Christianity is Strange: Sermon Preached on 4th February 2024 (Second Sunday Before Lent)

Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Colossians 1. 15-20; John 1. 1-14

“through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things … by making peace through the blood of his cross”

I don’t know if you have yet heard me say in a sermon that Christianity is a very weird religion. If you haven’t, don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of chances over the years to come. In this country, a Christian understanding of the world was simply the default position of almost everyone for well over a thousand years, and that has obscured the sheer strangeness of our faith to us. The retreat from Christian faith over the last two generations has started to make that strangeness apparent again. Interestingly, I think because we want to be as open to newcomers and explorers as we can, we have tried to underplay or hide that strangeness, for fear of scaring them off. But actually, I think it’s precisely the weirdness that makes Christianity a worthwhile alternative to a secular order – in business and politics and entertainment and so much else – that seems to know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Christianity has always been strange. The Wiltshire-based historian, Tom Holland, came back to the Faith after having abandoned it once he realised how much it had subverted the dominant value systems of the Roman Empire, which were all about power and authority, often exerted with great cruelty. This was the world in which this morning’s Bible readings were written.

At the centre of this strangeness is the person of Jesus Christ. Who was Jesus Christ and why did He matter so much?  Our readings both show 1st Century Christians trying to grapple with these questions.

The first comes from a letter St Paul wrote to the Christians in Colossae, a small city in what’s now western Turkey, heart of the region of where Paul seemed to be most successful in founding churches; our Gospel reading which was probably written for communities not much more than a hundred miles away, in and around Ephesus where St John lived after fleeing persecution in Jerusalem. There are huge scholarly arguments about when these passages were written, but in both cases they were probably around the 60s or 70s – the passage now in John probably as a stand-alone hymn before the Gospel was completed – and by communities close to one another and almost certainly in regular contact with one another thanks to the excellent Roman roads system.

They’re both saying that this Jesus Christ, was a human being just like you, me, Uncle Tom Cobley and all, but was also at the same time God. St Paul says “in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” while St John describes him as “the Word” who was with God before all things began and who at the same time also was God. These are grand visions and full of paradox. Yet there isn’t anything resembling a carefully worked-out theological definition here.

Indeed, after today’s readings were written, the Church would spend another two hundred and fifty years arguing about these and other key Biblical texts and their implications before agreeing the Nicene Creed, that we still say together at every Communion service, and then more than a century more before finally agreeing that Jesus Christ was truly God and truly human. Truly a carpenter’s son from a little town of no importance, and truly the maker of the stars who made the Big Bang go bang. Very strange stuff!

So, we’ve talked about who Jesus Christ was, and this might seem a little dry and irrelevant unless we explain why God became human in Jesus. The answer is, it was a rescue mission. The Garden of Eden is a myth, of course, and snakes can’t talk and all that. But it is a myth that paints some profound truths – we human beings did somehow in the last part of our evolution rebel against the God-given natural limits on our species. As soon as we had slingshots and control of fire we began to wipe other species out – even as we had come to know the difference between good and evil. That’s really what the Garden of Eden story is about. And we know in our hearts, when we look around our troubled world, where the power of the human race now greatly exceeds the wisdom we have to use it correctly, that there is profound truth in that story. Somehow, we created some sort of rupture in the God-given created order as we became less like the other animals and just a little more like God in our powers; worse yet, understanding the difference between right and wrong didn’t seem to stop us abusing those powers. Christ came to repair that rupture.

St Paul puts it like this – God was pleased to reconcile all things to himself – all things and not just all human beings and certainly not just a select group of human beings – by making peace through the blood of his cross. And as Jesus Christ was and is God, as much as the Father is God, this wasn’t a case of some angry divine tyrant needing to be pacified by a human sacrifice. Instead, to heal the breach created by human beings, God exposes Himself in human form to the worst that humanity can do, even to death – but being the source of all life, God cannot die, but instead by dying destroyed our death.

I told you it was weird!

In fact, I’m sure some of you here will think all of this is nonsense. Some of you will say Christianity is all about good works, that the important thing about Jesus were His commands to love one another and feed the hungry and love the enemy. You might even think the strange, supernatural stuff about great falls and cosmic rifts risks putting people off. That’s alright – I’ve been told I’m not a real Christian myself often enough that I don’t want to do that to other people. And I certainly don’t want to discourage you from good works.

But to me, a Christianity that confines itself to trying to make the world a better place doesn’t quite address the hard realities of human existence. For we all know that however noble our ideas, we will often fail to live up to them, sometimes for what are the pettiest of reasons; we all know that it isn’t always obvious what the most loving course of action is; that our best laid plans are sometimes based on completely unwarranted assumptions. On a grand scale, our technological advances of the last few centuries have eased much suffering and brought a quality of life once unimaginable to billions, yet may also depend on a consumption of natural resources on a scale that is simply unsustainable. Our attempts to make the world a better place seem to hit fairly hard limits due to our nature as humans and the limits of our environment.

Jesus taught us principles for living in the right way, and more than that He showed us in his actions how to live well—but on the Cross He went beyond any of that, and in his death spanned the gap between lofty principles and messy realities. The brutal execution of the God-made-man who was eternally alive somehow fixed the breach that occurred when Eve took the apple from the snake, and opened the way to eternal life for us.

That is, I think, the good news that people need to hear in a world where our logic, and our science, and our power, are leading us into deep trouble. Cut although we human beings are out of our depth are not on our own. Beset by climate change, and drone wars, and pandemics amplified by our technology, Jesus Christ, God-made-human risen to eternal life, prays for us constantly and if we put our trust in Him, He will lead us to eternal life.

And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.

Top image — the long walk to the Christian conscience; Bishop (as he was then) Desmond Tutu meets President Reagan in the Oval Office. Photo: Public Domain.