22 May Sermon for the 4th Sunday of Easter, Year C
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Sunday 11th May, 2025
Drama. Controversy. Argument. Tempers. Offence taken. Punishment needed. Violence and threat of death. Welcome to our Communion service this morning! Is that what you expected when you came to this particular temple today? That’s what we’ve just read about in John chapter 10. Even so, the drama in Bible readings can get rather lost in our flat, two-dimensional encounter with them through just words on a page that are read out and may be very familiar to us as well. We need to look at this story again. There’s real drama here and we do best if we can imagine and picture the scene in three dimensions.
So where are we and what is the context? We are in the courts of the Temple in Jerusalem. Jesus has been noticed increasingly by the Jewish religious leaders. He has been making claims about himself that are pushing the boundaries of what can be tolerated by any prophetic rabbi – verging too many times on blasphemy in the ears of these religious leaders. He has shamed them by forgiving the woman caught in adultery and challenging them to throw a stone at her only if they themselves have never sinned. He has been talking about God the Father and his own relationship to Him, claiming to be the Light of the world. He has accused those who did not believe him of being children of the devil. He has healed a man born blind on the sabbath and caused upset by doing so. And Jesus then goes on to talk about sheep and shepherds and of himself being the Gate of the sheepfold and of being the Good Shepherd who knows his sheep…. and He teases further in making claims of his relationship to the Father: “the Father knows me and I know the Father…. the Father loves me because I lay down my life … that I may take it up again (“What?”, you can hear the Jewish leaders saying). I have authority to lay it down and I have authority to take it up again (“Really?”). This charge I have received from my Father” (“your Father rather than our Father?”).
And then we come to today’s encounter. We are told by John that it’s the Feast of Dedication, otherwise known as Hanukkah. A relatively recent Jewish Festival celebrating the defeat 200 years earlier of the occupying power, the Greek Seleucid Empire, by the Maccabees, a group of Jewish rebel warriors. In 164 BC in particular, Judah Maccabees defeated the King of this empire Antiochus IV Epiphanes and took back Jerusalem and the Temple from him. Antiochus had taken control of the Temple and forbidden Jewish worship. To make his point he had sacrificed a pig (of all animals) on the Altar of the Temple and had thus insulted and deeply offended all Jews. What is more, Antiochus had claimed divinity for himself, even naming himself Epiphanes meaning “God made manifest”. Again, anathema and offensive to the Jews. His defeat is celebrated by this Feast of re-Dedication of the Temple.
And here Jesus comes on this Feast and makes the claims we heard about in our Gospel for today. “My sheep hear my voice…. I give them eternal life. My Father has given them to me. I and the Father are one…. I am God’s Son…. The Father is in me and I am in the Father.” Imagine what the Jewish leaders are thinking … “On THIS Feast, when just 200 years ago Antiochus had defamed this place and made himself out to be God, you are saying that you are the Son of God??!! What outrage, what affrontery, what blasphemy.”
Jesus knows what he is doing. Making his point loud and clear. You (you Jewish leaders) are the problem, he infers. Here is the irony of Hanukkah which celebrates the retaking of the Temple out of the hands of the blaspheming Antiochus who claimed he himself was God. But now, implies Jesus, you Jewish leaders are becoming the problem yourselves by not recognising God in your very midst.
“I and the Father are one.” Jesus questions them and forces it out of them as they say, “You have said you are God”. He tries to confound them by quoting Psalm 82 which contains within it the rather startling phrase that has God saying, “You are gods, sons of the most High, all of you…” it sticks out as strange and bucks against the Bible’s monotheism….
In the psalm God berates the readers who have judged unjustly and shown partiality to the wicked. And here Jesus points the words of this psalm back at the Jewish leaders of the day … who have received Torah but themselves are now showing partiality to the wicked…..
All of this pushed them too far and so they take up stones and try to stone him. This was no small thing. To stone someone (which would have killed them) was an immense decision and the Jewish leaders would have to have been so riled and stirred to anger even to consider it. And yet they did.
In our sanitary, well-ordered and peaceful liturgies we can’t really imagine what that must have been like. If someone interrupted our service that would throw us completely wouldn’t it? Particularly in monastic communities when we tend to be the kinds of people who like things well-ordered and predictable; we need people to stick to the rules…. Otherwise it throws us. Anything that breaks the written and unwritten conventions causes distress. If we had oranges and bananas for lunch on a Friday, there’d be consternation in the Refectory.
If any kind of similar scene were to take place here, this morning ….. “And the Jews took up stones and tried to kill Jesus” (take up a large stone and make out to throw it) we’re perhaps a step nearer in imagining the scene and understanding it’s significance….
So, how can we make familiar Bible stories leap out at us? One way recently which I am finding is helping me bring the pages of the Gospels alive in a brand new and very exciting way is the film drama series “The Chosen”. I don’t know how many of you have heard about it or even seen any of the episodes. So far there are 32 episodes over 4 series. I would like to recommend it to you. Given half a chance I will happily wang on about it, so please bear with me a moment. … I had heard a while ago about this series “The Chosen” and before I came to Mucknell it had been on my Netflix watch list for ages, but I kept putting off watching it. As we know, there have been quite a few attempts at making films or TV series about the Bible, and we also know that most of them end up being either over the top film productions like Ben Hur, or so tacky and cringey and poorly done, that we have been really put off such things. I suspected The Chosen would be the same, so for months and months at the end of busy days I would sit down and scroll through what to watch to help me unwind…. Do I really want to begin watching The Chosen or shall I just watch a repeat of Yes Prime Minister or Dad’s Army instead? I chose the lighter option every time.
Until one day I did finally begin watching Series 1. And oh was I blown away. For a start, it’s a proper filmed series. Top quality productions. Good actors who seem very well cast. No one you would recognize, which is perhaps helpful when watching Jesus and the disciples (we don’t want to see actors we know trying to play such roles – it’s easier somehow for an unknown face to become more credible). Over several series, it takes us gradually through the accounts of Jesus and his Chosen disciples (hence the title) so that great depth and back-stories can be developed. It burrows deep into the Jewish faith from which Jesus and his followers of men and women are coming. I have learnt a great deal more about why Jesus did and said many things, as the links to his Jewish heritage have been cleverly made. The episodes have come from a broadly evangelical Christian stable, but scholars from Roman Catholic, and Messianic Jewish backgrounds have been consulted throughout and have made sure that accuracy to the times and context is as consistent as possible.
What the series very cleverly does is create a wider backstory for each of the disciples and many other figures from the gospels. It is very faithful to the Biblical text and works hard never to contradict the scriptures, but it does add to them. “Now”, you may say, “that doesn’t sound right, you can’t add to the scriptures”. You are correct; we can be certain of very little beyond what the Bible tells us, but The Chosen adds only things that are “plausible” – that’s the word the writers use a lot.
There’s a lovely moment when Nicodemus has come to Jesus by night and they are on the roof top deep in discussion together… and just on the stairs to the roof out of sight is the disciple John who is listening intently and over-hearing their conversation whilst diligently recording notes of it on his writing tablets. Did that happen? We cannot know, for it is not recorded in the gospels, but we do know that John writes about the conversation Jesus had with Nicodemus in his Gospel. So…. it’s plausible… It doesn’t take away from the story of Nicodemus – which, by the way, the writers handle beautifully, powerfully and movingly in series 1 – but it is a plausible explanation as to how John ever got to know the details of that conversation.
Back to our text for this morning. When it comes to the scene we have before us in our Gospel reading today, The Chosen brings it to life in a most powerful way. In the Temple courts, in the hubbub and bustle of these courts Jesus speaks out and teaches using the words we have heard, and the Jewish leaders grow furious to the point of actually beginning to hurl stones at Jesus and his disciples round him. James gets injured and they retreat, but it is a tense and violent moment…..
This visual dramatization of Ch.10 of John’s Gospel brings home to me the power of Jesus’s words and the claims he is making. This is the same Jesus we worship this morning. This is the same Jesus who taught and demonstrated to his followers the significance of who He is and what He was about to do in Jerusalem and which we commemorate this morning and most days in this Abbey.
And here we are, in this Oratory, hearing this same account this morning. We have worked our way through Lent and survived the deprivations and the extra disciplines we chose to follow. We have lived through Holy Week and reached the goal of Easter Day. We have celebrated on that day and perhaps for a few days after as well. And now we find ourselves well embedded in the season of Easter. “Alleluia” begins to trip off our lips with not quite the same depth and joy after that first week or so….. ‘Twas ever thus; that we lose some of our enthusiasm and joy too quickly.
May today’s Gospel, with its drama and acute focus back onto Christ Jesus and who he is, remind us of what his Passion, Cross and Resurrection have truly accomplished. As we journey towards the Ascension and then to Pentecost, we are reminded of how Jesus lives in us and we in him. We are Resurrection people and we are all called to live out that resurrection in our world which loiters in the tomb and would drag us back there if it had its way.
Brian McLaren from the Center for Action and Contemplation, says the following, “What might happen if every Easter we celebrated the resurrection not merely as the resuscitation of a single corpse nearly two millennia ago, but more—as the ongoing resurrection of all humanity through Christ? Easter could be the annual affirmation of our ongoing resurrection from violence to peace, from fear to faith, from hostility to love, from a culture of consumption to a culture of stewardship and generosity … and in all these ways and more, from death to life. What if our celebration of Easter was so radical in its meaning that it tempted tyrants and dictators everywhere to make it illegal, because it represents the ultimate scandal: an annual call for creative and peaceful insurrection against all status quos based on fear, hostility, exclusion, and violence? What if we never stopped making Easter claims about Jesus in AD 33, but always continued by making Easter claims on us today—declaring that now is the time to be raised from the deadness of fear, hostility, exclusion, and violence to walk in what Paul called “newness of life”? What if Easter was about our ongoing resurrection “in Christ”—in a new humanity marked by a strong-benevolent identity as Christ-embodying peacemakers, enemy lovers, offense forgivers, boundary crossers, and movement builders? What kind of character would this kind of liturgical year form in us? How might the world be changed because of it?”
Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?
Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World (Jericho Books, 2012)
May it be so. Amen.
Rev’d Michael Woodcock, Alongsider
Image: JESUS MAFA. The good shepherd, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=48288 [retrieved May 22, 2025]. Original source: http://www.librairie-emmanuel.fr (contact page: https://www.librairie-emmanuel.fr/contact)
To watch “The Chosen”:
you can either download an App called “The Chosen” and watch episodes through the App on your mobile device
or
on a laptop or computer you can use this website https://watch.thechosen.tv/ All of the episodes of series 1-4 are available and there are more series to come. Plus if you click on the “Bible Stuff” tab you can choose to watch the “extras” such as the Roundtable discussions on each episode with the writers and consultants.
The first season may also be available on Netflix. The first couple of episodes take a while to get into and to recognise the characters. The first episode takes the story of Mary Magdalene (who in this account is originally known as “Lillith”) exploring her past and the damage she has experienced. The end of the episode is very powerful. We also meet Simon and his brother Andrew, behind on their tax payments, and the tax collector Matthew. By episode three it begins to fall into place and we are introduced more fully to the rabbi Jesus and his radical teachings… and then the fun really starts….
You could use it as a basis for discussions with one or two others after watching each episode……