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Handmaidens

By hughdbryant
December 20, 2015 //
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Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Advent, 20th December 2015

Luke 1:39-55

Not long ago there was a feature running in our parish magazine ‘Together’ about favourite hymns. Today I want to talk about another hymn, which wasn’t mentioned: perhaps the favourite hymn in all of Christianity. This is far bigger than ‘Shine, Jesus, Shine’ or ‘Love Divine’.

In the Gospel, that I have just read, we heard it. It’s the Song of Mary, which is often referred to by its old Latin name, Magnificat. ‘Magnificat’ means ‘magnifies’, ‘makes bigger’.

Every evening, about 6 o’clock, in every cathedral in this country, a really good choir (because all our cathedrals have super choirs) will sing this beautiful song, using the words from the Book of Common Prayer – words which were written half-way through the sixteenth century, as a translation from the Latin of St Jerome, which was itself a translation from the Greek that St Luke the doctor actually wrote his Gospel in.

And every Sunday at Evensong, at six o’clock at our sister church, St Mary’s in Stoke D’Abernon, there too, we sing the Magnificat. It could be the number one hymn in the Church of England – and versions of it are sung by churches all over the world. Magnificat might even be the most-loved hymn in Christianity.

Evensong in cathedrals – which is broadcast as Choral Evensong on BBC Radio 3 on Wednesdays and Sunday afternoons – it’s on this afternoon at 3, if you want to listen, this time from Chester Cathedral [ http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06rwy7p%5D – is reported to be the service where the congregations have grown most in the Church of England in recent years: not, actually, a modern service, but a service which can trace its origins back to the fourth century, and which was first set out, in the form we use today, in 1549.

The music which they sing is really beautiful. Choral Evensong, in every cathedral, every night, with a wonderful choir in every one, is a secret gem. More and more people are discovering it.

These are the words of the Magnificat that they sing:

My soul doth magnify the Lord :
and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

For he hath regarded :
the lowliness of his handmaiden.

For behold, from henceforth :
all generations shall call me blessed.

For he that is mighty hath magnified me :
and holy is his Name.

And his mercy is on them that fear him :
throughout all generations.

He hath shewed strength with his arm :
he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He hath put down the mighty from their seat :
and hath exalted the humble and meek.

He hath filled the hungry with good things :
and the rich he hath sent empty away.

He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel :
as he promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed for ever.

OK, some words we ought to explain a bit. ‘He … hath holpen his servant Israel’. ‘Holpen’ means helped.

He has ‘regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden’: he has looked favourably on her, he has held her in high regard, we might say.

And presumably you all know what a handmaiden is. Mary was a ‘lowly handmaiden’. She wasn’t one of the great and good.

‘For he that is mighty hath magnified me’. There’s that ‘magnifies’ word again. This time it’s not Mary ‘magnifying’ God, but her saying how God has magnified her.

And then the ‘purple passage’.
‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat :
and hath exalted the humble and meek.

He hath filled the hungry with good things :
and the rich he hath sent empty away.’

Can you, really, see Mary, a teenager, a simple country girl, singing this song? Are they the sort of words which would just come tripping off the tongue of a teenager?

Not for the first time our Bible doesn’t really put this – even in a modern translation, like we used for the lessons – in the sort of language we would use today. ‘Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord’, in Bishop Timothy Dudley-Smith’s hymn which we’ve just sung, isn’t actually a very good translation either – although Bishop Timothy got it from my favourite modern Bible, the New English Bible.

The meaning is really better expressed by what a teenager today might say: ‘Deep in my heart, I big up the Lord’. I big Him up: that’s exactly right. Mary isn’t saying that she is somehow making God bigger – because God is bigger than anything – but she is bigging Him up, she is telling out His greatness.

Giles Fraser, who often does Thought for the Day on the Today programme, who was at one time philosophy tutor at Wadham College, Oxford and Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s, who got fired for trying to make friends with the Occupy protesters camped out on the Cathedral doorstep, he, Giles Fraser, reckons that the Magnificat is one of the most powerful revolutionary texts. In September, he Tweeted, ‘BTW I don’t think [that] the Red Flag [is] anywhere near as revolutionary as the Magnificat’. [https://twitter.com/giles_fraser/status/643049147919110144]

Remember what Mary said. It could indeed be rather revolutionary.

‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat :
and hath exalted the humble and meek.

He hath filled the hungry with good things :
and the rich he hath sent empty away.’

In these short lines, Giles Fraser thinks there is a revolutionary blueprint. There are some shades of Jesus’ encounter with the Rich Young Man. Jesus turns everything on its head. The last shall be first and the first shall be last [Matt. 20:16].

I said earlier that perhaps Mary didn’t think up her famous song all by herself. As a regular worshipper in the synagogue, she would have remembered the song that Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, sang, thanking God for his birth. You can read it in the first Book of Samuel, chapter 2. ‘My heart rejoices in the Lord,’ she sings. ‘The Lord makes a man poor, he makes him rich, he brings down and he raises up. He lifts the weak out of the dust, and raises the poor … to give them a place among the great, …’

It’s very like the Magnificat. There is the difference that Mary uses a past tense: God did these things, he put down the mighty from their seat, and so on, whereas Hannah uses the present tense, he does these things. God is capable of bringing the rich and powerful down, and he is capable of building up the poor and meek. Hannah’s emphasis is more on what God can do, rather than on what he has done. Mary on the other hand says what He has done.

Both songs are songs, hymns, of praise for God. They are hymns of gratitude: ‘Now thank we all our God.’ And given that Mary undoubtedly started on one of the bottom rungs of society, it’s not surprising that from her point of view, she emphasised how God has humbled the rich and powerful from time to time.

So – do sample Choral Evensong, either on the wireless or – better – by going along in person, on Sunday evening to St Mary’s, or indeed on any weeknight to Guildford Cathedral. And when you hear, indeed when you sing, the Magnificat, do spare a thought for the handmaidens, spare a thought for the people who have to come to the Foodbank. You could be surprised at what might happen.

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Resurrection and Sacrifice

By hughdbryant
April 20, 2014 //
4

Sermon for Easter Day, 20th April 2014
Acts 10:34-43, Colossians 3:1-4, Matt. 28:1-10

When David Cameron published an article in the Church Times (which of course was widely quoted in the Telegraph and other less specialist newspapers than the Church Times), there were lots of people who said how good it was that the Prime Minister had said publicly that he was in favour of the Church of England and that the C of E should stick up for itself more.

Mind you, said the Prime Minister, he didn’t actually go to church very often, and his Christian faith ‘came and went a bit,’ he said. He did remind me a little bit of the caricature figure in WW2 dramas signing up for army service, where the recruiting sergeant asks what his religion is, and he mumbles, ‘Agnostic’, whereupon the sergeant writes down ‘C of E’.

On Thursday there was a big service at Guildford Cathedral for the renewal of vows of all the people in ministry in the Diocese. The Bishop of Dorking, giving the sermon, said that the Prime Minister’s article had been ‘somewhat surprisingly good’. Somewhat surprisingly. His caution might be explained by the comments on the Prime Minister’s article which had been made in various quarters, which tended to focus on the question how Mr Cameron’s Christianity didn’t seem to extend to making sure that people in Britain are not starving and going to food banks.

All this doesn’t take away the fact that the Prime Minister thought that it was important enough, in his busy life, to affirm his Christian faith in a public article. So for that much, I think we must be grateful.

Never mind the Prime Minister; Christianity has been getting a better and better name this year with the advent of the new Pope and the new Archbishop of Canterbury. Both of them are seen as very good adverts for the faith: very good examples of what it is to be a good Christian.

Today on Easter Sunday they reckon that 1.3m people will go to church in the UK. This really isn’t very many, out of the roughly 70m people who live here. So even if the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope are all valiantly pointing up the importance of Christianity, the message doesn’t really seem to be getting through to that many people.

Does that mean there’s something wrong with that message? Our lessons from Acts and St Matthew’s Gospel have the key things. Jesus went about doing good, teaching and healing, but he was arrested and condemned to death as a troublemaker – a freedom-fighter, a terrorist (because always remember, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom-fighter). He was put to death publicly in the cruellest fashion, being crucified. And He rose again from the dead.

The Gospel story is the most important bit. The story of the empty tomb, of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. I would risk saying that, unless there had been a first Easter Day, and unless there had been a resurrection from the dead, we would not be here, celebrating Jesus and worshipping God in the way that we are today.

Leave aside for a minute the fact that there are only a million or so of us in the UK who will bother to go to church today: if you take the worldwide figures for people celebrating Easter, it’s a very, very large number – and it is a growing number. Christianity is a very fast-growing religion: I believe it is still the fastest-growing religion in the world.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, St Paul explained the significance of Easter. St Paul said, ‘If Christ was not raised, your faith has nothing in it and you are still in your old state of sin’ (1 Cor.15:17).

Now pay attention! Resurrection from the dead, the resurrection of Jesus, is, of course, completely contrary to the laws of nature. It’s a super-miracle, the super-miracle. It is the sign, the sign by which we realise that Jesus wasn’t just a great teacher or a prophet: it’s how we know that he was God incarnate, God in human form.

I’m not going to argue here why I believe in the resurrection – which I, and you, surely do. This is, after all, a gathering of the faithful. But maybe I should encourage you a bit. It’s like adverts for Mercedes-Benz. Merc don’t need to advertise. They can sell every car they make, just by word of mouth. But they have great adverts, nevertheless. Have you seen the one with the chicken? It’s far and away the best ad on the telly at the moment. The reason they made it, and no doubt spent millions on it, was to reassure their customers: to reassure them that they have indeed made the right choice.

So maybe I should also just comfort you, in the same way, about what you already believe. There are plenty of eminent scientists who believe in the resurrection. For the atheists there is Richard Dawkins: for the Christians there is John Polkinghorne: both equally eminent scientists. Similarly in philosophy: for the atheist Daniel Dennett there is the Christian, Richard Swinburne – and Brian Leftow, another formidable logician, whose formal proofs of the existence of God were published recently [God and Necessity, ISBN 978-0-19-926335-6]. Or Roger Scruton, who plays the organ in his parish church.

If you want a good refresher course in why it’s intellectually respectable that we can believe in the resurrection, there’s the famous book, first published in the Thirties and still in print, ‘Who Moved the Stone?’ by Frank Morison. [ISBN 978-1-85078-674-0]. Morison was a sceptic who set out to prove that that resurrection couldn’t have happened, and ended up convincing himself that the weight of all the evidence went exactly the other way, and it did happen. Or of course you can read Richard Swinburne’s ‘The Resurrection of God Incarnate’ [ISBN 978-0-19-925746-1], for a heavyweight philosophy-of-religion treatment from the celebrated former Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford.

Back to St Paul. In the lesson from his letter to the Colossians, the very short lesson this morning, he underlines the significance of Easter for us.

‘Were you not raised to life with Christ?’ he asks.

He then says, perhaps rather mysteriously, ‘You did die, and your life has been hidden away with Christ in God’. [Col.3:1,2 (NEB: my translation, resp.)]

Of course this doesn’t mean that somehow we are all ghosts. We have died in the sense that we die in baptism: we die to sin, and have new life in Christ. In that sense, we rise with him. We have been ‘raised to life with Christ.’

And we say He died to save us from our sins, to redeem us. In the words of the hymn ‘There is a green hill far away’, Mrs Alexander wrote, ‘He died that we might be forgiven, he died to make us good,’ and, ‘There was no other good enough | to pay the price of sin’.

The language is apparently language of ransom, of kidnap and ransom, even. But I think that’s not the right way to look at it. If you think of sin not so much as specific sins, specific crimes – although sin can make you do those bad things – if instead you think of sin as whatever it is that separates us from God, then Jesus’ redeeming work was really to bring us back to God, bringing us back home to the true ground of our being. In the words of the lovely prayer,

Father of all,
we give you thanks and praise,
that when we were still far off
you met us in your Son and brought us home.

Even here, where things seem to be very spiritual, very mythical, there isn’t a conflict with science. In her 2012 Gifford Lectures, Prof. Sarah Coakley looks at the idea of sacrifice, sacrifice in the context not just of religion, of Jesus’ sacrifice, or the Jewish idea of a scapegoat, but in the context of evolutionary biology. Apparently the latest analysis is that evolution doesn’t depend on the ‘Selfish Gene’, but much more on co-operation, on selfless behaviour, self-sacrifice. A defining characteristic, the real mark, of humanity is altruism, self-sacrifice, selfless behaviour. We are the most successful species, the theory runs, not because we possess a selfish gene, but exactly the opposite – because ‘greater love hath no man’ is something we can, and do, aspire to.

Professor Coakley mentions in her first lecture –
http://www.faith-theology.com/2012/05/sarah-coakley-2012-gifford-lectures.html%5D – that Charles Darwin was inspired to study biology by William Paley’s argument, that the complex workings of nature meant that they were evidence of the work of a ‘divine watchmaker’. Although the current rather fundamentalist ‘intelligent design’ movement, mainly in the USA, isn’t very believable, nevertheless there does seem to be perfectly good scientific evidence for God, as the creator and sustainer of the universe. It’s really not necessary to be an atheist if you are a scientist.

Oh – and if you want to compare and contrast Prime Ministerial words of faith, you might want to dust off Gordon Brown’s speech in 2011 about his Christian faith, which you can find on Archbishop Rowan’s website. http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/903/faith-in-politics-lecture-by-gordon-brown.

Nothing political, honest – but Gordon Brown’s piece is head and shoulders over David Cameron’s: really inspiring stuff, not faith which ‘comes and goes’.

So I say, we should shout it from the roof-tops. It makes sense. Jesus was raised from the dead: Jesus is risen! Happy Easter!

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Glory and the Riley Elf

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February 10, 2013 //
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Sermon for Evensong on the Sunday called Quinquagesima, or the next Sunday before Lent, 10th February 2013
Exodus 3:1-6, John 12:27-36 – ‘Father, glorify your name.’ The Riley Elf.

Do you remember the Riley Elf? Or the Wolseley Hornet? Those little cars? Well, sometimes people used to say they were just ‘glorified Minis’. They were posh versions of the Mini.

Is that what we mean by ‘glorified’ – or, ‘glory’? Is it just a sort of embellishing process? What is glory?

I’ve always found the passage in St John’s gospel that we had as our lesson really rather difficult to understand. Indeed, it’s quite a theme in St John’s gospel, glory. What is this glory?

St Paul talks about a woman’s hair being her ‘glory’ (1 Cor. 11:15), and we talk about people ‘glorying’ in some good fortune or other. 12th August is known as the ‘Glorious 12th’. The glory there seems to consist in mass slaughter of grouse. We sometimes say that it is a glorious day, when we mean that it is sunny and fine.

But none of this really seems to help us when we examine what Jesus was mulling over here, after his entry into Jerusalem on a donkey. He is thinking about the fact that he is going to be ‘lifted up’, as he says, and as the gospel put it, ‘He said this to indicate the kind of death that he was to die’, being lifted up on the cross. Just as in the other gospels they have the scene in the garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus is praying to his Father, ‘Take this cup away from me’ (Matt. 26:36-46, Mark 14:32-42, Luke 22:40-46), here similarly he is thinking whether to ask to be saved from his impending fate.

On a human level, he’s afraid of what’s in front of him. So his instinct is to ask to be saved. But he knows that it is his destiny, that the purpose of his life on earth is to go through this terrible suffering. Just before this passage, he explains how death can be more fruitful, ultimately, than life. ‘A grain of wheat remains a solitary grain unless it falls into the ground and dies; but if it dies, it bears a rich harvest’ (John 12:24, NEB).

So Jesus says this rather peculiar phrase, ‘Father, glorify your name.’ And a voice comes out from heaven saying, ‘I have glorified it, and I will do it again.’ (John 12:28) Just like the voice from the burning bush to Moses in our Old Testament lesson from Exodus, here the voice from heaven, which was heard by those standing round, is miraculous evidence that God is present, and that Jesus isn’t just a man. One of the modern translations of the Bible, the Contemporary English Version published by the Bible Society, translates this section this way: “‘I must not ask my father to keep me from this time of suffering. In fact I came into the world to suffer. So Father, bring glory to yourself’. A voice from heaven then said, ‘I have already brought glory to myself, and I will do it again.'”

‘Glorify your name’: ‘bring glory to yourself’. The Greek word behind this passage (δόξα, δόξαζω) is interesting. It has been translated literally as ‘glory, I glorify’, but it started out as a word meaning, ‘I have an opinion about’, maybe ‘a good opinion’, something ‘seems to me’, then, something ‘seems good to me’. That goes on to mean something is a ‘good spectacle’, a sight to see: and it’s a very big word in Christianity.

In the Nicene Creed which we say at Holy Communion, we mention glory twice. Jesus ‘shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead.’ And we believe in the ‘Holy Ghost, The Lord and giver of life, …. who …. is worshipped and glorified’. We have great hymns, ‘Thine be the glory’; ‘Angels from the realms of glory’: the Gloria itself, ‘Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost.’ Good repute, good opinion. Difficult to translate – what on earth does ‘Glorify your name’ mean here?

I think the Contemporary English Version translation is probably right. Bring glory to yourself. On one level it seems an absurd request. God is omnipotent. God can do whatever He wants. He doesn’t need to demonstrate how powerful He is. He doesn’t need to curry favour. He is God.

But still, Jesus says, ‘Bring glory to yourself’. The more I consider this, the more I think about it, it dawns on me that of course this is a mystery, a holy mystery. Jesus is weighing up two alternatives. Calling on his father to save him, or the alternative, ‘Father, glorify your name’, which must mean, ‘Do something which will redound to your credit.’ In other words, let Jesus go through with the Passion, with suffering and death.

It doesn’t seem right. But so much about Jesus contains apparent paradoxes. The Servant King. Washing the disciples’ feet. Showing humility, never glorying in his position. ‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled; those who humble themselves will be exalted'(Matt. 23:12). So there’s a paradoxical meaning to ‘glory’ in St John’s gospel. When Jesus talks about being glorified – ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified’, he says – what he means is not that the Son of Man, that he, is going to preside in triumph.

There is a paradox about the way in which he entered Jerusalem, on a donkey. It’s meant to make you think about the way in which Roman generals, after a successful campaign, would lead their armies back to Rome and enjoy a triumph: games, processions, jollifications, huge celebrations. At their heart was a kind of worship for the successful leader. Jesus wasn’t intending anything like that. His triumphal procession, on the donkey, was nothing like a Roman general’s triumph. Jesus earns his glory, his good reputation, by showing ultimate humility, by submitting to the whole process of his passion: the torture at the hands of the Romans and the Jews culminating in his agonising death on the cross.

Some triumph! But it is meant to be a triumph. It is meant to be a glory. As St John writes, later on in his gospel, ‘The book has been written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing, you may have life in his name’ (John 20:31). ‘Glory’ really has a connotation of the divine nature. Jesus is not only a man, but also he is divine, the Son of God. ‘Coming to glory’ has that meaning. The realm of glory is the realm of the divine.

We may not now think of the realm of glory as being up in the clouds, somewhere beyond the clouds, but the idea is still a perfectly good way of understanding something which is strictly beyond our understanding. So when Jesus says that ‘the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified’, he really means it is time for the Son of Man, for him, to put on his divine nature. And that means that Jesus’ glory comes not only from his glorious resurrection, but also from his suffering and his passion. That is glorious too.

We are on the edge of what we can understand. It’s not really surprising that the words we are using don’t necessarily convey the full weight of meaning which this mighty truth requires. Let’s go back to the Riley Elf. A glorified Mini. Nothing of the divine there. That’s something that should bring us up short. We talk quite easily in church about something being glorious, God being glorious, ‘Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost’, and so on. It’s a word which just slips down and does not really mean anything to us as we say it. Just like the Mini turning into a Riley Elf, are we saying that Jesus in our lives is almost like a shining ornament in the corner, very nice to look at, but it doesn’t do anything?

Or are we saying that the lustre, the glory, the special shine, that we see on Jesus, is because he is the Son of God? And because he is, that we will have to change our lives in response? I think so. ‘Who is the king of glory: even the Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory.’ (Psalm 24).

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Supererogatory Goods

By hughdbryant
January 27, 2013 //
0

Sermon for Education Sunday, the Fourth Sunday of Epiphany, 27th January 2013
Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10, 1 Corinthians 12:12-31, Luke 4:14-21 – Supererogatory Goods

For over 100 years the churches in England have recognised the ninth Sunday before Easter, which is what today is, as ‘Education Sunday’. It’s a Sunday in which we celebrate the work of all the various educational establishments, and of course in particular, the teaching that comes from our church, either directly here in church, in Bible study or sermons, and in our church schools. Here in Cobham we have St Andrew’s School, who are coming to lead our service at 10 o’clock.

The lessons, that we have set for today, have been chosen with Education Sunday in mind. In Nehemiah and in our gospel reading from St Luke, we have a picture of someone in the synagogue taking down the scroll on which the Hebrew Bible was written, unfurling it and reading from it. Both in the Old Testament lesson from Nehemiah and in the gospel, after the Bible has been read, then there’s a session of teaching.

Indeed on one level, on Education Sunday, we can just celebrate the fact that there are teachers, and that education is a great good. We can reflect that it is a very good thing that the churches are very deeply involved in the whole process of educating children and young people.

Indeed it would be perfectly sensible to have services once a year on Education Sunday that just simply give thanks to God for the fact that God has given all the various talents, all the various complementary skills which St Paul picturesquely describes in our lesson from his first letter to the Corinthians, about the different parts of the body and the fact that each of the bits and each of the body’s faculties – the hand, the foot, the hearing, the sense of smell – have their real purpose in the way in which they relate to each other in the one body. It’s an allegory for the church. The church depends on people with all sorts of different skills and aptitudes and gifts to give. Among those talents there surely is the talent of teaching.

It is, however, worth pausing at this point just to review certain things about the educational landscape as it confronts our children, and ourselves as parents, today. There is some controversy about so-called ‘faith schools’. The argument, the controversy, is whether there should be a stripe running through the whole of a church school, a colour of Christianity. Wouldn’t it be better, some people say, if schools were all completely secular – even so, perhaps children could be taught about religion, or the various religions, as an academic subject, but not as a rule of life. They argue, what about children who come from unbelieving homes, or homes where people actually believe in a different religion?

Obviously there are standard answers to that, given by the church, that in fact there is no undue bias towards churchgoers in allocating places in church schools, that there is always provision made for those who declare themselves to be either unbelievers or believers in a different faith, in the form of separate assemblies or just being able to skip going to Christian worship and attending lessons where Christianity is taught.

Anyway, the churches have a good story to tell about their openness and their inclusiveness in the church schools, and the controversy, if there is really one, is all about the fact that church schools on the whole are very good schools, and obviously more people want their children to attend them than they actually have places for. So although the church has set them up and sustains them in many important ways, non-believers resent this and demand that they should have equal access for their children.

That brings me on to the second dimension in our lessons today, in particular in the gospel. What should a good school teach? I don’t want to get into sterile discussions about the various politicians’ ideas about what the so-called ‘core curriculum’ should contain. I’m more interested today in what Jesus was doing when he was teaching in the synagogue in Nazareth as indeed, according to the gospel, he regularly did, all over the place. Was he doing the sort of job that Ezra and the Levites were doing in the story from Nehemiah?

What Ezra was reading, and then going on to teach about, was ‘the book of the law of Moses’, the Pentateuch, the first five books in the Old Testament. At the heart of the Jewish law are the Ten Commandments. You will remember all the various Ten Commandments, and you could, if you were one of these non-believing parents, point out that, in a school today, you could certainly teach, in a General Studies lesson, say, the benefits to society as a whole if everyone followed the Ten Commandments.

You would say, as an unbeliever, that the benefits of most of the Ten Commandments would inure, quite irrespective of whether they were the commandments of God as opposed to being just good common sense, necessary for peace and harmony in society.

Obviously the first commandment, ‘Thou shalt worship The Lord thy God,’ doesn’t fit with that; and moreover, if you introduce the Ten Commandments with the story of how Moses came by them, it’s quite clear that the particular context of the Ten Commandments is a context of divine revelation, but it is possible to get most of the moral benefits without needing to know anything about God.

But there are little hints of what’s different, when the teaching is actually about the divine. In Nehemiah, there’s this intriguing last thing that Ezra preaches, that people should eat, drink and be merry: but that they should send a share of their food to people who haven’t got any: those ‘for whom nothing is prepared,’ as the passage says. And that that should be something done on the Lord’s day: ‘send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared, because this day is holy to our Lord’. So that suggests that the reason for sending the food parcels to the poor people is because it’s something associated with God: you do it on the Sabbath, on the Lord’s day.

Similarly in St Luke’s gospel Jesus takes as his text the passage from Isaiah chapter 61 which actually describes the coming Messiah, the chosen one of God. Again, the point about that is that Christian teaching is not just about what is good to do – although of course there is strong Christian teaching about it – but at its heart is the question where that teaching comes from, and who Jesus was, in order to do that teaching.

You can see the people of Nazareth resisted stoutly the idea that Jesus was anything special – but that is the difference. A secular set of ethics would come up with something very like the Ten Commandments (albeit minus the first one). Essentially such secular ethics would be based on the so-called ‘golden rule’, do as you would be done by; do to your neighbour, and so on; but where the teaching really comes from God, in the mouth of a prophet like Ezra, and in the mouth of Jesus himself, as in St Luke’s gospel, the difference is that the teaching is not only to do as you would be done by, in the various specifics laid down in the Ten Commandments, but it is also to pursue so-called supererogatory goods, things which go beyond what you are obliged to do. So this is sending food parcels to people who are hungry in the Old Testament, and in Jesus’ teaching, the commandments in the Sermon on the Mount, turning the other cheek, going the extra mile: these are all supererogatory goods, doing more than you strictly have to do in order simply to keep the fabric of society together.

They are the mark of a very special kind of teacher. As Jesus himself says, Isaiah’s prophecy, in Isaiah chapter 61, setting out what the Messiah, the chosen one of God, would look like, now is fulfilled. Jesus is the Messiah. He is the son of God. He is divine.

That brings me back to what we should be doing with church schools. If all we’re doing – and that’s not to belittle it – if all that we’re doing is teach children things that they could learn anywhere, church school or not, then it’s almost as though Jesus had never come. But if on the other hand, the important thing about a church school is that it’s run by people who recognise the difference between what Ezra was doing, what the OT prophets were doing, what Moses was doing when he collected the tablets with the Ten Commandments: who recognise what the difference is between them and Jesus himself, teaching in the synagogue and actually saying that the world has changed, that Isaiah’s prophecy has been fulfilled and the Ten Commandments are no longer the whole story. Jesus’ teaching is a whole big command of love, which enjoins people to do supererogatory goods, doing more than they are asked to do, going the extra mile.

And they are doing that, because it is God who is asking them. Isn’t that just the most important thing that you could possibly teach about, in your church school? I think it is, and I’m sure that Andrew Tulloch, the headmaster, and his teachers, at our church school, are very well aware of that, and they never forget it. Long may it continue.

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