Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
8 April 2018
1 John 1.1
– 2.2
Genesis
22.1-13
Today is
that day in the Christian calendar sometimes referred to as ‘Low Sunday’,
although no-one is quite sure why.
Possibly, it’s
because with Easter Sunday being one of the High Feast days,
the Sunday following it feels, by
contrast, something of a ‘low’.
Or
possibly, it comes from the Latin laudēs,
meaning ‘let us praise’,
which was the opening word of a
medieval sung prayer calling people to worship.
Or possibly
it’s a reference to the fact
that the numbers of bums on seats is
traditionally lower in the week following Easter,
as congregation sizes return to
normal levels
after higher attendance at the great
festival.
However, I
think I prefer a different name for today,
which is also, rather wonderfully,
known as ‘Quasimodo Sunday’.
But before
Philip gets carried away
and starts blowing the cobwebs out
of the Bloomsbury Beast
in tribute to the great organ of
Notre Dame,
the reason
Quasimodo has that name in Victor Hugo’s novel
is because he is abandoned as a baby
on the steps of Notre Dame Cathedral
on the Sunday after Easter.
The term
actually comes from the opening words
of the traditional Latin introit for
this day, Quasi modo genitī infantēs ...,
which translates into English as,
‘Like newborn infants, we come to God’.
And those
of you who have been paying attention
may have noticed that this quote
from 2 Peter was, quite deliberately,
our call to worship for
this morning.
‘Like
newborn infants, we come to God…’.
I like this
very much.
Here we are a week after Easter,
during which season we have enacted
the great truths of the Christian faith;
and yet we come to
today, just seven days later,
as newborn infants,
starting all over again.
Still fresh
in our memories
we can recall the long fast of Lent,
reminding us of our
excesses and calling us to simplicity,
we can still hear joy of Palm Sunday
ringing in our ears,
the fellowship of Mandy
Thursday still calling us to thanksgiving,
the horror of Good
Friday still haunting our souls,
the waiting of Holy
Saturday still gnawing at our hearts,
and the exultation of
Easter Day still lifting us up to new life.
But after
all this, we come to today as newborn infants,
longing for pure, spiritual milk.
There’s a
circularity to the Christian year here,
as the resurrection calls us to
start all over again,
and ask what it is that we are going
to build our life on.
What
spiritual nourishment are we going to take deep within us, and allow to shape
us?
Are we just going to go back to how
things were
before Shrove Tuesday
and Ash Wednesday
called us to the Lenten
and Easter journey,
or has something changed for us over
the last two months?
What kind
of Christian are we going to be, going forwards from today?
What God will we believe in?
What will we build our life on?
Today is a
day for big decisions, because we come to today as newborn children.
However old we may be in terms of
years, we are, today, all infants before God.
And it is
in this context that I want us to hear our reading this morning
from the first letter of John, which
begins at the beginning.
And that,
as the King advised the White Rabbit in Wonderland,
is always a good place to begin.
‘We declare
to you what was from the beginning’, begins the letter,
‘what we have heard, what we have
seen with our eyes,
what we have looked at and touched
with our hands,
concerning the word of
life.
This life was revealed, and we have
seen it and testify to it,
and declare to you the
eternal life
that was with the father
and was revealed to us.’
The letter
starts, significantly, with the revelation of God in the person of Jesus.
In true
Johannine style, a sort of code-word is used for Jesus,
and in language reminiscent of the
prologue to John’s gospel,
Jesus is referred to as ‘the word’.
In this
case, it’s not the pre-existent word of creation that it is in the gospel,
but rather Jesus is presented in the
first letter of John as the ‘word of life’.
Jesus is
the revelation of ‘life’,
and this ‘life’ has an eternal
quality to it,
originating with the father, and
revealed to humans in the life of Jesus.
Or, to put
it another way,
life in all its fullness can be
found and experienced
through an encounter with the life
of Jesus.
So, for
those of us gathering as spiritually new-born infants on Quasimodo Sunday,
this new life that has come us,
and which has caused us
to be ‘born again’,
(to use another of the
Gospel’s phrases),
has been made known to us through
our encounter
with the story of the
life, death, and resurrection of Jesus,
whose life speaks words of life to
us.
This is the
gospel that is ours to share:
the good news that God has been made
known in the life of Jesus.
And here we
come back to the key question,
that today’s invitation to start our
lives afresh with Christ raises for us.
The
question is this:
‘What God will we believe in’?
And the
thing is there are, as there always have been, plenty of options.
In the
ancient world of the first century,
the original context for the first
letter of John,
the
decision as to which God you would worship,
was a very real choice.
Some of the
early recipients of this letter would have been Jews,
worshipping the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob.
And in
fact, the author of the letter, whoever he was,
was himself a Jew, who had converted
to worshipping Jesus as the messiah.
But some of
the other early recipients of his letter
would have been what became known as
pagans,
those who had
grown up worshipping the gods
of the Greek and Roman pantheon,
and possibly also worshipping the
emperor himself.
There were
numerous competing gods available for you to worship in the first century;
and these different gods were encountered
in a variety of different ways.
The God of
the Jews was known through the stories of the Jewish faith,
and through the worship practices of
the synagogues
and the Temple until its destruction
in the year 70,
just a few years before
this letter was written.
The gods of
the Greeks and the Romans were known
through their stories, idols,
images, and temples,
and the worship of them formed the
backbone to the structure of society.
To decline
to worship these gods was an act of rebellion, of civil disobedience.
The Jews
had negotiated a kind of uneasy truce,
by which they had some protection
under the Roman law
to allow them to worship
their God,
but there were strict regulations
preventing them from
seeking to convert others to their faith,
and they were often an easy target
for scapegoating within the ancient world.
The long
and terrible history of European antisemitism
has its origins in the way the Roman
empire
treated and mistreated its Jewish
citizens.
And into
all of this, early Christians like the author of our letter for this morning,
were trying to say something new.
If you want
to know God, they said,
you don’t look primarily to the
Jewish scriptures,
or to the worship
practices of the synagogues;
or to the idols, images, and stories
of the pagan pantheon;
or even to the emperor
in Rome himself.
Rather, you
look to the life of Jesus.
And what
you discover if you do this, says our letter, is a new vision of God,
a new understanding of who God is
and how God can be known.
Verse 5:
‘This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you,
that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all’.
At this
point in the letter, the word ‘life’ drops out of use for a bit,
and is replaced with the word
‘light’, another typically Johannine concept.
The word
that has been heard, seen, and encountered is the word of life,
but what comes into the world
through that word of life
is a vision of a God who
is pure light.
‘God is light, and in him there is
no darkness at all’.
This kind
of understanding of God
stood in stark contrast with the
competing visions of the gods
that would otherwise have been
familiar to the early recipients of this letter.
They
believed that some gods were angry, and some were capricious,
some were gluttonous, and some were
lustful,
some were unfaithful, and some were
violent.
To say that
the gods had ‘no darkness’
would have been as nonsensical to
many of those receiving this letter,
as would saying that humans had ‘no
darkness’ in them.
And this is
because the ancient gods had come into being to reflect human nature;
they took all our glories and all of
our failures,
all of our light and all
of our darkness,
and wrote them across the heavens.
The reason
there were so many gods
was because humans are so
complicated.
The Jewish
understanding of one God
had emerged against a similar
context of many gods;
not the
Roman or Greek gods of the first century,
but the multiple tribal gods of the
Ancient Near East of a millennia or more before.
And the
Jewish belief that God is one, rather than many,
was a radical departure from the
beliefs of the nations surrounding them.
One way of
reading the Old Testament is to see it as a testimony
to the Jewish attempt to understand
their conviction that God is one.
The
different stories of the Hebrew Scriptures
are a series of thought experiments
concerning the nature of God,
as they explore different ways of
articulating their unique perspective on faith.
Is the ‘one
God’ of the Jews a consistent, faithful God, or is he capricious and needy?
Is God a God of war, or of peace?
Does God demand sacrifice or offer
mercy?
The story
from Genesis, of God testing Abraham
by asking him to offer his son Isaac
as a sacrifice,
is just such an example of the Jewish
exploration into the nature of their God.
The question
being asked here is whether God is the kind of God
who demands a sacrifice from his
most faithful follower?
At the
beginning of the story, in an echo of the story of Job,
God decides to test the faithfulness
of Abraham
by asking something of him that is
surely too costly.
And so
Abraham and Isaac set off up the hill,
with Isaac carrying his cross, so to
speak, on his shoulders.
It’s only
at the last moment,
once Abraham has proved himself
willing to sacrifice his own dearly beloved son,
that an angel directs him to an
alternative sacrifice,
and the ram caught in the thicket is
offered in place of the boy.
The
temptations to allegorise this story onto the crucifixion of Jesus are strong,
particularly as the stories of Jesus
carrying his own cross to Golgotha,
and dying as a
substitute for sinful humans,
are still ringing in our ears from
last weekend.
But whilst
this story was clearly in the minds of the gospel writers
as they reflected on the nature of
the Easter story,
there is no
straightforward allegory to be found here.
Because at
the heart of the Abraham and Isaac story
is still a God who demands a
sacrifice.
It might
not be Isaac, but the ram still has to die in his place
in order that he might live.
And if we
simply substitute Jesus for the ram caught in the thicket,
and take this as our understanding
of what happens on the cross,
we still end up with a God who
demands a sacrifice unto death.
And a God
who demands death to satisfy his wrath at human sin
doesn’t sound much like a God who is
light,
and in whom there is no darkness at
all.
This would
be a God of anger, vengeance, and violence,
not a God of life, love, and
reconciliation.
The conviction
that God is life and light,
challenges us to reconsider our
theology of the cross.
If our view
of the cross is dominated by death and darkness,
something profound has gone astray.
If the
cross is about God demanding a blood sacrifice
and then getting what he demands,
we have a
view of God which is predicated on death and darkness.
Saying that
God substitutes Jesus for us,
in the same way that Abraham
substituted the ram for Isaac,
does not solve
this problem.
What we
need is another way of seeing the cross,
and the story of Jesus gives us
exactly this.
If the
story ended at the cross,
we would be left with a violent God,
killing his innocent son,
to satisfy some universal law that
sin must be paid for by death.
But the
resurrection gives the lie to this theology.
The empty tomb challenges all
understandings of God
which are predicated on darkness and
violence.
The events
of Easter Sunday tell us that God is about life, not death.
Death is a human thing, not a divine
thing.
As frail
mortal beings, we live our lives in the shadow of death.
We can postpone it, we can fear it,
we can deny it, but we cannot avoid it.
But God is
not about death, he is about life.
And this means that God is not about
violence.
When we
find ourselves worshipping a God of violence,
I would suggest that we have
invented God, once again, in our own image.
If we
believe that God demands a sacrifice,
and then offers his son to be that
sacrifice,
we are
making our thing to be God’s thing,
and that is surely a grave error.
You see,
the truth is that violence, suffering, and death
are our experience, not God’s.
Murder is a
human action, not a divine one.
Jealously, envy, wrath and rage are
human, not godly, emotions.
And the message of the cross is not that God has
become like us,
demanding
of us a blood sacrifice to atone for our sins.
But rather, the message of the cross is that
God has become one of us,
entering
into our darkness of suffering and death
to
bring light and life, forgiveness and reconciliation.
The cross is God’s sacrifice offered to us,
not
the other way around.
The death
of Jesus at the hands of sinners
unmasks the depths of human
depravity;
it shines
the fierce light of God
into the darkest corner of the human
psyche;
it reveals
the murderous intent that lies deep in each human soul,
and meets that desire for death with
an overwhelming gift of life.
The worst
one human can do to another
is taken by Jesus into his own body
on the cross,
and still
it is not enough to extinguish the life that breaks through the darkness of
death,
to leave the tomb empty and the
darkness defeated.
And so we
are called to reassess our view of God,
to learn to lay aside our God as
angry, violent, and vengeful.
We need to
learn the difficult lesson that darkness lies not within the heart of God,
but within our own hearts.
‘If we say
that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves,
and the truth is not in us.’ (v.8)
But…
‘If we
confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins
and cleanse us from all
unrighteousness’ (v.9)
This is the
good news of the Easter story,
it is a story of life and light,
of forgiveness and
reconciliation,
of peace and
overwhelming love.
The cross
is the ultimate demonstration of God’s commitment to life;
to my life, to your life, to our
life together.
The
challenge for us, as we gather in the presence of God,
as new born infants seeking
spiritual milk,
is to learn
what it is to be born again into the love of God,
to set aside our addictions to
violence,
our compulsions to revenge,
and our captivity to malice, guile,
insincerity, envy, and slander. (1 Pet. 2.1)
And let us
not deceive ourselves that these are not part of us,
because darkness lies in all our hearts.
And let us
not deceive ourselves that these are part of God’s nature,
because God is light and in him
there is no darkness at all.
Rather, let
us find in the story of Christ,
a new way of seeing God, who comes
to us bringing light and life,
and a new way of seeing ourselves,
where we see ourselves
as God sees us.