2 February 2014
HYMNS:
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Preacher: Leslie Griffiths
“Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty”
“All hail the power of Jesu’s name”
“God of all power, and truth, and love”
“Love divine, all loves excelling”
READINGS: 1 Corinthians 1 21-28
Mark 1 21-28
“AUTHORITY”
I’ve recently preached two sermons that described significant journeys. First, there was
the journey of St Peter from Joppa (where he was taking refuge from persecution) to
Caesarea where he encountered a gentile believer. And then there was St Paul’s
journey from Jerusalem to Damascus (where he intended to persecute Jewish
Christians).
This week, I’ve undertaken a journey too. No. I’m not going to claim that mine was as
earth-shatteringly important as those I’ve mentioned above. But for me it was an
equally radical shift. I travelled from BBC Radio 4 (a speech based radio channel) to
BBC Radio 2 (a programme driven by popular music and home-spun chat). It was a trip
that took me from John Humphrys (one of the nation’s most revered commentators and
programme presenters) to Chris Evans (a very excitable and free-flowing spirit with
patter to die for). It was a journey from one planet to another.
When I got into the studio with Chris Evans he thought he was doing me a favour by
offering me an ice-breaker. Did I remember, he asked, what I said on the Radio about a
remark made by John Lennon in 1963? That was the occasion when Lennon
suggested that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. I replied I did indeed
remember that occasion. And how I had stated that I agreed with John Lennon. Jesus
never commanded a crowd of screaming fans to match those who’d turned out,
screaming and shrieking in New York 50 years ago. The Beatles were infinitely more
popular than Our Lord.
But I added a rider.
I suggested that the jury is still out. And it’ll stay out for another 1950 years. Jesus was
not a crowd-puller in his day but, within 350 years there were 40 million people who
claimed to be his followers. And today that total adds up to 1 billion. That’s an
extraordinary number of people who still call themselves “Christians”. “So,” I said to the
redoubtable Chris Evans “ask me on to the show in two millennia and I’ll give you the
answer to your question.”
We’ll see.
There was something about Jesus that singled him out from other people. The French
have a word for it. Jesus had what they call a je ne sais quoi. He just stood there and
people felt his presence. He just spoke and people admired his wisdom. He just
addressed a problem and the pieces fell in place.
This was infuriating for those who didn’t like him. They just couldn’t deny the evidence
of their eyes and ears. Nor could they be blind to the effect he was having on people. It
was jaw-dropping. This man from nowhere who carried none of the trappings of high
office, none of the glamour of a celebrity, none the power that money can buy, this
back-woodsman, this provincial wandering guru, had this mesmerising effect wherever
he went. It left the authorities of his day scratching their heads about the source of his
authority. What an irony!
Shakespeare, as so often, gets near the heart of it. “Some are born great,” he writes,
“some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.” Just substitute
the word authority (as appropriate) where Shakespeare uses greatness and we’re
getting near to understanding the sense of the gospel.
The “authority” of Jesus is instinctual, of his very essence, something of who he is, an
attribute or an aspect or a dimension of his very being. Put the word Jesus into your
spell check and it will come out as “authority”.
He speaks and acts as one having authority.
Or just listen to the way Charles Wesley sums it up in a magnificent stanza from a
simply wonderful hymn. Unfortunately, we’ve so got used to bawling it out, we love it so
much that we’ve polished its sharp edges and smoothed the rough and radical thinking
out, and we deny ourselves the time to let the words sink in. But they make my point for
me with some force:
He speaks, and listening to his voice,
New life the dead receive;
The mournful, broken hearts rejoice;
The humble poor believe.
That’s authority for you. Just by speaking and being heard all kinds of miracles are
brought into being.
This way of looking at Jesus challenges all our conventional ways of measuring
authority:
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from the barrel of a gun – an idea put forward by Chairman Mao Tse-Tung of
China in the 1960s;
achievement and authority measured by the size of a banker’s bonus;
a politician would claim authority on the basis of the number of seats won at an
election;
for some business leaders, they’d boast of their ability to win deals by the scale of
the bribes they were able and ready to offer;
then there’s authority based on who you know rather than what you know;
and even Churches have sought to underline their authority by shaping a dogma
of infallibility;
and then there’s military authority, measured by the number of stars on a
general’s shoulder.
That’s the way we are used to measuring what we call “authority”. With Jesus it is
radically different. You’ve got to listen to him. You dare not miss a syllable. He stands
before you and then it’s as if he places you under an imperative to consider carefully
what he sets out before you. We dare not allow familiarity to breed contempt for his
teachings, or allow our brains to conjure up a denial of what’s in front of us. We need to
look again at what the world considers weakness, to reconsider what he world calls
foolishness. We need to do this with urgency because the secret of Jesus’s authority
lies somewhere there.
During the lifetime of Jesus people got the point, they understood the message, viva
voce.
After his death, all they had was the shape of the instrument that caused his death.
They simply now had to cling to the cross.
“The good men do lives after them” – Shakespeare again. And that’s Jesus too. We
mustn’t base our attraction to him simply on the figure he cut in his day. We must also
consider the quality of his love, the
incorruptible,
unconditional,
incomparable,
unfathomable,
quality of his love. And, the seal of this rarest of precious ointments, the love of God,
was set by the cross. The cross, though it took his life did not diminish his love; though
it spoke of human cruelty, it did not infect him with its poison; though it could be
represented as defeat, it actually turns our way of judging defeat and victory on its head.
This wasn’t a loser who died on that cross but a winner. It wasn’t a victim, but someone
who gave human life new parameters.
I’ve seen people, illiterate people, sign official documents with a cross. Those
documents are perfectly legitimate and valid.
Jesus signed a statement about the meaning, the potential, the profundity, the
challenge of human life – also with a cross and it too was done legally and enjoys
perfect validity.
Paul’s rhetoric is never bettered than in these remarkable and ascending statements
about the true meaning of the cross. This is what we read:
God chose what is foolish to shame the wise;
God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong;
God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to
reduce to nothing things that are.
Jesus struck people with his authority whilst alive. It took his death to make the point
absolutely clear.
There is no greater strength, no greater freedom, no deeper wisdom, no more
convincing truth than the ability to hold fast to all that makes you the person that you
are, and to do it through thick and thin, and to keep on doing it right to the end. And
that’s exactly what Jesus did. And nowhere do we connect with that message more
intimately than when we take bread and wine, tokens of the life and love of Jesus who
spoke, acted, lived and died as the very embodiment of love, the supreme offering of
God to us his creatures.
We have a Lowry (L S Lowry, British artist 1887-1976) calendar that hangs proudly in
our downstairs loo. Yesterday, I turned the page to February and a picture call “Snow in
Manchester” – a piece done in 1946, came into view. I read the blurb. This is what it
told me:
“Lowry showed great skill with white paint. He only used five colours
throughout his career. But white flake, that was different. From 1924 he
conducted an experiment – to find out the qualities of white flake over long
periods of time. He stood several boards painted with a number of coats of
white flake and kept them for many years. And he found what he was
looking for – a perfectly beautiful tone of chalky grey-white. ‘So you see,’
he exclaimed, ‘the pictures I have painted today will not be seen at their
best until I’m dead.’”
And so it was with Jesus. And that’s my response on the question of John Lennon’s
remark – the picture Jesus painted whilst amongst us would not be seen at its best until
he was dead. And that’s my answer to Chris Evans – invite me back in a couple of
thousand years and you’ll see the true colours and the perfect beauty of the picture of
love painted in the life of Jesus come to its full and majestic flowering.