rich young ruler, Jesus puts his finger on the point where her life is most sorely in need of living water. Repartee again: ‘Call your husband.’ ‘Haven’t got one.’ ‘No – five down, one to go.’ Oops, change the subject… ‘Are you a prophet by any chance? We have this thing about which mountain we should worship on.’ (‘Oh, you’re from that church, are you? My granny said we should go to this one.’ Always a good distraction.) Objection overruled. ‘Spirit, not mountain, is what matters; and the one God is looking for Spirit-people right now.’ ‘Oh, very interesting – of course one day the Messiah is coming. He’ll explain all that complicated stuff.’ Phew. Let’s not get too far with this.
Pause. No way off the hook. Jesus holds her gaze. Ego eimi, ho lalon soi: ‘I am, who am speaking to you.’ Messiah, and … ‘I am’? End of repartee. Time for action. Sower and reaper are about to rejoice together.
The extension of Jesus’ ministry to the Samaritans, even during his lifetime, is a foretaste of that full extension which Paul celebrates throughout Romans. The Messiah’s death demonstrates the love of God, undercutting all regional or ethnic claims and boasts, and creating a new people, Spirit-people, worship-people.
The Fourth Sunday of Lent
1 Samuel 16.1–13
Ephesians 5.8–14
John 9.1–41
Don’t miss the sinister moment towards the end of John’s great story. We were told from the beginning that the blind man’s condition from birth had nothing to do with previous sins, whether his own or his parents’. That possibility, so prevalent in folk-religion (and in some more sophisticated systems), is alien to the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The Bible regularly refuses to ask ‘why?’, but rather ‘what?’ Our instinct is to look for a ‘solution’ in terms of a theory about the cause or origin of suffering (which might then mean we wouldn’t need to do anything further). God’s is to provide a solution by working towards new creation.
The Pharisees, however, don’t see it like this. Jesus is a sabbath-breaker; he can’t be the Messiah. His mighty works must have a different origin. He is deceiving the people. When pushed in discussion, they give the answer Jesus rejected to the question with which the chapter began: ‘you were born entirely in sins’ (v. 34). Your condition proves that you, and your parents, were in fact ‘sinners’, so you can’t teach us. There is a distant echo of Psalm 51.7, but they can’t be thinking of that (it would apply to them too).
The notion of purity in some sectarian Jewish groups (the Dead Sea Scrolls have the same idea) includes physical wholeness. It was this symbolic world, claiming to be the true observance of the Jewish law, that Jesus opposed with his fresh vision of that very Jewish vocation, to be the light of the world (v. 5). His healings, with all their own rich symbolic value, posed a deep-level challenge: is this not what it means to be loyal to the God of Israel, to be doing his work of salvation and new creation? If this is so, to cling to the symbols of a different world, a hard, exclusive system, is to be truly blind. It is to call down on oneself the very judgement one has pronounced on others (v. 41).
God sees, then, in a different mode to how we see, as Samuel discovered when examining Jesse’s sons – every bit as subversive an action, granted that Saul was still king, as that of Jesus in healing on the sabbath. Christian obedience can be categorized, as a result, in terms of learning to see differently. The image of light flickers and flashes through Ephesians 5: you are light, you are children of light, so your role (unfashionable though this may be) is to shine into the dark corners of life and show up what is going on. In doing so, you are acting as agents of Christ himself, the world’s true light, summoning the dead to life, to wake up to God’s new day. This message is all the more important at a time when our culture seems to have forgotten the meaning of shame. Take the reading back a couple of verses: ‘Let no one deceive you with empty words.’
The Fifth Sunday of Lent
(Passiontide begins)
Ezekiel 37.1–14
Romans 8.6–11
John 11.1–45
‘Resurrection’ began as a metaphor for the return from exile. Ezekiel’s surreal vision was an image of Israel, ‘dead’ in Babylon, being restored to her own land. It goes with the promises of the previous chapters, promises of covenant renewal, of cleansing from sin, of God’s gift of a new heart, a new spirit. The God who breathed into human nostrils at creation will do so again. Covenant renewal will mean new creation.
After Easter, metaphor and history changed places. ‘The resurrection’ should have happened to all God’s people at the end of time, not to one person in the middle of history; Jesus’ followers explained Easter in terms of return from exile, the long-awaited new Exodus. Romans 8 is the classic passage: what God did for Jesus he will do for all creation, liberating it from its present slavery to corruption. Those whose bodies are heading for death, but who are indwelt by God’s Spirit, are assured that what God did for Jesus as an individual he will do for all the Messiah’s people. (Notice how Paul moves between the name and the title: ‘Jesus’ is the individual, ‘Christ’ the one who represents God’s people.)
A preacher who needs help with John 11 is in bad shape. But the story has oddities as well as obvious, indeed spectacular, moments of glory. Jesus heard that Lazarus was ill, and therefore (vv. 5–6) he stayed where he was two days longer. This is only partially explained by vv. 4 and 14: Jesus has something in mind through which God’s glory will be revealed, and the disciples’ faith strengthened (perhaps not only the disciples’, either?). Jesus is the bearer of Israel’s destiny: he doesn’t just teach about the great Return, the new Exodus, he is embodying it. Then the exchange in vv. 39–42: Martha, characteristically anxious, warns about the smell from a three-day corpse; Jesus commands that the stone be removed, and then thanks the Father for having heard his prayer. We must presume that there was no smell: Jesus had prayed for Lazarus’s death to be temporary, and the prayer had been answered.
The life and light of this story are framed by a dark background. The Judaeans (not ‘the Jews’ as in most translations) include many who want to do away with Jesus, and this supreme sign – the sixth in John’s sequence, pointing on to the coming completion of Jesus’ work – will only exacerbate their opposition. Jesus’ prayer and action for Lazarus looks ahead to his own coming ordeal. The resuscitation of Lazarus into the same sort of body partially anticipates the greater event of Easter, when the Messiah will go through death and out into the unmapped new land beyond. But, as Lenten pilgrims know, the road to Easter lies along the way of the cross. Was Thomas doubting, or was he believing, when he said ‘Let’s go too, so that we may die with him’ (v. 16)?
Palm Sunday
(Liturgy of the Passion)
Isaiah 50.4–9a
Philippians 2.5–11
Matthew 26.14—27.66
C. S. Lewis, writing as a literary critic, proposed a test for good writing:
