St Luke’s,
“For in him every
one of God’s promises is a ‘Yes’.”
Every preacher has his or her own processes for giving birth to a sermon
– and trust me, sometimes it really is that painful. For me there are two main
ways in which it happens; sometimes I discover that I have a reasonably well
developed line of thought based on good academic research that fits
appropriately with the readings at hand and can be distilled into 10 to 20
minutes of sermon. That’s one way.
The other – and I have to say this seems to be more and more the
favoured method as I get older, although not necessarily favoured by me – is
when I get a word or a phrase from one of the readings stuck in my head going
round and round until I eventually manage to pry it out and develop it into
something semi-coherent, firstly on a page, and then, finally, here in the
pulpit.
I suspect most of
you are now silently praying that this morning’s effort has resulted from the
former rather than latter process. Good luck.
“For in him every one of God’s promises is a ‘Yes’.” Paul’s grand
assertion in 2nd Corinthians has been one of phrase that’s stuck in
my head this past week. The other is by the Rolling Stones and isn’t one of
this weeks readings, but I’ll come back to it soon anyway. Paul’s phrase though
seems to me especially appropriate as we both prepare for Lent and gather up
the themes of the past few weeks, where our gospel readings have shown Jesus
constantly saying ‘yes’ to requests for healing in a whole variety of
situations.
Of course none of
these situations are what Paul had in mind when he wrote his letter to the
Corinthians.
There’s general agreement that 2nd Corinthians is actually
made up of snippets from up to five letters written by Paul to the Church at
Corinth, all at least in part addressing a dispute concerning a promise Paul
supposedly made to visit them on his return from one of his many journeys, a
promise that was never kept, leading to accusations that Paul was unreliable, a
man whose ‘yes’ meant ‘no’, untrustworthy, and not fit therefore to be
considered an appropriate spiritual leader, to all of which Paul responds, ‘I
stand in the name of the Son of God whose answer is always ‘yes’’ or words to
that effect.
Over the past week I’ve kept coming to those words and their effect.
I’ve kept returning to this idea that in Christ ‘it is always yes’ because I
spend a lot of time around the Church and I hear a lot of ‘no’s’.
This is a serious issue because I know that as I stand here now and say
‘in Jesus the answer is always yes’ some of you are thinking, ‘that’s not my
experience’ and it’s not mine either. There have been plenty of times when I
wanted something and prayed for something and it hasn’t happened. Every week we
pray for God to heal the sick and care for the lonely, and still people die and
get depressed. I used to hear some old-time preachers saying that God answers
every prayer, it’s just that the answer’s sometimes no – but that’s not what I
hear from Paul, or at first glance, from Mark.
At the beginning of Mark’s gospel there’s an almost constant stream of
miracles as Jesus heals everything that moves and some things that don’t, and
it doesn’t seem that he ever says no, even when the person involved doesn’t
deserve it. Take the pushy leper in last week’s reading, he broke all the rules
and quite probably annoyed Jesus greatly, but still he got healed. Jesus said
yes, even when he would have been quite justified in saying no.
Of course today’s reading takes things in a whole new direction. Thanks
to the blabbermouth ex-leper, Jesus is stuck inside, the house surrounded by a
crowd waiting to see the next big miracle. The paralysed man and his friends
can’t even get close enough to catch his attention, but these are real friends
– the kind you want on your side when you’re in a jam – so they get him up on
the roof and dig their way through the coverings and the dirt and then lower
him down into the room.
Of course Jesus, down below, is busy doing something else entirely when
suddenly he finds he’s being pelted with bits of falling ceiling and
interrupted, yet again, by a simple human need. This time, though, as he
reaches out his hand he doesn’t say, ‘be healed’ but rather ‘your sins are
forgiven’, and that’s where the Rolling Stones come in.
Like so many of the characters who pop up in the Bible, we know almost
nothing about this man except that he’s paralysed and has some good friends. We
don’t, for example, know why he’s paralysed, or what he’d done in and with his
life before this moment, but for me when I hear this story I instantly start to
hear Mick Jagger singing, ‘You can’t always get what you want, but if you try
sometime, you just might find, you get what you need.’
‘You get what you need.’ ‘Which is easier,’ Jesus asks, ‘to say ‘your
sins are forgiven’ or to say ‘stand up and walk’?’ We all know that sometimes,
often, forgiveness is so much harder than healing, and so often it’s only with
forgiveness that healing is even possible.
Let’s be clear, the man never asked Jesus for forgiveness. It’s plainly
obvious that he was after healing, but he not have wanted, or believed that he
even needed, forgiveness, but Jesus gives it to him anyway.
‘Sometimes, you
just might find, you get what you need.’
In this story the actual physical healing is just an added extra – a
throw-away moment Mark tells us Jesus literally does just to prove a point. The
real miracle, the thing that Jesus hangs his credibility on, is the forgiveness
– something he does freely, with no demands, no conditions.
This is the Jesus whom Paul describes as God’s ‘yes’ to all our deepest
needs. This is the Jesus of whom the crowds say, ‘we have never seen anything
like this’. This is the Jesus of unconditional grace.
The Church is incredibly bad at unconditional grace. We are incredible
bad at unconditional grace. We talk about it sometimes – God’s unconditional
love – but it’s seldom born out in what we say and even less often in what we
do. That’s not so surprising really when we live in a society and a culture
where we’re told there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Everything costs
something, so surely something as valuable and important as grace or love must
cost too?
We constantly put conditions on God’s love and acceptance because we
don’t really believe that it can be unconditional. We describe it as free, as
long as you think or don’t think this, or say or don’t say that, or pray this
sinner’s prayer or come along to church each week, or do something to put some
kind of down payment on whatever it is we think they’re getting in the first
place.
Maybe we do that
because we think no one will take it seriously if there’s no cost involved?
There is a cost, of course, later. Jesus is pretty blunt about that – if
you want to follow me there will be a cross to bear – but that’s down the road,
getting on to the road, on the other hand, is absolutely free of charge.
That’s God’s ‘yes’ in Jesus. It’s not a yes to every whim or fancy, or
even our most earnest and deepest desires, it’s not a yes to what we want, but
it is a decisive and absolute yes to what we need.
This is the yes to God’s promise in Isaiah, “I, I am He who blots out your
transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” This
is the yes to God’s promises to Abraham and Sarah, and Joshua and David. “For
in him every one of God’s promises is a ‘Yes.’” And for that reason we can say
‘Amen’, not because all our prayers are answered and we have everything we
want, but because we can trust in the God who has promised to be all we need.
This is our Christian hope, not in a doctrine or a creed or a prayer, but in a
simple promise – you can’t always get what you want, but sometimes, you just
might find, you get what you need. Thanks be to God.