Pictures of Easter

Here's my article for April:

There are many images associated with Easter: bunnies, chicks, decorated eggs, bunches of Spring flowers; but often associated with the religious celebration of Easter is a picture of a hill with three crosses on it, and sometimes a rising sun behind it.  For those who aren't familiar with all the details of the Easter story, this can be a bit confusing.  They might know that Easter is something to do with the death of Jesus on a cross, but who are the other two crosses for?  Perhaps they are for two of his followers?  The answer is that “Two rebels were crucified with [Jesus], one on his right and one on his left” (Matthew 27:38).

The crime of these two men is translated many ways, and traditionally they are said to be thieves, however the translation above is probably closest to the truth.  We know this because crucifixion was the penalty for  rebels or revolutionaries, especially if they were slaves (think Spartacus!).   Jesus was charged with blasphemy by the Jewish religious leaders for claiming he was divine, but the Romans put him to death on a charge of treason for claiming to be the king (John 19:1-16).  Ironically he wasn't leading a rebellion and that was one of the reasons the Jewish leaders turned against him!

So Jesus was crucified along with guilty rebels, and in the place of another rebel, Barabbas, whose rebellion also involved murder (Luke 23:18-19).  So it is likely that they too were guilty of violent and murderous insurrection.  Today we might call them terrorists.

These terrorists were trying to overthrow the occupying Romans and regain an independent nation, and they looked for a Messiah, a warrior king, who would do exactly that.  However, Jesus didn't come as a nationalist leader.  But this makes the words of one of the rebels to Jesus even more appropriate: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Luke 23:42).  The terrorist realises that he had been fighting for the wrong kingdom, and instead wants to join Jesus in his kingdom.

Jesus was not offering a Jewish nationalistic alternative to a Roman colonialist system, but a kingdom that is “not of this world” (John 18:36).  He was misunderstood both by his people and by the Romans, and he continues to be misunderstood whenever he is appropriated to a political cause.  Jesus didn't come to be a left-wing alternative to a right-wing government, or vice-versa.  Jesus came to inaugurate a kingdom where he is king; where all ideologies and world-views are de-throned; and our ultimate allegiance is to God.

So if you see a picture of three crosses on a hill, you may want to ask yourself which kingdom you are fighting for, and perhaps to ask Jesus to join him in his.

Where can we find real and lasting community?

Here is the sermon I gave at the 2025 Broughton Town Council Civic Service:

Matthew 10:1-8

10 Jesus called his twelve disciples to him and gave them authority to drive out impure spirits and to heal every disease and illness.

 

2 These are the names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon (who is called Peter) and his brother Andrew; James son of Zebedee, and his brother John; 3 Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; 4 Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.

 

5 These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: ‘Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. 6 Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel. 7 As you go, proclaim this message: “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” 8 Heal those who are ill, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received; freely give.'

Sermon

As well as to asking God to bless us and guide us, our Civic Service is another chance to celebrate all that's good in our community. And so much of what is good in our community is done by volunteers. Alice has just read a poem praising volunteers who willingly give up their time to serve others. That includes many of you who are here today! So it's great that we have this opportunity to give you recognition and praise, which is so richly deserved.

It is always great to celebrate our community and those who work so hard to create that community, but it is perhaps even more necessary these days. Because we live in world where people are increasingly isolated because their attention is being given to online spaces rather than the people around them. This is not just a young person's phenomenon – all of us, whatever age we are, are susceptible to the addictive nature of online content, delivered to us through the handy, ever-present portal of our mobile phones. Community is breaking down because we care less about our neighbour and more about funny things that cats do.

Another downside of spending too much time in the online sphere is that the algorithms filter our content so that we increasing only see content we like and that we agree with. Therefore we are fooled into thinking that the majority of the world thinks like we do, because the majority of the content we see agrees with us – we operate in what are known as echo-chambers. So, people that disagree with us seem to be in a minority, and are often portrayed as ignorant and even dangerous. We saw this particularly with the response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk: some people's feeds portrayed him as the Messiah, other people's feeds said he was a very naughty boy. He was either a perfect saint or an evil sinner, with no nuance at all. With no grace at all.

Our discussions have increasingly also lacked nuance and grace , and instead of listening to other people's opinions and evaluating them fairly, we simply ignore them and, if possible, cancel them so no-one else can hear them. We may still have community but they are often online, mono-cultural and mono-opinioned communities, where no dissenting views are allowed. 

God is a fan of community. God himself is a community of three Persons in one. In Genesis when he created the universe, he created a huge diversity of plants and animals to live in harmony together. And when he created humans, as the pinnacle of his creation, as the only creatures made in his image and likeness, he declared that it was not good for Adam to be alone. And when God the Son became incarnate as Jesus, he gathered around him a community of twelve disciples.

 

We heard in our reading who those twelve men were, and it is easy to think that that list is insignificant; but on closer inspection this list tells us some important things about what true community is like. Most of the names, like Simon, are Hebrew or of Hebrew origin, but some, like Philip are Greek. Although all of the disciples are Jewish, their names probably reflect varying degrees of contact and comfort with non-Jewish people. We don't know much about their occupations but some were fishermen; some were owners of fishing businesses, and one was a tax collector, so there were varied levels of education and wealth.

 

But perhaps the most striking feature of this list is that Matthew was a tax collector and Simon was a zealot. As a tax collector, Matthew not only collaborated with the occupying Romans by collecting taxes on their behalf from his fellow countrymen, but he would have also extorted more tax than was due for his own commission: he was a thief and a traitor. Simon, on the other hand, was a zealot, someone who believed that the occupying Romans, and their collaborators, should be driven out of Israel by armed force. Ordinarily, Matthew and Simon would not have spent time together – these days they would have wanted each other cancelled, and denounced each other as holding views which are unacceptable in modern society.

 

But here they are, together in the community that Jesus brought together. I'm sure there were some animated discussions about how to deal with the Romans, and also what the relationship between the Jews and the non-Jews should be, but they didn't walk away from each other, nor did they expel each other from the group.

 

As humans we naturally want to spend time with like-minded people, and will often divide ourselves according to any number of factors, both trivial and serious. So what made the disciples stick together? The answer has to be the presence of Jesus.

 

Jesus didn't just want students who would learn his teachings and then go out to pass them on to others; he wanted to create a community. Their message wasn't just that the kingdom of heaven had come near because God has come to earth as Jesus; but that the kingdom of heaven had come near because Jesus was forming a kingdom community, people living out what it means to belong to the kingdom of God. So the signs of that kingdom were healings and the driving out of evil: the physical healings were signs of the healing of our fallen, sinful nature and also of the healing of divisions between people; the driving out of demons were the sign of the defeat of the causes of those divisions.

 

And this was all possible only through Jesus: it was by grounding their identity in Jesus that the disciples could rise above the other identities that divided them; it was by working for the higher cause of living the kingdom of God on earth that all other causes became insignificant or found their real fulfilment; it was by Jesus' death that the power of the malevolent forces, and of sin, was broken.

 

We have gathered to celebrate community, even at a time when communities are being splintered by fear, suspicion and ambition. Well done to all of you who work so hard to build that community by serving others, often voluntarily. But if we want real and lasting community, we need to be praying that God's kingdom would come, that his will be done on earth as it is in heaven. True and lasting community can only be found by gathering together around Jesus: not just around his teachings but by becoming part of the community that he founded, the fellowship of believers, that brings the kingdom of God near, by living that kingdom now.

Elections, Euros and almost certain disappointment!

Here's an extended version of my article for July:

This month there will be two competitions: the General Election and the football European Championships – I'll leave you to decide which is the more important!  One thing both competitions have in common is that the majority of people will be disappointed with the result.  Obviously only one country's team can win the Euros, leading to heartbreak for the other finalist, and the other teams who don't even get that far.  However it's easy to forget this truth with the General Election because we live in a democracy and so assume that the outcome of the election is the 'will of the people.' So it comes as a bit of a shock to realise that since the end of WWII no party has won the General Election with over 50% of the vote (and of course not everyone who's eligible to vote does vote). So although the question of who we vote for is really important, we might also want to ask ourselves how we will respond when statistically we are more likely to be disappointed with the result.

Christianity, unlike Islam and pre-exilic Judaism, has no codes for government as it is not meant to be a 'state religion': Jesus calls his followers into the Kingdom of God, which he says “is not of this world” (John 18:36). The New Testament gives no guidance on what a Christian government would look like, what laws it should enact, nor by what mechanism that government should get its power.  Nor does it tell us, if we have a say in choosing the government, what questions or issues should take priority in our choice, nor what the character of those governing should be.  However, it does tell us that we should pray for the coming of God's Kingdom where his will is done on earth (Matthew 6:9-10); and it does tell us the character traits of those who belong to the Kingdom (e.g. 1 Corinthians 13:1-7) and the sorts of values they should hold (e.g. Colossians 1:9-14.)  But as it is very rare that candidates for election are members of God's Kingdom, and no political party fully reflects the values of the Kingdom - even if the candidate we vote for and their party wins, we are still likely to be disappointed!!

The realisation that we will be disappointed is a great corrective to the inflated sense of the importance of our own views that democracy gives us. We should always have freedom to hold and express our views, but we should also have the humility to listen to other people's views, being open to changing our minds and having the grace to let others change their minds too.  Most importantly though we should read God's word in the Bible so that we are shaped by his thoughts and not “conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of [our] mind” (Romans 12:2) “then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming” (Ephesians 4:14).

The New Testament is also more concerned with our attitude towards those in power, however they got it.  Paul and Peter tell us to submit to the governing authorities (Romans 13:1; 1 Peter 2:13), which is even more shocking since the Roman Emperor was the supreme governing authority, and Paul also calls us to pray for the authorities (1 Timothy 2:1-2).  However, we shouldn't obey the authorities if they are telling us to do something that goes against God's commands (Acts 5:29).  If Paul expects the churches to honour an Emperor who was clearly against God's Kingdom, “to slander no one [including the authorities], to be peaceable and considerate, and always to be gentle toward everyone” (Titus 3:2), how much more should we honour all those who work in public office, regardless of whether we completely agree with them?

So let's not allow our inevitable disappointment (either with politics or football!) to express itself in cynicism, insults and derogatory comment, but instead let's pray for all in authority, that through them God's Kingdom may come and his will be done.

Left image by John Mounsey from Pixabay 

Right image by Prawny from Pixabay 

An Alternative Nativity story

Here's my article for December:

Christmas is coming and for many of us we'll be hearing again the story of Jesus' birth at the first Christmas, or watching children act it out. Some of us may even go back to the source of the story, the Bible. Of the 66 books in the Bible, the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) tell us about Jesus' life, death and resurrection. But only two of them tell us about Jesus' birth. John simply tells us of the eternal Word becoming flesh and living among us, and Mark says nothing about Jesus' birth at all. But of the other two only Matthew tells us about the visit of the wise men, and only Luke tells us about the shepherds in the fields. The Christmas story we retell is a composite story bringing in elements from Matthew's and Luke's accounts.

However, the birth of Jesus is also described in the book of Revelation but this account is radically different from the Gospels. In Revelation 12:1-6 John tells us of a vision he had of a woman giving birth to a son who “will rule all the nations with an iron sceptre” - a quote from Psalm 2 which the Early Church saw as referring to Jesus. So far, so normal. But the woman is described as being “clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head.” Stranger still, instead of being surrounded by angels, shepherds and adoring magi, next to the woman stood “an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads...so that it might devour her child the moment he was born.” I'm yet to see a nativity play with this in!!

William Blake, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, c. 1805, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 

The book of Revelation is packed full of strange images and complex symbolism which can make it tough reading It also makes it fertile ground for lots of different groups to claim they know exactly how to interpret each and every detail. Always be wary of anyone who is certain they know what it all means!! For example, the woman obviously represents Mary, who gave birth to Jesus, but she also represents Israel (the twelve stars remind us of the twelve tribes of Israel); and Creation (sun and moon); and Eve whose 'seed' will crush the serpent's head (Genesis 3:15); and from verse 6 onwards, the Church. The dragon is a major character in Revelation and the symbolism of his appearance is explored in more detail as the book goes on, but there is a parallel here with King Herod who wanted to kill the infant Jesus but, like the dragon, fails (Matthew 2).

So what are we to make of this third 'nativity'? It reminds us that the birth of Jesus has a cosmic and eternal significance. It's easy to hear the Christmas story as being like a fairy tale, but the reality is that it is the pivotal event in the battle between good and evil (the overall theme of Revelation). The dragon wants to devour the child at his most vulnerable because it knows that the child would ultimately defeat it. Throughout Revelation and the rest of the New Testament we discover that this defeat happens through the death and resurrection of Jesus (Colossians 2:15).

This is why the shepherds, angels and wise men come to worship the child; they recognised the universe-changing event that had taken place. As you hear again the Christmas story what will you hear: a fairy tale or the good news that the defeat of evil is now certain?