Sermon for the 9th of June - Second Sunday after Trinity

A couple of months ago, Fr Peter and I took a trip to Cookham, and to the Stanley Spencer gallery. It’s definitely worth a day trip. Today, I’d like to reflect on one Stanley Spencer’s paintings. It’s titled 'The Scorpion', [dated 1939, and was intended to occupy panels in the roof of Cookham parish church].

Here are a few things to notice include:

Jesus fills the frame, his face tired and drawn. His hair and beard unkempt and straggly.
In his left hand he holds a scorpion, and there is a second scorpion beside his right heel.
Behind him clouds are gathering.

The wilderness, in which Jesus sits, is a place of threat and vulnerability as well as solitude and discovery. Yet this painting is more than simply Jesus in the wilderness: there’s a much wider Christian narrative here.

And like all good stories, the Christian story has a beginning. The Genesis story tells us that God made the world, and he made it good. Yet into this good world there is the disruption we have heard in today’s first reading.

This is sometimes referred to as the Fall. This ‘fall’ sets the plot line for humanity and God’s good creation. The result of this disruption is separation or alienation… from God, from each other, with creation and with our deepest selves. This is described by God saying to the serpent:

I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will strike your head,
and you will strike his heel.

In the painting, we can see the possibility of the scorpion stinging Jesus’ heel or hand – the one at Jesus’ heel seems ready to strike. Spencer is referencing the enmity of Genesis 3. And we know that one of the ways in which the Christian faith has spoken of death is as having a sting.

So, Spencer’s painting references the disruption of the fall, bringing alienation from the source of life. But there is more to the Christian story.

If we fast forward to Jesus and the Incarnation, it affirms that God comes to dwell with his creation. He comes as a real embodied human being: as someone who can be tired, and hungry and grazed. It’s a body that’s vulnerable to the sting of scorpions. And to the sting of death!

In the painting Jesus contemplates the enmity resulting from the brokenness that has resulted from the fall. Spencer leaves us wondering what Jesus is thinking. Perhaps his vocation to redeem and to heal. I wonder whether Jesus senses that his vocation will be terribly costly.

I wonder whether he knows that his vocation will make a way for the sting of death to be defeated and for the created order to be brought back into right relationship with God.

It’s a vocation that will require submitting to the ultimate alienation of humanity - death. To defeat the sting of death, Jesus must allow himself to undergo death. As one theologian put it [Gregory of Nazianzus], what is not assumed is not healed.

The late Metropolitan Anthony Bloom puts it like this: Death can be conceived of only as severance from the source of life. And so, if Christ had not fully participated in our break with God, in our estrangement, he wouldn’t have participated fully in our mortality, and our mortality would have been outside the mystery of redemption [Anthony Bloom, God and Man pp 67-9].

God, being fully united to humanity in Jesus Christ, undergoes the full extent of what it means to be human. To get tired, lonely, abandoned, betrayed, and so on. AND to die, so as to unite humanity to the Godhead and to be saved. As the well-known German theologian, Jürgen Moltmann, who died this week, puts it: ‘Christ does not merely contradict the world. Christ embraces the world, suffers the contradiction then overcomes it in love.’

The scorpions, representing the sting of death, and contemplated by Jesus, are placed where nails will be driven at the time of execution. Hands that have created. Feet which have walked among us. Both will be pierced. Spencer portrays Jesus’ inner wrestle – the tired, strained face, the gathering dark clouds and the presence of the scorpions.

All these leave us feeling jarred, uncomfortable, disturbed. And rightly so. Here Spencer shows us the maker of all that exists, contemplating what it means for sin and death to be defeated; to redeem the whole created order; and to offer restoration of relationship with God to humankind.

It's a lot of theology to have squeezed into a painting.

The painting invites us to place ourselves in this story – the long narrative of good creation, the alienation and disruption of the fall, and the cost of redemption.

The ‘fall’ isn’t only about one archetypal couple, Adam and Eve. It happens in all moments and lives. It speaks to our estrangement from the source of life and love. And it speaks to how we all get stung or maimed by life. Stung by broken relationships, illness, depression, the loss of loved ones. But the gospel, the good news, affirms that isn’t the end of the story. And it’s not the end of our stories either.

And we’re invited to reflect upon how our estrangement, our fall, our pain, might be transfigured into something that can bring life, not death. And how Jesus’ fully embracing our humanity, offers healing and hope to our broken world and lives, living in the fullness of life now, and leading us to our ultimate destiny…. United in the love and embrace of the triune God.