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Keeping a good Lent
 1st Sunday of Lent – 9.iii.03
The Revd. Martin Jackson
Genesis 9.8-17;
1 Peter 3.18-22;
Mark 1.9-15
Why do we keep the season of Lent? Part of the answer must be in that hymn with which we have begun our worship this morning....
Forty days and forty nights,
Thou wast fasting in the wild,
Forty days and forty nights,
Tempted, and yet undefiled.
In Lent we remember those days which Jesus spent, fasting in the desert, led by the Spirit, praying that he might discern God's will. And, encouraged by his example, we ask that Lent might be for us a holy season, a time for spiritual renewal, a time when we will be enabled to spend more time in prayer and worship, in study of God's Word addressed to us, and in seeking to grow in understanding through time spent learning with other Christians. There is no shortage of opportunities to help us in this: in our own church we’ve tried to provide ideas for reading and forms of prayer we can join in together; there are housegroups you can join to follow Lent courses, there are extra occasions for worship during the week... and these make a special attempt not to be hurried, but to allow us a deeper reflection so that throughout Lent we may find ourselves coming ever closer to Jesus in our prayer. And then, there is what you can do on your own: finding time for the prayer of silence; making time for examination of your own conscience so that you can the better offer your needs to God; asking what are the needs of those around you, and offering them to God in intercession. If we should find this demanding, then we do have the example of Christ set before us.....
Sunbeams scorching all the day;
Chilly dew-drops nightly shed;
Prowling beasts about thy way;
Stones thy pillow, earth thy bed.
So that then we might make the glad response:
Shall not we thy watchings share,
And from earthly joys abstain,
Fasting with unceasing prayer,
Glad with thee to suffer pain?
If only we could keep to such a Lenten resolve, then, as the hymn puts it, "Holier gladness ours shall be." All of this – you might say – approaches Lent not as a time to give things up, but to take things on. Not a bad thing if we remember Jesus' invitation "Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for my burden is easy and my yoke is light." But at the same time, the principle of balance dictates that for what you take on, you must surely give something up…. even if it is simply to give up wasting time. Fail to understand that, and you end up with a life that is hopelessly cluttered,… one which never gets anywhere in particular.
And perhaps we need to go back behind my opening question, "Why keep Lent?"… and ask what Jesus was doing when he spent those forty days and forty nights in the wilderness. The Spirit drives him there, St. Mark’s Gospel tells us,… and St. Matthew and St. Luke major on the temptation of Jesus and how he resisted the devil... But if we’re looking for a reason for these 40 days in the desert we might guess that it’s to take Jesus to the place of empty spaces, away from the distractions of life's busy-ness, to seek God, to listen to his heart, to learn what truly is to be God's will for his life's work. The forty days and forty nights do not have a value in themselves, but rather are a time for preparation for his public ministry. And this must be the purpose of Lent for us. It is not a time simply for deeper devotion or spiritual refreshment so that, once Lent is over, we can go back to our old ways. It’s [instead] a time to explore what it means to be Christ's disciple, to learn more about our Christian calling and more about ourselves, so that Easter may find us changed, ready to meet the risen Jesus, discovering that he has already found us.
And this is a time not only for our spiritual renewal as individuals. We can seek that at any time by going on retreat. Lent is an opportunity for the whole Church, it is a reminder of something that all Christian people should be doing together, and at the end of Lent we should find ourselves in a better position all together, to serve Christ in this place. Lent is a season for the Church to look at itself, but not for introspection. We need to look at ourselves to ask where we are going and why.
And we should ask these questions without inflicting negative self-criticism upon ourselves. We hear enough about what is wrong with everything. What we need to know is how God cares for us, loves us, meets us in our anxieties and fears, nourishes and tends us. When we ask "Where are we going?" we need to be assured that ours is a journey we can invite other people to take with us. We need to recognise again that ours is a journey worth making.
One of our readings in church on Thursday gave us God's words to the Israelites spoken through Moses: "I set before you life or death, blessing or curse...Choose life, then, so that you and your descendants may live..." Meditating on the passage, Fr.Gerard Hughes – author of God of Surprises on which one of our Lent courses is based - suggests that,
"It is a very useful exercise to take a piece of paper, divide it into two columns, one headed 'Events which bring me to life', and the other 'Events which deaden me', then scribble down whatever comes to mind. Keep the list, and add to it whenever another item occurs to you. If you persist, the list will lengthen, and you may discover that you give more time and attention to the things which deaden you than to those which enliven you."
There is a warning to us here about a very common problem which afflicts both our society and the Church today…. the problem that we concentrate our energies overwhelmingly on what is negative and fail to see what is positive and life-giving. A critical approach is, more than ever, necessary in the life of the Church today, but it needs to be based on a right judgement. We mustn’t be afraid to point out what holds us back in our life, what needs to be reformed or what is plain wrong. But still more we need to affirm all that is good, and to identify strengths which may be built upon. It is all too easy to live life in a spirit of complaint where everything is wrong with everyone else. It takes a real generosity of spirit to see how people may be encouraged to grow in what may be difficult circumstances.
Someone once said, "When we stop giving, then we stop growing; when we stop growing, then we start dying." This is a truth which we all need to learn. Giving of ourselves, recognising all that is good in our common life, can lead to lives which are transformed. Holding back because we do not agree completely with what we see, means we’ll never get anywhere. I think that’s what we recognised yesterday at our Diocesan Synod when members voted overwhelmingly to affirm the proposed Covenant for Unity between Anglicans and Methodists. We could see all too well the inadequacies in the report, the deficiencies in the reasoning and wording of the Covenant itself. And yet somewhere we need to make a start in understanding each other, to let down our defences and be open to what God may be saying to both our communities. And not just to allow two Churches to get together, but so we can understand more about ourselves and about our calling in a world which is so perplexed at the divisions of religious people.
We need to look into our hearts and ask, do we find a spirit which deadens or a spirit which enlivens? Do we just try to get by, holding on to what we have got, but seeing it inevitably decay? Or do we take risks in living and loving so that we might grow? "Go, tell everyone the news that the kingdom of God has come," is the refrain of one of our more modern hymns. That is the Christian task, to which Jesus called the first disciples, and he goes on calling us to that same task today. It is the call he issues after his forty days and nights in the desert when he looked into his heart and recognised God's will. So may this season of Lent find us looking into our hearts to find God at work, and may he strengthen us to grow in all that is good, so that we may be empowered to share it with others.
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The Prospect of War and the Powerlessness of God
2nd Sunday of Lent – 16.iii.03
The Revd. Martin Jackson
Genesis 17.1-7,15-16;
Romans 4.13-25;
Mark 8.31-38
We had a visitor here at St. Cuthbert’s the other day who had come to photograph one of the war memorials at the back of church. More specifically, she’d come to record the inscription of the name of a relative who’d died in the First World War. And she’d brought with her an album of everything she’d collected about him. A copy of the order of service when our memorial had been dedicated by the then Bishop of Durham after the war. A picture of his gravestone tended by the War Graves Commission. Photographs of the village in France where he lies buried. Her own village, she said, didn’t have a war memorial. And there wasn’t one in the Parish Church either. It seems the Vicar at the time didn’t want one – and presumably the villagers didn’t either.
And people do have mixed feelings about such memorials. Inscriptions such as “Our glorious dead” are easily taken to be an endorsement of war and a glorying in battle. Do the memorials really have their place in our churches? To which the answer must be, “Yes.” Ours is a world of violence, injustice and oppression, and the response by those in authority is not easily separated from mixed motives. We need these memorials to remind us of the consequences. Not to say that war is a right response as we honour those who have died in past conflicts. Not to say that an armed response is always wrong as we lament their deaths. But to say that any course of action affects people. We read the names on our own memorials, and we recognize them. They may be members of our own families. There are local names which we find particularly in this area. They tell us that wars are fought not at the cost of other people, but with a cost which we share. And even if we feel we can fight wars with a minimum of casualties – especially on our own side – yet nevertheless those who do inevitably lose their lives are people just like us. Loved ones with families. People well-known in their own communities. Combatants and non-combatants who may have little love of their own leaders, but who fight because they are told they must – or whose lives are taken simply because they get in the way of the falling bomb.
Our memorials tell us of the cost of war. They don’t tell us that it’s to be avoided at all costs. It seems that governments on the whole are not terribly bothered by the arguments of pacifists – by those who will object to military action in any case. Far worse for them is the objection by people who see the point in having armed forces, but who do not think the time is right for using them. And as the prospect of war with Iraq looms ever larger, we have to ask, “Is the time right?” Will we go to war because Saddam Hussein is a dictator with destructive means at his disposal like no one else, because we believe he will use those weapons, and because we have no other means of stopping him than war? Or have we got here some other way? Will British forces be committed to war, simply because they are sitting there now in the Gulf? Will they move simply because America moves? We know the French won’t do anything. But perhaps they are too readily vilified. Because there are plenty of other instances where military force could arguably improve the lives of oppressed people. With rather less song and dance, British forces have been used to end civil war in Sierra Leone, United Nations Forces have helped end oppression and unjust occupation in East Timor, French forces have been deployed in West and Central Africa. And in each case without the commitment of American forces, and without vilifying the American government for its lack of action.
Something needs to be done about Iraq, but that something needs to be more than the single-minded outworking of rhetoric. Politicians have spoken, and the road to war seems to have followed inevitably while the majority stand powerless except to watch and suffer the consequences.
But perhaps powerlessness is in a sense the calling of the Christian. It’s certainly something we’re called to grapple with. Our Gospel reading this morning follows on directly from the recognition by Peter that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, the chosen one of God. And the next thing we find is Jesus telling the disciples that he is on his way to Jerusalem where he will die. Peter just can’t cope with this – he takes Jesus aside and tells him it just can’t be so, only for Jesus to rebuke him in turn. And then Jesus tells not only the disciples but the crowd too what following him involves: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me… those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”
“If any would be a follower of mine, let him take up his cross and follow me…” I think we read these words too easily. We’ve even made them a rallying cry with that hymn we sing: “Take up thy cross… if thou wouldst my disciple be.” We read it as a call to action. But to suffer on the cross is to lose any means of action whatever. When Jesus finally hangs upon the cross, his enemies know they’ve got him where they want him… If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross… save yourself…, they call. And they know he can’t. The nails driven into his hands and feet keep him there. To take the way of the cross is to know that you are following a way of action which means other people will do things to you which you can’t stop. It’s the way of powerlessness. All you can do is suffer. That’s what losing your life entails – the fact that someone else is going to take it from you.
And that call “Take up your cross”, is a call not to other people, but to us. “Take up your cross” we sing in Lent, and we will watch Jesus go there – but do we recognize the implications for ourselves if truly we are followers? We celebrate the martyrs who have given their lives for the sake of the Gospel. But can we believe that we share their calling?
Because we are human we believe that our action can make a difference for good or bad. That’s Peter’s point of view. “Don’t give in!” he says to Jesus. “Stand up and fight. Don’t let them take your life.” We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t take this attitude. When Jesus tells Peter, “You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things,” is that really a rebuke? Our calling is first of all to be human.
But it’s also to learn from Jesus – who shares our humanity, but who also shows us the way of God. This Lent I’ve been particularly struck by the Psalms which we say daily at Morning and Evening Prayer, and the sheer weight of grief, loss and powerlessness which they express. Like Psalm 38: “I am utterly numb and crushed; I wail, because of the groaning of my heart… My heart is pounding, my strength has failed me… Truly I am on the verge of falling; and my pain is always with me…” And these are not words merely of self-pity, but of truth. Words that are felt by their author, which we may feel… and which say finally that we can know ourselves to be utterly forsaken, that we may know the loss of health, happiness, even life.
And it’s then that all seems lost, except that God still hears our prayer. To take up the cross means readiness to follow Christ whatever the cost – and we may know it. It doesn’t necessarily mean physical martyrdom for us, but life’s cruelties may seem as bad. And it’s then that we need to know that God is with us, even as he is with Jesus as he cries from the cross, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”
The German theologian and pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote movingly of “The Cost of Discipleship” in his book of that name. It’s an irony that he wrote it before he realized what it would entail for him. He wrote just as Hitler came to power. He was amongst the leaders of German Church opposition to Nazi policies and realized he had no place in their society. In March 1939 he wrote to the English Bishop, George Bell, that he was leaving Germany to avoid conscription, and he reached the safety of America. But then he realized he could not stay: “I have come to the conclusion that I made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christians of Germany. I shall have no right to take part in the restoration of Christian life in Germany after the war unless I share the trials of this time with my people,” he wrote. And it was to cost him his life, taken just weeks before the end of the war.
Our call is to take up the cross. Not to glory in it. But to recognize its cost. To know that it is about loss, about lack of power. But to understand that it is a true following after Christ… that he is with us.
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Expect the unexpected
3rd Sunday of Lent - Sunday 23 March 2003
Rosie Junemann, Reader-in-Training
Exodus 20.1-17
1 Corinthians 1.18-25
John 2.13-22
“Expect the unexpected”
That’s the strapline in the information leaflet for the new Alnwick Garden, which I visited for the first time last Saturday. What might be unexpected in a garden? Well, of course, a garden changes all the time and this one will be even more spectacular and colourful in the summer. But if you read the small print in the information leaflet you will discover the even more unexpected developments which are still to come - a Poison Garden, a Garden of the Senses, a Labyrinth and a Serpent Garden. So there are certainly surprises in store!
In our Thursday night Lent Group we are learning about the ‘God of Surprises’ – the title of a book by Gerard Hughes. In our first session we discussed our personal images of God – the way God was presented to us as children, and the way we see God now. As children most of saw God as a benevolent, old, white-haired and bearded man in the clouds; or as the baby Jesus – a ‘Gentle Jesus meek and mild’. As adults we see God as ruler and as a loving Father – maybe the King of Love would be an apt description. So we are probably surprised by the God whom we see in Jesus, in today’s Gospel reading. The same Jesus whom we generally encounter as a compassionate and gentle teacher and healer now lashes out with a whip against people and animals – and drives them out of the great temple in Jerusalem!
Is this depiction of an angry God incompatible with our image of a loving God? Or is our image of the real Jesus masked by what we want or hope to see in him? As Gerard Hughes writes: “We are constantly tempted to make God in our own image and likeness. We want to control and domesticate him, giving him perhaps a position of great honour in our hearts, home and country, but we remain in control.” Should we ‘expect the unexpected’ in God?
The disciples and others who met him believed that Jesus was the Messiah, God’s promised deliverer. The Messiah was long-expected – but what an unexpected Messiah he turned out to be! The Jews were waiting for a Messiah who would be a king, a powerful political leader to deliver them from Roman rule and make them a great nation. But Jesus had a very different mission – to proclaim the kingdom of God. His challenge was not about political revolution, but about radical personal and social transformation. The people of God were to become God’s new society. Here’s how Tom Wright (our future Bishop of Durham) puts it:
“Ultimately, the challenge Jesus offered was the challenge to a crazy, subversive wisdom in which ordinary human wisdom, and conventional Jewish wisdom, would be stood on its head. To take up the cross and follow Jesus meant embracing Jesus’ utterly risky vocation: to be the light of the world in a way the revolutionaries had never dreamed of.”
Jesus preached a message of love of God and love of neighbour which excited and disturbed people. His mission frequently brought him into conflict with people who had other agendas. He challenged the Sadducees for their extreme conservatism and resistance to change; he challenged the Pharisees for their absurd legalism; he challenged the nationalistic fervour of the Zealots; and he challenged the corruption and injustice which he saw all around him. In his cleansing of the temple, the symbol of all that was at the heart of Jewish political and religious life, we see an enactment of that challenge. The old order is swept away. In God’s new kingdom the temple no longer has a part to play. Jesus himself becomes our meeting place with God.
Lent is a time for soul-searching. Or as Jane Williams writes in the Church Times this week: “Lent is a time for reminding ourselves that the world may not be quite what it seems. Lent nudges us into thinking about what we are here for, which is more than just living comfortable lives with as little unpleasantness as possible.” Jesus still proclaims the kingdom of God to us today. “The God of Jesus” someone wrote “is a blazing fire of ethical energy which glows through all things and which either embraces and changes human beings as love - or confronts them in the form of ‘hell fire’ with a life which has gone wrong for ever.” Are we prepared for that ‘blazing fire’? Are we prepared to ‘expect the unexpected’, to acknowledge the absurdity of the ways of this world in the light of his teaching?
There’s a story about a very rich man who was near to death. He had worked hard all his life to make his fortune, so he prayed earnestly that he might be able to take it with him. Suddenly, an angel appeared, saying “Sorry, but you can’t take anything with you.” But the man pleaded with the angel to ask God to bend the rules just this once. The angel disappeared and later returned to inform the man that God had decided to allow him to take one suitcase with him. Delighted, the man sold all that he had and packed a suitcase with gold bars. Soon after, he died and arrived at the Pearly Gates. Peter saw the suitcase and stopped him “You can’t bring that in here”, he said. The man explained that he had been given special permission. Peter went and checked and then came back and said “You’re right. You are allowed to take one bag with you. But I have to check its contents before I let you through.” Peter opened the suitcase to inspect the worldly goods that the man had found too precious to leave behind, and exclaimed: “You brought paving slabs!”
“Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” writes Paul.
If Jesus were here, in the flesh, today, in our society, in our community, who and what would he challenge? What would he want to sweep away? Would Jesus be angry about our preoccupation with material wealth and wellbeing, and impatient with our failure to conserve and share the resources God has given us? Would Jesus root out corruption and injustice in our national and local government and legal system? And what would Jesus think about the church? Are we ‘church people’ rather than ’kingdom people’? David Bosch in his book on mission writes: “Kingdom people seek first the kingdom of God and its justice; church people often put church work above concerns of justice, mercy and truth. Church people think about how to get people into the church; Kingdom people think about how to get the church into the world. Church people worry that the world might change the church; Kingdom people work to see the church change the world."
“God is uncontrollable, beyond anything we could think or imagine,” writes Gerard Hughes. “He calls us out of ourselves and beyond ourselves, he is the God of surprises, always creating anew.” God is at work in the world and we are called into his service, to further his kingdom. Could the surprising, radical, challenging Jesus we have glimpsed today transform us, too, into people who can make the unexpected happen?
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Living the Resurrection
 | Easter Day – Eucharist – 20.iv.2003
The Revd. Martin Jackson
Acts 10.34-43; Mark 16.1-8
Alleluia, Christ is Risen! He is risen indeed, alleluia!
That’s how we greet each other today. But where is the risen Christ to be found? A couple of weeks ago I came across the story of Sophia Tuyisenge. Sophia is a twelve year old girl who lives near Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. Hers is a country which has known much misery. Her father was killed during the genocide of 1994, when one tribe turned against another, and hundreds of thousands lost their lives. Her mother died of AIDS in 2001. Now she cares for her two sisters, aged 3 and 10. Her brother is looked after by grandparents, and they would like Sophia to give up her home and join them. It’s a hard life for Sophia, sharing a bed with her two sisters, looking after the little one all day and night, lugging heavy containers of water into her home, scraping a living selling paraffin to passers-by, ensuring that the 10-year old who she thinks brighter than herself gets to school, dependent on the meager help offered by a social worker, and denying so much of a life to herself. But Sophia won’t give up the house, even with the hole in its tin roof which means she has to hang the food in plastic bags to keep it dry when the rains come in. It’s her parents’ house, and she’s carrying on the love and care she saw in her mother who died so terribly. As Sophia herself says:
Sometimes Solange chatters so much I try to persuade her to go to bed early with a biscuit. But mostly I am so tired, we go to bed at the same time. It is better if we do all go to bed together, because we don't waste our paraffin by lighting the lamp. Every night I think about my mother as I lie in bed. I miss her so much. She told us that we should be brave and we must look after our brother and little sister. She told us we should have no fear because God would look after us. We can see that is true: today, two years after she died, we are coping just fine.
What sort of a life is this? we might ask. What hope is there for the future? – for three-year old Solange who’d been breast-fed by her HIV-infected mother? But Sophia lives with that belief that God would look after her. And two years on she copes “just fine”.
Perhaps Sophia is just deceiving herself. Perhaps she’s just doing her best where everything is grim and there’s no alternative but to soldier on. Or perhaps we can say that the way she lives tells us something of what it is to live an Easter faith. The Christian hope which is our Resurrection faith is something to be lived out in the here and now. It’s a truth which holds even in the grimmest of circumstances. It’s rooted in that first Easter morning nearly 2000 years ago, when the women went to the tomb of Jesus and found it empty. But its meaning is worked out in lives that are transformed today.
The newspapers over the last couple of days have been carrying a story which they say gives near certain proof that Jesus existed. The story is about an ossuary, a casket for holding bones, which has been discovered, dating from the middle of the first century. An inscription on the casket tells us that it had held the remains of James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus. And of course the Bible tells us that Jesus was brought up as the son of Joseph the carpenter, and had a brother named James. And the date of the casket would fit in with what we know of the date of James’s death. You can make whatever you wish of the story. It’s a good one for the press, I suppose, at Easter-time. But really it doesn’t tell us anything about the faith we celebrate. It might have been a different James, Jesus and Joseph – though statistically it does seem there’s a lot going for it. But it doesn’t really give us any more concrete evidence about Jesus’ death and resurrection.
The fact is we can’t have the evidence. There are no certainties in the Easter story – at least nothing we can produce and flourish at unbelievers. The message of Easter is that the evidence has gone. Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome come early to the tomb to embalm the body of Jesus – and they find… nothing. They come with the question, who will roll away the stone which covers the mouth of the grave? But the stone is gone. The body is gone, and for a time at least these women can say nothing – they have nothing to say, there is nothing they can say as they flee from the tomb in terror and amazement.
But even in the fear which grips them, these women are the first witnesses to the Resurrection – and it’s they who carry the message that Christ is risen. They come to the tomb in despair. They’d seen Jesus die, they’d seen him buried without the customary rites, they had no idea what to do about the massive boulder which would block their access to his grave. And suddenly everything is changed and they know their lives transformed. There’s a wonderful prayer by Janet Morley based on today’s Easter Gospel:
When we are all despairing;
when the world is full of grief;
when we see no way ahead,
and hope has gone away:
Roll back the stone.
Although we fear change;
although we are not ready;
although we’d rather weep
and run away:
Roll back the stone.
Because we’re coming with the women;
because we hope where hope is vain;
because you call us from the grave
and show the way:
Roll back the stone.
Easter faith in the Resurrection begins when we find that massive load we feel unable to bear, that stone we feel we can never roll away… is simply gone. It’s beyond us to move it, but we find God has done it for us. Or we find God’s love revealed in ways beyond our imagining. But it’s not a panacea – it’s not a bit of divine magic to cure all evils. I was reminded last week of the words of the playwright Dennis Potter, when he was dying of cancer: “God is in the wound, not the bandage.” And Potter was a man who knew much about suffering even before his terminal illness…
To believe in the Resurrection is not simply to believe that the tomb of Jesus was empty on Easter Day. It’s to believe that God was at work in the suffering and death which preceded Jesus’ burial, that God was at work in the lives of those who encountered Jesus in his ministry of teaching and healing, that God raised Jesus up to make a difference in the lives of those who would tell the Easter story, and that a Resurrection faith is what makes the difference in the lives of millions now. Easter Day does not stand alone. There are first those long days of Lent and Passion-tide, there are the days before and after when we must bring our needs and longings to Jesus, there is the need to recognize that we can’t have healing without having borne the wounds.
“God is in the wound, not the bandage.” Not in the account by St. Mark which we read today, but in that of St. John, we hear how the witnesses looked into the tomb and found it empty except for his grave clothes, the strips of cloth or bandages which would have been bound round Jesus’ body. But again, the point is that Jesus is not in them. As Lazarus emerged from the tomb from which he was raised, Jesus gave the command, “Unbind him, let him go free.” And they are the words he speaks to us as well, that we let God unbind us and free us to live his risen life.
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Five Minute Fools and a Faith which asks Questions
2nd Sunday of Easter– Eucharist – 27.iv.2003
The Revd. Martin Jackson
Acts 4.32-35; John 20.19-31
In his latest book, Dr. Richard Dawkins describes himself as a “Devil’s Chaplain”. Richard Dawkins is Professor for the Public Understanding of Science in the University of Oxford, but he’s also carved himself a niche as our nation’s foremost atheist – or so he would like to think. As far as he is concerned, religious belief is a matter of delusion, a dangerous condition which must be exposed as a fraud: science itself shows religious faith to be without foundation. Possibly to further this argument, Professor Dawkins recently took part in an experiment shown on television which set out to stimulate the area of the brain thought by some scientists to be the seat of religious experience. By putting on him a special helmet with all its electrodes and monitor leads, could a neuroscientist induce a religious experience in Britain’s most fervent atheist? Apparently not - after the experimenting was over all that Dawkins reported was an itchy left leg.
And I can imagine that Professor Dawkins reported his experience with a certain snort of derision. For him, religion is something like an itchy leg, and all you need to do is scratch it – not make a whole life changing experience out of the act of scratching. Only… I wonder if Dawkins also let his guard down. If religious experience is capable of being explained away by science, then it needs a scientific explanation. And if scientists can’t induce a religious experience in him, then isn’t the argument that religious experience is all down to stimulation of the brain’s frontal lobes all rather suspicious? Of course you can’t make an argument from one perhaps spurious example. But that’s my point: religious belief may seem a rather doubtful proposition to scientists like Richard Dawkins; but science itself can’t marshal the proof of religion’s false basis.
But as human beings we’re all creatures who would like proof. However religious we might be, faith needs some sort of assurance. And if we’re going to be honest Christians we need to be ready to wrestle with the issues at stake. There’s a Chinese proverb that goes something like this: He who asks questions is a fool for five minutes. He who asks no questions remains a fool for ever. It’s not enough just to take someone else’s word for it, if your doubts persist. And that’s why the apostle Thomas, a central character in our Gospel reading today, is so important. “Doubting Thomas”, he’s remembered as by most people, because he dares to question the account given by the other disciples after they experience the risen Jesus in their midst. They tell Thomas how Christ had come to them through locked doors that first Easter evening, how he’d shown them his wounded hands and side, how he’d spoken Peace to them and given them the assurance of the Holy Spirit’s presence with them. But it’s not enough for Thomas. He needs to see it for himself, examine those wounds himself, even put his finger in the scars left by the nails and spear. Unless he can do all this, he says, “I will not believe.”
But the title we give Thomas - “Doubting Thomas” - does him less than justice. Why should he believe? It’s not something he has seen for himself. The other disciples may be full of joy because of what they feel, but it’s not something he’s experienced for himself. Thomas can’t stop being himself just because of what other people say to him – and we need to recognize that when other people annoy us because they don’t see things our way. People are people – and they’re made the way they are, and the least we can allow them is to say how they feel. Perhaps Thomas is a rather stubborn person, but that’s the man Jesus first called to be his disciple. Perhaps Thomas is above all an honest man – and that’s what we need amongst people who call themselves religious: a readiness to confront the things that don’t make sense; a willingness to ask the questions that haven’t been answered; the courage to go against the line which everyone else is taking even if you’re going to be less than popular (even pilloried) for it. Ask the question, even if people will call you a fool for five minutes – because the alternative is to live with deception and unease for ever.
And that’s why I feel for Thomas – not so much Doubting Thomas as Questioning Thomas. I have to admit that I wonder if St. John – the Gospel writer – tries to tie things up just too neatly when he has Jesus appear again a week later with Thomas present this time. St. John is making the point which he puts into Jesus’ words: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” The fact is that most of those disciples who will follow Jesus will have to believe without seeing. We can’t all be there in the upper room with the risen Christ physically in our midst. And I think I might have preferred it if Thomas hadn’t been there on that second occasion either. Thomas is the disciple who has to live with the questions – and that has something to say to us… That questioning is so important. That there are so many issues which can’t easily be resolved. That the quick fix isn’t necessarily the best solution.
But perhaps there is another reason for Thomas’s presence when Jesus comes back. And that is that Thomas is the disciple who can appreciate the scars which Christ continues to bear. He’d wanted to put his finger in the mark of the nails, his hand in Jesus’ side. And it seems that it was Thomas who recognized that to speak of a risen Jesus meant rather more than him coming back from the dead. Jesus isn’t just brought back to life. It’s a new life. The wounds are not simply removed and restored to healthy flesh. They remain as a sign that resurrection faith changes us not simply by taking away our pain, not merely by covering over our wounds as though they’d never existed – but by addressing the wounds themselves. And where there is healing, nevertheless the scars remain. As they do on the body of the risen Christ.
The Christ who is risen from the grave… is the Jesus who first died upon the Cross. I found myself moved to read an account of the Pope’s celebration of Good Friday in Rome as he led the Stations of the Cross in the Colosseum. A huge occasion with massive crowds, he himself is now so sick that he couldn’t get out of his wheelchair where he had to sit by the thirteenth of the fourteen Stations of the Cross. When finally the procession reached him he was able to carry a light wooden cross for the final part of the celebration – and he received it from an Iraqi family who had carried it before him. Others who carried the cross that day included two Franciscan friars from the Holy Land, and the wife and son of Dr. Carlo Urbani who died last month of SARS – Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome: he’d contracted the disease as he had worked to isolate the virus in a hospital in Hanoi. Physically it was only a light wooden cross that was carried by these people. But each bore their own crosses as well – an ailing Pope, the family from devastated Iraq, the friars from the battle ground of Palestine, and the family of a doctor who died so that others might live; and their bearing of those crosses shows at the same time their hope in the Resurrection.
Because without the Cross there is no Resurrection. Without the burial of Jesus there can be no empty tomb. Without Thomas’s and our questions, there will be no answers. Without our challenge to what the world counts peace, there is no Peace of Christ.
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The Good Shepherd – a living or a life?
 4th Sunday of Easter– Eucharist – 11.v.2003
The Revd. Martin Jackson
Acts 4.5-12;
1 John 3.16-24;
John 10.11-18.
‘I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep… 14 I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me…’
In the Church’s calendar, we used to have a Sunday called “Shepherd Sunday” – it was the Sunday this reading from St. John’s Gospel came up. But from this year, the fourth Sunday of the Easter Season has a new name: “Vocations Sunday”. Talk about “vocation” is talk about our calling – what we’re going to do with our lives. Give “vocation” a capital V, and talk about it in church, and testing a vocation is normally thought of as deciding whether someone ought to proceed along a path which will take them to ordination. In this diocese we have a team of Vocation Advisers, and if you are going to get anywhere on the road towards being ordained priest, almost the first step is to take on a commitment to work with one of those advisers and to join a vocations group.
But vocation is more than just a matter of a call to priesthood. The hope of the Church is that people will see that priesthood is a real option and a calling worth pursuing. But unless rather more people recognize the real call that God gives them to live and work where they are in secular callings, then there’s not much point in having clergy to work alongside them. For anyone to recognize that they have a vocation is not to see that God calls them to be a priest or a deacon, a monk or a nun. It’s to understand that God calls us to do more than simply make a living from a job we might rather unwillingly take. God calls us not to scrape a living, but to make a life – and that entails recognizing all our gifts, offering them in the service of God and of others, seeing where God would have me be. Or – put in the words of Professor Dumbledore as he advises Harry Potter - "It is not the abilities you have that make you what you are – it is the choices that you make."
Perhaps it’s not surprising that the Harry Potter books are becoming a sort of Bible for our times - because these are rather wise words. How often people write themselves off, saying, “ I can’t do it, I’m not clever enough, I could never do that - somebody else is able to do that better than me.” How often we think that someone else is making the decisions – that life is something done to me, where other people tell me what to do without my having any say. But listen again to Dumbledore: "It is not the abilities you have that make you what you are – it is the choices that you make."
A few years ago the American writer, Studs Terkel, did a survey to find out how people felt about their work. Armed with a tape recorder he carried out interviews with a wide range of people – and his conclusion was that the great majority of people are unhappy with what they are doing. “Work” is something you don’t like doing. It might be that they did their jobs in bad conditions with long hours and poor pay, but the odd thing was that so many of those people didn’t question what they were doing in those conditions – they worked simply to put bread on the table. Where there was questioning it was not so much about the conditions as the desire for their work to have some meaning – to be recognized for what they were doing. A girl working at a supermarket checkout told Terkel that she saw herself as “nothing.” A refuse collector saw himself as a horse pulling a wagon. A labourer said how he would like to see on a skyscraper a plaque with the names of all the workers who put it up, not just those of the architect and builder. But the book is not all negative. There are those who like their jobs – and they are the ones who feel needed and useful, who have a sense that their work brings them close to people, that their work helps them work out in practice who they truly are.
The artist Vincent Van Gogh wrote of himself:
I often feel that I am rich as Croesus, not in money, however. I am rich because I have found in my work something to which I can devote myself heart and soul, and which gives meaning and inspiration to my life. I think it is a very great blessing when people find their work.
If at times I feel rising within me the desire for a life of ease, I go back fondly to a life of hardship. This is not the road on which one perishes. Rather, this is a powerful stream that will bear me safely to port.
Van Gogh wrote these words after many years of trying to work out what to do with his life. His final discovery that he had to devote himself to being a painter changed everything. It didn’t make life easy – not many people can have been quite so tortured as Van Gogh as he tried to make sense of life. And though his paintings sell for millions of pounds now, his art didn’t bring him the luxuries of wealth. But his understanding of his vocation – his calling to be a painter – showed him who he truly was. His was a life worth living whatever the hardships, and without it the world itself would have been poorer.
We don’t need to be great artists or famous people to act with a sense of vocation. In part, that’s the point in what Jesus says in today’s Gospel. Not the whole point… “I am the good shepherd,” he says – and Jesus is talking about his own particular calling, his love for the flock which is his people, his own relationship to God. But if there’s any point in telling his disciples what makes for a good shepherd, it’s in order to help them understand how they can live, how we can live out lives of discipleship. There’s a contrast between the “good shepherd” and the “hireling,” the person who goes out with the sheep because he’s paid to – because it’s a way of earning a living. But the one who is truly a shepherd makes more than a living – he makes a life, and he does what he does for the sheep. He’s called a shepherd because that is what he is, not merely what he does. By his work, by his caring he fulfils a vocation. And vocations should affect the whole of life – when the good shepherd goes home, he needs to put that care for the sheep into practice in other relationships - with the people who are his family and friends.
One of the best things about Lent as we observed it this year at St. Cuthbert’s was taking part in the group to which Ian referred last week – the group which spent five weeks meditating on the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and looking at Rembrandt’s picture which depicts the son’s return. Perhaps the biggest question we faced was, “where do I see myself in this picture?” So often we concentrate merely on the wasteful younger son who needs to see the error of his ways and come back to find forgiveness. In fact he comes back simply to make a living – if nothing else he hopes that his father will take him back and give him a job which will allow him to survive. Having made a total mess of his life, the best he can hope for is to become in a very real sense a “hireling”. But that’s not much to hope for. It’s the father in the story who makes the difference: the father whose love is so great that he can let that younger son go, who can bear the waste of his life while never giving up hope of his return. That’s how God is for us. But who are we? And the answer for most of us is probably “not the younger son.” Most of us are so much concerned to do the right thing. To earn our living. To honour our elders. But do we see where it is getting us? That’s just what the elder son of Jesus’ parable does. He is nothing if not dutiful. And while the parable doesn’t call him by that word, the elder son works as a shepherd. That’s what he’s doing when the younger son returns. The elder son is out with the flocks or herds, doing the job, feeling the sweat of his labour. It’s because he’s doing the job that he misses his brother’s return. And when he comes back to find a party in full swing to celebrate, then he lets his father know about his resentment. And that’s when we see the point. The older son resents the welcome given to his brother, because he doesn’t recognize what it means to be a son – he can’t understand the love of his father, he doesn’t know for himself what it means to be a son and to accept that love for himself. So we might wonder what he thinks he’s been doing all that time in the fields with the sheep and the cattle. Is he just doing a job, like any hireling. Does he think he can earn his right to be his father’s son? Or can he be helped to find his calling, his vocation, himself?
We come to a sense of our vocation when we can recognize that we are responding to God’s call. It’s a matter in the words of Harry Williams of “Becoming who I am”. We do that when we can recognise ourselves in Christ, hear his call, find his love making a difference in every aspect of our living. We fulfil our vocation when we find our true selves.
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Faith, Risk and the Root of it all
5th Sunday of Easter – Eucharist – 18.v.2003
The Revd. Martin Jackson
Acts 8.26-40;
1 John 4.7-21;
John 15.1-8.
One of the most exotic characters in the New Testament must surely be the court official of the Queen of the Ethiopians, who pops up from nowhere in our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles this morning. In the shorthand of Bible commentators, he’s forever remembered as “the Ethiopian eunuch”, which perhaps makes him still more exotic – as though he’s come hot from guarding an oriental harem to worship at the Temple in Jerusalem. But there’s no mistaking the fact that this is an important man. We don’t know how the author of Acts gets the information that he is in charge of the entire Ethiopian treasury. Presumably it’s Philip the Deacon who not only tells the tale of his encounter, but also passes on this story of a man who seems to be none other than the Gordon Brown of the Horn of Africa.
And this is a story of daring and risk. Philip, one of the first seven deacons to serve the poor amongst the first generation of Christians, has left Jerusalem during a time of persecution. But fear of the authorities doesn’t stop him preaching. Quite the contrary – he goes off to Samaria with his message of the Gospel, and there the first converts from outside the orthodox Jewish community are made. Then just as the Church is getting established amongst the Samaritans, Philip finds himself whisked off for another task. He gets sent into the middle of nowhere, to the desert road between Jerusalem and Gaza. He might wonder why he should need to go to so remote a spot, but he goes anyway. And it’s there that the encounter with this Ethiopian official takes place. Perhaps it’s hard to picture this man sitting, we’re told, in a chariot reading the Bible. Presumably it’s in a sort of primitive lay-by – a first century equivalent of today’s motorway service station. However it is, Philip gets to speak to this very important man, and the story unfolds....
But what do you make of the story? Perhaps it always strikes chords with me because during a time I worked in Jerusalem, I made my contacts with an Ethiopian community. It was 25 years ago, just after the Marxist revolution in Ethiopia, that I lived in Israel. The effect of any revolution is that people get displaced from their roots. Members of the Ethiopian diplomatic community could not return home, because they were part of the old regime. Some of their children were in our school. And a family of English missionaries working with the organisation which employed me arrived amongst us as they were pushed out of Ethiopia, where they had been working for a number of years.
The reason why they’d been in Ethiopia throws some light on this story. The mission society we were all involved with was CMJ, the Church’s Ministry among the Jews. Its work was predominantly based in Israel. But the Ethiopian mission was a reminder of a Jewish presence in that country. The Falashas of the Gondar region were a people who claimed to be Jewish. Cut off for centuries from mainstream Judaism, they worshipped in their own language, not Hebrew. Many of the teachings of Orthodox Judaism they simply didn’t know, but they kept the Commandments and Law of the Jewish Bible, and regarded themselves – in a sense – as a lost (Black) tribe of Israel. Because they were there – because they were Jewish – our society was there too, until its workers were forced out by the revolutionary dictatorship. Our missionaries came to Jerusalem as a practical step. It offered them a base where they could continue their work. And with a sizeable, mainly Christian, Ethiopian community in the city, including two monasteries, it gave them the chance to carry on the task of theological education and to do it in a language they (and not many other people) knew.
All of this was work they carried on at personal cost. Roger Cowley, the father of the family, was delayed in joining the rest of his family as he closed down his mission in difficult circumstances and then was gravely ill with hepatitis picked up in Africa. But they were carrying on the work started by people like Philip in our reading from Acts. They went where they believed they were called. The Ethiopian of today’s story seems to have been Jewish – or a convert to Judaism. Did he come from a community like that of the Falashas, who continued their own Jewish way of life in Africa until they were airlifted out of their country to Israel in the midst of the Ethiopian famine during the 1980s?
We don’t know. What we might wonder at is the seeming recklessness of Philip in his ministry to the Ethiopian official. He finds him puzzling over part of the Book of Isaiah, and takes the chance to explain it and to tell him about Jesus. You can’t understand bits of the Bible on their own, says Philip. They only make sense when they point you to Jesus. And suddenly it does all make sense for this man. He sees water by the side of the road and asks to be baptised. There’s no hesitation on the part of Philip. They go down into the water together, “and Philip baptised him.” And each of them straight away goes off in different directions.
We might ask if this is the height of irresponsibility on Philip’s part. What after-care can be given to this man from a far-off land? Won’t he need much more teaching? How can he be expected to survive on his own as a Christian? Doesn’t he need a Church to belong to?
But all this is about faith in its clearest form. So often we see the problems of believing. The man in his chariot had failed only to see where the Scriptures were leading him. Once Philip had told him about Jesus there was no problem. We might hesitate to baptise someone who has been taught so little about the Christian faith. We might worry that they don’t know what they are letting themselves in for. But it’s no problem for the man himself, nor for Philip who teaches and baptises him.
Perhaps we need to ask ourselves, just what do I believe? How much do I believe my faith is really able to sustain me when the going gets tough? Is my Christianity something I could live out if there were no other church members around? Is it something I could hold onto if I was threatened with persecution or ridicule? Perhaps it’s because we’re not very confident about our own answers that we’re rather slow to share with other people what it is we really believe. Perhaps we haven’t asked ourselves just how much of a difference faith in Christ really should and does make. Perhaps we doubt whether the good news about Jesus can be life-changing because we’re not sure we really want our lives to be changed.
But Philip believes it enough to preach it. The Ethiopian believer rejoices sufficiently to believe it might sustain him in his new-found faith. People like Roger and Jean Cowley found it took them to the remote parts of a far-off country at great personal cost – and to continue their work in yet another land even when we might believe they had reason to be discouraged.
One of the wonderful things I discovered in Jerusalem and through knowing the Cowleys was the vitality and vibrancy of the Ethiopian Church – even in exile and hardship. It’s a Church with origins shrouded in mystery with many of its own traditions which seem strange to our eyes and ears – almost as separated from a Europeanised Christianity as the Falashas became estranged from mainstream Judaism. How was that faith sustained?
Perhaps the answer is simple. It’s God who sustains faith. We can try to control it, to make it sound right, to tell other people this is what you really believe, and you’re not doing it right unless you do it our way. But it’s God who makes it a reality. “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine-grower,” says Jesus in today’s Gospel. We are simply called to be the branches. All the branches need is one root. To flourish it’s only necessary that the sap be able to flow from root to branch. Where the root is Christ, the branches can grow and bear fruit.
All too often perhaps we pay attention just to what’s going on on our particular branch of the tree. We formulate our strategies with regard only to the here and now, we complain when other branches don’t look just like our own, and we get tied up in such knots that the sap cannot get through from the root. That’s why we need to stop and take stock, why sometimes we need pruning / cutting back, even when it’s a painful process - so that we can see what truly we are connected to, so that we can again recognise that faith is not about dependence on ourselves but upon God.
The preaching of the Gospel is a great risk for Philip, a still greater risk for the man from Ethiopia if he’s to live it out back home. But faith needs to start somewhere. We need to see that it starts in Jesus Christ.
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Fides nostra victoria
 6th Sunday of Easter – Eucharist – 25.v.2003
The Revd. Martin Jackson
Acts 10.44-48;
1 John 5.1-6;
John 15.9-17.
I’m rather sorry that the college where I did my training for ordination seems to have dropped its motto. St. John’s College, Durham with its theological college wing, Cranmer Hall, seems to be doing great things. While some institutions for training clergy struggle for survival with few candidates to take up their places, Cranmer Hall has rather more students than when I was one of their number. The “Ember List” which tells you who is going to be ordained – and asks you to pray for them – seems to be longer than ever. And with it last week, I got not only a glossy up-date on college news but also the college’s own theological journal – and it’s pretty impressive.
The College crest was on all of these publications. But I missed the motto which always used to accompany it: Fides Nostra Victoria. I wonder it it’s been dropped because it’s in Latin? Perhaps some of the students think it means “Our faith is in Queen Victoria”? – the college dates from her reign. Even better without much mistranslation the words could be rendered, our dog is called Victoria or even our Victoria is a dog. But in fact for some time, the College has supplied the correct translation along with the Latin: “This is the victory – our faith.”
And when you hear those words this morning, you should of course be able to recognise where they come from – our second reading, 1 John 5.4: “This is the victory that conquers the world, our faith.” Even though the College was set up in an age of Empire, when so much of the world map was coloured a British pink, its founders knew there was something more important than victory in battle. They knew that earthly conquests finally will be lost, but what endures is the victory of faith. And so they took up this verse of St.John’s First Letter to show what motivated them in founding a college which shared the name of that Gospel and letter-writer.
“This is the victory that conquers the world, our faith.” The problem these days is that we can’t speak with much confidence about conquering anything – since we gave up having an Empire it’s not really very fashionable to go around conquering, and when we do it in Iraq it dawns on us that perhaps we create as many problems as we solve. As for victories, we know you can win lots of battles and still lose the war. Perhaps the only people to claim victories these days are politicians in election polls, but they don’t necessarily hold out much benefit for ordinary people….
What we need to do is to see what these words about victory and conquest mean when they’re applied to matters of faith. This is not victory for the sake of doing other people down, for the sake of turning ourselves into conquerors, for making ourselves bigger and more important than other people. This is a victory we have to win first of all with ourselves, in our own relationship with God, so that we can see what God is calling us to, so that we can relate better to him and to others. This victory is a faith which calls us to love God, to love the children of God, and to obey God’s commandments. And then we see that conquering the world is not a matter of imposing our wills and desires on others by force, but winning over the world – winning it over to the way of God and the way of love.
So as we read from St. John’s Gospel this morning, we see that Christ’s commandment to his disciples is to “abide in his love.” To love one another. Jesus has been speaking of his relationship with his people being like that of a vine and its branches. And here we see that the life-blood of this particular vine is the love which is to unite us in Christ – let that love direct us and we will “bear fruit [he says], fruit that will last.”
The author of the Gospel and letters of St. John, if he wasn’t himself present at the Last Supper, the occasion when Jesus spoke these words, at least was close to the “beloved disciple” who was there. The Johannine tradition bears testimony to the victory of faith. It’s there from the start of St. John’s Gospel in its amazing opening statement of faith in the Word of God who takes our human flesh. Throughout the three letters which bear John’s name the importance of faith is recognised along with a concern for the truth. And in the final book of the Bible, the Revelation of St. John, it is faith which sustains this disciple through imprisonment and exile – he finishes his days away from the Christian community, separated from those he loves, but nevertheless strengthened by his hope in Christ, even able to leave his own testimony in his vision of our heavenly calling.
A faith which conquers the world is one which persists and grows despite all the forces which can be brought against it – whether by the violence of physical persecution or by the insidious processes of modern secularism. But how will it grow? That’s a question which is addressed in today’s first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Most of the action is missing from the part we’ve read – we get only the conclusion. But it’s vital. It’s set in the house of Cornelius, a Roman soldier and a Gentile, a non-Jew. And to his house comes Peter, one of the first disciples. Their coming together is crucial in the growth of the Christian faith. Peter had always supposed that to be one of God’s people it was necessary to become a Jew first – even the Ethiopian official of last Sunday’s reading had become a Jew before the encounter which had caused him to become the first foreign Christian. Cornelius on the other hand is a Gentile. He has supported the Jews of his neighbourhood, and had wanted to know more about what they believed. He was a man who said his prayers. But he had never taken that step of converting to Judaism – always he must have held back. So Peter and Cornelius come from different sides with what must seem a great gulf between them. Except for a vision which each has.... For Cornelius it is an instruction to send for Peter to hear what he will tell him. For Peter it is a vision of clean and unclean, sacred and profane foods all mixed together, and an injunction, “It is not for you to count unclean what God counts clean.” For an observant Jew this is sacrilege, and it makes no sense to Peter until he is called from his prayers by the messengers sent by Cornelius in response to his own vision. And so the two come together – even though when they meet Peter tells him that for a good Jew like himself it is really quite wrong that they should meet this way.
But the point is that this is just what God intends to happen. Peter needs to let down the barriers which had stopped him meeting Gentiles. Cornelius needs the chance to find what is missing in his faith by hearing the Good News of Jesus Christ. It’s God who has spoken to each, and it’s God who brings them together. What both realise is that it’s God who makes the difference where their own limited perceptions had failed. Cornelius only has to be open to hear the Gospel. Peter has only to be ready to share the Gospel – and not to allow his own prejudices to judge people first.
“And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith.” We need to ask ourselves about that faith. How confident can we be in it? How much more have we to learn? Are we ready to open ourselves to God – to those who may be able to help us grow in our faith? Are we ready to open ourselves to each other? And then crucially will we share what we believe with others? Peter has to take that step of going to a man outside his own community, he will have to put up with criticism from those who felt he shouldn’t talk to non-Jews, he will have to shed his own prejudices and be ready to see that God can work with people who live and think in ways quite different from his own. He does it – and for the first time the Gospel is proclaimed amongst the Gentiles; at last the faith can be shared with the wider world.
Our calling is to be strong in our community of faith. But if we try to keep that faith to ourselves it can be like erecting walls – walls which don’t keep us secure but act as a barrier to our true task. If faith will have the victory we have to go on outside the walls, to share with others what we believe, even if it make us feel vulnerable. “This is the victory that conquers the world, our faith.” And if we feel we’re not up to it on our own, that’s quite alright – as the following verse says, “Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?” We need only to live in his love – and to take it to others.
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