Sunday Sermon 7th June 2020

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John 7: 37 CCM TRINITY
Today we celebrate the feast of Trinity,  the last Sunday before we return to what is known in the church as “Ordinary Time”, when our vestments and altar frontals return to the colour green.  When I was a school chaplain, I used to tell the students that it is in the “green time” that we grow, as we reflect on the celebrations of Easter and Pentecost.


Today we give thanks for God in three persons: God the Father, God the Son (Jesus) and God the Holy Spirit (the comforter).  The triune God is fully revealed to us.


Today’s Gospel reading takes place in the Temple, and as the religious leaders are plotting to arrest Jesus because so many people are beginning to believe in him.  They are just waiting for the excuse to take action against Jesus.


Jesus has gone to the Temple in Jerusalem to celebrate the festival of booths or tabernacles, which commemorated the time when Moses and the Israelites wandered in the desert and lived in shelters. 

The festival of booths was one of three major festivals when Jews were required to make a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem.
Earlier in the chapter we read that Jesus went to the Temple secretly, staying out of public view.   Jesus must have known that he was in danger from the Temple authorities, but he stood up on the last day of the festival and issued an invitation to the crowd: “If you are thirsty, come and drink.  You can have rivers of living water”.

Some people in the crowd recognised Jesus as the messiah.  But others refused to believe in Jesus because he did not fit their expectations.  They refused to look beyond their own understanding of who or what the Messiah should be.

Even the Temple guards who had been sent to arrest Jesus could not find a reason to do so and reported to the religious leaders that they had never heard anyone speak like Jesus.

 The Jewish leaders saw themselves as an elite group who alone had the path to God and they resisted the truth about Jesus and the miracles he performed.

 I suspect the leaders resisted Jesus for a number of reasons: firstly, Jesus was not one of them, he hadn’t been trained by any of their esteemed rabbis and wasn’t from any of the Temple’s elite families.  

 He was the son of a carpenter and had just appeared amongst them, and yet people accepted him as a rabbi. And he had an intimate knowledge of God that the Temple rabbis seemed to lack.

 He didn’t behave as they did: Jesus followed the laws of Moses and the prophets and yet his message was of love and reconciliation.  And I wonder if the leaders weren’t just a little jealous of Jesus, not only for his miracles and teaching but because people responded to his message of love.  

 We can have our own preconceived ideas of who and what Jesus is, and if he doesn’t fit our expectations, we can have doubts.  If our prayers are not answered as we expect, we might have doubts.

 I think that at times, the disciples must have had doubts about Jesus.  They had expected Jesus to save Israel and yet he had been executed.  They had seen the risen Lord and watched him ascend to heaven and now were waiting for what would happen next.

 So they continued to meet together and to pray together in anticipation.  They continued to believe even as they waited. And the Holy Spirit came to them in quite dramatic ways.  That is the same Holy Spirit of God who will still come to anyone who asks.


The Holy Spirit is the giver of gifts to believers:  we are given wisdom, counsel and understanding, we are given inward strength and knowledge of God. 

 We are given true godliness and a fear of the Lord, enabling us to see all people as our brothers and sisters. 

 The first letter of John tells us: “We love because he first loved us.”  When God called our name, God didn’t say that God would only love us if we behaved a certain way.

 God loves us. We have a choice to respond to that love or we can refuse it.  My friends, you are offered the love of God the father, through God the son and empowered and encouraged by God the Holy Spirit. Take that love and give thanks.  
AMEN

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