After the testing in the wilderness, which annoying we have not got to yet but the readings jump around in this strange time between Christmas and Lent, Jesus is ready to begin his preaching, but everything seems to go wrong. John the Baptist is arrested and so Judea, the heart of the Holy Land, becomes too hot for Jesus. He even leaves his home territory of Nazareth for Capernaum, “the Galilee of the Gentiles”, as it was called.But as so often, this apparent setback is a new beginning. It foreshadows the community which will come to be, of Jews and Gentiles. It is here Jesus meets and calls his first disciples – pointedly not in an established Jewish area, but in a new land. When we are forced out of our “comfort zone”, God’s grace brings new things into existence. This too is the experience of those whom Jesus calls. These fishermen are called to leave behind the familiar life they inherited from their ancestors, taken out of their depth, and be caught up in the life of this alarming stranger who comes from nowhere. Eventually they will be despatched beyond the boundaries of the world they know.Becoming a disciple of Jesus can be and often is thoroughly unsettling. One has no idea what will be asked and how one will cope. It is a perilous adventure, especially alarming for our timid culture with its fear of risk and obsession with health and safety.God’s love often propels us into deep waters where we must either sink or trust in him. To love anyone is risky. Who knows what it will involve? How much more dangerous to fall in love with the one who is love incarnate. This is an invitation to lose control of our lives. So the Christian imagination should defy the timid neuroses of our time. At Pentecost, much further on in their journey but with the same people we meet today the disciples received the Holy Spirit that propelled them on a mission to the whole world. But they were reluctant to go and leave the small and familiar community of the early Church in Jerusalem, which they could not even imagine today, as they are called in Capernaum. Finally it was persecution that dislodged them. God sometimes resorts to desperate means. We must dare to grapple with questions to which we have no easy answers and try ways of being a church that may well fail. Let us not be afraid, as Peter was in the boat a few years later.Jesus commanded the disciples to get into the boat and go before him. We cannot remain on the beach saying, “Myself, I would not go sailing today” or “I would choose a different boat.” Jesus is alone on the mountain but Peter must not be unaccompanied, he is supported by his fellow disciples, called this day, many of whom he would not have chosen, we too must not be unaccompanied, but also we cannot choose who accompanies us!Sometimes we too shall feel alone, burnt out, exhausted. But Jesus is watching and will come closer to us than ever before. So we need not be afraid. We live in a time of terrible storms too, of growing violence, from knife crime to war. The chasm between the rich and the poor is ever wider. The world order which came into being after the last world war is breaking down. We have no idea of what Artificial Intelligence will yield. If we are not nervous, we ought to be. But we are called and we are fed.For here is a shared meal, our Eucharist, the feeding of the 5000, the absence of Jesus, and his sudden appearance among us. Already on the Sea of Galilee after the call of the fishermen when they were on a boat again the disciples are living in anticipation of the death and Resurrection of the Lord. It will be repeated after the feeding of the four thousand. We will encounter it again on the road to Emmaus, we will find it in the Kingdom yet to come, so do not say ‘what can I give the world’, but ‘how can I let God feed others through me and us’, say ‘yes’ as the disciples did when they were called, step away from the comfortable. Step away from yourself and into Him.The disciples, called today in the Gospel, would later feed the five thousand but they were stuck in the old logic of calculation, of what to do next, of doubt. The Lord of the harvest works miracles with what they offer and with what we offer when we first learn to trust Him.We may feel that, faced with the vast challenges of our world and Church, we have so little to offer as Disciples. What can we say and do that will make a difference? But with God’s grace, our little will be more than enough. So let us not harden our hearts but be open to the incalculable gifts of God, who bestows upon us grace without measure if we open our hands and our ears to Him and to each other.
How do we come to understand God and our faith? Many people don’t really understand it at all of course and have a kind of totemic thought that just turning up in church saves them, which is in complete contradiction to the teachings of the Bible. We should claim no complete understanding of Jesus, and there is no Gnostic knowledge of Him that has been hidden from public view for centuries- and the original deceit of the devil was of course to offer that to Adam. What there is, of course, is scripture and history. Jesus cannot be understood apart from the history of Israel. God’s covenant relationship with the chosen people — ‘I will be your God and you will be my people’ — is the golden thread running through that history. Everything recounted in the Old Testament, whether in the law or in the prophets or in the writings, records the fortunes of that covenant-relationship and looks forward to its consummation in the coming of Messiah, the Christ. Jesus himself tells us that ‘salvation is from the Jews’ (John 4.22).In identifying him, John the Baptist describes him as ‘the Lamb of God’ (John 1.29). Lambs were slaughtered and eaten by the Hebrews in the moment of their deliverance from the land of Egypt. The blood of those lambs marked the houses that the Lord ‘passed over’. The annual remembrance of the Passover that began their journey towards a promised land, still involved, in Jesus’s day, the slaughtering of lambs in the Temple.These are thoroughly Jewish titles, then, and they take us to the heart of Jewish experience and faith. Jesus is the lamb, the servant, the chosen one, and the beloved. In Jesus the promise of an everlasting covenant (Jeremiah 31) is fulfilled. In Jesus, God visits His people in a ‘once and for all’ sealing of the covenant (Hebrews 7.27), its establishment on a foundation that can never be shaken. We can even say that Jesus is Israel. The servant of Isaiah is an individual from among the people but represents the whole people and stands for them so that what happens between him and God is happening between the whole people and God.John the Baptist has been described as the parting voice of the Old Testament and it is to the Old Testament that we must look to begin to understand his description of Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. The lamb occupies an important place in the story of the people of Israel. In the first few pages of their sacred text we encounter Abel, son of Adam and Eve, offering a lamb in sacrifice to the Lord. An atonement sacrifice of lambs would become part of the daily ritual of the Temple in Jerusalem. When God asks Abraham to go to one of the mountains in the land of Moriah – perhaps the mount on which the Temple would later be built – and offer his son Isaac as a burnt offering, the unsuspecting Isaac asks his father ‘where is the lamb?’ Abraham’s responds ‘God will provide’ – words which only become at the close of the Old Testament when John the Baptist points to Christ and says, ‘Here is the Lamb of God’. The prophet Isaiah speaks of a suffering servant of God, a man who would be despised and rejected by men and wounded for the transgressions of the people. He compares this suffering servant to a lamb that is led to the slaughter. From the very beginning of his life, Jesus is on a trajectory that will lead to the sacrifice of the Cross, he embodies perfectly the sacrificial lamb.Jesus would be crucified on the feast of the Passover. This feast recalled the Exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt. John the Baptist was the son of a priest, Zechariah, who would have participated in the daily Temple sacrifice. The blood of the Passover Lamb delivered the Israelites in Egypt from death in Egypt. When John describes Jesus as the Lamb of God he pointed to the definitive sacrifice that would deliver humanity from everlasting death. So Jesus is the fulfilment of the Old Testament story. The golden thread that had run through that story was God’s covenant relationship with his chosen people which began when God had said ‘I will be your God and you will be my people’.What also becomes clear in the story is that this Jewish Messiah, this servant of the chosen people, would be a Saviour not just for the people of Israel, but for all people, for us in Blackpool. He would take away the sins of the world. Until he came, the task of the chosen people of the Old Testament, as Isaiah insists in our first reading, was to act as a light to the nations. And this task of being a light to the nations is one that we must continue. Strengthened by the grace given to us in the Eucharist, the sacrament which makes present the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, the fulfilment of the old Order, we must go out as signs and instruments of the love, mercy, and forgiveness that Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, offers to all peoples of the world, and then we will come to understand God and our faith, because we will see it in others.
Do you remember the day of your Baptism? Probably not, I suppose, for a number of good reasons, one of which may have been that you were a baby, and it may even be that your Godparents have even forgotten the promises they made on your behalf – that’s one of the reasons I have no objection to there sometimes being so many Godparents – maybe at least one will remember! Our baptisms may well have been done in a quiet church, by a priest softly saying the words and pouring a small amount of water over our heads so as not to disturb us, or make us cry, or have a little accident, for all these things can be on our minds as we hold the baby!But today we hear of quite a different type of baptism. By all accounts, John the Baptist was no cosy figure and offered little to soothe. He was fierce, outspoken, direct, outlandish looking, and lived a strange kind of life. Soon he would be removed by execution for daring to question the establishment.To come to John was to be cut down to size and jolted into repentance. Jesus went to him not as a child but as an adult and took even John by surprise in doing it. This was no setting for the Saviour, the all-powerful and sinless one. It was a place of repentance; it was a time of humility before God to which everyone was flocking, none of them were asked to fill forms out, none of them were questioned about the role of a Godparent, none of them had to wear a white dress – the wish to repent and change was sufficient.What was Jesus Christ doing there? He who created the water and divided the waters and the land Himself now plunges from one to the other as the voice of the Father thunders from heaven – the world is created again, dynamically, suddenly, as creator meets creation and all is recreated to prepare the way for that which Baptism signifies – the joining of humanity to divinity, the Word in flesh is submerged and the word of the Father consecrates Him as he rises. It’s the eighth day or creation, and awesome to behold.Something new was coming to birth from the waters of the Jordan. Water that is womb, Adam and now a new Adam. There had been a parting of the waters of the Red Sea to allow God’s people to escape from slavery; Moses and now a new Moses. Christ divides the water to complete the Old Testament, the final exodus, the final pillar of fire, the new Adam rises and the Father testifies as to His divinity. The tomb of Adam is empty and the womb of life opens, out of the depths the Word shouts and from the heavens the Father comes. In the Son we see God sharing our materiality and submerged by the weight of sins he did not commit but took on. We were not saved from a distance by a Saviour who kept himself invulnerable. An ark survives the flood and this ark of the Body of Christ survives death and asks us all to become part of it, in this same, way, through Baptism. The dove brought a sign that the flood was over and now the Father announces that the plan for salvation has begun – what a beautiful day and what a beautiful thing we do in Baptism, forms or no forms!Our own baptism may well have been a tame ceremony, but its effects through Christ are matters of life and death, and by it we are involved in mysteries that change the world. Today’s feast completes that of Christmas day and the Epiphany, showing us just what a distance Christ travelled from the life he shared as God with the Father and the Spirit whilst remaining the Son of God. Christ journeyed to us with a purpose and not in vain and this day the purpose is revealed – that we can find salvation and forgiveness and belonging in Him.On Good Friday, Jesus would again be humbled and then executed. For him to be born at all was already a descent, a self-emptying of glory, and his whole life and ministry among us were often in obscurity. When Jesus was finally brought down, down from the cross, they put his corpse out of sight in a tomb, submerged in stone.In today’s feast of the baptism of our Lord, we reconnect with that day when he was submerged in water at the river Jordan. Yet as the Gospels tell us, the Father never took back his love for his Son, and the Spirit came to him.Because of all this, we too are baptised by water in the name of the Trinity of unbreakable and saving love. The Church has been made into our ark of salvation; the baptismal font is tomb and womb and we are His family, because He has lived and died that we can live and die in Him. Baptism really isn’t about the water, it’s about the whole creation shouting in joy because it has brought forth a saviour, and He has brought us life.
We are familiar with the almost comically unfamiliar Kings that we meet today, journeying in Eastern finery, sticking out like a sore thumb so much that they are strangely familiar, as though there has been a fire alarm in Funny Girls and all the cast were out on the street, exoticism suddenly brought face to face with minicabs and rain and litter. The Magi are not the dusty east of poor Palestinian peasants under Roman occupation, but the spice-laden Persian east, the Aladdin east of our Western imagination- turbans, colourful robes, vast palaces, sultans, minarets and genies, astrology and magic and smoke and mirrors. The Bible calls them wise men- magi (we get the English word magic from that word). Much of what we think we know about them comes is, simply, the accumulated imagination of two millennia.They arrive late in the Bethlehem story. For they have come a long way, and took a detour to consult with a tyrant- visiting Herod’s palace and asking,Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.Herod had not been expecting a new king, not least one announced by a star. He is worried, and calls in his own advisors. Instead of consulting the stars, they consult their old books, and by accident stumble on the old prophecy that a special ruler will one day come from Bethlehem. Presumably the Magi were by that point drinking sherbets and luxuriating in a palace, probably for the first time since they left their own.Herod tries to use the magi. He knows it’s in Bethlehem the danger lies- but where exactly, he’s not sure. So he pretends to be a potential worshipper (when in fact he has far more nefarious intentions) and sends them off to do the finding for him. And so the naive wise men toddle off to Bethlehem:When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure-chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.There is, of course, something incongruous about these richly dressed (as we like to imagine them) wise men stooping to get into a tiny cave to worship a baby. The son of a carpenter and a peasant-girl, worshipped by magi, worthy still of worship: here is, indeed, the mystery and magic of the story of Jesus’ birth.It would not have come naturally to the magi to disobey King Herod. For the Wise Men were members of the establishment. They were accustomed to royalty, used to honouring power, comfortable with kings telling them what to do. That’s why they first sought the new king in the royal palace. But this time, they go back by another road, because they had had a dream (people put a lot of store in dreams back then as well).The Wise Men, inadvertently, caused a massacre of children, though it is Herod who is guilty: a man ordering slaughter because he needs to preserve his own power. And that is why this story is so powerful- for we know who today’s Herod’s are, and who their victims.Around the world, children are still being killed because powerful people have ordered it. And they give political or strategic reasons why the children have to be killed- but it is revolting that it still happens today.God’s gift to the world is Jesus Christ, the vulnerable child. God stoops into a cave in Bethlehem to be born, but very nearly doesn’t make it out of the manger, escaping just in time from the murderous Herod. For the Christmas story is no fairy tale. There’s power politics, misunderstandings, evil, tragedy: Rachel weeping for her children. Not everyone welcomes the disruption which Christ will bring into the world. In Christ, God comes, not to a Christmas card world, but our real world of wicked and incompetent leaders, where children die unnecessarily, where ordinary people have their lives disrupted by powers beyond their control.And yet: there’s also the star. In Christ, the light has come which shines in the darkness, and the darkness will never put it out. Thanks be to our God, who brings light even in the darkest places. Amen.
