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What is the Gospel?
Lent talk by Bishop Paul Barber
Street Mission Church 2 April 2003
I ask this question against a background of something I was doing pretty regularly in the thirteen years that I worked as a bishop, prior to my retirement 16 months ago, and that was the placing of new clergy in parishes, either in a service of Institution and Induction, of Collation, or of Licensing and Installation - the name of the service did not matter that much.
The welcome the parishes gave to a new Vicar of Priest in Charge was invariably warm and genuine, and the words used in the different services were very much the same. Some words that were always used were these, and I remember then as we ask ourselves the question, "What is the Gospel?" They are words from the Preface to what is called the Declaration of assent:
The Church of England is part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church,
worshipping the one true God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
It professes the faith uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures,
and set forth in the catholic creeds,
which Faith the Church is called upon to proclaim
afresh in each generation.
That preface does not use the word Gospel, or the Good News, which is what the word means. It speaks instead of the Faith, which is the Good News, found in Scripture, and set forth in the creeds of the Church. And this Faith, this Good News, the preface is absolutely sure, needs to be proclaimed afresh in each generation.
And, I would add, and I guess you would too, never more so than today. Because we can all see, we can all spot, that a huge gap, a huge gulf, has opened up between the Christian Gospel, the Good News ofGod's love in Jesus Christ, and the people in the streets and homes and parishes of England. There is an ignorance of Christian things.
We could all give examples. Here are three tiny snapshots.
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Over my years as a parish priest, archdeacon and bishop I have visited many schools. Almost every visit included speaking in assembly. When I started out in 1960 I would conclude the assembly by saying prayers, and would normally end those prayers by inviting children to join me in saying the Lord's Prayer. In 1960 that request would always evoke an excellent response. The children would join in saying the Lord's Prayer with confidence and clarity. It was something they were thoroughly familiar with; it was part of their lives and experience.
Now my experience is different. In recent years I have detected a diffidence, a lack of confidence. When I say "Please join with me in saying the Lord's Prayer" I get a thin, hesitant mumble in return. That key piece of Christian equipment, or spiritual armour, the prayer that Jesus taught, has been lost to many of our children. It is one little sign of the gap of ignorace of which I speak, underlining the importance of proclaiming the Gospel afresh in each generation.
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A more trivial example. For 8 years I served as an Archdeacon in Guildford Diocese, with the title 'The Venerable'. Perhaps it gave me a puff of pride to be The Venerable, but that pride was very rapidly punctured. People in churches might be familiar with Archdeacons and so on, but not the outside world. I went one day to a post office to renew my passport. I had filled in the form, and where it said 'Title' I had written out in full, in capitals, THE VENERABLE. The woman behind the counter peered at it with a puzzled frown and uttered the immortal words, "What's this bit, then?"
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Now, knowing about Archdeacons and Venerables is of minimal importance when we consider the gap between the Christian Faith and millions of people. My third example underlines that gap in a much more serious way.
It may be an urban myth, but it was widely current a few years back, and I came across it in the Church Times. A young woman was shortly to be married. A relative wanted to give her some jewellery to commemorate the occasion. They were looking in the jeweller's shop at a variety of plain crosses and crucifixes. The young woman narrowed the search down to two, one cross, one crucifix. Finally she made her decision. "I'll have the one with the little man on it."
It is that 'little man', as she called Jesus of Nazareth, that we centre our thoughts on as we consider the question: What is the Gospel?, and how we proclaim that Gospel afresh in our generation.
There is a good Scriptural verse which proclaims bluntly and clearly that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and for ever. That being so, as I believe it to be, it would urge us to see that the Gospel of Christ does not alter. The question "What is the Gospel?" receives the answer: "The same as it has always been!" In God, we are assured, there is no variableness nor shadow of turning. He is faithful and consistent and loving and merciful. Nothing can alter that.
Nothing alters the fact that at a point in human history this great, merciful, creative God took flesh, we believe, in Jesus Christ. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. That, and what followed, is the Gospel, the great, inexhaustible Good News of God's love for the human race. What we have to do is proclaim it arfesh in our generation. But how? I should like to share with you a favourite Christian story which I hope will help us in two ways.
The story is of Father Damien, the Belgian priest who devoted a large part of his life to working among lepers in a leper colony on an island off the coast of Africa. Damian led a well-ordered, prayerful life. Part of this good order was a certain almost ritual that he took part in first thing every morning. A servant would bring him, at crack of dawn each day, a bowl of very hot water for Damian to shave with. Every morning he would dip his forefinger in the water to test that it was the right temperature for him. He did this daily for years. But there came, one Christmas morning, a very marked change. The bowl of water came. No change there. But when he dipped his finger in the water there was a huge change. He had lost all sense offeeling in his finger. And when he examined it, there, unmistakably in the skin, were the first signs of leprosy.
It was, as I said, Christmas morning. there was a special service for the lepers, and Father Damian, as always, preached the sermon. That Christmas morning he began unforgettably: "We lepers. Now I too am one of you."
I said I hoped that this story might help us in two ways. First, it illustrates that preaching the Gospel has to involve not just words but actions. Father Damian preached the Gospel by the life he led, dedicated for years to work amongst the outcast lepers. The Gospel inspired him to lead his life in that way and his life was an inspiration to many to give their lives to the service of God. The second help lies in the opening words of Father Damian's Christmas morning sermon: "We lepers. Now I too am one of you." We can imagine God, when he became one of us in Jesus Christ, saying "We human beings. Now I too am one of you."
That being one of us, one of the human race, I see underlined in the story of Jesus' baptism at the hands of John the Baptist in the River Jordan. You will recall how vast crowds from a wide area flocked out into the wilderness to that place where John the Baptist was at work - a striking, somewhat wild figure dressed in camel's hair and with a girdle of skin about his loins, and eating locusts and the honey of wild bees. A long line of ordinary people, troubled, muddled, guilty, puzzled, inadequate, very much like us, were going down into the river. allowing the waters of the river to submerge them completely in John's baptism. And then, right at the end of the line, comes Jesus. He does not stand aloof but goes down into the water, just as the rest of the crowd had done. In so doing he was marking out his identification with the whole human race, warts and all, for all time and in all places. And as he came up out of the water, an elemental voicefrom above:
This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.
Well pleased because of this commitment to his human brothers and sisters. Now he too was one of them.
From that Gospel truth we move on to another, very much part of our thinking as we move through Lent, towards the events of Christ's passion.
At the centre of it all is a little man on a Cross. He could seem small and insignificant as he dies there agonisingly in a remote and overlooked corner of the Roman Empire. It must have seemed like that to Jesus himself as he cried out from the Cross:
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Yet in reality he was far from being forsaken. We can say this with assurance, for the Cross of Jesus has become down many centuries the Cristian sign. The 'little man' in his dying has achieved huge victory. His suffering and sense of being forsaken have identified him with the suffering and sense of forsakenness in the world. Many, many have identified with him in his suffering. A very troubled parishioner I once knew would come to church on only one day of the year, and that was Good Friday. That day expressed for her the presence of Jesus with her through his crucifixion, in the pain and tragedy of her life.
Two further words from the Cross remind us what the Gospel is, and the necessity of speaking it today in ways that resonate and make sense for ordinary people.
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At the moment that the Cross was being lifted up, with Jesus already nailed to it, as it was being manhandled and jerked into its socket in the ground, Jesus, in the pain and horror of that moment, calls out:
Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.
He called out words, not of anger or hatred or vindictiveness, but of forgiveness. He called on a fathomless, finally inexhaustible, deep reserve of divine love and mercy.
He died that we might be forgiven,
He died to make us good.
Good, because we recognise the forgiveness that is ours. As Isaiah the prophet put it long ago,
Return to the Lord who will have mercy;
to our God who will richly pardon.
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Just befor Jesus died he gave a great shout, summoning up what physical strength was left to him, to communicate the magnitude of what was happening. The word he shouted was:
"Tetelestai"
which means "It is finished." It is done. It is complete. The job, the task, the commission that my Father laid upon me is rounded off. It is accomplished, by Jesus' obedience. In his own body on the tree of crucifixion he faced and took on all the powers of darkness, hatred and evil, and he overcame them in God's final victory over them all.
How can we claim such a thing, in a world that, in the lifetime of many of us, has prodiced Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse Dong, Pol Pot, Milosovic, Mugabe, Saddam? Knowing these tyrants, how can we claim that the final victory has been won?
Sometimes Christ's victory over evil is depicted in terms of a dragon that has been slain. In its death throes, mortally wounded, it thrashes dangerously about. We are in the death throe time. We should listen to St Peter:
Be sober, be vigilant;
because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion,
walketh about, seeking whom he may devour;
whom resist, steadfast in the faith.
Dragon or lion, the message is the same.
We speak with confidence of Christ's birth and death, because of that other vast strand of Christian belief, without which everything else falls and folds: the Resurrection.
It is worth reminding ourselves just how completely vital the Resurrection is: that Jesus, dead beyond doubt after his execution on the Friday, is seen and known to be alive, beyond doubt, on the third day. How precisely this came about, no one at all was in a position to say; no one was in the tomb to witness when God raised Jesus from death.
It has been likened to a new creation. As the Spirit of God moved over the face of the waters to bring life into being, way way back, so again the Spirit moved to bring about a new creation. This mystery can only be expressed in approximate, oblique, poetic language.
As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.
Christ, once raised from the dead, dies no more.
Death has no more dominion over him.
Christ has beed raised from the dead,
the first-fruits to those who sleep.
That last poetic attempt to convey the marvellous nature of what has happened refers to the old idea of the first fruits. In this, the newest, freshest, youngest first fruits of the harvest are offeredto God, in order that the whole harvest may be blessed. Jesus, in this thinking, is the first fruits; we and all who came after him may be blessed and included in God's great resurrection harvest, if that is our will and desire. It is certainly his.
We may be helped to grasp the fact of resurrection in different ways; by, for instance recalling that there would be no Gospel, no New Testament, no Church, no ministry, no Canterbury or York or Wells or Durham or Winchester, if it were not for the Resurrection of Jesus. Everything else Christian springs from what happened on Easter Day.
Or again, we may wish to recall an experience like that of Archbishop Anthony Bloom - Metropolitan Anthony of Soruz, as he became. He was one of the great Christian leaders and teachers of the twentieth century. A member of the Orthodox Church, Anthony Bloom decided in his teenage years that God was calling him to the priesthood. However, in his late teenage years he began to rebel, and came to the conclusion that he no longer believed, and was certainly no fit candidate for ordination. He was on the point of giving it all up, when he went to see a wise old priest, who listened to what Anthony had to say. Then the priest said, "If that is what you are being told to do, then you must do it. But there is one thing I want you to do before you take any further action. I want you to return to your room, pick up your Bible, and read St Mark's Gospel from beginning to end." Anthony did as he was bid, and went back to his room. There, in the quietness, he took St Mark's Gospel and began to read. He had reached about chapter 6 when he became aware, he writes, of the presence of the Risen Christ, there, unmistakeably present as a source of blessing in his room. From that moment Anthony gave up any idea of abandoning ordination, and the rest is history. Thousands upon thousands owe much to God for the ministry of Anthony Bloom.
I hope these thoughts will be of some value in helping you to recognise both the unchanging nature of the Gospel and also the responsibility we all have as Christian of commending the Gospel not only with our lips but by our lives.
A postscript. I have made no reference to the present Gulf conflict, though I am sure it is a matter of pressing anxiety and concern for us, our children and our grandchildren. It is a complex and distressing business. We may well be horrified to find ourselves in our present position. Nevertheless we are where we are. If we believe the Gospel, and in the power of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the Strengthener that Jesus promised he would send, that he breathed on his disciples on the first Easter evening, then we must pray in that Spirit.
Pray that out of the terror and suffering of this war, God's grace may prevail, and his work of love and mercy be carried forward.
God's grace flows always. It is not something that is suddenly withdrawn or turned off.
Last Sunday we visited the gardens of the Bishop's Palace in Wells. By the tranquil waters, where lie the deep-down wells that give the city its name, there is a notice with information about the wells. The water surges out at the rate of 40 gallon a second, or 44,000 gallons every hour. That amazing flow, and its consistency over the years, gives us a picture of God's ever-flowing grace and love and goodwill. It is with that constant healing, reconciling, rescuing work of Christ that we are called to co-operate in trusting prayer at this difficult, threatening, anxious time of war. That too is part of the Gospel, part of the Good News: that prayer to God is never wasted, nor is it unheeded. God is always more ready to hear than we are to pray. His redemptive power works through history.
Alanbrooke, who worked alongside Churchill through World War 2, wrote in his diary on 15th August 1945:
The end of this war for certain. Six very very long years of continuous struggle, nerve-wracking anxiety, dashed hopes, hopeless bleak horizons, endless difficulties with Winston etc etc finished with! When I look back at the bleakest moments it becomes almost impossible to believe that we stand where we do.
One thing above all others predominates over all other thoughts, namely boundless gratitude to God, and to his guiding hand which has brought us where we are. Throughout the war his guiding influence has constantly made itself felt.
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.
Romans 15.13.
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Thursday 28th of August 2008
