Preached at Holy Cross, Seend
Romans 4. 13-21; Mark 8. 31-38
“Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
Do you want to have a happy, successful, prosperous life? I certainly do. I don’t want to suffer, or be picked on, still less persecuted, and I certainly don’t want to lose my life—at least not until I’ve had my fair share of the good times.
Get Thee Behind Me Satan, by Ilya Repin, ca. 1860. Rostov Regional Museum of Fine Arts, Rostov-on-Don.
Poor Peter always gets a hard time for provoking Jesus into saying, “Get behind me, Satan!” But he’s only reacting like any of us would do if were told by our best pal that we would have to suffer on their behalf. In fact, if we saw someone we knew being spoken to by their best friend in the way Jesus spoke to Peter, we’d probably tell them to get a new best friend—even more if we heard them being told something as weird as “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake…will save it.”
Christianity, my brothers and sisters, is a very, very, weird religion. We often miss that weirdness, because Christianity was the framework through which nearly everyone in this country viewed the world for more than fifty generations—an unimaginable stretch of time. Perhaps Christianity was preached more than it was practiced, but it guided people in how they should behave even if they didn’t always live up to it. Now that it is in retreat, the strangeness of Christianity is starting to become visible again.
We forget how much Christianity, as it rose, upended what had been the established norms of right and wrong, and in a good way. The Wiltshire-based historian of the ancient world, Tom Holland, came back to the Faith after having abandoned it as a young man once he understood how much it had subverted the dominant value systems of the Roman Empire, which were all about power and authority, often exerted with great cruelty. At the heart of the Christian story is Jesus Christ being executed in a particularly cruel way, despite having broken no laws, for reasons for political convenience. The Romans never missed an opportunity to remind the public of just how bloody and brutal they could be if they felt it necessary. This was a society that glorified cruelty as something that successful and honourable men did, not only out of necessity, but also for pleasure. Might is right and the devil take the hindmost—this was this value system that Christianity upended
Now, you might be asking, well, if Christianity is so blinking weird, why did it appeal to people at all? We could discuss the way many Christians were indeed willing to risk and lose their lives for the sake of the Gospel. We could talk about how Christians took great care over the remains of their dead and the most vulnerable among the living. We could even talk about miracles. But ultimately, the growth of Christianity came down to one factor: Christianity helped people made sense of the lives they were living and the world around them.
In the parts of the world where the Church is growing rapidly today, it helps people make sense of their lives and the world around them. It declined in this country and across the West because other ideas about the world began to make more sense—for the moment anyway. After Christianity, came the idea that we were too mature for the God myth, and were in a new age when psychology, technology, and the social sciences would help us, in the fullness of time, to build heaven on earth.
Perhaps even more significant was the Church, sensing a shift in the times, trying to reinterpret Christianity to make it relevant, helpful, and in tune with the latest trends. We thought that we could keep Christ’s moral teachings like ‘love the enemy’ and ‘blessed are the meek’, even if the core of the faith had become literally unbelievable. The core of the faith is all about resurrection, eternal life, and God-made-human in the person of Jesus Christ—and you can’t get rid of the kernel of the faith without changing the content. You’re left with something like the over-processed white bread you get from the petrol station late on a Sunday night when you’ve run out. You have something that looks sort of similar, but all the nutritional value has been stripped out. Even though they rarely thought too deeply about it, people could instinctively tell that the Church was offering something less than it used to, and began to look elsewhere for spiritual sustenance.
But Christianity was the foundation upon which our culture, very imperfectly, had been built for unfathomable aeons. If the foundations begin to crumble, the building can survive for a while, but ultimately it will fall. I wonder if the nerviness, aggression, and intolerance of the last decade or so is a sign that that the structure of our civilisation is starting to lean dangerously.
At the same time, it seems improbable that an ageing and shrinking Church in a barren culture can do much to turn things around. And yet, here we have St Paul writing about how God used Abraham and Sarah, ancient and barren, to give birth to countless descendants over thousands of years—the spiritual forefathers not only of Christians and Jews, but also of Muslims. We see here a theme repeated constantly in Scripture and the history of the Church—God often uses those of least account in the eyes of the world for remarkable purposes. He chose to become human not as an Emperor in Rome or one of the great cities of Persia or China, but as a working man in a little town in an unimportant province. Perhaps he might even use us, these few gathered this morning in an ancient church in a little village in an obscure county for things we can’t begin to imagine. If we lose ‘our’ lives, we also lose our limited conceptions of what our lives might mean, so God can use us for things greater than we could ever imagine of ourselves.
That takes us back to my original theme—of course I want a happy, successful, prosperous life. Who wouldn’t? I am right to pray that God might grant that, to me and to all of you. But none of us can be guaranteed worldly success. Too many of the forces that govern our lives, from the great movements of history and the world economy to the random operation of chance in our own health and that of those we love, are outside our control. Mostly, despite our conceit about our scientific knowledge, they’re still beyond human understanding. We can’t have the whole of our lives in our control. Randomness is a factor in all of our lives and without it we would live in a world that was static, and stale, and lacking creativity. It is only in a universe full of risk that God can lead us the fullness of life he imagines for us.
That is, where I think, the Devil comes in. The Devil wants to keep us focused on human things rather than divine things, so promises that we can have both perfect freedom and also control over our own destiny in this world. He promises more particularly that we can have that control over our lives if only we have enough power – but most people with power abuse it at the expense of other people’s freedom, and as the environmental crisis shows, the freedom of other living organisms with as much God-given right to flourish as we have.
We can’t have total security that in a universe where others, and whole of creation, are granted the same freedom as we are. Instead we are called to follow the wandering preacher from Galilee, the carpenter with the strong accent and the gift of the gab who was not just a wise teacher and holy healer, but was God made one of us, who lost His life so that we might live forever.
Now praise, glory, and honour be to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who is with us in times of plenty and times of austerity, when we are doing and when we are fasting, in all the earth and for ever and ever. Amen.
Top banner image: Galilee countryside from Mount Tabor. © Gerry Lynch, 10 November 2022.
