A Socially Isolated Jesus
(Sermon by Russell Stannard)
Social isolation. There you sit spatially separated from each other. Faces covered. Not allowed to shake hands for the Peace. (At the 10 o’clock service) Can’t meet for a chat over coffee afterwards. Attendance at weddings and funerals restricted to the few. Stay at home. Keep your distance.
It is all so unnatural. We are by our very nature social beings. As a person, we are largely defined by our interactions with others, how we behave with them. One of the very worst punishments that can be inflicted on a human being is to be locked down in solitary confinement, denied all human contact. These are indeed very, very difficult times.
I find myself wondering how Jesus would have been affected if there had been a similar lockdown during his ministry 2000 years ago. After all, it is hard to imagine a more social person than Jesus. We always think of him mixing freely with other people.
Well for a start, think of the gospel for today. There would have been no feeding of the 5000. 5000 people all in the same place? Sorry. Not allowed.
He travelled a lot. ‘Stay at home,’ we are told. He couldn’t. He didn’t have a home.
He went everywhere with his constant companions, the twelve disciples. 12? That won’t do. The maximum size of your permitted bubble is 6 people, so he would have to get rid of 6 of them. I wonder which 6 he would choose to let go.
He had countless friends many of whom were women followers. He mixed easily with the outcasts of this world, prostitutes and tax gatherers. Under the lockdown, however, he would have to cut down on that. There is the story of how a tax collector called Zacheus was up a tree to catch a better sight of Jesus over the heads of the crowd. Jesus calls out to him ‘Come down Zacheus. I am to stay at your house.’ ‘Oh no you are not’ replies Zacheus. ‘Not unless you have been in 14 days quarantine,’ he might have replied.
With the wedding at Cana they probably would not have run out of wine because of the restrictions on the number of people allowed to attend the wedding.
He was concerned about people’s welfare. We are told that that crowd of 5000 were hungry so he provided them with food. Under lockdown, no he couldn’t. Not unless he had blue rubber gloves when handling the loaves and fishes.
Sick people were continually seeking him out to cure them miraculously. Sorry. All operations for treating blindness, deafness, leprosy must be carried out under hygienic conditions with the doctor wearing a face shield, mask, gown, overshoes and gloves.
Yes, there is little doubt that Jesus’s ministry would have been very different had he had to obey today’s social isolation rules.
And yet there is a totally different perspective one can have on Jesus’s ministry. And it is to that we now turn.
Being a social person he was being guided by one of the two great commandments: to love one’s neighbour as oneself. However, the first of the great commandments, and the more important of the two, is to love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind. And it can’t be helped but sometimes this commandment must take precedence over the one to do with being on good social terms with other people.
So for example, straight after praising Peter for being the first to recognise that he was the Messiah, Jesus rounded on him when Peter, quite understandably expressed concern that Jesus should allow himself to be killed. Jesus declared ‘Get behind me, Satan.’ One can’t help but feel sorry for Peter being called Satan. That was not a friendly thing to say. But Jesus saw that Peter was coming between him and his duty to abide by the will of God – namely that he should indeed die.
Jesus obviously loved his family. But when his mother and brothers came to take him home because they were not happy with all this preaching he was doing, Jesus ignored them saying ‘Who is my mother and who are my brothers? Whoever does the will of my Father in Heaven, is my brother and my mother.’ Pretty hurtful for the family, but again it was because they were coming between Jesus and his duty to God to preach the gospel.
In the Temple he caused great disruption overturning the tables of the moneychangers. They were simply doing their job as they saw it. But Jesus saw it as a desecration of God’s temple that must not be tolerated, even if it meant upsetting people and alienating the authorities.
The night he was betrayed he had a last supper with this disciples certainly, but he also withdrew from them to be alone, to be alone with God in prayer. In fact he was always withdrawing from company to pray on his own. This intrigued his disciples. What exactly went on between Jesus and God during these sessions of solitude? ‘Teach us how to pray’, they said to him. Whereupon he taught them the Lord’s Prayer.
So what am I saying? I am saying that there were two sides to Jesus. There was Jesus the social person easily mixing with everyone. A Jesus obeying the second great commandment. A Jesus whose activities would indeed have been impaired had he had to live under the restrictions imposed by today’s social isolation due to the Corona virus. But there was also another side to him. A solitary Jesus. A Jesus away from other people, alone with his Heavenly Father. No lockdown impairs that. Indeed
the lockdown offers an unprecedented opportunity to reassess whether we pay enough attention to observing the first and greater commandment – that of loving God, rather than devoting all our efforts to cultivating our social life.
Let me leave you with a picture:
Just outside Jerusalem there is the Garden of Gethsemane. And in the garden there is a church. It is called the Church of the Agony. It is built on the site of the rock on which, by tradition, Christ prayed in agony the night he was betrayed. The rock rises up from the floor of the church and is floodlit. Normally the place is swarming with visitors and noisy group-leaders holding aloft their umbrellas shouting and guiding their flock. It is difficult to catch sight of the rock over the heads of the mob. That was how it was the first time I went there.
On a subsequent occasion it was quite different. It was the time of the second intifada – the Palestinian uprising. There were bonfires, marches, people were being shot dead in the streets of Jerusalem. All very frightening. There were virtually no tourists. I was there simply because of attending a pre-arranged conference.
During a break in the conference proceedings, against the advice of my colleagues, I ventured out of the safety of the hotel where we were staying and made my way to the Garden of Gethsemane. This time there was just one person in the garden – a lone gardener. I went into the church. Just one person there – a priest saying his prayers. After 5 minutes even he left. For the next half an hour I had the incredible privilege and unforgettable experience of being alone, all by myself, with the rock on which Jesus prayed that fateful night. It is a picture seared in my memory. It is a constant reminder to me that lockdown or no lockdown, it is important to find time to let go of social ties for a while in order to be a solitary person in the presence of God.
……………………………………………………….
(Sermon by Russell Stannard)
Social isolation. There you sit spatially separated from each other. Faces covered. Not allowed to shake hands for the Peace. (At the 10 o’clock service) Can’t meet for a chat over coffee afterwards. Attendance at weddings and funerals restricted to the few. Stay at home. Keep your distance.
It is all so unnatural. We are by our very nature social beings. As a person, we are largely defined by our interactions with others, how we behave with them. One of the very worst punishments that can be inflicted on a human being is to be locked down in solitary confinement, denied all human contact. These are indeed very, very difficult times.
I find myself wondering how Jesus would have been affected if there had been a similar lockdown during his ministry 2000 years ago. After all, it is hard to imagine a more social person than Jesus. We always think of him mixing freely with other people.
Well for a start, think of the gospel for today. There would have been no feeding of the 5000. 5000 people all in the same place? Sorry. Not allowed.
He travelled a lot. ‘Stay at home,’ we are told. He couldn’t. He didn’t have a home.
He went everywhere with his constant companions, the twelve disciples. 12? That won’t do. The maximum size of your permitted bubble is 6 people, so he would have to get rid of 6 of them. I wonder which 6 he would choose to let go.
He had countless friends many of whom were women followers. He mixed easily with the outcasts of this world, prostitutes and tax gatherers. Under the lockdown, however, he would have to cut down on that. There is the story of how a tax collector called Zacheus was up a tree to catch a better sight of Jesus over the heads of the crowd. Jesus calls out to him ‘Come down Zacheus. I am to stay at your house.’ ‘Oh no you are not’ replies Zacheus. ‘Not unless you have been in 14 days quarantine,’ he might have replied.
With the wedding at Cana they probably would not have run out of wine because of the restrictions on the number of people allowed to attend the wedding.
He was concerned about people’s welfare. We are told that that crowd of 5000 were hungry so he provided them with food. Under lockdown, no he couldn’t. Not unless he had blue rubber gloves when handling the loaves and fishes.
Sick people were continually seeking him out to cure them miraculously. Sorry. All operations for treating blindness, deafness, leprosy must be carried out under hygienic conditions with the doctor wearing a face shield, mask, gown, overshoes and gloves.
Yes, there is little doubt that Jesus’s ministry would have been very different had he had to obey today’s social isolation rules.
And yet there is a totally different perspective one can have on Jesus’s ministry. And it is to that we now turn.
Being a social person he was being guided by one of the two great commandments: to love one’s neighbour as oneself. However, the first of the great commandments, and the more important of the two, is to love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind. And it can’t be helped but sometimes this commandment must take precedence over the one to do with being on good social terms with other people.
So for example, straight after praising Peter for being the first to recognise that he was the Messiah, Jesus rounded on him when Peter, quite understandably expressed concern that Jesus should allow himself to be killed. Jesus declared ‘Get behind me, Satan.’ One can’t help but feel sorry for Peter being called Satan. That was not a friendly thing to say. But Jesus saw that Peter was coming between him and his duty to abide by the will of God – namely that he should indeed die.
Jesus obviously loved his family. But when his mother and brothers came to take him home because they were not happy with all this preaching he was doing, Jesus ignored them saying ‘Who is my mother and who are my brothers? Whoever does the will of my Father in Heaven, is my brother and my mother.’ Pretty hurtful for the family, but again it was because they were coming between Jesus and his duty to God to preach the gospel.
In the Temple he caused great disruption overturning the tables of the moneychangers. They were simply doing their job as they saw it. But Jesus saw it as a desecration of God’s temple that must not be tolerated, even if it meant upsetting people and alienating the authorities.
The night he was betrayed he had a last supper with this disciples certainly, but he also withdrew from them to be alone, to be alone with God in prayer. In fact he was always withdrawing from company to pray on his own. This intrigued his disciples. What exactly went on between Jesus and God during these sessions of solitude? ‘Teach us how to pray’, they said to him. Whereupon he taught them the Lord’s Prayer.
So what am I saying? I am saying that there were two sides to Jesus. There was Jesus the social person easily mixing with everyone. A Jesus obeying the second great commandment. A Jesus whose activities would indeed have been impaired had he had to live under the restrictions imposed by today’s social isolation due to the Corona virus. But there was also another side to him. A solitary Jesus. A Jesus away from other people, alone with his Heavenly Father. No lockdown impairs that. Indeed
the lockdown offers an unprecedented opportunity to reassess whether we pay enough attention to observing the first and greater commandment – that of loving God, rather than devoting all our efforts to cultivating our social life.
Let me leave you with a picture:
Just outside Jerusalem there is the Garden of Gethsemane. And in the garden there is a church. It is called the Church of the Agony. It is built on the site of the rock on which, by tradition, Christ prayed in agony the night he was betrayed. The rock rises up from the floor of the church and is floodlit. Normally the place is swarming with visitors and noisy group-leaders holding aloft their umbrellas shouting and guiding their flock. It is difficult to catch sight of the rock over the heads of the mob. That was how it was the first time I went there.
On a subsequent occasion it was quite different. It was the time of the second intifada – the Palestinian uprising. There were bonfires, marches, people were being shot dead in the streets of Jerusalem. All very frightening. There were virtually no tourists. I was there simply because of attending a pre-arranged conference.
During a break in the conference proceedings, against the advice of my colleagues, I ventured out of the safety of the hotel where we were staying and made my way to the Garden of Gethsemane. This time there was just one person in the garden – a lone gardener. I went into the church. Just one person there – a priest saying his prayers. After 5 minutes even he left. For the next half an hour I had the incredible privilege and unforgettable experience of being alone, all by myself, with the rock on which Jesus prayed that fateful night. It is a picture seared in my memory. It is a constant reminder to me that lockdown or no lockdown, it is important to find time to let go of social ties for a while in order to be a solitary person in the presence of God.
……………………………………………………….