Sermon 16th February 2025
Third Sunday before Lent
I Corinthians 15.12-20; Luke 6.17-26
Catherine Gibson
As we heard just a few weeks ago, when Jesus went into the synagogue at Nazareth, read from the prophet Isaiah and said, “Today this prophecy is fulfilled in your hearing” he was announcing his programme for the Kingdom of God. Immediately before the passage read to us this morning, Jesus has spent a night in prayer on a mountain-top and selected his twelve apostles from among the disciples following him. People would immediately recognise the symbolism of twelve: they evoked the twelve tribes of Israel. Like a new Moses, Jesus has come down from the mountain and is launching a new Israel. He addresses his disciples, echoing themes from the Isaiah passage. In Nazareth he had described his role as reversing injustice and bringing healing: “[The Lord] has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free. . .” Now he promises his disciples a similar overturning of the way things normally are: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven. . . .” Conversely, those who are rich and have more than enough to eat, who are laughing now and are spoken well of by everyone: woe to them!
There are several passages in the Old Testament where a prophet, speaking for God, pronounces blessings and woes. The Old Testament reading, had we used it, is one such passage from Jeremiah. There are others in Isaiah and elsewhere. The concept of ‘blessing’ in the Old Testament usually referred to consolation in this life, and often included material prosperity (although this was beginning to be questioned). Jesus is launching his Kingdom-movement. The Kingdom is both present and future. It is wherever Jesus is, and we can enter it in this life: “He looked at his disciples and said, ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.’” But it comes into fulfilment at the General Resurrection, and we see in our first reading how insistent Paul is on the centrality of Christ’s resurrection, which establishes his conquest of death and sin, and opens the way to resurrection life for us all. It is that which makes sense of life, and transforms it from ending only in loss.
The woes are earned by those who make themselves too much at ease in the world: those who are untroubled by injustices and hardships suffered by others, who lack compassion, and care more about popularity than truth. They are satisfied with their life as it is, or as they have made it, and have left no room for God in it.
In his book, Surprised by Joy, C S Lewis describes three childhood experiences which haunted him through the years and which led him to Christianity. The first was “itself the memory of a memory:” his brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery; and remembering that event, the child Lewis felt something like “Milton’s ‘enormous bliss of Eden.’. . It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? Not, certainly, for a biscuit tin filled with moss, nor even (though that came into it) for my own past. Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. .
“The second came through Squirrel Nutkin . . . It troubled me with what I can only describe as the Idea of Autumn . . . As before, the experience was one of intense desire. . . And in this experience also there was the same surprise and the same sense of incalculable importance. .
“The third glimpse came through poetry. I had become fond of Longfellow’s Saga of King Olaf . . . There came a moment when I found the unrhymed translation of Tegner’s Drapa and read
I heard a voice that cried,
Balder the beautiful
Is dead, is dead------
I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky. I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale and remote) and then, as in the other examples, found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.”
Lewis calls this longing, which is more precious than any known fulfilment, “Joy”. Those who are too much at ease in the world stifle the possibility of such longings. But such experiences like this give us glimpses of God. Like T S Eliot’s Magi after they had seen the Christ Child, we are “no longer at ease in the old dispensation.” Such glimpses prompt us to go on reaching out beyond ourselves. We shall know their continuous fulfilment in the life to come.