Gerry Lynch’s Blog

Readings – 2 Corinthians 5: 6–17; Mark 4: 26–34

“‘With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed…”

Mustard Seeds. © Eugenio Hansen, OFS and used under Creative Commons 4.0

May I speak in the name of God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

I suspect many of you remember a BBC comedy series from a decade ago called Rev. For those of you who don’t know it, it is about the trials and tribulations of an East End vicar, the Reverend Adam Smallbone, and his congregation in a gentrifying but still sometimes troubled parish. His flock isn’t very large, and sometimes their motivations for being in church are frankly mixed, from the lady of a certain age who is, shall we say, often very taken with gentlemen in clerical collars, to the incoming middle-classes who turn up to get their children into the parish primary school, without remotely taking anything that goes on in Church seriously.

A consistent theme is Adam’s sense of his own inadequacy. Adam feels inadequate compared with the vicar of the lively parish down the road, with its in-house rap artist and huge congregation of young people, and inadequate compared with his very clever pal from theological college who has a column in The Guardian and a regular slot on Thought for the Day. Yet every once in a while, an encounter happens that makes Adam realise that he is indeed called by God to be the person he is, moments of grace where only he, precisely because of his transparent flaws, can bring the light of Jesus Christ into a situation where a grander or more self-confident person would never be allowed to enter.

“So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation”, says St Paul in today’s Epistle reading, from the Second Letter to the Corinthians. It is natural to feel inadequate when faced with words like that. I don’t know about you, but my faults have remained persistent throughout my journey of faith. Following Jesus Christ as my Lord hasn’t turned me into a heroic crusader against evil who makes sinners repent by the sheer radiance of my goodness. I am as flawed, as self-centred, as inclined to take the path of least resistance, and sometimes as plain annoying as I always have been. 

Yet: “There is a new creation.” This is where context matters, because St Paul wrote these words to a new and immature Church in Corinth, the Eastern Mediterranean’s sin city, a city of sailors on shore leave joining the locals in hard partying and loose living. We might think of it in our terms as Amsterdam multiplied by Ibiza. Paul didn’t write those letters to the Corinthians because they were the example of what a Church should look like, but because they were the most troubled of all the churches he established – sometimes immoral, obsessed with wealth and bling, and rather selfish. And yet St Paul didn’t give up on them. They were at the beginning of a journey that they didn’t even seem to understand: but they had made a start. Great things often have small beginnings, and the people who start them are never perfect. God called the Corinthians to follow Him in His Son Jesus Christ, not because they were the models of sainthood, but because they were the people He needed to fulfil his purposes, there and then.

Readings – 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, John 2: 13-22

May I speak in the name of God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

I love Giotto’s painting of the scene in the Temple in Jerusalem that forms the centrepiece of today’s Gospel. It has a raw edge that defies any domestication of Christ; Jesus, a cold fury on his face, is whirling the whip above his head, but he looks more than anything like he’s about to punch the moneychanger nearest him in the face. 

The reception of this story by the Church in the present moment fascinates me. The Giotto painting is the source of countless memes, little social media slogans, in the churchy parts of Facebook and Twitter, where people say that Jesus angrily whipping the money changers out of the Temple is the Jesus they emulate. The funny thing is the same people find the idea of the wrath of God absolutely taboo, as I suspect most of us do, dismissing it as primitive and theologically dubious. 

We don’t like the idea of God’s wrath in the abstract, but we like the angry Jesus when his fury is directed at people we disapprove of. After all, we’re not the sort of people who would set up a stall in the cloisters at Salisbury Cathedral to sell animals for sacrifice and exploit continental tourists by offering them a terrible exchange rate for their Euros. It’s OK for God to be angry at people like that, the sort of people who make us feel a bit smug and superior, but we’re quite sure God would never be angry at us. 

We only need to spell that approach out to realise how ludicrous it is, a cheap co-option of God as a sort of magic totem who is always on our side. Please God, we’re more mature and self-aware than that, open to understanding that the Jesus who judges the moneychangers has not only the right, but the duty, to judge us. We must know that the God who knows every hair on our head also knows the darkness that rests in each of our souls. We also know that any representation of a human being without shadow isn’t a human being at all but a cartoon, a caricature, and that anyone claiming to be such a flawless being is a liar. If Jesus Christ, who is God, is correct to be angry at the moneychangers in the Temple, then He must also at times be correct to be angry at us.