Sermons
Trinity 8 2009
People sometimes ask ‘What do you have to do to be a Christian?’
In the West we seem to live in a culture that is obsessed with doing and achieving, a culture in love with material success and with measurable results. This is not just a symptom of greed or insecurity and it runs through all kinds of human activity: the workplace and the sports field are the most obvious – (how much does she earn? how many times did they win the cup?), but it also appears in academia, in entertainment, in the arts, in much television and film, even in charitable functions such the faintly obscene Comic Relief evenings where people are goaded into a collective frenzy to generate a higher total than the previous year. It all has to be somehow countable, perhaps so that it can then be forgotten about as achieved, box ticked, move on. Competition and achievement are responsible for a huge amount of good, no doubt, but today’s gospel reminds us that there is also something distinctly irreligious about dwelling too much on what we can do, what we can achieve, and what we can understand. Today’s gospel follows on from the story of the feeding of the five thousand, and the crowd, having momentarily lost sight of the miracle worker who produced all the food catch up with him apparently transported miraculously to the other side of Lake Galilee. They were wowed by the loaves and fishes thing and they are hungry for more. And in their urgent desire for another free lunch they have failed to stop for a moment and reflect on what Jesus is trying to tell them.
And what a circuitous conversation they begin! Jesus gently opens up the nature of their base hunger for them ‘you are looking for me, not because you saw signs but because you ate your fill of the loaves’. But he is not simply telling them that they need to replace their short-term hunger for either food or miracles with long term spiritual investment in God, he is leading them to understand that an attitude that puts a priority on doing, achieving, and gaining, might be blocking their eyes and ears to the truth of what is going on in Jesus. When redirected by Jesus from the bread of miracles or the bread they need to eat towards the food of eternal life they still resist his lead crying ‘What must we do to perform the works of God’. Jesus heads them off again telling them that they don’t need to do or achieve or gain anything they just need to believe that he is the one whom God has sent. But still they don’t get it and they ask what sign he will perform, what Jesus himself will do to prove himself the true successor of Moses who gave bread in the wilderness to their ancestors.
Again Jesus leads them away from doing and gaining – it wasn’t Moses who gained the bread it was God who gave it and all they need to do now is realise that God is sending them now the bread that will not perish, like the water at the well that would spring up to eternal life, Jesus says they need to find that bread that gives life to the world. Still halfway between understanding and rejecting what he is saying they say, well, give us that bread, always! And Jesus says ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty’.
So what do you have to do to become a Christian? Maybe when people ask this question they have a vision of having to learn a lot, pass another set of exams, or maybe pray a lot, a measurable amount, or go to church as much as possible. All we have to do as Christians is believe in Jesus as the one whom God has sent. This sounds very simple but it demands everything of us, there is nothing we can do to achieve it, no list of actions or tests, no religious diploma or certificate, no measurable attainment, still less a catalogue of good works, or virtuous behaviour. There is nothing that we can do to earn it, yet it will cost us everything we can give.
There are complex dangers for religious people who live within a culture of achievement. First, the temptation to separate off their religious life from everything else: a spirit of competition all week but meek compliance on Sunday, a sort of work hard-pray hard balance. The second danger is what they used to call accidie, spiritual sloth. If Jesus says we can’t do anything to get anywhere in religion it might be tempting to adopt a fairly laissez-faire attitude. Not much point even trying if there is nothing to be gained, might as well stand metaphorically at a slight distance from something so absurdly counter-cultural. These two temptations can be overcome if we allow the spirit of trust, of belief, of security in the knowledge of God’s goodness in sending his son to us, if we could let that spirit seep into all the other areas of life that are currently overwhelmed with the spirit of competition and achievement. If we can let that begin to happen then people will be surprised, they might start to ask themselves questions about their own behaviour and attitudes, they might begin to wonder if Christians are onto something, they might start to ask the sort of questions that Jesus wants them to ask, not where can I get more, or how can I measure what I have already gained, but what do I actually believe, and who is this Jesus character who doesn’t issue a list of things to do but offers an invitation to believe.
I remember teaching a confirmation course a few years ago and talking about virtues and moral actions and so on when one of the candidates said ‘Oh now I get it, it isn’t so much what you do, it’s what you believe that makes you a Christian, is that it?’. ‘Yes’ I said, ‘that’s abo