Saying No.
Reflection given by Revd Maggie Hindley 22nd February 2026
My daughter sometimes gives her four-year-old a ‘yes’ day. In contrast to most days, when he has to do what he’s told, he gets to decide what they do and, so long as it isn’t dangerous or impossible, that’s what they do. Together, they gave me an early Mother’s Day ‘Yes’ day this week. I chose for us to go to the Tower (by boat) and to Chinatown. chose what went in the sandwiches. Joyful! Mateo called it my ‘Yesterday’.
The long season of Christmas is a season of glorious ‘yes’ saying – I hope it’s felt like that to you despite the winter, despite the world news, despite the troubles that beset us in our daily lives. Mary says ‘yes’ to Gabriel and from there on there’s loads of ‘yes’ in the story. Joseph says ‘yes’ to sticking by her. The disciples say ‘yes’ to his call thirty years later. And God sends affirmations to assure us that ‘Yes, this is really it’. The angels sing it to the shepherds, the star attests it to the Magi. The voice of God comes from heaven at the baptism of Jesus, echoed later at the transfiguration that we remembered last week.
It is a good thing to be a positive-minded person, seeing the good in everything, encouraging others. Expecting good outcomes later if not sooner. I love it when an infant innkeeper in the nativity play changes the script to welcome Mary and Joseph in. I wouldn’t mind if Herod’s script changed so that he set up a feeding and nursery programme for the under-threes instead of massacring them.
However, the time has come, in the story of Jesus and in the church’s year, to remember that the positive can only be there for us if we say ‘no’ to things that threaten it. Jesus goes off alone to face his temptations and say ‘no’; we try, in our little way, to replicate that.
Later in his ministry, Jesus says to his followers: You cannot serve God and Mammon’. I think what happens in today’s story from Matthew is that Jesus is saying ‘No’ to Mammon. ‘No’ to the pull to consumerism, as he refuses to magic bread out of stone. ‘No’ to the pull towards living the life of celebrity, as he refuses to magic angels up to save him from what would certainly be a fatal leap. ‘No’ to the power to rule the world as a corrupt autocrat. Each time temptation presents itself, he answers with wisdom from the Hebrew scriptures Don’t live by what’s just material. Don’t try to test God’s promise of protection. Don’t live your life by anything other than the call to serve God. We are sure, by the end of the story, that Jesus has seen off Satan and that his ministry is going to be rooted in and guided by his relationship with his father.
We are reminded in our reading from Genesis of the first misguided ‘yes’ in the story of humanity, when Adam and Eve made a poor choice about the one thing God asked them to say ‘no’ to. They over-reached themselves; they said ‘yes’ to self and ‘no’ to God and so precipitated the complex, frightening, conflicted world of the Old Testament and the New and that we still recognise today.
It’s the world unfolded in the dialogue, where the earth is ruined and life is precarious and the human moral compass is unreliable.
It’s the world where future life is under immediate threat from human caused climate change. It’s our world.
I’m sure you recognised many things from the dialogue. This church has been facing the climate change issue for a long time, drawing up your environmental policy and implementing it in the way you use and adapt the building and live your live together and as individuals.
Saying ‘no’ to the conditions that allow climate change to continue racing, bringing us closer and closer to the time when life on earth is no longer sustainable, and to the conditions that allow the many other huge injustices of out times – that’s our call this Lent and for as long as it takes.
It means saying ‘no’ to a world in which consumption is all; where power is concentrated in the hands of the very rich, where more and more of the basics of life – water, healthcare, education, transport – have become commodified, as have the lives of the animals reared for food in factory conditions. It means honouring the dignity of the have-nots, as you do in your food bank work, and the human rights of people throughout the world. We do not live by bread alone.
Similarly, it means resisting the lure of celebrity, where the opinions and values of people who’ve made it to fame matter more than yours or mine. It means saying ‘no’ to competition and ‘yes’ to co-operation. It means valuing what’s ordinary and questioning what’s exceptional, privileged. It means not going in for attention grabbing behaviours ourselves, but being happy to live an imperfect life in an imperfect but compassionate community. We are loved and chosen by God; but we don’t put that to the test.
It means saying ’no’ to accumulating personal power; going the opposite way to the demagogues of the present age. Saying ‘no’ in every way we can as we see democracy, not supported in the way it needs by the building of community, but undermined by those who have taken too much power to themselves. Saying ‘no’ to aggressive war, and to continuing colonialism, and to autocracy. Calling out corruption. Calling out megalomania. Asserting the value of each and every child of the God who alone deserves to be served.
What does that mean for us practically?
We must say no to the evils we see. If we don’t, them are colluding with it. My friend Wahida talks of putting up one hand to say ‘no’, emphatically, and reaching out with the other to say ‘But you are still human. We belong to each other. Let’s work together.’
Many ways to say ‘no’. On Wednesday I was with Christian Climate Action, keeping vigil to say our ‘no’ to the continued use of fossil fuels. But you don’t have to leave home to make a difference; getting reliably informed, signing petitions, writing letters, determining how to vote, all make a difference. And I think how we talk to each other, with thought and care, refusing despair and avoiding the language of contempt; I think that’s how we change each other’s minds and make room for the Bible’s vision of the kingdom in our lives.
I guess Jesus was thinking about all of this in his fierce retreat in the wilderness, working out what it would mean for his ministry – and his destiny. He’d be giving away bread, living the same life as his disciples, refusing power. And I think probably his most powerful preparation came in his prayer, as hour by hour and day by day he practised saying ‘no’ to his own thinking and dreaming and desiring and kept bringing his attention back to God, and to his relationship to God as a servant as well as a son. The apophatic way of prayer says ‘no’ to all thought, all assumptions, all giving the mind to future planning, recognising that God is incredibly greater than whatever we can imagine about him. So here’s an invitation to some still, silent prayer time this Lent.
What are you saying ‘no’ to this Lent? Chocolate? That lovely glass of wine? Social media? Many people trivialise giving something up. But it doesn’t have to be trivial. Saying ‘no’ can lead us deeper into the life of God, more courageously into the life of this impossible world, closer to the ‘yes’ day when once again the earth is a place of peace, generosity and equality, as God intends.
