Sermon Preached in the Chapel of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge: Evensong, Remembrance Sunday, 2016

What is it about?

The Expository Times vol. 127(2) published an article of mine entitled ‘Contempt or Respect? Jews and Judaism in Christian Preaching’ (first published online in November 2014). In October 2016, I was excited to discover, within OnlineFirst, a Jewish response to my paper by Sebastian Selvén. I had recently been invited to preach at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, at Evensong on Remembrance Sunday, in my capacity as Honorary Secretary of the Council of Christians and Jews. Remembrance Sunday gives a particularly sharp and poignant context to discussion of Jewish-Christian relations. There could be no avoiding the difficult issues, and so I chose the most problematic text I could think of: John 8:44, in which Jesus accuses ‘the Jews’ of having the devil for a father, a calumny exploited in Nazi propaganda. The challenge was to find a creative way forward. The Old Testament, in the form of the encounter between Jacob and Esau, came to my rescue. Part of the dialogue with Sebastian concerned how Christians should read the Hebrew Bible. I hope that this sermon, which reverses the usual lectionary procedure and uses the ‘old’ to reimagine the ‘new’, provides one model. It is printed below exactly as preached.

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