A sermon - May we dwell in Christ & he in us

A sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter: Readings Acts 17.22-31; 1 Peter 3.13-end; John 14.15-21

‘I will not leave you orphaned’ says the Lord.

+

Today is the Sixth Sunday of Eastertide and we continue to proclaim: ‘Alleluia Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Alleluia’.

The season of Eastertide is given to us to sustain our appreciation of the resurrection.

For Christians the resurrection is the epicentre and source of abundant life; the resurrection of Christ makes possible our conviction that death has no more power to come between human experience and the knowledge of God.

Eastertide is a week of weeks, seven days times seven – seven being the number of completion in the Bible - with a crowning day to make fifty. These fifty days of Eastertide hang on the twin poles of the Resurrection – Easter - and the Descent of the Holy Spirit – Pentecost.

That gives us fifty days of intentional reflection on what it means to be, in St Augustine’s phrase, ‘An Easter People with Alleluia as our song’; It also gives us fifty days to ponder what it means to say that we believe ‘in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life’ and contemplate how the Spirit forms, leads and guides us as the Church, the People of God.

And forty days into Eastertide comes the Feast of the Ascension of the Lord, which we observe this coming Thursday.

This is the time we recall Jesus’ bodily ascension into the heavens (Acts 1.1-11), when the followers of Jesus have to learn what it means to share his life when he is not physically present with us.

The joy of the resurrection meant that the disciples could still connect with Jesus present in their midst. The deprivation of his death, when they thought they had been abandoned and turned into spiritual orphans, was reversed in the resurrection when they continued to encounter Jesus, albeit in a new way.

Because of his ascension Jesus Christ is longer subject to place and time: that opens up access to God our Father, in Christ’s name, for people of all times and all places.

Jesus’ ascension is not going to be about deprivation but about discovering a deeper union with God, in Jesus’ Name, bound in by the Holy Spirit.

The Ascension gives us a vision of abundance in the church that flows out of the abundance of the Spirit and union with Christ, and not out of the narrow, human centred vision of scarcity that denies the life of God, and blasphemes against the Holy Spirit.

And this is what the gospel reading today prepares the disciples for, and trains us in too; preparing them for the rupture of their relationship with Jesus.

All through the gospel Jesus is quite clear that he will not be with them forever, that the time will come when, in his name, they will have to take responsibility for their discipleship, but they will be able to do so because the Holy Spirit will equip and lead them.

This is why the sacrament of the Eucharist matters so much to us.

Jesus is no longer present in human form, but in the sacraments the intensity of his presence is manifest in the things that we can grasp and touch and hold: bread and wine in the Eucharist, water in baptism, oil in anointing, another human body in marriage. The sacraments are the breaking through of the grace of God, in which we are reminded of the depth of the relationship we share with God in Christ. And the elements of the sacraments – bread, wine, water, oil, bodies – are given that capacity by the work of the Holy Spirit: ‘send down your Spirit upon the gifts to make them holy’.

So John’s gospel prepares us for the time when the Word made Flesh, who has chosen to dwell in our midst as one of us, is no longer with us. And the sacraments are given to us to connect us in the deepest possible way to God’s grace in the Holy Spirit.

This union with God is Christianity’s purpose, goal and end. Jesus’ discourses about being the Bread of Life (John 6) or about being the True Vine (John 15) or about his priesthood (John 16, 17) is all about abiding, dwelling, living, finding a home, in God. After all, God has found a dwelling place with us, in Christ: ‘and the Word was Made flesh and dwelt, lived, found a home, abided with us’ (John 1.14).

For God’s ancient, and first chosen, people the Jews, the relationship with God is established and maintained by living Torah, the way of faithfulness to the Covenant.

For Muslims, the relationship with God is established primarily in submission to God’s will.

For Christians the relationship with God is union and incorporation into the life of God: ‘Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them’ (John 6.56).

This is not a subjective feelings-based exercise – although it can feel wonderful to feel alive with God – it is an objective reality. Living the way of faith, hope and love in the Church, and feeding on Christ in word and sacrament, is our incorporation into the life of God.

That all begs the question of what we have been learning in this time of deprivation and being cut off during lockdown. What is it that has been most sustaining for us? What are we truly looking for in our hearts? What will a time of deprivation and disruption teach us about deeper union with Christ?

These are huge questions of course, so perhaps we might make this gospel passage into prayer:

Lord Jesus Christ,

you promise that if we love you

and keep your word

our heavenly Father come and abide with us.

Make your home with us

that we may truly be at home

in you and with you.

And may the Holy Spirit come down upon us

so that we are not left alone

but drawn into your nearer presence,

now and always.

Amen.

The Passover was near

First preached as a sermon at Choral Evensong for Passion Sunday (Fifth Sunday of Lent) at Croydon Minster. Luke 22.1-13.

‘Now the festival of Unleavened bread, which is called the Passover, was near.’

(Luke 22.1)

With that phrase there is a change of gear in the narrative of St Luke’s gospel, which mirrors the stage of this season of Lent that we have now reached.

We have now entered Passiontide, which moves us, as it were, from the focus of self-denial and the facing down of temptation, which is seen through the lens of Jesus’ forty days and forty nights in the wilderness, and, through the change of gear, into the impending betrayal, passion and death of Jesus Christ.

In the Slavic language there is a phrase, ‘the devil helps’. Well, the devil helps this change of gear. The adversary – Satan literally means ‘adversary’ - the Enemy of our Human Nature, as St Ignatius of Loyola calls the devil, came to Jesus in the wilderness (4.1-13), and now - for only the second time in Luke’s gospel he is named – this time as entering into Judas, surnamed Iscariot, who he reminds us, ‘was numbered among the Twelve’.

The previous change of gear happened at Caesarea Philippi when Jesus directly spoke of what awaited him as he came to Jerusalem, ‘The Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised up’ (Luke 9.22).

What unfolds as the Passover draws near is precisely what Jesus anticipated and declared at Caesarea Philippi, and to which, in both St Mark’s and St Matthew’s accounts, Peter took such great exception such that he is told, ‘get thee behind me Satan’, you adversary (Mark 8.33; Matthew 16.23). When you refuse the way of the cross you are an adversary, acting contrary to the ways in which the Son of Man must reveal God’s glory.

The journey from Caesarea Philippi was a journey to Jerusalem, and along the way Jesus healed, taught and prayed and spoke repeatedly of what was to come in the Holy City, the city that kills the prophets and over which he would weep.

Now, in Jerusalem, Christ’s disciples are to be drawn more into his inner life through their participation in the Passover of Christ’s body and blood.

Yet one of them could not bear to participate in the Divine Life. Judas.

There has been a certain attempt at the rehabilitation of Judas in recent years. It is of course the case that without his betrayal the route to the saving death of Jesus would not have opened up in the way it did; in that sense Judas’ betrayal of Jesus is indispensable to our salvation.

There has been considerable analysis given to Judas’ psychological condition, and a portrayal of Judas a victim not perpetrator. It’s an old question, really. In the fifth century St Cyril of Alexandria identified two motives for Judas’ betrayal of Jesus. The first of these is ‘envy…which always leads to the guilt of murder (Homily 140), the second, which is much less weighty, is greed suggested because Judas is the keeper of the common purse and is suggested to have siphoned off the funds of the band of disciples.

In the spirit of the French-American theologian and anthropologist, René Girard, we might reflect that Judas’s motivation is around adulation and disappointment. Judas was deeply attracted to something in Jesus which he did not himself possess, and rather than wait to receive Jesus’ life in the Passover meal he sought to take away Jesus’ life through betrayal.

Christ drew others into his life; Judas drew others into his plans for death.

Even in the face of betrayal Christ resolutely faces the cross, and knows that for the meaning of the cross to be sustained throughout the ages the Eucharist, the Christian Passover, will be the vehicle for bearing and bringing the reality of Christ’s saving death to his people by drawing us into his life.

The Passover meal that Christ celebrated with his disciples is the very meal that Paul describes having handed on to him, and what is handed on in turn to us:

For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. (1 Corinthians 11.23-26)

So the day of Passover drew near, and as we read, the day came, ‘the day of unleavened bread, on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. John the Baptist declared Jesus to be the ‘Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world’. Everything is converging such that St Paul can say: ‘Christ our Passover, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed for us: so let us celebrate the feast’ (1 Corinthians 5.7b).

But first we are drawn to the passion, the suffering that precedes resurrection: ‘So Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, “Go and prepare the Passover meal for us that we may eat it”’ (Luke 22.8). That is the commission to the Church this Easter and what begins to unfold, most intensively, next week: Holy Week.

May we now prepare for this Passiontide, for our Passover, and draw afresh from the life of Jesus Christ.