roughness of authenticity

The Gospel I Don’t Like: Sermon Preached on 5th April 2026 (Easter Day)

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

Colossians 3. 1-4; Matthew 28. 1-10

“So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples.”

A large, densely populated painting set in an English churchyard. Figures in various states of undress emerge from tombs and from between pale stone grave markers, some stretching, some clambering upright, others still dazed. The scene is crowded and unhurried rather than dramatic — people appear bemused, curious, or quietly absorbed. A woman in dark robes kneels among flowers in the foreground. A robed figure reads from a scroll near the centre. Angels and armoured figures stand among the risen dead. The church itself is visible in the background, bright white. Flowers — daisies, lilies — grow abundantly across the grass. The overall mood is strange and domestic rather than triumphant, as if resurrection were an ordinary if unexpected event occurring on a quiet English summer morning.
Stanley Spencer, A Cookham Resurrection (1924-7) – in the ownership of the Tate Modern, London, but not currently on display.

Let me start with a confession. The account of the Resurrection we heard this morning comes from Matthew’s Gospel. I don’t like it. It doesn’t persuade me. In fact, it annoys me. It feels too tidy compared with the other three Gospels.

When the two Marys go to the tomb at dawn, there’s none of the doubt or fear we see in the other Gospels. Instead, an angel descends, rolls away the stone, the guards collapse in terror, and everything falls into place rather conveniently. The women don’t run out screaming into the dawn, like they do in Mark’s Gospel; Mary Magdalene doesn’t mistake Jesus for the gardener, like she does in John’s Gospel; the men don’t think the story is just the sort of idle tale you’d expect from women, like they do in Luke’s Gospel.

Matthew’s Gospel ties down the detail of Jesus’ Resurrection and smooths the rough edges. And that’s the problem, because for me rough edges are the signs of something real.

And should we worry that there are four slightly different accounts of Jesus’ Resurrection? Well, if there’s a controversial penalty in a football match, or a controversial try in a rugby match, do four fans ever agree on what actually happened and what the ref should have decided? Even though these days everything gets filmed from a dozen angles and sent up to the video ref?

So, if the Gospels are genuinely describing what the women and the apostles experienced on that first Easter Day, I wouldn’t expect them to be too consistent. These accounts were written about thirty and sixty years later. They’re the product of old men making sure that the events they had experienced first-hand when they were young men, and which had changed their lives, got written down before they die.

But one detail that all the Gospel accounts agree on is that it was women who were the first witnesses to the Resurrection. Now, women weren’t treated as the most reliable witnesses in courts in the ancient world. Certainly they were seen as less rational and reliable than men, especially free male citizens. And while a high-status Roman matron might have been considered fairly credible, ordinary country women from backwoods places like Galilee certain weren’t—still less somebody like Mary Magdalene whose being “healed of seven demons” hints at a history of mental illness, and who probably wouldn’t be considered all that reliable a witness even today.

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Eleven Kilometres from Jerusalem: Sermon Preached on 23rd April 2023 (Third Sunday of Easter)

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A painting by James Tissot from 1900. Three men in long flowing robes, two in white and one in red, are waling as the walk along a rough path under some trees. This purports to be the scene from Luke Chapter 24, where a mysterious man talked to two of Jesus' disciples on the road to Emmaus, and the mysterious man turned out to be Jesus.

Preached at St John’s, Devizes and Christ Church, Bulkington

Readings – Acts 2:14a, 36-41; Luke 24.13-35

“…he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.’”

You may or may not know that our Bible readings for any given Sunday repeat on a three year cycle, and I very distinctly remember today’s Gospel reading, about the travellers on the road to Emmaus, at this point four cycles ago: on the Sunday that fell a fortnight after Easter in 2011.

A painting by James Tissot from 1900. Three men in long flowing robes, two in white and one in red, are waling as the walk along a rough path under some trees. This purports to be the scene from Luke Chapter 24, where a mysterious man talked to two of Jesus' disciples on the road to Emmaus, and the mysterious man turned out to be Jesus.
The Road to Emmaus, James Tissot (1900). Hangs in the Brooklyn Museum.

I remember it so vividly, because I was in Cape Town, and one unfamiliar detail in this otherwise very familiar passage of Scripture left me feeling disorientated and far from home. Instead of Emmaus being about seven miles from Jerusalem, it was instead about eleven kilometres from Jerusalem. As their country converted entirely to metric two generations ago, miles are an unfamiliar measurement to most South Africans today. Of course, neither miles nor kilometres were used two-thousand years ago in the Roman Empire – both are translations for the convenience for us modern hearers, and Luke originally reported that Emmaus was located sixty stadia from Jerusalem.

I have driven across the Irish border often enough that a switch from miles to kilometres is a familiar experience, and this was a minor quirk of translation – but worship is such an intense and meaningful thing for most of us, including those of us who don’t go in for emotionally expressive worship, that even very minor changes in ritual, translation, or music can leave us feeling disorientated and bewildered.

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Christianity is Strange (Easter Day 2023)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne, 9th April 2023

Readings – Acts 10: 34-43; John 20: 1-8

Christianity is a very strange faith – if it were not strange, it would scarcely be worth believing in. Take Mary’s encounter with the risen Christ. At first, she doesn’t recognise her close friend, whom she last saw just two days before; in fact, she thinks this stranger must be the graveyard’s gardener. It is only when Jesus speaks her name that she recognises that the impossible has happened; that the man whom she had watched being put to death is in fact alive. Yet there is something odd about his physical nature – He asks her not to cling to Him.

A "noli mi tangere" icon, 16th Century Crete.
An icon from 16th Century Crete of Mary Magdalene’s encounter with Christ in the Garden on the first Easter morning.

In our reading from Acts, another of the eyewitnesses of the risen Christ, Peter, has been asked to visit a senior Roman solider who has had a mysterious vision of angels. Peter recounts his own encounters with Christ after the Resurrection. In these encounters, too, Jesus’ physical characteristics are very odd – He is sometimes not recognised until He speaks or acts in a particular way; He sometimes appears in the middle of locked rooms. Yet He also eats and drinks with His disciples, apparently normally; they can embrace Him and even poke their fingers in His crucifixion wounds.

Jesus has clearly not been simply brought back to life, miraculously healed, but instead has become somehow different than He was. Nor is He a ghost or an apparition – He has a definite, tangible, physicality. The new life of the Resurrection is clearly something different from the mundane life of mortal human beings.

Of course, this could all be a story made up by people who couldn’t cope with the death of their hero.

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Saviour in a Manger: Sermon Preached on 25th December 2022 (Christmas Day)

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Readings – Isaiah 52.7-10; Luke 2.1-20

“…to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”

Luke’s Gospel, from which we hear the Christmas story this morning, is the familiar and cosy Christmas Gospel. At first sight anyway. It is from here that we get all those elements that we like to see our kids or grandkids act out at their nativity plays – the angels, the shepherds, the baby in the manger. As we hear it so often, we can be inclined to snooze off when we hear it in church, and even more inclined to snooze off when we get a sermon about it when we actually want to get to our Christmas lunch. We can be tempted to dismiss it as a soppy fairy-story: great for kids to have a bit of fun with, but not something that self-respecting adults should take too seriously.

The Angels Appearing to the Shepherds, William Blake (1809).

Let me implore you to pay it a bit more attention on this Christmas morning, because when one explores this story a little, it holds a few surprises. For starters, it is set in a realistic and indeed rather gritty world. It is a world not as different from our own as we might expect. We see a cold and indifferent state bureaucracy; underperforming private services where the customer certainly is not king; and people working at vital jobs too poor to put a decent roof over their heads. All this was taking place in what was the mightiest empire the world had ever seen up; it is as if we were discovering the same conditions in Edwardian England, or in today’s California – which is, of course, we could well do.

So, St Luke gives his story of the birth of Jesus a true-to-life setting in the economy section of the Roman Empire. Oh, sure, the angels singing in the sky are otherworldly and mystical and strange (we’ll come back to them) – but they appear in a context that could be a setting for a film directed by Ken Loach. You know, Cathy Come Home, Kes, Daniel Blake, and then the historical one set in the Roman Empire about the unmarried mother giving birth in a stable.

Unmarried mother? Yes, our Gospel reading this morning is very clear about that; Joseph was only “engaged” to Mary. They hadn’t actually tied the knot yet, even after the archangel Gabriel, the visit to Elizabeth, the strange circumstances of John the Baptist’s birth, and all that. Let me be clear, this isn’t one of those moments like where the bishop denies the Resurrection on Easter Day or says God is just a metaphor for goodness: the biblical text is very clear that Mary was an unmarried mother.

All that is important context for the news that the angels give to the shepherds about the baby. They claim it is the Christ, the Messiah, the great leader long heralded in prophecy who was going to forcibly boot the Romans out of the Holy Land and then set up an enlightened and godly state where justice and peace would reign.

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