Living Words

The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity: Made Well

St. Matthew 9:18-26

by William Klock

Our Gospel today begins with this introduction from St. Matthew:

As Jesus was talking, suddenly an official came up and knelt down in front of him.  “It’s my daughter!” he said.  “She’s just died!  But if you will come and lay your hand on her, she’ll live.”

Imagine everything going through this man’s head and heart.  He’s got to be grieving for his daughter.  But there’s also faith and hope or he wouldn’t have been there.  Mark and Luke tell us this man was a ruler of the local synagogue and that his name was Jairus.

Jesus was surrounded by a crowd.  He’d just got back from the other side of the sea of Galilee and this man came pressing through the crowd.  He was an important person and knowing who he was, the people let him through.  Jairus was desperate.  Death is the end.  At least it was until Jesus showed up.  And so Jairus left his daughter’s side and went to find Jesus.  He’d heard about the healings Jesus had performed.  He’d probably heard about Jesus raising the widow’s son at Nain.  He could see God’s future in the present wherever Jesus went.  And so he pleads with Jesus: “Come to my house and raise my daughter, too.”  And Matthew says that seeing Jairus’ faith and hope:

Jesus got up and followed him and so did his disciples.

But as they head off to Jairus’ house, Jesus is stopped.  Again, Mark and Luke tell us that he was overwhelmed by a crowd.  And in the midst of the choking crowd, a woman approaches Jesus.  Look at verses 20-21:

Just then a woman appeared.  She had suffered from bleeding for twelve years.  She came up behind Jesus and touched the hem of his coat.  “If I can only touch his coat,” she said to herself, “I’ll be rescued.”

 

To modern people this woman simply sounds like a sick person in the crowd.  For First Century Jews she represented a lot more than that.  What Matthew describes is most likely a menstrual disorder that caused her to bleed perpetually.  And he highlights just how long this has been going on: twelve years.  She’s been bleeding for as long as Jairus’ little daughter had been alive.  In his Gospel, Luke also highlights the physical seriousness of her problem.  At one point she’d had money, but now she’s destitute.  She spent it all on doctors and none of them had been able to help her.  But it’s not just that this woman has a medical problem that no one’s been able to heal in twelve years.  This woman’s biggest problem is that she’s unclean.

Menstruation, according to the torah, rendered a woman unclean.  It also rendered anyone who touched her unclean until sundown.  It wasn’t a sin issue.  It was an issue of ritual purity, something vitally important to the system of temple and sacrifices and what that meant for this woman is that she’s been unclean for twelve years.  She was shut out of the temple, shut out of the sacrificial system, shut out of the synagogue, and because contact with her brought uncleanness, she was shut out of society.  She might as well have been a leper.

That gives us a sense of the risk she was taking that day.  The crowd was pressing in on Jesus and this woman was working her way through the crowd to get to him.  Everyone she touched was rendered unclean, even if they had no idea who was bumping and jostling into them.  And by touching Jesus, she rendered him unclean too—or she should have.  But she catches up to him, touches his robe.  At this point, in his telling, Luke slows the story down to give us some insight into what’s just happened.  She touches Jesus’ robe.  She’s healed.  Somehow she knew as soon as it happened.  She got what she wanted.  Then she tries to quietly slip away through the crowd.  But Jesus stopped everything.  The crowd quickly goes quiet.  Here’s what Luke writes:

Who touched me?” asked Jesus.  Everybody denied it.  “Master,” said Peter, “the crowds are crushing you and pressing you!”  “Somebody touched me,” said Jesus.  “Power went out from me and I knew it.” (Luke 8:45-46)

 

Imagine what’s going through that poor woman’s head at this point.  “Oh no!  Somehow he noticed!”  And so she hunches a little lower and shrinks back further into the crowd.  She’s afraid.  If Jesus exposes her the crowd of people she just rendered unclean is going to be really angry.  Jesus might be angry.  She made him unclean too.  Imagine the crowd going dead silent.  No one knew what was happening, but something was wrong.  Jesus was asking who had touched him.  “Maybe,” they thought, “Jesus just realised that someone had picked his pocket.”  Peter reminds us of the crowd pressing in on Jesus.  “Master, Anyone could have touched you.  What’s the big deal?”  No one says a word and the woman shrinks back even more in fear.  What if she’s found out?

But Jesus explains: “No, Peter.  No one bumped into me.  No one picked my pocket.  Power went out from me.  Someone touched me in faith and I need to know who.”  Just as the woman knew she’d been healed, Jesus knew that someone had been touched him and had been healed.  It might sound like Jesus is talking about some kind of magic, but that’s not it.  God was at work through him.  The woman had touched Jesus and somehow God had done something through that touch.  Jesus wanted to know who and what.  Again, from Luke’s account:

When the woman saw that she couldn’t remain hidden, she came up, trembling, and fell down in front of him.  She told him, in front of everyone, why she had touched him, and how she had been healed instantly. (Luke 8:47)

Imagine how afraid she was.  It was one thing to sneak through the crowd unnoticed, but once they figured out who and what she was, the people she’d jostled would have been furious.  If Jesus hadn’t been there they might have stoned her.  But Jesus calls her out into the open to reveal his ministry and to reveal what real, saving faith looks like.  She was an outsider.  She lived apart from everyone.  She was an outcast.  But more importantly, because she was unclean, she didn’t even have access to God through the normal channels of the torah.  She might have been thinking that Jesus was just as angry as the rest of the crowd.  She might have been afraid he was going to do something awful.  But as she tells him what happened, he instead says to her:

“Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.”

 

Jesus understood her real problem even if she didn’t.  She just wanted to be healed physically.  Once the blood stopped she was ready to go home.  But Jesus knew that her bigger problem was being an outsider.  She was an Israelite by birth, but her physical disease had essentially forfeit her membership in Abraham’s family.  And now Jesus, as the king and representative of God’s kingdom, addresses her, comforts her, calling her “Daughter”.  He welcomes her into the kingdom.  He assures her of her inheritance.  That’s what she needed most of all.  And Jesus not only tells her, but tells the whole crowd that it’s her faith that has made her well.  It wasn’t some magical force that she connived out of Jesus.  It was faith in this man she’d heard about.  It was faith in this one who was so obviously by his preaching and by his miracles the Lord’s Messiah who had come to set the word to rights.  And so she came to Jesus the Messiah in faith, knowing that if he could set Israel to rights, if he could set the world to rights, he could surely set her to rights too.  She trusted enough to risk the crowd.  And her faith overcame the fear of public exposure and public shaming.  And because of that faith, Jesus sends her off in peace—he sends her off not only physically healed, but spiritually restored, and spiritually restored because she’s been welcomed into the kingdom.

Now, all this is wonderful, but what about Jairus’ daughter?  In Matthew’s shortened version of the story, the girl was already dead.  But as Mark and Luke tell it, she was dying when Jairus initially came to Jesus.  There’s a powerful sense of urgency.  Jesus needed to get to Jairus’ house soon and now he’s been delayed.  Luke tells us:

While he was still speaking, someone arrived from the ruler’s house.  “Your daughter is dead,” he said, “don’t trouble the teacher any longer.” (Luke 8:49)

 

It’s too late.  While the crowd and the sick woman delayed Jesus, the girl had died.  I would assume the servant hadn’t seen what had just happened with the old woman or he might have been more hopeful about the situation.  Luke says that Jesus addressed Jairus and the messenger:

But Jesus, hearing this, answered him, “Don’t be afraid.  Just believe, and she will be rescued.” (Luke 8:50)

 

Matthew then carries on and writes:

Jesus went into the official’s house.  There he saw the flute-players, and everybody in a great state of agitation.  “Go away!” he said.  “The little girl isn’t dead.  She’s asleep!”  (Matthew 9:23-24)

Jesus goes to Jairus’ house anyway.  It must have been a good way away, because by the time they get there the funeral mourners have already arrived and got things started.  Matthew says “They all laughed at him”.  They laughed at him the same way they’d laugh at you if you walked into Piercy’s and told them the folks in the refrigerator are just sleeping.  “Jesus, We’re in the funeral business.  This is how we make our living.  We know a dead person when we see one.  Faith’s got nothing to do with it.  She’s gone!”  But consider that the woman in the crowd could have said the same thing.  “Faith?  I’ve spent my life savings on doctors and none of them could heal me.  And maybe the Lord could heal me—but I’d have to find some way to get into his presence first and I can’t because I’m unclean.  It’s hopeless!”  But that’s not what she believed.  She had faith.  And Jairus has faith too.  That he came to Jesus in the first place shows that he had faith, but that faith was strengthened by what he saw in the crowd and that faith was demonstrated as he invited Jesus home, even after his servant had told him that it was too late.  And so as the crowd laughs at him, Jesus goes into the house.

When the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and she got up.  And the report of this went out around the whole region. (Matthew 9:25-26)

People—including the disciples—doubted.  They lacked faith.  And Jesus responds to them not only by working miracles, but by specifically working the miracles that the Old Testament prophets had said the Messiah would work.  This is important to remember.  Jesus didn’t go around doing random miracles.  What he did was fulfil the words of the prophets.  He showed the faithfulness of the God of Israel.  Isaiah had prophesied that the Messiah would preach good news to the poor and that he would give life to the dead.  And that’s just what Jesus does.  The woman in the crowd: Jesus gave her her life back—physically, socially, spiritually.  She was a daughter of Abraham, but because of her sickness she was unclean, an outcast, and shut out from the presence of God.  She was doomed.  But because of her faith, Jesus gave her new life and restored her to the fellowship of God’s kingdom.  If there was ever a case of good news being preached to the poor, that was it.  And from there he goes to Jairus’ daughter and literally raises the dead to life.  He confirms the faith of Jairus and his wife.  Jesus doesn’t tell them to go in peace as he did the woman.  He doesn’t call Jairus “Son”—he didn’t need that specific reassurance—but, nevertheless, their faith has brought them into the kingdom too.

Jesus is ushering in the promised kingdom.  He’s giving healing and restoration and calling people into that kingdom.  And at the same time, he’s establishing his identity.  Think about it.  There were two common things that the average person ran into fairly regularly that would render them unclean: death and blood.  Both were common and both were things everyone avoided.  And both are here.  The unclean woman comes to Jesus, touches him, and instead of Jesus turning to the crowd to ask who just made him unclean, he does just the opposite: “Who just caused power to go out from me?”  The uncleanness couldn’t touch Jesus.  Just the opposite, in fact.  Jesus’ cleanness, his vitality, his life flow to those who come to him in faith.  And it’s for that reason that he didn’t hesitate to go and lay hands on the dead girl.  He made a point of touching the dead so that everyone could see that it’s death that has to worry about coming into contact with Jesus, not the other way around.  Have you heard the joke?  When the Bogey Man goes to sleep, he checks under his bed for Chuck Norris.  Brothers and Sisters, when Death goes to sleep, he checks under his bed for Jesus—or something like that.  When Jesus comes, demons flee, disease is undone, sin is forgiven, and even death runs from his life-giving touch.

Brothers and Sisters, Jesus foreshadows here what he’ll do at the cross.  He doesn’t flee from our sickness and our sin.  Just the opposite.  He embraces us as sick and unclean and as tainted by death as we are in our sin.  He let his enemies nail him to the cross and suffered death for their—for our—sake.  He suffered and died, taking our punishment on himself, but even death couldn’t hold him.  On the third day he burst forth from his tomb, full of life, having conquered sin and death.  The revolution had begun.  And so we come to him in faith and he embraces us.  He takes our sin himself and releases us to go in peace, cleansed and made whole, and welcomed into his kingdom.  Then he fills us with his Spirit, his sons and daughters, and he sends us out to proclaim the revolution and to make it known.

Remember, God sent his Son into the world to redeem us from sin and death, from sickness and pain.  These are problems that we human beings have brought on ourselves because of our sin.  In the midst of suffering I’ve often had people ask why God is punishing them.  Friends, that’s not how God works.  Jesus tells us in John’s Gospel, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.  For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:16-17).

Jesus didn’t come to heap more misery and judgement on us.  He came to heal and save because we were already suffering from the consequences of our sin, because we already stood condemned and judged.  Remember, the Jews were suffering—they were living miserable lives in a sort of exile—they were supposed to be the people who lived with God in their midst, but when they returned from their exile in Babylon and rebuilt the temple, the divine cloud of glory never returned—and so their prayer and hope was that God would return and that when he did, he would smite all the pagan gentiles causing their misery.  Brothers and Sisters, in Jesus God did come to visit his people, but in Jesus we see that our real problem isn’t the evil people around us, the people persecuting us or causing our misery.  The real problem is our own subjection to sin and the death that our sin has brought into the world.  Not one of us is free from the corruption of sin.

If God had come to visit his people as the Jews expected, it would have meant judgement and damnation for us all—Jew and gentile alike.  But instead, in his lovingkindess, God visited his Creation by sending his Son to take our sin upon himself, to die the death we deserve, to make us clean and to set us free.  He sent his Son so that when he does come at the end of history to judge the living and the dead, those who have believed in Jesus, those who have repented, submitted to his lordship, and trusted in his victory over sin and death, those who have become a part of the revolution, those who live in hopeful faith of God’s new world, will be spared the punishment of sin.  Jesus came to forgive and to welcome us into the kingdom he is establishing and which will be consummated on that last day.  And so remember, God doesn’t afflict us.  Just the opposite.  He so desires to help us out of the trouble brought by our sin that he spared not his own Son.

And as he welcomes us into his kingdom, he sends us out into the world.  As Jesus shared in our suffering in order to make us clean, he now sends us out to embrace those still subject to sin and death.  Friends, Jesus had no reason to fear uncleanness because he was full of life.  And we have no reason to fear uncleanness either.  Jesus has washed us clean.  He’s filled us with his own Spirit.  He’s given us his own life.  And now he calls us to go out into the world to preach good news to everyone else mired in and suffering the consequences of sin—to proclaim the good news that in the Lord Jesus sin and death are defeated and creation is finally being set to rights.  As we once came to him in faith, trusting in his victory over sin and death, let us go out in that same faith, trusting that through his church—through us and in the power of the Spirit—he will make his saving and redeeming victory known to the world.

Let us pray:  Gracious Father, thank you for sending your Son into the world that we might be forgiven our sins and restored to life.  Strengthen our faith that we might always trust in the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus, that we might always remember that he has conquered sin and death, and that we might go forth into the world in power to share his victory and to share his life.  We ask this in his name.  Amen.

The Twenty-third Sunday after Trinity: Render to God and Caesar

St. Matthew 22:15-22

by William Klock

The Pharisees—and a lot of other important people—were mad at Jesus.  Our Gospel comes after Jesus marched into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to acclamations of “Son of David”, after he upset the temple, and after telling those parables about wicked tenants and about the wedding guests who refused to come to the wedding of the king’s son.  The leaders of Israel knew that Jesus’s rebuke, his condemnation was aimed straight at them and they were angry.  And so Matthew picks up in our lesson today, at 22:15, and writes:

Then the Pharisees went and plotted how they might trap him into saying the wrong thing.  They sent their followers to him, with the Herodians.

 

Every time they’ve confronted Jesus, he’s turned their accusations against them.  So this time they conspire.  They’ll send their henchmen.  And this time the plan is to trick him into saying something that will get him in trouble with the Romans—something revolutionary, something that will get him arrested—and if they’re lucky, maybe even crucified.

“Teacher,” they said, “we know that you are truthful, and that you teach God’s way truthfully.  You don’t care what anyone thinks about you, because you don’t try to flatter people or favour them.  So tell us what you think.  Is it lawful to pay tribute to Caesar, or not?”

These guys are pretty obsequious as they approach Jesus.  They’re undercover.  They want him to think that they’re like those other people who hailed him as Messiah and who were hanging on his every word.  They want Jesus to let his guard down.  So they address him as “Rabbi” and they try to butter him up.  But then the question.

And context is everything here.  We need to understand the background of this question.  The tribute they refer to was the poll- or head-tax assessed by the Romans on all the adult males in the territories and provinces they conquered.  As a tax it didn’t amount to very much: just a single denarius each year—about a day’s wages.  But it was the principle of the tax that was a problem for the Jews.  The Jews believed that the Lord was their king.  Their identity as a people was forged in the Exodus, when the Lord rescued them from slavery in Egypt and set them free in a land of their own.  Their more recent national hero was Judas the Hammer, who had revolted against their pagan Greek overlords, driven them out, cleansed the temple, and established a new monarchy.  But year in and year out as they paid tribute to the Romans, they were reminded that all of that was in the past.  Even in their own land, they were subjugated and ruled by pagan Caesar.  Many people felt that to pay the tax was tantamount to denying that the Lord was their king.

And it didn’t help that to pay the Roman tax, they had to use Roman coins.  These coins ordinarily bore an image of Caesar—at this time it would have been Tiberius—and an inscription describing him as “son of God”.  The coins themselves were blasphemous.  They were a violation of the Second Commandment against graven images and they were doubly blasphemous in ascribing divinity to Caesar.  There were some among the Pharisees who taught that it was a sin even to look at the coins.  The Jews were so outraged by the usual imperial coinage that the Romans removed the image of Caesar from the coins struck in Judaea, but they still bore that blasphemous inscription: “Tiberius, son of God”.  There was a sense in which just to use the coins, to carry them in your pocket was, for a Jew, to deny the kingship of God and to break his commandments.

But everybody just paid the tax because they didn’t know what else to do.  They weren’t happy about it, but they paid it.  Many of the religious leaders: the chief priests, the scribes, the elders, the Sadducees knew that to refuse to pay the tax was to declare open revolt against the Romans.  They had seen what the Romans did to people and nations that revolted and they knew it wasn’t pretty.  It was also true that the province of Judea had a unique relationship with Rome.  The Romans had had enough trouble with the Jews that they were willing to make some compromises.  They took the image of Caesar off the local coins and they let the Jewish authorities govern the temple and local worship.  But the Romans would only compromise so much.  The Jewish leaders knew that if they stopped paying the tax the Romans would remove them from power and would very likely stop their worship and desecrate the temple.  And so the Jewish leaders encouraged people to pay the tax.  It was the price of being able to continue to serve and worship the Lord.  (It was also the price of being able to stay in power.)  They argued it was a justified compromise: Yes, we know that God is King, but we have to pretend that Caesar is or they’ll kill us all.

But there were others who objected.  Not too many years before, in a.d. 6, when Jesus was a boy, a man known as Judas the Galilean had started a revolt.  He reminded the people that the Jews had no master but the Lord and that to pay the tax was to deny this and to compromise with pagans.  The Romans brutally put down his revolt and left the revolutionaries hanging on crosses all around Judaea—sending the clear message: Roman taxes aren’t optional.

Those taxes were still something everyone grumbled about.  If you’d asked people, most of them would have said that this was exactly the sort of problem the Messiah would fix when he came.  Well, probably not the taxes, but he’d bust up Roman heads so that no one would have to worry about anything Roman anymore.  So you can see where the Pharisees’ question is headed.  If Jesus says that people shouldn’t pay tribute to the Romans, well, that would probably get him crucified as a revolutionary very quickly.  But, on the other hand, if he tells the people that it’s okay to pay the tax because what God is interested in is a “spiritual” kingdom rather than a worldly one, the people will reject Jesus.  They’re looking to him as Messiah to set everything to rights in the real world, not to give them spiritual cop-outs and pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die.  The sad irony is that this is precisely what many Christians have done with Jesus’ answer: They’ve copped-out by spiritualising the kingdom of God and the lordship of Jesus and giving Caesar lordship over the world.  “Caesar is lord of this world and Jesus is Lord of the next,” say many Christians today.  Of course, the good news says Jesus is Lord of all!

How does Jesus answer them?  Look at verse 18:

 

Jesus knew their evil intentions.

“Why are you trying to trick me, you hypocrites?” he said.  “Show me the tribute coin.”  They brought him a dinar.

“This…image,” said Jesus, “and this…inscription.  Who do they belong to?”

“Caesar,” they said.

“Well then,” said Jesus, “you’d better give Caesar back what belongs to Caesar!  And—give God back what belongs to God!”

 

Jesus wasn’t born yesterday.  He knows exactly what game they’re playing and once again he turns their question back on them and puts them in the hot seat.  Instead of answering their question he asks them to show him one of the coins used to pay the tax.  One of them pulls a denarius from his coin purse and shows it to Jesus before he realises that he’s just hanged himself with his own rope.  If this coin is so blasphemous, what’s he doing with it?  Jesus drives this home by asking him to confirm the obvious: “Whose image and inscription are on it?”  And, of course, they answer: “Caesar’s”.  Jesus reveals that they’ve already made up their minds.  Clearly, they don’t have a problem carrying around Caesar’s coins, which means they’ve come up with some compromising rationalisation for paying Caesar’s tax too.  Presumably it was as obvious to the crowd as it was to Jesus that these were spies of the religious leaders trying to trap or to discredit Jesus.  It backfired.  He stole their thunder.  He deflated their balloon.  He could have left it at that, but he goes on to give them an answer and his answer points beyond both the compromise of the priests and elders and the revolutionary zealotry of men like Judas the Galilean and the kind of messianic revolution the people were longing for.  Jesus points them to the true nature of the kingdom of God.  He tells them: “You’d better give Caesar back what belongs to Caesar!  And—give God back what belongs to God!”

Or in the familiar words of the King James: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar and unto God the things that are God’s.”  Jesus echoes words that everyone would have known.  Two centuries before, the priest Mattathias lay on his deathbed and inspired his son, Judas, to lead a revolt against the pagan Greeks.  It was that revolt that the people commemorated every year when they celebrated Hanukkah and they all knew the story very well.  As he was dying Mattathias said to his sons:

Pay back the Gentiles in full and heed what the law commands. (1 Maccabees 2:68)

These were the words that followed a career of zealously calling the Jewish people away from compromise with pagans and back to the law.  Mattathias tore down altars and forcibly circumcised the sons of many compromising Jews.  These were words that inspired Mattathias’ sons to revolt openly against the Greeks.  He charged them to keep the Lord’s law and as far as the Maccabees were concerned, to keep the law meant revolting against the Greeks, driving them out, and cleansing the temple so that the Lord could once again be King in Israel.  And that’s exactly what they did.  Jesus echoes those words and in them the people would have heard him saying that to render to God what is Gods—to be faithful to the Lord’s law—meant paying back the Romans in full.  The people would have heard Jesus talking about revolt.

At the same time, though, there’s a second layer of meaning.  Jesus’ words sounded like revolt as they echoed Mattathias, but at the same time Jesus was also saying “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s” while holding up Caesar’s coin for everyone to see.  With the coin right there, Jesus’ response is also undeniably a statement that you’d better pay your taxes!  So which is it?  Do you suck it up, compromise the law, and pay your taxes or do you revolt against Caesar?  The answer is both and neither.  And Matthew says:

When they heard this they were astonished.  They left him and went away.

They were astonished.  Jesus changed the paradigm and they couldn’t quite wrap their heads around it.  It’s not easy for us to understand either, because we’re too often trapped in the same mode of thinking as the people who were trying to trap Jesus.  They looked at the pagans around them, the pagans who were oppressing them, the pagans who were insisting that they compromise their worship and their faith and their service to the Lord, and they only saw two options: Either you went along with the blasphemous compromise in order to keep your skin intact, or you rose up in open revolt, drew your sword, and charged into battle for the Lord the way Judas the Hammer had done.  Not many Jews were interested in doing the latter anymore.  It worked for Judas the Hammer against the Greeks, but when Judas the Galilean tried it against the Romans everyone ended up dead.  In a generation the Jews would try open revolt again and it would result in their destruction.  So many would die that the Romans would run out of crosses.  But this is what so many people were hoping for in the Messiah.  They couldn’t revolt on their own, but the Messiah would come with the Lord’s blessing and with supernatural help.  With the Messiah they could pull it off—or so many thought.  These were the two choices: compromise or war.

In some ways it seems like we have much the same choice today.  We face a hostile culture.  Of course, it’s nothing like the persecution of either the Jews of Jesus’ day or the Early Church.  Still, our culture is moving rapidly away from a biblical way of seeing the world.  It’s becoming increasingly hostile to Christians.  And what responses do we see?  We see many churches and many Christians compromising with the world.  We’re afraid people won’t like us, so we hide our principles in the closet and hope no one will find them.  Many often go so far as to deny fundamental tenets of our faith and practise.  Many twist or throw out portions of the Bible to justify their compromise.  On the other hand, there are Christians spoiling for a fight.  If we can only capture Caesar’s power for ourselves and for our agenda, we can manifest the kingdom of God and drive out God’s enemies.  That’s not to say we shouldn’t vote or speak our consciences.  Good and godly laws help to shape a good and godly people.  The church should be the conscience of the nation.  But legislation is not a substitute for the gospel and its transforming and saving power.  There’s a third option as well: We spiritualise the kingdom of God and compartmentalise our lives: Caesar here, Jesus there.  Obey Caesar in the things of this world and Jesus in the things of the next, as if the kingdom of God is pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die, not a present reality here and now.  The third option, in the end, is simply a variant of the first: compromise.

Again, Jesus changes the whole paradigm.  The Jews then—and many Christians today—were looking for the right answer to the wrong question.  Do we compromise with Caesar or take up the sword against Caesar?  Those are the only two options we see.  But Jesus offers another and we see it manifest at the core of his ministry as he goes to the cross.  Jesus brought a revolution and he brought it because he refused to compromise, but it was a revolution unlike anything the world had ever seen.  He called the people to the true and uncompromised worship of God.  He called the people to repent: to turn away from everything that was not of God’s kingdom.  He reminded them and he reminds us that he is Lord, that God is King, and that Caesar, whatever form he takes, is a cheap imitator and failing rival.  By his very life, Jesus undermined the false lordship of Caesar.  He exposed Israel’s idolatry as she tried to save her skin and keep her place in the world through compromise with Caesar.  He called for an end to all these things.  And for it he went to his death.  For a brief moment, Peter tried to stop it.  He drew his sword and attacked one of the soldiers arresting Jesus.  For just a moment it looked like the revolution everyone was hoping for might begin.  But Jesus told him to put his sword away and he healed the soldier Peter had injured.  Instead, Jesus took on himself the punishment the Romans meted out to revolutionaries.  He took Israel’s punishment on himself.  He bore the pain of rebellion and provided a means of escape, of forgiveness, of reconciliation, and of restoration not just for Israel, but for the whole world—for all those who would repent, turn away from the old ways of compromise and violence, and follow him in trusting faith.

The martyrs of the century that followed and the martyrs of our own day continue to “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s”.  A century and a quarter after Jesus began his revolution in humility on the cross, Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, like so many others of our brothers and sisters in that time, was arrested by Roman soldiers.  He didn’t draw his sword.  Instead, he invited them to come into his house and to share his dinner.  He wanted to tell them about Jesus.  They bound him to a stake and demanded he renounce Jesus and acknowledge Caesar, but he refused and they burned him alive.  Polycarp rendered to Caesar what was Caesar’s and rendered to God what is God’s.  The history of the Church is full of stories like this and it was through the blood of the martyrs, who followed Jesus in faith even to death, that the Roman empire was transformed.  Even the emperor eventually acknowledged the Lordship of Jesus as he saw the Church’s witness.

Brothers and Sisters, this is the story we tell.  This is the good news we preach with no compromise.  Jesus dealt with sin and rebellion and violence, not by meting out violence and death, but by taking sin and rebellion and violence on himself.  He took Israel’s punishment in his own flesh.  He died the death that rebellious, idolatrous sinners deserve.  He rose three days later, victorious over sin and death.  And now he calls us to trust him and to follow in his footsteps in faith and in love, uncompromisingly rendering to God the things that are God’s, even if that means rendering to Caesar our privilege, our security, our freedom, or even our lives as witnesses to the humble and servant way of the cross: the only means of bringing life and restoration into the darkness of this world.

Let’s pray: O GOD, our refuge and strength, the author of all godliness, hear the devout prayers of your Church: and grant that what we ask for in faith we may surely obtain, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

All Saints: Blessed are…

St. Matthew 5:1-12 & Revelation 7:2-27

by William Klock

The Feast of All Saints is one of the oldest holy days on the Christian Calendar.  We have evidence of sermons preached on this occasion going all the way back to the Third Century.  It took a while for our different communions to settle on dates.  The Eastern church still celebrate it on the Sunday after Pentecost, while we celebrate it November 1st.  And the purpose of the day has evolved.  In those early centuries, the church observed All Saints’ Day as a way to commemorate and honour the martyrs—the men and women who stood firm and who, when the time came, took up their crosses and followed Jesus.  Just as the enemies of God thought they had silenced Jesus when they crucified him, the enemies of God thought that could silence the gospel witness of those first Christian.  But the opposite happened.  The blood of the martyrs fertilised the soil of the empire and through their witness, the gospel put down deep roots, growing and spreading, eventually bringing even mighty Caesar to his knees before the cross, confessing his faith in Jesus the Messiah.  In the words of our Old Testament lesson from the Wisdom of Solomon, “in the eyes of the foolish they seem to have died” and “in the sight of men they were punished”, but the reality is that their hope was not in vain, “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will touch them…They will govern nations and rule over peoples, and the Lord will reign over them forever.”  Apocryphal that text may be, but it highlights the truth of God’s kingdom and its conflict with the world.  The kingdom of God seems upside-down, but only because the values of fallen humanity were upside-down already.  It's not an easy thing to follow Jesus and to take up your cross, but the Lord will vindicate his people.

And this is just what Jesus is getting at in our Gospel today from Matthew 5.  Blessed are, blessed are, blessed are…nine times Jesus says and each time he connects the blessing with people whose values are right-side up in contrast to the upside-down values of the world.  It’s language straight from the Lord’s covenant with Israel, going all the way back to Abraham.  Remember how the Lord call Abraham and promised to bless him, but the point wasn’t just to bless Abraham.  The point was that Abraham would then be a blessing to the world.  Through Abraham, the Lord would reveal himself to a world that had forgotten him, to a world that would, through his people, see his goodness, his grace, his faithfulness, and one day give him glory.  Through Abraham and his family, the Lord would remind the world that he will not leave it as it is, broken and fallen.  One day he would come himself to set humanity and the rest of his creation to rights, one day he will wipe away sin and death, and with them all the tears.  His people were—and still are—the witnesses of his faithfulness to that promise.

Israel mostly failed at that mission.  Instead of glorifying the God of Israel, the nations looked at Israel’s faithlessness and mocked her God.  But there were always some—like the people the Gospels start with—people like Mary and Joseph, Zechariah and Elizabeth, Simeon and Anna.  Faithful people, believing people, people with precious little blessing, but still committed to and still longing to see the Lord set this broken world right-side up.  It was to them that Jesus came and it was in their midst that the gospel started doing its work.  And as people like these gathered around him, Jesus exhorted them.  The Lord would not tolerate the faithlessness of Israel for much longer.  The axe was set to the root of the tree.  Judgement was coming.  The long-awaited age to come, God’s great plan to set the world right-side up was about to start unfolding, and here Jesus is saying, “This is how you have a share in it and it starts by forsaking the upside-down ways of the world and following me.  It means being the people who will finally witness the Lord’s presence with them.  It means being the people who will lift the veil on the Lord’s new creation to show the nations what it looks like.  And so he begins in Matthew 5:3, saying:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

 

Before we go any further, we need to understand what it means to be blessed.  It’s the Hebrew idea of shalom—something so broad, it’s hard to nail down exactly, but it’s the sense of completeness, and wellness, of peace with God and in the community.  It’s about being set to rights and living in a community or a world set to rights.  That last bit is important.  It’s not just an individual thing; it’s a community thing—a covenantal thing.  It goes back to Abraham and to the exodus and to God’s creation of a people who would know the blessing of living in his presence and then witness that blessing to the world around them—that they would witness it until the knowledge of the Lord’s glory covers the whole world as the waters cover the sea.  The very next thing Jesus goes on to preach about after the Beatitudes is being a people who are salt and light to the world.  It’s another illustration of what it looks like not just to be God’s people in the world, but to be God’s people for the world.  To be and to live out God’s new creation here and now.  To be the dawn that drives away the darkness of the long night.

That’s what being blessed is about.  The people Jesus describes in these blessings are people who are already living the life of the kingdom, even if imperfectly.  Their desire is to see the Lord set his people and his world to rights and they’re already living that way.  They’re prepared for the kingdom—unlike so many others who were still invested in the ways and values of fallen Israel, fallen humanity, and this broken world.  Jesus starts out with the poor in spirit and I can’t help but think of Mary.  When she finds out that she’s going to bear the Messiah—the one who will set everything to rights—what does she do?  Instead of the news filling her with pride, it humbles her.  She bursts out in song: “My soul doth magnify the Lord…for he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden.”

Most people though that God would usher in his kingdom and set the world to rights by coming like a great warrior-king to the important and the wealthy, to the powerful and politically connected.  Instead, he came to a young girl in a backwater village.  And people like Mary flocked to Jesus and through them the kingdom of God burst into the world.  The humble came in faith and he opened their eyes, healed their diseases, cast out their demons, and forgave their sins.  And all the while the powerful and connected, people like the Sadducees, fumed that Jesus was offering forgiveness apart from the temple.  The Pharisees fumed that he was healing on the Sabbath and welcoming tax collectors and sinners.  But Jesus says that judgement is coming and those who will see the kingdom will not be the powerful or the self-righteous, but those humble enough to recognise the kingdom in Jesus and to follow him.

The rest of the Beatitudes go the same way.  Jesus says:

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” (Matthew 5:4-9)

These don’t come out of the blue.  All through these sayings, Jesus is drawing from the prophets and, especially, the psalms.  He began his ministry preaching in the synagogue in Nazareth with the words of Isaiah: “The Lord anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor…to comfort all who mourn.”  Isaiah was announcing judgement on Israel and so was Jesus.  But those who mourn the sins of the people, those who mourn their broken fellowship with the Lord, they will be the ones to pass through the fires of the coming judgement to live in that new messianic community of the age to come.

In Psalm 37, David declared, “the meek shall inherit the land and shall take delight in the abundance of peace”.  It’s ironic, because so many people expected the Messiah to come like mighty David, crashing into Jerusalem to put the enemies of his people to the sword.  They expected the kingdom to come by violence.  But David himself had declared that it’s the meek who would inherit the land—the kingdom, life in the presence of God.

Jesus draws on Psalm 107 when he says that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness or justice will be satisfied.  The people longed for justice, but for far too many people in Israel that justice looked more like vengeance than justice and that’s not the way.  Violence begets violence.  It always has and it always will.  But Jesus shows the way of the kingdom as he let violence do its worst and then forgave, breaking the cycle and turning evil back on itself.  Humility, gentleness, mercy, forgiveness—and a desire to see the wicked repent—that’s the way of the kingdom.  And, of course, that’s why only the merciful can ever truly know God’s mercy.

And the pure in heart.  Jesus echoes Psalm 24:3-6.  “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?  And who shall stand in his holy place?  He who has clean hands and a pure heart…He will receive blessing from the Lord, and vindication from the God of his salvation.  Such is the generation of those who seek him, who seek the face of the God of Jacob.”  To see the kingdom, to live before the face of God, means you have to value that kingdom.  You have to want to be part of the world set to rights—not just to receive its benefits, but truly be part of it.  And so outward piety won’t do.  The people of the kingdom love it, they long for it, they want to be part and parcel of the world set to rights, to contribute to it, and so they don’t go through the motions—they’re truly pure of heart.

And the peacemakers.  The Messiah came to make peace.  To make peace with God by bearing in himself the sins of his people that they might be forgiven.  And to set us right so that we can be at peace with each other.  The vengeful, the violent, the proud—they’ll be the ones swept away in the coming judgement.  Only the peacemakers—following in the footsteps of their peace-making Messiah—will have a place in the kingdom of peace.

But Jesus also warns these people.  To see the kingdom, you’re going to have live out it’s values in the present evil age, and for that you will be hated, mocked, scorned, and even killed.  He goes on in verses 10-12:

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are you when others 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, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

To follow Jesus and to live for the kingdom is costly.  It means taking up your cross—sometimes very literally.  As Jesus would say: The servant is not greater than his master.  If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you.”  When he preached in his hometown of Nazareth, the people were so angry with him that they tried to throw him off a cliff.  Before too long the religious leaders would be scheming to have him killed.  He knew from the beginning that that was the path he had to take.  And he knew his people would suffer for the sake of his name.  At the cross the present evil age was dealt a death blow.  In rising from the grave Jesus inaugurated the age to come.  The present age is passing away and the age to come is breaking in, but Jesus knew that his people would live in the overlap.  God brought salvation and renewal this way for a reason.  The people of Jesus’ day wanted it to come all at once, but God chose to bring it slowly.  People today have the same sort of expectation.  They ask how a good God can allow so much evil in the world.  But in asking that question, in asking why God doesn’t come and deal with evil we’re showing the same sort of self-righteous mindset that dominated Israel.  We’re forgetting that for God to come and deal with evil means that God will not only have to deal with our enemies and the people who cause us grief, but that he’ll also have to deal with us.  We’re all sinners.  We’re all responsible for the mess this world is in—some more, some less—but we’ve all contributed to it.  And so God sent Jesus to deal with that sin and to inaugurate his kingdom, but he also delays, and in that he gives sinners a chance to repent and turn to him.  It also means that those who, in this in-between time, insist on revealing the kingdom, those who insist on confronting the sinful systems of the old age through their poverty of spirit, through their meekness, through their mercy, through their peace-making will face the same backlash that Jesus faced.  As God’s people show the world set to rights, those invested in the way things are will fight back.  When God’s people declare that Jesus is the world’s true Lord, the Caesars of this age and their supporters will lash out to silence the challenge.

The martyrs are a testimony to Jesus’ promise.  And when you see your brothers and sisters being carried off to die—whether by the Jewish authorities, or the Romans, or Communists, Islamists, Hindus, Buddhists, or radical secularists in our age, it’s easy to fear.  Are we really blessed when we are persecuted for the sake of righteousness?  This was the purpose behind St. John’s “revelation”.  The church was on the verge of being plunged into violent persecution—a time of great trial and tribulation.  Would their faith hold?  And what about those who died for the sake of faith in Jesus?  And so God gave John a vision.  Just as Jesus had promised, judgement was coming, first on unbelieving Israel and then on the pagan word of the Greeks and Romans.  The scroll of judgement announcing judgement on Jerusalem and Judah is brought forth.  The redeeming lamb is now the great lion of Judah.  The wrath of God is about to be poured out.  And then everything is paused.  What’s to happen to the faithful, to Jesus’ people in the midst of the storm.  This is where our Epistle picks up in Revelation 7:2-3.

Then I saw another angel ascending from the rising of the sun, with the seal of the living God, and he called with a loud voice to the four angels who had been given power to harm earth and sea, saying, “Do not harm the earth or the sea or the trees, until we have sealed the servants of our God on their foreheads.”

The imagery here is drawn from Ezekiel.  The prophet was shown a vision of Israel’s idolatry and then a vision of a “man clothed in linen” who was directed by the Lord to “put a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in it” (Ezekiel 9:3-4).  In the divine judgement to come, no one was to touch those market out for the Lord.  What the Lord did in Ezekiel’s day was about to happen again, but the Lord would spare the faithful.  Those who are sealed by the angel are announced in verse 4:

And I heard the number of the sealed, 144,000, sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel.

The text goes on to list specifically twelve thousand from each of the twelve tribes.  This is the remnant of faithful Israel, much like those marked out in Ezekiel’s vision centuries before.  This is the Jewish church of Jerusalem and Judea, those Jews who heard the good news and trusted in Jesus.  Those Jews who were appalled by Israel’s abominations.  Those who were about to face violent persecution at the hands of their fellow Jews.  The Lord would not abandon them, even though they die.  He places his mark on them and seals them as his own.  And their faithfulness to Jesus the Messiah, is the means by which the nations are brought to the cross.  They are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, and they know blessing as a result, because it is through their faithfulness to Jesus that they fulfil the Abrahamic covenant’s call to be a blessing to the nations.

John hears the announcement of the sealing of the Jewish church, and then he sees a vision of a multitude that could not be numbered, drawn from the nations:

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Revelation 7:9-10)

And jumping down to verse 13:

Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, clothed in white robes, and from where have they come?”… And he said to me, “These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.  (Revelation 7:13-14)

John’s vision now draws on the imagery of the prophet Daniel, who wrote of another time of great distress through which the Lord saw a faithful remnant of his people.  The wise amongst them were refined through persecution that they might “shine like the brightness of the sky above” (12:3) so that they would “turn many to righteousness”.  Faithful Israel, through her unwavering allegiance to Jesus in this time of trial would serve as the witnesses that will bring the nations to faith in the Lord.  The faithfulness of the 144,000, of the Jewish martyrs, their robes soaked in their own blood, brings that multi-ethnic multitude to Jesus that he might wash their robes in his blood and make them part of his people.  As Zechariah had prophesied, ten men from the nations, of every tongue, will take hold of the robe of a Jew and say, “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you!” (8:23)

Brothers and Sisters, because of the faithful witness of the martyrs, you and I are here today in the house of the Lord.  Our lessons today remind us their faithfulness to the Lord Jesus, their faithfulness to his kingdom, even in the midst of persecution, was the means by which God brought the nations to himself.  It’s also a witness to the faithfulness of God, who fulfils his promises.  He gives his own Spirit to his people that they—that even we—might face persecution in faith.  Today we see him embracing his people and wiping away their tears.  Revelation tells us the story of our brothers and sisters who lived in the First Century—of those Jewish believers who faced persecution and martyrdom at the hands of unbelieving Israel and of that multitude drawn pagan Greco-Roman world because of their witness.  They, too would face persecution at the hands of an empire that would, because of their witness, eventually be brought in submission to the lordship of Jesus.  And yet there’s obviously more to the story of Jesus’ people.  What we see in John’s vision is intermediate and temporary.  The martyrs held close by God as saints on earth and in heaven await the consummation of history, that day when the faithful will follow Jesus in his resurrection, when all things are made new, when heaven and earth are rejoined, and when men and women once again dwell in the presence of the Lord.

Brothers and Sisters, we don’t know what will happen between now and then.  We may face our own time of great tribulation one day, but even if we don’t, we continue in the ordinary fight of Christians in every generation against the world, the flesh, and the devil.  We face the ordinary troubles of life in an imperfect world and the difficulties of being faithful witnesses of Jesus in a culture that worships its own versions of Caesar and Mammon, Mars and Aphrodite.  Let us, like the saints who have gone before, stand firm in faith as stewards of the good news of Jesus and his kingdom, knowing that our God is faithful to his promises.  Let us be the people blessed to be a blessing, living out the life and values of Jesus’ kingdom.  Let us confront the upside-down values of the world in poverty of spirit, with mourning and meekness, and mercy; let us hunger and thirst for justice as we serve the Lord with pure hearts—lifting the veil on God’s future, showing the people around us what a right-side up world looks like.  And no matter the trials and tribulations that come, remember that Jesus has promised to hold us close, even in death, until that day when he makes all things new.

Let’s pray:  Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord: Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those inexpressible joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting.  Amen.

The Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity: Put on the Armour of God

Ephesians 6:10-20

by William Klock

St. Paul knew what the trials and tribulations of persecution look like—and not just what they looked like.  He knew what it smells like and tastes like, what it sounds like and what it feels like.  He had been surrounded by the angry, yelling mobs ready to tear him limb from limb.  He’d seen jail cell after jail cell, smelled the mould and the damp, and had eaten the rough bread and drank the stale water and smelled the filth of the prisoners.  He bore the marks of persecution on his body.  His back was criss-crossed with dozens upon dozens of scars that had once been the deep-cutting lashes of whips.  More than once he’d been beaten to within an inch of his life.  They were the marks of Jesus, he told people.  Jesus had told his disciples that they must take up their crosses and follow him.  When he said that, they would have been confused.  But then Jesus was nailed to a cross and eventually the enemies of that cross came for them, first their fellow Jews and then the pagan Greek and Romans.  All of them, except for John, were eventually hunted down and martyred for the sake of Jesus and the good news that he had died, that he had risen, and that he is the world’s true Lord.

Paul wrote today’s Epistle, Ephesians 6:10-20, while he was imprisoned in Rome, probably about a.d. 62, waiting to plead his case before the Emperor Nero.  A few years later, Nero lashed out at the church in Rome in one of the most violent and well-known persecutions in history.  Paul, himself, was martyred in that persecution, probably beheaded.  But when he wrote his letters from prison, he was hopeful.  He would plead his case before the Emperor and he would be set free—which it seems probably did happen—and maybe he would set sail for Spain, the end of the world, to proclaim the good news about Jesus there.  Paul was hopeful, because he believed that good news.  When Jesus was raised from the dead, God’s new creation was unleashed into the world.  Paul knew that the church and the gospel, empowered by the Holy Spirit, would do their work and transform creation.  But Paul also knew—because it had already happened to him—he knew that these little communities of Christians scattered across the empire would face the sorts of trials and tribulations and persecution that he had.  Things would get worse before they got better.  And each one of those Christians, Paul knew, before too long would have to face those words of Jesus: Take up your cross and follow me.  Paul knew how hard it was.  He had seen many already who, when the pressure was on, compromised the gospel, compromised their faith, compromised their Lord—in one way or another they compromised their witness.  Instead of taking up their crosses, they ran away.  Paul knew that God does not give his Spirit or sent out his word in vain, so he knew that the church would eventually accomplish the mission God has given her, but he also knew that for many there was a real danger of apostasy.  And so he wrote to churches, like the one in Ephesus, from his prison cell in Rome and he encouraged and exhorted them to stand firm.  To follow Jesus is to suffer, but it is to suffer with the hope of glory, the hope of resurrection, the hope of new creation—a sure and certain hope!—before us.

That’s the context of our Epistle today about the armour of God and it’s important.  This is a familiar passage.  And because of that and because it’s been so many centuries since Western Christians have faced the sorts of tribulation that those early saints faced, we’ve sort of overly-spiritualised the whole thing.  Brothers and Sisters, for Paul this was imminently practical.  Opposition, persecution, and even death were coming for those early believers and putting on this armour of God was how they were going to confront it, stand firm, and make their witness for Jesus and his kingdom.

So here at the end of his letter to Ephesus, after he’s given them five plus chapters of exhortation and advice as to how to live out the gospel, he brings it to a conclusion telling them how they’re going to manage being faithful.  He writes in verse 10:

Finally, by strong in the Lord, and in the strength of his might.

He’s given them a lot of things to do in light of the coming troubles.  They’ve got to be wondering how they’re going to do it all.  And I expect some of them were invigorated by the challenge and ready to take it on, but they were going to do it in their own strength.  So Paul is clear: Don’t be strong in you.  Be strong in the Lord.  Paul knew this first hand after everything he’d been through.  You can’t be faithful to Jesus for the long haul, let alone take up your cross in those times of tribulation, you can’t do it.  You don’t have the strength or the faith or the perseverance or whatever it will take to do it.  But, Brothers and Sisters, this is why the Lord has poured his own Spirit into you in your baptism.  You renounced the world, the flesh, and the devil, and then God poured his Spirit into you so that you could—so that you can.  Be strong in his might.  But how do you do that?  Paul goes on:

Put on the whole armour of God.  Then you’ll be able to stand firm against the devil’s schemes.

 

Put on the armour of God.  But before we get into that, Paul stresses that the devil was scheming against them.  Just as the devil had schemed to inspire that crowd of people to demand Pilate crucify Jesus, the devil was scheming against the church.  Paul had a personal sense of both ends of that scheming.  He knew what it was to be on the receiving end, but remember that Paul had been one of the chief persecutors of the church in the days after Pentecost.  He was there when Stephen was stoned by the Jewish mob.  When he had his encounter with the risen Jesus, he was on his way to Damascus to round up Christians so that they could be tried before the Jewish authorities.  And that was something he had a reputation for.  There was a reason the Christians were afraid when Ananias brought Paul to meet them.  So, I think, Paul also knew first hand that demonic influence that inspired the unbelieving Jews and the pagan Greeks to lash out at the followers of Jesus and that kept them shrouded in unbelief and darkness.  He knew.  It had taken a face-to-face encounter with Jesus to break him out of that influence and he also knew first-hand that believers could only withstand the onslaught of that demonic power in the might of God.  The power of the flesh, as he puts it, won’t do.  He goes on in verse 12:

The warfare we’re engaged in, you see, isn’t against flesh and blood.  Its against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers that rule the world in this dark time, against the wicked spiritual elements in the heavenly places.

 

If you were fighting flesh and blood, you could do this on your own.  But you’re not.  We need to remember this, because it’s the flesh and blood that we see.  People oppose us and sometimes that’s all we think about is the people.  But Paul reminds us that the people aren’t so much the problem.  It’s that old lie, inspired by the serpent in the beginning, the lie that we can be gods, that we can do our own thing, shape our own destiny, remake the world in our image and according to our desires.  It’s that demonic lie that inspires the hatred of the gospel and the hostility towards everyone who lives it and proclaims it, because the gospel exposes the lie.

For this reason, writes Paul, you must take up the whole armour of God, so that when evil grabs the moment, you’ll be able to hold your ground, do what needs doing, and still be on your feet when it’s over.  So stand firm!  Put the belt of truth around your waist.

 

The world is lost in darkness because of a lie.  The world hates Jesus, hates the gospel, and is coming after us because of a lie.  If you’re going to stand firm against a demonic lie, the first thing you need to put on is the truth.  Paul has in mind the armour a centurion would have worn.  Most of that armour was attached to or was somehow supported by his belt or girdle and just so with the armour of God.  It starts with the truth.  And the truth is that God sent his son, Jesus, to deliver us from the lie, to forgive us for our rebellion, and to set us—and eventually his whole creation—to rights.  The truth is in the words of the creed we confess every week when we say:

I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father.  Through him all things were made.  For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.  For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.  On the third day he rose again in accordance with the scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.  He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

That’s the truth, Friends.  Never forget it.  Belt it around your waist.  Everything else depends on it.

Then Paul writes:

Put on justice (or righteousness) as your breastplate.

 

The breastplate covers your vitals from frontal attack.  Paul compares it to justice or righteousness.  When the lie comes at you, Brothers and Sisters, remember that God is the great judge and that his mission is to set this world right.  That great work began when he raised Jesus from the dead.  Jesus is the Messiah, but the people believed the lie and rejected him.  The people shouted the lie at the top of the lungs, declaring him a false messiah and demanding his crucifixion.  But when he raised Jesus from the dead, God vindicated his claim to be the Messiah.  Jesus was justified that day and declared by the judge to be in the right.  And the truth is that because we have declared our allegiance to Jesus and have been united with him in our baptism, God has justified us and declared us to be in the right, too.

The world will come after us and try to shout us down, will try to cancel us, will say that we’re dumb or gullible for believing the gospel.  The world will call us narrow-minded or hateful or bigoted on account of Jesus and the gospel.  The world will even go so far as to try to tell us who Jesus really is and what his message really was and that we’ve got it all wrong—just like the scribes and Pharisees condemned Jesus and tried to tell him what the real Messiah was supposed to be like.  They’ll confront us and try to undermine the truth of the gospel and the truth of God’s word, making us think we’ve been deceived.  And when that fails, the world will mock us, shun us, cancel us—and in some times and places imprison and even kill us.  Brothers and Sisters, when that happens, remember that God, on account of Jesus, has declared us to be in the right.  He has justly vindicated us against the accusations of the enemy.  God’s justice is our breastplate.  Remember that when you’re attacked by the great lie.  If you are in Jesus the Messiah, you stand already vindicated in him—found by the great judge to be the right.

Then, as shoes for your feet, ready for battle, put on the gospel of peace.

 

This goes back to Chapter 2, verses 11-22, where Paul writes that Jesus the Messiah is, himself, our peace.  What Paul’s getting at there is our unity in Jesus with each other and our reconciliation with God.  One of the common tactics of battle is to divide and conquer.  Paul’s concern as he sat there in prison and heard reports of what was happening in the churches, his concern was for their unity.  The first Christians were Jews, but as the gospel went out to the gentiles, many of them believed, too.  And pretty soon there was friction.  As we saw in our Epistle from Galatians a few weeks ago, Jewish believers were being hassled by other Jews who heard that Jews and gentiles were mixing in these churches in Greece and Rome.  That prompted those Jewish believers to send out “missionaries” to Judaise those gentile believers—to make them respectable to unbelieving Jews.  In Rome, the Jews had been expelled in the early 50s, and then when they were allowed back, there was division in the churches between them and the gentile believers.  And so, back in Chapter 2, Paul says, “Look, you who are uncircumcised were once far off, had no hope, and were far from God, but in Jesus the Messiah you have been brought near by his blood.  He is our peace and he’s made us both—Jew and gentile—he’s made us one and by his broken flesh, has torn down the wall of hostility that was once between us…He’s created in himself one new man where there were once two, so making peace, and through his cross, reconciling us all to God in one body…He preached peace to you who were far off and to those who were near and now through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.  That means you are no longer strangers and aliens, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus the Messiah himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure grows into a holy temple in the Lord.”

Notice how Paul says that it’s by virtue of our being in Jesus, our being united with him, that we are one.  We don’t make Christian unity; Jesus does.  Our job is to remember what Jesus has done for us, guard it, live it, and cultivate it—to be a united front against the enemy and his great lie.  The Jew-gentile divide isn’t the great problem now that it was in Paul’s day, but there are plenty of other ways that Christians and churches fail to live out the unity we have in Jesus.  Brothers and Sisters, we who are in Jesus the Messiah, who believe and proclaim the truth, who have been justified on his account, we are one.  As we stand firm against the enemy, this truth is the shoes on our feet.  Forget to put that unity on, let ourselves be divided, and when push comes to shove, you’ll have no traction to stand firm for Jesus.

Now, verse 16:

With it all, take up the shield of faith, with which you’ll be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one.

 

The enemy will throw his great lie at you like flaming arrows, trying to get you to doubt.  Brothers and Sisters, remember that the Spirit has given you the gift of faith.  Take it up.  Use it.  It will quench those flaming arrows as the lie is thrown at you.

I’ve been listening to a preacher for the last few weeks who routinely plays up the grey areas, who spends a lot of time blurring lines that should be clear, and who talks about doubt as if it’s the same thing as humility.  He’s undermining the church from within.  Now, in our faith, there are some legitimate grey areas and there are some legitimately blurry lines, but one of the overwhelmingly central themes of the gospel is certainty.  The evangelists and the apostles stress the reliability of their eyewitness accounts as proof of the gospel’s truth.  Paul never coddles doubt.  Instead, he points to the truth of the gospel and the absolute faithfulness of God witnessed through the scriptures and ultimately at the cross of Jesus.  Brothers and Sisters, steep yourselves in those scriptures, meditate on the cross, and take up the gift of faith the Spirit has given you.  It will defend you against the lies of the enemy.

Next, Paul writes, Take the helmet of salvation.

 

Surround your head—your mind—with the sure and certain knowledge that in Jesus you belong to the family of the Messiah and that when you passed through the waters of baptism, he delivered you, he saved you from the enemy—from sin, from death, and from the devil, just as he saved Israel from Pharaoh when he took his people through the Red Sea.  Dear Friends, the lie has no power over those who have been delivered from its master.  Keep that central truth in your mind.

And, finally, Take the sword of the spirit, which is God’s word.

 

The other pieces of armour defend us from the enemy’s great lie, but this is our one offensive weapon.  There’s something to that.  How often do we charge into battle for Jesus wielding other things?  We charge out there wielding political clout or good works—and that’s not to say that there isn’t a place for those things—but, Brothers and Sisters, the thing that will ultimately defeat the enemy and transform this world is this sword of the spirit, what Paul calls the word of God.  That and that alone.  Everything else follows that, is derivative of that, is in some way secondary to that.  But what does Paul mean?  We often talk about the whole Bible as the word of God, but Paul has something narrower in mind here, which he’s already defined in 5:26, where he writes about the word as that by which Jesus has made us clean.  Specifically, what Paul is talking about is the gospel: the good news about Jesus, crucified, risen, ascended, and Lord.  John gives us a vivid picture of this in Revelation, Jesus riding out with the sword of his mouth and his people following behind, charging into the darkness of the world with the light of the gospel until the whole world has been transformed and brought into the light.  It’s an amazing thing.  The work that Jesus began at the cross, continues as his people go out into the world to proclaim who he is and what he has done, to overcome the enemy’s great lie with the truth.  It’s huge and it seems impossible that we can do it—and of course, no one generation of Christians will ever do it all at once—but that’s precisely the mission that Jesus has given us.  He doesn’t expect us to do it on our own power or authority.  We declare his word and we do it in the power of his Spirit and, Brothers and Sisters, that’s the only way we will ever do it.  But we know that his word does not return void and we know that he did not send his Spirit in vain, so we know that he will cause our work, done in faithfulness, to bear fruit, even if we don’t always see it.

And then, finally, knowing how hard it is to do this—and knowing that the enemy and lie were going to drop on the churches like a ton of bricks in the not very distant future—Paul reminds them in verse 18:

Pray on every occasion in the Spirit, with every type of prayer and intercession.  You’ll need to keep awake and alert for this, with all perseverance and intercession for all God’s holy ones.

 

And he—the one writing to them to stay strong in the Lord, he knows the struggle he faces and so he also asks:

And also for me!  Pray that God will give me his words to speak when I open my mouth, so that I can make known, loud and clear, the truth of the gospel.  That’s why I’m chained-up as an ambassador.  Pray that I may announce boldly; that’s what I’m duty-bound to do.

 

Brothers and Sisters, pray.  As we face the enemy, pray for faith and pray for wisdom, pray for understanding and pray for the words to say.  Steep yourselves in the scriptures and in the great story of God and his people and of Jesus and the cross and the empty tomb and then pray for his church and pray for the wisdom and the words and the courage to tell the story and to proclaim that Jesus is Lord.  Pray, pray, pray and when you think you’ve prayed enough, pray, pray, pray some more, because the more you pray the more you entrust yourself and your vocation to God.  The more you pray, the less you will rely on yourself and the more you will rely on the word and the Spirit to do their work.

Again, as I said earlier, I think we’ve had a tendency—because we’ve been out of the crucible of tribulation for so long—to overly spiritualise this passage.  Paul had a real attack by the enemy in mind.  It was an attack that would seriously challenge the fledgling churches and in which many would even find themselves literally taking up their crosses as the followed Jesus.  We’re not in that place and I doubt we in North America will face anything nearly that bad in the foreseeable future, but things are getting worse and they will get worse still.  It’s vital that we put on the armour of God, it’s vital that we take up the sword of the spirit, the word, the gospel, and it’s vital that we be a people of prayer, because that’s the only way through—it’s the only way to survive and it’s the only way we will ever advance the kingdom.  Brothers and Sisters, gospel light awaits us on the other side of the darkness.  So come to the Lord’s Table this morning, eat the bread and drink the wine, and remember that Jesus has died and that he has risen, remember that you belong to him, that in him we belong to each other, and be strengthened in faith as we remember his sure and certain promises to us.  Be strengthened, not with your own power, but with the strength of his might that you might stand firm.

Let’s pray: Merciful Lord, grant to your faithful people pardon and peace; that we may be cleansed from all our sins, and serve you with a quiet mind; strengthen us with faith as we recall what you have done for us in Jesus, your son, and send us out into the world in faith, equipped to stand firm against the enemy.  Through Jesus our Lord we pray.  Amen.

The Twentieth Sunday after Trinity: Wedding Clothes

St. Matthew 22:1-14

by William Klock

“The kingdom of heaven,” Jesus said, “is like a king who made a wedding feast for his son.  He sent his servants to call the invited guests to the wedding, but they didn’t want to come.”

The Pharisees scowled.  Jesus was on a roll.  He had been ever since he’d ridden into Jerusalem on a donkey on Sunday with the crowds hailing him as the son of David—the Messiah.  Then he went to the temple and not only yelled out an angry rebuke at the people working there, he started flipping tables and drove out the men selling the animals people needed for their sacrifices.  It had brought the whole place to a stand-still.  The next day he came back to the temple like he’d done nothing wrong.  When the priests and elders confronted him, he told them a story about two sons.  Their father sent them out to work in his vineyard.  One of them at first told his father “No,” but after he’d thought about it, he eventually got to work.  The other son cheerfully said he’d do the work, but never actually did it.

As soon as Jesus started the story, everyone knew what he was getting at.  If you told a story in Israel about a vineyard and a father and his sons—those were all images from the scriptures—everyone knew the father is the Lord, the vineyard is his kingdom, and the sons are Israel.  They recognised the imagery.  They knew who was who.  But they didn’t understand—or, really, they did, but Jesus wouldn’t possibly make that sort of accusation against the priests and elders.  “Explain yourself,” they demanded.  And Jesus did.  “You, the leaders of Israel, you’re the son who cheerfully said he’d do the father’s work, but never actually did it.  The son who at first refused, but eventually came round and did his father’s work—he’s the tax collectors and prostitutes.  Wise up.  Those ‘sinners’ are the faithful sons going into the kingdom ahead of you!”

And then, just to make things even clearer, he told them another story.  This is the one about man who planted a vineyard and then rented it out while he went on a long journey.  At the harvest he sent his men to collect his produce, but the tenants refused.  They beat and killed the servants.  The man sent more of his men and the tenants killed them, too.  Finally, the man sent his son.  Surely the tenants would respect him.  But, no.  When they saw it was the son, they had even more wicked thoughts.  “If we kill the man’s heir, then we can claim the vineyard for ourselves!”  So they killed the man’s son.

“What do you think the vineyard owner will do?” Jesus asked.  And with some trepidation—because they knew, it was obvious, that they were the tenants and Jesus was the son—they answered, “He’ll kill the wicked tenants and give the vineyard to someone else who will give him the harvest.”  “That’s right,” Jesus said.  They had to have known what was coming next.  “God will take his kingdom from you and give it to a people who actually bear the fruit of the kingdom.”  Even though they knew it was coming, the Pharisees couldn’t believe their ears.  Over and over Jesus was condemning them—the leaders of Israel.  And not just condemning them.  He was threatening them with God’s judgement.  Them!  How dare he?  They were the faithful ones.  They were the ones devoted to the Lord.  They were the ones devoted to the torah.  And Jesus, this would-be Messiah did everything wrong.  He healed on the sabbath, he offered forgiveness apart from the temple and sacrifices, he ate with tax collectors and sinners.  And he had the nerve to accuse them of unfaithfulness!  It was like Jesus wanted trouble.  They were furious.  They wanted to have him arrested, but the crowds loved Jesus and there’s no way it could happen when they were around.

But Jesus just keeps on going with the stories.  Again, today’s gospel from Matthew 22.  “The kingdom of heaven,” Jesus said, “is like a king who made a wedding feast for his son.  He sent his servants to call the invited guests to the wedding, but they didn’t want to come.”

Again, they knew who all the characters in the story were.  The wedding feast and the great banquet were symbols from the prophets.  The king was the Lord.  The invited guests—that was Israel—especially Israel’s leaders.

Jesus was telling the story everyone in Israel longed to see happen in real life.  As he had once rescued their ancestors from Egypt and led them into a land of milk and honey, so the Lord would one day rescue her from the Romans and usher in a golden messianic age.  Isaiah had written:

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples

         a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine,

         of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.

And he will swallow up on this mountain

         the covering that is cast over all peoples,

         the veil that is spread over all nations.

He will swallow up death forever;

and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces,

         and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth,

         for the Lord has spoken.

It will be said on that day,

         “Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us.

         This is the Lord; we have waited for him;

         let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.” (Isaiah 25:6-9)

This was the Lord’s promise to them.  He’d done it in the past and he would do it again.  They were sure of it.  Because the Lord is faithful.  And every year at Passover they ate the great meal that symbolised the renewal of his covenant with them.  The Lord would do what he had promised.  They looked forward to it with eager anticipation.

But Jesus doesn’t tell the story the way they told it.  The king was indeed preparing the wedding feast for his son.  And he was sending out the invitations.  But as Jesus tells the story, the guests who were invited didn’t want to come.  The Pharisees (and the priests and scribes and elders knew that meant them).  And this was dumb, because they most certainly did want to come.  In fact, they expected to sit in the places of honour because they had been faithful.  But Jesus goes on:

“Again, he sent out other servants, with these instructions: ‘Say to the guests, Look, my banquet is ready, my bulls and fatted calves have been slaughtered, everything is prepared.  Come to the wedding!’  But they ignored him.  They went off.  One went to his own farm and another went to see to his business.  The others grabbed his slaves, abused them, and killed them.”

This was starting to sound just like the story about the vineyard!

“The king,” Jesus went on, “was angry and sent his army to destroy those murderers and to burn their city.”  And they’re thinking, “Really, Jesus?  The Lord is going to destroy us and burn down our city?  That’s absurd.  We’re his sons!  We’re the ones who will stand by while the nations are judged and destroyed and burned.  You’ve got it backward.”  Jesus went on, “But there were still no guests to celebrate the wedding of the king’s son.  So the king said to his servants, ‘The wedding is ready, but the guests didn’t deserve it.  Go to the roads leading out of town and invite everybody that you find to the wedding.’  So the servants went off into the streets and gathered together everyone they found, the bad and the good alike.  And the wedding was filled.  The tables were crowded with people reclining around them.”

This is what Israel knew was coming—eventually, someday, somehow, because the Lord had proved himself to be faithful—and most people expect that the Messiah would usher in that day.  And here was Jesus, the one the people had hailed as Messiah on Sunday.  He was the son, who’s wedding the feast honoured, but he was also the gatekeeper at the door.  And the Pharisees and the scribes and the priests and the elders once again knew what he was getting at.  Here was the Messiah—or at least a guy who claimed to be the Messiah—and yet they couldn’t brush off his claims too quickly, because so much of what he did really was Messiah stuff, and that had to really have them fuming—so here was the Messiah telling a story in which they, the leaders of Israel, were left out.  Not only that, twice now Jesus had told stories in which the Lord had come in judgement on them—killing them and burning their city, Jerusalem.  And now, instead of them feasting at the Lord’s banquet, it’s the rabble and the tax collectors and the prostitutes.

The Pharisees wouldn’t tolerate much more of this.  A day or two later they finally decided to conspire to have Jesus arrested and executed.  That, they thought, would prove whether he was the Messiah or not.  When he was dead, that would prove they’d been right.  That would prove his claims were false.  Little did they know…

But in the meantime, Jesus wasn’t quite finished with his story.  The faithless leaders of Israel have been judged and executed, but there’s more.  Back to the wedding feast.  Picture all the people reclining around the table, feasting, laughing, singing, enjoying themselves and all dressed in their best, beautiful and handsome wedding clothes.

“So,” Jesus goes on, “the king looked out of the feast and saw all the people reclining at the tables and having a good time.  He admired all their fancy clothes.  It was a wonderful sight, but then the king frowned as he spotted a man—one man, over there—who wasn’t wearing the same beautiful wedding clothes as everyone else.  The king got up and made his way through the feast to that man.  ‘Friend,’ he said to the man, ‘how did you get in here without wedding clothes?’  And the man was speechless.”

He knew he was in trouble.  As much as this king was full of grace and rejoiced to see even sinners enjoying his feast, he’d also shown himself to be a stern judge.  When the original guests refused him, he killed them and burned their city.  He rejoiced to welcome sinners, but they had to put to on their wedding clothes to belong.  Jesus goes on, “Then the king said to the servants, ‘Bind him, hand and foot, and throw him into the darkness outside, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.”  And then Jesus simply ends his story with the explanation, “For many are called, but few are chosen.”

So the first part of Jesus’ story is pretty easy to understand, especially when we’ve just read the other stories he told to the leaders of Israel.  The Messiah came to his people, he came to lead them into the Lord’s great feast, and the leaders of the people rejected him and now the Lord’s judgement is barrelling towards them like a freight train—or, more accurately, like—very much like—the Roman army.  Instead, the king’s banquet is filled with the people no one expected—with the common people who had never seen the inside of a palace and with sinners—the people no one would touch, people like tax collectors and prostitutes.  Why?  Because they were the ones who received Jesus as Messiah.  Simple, ordinary people, nobodies, like Zechariah and Elizabeth, like Mary and Joseph, like Simeon and Anna, like the people who had gone out to hear John preaching in the wilderness and repented and who were baptised in the Jordan.  And, too, people like Matthew and Zacchaeus, tax collectors who repented and believed that Jesus really was the Messiah who would usher in the kingdom, sinners who met Jesus, who heard the good news, and who decided that they wanted to be part of God’s new creation.  That part of the story is pretty straightforward.

But what about the man without a wedding garment?  The first part of the story was a warning for the unfaithful, the hypocritical leaders of Israel who rejected him.  But this second part is a warning to those poor people, those ordinary people, those repentant tax collectors and prostitutes whom the Lord welcomed into his feast in the place of the leaders.  It’s a warning that just because you made it into the feast, doesn’t mean the need for vigilance, for perseverance, for faithfulness is over.

In the final scenes of Revelation, John brings us back to this language of being called and chosen and to the imagery of the great wedding feast.  Jesus’ people—the wedding guests—would find themselves in a time of tribulation.  The leaders of Israel—and later the Greeks and Romans—would lash out at them, would pressure them to abandon Jesus.  Eventually faithless Israel would be judged—destroyed and burned just as Jesus said—and later the Greek and Romans too—but would Jesus’ people stand firm for him and for his kingdom, would they keep proclaiming the good news in the meantime?  Would they be dressed for the wedding feast when it finally came?  But what are those wedding clothes?  Again, John helps with that.  He describes the banquet in Revelation 19:

Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out,

“Hallelujah!

For the Lord our God

         the Almighty reigns.

Let us rejoice and exult

         and give him the glory,

for the marriage of the Lamb has come,

         and his Bride has made herself ready;

it was granted her to clothe herself

         with fine linen, bright and pure”—

for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.

 

And the angel said to me, “Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb”

 

Notice that the bride is clothed in fine linen representing the righteous deed of the saints.  Brothers and Sisters, when we are baptised into Jesus, he baptises us with his Spirit and his Spirit makes us new.  The Spirit renews our minds and regenerates our hearts.  He takes away our old desires for sin and for self, and sets our hearts on loving God and loving each other.  In short, the Holy Spirit prepares us to be part of God’s new creation, to be part of the world finally set to rights.  And while we wait for the consummation of that new creation, the Spirit makes us heralds of that kingdom.  He fills us with God’s own life and causes us to bear the fruit that Jesus so struggled to find in Israel.  And the Spirit enables us to persevere.  And that, I think, is specifically what Jesus is getting at in his story about the man without a wedding garment.

Revelation shows us the banquet, but before we get there we see the saints, filled with God’s Spirit, persevering as his witnesses—first in those decades between Jesus’ ascension and the judgement and destruction of Jerusalem, and then in the years leading up to the judgement of the pagan nations, of Greece and Rome.  Jesus knew that his people would suffer as he had, that they would face the wrath, first of unbelieving Israel and then of the pagan nations, as they stood firm, as they proclaimed the good news that he was crucified, risen, and Lord.  They would be tempted to give up.  They would be tempted to compromise.  But when the day came to usher his people into the banquet, Jesus would recognise his bride by her wedding clothes, by her perseverance and her righteous deeds.  These are the clothes that the song in Revelation 19 says she was granted to clothe herself with—persecution, martyrdom, and Christ-like suffering.

And so the man without a wedding garment serves as a warning.  Many would hear the good news, many would be baptised, many would be faithful followers of Jesus, even showing the fruit of the Spirit and doing all sorts of good works.  But when tribulation came, when the pressure came, they failed to stand firm.  They compromised or they forsook their Lord.  They bowed to the pressure to be circumcised or they offered a pinch of incense to Caesar—there were and still are lots of ways to compromise our witness to Jesus and the gospel—and that’s just what they did.  When the trials came, they took the easy way out rather than suffer for the sake of their Lord.  When faced with martyrdom, they chose life today over the death that leads to life eternal.  They were willing to follow Jesus as long as there was little or no sacrifice, but when they finally had to actually take up their crosses and follow him, they chose to walk away.  They did not truly love their Lord with heart, soul, mind, and strength.  They were not the people of the Spirit they claimed to be and were not fit for God’s new creation.

Again, I think Jesus’ story and the part about the man without a wedding garment was aimed very specifically at the people of the fledgling church called to witness Jesus the Messiah in those violent decades between his ascension and the fall of Jerusalem, but it also serves more generally as a warning to us.  I think of St. Paul, who shouted out those words in our Epistle just a few weeks ago: new creation!  Brothers and Sisters, that’s where Jesus is taking us.  By his death he has forgiven our past, the past that has made a mess of this creation.  In his resurrection he has unleashed new life and by plunging us into his Spirit, he has made us new, preparing us to take part in this world when he has finally set everything to rights.  But in the meantime, he has called us and through his Spirit he has equipped us be heralds of his new creation and of his good news.  As I said last week, as he has united us with himself, Jesus calls us to share in his roles as prophet, priest, and king.  And as it got him into trouble with the world, the flesh, and the devil, it will get us into trouble with the world, the flesh, and the devil.  The more faithful we are, the more it will bring the scorn, rejection, and abuse of those who are invested in this old age that is passing away.  The more faithful we are, the more likely they will be to lash out.  It was Jesus’ promise: As they have persecuted me, so they will persecute you.  But we also have his promise if we stand firm—a promise of life, a promise to wipe away our tears, a promise of the age to come, a promise of life forever in the presence of the Lord.  And like Israel of old, we are not left without tangible signs of the Lord’s promise.  Brothers and Sisters, remember your baptism by which you have been united with Jesus, by which your sins are forgiven, and by which you have been filled with God’s own Spirit.  And come to the Lord’s Table and as you eat the bread and drink the wine, remember God’s promise to us.  Here he reminds us that we are his people, forgiven and made new at the great cost of his own son’s life.  And here he gives a foretaste of that great feast and that new world that waits for us in that time when the church, because of her faithfulness, has finished her gospel work and when Jesus has put every last enemy under his feet.

Let’s pray: Almighty and most merciful God, in your bountiful goodness keep us, we pray, from all things that may hurt us; that we, being ready both in body and soul, may cheerfully accomplish those things that you command; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

The Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity: The Son of Man

St. Matthew 9:1-8

by William Klock

St. Matthew writes in our Gospel that Jesus got into a boat and crossed back over the Sea of Galilee to his own town.  He must have been tired.  Matthew says in Chapter 5 that Jesus left Nazareth and went to live in Capernaum.  It was a town on the shore of the Sea Galilee.  He travelled the length and the breadth of Galilee teaching in the synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing the diseases and illness of the people who came to him.  And lots of people came to him.  He met Peter, James, and John there and called them to be his disciples.  And word went out, not just all around Galilee, but even throughout neighbouring Syria.  So wherever Jesus went, the crowds followed him.  Wherever he went, the diseased and the possessed came for healing.  All through Galilee, all through the Decapolis, even when he travelled down to Judea and Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley.

Most recently he preached a long sermon to the crowds—three whole chapters of Matthew’s Gospel—and then escaped with the disciples out onto the sea.  You remember the story.  Like any other preacher, he was exhausted.  He fell asleep in the  boat.  Then a storm came up and the disciples panicked.  They were all going to die and there was Jesus, fast asleep.  But Jesus calmed the storm.  There was always something for him to do.  And there was no rest when they got to the other side.  Practically before they could get out of the boat two demon-possessed men met them on the road.  Jesus cast the demons into a herd of pigs—which made him unpopular with the owners of the pigs—who ran into town and brought the whole town to confront Jesus and send him away.  So, now, back into the boat, back across the Sea of Galilee, back to Capernaum.

I suspect they got back during the night, because Mark tells us that Jesus managed to get a few days of peace and quiet and rest before people figured out he was back home.  But as soon as word got out that Jesus was home, the crowd showed up at his house.  So many people gathered in the street as Jesus preached, that you couldn’t get anywhere near the door.

And that posed a problem to four friends.  They had a fifth friend who was paralysed.  When they heard Jesus was back in town, these four men went and got their friend and carried him, cot and all, to Jesus’ house.  Jesus was healing everybody else.  Surely he would heal their friend.  If they could get to him, that is.  And they couldn’t.  Imagine them trying to push their way through the crowd.  There was no way they’d ever get through the crowd, not while carrying their friend on a cot.  And that’s when they see the stairs going up the side of the house to the roof.  (Remember that in those days, your roof was extra living space when it was hot.)  They have an idea.  They take their friend up to the roof and they start jabbing at it with sticks and kicking at it and digging at it with their hands.  The roofs of most people’s houses in a town like Capernaum were horizontal timbers with a layer of rushes or palms covered over with mud or plaster.  They broke it all apart and it didn’t take them long to make a hole in the roof big enough to lower their friend on his cot, and that’s exactly what they did.

But imagine Jesus, in the house, preaching to the crowd and wondering what in the world was going on when bits of mud and plaster and rush and palm started falling on him.  And pretty soon he and everyone else were looking up as these men tore a hole in his roof.  I wonder what went through Jesus’ head when he saw that.  He was tired.  His rest had been cut short.  The crowd was one thing, but he really didn’t need some yahoos tearing up his roof.  “Great!  There goes the damage deposit,” he might have mentally sighed.  But pretty quickly, as they lowered their friend to him, he saw what was going on.  And I think Jesus probably smiled.

And that’s because Matthew writes that Jesus saw their faith and if Jesus was anything like me and most of the other pastors I know, the exhaustion, the frustration of not having a break, the annoyance at having these guys destroy his roof, I think it all would have melted away, because seeing the faith of these men made it all worth it.  And looking down at the paralyzed man, Jesus says to him, “Have courage!”  In other words, “Don’t be afraid.”  Because I imagine some people might be afraid if their friends just tore a hole in the Messiah’s roof to get them inside.  And Jesus says, “Your sins are forgiven!”

Now, that’s not what we might expect Jesus to say to this man.  Judging by Jesus’ other encounters, we’d expect him to say something like, “Get up and walk; your faith has made you well.”  But instead, he tells him that his sins are forgiven.  That’s nice, but he’s still lying there paralysed on his cot.  What’s going on?  Well, Jesus is using this as a teaching opportunity, just as he did with so many other situations.  He’d healed people more times than anyone could count at that point, and that was a sign that the Messiah had come and that God’s kingdom was breaking in to the world.  But what did that really mean?  Because everyone had their own ideas about the Messiah and about the kingdom—and, most important, how they could have a share in it.  They needed more than just to see miracles.  And Jesus saw a group of scribes there in his house that day and that made this a perfect opportunity.  Maybe they were legitimately curious to hear what Jesus had to say or maybe they were there just to criticise or report back to the priests or the Pharisees, but, right on cue, they hear Jesus’ words and he can see their outrage.  He could see how they scowled as they grumbled to each other about how blasphemous this was.  “Who can forgive sins except God?” they say to each other in Mark’s telling of the story.

They were out of earshot of Jesus, but just as he could see the faith of the paralysed man’s friends as they lowered him through the hole in his roof, he could see just the opposite in the grumbling scribes.  And so he calls over to them, “Why are your hearts so intent on evil?” he asks.  You can imagine that getting them even more worked up.  “We’re not the evil ones!” they say back.  “You are…you…you…you blasphemer!”  But Jesus goes on with the teaching moment and says to them, “Which is easier to say, “Your sins are forgiven,” or to say, “Get up and walk?”  But so you may know that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—and now he turns back to the paralysed man—“Get up, take up your cot, and go home.”

And the paralysed man got up, took up his cot, and went home.  I think there was probably a little more to it than that.  He probably stretched a bit and moved his arms and legs around and maybe jumped up and down a few times.  I think he probably laughed and yelled and gave a hug and many thanks to Jesus, but Matthew doesn’t get bogged down in those sorts of details, because his point is—as usual—that when Jesus healed the man, he was healed.  When he told him to get up, to take his cot, and to go home, that’s exactly what the man did.  And if that’s all that had happened, the scribes would have had nothing to complain about.  Maybe they even would have been happy to see the man healed.  At worst, they would just have been annoyed to see that Jesus had such authority over sickness—that he was really doing Messiah things—but that he wasn’t doing other parts of the Messiah job the way they thought he should.

What really stuck in their craw was Jesus declaring the man’s sins forgiven.  That’s what made them mad.  Even for the Messiah, as far as they were concerned, that was too big a claim.  To heal the paralysed man?  That was great.  But if he had sins in need of forgiveness, his friends should have taken him to the temple in Jerusalem for that.  The priests there were the only ones with the authority to offer sacrifices for sin and to declare someone forgiven.  But the crowd understood and Matthew makes a point of saying that the crowd was afraid—afraid in the sense that they were awestruck by what had happened and knew that somehow and in some way the God of Israel was at work in and through Jesus—as if they’d just witnesses one of those great and awe-inspiring events from the Old Testament that no one in Israel had seen in hundreds and hundreds of years.  Matthew says they saw what had happened and that they praised God for giving such authority to men.

The story is sort of the whole gospel story in a nutshell.  Jesus teaches and he heals—he does the things the Messiah was supposed to be doing.  But he does them the wrong way and the Jewish leaders condemn him for blasphemy.  But then he exposes, for everyone around to see, that their hearts are full of wickedness.  He heals the man and in doing that he points everyone to the resurrection and to the day when God finally sets the world to rights and, somehow, everyone with faith in Jesus will be caught up in that act of new creation and share in the life of God.

But the heart of the story is the part about the forgiveness of sins and the authority that Jesus claimed to do it.  I wonder if this teachable moment popped into Jesus’ head as the plaster rained down on him and the man was lowered through the hole.  He probably had an apologetic look on his face—like, “I’m really sorry, Jesus, for the hole in your roof.  Please forgive me and my friends.”  And Jesus realised that this was the perfect moment to say something about forgiveness—because this man and his friends and, in fact, all of Israel, that’s what they really needed: forgiveness, not for making a hole in his roof, but for far more serious sins—for idolatry and for greed and for faithlessness and for all the ways they’d failed to live out their covenant with the Lord.  Israel needed a lot of things—just like the paralysed man did—but most of all she needed forgiveness.  In that, the paralysed man represents Israel and all her wrong expectations of the Messiah.  The Jews wanted the Messiah to solve all their problems, for some that was healing sickness, for others it was casting out demons, for some it was getting everybody to keep the law better, and for others it was bashing Roman heads and destroying the pagan gentiles.  But not very many people understood that none of these things was the real problem.  The real problem was sin.  The people had been unfaithful to the Lord.  They had failed to be the people he had called them to be.  And forgiveness, that’s what would pave the way to set them and, eventually, everything else to rights.

So, again, the heart of the story is that statement by Jesus that the son of man has authority on earth to forgiven sins.  When Jesus calls himself the “son of man”, he’s drawing on an image from Daniel 7.  The book of Daniel is about faithfulness in the midst of exile.  Israel had been defeated and the people taken off to Babylon. Worse, some like Daniel, were pressured to compromise, to bow to a pagan king and to pagan gods—to give up on the God of Israel and to give up on his promises.  And some did just that.  But Daniel stood firm and the Lord gave him a vision of his enemies—those pagan kings—cast down, of the God of Israel taking his throne, and the son of man “coming with the clouds of heaven…to be given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him” (Daniel 7:13-14).  And yet, when Daniel asks what the vision means, he is told that this kingship and dominion “shall be given”—not to a single person, but “to the people of the holy ones of the Most High; their kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom and all dominions shall serve and obey them” (Daniel 7:27).

The son of man in Daniel’s vision was a symbol for the faithful remnant of God’s people—for those who stood firm in their faith in the God of Israel, who remembered his covenant, and who refused to bow to pagan gods and kings.  So when Jesus referred to himself as the son of man, this is what the scribes (and everyone else) would have been thinking of.  And this is why Matthew says at the end that the people praised God that this authority has been given not to a man—Jesus—but to men, plural.  Because up to this point, Daniel’s vision had yet to be fulfilled.  The Maccabees, for example, had claimed to be that faithful remnant, but their kingdom didn’t last.  The people who were that faithful remnant—people like Zechariah and Mary and Joseph and Simeon and Anna, although they were probably too humble to actually claim being the faithful remnant—people like them knew all too well that the Lord had yet to grant them anything like authority and dominion.  That’s what Mary’s song, the one we call the Magnificat, is all about.  But here Jesus identifies himself with that vision.  In him the son of man is finally being granted that authority and dominion—that kingship that everyone thought of in connection with God’s kingdom and the world finally being set to rights—and Jesus isn’t just saying it or claiming it.  He proves it when he tells the paralysed man to get up, take his bed, and go home.  For the people there that day, this was bigger than just the Messiah.  Jesus could claim to be the “son of man”, but the son of man wasn’t just one person, the son of man represented the faithful remnant in Israel, so there’s hope here.  It’s not just Jesus who will take his throne.  He will.  But that he will take his throne also means that the faithful will be vindicated as their enemies are cast down, and that they will finally share in that God-given authority and dominion.  His kingdom had come and they would be part of it.

This makes sense of another passage that often confuses people.  Twice Jesus said to his disciples “whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven”.  The first is in Matthew 16, after Jesus praises Peter for his confession, “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God”.  Jesus says to him and the others, “I will give you the keys of heaven”.  And in Matthew 18, in that passage about what we call “church discipline” and dealing with an unrepentant person, he repeats this statement about binding and loosing.  This is “son of man” stuff.  Jesus isn’t giving special authority to Peter alone because he’s going to be the first pope.  In fact, he’s not giving any special authority just to the apostles.  No, this is a gospel authority given to all of the faithful remnant, to everyone who by faith identifies with the Messiah.  This is a people who are not only given dominion—to rule alongside the Messiah—but who also share in his role as prophet and priest.  That’s what this binding and loosing language is about.  As prophets, Jesus’ people were to speak out against the sins of Israel and to rebuke her faithlessness, and as priests they were called to mediate the saving, the forgiving message of the gospel to the nation.

This was good news and it explains why the crowds wouldn’t give Jesus a break.  Israel’s scriptures were full of promises, but so many of them had yet to be fulfilled.  Promises like Daniel’s vision of the son of man.  Promises of forgiveness and of restoration and of dominion and authority.  Time and again, things would happen and people would think, “Oh!  This is it!”  But it never quite happened.  The remnant returned from their Babylonian exile, but things were never as they had been.  The Maccabees defeated the Greeks and established Judah’s independence.  And for a little while it looked like the Lord’s promises were on track to be fulfilled.  And then it all fell apart.  But the people knew that the Lord is faithful.  Time and again he had shown his faithfulness in Israel’s past and they knew he would be faithful in their future.  Every year they ate the Passover and remembered the Lord’s promises and looked forward in hopeful anticipation.  And now, here was Jesus, and he was actually doing the things the Lord had promised and he was doing them like no one had before.  They had faith.  They would be forgiven, their enemies would be cast down, and the faithful remnant—who were now gathering around Jesus the Messiah—in them the people of God would be restored and made new and would be the people the Lord had promised—a people full of his life and a people for the life of the world—prophets, priests, and kings.

Brothers and Sisters, this is still good news for us—maybe even more than it was for the people crammed in Jesus house that day.  In Jesus we see the faithfulness of God.  They were still looking forward in anticipation, but we can look back and see the whole picture and how Jesus fulfilled the Lord’s promises and that ought to strengthen our faith and ought to give us reason to look forward to our future in hope, knowing that what God has begun in Jesus he will surely finish.  The world is often dark, we can feel small and alone, sometimes it feels like we’re fighting a losing battle, but we can look back and see what the Lord has done and trust that he is faithful.  He always has been and he always will be.

And this is good news because it tells us who we are.  I think that too often we look at passages like this, where Jesus talks about himself as the son of man and we forget that it’s not just telling us something about Jesus.  The son of man represents a whole people.  Because Jesus has fulfilled the role of the son of man, that means that we his people, through our union with him, we have been caught up in that son of man identity, too.  Jesus has been given power and authority and dominion forever, and you and I share that with him.  It’s authority to live and to proclaim the good news that he has died, that he has risen, and that he has come again and that he brings forgiveness and life.  And it’s also the authority to speak as prophets to the world, to call out sin, to remind the world that the Lord will come in judgement to cleanse his creation, and to call men and women to repentance.  And hand in hand with that role, we have the authority of priests.  We’re not only prophets, but priests, mediating the good news of Jesus and the life of God’s spirit—mediating the redemption Jesus has made at the cross—to a sick world, desperately in need of forgiveness and life.

Brothers and Sisters, think about that as you come to the Lord’s Table this morning.  The Table reminds us of the forgiveness and the life and the hope we find at the cross, but it should also remind us who we are in Jesus.  We are Daniel’s son-of-man people.  We are prophets, priests, and kings and we have been made so for the life of the world.  Seeing the faithfulness of God revealed in Jesus ought to move us—like the people that day in Jesus’ house—to give God glory and there is no better way to glorify him than to be the people he has made us in Jesus and the Spirit, a people who live and proclaim his good news so that the world might see and know his faithfulness and give him glory.

Let’s pray: O GOD, because without you we are not able to please you, mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts, that in his power we might be the gospel people who have made, that we might be faithful in making known your faithfulness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

The Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity: What do you think about the Messiah?

St. Matthew 22:34-46

by William Klock

I used to have a boss who prided himself on finding creative employees who were good at thinking outside the box.  When he interviewed them he’d always ask weird questions like, “How do you put an elephant in a refrigerator?”  (The correct answer is, apparently, “You open the door and put him in,” because no one said how big the refrigerator was.  Or he’d hand the prospective employee a big balloon and a small box and ask them to fit the balloon into the box.  The solution to that one was to let enough air out of the balloon that it would fit in the box.  Extra points if, instead of untying it, which a lot of people with big fingers couldn’t manage, you pulled a pin from the bulletin board a few feet away and poked the thick spot just under the knot, where the balloon wouldn’t pop.  That might be a good solution in a job interview, but it’s also just the kind of the solution a lot of people take when they’re confronted with Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?”  The full answer doesn’t fit in our box, so we let some air out of the balloon.  We leave out Jesus’ divinity.  Or we leave out his call to repentance and his demand for holiness.  Or we cut out all the things he said about judgement so that we’re just left with the warm-fuzzies.  However we do it, if our solution is to let some of the air out of the balloon, what we’re left with isn’t the real Jesus—and we inevitably end up with a false gospel to go along with it.

In our gospel today Jesus asks this same question of a group of Pharisees.  The Sadducees had just confronted Jesus with what they thought was a “gotcha” question and Jesus turned it back on them, leaving them nothing to say.  And now the Pharisees have their turn.  Look again at Matthew 22:34.  Matthew writes:

But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together.

 

This will be his last dispute with the Pharisees.  The next chapter, Chapter 23, is a long denunciation of the scribes and Pharisees.  It’s the beginning of the end.  They’ve been shut down by Jesus at every turn and will go off to plot to have him killed.  But first, Matthew tells us:

One of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.  “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”

 

The Sadducees took issue with Jesus over his teaching about the resurrection of the dead.  The Pharisees took issue with Jesus over his approach to the law.  They’d counted up all of the Lord’s commandments to Israel and the total came to 613.  There was some debate about which commandment was the most important, but for the most part, the Pharisees had this one figured out.  Israel’s “creed”—her daily prayer, and still her daily prayer as part of her liturgies for morning and evening prayer—was the Shema, Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”  And it goes on, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”  These Pharisees, however, seem to have expected Jesus to say something else.  I’m not sure what they expected.  They just expected that whatever he said about the law would be wrong.  But look at what he says in verses 37-40:

And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the great and first commandment.  And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

 

And there’s nothing here the Pharisees can argue about, and that leaves them frustrated and fuming.

Here’s why.  Think of it this way.  As Christians, as Jesus’ people, we know that when he rose from the dead, Jesus inaugurated a new age and God’s new creation.  It isn’t consummated or fully here yet, but one day it will be.  In the meantime, we’re the royal heralds of the Messiah, the King, called to live out the life and values of the kingdom here and now in the midst of the world’s brokenness and to proclaim that he will come again one day to finish what he has started—to call people to repentance and faith in preparation for the Messiah and God’s new world.  Consider that the Pharisees thought of themselves in a very similar way.  The Messiah would come to set things to rights and they were the ones heralding his return and calling the people to repentance—to a better and more rigorous observance of the torah—in anticipation of the Messiah’s coming.  They were, in so many ways, on the right track.  But their vision of the kingdom and the Messiah was just too small, too narrow.  It only included Israel and it misunderstood the purpose of the torah.  It was like they’d let half the air out of their Messiah balloon.

So Jesus and the Pharisees agree on this question.  They agree—at least on the surface—about the law: Love God.  Love your neighbour.  But how they do that is different from how Jesus does that and they know it.  That’s why they’re so frustrated with him.  The know that they and Jesus can’t both be right.  Jesus’ answer, in effect, is saying to them: You’re not loving God as you should.  And you’re not loving your neighbours as you should either.  Jesus’ is subtly—or maybe not so subtly—once again asserting his Messiahship, while call the Pharisees to repentance—to get in line with the new thing that Israel’s God is doing in their midst.  So they can’t argue with Jesus’ answer, but they’re still convinced he’s wrong.  They’re left frustrated and fuming.

So in this first part of our Gospel, Jesus gives them the answer they dare not question, but then he in turn asks them a question that they dare not answer—at least that’s how Bp. Wright rather brilliantly puts it.  With his answer about the law it seems like Jesus has shut up the Pharisees as soundly as he had shut up the Sadducees, but Jesus knew there was one more point that needed to be made.  What they understood of the person and ministry of the Messiah was just as important to the Pharisees as how they understood the law.  And so Jesus goes on to tie the two together.  Look at verses 41 and 42:

Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question, saying, “What do you think about the Messiah? Whose son is he?”

 

If the answer to their question about the law points to the ministry of the Messiah, then it makes sense next to ask just who they think this Messiah is or will be.  So Jesus points them in the right direction with that odd question about whose son they think the Messiah is.  He knew very well what their answer would be if he put the question to them that way.  Everyone knew that the Messiah was—or would be—the son of David.  In fact, that was one of the Messianic titles.  And the Pharisees answer just as we’d expect.

They said to him, “The son of David.”

 

And it’s the right answer.  Jesus has a way of showing everyone that they’re on familiar ground, and then using that to show how they’re looking at things through the wrong lens.  “Son of David” is the right answer, but now Jesus has to show them that this doesn’t mean what they think it means—or, at least, that how they understand it isn’t the whole picture. So Jesus replies in verses 43-45:

“How is it then that David, in the Spirit, calls him Lord, saying,

         “‘The Lord said to my Lord,

         “Sit at my right hand,

                  until I put your enemies under your feet”’?

If then David calls him Lord, how is he his son?”

 

That “The Lord said to my Lord” bit can be confusing.  It helps if we know that Jesus is quoting from Psalm 110.  It’s the most oft-quoted Psalm in the New Testament.  And if we go back to it you’ll see that in our English Bibles the first “Lord” is in small capitals.  That means that this is the “Lord” that refers to God.  It’s the title the Jews used instead of saying the divine name that was given to Moses: Yahweh, “I am”.  This important distinction between Lord and Lord is lost in the Greek version, which is what Matthew quotes from.  But if we understand this, then the passage starts to make more sense.  Instead of “The Lord said to my Lord,” we can read it, “Yahweh said to my Lord”.  It’s not just any two “lords” here; it’s Yahweh, the God of Israel addressing someone.  But who is that someone?  Who is “my Lord” referring to?

At this point, let’s just look at the whole psalm.  Again, this is Psalm 110.  Go ahead and turn there.  It’s titled “A Psalm of (or to or for) David”.

Yahweh says to my Lord:

         “Sit at my right hand,

until I make your enemies your footstool.”

Yahweh sends forth from Zion

         your mighty scepter.

         Rule in the midst of your enemies!

Your people will offer themselves freely

         on the day of your power,

         in holy garments;

from the womb of the morning,

         the dew of your youth will be yours.

Yahweh has sworn

         and will not change his mind,

“You are a priest forever

         after the order of Melchizedek.”

Yahweh is at your right hand;

         he will shatter kings on the day of his wrath.

He will execute judgment among the nations,

         filling them with corpses;

he will shatter chiefs

         over the wide earth.

He will drink from the brook by the way;

         therefore he will lift up his head.

 

So, first, “my Lord” is David.  The psalm is addressed to David, maybe written by a court musician or possibly a prophet like Nathan.  David is his Lord, his King, and he sings of what the Lord, Yahweh, the God of Israel, has promised to King David.  There’s no reason to think that this was intended to be a messianic psalm when it was written.  It speaks of God’s promises to David.  Yahweh, the Lord, seats him in a place of honour and gives him his sceptre—think of Samuel going out to anoint the lowly shepherd son of Jesse.  The Lord will give him victory over his enemies.  David was not of the priestly tribe of Levi, but the Lord, in making him King in Jerusalem (Zion), gives him the priesthood of Melchizedek, the priest-king of Jerusalem in the days of Abraham—and that kingly authority will be forever.  But then things are reversed.  As Yahweh has seated David at his right hand, now Yahweh places himself at David’s right hand to give him victory, to make him the instrument of his judgement and wrath on the nations.

It’s not hard to see how, many years later, this psalm came to embody the messianic hopes of Israel.  In a time when no son of David was on the throne and Israel was governed by fake Jews like Herod and foreign pagans like the Romans, the people looked to the promises of this psalm for hope.  The people longed for the son of David to return.  David’s throne—his kingly line—as the psalm implies, was to stand forever and the people knew that the Lord is faithful to his promises.  The people longed for the day when their God would judge the nations and so they sang this psalm in hopeful longing, sure of God’s faithfulness and looking for the day when the son of David would come with might to take up his throne.  The Pharisees sang this psalm, too, and longed for the Messiah.  This was their hope.  When they spoke of the Messiah as the son of David, they were looking forward to the great king who would come to bring God’s judgement and to defeat the nations.

But this gets back to Jesus’ answer to their question in the first part of the passage—the answer that pointed to the ministry of the Messiah that would finally set right the hearts of the people, that would finally enable them to truly love God and neighbour.  If the son of David is just a king who comes to crush the nations, what does that do to solve the heart problem of God’s people?  How does it solve the problem of sin and Israel’s inability to keep the law?  This should have been on the Pharisees’ radar.  They, of all people, knew how Israel struggled to be faithful.  They of all people knew how desperately Israel needed a change of heart.

So Jesus plays off the way in which this psalm had come to embody messianic hopes and that it was commonly attributed to David.  They understood the psalm to be about the son of David—the Messiah—and Jesus says, “Well, okay, that’s all well and good, but there’s more, because if in composing the psalm David refers to the central figure—the one you identify as his son—but calls him “my Lord”, how can that be?  How can the Messiah be David’s son and David’s lord (his master) at the same time?”

Jesus is, in fact, the son of David, but here he draws in another identification that we see throughout Matthew’s gospel.  Again, think back to Matthew 16 and Jesus’ question to Peter, “Who do you say that I am?”  And Peter responded, “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God”.  That was another option the Pharisees could have given in answer to Jesus’ question.  There was more than one facet to the Messiah, but hardly anyone was putting them all together.

The son of David is the great king, the one who will come in judgement to set all to rights by crushing the enemies of the people.  But there’s also the son of the living God.  In Matthew’s gospel the son of the living God is the representative of Israel.  This title, too, is drawn from the Old Testament Prophets.  This son will fulfil the Lord’s purposes for Israel where Israel has consistently failed.  This is the son who was called out of Egypt—remember how Joseph and Mary fled Herod?  This is the beloved son, the anointed servant of God—remember Jesus’ baptism and the descent of the Spirit on him?  This is the Israel who is obedient in the wilderness, who is consistently faithful to the Lord and to his commands—remember Jesus tempted by the devil?  This is the son of God who acts to make peace—remember the sermon on the mount and Jesus’ statement, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be sons of God”?  This is the son of God who is tempted to abandon his servanthood, first in the wilderness, then at the cross, but is faithful both times.

Eventually, a few chapters later, Matthew brings the son of the living God and the son of David together as Jesus stands before the high priest, Caiaphas.  “I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God,” the high priest demands.  And Jesus responds, “You have said so. But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven.”  Jesus brings together both of these “sons” in his answer.  He brings together the son of the living God story about the one who will stand as Israel’s representative, as the servant who will suffer for the sake of his people, and the story we see in Psalm 110 of the son of David, the great king who will rule over the nations with the authority of the God of Israel.  When we put these stories together we see Jesus as the Lord’s anointed servant, the son who humbles himself to represent the people, and who, because he has suffered and died, will be raised to God’s right hand where he will reign as both king and judge.  Jesus will be the King, because he was first the servant, and as King he will judge his people by that servant standard.  That’s what upset the high priest—Jesus’ claim that he would sit as judge over the leaders of Israel with the authority of the God of Israel.  The Pharisees—and so many other people in Israel—they wanted the King, but the servant wasn’t on their radar—and without grasping that Israel was called and created to be a servant people, they could never really understand—not really—what it meant to love God and to love neighbour.

But our Gospel lesson today, this final dispute with the Pharisees, is part of the story that gets us from Peter’s confession that Jesus is the son of the living God to Jesus’ claim before the high priest.  Who is Jesus?  Jesus himself draws on the narrative of the people of God.  He is the son of God who will represent the people in his suffering and death and he is the son of David, not just by birth, but because it will be on account of his suffering and death that he will be raised to rule at the right hand of God.

And, of course, this also redirects the people to the real source of their problems.  When they limited the identity of the Messiah to the son of David, they saw the gentiles, the nations, people like the Romans as their enemies—people the king could put to death with his sword and his army.  But when we bring in the son of God, the suffering servant, who dies and rises again, we see that what he’s really come to defeat are enemies common to Jew and gentile alike: sin and death.  The Romans, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Edomites, the Egyptians—the nations—were never really the real problem and destroying them was never really the solution.  Sin and death are the enemies—and they’re the common enemy of all humanity.  And so it’s then through this dual identity—both son of God and son of David—that Jesus opens the way for the salvation not only of Israel, but of the nations.

Matthew ends the passage in verse 46:

And no one was able to answer him a word, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

 

Jesus shut down the Pharisees once and for all.  The next we see of them, they’re plotting to have him killed.  And, of course, if they’d really understood what Jesus was getting at here, maybe they’d have thought twice.  Instead they help Jesus to fulfil his role as suffering servant.  They didn’t really understand.  Neither did the disciples.  Not at that point, anyway.  But that would change once Jesus has been raised from death and had ascended to the right hand of his Father.  Ten days later the Spirit descended on his disciples, just as he’d promised—not just as Jesus had promised, but just as the Lord had promised through the Prophets centuries before—and then they understood.  David died and was buried, but Jesus rose from death and is seated at the right hand of God.  Let me close with what Peter preached that day:

“Brothers, I may say to you with confidence about the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day.  Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants on his throne, he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the [Messiah], that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption.  This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses.  Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing.  For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says,

         “‘The Lord said to my Lord,

         “Sit at my right hand,

         until I make your enemies your footstool.”’

  Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and [Messiah], this Jesus whom you crucified.”  (Acts 2:29-36)

Let’s pray: Almighty God, gracious Father, we give you thank for your promises and for your faithfulness to them.  We think today especially of your promises to David and the Prophets that gave them a hope for your Messiah.  He is both David’s son and your own son, the true Israel, and in him we have forgiveness of sins and the life of your kingdom.  We pray that as we live the life he gives, we would also live in hope, knowing your faithfulness and trusting in your promises, and joyfully expecting—and participating in—the work of your Church, empowered by Jesus and the Spirit as we look forward to your renewal of all things.  Amen.

A Sermon for the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity: One

Ephesians 4:1-10

by William Klock

This week I updated the operating system on my computer.  It didn’t take long to discover that one of the most important applications I use—my Bible software—wasn’t compatible with the new operating system, so I had to upgrade that too.  Now, I’ve had that software installed for more than twenty years.  I read the manual for it way back then, got everything configured just the way I wanted it, and I haven’t messed with any of it since.  It just always does what I need it to do.  Then I had to reinstall it and after I’d done that I realised that I had absolutely no memory how it worked—not to mention that things had changed a lot in the new version I had to instal, so I had to take a trip back to the user’s manual so that I could get it set up and working the way I needed it to.  And as I was reading through the user’s manual—actually, in the intervening twenty-something years, it’s gone from a single document to an online library—I kept finding myself saying over and over, “Oh, yeah!  I forgot this software could do that!”  It’s really very sophisticated, but years ago I sort of figured out the basic features I needed, set it up for that, and then forgot about everything else.  Every once in a while I’d get a reminder.  I’d see someone blogging about how they use the software or I’d watch a YouTube video about it and it would occur to me that I’ve got a Ferrari, but I’m driving in the slow lane, but most of the time that’s all I really needed.

How often do we do that with Jesus and the Spirit and the gospel?  We hear the gospel and some particular aspect really speaks to us or really addresses the place we’re in at the time, but then we get a sort of tunnel vision and we can go for years focused almost entirely on that one narrow aspect of the gospel.  Or we hear the gospel and we realise just how big and how powerful it is, but maybe—a bit like me and my Bible software—we’re just not quite ready yet to explore those other things, so we settle down with the familiar and all but forget that there’s more to this great story.  Maybe we become narrowly focused on the gospel’s theme of forgiveness and forget all about the hope of new creation.  Or we become narrowly focused on its theme of justice, but we forget about mercy.  Or, vice versa, we focus so much on mercy that we forget about justice.  Sometimes we get so focused on the individual—the me-centred—parts of the gospel that we forget the corporate parts of it.  This seems to be why St. Paul wrote his letter to the Christians in Ephesus.  It’s hard to say if the problems Paul addresses were actually present in Ephesus or if he wrote this pre-emptively, knowing how other churches struggled with these things.  Either way, Paul takes them back to the basics of the gospel.  He doesn’t want them to forget.

In Ephesians Paul takes these people right back to what it means to be a Christian.  In Chapter 1 he reminds them that Jesus is their hope.  He’s the Messiah and he tells them, “When you heard the good news, when you believed in Jesus, he sealed you—all of you—with the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit is Jesus’ guarantee to you of the inheritance he has promised.”  And Paul says that God has done this that he might be glorified.

Paul also stresses the kingship of Jesus.  Jesus died and God raised him from the dead and gave him a throne—a throne and a dominion and a name above every earthly power.  Jesus is the world’s true King and the Church is his body, called to declare his death and resurrection and called to proclaim the good news that he is Lord until every enemy has been put under his feet.  We brought death into the world when we sinned and rebelled against God, but in Jesus he has unleashed life.  Jesus has begun the work of recreation and setting creation to rights and part of that setting to rights is manifested visibly in the unity of the Church.  And that’s Paul’s main point here.  Again, we don’t know if things were actually falling apart in Ephesus, but Paul had seen things fall apart—in the churches of Galatia, in Rome—particularly as the churches struggled with the old divide between Jews and gentiles.

In 2:14 Paul reminds them that Jesus is their—and our—peace.  In his flesh he’s made those who were near—that’s the Jews—and those who were far—that’s the gentiles—one in himself.  Through his cross he’s put to death the hostility that once kept the two apart.  Through Jesus we all have access to the Father in the one Spirit.  We’re one household, he writes—and the house is God’s.  We are his temple, each one of us brought from our particular background, each of us with our unique stories to tell, but brought together by the Spirit, made holy, and made a dwelling place for God.  Brothers and Sisters, that’s what the Church is to be.

And now in our Epistle today from Chapter 4 Paul sums things up for the Christians in Ephesus with three basic points.  First and foremost, they’ve been called to follow the King; second, that they’ve been given and equipped with God’s amazing grace so that each has a part to play, a role to fill in serving the King as the Church; and finally, he stresses the unity they have in Jesus.  It’s a wonderful reminder that unity isn’t something we create; it’s something Christians naturally have in Jesus.  Our duty is to cultivate and to guard that God-given unity.  Numbers two and three, the grace and the unity, tend to take care of themselves when we remember number one—when we remember that we’ve been called to follow the King.

Look at Ephesians 4:1-3.

I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord [Paul is writing to them from prison], urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

 

This is something that Paul stresses over and over in his epistles.  We’ve been called to follow Jesus and that means walking—living with each other and bearing with each other—humbly, gently, and patiently in love.  Friends, that’s how God has dealt with us.  He created all things good.  He provided everything human beings need to live.  His creation was perfect.  And we made a mess of it.  We’re the ones who doubted his goodness.  We’re the ones who disobeyed his commands.  We’re the ones who corrupted his creation.  And yet the almighty Creator of the universe who is perfectly good and perfectly holy has been patient with us.  To set his creation to rights, he is fully within his own rights to simply wipe us from its face.  But, instead, he entered his creation as one of us, humbling himself, taking up our flesh and dying the death that we deserve so that we might be forgiven and restored to his fellowship.  So that we might be set to rights and have a share in his new creation.  As Jesus said, he came to those condemned, not to heap more condemnation on us, but to redeem us.

Now, if that is how the Lord has dealt with us, shouldn’t we deal humbly, patiently, and lovingly with each other?  It’s a struggle.  It’s not easy.  Christians can gossip just as well as non-Christians.  We rub each other the wrong way.  We do things that offend.  We make mistakes.  Forgiveness can be hard.  And, yes, we’re called to correct each other, but we don’t correct each other by gossiping to others.  We don’t correct each other by ignoring them or putting them out of our lives.  We correct in love and with the hope of restoration—just as God has corrected us.  Friends, when something happens between you and someone else in the Church, is your first thought to take offense, to get upset, to assert your rights—or is it to maintain the unity Jesus has given us?  Is it to keep the bonds of peace the Spirit has forged?  We struggle to be patient, humble, and loving and we struggle because we have taken the grace of God for granted, because we’ve forgotten that God has been patient and humble and loving with us.  This is why we’re reminded each Sunday as we come to his Table, that what he has done for us in Jesus and the cross—the vertical element of the gospel—always needs to work out in how we live with each other—the horizontal element of the gospel.

Paul goes on in verses 4-6:

There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

 

One, one, one, one, one.  One body, one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and he’s Father of all—and this is our one call.  The call of the gospel at one point reached each of us.  At some point each of us, through a parent, a friend, someone, heard the proclamation that Jesus died and rose again, that he is Lord and the world’s true King.  At some point each of us heard that.  It was a call to repentance, a call to turn away from everything that is not Jesus and to find our hope, our security, our calling, our life in him.  At some point each of us believed.  We affirmed that Jesus is Lord—not Caesar, not money, not sex, not power, not self.  Jesus is Lord and we gave him our eternal allegiance.  At some point the call reached us and because we have believed we’ve now been called to live out and to carry that gospel, that good news to the world.  As Adam was called to steward the Lord’s creation, so we, through Jesus and the Spirit, have been made new to steward God’s new creation and to be its heralds, calling the people around us to hear the good news, to believe, and to join us.

Remember what the word “gospel” meant in the Old Testament.  It was the proclamation of good news. It was the good news that the army had won a great victory against the enemy.  It was the good news that a people in exile could return to their homes.  And remember what the word “gospel” meant in the Greco-Roman world.  It was the news spread by imperial heralds that a new king had taken the throne to rule the empire.  And “gospel” for the first Christians rolled all of that together.  Good news, they proclaimed!  Jesus has won the victory over sin and death!  Good news!  Jesus is Lord!  Jesus is the world’s true King!  Good news!  The long exile is over.  God is making all things news and summoning us to live in his presence again.  Brothers and Sisters, the gospel is not good advice.  What we proclaim isn’t a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.  We’re not going out to tell people that Jesus is another option on the religious smorgasbord.  It’s good news.  We are heralds of the news that Jesus has risen from the dead, that his kingdom is breaking in, that it is unleashing life into the world, and he is King and no other.  The good news is a call to the world to repent, to turn aside from everything that is not Jesus, and to take hold of him in faith, lest we be handed forever over to death.

Paul says that there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all and to proclaim that message the one Spirit has created one body, one Church to act as the herald of the kingdom.  In the early Church, the divide between Jew and Gentile was threatening that unity, but Paul reminds the Ephesians that Jesus has created a new family.  This is what so much of Chapter 2 is about, but it’s a theme that runs through the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament.  God doesn’t have two families or two peoples.  Jesus came in fulfilment of the prophecies given by God as far back as Abraham.  Through Abraham’s family he would restore a knowledge of himself to a world that had forgotten him.  Through Abraham’s family he would bring blessing to the world and set his Creation to rights.  Israel failed, but Jesus came, Abraham’s son, and he did what Israel had failed to do.  He gathered a new Israel around himself, starting with his twelve disciples, and opened to Jew and Gentile alike.  At Pentecost he gave his law, not written on stone tablets this time, but written on the very hearts of his people by the Spirit.  We, the body of Jesus the Messiah, represent God’s future and so we must guard our unity from whatever might drive us apart.  Paul writes about guarding our Jesus-centred unity the way soldiers guard a city from an enemy.

It’s hard, I think, for us to grasp just how important unity is in Paul’s teaching and in his vision of the Church.  We’ve become so used to the idea of division.  Drive though even a small town and you see church signs representing our fragmentation: Baptist, Lutheran, Anglican, Pentecostal, Roman, Presbyterian and so on.  Even our own Anglican tradition is fragmented.  Sometimes the divisions have allowed us to grow so far apart and our languages and practices have become so different that it can even be hard to recognize fellow Christians.

Some divisions take place over serious, gospel-compromising issues.  Those of you who started this church know that well.  The Anglican Church of Canada had compromised the gospel.  It was promoting sin as virtue.  Real Christians, real gospel people can’t remain in a church that has ceased to be a church.  Paul stressed many times that we are to have nothing to do with those who preach a different gospel.  In a situation like that, gospel unity has already been lost.

But what Paul is addressing here in Ephesians are the unnecessary divisions in the body.  The Ephesians all believed in the same Jesus and the same gospel.  The reasons their division were sinful was because they were over things that should not divide the body of Jesus.  The differences between Jew and Gentile should not divide.  The differences of socio-economic class or of race or language should never divide.  Our personalities, our priorities, even the wrongs we do each other should never divide.  Instead, we need to be patient, humble, and gentle with each other as we guard the unity we have by virtue of our shared life in Jesus.  This is what it means to be a gospel-centred people.  This is what it looks like to be stewards of God’s new creation in the midst of the old.

Our Epistle ends with verse 6, but let’s keep going just a little further.  In verses 7-11 Paul writes about the different gifts Jesus has given through the Spirit.

But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift. 

Paul’s about to launch into a list of some of the many gifts the Spirit gives to equip the Church for our calling to proclaim Jesus and his kingdom, but before he does that he quotes from Psalm 68:

Therefore it says,

“When he ascended on high he led a host of captives,

         and he gave gifts to men.”

(In saying, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth?  He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.)

 

The psalm is about Moses.  In the Exodus the Lord defeated the Egyptians and led Israel out of her bondage to Pharaoh.  When the people had camped at Mt. Sinai Moses ascended up the mountain and when he came down he had the law written on stone tablets.  And Paul sees Jesus doing something similar.  Moses points to Jesus.  The old covenant points to a new and better one.  In his death and resurrection Jesus has led us in a new exodus from our bondage to sin and death.  After he rose from the dead Jesus ascended to take his throne to rule from heaven until every enemy has been put under his feet.  But instead of coming down as Moses did with the law, Jesus gave his people the gift of God’s own Spirit.  When Moses came down the mountain with the law God created a people for himself and just so, but on an even grander scale, Jesus has created a new people for himself in his ascension and his sending of the Spirit.  We are the people of whom the old Israel was a type and a shadow.  In our baptism Jesus plunges us into the Spirit, he frees us from our bondage to sin and death, he gives us life, he unites us in that one Spirit, and he gives us grace and equips us both for our life together as his people and for our mission as his people to proclaim his kingdom.  We are heralds of God’s new creation, given the task of calling the world into this new life in Jesus and the Spirit, as we make our way into God’s new world.

That’s what Paul is writing about here.  But it’s not just the Font.  It’s not just our baptism.  Each Sunday we come to the Lord’s Table.  In Baptism we reach out to Jesus in faith and are united with him by the Spirit for the first time, but each week we gather and in the Lord’s Supper we celebrate the sacrament of our continuing life in Jesus by the Spirit.  Here we come and as Jesus feeds us we eat of the one bread and drink of the one cup, again reminding us that as individuals we are united: one faith, one Spirit, one Lord, one God and Father of all.

Think on that as you come to the Lord’s Table this morning.  We share in the one bread and the one cup because we share in one baptism into Jesus by the Spirit.  Despite all of our differences, we are one and we’re one because we share a common life in the Lord Jesus, God himself, who gave his life for our sake.  Dear Friends, let the Lord’s call to his Table this morning be a reminder to guard the unity Jesus has given, let it be a reminder to walk in a manner worthy of his call—to bear with each other patiently, humbly, lovingly, graciously as Jesus has borne with us.

Let us pray:  Heavenly Father, as we asked in the Collect we ask again: may your grace always go before us and follow after us.  May we be so enveloped by the grace you have shown us in Jesus that we can’t help but share that grace with each other and with the world.  Give us grace to guard the unity we have in Jesus.  Give us grace to remember that we are one in him.  And strengthen us with your grace to proclaim to the world the truth that has brought us together: Jesus died and rose again.  He is Lord and life.  Amen.

The Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity: New Creation!

Galatians 6:11-18

by William Klock

We all know the experience of working hard to make something nice.  Maybe it was all the time you invested in it.  Maybe it was all the money you invested in it.  Maybe it was all the emotion you invested in it.  But it was so nice.  And you were so happy about it.  Maybe you were even proud of it.  And all it takes is thirty seonds for someone else to come along, undo all your hard work, and to make a mess of it all.  My parents painted the house and before the paint was even dry, my sister and I ran down the hallway with crayons on the wall.  You pour your heart and your expertise into building a business, then you retire and the people who take over run it into the ground.  It’s even harder when we’re talking about people.  A few months ago I was talking with a pastor friend.  Decades ago he worked with a group of people to plant a church.  He loved those people and faithfully shepherded them for years and they were a thriving gospel-centred church.  I know he was happy to see them thriving in the gospel from afar in the years after he left them.  But the last couple of years were painful.  The church got a new pastor who did not have the same gospel commitments.  He had capitulated to the culture, especially on issues of sexuality.  People left.  Earlier this year he tried to take what was left of the church into a more liberal jurisdiction and the whole thing imploded and the church is gone.  I think my pastor friend has shed many tears over the situation.

Paul was in that sort of position when he wrote his letter to the churches in Galatia.  He had travelled through Galatia, proclaiming the good news about Jesus in A.D. 47 or 48.  People there, both Jews and gentiles, heard and believed, they were baptised in Jesus, and pretty soon Paul was helping them to establish churches.  He spent time with them, he preached the good news, he discipled, he helped them find leaders for the churches.  Now it’s about a year later.  He’s back in Antioch or maybe on his way to Jerusalem, and he starts hearing reports of what’s going on in the Galatian churches.  It wasn’t good.  Some other people had come to them in those intervening months.  We have to read between the lines a bit to figure out who those people were, but it sounds like missionaries, probably from Jerusalem.  And those missionaries had led the Galatian Christians to compromise the gospel.  Faith in Jesus wasn’t enough, they claimed.  Faith wasn’t, for them, the key thing that marks out the people of God.  Obedience to torah, to the Jewish law, that, they said, is what marks out the people of God—so, yes, believe in Jesus, but if you’re a gentile, you’ll also have to be circumcised.  I fully expect that Paul wept when he heard this.  And he tried to correct them, but they wouldn’t listen.  And so, in his letter to them that we have in the New Testament, we get a real sense of the tension as he writes.  He was hurt.  He didn’t know how they would respond.  It doesn’t have the usual friendly greetings that are in his other letters.  It’s very to-the-point and it gives us a sense of his frustration.  And this really comes through in his closing words, which we read for our Epistle this morning: Galatians 6:11-18.

It starts in verse 11 with with what might seem like an odd thing to say:

See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand.

 

In the First Century most people were illiterate, or at best, barely literate.  If you wanted to send someone a letter, you hired a scribe to write it down for you.  But even a literate person like Paul would use a scribe to write his letters.  It’s a bit like being able to hand-write a letter today, but typing it instead to ensure it looks neat and professional.  The scribe would write down the letter in his impeccable script, then Paul would write a personal bit at the very end in his own hand.  And that’s what he does here, but instead of the usual personal greetings, he summarises and reiterates his gospel message to them again, this time in his own imperfect hand-writing.  It was that important.  Even as he’s made his argument through the letter, he can’t just leave it at that.  What matters above all—and it’s the heart of his argument, but just in case they missed it—what matters above all is the cross of Jesus.

There are all sorts of things in the world that differentiate and divide us.  We divide the world up into nationalities.  We divide the world up by ethnicity and race and language.  We divide the world up by our politics.  We divide ourselves up by our economics…by status, by colour, by culture, by language, by our likes and by our dislikes, by what we eat and what we don’t eat, by whether you’re a man or a woman—and now even by what we think a man or a woman is.  Paul grew up in and was steep in a culture where the vital distinction was whether you were a Jew or a gentile, but after his encounter with the risen Jesus, Paul realised that the great division—the one thing that not only divides the Church from the world, but that divides those who are willing to count the cost of following Jesus and those who are not, what marks out that great divide is the cross of Jesus.  Some of those other things that divide us matter, some don’t, some are just plain silly, but at the end of the day the one thing that really does matter, the one thing that divides the human race into two distinct groups is the cross of Jesus.  Look at what Paul writes in those big, clumsy letters of his in verse 12:

It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh who would force you to be circumcised, and only in order that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. 

 

What was going on?  And what did whether or not these gentile believers in Galatia were circumcised have to do with whether or not these “missionaries” were persecuted?  This was before the time of Roman persecution.  The problem was the Jews.  Paul writes earlier in the letter about his own past as a persecutor of the Church and he has implied that the present problem is similar.  Again, we have to do a little bit of historic research to get behind all of this, but what was most likely happening was that the predominantly Jewish Church in Jerusalem was coming under pressure from a rising tide of Jewish nationalism.  The Zealots were on the rise.  Eventually they’d revolt against the Romans and trigger the judgement that Jesus had prophesied.  In the meantime, the Jewish Christians were coming under fire for associating with uncircumcised gentiles.  There probably wasn’t much of that going on in Judea, but word was getting back about these churches popping up around the empire, many of them full of gentiles and this didn’t make the Jesus movement look good in the eyes of unbelieving Jews.  So “missionaries” were being sent out from Jerusalem to get these gentile believers straightened out—which meant getting them circumcised and, therefore, basically making them Jewish converts—so that they would look more respectable to people like the Zealots back in Judea.

It was dumb.  The problem for people like the Zealots wasn’t really the gentiles, it was the gospel.  But when trouble, persecution, and opposition face the Church, there are, sadly, always some folks who think that if we compromise on whatever the problem issue is, we can placate our enemies.  In this case, unbelieving Jews were upset at the inclusion of unclean gentiles in the mostly Jewish church, so they thought they could solve the problem by, even if only superficially, they first made those gentiles into Jewish converts.  But this undermines the gospel, because the gospel isn’t just good news for Jews.  It’s good news that by its very nature makes the distinction between Jews and gentiles obsolete.  In trying to placate non-believers, these folks were losing that good news, that gospel.

If anyone understood the awfulness of persecution for the sake of the cross of Jesus, Paul understood it.  Think of the list he would go on to write in 2 Corinthians 11:

Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one.  Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure.  And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches. (2 Corinthians 11:24-28)

Plenty of that lay in his future, but already, Paul knew what it meant to count the cost of discipleship and when we read that list written a few years later we see that he was no hypocrite when he called the Galatians to count the cost.  He also knew how foolish this insistence on circumcision was.  After all, Paul had been a Pharisee—and not just any Pharisee, but one of the greatest and a member of the Sanhedrin.  Paul knew what it meant to keep the law.  As he’d write years later to the Philippian Church, when he was a Pharisee, he had been blameless before the law.  And that’s just it.  Circumcision makes sense—at least after a fashion—if you intend to keep the whole law.  But that’s not what these Judaising missionaries were demanding the gentiles do.  They didn’t expect these gentiles to actually keep the law.  It was all for show.  And it wasn’t even for the benefit of these gentile brothers.  It was for their own benefit.  “We need you Greeks to cut off your foreskins so that our own skins will be safe back in Jerusalem.”  And so Paul rebukes them:

For even those who are circumcised do not themselves keep the law, but they desire to have you circumcised that they may boast in your flesh.

 

And that’s the other thing.  It’s not just the hypocrisy involved, but that these folks will go back to Jerusalem and boast about the converts they’ve made.  They’ll try to make the Zealots think that Church is really all about making Jewish converts of the gentiles.  The Zealots would never have believed it, but these folks were willing to try in the hopes of avoiding persecution.  And where is faith in that?  I think Paul makes a subtle but important point here.  He writes about keeping the law, which he wrote earlier is and always has been about faith.  And he knows that these folks are going to end up boasting about all the guys they got circumcised amongst the gentiles…but boasting always stands opposed to faith.  Boasting is about what we’ve done.  Faith is about what God has done through Jesus and the cross.  He goes on in verse 14:

But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus the Messiah, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.  For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.  (Galatians 6:14-15)

Paul had been captivated by the gospel.  Here was a man who could boast about his accomplishments.  A Hebrew of Hebrews and a Pharisee of Pharisees.  But in light of the cross, it was all nothing.  No Jew had ever had any reason to boast.  The Lord’s covenant had always been about mercy and grace and it was there in the scriptures all along.  Jeremiah had written centuries before, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord” (Jeremiah 9:24).  But the cross drew this truth out for Paul.  The cross is God’s work, not ours, and to boast in the cross of Jesus is to acknowledge that nothing we can do will ever lead anywhere but death.  Our faith, our confidence can only ever rest in the grace of God who gave himself for the life of the world.  And, of course, the cross where Jesus gave his life for the sake of his sinful and rebellious people, for the very people crying out for his death, that cross is the central act of God’s grace.

Paul wrote earlier in the letter that if we are in Jesus—if we have identified with him by faith—we have been crucified with him.  So not only has Jesus been crucified.  And not only have we been crucified with him.  But now Paul goes so far as to say that the world—the kosmos—has been crucified with him.  Jesus took this fallen, broken, sin- and death-filled world to the cross.  It was crucified with him.  Pontius Pilate thought he was sentencing Jesus of Nazareth to death that first Good Friday, but in fact it was sin and death that stood under that sentence.  The old cosmos died that day and when Jesus rose from the grave, God’s new creation was born.  It’s not done yet.  It’s not consummated.  But it’s been inaugurated and like yeast, it is making its way through this world and bringing transformation as the gospel spreads and as God’s Spirit works in his people.  And so Paul can boast that his old self died with Jesus on the cross along with the rest of the world, not because of anything he had done, but despite him and only because of the glorious grace of God.  Those old division—like the Jew-gentile divide that so concerned those Jewish believers in Jerusalem—those old divisions no longer matter in light of the cross, because the old world has been crucified with Jesus and God’s new creation has begun.  The sentence structure in Paul’s Greek—which our translations smooths over—is telling.  He writes that “neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision”…and then he just breaks off and blurts out “new creation!”  He does the same thing in 2 Corinthians 5:17.  “So if anyone is in the Messiah—new creation!  Everything old has passed away, everything has become new.”  He lays out the old divisions and distinctions and then just sort of shouts over the top of them “New creation!”  Those things just don’t matter any more.

Brothers and Sisters, new creation!  Remember that.  These folks were getting bogged down in something that no longer mattered—and it was undermining the cross, the very thing, the most important thing!, that does matter and it’s like Paul just shouts over the top of their argument: new creation!  It’s his way of sort of dramatically reminding them (and us) what matters and what doesn’t.  God’s new creation was born that first Easter morning and it continues in every one of Jesus’ people through the life that God’s own Spirit gives us, and it will go on—Paul stresses this in Romans 8—it will go on until the whole creation is one day set free from its bondage to share in the freedom of God’s children.  The life of the Spirit is the down payment, the earnest, the foretaste today of that future day and that future day will come as Jesus’ people go out into the world to proclaim the cross and its transforming and life-giving power—God’s new creation.

That—at least in part—is why this was such a big issue for Paul.  It wasn’t just that the cross is the most important thing ever; it’s that the message of the cross as the most important thing ever and its power to transform the world is dependent on us living the life of the Spirit in faith and proclaiming to the world that the cross of Jesus is the most important thing ever.  Brothers and Sisters, if we let other things get in the way of that—the way these folks let their fear of the Jews and this irrelevant matter of circumcision take centre stage—if we do that, it undermines our very ability to be the people God has made us in Jesus and it undermines our gospel mission.  This is why those churches that capitulate to the culture around them always and inevitably become irrelevant, dwindle, and eventually die.

This is why Paul is always taking his readers back to Jesus and the cross.  This is why we need always to be brought back to Jesus and the cross.  This is why our liturgy brings us back to Jesus and the cross.  This is why we celebrate and eat the Lord’s Supper every Sunday.  Because Jesus and his cross are everything.  It’s how the world is set to rights and how each of us is born anew.  New creation!  And yet somehow we forget.  And so we need Jesus and his cross always before us, because you just can’t see Jesus and his cross and at the same time hold onto the things of the world that were crucified with him at the cross.  Years later Paul would write to the Ephesians:

He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it.  (Ephesians 2:15-16)

What sets apart the Jew from the gentile and the gentile from the Jew no longer matters.  What matters is the cross, by which God has unleashed his mercy and grace into the world and through which he invites us all to share in his promise of forgiveness and of being set to rights and of living in his presence.

Then he writes in verse 17:

And as for all who walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God.

 

Paul closes with a very Jewish benediction for those who have been listening and who take all of this to heart.  Peace and mercy.  Hebrew blessings announced shalom and chesed.  One later synagogue benediction goes this way, “Bestow peace, happiness and blessing, grace and loving-kindness and mercy upon us and upon all Israel, your people.”  Paul’s not-so-subtly saying, “If you want to be part of the people of Israel, if you want to know the Lord’s blessings—his peace and mercy—keep your eyes on the cross of Jesus the Messiah.  It’s not about circumcision or Sabbath or any of those other things.  By Jesus, his death and resurrection, God has created a new people for himself.

Brothers and Sisters, keep Jesus and the cross before your eyes, at the centre of your faith, and let him be the hope you proclaim.  Nothing else ultimately matters.  Do not be distracted and do not be tempted to compromise the message.  Circumcision is no longer an issue for us, but there are plenty of others.  We’re tempted to water down or to compromise the gospel in other ways.  Our culture likes to think that it’s not what you believe that matters, but simply that you’re sincere.  The gospel confronts that with the exclusivity of Jesus and reminds us that he is what matters.  Our culture tells us that we are what’s important and that we are enough in and of ourselves, but the gospel confronts that and reminds us that nothing we can be or do is ever enough and it’s Jesus who matters above all else.  Our culture calls us to invest in a million things, and the gospel confronts us with the fact that Jesus is what matters and that God has given our time and our talent and our treasure for his glory.  Our culture insists that we can do whatever we want, but the gospel confronts us with a call to holiness and purity, reminding us that in Jesus and the Spirit we are part of God’s new creation.  And that may be the best way to look at all of this: new creation.  The gospel is God’s promise to set this broken world to rights and by the gospel he makes us part of that new creation—and it’s his new creation, it exists on his terms, he defines what is good and true and beautiful, not the world and not the people who stand opposed to Jesus and his cross and who sneer at the promises of the gospel.

And that brings us to Paul’s final note.  He writes:

From now on let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.

 

Let “no one”, not meaning the world, but these people who claim to belong to Jesus.  Paul knew that the world would be out to get him, because he would never compromise his proclamation of the good news of Jesus and the cross.  That was to be expected, because he knew he was challenging the systems and the values, the kings and the gods of the old world, and he knew they would fight back.  Paul was martyred some fifteen years later at Rome.  He knew first-hand the cost of discipleship and his body showed it.  Scars from stoning and beating and all the other abuse he took for the sake of the gospel.  He new the cost of discipleship.  He never compromised.  He knew that to domesticate the gospel to the culture was to lose its power to give life, was to strip it of it’s promise of hope.  He never watered down the message, because he knew that above all things, what really matters, the one thing that is the only hope this world has, is the cross of Jesus the Messiah.  Brothers and Sisters, may the same always be true of us.

Let’s pray: Keep, O Lord, your Church, with your perpetual mercy; and, because without you our human frailty cannot but fall, keep us ever by your help from all things hurtful, and lead us to all things profitable to our salvation; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.