Epiphany 2C Praying with Mary at Cana

 

Three years ago I was away from the Cathedral for much of this Epiphany season, immersing myself in that fifth gospel that is a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I found myself renewing my baptismal vows in the Jordan on the very day that the Church recalled the Baptism of Christ, and just a couple of days later I stood beside one of the absolutely ENORMOUS water jars that are strategically placed around the possible site of today’s gospel story. Each one has the capacity of a wheelie bin -

We might think a bit more about those jars later, but in the meantime Id like you to join me in one of the countless shops selling olive wood statues, icons, rosaries...Do you want help in reflecting on Jesus and his mother? There’s a practically endless array of holy art designed to help you to so.

The Christmas-card images of a child snuggled safely in loving arms

The scenes of the crucifixion where that same mother, desperate and desolate, stands at the foot of the cross…

You’d imagine, looking at them, that Mary and Jesus were always bound together, that they remained as intimately connected throughout his earthly life as they were when she carried him in her womb.

And certainly, when I pray the rosary, when I consciously invite Mary to pray with me, inviting her intercession, that’s because she seems to have that intense connection that surely means she can speak directly into his ear…

But if we actually look at the gospels, we meet a rather different picture in the years between Bethlehem and Calvary.

Luke, whose text suggests that someone, somewhere had actually interviewed Mary, gives us not only the infancy narratives, all those extraordinary events which offered so much for her to ponder in her heart, but also that heart-stopping day when Jesus lingered in Jerusalem to “be about his Father’s business”…

Any parent who has mislaid a child will know how terrifying that experience can be.

And then, at the moment of reunion, instead of flinging himself into his parents’ arms, Jesus seems to push them away.

How would his words have sounded to Joseph? To me they seem full of teenage unkindess

Then, there’s that awful day when Mary and her other children turn up, concerned that Jesus seems intent on starving himself, and are rebuffed

“Who ARE my mother and brothers...”

Honestly, how COULD he?

Whatever the larger point, however pressing the claims of the kingdom, here is the woman who brought his divinely human body into the world, yet he turns away from all that family affection, relentlessly pursuing his vocation…

It must have felt like a slap to the face.

I’ve always imagined that Mary went home in tears…

It’s really not easy to mother the Son of God, and to hold on to the promise of heaven breaking in, if your child pushes you away and deliberately excludes you from his emerging ministry.

But in today’s gospel it sounds, at first, as if Jesus is actively trying to postpone that ministry

Listen…

Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come...

WOMAN - that’s hardly brimming over with filial affection. In fact, Mary is never named in John’s gospel…she is only, ever “the mother of Jesus”, her own identity utterly subsumed in her role.

Later, of course, when his hour HAS come he will speak to her as “Woman” again, but in kinder vein

“Woman, behold your son. Son, here is your mother”

John bookends Jesus’s ministry with these moments – spotlights mother and son not in the soft focus of a nativity scene but with the full glare of God’s glory to be revealed in and through him.

My hour is not yet come

I am not yet heading towards the cross

Just leave me be…I’m enjoying the party...

Yet, there is something too important going on for Mary to simply give up and sit back down among the women…

A wedding should be replete with joy, flowing over to include the whole community...yet shame and ignominy are about to descend upon the hapless couple and their families.

No wine.

Social disaster.

How did Mary find out?

Was it a family affair? A niece or nephew trembling on the edge of disgrace?

Was she someone who always paid attention to those in the background, the servants looking at one another with incredulous anxiety?

We can’t know – but for me it matters tremendously that she was there, at that wedding, that she noticed, that she alerted her son to the pressing need

“They have no wine”

Oh my goodness! How often as we read the room, read the world, might those words be ours.

WE are surrounded by so much screaming need

“They have no money.”

“She has no cure.”

“He has no justice”

They have no home

I have no strength.”

They have nothing.

I Have nothing

No way to help…

My faith seems simply a matter of empty words.

God is on a long lunch break.

They have no wine

And all I can do is tell God this truth that God already knows...and wait in hope...as Mary waited that day.

The hope might have felt forlorn, as Jesus pushed her away – and yet she is confident that she has told the right person, that despite his unpromising words, Jesus will act.Though John’s gospel gives us none of the back-story, the angelic annunciation, the babe in the manger, the prophetic words and portentous stars, nonetheless Mary KNOWS HER SON...and knows he can help.

She brings her distress for others to him then, as she does, as we all do, whenever we pray, confident that he can, that he WILL make a difference.

Do whatever he tells you

Even if it makes no sense

Even if it’s hard (filling a thirty gallon jar is no mean undertaking)

Even if you’re pretty sure you’ll end up looking utterly stupid.

Do whatever he tells you

Interestingly, these are the last words Mary speaks in John’s gospel…

Her intervention has been a catalyst.

She has propelled her son into action…

She has no idea how he might act to transform the situation, but believes that he will do so

And this is because she has been attentive…

Attentive to the needy world and attentive to her extraordinary, baffling, beloved son

Jesus.

In the face of his apparent refusal, she persists in faith, speaking to the servants on t he strength of her long-standing trust in Jesus’s loving, generous character. and invites the servants to practice that obedience which enables faith to become action. Her quiet conviction persuades them to follow her advice

They DO what he says

After all, they’re up against it

They need a miracle and as God says to Bruce, in the film Bruce Almighty

“If you want to make a miracle, BE ONE”

Their obedience, of course, unleashes God’s abundance

As our liturgy will remind us, in the Eucharistic preface for this season

In the water made wine the new creation was revealed at the wedding feast.Poverty was turned to riches, sorrow into joy.

The glory of God is revealed in the wine outpoured and the party continues unabated...and will continue into eternity.

But for now, too often it feels as if all that we have is water. We may TALK about God’s abundance, but we are surrounded by scarcity, loss and need...We face the reality of loss and grief, of financial trouble, political corruption, institutional injustice...We struggle to believe that there WILL be enough to go round, that God’s love and God’s grace will encompass all…

So, what can we do?

Me, I think I’ll try to pray with Mary, and model my prayer on hers.

I’ll be honest to God about what I see – the pain of a dear friend close to death, the heartbreak of exclusion, even from God’s Church, the terror that drives refugees to risk their lives in tiny boats on perilous seas – and I will keep on naming those needs in the face of my own helplessness and I’ll try not to be deflected.

And, if it seems that I have nothing to offer that might change the situation, I’ll ask to have the courage to offer it anyway Perhaps if I dare to pour out the pathetically inadequate resources I seem to have available, God’s grace will intervene so that I , even I, can be enough to answer my own prayers.

Our Collect puts is beautifully...as it outlines the possibility that we too can be part of the miracle,

Pray it with me once again

Almighty God,

in Christ you make all things new:

transform the poverty of our nature by the riches of your grace,

and in the renewal of our lives make known your heavenly glory

Lenses on Vocation - on the 70th anniversary of the Accession of Elizabeth II,

 What an extraordinary day…

Elizabeth 2^nd has been our Queen for 70 years – so long that it’s almost impossible to imagine anyone else in her place – yet today is the one on which we remember that moment of transition, when even as she received the news of her beloved father’s death, she was at the same moment handed all the weight of the crown.

No opportunity to consider whether she wanted the job

No chance to say “Thank you, but I’m not sure I’m quite what you need”

On that day, the young princess responded the call of her country because she heard God’s voice too

Whom shall I send and who will go for me

And she responded wholeheartedly, even amid her grief

“Here I am, send me”

5 years before, on her 21^st birthday, the Princess had proclaimed

I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.

The Empire may have gone, but that promise of devoted service has been lived out every single day since then and we know, though she would never shout about it, that our Queen has depended on God at every twist and turn of the way.

Vocation lived out in the service of others.

Whatever your views on the monarchy, that’s inspiring I think…

But what does it say to us?

Thankfully, I don’t imagine that anybody is ever going to call you, or me, to take up a weight like that. So can we just sit tight and ignore all this grandiose talk about vocation?

When God asks “Whom shall I send?” surely God has something in mind altogether more exalted or demanding than we could possibly aspire to…

After all, the whole of our reading emphasises the huge contrast between the glory of God seated on God’s throne– the Christ on our tapestry in the Cathedral, if you like – and the tiny, insignificant human figure of the prophet – as diminutive as the human figure between Christ’s feet.

When God asks “Who will go for me?” it can be very tempting to look at those around us, intent on spotting someone more obviously qualified, someone with spectacular gifts, - honestly, someone ELSE. Isaiah feels pretty inadequate

“Woe is me...”

I’m not up to the job, whatever that job might be…

It’s just not going to work

You need someone special, Lord…

But that’s never been the way God works. Our NT reading confirms this..

As Jesus gathers his team around him, that group who would listen and learn and in the fulness of time and the power of the Spirit ultimately set out to change the world, he doesn’t hold out for powerful orators or learned rabbis. He calls those who are available, in all their run of the mill ordinariness.

Fishermen were ten a penny on the shores of Galilee – and THEY were those whom Christ called.

Over the last few days the Cathedral has been hosting performances of the “Symphony of Us” a new work for orchestra and six speakers (the “people” section, as they were dubbed)...Each of them would class themselves as really ordinary – one, indeed, made much of her self image as “utterly boring”- but each of them has responded to a call to live as the best version of themselves. So we met Nor, who cultivates her garden and brings people together to welcome the stranger; Duncan, a gay teacher who uses his free time to offer young people the support he himself needed growing up; Sam, a bereavement midwife, who offers love and care to families dealing with the deep grief of baby loss;...and I could go on. Each ordinary, extraordinary person is changing the world by singing the unique song that God has put in their hearts and on their lips.

One of my favourite vocation stories turns up in several different contexts in slightly different forms. It concerns Rabbi Zusya, a Chasidic master who lived in the 1700s who clearly had a clear understanding of the heart of vocation.“When I get to the heavenly court,” he said “God will not ask me, Why weren’t you Moses?, Why weren’t you Elijah?” Rather he will ask me, “Why were you not Zusya?”

Responding to that call to be fully ourselves for God, and to allow God to do with us whatever God might choose, if pretty much the work of a lifetime...but it’s never too late to begin.

It may not be a call to do anything that seems extraordinary, but to do the ordinary with as much love as you can muster.

So, today, give thanks that God has made you YOU

Give thanks for the tangle of gifts and struggles, of lived experience, joy and pain that has shaped you

And listen...listen with open mind and heart, asking for the grace that you need to respond “Here I am, send me” when God calls.

Advent 4 C 19th December 2021 at Coventry Cathedral

 

Advent

Once again

the chance to wait with a purpose

Makes a change

Just four Sundays ago, as the snow swirled around outside, this haiku from the Iona community was one of the readings at Light in our Darkness...and, at that point waiting and hoping seemed to go very neatly hand in hand. 

Four weeks on, the climate has changed again and though it’s no longer as cold outside, there is a definite chill in the air whenever we engage with the news, and it’s tempting to wonder exactly what we are waiting for, whether the end of this tumultuous corona-tide season will ever come.

But that’s the problem with time while you’re travelling through it.

You never know the end of the story while you are part of it – and that is as true for us as it was for Mary in those days and weeks after the visit of the angel, when, I imagine, her plans for a nice traditional wedding before settling down with her betrothed to live happily ever after were thrown up in the air and written off just. Like. That…

Does that scenario feel distinctly familiar? Plans in tatters, disappointment rife, the Christmas we were waiting for postponed once again? 

I know. It’s rubbish isn’t it.

But I’m trying to hold on to the belief that we ARE waiting with a purpose, and that there are things to learn, maybe to do, even in the sadness, the anxiety and exhaustion of the here and now. That isn’t to suggest, even for a second, that the grief and loss of the past two years has been in any way engineered by God to teach us a lesson. My least favourite piece of pseudo-comfort is that “Everything happens for a reason” closely followed by “God never sends more than you can handle”.

I just don’t think that is true.

If you’re one of the many who feel that they absolutely CANT handle much more of this, - well, solidarity, my friend.

And if for the moment you’re barely on speaking terms with God, I think God’s fine with that as well.

We are human, after all, and we’re not programmed to live through times like these

And for the record, I’m pretty certain that this is not a plague sent to punish us, some proper Old Testament smiting

My vision of God in all this is much more of God working constantly with and through exhausted NHS staff, God weeping and mourning with the bereaved, God rocking each one of us to sleep, whispering softly “I know you’re sad. I know this is hard. I’m here. I’m here”

So if you’re hoping for some good news to carry you through these coming days, where should we start? 

And what has any of this to do with our gospel reading, the family visit of one cousin to another that probably won’t be happening much this year?

When she left Nazareth for the hill country, to spend time with Eliabeth, I’m sure Mary was seeking comfort and reassurance, and a place to hide out while she began to come to terms with her situation. 

If so, Elizabeth's words of greeting must have had a tremendous impact...the first confirmation that Gabriel's message might bear fruit in the life of this girl from small town Galilee. 

“Blessed are you...”

 

Blessed? REALLY? A teenager dealing with an unplanned pregnancy…maybe even doubting her own sanity as she reflects on her encounter with Gabriel in the cold light of day.

How can she believe his insistence that this baby she is carrying is God’s gift to the world?

And yet – and yet amid all this chaos of emotions and hormones, of amazement and alarm, something wonderful is happening.

Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit – and finds herself, against the odds, an unexpected messenger of good news

 

Her greeting validates Mary’s experience, confirming that the wild imaginings of Gabriel’s visit are, after all, a living reality. There are TWO babies growing here…and as they meet, the Spirit gives to each mother a vision of what their birth will mean for them and for the world. 

 

Mary needs Elizabeth's greeting before she can fully claim and celebrate what is already happening within her and for her. She is already the God-bearer, carrying that precious spark of life whose coming changes everything for all time and beyond.

She has earned an unchallenged place in Salvation history, her obedience to God's call enabling her to co-operate with God in a way that no-one else has ever done...but she is still in some ways an ordinary girl, seeking reassurance from one older and wiser, a woman to whom she can trust this greatest secret. 

Even the Mother of God needs the comfort and support of fellow pilgrims. 

Like us, she needs to know that she’s not alone as she copes with matters of life and death...and inspired by the reassurance she receives, she flowers into that hymn of praise that we call the Magnificat.

“My soul magnifies the Lord” she proclaims

And my spirit rejoices”

 

But once again, depending on your perspective, it’s not joy all round. 

This vision of God’s Kingdom is great for those on the edges, those who feel small and insignificant, who wonder if their life amounts to anything much. It’s good for those clinging on to faith by their finger-tips .amazing for the have-nots, whatever they lack, but for the powerful, secure in their place in the world, Mary’s song of praise might well strike a chill. We need, you and I, to reflect on what it might mean for us...to ask ourselves my favourite question “Where are you in the story?”

 

I’d like to place myself firmly on the side of the revolution – but here I am in a Cathedral pulpit, purporting to be a Reverend Canon if you please. Have I got, have we, got lost along the way? It’s a question worth considering...

 

The American writer Diana Butler Bass says “The only Christmas action movie I want to see is 

about two pregnant women plotting the overthrow of empire”...which sounds wonderfully subversive and altogether delightful, in the same way that this reworking of the rather irritating, mansplaining song “Mary did you know”  brings sparkle to the eye and a spring to the step.

“Mary, did you know that your Magnificat makes you sound like a raving Marxist

Mary, did you know that powerful men consider your words alarmist

Mary, did you know that governments will censor the song that you sang….”

 

Oh, I DO want to have the courage to be part of the revolution – and in this season of waiting with a purpose, I can’t deny that a new world order would be very welcome, and the sooner the better, though I recognise that it will involve a lot of letting go, for me and for many another.

 

At a season when many long for the mighty to be cast down from their thrones, 

when we are weary of waiting for the hungry to be filled with good things, and the rich sent away empty, perhaps like me you feel like shouting at God 

“Get ON with it. DO something. We can’t manage it alone”

And that’s true.

As clergy families often say to beleaguered priests in those seasons where they seem to need to be everywhere, fix everything and are dangerously close to believing themselves indispensable

“There IS a Redeemer – and it’s not you”…

 

So yes, we CANT manage it alone. 

And we don’t have to, however responsible we may feel for a messed up society and a messed up church.

The fruit of Mary’s womb, Jesus, has done everything necessary – and the world of Magnificat WILL come to pass….That’s something we CAN be sure of, even if we’re not sure with whom we’ll celebrate his birthday next week

 

So for us, here and now, comes the call to practice active waiting.

We may not, in our time, see the fulfilment of all that we long for, of that world reformed on gospel lines – but we can celebrate its breaking in, even as we wait and we can be part of the work  of revealing it to others

 

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray with us that your Son will give us strength to sing Magnificat with our whole beings,  even here, even now, that we may live as citizens of  his Kingdom in the face of powers and principalities  as we wait with a purpose for the full revelation of the world made new.

 

Job 38 for Trinity 20 at Coventry Cathedral

 

Let me take you on a short journey in time.

It’s millennium year and I’m curved around my cello, part of an orchestra drawn together for a community production of Noye’s Fludde, with my children all having solo roles. It has been a wonderful week but we’ve reached the last night, and the final chorus

We sang it as our opening hymn

The spacious firmament on high, with all the blue ethereal sky and spangled heavens, a shining frame, their great Original proclaim

The words present that popular idea of the music of the spheres as if the whole galaxy is an orchestra, and I exchange glances and smiles with our conductor as I reflect “as above, so below”

If you’ve spent much of your time researching 17^th century literature, that kind of thing is bound to happen...but for that moment as the music swells around me, it almost seems true. Everything makes sense. Divine order holds the universe in being. I have my place in the orchestra of creation, just as I do in the Britten performance. It all makes sense.

Except, of course, that life rarely presents itself in harmonious order and while we all indeed have our place – our vocation – a song that only we can sing, it’s often very hard to see the overarching patterns around us.

It has been a problem since the dawn of time.

Enter Job, who has had a long long wait for God to answer his appeal to make sense of things.

The famously upright man who had rejoiced in all the gifts that he’d seen as a reward for his virtuous life has found himself, overnight, blighted by the full weight of what seemed to be divine disfavour. (It’s small consolation for us, as the readers, to know that the whole thing is part of a divine experiment, dreamed up by Satan to determine whether faith in God can survive random misfortune...an experiment that God consents to. What, we may ask in outrage, is THAT all about?)

Job maintains a dogged stoicism – The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord – until the end of chapter 2 – but things keep on happening and it is altogether too much to bear so he begins to answer back.

He looks around him and sees injustice and suffering wherever he looks.

He is angry with God – no, furious!

Having listened to the apologetics offered by his three friends, the men known as “Job’s Comforters”, he is anything but comforted.

Let that be a lesson to any of us who find ourselves sitting beside those who are suffering.

There is no point in offering pious platitudes, in a desperate effort to make the unbearable somehow bearable. We can NOT claim that everything happens for a reason – or that God never gives anyone more than they are able to bear. The facts quite simply do not bear that out.

Last Sunday as we gathered for our annual Baby Loss service, what mattered was not to try and find tidy answers but to be real about the pain and sadness each family was carrying.

They didn’t need sticking plasters – which would never cover the gaping wounds of their loss.

Rather, they needed an assurance that they do not travel alone.

That’s probably true for everyone whom we encounter, who are staggering under a burden of grief.

We CANT fix it and we are unlikely to make things better by resorting to easy words.

Pain is pain and while it can be hard to watch with those who suffer, that’s

pretty much the best we can hope to offer. The ministry of human presence a reminder that God never leaves us alone in the dark, whether we feel God or not.

Back to Job. His friends haven’t helped at all, and the poor man is convinced that everything he had believed about God’s righteousness was based on error, that God is simply capricious …It’s centuries before Shakespeare has King Lear proclaim

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport – but that’s very much where Job is heading. He begs for answers, rails against God, laments that there is NO order, that nothing makes sense any more and God – well, God is silent

That’s possibly a situation that feels quite familiar to you…especially if you are bruised and battered by the loss and loneliness that have besieged many during covid-tide. We have, individually and collectively, faced so much that feels unfair, as we have grieved for loved ones sick and dying alone, have wondered what price humanity in a society that, in establishing priorities in a uniquely challenging landscape, seems to have placed economic survival above human suffering.

Much theology is already emerging from the experience of the pandemic, and I’m sure there will be more….because we so badly need to find meaning for our pain. Just like Job.

Despite what some parts of the Christian world might assert, there’s no guarantee that loving God and seeking to serve him will result in a charmed life and often in the immediacy of pain and loss it can be hard to feel the reality of God’s love. This is the absolute opposite of what the disciples hope for when they ask Jesus if they can be his right hand men. They imagine that closeness to their Lord will lead them to vicarious glory – while God has something very different in mind, in the upside down economy of the Kingdom where those aspiring to greatness must become servants and God’s empty Godself of all power except the power of love.

We aren’t wired for that

We find it hard.

We prefer a different world view, in which virtue is rewarded and God’s plan is clear for all to see, written across creation.

And, as God answers Job, it seems that this is what God expects us to do.

To look up, look around, and SEE.

The Jesuit writer Gerard Hughes writes early in his book “God, where are you”

We can only meet God as the God who is immanent. It is through our encounter with God, immanent in all things, that we catch a glimpse of God who is transcendant”

In other words, creation is a series of sign-posts toward the God who is both present in and far beyond everything that God has made.

The God who speaks to Job from the whirlwind

I love that.

While Elijah in his cave discovered that God was NOT in the whirlwind but in the still small voice of calm, Job is buffeted about by his own experience of grief and loss. His life, his emotions, are one big whirlwind – but God’s voice is louder still…

And, in the end, he advocates for Job...and against those friends who had sought to diminish the enormity of the situation by tidy, religious answers. Instead, taking me back to the music of Noye’s Fludde, God offers what amounts to a poem reflecting the unanswerable beauty of God’s creation.

Life, God suggests, is not a puzzle to be solved but a mystery to be recognised and entered into.

This is a mystery. It is not explained or defended; God merely asserts it. The world, full of beauty and creativity and danger, was not made merely for human consumption.

The story is bigger than us, and none of us are the main characters (see Job 38:12-39:30). God does not so much answer Job’s questions as re-frame them and offer Job a new way to see the world in which his grief and his experiences are not the end or the entirety of the story.

Of course, the divine speeches do not answer Job’s questions—nor ours, I imagine. But they give us a glimpse of the deepest and richest of all of God’s storehouses of knowledge. Lest we imagine that the divine speeches exist to stop us from asking any more questions, God seems intent on engaging Job in an actual dialogue, and draws him back to the conversation again and again.

There’s absolutely NO problem from God’s perspective our ranting at him...in sharing our confusion, our pain, our grief.

Being real, as Job was real, is a keystone of our relationships with one another and with God, so please, I beg you, keep talking...to God and to each other about order, justice, and the structure of creation itself. And keep on looking around you.

Th ere’s so much to marvel at, so many traces of God’s beauty in the beauty around us, even in the rhythms of loss and decay and death. All things in their season.

To end, here’s Gerard Hughes again

Now I know that you are always greater than anything I can think or imagine...I am glad that I cannot locate you, define you, describe you.

Now I can thank you for the mystery of my being

You are the God of every situation. God in our darkness drawing us to light. God who is for us, even when we are against ourselves…

The Camel and the Needle - Address for Welcome to Sunday 10th October 2021

Have you ever been so anxious to hear the answer to a question that you’ve actually run to discover it?
Maybe when you were a child…when you wanted to know if it was OK to go to a friend’s house for tea, or whether the post had arrived on your birthday?
Maybe later, anxious for news of exam results, or an absent loved one expected home?
But now…
Now, I wonder what question might so excite you that you RAN to get the answer…Is there anything that you would want to know so badly that you would fling yourself at the feet of the one who might just be able to tell you?

Actually, if I had just one question to ask God, then the one that the rich young ruler poses might well qualify
“What must I do to inherit eternal life?”
That surely is THE question…the one to set us tossing and turning at night…the one to force us from our beds….the one that really REALLY must be answered for each one of us.
Isn’t that what we’re for? To work out our eternal destiny?
What must we do?
His question, - our question.

But if that is the question, then I have bad news for all of us.
Though there is an answer…we probably won’t like it.

It’s one of those times when the gospel seems like anything BUT good news.
Listen to this.
Go, sell what you have and give the money to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven…
Oh. My. Life!
Over the years I’ve tried so hard to make a comfortable home wherever I’ve landed…a home defined by the presence of people and things that matter to me.
Keepsakes from friends and family.
Pictures and objects I’ve chosen with care
Books. Oh so very many books.
Go sell what you have
I wouldn’t know how to begin.
In fact, it might just be that I’m possessed by my possessions, for it certainly seems unthinkable that I should throw all my treasures aside…
Even for the sake of treasure in heaven.

That’s no surprise to Jesus.
Listen to his comment to the disciples
It's harder for a rich person to enter God's kingdom than it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.
That doesn’t sound promising.
Of course, you may have heard that there was a gate in ancient Jerusalem called "The Eye of the Needle," which was so narrow that a camel couldn't pass through it unless all its baggage was removed, at which point it could just get through painfully, laboriously on its knees.
We could deal with that scenario.
We might not like it, but it could be managed.
It would suggest that we, the wealthy, could enter God’s kingdom, if we weren’t too attached to our possessions….
But, oh dear, sadly research confirms that there was NO SUCH GATE.
Maybe that’s not surprising.
If Jesus had been talking about a well known local landmark, his hearers wouldn't have been reduced to incredulous questions
"Then who can be saved?!";
But that’s not the way of it.
There is no "Eye of the Needle" gate that camels can crawl through.
Jesus means what he says.
It’s that hard to enter the kingdom…

Nor can we claim immunity on the grounds that we’re not actually wealthy at all.
It may not feel much like it, but if you’re in any doubt then when you next have access to a computer, try entering your income on the website “Global Rich List” and see where you end up. Your income is measured against those of the whole of the world’s population…and the results are shocking. Even on a stipend that never seems to go quite far enough, I find myself in the top 3.6% in the world.
That’s rich, then.


But maybe I could bear to give away all my things.
After all, I’d still have my children, wouldn’t I?
Surely we can assume that family values are Christian values, Christ’s values
That must be a given.
But no
Jesus positively encourages his disciples to abandon their families, their responsibilities, all those precious human ties.

They (and we) are to strip ourselves of everything by which we identify ourselves…Possessions, relationships…the lot.
And stripped of everything, we are then to follow
Deeply disquieting stuff.
I don’t know how it’s left you feeling, but I don’t think I can do it.
Truly, I long to follow – I yearn to find my way into the kingdom of God…but I don’t think I’m brave enough to leave so much behind.

But this is the gospel!

It’s supposed to be good news!

So where do we find that, today?
We find it, first, as Jesus considers the young man
“Jesus, looking at him, loved him”
He has tried so hard, hasn't he...so determined to DO everything he can to get things right. Jesus knows exactly what course the conversation will take…he understands just how fettered the young man really is…but he loves him.
He loves him, and he loves us – with all our good intentions, our deeply buried longings, our welter of doubts and fears.
He loves us so much that he cannot, and does not leave us imprisoned in those many much-loved cages we’ve fashioned for ourselves.
We cannot on our own break free – but if we recognise that we are trapped, - then we’ll find there’s good news here, right enough.

The rich man, secure in his wealth, was asking the wrong question:
What can I do to inherit eternal life?
He assumed that it must be down to him, a matter of action plans, and personal control…and so he was crushed when it seemed that the necessary action was beyond him.
But actually, that’s the point.
That there was nothing he or we could do.
To let go of all that we have, all that supports and impedes us, all that deludes us into thinking we can somehow earn our place in the Kingdom – that’s still too much for us.
We cannot save ourselves.

But I promised you good news, and it’s here in the astounding paradox of grace.
The answer we struggle with turns out to be the best news of all.
We CAN inherit the Kingdom, not through what we own, not through who we are, not even through what we can give up…
We can inherit the Kingdom when we recognise our own helplessness….when we accept that there is, truly, nothing we can do
For mortals it is impossible, but not for God. For God, all things are possible