Matthew's baptism of Jesus

Isaiah 42.1-9; Psalm 29; Acts 10.34-43; Matthew 3.13-17

Every culture and people have their foundational stories, stories which are able to tell us who we are, where we belong, and what our purpose in life might be.  For Christians, one of those foundational stories in that of Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan river.  It is foundational because it is a story not only about who God is, but it is also about who we are as people who ‘believe in Jesus Christ’.  If we listen carefully, it is a story that can also provide invaluable guidance about where we belong in the world, and what we are to do with our lives.  It certainly did that for the early Christian communities.  So . . . listen carefully!

The first thing that Matthew tells us that Jesus came from all the way from Galilee to be baptised by John in the Jordan.  That’s quite a long way and, if you happen to be a young man seeking your fortune in the big wide world, in entirely the wrong direction!  For John was baptising people not in the middle of the city, where people gathered to work and do their business, but in the desert wilderness—way, way off the beaten track.  For John was preaching a baptism of repentance, calling people to reflect upon their lives and ask the question “Is what I’m doing with my life really enriching, satisfying, what I am put on this earth to do?  Or am I just doing it because everyone else is, or because I am afraid of something, or for some other reason I don’t quite understand?”  In John’s eyes, the Jewish people, particularly the most wealthy and successful, had forgotten about the call of their God to live lives characterised by justice, compassion and prayer.  And so he beckoned them out into the wilderness, to a place where the normal trappings of life were no longer there to support and ensnare.  He beckoned them to a place rich with meaning in Jewish faith, a place which marks the passage of a people who had been slaves in Egypt to their freedom in the land of promise.  “Be baptised in the Jordan,” he told them.  “Like the people who crossed this river in ancient times, you cross this river also.  Repent!  Put off your life of slavery to economic and social demands.  Wash away your sins and rise from the waters to pursue the life of freedom that God will give you!”

So, when Jesus comes to John it is not by accident.  It’s not that he was wandering in the desert one day, like some tourist in modern-day Palestine, and happened across a bizarre ceremony that would be kinda fun to have a go at.  No, Jesus comes to John with a deeply held belief and purpose:  that God had called him to leave behind all that was expected of him by his community, that is, to be the head of his household and chief provider for his mother, his brothers, and his sisters.  Jesus believed that God had called him to claim an entirely different identity and mission, a vocation that could only, perhaps, be finally discovered and embraced through this watery ritual of death and rebirth.

For that is what baptism meant for the Jews of the first century.  The word “baptism” literally means “to be immersed in water”, and the ceremony first came to prominence in the century before Christ as a way for Gentiles, non-Jews that is, to embrace the Jewish faith and community.  After a long period of preparation in which the candidates learned both the wisdom of the Jews in law and prophets and the ethical demands of the Jewish life, they would be taken to a body of water and washed thoroughly—yes, even immersed in that body of water.  Thus the name:  “baptism”.  The symbol is not perhaps so obvious to us these days, especially to those of us who have witnessed hundreds of infant christenings over the years.  Stripped naked and immersed in water, the candidates were killing off their former way of life by a symbolic drowning.  They were also washing away their sins so that God might lead them in a new, and very different, way of life.  What John does, then, is take an established Jewish ritual for the initiation of Gentiles into Judaism and applies it to lapsed or lost Jews, Jews who had forgotten what it meant to trust and obey the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

One should understand that, in the ancient world, water was not so benign as we regard it today—flowing purely and freely from our taps as it does.  In the ancient world, water very often symbolised chaos and evil.  In water, people lost their lives.  On the waves of the sea, many ancient people drowned.  With the flooding of the rivers, they lost their harvests.  In the ancient world, people knew that water was both necessary to life but also the bringer of death.  “Fear death by water” said the Buddha in T.S. Eliot’s famous poem, The Wasteland.  What that meant for Eliot, as it means for us, is that the waters of baptism should not be regarded as tame, given only to feed and sustain life as we know it.  The waters of baptism are dangerous:  they are designed to take our lives away.  Without doing so, they cannot give us a new life.  There is a terrific byzantine icon of Jesus baptism in which you can see, under his feet, the terrifying figure of Leviathan, an ancient symbol of water’s power to kill and destroy.  In order to be baptised, Jesus had to be willing to submit himself to the power of Leviathan.  For that is the only way to overcome Leviathan’s power.  Perhaps we moderns only get in touch with something of that ancient sensibility when a tsunami comes along.

So, all of these meanings hover in air and stir in the water as Jesus comes to be baptised by John.  That is why John at first refuses to baptise Jesus, according to Matthew.  For Matthew’s community, you see, which knew these meanings very well indeed, Jesus is not a person who needed to be baptised.  He is not a sinner who had lost his way and therefore needed to be cleansed and renewed in the water.  “That may be true,” says Matthew in reply, “but baptism symbolises other things as well:  not just the putting away of a life of sin but, more positively, the embrace of an identity and vocation from God.  This is why Jesus asks John to baptise him—in order to symbolise and fulfil all that God rightly asks of him.”  

And so Jesus is baptised.  Note the tense and the mood of that verb.  Jesus does not baptise himself.  Baptism is not something that he, or anyone else, can do for themselves.  It is something that another gives or bestows upon us.  The primary agent in baptism is God.  It is God who baptises, it is God who gives us the grace and the power to put aside the life of sin and embrace the life of faith.  It is God who acts in baptism, even though he does so through the agency of his servant.  For Jesus that servant was John.  For us, it is the church.  What this means, of course, is that salvation is not something we can accomplish for ourselves.  In the Christian view of the world it is simply not possible, by virtue of one’s own ingenuity and power, to be liberated.  In Christian understanding, even the will to be liberated is a gift from God.  Therefore, it is only by virtue of God’s love and grace that we can ever be saved.  

Yet, for all that, a well-informed human will and intention must be present, as it was for Jesus.  Without such will, there is no sacrament.  That is why the church can never baptise a person for whom there is neither faith in God, nor the will to follow God’s way.  What does that mean for infant baptism?  Simply this:  that we must stop baptising children where the primary caregivers have little-to-no informed intention of living a genuinely Christian life, immersed in the church and loyal to the promises made.  The word sacrament means, in fact, “promise”.  In the sacrament of baptism, we hear the love and promises of God.  But we also enact our own promises, promises to turn away from evil and embrace the life of Christ not only in word, but in deed also.  If we or our primary caregivers can neither understand nor make those promises, then the church has no business in baptising us.  To do so would be to mock the promises of God!

But what does God promise us in baptism?  Here we can learn from the baptism of Jesus once more.  As he emerges from the waters of death, Matthew tells us that Jesus saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon his ‘like a dove.’  This event is rich with resonance from Jewish history and theology.  It first recalls the messianic passage we read from Isaiah, where the servant of the Lord is given the Spirit in order to perform a particular task and mission in the world:  to accomplish justice for the oppressed, to open the eyes of the blind, to be a light for the nations, and to release the captives from prison.  In his baptism, Jesus therefore learns his task in the world:  to be God’s light and hope, and the promise of justice, for all who suffer.  This image of the Spirit descending like a dove reinforces that identity.  In the story of Noah, the dove comes as the waters of the flood recede, a sign that God’s new world is beginning to emerge.  So it is for Jesus, and for all who are baptised.  The Spirit is a sign or guarantee that there is life after disaster and death, that no matter how much we lose in baptism we shall be given, by that same action, blessings and riches beyond measure.  The dove:  a sign of God’s love after the deluge is over.

And then there is the voice from heaven:  “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”  Here Jesus finds out who he is.  It is likely that Jesus suspected something for much of his life, but now all his imaginings and intimations come together.  For here God owns Jesus as his son and messiah, the one by whom salvation will come not only to the Jews, but also to the Gentiles.  Remember that the most crucial component of this identity, in Christian understanding, is that of suffering.  Christ will not be the Son of God, and will not bring salvation to the world, unless he suffers and dies.  This understanding is confirmed, in Matthew’s narrative, by Jesus use of the ‘sign of Jonah’ in chapter 12.  There some teachers come to Jesus and ask him for a sign that he is indeed the messiah sent by God.  Jesus replies that no sign will be given them except the sign of the prophet Jonah, who spent three days in the belly of a sea monster, deep in the ocean.  “So shall it be for the Son of Man,” says Jesus, “who shall spend three days buried in the heart of the earth”.  Matthew wants us to understand that Jesus baptism anoints him to be the messiah, certainly, but a peculiar kind of messiah: a messiah who must suffer and die in order to accomplish his work.  The imagery of baptism is unmistakable.  Here baptism becomes a figure for his death and his resurrection:  buried in the water, risen to life on the third day.

Now, I said at the beginning that this story of Jesus baptism is not only about God and Jesus, but also about all who ‘believe in Jesus Christ’.  We’ve seen something of that as we’ve gone along.  But let me now conclude by making some things explicit which have perhaps been hidden in the detail up until now.  The baptism of Jesus became, in early Christian theology, the paradigm or model for what it meant to ‘believe in Jesus Christ’.  ‘Belief’ you see, is neither intellectual assent on its own, nor a group of habitual bodily practices on their own.  Belief is ‘faith’, a decisive unity of intellectual and bodily action which has its object and inspiration within the thought and action of another, an ‘other’ in whom one’s very self is taken apart and re-constructed.  Christians are made into Christians by becoming immersed in the symbolic world of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus that is figured in baptism, and precisely by that immersion, are transformed into people whose seek to imitate Christ is every way.  What we therefore learn from Jesus’ baptism is what it ‘belief in Jesus Christ’ actually looks like in a particular life:

1. a leaving of the well-worn expectations and loyalties of our society in favour of a life of faith dedicated to God;
2. a dying to sin, and the lostness of our culture, in order to rise to a new life, a life of grace and peace given us by God; in this we participate in Christ’s saving death and resurrection—‘the sign of Jonah’;
3. the conferral and gift of a new identity.  In our baptism, God owns us as his sons and his daughters.  Jesus was the first, in other words, of many siblings.  The whole company of these siblings is called ‘the church’.
4. a commissioning for mission, for now we are anointed with the Spirit so that we can share with Jesus his vocation as messiah.  In the baptismal liturgy we declare God’s promise that we are now, as a baptised people, the body of Christ, in whom the Spirit of Christ dwells.  All of us, whether we are ‘ordained’ or not, are therefore called to be lights for the nations and to work for the freedom of everyone from whatever it is that keeps them in chains.

The story of the baptism is therefore foundational for the identity and vocation not only of Jesus, but of ourselves as well.  As many as are baptised into Christ have died with Christ.  By participating in the baptism of his death and resurrection we, each of us, are given a new, messianic, mission and vocation.  As Christ gave himself for the sake of the world, so now we—as his body, the church—are called to join with him in loving the world, for the glory of God.  That is what it means, therefore, to ‘believe in Jesus Christ’.

A Still-born Hope? Asylum-seekers in Australia

Texts: Genesis 7:11-17, 21-23; 8.1, 6-19; Romans 6.3-11; Mark 4.35-41

Before I begin, I'd like to acknowledge and honour the Yallukit-Willam people, who have cared for the land on which this church was build for time immemorial. 

In the Jewish and Christian imagination, life is about the long and difficult pilgrimage of God’s people from a place of isolation, fear, despair and bondage to a place of community, love, hope and freedom.  The pilgrimage is long and difficult not because of God, but because of us.  We make it long and difficult by our ongoing attachment to the things and the behaviours which comprise the walls of our many prisons. If we were to finally let go of such ‘treasures’ and accept Christ’s free offering of forgiveness and peace, then things would change very quickly.  But, in point of fact, we don’t let go easily.  Because we actually love our chains – even to the point of worshipping them - and because we are therefore loath to take them off, we find the way to liberation very difficult. And this is true whether we are talking primarily about individuals or societies, about personal spiritual travail or the struggle of tribes and nations to become more just and humane.

In Holy Scripture, this long and difficult pilgrimage from death to life, from bondage to freedom, is most often symbolised as a difficult passage, either across or through a large body of water.  In the story of Noah, for example, God responds to the irredeemable wickedness of the world by hatching a Genesis project.  God takes the very best of this world – Noah’s family and breeding pairs of every species of animal - places them all in a boat, and floats it through the awful crisis of storm and flood that destroys the world utterly.  When the boat finally alights on dry land following the flood, its inhabitants spill forth to become the basis for a new world, a new humanity, and therefore the possibility of becoming a better –more just and peaceful - society.  From evil and despair, through water, to a founded hope for life and peace.

That pattern is repeated in the story of the Exodus of God’s people from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the land of Canaan.  Under Pharaoh, God’s people a severely mistreated. They are slaves, and therefore have no control, whatsoever, over their own destinies.  Their bodies and souls are nothing but the playthings of power.  But Yahweh sees their suffering and sends his prophets Miriam and Moses to arrange their escape.  Through the waters of the Red Sea as they run from Pharaoh, and through the waters of the Jordan River as they finally enter Canaan, the Hebrews are slowly transformed from a people without hope or identity to a people who have both a destiny and a future.  From evil and despair, through water, to a founded hope for life and peace.

There is a boat story in Mark’s gospel as well, and it draws heavily on the Noah and Exodus narratives.  Here Jesus is with his disciples on a boat in the middle of the sea of Galilee.  They are on route from safe, familiar, territory, to the region of the Gerasenes where they will encounter a demon named ‘Legion’. All about them is a wild storm which makes the sea ferocious.  Now, we can glean from Mark’s larger story that this small tableau symbolises the vulnerability of Mark’s small church as it seeks to carry its gospel of peace and liberation into the midst of a hostile and militant Roman Empire.  When Jesus stands up to rebuke the storm, when he cries out ‘Peace! Be Still!’ Mark is therefore telling his church that they can survive their ordeal if they look to Jesus, if they can trust in the grace of his presence in their midst, and follow with perseverance his way of suffering love.  In the midst of evil and despair, through water, they will find their way - with Jesus - to a place of life and peace.

The church has drawn on these very stories, from its very beginning, to symbolise the pilgrimage from death to life that is conversion.  Not surprisingly, the ritual of conversion is a washing in water.  In baptism we die to the basic principles of this world. We are drowned to all that is evil and unjust and cruel and selfish in the world.  With Christ we are buried in the waters, entombed in their icy depths. Yet, through the power of God’s love, we are raised from that place with Christ, raised to live a new life, with new hopes, and with faith in the new way of love God has shown us in Christ.  The ancient pattern is therefore repeated again in this fundamental rite of Christian discipleship: from evil and despair, through water, to a founded hope for life and peace in the company of our saviour Christ.

Now, what if we were to map this Christian pattern of pilgrimage and conversion onto the long and difficult journeys made by asylum seekers? What if we were to see in their incredible journeys across land and sea something of the same desperate hope that motivates Jews and Christians to flee from all that is evil and seek, instead, the peace and joy that God has promised? What if we were to interpret their voyages by boat, especially, in the light of Christian baptism? What if asylum seekers who get on leaky boats are not, in fact, demons come to threaten our peace, but simply people – people like us – who are actually fleeing the terrible demons that rule their places of origin in order to find - on the other side of dangerous and uncertain waters, a new life, a founded hope, a place where neighbours can live in peace? 

If we reframed their journeys thus, it would be no longer be acceptable to write so-called ‘boat-people’ off as ‘economic migrants’.  It would no longer be acceptable to tell them to ‘go back to where they came from’.  It would no longer be acceptable to imprison them for years at a time, heaping our own tortures on top of the traumas they have already experienced.  It would no longer be acceptable to build walls around our huge and wealthy continent and say ‘keep out’, ‘there is no room at this inn’.  Why? Because, as the book of Deuteronomy (10.19) so simply puts it:  ‘Show great love for the alien. For you were aliens in the land of Egypt.’  As Christians and Jews we are all boat-people, led by God from places of evil and despair, through water, to a founded hope for life and peace in the company of God’s redeemed people.  We are boat-people in a personal and psychological sense, and we are boat-people in the more communal sense. For most of our ancestors came here from across the seas seeking some kind of baptismal hope for a new and better land, for a place and a community of resurrection from the dead.  Who can deny it? We therefore have a responsibility, as people who are being loved and rescued by God, to love and rescue asylum-seekers. We cannot allow such hopes for life, life in all its promised fullness, to be still-born. It is as simple, my friends, as that.

Now, I am a person who has a better claim to this country than most. I am a direct descendent of Manalargenna, last chieftain of the Trawoolway clan whose traditional lands are in north-east Tasmania.  My family has lived in that part of the world for at least 25 thousand years, and for many thousands before that here on the bigger island.  But this I say to anyone who has come to these shores seeking refuge, asylum from the storm.  You are welcome here!  You are welcome! From the evil and despair of whence you came, through water, to a founded hope for life and peace in the company of God’s people, you are welcome!  And I promise you this. That I will do everything in my power to persuade our government to make you welcome also.  

This homily was preached at a service of lament with asylum-seekers at Williamstown Uniting Church in September 2013.

Springs of Living Water

Texts: Exodus 17.1-7; Psalm 95; John 4.5-42

In October 2000, much of the state of Victoria found itself without hot water. A key gas processing plant exploded, rendering most of the state's hot water systems useless. For weeks, the Melbourne papers showed pictures of scantily-clad people cuing at public utilities and hostels, hanging out for that hot shower. I was in Melbourne for a Minister's retreat during the crisis. We were staying at a centre which happened to have electric showers. It was very comical to see the Victorians heading for the showers the moment they arrived, and to hear their shouts of glee filtering down to the lounge from the upstairs bathrooms. The whole episode caused me to reflect on how much we Australians take for granted. I remember staying with my wife, Lil's, Aunty Mary once. Mary works as a doctor in Fiji. We got to talking about the contrast between life in Australia and life in Fiji. Mary pointed out that the most valuable facility an Australian house possesses is not the television, or the microwave oven, or the electric lights and heaters, but the capacity to provide pure, clean, running water by a simple turn of the tap.

The readings from Scripture today remind us that water is most certainly not to be taken for granted. In the ancient Near East, where these stories were first told, water was a very scarce commodity indeed. Much of the land in and around Palestine was extremely dry and arid. Indeed, after several millennia of de-forestation, it is even more so today. Although the Israeli irrigation schemes have become legendary for their efficiency in providing water for Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and some of the other big towns, it remains the case that much of the countryside is still serviced by little more than the wells dug in biblical times. It is still customary for some folk, rural folk in particular, to walk great distances to draw water in the manner of their ancestors. In dry and dusty climes like these, water is valued more than gold. It is properly regarded as both the bringer, and the sustainer, of life itself.

No wonder, then, that the Bible frequently uses the image of water to describe the gift of God for the renewal of a parched and dry life. In Exodus we read the story of the people's thirst. Having left Egypt in miraculous circumstances some months before, the people now find themselves in an inhospitable wilderness called Sin, and their thirst has become intolerable. They cry out against Moses and his God, saying, 'Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our livestock and our children with thirst?' An exasperated Moses goes to God and asks for a solution. The Lord instructs Moses to strike the rock of Horeb, from whence water will flow to quench the people’s thirst. He does so, and the people drink. Now, as with most Bible stories, whatever the historical circumstances that gave this story birth, it is being retold here for a purpose, a theological purpose. So let us listen for that purpose, else we shall miss the point.

Let me suggest to you that the thirst of the Israelites here represents their poverty of spirit before God. Note that the people have been wandering in the desert of Sin (a most revealing name, don't you think?), a place of meaningless desolation where there is precious little to live for. It is a place that represents their fundamental lack of trust in Yahweh, with whom they began to quarrel from the very moment the Red Sea closed behind them. Faced with an uncertain future, the people seem to quickly forget all that miraculous, cosmic, stuff around the liberation from Egypt. So much so, that they even begin to long for the slavery they left behind! 'Take us back', they say. 'Take us back to the place of slavery. It was so good there, compared to this terrible thirst we feel!'

Here the Israelites do what many of us do. They re-write the history of the old days in order to give comfort in a time of uncertainty or fear. The ‘old’ days, in these circumstances, have an uncanny knack for being far rosier than the history books would suggest, and certainly far better than these ‘new’ days could ever be! In moments of uncertainly or fear, people are very prone to nostalgia for a place and a feeling that never really existed. They are also prone to blame the loss of that nostalgic Eden on anyone else but themselves! In this case, it was Yahweh and his servant Moses who copped the blame. Frequently, in these days of apparently diminished Christianity, it is pastors and church leaders who are to blame. In his reflection on this story, the writer of Psalm 95 says that, in fact, the people have no-one to blame but themselves, for they were stubborn and hard of heart. They would not, in the face of uncertainty and fear, trust themselves to the God who had gotten them this far. Preferring the devil they already knew, their hunger and thirst turned to the gods of Egypt once more, the gods who had done nothing but turn them into slaves.

And yet, for all this, the Exodus story finishes not with God's condemnation, but with God's rather surprising provision of water. God sustains the people's lives, though they clearly don't deserve it, and keeps them moving towards the land of promise. Who would have thought? There is an extraordinary word of grace here for us. How many of us are like the Israelites who, having made a radical choice for faith long ago, now long for all that we foreswore at that time? How many of us, having chosen to follow in the footprints of the Crucified, now daydream about life in the service of other gods? Well, I do, for one. Sometimes I lie awake at night and wonder if I'm stark-raving mad; I lie there fantasizing about all those other lives I might have lived. Like the one where I’m an ethics-free corporate lawyer, retreating periodically to my wine-soaked retreat-house in Tuscany. Or the one where I’m Paris Hilton, the limit of my responsibility-free zone being exceeded only by the size of my credit-limit. But no, I became a follower of Christ, which immediately excluded either of these possibilities. And, let’s face it, in the eyes of our possession-obsessed society, that means I am one to be either pitied or detested. Can you see how these mid-night wonderings are a hungering and a thirsting? Like some of you, I hazard to guess, I wake up in the middle of the night feeling that my life has become dry and barren. I long for something more.

Of course, as the much-maligned (but scarily insightful) St. Augustine of Hippo said, all of us remain restless until we find our home in God. When Jesus met the woman at the well, he promised that the water he would give would be able to quench her thirst entirely. We thirst without end until we are given the water of God's Spirit to drink. We hunger until we are satiated by Christ, who is the bread of life. Only God can fill the hole inside. Only God can make life meaningful, right? Yes, but how constantly do we believe this? How vulnerable to the views of others do we remain?

Each of us, said Margaret Cooley, are mirror-selves, people who see ourselves not as we are, but as others see us. So that if others think Christians are naïve fools, we eventually become vulnerable to thinking that way ourselves. And the more we do, the more thirsty we become. Instead of hungering and thirsting after God, we start to hunger and thirst after other 'gods'. Gods like approval from others. Gods like 'the old days'. Gods like the perceived right to a sanitized, pain-free, life. Gods that can never, in a million years, satiate our desire for meaningfulness. Gods that succeed only in making us more thirsty, not less, because they are ultimately ureal, so many chimera: creations of desire and therefore never unable to finally satisfy desire. In this way, all of us who thirst are not so very different to those Israelites in the wilderness, or like the Samaritans who made the marriage covenant with all those pagan gods. Having chosen to believe in God's promise of a land flowing with milk and honey, we started on the journey to find it. Yet, along the way our minds and hearts begin to yearn for lesser things. Deep down we begin to have our doubts. We turn from God, and ceased to believe in the promise. We, like both the Israelites of old and the Samaritans of the first century, become prone to the worship of lesser gods, ever wanting to cleave unto husbands whose promises prove, in the end, to be empty.

Like the woman of Samaria, we may indeed lose our way in life. When faced with earthquakes and tsunamis, with nuclear meltdowns and collapsing buildings -whether literal or figurative - whether as individuals or as church communities, we are tempted to covenant ourselves to the control of the many false gods around us. We may indeed become thirsty for the sweeter water they seem to offer. And, very often, we do indeed place ourselves in their devilish hands. Sometimes it is so, and there is little point in pretending otherwise. The good news is that God does not abandon us to our empty flirtations. If we listen carefully, as the woman of Samaria listened to Christ, we shall hear a word of grace, the promise of a spring of living water which, being alive and real (rather than chimera, a nothing) is able to re-animate our lives and fill us with all that we really need: the far deeper truth that we are God’s beloved children, that in worshipping God we will find not only God, but also our best selves, the selves and communities we can be when we are alive with the Spirit who is love. That truth, and the knowing of that truth deep in our bones, is indeed as powerful as water to the dying. It can fill us with life, and hope, and the courage that is called faith. It can be, in short, our salvation.

But let me conclude with a few words about what this salvation might look like, 'in the flesh', as it were. As always, there is more to be said than can be said, but let me make just this one point for now. Salvation is certainly not about the giving away or cessation of desire altogether, as in Buddhism. It is not about denying ourselves to the point where we are able to shut down our senses, thereby blocking out the enticements of this world entirely. (Not that the Buddhism of the West even pretends to such a thing! In Western Buddhism, the denial of desire in meditation has a very different purpose: only to give it a much-needed rest, so that the drive for power and success can again go into overdrive when the meditation is over!) By way of contrast, listen to what Jesus tells his disciples in one of the many passages in John's gospel having to do with food and drink, with what is real and what is not: 'My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work'.

Christians do not shut down their senses or their desire; they simply have a desire-transplant. We learn, through a long process of attending to the word of Christ in Scripture and liturgy and Christian community, to desire in a different way, to desire as Christ desires so that our own needs, like his, are entirely met by doing the will of our Father. And what is the will of the Father, according to John? That we should not love our lives so much that we are unable to give them away for the sake of loving another. For, in the words of the Franciscan song, it is indeed ‘in giving we receive and in pardoning that we are pardoned’. And finally, it is quite literally true that it is only in dying to our fear, our uncertainty, and our nostalgia for an Arcadian past and handing it all over to Christ on his cross, that we shall find ourselves raised into the land and into the blessed way of life to which God has called us. This is the Lenten paradox. And, my friends, it is the only way to be saved.