Sermon for the 12th Sunday after Trinity – 22nd August 2021:Joshua 24, 1-2, 14-18; Eph 6, 10-20; John 6, 56-69.
Fr Leonard Wallace, St Paul’s Athens
[For the following two Sundays I am present but not the preacher. Next sermon from me is Sept. 12th]
If you ever have the privilege of visiting Capernaum by the Sea of Galilee, home village of the fishermen disciples of Jesus, there is a superb synagogue to be seen there. Though much of the little town of Capernaum from the time of Jesus can be seen in excavation, this synagogue is of a Roman date, later than the time of Jesus, perhaps built in the 4th century AD. Nonetheless the presence of this ancient building, probably on the very site of the synagogue mentioned in today’s gospel, exudes atmosphere and mystique, the fragrance of antiquity.
Capernaum originally means the ‘village of comfort’, but when Jesus teaches there his message is not such easy listening. His listeners had become complacent in their dependence on the facts of history. Way back in the time of the exile, Jesus reminds them, God had provided them with all they needed for their strenuous 40 year sojourn in the wilderness – specifically referencing the Manna. However those who had been sustained by the Manna all, at some time afterwards, died of all the usual causes. When Jesus speaks of the bread from heaven he is not talking about the same thing. Those who eat the true Bread from heaven will live for ever. This is a shock, and they tell him so.
If the Greek translation is anything like reflective of the Aramaic of Jesus, then even the language Jesus is using can be challenging, for he is really say those who ‘munch’ or those who ‘chomp’ on me will live. He is not even using polite table language.
So the group becomes shaken by his words and his use of language. They complain to him about it. But Jesus challenges them still further. He references the great image in the Book of Daniel, of the Son of Man descending in clouds of glory, one of the great biblical images of revelation. This goes too far for many of them – I suspect they are thinking along the lines of blasphemy. Then Jesus says no one can come to God except through the one God has sent. Jesus means himself.
So we see rejection at the synagogue in Capernaum, this so called ‘village of comfort’.
The gospel tells us that many of his followers now turn their backs on him and depart. When challenged by Jesus it is St. Peter who refocuses our attention. ‘Do you wish to go away?’ Jesus asks, despite this teaching, hard to swallow, about Jesus being the bread of life, and Jesus being the only way to the Father. St. Peter says, ‘Lord to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.’ John 6 69. Lord, to whom can we go?
In the great city of Ephesus sometime after Jesus shared his message in Capernaum, but before any of the gospels were written, St. Paul is urging the Christian community to faithfulness. Time after time he uses word images that connect the community to the everyday life they would be familiar with, namely the great temple of Artemis. He takes the familiar to point people to Christ.
Not only was Ephesus a great city of the classical world, made famous because of the temple to the goddess Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, it was also, in the Roman period, the metropolis of the Roman province of Asia, so it would have had a garrison of Roman soldiers there. It would have been a common enough sight to see the garrison patrolling, or protecting, keeping order, and quelling any riots – such as the one that Dimitrios, the silversmith of Ephesus could have caused when he was shocked at the teaching of St. Paul, and rallied all the shopkeepers and sculptors who made replicas of the temple or of the goddess Artemis to sell to tourists.
The presence of the Roman soldiers is not lost on St. Paul. What can he say to encourage the Ephesian Christians to be strong in their faith? ‘Put on the whole armour of God’; sheer gift for this great apostle of Christ. He takes each piece of Roman uniform, one by one, and applies its use to being strong in faith, and defence against those powers and human energies that seek to distract us from our love of God.
Now, of course, this military metaphor has its dangers – and the Christian generations have shown us, with all too much tragedy, what happens when we interpret being ‘soldiers for Christ’ literally. There are plenty of shameful examples of this in the trajectory of the Christian epoch, one of the most notorious in this part of the world, the disastrous Fourth Crusade in 1204, when Latin Christians on their way to slaughter Muslims in the Holy Land, and win back Jerusalem, stopped off in the Aegean lands and slaughtered and oppressed Eastern Christians.
I recall my student days at St. Andrews – where I studied one year of Mediaeval History, reading the terrible account of this Fourth Crusade, recorded by Joinville and Villehardoin, Frankish chroniclers of the terrors that become possible when religion turns to war and violence to promote its own selfish gains.
Only this last week we have all witnessed with a breathtaking bewilderment the advance of the Taliban throughout Afghanistan as they retook the whole of that country into their own control – religious soldiers, hell-bent on creating a theocracy at any cost to lives, supported, I am sure by the implementation of a harsh Shariah law – and all this to show that ‘God is Great!’ We pray for the citizens of that country, bracing ourselves here in Greece for the consequences of so many people being displaced or fleeing in fear to find better lives for themselves.
St. Paul’s image though, does not encourage us to take up arms and weapons to kill in this way – he uses the sword, the shield, the helmet, the breastplate as an image for standing strong in the faith. If we are in any doubt he says, ‘as shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace.”
Before signing off his letter to the Ephesians, in which we have been absorbing so much rich encouragement over these last few weeks, from Paul’s vivid use of local imagery, the Apostle encourages the faithful community in Ephesus to prayer – prayer for all the saints, that is, their fellow believers in other communities scattered around from Jerusalem even to Rome in the Mediterranean arc of mission; and prayer for himself who constantly has to confront personal danger on account of his preaching and teaching of the gospel.
But note that Paul does not end by considering himself as a warrior for the faith, as his armour of God image could be misconstrued, but rather as an ‘ambassador’ in chains.
It is this image, this metaphor, that Paul leaves behind as he concludes his correspondence. ‘Ambassador’. Not a bad place for him to stop, and not a bad place for each of us to begin.
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