| The Shock of the New |
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Sermon by Mark Wakefield on April 13 2008 I recently took an afternoon off work to go and see the exhibition of paintings from the great Russian art galleries in St Petersburg and Moscow that is currently showing at the Royal Academy. I was glad I made the effort as this was one of the best exhibitions I’ve seen in a long time. The quality of the paintings on show was truly impressive and – to put it bluntly – there weren’t too many of them so this was a relaxing and uplifting experience rather than an exhausting one.
Now I realise that this type of thing isn’t everyone’s cup of tea and if it hadn’t been for an old English teacher of mine it probably wouldn’t be mine either. One summer holiday, long, long ago when I could have been no more than 14 or 15 my teacher did what teachers have a very annoying habit of doing: he set us some homework for the holidays. The task was to write an essay on a work of art and describe our reactions to it.
Having to write an essay in the holidays was bad enough but the subject matter seemed to me particularly dreary. So it was with a heavy heart that I trudged off to the public library to see what I could find. As I leafed through my stack of books my fear that this sort of thing wasn’t for the likes of me seemed all too justified – endless dull, brown canvasses depicting stories from the bible or Greek myth that I understood little or nothing of and for which I cared even less. Boring, boring, boring and boring again.
But then I picked up a book on the French impressionists, opened it and fell instantly in love. Here was art that I could “relate to” as we say these days. Here were ravishing landscapes and scenes from every day life all depicted in fresh, vivid colours that danced before my eyes. So began a love affair that has lasted all my life and that has grown over time to embrace even the boring stuff and which has been the source of so much personal enrichment. Thank you Mr Cumming, wherever you are.
Well, as you can imagine, the essay now seemed not so much a chore as a labour of love. But as I read around my subject there was yet another surprise in store for me. To my amazement the men and women who had painted these wonderful pictures weren’t at first lauded and praised for their efforts but harangued, vilified and laughed at. “That’s no way to paint” the critics and the public cried, “you must be out of your tiny minds”.
Despite all this the artists stuck at it and remained true to their vision until – often at great personal cost to themselves - they became not just accepted but loved. And of course, what they achieved was nothing less than a revolution. They quite literally, changed the way we see the world and ushered in all sorts of innovations that would give us what we call “modern art”, a subject on which, of course, opinions remain divided to say the least.
One art critic has called this revolution “the shock of the new” and I think there are interesting parallels with the early days of the church that we see so vividly described in the book of Acts. Of course, this revolution was to have far more world-altering consequences and yet like the work of the impressionists, it’s now something we rather take for granted.
The book of Acts captures all the excitement and the drama of the period immediately after the resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost as the disciples started to work out for themselves what all these extraordinary events meant for them. And what we see here in today’s reading is an idyllic picture in which these first Christians live together in harmony as a community in which prayer and praise well up spontaneously.
All of this sounds remarkable enough but if you dig a little deeper you begin to realise how truly extraordinary it really was. For instance, we are told in this passage that they sold their possessions and distributed the proceeds to anyone who had need. We may think of ourselves as living in a society in which there is a wide and increasing gulf between rich and poor but this is as nothing compared to situation in first century Palestine.
To give you an example, the average pay for a day labourer would have been just one denarius. And yet to be eligible for election to the local Council – or Curia in Roman times – you had to possess no less than 25,000 denarii and it’s estimated that no more than about 5% of the population would have been this well off.
A Roman centurion might have expected to receive this sort of sum as a bonus on leaving the army but he would have been on the very bottom rung of the ladder of privilege with all sorts of extraordinarily rich people way above him in the pecking order.
What’s more, this elite regarded the rest of society with complete disdain and ruled over them with callous brutality within a legal system that was fixed to serve their purposes. So if you were of the lower orders and committed a crime you could be subject to hard labour, torture or even crucifixion, whereas any criminal member of the ruling class would only suffer exile.
This was the society in which Jesus preached good news to the poor. And the author of Acts – who also wrote Luke’s Gospel – is quite clear that Jesus’s message was primarily intended for the literally poor – for the destitute, for the blind, the lame and the beggars, for all those who, often through no fault of their own, were incapable of fending for themselves and who led a miserable existence at the very bottom of the heap. These were the people the Roman politician Cicero dubbed “the filth and dregs of the city”.
So, imagine then how amazing – scandalous to some – this new community must have seemed which positively welcomed the poor and in which the rich and the educated – of whom the author of the Book of Acts himself was almost certainly one – sold their possessions and shared the proceeds with those they would have once regarded as fit only for the gutter.
And of course, it wasn’t just the division between rich and poor that this new community - freshly inspired by the Holy Spirit - sought to break down but also the division between Jew and gentile. The Book of Acts tells the story of how what began as a small Jewish sect progressively moved outwards to embrace and attract non-Jews, first of all in Palestine and then throughout the whole of the Mediterranean. Again, this was something radically new. So exclusive was Judaism that for Jews to sit down and break bread with non-Jews was pretty much unheard of and would have been a source of scandal to many.
In today’s passage we are told that “the Lord added to their number those who were being saved” and we know that on some days this could run into thousands. Why? What was it that made them seem so attractive, rather than a bunch of cranks and religious nutcases?
There is, I believe, only one answer that really stacks up: and that is that they were speaking and behaving with the authority of truth. There was something authentic about them and the transforming experience of Jesus’s resurrection of which they spoke. How else can you explain how what was initially a band of poor, powerless people who had seen their hopes turn to dust on Good Friday, somehow found the strength and the energy to convince the world of God’s message of hope to mankind?
And theirs was no airy-fairy message of hope. For sure, it was a message of hope for the future but the guarantee, the proof of that hope for the future was hope realised in the here and now – the real, practical lifting up of the poor and the downtrodden, the welcoming in of the excluded and the rejected, the breaking down of barriers between people of all kinds.
Of course, the idyllic picture of the early Christians in today’s reading was not to last. As they grew in numbers, the Roman authorities began to clamp down on them, sometimes with cruel and terrifying persecution and quite quickly the stresses and strains of accommodating both Jews and gentiles led to splits in the church and eventually the split from Judaism. As so often, the shock of the new became a cause of pain and conflict. And yet, such was their faith in the transforming power of the resurrection that they persevered in the face of all adversity to establish the church and it is to them, of course, that we owe our presence here today.
There is, I think, a very important message for us in this experience of early church. For here we are, like those first Christians, still enjoying the afterglow of the great festival of Easter. And yet, while we believe in and affirm the reality of Christ’s ultimate victory over evil we know that we live our lives in a world in which evil is ever present.
As the literary critic and philosopher George Steiner has said, we live most of our lives as what he calls Saturday people, poised – often uncomfortably – between the awfulness of Good Friday and the great promise of Easter Sunday. “Ours”, he says:
“….is the long day’s journey of the Saturday. Between suffering, aloneness and unutterable waste on the one hand and the dream of liberation, of rebirth on the other.”
As Christians we know all too well the awful truth of Friday but we also believe, thanks to the testimony and courage of those to whom Jesus first appeared that Sunday is the greater truth. And as we hold to that, may we shock the world anew by challenging evil and injustice wherever we find them and in so doing play our part in making the resurrection a living and present reality in the midst of suffering and despair. Amen. |
