Sermon: Eucharist - 5 Sept 2010

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford

Preacher:: Victor Stock
Date:: Sunday 5th September 2010
Service:: Eucharist
Readings:: Luke 14: 25-33

The New Testament is a fascinating and complex set of writings covering a period of about fifty years, not much more time than has elapsed between the original David Hockney production of The Rake’s Progress, first seen by the Dean at Glyndebourne when he was a University Chaplain, and that production’s revival seen again the other day, same sets, but different world. A very great deal has happened since the 1970’s, as a great deal happened in the world which gives us the New Testament, even between Matthew, and Luke’s use of Matthew.

Here’s this morning Luke from his fourteenth chapter: ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, even his own life, he cannot be a disciple of mine’ ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate ...’ Here Luke adds something to Matthew, where Matthew had written the more emollient, ‘No man is worthy of me who cares more for father or mother than for me’, which sounds nicer, and we like it more. But scholars think that Luke may have retained the authentically more violent mode of Jesus, ‘If anyone does not hate his father or mother’, and this for two reasons: Luke is seeing the Church moving out, away from the world of the disciples to the world of confrontation with the Roman Empire and its very different values, persecution beginning, the sinews of the Church needing stiffening. Luke, like a theatre director, introduces his crowds and a wider stage. Secondly, Luke is unafraid to use Jewish hyperbole: light and darkness, life and death, or as Rabbi Lionel Blue says of his mother, ‘She always said life was egony, egony’. Not so different from the preacher raising his voice to make sure the congregation is still awake.

The New Testament gives us more than a hint that its world is changing, from the days before the Crucifixion, of picnics by the lake, walks in the country, sermons on the mount, to a dynamic of radical transformation, which, in the end, as the pagan philosophers ruefully observed during the fourth century, the Roman Empire is brought to its knees, perhaps by these new Christians. The Gospel writers, like theatre director, scene painter and composer, draw out attention to God as He is in Jesus, and God as He is in Jesus is not the white, middle class, 19^th century public schoolboy of Victorian stained glass and much hymnody. The historical Jesus is much more likely to have been the mesmeric fanatic and spell-binding hero of the film-maker Passolini’s Gospel according to St Matthew.

So, Matthew has his place in succeeding artistic imagination right up to one of the great film-makers of the mid 20^th century, and Luke also has his place, perhaps recovering a memory of the authentic voice of that young preacher: ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother ...’ Because the story must come first and God, as He is in Jesus, overturns our expectations of what God is, every bit as much as he sends the tables of the money changers flying, with which that very different Gospel writer John practically begins his Gospel, setting the upsetting of the tables in the Temple in the middle of his second chapter, underlining the fact that Jesus is going to disrupt, challenge and upset all pre-conceived religious ideas.

Forty years’ ago The Rake’s Progress opened at Glyndebourne. The director was a friend of the formidable Australian headmistress who first took me to see the opera, so formidable that she once took me by the throat, picked me up and shook me in the middle of London University. It was a tense moment during the viva for her doctorate, but in case you’re getting over-excited by this reminiscence, I weighed much less than I do now. The lyrics, as it still says on the proscenium curtain, are by W H Auden and his lover, Chester Kallman, and most memorably of all, for those with a visual mental landscape, the David Hockney sets. What John Cox, W H Auden, Chester Kallman and Stravinsky did was to take and re-work a simple morality tale, first known in the English consciousness through the much reproduced and often engraved paintings of Hogarth; a feckless young man who gets a lot of money unexpectedly and goes immediately to bits because of his lack of moral compass.

In the 1970’s this was hardly sexy - it was a frankly boring idea. But David Hockney saw it all in a new way and his cross-hatching, fabulous colour-scheme and beauty by exclusion, by reducing things down to a series of startling simplicities, breathed new life into an old story. As Luke takes us in his little re-working of Matthew deeper into Jesus, into his Jewishness, his hyperbole, his use of exaggeration, which in turn leads us to see the place of exaggeration and over-emphasis in the New Testament itself, from the rhetoric of Paul to the deadly horror of the facts of Christ’s agony and death. What Luke does in this little passage of his chapter fourteen is focus everything down on the unexpected, disturbing and disruptive in the man Jesus, leading further to that cataclysmic earthquake where God is revealed in all the vulnerability and terror of suffering absorbed and accepted as the paradigm by which we are ourselves invited to live.

Finally, there’s the salt. Well, if it loses its savour, it gets thrown out into the street, a familiar place for discarded rubbish in any Middle Eastern town, even today.