Barabbas vs. Jesus

Barabbas vs. Jesus

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church 15/3/15 11.00

Mark 15:6-15  Now at the festival he used to release a prisoner for them, anyone for whom they asked.  ⁷ Now a man called Barabbas was in prison with the rebels who had committed murder during the insurrection.  ⁸ So the crowd came and began to ask Pilate to do for them according to his custom.  ⁹ Then he answered them, "Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?"  ¹⁰ For he realized that it was out of jealousy that the chief priests had handed him over.  ¹¹ But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have him release Barabbas for them instead.  ¹² Pilate spoke to them again, "Then what do you wish me to do with the man you call the King of the Jews?"  ¹³ They shouted back, "Crucify him!"  ¹⁴ Pilate asked them, "Why, what evil has he done?" But they shouted all the more, "Crucify him!"  ¹⁵ So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released Barabbas for them; and after flogging Jesus, he handed him over to be crucified..

You can listen to this sermon here

When Rowan Williams stepped down as Archbishop of Canterbury in 2012,

          he said that his successor would need to minister

          “with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other”[1]

Something which Justin Welby appears to have taken to heart,

          if his recent interventions in matters political are anything to go by.

Of course, when Rowan Williams said this,

          he knew that he was quoting Karl Barth,

          probably the greatest theologian of the twentieth century,

who famously said that preachers should

          take a Bible and take a newspaper, and read both,

                   and should then interpret the newspaper from the Bible.[2]

But what is rather less well known

          is that Karl Barth was himself quoting a preacher from an earlier generation.

Namely, Revd William Brock,

          the founder minister of Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church,

who said, in the middle of the nineteenth century, that

          “the Bible and The Times newspaper are the best materials for the preacher”[3]

And if you were to ask me for a thread that has run through

          the preaching ministry of Bloomsbury over the last 166 years,

it has been a continued fearlessness

          to address the issues of the day from the pulpit,

always seeking to bring the light of Christ to bear

          on the darkness of the world to which we are called.

And so, on the one hand, we read headlines dominated

          by stories of religiously motivated violence,

          and fears of terrorists, insurrectionists, and extremists.

And in the other hand, we read the biblical story

          of a dangerous insurgent and a politically radical preacher.

Some things, it seems, never change…

In our story from Mark’s passion narrative,

          we find the ever-potent combination

          of political, economic and religious ideologies;

and as is so often the case,

          they lead to mob violence,

          scapegoating

          and the death of the innocent.

Some things, it seems, never change.

Let’s take a few minutes now

          to look at the circumstances of this passage,

          as we try to get to grips with what is going on in it.

At a surface level, we have the trial of two political revolutionaries.

          There is Jesus, up on charges of usurping the Roman state

                   by claiming to be the rightful King of the Jews

                   and none other than the son of God.

          And there is Barabbas, whose name itself means “Son of the Father”

                   up on a charge of political insurrection and group murder.

Two revolutionaries, both claiming to be sons of God,

          both accused of claiming political and religious power for themselves.

Both set in opposition to the Roman and Jewish authorities.

The Jewish people are looking to their religious leaders

          for guidance as to what to do,

and the Jewish authorities have in turn turned to Rome,

          in the form of the local procurator Pilate,

          to resolve the issue of these troublesome revolutionaries.

Pilate, in turn, throws it all back at the door of the ordinary people again,

          presenting them with a choice:

Will it be Jesus or Barabbas who gets off?

          Which son of the Father will die, and which will live?

          Which political revolutionary will survive to fight another day?

                             Who will they choose?

                                      Jesus or Barabbas?

This choice between Jesus and Barabbas

          dramatises a wider choice facing the people of Jerusalem…

They each represent fundamentally different kinds of revolutionary practice:

          one might call them: violence versus non-violence.

And the question before the crowds,

          is which path will they choose?

Will they choose Barabbas, the way of the violent revolutionary?

          Or will they choose Jesus, the “dissident of meekness”

                   (as Martyn Joseph calls him)?

Of course, as we all know, because Mark tells us, the crowd choose violence.

          The murderer goes free,

          and the innocent one goes to his death.

Some things, it seems, never change.

Pilate is as mystified by this choice as anyone

          – he thinks he’s been brought in to see justice done,

          but instead he finds himself being asked to legitimate the illegitimate.

And as politicians the world over have discovered,

          sometimes what the people cry for is not the right thing at all.

So the people cry “crucify” at an innocent man,

          and Pilate searches for a reason to justify granting them their wish.

After all, it doesn’t do

          for a politician to make himself unpopular with his people!

So he asks them “Why, what evil has he done?”

          What law has he broken?

                   What has this Jesus done

                             to deserve the execution you are asking for?

And in posing this question,

          Pilate is raising the same issue

          sparked by Jesus at the beginning of the Gospel

                   when he had his initial confrontation with the Pharisees

                   over the healing on the Sabbath

                             of the man with a withered hand (3:4).

This was really the incident that had started all the trouble,

          the event that had set the course to a conflict in a Roman courtyard.

Jesus had asked the Pharisees,

          who were complaining that he had broken the law

                   by healing on the Sabbath,

          “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath,

                   to save life or to kill?”

And in raising the question in this way,

          Jesus had struck right at the heart of the Jewish legal system

– by his choosing to heal on the Sabbath, and in the synagogue,

          Jesus had broken the laws of the Pharisees,

but he had done it in such a way as to show their laws

          for the unjust and oppressive regime that they were.

He had pitted his own mission, of compassion and justice for the poor,

          against the dominant social order,

and in so doing

          had called the entire ideological edifice of the Jewish law to account.

So, back to Pilate’s question from today’s reading:

          “What evil has he done?”

The answer is clear:

          The evil Jesus had done, was that he had taken a stand

                    against institutionalised power.

And as those who have engaged in non-violent resistance

          against institutionalised evil ever since have discovered

          – this is crime enough to deserve torture and death.

Some things, it seems, never change.

The response of the authorities to Jesus’ challenge had been predictable

          – they contrived to destroy him.

Straight after the confrontation in the Synagogue on the Sabbath,

          we are told

                   “The Pharisees went out

                   and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him,

                   how to destroy him” (3:6).

And it is this plot which forms the backdrop to the entire gospel,

          finally nearing its violent conclusion

          in the passage we’re looking at today

                   – with the Pharisees at last succeeding in their aim

                   of getting Jesus to trial before the governing authorities.

But here, curiously, it seems that Jesus isn’t the only one on trial.

          The way Mark tells the story,

                   it looks as if the Jewish system of religious authority

                   is itself on trial.

Pilate, you see, realises that there is no legal basis to crucify Jesus.

          He realises that what he has on his hands

                   is no cut-and-dried legal case,

                   where evidence can be weighted

                             and the guilty party established.

Pilate, it seems, can find no legal basis to crucify Jesus;

          and so he asks, ironically, “tell me, what evil has he done?”

And this question, put to the Jewish authorities as much as to the crowd,

          has the effect of making it clear that they are to be held accountable

          for their request for an execution.

One key difference between the initial confrontation

          that Jesus had with the Pharisees in the Synagogue

                   on the Sabbath near the beginning of the gospel,

and the confrontation we are looking at here, near its ending,

          is whilst that the earlier one took place in Jewish space

                   – with the synagogue representing the Jewish law,

                   and Jesus challenging that authority on its own terms;

          the confrontation before Pilate takes place in Roman space

                    – in the courtyard known as the praetorium (15:16).

As the gospel has progressed, the balance of power has shifted,

          and those who were offended by Jesus’ actions

                   in the Jewish synagogue

          are now being asked to account for their reaction

                   in the Roman courtyard.

Religious conflict has taken political shape.

And the sense comes through this

          that it is not just Jesus on trial here…

          rather, that the whole religious system is under judgement.

The authority structure against which Jesus took a stand

                   at the beginning of the gospel,

          suddenly finds itself faced with the full ramifications of its evil.

The religious leaders’ desire for power

          leads to them bringing an innocent man for execution.

Corrupt power cannot cope with those

          who would seek to show that corruption for what it really is.

Some things, it seems, never change.

In a scene reminiscent of the Roman gladiatorial combat,

          the crowd are appealed to by the Roman Pilate,

          and they are asked to give the thumbs-up or the thumbs-down

                   to the two condemned men.

Barabbas, of course, gets the thumbs up.

          A big cheer for the path of violence, please!

And the first victim is … Jesus.

          The path of peace receives the thumbs-down.

          The crowd choose violence

This is the same crowd, of course,

          who earlier in the gospel

                   were described as being “like sheep without a shepherd”

          and on whom Jesus had compassion as he taught them (6:34).

This is the same crowd who benefited

          from the miraculous multiplication of loaves (8:6),

who were spellbound by Jesus teaching (11:18)

          and who listened to him with delight (12:37).

Yet here they are, baying for his blood.

They are, it seems, still ‘sheep without a shepherd’

          following the lead of those who would lead them astray.

And so the crowd cry ‘crucify’ at Jesus,

          and are manipulated into rejecting the Messiah

          and maintaining the status quo.

The masses succumb to the manipulations of the ruling authorities,

          while the one who has challenged that imbalance of power

                   is sent to his death.

And so the system of domination continues.

          The revolution of peace is suppressed,

                   and the prince of peace is handed over to be killed.

The people in the end choose violence over peace.

Some things, it seems, never change

The crowd which had so recently backed Jesus

          in his attack on the religious authorities,

becomes in turn the tool of those same authorities.

Their call for Jesus’ blood

          echoes both the howls of the demons

                   that Jesus has confronted earlier in his ministry

                             (1:24; 3:11; 5:5,7; 9:26),

          and also the cries of those oppressed

                   by powers and ideologies (9:24; 10:47f; 11:9).

The cry of the crowd is both demonic and despairing.

          On the one hand they are ‘possessed’ by evil,

          and on the other hand they are the pawns

                   of those evil people in authority.

Pilate in the end gives the crowd their satisfaction

          by releasing the lesser revolutionary,

and handing the true dissident over for a beating.

And this, then, is the end of Jesus’ trial.

          He is simply handed over for crucifixion

                   on the say-so of a blood-hungry crowd

                   manipulated by those who would seek to oppress them.

The powers and the people

          have considered the subversive claims of Jesus,

          and condemned him to death.

They have chosen the path of violence

          and rejected the path of peace.

And so the judgement is pronounced.

And so it is today.

When power, religion and political ideology combine,

          and when inequalities are created

                   which seek to keep some in privilege

                   and some in powerlessness,

          mob violence is only ever just around the corner.

When people without a shepherd are manipulated and used,

          they all too easily choose Barabbas over Jesus.

The human tendency to scapegoat the innocent individual

          and to choose violence over peace

remains as strong today as ever it has been.

And the tragic message of this passage remains the same also.

Which is that when people choose violence over non-violence,

          they always in the end pass judgement on themselves.

When Barabbas is chosen over Jesus

          humanity itself dies, and evil is victorious.

Jesus goes to the cross once again,

          and all are implicated.

And so we hear the headlines:

Three teenage girls from east London travel to Syria to fight with Islamic State

Pakistan resumes executions for all capital offences.[4]

Myanmar riot police beat student protesters with batons.[5]

Deadly bomb attacks hit Egypt's Sinai peninsula.[6]

Nigeria's Boko Haram pledges allegiance to Islamic State.[7]

Political parties debate the replacement of Trident[8]

And I could go on, and on…

Some things it seems, never change.

Except…

When the mob cry ‘violence’, and the innocent go to their deaths,

          they follow Jesus to the grave.

And herein lies the mystery of the cross,

          which becomes, for us,

                   not the victory of violence,

                   but its end.

Who is on trial? Who is condemned?

In the final analysis, the path of nonviolence is vindicated,

          and righteous one is justified.

Those who would embrace violence

          always find, in the end, that they have embraced the cross.

And the one nailed to the tree,

          is the one in whom the healing of the nations is to be found.

And so we who would embrace the cross,

          must embrace it as the end of violence.

The cross points us to the conviction

          that conflict is not the solution to injustice and inequality.

The cross points us to another way,

          in our relationships, in our devotions, and in our politics.

The way of the cross is the way of Christ,

          and it lies before each of us.

Some things it seems do change,

          and what is changed, it turns out, is everything.

---

[1] http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/2686/archbishop-my-successor-needs-a-newspaper-in-one-hand-and-a-bible-in-the-other

[2] http://nacreouskingdom.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/bible-in-one-hand-and-newspaper-in.html

[3] http://bloomsbury.org.uk/church/page/a_church_with_two_spires/

[4] http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-31812177

[5] http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-31812028

[6] http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-31811235

[7] http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-31784538
[8] http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-31896570

On burning books and people

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

1^st March 2015 11.00am

You can listen to this sermon here: 

https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/sunday-morning-service-1st-march-2015?in=bloomsbury-1/sets/2015-services#t=34:00

Mark 8.31-38  Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.  ³² He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.  ³³ But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things." 

³⁴ He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  ³⁵ For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.  ³⁶ For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?  ³⁷ Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?  ³⁸ Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels." 

The News Media this week reported that

            ‘Isis militants have … ransacked Mosul library,

            burning over a hundred thousand rare manuscripts and documents

            spanning centuries of human learning.’[1]

I am well aware that in a world of internet-beheadings

                        and other less visible atrocities,

            this is just one more tragedy amongst so many others,

but for this book-lover at least, it is heart-breakingly symbolic of the depths

            to which human beings can sink.

As I read this news story this week,

            I found a quote I’d thought I’d forgotten coming to mind.

It’s from a play written 1821, by the German writer Heinrich Heine,[2]

                        and it’s about the burning of the Quran during the Spanish Inquisition.

Heine said, ‘Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.’[3]

Ironically, his own works were themselves on the list of books

            destined for the Nazi book burning purges of the twenthieth century.

And, again and again, through human history,

            we have seen it to be true,

            on every side of the political and religious divide,

            that where freedom of expression is smothered,

                        and independence of thought is extinguished,

            so the destruction of persons inexorably follows.

Words become flesh,

            and both are burned.

From the Spanish Inquisition to IS militants,

            from Farenheit 451 to Orwell’s 1984,

book burning has functioned as a potent tool of suppression and control.

One of the earliest examples is found in the Old Testament,

            in the book of Jeremiah,

Where the King Jehoiakim of Judah seeks to silence the words of the prophet:

Jeremiah 36:22-25  Now the king was sitting in his winter apartment (it was the ninth month), and there was a fire burning in the brazier before him.  ²³ As Jehudi read three or four columns, the king would cut them off with a penknife and throw them into the fire in the brazier, until the entire scroll was consumed in the fire that was in the brazier.  ²⁴ Yet neither the king, nor any of his servants who heard all these words, was alarmed, nor did they tear their garments.  ²⁵ Even when Elnathan and Delaiah and Gemariah urged the king not to burn the scroll, he would not listen to them.

One of my great treasures is a photograph of the front page of John’s Gospel,

            taken from the first edition of William Tyndale’s New Testament.

It was given to me by my College Principal, a certain Brian Haymes,

            when I left my time at Bristol Baptist College.

Tyndale was the first person to translate the Bible into English

            from the original languages,

and he is the person Melvyn Bragg once called,

            ‘The Most Dangerous Man in Tudor England’

There are only three copies of Tyndale’s first edition in existence,

            because they were seized as they entered the country,

                        and burned in bonfires in London,

            overseen by Cardinal Wolsey and Cuthbert Tunstall, the Bishop of London.

In scenes which could come straight from Wolf Hall,

            six thousand of his New Testaments were burned

                        on the steps of Old St Paul’s Cathedral,

            despite Anne Boelyn and Thomas Cromwell’s efforts

                        to reconcile Tyndale to the King.

One of the three surviving copies ended up in the library at Bristol Baptist College,

            but is now in the possession of the British Library,

            who have it on permanent display just up the road from here at St Pancras.

When he heard that his Bibles has been burned,

            Tyndale famously remarked ‘no doubt they will burn me too, if it be God’s will.’

And sure enough, a few years later,

            he was caught, and burned at the stake.

You see, books are more than words,

            they are ideas made flesh,

they create worlds,

            and invite us to enter into the worlds they create,

            and to start living those worlds into reality.

Books are dangerous,

            words are inflammatory,

and ideas are incendiary.

And supremely this is true in the stories of the word-made-flesh.

When God speaks words of salvation and restoration,

            he speaks them in the person of Jesus,

and the written records of those stories of Jesus

            make these words real to us in our world also.

This was the insight of Tyndale,

            that the words of Jesus might take on fresh life

                        in new languages, in new cultures, in new ways,

            not restricted to Latin, or Greek, or Hebrew,

                        but rendered in English, so that everyone might hear them,

                        from the scholar to the plough boy in the field.

And this is why people burn books,

            and it is why people burn people.

They do it because world-shaping ideas must be suppressed,

            if those who seek to hold power are to be free

            to shape the world in the way that they want it to be.

And nowhere in literature do we encounter a more inflammatory idea

            than that which we meet today in our reading from Mark 8.

This, truly, is a text to turn the world upside down,

            and it is as inflammatory now

                        as it was when Tyndale first translated it into English

                        nearly five hundred years ago.

Just as Tyndale knew that his act of academic rebellion

            against the religious control of the scriptures

            had put him on a course which would end in his own death,

so here in Mark’s gospel we meet Jesus facing the future with a similar certainty,

            as he too takes his stand against the religious and political powers-that-be,

                        and sets his face towards the cross,

            knowing that he is starting down a path that can only end in his own execution.

‘Deny yourself’, says Jesus to his disciples, and ‘take up your cross’

            and in so doing he calls those who would follow him

            to similarly set their faces towards the cross.[4]

The link between words and death is made:

            as words become actions,

            and actions challenge power,

            and power retaliates in defence of its privilege.

Of course, the cross was not a religious icon in first-century Palestine.

            No-one wore the crucifix as an item of jewellery,

                        or gazed upon it as an item of devotion.

The phrase Jesus uses here, so moving rendered for us into English by Tyndale as               ‘whosesoever will follow me let him forsake him life

                        and take up his cross and follow me’

            was no metaphor for personal anguish or pious forbearance,

            in the way it is sometimes used in the contemporary world.

Crucifixion, at the time of Jesus, had only one connotation:

            it was the vicious form of capital punishment reserved by imperial Rome

            for those who were marked out as political dissidents.

As we all know, we still live in a world

            where violent and visible execution

            remains a potent tool of those who would seek to intimidate others.

There are those who still seek to silence voices and mute narratives

            in the interests of asserting dominance and control.

And there are those who seek to do so through the burning and desecration

            of anything that dares to speak an alternative reality into being.

Whether that be ancient Islamic texts in a library in Mosul

            or aid workers seeking to negotiate peace and protect the innocent,

            or civilians wanting to quietly get on with their lives,

            farming their farms, taking their tubes and buses to work…

Such terrorism plays to our deepest fears

The thing is, none of us wants to lose our lives:

            we are afraid of the bomb on the bus,

                        the outrage in the shopping mall, the man in the street with the knife.

It sometimes seems as if the terrorists’ greatest symbolic weapon

            is the ability to persuade people to sacrifice their lives for their cause,

                        taking others with them.

It is here that we hear Jesus’ potent words as he set his own face to the cross,

            inviting others to do the same:

³⁵For those who want to save their life will lose it,

            and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.

³⁶ For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? 

            ³⁷ Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?

Does Jesus sound like a terrorist here?

            Taken in isolation, he could certainly start to sound like it.

But of course, this is not a sound-bite of incitement to violence.

There is a fundamental difference

            between the faithful disciple who carries their cross to its bitter conclusion

                        rather than compromise their calling,

            and the suicide bomber who carries their cross strapped to their chest

                        intent on taking others with them.

Crosses were a common enough sight when Mark wrote his gospel,

            since there was a Jewish insurrection under way.

And in contrast to Judean nationalists

            who were recruiting patriots to ‘take up the sword’ against Rome,

Mark’s Jesus invites his disciples to ‘take up the cross.’

And this action of taking up the cross

            is to be understood as an action of self-denial,

                        understood not in terms of private asceticism,

            but in the context of a political trial.

Under interrogation by Roman state security forces,

            anyone who admitted allegiance to God rather than the emperor

would face in charges of subversion,

            because this was a world where Caesar alone claimed Lordship.

‘Self-denial’, in this context, is therefore about costly political choices.,

            And it is in this world that Jesus speaks words

            that restate the matter another way.

It turns out that if one attempts to ‘save one’s life’ by denying Jesus

            then one is actually losing grip on what it is to be truly alive (8.35)

And conversely, to live - and die - ‘for the sake of Jesus and the gospel’

            is truly to experience ‘life’ in all its fullness…

So, what does, ‘deny yourself, take up the cross, and follow me’ mean for us?

            How do these ancient words reach down the centuries to us?

            How do they translate into our language, our culture, our world?

In many ways, our situation is not so dissimilar to that of the first century.

Like the early followers of Jesus, we too live in an imperial society

            that has stretched its political and economic arms around the globe,

                        seizing the resources of the many to the benefit of the privileged,

                        and overriding the self-determination of other peoples along the way.

In such a world, what does it mean for us to deny ourselves,

            take up our cross,

            and follow the executed and living Jesus in our context?

To avoid this question is to refuse to encounter

            the powerful challenge of this text in our contemporary world.

To turn from its critique of our lives and our culture

            is to burn the words of live that call us to a new way of living,

            and which challenge, once again, the dominant power structures

            of the world in which we live.

‘taking up our cross’ has specific political and personal implications for us all,

            and we cannot afford to ignore them,

            lest we lose our grip on true life along the way.

Taking up the cross does  not mean

            shouldering the personal burdens put before one in life

            and carrying on in the hope of heavenly rewards.

The language of ‘it’s just a cross I have to bear’

            is a misreading of what Jesus is doing here…

The call to self denial does not mean

            the negation of experience, selfhood, human rights, or physical integrity.

Rather, denying ourselves, and taking up our cross,

            is about challenging the self as the centre of our universe.

In this language, Jesus calls us out of life centred on individualism and self-interest

            and into life lived in the reality of God’s love.

The call to take up our cross and follow Jesus

            is a call to walk in a path of radical love,

            that challenges all oppressive power structures,

            wherever they may be found

For some of us at least, this can lead to danger and even the possibility of death,

            because we live out this call in the midst

            of overwhelming forces of greed and violence

            which take no long-term prisoners

            and which fight back viciously when challenged.

Suffering, in the form of persecution,

            is not something any of us should seek out.

But we must recognise that for many who follow Jesus in our world,

            suffering unto death is the consequence of their discipleship.

For those of us in the relatively safe and affluent West,

            we must never turn our faces from the suffering

                        of our sisters and brothers elsewhere in the world,

            because when we look away, leaving them to the flames of persecution,

                        we turn our faces from the burning of the words of life,

                        and become complicit in the evil that would silence love.

To ‘take up the cross’, then, is to resist systems and structures

            that cause or perpetuate injustice.

It is to rebuild systems

            grounded in justice, peace, and the integrity of creation.

It is to resist the rampant and seductive narratives of nationalism

            which tell us the old Lie;

            Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori

It is never a beautiful thing to die for one’s country,

            for one’s sect,

            for one’s tribe.

It is to make our voting choices in the forthcoming General Election

            on the basis of values of justice, equality, and care for the poor.

Did you see the Bishop’s letter recently?[5]

            I didn’t agree with all of it, but, they said:

"The privileges of living in a democracy

            mean that we should use our votes thoughtfully, prayerfully

            and with the good of others in mind, not just our own interests."

The letter goes on to say that:

"In Britain, we have become so used to believing

            that self-interest drives every decision,

that it takes a leap of imagination to argue

            that there should be stronger institutions for those we disagree with

            as well as for those 'on our side.'

Breaking free of self-interest

            and welcoming our opponents as well as our supporters

            into a messy, noisy, yet rich and creative community of communities

            is, perhaps, the only way we will enrich our almost-moribund political culture."

Or, as Jesus might have put it, ‘deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me…’

And the thing is, wholehearted commitment to this way

            is the path to true life;

whilst not choosing this path is to choose the path of death-in-life.

So where now does Jesus call us to take up the cross and follow him?

Where in our lives are we called to resist self-negation,

            the culture of violence, the lure of consumerism, the justification of injustice?

And what are the possible consequences for us of following this path?

Another way of putting this might be to ask,

            what do we most fear?

It may be in our deepest fears,

            that the path to the cross through self-denial may become apparent.

And this will be different for each of us.

This is no one-scheme-fits-all ideology

            where we all behave the same, think the same, and vote the same.

But we do walk forwards towards the cross in community with one another.

Mark’s Jesus did not call people to walk the path of discipleship alone

            but to do so in loving community.

Bound to one another through disagreement and difference

            every bit as much as we are bound to one another

            through our shared commitment to the path of Jesus Christ.

What do you most fear in life?

            Illness? Poverty? The mocking voices of others? Uncertainty?

What do you most fear?

What does taking up your cross, and denying yourself mean, for you?

I’m going to close by quoting from a sermon by Sarah Dylan Breuer [6]

            This was a sermon that she wrote to her congregation,

                        so I’m going to steal her words, and let her speak to us.

            She says:

‘This is a powerful congregation.

            We have power by virtue of our education,

                        our relative wealth in the world,

                        our privilege in society, our voice.

‘It can be very tempting -- all too tempting –

            to seek nothing more than charity.

‘Charity is a start, but it can take us to a dangerous place

            in which we release some portion of our resources

            in order to get more power.

‘We maintain a death grip on the unjust privilege that makes us wealthy,

            that gives us the illusion of control,

            and then we give away just enough to feel generous

            without seriously compromising our privilege.

‘The way of the Cross -- Jesus' way of life -- calls us to let go of that.

‘Jesus' way calls us to be honest about the power we have

            -- both the worldly power we've got

                        because of our skin color, our gender, our social class,

                        our education, our birth in one of the most powerful nations in the world,

            and the spiritual power we have

                        as a community upon which God has breathed the Spirit

            -- and then to let all of that pour out –

                        “let justice roll down like waters,

                        and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24)

            -- to empower the poor.

‘We are called not only to make sure

            that the most marginalized have a place at the table,

            but also to recognize whose table it is.

‘The table around which we gather belongs to Jesus the Christ,

            who saw, as Peter in this Sunday's gospel [reading ]did not,

that true power is made perfect in self-giving love,

            that the way of abundant life leads to the Cross.

‘And the symbol of humanity's brokenness,

            of power corrupted to become domination,

            becomes a sign of peace, and freedom, and life.

‘Thanks be to God!’

Also used in shortened form at Informal Church 7/10/2012

---

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-burns-thousands-of-rare-books-and-manuscripts-from-mosuls-libraries-10068408.html

[2] Almansor

[3] Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen

[4] Parts of what follow draw verbatim from ‘Say to this Mountain’ by Ched Myers et al.

[5] https://churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2015/02/house-of-bishops%27-pastoral-letter-on-the-2015-general-election.aspx

[6] http://girardianlectionary.net/year_b/lent2b.htm