Article
- Date:
- Sunday 2nd June 2024
Year B, The First Sunday after Trinity - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint
- Service:
- Eucharist
- Readings:
- 2 Corinthians 4.5-12
Mark 2.23-3.6
I am old enough to remember how deeply boring Sundays were in the late 1950s before Alan Freeman arrived with Pick of the Pops on Sunday afternoons, a mood timelessly set down in Tony Hancock's household. More than sixty years on, I suspect we have gone too far the other way so that even if we are churchgoers the rest of the day can readily be taken up with all the chores and pleasures that occupy a Saturday. I would not go back for the world but there must be a better way of going forward.
A good place to start is one we often overlook: the reason why Sunday is special is that it is the day when we remember the Risen Christ. Interestingly, our two prayer books give the game away: in the Reformation Book of Common Prayer the Sunday following Easter Sunday is called "The First Sunday after Easter" or, worse still, "Low Sunday" whereas in Common Worship this Sunday, in line with Catholic tradition, is called "The Second Sunday of Easter"; there is a world of difference between "after" and "of". For a complex of reasons, the 16th Century reformers seemed to think that the Crucifixion was far more important than the Resurrection but over time a proper understanding of their indissoluble bond has been restored.
But, back to the Sabbath. The Resurrection makes our Sunday totally distinct from the Jewish Sabbath that Jesus was discussing in our Reading from Mark. For the Jews, the observation of Sabbath rest was a legal obligation set down in the Genesis creation accounts, reinforced in the Commandments dictated to Moses and then enshrined in thousands of minor regulations and Talmudic extensions such that when I was in Israel, to save people pushing buttons to summon the lift or select a floor on the Sabbath, the lifts stopped at every floor. And it is this kind of meticulousness which Jesus was challenging, the whole thing was getting out of proportion, particularly if it meant that Jesus was wrong for healing people.
For us, then, the issue is not meticulous legal observance of the sort which led to grim Sundays of old. What we need to work out is how to celebrate and it will not have escaped your notice that, as a church, we are not particularly good at celebration. And there is a clear and obvious reason for this. The premise of our worship is not that we are imperfect people doing our best, unnecessarily busy people trying to be kind, or people who find ourselves in ethical muddles, our default characteristic is that we are sinners. Of course, in a literal sense, taking our whole lives into account, we are all sinners; but to say that is not to cite this as an identifying characteristic. If we were to write down ten words to describe us, where would "sinner" appear in the list? For all of the revolutionary changes of the 16th Century, one characteristic of Medieval Catholicism has remained deeply ingrained in our religious culture and that is the predominance of the idea of sin. Even though the Church of England has largely abandoned formal Reconciliation, what used to be called Confession, our default mode is still misery. We have to accept that to be imperfect is part of our God-created condition.
Imagine if you were invited to a party and that when you arrived your host said: "Well you are dressed shabbily" or "I've heard that you're a bad piece of work" or "We need to make sure you go through a cleansing ritual". Now of course the church is not quite like that but it is still, by and large, a party pooper. It forgives our sins but never lets us forget it.
On this basis I don't want us to restore miserable Sundays, rather, we need to celebrate what God has done for us in the person of the Risen Christ made alive to us today in the Holy spirit.
But we tend to become muddled about precisely what we need to celebrate. It is not that Jesus in some way saved us from our sinfulness - a brief examination of our world and of ourselves will convince us that that is not the case - the death and Resurrection of Jesus saved us from the mortal consequence of our sinfulness; because Jesus died and rose again, we will not die. That is what we are celebrating and it is what the whole world needs to celebrate. The Resurrection in no way mends our created fault, it simply ensures that that fault does not count against us.
Finally, thinking again about that party, is it a good mission strategy to start by telling people how bad they are? I think not, not just because this is negative but because it is divorced from reality. Most of our faults are in instances where we fail to do something mostly collectively fail; but the forces against which we struggle are indeed mighty. It is hard to behave well when good, honest behaviour is at best ridiculed and at worst punished.
And so, when you experience the grim beauty of the Book of Common Prayer, remember that there is another way: a way of thankfulness and celebration on the Sabbath so that we may rejoice in the blessings we have received.