Month: March 2026

True Power: A Reflection for Holy Week (Tuesday 31st March 2026)

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Given at Christ Church, Worton

Reading—John 19. 4-16

Two men stand facing each other in a stone interior. The figure on the left is seen almost entirely from behind: a heavyset man in a richly draped golden toga trimmed with red, his right arm extended with palm upturned in a gesture of dismissive question. His head is turned in profile, revealing a clean-shaven, well-fed face. He stands in full sunlight, which pools on the tiled floor around him. The figure on the right stands in shadow against a bare reddish-brown wall: a lean, dark-haired man with an unkempt beard, wearing a plain dark robe, his arms apparently bound behind him. He meets the other man's gaze directly. The contrast between the two figures — one luminous and dominant, one shadowed and still — is stark.
Nikolai Ge, What is Truth? (1890). Hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Do they ever get under your skin, the men and women who hold power in our world? Those who casually snigger and sneer and tell obvious lies as they make decisions that will condemn many thousands to their deaths, or devastate the livelihoods of many millions.

Such powers in the land have always existed, although we didn’t always see their faces and hear their voices every day.

Pontius Pilate was such a power in the land. As Roman governor of Judaea, he only had to click his fingers and some of the finest troops the world had ever seen would be sent into action to do his bidding. Over non-citizens, such as Jesus and the apostles, he had the power of life and death.  He wasn’t powerful because of any notable personal qualities of his, not as far as we can tell, but because of the Empire he represented.

You didn’t set yourself against the Romans lightly. They were extremely competent and effective, but also ruthless and unafraid of brutality. Their power rested on a reputation that left no doubt they would inflict terror on their enemies, and inflict it capably. That’s why the Jewish leaders started plotting against Jesus in the first place – they were worried that such a charismatic preacher and teacher would attract the wrong sort of attention from the Romans and provoke a bloody reprisal, especially a figure who was developing a name for acts of mysterious power.

Yet Jesus had no ambition for power, rejected violence, and committed no crime. That clearly unsettles Pilate. Clearly he isn’t afraid of a bit of brutality, but such manifest injustice seems a bit much for him. Still, a man of the world has to do what he has to do.

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Keep ‘Er Lit in the Face of Armageddon: A Reflection for Holy Week (Monday 30th March 2026)

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Given at St Mary’s, Potterne

Reading—Matthew 25. 1-13   

A watercolour depicting ten female figures against a dark nocturnal landscape. On the left, five women stand composed and luminous in pale robes, holding lit oil lamps on chains; the central figure extends her arm firmly, pointing to the right in a gesture of dismissal. On the right, five women in darker clothing react with distress — one kneels with arms outstretched in supplication, another throws her hands upward in anguish, a third slumps toward the ground. Their lamps hang unlit. In the middle distance, a city with illuminated domes and spires is visible against the dark sky, suggesting the wedding feast now out of reach. Above, a floating angelic figure blows a long trumpet, heralding judgement. The overall palette is cool grey and silver, with the warm glow of the lit lamps providing the only warmth in the composition.
William Blake, The Wise and Foolish Virgins (ca. 1800). Owned by the Metropolitan Museum, New York; not currently on public display.

The story of the human race has been one where we gradually, but continually, amass more knowledge, more advanced technology – and more power. Even before writing was invented, we were already unique because of the wheel, the domestication of fire, the domestication of other species, and perhaps most of all speech. These things also made us uniquely deadly to other life forms. Our kingdom is very much of this world.

In recent generations, we’ve also potentially become lethal to ourselves. We’ve lived with the risk of nuclear war for 81 years now, and the wars unfolding in different parts of the world at the moment are frightening and violent events. Experiments in Genetic Modification of humans and other life forms are rapidly increasing in ambition and potential to do good, but also in risk of disaster. But it is Artificial Intelligence that is currently most in the public eye as a potential risk to our survival. One after another, some of the world’s top computer scientists – in many cases people instrumental to making Artificial Intelligence a reality – have either quit the field warning that it could lead to our extinction, or called for development to be slowed dramatically to allow adequate safety checks before AIs are made more powerful.

The logic of human relationships, however, is such that the two great empires of our time, China and the USA, must race as fast as they can to develop more powerful forms of Artificial Intelligence. This technology could be as transformative of human existence as the wheel, or fire, or speech, perhaps even more so. If one country blinks, it risks ceding the future to the other. Such are the constraints that govern how human kingdoms relate to one another.

The kingdom of God is different. It lives in its citizens often because of what they are and how they approach life as much as what they do, still less what they achieve. It doesn’t have a capital city or any fixed territory to defend.

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The Madness of Mobs: Sermon Preached on 29nd March 2026 (Palm Sunday)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne

Philippians 2. 5-11; Matthew 21. 1-11

“When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, ‘Who is this?’”

A screenshot from the BBC television programme Wogan. Two people are seated facing each other in a talk-show setting with a neutral beige studio backdrop. On the left, a woman with short, voluminous auburn hair wears a bright teal blazer over a patterned blue and purple dress. She is looking toward her interviewer with a composed expression. On the right, a man with dark, collar-length hair, seen from behind and in profile, wears a dark grey suit and has his hands clasped together as if mid-conversation. The BBC logo is visible in the upper left corner and the programme name "Wogan" appears in the upper right. The styling and set design are consistent with British television production of the mid-to-late 1980s.
Lindy Chamberlain on the BBC Wogan Show in 1991. © BBC; used under Fair Use doctrine

Does anyone remember a lady in Australia named Lindy Chamberlain? If you don’t remember the name, you may remember her story. While camping at Ayers Rock in 1980, her nine-week-old daughter disappeared while she and her husband were making the evening meal at a barbeque pit. Chamberlain said she had seen a dingo leaving their family tent when she returned to check after hearing her daughter crying. Although other campers who were there that evening believed her, few members of the Australian public gave this unlikely story any credibility. I mean, “A dingo stole my baby…”—sure, love, whatever you say. Whipped up by the media, Chamberlain became a national and even international hate figure, with the hate exacerbated by the fact that she was a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and therefore seemed insufficiently grief-stricken by conventional norms.

Two years later, she was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour for murdering her own daughter, and soon exhausted every possible means of appeal. Yet she only served three years before the prosecution case fell apart: by chance, nearly six years after her disappearance, her daughter’s cardigan was found in a remote area with many dingo lairs; the prosecution’s forensic evidence also turned out to be full of flaws. Chamberlain was released: the hate figure turned out to be an innocent woman.

Somewhat closer to home, both in time and space, is Christopher Jefferies, a cultured and rather eccentric retired public schoolmaster from Bristol. When his lodger Joanna Yeates was murdered in 2010, the press went feral, portraying him as a sinister oddball who was almost certainly guilty. Yet he was entirely innocent; after the true killer was convicted, Jefferies sued multiple newspapers and won.

The social media era has brought a new arena for people to form mobs in. Because of that, the Internet gets blamed for changing human behaviour for the worse – and maybe it has – but the tendency to form badly-behaved mobs isn’t new at all. It goes back to the dawn of humanity.

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Stinking Lazarus and Dry Bones: Sermon Preached on 22nd March 2026 (Passion Sunday)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington

Ezekiel 37. 1-14, John 11. 1-45

“Lord, by this time he stinketh”

Against a deep blue sky, Jesus stands on the left, his right hand raised in command, a golden halo around his head. A crowd of disciples and mourners press close behind him, their faces expressing astonishment and distress. In the centre foreground, Mary Magdalene kneels prostrate at Jesus's feet. To the right, Lazarus stands upright before the entrance to a rock-cut tomb, his body still wrapped in white grave cloths, his face exposed. Two haloed women — Martha and Mary — stand near him. A small figure at the far right holds his nose against the stench. The composition draws the eye from Christ's commanding gesture across to the risen Lazarus.
Giotto, The Raising of Lazarus (1304-6). a fresco from the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua.

Compared with our other senses, there is something particularly potent and unavoidable about smell. You can close your eyes, you can stick your fingers in your ears, but if something around you stinks, there isn’t a lot you can do to stop noticing it while you’re breathing. And the neurologists tell us something else—they tell us that unlike our other senses, smell doesn’t pass through our thalamus, which is the brain’s central relay unit, but instead goes straight to the parts of our brain which control memory, and which control emotion. It’s why particular smells can so easily trigger memories from our earliest years, and why they can also trigger such powerful emotions.

Smell can trigger disgust in us like nothing else can. I hope that none of you have ever smelt an untreated human body after a few days but I’m sure that, like me, you’ve at times come across big animals like badgers or even livestock in that sort of state. This is one of two cases in today’s readings where the King James Version is definitely superior to the NRSV: “there is a stench” isn’t half as memorable as “he stinketh”!

Lazarus stinks because he’s been dead for four days. That’s more important than it might seem on a casual reading. There was an old Jewish tradition that the soul hovered near the body for three days, hoping to re-enter it, and then departed when it saw the face beginning to change with decomposition.

So one thing St John wants you to know here is that Lazarus was totally stone-dead: not out cold, not in a coma, not in the exit lounge, not dead for a day at most like the resurrection miracles in the other Gospels—but absolutely brown bread. So this isn’t a case of Jesus merely healing someone; this is showing Jesus as the Lord of death and life itself, someone who can bring Lazarus’ soul back from the netherworld. This is showing that Jesus is God.

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A Tart with A Heart: Sermon Preached on 8th March 2026 (Third Sunday of Lent)

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Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and St Mary’s, Potterne

Exodus 17.1–7; John 4.4–42

“They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman…”

A black and white photograph, showing a middle-aged woman seated in what appears to a domestic kitchen setting. She has a voluminous, bouffant-style dark hair and is wearing large decorative earrings. She holds a cigarette elegantly in one raised hand, her expression contemplative and self-assured. She is dressed in a boldly patterned blouse featuring an interlocking geometric or basket-weave design. Behind her, a gas cooker and kettle are visible on shelves, suggesting a working-class home interior. Her posture and expression convey a strong, independent character. The image has the grainy, high-contrast quality typical of mid-twentieth century British television drama.
Elsie Tanner holds court

People of a certain age might remember Elsie Tanner, a character from Coronation Street’s golden age. For those who can’t remember her, let me quote an academic anthropologist who described Elsie Tanner as a “tarty woman” who had the ability to “attract men like bees to honey”. At the same time, she had a heart of gold, helping those down on their luck even when she was barely managing herself. If you’re too young to remember Elsie, a similar figure might be Ophelia, brilliantly played by Jamie Lee Curtis in the movie Trading Places, a working girl who rescues the wealthy banker played by Dan Aykroyd after he ends up on the streets when his employers destroy his life in a bizarre sociology experiment.

The traditional term for characters like these in fiction is a “tart with a heart”, although Wikipedia tells me this term is “now considered offensive”. This character type exists in the literature of many cultures, including ancient Greek comedy, popular in the Eastern Mediterranean where Jesus and St John the Evangelist lived.

The Samaritan woman from today’s reading from John’s Gospel is clearly such an Elsie Tanner character. She had already been through five husbands and was now living with yet another man. Jesus was a holy man, and holy people weren’t supposed to hang around with disreputable people like that. But Jesus is chatting away, one-to-one, with nobody else present, with this woman known to be of loose morals. This is a scandalous encounter that provides a harvest of theological meaning rich for the picking.

In fact, his followers were surprised, the text tells us, that he was talking to a woman at all! Men and women did interact in Jesus’ time, both in Jewish communities and among the Graeco-Roman cultures they lived among. But there were limits! Men – in respectable society, anyway – were discouraged from having private or extended conversations with women they weren’t related to, and discouraged from being alone with them in public. Such situations, it was believed, brought temptation to the man and suspicion upon both parties.

But that wasn’t the end of Jesus’ trampling on social conventions. He isn’t just chatting to the ancient Holy Land’s Elsie Tanner. He’s chatting to a Samaritan – and we all know what dirty rascals those Samaritans are, don’t we?

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Was Nicodemus a Bit Thick?: Sermon Preached on 1st March 2026 (Second Sunday of Lent)

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Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Romans 4. 1–5, 13-17; John 3. 1-17

“How can anyone be born after having grown old?”

Alt text: A Baroque oil painting depicting two figures seated across from each other at a candlelit table. On the left, a younger bearded man with long brown hair, dressed in a blue robe with a red draped cloak, gestures upward with one finger as if making a point. On the right, an older bearded man wearing an elaborate striped turban and richly embroidered robes places one hand on his chest while pointing at an open book on the table with the other. Between them, two lit candles in iron candlesticks cast warm light across the scene. An open book, additional stacked volumes, and a small wooden box rest on a patterned tablecloth. The background is dark, focusing attention on the intimate, earnest exchange between the two figures.
Crijn Hendricksz Volmarijn, Christ Instructing Nicodemus (ca. 1631). In a private collection.

Was Nicodemus a bit thick? I have often found myself wondering this as I have read this passage, where anything other than a very literal understanding of Jesus’ words seems to go over his head.

But Nicodemus is identified as a leader of the Jews, so was presumably a smart cookie. He is also identified as a Pharisee. The Pharisees were big into keeping the rules found in the Law of Moses.

This encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus immediately follows Jesus’ first visit to Jerusalem in St John’s Gospel, where he caused quite a stir by performing miraculous deeds and claiming that if they destroyed the Great Temple, He could raise it up in three days. This seems to have upset some folks, and perhaps that is why Nicodemus – a respected member of the religious elite, remember – came to Jesus by night.

But although Jesus might have upset other people, Nicodemus says that because of these miracles, he knows Jesus must be a teacher from God. But Jesus doesn’t bask in this praise. He replies straightaway that nobody can see the kingdom of God without being born from above. And that’s where we’re left wondering if Nicodemus is a bit thick, because he doesn’t grasp that this might have symbolic or spiritual meaning and starts babbling about going back into your mother’s womb. Then Jesus tells him he needs to be born of water and Spirit – which, from our perspective, is a clear reference to baptism. Baptism is more than a symbol, it is a sacrament: but it has symbolic elements that are obvious, to people then as much as to us now – the water symbolises both washing away sin and also a drowning to the old self, after which the renewed person rises up afterwards.

Part of why this might have been difficult for Nicodemus is that, as we’ve already noted, he thought following God was all about keeping a set of God-given rules. What was all this business about being born again supposed to mean? Nicodemus was already a son of Abraham, known for being obedient and pious—wasn’t that enough?

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