Sermon for Evening Prayer for the Prayer Book Society, Guildford Branch, on Saturday 12th March 2016 at the Founders’ Chapel, Charterhouse Jeremiah 20:7-18, John 11:17-27

Jeremiah said,
Wherefore came I forth out of the womb to see labour and sorrow, that my days should be consumed with shame? (Jer.20:18)

What happened to the covenant, the special relationship between the Lord’s chosen people and their God? They are held captive, exiles in Babylon. Psalm 137: By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept.

It was a time of sad reflection. Had their God abandoned them? What would look like an exile from the Promised Land today? It’s difficult to empathise with the exiles in the Old Testament, not only because there’s a gap of nearly 3,000 years, but also because we aren’t in exile: in fact, we are very much at home. In Surrey we can almost pretend that we are in the Promised Land.

But does it mean that we can’t feel something of what Jeremiah was crying out against? Is the whole world like the Promised Land today? It’s sad, but it’s not. There are even parallels with the mass exile of the chosen people, of the Jews, in the current mass migration and refugee exodus from Syria and other troubled parts of the Middle East and Africa.

The Babylon into which the Jewish exiles went was, just as we are, relatively stable and affluent. But it didn’t feel that way. The mere fact of being in exile was a bitter fate.

And then we have heard, in our second lesson, the most complete answer to such a time of despair. If the logical implication of an imperfect life, a life of suffering, is its eventual death, then victory over death is its antidote, the confirmation that the suffering was not in vain.

Lazarus has died. Both his sisters, Mary and Martha, are distressed. Jesus doesn’t arrive until Lazarus has been dead for four whole days.

Both sisters clearly believe that, if Jesus had been there in time, he would have been able to stop Lazarus dying. That in itself is a remarkable thing to believe: but Jesus had demonstrated amazing powers of healing already.

And indeed, even though Lazarus has been walled up in the tomb for four days, Jesus calls him out, and Lazarus comes back to life.

But you know all this. What has it got to do with us in Guildford Diocese today, enthusiasts for the BCP as we are?

Jeremiah is all about a people who had abandoned their covenant with God, had become separated from God, eventually literally: they were driven out of the Promised Land into exile after Nebuchadnezzar had captured Jerusalem for a second time in 587BC.

The story of the raising of Lazarus has a metaphorical significance (leaving aside the question exactly what happened), that it is one of the occasions when Jesus said ‘I am’ something. Here, ‘I am the resurrection and the life’. Death has no more power.

Jesus is God’s sign that we can come back from our spiritual exile. If we believe, we will no longer be separated from God, and we will have eternal life.

Can we know what happened? It’s striking that it’s made very clear that Lazarus had definitely died. Jesus knew that was the real position. Lazarus wasn’t just asleep. Nevertheless Jesus delayed going to him. When he finally arrived, Lazarus had been in the tomb for four days. The body would have begun to decay, and to smell. Lazarus was emphatically dead; but equally emphatically, we are told that he came alive again out of the tomb. Lazarus was among the guests at the dinner party for Jesus where Mary anointed Jesus’ feet with pure nard. Lazarus was definitely alive. We have to understand it as best we can.

You might think that such a message, or such a phenomenon, would have been a cause for universal rejoicing. But it wasn’t. The Pharisees said among themselves, ‘If we let him thus alone, men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation’. The Romans had devolved to the Jews the day-to-day government of Palestine. If the people, the Jews, honoured Jesus rather than the Chief Priest and the Pharisees, the Romans might take away from the Pharisees the job of administration of the country.

I have to observe that this important passage in the lead up to Christ’s passion looks rather artificial, if it’s meant to be an eyewitness account. If Jesus had indeed raised a man, who had died and been in the tomb for four days, back to life, surely what the Romans might or might not do with the local government would seem to be of relatively minor importance. It does seem that what this story, of the raising of Lazarus, signifies, is much more important than just the minutiae of provincial government.

What Lazarus’ story really signifies, is that God is present with us. We are not alone, we are not separated. We’re no longer in exile.

Never mind what the Pharisees did: we can respond, we can respond to such a wonderful revelation, in several ways. The first is worship. This little congregation is gathered together because we want to uphold and support the use of the Prayer Book in worship: we think we will have better words with which to approach the Almighty, if we use the Book of Common Prayer.

And if that brings us together in fellowship, that’s good. ‘Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them’, (Matt. 18:20). We could say that the Prayer Book, for us, is a kind of conduit of God’s grace. As we meet together and worship, using Cranmer’s ancient and beautiful words, we pray for God’s grace.

Nothing we can do can earn that grace, that eternal salvation, but we have the assurance that if we believe and trust in Him, we will be saved, we will receive the grace of God.

And the way we will receive God’s grace will be through the Holy Spirit coming among us. How can we tell? How can we tell if the Holy Spirit has in fact, come among us?

Remember what St Paul wrote to the Galatians.
‘But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance;’ (Gal. 5:22-3). Our Lent reflection today should be whether we do exhibit those qualities – and how as Christians we are dealing with the opposite of the works of the Spirit, the works of the flesh.

A person called Jack Monroe Tweeted this week:

‘Does anyone else get overwhelmed?

….

Hope too much?

Calais, welfare reform, ESA, food banks.

My heart is just broken.’

ESA stands for employment and support allowance, the benefit which has replaced incapacity benefit. ESA is a much harder benefit to claim than incapacity benefit, primarily because the medical test – the work capability assessment – is very much harsher. The government has just announced that it is going to make it even harder for disabled people to claim this benefit, and thereby to save over £1billion – that is, £1billion will be taken away from the already reduced amount given to disabled people.

Incidentally, in my work as manager of a food bank, I recently came across a statistic, that over 2,000 people have died after being declared fit for work and denied disability benefit under this new regime. 2,000 people: fit for work: dead.

Where does that all fit in? Fit in with our salvation as Christians, I mean. What are our various churches doing? Are you happy about the cuts in benefits for disabled people? What about Calais? Are you following the Diocesan links to Guildford: People to People and the other charities coordinating help for the refugees? Perhaps we should have a PBS collection for Calais. What do you think? Let’s talk about it over tea in a minute or two.

The link that I’m trying to follow is that our love of the Prayer Book is fine, and very understandable, but it ought to be seen as something which leads us to God’s grace, grace in our worship. Worship which is just ‘having a nice time’ isn’t proper worship, and isn’t worthy of the Almighty. Let’s exhibit some of the fruits of the spirit as well.

Sermon for Mattins on the Second Sunday of Lent, 21st February 2016
Phil. 3:18-19 – ‘…they are the enemies of the cross of Christ:
Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.’

We had the first of our Lent groups this week. The one that I took part in was at the Catholic Church, Sacred Heart, in their new hall, which is almost as nice as St Mary’s Hall. This year our Lent groups are organised by Churches Together, which is the way it works every second year, and so we are joining together with members of all the other churches in Cobham and Stoke and Oxshott, which gives us an opportunity to compare notes on our various Christian beliefs and look at how we see things from our different points of view.

The course is about being a Christian in a secular world, and the first session offered us a number of instances where Christians might seem to be different, or at odds with, the secular world around them. The topics that the course material suggested we talk about included sex – whether a sex education course was right to suggest that regular sex was just like having five portions of fruit and veg a day: whether one should use condoms, for birth control or to prevent the spread of diseases – and euthanasia, or assisted dying. Issues of life and death.

The talks for the course include contributions from members of different churches. Clifford Longley, the well-known journalist, gives the Roman Catholic point of view, Rachel Lampard, who is a Methodist Local Preacher – which is the same as a Reader in the C of E – is giving the Protestant point of view; Archbishop John Sentamu starts the discussion and Bishop Graham Cray sums up at the end.

The topics were designed to elicit from everyone their various doctrinal differences, to try to get us to air our differences on these important moral questions, as between the various churches. For example, we were talking about abortion and birth control. Does the Catholic view on the point where life begins take precedence over the need, for example, to prevent AIDS or Zika by using condoms? Similar considerations might apply in relation to euthanasia. It depends on your view of the sanctity of human life; how human life works, and to what extent we might be interfering with God’s creation; you might think all these would be relevant considerations.

What was really interesting was that, in a group where there were representatives from St Andrew’s Oxshott, St Andrew’s Cobham, St Mary’s, Sacred Heart, and someone’s daughter, who confessed that she wasn’t currently going to church at all, it was actually quite difficult to get people to disagree. Everybody seemed to agree on a proposition, (which wasn’t in any of the notes), that ‘the church has too many rules’. ‘The church’, in that context, was everyone’s church. It didn’t matter what denomination it was; the suggestion was that all the churches were to some extent too bound by rules.

I thought that was very interesting. It seemed to me that it might be a reflection of something which I have noticed in other contexts, that we do seem to be shy of talking in terms of principles. Our allegiances seem to be determined as much by heredity and culture as by any kind of principled analysis and belief.

The point of this is that principles don’t seem to be that important to people; we are looking at almost tribal allegiances instead, I think. To some extent I think that that is what brings at least some of the Christians in this area together. Indeed I think it may be not just a local effect round here.

It may be that what brings us to church, or to a particular church, is a sense that it is familiar, it is what we’re used to. Our parents went to it: we were christened there, or married there. Our friends go there. Although we say, and sing, a lot of words, in the service, in the liturgy and in the hymns, we don’t necessarily take every word that seriously. 

People often talk about saying the Creed ‘with their fingers crossed’, for example. They mean that there are things we recite which they either don’t really understand, or even don’t actually believe. There are some very deep questions buried in our liturgy. What does it really mean that Jesus died ‘for our sins’? Do we still believe – if we ever did – in ‘substitutionary atonement’ – that somehow Jesus was a kind of ‘scapegoat’, punished in our place by God? How could a loving God do that?

But instead, we might say the Creed, knowing that there are bits of it which we don’t really subscribe to, precisely because it is a kind of membership subscription. We want to identify ourselves as Christians.

But then the question arises, what are the marks of a Christian? What are the basic defining characteristics of a Christian today? How do we mark ourselves off from secular society? Is it what we do or how we behave, or is it what we believe?

We sometimes hear people say that, where going to church is concerned, the process is not to ‘believe and then belong’, but the other way round: to belong and then to believe.

It might indeed be quite a challenge to start with the propositions in the Creed – Virgin Birth, sacrificial death and bodily Resurrection, for instance – if you’d never met any other Christians, and never seen the homely realities of church life. You don’t need theological sophistication in order to join the flower rota.

And indeed, unless you do engage with the theory, with the theology, it’s difficult to see how you could fall out with, or at least differ from, otherChristians in other denominations.

In our group of Anglicans and Roman Catholics, the group members didn’t split along denominational lines reflecting the supposed differences between our theological understandings, of what human life and death is, when it starts, and to what extent we can interfere with it: the members of the group didn’t fall into opposing camps over contraception or euthanasia, but rather regretted the fact that our different churches have different ‘rules’.

In one way, that’s great. There is undoubtedly more that unites us than keeps us apart. But is it clear what you need to sign up to, is there a minimum, core requirement, that defines us as Christians as opposed to humanists (who would agree with all aspects of Christian morality), or Moslems, or atheists?

And so we get back to ‘rules’ – or at least principles. ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth:..’ But what about contraception, and euthanasia, and gay marriage? My Lent group were seeming to suggest that they were relatively unimportant, just inconvenient ‘rules’ which perhaps the churches would do better without.

Theologians, for example Richard Hooker in the sixteenth century, in his debates with the Puritans, used the ancient Greek Stoics’ term αδιάφορα, ‘indifferent things’, ‘things which make no difference’, to identify ideas or rules which don’t affect the essential truths.

Jesus seemed to be all in favour of keeping things simple. In St Matthew chapter 22 [37-40] he said,

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. 

This is the first and great commandment. 

And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Immediately he seemed to have cut down the Ten Commandments to two. But remember, at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus also said,

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. (Matt. 5:17)

So who is to decide what matters, what is the hallmark of a Christian, and what makes no difference? Which is where we came in. We have to be careful to try to find out what God wants us to do, and to be, and not become like the people St Paul condemned as

‘…enemies of the cross of Christ:

Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.’
I’m looking forward to learning more in the next session of the Lent course. Do come along!

Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent, 14th February 2016
Romans 10:8-13, Luke 4:1-13

On my kitchen side there is a bottle of Waitrose own label Italian red wine ‘from Puglia’ half empty, and in the fridge there is a similarly half empty bottle of Denbies’ Surrey Gold. They are speaking to me every time I see them! Or rather, perhaps, they speak to me when the sun has gone over the yard-arm. (The yard-arm is a concept on which you may need expert naval advice from Godfrey!)

You see, I have decided to try to give up booze for Lent. The little voice speaking to me about my half-empty wine bottles is, you might say, the Devil. The Devil, tempting me.

As we embark on Lent, on the forty days before Easter, which reflect the forty days that Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, I want to review what it is that we are doing, and to try to answer the question, why? Why do we give things up in Lent? And in order to answer that, we need to know why Jesus was in the wilderness and what he was doing.

The first thing to say is that it seems impossible that Jesus actually spent 40 days without food or drink in the Sinai desert. If you are going to visit the fortress at Masada in the middle of the desert, the trip from Jerusalem has to start before daybreak so that you arrive before the sun has fully risen. After about 11am it’s so hot that it is not safe to be outside. If we are to believe the account in St Luke’s gospel (which is the same or similar to the account in St Matthew and St Mark), Jesus roamed about there, accompanied by the Devil, without any food or drink, for forty days.

It’s not just the logistics of living in a desert that make us realise that this is not a literal piece of history. Jesus was accompanied by the Devil, διαβολος, in Greek the ‘chucker’, the cosmic egg-thrower. But it’s clear enough what Jesus was going through, even if you don’t believe in a grinning but hornèd being. He personifies the temptations which Jesus faced.

Jesus has just been baptised by John in the river Jordan. The voice of God has appeared and has said, ‘This is my son, the beloved’. The Devil evidently didn’t hear this, as two of his temptations start, ‘If you are the son of God …’ If. But Jesus was ‘full of the Holy Spirit’. Jesus knows who he is. He doesn’t need to prove it. Indeed, he bats away the tempter with quotations from the Book of Deuteronomy – ‘It is written, ..’ and so on. He quotes back the Jewish Law, the Law of Moses, God’s commandments. But note that in each case what he quotes refers to God, not to himself: ‘Worship the Lord your God … Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ Does it – does it just refer to God? Doesn’t it refer to Jesus? Jesus is God, is what He is saying. The person you are tempting is God Himself.

We can contrast this with what St Paul says in his letter to the Romans. In chapter 10 he contrasts the way that some Jews are not able to come close to God – to be ‘saved’, or ‘justified’ – because they see it all as a question of following the letter of the Jewish law rather than a matter of faith. But ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved’. The distinction is between someone who is God, Jesus, and people who want to be aligned with God, to be on the Lord’s side, as the hymn puts it.

St Paul’s point is that for us mortals, getting closer to God, not being estranged from Him (which is what sin is), is a question not of following the law slavishly, but perhaps remaining unconvinced in one’s heart, but rather of having proper faith, faith both in your heart and in what you say. It doesn’t matter whether you are a Jew or one of the heathen.

But going back to Jesus in the desert, perhaps the other thing which comes out of his temptations is not so much what Jesus is – he’s clear on that – but how he should handle it. What if He had decided to make bread out of stones? How would that differ from turning water into wine, which he did do?

The Tempter was suggesting things which would potentially benefit Jesus Himself, not other people. But Jesus had come to serve, to be the servant of all. The first should be last, and the last first. So making miraculous bread, or BASE jumping off the pinnacle of the Temple, wasn’t it.

It is perhaps an insight into how God works. It’s no good just bombarding Him with wishes. On the whole, Jesus isn’t a fixer. If what you want doesn’t fit the divine plan, isn’t in line with what God has ordained, it won’t happen. Jesus must have been hungry, even if he had had sustenance of some kind. Being able to magic up some bread must have been a very attractive idea. But Jesus points to a higher level: ‘man shall not live by bread alone’. The King James Bible goes on, ‘but by every word of God’ – but now the textual scholars agree that ‘by every word of God’ was not in the original. It might well have been, as it clearly gives the sense.

And that gives the clue as to why we do things, or give things up, for Lent. Man does not live by bread alone. I went into Waitrose after the Ash Wednesday service, and one of the staff – one of the partners, rather – whom I know because she’s one of the ones who help the Foodbank, came up to me and said, ‘I hope you don’t mind my saying, Hugh, but you’ve got a dirty great mark on your forehead!’ Then a fraction of a second later, she remembered it was Ash Wednesday, and it made us smile. But that again was a clue. I suppose the nearest way to describe it is that we’re acting out the Easter story, and I was wearing my make-up for the play.

St Paul wrote about being ‘crucified with Christ’ in Romans 6, and in Galatians 2:19f – ‘For I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God. I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live: yet not I, but Christ liveth in me ..’

By doing Lent things, by Lenten observances, like going to Lent groups and not drinking, we are entering into the spirit of the Passion story. Clearly we are not, and neither was Paul, literally ‘crucified with Christ.’ But by following the story, entering into the spirit of it, by altering our behaviour to make it more like we think Jesus was, we are bringing ourselves closer, we’re making ourselves more distinctive as Christians. By being different, we make ourselves able to make a difference to others. And that’s when our prayers are often answered.

Oh, and by the way: as Godfrey has reminded us, Sundays aren’t counted as part of Lent. So if you were worried that those half-full – or half empty – bottles on my kitchen shelf might go off, don’t: don’t worry. I think that the sun will soon be over the yard-arm!

Sermon for the Third Sunday after Epiphany, 24th January 2016
1 Corinthians 12:12-31; Luke 4:14-21

In Common Worship there is a lovely prayer [The Archbishops’ Council, 2000, Common Worship, London, Church House Publishing, p.179 in Eucharistic Prayer E]:

‘Lord of all life, help us to work together for that day
when your kingdom comes
and justice and mercy will be seen in all the earth.’

It reminds me of the words of what Jesus read out in the synagogue in today’s Gospel, which is a quotation from the Book of Isaiah:

‘… good news to the poor,
… release for prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind;
To let the broken victims go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’. [Luke 4:18-19]

What a wish list! Justice and mercy: good news for the poor: release for the prisoners: sight for the blind: relief for the oppressed.

On the face of things, after 2,000 years, only one item can be – at least partly – ticked off, and that is, sight for the blind. The medics seem to have made a lot of progress on that one, although there is still a lot to be done.

But what about the others? Justice and mercy? What sort of justice? Are we just talking about criminal law, or about economic justice? If the ‘quality of mercy is not strained’ [Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene 1], where does it fit in? What about good news for the poor? And relief for the oppressed?

Jesus was reading from Isaiah chapter 61, which is a prophecy of the coming of the kingdom of God, when ‘a Redeemer shall come from Zion’ to save Israel (Is.59:20). The Messiah, the anointed one of God. And Jesus claims this title for himself. He is the man. He is the Saviour.

Funny how this works – or doesn’t work – on several levels. Take ‘good news to the poor’. The Greek word in the original, in the New Testament, means, almost letter-for-letter, ‘evangelise’, and it appears in the Greek version of Isaiah 61 as well, translated as ‘bring glad tidings to’. Then the word began to be understood as involving bringing a special type of good news, the gospel, the good news of Jesus. But here I think it’s just general good news.

After all, what is ‘good news’, if you’re poor? If you haven’t got any money?
Good news for the poor, as opposed to for anyone else? Is it the ‘good news of Christ’, (leaving aside for a minute exactly what that is), or is it that there has been a ‘bank error in your favour’? Collect £10. Bet that’s it.

It begs the question what the good news of Christ really is. St Paul, in his famous passage in his first letter to the Corinthians, which was our Epistle, our first lesson, today [1 Corinthians 12:12-31], is identifying all the different types of people who have received the good news. No one is better than another. We all have our part to play. It was an issue among the early Christians whether there were any entry requirements for the church – specifically, whether you had to be Jewish. St Paul made great play of the fact that there was no difference between Jew and Gentile, between rich and poor, between a slave and a freeman.

But there is a sort of paradox. If you are very poor, possibly the news, that your eternal soul has been saved, just might be a bit less than thrilling. The offer of a free meal might really be more like it. That would be good news.

If you didn’t know that it was a quotation from the Bible, this passage –

‘… good news to the poor,
… release for prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind;
To let the broken victims go free,’

you might think that this ‘manifesto’, as John Stott called it – he said it was the ‘Nazareth Manifesto’ [Stott, John, 2006, Through the Bible, through the Year, Oxford, Candle Books, p.179] – you might think it was pure politics. Not religion at all.

Politics, it certainly is; or even something worse: sedition, revolutionary talk. Who are the prisoners, who are going to be let out of gaol? Not so long ago a government minister, Michael Howard, said, ‘Prison works’. And we are sending more and more people there. This week, according to the Howard League for Penal Reform, there are 85,260 people in prison in the UK. 85,260.

Perhaps instead Jesus – and Isaiah – were referring to people imprisoned by an occupying power – it would have been the Persians, in the time of ‘3rd Isaiah’, the author of chapter 61, which Jesus read out, and the Romans in Jesus’ own time. Not just ‘imprisoned’, but unjustly imprisoned.

But I do wonder whether prison does ‘work’ anyway. Does it do anything really useful just to lock people up? Just as bombing does nothing to change people’s minds in Syria, I suspect that being banged up in Pentonville doesn’t make you any less criminal.

So even there, perhaps Jesus’ (and Isaiah’s) thought is almost along the lines of what he preached later in the Sermon on the Mount. Let them out. Don’t just lock them up and throw away the key. Work for redemption, for reform.

What about proclaiming (or preaching) ‘the year of the Lord’s favour’? This is the Jewish idea of a year when all debts are cancelled, once every fifty years. In Leviticus 25:10-13, ‘And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile [jubilee] unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.’ [v 10]

Debt relief, release, is something which we recognise as a good idea today, in the international sphere. Band Aid and Jubilee 2000 resulted in the Gleneagles Agreement of 2005 which cancelled a lot of developing countries’ debts, in Africa in particular. The idea is similar to the concept of personal bankruptcy. It enables the debtor to move on and carry on functioning economically. It’s basic to our economic life.

But the mere fact that we still think that some of these ideas are good, even today, shows that they’re still work in progress. The Messiah may have come in order to do all those good things, but in a sense, he was cut off in his prime. Perhaps after all, what we’re supposed to concentrate on is what King Jesus was, rather than what he did.

Then again, in those days people believed that, if someone is ill or suffers ill fortune, it was a sign that they had sinned, that they had done something wrong. So perhaps Jesus’ message was spiritual as well. You are suffering (they said), because you’re bad, or because you’ve done bad things. So to say that the poor, the blind, the prisoners and the oppressed won’t suffer any more is a spiritual release; your sins are forgiven; but at the same time it’s a practical, political move.

Jesus didn’t say, like John the Baptist, ‘Repent and be baptised,’ at least here, at the beginning of his ministry. He said, instead, that he was the one chosen, anointed (which is what the Greek word for ‘Christ’ means), anointed by God. The prophecy of his coming was true, and he would do mighty things. In response, we should take comfort from the revelation of God’s presence with us – and we also should do mighty things.

I was tackled by someone the other day. He said, ‘You’re preaching to the wrong people. There’s no point putting forward that socialist stuff about poor people to me. You should stick to preaching about ‘Christ Jesus, and him crucified’, (which was what St Paul claimed to do at the beginning of his first letter to the Corinthians [1 Cor 1:23]). In answer to this man, I tried to explain that I think that in fact, even when you are concentrating on Jesus’ epiphany, as we surely are in this season, concentrating on Jesus’ manifestation of himself as the son of God, you can’t avoid, at the same time as the manifestation, the manifesto – the practical things, even the apparently socialist things which Jesus taught, which were all inextricably bound up in his divinity.

Jesus didn’t introduce himself as a spiritual figure. He was going to be a man of action; social action. A revolutionary, in the eyes of the Jewish establishment. If you read on in St Luke’s gospel, the next thing that happens is that people scorn him. ‘Isn’t this Joseph the carpenter’s son?’ they said. And then when he suggested that the prophets had been sent sometimes to non-Jewish people in need, such as Naaman the Syrian, they marched him out to a cliff-top, and they were going to throw him off – just as ISIS or Daesh does now, with people they don’t like. It was perhaps a religious crime, a blasphemy, in their eyes, for him to claim to be the Messiah.

But what Jesus was proclaiming, how he was revealed, how God was revealed in him, was relief for the poor and oppressed. I think that must be a good lesson for us. Don’t just come and worship. Take care of the Good Samaritan stuff as well.