Beloved!

Sermon preached at St John’s Bexley: 15^th  February 2026: Sunday Next Before Lent: Exodus 24:12-end; 2 Peter 1:16-end; Matthew 17:1-9

“This is my Son, the Beloved; With Him I am well pleased.”

BELOVED!

The Bishop who ordained me had a reputation for opening his grand proclamations with BELOVED! – It became something of a catch-phrase… BELOVED! – I can’t do it justice… But I don’t think anyone can quite capture Richard Chartres, apart from the man himself… Or Brian Blessed.

Beloved! This is my Son, the Beloved!

It’s an old, Middle-English word, “Beloven”, no one really uses it anymore, but somehow “Beloved” has persevered as our language has evolved… Maybe because of its Biblical use.

If we were reading the Gospels in the original Greek the word would be agapetos: From the root agape, one of those oh so familiar words in the New Testament love-language… But agape is a noun: Love, and agapetos is an adjective – describing a thing, an object, a person, and giving them a defining characteristic: The Beloved: The definite article, the dearest and the best.

It comes up throughoutin the New Testament: Three times each in Mark, Matthew and Luke’s Gospels: Perhaps we remember it best at Christ’s Baptism – the Son rises out of the water and as the Spirit descends the Father’s voice speaks:

“This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

Now we hear those words again: As Christ is revealed to his beloved disciples in Glory: Shining with light, as God’s glory shone before Moses, on Sinai; as a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in our hearts.

The Shining Glory of the Divine revealed in Jesus Christ, the Beloved, the Son of God.

Beloved.

And then the moment passes (because in this life, such visions are always transitory), and when the disciples looked up they saw no one except Jesus Himself alone… Without the shine, without the without the dazzle, without the spectacle… And yet, still Christ. Still the Son, still the Beloved.

A man, just a man, like there’ve been so many men before; Just a man, with a man’s courage, nothing but a man…

The passage we heard from the Second Letter of Peter is something of an exception in the Epistles. Agapetos appears many times in the New Testament; Nine times in the Gospels in reference to Jesus, and of the remaining occurrences (outside of the Gospels) this is possibly the only time it refers to Christ Himself – the rest of the time the Agapetoi, the Beloveds, are found, in the community of believers: The Apostles, and those who assist them, those who persevere in the faith and are persecuted for it; Both the wealthy Philemon, and his runaway slave Onesimus; Even the Corinthians, as Paul is admonishing them, despairing in their behaviour, he calls them Agapetoi repeatedly: Beloved.

Why do we find it so hard, members of that same Community of Believers, to use the word Beloved? For those closest to us; yes – for those we have chosen to spend our lives with, those whose lives we take a special interest in… But there will be others: Those who irritate us and grate on us, those who have wronged us, and who we have wronged; who have judged us, and are judged by us… Because no community, no congregation, no Church, can be expected to get on with each other perfectly: When you come up to the Altar shortly, spare a look at the reredos: See how the disciples argue and squabble – how they glare at one another, whisper barbed asides, and clutch purse strings and daggers as they gather round the Beloved: The membership of the Church has been falling out and bickering like petty alleycats for millennia, and we’ll no doubt keep at it until the Last.

But what makes us Christian, what makes us a Church, is that in spite of that, every one of us may still be called the Beloved, the same adjective the Father uses to describe His Son: The Son of God who is also the Son of man and who humbled Himself to share in our humanity that we might share in His Divinity.

Beloved…

In the Christian life the two Great Commandments collapse into one another: To love God is to love our neighbour, and to love our neighbour is to love God: To love one another as Christ has loved us, means we are called (and it can be a struggle sometimes, but some struggles are meant to be worked through) to rise above the grievances and resentments that are a natural part of existing in the same World as other people, to believe that every child of God is the Beloved, in whom God is well pleased and whose faces can shine as brightly with the Glory of God as that of the Transfigured Christ.

BELOVED!