Palm Sunday was an illegal demonstration

Posted on by symonhill

This morning (on Sunday 29th March 2026) I had the privilege of leading worship for Palm Sunday at Sherbourne Community Church in Coventry.

Below is the text of my sermon (this is basically the text that I wrote beforehand but in practice I deviated from the wording at times and added in a few extra comments).

The sermon followed two Bible readings:

Matthew 21, 1-11

Psalm 118, 1-2 and 19-29

The first Palm Sunday sounds like it was pretty chaotic. People cheering and shouting “Hosanna”. Branches and leaves being waved. Cloaks being thrown on the floor in front of Jesus on a donkey. It doesn’t sound like an orderly event.

But if we look at the gospels’ descriptions more closely, it seems that it was much better organised that we might assume. Jesus and his followers had to arrange things in advance so that, for example, the disciples who were sent to fetch the donkey would know where to find her.

When they found the donkey – or, in Matthew’s version, the donkey and the colt – they had to say specific words: “the Lord needs them”. Clearly the people looking after the donkey and the colt did not know these disciples personally. It sounds as though the words were prepared in advance as a sign that they had come from Jesus. They were basically a sort of password.

There are other passages later than the one we’re looking at today that give further clues – about what to say, who to follow and so on. They all give the impression of something that had been carefully arranged – and arranged secretly.

They had to arrange this event – or at least some of this event – in secret, because what they were doing was illegal. To put it in modern terms, they were organising an illegal march.

So why would a donkey-ride be so controversial? Well, the Jews of Judea and Galilee were under the rule of the Roman Empire. It was a brutal rule. Many historians have analysed how Roman rule had increased poverty among the Jews.

Several attempts at rebellion had been unsuccessful. The Jews were allowed to keep worshipping in the Jerusalem Temple, but only as long as they offered regular prayers for the Roman Emperor and didn’t disturb Roman rule. The Jewish priests who were by then in charge in the Temple were those who had been approved by the Romans because they co-operated with Roman rule. They were viewed by certain other Jews as collaborators.  The whole situation was uneasy, unpredictable and volatile.

The most volatile time of the year was Passover, the major annual Jewish festival when Jews celebrate liberation from slavery. Jewish sensitivities were heightened. The Roman authorities became nervous. An account from the time by the writer Josephus records how the Romans increased the number of troops around Jerusalem as thousands more Jews poured into the city to celebrate the Passover festival.

And in the run-up to Passover, Jesus rides towards Jerusalem on a donkey. What was Jesus trying to say?

Well, firstly, Jesus acted like a king. “Hosanna”, which means “save us”, was traditionally something shouted out to a king. Throwing your cloak on the ground was a sign of loyalty, often used in royal processions. Waving branches and leaves also gave the impression of a royal procession. We didn’t hear mention of palm leaves in that reading from Matthew earlier, incidentally, because it’s John’s Gospel that mentions that palm leaves, but the gospels all talk of something similar. Jesus’ supporters acted like people welcoming a king.

But as far as the Romans were concerned, the only king who these people were supposed to follow was the Roman Emperor! It was treason to suggest anything else. Decades earlier, the Romans had set up a puppet king, Herod the Great, and called him “King of the Jews”. He was the Herod who had tried to kill Jesus as a baby. But by the time that Jesus was an adult, Judea was ruled directly by a Roman governor, Pontius Pilate. Occasionally Jewish rebels had tried to lead revolts and called themselves “King of the Jews”. The Romans had crushed and killed them. Calling yourself a king without the Romans’ permission tended to end with a death sentence.

But the second message that Jesus gave out was quite different. Although on the one hand, Jesus acted like a king, on the other hand, he really doesn’t. Kings ride on warhorses or chariots. They don’t ride on slow, stubborn animals such as donkeys! It would be like a president or a celebrity turning up not in a limousine but on a pushbike. Jesus would have looked a bit silly. This was a sort of royal procession, but in some ways, it was a parody of a royal procession. It was poking fun at royal processions.

But Jesus wasn’t the first person to think of a king of a donkey. The prophet Zechariah told the people of Jerusalem that their king would come “humble and riding on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey” (that’s Zechariah 9,9). Zechariah went on to say that this king, rather than bring war, would “command peace to the nations”.

The Jews who saw Jesus on a donkey would have known Zechariah’s prophecy. They would have known that Jesus’ supporters were proclaiming him a king. But perhaps they would also have recognised that Zechariah was not writing about a warlike king. After his donkey-parade into Jerusalem, Jesus didn’t take the city by force. Instead he led his disciples in a protest at the Jerusalem Temple, overturning tables and challenging moneychangers, causing disruption without physical harm to anyone.

The donkey ride and the Temple protest are the loving, nonviolent but forceful actions of a king whose power does not lie in coercion and military might but in love and truth. The upside-down Kingdom of God cannot fit easily into the categories of this world.

The donkey parade must have been extremely confusing for the Roman authorities. Perhaps that’s why they didn’t break it up. Or perhaps they were a bit less concerned because it was on the edge of Jerusalem rather than the middle. However, I suspect that they were afraid of the crowds if they had tried to stop it, so they let it continue for the time being. It’s worth noting that when Jesus was eventually arrested, it was under cover of darkness and he ironically asked the soldiers why they had not arrested him at the Temple “in the daytime”.

Nonetheless, the people who cheered Jesus and waved palm leaves were taking a massive risk. They didn’t know whether the Roman authorities would react or not. They shouted “hosanna” and celebrated. In the face of injustice and under threat of retribution, they nonetheless rejoiced in love and truth and justice.

What risks have we taken for Jesus? Or what risks are we prepared to take? We might not always think of it as taking risks for Jesus. We may take risks for the sake of love and compassion when we reject the temptation to choose greed or selfishness.

It is risky at times to choose the truth of human dignity and justice over colluding with unjust economic and social systems. It is not easy to do this. We are all broken people in a broken world. We are all compromised by the structures of the world around us. But however much we fail, God keeps offering forgiveness. Jesus shows us the way.

Riding a donkey into Jerusalem, Jesus reminded us that we can celebrate love and truth in the midst of injustice and suffering – without denying the suffering. Remember the passwords and the preparation for collecting the donkey? It’s a reminder that sometimes we need to prepare carefully together, supporting each other and seeking Christ’s guidance, if we are going to challenge the established way of doing things. In confronting injustice without using violence or promoting hatred, Jesus reminds us to love our enemies.

As Jesus rode on that donkey, he knew he would soon face crucifixion. God raised him from the dead, and the powers of sin, death and oppression were put on notice that their days were numbered. The power of love and justice and truth – the power of God revealed in Jesus – will ultimately win out.

It is this power that makes it possible for us to acknowledge the vicious reality of the suffering of the world and still proclaim hope that love will triumph. This is not a naïve hope that denies suffering, but a deep hope rooted in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

So like Jesus and his followers on that donkey-ride into Jerusalem, let us defy the powers of injustice, put our faith in the God of love and cry out, “Hosanna! Jesus is king!”.

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My book, The Upside-Down Bible: What Jesus really said about money, sex and violence (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2015) can be bought in paperback or e-book, priced £9.99.

1,000-strong Christian Bloc joins Together Alliance march against the far-right

Posted on by symonhill

You can tell when a march is big if you’re near the back of it. It you have to wait for hours before you even start moving, it’s a good sign that there are far more marchers than were expected.

The people at the front of yesterday’s Together Alliance march in central London reportedly reached the end of the route only shortly after those of us near the back had begun to march. Organisers estimated that half a million people had taken part.

There were people of many faiths and none, of many backgrounds, ages, nationalities, sexualities and genders; students, workers, unemployed people, young people and pensioners. There were trades unions, community organisations, faith groups and campaign networks.

We were united in rejecting the racism and hatred peddled by far-right groups such as Reform UK, Restore Britain and Unite the Kingdom. We were united for an inclusive, compassionate Britain in which resources are divided fairly and minorities are not scapegoated for the actions of billionaires and the consequences of unjust structures.

Amongst the many “blocs” (loosely organised sections) of the march was the Christian Bloc.

The point of the Christian Bloc was not to divide Christians from the other marches. That would undermine the unity that the march was championing! Rather, it was to the challenge the far-right’s attempts to co-opt Christianity. Christian nationalism has been increasingly visible in the UK in the last two years or so. Far-right figures claim to be defending “Christian Britain” as an excuse to demonise Muslims, Jews, LGBTQ+ people and others. We wanted to send a clear message that these people don’t speak for Christianity. There are many British Christians ready to stand in solidarity with our neighbours of other faiths and none.

When the idea of a Christian Bloc was first talked about, I thought we might get a few dozen people – perhaps over a hundred if things went well. A few days ago, organisers from groups including Better Story and Christians for a Welcoming Britain were suggesting there would be hundreds.

But I still hadn’t quite taken it in. When friends messaged me to say they would be in the Christian Bloc, I responded by saying “See you there!” – or similar words. Christian blocs at protests are usually small enough that if you know someone else who is going, you can be fairly sure that you will bump into each other. It hadn’t occurred to me that the Christian Bloc would be so big that I would simply not see many friends or acquaintances who were also there.

My first big surprise came when I arrived at Oasis Church Waterloo for the pre-march service. There were, by my admittedly rather rough estimate, about 400 people there. They were struggling to fit more people in. The numbers increased as the Christian Bloc assembled. As we marched down Piccadilly, the Guardian estimated that there were 1,000 people on the Christian Bloc alone.

We were not of course the only Christians on the march. I know that there were other Christians in the trade union blocs, the refugee blocs, the LGBTQ+ Bloc and elsewhere. They included some who had attended the church service before the march began. Nonetheless, I am delighted that so many joined a bloc that was specifically there to challenge the far-right’s misuse of Christianity and to reject Christian nationalism.

As the Christian Bloc marched, it was great to share greetings and encouragement with others, including Jewish and Muslim groups marching near us.

Well done and thank you to everyone who took part or expressed support!

Christian nationalism may be growing in the UK. So is the resistance to it. We need to keep going!

Christians must stand up for Muslims’ right to pray in public

Posted on by symonhill

For the first time that I can remember in my lifetime, there are MPs calling for an end to freedom of religion in the UK.

Nick Timothy, little-known Tory front-bencher and Shadow Justice Secretary, last week attacked an entirely peaceful public iftar that had taken place in London’s Trafalgar Square. This Muslim event, which involves sharing food and includes prayer, was open to people of all faiths and none.

It was the sixth time it had happened, but perhaps Timothy had only just noticed it. The more likely explanation is that racist dog-whistling has become more politically acceptable than it was five years ago.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph on Thursday, he attacked “the domination of public spaces”. Apparently with no sense of irony, he described this peaceful event that was open to all as an “act of domination and division”.

Nigel Farage – perhaps alarmed that far-right hatemongering was going on without him getting any headlines out of it – quickly joined in. In his usual style, he went further, and called for Muslim public prayer to be banned.

I cannot recall a previous case of a party leader (at least not the leader of a party mainstream enough to be in Parliament) calling for members of a particular religion not to be allowed to worship as a group in public.

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has shamefully backed Nick Timothy, although they seem a bit vague about Farage’s “ban” call.

To their credit, some other Tory MPs have disassociated themselves from Timothy’s vile remarks, most notably Emma Best, the Tories’ deputy leader on the London Assembly. All the centrist and left-wing parties have thankfully condemned Timothy and Farage’s comments.

The controversy exposes the hypocrisy of right-wingers who like to condemn what they call “cancel culture” and who claim to be proud of Britain. Surely one of the greatest reasons to be proud of Britain is British traditions of freedom of religion and civil liberties. We have these rights because our ancestors struggled for them, often in the teeth of opposition from monarchs, militaries and – at times – religious leaders.

I am pleased to have seen a number of people of other faiths stand up for the right of Muslims to practise their religion.

 As a Christian, I am glad to see Christians challenging Farage and Timothy and speaking up for religious liberty. At the same time, however, I am disappointed. Christians as a whole, particularly Christian leaders, need to be far more vocal in showing solidarity with our Muslim neighbours.

As Christians we need have no fear of religious liberty. The Gospel of Christ advances by love and compassion, not by coercion and proscription. Many other religions such as Islam and Judaism share our trust in the God of love, even while we disagree about important matters such as the divinity of Jesus.

It is not other religions that pose the biggest threat to Christian faith. It is the destructive idols that we have created. These are the idols of money and markets and military might – and the idols of nationalism and sectarianism.

Most of the people who struggled for religious freedom in British history were themselves Christian history. As a Baptist I am proud that Baptists have always rejected state control of religion.

The first book calling for freedom of religion of Muslims and Jews in England was written in 1612 by Thomas Helwys, one of the first British Baptists. Helwys declared that, “The king is a mortal man, and not God, therefore he hath no power over the mortal soul of his subjects to make laws and ordinances for them and to set spiritual Lords over them”.

Calling for religious liberty was outrageously radical when Helwys wrote those words. In the 21st century, I would have thought that rejecting religious liberty would been far outside acceptable political debate. But far-right rhetoric has now become so mainstream that this is no longer the case.

Christians in general and church leaders in particular must speak up in support of Muslims who are under attack for peacefully praying. This is partly a matter of loving our neighbours as ourselves. It is partly a working out of Jesus’ teachings about breaking down barriers and recognising that those who are different to us are indeed our neighbours.

It is also a matter of self-interest. Every time that someone’s rights are suppressed, the restriction of the rights of others becomes more likely.

As the Jewish News put it on Thursday, “If you think that could not happen here, you are kidding yourselves. Uphold religious rights for all – you’ll never know when you’ll be glad that you did.”

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There will be a Christian bloc at the Together march on Saturday 28th March 2026 in central London. The march unites people of all faiths and none, including trades unions, migrant groups and community organisations, in challenging the far-right. Join us!

Economic justice is central to the message of Jesus

Posted on by symonhill

I was recently asked to preach on the theme of economic justice at Wakefield Baptist Church. They are a very welcoming and active church and I was honoured to be invited to preach there.

The service was on St David’s Day, 1st March 2026. It was just after US and Israeli forces had begun bombing Iran and the congregation of Wakefield Baptist Church includes a large number of Iranian Christian refugees. The format of the service was changed a bit at the last moment, with members of the church’s leadership team speaking about Iran before and after I delivered my sermon. I also made some comments about Iran before preaching my sermon as planned. Below is basically the text that I wrote beforehand but in practice I deviated from the wording at times and added in a few extra comments.

The sermon was based on two Bible readings:

Luke 12, 13-21

Luke 19, 11-27

Jesus wants us to think. If he didn’t want us to think, he would simply have issued lists of rules and sets of instructions. But he talked in parables. He told stories. He almost never gave a direct answer to a question. He often responded to a question by asking another question and he came at issues sideways on. This is not the behaviour of someone who wants us to accept things without thinking about them. Parables invite us to reflect, to ponder, to work things through.

Now not all churches are comfortable with this. Some churches give the impression that they prefer rules to questions. Sadly this has left many people with the impression that Christianity is about being told what to think. Personally I really enjoy sharing passages of Jesus’ teachings with people who are not used to reading them – because they are often very surprised to see how Jesus talked.

It can also be a surprise to see the topics that Jesus talked about. When church leaders talk about poverty, or war, or immigration, they are often told to “stay out of politics”, which is an odd idea given that faith involves the whole of life. But it is assumed that church leaders will comment on issues such as marriage and sexuality and so-called “family values”. So some people get the impression that Jesus spent his time talking about such things. It can come as shock to discover that Jesus said far more about money than he said about marriage, sexuality or “family values”. Reading the New Testament, it’s clear that money, poverty and inequality are among the topics that Jesus mentions most often, especially in the Gospel of Luke.

Now of course parables can have lots of different meanings. That’s one of the wonderful things about a parable! It can continue to provide more and more meanings. Nonetheless, I think that when Jesus’ original hearers heard him talking about money, they were hearing something that was relevant to their own everyday lives. Jesus lived in a deeply unequal society, impoverished by the brutal exploitation of the Roman Empire. Jesus’ listeners really responded well to a teacher, to a leader, who talked, among many other topics, about the reality of inequality and injustice.

Of course, our society is in many ways different to the society in which Jesus lived. We have many rights that were denied to the poorest people in Jesus’ day. We have these rights because our ancestors campaigned for them, often inspired by their faith in Jesus.

Nonetheless, the world remains hideously unequal. The world has enough food to feed everyone in it. Yet in our sin we have distributed food so badly that some starve while others hoard their wealth. Oxfam report that the richest four individuals in the UK own as much as the poorest 20 million people in the UK. That’s nearly a third of the population, owning as much as four people. You don’t mean to tell you that internationally, the inequality is even greater.

Last week it was reported that Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, is close to become the first ever trillionaire. How many noughts are there in a trillion? There are 12 noughts in a trillion. A trillion is a million million. According to Oxfam, Elon Musk’s wealth would be enough to pay off the entire public debt of 31 of the world’s poorest countries.

And so we come to the reading we heard earlier from Luke 12, Jesus’ Parable of the Rich Fool. It’s about a man who is so arrogant about his own wealth that he builds bigger barns to store it in, not knowing that he won’t live to see them completed. The man in the parable can control his money, he can control his buildings, but he can’t control his span of life. His wealth leads him to overestimate his own power.

This man has a conversation. Who is the conversation with? It’s with himself! He speaks with his own soul! He says, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years”. The theologian Ched Myers says this story is a sort of cartoon. It’s about a rich man who is so unconcerned about other people than even when he has a conversation it’s with himself. He doesn’t seem to have a relationship with others who might benefit from his possessions, or with those whose labour has helped to produce his possessions. He doesn’t even seem to have much of a relationship with God. The only relationship he seems to have is with his wealth.

This man who thinks he has everything is impoverished in terms of both companionship and insight. And then he loses his life. It’s quite a sad story.

How has he gained all his possessions? Well, we’re not told. However, historians report that in Jesus’ time it had become common for landowners to increase their wealth by taking over the land of indebted small-scale farmers who could not pay their debts. This may have been the sort of wealthy landowner who Jesus’ listeners had in mind.

The problem is not simply that the man is too attached to his possessions. Anyone who needs to build bigger barns to store things for himself is stopping others from using them – others who may be in greater need.

In the Bible, almost every reference to storing food is negative – unless it refers to storing food to share with others. You may remember that in the book of Exodus, when the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness on the way to the promised land, they were fed with manna from heaven. They collected manna but people who tried to take more than their share found that the extra that they took went rotten.

According to Exodus 16,18, “The one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little. Everyone had gathered just as much as they needed.”

This is the Bible’s economic vision! We find it in Jesus’ parables. If instead we trust in the accumulation of wealth, we put our faith in something unreliable and temporary, instead of in the living God. As Jesus puts it in this parable, “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich towards God.”

Today of course, the super-wealthy do not need big barns. In Jesus’ day, most wealth consisted of physical possessions such as grain or gold. Nowadays even most money does not exist as coins or notes. Wealth today mostly consists of numbers on screens. It has meaning only because we all believe that the numbers on screens mean something. If we all stopped believing in the numbers on screens, the system would fall apart.

It is important to note that Jesus does not encourage us to hate rich people, even those with excessive wealth and power. Also in Luke’s Gospel, we read of Zacchaeus, an exploitative and fraudulent owner of a privatised tax-collection business. After meeting Jesus, Zacchaeus gave away half his wealth and paid back those he had defrauded four times over. Zacchaeus seems to have been welcomed into the community of Jesus’ followers, many of whom seem to have shared their property in common.

Following Jesus and challenging injustice is not about judging and demonising people. We need to recognise our own complicity in sin and ask God to send his Holy Spirit to empower us to live differently. Despite all the problems caused by inequality, we constantly hear people simplistically blaming social and economic problems on groups who they want to demonise. They blame migrants, or refugees, or Muslims, or Jews, or trans people, or benefit recipients, or whoever this week’s scapegoat happens to be. Let’s not sink to that level. We are called to love our neighbours, even to love our enemies, as we work for change and ask God to guide us.

What are we to make then of the second passage that we read? It’s a famous passage, although this is Luke’s version of the story. The version in Matthew’s Gospel is probably better known. Matthew’s version is often known as the Parable of the Talents, because the rich man gives each of the three servants, or slaves, a unit of currency known as a talent. In Luke’s version the currency is different, so depending on the translation, he gives them a mina, or a pound. But this isn’t a pound as we think of it in Britain today. It is much more than that!

Basically, without getting too much into the maths and the language, the rich man is giving each of the three servants a stonking amount of money. As we saw, he rewards the first two for making more money, and is angry with the third servant for not doing so. And in Luke’s version of the story, he then has his enemies killed in front of him.

So I’ve got a question for you: when you read this story, or when you hear this story, which of the characters do you most identify with? Honestly, with which of the characters do you most empathise, or sympathise?

(Members of the congregation then offered their answers to this question).

Have you heard sermons about this passage before? I had heard lots of sermons about this passage, and it had always worried me until I started to think about it differently. I had always been told that the rich man represents God. This bothered me a lot. It bothered me because the rich man in this story is a bully and a tyrant. He angrily punishes someone who says he is frightened of him and he casually has his enemies killed.

Why – why on earth – do we think that such a character represents God? What does that say about our perception of God? The God revealed in Jesus Christ is not a bully and a tyrant. It’s true that in some of Jesus’ parables there may be a character who represents God, but in many others there is not. Why do we assume that someone must represent God in this parable? What if nobody in this parable represents God?

I want to suggest that the more we think about it, the more this makes sense. Luke’s Gospel is full of challenges to the rich. Jewish people rejected lending money at interest. Yet in this parable the rich man says that a servant could have made money by investing money and gaining interest. It seems highly unlikely that a Jewish teacher such as Jesus would have encouraged such a thing.

Once we recognise that, the parable suddenly opens up! There are lots of fresh possibilities!

What if the rich man in the story is not somebody to be admired but someone to be challenged? Well, who is it who challenges him? It’s the third servant! Although I’m not entirely convinced that everything that the third servant says is true. He says to the rich man, “I was afraid of you”. “I was afraid of you”. But he doesn’t sound afraid, does he? Because he then goes on to say, “You are a harsh man; you take what you did not deposit, and reap what you did not sow.” He speaks this to a rich and powerful man who is the sort of person who orders his enemies to be killed in front of him. And here’s his servant telling him to his face that he’s a harsh man and reaps what he does not sow!

The third servant is speaking truth to power. The third servant is the hero of the story.

The parable finishes with a summary of the reality of economic injustice: “To all those who have, more will be given; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away”.

This isn’t a description of how things should be. It’s a description of how things are. It’s a description of an unequal world – a sinful world.

Jesus’ parables expose the realities of economic injustice today as they did 2,000 years ago. But now, as then, Jesus calls us to challenge that injustice. This isn’t simply about political protest. It’s about trusting in the God of love and justice rather than in the idols of money and earthly power. Luke’s Gospel gives us a clue about this in this parable – but it’s very brief and we could easily miss it! So let’s go back and have a quick look again.

Just before Jesus tells the parable about the rich man and the three servants, Luke tells us that Jesus told the parable because his disciples “supposed that the Kingdom of God was to appear immediately”. In other words, the Kingdom of God was not going to appear immediately, but the parable had something to say about that.

It seems to me that Jesus’ parable made clear that injustices and sins such as economic inequality would continue for now as the Kingdom was not going to appear straight away. At the same time, the parable showed the third servant challenging injustice. Thus the parable shows that it is possible to live in loyalty to the Kingdom of God even though the Kingdom has not yet been fully realised.

Throughout the New Testament, the Kingdom of God is shown to be both now and not yet. The Kingdom of God is not simply a dreamy hope for a distant future. Nor is it simply a fluffy personal feeling. The Kingdom of God is an alternative to the powers that dominate this world, an alternative in which all God’s children and all God’s creation are loved and cared for. The Kingdom of God is a reality that breaks into the present even as we hope for its total fulfilment in the future. From small moments of kindness to global campaigns for justice, the Kingdom of God breaks in. When we reach out across boundaries, when we take the risk of loving our neighbours, when we trust in God and defy the idols, we are serving the Kingdom of God.

The life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus call us back to trust in the Kingdom of God when we are tempted to trust in the world’s priorities instead.

At times the idols of money and markets and military might seem so much stronger. No doubt the Roman authorities who crucified Jesus thought that they could easily get rid of this troublemaking Jewish peasant. But Jesus died for us, and the troublemaking Jewish peasant rose from the dead: all the powers of death could not hold him. All the forces of sin and oppression and empire were put on notice that their days were numbered. We can have confidence that it is the Kingdom of God that will triumph.

In that faith let us continue to follow Jesus. Let us be inspired by the third servant in the parable, ready to speak out for truth and love in the face of injustice.

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My book, The Upside-Down Bible: What Jesus really said about money, sex and violence (Darton, Longman and Todd) can be bought in paperback or e-book, priced £9.99.

Church House Westminster are legitimising the far-right

Posted on by symonhill

A prominent London conference centre linked to the Church of England has been hosting the far-right political party Reform UK.

This is Church House Westminster, previously known as the Church House Conference Centre.

If this sounds familiar, it is because this is the same Church House Westminster that drew protests over several years for hosting military conferences sponsored by arms companies. I was arrested outside Church House in 2017 as the Land Warfare Conference took place inside.

At that point, Church House Westminster came out with the disingenuous excuse that they are a separate legal entity from the Church of England. They are making the same assertion now when challenged about hosting Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform party.

On 2nd March, the chief executive of Church House Corporation, Stephanie Maurel, said that Church House Westminster was “an independent commercial entity and is not part of the Church of England”.

This is a legal technicality. Church House Westminster is a wholly owned subsidiary company of the Church House Corporation. This legal technicality does not explain why the Christians who run it think they should operate by different ethics than they would bring to an entity that was officially part of the Church of England.

Church House Westminster’s own Lettings Policy seems to contradict their statement about being an independent entity. It states that they may “refuse any bookings which would be contrary to the witness and mission of the Church of England”.

After the controversy over the arms industry conferences, Church House Westminster took the bizarre and frankly ridiculous step of hiring Oliver O’Donovan to carry out a review of the ethics of their lettings policy. O’Donovan is Emeritus Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology at the University of Edinburgh. He is one of Britain’s most prominent Christian ethicists.

The commissioning of O’Donovan’s review was not a sign of progress. It was a sign of the appalling attitudes of the people running Church House Westminster. Who needs a Professor of Ethics to determine whether a Christian conference centre should take money from companies that sell weapons to tyrants?

To add an extra level of absurdity, the results of O’Donovan’s review were not made public.

Church House Westminster have allowed Reform UK to use the building for their press conferences multiple times, including the recent announcement of the party’s “shadow cabinet”.

Farage and his cronies repeatedly claim that Reform is not a far-right party, despite their constant demonisation of refugees in particular and migrants in general, as well as attacks by many of their politicians on Muslims, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, benefit recipients and other minorities. The rich and powerful are almost the only minority that Reform UK don’t attack.

Church House has been urged not to host Reform UK by groups including Christians For a Welcoming Britain, Christians Against the Far Right, and Better Story.

Keith Brindle, a Church of England priest and co-ordinator of Christians Against the Far Right, has said, “By opening its doors to an agenda of hostility, Church House has provided a veneer of spiritual legitimacy to Reform’s anti-migrant and anti-Muslim politics, and their cynical scapegoating.”

He added, “As followers of Jesus, we must refuse to let the architecture of our faith be used to endorse the dehumanisation of our neighbours. The Church must be a sanctuary for the displaced, not a platform for their expulsion.”

Going on their past behaviour, it is likely that the authorities at Church House are planning simply to ignore the controversy and carry on. We need to make sure that that they can’t.

Jesus’s blessings turn the world upside-down

Posted on by symonhill

Last month (on Sunday 1st February 2026) I had the honour of preaching at Foleshill Road United Reformed Church in Coventry. They are always very welcoming.

Below is the text of my sermon (this is basically the text that I wrote beforehand but in practice I deviated from the wording at times and added in a few extra comments).

The sermon was based on two Bible readings, from the Lectionary for the day:

Matthew 5, 1-12

1st Corinthians 1, 18-31

The first reading that we heard today is perhaps one of the most famous passages in the New Testament: Jesus’ list of blessings. “Blessed are the poor in spirit…” and so on. Known as the beatitudes, they come at the beginning of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

Although they might be familiar to many of us, these statements of Jesus are really quite weird. Jesus announces that people who are suffering are blessed. Isn’t that a bit odd? The rich and powerful might feel that they are the ones who have been blessed.

Jesus lived in the Roman Empire. The emperor’s wealth and power were seen as an indication of his divine status. In many other cultures also, it has been assumed that the rich and powerful are blessed by God. Despite Jesus’ teaching, Christians are not immune from this attitude. Following Donald Trump’s election victory, there were Christians in the US saying that Trump had survived the recent assassination attempt because God had chosen him to lead America. Meanwhile, Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, says that God has blessed the rule of Vladimir Putin.

So how can we make sense of Jesus’ words? Well, let’s look at where this passage fits. Here we are at the beginning of Chapter 5 in Matthew’s Gospel. Quite a lot has already happened in the first four chapters. Jesus has recruited disciples, started healing and talked a lot about the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven is a major theme in Matthew’s Gospel.

Incidentally, “Kingdom of Heaven” in Matthew is the equivalent of “Kingdom of God” in other gospels. We could also call it the “Empire of Heaven”, as “kingdom” and “empire” are the same word in the original Greek of the New Testament.

Let’s remember that Jesus was speaking to people in a predominantly poor society that was facing ongoing exploitation by the Roman Empire. Historians estimate that many – perhaps most – of the population lived near or below subsistence level. Attempted resistance to Roman rule had been brutally suppressed.

In short, Jesus was speaking in a context of poverty and injustice.

Now we are not in first-century Palestine. We are in twenty-first century Britain. We have many things that they did not – economically, socially and politically. Many of these advances were gained by our ancestors struggling for them.

Nonetheless, now, according to Oxfam, the four richest people in Britain own as much as the poorest 20 million. With society still recovering from the Covid pandemic, mental health problems are extremely common. On a global level, the beginning of 2026 has seen fast and unpredictable changes in world politics, with peaceful protesters are being killed in Iran and even in the US, and it is hard to predict where the next war will begin.

Our context is different, but I want to suggest that Jesus still speaks to a world facing injustice, poverty and violence.

So here at the beginning of Matthew Chapter 5, Jesus lists 9 groups of people who he says are blessed.

We can get a bit confused with the word “blessed”. Today the word “blessed” gets used in lots of ways. We might say we feel blessed by what God has done for us, we might pray that God will bless someone or something. There are people who say “Oh, bless!” about a child, or occasionally an adult.

Sometimes the word “bless” is used to patronise people. I am reminded of the theologian John Hull, who used to teach at the University of Birmingham. John Hull was blind and on one occasion, he encountered a Hare Krishna group. One of them told John that because of his blindness he was blessed. When John asked him to explain, the man said, “Well, your teacher Jesus said that it’s wrong to think lustfully about women. And you can’t do that.” John replied, “Dream on, pal”.

The word translated “blessed” in this chapter is sometimes translated as “happy” or “fortunate”. At least one translation uses the word “congratulations”: “Congratulations to the poor in spirit!… Congratulations to those who mourn!”.

These are odd things to be congratulated for.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit”. That’s what Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus simply blesses people who are “poor”. I don’t think these two things are very different. Poverty, oppression and humiliation were a daily experience for many of Jesus’ listeners. Many people’s spirits had been broken by such experiences. These people were materially poor, and they were poor in spirit.

Yet Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven”.

Jesus does not say that the Kingdom of Heaven will be theirs. Theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven is a reality that is both now and not yet, breaking into our present even as we look for its complete fulfilment in the future.

Then we have, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted”.

Anyone can be in mourning. The richest and most privileged person can be struck with grief. Jesus says they are blessed. However, in a land crushed through poverty and military occupation, it is the poor and oppressed who are most likely to be grieving, particularly to be grieving collectively. Grief can be not only an individual horror but a collective trauma.

So we come to the third beatitude: “Blessed are the meek”. We tend to think of “meek” as meaning quiet, shy, submissive. I am reminded of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, in which someone hearing the Sermon on the Mount says, “I’m glad there’s something for the meek – they have hell of a time”.

Because this can mislead us, some translators use words such as “powerless” or “crushed”. Psalm 37 repeatedly promises the meek that they will inherit the land. This is exactly the same thing that Jesus promises here: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land” – or “inherit the earth”. The allusion to Psalm 37 cannot have been lost on Jesus’ listeners, living under imperial control. 

So in the first three beatitudes, Jesus has spoken of groups who overlap quite a lot – people who are oppressed, crushed, grieving and powerless.

Then Jesus changes tack slightly. He moves on from talking about people who are suffering and talks instead about how people respond to these realities.  

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness”. Jesus promises that those who are hunger for things to be made right will be filled. Things will be made right. Justice will come about.

He goes to declare that the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers are also blessed.

All these phrases seem to refer to people who are going against conventional wisdom and living differently – by showing mercy, working for righteousness, building peace. Let’s note that peacemaking is about resolving conflict, not avoiding conflict! Indeed, building peace will put you into conflict with people who have an interest in pursuing violence. But Jesus shows a way of engaging in conflict. If you read on beyond this passage, you’ll find that shortly after announcing these blessings, Jesus encourages his listeners to love their enemies!

This is a reminder that while Jesus sides with the poor and marginalised, he shows his love for all people at the same time, while encouraging us all to repent of sin. While most of Jesus’ followers were probably poor, he also called the rich and powerful to repentance. Let’s not forget Zacchaeus who we find in Luke Chapter 19, a wealthy and exploitative man who after meeting Jesus gave half his wealth to the poor. He repented, and hungered for righteousness.

So Jesus says the oppressed are blessed. Then he says that those who try to change things are blessed. Then he changes tack slightly again.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.”

Jesus is realistic. He knows what often happens to people who challenge dominant values and side with the marginalised

This can be hard to relate to. In the UK today, Christians are not as a group persecuted. Yet Christians still face extreme persecution in countries including North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

As Christians in the UK we may nonetheless face negative reactions when our faith inspires us to live differently, to speak out, to campaign for a better world.

In the USA today, Christians who never expected persecution are finding the situation changed. Pastors in the US have spoken of being detained by ICE, Trump’s deportation enforcers known for snatching people off the streets with very little accountability. Following ICE’s killing of peaceful protesters, I was shocked to read that the Anglican Bishop of New Hampshire, Rob Hirschfield, has asked his clergy to make sure their wills are written. He said, “It may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us, with our bodies, to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable”.

Jesus says the oppressed are blessed. He says those who try to live differently and change things are blessed. He finishes by saying that people who suffer lies and persecution because they live differently and try to change things – well, they’re blessed too.

But how on Earth can any of these people be blessed? Marginal, outcast, apparently irrelevant people? Isn’t it absurd?

Of course it’s absurd. That’s the point. Jesus is turning common assumptions on their head.

The Empire of Rome belongs to the Emperor, the Senate, the rich and powerful people in Rome and their puppets among local leaders who had sold out to them. But the Empire of Heaven belongs to the poor in spirit, the grieving, the powerless, the people who hunger for righteousness, the peacebuilders, the merciful, the persecuted and so on. As we heard earlier in the passage from 1st Corinthians, God makes foolish the wisdom of the world.

The world’s wisdom is turned upside-down by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Roman Empire thought they could execute a troublemaking Jewish peasant. But God sides with the poor and oppressed, so the troublemaking Jewish peasant rose from the dead and the powers of this world are put on notice that their days are numbered. Sin and death may look strong, but Jesus’ resurrection reveals that love and life will ultimately triumph.

As Paul writes in 1st Corinthians – in the passage we heard earlier – “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong”.

The change that comes with resurrection cannot be put off until we die. As Christians we believe in life after death, and we also believe in life before death. Resurrection means that the dead are raised and that the living can live differently. It also allows us to look at the effects of our actions beyond the time of our own lives. Jesus makes the world’s transformation possible.

Jesus calls us to live in loyalty to the Kingdom of Heaven, or Kingdom of God now, not just in the future.

Of course, we frequently fail. We are all entangled in sinful systems and unjust structures. We wrestle with difficult decisions and moral confusions. However often we fear to ask for forgiveness, God in God’s mercy never tires of forgiving us. And if the situation we face leads us to be crushed, powerless, poor in spirit? God reminds us he is on our side.

So when will the powerless inherit the land? When will those who hunger and thirst for righteousness be filled?

While the Kingdom of God can only reach its fulfilment with the return of Jesus, the New Testament makes clear that the Kingdom of God is constantly breaking into our world. When people are fed, when love appears, when injustice is challenged and kindness triumphs over cruelty, the Kingdom of God is breaking in.

It can be hard to keep faith in the worst times. As the hymn we sang earlier puts it, “It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back”. But the reality of the resurrection gives us hope. As Martin Luther King put it, the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice.

Why is a Christian church hosting a far-right party?

Posted on by symonhill

Why is a Christian church hosting a far-right party’s conference?

The Emmanuel Centre, part of Emmanuel Church in Westminster, is today the venue for a major event run by Advance UK.

The Centre has so far failed to respond to concerned Christians and journalists who have asked why they are prepared to profit from hosting a racist party.

If you’re not familiar with Advance UK, they split from the far-right Reform UK, in part because they seemed to regard them as too soft and not right-wing enough. The main figure associated with Advance UK is Ben Habib, a former senior figure in Reform who fell out with Nigel Farage and went off to set up his own party.

Other Advance UK members include Rikki Doolan, a far-right Christian minister best known for his role in the reported conversion to Christianity of racist activist Tommy Robinson.

I cannot of course see into the hearts of Robinson and Doolan. It is not for me to judge the sincerity of their faith. What I can say is that I see no connection between the views they promote and the teachings of Jesus.

Doolan spoke at Robinson’s far-right “carol service” in London in December. He repeatedly attacks Muslims, refugees and LGBTQ+ people.

Meanwhile, you only have to look fairly briefly at Advance UK’s social media stream to see claims about refugees that can easily be demonstrated to be factually untrue. They confuse asylum-seekers with “illegal immigrants”, even though claiming asylum is entirely lawful and an internationally recognised human right.

As with most far-right parties, the one minority who they don’t attack is the rich and powerful.

Racism, deceit and demonisation of minorities are clearly at odds with the most basic aspects of Jesus’ teaching. Like many other Christians, I often fail to live up to the values that I believe in. I am not expecting all Christians to agree with me. The far-right’s misuse of Christianity, however, is a fundamental distortion of the Gospel. The Gospel of Jesus tears down barriers and upholds the value of all people, while the Bible is full of calls to welcome migrants and other people who are marginalised.

As a Christian, I believe in loving my enemies. I am not suggesting that members of Advance UK should be barred from churches. There is a big difference, however, between welcoming people as individuals (while also challenging them) and using your church to promote a party and their policies.

So why did the Emmanuel Centre think it was acceptable to host this party’s conference?

It won’t wash to say that Advance UK were simply booking a room in a conference centre. Most churches (and many other venues), have ethical lettings policies setting out who they will and won’t rent rooms too. It is inconceivable that a major conference centre in central London has given no thought to the question of who may be barred from hiring space there.

Even if they had allowed the Advance UK booking through naivety or incompetence, they have received emails and messages in recent days from a number of Christians expressing their alarm. Thus, while it’s hard to believe that the Emmanuel Centre’s managers were ignorant of the reality of Advance UK, it is literally impossible to believe that they still are.

The Emmanuel Centre urgently need to:

  • Explain how they came to host Advance UK’s conference.
  • Rule out hosting them in future.
  • Publish their lettings policy and rule out all bookings by far-right groups.

At a time when the far-right is on the march, it is vital that Christians work with people of other faiths and none to resist fascism and racism. Far from resisting far-right groups, Emmanuel Church are promoting and profiting from them.

If you want to urge the Emmanuel Centre not to host the far-right again, you can contact them at enquiries@emmanuelcentre.com or on 020 7222 9191.

Challenging the arms trade at Birmingham NEC

Posted on by symonhill

Arms fairs are not called arms fairs by arms dealers. They have a wonderful array of nonsense names and elaborate euphemisms. The arms fair taking place in the West Midlands this week is called the Specialist Defence & Security Convention (SDSC).

The SDSC (arms fair) will be held at the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) on the edge of Birmingham on Tuesday 3rd and Wednesday 4th February.

One of the problems for arms companies is that wherever they gather, people tend to turn up and protest. That’s why arms industry events keep getting moved around.

It’s a reminder that resistance to the arms trade is not futile. When we protest, we often succeed in pushing it back – another step on the journey to the day when we are free of the arms trade altogether.

That’s why this arms fair – which used to take place in Malvern – is no longer there. Local people resisted every time it turned up. The locals had support from groups including the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) and the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), as well as from other people around the Midlands and the UK.

The local protesters chased the arms fair out of Malvern. It moved to Telford – and held on for even less time before moving again.

That’s why it’s at Birmingham NEC this week.

This is not an event on the scale of the massive DSEI arms fair that happens in London every two years. But it another part of the chain. Many of the world’s governments and armed forces will be sending representatives to the NEC this week.

There will be protests and other actions by people of several faiths and none on both days of the SDSC arms fair. You can find out more on the Stop SDSC website – a wide range of groups and individuals are involved.

A Peace Pilgrimage to the site has already taken place, with an interfaith group of pilgrims walking from central Birmingham to the NEC yesterday (pictured).

The protests will include a Christian act of worship and witness near the entrance to the arms fair on Wednesday morning. Please let me know if you want details!

I am just one of many people of good faith joining resistance to the arms fair this week. I’ll do my best to answer any questions – or pass them on to others if they are better placed to answer.

Preaching the Gospel means bringing good news

Posted on by symonhill

Just over two weeks ago (on Sunday 18th January 2026) I led worship at Sherbourne Community Church in Coventry. Having preached there several times now, I am always honoured to be asked back!

Below is the text of my sermon (this is basically the text that I wrote beforehand but in practice I deviated from the wording at times and added in a few extra comments).

The sermon was based on two Bible readings, from the Lectionary for the day:

Isaiah 49, 1-7

John 1, 29-42

I used to work in Waterstone’s bookshop. It was over 20 years ago, but one of the memories that sticks with me is from a time when I was shelving books in the children’s section. A woman came into the shop with a small child. The child was holding a toy, which I think perhaps his mother had just bought for him. He was very excited about it. He ran up to me, although he’d never seen me before, and said, with great excitement, “Man, I’ve got – ”. And then he started to tell me enthusiastically about the toy.

He was so excited, he just wanted to tell the first person he saw. Even though he didn’t know me and just called me “man”.

I can’t remember what I said in response. I probably said, “That’s good”, or something like that. But I do remember feeling uplifted by a child being so delighted by something that he wanted to tell everyone. And I remember wondering if the world might be a better place if we all rushed around and told each other when something good happened to us.

If that did happen, on the one hand, we might be uplifted by each other’s good news. On the other hand, if you’re struggling with life, and things are tough, then hearing other people sounding cheerful is not always easy.

So how did Simon feel when his brother Andrew told him, “We’ve found the Messiah”? John’s Gospel gives the impression that Simon shared some of Andrew’s enthusiasm, for he readily went to meet Jesus, who gave him the name Peter.

Now we could spend a lot of time talking about whether this all happened in the way that John’s Gospel describes it. This account differs to the accounts in Matthew, Mark and Luke, which tell us that Jesus called Andrew and Simon Peter while they were fishing.

Some people are keen to try to make these accounts fit in with the account in John’s Gospel. Perhaps these two things happened at different times, perhaps Jesus had already met the disciples before he called them while fishing and so on.

All these things are possible. But I can’t help thinking that if we put our energy into trying to make these different accounts fit together, we may be missing the point. It’s rather like responding to the parable of the Good Samaritan by asking whether the money the Samaritan left behind was really enough to pay for an inn. That’s not what the story of the Good Samaritan is about. It might be more helpful to ask what the writer of John’s Gospel is trying to tell us in this passage.

Andrew is excited. He says, “We have found the Messiah!”. In his excitement, like that small child in the bookshop, he wants to tell people. He tells his brother, Simon. And Simon’s instinct is to want to meet Jesus.

This is about how these people respond to Jesus: with excitement, with curiosity, with hope, with a desire to know Jesus, with enthusiasm for sharing the news. This is the response of people hearing good news. 

It seems to me that as Christians, we often forget that we are proclaiming good news. Several times a week, I walk between New Street station in Birmingham, and Aston University where I work as a chaplain. One day I was walking back to the station after quite a tiring day and I passed one of the Christian street preachers who can be found in central Birmingham. He was warning passers-by that they had been living with no regard to God or the future, enjoying themselves without thought of the consequences but that they would soon find that they had – as he put it – “maxed out the credit card” – and that they had a debt of sin that they were unable to pay.

I looked round at the people in the street. There were people like me, on the way home from work. There were parents with small children, some of them clearly struggling. There were homeless or semi-homeless people begging on the sides of the street or under the influence of alcohol or other drugs, slumped in corners. There were people going in and out of shops. On the whole they didn’t look like a group of people enjoying riotous lifestyles with no thought of the consequences.

I considered approaching the preacher and saying, “Have you got any good news?” Because he seemed to have forgotten that the word “gospel” translates the Greek word “evangelion”, which means something like “triumph” or “good news”. I wonder if preachers like this go round knocking on people’s doors and saying, “Have you heard the bad news?”

The Bible makes clear that the gospel of Jesus Christ is good news. Mark’s Gospel, the oldest of the gospels we find in the Bible, begins simply, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ”.

Of course, the Gospel involves challenges. Sometimes Christ calls us to give things up, or to endure difficulties. But nonetheless, the message of the Gospel as a whole is overwhelmingly good news.

If we are not preaching good news, we are not preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Now there is lots of bad news in the world. We do not need to preach bad news. People already know the bad news. People know how horrible the world can be.

That’s why the gospel can never be cheap or easy good news. The good news that Jesus brings is much deeper than trite or shallow reassurances. When I became a Christian in the 1990s, there was a popular worship chorus that included the line, “In your presence, my problems disappear”. What nonsense. What blasphemy – to present Jesus as an individual problem-solving machine. Of course we are not likely always to feel as excited or uplifted as we may have done at the moment when we first encountered Jesus. But the presence of God does not depend on our feelings. God is there however we’re feeling. 

Proclaiming good news does not mean pretending that suffering is not real. It means proclaiming hope – not trite, shallow hope but deep, meaningful hope – in the midst of suffering.

This is the sort of hope that we see in Andrew and Simon Peter when they respond to Jesus. Their capacity for hope allows them to respond with excitement, with curiosity – and with faith.

Faith is more than an opinion. Faith is not simply signing up to a list of beliefs. Faith is not a naïve acceptance of things for no good reason.

Faith is a deliberate decision about where to put our trust, where to put our loyalty. It may include a decision to take a chance, to take risks. But it doesn’t mean pretending to believe things that we don’t, or to act one way on Sunday mornings and another way the rest of the week. Christian faith does not mean suppressing questions and uncertainties. It means facing the questions and uncertainties and in the midst of them choosing to make a commitment to trust and follow Jesus Christ.

Faith is not about thinking we’re always right or that we will always succeed in following Christ. We are all sinners and I know that I fail very, very often. Simon Peter himself denied Jesus three times. But because faith is about trust, commitment and loyalty, faith is about our starting-point – our starting-point for how we approach life.

John the Baptist makes that clear! Earlier in the passage we heard today, John the Baptist testifies that he saw the Holy Spirit descend on Jesus like a dove. Usually in Britain today, when we see a dove, we call it a pigeon. Thus God appears in everyday things, everyday creatures, everyday people – the extraordinary breaking in on the ordinary.

Accounts of Jesus’s baptism in the gospels refer to a voice in which Jesus is described as God’s son. This all happened of course in the Roman Empire. At the time, the empire was ruled by the Emperor Tiberius, whose titles included Divi Filius – son of a god. But here is Jesus being proclaimed Son of God. Jesus’s followers are offering their loyalty, their trust, their faith, not to the Roman emperor but to this apparently obscure Jewish peasant – Jesus, Son of God. Faith can be a dangerous decision.

Nonetheless, Andrew and Simon Peter clearly regard faith in this Messiah as a decision well worth making. The Messiah was expected as an alternative to the oppressive empire under which they lived, but in Jesus they found a Messiah offering salvation and liberation not only from Roman rule but from all forms of domination, injustice and sin.

And this is massive news. This comes through in the reading we heard from Isaiah. The book of Isaiah is a great read. It’s generally agreed that different parts of Isaiah were composed at different times across centuries. The part we heard today, Chapter 49 is from what’s generally called Second Isaiah, and it proclaims that the God who has chosen the Israelites as his people is using the Israelites to proclaim his salvation of the world. Isaiah quotes God saying that it is “too light a thing” that he should save only Israel and Judah. Instead God tells the Israelites, “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth”.

It is too light a thing that God should save and liberate only one group of people – one nationality, one ethnic group, one religious group, one class. God’s salvation and liberation are offered to all. So if you ever think that God might not want to save you, remember: it is too light a thing for God to offer salvation that does not include you.

This offer of salvation, of liberation, is made because of God’s faith in us. God is faithful. The last pope, Francis, wrote that God never tires of forgiving us. Rather, we are afraid of asking for forgiveness so often. Yet the Gospel makes clear that God is so faithful, that God stands ready to offer forgiveness however many times we stumble, however weak our faith becomes. And God keeps calling us back to the journey of faith.

Faith is not about certainty or being pure. We are all entangled in sinful systems and unjust structures. We wrestle with difficult decisions and moral confusions. Faith is about our starting-point. For if faith in God is our starting-point, nothing else can command our ultimate loyalty.

Of course, we can be loyal to lots of things: our family, our friends, our community, our country, the Warwickshire Cricket Team, the Sky Blues, a political party, a trade union – and so on. But once we are committed to Jesus Christ, we can never give our ultimate loyalty to any government, nation, army or organisation – or even to a church! We are called to start with God as revealed in Christ, the God of Love, who loves every one of our fellow humans and loves the world.

Of course, Christ calls each of us to different things. Christ may call us to unexpected places. Earlier this month, Christian pastors in the US spoke of being detained by ICE, Trump’s deportation enforcers who are known for snatching people off the streets with very little accountability. ICE’s recent killing of Renee Good, a woman protesting against ICE’s deportations, has made headlines. I was shocked to read that the Anglican Bishop of New Hampshire, Rob Hirschfield, has asked his clergy to make sure their wills are written because he fears where the situation may be heading. He said, “It may be that now is on longer the time for statements, but for us, with our bodies, to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable”.

I hope of course that such things will not come to pass. I pray that none of us here will find ourselves called to be martyrs. Many who live out faith in Jesus do so far more quietly – but no less valuably. For every big-name speaker, there are hundreds of people behind the scenes, for every prominent activist, there are hundreds more stuffing envelopes – and so on. The world doesn’t see or notice everyone’s faith – but God sees and notices us all. What has God called you to, I wonder? Where and how is God calling you today?

We may not always feel the excitement that we felt on becoming Christians. We may find it hard to feel hope in the midst of sadness. I pray that God will give each of us faith to see the glimmers of God’s love in the darkest times, to remember that Christ in his resurrection has triumphed over the forces of sin and death and that God is faithful to us.

May we keep putting our faith in the God of Jesus. In the midst of the world’s uncertainties and injustices, let’s have the faith to declare, like Andrew and Simon Peter, “We have found the Messiah!”.

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My book, The Upside-Down Bible: What Jesus really said about money, sex and violence (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2015) can be bought in paperback or e-book, priced £9.99.

We face a choice: the power of Herod or the power of Jesus

Posted on by symonhill

This morning (Sunday 28th December 2025) I led worship at New Road Baptist Church in Oxford. I was honoured to be asked to do so, as this is the church that I attended for years when living in Oxford, and where I served as a deacon.

Below is the text of my sermon. To be clear: this is basically the text that I wrote beforehand but in practice I deviated from the wording at times and added in a few extra comments.

The picture below shows a scene from The Massacre of the Innocents by Leon Cogniet.

The sermon followed two Bible readings:

Matthew 2, 13-23

Hebrews 2, 10-18

King Herod was frightened. He was not frightened of an invading army, or violent rebels, or a rival politician, or even the Roman Emperor who had given him his power. He was frightened of a baby.

Who’s frightened of a baby? King Herod the Great, as he was known, understood something about power. He ruled over a sizeable chunk of the area that we now call Israel and Palestine, which was then part of the Roman Empire. Herod was declared by the Roman Senate to be “King of the Jews”. He was really a puppet ruler for the Roman imperial authorities.

So when the magi turn up and ask where the “King of the Jews” is to be born, Herod is alarmed. He is the King of the Jews! On one level, it’s a bizarre question. It would be like asking Keir Starmer where the Prime Minister is, or asking Donald Trump where you can find the person who really should be President of the United States.

So Herod tricked the magi, and asked them to let him know after they have found Jesus, so that he can visit him. His real purpose, we soon learn, is to kill him. That brings us to the part of the story that we heard earlier. This horrible, terrifying story that tells of how Herod massacred children to try to ensure that Jesus was dead.

Now this may not seem a very cheerful story to be discussing in the Christmas season! Sometimes we don’t know what to do with this story. It often isn’t included in readings at events such as Nine Lessons and Carols. If we include it in Christmas services, we are tempted to brush over it, an inconvenient disruption to the smooth flow of a comfortable story. Although today, 28th December, is observed particularly by our Catholic and Anglican friends as the Feast of the Holy Innocents, when these murdered children are remembered.

I want to suggest that recognising this horrible atrocity – and others like it – is very relevant to the hope and joy that we talk about at Christmas.

This is because the birth of Jesus isn’t simply a reason to feel cheerful for a day at Christmas. In Jesus, God is with us not only when we’re celebrating or feeling cheerful. God is with us however we’re feeling. Whether you love Christmas or dread it, Jesus’ birth is good news. The nativity is a story of hope in the midst of despair, love in the face of violence, solidarity in the depths of loneliness and power of a sort that the Herods of the world do not understand.

As we discussed earlier, Jesus was not visited by three kings, but by an unspecified number of magi, or wise men. Ironically, however, the story of Jesus’ birth in Matthew’s Gospel is a story with kings in it – not three kings, but two kings. On the one hand, we have King Herod, described by the Roman Empire as King of the Jews. On the other hand, we have Jesus, described by the magi as King of the Jews.

Thus Matthew’s Gospel places before two very different belief systems, two different sets of values, two different notions of power, two different calls for our loyalty – King Herod or King Jesus.

To understand this more, let’s get back into the details of the story. I think this account in Matthew’s Gospel is very relevant to life today. Scholars debate and disagree with each other about its historical accuracy. However accurate Matthew’s account is in historical terms, it is widely accepted by historians that Herod was a brutal ruler. I am not going to go into questions of precise historical fact now, however. I want to focus on how in this story Matthew presents us with truths about Jesus and about the choices that face us.

This story may seem to be full of things that seem alien to us, but if we dig a bit deeper, we will find many aspects that are really quite familiar. Herod had the sort of power that is maintained with violence and fear. I dare say he may not have been able to imagine a king who would reign in any other sort of way. Accustomed to violence and fear as he was, he responds to the birth of Jesus in the way he knows how. He orders a massacre of children in Bethlehem to ensure that the threat of Jesus is ended before it has begun. He is prepared to sacrifice the lives of many, many innocent children for that aim.

It is very hard to imagine the fear that must have gripped Mary and Joseph when Joseph was warned in a dream about Herod’s murderous plan. Did he wake up, screaming and crying perhaps? He must have woken Mary and told her about the dream. We can imagine them hastily picking up Jesus and grabbing what few possessions they could, all the while fearing that soldiers would burst through the door. That fear may well have gripped them every minute of every day until they made it to Egypt as refugees. And what of the fear and horror of the children who were killed, and their parents?

There are a few Christmas carols that do mention Herod’s massacre. The carol Unto Us a Boy is Born speaks of Herod killing the boys in Bethlehem “in his fury”. The Coventry Carol refers to Herod “raging”.

What rage? What fury? Matthew’s Gospel says that Herod was infuriated when he realised he had been tricked by the magi. But did he order this massacre in a fit of rage? Well, he might have done. But it’s also possible that this massacre was ordered not in a moment of anger but as a calm, calculated political decision. Perhaps Herod sat down with his advisers and concluded that the only way to be sure that he had dealt with the threat posed by this baby was to kill all the babies in the area.

Did Herod find some way to justify this massacre to himself? We can imagine Herod’s advisers gathering around him, telling him what he wanted to hear. Perhaps they feared that this surprising baby could become the focus for a new rebellion against Roman rule. I can imagine them telling Herod, “Well, your majesty, if this baby becomes a focus of rebellion, then there could be a violent uprising, and the Roman authorities will retaliate, and far, far more innocent people will be killed”. And they might go on. They might suggest that it is better to kill a few innocent children now so as to avoid a rebellion that could lead to far more innocent people being killed overall. 

Now that argument might not sound very convincing. But it is of course the sort of argument that certain types of politicians and commentators use all the time.

This year that is now ending, 2025, marks the 80th anniversary of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nobody denies that those nuclear weapons killed innocent people – including far more children than Herod ever killed – but many will justify that massacre on the grounds that it saved more lives overall. There are people who are prepared to defend killings of Israeli children by Hamas, and other people who justify the killings of Palestinian children by the Israeli armed forces. Once you start talking about the “greater good”, you can end up justifying pretty much anything.

This is the sort of argument that the Herods of the world understand. This is the sort of power that they know about. What Herod could not have understood was that this Jesus was not merely a rival for the title “King of the Jews”. He posed a challenge to the whole structure of power and violence that Herod and the Roman Empire – and many others like them – represented.

The Herods of the world think that power comes with violence and control. Yet as he grew up Jesus lived so much by the power of love and justice that the Roman Empire considered him a such a threat that they executed him.

By the time Jesus was an adult, King Herod the Great was long dead. But Herod’s son, Herod Antipas, executed John the Baptist and was involved in the events leading to Jesus’ own execution. And the Roman imperial authorities to whom the Herods owed their loyalty made another attempt to get rid of Jesus. They thought they could rid of this troublesome Jewish peasant by crucifying him. He did not seem to have any power or strength in the way that the Herods and the Ceasars understand power.

But with Jesus’ resurrection, God confounded the world’s notions of power. The forces of sin and injustice were put on notice that their days are numbered. In Jesus we hear the good news that God’s subtle, transformative power of love and justice is on the way to winning. As Martin Luther King said, “the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice”.

Jesus calls us to live by his power. But unlike a tyrant who demands obedience, Jesus simply, gently invites us to follow him. As we heard earlier in the passage from the Letter to the Hebrews, Jesus is not afraid to call us siblings.

But it is hard sometimes to really trust in Jesus’ sort of power. We are all, I think, tempted at times to fall back on trusting in Herod’s sort of power.

Two weeks ago, I was in London, watching a group of far-right activists celebrating their racist, xenophobic and homophobic beliefs. These sort of rallies sadly happen quite often. What was unusual about this one, however, is that it was described as a “carol service” .

As many of you will know, a number of British far-right activists are claiming to defend Christianity and what they call “Christian Britain”. This is often a thinly veiled excuse to attack migrants, Muslims, Jews or LGBT+ people. On the platform at his bizarre event were several people dressed in clerical collars – clergy from fringe right-wing denominations, giving theological sanction to the far-right.

I cannot of course see into the hearts of the people on that platform. It is not for me to question the sincerity of their faith. Only God sees into their hearts, as only God sees into mine: God will judge them and me. But I can say that I do not recognise the Jesus who such people claim to be promoting.

Tragically, as Christians, we have all too often tried to turn Jesus into Herod. We have justified violence and coercion in Jesus’ name, we have insisted that Christians should have privileges in what we call a “Christian country”, and if we do not actually send people to kill the innocent, we shut the doors of our hearts and the borders of our countries and send people back to die.

Before we judge others for doing these things, let’s ask ourselves how often we have been tempted to slip back into trusting in Herod’s sort of power rather than Jesus’ power. Sometimes we are tempted to believe that only violence, coercion and privilege will be successful. If we find ourselves using the sort of arguments that Herod might have used, it is time to stop and think.

We are all challenged to make the choice between the power understood by the Herods of this world and the alternative sort of power embodied in Jesus. This is a challenge that faces us every day, in decisions big and small.

Of course, Jesus’ call is not the same for everyone. Jesus calls us to varied tasks and I do not think that he expects us all to agree about everything. But we do not have to share all the same views to take the power of Jesus as our starting-point.

And we will be tempted, and sometimes we will fail. We will face the temptation to trust in Herod’s power, to accept the idols of money, military might and selfishness. But as the Letter to the Hebrews says, Jesus himself has been tempted and he is able to help those who are being tempted. Every time we fail, God calls us again to turn around and follow the power found in a refugee baby lying in a feeding-trough.

Today and every day, in the coming year of 2026 and in every year, we face a choice: the power of the tyrant or the power of the baby. It’s up to us.   

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My book, The Upside-Down Bible: What Jesus really said about money, sex and violence (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2015) can be bought in paperback or e-book, priced £9.99.