Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot; St Mary’s, Potterne; and Holy Cross, Seend
Readings – 2 Corinthians 4.13 – 5.1; Mark 3. 20-35
“When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, ‘He has gone out of his mind.’
Have you ever heard a passage of Scripture and thought to yourself, ‘Jesus could be a bit bonkers, couldn’t he?’ Have you ever formed that thought but immediately suppressed it as un-Christian and maybe a bit blasphemous? It would be understandable to suppress a thought like that.
But, in this morning’s Gospel reading, we find Jesus’ own family – His brothers, His mother who would remain with Him right to the Cross, thinking either that He was nuts, or at least that a mob might do Him harm because they thought He was nuts.
Indeed, in crazy times, it’s the sane people who can seem to be nuts. Jesus lived in crazy times for the Jewish people of the Holy Land. We, too, live in frankly crazy times, as you’ll have noticed if you’ve watched the news recently.
Sensible people want to do the right thing; sensible people want to be good. Doing good is, of course, a very good thing. We all know, however, that none of us is good all of the time.
People who aren’t Christians think the Church is all about doing good; they think it’s an organisation for good people to celebrate and promote goodness in the name of a good holy man called Jesus Christ who lived a long time ago. It’s therefore easily dismissed as irrelevant to people who want to live in the present, and who know they aren’t always good all the time.
The Church too often colludes with this, by constantly trying to justify its existence with good works, as if it were a charity or an NGO. The Church, however, isn’t about goodness, but something far more wonderful – grace. Goodness is something we try to achieve through our own efforts; grace is a gift from God.
Grace is something that we pray goes ahead of us us in all that we do, keeping us living as God commands and loving those around us. St Paul, in today’s Epistle reading, paints a wonderful picture of grace extending to more and more people, giving glory to God.
What’s wrong with trying to be good? Nothing. Of course, I encourage you to try to be good. But St Paul was someone who knew better than most of us that the road to Hell can be paved with good intentions. He had thought he was a particularly holy follower of God, because he was so diligent in keeping all the rules which he found in Scripture. In reality, he was an angry and bigoted fanatic, who incited murder against the first Christians. Paul was so determined to always be right that he made himself a proper wrong ‘un, so much so that only a violent encounter with God could make him see sense. This type of fanatic has always been the cause of problems, whether claiming to be acting in the service of God, or the glory of their nation, or some worthy political cause. Thankfully most of us aren’t cut out for such fanaticism.
Yet it was precisely because he was such a fanatic that Paul was forced to confront a reality that most of us shy away from: that ultimately, at least some of our attempts at goodness will fail, because human efforts, whether through weakness or wilfulness, can never be perfect. It is through the grace of God and not our own efforts that we might be granted the means to live good lives, and it is through the grace of God and not our own efforts that we are saved into eternal life by Christ.
The Second Letter to the Corinthians, which we’ll have a lot of readings from in June and July, was written by St Paul as a challenge to people in the church in Corinth who’d forgotten that they depended on grace and thought they could earn God’s favour by always doing the right thing.
Grace is an essential part of what the Church believes: so the Church isn’t an organisation that seeks to good, but an organism—a living body comprising many individual people who all have their good and bad sides. This is why we pray the Confession together at every service, admitting that we have done wrong, or allowed wrong to be done, since we last met—then receiving God’s forgiveness, His free gift to us through grace.
Goodness is what most people, most of the time, set out to do, regardless of their religious views or lack of them. It’s the safe, sensible, way of looking at the world. To believe in grace is a bit eccentric; that God, in the Holy Spirit, is constantly circulating in the world, sustaining us even when we do wrong, seeking to turn our mistakes into opportunities for good things to happen, and always seeking to forgive our sins if we are truly sorry for them. You might even say that this idea of grace is a bit crazy. We’re all comfortable with the idea that that everyone should get what they deserve, without any discrimination or bias; but grace says we should get what we don’t deserve, as a free gift of God.
If I preached about the end of the world, most people – at least most sensible Church of England people like us – would find it a little crazy. But the truth is that we’ve lived in the shadow of the bomb for eighty years now: humanity has long had the capacity to wipe itself out. So far, we’ve managed to avoid jumping over the nuclear precipice, through God’s grace, although both 1962 and 1983 we came perilously close to it. But as our technological power continues to increase, so do the threats: climate change is often presented as a consequence of greed, but actually it simply followed from burning coal and oil to keep warm and get places, mostly at times when even the most perceptive scientists had yet to realise the problem. It followed from trying to do good. New technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Genetic Modification promise to cure terrible diseases and even to end material poverty, but might also threaten our survival. You don’t exactly have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder what was happening in those labs in Wuhan, in the months before the Covid pandemic, where we know that well-meaning but possibly misguided research on viruses was being carried out. The road to Hell, as St Paul knew, is paved with good intentions.
So we should pray that God’s grace always goes before us, the whole human race, as our power continues to increase even as we get no wiser, as we add to the list of ways that a small series of mishaps, even without any malign intentions, might kill many millions. That might not seem too cheerful, but remember that we Christians aren’t the supposedly sensible people who think the human race can keep improving for ever; we’re the crazy people who think that Jesus Christ died for us because we can never through our own efforts escape from our fallen nature and its consequences. Remember that we believe that Jesus Christ will return in glory, as we say in the Creed every Sunday. Remember that whatever the fate of the world is, for any of us time is short, and that we as Christians believe that this life is just a foretaste of the glories of heaven.
As St Paul writes, “we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen, for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”
All things in this universe must die; science tells us even the stars and the galaxies will come to an end, even the protons that make up all matter will eventually decay, on a timescale impossible to imagine. Jesus Christ lives forever and we will live through Him, even if the whole human race should perish, for as our Epistle reading this morning concludes, “we know that if this earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have … a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”
Crazy? Or the only sane thing to believe in a crazy world? You decide.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
Top banner image: James Ensor’s early piece of Expressionism, “Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889” was actually painted in 1888. It hangs in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
