The Assumption - Sunday 15th August Preacher by Canon Robert Gage
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The Assumption of the BVM – 2010

Canon Robert Gage

I am very grateful for the invitation to preach this morning. It’s good to be here. But being asked to preach today – the Feast of the Assumption – is a challenge. For me, at least, this particular celebration seems to emphasize things that make Christianity hard to believe.

First of all, what is the Assumption? It’s the belief that the Virgin Mary didn’t die in the normal way, but was ‘bodily assumed’ into heaven – like Elijah in the Old Testament. Elijah, you remember, ‘taken up in a whirlwind’ in front of his successor, Elisha. [1 Kings 2.11]

The idea of Mary’s Assumption was unknown to the early Church. It began to circulate (in widely different forms) around the end of the 4th century, and was first formulated theologically by Gregory of Tours at the end of the 6th. It spread very gradually. By the middle of the 18th century, Pope Benedict XIV still only thought it ‘probable’. It wasn’t defined as dogma until 1950, when Pope Pius XII formally declared that this was something the faithful had to believe. (He also consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary – whatever that means!)

The Eastern Church teaches something similar to the Assumption, but is more vague about it. They call it Mary’s ‘falling asleep’. The Church of England has (I think very sensibly) kept quiet on the subject – but the Common Worship calendar makes today, August 15th (kept by Roman Catholics as the Feast of the Assumption) the principal feast-day of the Blessed Virgin Mary – a typically nifty Anglican way of saying you can believe this if you want to, but nobody’s got to!

But let’s be positive. The Assumption does raise some rather useful issues: about the nature of Christian faith, about the process of believing, and about the teaching of the Church.

First, the nature of Christian faith. Like me, you’ve probably been taught all your life that Christianity is based on historical facts. Jesus was a real person, who said and did particular things. His life (like every life) has a specific historical context. To the eye of faith, that context includes not just how people had shaped Jesus’ world, but what God had done. Jesus is the culmination of two thousand years of Jewish history. He inaugurates a new era – based on things we believe happened. Above all, Christians claim that the Resurrection happened. If it didn’t – well, as St Paul says: ‘If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile.’ [1 Cor. 15.17]

But did these ‘facts of faith’ we’ve all been taught actually happen? In today’s western culture, that’s a perfectly natural question. It’s what we ask about any fact. Our minds are geared, not to suspicion, but to curiosity. We always want evidence. That’s how we trust what we think we know. And frankly, if we’re presented with a supposed ‘fact’ like the Assumption of Mary, which comes out of a cosmology now utterly foreign to us, and for which there can be no evidence, our minds balk. We’re not being impious. We’re just being intelligent!

But circumspection about the Assumption raises questions about other ‘facts of faith’. What about the Virgin Birth? What about Jesus’ miracles? What – above all – about the Resurrection?

A hundred years ago, there was an assumption amongst educated people that if you couldn’t see something, or measure it, or weigh it, or observe it in some way, it couldn’t be ‘real’. This world-view is called ‘materialism’. Physicists in particular were fairly sure that they understood reality pretty completely – and thought there wasn’t much more that could be said. They believed that Isaac Newton had said it all, and they had little time for the Bible.

Then came Einstein and Heisenberg, and a host of others. Newton no longer had the last word. Space is curved. Time is relative. Atoms aren’t solid at all, but composed of mysterious particles which cannot be observed, or measured, or weighed. They can only be inferred mathematically.
Around the same time, Freud and Jung started probing the unconscious – something 19th century physicists couldn’t have imagined. We’ve now had more than a century of depth psychology.

As a result of all these discoveries – these new modes of intellectual enquiry – the study of history changed. Biblical scholars stopped trying to prove (say) the Virgin Birth, in the way Victorian physicists tried to prove things, and started to ask, ‘What did the early Church mean by this doctrine?’ This has proved a much more fruitful line of enquiry.

Words – including the words of the Bible – always convey meanings beyond factual correspondences. They express feelings. They hint at things we know to exist, but which can never be observed scientifically – for example love, or fear, or hope. The Christian faith is indeed about ‘facts’ – but those facts include understandings that science can never prove.

Second, the process of believing. What does it mean to ‘believe in’ something? When scientists say they believe in this or that, they’re expressing trust in a strong probability based on both evidence and inference. Scientists ‘believe in’ gravity – but that’s not the same as knowing by experience that if you drop a book it will fall to the floor. Gravity is a highly sophisticated concept, backed up by mathematics. It’s a concept which explains why the book falls to the floor.

But if I say ‘I believe in the Resurrection,’ I’m making a different kind of statement altogether. Again, I’m expressing trust; but I know my belief in the Resurrection can never be backed up by evidence. I’m not even clear about what happened! The stories of the empty tomb show the Gospel writers struggling with the same problem. The Resurrection is not about an empty tomb. It’s about the experience of meeting Jesus, alive. We trust the Biblical record that the first disciples did have this experience; but exactly what happened is beyond our knowledge.

And third, the teaching of the Church. In every generation, the Church reflects (largely unawares) some of the presuppositions then current. In the 19th century, enthused by historical discoveries (especially in archaeology), and living in a climate of scientific materialism, the Church tried to claim that the facts of faith were of exactly the same kind as the facts of science. But they aren’t; and trying to insist they are just makes Christianity unbelievable.

Well then. Are the ‘facts of faith’ no more than fairy stories? I’m not saying that at all – though of course fairy stories are not ‘stories that are untrue’, as 19th century materialists claimed. Fairy stories are ‘myths’ – tales that express truth though parables. Jesus used parables a lot. No one imagines that the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son were historical persons; but the parables convey profound truths very vividly. The Assumption of Mary is a kind of parable.

And what does this parable tell us? That Mary was special. Yes, indeed! Hail Mary, full of grace: the Lord is with thee. But proclaiming Mary’s specialness does not require thinking ourselves back into classical cosmology, and accepting, as historical ‘fact’, that she was somehow taken up to a heaven above the sky without passing through death.

The Christian faith is not a long list of impossible propositions. It is trust in Jesus as God’s supreme revelation of himself. It is recognising God’s costly love for us. It’s making that same self-giving love the programme for our own lives. It is being part of Christ’s body, the Church, nourished by word and sacrament.

If Mary’s Assumption helps you do this, great; but please! Don’t feel you’ve got to just grit your teeth and somehow or other ‘believe’ it – or else forfeit your hope of heaven!
 

Sunday 21st March - Preacher Canon Audrey Elkington
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21 March 2010 Lent 5 (C) Is.43.16-23, Phil.3.4b-14, Jn.12.1-8

I come to you hot-foot, as it were, from a week’s retreat at Shepherds Dene.
As always, the effectiveness of the retreat was as much a result of being out in God’s creation, as it was a result of books that I read or holy thoughts that I had.
There were clumps of snowdrops under the trees, that lovely view across the Tyne Valley from Prospect Hill, and the cheerful song of the robin who kept me company.
I know I am not the only person who feels they catch more than a fleeting glimpse of God through the common, and uncommon, things of his creation.
So I really like that line in one of our new Eucharistic prayers that prays; “From the beginning you created all things and all your works echo the silent music of your praise.”
The attribute of God which comes to my mind again and again when I consider this natural world - is his generosity;
his extravagant, super-abundant, almost ridiculous generosity.
From carpeted bluebell woods to intricate alpine meadows to lavish rainforests……..
From the unimaginable distances of the night sky…… to the minute complexity of a fly’s eye or a snowflake’s pattern …..
A rainbow on a dark and dreary day,
a blackbird singing just as dusk is falling,
the taste of the first strawberry in due season, ……..
The shine of a conker, the teeming life of a coral reef, the flash of a kingfisher, the full scent of a rose…….
And all this is just the smallest sample of the outpouring of God’s unwarranted generosity.
Nature is a more than effective way of catching glimpses of God’s generosity.
But we were given more than just glimpses,
when that generosity was made flesh and lived among us,
when that outpouring of God’s very self took human form and spoke to us in terms we could understand.
He came from the splendours of glory - to the humblest of settings, to give of his riches to the poverty of all humankind.
Christ didn’t come to give a few denarii to the hungry, or a handful of shekels to blind beggars.
He came to bring the bread of life to those who didn’t even know they had an appetite,
he came to give sight to those who had never seen before.
He promised the water of life to a woman at a Samaritan well,
and ‘life from above’ to a pernickety Pharisee.
He befriended those beyond the margins of society, and gave a gentle touch to those who had never felt a human hand for years.
He saved the adulterous woman from a stoning, and taught us to forgive others seventy times seven times.
He told parables about harvests of a hundred-fold,
and about a Father welcoming back a son who’d squandered the family savings.
He spoke of being the good shepherd, who’d not only lead his sheep to good pastures, but who would also – ridiculously – lay down his life for his sheep.
To the lame man who only wanted someone to carry him to the healing waters, he gave the ability to get up and walk for himself.
To the wedding family who’d run out of plonk, he gave gallons of the smoothest of wines.
To the angry and bereaved sisters of Lazarus, he gave more than they could ever have dreamt of – their 4-days-dead brother walking from his tomb encumbered only by his grave clothes.
Martha and Mary knew well about the lavish generosity of Jesus of Nazareth.
And they wanted to pay back in some feeble way through their own generosity – they invited Jesus to dinner.
My guess is that this would have been the most important meal Martha and Mary were ever responsible for – you can imagine the tension in the kitchen before-hand!
These two women had been at the receiving end of the overwhelming generosity of this man Jesus, this was the best way they could think of saying ‘thank you’.
Martha’s gratitude was, as ever, expressed through practicalities –
so it was Martha who had to do the last-minute basting or boiling,
- it was Martha who had to bustle backwards and forwards between the kitchen, serving the men as they enjoyed this good food
- it was Martha, I guess, who was feeling slightly resentful that again she had been left with all the jobs by her sister – & where was Mary, anyway?
Mary, of course, had sidled into the room where all the men lay on their sides eating.
She had crept round behind them, and knelt by Jesus’ feet as they stuck out from the bottom of his robes.
She had taken a great jar of the most expensive perfume she could find and could afford
– and she had poured it all, down to the very last drop, over Jesus’ feet – the strong scent filled the whole house for days afterwards.
And then, as if that hadn’t been extravagant enough,
Mary undid her hair and let it down
(something decent women would never do in the presence of men) and she ridiculously began to wipe his feet with her hair.
This impractical, indecent, totally wasteful gesture of Mary’s would have been a shock to everyone present.
And perhaps Judas was only voicing what had been in everyone’s minds, when he asked why the cost of the perfume hadn’t been used in a far more practical and effective way – 300denarii would amount to about £8k today – that’s a lot of money.
I doubt whether Mary would have thought through the theological implications of her actions, and seen them in terms of anointing Jesus for his burial
– I think that it was more likely that this was simply a woman’s way of expressing her heartfelt thanks, because words would never have sufficed
– it was a way of being ridiculously generous, in return for the ridiculously generous act of the man from Nazareth, who’s words brought her brother out from the grave.
Now there’s something really significant about Mary’s attempt to wipe Jesus’ feet with her hair
– and I don’t think it’s anything to do with Mary being a fallen woman, or even being mistaken for one
– it’s got much more to do with the effect of such a large quantity of really good perfume on both Jesus’ feet and on her hair.
I expect that a week later, when Jesus was crucified, that perfume would still have been noticeable on his feet, and on Mary’s hair.
I wonder if it gave the Roman soldier pause for thought as he nailed Jesus’ feet to the cross?
To smell such rich burial ointment on a common criminal?
I wonder too if Mary was comforted that dark Friday,
to smell the reminder as she brushed her hair,
the reminder that she’d been able to thank the man who seemed to bring life with him wherever he went,
but who was now being put to death in the cruellest of manners?
And I wonder even if the other Mary (Mary Magdalene) could smell the vestiges of the scent on the gardener that first Easter morning?

But what about us?
Do we ever stop to count the ways we have been touched by the utterly extravagant generosity of our God
– the God who placed us within this fantastically abundant world,
- the God who out of his generosity, emptied himself for us “taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness…….. becoming obedient even to death on a cross”
- the God whose love is stronger even than death, and who infuses us with life in all its fullness in the breath of his Spirit?
Are we aware, really aware, of the super-abundance of God’s generosity to us?
Of the ridiculous nature of his self-giving?
Of all the richness of the life-giving blessings he has poured out upon us?
And if we can answer ‘yes’ to any of those questions, then what has our response been?
Mary took all her savings and blew them on a large quantity of perfume, which she wasted at the feet of our Lord.
She knelt and honoured him with her gratitude, with her instinctive extravagance.
By comparison how does the odd Sunday a month in Church seem? Or the occasional fiver casually tossed into the collection plate?
The promise of time to be consciously spent with God, but which somehow always gets squeezed out of our routine?
The intention to be helpful to our lonely neighbour, that we’re always too busy to fulfil?
Or the desire to respond to a sense of call from God, which somehow never gets acted upon?
Can any of these be called ridiculously extravagant?

The aroma of Mary’s wasteful gratitude must have lasted on beyond that dinner party, well into the following week.
It may have lasted until Easter weekend itself,
in a different way it has lasted for 2k more years as Mary’s story continues to be told today.
What might we do out of a sense of gratitude to God and his unrestrained generosity?
What might we do that will lavishly linger around us, and around those whom we meet this coming week?
What can we possibly do, to begin to give thanks, to the God who has given us absolutely everything?
 

Wednesday 17th March
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Homily by Canon Robert Gage

Wherever in the world you find the Irish, March 17th will be special. This is St Patrick’s Day, and Patrick is the Irish ‘mascot’; but he lived so long ago that his real life is entangled in pious myth. Legend claims that Patrick converted the whole of Ireland single-handedly, expelled all the poisonous snakes, and worked much magic. Despite these enthusiastic attributions, we can still just glimpse a real person, thanks to surviving contemporary writings.

Patrick’s dates are approximately 390 to 461. The Romans withdrew from Britain in 410, when Patrick was about twenty. He wasn’t born in Ireland, but somewhere between the Severn and the Clyde. His father was a deacon and his grandfather a priest. (No compulsory clerical celibacy in those days!) As a youth, Patrick was captured by Irish pirates and spent six years as a slave. This made him think about God; he admitted he wasn’t much interested before. He escaped and eventually returned home, and then trained to be a priest; but Patrick always regretted his relative of education.

Another 5th century cleric called Palladius was sent from Rome as ‘the first bishop of the Irish who believe in Christ’. Patrick succeeded him in about 435. His base was at Armagh, next door to the most powerful Irish king of the day. He set up a school, and sent missions across Ireland – though less to the south east, where Palladius had worked.

The Oxford Dictionary of Saints says, ‘Patrick’s writings are the first literature certainly identified from the British Church and reveal a scale of values and a type of activity which are full of interest. Although he had little learning and less rhetoric, Patrick had sincere simplicity and deep pastoral care. He was concerned with abolishing paganism, idolatry, and sun-worship; he made no distinction of classes in his preaching and was himself ready for imprisonment or death in the following of Christ. In his use of Scripture and in his eschatological expectations (and presumably in much else besides) he was a typical but very individual 5th century bishop. One of the traits which he retained as an old man was a consciousness of his being an unlearned exile and formerly a slave and fugitive, who learnt to trust completely in God.’ [ODS p. 313]

Patrick was soon venerated as the pioneer of Irish Christianity. Not surprisingly, pious stories grew up celebrating both him – and Ireland. It’s no accident that the Roman Catholic Cathedral in New York City is dedicated to Patrick, given the huge influx of Irish immigrants To America in the 19th century. Even more than St David in Wales or St Andrew in Scotland, Patrick became a symbol of national belonging.

That’s fine; but popular religion sometimes becomes a kind of weapon in the rivalries between factions and nations. From the 16th century, the Irish were intensely loyal Roman Catholics – partly, at least, in defiance of the English. That’s not surprising when you learn what Cromwell did there, slaughtering whole populations in the name of the Lord! There was a similar association of religion and nationalism in Poland – another nation colonised by a much bigger neighbour with a different religion. Faith becomes the expression of an independent national identity.

It’s ironic that popular piety can distort the true priorities of faith. Fierce loyalty to a saint, or a particular style of worship, or any aspect of the folk-culture associated with religion, can actually obscure the demands of the Gospel. ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength, and your neighbour as yourself.’ That ancient Jewish call is at the heart of Jesus’ teaching. The pieties of later tradition sometimes obscure this radical Christian core.

Patrick himself was quite clear that love of God and love of neighbour are central to our salvation. Those who despise or exclude or even attack their neighbours out of loyalty to their traditions do no honour to Christ or his saints. St Paul himself complained to the Corinthians, ‘Each of you says, “I belong to Paul”, or “I belong to Apollos”, or I belong to Cephas”…. Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you?’ [1 Cor. 1.12] And he goes on, ‘What then is Apollos? What is Paul? … I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. [1 Cor. 3.5-6]

If saints point us to God, and encourage us to be more Christ-like, they’re worth celebrating. If they become mascots of chauvinism, we might be better off without them. Patrick’s own loyalty was not to Ireland, but to Christ. That loyalty leads, not to a reinforced tribalism,
 

Wednesday 10th March - Homily
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 Homily by Canon Robert Gage

‘Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees,
you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’ [Matthew 5.20]

The Gospels often speak of the scribes and Pharisees. Who were they? What was Jesus’ relationship with them?

The scribes were technical experts in Scripture. They knew it inside out – not least because they were constantly copying it. No printing presses in those days! They were sometimes called ‘lawyers’, because they were guardians of the Hebrew Law, the Torah or Pentateuch, the five ‘Books of Moses’ – Genesis to Deuteronomy.

The Pharisees also knew the scriptures well, but their focus was less on the letter of the text than on God. Hans Kueng, in an excellent little book on the Apostles’ Creed, Credo [English translation published by SCM Press, 1993], puts it like this:

‘The name ‘”Pharisee” means “the separated”. And these “separated” ones had two specific concerns: they wanted to take God’s commandments with unconditional seriousness, and to observe them with scrupulous exactitude. Indeed, starting from the conviction that Israel is a “kingdom of priests and a holy people” (Ex. 19.6), they wanted voluntarily to observe strictly the regulations on cleanness … which were binding only on the priests. But at the same time…, they wanted to make the law liveable by wise adaptation to the present: they wanted to define precisely how far one could go without sinning.’ [Credo p. 74]

Jesus was actually very close to the Pharisees in many ways. ‘Like the Pharisees, [he] lived among the people: he worked, discussed, and taught in the synagogues as they did…. According to Luke, [he] also ate and drank with them.’ [Credo p. 74]

Kueng asks, ‘Was Jesus then simply a pious ‘liberal’ Pharisee? In details of daily life there are undeniable similarities, but in his whole religious basic attitude Jesus was different. We find no pride in his own achievements, his own righteousness, no contempt for the ordinary people who knew nothing of the law. There is no exclusion of the unclean and the sinners, no strict law of retribution. What then? Trust only in God’s grace and mercy: “God, be merciful to me a sinner. The poor publican, who has no achievements to show to God, is praised for his believing trust and not the Pharisee. This is justification of the sinner, on the basis of his faith.’ [Credo p. 76]

Hans Kueng concludes that ‘there is not the least to be said against the Pharisees “in themselves” and their real virtues.’ [p. 75] But Jesus’ agenda is different. Jesus says (in Matthew 5.17) that he doesn’t want to abolish the Law, but to fulfil it – ‘to deepen, concentrate and radicalize the law of God…. Jesus is convinced that nothing may be read into the law or out of the law that contradicts…the will of God – which is aimed at human well-being.’ [Credo p.75]

So, the letter of the law must never be used to contradict the spirit of the law: God’s Holy Spirit, which stands behind the written law. Paul reinforces this. For example, he tells the Corinthians, ‘The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.’ [2 Cor. 3.6]

By a terrible irony, we Christians sometimes behave like Pharisees. We quote texts of scripture at each other as if we were firing bullets. We might think we’re obeying God, but sometimes we simply want to justify our own narrow interpretations, and prove our opponents wrong. We claim the status of prophets, and feel brave. We remember that Jesus told his disciples to expect opposition, and feel vindicated.

For me, Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the publican sums it up. The Pharisee did all the right things, and therefore knew he was justified. The publican ‘would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat upon his breast saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner”.’ [Luke 18.13]

Jesus even brought one questioner up short, saying, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.’ [Mark 10.18]

God calls us to perfection, but we’re not there yet. We may think we obey the Bible, or follow the teachings of the Church; but we have no cause for complacency – and we certainly have no business judging our neighbours. Our job is to love them.
 

Wednesday 3rd March - Homily
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Homily by Canon Robert Gage

‘Whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant.’ [Matthew 20.26]

Who were the first Christians? A few fishermen – skilled, no doubt, but quite ordinary – and some women – second-class citizens in the ancient world. As Paul told the Corinthians: ‘Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.’ [1 Cor. 1.26] Jesus made the most sense to those who had least. Remember the rich young man in the Gospels, who ‘went away grieving, for he had many possessions.’ [Mt 19.22]

When those first disciples started to grasp Jesus’ significance, they started thinking about power. James and John got their mother to ask Jesus to guarantee them a place on his throne. The others protested – possibly out of jealousy that James and John had got their request in first! Jesus told them firmly that his kingdom isn’t like that. It’s not about power. It’s about service.

For several generations, Christians weren’t taken very seriously. There weren’t very many of them. The Emperor Nero blamed them for the great fire of Rome in AD 64, largely because they didn’t ‘count’. (This marked the beginning of persecution.) But Christianity gradually became intellectually respectable. Significant thinkers – Tertullian in the west and Origen the east, to name but two – saw how the Gospel could be reconciled with Greek philosophy – how it gave a new over-arching sense of meaning to every aspect of life. As a result, the new faith appealed to an ever wide cross section of people.

At the beginning of the 4th century, the Roman Emperor himself embraced the new faith. Constantine ended all persecution of Christians, and told the bishops to agree exactly what the Christian faith was. (If Christianity was true, everyone should believe it; but what exactly was it?) By the end of the fourth century, Christianity was the official religion of the Empire. St Augustine argued that civil power should be used to enforce orthodox belief. Bishops became state officials. When the Roman Empire collapsed in the west, they were left largely in charge.

We sometimes look back at the Middle Ages as the age of faith. That’s right in one sense; but it was also the heyday of Church control. Ecclesiastical courts enforced ecclesiastical law. Bishops ran their own prisons. Not even kings were above the Church’s power: after Thomas Becket’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral, King Henry II was forced to do penance.

The Church of England still retains vestiges of that medieval power today – as does the Church of Rome. We Christians seem reluctant to abandon the structures of former power – however illusory that control has become. As a result, today’s Church can feel a long way from those twelve fishermen and shadowy women who first followed Jesus.

I say this as one who loves the Church – who has tried hard to serve it. My sense of God is hard to dissociate from the forms and ceremonies of ecclesiastical tradition. But, increasingly, I worry that we spend so much time and energy preserving inherited structures that we may be neglecting the service Jesus commended as the hallmark of God’s kingdom. I have to wonder whether our institutional decline might be God’s way of recalling us of his priorities.

‘Whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant.’ Serving the Church doesn’t automatically mean serving other people, or commending the way of Christ to our generation. We need to abandon our pretensions to status, get our hands dirty, and try to do what Jesus did: feed the hungry, heal the sick, treat the down-and-out with real dignity, work for justice, promote peace, facilitate reconciliation – and thus, by our deeds, as well as our words, speak of God’s love for everyone.
 

Wednesday 24th February Homily
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 Homily by Canon Robert Gage

‘This generation is an evil generation, for it asks for a sign.’ [Lk 11.29]

‘Is it true?’ That’s the question we all ask today. We live in a world of spin. We’re bombarded with advertising, political propaganda, sound bites taken out of context. We are suspicious. We don’t want to be ‘taken in’, so we keep asking, ‘Is it true?’ And we don’t want to take someone else’s word. We want evidence. We assume that, if there’s no evidence, somebody’s trying to hide something – to ‘pull a fast one’.

Perhaps people have always been the same. ‘This generation is an evil generation,’ says Jesus, ‘for it asks for a sign.’

Are we wrong to want evidence? Is Jesus suggesting we should be more credulous? I don’t think so. He’s simply exasperated that people demand to be hit over the head with hard evidence, rather than draw intelligent conclusions from what they see and hear. So he says, ‘No sign will be given you, except the sign of Jonah.’

Matthew’s Gospel also mentions this demand for a sign, and Jesus’ response [12.38-42]; but Matthew interprets this as a reference to Jesus lying three days in the tomb. Luke, by contrast, has in mind Jonah’s preaching, which transformed of Ninevah – ‘an exceedingly large city, three days’ walk across’ [Jonah 3.3] – whose people, in Jonah’s words, ‘do not know their right hand from their left’ [Jonah 4.11]. But they listened to Jonah, and acted.

People today still want evidence of an incontrovertible kind before they put faith or trust in anyone – perhaps because we know how costly it would be to live by faith. And we know all too well that just because lots of people believe something, there’s no guarantee that they’re right.

But if we take Luke’s interpretation of Jesus’ words into today’s context, we are not being asked to believe things because other people do. We’re being invited to take responsibility for ourselves, draw our own inferences, and risk placing our trust accordingly.

Jesus never asked people to subscribe to ideas, or doctrines, or abstract concepts. He didn’t offer to accept them, or heal them, or love them, on the condition that they’d sign up to a list of propositions. He asked them to accept that God loved them already – that he loved them – and to respond with trust. If they did that, and something good happened, Jesus observed, again and again, ‘Your faith has made you whole.’ He didn’t say ‘my power’ or ‘your understanding of and acceptance of this or that doctrine’, but simply ‘your faith’ – by which I think he meant trust.

We sometimes make faith too intellectual. I’m not suggesting that intellectual reflection isn’t important and useful and even fun. But as an analogy, take the way people fall in love. A young couple isn’t likely to start their relationship by assuming it’s going to be lifelong, analysing all the possible pros and cons, pondering contractual arrangements about sharing money and property, or doing scientific research into their genetic suitability as potential parents. These may be important and useful things to consider in due course; but they are not the starting point for love.

In today’s Gospel passage, Luke presents Jesus as saying, in effect, ‘Relax! Stop calculating so much! If you do, you might be able to fall in love.’ For that’s what our relationship with God is most like. If we allow ourselves to fall in love with God, we can work out all the implications of our relationship bit by bit, as we move forward. But without love, we won’t want to move forward.

‘Why do you ask for a sign?’ If we wait for some kind of incontrovertible evidence of God’s love, we’ll wait for ever. Love isn’t like that. Love always involves risk. No risk, no love – and ultimately, no love, no life. What would you have?

Ash Wednesday Homily
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ASH WEDNESDAY – 17th February 2010

Homily by Canon Robert Gage

‘For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ [Mat. 11.21]

In one way, at least, having a heart attack has been quite useful for me. I’ve been brought firmly face to face with my own mortality: made aware, in a new and vivid way, of the value of time.

Time is our greatest treasure. We all have the same number of hours in each day; but none of us knows how many days, or years, lie ahead. We tend to live as if our earthly lives were infinite. They’re not. How should we use the time we have left? How should we spend our treasure?

Our priorities are not always what we tell ourselves they are. We may think we give primary value to family, or friends, or work – to political commitments, or charitable activities, or even hobbies; but how we actually spend our time shows our real priorities. Are we happy with these?

Most people are not wholly in charge of their own time. We have commitments: earning a living, raising a family, playing a part in the community – and perhaps a lot of other things as well. But we’ll never have time for everything. How we apportion the time we’ve got shows the real value we place on these different commitments. Alas, we can go on fooling ourselves for a long time.

‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ We’d like to have it the other way ’round. We’d like our heart’s desire to just produce the treasure, without any commitment on our part! But life isn’t like that. ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions.’ People spend huge amounts of time wanting things they take no steps to achieve – and so waste much treasure.

Lent is a time to reflect on how we do use our time – and how we might use it. Such reflection is the necessary prelude to good action; but it’s no substitute for the action. And our commitment of time to what really matters to us will have to last well beyond Lent if it’s to bear much fruit.

At the end of our lives, what will we be able to say we’ve done? Jesus insisted, ‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’ Will we have anything to declare – beyond our good intentions – when we stand before our Judge? God has given us an astounding amount of freedom: above all, the freedom to choose how we order our priorities. Do we use that freedom consciously and well?

We often feel trapped in commitments that curtail our freedom. But must we? Are we obliged to lose great chunks of precious time in unnecessary ways, largely because we can’t decide that some things are more important than others? We simply can’t do everything! What’s important?

This Lent, I urge you to spend some time with God each week, to re-assess your priorities. How many more years can you reasonably expect to live? What do you really want to do with that time? What are you willing to give up in order to accomplish the things that matter to you?

I don’t want to suggest that only those who do ‘great things’ stand high in God’s sight. We don’t earn our salvation. In fact, our most valuable achievements may look trivial to everyone else. But we need to be in charge: to use the freedom God gives us to determine our own priorities, and not to let them be fixed by other people, or by habit, or by chance, or just by sheer inertia.

I can imagine our Lord saying at the heavenly gate, ‘Why didn’t you even take the trouble to enjoy life more?’ It won’t be much of an answer to say, ‘I couldn’t make up my mind. I just couldn’t decide.’ I have no doubt our Lord will be merciful; but I can’t promise he won’t be just a little disappointed.

How you use your time is up to you. Spend a little time this Lent to try and make the most of all the rest!