Sermon by Rev Sydney Maitland at Evensong on Saturday 30 August 2025.
Christ the King: stained glass at All Saints, Jordanhill, photographed by Ken McCreadie.
• First Reading: Isaiah 7: 1-17 (The sign of Immanuel)
• Second Reading: Matthew 17: 14-27 (Jesus heals a demon-possessed boy)
The situations seemed to be so impossible. No way out and no resolution could even be imagined.
By all rational ways of looking at it, it looked like a loser: whether it was the armies threatening Jerusalem, the disciples of Jesus facing the urgent pleas of a desperate father for his sick child or even paying the temple tax.
Many people would roll over and die. Accept the inevitable, resign oneself to defeat, take whatever punishment is coming.
But then Israel had been there before. The whole story of the Exodus was about the sovereign act of God in rescuing His people from slavery in Egypt, and then leading them through the Red Sea to safety.
And even then, He provided them with water in the wilderness and manna and quails in the desert.
OK: that was then so what about now? Well look at the stories of the Judges: Gideon, Samson, Jephthah and the rest.
And then to cap it all there is the coming of Jesus who was not going to play political games which would all be forgotten in a generation.
He was going to reach into the depths of the human soul and meet that human need at its most basic and foundational level. He would meet it at the level of the most basic motivations and needs. He would be there in the deepest of emotions and the most disturbing of encounters.
He would plumb the deepest loyalties and senses of being and of identity. And He would show that this was the place where the most central of human demands and crises would occur.
The place where the self would overrule all else, including and perhaps especially the love and majesty and glory of God.
This was the place where the human spirit had made its most determined stand to be independent – of every spiritual and moral and cultural and social principle under which human society may find its peace and harmony.
And instead of just giving lectures on the moral life, Jesus would place Himself at the centre of the human alienation and rebellion against God.
Jesus would become the epicentre of that human rejection of God in favour of self. He would become every rebellion, every extremity and every depravity known to the human heart.
It was not just the sign of a young woman giving birth, or His intervention in the healing of an epileptic boy, or even paying the temple tax.
It was on the cross that Jesus became that most visible of signs of the love and mercy of God. And equally, it was in the empty tomb that God sealed that sign with His own in raising Jesus from the dead.
And if this is how God deals with us as we come before Him, naming our sins before Him, then how much more gloriously will He meet us with His glory when we present our needs before Him with the same simplicity and directness that Jesus Himself would have used to express His needs?
For it is in the nature of God to meet us with more than we can receive or absorb and He has at times to limit the extravagance of His desire to give to us and His exuberance in blessing us.
In times of uncertainty at all levels of life, we are presented with so many levels of confusion.
Yet this is the place where we need to come before the Lord, honest in our needs and yet open to receiving His word and His gift as He gives it to us.
We want a sign and it is given. Its shape is the cross and its name is Jesus.
