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Avatar photoHaddon Willmer

Haddon Willmer has been a member of Moortown Baptist Church since 1966. He is Professor Emeritus of Theology at the University of Leeds. He is married to Hilary: they have three children and eight grandchildren. He is a trustee of CROP and of the Child Theology Movement (see their websites). He is specially interested in politics and forgiveness; Barth and Bonhoeffer; the child, mission and the kingdom of God

Haddon Willmer. The anointing for the burial, the core Gospel for every day everywhere (Mark 14.9)  

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The anointing for the burial, the core Gospel for every day everywhere (Mark 14.9)  

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Two days before the Passover, at the end of the week after Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, a week of continued witness, teaching, about matters like the greatest commandment,  within a tumble of argument, conflict, plotting to kill Jesus, who doesn’t run away, but carries on upturning the tables, calling for a true temple, a house of prayer for all peoples….

If it is going to be for all peoples, it must be a house of love, and truth, and generous humility….

2

The woman pours out her love and gratitude and respect/faith on Jesus 

As he was, still healthy, functioning, teacher, healer, leader….

She does not know what is to come?

She is aware Jesus is opposed, threatened, but like him, is getting on with life, even in the land of Herod, and in the province of Pilate, and the city of the priests….

She lives in the will and love of God regardless of the danger. 

She is not immune to the dangers.  Jesus will be killed.  She will be bullied and disrespected.  But she does the good she is able to do.

And Jesus accepts it, and says, this is a greater good, a kindlier, stranger caring than she imagined.  

3

The woman runs into trouble from the people around who want to get Jesus trapped in trouble. 

They don’t directly say:  All this ointment should not be wasted on Jesus, but it is a thought near the surface of their minds, because it corresponds to a suspicion, a hostility to Jesus which is deep in them, maybe has them uncontrollably in its grip.

Can they think straight, when they are so hostile, and yet want to be respectable – can they get near to admitting to themselves what they think about Jesus?   They want to be rid of him, but they do not want to see themselves as killers.    (When it comes to the killing, they want the cover of law, to say, He ought to die, and that brings them out of the business as those who have righteously, innocently, simply done what the law requires.)

3

They do not directly attack the woman.   They rather indulge in a rather clever discussion of the ethics of charity.   

They see the ointment.  They do not see or value the love the ointment carries from the woman to Jesus.  They rather see the money it cost, the money they could get if they put it on e-bay.  A whole year’s wage, some say.   

They do not see the costly love in it, because they do not respect a woman, and they don’t think Jesus is worth that much – they rather tend to put a negative valuation on him.  

They want to make their objection to this anointing morally respectable, at least in their own estimation.  So they say, why is all this poured out on this one man, when it could be used to feed many poor people?    

In making this argument, are they not as morally respectable, as morally self-assured as the Pharisee of Luke 18.9-14 who boasts of giving a tenth of all his income?   

So they criticise the woman, give her trouble.  She may be generous in heart, but she lacks good judgment, a proper sense of priorities.   She makes a spectacle of herself in the middle of a respectable dinner party, she is out of place.  

4

Jesus comes to her defence

He does not say, I am the son of God, I should be honoured and cared for in this way.  He does not say, I am called, Teacher and Lord (Jn 13.12) – 

He says, directly, Don’t trouble her, she has done a good service for me.

I am here now, and will be gone tomorrow.  I am here, a weary man, in a dangerous situation, surrounded by friends like you, crypto-enemies, so I am now a candidate for care.  

In this dinner party, I am like the man I told a story about who was mugged and left half dead on the road.  A priest and a Levite had other things on their minds and their agenda, and they hurried by on the other side.  Don’t be like that here.  Rather, let the despised feared foreigner, the Samaritan, teach you, to respond with full involvement to the actual person you come across on the road, the person who was never in your plan at the start of the day, the person whose need cries out, the person it is very natural for lazy busy self-important people to ignore.   

Today, I am, for you, here in this passing moment, the blind man at the side of the road crying out for the Son of David to have mercy on him, while people around him tell him to shut up, to stop being a nuisance, the Master is too busy and important for you.

Today, this woman is the Samaritan.

Care for the poor in general, by all means, so you should – that is the teaching of all the law and prophets  (Isaiah 58).  But don’t worry, the great crowd of them will always be there, and you will have the opportunity to help them any time you like.  They will need you, make sure you help them.  They will be so many, and so perpetual, that you may easily get weary in doing well, and look for respectable excuses, Vance-like, to let your charity start with yourself, and stop soon after.  And then, just as you are blocked in your heart against helping me today, you will go on being blocked in heart and hand when all the poor are still with you.  

Don’t be deceived by your good show of standing up for the poor in general, as a nice idea,  when  you turn away from the one actual  poor person who is now, this moment, within your reach.  

The call of God comes to you in the person, the people, who are in your reach,  here and now….God calls you here and now into living partnership, to share his love in reality in life, starting where you are and never stopping till we come to the ends of the earth.   

To turn away from love in action for those who are in your presence, is to walk away from God, even if you go on with your temple duties.  (Matthew 25.41-45)

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We can see that all this is implicit in the story, for we have all the teaching and practice of Jesus in the story and the teaching.  

Don’t judge the pharisees too harshly.  They had clues and hints, but not as clear as we have.  They had Jesus before them, and they had the law and the prophets.  And they, like us, have years of human living, paying attention to themselves and how life goes on around them, all chances to learn, to see more clearly, to know what practical generous love is like, in distinction not only from plain hate, but also from hypocritical defensive self-righteousness. Jesus gave people the material, the pointers, the awakening questions, the example, so they could become more sensitive, more courageous, more eager to do good.

We are in the same human situation.  

We too in our way can be like the critics of this story, like people who saw and heard Jesus and one way or another, refused to go through the door to life which he pointed out to us, saying, This is the way, walk in it.  

We can be like the critics in this story, who saw the woman and what she did, and did not see…

6  

Jesus does more than defend the woman by shaking up the complacency of her critics.  

That is a negative defence.  

Jesus makes a positive defence.  

She has done a good work, a good service for him.  Its goodness, as he identifies it, is something, I suspect, beyond what the woman imagined.

Jesus sees, and is grateful for a gift much more wonderful and strangely comforting than the woman intended.  

And no one around could have thought it.  

Some were plotting to kill Jesus, but they didn’t think what it would really be like for the whole  thing to be done.  

Jesus did.  He was aware of the danger he was in, of the plotters and betrayers and deserters, of the vulnerability of his situation – he had lived a life out in the open, generously giving himself to all, not shunning conflict, not afraid to do disturbing things, like riding into Jerusalem on a donkey and upturning tables in the temple, and talking about its being taken down, stone by stone, by its enemies who had their opportunity  because Jerusalem refused his care and his peace (Matt 23.37-39) –  

People had warned him not to go to Jerusalem because there were plots against his life, but he was determined to do what a prophet of the Lord had to do.

So when the dinner party was seething with politely covered suspicion and dislike of Jesus, his possible, likely, coming death was in his view.  It did not divert him from his ministry, of love, truth-speaking, help to all, but he carried what he saw coming  as a burden, so his living involved constant effort and determination to do God’s will, in the spirit of God, and not to be frightened off-course, by what was frightening.  

A couple of days later, aware it was his last supper, he gave his friends bread and win-his body and blood.

Then night came and in Gethsemane, we see how Jesus felt the terrible reality of death as it was coming to him, physically, socially, spiritually.

It could be that a similar sense of his immediate future came to mind, when the woman anointed him.  He would be killed, and dead.  And dead bodies are anointed.  

Perhaps Jesus saw all this in foreboding and imagination, but he did not focus on himself, on  the sad condition of his being dead and anointed, but rather turns attention to what the woman is doing, and gratefully celebrates it.  

He celebrates it by sharing with us what he saw and felt in the woman’s act.  His dying would take him out of life, into dark loneliness, as a great No fell upon him – but there the oil of love was upon him, the heart and hand of the woman, living God.  

So Jesus celebrates it by expanding it, beyond the death, beyond the burial, which shuts him  away from humanity and puts human living behind a stone, reaching into life, the life beyond his dying.  He does not speak of his personal resurrection, as we tend to do, his being personally exalted on high.   He is buried, he empties himself (Phil 2) but that is not the end: there is good news of God to be proclaimed in the whole world.  And what the woman did to him is not just part of the telling, it is a key to seeing the good news that must be told and followed.

So, Jesus said.  In this way, Jesus valued what she had done.  

But as we can see, his expectation was more hopeful than realistic.  

He said wherever the Gospel was preached, her story will be told. 

I have been listening to the Gospel being preached, in many places, for nearly ninety years, and I have heard no more than a handful of references to this woman’s action,

But we can say, At least the story has been all this time in the Gospels and still is there now, so even if the church doesn’t make much of it, it is still with us in the Bible.

The important point, here, in my judgment, is that this saying of Jesus binds the history of his earthly life and ministry into the church’s post-resurrection witness.   

Jesus went around doing good to people.  He went on doing good right up to the end – hear him on the cross.  And Jesus did not simply do good to people, he did good with people, and he engaged and encouraged people to join him in his work.  He said to his disciples:  You give the people something to eat.  

And so, I read this story in this way.  Jesus is reclining at the meal, not doing anything, like walking, or talking, or healing.  And she comes, and anoints him, loving and caring. And so, in this story, the active side of Jesus is in her hands, in her actions.  The passive side, the people who lay around Jesus waiting, wanting to be healed, is in this story played by Jesus – he is weak, pressured, shortly to be buried.  And it is the woman who is the active person here, active as Jesus ia in so many of the stories about him.  

It is a story of a spreading partnership in the Gospel, which is not left to Jesus all on his own to do.  He called disciples, and sent them out to preach good news and heal the sick.   And in this story, a woman is not called, but somehow is moved by love and care, to do healing, edifying, work on Jesus.   And Jesus says, This I am glad to see, this is in accord with the will of the Father, which I am following.  She did it without any direction from me, but it is to be gladly owned.  Wherever the Gospel is proclaimed, this must be told, for the Gospel is not truly told, is not spread towards the ends of the earth, if it is simply talking about me, as though there is nothing else.  The Gospel is that God sends Jesus, and Jesus serves, in order to draw all men to him, not draw them into a lazy religious consumerism, where God does all the work, and we have all the joy and comfort, but into real partnership, where we accompany Jesus, in doing good, in feeding the hungry, in speaking truth, in sharing the cross.   

Mark 9.38

7

We should not read this story as though, in 2026,  we have Jesus reclining on the couch, physically   before us, ready to be anointed.  Or to have songs sung to him. 

We have to hear it in the reality of our ‘here and now’ and not in some religious make-believe, which is not worthy of Jesus and persuades no honest person.

Do not touch me – John 20.17   –   is a word calling for due respect…

You have the poor always with you.

And as much as you do it to one of the least of these my brethren, you do it to me.  Matthew 25.

8

A beautiful commentary on the story of the woman anointing Jesus is to be found, I think, in the hymn, Brother, sister, let me serve you.  It highlights the essentials of the relation between them, and calls us to live in a similar way

  1. Brother, sister, let me serve you;
    let me be as Christ to you;
    pray that I may have the grace to
    let you be my servant too.

    2. We are pilgrims on a journey,
    and companions on the road;
    we are here to help each other
    walk the mile and bear the load.

    3. I will hold the Christlight for you
    in the nighttime of your fear;
    I will hold my hand out to you,
    speak the peace you long to hear.

    4. I will weep when you are weeping;
    when you laugh I’ll laugh with you;
    I will share your joy and sorrow,
    till we’ve seen this journey through.

    5. When we sing to God in heaven,
    we shall find such harmony,
    born of all we’ve known together
    of Christ’s love and agony.

    6. Brother, sister, let me serve you;
    let me be as Christ to you;
    pray that I may have the grace to
    let you be my servant too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohy-vGSbkx8

9   And there is resonance with this Gospel story to be heard in Talarico’s response to Trump’s charge that Talarico ‘insults Jesus’

https://www.facebook.com/reel/2099306584199966

An LCCT blog by Haddon Wilmer. The Lord’s Prayer and how Jesus lived it before he shared it with his disciples

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Jesus lived the prayer before he gave it to his disciples, and so to us. Your will not mine be done, Jesus cried in Gethsemane: Your will be done on earth, says the prayer. Give us today our daily bread, says the prayer: Jesus sees the crowd hungry and leads the disciples in giving them bread and fishes to eat.  Forgive us as we forgive: so Jesus prayed, Father forgive the crucifiers who didn’t know what they could have known, for, as Pilate said, This man is innocent.

To pray this prayer, is saying the words enough? Does it not call us to live it, and thus to be shaped by it? Living the prayer takes us on the road of being stirred, reformed and informed by Jesus’ living of it. Are we praying to get things, or is our praying an apprenticeship of living, learning with and from Jesus to be givers, sharing the self-giving generosity of the Father and the Son?   

Some of us say this prayer, rote-learnt from childhood, so often, so easily, that it has no critical bite, so we hear no reiteration of Jesus’ call to deny self and take up our cross to follow him.  

Take very seriously this prayer’s first word – Our. It invites, even commands us, to live the generosity of the Father. I may find myself in a private spiritual place even when a people all around me are saying the words together in church – but the prayer itself, with its clear initial ‘Our…’ speaks against any retreat into ‘solitary Christianity’. There is no ‘I, me, mine’ in this model prayer, rather it is all along, ‘We, us, our’ – because the one God is Father of all.    

We pray, Give us this day’s bread, and, feeling peckish, adjust it to, Give me… So the nagging stomach undermines the ‘us’ and selfishness deafens us to our Father’s call, which is voiced by the seriously hungry  (Isa 58.7)

The name of ‘Our Father’  is to be hallowed, that is, respected and made credible in the eyes of all. When we retreat into the self, religiously, or materially, we contribute to making the world as it largely is, a world where it is hard to believe that we all have one Father, or that his will is really to be done ‘on earth as in heaven’. Faced by this God-unhallowing world, the hopeful wise way forward is to pray, Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us. Not forgive my sins and get me to heaven, but bring us into receiving and passing on the Father’s forgiving, responding to its being as wide as the sea, and as powerful as new creation, so that we are given a share in the hard work of forgiving as much as the freedom of finding forgiveness. Enjoy the power and glory of life, living this We-Us project, with and because of Our Father. 

A Christian follows Jesus, wherever he goes. Some thoughts from Haddon Willmer

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A Christian follows Jesus, wherever he goes.

Jesus lived in the world of Pilate and Herod, of Pharisees and Zealots, a hectic unsatisfactory political world.  He engaged with it, walked to the city, the polis, of doomed Jerusalem, weeping because it did not know or value what made for its peace.  

Jesus was a political person. But not a competitor for political status or power.

Excited people wanted to make him king, but he withdrew to the mountain (John 6.15). 

He refused outright Satan’s offer to give him ‘all the kingdoms of the world’ if he switched sides (Matt 4.9).

Jesus was political in a human way.  He wielded no sword, presided over no council or court  

He could have chosen to collude with the way society is run by the powerful, but he often found free space for living in the wilderness. 

People hungry for food, health, peace, joy, love went to him there. 

Here Jesus practised politics constructively, not competitively.  As enabling service.

Consider the components of constructive politics: 

He saw the crowds as sheep without a shepherd (Mark 6.34).

He had compassion, and shared his wisdom with them, and healed the sick.

He asked what is to be done for them, now that it was late, and they were far from home and hungry.

He asked the caring question and got an unsatisfactory answer from his disciples – ‘Send them away to the villages  where they can buy for themselves’.

He called disciples to practical generous responsibility – ‘You give them something to eat’.  

Their hands were empty, they could only find a lad with five loaves and two fishes – not enough. 

He led them to risk working bravely with the little they had.   Or put it another way, to risk being surprised by God.

He organized people into tidy fifties, distributed the food and gathered up the left-overs for recycling.

Let us take clues from Jesus and work with him constructively as creative responsible political human beings in God’s world. 

Politics often breeds distrust and disdain, we properly dislike the antics of competitive politics.   But we still have to live together, as we find ourselves, hungry for humanity in the middle of one wilderness or another.   We cannot do without politics of some sort, for we live in the polis, the human community.  We want politics that builds up human community, from the basics, from the rubble we humans often reduce ourselves to. 

Few of us are called to the Westminster village.  But wherever we are,  in family, workplace, community project, political skills, graces and vision are called for.   

For an earlier longer version of this piece, see ‘Does Jesus call us to political discipleship’   https://haddonwillmer.me.uk/does-jesus-call-us-to-political-discipleship/

 

 

 

 

Haddon Willmer offers us something to think about

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Kemi Badenoch read about Fritzl, who imprisoned and abused his daughter Elisabeth for 24 years. Kemi noted that Elisabeth prayed for life from death, but got no timely help, while she herself received positive answers to her ‘trivial’ prayers.   Outcome of this observation?    ‘Like a candle being blown out’- her faith in God went.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c80d7l03137o

How are we to respond to this story? Do not argue about the ‘problem of evil’. Rather, ask what prayer is, what it can be, in any dungeon experience like Elisabeth’s.

Or in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s. In prison, he said, he was ‘like a bird in a cage, struggling for breath…weary and empty at praying… ready to say farewell to it all’ (poem, Who Am I?).

We need or want things, trivial or vital, and so we ask God to give good gifts to us, his children

(Lk 11,12). Prayer as asking for what we want is honest about our humanity. But prison and things like that mean we cannot have what we want or need. If our candle of faith is not to be snuffed out by the pressures of life more is needed than a supposedly open supply-line. Bonhoeffer gives a clue to this ‘more’ in his letter of 21 July 1944 where he talks of ‘taking the sufferings of God in the world seriously and sharing them in our lives’.

So we pray not to get ‘things’ but rather to be with God in all our life, in the world. God creates, gives, rescues, blesses – all that and more, so pile the words to magnify God, but include ‘suffers’ in the list. God suffers in all his ill-treated creatures, suffers ‘the contradiction of sinners’, God cares, sees things clearly, and so not surprisingly, weeps. If prayer is coming close to God in heart and mind, it takes us into suffering. ‘Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving’

(Poem, Christians and Pagans).

Sharing the sufferings of God means a bumpy drive, instability. God suffers all the negation that human evil and blindness and destructive waste makes. In little and in massive suffering, God suffers. Suffering may drive the thought of God and of prayer from our agenda. If nevertheless, we pray, honestly, with our whole life meeting God in life, we will be drawn and commanded into the way of God’s goodness, and on that way suffering cannot be avoided.

Sometimes the suffering is as devastating as ‘My God why have you forsaken me/us/even yourself?’

There is hope. We are talking not just about the suffering of God, but about the suffering of God. Within the suffering, God is, and God is light in darkness, life against death, love battling Hate, hard pressed but not destroyed.  Christ is Risen and God always is, as he is in Jesus.

Team God… In a most perfect unity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. By Haddon Willmer

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‘Team God’

The doctrine of the Trinity states that God is ‘One in three persons’, but that should not lead us to think there are three gods, or even three parts of God, operating independently from one another, for God is one in a most perfect unity.

Nowhere in the New Testament, the earliest Christian witnesses we have, is there a statement of this doctrine, or the simple formula, ‘three persons One God’. But there are passages in the New Testament where three ‘persons’, the Father God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, are entwined together in a living way. Then we can see all three are united in the ‘Team God’ playing the real serious game of doing something good with human beings. This team is not like a football team that is trying to beat another team (united against others). It is more like the team in a hospital operating theatre, working together, to bring the patient back to healthy life.

One place where we see this team at work is in Romans 5.1-5. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice] in hope of the glory of God. 3 Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

We have peace with God: that is in Paul’s view a great and surprising gift, for he has spent the earlier chapters showing that ‘all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’ and earning the wages of sin which is death. God created human beings in his image, so that they would display the glory of God as they live in the earth – God called human beings to walk in his ways, and to be a blessing to the world, as they are blessed. But it has not turned out like that. Look at the world, our nation, our selves, we cannot say, complacently, that we image God and reflect his glory.

Peace with God is not to be assumed. Yet God makes peace with enemies, through our Lord Jesus Christ… who died for us.

Why do this great work of peacemaking through Jesus Christ? Why not do it by a simple direct act of divine power and authority? After all, God is free and able to do anything he likes, isn’t he? And God is loving, isn’t he? Why shouldn’t God simply declare ‘I love you: you are accepted’.

One reason why God does not take this quick and easy way is that it would be unrealistic and one-sided. God will not save human beings from their sin without taking their sin seriously. Sin is a great tangle of human failure that has to be untangled, worked through in detail, not cut at a stroke. God wants the string straightened out so that it can be used again for good. The mess of human being has to be repaired from within human being. To do otherwise would be a mere cosmetic job, a superficial con. It would be as shoddy as putting a new coat of smart glossy paint on a rotten piece of wood, to spare ourselves the pain of chisel and saw.

So God becomes human and dwells among us. God in Jesus lives humanly, with all the toil that involved; he suffers under the mess, struggles against it as he finds it in the people he encounters. Jesus lives in faithfulness to God despite all the difficulties, and only so is humanity being remade by God from inside the mess, working through the realities of human living and dying.

In Jesus Christ, we see and are drawn into God’s great costly work of renewing humanity in truth and love. It takes time and trouble, which God is involved in. So through Jesus Christ, we have access to the grace, the good favour of God, in which we stand, and then we can boast, not in our own strength or achievement, but in the hope of sharing the glory, not of ourselves, but of God. And because it is through Jesus Christ, we can’t avoid sufferings, but we can also ‘boast of our sufferings’. Jesus suffered, we know. When God does good to us, through Jesus Christ, God calls us to live our human lives as he lived his, not shrinking from the suffering involved in being faithful to the call of God. And as we walk with Jesus, we cannot exempt ourselves from sharing his suffering in some measure.

And yet, says Paul, we can boast of sufferings – how is that? The short answer Paul gives is that through this life-development of endurance and character- formation, hope arises. Long before we come to the final escape from all suffering, to the place where there is no more crying, no more tears, suffering in the way of Jesus produces endurance, and then character, and out of that hope.

Hope is fragile in this world of hostility, insecurity, futility. We hope and are often disappointed. So we learn to be realistic and not expect too much of life, and that is at least prudent. But if that is all there is, it falls short of what God wills. Along the way of life with Jesus Christ, sharing his suffering, a kind of hope is given that does ‘not disappoint because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given us’. Our human hopes are often fragile. We often hope and end up with disappointment.

Disappointment is an aspect of the suffering in our messed up world. But when we have peace with God, when we live by faith in God and not in ourselves, when we share a common life with Jesus Christ, then the love of God is poured in our hearts. And this is not a matter of our moods, but of the Holy Spirit who is given to us – God the Spirit coming close to our spirits, God finding us in the depths. In the last resort, it is not success that saves us from being disappointed, but it is love. And our weak love needs to be called forth and resourced by God who is love, whose Spirit inspires it generously.

This is how Paul gives us God, Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit, working as a team in an effective operation to rescue human being. God, Father, Son and Spirit, involves human beings in the operation of salvation: it is done with us, not merely to us. It’s the kind of operation that is done without anaesthetic, because it recovers and rebuilds human beings in a genuinely human way – which always has to be with human beings, involving them in the doing as well as the receiving. We don’t have a formulaic Trinity here, but the living God in God’s fullness.

Another way into Trinity: John 16.12-17
I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.13 However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come. 14 He will
glorify Me, for He will take of what is Mine and declare it to you. 15 All things that the Father has are Mine. Therefore I said that He will take of Mine and declare it to you. “A little while, and you will not see Me; and again a little while, and you will see Me, because I go to the Father. 17 Then some of His disciples said among themselves, What is this that He says to us, ‘A little while, and you will not see Me; and again a little while, and you will see Me’; and, ‘because I go to the Father’?

All the Gospels show that Jesus lived an ordinary human life, and was known socially as an ordinary member of society, son of the carpenter of Nazareth. And then Jesus surprised them: he healed the sick, calmed the storm, fed the crowds, so that they asked, what sort of man is this? We are faced with someone unusual. Who is he really?

Jesus taught with authority, so they asked: Where did he get all this insight, this practical wisdom, this soaring vision? Jesus responded unconventionally to poor, to marginal and despised people, he proclaimed good news to the poor, and told and showed broken sinners that they were forgiven. And then some asked, Who is this who forgives sins? Only God can forgive sins. Who is this Son of Man who exercises authority on earth to forgive sins? He blasphemes and blasphemers deserve to die.
But others, the poor and blind and penitent who benefited from him, accepted all this as the gift of God, the sign of God’s living presence, for them. God is with him, they said. He is from God. He does God’s work. He is clearly in God’s team. Meeting him, we meet God. When he talks with us, our hearts burn within us. Shall we go to anyone else? He has the word of eternal life and we have come to believe and know that he is the Holy One of God.

In his Gospel, John, more clearly than the other Evangelists, gives us a picture where the difference between God the Father and Jesus becomes paper thin: I and the Father are one, says Jesus. And yet the difference is plain: God the Father is in heaven, Jesus the Son is on earth. No one has ever seen God, human eyes haven’t got the wavelength, but Jesus is visible. God is eternal, immortal; Jesus the Son has his beginning and his end. Jesus talks about his ‘going away’, as his allotted time comes to an end, and he will leave the disciples. Jesus accepted that limit: he had his day, when the light was shining, and so he could do the work given him to do, but he knew the night was coming when work had to stop.

When Jesus died on the cross, he cried It is finished. He had done his work, in his time; he was finished. But it does not mean God was finished. Jesus said to his disciples, I am going to leave you and you are sad – but don’t be inconsolable: I will send you another Comforter, the Spirit of truth: he will take what is mine and declare it to you. You will lose my human presence on earth, you won’t see me any more, but I will come to you in the Spirit.

So we have another picture of the Trinity team in operation. All that the Father has, has been given to the Son, and the Spirit will take all that belongs to Jesus the Son, all that comes from the Father, and will share it with you. It won’t be shared with disciples for their exclusive benefit, to make them individually a more happy, or balanced, or successful persons. God does nothing to help us in the competitions of life, the quest to be great or the greatest, in this or that way.

Jesus said, If my life went on forever as my own personal life, so that my beautiful being was preserved in its health and prosperity and its gladness about itself, it would be godless, alone and useless. It would be futile, like a seed that was never put in the soil. But Jesus said, a seed should be put in the soil, hidden away in the dark dampness, so that it will die: for if it dies it bears much fruit.

That takes us to the heart of the unbearable reality of God as we see God in Jesus Christ: the God who loves and gives Godself for the life of the world. And when the Holy Spirit shares all that God has, all that God is in Godself, we are not offered blessings and powers which enhance our individuality. We are called insistently, every day, into the way of Jesus, the seed full of the life of God, that falls into the ground and dies.

That was the way Jesus went. The Son who was one with the Father lived his humanity right into the separation of death, and out of that has come much fruit. The Spirit which is free as the wind, that is free to go anywhere, comes to places and to times that Jesus could not reach. All through the world, long after the day of Jesus on earth ended, the Spirit shares the life of Father and Son with human beings.

Jesus brought us God in a living human person, intensely local, in a limited moment. The power of life was packed into that littleness, like a seed. The Spirit is God bursting out like the blossom and fruit that comes from a seed that dies. So much from one little seed: the Spirit in the world from the Son and the Father.

This is the story of God in action, a team of three, each playing its part, together making a more perfect unity than we can get our minds around. It is the story still being made by God, involving human beings all the way.

Recognizing and talking about sin

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Talking about sin is difficult, so we avoid it.  It threatens our mental health and self-esteem.  But sin meets us massively in the world: we cannot deal wisely if we do not recognize it.  Political discourse becomes deceitful, evasive, and merely euphemistic when there is no political will or words to confess sin. 

Some take refuge in the belief that climate change was caused by the sun, so the earth and its inhabitants are innocent victims. Now we know the rise towards 1.5 degrees and beyond is significantly down to human activity. Individuals may deny responsibility, claiming they are swept along helplessly in the tide of impersonal forces, like population growth generating consumption beyond earth’s capability. But sin is more than guilt that can be pinned without remainder on offenders; it is sin when the ‘innocent’ individual refuses to accept that they are members of the community, who have their being only in sharing with others. Goodness, as opposed to sin, makes itself responsible for the plight of the world, even when it has done nothing to cause that plight. So God in Christ bears the sin of the world, being ‘made sin’ (II Corinthians 5.16-6.10) and only from that truthful point bringing new life to birth. 

We cannot now save ourselves from climate disaster unless we think and act communally and give ourselves to the common whole-world enterprise without claiming exemptions.  

The West is abandoning Afghanistan shamelessly, as though we are innocent and Afghans must take responsibility for the disaster. We say we can be proud of enabling the education of girls and are still unfazed by our overall failure.  We have spent many billions on fighting a war to keep al-Qaeda from our streets, but as this piece in the Guardian points out we have put too little money into Afghanistan’s governance and development. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/13/whatever-happens-next-in-afghanistan-a-humanitarian-disaster-is-already-in-train  

We have the expertise to fight for our own interest, till we are weary, but not so much wisdom or humility to help other people to live better.  Yet still we are not ashamed: those whose prime concern is their own safety will not be ashamed when they fail those they count as less valuable.  So our sin is unveiled in this history, but we refuse to know what we are doing – and that refusal is deep sin. 

Haddon Willmer    

Jonah 4 and I Corinthians 13

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[Jonah Awaits the Destruction of Nineveh – copyright Trenét Worlds]

What do we get from Jonah?

If I preach to the Ninevites so they turn from their sin
If I pray from the depths in the most spiritual language
If I give my body to be thrown into the depths to save drowning sailors
And have not love – I am nothing

I am nothing because I am far from God
I do not know him in his works or his spirit
I do not share his mission
I preach his word powerfully to others but I do not hear it for myself
I resist God’s arguments with me to the end
It is not clear what will become of me, but so far as the story goes,
I am nothing

I am angry where God is patient
I want destruction while God wants reconstruction
I see they need to be converted but I do not want them to be converted
I see they need to be converted but I cannot see that I need to be converted
I see and make enemies while God values and is faithful to all his creatures
I think I am special and am not content to be like other of God’s creatures
I am privileged because God keeps on talking to me
But I am nothing because I do not get what keeps God going

I care about my comfort under the gourd;
The value it has for me is measured by my loss when it withers in the sun
But still it is a puzzle to me why God should value the children
And all the cows in Nineveh:
I have no sympathy for God when he contemplates losing his creatures.

I think out of my anger and disdain and go away from God
I pray but what do my prayers mean?
I am godly, unlike the Ninevites, and all the others I look down upon,
But in my godliness, I am godless and I don’t know it
Indeed I think in my pride my way is better than God’s

I am without God because I am without love
If I have not love, I am nothing

For God is love

Haddon Willmer

A film to see, a song to sing

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The film, Lilies of the Field (1963) is fascinating, beautiful, simple. It could be argued it is like the Sermon on the Mount, too good and too hopeful to be true. Or maybe it has the truth of whatever is good, for the really good always verges on the too good to be true. The people in the story are not goody-goody cut-outs. Some are proud, some selfishly calculating, some naïve, some sceptical, some awkward, but their faults are subsumed into an abounding grace which comes upon them all. The grace is what makes the whole story, in a strange, unexpected way; grace comes to light in the making of the story. People make their various limited contributions to the happening, with varying degrees of willingness; some work and suffer considerably to make it happen; but at the end of the story, when the work is done and stands there as an abiding and worthy achievement, none of them can claim credit for it.

I have told you the story without telling you anything, so I have not spoilt your entertainment. It really is a good film to watch – for all ages.

I had never heard Jester Hairston’s song, Amen, which we hear twice in the film. You can see Hairston singing it here on YouTube.

It is a great telling of the story of Jesus.
Hairston was a remarkable man – see this link on Wikipedia

God troubles Job

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Why do the innocent suffer?  That is one question running through the book of Job.  Job was a good and prosperous man, who lost his family, property and health in sudden disasters.   Some tried to argue that the good do not suffer, so there must have been something wrong with Job to cause his troubles.  Job does not accept that and complains about a world that is unjust, where the wicked prosper, get bonus after bonus, and are never called to account.  His advisers argue there is justice in the long run – for example, if the wicked man gets away with it, his sons will cop it.  Job is not satisfied with that answer.

Job 21.19  ‘You say, God stores up their iniquity for their sons.  Let him recompense it to themselves that they may know it.’   Job wants the wicked to suffer appropriately, and to have to pay up, so that they have to acknowledge and feel the wrong they have done.

Job has a strong sense of the individual before God.   So he looks for God’s wrath to be directed in justice to the precise places where it is deserved.

But that is not the heart and source of his view.  His prime concern is not that the wicked should be punished.  He is wrestling with his own situation.

He knows he is innocent or better, righteous.  He will maintain that.

But he knows that in his trouble, it is God he is facing.   He cannot stand outside his trouble, so that he is free to ask, ‘Why should God allow this, or do this to me?’   He does not say, ‘I have troubles, God is responsible, how can God justify himself?’

He rather says,  ‘My bodily troubles are bad and depressing in the extreme, but they are not my real problem.   It is rather that troubled as I am, I am before God.  God comes to me in my troubles, so he is the troubler.  In my troubles, I get no peace, no comfort.  They are the form of God to me: he does not let me alone.  Troubled as I am, I cannot say, ‘This is merely an accidental, earthly, animal occurrence, it has no personal or spiritual meaning, so my spirit can serenely rise above the suffering to be with God.’

‘No, God is after me’, says Job, ‘he will not leave me alone’.   ‘In God’s hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind’  12.10.   This general truth is emphasised and illustrated extensively in the book of Job.  Job’s trouble is a  particular occurrence of this general truth, the way it works out for him.   There is no escape from God.   You think that is comforting news?  For Joh, it seemed to mean trouble with little hope of light and peace.  Job sometimes says he wants to speak with the Almighty and argue his case with him (13.3) but at other times, Job thinks the only hope is for God to leave him alone, so that he can find a few days of brightening up, before he goes ‘whence he will not return, to the land of gloom and deep darkness’ 10 20-22.    (This is one reason why even many religious people give up on God: they sense that God might come for us, as he came for Job.   We would like to make our case to God, to speak frankly with God and call God to account, but we do not have the freedom to do that.  Before we can speak with God, God must take the pressure off.  So Job sets out the conditions under which he will talk with God: ‘Withdraw your hand from me and let not dread of thee terrify me.  Then call and I will answer…’ 13.20-22.  But sometimes, God does not leave some people alone, to get on with their life without his hand on them in a troubling way.  7.11-21: why does God make so much of human being, visiting him every morning?   ‘Will you never take your eyes off me long enough for me to swallow my spittle?’)

It is on this basis that Job appeals to his friends, who torment him with their words  19.1  They should not do this.  They should understand that even if he has done wrong, his error remains with himself – 19.4.   They should leave him alone with his responsibility and not interfere, as though they can make themselves great by humiliating him  19.5.

This is a form of the argument of Romans 12.19-20, Lev.19.17-18: Leave vengeance to God and do not interfere or try to do God’s work for him Romans 14.4.   A major issue here is knowing how to practise this wisely: for there has to be some sort of judging enacted in society by human beings.   We tend now in our secular society to ignore God altogether, and so to make social, ie state judgment final and complete.  But it is still the same as it always has been:  the human enactment of justice is often incomplete and cannot be counted as final; it leaves the victim unsatisfied, so that they have to find some other help in moving on with their lives; it is often clumsy and mistaken, and does not do redemptive justice to the wrongdoer; and when it escalates its own cruelty in order to match the heinousness of the crime it strays from the service to humanity which is the basis of its authority.

So we need human judging, but it needs to act with humility within limits.  That is what Job asks his friends  to exercise: not to magnify themselves by being haughty assured critics who humiliate him.   Job does not pursue this argument by pointing out the limits of human justice (as I have done in the last paragraph) and asking his friends to limit themselves.  Human beings, especially once they are on their high horse, are not very good at limiting themselves.  Rather Job calls God into the argument.

He does not call God into the argument to defend him against his critics (God at the end of the book 42.7 appears like that) but rather Job asks them to limit their own critical humiliating endeavours  by taking note of God in the situation.  ‘Know then that God has put me in the wrong and closed his net about me’  19.6.   They can see Job is in trouble, and so they speak down to him, diagnosing his trouble and advising him – and all the time, they have not noticed or taken the measure of the most significant thing about Job’s trouble: God is there, not indeed as his helper or comfort but as the one who has ‘put him in the wrong’.

We should not think ourselves superior to Job’s friends for most of the time, we are not very good at noticing when God is there putting people in trouble.  Indeed good kind Christians today are as bad as other good people at not being able to imagine or feel that when people are in trouble,  they have been targeted by God and that the trouble is not to be understood except as the manner and the place of God’s coming close.   It is a terrible thing to think;  it is a dangerous way to think about people’s troubles.  Indeed part of the lesson of Job is that we should hesitate to interpret anyone else’s troubles in these terms.  But the other part of the lesson of Job is that as a human being I,  for myself, may, in the course of life, be led into troubles, and that as I live through the trouble, I discover that at its heart or alongside it, God is putting me in the wrong.   Then God becomes my real trouble.

Because Job’s friends could not interpret Job’s troubles in this way without putting themselves in the wrong, it is right that pastoral practice and spiritual direction in church does not work in these terms.   Our pastoral practice assures people that God is with them and for them;  it does not talk of God putting you in the wrong.   But it is one of the limits of the best pastoral practice that there are things it cannot and dare not say.   Job’s friends simply have to keep quiet.  Yet Job in trouble cannot be comforted with the one-sided cheerful pastoring.  Job has been picked out by God and there are dark places he must walk through, because God has  ‘walled up his way’  19.8.   The church that may not pastor in these terms can, at least, read Job, which most churches never do these days.   Without pointing the finger or interfering with other people’s relation with God, reading Job would cause us to be sensitive to strange but pressing dimensions of human living with God.   It would mean that as a community we did not build and promote a culture which blocks out the discoveries the righteous man Job made when God put him in the wrong.   Reading Job might help us to know better what we are given in Jesus Christ, who in his dying, cried out, My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?

Jesus took those words from Psalm 22, a very Job-like Psalm.  What it is to be abandoned, Job describes in 19.13-20.  His family and friends have turned against him – even young children despise him.  All that is the form and measure of his trouble.  Job asks his advisers who magnify themselves and humiliate him to notice his abandonment.   He asks them not to analyse his problem and tell him how to behave, but simply to ‘have pity on me, o you my friends’ 19.21.    Why should they have pity on him?  Because they want to be better than all his other friends, who have left him?  Because they remember they too are sensitive human beings and they would not like this to happen to them – Do as you would be done by?   These good reasons for decent behaviour are not what Job points them to. They should have pity on him, ‘because the hand of God has touched me.’

He brings them back to the key point:  Job’s trouble is with God.  It does not follow that his friends must help him to put right his relation with God.  Job’s relation with God has gone into territory where they have evidently never been.  And in any case, if God is touching Job it is not for them to interfere.   So Job asks. ‘Why do you, like God, pursue me?’  19.22.   Do you think God needs some assistance?   Do you want to get on winning side?’     No:  if you see the hand of God touching someone, know that it is not your business to pursue them.  You will add to their troubles, but you will not be doing the work of God.   Have pity.  Stay with them in silence.  Maybe you will get close to Job in his trouble and find yourself in trouble with God.

Reading the riots: a NEET question comes home

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Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, writes in The Guardian  today:

The big question Reading the Riots leaves us with is whether, in our current fretful state, with unavoidable austerity ahead, we have the energy to invest what’s needed in family and neighbourhood and school to rescue those who think they have nothing to lose. We have to persuade them, simply, that we as government and civil society alike will put some intelligence and skill into giving them the stake they do not have. Without this, we shall face more outbreaks of futile anarchy, in which we shall all, young and old, be the losers. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/dec/05/riots-return-young-archbishop-canterbury

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/05/reading-riots-nothing-to-lose

We are also reminded that

In the aftermath of the August riots, the prime minister, David Cameron, was quick to dismiss the idea that poverty was a factor in the disorder. “These riots were not about poverty,” he said. “That insults the millions of people who, whatever the hardship, would never dream of making others suffer like this.”

This is a mistaken interpretation.  It is true that many people who are poor did not riot; many of them would not riot and loot even if the opportunity came near to them.  But that does not mean that poverty did not have a major effect on some people, leading them to riot or steal, at least opportunistically.  

This is where we need more sensitive analyses and descriptions, such as those coming out of the Reading the Riots study (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/series/reading-the-riots) which the Archbishop comments on. 

Different people react to any particular situation in different ways.  

We need to understand why some people respond to difficult circumstances in unhelpful or bad ways, and then out of that understanding, we can see how to help them and how to change the circumstances for the future.  That is the argument and the spirit of the Archbishop’s article. 

The big question….for us, the church

‘The big question Reading the Riots leaves us with is whether, in our current fretful state, with unavoidable austerity ahead, we have the energy to invest what’s needed in family and neighbourhood and school to rescue those who think they have nothing to lose.’  

Church is not mentioned  by name, but it belongs here.   The church is a local centre of some visible social energy: people come together to make a sort of community.  And the church claims that the heart of its own heart is the energy of God in Christ by the Spirit.   

So the big question comes home to us, the church: have we ‘the energy to invest what’s needed…to rescue those who think they have nothing to lose’? 

Who have nothing to lose?

When we talk about ‘those who think they have nothing to lose’ we are talking about many more than those who rioted or might riot.  There are

‘people who have vague but strong longings for something like secure employment, and no idea where to look for it; who on the whole want to belong, and live in a climate where they are taken seriously as workers, as citizens – and as needy individuals; and who have got used to being pushed to the margins and told that they are dispensable’.

How many have ‘lives in which anger and depression are almost the default setting, thanks to a range of frustrations and humiliations’?  

There are many, ‘in our current fretful state, with unavoidable austerity ahead’.  

There are, for example,  a record number of NEETs –  16- to 24-year-olds not in education, work or training in England.    There are now  nearly 1.2 million, 15.6% of this age group.   http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/feb/24/neets-statistics#data

Do you know what it is like to be a NEET, not by choice, but out of disadvantage, finding no door to life open, applying for jobs and never getting one, having the dreams of childhood stripped of all chance of realisation?   Have you ever got close enough to a NEET to begin to see. 

What happens to a NEET who is older than 24?  They have got used to a life where they count for very little, and now they cease to be counted in this statistic.  They join many other young people, who may have a job of some sort, but see no chance of ever getting their own home, what with the shortage of housing and the cost of mortgages.   They are not all disadvantaged from early years – many have degrees – but,  in their early adulthood, they are together as those who look towards the future and see more than austerity ahead.  It is more like sterility, existing but not living.   

Here is a big question that comes home to us as church.   Do we hear it?   Do we have the love and respect to hear it?  Do we have the energy to invest?   It is a searching question which may find us out uncomfortably.

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