Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Holy Cross, Seend
1 Corinthians 1. 18-25; John 2. 13-22
“For Jews demand signs, and Greeks desire wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified.”
I wonder if any of you have heard of the Bethel Bible Church of Redding, California? With 11,000 members, it is one of America’s biggest churches, in a little city smaller than Bath. With a firm faith in the power of God to work miracles, the Church is perhaps most famous for the “glory cloud” that sometimes appears at its services. This takes the form of a fog of golden dust that falls gently from the roof of its huge auditorium. Some scoff at the idea that this could be a miracle—but I think that it’s a real miracle that people haul all those heavy bags of glitter to the top of a huge building. I do envy the pastor there in some ways—it must make it easier to get people to pay the parish share when you can make godly glitter rain from the roof every time finances are a bit tight.
Matthias Grünewald, Crufixion (ca. 1515), now hangs in the Kunstmuseum Basel
St Paul writes in today’s Epistle that, “Jews demand signs, and Greeks desire wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified.” Today’s world is not so different from St Paul’s. It’s easy to scoff at Bethel Bible Church’s glory cloud but the world still wants the Church to prove itself by signs, and in our materialistic age that means to demonstrate its value in practical terms; people are often a bit suspicious of it, so they also demand that the Church prove itselves in alignment with the received wisdom of our own times. The Church is defensive and tetchy, as declining organisms often are, so while it usually happy to broadcast its good works, like a secular charity would, it gets a bit tetchy when its wisdom doesn’t align with the currently received wisdom, like a secular politician would. The Church is also very vain about being wise, even though it often conducts its internal affairs in a very unwise way.
Now wisdom is a funny thing. Like “beauty” it is usually a good thing, sometimes a divine thing, but it also has a second edge to it, a negative one when people get so wrapped up in wisdom that they ignore what’s right in front of them.
In that light, we need to ask if Jesus was, in fact, wise? Today’s Gospel reading is the very first act of Jesus’ public ministry as St John records it. In it, he goes off to Jerusalem, where His Galilean accent will stand out like a sore thumb, waltzes into the Temple, the epicentre of not just religious authority but local Jewish political power, overturns the money-changers’ tables, then chases them out with a whip. And why did he do that? So he could fulfil an ancient prophecy that He was the Messiah. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound “wise” to me, but a bit nuts.
The thing was that Jesus lived in a time and place where there were so sensible courses open for reform and progress. The sensible pragmatic wise men in the Jewish hierarchy ended up morally degraded by trying to adapt to the unshakable reality of Roman power. Beyond these power players was a world committed freedom fighters who refused to compromise with the hated occupiers, many retreating into the desert and the mountains to pray and to plot. A generation after Jesus lived, they would start a major rebellion against the Empire which not only failed, but ended with the destruction of the Temple and the end of the Jewish world as they had known it. Sometimes there are no wise, sensible, courses of action. Sometimes, the options that seem to be wise and prudent simply leave us ethically compromised without, in the end, keeping us any safer. Sometimes you just have to do the right thing because it’s the right thing, even if means going to the Cross. Perhaps we saw something of that in the last years of Alexei Navalny.
So back to those signs. Sometimes the lectionary ends a Bible reading at a particularly annoying moment. So, the verse after this morning’s reading is “When he was in Jerusalem during the Passover festival, many believed in his name because they saw the signs that he was doing.” Although it must have shocked the authorities, there were plenty of ordinary folks who were thrilled at Jesus overturning those tables, and probably also other signs he performed then. A few Passovers later, the same Jerusalem-based fan club would all run away when Jesus was no longer the talk of the town, but a dangerous fugitive scheduled for execution. This is a theme elsewhere in John’s Gospel – the masses thrill to Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand, but the very next day they want an even bigger miracle, and when He tells them off for demanding it, many of them turn on Him. People demand signs, but none of them convince people without true faith for very long.
Beyond that, there are two big problems with demanding the Church be a bearer of signs and wisdom. The first is that, actually, non-Christians also do good works and are capable of being wise. Jews and Muslims and atheists and agnostics and every other group in the world, are mostly pretty decent most of the time, just like Christians, and also seek out wisdom, and also seek to relieve the needs of the lowest and the lost. We have no monopoly and good works or wisdom, nor should we expect to have, as our faith teaches that all human beings are made in the image and likeness of God.
The second problem is that we Christians also have no immunity from folly, or stupidity, or sin… the Church is a flawed institution full of flawed people, and it owns up to this at every act of worship. That’s what we did when we confessed our sins together at the start of the service.
What the Christian faith offers that is unique is not good works, whether practical or miraculous, nor is it some unique approach to wisdom, but the Cross. A brutal public execution doesn’t seem like a hopeful message at first – not now, and not two thousand years ago, when St Paul wrote “the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing”. But think about it a little, and many of our most toxic temptations die there. The Cross is the antidote for our need to be useful, which we can never be at every point of our lives; the Cross is the antidote for our need to save the world, for that was achieved on it; the Cross is the antidote for our need to be wise, for sometimes the ills of the world are beyond even the wisest to solve. At a time when so many of us have lost trust in our institutions and our culture, the Cross is something we can trust, because the Cross is what so much of our lives is formed upon.
For most of us, the way to the Cross doesn’t involve history-making political events, still less public executions. Our Crosses are borne in our own domestic circumstances – in infirmity and ill-health, whether of ourselves or those we love; in periods of unemployment or business failures; in troubles in romantic relationships or their collapse; in divided families; in drink, and debt, and drugs; and worst of all, perhaps, in the terrible guilt that follows us when we know we’ve let down people who counted on us, or worse yet, betrayed them. These are the crucifying experiences of most of our lives. I offer no easy explanation for them. I too have at times been left bewildered and angry with God by them. I can only say that God bore them too, on the Cross, where He cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.”
Most of all, it is only when we take our unhealthy fantasies of what our lives should be to the Cross to die, that God can fill us with His life-giving dreams for us – which probably don’t involve miraculous gold glitter or the sort of wisdom that lands us our own programme on Radio 4, still less solving the world’s problems or overthrowing a repressive régime. But God’s dreams for our lives, although they may not be grand, will still be greater for us, and more beautiful and wise, than anything we could imagine for ourselves.
Now praise, glory, and honour be to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who is with us in times of plenty and times of austerity, when we are doing and when we are fasting, in all the earth and for ever and ever. Amen.
Top image: Viktor Vasnetsov, Crucified Christ (1885-96). Now hangs in the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
