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Sermon - Maundy Thursday - 5th April 2007

Saint Alban's Epping 7:45pm

Readings: Exodus 12:1-4, 11-14 Psalm 116:1-2, 11-18, 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, John 13:1-17, 31b-35

What did Jesus mean when he said that the Kingdom of God was at hand? I think that he believed that the creator God had purposed from the beginning to deal with the problems of the world through his chosen people Israel. Through Israel the world would be saved. Second Jesus believed that this would be accomplished through Israel’s history, in which Israel itself would be saved from her enemies and through which God, the covenant God, would bring his love and justice, his mercy and truth, to bear upon the whole world.

The Jew’s of Jesus’ day were living under foreign rule and the rulers were pagan. Simply, we can see that there were three options open to Jews in Jesus' day. First, the quietist and ultimately dualist option, taken by the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran: separate yourself from the wicked world, and wait for God to do whatever God is going to do. Second, the compromise option, taken by Herod: build yourself for­tresses and palaces, get along with your political bosses as well as you can, do as well out of it as you can and hope that God will validate it somehow. Third, the zealot option, that of the Sicarii who took over Herod's old palace/fortress of Masada during the Roman/Jewish war: Say your prayers, sharpen your swords, make yourselves holy to fight a holy war and God will give you a military victory which will also be the theological victory of good over evil, of God over the hordes of darkness, of the Son of Man over the monsters.

Only when we put Jesus into this context do we realize how striking was his own vocation and agenda. He was neither a quietist, nor a compromiser, nor a zealot. Out of his deep awareness, in loving faith and prayer, of the one he called 'Abba, Father', he went back to Israel's scriptures and found there another kingdom-model, equally Jewish if not more so. The Kingdom of God, he said, is at hand. In other words, God was now unveiling his age-old plan, bringing his sovereignty to bear on Israel and the world as he had always intended, bringing justice and mercy to Israel and the world.

Throughout his brief public career, Jesus spoke and acted as if God's plan of salvation and justice for Israel and the world was being unveiled through his own presence, his own work, his own fate. This idea of the plan being unveiled is characteristically Jewish and Jesus' contemporaries had developed a complex way of talking about it. They used imagery, often lurid and spectacular, drawn from the scriptures, to talk about things that were happening in the public world, the world of politics and society, and to give those happenings their theological meaning.

Thus, instead of saying 'Babylon is going to fall, and this will be like a cosmic collapse', Isaiah said 'the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven'. The Jewish Bible is full of such apoc­alyptic language not all meant to be taken literally. Jews of Jesus' day did not, by and large, expect that the space-time universe was going to come to a stop. They did expect that God was going to act so drama­tically within the universe, as he had before at key moments like the Exodus, that the only appropriate language would be the language of a world taken apart and reborn.

Jesus told stories whose many dimensions cracked open the worldview of his hearers and forced them to come to terms with God's reality breaking in to their midst, doing what they had always longed for but doing it in ways that were so startling as to be hardly recognizable.

Jesus was not primarily a 'teacher'. Jesus did things and then commented on them, explained them, challenged people to figure out what they meant. He acted practically and symbolically, not least through his remarkable works of healing. In particular, he acted and spoke in such a way that people quickly came to regard him as a prophet. Although, Jesus saw himself as much more than a prophet, he wished to be perceived as a prophet announcing the Kingdom of God.

However, like many of Israel's prophets of old, in doing this he con­fronted other kingdom-dreams and kingdom-visions. If his way of bringing the Kingdom was the right way, then Herod's way was not, the Qumran way was not and the Zealot way was not. Also, the Pharisees, who in Jesus' day were mostly inclined towards the Zealot end of the spectrum, were bound to regard him as a dangerous compromiser.

Jesus embarked on a public career of kingdom initiation. His movement began with John's baptism, which must have been inter­preted as a coded dramatization of the Exodus, hinting strongly that the new Exodus, the return from exile, was about to take place. Jesus soon became better known for healing than for baptizing. It was his remarkable healings that won him a hearing. He was not a teacher who also healed; he was a prophet of the Kingdom, first enacting and then explaining that Kingdom.

Jesus' parables were not simply shrewd stories about human life and motivation. Nor were they simply childish illustrations, earthly stories with heavenly meanings. Again and again they are rooted in the Jewish scriptures, in the Jewish narratives that were told and retold officially and unofficially.

The parable of the sower is not simply a wry comment on the way in which many hear the gospel message and fail to respond to it appro­priately. Nor is it merely a homely illustration taken from the farming practices of Galilee. It is a typically Jewish story about the way in which the Kingdom of God was coming.

It is rooted in the prophetic language of return from exile. Jeremiah and other prophets spoke of God 'sowing' his people again in their own land. The Psalms sang of those who sowed in tears reaping with shouts of joy. But above all the book of Isaiah used the image of sowing and reaping as a metaphor for the great work of new creation that God would accomplish after the exile. New plants, new shrubs, will spring up before you as you return from exile. The parable is about what God was doing in Jesus' own ministry. God was not simply reinforcing Israel as she stood. He was not underwriting her national ambitions, her ethnic pride. He was doing what the prophets always warned: he was judging Israel for her idolatry and was simultaneously calling into being a new people, a renewed Israel, a returned-from-exile people of God.

When Jesus said, “repent for the kingdom of God is near”, he was telling his hearers to give up their agendas and to trust him for his way of being Israel, his way of bringing the Kingdom. In particular, he was urging them to abandon their crazy dreams of nationalist revolution. Jesus was opposed to armed revolution because he saw it as, a way of being deeply disloyal to Israel's god and to his purpose for Israel to be the light of the world. Jesus was offering as a counter agenda an utterly risky way of being Israel, the way of turning the other cheek and going the second mile, the way of losing your life to gain it. This was the kingdom invitation he was issuing. This was the play for which he was holding auditions.

Along with this radical invitation went a radical welcome. Wherever Jesus went there seemed to be a celebration; the tradition of festive meals, at which Jesus welcomed all and sundry. Some of Jesus' contemporaries found this so offensive because it was not just that he, as an individual, was associating with dis­reputable people, it was because he was doing so as a prophet of the kingdom and was making these meals and their free for all welcome a central feature of his programme. The meals spoke powerfully about Jesus' vision of the Kingdom; what they said was subversive of other kingdom agendas. Jesus' welcome symbolized God's radical acceptance and forgiveness; whereas his contemporaries would have seen forgiveness and a God given new start in terms of the Temple and its cult. Jesus was offering it on his own authority and without requiring any official interaction with Jerusalem.

This hospitality and inclusiveness is what we are celebrating this evening. We serve one another as sisters and brothers, we gather around the table of the Lord to share a common meal of God’s provision irrespective of who or what we are. This hospitality and inclusiveness draw us back to the upper room with Jesus as our host. He tells us to serve one another and share his holy meal together as if he is physically with us. As the risen Christ was present in the breaking of the bread in Emmaus, so he is with us here this evening and every time we celebrate the coming of the Kingdom. We are to throw off our own ways of trying to bring love and justice, mercy and truth, to bear upon the whole world. We are not to withdraw from the world and wait for God to act. We are not to compromise with our political bosses as well as we can and hope that God will validate it somehow. We are not to just say our prayers, sharpen your swords, make ourselves holy to fight a holy war so that God will give us a victory of good over evil, of God over the hordes of darkness, of the Son of Man over the monsters. So how are we to be citizens of the Kingdom of God?1

Jesus said:

" 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

And

“Do this in remembrance of me … for as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”2