A Case of Mistaken Identity

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
12 March 2023

Matthew 22.1-14 

Isaiah 25.1-9 

I don’t know what sermon you were expecting to hear on this passage this morning,

            but possibly it might have gone something like this:

 

God’s kingdom is like a wedding banquet

            which is he throwing for his son, Jesus.

Those whom he first invited, the oh-so-religious and pious Jews,

            have declined to attend,

            and have even killed the messengers that God has sent to invite them.

 

So God has sent his messengers to the highways and byways of the world

            to invite everyone else to the party instead,

                        from tax collectors to prostitutes,

                        from riff-raff to nobodies,

                        from the blind to the lame;

            God drags into his party the people who thought they’d been forgotten.

 

However, whilst God may have invited everybody,

            this isn’t a no-strings-attached invitation.

 

Because whilst God loves everybody,

            he doesn’t want them to stay as they are:

                        after all, who would want the serial killer to get in

                        without him changing his behavior?

 

The invitation might be for all, but people must still accept it,

            and must behave appropriately if they are to stay in the party.

 

So a person who comes, metaphorically speaking, in the wrong clothes,

            who doesn’t clothe themselves with garments

                        of love, justice, truth, mercy and holiness,

            is in effect saying that they don’t want to stay at the party,

                        and so they are thrown out into the outer darkness.

 

That’s the sermon I’ve heard preached on this passage before;

            it’s the sermon with the established weight of interpretation behind it;

            and I think, frankly, that it’s a terrible sermon.

 

Let’s think for a moment about where this sermon takes us,

            if we follow it through to its logical conclusion.

 

Let’s start with the king,

            the one who is focussed on throwing a wedding banquet for his son.

 

What do we know about him from the parable?

 

            Well, to start with, he’s pathologically obsessed

                        with giving his son a magnificent party.

            It doesn’t seem to matter who the guests are,

                        just so long as the party is good.

 

He also keeps some very dubious company:

            let’s not forget that his preferred guests for the party

            are themselves hardly the nicest people:

                        they are, we are told, arrogant, landowning businessmen,

                        with a tendency towards murderous violence.

 

The king is also a military man of means;

            we know that he has slaves, and that he has troops,

            and that he is ready to use this power to its full capacity.

 

So he thinks nothing of putting to death anyone who slights him,

            and he’s happy to send in the troops to burn an entire city to the ground

            if they don’t give him the respect to which he believes himself entitled.

 

He is, in short, a military, self-aggrandizing,

            capricious, despotic, dictator.

 

He looks very much like the Herods of the early first century,

            or possibly the more psychotic of the Roman emperors.

 

What he doesn’t look like, if we’re honest about, is God.

 

Or perhaps he does look like God,

            if you’ve got an image of God as a military, self-aggrandizing,

                        capricious, despotic, dictator;

            which is exactly how some people do picture God.

 

There are many who believe that God is just waiting to catch them out,

            to throw them out, to cast them into the place of darkness,

            where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

 

There are many who believe that God’s gracious inclusion only goes so far,

            and that if we don’t respond properly,

            we’ll find ourselves on the receiving end of his sacred violence,

                        levied in judgment on us and the rest of the sinners.

 

But I want to suggest something

            which by now may seem obvious: this is not God.

 

What this is, is a huge case of mistaken identity.

 

So I’m going to suggest that we try to set aside

            the sermon we thought we might get on this passage,

and we try to put out of our minds

            the sermons we’ve heard before on this parable before,

and that we try reading it afresh,

            to see what might emerge from it if we read it a bit differently.

 

What if the king in Jesus’ parable isn’t God?

            What if his son isn’t Jesus?

 

What if the first-invited guests aren’t the Jews?

            What if the forced-in guests aren’t grateful to be there?

What if the man with the wrong clothes on isn’t a sinner?

 

What if people have been reading this parable wrong all these years,

            because they have been reading it through the lens of a wrong view of God?

What if God isn’t a violent dictator after all?[1]

 

Let’s try and her the parable as those listening to Jesus might have heard it…

 

‘There was a king who had a son,’ Jesus begins…

            And his hearers would already have been nodding along:

                        ‘Wasn’t there just!’ we can almost hear them thinking….

 

Herod the Great had been appointed ruler of Judea

            by the Romans some seventy years previously,

and after a reign of nearly half that

            had died and handed over the kingdom to his descendants,

                        the Herodian dynasty, as they became known.

Through a careful series of strategic marriages,

            he and his descendants had ensured that they were able

            to continue their despotic rule of Israel for generations.

 

And there’s nothing like a royal wedding to reunite the population

            behind the fading appeal of an aging monarch, is there?

 

And royal weddings, as we all know, lead to royal babies,

            and so fresh life is breathed into the tired old family firm,

            and everyone is won over for another generation.

 

Or at least, that’s the theory.

            Some of us are not so easily seduced.

            But that’s another story…

 

The Herodians had been ruling Judea for generations,

            their power-base carefully propped up by strategic alliances and marriages,

            supported by the world class Roman military,

                        and legitimated by a string of propaganda exercises

                        designed to keep the people happy.

 

What’s interesting, in Jesus’ story,

            is that the invited guests to the latest Royal Wedding choose not to attend.

 

We know what kind of people they are:

            they’re exactly the kind of people you’d expect to find at a Herodian wedding

                         – one of them owns a farm, another one is a businessman.

            They’re the elite, and they’re turning against the king.

 

Perhaps his popularity is running out, perhaps it’s time for a change,

            there’s always a pretender to the throne waiting in the wings

            if the current incumbent oversteps the mark.

 

The king pushes them a bit harder, and they push back,

            seizing the king’s slaves and killing them.

It’s insurrection time, civil war is only moments away now…

 

So the king sends in the crack troops,

            to utterly destroy those who have defied him, burning their city.

A response worthy of any dictator in any age.

 

But there’s still a party to have.

            There’s a succession to secure.

            There’s a population to be wowed with wedding cake and bunting in the streets,

                        and God help anyone else who doesn’t want to play monarchist.

 

‘Come in, come in, come to feast…

            And don’t you dare say that you’ve got somewhere else to be…’

 

This is political royalist propaganda at its most blatant.

 

And, of course, the people play ball.

            I mean, who wouldn’t?

Everyone loves a royal wedding,

            if they know what’s good for them.

 

Except for one, who doesn’t play ball at all…

            He’s there, along with everyone else who’s been forced to the party.

                        But he’s not joining in.

 

He’s wearing the wrong clothes,

            he’s silent when he should be singing,

            he’s still when he should be shouting.

 

He’s the party-pooper,

            he’s the one who makes everyone else feel uncomfortable,

            because he’s showing their forced jollity for what it is:

                        a lie inspired by fear.

 

‘The kingdom of heaven is like this…’

            said Jesus, introducing this parable.

 

And we may well now ask,

            ‘In what way is this story like the kingdom of Heaven?’

 

After all, we’ve just established that the Kingdom is not the banquet,

            and the king is not God;

this is a very earthly story,

            one familiar not just to those hearing it from Jesus,

            but to those in any generation who have looked at their ruling elite

                        and seen self interest and violent corruption.

 

So where in this parable is the Kingdom to be found?

 

The Kingdom of Heaven, as we know from some of Jesus’ other parables,

            is not always to be found in the places one might expect.

 

Sometimes it’s a mustard seed, small, almost invisible,

            fragile, and waiting to be discovered in the most unexpected of places.

 

I think it’s there in this parable,

            we just need to look for it…

 

When faced with a murderous regime or a despicable dictator,

            this parable points us to three possible responses.

 

The first is the path taken by the initial guests;

            it is the response that plays the political game,

            which seeks to effect regime change and resorts to violence if necessary.

 

The problem with this, of course, is that not only is it a high-risk strategy,

                        as the landowning businessmen in Jesus’ story discovered,

            but even if it is effective, you only end up replacing one Herod with another,

                        and so nothing really changes.

 

This is the path that will most readily appeal

            to those with a vested interest in the status quo,

            to those who have previously been cozying up to the dictator

                        and diligently attending all his parties

            right up until the moment when the wind changed against him.

 

The second response is that taken by those

            who actually ended up at the feast thrown by the king,

                        and this is the path of least resistance.

 

It is the path that says,

            ‘I know he’s a dictator, but what are you gonna do?’

 

It is the path taken by those who feel disempowered,

            by those who live in fear or apathy or both,

            who just want to be left alone and allowed to live their quiet lives.

 

If others take a stand and die for the trouble,

            that’s very sad, but at least we still survive for another night.

 

And really, is there anything so wrong with a bit of partying on demand,

            an extra bank holiday weekend to enjoy the monarchy,

            even if it does represent capitulation to state propaganda?

 

The third response is that taken by the man in the corner

                        who is wearing the wrong clothes.

            In a world of violence and enforced capitulation, he stands apart.

 

This, surely, is the kingdom of heaven personified.

            This is the kingdom of heaven as the suffering servant (Isa 52.13-53.12),

                        the one who remains silent before his accusers

                        and who goes to his death in defiance of the forces

                                    that seek continued and unfettered reign

                                    to diminish, distort, and demean humanity.

 

In the world of the prophetic book of Isaiah,

            written some six hundred or so years before the time of Jesus,

            and speaking to a time of military occupation and enforced exile

                        at the hands of the Babylonian empire,

we find the origins of this suffering-servant counter-testimony

            to the ideology of empire.

 

The Babylonians had declared that the world must bow down before them

            or else face terrible consequences.

Nebuchadnezzar, the king of the Babylonians,

            had declared that all must worship him, and him alone.

 

And it was in the midst of this world

            that Isaiah started to articulate the dream of a new world.

 

In the midst of oppression, Isaiah wrote of a hopeful future,

            of a time and place where tears would be wiped away,

            and people would be free to feast with their God

            in joyful celebration of their liberty from subjugation.

 

The kingdom banquet dreamed of by Isaiah

            is a world away from the wedding banquet of the king in Jesus’ parable.

 

But there is a common thread…

            and it is the figure of the suffering servant.

 

The insight of the prophet Isaiah was that the new world of justice and equality

            could only come into being through the suffering of the innocent

            who take their stand

                        in defiance of the inequalities and violence

                        that otherwise dominate the world.

 

So Isaiah personifies the nation of Israel as the servant of the Lord,

            and speaks of the people of God as the faithful servant

            who is wounded and marred and killed

                        for the sake of the new world that is coming into being.

 

In Isaiah’s time, this was clearly referring

            to the sufferings of the nation of Israel

            at the hands of their Babylonian oppressors.

 

And of course the New Testament writers

            used this same ancient image of a ‘suffering servant’

                        to describe what they saw in Jesus,

            who went to his cross to take upon himself the violence of humanity,

                        opening the way through death to resurrection and new life for all.

 

And it is this figure of the suffering servant

            that we meet in Jesus’ own story of the wedding banquet.

 

The silent man, who has refused to put on

            the appropriate garments of celebration for the royal wedding,

is seized by the king’s attendants, bound like a sacrificial victim,

            and thrown into the outer darkness.

This man is the suffering servant, he is John the Baptist, he is Jesus,

and he is all those who take their stand for the kingdom of heaven.

 This is the crucial moment in the parable,

            and it is here that the Kingdom of Heaven finally comes into view.

 

The guests at the banquet in the parable are in all sorts of trouble.

            They live in world of violence and fear,

                        they are asked to accept propaganda

                        that legitimates their own oppression and coercion,

            and they are in no position to challenge the king,

                        because those who have already tried that are now dead

                                    with their city burned to the ground.

 

The guests at the king’s banquet are a people with no hope.

            And it is to those who live in the land of darkness

                        that the unrobed man comes.

            Standing there in their midst, one of them, yet not one of them.

                        With them, but not the same as them.

            He takes onto himself the wrath of the king,

                        and becomes the sacrificial victim.

He interrupts their victimhood

            by making himself the victim for all.

 

So what about us… ?

 

We, like the prisoner-guests of the tyrannical king,

            live in a world of violence.

 

There is horror being played out before our eyes in Palestine and Ukraine,

            and in so many other places.

 

And our leaders don’t know how to respond

            except by trying to bring peace by violence,

which just perpetuates the suffering to another generation,

            or at best deferring it for another year.

 

And we might well ask, in the midst of the complexities of war and suffering:

            Where is the kingdom of heaven to be found?

 

Where is the counter-testimony to the dominant ideologies

            of retaliation or compliance?

 

Where is the Kingdom

            when those who were once our friends are now our enemies?

 

Where is the Kingdom

            when those who were once our enemies are now our friends?

 

Where is truth and justice

            and righteousness and forgiveness and peace

            in a world of terrorism, war, and bloody murder?

 

Where are those who are taking a stand?

            Where are those who will not bow to the king?

            Where are those who will not comply?

 

Where, in the midst of the spirals of violence that define our world,

            is the kingdom of Heaven to be found?

Where in a world of dictators and despots,

            of ideology and propaganda,

            is the kingdom of heaven to be seen?

 

Many Christians, in so many places around the world,

            have chosen to stand with the suffering servant,

to stand with the quiet man in the wrong clothes

            at the wedding banquet of Jesus’ parable.

 

And they are bearing the marks of suffering in their own bodies,

            for their refusal to join the party of capitulation to the dominant ideology.

 

And by so doing they are bearing faithful testimony, even unto death,

            of their refusal to be conformed to the demands of this world.

 

They are refusing to be intimidated by the violence of the king,

            refusing to bow down to the system of domination that seems to control.

They are holding fast to the cross of Christ.

 

And, Jesus might ask of us:

            Where will we be found standing at the king’s banquet?

 

Or, to put it another way,

            where are we going to take our stand?

---

[1] See Marty Aiken "The Kingdom of Heaven Suffers Violence: Discerning the Suffering Servant in the Parable of the Wedding Banquet.” http://girardianlectionary.net/res/innsbruck2003_Aiken_Paper.doc

What good does forgiveness do?

 A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

26 February 2023

This sculpture is made from decommissioned weapons 

from the civil war in Mozambique 

as part of the Christian Aid 'Swords to Ploughshares' project.

Matthew 18:21-35
 
Imagine two children sat in the back of the car, setting off on a long journey.
            The chances are that it won’t be long before the chanting begins of
                        ‘are we nearly there yet, are we nearly there yet?’.
 
But it probably also won’t be long
            before this refrain is replaced by more anguished cries:
 
‘MUM, she’s over my side’
            leading inevitably to ‘DAD, he’s hit me’,
                        in turn eliciting ‘but she started it’
                                    followed by ‘but he was asking for it’.
 
And so on until journey’s end,
            or until a frustrated parent intervenes
                        to try and bring some peace back to the car,
            by reminding the children
                        that, ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right’
 
This scenario could easily be a parable for the world we find ourselves in,
            as this week we mark the one-year anniversary
            of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
 
Our screens have been full of coverage
            of the horrific taking place on the edge of Europe
as, once again, death and destruction, and fear and tragedy
            are played out in widescreen in our living rooms.
 
None of us who have witnessed these scenes
            can remain unmoved by them
and the emotions they stir within us
            are deep, profoundly upsetting,
            and for some intensely personal.
 
Of course, the offensive in Ukraine
            is not the first time punches have been exchanged,
            and neither will it be the last.
 
From the great war to the cold war,
            from Palestine to Afghanistan,
                        from Iran to Iraq,
            from crusade to jihad,
                        from London to Madrid,
            from Bali to Sharm el Sheikh,
the cycle of punch and counter-punch
            has defined the relationship between East and West
            for over a thousand years.
 
 
 
Those of us who live in the Western world,
            and who enjoy and laud all the many benefits
                        and freedoms which it grants to us,
            cannot escape the troubling fact
                        that our so-called ‘free world’
                        is also locked into a destructive cycle
                                    of violence and counter-violence.
 
Whether in defence of honour, or territory,
            or wealth, or freedom,
or whether in search of justice or retribution,
            we all find ourselves complicit, willingly or unwillingly,
            in the spiralling world of retribution, violence and unforgiveness.
 
The question before us,  
            is what on earth are we to do?
 
Indeed, we might ask,
            what on earth can be done?
Who on earth has the power to intervene, to bring peace,
            to a world which seems hell-bent on fighting its way to journey’s end?
 
The situation was not so different in the first century.
 
The Jewish nation had been trading punches for centuries.
            From Assyria to Babylonia, from Greece to Rome,
                        from the Seleucids to the Maccabees.
 
Conquest, violence, terrorism and revolution
            had become an inescapable part of what it meant to be Jewish.
 
Then, as now, the world was inextricably wedded
            to the myth of violence and counter-violence.
 
And it was to people all-too-familiar with the vicious cycles of retribution
            that Jesus told a parable,
                        not about two children fighting in the back of a long car journey,
                        but about two servants and a king.
 
His parable provides a perfect example
            of the destructive nature of the cycles of retaliation and unforgiveness.
 
Let’s spend a moment with the first servant in the story:
            he is both a debtor and a creditor.
 
He is owed money by someone who is below him in the social hierarchy,
            but he also himself owes money to someone else
                        much higher up the ladder than he is.
 
He’s a middle man, and he’s in all sorts of financial trouble.
            He owes an unpayable debt to his king,
                        far more than he’s ever likely to earn in his lifetime;
            but he’s also owed a much smaller debt by another.
 
He is, by the laws of debt and justice,
            entirely within his rights to demand repayment
                        from the one who owes money to him.
 
He’s entirely within his rights to extract his just dues,
            and if he chooses to do so by exercising violence
                        against the second servant
            he is, by the law of his day, entitled to do so.
 
But, and here’s the catch,
            he is also in a position where the king has every entitlement
                        to do exactly the same to him,
            but more so, because the debt he owes the king
                        is so much higher than the debt he is owed.
 
Think about it for a moment:
If Jesus’ had simply told a story
            about a servant who was owed some money,
            and who then took his payment by force,
the chances are that we would say – well, fair enough.
 
Some might speculate that he was a bit harsh,
            throwing the man into debtors prison,
but some might also reflect that the man clearly had it coming
            and that he shouldn’t have got into debts he couldn’t repay.
 
The real power of the parable
            comes from the fact that the servant’s actions
                        are contrasted with the treatment he himself received
                                    at the hands of the king.
 
In the light of the forgiveness he received for his own unpayable debt,
            his imprisonment of his debtor
            suddenly appears both hypocritical and shocking.
 
He is, it turns out, a man who is happy to receive forgiveness,
            but is unwilling to offer it.
 
Of course, the twist at the end of the story
            is that his decision to withhold forgiveness comes back to bite him,
            and he ends up tortured for his lack of forgiveness.
 
In the gospels, and particularly in Matthew’s gospel,
            where this story of Jesus is recorded,
the language of debt and the language of sin
            are presented as two ways of talking about the same thing.
 
Sins are not personal moral failures in Matthew’s gospel,
            rather they are debts, or obligations, that cry out for repayment.
 
So if I were to say to someone that they had sinned against me,
            I would be saying that they owed me,
            and that they must therefore be made to pay.
 
We still use the language of sin and debt in a similar way today:
 
Imagine the gangster whose honour has been slighted,
            leaning forwards in a sinister manner
                        and pronouncing in a deep voice:
                        ‘you’re gonna pay for that’.
 
So much of the violence we encounter in our world,
            both at an interpersonal and international level,
is about making the other person ‘pay’
            for some actual or perceived sin or injustice.
 
From terrorist bomb, to punishment beating, to tactical invasion
            - violence and ‘repayment for sins’ are intertwined.
 
We even meet this language of sin and debt in the Lord’s prayer.
 
The version most people know best says,
            ‘forgive us our trespasses,
            as we forgive those who trespass against us’;
or if we’re using the more modern version,
            ‘forgive us our sins,
            as we forgive those who sin against us’.
 
But if we turn to the version of the prayer recorded in Matthew’s gospel,
            we meet not the language of sin and trespass, but the language of debt.
 
Matthew 6.12 reads, ‘forgive us our debts,
            as we also have forgiven our debtors.’
 
And in Luke’s gospel,
            the only other place the Lord’s prayer appears in the Bible,
the language of sin and the language of debt are intermingled:
            Luke 11.4 ‘forgive us our sins,
                        for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.’
 
We might say, therefore, that sins committed against God
            are debts to God that cry out for repayment.
 
And that any forgiveness we receive for these debts owed to God
            is inextricably linked to the offering of forgiveness
                        to those who in turn owe debts to us.
 
This is the point of the parable told by Jesus:
            The servant has not learned the lesson
                        that if his own debts have been forgiven,
                        he must also forgive those who owe him a debt.
 
He has forgotten the debt he owed to the king,
            and has become fixated with justifying the debt owed to him.
 
Or, to put it another way, he has forgotten that he is himself a sinner,
            and has become fixated with the fact that he has been sinned against.
 
In this servant’s action,
            we see clearly the violent and destructive outcome of non-forgiveness.
 
The consequence of his actions to extract of his just reward
            is that he himself ends up a tortured soul,
                        unable to pay his own debts,
                        unable to justify his own sinfulness,
            even though forgiveness has been offered to him.
 
We live in a world that is so often dedicated to the extraction of just dues:
            You hurt me, I’ll hurt you.!
            You bomb my city, I’ll bomb yours!
 
These cycles of violence and counter violence are so ingrained within us,
            and appear so seductively just and righteous.
 
Like children in the back of the car we cry:
            ‘she’s over my side’, and ‘he hit me’ and ‘she started it’.
 
All too often there is seemingly no way out
            of this spiral of punch and counter punch,
            which can only ever end in mutually destructive results.
 
And yet Jesus points us to the intervention of the loving parent.
 
Our own desire for justice and retribution,
            however righteous it may be,
needs to be set against the forgiveness offered to us
            by the one to whom we ourselves owe an unpayable debt.
 
When others sin against us, either individually or nationally,
            as they do, sometimes in terrible ways,
we need to measure our response
            by the response of the loving God
            to those who have sinned against him
 
Before we jump on our high horse and start to demand justice
            from those who have sinned against us,
we need to recognize that there may be others
            who might well be entitled to do the same from us.
 
I’m not just thinking here about the international response
            to terrorist actions or aggressive invasions,
I’m also thinking that each of us, as individuals,
            will have incurred debts from others,
each of us has, in different ways, sinned against others,
            just as others have sinned against us.
 
So when we pray, ‘forgive us our debts, as we forgive the debts of others’
            or ‘forgive us our trespasses
            as we forgive those who trespass against us’,
we are praying that a new way of being human,
            and new way of relating to others,
                        will come into being in our midst
                        and by our actions.
 
In this place we speak of the forgiveness offered to us by God,
            and we say that we are those who are forgiven.
 
So in the wake of those moments
            when others do to us a great wrong,
rather than automatically biting back, punching back,
            might we not instead be those who will seek an alternative response?
 
Might we not be those whose lives will bring into being
            the new way of relating to others that Jesus talked about:
            a way of relating built on forgiveness, rather than retribution?
 
So what is the just and righteous response at such times?
            What is to be said today, one year after Russia invaded Ukraine?
 
Is it to ask ‘how can we stop this terrible thing that is happening?’
             - possibly.
 
Is it to ask ‘who is responsible, and how can they be brought to justice’
             - possibly.
 
Is it to assert that ‘we must ensure that the aggressors are defeated
            in such a way that they will never attempt to do the same again,
            either in Ukraine or elsewhere?’
             - possibly this too is a just response.
 
But will these responses truly break
            the cycle of violence and counter violence?
I very much doubt it.
 
Difficult though this is,
            especially when someone has intentionally committed a great evil,
to see that atrocity as the latest in a long cycle
            of violence and oppression,
            imprisonment and subjugation,
            repression and retaliation,
is I think to learn to see it as it truly is.
 
When we retaliate in the name of righteousness and justice,
            when we meet violence with escalating violence,
                        when we demand our pound of flesh from the other
                        in return for wrongs committed against us,
            we are committing ourselves to a spiral of retribution
                        that can only end in torture and terror.
 
Is there another way?
            Yes.
 
It’s called forgiveness.
 
The title of this sermon is a question:
            ‘What good does forgiveness do?’
And here we have the answer:
            It breaks the cycle of violence.
 
I’m aware that using the language of forgiveness
            when we are engaged in armed conflict
in defence of an ally and against an aggressor,
            is a deeply uncomfortable thing to do.
 
But, at the risk of offloading the blame here,
            I think Jesus knew what he was doing when he did the same.
 
Christian living after the pattern of Christ
            should be a continual dispensing of mercy and forgiveness,
            mirroring God’s own character and treatment of his people.
 
If we pray for God’s kingdom to come on earth, as it already is in heaven,
            then we have to start living
            as the people of the coming kingdom.
 
And this means living as people of forgiveness,
            forgiving the debts of others as we ourselves have been forgiven.
 
Society will often view such behaviour as weakness,
            and even in our churches,
                        forgiveness and mercy are all too often lacking
                        in our dealings with one another.
 
But as Mahatma Ghandi reportedly said,
            ‘Only the strong can forgive.’
 
The cost of forgiveness should never be trivialised,
            and when we offer someone forgiveness for their debt of sin towards us,
            we will always count the cost of this action in our own selves.
 
And there will come a time, hopefully soon,
            when the West has a choice as to how it will respond to Putin’s aggression
            and the people of Russia who are caught up in it.
 
For some, in some situations,
            forgiveness of the debt of the other will be a step too far.
 
I have a friend who was abused as a child,
            and she tells of various well-meaning Christians
            who told her over the years that she must forgive her abuser.
 
Her reflection on this has been
            that the requirement on her to offer forgiveness
            has made worse the abuse of her past,
                        by placing her once again in a position of weakness,
                        with others demanding of her that which she doesn’t want to give.
 
However, she has also said that she can see forgiveness as a goal
            towards which it is worth aiming,
                        even if it forever remains out of reach in this lifetime.
 
Some people within this community
            will also find great difficulty and pain
            in all this talk of forgiveness.
 
There are those of us for whom the abuse and sin is too raw,
            who have to live with a range of feelings,
            from anger to injustice, from rage to profound grief.
 
We must never trivialise forgiveness,
            and we must never abusively ask of the other
            that which they are not able to give.
 
Forgiveness is not easy, it does not come lightly,
            it does not come easily,
and for some it remains out of reach.
 
But...
 
Jesus’ parable challenges us
            to never give up making forgiveness and reconciliation our goal.
 
There are many ways in which we can be active
            in forgiveness of sins and debts,
as through our actions and by our prayers
            we bear testimony to the in-breaking kingdom of peace.
 
So we might consider becoming active
            in supporting those who work for peace
            between those nations caught in vicious cycles of violence.
 
We might become involved in campaigning to end torture and oppression
            through the work of organisations like Amnesty International
            or Action by Christians Against Torture
 
We might build conversations and friendships
            with those from other faith communities,
                        both as a church and as individuals,
and by doing so we might play our part
            in bringing together diverse religious and cultural communities
            in relationship and shared understanding
even when so much that is going on in our world
            makes such relationships uncomfortable or problematic.
 
We might involve ourselves in campaigning
            for the forgiveness of debts owed to the West
            by countries that can never repay.
 
We might change our purchasing practices,
            subverting the global system of debt and oppression
                        by buying fairly trade products,
                        or investing in ethical funds.
 
We might choose to become involved in local initiatives
            aimed at alleviating the burden of personal financial debts
            through the offering of debt advice
                        or the establishment of a credit union
 
We might simply seek lift up those
            who have fallen on our doorstep
            in poverty and need.
 
Jesus’ parable about forgiveness
            speaks down the centuries
            to the world in which we find ourselves in today,
and it challenges us to be those who find ways of living forgiveness
            in a world which seems hell-bent on violence
 
Peter asked Jesus:
            How often should I forgive? As many as seven times?
And Jesus replied,
            Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times
 
Don’t count it, just do it,
            and heaven knows what good forgiveness will do.

The Transfiguration of Humanity

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Sunday 19 February 2023

The Transfiguration by Raphael

Matthew 17.1-9  
Exodus 24.12-18  

Émile Coué, the French psychologist and pharmacist,

            popularised a famous mantra, and say it with me if you know it:

"Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better.

            Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better".

Coué encouraged his patients to repeat this to themselves twenty times a day,

            as part of his psychoanalytical technique called optimistic autosuggestion.

The idea was that positive reinforcement of optimistic belief

            could have genuine health benefits.

Strangely enough, at a medical level, he may well have been onto something;

            as the placebo effect is now well documented:

                        when people believe something to be helpful,

                        they will often show a measurable improvement.

I tend to think that something like this lies behind

            many of the stories of faith healing that get told,

                        both within and beyond Christianity;

            people believe that prayer for healing works,

                        and so, at least to some extent, it does.

I mean, I’ve never seen someone grow an arm back after being prayed for,

            but I can understand how people might show improvement

            in other, less tangible, ways after being prayed for.

Interestingly, Coué’s ‘trick’, as he called it,

            was consistent with the idea of social Darwinism,

            as popularised in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This is an extension of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection,

            where the biological concept of ‘the survival of the fittest’

            becomes a model for understanding the development of society

                        and the individual who lives within it.

Social Darwinism finds its origin with Thomas Huxley,

            or ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ as he was sometimes known,

who took Darwin’s theory of the origin of species,

            and made it into a kind of philosophical model

            to explain human society without the need for belief in God.

Huxley, the famous agnostic, almost single-handedly

            created the division between Christianity and evolution

                        that comes down to us today,

            with many Christians still believing

                        that it is incompatible with their faith

                        to accept an old-earth evolutionary understanding

                                    of the origin of humanity.

He was unwittingly aided and abetted in this by the then Bishop of Oxford,

            Samuel Wilberforce, whose famous jibe at Huxley,

                        as to whether Huxley was descended from an ape

                                    on his mother's side or his father's side,

                        did much to create the animosity between faith and science

                                    that we still live with today.

Huxley won that debate, replying to Wilberforce

            that he would rather be descended from an ape,

            than to be a man who misused his great talents to suppress debate.

I think, on this and on many other things, Huxley had a point!

I’m one of those who thinks that evolution by natural selection

            is a perfectly adequate model for explaining

                        the biological adaptation and speciation

                        that we can observe in the natural world.

I just don’t see any conflict between it and my faith in God

            or my understanding of the Bible.

But what I don’t like

            is the use of evolution metaphors for societal and spiritual development.

I simply don’t think it’s true

            that every day, in every way, we’re getting better and better.

Surely the first world war was ample proof

            of the human capacity to descend into hellish madness at the drop of a hat;

and the links between social Darwinism

            and the eugenics programmes of the Third Reich

            are terrifying and deeply chilling.

I have occasionally joked that I do wonder

            if the fact that I was born with no wisdom teeth

            might mean that I am part of the next evolution of humanity,

but it turns out that this is simply a recessive mutation

            that arose about 300,000 years ago.

Or possibly, as some have suggested, Liz!, it is simply indicative

            of the fact that I have no corresponding wisdom!

So, with all of this in mind, what on earth is going on at the Transfiguration?

            What strange new humanity is coming into being here?

Our story, told for us today by Matthew,

            and drawing on the similar story from Mark’s gospel (Mk 9.2-8),

describes Jesus and three of his disciples going up a mountain

            to have a very strange experience indeed.

Listen to Matthew’s words again:

            ‘And he was transfigured before them,

                        and his face shone like the sun,

                        and his clothes became dazzling white.’

As I said, what on earth is going on here?

There are a number of clues in the text to which we need to pay attention,

            if we’re to begin to get to grips

            with what Matthew is trying to do with this story.

The first thing to realise

            is that this description of Jesus is not unique in the Bible;

rather it is drawing on a long tradition, stretching back into ancient Judaism,

            of visions of God in human form,

            and of encounters between humans and the divine on mountain tops.

We heard earlier the story of Moses going up the mountain,

            to meet God and receive the tablets of stone

            with the ten commandments written on them.

If we had read on a bit further in the book of Exodus,

            we would have heard that,

            ‘when Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, the skin of his face was shining…

            and Moses would put the veil on his face again,

            until he went in [back] to speak with him.’ (Exodus 34:30, 35).

It seems that, in some way, Moses’ encounter with God changed his appearance,

            it changed something about the nature of his being.

We might say that he was transfigured by his encounter.

But it’s not just Moses on the mountain that lies behind

            Matthew’s story of the transfiguration of Jesus.

In Daniel’s vision of heaven, he describes how,

            ‘thrones were set in place, and an Ancient One took his throne,

                        his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool;

                        his throne was fiery flames, and its wheels were burning fire.’ (Daniel 7:9).

The use of the colour white here is very deliberate,

            and is often used in the Bible to indicate righteousness.

So for example the book of Acts

            tells the story of the ascension of Jesus in similar terms,

            with two angels in white robes standing beside the disciples:

‘when he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up,

            and a cloud took him out of their sight.

While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven,

            suddenly two men in white robes stood by them.’ (1:9-10).

And Earlier in Matthew’s gospel itself, in chapter 13,

            we can read the promise that

            ‘the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.’ (13:43).

And Matthew’s version of the resurrection story

            is told in similarly dramatic and apocalyptic tones:

‘After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning,

            Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb.

And suddenly there was a great earthquake;

            for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven,

            came and rolled back the stone and sat on it.

His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow.’ (28:1-3).

And in the book of Revelation,

            we have several descriptions

                        both of the divine-human figure called the Son of Man,

                        and of those who follow him,

            all wearing white shining clothes which indicate their righteousness.

Just listen to these few sentences:

‘His head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow;

            his eyes were like a flame of fire,

            … and his face was like the sun shining with full force.’ (1.14, 16)

‘If you conquer, you will be clothed like them in white robes,

            and I will not blot your name out of the book of life. (3.5)

‘Around the throne are twenty-four thrones,

            and seated on the thrones are twenty-four elders,

            dressed in white robes, with golden crowns on their heads.’ (4.4)

‘After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count,

            from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,

            standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white.’ (7.9)

‘These are they who have come out of the great ordeal;

            they have washed their robes

            and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’ (7.14)

‘And the armies of heaven, wearing fine linen, white and pure,

            were following him on white horses.’ (19.14).

My point here is that Matthew is not writing in a vacuum.

From Exodus, to Daniel,

            to the Jesus tradition, to the apocalyptic literature,

the story he gives us of the transfiguration of Jesus

            is part of a wider literary tradition of humanity transfigured

            through encounter with the divine.

Or, to put it another way, when people meet with God,

            something profound and tangible changes within them.

Now, don’t hear me wrong here;

            I don’t think that Jesus was, or even is,

            the next evolution of humanity.

His transfiguration is not some kind of fusion

            of the physical and the spiritual

                        resulting in an ability to exist on a higher plane

                        than the rest of us mere mortals.

Neither is it a mystical experience for us to seek to emulate

            in some quest for enlightenment or esoteric knowledge.

That way lies heresy, I’m afraid.

But nonetheless I do think that there is a new humanity

            coming into being in Christ,

and it is revealed at his transfiguration.

Paul, I think ,was onto this when he described Jesus as the new, or second, Adam.

            Listen to how he puts it in his letter to the Romans:

‘Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man,

            and death came through sin,

            and so death spread to all because all have sinned …

much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace

            and the free gift of righteousness

            exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

Therefore just as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all,

            so one man's act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all.

For just as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners,

            so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous.’

            (Romans 5:12, 17-19).

Paul places Jesus in contrast with Adam,

            the symbolic first human from the book of Genesis.

Humanity came into being through Adam,

            and the new humanity comes into being through the new Adam,

                        the Son of Man, the Messiah who was transfigured

                                    in the presence of his disciples

                                    on the mountaintop in Matthew’s story.

But hear this, and hear it clearly:

            it is not about evolution, it’s about transfiguration.

The new humanity does not arise by natural forces,

            red in tooth and claw (as Tennyson put it),

            from the redundant carcass of the old humanity.

It does not out-compete its predecessor,

            nor does it vanquish it by might and right.

Rather, the new humanity arises by grace and through love.

            It emerges in the midst of our sinful fallen state

            as a gift from God that transfigures our lives and our world.

God, in Christ, is transfiguring humanity.

A new way of being human has come into being in Christ,

            and it has the capacity to utterly transform our way of being in the world.

The clues are all there for us in Matthew’s text,

            which as we have seen is rich with the resonance of ancient stories,

telling of God’s journey with humans

            from their very beginning

            to this crucial, decisive moment of transfiguration.

The mystical moment on the mountain occurs,

            we are told in the first verse of our story, on the ‘sixth day’.

The echo of the creation story from Genesis

            is too strong to ignore here.

According to the ancient myth,

            God created humanity on the sixth day,

            before resting on the seventh.

And in Matthew’s story,

            the new humanity is brought into being on the sixth day.

Then, the transfigured Jesus is seen talking with Moses and Elijah,

            whose symbolic presence speak of the law and prophets,

            fulfilled in the presence and person of the transfigured Son of Man.

The whole of human history is here in this story,

                        contained and completed in this moment,

            and the whole story of human attempts to encounter God

                        is reflected in the glory shining from the face of Jesus:

                                    from creation itself and the first Adam,

                                    to Elijah the prince of prophets,

                                    to Moses the giver of the Law.

It all comes down, for Matthew, to this one moment on the mountaintop

            with Jesus and his three disciples.

Like the narrowest point in the egg-timer of history

            the past funnels to the future through this one moment of transfiguration.

And so the new humanity is born.

The second Adam is transfigured from base human flesh,

            in the company of history, and baffled disciples.

And it’s not about genetics, it’s about inheritance; which is very different.

            It’s about covenant not country.

And any nation, tribe, or people

            who claim exclusive or privileged access

                        to the revelation of God in Christ

            are missing the point of the transfiguration.

From God Bless America,

            to God Save the King,

                        to One Nation under Allah,

God will not be so constrained.

Because God’s people are all people,

            they are humanity transfigured.

And all we need to do to see it, and to see our own place within it,

            is to open our eyes, look to the mountain,

            and see the moment of glory reflected in the face of Jesus.

Paul’s vision of Christ on the road to Damascus

            opened his eyes to the one who appeared to him as

            ‘a light from heaven, brighter than the sun,

            shining around [him] and [his] companions.’ (Acts 26.13)

And what Paul realised in this moment of his personal transfiguration,

            as his eyes were blinded to his old life, and opened to his new one,

what that God was not confined to one people,

            and that the call of God goes way beyond the ‘chosen nation’ of the Jews

            to encompass all the nations of the Gentiles as well.

And so Christianity as we know it was born,

            as Paul set off on his journeys to change the world.

And I think that brings us to today,

            to a gospel with no barriers, no exclusions,

            it brings us to the freely given love of God

                        extended to people of every nation,

                        from all tribes and peoples and languages,

                        of all genders, ethnicities, backgrounds, and sexualities.

This is the new humanity that comes into being in Christ.

We’re it! We are the new humanity,

            and we don’t worship a parochial God who exists to serve us and those like us;

            neither do we follow a partisan God

                        who is defined over and against the wisdom of science.

Honestly, I have had it with ‘little Christianity’:

            ‘Me and my Christian mates, we’re the only ones that are right,

            and the rest of the world is wrong and going to Hell’

Blow that for a game of soldiers!

            That’s not what it’s about.

God is so much bigger than that.

            In Christ, God is revealed as so much bigger than that.

The disciples didn’t really get it;

            they decided that they were going to try and build some little huts

            for Jesus, and Moses, and Elijah to live in.

The human response to this vision

            of the whole of history coming down to this one person,

            is ‘I know! Let’s build him a house so he can live with us, with his mates!’

We constantly take the big God, and we make him into the little God:

            our God, the God who goes with us, and stays with us,

            and dwells with us, and proves that we’re right and everybody else is wrong.

This is not what it’s about.

            It’s not about God of this nation, or that nation,

                        or this people, or that people,

                        or this denomination, or that denomination,

                        or this religion, or that religion.

This is not God over creation,

            it is God in creation, transforming it from within.

This is not a philosophy of gradual optimistic self improvement,

            we don’t become the new humanity

                        by just mutually encouraging ourselves,

                        by singing our happy mantra songs

                        (or whatever it is that we have a tendency to do

                                    in our various Christian traditions).

This is a gospel of the radical transformation of humanity

            without which there is no hope.

Because this is the transfiguration of humanity

            reflected in the glory of transfiguration of the Son of Man.

This is us, we are humanity transfigured.

            And so are they!

And our task is to proclaim the truth

            that there is a much bigger, wiser, more gracious,

            more loving God than any of us have ever grasped.

That it is our calling,

            and it is our only hope.

That is the gospel of Jesus Christ,

            and we should live it.

This is Christ transfigured for our sake,

            and for the sake of the world.