3 Before Lent
Sermon Preached by the Revd Anna Matthews
Saul was heading to Damascus with a deadly purpose. With the fire of zeal in his belly and righteous certainty coursing through him, he was intent on stamping out this new sect. Under his watchful gaze the church had already gained her first martyr. If he had his way, Stephen would not be the last.
It’s about 150 miles from Jerusalem to Damascus – or about two weeks’ journey on foot. That’s quite a long time to fixate on your purpose, to make plans, to imagine the great deeds you are going to do in service of God. And Saul is almost there – Damascus lies just ahead of him – when he is stopped in his tracks and falls to the ground.
And the voice that addressed him spoke a new person into being. No longer Saul but Paul: the persecutor becomes an apostle; the one vowed to suppress the church becomes the one who enlarges its boundaries to include the whole world.
From this moment on, Paul is convinced of the resurrection of Jesus as historical fact. Not a spiritual truth only, or a pleasing religious ideal, but something that happened, in history: Jesus died, was buried, and rose again. In fact he’s so convinced of it that he says to the Corinthians, ‘if Christ has not been raised then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain’. All this – the whole structure of Christianity and all that goes with it – the art, the architecture, the hospitals and schools and food banks and missions; Boticelli and Bach and Benedict, Bonhoeffer and Tutu and Mother Teresa – all in vain if Christ is not raised from the dead.
And yes, I have pushed Paul’s hyperbole beyond even where he goes, but his point is this: ‘if for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.’ Because the fact of the resurrection isn’t only or simply about God raising Jesus from the dead in Jerusalem after he had been crucified under Pontius Pilate, but about the life of the risen Jesus continuing, drawing into resurrection life all those who encounter him and respond to his call.
As it did with St Paul on the road to Damascus, resurrection interrupts the present, disrupts it, opens up a future that is genuinely new. We see it not just with Paul but with the first disciples, too: Peter’s encounter with the risen Jesus on the shores of Lake Tiberias and his threefold confession of love for his Lord heals and restores the disciple Jesus had called to be a rock but who had three times denied his friend. Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the risen Jesus at the empty tomb shows beatitude in action as weeping turns to joy because the resurrection opens up for her a future that is impossible without Christ. Without him her life would go back to being as it once had been: lonely, ostracised, trapped in the past. With him she has a love that draws her into community, where newness is made real in healing and forgiveness and belonging.
Resurrection is what happens when God’s future comes to interrupt the present. It's a future that kindles hope in the heart swollen with grief, because the resurrection means that death is not final. It’s a future that allows reconciliation to blossom in place of enmity because forgiveness opens up a new way of relating. It’s a future that inspires boldness and courage and persistence because it promises that justice will prevail.
Translated into a more contemporary idiom, resurrection looks like the faithfulness of Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany because Christ has conquered evil. It looks like Mother Teresa’s persistent love of the suffering poor in Delhi, in the face of structural injustices that are overwhelming, because they are the ones Jesus called blessed. It looks like Tutu’s vision where the human dignity of every single one of the rainbow people of God is honoured, because in the resurrection God’s life is shared with people of every tribe and language and nation. It looks like the countless individual acts of justice, compassion, and service that disrupt our belief that things are as things always will be, and that allow the future’s hope to pierce through into the present.
Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel show us how the life of God interrupting the present turns our understanding upside down. Listen to his woes: they’re addressed to the full, the laughing, the well-regarded. Don't most of us hope for and think that a good life is one where we are full, and happy, and do well? But blessed are the poor and the hungry, says Jesus. Blessed are the weeping, the excluded, the reviled, the hated – as one of whom Jesus will be crucified.
The poor will inherit the kingdom, says Jesus. The weeping will laugh and the hungry be filled and the reviled be honoured. That’s what resurrection does, and it doesn’t just leave it to eternity but comes and summons us to its life now: in concrete acts of hospitality and friendship and hope. As we live in resurrection’s light we become people and communities through which others encounter God’s blessing. Not because we’re good people. Not because Jesus was a wise teacher who shows us a good way to live. But because Jesus is raised from the dead. Because of that hope comes to meet us. Love addresses us. A future unfolds that is determined not by what we’ve done or what’s happened to us but by God’s refusal to abandon us.
‘Why are you persecuting me?’ the risen Jesus asks Saul as he lies stunned on the Damascus road. Not ‘why are you persecuting the church, or my followers’ but ‘why are you persecuting me?’ The Acts of the Apostles is written to show us how the risen life of Jesus continues in the life of the church, through the empowering of the Holy Spirit. And that life is made visible as the beatitudes are enacted. The hungry are fed. The poor are welcomed. The reviled find a place of belonging and the weeping are consoled. It happens imperfectly, as even a cursory read through of the rest of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians will show you. But it happens. And it happens still, because the risen Jesus has not stopped calling his church to live his life.
That means being a community that can hold out hope for those who’ve given up on it (and recognising that sometimes that includes doing that for each other). It means loving those who believe themselves unlovable, because the resurrection is God’s refusal to let that be true for any of us. It means creating places of welcome and belonging and community for those who’ve got used to existing on society’s edges. Not because we hope for this life only. Not because our faith is futile. But because Jesus is risen from the dead, and this is what it looks like for his kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven.