Author: MARK

Holy Week in the Time of Crisis—
Wednesday: Crucifixion of a Blasphemer
I have spoken in previous talks about God’s Kingdom as the source of Christian hope, and the Cross and Resurrection as the inauguration of the Kingdom. Yesterday, I discussed what it might mean for an individual to align her or his life to the reality of the coming Kingdom.
Today, I consider how our collective life as church engages with the coming Kingdom.
Monday’s talk was entitled “Crucifixion of a Rebel”, and I discussed how the Kingdom is partly about power and politics, and they are partly why Jesus was crucified. Jesus was crucified as a political rebel, under a sign that announced Him as King.
However, Jesus was also crucified as a blasphemer. He was tried by the religious authorities first, before he was taken to Pontius Pilate. Matthew, Mark and Luke all recount the same conversation: Jesus is asked, are you the Messiah? And He answers in the affirmative. Which is to say, in Mark He says ‘yes’, in Matthew and Luke “you say so” – but in each case he cites a prophecy from the Book of Daniel (chapter 7), about the coming of the Messiah. He is evidently applying this to Himself, and the response comes immediately: “The high priest tears his clothes and says, “He has spoken blasphemy!”
Organised religion was, in this case, “on the wrong side of history.” Religion is powerful stuff. It can be powerful for good, and it can go badly wrong and become powerfully toxic.
There are various root causes for toxic religion. Reading this story, what I mainly see is people detached from reality. Why did the Sanhedrin condemn Jesus? Well, perhaps their motives were impure – perhaps they were protecting their position of wealth and honour. But I wonder if the underlying issue was that they could not deal with a new reality when it stood in front of them. I suspect many of them were genuinely devout, and most of them (not all, but most) were expecting a Messiah. But when the Messiah stood before them, and turned out not to match their previous expectations, they wholly failed to deal with this new reality.
Religion can easily become the thing that detaches us from reality, when it is supposed to help us to live in line with reality. Religion can easily become self-referential, rather than pointing us to the larger reality that lies beyond religion. This is evident in the history of the church’s thinking about the Kingdom.
Jesus speaks about the Kingdom using images of fields, housework, parties or other ordinary things. It is pretty clear that He does not see it happening mainly within worship, whether in church, synagogue nor temple. The Kingdom of God is not primarily about religion at all – it is about the nature of reality, and how we live in it.
If this is true then, religion is a sub-category of Kingdom, not the other way around. The Kingdom does not fit inside religion – the Kingdom is too big, and religion is too small.
This, at least, is my understanding. But there have always been Christians who have thought that the Kingdom of God should fit inside the church. There have even been some who thought the Kingdom of God was the same as rule by the Byzantine emperor. An identification of church and Kingdom has historically always tended to suck more and more political power towards the people in charge, and makes it harder to resist abuse of power.
So I am working on the basis that religion might help to build the Kingdom, or help us to see it, but that the Kingdom is much bigger than religion. Having defined my terms, and been a bit critical of how religion can go wrong, I want to speak more positively as I ask: what’s the point? How does religion help us to engage with reality, and specifically with the coming Kingdom of God in which lies the hope and salvation of the world? I will offer three thoughts, which perhaps work down through the issue from the superficial to the more essential:
First, that the church is a prototype of the Kingdom;
Second, that the church is centred on repentance and forgiveness;
Third, that in worship our imagination is re-ordered in ways that help us to see the Kingdom coming into being.
First, the church can be a school of hope by looking like a working-model of the Kingdom of God. A prototype, if you like. Church can do this in a number of ways.
It can offer the kind of village that humans need if they are to thrive, even in the midst of a world capital. There are relatively few places in today’s society where people of different ages and generations get together, and that’s a real shame. Because there are lots of reasons to believe that having the sweep and bustle of children around is good for older people; and having lots of honorary grandparents around is really good for young families. The middle stages of life, between those extremes, can be the hardest; church can help people sustain their energy and sense of meaning through that phase. And as people move into retirement, church can offer more satisfying options than playing more golf. So, the sheer variety of people in church is part of its being a prototype of the kingdom.
What is more, church can jostle us up against all sorts of people who are not like us, and with whom we might not naturally choose to spend time. I do not know if your experience is the same as mine, that church can actually be really annoying? And also often quite ridiculous? I think this is true, but I do try to see it as a benefit, not a problem. Because what brings us into church is faith, not some consumer preference, this means you have to stick with it and work through annoyance and ridiculousness. You have to learn to exercise patience and forbearance. Life in church offers a lesson in being human: dealing with broken people without retaliating, dehumanizing or running away.
Church also organises activities to help other people. I suspect we under-estimate this as an evangelistic asset. In a society that seems to be going to hell, many people are looking for a way to be part of the solution rather than the problem, but they do not know what to do. Church is a solution. It helps passive consumers turn into active citizens – whether that happens through joining eco-church, or serving teas at the old folks’ lunch that combats loneliness, or shelving tins for the foodbank.
This ‘working model of the Kingdom’ should not limit itself to addressing purely local problems. When people join us in church, they ought to be able to see the radical inclusion of the Kingdom, the upending of worldly norms of hierarchy and status, and this should stimulate the question, why is the rest of the world not like this? A church that runs as a demonstration-project for the Kingdom is likely also to become a focus of dissent. This relates to my first point about getting in touch with reality. The consumer-capitalist society in which we live is massively and lethally dysfunctional, and perhaps we should be surprised not that some people are activists and dissenters, but that we are not all activists and dissenters. Church should help people to see straight, offer some space in which to think; and thus, to become not just thinkers, but doers – which is to say, cultivators of hope.
So far, so activist. All this is important, but also a bit superficial. Pressing further in, I suggest that religious practice can offer hope when it is centred on repentance.
It is not hard to describe what the world should be like – or to do the same for one community, for a church, for a family, for an individual’s life. Activists do this all the time. But the nub of the issue is that, as St Paul puts it, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (Romans 7:15). This is the rock on which activism often founders, and the reason activists so often burn out.
Christianity, as a response to its realism about human nature, centres on contrition, confession, repentance, penance and forgiveness. Corporate confession is a central part of Anglican liturgical tradition, and many of us also benefit from private use of the sacrament of reconciliation. The point is not to lower self-esteem or induce neurosis. Quite the opposite – we confess our sins so as to relieve ourselves from the terrible burden of self-sufficiency, and so as to look to God as the source of our hope.
When we confess often, then we know that we do not impress God. And to be free from the pressure to be impressive is to liberate hope. Churches in which everyone pretends that they are spiritually impressive – or, for that matter, pretend that they all believe every word of the Creed – are oppressive places. Places where one cannot be one’s honest self, or discuss with others the truth of one’s own life. On the other hand, a church that centres the recognition that we are all broken and unimpressive is more likely to be a church community that is worth belonging to.
But this focus on repentance is also part of a much bigger pattern, which takes us beyond religion into the whole of the Kingdom. I have stressed that King Jesus’ choice on the Cross was a choice to be on the side of the poor, excluded and despised: the scum of the earth, if you like. Part of the neurosis of some Christians is that they want to belong to the Kingdom, but they do not want to be the scum of the earth.
The Kingdom is not intended for the people everyone else likes, for the successful types. Jesus says in Luke 6 that they don’t need the blessing, because they get lots of positive feedback already. The Kingdom is for the scum. So, the invitation is to relax into being the scum of the earth; to recognise that we’re not going to fix ourselves or our own world. Our hope is not in our own goodness, or in progress, or in liberal institutions, or in science; but in God.
Third, we come to worship.
I am going to speak about the mundane practicalities of how we run our worship. I fully recognise that this is, in a sense, to miss the point. At the core of the experience of worship there is the raw encounter between God and God’s people. People sometimes rise from their knees transfigured by prayer in a way that has little to do with everything else that has happened in the service. However, this is all mysterious, because God is unaccountable and unpredictable. We certainly cannot generate this kind of encounter by running services to the correct formula.
However, worship also acts on us in ways that are steadier, more regular and more predictable, and which arise from how we actually run our services. I want to close by speaking about how regular worship shapes our religious imagination.
I spoke yesterday about the importance of imagination. It is the faculty that enables us to engage with the future. Since the Kingdom of God is already but not yet fully here – we need to imagine a Kingdom-future so as to live into the Kingdom.
Religious practices in general, Christian worship in particular, are like a gym for the imagination. They juggle images, weave stories, establish a whole imaginative eco-system. Within this system are to be found resources to deal with every one of life’s major challenges: with the constant flux of existence; with mortality, death and life; with evil and its defeat; with destruction and new beginnings.
I believe this complex set of practices that we call worship is God-given, and is essential for us to grow into properly developed human beings. However, they can be intoxicating – I refer to my previous comments about losing touch with reality – so Christian worship needs to be disciplined by the revelation of Christ. That is to say, it needs always to point to the centrality of self-sacrificial love as the principal of existence and as an ethical standard. It needs always to point away from itself and towards the Kingdom, and to avoid the trap of settling into a mythologised version of the cycle of nature.
The central act of Christian worship is Holy Communion. I will say more about that tomorrow, since we commemorate the institution of the sacrament on Maundy Thursday. For now, let me just highlight that the Eucharist is a powerful example of worship as a school for the imagination. It is a kind of sacred play-acting: we act out a historical story, but we also invoke a fundamental logic of self-gift. Bread and wine represent our sweat and tears, our lives – they are given away and sacrificed – and then given back to us, transformed into the flesh of God, into whose body we are once again incorporated.
As I say, worship is a gym for the sacred imagination.
However, the most important thing I have to say about the worship we carry out in church is that it needs to retain the hope of its own abolition. That is to say, at the heart of our worship must be the glorious dream of the Kingdom being fully realised, when heaven will come to earth, the Lamb will stand in the midst of His people, and we shall worship God not through signs and figures, but face-to-face. I end with Isaiah’s vision of the Kingdom – of a time beyond religion, when we shall simply live at peace with one another and with God.
They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:9). Amen.

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