3 Lent 2024

‘they will hand you over to councils and flog you…, and you will be dragged before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them…’

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In the autumn of 2003, I visited my first OxBridge college. I was in my third year of undergrad, and I had been on a study-abroad programme at the University of Glasgow. I came south to visit a friend who was doing a Master’s at Jesus College Cambridge. And before we went in for my first experience of formal hall with gowns and the lot, we met up in the Chaplain’s rooms for some chat  a few rounds of Bop-It.

For those of you who don’t know, Bop-It is a kind of electronic toy with various bits to tap or twist or press as an electronic voice instructs you, getting faster and faster until your manual dexterity or tolerance for a disembodied voice saying ‘bop it! twist it! squeeze it!’ give out.

This diverting exercise, along with a glass of sherry is about all I can remember from that visit, and, for better or worse, it was my first real encounter with Christianity in England.

Fast forward to today, I have been working in and around the Church of England for many years, but there is still something indicative about the stakes of being a Christian in England that that first, enjoyable, comfortable, slightly silly encounter twenty years ago.

Lovely as it was, and even as important as it might have been, nothing calling itself Christian, could really be further from the circumstances into which Jesus was sending his disciples with the warning to be ‘be wise as serpents and innocent as doves’.

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In the first century, it would not only have been dangerous to be a Christian: it would have been absurd.

On the one hand, in the context of first-century Judea, the first Christians were making claims about who God is and how they act in the world that were intolerable to the religious authorities and traditions of their time.  The earliest Christians were barred from the synagogues and from participation in the religious community in ways that put in jeopardy their ability to marry, work, and live in the land they had always called home.

And on the other, in the context of the wider Roman Empire, the first Christians were making claims about who people are as a result of who God is that were intolerable to the imperial authorities. If true divinity, true godhood, was to be found in the crucified body of a convicted traitor and felon, then that implied things about the body of the divine emperor and his godly ancestry that were intolerable to the civil order across the Mediterranean.

What is more, the absurdity of their claims about virtue would have run directly counter to the common sense values of the day. We take it for granted today that our sympathies ought to lie with the marginal and the downtrodden, that there is virtue in caring for those whom fortune seems to have forgotten or trodden underfoot.

That would not have been the case for ordinary citizens of the Roman Empire in the years following the life of Jesus. It would have been obvious to anyone in the great halo of Roman culture that the unfortunate were precisely those whom the gods had abandoned, spat on, punished for some misdeed or violation of their honour. There would have been no virtue for most in caring for the marginalised: they had been marginalised for a reason and the last thing any right-thinking person would want to do is to be identified with them.

And so to preach a God who not only cared for the marginal but loved them so much that she came down and lived and died as one of them: this would have been madness, let alone to claim that this self-abasement would have been rewarded with resurrection and eternal life. Early Christians faced persecution not only for their civil disobedience, but for the possibilities that their claims about God made available to ordinary people: that there was something more real, closer to truth, to be found among the lowly and forgotten than in the halls of power and the temples of the holy.

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The early history of Christianity is so coloured by its experience of persecution, first by the religious authorities of Judea and then by the imperial authorities of Rome, that speech about the ‘persecuted church’ has become both rooted in the first generations of Christianity and adopted like a mantle for many Christians today: to be authentically Christian, they reason, like the first Christians, is to be persecuted, as if persecution itself were a sign of righteousness and moral fibre.

So powerful has the language and identity of persecution become among Christian nationalists in America and elsewhere in the world that in order to justify practices of theocratic domination, they speak of themselves as being ‘persecuted’ by a secular culture that will not allow them to impose thier version of Christian ethics on an unwilling populace.

With this seeming to be the endpoint of a story that began with Christians being executed by the state, and ending with Christians complaining that they cannot use those same levers of the state to control those around them, Jesus words in the Gospel reading tonight seem to have very little to say to us this evening.

What could the Christianity that drinks sherry and plays Bop-It or broadcasts its intention to reignite the fires of Christian empire possibly have to do with a life of faith that fears being brought before the authorities of the world simply for speaking the name of a Jesus or insisting that his life, death, and resurrection show us something true about who God is and what reality is truly like? What do we have to fear today?

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Thankfully, in this place, at this time, for being a Christian, very little indeed.

And this is something to be grateful for. Truly.

There is no virtue in the mantle of persecution per se.

But it is a vital and always necessary reminder for us who live comfortably that this has not always been the case and continues not to be the case for millions and millions worldwide.

Not only do Christians continue to face active, violent persecution in countries like North Korea, Yemen, Eritrea, and India, people face exclusion, imprisonment, and death for all kinds of reasons, and it is the witness of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and the life of persecution and marginalisation of his followers throughout time and space that it is here that God is most clearly to be found: this is where God chooses most especially to live.

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Jesus tells his disciples that when they enter into spaces where they face judgement and unjust treatment, God’s Spirit will be with them.

And if we would know God, if we would see God’s face, we could not do better than to open our eyes and to see the world’s pain, not for its own sake, but to allow our hearts to be broken and to join with God in bringing healing and love and hope. To live in such a way that we become transparent to the life of God working in the world for peace, for reconciliation, for resurrection from the dead.