Archives for posts with tag: jubilee

Sabbath Day Observances

By hughdbryant
October 21, 2024 //
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Sermon for Evensong on the 21st Sunday after Trinity, 20th October 2024, at All Saints Church, Penarth

Lessons: see https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=596249536

Matthew 12:1-21

As you can see, Evensong today is a team effort. The vicar, our ordinand and I all wanted to join in to praise the Lord this afternoon. You may not realise this, but the vicar has not only been leading the service but also, without knowing it, he’s written most of this sermon. 

We meet to say morning prayers at 9 o’clock most mornings during the week, and anyone can come, but most usually, it’s just the vicar, our ordinand and me. We often take the opportunity, as we say our prayers, to reflect on what we have read in the Bible and our church life; and if that sounds a bit serious, I can immediately reassure you that there’s always a lot of laughter and joy in what we discover together.

This week I shared with the vicar the thought that today we were going to be talking about sabbath day observance – when all the shops used to be shut and you used not to be able to get a drink in a pub on Sundays, and all that good stuff. I was muttering slightly that I thought that things have gone a bit too far in a secular direction and that Sunday wasn’t special any more, whereupon he brought me up short, because he said, first of all we have to be clear that Sunday is not the sabbath.

The sabbath is a Jewish idea and it was Saturday, the day when God rested, the seventh day, during the story of creation in the book of Genesis, whereas Sunday is the day on which we as Christians commemorate Jesus’s resurrection, the first Easter. And so we started to talk about that, and I made a mental note of what the vicar was saying, for this sermon; and I invite you to join in this discussion, or at least to think a little bit about it. I don’t think it matters, by the way, that most of us, when we talk about Sabbath day observance, are not talking about Saturday but are talking about Sunday.

Another thing: do we as Christians have any right to inflict on society as a whole a way of spending Sunday that perhaps only makes sense if you are a Christian? The story of Jesus clashing with the Pharisees and scribes about working on the sabbath, either through the disciples picking up heads of grain in the fields and eating them, sort-of harvesting them, or more clearly as a question of work when Jesus did some healing of the man with the withered hand, those things put him at odds with the Pharisees and the scribes, who said that on the sabbath no work of any kind should be undertaken, because it was a time of rest, picking up from what God did in the creation. He rested on the seventh day, and we should follow God, they argued, and so rest as well. But is that just a religious thing, and not really appropriate these days, when perhaps only a minority are believers?

This story comes up in three of the gospels, Matthew (the version we had as our lesson today), Mark and Luke, but crucially it only has the really memorable, famous, words in Saint Mark’s account: ‘The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath’. (Of course if you want to say it in a gender-neutral way, you say that the sabbath was made for ‘humankind’ and not ‘humankind’ for the Sabbath, but somehow it doesn’t have the same ring to it.) The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.

I think this is a really encouraging story, and that Jesus is giving us the freedom to do what our conscience tells us to do, whatever the rules may seem to say. If you imagine the story of the healing of the man with the withered hand and put it in the context of an operation in a modern hospital, it would seem nuts to us if the surgeons had to stop operating at midnight on Saturday. The work of healing goes on every day, 24/7, and Jesus confirms, in effect, that that is what God intends.

But – perhaps it’s not quite as clear cut as that. The Jewish law, the first five books of the old Testament, contains some very enlightened ideas, two of the best of which, I think, are jubilee and the sabbath. Jubilee is not just a royal beano, but the idea that every seven years debts should be forgiven, written off. This is an idea which is still highly regarded in international affairs as there are many benefits to the world as a whole if the rich nations periodically excuse the poorer nations their debts. 

And similarly with the idea of sabbath, the day of rest. It has very clear benefits for society as a whole. If people are worked into the ground it is clearly harmful for them, and it’s ultimately harmful for the people they are working for as well, because tired people do a progressively worse and worse job, the more tired they are.

The Jews interpreted the idea of the sabbath as meaning that people were not allowed to do any work; and indeed, orthodox Jews to this day don’t drive to the synagogue on the sabbath, they don’t work and they keep exercise to the minimum. But that is quite legalistic. 

As Jesus pointed out, if people start to regard the rules as being more important than the situations which the rules are intended to cover, then things won’t turn out well. It wouldn’t be good to tell the man having open-heart surgery that the surgeon was out of time and had to stop for his statutory rest period, even though he was in the middle of the operation! 

But Jesus didn’t want to make a song and dance about it. The writer of the gospel quotes bits of the book of Isaiah, in Isaiah 42 and Isaiah 61, “Here is my servant, whom I have chosen, my beloved, with whom my soul is well pleased.” This is a reminder of the words which were heard when Jesus was baptised by John the Baptist, the voice from heaven, “This is my son, the beloved”. What Jesus said, and what he did, had divine authority.

It’s quite difficult to believe that Jesus really expected to keep all this quiet; his miracles were truly sensational. All that we can say about them is that it looks as though he did do them, but there’s absolutely no information about how he did them. They are just as startling now as they ever were before. 

So what should we say about sabbath day observance? I can’t help feeling that, just as the idea of Jubilee still has some real validity today, particularly in the context of international development and fairness between the richer and poorer nations, so the idea of a sabbath, in the sense of a day of rest, is still important; but I think it has to be interpreted consistently with what is practical, so that it may well be that some people do have their day of rest, but not actually on the seventh day (and never mind whether that is Saturday or Sunday). 

The important thing is that they should have the right to have some rest. God rested, according to the story, and so should we. Everybody should have a protected right to a day of rest. And that would be valid in a trades union meeting just as much as in Evensong – it’s not just Christians inflicting religious ideas on the heathen masses. 

It always used to amuse me that after I had taken a service, maybe Mattins, at my old church, I would see the congregation again, half an hour later, as we all did our shopping in the supermarket. But the only people that I would worry about, in that context, would be the people who worked in the supermarket. I do hope that they were not being pressed into working on Sundays, when they would rather have been taking a day of rest, or even, perhaps, coming to Evensong. It was Waitrose, after all…

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Forgive us our Trespasses

By hughdbryant
July 14, 2024 //
0

Sermon delivered at All Saints Church, Penarth, on 7th July 2024

Prymer (Prayer Book), 1538

And fogyue vs our trespasses, as we forgyue them that trespas agaynst vs.

Luke 11:4

Greek original: καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰς ἁμαρτίας ἡμῶν, καὶ γὰρ αὐτοὶ ἀφίομεν παντὶ ὀφείλοντι ἡμῖν·

NRSV: 4 And forgive us our sins,

for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.

Matthew 6:12

Greek original: καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν, ὡς καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀφήκαμεν τοῖς ὀφειλέταις ἡμῶν·

NRSV: And forgive us our debts,

as we also have forgiven our debtors.

Vulgate, St Jérôme, 4th century:  et dimitte nobis debita nostra,

sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris.

Sermon:

Today we continue our series on the Lord’s Prayer. We have reached ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.’

Have you done any trespassing recently? Maybe you’ve been put off by one of those fierce signs which say ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’. Maybe you are involved with Just Stop Oil or XR – Extinction Rebellion. Maybe you plan to lie down on the M4 to stop the traffic. That would be a trespass.

My Dad used to make a rather weak joke about one of those notices, not about trespassing, but about fly-posting, or ‘sticking bills’. The notice threatened that ‘Bill Stickers will be prosecuted’. Dad said, ‘Poor Bill’. …

But it looks as though what Jesus wanted us to pray about wasn’t really just a question of slipping through someone’s fence like Peter Rabbit.

So what is the meaning of ‘trespass’ here, in this context? It’s

something done against, an ‘intrusion’, into someone else’s space; and then by extension, to do harm against them.

So it means basically, forgive us for the harmful things we have done, as we forgive those who’ve done things to us.

But what did Jesus mean by ‘as’? ‘As’ we forgive? Does it mean a condition, ‘…only to the extent that we forgive …’ (and if we don’t, then what?), or ‘…as we definitely do forgive’?

The Lord’s Prayer comes twice in the Bible, in St Matthew’s Gospel [6:12f] and in St Luke, [11:4f]. Neither version uses exactly the words which we now say. In St Matthew, the Prayer comes at the end of the Sermon on the Mount – you know, about turning the other cheek and loving our enemies – and in Luke, it follows the parable of the Good Samaritan, that great story of unconditional love. The Samaritan didn’t think about whether the poor man who had been hurt deserved his help. He just saw his neighbour in need, and he followed the great Commandment to ‘love your neighbour’.

In both those places, where the Lord’s Prayer comes in the Bible, the words aren’t exactly what we now say.

In St Matthew, it says, ‘And forgive us our debts,

as we also have forgiven our debtors’. In St Luke, ‘And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us’.

Leaving aside the question precisely what it is we are asking to be forgiven, these texts bring us go back to the question whether there’s a condition, whether we can only ask for God’s forgiveness on condition that we forgive those who have ‘trespassed against us’.

If we look at the different texts in Matthew and Luke, in Matthew we find – ‘.. as we have forgiven..’, and in Luke, ‘for we ourselves forgive’, which translates Greek words which literally mean

‘.. for truly (καιγαρ) we do forgive’.

There are different tenses used. Matthew says, ‘as we have forgiven’ in the past, so maybe Matthew’s version is a bit conditional, that we couldn’t come to the Lord without clean hands, without having done to others what we are asking Him to do to us.

But there is definitely no conditionality in Luke’s version. Perhaps, although it reflects the ideas in the Sermon on the Mount, loving enemies, turning the other cheek, in Luke, it comes after the story of the Good Samaritan, which is about unconditional love.

But does the Bible really say that Jesus told us to pray to be forgiven for ‘trespassing’? The Greek words used in the two Gospel accounts don’t say this.

Depending on which translation you use, the thing to ask forgiveness for is ‘sin’, ‘debt’, ‘obligations’, what we ‘owe’ to other people, or just wrongdoing.

The word ‘trespass’ in English seems to have been first used early in the 16th century at the time of the Reformation, when the services were being translated from Latin so that they could be ‘understanded of the people’ as Art XXIV of the 39 Articles puts it. But really it has changed its meaning over the years.

‘Sin’ is the word used in some modern versions of the Lord’s Prayer – ‘forgive us our s…’ It’s the word used by Luke. The word for ‘sin’ means literally ‘missing the mark’. ‘Sin’ has a connotation of wrong-doing, missing the mark, as between us and God, not as between us and other humans. Sin is what separates us from God.

What if it has connotations of ‘debt’ or ‘obligation’? This would reflect the Jewish idea of debt relief, Jubilee, every 7 years. It is such a powerful idea. Think of the implications for justice between nations, for the rich as against the poor. Jubilee, debt relief, is the only real way that could lead to hope for long-term justice in the world. That’s a wonderful thing for us to pray for.

But – a final word – what about ‘forgive’ – forgive us, as we forgive? The word in Greek means to ‘let go’. Jesus is putting good psychological principles in the prayer. It is unhealthy to hang on to feuds and to bear grudges and resentment. Just let it go. Take it to the Lord in prayer!

And by the way – trespassers can’t be prosecuted: (in the law of England and Wales, just for trespassing, which is a tort, a civil wrong, and therefore only open to a private civil remedy, and that only if damage is caused. There is no public, criminal, remedy: no ‘prosecution’.)

Note

“To deter trespassing on to land, a landowner would often erect signage stating ‘trespassers will be prosecuted’. However, those with legal knowledge know that trespass was, in fact, a civil wrong and not a criminal offence, meaning trespassers could not be prosecuted.

However, the introduction of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 (‘PCSAC’) on 28 June 2022 makes trespass, in some cases, a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment of up to four months and/or a fine of up to £2,500”. Quoted from https://www.hilldickinson.com/insights/articles/trespassers-can-now-be-prosecuted, q.v. for more details. It is still essentially the case that simply entering on someone else’s land is not an offence, provided no damage is done to property on that land.

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Job’s Comfort

By hughdbryant
July 13, 2015 //
2

Sermon for Evensong on the Sixth Sunday after Trinity, 12th July 2015
Job 4:1; 5:6-27

Why do bad things happen? Has it got anything to do with God? Sadly, we’ve had several cases in point in the last couple of weeks. This week we remembered the ‘7/7’ bombings. Last week there was the dreadful shooting of tourists in Tunisia. Before then, more shootings of innocent people, in a church in the United States.

Poor old Job had a similar experience. He was a rich and successful livestock farmer. He had a large and happy family.

‘There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil.
And there were born unto him seven sons and three daughters.
His substance also was seven thousand sheep, and three thousand camels, and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she asses, and a very great household; so that this man was the greatest of all the men of the east.’

Then various disasters struck, and he lost everything; even his family were killed in a hurricane which destroyed the house they were staying in. The story in the first chapter of the Book of Job puts it all down to Satan, who had challenged the Lord God: strike down Job, he tempted, and he will curse you. The Lord didn’t exactly fall for the temptation, but

‘… the LORD said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand.’

So according to the story, Job came to grief not at the hand of God, but of Satan – or perhaps more relevantly, he came to grief not as a result of anything he himself had done. Job is portrayed as a wholly good man. But nevertheless something, some external force, has brought disaster on him.

That’s quite an important step. There is an idea in parts of the Bible called technically ‘eudaimonism’, according to which, if you become ill or suffer misfortune, it is because you have done something wrong, you have sinned against God: and God has punished you. For example in St Matthew chapter 9:

And, behold, they brought to him a man sick of the palsy, lying on a bed: and Jesus seeing their faith said unto the sick of the palsy; Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee. ‘Thy sins be forgiven thee’, not, ‘Here’s some medicine for your palsy.’ In this theory, illness is caused by, is a punishment for, sin.

Here, in Job’s case, it’s made quite clear that Job isn’t the author of his own misfortune. But I would just pause there, and say that eudaimonism isn’t an attractive idea anyway. Would a God of love make people ill? How would it be if, when you met someone who was poorly, your first thought was not, ‘I hope you get better soon’, but, ‘What did you do wrong, in order to bring your suffering upon yourself?’

And at first Job doesn’t blame anyone. He worships God and accepts his terrible lot. Then along come his three friends, the original Job’s Comforters.

In tonight’s lesson we hear from the first one, Eliphaz. His explanation for Job’s trouble is that troubles are just part of being human. There’s no-one specific to blame. Just put your trust in God, God

‘Which doeth great things and unsearchable; marvellous things without number:
Who giveth rain upon the earth, and sendeth waters upon the fields:
To set up on high those that be low; that those which mourn may be exalted to safety.’

It reminds me of the Magnificat: ‘Who hath exalted the humble and meek, but the rich he hath sent empty away.’

That doesn’t seem to me to offer Job much real comfort. If God has the power to right wrongs, to impose justice – then why has He allowed suffering to take place at all? If God is so capable, why has He allowed Job to get into trouble? This is something which still troubles us today. Even people with the strongest faith can find that it is tested to destruction. There was a moving dramatic recreation, on the TV this week, of the story of Rev. Julie Nicholson, whose daughter was caught up in one of the bombings on 7/7, and was killed. This terrible loss effectively destroyed the mother’s faith, and her ministry in the church. She just couldn’t square the idea of a loving God with what had happened.

Eliphaz goes on with a fine piece of Job’s Comfort:

‘Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty:’

I have never understood why people receiving punishment are supposed to be grateful for it. There are all those school stories involving corporal punishment, from Tom Brown’s Schooldays onwards. It is nonsense – and in a rather sinister way, getting the victim of brutality to thank the perpetrator, must be intended somehow to amount to consent – so that ‘volenti non fit injuria’.

This is the legal principle that ‘to a willing man, it does not turn into a hurt’, it does not become the cause of legal action. This is why rugby matches do not usually end up in the High Court, even when people are seriously injured. It is surely nonsense in this context. Hurting someone by way of punishment is not something which can or should be consented to by the person being punished.

But to go back to Eliphaz. He has introduced the idea that God may punish. He may punish, may do harm – but it’s all right, because He will heal the wounds afterwards.

‘For he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make whole.’

I suppose this is a refinement of the earlier idea that God is good, God only does good things – which clearly seems not to be true.

But God does everything. God is the creator and sustainer of all – so He must make or do bad things as well as good. The created world needs light and shade, black and white, good and bad.

But if in a given instance, in your bit of creation, you encounter the bad side, you may still, quite naturally, want to protest, to cry out against God in pain. ‘Why me?’ you will ask.

Eliphaz accepts this, and says that although there may be pain and suffering, God will heal and comfort. That’s the first part of what he says. But then he says that God ‘reproves’, ‘correcteth’. Although Job may think himself to be blameless, perhaps he isn’t.

Eliphaz’ first scenario is where the person who suffers is innocent: the second is where they are somehow at fault. But God still puts things right –

‘He shall deliver thee in six troubles: yea, in seven there shall no evil touch thee.’

There is an echo here of the Jewish idea of the Sabbath, the seventh day, the seventh year, the jubilee, the day of the Lord’s favour. It is described in Isaiah 61, which Jesus quoted in Luke 4:18-19 –

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’

Just in passing, I’m uneasy about the way that the restrictions on Sunday trading have been relaxed in this week’s Budget. Of course, we Christians have changed the original sabbath from Saturday to Sunday – it happened when the Romans adopted Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire, in the fourth century. Some people have said that one reason for changing from Saturday to Sunday was to get away from the Jewish idea of jubilee, of relief from debt and time off for recreation.

Canon Giles Fraser indeed commented this week that Sunday has become a day of worship – of shopping, not of God.[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2015/jul/10/money-is-the-only-god-the-tories-want-us-to-worship-on-a-sunday] The thing which worries me is that for many people, Sunday will become just another working day.

The Jewish idea of the Sabbath, when, on the seventh day, the Lord of creation rested from his labours, is still vitally important today. Perhaps it is right that the weekly day of rest should not automatically be Sunday: perhaps it is better that the business of life (or the life of business) should not stop only on Sundays. But I do hope that the government realises that there must be a right for people to have a day off each week. I hope they – and the other European governments – remember about debt relief in the Greek context too.

Things do come right for Job. He gets his family back, and his sheep, and oxen, and camels, even more than he lost before. At the end, the Lord acknowledges that, unlike his friends, Job hasn’t tried to explain away how God works, and somehow thereby put himself above God. He hasn’t tried to be clever. He has just accepted that God is more than he can see or understand, and that God has infinite power.

There are things which we can’t understand. Awful things. But God has assured us, revealed Himself to us. In the Old Testament, He appeared through the prophets: for us, He has appeared in Jesus Christ. We have to acknowledge that this will not of itself take away our pain. But we can believe that God is there, God cares for us. He has told us what to do with pain and suffering. The answer is in Matt.25:35-40.

‘For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?
Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’

We have the power to feed the hungry: we have the power to heal the sick: we have the power to house the homeless: we can accept the refugees. We ought to do something about it. And then, just as Job found out, the Kingdom of heaven will be ours.

‘And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.
And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new.’ [Rev. 21:4-5]

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Bible and Barnabas

By hughdbryant
October 28, 2013 //
0

Sermon for Evensong on Bible Sunday at St Mary’s, on 27th October 2013

Luke 4:14-21 – And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up for to read.
And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written,
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,
To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.
And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him.
And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.
And all bare him witness, and wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth. And they said, Is not this Joseph’s son?
And he said unto them, Ye will surely say unto me this proverb, Physician, heal thyself: whatsoever we have heard done in Capernaum, do also here in thy country.
And he said, Verily I say unto you, No prophet is accepted in his own country.

My younger daughter Alice is a medical student at Cardiff University. She is in her fourth year, and she is now doing clinical training. She’s just finished a stint in a psychiatric hospital. Apparently on her first day, when she met the consultant psychiatrist who would be training her, he introduced himself and then he said what Alice thought was a very strange thing.

He said, ‘You know, as a consultant psychiatrist, I sometimes think that I’m living very dangerously indeed: because nearly every week, I meet the son of God – but I never take any notice! What if I get it wrong some time?’

I feel a bit sympathetic to that consultant. We read stories about Jesus, where he did remarkable things or said remarkable things, which could only really have made sense if he were actually the Son of God. We read about the Pharisees and the scribes getting very angry, disbelieving him, and indeed threatening to do him in: just as they had done here. When he had read the lesson, read the scroll, and then said, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,’ they didn’t get it. ‘Isn’t this Joseph the carpenter’s son? He’s just an ordinary bloke, from an ordinary background – and here he is, claiming to be divine, to be God, to be the Messiah.’

It’s interesting how the people in the synagogue reacted. If you read on beyond the bit of Luke chapter 4 which I just read, you’ll find that everyone in the synagogue was ‘were filled with wrath,
And rose up, and thrust him out of the city, and led him unto the brow of the hill whereon their city was built, that they might cast him down headlong.’

They threatened to kill him. Quite a difference from the people claiming to be divine in the psychiatric hospital. The worst thing that the people there would say was that they were harmless, mad, not bad. There was certainly no question of getting angry with them.

But for the people in the synagogue hearing Jesus’ words, it was a capital offence. They wanted to rub him out, to annihilate him, by throwing him off the cliff.

That does seem to be a very strange and unwarranted reaction. In today’s language, what’s not to like about the message that Jesus was proclaiming? Good news to the poor: release to the captives: recovery of sight to the blind: freedom for the oppressed: the year of the Lord’s favour, the year of jubilee, when debts are forgiven: why on earth should all that be so hated? Why was the man who said it thought to have done something so awful that he deserved to die for it?

It was a good message, a happy message, a message of benefit and goodwill. How could you possibly be against it? Perhaps an explanation why the Pharisees and scribes were so cross was not that it was to do with what Jesus was saying, but it was all about who he was to say it. You know, ‘Who are you? You’re just Joseph’s son. How can you say things like that?’

When I was about seven, my aunt Pegs came to stay. She was rather a formidable history don from the Institute of Education in Malet Street, so I was a bit wary of her. One morning I was just coming out of my bedroom to go downstairs to breakfast when I bumped into Aunt Pegs, who was also about to go downstairs to breakfast.

She looked over my head into my bedroom and said, ‘I think you ought to make your bed.’ I was outraged. It wasn’t that my bed didn’t need making – it was indeed a piggy mess – but: the problem was that Aunt Pegs was not the right person to tell me. Only Mum or Dad could give me those sort of instructions!

The same sort of thing was in the minds of the people in the synagogue, only to a much higher level. What Jesus was saying could only mean that he was God. He was the Messiah. Only the Messiah, only God, could say the sort of things that he was saying. Only God would have the power to bring about those happy outcomes, of poverty relief, freedom and healing.

It wasn’t that these were bad things. What made the people angry was that Jesus was saying the same things that the psychiatric patients do, but he was in deadly earnest. He was really setting himself up to be the Son of God. And the Jewish leaders were affronted. It was a deathly serious business for them. It couldn’t just be shrugged off as the ramblings of a harmless nutcase.

There was something revolutionary about what Jesus was saying. When the Messiah came, this would indeed be a moment of revolution. But it was outrageous that an ordinary carpenter’s son could claim to have that kind of life-changing power, and what got them angry was that they felt that he was a cheat: that he was in effect making light of something which was absolutely central to their belief. God was so awesome that you couldn’t even speak his name. To impersonate God was something truly dreadful, a terrible blasphemy, and it deserved the death penalty.

I don’t know how I would react if Jesus reappeared today. I don’t know whether I’d get it right: whether I would turn my back on my life and follow Jesus. I’d like to think that I would – but it’s at least possible that I’d be like many of the people around Jesus, who didn’t get it.

But the fact is that around the world today, hundreds of millions of people have got it. They do acknowledge that Jesus is Lord, that we are the beneficiaries of God’s grace.

How come? If some people didn’t get it when Jesus was there in person, how come now so many people do believe now? Worldwide, Christianity is far and away the most successful religion. In China alone, there are a million new Christians each year. There’s great growth in Africa, in South America and in former Soviet Union. So what is it that has brought the good news of Christ so effectively to so many people in the last 2,000 years?

The answer of course is this, is the Bible. Through reading the Bible, through listening to the teachings of the church – indeed, even through listening to sermons – about the Bible’s message, people have come to faith. In the second letter to Timothy chapter 3, we read that all scripture is ‘given by inspiration of God’. There is something in holy scripture which is genuinely revelatory. The Bible is a window on God. It is a hugely varied book, a book of books. As well as straightforward instruction, how to be a good and effective disciple, like St Paul’s letters to Timothy, there is ancient ‘wisdom literature’ like the Book of Ecclesiastes, the Preacher, or the Teacher. In the two chapters which Isabelle read for us, describing the venture of faith, ‘Cast thy bread upon the waters’; the life of joy: ‘the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun:’ and how important it is to decide to follow a virtuous path: ‘Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come’. Common sense. Folk wisdom. History. And the Gospel, the story of Jesus. All in one book.

So reading our Bibles, and supporting the work of the Bible Society, which we remember on this, Bible Sunday, is important. Translating the Bible, distributing it where it has not been before, printing it in sufficient quantities – all the work that the Bible Society does, is really important.

But today there is a twist. Just as in Jesus’ time, his preaching, his message, did not evoke universal enthusiasm, but also sparked opposition, so today, although the Christian gospel is just as much a message of love as it has ever been, nevertheless there are many places where to be a Christian is to be in a minority, to be oppressed and persecuted for your beliefs.

The reason, just as much as it was in Jesus’ day, is not so much about the message, but about who the messenger is. If you look at the Qur’an, much of its message is very similar to the Bible: but for Moslems, to get that message from anyone except the prophet Mohammed is unacceptable. And if you, as a Christian, stand up and affirm your faith – by having a Bible, or wearing a cross, say – this is an offence, a blasphemy, in some countries.

So today, as well as celebrating the Bible and the work of the Bible Society – and, I hope, sending them something if we can spare it – I commend also to you the Barnabas Fund, the charity which exists specifically to give support to Christians who are oppressed for their beliefs – for example, in Syria, or Northern Nigeria, parts of Pakistan, or Iraq. Think of Canon Andrew White, suffering from MS, but still leading his big congregation in Baghdad, in his flak jacket. These are the sort of people whom the Barnabas Fund supports.

So let us give thanks for the Bible today, for its unique power in spreading the good news of Christ: so let us support the Bible Society. But also especially today let us remember those places where it is actually dangerous to read a Bible, and where to belong to a church might mean you risk being bombed in the middle of the service. That is where Barnabas comes in. They carry on getting the Bibles through, supporting Christians where it is dangerous to be a Christian. Bible Society and Barnabas Fund. Let us support them.

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