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Gonville and Caius College Evensong    Liam Beadle Easter 6, 2025—Zephaniah 3.14-end

A few months ago, I went to see Conclave at the cinema in Bury St Edmunds. I enjoyed it, but I also wonder why the appointment of a new Archbishop of Canterbury can’t be that efficient! And I’m sure that during the election of Leo XIV many of us will have had the film in our minds. I shan’t tell you how it ends in case you haven’t seen it. But I wonder: when the Roman cardinals elected an American, did they have in mind the need for someone to speak truth to another powerful American? I am sure that over the next few years, to have a significant American voice alongside that of Donald Trump will be important for all of us.

I know that in Chapel you have been having a series on the Nicene Creed in honour of its 1700th anniversary. On Thursday, Christians will celebrate the Ascension Day. It is traditionally a day when we celebrate the reign of Jesus: that he is God’s King and that, to quote the Creed, ‘his kingdom will have no end’. If Leo XIV and Donald Trump have authority in the world in the present, that short statement in the Creed is saying that behind and above that authority is God in Jesus Christ, and he has ultimate authority – not only now, but also tomorrow and the next day and beyond the grave and for ever. And that means, as Karl Barth wrote in the Barmen Declaration on the cusp of the Second World War, ‘Jesus Christ is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and death’. Reflecting on this evening’s second lesson, we might add that we are not to obey him, but also to teach others to obey him, making disciples of all nations.

But I want us to spend a few minutes this evening thinking about the first lesson we heard, from the book of the prophet Zephaniah. Zephaniah was speaking at a time of international conflict and political upheaval. If you know the book of Amos, you’ll know that Amos begins by pronouncing judgement on the nations before he pronounces judgement on Judah and Israel. It’s as if he lulls his audience into a false sense of security, getting them to indulge their jingoistic desire to see the surrounding nations defeated, before shocking them with some hard truths about themselves. Zephaniah is speaking a bit later, and his approach is the opposite of Amos’s. Zephaniah begins with a pronouncement of judgement on Judah: God says, ‘I will stretch out my hand against Judah, and against all the inhabitants of Jerusalem.’ It is as if he is starting with the most pressing issue; and only then do we learn that the surrounding nations will suffer a similar fate. It’s all pretty grim, to be honest. Zephaniah looks ahead, as prophets so often do, and he says confidently: ‘The Lord will be terrible against them.’

Now you’ll have noticed this is all rather different from what we heard this evening. The first lesson was, in fact, a very happy one. It tells Jerusalem to ‘rejoice and exult’. But we can only understand how exhilarating it must have been to hear that when we understand how dire the prospects for Jerusalem really were. If you go and see the Crown Jewels at the Tower of London, they are displayed against a black background. Only by contrast with darkness can their spectacular glory be seen. And in the same way, the glory of the message about rejoicing and exulting only really becomes obvious if we have been paying attention to the much bleaker message of the rest of the book. To a people who are under divine judgement, who have turned back from following the Lord and quite frankly have not bothered to seek him or inquire of him – to a people whose future is going to be in exile – comes a message to a faithful remnant, and the message is very good news.

And the first piece of good news is this: The sentence is repealed. ‘Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem! The Lord has taken away the judgements against you.’ It is as if God’s people have been on trial. In the courtroom of God’s justice, the evidence has been presented. And it’s not looking good for the defence. The people have been idolatrous – bowing down on their roofs to the host of the heavens. The people have been complacent – saying in their hearts, ‘The Lord will not do good, nor will he do harm.’ And the people have been stubborn – refusing to listen to reason, accepting no correction. They deserve a sentence to be passed against them. But God has taken away the judgements against them. ‘I will remove disaster,’ he says, ‘so that you will not bear reproach for it.’ The sentence is repealed.

Over the past few months in Exning, I have been preparing an adult for baptism. She is called Tina. We have been reading Mark’s Gospel together. In much of the second half of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is on trial. Tina has come to us from another faith tradition, so she is not familiar with the material, and when we reached the trial of Jesus, she was indignant. She exclaimed, “He did nothing wrong!” And that is right. The guilty Jerusalem is tried justly in Zephaniah; but the innocent Jesus is tried unjustly. Guilty Jerusalem is acquitted; but the innocent Jesus is condemned. And through that condemnation, as Jesus willingly enters into his Passion, the sentence against God’s people is repealed and the judgement is taken away.

If you’re anything like me, there will be moments when suddenly your blood runs cold, as you remember something you said years ago that you shouldn’t have said, or something you did years ago that you shouldn’t have done. The thought of being asked to explain it to someone else fills us with horror. If that is you, what God offers you, by God’s grace, through faith in Jesus Christ, is your justification. The judgement can be taken away. It is the good news at the heart of the Christian faith. Martin Luther said, ‘Justification is the article by which the church stands or falls.’ And Pope Benedict XVI said, ‘Being just simply means being with Christ and in Christ. And that is enough.’ The sentence is repealed.

If the first piece of good news is that the sentence is repealed, the second is this: The enemy is banished. The prophet says, ‘He has turned away your enemies.’ At this point we look back over Zephaniah’s three chapters and we read the judgement against the surrounding nations. With horrible contemporary relevance, he says, ‘Gaza shall be deserted, and Ashkelon shall become a desolation.’ And God says he has heard ‘the taunts of Moab and the revilings of the Ammonites.’ Gaza to the south-west of Jerusalem, the Ammonites to its north-east, the city’s enemies seem to be everywhere, ‘scoffing and boasting against the people of the Lord of hosts.’ I don’t know if we have any Ukrainians among us this evening, but if we do, they can tell us just how debilitating international conflict can be.

The conflict is not only between nations. When Tina was baptized in Exning last week, she said she rejected ‘the devil and all rebellion against God’. She renounced ‘the deceit and corruption of evil’. It was a reminder that while there is much inside us that needs to change, some of the enemies Tina will face in her new life of faith come from outside; they are external. And it doesn’t seem to be enough just to talk about evil in the abstract. If evil is sometimes national and international, it is also personal and interpersonal. It comes with names and places attached. Perhaps as we become more aware of the frighteningly personal nature of evil, the idea of the devil as personal evil becomes less hard to believe. And wonderfully, that is the enemy who is banished once and for all by the Easter mystery. To quote the twentieth-century Swedish bishop Gustav Aulén, ‘The work of Christ is first and foremost a victory over the powers which hold humankind in bondage: sin, death, and the devil.’ He is Christ the Victor.

The sentence is repealed. The enemy is banished. And thirdly and finally: The King is among us. Zephaniah says to the faithful remnant, ‘The king of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst.’ And the prophet expands on the idea: ‘The Lord, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory; he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing as on a day of festival.’ For most of the past two and a half chapters, the idea of God’s presence has been terrifying, as he comes in judgement with destruction. But now, God is present and he is present not to judge but to rescue, not to condemn but to rejoice.

I wonder if this might be the key difference God makes in our lives? When we hear words of judgement and condemnation, words that harm and hurt, we turn to God, and it would be natural to worry that we might hear more of the same, and this time with added power and authority. But in Jesus Christ the God who meets us delights in us. This God has come to be with us, to be in solidarity with us, to experience the worst the world can throw at us, to take it to the grave and to rise over it in triumph. And we find that, as a result, God is in our midst – in the words of Scripture, in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, in other people as we seek Christ in them, and by God’s Holy Spirit dwelling within us. The

kingdom in which by the grace of God we find ourselves, the kingdom that has no end, turns out not to be a harsh dictatorship but the just and gentle rule of the God who is literally dying to meet us.

So Zephaniah tells the faithful remnant, and he tells us this evening: we are justified by God’s grace through God’s gift of faith, as the sentence against us is repealed. We look around in trepidation and find that the enemy has been banished, as personal and interpersonal evil is defeated, once and for all. And we enjoy the presence of God, a presence that cannot be taken away from us, because not only has God inaugurated this kingdom by the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, but its permanence is guaranteed. His kingdom, the just and gentle rule of God, will have no end.