Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
13 May 2018, 11.00am
1 John
5:6-13
John 5.31-40
John
19:30-35
Listen to this sermon here https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/2018-05-13-simon-woodman-water-and-blood
At a recent pro-gun rally,
the
American President Donald Trump
made a
striking reference to the issue of knife crime here in London,
did
you hear this?
He was addressing the National Rifle Association,
which
lobbies strongly against gun controls in the US,
and said that an unnamed London hospital
was “like a
war zone for horrible stabbing wounds”
with “blood
all over the floors”.[1]
And whilst it is likely that he was merely half-remembering
and then
spinning a sensationalist story from the Daily Mail,
it is also true that violent crime, including knife crime,
has been
steadily increasing across the capital in recent years.
The causes of the current spike in violence are complex,
and there
certainly isn’t an easy solution to it.
But that doesn’t stop people wanting to find a one,
and of
course we’d all like it to be
as fast and
straightforward to implement as possible.
So, is the President correct?
Is the
reason we have knife crime
because
we decline to arm the civilian population with guns?
I’m not
sure there’s a great appetite for doing this,
so
maybe we need to look elsewhere…
Maybe we need more police on the streets,
with more
powers to stop and search?
And maybe we just agree to live with the erosion of liberty
and the
systemic racial profiling that such an approach inevitably brings?
Or maybe we should just keep locking people up,
to adapt
another slogan from Donald Trump.
If we keep removing people from society by sending them to
prison,
maybe
that’ll sort the problem?
This week I attended the launch of the Koestler Trust
Prisoner
Artwork exhibition at St Martin in the Fields.
I do hope that you all took the opportunity to look at these
works of art
while they
were on display here at Bloomsbury a couple of weeks ago,
but if you
didn’t you can see them in the Crypt Gallery at St Martin’s.
For the launch event on Tuesday night,
the panel
included two former Chief Inspectors of Prisons,[2]
both of whom spoke with passion about the fact
that our
prisons are simply not solving the problems
we’re
asking them to address.
We have the highest rate of prisoner per population in
Europe,
with 148
prisoners per 100,000 people,
which
compares with 94 in Germany and 84 in France,
and there
are more prisoners in England and Wales
than
in any other country in Europe;
more than
the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium, Austria, Scotland, Sweden,
Switzerland,
Finland, Norway and Northern Ireland combined.[3]
Overcrowding, unsanitary and dehumanising conditions,
and lack of
access to mental health care services,
mean that those who do spend time in prison
emerge
largely ill equipped to take up a meaningful place in society,
and all too
soon they are back in prison or living on the streets.
The question was raised, and raised powerfully,
about
whether this is the kind of society we want to live in,
and there was a good deal of discussion
about what
we might do about it.
And I’d just like to say that if you’re stirred by this
issue,
you might
want to have a conversation with me
about
whether you’d like to become involved
in
the Churches Together in Westminster prison visiting ministry.
I think this is an issue that affects us all,
but it
occurs behind locked doors and high walls,
and
it is very easy to ignore.
I’m going to go on a prison visit at some point, to see how
the other half live,
and I’ll
let you know how I get on.
But as I’ve been reflecting on this during the week,
the
question that has stayed with me
is the question of why it is that we, as a society,
have got to
a place where we are content to simply lock people away,
to
put them out of society,
as the best
solution we have to the problem of their behaviour.
Sure, some people who have deep and violent mental health
problems
may well
need to be locked away for their own and everyone else’s protection.
But most of the people in prison are not in that category
when they go in,
even if
they are closer to it when they come out.
Many studies have shown that prison is highly ineffective
as either
punishment or deterrent,
and yet we still turn to locking people up
not as our
place of last resort, but our solution of first resort.[4]
And all this got me thinking
about the
Old Testament story of the scapegoat (Lev. 16.10),
which will in due course take us into our readings
from the
New Testament for this morning.
The French philosopher René Girard describes this ancient
practice.
He says,
‘The ritual consisted of driving into the wilderness a goat
on
which all the sins of Israel had been laid.
The high
priest placed his hands on the head of the goat,
and
this act was supposed to transfer onto the animal
everything
likely to poison relations between members of the community.
The
effectiveness of the ritual
was
the idea that the sins were expelled with the goat
and
then the community was rid of them.’[5]
This Jewish practice of scapegoating emerged in a culture
where there
were already many different rituals of expulsion,
as
people were declared unclean, or unworthy, or unpalatable,
for
a whole host of reasons.
And the idea of the scapegoat was that it took the place
of those
whose sin or circumstance
might
otherwise render them unacceptable to society.
One of René Girard’s insights is that all societies,
whether
ancient or contemporary,
are prone
to scapegoating.
There is something deeply human
about
wanting to rid ourselves of the thing
that has
come to represent our deepest problems in society.
We can see it most clearly with the benefit of hindsight,
as we
identify places where other societies and cultures
have
engaged in scapegoating,
but it’s
much harder to identify from within when we
do it.
So, we can look at the Suffolk witch trials of the 1640s,
and we can
see how women who didn’t fit the expected model
of
what a woman should be,
were
hunted, tried, and executed,
as
society put on them all its fears about disaster and disease.
We can see it in the way people who were homosexual
were
treated by society through much of the twentieth century,
as they took the blame for everything
from the
breakdown of family life to the Aids epidemic.
We can see it in the way some sections of the Christian
church
still treat
those whose theology or identity is at odds with the mainstream,
blaming these transgressors for bringing God’s wrath
down upon
the wider Christian community.
But can we see it in ourselves, and in our society?
Who or what
represents your deepest fear?
Who would you be gladly rid of
from your
life and your community?
Our society, I want to suggest, scapegoats offenders.
But hear
this very carefully:
this is not
to say that offenders are innocent.
Actually, in order for them to be effective scapegoats,
they can’t be innocent.
A scapegoat has to be guilty of something for the process to work.
As the
first letter of John reminded us the other week,
‘If we say that we have no sin, we
deceive ourselves,
and the truth is not in
us.’ (1 John 1:8).
Everyone’s
guilty of something,
that’s the beauty of the
scapegoating system.
What happens, though, is that the guilt that is rightly
theirs
becomes
magnified, to the point where it starts to take on the guilt
of
everyone else in society,
so that by
putting the scapegoat out into the wilderness,
the
rest of us can sleep easier for a few nights
until
it’s time to do it again.
And as a society we are remarkably efficient at scapegoating.
We have a sophisticated and nuanced legal system
which
defines the fine line between transgression and innocence,
and we punish those who have transgressed,
putting
them behind walls and doors away from the rest of us,
in
the shared conviction that by doing so
we
will rid ourselves of what ails us.
Except, of course, it’s not working.
Violent crime continues to rise,
because
violence is not solved
by ever
increasing punishments for those who are violent.
It is solved by investing in mental health support,
in family
support, in better social care,
in better
education, in mentoring schemes,
in
rehabilitation programmes,
in
restorative justice initiatives.
And our lack of these things is a stain on our society
for which
we all share collective guilt;
we, after
all, are the shared architects of our society.
And so we collude to rid ourselves of our guilt
by
scapegoating the guilty,
requiring that they bear all our sins away to their prison
cells,
in the hope
that we will never see them again.
Can you see the circularity of the system that we’re stuck
in?
This is not a new phenomenon;
as I’ve
said, it’s as old as society.
The ancient Jewish practice of scapegoating an actual goat
at least
had the benefit of punishing an animal rather than a human.
Whereas we have a tendency to reduce humans to animals,
as we lock
them up in the crowded hutches we call our prisons.
But what is to be done?
Well, I think it all comes down to the question
of what
kind of life we want for ourselves.
What kind of life do we want for our families,
for our
friends, our neighbours?
Perhaps more challengingly,
what kind
of life do we want for our enemies,
for
those who offend or upset us,
or
do us wrong or harm?
To put it another way,
what kind
of society do we want to live in?
And this is where our passage from the first letter of John
offers a
valuable insight into our situation.
The challenge that it brings us is a stark choice:
are we
going to live in such a way
as
to bring life into the world,
or are we
going to make choices
that
perpetuate the stranglehold of death?
John offers his readers a tantalising vision
of an
alternative way of being human,
a new kind of life which is lived in the here-and-now,
but which
has an eternal quality to it.
Rather than prolonging those patterns of behaviour which
lead to destruction,
he invites
us to catch a glimpse
of
a different way of doing human relationships
where the
end result is not death,
but
a quality of life that has eternal significance.
Putting it plainly, he says,
‘God has
given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son’ (5:11).
There is something about Jesus which changes everything,
there is
something to be experienced in encountering Jesus
which
opens new possibilities for living.
And this something is called,
in language
strongly reminiscent of John’s gospel, ‘eternal life’.
Now, I want to be clear that ‘eternal life’,
in the way
that it’s used in John’s gospel and the letters of John,
is not a
synonym for heaven where you go when you die.
And by the same token, not having ‘eternal life’
is not a
code for going to hell to be punished eternally.
Rather, when the Johannine writings talk about ‘eternal
life’
they are
speaking about a quality of life
that
we can access in the here-and-now,
but which
has an eternal value
that
transcends our lived reality of right now.
And this ‘eternal life’ is not something that any of us can
find for ourselves,
rather it
originates with the love of God,
is
perfectly present in the person of his son Jesus,
and is
brought to us by the Spirit of Christ
who
is at work in and through us,
drawing
us closer to the example of Jesus Christ.
To be without this eternal life is to be spiritually dead,
but to
discover it is to discover a new way of living
that
breaks through our spirals of unforgiveness and scapegoating,
to draw us
into ‘the highest kind of spiritual and moral life’[6]
If who we are eternally is the redemption of all that we are
now,
then there
are certainly eternal consequences
to
whether or not we live the eternal life of Christ into being in our midst.
But what is it about Jesus that gives us this new quality of
life?
What is it
about the story and example of Christ
that brings
this gift of eternal life to those who encounter him?
To answer this, we need to go back
towards the
beginning of our passage for this morning,
to the strange phrase, repeated in verses 6 and 8,
that Jesus
comes by the water and the blood.
Scholars have spilled much ink over this slightly strange
phrase,
and in true
John-style it probably carries a range of meanings.
Some see an echo here of the baptism and death of Jesus,
as he was
baptised in the waters of the river Jordan,
and as his
blood was shed on the cross.
This would mean that those of us who encounter him in a
life-giving way
do so by
meeting him in the waters of baptism,
and again
and again in the poured out wine of the communion meal.
The Spirit that descended on Jesus at his baptism is with
us,
bringing us
to the new life of forgiveness for our sins
as we too are washed clean of our guilt,
and raised
from death to new life with Christ.
I think there’s something in this,
and I’ll take
the opportunity to repeat the offer I’ve made for the last few weeks
that we’re planning a baptismal service for early June
and if
you’ve not been baptised but would like to be,
please
speak with me.
But the image of water and blood
goes to
other levels of meaning beyond baptism and communion.
There may well be an echo here of the process of human
birth,
where
babies are born into the mixture of blood
and
the waters of the amniotic fluid.
At this level of meaning,
the
assertion that Jesus comes into the world
through
the water and the blood
is a
statement of his total humanity, as well as his total divinity.
Writing against those who were arguing
that Jesus
was adopted by God at his baptism,
John is using this image to show that he believes
that Jesus
was God’s son from his birth.
The implication for those who follow Jesus
is found in
another echo of John’s gospel,
this
time the story of Nicodemus,
who argued
back when Jesus said that people needed to be born again
in
order to enter the new life of the kingdom of God.
Jesus replied to Nicodemus,
‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can
enter the kingdom of God
without being born of
water and Spirit.
What is born of the flesh is flesh,
and what is born of the
Spirit is spirit.’ (John 3:5-6).
Those who want to live the eternal life that Jesus brings
can do so as the Spirit
brings them to new life.
But we’re not done with this image yet.
It speaks to us of
encountering Jesus in Baptism and Communion,
and of being
born anew into the kingdom of God,
but it also takes us
straight to the moment of crucifixion.
We had this in our reading earlier from John’s gospel:
the centurion takes a
spear and pushes it into Jesus side,
and blood
and water flow out.
By this image, the way we enter into eternal life
is through the cross of
Christ.
And this takes us back to scapegoating,
back to violence, and
back to spilled blood.
The practice of taking our collective guilt,
putting it
onto an identified other,
and
then putting them out of society,
is both
ubiquitous and ineffective.
It doesn’t solve the problem it sets out to solve,
and it just
creates more problems in the long run.
But within Christian thought,
the
sacrifice of Jesus is something different.
The significance of Jesus being truly innocent
is that
when the collective guilt of society is placed on him,
and
when he is crucified for the sins of the world,
it is a
once-for-all sacrifice which is effective eternally,
in
all times and in all places.
The insight here is that people can only be freed
from their
compulsion to scapegoat others
when something decisively breaks that cycle,
and that
something, within the Christian tradition, is the cross of Jesus.
The spiral of death is disrupted by the sacrificial death of
Jesus,
and those
who encounter that disruption
are given the capacity to enter into a new way of living
where life,
and not death, is dominant.
Those who know that their sins have been forgiven by Jesus’
death,
can
discover that they no longer need to offload their guilt onto scapegoats,
and so they can start to see new ways of dealing with human
sin
that take
us in the direction of eternal life, rather than death.
So the person who has embraced eternal life in Christ Jesus
will see
pathways to restoration and rehabilitation in others,
where many
will see just evil and danger.
The person who has been born again from above,
will see
possibilities of forgiveness and new life
where
others see just punishment and death.
The person who has been baptised into Christ’s body,
and who
shares in the spilled blood of the cross at communion,
will know that they are a sinner saved by grace,
and that
they should not judge others,
lest they
too be judged.
The person who believes that in Jesus, God became flesh, and
died and was raised,
will know
that the potential for new life
can
emerge from even the darkest of lives,
and so they will resist any attempt to write off anyone as
beyond redemption.
In short, it is through our encounter with Christ,
that we can
stop scapegoating others.
And if we can do that,
we can
start to live in ways that bring life and not death.
And if we can do that, we can offer good news
to those
who are still trapped in spirals of death,
that there is hope and forgiveness
and
restoration and redemption,
and
resurrection to new life.
So when we come to playing our part in society,
in our
voting, and our actions, and our speaking,
we are called to be the voice of the alternative way,
we are
called to resist the insidious narratives of scapegoating,
we are
called to see the divine spark in the darkest heart,
we are
called to visit those who are in prison,
and to
bring liberty to those captivated by evil.
x
[1]
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/donald-trump-london-hospital-war-zone-knife-crime-nra-speech-sadiq-khan-a8337666.html
[2]
Dame Ann Owers and Nick
Hardwick.
[3]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn1page1.stm
[4]
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/nov/04/jail-less-effective-community-service
[5]
http://girardianlectionary.net/res/iss_12-scapegoat.htm
[6]
Stephen Smalley, 1,2,3 John,
Word Commentary, 2007 p.274
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