Physics and the Kingdom of God
Repent and believe in the Good News
I was never much one for the study of science. At school it soon became that my over-riding passion was music, and the arts and humanities were, by and large, the subjects in which I showed a degree of competence. The sciences, by comparison, were - for me - hard work. Indeed, it would probably be fair to say that the sciences were hard work not just for me, but for those who had the pretty thankless task of having to teach them to me. At my grammar school, it was pretty much impossible to get out of any science subject before O levels, and I think my most miserable moments in what we would now call Year 11 were those I spent desperately trying to understand and revise for my Physics O level, which I approached with gathering gloom and despair.
God, however, has a sense of humour, and somehow I was dealt the most remarkable set of questions in my physics exams. Essentially I was asked the only questions I actually knew the answers to - out of the very few topics about which I was confident, they all came up, and to my own incredulity, I got an A grade when the results were published that momentous August. (Lest you think I escaped my just desserts, I had also thought that I would scrape a pass in my Biology O level - and that I failed.) The poor man who had taught me physics for four hard years was, truly, speechless at my result - and, if I am honest, I’m not entirely sure he was altogether pleased, as a number of his star pupils that year ended up with B and C grades.
Two things come out of all of this. The first is the reminder that God, truly, has a sense of humour. He jumbled up the expected and deserved outcome of my science exams, flummoxing me and at least one of my teachers, giving us a bit of a surprise, and a slightly new outlook on life. The second is that, despite the glory of my qualification from 1978, you probably shouldn’t trust me to talk to you about physics! However, that is exactly what I propose to do, because...
The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness...
And one of the few things I still remember from all those years ago, when I had to immerse myself in the laws of Physics is the phrase, which I am sure most of you will also know, that To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Newton’s Third Law of Motion, I think you will find, and one of the most basic principles of the scientific world. And it seems to be the stuff of our gospel reading this morning.
A short gospel reading - merely six verses - and perhaps a slightly unexpected one, as it is probably, at most, only the fourth time you have heard this passage read in church in this way. For the first Sunday of Lent has always been the Sunday on which we are reminded of Jesus being tempted, but until the Church of England’s new lectionary was produced as part of Common Worship in 2000, we had never heard Mark’s very truncated account read. And when I talk to you of "The Temptations of Jesus", you probably are all thinking of Satan’s challenge to Our Lord to turn stones into bread, and his famous riposte about not living by bread alone. You will probably also remember how Satan challenges him to bring forth a host of angels to catch him in a jump from the pinnacle of the Temple, and the prospect of a rather dubious deal involving paying homage to Satan in return for ultimate worldly political power.
That, in other years, is the stuff of the first Sunday of Lent. That is the Temptation Story as told by Matthew and by Luke. But instead, in these six verses, we get Mark recounting Jesus’ baptism at the hand of John, a very brief mention of temptation, and, indeed, the story continues onwards with the arrest of John the Baptist and the beginning of Jesus’ own ministry.
It is a very condensed piece of writing indeed - and, for that matter, it is the very first time that Jesus appears in Mark’s gospel, and only the second time that he is mentioned. There are none of the introductory formalities to do with virgins, shepherds, wise men and babies in mangers that Matthew and Luke bring us each Christmastide. Mark, so it seems, is telling us the bare essentials of the story, and he’s not wasting time or words in the process. And, in this clipped, urgent narrative, we begin to see an ancient proof of Newton’s Third Law: To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
After all, after a brief eight verse introduction, mainly telling us about John the Baptist’s ministry at the River Jordan, Jesus appears on the scene, drawn, we can only assume, by the magnetism of John’s preaching and ministry. Certainly, Mark tells us that all the people of Jerusalem and from the whole Judaean countryside were going out to see John and to be baptized by him. And along comes Jesus - about whom we know nothing at this point - and he has the most astonishing experience, doesn’t he?Just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’
In normal terms, we’d call that a religious experience. Different people experience God’s presence and God’s affirmation in their lives in different ways, and it is dangerous to generalize. Some of you will have had moments when you have had a profound sense of knowing that you are God’s beloved daughter or son, and that he is pleased with you, or delights in you (and all of us should remember that that is a profound truth about who we all are, whether we recognize or remember that, or not); others may not have had such intense or profound experiences, but will, I hope, still have understood the importance and the joy that is brought to us by being God’s children.
For Jesus, however, it seems plain that this was, in any spiritual sense, a big moment - heavens torn apart, the descent of the Spirit, a divine voice expressing divine pleasure - that’s big stuff - that’s a sort of 10 on the Richter Scale of spirituality. And it has an equal and opposite reaction: the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.
How is your Lenten resolve holding up? We had an impressive number of communicants on Ash Wednesday across our three services, and I’ve had a very significant number of replies to the letter I wrote to each of you about keeping Lent. That’s a very positive sign, and I’m sure it is backed up by an awful lot of you seeking to take on some kind of Lenten discipline, whether by way of an extra duty or responsibility, or by abstaining from something which you will miss as the forty days pass. But, certainly in my own experience, it doesn’t take long for the optimistic or even pious good intentions we formulate for Ash Wednesday, to start becoming just that bit more tiresome and tedious than we had hoped....
Does it really matter if I have the odd chocolate biscuit? After all, there’s no point in letting the opened packet just go stale.... One glass of wine won’t hurt... I really just can’t drink tea without at least one spoon of sugar... I can always read today’s page of the Lent Book tomorrow....
The harder resolve, the more temptation tugs at our wrist, or, to quote Newton, To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
And so it continues - while he’s in the wilderness, he’s in the company of wild beasts.... but angels wait on him. To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. And, even more significantly, at the end of this succinct piece of gospel narrative, we learn that John the Baptist - that remarkable figure who drew so many people to hear his preaching - John has been arrested, and his preaching forcefully ended. You all know the story of the corrupt and immoral Herod and his dealings about John. And so, as Herod tries to silence John’s preaching of the Kingdom, there is, once again, an equal and opposite reaction, for after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, 'The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.'
And if we left it there, those of you who hold to Newtonian physics would be satisfied, and might even be prepared to grant that my grade A in physics O level had some merit in it. But if we do leave it there, we miss the whole point of Jesus’ message - his message that begins with that final sentence of our gospel this morning. If we leave it there we miss the whole point of Jesus’ life. If we leave it there, we certainly miss the whole point of Lent - and if we leave it there we forget that the laws of Physics, vital though they are to understanding how the earth works, are no use at all in understanding the laws of the kingdom of God.
If you look at the world around you, you will find it easy to identify a great many people who believe that life is a battle between opposites - a battle between good and evil, or truth and error, or joy and sorrow, or health and sickness, and, ultimately between life and death. You may be tempted to think that is true yourself - it is a rhetoric that fills much of public life.
But the Good News - the Good News that requires that change of heart which, in church speak, we rather inadequately call repentance - the Good News of Jesus Christ the Son of God, which is what Mark’s gospel is all about - the Good News is actually that, ultimately, there is no bad news. The Good News is that the journey on which we have embarked now that Lent has begun is, indeed, the journey to the Cross. It can only be a journey to death, for there would be no value in talking about God living, or being a God of life, if he was not, too, a God who had tasted death. And now is the time we need to remember that.
If Lent is truly to be a journey with Jesus towards God, if Lent is truly to be a time of proper spiritual renewal, if it is to be a time that will properly prepare you and me to come once again to the drama of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday - if Lent is to be all this, then it will be hard. The Spirit probably will drive us into the wilderness at some point.
But take heart and take note that it is, indeed, the Spirit, God’s Spirit, that is in the driving seat; take note that if you open your eyes to see them, there will be angels to minister to you as you journey; and take note most importantly that if you see the journey through, your moments of testing, wilderness and death will be swallowed up in transformation and life eternal. That is why, my friends, Jesus is saying to you and me, as he said 2000 years ago, Repent and believe the Good News.
Dominic Barrington, March 1st, 2009
