Lent Sermons 2014
1 - Jesus the STRANGER
1st Sunday in Lent, 9th March 2014
Someone I was at school with was once asked by the headmaster, “Would you call yourself a Christian?”. He
thought about it a bit, then replied, “Well, yes, I think I am a Christian: but I’m not so sure I’m a Godian”. He
could relate easily to the attractive, charismatic figure of Jesus: but found it much harder to believe in a distant
and intangible God.
There are plenty of people who would agree with him: but also, I suspect, quite a few who take the opposite line,
saying, Yes, I’m certainly a Godian – how could there be such a world without God? – but why bring Jesus into
it? doesn’t he just get in the way? why have two focal figures instead of just the one? why can’t we come to
God directly instead of having to go through Jesus?
Well, the most common title for Jesus in the gospels is “Son of God”: even the devil in today’s gospel seems to
recognise that one. What does it mean? Definitely not a second God, sitting next to the first one up in heaven
and giving us a perpetual double-take, like watching a 3D film without the glasses: but rather the one who
reveals God, the one through whose person and life God breaks through into our world. The Son of God isn’t
an obstacle, a complication, but a prism, a window on to the glory of God. “Whoever has seen me has seen
the Father”, says Jesus in St John’s gospel, and that’s the whole idea – look at Jesus, contemplate Jesus, and
the Father will be made known, will break through to us.
(A bit in brackets here: so must the life of Jesus be the only time God has sent the Son into creation? That was
easy enough to believe from a smallish universe with the earth at the centre, lasting just a few thousand years:
but now? when there are not just billions of stars but billions of galaxies (and who knows? perhaps also billions
of universes beyond this one), offering at least a strong possibility of intelligent life somewhere else, life which
could never hear about our Jesus because it’s just too far away. That is the question Sydney Carter asks in the
hymn we’ve just sung: who can tell what other cradle may rock the King of Heaven? who can count how many
crosses...? who can tell what other body he will hallow for his own? He doesn’t answer the question; and he
isn’t suggesting that God might have other Sons: only that perhaps The Son might appear in other ways in other
places. Anyway, why worry? what matters is that “holy is the name I know; I will praise the Son of Mary”.)
Jesus didn’t come to reveal himself, but to reveal the Father, in fact he is constantly pointing away from himself
to the Father, refusing to be made king, refusing to be the centre of attention, even refusing to be called “good”.
But the question is: what sort of God does he reveal? That’s what these sermons are supposed to be about.
What was Jesus like? and, therefore, what is God like?
Today I want to talk about Jesus who was a stranger. Of course he was a local man, indeed a man from an
unregarded little village: can anything good come out of Nazareth? asks Nathaniel in John chapter 1. But he is
also a stranger, the citizen of an entirely different realm, which he calls “the Kingdom of God”; and, as such,
speaking strangely, acting strangely, and showing a radically strange, not to say offensive, set of values quite
foreign to those around him.
This idea of Jesus the stranger is very different from the popular picture painted in hymns like “What a friend we
have in Jesus” – a nice, approachable human being, universally easy to get on with. This may have been one
side of his character, but strangeness was certainly another, and actually the gospels show us far more of the
unexpected stranger than the easy friend. People find him different, even scary: Depart from me, Lord, for I am
a sinner! says Peter in Luke’s gospel, and Jesus has to reassure him and many others: Don’t be afraid! For it is
often fear that he inspires.
And also astonishment. Who is this? they all say. What is this? a new teaching! he’s not like the others! he
teaches with authority! who is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him? His values are the opposite of
the world’s values: he eats with sinners, he slams the respectable, he tells subversive stories which put the
outcast before the righteous: all the time, as our final hymn puts it, he is turning the world upside down! In the
end, like the weird people in Edward Lear’s limericks, he is too strange to be tolerated, and “they” smash him!
Look at how he is introduced in the various gospels. Mark, probably the earliest of the four, is often said to give
us the most human picture of Jesus: but he doesn’t begin “the gospel of Jesus Christ, the great Human Being”,
but “the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” – hardly an invitation to see him as ordinary. Luke, of course,
begins with the stories around Jesus’ birth - the Christmas stories, which it’s hard for to read without a
background of twinkling lights, rustling paper, traditional carols, and frosty landscapes. But, if we can manage
to peel these away, the stories are actually very challenging (witness the great liberation songs of Zechariah,
Mary, and Simeon) not to say scary. Zechariah gets struck dumb by an awesome visitor, Mary gives birth in a
cold hovel, the shepherds are “sore afraid”, and Joseph and Mary are amazed –“gobsmacked” might be a better
word – at everything that happens.
And in the Fourth Gospel – St John – there is no doubt about the utter strangeness of Jesus. He is introduced
not as a tiny baby or a wandering preacher, but as the eternal Word of God; and the whole book is shot through
with mystery and divine power. Consider the three gospel stories we shall hear during Lent: Nicodemus coming
to Jesus by night, and being told of a mysterious new birth which admits us to God’s kingdom; the woman at the
well told to ask him for living water, gushing up to eternal life; and then Lazarus, coming out of his tomb still
wrapped in his grave clothes: that’s really scary. And one of the few stories that makes it into Matthew, Mark,
and John is Jesus walking on the water, a terrifying experience for the disciples, so terrifying that Luke left it out.
(Did it happen? who knows? but that’s how the evangelists wanted us to see Jesus).
The early church did nothing to counteract this picture. Icons show him as the “Pantocrator”, a divine being at
the top of the dome, surrounded by saints and angels; and the liturgy which the church developed was not
simple, let alone matey, but a Holy Mystery which only the elect could enter. The liturgy of our church here is
not “catholic” because we happen to fancy nice vestments and the smell of incense: but because this alone can
begin to express the inexpressible wonder of the one who shows us God.
So: amongst other things – and it’s only one part of the picture – Jesus was a stranger from the Kingdom of
God, whose life and person revealed that kingdom’s strangeness. But he also invites us into the kingdom,
where he will indeed be our friend. There, Jesus will no longer be a stranger to us: but here it’s us who will be
the strangers.....