This Sunday is the Sixth Sunday of Easter and is also the Sunday before Ascension Day.

Hence our Gospel reading for this evening gives Matthew’s account of Christ’s victory over

death and of his Great Commission to his disciples, and therefore to us, to share the good news of the Kingdom of God with all peoples. (Matthew 28: 1-10,16-20)

It is both an end and a beginning. Christ’s ministry on earth has come to an end and the Church’s work must now begin. And, as so often happens in the Gospels, that change in our understanding of God’s work, is characterised also by a change of location. The disciples have been in Jerusalem where Jesus has met his death at the hands of the Roman and Jewish authorities. Now the disciples are to return to Galilee where their life with Jesus began so that it might all begin again in a new and exciting way.

Nobody in Jerusalem gave much thought to Galilee. It was a place in which gentiles lived closely alongside Jews and it was a poor region where the people had a reputation for being less than pious. But in truth many people just could not afford to keep the demands that the law placed upon them And this is why so many found themselves excluded from the community of God’s people.

And yet Jesus embraced this region and this people. He chose to live and work among them and spent three years in Galilee proclaiming the good news of God’s Kingdom. And he proclaimed his message well away from the seat of religious and political power in Jerusalem, modelling in his life and work a new way of understanding God and his purpose for us.

It was I suppose inevitable that the Jewish people would equate wealth and position with God’s grace and pleasure. It is natural to assume that those who are blessed with wealth and education would be better equipped to lead the people of God and be more able to understand his will. It was after all the religious elite who wrote the stories of the faith and created what we now know as the Old Testament. And they did in truth honour the different strands of the revelation made known to them; the law, the prophets and the writings. And within each of those traditions came God’s demands to honour and support the poor and the vulnerable.

But they still could not have believed or expected that God’s son would spend the vast majority of his life and ministry on earth working alongside those who others rejected as sinners and outcasts. They could not have thought that he would shun Jerusalem for the border country of Galilee.

But as we know, that it exactly what Jesus did. He worked with people that others failed to see, those who were non- people in the eyes of the privileged. These were people who knew poverty, people who suffered exploitation from rich absentee landlords in Jerusalem, people who suffered from diseases of various sorts. These were people who had begun to believe that God was only for those who could afford him, perhaps because that is what they had been taught from birth by those in positions of wealth and authority.

And he touched them and he touched their lives by creating new spaces and new places where the Kingdom could be proclaimed. He healed them in the villages where they lived. He taught them by the sea where they fished for food, and he fed them with the bread of life in the wilderness places. And he became one of them. He became an outcast, he became a non person, one of the poor, a Galilean.

And when he went up to Jerusalem they led him outside the city walls, took away his dignity, took away his birthright, took away his citizenship and executed him as a common criminal.

So, is it surprising that Jesus’ first command to his followers in Matthew’s Gospel, after he is raised from the dead, is that they should go back to Galilee?

With the resurrection of Jesus and with his ascension into heaven, what happened in Galilee must now happen in the whole world and in every age and generation. The Jerusalem of Jesus’ day would be destroyed, and for Christians, the focus of faith in Jesus would never be a temple or indeed a church, but a body. It would be a body that had been broken and is now to be shared out among all those who need his love and his healing power. Therefore the new church must begin its life and work on the soil that the earthly Jesus trod and must do so in ways that he taught his disciples.

The Kingdom of God, or the rule of God would require Jesus’ followers to live by a code of behaviour that would put the last first and the first last. In the Kingdom all must be valued and supported regardless of their social status or gender or ethnic origin. And those who would lead must serve. And the Kingdom would never be rooted in the halls of government or temples of ecclesiastical power. The Kingdom would always be rooted in the soil on which the poor tread and the beds on which the world’s forgotten die because of violence or malnutrition or unnecessary disease.

Of course Mother Teresa is right. We are one world and we depend on each other. Therefore, those of us who use so much of the world’s resources for our own pleasure are not rich. It is indeed poverty to decide that a child might die so that we might live as we like. But it is also hard for us to know how we can make a difference and how we can allow the Kingdom to draw near to those in need.

However, one way in which we can help is by supporting Christian Aid, and resourcing those who work throughout our world to confront oppression and bring relief to those in need. Therefore it is my pleasure today to commission those who will collect for Christian Aid this year and the Church’s privilege to support its work in our world.