Readings: 2 Samuel 6.1–5, 12b-19; Psalm 24; Ephesians 1.3–14; Mark 6.14–29
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.
When I came to prepare this sermon, two themes stood out.
First, John the Baptist and my “relationship” with him.
I’ll come back to that in a moment.
The other theme from our readings is …
Well … it’s dancing!
David dancing before the Ark;
Salome dancing before Herod.
Now it’s a bit of a co-incidence
that they are paired here together:
we’ve been hearing the story of David
over the last few weeks,
and we just happen to arrive at this episode
as the gospel gets to this interlude in Jesus’s ministry.
But I expect lots of you watch tv programmes about dancing –
Strictly Come Dancing anyone?
So perhaps you’re imagining David and Salome
as celebrity contestants in Strictly.
There’s David, king of Israel,
stripped down to a “linen ephod”
whatever that is,
but it definitely sounds a bit scanty doesn’t it?
Dancing, ooh, the quickstep, perhaps.
And the princess from Galilee, Salome,
(though she is called Herodias
in our bible translation this morning) –
young and attractive,
dancing something a bit raunchy, a tango, maybe.
In popular modern culture
it’s the dance of the seven veils,
though that was only invented by the writer Oscar Wilde –
the biblical text lacks the eroticism
which we might imagine into the story.
As for David,
the ephod that he wore was a priestly garment –
knee-length, open at the sides, belted at the waist –
perhaps a bit like the vestment
that a deacon sometimes wears, a dalmatic.
But back to John the Baptist.
I have, as I mentioned, a bit of a history with John.
It’s getting on for 40 years since Karen and I moved here –
and when not serving, I’ve usually sat somewhere over there:
right by Comper’s statue of John the Baptist.
But long before that,
from when I was born,
I went to a church dedicated to John the Baptist:
I was a choirboy and then a server,
and I was formed as a young Christian.
Now that church was a great Victorian barn of a place,
bigger than here.
And one feature I remember vividly
was a set of three big windows at the east end,
behind and above the altar.
In the lower part of each window
there’s a scene from the story of John the Baptist,
and above each of them a parallel scene
from the story of Jesus.
So the left window depicts the Nativity of Jesus,
a manger with a shepherd and worshipping angels,
while below are scenes from Luke’s account of John’s birth.
And the bottom of the centre window
shows the story we have heard today.
There is Salome dancing –
fully and demurely robed I hasten to add.
There is John
kneeling before the executioner wielding his sword.
There is a man opening a door,
presumably bringing in the head of John,
though that horror isn’t shown.
So, why do the windows pair these scenes?
Well John was an important figure to the gospel writers,
and all four of them include him in their stories.
He’d been the major figure in what we might call
a religious revival,
and crowds had flocked to see him,
a bit like some Billy Graham rally perhaps.
Among them came Jesus.
Are the gospel writers a little embarrassed about this?
About Jesus being baptized by John?
About Jesus perhaps playing second fiddle to John?
They want us to understand
that from their point of view,
from our point of view,
John was preparing the way for Jesus.
The first readers and hearers of Mark’s account
must have included people
who had been followers of John,
who perhaps had come out to the Jordan and been baptized,
but maybe had had little involvement with Jesus.
The gospel writer wants these people to see
that Jesus is continuing John’s proclamation:
repentance and new life.
But Jesus brings a new twist to the proclamation.
John had preached repentance
as preparation for the arrival of God’s kingdom.
But Jesus proclaims that God’s kingdom has arrived already,
here, now:
Jesus’s followers – you and me –
can repent
and move from the ways of this world
and live instead in the kingdom of God,
where the hungry and poor,
the troubled and the dispossessed
are lifted up
and people are reconciled
with each other and with God.
And there’s a second message from today’s gospel.
Following Jesus isn’t always easy.
It can be hard to lift up the lowly
and be reconciled with others,
and sometimes others don’t want to be reconciled,
sometimes people don’t want the lowly lifted up,
perhaps because they like to have people to lord it over
or to exploit.
Sometimes there are hard consequences.
Certainly there are hard consequences for John –
that’s the story we have heard today:
John is condemned and executed by Herod.
And soon Jesus in his turn
will be condemned and executed
on the orders of Pontius Pilate
and with the connivance of this same Herod –
and of others who are challenged
by the idea of God’s rule, God’s kingdom.
In death, as in life,
John is the forerunner of Jesus.
And this is what can be seen
in the middle window at my old church:
above the panel with the beheading of John,
we see the Crucifixion.
Jesus pays the ultimate price of love and reconciliation,
put to death by the Roman governor
on charges brought by the Temple leadership,
a conspiracy between the rulers of this world
to attempt to defeat … love.
And there’s one more window to look at.
The third window at my childhood church
reminds us of one more thing.
It shows, in the bottom, the end of today’s story:
John’s disciples come and carry away his body
and place it in a tomb.
It is the end for John.
But the upper section of the window
shows a very different scene.
The follow-up to the death of Jesus
is the empty tomb,
the bursting from the grave,
the defeat of death.
The triumph of hope.
That is to go beyond the story we have heard today, with the message of Jesus:
Love conquers all.
You see,
John had proclaimed
that the end of the world was coming,
and people needed to repent.
And John had been killed and buried.
Jesus, though, proclaims something new:
not the end of the world,
but the end of the age,
and a new age
where God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven.
And Jesus too is killed and buried … and …
rises to new life.
And that’s what we see in the last of the windows,
that similarity-and-difference between John and Jesus.
John buried; Jesus resurrected –
resurrected to new life,
life in the new age where God’s will is done.
As we heard Paul remind us in his letter to the Ephesians –
Jesus’s death on the Cross
reconciles us to God and also to one another.
And Jesus’s resurrection brings us
to share in life in God’s kingdom.
Right here and now.
So,
unlike John, we are Jesus’s followers.
But, like John,
our role does include preparing the way for Jesus:
preparing the way for Jesus
in the hearts and lives of those around us.
John’s life – and John’s death –
remind us that this might not be easy
but the example he sets
is one of boldness in telling the truth
and in proclaiming the gospel,
the good news that, in Jesus,
the kingdom of God is among us.
Let us each consider this week
how we might begin
to prepare the way to Jesus
for just one person.
Amen.
0 CommentsStations of the Cross is a traditional devotion for Lent, and especially for Holy Week. It originated in Jersualem, where pilgrims would literally walk along the route from the centre of the city to the traditional place of Christ’s execution, stopping en route to recall various incidents recorded in the gospels, or elsewhere in the tradition. The number and names of the stations were later codified at fourteen (to which a fifteenth station of the Resurrection was added in more recent times). Many sets of words and prayers have been written to acccompany the walk. I compiled this particular set for an ecumenical service in my home parish, and subsequently published them on the Thinking Anglicans blog. It envisages a scenario in which some of those who participated in or witnessed the original events are gathered to remember what happened on that day.
This Sunday’s readings include part of chapter 3 of the book of Genesis, the central story of the fall, in which Adam and Eve are tempted to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, planted in the centre of the Garden of Eden, and which God has forbidden them to eat.
The consequence of this is that the couple are expelled from Eden, and they will die.
What are we to make of this?
The key to our understanding this today is perhaps in the words ‘knowledge of good and evil’. Our human ancestors, at some point in their evolution, developed enough consciousness to become self-aware. This is a fundamental human trait — to be aware of yourself, and to be aware of other people and realize that they too are self-aware. Perhaps this realization, this consciousness, went hand in hand with the development of language, the development of communication with fellow humans. And consciousness and the recognition of others leads to conscience — the recognition of good and evil, as the writers of the Genesis story put it. Humans had eaten of the fruit of the tree, and there was no going back.
And along with this self-awareness must have come the realization that things die: that other creatures die, that other humans die; and eventually the realization that each of us will die too — the realization of our own mortality.
Like the writer of Genesis chapter 3 we can understand the link between this high level of consciousness, or self-awareness, and death. The writer of Genesis puts the story in mythic language, language that all can understand. He (most probably it was a ‘he’ or several ‘he’s) starts from the innocence in which we assume the non-conscious to live: the innocence where one does not have to make moral choices and the innocence in which one’s own life is the centre of the world, indeed the only thing that makes the world, the innocence in which one has no idea that one’s life is finite. And he points out that self-awareness leads inevitably to a loss of that innocence which culminates in the knowledge of our own impending death.
And in this mythic language we too can grasp at the truth, that in our self-awareness we do things that we know to be wrong, and in our knowledge of our own mortality, we live in darkness and fear, failing to reach the great heights of creativity and light of which we should be capable.
What then of Jesus? Jesus proclaims to us the kingdom of God in which is life in all its abundance. In this kingdom we are freed from fear of death to live life, a life in which we can make moral choices, a life in which we are not consumed with jealousy or with bitterness towards others, but a life in the light, a life of creativity. The apostle Paul wrote, ‘As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive.’ (1 Corinthians 15.22.)
0 CommentsIf this is Thursday, this must be the Vatican! Today we visited the Vatican Museum, the Sistine Chapel, and the Basilica of St Peter. Jonathan Boardman, chaplain of All Saints, the Anglican church in Rome, gave us a tour of some of the principal works in the museum, and talked about the paintings in the Sistine Chapel. Although I have been in the Chapel twice before, this was the first time since the major restoration of the Michelangelo frescoes. It was also the first time I had really considered the overall scheme of the decoration: the ceiling depicting scenes from the Creation to the Flood; the pairs of pictures on the side walls by a number of earlier artists (Old and New Testament scenes in pairs, where the OT scene is in some way a ‘type’ for the NT one opposite it); and, of course, the Last Judgement on the ‘east’ wall. Here we see Peter and Paul as the strong men of Christ, sporting their perfect, resurrected, bodies (or at least, as Jonathan later noted, perfect in the eyes of Michelangelo; we might not all envisage our perfected bodies as those of East German athletes!).
And then to the Basilica of St Peter. The vastness of this building never ceases to amaze. I remember visiting as a schoolboy in 1973. Our guide asked a fellow pupil to walk over to one of the columns and touch the carving of a dove that seemed a few feet off the floor. As he got nearer we realized that far from having to reach down to it, he could not in fact reach it by stretching up. The perfect scale of the building had confused our senses. On the other hand, you do have to wonder what the fisherman from the Sea of Galilee might have made of all this splendour and pomp.
This is a place where the claims of the bishops of Rome are most evident, from the ‘Tu es Petrus’ mosaic in massive letters written around the base of the dome, to the monuments recalling papal declarations such as the ‘immaculate conception’, and above all the grandiose memorials to a swathe of popes in the main basilica. These explicitly proclaim the primacy and universal immediate jurisdiction of the see of Rome. As an Anglican, I find it very easy to challenge the show of pride and opulance, and the claims to power that these buildings and memorials present (whilst not forgetting that my own church has its own grand buildings, monuments and claims).
As a contrast to all the show it is a welcome change to descend to the crypt. Here you stand more or less at the level of the basilica built in the time of Constantine in the first half of the fourth century. Immediately beneath the dome and the high altar (with its great baldachino designed by Bernini, and forged from bronze taken from the Pantheon of ancient Rome) stands the tomb of St Peter. Not his actual tomb, I think, which lies another level down, not accessible to the general public, but a shrine to the saint, nonetheless. This is the place to stand and give thanks for the life of Simon son of Jonah, to whom Christ gave the nickname ‘Cephas’ or ‘rock’ (‘petros’ in Greek), and to pray — especially at this time, in the middle of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity — for the unity of the Church, union amongst Anglicans and union with our other separated brothers and sisters, and especially in this place, union with the see of Rome, with the successors of St Peter.
When you stand before, or over, the tomb of the leader of the Apostles, you are taken back to New Testament times, to the days 2000 years ago when Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee and called Simon, son of Jonah, to follow him, to the days when Simon Peter acclaimed Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ, disowned him, and was forgiven, to the days when he preached the resurrection of Christ in Jerusalem, and then through the eastern Roman Empire, before ending up in Rome, to suffer and die as a witness to the kingdom of God proclaimed by the Jesus he had known. Here, in the crypt of the basilica, the pomp of the main church is forgotten — the roof is low, the walls are plain. Here are the simple tombs of many of the popes, placed close to where they believed Peter was buried. Here it is possible to forget the grandeur that is just a few feet over your head, and to recover a simple spirituality, and the simple message at the heart of what Christians believe, and to which Christians down the ages have borne witness.
It is easy to say that the claims of Rome are misconceived and misunderstood, but even so I find myself not unwilling to allow a primacy of honour to this ancient see, effectively the only one remaining of the ancient patriarchates of Jerusalem (the see of James, the brother of Jesus), of Alexandria, and of Antioch, all three long since having lost their Christian hinterland. This primacy would not be the primacy of the main basilica, a primacy of marble and costly show, a primacy of universal jurisdiction or of infallible pronouncements; rather it would be like the crypt, plain and simple, unadorned, the servant of all, exhibiting moral strength, uncorrupted personal character, and the love of God the Father and of the created world, preached by the carpenter of Nazareth.
0 CommentsToday we visited the church of Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura — St Agnes outside the Walls. It’s the feast day of St Agnes, a young girl of 12 or 13, who was killed in Rome for her Christian faith near the end of the persecution under the Emperor Diocletian, around the year 304. This is the church where she is buried, and a great service is held in this church on this her feast day.
At the start, two tiny (live) lambs, garlanded and bedecked with flowers are carried into the church on trays and placed on the altar. They are blessed, and then, during the Gloria, carried out in procession, and away to a convent. When they are old enough to be shorn, their wool is woven into the palliums which the Pope gives to all Roman Catholic Archbishops (as a symbol of their metropolitan jurisdiction).
Margaret Visser has written an interesting book about this church and the cult of St Agnes, The Geometry of Love (see it at Amazon UK, and there are some pictures on her website). After the service one of our group spotted Margaret Visser in the church and she was kind enough to come and talk to us about the church and the book.
Here we worshipped; here we prayed, at this place (as Eliot wrote about Little Gidding) where prayer has been valid; to stand and pray at the shrine of this young girl, martyred for her faith 1700 years ago today; to stand and pray with this young girl and for this young girl, who surrendered her life rather than offer incense and prayers to pagan gods; to stand and pray with the countless numbers who down the centuries have stood in this same place, before the tomb-chest of Agnes, and who have similarly offered their prayers — this is a moving experience, although one rather wonders what she would have made of the great church and the great service held in her name, let alone the incense offered at the altar over her tomb!
0 Comments