my mind it sits at odds with the presentation of Jesus to the crowds by Pontius Pilate. How could a ‘form beyond that of mortals’ be presented as ‘the man’. It also sits at odds with the fact that Jesus went unnoticed to the Festival of Booths, as given in the Gospel of John.  How could he have done this if his appearance was out of the ordinary?  The implication here is that Jesus was average looking and I favour that conclusion as I find it hard to believe that the disciples and the people Jesus encountered in his ministry would have done so if his appearance was beyond that of human semblance.

What I do believe is that in an ordinary looking man we are given a glimpse of the divine in his appearance at certain moments in the Bible.  One such is the Transfiguration when the face of Jesus ‘shone like the son and his clothes became dazzling white’. In Revelation, Jesus is described as ‘the Son of Man, whose head and hair were white as white wool, white as the snow; his eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace’. It was this divinity that enabled him to perform miracles and to rise from the dead.

We may not have a description of what Jesus looked like, but we could say that the silence about his appearance is there to give us a full understanding of who he was and how we can perceive ourselves in relation to him and to God.  My view is that, as given in the opening sentence of John’s Gospel, ‘in the beginning was the Word’. The Word was with God and the Word was God’.  In Jesus, as the Son of God, the Word became flesh.  It became flesh but the Word came first.  The flesh signifies because it was crucified on the Cross but as the Word came first so the Gospel writers draw our attention to the words of Jesus, and his actions, rather than his appearance. We need primarily to hear his words. For example when says: ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’. This statement reflects his boundless character. Also, we, as Christians, need to see ourselves, as St Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, not walking according to the flesh but according to the spirit.

Let me finish by returning to the realm of my imagination to hear the words of Jesus saying ‘it is finished’ and watch his body being taken down from the Cross in the sure knowledge that his death is not a defeat but a triumph over the power of death and a prelude to the glory of the Resurrection.

 

AMEN

 

 

 

 

About 20 years ago, the son of a friend of mine had to do a school project on “My Hero.” His father, my friend, also a clergyman was proud but somewhat surprised by his son’s choice of topic, so he asked him “Alex, why did you choose Jesus as My Hero?” “Well Daddy” said Alex “I couldn’t spell Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

The word hero is used rather casually today. Sports people are called heroes if they defeat a better team against the odds. Think how often you heard the word hero at the winter Olympics or in the 6 nations rugby. Popstars are called heroes if they do some physical task and raise money for charity. Much as I like sport and music, I am not sure that I would call sport stars or musicians heroes. In fact I am sure I would not (stand fast Paralympians perhaps).

In my work as a military chaplain, I have however worked with a number of heroes. In the hospital at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan and in the desert of Iraq, there were any number of heroes and heroic events. The fact that such events were conducted in 50 degree heat, in mud-summer, made them even more remarkable. In the 10 degree heat of NW1 in this season of Lent however, what can heroism say to us?

Our gospel story this morning is about Jesus asking the  Samaritan woman for a drink of water. What’s this story about? Well, we could think that it is about sin and repentance and moral purity – except that it’s not. It isn’t a story about morality, sexual or otherwise.

Stories with women at the centre don’t happen very often in our scripture. When they do, they often want us to understand the story as a miniature morality lesson with a woman as the tawdry example. There’s Eve, for example, castigated as the one through whom sin and death entered the world.

And there is Mary Magdalene, friend of Jesus, one of his first disciples. We know her as a harlot, though none of that comes from scripture. What does come from scripture is that she was the first witness to the Resurrection.

Women are not very often at the centre of our scripture stories, and when they are it’s often because they did something important, something worth noting and remembering, something that sets a good example of faith. Women show up so infrequently in our scripture stories, that when they are there, it might be a signal to look closer, dig deeper, wait for the critical message that will be revealed.

If we look in a Bible that names stories – you know the kind that puts story titles on the top of the page, we see that this story from John’s Gospel is often known simply as The Woman at the Well. Sometimes it is known as The Woman of Samaria. Both of these factors are important to the story in identifying who she was.

First, a woman. Second, a Samaritan woman. Third, an immoral Samaritan woman. By anyone’s reckoning, she is a rather poor choice for an illustration of goodness – someone highly incredible as a disciple. In her own time, she was nobody to a Jewish man.

This is the longest conversation recorded in the New Testament between Jesus and anybody. There has to be something in this story more important than how many men she had known.

Consider the story. Jesus asks the woman for a drink of water. She expresses her astonishment that he would talk to her. He says to her that if she only knew who he was, she’d be asking him for a drink – of living water. She says, “Okay. May I have a drink of this water?” He says, “Go. Call your husband!” Now, to this point, she’s talking about plain old well water. And while that’s the drink that Jesus asked from her, it is not the water he offers to her.

After the woman realizes Jesus is the Messiah, after she realises what he’s been talking about as “living water,” she takes her new and tentative and shallow and not-yet-fully-formed faith and tells someone about it.

She went back to the city, the scripture says, and talked to people about her experience. “Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony… And many more believed because of [Jesus’] word. They said to the woman, ‘It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Saviour of the world.’”

That’s the highpoint of the story: the believers. And it all started when she believed, and when she told someone else of her belief.

Her understanding may have been incomplete; “He can’t be the Messiah, can he?” But it was enough to hook people, to make them think, to invite them in. “Many Samaritans in that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony.” This woman, who is often remembered badly in Church history, who would not have been considered a credible witness, was an early disciple.

This woman, whose witness and testimony were only as strong as: “He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” brought many to faith. So think: how will history remember you? Will it be for your behaviour, or for your testimony?

This woman, the Samaritan woman at the well, is an example to us of discipleship. However strong or weak or confused or partial or new or unclear or even certain your faith, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you are faithful.

The encouragement to spread the Good News, to talk of faith and the wonders of God, permeates scripture. That’s what this gospel story is about. We may not be called to be heroic, or to be like a figure in an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, but we are called, like to the woman at the well, to be faithful. Don’t strive for heroism, strive to drink from the living water offered by Jesus.

When asked for a drink of water, what will you offer from your own well? Amen.