Trinity 19
The Sermon for the 10.00am Eucharist at St Bene’t’s
on 15th October 2023, 19th Sunday after Trinity
The Reverend Dr James Gardom
Isaiah 25.1-9; Psalm 23; Philippians 4.1-9; Matthew 22.1-14
How can we retain hope in the world in the face of darkness, cruelty and destruction?
Up until 2016, High Table conversation between Fellows of Pembroke College often took a gently political turn. The Master is a veteran politician. The Fellows are a humane group, not short of opinions, with reasonable levels of confidence in their ability to play their part in making the world a better place. All this began to change with Brexit. I remember having lunch in college on the day after the vote. It was experienced as an unmitigated catastrophe. No one wanted to talk about it, and no one wanted to talk about anything else.
In the years since 2016 there has been a growing retreat from the discussion of politics, and world affairs, as they have seemed too mad, too shameful, or too frightening for over table conversation.
Rather than talk about our limp and feckless responses to Climate Change, the ever darkening political rhetoric about refugees, migrants and human rights, for example, we talk about the Mastership election, the University Admissions Processes, the College Gardens, the new coffee machine in the Senior Parlour.
I have been at lunch in Pembroke every day this week, and no Fellow as felt able to, or wanted to start a conversation about the events in Israel and Gaza. They are used to being able to see and even create solutions. I think that they have just given up hope. The Bedders, the maintenance staff, the gardeners are as wise in their own way, and their response has primarily been one of lament, and telling over their anger. Lament, and even anger are good Christian response to catastrophe, and we should make time for it in our prayers, and even in our conversations. But Christians face this kind of catastrophe with a different frame of reference in which there is always, and necessarily, a place for hope, and this is because our faith is inseparably connected with the Cross and the Resurrection.
Our readings this morning give us three visions of Hope.
There is the vision of God’s feast, in Isaiah 25.
There is a powerful image of Psalm 23. The Lord is my Shepherd.
There is a story of reversal in Matthew’s parable of the wedding Banquet.
Isaiah 25 was almost certainly written at a time of maximum peril for God’s people. The kingdom is on the verge of collapse, because of internal corruption, unwise external alliances, and the rapid growth of enormous empires in adjacent territories. In face of fear, anger and despair, Isaiah has a vision of a glorious feast for all the nations, which God will prepare the richest of food and wine, and at which God will wipe away every tear. This image of the completion of God’s purposes sustained God’s people through the difficult centuries around the exile in Babylon, the Hellenistic and Roman empires, and the millennia in Diaspora. It also came to symbolise for Christians the messianic banquet – our vision of the completion of God’s purposes in heaven, expressed with such eloquence in the book of Revelation, in hymns and poems. So, we can sustain hope, because our ancestors in even harder times were sustained by hope.
Psalm 23, the Lord is my Shepherd, has been used by Jews and Christians in times of fear and uncertainty – it is our refuge at funerals, words to calm us in the face of our darkest fears. Fully to make sense of it and of the other uses of Shepherd in the Bible, we need to understand the difference between a Palestinian shepherd and a British sheep farmer. The Shepherd of the Psalm is the Guardian and the guide of the sheep. He leads them through hills to valleys where there is water and grass. He relies on them to trust him, and to follow him – he is not behind on a quad bike, with dogs to push the sheep forward. The key thing about the sheep and the Shepherd is a relationship of trust, more than a relationship of understanding. If the sheep will not follow, or if having followed, they wander off, it is really hard for the Shepherd to provide for them, to protect them. By using this Psalm we are acknowledging our part in a two-way relationship, of which Trust is a much larger part than understanding. In the face of so much we cannot understand, we can maintain trust and obedience because the Lord is our Good Shepherd.
The final image we are given today is that of the wedding Banquet and to some extent this is Jesus’ version of Isaiah’s banquet. It is a parable in two parts.
The first part is a parable of reversal and replacement. The king is giving a wedding banquet for his son, and invites the worthy people to the banquet. In an extraordinary reversal, and insult to his honour, the worthy people cannot be bothered to come, or actually insult and kill the Messengers who remind them of the wedding feast. As so often, this is a parable of judgement. Those who ignore the invitation to God’s banquet of love and peace are simply ignored. Those who respond with anger and violence are destroyed by anger and violence. And then there is the great replacement – the King commands the presence of those thought not worthy, so his house will be full, his feast will be eaten, the wedding of his son will be honoured.
This hope of the great replacement of the violent and the arrogant by those who will take their places in gentleness and love in the banquet and purposes of God is one that can sustain us. The expectation of God’s judgement against the violent is a better place for our fear driven anger than retaliation and escalation. So, we can sustain hope because we have been invited to the wedding feast of the Son. After that, there is a sub parable of the man without a wedding garment. Even those who were unworthy, but have been asked to come to the feast, have a responsibility. They need to honour the occasion with their most honourable garment. It is notable that the King addresses this man as “Friend”. One senses that any answer would be acceptable – anything we can do in response to God’s call – but simply doing nothing, having no answer, will not do as a response to the invitation to the wedding feast.
These are images of hope for us in dark times. For Christians, they get their urgency and their validation in the Cross and the Resurrection of Christ. Our faith is that all the sinfulness and all the suffering of the world through all time are present to Christ on the cross.
The Starvation in Yemen.
The invasion of Ukraine. Genocide in Darfur.
The slaughters in Israel, and now in Gaza.
Christ has taken upon himself the anger, selfishness, cruelty and incompetence of leaders who cannot enable people to live together in peace, and even our own complicity with the arrangements that keep us comfortable while others suffer. And Christ has been given Victory. All the evils of the world, in all time, were marshalled against him in the cross. In the resurrection they were defeated, and we received the proclamation of the victory of God, working itself out through us, and through time. I cannot tell you how this victory is being worked out. My ordination, and my occupancy of this pulpit, does not give me a crystal ball, or any wisdom, greater than yours, about the detail of the working out of the purposes of God. In that matter we are all Laos - equally the people of God. But I can tell you that it is our business, in the face of the generosity of God, to acquire a wedding garment – a life of engagement and response in our own context – not because such a life is an adequate response, but because that is how we are called upon to honour God’s invitation. I can tell you that it is our business to follow the good Shepherd, with obedience and trust, even when, sheeplike, we cannot understand or predict the route that obedience and trust will lead us. I can tell you that nothing can happen which was not present on the Cross, and conquered in the resurrection.
And therefore, I can tell you that the end of the path is life, and the glorious banquet of peace and love, which is the completion of God’s purposes.