A Sermon for the Desert

Last week the theme was transfiguration and glory; this week it is wilderness and pain.  At the outset of his ministry, like Moses and Elijah, Jesus goes into the wild places to live for a time on the margins of the world.  Like Israel’s forty years in the wilderness, Jesus must face forty days of ordeals before he can enter his promised land.  Temptation means testing.  It is peirasmos, the time of trial we pray to be delivered from.  And the test for Jesus is the same as it is in the Genesis story of Adam and Eve when the Lord God comes walking this earth and puts this question to them, to him, to us: where are you?  Where are you, where do we stand before the great decisions of life, where is our life leading us?  Whose are you?  To whom do we owe allegiance?  Are we slaves to the illusions and fantasies of power or pleasure or wealth or ambition or whatever other hungers drive us?  Or are we free, through the love of God, to exercise the choice to have no other gods but him, free not to be corrupted with idols, free to take up our true humanity, be the men and women God made us to be?

For Israel, for Adam and Eve, the test results in defeat: their stories are of capitulation and failure. And St Matthew’s reason for telling his wilderness story near the outset of the gospel is precisely to demonstrate how Jesus the archetypal Man, the new Israel, is victorious where they once failed.  Three times the adversary Satan tries to deflect Jesus from the path of obedience; three times he is thwarted, comprehensively.  And this, says Matthew, sets the pattern for his entire ministry: from baptism to resurrection, he demonstrates that he is God’s beloved Son by submitting to his Father’s will and overcoming the evil one. 

For Matthew, the wilderness story is by no means just a moment, an episode, of testing after which the ordeal is over. He is careful to point out how all through his ministry Jesus is tempted to turn aside from the path set before him.  The temptations set a pattern, for although the devil departs from Jesus for a while, he will soon be back; for Jesus to announce that the kingdom of heaven is near is to assault the very citadel of evil itself.  So when Peter tells him he must on no account suffer rejection and death, Jesus vehemently takes up the words with which he had seen off the devil in today’s gospel: ‘Get behind me, Satan’.  In Gethsemane, on the way to the cross, his threefold cry, ‘Father, let this cup pass from me’ echoes the threefold ordeal of the desert: in his passion, this garden has become a wilderness, bread is turned to stone.  And when the bystanders mock him, ‘If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross’, they unconsciously echo Satan’s taunts to Jesus as they are locked together in combat on the temple pinnacle: ‘if you are the Son of God, throw yourself down’. 

Each time, says Matthew, there is victory.  For the three temptations Jesus resists in this morning’s gospel lead later in the story to some new act of enlargement, of generosity, on God’s part.  He will not turn stones into bread, yet he provides loaves to eat for a huge crowd on the mountainside, and more than that, makes bread his own body at the last supper.  He will not throw himself off the temple pinnacle, yet in the resurrection he is able to ‘destroy the temple of God and to build it in three days’, for one greater than the temple is here.  He will not worship Satan to inherit the kingdoms of the world held out to him on the mountain, yet at the very end of the gospel, on another mountain top, he enters into the promised dominion, and more besides: ‘all authority in heaven and on earth is given to me’.

We need to draw strength and inspiration from this story as we embark on the journey of Lent. These 40 days take us to the paschal mystery of death and resurrection, the very heart of the Christian year, the very heart of Christian faith.  In the early church, as we know, Lent was the time when catechumens were prepared for baptism by prayer and fasting before the awesome initiation rites of Easter.  Lent was when sinners who had been separated from the fellowship of the church performed acts of penance, kept quarantine before being reconciled and restored to communion at Easter.  The history of this holy season tells us what it is really for.  It is not an act of discipline for its own sake, denying ourselves because rigour is somehow ‘good for us’. It not really something we do at all.  Rather, it is a gift: for as we are drawn into the dying and rising of Jesus, we re-learn what grace is, forgiveness, reconciliation, renewal.  We realise like the prodigal son that there can be a homecoming, and life can begin again. 

St Paul says that ‘if through baptism we share in a death like his, we shall also share in a resurrection like his’. And this is how I read the temptation story: not simply as a story of the triumph of Jesus, but as a parable about ourselves and our own struggles, how death to self and resurrection to a new life are possibilities held out to all of us here and now.  For St Matthew, Jesus is not only the triumphant saviour-king who comes in the name of the Lord, victorious in the desert as he is victorious over death.  He is also the perfect disciple, the human being who lives out in his painful ordeal what it means to be made in God’s image. The ashes of last Wednesday point us directly to the new fire of Easter and the flames of Pentecost. In the ashen sign of the cross imprinted on our foreheads in memory of our baptism and in anticipation of our death, we know that we are already more than conquerors through him who loved us.

The simplicity of Lent for me puts a question mark against the easy comforts of conventional religion, suggests the need to look for what is altogether more passionate, more fervent, more real, something felt in the deepest places of the human soul that makes a life-changing difference to us and to our world. Lent is a time to rekindle spiritual longing, re-awaken hope, turn back our disordered appetites and addictions into hunger for God.  The temptation story shows us what we can become if we embrace the call to conversion of life, give ourselves once more to this great project of Christian discipleship. Kierkegaard asked the question, what is the truth for which we would both live and die?  He answered it with the title of one of his books: ‘Purity of heart is to will one thing’. By purity he meant singleness of heart and mind, shedding whatever distracts us from that focus, a purposeful, intentional following of Jesus wherever he leads us. Lent invites us into this tough but rewarding journey, the path that points forward to resurrection, the golden thread that leads us to Easter.  And if we search, or perhaps simply find it in ourselves to want to search, to take the first tentative step of acknowledging our longing and our hunger, then we shall find that Christ is already rising - Eastering - within us.

All Saints, St Andrews, 9 March 2014 (Lent 1)

Genesis 2.15-17; 3.1-7; Matthew 4.1-11

On a Snow-Capped Mountain: Transfiguration then and now

There is a physical geography in today’s gospel and there is a geography of the soul. St Matthew tells us that Jesus and three disciples went up a ‘high’ mountain. Which one? There is only one serious candidate for me, and that is Mount Hermon in the far north of what is now Israel. We know from the previous chapter that Jesus has been in the district of Caesarea Philippi where Peter confesses him to be the Messiah, the Son of the living God. Here the infant River Jordan flows out of a mysterious cave in the cliff where there was once a shrine to the god Pan. I have a precious relic from this numinous place, a piece of limestone from the river bed that I brought back from a pilgrimage there. The headwaters of Jordan rise behind the cliff on the south-west flank of the great Hermon range. At nearly 3000 metres high, it is covered with snow for most of the year, a towering backdrop to the borderlands of Lebanon, Syria and Israel. This gleaming white mountain is my candidate for the transfiguration despite the claims made for Mount Tabor, which is much further south and just a modest hillock compared to Hermon. ‘His clothes became dazzling white’ says Matthew, and even if this is not persuasive, the three summits of the massif seem to echo the threefold company of Jesus, Moses and Elijah.

Israelis in Galilee call Hermon ‘the eyes of the nation’, a poetic epithet for a sinister purpose, which is to be home to Israel’s strategic early warning system located on one of its summits. For this is troubled territory. When I was there we were driven through the Golan Heights, the ancient hills where, as every chorister knows from the Psalms, Og was king of Bashan. This is occupied Syrian territory, and I wondered what risks we ran by driving through it in tourist buses.  It was not reassuring to pass through a ruined Syrian village, shot to rubble by Israeli artillery in the Six Day War. On both sides of the road alarming signs with skull and crossbones warned of minefields. With the tragedy of Syria in all our minds today, the memory of stopping beneath the foothills of Hermon and looking into Syria is strong.  Near here the ancient Via Maris headed towards Damascus only about 50 km away, with the memory of St Paul’s transfiguring encounter on that road. We could see beautiful vineyards and cherry orchards in blossom; but we could also see watch towers, radio transmission posts, barbed wire and army barracks, for these are turbulent, troubled landscapes.

In these foothills of Hermon is the wonderful castle of Subeibe which we visited. It has both an Arab and a Crusader history.  The ruin is set on a spectacular spur from which there are marvellous views across to the mountain. The fortress was built in the 13^th century by a nephew of the Islamic warrior Saladin to pre-empt an attack on Damascus by Crusaders. I have to confess that it was a relief from the holy sites which can become a shade oppressive when you are seeing so many in a short time. There were no biblical associations in these underground cisterns, winding staircases and forbidding towers. Yet the very existence of this fortress underlined how this sunny landscape held a dark side, for it has been fought over since the dawn of time, and the bloodshed is not over yet.

My point is that this is the landscape where transfiguration happens. Christ reveals his glory not in the imagined oasis of ‘sabbath rest by Galilee, the calm of hills above’ but where lands have been and still are bitterly contested, where blood goes on being shed, where human beings exact cruelty and pain on one another. You could say they are lands of crucifixion. St Matthew frames his transfiguration story with predictions of how Jesus will be made to suffer. At Banyas under Mount Hermon, Caesarea Philippi, where he has been recognised and proclaimed, Jesus begins to ‘show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised’. Afterwards when they are back in Galilee, he says that ‘the Son of Man is going to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and on the third day he will be raised’. Even on the mountain’s flank, he speaks about how ‘they did to Elijah whatever they pleased. So also the Son of Man is to suffer at their hands’.

In the first three gospels, Hermon is the turning point in Jesus’ career. When Jesus descends from these snowy heights of the north, it will be to return south again, back down into his homeland of Galilee, and beyond that, to Jerusalem itself. The holy city is where he will face his crisis, and he needs to prepare his followers for what ‘must’ come to pass – the texts underline that little word ‘must’ because it is not only his choice but his destiny. So already, on the mountain of glory, the passion is in view. Hermon is a long way from Judea, yet distance is collapsed in the geography of the spirit. It’s to say that we must not be misled as to the meaning of transfiguration. Yes, it is to be overwhelmed by the vision of divine splendour and the prospect that all of life, the whole of creation, and ourselves with it will one day be transformed from one degree of glory to another. The new heaven and the new earth are palpable on that summit, as they are whenever we find ourselves on some summit shared or alone, some peak experience as we say, when the air is suddenly thin and the colours glow and the ordinary falls away and we feel we know ‘the hills where our life rose and the sea where it goes’.

But the gospel writers would not want us to slip into that way of speaking too easily. They would urge us not to dislocate the story from its context. They would say: remember where Hermon is, remember that these dangerous lands have long known conflict and suffering. And remember how before his transfiguration and in its glowing aftermath, Jesus felt the icy shadow of pain and death fall across his heart. Remember that the cross is his true glory, his self-giving love for the human family for which he was content to be betrayed, and given into the hands of wicked men, and to suffer death at Golgotha. This is why all the gospels speak of the cross as transfigured glory, the deep and dazzling darkness in which, as we gaze at it with awe and faith, we see the light of everlasting love.

We stand on the threshold of Lent, about to embark on the journey towards Easter. To be on Hermon is like the Hebrews on Mount Pisgah, looking out across to the promised land. For us today, that promised land is Easter. We have a journey to make to get there. It may be rough and steep, but it will be filled with its own beauty and reward: the desert is a place of wild beasts and angels, says St Mark where life is stripped thin and bare so that we can glimpse glory. I am saying that it is time to turn from the mountain to the plain and learn once again whatever God has to teach us in that desert’s tough but cleansing place. It is time to turn towards Jerusalem where faith will be tested in the time of trial, and where we shall walk the via dolorosa with Jesus and with suffering humanity and pray that he will take into himself the pain of the world. Time too to turn towards the resurrection we celebrate on this first day of the week, the risen glory that the transfiguration foreshadows. Time to pray the ancient prayer that God may show us his glory and beckon us to embrace it, time to reawaken our hope that one day all creation will find what it has longed for since time began, where there will be no more darkness or dazzling but one equal light.

Durham Cathedral, 2 March 2014
Matthew 17. 1-13

My Child, My Beloved: a Baptism Sermon

I sometimes think that going into the new-year, facing the January blues, is a bit like travelling into a strange country. We had got used to 2013. We were at home in it: it felt familiar even if we didn’t always like what it brought. January means a doorway. I know it’s only turning a page on the calendar. Yet it does feel like crossing a threshold where we have to learn to navigate a landscape that will take time to read and understand.

Throughout life there are thresholds to negotiate. Some like new-year are common to us all; some – birthdays, marriage, a new job, retirement, bereavement - are personal to each of us. But each time we face one of these threshold experiences, when we cross over and glimpse something different on the other side, there is to begin with a kind of exile. It is new, and a bit strange.  It’s like being away from home where habits are different and no-one quite speaks your language. And when exile is forced upon you against your will and you have to make your own way on alien soil, it is deeply painful. Listen to the displaced of the Central African Republic or Syria, to refugees and asylum-seekers anywhere.

Our first reading envisages just such a situation. The Hebrew community had been in exile in Babylon, struggling, as they put it, to ‘sing the Lord's song in a strange land’. For half a century, they’d had no reason to think their exile was coming to an end, or that their desperate longings to see their homeland again would be fulfilled.  Prophets like Jeremiah had warned that exile would be long and hard, and the people should learn to accept that this was the will of God, settle down and establish themselves in Babylon and more even than that, pray for the welfare of this godforsaken place.  But then along comes another prophet whose name we do not know though his writings are found in the book of Isaiah. He is full of hope for the future. He foretells that the time is coming when the people will return home, and glory will fill the land. Indeed, not only Israel but ‘all flesh’ shall see it together. The land will resound to songs of celebration as all the nations inherit the blessing once promised to Abraham, and the world is rebuilt on the foundations of truth, justice, freedom and love.

And this prophet of homecoming has something specific to say about Israel’s vocation as the people of God. What are they to do and be when they return home? ‘You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified’. Or as the Greek version has it, ‘you are my pais, my child’. It’s a lovely phrase, but not a new one to Hebrew ears. Two centuries earlier another prophet had declared on God’s behalf in a moving moment of divine self-discloure: ‘When Israel was a child I loved him, and out of Egypt I brought my son’. He went on to record the wayward behaviour of that child. ‘The more I called them, the more they went from me. Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk. I took them up in arms but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness; I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them.’  What parent or grandparent does not respond to the deep feeling in those words? So now, says Isaiah, the moment has come for the people of the covenant to realise in a new way this vocation to be God’s child, to be those through whom God opens his arms wide and embraces the world. ‘I will give you as a light to the nations’ he says, ‘so that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth’.

Our Christian hindsight looks back across the centuries to those words. It looks back and recognises that only one person has ever truly embodied that vocation. That truest of Israelites, we Christians say, is Jesus of Nazareth, the one who fulfils the ideal of the Lord’s Child, the infant who lay in the manger and whom shepherds and magi recognised as Immanuel; the one who called God Abba, Father, who learned to see himself as the child who must be about his Father’s business. So we are not surprised that at his baptism, when the sky is torn open and the dove descends, the voice echoes these ancient words of the prophet and cries: ‘This is my Son the beloved, with whom I am well pleased’.

Today, as we baptise Alexander and Lucie, we hear those words again. ‘This is my child, my beloved’.  We hear them spoken to Jesus. But we also hear them spoken to the children who come for baptism, and we hear them spoken to each of us. For what is baptism if not to receive the seal of God’s Spirit that affirms that we are indeed children of God? What is it if it is not the sign that God welcomes us home from exile, receives us back from our strange lands, offers us his generosity, stretches out his arms of love and reaches towards us to embrace us, invites us through Jesus to pray with the words ‘Our Father’?  There is no way of life more dignified, more humanising, more fulfilling than living out this call to be God’s beloved child. The voice says ‘this is my beloved child’ and Lucie and Alexander say ‘yes’ to it today, yes to God’s invitation to become more truly a human being, find their truest selves, embrace the path of light and love, and life in all its abundance.

All this belongs to Alexander and Lucie today. In baptism, each of us is made ‘a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven’ as the old Catechism puts it.  A beloved child of God, the voice from heaven tells us, our names written on his hands: that is what we are when we become members of Christ. Like him, we are in the world to be children, disciples, servants, bearers of light and glory.  Where horizons are dark, and exile threatening, where so many suffer and peace on earth seems distant, where we quickly lose heart and hope begins to fail, baptism is a sign of the God who keeps faith with us. Because of that voice that spoke from heaven, we can safely entrust this world and ourselves to God’s Child who comes to us. With joy we journey on into another year and give a heartfelt welcome to Alexander, Lucie and all who want to walk this Christian way with us.

For if we are God’s children, God’s beloved, we know there is a future worth living for. The world, time, eternity are ours, for we are all Christ's, and Christ is God's.

Durham Cathedral
12 January 2014, The Feast of the Baptism of Christ
Isaiah 42.1-9; Matthew 3.13-end