March 1, 2015

Rev Dr George Armstrong

Lent 2

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A prophet is one who tells something forth rather than literally predicting something before it happens. Jesus in today’s gospel (Mark 8:31-38) tells his disciples what is going to happen in Jerusalem in the next few days. He is only telling them what they should already see for themselves - nothing mysterious or supernatural about it. Jesus tells them that he is going up to Jerusalem. Jerusalem spells big trouble!! Why? Because Jesus is a big-time troubler of everything the Jerusalem stands for in Jesus’ time.

The Son of man [that’s himself – Jesus] must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed [“accomplish his exodus”], and after three days rise again.

Jesus has increasingly attacked the Temple, its priests and the political economy that it supports and fattens itself off. It’s all part of the oppressive apparatus of government and economy – all bound together by a religion gone badly astray.

Jesus has only just congratulated Peter for his insight into the fact that Jesus is the true Messiah. Now Peter freaks out at the Jerusalem prospect. Jesus rounds on him: “Get behind me you Satan you”. It has become more and more clear that Jesus and his disciples, when push comes to shove, live in different worlds. And it’s the world of Jesus that is the real world, the world where injustice and evil triumph and good people are put down and out and where anyone who tries to do something about it gets snuffed out by homeland security and The Empire beyond.

Jesus was only one of many Messiahs who tried to remedy things. Many of these were religious terrorists, violent Messiah Saviours. Almost all of them ended up crucified or murdered. The temple archbishops eventually concluded that Jesus’ style of loving Messiahship was even more dangerous than the violent type. Specially when he publicly condemned the temple leadership, started a riot around the money changers, and seemed to be setting up a sort of very popular half mocking counter-kingdom of his own. His carefully staged triumphal entry into Jerusalem was a kind of mockery of an Augustus Caesar or King Herod the Great entering a city with motorcades and sirens blaring.

So Jesus the prophet tells it like it is and like it is about to be – all in one breath. He did it for his own death. And he did it elsewhere for the death of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple also which happened 35 years later. That didn’t require supernatural foresight either. Jesus, like any decent prophet, had unerring antennae for the signs of the times. He could interpret the historical, political, economic and sacral events and activities that were going on around him. And he did it in religious as well as material terms – sub specie aeternitatis (“seen in the mirror of eternity”).

St Matthew’s preachers have for several years now been happily stripping away the old supernaturalist wallpaper to try to get back to the basics that that supernatural lingo was trying to bear witness to. So my rendering here this morning of Jesus the prophet will come as no surprise.

Jesus’ cousin, John Baptist, munching his locust-and-honey muesli in the desert, said that he himself was no messiah - no more than a voice crying in the wilderness. For Elijah that voice in his desert mountain was not in an earthquake or firestorm but in a still small voice telling him to go back and converse with his significant other, the formidable Queen Jezebel who was thirsting for the prophet’s blood.

Just after this little bruising conversation with Peter, Jesus took his quaking disciples up a prophetic mountain too – to get away from it all so they thought, mistakenly as usual. It is transfiguration time. There Elijah and Moses, champion desert-survivors, talk things over with Jesus. There was only one item on their agenda: the so called “exodus” that Jesus was about to “accomplish” in Jerusalem. All three of these prophetic giants had exoduses – liberation – freedom – in their bones, spiritually as well as politically. The three disciples got their spirits back up. But when Jesus said time to go they wanted to stay. No way, said Jesus.

Let me now come to the second part of this sermon, from the sublime you could say to the ridiculous. 1975 years have past since Jesus. It’s now Auckland. Another far from holy trio assembles. I became part of that trio. Ted Buckle had just arrived from Australia to be Vicar of St Matthew’s. John Mullane (later also a vicar of this illustrious parish) and I were already in New Zealand, having been students together earlier. I had just come from four quick fire parish assignments to become a lecturer in systematic theology at St John’s College. We three young patriarchs were expected to turn the church upside down and inside out. We were respected after a fashion though not always exactly popular. I learned a huge amount from having to fit in with them. About the only thing we ended up agreeing on was a revelation to me. After a transfigurative day together at the Clevedon vicarage, we concluded that it was not actually our job as clergy to do the prophetic work of the church but to help the whole church to do its own prophetic work itself as a community. There’s a big difference and its not as easy as it sounds. For myself I went on to extend that idea radically. We three had agreed that it was the whole church that had to be a priest to humanity. But after much theological wrestling I concluded that our job as total church not actually to be prophet and priest to the world but to help the whole of humanity be prophet and priest to the world and with the world.

What I have just said is monstrously shorthand. I must turn to the experience of the 1960’s-1970’s and to poets and artists, sacred and profane, to explain.

In the nineteen sixties reality and divine reality seems to have deserted an unreal and failing church and to be reappearing in very different garb in totally worldly situations. From the Beatles on, out of anyone’s control, the words of the prophets turned up written on the subway walls. Curiously the Churches started to realise that their Jesus was deserting the sanctuaries as the people were departing from the pews. The Catholic Church’s Vatican 2 Council strove mightily to lay out what might be the mode of a new kind of church in the modern world. Missionary Leader Max Warren told the world Anglican Congress that you needed to have the bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Teilhard de Chardin declared that when the two realities God and the World met together, everything burst into flame. Bonhoeffer said we had to stop expecting Christ to come to us as a powerful rescuer. Christ, said Bonhoeffer, was in the world struggling to preserve it and Christians had to get in there with him. Bonhoeffer would have known. He was jailed by Hitler and executed by Hitler’s express order in the last days of the 1939-1945 war.

And now for me another magical trio appeared – with me this time on its periphery. At St John’s College another young trio – students – emerged. A wondrous group of young patriarchs allowed no longer by their womenfolk to remain patriarchs. They endured the College educational regime for six months then declared direct action in shaping their own education: curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, credentialing the lot. They were not rebels. They just set out on a road less travelled. With my shiny new Princeton PhD I was put in charge of them – ha ha! At the moment of their decision I felt almost a transfiguring light around the three of them. I kid you not.

I’m writing my book around the sixties and I think that that period still has to fulfil itself. It was a prophetic 20 years for New Zealand. There were hot-button issues everywhere. I had my fumbling finger on several of these buttons and more than my finger got burnt: the Vietnam War, Theological and other Education, nuclear warships in NZ, the Springbok Tour. Still today, underneath all the neoliberal lingo, we are struggling with the same underlying issues. Prophecy is not about the future only but binds the past and present into the future. John Mullane and Ted Buckle are dead now but they are with me every Sunday here. And I’ve been discussing this sermon with them. The Congregation can join in this discussion after a cup of tea. There’s so much more.

Amen (for now).