Last Sunday's thought: this is the Gospel we proclaim

Then Jesus ‘opened their minds to understand the scriptures’ (Luke 24:45). Earlier on in chapter 24, Luke recounts how, on the road to Emmaus Jesus (though at the moment not recognized by two disciples) did the same thing: ‘Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures’ (Luke 24:27). After the two disciples recognized Jesus at the breaking of the bread, they recall: ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’ (Luke 24:32).

Paul wrote to the early Christian church at Rome: ‘how can they believe without hearing about Him? And how can they hear without a preacher?’ (Rom. 10:14). Paul practised gospel-focused kerygmatic preaching, that is preaching centred on the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He told the Corinthian church that ‘I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified’ (1 Cor. 2:2). The preaching recorded in the Acts of the Apostles repeated again and again the divine kerygma, the story of Jesus Christ: but then the apostles had no written gospels to which to refer their audience.

This is not the only Biblical model of preaching. There are times when life may seem to us almost meaningless and ruled by despair and death. What people need, in such circumstances, is a Word of redemption and meaning from outside this situation that will answer their deepest questions about life and death. Preaching brings this Word. It is Biblical because it was used by some of the Old Testament prophets and also by Jesus himself in some of his meetings with individuals in which existential questions are answered: three good examples (but they are by no means the only ones) are his meetings with the tax collector Zacchaeus, with Nicodemus and with the woman at the well.

An alternative style of preaching is the proclamation of God’s word as an alternate vision to injustice, inequities of power, suffering, and oppression. Biblical models for ethical-political preaching stretch from the prophetic preaching of the Hebrew prophets to Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God. Today this is very much the mission field of Christian Aid.

Another model of preaching has been called the ‘whispered word of God’, in the preacher seeks out the divine Word within the world and draws it up from the level of a whisper to the level of an assertion or proposition. Jesus is in conversation with disciples and the crowd uses metaphor, story, and parable, to take the ordinary bits and pieces of people’s lives and transform them into the very stuff of God’s revelation.

So there are several types of preaching according to the work of the Holy Spirit, circumstance, our needs and the needs of the world. Proclamation of the gospel, including interpretation and teaching is not an optional extra. It is close to the essence of our faith. Paul put it this way in Romans 10:8-10: ‘The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart (that is, the word of faith which we preach (kerygma); because, if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.  For man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved.’

Which preaching style is the most appropriate for the church and the needs of contemporary society? There are no simple answers. Perhaps an awareness of different styles and the deployment of a variety so that neither the preacher nor the congregation falls into cosy predictability is important. Most important of all is the need for openness to guidance and direction from the Holy Spirit who ‘blows where he wills’ (John 3:8). ‘You hear its sound, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it is going.’

Thought for Ash Wednesday and the First Sunday of Lent: what is Lent for?

‘I don’t think Christ needed 40 days in the desert. A long weekend would have done. It would have made it a lot easier…’ The late Sir Jimmy Savile was quoted thus in a newspaper article in 1995 which proclaimed ‘the ritual of abstinence over Lent … has all but disappeared. The British public has given up on giving up.’

The dire warnings of nearly a decade ago may not have entirely been confirmed by events, because the Church of England announced this year that one in three churchgoers were planning to observe Lent, but almost up to the last minute 32% of them hadn’t made up their minds on what to give up or take up. Sadly only 9% of those interviewed were considering ‘doing something spiritual like praying [or] reading the Bible’. Giving up chocolate or other treats or doing more positive or kindly acts were much more popular (respectively 17% and 21%). Apparently men are twice as likely to give up alcohol for Lent, whereas women are nearly three times more likely to give up chocolate.

Our understanding of the purposes of Lent seems to have narrowed. If we contemplate the needs of the world, as Christian Aid asks us to do in their Count Your Blessings journey for Lent, we are already meditating and opening ourselves up to God in prayer. This is the essential purpose of Lent. For as the late Cardinal Basil Hume remarked, ‘Christ shared our experience; he suffered as we suffer; he died as we shall die, and for forty days in the desert he underwent the struggle between good and evil.’

Continuing with the words of the late Basil Hume, the devil seeks to take advantage of Christ’s hunger ‘to tempt him to limit his concern to the relief of human need. These are vital concerns; but they cannot be the sole concern of the Church. We need daily bread; we need too a reason for living, a sense of purpose, a vision. We need the bread of life, the word of truth which comes from God.’ And as the Cardinal also remarked, the blessings we receive in the joy of the Resurrected Christ on Easter morning rest on the quality of our Lenten journey up to and including Holy Week.

Mark’s gospel emphasises that after his baptism in the river Jordan, Jesus went off straight to the wilderness for his 40 days’ preparation for his earthly ministry. The Devil comes to tempt him, but Christ is clear in his response: ‘I don’t have to prove that I am worthy of love. I am the Beloved of God, the One on whom God’s favour rests.’ Though, unlike us, Jesus remained ‘without sin’, he was not immune from temptation. In that respect, critically, he shared our human condition. And remember, too, that like us, the challenge of temptation never entirely left him. As Luke comments at the end of his version of the story of the temptation in the wilderness: ‘having exhausted all these ways of tempting him, the devil left him, to return at the appointed (or opportune) time’ (Luke 4:13). We are most severely challenged when we are closest to God and most open to God: it is then that temptation seeks to come in via an open back door precisely because our defences are down.