Readings – 2 Corinthians 4:7–15; Matthew 20:20–28
“…we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.”
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
You are all a terrible bunch of Christians! I mean really, really, deeply flawed followers of Jesus Christ; and in the main you have very mixed motives for coming to church this morning and you should repent – repent – of your sins.
I’m sorry for that start to the sermon, but I’ve always wanted to rain a bit of fire and brimstone from the pulpit and this morning’s readings gave me the perfect opportunity to do so. It was worth it to see the looks on your faces.
Of course, you’re all deeply flawed Christians; I know this partly because I am myself a deeply flawed Christian and a deeply flawed priest and, like you, I need to repent of my sins, on a regular basis. That’s why we call our sins to mind and pray together for God to forgive us them every Sunday in the first part of the Eucharist.
I know how flawed we all are for another reason, too. Over the course of my life, I’ve been privileged to get to know well a few people who had a deserved reputation for being saints; and the better I got to know them, the more I saw that they all had real character flaws and could, just every once in a while, be quite horrid or quite hopeless.
I wanted to put that prelude into your minds before we turned to today’s Gospel reading, which is both hysterically funny, toe-curlingly awful, and very true-t0-life. When I play this scene out in my mind as if it were in a film, the bossy mother is always played by Maureen Lipman. What makes the encounter even more cringe-making is that this episode happened very late in Jesus’ final journey to Jerusalem, immediately after he told the twelve apostles that he was soon about to be handed over to death.