Easter 3

Sermon preached by the Reverend Ed Green

Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.

For some people, it seems perfectly obvious that the whole Bible is all about Jesus Christ. We hear from one of the four Gospels at every eucharistic service. The epistles often give some practical advice, but you don’t have to sit down reading one for very long before Paul or one of the other New Testament writers starts to say something important about Jesus and our relationship with him.

And even what we call the Old Testament - that is, the Hebrew Bible, that part of our Bible that was already considered to be Scripture before the incarnation - often seems to be telling us something about Christ. Just think of all the readings we get from Isaiah and other prophets in the run-up to Christmas. Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given - it’s not surprising that we hear things like that and think of Jesus. Indeed, the Gospel writers were keen to demonstrate that the life and death of Jesus fulfilled various prophecies that had already been made.

And yet, there are also many Christians who find the difference between Old and New Testaments too big to reconcile. The God of the Old Testament, some people feel, cannot be the same God that we know from the New, for his character is just too different.

Add to this the Church’s regrettable history of supercessionism - that is, the belief held for centuries that Christianity replaces and invalidates Judaism - and before long our shared view of who Jesus is, where we find him in the Bible, and why, becomes hopelessly tangled.

The solution to all this is not some clever theory about the text. Instead, Jesus tells us directly; he interprets to us the things about himself in all the scriptures.

As it happens, Eastertide is the one part of the year when we don’t actually get much from the Old Testament on a Sunday morning; since we are commemorating the time after the resurrection, we get our first lesson from the Acts of the Apostles instead.

However, we do still sing our psalm. And Jesus sings it with us. The snares of death encompassed me; the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me; I suffered distress and anguish. I kept my faith, even when I said, ‘I am greatly afflicted’; we don’t hear these particular words said by Jesus in the Gospels, but we do know that they apply to him.

He was betrayed, put on trial and sentenced to death. He didn’t want to die. But his plea to be spared that fate was always accompanied by “not my will, Lord, but your will be done.” Even when he was greatly afflicted, he kept his faith. It’s not that the psalmist wrote this verse intending it to be about Jesus - but as Christians, we interpret it through Jesus, who reveals himself to us as we walk along on our journey.

But does the fact that we can find Jesus in the Hebrew Bible mean that we Christians have the monopoly on God’s words and promises? Certainly, throughout history it has been common to believe so, and even today there are many Christians who feel that in order for us to be right, everybody else must surely be wrong.

And it might seem, from what we hear St Peter telling us today, that they have apostolic backing. After all, he says to his audience you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors … with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish.

This is where a lack of context is a severe impediment to our understanding. In the first few decades of Christianity, when the First Letter of Peter is most likely to have been written, there wasn’t one clear religion called Christianity, and another one called Judaism.

Peter was Jewish, but he believed in the risen Christ, which was a radical new understanding of who and what a Messiah should be. The communities to whom he ministered would have had both Jewish and gentile members. It doesn’t make sense to think of this passage as a statement from a Christian against Jews, because there wasn’t a clear boundary between the two religions back then.

“The futile ways of our ancestors” is far better understood as a criticism of the fragmented and inequitable structure of their society, inherited from successive imperial dynasties.

Helpfully, we also got to hear Peter’s preaching narrated for us this morning in the Book of Acts, and here again we can start to see Jesus himself teaching us. Peter, Jesus’ chief apostle, declares to his audience: the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him. That promise was made by God long before the birth of Jesus, and Jesus did not come to abolish it.

Jesus’ ministry is not about division and exclusion. He does occasionally admonish people for their bad behaviour, even gets angry. And he does at times warn us about great chasms that can grow between us.

But he is not about division; he’s about togetherness, and this is lived out every day. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. Above all others, this is the great act of interpretation that Jesus performs for us, and he didn’t just do it that one time. Time and again, day by day, week by week, he speaks to us (through the voice of his priests) and says “Take, eat.”

When we read the Bible - any part of the Bible - in light of this sharing, this togetherness at his table, we can find his interpretation laid out for us on every page. Where practices are divisive and exclusionary, they are admonished - sometimes with very stern language.

It’s part of the reason why idolatry is so consistently condemned in the Old Testament; instead of being united as a community worshipping God people were forming smaller, rival groups, each worshipping their own deity and abandoning practices which served to keep the community together as one.

Whenever we hear about God’s wrath, we’re not far away from hearing about people neglecting their duties to the less fortunate.

And when, in parables, we hear about the good people and the bad, we are so often told not to try and separate out the bad ourselves, in this life. Think of the wheat and the tares - we are told not to pull up the weeds before the harvest, because doing so might damage the crop. That parable ends with a rather ominous statement about burning the tares, but the point is that wheat and tares are very hard to tell apart while they are growing. Who are we to try to separate them ourselves? By sharing in the Body of Christ - the Bread of Life - we are expressing our hope and our faith that we are the wheat. Deciding

who might be a tare is not for us. But it goes beyond this - ripping out the weeds is a bad for the whole crop. If the crop is a metaphor for us, what does that say to us about the people we think might not belong in our midst?

As Christians, we come to know Jesus through scripture, but he makes himself known to us in the breaking of the bread. By this, of course I mean the Eucharist, but that goes so far beyond the end of the Sunday service, because he also makes himself known to us when we break bread with Christians elsewhere, as family, or friends, or colleagues.

And, yes, he even makes himself known to us when we break with non-Christians, too. Breaking bread with friend and stranger is how he interprets for us, his followers. We don’t - or rather we shouldn’t - take our preconceived idea of Jesus and crowbar that into all our texts and situations. On the contrary, we always look for the interpretation that he reveals to us in the breaking of the bread.

And then will our hearts be burning within us while he talks to us on the road, while he opens the scriptures to us.