Easter 4. – Cirencester Parish Church.
(Revd. Canon Leonard Doolan)

On the top margin of one of his manuscripts Johann Sebastian Bach wrote ‘ad Deum gloria’. ‘To God be the glory’. It seems appropriate that we should acknowledge the superb festival of music that we have experienced in this church over the last week. Sincere thanks to Helen and Anthony Hammond for the envisioning and the delivery of this – and to all who have helped to make it happen. I hope very much that this will be the start of a new era of music making in this fine parish church, for it has touched the hearts of many but ‘ad Deum gloriam’.

In the passage we have heard from John’s gospel this morning, Jesus is giving the glory to his Father.

The event is Hanukkah. John calls it the Festival of the Dedication, and to confirm this he tells us it was winter. Hanukkah of course is a feast that takes place on the 25th day of the Festival of Chislev in November-December time.

Back in 165BC a great leader of the Hasmonean dynasty, also called the Maccabees, overthrew the pagan rule of Antiochus Epiphanes, and the priests of the Temple who had compromised true worship when Antiochus had held a sacrifice to Zeus on the altar of the Temple. The leader of those Maccabees was of course Judas Maccabaeus, made yet more famous by Handel, and even more recently with that great hymn tune named after him, you know the one, Thine be the glory….

So Jesus’s conversation at the Temple has all this as its backdrop. He is present for the Feast of Lights. At the time of Jesus the priests who controlled the Temple were from a coterie of rich and powerful families, who are called the Sadducees. Deeply unpopular, they were the very opposite of the job description set for the priests in the time of Ezekiel. He says,’As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places…I will bring them to their own land…I will feed them on the mountains…I will bring them to the watercourse…I will feed them with good pasture.’ And so on. A pastoral care far from that exercised by the Sadducees.

It is no surprise therefore that if we read the passage immediately before today’s gospel reading, we hear Jesus say ‘I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.’  Not surprisingly we are told that, hearing him say, ‘I am the good shepherd’, the Jews are divided. When he rams this home (if you will pardon the pun) by saying, ‘My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me,’ some pick up stones to throw at him.

Jesus is in the right place to say the right thing to the right people. His is a challenge not just from man, but from God. What better place to do this than at the Temple.

The Temple is central to Jewish existence. It was a sign of God’s permanence, his presence in the world, his alliance (or covenant) with his chosen people. But hold on a minute. The Temple of Solomon had been destroyed in 587BC and the people had to worship God in Babylon, ‘in a strange land’ as Psalm 137 tells us. A smaller Temple had been built under Nehemiah, but of course like all of these things ‘not as good as the old one’. So the Temple wasn’t such a sign of God’s permanence. We attribute things to God and we mistake them for God himself. We transfer our faith in God to things of the faith. We will be wise indeed if we do not look too much to ‘things’ for permanence. Be careful what we put our trust in, and cling to mistakenly.

Most of us have never been to Iceland, but we know what happens when Iceland comes to us. Who would have thought that planes couldn’t fly. We book a flight on-line. We choose our seat by moving the cursor through the cabin till we get the comfy seat we want (you couldn’t do that in the church), you get your travel documents sent immediately by e mail confirming your flight, 48 hours beforehand you check in your luggage. You turn up get through security, and your plane takes you to wherever you want in the world. That is how it is. You can depend on it.

I don’t think so. Don’t be tempted to set up false Gods – aeroplane and idolatry free zone. Jesus criticized the Temple priests at Hanukkah for being false shepherds of God’s people. He is the Good Shepherd. Listen, my friends, to his voice.

Johann Sebastian Bach got it about right when he wrote on that manuscript ‘To God be the glory’.