40 years in the wilderness

This is the subject matter of the 5 th Advent Antiphon: O Morning star, splendour od light eternal and the Sun of righteousness. Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death. According to the historical book of Numbers this star will arise in Israel with a sceptre top rule over God’s ancient people. According to the Gospel of Mathew priests of an alternative religion saw a star in the night sky and followed it to Jerusalem. There they enquired of the then King, Herod, where the child had been born who would be King of the Jews. In Bethlehem, was the answer, which means the house of bread, the gift of wisdom to her people. According to the prophet Isaiah there is a sense in which we are all living in darkness and need enlightenment. Whilst the Psalmist can lament that too often our experience is like the shadow of death. Leonard Cohen has a song in which he remarks that it is only through the cracks in the pot that the light can get in...

Jesus came proclaiming and Incarnating an alternative empire to Rome. It was an Empire characterised by service and love rather than by domination and cruelty. He came to his own people, largely, and incurred the wrath of the authorities by threatening the establishment. Not only did he reject their interpretation of their own scriptures but he established an alternative purity system. At that time there was a very narrowly defined set of conditions of and for those that were deemed acceptable. Acceptable to the power brokers who controlled the means of access to God, namely the Temple. Those who were untouchables, sinners, women, tax collectors ie agents of Rome, Samaritans and so forth. It should be clear that this was a patriarchal structure, defined in terms of gender and race that was intended to exclude. Similarly it should be clear that in word and deed Jesus exploded such exclusivity and inequality. Indeed at one point Jesus suggested that were the Temple to...

The Apostle Paul describes Jesus Christ as the power and wisdom of God (1 Cor 1;24). He is contending with those in the fledgling church that he had helped birth in Corinth who would prefer signs and wonders and great oratory. He is contending with those who measure status and significance in terms of strength and learning. His response is to declare that God’s strength is human weakness and God’s wisdom human foolishness. And that this is exemplified in the person, teaching and death of Jesus the Christ. Jesus to use the song of his Mother was the one who lifted up the lowly and brought down the mighty from their thrones. This is the wisdom of God, the equalisation of all peoples, the honouring of the least honoured and the dishonouring of those who think too highly of themselves. This is the power of God, the forgiveness of sinners, sitting and eating with them and the confounding of religious scruples and cleanliness preclusions. The power is in the sacr...

Jesus described the alternative Empire he came to proclaim, incarnate and establish as treasure hidden in a filed and as a pearl of great price. The Empire of heaven is counter to that of Rome and rooted not in violence, slavery and oppression but peace, service and love. The Empire’s of this world that have come and gone nevertheless share characteristics of their unseen invisible Heavenly counterpart. They are universal and embrace all peoples, they require a response it is impossible to remain neutral in or to either earthly of heavenly Empire’s. In and of themselves these alternative Empire’s mysteriously grow, have a life in and of themselves and bear fruit the one form to evil and the other to good. This Heavenly treasure is hidden because God delights in playing the game of hide and seek, a game that all children love. This is a game of love in contrast to the bullying that so often characterises childrens lives on the playground. It turns out th...

So who has heard of the Sidonians? Perhaps if I say the cities of Tyre and Sidon some might get the Gospel reference to the travels of Jesus. That said it is somewhat strange that he did travel to that part of the ancient world. Again unless we are familiar with the Hebrew scriptures we would miss this as well. For Tyre and Sidon were regarded at the time of Jesus by the people of God as, as good as, or rather as bad as the Samaritans. And I suppose I assume that most people will have heard of them because of one of Jesus’ most famous parables about good neighbourliness. Albeit that once again I suspect most of us will not have a clue that to Jesus’ audience a ‘good Samaritan’ was a contradiction in terms, san impossibility. So Jesus deliberately chooses a Samaritan for his parable just as he deliberately journeys to and through the region of Tyre and Sidon, it is calculated. The Gospel writer Luke as well as Jesus anticipates that we will make ...

This Sunday we turned our attention to the beginning of mark chapter 3. The Gospel writer records an incident early in Jesus ministry in the synagogue on a sabbath.# The scriptures would be opened and read out loud for commentary and discussion. So too we do that on a Sunday morning in church. At its best this is an open ended participative engagement with the words and the one who stands behind them. On this occasion there was a man with a crippled hand and the leaders of the people are looking to see if Jesus will break the sabbath by healing him. Jesus asks them a question from the end of Deuteronomy, the sermon of Moses to the people before they enter the promised land. Is it better to save a life or to kill, to do good or evil on the sabbath. The answer od course is obvious and confounds his opponents. But here is where legalism has driven the religious interpreters of their scriptures. They are occupying a place of condemnation of the Deliverer, the Christ who...

I am somewhat obsessed with numbers when they occur in the Bible. So when I read in an encounter between Jesus and the synagogue ruler that there is a woman there bent over for 18 years I wonder. Apparently and I haven’t been able to confirm this Jesus never quotes form the books of Joshua or Judges. Unsurprising really as these two books record the record of Ancient Israel’s dealings or I should say destruction and genocide of the indigenous peoples of Canaan. As far as these two books are concerned, according to their writers they have God’s sanction for such bloodthirsty violence. Of course it is no wonder Jesus never quotes form them as he takes a very different view of who is my neighbour/enemy (A hated Samaritan par excellence) and teaches not a tooth for a tooth, kill or be killed but rather non-violent resistance of injustice and love of one’s enemies. Therefore in this particular encounter the allusion to Judges chapter 3, the only other...

When I was being introduced to Christianity as I approached the end of my schooling I was encouraged to learn Bible verses. One of those was 2Tim3:16, “all scripture is inspired by God and useful for teaching, reproof, correction and training in righteousness”. I did not realise at the time that that meant the Hebrew scriptures, but a small matter. Similarly I did not fully appreciate that the scriptures that formed the basis of Christ’s meditation while on earth did of course not include the new Testament. I understood by this verse that all scripture was of equal standing, worth and authority. Later I began to realise that some books and verses were valued more highly than others and emphasised more within my particular tradition. Over the years I have had to form my own way of reading the whole Bible in some way that does not leave me with a for example a rather dark view of the God it reveals. So for example in a recent sermon when the preacher described the God of ...

I have been reflecting upon this now in the light of Father’s day, having come and gone. Is God the father male, of course not as the book the Shack so delightfully depicts. Albeit that in that book Jesus, the son is male, whilst father and Spirit are female. But of course there is no gender in God in the sense that we understand that distinction. And I was pondering, I like to think like Jesus’ mother Mary was wont to do, Paul’s famous dictum “Now in Christ there is neither Jew nor gentile, male nor female, slave or free, for all are one in Christ Jesus”. He suggests that in Christ there is an end to all binary distinctions by which ‘we’ gain out ID over and against 'them’. So here in Cambridge we are entering into the season of overseas visitors with all the students departed for the summer. And the distinction between us and them is never more clear than when they take to the roads on their hire bikes! And I wondered whether it was because Paul’s doctrine of the Trinity was so s...

I have been somewhat stuck with the story of Jesus in the Temple as a twelve year old boy. He is discussing the Hebrew scriptures with the teachers of the law. His parents cannot find him and when Mary questions him he replies: Did you not know I would be in my Father’s house? This is not in my opinion a rebuke so much as an invitation to his Mum to go on pondering. The ten infancy narratives of which this is the last at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel give us an insight. Mary AND Jesus are pondering who he is why he has come and how to understand this incarnation in the light of their own scriptures. Mary’s song after her initial encounter with Elizabeth whose husband had also been visited by an angel turns the expected norms of those scriptures upside down. We should expect nothing less inn the person and ministry of Jesus. And the boy Jesus invites Mary to go on ‘seeing’ this revelation/manifestation of God for what it truly is. For in Jesus the God of the Hebrew script...

It is interesting that the word trinity is not a Biblical word and yet is a central ‘Christian’ doctrine. Similarly it is interesting that this Doctrine was not finally formulated until the Council of Nicea in 325 AD. What the first followers of Jesus would have made of the form of creed we now recite is anybody’s guess. Indeed what most of us who recite it make of it is anybody’s guess. For the language and forms of thought that constructed it were neither those of the first church not ours. I went to an induction of a local vicar last night and was struck by a phrase in the service. “To make the Gospel known and relevant in this generation”. Which I took to mean in words and thought forms that resonated with particular people in time and place. Therefore what form the Gospel might take in Great Britain in this third millennium is unlikely to be the very words either of scripture Or the council of Nicea. All that said what is the purpose of the Doctrine of the trinity apart...