Against the Gnostics

Preached Septuagesima (17th February) 2019. St Michael's, Stockwell.

Jeremiah 17:5-10

1 Corinthians 15:12-20

Luke 6:17-26

It’s a great pleasure to be speaking today. I don’t often hear the sermon in church at all because of the children. And they don’t want to listen to anyone for 10 minutes, certainly not me. I asked Jamie what I should talk about today and he asked if I was going to talk about poo. I fear he would be disappointed. 

To give you my credentials for preaching, I should add to Erica’s introduction that I’ve just finished my Doctorate on the early church ecclesiastical historian Socrates Scholasticus, who I am confident no-one has ever heard of. I’m not going to talk about him either. 

But he was in my mind when I saw the readings for today. Because they are also obscure. Jeremiah is always obscure. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is famous, and includes one of the most read passages in the bible – the one about love that people have at weddings. I had it at my wedding. It’s not that one. The gospel looks more promising – it’s the beatitudes. But it’s not the famous ones. They’re in Matthew. From the Sermon on the Mount.

I want to start today by comparing Luke’s account of the beatitudes with Matthew’s. 

There are a lot of similarities. Both of these are blessings. In both we can hear the echoes of Jeremiah and the psalmist (and lots of other Old Testament prophets): blessed are those who trust in the Lord, not in man’s priorities, but God’s. These blessings are pointing us towards what God’s priorities. 

In both, they occur just after the disciples are called by Jesus and after a crowd gathers. And this crowd has come from a long way away. It a couple of hundred miles between Sidon and Jerusalem. Thereafter they diverge.

In Matthew, Jesus goes up a mountain with them alone and then he launches into a list of blessings that mostly concern spiritual virtue. The poor in spirit, they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the pure of heart, peacemakers and so on. Each of those has a more or less linked reward: the merciful obtain mercy; the pure in heart see God. 

Luke’s account is different. It’s different in lots of ways – I am always struck by how he blesses and condemns his audience not by talking about what they will do, but what they are. I suspect some of us are pretty uncomfortable with the condemnations of those who are rich and those who are full. I know I am. But I am not going to preach today on the role of the poor or the nature of salvation or the humanity of Christ. 

Instead, I want to talk about the world and Christ’s engagement with it. Because when we listen to Jeremiah and the Psalmist, I think there is a risk of withdrawing from the world and treating this is as a spiritual exercise. From the Psalm: their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night. 

But what Luke describes is rooted in the present and the physical reality of who he is speaking to. He doesn’t bless those who will hunger for righteousness, but those who are hungry. He is blessing them for what they are, right now. Literally, two of those blessings have the intensifier ‘now’ in them. The subjects of his blessings are the poor, the hungry, and the weeping. And the rewards are both spiritual and tangible. The hungry are promised food, not a vision of God. Luke’s account does promise the kingdom of God but is stripped of much wishy-washy spiritual allegory that lurks around promises of reward. These ambitions are rooted in the world as well as the kingdom of God 

It may not be obvious, but our section of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is addressing the same thing. 

Paul argues here that our salvation happens through the resurrection, and this is a real tangible event. The dead are raised. This is so important that Paul writes it out twice and added it to a letter that mostly talks about something else. 

He does this because he is worried about the church in Corinth. They are clearly talking about the resurrection in a different way a milder, more palatable, spiritual experience. This is one of Paul’s earlier letters, written in the early 50s, but that tendency to downplay the concreteness of the resurrection never goes away. In the second century, a series of Christian thinkers we now call the Gnostics (from the Greek, meaning secret knowledge) sought to allegorise away great swathes of Christ’s death and resurrection. Replacing them with ever more elaborate schemes of spiritual hierarchies and supernatural powers. Valentinius, the most well-known of them, argued that Jesus had a supernatural body, and indeed was unable to experience corruption – to digest and excrete food. My son was perhaps right to ask about that. His opponents rejected this, led by Irenaeus of Lyons, one of the great orthodox theologians. And I am very glad they did. Because if we deny the tangibility of Jesus, we rob the mission of Christ of its roots in the world. 

Normally at this stage in my sermons I like to dredge up an ancient saint to make my point. And today is the feast day of Donatus, Romulus, Secundian, and their 86 companions, who died in the year 304 under Emperor Diocletian. But it is also the feast of Janani Luwum, archbishop of Uganda, who protested against Idi Amin and was murdered by him on this day in 1977. It is his statue – and not those of Donatus and his friends – that is outside Westminster Abbey as testament that bearing witness to Christ doesn’t just mean letting pagans execute you. It means fighting the problems of the world. And that is because of the exhortation the Christ made. 

In my favourite novel about American anti-slavery Calvinism, and indeed about Christianity at all, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, the main character, a preacher, says this about the world: 

I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. … I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.

[M. Robinson, Gilead (2004), 65] 

I think Jesus thought that too. And today’s gospel calls us to root our faith in the hereafter in the condition of the world, right here, right now. 

There’s no social or political blueprint in the bible. No manual on how to do it, which is probably a good thing. But there’s a clear instruction to do it. 

And it is because Jesus did, that he brought humanity to salvation. The concrete reality of Christ’s presence and mission is what makes his resurrection our resurrection. 

I’d like to end by going back to Jeremiah. Let our trust in the Lord make us like a tree planted by water and because of this, let us never cease to bear fruit in the world, right here, right now. 

Amen.