Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne; Christ Church, Worton; and Holy Cross, Seend
Readings – 1 John 3.1–3; Matthew 5.1–12
“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God”
Wassily Kandinsky, All Saints Day I (1911). Hangs in the Lenbachhaus, Munich.
Which is your favourite saint? Is it St Agur, known for his blue cheese? Or perhaps St Ivel, dedicated to the more humble margarine and yoghurt? And who could forget my favourite saint, St Bruno – the patron saint of pipe-smokers?
The funny thing about all those famous saints from the labels of consumer products is that none of them exist – except for St Bruno, who was one of the most austere monks in the history of the Church! Why is it that naming a product for a saint is so popular that marketing men will make up entirely fictitious saints for the sake of branding? Is it something about the sense of wholesomeness and age-old tradition they invoke?
Yet most of us would run a mile at the idea that we are saints, or should be saints. We know we aren’t saints: we’ve all cheated when we were playing Patience – sometimes Scrabble and Monopoly too – and we pick our noses when we think nobody is looking.
Saints? No, not us. We just muddle along and hope the Big Man is going to be kind enough to do right by us when we pop our clogs.
We all know that song by The Beatles. It’s just so sixties, isn’t it? Flower power was going to save the world. All you need is love. Except it didn’t turn out that way. The optimism faded as we found we couldn’t magic away war by sticking flowers into gun barrels any more than we could magic away crime by social science and psychology.
Our own Turbulent Twenties have never been anything other than a dark and troubled time – the era of Netanyahu and Hamas and Trump and Putin. All you need is love? Well, none of us would like to live without love, but is it really all you need? I mean, a drone production industry and a nuclear deterrent are also quite useful.
Surely all this talk of love being what holds up the law is all very well and good for the idealistically minded, but it’s not very practical in a world of serious criminals and political hard men, is it? Well, that’s what we’re tempted to say anyway.
But, hang on, let’s ask ourselves where and when Jesus says that loving God is the greatest commandment, and that the second is to love your neighbour as yourself. It’s just a few days before He’s crucified, in the Temple, the stronghold of the Jerusalem religious establishment, which is already plotting to have Him killed. And Jesus knows all this.
The biography of Nikita Khrushchev by the American academic William Taubman is a doorstop of a book. I mean that literally. It’s so big and heavy I sometimes use it to hold my interior doors open whenever I air the house. It’s 900 pages and runs to well over a quarter of a million words. It’s a very good biography – it won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, in fact – and it’s an enjoyable read, but I’ve only ever managed to dip in and out of it, despite owning it for many years.
A banging read – William Taubman’s Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (2003).
Khrushchev, who led the Soviet Union between 1953 and 1964, has been the subject of nine significant biographies in English, at least another three in Russian, two in French, and one in German. So you might assume that he must have been a very important figure but I think it’s still too early for history to have come to a mature judgement of that. He led the Soviet Union during the terrifying Cuban Missile Crisis and the construction of the Berlin Wall, so I think he will be of interest to historians and enthusiastic ordinary people for centuries to come – in the way that Metternich, or Montezuma, or Charles II still are. But he was a man who was made and ultimately deposed by the winds of history, not one who changed their direction. Will people still call themselves followers of Khrushchev in two thousand years? Or be reading any of his speeches? My dears, they don’t even do so sixty years after he lost power.
Jesus Christ, on the other hand, has only four biographies, and three of them use a lot of the same material – together they have far fewer words than William Taubman’s biography of Khrushchev. We know them as the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and that’s how they have been known since ancient times, although none of them actually identifies its author in its text. We owe the people who wrote these works nearly everything we know about Jesus Christ and His life, and excerpts from their biographies are read in our church every Sunday, and will be in literally millions of churches around the world this very day. Well over three thousand languages have had at least one of the Gospels translated into them.
Today we celebrate St Luke’s Day. So, what do we know about St Luke? Not very much. St Paul mentions a Luke, “the beloved physician”, in his Letter to the Colossians, and the Church has long believed he wrote both the Third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, which are really two halves of one work. He was probably a gentile, perhaps from Antioch, the city where followers of Jesus were first called Christians. He stayed with Paul to the end, as we heard in our first reading. But across his two volumes, which together constitute the largest contribution by any single writer to the New Testament, he never once tells us his name.
Thanks to Unherd for asking me for my view on the consequences of the Secretary of State for NI banning the Drumcree march. An excerpt is below – the full article is on Unherd.
The ban, “was the only sensible decision after the region’s police chief, Jon Boutcher, had written to Bryant formally requesting a review of the Commission’s ruling. The alternative was to let the dispute fester through a long winter and set the context for regional elections looming in May.
[…]
“The decision lets both sides of Northern Ireland’s divided community claim victory. Nationalists — from anti-Good Friday Agreement dissident Republicans, through to Sinn Féin and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) — were united against reviving the parade. Thousands, including Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald and Vice President Michelle O’Neill, descended on Portadown over recent weekends to support locals, who repeatedly showed they could block the road in numbers too great for the police to remove them without a degree of force nobody was prepared to countenance.
“Many Unionists, however, see a decidedly pyrrhic victory for Irish nationalism, undercutting its claims to accommodate Orange and British culture in any future “new Ireland”. They hope it will bolster wavering liberal Protestants — the sort deeply perturbed by Brexit, who have shown intermittent flashes of being tempted by a united Ireland in a future border poll — although this group is hardly known for supporting Orange parades. Unionism can walk away from this crisis seeing itself as the side that boxed clever and took the moral high ground. Rather than shouting “No surrender” and digging in for a long siege as it once would have, it leaves with important legal victories in its back pocket, having avoided unduly annoying the likely swing voters in any border poll: the region’s detribalised moderates and ethnic minorities.
“Nationalism’s victory comes at the cost of a real medium-term risk to the 1998 Public Processions Act which regulated parades.”
Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and St Mary’s, Potterne
Readings: Philippians 4.1–9; Matthew 22.1–14
“The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city.”
Today’s Gospel reading is all about judgement – severe judgement at the hands of a powerful king who is clearly meant to represent God the Father – and we don’t like it. We want Jesus to be the meek and mild gentle Jesus who cuddles lambs. Talk of divine judgement scares us. Probably we should indeed have a healthy respect for it, although if any of us is genuinely consumed by fear of it, we’ve either misunderstood Jesus Christ or perhaps misunderstood ourselves.
Image by Alena Darmel on Pexels. Public domain.
We may not like to contemplate judgement, but without it there is no justice. A Christianity without judgement is one where Jimmy Savile and Joseph Stalin get away with it, perhaps after God tells them how very naughty they’ve been. That may be the action of a God who is good, but certainly not a God who is just.
So unwelcome is the idea of divine judgement – especially from this unbending and angry king – that the Internet is full of sermons on this Gospel reading ducking it entirely, saying things like the king isn’t really meant to be God, and Jesus is identifying Himself with the man without the wedding garment cast into the outer darkness. No way, José. That parable is about divine judgement. That should be obvious since Jesus is telling it to the chief priests and Pharisees, the top holy men of His world, in the Temple, which is their stronghold. It is just before the Passover festival in which they’ll plot and bribe one of Jesus’ closest friends to betray Him, and then they’ll have Him killed. They may not have worked out the details, but they know where they are heading. Here, He is warning these holy men that they are embarked on their own destruction, a terrible and violent destruction exacted by God but provoked by their own cruelty, arrogance, and stupidity. A few decades later, Jesus’ prophecy would be fulfilled when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem.
In fact, this is the third Sunday in a row to give us a parable Jesus told to the Jewish leadership in the Temple in Holy Week. Each warns of the loss of the kingdom, or of destruction..
So this isn’t about us, is it? We aren’t top holy men and we aren’t plotting to have Jesus killed. We’re just ordinary Christians, trying to follow Him faithfully even through our moments of stupidity and moral laziness and all the normal run of human failings. We aren’t perfect – but none of us is beating God’s servants or anything like that, or at least I hope we aren’t.
Preached at Christ Church, Worton; Holy Cross, Seend; and Christ Church, Bulkington
Philippians 3.4b-14; Matthew 21.33-46
“…the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.”
Giotto, The Renunciation of Worldly Goods, one of 28 scenes of the life of St Francis in the Upper Basilica at Assisi, painted ca. 1296-1304.
Did you know developing countries don’t always make all the money they should from their natural resources, because so many of their products are processed and finished elsewhere, and that’s where the real money is to be made. So copper is sent from Zambia to China to be turned into wires, and cocoa is sent from Ghana to Switzerland to be turned into… Toblerones.
So, the tenants in today’s Gospel reading are really fortunate to have a landlord who hasn’t just let some land to them, but has also provided a winepress – a significant capital investment for their benefit. Rather than just selling grapes, they can sell wine, which is where the real profits are. Are they grateful to him for that? Not at all – they beat up and even kill his servants when they come to collect the rent, which is due in the form of produce of the land, specifically its fruit.
The landlord’s patience with these ungrateful tenants is incredible. Long after most would have hired some hard men to enforce payment, he persists in asking them nicely. In the end, he sends his own son – and they kill him too, hoping to steal his inheritance. Talk about ingratitude!
Maybe the money they’re making has led them to believe they’re landowners rather than just tenants, that they’ve made this profitable wine entirely on their own and haven’t needed help from the landlord.
The landlord is God; his son is Jesus Christ; the tenants are the Jewish leaders, who have not paid God back for what He has done for them. When Jesus told the chief priests and elders this story, they replied that the ungrateful tenants deserved to be put to a miserable death and their land given to a more co-operative tenant. Then they realised He was talking about them – and started looking for a way to arrest Him.
Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot; Christ Church, Bulkington, and Holy Cross, Seend
Philippians 2.1-13; Matthew 21.23-32
“…the tax-collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you…”
Georg Pencz, The Parable of the Father and His Two Sons in the Vineyard, from The Story of Christ (1534-5). In the drawings and prints collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Do you ever catch those little ‘God slot’ reflections on the radio? Things like Thought for the Day on the Radio 4 Today programme? Has any of them ever stuck in your mind?
One still sticks in mine, from decades ago, when I would hear the Radio Ulster ‘God slot’ blearily as I got ready for school. The clergyman presenting it startled me by saying that hypocrisy was a good thing. If you’re a hypocrite, at least you know what the right thing to do is, even if you don’t actually do it. There’s room for God to work with a hypocrite, ran the argument, in a way there isn’t with someone completely blind to what’s right. It was an interesting argument for grabbing the attention of a distracted audience more interested in the Weetabix and the traffic report – interesting enough that I still remember it three decades later.
The problem is that it’s hard to square with what Jesus actually taught, especially in today’s Gospel reading.
“…the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.” As attention-grabbing statements go, that trumps even the argument that hypocrisy is a good thing. Any of us would be taken aback, and probably a bit outraged, to have this said to us. And Jesus says it not to a group of randomers, but to the chief priests and elders, on the sacred ground of the Temple itself.
For months our Sunday Gospel readings have been following Jesus around the Holy Land teaching and healing, starting in His home turf of Galilee with the Sermon on the Mount, then into surprising places like the territory of the Syrophoenicians (the descendants of the Canaanites), and finally on Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, where He warned His followers He had to die in the Holy City.
Now Jesus’ journey is over. It is the Monday of Holy Week. The day before, He rode into Jerusalem riding on a donkey, as the Scriptures foretold a mighty prophet would, and the crowds flocked out to see Him, singing His praises and spreading palm branches before Him, also just as those prophecies foretold. The tax collectors and the prostitutes and all the common people of Jerusalem knew a prophet when they saw one.
“…live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ…”
Vincent van Gogh, The Red Vineyard (1888). Hangs in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
It’s never too late to turn to God. That’s the simple reading of the story that Jesus tells His followers in this morning’s Gospel, about the labourers who start work late in the afternoon getting the same wage as those who’ve toiled from the morning. That’s certainly not an incorrect reading of it. But there’s a lot more to it than that.
The really big question it raises is whether God is fair. You’re going to tell me that of course He is – what sort of vicar would say otherwise? – and I’m going to tell you that God is something far more than merely “fair”. In a fair system we get what we deserve. However, we don’t always want to get what we deserve. We know that sometimes we let ourselves down. Perfect justice is something few of us would want to confront.
God goes beyond fairness, to generosity and abundance and forgiveness, something symbolised by paying everyone a fair day’s wage even when some have done less than a day’s work. You know some people would take advantage of you if you tried to run a company like that. You can see why the labourers who worked all day had a bit of a grumble.
Unherd asked me for my views on Donald Trump’s United Ireland comments, and I was glad to supply them. Here’s an excerpt.
“The United States was founded through a successful rebellion against the British Crown, and Americans have consequently long felt a degree of sympathy for those seeking a united and independent Ireland. For some, that sympathy went much further: during the Troubles, Irish Americans even helped fund the IRA’s campaign, with some going so far as to buy weapons. But across the world, people who know little about Northern Ireland or the precise nature of its communal divisions generally assume that it is natural and inevitable that the region will ultimately leave the UK and reunify with the Republic.
“It is likely that Trump’s remarks reflected that widely held instinct and have no actual diplomatic plan behind them — just another flippant comment made for laughs. But those with more intimate knowledge of what is still a place apart from both Great Britain and the rest of Ireland are only too aware that four centuries of complex and messy ethno-sectarian conflict in Ulster will not vanish quickly.
“Northern Ireland is a notoriously self-obsessed place, where political shifts are measured in decades and generations rather than months or years. It is unlikely to pay much attention to outsiders as its people work out whether its changing demographics will also alter its constitutional status — a genuinely open question.”
Jan van Hemessen, The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant (c. 1556). Hangs in the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, USA.
When St Paul writes that the weak eat only vegetables, he isn’t acting like the ancient equivalent of a social media influencer from the manosphere, recommending that his followers stick to a fat-rich diet of red meat and bone broth. He’s actually referring to a controversy that divided the ancient Church in exactly the same way that gay marriage or women bishops divide the Church of our own time.
For St Paul, the question at hand was what Christians should and shouldn’t eat. In the pagan cults of the Roman Empire sacrificing animals to various gods at their temples was a big thing, especially on their holy days. Of course, a lot of the meat was consumed at big parties at the various temples, but some of it was given away, perhaps to the poor or just to buy goodwill, and some of it was sold on the open market. So, if you were tucking into a nice ham sandwich in a big Roman city, there was a fair chance the ham had been sacrificed to a pagan god.
So, some people in the early Church avoided eating meat, because they were worried it might have been sacrificed to pagan gods. For St Paul, that kind of scruple was a sign of having a weak faith. After all, pagan idols weren’t actually gods – they were just dumb statues, or figments of people’s imaginations, after all, so if you really had a strong faith that Jesus Christ was Lord, then why would you worry about a bit of chicken that had been sacrificed to Jupiter or whoever?
This had big social implications, because just as now, a lot of Roman socialising and commercial life was done over a meal. Business deals were struck at the dinner table. Men of social standing invited others to dine and accepted invitations. The Christians who refused to eat meat that might possibly have been sacrificed to pagan gods were cutting themselves off from respectable society and job opportunities.
So, the Christians who abstained from meat sacrificed to idols thought that the people who ate it were barely Christian at all, unwilling to make the slightest sacrifice for God, completely captured by the pagan society round them. The people who ate meat thought the abstainers had totally missed the implications of Jesus Christ dying for us, which freed us from the idea that breaking arbitrary laws about diet and washing could put us on the wrong side of God.
This might seem obscure, but it was a topic that divided the Church along the lines of whether Jesus was calling Christians to be a group of particularly holy people quite separate from the mass of people; or whether Jesus was calling Christians to be an integral part of society to better lead others to Him – very like, for example, a lot of Christian arguments about whether or not the Church should embrace same-sex marriage.
