Sermon for Evensong on the 3rd Sunday after Easter, 12th May 2019

Psalm 114, In exitu Israel, Isaiah 63:7-14, Luke 24:36-49 – see http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=424470667

‘The mountains skipped like rams: and the little hills like young sheep’.

Today is a very sheepy day in the church. Lots of sheep. The Roman Catholics call it Good Shepherd Sunday – and we have followed their nice idea this morning here at St Mary’s.This morning in the Gospel of John, Jesus ticked off the Jews who were clamouring to know if he was the Messiah they were expecting; he ticked them off by saying that, even if he was, they wouldn’t realise: because they weren’t from his flock. He said, ‘But ye believe not, because ye are not of my sheep, ..…

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me:

And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish’. [John 10]

The other readings prescribed in the Lectionary this morning included the story of Noah’s Ark; ‘The animals went in two by two; the elephant and the kangaroo’. And the sheep, of course. And there is a piece from Revelation which is a vision of a great multitude standing before the throne of God and ‘before the Lamb’. Behold the Lamb of God.

And in other parts of the Bible there is the parable of the lost sheep, and Jesus’ rather enigmatic saying to Peter, when, in response to Peter’s three denials of Jesus earlier, he had asked Peter three times how much he loved him, and, after Peter had assured him he did, Jesus answered each time, ‘Feed my lambs’, or, ‘Tend my sheep’ [John 21:15-18]. And there is the vision of the Last Judgement in Matthew 25, with Jesus separating people into two groups, ‘as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats’.

Sheep are good and goats are bad, according to this. It reflects the Jewish idea of the scapegoat, sacramentally loading the sins of some people on to the back of some poor goat, which is then cut loose to roam in the desert till it dies of hunger and thirst.

I’m sure you can think of other sheep references. The idea of a sacrificial animal, a scapegoat, is a very old one in Judaism. Actually, of course, they seem to have mixed up sheep and goats quite a lot. The ‘lamb of God’, the sacrificial lamb, is effectively a scapegoat, a goat: the idea is that Jesus is that scapegoat, that, as we say, in the Prayer of Consecration in the Communion service (page 255 in your Prayer Books), he ‘made there (by his one oblation of himself once offered) a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world’.

The vision of the New Jerusalem which our Old Testament lesson from Isaiah shows, is in line with this.

‘Surely they are my people, children that will not lie: so he was their Saviour.

In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them: in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; and he bare them, and carried them all the days of old’ (Isaiah 63.8-9).

Then the prophet recalls the story of the Exodus from Egypt. God must have been infinitely powerful, in order to part the waters of the Red Sea and let the Israelites pass through on dry land. It is the same thing that our Psalm, Psalm 114, celebrates. ‘When Israel came out of Egypt’. All these miraculous things happened. The sea ‘saw that, and fled’; ‘The mountains skipped like rams: and the little hills like young sheep’.

All this is meant to prepare us for the greatest miracle of all, Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. So when he appears to the disciples in Luke’s account, he stresses that what has happened to him is just as it was foretold by the Jewish prophets. The author of the Gospel, Luke, is usually taken to be a doctor – St Paul described him as (Col. 4:14), ‘the beloved physician’. He is a scientist; his Gospel tends to look for objective facts as well as metaphysical theology. So here, in this resurrection appearance, Jesus does a re-run of the Doubting Thomas story. See me, touch me, feel me. I am not a ‘spirit’, not a ghost.

And there’s this rather curious eating ‘broiled’ fish and, if you can believe it, ‘honeycomb’. You remember, the Gospel says, ‘And they gave him a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb. And he took it, and did eat before them.’ Now the ‘broil’ isn’t some American style of cooking, but just another word for being cooked. American English sometimes preserves much older English words than are now current in English English. The ‘honeycomb’, by the way, isn’t evidence of Jesus liking combinations of flavours which even Heston Blumenthal might find challenging – fish and honey sounds a disgusting combination – but rather it’s a rare example where the Authorised Version of the Bible has been led astray by what was presumably a corrupted manuscript. They translated as if it was μελου – ‘of honey’, as if it had had an ‘L’, instead of the better reading, μερου,’R’, ‘of a piece’, ‘of a piece of fish’. There’s just fish, no honey.

But still, he ate it. So let’s assume we can say that, astonishing as it was to see, it happened. But is it too contrary to ask, ‘So what?’ If we had been there, what would we have made of seeing Jesus brought back to life? Would we have picked up on the idea that he had offered himself as some kind of human sacrifice? And if he had, what was the purpose of the sacrifice?

If we follow the theology of Isaiah, the mechanism, how it works, is what is called ‘substitutionary atonement’. Greater love hath no man – and here Jesus is showing his love for us by accepting, or even bringing on himself, punishment which we, not he, deserved. He was offering himself to make up for our sins, to atone for them, to propitiate – those two last words you will recognise from services and hymns. Atoning for our sins; for ‘he is the propitiation for our sins’ (1 John 2:1; in the ‘Comfortable Words’, p.252 in your Prayer Books). The idea is one of ransom. God’s wrath has been bought off.

Does that square with how you think of God? Do you – do we – seriously think, these days, that God is so threatening? It seems to me that one would have to impute some characteristics to God that I doubt whether we could justify. Granted there are people who claim to have conversations with God, perhaps in the way the Old Testament prophets like Isaiah said they did. God ‘spoke through’ the prophets. But in Jesus, the prophecies were fulfilled: there were no more prophets.

What about the ‘sin’ that we are said to need to ‘propitiate’? What is it? Obviously, some sins are bad actions, breaches of the Ten Commandments – thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal. But we say now that sin is wider than just doing bad things – which could be dealt with as crimes, without bringing God into it, after all.

Sin, we say, is whatever separates us from God. So if God is love, the ultimate positive, hatred is sin. If God commands us to love our neighbour, and we wage war upon him instead, that is sin. But what is God’s reaction? Is there an actual judgement? Do the sheep go up and goats down? And if so, what was Jesus doing?

In the great last judgment at the end of St Matthew’s Gospel, when the sheep and the goats are being separated out, Jesus the Judge Eternal was bringing another angle on God. ‘Inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these, ye did it unto to me’. You didn’t just turn your back on a starving man; you turned your back on Jesus, on God. Perhaps that’s how he takes our place, in some sense.

The great French philosopher and founder of the network of communities where people with learning difficulties and ‘normal’ people live together, called L’Arche, (in English, the Ark), Jean Vanier, who has just died at the age of 90. On the radio this morning someone quoted him as saying, ‘It doesn’t matter whether you believe in God: just believe in love’. I think that Jean Vanier meant that God is love. God showed that love for mankind by sending Jesus to live as a man here with us. In that he brought us closer to God, in showing us true love, Jesus conquered the power of sin. Perhaps this, rather than the idea of ransom, of human sacrifice, is what it means that Jesus offers ‘propitiation’ for sin.

Which is it? I don’t think that I can give you a neat resolution, a pat explanation, of this. Theologians from the early fathers through Thomas Aquinas and the Reformation scholars to the moderns like Richard Swinburne [Richard Swinburne 1989, Responsibility and Atonement, Oxford, OUP] have all wrestled with the meaning of what Jesus did – or what happened to Jesus, and why. It is, if nothing else, a demonstration of power, infinite power. No wonder that the ‘mountains skipped like rams’. But can we still feel it? We need to keep our eyes open.

Bible readings: see https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=592871225

What must it feel like to be wrongly, unjustly, accused? What must Andrew Malkinson have felt as he was condemned for a terrible crime and then, no doubt, treated in prison, for 17 years, as though he had done that terrible crime, a terrible rape? What must it have felt like to be one of the poor postmasters and postmistresses accused of stealing from the till, sometimes thousands and thousands of pounds? Being up against a computer system – you know, computers do all our sums today – because they never get things wrong, do they? So all the people who used to come into your post office start to look at you differently – especially if you are not a white person, or if you have come from another country. ‘The till is short by £20,000.’ Have you got £20,000 saved up so you can make up the shortfall? How can you be sure that it isn’t going to happen again even if you do make up the shortage now? Think of the shame. What exactly am I supposed to have done wrong? “Call and I will answer; let me speak and I will let you reply to me. How many are my iniquities and my sins? Let me know my transgressions and my sin.“ It’s what Job was saying.

Job was a good man with a happy family, prosperous. Everybody liked him and respected him, but in heaven, Satan said to God, “Even though Job is a good man, and he worships you, and does everything that you command him to do, I can make him curse you.” God said that he didn’t think that would be the case, but Job would remain faithful, and he allowed Satan to put Job to the test. Terrible things happened to Job. He suffered from a plague of boils all over his skin. He lost his wealth. He lost his family. But he still sent his prayers, and looked to the Lord to save him. His three friends, Job’s ‘comforters’, came along, and they didn’t really give him any comfort, they didn’t show themselves to be real friends, because they justified all the terrible things that had happened to Job, on the grounds that he had sinned, he had brought his misfortune on himself. But still, he knew he was innocent and he clung on to his trust in God.

Job’s prayer, that we had as our first lesson, must be the sort of thing that you would expect that someone in Andrew Malkinson or any of the postmasters’, positions would be likely to say, if they were praying for relief from their terrible suffering, relief from the wrongful accusations.

How could a good, kindly, God allow such things to happen? That’s what the book of Job is all about. Ultimately, God is there for Job and Job is rescued from all his trials and troubles, his prayers are answered. But you must know that the book of Job is not a history book. It isn’t a story of something that actually happened, like the story of Andrew Malkinson or the postmasters. It’s a roman à clef, a story with a purpose.

The letter to the Hebrews, too, isn’t a news report, or a bulletin ‘From Our Own Correspondent’. It’s supposed to have been written by St Paul, but scholars think that it probably wasn’t, although it was written by someone who wrote just as well as St Paul, perhaps someone who had learned from him. The letter to the Hebrews is really an extended sermon. The idea is that it goes through a lot of biblical references, relating them to current life and the life of Jesus, and then exhorting the people that have been written to, to live according to the teachings which had been illustrated. It does that in 13 chapters. We are looking at the second chapter, and you might well think that this is another take on the issues which the book of Job addresses. It’s not about the suffering of one man as a result of the devil and how or whether God allows that suffering to take place, but the Letter to the Hebrews is about Jesus, who was divine, but who was at the same time fully human. We have this slightly mysterious reference to angels, a quote from Psalm 8,

What are human beings that you are mindful of them, or mortals that you care for them?

You have made them for a little while lower than the angels,

And then the letter goes on to say that Jesus, who also for a little while was made lower than the angels, so he was fully human, is now crowned with glory and honour, because he died: ‘so that by the grace of God, he might taste death for everyone.’

What an extraordinary thing to say: ‘…so, that by the grace of God, he might taste death for everyone’! You could probably settle in for at least an hour’s worth of theological explanation about that one sentence – but I hasten to reassure you that I’m not going to inflict it on you, even if I were capable of it!

But immediately, you’ll think that some of those words just don’t fit. How can God’s grace, which presumably is something nice, something welcome, something good and pleasant, involve ‘tasting death’ as though it was some kind of delicacy instead of actually being strung up in agony on the cross for three hours and dying? That doesn’t seem to me to be a tasting experience. What on earth is that all meant to signify? It’s bringing home the point that Jesus was a man just as much as he was divine. He was fully man, and as a man he was subject to mortality. As God, he was immortal, not bounded by space and time at all. He was there before the world began, if we can understand that: even with Stephen Hawking’s eleven different dimensions, I think it is really difficult. But at the end of his life, as a man, Jesus died, so in that sense, he tasted death. He had the same experience as a man. He was a man. But he was also divine. ‘This is my Son, the beloved’. So I suppose we can say that the grace of God there, in Jesus’ death, is the permission of God, God allowing it to happen.

That grace is also the grace, the gift, referred to in St John’s Gospel chapter 3, verse 16, for ‘God, so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ The ultimate gift: the ultimate grace.

You might think that God didn’t care for the world, that he didn’t care for us, if you look at all these terrible injustices: Andrew Malkinson, the postmasters, Windrush, all the natural disasters – how can we say that God is good and how can we say that God cares for us? As the letter to the Hebrew says, it is the fact of Jesus, what he represented, what he represents in our lives today. That is our assurance of faith. It is because God gave us his only son, and because Jesus rose again from the dead, that we can have the sure and certain hope of eternal life, of the resurrection to eternal life and the time to come.

I am very conscious of the fact that I’ve left a lot of loose ends. The idea of God ‘incarnate’, in the form of a man, is a huge topic, literally beyond our understanding. Some of the easy stuff, like angels, I think I can safely leave you to work out.

The name, ‘angel’, means a messenger; and we do pray sometimes for God’s holy angels to watch over us, keep an eye on us and look after us, perhaps when we are asleep.

In the letter to the Hebrews, it looks as though angels have some kind of status between human and divine. I’m pretty sure, though, that I’ve never actually met one and I’m not really sure what an angel would look like.

But on the other hand, just as we often pray as the people of God to be God’s eyes and ears and hands in his work on earth, so maybe in certain circumstances, we can be his angels too.

But then, back to this question why God allows there to be suffering, and if so, how we can square that with our understanding of him as a loving God. There’s this idea that somehow suffering is a good thing. St Paul said, in his letter to the Romans, chapter 5, ‘We glory in our suffering because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.’ Even so, Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane prayed not to be tested to destruction – ‘Take this cup away from me.’ Indeed in Jesus’s own prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, we say, ‘lead us not into temptation’, which is sometimes translated as the ‘time of trial’. Why would a loving God inflict something like that on us? Maybe we can understand suffering as being like the processes of evolution, the survival of the fittest, and not something actively willed upon us.

The other thing I haven’t really talked about is at the end of the passage in chapter 2 of Hebrews, where Jesus’s role as a priest is dealt with. A priest in ancient Israel was someone who stood between the people and God, who uniquely had the ability to be in the presence of God, without being destroyed in the process, and who made sacrifices to God as part of the worship. In the letter to the Hebrews the idea is that Jesus, as a priest of the order of Melchizedek, isn’t somehow separate from his congregation, but rather he is part of it. It is a priesthood of all believers. He is one of us.

The sacrifice mentioned, the atonement, is the Jewish idea of making a sacrifice to placate God, to make up for sins, and failures to follow God’s commandments. We need to think very hard what the letter to the Hebrews means when it says that Jesus was a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God ‘to make a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people’. Perhaps the answer is the next sentence. “Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, He is able to help those who are being tested.” So if we suffer, God suffers too, his shares our sufferings. ‘Tears and smiles like us he knew’.