It's quite a rare thing for mew to preach in all three services in a day, and probably even rarer to preach the same sermon in all three churches.
The readings were Hebrews 5, 5-10 and John 12, 20-33
There were a lot of ad libs, for example about PSA. The bit of the shack I read out was from page 31 where Mack and Missy are talking about whether God is mean to send Jesus to the cross
Why is Jesus like the Internet?
One reason is my spell checker won’t let me write either of those two words without a capital letter!
This week in Stebbing the broadband Internet connection wasn’t working.
As a result I found myself getting quite stressed, and realised just how much I rely on these things for communication, to stay connected to lots of networks and to receive and send lots of information. I felt cut off, and it made me think about being cut off from God.
Last week after church at Little Saling, young Oscar Roe asked me “What is salvation?” I gave him an answer, but I’m not sure it was an adequate one. This week, I might have answered using the broadband cut off metaphor.
Without Christ, we are cut off from God, we cannot get through to him and we cannot come into his presence, but Christ provides for us a means of communication with God, and he is also the provider to us of everything God wants to give us. Just as our computers give and receive information from other computers via the Internet, Christ the means both of our communication with God, and his communication – of his love, his guidance, his power and his comfort – with us. When our Internet connection goes down, we may feel cut off, but that state of isolation is nothing compared to the condition of being cut off from God.
In this sense then, Jesus is, as the writer to the Hebrews says, the source of our salvation, as well as being the means. He is how we receive God’s gift of eternal life – through faith in him, and he is the reason we can receive it, because of his death upon the cross. Hebrews tells us that Jesus’ priesthood was not a human institution but a divine appointment. It was God’s purpose, and Jesus’ choice, to take the path he walked, the path to the cross.
So then, another way Jesus is like the Internet is that you don’t need to know how it works to benefit from it.
What I mean by that is, I don’t understand computers beyond a limited amount of information like how to switch them on and off, or how to … er, actually that’s about it. Yet I can still use one and benefit from the communication tools it affords me (when it is working of course!)
In the same way, there are whole libraries full of books on the theology of the cross. Theologians from all shades of the church have spent the last 2 millennia puzzling over the mechanics of the cross, how it is that one man’s death at one point in history can have such far-reaching and fantastic consequences. There are lots of different theories of the atonement, but they remain theories. I am not one of those people who assess a Christian’s orthodoxy on the basis of which theory of the atonement they subscribe to. But there is one issue surrounding this that has been debated recently, and which our readings today offer interesting insights on.
Hebrews speaks of Christ’s obedience, and John’s gospel portrays Jesus predicting his own heath, and speaking of its consequences. John’s Jesus is a man who knows what he has to do, yet still chooses to do it in the face of extreme distress. Some people say they do not like the idea of God forcing his Son to die, railroading him into making a sacrifice. This, it is said by some, is inconsistent with the idea of a God of love and grace, which the New Testament tells of. This approach regards the idea of God sacrificing his son as barbaric, just as we would regard the story of Abraham and Isaac as barbaric, if God had not intervened to stop the patriarch from killing his own son.
However, it is clear that Jesus knew his own mind – he was daunted by the prospect, but he trusted God. He was aware of the stakes, but he chose to go to the cross; he was not railroaded and could have taken another route; yet he knew the Father’s will. Not that it was a vindictive death sentence laid down by a vindictive God, but that when he was lifted up form the world, he would draw all people to himself. Lifted up in John is a reference to the cross, the throne of the King.
To reinforce this point I would like to read a paragraph from the Shack (p31)
So, if you like, to answer Oscar’s question more articulately, salvation is the fact that Jesus chose willingly to die for us. He knew his sacrifice would not be in vain, and he became obedient to his father in choosing to die. His death conquered death for us; that is salvation, that even though we die yet shall we live, because that’s what he did – but we must save the last bit for Easter.
So to conclude, Oscar, salvation is being saved from death, being brought into God’s family, God’s kingdom. It is something Jesus has done for us upon the cross, but we are not passive it this. Just as Jesus chose to die – his Father did not compel him, but he chose to die, we have to choose to follow him, to trust him and to believe in his promises.
When we have done that, if it’s not too trivial a comparison, Jesus is our Internet connection to God. Through him we receive messages, reassurances, encouragement, rebukes, healing and forgiveness. Through him we send to God our worship, our praises, our prayers, our confessions, our frustrations and our distress. In doing this we draw closer to Christ, closer, by the power of the Spirit in us, to each other, and closer to our Father God.
