Who is my neighbour?

Colossians 1.1-14, Luke 10.25-37

The Good Samaritan Window
St Mary, West Malling

A lawyer – a religious expert – comes to Jesus, full of questions.  “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”  he begins. I’ll come back to that opening question later, so tuck it away in your mind somewhere. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” 

Jesus answers his question with another question “What does the law say?” “Love God and love your neighbour” says the lawyer. Perhaps he’s a little insulted – everyone knew that summary of the law – so he goes on quickly, trying to regain the upper hand in this discussion. “But who is my neighbour?” 

In response, Jesus tells a story, one of the most famous stories in the New Testament. It’s even featured in one of our stained-glass windows here at St Mary’s. It’s so familiar, though that the danger is it goes in one ear and out of the other. We know what it’s telling us, don’t we. Be kind and helpful, even to those who are different from you…  That’s obvious, isn’t it?

Well, there’s nothing wrong with that message, of course, but I’m not so sure it’s the message of this particular story. To explain what I mean, let me ask a question. Whose perspective is this story told from? Through whose eyes are we seeing what happens? 

The answer is that it’s told from the perspective of the unfortunate man who has been beaten up and left for dead. We’re not told anything except what he could have seen and experienced and known as the events unfold. 

The story doesn’t tell us, for example, why the priest and the Levite pass him by without helping - because the injured man had no way of knowing that either as he lay there watching them disappear into the distance. 

Their behaviour is often explained by saying that they were going to the Temple to serve there. They were in a hurry to get to their important jobs or didn’t want to make themselves ritually unclean and unable to serve because they’d touched a dead body. Actually, that’s very unlikely, because the story says they were coming “down” the road, and that means they must have been travelling away from Jerusalem, not towards it, because Jerusalem is up in the hills, and Jericho below sea level. I’ve been on that road, and it’s one long descent.

But now I’m doing it, aren’t I, centring the priest and the Levite through my speculations. It is so easy to do. We want to give them a back story, to understand, maybe excuse them, perhaps because we know we pass people by on the other side too. But I am sure it’s deliberate that we aren’t told their back stories, because the injured man wouldn’t have known those back stories either. All he knows is that he sees someone coming who could help, who should help – not least because he is a fellow Jew - but doesn’t. And then he sees another man who could and should help, but he doesn’t either. 

But then, when all hope seems to be lost, along comes a Samaritan.  Again, we are tempted to put him centre-stage. We even call this story “The Good Samaritan” though Jesus doesn’t give it a title and neither does Luke. But actually, we’re told very little about him, and again, nothing the injured man couldn’t have known, simply the fact that he is from the despised nation of Samaria, whose people the Jews saw as heretics and enemies. We don’t know why he stops, any more than we knew why the priest and Levite don’t. We don’t know what his motivation is, because the injured man doesn’t know it either. All he knows is that this very unlikely person has given him the help he needed. 

Why does this story work so hard to keep bringing us back to the injured man, despite our desire to wander off with the other characters?  It’s because he is the one we are supposed to identify with. We might want to identify with the Samaritan. We might hope we’d act like him. We might fear that often we’re more like the priest or the Levite, and identify with them through guilt. But they aren’t supposed to be the centre of this story.  

Its central question isn’t “who do we help? It’s “who are we be willing to be helped by?” We’re meant to be asking ourselves what we would feel like if we were vulnerable, helpless, hurting.

Most people, in my experience, find it a great deal easier to give help than to receive it. It can feel humiliating to need help, especially if the helper is someone you don’t get on with. If we have to fall flat on our faces, I’m sure there are people we’d rather weren’t around to see it. But like this injured man, we may not have a choice. 

And that brings me back to that opening question, which I asked you to tuck away and remember. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” the lawyer asked Jesus. “What must I do?” This is a man who is used to being in control, having power and using it – doing things. He’s used to providing for himself through his own efforts. Eternal life, to him, seems to be just another thing that he can and should get for himself, if he does the right things, prays the right prayers, performs the right rituals, lives in the right way. 

Jesus turns his thinking upside down, though, by inviting him to identify with the helpless, injured man who is really at the centre of this story. This could be you, he is saying. It could be any of us. Frailty, pain, loss are part of being human. Whether it’s a mugging on the Jericho Road or some other disaster that befalls us, none of us gets through life without needing help at some point ; it’s not our fault, nothing to reproach ourselves about. That can be hard to acknowledge, because we like to feel that we are in control, but it’s true. This lawyer strikes me as someone who might struggle accept help, and who might especially not want to accept help from Jesus. A carpenter from Nazareth? Who does he think he is to be claiming to speak with the authority of God? 

In John’s Gospel Jesus is actually accused of being a Samaritan – either that or that he is demon-possessed, the crowd says – the one is as bad as the other to them. Either way, it shows how hard it was for many people to accept that he might have something to say that was worth hearing, and it casts this story in an interesting light. 

This is not a story about how we should help others, though of course we should. It is, primarily, a story about our need of help, and the importance of being open to it, however it comes to us. That might be in the small acts of kindness which we are tempted to rebuff because we want to go it alone and are too proud to accept help. But ultimately, it is surely also a story about the grace of God, that unearned and unearnable, gift which “rescues us from the power of darkness” and brings us to a safe lodging where all our hurts can be healed. Amen 

Trinity 1: Living in a terrifying world

Trinity 1 Proper 7  - Gal 3.28, Luke 8.26-39

As some of you may know, I have a patent method for getting my head around a Bible passage which I have developed over the years. I call it reading the Bible with our heads, our hearts and our hands. Reading the Bible with our hearts means asking what we feel about it, how it connects with our own lives and world. Reading it with our hands means thinking about what it might call us to do in response, but before any of that, we need to read the Bible with our heads, to notice the details – who’s involved?, where does it take place? when? and what happens? Good storytellers don’t waste words. And that’s certainly true of the Gospel writers. If they tell you something, it’s because they want you to know it. They think it’s important. 

Today’s Gospel story is a classic case of this, especially when it comes to the “who and where”. If we don’t get those, we may miss the meaning of the whole story. 

So – who? Who do we meet in this story?

First, of course, there are Jesus and his disciples. Then there’s this poor man, living among the tombs outside his city, clearly very distressed. He tells Jesus his name is “Legion”; we’ll come back to that later. Then there are the demons who possess him. Demons might seem rather alien to our way of thinking, but we need to go with the flow and accept them, because they are important characters in this story. Then there are the unfortunate swine, who end up at the bottom of the lake, and their indignant swineherds. Pigs were unclean animals to Jewish people, so what are they doing here? And finally, there are the townsfolk, the neighbours, friends, maybe family, of this man. We might expect them to be glad when he is healed, but instead they beg Jesus to go away. That’s not what usually happens when Jesus heals people. He is usually besieged by crowds bringing him every other sick Tom, Dick and Harry in the neighbourhood, so what’s going on?

To answer that, we need to know a bit about where this story is set.

We’re told it’s in the “country of the Gerasenes”, which is “opposite Galilee”, on the other side of the lake from the predominantly Jewish areas where Jesus had been born and usually ministered. The land he’s come to is sometimes called the Decapolis, literally the “ten cities”, Gentile settlements founded after Alexander the Great’s conquest 300 years earlier. That explains the pigs – Gentiles were quite happy eating them - but it would have surprised some of Jesus followers that he went there. Why should he care about these foreigners?

But there’s something else significant about the location of this story, something Luke’s first hearers would have known, even if we don’t. Northern Galilee and the Decapolis was where the Roman Army, the occupying force, garrisoned its troops. It was fertile land, and an army marches on its stomach. The Romans set up their camps in this area because there was food available - to buy, if the population were lucky, to seize by force if they weren’t. The pigs that ended up at the bottom of the lake may have been destined to be some Roman squaddie’s bacon butty. 

The presence of the army is hinted at in the name this man calls himself - “Legion”. A Legion was the name given to the largest unit of the Roman Army – around 6000 people – that was what that word meant to the people of Jesus’ time. It would be a bit like calling yourself “battalion” today. Luke isn’t just telling us that this man has many demons; he’s telling us what kind of demons they are, and why they are so terrifying to him.

No wonder the swineherds, and the local population, are so alarmed by the loss of those pigs. No wonder they just want Jesus to go away. What will happen if the bargain they’ve made with their oppressors – we feed you; you leave us alone – breaks down? 

Rome made its presence felt through brutal demonstrations of power; crucifixions, enslavement, bloodthirsty gladiatorial “games”, savage suppression of any hint of rebellion. This was the backdrop to everyone’s lives. It’s what this man who called himself Legion had grown up with. What might he have witnessed? What might he have been caught up in? We don’t know, but whatever it was, he’d have had good reason to be terrified out of his mind. There’s nothing insane about finding occupation, war and brutality unbearably distressing. Today we might say he had PTSD, but his description of an army that lives in his head, the Legion inside him, is just as valid and powerful a way of talking about it. 

And, of course, everyone around him is terrified too. They may have been able to push it down inside themselves. They may look as if they are coping, but when those pigs go off the cliff, it becomes obvious that their sense of security is only skin deep. 

This isn’t a story about one man’s mental health problems – something that’s gone wrong in his head. It asks all of us how we manage to live in a world that’s objectively and realistically often terrifying. Iran, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, starvation, climate chaos; pick your own catastrophe – there is no shortage. And that’s without considering the personal challenges each of us might face, the personal burdens we bear. We’re out of our depth from the day we are born, always at the mercy of forces beyond our control - disease, disaster or the deeply rooted hatreds that erupt into violence between nations. How do we live in a world like this without it destroying us?

Legion finds his answer in his meeting with Jesus. He acclaims him as “Son of the Most High God”. He realises that he’s in the presence of someone who is greater than the power of Rome, greater than the demons that possess him, and yet – and this is what really transforms him - Jesus believes that he matters, and treats him as if he matters, with dignity and care. He’s not even of the same faith and ethnic background as Jesus and yet he is loved. 

Jesus doesn’t promise him that nothing bad will happen to him. Jesus doesn’t promise to overthrow the Roman army. There were many who hoped he would, who were looking for a “strong man” leader; as people still do. But Jesus refuses to be that person because he knows that ultimately you can’t defeat hatred with military force, you can only defeat it with love. 

It is by loving this man that Jesus helps him discover the ultimate safety he really needs, and he sends him back into his fearful community so that they can find it too. It’s the same safety we all need; the awareness that we are known and loved, that we matter, whatever happens to us and around us. It’s the story Jesus’ life, death and resurrection tell us. The cruel force of Rome might crucify him, but the God of love is stronger, and holds the ultimate power. 

It’s not wrong to be terrified by what we see happening around us. It’s realistic, because life can be terrifying – but Christ calls us to look beyond and beneath what terrifies us to the greater reality of God’s love, the everlasting arms in which we, and all creation, are held. And if we can let that knowledge sink into us and transform us, then, just as it does with Legion, it might also spill out to others and make the world a little less terrifying for us all.  

Amen

Woven into God's heart: A sermon for Trinity Sunday, preached at St Mary's Church, Platt.

Trinity Sunday 2025 - A sermon for St Mary's, Platt

Romans 5.1-5, John 16.12-15

Christian faith started with experience - raw, dramatic experience; the experience of those who knew Jesus in the flesh and felt that in him they were meeting the God they already knew as Father and Creator; the experience of those who watched Jesus die, but later met him alive again; the experience of those who felt God’s presence on the Day of Pentecost, a presence they called the Holy Spirit. These experiences were utterly real – experiences always are, by definition. 

The problem with experience, though, is that it can be very hard to put into words.  “You had to be there!” we say of some extraordinary experience we’ve had.  It’s a bit like being in love. You know it when you feel it. It can change your life, set you on a completely different course. But try to describe it and you’ll probably be reduced to syrupy clichés that never really capture the unique relationship you’ve found with that person who is, to you, the most special person in the world.

That’s what the early Christians discovered when they tried to talk about the experiences they’d had. No matter how clever they were, they were never going to be able to sum it up in words – you had to have been there to know what they had known, to feel what they had felt.  

To add to that, they were trying to explain all this across barriers of language and culture.

The first Christians were Jewish by background and spoke Aramaic. But they took their faith out into a predominantly Greek speaking and Greek thinking world. Greek was the language of learning, of philosophy, the language you used when you wanted to talk or write about ideas. The Greek philosophers like Plato had laid the foundations of a world view which was very different from that of those who had grown up in Galilee and Judea. Their image of God was different. The God of Greek philosophy was distant and serene, perfect and unchangeable, with no personal interest in the doings of humans. The God of the Hebrew Scriptures – our Old Testament – was passionate, personal, sometimes seeming to change his mind, so in love with his people that he would do anything for them.

If God was an unchangeable, perfect, complete, serene being in a distant heaven, how could he be present in a carpenter from Galilee, thought the Greeks? How could he learn and grow as a child? How could he suffer and die? How could he move through the world inspiring and enthusing people? How could he be part of our messy reality at all?  And how were the experiences of God as Father, as Son and as Holy Spirit related to each other? What was happening to God the Father when God the Son was dying on the cross? Were they three different Gods, or three parts of one God, or something else completely…? Every attempt to answer these questions neatly seemed to tangle things up further. 

 

Theologians argued for centuries.  The arguments often became bitter and divisive, no more than tribalism. Ironically, and tragically, those divisions undermined the very thing the first Christians were trying to express when they talked about their experience of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the sense of wholeness, reconciliation and peace they’d found. 

The first disciples felt God come close to them in Jesus. “All that the Father has is mine” we hear in John’s Gospel, the same Gospel that begins by telling us that the “Word became flesh and dwelt among us”. Heaven had been born on earth, and earth was lifted to heaven.  “We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” Paul proclaimed in our second reading. The things that had made them feel cut off from God, whether that was the condemnation of others or their own sense of failure or unworthiness, were swept away. God was with them in Jesus, touching those who’d been told they were untouchable and unfit to enter God’s presence. “Look, here I am sitting down to eat with you,” said God in Jesus, “travelling the road with you, laughing and crying with you, sharing the good times and the bad, enduring the worst that human beings can do to one another.” And when Jesus ascended into heaven, they found that bond – that peace that passed their understanding – hadn’t left them, because God was present with them in his Spirit.

As they took that message out into the world, they discovered God was present with them in one another as well. They were drawn together across the divides of their society – remember all those languages they miraculously spoke on the Day of Pentecost. Jew and Gentile, men and women, slave and free were united in one body. They didn’t always get it right, but they tried to live as equals, a radical thing to do in their stratified and divided world, where great gulfs separated rich from poor and powerful from powerless. And they did so because they had discovered that being woven into the heart of God meant they were woven into each other’s hearts as well.

That was a compelling but challenging message then, and it’s just as compelling and challenging now. We live in a world that is deeply divided too. Where differences of outlook and perspective spiral into mutual suspicion and bitterness at the drop of a hat, where if people don’t look like us, act like us or think like us we all too easily see them as a threat. We watch the news and see things falling apart, nations falling apart, communities falling apart. Perhaps we feel that we are falling apart too torn apart by all the competing demands on us, the barrage of information coming at us. 

The idea of the Trinity wouldn’t have arisen unless people had felt there was something important about it – after all, you wouldn’t make it up. They wouldn’t have clung to it and wrestled with it unless they felt there was something in it they couldn’t let go of, something essential to Christian Faith. The tragedy was that they often lost sight of what that important thing was. It wasn’t about providing a litmus test for orthodoxy, a way of tripping up people you felt were heretics, a box to tick to decide who was friend and who was foe.  

The important thing about the idea of the Trinity is that it calls us back again and again to that glorious truth that at the heart of God is a loving relationship, which we are all of us, together, woven into.  

The astronaut Chris Hadfield was once asked what it felt like to go out on a spacewalk. You have to imagine him, floating in space, with Earth shining below him and the blackness of space beyond, as you hear his answer. He said  “It is the most magnificent experience, hanging onto all of humanity with one hand, between Earth’s riot and the bottomless universe.”

That says it for me. To believe in the Trinity is to believe in - and to follow - a God who holds all things, Earth’s riot and the bottomless universe, friends, strangers, enemies, all that has been and all that will be, the whole of me, the whole of you - and who loves it all. 

Amen

Sermon: The God who speaks our language: Pentecost

Acts 1.2-21, John 14.8-17

I wonder what makes you feel at home, what you greet with a sigh of relief when you get back after a trip away. Often, it’s the small things – the favourite mug or armchair that’s shaped to our body. Most of us sleep better in our own beds.  And of course language matters too. Being able to understand the road signs and the tannoy announcements at the station is a great relief, however much we have enjoyed being somewhere different.

The people we meet in today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles are a long way from home, a long way from those comfortable, familiar things which say “home” to them. We’re told that Jerusalem is crowded with  Parthians, Medes, Elamites and all the rest.  They have come to Jerusalem from all around the ancient Near East– the Parthians, Medes and Elamites and all the rest… people from all over the ancient world from Mesopotamia in what is now Iran to Libya in North Africa, from the island of Crete to Phrygia in the Anatolian highlands of Turkey to the Arabian peninsula, and people from the great city of Rome too. Some may have been there on business, or just passing through,  and some – the proselytes in that long list – were people who were interested in Jewish faith, but not ethnically Jewish. But it’s likely that many would be from Jewish communities - in some cases centuries old -  founded during times when the people of Israel had been exiled from their homes by invading powers and had had to make their homes in foreign lands. Some had just merged into the surrounding culture, but others held onto their Jewish faith, and the commandment that all Jewish men should go to Jerusalem for certain important festivals, like Pentecost, the festival that celebrated by the early summer harvest, and the giving of the law to Moses on Mt Sinai. Of course, not everyone went – it would have been expensive and dangerous – but perhaps just once in a lifetime you might make the trip if  you could manage it, just like the Muslim pilgrims who this week are travelling from all over the world for the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

But when you got to Jerusalem I wonder what it was like for you? Maybe you thought you’d feel at home, but the reality was probably complicated. If you were a second, third, fourth, or even more, generation immigrant, you would have grown up surrounded by the language and customs of the place you lived in – high on the Anatolian plains or in the cultural sophistication of Rome, perhaps. Whether you liked it or not, it would be the sights, sounds and smells of that place that felt most familiar, that really felt like home; in Jerusalem you felt like a fish out of water. 

But then those homesick pilgrims hear something strange. They hear their own languages, their own particular dialects, being spoken by an excited band of people who seem to have a message they are burning to transmit. It’s not just the words that catch your attention if you are one of those far-from-home travellers, it is the sound of home, “how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?” Our own mother-tongue… Not in some garbled translation – Phrygian spoken with a Galilean accent – but as if by a native, our neighbour in our home village, someone who knows where we are coming from, literally, but also culturally, spiritually, emotionally. Someone who has shared our experiences, who knows how the mountain stream tumbles through our village, or where the best grazing is up in the hills. Someone who has been where we have.

I’ve often described the Holy Spirit to people as “God in the here and now”.  We sometimes speak and think of God in ways that make him seem a million miles away up in space, or thousands of years in the past, but the Bible speaks of the Holy Spirit making him known in people’s daily lives, breaking through that barrier of time and distance. The Spirit puts the words of God into the minds of the Old Testament prophets for example, and in Ezekiel’s vision breathes life into the dry bones of Israel (Ezekiel 37). In the book of Exodus, the Spirit even inspires the craftspeople who built and furnished the tent where the people of Israel worshipped as they journeyed across the wilderness, as they embroidered its curtains with pomegranates, (Exod 35) and beat metal out to make its sacred vessels. In the New Testament, Paul speaks of the Spirit praying in us “with sighs too deep for words” when we can’t think of what to say. 

God in the here and now, our here and now, whatever that is. God knows where we are coming from, because he is there too, at home with us and in us, just as he was in Jesus. “Show us the Father,” says Jesus’ disciple, Philip in today’s Gospel reading. “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father…” We haven’t seen Jesus, not in the way Philip had, but through God’s Spirit we can have the same experience. He is the Advocate, says the Gospel – literally the one who speaks for us. Through the Spirit God is present in our lives, understanding our language, the things we say, and the things we don’t and maybe can’t say, better than we can understand it ourselves.

And, of course, if that’s true for us, then it must equally be true for every other person he has made. He must equally be present in their lives, at work in them. 

How different would our world be if we really lived out that belief, that in everyone we meet, we also meet with God? 

I’d like to finish with a poem by Malcolm Guite, which says all this far better than I can. It is called, simply, Pentecost.

Today we feel the wind beneath our wings

Today  the hidden fountain flows and plays

Today the church draws breath at last and sings

As every flame becomes a Tongue of praise.

This is the feast of fire, air, and water

Poured out and breathed and kindled into earth.

The earth herself awakens to her maker

And is translated out of death to birth.

The right words come today in their right order

And every word spells freedom and release

Today the gospel crosses every border

All tongues are loosened by the Prince of Peace

Today the lost are found in His translation.

Whose mother tongue is Love in every nation.

Amen

Sermon: Easter 7: Leave us not comfortless...

Easter 7 (Sun after Ascension Day) Acts 16.16-34, Jn 17.20-end

"O God the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven: we beseech you, leave us not comfortless, but send your Holy Spirit to strengthen us and exalt us to the place where our Saviour Christ is gone before, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen"

“We beseech you, leave us not comfortless”.

Today’s collect is one of my favourites. That phrase, “leave us not comfortless” seems to me to come straight from the heart. It taps into one of our deepest and earliest fears, fear of abandonment, of being left to face the world alone, which goes right back to our childhood.

“Leave us not comfortless” Comfort, in this context, of course, isn’t about a cup of hot chocolate or a cosy blanket. It’s about strength – “fortitude” – the capacity to keep going, to get through the stuff that life throws at us.

 We may not face the challenges that a starving family in Gaza does, under a barrage of bombs, but my experience is that everyone in this world is confronted at some point with things that seem too heavy to bear: bereavement, illness, anxiety about work or money or friends of family members, regrets, guilt, crushing disappointment.  It’s not a sign of weakness when we struggle with these things; it is simply a sign that we are human. For all of us there will be times when we look around for the adult in the room, and find that it is us, and know that we aren’t up to the job. And often we’re right - we aren’t.

This Sunday is the Sunday after Ascension Day, when we hear the story of Jesus returning to his Father. His followers have been on an emotional rollercoaster as he has been arrested and crucified, then raised from death and restored to them, and now, it seems, taken away again. According to Luke’s story, they stand on the mountaintop, gawping at the space where he was, until two angels appear and ask them “why are you looking up into the heavens?”

What else are they supposed to do? The person who made sense of their lives, the person who knew the answers, the person who they felt safe with, the person who had turned them around and transformed them has gone. But the challenges they face haven’t. The New Testament was written by and for people who lived in a tough and precarious world to start with, and now faced persecution as well. The Romans didn’t take kindly to threats to their rule – that’s why they had killed Jesus. Those who followed him often faced the same fate.

The reading we heard from the book of Acts illustrates that. Paul and Silas have been jailed because they have healed an enslaved girl who was being exploited by her owners. But in doing that they’ve wrecked their “get rich quick” scheme. They probably aren’t surprised to find themselves arrested, beaten and flung in jail. But in the middle of the night an earthquake throws the doors open. Great news for Paul and Silas, we might think. But not so much for their jailer. He knows that if his prisoners escape his own life will be on the line. In a way, he was just as much a prisoner as they were. He would rather die by his own hand than wait for the punishment he knows will come, but Paul reassures him that they are still there, and intend to remain so.

The jailer is stunned, but his response might seem like an odd one to us. “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” he asks.

The word “saved” has picked up a lot of theological and historical baggage for us. It’s often distorted into simply being a matter of getting a ticket to heaven when we die. But I don’t think that’s what’s in this jailer’s mind. He’s not looking for a theological debate with Paul and Silas, about faith vs works or theories of the atonement. I think his question is far more basic than that. “Saved” is essentially the same word as “safe”. If you are saved, you are safe. And that’s what he’s seen in Paul and Silas, a deep and unshakeable sense of safety, of ultimate security, a conviction that, whatever happens – even if they die - “all shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well” to quote the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich. It’s this which has enabled them not only to sing hymns in their jail cell, but also to stay there when they could have escaped, putting their jailer’s needs before their own. The foundations of the prison may have been shaken by the earthquake, but the foundations of their lives and of their faith haven’t been. “How do you get to feel that safe,” the jailer asks, “and can I have some of it too, please?”

“Believe on the Lord Jesus” says Paul in answer. That can lead us down another blind alley if we’re not careful, because, like “saved”, “believe” has also picked up a lot of baggage over the centuries. What must we believe? How strongly? What about our doubts and questions? But again, these aren’t really the questions Paul is trying to answer. “Belief” in the New Testament isn’t about creeds and doctrines, it is about action.  The Greek word is more accurately translated as “trust”.  It’s not about giving intellectual assent to a list of statements about Jesus – that he is the son of God, born of a virgin and so on. It’s about living our lives in the way Jesus did, walking in the way he did and letting the journey shape us; welcoming, loving, serving. Paul and Silas don’t know what will happen to them, but they do know that they can’t fall out of the hands of God. That’s what the death and resurrection of Jesus has taught them, and as they have followed in his footsteps they have found a fullness of life and richness of meaning that nothing can take away or destroy. As Paul wrote to the church in Rome, “ If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” (Romans 14.8) This is what the jailer sees in them, and what he wants for himself, the assurance that he is not alone, not forsaken, not left comfortless, and never will be, because he is held in the love of a God who will never let him go.

Jesus’ prayer for us in the Gospel reading is that “as you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us…” He knows that the comfort we need, the strength to get us through , comes ultimately from knowing that we are woven into the love of the Godhead. It comes through the power of the Spirit, through prayer and the words of the Bible, through loving and being loved by one another, through serving those around us, walking in the way of Christ and finding it a way that leads to life. “Leave us not comfortless,” we cry. “Lo, I am with you to the end of the world” answers God –" I am here, I am here. " Amen

OPENING THE GOSPELS: Easter Sunday

 EASTER SUNDAY

Click on the links for an introduction to the series, and the techniques of reading with your head, heart and hands.

Luke 24.1-12  (Acts 10.34-43 or Isaiah 65.17-end, or 1 Cor 15.19-26, Alternative Gospel John 20.1-18) 

24But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, [the women who had come with Jesus from Galilee] came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. 2They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3but when they went in, they did not find the body. 4While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. 5The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. 6Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, 7that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.’ 8Then they remembered his words, 9and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. 10Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. 11But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. 12But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.

HEAD QUESTIONS

WHO?

The women who had come with Jesus from Galilee: Jesus’ female disciples, of whom there were a significant number, are crucial to the story of the crucifixion and resurrection. The Gospel writers are all careful to make sure we know that the same group of women (though the names vary from Gospel to Gospel) witnessed Jesus’ burial and then found the tomb empty. The continuity is important, to counter any suggestion that the disciples went to the wrong tomb. They bear witness to the resurrection, telling the other disciples about it, but the other disciples, except Peter, write it off as an “idle tale”. This story is deeply counter-cultural. At this time women’s testimony was not considered to be reliable, and the fact that the other disciples disregarded them wouldn’t have surprised anyone. But Luke is clearly pointing out that they are wrong to do so. It’s a sign of how radical this new movement was that Luke, like the other Gospel writers, puts the women centre stage. It also underlines that the Resurrection wasn’t made up by the Gospel writers – if they were going to make it up, they wouldn’t have done so with women as witnesses. The women are identified by Luke as Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, along with other unnamed women.

Two men in dazzling clothes: Luke doesn’t identify these ‘men’ as angels; he leaves it to us to join the dots. The ‘dazzling clothes’ might remind us of the story of the Transfiguration, when Jesus’ clothes became ‘dazzling white’, and of the stories of his birth, when ‘the glory of the Lord shone’ around the shepherds who were the first to hear that Jesus had been born. The light of God, say the stories, is no ordinary light; it is light that is above and beyond human understanding.

The eleven: Luke specifies that only eleven of Jesus’ inner circle were present after the crucifixion - the twelfth was Judas, who had taken his own life after he betrayed Jesus. “…and all the rest” reminds us that there were more disciples than just this select group. The number twelve was intended to mirror the twelve tribes which made up the kingdom of Israel. In Jesus a new Kingdom was coming about. 

Peter: Peter is often singled out in the Gospel stories, sometimes for his ‘have-a-go’ courage, but also for the times he got it spectacularly wrong. The last time he had appeared in the story before this was when he denied even knowing Jesus when Jesus was arrested and tried. We have to wonder what was going through his head as he ran towards the tomb. Peter became a prominent leader in the early church, so the people Luke and the other Gospel writers were writing for would have known of him, or maybe even known him, as the elder statesman of their community. The stories which cast him in a less than flattering light are probably included to encourage that early Christian community. That is especially true of the stories which can only have come from him, like that of his denial. If the great Peter had all these ups and downs, and yet was used by God, so can we all be.

WHERE?

The Tomb: Ancient tradition, dating from just a couple of centuries after the crucifixion, placed Jesus tomb on the location of what is now the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Some Victorian Christians suggested, on rather shaky grounds, that it was located in what is now called “The Garden Tomb” a little further away. Having visited both, I am very unconvinced by their arguments! What matters, though, is that the women who were there knew exactly where the tomb was, because they had seen Jesus buried in it. Rock cut tombs were common in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean. A large stone would be made to run in a groove across the tomb, sealing it after the burial.  According to the Gospels this tomb had been cut for Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent leader who gave it to the disciples to bury Jesus in as a sign of his belated support.

The place where the disciples were: We don’t know where Jesus’ disciples were staying, but it seems that they had a base in Jerusalem, where they had gathered together and were lying low after the trauma of the crucifixion. It may have been the home of one of Jesus’ supporters. The reference in vs 12 to Peter going “home”, is a rather unhelpful translation. The Greek word simply says that he “went back”, presumably to this shared lodging. 

WHEN?

“On the first day of the week,”: The first day of the week was Sunday, the day following the Sabbath, which was Saturday. 

“at early dawn”: All the Gospels say that the women came to the tomb as soon as they could after the Sabbath, when no work could be done. By implication, the resurrection happened while it was still dark (as John’s Gospel states). Jesus is not the light that shines after the darkness, or the light at the end of the tunnel, but the light that shines in the darkness and is with us in the tunnel! 

“On the third day”: Ancient cultures, including Judaism, counted days beginning with the day on which the count started. Friday, when Jesus died and was buried, was therefore the first day, Saturday was the second day, and Sunday was the third day. In the hot climate of the Middle East, there could be no doubt, by the third day after a death, that the person really was dead, and some thought that the soul of a dead person lingered until this point.

WHAT?

The Resurrection is a baffling story. We know that dead people don’t rise. And yet the early Christians insisted that Jesus had died, been buried, and was raised to a new sort of life by God. Many of them went to their deaths because of it. Luke, like all the other Gospel writers, doesn’t make any attempt to explain the Resurrection, but he is in no doubt that it is the central, transforming, feature of Christian faith. The details he gives us underline that the women knew where the tomb was and that Jesus really was dead – after forty lashes, a brutal crucifixion and a lance thrust into his side, followed by three days without water and food sealed in a tomb, there is no way Jesus could have just come around as if from a faint, and then shouldered aside the huge stone. If the authorities had removed the body, they had only to say so and produce it to stop the wild rumours of Resurrection circulating. If the disciples had removed the body, they would not have gone to their deaths insisting Jesus had been raised, because they would have known it wasn’t true. They had nothing to gain – there was no power or wealth on offer in the early Church - and everything to lose by it. Like Peter, we are left “amazed”, with no way of getting our heads around this story. What would we have seen if we had been there? We can’t know. But those who were there clearly felt sure that whatever had happened changed everything for them – the death of Jesus was not the end, but a new beginning, not just for him, but for them too. 

HEART QUESTIONS

• What do you feel as you read this passage?

• What do you think the disciples were feeling before, during and after they heard the news of the Resurrection?

• What difference, if any, does the Resurrection make to you?

HANDS QUESTIONS

• What do you feel prompted to do in response to this Gospel story?

 

OPENING THE GOSPELS: Palm Sunday

PALM SUNDAY

Click on the links for an introduction to the series, and the techniques of reading with your head, heart and hands.

Luke 19.28-40 (Isaiah 50.4-9a or Philippians2.5-11, Luke 22.14-23)

28 After Jesus had said this, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem.

29 When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the disciples, 30saying, ‘Go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it here. 31If anyone asks you, “Why are you untying it?” just say this: “The Lord needs it.” ’ 32So those who were sent departed and found it as he had told them. 33As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, ‘Why are you untying the colt?’ 34They said, ‘The Lord needs it.’ 35Then they brought it to Jesus; and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. 36As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road. 37As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, 38saying,

‘Blessed is the king

   who comes in the name of the Lord!

Peace in heaven,

   and glory in the highest heaven!’

39Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, order your disciples to stop.’ 40He answered, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.’

HEAD QUESTIONS

WHO?

Jesus: What does this passage tell us about Jesus? What image do we get of him from this?

Two disciples: The disciples aren’t named, but are probably part of Jesus’ inner circle.

A colt: Jesus is deliberately acting out a prophecy associated with the Messiah from the Old Testament book of Zechariah (9.9), which talks about the new leader God will send coming to Jerusalem “humble and riding on a donkey, a colt, the foal of a donkey”. Matthew’s version (Mt 21.2) has Jesus riding – rather improbably – on both a donkey and a colt at the same time!  Whose colt does Jesus borrow? Does the owner know it was going to be borrowed? Who is the owner? Did they get it back afterwards? Luke doesn’t tell us the answers to these questions because they aren’t relevant to his story, and we have to be careful not to get distracted by them – they are our questions, not Luke’s! The colt is important – see below - but the details of how it comes to be made available aren’t.  

The questioners: The questioners who ask the disciples why they are taking the colt (as you might expect someone to) are a way for Luke to underline the symbolic importance of this action. The disciples’ answer seems to satisfy them. 

“The whole multitude of disciples”: Matthew, Mark and John describe very large crowds acclaiming Jesus when he rides into Jerusalem, by implication people who just happen to be there – ordinary men, women and children. Luke, in contrast, says they were Jesus’ disciples, probably a larger group than the 12 closest disciples, but people who already supported Jesus and knew something about his teaching and wanted others to know who he was.

Pharisees: We aren’t told why the Pharisees want to shut up the disciples. It might just be that they disagreed about Jesus being the Messiah, but they are also likely to be aware of the potential for their Roman overlords to crack down on the whole population if it looked as if unrest was brewing. It wasn’t uncommon for people to claim to be the Messiah, and it usually ended badly for them, and those who were caught up in the backlash.

WHERE?

The Mount of Olives: The approach to Jerusalem from the east led down the steep slopes of the Mount of Olives into a deep valley and then up the other side of the hill on which the city stands. Ancient prophecies of the Messiah’s coming said that he would come from the east – the place of the rising sun. No one could have missed the significance of Jesus coming in this way. It is still a wonderful viewpoint, preserved in many tourist photos, of the old city. It still has many olive trees growing on its steep sides. 

WHEN?

“After Jesus had said this”: Jesus has just been telling a very pointed parable – Luke’s version of the parable of the Talents – about a nobleman who went away “to get royal power for himself”, leaving ten pounds for his slaves to invest. When he comes back, two of the slaves have put his money to work for him and made a profit, but one, who was afraid of losing it, has wrapped it in a cloth, where it was safe, but did nothing. His pound is taken away and given to the others, and those who did not want him to be king are slaughtered. Whatever we think of its brutality (and we should remember that parables are stories to engage our imagination, not descriptions of how God acts!), it carries an uncomfortable and pointed message. A time is coming when the decisions people have made about who to support will lead to real world consequences. What have they done with the treasures of faith they have been given? Will they recognise “the king who comes in the name of the Lord” or not?

WHAT?

As I have said above, Jesus is very deliberately acting out a prophecy from the Hebrew Scriptures (Zechariah 9.9), written many centuries earlier during another time of national crisis – occupation and oppression was the norm rather than the exception in Israel’s story. The Jewish people were longing for God to send them a leader to defeat their enemies. Zechariah’s prophecy said that this leader would come “humble and riding on a donkey, a colt, the foal of a donkey”. It’s an image that was as strange in Zechariah’s time as it was in Luke’s, and as it is in ours.  Jesus deliberately acts out the prophecy, and those around him – rejoicing disciples and wary Pharisees – know exactly what he is saying, that he is God’s promised Messiah. It is a deeply subversive political gesture. At almost the same moment Jesus enters Jerusalem on a colt, Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor would have been coming into the other side of the city, at the head of a grand procession with heavily armed, mounted troops, from his base on the coast for the feast of the Passover, a time of heightened nationalistic tension, to discourage any thoughts of rebellion. The contrast between the two processions would have been stark, but which leader would God bless and use – the carpenter on the colt, or the Roman military leader on his war horse? 

HEART QUESTIONS

• What do you feel as you read this passage?

• If you could step into this story, as part of the crowds around Jesus, where would you be and what would you do?

• Have you been part of any large demonstrations? If so, how did it feel? If not, why is this something you have chosen not to do? How do you show your support  for causes you think are important? 

• Do you think the Pharisees have a point? Is it fair for Jesus and his disciples to risk causing the wrath of Rome to fall on the whole nation?

HANDS QUESTIONS

• What do you feel prompted to do in response to this Gospel story?

READINGS FOR HOLY WEEK

Why not read Luke’s account of Jesus arrest, trial and crucifixion through this week. You can find it in Luke 22 and 23. You know the “Head, heart, hands” drill now, so feel free to use it as you read!