'Saved by the Cross of Christ'. But How?

 Text:  Romans 3.22b-31

According to the Apostle Paul, you and I are made right in God’s eyes not by our keeping of God’s law or commandments, but by our faith in God’s gracious gift of righteousness which, we are told, comes to us by way of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. In this event, we are told, God reconciles us to himself, for the death of Jesus is not just any death. It is a sacrifice of atonement that puts aside the sin that estranges us from God so that we might be reconciled to God once more. Therefore, says Paul, there can be no room for boasting in the Christian community. Who we are and what we have is a gift, pure and simple. No one can brag about how much they’ve achieved, because the power to be right in God’s eyes is a power that comes not from the human person, but from the free sacrifice of God’s own son for our sake.

Surely we moderns would have a few questions to ask about all this, however. If God is willing to forgive our sins, no matter how good or bad we’ve been, why doesn’t God just get on and do that without any fuss? Why is it necessary to have all this complicated business about sacrificing Jesus on the cross? Wouldn’t it have been easier for God to say ‘I’m o.k., you’re o.k.’ and leave it at that? And wouldn’t Jesus himself have been significantly better off?

Well, a number of theories have been put forward to explain why Jesus had to die, some of them better than others. The one that has been most influential in our own Reformed tradition was championed by Jean Calvin and is often known as the theory of ‘penal substitution’. Here God is likened to a Lawmaker and Judge who, having made the laws that define sin and goodness, is now compelled to enforce that law for the sake of consistency, even if the consequences are catastrophic. For if the penalty of sin is death, then all are destined to suffer the punishment of death, for all have sinned. Now, that can be put in a more nuanced way, of course. One could argue that death is not a penalty that God imposes so much as the interior meaning of sin itself—i.e. that sin is the beginning of death in the midst of life, because it is a straying from God as the source of life—which I think is right. Yet the logical result, in the end, is still the same. That everyone who sins dies, and that God, having made a universe in which it works like that, is still ultimately responsible for the fact. What Calvin argued for, as a way of salvation for us all, was the death of the righteous man Jesus, in the place of the rest of humanity, who are sinners. Jesus is punished instead of us. Jesus dies in our place, so that we don’t have to be punished at all.

There are a number of rather obvious problems with this account. First, how is it possible that the sacrifice of only one righteous man manages to pay the debt of sin for all people? Isn’t there are serious mismatch there? Why would God, under his own rule of an ‘eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ wipe out the debt of millions? Second, and more seriously in my view, isn’t there something a little immoral in letting people off the hook so easily? If people who are troubled by their own sins, or the sins of their world, turn up to church and all we have to tell them is that ‘God is no longer angry about your sin—all God’s anger was spent on Jesus’, I’m not sure that they’re going to be that impressed. Because the next day they’re going to be caught up in sin all over again, and they’re not going to feel that sin has been finally dealt with.

There is something deep in the human psyche that knows jolly well that sin cannot be entirely done away with apart from an act of the will, a deeply moral choice to turn away from one’s past and live differently. We all know that moral truth, deep down. From that perspective, then, a God who lets us off the hook apart from that moral striving would be an immoral God. Note that Paul himself, at the end of the passage we read just now, does not exempt Christians from keeping the law of God. Finally, then, the biggest problem with the penal substitution theory of atonement is that it is all so objective, and impersonal. It’s like ‘O, so Jesus suffered the punishment for my sin? Right. And all this happened two-thousand years ago? Right. Well. That’s great, I guess, but why don’t I feel forgiven?’ To summarise: we all know, deep down, that an objective transaction between Jesus and his Father a long time ago is of no real help for us right now, in this world, at this time, in the midst of the broken lives we are dealing with.

So, if Jesus didn’t die to take God’s punishment for my sins, what possible purpose can there be in his death? And, more importantly, what relevance (if any) has that death for us today, here in the midst of our struggles with sins both personal and corporate? Well, strangely enough, some of the answers can be found in the passage we just read. For what Paul says about the death of Jesus is this: that it is his sacrificial death that effects an atonement or a reconciliation between God and ourselves. Sacrificial. That word is the key. Let me dwell on that for a moment.

Now, any botanist or zoologist will tell you that in order for some kinds of lives to continue, other lives have to come to an end - in order for human beings to stay alive, for example, plants and animals have to lose their lives. This pattern is repeated a hundred times over in the biosphere of which we are merely a part. Now, this simple biological fact has been dramatised since ancient times by means of various rituals of sacrifice. For the Jewish people, a system of ritual animal and vegetable sacrifices served to remind them that their lives were made possible because of death. What the Jews added to this basic anthropological understanding, though, was a theology—a story about what this might mean for God. God, they believed, had made a personal sacrifice even in creating the world. For the existence of the world spoke of a God who had chosen to limit or sacrifice God’s influence and power so that another reality or power, a cosmos, could come into being—a cosmos inhabited by beings who were genuinely free to exercise an independent will and power over and against the will and power of God. Theologically, one could then say that life itself, especially human life, can only be because God chose, and continues to choose, to sacrifice something of God’s sovereignty out of a desire to form a relationship or covenant with a cosmos and humanity that are in no way simply puppets, playthings of divine power. What this Jewish theology means, of course, is that God can no longer be thought as a monarch or tyrant who always gets his way. On the contrary, this God is one who freely chooses to be vulnerable, vulnerable to all that we human beings would do. God sacrifices God’s power and will that we human beings might be capable centres of will and power as well. We do not, of course, use our freedom and power particularly well. By and large, we have used our will and power to turn away from God, making the world according to our own independent vision.

In this perspective, the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross should be seen, first of all, as a divine self-sacrifice. Not the killing of an innocent man to turn aside the wrath of an angry tyrant, but a potent and effective symbol of the way God was, and is, and always will be with the world. A God of costly love. A God who sacrifices God’s own will to create the possibility of relationship with his others, with you and me. For Jesus is not simply you and me. He is God, the divine Son who goes out from the Father to invite all to turn away from the terrible wastefulness of sin and be reconciled to God. Jesus is God’s invitation to turn, to repent, and to accept God’s ever-new invitation to be reconciled with God in making a world that is finally healed and whole, a world of peace or shalom. Jesus is God’s invitation to forgiveness which is, of course, nothing other than the making-new of a broken relationship.

But there is another aspect to the sacrifice of Jesus, and this is the bit of the story that Calvin and his followers have never, ever come to terms with. The sacrifice of Jesus, you see, is a symbol not only of God’s sacrifice for our sake, but also of humanity’s sacrifice for God’s sake. Let me repeat that. The cross of Jesus is a symbol not only of God’s sacrifice for our sake, but also of humanity’s sacrifice for God’s sake. Jesus, you see, is not only God. He is a human being who shares our nature in every way. He is one who has none of the privileges of his father: he does not see all, he does not understand all, he cannot do anything that he wishes to. Christ confronted his own future with nothing other than the resources that are given to everyone. In that, he was utterly and entirely human. Yet, and this is crucial, Christ is unique in the pantheon of human histories because he used his freedom, his will, and his personal resources, not to please himself alone, nor even to serve the collective will of his society and culture, but to do the will of his Father God. What Christ desired, more than anything else it seems, was to love and serve the one who loved and served him. In this perspective, the sacrifice of Christ is the sacrifice that any human being could make if they really and truly desired relationship with God: the putting away of all that keeps us from knowing and loving God, all those unhealthy addictions and allegiances, so that there is room in our lives for what God might will and desire. In that sense, Christ is what each of us might be if we truly loved and trusted God.

This, then, is how the death of Jesus saves us, right here and now, in the midst of the real world we must negotiate every day. It reminds us that God is no tyrant, but one who continually sacrifices God’s own life that we might be alive and free. It reminds us that God is continually inviting us to have done with evil and violence and turn, instead, towards a reconciled relationship with God, a reconciliation that makes for peace, justice and love in the world. But the death of Jesus reminds us, also, that there are no short-cuts to reconciliation with God. We, too, are called to make our sacrifice. For that is how it is with relationship. Each partner receives his or her life from the other, from the other’s willingness to be hospitable, to make space in their hearts for other’s desires and dreams. So let’s face the fact, squarely: in a world such as ours, making room for God’s dreams means, in the end, a very costly putting aside or sacrificing of many of our own dreams, those dreams bequeathed to us by family and society—the dream of a prosperity that doesn’t include people other than own family or tribe, for example. Without dying to idols such as these, says the gospel, without joining with Jesus in his deliberately counter-cultural lifestyle, there can be no salvation.

The grace offered us in Christ, you see, is not cheap grace but “costly” grace. I quote Bonhoeffer once more, of course. Yes, God has invited us to God’s banqueting-table. Yes, God has sacrificed God’s own self in order to make it possible for us to be reconciled with joy. Yes, God has shown us to the way in Christ. But no, we will never get there unless we struggle daily to make Christ’s way our own, to accept God’s grace in the shape of a daily discipleship that calls upon the power of Christ’s Spirit to resist the spirit of the world in which we live. That is how Christ saves us: by calling us to sacrifice ourselves, via a thoroughgoing participation in Jesus’ own sacrifice, so that in dying to this world and its sin, we might have done with such things, and share in the glorious future of the children of God.

Garry Deverell

St Paul's Catheral

Evensong, 7th Sunday after Pentecost

Revolutions

Ruth 3.1-5, 4.13-17; Psalm 127; Hebrews 9. 24-28; Mark 12. 38-44

The book of Ruth is a parable, a story written in order to undermine the dominance of a certain kind of religious ideology that was prominent in Israel at the time of its composition.  You can read all about that ideology in the book of Ezra.  There you will read about the zealousness of a group of aristocratic religious reformers who returned from the exile in Babylon convinced that God had punished Israel primarily because its men had taken foreign wives to their beds, thus making it possible for corrupt (that is, non-Jewish) ideas and practices to flourish amongst the chosen people.  The reformers therefore forced or convinced thousands of ordinary men, most of whom had never in fact left Jerusalem at all during the exilic period, to ‘put away’ both their wives and their children as an act of religious duty.  Read against that background, one can see how the book of Ruth would have once been regarded as a revolutionary literature.  For in telling a story of the royal lineage of David, it also seeks to demonstrate that the God of Israel cannot be counted on to support such a programme.  In the verses we read this morning, the authors stress that Israel’s most lauded family only became what it was because God chose to bless and honour two revolutionary women who chose to buck the religious system of dos and donts.  Tamar, a Canaanite woman, disguised herself as a prostitute in order to get an heir for Judah, the great ancestor of the Davidic clan.  And Ruth, a Moabite woman with no firm legal or religious status in Israel, went out on a very thin and very dangerous limb in order to get a son for Naomi.  One must surely conclude, at least, that God is not one to honour our fear of ethnicities other than our own.  And perhaps we may also conclude that God will not be bound by any of our human fears or anxieties, no matter how deeply mythic or religious their origins seems to be.

Now, there is a message in this for our politicians, is there not? And for all those millions of Australians who support their current policies.  Allow me to paraphrase the Psalmist for a moment.  Prime Minister, Premier, unless God is in your vision for Australia, you dream in vain.  Unless God supports all your hard work in keeping the poor and the desperate from our shores, then you work for nothing.  In vain you rise early to plan for a strong and secure Australia, and in vain to stay up late to ‘protect’ our children from the poor and wretched, and so secure their future.  For unless God grants a future, in the sheer gratuity of his love and care, there is no future.  Unless God shares your vision, your vision will fail.  A happy and secure future, you see, is like having children.  It cannot be produced by our one’s will or effort, especially if such effort is motivated by such deeply held fears or anxieties.  Ask any parent you know, especially those who laboured anxiously to conceive for many months or years, and they will tell you that children come when they come.  They come from God, neither as reward for effort nor because of any sense of right or the privilege we could lay claim to.  They come as a gift, without reason or foretelling.  And so it is with our future, Prime Minister, Premier.  God will not labour with you to secure our children’s future by saving them from evil, dangerous immigrants.  Quite the opposite, I suspect.  Could it be, Prime Minister, Premier,, that in their arrival is our gift, God’s gift for a revolutionary future of peace and reconciliation amongst the tribes of the world?  If the parable of Ruth is to be believed, Prime Minister, Premier, then the gift comes always in the stranger, the one beyond the pale, the one who would cross a great boundary, a sea of impossibility, in order to reach us, in order to make the revolution possible.

But I am ahead of myself, for I wanted to talk about another of God’s revolutions, the revolution in which poverty becomes the most enriching experience in the world.  This is figured for us in the gospel story of the widow who gave all she had, all she had to live on, into the temple treasury.  Lest you think I am being romantic about her poverty, let me remind you of the situation such a woman would have faced in that time and place.  In a deeply patriarchal society, such as that of first-century Palestine, women are little more than goods to be bought and sold.  Upon marriage, they pass from their father’s ownership to their husband’s.  If that husband dies and there is no-one else, no other kin, who will marry her, then she reverts to the patronage of her father’s house.  But remember that we are talking about a desperately poor peasant society here.  Most men, because of hard labour and poor nutrition, could not expect to live beyond thirty five in ordinary circumstances.  Fathers and brothers would therefore be most unwilling, if they were still alive, to take the widows of their kin, especially if they had children already.  Jewish widows were, quite simply, at the bottom of the food-chain.  They were the ones left to fend for themselves when the going got tough.  And that often meant either Roman slavery, or prostitution, or both.  Often these options amounted to the same thing.  Now, add to all that the expectations of the religious elites who ran the temple, those whom Mark’s gospel calls ‘the Scribes and the Saducees’.  These groups had enormous power in Israel, in both religious and political terms.  They enjoyed the highest religious and social status because they were the heirs of the priestly casts.  But this also gave them enormous economic power, because, by declaring a person or place ritually unclean, they could also successfully blackmail any person who wished to claw their way back into a state of purity.  The phrase in Mark’s gospel, ‘they devour widows houses’ probably refers to precisely that practise.  It is likely that some of the priestly class, at least, were given to extracting money from pious widows in return for a declaration of cultic purity from sin.

Given all that, why does Mark record the story of the widow’s offering?  Wasn’t she being ripped off?  Why would she put in all that she had to live on, unless she was being blackmailed in some way?  Some commentators say that the story is told simply to highlight the evil practices of the scribes.  But I do not think this is so.  For later tradition will make explicit what is already right here in Mark’s text, namely, the intention to hold this woman up as an example of a truly revolutionary discipleship under very trying conditions.  For while it is true that the text does warn the reader against the false piety and moral blackmail of the priestly system, it does not propose an entirely socio-economic solution to the problem.  How could it?  How could a widow possibly be saved from economic ruin in such circumstances?  Is someone going to step in to give her more cash, or protect her from what the system makes inevitable?  There is no hint, in Mark’s text, that Jesus or his benefactors intend to do so.  So why is the story told?

The answer lies, I think, in a reading of the story which takes the whole flow of Mark’s gospel into account.  In chapter 1 we read that Jesus had come to preach the kingdom, to heal, and to exorcise.  In chapters 2 and 7 we read stories about Jesus’ willingness to confront or break the laws of the temple aristocracy in order to do so.  In chapters 8 & 10, Jesus tells his disciples that there is salvation only in being willing to die, to be baptised with his own baptism, to become the slave of all.  Also in chapter 10, in what I believe to be the key utterance of the gospel, Jesus declares that salvation, while impossible for human beings, is indeed possible for God.  Can you see where all this is heading?  By the time we come to this story of the widows offering, the reader couldn’t possibly believe that Jesus is offering some kind of socio-economic solution to the problems at hand.  On the contrary!  What Jesus seems to be implying is this:  that in order to overcome, to be saved, to be healed, to be liberated, or whatever, one must ultimately give the powers arraigned against us what they want:  our very lives.  Why?  Because Mark believe that it is in giving our lives over to the powers that be, that we shall ultimately gain our freedom from those powers.

Now, one can see how Karl Marx came to his stinging criticism of Christianity, can’t you.  Religion, he said, was an opiate to keep the poor in their place.  But this is of course to entirely miss the point of what Mark is trying to teach us!  You see, for Mark – and indeed for Paul who wrote before him – there are two powers in the world:  the power of religion or karma, which says that we get what we deserve, and the power of gospel and grace, which gives without reason or cause.  Now, in Mark’s world as in ours, it is the power of karma that appears to reign supreme.  We get ahead by paying our dues, working hard, and keeping our patrons happy.  Which implies, of course, that we want to get ahead, that we are happy to invest in the very system that enslaves us because we believe it will reward us.  But grace inhabits this world of karma in such a way that its power is stolen away.  The power of karma is death:  death is what the karmic system threatens us with in order to make us do and be what it wants.  But Grace says:  “in order to find yourself you must lose yourself.  In order to live, you must die.  In order to gain all things you must lose all things.”  In this way, grace promises that the moment of capitulation will ultimately become the moment of freedom, for it is in being willing to let go of what we cling to so desperately that we shall gain ourselves anew as a free people whose lives are hidden with Christ in God.  What seems ludicrous and impossible for human beings, is of course entirely possible for God.  This is God’s revolution:  the coming of a new and strange peace, at precisely that point when justice seems dead.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the new Matrix movie is called Revolutions.  In that story, it is at the precise moment when the new Son of Man, Neo Anderson, gives himself over to the power of inevitability - to the evilly karmic power of Smith who wants to repeat his banality over and over in the world until there is nothing left but the Same - that the revolution begins.  As he lies crucified upon the power of the machines, absorbed, it seems, into the power of the same old thing, a miracle begins to happen.  What was absorbed begins to absorb.  What was dead now begins to infect the whole system with life.  What had been given away now spreads through all the world, bringing light and life and peace where there was only darkness, death and enmity.  So it can be for us.  Jesus promises that if we give over to him that which controls us most, our desire to ascend the karmic ladder and become someone, then we can be saved.  Only in dying is there is life, only in stillness is there dancing, only in suffering the evil of what surrounds us is there freedom from it.  This is the revolution the gospel promises.  What is impossible for human beings, is possible for God.

'I lay down my life' - Centenary of the Gallipoli landing 2015

Texts:  1 John 3.16-24; John 10.11-18

How sweet and honourable it is to die for one's country:
Death pursues the man who flees,
spares not the hamstrings or cowardly backs
Of battle-shy youths.

So wrote the Roman poet Horace in his Third Ode.  And if you visit the chapel at the Royal Sandhurst Military Academy at Berkshire in the UK, you will find the first line of Horace’s poem inscribed on the wall there, in the original Latin: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. This concise epithet has been trotted out to justify the deployment of every soldier in every major conflict involving European nations since Horace became the apologist of Roman imperialism in the first century BCE. It is an epithet that was deployed liberally in both the recruitment and conscription of soldiers for Britain in the Great War of 1914-18. It is an epithet that makes it very clear what a soldier’s life is ultimately about: the service of the nation and its interests, even unto death.

As a Christian, I am obviously deeply uncomfortable with any view of the world that elevates allegiance to the nation above allegiance to Christ.  In the ancient Roman empire, whose ideology Horace helped to both form and express, many thousands of Christians were martyred precisely because they refused to so worship the Roman state. The ancient Christian confession ‘Jesus is Lord’ has its origin in precisely this repudiation. If Jesus is ‘Lord’, if it is Jesus and his kingdom of peace to whom we owe our very lives, then there is no other power in heaven or on earth to whom we can legitimately bend the knee in service.  Especially if such service involves a repudiation of the fundamental Christian conviction: that the God who loves and forgives every sinner calls such sinners to love and forgive one another, even and especially those whom the state may designate our enemies.

The writings of John are very clear on this point.  If we have any claim to the Spirit of Christ, if we are to claim that Christ genuinely abides with us, then our behaviour must be consistent with what we know of Christ’s own way.  Because Christ our shepherd laid down his life for us – we who are least deserving, we who are spiritually impoverished – so we are called to lay down our lives in loving service. Not for emperor, state or tribe, but for everyone who, like ourselves, lives in poverty – whether a poverty of spirit or a poverty of material wellbeing.  For what ultimately motivates the follower of Christ is not the will to power and the maintenance of power – the will at the heart of every form of tribal nationalism – but the emptying out of any such power in the name of loving the last and the least.  And let’s face it – the last and the least for every single one of us is not our friends – those with whom we have most in common – but our ‘enemies’, those whom we regard as furthest away from our preferred way of life and of living, those who draw out of us our most self-righteous rage.

ANZAC day celebrates a collection of myths that enshrine a particular moral code, a moral code that considers it a great good that a man or woman should sacrifice their lives for the glory of the nation.  The ANZAC mythology also says that it is a good thing, a thing to memorialized and celebrated, that a man or woman should sacrifice the prohibition against killing another human being for the glory of the nation.  People who do this, so the ANZAC code of morality tells us, will be treated as heroes.  They will be given medals and honoured in parades.  Now I know very well that this is not ALL that ANZAC day celebrates.  I know very well that there is a legitimate mourning for fallen and traumatised comrades there in the mix as well.  But consider for a moment the terrible contradiction that recognition sets up, both for soldiers and for the nation.  On the one hand, the solider is told to kill other human beings, and to do so for the glory of the nation.  On the other hand, the soldiers who do so are then condemned to live with the terrible horror of what they have done for the rest of their lives.  Today the guilt and depression of that heart of darkness has been psychologised as ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’, but that name erases as much as it reveals.  It erases the fact that even the most prestigious medal and even the most honorific parade cannot take away the simple fact that to kill another human being is to disown life itself, ANZAC morality notwithstanding.

The idea – endlessly invoked in the two world wars - that a Christian can fight for ‘God, king and country’ must therefore be subjected to the most careful theological suspicion.  Fighting for God is, for Christians, simply a contradiction in terms: at best, the Christian is called to fight, with Christ himself, against any tendency to judge or condemn our fellow human beings rather than to love them.  And while Christians are certainly not republicans, nor can we serve the kings and chieftains of any tribe, nation or state. For the very notion of the tribe, the nation and the state contradicts the vision of a universal commonwealth of peace with justice, which Jesus proclaimed to us under the name of the ‘reign’ or ‘kingdom’ of God.  Jesus, our Good Shepherd, laid down his life for that vision. He sacrificed himself for the sins of the nations so that they would never have need, again, to take up arms against one another. How quickly ‘Christian’ Europe forgot Christ’s legacy! How quickly the pride of nations reasserted itself! Forgetting Jesus’ sacrifice - in the first and second world wars, certainly, but also in the many other wars that followed them – nations have instead chosen to sacrifice their young people on the blood-red altars of national pride.

I’d like to conclude today’s sermon with a poem written by Wilfred Owen, perhaps the greatest of the poets of the First World War.  An English soldier, he served in France and was ultimately killed on the front line in November 1918, just one week before the armistice that ended the war.  His reflections remain for us a permanent reminder of war’s absurdity.  I read it now as an act of grief and of mourning for all who have been sacrificed on the altar of state.

Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,

And took the fire with him, and a knife.

And as they sojourned both of them together,

Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,

Behold the preparations, fire and iron,

But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?

Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,

and builded parapets and trenches there,

And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.

When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,

Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,

Neither do anything to him. Behold,

A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;

Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,

And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Garry Deverell

Centenary of the Gallipoli Landing

April 25, 2015

God's Revolution

Psalm 127; Hebrews 9. 24-28; Mark 12. 38-44

In the Four Quartets T.S. Eliot wrote this:

. . .   In order to arrive there,

to arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,

        You need to go by a way in which there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know

        You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

        You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

        You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.

There is a revolution from God, an impossible turning in which the very worst that may visit us in life is able to reconfigure itself as the very best.  It is a revolution that resists explanation or representation.  It happens in our experience.  We know that it happens, and we can recognise it when it happens to others.  But we struggle to understand or tell it, to name its dark contours even for ourselves.  To my mind, the gospel of the crucified and risen Jesus is our best telling of this revolution.  “Best” because here the story unfolds from our lips and imaginations, from the lips and imagination of the church, and yet it does not come from us.  We hear it, first of all, from God.  What we confess with our lips and know in our hearts begins not with our own hearts, but with an event that happens in the heart of God. 

The gospel story of the widow who gave all she had, all she had to live on, is a version of that telling.  Although we have it here, in Mark, as a story about discipleship - an allegory and paradigm example for us of what a disciple of Jesus would do - its context in the larger gospel story suggests something else.  Since Jesus himself is about to be arrested, and everything taken from him through the humiliation of torture and crucifixion, and since Mark casts this great loss as a willing loss, a sacrifice or gift on the part of Jesus and his Father for the life of the world, so this simple act of a widow’s offering is not primarily about what disciples do, but what God does.  In the larger story about Christ’s offering, God’s gift, the woman’s willingness to part with everything that she has to live on prepares the reader to hear the story of the passion: that she is like the God who loses everything, but willingly, in the encounter with human evil. 

Consider, if you will, what has happened in the story so far.   In chapter 1 we read that Jesus had come to inaugurate a kingdom, the kingdom of God.   In chapters 2 through 7 we read stories about the signs of that kingdom’s arrival:  the preaching of good news, healings, exorcisms, and (not least) the shattering of human traditions about what is right and what is wrong.  In chapters 8 & 10, Jesus tells his disciples that salvation comes only for the one who is willing to die, to be baptised into death, to become the slave of all.  Also in chapter 10, in what I take to be the key utterance of the gospel, Jesus declares that salvation, while impossible for human beings, is indeed possible for God.  Can you see where Mark is leading us with that story-line?  To suffering and to crucifixion, as a direct and necessary consequence of God’s encounter with human beings.   But also to the revolution revealed there, that strange turning in which death becomes life, poverty becomes riches, and the loss of self the key to a newly made identity that God gives freely.  So what Mark is trying to tell us in this stark story about a widow who gives away even the little she has, is nothing other than what he is telling us in the gospel as a whole.  That one can never be saved from life’s cruelties unless one is willing to confess and acknowledge one’s own involvement in the system that perpetuates those cruelties, giving oneself over, instead, to a different logic, the logic of God which is called by the beautiful name of grace.

What I mean is this.  For Mark – and, indeed, for the Letter to the Hebrews before him – there are two powers or logics in the world:  the power of religion or karma, and the power of the gospel or of grace.  In Mark’s world, as in ours, it was the power of karma that appeared to reign supreme.  Karma is the power of necessity, you know, the compulsion we feel to ‘get ahead’ by paying our dues, working hard, and keeping our patrons happy.  Of course, we would not feel such compulsion unless we believed in karma ourselves, if we did not want to get ahead, if we were not already invested in the very system that enslaves us because we believe it will reward us.  Yet this is where most of us are.  Compelled, entranced, invested.  Yet, the karmic system can only ever lead us to despair, for it condemns us to reap only what we sow.  It is like capitalism, which delivers to us only what we produce ourselves – images of the real, but not the real itself.  The real eludes us, for we are not God.  We cannot create even ourselves, let alone what we need for happiness or peace!  This widow of Israel, for example, was probably caught in a double-bind, a circle of despair with no exit.  Like all good Jews, she longed to be part of the people of the redeemed, those who were acceptable to God because they obeyed the priestly law.  Yet, she wanted to survive as well, to live.  When her male patrons died or put her aside, she had to turn to activities condemned by the law in order to feed herself and her children – to prostitution or stealing or slavery in the houses of idolators.  The only way to achieve both ends, to stay alive and ritually clean at the same time, was to accept a form of moral blackmail, to pay the priestly caste a large portion of her ill-gotten earnings in return for their acceptance and protection.  Unfortunately, her willingness to do so almost certainly kept her in a state of perpetual want and need.  It also perpetuated and repeated the very system that oppressed her, so that nothing was able to change.  She reaped what she sowed, her poverty and need creating nothing but more poverty and more need.

Thank God there is another power in the world, the power of grace!  Grace, as I have been preaching for some time now, is the opposite of karma or religion or myth.  It is like the blessing of children of which the Psalmist speaks.  Children cannot be produced by the machinations of our human longings, needs or planning.  They are not a reward for our labour or a right to be possessed.  Children come, as many of you know very well, as a sheer gift from God, without reason or foretelling.  Children are therefore signs to us of grace, that condition of blessedness and peace which comes not from ourselves but from somewhere other, from God.  Grace is that which comes to question, to interrupt, to displace and even destroy the cycle of despair which is karma.  With the gift of grace, we reap what we have not sown, and live in the power of that which we have not produced or made for ourselves.  In grace we experience the love of God shown in Christ’s self-sacrifice.  In Christ, God is totally for us, even to the point of so identifying with us in our karmic cycle of despair that he suffered the full consequence of what that cycle produces:  nothingness, and only nothingness.

Of course, having given itself over to nothingness and to death, grace is not exhausted.  It rises, phoenix-like, from the ashes of its own destruction, and proceeds to infect the karmic system like a virus which cannot be quashed.  In the gospel story, this power or property is called resurrection.  It is the perseverance of love in the face of death and despair, the never-depleted surplus of possibility over necessity.  In Mark’s world, the widows of Israel were forever caught in a web of karmic despair.  In trying to escape its demands they succeeded only in fulfilling its demands.  Not so, we are told, with the widow who gave her all, all she had to live on.  In the context of the gospel as a whole, we must understand this act evangelically, that is, as a picture or metaphor of salvation.  As for Christ himself, and for all who follow his way of the cross, it is only by finally allowing the karmic system to have what it seeks – our very lives – that we shall find ourselves free of its determinations.  For while she, and we who are Christ’s, indeed give our lives daily to the system we inhabit, that system need not possess us thereby.  For we are Christ’s, and our truest selves are hidden with Christ in God, as the apostle says.  Therefore we are being freed from the desire to get ahead, to succeed in terms determined by the law of karma.  We are people who know a love which is stronger even than death, and the gift of a life and future we have not produced.  Therefore we choose, over and over again, in all the minutiae of life, to serve our neighbour without thought of cost or ego.  For the price is already paid.  What can karma take from us that Christ cannot return a hundredfold?

The movie known as Matrix: Revolutions, can be read as the third volume in a three-fold re-telling of the gospel as I have proclaimed it today.  In that story, it is at the precise moment when the new Son of Man, Neo Anderson, gives himself over to the power of karmic inevitability, that the revolution begins.  As he lies crucified upon the power of the machines, absorbed, it seems, into the power of the same old thing, a miracle begins to happen.  What was absorbed begins to absorb.  What was dead now begins to infect the whole system with life.  What had been given away now returns more powerfully to inhabit all the world, bringing light and life and peace where once there was only darkness, death and enmity.  So it can be for us.  Jesus promises that if we will face our deepest fear – the loss of our very souls – and if we will trust in his love, then we shall live, even though we die.  “In my end is my beginning,” wrote T.S.  Eliot.  Let us give thanks that it is so.

Wisdom for a time of madness

Proverbs 1.20-33; Psalm 19; James 3.1-12; Mark 8.27-38

We live in difficult and disorienting times. Sometimes I wonder if the world is going mad. Sometimes I wonder if I am the one who is going mad. What about you? One definition of madness is this: ‘a fundamental breakdown in the capacity to distinguish between what is real and what is not’. So how do you distinguish between the real and the not-so-real? And, more particularly for our purposes this morning, how should the Christian church go about discerning the real from the unreal?

Some of you may be thinking that to ask this question is either silly or just plain redundant. You may feel secure in your capacity to know what the truth actually looks and feels like. But tell me this: when our government told the Australian community that a group of refugees had threatened to throw their children overboard unless they were received into Australia, did you know you were being lied to? Or when Colin Powell assured the United Nations that Saddam Hussein possessed huge stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons that he planned to use against the West, did you know that he had been lied to? Or, to pick a very live issue in our community at present, when Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten assure us that stopping the boats saves lives, how do you know that they are right, or that they are wrong?

Let me suggest, ever so tentatively, that many of us decide who is right and who is wrong before the fact. And that even after the ‘facts’ have come to light, that we conveniently change the ‘facts’ to suit ourselves. In at least two of the three instances just cited, reality was manipulated by powerful people for their own ends. They told us lies because the truth would have undermined their stated policy positions, their fundamental beliefs about how the world works, about who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. I suspect that this will be the case with the policy on stopping the boats as well. But, in all honesty, I do not yet know if I am right about that or not.

‘Time will tell us the truth’. That is what we say to ourselves. That is how we reassure ourselves when reality seems difficult to grasp. But will it? Will time, or the accumulation of evidence, ever convince some of us that our democratic, transparent form of government is not very honest or transparent? Large sections of the Australian community still trust what our governments tells us, despite everything: the children overboard affair, the weapons of mass destruction debacle, the reasons we were given for sending troops into Afghanistan. Large sections of the Australian community are still going to vote for what I call the ‘Liberal-Labour coalition’ at the next election, because they believe what they are told about being overrun by ‘asylum seekers’. So, for many of us it seems, time does not reveal the truth. Many of us prefer to believe subterfuge and spin, if we find it comforting, than face the truth of what is happening to us. Some of us are like the proverbial ostrich, who sticks its head in the sand when danger arrives. Some of us would rather die believing in comforting and convenient falsities than be taught the truth by either time or the accumulation of evidence.

For Christians, there is a plumbline that helps us to discover the truth, that teaches us how to read the world in such a way that we will eventually discern, not without effort I must add!, which way is up and which way is down. This plumbline is Christ, the holy wisdom of God revealed to us in the Scriptures. Christians believe that the deepest truth of things only comes to light when it is scanned, or passed through, the UV field of apostolic testimony. That is not to say that Christians, even Christian theologians, are immune from kidding themselves - as will soon become clear.

So, having read from the apostolic testimony this morning, what can we say about our contemporary attitudes to truth, and to the finding of truth? Proverbs says that the truth has been out there for time immemorial, because Holy Wisdom has been preaching her gospel in the streets and the marketplaces since the world begun. Sadly, however, many human beings would prefer to ignore her counsels. Proverbs tells us that many people prefer to be simple, to reduce the complexities of life to simple propositions that no amount of wise teaching will ever succeed in undoing. It also tells us that the simple will eventually pay for their complacency. One day, says Proverbs, the simple will reap what they have sown. Their ignorance will be exploded by a burst of reality, which will undo the layers of lies on which they found their lives. In that moment, we are told, disaster will arrive to steal away the false comforts by which the simple hold the truth at bay.

Now, are you one of the simple? Are you the one who cannot live with too much truth? Or are you one of the wise, those who are open to the truth no matter where it may take you?

Now before you answer too swiftly, I invite you to consider another piece of apostolic testimony, namely, the story of Peter as we have it in the gospel of Mark. Perhaps, like Peter, you pride yourself on being insightful, on possessing an aptitude for recognising truths that others find too difficult to countenance. For the gospel indeed tells us that it was Peter, amongst all the disciples, who first recognised that Jesus was the messiah of God, the one anointed by God to save his people from their sins. While the other disciples apparently saw Jesus as just another prophet, it was Peter who first recognised that he was the Christ. Surely there are grounds for a certain smugness here? If you were Peter, would you not feel that you were one of the wise, seeing things not usually seen and pointing to truths that others find too difficult to grasp? Well, perhaps so. We theologians are particularly susceptible to such feelings. But we are not alone in this. I can’t count the times that someone has told me, with an impressive sense of certainty and authority, what God is really like, without having spent more than a week of their lives with either Scripture or theology! At such times, I feel like an electrician who is being lectured about how to install a new heater by someone who believes that electricity is what elephants produce when they have eaten too much.

Nevertheless, back to being smug about one’s insightfulness. Peter, having apparently seen the truth about Jesus, then demonstrates to all that he has missed the real, existential, significance of this truth. For when Jesus begins to teach the disciples what the messiah was sent to do—that is, to suffer the rejection of the authorities, to be tortured and killed, but then to rise again on the third day—Peter cannot bear it. Taking Jesus aside, he rebukes him. ‘Look, Jesus, don’t be so downhearted. You’re the messiah, for goodness sake. The messiah thrashes his enemies. He doesn’t suffer and die, he makes others suffer and die. He makes them pay for their sins!’ All of which reveals, from the point of view of those who first heard this story, that while Peter correctly identified Jesus as the messiah, his ideas about messiah-hood were deeply flawed. ‘Get behind me Satan,’ said Jesus in reply, ‘for you are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things’. And there’s the rub you see. God’s ways are not our ways. What we would like to be real is rarely the ‘really real,’ the real that God is. For we rich Christians from the post-industrial West corrupt ourselves with forlorn desires for a peace that bursts into bloom apart from the costly scars of sacrifice. So say the martyrs. And they tell us the truth.

In the reading from Mark, Jesus tells his disciples, along with everyone who is reading the story, that there can be no peace without a fight, no rest without work, no resurrection worth having, apart from one’s death. Those who want to protect themselves from the truth will only end up being destroyed by it, says Jesus; and those who want to own the truth, that is, to make and control the world according to their own solipsistic lights, they will end up losing the only thing that really matters: the truth of who they are in God. The really wise people, according to Jesus, are those who are willing to submit and sacrifice their version of the truth to that of Jesus. The wise are those who trust Jesus absolutely, even to the point of letting everything else go, every truth they have ever clung to for the sake of solidity and certainty in the world. The wise are those who die to such things in the belief that Christ will raise them anew, new beings in a new world, a world in which the only truth worth clinging too is the love and grace of God. So, who is feeling smug now? Certainly not me!

Christians, then, have a really strange—strange, that is, by the usual standards—approach to discerning the real from the unreal. Christians are, at one and the same time, both absolutely sceptical and absolutely trusting. Christians cannot believe that any version of truth produced by the world, whether by politicians, scientists or theologians, is completely and absolutely right. Apparent truths, no matter how subtlety constructed, need to be tested for their inherent capacity to hide us from the truth. For while the world is indeed real, in Christian understanding, its reality oftentimes consists in its failure to come to terms with the really real, that is, with God. So Christians are called to test and approve everything, especially the truths we manufacture about ourselves.

Yet—and here, surely, is the most extraordinary paradox—Christians can only be so sceptical on the basis of an absolute trust in a particular truth, the faith and belief that God is there, and that God is love. Without this, I would argue, there is no basis for a productive and creative scepticism, there is no really real by which we might evaluate what appears to be real. Equally, without this faith and belief, there can be no finally successful motivation for seeking the truth. For if we do not believe that the Real is finally on our side, that the Real is, in fact, a personal reality who is other than us, who nevertheless loves and welcomes us, then our search for the truth will always be permeated by a lingering suspicion that we are really alone in the universe, that the universe may well be only the entirely made-up conversation that we have with ourselves.

Someone will of course ask, and someone has always asked this of Christians: ‘But how do you know that God exists, and that God is love?’ The answer is the same today as it has always been. We know, not because we have discovered this truth ourselves, but because God has reached out to us across the chasm between God’s being and ours, and revealed that God is there, and that God is love. That revelation is none other than the man, Jesus Christ, God with a human face: God the other, who is nevertheless closer to us than we are to ourselves. So close that our knowing is not so much our knowing, but the knowing of God in and through us. We see in a glass dimly, nothing is surer, but we see nevertheless. We see that we are seen, and we love that we are loved.

And so we return to where we began. If we are mad, perhaps it is because the world regards us as out of touch with the reality it manufactures and reifies. If we are sane, perhaps it is because we have opened ourselves up to a reality that others do not wish to see. For all that, let us not forget that the truth of God is stranger even than fiction. Let us pray for the grace to be sceptical about the truths we are told in the daily round of news and advertising. Let us pray for the grace to be sceptical about the truths we design for our own comfort or security. But let us trust, absolutely, in the God who is grace and truth in Jesus Christ. For without him, we will never find the courage to admit our mistakes and let our truths go. We will never, therefore, becomes signs of the truth for a world that is going mad.

I lay down my life

Texts:  1 John 3.16-24; John 10.11-18

In the passage we read just now from John’s gospel, Jesus is addressing his Jewish opponents. ‘I am the good shepherd’ he says, ‘because I lay down my life for the sheep that I know and love by name.  You, on the other hand, behave like the hired hand who runs away when the wolf comes by, because he does not love the sheep and cares not for their fate.  The life I lay down, I lay down by my own choice.  But I will take it up again.  This power I have received from my father.’  This morning I should like to dwell for moment on this sense of volition we get in John’s gospel around the death of Jesus, that Jesus somehow chooses to lay down his life, and that he does this out of love for his disciples. 

It is difficult for we moderns to really understand why the crucifixion happened.  On one level, of course, we know exactly why it happened.  Jesus got himself into trouble by being incredibly naïve, by seeking to upset the carefully negotiated détente that existed between the Roman state and the Jewish authorities.  Jesus died because he was a starry-eyed idealist who could neither comprehend nor accept the real-politik of his time.  From that perspective, the perspective of historical and political ‘realism’, the more theological explanations for his death seem rather odd.  That Jesus died for our sins.  That he chose to die out of love for sinners.  That his life was given to exhaust and destroy the power of sin and death over our human future.  Journalists are completely lost with it all, as a review of the film version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe revealed a few years ago.  ‘What I have never understood,’ says the journalist, ‘is why Aslan, or Jesus, had to die.  If God loves us, why would he need some kind of blood-sacrifice?  Why doesn’t he just forgive us and be done with it?’  Even bishops and theologians have trouble understanding it all, as regular readers of our esteemed denominational newspaper will have discovered.

There are, of course, good reasons why we find the death of Jesus difficult to understand.  One of them I have mentioned before in this church.  Affluent westerners now live at a great distance from the rather sobering fact that life comes from death.  Indeed, we have become afraid of death because we have forgotten about its connection to life.  When we lived nomadic or agricultural lives, we were much more aware of the connection.  We saw that the beasts that provide our meat had to be slaughtered.  We saw that the plants that produced the grains for our bread had to die in order for us to harvest their fruits.  We saw that the land became fruitful again by ploughing in the dead remains of the harvest.  When you buy your food from the supermarket, when medicine has all but removed that daily certainty that death is around the corner, it is difficult to see that life itself comes at a cost, the cost of other life.

At one level, then, the theology of the death of Christ reflects upon a simple biological fact:  that life itself is very costly, that the aliveness of one is made possible only by the death of another.  Theologically, there is a sense in which this is true even with the doctrine of creation.  Here the creation only becomes possible, is only able to come into existence as something other than God because God is willing to undergo a kind of death, the death of God’s right to exercise sovereignty over the creation.  If God retained that right, you see, then the creation would be no more than an extension of God’s own mind and will.  It would always do what God willed it to do.  It would not be God’s other.  What God apparently chose to do, though, was to expend his power to create a power other than his own, a power that is able to choose a way other than that which God would have chosen. 

But note the way that theology has already complicated, here, the simple sense that the nomad or the farmer has that death is somehow necessary to life.  For what God does , in giving us life, somehow transcends the simple categories of necessity, of cause and effect.  What God does is introduce the wildcards of love and volition, which means that life and death are no longer a matter of necessity alone, unfolding according to a pre-programmed genetic imperative, but of choice, and especially the choice to love.  The death Jesus dies is not, therefore, to be understood only as some kind of necessary death, a death like that of the beast which is slaughtered (against its will) to feed the tribe.  His death certainly does feed the tribe, let us make no mistake about that.  What are we doing at communion, if not to participate in the food and drink that is able to give us the life of the kingdom of God?  Yet, let us be clear, this life is given us not because we take it from Jesus, against his will, but because he has chosen to give it.  Out of love.

There is a sense, then, in which the crucifixion simply manifests in human history what God has always been about: love.  And what is love?  According to the Johannine corpus, love is what God is as trinity, a community of service and care.  It is hospitality, the willingness to make a home within one’s own life for someone who is other than oneself.  It is solidarity, living the sufferings of another as though they were one’s own.  It is sacrifice, the laying down of ones own powers, one’s own capacities for life, that they may be taken up by another.  It is to centre oneself on helping another to come alive, in the faith that life shared is the best life of all. 

Perhaps our difficulties with the death of Christ come down to this, then.  That we moderns have become strangers to love, and especially to its costs.  Over and over we are told that love is something other than what Christ would teach us.  Over and over we are told that love is a contract or convenience that is fine while it serves our own interests, but can be legitimately done away with when it begins to cost us somehow.  Over and over we are told that love is about feelings of euphoria, a drug to help us cope with the pains of life.  As such, when love itself becomes painful, we are better to ditch it.  Over and over we are told that laying down one’s life for another, and especially for the stranger, is irrational.  Life is about securing yourself against the misfortunes of others.  Life is about comfort, no matter that our comfort deprives others!  Today elections are won or lost on this platform.  Is it any wonder that we struggle with the death of Jesus, then, a life laid down for another!

The good news of Easter is that life shared, life laid down for others, creates a new kind of life altogether, a life hitherto unimagined in the history of the world.  In the mystery of divine love for the world, the self-centred egotism that has destroyed human life for millennia is itself destroyed and done away with, absorbed, as it were, into the death of Christ so that the usual cycles of human relating—our cruelty, indifference, violence and greed—is not only interrupted, but done away with altogether.  You might not believe that this is so, if you look at the world we live in.  But what God gave us, in the time he spent amongst us in the flesh, was a glimpse into the reality of God, a reality yet more real than that reality we usually experience, a reality that is close enough to change our world if only we will believe and live our lives accordingly.  Faith, you see, is the place in which God’s reality (which is sometimes called grace) arrives in the world.  It is the place where love finds soil enough to flourish.

I pray for the faith of the people of God, that we shall be able to resist the rationalism and cynicism of our world, and let love in.  I pray that we might summon faith enough to love each other as Christ has loved us.  

Christ is risen to heal the world

Texts: Romans 6.3-12; Matthew 28.1-10

Tonight we celebrate the resurrection of the crucified Jesus, an event that - in the faith of the church – bears no comparison or analogy within the ordinary space and time of this world.  It is an event that has happened only once, and will never happen again in exactly the same way.  The resurrection is so unique, in fact, so singular in its eventfulness, that we are able to say a lot more about what it is not, than we are about what it is.  That’s just how it is when God decides to change world.  The old rules no longer apply, even the laws of biology or physics, and suddenly what we thought we knew turns out to be wrong!

Amongst the many things that the resurrection is not, for example, is a resuscitation of the dead body of Jesus.  We know this because, according to the eye-witnesses, the risen Jesus’ body does not behave like a re-animated body should. It can change its basic appearance, so that even the closest friends of Jesus do not recognise who he is. It can appear and disappear from sight, at once here and then somewhere else in an instant. It can walk through walls. It can even ascend into the air.  Resuscitated bodies don’t do that stuff.

Another thing that the resurrection is not, is a moment of re-birth or re-turn in the cycle of life as we know it.  This may be bad news for those of you who take Bunnies and eggs to be legitimate symbols of ‘Easter’.  Because actually they are symbols of a certain kind of Easter, the pagan ‘Easter’, the Easter that is named after the Anglo-Saxon goddess of fertility, Oestre.  This Easter celebrates, and is actually all about the turning of the agricultural seasons through autumn, winter, spring and summer.  This Easter is about the re-birth of light and life and fertility after a long fallow, enwombed, winter.  It is the Easter that the ancient Christian missionaries sought to overcome, but never did, because here we are in the midst of a bunny-and-egg obsessed culture in the southern hemisphere, which celebrates such things according to the northern agricultural cycle!  Such is the strength of the pagan myth!

Enough, then, of what the resurrection is not.  Allow me to explore something of what the resurrection is.  Tonight's gospel reading shows us that in the face of the resurrection of Christ, the theologian must become a poet.  When he speaks of the resurrection, Matthew does not speak of the thing itself, but only its effects.  This is to invoke what the English poet, Percy Shelley, called ‘negative capability’, the capability of a event that we cannot directly see, touch, taste, smell  or hear, to nevertheless produce effects that we can sense and interpret.  In Matthew’s account, the resurrection is something that happens in the dead of night, the dead of this night (but without the benefit of coal-fire electricity and street lamps).  The darkness represents an event that cannot be witnessed directly, like a nuclear explosion, or the implosion of a vast star into a tiny singularity.  Matthew wants to insist, nevertheless, that the event is very real and that its effects are profound.  That is why he invokes the image of the Angel who brings lighting and an earthquake to unlock the tomb and let the dead Christ free; that is why he speaks of an Angel who is, himself, bright, swift, and devastating as lightening.  The Angel is an image from Jewish apocalyptic literature, a literature that seeks to bear witness to things hidden since the foundation of the world, to represent, though the hyperbolic devices of poetry, the revolutionary action of a God whose actions so fundamentally change the rules that whatever rules we are working with are for ever playing catch-up.

Let us then, like Matthew himself, confine ourselves to speaking of the risen Jesus in terms of his revolutionary effects. The first thing to say is that Jesus is risen to trans-value every value, to re-value, in fact, every thing and every person that is considered mere rubbish by the powers that rule our world. Christ is raised to go before us into Galilee, the Galilee of where we happen to live, the Galilee of Melbourne, shall we say.  Christ is risen to effect in that Galilee a revolution of values whereby those who are called ‘sinners’ become saints and those who are called ‘saints’ or ‘models of virtue’ are shown, in fact, to be sinners.  Christ is risen to give life and worth to anyone generally considered to be either ‘dead’ or ‘worthless’, like aborted babies and the severely disabled, locked away from public view (as they are) in institutions, in order to protect the general public from distress.  Christ is risen to reveal that the many who claim to be  really ‘alive’ and living the good life are already dead, dead inside, living only on the phantasmal power of their insatiable desire and wishful thinking.   Christ is risen to raise the least important people of all, whether they are children or seekers of asylum or whatever, to membership in the royal household of God.  Christ is raised to shine a light on the so-called ‘leaders’ who rule it over us, to show that their care, in far too many cases, is only for themselves.  Christ is risen, finally to reveal that many whom this world considers wise (Richard Dawkins comes to mind) are nothing more than ranting fools, while the so-called ‘fools’ of this world, those who live out a simple faith in the God who is love, are actually wiser than any mind can measure or equation can tell.

Even more than this, Christ is raised to create a new world, a new universe.  Christ is raised to effect a revolutionary transfiguration in the very cosmos we inhabit.  His crucified and risen body straddles, you see, both this universe - the universe think we know - and the new creation to come that God has promised.  Through his body broken on the cross, Christ has opened a conduit, a portal if you like (you Harry Potter fans, you), into this new cosmos, where the rules have been changed so that the power to kill and to break, to maim and destroy, has been rendered as nothing.  There, it is only the love of God shown in this crucified Son that prevails.  In this perspective, the day of resurrection is simultaneously the last day of this creation, and the first day of a new creation.  What happens now is that the new will unfold within the old, until this world has finally fulfilled its purpose: to find sons and daughters for the God who is love.

Note that while the portal has indeed been opened in the risen body of Crucified, the purpose was never to suddenly transport us to that world - immediately and instantaneously - but to create, instead, a colony of witness in this world for the world that is coming but has not yet arrived.  That is what Matthew’s talk of evangelism is about.  You know, the woman being sent to tell the men, and the men being sent, with the women, into Galilee to wait for and bear witness to the resurrected Christ.  ‘In the resurrection of Jesus the new creation has indeed arrived’: that is the substance of their message.  But there is more.  ‘To everyone who believes in our message, Christ will grant a key to the portal of life, that everyone who believes may experience the liberating power of the new creation, even before it has fully arrived!’  This is the promise of the risen Christ to all who would believe.  To every soul who is willing to die with Christ to the hateful values of this world and its values.   To every soul who would submit to Christ’s teaching and allow his or her self to be undone by it.  To every soul who is willing to be broken and remade after the image of the Crucified. Christ is risen, friends, to do nothing less than heal and transform both our selves and our world into a place of goodness and beauty. A world like the one that is to come.

That he does so in a mysterious and rather hidden way goes with the territory.  For the story of Jesus told by Matthew is not, in the final analysis, the story of two worlds, one that comes before the resurrection and one that comes after.  It is the story of an ordinary and not particularly powerful man who is always already - from the beginning of the story to its end - a visitor from the new creation, whose only power is the power of love.  If he was to take Galilee or Melbourne or anywhere by storm, with weapons and armies to effect his will in a campaign of shock and awe, this would be to contradict everything that his Father, the God who is love, is on about.  Instead, in the gospel story, he takes a route at once more subtle and far more powerful: the strange and hidden way of friendship, servanthood and loving sacrifice.  And we who have died with him in baptism are called to do exactly the same: in every thought, in every deed, in every relationship, in every moment; trusting not to the power of this world, the power of our ferocious self-protection or self-interest, but to the hidden power of self-giving love that flows from God’s future, through the portal of Christ’s crucified and risen body, into the hands, the feet, the faces and the voices gathered thus on this night of revolution.  To the church, which is Christ’s very body - crucified and risen, like him, for the healing of the world. 

Christ is risen.  Hallelujah!