The Return of the Prodigal Son

Unconditional Love (Mothering Sunday, Lent IV)

“This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” Luke 15.2

It’s a typical family scene. The mother is knocking on her son’s door: “Come on Jimmy. Time to get up. It’s Sunday and time for church.”

“I don’t wanna get up. Church is boring. And I don’t like the people; and they don’t like me!”

“Come on son. Time to get up.”

“Give me three reasons why I should get up”

“Well. It’s 10 o’clock. You’re 43 years old and you’re the Vicar”

I know it’s an old one. But suitable for Mothering Sunday and for opening up today’s Gospel about love in a rather dysfunctional family.

Remember what we have often said of a parable – there is usually only one main point, although there can be other aspects of the parable that often explore the same point in a deeper way.

One of the reasons Jesus used these stories as a teaching tool was because the meaning of a parable is rarely exhausted. We’re still preaching about them 2,000 years later.

So what is the primary point of the parable of the Prodigal Son?

Well it is unconditional love. As we have just sung in Faber’s great hymn:

For the love of God is broader

than the measure of man's mind

and the heart of the Eternal

is most wonderfully kind.

But we make his love too narrow

by false limits of our own;

and we magnify his strictness

with a zeal he will not own.

[Frederick Faber was the first Superior of the Brompton Oratory along the road here, from its formation in 1849 until his death at the age of 49 in 1863.]

The religious authorities were scandalised by this unconditional love of Jesus: ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’

It reminds me of that other little verse I’ve often quoted by Edwin Markham:

They drew a circle that shut me out;

Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.

But love and I had the wit to win

We drew a circle that took them in.

The Pharisees wanted Jesus to condemn the sinners and praise the religious. Instead he partied with the sinners and called the religious ‘whitewashed sepulchres’.

But of course there is more to it than that.

Today’s parable is a tale of three men: two sons and a father. It is only as we look at all three that we begin to get an understanding of God’s unconditional love; his outrageous grace.

Henri Nouwen was a great spiritual writer who died in 1996 and one of his short and profound works is entitled The Return of the Prodigal Son (1992). It was based on Rembrandt’s painting of the same name. [Look it up here or visit the Hermitage in St Petersburg – painted in 1662, shortly before the artist's death; the year of the Book of Common Prayer.]

Henri Nouwen explores each son’s response to the all-loving father.

The younger son is the Prodigal one, or the Lost Son – the verses we missed out of today’s Gospel were the parables of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin.

[I guess like many of you I was well into my teens before I realised that prodigal didn’t mean ‘wicked’ or ‘immoral’ – the parable is best called the Lost Son.]

One of Nouwen’s themes is ‘belovedness’ – being forgiven, accepted and loved by God.

The younger son's life shows how the beloved lives a life of misery – eating the pigswill - because he thinks he can only earn the Father’s love; he can only truly be the beloved by living up to the qualifications laid down by his lover.

Some of us are caught in this trap in our family life, our relationships, and usually therefore, in our spiritual life as well.

It may start with a pushy mother or father who have plans for our life. And we become only too aware that we disappoint them and don’t live up to their expectations, and so whatever the reality, we feel unloved.

And continuing in the pattern of learned behaviour, we often choose partners who also make demands on us, and struggle again to live up to them so we can somehow deserve their respect and love.

It’s hardly surprising then that we listen to the wonderful love story of the Gospel of Christ, and interpret it as another set of demands about the way we live. Only by living an exemplary Christian life will we be worthy of the love of God.

It’s all so wrong and so debilitating.

On the other hand, the elder son's actions show how the beloved can be miserable and depressed, unable to enjoy the party, because he thinks he deserves more. He’s kept the rules and struggled all his life to please his father.

And yet he feels unable to enjoy the father’s love, because it only springs from what he thinks he deserves.

Henri Nouwen suffered from great depression at times and put himself in this category of the elder brother. A life of obedience as a Catholic priest and dedication to the church, and yet he felt an inability to enjoy the love of others or of God. Rather he felt anger – why can’t I have intimate relationships with others; why does God let all this happen to me?!

Needless to say, neither of these two responses represent the Christian response, although we all too often follow them at different times in our lives.

The Father in this parable, he alone understands how to give unconditional love and to forgive, and so is able to rejoice and be truly happy that the lost son has returned.

He is our model for both giving unconditional love and receiving it. This is at the heart of living in fulfilled relationships and in enjoying our Christian discipleship.

And then our obedience to God, our ‘wanting to please’, stems from a realisation of how much he has done for us and how much he loves us. When we come to worship, we do not go away and want to lead better lives for fear of punishment – we are justified by faith in Christ. ‘There is now no condemnation for those that are in Christ Jesus’. This is the message of Paul’s words to the Corinthians in today’s epistle.

No, we want to lead better lives because we love God and know the comfort and assurance of being forgiven, accepted and loved by him.

This was the experience of the godly priest-poet George Herbert. He felt all unworthy to come to the altar, to the Table of the Lord, and had to be reminded of the Love of Christ, Love himself, who had born the blame and justified him through faith, and who welcomed him unconditionally to the Table.

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

If I lack'd anything.

A guest, I answer'd, worthy to be here:

Love said, You shall be he.

I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,

I cannot look on thee.

Love took my hand and smiling did reply,

Who made the eyes but I?

Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame

Go where it doth deserve.

And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?

My dear, then I will serve.

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat.

So I did sit and eat.

The Wedding Banquet - Justification

The Wedding Banquet. Matthew 22.1-14

“I will greatly rejoice in the Lord… for he has clothed me in the garments of salvation.” Isaiah 61.10

As a young working class lad, I remember being very nervous in my first few terms at Cambridge, every time an invitation appeared in my pigeonhole to some dinner or lunch or blessing of the university beehives... What was I to wear?

Sometimes the invitation would bear the enigmatic phrase: “Doctors will wear Scarlet.” But I wasn’t a doctor. That didn’t help.

Gradually I learnt the dress codes and visited the charity shops where I picked up tail coats and dinner jackets and patent leather shoes – all of which I still have in my wardrobe. They have survived the last 40 years considerably better than my body has.

Many of us have dreams about being inappropriately dressed on posh occasions. Or worse still, there is the nightmare that we are completely naked. Of course Mr Freud had plenty to say about that.

And this surprisingly common feature of human dreams around the world, is what gives something of an edge to today’s parable of Jesus – and to the plight of the poor man being bound in the picture by Merian the Elder which adorns the front of our service sheet.

This parable, sometimes called the Great Banquet or the Wedding Feast, has a twist at the end which is not in Luke’s version of the same parable. (Lk 14.16-24)

Let’s do a little Bible study on the Gospel this morning.

The context of the story is Jesus’ teaching that many of the Jewish leaders had rejected the message of the Gospel that he was proclaiming. “He came unto his own and his own received him not” as John put it. (John 1.11)

Matthew also used a perfectly legitimate Jewish teaching method of interpretation – called pesher – which embellished the original parable in the light of what had happened since Jesus delivered it.

So the slaves being beaten and killed is a description of what happened to many in the Christian church in the four decades after Christ – especially the early missionaries.

Matthew adds too that the King was furious and sent troops to destroy the City. Certainly Christians after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70AD could not see this as anything other than God’s judgment on a nation that had rejected the Messiah.

So Jesus came to the Jews and they did not want him, and the Gospel was then thrown open to the whole world. The servants were to bring in good and bad, Matthew tells us – everyone was welcome to the Banquet in honour of the King’s Son.

But what about this man without a wedding robe?

The king immediately spots him: ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen.’ (Matt 22.12-14)

Now that’s worse treatment than you get if you turn up at the Athenaeum wearing trainers!

But why does Matthew add these curious verses?

Well think for a moment about how the other guests managed to get wedding robes. They were dragged in off the streets.

I can remember my embarrassment at turning up to a friend’s club for dinner, one summer evening, without jacket or tie. It was like the scary dream.

But very politely I was ushered into some cubby-hole where there was a selection of ill-fitting jackets and hideous ties – they certainly didn’t want to encourage you to do it again! But they clothed you in an acceptable way for dinner, even if you felt the style police were about to arrest you at every mouthful.

The simple part of this parable, in both Luke’s and Matthew’s version, is that we are invited to the Gospel party and should accept the invitation.

The more complex part, has to be teased out, and contains a doctrine explained most fully in the subsequent writings of St Paul – the doctrine of justification.

The King in the parable is hugely generous.

He provides his Son - whose wedding feast it is.

He provides the food and the wine.

But what Matthew adds in his version, is that the King provides also the fine wedding robes.

“In this way, nobody need be ashamed of their rags, and nobody can be proud of their party frocks; there is room neither for embarrassment nor for pride in the feast of the kingdom – at this Table. Both attitudes ruin the enjoyment.” (pace Michael Green)

In the words of one of Charles Wesley’s great hymns: “Clothed in righteousness divine, bold I approach the eternal throne.”

Or as our text from the prophet Isaiah has it: “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord… for he has clothed me in the garments of salvation.”

The biblical doctrine of Justification is simply this: that when we feel all unworthy of stepping into the presence of God; when we feel, again in the words of the prophet Isaiah, that “all our righteousness is as filthy rags” (Isaiah 64.6); when we feel stripped and naked before the loving gaze of the Judge of all the earth – then God clothes us in the righteousness of Christ; he looks on us with unreserved acceptance, because we are in Christ; in the Beloved Son in whose honour the wedding banquet is spread.

The offending guest was offered wedding robes like all the rest. But he chose to wear his own robes – he was good enough for God and didn’t need any charity from the King; any grace and forgiveness from God. He was arrogant and proud in his heart.

So this parable is not a threat or a warning, that if we don’t make the grade we will get bound and cast into hell.

Rather it is a loving invitation, that whether good or bad, as long as we come pleading only the merits of Christ our Saviour, clothed in his righteousness, then we are welcome to enjoy the banquet.

Never believe the self-deception that you are unworthy to receive the bread and the wine. Of course you are unworthy. We all are!

As I shall say in a few minutes as I invite you to receive the Bread and Wine of the kingdom: “Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Happy are those who are called to his supper.”

And we will all respond, priests and people: “ Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof, but speak the word only and my soul shall be healed.”

The Banquet and the wedding robes are gifts, to be received joyfully.

As the choir will sing as we eat and drink:

O sacred banquet, wherein Christ is received;
the memorial of his passion is renewed;
the soul is filled with grace;
and a pledge of future glory is given to us.
Alleluia!

[O sacrum convivium a 6
Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611)

O sacrum convivium, in quo Christus sumitur;
recolitur memoria passionis ejus;
mens impletur gratia;
et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur.
Alleluia!

Words: Antiphon to the Magnificat, Second Vespers, Corpus Christi]

Dead Dogs & Assurance

Dead Dogs and Assurance

Luke 16.19-31 (Dives & Lazarus), Trinty 17

"What is your servant, that you should look upon a dead dog such as I?" 2 Samuel 9.8

I am reminded of the agnostic, insomniac, dyslexic, who lay awake at night thinking: “Is there a Dog?”

Another question that has worried Christians down through the centuries has been: “Am I a Christian?”

The doctrine of predestination was an unsuccessful attempt to try and give reassurance to the doubting soul, and we have looked at this together in a past sermon.

We saw that if you pursue this doctrine with too much rigour, you end up with a capricious and almost vicious god, and a view of life that is fatalistic. (You remember the Calvinist who fell down stairs and said, “Thank goodness that’s over with!”)

And of course the question is simply transferred to “Am I among the elect?” I knew a number of strict Calvinists in my younger days who were plagued throughout their lives by terrible doubts that, after a life of godly devotion, they might after all, not be among the elect.

Tomorrow the Bishop installs the new Dean in St Paul’s Cathedral, Bishop Graham Knowles. One of his predecessors, John Donne, who became Dean in 1621, was greatly influenced by this strand in Calvinism. You see it in some of his poems as he pleads with God for assurance.

Do you remember the last verse of ‘A Hymn to God the Father’?

I have a sin of fear, that when I've spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by Thyself that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as He shines now and heretofore:
And having done that, Thou hast done;
I fear no more.

Others have taken a different route to assure themselves of their eternal salvation. They have placed an almost magical emphasis on the sacrament of Holy Baptism. As long as the water has been applied and the words said, then you’re ‘in’. No more worries.

Scripture, however, deals with this question of assurance in a very different and much simpler way: showing kindness and love to others is a sign and a confirmation that we have responded well to the love of God shown to us.

And this is the burden of today’s Gospel.

First let’s remind ourselves of the background to our text. It is taken from the OT reading that is suggested to accompany this Gospel reading in the Book of Common Prayer, where it is set for the first Sunday after Trinity.

Mephibosheth was a rather sad figure. His grandfather King Saul had killed himself after a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Philistines. His father, David’s beloved best friend, Jonathan, had also been killed in the battle. And so had Jonathan’s two brothers, Mephibosheth’s uncles.

But he had a forceful and protective nanny. She knew what would happen to young heirs to the throne when the royal dynasty of Saul was giving way to the dynasty of king David.

She took up the 5 year-old boy and fled. In her haste, she fell and somehow the boy’s ankles or feet were broken. He became lame. (2 Sam 4.4)

She had misjudged David, who rarely acted as other ancient near eastern rulers did nearly three thousand years ago.

Some years later, when he discovered the young man was still alive, King David welcomed him into his household and made provision for him for the rest of his life.

Now some would say this was just a shrewd move by David - keep any possible rival to the throne where you can see him!

But this is a cynical view of a passionate man who valued friendships and tried to do what was right in the eyes of the Lord.

The NT records that God says of David, “This is a man after my own heart”. (Acts 13.22)

Mephibosheth’s response is grovelling, even by ancient near eastern standards: "What is your servant, that you should look upon a dead dog such as I?"

Perhaps he was simply trying to reassure David that he posed no threat?

Whatever, history remembers Mephibosheth for these words, and these words alone, that have come down to us over the millennia: "What is your servant, that you should look upon a dead dog such as I?"

We will return to Mephibosheth later.

The parable of Dives and Lazarus is more specific in addressing the issue of assurance that we are Christians. And of course dogs have a walk-on part in that story as well: the graphic image of dogs licking the sores of Lazarus.

Incidentally, this is the only parable where proper names are given, but this is probably to do with their meaning: Dives means ‘rich’; and Lazarus, or Eleazar, means ‘God is my help’.

It’s such a gruesome parable to the modern ear, that we can get too easily sidetracked into a discussion about the afterlife – torment and fire. But that is not the point of the story and certainly, as in other parables, the details may not be pushed to form a credible theology of the life hereafter.

However, neither is the parable primarily about the rich and the poor, although it fits in with other teaching of Jesus about this.

It is about unbelief and hardheartedness, and because of this, it is also about personal re-assurance concerning our own faith.

Dives exhibits four ‘symptoms’ of the disease of unbelief; although these should not be mistaken for the disease itself. As Archbishop Trench of Dublin remarked about the symptoms: “the seat of the disease is within; these are but the running sores that witness the plague.”

The marks of unbelief seen in this parable are:

the pursuit of wealth for its own sake
pride - the costly purple and fine linen of dignitaries
callousness - he just ignored Lazarus
and spiritual hardness of heart – not even someone returning from the dead could raise the spiritually dead.

So the parable seeks to emphasise that our spiritual state is reflected by our inner attitude and outward actions.

The constant refrain of the prophets, of the epistles and of Our Lord himself is that our hearts must be right. Christianity is a heart religion.

The epistle of John, which accompanies this Gospel in the Book of Common Prayer, puts it very bluntly: “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar!” John is concerned with how Christians can be assured that they are in fact children of God, and not deceiving themselves like Dives and his brothers.

And as in our Lord’s parable, the answer is simple. Loving actions as we respond to the love of God, should confirm and convince us in a way, that even someone returning from the dead, would be unable to do.

The five brothers whom Dives wants to warn, would not so much as ask the question ‘Am I a child of God?’ They had the arrogant confidence of the proud and self-satisfied: ‘We are the children of Abraham!’

What is the opposite of faith? Is it doubt? No! It is certainty.

Assurance of salvation is not certainty. It is rather a reasonable and proper confidence in the Gospel.

Intellectually we should be convinced, as we shall say at the altar in a few minutes, that Christ has done all that is necessary to make us one with God; accepted in the Beloved.

But although Scripture encourages us to be assured that we are saved by grace alone, it nonetheless wishes constantly to unsettle us from too arrogant an assertion of that saving grace, lest any man should boast. (Eph 2.8f)

This is where sometimes we find some of our brothers and sisters in Christ a little too sure of a little too much. There should be a godly reticence about our claim to be Christians – to be followers of Christ.

To go back to where we started, the question should be, not so much, ‘am I a Christian’ as, ‘am I living a Christian life?’

And the answer is always to look at the ways in which God is enabling you to love others, with kindness and good deeds.

Of course there will always be failures and inadequacy, and it is a healthy spiritual sign that we are aware of these. There will always be room for improvement. But we must not be too hard on ourselves, for if our love for God results in a practical love for others, then we should not fear as Dives did.

For Mephibosheth there was a degree of astonishment at the King’s love lavished on him, a crippled man, fallen from greatness. Yet there was proper confidence because of all that he had seen of the King’s love and loyalty.

No less for us, as we stand in humility before our great King, with confidence in his love, lavished upon us in this feast, we can say with the wonder, and indeed assurance, of Mephibosheth:

"What is your servant, that you should look upon a dead dog such as I?" 2 Samuel 9.8

The Lamb Blake/Tavener

The Lamb

Trinity 2 & Adult Baptism

In the order of service sheet:

The Lamb

Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice:
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee

Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb I'll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.

And mentioned in the sermon

The Tyger

Tyger Tyger. burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes!
On what wings dare he aspire!
What the hand, dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger, Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

“Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honour and glory and praise!” Revelation 4.12

My maternal grandmother lived with us until she died. I remember asking my mother when I was about 11, what granny Steele’s maiden name was. “Steele”, my mother replied somewhat curtly. In what was probably one of my last acts of childhood innocence I reasoned out loud: “so she was called Steele and then she married someone called Steele.”

I won’t give you my mother’s exact words of reply, but it was a strong suggestion that I was stupid and that I should grow up. Of course, it was unthinkable to me that this little old lady had conceived 3 children out of wedlock in the 1910s.

I began to realise that the world of adults was anything but straightforward, and that many things, in my family, among the neighbours, at church, were not what they seemed to be. And, horror of horrors, neither was I.

Loss of innocence is a gradual process, but most of us can remember some defining moments. The Bible traces the loss of innocence of Adam and Eve in the Garden, through the violence and injustice of tribal humanity that culminates in the death of the one innocent man – our Lord Jesus Christ - to the final book, Revelation, which looks to a new and different age of innocence.

In my sermon this week and in a fortnight’s time, I want to explore this Bible theme through the offertory motets. Today it is William Blake’s The Lamb.

William Blake was absorbed by this idea of loss of innocence. He grew up during the turbulent 18th C, with all the uncertainties of revolution and war in Europe. He was a London journeyman engraver. But he was more than that. He was an artist and a free thinker. His Christian views were shaped by his own mystical visions and a strange romantic mythology that he developed in his later writings.

When he was barely 30 in 1789 he published his first, very unusual book, comprising 31 colour plates of poems intertwined with design and illustrations. It was called Songs of Innocence and was influenced by Rousseau’s belief that children are free and innocent until society corrupts them.

But in Blake’s peculiar belief system, there was also a more traditional Christian understanding of a fallen creation. Blake and his wife, practised nudism, as a gesture towards returning to the innocence of Adam and Eve. They would have been at home with the 1000 naked cyclists who were here yesterday!

In the early church, baptismal candidates, both children and adults, went naked into the waters, and were then clothed in white as they emerged to a new innocence in Christ – it is a theme in the baptismal liturgy. (Time will not permit me to tell you of an adult baptism by immersion that I carried out while wearing white, designer cotton trousers, which turned transparent as I walked down into the water of the baptistry!)

In The Lamb, Blake draws a picture of an innocent child... and of an innocent God. The engraved and then painted illustration in his book shows a small naked, androgynous child, talking with an attentive lamb, in a rustic setting.

Here are two of God’s creations, harmlessly wandering in a paradisial idyll - “and was the holy Lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen?” - well here, at least, it was.

Christ became a little child, and became known as the Lamb of God, meek and mild. Blake wonders at the beauty and simplicity of it all; the resonances between Creator and created; the sheer grace of God experienced in the delight of nature.

The child senses his kinship with the Lamb and all creation, and with the great God who made them all, and yet who is immanent within his world, walking in the garden with his creation. The child sends up the simplest of innocent prayers - “Little Lamb, God bless thee!”

This is the sweet innocence that haunts us throughout our adult life. If only our life could be full of simple pleasures and simple childlike trust. But it’s not.

Blake was wrestling with those age-old questions:

How do we retain our innocence, and yet grow up and gain experience?
How do we gain worldly-wiseness, and yet retain a childlike trust and sense of wonder?
How can God be all loving and all good, and yet create a world red in tooth and claw?

In 1794 Blake published Songs of Experience. The perspective of the child in Songs of Innocence is now replaced with the perspective of an older and more bitter man, who has seen the evils and suffering of the world. The poems in these two volumes run in loose parallel and the corresponding poem to The Lamb is The Tyger. (Which Tavener also set in a complementary setting to The Lamb.)

Who dared frame the tiger’s ‘fearful symmetry’? Was it the same God who made the little lamb?

Blake is unequivocal in his answer. Yes, it is the same God. There is no escape into a dualism which places blame elsewhere – in some other god of chaos. Luther’s striking words encapsulate the problem for Christians:

“Always remember the devil is God’s devil!”

The Tyger is about having your reason overwhelmed at once by the beauty and the horror of the natural world. "When the stars threw down their spears / And watered heaven with their tears" – a couplet from The Tyger.

For Blake, the stars represent cold reason and objective science. Blake greatly appreciated the explosion of scientific knowledge during his era, but he was hostile to any attempts to reduce all phenomena to chemistry and physics – such as we see in the current writings of Richard Dawkins.

Blake's contemporary "rationalists" who had hoped for a tame, gentle world guided by kindness and understanding must face the reality of the tiger.

To change the historic setting to our own, postmodernity with its ironic and wry take on the world has nothing to say to the jackboot or to the brutal rawness of nature. It has no power to tame the tiger within or the tiger without. Pure rationalism, the enlightenment project, has failed. As all the recent surveys show, human beings are irrepressibly religious. There is more to life than what we see, and it is that which humanises us and gives us hope for a second innocence.

John Tavener, who composed the musical setting of Blake’s poem, is a Russian orthodox convert and is making a similar point as he describes the icon-like nature of his compositions:

'There is in ikons an uncontrolled wildness, a coarseness almost, a deep sense of the untamed ferocity of the desert… I try to recreate today in my music just this uncivilised and surrealistic wildness'.

Our text today, comes from a passage which attempts to paint an impressionistic picture to help us in our understanding of innocence and experience. In the Revelation of St John the Divine we see the central figure as the Lamb, slain yet standing.

John has in his mind the writings of the Old Testament pseudepigraphal book, the Testament of Joseph (19.8f), in which the lion and the lamb appear together: the Lion is the Messiah from Judah and the Lamb is the Messiah from Aaron. And in this Testament of Joseph, the Lion and Lamb are not contrasting figures, they are different ways of looking at the same victorious and righteous God.

St John takes the conflation of the images one step further and proclaims Christ as both priest and victim; Passover lamb of sacrifice and the Lamb with seven horns and seven eyes who opens the seals and judges the world; the crucified, risen and ascended Lord, the lion of Judah.

There is no loss of innocence in Christ, only a carrying forward of that innocence into experience. ‘He who knew no sin became sin for us’ as Scripture puts it.

And so the Christian path becomes for us not so much a loss of innocence - our childhood is still with us, sometimes in very positive, and sometimes in very destructive ways – not loss, but a maturing of innocence.

In Emperor Constantine’s time, the 4th century, it was common practice to delay baptism until the deathbed, in the hope of passing through death in pristine innocence.

This was a mistaken understanding of baptism and forgiveness. Rather, as baptized Christians we must persevere until that time, after death, when we join all those who have struggled through innocence and experience, both in themselves and in their understanding of God.

Here in this life, we must keep on trusting even when our trust is sometimes rejected.

We must keep on loving, even when the love is not returned.

We must keep on forgiving, even as God constantly forgives us.

Then, in the life after death, at last our innocence will be restored and will make perfect sense of all our experience, and of all that we do not understand about God. Then we will join the unnumbered host and proclaim:

“Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honour and glory and praise!”

Eucharist & Life

Eucharist and Life

‘Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.’ John 6.53

It’s a very stark statement of our Lord - “no life in you”. It has led the church into great debates which have largely missed the point of the words. But then the church is good at great debates that largely miss the point...

This verse became a proof text for receiving the Eucharist in 2 kinds: bread and wine. It encouraged the practice of feeding the sacraments to babies, lest they die with no life in them.

But what is the life that Jesus speaks of here and how do we receive it?

These verses 51- 58 from John 6, form a later, cogitated part of John’s teaching, already beginning to reflect early church eucharistic practice.

It is always difficult in John’s discourses to tell where the words of Jesus end, and where the pondered theology of John begins. And often the words of Jesus are selected from different times in his ministry and then run together thematically.

In fact the earlier verses from 35 - 50 form the backbone of our Lord’s teaching, and so help us to understand our text in its context. Raymond Brown, the great Roman Catholic commentator on John puts it this way:

“The juxtaposition of the two forms of the discourse teaches that the gift of life comes through a believing reception of the sacrament” (cf.47 - “he who believes has eternal life.”) (Raymond Brown p.292)

John is stressing that Christian mystery is not pagan mystery, nor is it like the magic of the Jewish gnostic cults. There is no hocus pocus, no hoax (which despite most lexicographers who think the phrase derives from the magician’s nonsense bit of dog-Latin hax pax max Deus adimax, I and others think comes from the words of the Latin Mass, hoc est corpus meum - hocus pocus).

The church has spent much of the last 500 years arguing over what actually happens in the Eucharist.

Transubstantiation was the doctrine developed most fully by St Thomas Aquinas in the 13thC: the conversion of the Bread & Wine into the Body & Blood of our Lord, only the ‘accidents’ (appearances of bread & wine) remaining. This fitted well into the Aristotelian metaphysics that so greatly influenced Aquinas.

Consubstantiation was Luther’s re-interpretation in the 16thC of the mediaeval doctrine: the Body & Blood of our Lord coexist in the Bread & Wine. But there was no transformation.

Memorialism, or Zwinglianism - Zwingli was the People’s Preacher in Zurich in the early 16thC - stressed the purely symbolic value of the elements. In contrast to the Anglican ‘harmonisation’ described as the Real Presence, Zwinglianism was caricatured as the Real Absence.

The ARCIC (Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission) report of 1971 tried to avoid all troublesome descriptions of process and simply referred to ‘the mysterious and radical change’ which takes place at the consecration.

One of my friends - Nick - spends all his time on the internet. Most of his waking hours are spent in Virtual Reality; in Cyberspace - there is no ‘there’ there.

Sometimes theologians live too long in doctrinal cyberspace. To take Kant’s words out of context: ‘God is not an it to be discussed, but a Thou to be met.’ The Blessed Sacrament is not a doctrine simply to be analysed, it is a meal in which we encounter the living God.

This very earthy, everyday stuff of bread and wine, is to remind us that reality, that eternal life, that starts from this moment and goes on into the glory beyond death, is ours through Christ. The everyday act of eating, is in this sacrament, the assurance that we share in the eternal life of the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself for us.

It was Archbishop Temple who remarked that Christianity is the most materialistic of all religions. We worship a God who became flesh – like us. And the central act of our worship is in the very human act of eating and drinking these everyday elements of bread and wine.

It is such a real and earthy re-assurance that despite all our doubts and fears and feelings of unworthiness, we are forgiven and deeply loved by God.

And it points ahead as well, to a love that is so strong that it continues after death and holds us in life for all eternity.

In this Feast, we eat the Bread from heaven so that one day we will drink with all the saints in glory.

‘Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day’. John 6.53

The Cross, Good Friday 2006

The Cross – Good Friday

“For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” 1 Cor 1.18

It is said that when Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Last Supper he used the innocent face of a choirboy for his portrait of Our Lord. Much later (and he took many years to complete it) he looked for a suitable model for Judas and found it in the degenerate and corrupt face of a dissolute young man recruited from the gutter.

Something familiar about the face prompted him to ask the young man about his origins. And to his surprise and horror it was the same choirboy who had fallen into a depraved and degenerate life.

And this is part of our common human dilemma. For the same face can present innocence and corruption. We know in our best moments and in our worst moments, what we are capable of.

The very name Good Friday contains this ambiguity, for it reminds us that the cross is the Good News of the Gospel, and yet at the same time it is the instrument of torture for our Saviour.

On Good Friday our Lord wrestles with the powers of sin and darkness, and overcomes. We still wrestle with our own sin and darkness and with the corruption which blights the whole human race on this war-riven planet.

Yet the Cross is our strength and our help, and the guarantor of our ultimate victory – the victory we will celebrate tomorrow night.

But on this Good Friday, let us spend a few minutes looking at the daily struggles we all face to choose the hard way of the cross, rather than the easy way of self.

One of John Donne’s poems illustrates this struggle very well – A Hymn to God the Father.

As you read the poem you are reminded of the choices and contrasts in Donne’s career (1573-1631): from ‘Don Juan’ to Dean of St Paul’s; from ‘Man of the World’ to ‘Man of God’; from dashing young love poet to the shrouded marble corpse that still stands today as his memorial in the aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral. Donne knew all about original sin and Augustine and Calvin’s emphasis on the ‘total depravity’ of man.

He would take very seriously indeed the 9th Article of Religion, formulated just before his birth: that "man… is of his own nature… inclined to evil". Not surprisingly then in his poem Donne first confesses the effects of original sin: the sin of Adam; the first choice that went so very wrong. But also the choices we make day by day, even when we know they are wrong and ultimately self destructive. We follow the example of Adam & Eve.

Even from outside the Garden we still hear God’s voice announcing: "Behold the man is become like one of us, knowing good from evil".

Donne writhes with that human consciousness of the trapped-ness of existence. We’re doomed to follow the sins of our forebears. To lighten the theme a little, he makes a play on his name ‘Donne’, throughout the poem. Let me read the first verse that looks back to Adam’s sin:

WILT Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.

And the ‘more’ is the realisation that his sinful behaviour affects others. However much we imagine that our sins are simply ‘private’, they always contribute to the greater woe of our corporate humanity; and more specifically to those closest to us at home, at work, in church. The second verse:

Wilt Thou forgive that sin by which I won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallow'd in a score?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.

In the final verse, Donne begins to bring some resolution to this dilemma. The verse reminds us of another 17th century poet with far better Protestant credentials; namely John Bunyan.
You may recall in Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian is shown a vision of a man locked in a room: the room of his own despair; despair that he can ever be saved; despair that he can ever be loved by God.

And this too is Donne’s last fear – his greatest horror. Why? Because it is the underlying neurosis of the human condition; now, in the 21st century, as then in the 17th. We too fear being locked into an empty, Godless universe. We too fear being locked out from the love of the God who made us.

But Donne, unlike many today in the Western world, can dare to believe - can allow himself to see - the human face of God shining from the face of this clouded universe. John Donne believes in the Incarnation; believes that God and Man, the objective and the subjective, the spiritual and the material, meet in the person of Jesus Christ. The Cross is a crossroads, where the sin of man is overwhelmed by the love of God. Through the saving work of Christ on the Cross, there is the death of death, and therefore for those who cling to the cross, even the death of the fear of death.

Hear the third verse:

I have a sin of fear, that when I've spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by Thyself that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as He shines now and heretofore:
And having done that, Thou hast done;
I fear no more.

In our sophisticated, liberal Western lives, we sometimes forget the simple assurance and wonder of the Cross: that our sins are forgiven.

I remember a young man called Neil, who had a past that could almost match Donne’s! He came out of church after mass one day – tears streaming down his face – ‘you ought to put tissues in the pews!’ he said. He was overwhelmed by the fact that he was forgiven and loved by God.

Today as we venerate the cross, we mourn for our sins and the sins of the world which cost Christ so dearly; and yet we wait with quiet confidence for the power of the resurrection to break afresh into our lives.

“For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” 1 Cor 1.18

Forgiveness, lent 3

Forgiveness

Readings: 1 Cor 1.18-25, John 2.13-22

“the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” 2 Cor 3.6

Religion has always been the enemy of Christianity. Sometimes I answer the question ‘are you religious?’ by ‘No, I’m a Christian’.

Now I know that such assertions as this are really playful ways of making a point, for Christianity is of course a religion. The word is almost certainly derived from religare – to bind. Religion is binding yourself to your God. I suspect St Paul, however, might have argued it’s meaning is returning to bondage!

And this is the point. There has always been a tendency in religions in general, and Christianity in particular to move from the freedom of the Spirit, with all its grown up responsibilities, to the slavery of the letter, with its infantile dependency on dogma and rules.

And it would be nice to say that religion is responsible for wars and crusades, for inquisitions and apartheid, for divisions in Northern Ireland and genocide in Serbia. But that would be an over-simplification.

Nonetheless, at a basic level, Our Lord’s cleansing of the temple, whip in hand, was a rant against religion; against the deadening effects of the letter of the law; against the cultural appropriation of faith in the living God, for commercial purposes.

St Paul may have had the etymology of religion in mind when he wrote to the Galatians: “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” (5.1,2)

Perhaps religion, this binding and stifling straightjacket on life, has been nowhere more successful than in identifying itself in the human mind with guilt. I only need to sit on the tube in my dog-collar, and I’m aware that half the carriage immediately feel guilty.

Why did the thief last week leave the beautiful leather holdall he had stolen from Frank in Hammersmith, outside of my vicarage door? Guilt! (He had of course removed from it anything of value, and it was only an overlooked business card that allowed me to track it down to Frank.) (Reminds me of the letter received by the Tax Inspector:“I feel so guilty, I can’t sleep; so here is £1000 of tax I owe you. If I still can’t sleep, I’ll send you the other £1000…”)

So what is at the heart of Christianity, or ‘pure religion’ as the Apostle James calls it, that distinguishes it from the bondage of false religion?

“the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life”

The ministry of the Holy Spirit enables a work of grace in our hearts that draws us on to love God and others.

By the 16th Century, at a time when cloying religion was getting the upper hand in Christiandom, the Reformation and the Counter-reformation rediscovered this great liberating truth.

‘Sin boldly!’, Martin Luther once wrote to his friend Philipp Melanchthon. This sprang from Luther’s overwhelming conviction that we are saved by grace, and that the message of the cross of Christ is, as Paul writes in v18 of today’s epistle, the power of God to those of us who are being saved.

Of course Luther was not advocating deliberate sin, but he was reminding Melanchthon, who erred on the side of legalism, the letter, that living life is a messy business and we need not be so terrified of putting a foot wrong, that we never put a foot forward!

This is the outrage of grace. No wonder it was a stumbling block (the Greek word is ‘scandal’) to the law-driven Jews of the first century. They would not trust God unless they saw signs. As they say to Jesus, whip still in hand, standing in the chaos he had brought to the Temple court:

“What miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?” (John 2.18)

Or as Paul puts it in the epistle: “Jews demand miraculous signs.” (1 Cor 1.22)

This is walking by sight and not by faith; the very opposite of what Paul commended to the Corinthians in his second letter (2 Cor 5.7). Although we should pray to see evidence of God at work among us, we must not cross over the line and become those who only believe when we see God at work.

Paul also points out in the epistle that the message of the cross is foolishness to the Greeks and Gentiles. Not that Paul is being anti-intellectual here. This is the man who wrote the letter to the Romans!

He is pointing out another scandal of the Gospel, that it cannot be grasped by intellectual rigour alone.

You remember that verse in Luke’s Gospel:

“Jesus rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.” (Luke 10.21)

The ‘wisdom’ that these worldly-wise Greeks and Gentiles desired, is probably the equivalent of today’s New Age pick ‘n mix; consumer religion, where you have a little bit of Christianity, a smidge of Sofi mysticism, a comforting hint of re-incarnation and an ethical shot of New Labour – and write on the form ‘Church of England’!

In the first century it was the ancient gnosticism: the speculative knowledge passed on sometimes through arcane ritual and sometimes just to those ‘wise’ enough to receive spiritual revelations and secrets. It’s instant religion. We heard lots about it through the Da Vinci Code and will no doubt hear more now the Gnostic Gospel of Judas is about to be published.

In contrast, the way of the cross is simply accepting the grace of God through the passion of Christ. It is of course at times painful and costly, as it was for Christ, involving a life of self-giving. But it is the self-giving that springs from love, and which results in deep inner peace and joy.

This is never very popular. Just as there were gnostic Jews in Corinth, there are always ‘quick fix’ Christians around, who want the gain without the pain. The super-apostles who were arriving in Corinth as Paul wrote, argued that Paul was weak and ineffectual. They preached the way of success and triumph. Paul gloried in following Christ in the way of suffering and hardship, weakness and dependency on God. (See 2 Corinthians 11.19ff)

Jesus’s anger against the temple-traders, leading to such uncharacteristic physical violence from our Lord, is another attack on easy religion: a religion that is all about doing the right things, rather than loving God with heart and soul and mind, and our neighbour as our self.

The disciplines of lent are supposed to help us in our struggle against ‘the world, the flesh and the devil’ (today’s post-communion prayer). But we should not finish lent feeling pleased with ourselves and with what we have achieved – we’ve lost a few pounds and been to some improving studies. That would be religion.

The result of a good and holy lent will be a greater love for God and a deeper desire to serve others. Or in the words of the epistle, knowing ‘Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God’ better.(v24) This is Christianity.

“the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” 2 Cor 3.6

Jonah

Jonah

Jonah prayed “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful.” (4.1)

The Welsh preacher: "There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." Plaintiff voice from the back: "What if we have no teeth..."
"Teeth will be provided!"

Many of us within and without the church have difficulty in understanding a God of love who wants to punish wrongdoers. But then poor God can’t win, because when it comes down to it, we also have difficulty in understanding how he can let evil men and women ‘get away with it’ – often at the expense of the good and the poor.

Jonah is a story on this theme; on what has been called ‘The Outrage of Grace’.

This enigmatic little book with its 48 verses, carefully worded and skilfully constructed, is full of surprises and amusing improbability.

Let me remind you of the story. Jonah is not a false prophet but a disobedient one, sent to pronounce judgement on the wicked city of Nineveh - a city that flayed it’s captives alive and whose atrocities are recorded in extra-biblical writings about the Babylonians.

The conversion of Nineveh was not high on the good Jew’s weekly intercessions list. So Jonah, as a good Jew, runs away from the Lord and his duty - to take a cheap Spanish holiday at the opposite end of the Med - in Tarshish.

God brings his ship near to destruction in a fierce storm. The sleeping(!) Jonah is woken, reveals all, and finally persuades the reluctant sailors to throw him overboard: for the storm is his fault. (We’re already detecting a self-destructive streak in Jonah’s personality.)

Now the enormous fish (which is all that most people remember about Jonah) swallows this unlikely servant of Yahweh and after three days vomits him up on the sea shore not a million miles away from Nineveh. That’s package holidays for you.

(The NT draws a parallel between these three days and those of Jesus in the tomb – we read about this in Matthew.)

Thus the fish, as an instrument of God’s grace and mercy, allows Jonah a second chance to obey. He takes it, probably grudgingly, although he is wise enough to realize that God has his mind set on this mercy mission to Iraq – for Nineveh was in modern day Iraq.

So he announces the fate of Nineveh to its wicked inhabitants. To a man they repent - what effective preaching! So God has compassion on them and spares them destruction. But is Jonah pleased with this magnificent story of missionary conversion? Of course not! He’s a religious bigot!

1 But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. 2 He prayed to the LORD and said, “O LORD! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. 3 And now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.

He sits down, still hoping for a thunderbolt or two. Then the bush, then the worm (appointed - like the big fish) and the sun and the anger again...

10 Then the LORD said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. 11 And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”

And that’s the end.

This fourth chapter now leaves the hearers puzzling over the message of the book and the future of this reluctant prophet. Where is the denouement of a chapter 5 with its resolution of the story and the moral for its listeners? There can be none, for that would defeat the purpose of the book.

Voltaire and lesser known sceptics have mocked the apparently farcical elements of the book, and some Christians, like Luther in his day, would rest easier at night if Jonah had just failed to get into the canon of Scripture.

As a prophecy (Jonah finds himself amongst the twelve minor prophets ion the Bible) it’s almost an oracle free zone. In fact in the Hebrew, there are only 4 words of prophecy in all 48 verses. “Forty - Days - Nineveh - Destroyed” (3:4) (Now that’s a short sermon!)

There is an element of parable in the story. The opening chapter allows the hearer to distance himself from this foolish and disobedient prophet of Yahweh, but as in Nathan’s parable to King David (2 Samuel 12), the closing verses of Jonah round on the hearer with that accusing “Thou art the man!”

Like Jonah you want to limit God’s loving-kindness to Israel alone. You cannot see that his compassion reaches out to all who repent and turn to him; a foreshadowing of the Messiah’s universal mission, the inclusiveness of Pentecost – the Spirit poured out on all flesh.

How just is God? This is the undercurrent of Jonah.

If in God’s world, as the Old Testament recognises it, good is rewarded and wickedness is punished, how can God forgive Nineveh and overlook their sin? To let iniquity go unpunished is as unjust as punishing the innocent.

In Jonah’s eyes it was dishonouring to God for him to show mercy to obvious wrongdoers, even after repentance. For if God is the supreme moral being he must punish or at least demand some penitential good deed or cultic sacrifice to restore the balance.

Like the psalmist, he wonders that the wicked are sleek and fat while he suffers in godly innocence (eg Psalm 73.12.13). Jonah was outraged by grace - the apparent contradiction in God’s moral nature. And he wanted to die and be free from this confusion of mind and from all his self-pity and longings for vengeance.

So finally God points out to Jonah through the incident with the bush, that Jonah’s concern for the plant was motivated by self-interest - whereas God’s concern for all that he had created sprang from the compassion which is God’s very nature.

Perhaps too Jonah was ultimately concerned to vindicate his own theological view of God, rather than to trust obediently in a God whose ways could not always be understood. How could God justify his actions on the grounds of compassion alone? The hearers (you and me) are left to wrestle in their own minds with the tension between crime and punishment: between repentance and forgiveness; and in a latter day Iraq, between Tony Blair & Clare Short.

Is there a New Testament solution? Well, not really. But there is significant further development, shedding light on God’s justice, or lack of it, and his mercy.

The tensions in Jonah’s and the narrator’s theology are partly resolved in the cross of Christ. Here justice and compassion meet as God’s absolute holiness is satisfied by his overwhelming love.

Yet the principled and God-fearing part in all of us wants Christ to come down from the cross and smite the Pharisees and scoffers; to vindicate the honour of a just God and a sinless Son. But in that sense, God is not just - if he were, there would be no hope for us.

Jonah wanted no forgiveness for Nineveh and asked that he might die. God forgave Nineveh and let Jonah live.

But Christ cried ‘Father forgive them’ and God let him die. This is not so much a resolution of the tensions in Jonah, as a call for us to live with that uneasy outrage of grace and mercy in our own lives, in our dealings with others, and in ordering our society.

I spent the New Year in Cape Town enjoying the summer sun, sea, sand and wine. I visited Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated for many of his 27 years in prison. As I stood at the door of his cell, I wondered if I could emerge after 27 years, when comrades had been tortured and killed, to smile and forgive and demonstrate the Outrage of Grace; this radical mercy which we are called to show, whether it makes sense or not.

May God’s Holy Spirit allow you to follow Christ in living lives of outrageous grace to all you meet.

Jonah prayed “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful.” (4.1)

Foregiveness

Forgiveness

“Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” Romans 6.11

It is said that when Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Last Supper he used the innocent face of a choir boy for his portrait of Our Lord. Much later (and he took many years to complete it) he looked for a suitable model for Judas and found it in the degenerate and corrupt face of a dissolute young man recruited from the gutter

Something familiar about the face prompted him to ask the young man about his origins. And to his surprise and horror it was the same choir boy who had fallen into a life of debauchery and sin.

And this is part of our common human dilemma. For the same face can present innocence and corruption. We, as fully human creatures, are endowed with the awful responsibility of choice.

As Paul puts it later on in this letter:

“So I find this law at work: when I want to do good, evil is right there with me.” (7.21)

Children: hands up if you never do anything wrong!

Let’s explore this subject by way of another sinner who struggled with the Flaw at the heart of human nature, John Donne (1573-1631). He belongs to that period of English church history that is presently hotly debated. His life spans the years in which Anglicanism as a distinctive form of Christianity – encompassing Catholic and Protestant elements – came into being.

Donne came from a Roman Catholic family. Yet, after a vivid and chaotic life, he embraced the current Anglicanism of Jacobean England. There is a debate about this. Was Donne a precursor of the Catholic-minded High Churchman or a convert to the prevailing Calvinism of the Church of England at that time?

One of his poems illustrates this debate very well – A Hymn to God the Father. It’s a poem about choice. And choice – God’s choice of us, His election, His predestination of His creatures – is at the heart of the Catholic/Calvinistic apposition, as it was at the heart of Donne’s life.

As you read this poem you are reminded of the choices and contrasts in Donne’s career: from ‘Don Juan’ to Dean of St Paul’s; from ‘Man of the World’ to ‘Man of God’; from dashing young love poet to the shrouded marble corpse that still stands today as his memorial in the aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral.

Donne knew all about original sin and Augustine and Calvin’s emphasis on the ‘total depravity’ of man. He would take very seriously indeed the 9th Article of Religion, formulated just before his birth: that "man… is of his own nature… inclined to evil".

Not surprisingly then in his poem Donne first confesses the effects of original sin: the sin of Adam; the first choice that went so very wrong, but also the choices now that we know will go wrong: the weight; the burden (almost too much to bear) of our ethical, moral being.

Even from outside the Garden we still hear God’s voice announcing: "Behold the man is become like one of us, knowing good from evil". Donne writhes in that Calvinistic, that human consciousness of the trapped-ness of existence. And to lighten it a little, he makes a play on his name ‘Donne’, throughout the poem. Let me read the first verse that looks back to Adam’s sin:

Wilt Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.

He’s trapped. And yet, even within this moral prison, he is aware of something else: a counter weight that is both a clue to Donne’s own spiritual experience and to the internal workings of Anglican spirituality in general. The clue is in the second verse, and it lies in this corporate nature of our sin. We’re in this together.

Wilt Thou forgive that sin by which I won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallow'd in a score?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.

Donne’s past life was a torment to him. He knew only too well the lure, the compulsion, of sin. But he was especially shamed by the memory of those he had won to sin by his own sins: those who made his sin their door to corruption. And this is most painful to him as it is to us!

But look more closely at this poem. In this torture there is healing. In this remorse there is redemption. And here maybe is the Catholic counter-point to Donne’s Calvinism. For the Church teaches that sin is relational. We drag others down with our sin.

But at the same time the opposite is true. Namely, that our repentance, or sanctity, can raise others up! Furthermore, we can be redeemed by that same common humanity that was this first cause of our sin.

And here is the pivotal point of the poem as it was the pivotal point of Donne’s life. Yes, he found degradation in abuse, the rage of his human relationships. But his ultimate salvation comes through that humanity: our humanity which God has made the instrument of our redemption in the human Christ Jesus.

Donne is perhaps the first truly Anglican poet. For in this poem we see him poised – historically, doctrinally - between Protestant and Catholic insight; between saint and sinner; between human experience and biblical truth. This is what Paul wrestles with in this epistle.

For Donne, this resolution is fully worked out as the poem (more of a confession than poem) reaches its climax in the final verse – a final verse that, curiously enough, reminds us of another 17th century poet with far better Protestant credentials; namely John Bunyan.

You may recall in Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian is shown a vision of a man locked in a room: the room of his own despair; despair that he can ever be saved; despair that he can ever be loved by God.

And this too is Donne’s last fear – his greatest horror. Why? Because it is the underlying neurosis of the human condition; now, in the 21st century, as then in the 17th.

We too fear being locked into an empty Godless universe. We too fear being locked out from the love of an Almighty Parent-God.

But Donne, unlike many today in the West, can see - can allow himself to see - the human face of God shining from the face of this clouded universe.

John Donne believes in the Incarnation; believes that God and Man, the objective and the subjective, the spiritual and the material, meet in the person of Jesus Christ – we are alive to God in Christ Jesus.

I have a sin of fear, that when I've spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by Thyself that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as He shines now and heretofore:
And having done that, Thou hast done;
I fear no more.

In our sophisticated, liberal Western lives, we sometimes forget the simple assurance and wonder of the Gospel: that our sins are forgiven.

I remember Neil, who had a past, after communion – tears streaming down his face – 'you ought to put tissues in the pews!' he stammered. He was overwhelmed with the fact that he was forgiven and loved by God.

Let this Gospel sacrament this morning remind you, as you taste the bread and the wine, that you are forgiven, and that you should

“Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” Romans 6.11

Serpents & Symbols

The Serpent in the Wilderness

“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
John 3.14,15

Typology has a long and quirky tradition. It is a theologically risky practice. Typology has nothing to do with amateur printers; nor computer nerds obsessed by fonts - and there are many of them - you know who you are…

It is a system of biblical interpretation which the New Testament often uses in treating the Old Testament. The word is derived from the Greek word tupos, meaning pattern or figure. So Paul says in Romans 5.14 that Adam was a ‘type (tupos) of the one to who was to come’, ie of Christ.

The NT also uses the word ‘antitupos’ antitype. The writer to the Hebrews, a letter full of typology, says that “Christ did not enter a man-made sanctuary that was only an antitype of the true one; he entered heaven itself, now to appear for us in God's presence.” (Hebrews 9.14) And in Hebrews we learn that the mysterious Melchizedech, King of Salem who appears to Abraham, is an antitype of Christ.

The type or antitype, prefigures or foreshadows some historical event, or person, or object.

The Passover and the Exodus from Egypt provide a rich vein of material for NT typology.

The Passover foreshadows this meal; the Exodus sets the pattern for Christian salvation and the life of a pilgrim disciple.

Wherever you look in the world around us there are symbols: things that carry meaning beyond what they actually are. Eg. The Union Flag; Big Ben; even colours like pillar box red, or ORANGE! And of course, rainbows!

Churches of our tradition are full of symbols: and this church more than most and certainly more than the tin tabernacles of my youth - although so deep is the urge in humans to find and use symbols, that even there there were unmistakable symbols: the table, the open Bible, the pictures of Jesus on the cradle roll, the brass plaques on the walls.

When I was young, I always thought the serpent on a pole was a curious Christian symbol. Somehow it looked as if it should be in the local Satanist Temple and not with the other sacred symbols around the altar.

I stared at it at mass each day on the cross in the Seven Sorrows chapel at St Mary’s Bourne Street. And Bishop Richard has two serpents intertwined on his pastoral staff.

This is the symbol that Jesus uses when he’s talking to Nicodemus, who came to him at night to find out some of the answers to his questions about faith.

“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.””

So what did Nicodemus make of it? He was an intelligent Pharisee, member of the Sanhedrin and prominent teacher. He would certainly have known the story of the murmuring rebels who got fed up with Moses and God.

The basic imagery is clear. The Israelites had sinned by rejecting God’s chosen leader, Moses. They were condemned to death by the snake bites (literally the ‘burners’ - inflammation?). Moses is instructed by God to make a copper effigy of the serpent and to raise it aloft on a pole - a standard for all to see, and so to live and be healed.

(This is why it’s the symbol for a chemist’s shop - where you get medicine for healing - & sometimes for doctors (although cf Asclepius) - and Barbers - who were the surgeons).

The story as you can read it in Numbers 21 contains deeper levels of imagery as well. The fiery serpent on the pole didn’t stop the people from being bitten, but it stopped them from dying if they looked with the eyes of faith to the pole.

The writer uses two different Hebrew words for ‘see’ (vv 8,9), and although this may be just literary style, the words do have significantly different emphases.

The second word carries overtones of perceiving, paying attention, even, looking with spiritual insight.

So there is nothing automatic about the deliverance - no magic - there is a degree of intentionality about the action of looking.

Sin infects us all, as the opening act of penitence of this Mass remind us. We are all bitten.

But we need not die spiritually – we need not be separated from God. God loves us so much, the Bible tells us, that he did something about it – he sent Jesus into our world, to be our Saviour & Friend.

There is an antidote to the bite of sin. Jesus had to be lifted up - on the cross - and in this sacrament - when the priest says ‘this is my body’ & ‘Jesus is the lamb of God’.

But it’s not magic - this is not the wonderful world of Harry Potter, where you can wave a wand and make everything alright.

The Christian life is about growing in faith. When we see how much God loves us, and what he went through in Jesus to put things right between us and God, then we choose to believe and follow him - living for God and living for others. The disciplines of Lent are to reinforce this within us.

It’s not saying the right words or doing the right things in themselves that save us - although they are important - it’s simply trusting God as Abraham did.

It’s believing in Christ, and however often we fall and sin again, coming to say sorry and making a fresh start. That’s what this mass, and confession, is all about.

It’s interesting to reflect on what happened to the bronze serpent. It was around for a few hundred years and then good king Hezekiah when he came to the throne at the age of 25, smashed the bronze serpent of Moses. (2 Kings 18.4)

The people had turned to vain idols and superstition and now worshipped the bronze serpent as ‘Nehushtan’ - they weren’t trusting in God any more, but in the magic of the gods.

We must always remember that all the symbols, all the imagery, everything we do in devotion - is not magic, or worse still, superstition. It’s to point us to Christ, to bring home that simple fact, that God loved us so much, that he gave Christ to die for us, so that we could live with him in heaven.

The symbols which we can see and grasp point to the eternal verities which we cannot easily see or grasp. The night in which Nicodemus came to Christ is replaced by the light of Christ in our Lord’s final words to Nicodemus – “whoever lives by the truth, comes into the light.” v.21

Well, there was obviously a long conversation with Nicodemus that went on far into the night. John has only summarised it here and shaped it to suit his purposes of unfolding the mystery of Christ. He has been careful with his use of language also.

The phrase ‘lifted up’ is ambiguous in the way John uses it, for it can mean both exaltation (triumphant heroes on shoulders) and – crucifixion.

Christ was bitten for us by the Serpent (one of the symbols for the Devil) and so raised to the glory of heaven where we will also sit and reign with him. (Ephesians 2.4-6)

So in just these few words, John paints a picture rich in Jewish history and Biblical imagery.

As we look again today at the crucified, glorified Christ, lifted up before us in the Sacrifice of the Mass - so we are healed.

We are not worthy, but he speaks the word and we find salvation, that deep inner wholeness which will only be fully realised when we are lifted up, and share in his glory in heaven.

“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
John 3.14,15