Preached at Holy Cross, Seend; St Peter’s, Poulshot; and St Mary’s, Potterne
Philippians 2. 6-11, John 3. 3-17
“Christ… became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”
The modernist rood in the Augustinerkirche, an Old Catholic parish church in Zürich. © Gerry Lynch, 11 July 2019.
You lot are a bunch of failures! A load of hypocrites who often do things against your own principles, and fail to deliver what you say you’ll do. Fair weather Christians who cave in too easily when the going gets tough. More than that, I know that at least some of you are here in Church today for decidedly mixed motives.
Don’t think you can try to hoodwink me, because I know all those things to be the case. I know they’re true, because they’re true of me also. And if we read the Bible, we find all that was true of the apostles, of Peter and James and all that lot, and that’s before we even begin talking about St Paul. And that is one of the most important things about Christianity—it’s not, despite what the Good Friday hymn says, a religion that promises to make us good; it’s a religion that makes promises to people who often aren’t very good.
So let me wish you a happy Holy Cross day!—For that is why I started my sermon in the way I did. The Cross has become probably the most successful visual brand in history, and that’s why we often miss that it’s actually a symbol of human failure. God walked among us in the person of Jesus Christ, actual God, healing and teaching and refusing both power and violence, and we put Him to death in one of the most horrific ways possible. We put Him to death in part because He told the truth, and we often hate the truth. Cosy lies often seem more comforting that the sometimes harsh cleanser that is truth. But we’ll come back to that.
The Cross upends everything. That’s the point of it. The means symbol Christ’s defeat is actually the means of his victory, and the symbol of our failure is actually the means of our liberation. The major part of that liberation we will experience only in the world to come, which the Cross opens to us. But some of that liberation we experience in the here and now, in the freedom from needing to be perfect the Cross provides.
I mean, would you have been one of the few who stayed by Jesus’ side even on the Cross? Would you have been with John and that handful of women? I’ve actually met a few of people who thought they would have done – who really thought they’d have managed what Peter and James and Thomas couldn’t do – and all have been the most egotistical pillocks, lacking all self-awareness. The rest of us know better than that. It is at the Cross that our delusions must die—and strangely, it is precisely knowing that we would have failed then, just as we so often do in our day-to-day lives, that liberates us to accept the flawed real people we are, the real people that God loves as they are.
It’s not only our individual delusions that must die at the Cross, but the Church’s collective delusions. Most of all, after a long period of decline, the Church in the Western world is desperate to be relevant and useful, desperate to count for something in the eyes of the world, desperate to be instrument of making the world a better place. We tell ourselves that if we do that, people might come back to church. And sympathetic well-wishers, who are atheist or agnostic but respect the Church, or people who sort of believe but not to the point of doing anything about it, always encourage us in this. If only we fed more hungry people and tried to solve climate change, they assure us, more people would come to church.
But the more the Church has tried to be relevant, and to matter to the world, the more quickly it has shrunk. Part of the reason is that, while of course the Church should do good works simply because that’s a good thing to do, it’s pretty arrogant to think only Christians who do that sort of thing. Surely we all know plenty of atheists or Muslims or Sikhs who feed the hungry or work for a more just world? Certainly, it’s one of the jobs of the Church to do good works, especially for the lowest and least, but it’s not our unique job.
Our unique job, the job that only the Church can do, is to point the way to Jesus Christ, and in His name to proclaim His promises of the forgiveness of sins and of eternal life, won for us on the Cross. That’s what makes the Church worth getting to know and be part of.
But there’s something more profoundly problematic than that about our need to be useful. When we try too hard to be useful, we fall into the same trap that Jesus’ followers fell into. They wanted to make Him king. They wanted Him to fix the world’s problems. But He rejected this. Instead of taking power, He humbled Himself into a terrible end in this world precisely so that He could open the way to eternal life for us in the next world.
Of course, Christ healed the sick and cast out demons. But if some holy man healed a few hundred people a few thousand years ago, what does that matter to me today? He didn’t make a dent in the power structure around Herod and the clerics in Jerusalem, still less the Roman Empire—not during his earthly life anyway. In earthly terms, Christ wasn’t particularly useful. But that wasn’t the focus of His mission anyway: His mission was what He fulfilled on the Cross. His mission was to show us our failure so we could embrace His love.
It’s easy to be despondent in a world where things seem to be spinning out of control. There is no gradual ascent towards an ever better future visible, but instead the ancient story of the pendulum swinging between order and prosperity on the one hand and chaos and violence on the other. We repeat the old story except with bigger weapons and stuff like genetic modification and computers. If the Church’s job were to rewrite that old story, we would be right to be despondent. But it isn’t. It’s to tell a completely different story, one that was written on the Cross.
On the Cross, Christ died but as He is the source of all life, He could not be defeated by death and rose again. In dying He destroyed our death, and in rising He restored our life.
Death is not the end, and this world in all its beauties and glory is but a foreshadowing of the life we were truly made for. For now we are but seeds and this Earth, for all its beauties, like living underground; then we will be transformed, as if we were orchids blooming in the sun. And just as Christ humbled Himself to destroy our death, so we must humble ourselves to embrace eternal life. We must shed those cosy lies that if only we got our way a little more often and had a bit more money, we could build heaven for ourselves on Earth. It is only when we embrace the message of the Cross, that we can die to all the things that prevent Christ from raising us to eternal life. For this is not something we can earn for ourselves. Instead lose your delusions, accept your failings, and let God lift you up from the Cross to eternal life.
Now praise God from whom all blessings flow! Praise Him all creatures here below! Praise Him above, ye heavenly hosts! Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost! Amen.
