Parish Of Opawa St Martins Blog

Today is our special day, a day for giving thanks for one of our patron saints, St Anne the mother of Mary and the grandmother of Jesus. I have written in the pew news about St Anne, of whom little is known. Most of what we do know about her is in the realm of legend which has been embellished by centuries of medieval piety and Mariology. Hard facts about St Anne have been lost in the mists of time. But that doesn’t really matter. We are celebrating the Christian faith and giving thanks for church. There is room in the Christian faith for imagination and dreams. Every time we gather together God brings the past into the present and discloses a future laden with grace beyond our wildest dreams. When we gather, we gather with all the angels and saints and all those who have gone before us, and who are now part of the company of heaven. We join in with their eternal praise of God. Their stories inspire us to go the extra mile for God, and we strain forward to join with them in the heavenly banquet. All that matters is that St Anne is with them in heaven giving glory to God, and she is praying for us as we gather here today. For that we give thanks and praise to God. We give thanks, also, that Jesus was a real human being born into a real human family, and that his faith was undoubtedly nurtured under the influence of his grandmother. I have no doubt that she never ceased to pray for the young Jesus as he grew up and became an adult.

The gospel before us today is a picture of a woman, Mary, at prayer, her heart open and receptive to God. This means I think of Mary and Anne as women of prayer who have much to teach us about prayer. We know from the gospels that Mary was a person of prayer. She may well have been praying when the angel Gabriel showed up. Jesus was very intentional in nurturing his life of prayer, and that it was because he prayed that God gave him the resources he needed to sustain him in his ministry and to face the tough times and the hard questions life threw at him. As we have St Anne as one of our patron saints, wouldn’t it be good if this parish could be known for its life of prayer and for the way that we nurture people through prayer? Could that be a vision for our St Anne’s site? Could this church be a place where, following the example of St Anne, quiet days happen, where we hold contemplative services in this more intimate space, where a labyrinth is set up from time to time, where we focus on spirituality for older people, where we continue St Anne’s ministry of prayer? This is just a thought as this parish continues to work out our identity as a two centre parish.

Today I would like to encourage all of us to review our life of prayer. How can I begin to pray? First and foremost, prayer is facing God. Now when we face something, like a painting or a work of art, we think of ourselves as having to concentrate on the object as we contemplate what it has to say to us. But the kind of prayer that Jesus engaged in was different in a subtle way. His was more of a “letting go”, an abandonment of himself to God, identifying with God and being with God as if he and God were two lovers enjoying each other’s company. In the book Silence and Honey Cakes, Archbishop Rowan Williams talks about the spiritual tourist who comes to a religious community in the desert to meet a monk who was famous for his wisdom. When the tourist arrived he was welcomed, and taken to the monk’s cell. After about 5 minutes the tourist came back out again complaining. “That was hopeless!” he said. “That monk is no use at all. He is just sitting there in silence and I couldn’t get a word out of him. Is there anyone else I can see?” So the tourist is taken to another monk. After some hours he comes back saying, “That was fantastic. I’ve just been on a boat dancing and eating honey cakes. I’ve had a wonderful time.” Readers of the story are let into a secret. Both monks have abandoned themselves to God. Invisible to the eye of the tourist, the visitor with insight would see another person with the first monk. The other person is the Holy Spirit. The two are facing each other in silence, communing with one another. Nothing else matters, they are just enjoying each other’s company. And for the visitor with insight, the second monk on the boat having a party is not dancing with himself. He has been joined by the angels and they are celebrating and dancing together, enjoying each other’s company. Both are legitimate ways of abandoning oneself to God.

Prayer begins with the realisation that I am loved by God as I am. God’s love is based on nothing. We don’t have to earn it, or prove our worthiness. God’s love is the most basic and secure fact in our lives. All we have to do is let ourselves be loved by God. This is not so much an activity that I do. It is much more a kind of passive receptiveness, in which I let God’s love soak in and permeate my whole being. To do this kind of prayer, all we have to do is find a place where we can be silent and still. We might think of a phrase like “Come Lord Jesus” and say that in our heads with every intake of breathe. That way our being begins to focus on Christ, who will lead us to know the Father.

Once in this place where we are able to soak up the love of God and enjoy God’s company, my response is the highest and most intense act of which I am capable; namely to adore God. To adore God is to abandon myself completely into the loving hands of God. We can say, “Your will be done” without any tension or apprehension, because we are convinced that God is no threat, that his agenda is always for our good. This adoration can be without words; or we can use the words of another, or some music.

Next, it is good to refer to some scripture when we pray and to allow God to speak to us through the bible. There are lots of ways of using the bible in prayer. One of the old methods taught by the saints is to contemplate or ‘day-dream’ a passage from a gospel. Allow the scene to unfold in your imagination. See Christ in your mind’s eye, hear him speak, notice your reactions, be a participant, allow him to speak to you. That way, your praying of scripture becomes an identification with Christ. The gospels become a matter of the heart which knows itself as related to Christ: It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.

Only then comes prayer of petition. Many petitions might well come to mind. The most important will be to ask to know Christ better, to have greater faith in him, more courage and generosity to follow him, more love for the people who come into my life.

Four simple steps: abandoning ourselves to God’s love, adoration of God, praying a passage of scripture perhaps from one of the gospels, then petition when we pray to know Christ better and bring our anxieties and concerns to God. You may wish to explore these further in the Week of Guided Prayer coming up in August.

The whole point of prayer is to face Christ, to identify more deeply with him. It is to be led by the Spirit into a deeper relationship with the Father. May we follow in the footsteps of Ss Anne and Mary and come to know Christ more deeply in our life of prayer.

The gospel before us today contains the parable known as the Good Samaritan. We begin with a lawyer easing his way smoothly through the crowds to speak with Jesus. He is, perhaps, a bit like a politician in an election year wanting to be seen in the right place, needing a public ‘sound bite of approval’ from Jesus about how well he loves his neighbour. Jesus and the lawyer dialogue about the greatest commandment; “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.” But wanting to be especially in tune with Jesus, the lawyer asks the question, “Who is my neighbour?”

In response to this, Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan. We are invited to identify ourselves with this traveller who comes alone down the difficult terrain on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. This road has been dangerous all through history. Pompey had to wipe out a stronghold of brigands when he went through. The Crusaders built a fort at the halfway mark to protect pilgrims. Robbers in this area have always been a serious threat. So, the fate of this traveller is almost anticipated from the beginning. He is beaten, robbed, stripped of his clothes and left for dead. The fact that he is naked by the side of the road is not accidental. Now the traveller cannot be identified. If we see someone for the first time, there are probably two major ways of identifying them. One is by listening to their accent, at which point we can say, “Ah, they’re from so and so.” A second way that we identify people is by looking at the clothes they wear. In the Holy Land in the first century, there were many different cultures and religions. Each had their traditional dress that identified them and marked them out. But this man is near death. He cannot speak and he has no clothes. He is unidentifiable.

Luke wants us to identify with the traveller in this state. Within each of us there is a vulnerable human being on a journey. We all have parts of ourselves that are wounded, parts of ourselves that are alone, poor, unlovely, vulnerable, in need, perhaps even parts of us that are injured or dead. These are the aspects of ourselves that are in need of the grace of God; they lie waiting, as it were, by the side of the road, waiting for Christ to come with the oil and wine of healing balm. Who will be the Christ figure who will come and bring the healing and forgiveness this wounded person so desperately needs? Or we can ask another question. If God is sending us out to be people in mission, who are the people in need and where are they? Who are the people we are avoiding, the ones we treat as less than human?

Well, in the parable, we sit with the near dead traveller. Who should come along first? Not just any wayfarers, but members of the religious establishment, who we be expect to assist an injured person. But the priest, when confronted by the half dead, mute, stripped body, is paralysed for he cannot identify him. What if this wounded man is a non-Jew, or a sinner, or even just plain dead? Contact with this person will render him ritually impure, defiled, especially if he turns out to be dead. Dead bodies are at the top of the list of things that render someone ritually impure. Ritual impurity would be a major problem. The priest would be unable to use the tithes he is carrying so his family would not eat. He would be shamed in public. He would have to go to the cost of purifying himself at the temple. That process was humiliating, time consuming, and costly. It’s all too hard and too risky. The priest walks by on the other side. The next person is the Levite. He is a kind of lay-assistant in the temple hierarchy. He takes a closer look, but he’s seen the boss walk on by, and if it’s too hard for the boss to sort out then it’s too hard for the Levite as well. So he walks on by.

So we come now to the major shock in the parable, for unexpectedly, the next person is a Samaritan. Centuries of pious reflection have dulled our sensibilities to the hatred that existed between Jews and Samaritans. This hatred ran deep; it was the Samaritans who had opposed the building of the Jerusalem temple after the return of the exiles. It was the Samaritans who in the second century BC had helped the Syrian rulers in their wars against the Jews. It was the Samaritans who had defiled the Jerusalem temple by scattering bones of a corpse so that the festival of the Passover could not be celebrated. The Samaritans were therefore heretics, schismatic, apostates, people to spit on. They were more to be despised than unbelievers. But, it is the Samaritan who will unmask the pious quackery of the lawyer questioning Jesus. The Samaritan becomes the one who demonstrates what love of neighbour looks like and who shows us what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.

All through Luke’s gospel, it is the compassion of God and the hospitality of God that stands behind the coming of Jesus. Compassionate hospitality motivates God and marks out the character of Jesus’ mission and ministry. Here we are presented with a paradigm of this compassionate vision. First of all, the Samaritan makes up for the failings of the priest and Levite. Using oil and wine, elements of the daily temple sacrifice, he performs deeds of mercy and loving-kindness. He binds up his wounds (shades of the Ezekiel’s description of God as the Good Shepherd). He then takes the wounded traveller and pays for his recuperation, keeping him free from debt and from certain slavery, thus making up for the treachery of the robbers. In doing all this, he becomes the one who embodies true worship of God in his care of this broken, wounded person, the one who ministers Christ’s healing touch to him. The hated Samaritan demonstrates the profound, costly, steadfast love of God. This cost is further illustrated when he goes to the inn. This would be like a Palestinian today, taking a Jewish bomb victim back into a Jewish town. In doing this, the Samaritan risks death by retaliation. The wounded man’s community, of course, would want someone to pay. The Samaritan would be a soft target. It would have been safer to go to a friend’s house, or to his own home. But no. The Samaritan, the unknown stranger, at great risk to himself, enables the wounded man to return home without hope of ever being reimbursed. This is a breath taking picture of God’s grace. Jesus is saying that the traditional leaders of Israel have failed. So God will use others to bind up the wounds of the sufferer, and fully pay the price of restoration.

There is so much Jesus wants us to see in this simple story. Are you the wounded person by the road? God is not coming to accuse you or beat you up or blame you or suggest you are there because you have sinned. Please put that idea firmly out of your head. No! Christ comes to you as a compassionate, forgiving and healing presence. He comes to raise you up, to heal and restore those bruises with his healing touch, to welcome you home into an intimate communion with him. Jesus comes to search us out, to pick us up from the roadside, to bind up our wounds, to bring us home, even if it means risking his life to do so.

Perhaps part of you is the lawyer coming to Jesus thinking you have worked jolly hard for God and wanting God’s approval and blessing. The lawyer is in a subtle trap of thinking his work earns him a place in heaven, justifying himself by his piety and good works. This story lifts that demanding burden from his shoulders. Salvation is given by God’s as gift, a gift freely given. We can’t earn it and we don’t have to. God simply loves us and accepts us as we are, even if the truth is that we are broken, wounded and vulnerable. Notice too, how God chooses an outsider as his agent of compassionate love. This parable, therefore, is a sharp attack on communal and racial prejudice. It demands that we take another look at those our society despises. Who are the people we treat as sub-human, or pretend don’t really exist? Criminals perhaps, the mentally ill, migrants, tangata whenua? Jesus is challenging us to be open to the Spirit speaking to us in the voices of those we despise.

Finally, this story totally rephrases the original question. Instead of asking, “Who is my neighbour?” the disciple of Jesus must ask, “To whom must I become a neighbour?” Of course my neighbour is everyone in need, even if that person is my enemy. We need to think again about what it means to be sent by God to be engaged in mission. God sends us into our community to sit with the broken hearted, the wounded, the unlovable. To do that, we must face our own wounds and prejudices and ask God to heal them so that we can be comfortable with those God loves, yet are unlovely and unlovable to us. Pray for God’s healing for those parts of ourselves, and ask God to show us how we can be with hurting parts of our community, how we can bind up the broken and how we can embody the compassion and the hospitality God.

Gathering:
We have just completed the first part of the church’s liturgy of the Eucharist. Page 403 of the NZPB has an introduction to the Eucharist. It calls this act of worship a “sacred meal”, and says that we are “summoned” by Christ “to have communion with him.” Further down that page, the introduction says that this Eucharist is central to Christian spiritual life because for us, Christ is present when we gather for this celebration. He is present as our shepherd, as a prophet who announces God’s word to us, and he is the priest who celebrates God’s presence with us.

We gather on Sunday, which is the Lord’s day, the day of the resurrection.

The first section we have called “the gathering of the community” sets the tone for the celebration. The word “Eucharist” comes from a Greek word eucharistein which quite literally means “thank you”. The word comes to us from the liturgy of the Temple in Jerusalem where it is associated with the most important of the sacrifices, the one which was the climax, the ‘sacrifice of praise.’ So the tone of every Eucharist is “thanksgiving and praise.”

I hope you can sense that with the opening music we have been singing. The first hymn is usually one with lots of energy offering praise to God. The greetings announce that we gather in God’s name. Some people choose to make a sign of the cross at this point. This is an ancient sign from the earliest days of Christianity meaning that we belong to Christ. Grace and Peace to you from God: these are words that St Paul used to greet the churches in his letters. We open with prayers of confession, acknowledging our human frailty, but above all, hearing the words of forgiveness: “Know that you are forgiven” – that is declared right at the beginning of every Eucharist. Knowing we are forgiven needs to inform our understanding of self before God and become part of the reality we carry around with is. This is why we stand to offer our prayer of praise and stand to receive communion later on, because we know ourselves as forgiven people of God. Hence the absolution is followed by singing the ancient song of praise, Glory to God in the highest, which dates from the 5th-6th centuries.

Finally we have prayed the collect for the day. This marks the end of the gathering rite. It “collects” or “sums up” the main theme of the introduction and help set the main mood for the day.

So then, we have gathered in God’s name. We have sung songs of praise and thanksgiving, we have acknowledged our human frailty and heard the proclamation of God’s forgiveness, and prayed the collect for the day. We are now ready for the first main course of our meal, the readings from Holy Scripture.
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Ministry of the Word
One of the most important points for us to take away from today is that the Eucharist is Christ’s feast with the Church, with you and me. This is something we do together and requires that all of us be participants. As Christian people we have a vocation to be a people of praise, and our task is to raise the whole creation to God in an act of thanksgiving, so that the whole world becomes one of praise and thanksgiving.

If we were to open the book of Acts, one of the earliest descriptions of the Christian community is given immediately after the feast of Pentecost. Here is what it says: “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” The term, “the breaking of bread,’ was one of the first names used for the Eucharist. Devoting themselves to the apostles teaching is a reference to the reading of scriptures. St Luke says elsewhere in his gospel and in the book of Acts that understanding the scripture and breaking bread are two actions that belong together. So those two things, listening to scripture and breaking bread are still at the heart of our life together.

We have just heard the readings. You will notice the pattern of three readings interspersed with song. Every now and again someone has marvelled at how clever the vicar is at choosing the readings. Well, the readings are not chosen by the local vicar anywhere. Parishes are required by our bishops and our formularies to follow a thing we call the lectionary. The lectionary is decided by the international church, so that Christians all over the world are reflecting on the same readings together. The reason for this is to protect you, the people of God, from the whims and ‘hobby horses’ of the local clergy, who otherwise would choose their favourite readings or be tempted to use the bible to suit their own agenda. Rather, the wider church has discerned the most important parts of the bible to be read so that over a period of three years the key aspects of the Christian faith are proclaimed.

The key action for the people of God is that of listening. Rowan Williams says that when the bible is read, it is as if God is reaching back into the past to bring the particular speaker (such as Ezekiel, or Jeremiah, or Moses) from the past into our present, so that in Christ, we hear their voice and their experience of God. The high point of all this is the reading of the gospel. The gospel deal directly with the preaching and the activity of Christ himself. In fact, the gospel stands for Christ himself, who through his word is present in his community. That is why we surround the gospel reading with song and with ceremony.

In response to hearing the gospel, the church might do a variety of things. Usually, we have the prayer of the faithful. These are one of the oldest parts of the Eucharist. Justin Martyr (2nd century) mentions them explicitly. This is the point where the people of God, exercising their priestly character, the priesthood of all believers as Cranmer put it, on behalf of the world, prays for the Church, those in authority, for those with particular needs, and for the salvation of the world. We usually say these from the lectern, but Bishop Victoria has asked all parishes to pray these from the middle of nave of the church, so that instead of being proclamation, they really are prayers offered by all of us to God. We will need to address that here in due course.

Today, however, we will do something else which is equally important. In response to Gospel, we are going to gather around the font to baptise Oscar Parsons, one of our newest parishioners!
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Ministry of the Sacrament
We come now to the second “main course” of the liturgy, what the book of Acts calls “the breaking of bread”. Here we follow the same pattern established by Christ himself. Recall the feeding of the 5000, and the accounts of the last supper on Maundy Thursday. The choice of words there is significant. Jesus, took bread, blessed it, broke it, and shared it. Four basic actions: taking, blessing, breaking, sharing. Shortly we will take bread and wine, ordinary food and drink representing our lives and our work. We will pray a long prayer, the Eucharistic prayer, over these gifts, during which the bread and wine is made holy so that it can be given back to us as the bread and wine of heaven. The bread is broken, and then it is shared out equally to everyone here. There is much that could be said, but the important there is one important point that we should make about this.

These four actions of taking, blessing, breaking, sharing are to shape our lives. Every aspect of ourselves is to be offered to God and given for his use and for his glory. The tone of our lives is to be set by the Eucharistic prayer – the tone of thanksgiving and praise. Just as the bread is made holy, just as it becomes a dwelling place for Christ himself, so our lives are made holy and our hearts are made into dwelling places for God. The bread is broken, and so our hearts and minds and wills are broken for the purposes of God. The food is shared, and so our lives are to be marked by hospitality, by our willingness to share, to ensure no one goes without. The four actions of the Eucharist set the tone and the pattern for our living.

Finally, a comment about the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. It is the experience of generations of Christians that Christ is present in the Eucharist. Recall the first Easter Day, two disciples are were on the way to Emmaus. The Lord joined them, but their eyes were prevented from recognising him. “When he was at table with them, he took bread and blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognised him. The promise made by Jesus becomes reality: “Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.”

Every preacher looks forward to the chance of preaching on the Trinity! I speak with the tongue placed firmly in the cheek. There is no doubt that preaching on the Trinity is not straight forward. What worries the preacher is saying something in error; inadvertently pronouncing a heresy. So there will be some who will opt today for something vague. Use of the musketeer’s language (one for all and all for one) by some preachers will enable them to think they have avoided the pitfalls. Some will carefully destroy their preaching notes to avoid leaving behind incriminating evidence.

Well today, we are going to confront that sense of trepidation head on. The Trinity is not a concept, just as God is not a concept. The Trinity is at the heart of the Christian faith. We might be tempted to say that God is a mystery, and therefore the Trinity itself is a mystery, and then move on. That is good enough either. For sure, God is always bigger than our small minds can perceive, but we should always be at pains to know the knowable. What is not actually a mystery should not be turned back into a mystery by us.

Having said that, I acknowledge that Trinitarian theology is complicated. There are, however, quite tactile ways of seeing what the Trinity is all about. The Trinity is how we understand God, and how we understand the way God loves us.

The first tactile way of seeing the Trinity is a network of personal relationships, a dance. So I want to ask you all to stand and move to a place where we can all physically link together by holding hands (don’t be shy!). Now we are going to do a simple dance together. (This is called Perichoresis, life giving life in a circle of love).

The point is that the Trinity is a divine community where all are quite distinct persons but all act as one. The Trinity is not three individual divine persons who decided to come together to form a partnership or to collaborate for some clever project. The Trinity is first and foremost a community; in other words at the heart of God is a communal reality. They are three, distinct persons, who act as one. They act as one because the essence of this community is love, mutually given and received. When God acts, all that God does and says is done and said by the whole Trinity equally. Their being, or their personhood, is derived from being held in a community of love. This runs directly counter to our modern culture which says that human beings are individuals first who then decide to form a relationship. Within the being of God is the other way around. There is first and foremost, community. From within that community comes personal being. It is the same with us who are made in the image of God. Our personhood, our sense of being comes from being in relationship, when we know ourselves to be loved by others. When we have that, we grow and mature in being and in personhood.

The second way into the Trinity is to reflect on this ICON of the Trinity painted by Andrei Rublev in the 15th century (see OHP slide – hope folk can see it). The background here is the story of the three angels who came to visit Abraham, who tell Abraham that Sarah will bear him a son. The angels in the story are an appearance of the Lord. They speak and act as one. These three angels become the basis for the depiction of God as Trinity; three separate divine persons acting as one. They are seated here around a table.

The central figure (middle person) is Christ. We are reminded that God is fully revealed in Christ and that we must always start with the Word-Made-Flesh in order to comprehend the revealed nature of God. So our eyes are drawn first of all to Christ. But the direction of the head and the eyes turn to the figure on the left (God the Father). We can learn a great deal from following where the hands and eyes lead us. The hands and eyes of Christ lead us to God the Father (on the left as we look at the ICON), who in turn points us to the Holy Spirit (right hand figure). Once our eyes begin to trace the movement, we find there is no place to stop. The movement simply circles round and around. One can’t look anyone of the figures directly in the eye.

This is important. To focus on Jesus, whether in prayer or in our devotion, is not to enter into a one-to-one relationship with him. It is right to think of Jesus as our personal saviour, but we can not stop there. To be in relationship with Jesus is to be drawn in to relationship with God the Father. All that Jesus says and does, all his living and dying and rising again is to draw the world into relationship with God, the ultimate Source of Divine life.

But equally, we do not stop there either. We are drawn around to the third person on our right, to the Holy Spirit, whom the Father is sending. The role of the Spirit is to bring the Son to life again and again wherever Christ is shared or imitated in creation. The Spirit makes the life of the Word, the life of Christ and the prayer of Christ, present in the world. When it comes to church, that is the work of the Spirit among us too. The Spirit echoes the teaching of Christ, keeping the Word alive in our midst, bringing harmony to our relationships, showing us how to love. Wherever there is reconciliation we can be sure the Spirit is at work.

The point of all this is that the Trinity is not a theory, a philosophy or an object that we look at once per year on Trinity Sunday. In knowing Jesus we are drawn into the life of a Divine community of persons, into a community of love. There is room for us in that intimate relationship between Jesus and the Father the New Testament writers so often talk about. Christ draws us to God. God draws us into his breathing out of the Spirit upon the world. That means we are sent out into the world again so that the life of Christ may be made real again here and now in today’s world. This is what the church is. It is the holy people of God living within the life of the Trinity, being drawn to God and experiencing the depth of God’s love, then being sent out again to co-operate with the Spirit in making Christ humanly present today.

So when we are talking about God as Trinity, we are not discussing some complex theoretical idea. We are talking about a way of being loved and a way of being. There is an empty space in the front of the Icon. This is the space God makes for you and me, not so that we can look objectively at the Trinity, but so that God can draw us into communion with him, so that we can know what it is to be held and loved by God, Father Son and Holy Spirit. God wants us to be included in this divine community. There is always this space within God, a place of welcome, an open door, where you and I are welcome and where we can rest in God’s love and God’s peace.

In contemplating the life of the Trinity, we see that the life of God exists in three persons in relationship with each other. The Holy Trinity is God showing us how to love; showing us that need each other, that we have a place to belong, and that it is in being loved within community that we can relax into being the person God has created us to be. The Trinity reminds us that being human is to be held in the company of God and in the company of Christians. If we are open to growing in relationship and sharing gifts with each other, God will work miracles and enrich our lives in ways beyond our imagining. God is calling us to work for healing of relationships; to know one another more deeply, to be living witness showing the world how to love. He wants us to discover the wonderful gifts others are for us. He wants us to name gifts we bring. He wants us to be people who present Christ to the world, who bring the Word of God to life in the places where we live and work.

This day reminds us of our calling to be a Christian community, not a social club singing hymns, not a community for our own sake. This is a place for building relationships in depth with others and with God, so that we can learn how to work with God to build loving relationships in all the places we live and work. For whenever we do that, the Trinity is echoed in us, we become witnesses who show forth for the world how God loves, and how God can enable us to be the people we have been created to be. Whenever we do that, we bring glory to God.

Spoken in the name of the blessed Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen

The Day of Pentecost is the sometimes called the Birthday of the Church. It is the day we celebrate God pouring out the gift of the Holy Spirit, the breathe of Jesus’ life, on the church; hence the balloons, the bubbles, and the party atmosphere!

We have two different pictures of the giving of this gift in the gospels. When we celebrate Pentecost at the end of the 50 day season of Easter, we are following the picture given by Luke in his gospel and in his sequel, the Book of Acts. The 50 day period which Luke unfolds includes the resurrection and the glorification (or the Ascension) of our Lord. The gift of the Spirit comes on the 50th day, which is today. For Luke, the Spirit is the gift of new life poured out by God on his sons and daughters, the new Israel, the new holy people of God. When we hear Luke’s picture from the book of Acts, there is noise, “like a wind”, that fills the house, and there appeared to the disciples tongues “like fire”. These are familiar images of God’s coming and action: the loud sound recalls God speaking to Moses in thunder at Sinai; the wind, God’s coming to Elijah and Elijah’s ascension; the fire that does not destroy, recalls God calling Moses at the burning bush. Pentecost was originally a Jewish feast which celebrated God giving the Law on Mt Sinai; the Law, which makes humans pure before God, was symbolised by fire. So Luke links the giving of the Spirit with the vision of the prophets of old, who looked forward to the day when the Spirit of God would be freely given to all, and when God would write the law on our hearts instead of on tablets of stone.

John’s gospel, on the other hand, links the giving of the Spirit much more closely with the resurrection: “On the evening of that day, the first day of the week”, the day of Resurrection, Easter day. That day began when the women found the empty tomb at dawn, continued with Mary mistaking the risen Lord for the gardener, and concludes with the risen Jesus appearing to a group of fearful, cowering disciples in the upper room. He breathes on them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit”. Jesus now lives. He breathes new life into them so that all that smells of death within them is raised up to new life. They are animated with the life of God, the Spirit, which enables them to become fearless Apostles who will carry the Good News of God into all the known world. As they do so, they continue the work of reconciliation begun that day. They bring the forgiveness, peace, and joy that only Jesus can bring.

In the creed which we recite every Sunday, we say that we believe in the Holy Spirit. The belief in the Holy Spirit is linked to affirmations about the Church. St Paul had a lot to say about this when he wrote to the Corinthian church, which was a deeply divided Church. In that letter he describes in many different ways, how the Spirit gives “communion”. The Spirit, says Paul, enables the people of God to live a common life together. The word he uses here is kononia, a word that is much loved by theologians these days. Kononia means “sharing”, but it also translated as communion, or fellowship. If we talk about ‘sharing’ we might think in terms of me sharing something with you, like my box of chocolates, or I might let you borrow the car or come over to watch the rugby on my TV. But the New Testament idea of kononia is much more profound. Kononia is a way of being. It involves sharing our lives in common, belonging to the same whanau or group, sharing a resemblance, a common identity. This change of being, becoming this new community, is what happens to the disciples when the Holy Spirit is poured out on them. This thing we call ‘church’ is born. We begin to breathe the air of God, which means that the life that results is a life we share together. St Paul unfolds the profound nature of this life, picturing the church as a new humanity sharing in a new creation. We are a new humanity living by a pattern of mutual giving and receiving, mutual nourishment and dependence.

The Spirit gives us a community we can trust, and that community is called the Church. We can trust it because we can trust God, and God has no agenda other than for our good. If we were to think of a strap line for the kind of community the church is, it might be the one Lynda Patterson suggested a few weeks ago, “It’s not about us”. Rowan Williams suggests another line that says, “Not without the other”. The kind of community the Spirit gives is one where every single one of us is needed. We are here because God calls us to be here. That means we will be a diverse community, and we may actually dislike some of the people here, or even be here in spite of them. If we turn up on Sunday and we all look the same and think the same way and we all get on swimmingly, that’s when the alarm bells need to start ringing, because then we are not ‘church’, we are a club for the like minded.

If we believe in the Spirit of God and in the community we call Church, we believe that each person here is a unique gift that God has given for us to live with. St Paul often talks about spiritual gifts in his letters, but the real point that the New Testament is making is that the Church is a community in which every person has a gift that only they can give to our life together. It’s as if being Church, being God’s new creation, is like a stage production of which God is the playwright and the director. Each one of us has our own unique part to play, and without our contribution, the play can’t work properly. In the BBC production of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Father Christmas turns up to give gifts. Peter is given a sword and shield which he is to use to fend off the White Witch’s evil hoards; Lucy is given a charmed trumpet to call together the armies of Aslan, and Lucy is given a vial of healing balm. Each gift says something about who they are. As the story unfolds, we see how these unique gifts become vital for the building up and well being of the community. It’s like that for each of us. All of us are given unique gifts by God, and all of us have been granted the freedom to offer what only we can give. The point is that our gifts become ways that God’s work can become real for each other. That is why it is so important that we ask God to help us see what our gift is, and that we ask God to show us how our gift can be used for his glory. Today we will be baptising Soren. God will pour his Spirit into him, as he poured the Spirit on Jesus when he was baptised at the Jordan. Part of our job as a Christian community is to embrace him as one of us, and provide him with the space he needs to offer the gift that he is to us and to God. We need to do that for each other too; we need to do all we can to affirm one another’s gifts and enable us to offer them to the community of faith.

Jesus promised that the Spirit will continue the revelation of God in Jesus. The Spirit will help us call to mind the words and actions of Jesus, and empower us to extend God’s forgiveness and love down through the generations. Our being sanctified by the Spirit will bring us to blessedness before God. This is not always an easy option. The Spirit will expose the parts of us that reject the love lavished on us by God. We all know that facing those parts of us is hard, something we would rather avoid. But the gospel calls us to go with the wind of the Spirit, to allow the Spirit to be active in our hearts, to draw us into communion and friendship, and manifest the gifts of wisdom, insight, counsel, power, knowledge, reverence before God, so that we can manifest in our lives the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness and self control.

The phrase, “He ascended into heaven” trips off the tongue pretty easily every Sunday when we say the creed, but most of the time we hardly think about what we are saying. When it comes to other parts of the creed, things like the cross and the resurrection and the person of the Holy Spirit, we tend to have given things a great deal more thought. But when it comes to the ascension, the first thing that comes to my mind is an imaginary scene in which I am standing with a group of teen aged boys looking up at the clouds saying, “There goes another foot. Woops, one of his jandals just fell off. Skilful Jesus! How do you breathe up there?” In other words, the meaning and significance of the ascension does not jump immediately off the page for most of us. It takes a bit more thinking through before we can see the point.

The text before us today gives us an account of Jesus’ last moments with his disciples. First he prepares them for his departure and for their future existence as the Body of Christ that will remain on earth. For that is part of the dynamic that Luke is helping us see. If we ‘rewind the tape’ to the beginning of Luke’s gospel, we recall that Luke gives a powerful account of the birth of Jesus, a story that has captured the imagination of generations. Luke’s message is that the eternal Word of God became flesh in Mary’s womb. The angels tell the shepherds news of great joy; that the Saviour would wrapped in cloth and lying in a manger. The technical theological term is “incarnation” which is what we celebrate every Christmas: God coming to us as a human being to speak to us our level and in our own language. Now we come to the end of Luke’s gospel and that same Saviour departs and is carried into heaven. This cycle of the incarnation is being completed. A new phase is about to begin.

Before Jesus leaves, he opens the minds of his disciples to understand the scriptures, “That everything written about him in the Law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” That sounds like a brief conversation, as if the disciples got the ‘low down’ from Jesus over a flat white at the local café before Jesus floats away. In fact, the truth is quite a different story. We notice that in Luke’s telling of the story that the risen Christ appeared to the disciples over a period of 40 days before ascending into heaven, which is why the Church celebrates the Ascension 40 days after Easter. In the minds of first century Jewish readers familiar with the Old Testament, the period of 40 days wasn’t necessarily a literal 40 days. It meant ‘a long time’. In other words, it took the disciples some time to make sense of their lives in the light of Jesus’ death and resurrection. There wasn’t a single flash of insight when everything suddenly clicked and they worked out who they were and what they were called to do. That process of discernment, of study and interpretation of the scriptures, of encountering Jesus in the breaking of bread, took some time. What we are witnessing in Luke’s account of the resurrection is a gradual process of healing, of forgiveness, of reconciliation, taking place gradually in the hearts of the disciples. The disciples discover the presence of the risen Christ in reading the scriptures together and in the breaking of bread together. The risen Christ appears to the disciples bringing healing and forgiveness. And as they read the scriptures together and hear the voice of Christ in them, they begin to understand God’s purposes. The disciples slowly come to the realisation that Jesus has left another body behind, that that body is still the Body of Christ, and that they themselves are that body. The twelve disciples come to the realisation that God is calling them to be the continuing Body of Christ on earth, and that they are to continue the work of Christ in the world.

That is why this story is laden with joy. There was joy at the beginning of Luke’s gospel at the birth of Jesus. Now there is joy at the Ascension. There is joy because Jesus continues to be present to them, in the scriptures and in the breaking of bread. They sense that they are Christ’s body on earth, that God is giving them an exciting future laden with hope. That is why the disciples go into temple in Jerusalem to pray and to bless God. They have come to the realisation that Jesus is still present to them and will be eternally present in the world. They are beginning to glimpse God’s vision that they are now this thing we call Church, that Christ is present in that Church, which means that this Church is nothing less than a foretaste of heaven itself. That’s why they gather in the temple to wait and pray for the promised outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Our task as Christian people is simple. We are called to stand with them, to take our share of responsibility for transforming the world. So with them we wait on the Spirit of God to empower us to carry God’s Good News into the world.

There is one piece of the action in the readings today that so far we have skirted around: that of Jesus being taken up into heaven. This seems like an odd piece of literary imagery at first sight. But when you look up into the night sky and see the immensity of the universe, what Luke is telling us is that Jesus is being taken back into the depths of God, into the immensity of God. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews will go on to explain that Jesus’ has taken the fullness of our humanity into heaven, where he is praying for us, presenting to God all the trials and anxieties we face every day. That’s what it means when we sing the hymn, “Alleluia! Sing to Jesus.” There is that well known line, “Intercessor, friend of sinners, earth’s redeemer pleads for us…” Jesus is near us, to be sure, but he is also in heaven praying for us daily before God. All the bruises and batterings that afflict us in this life, Jesus is presenting to God in his own wounded body. He takes all our trials, all our hurts, our failings, and offers them to God as he prays for us continuously before the throne of heaven. That is why we give thanks today, because Jesus takes the fullness of humanity into heaven. He takes all our frailties, our experiences of the toughness of life, and he offers that to God in prayer.

Earlier this week I had a fascinating discussion with someone about heaven, about what it will be like when we get there, and what it will be like to come face to face with God. Should we be afraid of that moment when we meet God face to face? The experience of meeting God will be a moment when all our defences will be stripped away, the identities we wrap ourselves in will fade, so that all that is left is our vulnerable selves; the truth of who we have become will be exposed before God’s searching eye. The key thing to remember is that Christ will be alongside us on the human side of that encounter, interceding with God on our behalf. He will be there as one who has experienced all we experience; he knows that trials we go through, the fears we must face, the failings and hurts we endure, and he prays for us out of that human experience that he has taken into the being of God.

What we are saying is that the ascended Jesus is taking us into the middle of the divine life of God. He is the embodiment of the outpouring of God’s love and grace, which is like waves surging around us as we try to live the life of discipleship. As he ascends to God, he takes our being into the being of God, into eternal, selfless, divine love. This is the same divine love that God makes present every time we gather celebrate Eucharist. To put it bluntly, that action of being taken into the being of God is the experience Christ gives us here, when we gather around this table. When we gather as Christ’s body, we sense that our roots are in heaven, our identity and true dwelling place is heaven, as St Paul says, our citizenship is in heaven. The ascension reminds us that because Christ is truly present among us and before God, heaven is laid open before us as well as a reality we experience here and now. All we have to do is have confidence in Christ; that he will come to us and open heaven’s door, and that knowing his welcoming touch, we will have confidence to be Christ’s body today, and bring a touch of heaven into a broken, desperately needy world.

Last night we used the metaphor of looking back over the family photo album to help us understand our identity better as God’s people. Today we look at the next big picture, the crucifixion and death of Jesus. Fortunately, when the evangelists tell us about the death of Jesus they are actually quite discreet. We are spared the gory details of the crucifixion and all the suffering that goes with it. All we are told is that “there they crucified him,” and that when he died he said, “It is finished”. We are spared the unpleasant detail. Instead, what is placed before us is the theological agenda of the evangelists. What the gospel writers want us to see is the real meaning and significance of Jesus’ death. So when we come to the cross, what do you see?

One obvious thing we see is Jesus hanging on the cross. We might see terrible suffering, a lonely victim, and wonder how God could allow it. What does God see? The primary thing God sees in the death of Jesus is sheer grace-filled love, total self-giving. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” Jesus is the sacrament of God’s love for the world. This is another epiphany moment in the gospels, a moment when God is fully revealed. What is revealed is Love. In this helpless and vulnerable human being, in this divine life, the love of God is made manifest.

The New Testament writers struggle to find language to make sense of this display of love. They reach for a number of images. St Paul says that he “becomes” sin, that he takes on us the curse that has been laid on us (2 Corinthians 5:21) in order to remove it from us, and so open a way to God. In a similar vein, Jesus himself understood himself to be the Suffering Servant in the book of Isaiah. On the cross Jesus draws the evil of the world to himself and robs it of its power like sucking the poison from the world that contaminates our relationship with God. An obvious image for the biblical writers was the notion of sacrifice. They were familiar with services of animal sacrifice in the temple. The sacrifices were gifts that made peace with God and made it possible to be close to God, so that God and people could sit down and eat and drink together. So some writers speak of Jesus as a sacrifice. John’s Gospel has Jesus as the Lamb of God, the Passover Lamb, whose death will restore peace with God. His blood is shed so that there may be a renewal of our relationship with God and a restoration of communication between God and the world. Sometimes Jesus’ death is described as a ransom. Sometimes he is pictured as standing in the dock taking the punishment we deserve. It is important to be clear that these are all images that the New Testament writers reached for to try to explain the meaning of the cross.

The key thing to remember is that these are images. We avoid the notion that there is an inflexible and vengeful God demanding satisfaction. On the contrary, Jesus is on the cross because he loved the world too much, if you like. We don’t have to fully understand. All we have to do today is come before the cross and stand in awe and wonder at what has done and the love that is displayed. Here is Love that stays connected to us even when we refuse God. Here is Love that does not run away in the face of trial and hardship. Here is Love that loves to the end.

There is more that we are being asked to see. Jesus’ death shows us the consequences of our resistance of God, our inability to accept that love and receive it, our refusal to face truth, our inability to love ourselves, our self deceit, our undermining of the Life and Love that God gives us. Not only does Jesus fully embody the loving purposes of God, he also fully embodies the effects of human self-destructiveness. He shows us where we end up if we turn away from God, if we refuse to face reality, and if we cut ourselves off from what is true. He came as the goodness of God, as God’s light and truth, but it is human nature to see that as a threat and to respond with a violent “no”. Examples of this dynamic include Martin Luther King’s struggle for human rights in the USA or Ghandi’s struggle for independence in India. In the USA, King’s non-violent campaign triggered a response of murderous violence. Faced with goodness, it is human instinct is to run for cover when our prejudices and weaknesses are exposed. We prefer to scapegoat, to reinforce our position by identifying the other as an enemy or threat, and then to expel and exclude the very one who brings God’s goodness and love. We prefer not to allow ourselves to grow and expand to include the stranger. Rather, we prefer to mock and destroy and kill. This is what Jesus’ opponents did and this is why they killed him. God wants us to see this, and he wants to help us be comfortable with the points where we are vulnerable, powerless, insecure, and speechless, so that we can grow enough to be at home with the stranger, both the people we struggle to like, and the stranger within ourselves that we prefer to deny. Then we can co-operate with God to end the cycle of hatred and violence of our world.

There is another thing that we might see if we look around the scene of the cross in our mind’s eye. That is the absence of the disciples. They are in shock and they have run away. The shame of their failure was also shattering. At the last supper, just last night, the disciples were still arguing about who would have the best seats in Jesus’ cabinet. Yet, just a few hours later, here he is on the cross, and they did nothing to prevent it. They found themselves speechless, powerless, and insecure. That their weakness could have been exposed so decisively and ruthlessly must have been shattering. Today we see the disciples in disarray. Their lives have become tragic, a real mess. The reason for that was a basic lack of self awareness. They either had big egos that projected an idealised self that did not exist, or they suffered a lack of self esteem and were trying to over compensate. The big egos died with Jesus on Good Friday. That was painful.

But is God seeing in this human mess? God sees, with sadness to be sure, that the forces that put Jesus to death continue even now; truth is gagged, profits threaten peace, greed means many go hungry, outsiders are still ignored and expelled. Genocide still happens. God is pleading that Jesus’ death open our eyes to the violence of our world, to the extent to which we reject God’s purposes for us and live in a reality that leaves us impoverished. But God also sees past all the mess. God sees that we are so loveable that we are worth dying for. He loves the failed and shattered disciple in spite of everything. He loves the outsider, the ones rejected and discarded. He wants to help us to be at home with our powerlessness, with our limitations so that we can be fully loved, and so that we can share the world with those who are strangers to us.

When Jesus died, the evangelists describe the curtain in the temple being torn in two. Jesus, the Holy of Holies is no longer confined to the temple. He is present to the world. He is drawing all people to himself. He is still giving his life and his love. Because of this day, Love is available to us. That is why we call it “Good Friday.”

We stand again at the threshold of the Great Three Days which St Augustine called the Easter Triduum. These three days beginning at sunset tonight and going through Good Friday, Holy Saturday until sundown on Easter Day are the three holiest days of the Christian year. These are the days in which we give thanks for the great love shown to us by Jesus in his passion and death and we pray that he will draw us closer to his side as we walk with him through these holy days. These three days commemorate our Christian identity; they tell us who we are and what we are baptised into. Just to make sure we don’t miss the point, God has sent us a candidate for adult baptism, Jessica. As we walk closely to Jesus tonight and tomorrow, we will be accompanying Jessica on her own journey to the cross and to an encounter with the risen Lord in the waters of baptism. As we do so, our prayer is that we all be united once again in a death like Christ’s so that we might be raised with him into eternal life.

The Liturgy, therefore, dramatises all the events of Jesus last hours. Tonight, we are in the upper room as it were. Our feet will be washed, we will share in the meal of the kingdom, and eat and drink the Supper of Our Lord, and we go to the Garden of Gethsemane and watch and pray with Jesus. The church will be stripped to remind us of the desolation of that night. Some of us will keep vigil all through the night, recalling Jesus’ long hours of prayer.

What we are doing is returning to the sources of our faith; we are rehearsing story of God’s saving action that forms our identity as Christians. To explain: every now and again in my family we get out the old photo albums. I have an aunt (dead now) who was into family trees and family history and she encouraged bringing our family history together into book. From time to time when we meet up with our aged relatives, we get the photos down and pull out the family tree and listen again to our elders telling the story of how our family came to be here and what has made us who we are. “Telling the family story” is really useful for checking our bearings. We hear about our roots; we hear the underlying values of our ancestors, the things they fought for and the sacrifices they made. So it is for the followers of Jesus in Holy Week and Easter. We listen to the last words of the One who first proclaimed the Kingdom of God and we watch his last actions. When we understand these clearly, we are better placed to mark more clearly what God is calling us to be and do.

Our celebration of the Last Supper tonight is just like that. Tonight, our liturgy begins this sacred story as we join Jesus and the Disciples at the Last Supper in the upper room. On this very night, Jesus does two things that would sum up his whole life and ministry so that we would never forget what he was about. One of those things was giving the gift of the Eucharist to the disciples, which will become the family meal of the kingdom.

The bible is full of meals: the people in the desert being fed manna, bread and wine being brought out by Melchizedek in honour of Abraham, Elijah being sustained by the bread of angels on his long journey to the mount of God to name but a few. The list of meals goes on and on. All through the bible, meals form the identity of God’s people. Luke’s gospel has lots of parables about God’s table manners, the expected standard of behaviour at meals, and how they shape us and form us. The Last Supper took place at the Jewish Festival of the Passover, which is another of the key identity forming meals in the bible. At the Passover Israel remembered God’s mighty acts of deliverance from bondage. The Passover meal is celebration of God’s drawing close to bring freedom from bondage. It recalls the journey through the Red Sea, the sojourn in the wilderness, the gift of the law from Sinai’s smoking heights, the murmuring of the people as the journey went on and on, and the entry into the Promised Land. A typical Jewish celebration of Passover is a family meal eaten at home. The youngest child asks questions of Mum and Dad and so Mum and Dad explain why they eat bitter herbs, unleavened bread, Passover lamb, and so on. One generation remembers and tells the story to the next. It’s an identity forming story recalling God’s providential goodness. As they eat the meal, the presence of God is palpable. God couldn’t be closer. The people remember being aliens in a strange land so they make extra effort to be hospitable to strangers. At every Passover meal there is always a spare chair. It’s called Elijah’s chair and its there so that the family is always ready to welcome the stranger into their midst.

Holy Communion, Eucharist, The Supper of the Lord, the Mass, whatever you call it; this is our identity forming meal. This is our meal when Jesus draws close to us. As we eat it, he couldn’t be closer, he comes right alongside us. In this meal we too rehearse our identity forming story, the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and we allow that story to shape who we are. But there is more. When Jesus took bread and wine, he identified himself with it. So when we come together and eat the bread and drink the wine of the kingdom, Jesus is present to us as the Bread of Life and our Spiritual drink. He is here. He is giving his very self to us so that we might live, and for that we give thanks and praise. This meal is the meal of the kingdom, and as St Paul reminds us in the second reading tonight, it is to be a living sermon setting forth the table manners of the kingdom. In this meal, divisions of class, of race, of gender are made to look ridiculous. Everyone receives enough. All are welcome to the table, especially the stranger and the alien (the New Testament calls them tax collectors and sinners). Every time we gather to celebrate it, we remember the whole ministry of Jesus and the radical ethics of the Kingdom of God. This is the banquet that brings God’s future into the present. Here we glimpse what heaven will be like. It is the meal enjoyed by those who have passed with Christ through death into eternal life, where we enjoy transparent communion with God.

The second thing Jesus does is wash his disciples’ feet. Jesus lays aside his garment, and in doing so he becomes a servant, thus reminding us of an essential aspect of his being. He empties himself, takes the form of a servant, and pours out loving service to his own. He does this to sum up his life and teaching. Jesus requires the same attitude of service of his followers, so that all we do and say is a parable of loving service. Footwashing requires us to divest ourselves of power and privilege, to take up the towel of service to one another, to expend one’s self in loving service of others. This is Jesus’ style of ministry; he ordains it and calls us to live it.

So tonight we contemplate two of the big photos in the family album, the washing of feet, and the first Eucharist. As we come forward this evening to have our feet washed and to receive our Lord’s body and blood, we step into the journey that will take us to the cross and into the Kingdom of God. You might be interested to know that Jessica, (adult baptism candidate) has carefully chosen not to receive communion until she has been baptised. Jessica, Jesus earnestly desires to eat this meal with you and he earnestly desires to be united with all of us gathered here. Leave behind any desire to dominate, to control, to exclude. Come to be transformed and renewed. Come with your memories, good and bad. Come into this future made present, in Jesus name.

Now, once again we stand together at the beginning of Holy Week, the week that for Christians is the most important week of the year. There are two journeys before us today. The first journey is the journey of Christ into Jerusalem where he is welcomed as a Messiah, the Son of David. The second journey is Christ’s journey to the place of crucifixion. The first journey is marked by the royal date palm tree; the second by a tree that is dripping with blood and scarred with nails. This is the journey we are all called to make.

For today and all through this week, we take part in the Passion story ourselves. Our Holy Week services are not just a commemoration. Through them we enact out faith. We go to the cross and die with him so that we might be raised by God with him into eternal life. That’s why the church has always baptised at Easter; Jessica and Pippa will be coming up out of the water at the very moment we celebrate Jesus coming up out of the tomb.

We do this because in Christ’s crucifixion and redemption we enter into a reality that is taking place every day. We may be living centuries after Jesus life and death on earth, but we all play roles in the story. Over the last year there will have been times when we have been a Judas figure betraying others. At times we have been Pilate, more concerned with holding on to power than doing what is right. Or we have been Peter, too weak to be associated with a brother or sister in strife and so we have pretended not to know. Some of us have been the figure of Mary or of Joseph of Arimathaea, laying our loved one in the tomb with tears and with weeping. Some of us come with hurt and pain because we have been betrayed, suffered injustice, or been mowed down and crushed by people more powerful than us. We come today with the bumps and bruises of life together with our failings and we will lay them at the foot of the cross on Good Friday.

Today we have heard Luke’s account of the passion of Jesus. All through Luke’s gospel, a major theme is that those who turn out to be the most welcome in the Kingdom are those who have the least right to expect a welcome or a hearing. In the opening chapters it is the shepherds who first hear the good news of Jesus’ birth. These people were not regarded as productive contributors to their social world, yet they slot into central roles in the story. In the parable of the great feast, those who are welcomed in from the highways and byways are the helpless; those who expect nothing and those who can take no initiative for themselves. In the trial of Jesus today Jesus is asked by the council to tell them if he is the Messiah. He responds, “If I tell you, you will not believe me, and if I question you, you will not answer.” In other words Jesus is saying: I have nothing to say that you will be able to hear or to which you will be able to respond because I come with a much larger perspective and a larger world than yours; one that includes the powerless and voiceless. In other words Jesus has placed himself with the outsiders, with those whose language cannot be heard, with those on the margins, with those who are treated as discarded by our society. He speaks from the perspective of those who are constantly excluded.

In the story of Jesus’ passion, Luke’s insight is that God positions himself with the outsider; in those who are strangers to us and in the ones who are “left over” and those whose place is not guaranteed. God is present in those who do not have a voice, in those who have no power to affect their world, and with those believed to have lost any rights they may have had.

Today, the gospel perspective is that God comes to us as one who reminds us of our limits, our incompleteness, our limited understanding. This is what Jesus means when he says, “If I tell you, you will not believe me, and if I question you, you will not answer.” Jesus is coming from a larger world and a larger perspective than the one his captors are willing to see. We are therefore being called to grow and expand from our place of security into something larger; to come to the point where we can acknowledge our insecurity and powerlessness and be at home with it. For example: Most of us who are parents have probably been in the situation where we are faced with a crying baby who seems unable to be comforted. The infant is unable to speak to us and tell us what’s wrong. After this has gone on for hours, feelings of frustration, helplessness, and being out of control arise. It’s at this point that a few parents, desperate to regain some sense of control, lash out and hurt the child. Another example: We may have met with a severely disabled person who is unable to communicate something important to us because they have lost the ability to remember or speak. As we sit with them the same feelings of frustration, of anger, of being out of control will surface. We know what needs to happen to keep this disabled person safe but we can’t make them understand. The stranger here: the crying child or the severely disabled, confront us with our limitations. What is happening is that they are bringing us to the limit of our humanity, to the point where I know that I have some growing to do so that that person and I can share the same world together.

Jesus came to show us that we are most in danger when we deny our own poverty and neediness. Luke is telling us that this is why Jesus is beaten and flogged, because he puts the powerful in touch with their own powerlessness and refuses to compete with his captors for their space. In the trial of Jesus, it is not really Jesus who is on trial, but us. We are being cross-examined on our readiness to face our own powerlessness, the exclusion we fear, the extent to which we withdraw from others and inadvertently exclude them. The gospel confronts us with the need to see in ourselves the tax collector, the leper, the blind or the lame person, woman in Simon’s house, and the lost sons in the parable of the prodigal. Jesus asks us to befriend that person and welcome them, rather than run away from them or flog them or crucify them.

The gospel calls all of us to journey with Jesus through Holy Week. I will be making that journey; will you come with me? Will journey with our baptism candidates, Jessica and Pippa, and pray for them and support them with your love? As you make this journey, take time to nurture your inner being. Ask God to show you your own inner regions of helplessness and speechlessness, the inner silences you fear and the weaknesses you don’t want to acknowledge. When Jesus’ captors were in the presence of Jesus, all they could see was the need to dominate and use the full force of their power. By contrast can we acknowledge our own our frailty, our poverty, our neediness, the gaps in our competencies, the mistakes of our youth? Can we learn, with God’s help, to be at home with these? In your prayer this week ask God to help you see these parts of your soul and ask God to help you be reconciled to the stranger within.