A word in season

Speaking as someone tasked with preaching sermons, Sunday’s texts did not fit the mood of the moment. Last Sunday’s texts would have been better. Last Sunday's texts spoke of nation rising against nation, of wars and rumours of wars, prompting thoughts about the ‘end times’ which might have better reflected the recent events in Paris, and better served the less imaginative preacher.

The power of suggestion is great but it is not always good for preaching. It can take the preacher, and their listeners, into a kind of spiritual cul-de-sac, a place you know you have visited before, and where you found nothing which could take you or your listeners any further on your journey, so that the only option left is to reverse back to where you started from. This is difficult unless you have an idea of when the words were said and what specific events they were referring to.

When it comes to the ‘end times’, history has had plenty of them. There have been plagues, famines, wars, earthquakes and other cataclysmic disasters since before anything was ever recorded in words. But perhaps the biblical texts which depict end-time scenarios are, nevertheless, helpful. They can serve as a kind of purge for collective fear. As we read them, we can tell ourselves that all this happened before, but here we still are, and here we will remain, regardless of global terrorism and ad hoc missile responses to the recent horrific events in Paris.

This Sunday’s text was the feeding of the five thousand. The lectionary, which is the selection of scripture passages appointed to be read in churches on a particular Sunday, has moved on, even if the mood of the moment remains the same.  The story is appointed to be read on the last Sunday of the Church’s year, on the feast of Christ the King, just before the beginning of Advent. In this story, we are faced with the end-times again but in an entirely different way. The crowd, now healed and fed, thinks of Jesus as ‘the prophet who is to come’. They want to make Jesus a king, but he will have none of it.

The story is a cameo moment, a memory which never fades. Cameo moments are full of small but unforgettable details, such as the people being told to sit down in groups on the ‘green grass’, the disciples wondering how they are going to feed five thousand people with five loaves and two fish, Christ blessing these morsels of food and instructing his disciples to distribute them, and the twelve baskets filled with leftovers because nothing must go to waste, ‘nothing must be lost’.

The fear which many of us carry around at the moment, in the aftermath of the Paris massacre, has to do with the possibility of loss. We speak of our values and way of life being threatened, which is probably an exaggeration and not what matters most. The greatest loss would be a state of final separation from the love of God, something which cannot happen unless a person consciously wills it. No ruler or movement, however evil, can oblige an entire nation to consciously reject that love. In fact, the greater the evil, the more the love of God seems to manifest itself in the hearts and minds of human beings, as we saw with those who resisted the Nazis and those who danced and sang in the Place de la République at 9.20pm on Friday, exactly a week after the massacre.

I do not think that it is possible to consciously will a final separation from the love of God while still loving other human beings. The story of the feeding of the five thousand, placed in the context of the aftermath of the Paris massacre, speaks of people wanting others to connect with this love. It speaks of human love as much as it speaks of God’s love. People had followed Jesus all day, perhaps bringing friends or relatives who were suffering from physical or mental illness and who may or may not have thought that he could do much to help them. But in that cameo moment they would have known that they were held in the impregnable fortress of God’s love. We need to know this too.