On Ash Wednesday, I chose for my sermon text, a reading from the Book of Proverbs:

There are six things that the Lord hates,
seven that are an abomination to him:
haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood,
a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil,
a false witness who breathes out lies,  
and one who sows discord among brothers.

I said then that way this proverb is written, six things and seven, is probably a literary device intended to draw attention to the seventh item listed, which is the worst offence of all, and one that all the others lead to, discord among brothers.

During Lent, I preached on these things that God hates, and I’ve shown how we all have these hateful qualities and characteristics, and that what we do at times clearly shows that we have them. And in addition to the six hateful things I’ve already preached about, there’s no doubt that we’ve also all had the seventh in our lives too – discord.

It’s not very hard to see why the first six hateful things lead to discord, to see why and how haughty eyes, lying tongues, hands that shed innocent blood, hearts that devise wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, and false witnesses who breathe out lies, lead to discord, to disagreements, hostility and conflicts between people. And it’s not too hard to see why this seventh thing is the worst and most hateful in God’s eyes because what does discord show other than a lack of love; a lack of love for God by showing that we’re not acting as he wants us to, and a lack of love for our neighbour because we’re treating them so badly, much worse than we’d like to be treated ourselves? So Lent has been, and of course always is, about our sinful ways and about examining our lives in the light of Christ to see where we’re going wrong and how we could be and need to be better. And all this leads to the climax of Lent on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.

Maundy Thursday and Good Friday are the climax of Lent because we see on those days just what sin, what having and doing things that are hateful to God leads to. These days are the climax of Lent because they show the result of sin, that alienation from God that’s revealed in Jesus’ cry from the Cross;

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

They’re the climax of Lent because they show the cost of sin, the pain it causes and the death it ultimately leads to, as shown in Jesus’ Passion, his agony in Gethsemane, his betrayal and abandonment, his humiliation, the spitting and beating, the scourging, the thorns and the nails, and finally, his death on the Cross. But these days are also the climax of Lent because, in the light of faith, in the light of what we now know follows these terrible things, they show us the depth of God’s love for us. They show us length to which God, and his Son, were prepared to go to, to save us from our sins and from the true price of our hatefulness.

Having said all that though, those who claim that Jesus’ death on Good Friday is the foundational event of the Christian faith, are wrong. There are those who do say that, in fact it’s something you often hear on TV programmes about Jesus and the Church, but they are wrong. In fact, they couldn’t be more wrong. Jesus’ Passion and Cross are of vital importance to Christians and to the Church but only when we see them in the light of what happened next. The events of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday are central to our faith, but only because of today, Easter Day, and what we celebrate today. These things are only important to us, and in fact they only make sense to us, in light of Jesus’ Resurrection.

We see Jesus’ Passion and Cross as a sacrifice for sin, a sacrifice that was necessary under the Jewish law. But the law already made provision for sacrificial sin offerings. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the holiest day of the Jewish year and it’s a day that, even today, is still devoted to sacrificial offerings to take away the sins of the people. These days those offerings are usually in the form of prayers and fasting but in biblical times, Yom Kippur was a day for blood sacrifices and for the driving out into the wilderness of the ‘scapegoat’ which, symbolically, carried away with it the sins of the people. But that sacrifice has to be repeated every year and if Jesus had died on the Cross and that had been the end of it, what would his sacrifice have been other than just one more in a long line of sacrificial sin offerings? What more would it have meant or signified to anyone than any other sacrifice meant, or had meant or still means?

No, the foundational event of our faith is not what happened on Good Friday, it’s what happened today, on Easter Day. Today is the day we realise just what God has done for us, just how much he and his Son were prepared to do to free us from the sin and death that our often hateful nature would condemn us to. Today is the day we realise that God didn’t simply send his Son to earth to tell us the error of our ways and show us how we need to live in order to be less hateful to God, but that he sent him to hell and back to prove to us that what his Son said was true and what he did was right. Today is the day we realise that Jesus’ sacrifice was accepted by God. We realise that because he died as a sinner, as one of us, carrying the guilt of all the hatefulness of the world, but he didn’t remain in the death that should have warranted, but was raised from death to life. And because of that, today is the day we realise that we can hear his words,

“I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.” 

and truly believe them. So today and the Resurrection we celebrate today is the vindication of all that Jesus said and did and because of that, today is also both the foundation of our faith in Jesus, of our faith as Christians, and the vindication of our faith.

Despite all this, of course, we still have those qualities that are hateful to God, and we still show them in our words and actions. But when we realise that Jesus’ sacrifice was accepted by God and therefore, that his sacrifice did take away the sin of the world, we can also believe that our sins can be forgiven too.

The Christian faith speaks of both sin and sins, but these aren’t necessarily the singular and plural cases of the same thing. When we speak about sin, what we’re often referring to is a state of being; sin, if you like, refers to the fact that we do have those qualities and characteristics that are hateful to God and are inclined to show them in our words and actions. Sins, on the other hand, refer to the hateful things we actually do and say, the things we do and say that show these hateful qualities and characteristics. So, when we call Jesus the ‘Lamb of God’, which is a reference to the sacrifice he made on the Cross and profess our belief that he takes away the sin of the world, we don’t mean that Jesus’ sacrifice has removed these hateful qualities and characteristics from us. We must realise that because we know we still have them and show them in our lives. What we mean is that Jesus’ sacrifice has removed the consequences that result from our possession of those things.

His sacrifice does that, not by taking away the consequences we do suffer as a result of our hateful nature, which is a tendency to do and say hateful things, but by taking away the consequences we would suffer as a result of those hateful things we actually do and say.

Jesus’ sacrifice doesn’t take away our sin by taking away our sinful nature, it takes away our sin by taking away our need to pay the price of the things our sinful nature leads us to do. We don’t have to pay the price of our sin because Jesus has already paid the price for our sins. He paid the price for our sins in his own blood during his Passion. He paid the price of our sins by dying for them on the Cross. His Resurrection is the proof that God the Father accepted the offering Jesus made on our behalf as the price due, paid in full.

Of course we still have work to do. We don’t get off entirely ‘scot free’ (a medieval term for what we’d call tax evasion, not a slur against our northern neighbours who are sometimes noted for their frugality) for our hateful nature and ways, because we have to do our best to be less hateful to God in what we do. Today is the day we realise that all Jesus said and did was true, but that also means it’s a day when we have to remember that, although Jesus never condemned sinners, he did tell them to “Go, and sin no more.” But nevertheless, when we do allow our hateful nature to get the better of us and lead us into doing hateful things, we know that we can turn to Jesus in penitence and ask forgiveness knowing that the full cost of what we’ve done, the alienation from God and the death that brings, has already been paid and the payment has been accepted. So today is the day when we should realise that, even in our most hateful moments, we should never despair that we’re hopeless, a lost cause, or that we’re unforgivable, because Jesus’ Resurrection assures us of quite the opposite.

And so today, the day when we celebrate the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, the day when we celebrate the foundational event of our faith, the day when we celebrate the vindication of all Jesus said and did, is the day when we can say and should say, loudly and boldly,

Alleluia, Christ is risen!
He is risen indeed. Alleluia!
Amen.

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Propers for Easter Day, 9th April 2023

Entrance Antiphon
I have risen: I am with you once more; you placed your hand on me to keep me safe.
How great is the depth of your wisdom, alleluia!

The Collect
Lord of all life and power,
who through the mighty resurrection of your Son,
overcame the old order of sin and death to make all things new in him:
grant that we, being dead to sin,
and alive to you in Jesus Christ,
may reign with him in glory;
to whom with you and the Holy Spirit
be praise and honour, glory and might,
now and in all eternity.
Amen.

The Readings
Missal (St Mark’s)       
Acts 10:34, 37-43
Psalm 118:1-2,16-17, 22-23
Colossians 3:1-4
John 20:1-9

RCL (St Gabriel’s)       
Acts 10:34-43
Psalm 118:1-2,14-24
Colossians 3:1-4
John 20:1-18

One of the things I’ve noticed over the years is the great number of people who want authority without responsibility. I’ve come across so many people who want to be in charge and call the shots, and who are then quite happy to accept the credit and praise for things that go well, but who don’t want to carry the can when things go wrong. Rather, when things do go wrong, things which they’re responsible for, they look for a scapegoat, someone else to blame for what they’ve done wrong or caused to go wrong. I’ve seen it in life generally, I’ve seen it in the workplace, and I’ve seen it in the Church, and I’m sure you’ve all seen it too. And when we see this happening, what we’re seeing are people being one of those things that God hates; false witnesses who breathe out lies.

Normally when we talk about people bearing false witness, we’re probably talking about perjury, people lying under oath, perhaps in a court case. But to bear false witness doesn’t only mean that. A false witness is simply a liar and a deceiver, someone who either tells lies or distorts the truth in some way, someone who is deliberately deceptive in order to get other people to think and act in a certain way. And false witnesses are very much at the heart of the heart of the Passion story that we read today.

We really don’t know why Judas betrayed Jesus. We don’t know what passed between him and the chief priests so we can’t say whether there was any false witness, any lies or distortions spoken in their conversation, but what we can say is that the priests, and others, were quite happy to use false witnesses in their plot against Jesus, as we read this morning;

Now the chief priests and the whole Council were seeking false testimony against Jesus that they might put him to death, but they found none, though many false witnesses came forward. At last two came forward and said, “This man said, ‘I am able to destroy the temple of God, and to rebuild it in three days.’”

Even this last testimony, although it was based on something Jesus had said, was distorted and taken out of context. Jesus had said that if the temple was destroyed he would raise it again in three days, but he never said he would or could destroy the temple because he was speaking about his own body and Resurrection, not the temple buildings. But why would people bear false witness against Jesus? To curry favour with the authorities? Perhaps they’d been offered bribes or other inducements, as Judas had to betray Jesus?

But the chief priests also bore false witness against Jesus. Jesus was put to death as the King of the Jews, but when did Jesus ever claim to be that? The only kingdom Jesus spoke about was the kingdom of heaven, and he’d quite clearly shown himself to be no threat to Rome because hadn’t he said, “Give to Caesar what’s due to Caesar, and give to God what’s due to God.”? So he was no threat to the imperial earthly power of Rome. But what did the chief priests say to Pilate? According to St Luke, this:

“We found this man misleading our nation and forbidding us to give tribute to Caesar, and saying that he himself is the Messiah, a king.”

As we read the Gospels, and what Jesus had actually said, we can see these statements as nothing more than lies and distortions, as false witness that was made with the deliberate intention of inducing Pilate to sentence Jesus to death.

As we read the Passion stories in the Gospels, it’s noticeable that only the Romans call Jesus the King of the Jews. The Jews themselves never openly call him that, and indeed, they try to distance themselves from it later when they ask Pilate to change the charge against Jesus to one of claiming to be the King of the Jews. But Pilate himself implies that they put the idea that Jesus was the King of the Jews in his head. We find this in an exchange between Jesus and Pilate in St John’s Gospel:

So Pilate entered his headquarters again and called Jesus and said to him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?” Pilate answered, “Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you over to me…” 

What we also see in the Passion stories is a succession of people in authority who try to evade their responsibilities. Whilst it is true that Rome had forbidden the Jews from carrying out executions, the charge against Jesus was a religious one, and it was their responsibility, not Pilate’s, to deal with it.  But they were frightened of how the people might react if they acted against Jesus, so they bore false witness against him in order to make the charge against Jesus a political one so that they could pass the buck to Pilate. Judging political charges was Pilate’s responsibility, but he didn’t want it either. So, he tried to pass the buck to Herod, by claiming that, as a Galilean, Jesus came under his jurisdiction. We don’t know what Herod said or thought about the charges against Jesus, but it’s clear he didn’t want the responsibility of dealing with the case either, so he passed Jesus, and the buck, back to Pilate. And in the end, even though we’re told that Pilate knew there was no case against Jesus, he simply, and quite literally, washed his hands of the whole affair and tells the people who clamoured for Jesus’ death to “see to it yourselves.” The find the symbolism of this in the Book of Deuteronomy where, in the event of a death, a killing, where no responsibility can be found, any guilt is taken away by the sacrifice of a heifer over which those who made the sacrifice wash their hands and, with the blessing of the priests, declare that their hands did not shed blood, nor their eyes see it shed.

And so, as a result of false witnesses and people refusing to accept the responsibility that went with their position and authority, and refusing to accept responsibility for their own actions, Jesus became the scapegoat for the sins of his own people and of the whole world.

What happened to Jesus offends our sense of justice doesn’t it? In fact to see anyone falsely accused and be made a scapegoat for the faults and wrongdoing of others is unjust, and it should offend us. But are we really any better than those who bore false witness against Jesus? Are we any better than those witnesses, than the chief priests and the Council, than Herod, or Pilate? Because don’t we distort the truth for our own ends at times? To use the modern parlance, don’t we all put our own spin on things?

Isn’t it true that, at times, we try to evade our responsibilities and evade taking responsibility for our own actions? When something’s gone wrong or something wrong’s been done and we know that it’s our fault, don’t we twist the truth, or even tell blatant lies, to get ourselves out of trouble, or to make people think that we really weren’t to blame for what’s happened? But if something’s gone wrong and we say, ‘It wasn’t me.’ aren’t we inevitably posing the question, ‘Who was it then?’ and so, also inevitably, shifting the blame on to someone else? If we do something wrong or something goes wrong because of our decisions and actions, and we say, ‘It wasn’t my fault.’ aren’t we automatically implying that it was someone else’s fault, and inevitably, making a scapegoat out of them? Isn’t that also what we’re doing when we plead extenuating circumstances, the ‘Ah, well yes, but….’ response to a problem we’ve caused or a wrong we’ve committed. Because what is a plea of extenuating circumstances other than an admission of guilt but one that’s qualified by an insistence that this would never had happened if someone else had done what they should have done? ‘Yes, I did that, but it’s not really my fault, it’s theirs.’ And haven’t we all, at times, done what those in authority have wanted us to do rather than doing what we know is the right thing to do? Haven’t we all, at times, told someone in authority what they wanted to hear rather than telling them the truth? And haven’t we done these things because it’s been to our own advantage in some way to do them, even though doing them has been to the disadvantage or even harm of someone else?

If we think about the times we’ve been false witnesses who breathe out lies, and we have all done that, it’s not too hard to put ourselves in the shoes of those who bore false witness against Jesus; of those who did and said what the chief priests wanted them to, to put ourselves in the shoes of the chief priests themselves, in the shoes of Herod, and of Pilate. And Jesus said that what we do to others we do to him, so it’s not hard to see that when we have done these things and stood in the shoes of these people, we’ve betrayed Jesus, that we’ve made a scapegoat of him and crucified him, and then tried to wash our hands of it and deny any responsibility for what we’ve done. 

As we enter Holy Week, our minds turn to  focus on Jesus’ Passion. As we do that and we read and hear about the events of the last few days of Jesus’ earthly life and ministry, let’s try to put ourselves in the shoes of those people we read and hear about by thinking about the times we’ve acted just as they did. And let’s do that, with a sense of penitence, a sense of sorrow for the times that we have acted just like them. But let’s also do it with a sense of great thanks to Jesus because, when we come to realise that, at times, we’ve betrayed him, and denied him, and deserted him, and borne false witness about him, we’ll also be able to really understand something else too. We’ll understand, really understand, that, as Jesus was crucified and he prayed,

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” 

he wasn’t just praying for those whose actions had led him to Golgotha and nailed him to the Cross on that day almost 2000 years ago, he was praying for us to. He was praying for you and for me.

Amen.

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Propers for Palm Sunday – 2nd April 2023

Palm Liturgy

Entrance Antiphon
Hosanna to the Son of David, the King of Israel.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest.

Palm Gospel
Missal (St Mark’s) & RCL (St Gabriel’s)    Matthew 21:1-11

Mass / Eucharist

Entrance Antiphon
Six days before the solemn Passover, the Lord came to Jerusalem,
and the children, waving palm branches, ran out to welcome him.
They loudly praised the Lord; Hosanna in the highest.
Blessed are you who have come to us so rich in love and mercy.

The Collect
Almighty and everlasting God,
who in your tender love towards the human race,
sent your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ to take upon him our flesh,
and to suffer death upon the cross:
grant that we may follow the example of his patience and humility,
and also be made partakers of his resurrection;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.

The Readings
Missal (St Mark’s)        
Isaiah 50:4-7
Psalm 22:8-9, 17-20, 23-24
Philippians 2:6-11
Matthew 26:14-27-66

RCL (St Gabriel’s)         
Isaiah 50:4-9
Psalm 31:9-16
Philippians 2:5-11
Matthew 26:14-27-66