12-03-06 - Lent 2


Some time ago, a member of the congregation who is – let me put this delicately- a good deal older than I am – was in an accident, and after some treatment in hospital, the doctors and nurses were wanting to establish if there had been any to her memory. “Who is the Prime Minister?” she was asked. She gave the right answer, but, in telling the story, said that she was very tempted to say “Mr Disraeli” just to see what the reaction would be.

 

When Benjamin Disraeli was Prime Minister, his great opponent in the House of Commons was William Ewart Gladstone. And when Gladstone was Prime Minister he faced Disraeli across the Despatch Box. There was a famous occasion when Gladstone had just made a speech about something or other, and adopted a very high, moral, religious tone. And Disraeli said that he didn't mind Gladstone thinking that he had all the aces up his sleeve, but he did object to Gladstone thinking that God had put them there!

 

And that story came to mind three weeks or so ago ago, when, on a Friday night, I saw on ITV a trail for the late night news which said that in the forthcoming Parkinson programme, the Prime Minister had said that God had guided him in decisions about the war in Iraq . And I groaned inwardly and decided to wait up to see the late night news. And there it was again: the same thing repeated in the headlines. But when a clip of the interview was shown, that's not what Tony Blair said at all. What he said was that his decisions about the war in Iraq would be judged by the electorate, and, he went on, if you believe in God, you believe that it's a matter of God's judgment too.

 

But some television news editor had decided that what Tony Blair meant was that Tony Blair's judgment about the war in Iraq , and God's judgment coincided; that Tony Blair thought God was on his side.

 

I don't know whether Tony Blair does think God was on his side or not, but I do know that there is a world of difference between saying that you think God is on your side, and saying that you hope you are on God's side.

 

I want to explore this morning what it might mean to say that what we do, the decisions we make, the attitudes we hold, the motives we have are all to be judged by God. And I want to do so by looking at the passage we read earlier on, about a conversation which Jesus had with his disciples at a place called Caesarea Philippi.

 

Jesus asks his disciples what people are saying about him; and they tell Jesus that people are comparing him to someone like John the Baptist or Elijah. Then Jesus puts the question pointedly to his friends: who do you say that I am.

 

In a book of sermons he preached when he was minister of St Magnus Cathedral, Ron Ferguson tells the story of a time several years ago, when a hurricane hit the United States and caused some devastation in Florida, and President George Bush – father of the present President – went down to talk to the people. An old people's home had been hit by the edge of the hurricane, and many of the old people were, very understandable, disorientated by the experience. President Bush went up to one elderly lady in a wheel chair, and said to her: “Do you know who I am?” The old lady looked into his eyes, and after a few seconds she answered “If you don't know who you are, perhaps you should go to the Information Desk and ask there”!

 

When Jesus asks “Do you know who I am?” he knows perfectly well who he is, but when Peter blurts out the answer “Yes: you are the Messiah” – that one statement marks a watershed in Mark's story of the Gospel. It marks the difference between “before” and after”. Before Peter said that, Jesus is another in the long line of prophets who have brought God's Word to Israel , after that he is the Messiah, who is God's word for Israel . And for us.

 

But its not just a matter if “before” and “after”. What Peter said marks the difference between those who recognise Jesus and know who he is (even if they sometimes find it pretty difficult to realise all that it means)…..and those for whom Jesus identity remains obscure and unclear and uncertain.

 

Which makes it all the more surprising that as soon as Peter has said to Jesus “You are the Christ”, Jesus is telling Peter and the rest of the disciples to keep that to themselves. “He ordered them not to tell anyone about him”.

 

Of course it could have been a tactic.

 

When I was in the BBC, one of our Pa's went off on maternity leave, and the Personnel department said that the only person they could get to fill in was someone who worked in the Personnel department. A colleague of mine warned me that this was a young woman who was likely not to be the most loyal member of staff we would ever have, and that everything that was said in the office was likely to find its way back very quickly to the Head of Personnel. So for the first couple of weeks, every time one of our team was tempted to be indiscreet, I would say, jokingly, “Sshhh….don't say anything. Remember we have a mole from Personnel working with us.” Until one day I got a phone call asking if I would go that very afternoon for a meeting with the Head of Personnel, who, I have to say, I wouldn't have trusted with the time of day, far less something private or confidential. She was more addicted to gossip than work. However I dutifully went up to the fourth floor and sat down opposite her. We exchanged pleasantries, and then she said “I think it's very childish of you Johnston to think that someone in your department, on attachment to your office would be back here all the time, telling me things that were said.” I said “childish, maybe, but apparently quite accurate”. Because of course I was then able to go back to my team and say: right, I now know everything's being passed upstairs, so say nothing when she is around”.

 

“Don't say anything” was a way to discover how much was being spread. And maybe Jesus saying “don't tell anyone” was a way of making sure that everyone got to hear about who he was, because nothing broadcasts better than a secret!

 

But I don't think it was that.

 

I think Jesus told his friends to keep quiet about who he was because if people got to hear about it, they would just misunderstand, or they would misinterpret or they would misconstrue. They would get the wrong end of the stick; and think that Jesus was a kind of Messiah that he certainly wasn't going to be. Better they aren't told than that they jump to the wrong conclusions.

 

Which brings me back to Tony Blair. You see, I think we have to grasp how out of touch with the way the world works, how out of tune with the way the world thinks, Christian faith is today. And so when Tony Blair was really talking about being judged himself by god, people jumped to the wrong conclusion that he was talking about God's judgment about the war being the same as his.

 

Because of course, to most people someone's judgment means their opinion, their opinion, what they think, what conclusion they come to – the sort of thing we mean when we describe someone as having “good judgment” or “bad judgment”. But for a Christian there is another sense of judgment, and it's how God sees what we've said or done.

 

So what can we say about the judgment of God.

 

Well, that takes me on to the second part of the reading from Mark's Gospel, where Jesus says that if anyone wants to become one of his followers, they have to deny themselves, and take up their cross and follow him.

 

So often when we hear Jesus saying “deny yourself”, we think he means that we have to deny ourselves something. Like we were thinking about last Sunday: giving something up for Lent as an act of self-denial. But Jesus doesn't say we should deny ourselves something; he says we should deny ourselves.

 

One of the things I think that means is denying that our judgment, our opinion, our view, our attitude is the one that matters most because it means denying that our welfare, our self-interest, is what matters most. And so Tony Blair was absolutely right (in the view of Christian faith) to say that the decisions he makes aren't just ones that will be judged by the electorate at a General Election, but that in every one of them, God comes into the equation.

 

I came across a true story not so long ago about a man called Daniel Webster, who was Secretary of State to two Presidents of the United States , first in the early 1840s and again in the early 1850s. He tried very hard to find a way of keeping the northern states and the southern states, who were divided over slavery together, but the issue ran too deep for compromise. He was a great conversationalist and a great orator, but on one occasion he was dining with twenty gentlemen at the Astor House in New York and he was unusually reticent and quiet and seemed absorbed in something else. One of the men round the table tried to draw him out by asking him “Mr Werbster, will you tell me what was the most important thought that ever occupied your mind?” Webster – so the account goes – passed his hand over his forehead and whispered to the man sitting next to him “Is there anyone here who does not know me?” “No” said Webster's neighbour at the table, “we are all your friends.” Then very loudly, Daniel Webster said “The most important thought that ever occupied my mind was that of my individual responsibility to God”, and he talked about that for twenty minutes, and then left the table and went to his room.

 

Perhaps the most important part of denying yourself is to recognise that we are responsible not only to ourselves and for ourselves. We are responsible to God.

 

Most people are guided by their conscience, but I believe the person of Christian faith has to describe their conscience in a different way from others. For many people, maybe for most people, their conscience is what they feel is right in themselves, something which they themselves can live with and can accept without feeling “bad” about it. But a Christian, I think, has to go further than that. A Christian's conscience isn't my feeling about me; it's God's judgment of me.

 

We are responsible to God.

 

And then Jesus says that if you want to become his follower you have to take up your cross. The people Mark wrote his Gospel for knew all about that – literally. They were in Rome , on the sharp end of the persecution of the early Christian Church. But as time went on that persecution was less of a threat, and in other places than Rome there was no danger. And so, later on, when Luke wrote his Gospel, taking up the cross wasn't literally the calling of a Christian. And so when St Luke records what Jesus said, he says, yes, that we must deny ourselves, and then take up our cross “day and daily”.

 

And if we don't actually, like Jesus have to carry our cross, then one of the things I think that means, day and daily, is that our decisions and our judgments and our actions and our attitudes have to be measured against what we think that cross of Jesus was all about.

 

Which, for me, means asking myself whether I have confused vulnerability with weakness, whether I have put limits on reconciliation, whether I have imagined love is something to be calculated or negotiated or simply offered without expecting anything in return.

 

Did you see the report on television about the Vicar in the Church of England, whose daughter was killed in the London bombings of 7 th July – who resigned because not just because she could not forgive the person who killed her daughter. She said she did not want to. It is not for any of us who have never been in that awful position to criticise her, but I do admire her honesty Because what she recognised was that she could not carry the cross she had to carry, which sometimes is a commitment to forgiveness in the most unforgiving of situations.

 

And so, what can we say about the judgment of God?

It is not something there, at the end of time, hanging over us. It goes much deeper than that. It is there all the time – if we believe in God (as Tony Blair put it in that interview) – it is there all the time, and to follow Jesus is to judge everything we do in the light of what we believe that Cross says about God's judgment.

 

And as I have said before, I keep coming back again and again to words of the Frederick William Faber:

There's a wideness in God's mercy,

like the wideness of the sea;

there's a kindness in his justice,

which is more than liberty.

 

If you go to the Old Bailey in London and look up at the dome above the courts there, you will see the figure of justice, blindfolded. Because earthly justice is about blindness to status or importance or rank or privilege. God's justice is about kindness , which with eyes wide open, forgives.