Now, I call you my friends.

Today I want to talk about love and friendship.

The command to love each other doesn’t appear in isolation. There is a reason, an inducement. The command comes with the attachment “Just as I have loved you”.  So it is not a do as I say and not as I do,  It is an invitation from the divine to live as Jesus lived. It is an invitation to follow him on the way of love and compassion, no matter where it leads.

While love is the most powerful force in the universe – it is also a word that confuses and threatens because in the Western world the word love is so tied up with Romance and sexuality, which is also true and good of course but I want to use a less threatening word  - friendship.

Friendship is probably the most under-rated word and concept in all religions. Friendship can be seen as a bit weak and frivolous compared to the heavy word “Love” but actually Friendship is essential  and is foundational for the big three .

Abraham, the Father and foundation stone of three of the most important religions in the world – Judaism, Christianity and Islam is known simply yet profoundly as “The friend of God”. In another place in John’s gospel Jesus says, I don’t call you servants any longer, because when you realise that love and compassion are the very heart of God I call you my friends.

To be a friend of God implies being friends with each other. And this is not theory or dusty theology this is a lived reality. Without my friends I couldn’t have survived these last two and a half years since my wife died.

Friends kept me going. Friends are the most important thing in the world. Don’t whatever you do under estimate the value of friendship. Friendship is a way of loving and life giving and supporting someone that lifts us out of depression and reminds us that life is worth living.

Sarah is one such friend that helped me to survive, and not just survive but flourish. I think I was one of the first people to be told when Sarah became pregnant so I have known Jacob since he was a barely discernable bump. I am honoured that she decided to baptise Jacob her in Gainford.

This morning in baptising Jacob we are affirming not only that Jacob is loved by his family and friends but is infinitely loved by God.  We do so in the hope, not the expectation, but the hope that Jacob will one day return that love and be a friend of God. In baptism we affirm that Jacob is part of a universal family, whose local expression is us – the people in this church. Jacob, but not just Jacob, all of us, are loved by God.

But do we even believe in God? If you’re not sure, let me try and offer some help. In another place St. John says “God is love”. So another way of framing that question would be “Do you believe in love?”

It is a lovely and profound thought that if any of us have ever experienced love – either love for us – or us loving someone else – or witnessed love – you have seen, experienced and witnessed God in your life. God is not a distant stranger to you after all – he rests within you in your heart – at your very centre and you actually felt God. You may not have recognised him,  but you do know him. The divine is then rescued from being a strange other worldly theory or concept and made real flesh and blood. Just like Jacob. Just like all of us.  

Blessed are the cheesemakers

In John’s gospel “the Jews” don’t mean the Jewish people as a whole, but those segments of the Jewish religious hierarchy who antagonise and fear him. Their aim is to try and trip Jesus up, to get him to incriminate himself, so he has to be very careful with his replies.

Today’s gospel has Jesus out walking in the Temple when another group of them comes up to him and probably in a taunting manner say “Come on then, tell us straight”. “Who and what are you?” “Are you the messiah?”

Except that Jesus doesn’t give a straight answer at all. He evades it again. Because to answer it would just serve to confirm all their pre-conceived ideas and prejudices about him and their own interpretation of what the Messiah ought to be like. In 1^st century Israel, their idea of the messiah was of a warrior king that would fight the Romans and establish a free Jewish state – but Jesus was no warrior, so how could he be?

When people ask these kinds of loaded questions, the truth is usually the last thing they are looking for – they usually just want their pre-conceived opinions confirmed.

All those loaded terms like messiah, son of man, son of God – they all meant different things to different people and a straight yes or no answer would have meant falling into their trap.

It is like when people from other  more fundamentalist Christian traditions ask me if I am a Christian or that fateful question “Are you saved?”.  What they are really saying is. “We don’t really think you are. Just confirm that for us would you?

So in like manner – and it is fair to say it is probably the only way that I am like Jesus – is that I like to throw the question back to them in a different form that might make them think. 

At this point I think it is good to explain one important property that all these terms share in Israel at that time. Terms like Messiah, Son of man, even the title son of God, does not infer that Jesus was divine. All those terms are titles properly given to human beings. To be a son of God was to be God-like not “God”. In the same way as we Christians also after Jesus’ example call ourselves sons and daughters of God.

And when I use the word God I mean God the Father, which is just what Jesus meant too. The sourceless source of the cosmos. The formless one – the divine mystery that cannot be explained or described.

The same formless source that Jesus prayed to. Jesus did not use any formulary to approach God other than as the Father and he taught us to do the same. Our Father who art in heaven.

I am a follower of the way of Jesus in that I follow Jesus’ example  and address my prayers only to that divine mystery, the unity of all things, whether that mystery be called, Yahweh, I AM, Allah, Father, Friend or some other appoximation. The intent is the same.

In an answer to their taunts, Jesus does give a straight answer but not in the form they recognised. He said plainly, “See how I act, love, and live – see what I do and what I say and discern the spirit behind my words”. There is your answer.

People who recognise my words and actions as having a divine origin will respond, because I am transparent to the will of the Father as much as any human being can be. Which is what Jesus means when he says  “I and the Father are one”.

There is the innate unity with the Father that all created things share, and then there is the transparency to God’s Spirit that Jesus modelled in his life.

It is in trying to realise this sense of innate union with the Father, a property of being human that is ours by right that is the goal of the Christian life – and also to become transparent to the will of the Father as Jesus was – an aim recognised much more strongly in the East than in the West. The Orthodox, using the incarnation as their starting point say “God became man so that man can become God”.

With so many voices claiming to speak the word or will of God, how do you discern the will of the Father or know you are hearing his voice?

Here I would recommend that we pray for discernment and intuition. For actually when a connection is made you can actually feel it. You know it. You know it in a deep way. It is not knowing in the sense of “I know the world is round” It is a kind of knowing like “I know my mother, my friend, my husband, my wife”. You know in a deeper way that mere facts and appearance.

By their fruits you will know them.  

The challenge of Thomas - John 20: 19-31

There are inherent dangers in knowing too much. Once upon a time on reading that gospel passage I would have just preached on it straight. But nowadays of course I know far more than I ever used to about Thomas and the tradition that used him as a kind of standard bearer, and I know that in part, John’s gospel was written to refute the ideas of the followers of Thomas.

I know that Thomas would never have said “My Lord and my God” to Jesus because that is exactly what he didn’t believe, and having those words put into his mouth was a kind of delicious revenge wrought upon him by John, presenting as he did the ideas of catholic orthodoxy.   I know John is more mystical and spiritual that the other gospels because he is playing on the same field as the followers of Thomas and trying to play them at their own game.

So what do you do when you know all those kinds of things? Carry on regardless spouting stuff you know can’t be true – but doing it anyway. Or do you man up and show a bit of integrity?

The church as a whole has become much more infantile over this last century. Parts of it have tried to ignore all the advances in scientific knowledge and understanding of the universe around us. All the massive advances in textual criticism, context and interpretation are routinely ignored. All the discoveries of other interpretations of Jesus by early Christians are also ignored.

We end up wearing blinkers and living and preaching in wilful ignorance of certain truths that have been known for a very long time. In short I think that many clergy are terrified of challenging certain things, terrified of upsetting long cherished beliefs, terrified that they’ll lose their jobs or be subjected to public ridicule like Bishop Jenkins was. There is a real existential dilemma here.

I have always been one for “keeping things real” as people much  younger  than me might say. So I can stand here and say that the gospel incident I just read never happened.  It is not history – it is theology and political polemic. Very clear and insightful theology – the point of which is to refute and undermine the followers of Thomas.

The two sides had very different things to say. The ideas that won the day and were rigourously enforced were a belief in a literal virgin birth and a literal bodily resurrection, that Jesus was God and worthy of worship, that authority was vested in a small male coterie and anyone outside the discipline of this hierarchy was not saved. The problem of the world was sin because we are utterly sinful beings and only belief in a “saviour” would redeem us.

The other side thought that belief in a literal virgin birth and bodily resurrection was ridiculous and called it “the faith of fools”. They saw Jesus as intrinsically no more or less God that you or I – except that he was more transparent to God’s Spirit than most of us – but that actually we all have the potential to be the same as Jesus. In fact, we could be his twin – which in Aramaic is Thomas. Thomas was a nickname that reflected his theological views. His actual real name was Judas – though as the Gnostic gospels are quick to note – “not Iscariot”. For the opponents of the catholics the main problem of the world was not sin as such but ignorance and Jesus brought enlightenment.  Authority and power was not vested in a small hierarchical male elite but was diffuse and rested an whoever manifested the fruits of the Spirit.

So you see knowing too much has its downside. How do you preach about the resurrection in these circumstances? I gave a strong hint in my Easter day sermon when I talked about the Spirit of God being alive and active and working though his children – the church.

You know my favourite gospel that related the truths of the resurrection? It is Mark’s gospel.

Why? Because he says absolutely nothing about it. There are no appearances in Mark. His gospel ends with the words “for they were afraid”. 

Mark says nothing but to me, in that space he says everything.

The embarrassed church fabricated an ending and attached it to Mark’s actual ending because they thought it was incomplete.

Yes , but it was incomplete, but is was incomplete for a reason. Because the next chapter of Mark’s gospel is not to be written in words on a page – the next chapter is written in the lives of his followers. His ending is deliberate.

You, we, are the next chapter of Mark’s gospel. We are the resurrection. What are we going to do with it – how are we going to live it? I know the responsibility is almost too much to bear and as Mark says....for they were afraid........ But we are writing it, so how the story develops  is up to us.

Amen.

Mary Magdalene & The gardener

At the good Friday service I mused why it was that we all can identify so much more easily with the cross than with the resurrection – and in truth it isn’t hard to see why.

We are all acquainted with grief, suffering and death. It is a part and parcel of life. When Jesus uttered those words from the cross “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” we can relate to that instantly. We so often can feel forsaken, forgotten, unloved. For some of us, especially if they are used to constant pain I’m sure it can feel as if we are permanently nailed to a cross.

So what is the resurrection? Well i could just talk about the promise of life beyond death.  I am not saying that is wrong. On the contrary I believe it to be true that our lives are drawn against an infinite horizon. I don’t believe we come from nothing and go to nothing. I believe we come from something and go on to something else.

But how does that fact work for us and change anything for us in our lives now which so often  have their fair share of tragedies.

Because I think it is true to say that the resurrection for most of us is either just a historical event that happened to Jesus 2000 years  ago or else it is a future event that might be waiting for us when we die. Either way it’s power to change the present is very limited.

When John talks of eternal life he means neither of those options – he means eternal life as a transforming quality of life that we can enjoy in the present. That quality of life feeds off the resurrection and uses it as fuel for the transforming of our perspectives and expectations.  

True resurrection, if it is to have any power at all to transform our lives has to be experienced in the blood and guts of everyday life.

Mary Magdalene meeting Jesus after he had died, yet in a form that she didn’t immediately recognise, I believe is a metaphor for meeting the Spirit of God in and through the stuff of ordinary life. I happen to like the thought which actually only came to me yesterday, that actually Mary didn’t recognise Jesus at first – thinking it was the gardener for a very good reason. It was the gardener that Mary met – but Jesus spoke through him. She recognised the Spirit of God working through the ordinary.

That shouldn’t be so surprising to a Christian. We ask every Sunday that we recognise God in a piece of bread and a sip of wine, in a handshake, in a community. It is a commonplace of Christian theology that we, the people in this church are the body of Christ. Look at the people around you – on your left and on your right, in front and behind you.

What do you see? A bunch of disparate individuals who happen to be sitting in the same building at the same time? Or do you see people made in the image and likeness of God? Do you recognise Christ’s body and hear his voice through them as Mary saw and heard Jesus through the gardener?

Brother sister  let me serve you, let me be as Christ to you – is radical Christianity that dares to believe what is hinted at in the Bible that the divine is living and active in the world now and God can come to you through any one of us.

One of the sadnesses of life is that most of us go through life without being truly blessed. Blessing, to speak well of, is fundamental to human well being. To be loved, praised, appreciated in a non-exploitative way. To be told you are loved, appreciated, and praised for being a wonderful human being just as you are by another human being is a blessing. We all need to be blessed. But to be unblessed is the normal lot of most of us.

For resurrection to be felt, to be experienced in the here and now we need the blessing of others. We need to hear the words that Jesus heard at his baptism “You are my child, the beloved, with you I am well pleased”. And we hear and experience those words through other people.

You can be the voice of God for others today – you can be a blessing for someone else – you can help unlock the potential of the resurrection in someone’s life. At the peace we say “Peace be with you”. Through repetition we can become inured to it – but don’t take it lightly. When we come to the peace – actually look at the person you are talking to – and mean it.

You can do God’s work today.

You can do God’s work any day.

Amen.