Sermon: The Fifth Sunday of Easter

Preacher:

Date:

Sunday 28th April 2013

Service:

Cathedral Eucharist

Readings:

Acts of the Apostles 11: 1-18

John 13: 31-35

It is very instructive to spend a little time observing children playing. It is extremely good for adults: the sheer joyfulness, imagination and exuberance of play. Would that many adults could recapture that playfulness in life and faith: but we ‘grown ups’ become experienced in the ways of the world, some would say jaded or cynical. We succumb to the destructive narratives of envy, rivalry and jealousy. Lest I sound like I am over romanticising children, then let me be clear: children exhibit all those features too. The difference is that adults should know better: it’s something Jesus points us to in the gospels.

Picture two children playing. One of them is playing very happily with a teddy and then the other starts to want teddy as well. A squabble brews and the wise adult offers the child who hasn’t got teddy another toy. It is spurned. Indeed, any toy, even if it’s much better than teddy, is still rejected: ‘I want teddy’. So the adult steps in and says to the child who has teddy that she must share. But now the other child now displays no interest. What the child wanted was not the teddy, but the fact that the other child wanted the teddy. I want such and such, not because I want it for itself, but I want it because you want it: I mimic your desires. Human envy, rivalry and covetousness, as the Bible terms it, have early and deep seated roots.

Such covetous desire is deeply destructive, and leads us to seek to manage its violent outcomes: classically the creation of scapegoats to assuage us. The scapegoat in Hebrew practice was literally that; a goat upon whom ritually the sins of Israel were placed before being driven out into the wilderness. What we celebrated at Easter was the way in which Jesus took upon himself the role of scapegoat: as St Paul puts it, ‘for our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’ (2 Corinthians 5.21).

So then Jesus takes our mimicking desire and directs it away by being and showing the love that gives its all, that offers true peace and not the false peace offered by creating a scapegoat despite the great, but fleeting, satisfaction that it brings. The words Jesus speaks in St John’s gospel direct us away from our self-concern and out to concern for our neighbour: the love that desires only to serve is the love of Jesus.

Covetousness breeds criticism and harsh judgement. Not unlike those who criticise Peter in our first reading. They are angry with Peter because he is displaying a generosity they cannot make their own. Peter has already declared that ‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality’ (Acts of the Apostles 10.34); in other words God doesn’t pick or choose people based on human ethics and codes; God’s love cannot be restricted, his grace abounds. The Acts of the Apostles is the narrative of a people from whom grace abounds. This is at the heart of our catholic faith; that grace is not manifest locally, or amongst like-minded groups of people, but abounds throughout the world, with the Holy Spirit racing on before us.

Peter’s vision takes the notion of what is sacred and what is profane and turns it upside down, and through it Peter has the last of his three threefold interrogations: a threefold denial, a threefold confession of love of Jesus, and now the threefold perception of grace abounding.

Something like a large sheet comes down from heaven, and is spread out like a celestial picnic cloth; on it are animals that Peter is told to kill and eat: this is a problem for Peter, which characteristically he articulates: ‘I can’t do that, according to what I know to be holy’. The killing of animals by Jews was, and is, to make them ritually pure. But remember the criticism addressed to Peter was that he had already been defiled by eating with Gentiles. Excuse the pun, but Peter is caught between a rock and a hard place. Does fidelity to the Law of Moses trump fidelity to the driving of the Holy Spirit and faithfulness to Jesus? It is a decisive moment in the history of the church. Three times the voice from heaven declares that what God has made clean, Peter must not call profane. It is for not now about the food per se, it is about those with whom he can eat. This is church: sitting down to eat with people we might not, for all sorts of reasons, normally want to sit down with.

Peter has seen the table cloth of heaven. The creatures on it are immaterial, the point is that the table cloth of heaven is spread before him to teach him that God shows no partiality, and neither must he. He must eat with all who share the gift, as he says: ‘if then God gave [the Gentiles] the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?’ (Acts of the Apostles 11.17). Peter came to see that the Covenant God had made with Israel now encompassed all peoples, and languages and nations. This is how heaven will look and Peter has glimpsed heaven itself.

The table cloth of heaven is spread on the altar at the Eucharist as we come to share table fellowship together with the Lamb of God, Christ our Passover, at the heart of all we do. Sharing in the life of the forgiving victim, the scapegoat who saves us means we can no longer create victims, for God shows no partiality; it means that we cannot claim God as our possession, like the child with teddy, but rather that all that God is possesses us and draws us as forerunners of the coming kingdom which has at its heart the banquet of the Lamb; and blessed are all those who are called to his supper.