Mourner, suspected to represent Isis mourning Osiris. 18th dynasty, 1550–1295 BC. Now in the Louvre, Paris.
Often when I take a funeral, people tell me they want it to be a celebration. But I always reply that I hope that people won’t be too happy at my funeral.
The summer I finished university, twenty-five years ago, I went on a post-graduation trip to Turkey and Georgia – Georgia the country in the Caucasus, not the American state. One of my abiding memories of that trip is being invited to a wake, which in Georgia involves a full day of banqueting—and drinking. As the coffin was carried off from the house, Chopin’s Funeral March was played on old record player as a black and white portrait photograph of the deceased in younger days, resplendent in his Red Army dress uniform, was processed in front of the coffin. Most incredibly, professional mourners, all of them older women dressed in black, wailed at the top of their voices and pulled clumps of hair from their heads.
I don’t think I want people to go that far at my funeral, but I hope they’ll be at least a little bit sad that I’m gone.
According to this morning’s Gospel reading, that might make me a bad Christian. The reading comes from a speech Jesus made to his closest followers on the night before He died, and He uses a strange phrase “If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father”.
“And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him…”
Conjure the scene in your mind: Peter tapping Jesus on the shoulder in front of James and John and all that lot and saying, “Jesus, can I have a word… in private?”
Sometimes there are revealing little details in the Bible that can pass us by our whole lives, even when the stories are very familiar. As I prepared this morning’s sermon, a phrase that caught in my mind for the first time was that when Peter told Jesus not to risk His life in Jerusalem, Peter “took him aside and began to rebuke him.” One wonders what the other disciples thought.
Now, Jesus doesn’t tell Peter off for embarrassing Him in front of the other disciple, but something more dramatic, famously telling him, “Get behind me, Satan!”
Why did Jesus give Peter such a blunt and probably rather hurtful answer? Well, can you remember what last week’s Gospel was? It was Peter working out the Jesus was indeed the Messiah, and Jesus telling Peter that he would be the rock on which He would build His Church. This morning’s reading follows directly on from that story without a break. In all three synoptic Gospels, once Peter works out that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus begins to tell the disciples that He must suffer and die in Jerusalem – although Luke doesn’t mention Jesus saying “Get behind me, Satan.”
Why should The Devil get all the good music?
Poor Peter must have been crushed by this. When Jesus told Peter that that He was indeed the Messiah and, better still, that Peter would be the rock of His community, suffering and death would have been the last thing in Peter’s mind. The Messiah was expected to be a great religious, political, and probably military leader. Peter will naturally have thought that Jesus the Messiah would march into Jerusalem, annihilate the Romans in a huge battle, overthrow Herod, and put the scribes and Pharisees in their place. Jesus would then reign as king, and Peter would be something like His Prime Minister. Peter thinks he’ll be a powerful figure in Jesus’s new Kingdom—and, in fact, he is entirely correct in that, but he completely misunderstands what the new Kingdom is.
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
This morning’s Gospel doesn’t mention Jesus directly; it instead tells the story of the public ministry of John the Baptist. Yet, it is important for understanding Jesus’ ministry and mission, especially as related in Matthew’s Gospel, which will supply nearly all of our all of our Sunday Gospel readings between now and next November. For it directly connects the preaching of John and of Jesus. John in his preaching calls on people to: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near”. Matthew later reports Jesus using this phrase habitually, word for word, in his own preaching.
The Kingdom of Heaven Suffereth Violence (1910) by Evelyn de Morgan.
“The kingdom of heaven” is a phrase specific to Matthew’s Gospel and it is repeated twenty-four times in it, so it is important to think about what it might mean, for we are going to be hearing it a lot in church over the next year.
The “kingdom of heaven” is a phrase that is never rigidly defined; Jesus explains it mainly in parables. The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed; it’s like treasure hidden in a field; like a merchant in search of fine pearls; like a net that was thrown into the sea; like a landowner who goes out in the early morning to hire workers.
Parables catch us in different ways in different points of our lives. The same story can present us with different truths and different lessons depending on how and where we hear it. So the kingdom of heaven seems to be hard to pin down, to be something that changes depending on the person encountering it and the context in which it’s encountered. It isn’t something that’s rigid or fixed, but instead lives and breathes and adapts and evolves.
This can seem frustrating when all we’re looking for is a few simple rules for life – if you’re looking for that, I recommend the Ten Commandments painted on the wall behind me – but remember, if the kingdom of heaven really is something that is truly from God rather than just being invented by people, then it must lie partly beyond human understanding.
More than that, and this really is good news, if the kingdom of heaven is truly from God, it isn’t something that can be grasped or controlled by human beings as a way of setting themselves up in power over other human beings. It can’t become an oppressive power structure, in the way even the most enlightened earthly kingdoms do from time to time. Indeed Jesus will say early in his public ministry, in the Sermon on the Mount, that this kingdom belongs to the poor in spirit and those persecuted for righteousness’ sake. Those who seek power often seek to take the kingdom of heaven by force and prevent those they disapprove of from entering it – but they do not own it, for it is the possession of the humble and those who are the victims of unjust power. When we seek to control the kingdom of heaven, it seems to crumble in our grasp; yet it is so precious that people will sell all that they have to possess it.
