Hope for the Bad Guys: Sermon Preached on 30th March 2025 (Fourth Sunday in Lent)

Preached at St Mary the Virgin, Bishops Cannings (Devizes Deanery Evensong)

Prayer of Manasseh; 2 Timothy 4. 1-8

“Alexander the coppersmith did me much evil: the Lord reward him according to his works!”

Have you ever heard of Manasseh, whose prayer was our first reading this evening? He is one of the main bad guys in the Old Testament—or at least he started out that way. He became the King of Judah when the great prophet Isaiah was an old man. Unlike his father, Hezekiah, who had been a pious man, Manasseh was an open worshipper of idols who abandoned many of the most important tenets of the religion of Moses, David, and Solomon. Although Isaiah’s end is not recorded in the Bible, there is an ancient Jewish tradition, going back many centuries before Christ, the Manasseh had Isaiah executed by sawing him in two. He had evidently spoken too many truths for the comfort of the new man in power.

Now, I wonder how many of you had even heard of the Prayer of Manasseh before this evening, let alone that the Church of England lectionary occasionally sets it as a reading in church? The Prayer of Manasseh comes from the collection of writings known as the Apocrypha, which your Bible may or may not include—although if you’re an Anglican, it should include it. The Thirty-Nine Articles say that the Church should read from the Apocrypha “for example of life and instruction of manners”, but that they cannot be used to establish any doctrine. They are enlightening writings to read, but don’t have the weight in Christian teaching of canonical Scripture. The New Testament contains many references the Apocrypha, and these writings enjoyed a prominent place in the early church.

Interestingly while some parts of what we Anglicans call the Apocrypha are regarded as fully part of the Old Testament in Roman Catholic teaching, the Prayer of Manasseh isn’t among them. It has roughly the same status in Roman Catholic teaching as it does for Anglicans. But it is fully part of the Old Testament for some our Orthodox brethren, and this long prayer of forgiveness for the gravest of sins is used in the Orthodox liturgy for compline, or night prayer.

After some decades of ruling Judah in an ungodly way, Manasseh was captured by the Assyrians and taken away in chains. The Second Book of Chronicles records that in prison in Babylon, Manasseh returned to the fear of the Lord, after which he was released and restored to his throne. This is supposedly the prayer he prayed in jail.

I say “supposedly” because it probably wasn’t written until many centuries after Manasseh’s death around 643 BC. Most scholars date it to the generations before Jesus’ time. Why would people so much later write something like this, and why would it come to be seen as being of spiritual significance?

It was written at a time when the Holy Land had long been run by a succession of foreign kingdoms and empires. The Jewish people had been left in this position not least because of the selfishness and corruption of their political and religious leaders. It was evidently a time when people hoped that their leaders might do what Manasseh had done and turn away from their sins, ask for God’s forgiveness, and so see the kingdom restored to glory. That is a major element in the religious and cultural environment of the Holy Land in which Jesus Christ lived.

We too live at a time and place when most people have lost faith in leaders. Yet if Manasseh can turn his life and his reign around after a confronting crisis, so too can our leaders. So can we all.

I wonder what happened to Alexander the Coppersmith in the end. Did he, like Manasseh, turn over a new leaf? Whatever “great harm” he did, Paul is content to leave judgement, and any payback, to Christ, who will, as he reminds us in this passage from the Second Letter to Timothy “judge the quick and the dead at his appearing”.

The idea of divine judgement frightens us, and perhaps that’s why practising Christians seem to be so embarrassed to talk about it in front of the wider public. But without judgement we live in a cosmos where the cruel and corrupt get away with it, and there is ultimately no justice.

We should have a healthy fear of divine judgement, but the New Testament is repeatedly clear that judgement will be carried out by Jesus Christ – very specifically by Christ – not even by the Father and certainly not us. So our judge is someone who not only taught us to forgive but who gave His life out of love so our sins could be forgiven.

Paul may have forgiven Alexander, but that doesn’t mean he likes him. In fact generally he seems a little bitter in this letter, written in the knowledge that he is near the end of his life. He seems to have been abandoned by most of his former colleagues – hardly surprising, as Paul could clearly be a very awkward man to deal with. Again, despite Paul’s prickliness, what he wants his readers to know is that he hopes this “not be counted against them”.

For despite everything, Paul remains confident that “the Lord will rescue me from every evil attack and save me for his heavenly Kingdom.” May we too be granted such confidence in the reality of Christ’s coming judgment, in God’s power to save us in that judgement, and in His desire to so save, so great that He gave Himself to death on the Cross. And if we need to turn over a new leaf to return to God, He is always willing to receive us.

And now to God the father, God the son, and God the Holy Ghost, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.

Top image: Apostle Paul Preaching on the Ruins (1744) by Giovanni Paolo Pannini; now hangs in the Hermitage, St Petersburg.