Sermon for Evensong on the First Sunday of Christmas, 30th December 2012
Isaiah 61, Luke 2:15-21.
I’ve never done better than when our two daughters were 5 and 10 respectively, and we decided to have Christmas in Switzerland. We decided that Father Christmas should give the girls a train set, which came in two huge boxes. I bought it on the telephone from the toy shop in the Swiss village. I arranged for the shop to gift-wrap the two big boxes and deliver them to the hotel, where I conspired with the concierge that he would have these large presents delivered to our room at 3 o’clock on Christmas morning, when everybody was safely asleep, and before the girls had started to wriggle their toes to see if they could feel the stockings which they expected Father Christmas to have left at the bottom of their beds.
I issued a stern injunction that anyone who found their stocking and opened it before 6.30 in the morning ran the risk that Father Christmas’ presents would disappear back up the chimney where he had come from. The girls were amazed when they awoke and found that, in addition to fairly modest stockings, they had two huge boxes beautifully gift-wrapped at the bottom of their beds.
Emma, aged 10, had indeed previously had some sceptical thoughts about Father Christmas; but she said, ‘This is amazing, Dad! Those boxes, that the presents came in, were far too big for you to bring on the plane.’ And the magic enveloped us all.
Well, I hope that, even if you were not surrounded by Father Christmas magic, as our daughters were all those years ago, you nevertheless had a happy and blessed time. Perhaps Father Christmas didn’t really come: but what about the baby Jesus? It may be that certain things were not exactly as they were described in the Bible – for instance if you compare the birth story in St Matthew’s gospel with St Luke’s account that we were reading tonight, you will discover that in St Matthew, the wise men were the people who came to see Jesus first, whereas in St Luke it is the shepherds.
And of course no-one could really prove the story of the Virgin Birth. But I am not really so concerned about that. What I am concerned about tonight is understanding some of the significance of Jesus’ birth. We are of course able to draw some inferences from the circumstances; from the fact that Mary and Joseph were clearly not well-off. When they arrived in Bethlehem they hadn’t booked a room in advance and they didn’t have the right frequent traveller cards in order to give them priority on the waiting list for a hotel room.
It has been said that St Luke’s choice of the shepherds to receive the angels’ message first, telling them exactly who Jesus was, about the true importance of the baby, is in itself significant, because again, shepherds were not rich or important people, and in Jewish society of that time they were even worse than that – shepherds were regarded as being devious, dishonourable and unreliable. So just as, later on in the gospels, Jesus is taken to task for consorting with tax-gatherers and sinners, so here the message which the gospel is giving us is not what we would have expected if we were looking for a description of the the coming of someone who would change human history for ever.
He was of course much more in the line of the Servant King in Isaiah’s prophecy, the very antithesis of a mighty conquering hero of the sort that the Israelites were hoping for, to be their Messiah. That is St Luke’s theme, and it is all very well understood. But who was he, really?
As I was coming out of the midnight communion service at St Andrew’s, I picked up a leaflet which had been left on the pews by the team who are about to launch the Alpha course there; a pamphlet called ‘Why Christmas?’, by the Revd Nicky Gumbel, the vicar of Holy Trinity Brompton, where the Alpha programme comes from.
As I was brushing my teeth before going to bed, I flipped through the Alpha pamphlet, and on page 4 there was a sub-heading, ‘Who is Jesus?’ And it said there, ‘Jesus was and is the son of God.’ So I went to sleep on Christmas morning starting to mull over the thought that the baby Jesus ‘was and is the son of God’.
I had a lovely Christmas Day with my family; a splendid turkey, and then a splendid turkey pie on Boxing Day. Then the next day, I sat down to write this sermon. At which point the Alpha booklet, and the Revd Nicky Gumbel’s simple words, ‘Who is Jesus? Jesus was and is the son of God’, came back into my mind.
Somehow, it didn’t feel right. I must confess that, whereas I usually quite happily listen to the Today programme on the radio in the morning as I get dressed, in the last week or two I really haven’t felt like staying with the programme all the way through. The news is so full of terrible things. The terrible shooting in the school in Connecticut; the poor firemen who were burned by the mad arsonist, who said that his favourite activity was killing people; the crisis in Europe concerning the Euro, where the poor countries like Italy or Greece, Portugal and Spain are forced to become even poorer by the rich countries.
In the wider world, we continue to hear terrible stories from Syria. Now it seems quite clear that, whatever the beginnings of the conflict, it has turned into a proxy war where each side is supported by outside interests. Other countries outside Syria supply each side with terrible weapons – and the wherewithal to buy them.
We are told that climate change is going out of control. Those economies that are still growing, where people aspire to have better living standards, almost necessarily produce rising amounts of pollution. They want to live as comfortably as we do. But as a result the outlook for the future of the world is not good.
It doesn’t seem to sit very easily with this catalogue of woe for us simply to say, ‘Jesus was and is the son of God’. What sort of a god would allow all these terrible things to happen? What sort of a god would send his son into such an awful world, so that not only did his son ultimately get destroyed by it, but also so that his son appears to have had so little effect?
As I reflected on this, I was sad. Perhaps it was a normal reaction, coming down to earth after the happy times of Christmas Day and Boxing Day. But I did feel pretty bleak. But then I had a telephone call. It was from an old friend of mine, and she wanted to talk to me about a situation that we had both been wrestling with, where I had got completely stuck. If I did one thing, then I would offend someone that we both care for. If I did another thing, to please that person, I would end up, I thought, hurting my friend.
I knew that she’d tried to ring me a couple of times before Christmas, but I’d been out. She hadn’t left any messages, but I knew she had rung. But I hadn’t rung her back, because I really didn’t know what to say. And then she rang me, out of the blue, and she said, ‘Don’t worry about me. I know the dilemma that you’re in. It’s all right. I won’t be hurt, and I’ll still be your friend, whatever you decide.’ She meant it. Her generosity – the simple, kind thing that she said to me – lifted my whole mood. In a flash I saw one of the things that it could mean for Jesus to be the son of God.
C.S. Lewis wrote, in Mere Christianity, ‘The son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God’ (Ch 27). Because Jesus came, we can have a chance to be like him. In the collect for today I prayed, ‘Grant that we being …. made thy children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by thy Holy Spirit’. Children of God. Us as well as Jesus. But God doesn’t treat us like puppets. He doesn’t force us to behave in a particular way. Just as we can’t always stop our children doing the wrong thing, so he doesn’t always stop terrible things happening.
But he does come, in us and in other people. He is present. We are children of God. My friend gave me grace, gave me permission and freedom in a difficult situation; I believe that it was God at work in her. In the same way, God is always there to hear and answer our prayers, and God comes to us in the people of God. We carry God. God is in us. God in us can lead us to strive against the evils we see at work in our world.
In his childhood, as a baby and even as a wayward teenager giving his parents the slip, Jesus showed us the way. ‘Grant that, as he came to share in our humanity, so we may share in the life of his divinity’.
- Talk for a ‘Prompt Corner’ Luncheon at the Nomads Theatre, 21st November 2012
When I sat down to write this, I couldn’t remember which part of the theatre I was supposed to be sitting in. Of course like all men, I like to think of myself in my prime, the young man, the world at his feet, striding down Leadenhall Street – but of course those young chaps’ salaries only let you sit in the gods. Hence my title.
But just as there is some cognitive dissonance in the air when I tell my daughters that so-and-so has dark hair, dark hair just like mine – so I have to confess that it’s not the gods, but the stalls that are now better suited to a man of my girth. So perhaps this is really a view from the stalls. Whatever: I am definitely out there, beyond the footlights. This is what I am thinking, as I sit – wherever I sit, watching the play. I am not an actor; I’m in the audience.
By the way – the reference to ‘the gods’ may have hinted at a nod to my being a preacher – six feet above criticism in the pulpit – but don’t worry, I’m not planning to deliver a sermon today.
Why do I go to the theatre? Was Shakespeare right to dismiss the actor’s craft as to ‘strut and fret his hour on the stage …. signifying nothing’? Or is this a very serious business, almost a spiritual work-out, what Aristotle was talking about when he said that in a tragedy the playwright achieves ‘catharsis’ in the audience, a sort of purification of the spirit, through ‘pity’ and ‘fear’?
That might be rather a challenging beginning. I put it almost as a set of logical extremes. Somewhere in between lies the secret, the magical secret, of what we see and hear in a play. Aristotle does specify that he is talking about ‘drama’ rather than storytelling. We need actors, saying their lines and doing their action, on a stage, with scenery and props, in order for the magic to happen.
I think that that is because drama is the most involving form of storytelling. The action doesn’t happen in your head as you listen to the storyteller, but it is there, in flesh and blood, on the stage in front of you. You see people – perhaps people like you in some respects – in dramatic situations, situations which put them to the test. How will they react? What will they do?
The other thing, as well as what the characters do, is what they feel. Sometimes what they encounter in the plot is beyond our experience. We in the audience don’t know what it felt like to be Hamlet, or Othello, or Macbeth. Indeed we wouldn’t identify ourselves with any of those tragic characters. They’re too elevated. But what about Romeo or Juliet? A boy and a girl; they could be any of us, well, at least when we were young.
We often find characters on stage whom we want to identify with. Perhaps we secretly feel, ‘If only … If only I had done this, or had this bit of luck, then it could be me that this play is all about.’
Of course you, as actors, do have to work out what those tragic giants felt, to act out their jealousy, their ambition, their rage. But I’m speaking strictly from the other side of the curtain. And we in the audience don’t know how it feels – we depend on the players to show us, to play out visibly, the characters’ emotions.
Sometimes we know we’re not like the hero or the heroine, but we still admire them, we still love them. Richard Griffiths’ character in the History Boys – actually any schoolteacher in a play, Mr Chips, Miss Jean Brodie – we love them all. They never seem to give out detention or lines! We admire them – they are ideal figures. Here is some of the magic. You come out of seeing The History Boys and you have a warm feeling of having been close to a source of wisdom, a source of goodness. The teacher, gifted himself, nurturing people who are talented, precociously talented as only teenagers can be. Their flame is burning bright – who knows whether it will settle in to generate steady power, or flame out, die away in a couple of years?
That’s another part of the magic – the risk. How can our hero do that, risk that, and not get cut down? How can those young ones risk it all for love – or for a cause? You would like to think that you would take that risk, you would put yourself on the line – but what does it feel like? The play will tell you. I would not dare to challenge a king – even if I was able to speak to him at all – but in any case would I risk it that he might hear me and then say, ‘Off with his head!’? In the play, that’s what happens – and I can see how our hero is shaken, how he is terrified. He is playing out the emotions, the horror, the cruelty. And then, in the nick of time, he is pardoned. How good does that feel?
My daughters, who are now young grown-ups, were very fond of a rather lurid book called ‘How it Feels’. It is all about how it feels to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, or be in a plane crash – it’s not about finer feelings. But the fact that teenagers love the inside story of spectacular events does illustrate something about what we get out of seeing a play, and why it is so fascinating. We want to know not only what it looks like when the dirty secret is discovered, but what the jilted lover feels – and what the naughty couple’s thoughts are when they are discovered.
Perhaps it’s like a dolls’ house. Girls say that playing with dolls is like creating your little world. The dolls are actors, and you make a play for them. You lift the lid off the house, and there is life inside. Watching a play, to put it another way, is as though down those streets, in the heart of the city, we could take the lid off and see inside people’s lives.
But what was Aristotle on about? I haven’t identified anything yet in being a playgoer which would have such a fundamental effect as Aristotle thought a good tragedy should have – achieving a catharsis, a cleaning out, of the emotions. Remember, the essential ingredients are pity – our hero doesn’t deserve to suffer, although he does – and fear. Something truly terrifying happens to our innocent victim.
‘Catharsis’ is something much more serious than the mild warmth we might feel after seeing the Mousetrap. It really is something much more spiritual, something which goes to the audience’s hearts, to the depths of their very souls, perhaps. The tragedy – Oedipus Rex, say – is so serious, the disaster for its leading players so complete, but yet so undeserved, so unexpected – that it really shakes us.
Somehow the actors, ‘doing’ the play, acting it out, are able to influence our thoughts and feelings. There is magic here. Somehow working out the scene, performing it, draws us, the audience, right into the heart of the action and makes us part of it. We feel Oedipus’ pain; we are terrified by the realisation of the impossible choices facing him. It moves us. It’s not just what happens that is terrifying, or that is sad. It’s that we are terrified, we are sad. The play has done that to us.
It’s difficult to see precisely what Aristotle expected in the way of catharsis. Was it a question of mental inoculation – being so scared by the play that it freed you emotionally, so you could be much braver in real life? There’s no sign that plays have that effect. Or was it much more mystical, much more mysterious? You cannot completely, exhaustively describe the effect that seeing a drama can have on people.
Here’s another set of words which came to mind when I thought how you can be affected by drama, perhaps by a dramatic spectacle, even, in front of you. The words are, ‘An outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’. The play, the external manifestation, has an internal effect, or rather, it brings out the innermost secrets in us. This is what is really meant by ‘catharsis’. And some of you will recognise those words, the outward and visible sign, the inward and spiritual grace. They are, of course, from the Book of Common Prayer.
In a religious context, a drama – a serious drama – to act out the life of Christ, (as they do at Wintershall, and Alan, I am sure, will be up for a big part next year): or the miniature ritual of the Eucharist, of Holy Communion, of the Mass: both those are equally serious dramas, and if you attend, if you are not just in the audience but taking part, being involved, then the play becomes a ‘sacrament’. It has religious meaning and worth.
In church, in the C of E that I belong to, there are only two sacraments, ‘… baptism, and the Supper of the Lord – that is, Holy Communion. The magic of the drama is in these too. The words, the actions, make something happen in the people taking part. People say that the sacrament of Holy Communion is not just the business, to use a theatrical expression; not just the sharing of the bread and wine: instead it is the whole drama, the whole performance, that works its magic in the believer.
This is very like what Aristotle was writing about, 300 years before Christ. Catharsis, purification: and indeed the church service usually starts with what we call the Collect for Purity: ‘Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts’, we pray.
Well, I don’t want to break my promise, not to preach to you. But I think I have reached the point where I can say that, as between the poor player in Macbeth, strutting and fretting his hour upon the stage, but signifying nothing, and the awesome wrenching of the soul in the great tragedies, I do tend to believe that there is more to a play than just trivial titillation, mild amusement. You actors do have a sacred task to perform. You are, in a sense, guardians of holy mysteries.
And of course, from my humble seat in the gods, I do still see myself as the Prince, as Romeo, as James Bond. You just have to help me to keep on believing.
Sermon for Evensong at St Mary’s on the Feast of Christ the King, 25th November 2012
Galatians 3:28 ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus’.
Tonight I am going to break one of the rules which I set myself in my preaching, which is that I try always to say something about the lessons which are set in the lectionary for the day. Today as we heard, we had the story of Belshazzar’s Feast and the writing on the wall in Daniel, and in the NT lesson from Revelation we were reminded of the overwhelming power of God: ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’, the beginning and the end.
But, apart from reflecting on the difference between the ‘principalities and powers’ of which Belshazzar, King of the Chaldeans, was one, and The Lord God, almighty, invisible, only wise, which will prompt us to reflect that God is far more powerful and important than the meaning of any particular way of life, I want tonight to deal with something less earth-shaking, but nevertheless important for us in the Church of England today. That is, the question of women bishops.
I am sure that we all know that on Tuesday the governing body of the church, the General Synod, the Church’s parliament, voted against the proposal to allow the ordination of women as bishops, subject to a safeguard for those parishes which did not want the oversight of a female bishop, that in the arrangements for episcopal oversight, due ‘respect’ would be paid to the reasons why those parishes felt as they did. To say that the Synod ‘voted against’ the proposal to allow women to become bishops is misleading. The Synod voted overwhelmingly in favour of it, but under the Standing Orders, the constitutional rules which the church has adopted for the Synod, the vote was six short of the majority needed under those rules for the proposal, the Measure, as it was called, to be passed.
The General Synod has three ‘houses’, for bishops, clergy and laity respectively. They are not houses like the House of Commons or the House of Lords, separate chambers in which each group votes: it is more a question of having groups within the one Synod body, a certain maximum number of bishops and clergy, and enough lay people to reflect the Protestant character of the C of E – it was controlled not by the Pope, but originally by the King, Henry VIII, and the king’s powers have now passed to the people. There are 470 members; 47 bishops, 194 clergy and 206 lay members.
Under the Standing Orders of the General Synod, (SO 35(d)(i)(1)), a vote finally to approve a Measure which provided for permanent changes in the ordinal (the rules for ordination of clergy), requires not a simple majority, but a two-thirds majority of all three houses.
Although 42 of the 44 dioceses in the C of E, including our Diocese of Guildford, have voted in favour of women bishops, and although the requisite 2/3 majority was obtained in the houses of bishops and clergy, in the house of laity the result was 132 in favour and 74 against, six short of the majority required by Standing Orders.
We have four lay members of General Synod from Guildford Diocese. I wrote to three of them before the vote, and two replied. After the vote, as there doesn’t seem to be any published list of votes cast, I asked them to tell me how they voted. So far they have not told me how they voted; however, from the correspondence I had with them beforehand, I think that it is likely that at least those three of our representatives voted against the Measure. I think that it is somewhat odd that at least a half of the votes which doomed the Measure came from a diocese, Guildford, whose parishes solidly supported it. It is a peculiar form of democracy, which allows these so-called representatives to vote completely contrary to the overwhelming wish of their constituents. [The official voting record, issued after this sermon was preached, confirms that three lay members from Guildford voted against the Measure.]
So much for the nuts and bolts of what happened on Tuesday. What are the main schools of thought for and against women bishops?
The first minority group opposed are the so-called traditionalists, or Catholic fundamentalists. They say that, as Jesus, the head of the church, was male, his vicars, which literally means those who stand in his place, from St Peter downwards, must also be male. They also advance the view that the patriarchal society which existed at the time of Jesus is the immutable model for all human society, still valid today. So men are the leaders, the hunter-gatherers who go out to work, and women are the home-makers, whose role is to support the males, produce and rear children.
The traditionalists don’t seem to have any difficulty with the thought that the head of the Church of England is the monarch, which of course for the last sixty years has been a woman – and indeed in the reigns of Queens Elizabeth I, Mary and Victoria, there has been a substantial history of female overall leadership of the C of E.
The second dissenting group are the so-called Conservative Evangelicals, who believe that the Bible is the literal Word of God, and that because St Paul in his first letter to Timothy, 2:12, wrote, ‘I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence …’, women cannot be in leadership positions in the church – and some evangelicals also refer to a sentence in the following chapter of the same letter to Timothy, 3:1f, where for example the King James Bible translates the passage as, ‘If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work’. ‘If a man …’ In fact this is a wrong emphasis. ‘Man’ in the King James usually just means ‘person’.
The Greek original simply says, ‘If someone aspires ..’ (ει τις … ορεγεται). There is no gender defined – although in the passage St Paul goes on to describe the qualities which a bishop needs, ‘above reproach, faithful to one wife, sober, temperate, courteous, hospitable and a good teacher’, and so on in the same vein. Clearly there, St Paul assumes that bishops will be male, although commentators have pointed out that this passage is about the moral qualities required, against a background which reflected the make-up of society 2,000 years ago. In that sense, the background assumed in these passages is descriptive, describing how things were, rather than prescriptive, saying how they ought to be.
Be that as it may, both these groups, the traditionalists and the conservative evangelicals, are implacably opposed, not just to women bishops, but also to women priests. To them it doesn’t matter that they are a tiny minority – the six people whose votes brought down the Measure amounted to 1.27% of the members of the General Synod. These opponents of women in ministry don’t care if they are a minority, don’t care if the world outside thinks that their views are outdated or inhumane. They believe that tradition, in the case of the the traditionalists, and a literal interpretation of St Paul’s teaching in one of his letters, in the case of the conservative evangelicals, are reasons which trump any more secular or even legalistic considerations, such as equal-rights legislation (although the churches currently have an exemption from complying with it).
But what about the vast majority in the C of E? Are we just wishy-washy liberals who bend to the force of public opinion rather than keeping to the true theological position? Of course you know that I certainly believe that it is right that the church has women in ministry, and that there should be women bishops. And of course you know that I am indeed a liberal in the church: but I would hope no-one would ever think of me as wishy-washy!
I believe that in fact there are excellent theological reasons for women bishops. It is not a question of being in tune with modern society. I see that Bishop Tom Wright, the evangelical theologian, has written an article this week in the Times in which he says that it would indeed be wrong just to follow the dictates of society, and he insists that there must be Biblical authority for what the church does. But he finds that, rather than the Bible ruling out the possibility of women bishops, in fact there is substantial Biblical authority for women having a perfectly good right to be bishops. (See http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/page.cfm?ID=759)
St Paul’s messages on bishops are not as weighted against women as the conservative evangelicals argue. The passages in his first letter to Timothy, about a woman not being fit to teach, are based on an argument that because in the Garden of Eden it was the woman who was beguiled by the serpent, and who led Adam into sin, so women can’t be trusted to teach in public. But does anyone seriously believe that the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis is anything other than a picturesque fable?
On the other hand, in his letter to the Galatians, 3:28, comes this famous passage. ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.’ There is no need to explain that! It should dispose of the whole question.
In St Paul’s greatest letter, to the Romans, at 16:7, he addresses a woman called Junia as an ‘apostle’: surely at that time that was the highest level, the highest status, in the early church. If you were an apostle, then surely you could be a bishop, like the other apostles – certainly like Peter.
In this closing chapter of his great letter to the Romans, St Paul sends greetings to a number of other women who he clearly regards as leaders in the church there, such as Phebe, whom he calls a ‘deacon’, Priscilla and Aquila, who were willing to risk their necks, literally, to save him; Mary, Tryphena and Tryphosa, Persis ‘the beloved’, who are all said to have ‘laboured in the Lord’; and he entrusts the letter to be carried to Rome, and no doubt to be read out to the Roman church, to the deacon, Phebe, who was travelling to Rome on business. In other words, St Paul trusted the safe carriage and exposition of his greatest letter to a woman. So much for women not being allowed to teach!
And of course there are other examples of leading women in the early church – for instance Lydia in Acts 16:13.
But surely what is most striking of all is that at the heart of the most important event in the whole of Christianity, Jesus’ resurrection, it was not the male disciples to whom he appeared, but ‘Mary Magdalene and the other Mary’ (Matt. 28:1, for example). These women, women, announced to the disciples the most important event in world history. If Jesus himself chose women to convey the earliest Gospel, the quintessential Good News, surely He would be happy for them to be leaders of his church.
I agree with Tom Wright that the justification for there being women bishops, for Christians, doesn’t depend on what he calls ‘Fake Ideas of Progress’, but on the Bible. I would rather say that those ideas of progress, according to which men and women are all equal in God’s sight (Heb. 4:13), are themselves in accordance with Bible precedent, rather than being somehow opposed to it.
So what is the church to do? In particular, is there anything that we in Stoke D’Abernon can do, about the perverse and unrepresentative decision of the General Synod this week?
I think that there is. The Synod has been in effect taken over by minority interests, in the way that all democratic bodies risk being infiltrated by activists. In order to become a member of General Synod, a lay person has to be first a member of a Deanery Synod, and then the Diocesan Synod. These are not seen as very exciting jobs – so the normal middle-of-the-road people don’t put themselves forward. That has to change.
It is really as a result of apathy, a sin of omission, that these people, whose views are not representative of the majority of ordinary church-goers in our diocese, have got themselves on to General Synod. I wrote to one of them, whose views were clearly against women bishops, pointing out that as one of our representatives, surely he should subordinate his personal views to the expressed view of his constituents when he voted. He replied that, if we didn’t like the way he voted, we could vote him out at the next General Synod election. I think that that is exactly how this vote was lost. People like this man, one of our, Guildford Diocese, representatives, put their own esoteric minority views ahead of the majority view, and thereby stymied it.
I do hope that we remember this: that you and I, the lay people in this Diocese, should not stand idly by. Let’s get ourselves into the Synod and make sure that nothing so undemocratic, and so unbiblical, ever happens again.
Remember, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.’
Today is Rose Sunday, in the mediaeval church known by the Latin name Gaudete Sunday, ‘Rejoice’ Sunday; the third Sunday in Advent. The mood of watchful expectation which in the church’s tradition in the first two weeks in Advent is supposed to be rather sober, rather monochrome, is now relieved by a hint of colour – we lit the pink candle today as a symbol of this lightened mood.
We are getting closer to our celebrations, closer to the time when we remember Jesus’ coming as the baby in the manger. In some ways it might seem odd to introduce the story of John the Baptist at this point. Certainly John the Baptist had a prophetic mission which introduced the beginning of Jesus’ work. But as S. Luke puts it very precisely, in historic terms which can mean only that John the Baptist was working around 29 or 30 AD, ‘in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar’, we have moved thirty years beyond Jesus’ birth.
In the Orthodox churches, the story of John the Baptist is celebrated after Christmas for that reason, so as to keep the chronology more logical. Jesus is first a baby, and then grown up. After he has grown up, and before he starts teaching, along comes John the Baptist.
All through the Old Testament, the history of the Jewish people, the history of God’s chosen people, is expressed in a way which relates their successes and failures not to economic factors, not to whether they were rich in natural resources which they exploited successfully; not to whether they were successful in wars, conquests or alliances with other powerful nations, building up empires: but rather the story of the Jews is a story of their relationship with God.
If you think of the story of the Jews in the Old Testament – Moses leading them out of Egypt through the Red Sea; the exile in Babylon – the only thing that matters, the only historical driver, is whether the Israelites listened to their God, followed his commandments, kept their covenant with God. If they did that, they were blessed and they were in the promised land. If they turned aside and worshipped other gods, forgot about their covenant with the one true God, then they were invaded, they were taken into captivity, they became slaves.
The Jews believed that God loved them much in the way that a father loves rather unruly teenage children; that sometimes God needed to punish them because they hadn’t obeyed him, but on other occasions they felt the full warmth of God’s love and blessing. The way in which they learned about their relationship with God was through the prophets – Moses and Elijah and the lesser prophets were the ones who brought before the people of Israel the word of God.
Jesus was born when the Jews were going through a hard time. The promised land was under occupation by a foreign power, the Romans. The relative prosperity of the the time of Herod the Great had given way to a break-up of the kingdom into four parts. There had been rebellion against the Romans by the Zealots, which had been brutally suppressed. This was not a high point in Jewish history.
As before in Jewish history, along came a prophet, a prophet who interpreted how the Jews found themselves, their difficulties and their lack of success, in terms of a breakdown in their relationship with God. That prophet was John the Baptist. John’s message of repentance – ‘O generation of vipers …’ was very much in the prophetic tradition. John is saying that the Israelites’ troubles are directly attributable to a breakdown in their relationship with God, that they have forgotten God’s commandments. So his message, the various things that he tells them to do, in order to restore the covenant, are from the heart of the moral teaching in the Jewish Law. After the basic Ten Commandments had been given to Moses on the tablets of stone, then in Deuteronomy, which means Second Law, the law of Moses is developed and refined. Indeed, for the first time in Deuteronomy you have the golden rule, ‘love your brother as yourself’ (Deut. 19:19).
So here, John teaches, ‘He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise.’ And the ‘publicans’ who are told not to exact ‘more than that which is appointed you’, are not innkeepers, but tax-gatherers. Privatising government services is not a new idea. At the time of Jesus, the Romans had private contractors, τελωναι in Greek, who were authorised to collect tax. They were paid by charging a percentage on top of what they were due to hand over to the Romans. So if the Romans needed 100, your friendly local tax man might actually charge you 110. What John is saying is that the price, what the private contractor, the ancient equivalent of Accenture or KPMG, is charging, has to be reasonable.
The point about this is that these are not just good moral precepts, which they certainly are, but also marks of the Jews being faithful to their covenant with God. It’s not enough, John says, to say, We have Abraham for our father, we are Jews. Instead, John says you have to bring forth ‘fruits worthy of repentance’, you have to show in tangible form evidence that you have repented, you have come back to the fold.
The Jews recognised that this message that John was giving was indeed a prophetic message, and they began to think that perhaps he himself was the Messiah, the chosen one whom they expected to lead them again, like Moses, out of slavery. What John was doing, in baptising, was certainly a new thing. There was no precedent in other religions for baptism in the way that John was practising it.
It was a single ritual washing. Of course are plenty of religious observances where ritual washing is involved. The symbolism is very clear. You wash away everything bad and you become clean, pure, before God. But in other religions that’s a sacramental practice, something that you do as part of a religious service regularly, purification.
But with John it was an altogether bigger thing. The idea of a total immersion in the River Jordan was that it marked a complete reversal in the person’s life. ‘Repent’, said John – μετανοειτε, Greek which means ‘turn over your minds’, ‘turn back your minds’. It’s not so much turning back as turning over, turning over a new leaf, a clean page in the book. That you can only do once. When you have been baptised, you are a new person, a clean person. It is very powerful symbolism indeed.
But despite the power of this, John says that he is making way for Jesus, who will come and not baptise with water, but with ‘the Holy Ghost and with fire’, that he will bring God to his people in an all-consuming way. You can come up out of the water and dry off; but once you have been touched by the Holy Ghost and by the divine fire – ‘set our hearts on fire with love for you’ we pray – then really you are changed. It’s a glimpse of what that baby is going to be able to do.
He will not just be a prophet like John. He will not just be a man, a man grown from the baby in the manger. He will be God, God among us, Emmanuel. That is truly something to look forward to; something to add colour to our expectation. Today, the colour of the rose.
So enjoy Rose Sunday. But also, remember the message of John the Baptist. ‘He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise.’ … ‘Do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely; and be content with your wages.’ Finally, a message to the tax men, ‘Exact no more than that which is appointed you’. The obverse of that teaching is something which some of our multi-national companies should reflect on too. If HMRC should not take too much, Starbucks and Co should not pay too little.
It’s the same message which S. Paul gives to his friends in Philippi. ‘Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand.’ This ‘moderation’ that he talks about is a word which really means ‘even-handedness’, ‘sense of balance’. It’s really a word that S. Paul took from the Stoics. Nothing to excess, moderation. When Paul wrote to the Philippians, perhaps around 60AD, the baby had come; he had grown up. He had been baptised by John, and those wonderful three years of teaching, his life, his death and his resurrection, had taken place. As John had predicted, Jesus had brought the Holy Spirit and fire, first of all at Pentecost, on the disciples. The Lord is at hand. The Lord is here. His spirit is with us.
hughdbryant 