Sermon: Success, victory and triumph

One of the surprising broadcasting successes of this year has been The Apprentice. The format of this show may not be familiar to this whole congregation but is easy to explain.

12 young business people have been competing against each other by taking part in business exercises – all of which involved forming teams to promote and sell some sort of product. The winner is the eponymous apprentice – the prize being a year in the employ of Sir Alan Sugar on a 6-figure salary. And on Wednesday evening the show concluded with one of the two finalists (both of whom were young women and neither of them university graduates) hearing of her success with the words ’you’re hired’ – a welcome relief to the harsh refrain of all the weeks thus far:  ‘you’re fired’.

The series has generated a following in broadsheet and tabloid newspapers. It has been pilloried by both TV critics and business gurus but has nonetheless caught people’s imaginations, including I have to confess my own.

Now that it is all over I have to wonder why it was so compelling. There are several strands to it. There is the excitement of seeing highly individualistic people trying to cooperate; there is the contrast between the glamorous rewards for winners and the public humiliation of the losers; there has been the rude and often ungrammatical acuity of Sir Alan Sugar and the more reflective wisdom of his henchman and woman. And there has been the spectacle of the unbridled egotism and competitiveness of some of the participants, which has sometimes expressed itself in language a very long way removed from that of the Book of Common Prayer.

But the connection that I want to make with today’s readings, and indeed with our own spiritual quest, has to do with the way in which the series The Apprentice manipulates people by appealing to their fantasies of triumph and victory. It is this that makes it a suitable starting point for an Easter sermon.

Any reflective participant in worship at Easter will notice the references to triumph and victory in the words of hymns and anthems. We are celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and the end of the dominion of death and evil – which is genuine cause for joy. But some of the language is vivid and violent.

For Judah’s lion burst his chains

And crushed the serpent’s head.

As we go through the season of Easter, so the Old Testament is purloined for passages which speak of the historical triumphs of Yahweh. One passage that I find especially difficult to live with is the song of Moses and Miriam which has in recent years been drawn out of the obscurity of chapter of Exodus 15 into the daily form of Matins. 

Sing to the Lord who has triumphed gloriously

horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.

This coupling of ‘triumphing-over’ with ‘violent destruction of’ goes a long way back in our collective memories and surfaces in all sorts of competitive situations. The point here is that the ambition and hope of success is not expressed in terms of achieving a great and desirable goal but of defeating, crushing, destroying another.

Now there is a sense in which this is inevitable. Christ’s battle with sin and evil and death needed to be decisive. The final words from the cross in John’s gospel are well translated ‘it is accomplished’: the job has been decisively done.  The problems begin, however, when we try to find ways of expressing this in terms of other battles, other triumphs, other victories, other successes, including those found in the earlier pages of the Bible.

The exodus of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt is not a victory or triumph of the same order as the resurrection.  But neither is the reading we heard as our first lesson, that wonderful passage from Isaiah 60 which begins ‘arise, shine for your light has come and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you’.

That one verse, taken alone, could make a very happy Easter refrain. If we were able to excise it from its original place and pop it in the garden with Mary Magdalene or in the upper room with the disciples with or without Thomas or indeed on the road to Emmaus it would fit the bill very nicely: ‘arise, shine for your light has come and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you’.

The problem, however is that this is a passage which goes on to speak of the glorification not of God but of Jerusalem.  It speaks of the restoration of the material and financial wealth of the ruined city. It speaks of economic and political success.

The vision in the passage is of Jerusalem becoming the leading city of the global community, a headquarters of trade and wealth, a beacon of the light of worldly success in a dark and impoverished world. 

The passage is, of course, more regularly associated with Epiphany rather than Easter. It lies behind the story we read in Matthew about the magi coming from the east with their gifts.  But notice that Matthew goes only so far with interpreting this prophecy in its own terms. The magi, camels, gifts and all are indeed led by a star to Jerusalem. And there they do indeed meet the top man, Herod the King, the icon of icon of success and power. But, as the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann suggests in his sermon ‘Missed by Nine Miles’ at some point during the visit those visiting scholars, in consultation no doubt with Herod’s own wisest advisers, realised that Isaiah 60 with its grand and imperial and materialistic vision of success was not the relevant text. It pointed to Jerusalem, but somehow Jerusalem was a disappointment. So they thought again and another text came to mind. Not one from the prophecies of Isaiah but words from Micah chapter 5:

But you O Bethlehem of Ephrathah
Who are one of the little clans of Judah, From you shall come forth for me
One who is to rule in Israel.
As Brueggemann puts it:

That text from the lips of the rural peasant Micah, is the voice of a peasant hope for the future. It is not impressed with high towers and great arenas, banks and great urban achievements. The little ones think rather about a different future, as yet unaccomplished, in a peasant land that will be organised for well being in resistance to the great imperial threat. (Brueggemann, W. Inscribing the Text Fortress Press 2004 p132)

The wisdom of the magi was revealed not when they undertook the journey to the bright lights of Jerusalem but when they realised that this is not it, and travelled with their gifts that extra nine miles to Bethlehem.  It was further revealed when they offered their gifts and worshipped. And came to the fore once more when they returned home – ‘another way’, and maybe began to live, another way.

Our fantasies of triumph and victory, of success and achievement, accomplishment even, always have the potential to get in between us and God, between our hopes and plans and God’s objectives. The default fantasy about God’s power and victory is that it is involves violent defeat of the enemy followed by the elevation to super grand status of the already very grand. And there is a danger that this season of Easter, culminating in the story of the ascension can encourage us in this erroneous way.

But this is not the whole story of Jesus; it is not the full gospel. It is not the story of Bethlehem, nor is it what we find in the story of Miriam’s New Testament sisters Mary the mother and Mary Magdalene. Mary the mother sings Magnificat – ‘he hath put down the mighty from their seat and exalted the humble and meek’. And Mary Magdalene does not sing at all. Rather she weeps in the garden. There is no glorious triumph in mistaking the Messiah for a gardener. No serpent’s heads are crushed and the victor and the victim are one. This is a very different world from the one where the winner takes all after the others have all been fired or drowned or otherwise eliminated.

The point of this sermon is not, I stress, an attempt to relativise the achievement or accomplishment of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Rather it is a plea that we should work to make this triumph, this victory the model, key or paradigm for our understanding of all other success and failure. Easter does not fulfil our fantasies of triumph. Rather it teaches us the true nature of victory and accomplishment.

Quite how we let this understanding inform our practical living is far from straightforward. It does not lead me to suggest that all forms of competition are wrong because they create winners and losers. On the contrary it is important for our development to experience both.  So the educational plea from me would be that we give young people a sufficiently rich variety of competitions that all can experience the bitter taste of failure and defeat so that their personalities will be formed at least as much through responding to failure and loss as enjoying success.

Paradoxically, the winner of ‘The Apprentice’ had exactly this kind of experience and her personality was a response as much to personal tragedy as it was to the need to achieve. She had been to the place of sadness, anguish and grief and moved on.  And this, I would suggest, is a very different form of triumph than that of seeing others being cast aside – either because they have been fired by Sir Alan Sugar or tossed into the sea by Yahweh.

When told in its richly nuanced form, the Christian story has the capacity to give us a pattern for living as citizens and indeed choristers of the New Jerusalem. This is a city made holy not by worldly triumph and success but by a journey made in humility from the stable to the garden via the cross and the tomb.

Christianity is, let me reassure you, very interested in success, victory and triumph. But it is interested in the triumph, victory and success of those who seem to have lost, those who have known the pain of victimhood. It celebrates the victory of those who have triumphed not over others but themselves. Those who have let the grace that flows from the wounds of the dead and resurrected Messiah flow into and through their hearts and on into the world so that all can sing the eternally new song of the God who lives and loves and reigns as the victorious victim.