Month: March 2016

Acts 4.32-35, John 20.19-31 

Second Sunday of Easter, 3 April 2016, Sutton Montis

A man walks into a hardware store – working clothes, cloth cap, shopping list in hand – looks at the list, looks at the diminutive shopkeeper – brown overalls, cloth cap – and says, ‘Four candles’.

I imagine you will have seen reruns of that Two Ronnies comedy sketch this week, following the death of Ronnie Corbett. Its enduring appeal rests on a couple of tremendous comic devices. Firstly, the quirks of the English language which allow for so much misunderstanding – quirks which the Two Ronnies never tired of exploiting in all their work, not least in the double-entendres of the  News Item sketches which closed their shows. And secondly, Ronnie Corbett’s brilliant portrayal of the shopkeeper, a man whose confusion about the customer’s orders simmered and grew as the sketch progressed, into barely concealed frustration and anger. Here, before our eyes, was a man caught in two minds. [1]

Now, Corbett’s shopkeeper had no name, but if he had been given one, maybe it would have been the name that the gospel writer John used for Jesus’ disciple Thomas Didymus. For Thomas Didymus can mean ‘twin’, or ‘double’, or ‘twofold’. Or ‘in two minds’.

And so from the Four Candles sketch we switch over to revisit the story of a man whose faith was in two minds; a man who wouldn’t believe the resurrection had happened until he’d seen Jesus with his own eyes. Thomas was a man whose faith was in two minds, and we can relate to that, can’t we, as sometimes we’re also in two minds about Jesus, God and faith.

Now, he gets called Doubting Thomas because he took a while before he believed his eyes, that Jesus had risen and was standing before him. A little unjustly, perhaps, for we don’t call the others Doubting Mary or Doubting Peter although each of them couldn’t quite believe it at first. I think Thomas gets singled out because of all of them, he was the one who vocalised his questions. 

But let us be clear at the outset. Doubt is not a bad thing. Doubt is not the opposite of believing – doubt is an essential part of the process of believing. The writer Oz Guinness, who has thought about this very deeply, says that doubt is ‘faith in two minds’: Doubt is not the opposite of faith, unbelief is, he says. Unbelief is a state of mind which is closed against God, whereas doubt is a – hopefully temporary – suspension of faith, a state of mind which is not closed against God, but which has questions needing answering. [2]

One of the healthy outcomes of Thomas’s encounter with the risen Jesus is the revelation that there’s no shame in being in two minds about faith. The story of Thomas’s encounter with Jesus is not in the bible to make an example of someone who doubted, nor is it in the bible to show that doubt is wrong. No – doubt is a normal and acceptable part of believing: Jesus does not condemn it. Jesus’ opening words to Thomas were ‘Peace be with you’.

Thomas’s story is not the story of an unbeliever, but of a believer who doubted.We might just as credibly name the man Believing Thomas, because after meeting the risen Jesus, Thomas confessed his faith clearly and confidently, exclaiming ‘My Lord and my God!’ It is one of the greatest and most emotional professions of belief in all of the gospels. 

The gospel writer John tells us the reason why he put Thomas’s story in the bible: it was ‘so that we may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing we may have life in his name’. Through the questions raised by a disciple bold enough to express doubts, it becomes possible for us to have faith.

If we approach it in good faith then the story of Thomas will help us to see that there are different ways of believing … each of us comes to Jesus in our own way; and that there are different stages on the journey of believing … each of us is at a different place in our life of faith. And that if we are in a position of doubt, if we are in two minds about the reality of Jesus Christ and his place in our lives, then we are in an acceptable place, a place where Jesus wants to meet us and show that he accepts us, and say to us, ‘Peace be with you’.

I wonder if, like me, you can give thanks now for those times of doubt in your life, when you have learned and grown in your faith through struggling with an aspect of it and coming through that time with a greater understanding, a sense of having become closer to God through the process.

I give thanks for the time of doubt I had after attending the funeral of a schoolfriend who had died in a road accident. We were both only 18 and not godly boys at all. The funeral service was full of confidence about my friend’s heavenly destination; but it all seemed so impersonal, formulaic. The God which the funeral liturgy portrayed that day seemed to me to be passive, disinterested, and I doubted that God. I started searching for an engaged God, a God attentive to me and my questions, a God able to mould me into someone who might be judged faithful, and over time that was the God I found. It was the initial questioning and doubt that drove me in that direction.

And I give thanks for the doubts I had about God’s love and mercy at the time when my beloved grandmother – a woman of quiet but deep faith – was suffering terribly in a hospital bed at the end of her long life, keeping the others in her ward awake at night with her cries of ‘Help me, Jesus’. Why wasn’t he helping her, by either healing her pain or – better still – taking her to the place she by then really wanted to go? Through the anger and bitter tears, through the doubts that God was loving and merciful, I gradually came to see both God and my grandmother in new ways; to understand them and their relationship more deeply. Her cry of ‘Help me, Jesus’ was a cry of firm faith, not unbelief: she was being bold, making demands of her Lord like that; my cries of anger drew me closer to God too, and the doubts I had about him gave way to keener insights into how God does draw close to us in suffering, and sees us through. 

When I think of that experience today I picture Thomas, whose pivotal moment, when unbelief melted into faith, was when he saw the scars on Jesus’ body. In that moment Thomas came to terms with the reality of Jesus’ crucifixion, it dawned on him that to defeat death, Jesus went through the most unimaginable suffering. Thomas’ belief was in a God who suffers. In that moment Thomas realised that faith is trusting One who suffers with us when we suffer.

We should not be afraid to doubt, if we see it as a means of learning and growing in our faith. And we should not be afraid to engage with other people who express their doubts, for Jesus yearns to meet them and show that he accepts them, and say to them, ‘Peace be with you’. 

We live in a time and place where no-one can take Christianity for granted any more. Believers and churchgoers can’t assume that their friends and neighbours outside the faith know and understand what it is about. And there are many outside the faith who have genuine interest, genuine questions, sincere doubts. In the spirit of Thomas, this situation should be seen as a good thing, to be embraced; those who have faith should be encouraging others to raise their questions, to air their doubts, we should be thrilled to try to help them in their understanding, we should seek out and encourage such conversations as they will stretch us and challenge us and help us to grow in our faith too.

At The Last Supper Thomas spoke up for those who can’t take Christianity for granted. When Jesus told his disciples that he was going to prepare a place for them, and said, ‘You know the way to the place where I am going,’ Thomas responded, ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?’ [3]

We know how Jesus answered – by telling Thomas that ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’ And Thomas, a man for whom seeing was believing, understood at that moment that for him to know which way his life should go, Thomas had to see Jesus. It is the experience of all of us who have struggled with doubts and difficulties at various stages of our life – waiting for God to reveal himself to us so he can direct us, yearning for Jesus to show us the way. And having come through those times strengthened in our faith we understand that process as a good thing. 

So if we think of our faith as a work in progress, if we think of our life as a journey on the way, with all its unexpected diversions, twists and turns, then we should be encouraged by the story of Thomas. A man on a journey of faith who had questions on the way. When we go on long unknown journeys we have those moments where we doubt we’re going the right way, we wonder if we should have taken a different turning, and we seek out help and confirmation from one who knows. And when a traveller stops us and asks us for directions, it makes us happy if we can help them on their way.

Thomas saw Jesus in person. We see Jesus differently – usually it’s when others show Jesus to us through their love and care and generosity. This is how the early church grew: as people were drawn to a community which cared practically and wholeheartedly for each other. The early Christian groups described in the Acts of the Apostles modelled a social existence that replaced material growth and individual acquisition with holding all things in common: their way of life was deeply attractive to those outside looking in. 

We can’t take Christianity for granted any more. But if we live it out faithfully together, if we work through our doubts together in confidence that Jesus will show us the way, if we talk our faith through honestly with those who have genuine questions and sincere doubts: then our faith will grow; and those whose faith is in two minds will see Jesus, and believe. 

 

 

Notes

This talk draws on material from sermons preached in Liverpool in 2007 and in Devon in 2012.

[1] Ronnie Corbett died on 31 March 2016. YouTube: The Two Ronnies Fork Handles sketch.

[2] Oz Guinness, God in the Dark.

[3] John 14.5.

… We love the story of Crazy Mary, Mary crazy with God's good news. Mary who recognised Jesus when he called her by her name. We understand that because he chose her, means he chooses us too. He chooses us to tell others that he is risen and alive today. Jesus calls you and me by name. Everyday people like you and me get caught up in God's crazy vision. …

– from my Easter Sunday talk, The Resurrection – it's all about Mary. With a very loud shout out to Walter Wangerin for his brilliant resurrection account in The Book of God.

John 20.1-18 (preferably the account from Walter Wangerin, The Book of God)
Easter Day, 27 March 2016, West Camel, Weston Bampfylde

 

If you haven’t heard the story of the resurrection for a long time, or even if it is familiar to you, I wonder if you’ve noticed, hearing it just now, who features most often in it, who is the character at the centre of the events. I wonder if you noticed, as I did when I came to prepare for today’s talk, that Jesus himself, the reinvigorated victim, the defeated one now risen from the dead, only features in a brief cameo, albeit a very important one. But the person who the gospel writers place at the heart of these extraordinary, world-changing events, is Mary Magdelene. The resurrection – it’s all about Mary. 

And this is notable because placing Mary Magdelene at the centre of events makes her the chief witness to the resurrection. Which is not what you’d expect. We can assume that God could have chosen anyone at all to witness to Jesus Christ rising from the dead. A reliable witness, at least. Mary, of all people: she seemed the unlikeliest witness of all. 

For one thing, Mary was a woman, and in that society women were thought of as unreliable witnesses – they couldn’t testify in a court of law. 

And for another thing, Mary was a woman with a history of mental illness, some would call her a madwoman, known for her odd behaviour, for shouting strange, provocative messages sometimes bordering on the rude or obscene. 

All her life people had treated Mary like dirt, avoided her, laughed at her. All her life people in authority had written her off; told her she was no use, a menace to society. Care in the Community. Down there with the druggies and the Big Issue sellers. Crazy Mary, they called her. 

We may know people like that ourselves, people who everyone else condemns or avoids. We perhaps feel like that ourselves at times. When people avoid or mistreat or sideline or condemn us. Often Christians feel like that, misunderstood, misrepresented, our motives mistaken in today’s polarised society, as do our Muslim brothers and sisters and other people of faith. 

But the good news is this. God, through the gospel writers, put Crazy Mary at the heart of the resurrection story, made her the chief witness to the events of that morning, when Jesus put death to bed by rising again. 

It’s good news because it’s one more indication, should you need it, that the story must be true. Any gospel writer wanting to establish beyond all doubt that the story was true, that Jesus was risen, would surely not have placed the most unreliable witness at the heart of the story. They’d have a lawyer, or Pilate, or the chief priest, meeting the risen Jesus. Their word proving beyond doubt the accuracy of the story. But that the events were reported by Mary Magdelene has the ring of reality about it – when you’re familiar with the many other stories in scripture where God seems to speak through the peripheral ones. It’s so unlikely that it must be true. 

And it’s good news that God made Mary the chief witness to the resurrection because Mary is someone we can relate to. We like her, the imperfect one. We are like her, in our imperfections. We like her, the misunderstood one. We are like her, the misunderstood. 

But how did Mary know it was Jesus, talking to her there in the garden? What made her realise that it was her love, her Lord, alive and in front of her? She hadn’t realised at first. It was when he did something specific that she knew. It was when he spoke her name. “Mary”. Her heart missed a beat, because that was the voice of someone who was close to her. That was the voice of someone who loved her. The voice of someone who knew her name. “Mary”. 

So here’s the good news – God chooses the unlikeliest people to share his good news with. His good news is the unlikeliest sort of news we’ll ever hear. The news is, God loves us. Jesus saves us. His coming-back from death means an end to death for those who believe; and an abundance of life instead. 

And here’s the good news – just as Jesus knew Mary by name, Jesus knows us by name too. His voice is the voice of someone who is close to us. His is the voice of someone who loves us. His is the voice of someone who knows our name. And will call us by our name as he did Mary, if we go looking for him. 

If we go searching for Jesus as Mary did, we will find him. Even if at first, compromised by the lies the world tells us about the absence of God, we suspect that we’re going to find a dead body: like she did, if we are searching from our heart then we will find him. Even if we’re saddened because however hard we look we can’t see anyone there for a while: like she did, if we are searching from our heart then we will find him. 

If you want to find Jesus, if you want him in your life, then he will come to you. He might come to you when you are least expecting it, or when you are most hoping it, and however it happens – in a time of prayer, in a church service or on a country walk, through an unusual encounter or in conversation with someone you know very well, on a journey or in a familiar place – just as he did to Mary, Jesus will call you by your name. It can happen every morning if you open the ears and eyes of your heart to him. 

Jesus calls you and me by name. Everyday people like you and me get caught up in God’s crazy vision. We love the story of Crazy Mary, Mary crazy with God’s good news. Mary who recognised Jesus when he called her by her name. We understand that because he chose her, means he chooses us too. He chooses us to tell others that he is risen and alive today. 

We might feel like unreliable witnesses to his wonderful love at times. But he chooses to share it with us anyway. He speaks our name in the garden of our hearts. And when the joy hits us – the joy of realising that because Jesus has come back from the dead, life need no longer be deadly to us – then we find the impetus to dance and sing the good news at those around us, like Mary did. 

The resurrection – it’s all about Mary. It’s all about you and me. And that’s why at Easter we can’t help saying, Alleluia! 

 

Notes 

[1] Previously preached as The Resurrection – It’s all about Mary in Devon, 2011, based on an earlier sermon, Mary – Easter Witness preached in Liverpool in 2004. 

 

 

 

#TheWelshAreComing, a flash mob singing out 'Land of My Fathers' in the middle of Victoria Station prompted me to sing a line or two – in Welsh of course – during today's talk, a Palm Sunday favourite revisited, The donkey-king is coming! Jesus’ crowd is a Flash Mob. 

Luke 19.28-40

Palm Sunday, 19 March 2016, Sparkford

 

 

Not long ago, on the busy concourse of Victoria Railway Station, London, a man walked into the middle of the teeming crowd, pulled out a klaxon which he held high and blew, turning heads everywhere around the station. Then, holding his arms out high and wide he shouted at the top of his voice, “We are Wales!” He was wearing a Welsh Rugby Union replica jersey. 

And in that moment, the crowd heard female voices begin singing; out of the crowd, half-a-dozen women, dressed just like all the other commuters and travellers, joined the man in the centre of the concourse, removed their outdoor coats and jackets to reveal that they, too, were wearing Welsh Rugby jerseys, and broke into a rendition of the Welsh National Anthem: 

“Mae hen wlad fy nhadau yn annwyl i mi,

Gwlad beirdd a chantorion, enwogion o fri…”

As the singing went on an audience began to form; and as it did, out from behind the audience from all directions, others came to join the Welsh choir – men, women, all ages and sizes, sopranos, altos, baritones, tenors, basses, all displaying their red Wales jerseys, altogether making a great show of themselves to get across their message – their passion for their national team.

As the anthem came to a close, the man who had started it all stepped forward again, shouted: “Come on Wales!”, people all around the station cheered and applauded, and in an instant he and all the makeshift choristers put their coats back on, went off in every direction, the audience dispersed, and station life returned to normal. [1]

That, my friends, is a flash mob.A flash mob is ‘a group of people who organise on the Internet and then quickly assemble in a public place, do something bizarre, and disperse.’ [2] And in this social media age they are everywhere, whether playful flash mobs or ones purposefully protesting a cause, people get to know about them because their antics get filmed and posted online – which is how I came to see the Welsh flash mob at Victoria Station, first posted on Twitter with the hashtag #TheWelshAreComing.

Now flash mobs have the appearance of being spontaneous – and to some extent they are – but they always have someone at the centre organising them: conceiving the idea, setting things in motion, spreading the word which will bring people together in a common purpose.

I know that I’ve suggested this to some of you before, but I like the idea so much that I want to suggest to you again this morning: that Jesus on the donkey and the crowd who met him at the gate of Jerusalem waving palms was a flash mob. His entry into Jerusalem, was carefully planned by Jesus, who fixed it for word to get around that he, Jesus – regarded as a rebel, seen as a leader of a quiet revolution – would that day be riding into Jerusalem by a back gate on a donkey, posing ridiculously as a mock king. Because Jesus and everyone else knew that on the very same day, and perhaps at the very same time, the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate would be riding into Jerusalem by the main gate, in all the pomp and ceremony of his exalted position, to keep order in the city during the Passover festival. 

I love the idea that Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem was a carefully orchestrated one-off event – a flash mob, if you like; a deliberate provocation towards the Roman imperial power with all its military hardware designed to keep the Jewish people compliant, and the Roman imperial theology which upheld the emperor as not simply the ruler of Rome, but as the Son of God. I like to think that Jesus adopted the donkey-king persona to mock the emperor’s pretensions and to playfully assert his own status as God’s Son, by entering the holy city by the back door in that ridiculous but evocative peasant procession. 

You see, throughout his life it was Jesus’s passion to promote what he called ‘the kingdom of God’, an alternative vision of human life in sharp contrast to the way of the kingdoms of the world.

‘This contrast – between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Caesar – is central […] to the story of Jesus and early Christianity.’ … And ‘the two processions [into Jerusalem that day embodied] the central conflict of the week that led to Jesus’ crucifixion’. [3]

That confrontation unfolded day by day as Jesus let his passions drive his actions through that week.

On the Monday Jesus shut down trading in the temple to protest against the way the temple authorities made money there at the expense of the poor people of the land – driven by his passion that all people should enjoy free access to their God, unhindered by wealth or status or condition. [4]

On the Tuesday his conflict with the temple authorities deepened as Jesus predicted the destruction of the temple and the coming of the Son of Man – driven by his passionate belief in the ultimate triumph of God’s kingdom of righteousness and peace, over the corrupt structures of the world. [5]

On the Wednesday, at a meal in the house of a leading Pharisee, Jesus received a poor woman who, it is likely, had spent her lifetime savings on an expensive ointment to anoint him with – driven by his passion to affirm the poor in the presence of the privileged, despite the self-serving protests of Judas. [6]

On the Thursday Jesus again went ahead of his disciples to make another set of secretive arrangements – this time for a Passover meal in an upstairs room – driven by his passion to unite his friends and followers in a celebratory meal they would never forget.

Though that evening ended with betrayal, the spiritual and emotional torment of Gethsemane and the arrest and trial of Jesus by the high priestly authorities and the Roman ruler, [7] what Jesus leaves us with as we journey with him through Holy Week, is a clear sense of his passions and his priorities, those things which drove him to do what he did.

We call it Jesus’ passion, this week of confrontation and suffering, the word passion coming from the Latin passio, which means ‘suffering’. But today we more commonly use the word passion to describe those things we are deeply interested in, enthusiastic about and committed to. [8]

Sometimes we spiritualise the meaning of Jesus’ death, and it is hard for people to comprehend precisely what is meant by him ‘dying for the sins of the whole world’. It is crucial that we don’t reduce it to some cosmic, legalistic formula, for the events of what we call Holy Week were concrete not abstract, and the meaning of Jesus’ death is entirely bound up in his confrontation with these earthly powers and authorities, for the sake of the good and gracious way of God. [9]

Jesus’ execution is the last desperate act of the kingdoms of this world to assert their dominion over those who oppose them; Jesus’ resurrection is the ultimate triumph of the kingdom of God over those forces – meaning Jesus can continue to live out his passions in collaboration with those who choose to walk with him. 

These stories leave us with a single question, a question which could turn our world upside down, depending on how we answer it. The question for you and me is this: are the passions of Jesus, also my passions?

 

Notes

This is a rewrite of my earlier sermon, Jesus’ crowd is a Flash Mob, preached in Devon in 2013.

[1] YouTube: #TheWelshAreComing.

[2] Wikipedia: Flash Mob.

[3] Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week, What the Gospels really teach about Jesus’ final days in Jerusalem, p.2-5. The entire thesis of this sermon owes a great deal to Borg and Crossan’s inspirational work.

[4] Borg and Crossan, Chapter Two.

[5] Borg and Crossan, Chapter Three.

[6] Borg and Crossan, Chapter Four.

[7] Borg and Crossan, Chapter Five.

[8] Borg and Crossan, p.VIII.

[9] For a range of resources discussing atonement theology, see Paul Neuchterlein, The Anthropology of René Girard and Traditional Doctrines of Atonement.

 

… I found new depths of discovery in this story when I realised that Mary herself was one of the poor, the poor who Judas was so bothered about when he protested at her action. When you realise that Mary was poor the story is transformed from being a commentary on how the poor should be treated, to become a celebration of the powerful contributions the poor can make. Mary was poor, but Jesus ensured she would not be a pawn in Judas’s game: she would always be celebrated for her wondrous act of outlandish generosity…

– from my talk today, Poor Mary - Jesus' prophet, not a pawn in Judas’s game. With help from a rendition of Sydney Carter's Judas and Mary.

 

Philippians 3.4b-14, John 12.1-8

The Fifth Sunday of Lent, Sunday 13 March 2016

West Camel, Weston Bampfylde

 

Jesus came to the poorhouse. And the poorest of the poor poured the most expensive perfume on his feet and wiped them with her hair.

The village of Bethany was a place where the poor and the sick would gather, seeking help. Just southeast of Jerusalem, Bethany was tucked away in the hills far enough from the city to comply with the law that the sick should be taken care of ‘out of view’ of the Temple. So the poor came to the almshouse there, seeking welfare, and the sick were cared for in Bethany. The name Bethany means ‘house of the poor’ or ‘house of affliction [or] poverty.’ [1]

We can assume that the homes which Jesus visited in Bethany were poor houses. The house of Simon the Leper was one of them – as we know, lepers were outcasts of that society; it’s very likely that Simon, unable to work or denied work because of his affliction, could only have had the humblest of homes. [2] And the house of Lazarus, Martha and Mary – we can only speculate on their social standing, but it’s fair to assume that they too were just ordinary village people, scraping a living, two single women and one man with health problems so bad that had it not been for the miracle of Jesus raising Lazarus back to life, he would not have been there at all on the day described by John in our gospel reading. This was a day significant because on it Lazarus, Martha and Mary gave a dinner for Jesus in thanksgiving for what he had done in bringing the brother back to life. [3]

Now at the start of this talk I described Mary as ‘the poorest of the poor’, but that was poetic licence: clearly Mary wasn’t desolate. Certainly, she was vulnerable, without the support of parents or a husband, but she wasn’t homeless. She must have had some income to be able to save for that pound of costly perfume, or maybe it was a family inheritance she had spent on her extravagant gesture. It amounted to a year’s wages for an ordinary village labourer. 

Perhaps Mary and Martha had decided between them to spend their savings on this precious oil at the time of Lazarus’ death, to anoint their beloved brother. And maybe, filled to overflowing with thanksgiving for Jesus resurrecting Lazarus, the three of them had agreed that Jesus should be blessed with the oils at the party given in his honour. But when Mary poured that pound of costly perfume on Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair, Jesus saw her gesture as prefiguring the day of his burial: in his eyes Mary’s outrageous act of devotion was also an act of prophecy.

I must say that I found new depths of discovery in this story when I realised that Mary herself was one of the poor, the poor who Judas was so bothered about when he protested at her action. When you realise that Mary was poor the story is transformed from being a commentary on how the poor should be treated, to become a celebration of the powerful contributions the poor can make. Mary was poor, but Jesus ensured she would not be a pawn in Judas’s game: she would always be celebrated for her wondrous act of outlandish generosity.

Remember that in this time women were far poorer than men because they were marginalised; disallowed from the decision-making processes of the day, kept at the fringes of communal life, their opinions and actions counted for little. So when Jesus framed Mary’s outrageous act of devotion as also an act of prophecy, he did something very powerful indeed. Because Jesus took Mary’s actions seriously, took them to his heart, gave voice to their meaning to all who would hear, her prophetic act rang out then and still sings out for us today. 

And Mary’s generosity rings true today, as it always has – for in affirming her actions towards him, Jesus was also affirming the truth that the materially poor are often the richest of heart. Those most struggling are those most likely to help other strugglers. Their giving to others in need will always be massively out of proportion to their means. A character in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath said, ‘If you are in trouble, or hurt or need – go to the poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.’ [4] The truth in Mary’s anointing of Jesus is the same truth in the parable of the Widow’s Mite.

In this day and age it’s plain to see how the poor continue to be pawns in other people’s games. From the displaced people of the demolished Calais refugee camp, to those on disability benefits facing the news of a £30-a-week cut to their allowance [5], so much is said every day about the poor, there is so much political point-scoring on very side, but it seems very little compassion or desire to get to the heart of these matters. It is true to say that those most affected – the poor themselves – lacking the power to make their voices heard, seldom get to give their view or to play a part in effecting change.

In Scotland and the North of England, faith communities are working together on The Poverty Truth Commission, which brings together society’s key decision makers face-to-face with those living at the sharp end of poverty. Believing that poverty will only be truly addressed when those who experience it first-hand are at the heart of the process the Commission works to ensure that those affected by decisions are central to decision-making. 

The Poverty Truth Commission have a guiding principle which goes like this: ‘Nothing about us, without us, is for us’. It is what Mary might have said in reply to Judas’s pronouncements about how the money of the poor should be spent on the poor. ‘Nothing you say and do about me, without me, is for me’. [6]

Writing his gospel in retrospect, after the betrayal and death of Jesus, John condemns Judas as a thief, suggesting that the reason he was so concerned with Mary and the disciples saving their money for the poor was because he was in the habit of embezzling their funds for himself. He may have been right; but at the time Jesus was unconcerned with Judas’ agenda, and solely concerned to affirm and celebrate what Mary had done for him.

So what should be the Christian attitude to the poor among us? Clearly something other than the attitude of Judas, treating the poor as little more than pawns on our games. Clearly something guided by Jesus’ attitude towards Mary, and to the poor at large. 

I suggest to you that Jesus was biased to the poor, but not in a way which can be taken as prejudiced against the wealthy. The good news of the new way of life he inaugurated, which he often called the kingdom of God, is good news for us all.

This good news challenges contemporary Christians of all political leanings and of all social classes. In the seminal book ‘Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger’, Ronald Sider wrote that ‘God is not partial; nor is God neutral’:

God is not partial. He has the same loving concern for each person he has created. Precisely for that reason he cares as much for the weak and disadvantaged as he does for the strong and fortunate. By contrast with the way that the comfortable and powerful of every age and society always act toward the poor, God seems to have an overwhelming bias in favour of the poor. But [it] is only when we take our perverse preference for the successful and wealthy as natural and normative that God’s concern appears biased.

God, however, is not neutral. […] God is on the side of the poor! The Bible clearly and repeatedly teaches that God is at work in history casting down the rich and exalting the poor because frequently the rich are wealthy precisely because they have oppressed the poor or have neglected to aid the needy. God also sides with the poor because he disapproves of extremes of wealth and poverty. The God of the Bible is on the side of the poor [not] because he is biased, [but because] he is a God of impartial justice. [7]

‘Nothing about us, without us, is for us’. It’s how Mary might have opposed Judas’ criticisms of her use of that expensive perfume on Jesus’ feet that day.

‘Nothing about us, without us, is for us’. It’s how Mary might have welcomed Jesus’ support for what she did, and how he celebrated the contribution she had made to his life.

‘Nothing about us, without us, is for us’. It’s what the poor of our day might say about us, and the way we deal with them. A question we must always ask is: when we intervene in the lives of the poor, will our words about them affirm their own experience; will they feel appreciated and be appropriately supported by our actions towards them? And when the poor intervene in our lives, in need or fellowship or unwarranted generosity, how will we receive them?

 

Notes

[1] Aware that there are other views on the status and etymology of Bethany I am basing my convictions here on the work of Brian J. Capper, ‘Essene Community Houses and Jesus’ Early Community’, in James H. Charlesworth, Jesus and Archaeology, p.472-502. Cited in Wikipedia: Bethany (biblical village).

[2] Jesus in the home of Simon the Leper Matthew 26.6-13 and Mark 14.3-9.

[3] The raising of Lazarus, John 11.

[4] John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 26.

[5] Demolition teams begin to dismantle Calais ‘Jungle’, BBC News, 1 March 2016, Criticism as £30-a-week disability benefit cuts go ahead, BBC News, 8 March 2016.

[6] Poverty Truth Commission.

[7] Ronald J. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, p.76. This section of the talk is extracted from my previous sermon, Placed among the poor, preached in Devon in 2013.