Holy Week is always a very moving time of the year for Christians. It can’t really be anything else because, as we remember and commemorate the events of the last week of our Lord’s earthly life, they remind us of just how much Jesus suffered for our sake and the depth of the Father’s love for us. But this year, I think Holy Week will be especially poignant for us because of what we’ve all gone through during the past year.

As we go through Holy Week, we’re reminded of just how quickly life can change. Today, on Palm Sunday, we begin Holy Week by celebrating the Lord’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. And it was triumphal. Crowds of people lined the streets and threw their cloaks and palm branches on the road in front of him, or walked ahead of him, heralding his arrival in the city, clearly and openly acclaiming him as the Messiah with shouts of,

“Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David! Hosanna in the highest!”

But within a few days, all that had changed. By the end of that week, Jesus had been betrayed by one of his friends, arrested, beaten and abused, rejected by the very people he came to save, and put on trial for his life. The cheering crowds had gone and had been replaced by crowds baying for his blood, even his friends had deserted him. And finally, he was put to death, though he’d done nothing wrong at all. And I think that dramatic change in Jesus’ fortunes over the course of those few days will resonate very strongly with us this Holy Week because of the year we’ve just lived through.

Just over a year ago, we were busy preparing for Holy Week and looking forward to Easter 2020. But then, suddenly, everything changed. We couldn’t keep Holy Week or Easter in the way we always had in the past, and were expecting to again, because our churches were closed down. The freedom we take for granted was taken away and we went into lockdown. On 15^th March last year, which was the last Sunday we were in church before the lockdown, I don’t think any of us could have foreseen what was about to happen nor, when it happened, that our lives would be restricted for as long as they have been.

As we’ve gone through the events of the past year, the lockdowns and tiers and all the other restrictions we’ve had to adhere to, people everywhere have been looking forward to things getting ‘back to normal’ so that we can get on with our lives again in the way we did, and took for granted, before we were hit by the coronavirus pandemic. But, although there is some light at the end of this particular tunnel now, for many of us, things will never go back to normal, at least in the sense of going back to the way they were pre pandemic.

People will have changed over the past year. So what they want to do, and are willing to do perhaps, maybe even what they’re able to do, will have changed. And so the lives of their families, friends, neighbours and colleagues will be changed too. Society will have changed and what was acceptable, everyday behaviour before the pandemic, might not be so acceptable and everyday, post pandemic. And, of course, many people have died during the past year, both of Covid-19 and many other causes too. And our lives will be permanently changed because they are no longer here with us. We may soon be able to go back to doing the things we did before the pandemic, going out for meals or to the pub, going to concerts and sporting events, coming to church without any restrictions on what we do when are in church, being able to go to work, assuming we still have work to go to, even something as simple as meeting our families and friends when we want to: we may well be able to do all those things again soon, but doing those things will not be that same as it was because some of the people we used to do those things with, are no longer here to see and share those things with us.

Things have changed since last March. People have changed. The world has changed. And things will never be the same again for many of us. But, in a way, that is the message of Holy Week and Easter. Holy Week tells us just how very quickly life can change; and change for the worse. But beyond Holy Week lies the greatest change of all. A change that turned the most terrible of defeats into the greatest of victories. A change that turned the most heart-breaking tragedy into the most joyous of blessings. A change that turned the deepest despair into the greatest hope ever given to human beings: Easter and the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

We know that we’re in a constant state of change as we go through life. We know that some of the changes we have to go through are hard and unpleasant. Some of the changes that happen in the world, change our lives forever, and some of the changes that we go through in our lives, change our worlds forever. Covid-19 and the pandemic has been one of those changes.

But if the events of the past year have changed the world, and our worlds, forever, so did the events of the last week of Jesus earthly life. Holy Week tells us how quickly our lives and our worlds can be thrown into chaos and confusion. It tells us how quickly things can go wrong and how quickly things can change for the worse. But beyond Holy Week, Easter tells us how quickly bad things can turn around and become new, good, and even better, things. And amidst the changes of life, Holy Week and Easter reminds us of some things that never change:  God’s love for us and Jesus’ presence with us in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Holy Week and Easter tells us too, that Jesus is the eternal Son of God who lives forever. And if our world has been changed forever because we’ve lost loved ones during the past year, we have Jesus’ assurance that they’re not really lost to us forever, but merely hidden from our sight for a time because where he is, they are too. And it’s there where we will see them again when we too are called from this world to our place in the Father’s heavenly house.

That is the message and meaning of Holy Week and the hope and promise of Easter and they are very poignant and powerful at this time when so many people are looking for certainty amidst the confusion of life during this pandemic, and for meaning and hope in their lives.

Amen.

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The Propers for Palm Sunday can be found here.

This morning’s Gospel reading marks a pivotal moment in St John’s account of Jesus’ mission and ministry. But if we take this reading at face value, it probably seems anything but that. In fact, taken at face value, it seems a rather strange story. To recap. Some Greeks want to see Jesus but, instead of speaking directly to Jesus, as so many others had, they go to Philip and tell him they’d like to see Jesus. Then, rather than taking them to Jesus himself, Philip tells Andrew, and they both go to put the request to Jesus. But Jesus’ response is quite strange. There’s no record in the Gospel that he spoke to the Greeks, or that he even saw them, instead he starts talking about the hour of his glorification having come, about his death, about judgement being passed on the world and about drawing all people to himself when he is lifted up from the earth. So what’s going on here? What is Jesus saying here that’s so important, and what is St John trying to tell us through Jesus’ words? 

One of the problems with the way we read the Scriptures in Church is that we chop them up into ‘bite-sized’ pieces so to speak. We do that so that the readings we have in Church aren’t excessively long, but in doing that, we very often make the readings more difficult to understand because we take them out of the context they’re set in, in the overall story. And that’s certainly the case with this morning’s Gospel.

Reading St John’s Gospel as a whole, we know that by this point in the story, the religious authorities had started to plot Jesus’ death. The part of the Gospel we heard this morning comes shortly after Jesus had attracted great crowds of people to himself by raising Lazarus from the dead, and it comes immediately after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem on what we know as Palm Sunday. That attracted great crowds to Jesus too and the religious authorities were getting worried, they were very likely frightened too. We know that because, in the verse immediately before this morning’s Gospel starts, we read;

‘So the Pharisees said to one another, “You see that you are gaining nothing. Look, the world has gone after him.”’

That’s the context in which we have to read this morning’s Gospel.

In the original Greek language the Gospel was written in, it’s clear that the Greeks who wanted to see Jesus were not Greek-speaking Jews but Greeks by birth. And so in the coming of these Greeks, gentiles who are looking for Jesus, symbolically at least, the whole world was indeed now going after him.

We also know from our general reading of the Scriptures that ‘to see’ very often means not simply to see with our eyes, but to see with our minds and hearts too: in other words, ‘to see’ means to know and understand. And so what these Greeks were really asking Philip is to know and understand Jesus; who, and possibly what, he really was. We also know that Jesus’ mission and ministry was to the Jews. As he himself said to the Canaanite woman who begged him to rid her daughter of a demon,

“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

We know that Jesus did help the Canaanite woman, and other non-Jews during his ministry. But that was on account of their faith and St John doesn’t say that these Greeks came to see Jesus ‘in faith’; they were simply enquiring about him. They were looking for understanding and they would need to be brought to faith. And that wasn’t Jesus’ mission and ministry, that was the mission and ministry that he was going to entrust to his disciples and to his Church. And we see that played out in this morning’s Gospel.

These Greeks, these non-Jews, wanted to see Jesus. They wanted to know and understand him. But they didn’t go directly to Jesus, instead they went to his disciples to enquire about him. And it was up to the disciples to bring them to Jesus. It was through the disciples that they’d ‘see’ Jesus, that they’d come to him and come to know and understand him. So what this short Gospel story is about and why it’s so pivotal in the Gospel as a whole, is that it marks the end of Jesus’ own earthly mission and ministry, the mission and ministry to the Jews, and the beginning of the Church’s mission and ministry to non-Jewish world. The disciples almost certainly didn’t recognise that at the time, but Jesus certainly did, and that’s why he answered the request in the way he did. 

Earlier in St John’s Gospel, Jesus’ prophesied his own death when he spoke of himself as the ‘Good Shepherd’. He said,

“I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father.”

And now, the sheep of another fold, symbolised by the Greeks, were coming to him. And so he knew the time to lay down his life had come. His ‘hour’ had come. The time for him to be glorified had come. The time for everyone to ‘see’ him, to know and understand who he really was, had come. And he knew that would happen when he was lifted from the earth because it would come through his death, through him being lifted up on the Cross. It would come through his Resurrection, through him being lifted up from the grave. And it would come through his Ascension, through him being lifted from the earth back to the Father from where he’d send the Holy Spirit on his disciples to empower his Church to go out into the world in his name, to draw all people to him.

If we look at Jesus’ words in this morning’s Gospel in this context, we can see how much sense they make and how important they are. We can see what Jesus means when he speaks about a single grain of wheat, failing to the ground and dying, so that it can yield a rich harvest because he was the single grain whose death yielded a worldwide faith and Church. We can see why Jesus says that earthly life is less important than eternal life because if he hadn’t laid down his earthly life, there would have been no Cross, no Resurrection and no Ascension. People wouldn’t have been drawn to him and there would have been no faith in him and so there would have been no hope of eternal life through him. And we can see what Jesus means when he said that where he is, his servant is too. Not only because he promised to be with his disciples always, but also because whenever and wherever his disciples bring someone to know and understand Jesus, that person ‘sees’ him.

This morning’s Gospel reading isn’t very long but, if we read it in the context of the Gospel as a whole, we can understand how important it is and why St John made it such a pivotal moment in his account of Jesus’ mission and ministry. If we read this Gospel story in it’s true context, we can find so much in so few words. And amongst the things we find in these words, is own place and role in the Gospel and in Jesus’ story.

We are Jesus’ disciples. We are his Church. Today, we are the ones entrusted with continuing Jesus’ mission and ministry to draw people to him in our own time and place. Today, we are the Philips and the Andrews because we are the ones people come to when they want to ‘see’ Jesus. Jesus promised to be with his disciples always, so we know that he is here to be seen. What we have to do is make sure that we are his disciples and servants so that wherever he is, we are too.  And we need to do that so that, when people ask us to help them know and understand Jesus, we can see him well enough ourselves to help them find him and see him.

Amen. 

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The Propers for the 5th  Sunday of Lent can be found here.

One of the mysteries of what we might call the Christian era is the extent to which the Church has been persecuted throughout its existence. And it is a mystery. The Christian faith is about love of others. It’s about agape love, which I spoke about recently, loving, not in order to be loved in return, but loving simply for the sake and good of those we love. That is what Jesus taught, it’s what the Church teaches, and it’s what Christians are called to do. And yet the Church has been persecuted throughout its history, and still is today. So why should that be? Why should the Church be persecuted for telling the world that people should love one another?

The mystery of Church persecution is one that even the persecutors themselves can’t seem to answer. Those who have and do persecute the Church have never really been able to explain why they’ve done so. They’ve no doubt had their reasons but, in the end, what these reasons all seem to boil down to is simply that Christians are different to other people.

As we all know, people who are different can make us feel uncomfortable. And one way to deal with people and groups of people who make us feel uncomfortable is to get rid of them from our lives, or silence them, so that they don’t bother us anymore. So, perhaps the answer to the mystery of Church persecution is simply that the world has tried to get rid of the Church because, by its proclamation of the Gospel, the Church has pricked people’s consciences and reminded them of the error of their ways, and they simply want to go about their lives without being reminded of those things and being called to face up to them. 

But we shouldn’t really be surprised that this has happened. Jesus himself warned his disciples that they would be persecuted in the way that he was, and the reason for that persecution is given in this morning’s Gospel:

“…the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.”

And what better way to prevent those evil works being exposed is there, than to put the light out?

In our own society, we don’t have to suffer the kind of persecution that Christians in many other countries have to endure. We’re not likely to suffer any physical harm or risk death because of our faith. But the Church is persecuted in other ways. There’s been a widely reported anti-Christian bias in the nation’s media and we know that our faith can be ridiculed and suppressed in ways that wouldn’t be allowed if it were any other faith. But, on the whole, I think the problems we face can be put into three categories, all of which are linked and form a more general circular problem.

The first is that, for the majority of people in our society, the Church and the Christian faith are simply an irrelevance. That’s obviously true of those who don’t believe in Christianity, but at the last census, more than half the population of this country said they did. So where are they all? Why aren’t our churches bursting at the seams? The answer seems to be the vast majority of the people in our country who claim to be Christians obviously don’t see any need to come to church, or of the Church in their lives either.

The second problem we have is that of the Church’s compliance with society. By compliance, I don’t mean compliance with the law, I mean compliance with the values and standards of society. When was the last time the Church made a real stand against the corruption and injustice that exists in our society, and made that stand because society’s values and standards are contrary to the Gospel?

The Church is far too content to say nothing and to simply ‘go with the flow’. That no doubt reduces the severity of any persecution the Church might otherwise face, but it results in a Church which is simply tolerated because it’s acquiescent. The Church no doubt knows society is wrong, but it accepts what society does without protest. That actually causes people to think that the Church is irrelevant, because the Church makes no difference to society, but it also leads to a third problem, that of the Church being despised for its weakness and hypocrisy. And that, in turn, leads to the kind of anti-Christian bias we see in the media and in the ridicule and suppression our faith is singled out for.

I don’t think there can be much doubt, that one of the root causes of all this, perhaps the major cause, is the attempt the Church has made to reverse, or at least arrest, the decline of Church congregations, by making the Church more ‘acceptable’ to society. The only way the Church can do that is by acquiescence with society’s values and standards; by going along with the world, or at least turning a blind eye to the world. But the Church isn’t called to be acceptable to the world or any society in it; it’s called to be acceptable to God. And to be acceptable to God, the Church is called to do things God’s way, not the world’s way. The Church is called to encourage others to do things God’s way, not to simply stand by and say nothing while God and Christ are ignored. The values and standards of the world are based on pride and ambition, the desire for power and lust for this world’s riches. The values and standards of the world are anti-Christ, they’re the very darkness that Jesus talks about in this morning’s Gospel. And when it goes along with these things, the Church itself is moving from the light into the darkness because it’s going along with the very things that Jesus himself says will condemn us.

The first great persecution of the Church was the Decian persecution (named after the Roman emperor Decius) which began in 249 AD. During that persecution, many Christians were martyred for their faith. Many others though, renounced their faith but, when the persecution ended, they wanted to be readmitted to the Church. What became the official Catholic position on this, was that these people could be readmitted to the Church but only after they’d served due penance and undergone a programme of teaching. It was a lengthy process, and it took years for those who’d renounced their faith to be readmitted to the Church. But even so, some in the Church wouldn’t accept them, and a schism, a split in the Church which became known as the Novatian heresy, resulted.

In response to this, and in defence of the Catholic position, one of the great Church Fathers, St Cyprian of Carthage, wrote a work entitled On the Unity of the Church. In it, St Cyprian spoke of the Church as the mother of Christians and the bride of Christ. This is what St Cyprian said: 

‘… she (the Church) is one mother, plentiful in fruitfulness. We are born from her womb, nourished by her milk, given life by her spirit.

The spouse of Christ cannot commit adultery. She is uncorrupted and pure. She knows one home, she guards with chaste modesty the sanctity of one bed. She keeps us for God. She appoints the sons whom she has born for the kingdom. Whoever is separated from the Church and unites with an adulteress, is separated from the promises of the Church. No one who forsakes the Church of Christ can receive the rewards of Christ. He is a stranger; he is profane; he is an enemy. No one can have God for his Father, who does not have the Church for his mother.

… The Lord warns us, “He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters.” [Matt. 12:30] He who breaks the peace and the unity of Christ, is an opponent of Christ. He who gathers anywhere than in the Church, scatters the Church of Christ.

The Lord says, “I and the Father are one” … Does anyone believe that such unity which comes from the strength of God and is held together by the sacraments of heaven, can be divided by the falling out of opposing wills? Anyone who does not keep this unity does not keep God’s law, does not keep the faith of the Father and the Son, does not keep hold of life and salvation.’

The Church has never been acceptable to the world’s societies. It isn’t called to be and was never intended to be. The Church, and the individual Christians who make up the Church, are called to be in the world, but not of the world. We are called to be, and intended to be, acceptable to God, and God’s ways are not the world’s ways: they are as different as light from dark.  Let us pray that the Church of today will remember that. That the Church will remain faithful to Christ, and that holy mother Church will bear and nourish many more sons and daughters fit for God’s kingdom where his will, and not the world’s ways, is done.

Amen.

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The Propers for the 4th Sunday of Lent (Mothering Sunday) can be found here.