24th Sept 200615th Sunday after Trinity

Fr Julian Browning

Wisdom 1 : 16 - 2.1 ; James 3 : 13 - 4.3 & 7 - 8a ; Mark 9 : 30 - 37

Jesus said: Whoever wants to be the first must be last of all and servant of all. 

All that was true of a child, the exclusion, the lack of status in society, was true of one who was crucified. 

Christianity turns conventional wisdom on its head. We have an upside down religion. It's all so strange today because we are seen to be so conservative, we are conservative by nature, seen to be the oldfashioned dull old ineffective Church of England, and yet the Gospel we preach is so new, so radical, so life changing, and above all so subversive of current values, so critical of the proud and the ungodly.

We have to hang on in there. Let us never be taken over, neutralised by the spirit of this age. The duty of the Christian is not to leave this world a better place. The duty of the Christian is to leave this world a better man or woman. It's an easy thing to try to change the world. Even the ungodly in the Book of Wisdom could do that, as they passed through what they call their short and tedious lives. If it's all there is, then make the most of it, today's philosophy in a nutshell. It's not so easy to let yourself be changed. We're used to ourselves, the old familiar weaknesses, the hidden wickedness, the pride in our strengths, we'll get by somehow. And yet, it's not enough. I waited for the Lord.

Today the Lord shows us a child, as a sort of example, I suppose. Jesus and Children, there's a subject. We have to put out of our minds those old coloured Bible illustrations, in which Jesus wears white, and everyone else is slightly grubby but they cast adoring glances at the beautiful children playing in the dust. And we can forget modern children too. The child Jesus lifted up and put down in front of his disciples was not a protected species. The child had no rights. Childhood was something to be got through as quickly as possible, because a child was a useless creature.

Today we have children aged 26, at which age Nelson was commanding his first ship in the West Indies, but that's another matter. The child in the time of Jesus stood for everything one didn't want to be: uninformed, immature, no status, owning nothing, earning nothing, ignorant, weak,  and probably offensively dirty. Yet here is Jesus gathering us together, and putting a child in the middle, and saying this is my ambassador. How you treat these useless mouths is a measure of what you think of me, and what God means to you. As with so many Gospel stories, this has layers of meaning so deep and so rich that we can feed on it all our lives, finding different meanings as we grow older. The dirty, status-less child, the non-person put in front of us by Jesus as God's ambassador, represents the crucified one.

All that was true of a child, the exclusion, the lack of status in society, was true of one who was crucified.  

Unless you become like a little child you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.  Seems rather harsh, we are asked to see the child as some sort of role model. But maybe Jesus is telling us what Christians are like. What we are like, in our better moments, when we know that we live in the kingdom of God. Like the child, we are immature, we are here on earth to grow up into our full stature as children of God.

Like the child, we own nothing, because what comes from God we offer back to him. Like the child, we are still unformed, we are ignorant and ready to learn, not knowalls like the ungodly. There's a frightening passage in the Wisdom of Solomon in which we learn that the ungodly shall be punished according to their own imaginations – that's the limit of their lives, what they do, what they think. They summon death, we're told, considering him their friend. The Christian, like the child, has nothing, and will therefore receive anything and everything which God will give.

Like children, we do not believe in death, we always have time on our side, a glorious future, a lifetime with God, an eternal lifetime. Like children our arguments amount to very little. What were you arguing about, said Jesus to his disciples. They were arguing about who was the greatest. As if it mattered.

I read the Wisdom of Solomon last week. No need to be pious about it. A couple of glasses of wine and a Mozart Mass saw me through it. It's only 19 chapters. It's a book in the Bible which everyone thinks they've read, but probably haven't, because it's in the Apocrypha, the alpha minus books in the middle which aren't in everyone's Bible. It's not the Song of Solomon, and it's not Proverbs, it's the Wisdom of Solomon. It's about what Wisdom is, or who he is. It's about our love affair with God, sometimes it's on, sometimes it's off; it's about the difficulties we all go through. It's about the idols we worship. It's about the ungodly and how they live, the dangers of their negative and pessimistic lives, and the threat always posed by the righteous man. Might is right, the weak are useless, that's the philosophy of the ungodly, the very opposite of Jesus's lesson with that child. I commend the book to you. It puts us in our place, and God in His.

And it is there that we learn that the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God.