St Richard, Haywards Heath Easter 5(C) 15th May 2022

 

 

In dealing firsthand with the hike in the cost of living, with COVID and many of us second hand with Ukraine, not to mention our own contingencies, those words of the apostles in Acts 14 have a resonance ‘We all have to experience many hardships before we enter the kingdom of God’. It's that kingdom in its fullness beyond this world, which we yearn for, which is subject of our second reading from the book of Revelation Chapter 21. John the visionary speaks there of a new earth and heaven and a new Jerusalem. These new things are to be found already in the Church on earth inasmuch as the resurrection of Jesus thrills through her life. That’s why we read Revelation in Eastertide. 

God does indeed dwell with men and women through Jesus veiled in word and sacrament. We’ve got his life in the Christian community. This life is a foretaste, a preview of forthcoming attractions, where ‘mourning and crying and pain will be no more’. Oh yes there’s mourning and crying and pain in the life of the Christian church as much as outside it - but it’s mourning, crying and pain sweetened by the Lord we know who’s with us. 

Just a month ago I was in the sanctuary to hear the priest say, piercing the candle with the five studs at the Easter Vigil: ‘By his holy and glorious wounds may Christ our Lord guard and keep us’. The Paschal Candle is a triumphant witness, standing tall, that says God is above death. It also reminds us he’s not above suffering, as witnessed to all on Good Friday. That is so very, very important to us as witnesses to Christ in a world losing hope. God, the God and Father of Jesus, expects nothing of us he’s not prepared to go through himself. This is the main ground of hope we cling to as Christians as we ourselves experience hardship, hope that isn’t just out of this world - though the resurrection is all of that - but hope rooted in sharp human reality, in blood, sweat and tears. 

Our Blessed Lord has drawn the sting of death and suffering for all who turn to him. The vision of St John in our second reading, the vision of Christianity, is a now and then vision. What is then to be in a transformed universe is now present – this is the gospel and it is particularly expressed in the Paschal Candle and its piercings which towers over the sanctuary for the 50 days of Easter season

I always take heart when I pray before the coronation altar in Westminster Abbey. Above it there’s another quotation from Revelation: ‘The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ’. What does it mean to seek that ‘the kingdom of the world becomes the kingdom of God’? Certainly it is a robust vision of inclusion though that inclusion extends beyond this world into ‘the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting’. Nevertheless at St Richard’s we take very seriously our responsibility to serve the common good in our community evident yesterday at the craft fair and week by week in Ric’s Bench and Memory Moments cafe. With you I pledge to do my bit to help these ventures during the pastoral vacancy - may that be short! May God’s richest blessing follow Fr Chris, Carolyn and Sam and remain with us - ‘give and it will be given to you’ - as we seek a faithful priest to succeed a rich legacy! As we serve here the good of our town we are serving the aspiration for each and every person to be granted opportunity to reach their full potential especially those hardest pressed in the current economic climate.

The kingdom of God is nothing less than his reign. That’s not just for the new heaven and earth but for now. God reigns now where folk will let him in. I am always praying we see more prophetically gifted leadership in public life, not least a Wilberforce or two or three in Parliament! It says in Proverbs 29 verse 18 that ‘where there’s no vision the people perish’. Away from God’s reign there’s ‘mourning and crying and pain’ without consolation. Those who promote a vision of God help keep us faithful to enduring values paving the way to the heavenly Jerusalem descending from God. 

Lastly let’s see what we can glean from today’s Gospel from St John chapter 13. ‘A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you’ (v34). Love makes the world and the church go round. The best sort of evangelism is a community that intrigues people with the love of Jesus. The vision thing centres in Christianity on loving God and your neighbour as yourself. It’s resourced by God’s love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit as St Paul writes in Romans 5 verse 5. ‘As I have loved you’ – as God loves us – we’re to love one another. This is the Christian call and when it’s applied it brings transformation.

Wise politicians know their need of the voluntary sector. Communities can’t be built and neither can citizens be formed without people who’re prepared to put themselves out for others.

What’s the answer to the abortion rate? To family breakdown? To care for the elderly? To those who wish to legalise mercy killing? The answer doesn’t lie so much in policies as in a spiritual revival bringing a fresh outpouring of love. ‘A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you’.

Just to take one of my list, isn’t the problem of people wishing they were dead and not suffering  linked not just to low pain tolerances but also to the lack of compassion around in our families? If people know they’re loved they can brave pain. You can cope with no end of hardship if you know you’re loved. Values come from vision and we sorely need vision in our society. The Lord send more visionaries into public office, some of Christian conviction with a yearning for the new heaven and the new earth where righteousness dwells.

May the kingdom of this world advance a little towards becoming the kingdom of our God and of his Christ through this eucharist, through our prayer, through fresh concern for the world of politics and through a new wave of the Holy Spirit pouring his love upon us, upon our town, county, nation and world. Amen.

St Bartholomew, Brighton Feast of St Matthias, Apostle 14.5.22

 

Today’s Collect rejoices at ‘how God’s love has been allotted to us’.

Do you ever think why the Lord has allotted you a place in the company of the saints and not your neighbour or your sister or your brother?

The mystery of the choices of God is something to ponder so as to deepen humility. As the entrance antiphon from John 15:16 reminded us: ‘It was not you who chose me, says the Lord, but I who chose you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.’

Today’s Saint must have pondered ‘the lot of God’s love’. Matthias wasn’t one of the original Twelve but after the betrayal of Our Lord and death of Judas Iscariot, someone was needed to take his place. Two men were selected, and lots were drawn to see which should be made an Apostle and we read in today’s passage from Acts how the lot fell on Matthias. 

Being chosen by casting lots seems a random choice at one level but, being a gamble set up by the Holy Spirit after prayer, its consequence came to be seen as expressing God’s will. It was a way of putting the important choice to make up the Twelve into the hands of God.

My presence and yours at Mass this morning traces back both to people we have met who have influenced us towards Christ and, like Saint Matthias, a readiness to put to God’s service the gifts and talents he has given us. It's humbling to consider the seemingly random element of ‘how God’s love has been allotted to us’.

‘It was not you who chose me, says the Lord, but I who chose you to go and bear fruit’. God has chosen us, with our needs and inadequacies as well as with our gifts and strengths to be his servants - and before that to be his.

We work for God, yes, but today’s feast reminds us of the beautiful grace that lies behind that reality. It reminds us as we celebrate Mass, or serve, do the flowers or whatever that the work of the Lord flows from the Lord of the work who is ours for ever.

The Lord make us aware, at the prayer of St Matthias, of his love allotted to us from beyond this world, the One we love before we make the object of our employment.

May your love be upon us, O Lord! It is that love we trust - may you, the Lord of our work, always come before the work we do for you at the altar, in the Sacristy or out there in the world that awaits us after Mass!

St Mary, Balcombe Easter 4 Friendship 8th May 2022

 

We live as ‘the connected generation’ and we live as Christians. When we make our communion we network with all those in this Church and with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven. It’s great to be just a small part of such a wonderful whole that’s going to be revealed in its fullness beyond death. It’s great to have faith in the Risen Lord who connects us with one another, with the whole church and the risen Christ’s transformation of the cosmos. 

The great priest and thinker Teilhard de Chardin saw the pathway of creation moving from inanimate being to the animation which is life, then from life to self-consciousness as in human beings made in God’s image. He saw that the next obvious stage would be the connecting up of human consciousness globally, which we now see in the internet. Teilhard de Chardin prophesied almost a century ago the connecting up of conscious beings into the collective consciousness we call the World Wide Web.  The picture that came out of his thought and prayer is of the whole cosmos resembling a cone with the movements within it converging upon Jesus as the apex or omega point. Our individual futures, that of the universal church and the whole created order rests in Jesus and is to end in Jesus. As we heard in the Gospel, his gift to us is eternal life. This is the ultimate vision of what it is to ‘be connected’ and to be Christian and it is based on the truth of the risen Lord Jesus Christ underlined to us year by year in the Easter season.

The internet and the growth of high speed electronic communication seems to me, to be part of a God planned connecting, but, it inevitably has a downside. Electronic communications have facilitated ever tighter personal and work schedules that seem to be squeezing out family and village engagement, though of course they can and do serve these. There are many people living in the village deprived of time to stand and stare which is harsh for them and for us. Villages lose heart when people haven't time for one another.

Connecting is different nowadays. There is ‘e-anxiety’, the feeling that comes on as soon as you’re unable to check your email or take a look on social media.

How many of your children or grandchildren will sit with you this Sunday lunchtime with their phone on the table? Of course they’re only doing what human beings have always done – polyphasing, keeping in with different networks, only simultaneously – simultaneously, there’s the rub. You can’t be with someone truly if you’re on the phone as well!

To bring ourselves back to the sorts of connecting that gel with the Christian vision, that rests and ends in Jesus, we need to be reminded about the nature of friendship and how it is rooted in friends being fully present to one another in space as well as time.

Living in a village, worshipping at a parish Church, provides the opportunity for making lifelong friendships through being regularly present to one another. 

You can have friends on Facebook and Instagram – I have and I tweet them – but the friends that really matter are those you’ve lived close to over time. Through the common life of village and church we build friends who can help rub off our rough corners and make us better instruments of bringing all things together in Christ.

They say a dog can be your best friend (picture). More profoundly, friendship’s a spiritual reality. We see our inner selves, as if in a mirror, through our friends, with their honesty about us, something we can best bear from a friend.

Friendship holds us to principle. It’s also empowering to know someone who’ll be on your side through thick and thin. In the first reading Dorcas seems to have had many friends who grieved at her passing and no doubt rejoiced at her return to them.

A year or so back I bumped into a young man at the gym with an eight digit number tattoed on the inside of one arm. Curiosity got the better of me. Jokingly I asked him which jail he’d been in. ‘No jail’ he said. ‘It’s the military number of my best friend. He died in Afghanistan’. I praised him for keeping his friend’s memory and sacrifice alive. It got me thinking.

Christianity’s a religion of friendship.

God made us for friendship. Sin came in as a barrier. By his dying and rising Jesus Christ removes that barrier making us friends with God.

Just as that young man had his friend’s number tattoed on his arm so Our Lord has got your name and mine written on him.

‘See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands’ the Lord says in Isaiah 49 verse 16.

In this Church, through its worship and supremely through the eucharist, the memory and sacrifice of our friend Jesus are kept alive.  Christianity builds beyond earthly friends and networks towards a communion with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven. Through friendships with Our Lord built up as we engage with scripture and sacrament it populates heaven, no less! As we heard in the Gospel: ‘My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.  I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand’ (John 10:27-28).

May our hearts burn as we reflect now upon Jesus our Good Shepherd as he speaks his word to us this morning and may our eyes be opened as he makes himself known to us afresh in the awesome encounter ahead which is Holy Communion in his Body and Blood, Christ in us the hope of glory.

St Wilfrid, Haywards Heath Easter 3 Getting to know God 1.5.22

How do you get to know God?

Some get to know him in a blinding flash, others find gradual illumination and many stay in the dark.

My own illumination has been through gradual flashes helped especially by holy people.

It came also through a doctorate in Chemistry researching carbon polymers. As I opened up new realms of knowledge through neutron scattering, I had a sense Someone had seen these things before. 

Science works through humility so that hypotheses that get disproved are good news bringing advance. My old research field is a bit strange to me nowadays. I have been fascinated though to read recently of carbon-breathing batteries that use Aluminium to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere whilst making electricity. 

How do you get to know God?

We scientists pursue truth but many of us have a sense that truth is with us and awaiting us. Reason and faith both lift us to God. Saul of Tarsus whose Conversion is the subject of our first reading originally followed a reasoned religion lacking faith. He lacked openness to the transcendent. God was in his religious books and laws so he was rattled to encounter the first Christians. They spoke of laws and indeed life itself transcended through the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. 

It was too much. He raged against it. But Saul was to become Paul, the reasoned man became the man of faith as heavenly light came over him on the Damascus Road. His eyes were opened to a God built less to his dimensions and more to those of God who is God!

How do you get to know God?

As God is truth you need to seek truth, but that's not enough. You need to be open to truth as something or Someone seeking you! 

The best of scientists like old Archimedes get eureka moments - I see it! These moments are, like Paul’s today, a lesson in humility, that is, in disbelieving yourself so as to see something more wonderful. To get to know God – and what an awesome, joy-giving and life-enhancing business that is - you need a readiness to loosen from self preoccupation, see the big picture of reality and be put in your place!

That happened to Saul of Tarsus in a flash which really put him in his place. He was temporarily blinded, and had to be led by the hand into Damascus where he joined the very body he was persecuting.  Later on Paul wrote of this in 1 Timothy 1:16 I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life.  Paul saw himself as the foremost of sinners since he had persecuted the very body he came to join and lead. If God can use me, he says, he can use anyone.

How do you get to know God?

On my way back from St Wilfrid’s to Bentswood I always catch a glimpse of the South Downs waiting at the traffic lights at the top of New England Road. God is before me in that grand view as much as he’s before me here in Church looking at our beautiful window of the risen Lord Jesus. 

St Nicodemus who lived on Mount Athos in the 18th Century admired the grand views there. He pondered and came up with an astonishing two liner that captures what it is to be in the image of God. Human beings are the macrocosm. The whole universe is the microcosm. I repeat: Human beings are the macrocosm. The whole universe is the microcosm. 

You can find God by pondering yourself, or, one step back, reflecting on what it is to reflect.  As your mind and heart contain the view of the Downs from Haywards Heath, and indeed, in a thought, the whole universe, you become in a sense greater than all that is as you contain it. Human beings are the macrocosm. The whole universe is the microcosm. 

God is God and always will be God. We’re made in God's image capable of his glory but that capacity isn't automatic. People miss God through two deceptions. They reason to the exclusion of faith or they believe to the exclusion of reason. 

The greatest threats to peace on earth are folk who deny the transcendent and folk in possession of mindless religion. God is love and love transcends reason – it goes beyond but not against reason. 

To know God who is truth you need to be drawn beyond any mental construct. You might also need freeing, as Paul was, from false and compulsive images of God.

A few ideas this morning on how you get to know God. 

I want to encourage you to pray sometime, in quiet, on your own, this honest and risky prayer: 

God if you're there and you love me show yourself to me. Give me a vision of yourself more to your dimensions and less to my own. 

It's an honest prayer - saying 'if you're there' tames reason as it admits we can't prove God is there however strong the evidence. It's a risky prayer because you're expressing a readiness to be put right on God by God – but… God is love! It’s an ongoing prayer - you need to wait for an answer. God if you're there and you love me show yourself to me. Give me a vision of yourself more to your dimensions and less to my own. 

If you already know God you’re asking for a fuller vision of him, something I find myself doing often, but not as often as I should so I’m preaching this morning at myself too.

Have a go - you won't regret it!

In Paul’s own words to Corinth, God give you the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Corinthians 4v6)

God who shone on Paul shine on us all! 

[Picture of Saul’s Conversion by Caravaggio]

St Wilfrid, Haywards Heath & St Bartholomew, Brighton Wed 27 April 2022

‘Look to the Lord and be radiant’ our Psalm invites (Psalm 34:5). For ‘God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost but may have eternal life’ (John 3:16) The Gospel passage from John 3:16 explains the origin of Christian radiance. 

To believe is to look to the Lord and welcome the radiance Paul calls ‘the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Corinthians 4:6)

‘The light has come into the world’ we read in today’s Gospel. Not a blinding light but one we can be bathed in through belief in Christ - or lose through turning ourselves away from the revelation of God in Jesus. It's a choice - once you see it - like the famous choice of prisoners: ‘Two men looked through prison bars, one saw mud and one saw stars’. Our choice, that of Christian faith, is to look up to the risen Lord and welcome his radiance! (Visual by Coaching 4 Life Ltd)

Easter season is a time for refreshing our gaze upon the Lord who lovingly shines upon us in the risen Lord Jesus Christ. His gaze towards us, with which we can engage day by day in prayer and sacrament, is a healing ray. It reaches into our cold heartedness as microwaves reach into frozen food. We need not avert his gaze, but confessing our unworthiness, hold ourselves to God with humility and determination.

God’s love spoken of in today’s Gospel is to be welcomed by each and every one of us. It is more than benevolence or good will but a reality linked to our coming into existence which would lay hold of us to bring us to our destiny with all the saints.  

I come from God. I belong to God. I go to God. The Lord is my first beginning and my final end. This is the Christian revelation shown to us in the dying and rising of Jesus through which his Spirit is poured into hearts that welcome his love and leading.

How much we need that love! CS Lewis writes: ‘Our whole being… is one vast need; incomplete, preparatory, empty yet cluttered, crying out to him who can untie things that are now knotted together and tie up things that are still dangling loose’.

‘By love God is caught and held, by thinking never’ we read in the 14th century mystical book Cloud of Unknowing. When you pray, wrote 16th century Saint Teresa of Avila, be still and let God love you. See his smile and it will generate your own smile. God loves you with an enormous love and wants to look upon you with that same, generous love whilst awaiting your engagement.

‘God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost but may have eternal life’. At the eucharist we repeatedly make a choice, an act of faith in our prayer, to take him at his word, look to him and welcome the radiance of Jesus in word and sacrament. So be it!

 

St John, Burgess Hill Easter 2 Hope 24th April 2022

There’s a lot around to trouble us. Warfare in Europe we never imagined would return to our continent. COVID hitting more widely now though mercifully in a less deadly fashion. The rise in energy costs and the associated fall in living standards linked to it. These are three things that trouble almost everyone and they provoke a variety of responses including more talk about the essential meaning of life.

In the midst of widespread pessimism our religion shapes and gives meaning to our lives but some of our peers are saying ‘no wonder people turn to religion to escape this awful scenario’. The assumption widely held is that religious belief provides an escape from reality – and yet the realities we live through seem to demand such an escape, however irrational. Without faith people are entering deep pessimism as they face the troubles we all share at this season.  

What does Easter have to say to such pessimism? Is what I’m about as a Christian just otherworldly escapism? How does the Easter good news engage with the reality of human suffering and how can it best impact the loss of hope around us?

As I reflect with you on this Octave Day of the Easter Feast I look back eight days to our blessing of the Paschal Candle when five pins were stuck in it to represent the wounds of Christ, commemorating today’s Gospel reading. Jesus said to Thomas, 'Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.' Thomas answered him, 'My Lord and my God!'

How did Our Lord deal with Thomas’ pessimism? He pointed him to those very same wounds the Risen Christ carried from his crucifixion. In other words ‘you can be sure it is I, Thomas, and you can lay hold of sure and certain hope in the face of all in your world that would confound you’.

As Peter and the apostles answered the high priest in our first reading from Acts Chapter 5: The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. The Jesus raised up at Easter is the same Jesus killed by hanging … on a tree in other words the Cross. That’s why the Church decorates, if that is the right word, its Easter candle symbol with the wounds. As the priest says piercing the candle with the five studs at the Easter Vigil: By his holy and glorious wounds may Christ our Lord guard and keep us. 

The Paschal Candle is a triumphant witness, standing tall, that says God is above death. It also reminds us he’s not above suffering. That is so very, very important to us as witnesses to Christ in a world that’s losing hope. God, the God and Father of Jesus, expects nothing of us he’s not prepared to go through himself. This is the main ground of hope we cling to as Christians, a hope that isn’t just out of this world - though the resurrection is all of that - but a hope rooted in human reality. What I am about as a Christian IS an engagement with otherworldly consolation, it’s absolutely true. Christianity is a metaphysical religion, it’s beyond (meta) the physical because of Christ’s resurrection. Yet it’s rooted in the most basic and painful human reality.

God revealed the resurrection by sending his Son to die for us. The five wounds of Christ on his arms, legs and side are the great symbol of this and as such they engage with our sorrows for he is and he remains for us as Isaiah prophesied a man of sorrows acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53v3). 

If I am talking about Christian hope this morning I am talking not about a shallow optimism but resurrection faith firmly rooted in Christ as the suffering Saviour from all eternity. Second century Bishop Melito of Sardis in an Easter sermon wrote of how Christ’s sufferings should be seen in the suffering of holy people right back through the Old Testament: He is the Passover of our salvation. He was present in many so as to endure many things. In Abel he was slain; in Isaac bound; in Jacob a stranger; in Joseph sold; in Moses exposed; in David persecuted; in the prophets dishonoured. He became incarnate of the Virgin…buried in the earth, but he rose from the dead, and was lifted up to the height of heaven. He is the silent lamb, the slain lamb, who was born of Mary the fair ewe. He was seized from the flock and dragged away to slaughter.  

In Christ’s sufferings we see human suffering in a new light. I can’t speak too well myself, my sufferings have been slight, but I’ve been close to women and men of God who say so, who say God in Christ comes close in suffering. I think of people I’ve visited in great pain telling me of the grace they’d experienced grasping a holding cross. I think of instances where my marking the cross in holy oil on the foreheads and palms of the sick, commemorating Christ’s wounds, lifts their spirits. Péguy said a Christian is a sad man saved from despair by the Cross of Christ. 

In the book of Revelation we read of how grace… and peace come from Jesus Christ… the firstborn of the dead, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood. St John goes on to predict the risen Christ’s return Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him. The wounds of Christ are source of hope to believers, though they will be troublesome to those who pierced him and that includes you and I through unrepented sins. 

Easter is incomplete until the Lord’s Return. Charles Wesley’s Advent hymn Lo he comes enters imaginatively into the sight of the risen Christ coming to be judge of the world:

Those dear tokens of his passion still his dazzling body bears; 
cause of endless exultation to his ransomed worshipers; 
with what rapture gaze we on those glorious scars!

Indeed it will be, and that is our sure and certain hope, which should help us bring all pessimists to Christ’s Cross. 

We Christians are saddened by suffering but our sadness is saved from despair by that very Cross and by the out of this world resurrection truth we’re celebrating in these great days of Eastertide which will be fully revealed at the Lord’s return! 

Alleluia Christ is risen - he is risen indeed, alleluia!

St Mary, Balcombe Palm Sunday 10 April 2022

 

Why did Jesus die?

The Creed answers he was crucified for us.

It does so after it names Jesus God from God, light from light, true God from true God.

The link between Jesus in April 33AD and us in April 2022AD is in the AD – anno Domino.

Because of who Jesus is as Lord what he suffered on Good Friday carries forward to all times in a way only God can achieve.

When these lowly hands take bread and wine in a moment, what Jesus did then will become a living reality for us now. 

This is the Church’s faith, that the death of Jesus impacts us today, but where is this impact on my life?

How you see Jesus is inseparable from how you see his death and what difference it makes for you.

There’s a plaque in Aldersgate near the Museum of London commemorating an event in the life of Methodist pioneer John Wesley. Wesley, an Anglican priest, had always said the Creed we say. To him though, Jesus as God from God, light from light, true God from true God was more known by his head than his heart. 

That evening of 24 May 1738 he reluctantly attended a Christian meeting at Aldersgate. There he felt his heart ‘strangely warmed’ and received an assurance that the death of Jesus all those years ago was a gift of forgiveness and assurance for him personally. From that day he set off on an itinerant preaching ministry covering 20,000 miles a year which touched thousands of lives with the reality of Jesus Christ now alive in him. 

'Faith is the amen of the intelligence and the will to divine revelation.'

When we say the Creed or hear the annual account of Christ’s passion our ‘Amen’ is often more notional than passionate.

As educationalists say in their motto: We hear and forget, we see and remember, we do and we understand.

Hearing about the Cross, seeing the Cross, is nothing compared to acting upon it and the love that lies behind it.

For what Jesus has done for us in Holy Week to come real to us we need to put our lives on the line, to act as if he were alongside us still – then we understand. 

You see, we can hear about Jesus, we can even believe notionally - in our heads - that he is God incarnate - but it may make no difference to our lives.

I believe Mongolia is north of China but that belief makes very little difference to my life. I have prayed once or twice for Mongolia but I have never been there and have no friends from there.

Yet I believe also in the resurrection of the dead. I have not experienced that either, but it has come real to me through One whom I trust, who has himself experienced resurrection and who has promised me a share as well when I die!

It is the Jesus we are talking of who has promised me this!

'Christ is as great as your faith makes him' said the evangelist D.L.Moody.

Why did Jesus die?

He died for us, say the Bible and the Creed. When you approach the crucifixion with faith in Christ’s divinity you see it as an action demonstrating this truth, that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. John 3.16

It is an awesome act of substitution in which Jesus dies in our place so as to live in our place. All that suffering just recounted in the passion account was borne by Jesus on your account and mine

The holiness of God, affronted by sin, demands a penalty which he himself provided. 

It is like the pauper woman in court charged with theft faced with a judge who sentences her to fine or imprisonment. She has no money for the fine so the judge sentences her to imprisonment. When the court finishes the judge goes and gives her the fine she can’t afford, satisfying both mercy and justice.

To believe in the crucifixion of Jesus is to commit to a God who loves us and who is holy, who reaches out to us in love even though we are sinners.  

In his holiness he cannot be reconciled to sin, but through the sacrifice of Jesus upon the Cross the horror of sin is overcome and we are credited with God’s own love and holiness.  

The power of evil over humankind is overcome by the Cross.  Only when we see that power being overcome in our own lives through it does the Cross make sense. When we find ourselves living more by faith in God than self-sufficiency, living more by submission to God than by self-will.

Through coming to the Cross we see benevolence flowing where there was self-seeking before and humility where there was cold self-righteousness.

Only when we see those sinful tendencies and find the merciful therapy of God in Jesus Christ can we know how wonderful a thing the Cross is, what awesome yet living and practical truth it contains. 

We know deep down how flawed our lives are but we hide that truth from others and even from ourselves. Just like when you’re preparing a meal like scrambled eggs, and a bad egg slips in to make the meal unacceptable for human consumption, the sin in our lives makes us unacceptable to a God who, in the words of the prophet Habakkuk, is too holy to behold evil. Yet Jesus died. By God’s Son going to his death and through death to resurrection we can call upon him in April 2022 to make our stinking lives fragrant and acceptable to God.

As St Paul writes in the first chapter of Ephesians God has made us acceptable in the beloved. By the death of his beloved Son God has made all who abide in Christ acceptable to himself. May that joy of seeing the barriers set up between ourselves and God lowered be ours this Holy Week. 

God seeks intimacy with us. To achieve this, in an awesome mechanism far beyond human understanding, Jesus was crucified for us. This is good news to all who will face both the truth of it and the truth about themselves as sinners in need of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Amen.