Bishop, Canberra & Goulburn.
BISHOP'S EASTER REFLECTION
2010
Beloved in Christ,
The cross was so unpalatable that the Romans refused to allow their own citizens to be crucified, regardless of what the person had done. The great Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (d. 43BC) called crucifixion “a most cruel and disgusting punishment.” He went on to say, “It is a crime to put a Roman citizen in chains, it is an enormity to flog one, sheer murder to slay one; what, then, shall I say of crucifixion? It is impossible to find the word for such an abomination.”
The cross was so distressing that
It is neither surprising nor accidental therefore that the evangelists are very restrained about what they write. All they say is that “here they crucified him”. We are not given descriptive details.
That said, we know from other sources that the prisoner was laid on his back; that his hands, wrists or arms were nailed to the patibulum (the crossbeam); the cross was then hoisted to an upright position and dropped into a hole that had been dug for it.
And that is how Jesus died – or more to the point, that is how Jesus allowed his life to be taken. Jesus was quite clear about this. No-one took his life from him. He willingly laid it down of his own accord (John 10:18).
So on that wretched cross – Jesus embraces sins’ ‘curse’ (Galatians 3:13). In his death Jesus redeems us from the consequences of being out of fellowship with God.
Jesus – of his own volition – takes on our enmity with God in exchange for his life giving relationship with God.
That is why Jesus with his dying breath declares, ‘it is finished!’
Through his death on the cross people are reconciled to God.
Through his death on the cross God’s justice and mercy are given their very fullest expression.
Through his death on the cross a new world order (with Christ as Head) is inaugurated.
Through his death on the cross, our last great enemy – death, is trounced.
And to underscore the finality of Christ’s work and the reality of the curse being broken, Jesus, who laid down his life, takes it up again. The abomination of the cross is swept aside in the splendour of the resurrection.
It is finished, for Christ has risen!
Unlike
The Lord be with you.
Amen.
Bishop Stuart's Christmas 2009
Media Release
The incarnation of Jesus according to Luke 2 erupts from God’s heart onto the world-historical stage via God’s promises to
While Luke doesn’t give us the ox and the ass, or the animals with whom Jesus later underwent his temptation in the desert, nevertheless the manger is present, and the shepherds watching their flocks, as the great shepherd of
Now God is with us in the thick of human reality, with a mission to transform and to liberate the world God loves from its addiction to injustice and violence. So in this sense a spiritual power also has worldly clout. God’s glory and the peace of human beings are revealed together in the coming of Jesus. The boot is now on the other foot. Poor shepherds, universally reckoned to be dubious outsiders, are the first hearers of the news, while the divine Augustus is put on notice and his local governor is fast asleep. God’s invasion of human conditions has begun from within, from below, from ahead of where we are now.
In our day we struggle towards a new way of being human together, beyond the collapse of communism and the more recent convulsions of capitalism which have transformed our world, and as new forces of violent religion seek global influence. Many are rightly sceptical both of militant religion and militant secularism and atheism, sensing that only a holistic spirituality—re-knitting alienated Western lives, also respectfully reintegrating human life and enterprise with animal life and the environment—will satisfy us. It will surprise many who have given up on organized religion to hear that God’s Christmas gift to the world in Jesus Christ brings just this promise of meaningful identity, sure purpose and genuine traction in the real world and its problems—spirituality with bite, with sufficient scope to be able to do the job.
We start on Christmas Eve with communities gathered, with carols and bible readings, with the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper, empowered by God’s Spirit to embody the hope of Christmas in a concrete human movement around the world where lives do change, and where God’s dream for God’s world is made flesh—week by week, year by year, in the Christian Churches.
The Lord be with you.
+Stuart (with thanks to Canon Scott Cowdell).
ST SIMON
ST SIMON
from an address by
Andrew Moore, Lay Minister
at the St Simon’s Day Dinner October 2002
We’re almost unique in Australia in being St Simon’s Church. There are a number of churches of St Simon & St Jude – they come as a pair in the traditions – but the only other church of St Simon I’ve been able to locate in Australia is a Catholic church near Dandenong.
The idea of having a saint associated with a church seems to have grown up at the time of the Emperor Constantine, abut 300-and-something, once it was finally safe to actually build churches. And instead of choosing a saint to go with a church, it was more a case of building the church to go with the saint. Churches got built at sites associated with martyrs. So, for example, outside Rome they built a church at the place where St Paul was executed, so it was natural to call it the church of St Paul. The idea of patron saints has grown from there.
Our patron saint was one of the twelve apostles. There were two Simons in the group, so they both got nicknames. There was Simon the Rock – Simon Peter – and then there was our Simon, who got called Simon the Zealot. Now the Zealots were a Jewish faction: for them living by the law of God was everything, and they weren’t prepared to compromise – and if that meant violence, so be it.
And that’s really all that we know about St Simon – that he was a no-compromise kind of guy when it came to living for God. Whether he himself had a history of violence, we don’t know.
There is a tradition that suggests that he might have been the bridegroom at the wedding in Cana.
After the resurrection, it seems fairly clear that he went out as an evangelist and was eventually martyred, but just where, no-one knows. You can take your pick of Persia, around the Black Sea, North Africa or even Britain.
There are two things I think we can take from our patron:
- The first one is the idea of being zealous for God, as Simon was.
- The second is the idea that we as the church in Kaleen belong to the universal Church in both space and in time. We stand before God with Simon, with the faithful through the centuries and with Christians yet unborn – and that is a mighty thing to be a part of.
[Note: The church was to be called St Simon of Cyrene but as he was not an “official” saint a bureaucratic decision at Bishop level was made to change the name to St Simon the Zealot. (Rev N. Kelley)]