Photo credit: Carla J Roth

Luke 2: 22-40, Hebrews 2: 14-18, Malachi 3: 1-4

Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon, just and devout… and the Holy Spirit rested upon him (Luke 2: 25).

ACCORDING TO TRADITIONS that go back to the fourth and fifth centuries in the Eastern church, it is the festival of Candlemas – marking the formal presentation of the new-born Jesus at the Temple in Jerusalem – which finally brings the Christmas season to an end [1], following the sequence set out in chapter two of Luke’s Gospel. The name Candlemas, unsurprisingly, developed from the tradition of celebrating it with the lighting and parading of candles, symbolising Christ as the Light of God to all peoples.

In Luke’s account of the Presentation, Christ is both the anticipated deliverer of the people from captivity, but also a stumbling block for ‘business as usual’ as far as religion and nationhood are concerned. At the centre of Luke’s story are two figures, Simeon and Anna. The prophetess Anna speaks of the child with the voice of those living in expectation of the deliverance of Jerusalem from Roman occupation.

Simeon is simply described as “a devout and just man” living in Jerusalem. He is pointedly neither a member of the wealthy priestly caste that ran the temple, nor of Judea’s regular upper-class citizenry whose members sought to emulate the Roman aristocracy and who lived in the shadow of Herod’s opulent mansion to the west in the Upper City. Instead, as is so often the case in the gospels, it is an otherwise marginal figure who finds himself the vehicle of divine insight into the true meaning and destiny of this child from Nazareth.

As we read: “Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, ‘This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel and to be a sign that will be opposed, so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed’.’” (Luke 2: 34, 35a). He goes on to describe Christ as a light to the Gentiles, to those well outside his own tribe and nation, as well as a blessing and honour to his own people. As Simeon rightly discerns in his words, Jesus the Light of the World will always be a stumbling block and a problem those who wish to preserve the ethnic and religious purity of their own, to exclude those they deem impure and alien, or to restrict God’s love to kith and kin.

Divine love challenges the distinctions we make between insiders and outsiders. This message is echoed again and again throughout the gospels. When religion denies people dignity, forsakes the marginalised, and restricts our concerns to those who are like us, it abandons the God made known to us in the flesh – the one who is described as “merciful and faithful” in our reading from the Epistle, and who ministers to humanity in and through suffering (Hebrews 2:18).

Over the past few weeks we have seen how this radical gospel of love, mercy and justice for strangers as well as siblings, outsiders as well as insiders, enemies as well as friends, still has the capacity to shock and anger some who love to shout “Lord, Lord” – but who in doing so reduce Christ to a tribal deity by refusing to acknowledge that through him (to quote St John) “God so loved the world”, not simply those they favour.

First, the 47th US President and his supporters were outraged at Episcopal bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s application of the words of Jesus in the Beatitudes, recorded in Matthew 5:7: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” She could equally have been preaching from Luke, incidentally, which has the width of divine mercy – compassion to, and identification with, those in need – as one of its leitmotifs. In this context, it is worth quoting the bishop’s words in full.

Have mercy, Mr President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. Help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were once strangers in this land.

 May God grant us all the strength and courage to honour the dignity of every human being, speak the truth in love, and walk humbly with one another and with God, for the good of all the people of this nation and the world. [2]

Does it not astonish us that such words could be construed as hateful and un-Christian (as some suggested on social media), and that the human empathy they embody could be described as ‘evil’ by a US pastor? Sadly, it should not. For as Simeon foresaw, “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel” (and the US, and Britain, and any other nation or group you may like to mention) “and to be a sign that will be opposed, so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed.”

Following on from the row over Bishop Budde’s sermon, a couple of days later the US Vice President revealed his own inner thoughts. He sought to reinterpret love of neighbour as concentric circles of favour and feeling focussed primarily on our own family, people and nation. He tried to support this by misusing Augustine’s ordo amoris (order of love) [3]. The VP’s outlook is actually based not on the words and actions of Jesus, but on the Roman rhetorician Cicero.

Imperial theology is what the gospel contends, rather than affirms. JD Vance is using a hierarchy of concern and affection to demean ‘foreigners’ and to justify policies like the mass deportations of migrants. As was pointed out in response to him (by commentator Rory Stewart, among others [4]) the message of Christ, in contrast, is about a love that breaks barriers rather than erecting them. It actively welcomes those the world (and not infrequently the religious) deem alien or surplus to requirements, rather than dismissing them.

In Luke’s famous rendition of the parable of the Good Samaritan, it is the religious and ethnic other who is the test of whether our humanity is capable of being moved beyond self-preservation and self-justification towards a love of neighbour which is about the need and vulnerability of who is in front of us, not who is convenient or sympathetic to us. That is part of the deep conversion of the heart and will that the gospel calls us to, both personally and even more so as a community of the baptised.

As philosopher, theologian and activist Cornel West aptly puts it: “Just as tenderness is what love looks like in private, so justice is what love looks like in public.” The true church, the one that seeks first God’s realm and the challenging way of Christ, will therefore always see the global in the local and the local in the global. That, I think, is what we are trying to do here at St James, in seeking to offer support and welcome both to those in our neighbourhood and to those whose need for love, mercy and justice comes to us from many unexpected parts of a tormented world.

Turning back to the account of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple in Luke, we cannot but note how inherited religious understandings of purity and purification are set aside. First, see what is downplayed. Ritual purification in the Temple arose from the belief that women were rendered unclean by the birth of a child. For 40 days after the birth of a boy, and 60 days after a girl, women were not allowed to worship in the temple. At the end of this time, they were brought there, or to a synagogue, to be purified and their child dedicated to the service of the temple. Only after this ceremony they were allowed to take part in religious observance again.

Luke’s narrative effectively bypasses these inherited ideas of purity and impurity. Instead, he employs the words of Simeon and Anna to make Jesus the purifier of the temple (that is, the human religious institution) rather than the other way round. To adapt the words of Malachi, God’s messenger, the Messiah, “is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap (a harsh, alkaline substance used to clean cloth) “He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them.” The Levites – Jewish males claiming patrilineal descent from Jacob and the Tribe of Levi – were part of the priestly elite who ran the temple. In Luke chapter 19 Jesus the refiner goes on to confront imperial power by entering Jerusalem on a donkey, and in the very same movement he overturns the tables of the money-changers in the temple. What he is challenging here, by the way, is not some aberration of a twinned system of politics and religion. It is the system itself.

So where does such a gospel or radical love and mercy leave us today? Where it leaves the organised church and much of what passes for Christianity right now, I believe (not just in America, but here too), is in need of purification by the Spirit of Christ through those he came to minister to. The last who Jesus puts first. The outcasts, the refugees, the sick, the suffering, the despised, the abused: all those rejected by a world organised around greed rather than need. For in our age, as much as in his own time, “this child is destined for the falling and the rising of many.” The point and promise of the gospel, however, is that in repentance for our continual falling and failing, we can and will be raised again and again. Let that be our prayer and our commitment.

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NOTES

[1] In 542 the Byzantine Emperor Justinian decreed that this festival should be moved back from 40 days after Epiphany, then celebrated as Christ’s birthday, to 2nd February, 40 days after 25 December.

[2] The full sermon, preached at the National Cathedral in Washington DC on 21 January 2025, is reproduced here.

[3] For a short guide to Augustine’s actual argument, see Dawson Vosburg, ‘Wait, What does Vance think Augustine said about love?’ published in Sojourners, 5 February 2025.

[4] See commentary from Novara Media on the Vance-Stewart argument. Vance disposes love as a feeling, and therefore prioritises the felt relationships of kith and kin. In the gospel, love is the re-ordering of relationships beyond ‘the natural’, and therefore extends even to the stranger, the alien and the enemy.

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© Simon Barrow is a writer, researcher, activist, theologian and poet. He was co-director and then director of Ekklesia from 2005 – 2024. His latest book is Beyond Our Means: Poetry, Prose and Blue Runes (Siglum Publishing, January 2025). This is slightly adapted from a sermon preached for Candlemas at St James, Leith, on 2 February 2025.

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Photo credit: Carla J Roth

Isaiah 9.2-7; Psalm 96; Luke 2. 1-14

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light” (Isaiah 9. 2a)… “And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth” (Luke 2.7).

WHAT DOES Christmas mean for you? We will each have our own personal answer to that. For some it means a good deal. For others, a bit of a break – if they’re lucky – and not a huge amount more.

For many it is an occasion of family gathering and joy. For others it is a time marked by loneliness or loss. Amidst the tinsel, the magic, the mythology (and, yes, an orgy of consumption) there are, for a few of us, mixed emotions about this Season of Goodwill.

The emphasis of the readings, carols and prayers shared on this Holy Night is rightly on song and celebration, peace and possibility. But there is no escaping the fact that the light we desperately need in a darkened world is a ray of hope born not of some easily-won comfort and joy, but out of varying degrees of pain and suffering.

This evening, if you read the news, you will know that the traditional birthplace of Christ, Bethlehem, lies under siege on the occupied West Bank, while many of his followers live in fear or are making desperate plans to escape. Manger Square, formerly a tourist hub, is largely silent as the town marks its second Christmas under the shadow of seemingly endless slaughter and destruction in Gaza. In the real world, rather than in one of make believe, what possible hope can people facing the terror of war and oppression – or, more personally, for some of us right now, grieving and sadness – find in the story we tell about salvation?

This is not a new question. The prophet Isaiah, writing eight centuries before Christ’s birth, was part of a long tradition that anticipated a strong deliverer. This rescuer from God would restore peace by overthrowing the Babylonian tyrant Cyrus, who was holding the Judeans captive and in exile. We Christians read Isaiah’s words in the light of the birth we celebrate tonight. But it is important to note the differences as well as similarities between Isaiah’s longing and Luke’s story.

In the gospel of Luke, the context is also a desire for deliverance. While the historical details of the census under Caesar Augustus and his delegate Quirinius are disputed, the meaning is clear. The Empire wishes to know who and what it controls in order to strengthen its economic and military domination over the territory and the people it occupies.

For those living under occupation, the hope had been that God would provide a kind of ‘kinsman redeemer’, a Messiah who could overthrow the yolk of oppression and restore peace by force. Isaiah talks of a Prince of Peace, yes, but also, by implication, a strong leader. Peace through strength was, it’s worth noting, the slogan of the tyrant Cyrus and the Roman Emperor Augustus, too.

What comes to pass in that barn in Bethlehem is something rather different, however. God’s answer to the people’s prayers for deliverance is not a mighty warrior, but a defenceless baby. The heralds of the Christ-child are not the rich and powerful, but a bunch of lowly shepherds.

Now of course the narrative symbolism of those shepherds, as well as the location of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem (for what it’s worth, the more likely location would be Nazareth) is all about linking the figure of Jesus with the long lineage of Davidic kingship. But this Bethlehem child is as unlike traditional ideas of kingly rule as you could possibly imagine.

Indeed, Luke quietly and subversively presents the arrival of Jesus as being in direct conflict with the Imperial cult of Caesar. It was the birthday of the Roman emperor-god Augustus which was routinely proclaimed as “good news for the whole world” – namely, the world held captive by him. By contrast, the angelic messenger in 2:10 announces Jesus’s birth as “good news for all the people” and “those whom God favours” – that is, a message of liberation for the occupied. (To really understand the gospels, it is necessary first to understand Roman imperial theology.)

Jesus will go on to make it clear that the meek, not the mighty, will inherit the earth. His companions will be the poor and disreputable, not the rich and respectable. His destiny will be a mocking crown of thorns and execution by the state, not a Royal crown and laurel. His last recorded words to his followers will be “put away your sword”. His triumph will not be an avenging crusade, but the nonviolent vindication we call resurrection. That is, God’s unfathomable gift of new life beyond what we currently know as life and death.

Conventional human ideas about God have often involved the projection of our fantasies about dominance onto the divine. We have concocted a bullying old bloke in the sky dishing out approval and disapproval in a slightly grudging and often rather vindictive fashion. But what if God is actually not like that at all? What if the source and destiny of our life comes close to us not as the promise of wealth, success and might, but in the total vulnerability of a small child born in obscurity? What if all our ideas about solving the world’s problems (and justifying ourselves) through wealth, success and might are, in fact, a lie?

The God revealed to us in the Christ-child is the ultimate embodiment of the power of love overcoming the love of power. That sounds nice, but according to the normal way the world works, it’s nonsense. Surely, it is those with the most money and weapons who will inherit the earth, not the meek? Isn’t it bigger elbows we need to get on in life, not gentler hearts? Isn’t it celebrities and billionaires who merit publicity and admiration, not troublemakers from Nazareth who hang out with homeless people, with undesirables and with refugees?

The real challenge of Christmas is not whether we can believe six impossible things before breakfast about elves, or Santa, or angels, or donkeys or mangers. It is about whether we are willing to invest our whole lives, in whatever way is possible, in making this crazy story about a life-changing birth make sense. In daring to love where hate rules; in daring to forgive when only bitterness seems appropriate; in daring to resist injustice when shrugging or giving up feels so much easier; in taking sides rather than taking flight; in working for peace through peace, when the logic of war as the only path to victory seems unassailable.

None of that, I hope, will take away the magic and sparkle of Christmas, which is something we also need in times of darkness and despair. But we should surely not walk away from the crib tonight, we who have ventured into church, without realising that what is at stake in the Nativity story is about so much more. It’s about what path we will choose in life as we venture out into the cold night air. Will it be one where fear and loss continues to haunt us? Or will it be one where we can work and pray together? One where we can learn how to allow the vulnerable love of the Christ-child to have the first and last word in shaping our actions towards neighbours and strangers, friends and enemies, others and ourselves, alike?

Mary the mother of Jesus pondered such things in her heart and treasured them, Luke says. May it be so for us, too, in the deep fabric of our daily lives, and in whatever small way is possible for us. And may you and those you care for be wrapped in the swaddling clothes of Christ’s revolutionary love at Christmas, now and always.

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© Simon Barrow is a writer, researcher, activist, theologian and poet. He was co-director and then director of Ekklesia from 2005 – 2024. His latest book is Beyond Our Means: Poetry, Prose and Blue Runes (Siglum Publishing, January 2025). This is a sermon preached for Midnight Communion at St James, Leith, on 24 December 2024.

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Luke 21: 25-26; Jeremiah 33: 14-16; Psalm 25: 1-10.

“When you see these things taking place, you will know that the kingdom of God is near.” (Luke 21:31)

WELCOME TO ADVENT, the season of deep expectation and intense preparation. So what is that we are anticipating and getting ready for, exactly? The trick the season plays on us is that we already know – or think we know – exactly what we are waiting for. We are waiting for a birth. We are longing for peace, for deliverance, for hope; for pathway towards life renewed. This is what the coming of Christ means, we believe – and rightly so.

How strange, then, that the central reading for this first Sunday in Advent in the New Common Lectionary seems to strike a quite different set of chords. The twenty-first chapter of Luke’s gospel is about anticipation, certainly. But in the context of darkness, distress, foreboding, dislocation in the natural world, and warnings about dissipation, disorder and trials among us.

In one sense, the connection seems all too relevant in our era. Today we seek redemption, the inbreaking of God’s transforming love, at a time of what social scientists are calling a poly-crisis: the cumulative and intertwined existential threats of global heating, the crucial loss of biodiversity in the natural world, ever more dangerous wars and conflicts, a renewed nuclear threat, loss of security for many millions of people who have become refugees, the rise of authoritarianism, and an economic system based on unregulated consumption which is literally killing the planet.

It feels as if we are living in apocalyptic times, ones which portend catastrophe more than deliverance. Yet there is also the strong resonance of the hope we desperately long for: the prophet Jeremiah’s anticipation of the arrival of justice and the promise of safety to a battered and bruised people. The Psalmist hymning God’s steadfast love in spite of life’s tumults. Then there is Jesus’s enigmatic statement: “When you see these things taking place, you will know that the kingdom [or realm] of God is near.” It’s all rather confusing, is it not?

Today’s readings remind us that learning to read the signs of the times in the light of the bringing together of authentic humanity and divine life in Christ is of crucial importance. Get it right, and there is indeed hope for our world. Get it wrong, and the seeds of destruction will be sown deep.

Some of you may remember Nick Adams, who used sometimes to come to St James with his family when he taught theology here in Edinburgh. He’s now Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of Birmingham. Nick once wryly observed that almost any text – not least a biblical one –  will be open to a whole range of possible interpretations. But, he warned, we should not forget that some of those interpretations will still be wrong!

So it is in America today that many people use passages like this one in Luke to speak of the return of Christ (the proper meaning of which we will return to later) as a Rambo-like figure who will bring about a cataclysm in the world in order to wreak vengeance, violence and destruction on anyone who is not like them.

The Rambo-Christ of the religious right has nothing to do with the Jesus of the gospels, and I call this figure Jeez-Us (‘jeez’ and ‘us’). That is, the living Christ turned into a total caricature, a  death-dealing justification of the self expressed as a wholesale rejection of the other – issuing in hatred and fear of refugees, foreigners, strangers: all those marginalised people who Jesus of Nazareth calls on us to love, and in whom to recognise his presence.

In short, the Rambo-Christ is anti-gospel. So how on earth do we get to this level of distortion, dilution and depredation? By making Christ in our own image, rather than having our image remade in Christ, and by reading our founding texts in the light of that very hijacking of the divine image.

Now the difficult part of this is that it would be untrue to say that the Rambo-Christ has no scriptural warrant at all. Take the book of Revelation. First the good news. Amidst the complex and sometimes obscure symbolism there is both a moral core, and a promise of a New Heaven and a New Earth. The moral core is that the Lamb who sits on the throne is the lamb who was slain, and restored to life – not a representative of the slayers of lambs. Jesus is not the Emperor, and he is not Rambo or John Wayne. His rule is one of love, not terror. Meanwhile, the promise (echoed in Luke 21:31) is that the habitus of the divine and the habitus of all that lives and breathes and has its being alongside us will finally be united in God’s new creation.

But the bad news is that woven through the text of Revelation there are also more than a few bloody revenge fantasies in there. Perhaps it is understandable that those fearing or experiencing persecution would wish God to crush their foes. But, like those imprecatory Psalms which talk of dashing babies heads against the rocks, such passages are not to be read as injunctions, but rather as warnings. We need to understand that they are not the way of the Prince of Peace, for whom we wait.

However, it is precisely passages like this which White Christian Nationalists and Christian Zionists (among others) extract from their biblical context and seize for their own manipulative purposes. So how we read texts like this, and today’s gospel, can literally be a matter of life or death. For as God says through the words of the Deuteronomist (30:19) in the Hebrew Scriptures, faced with destruction and death: “Therefore, choose life”.

In Jesus’s day, the storm brewing would lead to the destruction of the Temple in AD70, unlike its preservation in the hopefulness of Jeremiah. Some therefore see passages like this one in Luke as referring back to that in coded form. Under Roman occupation you had to be careful what you said.

But let’s return to Jesus’s enigmatic “when you see these things taking place, you will know that the kingdom of God is near.” Were Christ and his disciples expecting the sudden end of the age? Albert Schweitzer thought so. In 1906 he published his famous book The Quest of the Historical Jesus. He concluded that Jesus was yet another apocalyptic madman, and horrified by this discovery, he fled to Africa and to nature religion. He did a lot of good and contributed to the stock of both humanitarianism and environmentalism. But it was a sad and wrong verdict.

What we know is that the world did not end, and predictions of its ending throughout history have failed – though we may be tragically closer to fulfilling that grim narrative now than in any past generation, given the crises to which I have referred. Other scholars suggest that the gospel writers are putting an expectation of the ‘end of the age’ back into the mouth of Jesus, or that he is actually referring to something else – the inbreaking of God in his own crucifixion-resurrection and ascension, and the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost. Disturbances in the natural and human order are built into many of the texts around these episodes. So that fits with the symbolism of Luke.

(Incidentally, whereas in the Hebrew scriptures God’s enveloping presence on Sinai, in the giving of the Law, or in the Shekinah glory around the Ark of the Covenant, involves the clouds descending, in the New Testament an ascending into the clouds accompanies Christ’s bodily disappearance from the presence of his followers, prior to his re-appearance at Pentecost and beyond.)

The truth is that the exact meaning of the words attributed to Jesus is not clear, though they are evidently a call to attention, interpretation and understanding of God’s coming in our confusion and distress. Our difficulty is that we too readily assume, when reading passages like this, that ancient peoples told literal stories which we are smart enough to take symbolically. Whereas the truth, as John Dominic Crossan often points out, leans the other way. They often wisely spoke of the inscrutable God’s ways symbolically, and we moderns are dumb enough to tie ourselves up in knots trying to take them literally.

What we do know is that ‘the realm of God’, which Jesus spoke of in parables and lived out in love of despised neighbour and acts of healing, is both now and not yet. It is within us and yet also among and between us; it is present to us and yet ahead of us. It is an existential reality not limited by geography or temporality. It is an invitation to taste God’s future right here, and to long for its coming at the same time.

We also know that the Rambo-Christ is a terrible lie. The advent of the true Christ is all about choosing life. But it entails doing so against the hoard of destruction that we see in our world, mirrored in this passage from Luke. That is why verses 34 to 36 of chapter 21 call us to attention rather than drunkenness, alertness rather than dispiritedness.

When we read the signs of the times rightly, whichever times we are in, we will discover that even in the darkness, God’s presence is to be found, breaking through. Our job is to discover and nurture the practical gestures and actions of love, grace, justice, forgiveness and hope which connect us to the inbreaking realm of God, and to see in them the healed future to which we are invited, no matter how compelling the narratives of doom in our world remain.

For the return of Christ, to which this passage in Luke and others in the New Testament seem to refer, is not a singular event. It happens again and again. Or it will, if we are paying attention. And its fulfilment will be when the love of God made manifest in the suffering, life-giving love of Christ is in all and for all. That is a matter of God’s eternity enveloping and restoring our brokenness. We are not in control of when and how it happens.

If all this is so, then to be a companion of Christ is to live perpetually at the end of the world as we know it, in anticipation of a new world coming. That is what Advent invites us to consider. The challenge is to imagine, and then work together to enact, what it means for our lives here and now. What it means to become peacemakers. To act justly. To forgive repeatedly. To share endlessly. To hope ceaselessly. To love without limit.

The gospel calls us to nothing less than a personal and social revolution. To see in the vulnerability of the coming Christ-child and the weakness of the crucified Lord a complete reversal of our ‘normal’ human understanding of status, power and possibility. In our own strength this may seem impossible. But through small steps, through prayer, and through assisting each other towards the Light, tiny miracles can happen. May this be the Advent journey for us. For “when you see these things taking place, you will know that the realm of God is near.”

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© Simon Barrow is a writer, researcher, activist, theologian and poet. He was co-director and then director of Ekklesia from 2005 – 2024. His latest book is Beyond Our Means: Poetry, Prose and Blue Runes (Siglum Publishing, January 2025). This is an address given at St James Episcopal Church, Leith, Edinburgh, on 1 December 2024.

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Hebrews 7: 23-28; Mark 10: 46-52

“[Christ] has no need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins and then for those of the people; this he did once for all when he offered himself.” – Hebrews 7: 27.

SOME YEARS AGO I was involved in a fascinating word-association exercise. The aim was to find out what a reasonable cross-section of people instinctively thought about a range of topics. We gave them a word, and then asked them to write down the next one that came into their minds without stopping to think.

In response to ‘Christianity’, unsurprisingly the most popular response was ‘church’. The next was ‘boring’. The fifth most cited word was ‘hypocrite’, and sandwiched in between ‘boring’ and ‘hypocrite’ were two others: ‘sin’ and ‘guilt’.

At the risk of vastly oversimplifying, it sometimes feels to me that one of the biggest divides within Christianity these days is between those who morbidly (and sometimes gleefully) make it about sin, guilt and little else, and those who try their best to avoid talking about either if at all possible!

Neither of these responses is useful. Indeed, quite the reverse. Morbid preoccupation with human depravity and a God eager to condemn and punish rapidly descends into pathology. But the idea that humanity is basically fine, and we just need more niceness or tolerance, rather than radical reformation, flounders on the rock of history and experience.

If you look at the world around you, there is a huge amount of creativity, decency and goodness out there. Let’s acknowledge and celebrate that. But there is also an ocean of conflict, abuse, selfishness, injustice and destruction, too. And the positive does not simply cancel the negative out. That’s not how the ecology of human behaviour works.

In an unprecedentedly wealthy world – one where a large proportion of the global population still remains on the brink of war, hunger and ecological disaster – the gap between human technological capacity and human moral awareness and agency seems larger than ever. And if we look into the depths of our own lives and relationships, we cannot but be aware of how things can go horribly wrong, to put it mildly.

So if ‘sin’ is about recognising our distance and separation from ultimate goodness (from God, as we would say), and if guilt (rather than being fearful paralysis) can come to be about acknowledging human failings and imperfections as blockages to the repair, restoration and change we all seek and need – well, then we are on a path of hope, not despair. In short, how we talk about these things is absolutely crucial, as our readings today illustrate.

In very different but overlapping ways, the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Gospel of Mark point towards how God in Christ breaks unhealthy cycles of condemnation, abasement and sacrifice. They show us that, on the contrary, divine love and forgiveness finally abolish guilt and sin, so that we can enter a liberating, alternative cycle: one of continually being healed (and becoming healers ourselves) on a shared journey towards wholeness in the divine life. A vicious cycle is replaced by a virtuous one – with profound consequences for how we see ourselves, each other and God, and how we act in the world.

While it may not be obvious at first, the story of Bartimaeus Bar-Timaeus in Mark, is highly relevant to all this. It highlights the fundamental tension between Jesus and the restrictive and exclusive elements in his own religious inheritance. So let’s look at the story more closely.

The likely Aramaic source of the family name Timaeus is “son of shame”. As a beggar, Bartimaeus will have been ritually impure, too. In crying out to the ‘Son of David’, a mere beggar appeals to kinship with the most highly honoured of lineages, which is why shocked onlookers immediately rebuke him. They want to deny the blind man a voice. Jesus does not. He turns the tables on the nay-sayers by getting them to affirm the courage of marginalised Bartimaeus. (“Take courage” is a far better rendition than “take heart” in verse 49).

The cloak Bartimaeus casts aside is, of course, his source of income. It is what he uses to collect money. It is also where he sleeps. He is literally abandoning everything in approaching Jesus. The cloak also foreshadows the very next scene in the drama, in chapter 11. This is Jesus’s challenge to imperial power in Jerusalem, when he enters on a donkey and the ordinary people line the road with their cloaks to honour him.

What does Bartimaeus want? He asks for his sight. He is given so much more. His trust (which is what faith means, rather than some sort of propositional claim) has made him not just ‘well’ (as the weak translation has it here), but whole. He is restored to the domain of the sighted, but much more to the whole community – socially, spiritually and economically. This is the key dimension of the healing stories in Mark. They are not just about physical restoration, but reintegration into society.

That done, Jesus tells Bartimaeus to go on his way. Note that he doesn’t make confession of sin a precondition for healing. He doesn’t tell him to report to the religious authorities, to seek ritual purification, and to offer sacrifice in the Temple. Which is what would have been expected. No, Jesus effectively bypasses the system of ritual purity, priestly power and sacrifice. He offers free healthcare outside the system to those designated ‘unclean’. This may be one reason why he often tells those who are restored not to speak about it: the so-called ‘messianic secret’. He knows that he will be accused of subversion, even though from his perspective he is being more not lessfaithful to the tradition.

The very essence of the gospel, the good news, is that God’s restoring love does not discriminate. It is offered to all, with the priority being the most excluded. So whereas some religious leaders – in Jesus’ day, as in ours – arrogate to themselves the idea that they have the authority to decide who is clean or unclean, who is acceptable and unacceptable to God, Jesus effectively declares in his actions and words that a religious system which restricts access to God in order to maintain its own power is false and damaging.

Which brings us to the Epistle. Hebrews is a complex book. It was probably written by an associate of Paul to Jewish Christians in Jerusalem around 40 to 60 years after Christ’s death. On the one hand, it is encouraging them in the face of the threat of persecution. On the other hand, it is an extended argument about the relationship of Christ to the Jewish Law. From our perspective, this is a bit like being invited into a philosophy discussion where some of the key terms of debate are strange or alien to us. But essentially, what the Epistle is saying is that the entire sacrificial system has now been replaced by Christ. In short, the death and resurrection of Christ is the end of sacrifice, the display of God’s perfect love, and the first fruits of the restoration of all things. Christ is the new High Priest.

Now, there are some difficulties here. One is the danger of interpreting this as Christian supercessionism, the idea that the new covenant expunges everything before it. Historically this turned into anti-Judaism and paved the way for anti-Jewish hatred with utterly horrific consequences. The Epistle is instead seeking to reconcile inherited faith and a new creation in Christ. It is therefore best read not as the end of a conversation, but as an invitation to continuing dialogue, to join and add to the communal narrative through our lives.

Second, is there not something contradictory about the idea that Christ’s death abolishes sacrifice. After all, isn’t it still a sacrifice, albeit “once and for all”? To address that knotty question, let’s listen a little to the French literary critic and philosopher of social anthropology, Rene Girard – who has been very influential on recent theological work, including that of Rowan Williams.

Girard says that humanity’s archetypal flaw (our sin) is our constant temptation to self-destructive conflict and violence, which we try to resolve through the scapegoat mechanism. That is, deep disagreements and anxieties within communities are addressed by uniting against an arbitrary ‘other’ who is blamed for all the chaos, excluded, and maybe even killed. Think about the hateful rhetoric around refugees and migrants on both sides of the Atlantic right now as a prime modern example of scapegoating.

The function of ancient religion is to turn this mimetic scapegoat mechanism into a sacrificial system in order to relocate social violence in ritual. In some religious cultures the resulting sacrifices have actually been human. In others, the brutality has been turned against animals. But the logic is the same. Blood is required to cleanse the community, to expel the threat, and to appease the gods.

But in re-reading the Passion narratives on his journey back to Catholic Christianity, Girard noticed to his shock and amazement that (unlike many early religious texts) these gospel stories are actually anti-sacrificial at their core. Jesus does not demand sacrifice. On the contrary, he himself becomes the scapegoat of religious and political fear and hatred, thereby exposing both its futility and its death-dealing character.

It is in this sense that he bears the sin of the world. That is, our continual construction of, and participation in, deadly scapegoating, blood sacrifices (think of what is happening in Gaza), and the imposition of sin and guilt as unpayable burdens on humanity. In return, Christ – the one who offers healing and wholeness to those excluded by society and its religious institutions – is vindicated in the act of divine restorative life-giving that we call resurrection.

Here is truly good news, gospel. God absorbs sin and death, and restores life and liberty. Divine love and forgiveness abolishes the vicious, religiously-perpetuated cycle of guilt, sin, scapegoating and sacrifice. This frees us to enter the new, truly liberating cycle I mentioned a little earlier: one of continually being healed (and becoming healers) on a shared journey towards wholeness.

The story of how Christianity managed to turn this extraordinary gift of liberation from retribution and condemnation into yet another guilt-inducing sacrificial religion is a much longer one. Sadly, too much of the history of Western Christendom has been about division and conquest performed in the name of the one who actually came to free and unite us.

But it is never too late to join Bartimaeus and all those who want to experience the wholeness Christ offers. The challenge is that instead of heading back to the old sacrificial ideology, we need to learn to walk tall and free in the community of healed and the healing, and to spread that possibility and hope far and wide.

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© Simon Barrow is a writer, researcher, activist, theologian and poet. He was co-director and then director of Ekklesia from 2005 – 2024. His latest book is Beyond Our Means: Poetry, Prose and Blue Runes (Siglum Publishing, January 2025). This is  an address given at St James Episcopal Church, Leith, Edinburgh on 27 October 2024.

The post Rejecting sacrifice, embracing healing appeared first on Ekklesia.

Photo credit: Carla J Roth

IN LETTING GO of Ekklesia’s think-tank, regular commentary and news service activities after heading towards a quarter of a century, we are not quite saying ‘that’s it’.

Our publishing continues, several online newsletters are being planned (including my own Illuminations), past work is accessibly archived, and the network of friends, allies, curious onlookers and helpful critics we have built up over the years – some 14,000 people on our social media channels (including X/Twitter) – will continue, as we have said, for the time being.

It is interesting how that qualifier in the announcement we made about our future was interpreted in some media spaces. “For the time being” was put in inverted commas, as if to stress uncertainty about these activities. That was not the intention. We were simply saying that we cannot specify the long-, medium- or (in some respects) the short-term at present. But, nevertheless, we move forward in fresh ways; with relationships treasured, ripples of change moving outwards, and possibilities wide open.

That, in fact, is the texture of life. If where we are and what we are letting go of carries the whiff of impermanence or uncertainty, that is because this is how life is. All things shall pass. We shall all die. Nothing lasts for ever. Yet we still have hope, invest in hope, proceed in hope. But to what horizon? When Ekklesia began in 2002, the horizon was what you might call “a different Christianity” to the one of Empire, domination, exclusion and enemy-making. A key moment was the publication of our founder Jonathan Bartley’s thought-provoking book, Faith and Politics after Christendom: the Church as a movement for anarchy (Paternoster, 2006).

Ekklesia’s commitments meant exposing and opposing the dark side of historic Christendom and the religion of power, but also the agitations and threats of what is now labelled Christian Nationalism (rooted in US exceptionalism and white supremacy) which have subsequently raged through MAGA and the symptomatic proto-fascism of a Donald Trump.

Positively, it meant focusing ourselves unceasingly on elevating the voices of nonconformists, dissenters, Quakers, Anabaptists, radical Catholics, peace churches, levellers, liberation theologies and all those (people of faith, and people of good faith but no ‘religion’) who are animated by the conviction that “another world is possible”. That war, injustice, inhumanity, exclusion, genocide, predatory capitalism and environmental destruction are not permanent features of our lives, but temporary disfigurements and aberrations – no matter how deeply rooted, persistent and irreversible they may sometimes seem to be.

How so? What is the solidarity, the possibility, the horizon that relativises such things, that suggests that peace, justice, community, flourishing and sustainability can prevail against all the odds (including those spelt out in all the recent science-based reports on global heating)? We will all have different answers to that. To what keeps us going. But for those of us who continue, against all common sense, to seek the path of costly transformation that led an obscure Palestinian Jew to crucifixion, and to a promise of life beyond the death meted out by Empire, the answer is perhaps most succinctly summarised in the title given to the web resource page of our long-time friend and associate, Dr Harry Hagopian, an International lawyer, commentator and ecumenist.

Epektasis is “largely about politics”, he writes. “But it is also about human rights, democracy, good governance, peace, justice and reconciliation at a time of ongoing turbulence across the Middle East, North Africa and Gulf regions.” Crucially, he explains, it is profoundly rooted in an “overarching Christian ethos of striving to ‘stretch forward’ (epekteinomenos in Greek, from St Paul in Philippians 3:13) towards a new world coming, something which indeed expands the boundaries of what is and what shall be.

That word epektasis is actually the conviction about the unceasing journey towards eternal fulfilment, communion and bliss in the Divine which was developed by St Gregory of Nyssa (335-394/395 CE). It is one of the most original aspects of the great Cappadocian’s way of thinking. It is a message of hope for unlimited personal, interpersonal and social transformation and possibility which, at its best, the Christian message embodies, proclaims and acts out in all things – including politics and economics.

It does so not because it seeks to privilege itself, nor because it wishes to marginalise or cast out those who are different (quite the reverse), but because it has been grasped by a vision of life in all its fullness, with all and for all… and because it therefore cannot let go of hope, no matter how tough and threatening the circumstances. Perhaps a better way of putting that is not “cannot let go” (let’s face it, we lose our grip all the time), but “will not be let go”, because others will always be there, and because the final Other is love and communion, not hate and separation.

Martin Luther King Jr. famously declared that “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” As a matter of fact, there is very little in human history, current events or honest inspection of the human condition which would finally suggest this. From the perspective of mortality it is fracture, decay and death which have the last word. But, of course, that was not the perspective from which Dr King conceived those words. Nor were the undeniable limitations of this life the ultimate horizon for Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, Desmond Tutu or any of the other figures who have inspired us in the path of Jesus of Nazareth. No, their commitment was not holding on, but being held; not life threatened by death, but life in defiance of death; not carrying on in our own strength, but living beyond our means into the invitational infinity of love we name God. This is the true ecumenism.

Not everyone who has valued, engaged with, looked in upon or contributed to Ekklesia over the years has shared that particular perspective, belief or hope. Many have struggled with and rejected Christianity and religion, institutional or otherwise. Some would name the things we have talked about differently, or find the theological language we have sometimes needed to resort to and expand upon a struggle. But the key thing that has bound us together is the double conviction that “the system is broken” and that “another world is possible”.

So we (whoever ‘we’ have been over the past 22 years) will continue to identify alternatives, propose transformations, form coalitions, tell difficult truths, organise resistance, amplify prophets, press for change, value all people, hug one another deeply, negotiate awkward realities, recognise the abyss, pray fervently (which means to welcome what-shall-be in the domain of love), and remain undeterred. The space for all that is still an ekklesia, a public square in which all things are made new, a vision and body of humanity that Dr King called “the beloved community”.

In those terms, the ones that really matter, the search for (and building of) ekklesia continues. Not as a denomination, a church, a religion, a faction, a class, an ideology or a think-tank, but as a continually rediscovered zone of flourishing, hope, repair, rebuilding and imagination. A liberated and liberating space for all. That, we have always believed, is the place where a disruptive stranger from Nazareth would and will be truly welcome. Nearer the gutter than a Cathedral, as Dorothy Day once put it. This is the place where God is to be found in the world, and where solidarity begins anew, daily.

So our message to all we have travelled with over these more-than-two-decades is “fare well” as you continue your journeys (of which we have been privileged to be part), and au revoir – literally, “until we see each other again”. This is not a final word. No word ever is. It is just a word in transition. And it remains, as always, a poem; an invitation to see things differently and practice hope-in-action.

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© Simon Barrow was director of Ekklesia from 2016 to 2024, co-director from 2005 to 2016, and an associate from 2003 to 2005. He is a writer, educator and activist. His columns can be found here.

The post Ekklesia, au revoir, and ‘another world is possible’ appeared first on Ekklesia.

Image: courtesy of Oxfam

IMPORTANT: Ekklesia Network X/Twitter updates on Gaza and Israel Palestine continue, though this page ceased activity on 7 September 2024.

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IT HAS long been said that truth is the first casualty in war. In the age of digital technology, social media, AI and deepfakes, that awful reality has been turbo-charged. The continuing bombardment and assault on Gaza and the Russian invasion of Ukraine are prime examples here.

Like others, Ekklesia has been following the Palestine-Israel conflict for many years, not just since the awful Hamas attack on 7 October – itself a terrible part of a long history of occupation, brutality and cycles of violence going back decades.

We wish to see peace, justice and security for both Palestinians and Israelis alike in the region, an end to illegal occupation and settlement, a secure state for the Palestinians (either a two-state solution, or a federal single-state Israel/Palestine one with guaranteed rights and protections for all), and a recognition that war and killing are never a solution. We also oppose racism and discrimination in all its forms, including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

1. Reliable news, comment and advocacy sources

In terms of news sources, we follow events via both mainstream outlets/agencies (AP News, Reuters) and the United Nations and its organisations plus a variety of human rights, civil society and faith/church agencies with proven connections to, and/or presence in, Palestine Israel. Our own regularly-updated social media and reporting coverage has focused on credible news networks, Jewish and Israeli human rights organisations and campaigns in particular, and organisations building solidarity between Israelis and Palestinians in opposition to violence, war and occupation in all its forms.

That includes Human Rights Watch (international human rights agency), Amnesty International (Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories), +972Magazine (quality independent reporting from Palestine-Israel), the B’Tselem (‘image of God’) non-profit organisation (Jerusalem) documenting human rights violations in the occupied territories, Haaretz (Israeli newspaper, founded in 1918), Churches for Middle East Peace (regular updates via Facebook), Francesca Albanese (UN Special Rapporteur), International Middle East Media Center (run by Palestinians living in the Palestinian territories, working together with international journalists), Middle East Eye (UK-based news and comment), Middle East Monitor (online magazine), Electronic Intifada (Chicago-based, in-depth Palestinian perspectives), UN News (official agency), Al Jazeera (24-hour English-language news channel, funded by Qatar), Quds (news network), Times of Gaza (news and media company), The New Arab (journalism from the MENA region), Mondoweiss (news and opinion on Palestine and Israel), AJ+ (digital news and storytelling project for human rights), Middle East Council of Churches (MECC – official ecumenical body), Physicians for Human Rights Israel (monitoring and advocacy), MSF International (Médecins Sans Frontières), CPT-Palestine (building partnerships to transform violence and oppression), Good Shepherd Collective (based in Palestine, working for justice), Institute for Middle East Understanding (NGO, untold stories from Palestine), Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention (global grassroots genocide prevention), Standing Together UK (a solidarity campaign in support of Israel’s Jewish-Palestinian grassroots movement for peace, equality and social justice), the Quakers (engagement with Israel and Palestine), Jewish Voice for Peace (US-based advocacy organisation), Gisha (Israeli NGO seeking to protect the freedom of movement of Palestinians, especially Gaza residents), Accountability Archive (crowdsourced record of journalists, politicians, and public figures endorsing or encouraging ethnic cleansing in Gaza and defaming pro-ceasefire activists), Rabbis For Ceasefire (activist network), IfNotNow (American Jewish movement for justice for Palestinians), Refuser Solidarity Network (supporting war resisters), Voices Against War (people in Israel-Palestine for an end to the war and relies of hostages), Peace Now (Israeli action group promoting a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), Mennonite Action (US direct action to resist war and occupation), War Resisters International (WRI, global antimilitarist network), Pax Christi International (Catholic peace organisation), Na’amod (“Jews in the UK seeking to end our community’s support for Israel’s occupation and apartheid”), Sabeel (ecumenical Palestinian liberation theology), Palestinian Christian Alliance for Peace (North American network), Kairos Palestine (Christian Palestinians inspired by the Kairos Document in South Africa), Just Jews (an alternative Jewish viewpoint in the UK), Mesarvot (Israeli war refusers), Breaking the Silence (Israeli veterans), Jewish Elders for Palestinian Freedom (US-based), Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (US-based advocacy), Tikkun (Jewish, Interfaith and Secular voices for healing and transformation), Amos Trust (human rights organisation), Torah Judaism (non-Zionist conservative Jews supporting Palestinians), New Profile (movement to demilitarise Israeli society), Institute for Palestine Studies (research), Munther Isaac (academic dean, Bethlehem Bible College, convener of Christ at the Checkpoint network), Rabbi Alissa Wise (organiser, Robbie for Ceasefire), Rabbi David Mivasair (peace and justice activist, Canada), António Guterres (Secretary-General of the UN),  Mehdi Hasan (British-American broadcaster and author), Peace Action (US foreign policy lobbying), IfAmericansKnew (Independent research NGO focusing on Israel-Palestine), Mariam Elsayeh (freelance journalist and story producer who has written for BBC, Al Jazeera, The New Arab, etc.), Kenneth Roth (attorney and former HRW executive director), Lindsey Hilsum (Channel 4 international editor and correspondent), Jonathan K. Cook (journalist, Bristol/Nazareth), Mairav Zonszein (Senior Israel Analyst, Crisis Group), Mohamad Safa (diplomat, United Nations ECOSOC),  Canon Richard Sewell (Dean of St George’s College, Jerusalem), Alison Phipps (UNESCO Chair, University of Glasgow), Myriam François (director of ‘Finding Alaa’, presenter France in Focus), Sarah Abushaar (policy adviser), Sarah Wilkinson (social media campaigner), Jan Egeland (Secretary General, Norwegian Refugee Council), Yael Kahn (Israeli activist – daughter of Holocaust survivors), Robert Cohen (“edgy Jewish thinking”), John Aziz (British-Palestinian musician, peace activist, analyst of Middle East politics / history), Sayeeda Warsi (Conservative peer, Muslim), Owen Jones (Guardian columnist), Peter Oborne (conservative journalist with strong MENA interests), Religion Dispatches (acute comment on Palestine-Israel), Democracy Now (independent global daily news), Novara Media (independent left-wing alternative media organisation based in the UK), Double Down News (independent progressive media), DeclassifiedUK (public interest journalism on UK foreign, military, intelligence and climate policies), International Federation of Journalists (IFJ, supporting journalists worldwide), Bureau of Investigative Journalism (UK non-profit network), Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs), ICAN (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on Israel and nuclear issues), and many others.

The bold names above reflect sources and advocates we have cited most frequently in our social media and reportage, though that can change.

2. Our own partners

Mural: Massacre of Innocents, (c) St John’s Episcopal Church, Edinburgh

We especially recommend the analysis of our longstanding friend and associate Dr Harry Hagopian (international lawyer, ecumenical advisor and political observer of the MENA and Gulf regions). His book Keeping Faith With Hope: The Challenge of Israel-Palestine, provides  important background and was published by Ekklesia Publishing in May 2019. See also his commentary on YouTube. His 22 March article on Gaza is here.

We have been longstanding supporters and cooperators with Community Peacemaker Teams (formerly Christian Peacemaker Teams) and EAPPI (Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel), who work with the World Council of Churches and the Quakers. Ekklesia is a member of the Network of Christian Peace Organisations in the UK.

We welcome the Christian Aid Middle East Crisis appeal, alongside those from Oxfam and Save the Children. Donations to UNRWA’s emergency Gaza appeal can be made here. 

Ekklesia Network twitter updates will continue, though this page ceased activity on 7 September 2024.

• Listening with our hearts: Jewish prophetic voices and Israel-Palestine – Iain Lothian (7 September)
• Continuing export of F-35 combat aircraft parts to Israel ‘unjustifiable’ (3 September)
• Israeli attacks on refugee camps should be investigated as war crimes (29 August)
• UK ministers and civil servants ‘could be held liable for Israeli war crimes’ (23 August)
• US Christians appeal for ceasefire in protest at Gaza border (22 August)
• Statement on Israel’s impediments to freedom of worship (19 August)
• Humanitarian pauses vital for polio vaccinations in Gaza (17 August)
• Archbishop of Canterbury statement on Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (4 August)
• Delayed decision on arms exports to Israel is ‘unconscionable’ (1 August)
• Conditions for Palestinian children in Israeli miltary detention deteriorate (31 July)
• Farnborough Airshow protest against arms to Israel (24 July)
• Letters from Gaza children to Keir Starmer ask for violence to end (10 July)
• WCC strongly condemns attacks on Sacred Family School in Gaza (10 July)
• Decades of unfair trials for Palestinians in occupied West Bank (8 July)
• Catastrophic conditions for pregnant women in Gaza (24 June)

• Israeli use of heavy bombs raises serious concerns under laws of war. (23 June)
• Rishi Sunak should correct record on arms sales to Israel. (10 May 2024)
• CAFOD update from local partners on the ground in Rafah. (9 May 2024)
• ‘Protect freedom of speech and academic freedom on campus’ in wake of Gaza protests, says ACLU
• The scale of destruction in Gaza is almost beyond belief. (Haaretz newspaper, Israel)
• Rate of attacks on Gaza healthcare currently highest in global conflict.
• Israel’s slaughter of aid workers is a tragedy. But it is also a story of western racism (Middle East Eye)
• ‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets (Guardian)
• Majority of voters in UK back banning arms sales to Israel, poll finds (Guardian)
• Jesuits refuse to be silent on Gaza and call for immediate ceasefire.
• Latest marches in London and Ipswich calling for a ceasefire and an end to genocide.
• Stations of the Cross for Gaza. (Christians for Palestine UK)
• UK must stop arising Israel. Sign the petition now. (Oxfam)
• Global Christian leaders call for permanent Gaza ceasefire.
• UN Security Council resolution calls for immediate Gaza ceasefire (BBC, 25 March)
• An Israeli conscientious objector with anti-militarist organisation New Profile has spoken at Friends House in London.
• More on New Profile, the movement to demilitarise Israeli society.
• UN chief says it’s time to ‘truly flood’ Gaza with aid and calls starvation there an outrage (AP News)
• Reflections on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the language used to describe it (Humanity Journal).
• Can we dare to hope when it comes to Israel-Palestine? Harry Hagopian, Ekklesia associate.
• Israel continues blocking aid to Gaza despite ICJ genocide ruling.
• Human Rights Chief deplores move to expand Israeli settlements.
• South Africa requests the International Court of Justice to issue new additional provisional measures against Israel.
• ‘The Shoah after Gaza‘, by Pankaj Mishra (London Review of Books, Vol. 46 No. 5, 7 March 2024) — really important context.
• Gaza: Israel’s dehumanisation of displaced persons must end, says UN expert (6 March).
• Jewish Voice for Peace: “We are devastated to be marking 150 days of genocide. As of today, 30,631 people, including 12,000 children, have been murdered by the Israeli military.We will always bear witness. We will never forget.Ceasefire Now! (5 March)
• A group of journalists has written to both the Israeli and Egyptian governments asking for access to Gaza, so the war can be reported on fully.
• Gaza and a ‘beyond alarming’ election result, by Ekklesia associate Bernadette Meaden.
• Recording: A service of prayers, music, readings, poetry, silence, and a call to action; with the sermon given by Rev Dr Munther Isaac, pastor of Christmas Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem.
• Latest updates from the excellent Middle East Eye.
• UK Parliament debates SNP motion calling for an immediate #ceasefire in Gaza, but scuppered by Labour. 
• Number of Palestinians killed each day since the invasion of Gaza (via Shane Claiborne)
• Antisemitism and the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 (Religion Dispatches).
• Leading British rabbi warns against Rafah invasion: ‘If I said nothing, I couldn’t live with myself’ (Jewish News)
• Sunday 18th February, 2pm at Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church: vigil for Gaza, with Rev Mother Isaac.
• The next national, UK-wide day of action for a ceasefire is Saturday 17th February – London, Leeds, Edinburgh, Glasgow and many more. Look out for local details.
• Bishops (C of E) call for an immediate ceasefire.
• Forced evacuation of Rafah would be ‘catastrophic and unlawful’.
• Israel-based civil society and human rights organisations call for a ceasefire.
• Policy Advisor and graduate from Harvard and Stanford University, Sarah Abushaar, recounts the violence of the past 100+ days in Gaza, along with the past 75 years of Israeli occupation of Palestine, in spoken word.
• Grave dangers as US and UK leaders defy Genocide Convention, by Ekklesia associate Savitri Hensman.
• Locations of UK companies helping to arm Israel revealed.
• 110,000 Palestinians killed, wounded or missing in the ongoing Israeli aggression on Gaza.
• Online seminar on Christian Zionism and action for peace and justice, with the Rev Dr Munther Isaac. Sunday 4th February at 6:30pm UK time. Full details and registration here.
• The next national (UK-wide) day of action for a ceasefire in Gaza will be Saturday 17th February.
• A UK ‘Christ at the Checkpoint’ conference will take place on Sunday 18th February. More info to follow.
  

  EuroMed Human Rights, 4 February 2024

• Codepink (Women for Peace) Action for Palestine – including petition to Biden on UNRWA funding.
• Know their names: Palestinian children killed by Israel in Gaza (Al Jazeera)
• Israeli army shoots and kills the director of volunteers at Red Crescent Society Hidaya Ahmad in the office of the Red Crescent Society in Khan Younes.
• Gaza: UN rights experts condemn ‘killing and silencing’ of journalists.
• Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention issues a warning to several nations about their direct involvement in the intensification of genocidal acts against the Palestinian people (*.PDF file).
• Joint statement by aid agencies on suspension of UNRWA funding (1 Feb)
• UK will consider recognising Palestinian state, says Foreign Secretary.
• Petition: asking President Biden not to veto another ceasefire resolution at UN following ICJ interim judgement.
• Accountability Archive: a crowdsourced record of journalists, politicians, and public figures endorsing or encouraging ethnic cleansing of Gaza and defaming pro-ceasefire activists.
• UN Member States urged to stop fuelling crisis in Gaza.
• Raz Segal: Why International Court of Justice ruling against Israel’s war in Gaza is a game-changer (LA Times)
• UNWRA: Israeli official calling for its “destruction”.
• The ICJ ruling is a repudiation of Israel and its western backers – Kenneth Roth
• Holocaust Memorial Day: a powerful message from descendants of survivors.
• Indie Nile on The Psychology of Israeli Propaganda.
• Letter from American rabbis to President Biden.
• Christian peace group renews ceasefire call after ICJ ruling.
• International Court of Justice interim ruling on genocide charges against Israel.
  

  What had happened within five days of the ICJ interim ruling on genocide (26 January)

• The International Court of Justice will deliver its Order on the request for the indication of provisional measures submitted by South Africa in the case #SouthAfrica v. #Israel this Friday, 26 January 2024, at 1pm (The Hague). Watch live on UNWebTV here.
• The economic case for a Gaza ceasefire (Chatham House, 23 January 2024.
• Women and children in Gaza bearing brunt of ongoing war (World Council of Churches, 16 January 2024).
• The daily scenes of death, suffering and destruction from Gaza are shocking and sickening. According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, 32,246 people have been killed (including 29,720 civilians, 12,660 children and 6,860 women, 657 health professionals) by the 105th day of the assault, 19 January 2024. That includes people buried in the rubble, missing and believed dead. Another 1,955,000 are displaced, 72,440 homes have been destroyed completely and 190,000 partly destroyed, 208 hospitals and health care facilities destroyed, 326 schools damaged or destroyed.
• South Africa’s case against the Israeli government at the International Court of Justice highlights the incredibly high stakes of the current situation.
• Statement from the Church of England Bishop of Southwark calling for a ceasefire.
• Appeal from the  International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) to support journalists in and around Gaza.
• Documenting of atrocities committed in the assault on Gaza.
• Mitri Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, the People, the Bible (published September 2023).

(It is worth noting that the BBC, US [CNN] and European networks are subject to Israeli government monitoring and censorship in some aspects of their reporting. See: CNN staff say network’s pro-Israel slant amounts to ‘journalistic malpractice’. A huge number of journalists (current estimates vary from 96 to 115) have been killed by IDF operations and targeting in Gaza, and international reporters are barred. Citizen journalism material continues to emerge, however. The overall situation is clearly one of horrific death and destruction, mass displacement, a humanitarian and health catastrophe, the growing threat of hunger, and evidence of serious war crimes.)

This page was last updated 7 September 2024.   

The post Gaza news updates and truth-sourcing appeared first on Ekklesia.

IN HIS NEW BOOK, God the Child: Small, Weak and Curious Subversions (SCM Press, 2024), Graham Adams follows up his ground-breaking Holy Anarchy: Dismantling Domination, Embodying Community, Loving Strangeness with a book which turns our thinking about the divine upside-down again, starting from the perspective of childness.

This is one of the ways that Jesus is recorded as speaking about the concerns and priorities of the weak God who overturns all regimes of power and domination in the realisation of love. In some cultures children are idealised. In other ones they are marginalised. In all they are ignored and abused to some degree. This is where God is to be located, but never pinned down.

As the publicity for God the Child points out, We often express the mystery of God with diverse metaphors, but mostly in adult terms. In this experimental theological adventure, Adams imagines what might flow from a more thorough ‘be-child-ing’ of God. Aware that the child can indeed be idealised, he selects particular characteristics of childness in order to disrupt discourses around God’s omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience.

The smallness of the child re-envisages divine location in sites of smallness, like an open palm receiving the experiences of the overlooked. The weakness of the child reimagines divine agency as chaos-event, subverting prevailing patterns of power and evoking relationships of mutuality. And the curiosity of the child reconceives divine encounter as horizon-seeker, imaginatively and empathetically pursuing the unknown.

These possibilities are brought into dialogue both with other theologies (Black, disabled and queer) and with pastoral loss, economic/ecological injustice, and theological education. Through these conversations, God the Child emerges not only as a new model for God, but intrinsic to God’s new social reality which is close at hand.

Like Holy Anarchy, this book is essential reading for those seeking to rediscover the meanings of God in the twenty-first century, for those whose reception of Christianity was as a religion of overwhelming power, and for anyone who wishes to discover how revolutionary and subversive metaphorically-shaped theology has been and is.

* Graham Adams, God the Child: Small, Weak and Curious Subversions (SCM Press, 2024).

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© Simon Barrow was director of Ekklesia from 2016 to 2024, co-director from 2005 to 2016, and an associate from 2003 to 2005. He is a writer, educator and activist. His columns can be found here.

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EKKLESIA PUBLISHING was established in 2015/16 and has so far produced fifteen titles (including two currently in production), with a number of others in process for 2025. Though Ekklesia’s think-tank and news briefing services have ended, and the limited company that ran them is being wound up, publishing will go on as a sole trader business.

Our aim is to bring to market high quality books which help change the way we look at the world based on the values of social justice, peacemaking, sustainability and inclusion. Many of our authors and contributors write from a deeply rooted and progressive Christian perspective, but we want to encourage conversation across a spectrum of beliefs and spiritually informed viewpoints, religious or otherwise. Ekklesia Publishing also seeks to build a bridge between disciplined thinking and popular expression and discussion.

Forthcoming and in consideration at present are a book on Bishop George Bell and the recent controversy around him, by Ruth Greyson, with a contribution from Bell and Bonhoeffer scholar Keith Clements; Ekklesia director Simon Barrow’s book, Against the Religion of Power: Telling a Different Christian Story; and Stephen Kuhrt’s powerful Safeguarding the Institution: How the culture of the Church of England facilitates abuse.

There are also titles forthcoming from Siglum, which will now operate fully independently of Ekklesia Publishing.

We are currently looking for financial support and investment in this area of work. Ekklesia Publishing contact form to connect with us if you have offers or ideas.

* Our current list can be viewed here.

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These have demonstrated that our approach to transformations in the areas of beliefs, ethics, politics, economy, peacemaking, sustainability, sexuality and more is broad and wide. Our particular perspective has emerged from subversive and dissenting forms of Christianity. But we have also enjoyed lively conversations and points of collaboration with those of other faith or no faith (in religious terms) at all.

This final ‘bookshelf’ illustrates some of that diversity. First off, there is Riders on the Storm: The Climate Crisis and the Survival of Being (Birlinn 2020, reprinted 2021) by our good friend, the Quaker thinker and activist, Alastair McIntosh. This remains an essential primer and guidebook for those who wish to understand the scientific underpinning of urgent and existential concerns about global heating, especially given the misinformation and denialism that still surrounds it.

McIntosh rightly identifies climate change as the greatest single challenge to humankind as a whole today, and inherently links it to other major threats – war and conflict, economic inequality, pandemics like Covid, forced migration, and the predations of unregulated ‘free’ markets. He shows that conventional solutions and technical fixes are insufficient, weaving together a vision of humanity restored through science, politics, culture, psychology and (not least) spirituality.

To avert catastrophe, we need a massive shift in institutional and economic life. The super-rich, corporations, nation states and the military are particularly responsible for the situation we face. But there also needs to be a huge recalibrating of human thought, response and behaviour. This book brings the social and the personal, the political and the spiritual together beautifully, creatively and hopefully.

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Meanwhile, Jonathan Chaplin’s Faith in Democracy: Framing a Politics of Deep Diversity (SCM Press, 2021) both anticipates the continuing disruptions of democratic politics, and also offers hope for their development and reformation. Chaplin calls for an approach that maximises public space for the expression of faith and belief-based visions within democratic forums, while repudiating all traces of religious privilege. This is very much in line with what Ekklesia has sought to articulate over the years: a separation of powers when it comes to church and state; but shared, transformative action involving those of different convictions in civil society and in the deliberative and participatory forms of democracy which help shape representative ones.

Chaplin argues for a truly conversational and democratic citizen space, reflecting theologically on the contested concepts at the heart of the current debate about the place of belief in British public life: democracy, secularism, pluralism and public faith. I would add that democracy and subsidiarity are also about claiming back economic institutions and practices, socialising the economy by stealth, and making a people-and-planet priority of how we do local, regional, national and international politics.

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In a related way, Joseph Forde’s Before and Beyond the ‘Big Society’: John Milbank and the Church of England’s Approach to Welfare (James Clark, 2022) interrogates one of the several ‘grand narrative’ rhetorical projects which have emerged from New Labour and Tory UK governments in recent years, starting with the (some would say mythical) Blairite ‘Third Way’ between Thatcherism and social democracy. These have since included ‘the northern powerhouse’ (it disappeared) and ‘levelling up’ under the Conservatives (it never happened) – aiming to reduce the imbalances, primarily economic, between different areas and social groups.

Cameron and Osborne’s ‘Big Society’ was pivotal in all this political positioning and triangulation, which many might now think was much sound and fury signifying little, other than a deep determination by those in power to ensure that huge concentrations of wealth and control in the UK and in the global neoliberal order were not properly scrutinised, challenged, and assigned rightful responsibility for economic, social and cultural decay. The focus was on people and communities in such a way as to make them manage austerity and ‘take responsibility’, in other words. Issues of class, justice and power were sidelined.

Cameron guru Steve Hilton, who has since moved Trumpwards in his relentless search for ways of integrating right-wing populism with an individualised communalism, was a key figure in devising ‘the Big Society’ idea, though curiously he does not appear in the index of this book. The idea, according to the UK Government website at the time was that “the Big Society is about collective action and collective responsibility. We recognise that active local people can be better than state services at finding innovative and more efficient solutions to local problems. Tax-payers want better value for money, and the Big Society can deliver that.”

Forde subjects these claims to critical scrutiny, identifying positive features and acknowledging some of the evasions and problems too. I have to declare a direct interest here, because I was a signatory to the 2010 statement Common Wealth: Christians for Economic and Social Justice, primarily drafted by Steven Shakespeare and others, which forensically critiqued the Big Society as a ‘Big Lie’. It masked perpetual governmental attacks on the poor, and sought to get us to live our lives in collaborative submission to the great God of Capital with a nice neighbourhood gloss. This was an outspoken assault, and one I still believe to be essentially correct.

The main focus of Forde’s thoughtful and well-researched book, however, is the established Church of England’s social policies (which to a significant extent lined up with Big Society thinking) and the influence of the theologian and commentator John Milbank on this. Milbank, known for being the prime mover in the Radical Orthodoxy movement, has also been a significant figure in relation to the ideological underpinning of the Blue Labour and Red Tory tendencies. These are essentially overlapping critiques of aspects of neoliberalism allied with strong elements of social and cultural conservatism. There is a huge amount to be said about this, but a review is not the place for that. I may write more about it on the new newsletter Illuminations at some point. Suffice to say, Joseph Forde has supplied some very important background reading to what should continue to be a vigorous but nuanced debate.

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Next in line for consideration is a positive, optimistic and challenging read. Lesley Riddoch’s Thrive: The Freedom to Flourish (Luath Press, 2023) follows on from her acclaimed Blossom: What Scotland Needs to Flourish, issued by the same Edinburgh-based publisher ten years earlier.

Both books are rooted in an impassioned and incisive call to restore control to local communities, to learn from the social democratic and green experiments in other northern European countries, and to develop a fresh story around the case for Scottish independence which puts creativity, determination and the power of ordinary people at its heart.

Art and culture is not an unimportant part of this venture. So it is not surprising that iconic singer/songwriter Karine Polwart has commended Thrive as “an inspiring, galvanising analysis of the untapped potential of the Scottish people.”

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How should we live? This is a central question for all systems of belief and moral thought or action. It is the natural focus of Luke Bretherton’s A Primer in Christian Ethics: Christ and the Struggle to Live Well (Cambridge University Press, 2023). With his academic career spanning both sides of the Atlantic, Bretherton offers an innovative, narratively well-constructed and perceptive dive into the wide range and scope of Christian ethical thought over the centuries. In that regard, the book is well titled and subtitled, because its practical outworking is experiments in understanding and re-understanding how Christian faith and practice relate to living well amid both the difficulties of everyday life and the catastrophes and injustices that afflict too many across our world today.

The starting point, as Bretherton rightly determines it, is good description of the world, our engagement in it, and our responses to it at all levels – from the local to the global. Here the key is listening, and that provides the material of the first part of the book. Listening to creaturely life, to scripture (biblical texts understood as divine inspirations and warnings), to strangers, to cries for liberation, and to ancestors. Yes, we have much to learn from the past. No generation has all the answers. In fact it is the wisdom of yesteryear that our obsessively consumerist, instant, and technological society is most apt to lose sight of.

Part two then looks at the components, building blocks and interrogations involved in acting well. It begins with a recognition of our human finitude and failings, and proceeds to examine calls and commands, rules and regulations, and the vision of ‘virtue ethics’, all leading to deliberation and action. There is then a process of refection on action, repair and regalvanising.

The tradition of the virtues is one that Ekklesia has been particularly concerned with in recent years. What particular behaviours and habits can help us move more surely towards discerning the good, the true and the beautiful? How do we build character and learning among groups of people, so that they become the kind of persons capable of sustaining such actions? What is the link or bridge between interpersonal reformation, political action and economic justice? Bretherton ends up exploring the texture of ethical living and discernment in relation to intimacy, work and politics in part three of this wise and thoughtful book. Thoroughly recommended.

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Then, of course, there is insurrection. My forthcoming book Against the Religion of Power: Telling a Different Christian Story will, among other things, suggest that subversive Christian praxis – in opposition to imperial religion – should indeed be about revolt. But of what kind? Part of the origins of Ekklesia as a think-tank and change-agency came about through engagement with Anabaptism, which has its roots in the ‘radical reformation’ of the seventeenth century. In seeking to recover the levelling dynamic of many strands of the earliest Christianity, Anabaptists refused state baptism, held goods in common, refused to bear arms and rejected the judicial system as an arbiter of justice for a community of love. The historic peace churches (Mennonites, Quakers, Brethren in Christ) are among the descendants of these quiet revolutionaries and martyrs.

Yet all liberating movements have their distortions, failings, flaws and shadow sides, too. Jeffery C Pugh’s vivid, ingenious, gripping and imaginative novel, Cages: A Tale of Insurrection (Wipf & Stock, 2022), tells the history of the part of the radical reformation that gave way to violence and forced eschatology in the Anabaptist rebellion at Münster in 1534-1535. The revolt was against Christendom. The aim was to establish a communal government in the German city, then under the dominant Prince-Bishopric of Münster as part of the Holy Roman Empire. Pugh’s novel starts in 1533, and with Elsbeth Joris, who is about to be executed for witchcraft when Andreas Wagner cuts her loose from the ducking stool.

Exiled from family and village (from here on I am quoting here from the incisive blurb), Elsbeth accepts Andreas’s offer to accompany him back to his home in Münster, Germany—a decision that plunges her into a world of unhinged prophets, sassy nuns, and a deranged charlatan king. A disillusioned former monk, Andreas is returning home to confront his past, but the city is on the brink of collapse. Crowds rave hysterically in the streets, churches are ransacked, convents and monasteries empty, sacred texts are burned, and polygamy is instituted as God’s law.

To his surprise, Andreas finds that Ulrich Schlatter, a former nemesis, has also returned, seeking revenge on those who exiled him years ago. Stakes are raised for everyone when the Prince-Bishop of Westphalia calls mercenaries to besiege the city. The rebels, however, offer unexpected resistance, thwarting hopes for a quick victory. Finding refuge with one another and new friends in the ensuing struggle, Elsbeth and Andreas discover that love in the reign of a mad king is not impossible, but it does come with scars.

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Last but not least, and in a very different vein from the preceding books, there is play. How much do we need play in a world caught up in production, often in supremely deceptive, disruptive and destructive ways? These questions are never far from the surface in Dan Shenk’s You Are More Than Your Score: On Sports and Spirituality (Author Academy Elite, 2022). This book really is a labour of love. Checking in at nearly 600 pages, it is an exhaustive exploration of the relationship between loving sport and finding meaning in life through a huge range of stories, experiences and reflections.

Shenk, a copy editor who is a former church communications worker, youth minister and newspaper reporter, engaged with a large number of sports enthusiasts in compiling this comprehensive volume, which is packed with insight, provocation and questions, as well as touches of humour and surprising insight. Again, I must declare an interest, as my own small forays into this area are cited in the chapter on the phenomenon of fandom: my analogue of prayer with ‘wasted’ time, and the publication of Iain Whyte’s Football’s Faithful Fans (Siglum, 2019) which raised vital money for African development projects through the Homeless World Cup.

I will not attempt to sum up the contents of  You Are More Than Your Score (an impossible task, frankly!), except to say that it probes well beyond the cliches that can sometimes overrun attempts to link sport with spirituality, and that its primary methodology is story-telling. Because we are, essentially, narrated beings, and sport is narrative. It is also transformational. Lives change, the ordinary gives way to the extraordinary, joy and sorrow are intermingled, and our journeys take on ever-new, interesting and unexpected shapes.

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© Simon Barrow was director of Ekklesia from 2016 to 2024, co-director from 2005 to 2016, and an associate from 2003 to 2005. He is a writer, educator and activist. His columns can be found here.

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Photo credit: Carla J Roth

John 6:51-58; Psalm 34:9-14; Proverbs 9:1-6; Ephesians 5:15-20

“I am the living bread that comes from God. Whoever eats this bread will live eternally”  (John 6:51).

SOME YEARS AGO, the ecumenical development agency Christian Aid (with whom, I am delighted to say, Ekklesia has enjoyed a long and fruitful partnership) adopted a striking – and, for some pious souls, a rather shocking – slogan: “We believe in life before death.”

This was controversial because, in directing our attention towards the urgent need to address want, poverty, inequality and injustice in the immediate world of broken and wounded flesh, it was implicitly challenging those who would reduce Christianity to ‘pie in the sky when you die’; or life after death as the real or sole essence of faith, in such a way that “our eternal hope” (to use the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner’s striking phrase) is seen as marginalising, trivialising or dismissing life in the here-and-now.

In fact, as today’s strange and challenging gospel reading makes clear, “life in all its fulness” (to quote Jesus four chapters later, in John 10:10) is not about today or tomorrow, the present or the future. Rather it is about an extra-ordinary, unfathomable quality, vividness and intensity of life which can only come from God; a life-beyond-life which saturates and transforms our existence precisely and crucially in the here-and-now.  This is a taste of the inexhaustibility and incorruptibility of the divine life by which we have been formed and to which we are irresistibly destined.

Now that is a lot to absorb conceptually, so the Jesus of St John’s Gospel puts it in terms which are, at one-and the-same-time, both brutally material and bafflingly mystical. He is, he says, “the living bread” which must be consumed by us so that we might fully taste the love of God and be changed into the full likeness of the divine nature once and for all.

Eastern Orthodox theologians have a disarmingly straightforward way of putting this. God became human so that humanity might be taken into God, they say, with full biblical warrant. “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life… for my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink,” declares Jesus. “So whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them”– in the same way that he, the Christ, the anointed one, lives in God and God lives in him.

It is this indissoluble relationship (ourselves in God, and God in us) that we enact and anticipate every week in the Eucharist. As we eat bread and drink wine together, we remember Christ – who both truly died and is truly alive, until Christ is fully manifest (“until he comes again”, as we say in the liturgy). It is through the Eucharistic ritual that we are re-membered, re-joined, to one another and to God, whose very life we feed on… so that nothing can ever be or look the same again.

In God’s transforming presence, the bread we touch and taste is not mere flour and water, and the wine we savour and swallow is not mere fermented fruit. Rather, the bread we eat and the wine we drink, while remaining what they are, are experienced as an authentic foretaste of something imperishable and unimaginably real that sustains life beyond the limitations, losses and disappointments that we experience in our mortal flesh and blood. What we receive at the common table, a symbol and embodiment of the common life to which we are called,  is therefore “the living bread”, as Jesus puts it.

For we are not, as humanly constructed religion says, immortal. We are mortal; fleeting like grass, as the Psalmist notes, unsentimentally. Yet the essence of who we are – persons in relation (not isolation), and persons made in the image of God (that is, born from and destined towards God), can and will be “reclothed in immortality”, to use the language of Paul in 2 Corinthians 5.

In other words, mortal life – life bounded by birth and death, and subsumed in decay and suffering –  can give way, starting in the here-and-now, to the power and possibility of what is otherwise known as “eternal life”.  This word eternal is frequently misconstrued. In essence it doesn’t mean “going on forever” (we are all going to die). Rather, it means life re-clothed, re-imagined and re-understood in ever-increasing union with the love of God, which alone is unlimitable (and in that sense everlasting), and which changes everything.

What this means in practical terms is that, when we truly live in the presence of God, these things happen: hate gives way to love, war gives way to peace, injustice gives way to justice, enemies become friends, the hungry are fed, the guilty are forgiven, the naked are clothed, the bereaved are consoled, the lost are found, the least are most important, the last come first, and death gives way to life.

Whenever we work for these things (love, peace, justice, forgiveness and more), we join ourselves to, and participate in, the divine reversal of all that imprisons, shrinks and diminishes us and our world. “For my flesh is real food (not the perishing kind) and my blood is real drink (not the evaporating kind).” This is the gospel: an invitation to what our late and much missed friend and New Testament scholar Professor Larry Hurtado called “life beyond life-and-death”. In other words, in the flesh and blood of Christ, in his unjust execution and in the vindication of his risen life, we witness and begin to access God’s love vanquishing death and suffering.

We experience this not by running away from everyday earthly existence, with all its joys and sorrows, or by retreating into a (supposedly spiritual) ghetto, but by seeing life afresh in the light of Christ – such that we can re-experience and re-live it. As the ancient writer of Proverbs puts it: “Come, eat my food and drink the wine I have mixed. Leave your foolish ways and you will live; walk in the way of insight.”

How much do we and our world need to hear this message right now. For as the author of Ephesians bluntly says, “the days are evil”.  Greed, neglect, environmental destruction, genocide. You name it. “Therefore, do not be foolish, but discern what God’s will is… be filled with the Spirit.” See the world differently, live differently. Turn around and head in a different direction – the literal meaning of the gospel word metanoia, or repentance. As the Psalmist challenges us: “Turn from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.”

Why is this so hard? Partly because, if you are a certain kind of religious person, it is tempting or even preferable to give up on the sheer difficulty of life before death (that Christian Aid provocation), and instead to seek consolation in a stunted form of life after death which is largely disconnected from our present challenges. But that is not the gospel. It is not receiving the gift of true life, which enables us to confront our current limitations and fears through an enduring hope in the unrestricted life and love of God.

Life re-experienced in and through Christ, in other words, is undividable and indissoluble. It is flesh and blood, but much more than flesh and blood. It is bread and wine, but much more than bread and wine. Equally, it is not less than flesh and blood, not less than bread and wine. The spiritual is not separated from the material, it is what changes it into something beyond itself. It is the beyond in the midst, “what shall be” visiting and transforming “what is”.  Risen life displacing life lived in the shadow of death, or life greedily consumed at the expense of others.

So as we visit the table of communion shortly, think of it this way. We are being fed on the very life of God – not on our own, but together. We are being bound together in one body, despite all our oddities and differences. We are being invited to feed one another, and the world. We are being rendered equal in our need and desire for nourishment. We are being empowered to go out into the wider community, nourished again, in order to be able to nourish others and, yes, to be nourished by them. All this and much, much more happens in the name, presence and possibility of the one who says to us, yesterday today, and always: “I am the living bread that comes from God. Whoever eats this bread will live eternally.”

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© Simon Barrow is director of Ekklesia. This is the text of an address given at St James the Less Episcopal Church, Leith, Edinburgh, on 18 August 2024. His book Against the Religion of Power: Telling a Different Christian Story will be published in the near future, and his Ekklesia columns can be found here.

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