5th Sunday of Lent St Peter's. 28 March 2004

Fr Mark Bonney

Since today is the star of Passiontide - and commonly called Passion Sunday (although not called that in the calendar) - some reflections on the film The Passion of Christ might have been appropriate. But I've done that in the Review, which is now available. So something different instead - a little bit of church history!

Martin Luther is one of the great names of the 16th century Reformation. On the 31 October 1517, by way of an academic debate and not expecting to cause any great stir he posted what are known as his 95 theses on the door of the Church in Wittenberg where he taught. That event, though minor at the time is now seen as the seminal turning point of the Reformation leading inexorably to Martin Luther's excommunication from the RC church and the beginning of what we call Protestantism. The 95 theses were principally an attack on the sale of indulgences - that is you paid money to the church to get time off purgatory (quite a canny fund raiser you might have thought!) The thinking behind it had grown out of Luther's recent biblical study which had made him realise that human beings couldn't put themselves into a right relationship with God by their own deeds - being right with God - what is technically called justification - was a work of God received by us in faith - and not earned by good works. In some ways Luther said very little that St Augustine hadn't said 1000 years before - but certainly a few corrupt practises had grown up in the church and it was these that Luther was having a go at.

The point of this little bit of history is that those who know anything at all about Martin Luther will also know that he was a deeply troubled man - he had struggled and struggled to be right with God- he had obeyed all the laws and rules of the Church - but it was while reading and studying St Paul that the penny dropped and the weight of his anxiety lifted - the tremendous realisation that salvation was pure gift and not something to be earned.

That's a great truth - and we could all do well to reflect deeply upon it. However - such is the influence that Martin Luther has had on the Protestant Church in particular that the way St Paul is read has often been to see St Paul as suffering the same kind of guilt complexes as Martin Luther - that he was a man weighed down by the Jewish Law until his conversion and the penny dropped that everything was different with Jesus.

That's not at all the picture painted by our second reading this morning (see below) to which I want to give a little attention. It might even be worth having it handy. 

Paul is responding to a group of people who are insisting that Gentile Christians should be circumcised - and he begins with a lavish CV - his credentials as a Jew are impeccable "as to the law a Pharisee; as to zeal a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law - blameless." Apropos of what I've said earlier - there's not the slightest hint here of the impression that some are given in the light of Luther's legacy that Paul was a man riddled with guilt over his inability to live as the law demanded. In fact it's quite the contrary - Paul presents himself as an accomplished Jew - pretty well blameless.

What follows Paul's CV as a Jew is quite dramatic - he speaks of his conversion - not however as something that is a solution to a problem, or that is the release from a deep moral, psychological or spiritual crisis. Quite the opposite - "because of Christ" all his previous accomplishments became for him simply "loss". - our translation says, "I regard them as rubbish" - the translators were being polite - the words means dung. Even the best that Paul had done he cane to regard as nothing more than garbage because of "knowing Christ Jesus". 

That's pretty strong stuff - by "knowing Christ Jesus" Paul means being within what he calls elsewhere the 'body of Christ' - being part of a body of believers: and it means leaving aside the righteousness of one's own accomplishments in favour of the righteousness that "comes through faith in Christ" - something that is fulfilled in the resurrection itself.

I am very reassured by the last part of the passage as Paul recognises that he hasn't arrived but continues to press on towards the goal. - the goal of being with Christ beyond his own death - and secondly the goal of spiritual maturity. The phrase "because Christ Jesus has made me his own" is pretty strong stuff again - it means that he has been seized or captured by Christ - not that he initiated the relationship, or that he earned it somehow - and because of that being seized by Christ, which he understands to have been a gift of grace, he continues to strive towards what lies ahead.

As we begin today the last lap before Holy Week and Easter this passage has made me think - which is why I've looked closely at it. The events of Holy Week and Easter are absolutely central to the Christian gospel - ALL the events - it remains a complete mystery to me how some folk can come to church on Easter Day and have been to nothing the rest of Holy Week - but there's lots I don't understand. Anyway - they are the heart of the Gospel - and as we nudge towards celebrating them liturgically in some depth - this passage of Paul can help us think again about what it means to proclaim the gospel. I've laboured the point about how Luther's struggles with keeping the Law and Paul's apparent confidence in what he had done in the past; because some approaches to proclaiming the gospel offer the gospel as the answer to problems in people's lives. Paul understands the gospel to be just the opposite - it gives him no answers to problems, but instead it disturbed his answers and sent him in search of a new solution - a new understanding - or to be more accurate it thrust a new understanding in front of him that required a radical reassessment of the way things had been, the way they were and the way they were going to be. 

Reflecting on this moving passage of Paul I have been stuck again that the gospel that we will be proclaiming through our liturgies of Holy Week is not an answer to questions about life and the universe it is about being seized by God at ever deeper and deeper levels - it is about being brought face to face with what love is all about - a love that is hinted at in the utter extravagance of the anointing in the gospel passage - it is about being seized by the one and only living God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

SECOND READING Philippians 3.4b-14

A reading from the letter of Paul to the Philippians.

If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth
day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews;
as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the
law, blameless. Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of
Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of
knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I
regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a
righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in
Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of
his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if
somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this
or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has
made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing
I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on towards
the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.