HOLY WEEK LECTURES 2008

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WHY DID JESUS DIE?

It looks such a simple question, doesn't it? And yet for 2000 years some of the greatest minds have struggled with it. At the practical level it is reasonably straightforward. Jesus died because he was executed with extreme cruelty by some Roman soldiers. Why did they do it? Because the governor told them too. Why did he condemn a man he knew was harmless? Because the Chief Priests blackmailed him into doing it. Why did they do that? Because they regarded Jesus as a serious threat to their own authority, and  to the political stability of the City.  Why was Jesus seen to be such a threat? Because he was mobilising a tsunami of popular support and enthusiasm. And so on. Each “why?” opens up other “whys” and leads back into deeper questions about Jesus,  his motivation,  his self-understanding, his awareness of God,  and his dialogue with the ancient traditions of Israel.

For centuries Christian theologians and teachers have offered differing answers to  our question. A whole library of doctrines has been produced. Anyone who seriously wants to grapple with this question now has to pick their way through two thousand years of evolving Christian doctrines and the shifting images used to illuminate what is at heart a mystery. The Cross is not like anything else in human history. Thousands of men were crucified by the Romans. Why is this one so remembered?

We haven't time to go into all that doctrine this evening, except to note that even in the New Testament there is no one single dominant image or explanation for the death of Christ. From the very first different writers used different words, different metaphors, different images. But there is one little word which is used over and over again, so small that most of us don't even notice it. It is the word “for”. Christ died for us. Or as Paul wrote, “He loved me and gave himself “for me”. “He was wounded for our transgressions.” A huge load of meaning is packed into that tiny slippery word.

In a moment I will try to unpack some of those meanings. But first I want to try and explore the motivation of Jesus himself. What was it that drove Jesus to his fatal confrontation with the Temple authorities? Why did he walk into the jaws of the dragon? If we go right back to the beginning of the Gospel narrative we are told that Jesus had an epic internal struggle with Satan – the embodiment of all the seductive, persuasive, plausible human arguments facing a man who believed he was called to inaugurate God's Kingdom. Jesus rebuffs Satan,  affirming that  he is indeed God's Son. So He has to wait on the Father, wait on the Father's initiative, wait for Father's prompting. His motto is “Not my will, Father, but your will.” And so with his hand in the hand of the Father he goes out to confront the blindness, the paralysis, the hideous oppression of God's people. They are like the slaves in Egypt. Like Moses he is to set them free. But how? Not by raising a rebellion. That is Satan's human way, not God's.
What Jesus does is just to be himself – to act out of the deep spring of truth and love which constantly wells up inside him. Whenever he meets a woman a child or a man he  gives each his undivided loving attention; as they respond to him he offers them the freedom of his Father's Kingdom. “Follow me ; treat other people as I have treated you. Then you will be given the Kingdom”

The Kingdom of God is constituted by healed, renewed and loving human relationships. Jesus invited men and women to come out of  the distorted systems of relationships which are organised by power, hatred, violence, exploitation, taboo and fear. That is the system into which we were all born and in which we a have all to some degree been brought up and with which we collude. Jesus invites everyone, regardless of status, wealth or race to join him in a new community of truthful, generous and mutually nurturing love. In the Kingdom, nationality, race and education are unimportant. In the Kingdom the rich must abandon their wealth if they are to be joyfully welcomed as equals among God's sons and daughters. Wealth distorts human relationships just as much as extreme poverty. There are enough  resources in the world to feed the earth's population twice over. We live in luxury while children starve. We cling to our standard of living at a terrible cost to others. If that isn't a distortion of human relationships I don't know what is. We seem helpless to change it.

Jesus comes to public attention in Judea with his proclamation that the Kingdom of God is here. It has arrived on your doorstep. It is present in himself and his preaching and in his disciples, in that group of men and women (yes, scandalously, women too) who he was showing how to be Kingdom people.  Proclaiming the Kingdom was political dynamite in Judea with its feverish climate of religious rivalries, revolutionary groups, messianic claimants, feuding religious sects, and a ruthless occupying army. Think of Lebanon or Iraq today, or Ulster during the Troubles. 

The Kingdom which Jesus proclaims is God's Kingdom. It doesn't fit any of the normal beliefs or expectations of his contemporaries. He believes that he is called by God to liberate his people and accomplish the restoration of Israel to its calling to be the servant of a loving, liberating God.  His message is God's message to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.

The lost sheep of the House of Israel include the Priests and scribes and the whole apparatus of the Temple, as well as the impoverished masses of peasants. Very early on in his ministry Jesus realises that the main obstacles to his Kingdom programme, indeed the main sources of oppression and exploitation of God's people, were the religious authorities themselves. Very early on they in turn realise that Jesus presents a real threat, not because he is a revolutionary, but because he is challenging the basic ideology of their claim to be speaking for God and to interpret Holy Scripture. In the eyes of the people Jesus' miracles of healing were witness to his Divine Authority – he is clearly acting and speaking for God. Not popular to Caiaphas.

Totalitarian regimes steal the souls of the people. Tyrants hate novelists and poets because they awaken people to the lies they are being told. They shoot them or imprison them so that everyone will continue to believe the State lie. Soviet Russia treated the intellectual dissident poets and writers in the gulags far more harshly than thieves and murderers, because they questioned the very foundation of Communist ideology. For Tyrants thinking is treason. It leads on to speaking the unspeakable aloud: “The Emperor has no clothes.” It was a little boy who said that, and Jesus says, “Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven”. Children see and speak the uncomfortable truth.
Every Jew knew that Imperial Rome was idolatrous. The Emperor had declared himself a god and commanded worship throughout the Empire. The followers of Jesus were later persecuted not for any crime but for their belief that the Creator God had designated Jesus as Lord, Lord of the whole earth to whom even Emperors were subject. Not popular thinking in Rome.

But Jesus was not confronting Rome. He was confronting the rulers of his own people, the House of Israel. The response of the Temple authorities to Jesus reveals the terrible truth – they too have become idolatrous. They were running an oppressive regime which impoverished and oppressed God's own people. The Temple itself and its cult has become idolatrous. Their self-serving interpretation of Holy Scripture has become idolatrous.. The Temple authorities were in effect stealing the souls of God's children and closing down their minds. The Kingdom of God offers them freedom. “The truth will set you free” says Jesus.

He sets them free by giving them back their eyesight and their hearing. Jesus is not a one man National Health Service. All his miracles have profound symbolic power. In effect he says, “Open your eyes! This is what God is doing. This is what God is like. He enfolds prostitutes and tax gatherers, gentile children and lepers and Roman slaves in his arms and promises them the Kingdom.” His touch enables them to hear God's voice and see God's face, to get up out of paralysis and dance into the Kingdom. He invites them to follow him in the Way – a Pied Piper for all human kind. “All you have to do is to respond to this love and allow this relationship with me to make you a child of God. If you respond to me your sin is irrelevant.” To an adulterous woman he says “I don't condemn you.” The Law says she should be stoned to death. The Prodigal son is welcomed home and no questions asked. The Law says he should be stoned to death. How different is this God from the censorious God of the Lawyers. No wonder the common people heard him gladly. No wonder the priests plotted his death. Love like that is subversive of good order and decent religion.

Just by being himself Jesus was bound to come into confrontation with the Temple authorities. It was bound to happen. To act in any other way, to be  more political, more cautious, more compromising, was to betray the very core and mainspring of his being – his spontaneous  openness to the Divine love welling up inside him. He had to challenge the legalism of the Scribes where it locked up people's lives. To do anything less was a failure to love them. And when the religious authorities challenged him,  in the name of love he had to challenge the whole massive edifice of the Temple and its oppressive apparatus which they served.

At what point Jesus realised he was bound to be killed we can't be sure. Certainly by the time Peter named him as the Christ, God's Messiah, at Caesarea Philippi, he already knew the fate that lay before him. My own hunch is that he intended to have a formal, public confrontation with the Temple authorities in the crowded Temple courtyards at Passover. He knew the inevitable outcome. But at least all Israel would then know that the Temple was on the side of Rome not of God.

He was in the same kind of cleft stick as that once faced by a young teenager in a Protestant suburb of Belfast  in 1970. His mother realised he was deeply unhappy and asked him what was going on. He said he had been forced to join a UDF paramilitary gang and was told that he must go and shoot a catholic boy. If he refused the gang would torture him to death. That night he hanged himself in his bedroom. His mother said, “Better that than have him shoot another innocent lad.”

Jesus doesn't commit suicide. He goes open eyed into the jaws of the dragon, drenched in a sweat of terror and doubt, but saying with the last ounce of his soul, “Father, thy will be done, not mine.” The Father doesn't condemn his Son to die. The Son dies because he carries the Father's unquenchable love deep within him right into the jaws of the dragon. Any other decision – to run away to fight another day – is a betrayal of the Father's will to embrace not only the House of Israel, but all human kind with all our appalling sins.

There are still many Christian people who  hang onto the strange notion that God is an implacable judge whose justice must be executed on human sin, and who, because sinful humankind cannot pay the debt or penalty, which justice demands, sends his Son to pay the penalty for us, so enabling him to pardon us. I find that morally and spiritually repulsive. It doesn't touch the heart of the matter which is this: how can personal beings come to personal reconciliation after grave wounding and appalling abuse? The transaction of God with human kind is not institutional, it is essentially a transaction of the heart, of the kind that has to take place between estranged husbands and wives, or parents and their abused children, or torturers and their victims. The law, justice,  has nothing to offer to that exceedingly painful process of truth telling,  forgiveness and reconciliation.. Only love can hope to offer some kind of healing, some possibility of a new beginning That is beyond the reach of justice .

In South Africa the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired be Desmond Tutu, was a brave attempt to bypass the endless cycle of victim, vengeance, retribution and penal process. Some people said, and still say, that without justice and due punishment there can be no closure for the victims. But some of the victims themselves recognised that as long as the truth had been told, the often terrible truths, told in public and named for the atrocities they were, no amount of punishment, not even the death sentence, could ever compensate for the appalling wounds inflicted on so many people. Vengeance never heals the wounds, it only inflicts others, including on those who demand it. Death is a cul de sac. The truth, the terrible, shaming truth is punishment enough when told in the presence of God and the victim. Jesus doesn't punish Peter for his treachery. He just looks at him. He never asks for justice because he knows that human kind cannot bear it. And Peter goes out and weeps bitterly, broken hearted. It is only on the foundation of that weeping that Jesus can can still name him Peter, the Rock, and command him to feed his sheep. But that is a subject for tomorrow.

Why did Jesus die.? Because love drove him into the jaws of the dragon. For love there are no roads round Calvary.

But now that slippery little word For.

We say that Jesus died for us. He was incarnate of the Virgin Mary for us and for our salvation. Paul says “He loved me and gave himself for me.”  I can see how Jesus allowed himself to be arrested in the garden in order to enable his disciples to escape. “I am the man you want. Let these men go.”  When he saw the torches and glints of swords gathering outside the gate to the Garden of Gethsemane, where he had posted his disciples to keep watch, I suppose Jesus could have slipped away over the farther wall and made his escape. But love can't do that. Going back to wake them he gets caught and they go free. In that direct sense he gave himself up for them. Those 11 men and one small boy could realistically say Jesus died for them
But how can Paul say that Jesus “gave himself for me”? They had never met. It's possible that Paul had seen Jesus at some point in his early teens. It's highly unlikely that Jesus had ever seen Paul. But something happened on the Road to Damascus that became  the lifelong dynamo of Paul's hugely energetic life. It was, I believe, an overwhelming awareness of being confronted  by a personal loving Presence who said, “I am Jesus. Why are you persecuting me?”

Two things become clear.
This radiant Jesus is present to Paul because of the Crucifixion.
And, it was indeed the Messiah, God's own human presence to Israel – God's Son - that Israel had crucified. That is why he is radiant.
In persecuting Jesus' disciples Paul was himself continuing to perpetrate that appalling crime of Caiaphas against God's Messiah. It took Paul 20 years and more to work out the full implications of this shattering revelation. At the time it blinded him. But later on he could write that in all his teaching he could know nothing except Jesus the Messiah, the crucified Messiah, the murdered Son of God, who had confronted him on the Damascus Road and enfolded him in his love.

So Jesus did die for Paul as well as for those disciples who deserted him so shamefully in the garden. If Jesus hadn't walked into the jaws of the dragon Paul would have remained out of reach. So would we.

When Jesus confronts the house of Israel with God's truthful love he is in effect bringing God's judgement to bear on the scheming Temple authorities and on a whole nation who could be so fickle that they were happy to shout, “Crucify him, Crucify him!” “Give us Barabbas, we want Barabbas!” But God's judgement is also brought to bear on the disciples. They half knew who he was, their friend and Master, and still betrayed his trust and his love.. He is their victim too. And yet, on the Cross, he can pray, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do!” Not just the brutal soldiers, but Caiaphas, Pilate, the fickle crowds, Judas, Peter and the others. All of them have been caught up in a network of evil, some actively promoting it, others colluding with it, others just drifting along with it, others cowardly or blind victims of it. The only absolutely innocent person in the who sorry drama is Jesus. He is the victim of us all.

Jesus is the ultimate victim of our distorted human community, a kind of death machine. The whole of humanity is entangled in a network of distorted and distorting relationships. He refuses to ask God for justice and vengeance, because the Divine love will never let any human being go. “God was in Christ,” says Paul, “reconciling the world to himself.”  As St John writes, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” God wants reconciliation not justice. As we have seen, reconciliation has to be personal and truthful. For Jesus and for God everything is personal. The Kingdom is a personal world.  Transactions of the heart can be agonisingly painful; yet they are the only currency of grace and the salvation it offers.
How then does the Cross initiate these personal transactions of reconciliation with Paul and finally with us here in Holy week 2008?  Paul is insistent that the Good News – the Gospel – is the crucifixion of the Son of God. “We preach Christ and him crucified.”
How can such an appalling crime be good news? Because it reveals the heart of our Creator God in action. There was a Cross in the heart of God before ever there was one on Calvary. God's will for good cannot be finally defeated because he has in his heart from all eternity the means to reach out even to the most appalling and wicked human beings and to bring them home. But it's not just a demonstration like showing a video of a remarkable heroic action. It is a cross section of  God's own heart, the constantly repeated, unrelenting agency of love, impinging on and engaging with every creature that is capable of love, however diminished or vestigial that capability may be.

The Incarnation and death of the Son of God changes the world by enabling the Divine love to touch and change the lives of any man woman or child who becomes aware that he or she is enfolded in the love of the crucified. That awareness is constantly recreated through the  life and mission and sacramental gifts of the community of Christ's followers – those who believe in him and form his body, his human physical presence in each succeeding generation. The mediators of Christ's presence are physical things – the  physical bodies,  tongues and hands and eyes of his friends, their words and loving touches, bread and wine and water, by all  of which his church is constituted. But all point back to the one event of the Crucifixion, the self-sacrifice of the Son of God for us, which has made the transactions of the heart possible for us.. The heart of that transaction is that we are enfolded in a love which offers us forgiveness, freedom and a new life in relationship to him and one another.
So finally I want to focus on that word, forgiveness.

One of the simplest and best loved of our Passiontide hymns is

There is a green hill far away
Without a city wall,
Where our dear Lord was crucified
Who died to save us all.
We may not know we cannot tell
What pains he had to bear;
We only know it was for us
He hung and suffered there.
He died that we might be forgiven,
He died to make us good,
That we might go at last to Heaven,
Saved by his precious blood.

There's that slippery little word for again. It was for us. The hymn goes on to unpack that “for” by saying that he died that we might be forgiven, to make us good, and to land us in Heaven.
How does this forgiveness, this restitution, this homecoming to God flow out of the death of Christ? This is the last of my attempted answers to the question: Why did Jesus die?
We said just now that Jesus is betrayed and executed by our distorted human society, which failed to recognise him and rejected the Kingdom community which he started to build. That was The House of Israel in collusion with Imperial Rome. He is directly their victim. If he came to reconcile the perpetrators of  that cruelty to God how is it going to happen? At some point in their cosmic history those cruel heartless men are going to be confronted by the Son of God who will show them the wounds in his hands. Let us suppose it is Judas face to face with Jesus. It might be Caiaphas or Pilate, or a million others. “This is what you did to the Divine Love.”

How will they respond? For remember Jesus says, “ I condemn no one.” “I did not come to condemn the world but to rescue it”. Judas has two possible choices. One is to flee into darkness and denial, overwhelmed by the pain and shame of what he has done. The other is broken-hearted weeping, the acknowledgment of the appalling betrayal, the indelible brand of Traitor on his forehead ,like the mark of Cain.

What can forgiveness mean for Judas? It must be something more than a benign formula issued by a magnanimous Christ, a kind of formal Not Guilty. If forgiveness is to be real and complete Judas has to be restored to loving fellowship with Jesus and the other disciples. Pronouncing forgiveness and leaving him outside the door to wander away with his shame is not enough – certainly not enough for the Divine Love. The Crucified Christ stretches out his wounded hands and embraces Judas, enfolds him in his love and offers him a new life. The new life doesn't deny or annul anything that has gone before. What Judas did can never be undone. But it can become the foundation stone on which the Crucified Christ can prove that the Divine Love is more powerful than any human sin. Can we dare to imagine Judas among the Saints shining with a radiance of the redeeming love which had to reach so far and at such cost to bring him home?
What about the victims of Pol Pot or the Holocaust, the 20 million Russians slaughtered by Stalin and his henchmen, Darfur, Ruanda, Hiroshima, The Somme, the slave trade which made us rich. The list of butchery goes on and on. We have done things so appalling to each other that even to read of it makes us sick. Can the Cross carry that huge load of wickedness in which in the end we are all entangled? Can forgiveness stretch that far? And should it? Do we want it to? Do we want to draw a line beyond which we do not want the Divine love to stretch, to draw a line this side of  Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, the men who tortured children to death in Belsen, the paedophiles and, and ,and,........We all have our special baddies to cast into hell, before we turn to Jesus to ask his easy pardon for our mild, innocent little misdemeanors.
There is no easy pardon. We all have to stand before Jesus and  look into his eyes as he shows us his wounded  hands. Today the poor of the world are our victims. Jesus says explicitly in the Gospel that he is in the sick, in the oppressed, and in the starving. So Jesus is our victim too. We may not have hammered the nails in, but we have sat by and watched, or turned away to watch Who Wants to be a Millionaire. And he tells us that our forgiveness depends on our forgiving – not condemning anyone. Men and women condemn themselves if they reject the offer of truth and reconciliation. We all have to face that agonising truth about ourselves when we are enfolded in those wounded arms. And then in the eternities we have to go round and ask the pardon of all the people who in any way have been our victims, because it is our victims who mediate to us the forgiveness of God and are able to enfold us in his love.
A young man once asked a Bishop of the Orthodox Church why God had allowed so many millions of Christians to be killed in Soviet Russia. “Ah,” he replied, “ There had to be a lot of them. Who else is going to plead before God for the forgiveness of the Communists. That will be their glory.”

And that is glory of the Cross. “Father forgive them. They know not what they do”. In St John Jesus asks the Father to glorify his Son;  that is to placard his all embracing love on Calvary. “I if I am lifted up from the earth will draw all human kind to myself.”
That is why Jesus died.      

Holy Week Lecture 2 CIRENCESTER'08

DID JESUS REALLY RISE FROM THE DEAD.?

In his first letter to the Corinthians  Paul devotes the whole of Chapter 15 – nearly 60 verses – to an intense discussion of the Resurrection. That must surely have been prompted by some Christians in that highly educated city questioning the believability of the Gospel message of Christ's Rising from  the dead. So right back there within 20 years of the event people were asking exactly the same question as we are asking ourselves this evening. For Paul it was the central hinge of his faith. “If Christ is not raised then your faith has nothing in it. If it is for this life only that Christ has given us hope, then we are of all men the most to be pitied.” Without the Resurrection Christianity is whistling in the dark.

But is it believable? For many generations from, say, 500 AD to 1700 AD it was unquestioningly  believed by almost everyone in the area we used to call Christendom. Their reasoning was simple. The Bible is God's Holy Scripture. He guarantees that the Gospels are true. The Gospels record the appearances of the Risen Christ. So that's that. Of course  it was not believed by Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists. For them the Gospels don't have unquestionable authority. But making an act of faith in unquestionable texts is as problematical as believing that someone rose from the dead.  Since the C18th the Gospel narratives have been questioned and doubted not only by  Muslims, Rationalists and atheists but also by many who nevertheless claimed the name of Christian. In our own time we have had two Bishops who have come to quite contrary conclusions about the nature of the Resurrection narratives, one who believed that they were in places poetic attempts to describe a real but indescribable experience; and another who believes that they are eyewitness accounts of what actually happened.

I don't want to get involved tonight in a detailed historical analysis of the Gospel texts. But I have to point out that, however disturbing we may find it, there is wide disagreement among the most eminent, truthful  and respected Christian theologians about the extent to which the Gospels are  authentic records of the actual events of the life of Jesus; or, in some places, later elaborations by his followers in the second and third generations of the early Church. It's not just that we live in a climate of scepticism. Unless you believe that Scripture is factually inerrant, the evidence is genuinely perplexing.

I want this evening to look at three particular incidents recorded in the New Testament.

We have to remember that the Gospels are not the earliest witnesses to the event. Mark wrote about 35 years later, Matthew, 45, Luke 55 and John at least 60 years after Jesus died. I want to begin by going back behind the Gospels to an event much closer to the Crucifixion and unquestionably authentic – Paul's encounter on the Road to Damascus. It is told three times with minor variations, but it is clearly Paul's own narrative. I want to pick up from where we left Paul last night and to ask again what actually happened on that day – What was that event which has changed the history of the world?

We know from Paul's own account that he was a hardline Orthodox Jew, fanatical in his zeal for the most rigorous interpretation of the Jewish Torah. Think of the Taliban, or an Islamic fundamentalist in Saudi Arabia. We know he had been involved in the  stoning of a notable Christian called Stephen; there may well have been others he had had killed or imprisoned. He had a visceral loathing for these vermin who were corrupting the Orthodox Jewish faith. It was that fanatical loathing that sent him off to Damascus.

Once again the accounts of this mysterious event - something clearly happened -  are open to different interpretations. Did he have a seizure or an epileptic fit? Was it a hysterical fantasy? Did his companions or did they not hear or see anything? My own take on this extraordinary event is that it must be judged by its consequences in Paul's later life. Seizures do not result in  a dramatic change in character for the better, or a  transformed world view or a permanently heightened awareness of a transcendent reality.  So could it have been, as Paul claims, a genuine encounter with the risen Christ?  It fits none of our normal medical or historical categories. It's a one off.

If so, it is Paul, not the Gospels, who is our earliest witness to the Resurrection. He admits that he was not among the first disciples of Jesus who, according to the Gospels, encountered the Risen Christ in Jerusalem  and were eyewitnesses of his visible appearances.  Paul's encounter on the Damascus Road was not, like that of the disciples, with a visible human figure walking on the ground, but, apparently, with an audible  Presence, so undeniably personal, so utterly real, that he could claim that he had indeed seen the Lord, and that the Lord had spoken to him with that same direct personal engagement that his friends had experienced with Jesus in Galilee.

But there must have been something else. Paul could write years later that Christ “loved me and gave himself for me”.  As we noted last night there is no evidence that they ever met, although Paul may have seen Jesus as a lad. I mentioned just now that one of the consequences for Paul of the encounter was an astonishing change in his personality. He is a changed man. From being driven by hatred, now the driving force of his life is  a great upwelling of love. You have only to read his letters to hear the intensity of his feelings for his friends and his converts, an all-embracing concern for everyone he meets. It's classic expression is in the great hymn to love in 1Cor 13 culminating in the paean, “and now abide these three: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” It's there through all his writings.  Look up the word “love” in a concordance and you'll see that it occurs dozens of times. We are told that the other disciples were shown by the Risen Christ the wounds in his hands and side.; as if to say “look, this is what you have done to me.”  Paul too seems to have been made intensely aware that he was being enfolded in an unconditional, all embracing love – but a love with wounds in his hands. “Paul, Paul, why are you wounding me?” The victim condemned to death by the  highest Court in Israel confronts Paul with unquestionable Divine authority. His whole world is turned upside down. He realises he is continuing to perpetrate that terrible crime.

Something else changed too. Paul had been a diehard racist Jew.  . He loathed all Gentiles. Racism is embedded so deeply in the psyche of millions of men and women that it is almost impossible to root it out. Even those who have come to see that it is morally wrong find they cannot eradicate the deep visceral fear and loathing for other races which has been imprinted in their minds since childhood. Something happened to Paul which made him the first champion of the Gentiles, happy to eat with them and to defy all the ancient racial and purity taboos of his orthodox upbringing. It's like an Israeli today fraternising and eating with Palestinians.

Now Paul says explicitly more than once that his mission to the Gentiles was entrusted to him personally by Jesus. He makes the point that he didn't go back to get information or instruction from the disciples in Jerusalem. His mission, and his understanding of the Gospel message which he preached was, so he claims, given him directly by Jesus.  This claim is confirmed – for me at least – by his  radical teaching about the all inclusive love and forgiveness to be found in the Church of Christ. Everyone – yes, Gentiles too - is welcome. That must have come from his own personal experience of being himself  enfolded in Christ's love and forgiveness . It is  a direct echo of the  teaching and practice of Jesus himself, and his radical break with traditional Judaism. Peter and James and the other Jewish disciples  found it hard to accept that Gentiles could belong to the Jesus people. Where did Paul get that radical idea from?  Not from Peter. He says he got it from Jesus. How?

Paul seems to have absorbed not only the teaching of Jesus but also his intense  personal engagement with  everyone he met. That was the way Jesus had related to people.  In the Kingdom what matters  most is not being good, but being open to personal love and forgiveness - being loved and loving. Paul's letters are full of personal names and personal messages of affection. That is typical of the ministry of Jesus who is so often pictured in personal conversation with an individual man or woman, many of them named. 
Paul takes the model of Jesus in Galilee and extends it to the whole world. It is the inescapable logic of unconditional love that it can accept no limits to its reach. As we saw last night it was that unconditional  love which drove Jesus to walk into the jaws of the dragon. Paul is saying, “ Jesus did that for me because he loves me, even me, who had been killing his friends.” That same love drove Paul out to take this amazing Good News into the Gentile world and in the end to Rome and to a gruesome death in the arena. And the Gentiles looked on with amazement: “See how these Christians love one another.” The Spirit of sacrificial love is let loose in the world. How did that happen?

From being a fanatical hater, Paul is changed into an uncompromising lover of everyone he met. From a man whose horizon was no wider than Jerusalem and Judaea, his horizon is suddenly the whole world and the realm of spirits. The range of his mind has astonished his readers for 2000 yeas. How did that happen?

I can think of no natural explanation for such an astonishing transformation. The encounter on the Damascus Road forces me back to the only convincing conclusion.
Paul really did encounter the living Christ months after the crucifixion. He  realised that Christ was indeed the Messiah of God, God's Son, the human face of God and therefore Lord of all God's creation. Wherever God is,  there also is the human face of God. For God all places are here, all times now. So the risen Christ is simultaneously present in Jerusalem, in Galilee in Damascus, in Ephesus in Rome in Corinium Castra in 300 AD and in Cirencester  in 2008, and, if we ever get there, on some planet floating round some distant star. It was Paul who first saw that was the meaning of Christ's resurrection. Who told him that?

I want now to turn on to The Fourth Gospel, St John's Gospel, written perhaps in the 90s of the First Century, and to one of the most poignant scenes in the whole of human literature.

Mary stood outside the tomb weeping. She said to the gardener, “They have taken my Lord away and I don't know where they have laid him.” And the gardener spoke just one word, her name: “Mary!” I know no other narrative which packs such a weight of  feeling, meaning and ecstatic surprise into the one word of her response: “Rabboni!” It is an astonishingly poignant moment  with a personal intensity that carries complete conviction – the conviction of something profoundly truthful.
It still remains mysterious. The risen Christ is unrecognised even by a woman who loved him. I think we may say she was in love with him. And why not? Jesus had rescued her from a life of madness and degradation. She is thought to have been a prostitute, the most despised role a woman could descend to – exploited, abused,  a filthy outcast.  Jesus not only rescued her, he welcomed her into the little community of followers who travelled with him, disregarding the public abuse he would incur. Naturally he became the lodestar of her life. Her soul fed on his attention, she hung on every word he spoke. In his company she felt alive again, a new person, a valued member of his little community, accepted for the first time in her life. No doubt she prepared food for him, mended his clothes, happily doing anything that won a smile or a grateful glance.

His appalling death must have been a living  death for Mary. We talk too glibly of the broken heart. Mary was a broken woman, her newfound life shattered. She is a dead woman walking. She has come to do the last sad service she can do for her beloved. Yet when he stands in front of her in the half light of that dawn she doesn't recognise him, supposing him the be the gardener. There is something strange about the risen Lord.

Then he speaks her name, “Mary!” From what follows I  think we can guess that Mary falls down and embraces his knees. But she is gently told, “Do not cling to me.” That is not the slightly impatient pushing away of an over emotional woman. It is much more profound. She has to let Jesus go, the man she had so loved in Galilee, in order to move on into a more profound love. “He is not here. He is risen!”  She is still loved by Jesus, but now she is enfolded in a huge cosmic love. The risen Christ who  speaks her name is ascending to the Father. He speaks for the Father. It is the Father who now names her Mary. When God names us, he gives us back our true selves, for he alone knows who we really are. The risen Christ gives Mary back herself, her true identity. Her life.  But at a price.
Mary was one of the causes of Jesus death. When he reached out to rescue her he had to risk provoking the fanatical rage of the Jewish priests. That was one step towards Calvary. She sees the wounds in his hands. That was for her. The price of her life. One of the nails has her name on it.
Now in the Realm of the Resurrection she is named by the Son of God. “Mary!” Once we are named by God we are known to a love that never lets us go. We have no information about what happened to Mary afterwards. But I can imagine her looking after the poor and destitute, like Mother Teresa perhaps, a strong, gentle and wonderfully generous woman, aware with every waking moment that she is enfolded in continuous love. Only Resurrection could do that.

And so to our final narrative. The third episode I want to reflect on also comes from the Fourth Gospel, from a chapter right at the end.
After the crucifixion Peter and the others have returned to their village on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.  The tragic enterprise of Jesus of Nazareth has ended in shame,  disappointment and ridicule. “He saved others; he could not save himself.”  All that is left to them is to return to their former lives and start to earn a living as fishermen as if nothing had happened.
“I'm going fishing,” says Peter, and the others join him. After a fruitless night – the fish come to the surface at night - they row back to the shore to be hailed by a stranger standing on a promontory. “Try casting your net on the other side.” You know the rest of the story. John recognises the stranger - “It's the Lord!”; Peter jumps overboard to swim ashore, taking the trouble for decency's sake to pull his tunic on; they drag their huge catch to dry land only to find that there is a charcoal fire, with fish and bread already cooking on it. “Come and have breakfast,” says Jesus.
None of the disciples dared ask, “Who are you?” They knew it was Jesus. Isn't that strange?. The stranger on the shore is not recognised; and yet they know it is the Lord. Something has changed. It is still Jesus, yet so transformed that he is not immediately recognisable. That's exactly what Mary found when she met the gardener. Exactly like the Road to Emmaus.

It's a telling little point but the only other place that a charcoal fire is mentioned in the whole of the Bible is the one burning in the courtyard of the High Priest's house where Peter had denied his master three times. So it's no surprise to us that after breakfast there follows the poignant conversation between the Risen Christ and Peter. It echoes that triple betrayal. Three times Jesus asks Peter, “Do you love me?” Three times with more and more urgency Peter replies, Lord, you know that I love you”.I think the third time he is reduced to tears.  “Well, then,” says Jesus, “Feed my sheep.”

St John is a great artist. I can't tell what is history and what is art in this wonderful little story. But it rings true to an experience that John himself must have had, an experience shared by Peter and Mary and Paul and common to all those first disciples who betrayed Jesus. They too met this mysterious stranger. They too wept with shame. They too were named by the Risen Christ and in the naming found themselves enfolded in love - a flame of love which within a century was  burning from India to the Atlantic coast. How come that Thomas ended up in Bombay and Peter and Paul in Rome, both dying for love of the Lord who “loved them and gave himself for them?

The encounters of the disciples with the Risen Christ have this common pattern. The Jesus who meets them is a stranger who yet greets them by name. On the shore, before he says anything else, he sits down and calls them to eat with him. It's just like the old days, way back there in Galilee. But now he has wounds in his hands and feet and is transformed as if living in a different realm. He is not a resuscitated corpse like Lazarus. He has been through death and has come out the other side. He looks at them with total truthfulness, just as he had turned and looked at Peter in the courtyard as he was being led away to trial.  There's no hiding here, no pretending before that gaze. “Yes, you betrayed me. You slept and so forced me to rescue you. You said you'd never met me. You fled and left me to die alone. And I still love you and would do it all again for you. Will you now do as much for me – go out with me and rescue God's lost sons and daughters. For I will be with you until the end of time. Abide in me and I will abide in you. I will give you back your true self. I have named you. Simon. You are Peter.” He started out as Simon; Jesus named him Peter. And Peter he became. His bones lie somewhere under the rock foundations of that vast Church in Rome that is named after him.

The Resurrection does not undo the Cross, nor can Christ's accepting love annul what we have done and been. Judas will be traitor to the end of time. But so is Peter. So am I. But Jesus enfolds the degraded woman in his accepting love and says “I don't condemn you.” She weeps for what she has been and for what it has cost him to hold onto her. He went to Calvary because that's what happens to unconditional love. And then outside the tomb he names her. And for the rest of human history Mary will be loved because she evoked such an astonishing enfolding of personal love from God. If Judas can ever bear to turn and meet the eyes of the Master he betrayed, he will also be a cause of astonished wonder among the angels when Christ enfolds him too in his love. The Resurrection embraces us all and offers to reconstruct our lives, but building always on what we have been without any denial or hiding, but only opening up new and astonishing opportunities for God's endless creativity. “Behold, I make all things new!”

What has become clear to me is that we can never present the resurrection narratives in the four Gospels as straightforward, indisputable evidence that Christ did rise from the dead.  They are too fragmented, inconsistent and impressionistic to stand up to forensic scrutiny. But as we probe into the inner personal lives of Paul, Mary and Peter, and what became of them and the other first disciples of Jesus, we come across a consistent strangeness. Something happens to them which is inexplicable to any of our normal ways of thinking. To suggest that it was all self induced fraud or innocent delusion, or some kind of mass halucination, ignores the fact that they come away from the encounter changed and liberated. The Christ they encounter stands over against them as a stranger, who yet loves them, names them, sets them free from the past and gives them a new life. That surely is a work of God.

There remains one final knotty question which I cannot leave unasked. Was the tomb empty? We want to believe, but isn't that stretching credulity one step too far? Yet it is the one point on which Paul and the four Gospels are unanimous.  Archbishop Rowan Williams has pointed out that in first Century Judaism it would have been impossible to think of resurrection as a purely spiritual event. If the tomb wasn't empty then Christ could not have risen. According to Matthew the Jewish priests started a rumour that the disciples had stolen the body overnight. If they could prove that, it would discredit the whole fanciful tale. But they couldn't. Apart from the Jewish taboo on touching dead bodies,  it's equally difficult to see how the disciples and Paul could have had such a transforming experience if they themselves had been party to the fraud. It just doesn't add up. Yes, the tomb was empty.

So where is the crucified and risen Christ now? Here and everywhere. He still comes as a stranger with wounds in his hands. He is still our victim today, in Darfur, in Iraq, in the homeless and marginalised people in our towns and cities, in those we belittle, ignore or depsise, in the drunken kids on the streets of Manchester. He's also in us. All of us one way or another have been belittled, wounded and unloved. We too are victims of this world which diminishes everyone. Unconditional love reaches out to us too. He asks all of us, victims and oppressors - and we are both – to meet his truthful gaze and acknowledge that we have colluded in the wounding of his love, perhaps not so much by what we've done but what we have failed to do or to be. And because he is the one sinless victim he can name us, each one of us, and enfold us in his love. Then he helps us walk on in the power of his risen grace to find our new identity, our true selves, as agents of his Kingdom and instruments of his risen love.

See also Hugh's Christmas sermon 2007 and his Easter Sermon 2008