Christ in the wilderness

 

Preached as a sermon at Croydon Minster, the First Sunday of Lent, 2021

‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near;

repent and believe in the good news (Mark 1.15)

 

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This is the third time since Advent Sunday that we have been given this passage of St Mark’s gospel.

 

At its heart is the Baptism of Christ, but we have come at it from different angles.

 

First, in Advent, we read it through the lens of the ministry of John the Baptist; then on the Feast of the Baptism of Christ we pondered the mystery of Christ’s Baptism itself; and now, in these forty days of Lent, our focus is on what happens after his immersion in the waters of Baptism, when he is driven out into a place where there is precious little water: the wilderness.

 

The whole scene is dramatic. It begins with the almost violent image of the heavens torn open, ripped apart like a piece of cloth.

 

From that fissure comes the tranquillity of the Spirit, just like a dove, who rests on Jesus, as he is told by God the Father, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’ (v11).

 

Then, just as a breeze can pick up and blow hard as a mighty wind, so the Spirit’s breath picks up and drives Jesus out. Into the wilderness. Immediately. No hanging about.

 

The relationship declared at the Baptism – of intimacy between the Father and the Son - is now to be demonstrated in the driving power of the Spirit out in the wilderness.

 

The wilderness is by any terms, and certainly in the scriptures, a place of challenge, devoid of life. But Jesus brings life to the wilderness, so he is not alone and without comfort: ‘he was with the wild beasts, and the angels comforted him’ (v13). The beasts are not a threat, they are with him.

 

There are echoes here of the Garden of Creation, where the ‘creatures of the field and birds of the air are created’ (Genesis 2.19). In that Garden Satan comes to disrupt, humanity colludes and sin enters the world. In the wilderness, by contrast, Satan is faced down, humanity in the New Adam, Jesus Christ, rejects the Prince of Darkness, and the power of sin is annulled.

 

From the Garden of Creation flowed mighty rivers. Life flows from Christ. At the heart of the garden was a tree; at the heart of the Christian life is the Tree of the Cross.

 

And all this, the Church proclaims, is Good News! It’s the Good News of water flowing in a wilderness; light shining in the darkness; life triumphing over death.

 

Many of us are in a wilderness at the moment. It may be a wilderness brought on by the pandemic, or brought on by quite different circumstances.

 

In our wilderness, Christ is with us, bringing life to us, generating within us a New Creation, saying ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me’ (John 7.37). And as St Paul declares, ‘If anyone is in Christ, there is a New Creation!’ (2 Corinthians 5.17). Good news indeed.

 

As the Israelites were fed by God with miraculous manna from heaven as they trudged round the wilderness of Sinai for forty years, so may we be fed, in our wilderness, with the bread that comes down from heaven so that we hunger and thirst no more.

 

'The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God'

 

A sermon preached at the Parish Eucharist at Croydon Minster on the Second Sunday of Advent. Mark 1.1-8

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Where did it start? What are the origins? Where did all this come from? Detecting the beginnings of something is always an intriguing exercise.

 

Explorers have long sought out the source of great rivers, to discover the beginnings, the very spring from which a trickle becomes a stream, which becomes a mighty river.

 

Astronomers follow the dream of the ancients to gaze into the heavens to uncover the very beginnings of the universe.

 

And what of the beginnings of Jesus Christ?

 

St Matthew begins his gospel with a genealogy detailing the generations of ancestors of Jesus, ‘who is called the Messiah’ (cf Matthew 1.1-16), and he then tells us that after his birth in Bethlehem Jesus is visited by the Magi.

 

St Luke sets out, in his words, an orderly account, ‘from the very first’, and - after telling us of the birth of John the Baptist - takes us to the beginnings of Christ’s earthly life through the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary, when the Most High overshadows her to be the Mother of the Lord.

 

St John in his magisterial opening to his gospel declares: ‘In the beginning was the Word’. He connects who Jesus is with the Creation itself. He echoes the opening of Genesis en archē, ‘in the beginning’. Jesus Christ is the Word who was in the beginning with the Father: he is God and not a creature, begotten, not made.

 

St Mark does not give us a Nativity account: there is no Bethlehem, no star, no shepherds or wise men: not the beginnings we’re used to!

 

St Mark simply states, ‘The beginning (archē) of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God’ (Mark 1.1).

 

He tells it in punchy form. This is the beginning of the gospel and this gospel of he who is ‘Son of God’.

 

The Son of God, the Son of Man, the Son of Mary comes to fulfil the promise made through the prophets and heralded by John the Baptist preparing the way.

 

Christ is the source; Christ is the beginning and Christ is the fulfilment. From this beginning, rooted in God’s timeless promise, the gospel unfolds.

 

This gospel is of liberation from the constraining powers that obscure our vision of God, that impede our growth in holiness embodied and fulfilled in Christ and that draw us into the very presence of the Most Holy Trinity.

 

John the Baptist’s ministry - of calling hearers to a baptism of repentance and forgiveness of sins - is a necessary preparation, a preparation for something already begun from the heart of God.

 

John’s preparation is, in the terms of the prophet Ezekiel, about receiving hearts of flesh in place of hearts of stone (Ezekiel 11.19; 36.26). Repentance is a movement and reorientation of the heart: oh, for warmed hearts ready to receive Jesus Christ and the gospel!

 

So it begins here and we are invited to begin afresh the journey with hearts and minds renewed and set on the way of Jesus Christ: this is our Advent journey of expectation.

 

 

'With the help of God, I will': Words & actions

‘Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus’.

In nomine Patris…

‘Andrew, will you do this for me?’

‘Yes, of course I will.’

You hear the words coming out. Perhaps you really do mean to do what you say you will, and then find that, somehow, it just never happens. Perhaps something deep down tells you that you never intended to do it in the first place, but your words get ahead of your actions.

It’s not that you didn’t want to do it, it’s not even that you consciously decided not to, it just didn’t happen: a sin of omission not commission.

Jesus’ parable of the two sons cuts to the quick of human motivation and action. I wonder if this parable inspired the words of a Book of Common Prayer Confession: ‘we have left undone those things we ought to have done, and done those things we ought not to have done’.

The parable should prompt us to examine our motives and actions.

Of course the parable also points to the possibility that we might equally refuse to do something but then do it. It may be a little perverse, but at least it’s done. This is a time when we ‘may turn from our wickedness and live’.

The irony of the parable is that the unwilling son is found to be willing and the willing is found to be unwilling.

Parables open up possibilities of interpretation. The two sons could represent two aspects of our personality; the bit of us that is willing and the bit of us that is grudging; the bit of us that acts and the bit of us that fails to act.

The two sons could be the Church at times, talking a good Gospel of love, faithfulness and holiness then reining back on that; or at other times, not trumpeting significant acts of mercy and love that we know do happen.

In the context of Matthew’s gospel the target of the parable is thinly veiled. The two sons represent the ‘righteous’ in the guise of the religious authorities – the chief priests and elders - and the ‘sinners’ in the guise of tax collectors and sex-workers: the righteous who say ‘yes we’ll do that’, and don’t; and the sinners who actually do it despite their words.

The two sons were asked to go to work in the vineyard. Herein lies a clue of Jesus’ intent to that first audience. The vineyard is code for Israel. Go and work amongst the people of Israel: recall them to the Covenant; recall them to works of justice, mercy and truth, their first love.

Reflection on the two sons cajoles us into asking ourselves a question: what is my response to God’s call on my life?

Another way Jesus approaches this question is to ask ‘can you drink the cup that I am about to drink?’ Am I willing to shape my life according to the way of Jesus Christ, the one who walked the way of the cross?

The parable asks us to examine our hearts as followers of the way of Jesus Christ. It asks us to reflect on our deepest desires as children of a loving heavenly Father. This is what St Paul is getting at when he shares with the Christians of Philippi his own search, ‘Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus’.

The use of the word ‘mind’ implies that this is all in our heads; that it is something we decide through rational processes. But we are so much more than being thinking animals. We are desiring, yearning animals: we desire and yearn for love, protection, intimacy, forgiveness. That is not a mind thing; that is about tapping in to our deepest desires.

Our translation of the Bible lets us down when it says that the son who said ‘I will not go into the vineyard ’changed his mind (verse 29). It’s much deeper than that. A more literal translation is ‘change what one has at heart’. He came to realise what he truly had at heart, which is to do his father’s will, despite his initial words.

A change of heart is so much deeper than a change of mind.

Icon of the Parable of the Prodigal Son

There are uncanny echoes in this parable with another parable involving two sons. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, told in St Luke’s gospel, one son goes off the rails and the other stays dutifully attentive. And there’s a twist.

It is the son who rejected his father who learns true repentance and knows abundant forgiveness by overcoming what he thought he wanted to do through a deep change of heart – conversion of life – and what prompted it was ‘when he came to himself’ (Luke 15.17).

Body and mind and heart came together and he returned to his family home to pursue his deepest desire for love, protection, intimacy, forgiveness.

The dutiful son – the one who stayed around - revealed that his heart had not yet caught up with the joy of the love, protection, intimacy, forgiveness that he had already had.

In St Luke’s gospel Jesus beautifully tells us that ‘it is out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks’ (Luke 6.45).

Out of the abundance of the heart Jesus speaks: he speaks out of his love for the Father and the Father’s love for him. His speaking, his acting, his mind is all prompted by where his heart is: which is deep in the heart of God. As he reminds us elsewhere, our treasure and our heart are co-located: what we treasure most is deep in our hearts.

This parable of the two sons speaks to our personal discipleship – our ‘yes’ to God – it searches it out and examines it. It also speaks to our commission to go out into vineyard, whose boundaries stretch beyond God’s first-chosen people to the ends of the earth.

This is the Spirit’s gift that our thinking, speaking and acting is shaped by Jesus Christ coming from the very core of our being: our guts; our hearts. That is the Spirit in which we proclaim the Creed, pray the Lord’s Prayer and respond to the dismissal, ‘In the name of Christ. Amen.’ It’s from our guts.

To know the mind of Christ is to be filled with love for the Father, a love poured out in service of the world.

Today let us commit ourselves to take into this new week, both in our words and in our heart, a renewed commitment to Christ: by saying ‘with the help of God, I will’:

Those who are baptized are called to worship and serve God.

Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship,

in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?

With the help of God, I will.

Will you persevere in resisting evil,

and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?

With the help of God, I will.

Will you proclaim by word and example

the good news of God in Christ?

With the help of God, I will.

Will you seek and serve Christ in all people,

loving your neighbour as yourself?

With the help of God, I will.

Will you acknowledge Christ’s authority over human society,

by prayer for the world and its leaders,

by defending the weak, and by seeking peace and justice?

With the help of God, I will.

May Christ dwell in your hearts through faith,

that you may be rooted and grounded in love

and bring forth the fruit of the Spirit.

Amen.