The Birth of a Cliche
I was reading my book peacefully, just settling in to it at chapter three, when the man who will turn out to be the hero made a remark he liked and which jolted me awake. Ah, he said to the people in the room, remember this moment, you were present at the birth of a cliche! What a lovely idea. I felt happy after that for it’s a great thing to give birth to a cliche. A fortnight ago when I was taking the service at St Andrews I thought I gave birth to a cliche: the God of cash or the God of character. Of course a cliche is not all it’s cracked up to be. My definition of a cliche is that it is a truth that is universally acknowledged but believed by no one. You don’t need to fix what isn’t broken is an excellent cliche - it’s so self-evidentially true - yet none of us believe it. We are always fixing things, especially in the church, that are not broken; the bureaucracies around us of business, education, health, government are always fixing things that aren’t broken, and when the jargon machine starts to operate it is a sure sign that people are fixing what isn’t broken. And, strangely, the things that are broken, like the sound system, don’t get fixed at all.
The birth of the cliche that I have in mind took place a long time ago; we weren’t on the spot but the Bible takes us back to it. You find the moment in the reading from Isaiah. This reading is part of a section of the book of Isaiah that we call Second Isaiah. First Isaiah is a prophet from the era when the Assyrians were the dominant power; Second Isaiah is an unknown prophet from Babylon, part of the Jewish community in exile there following on from the fall of Jerusalem. Second Isaiah contains some very special material because instead of preaching judgment he preaches mercy, instead of preaching doom and gloom he proclaims hope, instead of captivity and punishment he points to freedom, instead of exile in Babylon he envisions a homecoming back to Jerusalem. He looks over the horizon to the fall of the Babylonian Empire at the hands of the Persians, and he conceives of a road to Jerusalem from Babylon across the vast desert wastes, except it is desert no longer, there are pools of water, springs in the desert, places where wild life gather to be refreshed and drink. Out of this effervescent sense of promise and blessing, of hope and home the cliche is born. Behold, says God, I make all things new. Or, as it is found in our text: I am about to do a new thing. For a moment I’ve taken you back to the exciting moment when this wonderful truth is born: Behold I make all things new.
Quite intentionally I called it a cliche. Behold, God makes all things new is a truth universally acknowledged and equally universally ignored. It was ignored by Second Isaiah’s contemporaries. Lost in Babylon they were full of doom and gloom. Like British people pining for the old country they saw no way that God was making all things new. If you ask them they will tell you that God who once brought them out of Egypt could bring them out of Babylon, and you notice the unspoken comment that there’s a fat chance of that happening. Sad, but true, Second Isaiah’s great insight that God makes all things new becomes a cliche from the moment he first said it. You, too, would tell me you believe it, and then if you were honest you would tell me it doesn’t mean anything or you can’t understand it. Our world, our church, our lives go on in the same old way, we don’t know about any new thing, we don’t want to know about any new thing.
Paul covers the same ground as Isaiah. He gets into hot water with the Corinthians because he said he would visit them, then changed his mind. Some kind person had the bed made up and the spare room tidy and he didn’t come. You, the Corinthians said, pointing and wagging their fingers, you say Yes today and tomorrow you say No. How can we believe a word you say? Paul, who is always sharp to make a gospel point, replies: What matters is Jesus. Jesus is God’s Yes. In him every one of God’s promises is a Yes. Just like Second Isaiah who sees God as making all things new, Paul has the cutting edge of faith as God who says Yes. That’s a new thing. Humans generally think of God saying No. Don’t do this, Don’t do that. God is not like that - God wants us to grow and to be good, to find fulfilment in life, to have a happy life, to be in touch with all the Yesses there are. As soon as Paul said it, it became a cliche. Of course the Corinthans gave lip service to it, who wouldn’t, it’s such a lovely idea. Jesus is God’s Yes, his eternal and everlasting and constant Yes. But did they take it on board? No. I ask you, Is Jesus God’s Yes? You reply in 2009 speak, Absolutely! Yet if I ask you how is Jesus God’s Yes to you, you will hum and ha, and talk about the weather.
Then Jesus, in the fascinating drama of the paralytic let down through the roof, says to him one thing: Your sins are forgiven you. This starts an argument, because it’s virtually unprovable, impossible to demonstrate the forgiveness of sins. But when Jesus heals the man so that he gets up from his bed and slowly walks away, we see an objective outcome. Our eyes see what faith doesn’t. Strange that! Why should we have so much difficulty over the forgiveness, more difficulty than over the healing? It’s only Isaiah: Behold I make all things new. And they know that. It’s only Paul: Jesus is God’s Yes. And they know that. But the words Jesus used - your sins are forgiven you - have in an instant turned into a cliche. Forgiveness is a quality we all know that God has; forgiveness is a state so hard to live in for ourselves, or to let anybody else live in, for that matter.
I’ve been telling you of the roundness of the Christian story, how time for the Christian doesn’t go on and on, but round and round. We can enter the Christian story at any point on the church year. When I last preached to you it was early in Epiphany and I preached to you on discipleship. Workers come in to the Christian story at Epiphany, they come to stand alongside Jesus and support him, be in solidarity with him as he sets about doing good, making an impact on the world. Yet the prime task of disciples and workers is deeper, it’s to take the gospel cliches that we all know and let them be the foundation of a new community which is actually prepared to take them on board and let them work. Discipleship is living in a world where God is making all things new, where in the turmoil nations are reshaped and in the economic crisis there is a new release from captivity to wealth and greed, and we come home to a life with greater justice and fairness. Discipleship is living in a world where Jesus is Yes. Not a grim forbidding personage down on fun and solo mums and gays, State house tenants or whoever our pet hate happens to be. Discipleship is living in a world where sins are forgiven and new life is shared. It’s a wonderful thing discipleship; to stand with Jesus in the newness of life. But if discipleship is seeing and accepting and working in and with the new thing God is doing, there are few disciples. It’s amazing how many sceptics there are in that room with the paralytic and Jesus, amazing how many said No to forgiveness of sins.
Sometimes people tell us who preach to stick to the Bible, meaning we should stay in the past and forget about our present world. Faith in the past is safe, faith in the present, in the emerging newness is risky, and it is this tension which turns our life and our faith and our gospel into cliches. We accept cliches for the past, we reject them for the present. Here in the tension between truth and unbelief in cliches lies the Cross. Ash Wednesday this next week, and once again we will have to choose, decide, commit.