The Sermon . . .

Rev'd Dr Andrew McGowan

Religious people generally, and Christians in particular, say that we are seeking God. We are, in an over-used metaphor, on a spiritual pilgrimage. Or as Augustine of Hippo said of the human condition and its struggles, "[God] you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you."

Today's Gospel presents us with another seeker after God. The wealthy man in the Gospel seems to have everything, or everything else, that he needs or thinks he needs, lacking one thing only. "What must I do to inherit eternal life" sounds as though it belongs on a list of tasks for self-fulfillment. He has researched and achieved everything else - get an education, travel perhaps, buy a house, get good investments, marry well, keep the commandments, and now inherit eternal life.

Jesus' answer is startling. You're nearly there, he says, remarkably close, there's just one small detail, an 'i' to dot or a 't' to cross: "go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me".

The man might well have been as angry as sad; but he was at least given a choice. Not so Job, the legendary righteous sufferer of whom we heard in the first reading, who knew perfectly well that an encounter with God might indeed involve not the expected icing on life's cake, but hunger. Job, a pious and righteous man like the seeker in the Gospel, actually bemoans and bewails his divine encounter: God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me; If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face!

Job knows full well that when God speaks it is "sharper than any two-edged sword," and cuts, as the author of Hebrews says in disquieting terms, soul from spirit, joints from marrow. We want to find God - but are we prepared for what we will find? God's answer to our accumulative way of seeking is devastating, and rips away pretension as soon as possession. The Psalmist also speaks in cuttingly honest terms that we wonder whether we should prefer God's presence or absence: "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me".

This Maundy Thursday moment that steals up on us in the middle of Ordinary Time coincides of course with the anniversary of the Bali bombings, a day on which there might well be many others who, if they wonder about God at all, wonder why they have been forsaken. The terrible events at the Sari club have made us, at certain moments at least, into a nation of Jobs, terrified in the darkness, wondering whether God is to be sought at all.

There is nothing holy or good about violence and suffering, neither in Job's loathsome sores nor an exploding nightclub, nor a cross. But they have the capacity to teach us something; that God's presence is not to be equated with comfort and safety and prosperity. Indeed the prosperity we have created for ourselves in a world more and more divided between rich and poor is shown to be illusory, and this knowledge is a gift, if clearly one that makes many go away sad on hearing it.

Those words of abandonment from Psalm 22 will recur later in Mark's Gospel, from Jesus on the cross. Even the religious teacher who had discoursed on how to inherit eternal life would ultimately find himself giving this same bitter discourse on spirituality, agonizingly quoting scripture from his own place of complete poverty and destitution - not just the benign detachment of the voluntary poverty he offered the wealthy man, but the violent abandonment of the cross. Jesus himself might as well have asked from that hopeless position, "who then can be saved?" But without this stripping bare even from such little as he had, even friendship, Jesus would speak even his profound words about God's demands just from a theoretical perspective. Instead, as Hebrews puts it, he is one "able to sympathize with our weaknesses because he has been tested in every respect as we are".

Each of us who dares seek God is going to be placed in the end not merely where our privileges and assumptions will be challenged by difficult questions, but where we ourselves may be in the way of that two-edged sword that cuts our accumulative, self-protecting way of seeking from us, as we move into the terrible freedom of God's presence, the freedom that shows us God was with the crowd in the Sari Club; how hard indeed to enter the Kingdom of God…

It is of course possible to make even Jesus and the Church the object of our accumulative seeking - what must I do to inherit religious certainty, moral surety? Our Anglican primates meeting this week is being pressured to take refuge in such false comfort. Now as then, what is really needed is not a glib answer but radical trust in God even when power and privilege are threatened. What must the Anglican Communion do to inherit eternal life? The real heresy emerging in these days, I suspect, is not the rethinking of ancient sexual mores, but the notion that our restless hearts should find contentment in solutions of which Jesus and Job could quickly disabuse us.

Each of us in our own lives, like our Archbishops, will have to listen to whatever devastating answers God gives us to our questions, even if we must lose things we have held dear. But quest we must - we have been made for this, and our very lives depend on it. The last word, the answer to the question, is not the word from the Cross, but the words spoken to Mary and Peter and Thomas and the others by the risen Jesus, who has lost everything and gained more. Christ, who gave up all he had, is now transformed as we will all be, and shows us that for God all things are possible.