KILL JESUS

As I walked down the road this morning I saw two words scratched into the frost on a car windscreen. “Kill Jesus.”

So I added four more: “It’s already been tried.”

Jesus is an inconvenient truth.

Imagine kneeling at an altar rail while gunmen enter the church and shoot the heads of those alongside you, mingling their blood with the communion wine.

That you would be upset is an absolute understatement, you would react with shock, horror and hatred. But just such a massacre by Pilate’s forces in the temple is presented in Luke 13:1-9, and Jesus simply dismisses it as if it has not happened.

Or imagine a tower block suddenly falling and crushing 18 people in your neighbourhood. This calamity, in the form of the collapsed tower of Siloam, is also presented to Jesus in Luke 13:1-9. He isn’t shocked, he doesn’t gush sympathy or offer an explanation. He just says: ‘Repent!’

What?

Jesus doesn’t threaten us, he undermines us, because we are asleep.

Our taken for granted, deeply held bed-rock belief is that physical matter is everything.

Or if we believe in a just God, we may think everything happens for a reason, so God allows bad things when people somehow deserve them.

Jesus simply won’t endorse this ignorance.

He doesn’t say the Godless will be struck by an asteroid, good fortune is God's blessing, or suffering is due to sin.

Jesus’ reality is not the parroting of religious platitudes.

He is aware of life's fragility and the suddenness with which death comes. He doesn’t need murder and natural disaster to remind him.

I once wrote a sermon containing the image of dead bodies to shock, and a tutor warned me not to upset people. Which made me think, to coin that dreadful phrase, what would Jesus do? Well what does he do? Preach repentance in this life, or serve up inoffensive pie in the sky when you die?

It was Jesus who, when told about a funeral, said this: “Let the dead bury their own dead”.

Do we imagine a vicar saying this?

Those who die in Haiti and Chile and Iraq are not news items, unconscious intercessory reflexes, or chances to rationalise it all away.

They are nothing less than the very contingency of our own humanity reflected back to us.

There’s an unwritten rule in news-reporting which states that one death in your local news outlet is worth hundreds in your country, thousands on your continent, and millions on the other side of your world.

But a Church shocked by even one death is asleep.

Because repent means wake up, we are more than this, it shouldn’t take tragedy to nudge us into God.

Jesus commands us to repent, and repentance, or metanoia, simply is not some ritualistic religious expression of regret in some Sunday morning cultural backwater.

Repentance is a changed mind, new being, fuller consciousness, a way to see, to discover a different perspective which arcs toward joy in God just as it lives in the awful precariousness and odd beauty of our fleeting existence.

Repentance says live, because we are not this, so wake up, ACT, but out of peace, not fear, or compulsion, or desire, or profit.

You may have seen the film called: ‘Bucket List’, starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. The two characters meet in a hospital because they have each been diagnosed with cancer. When they realize they are dying they set about writing a list of everything they now intend to get done.

But who isn’t dying?

If we live the knowledge of mortality, we become someone much greater, with no Bucket list required.

This is repentance, or as the Bishop of Lyons put it more than 1,800 years ago: “In his infinite Love, God became what we are, in order to make us what he is himself.”

Repentance then is learning to live wholly and fully.

Later on is always too late.

We have not been cut down, but we should not presume we have the fruit of God’s infinite and higher Self.

Our stay of execution is our opportunity to interpret the present times, the fundamental stuff of this life, which depends not upon dead matter, but conscious living spirit.

The "sin" of the fig tree is not that it is doing something bad, but that it is doing nothing in particular.

It is just comfortable, complacent, and taking up space in God’s economy until shocked to find physical life is nasty brutish and short.

While he may correct some bad theology, Jesus stays silent about why God, the supreme consciousness who expresses this unstable universe as his body, will allow bad things to happen to good people.

Repent, he says, look at it this way. The time to grow and watch and pray and turn on the light is always now, because we are in a much much much bigger picture, which is supremely good and conscious.

There IS more than this.

To repent then, is to act on this haiku by the Japanese poet Toyohiko Kagawa:

I read

In a book

That a man called Christ

Went about doing good

It is very disconcerting to me

That I am so easily

Satisfied

With just Going about.