St Paul's CofE Church Sarisbury Green

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Some of you will breathe a sigh of relief, not least me! Some of you will be somewhat bewildered at the state of the inner recesses of my mind but I hope that I might have made you think a bit, and to use the old cliché, maybe to think outside the box – I've always wondered what shape that box might be, and in wondering now, I have thought of a picture by Christian artist Gwen Meharg (www.drawneartogod.com). Here it is

 

It represents the raising of Lazarus in John 11. And this throws us straight to the resurrection. This is the note we want to finish on. It's what Lent leads to, the event that we have been waiting for that has already happened.

Jesus said, 'I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?' (John 11:25, 26)

What seems a long time ago, I asked you ask yourself three questions

• Where have I come from?
• Where am I now?
• Where am I going?

Given what we've been through over the past 38 reflections, it's my hope and prayer that the answer to the second and third questions might be different from when you started.

Let's do this again sometime...

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I can get the idea that I'm all too easily a disappointment to God; sometimes He shows me what I'm really like, underneath the veneer, behind the mask, and I don't like what I see. I can get the idea that the disciples often disappointed Jesus, their understanding or lack of it, their faith, or lack of it, denials, doubt; I see myself in them.

But the cross showing us how disappointed and disillusioned God is – well, I'm not sure...I wonder how God the Father felt about having to send his son, knowing that there was no other way, no other means by which reconciliation and restoration, not just of people but of the whole of creation, could be achieved. Was he happy to do that? I don't know. Was he reluctant? I don't think so; I don't think God hesitated for one moment. His motivation was his sovereign choice to love unconditionally what he had made – including us. I am sure that God the Father was equally hurt by the break in the relationship he enjoyed with his son caused when Jesus bore our sin on the cross; this sense of God the Father's hurt may be something we don't think about – we tend to focus on Jesus, 'About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice..."My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"' (Matthew 27:46), but Father and Son were, I think equally estranged.

Was he disappointed and disillusioned that he had to go so far? Perhaps this idea opens up for us just how great a price was paid; the cost of the cross cannot, indeed, must not be underestimated. It is true to say that we cannot begin fully to understand, neither should we expect to, the full extent of that cost. But we can stand in awe, we can marvel, we can be amazed, keeping a firm grip on the childlike wonder that our Father should go to such lengths and never taking it for granted – never taking forgiveness granted, never taking reconciliation for granted, never taking restoration for granted, never taking for granted what God wants to do in us. He wants to put us back together, to repair our brokenness,  to go on making us and remaking us, to restore the image of God in us, to make us like Christ. The cross is where it begins, is what makes it all possible – and only the cross.

Maybe God was disappointed; maybe God was disillusioned; but there is a sense of inevitability – caused simply because God loves us so much – we do catch a sense of inevitability - '...From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.' (Matthew 16:21). Jesus knew that his ministry would culminate in a cross and Luke tells us that Jesus '...set his face to go to Jerusalem.' (Luke 9:51, NRSV).

What we see in the gospels is Jesus determination and resolve and beyond that we see him loving us 'to the end'. I, for one, am glad about that. I'm glad there is a cross; I'm sad that it had to come to that. I'm glad because in the presence of a holy God I am impotent; there's nothing I do in my defence, nothing I can do to justify myself – that he has done it all is brilliant. That's the cross – the place I can shed my impotence, my sin, my disappointment, my disillusion,  and know that it has been dealt with, all of it. It's the cross that makes the Covenant Prayer possible – that kind of surrender, that kind of submission, difficult, immensely difficult, but possible. Possible because God works from the inside out;  the cross marks the start of what He wants to do, not for me, but in me.

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"You call me 'Teacher' and 'Lord,' and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another's feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. (John 13:12 to 15)  There's a sense in which the term 'servant leadership' is too easily used. True, it gets us away from a paternalistic, 'father knows best', approach, but I think there's more to it. Jesus wants us to wash each other's feet – metaphorically, of course! We are to be everyone's servant. The church is a community of servants; the servants are to serve the servants and all the servants serve their servant king, Jesus, who served us first. We have to be willing to serve each other; perhaps more importantly, we have to be prepared to be served. To accept the service of another is to place value and worth on that person (the pearl again?). It requires humility; it requires us to place the interests of another before our own and accept the service offered.

There's almost an aside before the foot washing is described.'Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end' (John 13:1, NRSV).  It's an aside worth reflecting on, especially 'to the end'.

Second, Jesus gives us a way of remembering – the bread and the wine – the tangible sense based way of getting to grips with the cost of our salvation and realising that we bring nothing to the table. God gives '...to those who can give nothing in return...Serving those who have no way to serve in return...Jesus has rescued us. His blood, our redemption. He's the good gift...the church says yes to the good gift' (Jesus want to save Christians; Rob Bell, Zondervan, 2008). God does it all; God commits everything – no higher price.

Third, Jesus goes through the experience of Gethsemane. We can only guess at his understanding of the horror that lay before him – the physical agony, the pain of separation from his father, the weight of our sin laid upon him – no wonder he recoiled, 'My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death' (Matthew 26:38); no wonder he prayed, 'My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me.' (Matthew 26:39). But, wonder of wonders, he continues, 'Yet not as I will, but as you will.' (Matthew 26:39). This is surely love 'to the end'. This is Jesus committing himself to us, to the way of the cross. This is Jesus, in a sense, praying the Covenant Prayer with us, 'We freely and wholeheartedly yield all things to your pleasure and disposal'.

Jesus commits to us; we commit to him and in so doing we commit to each other.

... The queue I join is always the slowest moving...Not for me a book like 'The Stature of Waiting' (W.H. Vanstone; Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982), required reading when I was exploring vocation! Others are happy to wait, having accepted the benefits of 'delayed gratification', apparently unperturbed by the passage of time and the slowness with which their aspirations are achieved. If there's something odd about waiting, there's something completely baffling about Lent.

I have heard it described as waiting for something that has already happened. That's right, I suppose – we live this side of events that have already happened. In effect, we are looking back in time and we do that through the eyes of all sorts of people, all of whom have placed their own perceptions on what happened and what its impact might be – the gospel writers, Paul, John, James, the Early Fathers, Augustine, Wesley...and so on, including my own prejudices and preconceptions. Perhaps what we carry forward in our own minds is a distilled version, but I wonder whether that has to be inevitable.

We look back to something we know has happened, and rightly we rejoice; they weren't even looking forward to an unimaginable future. Perhaps we could try to view things through the eyes of the people that were actually there; for them the events of Easter happened in real time. They didn't know what lay ahead. The death and resurrection of Jesus were scarcely expected by those around him and would have been a surprise – and it is, surprising just how quickly events unfolded after the last supper and the haste with which things were done. Despite all that Jesus had said to them, they didn't quite get the point. What did it all mean to them? Could they actually make sense of what was going on around them and of what they felt?

Only after the resurrection did things begin to fall into place, and even then not for all. After all, they had to deal with disappointment, disillusion, shock – their dreams had been shattered. To come back from such a position takes time and the disciples are no exception. Thomas doubted, the disciples on the road to Emmaus debated and in both cases Jesus  revealed himself in person; Peter had to be reinstated and Jesus did so face to face. And things fell into place really quite slowly. Even as late as the Ascension, 'some doubted'. Yet however slow they were on the uptake, however they felt, whatever they thought, they were all given a mission – to take the gospel out, to make disciples.

'When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."' (Matthew 28:17 to 20)

We could be encouraged that 'some doubted'. We can identify with that – so often caught in two minds, uncertain. However, the doubters were commissioned too. There aren't any excuses that hold water. Outreach, mission, evangelism, whatever you want to call it, is the obligation and we can't say, 'We're not ready, we need to prepare more'. We can't say, 'That's the job of the professionals',  'We aren't mature enough as Christians'. It's a nettle we need to grasp. Yes, we will need God's help and empowerment, but yes, He is more than willing to give it to us so that we can go out with the gospel and tell people that God love them.

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• We see at least
  • Triumphal entry – Christ, the coming King
  • Washing the disciples' feet – Christ, the servant King
  • Crisis at Gethsemane – Christ, the committed King
  • Crucifixion – Christ the suffering King

  As we reflect, as we must, on these events (and others, certainly) we will be reminded of the price, 'For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, 19but with the precious blood of Christ,' (I Peter 1:18, 19), of the purpose, 'For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God' (I Peter 3:18). There is nothing shallow here; there is nothing shaky. We see the love and grace of God, not as a theological construct, but in action, achieving what we could not achieve for ourselves, bridging a gulf we we would never be able to cross, destroying a barrier that we would never be able to break down. The 'deal' would never have been cut, had it been left to us; there would be no marriage, no relationship between man and God, had we been left to our own devices. We can say 'you are ours and we are yours' with confidence only because God has acted and continues to act.

  And God has acted, in a sense, in defiance of of human logic.  We so often attribute    worth on the basis of achievement or wealth or possessions or potential to contribute to wider society. God acts not '...because you were more numerous' (Deuteronomy 7:7). He has attributed worth to those whom society would consider worthless, the barren, the hopeless, the disadvantaged. 'Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.' (I Corinthians 1:26 to 30)

  That God has chosen to love, to attribute worth, actually opens the door for us to 'love our neighbour'. We are to love our neighbour '...as ourselves'. Intriguingly, we cannot love others without loving ourselves, value others without valuing ourselves, attribute worth to others whilst feeling worthless ourselves. There is something counter intuitive here; it actually flies in the face of much of our received wisdom, all the thinking around being 'unworthy'.

  'Very often in the history of Christianity theologians and teachers have dwelt upon the unworthiness of human beings, our proneness to sin, our worthlessness in contrast to God's supreme goodness; they have even laid the responsibility for evil at our doorstep. There is none of this is the teaching of Jesus. Jesus is often disappointed in people, of course, but only because beings are potentially of the highest value, the inheritors of God's very own kingdom. We harbour the kingdom within our own soul. God searches for the one who will recognise the kingdom within himself or herself and he ascribes to such a one supreme value.' (The Kingdom Within; John A Sanford, Harper and Row 1987)