PostScript: Budgets as good news?

How do we read the grain of wheat imagery from today’s gospel reading (John 12.20-33), with its resonances of death and resurrection, in a world of debt and tight budgets?

This week's news

• This week’s news has been dominated by the Chancellor’s Budget. As I write on Tuesday it is all still speculation; as you prepare for Sunday you will know the details from the BBC News website if from nowhere else. Yet for many of us the numbers are meaningless, bearing little relation to our household budgets or our church budgets or the budgets we handle at work. Should the same criteria apply however large the budget?
• Debt must be reduced, we are told; and that means austerity. But who should pay the price? Who is paying the price in many third world countries as they seek to rein in debt burdens? Do those, mainly in the West, who lent the money in the first place, carry some responsibility? Are we really all in it together? And who are the ‘all’: everyone in the world or just those in one country?
• What would a fair budget look like? And how close is the Chancellor’s budget to such fairness?

Reflection

• Jesus’ imagery in today’s gospel is about growing and changing being at the heart of life. And growth we are told is the medium term way out of our economic ills. But are we open to death and resurrection change in our church life, let alone in our economic life? And what might it mean for us to embrace real change in our economic life?
• Some argue that the economic growth model which underpins all advanced economies is inherently unsustainable, essentially because it involves draining the earth’s resources of things like fossil fuels and rare metals. Yet in one of his stories (Matthew 25.14-30 and Luke 19.11-27) Jesus questions those who bury their money in the ground rather than using it for growth. Where should we strike the balance between enough and too much?
• How is that question as relevant to our personal lives as to our national economy, let alone the world economy?
• We believe that we are all created equal and that in Christ there are no distinctions between races and genders (Galatians 3.28). Yet another of Jesus’ stories provides what seems to us a most unfair outcome (Matthew 20.1-16). Is not God deeply unfair because his grace is for all irrespective of who we are and what we have done?
• To what degree should fairness determine our approach to our economic life as a society?
• On a completely different angle, how might the story of Fabrice Muamba (the Bolton footballer who collapsed with a cardiac arrest during last Saturday’s game) relate to today’s readings?
• His family are reported as thanking people for their prayers and another footballer showed a shirt calling for prayer for him. Surprisingly in this connection, two national newspapers which few of us in churches read used headlines speaking of God: ‘God is in Control’ from the Sun and ‘In God’s hands’ from the Daily Star.
  

Prayer

A prayer to bring a sermon to a close, or to use at the close of intercessions.

Creator God,
by whose will seed dies as it grows into new plants,
give each of us grace to understand what it means for us
to die to sin and rise again to new life.
Help us also to understand
when and how our communities need to die and be reborn.
Give us wisdom to discern
how to help our society learn that death and resurrection
is a God-given way to a kingdom future.
In the name of him who died and rose again, Jesus Christ.
Amen.

In your prayers of intercession remember all who face challenging times:

• those who are sick or are awaiting diagnosis or treatment;
• those who have lost, or are threatened with losing, their jobs; and
• those who no longer have enough on which to live.
  

Questions

• In which circumstances might the imagery from the gospel about death and resurrection be helpful in our personal or corporate lives?
• If death and resurrection are at the heart of the good news (John 12.24-25), what does it mean for each of us as individuals? What does it mean for our church? And how should it affect our views about the country of which we form a part?
• To what degree and in what ways should we challenge our wider society to consider such death and resurrection imagery?

Action

Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green

Read the hymn ‘Now the green blade rises’ and ask yourself, verse by verse, what action you should now take in your church, in your community or in the wider world?

Young People

• Do you think that God wants us, or expects us, to be fair?
• How would you rebalance the budget?
  

Dudley Coates is a Local Preacher in the Bridport and Dorchester Methodist Circuit and a former Vice President of the Methodist Conference.

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