I don’t know about anyone else, but I am a great fan of the animated television series, South Park.  Now, I know South Park is a controversial program, sometimes for very good reasons; but when they are done well, shows like South Park – along with other shows like The Simpsons or Family Guy – actually have important things to say.  The extreme lives lived by their characters, the absurd situations by which they are confronted, and the often shocking tactics they utilise to resolve their conundrums, are often all-too-accurate reflections of underlying attitudes or processes that exist within “normal” society.  Quite often, shows like South Park are controversial precisely because they hit a nerve: we recognise ourselves or our cherished values in the grotesque distortions of satire; and, stung by the recognition, we respond by attacking the program.  We complain about bad language or depictions of violence, or allege disrespect for religious belief – anything, in fact, to avoid looking at the mirror being held up to our faces; anything to avoid looking at the reflection we know all-too-well. One of my favourite episodes of South Park occurs early in the second series, when one of the main characters, Cartman, somehow contrives to become a police officer.  Now, for those of you who are unfamiliar with South Park, Cartman is a thoroughly obnoxious character: to say he was lazy, narcissistic, and bigoted would be to describe some of his better qualities! And once in a position of power, Cartman immediately begins to abuse it, bullying the townsfolk to his sadistic heart’s content and generally making everyone’s life miserable.

In this episode, Cartman fits a recognisable type: the otherwise utterly innocuous individual who, due to circumstances beyond their control, achieves a little power – and who immediately allows that power to go straight to their head.  Cartman’s loss of control is symbolised by a catchphrase which became so popular it even entered the language; throughout the episode, Cartman shrieks at the top of his lungs: “I am a cop! You will respect my authoritah!”  Indeed, so ubiquitous did this saying become that, all on its own, it came to symbolise the petty tyrant, the jumped-up nobody with an intolerable chip on their shoulder.

It would be fair to say that over the course of its history, the Church has had its fair share of Cartmans.  Clergy and laity, high and low, there have been Christians who have viewed the life of faith as a matter of by-laws and regulations, of obedience to rules and to hierarchies – especially those rules which they have written, or those hierarchies which they control.  Now, the life of faith is a disciplined life; and every faith tradition has its own internal ordering.  But properly understood, this discipline and ordering is not about who calls the shots or who has to tow the line; properly understood, this discipline and ordering speaks to how a faith tradition understands the nature of God, how God’s nature informs the relationship between God and humanity, and how this relationship is embodied and reflected in the life of the worshipping community.  In other words, the discipline and ordering of any faith tradition ought to be part of that tradition’s teaching ministry; it ought to reflect what that tradition teaches about God, about God’s relationship with us, and about our relationships with one another.

What this all means is that the discipline and ordering of the life of faith are as much theological issues as they are administrative or organisational issues.  And when we understand discipline and the ordering of the Church as a theological issue, we understand that authority, in this context, is not about power or control, it’s not about “who’s in charge” or who must obey.  Rather, authority, understood in a theological context, points us in the direction of service; we come to understand that it’s about enabling human flourishing by enabling people to enter into relationship with God.

This theological concept of authority is articulated in today’s passage from Mark’s Gospel through two key events: Jesus teaching in the synagogue; and the healing of the man possessed by an unclean spirit.  Neither of these events is about power or “being in charge”, even though Jesus seems to appear front-and-centre in both episodes.  Rather, the actions which Jesus performs point to the purpose for which they are performed; and it is this purpose which articulates Jesus’ understanding of authority as liberating service to others.

Mark says that Jesus taught in the synagogue as “one having authority, not as the scribes”.  He also reports that everyone was “astounded” by his teaching.  Now, Jesus “teaching with authority” does not mean that he merely stood up and put on a good show, interspersing his commentary with witty asides or displays of his scriptural erudition.  That’s the kind of thing the scribes and religious authorities would have done; their teaching was aimed at ensuring their own standing in the eyes of the people.  Rather, Jesus “teaching with authority” meant he touched the hearts and minds of his listeners in such a way as left them astonished, left them amazed by the new horizons, the new possibilities which Jesus’ words opened up to them – so that in the end, their response is not an acclamation of Jesus’ power, it is simply a recognition of who he is.

It’s an encounter that reminds me of Jesus’ appearance on the road to Emmaus, which is recounted at the end of Luke’s Gospel.  Some followers of Jesus are hurrying away from Jerusalem he appears among them; they do not recognise him, even after he speaks to them; so Jesus chides them, and then, in Luke’s words, “beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.”

Later, having been invited to stay with them, Jesus begins the evening meal by taking bread, blessing and breaking it; and in that instant, Jesus’ companions recognise him and he vanishes from their sight.  And such is the shock of their sudden insight that they say to one another: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?”

Opening the scriptures to us.  That’s the key phrase; because in today’s reading from Mark, you can imagine Jesus’ audience listening to him, their hearts burning within them, as suddenly, through his teaching, the scriptures are opened up to them.  Suddenly, astonishingly, they are liberated from the stale, old rote exegesis that treats the Law and the prophetic writings as a kind of legal code or moral textbook; suddenly, they are given a glimpse of how liberating the scriptures can be, how they can be rich and accessible, and wondrous; how they can be, not dusty words from a distant past, but a portal into a life-giving relationship with the Living God.

And that’s what Jesus’ authority consists of; not the power of command over others, but the unique capacity to touch people’s hearts, to liberate them to an extent they had not previously thought possible. The people are astonished at Jesus’ teaching precisely because he does not fit any paradigm they are used to; unlike the scribes, whose teaching points toward their own exalted position, Jesus’ teaching points only toward God.  Jesus’ teaching liberates the people from the oppressive power of the scribes and points toward the liberating power of God.  And in response, their hearts burn with astonishment, with the sudden, unexpected glimpse of freedom.

And this is a liberation that is even more dramatically expressed in the episode of the person possessed by an unclean spirit.  Now, how you interpret this “possession” is entirely beside the point; arguments about whether or not this passage is to be read literally or metaphorically are the same kind of pedantic arguments which the religious authorities of Jesus’ day used to spend all their time wrestling over.  Because what this passage is concerned with is the purpose of Jesus’ ministry, whether teaching or pastoral.  And that purpose is to set people free, to engage all the dimensions of human life that enslave and destroy, and through that engagement enable all people to live a fully human life in relationship with God.

But not every person is able to do this – indeed, not every person wants to do this.  The capacity to enact this liberating ministry is a matter of authority.  But as this episode from Mark’s Gospel reveals, this authority is not a matter of power or self-promotion; it is a matter of responsibility, of service to others for the sake of others.  In Jesus’ time, and throughout the New Testament period, there were many people who claimed they possessed the power to cure illness or cast out demons; but these claims were made in pursuit of wealth and fame.  They were made for the purpose of self-service, not service to others.  By contrast, Jesus often instructed the people he helped to keep quiet about who he was and what he had done, for the very reason that fame and wealth would be impediments to his ministry.  Jesus wasn’t interested in what he could get out of his ministry; he was interested only in what he could give to others.

In other words, Jesus’ authority was the very product of his selflessness, of the absence of any agenda except to point others toward God.  And we would do well to remember that in our own ministry as a congregation today; because quite often when we talk about ministry, what we have in the back of our minds is not so much a question of who we can help, but how many people we can convince to come to church on Sunday , or how we can improve our finances, or rebuild our standing in society.  We are motivated, not by a desire to point others toward God, but by a desire to point them through our front door.

And that is why the Baptismal vows we as a congregation have taken today are so important.  Because in taking those vows, we have been vested with an authority to teach and raise the child we have baptised today in the life and faith of the Christian Church; but that is authority understood, not as power over that child, but as responsibility toward them.  We are – and must remain – not this child’s elders and betters, but their servants; for ours is the responsibility to help this child grow and develop into a mature adult faith, a faith in which there is space to ask questions, and explore new horizons, and come at last into their own freely-entered into relationship with God.

In other words, unlike Cartman from South Park and his insistent demand that others respect his “authoritah”, we must exercise the authority of service.  We must give up power and control and instead teach and guide; we must give up the temptation to oppress, and instead embrace the possibility of freedom.  And we must give up the certainty of legal codes and moral textbooks and instead enter into the ambiguity of relationship.  Because those who come after us will only follow in our footsteps if we enable them to draw on the richness of tradition in order to grasp new insights; and we will only be seen as authoritative by future generations if we help them live fully human lives that point away from us and our concerns and toward the liberating love of God.

Hannam makes no bones about the fact that, for most people, life in the medieval period was frequently brutish, nasty, and short.  However, Hannam argues that this was not due to the suppression of science by a totalitarian Church, but to the fact that the very scientific foundations upon which the medieval world operated were woefully inadequate to the task of understanding such basic matters as human health and environmental hygiene.  In other words, the medievals were not ignorant or superstitious or irrational, nor were they terrorised into silence by the Church; rather, the first principles from which they proceeded were just simply wrong.

Moreover, Hannam points out that, despite the conceptual and methodological burdens under which medieval thinkers laboured, their accomplishments were nonetheless quite impressive.  As Hannam notes:

Popular opinion, journalistic cliché, and misinformed historians notwithstanding, recent research has shown that the Middle Ages was a period of enormous advances in science, technology, and culture.  The compass, paper, printing, stirrups, and gunpowder all appeared in Western Europe between AD500 and AD1500.  True, these inventions originated in the Far East, but Europeans developed them to a far higher degree than had been the case elsewhere…Meanwhile, the people of Europe invented spectacles, the mechanical clock, the windmill, and the blast furnace all by themselves…Most significantly, the Middle Ages laid the foundation for the greatest achievement of western civilisation, modern science.  It is simply untrue to say that there was no science before the “Renaissance”. (p.5)

Hannam takes the reader on a tour through the scientific achievements of the medieval philosophers, beginning with the “mathematical Pope” Gerbert of Aurillac, who pioneered the use of the astrolabe and introduced Arabic numerals into Western mathematics.  Hannam then introduces figures such as Anselm of Canterbury and Peter Abelard, who argued that the principles of logic and reason established by the Greek philosophers could properly be utilised to illuminate the mysteries of faith and theology.  This might sound distinctly “unscientific”, but it points to two important truths: firstly, that medieval clerics did not blindly argue their positions from a basis of unthinking dogma; and, secondly, that in introducing logic and reason – with its demands for proofs and coherent argument – into intellectual life, theologians in the Middle Ages were, in fact, laying the foundations for the scientific method itself.

Indeed, it is the origin of modern intellectual enquiry within the theological institutions of the Middle Ages that marks one of Hannam’s most important points: that the medieval worldview was neither irrational nor illogical.  Far from suppressing investigation into nature, medieval philosophers actively enquired into the operation of the world around them.  They did so from the point of view that God had gifted humanity with a reason which was equipped to discover the secrets of creaturely existence, and thereby reveal the glory of God in creation itself.  Granted, this represents a difference in motivation from that which animates the “scientific method”;  but the point is that far from being an agent of suppression and obscurantism, the Church did, in fact, foster a detailed exploration of nature.

This is reflected in the now largely forgotten “renaissance” of the High Middle Ages, when figures such as William of Conches argued that it was absurd to interpret Scripture in a strictly literal sense; Pope Innocent III, who wrote that the Moon reflected the Sun’s light, instead of being a source of light itself; and Adelard of Bath, who translated hitherto lost works of Greek science into Latin, and who wrote original works on nature.  These clerical scholars were seriously hampered by their lack of access to systematic information, and some of the answers they produced in their investigations were just plain wrong; but their thirst for knowledge resulted in a widespread movement dedicated toward the translation of ancient texts, which in turn paved the way for the foundation of the first universities – and for the later “Renaissance” itself.  Says Hannam:

…Adelard is struggling because he is attempting to make sense of incomplete information while also sticking to the rules of rational enquiry.  He never tells his (reader) that a subject is impious or forbidden.  Nor does he invoke concepts that he would class as supernatural…Adelard’s science was wrong, often spectacularly so, but not because he was irrational or superstitious. (p.68, parenthesis added)

Which in turn brings the reader to an important discussion about one of the most contentious and most misrepresented aspects of the medieval Church: the Inquisition.  Hannam points out that there was no such thing as “the” Inquisition (that is, a monolithic institution charged with hunting down heretics) during the Middle Ages; rather, Inquisitors were individuals commissioned by the Pope to investigate specific allegations.  Moreover, the need for Inquisitors arose partly in response to anti-Semitic mob violence that followed in the wake of the Crusades (and which violated Church Law protecting Jews); and partly in response to a related upsurge in large-scale heretical movements such as the Cathars, a bastardised descendent of Manichaeism.  In other words, the Inquisition arose because of religious upheavals, and not because of any desire to suppress the scientific discoveries of medieval philosophers.

Which isn’t to say that Hannam pretends that, viewed from a modern perspective, the Inquisition wasn’t a barbarous institution responsible for untold human misery and suffering.  But what he does cogently argue is that, compared to the secular judicial institutions of the Middle Ages, the Inquisition was frequently a haven of fair-dealing and justice.  And that was because the Inquisitors had to follow strict rules of procedure and evidence, giving the accused multiple opportunities to escape serious punishment.  As a consequence, torture was relatively rare, and imprisonment and death penalties reserved only for the most serious cases.  And this relative lenience was a consequence of the Inquisitors being guided by new legal techniques that were themselves the product of a revival of interest in Roman law sparked by the translation movement of the High Middle Ages.  Hannam writes:

With the new system of “inquisition”, the “accusation” method (trial by ordeal, etc) of justice was eventually abandoned altogether.  Instead, the authorities appointed a magistrate to investigate the crime, interview witnesses, examine the evidence, and reach a verdict…The system was an obvious improvement over the old ways and slowly spread to secular justice too.  In fact, it worked so well it still forms the backbone of criminal investigation in continental Europe to this day. (p. 85, parenthesis added)

Over the course of the rest of Hannam’s book, he presents the reader with a parade of extraordinary individuals and groups who advanced scientific knowledge over the course of the Middle Ages, often in surprising and unexpected ways.  A brief survey includes:

• St Thomas Aquinas, whose magnum opus Summa Theologiae, among other things, established the first agreed boundaries between scientific enquiry and theological reflection, enabling philosophers to investigate the natural world without fear of retribution from the Church (and which laid the foundation for the specialisation of intellectual disciplines that characterises modern science and theology)(p98-105);
• Roger Bacon, who undertook pioneering work in the field of optics; and Richard of Wallingford, who used algebra to build an accurate mechanical clock (chapters 9-10);
• The Merton Calculators, a group of Oxford scholars including Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, who further developed Aquinas’ theology of reason, and who disproved the then popular notion of the “infallibility” of Aristotle (p. 167-74);
• Thomas Bradwardine, who first realised the utility of mathematics in addressing problems in the field of physics; and Thomas Swineshead, who developed the Mean Speed Theorem that would form the basis of Galileo’s subsequent work in motion (p.175-80)
• John Buridan, whose theory of impetus demonstrated that a projectile in motion travels in a type of arc known as a parabola (p.181-5);
• Nicole Oresme, Bishop of Lisieux, who used the Mean Speed Theorem to demonstrate that the earth rotates on its axis (p.186-90)
• Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, who argued that the universe was limitless, and that the earth was just another heavenly body (p.198);

The point of this parade of luminaries is not just that they were clerics and Christians, but that the Church either actively supported their researches, or viewed them as entirely consistent with their status as clergy.  As Hannam notes:

The popular image of the medieval Church as a monolithic institution opposing any sort of scientific speculation is clearly inaccurate.  Natural philosophy had proven itself useful and worth supporting.  It is hard to imagine how any philosophy at all would have taken place if the Church-sponsored universities had not provided a home for it.  But the price of having a rich sponsor is having to bend to their interests and avoid subjects they find controversial.  Modern scientific researches competing for funding from big companies have exactly the same problem.  The Church allowed natural philosophers a much wider dispensation than many corporate interests allow their researchers today. (p.193)

The point of this last observation is not only to draw parallels between the Middle Ages and the present, but to demonstrate that the Renaissance, far from being the liberation of Western civilisation from the shackles of benighted obscurantism, in fact nearly completely destroyed European science by rejecting all the advances of medieval philosophy and investing in an (ironically) unthinking belief in the truthfulness of the classical authors, especially Aristotle.  Whilst this obsession resulted in the recovery of many previously lost Greek and Latin manuscripts, the very “modernity” of medieval philosophy meant its advances went unrecognised or were disregarded.  But in a tragi-comic twist, the advent of the printing press enabled the works of Buridan, Bradwardine, and others to reach a wider scholarly audience, thereby enabling Kepler, Copernicus, and Galileo to make their great discoveries.

And it is on that point that Hannam makes perhaps his most important observation: that far from being the wholly original geniuses who shaped modern science out of a void of ignorance and irrationality, Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo were heavily indebted to the natural philosophers of the Middle Ages – even if they rarely acknowledged that debt.  Indeed, the “genius” of these giants of modern science was actually in their capacity to systematise the previously disparate threads of medieval intellectual enquiry, and apply this collated data to their observations.  This in turn enabled them to make original discoveries on their own account; but without the foundations laid by their predecessors, they would probably now be just as forgotten.

Allied to this is the misleading notion that the Church reacted negatively – and uniformly – against the discoveries of early modern science.  This, however, is simply not the case: for example, it was more than 50 years after its promulgation that the Church reacted in any way to Copernicus’ heliocentric theory of the solar system; in the meantime, the “controversy” surrounding it was generated by other astronomers, not Church bureaucrats.  Moreover, the status of figures like Galileo and Giordano Bruno as “scientific martyrs” is a myth.  Bruno was something of a charlatan who wandered around Europe peddling a mystical-magical philosophy to anyone who would listen (he was eventually executed for his heretical views on the Eucharist, not for his scientific speculations); while Galileo was for a long time actively supported by the Jesuit Order and by Pope Urban VIII -  things only started going wrong for him when he indulged in a personal attack on the Order and the Pope himself.

Which isn’t to say that Hannam suggests that the Church was innocent of wrongdoing, or was in any way justified in its handling of Galileo or Bruno or any of the others who incurred its displeasure.  Rather, that this reaction, inhumane as it seems from the present, was nonetheless neither hysterical or irrational.  Moreover, the reaction, when it did come, was as much about personalities as it was perceived threats to the Church: both Galileo and Urban VIII were notoriously techy and arrogant.  Additionally, much of the opposition to Galileo and other “scientific martyrs” during their lifetimes came from other scientists, not the Church, again for reasons that had more to do with vanity than science. So the image of the valiant Galileo taking on the might of the tyrannical Church is vastly overblown where it is not actually false.

Ultimately, God’s Philosophers is a remarkably even-handed, thoroughly researched, and enjoyably accessible book that not only explodes the myth of medieval irrationality, it actually illustrates the muscular vitality of intellectual life during the Middle Ages.  Hannam does not gloss over the realities of life during this period, nor does he hide the tension between the natural philosophers who paved the way for modern science and the institutional Church that was the underlying reality of medieval life.  But he flatly rejects the notion that there was no science worth mentioning before 1500, or that the Church was responsible for wholesale suppression of its achievements.  God’s Philosophers is, ultimately, a paen to individuals and a culture which overcome enormous adversity to achieve spectacular results.  As Hannam says in the splendid closing paragraph of this book:

Life in the Middle Ages was often short and violent.  The common people were assailed by diseases they didn’t understand; exploited by a distant ruling class; and dependent upon a Christian Church that rarely lived up to the ideals of its founder.  It would be wrong to romanticise the period, and we should be very grateful that we do not have to live in it.  But the hard life that people had to bear only makes their progress in science and in many other fields all the more impressive.  We should not write them off as superstitious primitives.  They deserve our gratitude. (p.342)

They remind me of a story about that time in Australia’s recent past when it was the height of fashion to have an ancestor who was transported as a convict on the First Fleet.  Apparently, there was a wealthy society matron in Sydney who was delighted to discover that she had just such an ancestor – only for her delight to turn to dismay when she discovered that the aforesaid ancestor had been transported for molesting sheep.  But the real irony of the story lies in the fact that the society matron was so focused on superficialities that she failed to realise that, in 18^th century parlance, “molesting” probably meant nothing more than “stealing” or “poaching” – and did not carry the dubious connotations which modern usage ascribes to the word.

In other words, snobbery is not just about insecurity and compensation, it’s also about the inability to see the wood for the trees.  The snob is so pre-occupied with shoring up their reputation and creating a certain image about themselves, they fail to see all the wonderful things in life that are actually worth celebrating.  For just as a Puritan is a person tormented by the thought that somewhere, someone is enjoying themselves, so a snob is tormented by the thought that somewhere, someone is looking down their nose at them.  And so the snob spends their life pre-emptively looking down their nose at everyone else, missing out on all the relationships that make life so potentially rich and fulfilling.

Sadly, this is an attitude that manifests itself as much in the life of faith as it does in life generally.  In many different times and places, Christians have been guilty of assuming airs and graces, of imagining themselves to be members of some sort of sanctified elect, some sort of community of the righteous with direct access to God.  And this attitude is usually buttressed by some misquoted or misunderstood passage from Scripture, such as certain texts from the Book of Revelation which speak of “the Elect”, or of those who are to be saved.  But it seems to me that if we are to take seriously Jesus’ declaration that he came for the sake of sinners and not the righteous, then we must understand the Church, not as a community of saints, but as a society of sinners.

Which is to say that Christians, far from being righteous and pure, are as broken and incomplete as any other person.  In which case, the point of faith is to acknowledge this brokenness and, from the depths of our incompleteness, turn to God in the understanding that it is in and through God that we are made whole – and not through our own virtues or merits.     Which does not mean that we are required to grovel in self-loathing submission before God; rather, that we come humbly and openly before God, knowing that in God’s unconditional love we will be accepted and made welcome.

Unfortunately, one of the tragedies of religious snobbery is that this message of God’s loving grace gets lost amid the demands we make on others that they conform to our standards, that they become like us, that they, in effect, stop being who they are and transmute into clones of who we think we are.  Fortunately, the authors of Scripture were aware of this potential; and in today’s reading from John’s Gospel, we have a singular warning against snobbery of this sort.

The first thing that needs to be said is that, aside from Jesus, the central characters are two of Jesus’ disciples, Phillip, and Nathanael.  Now, Phillip is a name which comes from Greek; whereas Nathanael is solidly Jewish.  And the significance of this is that, culturally speaking, Phillip represents an “outsider”, whereas Nathanael represents the “insiders”.  Nathanael has, as it were, remained pure, untainted by the influence of Greek culture, which at this time dominated the societies of the eastern Mediterranean.  Phillip, by contrast, in and through his name, is emblematic of the very influence of that culture in Jewish life.  So in Phillip and Nathanael you have two representative figures: the “pure” insider and the “tainted” outsider.

And isn’t it a curious thing that it is the “outsider” who draws the “insider’s” attention, not just to Jesus, but to his identity as the one about whom Moses and the prophets spoke?   It is to Phillip whom Jesus says, “Follow me!”  And it is Phillip who, in turn, goes to Nathanael and invites him to likewise follow Jesus.  In other words, we have here an episode that is emblematic of Jesus’ own ministry: the outsider, the hayseed from provincial Galilee, who will not only dare to correct the leaders of the Temple in Jerusalem, but who will declare himself to be the Messiah, the One who will fulfil God’s promise contained in the Law.  And in a sense, Nathanael’s sneering response to Phillip is emblematic of the outrage and contempt which Jesus will provoke from the religious authorities: “can anything good come from Nazareth?” mirrors the outraged “how dare he!” with which the Pharisees and Sadducees and others will respond to Jesus.

But there is also irony at play here, an irony that both shows up Nathanael’s snobbery and the absurd blindness of snobbery itself.  Phillip, we are told, is from Bethsaida; and so, presumably, is Nathanael.  Now, Bethsaida was one of a number of prosperous little cities which sprang up during this period along the shores of the Sea of Galilee; cities in which there was a good deal of construction of public buildings which displayed the civic pride of these communities.  And to carry out these works, significant numbers of craftsmen and labourers from the inland villages of Galilee and were recruited; but, as with other times and places, the people doing the work were despised and ridiculed by the people for whom they worked.  So Nathanael saying “can anything good come from Nazareth?” is a put-down associated with this kind of snobbery: Jesus is not from Bethsaida, he’s not “one of us” – how could he possibly have anything of value to offer?

The irony being of course that Nathanael is too blind to see the sheer effrontery of Jesus approaching a half-Greek Jew like Phillip, instead of first coming to him, one of the local cultural and economic elites.  He cannot see the implicit message that the Kingdom of God belongs to all, not merely to those who imagine themselves to be its true inheritors.  Like Nicodemus the Pharisee, Nathanael cannot “see”, he cannot understand who Jesus is and what he portends; whereas Phillip, the lesser light by virtue of his “outsider” heritage, immediately grasps who Jesus is and what he is about.   So it is with irony added to irony that the “outsider” goes to the “insider”, to help him understand what is before his very eyes.

And, perhaps curious, perhaps amused, Nathanael goes with Phillip.  And as he approaches, Jesus pays him an apparent compliment: “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!”  But in the context of Nathanael’s response to Phillip, the compliment is decidedly backhanded: Nathanael is not “deceitful” in the sense that he wears his snobbery on his sleeve; it’s there for all to see, not hidden behind a display of courtesy or good manners.   Moreover, in identifying Nathanael is a “true Israelite”, Jesus names the basis of Nathanael’s snobbery: his pride in his “untainted” cultural background.  It’s almost as though – to use Herbert Agar’s phrase – Nathanael had begotten his own ancestors!

But the “backhanded” nature of this compliment is also revealed by the fact that Nathanael’s openness is, in fact, his saving grace: being of an open disposition means that he is likewise open to new understanding: like Nicodemus the Pharisee, his “blindness” is not total, there remains the possibility of insight.  And this is an insight which Jesus subsequently provides; not in response to Nathanael’s rather formulaic declaration that Jesus is the Son of God and King of Israel – which, as an aside, is John’s ironic premonition of the words which will be nailed to Jesus’ cross – but in the promise of greater things to come.

But this is not “greater” as in “more spectacular” or “more impressive”.  Such a promise would merely be a repetition of the materialist and cultural paradigm out of which Nathanael’s snobbery operates.  Rather, the “greater” which Jesus promises is a statement about what will happen to Jesus himself, a statement expressed through an image that recollects Jacob’s dream at Haran. For in the Incarnation, the Heavens have indeed opened up; and in the person of Jesus, God has descended to earth and entered into human life.  And in his death, Jesus will descend further, into the fullness of human death.  But in his Resurrection, Jesus will ascend once more to Heaven; and in so doing, will enable the earthly life of humanity to ascend into the eternal life of God’s Kingdom.  The “greater” will be the inclusion of the whole of creation in God’s scheme of salvation, contrary to the expectations of the elites.  The “greater” is the width and unconditional nature of God’s love, which rebukes Nathanael’s snobbery and its assumptions about who is “in” and who is “out”.

And which, correspondingly, rebukes our own snobbery, our own assumptions.  Because there are times when we act with conceit and label it righteousness; when we compensate for our insecurities and call it respectability.  But the truth is, none of our confessions of faith, none of our activities as a congregation, mean anything unless they declare that our discipleship to Christ is centred on making known the love of God, through and in a community that makes available life and love to the world.  All else is affectation and pretence; it is snobbery and elitism, pure and simple.  And we are called, not to be snobs, but to follow the One who entered our humanity for the sake of us all.

You can see why Mark’s Gospel was neglected for so much of Christian history: it comes across as too bland, too insufficiently magical to capture our attention.  But four centuries before Mark’s Gospel was written, the great Greek historian Thucydides articulated a concept which I think Mark follows closely.  In the Introduction to his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote:

It may be that this history will be less popular because of the absence in it of a romantic element; it will be enough for me, however, if my words are judged useful by those who want to know that which happened.

In other words, Thucydides is more interested in reporting events as they occurred, rather than in adding what he called a “romantic element” – and which we would probably call a “magical element” – into his narrative.  The only problem is, shortly after articulating this noble principle, Thucydides cheerfully admits that many of the great speeches which infuse his work are entirely made up; instead of being the words that were actually spoken at the time, he inserts speeches which reflect either what he thinks was said, or what the occasion was about.  In other words, a speech was made; it’s just that it wasn’t the speech Thucydides records.   

So Thucydides the scrupulous reporter becomes Thucydides the utiliser of poetic licence.  Does this make him a liar or a hypocrite? Absolutely not, for Thucydides’ purpose was to record a truth that goes beyond the mere recitation of facts.  Thucydides’ speeches give us a flavour of the social forces which existed at the time, as well as an insight into the motivations behind the parties to the conflict which he recorded.  In other words, Thucydides helps us to establish context, even if the words which he attributes to various politicians and generals were never actually said: and in doing so, he provides us with a richer truth that the mere recitation of dates and battles and treaties would ever provide.

And I think a similar thing is going on in Mark’s Gospel.  Because beneath the apparently bland surface of his rather straight-forward narrative there is a rich symbolism that points to a deeper truth than that which is verifiable through historical or scientific analysis.  The fact that he begins his Gospel with the seemingly straight-forward but incredibly rich declaration that Jesus is the Son of God – and you should pay attention to the fact that this declaration is in the present tense – alerts us to this fact.  And it is a reality which we encounter fully in Mark’s account of Jesus’ baptism.

On the surface, the story seems simple enough.  John is baptising by the River Jordan; he declares that he is not the Messiah, that One is coming who is greater than he is; then Jesus comes and presents himself to John and is baptised by him; and as Jesus emerges from the water, he has a vision in which the heavens tear open and the Spirit descends on him, while God says from Heaven that Jesus is the Beloved Son.  Leaving aside the “magical” element of Jesus’ vision, the event is depicted in typically direct Markan terms: Jesus comes, Jesus is baptised, and, in the passage immediately following today’s reading, Jesus departs for the wilderness.  Nothing to it, really.

Of course, it’s not quite as straightforward as that, because there is that “magical” moment at the end that needs to be accounted for.  And the usual explanation is that this is Mark once again drawing on images from the prophet Isaiah to underline Jesus’ identity as the Son of God.  In Isaiah 64, the prophets speaks of his longing for God to rend the Heavens and descend to earth.  Isaiah 11 speaks of the Spirit anointing the Chosen One, God’s Messiah who is to be King over Israel.  So the episode of Jesus’ vision is Mark’s way of saying that Jesus is the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophetic vision.  Just as Thucydides used symbolic speeches to reveal the deeper social and political depths of the events he was recording, so Mark uses Isaiah to reveal those same depths about Jesus.

All of which is fine as far as it goes.  Except for the fact that this episode is not just a matter of illustrating who Jesus is, but also about revealing the consequences of Jesus’ identity as the Messiah.  The imagery in this passage is not merely symbolic: it points directly toward what is involved in the fulfilment of prophecy, in God’s faithfulness to covenant.

In the previous two weeks we have examined the significance of the Nativity for humanity and creation.   On Christmas Day we examined the absurdity of Christmas and the joyous Good News which it proclaims: that through the humanity of Jesus, God is one of us, and one with us, in every sense of the word.  Last week, we explored the “flip side” of the Nativity: how, through our adoption as Children of God, we are taken up into the life of God through the divinity of Christ, our broken human life transfigured into a fully human existence within the life of God.  And in today’s reading, Mark brings these two halves of the Christmas narrative together, revealing Christ as the fulcrum through and in whom Heaven and earth are joined, in and through whom we are baptised into a new birth.  For make no mistake about it, today’s passage from Mark is a Nativity reading.

Let me say that again: today’s passage from Mark is a Nativity reading.  No, there is no Mary or Joseph or angels or shepherds or wise men adoring a child in a stable.  But that is not what Nativity readings are primarily about: rather, they are about Jesus’ identity as the One who redeems broken human existence, who both breaks the eternal Heavenly realm into earthly existence, and who raises mortal earthly existence into the eternal being of God.   And this is what Mark does in today’s reading: and he does it by utilising some extraordinary birth imagery in his retelling of Jesus’ baptism.

Firstly, there is Jesus’ baptism at John’s hands.  John has already declared the temporality of his baptism with water, of his unworthiness before the One who is to come, and of the Spirit-filled Baptism which that One will perform.  But given all this, why does Jesus consent to be baptised at John’s hands? Precisely because this act is emblematic of the purpose of Jesus’ whole ministry: to claim ineffective human rituals for God and transfigure them into eternally effective symbols of the advent of God’s Kingdom.  Just as Jesus claims our life and our death to transform both into the eternal life of God’s Kingdom, so Jesus claims the ritual of baptism and gives it a new birth of effectiveness; it ceases being a ritual and becomes instead a sacrament of God’s grace.

Next there is Jesus’ emergence from the waters of the River Jordan.  Water has an ambivalent meaning for people who live in arid environments: on the one hand, it represents life itself, replenishment and renewal; but on the other hand it is a threat, a context in which humans cannot breathe, a place of smothering, suffocating death.  So Jesus coming up out of the water again represents who Jesus is and what his ministry involves: life, replenishment and rebirth in the face of death; and emergence from death itself, life breaking through and out of those powers which cause death.  Jesus enters the waters, claims its ambiguity for God, and emerges as the Water of Life itself.

But the most extraordinary image in Mark’s account is the dual representation of Christ emerging from the water as the Heavens break open and the Spirit pours down.  For let us not be coy about this: water, and emergence from water, and tearing open, and Spirit pouring forth are all symbolic representations of the physical processes of birth.  As the citizen of a rural society in which humans lived in close proximity to livestock, Mark would have been more than familiar with the processes of animal birth.  And despite the taboos by which it was surrounded, he would have understood the human childbirth was not much different.  So when he wanted to illustrate that it was in and through Jesus that humanity’s new birth of salvation was achieved, it would have only been natural for him to have used graphic, visceral – if symbolic – images associated with creaturely birth.  But the very fact that these images are achieved through water and Jesus and Heaven and the Spirit tells us that this is not ordinary, temporary, mortal birth; rather, it is the birth of God’s Kingdom, the birth into eternal life.  In Jesus, God claims creaturely birth, and transfigures it into a promise, not of eventual death, but of resurrection.

And all of this is achieved in the stunning image of Jesus coming up as the Spirit comes down: and at the point where they meet, Heaven and earth come together.  Jesus is the fulcrum in which Spirit and flesh are unified in Christ.  Jesus, today’s reading from Mark proclaims, is the One through whom God enters into human life, and through whom humanity is embraced by the life of God.  The Kingdom of Heaven is present in the earthly realm precisely because the human person Jesus is also the divine Christ, the Son of God through whom God’s Spirit pours into the world.

So today’s reading from Mark is indeed about Baptism: but it is Baptism as Nativity, as birth and re-birth.  But this is not being “born again” as this is understood in certain Christian circles; the new birth promised by Baptism is the transformation of our brokenness into fullness, not a requirement that we adhere to certain interpretations of Scripture.  It is a promise made effective in the humanity of Jesus, and in his identity as the divine Christ.  A promise which Mark illustrates in and through his own recounting of Jesus’ Baptism.

So don’t lament or go looking for the supposedly “missing” Nativity story in Mark’s Gospel.  Unlike our missing Christmas dollars, Mark’s understanding of Jesus as the Nativity figure has always been there for us to read.  For just as we are promised life anew, let us begin to see anew; and in so seeing, discover richness in what we once thought to be mundane.

This doctrine, called divinization, or theosis, teaches that God calls all of us to share in God’s life through the life of Christ.  St Augustine provides a striking image of this doctrine in action: God, Augustine says, is the food of life, and humans are invited to partake of this food; but whereas ordinary food is converted into the substance of our bodies, by feasting on the food of life, humans are converted into the substance of God.  The food, being taken into us, takes us into itself.

Modern Christians may find this a slightly disturbing image, but, in essence,  what Augustine was saying was that through faith in Christ, we respond to God’s invitation to enter into Heavenly life; and in so responding, are drawn into that life.  This is what divinization or theosis means: not that we become divine, but that, through faith in Christ, we are incorporated into the divine life of God.

But what Athanasius and Augustine stressed was that this taking up was an act of God’s grace.  It was not something humans achieved: simply saying “I believe!” won’t effect incorporation into the eternal life of God.  Rather, salvation, the liberation from death and sin which the doctrine of theosis points to, is an act of God’s initiative.  It is something which God has done of God’s own free election, and is not something which humans achieve through their own efforts.

In other words, humans “becoming gods” is the fruit of God’s love, not the reward of human endeavour.

On Christmas Day we saw the fruit of this love in action.  In the Incarnation, God set aside God’s own godhood in order to enter into human life through the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  Jesus was fully human in every sense of the word; a fact demonstrated during last week’s Children’s Address when one of the children observed that one of the qualities of being a baby is that you are very fragile.  Jesus was as fragile and as vulnerable as every other human child.

But Jesus was also – is also – the Second Person of the divine Trinity, whose titles Son of God and Son of Man point to the intersection of Heaven and earth in his own life and being.  And that intersection is absolutely crucial, for without it, Christmas – as absurd and ridiculous as Christmas sometimes seems – makes no sense.

I saw a sign outside a church the other day which read: Without Christmas there is no Easter.  This sign summarised the situation very neatly.  Unless Jesus is both the divine Son of God and the human child of Joseph and Mary, then neither Christmas nor Easter are worth celebrating.  And this is the point that Athanasius and Augustine and which the doctrine of theosis makes: that what makes Christmas and Easter special is what they signify for humankind, namely, the making effective of God’s promise to liberate humanity from sin and death.  And the One who makes this promise effective is the human Jesus/divine Christ, who stands on the borders of Heaven and earth, and in whose humanity and divinity the mortal, enslaved life of the earth is incorporated into the eternal, liberated life of God.

But some people worry – and other people accusingly suggest – that the doctrine of theosis is an “add on”, a later accretion that was imposed upon Christian faith by certain powerful individuals running their own agendas, or who were operating under the influence of Greek philosophy or Gnostic mysticism.  And that is why today’s reading from Paul’s Letter to the Galatians is so important: because it demonstrates that, even in the very early Church, the understanding of Jesus as both fully human and fully divine – and the implications of this understanding – were located at the very heart of Christian faith.

In today’s brief passage from Galatians Paul uses two key images: the redemption of those born under the Law, and their consequent adoption as Children of God.  Paul uses both these images to describe how the advent of the Christ in the person of Jesus redeems the brokenness of humanity and elevates humanity’s mortal life into the eternal life of God.

Paul’s image of the Law as an emblem of human brokenness is quite provocative and needs to be carefully understood; because, sadly, misunderstanding of this imagery has resulted in much anti-Semitic prejudice and violence.  What first needs to be remembered is that Paul never surrendered his Jewish identity; even after his conversion, as he writes elsewhere in Galatians and in other letters, he remained devoutly Jewish in his practice and outlook – indeed, rather proud of his righteousness under the Law.  But the insight which Paul’s conversion provided him was that the Law was not fulfilled by slavish, literalist obedience; rather, it was fulfilled by Christ, who embodied the very purpose for which the Law was gifted to humanity.  Paul realised that the Law was never intended as a kind of legal code which dictated every aspect of human life; rather, it was intended to be the means by which humans lived in covenantal relationship with God.  But human brokenness had made it a kind of repressive instrument of control; the insistence by the Pharisees and others on literal adherence to the Law had reduced it to an imprisoning statute book, not a source of liberation.

So when Paul writes about the redemption of those born under the Law, he is not making a statement about the Law itself, nor about Jewish faith and practice.  Rather, he is describing the effect of Christ’s Incarnation: the Law, undermined by human brokenness, is fulfilled in the person of Jesus.  Because humans are unable of their own accord to enter into the covenant which the Law articulates, God acts in and through the person of Christ to give effect to that covenant, to make its promise real in the sphere of human existence.

All of which means that when Paul writes about our adoption as Children of God, he is talking about the effect of our redemption.  And nor should we understand the word “adoption” in merely symbolic terms.  Because when Paul uses this term, he does so within a specific cultural context, a context that gives the word “adoption” a very particular meaning.

For in the world of the Roman Empire, to be adopted was not merely a matter of one person becoming part of another family.  Rather, the Roman theory of adoption held that a person become part of the literal flesh and blood of the family into which they were adopted.  Not merely symbolically or figuratively or metaphorically, but literally part of the historical lineage and descent of the adopting family.  Which in turn meant that anyone who was adopted became the literal blood-heir to the family inheritance.  All the wealth and privilege which a family had acquired became the legacy of the adopted person.

In other words, when Paul writes about our adoption as Children of God, he is saying that, through Christ’s fulfilment of the covenantal promise contained in the Law, humanity becomes part of the very being of God; we are taken up into God.  For this is what salvation is: the lifting of human life out of its enslavement to sin and death and into a fully human existence within the eternal life of God.  Our status as Children of God is not merely a symbolic or honourific title reflecting a theoretical solidarity between God and humanity; on the contrary, in the human life of Jesus and his identity as the divine Christ, we are able to access the eternal being of God.   Our adoption as the Children of God is our inheritance of the inexhaustible wealth of God’s unending Kingdom.

And what this in essence means is that today’s reading from Galatians articulates a doctrine of theosis, of God becoming human so that humans might become gods.  And what this in turn means is that this doctrine is not an historical “add on”; rather, it highlights how Christians have understood Jesus, and Jesus’ centrality to salvation, from the earliest days of Christian history.

In other words, the doctrine of theosis is the “flip side”, the other side of the same coin on which one finds the Incarnation.  Last week at Christmas we explored how God coming into the world created an inseparable bond between ourselves and God; this week, we discover what this means for us in terms of salvation.  For God in Christ did not become one of us merely for the purpose of sharing our human life; rather, God become one of us so that through the life of Jesus, we might share the eternal life of God.  And God has done this on God’s own initiative, and for no other reason than love.

So as we go into a new year, let us be mindful that we are not merely passing from one calendar to the next, but from one condition to another: we are passing from a broken to a fully human life, taken up into the eternal life of God.

How often have we heard reference to this phenomenon? We talk about it, others talk about it, it’s a perennial topic of conversation whenever people get together at this time of year: the sheer madness, the mind-blowing absurdity that is the Christmas season.

Of course, as a topic of conversation, what we’re usually referring to when we talk about the insanity of Christmas is the collective madness that seems to descend upon us all every December.  The hectic dashes to and from shopping centres as we buy presents and stock up for family Christmas gatherings; the grid-locked traffic; the endless circling as we search ever more desperately for a vacant car-space; the crowds; the noise; the queues.  And playing as a kind of deranged background to it all, the demented cheeriness of the piped music in shopping malls and television ads, telling us to be filled with joy and good will as we struggle with shopping carts and restless children and ever diminishing bank balances.

It’s absurd, isn’t it? Utterly, madly, crazily insane.  And yet we do it, over and over, year after year, when reason alone would surely persuade us that this is completely stupid, and that we would be better served giving it all up as a bad joke and saving ourselves the trauma.  And yet, if anything, reason does the smart thing and gets out of town early to avoid the rush; with the result that the rest of us go quietly mad and repeat the same old rituals and patterns of behaviour.

The insanity of Christmas.

If by now you’re thinking that this minister is a Christmas Grinch who can’t get into the spirit of the season, let me tell you that the reason I have highlighted this aspect of Christmas is because I do think Christmas is insane – but not for any of the reasons I have already mentioned.  Rather, I think Christmas is insane because I think the very notion of Christmas – what it purports to represent and convey – is utterly absurd.  Christmas – as Christmas is understood by Christians – is an affront to our intelligence, it is a contradiction of everything we know to be reasonable and true.  There is no place whatsoever in our world for stars that guide wise men, or angels who visit shepherds, or virgins who give birth to babies who are both fully human and fully divine.  All these things represent an order of insanity far greater than the mere stupidity of subjecting ourselves to the commercialised hell of a busy shopping mall.

And it is because of that, the insanity, the sheer absurd madness of the Christian Christmas, that I think Christmas is the most important thing in the world.

A few years ago, I was reading an opinion piece in The Age newspaper, in which the author revealed that they became an atheist the day they realised they couldn’t explain the Christmas story to their children; indeed, when they were forced to agree with their children’s opinion that the Christmas story was, in their words, “a load of crap”.  And, of course, atheists of a particular fundamentalist mindset continue to lambast Christianity on the basis of the absurdity of the Christmas narrative: the supernatural and miraculous events depicted clearly contradict the scientific picture of the natural world; the narrative differences and historical inaccuracies in the different Gospel accounts obviously point to the fact that the story is a fiction, passed on and added to over time; and the apparent similarity of aspects of the Nativity story to the mythic narratives of other ancient cultures shows that the Christmas tale is just another “myth”, just another made up feel-good fantasy.

In other words, the Christmas story is just a load of “crap”.  It might make us feel good, it might give us an excuse to wind down and celebrate at the end of the year – but that’s all there is to it.  Any suggestion of anything more is just a sham.

Of course, we might just shrug our shoulders and say, well that’s atheists – or, at least, a certain kind of atheist – for you.  But matters get a little more awkward when we realise that there are a significant number of Christians who say a very similar thing.  Embarrassed by the Christmas story’s apparent lack of adherence to the insights of science or the demands strict rationality, many Christians attempt to rationalise or explain away the Nativity.  They do this by asserting that Jesus was simply a man, but a man who had a special and unique connection with God; the Nativity stories are therefore just metaphorical attempts by ancient writers to highlight Jesus’ special qualities, utilising cultural and mythological references which were common in the ancient world.   The Christmas stories shouldn’t be taken literally; they’re just a way of explaining what a special human being Jesus was.

Either way, it amounts to the same thing: whether atheist or revisionist, the message is that the Christmas story is too absurd, too ridiculous, too unbelievable to have any value.  At best, it’s a good excuse for a holiday, or a quaint way of saying what a good bloke Jesus was.  But the bottom line remains the same: any understanding of the Christmas story that goes beyond these narrow limits is an indulgence in fantasy.

The insanity of Christmas.

So what do we do? Caught between the options of atheism and revisionism, do we just give up and declare it all too hard? Or do we retreat into a kind of defensive fundamentalism that rejects science, mocks atheism, and scorns revisionist Christian opinion as a kind of theological fifth column?

My answer to these questions takes us back to the beginning of Christian history.  It’s a curious – though little known – fact that the early Church was persecuted because, among other things, early Christians were accused of being atheists.  I know it sounds ludicrous; and I’ve often wondered what Richard Dawkins would think if he discovered that he and Christians have more in common than he supposes!  But it is true: the early Christians were accused of being atheists.

This accusation came about because the Christian message of the Incarnation was not only deemed to be absurd, it was also profoundly offensive.  In the society of the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East, God was conceived of as a remote perfection, existing in divine serenity in a heaven untouched by events in the world.  Nothing on this world concerned or affected God.  That’s why the Sun was so often thought of as divine: its perfect round disc high above the earth was seen as emblematic of God’s perfection – remote, untouchable, inaccessible.

So for Christians to proclaim that God was not a remote perfection, that God had, in fact, laid aside Godhood and in the person of Jesus of Nazareth had entered into human life, was profoundly shocking.  So shocking, in fact, that it warranted a charge of atheism: the Christian conception of God was so alien, so contrary to common sense that it amounted to a denial of God.  The God of Christian faith was an absurdity, a fantasy, a lie.  The God of Christian faith didn’t exist, because this God did everything which the culture of the time said God didn’t do.  These Christians were obviously atheists.

Isn’t it an interesting point of comparison that the Christmas story, the story of the Incarnation, was causing offence and embarrassment 2,000 years ago, and is still doing the same today?  In the time of the early Church, it was offending cultural assumptions about the nature of God; and in the modern world, it is offending certain narrow assumptions about what is scientifically valid or rationally feasible.  It’s almost as though the point of the Incarnation is to cause offence, to challenge and upset notions that are either culturally hardwired, or popularly assumed.  The story of the Nativity, instead of being a warm and fuzzy tale about Jesus meek and mild, is, in fact, profoundly shocking.

And it’s shocking precisely because it reveals something rather disturbing about God: it reveals the lengths to which God is prepared to go in order to embody solidarity with suffering humanity.  A few years ago, the singer Joan Osborne released a song called One of Us.  In the rather remarkable chorus to this song, Osborne asks:

What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us?
Just a stranger on the bus,
Trying to make his way home?

And the extraordinary thing about the Christian Christmas narrative is that we can answer the question posed in this song with a rousing affirmation: God is one of us, and one with us, through the Incarnation, through the birth of a small, vulnerable baby to an insignificant couple in a backwoods province of the Roman Empire.  But that is a notion that is too shocking, to scandalous, to utterly absurd for many people – atheist and Christian alike – to accept.  For many, it is emblematic of the insanity of Christmas.

So what should we do when the atheists and the rationalists and revisionists tell us that the Nativity story in the Gospels is absurd and irrational and ought to be jettisoned? My answer is that instead of retreating into defensiveness or trying to explain away the Incarnation, we should meet its critics head on.  When they tell us that it’s preposterous and mad and unbelievable, I say we should agree with them. We should say: yes, it is absurd; yes, it is ridiculous; yes, it is insane.  But that is the very point; the very impossibility of the Nativity is what makes it so profound, so real, so true.  In the words of the English writer G K Chesterton, the Nativity is an example of the kind of “absurd good news” that completely resets our understanding of the world, and of our relationship with the world.

All of which means that we will not recapture the Christmas spirit by bemoaning its commercialisation, or by attempting to either debunk or rationalise the content of the Christmas story.   Rather, we will recapture the true spirit of Christmas once we realise how shocking – indeed, how offensive – Christmas is.  Only by embracing the absurdity of the Christmas narrative, by engaging with the extent to which Christmas upsets our demands and expectations, will we be able to appreciate what the Christmas spirit truly is.  Not cheeriness or gift giving or even good will; but a stunned silence at the extraordinary, incredible, astonishing extent to which God is prepared to go in order to embrace us, to become “one of us”.

The insanity of Christmas.  Next time we are tempted to bewail the travails of the season, perhaps we might instead try and look deeper.  And in the depths of Christmas’ insanity, see instead the absurd, irrational, joyous grace of the God who, in Christ, comes to meet us as we are, where we are, here on earth.

Attenborough has brought many remarkable images from the natural world into our living rooms.  And for myself, one of the most remarkable was the spectacle of salmon, flying through the air over the waterfalls, only to be brought undone by the bears waiting at the top.  All that effort, all that remarkable instinctive labour to mate and reproduce, only to be dashed to nothing against the appetite of a hungry bear!

It reminds me of a coffee cup I have at home.  It shows this very scene of a bear catching a salmon at a waterfall; and the accompanying caption reads: Sometimes the journey of a thousand miles ends very, very badly!

Personally, I suspect it’s awareness of the riskiness of travelling that makes humans so fond of stability, of standing still and not moving.  We know that to make a move is to take a very great risk indeed; as Bilbo says in The Lord of the Rings: It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door. You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no telling where you might be swept off to.

And I suspect this also explains why, among other things, Christians are so fond of buildings and property.  We invest our identity in location, we place great value of the accoutrements of property, such as pews and windows.  Our identity is so often located in place: we attend this congregation; we worship at that church.  Even more than denominational identity, even more than our identity as Christians, we often define ourselves by reference to narrow geographical location.

The irony of all this is that Christians often talk as though building permanent structures were almost an anathema to our faith.  We often talk about journeying or our journey of faith; a lot is said about the Church being a community of pilgrim people whose lives are a movement toward God.  And much is often made, from the pulpit and elsewhere, about the necessity of not being burdened by the material world, that we might travel more faithfully the road of discipleship.

In other words, Christians spend an awful lot of time talking about travelling and journeying of one sort or another – and then proceed to live their faith lives as though the exact opposite was true.  All too often, Christians are identified by their attachment to permanency rather than their embrace of ambiguity and change.

I suppose we can take solace from the fact that this dichotomy is a common human experience, one that is by no means exclusive to Christians.  And in today’s reading from Second Samuel, we see this dichotomy in operation – and how God responds to all attempts to pin down the life of faith.

David has been remembered as the greatest of all the kings of Israel; but as the historical writings of the Old Testament make clear, David did not inherit an undivided Israelite kingdom.  His predecessor Saul had ruled a relatively small territory; and it was only after much struggle and difficulty that David managed to weld the disparate tribes of Israel into a unified kingdom.  And for his capital, he chose a neutral location: the city of Jerusalem, previously inhabited by a Canaanite tribe called the Jebusites.  In just the same way that Canberra was chosen as a neutral location for Australia’s national capital in order to mollify the egos of the competing States, so Jerusalem was chosen to convey a simple, but powerful, message: this city belongs to no one tribe, but to all.

But there was also another compelling political motivation behind David’s choice: he was sending a message to every Israelite that he was not like Saul, nor like any of the Judges who had once guided the tribes of Israel.  Rather, David was their king, their ruler, and Jerusalem was the capital by virtue of his decision; he was neither guide nor tribal chieftain, but the fountainhead of law and authority, ordained by God for the purpose.

In other words, the decision to choose Jerusalem was a propaganda statement by David about his identity.  Moreover, Jerusalem itself was to be the enduring symbol of his kingship, and that of his successors.  David was putting down roots; roots of political identity, roots of political immortality.

And it is in this context that David speaks to the prophet Nathan about his proposal to build a Temple in which to house the Ark of the Covenant.  On the surface, it appears a perfectly benign request: David wishes to provide God with a house as splendid as his own palace.  And who could say no to such a project: afterall, why should David, a mere mortal, have an enduring symbol to his greatness, while the God who put him on the throne makes do with tents and mobile tabernacles?

And such is the plausibility of the request that Nathan at first gives it his blessing.  But if we view David’s proposal in the context of his decision to make Jerusalem his capital, we come to understand the less commendable political dimensions behind his request.  For David understands full well that building a Temple in his city, next to his palace, will not only confer his regime with the appearance of divine legitimacy; it will also enable him to control the religious life of his people.

In other words, David’s request to build the Temple is an attempt to get God into his pocket, to use God for his own political purposes.  Like Constantine centuries later, David has realised the tremendous unifying potential of religious belief; but he also understands how that belief can also legitimise his regime, and that of his successors.  He realises that the various sites of local worship must be replaced by a central place to which the people must come in order to give expression to their religious beliefs; and he knows that in doing so, the people must naturally be guided by a college of priests and officials appointed for the purpose.  Priests and officials, it need hardly be said, who owe their position to David.

But like Constantine, David gets more than he bargained for.  God intervenes to deliver a rebuke that is as revealing of God and the nature of faith as it is of David’s political pretensions.

Who is David, God enquires, that he should think to build a place in which to contain God – the God, afterall, who has journeyed with the People since their release from captivity in Egypt; the God who has moved among the people from tribe to tribe since their settlement in the land of Canaan? God has made no such request of any of the tribal elders – what makes David think such a structure is required now?

And in delivering this rebuke, God reveals something important: that the God whom David seeks to contain inside a Temple under his control is, in fact, a God who moves, a God who journeys and travels, who lives out among the people and in the midst of daily life.  This is a God who doesn’t require a house in which to live, because this is a God who is everywhere; a God who defies human expectations, and refutes our demands for simple answers.  This, more than anything else, explains why God cannot be worshipped as a graven image: because nothing so static as an image – or a Temple – could ever capture and convey all that God is.

But God’s contrarian and difficult nature is also revealed by the fact that the rebuke also conveys a blessing.  God tells David through the prophet Nathan that his house will be established in perpetuity, and that this promise will not be broken despite faithlessness on the part of David’s descendants.  In other words, God is not only telling David that he should not presume to build a house for God, but that God will build up the house of David instead.  Indeed, David need not resort to such cheap tricks such as trying to control religious belief through a politically organised Temple; rather, he need only trust in God, and in God’s faithfulness to God’s own promises.  David might have his own politically-motivated imperatives; but God has a different agenda, one that does not conform to human demands or expectations.

And what all this tells us is that the God of Christian faith is not a static God, an idol lurking in some purpose-built construction.  The saying “a house of God” is, in many senses, an oxymoron.  Because the God who calls us into relationship is a God who refuses to be pinned down by us, who refuses to be defined or mapped out or simplistically characterised.  The God of Christian faith is mobile, frustrating, and elusive; and calls on us to enter into that ambiguity, to engage with complexity for the sake of relationship.

Because, ultimately, that is what faith is: a relationship, with all the risks and uncertainties which all relationships involve.   With the sole exception that the God who is the other party to this relationship is also unfailingly faithful; despite our own unreliability, God will always stand by this relationship.  This is a God who is so steadfast in faith that, in the person of Jesus, this God will lay aside Godhood and come into the world as a human life.

So politicians and others can try and use God to buttress their own power or reputation or success, but in the final analysis, God will always elude their attempts at capture, God will always refuse to be contained by their Temples.   And that in turn tells us something about our own addiction to property, our own craving for stability and protection from the risks of journeying.  If we want security, if we want guarantees of happy endings and journeys that never end badly, then we are worshipping the wrong God.  The God of Christian faith makes no such promises.  Because the promise which God does make is to relationship, and commitment, and to hope: and these are far more nebulous, and far too substantial, to be shut up within buildings, or confined to specific locations.

So as we mark this final Sunday in the season of Advent, let us remember that waiting is not a matter of standing still, or being static.  And that’s because the God of our faith is an active God, a God of risk and journey, who summons us to leave behind our buildings and head out into the world.  A God who sets our feet upon the dangerous road and then beckons us to discipleship, saying: Follow me.

Naturally, this has caused a storm of protest from right-wing groups within Australia.  Among the most vociferous have been an organisation called the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL).  ACL is both a lobby group which attempts to push its conservative view of Christian life and faith on society and the government, as well as an umbrella organisation for a range of conservative Christian Churches.  It is very well funded and resourced and has an enormous reach.

Unfortunately, the name “Australian Christian Lobby” suggests that Christian opinion is uniform and undivided on social and political issues, and that the ACL represents and speaks for Christian opinion in Australia.  Despite the fact that this is patently untrue, the ACL has been very successful in projecting its opinion through the media and creating the impression that the views of the ACL are also the views of every Australian Christian.

The matter of same-sex marriage is a case in point.  The ACL have whipped up a storm of hysteria, threatening a “Christian backlash” on this issue, and generally creating the impression that Christians are uniformly hell-bent on ensuring same-sex couples never have the chance to marry.

Well, enough.  A group of Christians have created a group called Australian Christian Voices.  We are not a lobby group, nor do we claim to represent a particular Christian denomination or perspective. Rather, we intend to promote public awareness of the wide diversity and breadth of Christian opinion on any given issue, and contest the co-opting of that opinion by narrow sectional interests.  We are not “anti-ACL” – rather, we oppose the conflation of Christian opinion with the views of the ACL, as well as the misapprehension that the ACL speaks for Christians generally.

As a first step, we have established a Facebook page.  If you are:

• Concerned that the broader Christian opinion is being appropriated by narrow sectional interests;
• Concerned that public awareness of the variety of Christian opinion is being lost in the face of the reach of sectional lobby groups;
• Looking for a way to support, nourish, and foster awareness of the diversity of Christian opinion

Please “Like” our Facebook Page Australian Christian Voices.  Once you’ve done this, you might like to join our Members Group at Australian Christian Voices (same name, different URL).

I won’t share with you now the response which his question elicited – suffice to say, it was forthright in nature and, I suspect, expanded that unfortunate young man’s vocabulary in several unexpected directions!   Diatribe delivered, I stormed off, cursing the luck that had lumbered me with unreasonable HR practitioners and impertinent curbside canvassers.

I have thought of that young man many times over the years; partly out of a sense of remorse; but partly because, in retrospect, it has occurred to me that he was a kind of harbinger, a symbol and messenger of the change that was then taking place in my life.  For at the time of this occurrence, I was not a practicing Christian: I had, for various reasons, stopped going to church many years previously, and was no longer part of a faith community.

And yet it was also a period during which I was feeling the pull back to church.  I had, even before I left, felt a call to the ordained ministry; and that was a call which had not ceased in the interim, and so remained unresolved.  And despite being a “lapsed” Christian, God remained a powerful – if occasionally disturbing – presence in my life, a reality I was finding increasingly difficult to ignore.  So you’ll appreciate that I was in a bit of a bind: I had left the Church, in part because I felt I had no place within it; and yet, some part of me recognised that the authenticity of my humanity was dependent upon not just feeling, but practicing my faith.  And to do that, I needed to belong to a faith community.

It was during this period of transition that I had my encounter with the young man with the clipboard.  In a strange kind of way, he has become symbolic of that transition; an unusual and unlooked for angel whose question – What is your attitude to Christianity? – I now recognise as the key question with which I was grappling at the time.  It was not a question of whether or not I believed; I had to work out what I was going to do about that belief.

And isn’t it often the way that the significant sign-posts of our life are those which, at the time, we overlook or dismiss because they seem so unlikely, so unprepossessing? If you had told me that this young man would be anything more than a passing nuisance, I would have laughed in your face; and yet, here I am, years later, talking about him and recognising his significance – or, at least, the significance of what it was he pointed to, the forces moving within my life which his question so concisely encapsulated.

All of which makes the quote from the prophet Isaiah in today’s reading from Mark’s Gospel all the more significant.  Last week, we heard a reading from the end of Mark’s Gospel, in which Isaiah was quoted in order to indicate who Jesus is: the One in and through whom God makes salvation effective for all humanity.  In this week’s reading, Mark again quotes Isaiah, but does so in order to reveal a different aspect of Jesus’ character.  And this is Jesus the Unexpected, Jesus the Unlikely and Overlooked; Jesus the last person anyone would think of as Messiah and Saviour.

For those of us who are reading Mark’s Gospel retrospectively, this sounds absurd; of course we know that Jesus is the Christ – that, afterall, is the basis of our faith.  But we must remember that it was less clear to the early Church; not only were they trying to work out what it meant to confess Jesus as Lord, they were also facing external critics who argued that their faith was a lie, a delusion, a product either of ignorance or dishonesty.

And many of these external critics pointed to Jesus’ own origins in order to buttress their case.  Here was this total unknown, from a backwoods corner of an unimportant frontier province, born into an undistinguished family who were totally unimportant in the scheme of things.  Was this the person Christians claimed was the Redeemer of creation? The suggestion was absurd, offensive; Christians were clearly deluded fools or criminal upstarts.

It’s one of the ironies of this situation that, in many respects, Mark’s Gospel appears to confirm this impression.  Over the course of this new liturgical year, Mark will reveal to us a Jesus who seems less than impressive – and certainly not a Messiah.  This is a Jesus who struggles to make his own disciples understand his message; a Jesus who is rejected by the people of his home town; a Jesus who can cure people, but who cannot make them obey his command to keep silent; a Jesus who speaks truth, and yet is condemned as a heretic; a Jesus who, dying on the Cross, cries out in his agony: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”. Moreover, Mark’s Gospel does not end on a note of triumph but of terror: the women, seeing the empty tomb and hearing the joyous message of Jesus’ resurrection, run away in mindless panic and tell no-one what they have seen because of their fear.

In other words, this is a Jesus who is often described as the most “human” Jesus of the Gospels.  A Jesus who seems far less the Son of God than a mildly incompetent pretender.  And it is because of this that Mark’s Gospel has been overlooked for much of Christian history, indeed, often dismissed as an inferior version of Matthew’s Gospel.  It’s why not one but two endings were tacked on to the end of Mark, to make it conclude on a more positive note.  It’s almost as though Christians feared that Mark’s Gospel confirmed, rather than refuted, the claims made by their critics.

And yet this is a fear that ignores the opening words of Mark: The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  So Mark states right from the outset who Jesus is; he leaves us in no doubt about Jesus’ identity as the Messiah.  So why does his Gospel portray Jesus in such apparently unflattering terms?

I think the answer to that question resides in today’s reading, in the quote from Isaiah that follows on from that decisive opening sentence.  Jesus is the voice from the wilderness, the One from the rural obscurity of Galilee, calling to the world to turn to God, to respond to God’s invitation to relationship.  For it is the very unpromising, apparently absurd nature of Jesus’ identification as the Messiah that articulates the “Good News” which Mark’s Gospel proclaims: it is not our status, or place in the scheme of things, that determines whether or not God comes to us.  Rather, God comes to us as we are, in the depths of our humanity; and God comes to us in the most unlikely of ways, in the most unlikely of forms.

And in that respect, at least, John the Baptist is a kind of symbol at the beginning of Mark’s Gospel of who Jesus will be by the end of the Gospel: the outsider, the unlikely and unprepossessing figure who points to God’s love for broken humanity.  Because – let’s face it – if someone wearing a camel hair suit, eating honey and locusts, and urging you to repent sat on the seat next to you on a train, you’d get up and leave.  You’d think: Nutter – and would rapidly make yourself scarce.   Yet it’s this very figure of absurdity and rejection who is God’s choice as the harbinger of Christ; the one who calls the people to a once-and-for-all-time repentance and forgiveness of sins.

And it is to this wilderness figure that Jesus will come to be baptised, emerging from provincial obscurity to embody God’s desire for relationship with humanity.  And it is as a figure of rejection and ridicule that Jesus will die on the Cross, his cry of grief embodying every human cry of anguish uttered down the ages.  For it is in ridicule and rejection that God will demonstrate the lengths to which God is prepared to go in order to express love for humankind, in order to stand in solidarity with human suffering and brokenness.

In other words, the quote from Isaiah at the beginning of Mark’s Gospel is not just about John the Baptist; it’s an identification of Jesus, the voice who comes from the wilderness.  And, in some respects, it’s a premonition about the fate which many a wilderness voice suffers when its message becomes too inconvenient: a fate which John the Baptist, and Jesus, and many early Christians were to share.

A fate which, in my own small way, I inflicted upon that anaemic young man with the clipboard. He has loomed large in my consciousness in a way I would never have expected; but in my memory, he remains an implausible figure – and if I saw him today, I doubt I would recognise him.  But that, today’s reading from Mark tells us, is exactly the point: it is the figures of ridicule and rejection who are frequently the most important.  Last week, Mark’s Gospel warned us to remain alert, on watch for the unexpected; and this week, we are told why.

We must remain alert – less we miss that voice we would otherwise think it safe to ignore.

We may not be aware of the fact, but there is a similar concept in the pages of the Old Testament.  In many of the Psalms, the word selah is to be found.  And while scholars don’t agree on its exact meaning, the consensus appears to be that the word selah denotes a period of reflection, a pause in which we consider what we have read in order to properly digest its meaning.  Selah marks out an interruption in the text, a space in which we are given the opportunity to meditate on our own lives in the context of God’s Word to us in Scripture.

And we are given this opportunity so that Scripture may inspire and motivate us toward critical thinking, toward a self-examination of life in light of the still, small voice of God.  Selah, in effect, asks us to examine the orientation of our lives: do we seek after the deep realities of being, or do we paddle around in the shallows of superficial existence? Do we look beyond the familiar and the obvious, or are we content with appearances and first impressions? Are we alert to the movement of God in the world, or are we distracted by the parade of events and personalities?

In today’s reading from Mark’s Gospel, we have a text which, taken at first glance, is rather unprepossessing – perhaps even a little intimidating.  But viewed from the standpoint of critical engagement, it is a text that comes to life with new meanings and hidden depths; it is a text which enables us to see ourselves anew, that we might move beyond the familiar and the comfortable into the realms of the different and the transformative.

But in order to see how this might be so, we must begin, as always, with context.  Today’s reading begins with a quote from the prophet Isaiah, which immediately places everything that follows within the prophetic tradition.  In other words, the insertion of this quote from Isaiah into the text is a cue that what follows in today’s reading is not a matter of earthly concerns or of human agendas; what this passage relates is God’s agenda, what God plans to bring to pass in and through the life of the world.

And we gain an insight into this if we consider the prophet Isaiah himself.  Or, rather, I should say, themselves.  Because most scholars agree that there was not a single prophet Isaiah, but at least three, prophesying and proclaiming at different stages of Israelite history.  There was Isaiah the Harbinger, who warned Israel of the consequences of abandoning their covenant with God; there was Isaiah the Exile, who lamented the suffering of the captive people, and who looked forward to Israel’s restoration; and there was Isaiah the Returnee, who rejoiced in Israel’s release from captivity, and who anticipated God’s ultimately redemptive judgement, not just on the People, but on the whole world.  So in the figure of the three Isaiahs, we see the movement of the prophetic journey: from warning, through suffering, and into restoration.  In other words, a movement which symbolises the re-orientation of life away from the shallows and into the depths.

The point of all this context is that the prophetic journey we witness in Isaiah is the same prophetic journey that is undertaken in today’s reading.  Mark places this passage in the context of the prophet Isaiah, not merely to show how erudite or learned he is, but to illustrate who Jesus is, and the movement toward which his life and teachings point.  Mark is saying that Jesus is the end, the goal toward which God’s purpose is focused; and he does this by having Jesus himself indicate how this end will be accomplished: through the sinfulness of humanity, into suffering, and thence into the redemption beyond.

The first two parts of this movement – sinfulness and suffering – have already been alluded to in the passage immediately preceding today’s reading.  In that passage, Jesus speaks about the Temple being destroyed, about nations going to war with one another, and about the faithful being persecuted for Jesus’ sake.  All this suffering is the result of human sinfulness, of the pride and arrogance that takes delight in human achievement, or which presumes to set itself up as a false messiah.  And from these conceits spring the evils of conflict and persecution, graphically described by Mark in the apocalyptic language that was an integral part of the literary heritage of the time.

The purpose of this language was not to describe in a literal sense what would happen; rather, it was to give its audience an insight into the depth of what was to come, into the stark reality of the consequences of human sin.  Mark understood that to be a prophet was not to predict the future; it was to speak God’s truth to the world, to help people grasp the urgency of the call to redemption.  It was a purpose for which the imaginative poetry of apocalyptic language was especially suited.

And it was a language Mark’s audience would have deeply appreciated – not because it contained allegedly hidden codes or meanings, nor because it contained some esoteric knowledge available only to the elect.  Rather, the Christians to whom Mark was writing would have grasped the relevance of his apocalyptic language precisely because it spoke directly into the reality of their lives.

And that was a reality of hardship, of suffering and uncertainty.  This was a community that had been driven from the synagogues, that had been condemned as heretics and schismatics by the religious authorities; this was a community that had been traumatised by the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple after the failed Jewish revolt of AD66-70; this was a community that had lived through the first systematic persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor, Nero.  So Mark’s audience was a community of outcasts and undesirables, of people who must have been wondering what the future held.  They knew that Jesus had died and risen from the dead; but they didn’t know when Jesus was coming again, when the present time of uncertainty would be ended by the glory of the second advent.

And the temptation must have been very great to try and end the uncertainty by working out for themselves when the great moment of Christ’s return would take place.  Today’s passage from Mark begins with more apocalyptic language describing the conditions heralding Christ’s return; but then it contains a warning: no-one knows the day or the hour.  To modern audiences, this appears to be a contradiction: on the one hand, signs and portents; and, on the other hand, a clear warning – do not presume to know.  What is happening here?

It seems to me that what is happening here is a call to mindfulness, to an examined, reflective faith that takes nothing for granted, and which resists the temptations of complacency and conceit.  And from that mindfulness, we are promised something extraordinary, something perhaps unexpected – not certainty, not the peace of familiarity or the comfort of easy answers.  Rather, we are promised something altogether more profound, more powerful: we are offered hope.

But how does this examined faith lead to hope? Quite simply because a faith which reflects, which critically examines itself and pays attention to the world, is a faith which is able to see God’s prophetic movement in the world.  Not in the sense of being able to “read the signs” or “predict the future”, but in the sense of being able to articulate the realities of human existence; and, in giving voice to those realities, to examine them in light of the Gospel message of unconditional love.  A faith which pays attention to the world is a faith that can speak prophetically to the world; it is a faith which can anticipate and make manifest in the world – despite all the brokenness of the world – that restored and redeemed humanity Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven.

Hope is the product of an alertness that does not minimise or gloss over the reality of human brokenness, or the suffering to which it gives rise.  But it also sees through and beyond that brokenness, to the reality of God which underlies the whole of creation, and which moves through creation notwithstanding human conceits and endeavours.  The prophetic movement embodied by the lives of the three Isaiahs is present in today’s reading from Mark: the sin and suffering of humanity are and will be overcome by God’s redemptive grace.  Our task as disciples is not to second-guess God and predict when this will happen; rather, it is to live out this hope in our own lives, and to be mindful of its operation in the world.

The call to watchfulness in today’s reading from Mark is a call to a life of discipleship, to a mindfulness of the reality of God in the world.  It is a call to pay attention to the world in order to speak the hope of God to the world’s brokenness; not a hope of “pie in the sky” or some kind of post-earthly compensation for life’s travails, but a hope that gives meaningful expression to God’s redemptive solidarity with suffering humanity.  A watchfulness that calls on us to view the world with the prophet’s eye; an eye that sees beyond the immediate and the obvious toward the deep truths of being.

And all of that requires a change of perspective.  It requires a life-long commitment to moments of selah, to stopping and thinking and reflecting on the orientation of our lives.  It requires a preparedness to move beyond the shallows of the safe and familiar into the deeps of God’s surprising – and often unsuspected – grace.  It requires a willingness to not merely observe, but to embrace, God’s prophetic, transformative movement.

Socrates encouraged the people of his time to think in new ways, to live an examined life that went beyond the trite answers of unthinking convention, and which saw in the difficulty of change and upheaval the possibility of hope and renewal.  Christ likewise challenged the people of his time – and challenges us today – to see the life of faith in new ways, ways that enable us to live lives that are mindful and awake and alert, which, through selah moments of critical self-reflection, are lives of hope; lives that make real in every moment of now the promise of restoration embodied in Christ.

At the beginning of Advent, at the start of the new liturgical year, we are challenged by this passage about the end times to commit ourselves once more to a renewed, examined faith; a faith that enables new beginnings, and new ways of being.