The Story within the stories

 

Reflection given at Zoom Night Prayer on Monday 4th April 2022

John 18.12-24

Reading tonight’s gospel passage reminds me that the Story of our Salvation is found within the everyday stories of daily life in first century Jerusalem.  It is the story within the stories.

Take Annas, faither in law to the High Priest Caiaphas.  His story dominated the initial decades of the first century.  He had been High Priest himself and remained the ‘power behind the throne’ whilst he fours sons, in turn, succeeded him.  Now, with his son in law in power, he remained the mover and shaker in chief.

Annas, it’s thought, was just about as corrupt as they come.  He was a sycophant to the Roman Governor rather than a champion of the Jewish people. 

His family were immensely rich because they owned the stalls in the temple selling unblemished animals, the only sort suitable for sacrifice.  Even the poorest worshipper had to buy their sacrifice at the Booths of Annas at a price which was almost ten times more expensive than outside the temple precincts.  These were the booths that Jesus turned over when he took a stand against extortion in the name of justice. 

No wonder the troops took Jesus to Annas first.  The old high priest wanted to see the young upstart face to face.  And when he did, he broke the law.  A Jewish law which said no question could be asked of a prison which, when answered, would self-incrimate him.  So, Jesus answers back by saying, ‘Ask others, not me’.  He wasn’t evading the law, just reminding Annas that it was he, Annas, who was breaking it at this point by asking this type of unlawful self-incriminating question.

So much going on.  So much history. The story, within all these stories.

 

And then, this evening, a mystery.  The mystery of an un-named disciple who has right of access to Annas’ house, who is allowed in first because he is well known there, and then sends out a message to Peter that he too could come in.

Who was that mysterious disciple with unexpected connections in high places?  Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, Judas, or was it John, the writer of the fourth gospel himself, the beloved disciple?  Some think it might have been.  They suggest John’s Galilean family had a branch office in Jerusalem and sold salted fish from the north in the capital, even supplying the house of Annas.

Another story within the story.

For us, of course, there’s only one story in Holy Week, yet in reality it was going on within the context of all the others.

I remember those days after my parents or grandparents died almost feeling surprised that other people were still getting on with their routines in the shops, on the buses, on the TV, when the only thing that mattered to me seemed so earth shatteringly big, yet no one, outside the family, was noticing.

The final ordinary, routine story of the night came at 3am, the start of the 3^rd watch.  Peter denies his Lord three times, not as a real cock crowed, for no cocks were allowed in the city, but as the early morning trumpet call, which happened at 3am every day to signal the beginning of the 3^rd watch of the night, was sounded.  A trumpet call commonly referred to as the cock crow. 

And once again The Story of Holy Week finds its place within the stories of every day and every night.

God’s activity, the moving of the Spirit among us, isn’t separate from but integral to our ordinary lives and the many stories that make up our every day.  It’s in those ordinary moments when we meet with God and his story becomes ours.  There really isn’t something called sacred, and something called secular, just life. And God is part of it all.

Come to the Waters

Living Water display at the BURG Retreat

Talk given to the Baptist Union Retreat Group this week, the theme of which was 'water'.

On our first visit to Venice, in the early years of our marriage and on a holiday when we counted every lira (pre-Euro days), I dropped the only bottle of water we had left.  The next day we were driving to the Black Forest, so we had no local currency to buy anymore.  It was a boiling hot day and I remember the sound it made as the bottle hit the pavement and burst.

Water is so important and so easy to take for granted.

The other night we attended a talk at a village hall.  My family, many generations ago, came from a village near Amersham called Sarratt, so we turned up at the Sarratt Historical Society’s evening talk on local pubs.  We loved the history and reckoned my relatives would have known quite a few of these establishments, and in the questions afterwards a lady asked a very pertinent question:  Did anyone know when piped water came to the village?  Of course, ale and beer were considered healthier options in the day when water was scarce or contaminated.  Piped, running water transformed lives.

Jesus calls himself and the gospel he taught:  Life Giving Water.

It was a metaphor all about being refreshed and sustained.  Water is life giving to the body.  Living Water is life giving to the soul.

I find this symbolism so encouraging.  That faith and belief in God can bring such a positive understanding to life.  It can sustain us and makes so much possible.

This year I was very taken by the Old Testament reading set for the 2^nd Sunday of Lent from Isaiah 55.  In it the prophet invites those returning from Exile to Come to the Waters.

No longer are these the waters of Babylon, but of Jerusalem.

And yet, returning home wasn’t going to be easy.  The city was in ruins, there would be quarrels about land and food was in short supply.  Maybe this wasn’t the Utopia they were longing for.

And maybe emerging from Covid isn’t Utopia either, especially when it feels just as one world crisis is beginning to subside and another started.

But 500 years before Jesus, Isaiah calls a returning people who will be facing continuing struggles even though they have returned home to Come to the Water.  A call of hope.  A call to trust.  A call to receive God’s help and sustaining joy.

2000 years ago Jesus issued the same call to the Woman at the Well.  Come to the Water, drink of this living water and let it be a well of water springing up inside you to nourish and sustain.

It's still a wonderful invitation and a life sustaining promise:
Isaiah says: Come to the Water.
Jesus says: I am the Living Water.

A Black Halo - Really?

Reflection given at Zoom Night Prayer on Monday 21st March 2022

Whilst living in Yeovil we enjoyed taking friends who were visiting us around St John’s Church, called the ‘Lantern of The West’ because of its huge windows.

One of these is an ‘Apostles’ Window’ depicting The Twelve.  Each of them is represented and honoured with a golden halo, except Judas.  His is black.

At this time of year we recall Judas’ part in the story as the ‘betrayer’, and the recurring question comes to us once more: did he, and does he deserve a black halo?

Treasurers, and that’s the position Judas was entrusted with by the others, are normally reliable and honourable people.  For three years Jesus and the eleven had looked to Judas for their daily bread.  He settled up their expenses and made the practical side of life as comfortable as possible.  No doubt Jesus had had many ‘quiet words’ with him in the past, requesting, perhaps, a gift to help out a disciple’s family back home, or something extra be purchased to make this week’s Shabbat meal a little special as a birthday celebration.  On Maundy Thursday Jesus’ final ‘quiet word’ with Judas is full of deep sadness and dignified resignation.  ‘Do whatever you have to’.

Of course, John is telling us all this overlaying his narrative with his own interpretation of that night’s cruelty.  So, he depicts Judas’ actions as evil.  Part of the diabolical momentum that’s now running which will see Jesus executed at the cross.

And Jesus is very close to the cross as he now sits for one last time reclining at table alongside his friends.  And there’s the rub.  One of them was friend no longer but enemy.  The enemy within.

It’s Jesus’ reaction to disappointment, and here particularly his intense disappointment with Judas, that speaks to me most.  It’s as if he realises that after three years of such close companionship when so many words must have been spoken and discussions had, Jesus knows he hasn’t won Judas over to his version of servanthood Messiahship.  Judas is a zealot, or at least he’s prepared to use zealot tactics, pushing Jesus into a crisis moment of confrontation,  maybe with the hope that his arrest will trigger anger and aggression in Jesus, a call to arms against the oppression of the Romans.

It's conjecture, it’s our yearly attempt at trying to understand Judas Iscariot, friend turned foe.

Does he deserve the black halo he wears in St John’s Parish Church in Yeovil?  Answers of a postcard!

I’m not sure the distribution of halos is ever wise, for don’t all of us combine in our lives the character of both saint and sinner?

What I’m surer of, is the honour due to Jesus at this lonely moment.  The time for debate with Judas is over, he knows he must now accept the consequences of his treasurer’s duplicity.  Yet he does this with quiet dignity and without rancour towards his friend.

Holy Week surely teaches us that the struggles are rarely taken away, what’s important is how we face them.  Jesus faced his with an acceptance that this was the only way forward.  And, having accepted that pathway he walked it in a spirit of forgives to others and trust in God his Father.

View from The Pew: March 2022

 

View from The Pew write up of visit to Oxford - found at: https://viewfromthepewsabbatical.blogspot.com/

It is in giving that we receive

 

There is a line in the famous prayer of St Francis of Assisi that it is in giving that we receive.

At that, sounding in the first hearing like a contradiction, is what we come across the very essence of Jesus.

He came among us to show that most godly of characteristics; self-giving love.

He spoke of his life in terms of a seed being thrown into the ground where it seemed as if it died.  Yet, under the soil in the darkness, it germinated and grew up into a harvest of wheat. 

During Lent and on Good Friday we remember Jesus being given up upon the cross.  To many watching it seemed the ultimate failure, yet because of Jesus today the cross, both inside and outside of the Christian tradition, stands for love, compassion, assistance and peace.

Two years ago next week we entered that first official and prolonged lockdown of the pandemic.  Our world became smaller and more focussed and regularly we applauded and admired those frontline workers who, in the days before a vaccine, literally gave of themselves to keep society going.  Again and again, we encountered sacrificial love and cross shaped generosity.

Lent doesn’t have to be a bleak and joyless time, indeed it shouldn’t be.  Before us is the example of the Lord Jesus and his self-giving love and nothing makes faith more ‘joy-filled’ and ‘down to earth’ that acts of loving service that reflect that side of our Saviour.  It is, indeed, in giving that we receive.

Today is St Patrick’s Day, so happy Saint’s Day to all our Irish friends!  We don’t really know much about St Patrick and he was probably English anyway!  Many think he was sold into slavery and taken to Ireland where he worked for many years in forced labour.  Eventually he returned home to England before receiving a call, which he considered to be ‘of God’, to return to Ireland, this time as a missionary.

It's a wonderful story of someone returning to a place which, for them, was full of painful memories. Yet into this context he pours out his life in sacrificial service.  So, what was a place of sorrow is turned into a context of joy filled service by this self-giving generosity of Ireland’s patron saint.

May themes of sacrificial giving and generous love give us all a sense of joy and hope as we continue our journey through Lent.

Representation of The People by The People

 

I once served as an MP.  Let me explain that!

I sat in my School Parliament as an elected representative of my class; these were heady days you understand and I loved it for we all took it very seriously.

This was my school’s way of instilling a love of democracy among us, and I continue to be grateful for their efforts. 

Of course, to anyone who even casually dips into history it’s obvious that democracy, to misquote Churchill, is the worst form of government except for all the others.

I often think of that whenever I get the chance to visit parliament at Westminster.  I know its architecture is gloriously ‘over the top’, yet perhaps it was quite deliberate of Pugin to give both the Commons and Lords the feel of a cathedral, for there is something reminiscent of the ‘sacred’ in this citadel dedicated to democracy.

One of my favourite scenes from the American political drama series The West Wing is a visitation to the White House of a new democracy recently carved out of The Eastern Block.  The President drafts in an eccentric history professor to facilitate them in drawing up a constitution.  They gather in the Roosevelt Room day after day till long into the night seemingly getting nowhere, with not a page of the new constitution drafted.  Eventually an aide challenges the wise professor who says it matters little that nothing has been written, that can all be done when they get home, for now these few days have been focussed on discussing democracy, getting a feel for it and beginning to have a deep appreciation of what it means, he called it a ‘beautiful process’!

Such thoughts have filled my mind over recent days because it seems that the Russian system of government has enabled dictatorship and an evil tyrant to triumph and wreak terror on its neighbour without the slightest reference to the wishes of the Russian people.

The Bible tells us we have an ongoing responsibility to pray for our leaders.  Today we pray for those leading Ukraine that they will be sustained, even as we continue to pray that those leading Russia will stop this bloodshed.  And longer term, we carry the hope that a more effective dialogue will emerge in Russia so that one day there may be a true representation of The People by The People.

Lord, look upon our broken and blooded world, sustain those who are fighting for their lives and show, we pray, those who would act with aggression the way of peace.
Lord, have mercy.

View from the Pew

 For this week's blog please see the report I've written about our recent visit to Scotland and attending morning worship in Edinburgh at https://viewfromthepewsabbatical.blogspot.com/