On sharing (a sermon in Black History Month)…
This is my sermon from today, for a lovely church I was visiting in south London—who took me with them on their Black History Month walk around Clapham after the service, and for lunch.
The readings today were Isaiah 53:4-end, Hebrews 5:1-10, and Mark 10:35-45—all of which merit about 45 different sermons.
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I wonder, what does sharing mean to you? What does it look like?
Does it look like eating together, celebrating at festivals, teaming up to make things happen in our communities—be they churches, or schools, or other kinds of groups?
Does it look like sharing the things that we have that others don’t? Lending and borrowing tools for DIY? (I still have the saw my cousin lent me when I moved house a year ago). Handing on clothes and equipment for new children? Passing on copies of books, films, perhaps recipes, that we love?
Does it mean sharing in joy—the celebration of good news, loves, successes?
Does it also mean sharing in the difficulties of life—pain, even suffering? These are the things that it can be hard to share, no? It can be hard to be the one who shares personal difficulties and pains, to ask others to listen, or to help carry the load? And it can be hard to listen, to share burdens—especially when they are difficulties and griefs that don’t have easy solutions or quick fixes.
I am wondering about sharing today, because of one of the themes that links our readings together today is sharing. Sharing in a common life – and in particular, in its pains and sufferings.
In Isaiah, we have the picture of the ‘suffering servant’, carrying the pain, suffering and burdens of a community.
In Hebrews, we see Jesus sharing in the role of the high priest and its responsibilities, and in the pain and death that humanity so often suffers.
And in the gospel, we have James and John, two of Jesus’ nearest and dearest disciples, asking to share in Jesus’ glory while still not quite understanding what this glory will mean for him—or for them. Jesus doesn’t spell it out for them here—but we know what is coming next in the story (and in fact, in the verses before this, Jesus has told his disciples what is about to happen!)
The favour that James and John ask, to sit at Jesus’ right and left hand in his glory, probably wouldn’t have been an unusual one at that time in the ancient mediterranean world. They had clearly got their heads around the idea that Jesus was the Messiah, the saviour – even a coming king. And in their world, kings and conquerors shared their glories and good fortunes with their friends and allies. But they hadn’t got their heads around what being the Messiah was actually going to mean for Jesus.
They hadn’t quite grasped that for Jesus, incarnation, becoming human, taking on flesh, meant sharing in human life, with all its joys and all its pains—including the pain of death. We describe this as Jesus’ solidarity with humanity: his shared experience of life and death on earth—which makes it possible for us to share in his resurrection and a new, eternal, life. And we understand it as good because it means that Jesus knows what we are going through when we suffer – and it means that we can meet him even in those times and places, with us and sharing with us. He isn’t somewhere outside these experiences.
We can read our Isaiah passage as a picture of this—though its important to remember that it wasn’t originally written about Jesus and that in the Jewish tradition, the suffering servant has often been read as Israel in exile. But here we see the connection between pain and suffering and the reality of sin in a broken world.
As a lot of liberation theologians and teachers remind us, Jesus’ death is the consequence of sin, not because he is being punished for us in the way we are sometimes told or think we ought to be— but because sin can be understood as all of those actions and attitudes that damage our ability to love, and to hope, and to have faith in each other and in God, that have consequences within the world. There’s a kind of cause and effect in the way humans have treated each other over millennia—the ways in which we continue to treat each other—in which our fears of pain and suffering leads us towards self-interest and mistrust of others, to seek our own wellbeing first…
It’s the kind of thing that leads people to hoard wealth and goods. To seek self-sufficiency, and the interests of their own families and countries at the expense of others…
This is part of the history of wars and empires, over the centuries
It is also the kind of fear that led people to see Jesus as a threat and to seek his death.
When we understand this, we understand what it is that Jesus is asking James and John in the gospel—he is asking them if they can share not only in the business of daily life, of friendship and meals and travel, and so on, but if they can also share in the love that Jesus has for the world, and in the pain and suffering that such love experiences when it meets the consequences and reality of sin.
They don’t really understand this, but they still say yes – which is quite beautiful, I think. I suspect that, like them, we often don’t fully realise what it is Jesus is asking us to share in, as we follow him—perhaps if we did, we wouldn’t be able to say yes. But today’s readings prompt us to think about it for a moment.
And I want to be really clear that saying that following Jesus means sharing in the pains of the world and its people, as we share in his love them does not mean that suffering itself is ‘good for us’ or in some way redemptive, a thing we have to go through to be saved. Suffering just is. It exists because of these failures of love and trust. Because the world is broken and sin has real effects. God can and does do new and good things in some of these situations—Hebrews and Isaiah are wanting to help us see this– but we actually have to encounter and experience this for ourselves in these moments, to find this meaning. We can’t just tell people that this is what will happening and expect them to feel it.
But we can, I think, remind each other that Jesus experienced pain and suffering, shares our pains with us. And I believe that by trying to show up to hear and sit with each other’s hard experiences, as well as the joyful ones; by trying to be people that others can trust in and be loved by; and perhaps even by quietly hoping in the promises of Jesus’ resurrection when others find they cannot—I believe that in all of this there is form of solidarity, of the kind that Jesus is asking James and John to take up as they share in his life.
This is something that Black History month asks us to do: in particular it asks those of us, like me, who are white and British to listen to stories and experiences within our shared global history that we might not have heard before or might not have learned about. Stories that are shot through with the realities and consequences of sin and suffering. Of enslavement and colonisation, of racism and cruelty—and also of survival, of work and love, and of encounters with Jesus in all of these experiences.
I’m hoping that those of us on today’s Black History walk will experience something of this, and that you all experience something of it in your lives together, here.
Like James and John, we are asked to share in whole lives: giving, receiving, supporting, caring—with the kind of love that seeks to challenge sin and to blunt its effects or help carry the burdens of its consequences. And we are asked to help each other to hope, faithfully in the love of Jesus, who has gone before us through suffering, through death, and into new life.