Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne; Christ Church, Worton; Holy Cross, Seend; and Christ Church, Bulkington
Hebrews 2. 14-18; Luke 2. 22-40
“Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested.”
Jacques Daret, The Presentation in the Temple (c. 1434-35), hangs in the Petit Palais, Paris.
I wonder how many of you know that 1990s hit song by Joan Osborne about God? You hear it on the radio quite often still, or playing in the supermarket when you do your shopping. It goes like this:
♫“What if God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us?”♪♫
I’m not sure the word slob is appropriate, but one thing that makes Christianity unique among religions is that Christians believe that God really was one of us. Maybe not a slob, but one who did all the normal human things, including going to the loo and blowing His nose, and sometimes being afraid, and being tempted to do things that were wrong.
“I’m only human.” It’s a phrase we usually offer by way of an apology—as if being human was something inadequate or second rate. Humans aren’t perfect. What torments us is that somehow we think we’re supposed be perfect, so when we can’t manage to be the perfect people we think we should be, we think we’ve failed.
We’re supposed to be good at our jobs, to run a perfect home, to be a cheerful friend and companion while also being capable of giving frank and realistic advice if needed, a wonderful spouse or partner, an absolutely perfect parent, to give regularly to charity, to feel deeply for a range of worthy causes and always say the right things about them, to never hit the credit card too heavily, never drink more than 14 units of alcohol per week, never smoke, and have a clean driving licence and a Body Mass Index below 25 – or, if we’re Black or Asian, a Body Mass Index below 23.
Of course we don’t manage to achieve all that. We’re only human. Although there are always Instagram influencers and people in the lifestyle magazines who claim to manage it all, and tell us we all could too if only we tried hard enough. Maybe they’re not human—better than human?—superhuman?
We’re so negative about the idea of being human – but being human was good enough for God. That’s what that strange mystical passage from St John’s Gospel that I read a moment ago is saying. I freely admit that it is strange stuff, and I don’t see that as a problem. After all, if God is real, then any human attempt to describe God must strain the limits of human language. The passage writes of two beings, the Word, and God who created the universe. The Word, it says, was God, every bit as much as the creator of the universe—somehow these two beings while being distinct, were one. The Word was with God before time began. And then the Word became flesh—God became human. That is the unique and distinctive point of the Christian faith
Now, we have much in common with Jews, something I think we all know, and we also have quite a lot in common with Muslims, something that is quite difficult to say with being latched on to as a Culture War point by one side or another. But it is a simple statement of fact. Like Muslims and Jews, we believe that there is a God, one God, who created the universe. This is very different from what atheists believe about the universe, or Buddhists, or Hindus. And like Muslims and Jews we believe that God will judge us at the end of our lives for what we have done on this Earth: which is a pretty scary prospect; we’d better hope that God judges us with more mercy than the lifestyle magazines and the folks on social media.
But one belief that separates Christians dramatically from Jews and Muslims is that we believe God actually became human. He did so in the person of Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ was truly God, then God got the cold and blew His nose, went to the toilet, told jokes, ate breakfast, and was so fond of eating and drinking with the wrong company that his enemies called him a glutton and a drunkard. If this festival we celebrate tonight is true, then God got so exhausted by the crowds who mobbed Him like a modern celebrity that He fled to the hills for peace, and God was perceived as such a threat by powerful men that they had Him executed. That’s very different from what Jews believe, and very different from what Muslims believe.
Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and St Peter’s, Poulshot
Colossians 1. 15-28; Luke 10. 38-42
“Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things.”
Henry Ossawa Tanner, Christ at the Home of Mary and Martha (1905), hangs in the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA.
I remember hanging on the living room wall at my Granny Duffy’s house was a picture of the Holy Family. It was in the style of a grainy black and white photograph, and in fact I think it may have been a posed photograph from around the turn of the 20th Century. I can remember it distinctly in my mind and I looked for it on the Internet as I was preparing this sermon, without any luck. In the photo, Jesus and Mary are helping Joseph in his carpentry workshop. They have halos over their heads and they all look very serious.
That’s what we expect Jesus to be like, don’t we? Jesus and all those old saints? Serious, and humourless, and so holy they have halos floating over their heads as they walk down the street, and not like real people at all.
But the snatches we get of the lives of Martha and Mary and Peter and Paul and all the rest of them in the Bible aren’t like those old holy pictures, but real and three dimensional. These are real human beings, with real flaws and gifts and personalities. And one thing pretty much all serious historians agree on, including the ones who are committed atheists, is that Jesus of Nazareth, was an actual flesh and blood human being who really did live in the Holy Land 2,000 years ago.
And so to Martha and Mary – this isn’t Mary the mother of Christ, but another woman with the same name. Martha is perhaps a bit of a fusspot. It was she herself who invited Jesus into her home, and there’s no sense that Jesus has asked her to go to a lot of trouble for Him. We all know people who see hosting someone as a test of their skills and dedication. Would Martha really have been happy if Jesus had told her not to worry about all her jobs just to take it easy and hang out with Him for a few hours? I doubt it! Whereas Mary is perhaps more given to the appreciation of beauty and the good things in life, even when times are tough.
“While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.”
The Ascension of Christ by Salvador Dali (1958). In a private collection.
Poor old Jesus. Even after all that the apostles had seen and experienced, even after all that happened and didn’t happen in Jerusalem, even after the encounters when He appeared to them on the lake and stood among them even though the doors were locked, the apostles really didn’t know what He was about.
“Is this the time when you will restore the kingdom” they ask Him. They’re still expecting that at some point, probably very soon, Jesus is going to seize power and put them, of course into top jobs. They still want Jesus’ to give them a kingdom that is of this world. Instead Jesus’ kingdom is something that can only be shared in in its fullness in a state that is higher than the one in which we live, when we are in the nearer presence of the Father. It is a state to which it seems that even Christ Himself must ascend to participate in fully, and to do so must withdraw from them. This kingdom is much greater than any state we or the apostles could imagine for ourselves on this Earth. For most of us, in this life, we can only detect little flashes of this kingdom for brief and wondrous moments.
Christ, truly God as well as truly human, knows what this kingdom really is, and how much greater it is than the kingdoms of the world. So, you can almost hear the exasperation when He answers the apostles’ question, “It is not for you to know.” Authority over everything belongs to the Father. The apostles wish to seize that authority, to rule over the Earth, and they think they’ll be much better than the world’s existing rulers and not corrupt or cruel or incompetent. No, not them! God knows what is actually best for them, however. The job of the apostles at this point is something very different—to wait for the Holy Spirit; to wait for God who is love to flow and blow and make His move.
Life often seems to be a waiting game – waiting for the train, waiting for exam results, or medical results, waiting for the money to clear into your account or, worst of all, for the contracts to be exchanged. The worst waiting comes when you don’t exactly know what you’re waiting for, when it feels like you’re going nowhere and being left behind. We can see why the apostles are getting a little impatient to find out what they’re supposed to do next.
Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Holy Cross, Seend
Colossians 3. 12-17; John 19. 25-27
“…he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’”
James Tissot, “Woman Behold Thy Son” (1886-94), in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum.
Sometimes you’ll hear people complain that Mother’s Day, a modern commercial invention, has eclipsed Mothering Sunday, the traditional celebration kept on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, which is today. Mothering Sunday was traditionally the time that people who worked a long way from their homes came back to their “mother church”, the place where they were baptised and became a child of the Church. Of course, as a result, they had a chance to see their families. You’ll most often hear the complaint about Mothering Sunday being abandoned from a certain type of slightly grumpy old-fashioned High Church clergyman. Although I am very much such a grumpy old-fashioned High Church clergyman, I am in fact quite strongly in favour of Mother’s Day and that we keep it in church.
You see, Mother’s Day does two things at one—certainly it speaks into our own lives and our own families. Yet it also speaks into one of the beliefs about God and the universe that makes Christianity truly unique—that Jesus Christ is God made human. Jesus Christ is God, every bit as much as the Father, the maker of the universe, and every bit as much as the Holy Spirit, the mysterious force of life and love which circulates everywhere, and which we find rather difficult to understand. For Christians, Jesus Christ is not just a wise and holy teacher, and not even a prophet, but God Himself.
You may be wondering how Mother’s Day speaks into this. We see it in today’s very short Gospel reading—the incredible, horrendous, scene on Cross where Jesus, close to death, has been abandoned by all His followers except for four women, including His mother, and ‘the disciple he loved’ – generally assumed to be St John the Evangelist. Jesus asks John to take care of his mother. Think of what’s going on here: Jesus must be in physical agony, exhausted and close to death, and His main concern is the welfare of his mother. When we think of ‘the love of God’, we tend to think of something remote and abstract, perhaps even a bit overwhelming and frightening. But this isn’t remote or abstract love—it isn’t love for a great principle or a sort of universal love for all of humanity, wonderful and important as these things are. This is the love of one person in particular for another actual person, in the face of death. Most of us have experienced the sheer intensity of love when someone we love is dying; it can be overwhelming even when it doesn’t involve a brutal public execution. This is what God’s love is like—so intense it can be overwhelming, and felt for you in particular.
“…he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes…”
Some of you will have noticed that there was a rugby match between England and Ireland yesterday. For those who have not the slightest interest in sport, let me cut a long story short by saying that Ireland won comfortably. I tell you that not to gloat – although I’m sure that some of you will be cynical about my intentions! – but to provide context for this morning’s readings.
When I was schoolboy I wanted, for a brief time at least, to play rugby for Ireland. In my imagination, I would see myself in a green jersey on the pitch at a packed Lansdowne Road, on a mild March afternoon like yesterday’s, in the final weekend of a Six Nations championship, crashing over the line for the winning try as the seconds ticked down in a Grand Slam decider. Hopefully, a Grand Slam decider against England! It has, however, been a long time since five-foot-five has been a sufficient stature for international rugby, and so those dreams had to remain unfulfilled. I must trust that God’s plans for me never involved international rugby, for otherwise he would have given me an extra centimetre… or twenty. Indeed, in His good sense God probably realised that I was never going to enjoy a life of getting up at half-five every morning to lift weights and down protein shakes. God made me to be me, not just in my soul and my mind, but also in my body, which He made specifically for me, with its stumpy little legs and fat backside.
The Healing of the Man Born Blind, painted by El Greco in 1567. It now hangs in the Palazzo della Pilotta, Parma, Italy.
Christians face the constant danger of reducing their faith to something otherworldly, overly spiritualised, and detached from physical reality. Yet one of the things that stands out in this morning’s long Gospel reading is the sheer physicality of its portrayal of Jesus. The passage rejoices in the messiness of human life and the human body – Jesus spits in public, indeed in front of his own followers, then rubs his spittle in the mud, makes a paste out of it, and rubs it in the blind man’s eyes.
Even more significantly, this comes immediately after Jesus saying, “I am the light of the world”. Jesus has therefore just identified Himself with “I am”, the Hebrew term for God, and said His life was of global importance. Then He gets His hands muddy with his own spit and washes a stranger with the product.
“For a child has been born for us … authority rests upon his shoulders.”
The international situation is darkening with a series of protracted and frightening wars, while domestically people are setting their hearts against God. Religiously-minded people see that abandonment of God as a direct cause of the obvious collapse in standards in public life, especially among political leaders. I am not referring to the present day, but to the time when our Old Testament reading was written by Isaiah, around two-thousand seven hundred years ago.
In the midst of this darkness, Isaiah wrote down a vision of a brighter future. In it, a child is born who will have authority to lead people from darkness into light. He will establish peace and justice, and even be known as “Mighty God”.
Hundreds of years later, about the same distance in time as separates us from knights in armour and feudal lords, the vision still inspired many people to keep hope in difficult times. Some of them had been followers of a wandering preacher called Jesus, whose life was so extraordinary and so surrounded by miracles and the seemingly impossible that they reached the conclusion he was the Son of God. As they reflected on the sacred writings of the Jewish faith which they all devoutly held, this was one of the pieces they thought had foretold Jesus all along.
Our Gospel reading was also a product of those followers, as they wrote down their own reflections on what they had experienced through Jesus. Its first sentence is particularly famous – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Famous it might be, but it can be a little difficult to unpack. So let me try to explain. The Word is God – God who made the universe, God who was there in the very beginning, God who existed when the Big Bang went bang, God who made the Big Bang go bang. But the Word was also apparently with God in the beginning. So we have two beings in the beginning, who make the Big Bang go bang – God and the Word; but the Word is also God. It’s very odd, isn’t it?
Virgin and Child with Canon Joris van der Paele by Jan van Eyck (1436)
Now here’s another strange phrase from our Gospel reading – “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” You might have noticed that I knelt when I read that phrase. That’s because it expresses the thing that is so unique about the Christian faith – not only that there is a God, but also that God holds us human beings in such high esteem that He actually became one of us, took on human flesh Himself, to open the way to eternal life for us.
And it’s not just the fact that God became a human being that is amazing, but how He did it, the sort of human being He became. For there couldn’t be more of a contrast between Jesus’ supernatural beginnings and his earthly beginnings. Jesus was with the creator of the universe when it all started, and indeed was Himself the creator of the universe, grand concepts that seem to be full of paradox and which aren’t really understandable in human language. At the same time, Jesus became one of us in the womb of a woman, who gave birth to Him in poverty in a stable, as physically weak as any other baby, and absolutely vulnerable and dependent like any other baby. The maker of the universe and the baby in the stall are one and the same: both are the baby who was prophesied by Isaiah all those centuries before.
