Abundant Life & Universal Love

March 07, 2021

Third Sunday in Lent

After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

This week, a frail 84 year old man, walking with a painful limp, visited a country in which COVID-19 is far from under control, and which currently has little access to any of the vaccines that are accessible in affluent western countries. The country in question is a dangerous place - and not just because of the Coronavirus. It has endured almost twenty years of political instability that has produced an almost endless cycle of violence, particularly aimed at those who are members of its minority communities.

It was into this challenging setting that Pope Francis came on Friday morning, drawing the eyes of the world to the many problems facing Iraq, including the hardships and persecutions endured by its Christian communities.

One of his first visits was to the Assyrian church of Our Lady of Salvation in the heart of Baghdad - the site of a vicious attack by Islamic State terrorists in 2010 that saw 56 people murdered, and accelerated the flight of Christians from the country. To quote the New York Times’ report of the visit, the Pope was ‘surrounded by guards and watched over by rooftop soldiers with heavy weaponry’, as he heard story after story of violence and persecution, related to him by mask-wearing, socially distanced Christians facing what the Pope rather modestly called ‘daunting pastoral challenges’.

Now I have no inside knowledge of discussions in the papal household, but it is not hard to imagine that in the build up to this extraordinary journey, the Pope will have had no shortage of well-intentioned advice that he should have cancelled or postponed the trip, for the simple reason that it would be too dangerous. After all, for the most significant religious leader in the entire world to be assassinated or to fall gravely ill would - surely - be an unthinkable event to be avoided at all costs. And, in my imagination, I see the Pope looking kindly at the person making such an eminently sensible suggestion, and saying to them, “So, what’s the worst that could happen?”

For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

It was almost exactly a year ago that Illinois entered lockdown. Those who lead this diocese faced hard choices about how we should act in the best interests of the communities we are called to serve, while remaining faithful to our vocation to be the Body of Christ. Even now our protocol-observant public worship continues to be limited, and this past year Easter, Pentecost and Christmas were all celebrated without any live congregations in our churches.

Mercifully, we seem to be well past the worst. The positivity rate of infection in the city yesterday was the lowest it has been in over a year, and we all sense some kind of normality is returning. But complex choices still face us all - whether politicians or church or community leaders, or simply as individuals. As opportunities open up, whether to worship, work out, or anything else, there will inevitably be discussions and questions about how ‘safe’ a particular activity might be - a question which leads rapidly to the natural follow-up: “So, what’s the worst that could happen?” A question which has been asked throughout history, and which, as you may have noticed, runs through the pages of the gospels…

Just last week our gospel reading was that critical turning point in the story of Jesus’ life where he starts to make plain to his disciples what the consequences will be of his mission and ministry. He intends to go to Jerusalem, where he will undergo ‘great suffering’, before being killed. Mark makes a point of telling his readers that Jesus is ‘quite open’ about this, and the response of his closest friend, so we are told, is to rebuke him. Matthew goes further and has Peter saying to Jesus, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.”

But Jesus will have none of it. Having only just acclaimed the disciple as the rock on which the church of God will be built, Peter is now re-labelled Satan, and told - very significantly - told that he is setting his mind ‘not on divine things but human things’. “So,” Jesus is in effect saying, “what’s the worst that could happen, Peter?” And Peter has come up with precisely the wrong answer. For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. Paul brings uncompromising passion and energy to his vocation to preach what he calls ‘the message of the cross’, and to proclaim the universality of God’s love. He aspired to bring this message to the entire known world with manifest disregard to his own comfort or safety. You can be sure that if any of his sometime companions, such as Barnabas or Timothy, had dared warn him of the danger of preaching in a particular place, he’d have looked at them - probably with some anger - and demanded of them, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

For Paul, his vocation meant a permanently itinerant life lived out in communities of gentiles, bringing him into constant conflict with pagan authorities, practitioners of other religions, local Jews, and even other Christians. And when his preaching of God’s universal love is contradicted by some of these other voices he could get profoundly angry: you can remind yourselves of this by re-reading both the telling off he gives the Galatians for having their heads turned by false teaching, and the depths of fury he hurls at those who misled them. And for Jesus, in his own context, there was an equal desire that the Kingdom of God be preached and manifested, so that all would come to know and understand the depths of God’s love for all. And all four gospel narratives show us that Jesus was consistently both dismayed and angered that those who should have taken the lead in making this greatest of all truths known consistently failed to do so. Thus we read of constant clashes with scribes, pharisees, elders and priests.

And as the tempo of all this conflict hots up, we see ever more clearly Jesus’ own disregard for comfort and safety. The ‘worst that could happen’ is nothing to do with Jesus’ own life and wellbeing. In Jesus’ eyes, the worst that could happen was the debasing of the universal love of God and the failure to teach, to preach and to proclaim it to anyone who would listen. And Jesus was not going to let that go unchallenged - not on his watch - whatever the cost. For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

And so it is that the synoptic writers - Mark, Matthew and Luke - tell us that eventually Jesus comes to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. Just once - in the last week of his earthly life. He arrives from the east at the Mount of Olives, and descends on a donkey, to the adulation of the crowds that have gathered there on the day we now call Palm Sunday.

But he is already a marked man, well known to the religious authorities, and despite the acclamation of the crowds, there is no shortage of tension in the air. And the very next day, with a clear sense of purpose, Jesus comes to the Temple - comes to the Temple for a
showdown.

It is, if you like, the final red rag to the bull, and makes decisive and certain the inevitability of his arrest and death only three or four days later. The event was the equivalent of throwing gas on an open flame - it was incendiary and provocative, and was, perhaps, the climax of Jesus’ ministry as set out in the three synoptic gospels.

Now, between Jesus’ baptism and his crucifixion there are very few events that are recorded in all four of the gospels. But this ‘incident’ that we call the ‘cleansing of the Temple’ is one of them. And yet we hear it read on a Sunday morning just once in our three-year cycle of readings - today, the third Sunday of Lent in what we label Year B - and we did not hear it read from the synoptics. What we heard read just now, came from John… from John chapter two. John has changed the chronology so that the Temple incident is not the climax, but the curtain-raiser.

At this early point in the fourth gospel, Jesus has hardly begun to get busy. He has called his first disciples, and then, if you like, he has been ‘outed’ by his mother at the wedding at Cana, who demands that he keeps the party going when the wine runs out prematurely. Jesus obeys and honors his mother’s request - but he’s not pleased to do so, because, as he tells her in rather curt words, his ‘hour has not yet come’. Because, for Saint John, that hour comes not in a Galilean backwater in front of some peasants at a wedding - it comes at the heart of the religious establishment in Jerusalem, in the precincts of the Temple.

Now, most scholars have absolutely no doubt that John’s chronology is a theological one and not an historical one. It feels unlikely that Jesus would have had his liberty for another two or three years after an incident of this kind. But, for John, this incident is a defining moment that demonstrates from the outset of Jesus’ ministry the offensive redundancy that the Temple and its leaders have become, and forges the link with Jesus’ death and resurrection. And, more than that, forges the link between what the evangelist calls ‘the temple of his body’ and what becomes of his disciples after the resurrection.

Because the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. It is beyond unlikely that Saint Paul would have known the document that we call John’s gospel. But had he heard another Christian speak of ‘the temple of his body’, he would have understood it as speaking of the church, for such is his language a little further on in First Corinthians. And - just as has been the case throughout history - we who make up the Body of Christ face choices and challenges in living out our vocation to mission and ministry.

For the church is a body that exists both to worship God, and to serve the community in which it finds itself placed. And the decisions which we take - both collectively and as individuals - must honor this high calling. That most certainly includes decisions taken about suspending public worship during the worse parts of the pandemic, and the need for careful thought about how we return to some kind of normality in the weeks and months ahead.

Our challenge is to remember that for those of us who now make up the temple that is the Body of Christ, the worst thing that can happen is not death. Jesus did not think that it was. Neither did Paul (who wrote the famous words “Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s”), and - clearly - neither does Pope Francis. Both in the pages of the Bible, and in events unfolding even today in Iraq, that theological view is writ large.

It may well be the case that - as the church - we agree with many of the values or conclusions drawn by secular authorities that govern our lives. But we are called to a clarity of vocation and vision rooted in the fact that death is not a failure, and that it is not the ultimate disaster. And that means that our vocation and our vision will sometimes be at odds with the world around us, for death and failure are neither the stuff of politics or economics. That is why Paul is so abundantly clear that the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

But Saint John reminds us that “After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken…” - and just look at how those disciples formed the Church and changed the world, as they preached the prospect of life in its fullest abundance given to the world through the unstoppable love of God - a love shown at its most glorious when Jesus, dying on the cross, tells the world that his work and vocation has been fully, and perfectly accomplished. And the worst thing that could happen - for us who are the temple of his body - the worst thing that could happen is that we fail to make the message of the cross the center of our being and our speaking and our living and our doing. For it is the very heart of the Christian message, and if we diminish it out of a desire for comfort or out of fear, then the world around us will fail to hear and understand the fulness of abundant live and universal love.

For the path to Easter Sunday can only ever lead us there through Good Friday - which was not a place of safety or comfort. But after he was raised from the dead his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken. Let’s make sure that we do the same. Amen.