Palm Sunday 17th April 2011

So we begin Holy Week recalling how Jesus put his life on the line for us.
Through the centuries people who have met and followed Jesus have readily done the same obedient to his words:

'If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it’. (Matthew 16:24-25)

Self-sacrifice is a powerful brand. When I have seen it in the Christian people around me it has made Jesus more real to me.

Jesus calls forth witnesses. The most effective have been martyrs who have lost absolutely all self-interest. Such self-sacrifice has branded Christianity in every age. As the second century writer Tertullian famously expressed it ‘the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church’.

Where people have followed Jesus to distant lands to bring his good news their sacrifice has regularly been infectious.

In a recent chronicle of the church in China called The Heavenly Man the exiled Pastor Yun chronicles three imprisonment’s (1983-88, 1991-3 and 2001) in a story that starts in the Cultural Revolution of 1974. Mindful of the teaching and sacrifices of western missionaries in the early 20th century the sixteen year old Yun and his family are led in desperation to pray to Jesus for his father to be healed from cancer. He is remarkably healed so that Yun recognises the power of Jesus. From this first encounter his story goes on testifying to the Lord’s intervention again and again as people are repeatedly humiliated and reduced by circumstances that are again and again turned on their head. This brings praise to God and dramatic growth to his church. The book is as exciting as any adventure story, with miraculous healings, prison escapes and the greater wonder of mass conversion of lives to Jesus all happening in these days on the other side of the world.

Thousands in China are now emulating the heroic witness of the hundreds of western missionaries who gave their lives over a thousand years to plant the church there. They sowed gospel seed but it is only now that the harvest is beginning, so that hundreds of Chinese missionaries are even now taking the gospel back west on foot to Jerusalem challenging Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu cultures on their way with the unique claims of Jesus Christ.

Brother Yun writes: ‘The gospel grows through hardship and will spread throughout the world. The truth will enter everyone’s heart. Truth is always truth. Nothing and no one can change that. It will always conquer’. This uncompromising word of faith captures the spiritual force of his witness. Yun’s recent flight from China has brought him into direct contact with the wider church where he senses something is missing. He writes of God’s desire to loosen our selfish attachments, release more of our energies into prayer and worship, open our minds to scripture and equip us with new boldness to witness for Jesus so that the harvest of transformed lives seen in China can extend into our own nation.

Because Jesus is God’s Word made flesh (John 1:14) he expects the words of his followers never to be empty. He leads them again and again to invest themselves fully in their profession of faith in him.

When people know Jesus they know their witness to him in words will be weighed according to their perceived obedience to his call to die to self and rise to new life in the Holy Spirit. As all England cricketer turned missionary C.T.Studd once wrote ‘If Jesus Christ be God, and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.’

Last week I was blessed to see one of the most powerful films I have ever seen, Of God and Men. It centres on the monastery of Tibhirine, where nine Trappist monks lived in harmony with the largely Muslim population of Algeria, until seven of them were kidnapped and assassinated in 1996.

It tells the tale of a peaceful situation between local Christians and Muslims becoming a lethal one due to external events rather like those that have recently swept through Libya and other Arab lands.

The reconstruction of their martyrdom shows the monks at worship, serving the poor Muslims around the monastery and encouraging one another as the violence grows. They have to choose whether to leave Algeria. The screen play focuses on conferences of the community where they debate the possibility of martyrdom which in the end becomes a reality. It is a beautiful film which won a Grand Prix at the 2010 Cannes Festival. It ends with the reading of the letter one of them, Brother Chretien, left for his mother in case of his death.

Here it is.

‘I have lived long enough to know that I am an accomplice in the evil which seems, alas, to prevail in the world, even in the evil which might blindly strike me down. I would like, when the time comes, to have a moment of spiritual clarity which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God and of my fellow human beings, and at the same time forgive with all my heart the one who will strike me down. I could not desire such a death. It seems to me important to state this. I do not see, in fact, how I could rejoice if the people I love were indiscriminately accused of my murder. It would be too high a price to pay for what will perhaps be called the ‘grace of martyrdom’’.

To the letter to his mother Chretien adds a note to the one who will kill him: ‘In God's face I see yours. May we meet again as happy thieves in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both. Amen! In H'Allah!’

What grace! To recognise God in the face of one’s murderer!

It was a profoundly moving film made more so by its accurate representation of well documented events 15 years ago in Algeria and by its topicality with all that is happening in North Africa today.

Holy Week lifts the bar. We have performed the annual reading of the passion of Our Lord. We have heard some stories of how that story has drawn forth self sacrifice in China and Algeria.

Back to Horsted Keynes! For us self sacrifice will be more mundane but nonetheless significant for that.

We can’t get to be like Jesus without it.

Holy Week is I crossed out. It’s a time to identify and break selfish attachments and release more of our energies into prayer and worship. It is an opportunity, if we make it so, to follow the way of the Cross in the services later this week, to open our minds to scripture and be equipped with new boldness to witness to him.
As has been said Jesus Christ expects the words of his followers never to be empty. He wants us to commit ourselves, our souls and bodies into the profession of faith we make in him.

‘If Jesus Christ be God, and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for him.’