On authority

Address given at All Saints Stradbally (Castleconnell) on Sunday 27 September 2020, the 16th after Trinity

 All three readings today are about authority, in one way or another.

In the Gospel reading (Matthew 21:23-32), the Temple leaders ask Jesus who gives him the authority to do what he is doing. In the Epistle reading (Philippians 2:1-13), Paul tells the Philippians that it is God who has given Jesus authority over everything in heaven and on earth and under the earth. And in the OT reading (Exodus 17: 1-7), the Israelites question the authority of Moses to lead them through the wilderness when they find no water at the oasis of Rephidim.

This question about who has authority in the congregation of the faithful, and from whence it comes, has troubled people of every religion, not just Christians and Jews, but others too. This is why every faith is divided into competing antagonistic sects, I think.

So let’s examine what we can learn from todays readings, and see how we might apply it to our own circumstances today.

The background to the Gospel reading is this.

The previous day, Jesus had ridden on a donkey into Jerusalem in triumph to the cheers of the crowd, many of whom hoped that he was the promised Messiah. He had entered the Temple, overturning the tables of the money-changers, and quoting from scripture, he had declared, ‘It is written, my house shall be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of robbers’. In this way he directly confronts the authority of the chief priests and the elders, and they are furious. Jesus threatens their power and authority, and they begin to plan how to do away with him.

Now, they ask Jesus a trick question, ‘By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?’ If he claims the authority of the Messiah, they will charge him with blasphemy. If he doesn’t, he will disappoint the crowd, making it easier for the Temple leaders to move against him in another way. But Jesus spots the trap. He tells them he will not answer their question until they answer a question of his: ‘Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?’ The chief priests and elders see that if they reply ‘from heaven’, Jesus will accuse them of not believing in John’s baptism, while if they reply ‘of human origin’, they will incense the crowd who believe John was a prophet. Caught in this dilemma they say, ‘We do not know’, justifying Jesus in his refusal to answer their question.

In his epistle to the Philippians, St Paul answers those who query the authority of Jesus.

Let us hear his words again:

‘Christ Jesus … though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death - even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.’

For Paul, the answer to the chief priests’ and elders’ question about the authority of Jesus flows from his divine nature and complete obedience to God, even to the point of crucifixion. Paul’s words are really a creed, one of the earliest statements of Christian faith that we know about.

In the Old Testament reading Moses faces a crisis of confidence among the Israelites.

They challenge his authority to lead them when they fail to find water for themselves and their flocks in the arid wastes of Sinai. Moses recognises that their quarrel is not just with him, but with the Lord, their God.

The Israelites seem to have forgotten how God through Moses had led them away from Egypt through the Red Sea, and how God had already provided them with food when they were starving by sending bread from heaven in the form of manna, as we heard last week. But despite their persistent lack of faith, God himself is faithful, and once again comes to their aid by sending Moses to strike the rock at Horeb with his staff – the staff with which he parted the Red Sea – to reveal a spring of water.

In this way God shows the elders of Israel that Moses is the agent of God’s care for his people, so confirming Moses’ authority to lead the people.

The issues which sadly divide us as Christians have at their root this question of authority, where it comes from, and how we may recognise it.

The second part of the Gospel reading is relevant here, Jesus’s parable about the two sons. The father asks them both to go to work in the vineyard. The first refuses, but later changes his mind and does as he is asked. The second agrees to go, but never does. Which did the will of the father? The first of course, the chief priests and elders agree. Then Jesus turns their answer into a cutting indictment of their own refusal to respond to John the Baptist’s ministry. The outcasts and marginalised – tax-collectors and prostitutes – who responded to John, will enter God’s kingdom before the religious leaders, who didn’t respond.

The truth is that all authority comes from God, our loving Father, and belongs to those who hear his call and act upon it. Anyone who hears the call, but does not act on it is useless. 

But how do we know when such a call is truly of God and not a false call? Earlier in Matthew’s Gospel (7:15-16), Jesus warns us to beware of false prophets, and tells us how we may recognise them: ‘You will know them by their fruits’.

This is the test each one of us should apply when we must decide whether or not to accept a person's authority in the congregation of the faithful. For, as St Paul advised the Philippians, we must ‘work out (our) own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in (us), enabling (us) both to will and to work for his good pleasure’.

As a diocesan reader I have been entrusted with a small measure of authority to lead worship and to preach the word within this diocese.

This ministry is a great privilege which I enjoy. But where does this authority entrusted to me come from?

This is my story. During a parish vacancy, when sometimes there was no priest to lead worship, I realised that this was something that I could do, and I felt called to offer myself. The new Rector encouraged me and began to train me, and later I had informal sessions with the Archdeacon. Nowadays training is more formal, involving an 18 month part-time course, which those who have taken it, as John Jarvis in your own congregation has, tell me is very worthwhile. The Warden of Readers then recognised my vocation to reader ministry, and recommended me to the Bishop, who commissioned me as a diocesan reader in a service in my parish.

So it is the Bishop who has given me the authority to lead worship and preach, after a period of training and discernment. But ultimately it is up to you, through the power of God at work in you, to decide whether or not to accept my authority to minister as being blessed by God.

The Sunday before last was marked by the church as ‘Vocation Sunday’, where we were asked to consider how God is calling us. Maybe someone here today feels called to reader ministry as I was, and as John Jarvis was. If so, I would heartily encourage you to follow it up, by talking to Dean Rod about it in the first instance. I can assure you it is a most rewarding ministry, and it is one that is increasingly needed.

 

 

Address given at Killodiernan Church on Monday 31st August 2020, 

the feast of St Aidan of Lindisfarne.

Statue of St Aidan in front of Lindisfarne Priory

Today we remember St Aidan of Lindisfarne, whose feast day falls on the 31st August, the anniversary of his death in 651AD. Most of what we know about him we owe to the Venerable Bede, from his great history of the English church and people, completed in about 731AD. 

Bede tells us that Aidan was born in Ireland and became a monk of the island monastery of Iona, founded by St Columba. The future King Oswald of Northumbria was fostered in exile and baptised there. The Anglo-Saxon people of Northumbria still followed their ancient pagan religion, but when Oswald gained the crown of Northumbria in 634AD he vowed to convert his kingdom to Christianity. He asked the Abbot of Iona to send him a missionary bishop. The Abbot sent a bishop called Cormán, but he alienated the Northumbrians by his harshness and returned to Iona in failure. The Abbot then chose Aidan and sent him to Oswald with twelve other monks.

Aidan was quite different to his predecessor, an inspired missionary. He allied himself with King Oswald, and chose the tidal island of Lindisfarne to be the seat of his monastery and diocese, in sight of Oswald’s royal castle at Bamburgh. Bede tells us that Aidan chose to walk around the kingdom from one village to the next on foot, rather than horseback, talking politely with all he met and bit by bit interesting them in Christianity. Until Aidan and his monks learned English, King Oswald, who was fluent in Irish from his time on Iona, often had to translate for them.

Aidan earned a terrific reputation among the people for his pious charity and care for orphans. The monastery he founded on Lindisfarne grew and became a centre of learning and scholarly knowledge, where many young men were trained for the priesthood. Aidan founded daughter monasteries, churches and schools throughout the kingdom, so that by the time of his death the church was firmly established throughout Northumbria.

The English church that Aidan founded in the North of England, like Iona, followed the traditions of the Irish church in such matters as how to calculate the date of Easter. But the church that Pope Gregory the Great sent St Augustine to found in the South of England at Canterbury followed different Roman traditions. This caused problems in Northumbria. The Queen, the daughter of a southern king, sometimes celebrated Easter at the same time that the King was still fasting during Lent. The differences were finally resolved after Aidan’s death at the Synod of Whitby in 664AD, when the then King of Northumberland decreed that his kingdom should follow the Roman traditions.

My wife Marty and I enjoyed a day on Lindisfarne a few years ago, crossing the causeway early in the morning just before it was shut by the incoming tide, so we avoided the usual throng of visiting tourists. We found it an inspiring, peaceful, prayerful place. We toured the remains of the later medieval Priory. We wandered the lanes of the village. We joined the daily prayer of the Community of Aidan and Hilda, and we shared lunch with Ray Simpson, its founding Guardian. The Community of Aidan and Hilda is a dispersed ecumenical community drawing inspiration from the lives of the Celtic Saints, a bit like an elder sister of our own Community of Brendan the Navigator.

St Aidan of Lindisfarne is remembered to this day as ‘the apostle to the English’, alongside St Augustine of Canterbury. It is right that we should celebrate him as a hero of the Christian faith, and give thanks for the success of his mission to Northumberland.

Finding life by losing it.

Address given at St Mary's, Nenagh on Sunday 30th August 2020, the 12th after Trinity.

‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block for me!’

What a shock it must have been for Peter to hear Jesus address him in these cutting words, as recorded by Matthew (16:21-28) in the reading we have just heard.

Peter had been the first to say, ‘You are the Messiah’, when Jesus had asked ‘Who do you say that I am?’ But now, ‘Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem … and be killed’. Peter is shocked by Jesus’s words. Like most Jews of his day, he expected the promised Messiah to come as a great conqueror to destroy the gentiles – including the hated Romans - and to rule over a revived Kingdom of Israel. The Messiah would vanquish his foes, not be killed by them! So Peter remonstrates with Jesus: ‘Look here, Jesus, that can’t be right!’ he says - or words to that effect. Then Jesus turns on Peter and calls him Satan.

Why was Jesus so hard on Peter, his great friend and disciple? Jesus knew that God’s way was not the way of violent earthly conquest, but the way of self-sacrificing love. He needed to teach Peter and the other disciples to change their thinking. I feel sure Jesus didn’t want to die a painful death, but he must have realised this was the inevitable outcome of what God called him to do. He was determined to face it bravely. But Peter tries to argue him out of it, in an echo of Satan tempting him in the wilderness.

Isn’t this often the way it is? When we’ve made up our minds what is the right thing to do, even at a cost to ourselves, our friends and loved ones may try to talk us out of it. The tempter can be the very person dearest to us! Yet we must not allow even the pleading voice of love to stop us from doing God’s will. This surely is what Jesus felt that day – no wonder he responded as he did.

Jesus immediately seized the moment to show the disciples his way, the way of the cross, how to find life by losing it. It is worth reflecting on his words, which go to the very heart of our Christian faith.

 ‘If any want to become my followers’, says Jesus, ‘let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’

Jesus’s honesty is startling isn’t it? No one can ever say Jesus lures his disciples to follow him on false pretences! He does not offer them – or us - an easy life or a comfortable way to God. Like other great leaders, he calls us as Churchill did to ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’. But again like a real leader, he does not call us to do anything more than he was prepared to do himself.

First Jesus calls us to ‘deny ourselves’, to say no to our own selfish instincts. We must do God’s will, not our own will, to the best of our ability, in all things.

But more than simply practicing self-denial, Jesus tells us we must be prepared to take real risks – even to risk our very lives – if that is what God, through our conscience and the prompting of the Spirit, tells us is right.

‘For those who want to save their life will lose it’, says Jesus, ‘and those who lose their life for my sake, will find it.’

Jesus focuses our attention with this great paradox: to save life is to lose it, and vice-versa.

The very essence of life is in risking it and spending it, not in saving it and hoarding it. If we live selfishly, always thinking first of our own security, profit and comfort, not of others, then we are losing life all the time. But if we spend life for others, if we follow Jesus’s way of loving self-sacrifice, we are winning life all the time.

The truth is that the only way we can find a life that matters is by losing it in the love of God and the love of our neighbours. That is the way of Jesus, that is the way of God, and that is the way of happiness too.

‘For what will it profit them’, says Jesus, ‘if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?

I’m sure you, like me, can think of people who are outwardly hugely successful, but who in another sense are living a life that is not worth living. In business, they may have sacrificed honour for profit. In politics, they may have sacrificed principle for popularity. In their personal lives, they may have sacrificed their deepest relationships for their own ambitions or desires. Whatever the reason, such people are usually not comfortable inside their own skin, and often live to regret their bad choices. We have been watching a few squirm on the media over recent days.

It is a matter of values really - Jesus is asking us where our values lie. As he says elsewhere, you should store up your treasures in heaven, not on earth, ‘for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also’. Our values should be God’s values, as Jesus reveals them to us, not the false values of worldly success.

‘For the Son of Man’, says Jesus, ‘is to come with his angels in the glory of the Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done.’

Jesus knows that many people do not like what he says nor how he behaves. He stands up for the poor, the despised and the rejected, and he befriends sinners. And the scribes and the Pharisees – the pious and the respectable - attack him for it. But Jesus also knows that he is doing God’s will.

With these words Jesus warns his disciples that in the end they will be judged before him for what they have done, both the good and the bad.

It is a simple truth: we cannot expect to share with Jesus the joy of shaping the world into the place God means it to be, if we are not prepared to act on his message of loving self-sacrifice.

So to sum up, when I reflect on these words recorded by Matthew, I hear Jesus’s voice calling me down through the ages:

·         calling me to be ready to take risks to do God’s will, rather than my own;

·         calling me to find true life and happiness by losing my life in the service of God and others;

·         calling me to live my life by God’s values, not the false values of worldly success.

·         calling me to follow joyfully, Jesus’s way of loving self-sacrifice.

Let us pray for the grace to respond to Jesus’s call:

O God,

whose Son has shown the way of the cross

to be the way of life:

transform and renew our minds

that we may not be conformed to this world

but may offer ourselves wholly to you

as a living sacrifice

through Jesus Christ our Saviour;

who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever. Amen

 

Clean and unclean

 Address given at St Mary's, Nenagh on Sunday 16th August 2020, the 10th after Trinity.

‘Cleanliness is next to godliness’, as surely we all heard as children.

A lot of people think this proverb must come from the Bible, since the Bible has so much to say about cleanliness, but it does not. The idea behind it can be traced back to the Babylonians, to the earliest civilisations we know of. And the first known use of the phrase in English is in a sermon by John Wesley from as late as 1778.

As we learn to live with Covid-19, we realise just how important cleanliness is to our health and the health of our communities. If we are to beat the virus, we must avoid contaminating ourselves and others. Among other things we must wash our hands frequently. In particular, we ought to do so before we leave our homes, in case we are infected, to lower the risk of spreading the virus to other people. And we ought to do so again when we return home from public places, to lower the risk of bringing the virus into our households from outside. We must also for the time being avoid close physical contact with our neighbours, even in our churches.

For Jews of Jesus’s time ceremonial cleanliness was truly next to godliness. Jewish law forbade anyone who was unclean from approaching God in worship, and such a person would be shunned by all pious Jews.

They believed that a person or thing was made unclean by contact with a wide range of things, from a mouse to a pig, to a dead body, a menstruating woman, or a gentile. And this uncleanliness was, so to speak, infectious. If a mouse touched a pot, the pot became unclean and anything put in it became unclean. Anyone who touched or ate anything from the pot became unclean. And anyone who touched such an unclean person became unclean themselves.

No doubt these ideas had their roots in sensible and practical hygiene. But by the time of Jesus religious leaders had elaborated them into a complicated system of religious law to purify unclean things to make them clean. This included ritual washing of hands before meals. For the scribes and Pharisees, following the correct washing rituals had become as important as keeping every other aspect of the Jewish Law, including the Ten Commandments.

This is the background to today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 15:10-28).

A party of scribes and Pharisees from Jerusalem has just challenged Jesus, saying ‘Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands before they eat.’  He chides them, calling them hypocrites, for insisting people obey the details of a man-made tradition while ignoring the spirit of God’s law expressed in the Ten Commandments.

Then, in the first part of today’s reading, he turns to the crowd telling them, ‘Listen and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out that defiles’.

As he explains to Peter, ‘What ever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer. But what comes from the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.’

In other words, Jesus says, what matters to God is not our ritual observance, but the state of our hearts, which may lead us to do wrong. No wonder the Pharisees took offence! If Jesus is right, their whole theory of religion is wrong, their rules and regulations about purity have nothing to do with being righteous before God. Instead God requires them to look inside themselves, to control those human impulses which might lead to bad deeds, which might lead them into sin.

We Christians don’t have rituals to purify ourselves as many religions do, including modern Jews, Muslims and Hindus.

Though that doesn’t mean we don’t have taboos – I’ve yet to see horse on the menu in Ireland!

But we have built up great edifices of ritual and tradition over time, as all religions have.

No doubt ritual and tradition can be helpful – but only to the extent to which they help us look into our hearts and strive to live as God intends us to live, loving God and loving our neighbours as ourselves. In today’s reading Jesus teaches us that we must not let our rituals and traditions get in the way of this. But unfortunately disputes between Christians about ritual and tradition all too often do just that.

Details of ritual and tradition keep Christians of different denominations from recognising each other’s baptism, or from sharing in the Lord’s Supper. And our Anglican Communion is threatened by schism over disputes about the ordination of women, the acceptability of homosexual behaviour, and equal marriage.

Christians engaging in such disputes should, I think, reflect on Jesus’s teaching in today’s Gospel. What matters is the state of a person’s heart, and the deeds it prompts, not their ritual observance and tradition.

And all who claim to be Christians should reflect on Jesus’s advice on how to deal with Pharisees. ‘Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted.’, he says. ‘Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into the pit.’ In other words, leave it to God to deal with those who we think are mistaken.

When we conscientiously disagree about what is right or wrong, we should not try to bludgeon our opponents into accepting our view. We must do what our God given conscience and reason tell us is right. But we should leave those with whom we disagree to go their own way. If they are mistaken, if they are ‘the blind leading the blind’, our heavenly Father will deal with them in his own way.

As he will deal with us if we are mistaken!

I shall finish in prayer

God our loving Father,

grant us wisdom to distinguish right from wrong.

May our hearts bring forth only what is righteous in your sight,

and make us agents of your peace,

spreading good news for all people.

We pray in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Walking on water

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan on Sunday 9th August, the Ninth after Trinity.

We have just heard Matthew’s account (14:22-33) of how Jesus came to help his disciples, when they got into trouble in one of Galilee’s notorious storms.

The same event is also recorded in the Gospels of Mark and John.

The Sea of Galilee is renowned for the fierce and dangerous storms that suddenly appear out of nowhere, and abate just as quickly. I see it in my mind’s eye as rather like our Lough Derg – it’s about 40% bigger in area and wider, but not so long. Those of us who have spent time fishing or sailing on Lough Derg can imagine how the disciples felt, because we know how quickly a squall can blow up.

Immediately after feeding the 5000, Jesus sent the disciples off in a boat, while he told the crowds to go home, and went off by himself up the mountain to pray. The disciples set out in the evening light, unaware of the coming storm. I imagine the night was bright and moonlit, since Mark tells us that Jesus ‘saw that they were straining at the oars against an adverse wind’.

‘Early in the morning’, Matthew tells us, Jesus ‘came walking toward them on the sea’. The Greek words translated as ‘early in the morning’ literally mean ‘in the 4^th watch of the night’. In those days, with no clocks, time during the night was counted in 4 watches of 3 hours each. So sometime between 3 and 6 am, Jesus, walking on the high ground after praying all night, saw the little boat struggling through waves and spray, and came down to help.

But what is this about Jesus walking on the sea?

Should we imagine Jesus far from land, in the middle of the lake, walking on the water, stepping over the waves? This is how most Christians have imagined the scene, I suppose, and many artists have depicted it.

But we should be aware of a translation problem here. The Greek words translated as ‘on the lake’ could equally mean ‘towards the lake’, or ‘at the lake’, that is by the lake shore. The truth is that there are two perfectly possible interpretations of this passage. The first describes Jesus miraculously walking on the water in the middle of the lake. In the second, the disciples’ boat is driven by the wind to the shore, Jesus comes down from the mountain to help when he sees them struggling in the dim light of dawn, and Jesus walks through the surf towards the boat. Both interpretations are equally valid. Some will prefer one and some the other.

When the disciples saw Jesus they were terrified, believing him to be a ghost, until Jesus spoke to them, saying, ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid’.

Whichever way we interpret the Greek, the significance to the disciples is perfectly clear: In the hour of their need, Jesus came to them, to help and reassure them.

 

Only Matthew adds the detail about Peter trying to walk on the water too.

It’s a charming vignette, and so in character for Peter, from the other things we know of him. He was brave and impetuous, but he often found it hard to live up to his good intentions. Remember, it was Peter who swore undying loyalty to Jesus only to deny 3 times that he knew him the very next day.

When Jesus said ‘Come’, Peter bravely ‘got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus’. But his courage failed him and he started to sink. ‘Lord, save me!’ he shouted, and ‘Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”’

Whether Jesus was miraculously walking on water, or whether he came through the surf on the shore to help the disciples in the boat, Peter surely learned this: It is not always easy to follow Jesus, but Jesus is always there to catch you when you stumble and sink.

Finally, what can we learn from this story, 2000 years on?

Well, surely the same things that Peter and the disciples learned! They were privileged to know Jesus in the flesh and to sail the Sea of Galilee with him. But we are privileged too to know the spiritual reality of the living Christ.

In life the wind is often against us. Life for every one of us sometimes feels like a fearful struggle, with ourselves, with our circumstances, with temptations, with sorrow, with the consequences of decisions made, by us or by others. Many today struggle with fear for the future of a world that seems to be spinning out of control towards disaster - fear of the Covid-19 virus and its consequences, fear of an impoverishing Brexit, fear of life destroying climate change. But none of us need struggle with our fears alone. In the hour of our need, Jesus will come to us as he did to the disciples long ago, to help and reassure us. Just listen for his voice saying, ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid’!

If we seek to follow Jesus, we will find like Peter that it is not always easy. It will test our faith at times. Our faith will not always be enough and we will have doubts. But when we feel ourselves going under, if we cry out ‘Lord save me’, Jesus will be there for us, just as he was for Peter, reaching out his hand to catch us. Jesus is always there to save us when we are sinking. Just listen for his voice saying, ‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’

 

Let us finish in prayer with a Collect of the Word:

Mighty God and ruler of all creation, 

give new strength to our faith,

that we may recognise your presence

even when all hope seems lost.

Help us to face all trials with serenity

as we walk with Christ through the stormy seas of life

and come at the last to your eternal peace.

We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord,

who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever. Amen

St Mary Magdalene - Seek, Find, Tell

Reflection during Morning Worship for the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 21st July 2020, the Eve of the Feastday of St Mary Magdalene.

St Mary Magdalene, whose feast day falls tomorrow, plays a central role in Jesus’s ministry.

Her name tells us that she came from Magdala, now called Migdal, then a small fishing village on the Western shore of the Sea of Galilee, a little over 15 miles as the crow flies from Nazareth.

Luke tells us that she was one of several women who supported Jesus during his ministry in Galilee, after being cured of 7 demons. In those days all kinds of psychiatric illness were blamed on evil spirits. I think she must have been in great distress when she encountered Jesus, to need so many demons to be exorcised! We don’t know what her illness was, but perhaps she experienced psychotic hallucinations or something like that.

Mary was one of the women who accompanied Jesus on his last trip to Jerusalem. All 4 Gospels tell us she was one of those who watched and waited as Jesus was crucified, and we are told that she was close by when he was put in the tomb prepared for Joseph of Arimathea and the tomb was sealed with a stone on Good Friday evening.

In the early morning of the first Easter Sunday she went to the sepulchre with sweet spices to anoint Jesus’s body, and saw that the stone had been rolled back. She ran back to tell Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved. She returned to the tomb, weeping, and saw a vision of angels. And she said to them ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him’.

Turning around, she was the first to see the resurrected Jesus. She didn’t recognise him at once. She thought he was the gardener, even when he spoke to her. It was only when he called her by name, ‘Mary!’, that she knew who he was, and responded ‘Rabbouni’, meaning teacher in Hebrew.

And then she went to tell the disciples what she had experienced: ‘I have seen the Lord’.

That’s all we hear of Mary Magdalene in the New Testament, though no doubt she was one of the women who joined the Apostles in the upper room after Jesus’s ascension, as Acts tells us.

Many traditions and stories grew up about Mary Magdalene over the years.

Hundreds of years after her death, leaders of the Western Church identified Mary Magdalene as the same person as John’s Mary of Bethany, and Luke’s woman who was a sinner, who washed Jesus’s feet with her tears, dried them with her hair, and anointed them with perfume. Pope Gregory the Great preached a sermon about it in 591. But there is absolutely nothing in scripture to support this.

Quite unfairly, Mary Magdalene came to be seen as a prostitute who repented of her sins. There are many beautiful pictures of her, traditionally with long red hair immodestly worn down over her shoulders - other female saints have dark hair kept under a scarf. And her name was used for institutions for “fallen women”, including the notorious Magdalen Laundries here in Ireland.

The Eastern Churches are quite sure Mary Magdalene is different to the other two. In their tradition she retired to Ephesus with Mary the mother of Jesus and died there.

But in Provence a quite different tradition arose in the late middle ages. Mary Magdalene is supposed to have travelled with her brother Lazarus across the Mediterranean in a frail boat without rudder or mast to land near Arles. After converting Provence, she lived a life of penance in a cave for 30 years until her death, when angels carried her to her burial place in the oratory of St Maxime at Aix. The monks of Vézelay in Burgundy competed for years with the monks of St Maxime as to who had her real relics. They embellished their stories as they relieved pious pilgrims of their money.

To do the real woman justice, we must chisel away the later legendary incrustations, and get back to the simplicity of what we read in the gospels.

We should remember and celebrate Mary Magdalene, because as well as being a close friend of Jesus and supporting his ministry, she walked with him on the road to Calvary. She watched as he was cruelly murdered on the cross. She was there when he was laid out in the tomb. And she was the first person to experience his resurrection.

She was also the first person to carry the message of the resurrection, when she rushed to tell the news to the disciples. She was literally the Apostle to the Apostles. Let us put ourselves for a moment in her shoes that first Easter morning.

She was a seeker after God’s Kingdom. Jesus was her teacher. She believed he was showing her the way to the Kingdom. But he had been arrested, subjected to a show trial, and cruelly crucified. It must have seemed that all she hoped and prayed for had been dashed. Yet she loved him, so she couldn’t let him go without the proper rituals of mourning.

When she found the tomb apparently desecrated and the body gone, she must have felt she was living a nightmare. But she didn’t give up - she kept on seeking. She asked the person she thought was the gardener where the body had been taken to.

Then Jesus called her by name. Jesus found her - only then did she find him.

She heard Jesus say ‘Go to my brothers and say to them “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God”’, and she did as he asked. She must have felt an overwhelming joy, when she announced to the disciples ‘I have seen the Lord’.

What Mary Magdalene teaches us can be summed up in three words: Seek, Find, Tell.

If we seek God, we shall find him - but only when he calls us by name. And then we are compelled to repeat his message to others.

Weeping and gnashing of teeth

Address given at St Mary's, Nenagh on Sunday 19th July 2020, the Sixth after Trinity

Have you heard the old joke about the hell-fire preacher?

Reaching the climax of his sermon about the day of judgement, he declares in ringing tones the fate of those who fail to meet the standards of God’s Kingdom: ‘They will be thrown into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth’. At which point an old woman interrupts him, saying, “But I have no teeth”; to which the hell-fire preacher replies, “Madam, teeth will be provided”.

Joking aside, it is always worth pondering the parables Jesus uses to teach his followers. The parable of the weeds of the field in today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel (13:24-30, 36-43) follows on from the parable of the sower we looked at last Sunday, and it is no exception. So let’s look at it a little more closely.

The images Jesus uses in his parable would have been vivid and familiar to a Galilean audience.

Weeds were one of the curses against which a farmer had to labour before the discovery of weed-killers. In this parable the weed is no doubt bearded darnel, a kind of rye-grass. In its early stages darnel is indistinguishable from wheat. Only when they both produce seed-heads can they be told apart. But by then their roots are so intertwined that the darnel can’t be weeded out without damaging the roots of the wheat. Weeding would only reduce the yield.

The wheat and darnel can’t be safely separated while they are growing, but in the end they must be, because the grain of the darnel is slightly poisonous. In quantity it causes dizziness and sickness. So the master in the parable gets the reapers to separate them at harvest time. The darnel will be bundled up and burned, while the wheat will be threshed and gathered into the barn.

The idea of an enemy deliberately sowing weeds in someone else’s field would also have struck a chord. It was a crime forbidden in Roman law, which prescribed a punishment for it, so we can be sure it used to happen.

Jesus tells the crowd that the parable is about the kingdom of heaven, and Matthew records him later explaining it to his disciples, to help them – and us – understand what he meant by it. It is one of several parables recorded by Matthew in which Jesus likens the kingdom of heaven to different things – others are a mustard seed and yeast. Jesus is teaching by analogy, and I feel sure we should not take it literally, but rather look for the underlying message.

It is the devil, says Jesus, who sows the weeds, the children of the evil one, in the field which is the world.

We all know instinctively, don’t we, what is right and what is wrong? We have been created as souls with consciences - in the image of God, to use the imagery of the Book of Genesis. But we all also experience insistent little voices within us, which tempt us to do what our God-given conscience tells us is not right. Theologians call it original sin, and Jesus personifies it as the work of the devil. But in our culture it may be easier to think of it as the bad side of ourselves, that part of own psyche which enables and encourages us to damage ourselves and others.

Let me illustrate it with some examples. Advertisers play on our innate greed by whispering, ‘Because you’re worth it’. They tell us that we will live more exciting lives if we buy a new car which will pollute the air in cities and damage health. They offer us a surfeit throughout the year of the rich food we all crave, even though air miles and intensified agriculture damages the ecosystems we depend on. They tempt us with foreign sun holidays, contradicting the public health advice we must follow to suppress Covid-19. It is the thin end of a very fat wedge. Further down that wedge we find unscrupulous interests that seek to persuade us that we and our communities cannot afford to take the steps needed to prevent catastrophic climate change.

However, Jesus warns us against pulling the weeds in case we uproot the wheat.

He is teaching us not to be too quick in our judgements of others. We are all too liable to classify and label people as good or bad without knowing all the facts. And people can change. We can be redeemed from sin by the grace of God, and equally we can disfigure a good life by a sudden collapse into sin. As Jesus says elsewhere, ‘Let he that is without sin cast the first stone’.

We are not entitled to make a final judgement about the righteousness of any other person – only God has that right. It is God alone who can discern the good and the bad. It is God alone who sees all of an individual and all of a person’s life.

Of course, we can’t help forming opinions of others, using our reason which is also God-given. And it is surely right that we should let such opinions guide our actions when appropriate. But we must never forget we may be mistaken. We would do well to remember the Quaker maxim – ‘There is something of God in every person’ – and try to find it.

But of one thing Jesus assures us – we will be judged eventually.

‘Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire’, says Jesus, ‘so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

When Jesus talks about the ‘end of the age’, I don’t think we should understand it as the end of time. Rather I think we should see it as a time which will come to us all – as certain as our own death – in which we see ourselves as God sees us, in one piece from our conception to our death, how we have touched those we have met, all the good in us, and all the bad too.

We are all a mixture of good and bad. Throughout our lives we have often done the wrong thing, but we have also often done the right thing. God loves each and every one of us, and will forgive our failures if we repent and change for the better.

At the end of the age, at a time that will come to us all, each one of us will see clearly. We will burn in the torment of shame for the evil we have done in our lives - we will weep and gnash our teeth. But for the good we have done, we ‘will shine like the sun in the kingdom of the Father’.

The issue in front of us is the balance between burning and shining.

I shall finish in prayer with a Collect of the Word

Saving God,

in Jesus Christ you opened for us

a new and living way into your presence:

give us pure and constant wills

to worship you in spirit and in truth;

through Jesus Christ our Lord,

who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever. Amen