triumph | hughdbryant

Sermon for Evensong on the third Sunday of Lent, 12 March 2023, at Saint Peter’s, Old Cogan

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=545542568‘

Put on the whole armour of God…; the breastplate of righteousness…; the shield of faith…; the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit.’

My favourite toy shop – yes, my favourite toy shop – isn’t Hamleys in Regent Street but it’s in Zürich and in a number of other places in Switzerland under the name Franz Carl Weber. It’s a very old shop; it’s been going since 1881. It is a truly wonderful toy shop.

The top floor is very well stocked with model railways at one end and dolls at the other end, so there is no sexist hierarchy. Then on the floors going down, are pedal cars and bikes, dressing up clothes, board games and construction toys: there is Lego and Playmobil but, alas, no more Meccano. There’s absolutely everything for kids in there and indeed there is quite a lot for their grandpas to enjoy as well.

But there is one small category of stuff that Franz Carl Weber does not stock. I wonder if you can imagine what it is. Well, the answer is that Franz Carl Weber, the best toy shop in the world, I think, does not stock anything to do with war or weapons. There isn’t even a spud gun to be had in there. No toy soldiers; no World of Warfare games, no Airfix kits of warplanes; nothing to do with war or weapons.

I’ll come back to the toy shop without any toy soldiers in a minute. But I just want to look at something else we haven’t got at the moment, which is any hymns today. Sometimes that’s quite a good thing; because it’s rather like listening to the radio – you know, ‘the pictures are much better on the radio’ than on the TV – because they are in your head. That goes for other things that you can hear in your mind’s ear, if I can put it that way. So what would be our hymn? I would suggest the one that immediately springs to mind is a great one of Charles Wesley’s,

Soldiers of Christ arise,

and put your armour on.

Strong in the strength which God supplies

through his eternal Son.

…

Stand then in his great might,

with all his strength endued,

but take to arm you for the fight

the panoply of God.

The panoply, the complete kit of weapons, the suit of armour; for this is a hymn based on our reading from Saint Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. And it’s a rousing hymn: that I certainly remember being very popular with us when I was at school.

And in one sense, what’s not to like? Either about our lesson, or about Charles Wesley’s poetic rendering of it? Stand up to evil; be armour-plated in your resistance, use the best weapons you have, to stand up for the good guys. It’s pretty topical, in the context of the Ukraine. There’s lots in the newspapers, on the TV and on the radio, comparing the weapons used by the Russians with those supplied to the Ukrainians by the Western nations.

There’s something quite celebratory about the respective descriptions of the Russian and western tanks that we and some of the other European nations – and, indeed, the United States – will be sending – in fact I think that we are already sending, for the Ukrainians to use.

There has been quite a lot of learned discussion about the relative merits of the Western weapons as against the weapons used by the Russian invaders. I am sure that most 15-year-old boys would be able to give you a detailed rundown of the respective specifications of the Russian T90 as against the Challenger 2 or the Leopard 2 tanks, or the Abrams.

You know, I used to rather like playing with toy soldiers and those Britain’s model field guns which shot out a sliver of lead as a shell. My friend John DeVille, when we were eight or nine, had the most marvellous model 18 inch ‘naval howitzer’ which reproduced all the main things that a real field gun did. You could lay the barrel at the right elevation and tracking; the shells were little masterpieces of brass with a spring inside them and the lead projectile which you put in the breach and then fired, then ejecting the casing. The whole thing was about eight or 9 inches long and it went with our toy soldiers, which were predominantly lead or die-cast, painted in enamel and colourful in their fine uniforms.

But there was a problem. The problem was, what to do if there was a battle. Then you would actually shoot your wonderful naval howitzer or model 25-pounder at the army which you had lined up against them. But I didn’t want to break any of my soldiers and I didn’t want to damage the opposition’s half-track truck that I was very proud of. So this was a war without casualties.

And after a bit it began to dawn on me that there is no such thing, that those beautiful soldiers would get smashed up. Some of them would lose arms and legs – and heads. Some of them would not get up again.

And I want to suggest to you, in all humility, that St Paul may have been a bit up the pole here, in this famous passage from his letter to the Ephesians. In celebrating weapons of war, even when they are used in a good cause, he is missing what Jesus himself said. ‘Love your enemies. Turn the other cheek.’

Oh, but surely, you will say, Saint Paul is being a realist. The way of love is just not practical, and you do need the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit; and indeed you may say that this is exactly in line with the Old Testament as well.

Look at our lesson from the book of Joshua, where God says to Joshua,

‘There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life: …Be strong and of a good courage: ..Only be thou strong and very courageous, … that thou mayest prosper whithersoever thou goest.’

And you will remember that this led on, once the Israelites had crossed over the Jordan, to their encounter with the Amalekites where, rather surprisingly, God took them to task for having shown mercy to the people whom they defeated.

But the thing that perhaps St Paul didn’t really get, but which Franz Carl Weber, when he set up his toy shop in 1881, did understand, is the point about my not wanting any of my toy soldiers to be broken. Mr Weber realised that you can’t have a war without breaking soldiers; that the use of weapons does not bring about victory, but it is, rather, a sign of failure.

Paul paints a picture which looks like a Roman centurion in his armour, and perhaps, as he was the ‘ambassador in chains’ imprisoned in Rome when he wrote the letter, he might have seen a victorious general coming back from a campaign and being granted what was called a triumph, leading the people whom he had conquered, their kings and generals, in chains through the streets of Rome. His centurions would be in their best uniform.

But war never really leads to triumph. Away from the soldiers marching in their dress uniforms there are the broken ones, maimed and dead on the battlefield. And at this time, when we are now confronting again the feeling that we have to wage war, in order to defend civilisation against the attack of the Russians, we don’t know what victory should really look like.

And at this time of Lent we have to realise that the conflict that Jesus entered into, in trying to bring about his kingdom of love, ended on the battlefield. Jesus was one of the fallen.

But the other message of Lent points to the triumph, the real triumph, of Easter. Be of good cheer and I will support you. Do the right thing and I will support you, is God’s message to Joshua. The prophet Isaiah, (or perhaps more correctly the first of the three prophets writing under the name), had a vision of the kingdom in which they would ‘beat their swords into ploughshares, and they would not learn war any more.’

Then, on God’s holy mountain, the sword of truth will have more truth than sword; the breastplate of faith, more faith than breastplate, and the helmet of salvation, more salvation than helmet. Let it be so! Let us pray for peace and love in place of war. With that peace and love, we can have the ‘sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life’ which comes at Easter.

Sermon for Mattins on Palm Sunday, 20th March 2016

Zechariah 9:9-12, 1Cor.2:1-12
We know what happens next. Or as people say nowadays, ‘Spoiler alert!’ ‘Ride on, ride on in majesty’. If you’ve just been to the family Eucharist at 10 o’clock, and seen the lovely tableau which the children presented, and maybe you have admired the Shetland pony on your way out, you will know why, when you were little, Palm Sunday was one of the best Sundays in the year to go to church. Donkeys are, alas, in rather short supply these days: there are now rather strict rules about what you have to do if you are going to carry a donkey around.

Mind you, in Stoke D’Abernon, many of the Mums do have the right vehicle for towing a horse box. Somewhere around here there is even a Range Rover with the registration number KT11 MUM! Anyway at St Mary’s we have had a lovely Shetland pony, and I am sure that Jesus would not have turned his nose up at a ride on him.

Processions are fun. Walking down the hill in a happy throng following someone riding on a Shetland pony was a very jolly thing to do. You can wave your palm leaves and your palm crosses. People do get quite carried away when they get caught up in supporting somebody who seems to take away their cares and blot out the annoyances that they have to put up with.

It’s quite noticeable, for example, that Donald Trump seems to have caught the imagination of a lot of people who feel left out by mainstream politics in the United States. They feel that big government doesn’t listen to them. Trump is their champion.

The Israelites had been in exile, and then under foreign domination, in their own country, for hundreds of years. At the time of Jesus, of course, the Romans were in charge and the Jews were second-class citizens. They were looking forward to the coming of a messiah, a deliverer, a king who was going to liberate them. They looked back to the various prophecies in Isaiah: the servant king, and in Zechariah was this strange image of a king coming on a donkey.

The basic model for the procession was what Roman generals did when they came back from foreign wars. If they had been successful, they were granted the right to have what was called a ‘triumph.’ A triumph was a magnificent procession through the centre of Rome, parading their captives and soaking up the applause of the people.

You can see that it would very much depend on your point of view how such a procession, with Jesus at its head, would be viewed. Even though Jesus was riding on a donkey, it might look rather challenging to the powers that be. In Palestine at that time, the ‘powers that be’ were both the Romans and the Jews, (the Pharisees and the scribes), because the Jews had a form of self rule, under the overall authority of the Romans. So if this big procession came over the hill from Bethany and down the Mount of Olives, it’s fairly understandable that both the Jewish authorities and the Romans might well have found it disturbing.

Even today, although we are supposed to be very liberal in our approach to free speech, you have to get permission for a demo to take place. You can’t just have a procession through the centre of the village, so that it blocks the traffic. For people in authority, processions are a sign of discontent.

There was a raw energy about to this crowd. In St John’s Gospel, we are told that the people were particularly excited because they had heard about Jesus bringing Lazarus back to life from the dead. Jesus, riding on a donkey, was a fulfilment of Zechariah’s prophecy. It all added up to a moment of great hope for the people. A man who could bring a dead man back to life could certainly be the king that they were looking for, to throw off the yoke of Roman rule so that Jerusalem would be liberated again.

But we know what comes next. ‘Ride on, ride on, in lowly pomp ride on – to die.’ A huge amount of the New Testament is devoted to the events of next week, Holy Week. A quarter of St Luke’s gospel; a third of Saint Matthew and St Mark and nearly half of St John’s Gospel. This is what Christianity is all about. And certainly, in this week, it is not about a triumph. It is not about conquest. It is more like a catalogue of suffering and failure.

When you’re little, you can only really take in nice stories about people riding on the back of donkeys. Good Friday is not something that we go into in great detail with our children. It is in a very real sense what in the cinema would attract an X rating. It is something which is too shocking. What we are talking about is the death of God, people putting to death the man who was also God. Five days earlier this man was being feted as the returning hero, as the Messiah, the king from over the water.

Nevertheless he, this same man, was going to be strung up on a cross along with common criminals.

Saint Paul says that the authorities would never have done it if they had known the full story. ‘We speak the wisdom of God in a mystery which none of the princes of this world knew; for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.’ [1 Cor. 2:8]

In Spiritual Cinema next week, on Tuesday, we intend to show the shortened, animated version of Ben Hur. We debated what would be an appropriate film to show during Holy Week. One film which we have shown in the past, which I felt was perhaps the very best one, was Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. A few years ago, we actually showed it in St Andrew’s Church, in the church itself.

For those who haven’t seen it, it is a very harrowing film, because it does show, in a very realistic way, exactly what happened to Jesus; how he was flogged, humiliated and ultimately crucified. Somehow it brings home to you the awfulness of what he suffered in a way that cold print on a page just can’t do. It would be a shocking film if you were watching somebody – just anybody – suffering in that way. Nobody should be treated in such a brutal and bestial way. But Jesus did suffer in that way, and he was the son of God.

The contrast with the jolly man on a donkey could not be more profound and more complete. We know what happened next. What must it feel like if you have just committed the most terrible crime, and realise what you have just done? What will the Judge say? What will your sentence be? What if that crime is to kill the son of God?

Oh, you say, but we didn’t. We weren’t there. It was the bad people, even the Jews. But in a sense, we were there. In a sense, the turnover, from his triumph to his downfall and being lifted up on the cross, was entirely predictable. It made sense in human terms to the powers that be. It wasn’t specifically because they were Jews or because they were Romans or whomever. They were just ordinary fallible human beings. They didn’t recognise his divinity. Pontius Pilate having the inscription put over the cross, naming Jesus as the King of the Jews, says it all. In one sense, he was the king of the Jews, but in that the Jews were the chosen people of God he was also king of heaven.

In Lent we have been encouraged to reflect, to deny ourselves, maybe to fast, and to pray. Now in this week, this Holy Week, we are invited to think about the full awfulness of what Jesus suffered, and why he suffered it. Maybe we should do it without a spoiler alert. Maybe we should say, we don’t know what comes next. Maybe we aren’t too comfortable. If Jesus died for all of us, for all of humankind, we should reflect that the sort of evil which pushed Jesus on to the cross is still with us.

People are still hurting each other, pursuing gain without thought for the loss to someone else that that gain entails. We are still returning an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. We are still going by on the other side. We are still worshipping false gods.

‘Ride on, ride on in majesty. In lowly pomp, ride on to die.’

Toy Soldiers

Ride on, ride on in majesty