Sermons

Tenth Sunday after Trinity
Sunday 31 July at 8am

Simon Cowling

Readings: 1 Corinthians 12. 1-11; Luke 19. 41-47

There has been a good deal of talk over the past few weeks about what kind of religion Islam is. Is it a religion of peace whose scriptures commit its followers to live in harmony with their neighbour, whether Muslim or not? Or is it a religion of aggression, whose followers are forbidden to consort with kaffirs, non-believers and for whom suicide bombings are a divinely sanctioned form of protest against western governments' policies?

I am not sufficiently well-grounded in the sacred texts or the traditions of Islam to be able to do justice to that question. All I will say is that Christianity, whose texts and traditions I do know reasonably well, could legitimately be asked the same question by outsiders. I am currently reading a masterly history of the Reformation in Europe by Diarmaid McCulloch and it makes sobering reading for anyone who likes to think of Christianity as a peacable religion. Tell that to the thousands of Protestants and Catholics who died at each other's hands during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; or to those who, in a distant and distorted echo of those Reformation struggles, have lost their lives in Northern Ireland since 1969.

In the end, though, and sometimes against the evidence of history, I believe that our core beliefs as Christians commit us to the path of peace rather than the path of violence. That should certainly inform our response as a religious community to the terrorist attacks we have experienced recently. One of those core beliefs is implicit in today's Gospel reading: repentance. It can be, and has been, argued that underlying the whole of Jesus' ministry as recorded in the Gospels is one great foundational theme: a call to repentance. Nowhere does this theme come across more clearly than in chapter 1 of St. Mark's Gospel when Jesus proclaims in Galilee: (The) Kingdom of God is near! Turn away from your sins and believe the Good News. Jesus is renewing the call of the prophets, so often despised and marginalised in Jewish history: God's people are to heed God's call to repent, to renew their lives in accordance with God's will and not their own human will. This call to repentance climaxes with the arrival in Jerusalem, part of which we have heard this morning in Luke's account. Jesus weeps over God's city, Jerusalem, representing as it does the failure of God's people to heed the call to repentance. His tears are those of anguish about the ultimate consequences of such a failure: the final destruction of God's holy city at the hands of her enemies. And Jesus' subsequent entry into the Temple and his clearing out of those who sold what was needed for sacrifices was, perhaps, not so much to do with his anger about the sacrificial cult as such, as about the fact that this cult had not produced the repentance he believed to be necessary for God's people to be reconciled to God.

If we are to live the life to which Christ calls us we need first to repent. The theological understanding of this word for Christians has to do not simply with saying, or better being, sorry - although it does involve that. It has to do more properly with a change in attitude, with seeing people through the eyes of Christ and loving them as he loves them; with having what Paul calls the mind of Christ through our right use of the gifts of his Holy Spirit. Out of this repentance, out of this change in attitude, will grow the fruits of God's Spirit - the love and the joy and the peace that are the traits of true Christian discipleship. May it be so in our lives, and in the lives of all those who seek to follow Christ. Amen.

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