Advent 4 : Joseph's choice

Isaiah 7.10-16,  Matthew 1.18-25

 

“And he named him Jesus”. That moment, at the end of our Gospel reading, is a crucial moment, a moment which its first hearers would have been very struck by. It’s not just the name itself, it is who is doing the naming that they would have noticed. It’s Joseph, that often overlooked and side-lined character in the story of Christ’s birth.

 

Matthew doesn’t tell us how Joseph found out that Mary was pregnant, only that she “was found” to be so. Did she tell Joseph herself, or was it blurted out by a meddling sister or aunt or friend who noticed the signs and thought Joseph ought to know? However it happened, though, it wasn’t going to be something that could be hidden and Joseph had a dilemma, because he knew this child wasn’t his. He needed to do some damage limitation. He seems to have cared about Mary. He didn’t want to expose her to public disgrace. She could even have been stoned for adultery. But if he didn’t denounce her it would either look as if the child was his, and they weren’t supposed to be sleeping together yet, or that he knew it was someone else’s, which would have demeaned him in the eyes of his society. We might not – I hope we wouldn’t – think of it this way today, but that was how it was at the time. Joseph couldn’t win.

 

He weighed up his options. We can imagine him agonising in the small hours of the night, flipping between plans, desperately trying to find some way of squaring the circle, so that everyone came out of this ok. In the end, he made his choice. He worked out a solution he could live with. The least worst option seemed to be to send Mary away quietly. Least said, soonest mended. Call the wedding off, and hope against hope that people would forget about the whole sad business. That way Mary wouldn’t suffer too badly, and Joseph would save as much face as possible. Perhaps that was the moment he fell asleep, finally having made up his mind.

 

But then he had a dream, and in his dream an angel came to him, and dropped the bombshell that the child was “from the Holy Spirit” – whatever that meant – Matthew doesn’t explain it. The message was clear, though. This child wasn’t a mistake or a sign of shame, as it would have been seen at the time, but a child through whom God was going to do something new, something vital, saving people from their sins. That’s what the name Jesus means. It means God saves. It was the same as the name Joshua – the great leader who had led the people of Israel into the Promised Land after they’d been freed from slavery in Egypt.  Jesus had been chosen to lead people into a new sort of freedom. And Joseph was called to be part of God’s plan too. Mary needed his protection. This child needed his protection.

 

We often focus at Christmas on the price Mary paid, on her faithfulness and courage in saying “Yes” to God, but Joseph paid a high price too. Who was going to believe him if he said that the child was “from the Holy Spirit”? He’d be, at the very least, a laughing stock. But Joseph, like Mary, was a person of courage – a righteous man – one of those people who decide what to do on the basis of whether it is right or wrong, rather than on whether it will bring them advantage. And so, when he woke up, we’re told, “he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him”. That’s a small statement, but a huge act of commitment.  Joseph threw his own carefully laid plans out of the window and chose God’s plan instead. “He took Mary as his wife but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

 

Naming children has always been the prerogative of their parents. Grandma might or might not like their choice. Uncle Bill might have hoped they’d name it after him. But no one would seriously argue that it was anyone else’s right to name a child except the parents. In naming Jesus, Joseph takes on parental responsibility for this child. He is saying that he’ll be the one who will protect him, provide for him, teach him a trade, worry about him, do what any good father at the time would have done.   

 

But we also know, because we have heard about his dream, that in choosing the name he does, he is also committing himself to God’s plan for this child, because he chooses the name the angel told him to. Maybe, left to his own devices, he’d have called him Joseph, but he doesn’t. He takes on the responsibility of fatherhood, but he also recognises the greater fatherhood of God, who has a purpose for this child which is beyond Joseph’s understanding. He calls him Jesus – God saves.

 

How is this tiny child going to bring about any sort of salvation? Joseph doesn’t know, but Matthew gives us a hint when he quotes from a rather obscure story from the book of the prophet Isaiah, and it’s worth us taking a small detour to find out a bit more about that.

 

King Ahaz, the king of Israel, was being attacked by neighbouring kings. Things weren’t going well.  Just before the passage we heard we are told that “The heart of Ahaz and the heart of his people shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind.” (Isaiah 7.2)

 

But in the face of Ahaz’ fear, God declares that he will act. He will defeat the attackers himself, and it will happen soon, by the time that a child who is soon to be born has grown up enough to know right from wrong, he says in the passage we heard. It is actually Isaiah’s own child God is referring to, a child he has with a Israelite prophetess, if you are interested. But, like Jesus, this child is named by God. He will be called Immanuel. “God with us”. His name will be a message, a reminder of the presence of God in these difficult times.

Isaiah’s words aren’t intended to be a prophecy of a child born in a stable six hundred years or so later, but Matthew sees an echo of this old story in the birth of Jesus, because he knows that salvation, God’s gracious reshaping of our lives, always begins when we realise that God is with us, beside us, within us, around us, close to us, caring about us. Matthew is telling us that Jesus will save people by being God’s presence among them. They will start finding the new life God wants to give them as they find God in him, healing, teaching, welcoming, loving.

 

Joseph could have said, “this child is nothing to do with me”. He could have turned his back on him and never given him a second thought. No one would have blamed him for it. It wasn’t his child. But he didn’t do that. He got involved. He named him. He cared for him. He loved him. He let this baby’s life become tangled up with his own, and in doing that he found that God was with him – Emmanuel  - in this child, and that changed everything.

 

The story asks us to consider what Jesus is to us? Is he just a theological idea, a long-ago story, an image in stained glass, paint or plaster? Or is he, in some sense, a living presence – God with us - someone we can’t forget about, someone whose life, whose ministry, whose priorities, impinge on us in a way we can’t ignore, change us too?

This story invites us into the moment when Joseph looked down at Mary’s baby and was given a choice – to take him as his own, or to leave him and walk away – and it asks us what we will do?

Amen

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Advent 3: The desert rejoices

 Isaiah 35.1-10, Matthew 11.2-11

“The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad. The desert shall rejoice and blossom,” said Isaiah in our Old Testament Reading. 

Deserts do sometimes blossom, exactly as he describes. Flower seeds that have lain dormant in the dry dusty ground, sometimes for years, suddenly spring up and flower and set seed, all in a few weeks after a sudden rainstorm drenches them. It is a wonderful spectacle, and to ancient people it must have seemed like a miracle. How could so much life be hidden in such an apparently dead landscape? 

Stories of the saints often featured miraculous flowering too. Flowers were said to spring up in the footsteps of the Irish Saint Brigid, for example. According to legend Joseph of Arimathea came to Glastonbury after the resurrection and was said to have stuck his wooden staff into the ground where it promptly burst into bloom.  I did much of my training for ministry based in the church in Glastonbury, and there are ancient varieties of hawthorn growing in the churchyard there which bloom in the winter. A sprig of those “holy thorn” trees is sent to grace the Royal Family’s Christmas dinner table to this day. 

The springs and wells which fed this unexpected flowering often litter the stories of saints too. Wells often spring up where saints are martyred, according to legends, and we find stories in the Bible too, like that of Moses, who struck a rock in the desert, as God commanded, and water poured from it. In Jewish legend, a well of water appeared wherever Miriam, Moses big sister, camped during the Exodus. The legend arose because when she died, the book of Numbers said that “the people had no water”. (Numbers 20.2)

Whether we put any credence in these stories or not, the message is obvious. There are times when we are confronted with situations that seem lifeless, hopeless, but what you see is not necessarily what you get. There is more to life than meets the eye. God can be at work even when we don’t see him. We can flourish and bear fruit in the most arid and unlikely situations, and the reason for that is that it isn’t down to us. It is the work of God, who is as much at home in a desert as he is in a fertile pasture.

In our Old Testament reading today, that’s what’s promised. The people of Israel are in exile in Babylon, and have been for many decades, long past the point where hope of return seemed sensible. And yet, says Isaiah, God would lead them home, and not only that, as they travel together with him, flowers would spring up in their path, pools of water would appear. It would be a journey full of hope for the future.  

In the Gospel reading Jesus doesn’t promise flowers in the desert in the future. He points to miraculous flowers that are appearing there and then. John the Baptist has been arrested by King Herod, and he knows he isn’t likely to get out of prison alive.  Has it all been worth it? Does his sacrifice mean anything? It’s easy to see how he might question himself, facing a squalid and terrible end, and want to know that his suffering hadn’t been in vain, so he sends messengers to Jesus. 

Jesus’ response is tender, consoling, but very, very definite. “Go and tell John what you hear and see; the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the poor have good news brought to them”. It’s almost as if each of these things is a flower from the desert, a miraculous bloom, which he is sending to John. “See! Here is God at work! Nothing you did, nothing that will happen to you is a waste, because love is never wasted.” 

All of us need to hear that at some point in our lives. We look back and wonder what we have achieved, what good we have done, what we will be remembered for. What is there to show for our lives? We look forward and wonder how we will cope with the future, how we will cross the trackless deserts that might confront us – illness, aging, the uncertainties that we all face. Most of us are not called to the sacrificial life of John the Baptist, but we are all called to share in God’s work of bringing healing to the sick, good news to the poor. We are all called to look for God at work and join in, to be part of a community of hope. 

God says to us “look! I have been at work, here, and here, and here, in the love you have given and received, and if I have been there in the past, why shouldn’t I be there in the future to bless and enrich you? It’s not about you, and your strength – you of the feeble knees and the fearful hearts – it is about me, the limitless creator of the universe. I spoke the light into being with a word. Flowers in the desert? Water in the wilderness?  Hope in despair? Love out of bitterness? Life out of death? Why should they be impossible for me? Watch, wait, and rejoice!”  

Amen

Christ the King: Leading and following

Jeremiah 23.1-6, Luke 23. 33-43

“There was also an inscription over Jesus, “This is the King of the Jews”.

The inscription Pilate ordered to be nailed at the head of the cross was meant to be satire, designed to rub in even further the humiliation heaped on Jesus by this shameful death – “This is your king? This broken, brutalised man? Follow him and this will happen to you too – losers!” it says. All four Gospels record it. In some the Jewish authorities argue with Pilate, asking him to write “This man said he was King of the Jews”, but Pilate tells them, “I have written what I have written”. Pilate is convinced he has finished with Jesus,  and he has underlined the might of Rome in doing so. The Romans will decide who is a king, who has power, who rules, and people had better remember that. 

Three days later, and his confident assertion doesn’t look so clever, as Jesus’ followers insist he has been raised from the dead, and because of that they refuse to bow to Roman power, even if it costs them their own lives. 

Two thousand years later, Pilate’s inscription stands as a challenge to us 

We hear this Gospel reading today, because this – the last Sunday of the Christian year - is the feast of Christ the King, a feast that was instituted around a hundred years ago by the then Pope, Pius XI, in reaction to the rise of communism and fascism, and of the populist leaders who seemed to be grabbing the attention of so many across the world in the political turmoil that followed the First World War.  I doubt whether the Pope’s own motives would stand up to too much scrutiny – it was partly about reasserting the position of the Catholic church – but nonetheless I think it is a useful challenge to us  to think about what it is we mean by kingship, what good leadership looks like, who we decide to follow, and why. And that’s something that is just as valid and vital today as it was then.. 

Any group of people, left to their own devices, will tend to throw up leaders, whether they mean to or not. And it’s just as well; it’s very frustrating to be in a group where no one is prepared to take any decisions or responsibility. Nothing gets done.  Those who find themselves in the lead may be willing or not; sometimes it’s just that everyone else takes a step back more quickly than you do. And those who lead may be good at it, or not.  As one old, and supposedly genuine, report on a military leader said, “his men would follow him anywhere, but only out of morbid curiosity.” 

Generally speaking though, leaders won’t lead for long unless they deliver a bit more than this. Leadership is intrinsically tied up with followership – it’s followers who make leaders. However clever or strong the leader is they can’t make people come after them. So if we wonder why we have the leaders we have, we need to look first at ourselves, at the things we demand, the needs we expect them to meet.

In uncertain times there is a well-documented tendency for people to look for what seems like “strong” leadership, black and white certainty – might is right “warrior culture”. That was the case a hundred years ago, when the Feast of Christ the King was inaugurated, when dictators like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Franco were on the rise, and it is the case now, with the growth of populist leaders around the world. When life feels complicated, when change is rapid, when we don’t know what to do, someone who gives us a clear direction of travel – even if it is the wrong direction – will always tend to be popular.  At the time of Jesus, the Roman Empire provided what has often been seen as the “strong man” style of leadership, ruling through a mixture of reward and brutal threat. People were controlled, said the poet and satirist Juvenal through “bread and circuses”. Roman citizens were given free grain, as a reinforcement of their privileged status, but also gladiatorial games, in which opponents of the regime were forced to fight to the death or used as bait for wild beasts, a not-so-subtle reminder of what might happen if you stepped out of line. Crucifixions were a common punishment for rebellion – an excruciatingly painful, humiliating and most of all public form of execution. And that was what people expected. 

That’s why Jesus is so counter-cultural, so hard for Pilate to understand. We’ve had two thousand years to get our heads around the pattern that Jesus shows us on the cross, non-violence, self-sacrifice, love. We’ve often been very bad at following it, but we know it at least as an ideal. At the time of Jesus, though, the idea of a leader who led through service, who didn’t want to lord it over others, who cared more for the people around him than himself, who was prepared to give up his life for people who would never be able to give anything in return, just didn’t make sense at all. If he can’t even save himself, say his accusers, as he dies on the cross, then how can he possibly be any use to anyone else. 

It's only one of the robbers crucified with him who gets it. “Jesus remember me when you come into your kingdom” he says. It may look obvious that Rome has won, but this man at least sees that the real king is the man hanging next to him on the cross. What so impresses him is that Jesus has done nothing to deserve crucifixion, and yet here he is, coming alongside an outcast like this robber, sharing his fate. Jesus could have avoided death. He could have looked to his own interests. But he won’t go back on the message he has been preaching throughout his ministry; a message which proclaims the worth and dignity of every person, old or young, rich or poor, powerful or powerless, male or female, slave or free, Jewish or Gentile, good or bad, a member of the in group or a total outcast. Each one is a child of God, and because of that is equally loved. 

That revolutionary message is the bottom line, the deciding factor, for Jesus, and if we claim to follow him that means it has to be our bottom line too, the thing that guides our actions, guiding how we lead but also how, and who, we follow, who we are influenced by, who we give our allegiance to, so that we are making a world in which, as Jeremiah put it, people need not “fear any more, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing.” Amen

Second Sunday before Advent: Beautiful stones

Malachi 4.1-2a, Luke 21. 5-19

“Some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God…” 

The opening words of today’s Gospel reading seem very apt for today here at St Mary’s, because later this morning, after the 10 am service, there’s going to be an open meeting to talk about the plans for the building project here. I’m not sure that we will be running to something quite as spectacular as the temple in Jerusalem, but as many of you will know, there have been plans for many years to make some change to the building adding much needed facilities. The process has ground on very slowly, hindered by Covid, changes of staff and various planning hitches, but it looks as if there is a real prospect that something will happen in the not too distant future… Because of that the PCC thought it was important to revisit the plans to check out whether priorities might have changed. I’m not on the PCC, by the way – just a retired priest helping out a bit – so I don’t have any special insights into all this. 

It’s been obvious to me over the year  or so I’ve been here that there are deep feelings about this that people long for some changes, but are maybe fearful too and that’s really understandable and normal. Place matters to us. Familiar buildings, familiar landscapes – that sense of home, the place that is ours, where we belong. Change can feel uncomfortable. We worry about it for all sorts of very justifiable reasons.

If it’s any comfort, I was reading a history of West Malling church, written at the time of the last big rebuilding project, in the opening years of the twentieth century, by the then vicar, Rev Lawson, which gave us the church we know now. After lamenting the rather unsatisfactory Georgian nave he had inherited, which he described as “gaunt” he commented that despite this, “it was naturally full of hallowed associations to those who had worshipped within its sacred walls for years. To them it was the parish church which they had learnt to love; and we can sympathise with the regretful feelings of some, when they saw it taken down, stone by stone in order to give place to an edifice more suited to the better taste of our own generation.” The building we are sitting in now is that new build which so shocked the congregation then… This space is where the organ stood, with the pulpit in front of it… That rebuild was just another chapter in a story of building and rebuilding which stretches right back to Norman times, and maybe beyond. Every generation makes its changes, and probably felt a bit unsettled by them too.

Buildings matter to us. And they mattered just as much at the time of Jesus. The Temple which so overwhelmed the disciples in the Gospel reading was the latest in a long line of buildings on that same site.

At first the people of Israel had worshipped in a tent, reminding them of the time they had wandered in the wilderness after God had freed them from slavery in Egypt. For centuries that was fine – and God seemed to like it that way, if we listen to what he said through the prophet Nathan to King David when he wanted to build something more permanent. But David’s son King Solomon wasn’t happy with that. A proper nation needed splendid buildings! So he built the first Temple, at huge expense. It stood for a couple of hundred years, until the Babylonians destroyed it when they took the people of Jerusalem into exile. 

When the exiles came back seventy or so years later, they built a new temple, but it was a modest affair – there wasn’t the money or energy for a big build . It would have to do.

But eventually another powerful king arose, King Herod – the one who had all the babies of Bethlehem killed. That tells us all we need to know about him, but history confirms that he was a paranoid megalomaniac, the kind of person who has to build, and build big to make himself feel secure – - if you are starting to think about Trump Towers and new White House Ball rooms, I’m not going to stop you making that connection. For King Herod it was fortresses, harbours, aqueducts and whole new cities…he was obsessed with building things that would impress people and curry favour. But the most important building project he undertook was the expansion and glorification of the Temple. Building work started shortly before Jesus was born, but it was such a vast project that by the time of his death it had only just been finished. It was around 40 years in the making, which sets our building project into a different light… 

Herod’s was spectacular though, shining and magnificent on the top of the hill on which Jerusalem is set, bringing pride and glory to the nation, “adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God”. It was this new Temple which so impressed Jesus’ disciples.

But Jesus words bring them down to earth with a bump. “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” According to the Gospels it was this perceived threat against the Temple – the symbolic centre of the nation – which the authorities seized on to condemn Jesus. In fact, Jesus hadn’t said that he would destroy the Temple, simply that it would be destroyed, but that nicety didn’t bother his enemies.  This was a sign that he meant trouble. 

But Jesus was right. By the time Luke wrote his Gospel, Herod’s fine Temple had been reduced to rubble, destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. All that remains of it now is part of the Western Wall, still a very important symbolic place of prayer, but a pale shadow of what went before. The destruction of the Temple provoked a huge crisis of faith for Jews and Christians alike. Where would people meet with God now? Where would they look for his presence?

For Christians the answer was simple – in Jesus and in one another, in the new communities that had been drawn together by faith. For several centuries, while persecution against them rumbled on, Christians had no church buildings. They met in each other’s houses, strengthening one another through times of change and turmoil, through those wars and insurrections, earthquakes, famines and plagues that Jesus foretold, times when they were dragged in front of kings and governors.

That doesn’t mean that church buildings don’t matter – we really do need to do some work on ours! - but it is a reminder that what happens within them matters more- the opportunities they give us to strengthen our faith, draw close to God, welcome others, love and serve our communities. That may happen in many different ways. Through Sunday worship, through groups that can meet during the week, through community activities that can take place in them, and as places where people can come and sit quietly to pray. 

That’s why the PCC is asking for your involvement, your support, your prayer at this moment, so that this church building, can continue to be a place where the love of God is known and shown to people today as it has been for so many people before us.  

Amen 

Remembrance Sunday: Today and tomorrow

Job 19.23-27a, Luke 20.27-38

I’m sure that over the next few days, in this season of Remembrance, we will all hear at some point the famous words we know as the Kohima Epitaph, 

When you go home, tell them of us and say

‘For your tomorrow, we gave our today.’

The Epitaph is inscribed on the memorial at the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery in Kohima, on the India-Myanmar border, the site of a crucial battle in WW2, and they are especially treasured by those who fought in the Far East, but they are powerful words for all of us. 

They capture perfectly that sense of loss not only of the lives those who died were living then, but of the futures they might have had, the lives they would have gone on to live, which were laid down for the futures of others – our futures, the lives we lead now.

They are a reminder that Remembrance Sunday isn’t just about death; far more fundamentally it’s about life. Every year, it is a wake up call to us all to be aware of what we treasure, of all that is precious in our everyday lives, and how easily it can be lost when hatred and division spiral into violence and bloodshed. 

My father served in the Royal Navy throughout the Second World war. He was part of the evacuation operation from Dunkirk, sailing seven times across the channel to rescue soldiers from the beaches, and then served on small Motor Torpedo Boats off the coast of Yugoslavia, trying to distract German U-boats so that the Yugoslavian resistance could do its work. It was dangerous work. Like many other veterans, he rarely talked about it, and certainly never glorified it, so I wasn’t sure what reaction I would get when I asked him once if he would talk to my son about his war for a project he was doing at primary school. He agreed, and I remember him saying “It’s good that they learn about it” he said, “so that it doesn’t happen again.” What mattered to him wasn’t just remembering the past, it was remembering the past, in the present, so that the future could be different, and I’m sure he wasn’t unusual in that.

Our Bible readings today are about the past, present and future too, about life and death. 

Some Sadducees come to Jesus, with a very strange question. The Sadducees were one of a number of religious groupings in first century Judaism and were largely drawn from the elites, the upper classes, the people who ran the Temple. As Luke helpfully tells us, they didn’t believe in life after death. That may come as a surprise, because that’s often assumed to be an intrinsic part of religious faith, but it was an idea which had only very slowly taken hold in Judaism. The Jewish scriptures – our Old Testament -  are rather vague, and not always consistent about what happens after death.

But by the time of Jesus most people did think there would be some sort of general resurrection and judgement at the end of time. It was only really the Saducees who held out against this view though. 

They come to Jesus to see where he stands, with a rather ridiculous scenario. “So,” Jesus, “what if a man dies without heirs?” By Jewish law, if this happened his brother was supposed to marry his widow, and her children would count as heirs for his dead brother, so there was someone to carry on his name. But what if the second husband died before she had a child, they asked Jesus, and the next brother married her, and the same happened again and again and again until she had gone through all the brothers? If there was a resurrection, whose wife would she be?

You can almost hear Jesus sighing. Where to begin? His answer is blunt – he knows a strawman argument when he hears one. Basically he says “what happens after death is nothing like anything you can imagine – it’s not just more of this life, it’s something completely outside your ability to understand. All that matters is that whether we live or die, we are the presence of God, “to whom all are alive”. 

In our Old Testament reading Job says, “I know that my Redeemer lives…in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold and not another.” He has lost everything – family, wealth, health – and he knows that ultimately, like all of us, he will lose even his life. There will come a time when - “worms destroy my body” as the King James version of the Bible puts it,  which I think is rather more vivid than the version we heard today “after my skin has been thus destroyed”.  But living or dying, he knows he can’t lose God, and God can’t lose him, and that is what matters most to him. Living or dying he is with God; that’s all he needs to know to help him in this present moment, to get through this time of pain and sorrow.

On Remembrance Day we look back to the past, of course, with gratitude to those who have gone before us, those who gave their today so that we could have a tomorrow. And we look forward to the future, to the peace of God “whose will is to restore all things” as the collect put it. But most importantly we are called to look at the present, to look for the God who is the God of living, the God who is with us now, calling us to live this day well, to see and deal with the things which prevent his peace from becoming a reality; the resentments, the prejudices, the words and actions which diminish others, and, left unchallenged, grow into hatred and war. The present is the only thing we have any control over. Today is where we can make a difference. 

We may never – please, God – have to lay down our lives in war in the way that those soldiers commemorated by the Kohima Epitaph did. We may never have to give our today physically so that others can have a tomorrow. But that doesn’t mean that our “today” doesn’t matter, because our “today”, however unimportant is might seem in the grand scheme of things, shapes tomorrow for those who come after us. The God who is present with us today calls us to take it as seriously as he does.

Amen 

All Saints Sunday 2025

All Saints Sunday (readings for 4th before Advent)

Isaiah 1.10-18, Luke 19.1-10

“Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today…”

I wonder how you feel about unexpected visitors. Are you the kind of person who cheerfully expects people to take you as they find you – dust and all - or would you be mortified if someone turned up when you hadn’t had a chance to put the hoover around?

Zacchaeus wasn’t expecting to host Jesus on the day he heard he was coming through Jericho. He thought he’d be lucky even to catch a glimpse of him. He was short, we are told, and couldn’t see over the heads of the crowd, and even if he could have done, it’s clear that this particular crowd weren’t exactly well-disposed to him. 

He was a chief tax collector, “and was rich” the story says. Tax collectors have probably never been the most popular of people, but in 1st century Palestine they were particularly hated because the taxpayers knew that the money they took was going to be used to fund the Roman occupation. They were being made to pay for their own oppression. 

Tax collectors often seem to have skimmed off money for themselves too. Zacchaeus admits he has done this, and the fact that he is rich underlines it.  

So tax collectors were regarded as cheats, and collaborators as well. No wonder people didn’t like them. No wonder this crowd grumbles when Jesus calls Zacchaeus down from his hiding place in the sycamore fig tree and invites himself to Zacchaeus’ home. How could he eat and drink under the same roof as this sinner? 

But Jesus isn’t bothered. After all, he has a track record of associating with outcasts, and being criticised for it. Zacchaeus may not seem like an outcast – he has wealth, and the favour of his Roman masters. In some ways he is part of the in-crowd, but Jesus sees the lonely, rather desperate man beneath all that. Zacchaeus climbs a tree to see Jesus, but actually it is Jesus who sees him.  

The effect on Zacchaeus is transformative. Instantly, before he and Jesus have had any real conversation at all, he announces that his life is going to change, that he’ll give half his possessions to the poor and repay those he has defrauded four times over. Jesus didn’t have to persuade him with any clever theological arguments. He didn’t have to shame him – there are no words of accusation or blame here. All he had to do was announce that he was coming home with Zacchaeus, staying in his house. Everything seems to have changed for Zacchaeus in that simple act of homecoming.

We sometimes describe our deepest moments of change as times when something “came home” to us, when something strikes at the heart of us. It can be a challenging time. We talk about the “chickens coming home to roost” – there have been some high profile examples of that in the news this week - the moment when we wake up to the reality of something we’ve done and have to face the consequences. It can be a heartsink moment, but it can also be a new beginning, because it’s only when we see what’s wrong that we have a chance of changing it. 

But for that chance of change to mean anything, condemnation on its own isn’t enough, challenge on its own isn’t enough, and that’s what makes Jesus’ simple action so powerful. He doesn’t just bring home to Zacchaeus the accusations which the crowd clearly want to throw at him, that he is a cheat and a collaborator, he also brings home to Zacchaeus that, cheat and collaborator as he is, he is still loved by God. 

“Today salvation has come to this house” says Jesus, “because he too is a son of Abraham”  - he belongs just as much as you do, Jesus says to the grumbling crowd. He is a fellow human being, part of the family of God. Jesus isn’t talking about getting a ticket to heaven when we die – that’s not what the Bible usually means by salvation. He is talking about the change Zacchaeus needs here and now in his heart, in his life, the change that will spill over into the world around him, because God has come home with him, and God has come home to him. 

“Cease to do evil, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan and plead for the widow,” our Old Testament Reading reminded us .This is what counts as far as God is concerned. These things are the evidence – not fancy words or rituals – that God has come home to us, that “salvation has come to our house”.

We don’t know anything about Zacchaeus’ life after this. There are a few legends – the Eastern Orthodox churches say he was the first bishop of Caesarea Maritima on the coast of Palestine. And there’s a very far-fetched medieval Catholic legend which says that, under the nickname of St Amadour, from the Latin word for Love, he travelled to Southern France and became a hermit in a cave dug out of a cliff face which eventually became a shrine to the virgin Mary. It still bears his name, they say - Rocamadour. I’ve been there – maybe some of you have. But the Bible tells us nothing more about him. 

I’m convinced, though, that the change in him was genuine and lasting. And the reason I’m convinced is that he is named. Peripheral characters in the Gospels – the bit part players we meet only once - are very rarely named. I can only think of four others,– Jairus, Bartimaeus, Simon the Leper and Simon of Cyrene, who helped carry Jesus’ cross, and who we are told in a throwaway comment is “the father of Alexander and Rufus”.  Usually, though, the people Jesus encounters along the way are anonymous - a blind man, a Samaritan woman at a well. We don’t need to know their names for the story to make sense. We don’t need to know Zacchaeus’ name for this story to make sense – he could have just been “a tax collector”.

And yet, Zaccheus along with these few others, is named. The only plausible reason I can think of for that is that the early Christian communities for whom the Gospels were written would have known this man, or known of him.  Luke’s Gospel was written about 50 years after the events they described – that’s like 1975 to us, well within living memory, so it’s quite likely that there would still be people around who’d come across him. I’m not a Biblical literalist, who thinks everything in the Gospels has to have happened exactly as it is written. But it seems to me, working from logic, that this isn’t the tale of some anonymous character, created as a plot device. To the people who first read Luke’s Gospel this is Old Zacchaeus, who their mum and dad knew, who told his story to anyone who would listen to him, ad nauseam, because it was the most important moment in his life, the moment when his life turned around.

Today we celebrate All Saints Sunday, that moment when we think of the saints who may not be famous, not the big hitters like St Peter, St Paul, St Francis, but all those people, named or unnamed, whose lives have been changed because the love of God came home to them, connected with something deep within them, made sense of their lives in a new way. Today we celebrate all those who found that a light had been kindled in them, maybe just a small light, but one that made a difference to the way they lived their lives, and who passed on that light to others, and, eventually, to us. The feast of All Saints reminds us that God wants nothing more than to come home with each of us, and come home to each of us, not with condemnation but with the love that brings us the salvation we need, the change that changes the world. 

Amen 

Trinity 18: A good listening to

 Jeremiah 31.27-34, Luke 18.1-8

I remember an advert for the Children’s Society from a few years back which featured a very disaffected looking teenage boy – someone who looked like he might be up to no good - staring straight out of the poster, and the caption was “What he needs is a good listening to”. It has stuck with me ever since. What he needs is a good listening to. 

During thirty plus years of ordained ministry I have done a lot of listening. People tell you stuff when you are a priest. You hear happy stories, sad stories, stories of old hurts and regrets and family feuds. You hear extraordinary stories of spiritual experiences which people think no one else would believe. Couples booking their weddings tell you how they fell in love. Baptism families tell you about the birth of their children. And you hear whole life stories of people whose funerals you are preparing to take – both the bits the family want you to include and the bits they don’t – you soon discover that it’s vital to know which is which!  You often hear things people have never told anyone else.

Listening is one of the great privileges of ministry, but I have come to realise that for many people it is quite rare to be listened to. There are long waiting lists for counselling on the NHS, and private counselling is expensive, and anyway, it’s not just when we’ve got a problem that we need to tell our stories and feel that we’ve been heard. Being listened to is a basic need for all of us, whether things are going well or badly. It reminds us that we are known and loved, that we matter.  

In the parable we’ve just heard we meet a woman who is desperate to tell her story and be listened to. We don’t know what’s happened, but she comes to the local judge for justice against some unnamed opponent. Instead of a listening ear, though, she gets the brush off. He doesn’t want to know. He “neither feared God nor had respect for the people” we are told, and he even says it of himself. He doesn’t care, and he knows he doesn’t care, and he doesn’t care that he doesn’t care. But the widow doesn’t give up. She keeps turning up on his doorstep until, very reluctantly, he hears her grievance and gives her justice. He still doesn’t care – but he’s so fed up with her that he gives in. 

Parables, like all stories, invite us to step inside them and try them out for size – how would we feel in this situation, who would we identify with, what would we do? They aren’t always – or even usually – simple moral or theological lessons. They are more like mirrors which show us ourselves and help us to reflect on the world we live in.

And that’s certainly the case here. It’s tempting, when we come across a powerful figure in a parable, to assume it’s meant to be a picture of God. But this judge, who is the complete opposite of everything a good judge should be, certainly isn’t that. Quite the opposite. But he is meant to help us think about what we think God is like. Through this rather over-the-top story, Jesus asks us a very important question.  “When you pray, who do you think you are praying to? Is it someone like this uncaring judge? Is this what you think will happen if you cry out to God? That you will be given the brush off. And when you do cry out for healing and are still ill, when you cry out for an end to war in the world and it doesn’t seem to come, do you conclude that it’s because the God to whom you cry doesn’t care? Is this what you think God thinks of you, that you are nothing but a nuisance, a bother to him?”

When we need “a good listening to”, whether that is from a fellow human being or from God, one of the reasons we are sometimes reluctant to reach out and open up to others is that we don’t think they want to hear what we need to say. We feel like we’d be bothering them. We feel like we’re taking up their time and space. We’re afraid of being rebuffed, sent packing.  

The same can easily be true of our feelings about God. We all carry around in our minds an image of God. Even if you don’t believe in God, you will have some image of the God you don’t believe in…We can’t help it. We are people with imaginations. If we imagine him to be like this unjust judge, it’s no wonder we don’t want to take what’s on our hearts to him, and yet, if we don’t, how can anything change?

This story is set in the context of a longer conversation with some Pharisees who have asked Jesus to tell them when “the kingdom of God is coming”. They are thinking in terms of some grand supernatural event when God will swoop into history to overthrow the Romans and usher in a new and better age on earth. 

Whether their question is genuine, or a trap for Jesus isn’t clear, but Jesus’ answer to them is. He says that “the kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say , Look here it is, or There it is! For in fact the kingdom of God is among you…” or in some translations,  within you. They’re looking for a magic wand, for someone to intervene “out there”, but Jesus tells them that, if things are going to change, the place God needs to work is within their own hearts and lives. “Be the change you want to see” we sometimes say – it’s a quote attributed to Gandhi, though he never actually said it. But I think Jesus goes further. “You want to see the kingdom of God around you,” he says. “Then you will have to start by letting it become established within you first.” 

We can’t ‘be the change we want to see’ unless we have been changed ourselves first. As God says to Jeremiah in our Old Testament reading, “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.” 

To be changed like that, says Jesus, we need to pray, to keep turning up in God’s presence – however we do that, whether it’s in church or at home with a cup of tea, or out walking the dog - turning up with our questions, with our doubts, with our laments, with our anger, with our sorrow, with whatever is on our hearts.

Prayer is a mystery. I don’t know how prayer might affect events out there in the world. But I do know that it has an effect on those who pray, changing and shaping us, inviting us to discover a God who isn’t some unjust judge, but someone who listens and hears us. And when we get the “listening to” we need, then we can start to “be the change we want to see” that will change the world around us.   

Amen