And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

Once when I was invited to the St Jean Baptiste Day reception in Montreal Town Hall  I was introduced to the Premier of Quebec, Pauline Marois.  Making polite conversation over the canapes she asked me ‘So what exactly is the Anglican Church of Canada?’

Being a provocative sort of chap I replied that the Anglican Church of Canada is like the Roman Catholic Church but with married clergy, women clergy and gay clergy – she laughed and we shifted the conversation to Edith Piaf and Celine Dion.

Jesus sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

The Epistle reading from James warns us about the power of words.  At one level it is just good advice against gossip and about saying too much.  How many of us have pressed the ‘send’ button on an email only to regret it in the morning?

But on another level it is about more than just idle gossip and temper.  The words we use are also definitions and identity.  It is with words that we tell people about Jesus  –  or not.

And words are often not what they seem.  In predominantly francophone Montreal, I took a lot of care translating between English and French.  How do you say ‘atonement’ in French?   What is the best English translation of ‘recueillement’.  Translation is never quite as easy as looking it up in Google Translate.

To a Parisian the word ‘pain’ – the ordinary word for bread – conjures up a long thin crusty baguette freshly baked in the early hours.

To Jesus I imagine the word for bread would conjure up a round flat bread.

To my mother in Leeds ‘bread’ was always a white sliced loaf of Mother’s Pride.

Even such an everyday staple as ‘bread’ cannot always be translated so simply.

So God help us when we come to telling anyone about Jesus.  There is an argument that the Eastern and the Western Churches never got over the fact that the Greek word  ‘hypostasis’ looks so very much like the Latin word ‘substantia’ –  but that translation would lead us into heresy for God is three hypostases but only one substance.

So perhaps Jesus shows exceptional wisdom when he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.  Words will never do him justice and may lead us into trouble.

Those of you who have studied the Bible may want to heckle me now and tell me that this is just the Messianic Secret.

And if you have never heard of the Messianic Secret, the theory goes that Jesus never said these words at all, but that Mark invented them as a literary device to explain why Jesus remained incognito, as it were, until after the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.

But biblical studies have changed. We’re less fussed these days about the actual words of the Historical Jesus and we’re more content simply to read the  Gospel, so whether or not Jesus ever sternly ordered his disciples not to tell anyone about him,  St. Mark thought it was important enough to say – and therefore important enough for a preacher to preach about!

So what do we make of this counterintuitive stern order not to tell anyone about Jesus when Church today is all about discipleship and evangelism?

At first Jesus merely asks the disciples,  who do other people say that he is –  they come up with the usual suspects:  – john the Baptist, Elijah, one of the prophets –  all of them wrong.

So Jesus asks them who they think he is – and it is Peter who answers : you are the Messiah.

All well and good.   It is tempting to sit back and think ‘ Yes, Peter has got it right’ –  Yes, Jesus is the Messiah –  but you see he hasn’t got it right – he has got it very wrong.

He has used the right word, of course  – Ha Mashiach – but what Peter means by Messiah and what Jesus means by Messiah are diametrically opposed – as far apart as a French baguette and a slice of Mothers’ Pride.

Jesus explains to Peter that Messiahship is about suffering, rejection and death – but Peter thinks the word Messiah means something very different indeed – and Jesus calls him Satan – a strong word to call one of your best and most loyal friends.   It starts to become clearer why Jesus sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.  Even if they used the right word they did not always understand what they were saying.

And perhaps that is the word of caution for us from the Gospel today.

There are about two and a half billion Christians in the world – and we all use the same words about Jesus in worship and prayer:

the only Son of God, begotten of the Father, true God from true God, 

and yet scratch us  –   scratch our understandings of the what the Good News is, and of what it means to live faithful and holy lives, and we are as far apart as chalk and cheese.

Between the Plymouth Brethren and the Metropolitan Community Church we are barely recognisably the same faith.

In our own Anglican way both St Michael le Belfry and the Minster may sometimes sing about the Church by schisms rent asunder, and by heresies distressed,  and yet I think we have very different views on what those schisms and heresies actually are.

And this subtle disagreement has always been one of the great strengths of the Church of England.

We have been traditional careful not to tell anyone too much about Jesus!

When I grew in Armley, I first attended Christ Church – a low evangelical church which taught me about my personal sin being like a rain cloud separating me from the love of God.  Only Jesus the atoning death of Jesus could take that cloud away.

That metaphor didn’t work for me and I defected to St Bartholomew’s Armley where I learned to make the sign of the cross, genuflect and say the Hail Mary.

And both churches happily got on with their own business of burying the dead, marrying and baptising the parishioners, feeding the hungry and preaching the word.  We didn’t interfere in what each other was doing.

No doubt the faithful at Christ Church thought we were all deeply misguided praying to the Virgin Mary up at St Bart’s – and I thought that the chorus  ‘Jesus how lovely you are, you are so gentle, so pure and so kind’  was – well how do I put it –  lacking a certain depth of theology and musical subtlety  – but Fr Owen happily went to Deanery Synod in his Cassock and Steve went in his open neck shirt and chinos.

And therein lies a change.  When I was much younger I was taught that there is no such thing as ‘The Anglican Church’,  – that there is no Anglican Confession of Faith – like the Westminster Confession or the Catholic Catechism, or dare I say it like The 2008 Jerusalem Declaration.   We don’t have a Constitution or a Supreme Court.  There is just the Anglican Communion – the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Creeds of the first Ecumenical Councils.

But over these past 40 years people have talked more freely about  – ‘The Anglican Church’

And I wonder what exactly they mean by that?

Do they mean a centralised body led by The Church of England?   My friends in Montreal would not think very highly of that bit of English colonialism.   Or are the words  ‘The Anglican Church’ just a verbal grenade to mean the global majority of Anglicans, especially for liberal Anglicans like myself who disagree with the global majority on a number of issues?

Jesus sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

As I get older, I feel more and more that the Anglican Way of not over-defining, and of not making windows into people’s souls has a great deal to commend it.

I still want to preach the word of course, and to tell people about Jesus, but today’s Gospel gives wise advice to be very cautious when we attempt to over explain the mystery of the Word made Flesh.

In the end I am want less of other people telling me about Jesus and a little bit more of people showing me Jesus – not necessarily the right answers, but a bit more love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control in the Church and in the world.

You could say a little bit more ‘recueillement’ and a little less ‘atonement’.

Jesus sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

But he did tell us to follow him.