Matthew 26.36-46

I wonder what you pray when things are looking tough and the future appears to be rather a gloomy one. Or when you’re in trouble and everything’s going wrong.

If you’re anything like me, and like, I’m sure most of the rest of the population, our prayers when we’re up against it go something like this:

Dear God, please help me. Please take away the pain. Don’t let this bad thing happen to me, and so on. Give me strength.

The human inclination naturally wants us to avoid hardship and difficulty. But I’m always struck by Jesus and his example. We heard earlier some of his prayer. How different from many of our own. And, yet, how alike too.

In the run-up to the crucifixion, I think we see the humanity of Jesus, and the vulnerability of the human Jesus, perhaps in a way that we don’t elsewhere. We see the Jesus who asks his Father to take away the cup of suffering that he is undergoing.

Jesus is praying just before his betrayal and arrest. Judas’s betrayal has been foretold, and Jesus has some idea of what he is to do. He has also just told Peter that he will deny him three times. What must it be like to know that your friends are going to desert and betray you, right at the hour of your greatest need?

Jesus is clearly suffering heavily – we’re told that his prayer is agitated and that he is deeply grieved (check translation), that he has thrown himself on the ground to pray, and that the friends who were with him have fallen asleep. The abandonment that he faces on the cross when they all run away has already begun.

But where Jesus differs from many of our prayers is that he doesn’t continue to focus on his suffering but then moves his thoughts and focus on to doing God’s will. He follows his plea for an end to suffering with those haunting and powerful words: “Yet not my will, but yours (check translation).” And then his prayers continue – “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done.”

God’s will at this point involves Jesus’s great suffering. It’s one of the paradoxes of the Christian Gospel that the loving, compassionate God allows his Son to suffer so greatly, indeed needs that suffering to take place in order for his plan to be fulfilled.

And Jesus could have walked away. But he didn’t because he always put God’s will before his own human desires.

He was the man who is God – a God who limits himself in order to become human and experience the life we do, and much worse, in order for the resurrection to take place and for our salvation.

We pray frequently in the Lord’s Prayer – Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

But our prayer can only really be a true one, if as well as saying the words, we live it out in our actions. Our Lent Group was talking last Monday about how we discern what is God’s will, for if we are to do God’s will, we need to know first what it is. And at heart that comes back to our relationship with God.

We only get to know someone by spending time with them, by listening to what they think and feel.

It takes time to build up strong friendships with people – and it’s only those whom we know really well about whom we can ever say we know what they’re thinking about something.

It’s a bit the same with God. We discover God’s will by spending time with God, through reading Scripture and spending time in prayer.

Of course many of the things we wrestle with our not talked about explicitly in the Bible, but there are patterns and principles we can find there which can help us make decisions about God’s will. We know, through Jesus’s teaching what the values of the kingdom of heaven are. Those are God’s values.

We see those values in the example of Jesus and how he lived his life and the people he enjoyed spending time with.

And, of course, once we know what God’s values are, we then have to put into practice living according to his will, so that we can, with Jesus, say about everything we do – yet not my will but yours.

There’s a story of an elderly Scottish woman – I don’t think her being Scottish is particularly significant – who is making her way through the countryside.

Each time she comes to a crossroads, she tosses a stick into the air. Whichever way the stick comes down is the road that she takes. At one intersection, however, an elderly man saw her toss her stick into the air not once but three times before resuming her journey.

He was curious. “Why are you throwing your stick like that?” he asked.

“She looked at him and replied: “I’m letting God direct my journey by using this stick.”

“Then why did you throw it three times?” asked the curious man.

“Because,” the woman replied, “the first two times God was pointing me in the wrong direction.”

Sometimes where we want to go and what we want to do is not the same as God wants. I wonder if you are aware of times when God has been prompting you in one direction but you’ve constantly tried to go the other way or to make God’s plan fit in with yours.

We need always to ask ourselves: is my life following God’s will, or not? Or do I make compromises? Do I long for honour for myself? Do I shut my mind to things that seem too hard or too big even though I know them to be God’s way because the sacrifice seems too great?

Do I tell just a little white lie because I’m afraid to be honest with someone? Do I end up being rude to someone because I’m in a bad mood? Do I end up being less than polite because I’m in a hurry?

There are all sorts of ways in which our lives reflect a lack of God’s will, often without us even realising it.

It’s not always easy to know what God’s plan is, and often we only discover later when we can look back and see the direction in which God has taken us, sometimes against our will.

Sometimes we will get no clear signals and will have to rely on God to close seemingly open doors.

Sometimes we just have to step out in faith and trust that God will lead us to do the right thing or go the right way.

At other times we will feel as if we’re floundering around not knowing where we’re going or what we’re doing. In my own life, I’ve had several times where I’ve not really known what God was playing at, and it’s only been in looking back that I’ve seen how God’s hand was guiding me. But that’s not made it any easier at the time. Sometimes we just have to say to God, we don’t understand where you are leading, help us to trust in your will.

So it’s not easy, but it is something that each one of us is called to do, to be aware of God’s guidance, to fit our will with God’s and not try to make God’s will fit in with ours. And it’s important for the little decisions involved in the way we live our lives, as much as for the big life-changing decisions: how we use our money, what time we make for God and for other people, how we rate the needs of others compared with our own.

I find it endlessly interesting to see what people nowadays consider essential for life, with many getting in to debt because of things they feel they can’t live without – the new television, the exotic holiday, the expensive party or wedding. Of course, all these things are nice to have, but compared with the basic essentials of life – shelter, food, clean water, medicine, love – not really a high priority.

But God is not like the mother of three notoriously unruly teenagers who was asked whether or not she’d choose to have children if she could live her life all over again. “Oh, yes,” she replied. “Just not the same ones.”

That’s not God’s attitude towards us. We’re told in John 3.16 that God loved the world so much that he gave his only begotten Son so that all who believe in him might not perish but have eternal life.

We’re not told that God gives up on the children who misbehave or who are not able to put his will first in everything. We’re told that in spite of that, God keeps trying to call us back.

God doesn’t send us back when we don’t meet the standards. God continues to love us. And our response to that love matters.

I suspect that where many of us struggle is in receiving God’s love. We make that initial response of faith. We strive to be good Christians. We beat ourselves up when we go wrong. We feel desperately guilty – or some people go the opposite way and make excuses – for their lack of prayer or service. We haven’t got time is a constant cry.

We need to allow ourselves the time and space to discover what it really means to be loved by God. We need to allow that to sink deeply within us.

If we know truly what God’s love means, we will have a sense that we are valued and worthwhile, because we are created and loved by God. I know more Christians who struggle with issues of worth than those who don’t. And when we know deep down that we are loved by God, then it become easier to do God’s will in everything.

When our security is found in God and not in the good opinion of others or in material things, then it becomes easier to do the will of God. Sometimes it will mean standing out against the world, or against those whom we love, or against possibly even our fellow Christians. That’s not easy.

In order to do that we sometimes need to let our defences down. We need to accept time and time again that it is God not us who is at the centre of the universe. That God loves us in spite of our imperfections.

That is so hard for most of us – because it goes against our natural inclination to want a good life for ourselves. It goes against much of the flow of our society which lives by a Gospel of what I want I will get. It’s hard for children in this day and age, who live with those messages, to learn to accept the boundaries. I know too many parents, with whom I have sympathy because no one enjoys putting up with whining and moaning children, who admit to giving in to their children’s demands just because it’s easier to do that.

A young police officer was taking his final exams at Hendon Police College in north London. He was faced with this question:

“You are in patrol in outer London when an explosion occurs in a gas main in a nearby street.

On investigation, you find that a large hole has been blown in the footpath, and there is an overturned van lying nearby. Inside the van is a strong smell of alcohol. Both occupants – a man and a woman – are injured.

“You recognise the woman as the wife of your Divisional Commander, who is away in the United States. A passing motorist stops to offer you assistance and you realise that he is someone currently wanted for armed robbery. Suddenly a man runs out of a nearby house, shouting that his wife is expecting a baby, and that the shock of the explosion has made her go into labour. Another man is crying for help – he’s been blasted into the canal but cannot swim.”

Bearing in mind the provisions of the Mental Health Act, describe in a few words what action you would take.”

The officer thought for a moment, picked up his pen and wrote: “I would take off my uniform and mingle with the crowd.”

Rick Warren in the Purpose Driven Life says this: “Nothing shapes your life more than the commitments you choose to make. Your commitments can develop you or they can destroy you, but either way they will define you. Tell me what you are committed to, and I’ll tell you what you will be in twenty years. We are what we become committed to.”

It’s our decision whether we want to become more like Jesus, whether in 20 years’ time or even 20 days’ time, people will look at us and see that what is distinctive about us is our commitment to Jesus. If our commitment is to God’s will above all else, then that will shape and change us and transform us. Many people fear change, but I can assure you that any changes that come about because we seek to do God’s will will ultimately be for our benefit.

They might involve some opposition. They might involve others not understanding our position. Christians often get bad press because they are seen to be judgemental or to be always saying no to things that everyone else thinks are acceptable. But we are called to be different. We are called to live with different values. And it’s not only those outside the Christian community that need to take note of those values. Jesus’s fiercest criticism was reserved not for the sinners and prostitutes, the unclean and the outcast, but for the religious authorities.

Are we different? If so, what is it that is different about us? Is it our disapproval of the world around and our standing apart from it? Or is it our willingness to get involved with that and transform it? Jesus didn’t stand on ceremony. He didn’t avoid the people whom others thought might contaminate their pure lives. He was right in there, talking to them, building relationships with them.
He didn’t stand apart from the world – his whole life was given to seeking to transform the world, which led to the ultimate sacrifice of his life and an agonising death, both physically and emotionally and spiritually. Just think of that cry from the cross which echoes the words of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Do we, like the police officer in his exam take off our uniform and mingle with the crowd, or do we always wear the armour of God: the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, shoes that make us ready to proclaim the Gospel wherever we go? Do we take with us the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit?

When our time comes and they write our obituary, what, I wonder, will they say about us? Obituaries often sum up where the commitment of a person lay.

God doesn’t expect us to be perfect – he knows so well that we are not. After all, it’s his world and his people that we sin against. But God does ask us to centre our lives around him and his will – the greatest commandment of all is to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and being.

We don’t need to be perfect to stand out from the crowd, we need to be in tune with God, willing to be open to doing God’s will, seeking God’s help and recognising our dependence on God for everything we have, everything we do and everything we are.

Of course, we’ll get it wrong at times; of course we’ll go our own way.

But that’s why God sent Jesus, that’s why Jesus went through that agony in the garden – because we couldn’t make ourselves perfect, in spite of what Jesus said in Matthew 5.48 – be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.

Christians are people who are not perfect, just forgiven. And we see this lived out in Jesus’s trust of the disciples after the resurrection. The disciples who fail him. The disciples who fall asleep in the garden while he wrestles in prayer. The disciples who ran away when he was on the cross. The disciples who included Peter who denied Jesus three times. And yet, it was those very same people to whom Jesus entrusted his commission to go and make disciples of all nations.

So let’s sum up.

First we have Jesus’s example to follow – in great agony he was able to put the will of God first, but we can know that he knows our struggles to do just that, because he too was tempted.

Second, we need to know God’s will. That discernment comes from a life of prayer and a knowledge of Scripture. There is no one who cannot make either of those things part of daily life. Even people who cannot read can pray and nowadays the Bible is available on tapes and CDs and so on, so that all may listen to it read, even if they cannot read it themselves. There is always time to pray, even if it means getting up ten minutes earlier in the morning.

Thirdly, when we know God’s will, we need to do it. That’s not always easy, but God will help us, we have the support of other Christians, their encouragement and prayers, and best of all, we know that if we fail, we can trust in God and his forgiveness, we can trust in God’s love knowing that God will not reject us but help us to stand up when we fall, brush ourselves down, and start again.

Loving God, give us open hearts to you. Inspire our lives by your Holy Spirit. Increase our faith and trust in you, so that, with Jesus, our cry may always be: “Yet not my will, but yours.”

We give thanks for his example, that even when he was suffering the greatest agony, he was able to put your will first, and we pray for strength that we might always have the courage to follow his example.

We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ, your Son, our Saviour. Amen.

Genesis 12.1-4a; Romans 4.1-5, 13-17; John 3.1-17

Today’s Gospel reading is jam-packed full of things that are important within this Gospel of John. You will realise how different John’s Gospel is from the other three, which are known as the Synoptic gospels. John is sometimes called the spiritual gospel, and, to my mind, it shows a much greater sense of the symbolic than Matthew, Mark or Luke.

There are themes which come up time and time again in John’s, sometimes explicitly, sometimes hidden under the surface, and today’s reading is full of these.

Nicodemus – a respected Jewish leader, a Pharisee – comes to Jesus by night. That he does so in darkness can be taken to be symbolic. Darkness symbolises in John the things that are not of God.

Think back to the Prologue, that wonderful opening section to this Gospel, which says “In him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

So, right at the beginning of this story, through its setting at night, we are being told that there is a contrast between Jesus, the one who brings light, and Nicodemus who is furtively seeking to discover more about that light, but who at the present is in darkness.

In our reading from Genesis, we hear God telling Abraham that his descendents will be a great nation, through whom the earth will be blessed. Jesus and Nicodemus are both descendents of Abraham, but one of the messages Jesus was keen to get across to those who heard him was that that provided no guarantee by itself of entry into God’s kingdom.

Nicodemus has recognised something in the signs that he has seen Jesus do, but he’s still cautious, not willing at this stage to take the risk that becoming a disciple would mean. Unlike Abraham himself, who took a massive risk when asked to do so by God, but a risk that he knew could not fail because he trusted in God’s goodness. When God told Abraham to uproot everything and go and live in a new country, he did just that.

Darkness and light – key themes in John’s Gospel. I’ve already mentioned the Prologue. Later in chapter one, we are told that John that Baptist’s role was to testify to that light. A few verses after those we read this morning continue in this way “this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.”

A rather damning verdict on the behaviour of Nicodemus, creeping to Jesus in the dark.

And, of course, this is the Gospel with the great “I am” sayings, including the one “I am the light of the world.”

But there are other Johannine themes also in our passage. In order to be born again, Jesus says, we need to be born of water and of Spirit, Both water and spirit feature heavily in this Gospel.

Water is what is used by John to baptise; it is turned into wine; Jesus offers the water of life to the woman at the well; he carries out a healing at the pool by the Sheep Gate; he walks on water; he uses it in healing and in washing the feet of the disciples. There are two ways in which the reference here could be understood. Jesus could be referring to Nicodemus’s actual birth, when his mother’s waters would have broken and he entered the world.

But, of course, for Christians there is also great symbolic significance about the waters of baptism. Being born of water looks back to John’s baptisms, and represents healing and cleansing. Some see very definite sacramental imagery in Jesus’s words here.

So, entry into God’s kingdom requires two births – first a birth in water – either literally, which appears to be how Nicodemus interprets since he then asks Jesus how anyone could possibly go back into their mother’s womb to be reborn – or more symbolically referring to baptism.

The second birth is a birth of the Spirit, a birth from above, from God, a spiritual birth. This is where the idea of confirmation stems from. Traditionally at baptism both water and the Spirit were associated with the ceremony, at that stage carried out by bishops.

But, as numbers of Christians grew by the fourth century AD, baptisms of water began to be carried out by others, and then when the bishop visited the community at a later date he would lay his hands upon those who had been baptised and pray for the Holy Spirit.

Of course, less structured forms of Christianity have their own sense of birth in the Spirit – a charismatic experience that often involves speaking in tongues. This point in such circles is seen as the moment when a person becomes a Christian.

And I want us to think a little about that now. Nicodemus at this stage does not become a disciple. He has approached Jesus in the dark but goes away still not understanding, still not entirely convinced of who Jesus is – in stark contrast to the Samaritan woman of the next chapter.

A common theme – that those who are part of the religious establishment are often much slower to see who Jesus really is than those who are outsiders or on the edge in some way, as the Samaritans were seen to be by the Jewish people.

But, as John’s story continues, we have other glimpses of Nicodemus. In chapter 7 he stands up for Jesus against those who wish to arrest him; and by the end of the story it is Nicodemus who brings 100lbs of myrrh and aloes with which to embalm Jesus’s body. His conversion seems to have been made. Nicodemus’s journey from darkness to light has been made.

We often hear the phrase “born-again Christian” and think of a particular type of Christian, someone who has had perhaps a dramatic experience of God and turned their life right around.
There is a temptation among those who have had long-standing faith and no particular awareness of a special life-changing point in their lives to be somewhat disparaging about this phrase. But we must not forget that it is one that originates with Jesus himself.

All Christians must be born of water and of the Spirit. For some that rebirth is a cataclysmic event – a point of crisis. For others, faith and belief in God are a much slower process, a sense of deepening awareness of the love of God. But at some point, whichever is our experience, a decision needs to be made for Christ. At the point of our story Nicodemus was not ready to make that step of faith. He came in the dark to question Jesus, and left not fully understanding.

The point of birth is an important one, but as Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham points out, in future life we don’t tend to dwell much on the moment of our physical birth, which, of course, we were far too young to remember. What is important for our lives is that we move on from that point of birth, growing and developing.

And it’s the same with the Christian life. However our faith comes into being, whether through a significant one-off encounter with the living God or through a slower process, what’s important is how we continue to grow and develop. A baby does not remain a baby, but learns and grows. In our Christian life it should be the same.

We see in John’s Gospel part of Nicodemus’s journey. I wonder where you are on your journey of faith.

Lent is a good time to stop and pay attention to this pilgrimage, to take time to pray and to think about one’s spiritual life, to look at where we are growing and at where we seem to be stunted in our growth, to look at what needs lopping off, if we are to continue growing in a positive way, in the same way that gardeners prune in order to strengthen the plant and its future growth.

What matters is that we are children of Abraham, not in the way that Nicodemus was, Jewish by birth, but through the love of God in Christ Jesus. Eternal life now comes about, not for those who have a direct physical line of descent back to Abraham, but for those who recognise Christ.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

That’s one of the Archbishop of York’s favourite Bible verses – and little wonder – in one short sentence, it encapsulates the heart of the Gospel, the good news of Christ.

And that is what we are called to live out as we grow and develop our relationship with the Lord Jesus. May God’s new birth enable us to worship truly, to love Christ and to serve on another. Amen.