Giggleswick School, Settle Yorkshire 14th October 2018

Do you want to be great?

Great people - people fondly thought of - aren’t those seeking to further themselves but those recognised for furthering the good of others.

They’re also resilient - a term set as our theme for this week which means able to withstand misfortune.

Great people have capacity to rise above what Hamlet calls the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and bounce back into life with a compassionate focus.

It's strange how suffering can make you better as a person though no human being worth their salt would deny how awful it can be to suffer.

All world views have something to say about suffering and most face it head on encouraging resilience rather than escape, let alone the suicide Hamlet pondered in that passage to be or not to be which includes the slings and arrows line.

In my day at Giggleswick Mr Wood would stare down from his high plinth at our English class and say: ‘To be or not to be Twisleton?’ if I was his unfortunate choice. My response would be to complete the Shakespeare passage from the memorising homework we were then given. It was indeed one of the the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to have to answer Keith Wood, rest his soul!

I chose the account of Christ’s death and resurrection in Mark’s Gospel and Paul’s practical reference to that event in Philippians to fit this term’s miracle series in Chapel and address resilience from a Christian perspective.

In the first passage one who is acclaimed God’s Son is done to death only to rise again. It's the key passage of what’s called the Christian revelation. In Christianity what God’s like isn’t made up so much as revealed through historical events. Many of these events are strange and some say fanciful, especially in parts of the Old Testament, but those of Good Friday and Easter Sunday stand in a different league. A former head of the Judiciary said no jury in the world would provide a negative verdict on their happening such is the overwhelming evidence, positive and negative, factual and circumstantial.

The second passage from Philippians spells out how Christianity sees resilience. It's a passionate statement of allegiance to the risen Lord Jesus Christ which links knowing Jesus to living out the first passage as his disciple, dying to self and rising to him. It's about sharing suffering and gaining hope within it from the promise of resurrection. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Paul writes, adding: Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.

How do you see Good Friday and Easter?

At one level they’re events to be weighed up and not lightly dismissed. At another level they reveal a God who’s not above suffering and doesn’t expect anything of us he’s not ready to go through himself. At yet another level, that taught by Paul in his letter to Philippi, the suffering and resurrection of God’s Son are the clue to resilience.

When things go down in life you know God’s not aloof from you and even that dark tunnel of death has got a light at the end. This we call the good news or Gospel of Jesus Christ.

You will recall from the passage Jesus cried in his death agony ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ It’s actually a verse from one of the Psalms, so it wasn’t a terrible thing to say, but it must have shaken folk around him, given the godly reputation Jesus had. In that cry God was making his own cries of the tormented down through the ages. No wonder that total outsider, the Centurion on duty, is recorded as saying there and then: ‘Truly this man was God’s Son’! From that dark place Jesus the Son is raised two days later by God the Father through their Holy Spirit rolling back the stone from the entrance to the tomb. Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified Saint Mark records the mysterious young man dressed in a white robe saying. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him.

All the forces of evil from every age and place met Jesus head on and in resilience he met and overthrew them. He took in suffering, death and all the powers of evil, absorbed and transformed them.

Do you want to be great?

To attain greatness is to take part in such a battle, to gain an ambition beyond being good at what you do and succeeding in it, an ambition Christianity states as one: to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings so that by becoming like him in his death, you [and others your enthusiasm infects] attain the resurrection from the dead.

The resilient explorer Laurens Van der Post complained in these words about what he calls elsewhere the Church’s domestication of God. One of the strangest ideas ever conceived is the idea that religion is the opium of the people, because religion is a call to battle…human beings in their rational selves...shy like frightened horses away from a God who is not the source of opium for people but a reawakening of creation and a transcending of the forces and nuclear energies in the human soul.

So be it - God wake in us such a vision of God, such passion and supernatural perspective!

Van der Post was imprisoned by the Japanese during the World War Two and lived under the threat of execution. A date was set. The night before he records experiencing a tremendous thunderstorm outside his prison. He saw in this storm a strengthening truth, as if from the awesome truth of the resurrection. The Japanese weren’t ultimately in control. The storm witnessed a greater than human power which in the end would decide all. He was spared execution.

It’s the Lord’s day - the day of resurrection!

God open our hearts and minds to possibilities that exceed our imagining!

May the Lord build in us the resilience we need to turn misfortune to good and build the outward focus to our lives that will make us truly great!