Parish Of Opawa St Martins Blog

Today we hear that Jesus is approached by night by a would-be disciple. A strange conversation ensues.

Usually when we hear Jesus talking, it is loud and clear in ways that are easy to understand. Often Jesus’ teaching was in parable form, sophisticated stories that challenged us on all sorts of levels. They offered new realities that Jesus invites us to grow into.

This is a different conversation, typical of John’s gospel where things are going on at different levels. Jesus’ words sound like a series of riddles designed to confuse. The key of course, is the timing of the conversation. It takes place at night, so we know that Nicodemus’ faith is fragile, that he is moving toward Jesus from a place of opposition. He is coming gradually into the presence of the One who is Light and Life.

Nicodemus is a member of the Sanhedrin. In other words he is a member of the Jewish council in Jerusalem. Ironically, the name “Nicodemus” means something like “power to the people”. His problem is that he has a limited understanding of who Jesus is, and when he begins talking with Jesus and finding himself getting out of his depth, he resorts to a kind of faith which is about definition and formula. He wants to stay in a world where he feels in control and that he understands, rather than allowing Jesus to take him on a journey to show him a new reality. Jesus’ patience and perseverance in this conversation is admirable.

Nicodemus’ response is a temptation for any of us who would be followers of Christ. Faced with new experiences and new challenges, it is easy to cling to what we know and stay in a world we understand. One of the enjoyable aspects of the Lent Study Group DVD that we are watching at present, A History of Christianity, is the shear variety of Christian identities that have developed down through the ages. We have discussing what the shared core of Christian faith might be, whether it’s the creeds, scripture, Eucharist, confession, vocation to live under vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, or whatever. The question I have been sitting with over recent days is whether the shared core is actually to be in mission, since every single one of the various ways of being Christian have all been incredibly effective in adapting to local context and communicating the Good News in their time and place, and in their unique way.

The music of our Sunday liturgy is a celebration of the variety of Christian identities we find today, drawing music from Catholic as well as Protestant traditions, from Europe as well as Africa. At the moment we have been learning music from the Orthodox Church. Recently we have sung a beautiful Kyrie Eleison from Russia. During communion today we will attempt another equally beautiful piece of Russian Orthodox music. Orthodox music is interesting in that it is designed to be sung in harmony but without an organ to accompany it. The result is beautiful harmonies that are easy to sing, and that lift the soul heavenward.

On the subject of rejoicing in the various Christian identities surrounding us, I would also like to encourage parishioners to think about confession. This is a practice that the Anglican Church did not stop at the Reformation, so it has a long tradition in our church stretching back over 1500 years. It is available for those who wish to avail themselves of it. These days we call it Reconciliation of a Penitent. You can read all about it on page 750 of the NZPB. It is a way of talking to God about things that you find troubling in your life, and it provides a way for you to hear the good news that God’s forgiveness is for you. Some people find this a helpful preparation for Easter. Parishioners are welcome to make an appointment to see your vicar if you would like to avail yourself of this sacrament of the church.

Jesus takes Nicodemus out of his comfort zone in the conversation they have today. Nicodemus tries to keep Jesus under control by keeping the conversation tied down to known certainties that he understands (which is what he is doing when he understands birth as having one meaning – our physical birth). In response, Jesus keeps explaining gently about what it means to be in the Kingdom of God. Nicodemus is struggling to see that entry into the Kingdom of God is something God does. God calls us; God gathers us; God enables us to be born into the kingdom. This is a gift from above, a gift from God. It happens because of God’s divine initiative and will, rather than being something we initiate and control, because it a work of the Spirit that blows where it wills. Entry into the Kingdom is like a birth into a new situation. Indeed, this birth is accomplished in a ritual with water, what we call baptism, in which the Spirit is poured out. In John’s gospel, entry into the Kingdom means being part of a community of believers who profess faith in Christ and who want to live out their understanding of Jesus.

Nicodemus struggles with this. It may be that he is part of the religious bureaucracy used to regulating and controlling who can be in the Kingdom. But here Jesus blows open the boundaries of the kingdom. God will open this community right up to include all who believe and trust in Jesus. The writer to the Ephesians will develop this theme and say that we need ‘the other’, we need people who are different from us, to open our eyes to aspects of God that we would otherwise not be able to see.

A central piece of the Gospel reading today points to the cross, which is important to note as we approach Holy Week and the culmination of the church’s year at the Great Vigil of Easter. Here, Jesus explains his suffering as a process. He refers to the incident in the Exodus stories where the people are bitten by snakes. Moses finds a way to remove the pests and bring healing. One commentator suggests that these were fire snakes, and that the way to get rid of them was to wind them slowly around a stick from the tail up so that they would release their jaws and let their victim go such that the head is not broken off and left in the wound. The religious aspect of this is the memory of the snake being raised up on a pole and the people receiving the healing of God. Jesus is saying that he is a copy of this. He too, will be raised up on a cross. He is a definitive sign of God’s healing, and one who brings that love into the world. His is agenda, therefore, is to love rather than condemn; to announce that God’s purposes are always for our good. He wants us to slowly and carefully copy his way of loving and living, so that more and more we are united to him and become like him in the ways we think and speak and act. Lent is a kind of practice time for doing this so that we can live into Christ’s way of loving and living all the year round.

The task before us, then, is simple. Like Nicodemus, we come to Jesus. Come out of darkness into the light of God. Come to experience God’s forgiveness and healing. Come that God may raise you heavenward into life in Christ. Come to Jesus who longs to overcome the darkness of our lives and to feed us with the gifts of faith and hope and love. Come to Christ; place your trust in him, and experience the love and peace which passes all understanding.

Today’s gospel has Jesus doing something political. It would have been seen as an act of public protest. According to one commentator, Jesus and his followers occupied the whole temple mount for an afternoon, driving out the traders and money changers in the process. It is not hard to imagine the pious sensitivities of many people being stirred up by this. John’s gospel tells us that this took place at the Passover Festival when many of the faithful would have been present. I am quite a sure strong reaction would have ensued.

But the mention of the Passover is an important detail for another reason, because the Passover festival is when the people of God celebrated the Exodus, the time long ago, when God released the people from bondage in Egypt and led them freedom in the Promised Land. Passover was a festival of hope and a celebration of God’s redemptive activity, and this episode points toward Jesus death and resurrection by which he will bring salvation to the world.

Most of us have an understanding of the symbolic power of a building such as the Jerusalem temple. Many in Christchurch are feeling the grief of the loss of our Cathedral in the Square. Yesterday the square was filled with ordinary people from Christchurch going to see the damage for themselves and to say good-bye to a beloved building that had been a symbol of this city for so long.

The Jerusalem temple had also been a powerful focal point for the Jewish people for centuries. If we think back to the Exodus story, the people of God were led through the desert by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar fire by night. Only Moses could approach the cloud when it came down to the tent of meeting, and when he emerged from meetings with God it is said that his face glowed. Well, when the temple was completed by King Solomon years later, that same cloud descended on the temple. The cloud was so bright, says the writer of 1 Kings, that the priests could no longer fulfil their duties that day. In other words, the cloud was a visible manifestation of the glory and presence of God, who was taking possession of the temple. From now on, the temple would be the point of access to God for the people of Israel.

Enter Jesus, coming into the temple. He arrives, makes the whip of chords, and drives out the money changers and the pigeon-sellers. In the terminology of John’s gospel, this is a sign. Changing water into wine is the first sign Jesus gives. The prophetic act of driving out the money changers and pigeon-sellers is also a sign. It’s a sign that works on many levels as we shall see.

It might help to understand the layout of the temple. The Jerusalem temple had three parts. The inner-most court was for Jewish men. Then there was a middle courtyard that the women and children could access. The outer courtyard was called the courtyard of the Gentiles. This outer courtyard was where the money changing and selling was going on. The temple authorities would have justified what was happening by saying that it was helping worshippers worship properly in the temple. The money changers changed the coinage, with images of emperors or one of the pagan gods on them, into kosher temple currency. The cattle and sheep would all be unblemished and acceptable for sacrifice. The pigeon sellers were there to make it possible for the poor to purchase an affordable sacrifice, so that they could participate in temple worship. So you might be asking, “What’s the problem?”

The issue is one of justice. We don’t know the politics of everything going on here, but the suggestion is that there is a racket going on, where the temple authorities are benefiting from running a monopoly and making themselves considerably better off.

So on one level, the “sign” we witness today is Jesus cleaning up corrupt business practice in the temple. The point is to make sure ordinary people can access God when they come to pray. Helping people know God better is an important aspect of our life and witness. And the Good News of God has always included what the Anglican Church calls “transforming unjust structures in society”. The Anglican Consultative Council declared that there are five aspects to the mission of the church. Proclamation of the gospel, nurture and baptising new believers, loving care of people in our society, care of creation, and transformation of unjust structures. Hence our church often calls for justice in national and international contexts. For instance, Archbishop Rowan Williams visited Zimbabwe recently and called for an end to injustice and corruption in that country.

But there is more to the sign that Jesus offers here. It is much more than a challenge to corruption in the temple. Think back to the cloud coming down on the temple when Solomon first consecrated the first temple centuries earlier. Now Jesus is saying that he in his person is the place where the glory of God dwells. He is acting decisively to become point of access to God. He will be the person in whom God’s redemptive activity will be focused. From now on, temple and its whole apparatus will be irrelevant. We notice that the cleansing of the temple takes place in the court of the Gentiles. The hope of the prophets was that the Messiah would open a channel for all people to access God, including Gentiles. So when Jesus cleanses the temple in the court of the Gentiles, he is saying that he now provides an access point for Gentiles to approach God. Furthermore, the episode quite clearly points to his passion and death on the cross, and his resurrection: “Zeal for your house will consume me,” and, Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” While the temple authorities think Jesus means the bricks and mortar, Jesus is talking about his body, which rose from the dead on the third day.

In the hands of Jesus and the writers of the New Testament, the temple becomes a symbol for Christ himself. St Peter will later write a letter or sermon, in which he calls Jesus the head stone, or corner stone, and you and I are the living stones making up a temple made of people. The true temple of God is not a building, no matter how ancient, or beautiful, no matter how long it has taken to build, and no matter how much gold has gone into building it. No. The true temple is of God is God’s holy people, baptised into his death, which we recall on Good Friday, and raised in him into eternal life, of which the primary celebration is the Great Vigil of Easter on Holy Saturday night. Be that temple, and in your prayer, ask God to shape you and to show you your unique place in this spiritual building, so that your participation in the Body of Christ may give glory to God.

Mountaineering is one of the great past times New Zealanders engage in. And little wonder as we live in one of the most beautiful parts of the world. We enjoy stunning mountain scenery becomes to the point where we can become blasé about the landscape we are in. There are some downsides, such as the fact that the mountains also represent the location of active fault lines that can rupture at any time, but nevertheless we enjoy them. We climb mountains, we ski on them, build tramping huts and tracks, and the very fit and the brave will climb to the top of them. The reason many people like the mountains is because they allow us to experience transcendence. On a human level, anyone who climbs to the top of Mount Cook or one of the other big mountains, transcends themselves; transcends the limitations of their fears. As Sir Edmund Hillary put it, “It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.” From the top of a mountain God shows us that our human limitations and our fears can be transcended, and we find the heights to which the human spirit can soar.

Maybe that is why mountain tops come up so frequently all the way through the bible. Abraham, Moses, Elijah, all of these great spiritual leaders went to the mountain top to encounter God. Abraham encountered God and God made a covenant with Abraham to make him the ancestor of a multitude of nations. Moses received the 10 commandments at the top of the mountain amid the sound of trumpets and in the thunder of the storm. Elijah encountered the sheer silence of God and the whisper of a still small voice. Jesus frequently went up the mountain as well. That is where he went to pray and to be close to God.

But on this occasion, they had an unexpected experience of transcendence. Jesus was transfigured before them and his clothes become dazzling white. In other words, God reveals to the disciples the fullness of Jesus’ divine being. They see that his life comes out of the depth of God’s life, that in his being he is the fullness of God. Imagine for a moment a singer or an instrumental performer performing a beautiful piece of music. You see that musician is totally focused; every ounce of energy is being focused into producing music, every muscle, every nerve and every breath, his/her whole being is focused in the life of that piece of music to the point where it seems that the musician is being carried by the music rather than the other way round. That is a metaphor for what we are seeing here. If the music is the life of God, Jesus is fully immersed in God’s life and is being carried along by it. He is being borne towards us as if carried on a wave and he is bringing with him the fullness of God.

In the vision, Moses and Elijah are standing either side of Jesus. Moses and Elijah represent the law and prophets of the Old Testament. Their presence tells us that Jesus is standing at the very heart of our history as a focal point to which everything points and from which all life flows. It is as if Jesus is standing at the centre of the vortex of time; all time and all life flows through him and from him. Mark introduces this moment with that enigmatic phrase, “after six days”. From the earliest times, commentators have said that this is an allusion to the days of creation, making the Transfiguration the climax of the creative work of God and an entrance into the joy and rest of God on the seventh day. In other words, where Jesus is, the fullness of God’s kingdom is also present and the harmony of creation is restored.

So Moses and Elijah, figures from the past appear in the present moment. The light that makes them radiant is not their own. It is the same light that is coming from Jesus. We see what has been true all along: that what makes them agents of God is the light of Christ that is shining in them. What all this is saying is that their lives have layers of meaning that they couldn’t see when they were alive, but which is visible now in the light of Christ. So it is with us. The light of Christ shines in our lives too. We have to allow for the fact what we say and do now will have new significance when seen in the light of Christ. Sometimes we look back on our lives and realise that some good has come out of distress or failure, or that God has been working away in us in ways we hadn’t noticed. When our lives are finally seen in the light of full light of Christ, there will be meanings and significance that we can’t see now. That means we can reflect on the sufferings and failures of our lives with a degree of hope. St Paul says that “all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8: 28). Moses and Elijah had many failings, but in the light of Christ we see their lives working for good. God will do the same in our lives too. This is not necessarily being said to make us feel comfortable. It is a recognition that there is a depth in God that can give shape and meaning even to the painful experiences of our lives. Even if we can’t see that meaning now, God’s providential grace is at work in our past, present and future, redeeming what is broken and giving a meaning purpose that will be revealed when we can see our lives in the light of Christ.

Many people wonder why the church reads this passage in Lent. Why does it belong on this day? Mark does not tell us what Jesus, Moses and Elijah discuss when they are together. But Luke does. Luke tells us that they were talking about Jesus’ impending death in Jerusalem. Indeed, next time we see Jesus on top of a mountain, the mountain will be Calvary and Jesus will be on a cross. He will be flanked by two other figures on that day as well, but they two will be the two who were crucified with him on a cross. The disciples are yet to understand this, and until they do, they will not have a full understanding of who Jesus is. The point of the Transfiguration is to open our eyes to see what is true about Jesus and about God, and indeed about all the saints. All human life is sustained out of the depths of God, and God’s life is united to every aspect of ours. Today we see that God is sustaining Jesus: we will know, therefore, that when Jesus is racked by fear and doubt in the Garden of Gethsemane God will be sustaining him. We will know that God will be sustaining Jesus when he is on the cross and when he walks through the valley of the shadow of death. What the Transfiguration is telling us that God’s life has so much depth to it, that God can live even in the midst of death. That is why we tell this story now. It comes as an encouragement to Jesus as be approaches the agony of Holy Week and Good Friday; and it is an encouragement to us in the midst of our disaster, grief and pain, for God is sustaining our lives in all that we face. That’s good news. The Transfiguration assures us that God can survive death itself. If God’s life can absorb death, death will not overcome Jesus, and God will sustain us in our time of disaster and need. There is no place where God is absent and there is no experience so appalling that can separate us from God.

On one level this is good news, but it does mean that God does not spare us trial and agony or even death itself, as we all know. The glory of God will be most apparent when we see it containing disaster and surviving. As we gather at the table of the Lord on this day, we stand in awe of the transfigured Jesus. We give thanks that our lives will finally be seen from God’s perspective and not the perspective of human history. And having seen the glory of God on this mountain, we know that what ever terrors we face, or that Jesus faces, God is present. He is present at the heart of our darkest places; he is sustaining our hearts and our lives, and he is holding on to every single bit of us. Thanks be to God.