Love and revelation

Texts:  Acts 10.44-48; 1 John 5.1-6; John 15.9-17

This morning I want to lead you in a criminally brief meditation about love.  ‘Love’ is a word that has almost come to grief in our modern world.  Used so often, and with so many different interests and agendas, it is in danger of becoming empty: no more than a vacuous vessel into which both speaker and spoken-to may pour any kind of meaning they like. 

Depending on the context, love turns out to mean so many things.  In Hollywood, love is a feeling of euphoria, a chemistry between people which (like the weather) can come and go.  While that euphoria is around, life is great.  But when it departs, there is no longer any reason to persevere with a relationship. In some sections of the Australian military, love seems to mean being willing to stick by your mates even if your mates are using and abusing you.  Love means keeping silence while your ‘mates’ do with you as they will. It means remaining loyal to people who actually hate you. In the middle-class suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, love so often means no more than ‘being nice’, that is, keeping up the appearance that we all get on with each other (even though we don’t) or pretending that we have a common view of the world (when actually we don’t).  Love, in this context, means to avoid talking about anything that may raise our passions, for fear that the other person’s passions may come back at us in unpleasant ways.  This is ‘love’ as the avoidance of difference, or conflict, or strong emotions, or the possibility of working toward a common truth.  Love is being polite, even to the point of living a lie. I suspect this is the creed of many of our churches as well.

The Christian meaning of love is rather different.  Christians are not bound to love after the manner of our many secular religions.  Christians have been freed to love in a very particular way: the way of Jesus, the Son of God.  Where the secular versions of love are as manipulable and as whimsical as the many contexts in which they appear, the love of Christ has a strong and consistent content in any place or time.  Why?  Because love, in the Christian lexicon, is not something we may define and embody according to our usual lights.  It is a way of life that comes from before and beyond us, from the God whose very being is love.  It is a way of life that is nevertheless available to us in our human bodies and cultures by the action of the Spirit, who permeates and suffuses the Christian community in exactly the same way that she permeated the life of Jesus, the Son of God, when he lived and died amongst us more that 2000 years ago.  The meaning of Christian love is therefore tied, not to the constantly shifting fashions and fabrics of human culture, but to the living story and character of a particular man:  Jesus, the Son of God.

John the Evangelist has Jesus say this, and I quote:

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.  If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love . . .  This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.  No one has greater love than this:  to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.  You are my friends if you do what I command you.  I do not call you slaves any longer, because the slave does not know what the master is doing.  Instead, I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have learned from my Father.

I want to make just three observations about this extraordinary passage.  First, that the love of which Christ speaks does not wait for human thinking or culture to fill it with meaning.  No, the meaning of this love is always already established:  it is an imitation of Christ’s radical form of friendship, the willingness to lay aside one’s own life in order that another’s life may flourish.  It is, in the words of Paul Ricoeur, the apprehension that the other person has a claim on me, and that I am no longer responsible only for myself, but that I share in the responsibility to ensure that the life of my brother or sister is able to flourish as well, to become what God intends that it may become. 

A second point now.  The language of laying down one’s life refers, of course, to a particular history:  the real event of Christ’s crucifixion.  It should be remembered, however, that the crucifixion represents not just the love of a singular man at a particular time, for a particular community.  The crucifixion is a sign in the world of the love of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit for every single creature, in every time and place.  The cross enacts in human history what God is like, and will always be like, for eternity:  sheer love.  We are talking here about the love of the Father for the Son, and the Son for the Father; the love that is able to welcome and cede its place to the other; the love that is willing to lose that another may win; the love that able to long for another’s flourishing and give that longing both form and body.  All that Christ did in the world, he learned from his Father.  Now the Father and the Son have come to us anew in the Spirit, that the love which properly belongs to the Father and the Son may be spread abroad in our own, oh-so-human cultures, relationships and bodies.

A final observation.  The love of God, as I have been saying, is not without substance.  It has form and shape and a particular history in the world, and that is really what the language of ‘commandment’ is about, in this passage.  We are commanded to love not because God is a bully and we are his slaves.  On the contrary, as Jesus says here, we are no longer slaves but friends; but this is only the case insofar as we are willing to love.  The command to love, you see, is also (and somewhat paradoxically) the means by which God frees us from our bondage to self.  If we did not love, we would still be slaves to all that we are apart from Christ—a series of basic, and seemingly irresistible, drives-toward-power derived from DNA, from family, from our peer environment, or where ever.  In love, however, we learn to listen for another voice, the voice of God, who alone knows how it is that human beings may flourish.  The command to love is therefore, in its most basic form, an apprehension of the pressure God exerts towards our freedom, our liberation towards a life lived not only for ourselves, but for the people around us as well.  The command to love reminds us that love cannot be what we want it to be.  Love can only be what God is.

So then, let us love one another.  Not after the manner of fashion or convenience, but after the costly manner of God in Christ.  Let us love one another as if we had a claim on each other.  Let us love as though nothing else really mattered.  And whatever we do, let us not turn love into that kind of law that is unable to forgive and set free.  For the love of God is the capacity to forgive most of all.  Let us therefore love and forgive each other from the heart, just as in Christ God has loved and forgiven us.

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.  

I am myself

Texts:  1 John 3.1-7; Luke 24.36-48

When, in Luke’s version of the story, the risen Jesus first appears to his closest friends and companions, they are not entirely convinced that he is Jesus, the man they had known and loved.  At first they think he is a ghost, some kind of other-worldly apparition who has come to harm them.  They start to believe only after Jesus has said, ‘Look, I am not a ghost, I am myself’ and invited them to touch the wounds in his hands and his feet. A few moments later he eats some fish in the presence, again to show that he is himself, ‘in the flesh’ as it were.  This story, and the one before it about the encounter on the road to Emmaus, have always intrigued me.  Not because of their apparently miraculous elements (I have never really struggled with the idea that God can do miracles) but because they model for us that rather paradoxical process by which Christian selves become yet more themselves by dying to themselves.  So, that is what I should like to talk about this morning: becoming who you are by letting go of who you are in order to become a new self that is like the risen Christ.

According to Luke’s story, Jesus was not always himself.  Which is not to say that he was not recognisable as himself.  His name was Jesus, he was a son to his mother and a brother to his siblings.  He grew up in Nazareth and learned a trade, which he then used to support his family.   Everyone who knew him over a period of years could have identified him as himself, even if they had not seen him for some time.  Even after his baptism by John in the Jordan, even after Jesus left his home town in pursuit of a new and dangerous vocation, Jesus was recognisably Jesus.  And yet.  And yet Jesus had not yet become entirely himself.  Even at the point of his death on the cross, Jesus was not yet what God had promised he would be.  He was not yet the risen one, who could shake off the power of sin, evil and death.  He was not yet the new kind of human being that the disciples encounter in our story: a flesh and blood person who could nevertheless appear and disappear as though he were no longer subject to the powers of time and space.  For much of Luke’s story, then, Jesus is not yet himself in the sense of having become who God had destined him to be. 

Crucially, in the story, Jesus is only able to become truly himself by letting go of a whole heap of cherished dreams about his future, some originating in his own imagination, and some in the imagination of others.  His mother, being a Jewish mother, probably hoped that Jesus would become a successful lawyer or rabbi.  She, and he, had to let go off that dream.  His friends and companions hoped that Jesus would become a political leader, a leader who could oust the Romans and restore the fortunes of Israel.  They, and he, had to let go of that plan.  And from the story of the garden of Gethsemane, we can surmise that Jesus himself would really have preferred to live rather than to die, to retire quietly to some regional synagogue perhaps, rather than to suffer the wrath of the Jewish Council.  Yet, in the end, he makes a crucial decision which makes all the difference.  ‘Not my will, but yours be done’ he says.  He says that to God, his Father.  And by that decision he lets go of his own hopes and dreams in favour of his Father’s hopes and dreams, which enables God to complete the process of his becoming.  By this death, Jesus becomes the Christ, the one anointed by God to bring a new kind of life in the world, a life so new that most of us still have trouble coming to terms with what it all means.

But that is how it is for all of us, as well.  We shall never be truly ourselves until we are able to let go of ourselves—the usual hopes and dreams planted in us by family, friends, and media—grasping, instead, the self that God wills and promises for us, the self that is Christ.  The Christ-self, as the 1^st letter of John tells us, is ‘righteous’.  Not ‘righteous’ in the sense of a self-interested hiding away from the rest of the world or a sitting in judgement upon it.  No, the Christ-self is righteous in the sense that Jesus was ‘righteous’—an engaged embodiment of the mercy of God, a tough kind of love that is centred on other people and refuses to simply abandon them to the powers of death, despair or banality.   According to John, we shall never be entirely ourselves until we are like the risen Christ, the new human being, the revelation of what God intends for humanity in general.  ‘When he appears,’ says John’ we shall be like him’.  This is God’s promise, but like all God’s promises, it is not a promise that can be fulfilled apart from the choices we make.  God created us for freedom.  To become who we are, we must choose the path that Christ would choose.

Ego eimi autos . . .  I am myself.  That is what the risen Christ said to his disciples.  And we shall only be able to say that ourselves if we are prepared to do what Jesus did, to take our baptism into his death seriously as a very real dying and a rising.  We shall be ourselves when, by faith, we have allowed Christ to take away the fear of what others may think, and the desire to conform to all that is conventional or common-sense.  We shall be ourselves when we are prepared to risk both security and sense for the sake of a gospel of outrageous love.  We shall be ourselves when we stop believing that there is nothing we can do to transform this crazy world of economic and scientific rationalism.  We shall be ourselves when prayer has become a more familiar habit that watching TV or surfing the internet.  We shall be ourselves when we are able to attend to the needs of others (‘needs’, note that, not ‘wants’), even if that means putting aside what we think we might need for ourselves.  We shall be ourselves when we are able to surrender ourselves to Christ and say ‘not my will, but yours’.  Now, I am very aware of not yet being myself. And you, I know, are aware of it too.  But in faith I believe that Christ will complete the work that he began when I was baptised.  He will do it for you to.  If only you will surrender.  If only you will let go.

Easter in Ordinary

Acts 2. 14, 36-41; Psalm 116.1-4, 12-19; 1 Peter 1.17-23; Luke 24.13-35

Well the times have come full circle and we find ourselves in the Easter season once more.  Like last year, and the year before, and the year before that, we sing the Easter refrain 'He is Risen!' and crack open the symbols of new life and fertility:  Easter eggs, Easter bunnies.  And they remind us of the new life which came with Christ’s resurrection, just like last year, and the year before that, and the year before that.  And we get up early on Easter morn and sing the Easter refrain 'He is Risen!' and crack open the symbols of new life and fertility:  Easter eggs and Easter bunnies.  And, well, the times have come full circle and we find ourselves in the Easter season once more.  Like last year, and the year before, and the year before that, we sing the Easter refrain 'He is Risen' with hearts full of joy, and crack open the symbols of new life and fertility:  Easter eggs, Easter bunnies and . . .  do you get the feeling that I’m going around in circles?  Do you get the feeling that the record is stuck, and you’ve heard it all before? 

Friends, what I have done just now is reflect back to you what I myself hear at Easter time just about every year.  I hear the resurrection of Christ being tied to the cycles of nature, to the return of fertility, to the flowering of flora and fauna in the European springtime.  For that is what the theology of the resurrection has become in our culture: an affirmation of the Eternal Return of that which we saw last year, and the year before, and the year before that, and so on.  Here the Christian meaning of the resurrection has been collapsed into that old pagan celebration of Oestre, the Anglo-Saxon god of fertility, whose advent is celebrated with the cyclic return of the sun to warm the world and awaken the life that lays dormant in the soil.   This Easter celebrates what Nietzsche called ‘the eternal return of the Same’, the irrepressible tendency of nature to repair and replace itself; but more seriously, of human beings to want what they have always wanted, to believe what they have always believed, and to know what they have always known.  It is an Easter in which the rhetoric of ‘new life’ is just a figure of speech, because nothing new is really possible.  The circle returns, endlessly, to where it began.  Which makes me think that perhaps the best symbol of this modern Easter is not even the fertile bunny or the egg of new life, but the Big Mac.  Because each time you have one, it tastes exactly the same as the one you had last time.

Of course, the Feast of the Resurrection has absolutely nothing, nothing I say, to do with the Eternal Return which is 'Easter'.  On the contrary, the resurrection of Jesus is about the in-breaking of something which is so new, so different, so unheard of, that, strictly speaking, we cannot even describe it.  It is, as Jürgen Moltmann says, an event entirely without comparison or analogy.  It is an event which shatters every established pattern, every expectation, every shred of comfort and certainty we may have had about the way things are.   It is like the T-Shirt which I bought at a U2 concert a few years back which said “Everything You Know is Wrong”.  It is the explosion within Sameness of a reality which is totally and radically other than anything that we could ever think or imagine:  it is the arrival of God.  And the purpose of this interruption?  To change things.  To change things so entirely that we will never again become captive to all that is predictable, or ‘necessary,’ or ‘fated’.  When Christ rises he does not rise, like Lazarus, to a life lived as it had been lived before.  When Christ rises, he rends not only our hearts, as Peter says in his Pentecostal sermon, but also the very fabric of the way things have always been, so that God’s creatures may never be slaves to the Same ever again.

Here we find ourselves inside Luke’s story of the Emmaus road.  Like us, the travelling companions live in that time after the resurrection.  The women had been to the tomb and witnessed its emptiness, but scarcely able to understand what had happened themselves, find that they cannot make themselves understood amongst their male companions, who remain trapped inside their cycle of despair.  And that is where we find the companions as they begin their journey.  Like many of us, they had lived though a cycling of highs and lows: their messianic hope had been shattered on a Roman cross.  Yet it is here, within the circle of despair, that the Christ chooses to meet them. 

Now, having joined them, Jesus, listens to their woes.  We would expect that of him, would we not?  But then he does something rather surprising.  He begins to preach to them from the Scriptures, but not in the mode of most of the sermon’s I’ve heard, which do little more than confirm and comfort me in circle of that which I already know.   No, this is a profoundly dis-confirming preaching, which first castigates them for their lack of faith in the prophets, and then proceeds to deconstruct their Scriptural knowledge so radically that the meaning of the same is utterly and irreversibly altered.  The results were, I imagine, terrifying.  Suddenly the disciples begin to see that everything they had ever known and believed was wrong.  Yet despite the upset, there is something in what Jesus says that compels them to hang onto him. 

So when they urge Jesus to join them for the evening meal, he consents to do so.  And there he does something which really dislodges their expectations.  In a careful repetition of what he had done at the last supper, Jesus takes bread, says a prayer of blessing, and breaks it so that all gathered may eat.  At that moment, we are told, the companion’s eyes are opened.  They recognise that the stranger is Jesus, their friend, the crucified one.  And yet he is not that one.  He is radically different.  He is risen.  If that isn’t weird enough, Luke then tells us that in that precise moment of recognition, at that very nano-second, Jesus then vanishes from their sight and is seen no more. 

Turning to each other in wonder and excitement, the disciples declare to each other the way in which their hearts were ‘burning’ within them when they heard the word preached.  Note the word: ‘burned,’ as in purged by a bushfire, not ‘warmed’, as by a cosy open fire on a winter’s night.  The disciples rise from where they are and return to the place of despair and forlorn logic from which they came.  They return to Jerusalem with a distinct and special mission:  to declare and confirm that Christ had indeed been raised, and that he had make himself known to them in the breaking of bread.  Which is to say, they returned to Jerusalem to dis-confirm the logic of the Same which held sway there, to interrupt and fragment its omnipotent power by the burning presence of all they had glimpsed in the risen Christ.

Now, this is a strange and wondrous story by any standard.  So strange and wonderful that I am certain that almost everything I intend in speaking about it tonight is not quite right.  But this is how it is with the resurrected Christ.  He comes to us as the word that is strange and in/credible, not conforming to the logic of what we know and experience to be real and trustworthy.  He comes to us not to confirm what we know or to reinforce our sense of what is good and noble and true.  He comes to change all that, to show us, in the blazing light of his risen glory, that the Eternal Return of the same is killing us.  Slowly killing us, but killing us all the same.  And who can doubt this word?  Hasn’t life become genuinely banal for us in this neo-pagan world of circles?  Hemmingway wrote famously that most people live lives of “quiet desperation”.  He was writing about himself, of course, a man who was constantly on the look-out for new experience, something which might cut across the boredom of his life.  The writer of Ecclesiastes complains that all is ‘vanity’, by which he means that human beings, despite all their apparent thirst for experience, tend to look only for that which may be easily integrated into the logic and the framework which is always already there.  But Christ is raised to shatter that logic, to undo the idolatrous gaze that works such vanity into all that is seen and touched and felt.  Christ is raised to set us free from such a thing.

This I believe, and this I declare to you today.  But I want you to note two important implications of this belief.  And these reflections are guided directly by Luke’s text.  First, resurrection belief is sustainable only if one believes what Luke says about the disappearance of Christ at the very moment that we recognise him.  Remember what we heard from Moltmann. The resurrection is an event without analogy.  No matter how much we try to understand and describe him, the risen Christ will always and everywhere elude and elide our grasp.  We see him as in a glass darkly; he is a flash of light at the corner of our eyes, which, if we turn to take squarely into the full ambit of our gaze, will disappear into invisibility.  The Celtic tradition speaks of the Christ who always comes in the guise of the stranger, a stranger who is gone even before one realises who he was.  In precisely that mode, the Emmaus story tells us that no matter how ingenious our resurrection accounts and theologies become, they will certainly not secure a Christ who may be domesticated for our own use and purpose. 

Which leads into my second point, and a rather perplexing one at that.  Perhaps you will have noticed how Luke structures his story after the model of a first century worship service?  First there is a Gathering of companions, who come immediately from the circle of despair, and they are joined there by Christ.  Then there is a Service of the Word, a recounting of the Scriptures and a preaching; and it is Christ himself who does this; yet he is not recognised by those who hear.  Then there is a Eucharist, where Christ is again the anonymous presider who breaks bread, blesses, and share it with his companions.  And then there is a Mission.  The disciples, having finally discerned the risen Christ, are then driven out by the burning in their hearts to dis-confirm and question the logic of the world from which they came.  What is Luke telling us in all this?  Simply this: that the risen Christ ministers to us in the gathered worship of the Christian church.  That he reveals himself to us in the reading of Scripture, the preaching of the word, and in the breaking of the bread. 

But how can this be?  How is it that this ordinary human language of worship may become the language of Christ?  Didn’t I just say to you that Christ comes to interrupt our language and to un-say all that we might say of him!  Well, there is a great mystery here, a mystery very much at the heart of everything I am trying to do in my own journey through life.  And a mystery tied very much to the mystery of Christ himself, who, in the incarnation, is said to be God in an ordinary human life.  Perhaps all that one may say about this mystery is something like this:  That in the human language of Christian worship, Christ himself arrives in the midst.  Not to confirm what we intend to say, but rather to so dispossess our symbols of the meaning we intend, that, somehow, even as we say it, we hear it said back to us with a meaning not our own, in an inflection and tongue not our own, so that our hearts burn with confusion, and terror, but ultimately with the holy joy of people who are being liberated from their bondage to the same old thing. 

I pray to God that Christ may do just that, even with what I have said to you this morning.  Maranatha!  Come Lord Jesus, come!

I want to acknowledge the work of three other theologians of the resurrection in the composition of this sermon: Ebarhard Jungel, Jean-Luc Marion and Nicholas Lash.

The Dark Light of Crucifixion

John 12. 20-33

In 1819 John Keats, the English poet, sat transfixed before an ancient vase he happened upon in an Italian museum. It was an urn from ancient Athens, the principle city of Greece, and it featured the carved figures of women and men dancing to some kind of ritual in an idyllic forest glade. Something about these figurines captured the poet’s attention and, more than that, took him away into a rapt meditation upon the capacity of art to convey spiritual truths. What Keats found most moving was the way in which the artist had captured a moment of truth—the truth of a particular human joy and longing—in the stillness of such beautiful forms. He wondered at the way in which such truth could be frozen in stone, and therefore rendered communicable even to people who would view the urn thousands of years later. The poem he wrote to commemorate the occasion closes with the famous aphorism,

Beauty is truth, truth beauty.—That is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

In saying this, Keats revealed his admiration for a particularly Greek way of seeing the world. The ancient Greeks believed that the truth about things was revealed to human beings through their eyes, particularly in beautiful and bright forms, and even more particularly in the beautiful and bright forms of the human body. I’m sure that many of you will have seen pictures of those strong and erect young men carved in white marble, often standing at the entrance of public buildings or temples, often naked, and often with some kind of weapon in their hands. Or of slender women draped in jewelled finery with garlands in their hair. Usually in a state of semi-undress. But such figures represented far more than an ideal for human beauty. They also represented the Greek understanding of God. For them, God was exactly like one of these statues: strong beyond all strength, glorious and bright with the brightness of the sun, beautiful such that mortals would desire to be joined with God, but also distant and impervious to any kind pain or suffering.

Now, in the passage we read from John’s Gospel tonight, who asks to see Jesus? Some Greeks. Some Greeks ask to see Jesus. And because they are Greeks, they are hoping to see a particular kind of Jesus, a Jesus who is like one of their Athenian statues of the human form divine: a strong and noble Jesus, a Jesus whose form is beautiful in that classical Greek sense, a Jesus who shines with divine light and ignites their desire for him, a Jesus who is clearly more than human, who somehow sails above the ordinariness of human pain and regret and grief in some kind of cool, divine inscrutability.

Now, in case you’re thinking that I might be imputing motives to these fellows which don’t exist, consider this. That John’s whole Gospel might be characterised as a sermon to the Greeks, and particularly to Greek-speaking intellectuals. Unlike the other gospels, John talks about Jesus in a language which Greek-speaking intellectuals could understand and appreciate. He nicks, for example, their idea of the logos—an idea or a form that exists in the mind of God before the universe began—to explain how Jesus could be considered divine. “In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God, and the logos was God.” The Gospel also seems to address that peculiarly Greek obsession with light and seeing and form as the appropriate way to find out about divine things. Only in John’s gospel do you have Jesus proclaiming that he is the light of the world. Only in John’s gospel do you find passages where Jesus exhorts his listeners to become “children of the light,” children who gaze at the glorious brightness of God and are drawn to that light like moths to a flame. All of this is very, very Greek. Right down to the word which John uses for seeing in this passage. It is eidein, from which we get both “idea” and “idol”. The Greeks, in wanting to “see” Jesus, are looking for a form, an “idol,” if you like, in which their divine “idea” might be both seen and admired.

But wait. Doesn’t this imply that John is basically on board with all this Greek stuff, that he is something of a pagan philosopher, seeking to transform Jesus into some kind of semi-divine hero like Ulysses or Hercules, therefore priming his image for popular consumption in a world dominated by Greek thinking? Yes and No. Yes, he wanted to talk about Jesus in a way that people other than Jews would understand and appreciate. But no, he didn’t buy into the pagan version of God in the process. Indeed, the passage we are reading contains one of the most damning critiques of that God you will find in all of literature! Note, if you will, Jesus’ response to what the Greeks ask. I quote.

The hour has come for the son of man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life . . . Now my soul is troubled, but what should I say? “Father save me from this hour?” No, it is for this hour that I have come. Father, glorify your name! . . . Now is the judgement of this world; now the ruler of the world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.

What we find here is a specifically Christian warping or transfiguration of the Greek idea of divine beauty so admired by Keats. For John argues that the human form of God is not strong and beautiful, in that classical sense we described earlier. Nor is it impervious to the ravages of ordinary human life—the passing of time, the reality of evil, or of human suffering. On the contrary, according to John, the human form of God is the crucified Jesus. A suffering man, hanging from the most vile instrument of torture of the ancient world. A man vulnerable to being troubled in soul. A man vulnerable to death. In describing Jesus like this, John effects a transvaluation which would have been scandalous for the Greek thinkers of his time. Beauty, he declares, no longer has anything to do with the classical forms of the Olympic body or the Olympian gods, objects of religio-erotic desire that they were. The beauty of God, he declares, is revealed in its opposite, in that which strikes the ordinary gaze of the human eye as the least desirable of all. The weak ones, the ugly ones, the suffering ones. For it is these, to whom the world denies value, that God ascribes the most value. Unlike ourselves, God actually loves the unlovable, and desires the undesirable. Such love is able to raise a person from despair to hope, from darkness into light, from misery to blessedness. Such love is able to bring a sense of the beautiful even to those of us who, in the world’s eyes at least, live not-so-beautiful lives.

I want to close with a word about what all of this might mean for our Lenten journey. The thinking of the ancient Greeks has not gone away. It is everywhere present, even today in Australia. It visits us in every commercial which represents happiness and the good life in terms of the beautiful forms of sculptured bodies, impervious to age or to the suffering of the poor and broken-hearted. It visits us in New Age notions of God as some kind of universal being which is everywhere present, especially in nature, and yet (like nature) is blind and deaf and dumb to our specifically human anxieties. Finally, it visits us in our cultural obsession with seeing as the preeminent way of knowing what is true. If we see it, even if “it” is only on the TV, we believe it. If we don’t see it, then we don’t believe it. These are the realities we live with everyday, and they are not so very different from the realities of John’s “Greeks”. The colonial powers might have changed. But their message has not!

During Lent, God invites us to be immersed in another possible reality, another way of seeing the truth of things. Instead of looking at the world through the light of our televisions, God invites us to look at the world with the dark and contrary light that comes from the cross of Jesus. For John says that the cross is the visible form of the divine glory, and therefore a unique and powerful critique of all that our world would consider beautiful. Under the paradoxical power of this dark kind of light, a power which Shelley called “negative capability,” even scenes of torture become signs of resurrection. Sinners become capable of sainthood, misery becomes capable of joy, and ugliness becomes capable of beauty. All because God’s love empowers us to let go of the way we see things with our eyes, in favour of a seeing by faith in which the beauteous promise of things comes into focus.

Something of what I have been saying this morning is powerfully conveyed in the words of Leonard Cohen, a poet, this time, who understands that sense of joy and liberation one can experience in being loved by a God who is not ashamed to share our imperfections:

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack, a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.

Power and Wisdom Contradicted

1 Corinthians 1.18-25

When Paul writes his first letter to the Corinthians, he writes to a church that has begun to abandon the Christian way of life introduced by Paul and slide back into the pre-Christian paganism from which it came.  That paganism was all-pervasive in Corinth.  Of all the Hellenistic cities of the first century, Corinth was the most cosmopolitan.  It’s citizens and traders came from every part of the ancient world, and so did its religion.  The city possessed temples and sacred shrines by the bucket-load, most of them devoted to the so-called ‘mystery’ religions of the ancient world, which taught that one could (and should) escape the limitations of this earthly life through the accumulation of a secret ‘knowledge’ or ‘wisdom’.  The mystery cults took a very dim view of ordinary life, the life associated with the body, daily toil and ethical responsibility towards other people.  All these things were regarded as a prison in which the human spirit had somehow become trapped.  Our destiny, the mysteries taught, is otherwise.  Each of us possesses, deep inside us, a spark of light from the divine being who created the universe.  Through the accumulation of secret knowledge (gnosis in Greek), one could aspire to escape that prison and ascend to the world of pure spirit, where the shackles of flesh and toil and care for one’s neighbour would no longer be of any consequence.  In that world of pure spirit, the initiated could expect to be re-united with the divinity from which they had become separated by their ‘fall’ into material existence. 

Most of the Corinthian Christians had been converted in precisely this religious environment.  They took to the new faith with great enthusiasm.  But after Paul left them to continue his missionary journey through Asia Minor, many of the converts began to exhibit signs that their conversion had only been skin-deep.  Instead of reinterpreting the meaning of their world and lives through the story of Christ, and especially of his crucifixion and resurrection, the Corinthians started to do the opposite: to reinterpret the new religious experience of Christianity according to the gnostic imagination they had grown up with as pagans.  As this gnostification  process continued apace, the Corinthians came to some very alien conclusions about Christ and his ways.  Christ, they said, had not become a human being and had not died on a cross.  Christ had only appeared to die, for he was really a demiurge, a lesser deity who had come from the world of spirit to impart a secret knowledge about how to escape the burdens of suffering and death.  As a being of pure spirit, he could not have taken on real human flesh, and therefore he could not have really suffered or died.  To think otherwise, they said, was nothing but foolish superstition. 

This fundamental distortion of Paul’s teaching also had its ethical consequences in the Corinthian community.  The body no longer mattered, and neither did the bodies of other people.  All that mattered was the accumulation of secret knowledge (gnosis again) of spiritual things.  Thus, in the end, one could do anything one wanted to with one’s own body of those of others: you could unite your body to a prostitute or sleep with your own mother; you could eat and drink as much as you liked, even if others went hungry; you could ignore the needs of the weak and vulnerable.  Since it was only the spirit that mattered, you could do anything you like.  The ethical inheritance of Judaism and the ‘ten commandments’, those norms that governed what one could legitimately do, or not do, in one’s bodily life, were to be regarded as part of the problem, part of the prison which kept us from being reabsorbed into the divine life.

Perhaps that little bit of social and religious background will help you see why Paul writes as he does.  The wisdom of the cross of Jesus, he says, is nothing like this secret ‘wisdom’ being taught by the gnostic sects.  It is not a wisdom that separates the body and the spirit, seeing the former as false and the latter as true.  Neither is the wisdom of the cross a wisdom that exults elite societies and specialist knowledge at the expense of the real, fleshly, needs of the weak and vulnerable.  On the contrary, the revolutionary message of the cross is one that seeks to transform and convert all that Greek religion and philosophy would see as wise, and all that Jewish religion would see as powerful and worthy of praise. 

To that form of Greek religion that denigrates the body and exults the mind or spirit God has spoken an embodied word:  the Son of God becomes a human being, and suffers, and dies, in order to show how much God loves the weak and the most vulnerable, in order to save all who the world counts as nothing.  To that form of Jewish religion that looks for signs of naked power, for a messianism that would establish the rule of God through the smashing of God’s enemies, God has spoken a word of covenantal submission:  the power of God achieves its purposes through the humility and condescension of vulnerability and weakness.  The ignominy of God on a cross is, paradoxically, the mode by which the ‘nothings’ of the world find themselves risen with Christ in glory.  Thus, as Paul would have it, the wisdom of God is not the same as Greek wisdom, and the power of God is not the same as the most dominant Jewish notions of power.  In the word of the cross a new kind of wisdom and power is revealed, a wisdom that counts love as more important the knowledge, and a power that counts patient compassion as more important than getting one’s own way.

Of course, the ‘secret knowledge’ approach of the gnostics is not dead in the world.  The advent of Christianity did not destroy it.  The Corinthian controversy continued well into the fifth century of the Christian era.  Most of the early creeds, and the New Testament canon itself, were formulated in order to protect and distinguish the Christian confession of faith in the crucified God over against the gospel of pure spirit and mind preached by the gnostic sects.  And it didn’t end there.  The gnostic instinct is as alive today, in our own time, as it ever was.  It is with us in that theology that seeks, continually, to absorb the singularity of the Christian faith into a form that is commensurate with the philosophy or science of late modernity.  It is with us in that Christianity which exalts the idea that we can have a ‘personal’ relationship with Jesus that bypasses the teaching and tradition of the church or a scholarly appreciation of Scripture.  It is with us in the syncretism of new age religion or secret brotherhoods, which seek to absorb the uniqueness of Christian language and history into a vague pot pouri of universal ‘faith’ or ‘spirituality’.  It is with us in the longing for a return to the time when the church could exercise its power through the instruments of state, for that time when ideology became more important than basic care and compassion for other human beings.

Whatever our gnostic tendencies, and we all have them, we cannot claim to be genuine followers of Christ unless we are willing to accept that the power and wisdom of God are revealed in the literally pathetic figure of Christ crucified.  Unless we are willing to redefine our notions of both power and wisdom according to that history and parable, then I worry for our future, whether ‘political’ or ‘spiritual’.  For the power of God to save and liberate has nothing to do with hunting down terrorists and beating up our enemies; and the wisdom of God has nothing to do with the accumulation of esoteric theories or personal religious experiences.  Power and wisdom are defined, for Christians, by the strange and paradoxical figure of a Jewish man nailed to a Roman torture stake, truly a stumbling block for the ‘powerful’ and foolishness to all who consider themselves ‘wise’. 

In this Lenten season, I would therefore encourage us all to throw caution to the wind and become the kind of ‘fools’ who can change the world as Christ did, not by power or wisdom (as they are conventionally understood), but by patience, kindness, condescension and humble service; and by the fearless proclamation of the kingdom where fools can become saints and nothings the very children of God.

Is tea a worthy substitute for wine at communion?

The Uniting Church's National Christian Youth Convention in January 2009 celebrated the Eucharist using billy tea instead of wine, apparently under the leadership of pastors from the Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress. I was not present, but I gather it was a moving occasion. This ceremony was again conducted last week at a gathering of Uniting Church youth pastors in Sydney.  Again, tea was substituted for wine and again (I am told) it was a moving occasion.

The idea of using staple foods for communion has been around since the beginning of Christianity. That is, apparently, one of the reasons bread and wine were chosen by the early Christian churches. These were relatively cheap and common staples for Mediterranean-rim communities. Commonness speaks of the very ordinary places in which God chooses to dwell and act. Good theology.

It should be remembered, though, that (unleavened) bread and wine were not chosen only because they were common. They were chosen because of their particular Jewish history as symbols of exodus and of atoning sacrifice. The (not yet risen) bread reminded people of the haste with which they fled the oppressor. The wine reminded them of the blood of the lamb by which the Angel of God's wrath recognised their homes and passed over or by.

The early Christian communities also learned from Jesus that the bread and wine were to symbolise his body and his blood at their ritual meals, a body broken and blood poured out in atoning and liberating sacrifice. Wine was chosen not simply because it was common, but because it was red like Christ's blood, and because it was a drink of celebration already associated with the salvation history of the Exodus.

For that reason, I find it rather difficult to accept that common billy tea could really function to carry all those meanings. It is not red and, as far as I know, carries no liberative or salvific meanings in either Indigenous or migrant Australian cultures.  That said, I'd be happy to consider the use of other red-coloured drinks such as some Indigenous Christian communities actually do - some of them derived from native plants - but not common billy tea.

One other reason I'd balk at using tea is because of its colonial history. It was very often one of the substances which colonial authorities used to 'buy' Aboriginal land. It was very often exchanged for land, at least in the understanding of whitefellas. For that reason, tea is not a neutral pan-Australian symbol. It is one of the instruments by which the country was stolen.  I have a few misgivings about the use of damper in Indigenous contexts as well, since flour was also one of those colonial buying tools. I am not as concerned about this as about tea, however, because flour can at least keep you alive by providing nutrition - and it did keep many Aboriginal communities alive as more traditional food sources were driven away or destroyed. Tea, on the other hand, had and has very little nutritional value. But there are Indigenous alternatives here too, and they are as various as the clans and where they come from. I am a supporter of moves in every community to use whatever is the basic staple at communion [And what is bread, anyway, if not the staple food in any given culture?]

Some have argued for the use of tea on other grounds. Tea can be seen, for example, as a symbol of hospitality, welcome, and an open table.  I would agree. In Christ we learned, of course, that God is a hospitable God who would ultimately long to welcome all people to the banqueting table of heaven.

My difficulty with using tea remains, however, because surely the symbols we use at communion need to carry ALL the meanings associated with the meal, and not simply SOME of them. While tea can indeed speak of God's hospitality (in some cultural contexts) it cannot, I would argue, carry the crucial meanings of reconciliation through atonement and of God's sacrificial, costly, love - themes that stand at the heart of the Christian message.

I also have a difficulty with any theology of Eucharist that sees the table of communion as open to absolutely everyone, without remainder. From the beginning, Christians certainly welcomed everyone to their ordinary meal tables, whatever their beliefs or lifestyles. Here they followed the example of Christ himself. But they did not welcome everyone to the ritual meal known as the Lord's Supper or the Eucharist. This meal was reserved for the baptised, for those who had 'signed up', as it were, to the Christian life - with all its beliefs and practices. Why? Because the meal was seen as a weekly reaffirmation of the covenantal promises made in baptism. Now, you can't RE-affirm what you've never affirmed in the first place. In that context, it made no sense to welcome those who were not signed-up. And it still doesn't.

So the invitation to the table is indeed for all. But the mode by which Christ's invitation may be accepted is by passing through the waters of baptism, which (in Christian understanding) is our death to the basic principles of this dark age, and our rising with Christ to a new (de-colonised) way of life.

Let me conclude by noting that the use of tea instead of wine (or another blood-coloured drink) is not something that has been proposed or practiced at any official Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress gathering that I have attended. Certainly not at the national theological forum we held about worship and the Eucharist in Jabiru during 2010.  As one of the Aboriginal theologians helping to form both policy and practice on these things, I would strongly resist any such move.