Good News: Hip, hip, hooray!

Romans 12:9-21, Matthew 16:21-28

The word “gospel”, as many of you will already know, means good news. When we share good news, there is often excitement, as we experienced at the beginning of the service: a reason to say hip, hip, hooray!

But when it comes to the good news of our faith, there is a strange dissonance in the gospel accounts of Jesus’s life. In Matthew’s gospel, Peter hears Jesus speak about what will happen to him. Peter cannot bear it. He tries to reject what Jesus is saying. And Jesus says to him, “Get behind me, Satan.”

Jesus goes on to say, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

Ouch! That doesn’t sound much like good news. This would have been understood quite literally. Jesus was anticipating his death. And he was also pointing to the reality that following him could mean risking a horrible death by crucifixion. The cross was a symbol of torture and Rome’s power. So pause with that for a moment. How can taking up your cross be good news?

But then, we hold that strange idea of good news in tension with what is written in John’s gospel. 

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

This sounds more like good news. Abundant life. Overflowing life. Enjoying life to the full. Having what we need. Life that is full and good. A rich and satisfying life. Now that, in my mind, is a reason to say hip, hip, hooray!

So, which is it? Is the good news about taking up our cross? Or is it about receiving the gift of abundant life? I think it is both. Not as a neat dichotomy, but as the truth of human existence. Joy and suffering are often held together. And if we are to be witnesses to God’s love, then this is the honest message we have to share. Our experiences of life are filled with complexity.

Pause for a moment and consider what the phrase “good news” means to you when it comes to being a Christian. If you told someone that you believe in the good news of Jesus Christ, how might you put that into words so that a person who knows little or nothing of the Bible might find a point of connection? Would there be joy in it? Would there be honesty? Would there be a sense of saying hip, hip, hooray?

Personally, I know that the phrase “the good news” no longer means what I thought it meant when I was 15 years old at my confirmation. It means something different from what I thought even 10 years ago, and I suspect it has changed again in the last year. Maybe, when I talk about it now, I feel less like saying hip, hip, hooray and more like conveying a deep sense that we are not alone in this universe. And more specifically, I believe we are not alone because God has become known to us in Jesus. In Jesus God shared both the flourishing joy of human existence and its deepest pain.

So, when I ponder the vision of this congregation, that we are “Growing lifelong disciples of Christ,” I hear an invitation for all of us to keep growing in faith at every stage of life. Faith is a journey, not a destination. And Peter helps us see that. He can be chief among the disciples and still get things terribly wrong. Jesus says to him, “Get behind me, Satan,” and even after Jesus’s resurrection and ascension, Peter still does not have all the answers.

There was a time when I was younger when I believed faith involved clear, dogmatic, orthodox, right answers. But as I get older, I am more aware of the limits of my own understanding. At times, we can pressure people to believe, think, or feel the right things about God, all shaped by the limits of our experience and knowledge. But God is bigger than all that, and the call of faith is not to master God, but to keep following Christ.

In speaking about the good news, I find myself drawn to Paul’s words at the beginning of his letter to the Colossians: 

“He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” There is no gap between any person, or any part of creation, and God, because in him all things hold together. As Acts puts it, “in Him, we live and move and have our being.” Our understanding of this, or whether we feel that we experience God, is not the measure of whether it is true. My sense is that God’s hand is upon all of us.

My thought is that, just as I do not think much about pulmonary respiration and barely understand it, I cannot live without it. So, we can all celebrate and say hip, hip, hooray that we have been breathing this whole time I have been speaking. In the same way, the hiddenness of God’s life within us is there in the background of each moment of our existence. God is closer to us than breathing.

But here is an interesting thing. 

One of the simplest ways to focus our attention is to focus on our breathing. This technique appears in many religious and mystical traditions, and it is also promoted in positive psychology and mindfulness. Paying attention to our breathing in and out can help us centre ourselves and connect. As people of faith, it can also help us become more aware of the presence of God with us and at work within us.

David Bentley Hart, in his book Experience of God, offers a philosophical exploration of God through three words: being, consciousness, and bliss. In slowing down and becoming present through our breathing, we can become aware of our being and marvel at our existence in the world. We can connect with the wonder of consciousness, our capacity to think and know. And we might even feel the joy and goodness of being alive: bliss.

Being, consciousness, bliss, or perhaps existing, knowing, and loving, are not simply an exercise in philosophy; they are part of being human. Hart’s claim is that all three point back to the same source: God, who is not only off in the distance but is the very ground we are standing on. This is one avenue for connecting with the good news of Jesus’s presence at work in and through us.

Yet not everyone connects with God in this way. 

So, to return to the beginning of our service, I think our sharing of good news may also have had the fingerprints of God all over it. Our hip, hip, hooray was a prayer of thanksgiving.

But as people who want to share our witness of faith with others, how do we move from a simple story of good news in our lives to the deeper sense of God’s presence within us that I have been describing?

On one level it brings to mind the old concept of the random act of kindness and maybe even the concept of paying it forward. Way back in the 1990s when you had to stop and pay a cashier at a toll booth, I still remember a friend who used to pay for the car behind her. A strange and simple gift. This might connect with a concept that is often attributed to St Francis, 

"Preach the Gospel at all times and, when necessary, use words". Good deeds are one thing, but we are called to share our faith in word and action. Another colleague when they heard a person tell their story, whether a good or bad story, would often offer to pray with or for a person. Small actions that might encourage curiosity in another person as to why we act and say what we do.

Those small gestures are great, but Paul gives us something more like a structure to grow into. Let’s look again at what he said to the early church in Rome. Paul’s ideas can be grouped in three widening circles, all driven by love. 

The inner circle is the love shared by the community. It is how we as a congregation notice one another, listen to one another, show affection to one another, and honour one another. These may seem simple things, but in every church community there are people who do not always experience them.

The next circle is love under pressure: the call to love one another through difficult times. Remaining hopeful. Being patient. Weeping with those who weep. I have learnt over many years that I cannot fix many of the problems people share with me, and there is no need to search for a silver lining. Sometimes all we can do is be present and pray that, in the presence of God, a person may know they are not alone.

And finally, and this is the hardest one, love toward the enemy. I recently had a very insightful email from someone in the congregation about just how difficult it is to love those we may not like, or those who may even persecute us. Blessing those who wrong us and seeking to overcome evil with good sounds like a lot. Perhaps this is where Jesus’s words about taking up our cross become concrete: not in seeking suffering for its own sake, but in costly love that follows him.

As people who gather and say hip, hip, hooray about the good stuff, and who support each other through the difficult stuff, we are doing more than simply being good and decent people: we are living out our connection to the good news. We are learning to receive God’s presence, to recognise God’s goodness, and to practise God’s love. What we practise with one another, however imperfectly, flows outwards towards the people we interact with day by day. Whatever our age and stage of life, and however we interpret the good news, I want to suggest that God is with us in it all, and that is indeed a reason to say hip, hip, hooray!