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.

Don't miss the boat.

Mary took a pound of perfume worth a year’s wages, anointed Jesus’ feet and wiped them clean with her hair.

With such a magnanimous gesture she left no room for doubt as to how she felt about Jesus and as such it is a beautiful moment. Her actions spoke much louder than any words she could have used.

The perfume was meant for his burial but she couldn’t wait until then, she wanted to show her feelings now while Jesus was still with them.

Doing and saying things while your loved ones are still with you is something we all put off all too frequently.

I suspect all of us, me included, can recall with regret all the things we  could have said and should have said, things we could and should have done for people while they were still with us, but the moment never seemed right or we were too buttoned up and embarrassed to do or say anything.

So while we may have regrets about those things, there is nothing we can do about that now because those occasions are in the past and cannot be changed.

We can resolve to do and say these things in the near future. “We’ll say it tomorrow” we tell ourselves but in reality tomorrow never comes.  It just avoids grasping the nettle.

Men in particular because of social conditioning as much as anything and a certain British reticence have the greatest difficulty in telling someone that they love them. We hope the other person will guess from our actions, just like Mary when she anointed Mary’s feet, though our actions are usually rather more mundane than that but I’m sure no less full of meaning.

I’ll bet there are a lot of people in all our lives who have never heard us express our deeper feelings for them, and perhaps never will because I’m not suggesting for a second that it is easy.

But a little courage goes a long way. The courage to lift the phone and talk to someone and establish contact after a long break or pointless argument. The courage to say “I love you” to someone who is so close to you that you hope they’ll already know that; and many do of course, but to hear it leaves no doubt.

The point is that Mary did what she did because she knew there wasn’t much time left. We always mistakenly think there is always plenty of time. But we never know what is just around the corner. We don’t know what tomorrow will bring, so by far the best option is to live in the present and do it or say now because you might not get another chance. Ever.

Mothering Sunday

The most primal relationship we ever have is with our mothers. At one level this is absolutely obvious.

Although conception takes two it is your mother who carries you, and feeds you for nine months, and it is your mother who brings you into this world, and even today it is mostly still our mothers who mostly takes the lion’s share of the feeding and rearing of us.

Having been physically connected for nine months -your life being completely dependent on your mother’s life - it seems natural (all other things being equal) that the bond with your mother is going to be one of the most important, if not the most important relationships of your entire life.

Before we get too dewy eyed we all know that not all mothers are perfect, and while the relationship will always be significant it may also be very difficult to manage.

But difficulties don’t alter the fact of the uniqueness and closeness of our relationship to our mothers.     

Now it is widely known that Jesus had some very harsh things to say about family ties, but what he said what he said talked of a radical extending of love that broke through the barriers of blood ties.

What Jesus was concerned about was that that very closeness of family ties didn’t become an exclusive bond that excludes all others. In the harsh things Jesus says concerning family ties the thrust of what he means is that those extremely close ties that we enjoy with our families should not be reserved exclusively for other members of our families but should be extended to include others outside of our blood relations.

There is no evidence in the New Testament for anything resembling “Christian family values” but there is  a sense that those close familial bonds of affection and service that are implicit should also be the way we relate to the wider human family. Rather than downplaying the best traits of normal  family  life of loyalty love and devotion Jesus advocates not loosening them but extending them.

This is the meaning of that poignant story when Jesus on the cross sees his mother standing there next to a young disciple called John and he tells them. “Woman here is your son” and then turning to the disciple says “Here is your mother”.

Spreading the love around, not keeping it for certain favoured inner circle is what Jesus wanted.

He encouraged us to think of God as a parent – in familial terms for a reason. For if God is our Father and mother, then we are all brothers and sisters – members of the same family, and as family members of the same family that means anyone here is due from me the same love and respect as my blood brother and sister.

Of course the analogy doesn’t stop there. Brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers don’t always get on. Sometimes families can be dysfunctional. That is exactly the same as in church as well but  even when we don’t get on, even when things get really bad – they are still “family” at the end of the day – and that is the same for all of our relationships in this model. Often we don’t like each other – but we are still commanded to love one another. And as I never tire of saying – Love is the absolute core of the Christian faith.  When all else fails – I believe in Love. And that is what we are celebrating here today.

The responsibility is ours

I think I can paraphrase this bit of prose from Luke quite succinctly like this;

Don’t worry about how sinful or otherwise other people might be. Sort your own life out. Your life is the only one you have direct control over.

Take responsibility for your own being and standing before God. The last  little parable of the fig tree  Jesus uses to emphasise what he says suggests there is always time to change and bear fruit but that time won’t last forever because eventually the fig tree will be cut down. Of course in the natural course of things we will die.

Nurturing our spiritual lives is what Jesus is alluding to when he talks about putting manure around the tree.

The fig tree is used in the Bible as a symbol  of the people of Israel, and of course  they always thought more collectively than we instinctively do but taking into account our more individualistic frame of mind I invite you to think of yourself as the fig tree or actually as any fruit tree you like.

Close your eyes and Imagine yourself as any kind of fruit tree. What state are you in?

Are you flourishing? Are you well watered, have you basked in the light, has your tree been pollinated? Will you produce lots of blossom that will produce lots of apples or pears or figs or whatever?

Or is the ground your tree in standing in poor ground, did the rains fail to come, the sun not shine, were you not well fed and watered so your crop will be a bit miserable.

Taking responsibility for the growth of our own tree is a spiritual task that only we can do for ourselves.

Part of that nurture will be coming to church on a Sunday. Part will be time spent in contemplation meditation or prayer. Part will be in taking theology seriously. Theology means just “God talk”. Who is God, what is God, what is the essential nature and character of the divine. Learning and discussing in a more structured and intellectual level is also a constituent part. Does it make any sense at all? Can you defend your faith publically?

The responsibility for each of us precious plants to blossom and grow is primarily our own responsibility  but naturally there is always a communal aspect in Christianity. We, each of us has a responsibility to make this space and this community(the church) fertile ground where a person can set down roots and grow. Our communal responsibility is to hold and accept and offer an open space where a person can freely explore their own way of being in the light of God.

To be held in community is a vital human need which when neglected causes something inside to atrophy and sometimes even die and people can turn in on themselves.

To stop that happening, to provide fertile ground for all of our journeys  the best place to start is as an individual taking responsibility for our own spiritual development and then also realising  our part in our collective responsibility to build a community worthy of the name.

All change

There is a story, probably apocryphal, of a priest asking a group of children what a saint was. One of the children pointed at the stained glass windows and said. “They’re the people the light shines through” which I’ve always thought was rather lovely.

That is the way I’d describe what was happening in this story, now known as the Transfiguration of Jesus when his face and his clothes shone dazzling white.

In order to ram home the point of the closeness and intimacy Jesus enjoyed with God the story is set on a high place. High places were always thought to be especially Holy places in those days. Then another metaphor for God is employed – a cloud – envelops them and then the cloud representing God speaks and repeats the form of words Jesus heard at his baptism “This is my beloved Son – listen to him”

As I have said before, the presence of Moses and Elijah is there to show the Jews that followers of Jesus saw him as the culmination, the zenith of everything their religion had been hoping for.

I always thought that transformation was a central goal of all religion – that in putting ourselves in God’s way, as we are doing here this morning – perceptible change would happen. When I was at Mirfield,  and we knew which was to be our first parish we’d go to after training – our vicars where we were going to serve came up to visit us.

I always remember Brian Sharp, vicar of St. John’s Margate asking me. “What do you expect to see in your ministry?” I said “Transformation”. He then said in his deadpan way “You are going to be very disappointed”. And he was right.

Not only in my ministry but in me as well. Transformation, the changing of habits, becoming kinder, more loving, braver, bolder, just doesn’t happen overnight.

Change does happen, but it is slow, steady, almost imperceptible. Change comes gradually. It is bolstered and encouraged by regular practice. Coming close to God, the source of that light, is what we are doing in church. It is what we do when we pray and meditate.

Ironically the biggest and fastest change in my experience comes through trauma;  death, disease, divorce. It appears that we have to die a bit inside before we can grow again, this time a little differently. The central Christian motif of death and resurrection couldn’t be truer in this case. The trouble is that we have to die inside first before we eventually grow the fruits of resurrection, and even then it may be slow and may indeed never happen.

That is not to say that there are not people who do let the light shine through in their lives a little more than others. I often hear people talk of Peggy Conway in those kinds of terms, who I have never met but obviously left a deep impression on all who know her and on Tuesday I conducted the funeral service of Nancy Deas, and Maureen spoke of Nancy in just those terms.

Unusually for a funeral we didn’t have the usual readings about death – we had Paul’s hymn to love – 1 Corinthians 13. Maureen also linked that to something else Paul wrote about the fruits of the Spirit.  A list, not exhaustive, of what our characters grow into, how we change when we let more of the light of God shine through our lives    Paul writes “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,  and self-control”

And of course Jesus said. “By our fruits will we be known”. 

The trouble is, that when we compare our own lives with that impressive list the outcome could be depressing, when we  see where we don’t measure up. I’m sure my life is pretty spare of most of the things on that list.

That is where the other , and actually the most important Christian understanding of God is so important. We believe that even when we don’t measure up – God loves us unconditionally anyway. That idea is called GRACE.

No, perhaps we don’t measure up. Perhaps we never will, though we want to. That is why we continually put ourselves in God’s way by coming together to commune with the divine and each other Sunday by Sunday.

Transformation does occur. But it is slow and sometimes brittle and it relies on practice. And as I say, often the most dramatic change occurs through trauma – but it does happen.

The way to personal growth is to bask in God’s unconditional love for you. To know that you are infinitely loved  is the greatest and most fertile soil you can have to blossom and grow.

But we can often forget that simple fact, as I often do myself. We need reminding often.

We are infinitely loved.

The shock of the new

That Luke in his story is confused in his description of what is going on – he confuses  two Jewish customs – The purification of Mary and the presentation of a first-born male – is of no real interest to me.

That is all just a preamble anyway whose function is simply to place the infant Jesus in the Temple so that Luke can explain the real thrust of the story. It doesn’t really matter how he got there – it is more the fact that he was in the Temple. So we come to the real meat of the story  - the encounters with Simeon and Anna.

This might sound a bit harsh but what we heard read today is actually a marketing strategy that failed.  It failed to reach and convince its target audience – the Jews.

Just as the figure of John the Baptist was supposed to be representative of the entire prophetic tradition of Israel that was pointing to Jesus as the Messiah, so the story of Simeon and Anna are, in a similar way supposed to represent the Holy and wise sages of ancient Israel.  Their function too was to point to Jesus and say “this child is the one we have been looking for all our lives, the one who is going to redeem Israel.”

The reason for these stories is that the nascent Christian movement was desperately trying to convince their fellow Jews (and Christianity at first was a small sect within Judaism) that Jesus was no bolt from the blue, no wild eyed radical with no back story or provenance. However new and decisive Jesus was, he was essentially, for Jesus’ Jewish supporters, the culmination, the climax of Jewish religion. There was continuity with the past and everything that had gone before.  This was essential to establish because human beings distrust new things. They prefer, especially in religion to imagine continuity with what has gone before. The tightrope they were treading was also trying to express the universality of the Jesus way with the closed promises to a “chosen” people.

“A light for revelation to the gentiles and for glory to your people Israel” (V. 32)

But of course this failed in a quite spectacular way. Judaism was not convinced in the slightest. Judaism continued in its own way and developed into the vibrant modern day religion that it is today and within a generation Christianity became an almost entirely separate gentile (non Jewish) religion.

The tragedy is that the relationship between the two faiths became increasingly poisonous and paved the way for two thousand years of hatred, discrimination and pogroms. When we hear people like the new Egyptian leader Mohammed Morsi who was recorded making comments comparing Jews to pigs and monkeys or the rhetoric of Iran, we understandably baulk, but let us not forget that the planned extermination of Jewry did not take place in Islamic lands, but in the heart of Christian Europe just over  70 years ago.

The catholic church’s Good Friday liturgy referred to “Perfidious Jews” until very recently and in a return to Latin rites have reared their head again.

So to return to the story itself; to the audience it was actually aimed at, this story and others like it in the New Testament were dramatic failures.  So is there anything we can draw from it at all?

For me, the most striking thing to draw out is the deep seated need in human beings for continuity which provides a kind of solidity.  For the majority of Jews, Jesus couldn’t be true in his own right – only in the context of the established religion. We instinctively seem to distrust new things. We get comfort when something is old. It seems to convey comfort and time honoured truth. That is why people are very conservative and traditionally minded, especially in religious terms.

If its old it must be true!  We get comfort from tradition, from old buildings, from old hymns. You will hear people wax lyrical about walls steeped in prayer, or lose themselves in ancient mystical sites like Stonehenge.

People get comfort from the Book of Common Prayer, because it is old and uses arcane English, whilst perhaps missing the fact that when it was written it was a radical expression of Protestantism written in the common language of the day. Everything old and venerated was once bold and new!

But there is a deeper spiritual point I want to make here. All of this is a grasping after something  that appears permanent or at least has an air of permanence about it  (and we all do it), I submit that this is always a search for a deeper reality  that is God

Because here’s the rub. Nothing is permanent in the created universe. Everything is in a permanent state of flux. All the things we use to convey an air of permanence are in themselves in a constant state of change. Not only will this church one day not be here, but neither will the earth on which it stands. Our search for permanence, our search for solid ground, is partially sated by “things”, but in reality they are all just substitutes for the search for God.

The problem is that God is indescribable, ineffable, a true mystery that we struggle to comprehend and apprehend. But we can comprehend things like books, wonderful words, ancient buildings, people, so we fix our gaze on them.

There is nothing wrong with that in principle. It is only a problem if we mistake and confuse that which is transient and impermanent with the eternal mystery that we call God – the true depth of all things.

 In what is for me the most helpful part of this religion we call Christianity is that impermanent things can be vehicles for communion with God, because the divine indwells all things. That is the underlying logic of all sacraments – that physical things can convey God.  Pernickity Western Christianity, true to form, wanting to neatly package God tried to name and list them. Baptism, eucharist etc. As official ways of meeting God through things. Thank goodness for Orthodoxy who saw the madness in that and said – why list them. The whole world is aglow with the glory of God and God can come to you through anything and everything.

When for example we pray and light a candle, that most beautiful image and icon of our prayers , this ancient symbol touches something very deep. As a sign it seeks to bypass all that is transient and join our collective prayers together  at a deeper level, the level at which we are all joined together, with each other, with the candle, and with the essence of all those people we are praying for, subsisting in the wholeness that is God.

A mystical communion that joins the physical with the spiritual, the living and the dead, using a beautiful physical symbol to embody a deeper spiritual reality.   In that sense tradition is magical. It has the power to move and connect us with the deepest parts of ourselves .  All things, ancient churches and liturgies and hymns, ancient mystical sites, symbols like candles or flowing water, dramatic landscapes, or the mundane yet magical miracle of childbirth or the beauty of a tree or a flower can all move us towards the oneness of the divine, so long as we don’t see all of those things as having a power of their own separate from the divine. That, in the Bible is called idolatry. God is the  mysterious depth within all the impermanent things that we use to commune with the divine.