Easter – Faith Meets World

Crucify him!

On April 7, 2023

This morning I stood in the congregation at Coventry Cathedral’s Good Friday Passion Service as members of the cathedral clergy enacted a dramatised form of Matthew’s account of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. As Pilate questioned Jesus and the priestly caste lobbied for his death, the congregation was asked to take on the role of the crowd:

Crucify him!

Like most Christians, I’m pretty familiar with the events surrounding Jesus’ death. I’ve often pondered about the people in the crowd who bayed for his blood, and I’ve written before about how quick they were to pivot from Hosanna! to Have him strung up!

But it’s one thing to muse dispassionately about other people’s attitudes and intentions, especially when those people are separated from you by two thousand years of history and a yawning cultural chasm; it’s quite another to suddenly find yourself standing with them clamouring for blood, even if only as part of a dramatic re-enactment.

What kind of messiah? A sermon for the fourth Sunday of Easter

By Rob

On May 12, 2019

In Christian life, Cross, Easter, Gospel, Jesus, Kingdom, Leadership, Sermons

[This post is the transcript of a sermon I preached this morning at the local Anglican church I attend.]

Today’s Gospel reading is John 10:22-30. You can read the text here.

Background

In the year 167 BC, nearly two centuries before Jesus was born, disaster came upon Jerusalem.

Israel was under the control of the Seleucid Empire and its king, Antiochus IV, who came to power in 175 BC. He chose for himself the name Antiochus Epiphanes, which means “God manifest”; that gives you some idea how he saw himself. He immediately began to persecute the Jews, outlawing their religious practices, including the observance of kosher food laws, and ordering the worship of the Greek god Zeus. He had a gymnasium, symbolising the supremacy of Greek culture, built just outside the Temple. And in 167 BC, he committed the ultimate act of sacrilege, vandalising the Temple, setting up an idol on its altar, and outlawing various central practices of Judaism, including circumcision and the Sabbath. He set up altars to Greek gods and idols in every town and put to death anyone who refused to pray to them.

This, obviously, was the worst kind of humiliation for the people of God. For them, the Temple was much more than just a building where you went to worship: like the Ark of the Covenant and the Tabernacle before it, it was the place where God himself dwelled among his people. And practices like circumcision and observance of the Sabbath were much more than mundane religious rituals: they were vital markers of Israel’s identity as the chosen, covenant people of the one true God.

Who would rescue the Jewish people from this awful humiliation and repression?

Broken and poured out – A sermon for the fifth Sunday in Lent

By Rob

On April 7, 2019

In Cross, Easter, Gospel, Jesus, Kingdom, Sermons

[This post is the transcript of a sermon I preached this morning at the local Anglican church I attend.]

Today’s Gospel reading is John 12:1-8. You can read the text here.

Introduction

Come close with Mary, Martha, Lazarus
So close the candles stir with their soft breath
And kindle heart and soul to flame within us
Lit by these mysteries of life and death.
For beauty now begins the final movement
In quietness and intimate encounter
The alabaster jar of precious ointment
Is broken open for the world’s true lover,

The whole room richly fills to feast the senses
With all the yearning such a fragrance brings,
The heart is mourning but the spirit dances,
Here at the very centre of all things,
Here at the meeting place of love and loss
We all foresee, and see beyond the cross.

(“The Anointing at Bethany”, a sonnet by English poet and Anglican priest Malcolm Guite)

Retelling the story

Picture the scene. It’s Saturday evening and the sabbath is over. Jerusalem is already swelling beyond its usual size as pilgrims arrive for Passover, just a few days away. We find Jesus and his closest associates in Bethany, a village about a mile and a half away from the hustle and bustle of Jerusalem, on the far side of the Mount of Olives.

Jesus has already been to Bethany, not long ago. You might say he made quite a splash, raising his friend Lazarus from the dead after four days in the tomb. In fact, the commotion around the raising of Lazarus prompted the Sanhedrin – the Jewish council – to make plans to arrest Jesus and have him killed. In raising Lazarus, Jesus graduated from being a manageable nuisance to representing a serious threat to the religious authorities. Ironically, in restoring Lazarus to life, he effectively signed his own death warrant.

Jesus’ prayer for his disciples – a sermon for Easter 7B

By Rob

On May 13, 2018

In Easter, Jesus, Kingdom, Prayer, Sermons

[This post is the transcript of a sermon for the seventh Sunday of Easter I preached this morning at the local Anglican church I attend.]

Today’s Gospel reading is John 17:6-19. You can read the text here.

Introduction

To tell you the truth, when I saw the text for today’s Gospel, I felt a bit intimidated about preaching from it. Of the four Gospels that we have in our Bible, John’s is easily the most complex; and this particular section of John’s Gospel is arguably the most theologically dense and, in some ways, the most cryptic of all.

So you’ll probably be relieved to know that I’m not even going to attempt to give you any kind of blow-by-blow exposition of the text. What I want to do instead is to give you a bit of context about the text itself – what kind of text it is, and where it fits into the overall gospel story – and then we’ll briefly see whether we can pull out one or two key points from this prayer that Jesus prays for his disciples and explore how they might apply to us today.

Context

So, what kind of text do we have in our Gospel reading today? Well, this passage from John 17 forms part of an extended monologue by Jesus that starts at the beginning of chapter 14 and runs right the way to the end of chapter 17. Scholars refer to this part of John’s Gospel as the Farewell Discourse, and this kind of farewell speech is a well established genre in Jewish literature. So one of the functions of this long discourse is to signal to readers that Jesus is saying his last and most important words to his friends before he moves into what he knows is going to be the final act of this great drama that is his life, death and resurrection.

How Jesus comes to us – a sermon for Easter 2B

By Rob

On April 8, 2018

In Easter, Jesus, Kingdom, Sermons

[This post is the transcript of a sermon for the second Sunday of Easter I preached this morning at the local Anglican church I attend.]

Today’s Gospel reading is John 20:19-31. You can read the text here.

Introduction

Picture the scene. A week ago, joyous crowds thronged the streets as Jesus rode into Jerusalem, hailed as Israel’s king. Expectations were high: surely this would be the culminating moment when Jesus would finally make his move and go from being a backwoods preacher to restoring Israel’s greatness and visibly ushering in the kingdom! But now, a week later, he’s dead and gone and the disciples are in hiding. Where did it all go wrong?

The state the disciples were in

From our twenty-first century vantage point, we can easily misjudge what the disciples must have been thinking and feeling at this point. Because we know how the story ends, it would be easy for us to assume they were hopeful and full of eager anticipation. But that would be a very misguided assumption.

Faith Meets World

Reflections on faith in a messed-up but beautiful world

Category: Easter

Crucify him!

What kind of messiah? A sermon for the fourth Sunday of Easter

Background

Broken and poured out – A sermon for the fifth Sunday in Lent

Introduction

Retelling the story

Jesus’ prayer for his disciples – a sermon for Easter 7B

Introduction

Context

How Jesus comes to us – a sermon for Easter 2B

Introduction

The state the disciples were in

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