Here is the audio file.

Last week, we reflected together on the last of the seven “I am” sayings, I am the true vine. We took note of its three movements—the vine, the vinedresser, and the branches. Life comes from the vine and flows into the branches. The vinedresser prunes the vines so that the life flowing into them will result in fruit; the vinedresser cuts away the branches that are dead. So it is that our connectedness to God is Jesus. He is the one through whom God’s life comes to us. God the Father, as the vinedresser, prunes us with the words of his Son that we might bear fruit. But just what is fruit? If Jesus is the vine, the Father, the vinedresser, and us, the branches, what is the fruit that is the sign that the life of Jesus is being lived through us? That is what we are going to look at today.

The answer is both distressingly difficult and wonderfully. Difficult insofar as it is just so hard to see not simply in our common life but in the common lives of the churches throughout history from the book of Acts to the present day. Its appearance is so exceptional, in fact, that when it does occur, we are amazed. We are shocked. We call the people who embody it saints. We call the groups that embody it renewal movements. The people and the movements get written up in history books while the pious lives of most of us go unremarked.

Think of the names: Edith Stein, Theresa of Calcutta, Francis of Assissi, William Wilberforce, Billy Graham. Think of the movements: the Catholic Workers Movement. The Little Sisters of Charity. The Church Missionary Society. The Order of the Friars Minor. Why, the names of people and movements cross all the divides of Christendom and are celebrated regardless of historical distance or theological disagreement. These are names invoked with awe. Names cited in our prayers as examples that God would give us the grace and strength to emulate. What they did and do is hard. The fruit they bore for the kingdom of God is hard work. Obviously hard.

And yet, as Jesus describes what the fruit is, it is so simple. So easy to understand. Why, you get the impression that as far as Jesus is concerned, this isn’t supposed to be the exception in our common life, but the rule. This is how things are supposed to happen. Indeed, if we take the organic nature of the vine metaphor seriously, it’s not merely a matter of “supposed to.” It is much stronger. It is more a matter of “inevitably will.”

If we are united to the Lord Jesus, if we are connected to him as branch to vine, such that his life flows into us, the bearing of fruit will take place. As sure as bud gives way to blossom  and blossom leads to apple (ok, I’ve switched from vines to trees, but go with me), we will bear fruit. If we are being pruned by his Father as we attend to his word and fed by his life as we come to his table, we will bear fruit. Indeed, not only will we bear fruit, but we will do so joyfully. I have said these things that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. Fruit bearing is an organically inevitable, normal, joyful consequence of our real, life-giving union with Jesus.

But we still haven’t said what it is yet. Are you ready? Here it is: This is the fruit we will bear if we are united to the vine: we will love each other. That’s it! Love each other. Bear much fruit. Abide in my love. Obey my commandment. This is my commandment—love each other.

So simple. So inevitable. So normal. So joyful. So absolutely and frustratingly rare. Why?

We might begin to find the answer to this question when we realize that the love with which we are to love each other is the very love that binds the Son to the Father. What does this love look like? That’s what the entire Gospel of John is all about. And it is encapsulated in the verse many of us memorized as children. The verse with which we comfort or strengthen ourselves as we come to the table of the Lord in the BCP: For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.

It is a love that is demanding, that is sending, that is strong and that is costly. How costly? Do you remember Jesus words about fruitfulness in John 12? Unless a seed falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a seed. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. Jesus elaborates on that theme here: No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. The love with which you are to love one another is the love with which I love you. I will show you my love and the Father’s love by dying for you. That’s the love you are to abide in. That’s the love that flows from me to you. That’s the love that bears fruit, that is the fruit of being united to me. That’s the love that I command.

And now we are beginning to see just why fruitfulness is so simple and yet so very difficult and so very, very rare. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, the great Catholic popular apologist of the early 20^th century put it aptly: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” We would rather say with the TV preacher that God loves us and wants us to be materially prosperous, or with Oprah, that God loves us wants us to be psychologically sound and happy, than to say with Jesus that God loves us wants us to give our lives for the sakes of the lives of others as an embodiment of that love.

But, my friends, that is what Jesus says. And if we would be his friends, that is both what we must say and how we must live. Again, not in the sense of struggling to get as close to the impossibly high ideal as we can on our own, but in the organic sense of being pruned, being nourished, and being fruitful.

Indeed, our fruitfulness has nothing at all to do with our own powers or our own initiative. Our fruitfulness hinges on the free choice and lavish love of him who is the vine—I chose you. I appointed you. You will bear lasting fruit. There again we are faced with the language of inevitability. Our fruitfulness, our capacity to obey the command to love, hangs not our capacity for niceness or compassion, but on the choice of him who has united himself to us in love, who prunes us with his words, who feeds us with his very self by his Spirit in the gifts of bread and wine.

During his long pontificate, Pope John Paul II canonized 482 people and beatified 1388 others. In other words, he “officially recognized” 482 people as saints and 1388 others as blessed. These people, he said, are examples of faith and holiness and fruitfulness and the adventure and joy that is the Christian life. That’s more canonizations and beatifications than all previous popes before. Why did he do that?

Because he himself recognized that the Christian life as described by Jesus in this passage was reckoned to be both easily understood and difficult to actually live. So, he wanted believers to see that it could be lived, that there were examples of fruitfulness all around us if we have eyes to look for them, that the Christian life can be joyful and abounding in the costly love with which God loves the world. The people he canonized were people from all walks of life, from both sexes, from all inhabited continents. Saints, he said, in effect, are found everywhere. They are gifts of God to all of us. Examples to be embraced and emulated whatever our vocations might be.

It was John Paul II’s way of saying, it’s not as rare or as difficult as we have been trained by the father of lies to believe. The examples of self-giving love are there. We just need to look for them.

Now, look around, saints. Because if you have been called by Christ, that’s what you are. You don’t need to wait for the church, in any official way to recognize that it’s true. It’s already true. So look around. Do you see the fruitfulness that is the love of Christ here? Do you see it among us? I do. I see it in lots of ways and in lots of places.

I see it on Out of the Cold Fridays.

I see it on bicycle ambulances.

I see it when we welcome visitors with a cup of coffee before service.

I see it when we make sandwiches for the mission.

I see it when we invite people to join us for worship.

I see it when we celebrate the new life in Christ when someone is baptized.

But I’ll tell you a secret. I want to see more!

Not more in the sense of piling activities on top of activities until we burn out. More in the sense of seeing the love of Christ so infuse whatever we do—whether we have been doing it for a long time or not—that it ceases to be chore and becomes instead the completion of our joy.

So, I want to give you in the time we have left, a 7 step programme for fruitfulness, a 5 factor lesson on love, and 12 tips on radical discipleship which you can incorporate into your lives.

No I don’t, actually.

Because it’s not a matter of programmes, lessons, or tips. It is a matter of prayer: “I appointed you to go and bear fruit . . . so that the Father will give you whatever you ask!” Isn’t that daring? Not daring in the sense of bravery, but just daring—don’t you think Jesus is daring us to ask? I think he is.

So, let’s ask. It is my prayer for this parish and its priest that the Father so to prune us with his word, so to enliven us with the life of his Son in the power of his Spirit, that we would bear lasting fruit. That we would, organically and inevitably love one another to the very end.

I do not that God would make love easy, but that he would make us fit for the challenge to love in Christ’s love, with Christ’s love and as Christ loves.

Will you ask with me?

Every week, Christians say—sometimes stubbornly, sometimes not stubbornly enough—that on the third day he rose again. That’s what Easter is all about. That’s what we have been celebrating for three Sundays now.

And we  Christians mean something specific. We don’t mean Jesus’ soul went to heaven. We mean he rose in his body. “Make no mistake. If he rose at all, it was as his body. If the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will Fall,” wrote the great Lutheran novelist John Updike in his famous poem, Seven Stanzas at Easter. We encountered the sheer physicality of the event last Sunday when we heard Jesus’ challenge to Thomas. “Put your finger here in the marks; put your hand here in my side.”

Whatever else it involved, the resurrection of Jesus was something that really happened to Jesus. The Jew fromNazarethwho was crucified on Friday was alive again on Sunday morning—alive in such a way as he could be seen, heard and touched.

But where is he now? What is he doing? What difference does it make? These are the questions The Gospel lesson for today invites us to weigh.

As the Gospel lesson opens, it is the evening of Easter Day. That morning, some of the disciples—first the women and then some of the men—went  to the tomb only to find it empty. Then Cleopas and his unnamed companion met with a stranger on the way to Emmaus. The stranger who opened to them the Scriptures, causing their hearts to burn, and then took bread and blessed it, broke it and gave it to them. And he ceased to be a stranger.

Now, Cleopas and his friend have gathered with the rest back inJerusalem, late in the evening, and they are talking about what had happened when Jesus himself appeared.

That’s an important point and it is unfortunate that our lectionary reading begins to late to include it.  But I’m including it this morning. While they were talking, the Scriptures say, Jesus appeared. We should immediately notice that it’s important because theEmmaus Roadstory begins similarly. It is as Cleopas and his companion are talking that the Risen One appears and makes to journey along with them. It is as Cleopas and his Companion are talking with the rest of the disciples that the Risen one appears and offers to them his peace.

Luke is, through his story making the same point that the Lord himself makes in Matthew 18, when he says, “When two or more are gathered, there I am in the midst.” The disciples have gathered. They are talking. And Jesus appeared.

A second point to notice is the sheer physicality of the event. The Risen One is intent on convincing them that he is standing before them as a body, not a phantom. “Touch me and see,” he says. And while they are still disbelieving and wondering, he says “Give me some fish.”

This is not merely an emphasis on the reality—the weighty materiality—of the resurrection (though it is that). Luke is also making a point about continuity. The One who was crucified on Friday was really raised on Sunday morning.  Death is not the final and insurmountable enemy. For he has conquered it. He who appeared on the way to Emmaus, who appeared and ate some fish, is He who forgave his tormentors and who committed his spirit to his Father as he died on Friday afternoon. The Risen one rises as he who was crucified—“Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself.”  The Crucified one is Risen, and is so in his body.

This brings us to Luke’s third noticeable point—the Risen Lord is not there in the room with the disciples simply to be marveled at and worshipped (though, of course, he is). He is there to teach them. “These are my words,” he says, as he opens to them the Scriptures. Think about that! “These are my words!”

And then, Luke tells us, he opened their minds to the Scriptures. And again Luke is making two points. The first is, the Scriptures—the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms, or what we would call the Old Testament—find their true meaning in Christ. He is their center; they testify to him. The Old Testament, in other words, is inescapably part of Christian Scripture. And second, Christ is the teacher of the Scriptures. He taught them; apart from his presence with them as the Risen One, they would not understand what they were reading.

There is a third movement, and with this our story ends. Having opened their minds to the Scriptures, to their testimony about him, the Risen Lord goes on to say that the same Scriptures foretell that the Good News of Repentance and forgiveness of sins will be proclaimed to all nations, beginning inJerusalem. And then our lectionary reading ends with the words, “you are the witnesses.” The disciples, in other words, are the fulfillment of this prophecy. They will go, beginning inJerusalem, to tell the Good News of repentance and forgiveness of sins.

We might say, then, that the third movement is one of sending. Having gathered and heard, the disciples are now sent to tell what they have heard. But this message is not something new. The message to which they have been witnesses, is nothing other than the mission ofIsraelcontained inIsrael’s Scriptures, is nothing other than the mission of Chirst, who is the climax of the mission ofIsrael, which is now, the mission of the Church composed of all nations.

Gathering; teaching; sending—a threefold movement, and all centered on the presence of the Risen Lord in the midst of the disciples. With that movement fixed in our minds, we can turn to the questions that we started with today.

Where is Jesus now? He is here with us. Really. Our entire liturgy is structured to remind us all the way along that this is the case. When we gather, we gather in the grace and peace of the Risen Lord. When we read, we end each reading with the words, “This is the Word of the Lord.” Not this was, or this contains, or this might be depending on how you feel about it. This is the Word of the Lord, we say. Why do we say that? Because the Risen Lord appeared to his disciples, opened to them the Scriptures and said, “These are my words.” They still are.

We identify the words of Scripture with the words of the Lord even more when we read the Gospel. We bring the Gospel down in to the nave to remind ourselves that the Lord Jesus has come among us, as one of us. Then the Gospel is announced and we say what? Glory to you Lord Jesus Christ. And when it ends we say, Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ. Not, “Thank you Father Tim for reading to us.” But Thank you Jesus for giving us your words again.

We don’t say This is the Word of the Lord or Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ because they are nice flowery words. We say those words to remind ourselves that the Risen Christ is really here. Really with us. Really making these human words his own words. Really speaking to us.

And then comes the sermon. And the sermon is also the Word of God. That is first of all a word of judgment for the preacher! I have been called by God and set apart by God’s church to bring to you the truth of the Holy Scriptures every week. And that is a responsibility that can be—even should be—frightening. And it is a word of grace. My words, however inadequate, are taken up by the Risen Lord in our midst and he says of them,”These are my words,” and he makes them his, makes them vehicles of his grace and his forgiveness to all of us.

To say with the reformer, Heinrich Bullinger that the preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God is to say two things to listeners, too. And the first thing is a word of judgment. Listen for the Risen Lord! Don’t pick apart the preacher’s grammar. And it is a word of grace. Listen for the Risen Lord, who has in these all-too-human words joined us to announce to us his grace and his forgiveness.

What is the Risen Jesus doing as he takes these words—these human witnesses—and makes them his? He continues to teach us and not simply with a view to mastering content. Rather these human words are taken as vehicles through which He gives us Himself. In these human words, our sins are exposed and judged; in these human words, our sins are forgiven and set aside; in these human words, the promises of God are once again announced, and made real because of he who promises. And he who promises is not the preacher. He who promises is none other than the Risen Lord who told his disciples that he would be present when they gathered; who appeared when they came together; and who opened their minds to the Scriptures to show that they bear witness to him.

What difference does it make? We have talked about gathering in the presence of the Risen One, being taught by the Word of the Risen One.  Now to this third question. Why? Why do we do this? Why do we gather? Why do we listen? The conclusion of the Gospel lesson is, so that we might be sent. You are witnesses to these things.

Sure, Peter, James, Mary Magdalen, Cleopas and whoever else was in that room when Jesus appeared. But also, you, Frances and Phyllis and Don and Lamont. You, like the discples in the room, gathered. Like them, you heard from the risen Lord. Now, like them, you are being sent out into the world.

Again we remind ourselves of our sending at the conclusion of every service when the Lay Reader sends us on our way with the command, “Go forth!” We can only go forth into the world to love and serve the Lord, go forth in the power of the Risen Christ, (there are any number of sending sentences we could use), if we have in fact first met with Christ. We can only go if we have first gathered. We can only go if we have first heard. We can only go if we have been sent in the name of the one who himself was sent by the Father.

And so the mission we have been sent on is not our own. It is another’s. It is the mission of him who called Abraham to get up and go to another land. It is the mission of him who loved the world to the end that he gave his only Son. It is the mission of him who now gives us his Spirit that his mission might continue in and through our witness. You are the witnesses.

The disciples gather. And Jesus is present. The disciples listen. And Jesus says, “These are my words.” The disciples were sent. And Jesus’ mission continues. Amen.

“My Lord and My God”

audio is available here.

What does the Gospel for today say not only to all of us, but especially to Robbie and Chelsie and Devon and Chris as they bring Kinglsey to the waters of baptism today? Well, I think we can get there if I start at a very unlikely place: tattoos.

“Dr. Perry, can I ask you something, um, personal? Should I get a tattoo or not ‘cause all my friends have one but my dad says I shouldn’t ‘cause the Bible says I can’t and he says that I should talk to you if I don’t believe him? So I’m talking to you.”

Clearly, the student who asked me was searching for ammunition in a family argument and I was in a no-win situation. Any attempt at nuance would be interpreted as permission; any expression of caution would end the talk. So, after a quick wordless prayer for wisdom, I asked her a question. “I’ll answer you if you answer me. Why do you want to mark your body?”

“I dunno. ‘Cause it’s my body and I want to.”

I wish I could say we moved into a helpful discussion both for the student and for her father of what it means to be made in God’s image, what it means to be gradually conformed to the image of Christ, what it means to be marked by Christ in baptism, and whether that changed how she thought about marking herself. But it didn’t turn out that way.

For my student, as for so many of us, faith is inner. Faith is private. Faith is spiritual. Jesus makes no claims on our visible selves. No claims on the way we use our bodies. “It’s my body,” is the final answer to just about any question of personal or moral significance.

Well, let’s leave my student’s dilemma behind for a few moments and move to the Gospel lesson.

As the second half opens, the disciples are still to be found huddled in a “secure, undisclosed location.”  They had already heard Mary’s report. They had indeed seen Jesus themselves one week earlier. This time, however, Thomas is with them.

Thomas was not with the rest when the Lord first appeared one week earlier and we call him “Doubting Thomas” for the height at which he sets the bar for his assent to the disciples’ report:  “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” A high bar to be sure. But is it fair to label Thomas in such a negative way? Mary and the other disciples had had a physical encounter with Jesus—Mary had laid hold of him. This was no ghost. This was hinged thumbs and toes and pumping heart and windswept hair materiality. Did Thomas ask too much when sought the same experience? Surely not.

Were we to look at how Thomas is described elsewhere in the Gospel, the word “doubting” would never come to our lips. It is this Thomas who grasps the provocative nature of Jesus’ commitment to go back to Jerusalem to face the wrath of the Jewish religious leadership and says to his fellows, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” He is not like Peter, who envisions a battle in which he might fight and might die for the cause. He understands that the sojourn to the tomb of Lazarus in Bethany is a sojourn to Jesus’ own tomb. And he resolves to go anyway. He is Loyal Thomas. It is this Thomas, who alone of the disciples confesses his and his fellows’ ignorance of Jesus’ ultimate destination: “Lord we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” He is not like Phillip, who wants Jesus to show him the Father. He wants to know the way to go. And he wants to see the One who claimed to be the way. He is honest Thomas. And loyal, honest Thomas is the one who, because he is loyal and because he is honest wants to see the wounds. He wants to know in as full a way as Mary. As full a way as Peter. As full a way as Philip. He wants to know that the one who was crucified has indeed triumphed. He wants to know that the hour when his Lord was lifted up on the cross was the hour of his exaltation. The hour when the glory of the only one of that Father was displayed to those had eyes to see and ears to hear. This is no skeptic; this is no atheist searching for an argument; this is no cynic daring the disciples to make him believe. “Unless I see the wounds. Unless I touch him.” These are the words of a wounded lover who dared not hope against the awful weight of the reality of death that, in the midst of the ashes of his loyalty, there was an ember of faith left.

Loyal Thomas, honest Thomas has come, one week after, on the eighth day in the house with the other disciples and the doors were shut. It is loyal Thomas, honest Thomas who confesses: “My Lord and My God” even though—and this point is often overlooked—he never does touch the wounds of the ascending Lord. Of all the disciples, only Thomas believes on hearing the word. Only Thomas believes on sight.

Whom does loyal Thomas confess as Lord and God? Listen to Jesus’ words: “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.” Thomas confesses again his loyalty unto death to the one who was crucified, for it is the one who was crucified who is Lord and God. He was crucified in his body. He who hung the stars in place really did hang there on the cross. He  really suffered, really died, was really raised. It is in his humanity, in his wound-bearing body that he presents himself to his Father.

The wounds of Jesus displayed to Thomas, and through him to us, are signs of the reality of the Gospel: that God has come to us as one of us and where we would fight and fail, he has fought and conquered. The wounds are thus no longer signs of his humiliation. They are, in the powerful lyrics of Matthew Bridges’ 1851 hymn, Crown Him with Many Crowns “rich wounds, yet visible above, in beauty glorified.” Jesus can no more put off his wounds than he can put off his body. They are the signs that the Crucified One has triumphed over death; that the Risen One is he who was crucified; that the Reigning One reigns as one who suffered.

This wounded body has triumphed. This one and no other was Lord and God. It is difficult to express the personal weight of Thomas’ words. This is no mere address as we might begin a prayer: “O my Lord and God.” It is still less an exclamation of praise or shock in the same ball park as our “O my God!” It is a confession springing from St. Thomas’ depths “You are my Lord and my God.” And so it is that loyal Thomas, honest Thomas, the first to grasp the cost of Jesus’ redemption, becomes the first to grasp the identity of the wounded one standing alive before him. While the disciples cower, Thomas comprehends that Jesus is in his body, Lord and God.

But this is no mere theological pronouncement. It is that, to be sure, but the personal pronoun gives it even more weight. He is my lord and my God. The one who has always been loyal is now the one who adores and in his adoration, serves the wounded and risen and ascending King.

This is the oath of loyalty to another King. For if, for Thomas, the wounded Jesus is the one true Lord and God, then there could be no competitors for his loyalty.

We do well here to remember that the fourth Gospel came into its final form during the reign of the Emperor Domitian, who reigned from 81-96. There is some debate about whether he actively persecuted Christians and Jews during his reign. The traditional view that his violence was second only to Nero has been modified by more recent scholarship. But all agree that he could be ruthless when presented with opposition or ambition. Historians also have noticed how he signed his decrees. Uniquely, he signed them with the words, “Dominus et deus noster.” Our Lord and God.

John’s readers would have known full well what Thomas was saying. Another Lord and God had claimed him. Another Lord and God had required his life. Another Lord and God had claimed them, too. Whatever Caesar could require, the confession of Lord and God would never come. For Caesar’s authority extended only to the body. Thomas’s Lord and God invited the fealty of both body and soul.

That other Lord and God, ascended in his wounded body, has claimed us too. In the waters of baptism he has marked us as his own. In bread and wine, by his Spirit, he feeds us with his very life. And he says to us as he did to Thomas, “blessed are those who have not seen, yet believe. Stop your doubting; start believing.”

Which brings us back to my student’s dilemma. I hope by now we’re clear that we’re not talking about tattoos, right? We’re talking about how we think about our bodies. If Thomas’ confession is true, our bodies are not our own. They belong to another. They have been marked by another as His in baptism. He bears the marks of his office, his Risen, Ascended body bears the signs of his saving work, to show us that he has claimed us as his own. And if we are his, in some sense, his marks—the marks of his suffering and death—are also to be our marks, lived out in how we use our bodies, that is, in how we live.

And now finally, we can say something I hope of value to Chelsie and Robbie, to Devon and Chris as they bring little Kingsley to the font. In our baptism, we have put on Christ-with-his-wounds. Indeed, there is no other Christ to put on. When you come to the font, you are surrendering Kingsley to the Risen Christ who will claim him—just as he has claimed you—as his own. Kinglsey will belong, from here on, body and soul to the One whose body and soul was given over to death for him. With water and oil, he will be marked as Christ’s own as surely as if he were to be marked with ink.

In a very real way, you will give your son to the Risen One, so that he may give you back a brother, who with you and with St. Thomas and all the host of heaven, name Christ alone as Lord and God.

Two words sum up the Christian Gospel. Two words boil it down to its barest essentials and its deepest truth. Two words are the bedrock on which all the rest are built.

They are not “God loves.” No doubt those words are true. We read those words when we read the story of Nicodemus come to Jesus at night. “This is how God loves the world. . . .” said Jesus.

They are not “God gives.” We read in the same story, in the very same sentence that the manner of God’s love is expressed in God’s gift. “This is how God loves the world: God gave his only Son. . . .”

But they are not God gives, either.

Neither are they “Jesus saves,” or  “God accepts.” They do not include the words grace or faith or sin or salvation. They don’t include God or invoke two of the three persons of the Trinity. They aren’t found in any Creed or Confession. They aren’t particularly religious words at all.

In fact, the words don’t even comprise a sentence.

These are the words: “And Peter.”

Why?

Do you remember Peter’s last words to Jesus?

“Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you.” A powerful declaration of loyalty. We are going to die together, Jesus. I will be with you to the end.

Words that must have been hard to say. After all, they come right after Jesus’ prediction that Peter would deny him. “Before the rooster crows twice,” Jesus had just said, “you will deny me three times.”

Imagine how those words slammed into Peter. Peter—the spokesperson for the disciples. Peter—who though he often got it wrong, was always there. Peter—who with James and John formed the core of the core of Jesus’ confidantes.

Jesus words must have cut him deeply. They could not but have wounded. “I know you Peter. Better than you know yourself. You will deny me.”

And Peter’s response “Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you,” well, they sum up Peter don’t they? Immediate. Passionate. Brash and bold. I am going with you to the end, Jesus. All the way to the death.

There is no reason given in Mark’s text to doubt Peter’s truthfulness here. No reason given to allow suspicion over whether he really is genuine. Peter believes and feels the depth of these words.

And he means them. “Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you.”

Not only does he mean them. He backs them up. Even if he does not stride with Jesus in to council’s chamber, even if he does not stand with his Lord as he is falsely accused by the religious elite, he goes a fair bit further than the rest.

Mark tells us that at the point of his arrest, “all of them forsook him and fled.” The three in the inner part of Gethsemane. Peter James and John. The three who had seen Jesus transfigured in his glory, seen him talking to Elijah and Moses. They ran. The rest—the remaining 8, the other anonymous disciples—they all ran too. Everybody fled.

One anonymous disciple—and tradition suggests it may have been Mark himself—ran so quickly, he ran right out of his clothes. “He left his linen cloth and ran off naked,” so the Scriptures say.

All of them cowards. All of them deniers. All of them betrayers.

All except Peter.

Peter only goes so far. And then he remembers his promise: “Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you.” And as those words echo in his memory, his flight away from Gethsemane slows. First to a jog. Then to a walk. Then he stops.

Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you.

And he turns. And he walks, and then he jogs, and then he runs. Peter alone runs to the courtyard. Peter alone follows.

Only Peter.

Quietly. Surreptitiously. Scared out of his wits, Peter enters the courtyard and finds a fire. He strains to hear the goings on in the great room above the courtyard.

And then, he is recognized.

A serving girl takes note of him: “You also were with Jesus, the man from Nazareth.”

And Peter replied, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

But of course he knows. He knows that he has been found out. And he moves away from the fire to a darker, more secluded part of the courtyard.

But the girl won’t leave him alone. She follows after and begins to shout to the rest, “This man is one of them!” And Peter denies a second time.

By now, however, the secret is out in the open. One of the bystanders recognizes Peter’s accent. “Certainly, you’re one of them. You are a Galilean.”

And now, every bit as eruptive, every bit as passionate, every bit as brash as he was before.

But now, his words are these: “I swear to God, I do not know this man!”

“Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you.”

“I swear to God, I do not know this man!”

Peter made two declarations that night.  Peter believed one and knew the other was a lie. And he wept.

That’s all. He wept. He did not repent. He did not undo his lie. He did not, in the end, own up to his allegiance and follow his Lord. He did not deny himself. He did not take up his cross.

He wept.

Tears. Fear. Remorse. Crushing guilt. But no change of behaviour. No indication of repentance.

And so it is that the last words Peter speaks in the Gospel of Mark are these: “I do not know this man you are talking about.”

But Jesus knew Peter.

As Thursday gave way to Friday, Jesus knew Peter.

As he stood before the religious elite, Jesus knew Peter. As he stood before Pilate, Jesus knew Peter.  As the soldiers mocked him, Jesus knew Peter. As he was being nailed and lashed to his cross, Jesus knew Peter. As he hung on that cross, suspended between heaven and earth, bearing in his body the sins of the world, Jesus knew Peter.

In the silence of Holy Saturday, Jesus knew Peter.

When the women went to the tomb on Easter Sunday morning, Jesus knew Peter.

And now you know why “And Peter” sums up the good news of Easter, the good news of the Gospel.

Now you know why there are no better words than “And Peter” in the entire Bible. “Go and tell his disciples and Peter.”

Jesus knew and never stopped knowing Peter.

The crucified one kept faith with Peter when Peter’s faith failed. The Risen one would not release Peter from his loyalty, now.

And Peter—Peter who boasted.

And Peter—Peter who fled.

And Peter—Peter who denied.

And Peter—Peter who did not repent.

Go and tell his disciples and Peter. And All of us who, on our own, ares beyond hope.

Every name of every disciple, every denier, every last unrepentant one of us is kept and known and bound up in that name. Each of us is Peter.

And the Easter message of the angel is as true for us as it was for Peter.

“Go and tell his disciples. And Peter. And Tim. And Anne. And Glenn. And Gwen. And Amanda. And Riley. And Calvin. And Rachel. And Patti. And Chris. And Mary.

He has gone ahead of us. And he will meet us soon.

Amen.

Here is a link to the mp3.

(1) Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.

Forgiveness is almost a platitude. But how hard is it to forgive when we have really encountered evil? That is something only the victims of evil have a right to speak to. Their words are words to which the rest of us must listen, long and hard, before we utter our own.

There are some in this parish who have been on the receiving end of evil, who have known the suffering that comes from cruelty far more directly than I and all of us ever want to. They have spoken to me about how hard it is to say with the one they name as Lord, “Father, forgive them.”

Forgiveness is hard not because it is a denial of judgment, but because it is a response to judgment that says, I let go of my call for justice. You are guilty. You have wronged me. You are condemned not by my ill-will, but by your own actions.

AND, I refuse to call out for penalty or punishment.  That is what forgiveness is.

And that is the first word from the cross.

It is fitting that the first word should be a word of forgiveness, for that is what the cross is all about—it is God’s hard medicine to cure the world’s sins, but mine. And yours.

In that word, we have God-in-Christ’s pronouncement of judgment on our situation. The world has gone wrong. The world has rejected God’s love. The entire human race, crystallized in the judgments of select Jewish and Roman leaders and the actions of the their lackeys, has passed its own judgment on the fullness of God’s presence dwelling among us. And we have decided to get rid of it at all costs.

It will not do to hear this first word applying to someone else. The Jews did it; the Romans did it; whatever. “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” is the haunting question asked by the old spiritual song. The answer is given by B.B. King and Bono in the song, “When Love Comes to Town.”

I was there when they crucified my Lord
I held the scabbard when the soldier drew his sword
I threw the dice as they pierced his side,
But I’ve seen love conquer the great divide

I was there and so were you. We cannot look at others. We did this to the Son of God. His first word is a passing of judgment. And until we hear it as judgment, we cannot hear it as Gospel.

But it is Gospel, too.

Father forgive them. That is God’s own response to God’s own judgment. God’s own response to his determination that the world has rejected his reign, God’s own response to the fact that, in the words of the prophet, “each has turned to his or her own way,” is not to demand penalty punishment. It is to intercede for forgiveness.

Father forgive them. The first word, is first a word of judgment and then a word of grace. Both facets are true. And judgment and grace are spoken not simply for the soldiers “just following orders,” but for all of those who are taken up in their actions. They are spoken for Caiaphas and Annas and the Jewish leadership. They are spoken for Herod and Pilate. They are spoken for Peter and even for Judas. And they are spoken for me. And you.

(2) I assure you, today you will be with me in paradise.

“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” It’s a rather feeble prayer, isn’t it? Pathetic, even. A gambler’s last hope, the last refuge of a thief, and a cynic’s final bulwark against despair. “Remember me.”

There is no repentance here—no I am sorry for my sins. There is no penitence—no if I could I would make restitution to those I have harmed. There is only this plea, “Remember me.”

What would the magistrate who had passed sentence say in response? No doubt, he would have said something like: “We will remember you. Or if not you in particular, at least that your actions brought about the appropriate punishment. And our memory will be a deterrent to others. We will remember that you died the death of a sinner. Because that is what you are.”

What would have this man’s victims have said had they any voice at all? “How can we ever forget you? You robbed us of our daily bread and left us hungry. You took from us the means to live and left us to die. For your own gain, you sent us into poverty and we have yet to recover. You destroyed our lives as surely as if you had simply killed us. We will never forget. Now die the death you deserve.”

He knows it, too. He said himself to his foul-mouthed accomplice, “we deserve to be here.”

What audacity! What insolence that, having recognized in Jesus an innocent man and perhaps much more, he should ask him to remember. “Remember me.”

And Jesus—the incarnate God, who wrote the law on the very fabric of the universe, who has declared himself again and again to be on the side of victims and against their oppressors—Jesus should have stood with the magistrate victim both and spoken with their voice. “I will remember you,” he should have said, “now, die in your sin.”

But he does not say that. “I assure you, today you will be with me in paradise.” To this thief! This criminal. This impenitent and unrepentant man. He receives God’s free gift of salvation there. In response to that prayer that is at once feeble and audacious.

Before we get too wrapped up in our offense, however, let us look at our prayers. They aren’t much more than the thief’s, are they?

We are, in the end, very comfortable in calling the fire of God’s judgment down on others while we stand a safe distance away. But we do not stand a safe distance away. All of us, the Scripture says, have gone after our own ways. All of us have done what was right in our eyes. And when we’re honest, the most we can manage is this thief’s “remember me.”

And Jesus’ answer to us is the same. “I assure you, today.” Our assurance lies not in ourselves. Our assurance lies not in what we have done, nor in what we have left undone. “I assure you, today.” Our assurance lies only in the goodness of he who pardoned the thief on the cross and who extends his pardon to all who trust in him.

All because of your goodness, Lord, in your love, remember me.

(3) Dear woman, here is your son.

She stood there. Watching. Seeing it all unfold even as she was wrapped tightly by cords of utter helplessness. She stood there. Weeping. The sword now passed through her own soul, too.

Jesus’ dreams were not hers for him. Jesus’ mission was not what she wanted it to be. Jesus was always, even as a child, at one step removed from her.

And she loved him. She loved him through fevers and skinned knees. She loved him when he left the family business to become an itnerant preacher. She loved him as she went with her children to find him and to restrain him when she didn’t understand his preaching.

She loved him at the wedding when she goaded him into continuing the party. She had no idea what had happened, but somehow he had managed to solve the problem. How had he gotten that wine? From whom? Where? No matter. He had solved the problem and she loved him.

She loved him now as, still not understanding, she saw his mission end in failure and he prepared to breathe his last.

And he looked at her. “Woman, behold your son!” It was not an invitation to look upon him one last time. It was the creation of a new family. From now on, Mary would become part of the family of the apostle whom Jesus loved. He entrusted her to him and him to her. And from that very hour, the Scriptures say, she was taken into his home.

“Woman behold your son.” With these words, Jesus creates, in death, new life, a new family. The family made up of his mother and his messengers. The family into which we have been incorporated by our baptism. That family is the Church.

That is the family that is created by the death of Jesus. A family created by word and water, a family sustained by bread and wine.

So it is that, through the Cross of Jesus, we live in the same house as Mary, as John, as Peter. We are part of the same family as angels and archangels and all of have served God in every age.

He is the ground and guarantor of our communion.

“Woman behold your son.”

With those words, Jesus relativizes ever other prior claim to loyalty, whether to family, to clan, to tribe, to nation. Those bonds—which are real enough—no longer can ever come before the bond of loyalty to the one who made a new family in his death and invited us into it by the waters of baptism.

Woman, behold your son.

In this new family, water is thicker than blood.

(4) My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

“He descended into hell.” So we confess when we say the Apostles’ Creed, at least in the old language. Into Hell is better than to the dead, it seems to me. For it is more evocative.

“He descended to the dead” could be a simple gloss on the previous words. “He was crucifed, died and was buried.” It could be a metaphorical “really,” emphasising the reality of Jesus’ death.

The older language of the descent into hell reminds us that it this is no mere underlining of the previous sentence. He descended into hell. He descended into the realm of godforsakenness. He died, as the reformer John Calvin puts it, the one great death of the Sinner.

And that descent is captured in the heart-rending cry in which Jesus makes Psalm 22 his own. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The descent into hell, then is real. It does not merely reaffirm the reality of Jesus’ death but names it as a peculiar kind of death. It is not the mere sundering of body from soul. Jesus’ death was his being undone by the wrath of God poured out against all sin; it was his surrendering fully to God’s enemies—the unholy trinity of sin, death and the devil; it was his taking on himself the dirt of the world’s sin, and feeling excluded from the love of his Father, which he had known from all eternity.

He who knew no sin, St. Paul wrote, became sin.

He descended into hell. My God, why have you forsaken me?

In 1988, Pope John Paul II explored the meaning of the cry with these words:

“In that experience, in that cry, in that ‘why’ addressed to heaven, Jesus also established a new manner of solidarity with us who are so often moved to raise our eyes and words to heaven to express our complaint and even desperation. . . .

“[Jesus’ human soul was reduced to a wasteland. He no longer felt the presence of the Father, but he underwent the tragic experience of the most complete desolation. . . . The external events seemed to manifest the absence of the Father who permitted the crucifixion of his Son . . . . That silence of God weighed on the dying Jesus as the heaviest pain of all. . . .”

And that cry continues to echo. It is the cry of human suffering that has now been taken into the very life and heart of God for the healing of the world, for the forgiveness of sinners, for the radical welcome that God now extends to you and me for the sake of his Son whom he did not, finally, abandon.

He descended into hell. He cried the opening words of the 22^nd Psalm filling them with a despair that even the Psalmist did not know when he first penned them. My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? And with those words, he spoke for all God’s suffering and sin bound creation. He spoke those words also for God and as God, who has made the world’s suffering his own, that the world might enjoy his life and salvation.

(5) I thirst.

The SS seemed more preoccupied, more disturbed than usual. To hang a young boy in front of thousands of spectators was no light matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was lividly pale, almost calm, biting his lips. The gallows threw its shadow over him. This time the camp executioner refused to act as executioner. Three SS replaced him.

The victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses. “Long live Liberty!” cried the two adults. But the child was silent.

“Where is God? Where is He?” someone behind me asked.

At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over.

Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting. “Bare your heads!” yelled the head of the camp. His voice was raucous. We were weeping. “Cover your heads!”

Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive…

For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. Behind me I heard the same man asking: “Where is God now?”

And I hear a voice within me answer him: “Were is he? Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows. . . ” (Elie Wiesel, Night)

“I thirst.”

You might not see it. “I thirst,” is simple and straightforward enough on its own. But Jesus is still quoting the Scriptures he memorized as a child in synagogue in Nazareth.

This time, he is quoting Psalm 69: “they offer me sour wine for my thirst.”

It is a full expression of the agony endured by God the Son, the man, Jesus of Nazareth. And they are not his own words. They are the words of another. Another who was himself just like us.

“Tis mystery all! The immortal dies. Who can explore the strange design. In vain the firstborn seraph tries to plumb the depths of love divine.” So wrote the Anglican hymn-writer, Charles Wesley in the second stanza of And Can It Be.

Yes really, really dies. And really—really—suffers in the agony preceding death.

I thirst.

Two simple words taken from a Psalm in which the writer calls out to God to deliver him from cruel and uncaring enemies. Two words in which are capture the reality of the suffering of a human being.

This is no concept. No philosophical discussion of atonement. This is the suffering of a body broken and exposed; a body suspended between heaven and earth; a body dried out by sun and wind and torture.

This the real human suffering that God has made his own.

There is no comfort in the phrase God suffered for us. No relief, no sense of meaning given to our own suffering. It means nothing to me that God suffers as God. Because I’m not God. And I will never ever know or experience just what kind of suffering that is.

But human suffering? That I know.

None of us knows the suffering of another, mind you. And my own life has not known much. But I have suffered. And so have you. Many of you have suffered more than others, and more than I ever will.

We do not all suffer the same pain or to the same degree. But we all suffer. It is the one experience alongside birth and death that every human being will share in.

And another has taken that human experience and made it his own. And he has taken our own words to express it! I thirst.

That is not the cry of a God pretending to suffer. Hovering six inches over the cross of his sin; six inches over the gallows at Auschwitz.

I thirst.

That is not the cry of a God suffering in his own unique god-like way. Remote and removed and uninvolved with us

I thirst.

That is the cry of the God who suffers as a human. Who knows human suffering and dying because he has suffered and died as a human being. Who was there, as Elie Wiesel wrote, with that child on the gallows.

(6) It is finished.

It is finished. It might sound like an exhausted and desperate announcement. “I have nothing more to give.” Or “It’s finally over.” The last words of a broken man.

But in the Greek language of the New Testament, it is one single word of triumph. Tetelestai! It is accomplished.

Jesus mission was  completed. There was nothing more left to do.

He had displayed the love of God to the full. He had displayed the wrath of God against all that would harm God’s good creation. He had engaged fully with the enemies of God, fighting them not with armies, whether of angels or men, but only with the Word of God. He had inaugurated the Kingdom of God.

And now, it is accomplished. God law has been upheld. God’s enemies have been defeated. God’s people have been drawn into fellowship with God and each other in a kingdom that will never pass away.

It is accomplished. His saving work is done.

In our own following of Jesus, there is to add to it. We do not bring in the promised kingdom with our works of mercy and justice. We do not heal the world of sin through our own mission and discipling work. We do not save ourselves through our asceticism, our own pursuit of holiness.

All of those things are important. None of them is what saves us.

In our own failure to follow Jesus, there is nothing that can take away from it. Our own participation—known and unknown—in systems of oppression and in justice. Our own thoroughly inadequate and sin-stained presentations of the life-giving Gospel of God. Our own inability to be holy enough.

All of those things are serious lapses. None of them can undo us.

Our works neither save nor damn.

Why?

Because his work is sufficient. And his work is accomplished. It is done.

Because his work is finished, none of us is ever finished—over. Done. Passed by. Hopeless.

Because his work is finished, we have fellowship with God and with each other. A fellowship bought by the precious blood of Jesus. By his life poured out on this Friday we call Good.

On this Friday, it was finished. And that means none of us is beyond hope.

(7) Father, I entrust my spirit into your hands.

Jesus is still, even now, praying the prayers of Israel. This time, it is Psalm 31. It is striking that at no point does Jesus depart from the faith of his ancestors. Even when in the depths of abandonment by God and brokenness in body, the words that were his were the words of Israel.

All the way through, Jesus acts not alone or on his own or apart from the faith of Israel. All the way through, the faithlessness of Israel, and with them, the whole human human race are heaped up on this one man, who stands with Adam and Abraham as a representative of us all.

All the way through, the faithfulness of Israel’s God is displayed here in the obedience of this one man that undoes the disobedience of Adam. That fulfils God’s promise to Abraham that his faith would father many nations.

All the way through, the prayers of Israel are taken by God’s one obedient covenant partner, and infused with a depth of meaning their original authors never knew.

All the way through the prayers of Israel are taken by God’s one obedient covenant partner and spoken with the meaning that their true author had intended from and for all eternity.

Father, I entrust my spirit into your hands.

The mission of Israel has been brought to its right and good end. The whole world is now to be blessed by the calling once given to Abraham.

And the blessings given to Israel are once again seen not as gifts to be kept from the world, but as gifts to be lavished upon the world.

This one Israelite has committed his spirit to his Father.

This one Israelite has committed his Father’s Spirit to us.

This one Israelite  has tied us forever to our Jewish brothers and sisters in the faith of Israel. He has given us their prayers. He has prayed them for us. And he invites us to pray them, too. He committed his spirit to the hand of his Father so that in death, we might do the same.

Here is a link to the mp3.

All or Nothing

Nicodemus has come to Jesus at night to query this rabbi who is baffling the leadership of which Nicodemus is a part. On the one hand, as we saw last week, Jesus represents a challenge to their authority and the way they have used it. Jesus has refused the easy peace the leadership has made with Rome. And yet they cannot write him off. For even if Jesus would not perform a sign when demanded—as though he were some kind of magical miracle machine—there were signs. Nicodemus says so. “No one can do these signs,” he says, “apart from the presence of God.”

What follows is Jesus’ first major speech in the Gospel of John. It begins at verse 5 and runs through to the end of verse 21. Throughout, we are confronted by John’s love of binary combinations again, his stark “either/ors”: below and above; earthly things and heavenly things; descent and ascent; light and darkness; salvation and judgment; and the pivot between them all is Jesus.

Jesus as the center, the fulcrum, the dividing line. Jesus who forces the decision.  We don’t like this all or nothing Jesus.

I will be more forthright. I don’t particularly like this all or nothing Jesus. In Lent we all confront our besetting sins. Mine is very much like the Anglican Priest  in C. S. Lewis’ parable, The Great Divorce who, on his visit to heaven from his study in hell, said, “For me there is no such thing as a final answer. The free wind of inquiry must always continue to blow through the mind, must it not? ‘Prove all things’… to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.” In Lent, I must confront the unhappy fact that  I want a Jesus who gives me room to maneuver. I want a Jesus who gives me options. A Jesus who will let me explore a little.

But this Jesus who talks—as he did two weeks ago—about self-denial and taking the way of the cross? This Jesus who refuses easy compromises that allow Caesar and God to reign over separate parts of our lives? This Jesus who says, “this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness”? He’s hard to take.

Here’s the problem: not simply for the Anglican priest in the parable, or for me, but for all of us: John’s all-or-nothing Jesus is the real Jesus. And if we are going to take Jesus at all, this is the Jesus we will take.

At my former parish, I once had a conversation with several parishioners who loathed St. Paul. St. Paul, they said, was a moralist. St. Paul was about rules. St. Paul wanted to tell people what to do. He wanted to regulate their lives. Jesus, on the other hand, was cool. A hipster, even. Jesus went about doing good and healing and helping people. And otherwise not interfering.

I confess, I still don’t get that. Whatever his alleged flaws, Paul’s view of Jesus is so expansive, so broad, so cosmic, that it is hard to imagine any human being escaping its compass. Jesus, on the other hand, says some mighty hard things about narrow doors and needle’s eyes. About light and darkness. About the need to be “born from above.” About perishing and living. Jesus, as he gives himself to us on the pages of holy Scripture, is very all-or-nothing.

Raymond Brown, perhaps the greatest scholar of the fourth Gospel in the twentieth century has some good advice for preachers who are, like me, uncomfortable with John’s Jesus: “Do not domesticate the Johannine Jesus. It is his style to say things that border on the offensive, be puzzled and even offended; but do not silence this Jesus by deciding what he should not have said and what your hearers should not hear.”  

So, we’re going to stick with this Jesus. And we’re going to see what he says and why he says it.

Jesus likens his life and ministry to an episode from the life of Moses. The episode which formed out Old Testament lesson today. It is itself a hard story, depicting God first as sending poisonous snakes along with food to punish the people of Israel for complaining yet again and then providing healing through a snake of hammered bronze hoisted on a pole. Anyone, God told Moses, who looked at the snake on the pole would recover.

“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” Jesus said, “so must the son of man be lifted up that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”

There is an allusion to the cross here, certainly. For there, the Son of Man was indeed lifted up. Suspended between heaven and earth and there, looked upon. But the image Jesus uses is more than an allusion to his death. It is also to his resurrection. His being lifted up after his death. His exaltation. For John Cross and resurrection is one single event. And it is one single event that reveals one singular identity.

It reveals Jesus’ singular identity as the one sent from God, the one in whom the kingdom comes, the one whose identity is most fully captured when he is lifted up on the cross on that bleak Friday afternoon that we have come to call “Good.” Whenever he is lifted up, he says, whoever believes in him will have eternal life.

This lifting up, further, is the fullest demonstration of the love of God for the whole of creation. This singular eternal identity captured in a singular temporal moment is the love of God: “This is how God loves the world: he sent his only Son so that everyone who believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

This is the first verse I memorized as a child. I know that it is the first verse that some of you learned as well. Those who taught us were wise to make this the first verse. Because this verse is the Gospel. Everything else hangs on the truth of this verse. If it is finally false, none of the rest matters.

Now, here’s where things get difficult.

This divine intervention is not simply a display of divine love. It is also an act of judgment. And we don’t want a God who judges. Talking of God coming in judgment is to evoke memories of the great American Puritan, Jonathan Edwards and his sermon, Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God. A sermon which, though he delivered it sitting and in a voice barely above a whisper, evoked a powerful emotional reaction from his hearers. Today, if we read that sermon, we would more likely react with embarrassment and pat ourselves on the back for belonging to a more enlightened era.

Whatever we think of Edwards’ notion of judgment, however, we can get away from John’s. John sets before us plainly the man Jesus not simply as the love of God, but also and at the same time, the judgment of God.

The man Jesus of Nazareth is God’s act of judgment, first of all, simply because his entry into history and the manner of that entry declares that something has gone wrong.  Things are not the way they’re supposed to be.If people need to be given eternal life, then it seems we lack it. For the Son of Man is not lifted up to give us what is ours already.

It is an act of judgment, second, because in sending Jesus, God judges this lack of life to be a bad thing. It is not simply declarative, but it is also discerning. To lack eternal life is to lack light. It is to live a half-life shrouded in darkness. This, says John, is bad. God judges that it is bad precisely by sending his Son to rescue us from it. God desires us to have the light and life that should enlighten and enliven all of us. He desires us to have not a half-life, but the very fullness of life. A life not bounded by death, but defined by death’s utter absence.

So it is that this act of judgment is not simply declaring and discerning. It is also loving. Jesus as the the judgment of God is also God’s act of loving intervention. Jesus entry—his descent—into our world is not undertaken to condemn the world. It is undertaken that he might again ascend and take us and all creation  with him into God’s very life. It is the deepest expression of God’s love for God’s creation. God’s care for his people.

It is no problem at all for John, that judgment and love are not opposites. One does not need to be set aside for the other to be undertaken. In the single temporal moment—the lifting up of the Son of Man—the singular identity of that Son of Man is revealed. He is the love of God on radical display and at the same time the judgment of God upon the world. His entry into his own world—as John puts it in his first chapter—is judgment enacted and directed toward the world’s salvation. He judges that world needs saving and then acts to save it. And that is how God loves the world.

What then of condemnation? Well, the first thing we have to do is acknowledge the language of condemnation whether or not we like it. The loving judgment and judging love of God displayed and enacted in Jesus lifted up is, as Jesus says in this passage, the pivot at which light confronts darkness. It names darkness as darkness. It exposes it to be a half-life, a pale and feeble imitation that is ultimately opposed to and finally defeated by the life freely offered by God.

And the second thing is to say straightforwardly that condemnation comes not from God, or from ignorance of God’s saving work. “For God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” That’s what Jesus says. Whatever condemnation arises as a result of God’s intervention in the sending of his son, that condemnation is not his.

It arises, Jesus says, because the presence of the light in the darkness now thrusts upon people the responsibility to decide how to respond to that light. People says Jesus in the lesson’s conclusion either love the darkness because their deeds are evil and they do not wish them to be exposed, but those who do what is true come to the light so that their deeds might be seen.

That is why the revelation of Jesus, his lifting up on the cross and through the resurrection, is the stark either/or, the pivot on which all this turns. He forces us to make a decision.

Not forced, but forces. For the moment is always present. It is not past and gone, some far away event from two millennia past, the occurrence of which has no bearing on me. It is now. It is every time that single temporal moment is re-declared in the reading of the Scriptures and re-enacted in the Eucharist.

And so this morning, the light again shines in the darkness. The life and love of God are put on full display in words and in bread and in wine. And in this moment the judgment of God is passed again. And a past event becomes a present salvation.  And in this moment we are invited again to encounter the judgment of God in its fullness. A judgment that is from all eternity, gracious and loving and oriented to our healing. A judgment that calls us from the darkness of our own devising into the light and life of God. A judgment who is a person.

The Lord Jesus who gives his life for all and to all who believe.

A link to the mp3 will be provided later today.

Here is a link to the mp3.

Losing Life And Finding It.

Life is a good thing. We are told to celebrate it. We are told to walk for it. We are even told to choose it. Seldom does our culture celebrate stories of those who “lose” their lives. About the only time I can think of is when we honour those of our armed forces and police services who die in the line of duty. But even that is not quite what I’m getting at. Those events—with all their pomp and populism—are celebrations of life lost, not celebrations of losing life. They are tragic memorials to lives in which the world was not gained and still the life was lost. What I’m talking about is a life—whether long or short—in which the advantages of the world are refused.

And I’m talking about it because that’s what the Gospel is talking about this morning.

In response to Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?”, Peter has confessed Jesus as Messiah. Jesus in turn takes this recognition as a defining moment in his ministry and, as we saw on Transfiguration Sunday, from then on begins to teach his disciples that he would be rejected, killed and on the third day, rise again.

And Peter, says Mark, began to rebuke him. Matthew elaborates a little. He gives us Peter’s words: “Surely not, Lord!” Poor Peter always guilty of voicing what all of us—first century followes as much as twenty-first—think. Surely not Lord! It’s not going to end this way. You are not going to the cross. You are going to ride on in triumph. You are going to assemble an army whether to remove the Romans of ancient times, or whatever unjust empire is ruling at present. Surely not.

“Surely not, Lord.” We all say it at times, don’t we? There are times, if we are serious about following Jesus, when the cost of discipleship will appear to be just too high. And when it does, Peter’s words very easily become ours. “Surely not, Lord.”

When those words are ours—and all of us can think of times when they are—Jesus’ rebuke of Peter is ours as well. “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things, but human things.”

You know, it always stings when I put myself in Peter’s place here. “Hey, I’m not perfect, but I’m loyal. I’m following you as best I can. I’m sinful. I’m fallible. I don’t always understand. A little compassion, Jesus.” Do you think similarly? But there’s no eliding Jesus words. When I—even if only in my deepest thoughts and never aloud—rebuke the Lord with Peter, Jesus reminds me that in so doing, I am giving voice to the thoughts of God’s enemy.

“Make these stones bread,” he says. Give the people food, Jesus! Solve the world’s distribution problems. Then they’ll believe in you. “Rule over these kingdoms,” he says. Identify with the political elite and save the poor from their corruption and incompetence. Reign over us in justice, Jesus. “Perform a miracle,” he says. Make everything whole, Jesus. Restore the bodies of those who have been broken by sin and cruelty, by disease and even death. “Surely not, Lord!” we say. Surely there is an easier way than the way of the cross—as much for our sake as for yours.

But there is no other way. And Lent reminds both how singular and how difficult the way of Jesus is. It reminds us that left to ourselves, there is no hope for us. It reminds us that our hope lies only in the fact that one has already walked that road, and has sanctified it by making it his own.  And if we would be his, he says, we must follow after.

“If any want to become my followers,” says Jesus, “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” That is, if you want to be my disciple, do the things you see me doing. Imitate me.

No. Imitation is not quite the right word. We are not dealing here with a naked or mere exemplarism. Making Jesus our example, our pattern for life, is not enough. Now, that’s shocking, isn’t it? Who among us, after all, hasn’t heard the phrase, “What would Jesus do?”

But this call to radical discipleship, to the way of the cross, to losing one’s life for the Lord’s sake and that of the Gospel, is not a call to making Jesus our example.

And, deep in our hearts, if we’re honest with ourselves, we are relieved that it’s not. Or we should be.

Why? Because, like Peter and the rest, we cannot imitate perfectly. On our Lenten walk to Good Friday, we will all be reminded at some point or other of those times when we spoke, or at least thought, like Peter: “surely not , Lord. We will be reminded of times past and warned of times future when the faithlessness of the disciples in Gethsemane will be repeated in our own: “they all forsook him and fled.” We may even be reminded of times, when the call of the cross was especially close, when our courage failed and with Peter we cursed and swore and insisted, “I don’t know the man!”

If it is down to us, our efforts at imitation, our adopting the great example, we have failed and will fail.

No the invitation to walk the road to Jerusalem, the invitation to walk the way of the cross is not so much an invitation to try to catch up with Jesus, as it is to let him walk his road to the cross in and through us.

The call to deny, to take up, and to follow is not a call to imitate, but to identify. To become one with. To participate within. To live within our baptismal vows. “Do you not know that all who have been baptized have been baptized into Christ’s death?” So wrote Paul. To walk the way of the cross is to place our lives in his hands, to allow him to live his life in and through us, is to embrace the topsy turvy world of the Gospel. A world in which leadership is expressed in service—as we will recall on Maundy Thursday.  A world in which life is of found in abandonment to death—as well will recall on Good Friday. A world in which death does not have the last word—as we will celebrate on Easter Sunday. A world in which simple signs like bread and wine become the very life of God incarnate, to be freely received as we eat and drink.

Now, what does all this have to do with us? With us who are told over and over and over again to cling to life, to celebrate it, to choose it, to hold on to it for all we’ve got?

Lent is the time when we are freed through our fasts, through our conscious attempts to own the call to discipleship, through our attempts to become more aware of the Lord who seeks to live his life within and through ours to see just how profound a lie that message is. How the attempt to deny the fact of death is itself the way of death not merely for the body but also for the soul. How the denial of death has birthed in fact a culture of death.

If all that sounds a little odd, let me give you an example. The first two movies in the Godfather trilogy tell of the rise of Michael Corleone and the consolidation of his power.

Why does Michael Coreleone become the God father? Why, when he is the one Corleone son destined not to go into the “family business,” of illegal gambling and prostitution? He was destined for something greater. His own father had it all planned: “Judge Corleone, Senator Corleone,” he says. His plans for Michael are not like those for hot-headed Santino or simple-minded Fredo. Michael will get out. Michael will be great.

What corrupts Michael, finally, is the love of his family. What corrupts him is his intense love for his father, for his brothers, for his wife and children. What corrupts him is his passion to see them protected from evil, to see them thrive.

We see it first in his father’s hospital room, when he saves his father’s life from those trying to kill the older don. From that point on, he increasingly assumes control of the family’s business affairs, until, at the end, he directs his henchmen to “settle all the family business,” and has them ruthlessly eliminate his enemies.

We see it, in Godfather II, as he tries to outwit the old gangster Hyman Roth. When his own brother, Fredo, becomes embroiled in the plot to undo the Corleone family, Michael first excludes him from all family functions and then has him killed. Michael and the Corleone family triumph eventually, but at terrible cost. As the movie ends, we see Michael alone in his lavish boathouse near Reno, Nevada. His brother has been murdered. His wife has had an abortion and forsaken him. His children are fearful of him. All this because he loves them. He really does. And will do anything to protect them.

He sought to save his life and theirs. And as a result, he lost those things most important to him

What will it profit a man should he gain the whole world, but lose his soul? Too late, Michael Corelone knows the answer.

Of course, not all of us are Michael Corleones. I pray that none of us in this room are. But what Michael Corleone presents us with—on a broad and darkly coloured canvass—is the truth of this Gospel lesson. That as we grasp and cling and fight and claim and even celebrate our lives, we will lose them.

Jesus presents us with the alternative. Lose your life for my sake, he says, and you will find it again. Pour out your life for the sake of the gospel, he says, and it will be returned to you.

Let me live my life in and through you. Walk my way. Let me walk my way though you. It will be like squeezing a camel through the eye of a needle. It will be like finding the small door in the wall only to see that it opens not on to a garden, but on to a rough road. But if you want to find life—real life, my life—this is the only way to it.

Some of us have been baptized a long time. And we might be scandalized by this radical call from our radical Lord. And that’s ok. Conversion is not a once and done event. Conversion is a continual response to the call of Jesus, a continual living into the claim he has made upon our lives. Short of the glory that will come in the fullness of his kingdom, we are always becoming converted. We will have never entirely arrived until we entirely arrive.

And so we hear the Lenten call of the Lord to the way of the cross again. And we come to the Table, admitting that on our own we cannot follow. That on our own, we will like Peter try to dissuade even him. That on our own, like Peter, deny him. That on our own we will forsake him and flee. And in grace we will take his life into us. And he will again, by his Spirit, live his life through us and walk that road with us. And we will be converted.

Others of you are preparing for confirmation. You are preparing to own the promises made on your behalf by your parents and sponsors. I want, in the light of this Gospel message, tell you something that Bishop Stephen will tell you when he comes to visit us in a few weeks.

You are not going through a rite of passage.

You are not graduating from church.

You are agreeing to the claim that the Lord Jesus made on your life when the water coursed over your head. You are agreeing to the call of discipleship that you have heard today. Confirmation is serious business. And you need to think long and hard about  just what it is you are deciding to do. And if you are not yet ready to walk more fully and more consciously in the call of the crucified, you ought not to take this step. No one will think less of you if you say so. I, for one, will commend you for your honesty and tell you that when you’re ready, we’ll still be here.

Still others of you are preparing for baptism. You are preparing to begin in a public way, your own walk with the Lord. Well, now you know the way to which you are committing yourself.

It is the way of life. It is a way of deep joy. It is an adventure in every sense of the word. And it is unfathomably hard and frustrating and discouraging. It demands that you embrace as true beliefs that all around you our culture says are absurd. It demands that you act in ways that all around our culture will tell you are wrong. It is a way of denial. A way of the cross. To take this way in baptism is to follow the one whose road to glory goes not around the grave but through it.

Like our confirmands, you need ot think long and hard about what it is you are about to do. Are you sure you want to do this? If you are sure, the good news is, that as you lose your life, you will find it. As you lay down your life, you will take it up again. And you really will live because someone else has claimed you and has promised to live for you and in you.

It is the first Sunday of Lent, that time of preparation for the climax of the Christian year that is Holy Week. We have begun our fasts, however we might understand them. For some of us, the fast might be something positive. So to engage in a Lenten discipline is to join a small group, study a topic or book or author of spiritual significance.  For others, it might be something negative—a fast in the more traditional sense—a temporary relinquishing of a good for the sake of something better.

At my former College, Lenten fasts were a bit of a novelty for most students. Here were Baptists, Pentecostals, Evangelical Free kids trying to make sense of the three or four Anglican profs who had smudges of ashes on their foreheads. Who talked of fasting. And after a couple of years of observing, a few would try to enter into a Lenten fast. Foregoing Chocolate was a favourite. As was coffee or soda. A few particularly hardy souls even tried a traditional Lenten fast and bid what was at least sometimes a not-so-fond farewell to meat, which is what “Carnival” means.

I wonder if they ever got to working out why Christians fast. Have you? A friend of the family wrote to me on Facebook on this past Tuesday to tell me that she had tried to explain the connection between Shrove Tuesday and Lent to their 5 year old daughter, Sheyenne. Kara began by explaining Lent and how, traditionally, people gave up eating meet for the 40 days. Sheyenne thought about that for a few moments and then said, “It’s good that they lent-ed, because vegetables are good for you!”

Do some of you think about fasting that way? In terms of what it will provide for our bodies? I confess that I hadn’t given it a whole lot of thought until recently myself. The Gospel this morning helps us begin to think about it, perhaps in ways that may surprise.

Jesus, Mark tells us, was driven by the Holy Spirit to the wilderness where he was tempted by the devil. Where did Jesus go to fast? The wilderness—the home of the powers of darkness. Why? To be tempted by the devil.  By opening in this way, Mark places Jesus’ fasting in the context of his preparation for ministry and mission.

Irenaeus, a second century Church Father, sees here the beginning of the undoing of the Fall. He plumbs the depths of Paul’s title for Jesus, the Second Adam, by setting the temptation of Adam alongside the temptation of Jesus. Here’s how he presents it. Adam and his wife faced the tempter in God’s garden. Satan, says Irenaeus, came to their place of advantage. He appealed to their bodies (the fruit was good for food), their wills (the wisdom it held was to be desired), and their spirits (in eating, they would become like God). Powerful temptations to be sure, but Adam and his wife had every means at their disposal to resist. Their bodies were strong from the good food of God’s garden. Their wills entirely oriented toward the good. Their spirits continually refreshed by direct communion with God. Where they should have won, they lost, consigning themselves and all their children to live under the reign of God’s enemy.

On the contrary, Jesus, the Second Adam, faced the tempter in the wilderness. Far from facing the enemy from a position of strength and relative safety, Jesus took the battle to the devil’s arena. Far from a mere fruit, Jesus faced a full frontal satanic assault. Satan appealed to his weakened body (make these stones bread), his will (rule over these kingdoms), and his spirit (perform a miracle). Where every advantage was gone, Jesus should have lost.  Yet he defeated Adam’s (and our) old enemy. And so began to undo the sin that enslaved human beings to him who holds the power of death. The battle was joined.

Conflict and victory: these are the themes are boldly painted on the Gospel’s  canvas. We have seen it already in the miracles that Mark has recorded for us. The dominant motif for Mark when describing the mission of Jesus is a conflict, a war. And it is not Jesus who’s under attack. Rather, as he moves from the waters of baptism in the Jordan to the wilderness and thence into Galilee he’s on the offensive.

From the first skirmish in the wilderness on, Jesus would proclaim and enact the Kingdom of God, rescuing people from the powers of darkness. Every healing, every exorcism, every aphorism and sermon from Galilee to Gethsemane to Golgotha is to be understood as the slow and steady march of the Kingdom of God against the devil. And in the end, and in all of this, the Ascension tells us, Jesus is victor.

So why do we fast?

Well, let’s begin with the most obvious: Lauren Winner, in Mudhouse Sabbath, talks about fasting weakening and strengthening us simultaneously. The connection between the two movements, she says, is desire. We long for food and as our bodies are weakened that longing grows. It sharpens. It might even become painful. At the same time, when we fast, we long for God with a desire that, hopefully, is also sharp and perhaps even painful. And our spirits are strengthened.  Our hunger for food reminds us that our true hunger is for communion with our Creator and Redeemer.

Fasting does remind us that our true desire is, or ought to be, for God. To remind us of the great truth expressed by St Augustine this way: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord. And our hearts will not rest until they rest in you.” No doubt this is true. Fasting—if undertaken rightly—does sharpen our desire for God, it does create an environment where greater intimacy with God is possible.

So, Fasting does draw us closer to God, but what does drawing close to God look like? To what end do we cultivate intimacy with God, longing for God, by fasting? Some of us might have an image of the hermit, cut off from the wider life of the world. To be close to God is to be removed from the affairs of daily life. The goal of intimacy with God, which fasting helps encourage, is withdrawal from the world. But this is not the image in the Gospel gives us.

We fast to prepare for the battle that the Spirit leads us into. We do not fast to withdraw from the world, but in order to be led—driven even—by the Spirit into the world to proclaim the Good News. For the mission of Christ becomes at his Ascension the mission Christ carries out through the Church. It becomes, simply, our mission. Just as Jesus went from Jordan to the wilderness being led by the Spirit; just as he came from the wilderness into Gallilee empowered by the Spirit to bring the Good News, so in the power of that same Spirit, we bear witness to the Kingdom that he brings.

Of course, this is not to say that we fast in order to bring about the successful completion of Jesus’ mission. Jesus’ fasting isn’t only an example which we are called as his followers to emulate (though it certainly is that). We bear witness to the Kingdom; we do not build it ourselves. To say that we do is to say we save ourselves, and indeed the world, by imitating Jesus’ example. All of us, if we are honest with ourselves, can point to places in our own lives where, unlike Jesus, we failed, we fell, we took the easy way. I can certainly say that. None of us is, in this life, ever free from having to pray, “Forgive us our sins.”

And that brings us to the final reason that we fast. We fast to remind ourselves that One has fasted already for us. He went into the waters of baptism for us. He pursued the devil into the wilderness, and where in Adam we failed, where in Adam we fell, where we in our own confrontations with the principalities and powers and spiritual wickedness in high places, we are defeated, He faced the tempter’s power to the very end. And he won. And in him, we win, too.