Living Words

The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity: Led by the Spirit

Galatians 5:16-25

by William Klock

If the COVID pandemic proved anything, it was that people don’t like to be told what to do.  We value our liberty and we rankle when we realise there may be limits to it.  We should value our liberty.  The problem is that liberty doesn’t work when it’s not exercised in the context of love.  Think of our Gospel last week and the lawyer’s summary of the law: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind and your neighbour as yourself.  The law restrains, whether we’re talking about the torah or the law of the Spirit.  It limits liberty.  The torah taught Israel what it means to love God and to love neighbour.  And it was necessary because this love is what’s missing from fallen human hearts.  And yet even with the law Israel struggled.  The law was external.  It was carved on stone.  It could reveal what is wrong with the fallen human heart, it could restrain the wickedness of the fallen human heart, but it could not of itself fix the fallen human heart.  Something greater was needed.  And so the new covenant, instead of giving us another law carved on stone, gives us God’s own Spirit who indwells us and writes his law of love on our hearts—love for God and love for neighbour.  And in doing that, the Spirit sets us free from the law to live a liberty shaped by love.

Let me read the first words of our lesson from Galatians again.  This is Galatians 3:16.  St. Paul writes:

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.

 

How does that work?  I think it’ll help if we back up a few verses to get some context.  Look at verses 13-15:

For you were called to freedom, brothers.  Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.  For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another.

 

You were called to freedom.  Think back to the Exodus, when the Lord delivered Israel from Egypt.  He liberated the people from Pharaoh’s slavery, he set them free—but he did that because in reality they belonged to him.  They were his people.  They didn’t belong to Pharaoh.  And so in setting them free from Pharaoh, the Lord claimed them as his own—“Israel is my firstborn son”, remember that?—and he took them into the wilderness to worship, to serve him.  And he gave Israel the law to set them apart from the nations, to mark his people out as holy.  While it the law may seem constraining to us, for Israel the law was actually a symbol of freedom.  It represented their deliverance from Pharaoh and it marked them out as the people of God.  The law was a beautiful thing and the Jews loved it dearly.

And so it’s no surprise that we see some of the problems we do in the New Testament.  As gentiles heard the good news about Jesus, as they saw in the gospel the faithfulness of the God of Israel, they came to the Messiah just as the old prophets had said they would.  Here was a god completely unlike the gods they knew as Greeks and Romans.  But what was to be done with them?  Remember that those first Jewish believers in Jesus didn’t think of believing in Jesus as having changed religions.  At that point there really wasn’t any Judaism versus Christianity thing.  Being a Christian was simply a new way of being Jewish.  And so as gentiles began entering the church it posed a problem.  Some of these Jewish believers didn’t want them at all.  They were unclean.  The Lord solved that problem for Peter.  The gentiles were to be welcomed.  But then the assumption was that, well, they first had to become Jews.  They had to be circumcised.  They had to start observing the law.  The first church council was called to address this and they settled the matter, largely thanks to Paul.  Gentiles were gentiles and they had no obligation to the torah.  But this was still difficult for many.  The problem didn’t go away.  There were Jews who believed in Jesus but were still putting their confidence “in the flesh” as Paul puts it—in these outward signs that had historically marked out God’s people.  And there were gentiles who were being taught that they had to do the same.  This was happening in the churches of Galatia, so Paul wrote these words to them: You were called to freedom.

This new exodus in which Jesus had led his people carried the old exodus even further.  In the Messiah, the Lord had accomplished something even greater than he had in Moses.

And Paul’s first point here is that in Jesus we have been freed to love.  He reminds us of the law, summarized in those familiar words: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbour as yourself.  In pouring out God’s Spirit on his people, Jesus has set us free from the law written on stone and inscribed this law of love on our hearts.  Israel struggled.  The law written on stone told her what she was supposed to love, but the fallen human heart has other ideas.  But for the Christian, God’s own Spirit indwells the heart, making it new, and turning its desires towards God and then towards neighbour.  Here Paul only mentions the love-your-neighbour-as-yourself part, because the specific problem in these churches was what he refers to as biting and devouring each other.  We don’t know specifically what he means by that, but it seems to have involved some kind of squabbling and fighting.  Whatever the specifics, this biting and devouring, instead of witnessing the renewing work of the Spirit, revealed that these folks still had a serious heart problem.  It raised the question: Were they really free?  Or were they still enslaved to sin?  And it also risked the church.  If church members are biting and devouring each other, will the church even survive?  Some of us have seen the results of this sort of thing first hand as churches implode or split.

In this case, Paul’s diagnosis of the problem is that these men and women have forgotten that what really marks out—and has always marked out—the people of God is faith, and specifically for God’s new covenant people, faith in Jesus.  Clearly they’d known this at some point in the past, but they’d allowed these “Judaisers”, these false teachers to lead them astray and they were back to emphasizing the marks they once bore in their flesh—things like what they ate or observing the Sabbath and, especially, being circumcised.  And so Paul rebukes them: Is it any wonder you’re devouring each other?  After all, you’ve been putting your confidence in the flesh when you should have been putting it in God’s Spirit.

Look at verses 16-22.  Here’s what Paul writes:

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.  For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do.  But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.  Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

 

The flesh—that’s the human heart that hasn’t been renewed by God’s Spirit—the flesh is all about self.  The flesh needs the law to remind it constantly what its values and loves and desires are supposed to be.  The flesh needs the restraint provided by the law.  Even then, as Israel illustrates so dramatically over her long history, the law isn’t enough.  But the Spirit changes everything.  Jesus pours God’s Spirit into his people and the desires of our hearts are transformed.  The Spirit sets us free from the burden of the law.  And yet, what do Spirit-filled people do?  They do the law anyway.  They love God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength.  And they love their neighbours as themselves.  That transformation is what takes place when we place our confidence in Jesus.

If you place your confidence in the flesh, well you’ll get what a fleshly heart desires—even if you do have the law, because it’s just not enough.  You get the biting and devouring that was taking place in these churches.  Paul lists a string of truly awful sins and I don’t think he intends to say that all these things were actually happening in the Galatian churches.  He’s trying to get their attention.  After all, they were mostly Jewish people who knew the law and many of the things Paul lists here are things that would have appalled an observant Jew.  But he works that biting and devouring into the list of really bad stuff: things like rivalry, dissensions, jealousy, enmity—the more mundane sins that often break up Christian fellowship and churches—right along with sorcery and orgies.  His point is that even these more mundane sins come from the same place as sorcery and orgies and they’re what you get when you put your confidence in the flesh instead of Jesus and the Spirit.

It’s a remarkable thing that Paul gets at here.  It’s important to think about what we believe marks us out as God’s people.  Get this wrong and the whole thing falls apart.  God’s law was a good thing.  Circumcision and Sabbath were good things.  But if that’s where you put your confidence you’re going to be in a world of hurt.  And it isn’t just a matter of Judaising as it was in Galatia.  Christians today can put their confidence in all sorts of good things as well: our charity or our church attendance, our Bible reading and prayer, and even our holiness and our spiritual giftings.  But none of those things is Jesus any more than circumcision or Sabbath is.  What marks out the people of God is faith in Jesus.  And if you remember from our study of Romans, Paul stresses there that even in the old covenant, even though the law and things like circumcision did mark out the people as belonging to the Lord, what was really important was the faith behind them—even in the days of the law, faith was the real mark of God’s people.  It always has been and always will be.

In contrast to the works of the flesh, Paul lists the fruit of the Spirit.  I think it’s worth noting that he describes these characteristics as fruit.  You can’t force fruit to happen.  You can’t just glue apples on a tree or grapes on a vine.  Fruit is cultivated and it comes naturally when a plant is healthy.  And just so these are the things that grow naturally out of a true and living faith in Jesus and a heart indwelt by God’s Spirit.  Look at verses 22 to 24:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.  And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

 

Not only is love there at the head of the list, but the rest of the list: joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control are all things that flow from and reinforce love.  The works of the flesh destroy, but in the fruit of the Spirit we see the life of the God at work in his people.  And here’s what’s really interesting.  Remember that Paul was dealing with Jewish people who were stuck on the law.  Not only did they insist that they had to obey it, but they were insisting that gentile believers had to as well.  And Paul writes here that against these things there is no law.  In other words, if your life—and if the collective life of the Church—is characterized by the fruit of the Spirit, we will have fulfilled the law.  It will have no condemnation for us.  Because the fruit of the Spirit is the epitome of love for God and love for neighbour.

In verse 24 Paul stresses this transformation.  Those who belong to Jesus the Messiah, those who are part of his family, part of the renewed people of God, he writes, they have crucified the flesh and everything that goes along with it.  Our broken, selfish, sin-filled hearts have been put to death with Jesus.  Like the Israelites leaving behind Pharaoh’s slavery as they passed through the waters of the Red Sea to new life with the Lord on the other side, so we have left our fallen hearts—sometimes Paul writes about our “old man”—we’ve left that behind when we passed through the waters of baptism.  As we rise from our baptism, we are raised to a new kind of life with Jesus and the gift of the Spirit is the earnest, the down payment on his promise of resurrection, that day when Jesus finally makes everything new and evil and death are finally wiped from creation completely.  Until then the Spirit keeps our hearts focused on God and grows his fruit.

Of course, we all know—and it’s why Paul had to write this to the Galatians—we all know that none of this just happens.  There will come a day when sin and temptation and selfishness are gone forever, but until then the flesh wars with the Spirit and so he writes in verse 25:

If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit.

 

It’s not good enough to just say that we live by the Spirit.  Every Christian is indwelt by the Spirit.  You can’t be a Christians without him.  But we need to actively “keep in step” with the Spirit, as the ESV puts it.  It’s sort of a military image of soldiers marching in step with their drill sergeant or their commander.  The battle with the flesh will never be won if we aren’t diligent in pursuing the life that Jesus has given us.  Put things into neutral, do what comes naturally and the flesh inevitably reasserts itself.  And it’s important to remember that the battle won’t be won by our own moral effort.  That’s just putting our confidence in the flesh.  We’ve got to keep our eyes on Jesus, we’ve got to put our faith in him, and we’ve got to put our confidence in the Spirit who breathes life into our hearts and causes us to bear fruit.

And, again, Paul’s point here within the context of Galatians, is that if they would do this—if they would maintain this gospel-centred, this Jesus-centred life rather than putting their confidence in things like circumcision, they wouldn’t have to worry about the law anymore, because love for God and love for neighbour come naturally from such a life centred on Jesus and in step with the Spirit.

Now, the Galatians’ problem isn’t really our problem—although there are parts of the modern church where something very similar crops up—but we need to hear this as much as they did.  Paul steers us down this path—the way of Jesus and the Spirit—and we have our own tendency to fall into the ditches on the side of the road.  There are a lot of Christians who stress the fruit of the Spirit, who emphasise love and peace and kindness, but who end up neglecting the Jesus part of the equation.  Often they’re troubled by the exclusivity of the gospel.  Sometimes it’s the gospel’s call to a kind of holiness that is increasingly at odds with the world around us.  Brothers and Sisters, without faith in Jesus and an uncompromising commitment to the gospel, the fruit of the Spirit part of the equation will fall apart.  And once we compromise Jesus and the gospel, not only does the fruit of the Spirit part fall apart, but we end up losing the church as well.  That sort of Christianty degrades into do-gooderism and since it’s ultimately rooted in the flesh, you eventually lose even the do-gooderism.

If we don’t fall into that ditch, we can easily fall into the ditch on the other side of the road.  That’s the ditch where we stress the importance of Jesus and the gospel, remembering just how vital they are and knowing we can never compromise them, but we fail to keep in step with the Spirit.  We have truth, but the fruit of the Spirit has withered on the vine and we end up trying to defend the truth of Jesus and the gospel with the very fits of anger Paul lists amongst the works of the flesh.  We defend Jesus and the gospel in ways that cause strife and division within our own ranks, with other real Christians.

Brothers and Sisters, it’s vital to maintain a balance.  The truth of Jesus and the gospel is just as vital as the fruit of the Spirit.  And, vice versa, the fruit of the Spirit are just as vital as the truth of Jesus and the Gospel.  I think this is how Paul could write those words we read a couple of weeks ago to the Corinthians.  Remember that?  He was writing to a church that had rejected him, that told him not to come around or to write anymore.  They were worldly, there was serious sin being tolerated in their church.  Their worship was messed up and they were abusing the Lord’s Supper.  And yet when they demanded his credentials, he pointed back at them.  Those messed up, infuriating people were his credentials, because despite their failures and shortcomings, despite their failure to fully live into the gospel and walk in step with the Spirit, they did have Jesus and the Spirit and that was because Paul had brought the gospel to them.  And so he could write to them and stress the truth of Jesus and the gospel without compromise, he could rebuke them of their sins, but he could do it all out of a loving heart that throughout displayed the fruit of the Spirit.  Brothers and Sisters, let us walk by the Spirit.  Let us find our confidence in Jesus rather than the flesh, so that the fruit of the Spirit will grow in abundance, so that our love for God and love for neighbour are on full display.  Let us live in such a way that the law cannot condemn us.

Let us pray: Almighty and everlasting God, increase in us the gifts of faith, hope, and love; and, that we may obtain what you promise, make us love what you command; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity: A Priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan

St. Luke 10:23-37

by William Klock

“Behold,” St. Luke writes in Chapter 10, verse 25 of his Gospel.  “Behold, a lawyer stood up and put Jesus on the spot.”  That sort of thing happened a lot to Jesus and it was no surprise.  Even when he didn’t say it outright, it was obvious to everyone because of the things Jesus said and did, that he was making himself out to be the Messiah.  That made a lot of people angry.  Some, like the Sadducees, weren’t particularly keen on the whole Messiah thing, because if it was true, it probably meant that when and if the Messiah came, they’d lose their status as kings of the Jewish mountain.  The Pharisees—like most people in Israel—were hoping and praying for the Messiah.  Their problem with Jesus was that in some ways they could see that the Lord was clearly behind him.  No one else could do or say the things he was doing and saying, but then he was also doing things they thought the Messiah should not or would never do.  So people were always challenging Jesus.  And if they paid as much attention to the things he said in response to those challenges, people like this lawyer might have thought twice about challenging him themselves.  But this smarty-pants challenges Jesus anyway.  And he asks, “Rabbi, what am I to do if I want to inherit eternal life.”

Now, we need to pause there for a minute.  Because when this lawyer asked about inheriting “eternal life” he wasn’t asking, “How do I go to heaven when I die?”  The Jews expected the Messiah bring an end to the present evil age and to inaugurate the age to come—that age when all would be set to rights and the Lord would return to his temple and the people would live forever in his presence.  “Eternal life” wasn’t about the Lord taking his people away to heaven, but about bringing heaven to earth.  It was about the restoration of all things and the world set to rights like it had been before human beings rebelled and brought sin and death into the world.  And most people expected that God’s people—at least the good and faithful ones—would be part of it, while the nations, the gentiles, would be destroyed in a hail of the Lord’s judgement, fire and brimstone, or at least they’d be left in the outer darkness, wailing and gnashing their teeth.  Everyone knew that the Messiah would bring this kingdom so the lawyer is asking, “If you’re Messiah, Jesus, what do I need to do to have a share in your kingdom?”  And, again, he’s asking because Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners and that seems to be setting an awfully low bar for who is in and who is out—and, probably most important, it seems like Jesus doesn’t care about obedience to torah.

And Jesus, knows this is really about what torah means, so he dumps the question back on the lawyer.  And the lawyer responds with those words that even we know by heart, if for no other reason than that we recite them every Sunday as part of our liturgy: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself.”

And, much to the lawyer’s consternation, Jesus says, “Yes!  You answered correctly.  Do this and you will live.”  In other words, “Do this and when the Lord comes in judgement, you will live to see his kingdom the other side of it.”  To love God and to love one’s neighbour, the whole law boils down to that.  All the details and commandments are just the practical outworking of these two basic principles.  They’re both right there in the law itself: Deuteronomy 6:5: love God; and Leviticus 19:19: love your neighbour.  This love is what marks out and has always marked out God’s people.  It’s how he knows them—an abiding love for him and for neighbour borne out of faith in him and in his promises.

That should have been the end of it, but the lawyer can’t let it go.  He’s frustrated with the answer, because if obedience to torah is the way into the kingdom, what is Jesus doing hanging out and eating dinner with all the torah-breakers?  He knows that there’s something wrong with Jesus and he wants all the people gathered there to know it, so he pulls at this thread.  “Ah!  But who is my neighbour?” he asks—I expect with more than a little bit of smugness.  Because this is where everyone will see that what Jesus means when he talks about loving your neighbour isn’t what the scribes and Pharisees mean—and that Jesus’ is interpreting torah all wrong.

And “Who is my neighbour?” may seem like a dumb question to us, but that’s because we’ve all been raised on the story that Jesus tells here.  The lawyer, however, was raised on the teaching of the rabbis.  Jews only saw other Jews as their neighbours.  Pharisees, for the most part, really only saw other Pharisees as their neighbours.  One rabbinical saying ruled that “heretics, informers, and renegades should be pushed (into the ditch) and not pulled out”.[1]  Tax collectors and sinners, well, most people wouldn’t consider them neighbours and there was no question about were gentiles stood.

It’s the perfect opportunity for Jesus to tell another story and that’s just what he does.  “Once upon a time,” Jesus says, “a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and was set upon by robbers.  They stripped him bare and beat him and ran off leaving him for dead.”

Everyone could picture this.  They all knew the winding road that went down the mountain for Jerusalem to Jericho.  They knew it was dangerous.  They knew that it wasn’t wise to travel it alone.  In their day, the Roman army was having constantly to deal with the robbers that camped out along it.  A thousand years later it was still a problem and the Crusaders built a fort half-way up the mountain to protect pilgrims.

“A priest,” Jesus said, “happened to be going down the road.”  Oh, that’s good.  A priest will surely stop to help the man.  But Jesus goes on, saying, “When the priest saw the man, he went past on the opposite side of the road.”

A lot of people will say that this was expected, after all, the priest didn’t know if the man was dead or alive, whether he was Jew or gentile, and he couldn’t risk defiling himself and becoming unclean.  That would keep him from his priestly duties.  But the longer I think about this story as Jesus tells it, it’s pretty clear that Jesus’ story hinges on the expectation that the priest—a man who should be setting an example for Israel of love for God and love for neighbour—the story hinges on the expectation that he, of all people, would stop to help.  If anyone should care for the lost sheep of Israel, it’s Israel’s religious leaders.  But instead of stopping the priest goes out of his way to avoid this poor man.

“Next, came a Levite,” Jesus goes on.  “He saw the man too and went past on the opposite side.”  A Levite was a member of the priestly tribe, he just wasn’t an actual priest.  They took care of the temple and supported the ministry of the priests.  Again, this man wasn’t necessarily a leader of Israel, but we might still think of him as a holy man, so you’d expect this second man to stop and help.  But he doesn’t stop either.

The tension is building as Jesus tells the story.  On the one hand, even the lawyer knew that the priest and the Levite should have stopped.  But he—and probably most of the other people listening—were thinking of all the good justifications the priest and Levite would have for not stopping.  Leviticus 19:17-18, for example, equates one’s brother and a “son of your own people” with one’s neighbour.  The man was naked.  The priest and Levite couldn’t tell from his clothing if he was a Jew or not, so maybe they were justified in not helping.  And then there was Jesus ben Sira, the great teacher of wisdom.  The Pharisees stood very much in his tradition.  He had this to say on the subject:

Do good to a godly man, and you will be repaid…Give to the godly man, but do not help the sinner.  Do good to the humble, but do not give to the ungodly…For the Most High also hates sinners and will inflict punishment on the ungodly.  Give to the good man, but do not help the sinner.  (Sirach 12:2, 4, 6-7)

So, again, as much as the lawyer knew the priest and Levite should have stopped to help, the fact that he could think of any number of justifications for why they wouldn’t stop is starting to expose his hypocrisy—and that’s the brilliance of Jesus’ storytelling.

Jesus goes on and now he really gets everyone’s attention.  There was a formula to this kind of story.  We have the same kind of formula.  If I start telling a joke by saying that three men walked into a bar and that the first two were a priest and a minister, you all know before I even say it that the third will be a rabbi.  Well, in Jesus’ day there was a formula for story-telling that also included three men.  If the first two were a priest and a Levite, the third was supposed to be an ordinary Jewish layman.  So Jesus goes on:

“But then,” he says, “a travelling Samaritan came to where he was.”

That would have startled everyone.  “Wait…what?  A Samaritan?  No, Jesus, that not how the story’s supposed to go.”  But  that’s the point.  “When the Samaritan saw him he was filled with pity.  He came over to him and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine.  Then he put him on his own beast, took him to an inn, and looked after him.  The next morning, as he was going on his way, he gave the innkeeper two dinars.  ‘Take care of him,’ he said, ‘and on my way back I’ll pay you whatever else you need to spend on him.’”

I think everyone understood what Jesus was getting at now.  They were all squirming after the priest and Levite parts, because they knew that both men should have stopped to help, but they could think of all sorts of good reasons to justify why they didn’t—and they all knew that if it weren’t for the way Jesus was telling the story, they probably would have been totally sympathetic with the uncaring priest and Levite—and that didn’t sit well.  It was convicting.  But now the person who does help the man turns out to be a Samaritan?  Everybody hated the Samaritans and you could say bad things about them—you could even do bad things to them if one happened to show his face in Judah—and it wasn’t like today where some politically correct do-gooder would call you out on it.  Samaritans were the worst of the worst.  The Jews could sort of excuse gentiles for being gentiles, because they didn’t have the torah.   But the Samaritans, they had the torah.  They had been Jews once, but then they intermarried with the pagan Canaanites.  And they adulterated the scriptures.  And they had their own rival temple so that they didn’t have to go to Jerusalem.  And in Jesus’ day, most of them had become thoroughly hellenised, compromising their philosophy and religion with the Greeks.  They had no excuse.  They were scum.  Again, to quote Jesus ben Sira: “There are two nations that my soul detests, the third is not a nation at all: the inhabitants of Mount Seir, the Philistines, and the stupid people living at Shechem” (Sirach 50:25-26 NJB).  Those stupid people at Shechem, those are the Samaritans.

But it’s one of those stupid people who does the right thing.  Not the priest, not the Levite, but the stupid Samaritan—someone who did everything else wrong.  He had compassion, Jesus says.  And that compassion put everything else: the law, defilement, race hatred, fear of robbers—it put everything else in perspective.  He treated them man’s wounds with wine and oil and bound them up, then he put the man on his own animal and took him to an inn.  He risked the return of the robbers.  He risked the Jews of Jericho or whatever town he took the man to.  If anyone figured out the man on his horse was Jewish, they would have come after the Samaritan.  The Samaritan risked being ripped off by the innkeeper—which was apparently a very common thing.  But without the innkeeper having been paid, the dying man would have been stuck with no way to pay and likely sold into slavery as a debtor.  And in conclusion Jesus asks the lawyer, “Which of these three do you think turned out to be the neighbour of the man who was set upon by brigands?”

And as the lawyer answers Jesus, I think you can hear that he’s been convicted by the story.  “The one who showed him mercy,” the lawyer said—I think, probably, fairly sheepishly.

And then back to his question: “What do I need to do to have a share in your kingdom, Jesus?”  Jesus says to him, “You go and do the same.”  This is what it looks like to love God and to love your neighbour.  This is what it looks like to be faithful to torah and to the Lord’s covenant.  This is what it looks like to be one of his people.  Do this, and when the Lord comes to judge Israel, you can be sure to escape his judgement and to have a share in the age to come.

The lawyer wanted to expose Jesus.  To show everyone how Jesus was misinterpreting torah, but Jesus’ uses the story to turn the tables and to show how the lawyer and those like him were the ones who had got torah the wrong way around.  They, the most righteous people in Israel, are here exposed for their unfaithfulness.  I think this is obvious even if we don’t dig any deeper.  Just on its face the story exposes the hypocrisy of the religious leaders of Judah in Jesus’ day.  But there is more to the story.  The imagery that Jesus draws on comes from the sixth chapter of the prophet Hosea.  Roughly seven-and-a-half centuries earlier, Hosea had spoken words of warning to the king and people of the northern kingdom of Israel—otherwise known as Samaria.  Samaria had been unfaithful to the Lord and imminent judgement was coming if something didn’t change.  Hosea writes:

“Come, let us return to the Lord;

         for he has torn us, that he may heal us;

         he has struck us down, and he will bind us up.

After two days he will revive us;

         on the third day he will raise us up,

         that we may live before him.

Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord;

         his going out is sure as the dawn;

he will come to us as the showers,

         as the spring rains that water the earth.”

What shall I do with you, O Ephraim? (That’s the northern kingdom)

         What shall I do with you, O Judah? (That’s the southern)

Your love is like a morning cloud,

         like the dew that goes early away.

Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets;

         I have slain them by the words of my mouth,

         and my judgment goes forth as the light.

For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,

         the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.

But like Adam they transgressed the covenant;

         there they dealt faithlessly with me.

Gilead (a prominent city in Samaria) is a city of evildoers,

         tracked with blood.

As robbers lie in wait for a man,

         so the priests band together;

they murder on the way to Shechem (the place of Samaria’s rival and unsanctioned temple);

         they commit villainy.

In the house of Israel I have seen a horrible thing;

         Ephraim’s whoredom is there; Israel is defiled.

 

In the end, Israel (or as it’s called here, Samaria) was defeated by the Assyrians and the people scattered and lost forever to the nations.  In telling his parable, Jesus shifts the story of the northern kingdom’s judgement and destruction into his own day.  This time, instead of Israel being under imminent judgement for her sins and faithlessness, it’s Judah.  And instead of the Assyrian armies hovering threateningly, it’s the armies of Rome.

Hosea’s all here in Jesus’ story.  The lawyer talks about loving God, but Hosea condemns him when he says that the love of Israel and Judah for God is “like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes early away”.  Hosea condemns the priests of Israel for lying in wait like robbers on the road to Shechem, ready to murder the very sheep they were supposed to shepherd.  There’s a reason Jesus sets his story on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem.  In his day the priests preyed on the people of Judah when they went up to Jerusalem to visit the temple.

And the Samaritan who stops to help.  He’s a reminder to the people of Judah of the Lord’s judgement on his people.  The Samaritan—or at least his ancestors—knew that judgement.  Just a few verses back Jesus had warned that on the day of the Lord’s judgement, it would be better for the gentile cities of Tyre and Sidon than for Jewish Capernaum (Luke 10:13-15).  Would Judah take the lesson of Samaria to heart?  Or would she continue to cling to her hypocrisy and face judgement as the Samarians had?

And then there’s another contrast between the priest and the Levite and the Samaritan that Hosea brings out.  The priest and the Levite were on their way home from the temple having taken part in the sacrifices offered there, but they weren’t the ones who showed mercy”.  I don’t think anyone could have helped but hear Hosea’s words as Jesus spoke, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice, and knowledge of God rather than whole burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6).  It echoes what Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.  Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matthew 9:12-13).  Think of his other parables: the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son.  Jesus came for the sick in Israel, while people like the Pharisees passed them by on the other side of the road.

That’s the point of the story.  Jesus isn’t in the story, he’s the prophet, like Hosea, telling the story to rebuke the shepherds of Israel—the priests and Levites and people like the lawyer—for their lack of mercy and compassion.  They’ve condemned the lost sheep, when they should have been out looking for them.  They couldn’t be bothered to search for the lost coin.  And they’ve mocked the father of the prodigal son as they saw him waiting day in and day out for his son to return and then rebuked him for receiving him back.  This is why they were so hostile to Jesus, who came not to condemn, but to redeem.  They just couldn’t wrap their heads around that.  And so Jesus does everything, from pleading to rebuking to rampaging through the temple with a whip to make his point and to call his people to repentance—that they might understand both the coming judgement and the mercy the Lord is ready to pour out on those who believe.

Now, two thousand years later and on the other side of the judgement that Jesus was warning the people of Judah about, what do we take away from this?  As a people who live with the law of the Spirit written on our hearts rather than with the torah carved on stone tablets, what does this mean?  On one hand, Jesus’ warning to people who thought they were being faithful to the Lord, while treating others without mercy and compassion is always going to be applicable.  If anything, we—people who have known the redeeming love of God made manifest in Jesus and his death and resurrection—we ought to understand and value mercy and compassion more than any other people on earth.  If that lawyer stood there convicted for loving the law, but failing to show mercy and compassion, how much more ought we to feel convicted if we fail to show mercy and compassion.  There’s that.

But I think, too, much as Jesus brought Hosea’s denunciation of Samaria into his present to convict the people and leaders of Judah, we need to bring Jesus’ parable and denunciation of Judah into our present to convict the church where we have failed to be faithful.  A lack of mercy and compassion is certainly one way that we’ve sometimes failed, but we compromise the scriptures and the gospel and the life of the Spirit in other ways.  What the parable highlights so well is that we’re so often blind to our compromises, either because everyone else is making the same compromises or because the compromises come from the cultural air we breathe and the cultural water we swim in—things like materialism, commercialism, individualism.  And so we put ourselves first, we act selfishly without even realising it.  We treat the gospel or the church like a commodity without even realising it.  We squander our time and talent and treasure on the things of this world without even realising it.  And because everyone—or most everyone—is doing the same things and because it’s in the cultural air and water, we just keep on doing it without giving it any thought.  Brothers and Sisters, this is where we need to let the scriptures and the gospel and the Spirit speak to us—to expose our idols and our points of unfaithfulness to the Lord—and to let them drown out the voices and values of the world that we might see our hypocrisies and repent and follow Jesus and love God and love our neighbours all the more thoroughly.  We need to want, to desire to follow Jesus and the Spirit more closely—to pray for that renewal of our minds and regeneration of our hearts—and then to let the scriptures and the gospel and the church and the Spirit do their work to make us the people God has called us to be in Jesus the Messiah.

Let’s pray: Almighty and merciful God, by whose gift alone your faithful people offer you true and laudable service: Grant that we may run without stumbling to obtain your heavenly promises; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

[1] Joachim Jeremias The Parables of Jesus (New York: Scribners, 1972), 202.

A Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity: Of the Spirit

2 Corinthians 3:1-11

by William Klock

In our Epistle, Paul writes to the Corinthians:

 

Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you, or from you?

 

Letters of commendation from one church to another are quickly becoming a thing of the past—particularly in Canada.  But for most of the church’s history they were common.  The Didache, a document from the late First Century describes churches writing letters of recommendation for people so that when they went from one church to another claiming to be teachers or servants of Jesus, the people in the new church knew they were legit, not troublemakers.

 

Paul had a difficult relationship with the Corinthians.  Even though he’d started the church and had spent a lot of time with them, the Corinthians didn’t have much respect for Paul.  The Christians in Corinth, in particular, were especially prone to getting carried away with the values of their Greco-Roman culture and Paul didn’t meet all their cultural standards.  It would be a bit like the way some churches today expect their pastors to meet certain standards, whether it be that they’re stylish and attractive, with the times, or meet some standard for rhetoric or emotiveness in their preaching.  Paul didn’t meet their expectations.  So when he heard about their problems and wrote to them giving advice, they wrote back and told him “Thanks, but no thanks.  We’d rather take advice from So-and-so.

So Paul responds sort of facetiously: Am I going to need a recommendation before you’ll listen to me?  That would be a bit like telling our bishop that he needs a recommendation from some other church before we’ll let him visit or preach here.  Others might have shaken the dust from their shoes at that point and left the ingrates in Corinth to themselves, but not Paul.  I don’t think they actually asked for a letter of recommendation, but he offers one anyway—but not like any other—because Paul knew that the gospel commends itself.  So he writes to them:

You yourselves are our letter…

They rejected him.  They’ve told him not to come around and not to write to them anymore to give advice.  They’ve disrespected and insulted him.  And Paul writes: I don’t need a letter of recommendation to prove my credentials as an apostle and servant of Jesus.  No.  You people yourselves are my letter of recommendation.  You people, even though you’ve rejected me, you’re the proof of my credentials.

You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all; and you show that you are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.

 

If that’s not grace I don’t know what is.  Paul doesn’t need a letter written in ink on paper.  These messed up, confused, infuriating people are still loved by Paul, because despite being muddled and confused, they’re filled with the joy of the Lord and the hope of his kingdom.  For all their faults and for all their inability to see how they’ve been shaped by their culture in their rejection of him, their joy in the Lord and their hope in the Good News is the result of Paul’s ministry to them and that says everything about Paul that needs to be said.  Despite their imperfections, they’re his credentials.

That’s pretty astounding and it says something about the power of the gospel and Paul’s expectation of its power to transform people, even when they looked hopeless.  These were people he rebuked for putting the wisdom of the Greeks over the truth of the gospel.  These were people he rebuked for tolerating a church member who was sleeping with his step-mother.  These were people he rebuked for dragging each other through the courts, for divorce, for not treating each other as equals, for abusing spiritual gifts, for abusing the Lord’s Supper, for having crazy, disordered worship.  The list is a long one.  And yet despite their multitude of failings, he says, “You want to see my credentials as a gospel minister, as an apostle?  You’re it.”  Paul could see the gospel at work in them.  For all their faults, they were not the people they had once been.  As he had written to them in his first epistle, no one affirms that Jesus is Lord apart from the transforming work of the Spirit.  Paul could see through the flaws and knew that they believed, that they loved Jesus, that they were full of the Spirit.  He had proclaimed the good news about Jesus to them and it had done its work, it was continuing to do its work, and he was confident, it would in time complete its work.  This is important.  Sometimes we look at other Christians or other churches and they’re a mess and we’re tempted to write them off completely.  Brothers and Sisters, be careful.  Is Jesus being proclaimed as Lord?  If he is, that means that the gospel and the Spirit are at work there.  Maybe the gospel and the Spirit have a lot of work yet to do.  The Corinthians needed correction—a lot of it.  But Paul didn’t write them off.  They had the gospel.  These aren’t the other folks Paul warns about who preaching another, a different gospel.  That’s a whole other problem.  No, the Corinthians received the gospel and the gospel is a powerful thing.  It is the power of God to save.  Now, don’t misunderstand.  Their context was different from ours.  This was a first-generation church living in the days when these things were being worked out.  We don’t have that excuse today.  But still, no one, no church is perfect, but if the gospel is there, we should be confident that Jesus and the Spirit will be with a church to correct and to bring maturity.

Now, to make his point Paul takes the Corinthians back to the idea of “covenant”.  Covenant is critical to who we are in Jesus, but it’s something we often forget.  We’ve been shaped more than a little by our own culture’s way of thinking.  For about the last century we’ve largely exchanged the biblical language of “covenant” for the language of “relationship” when we talk about how we relate to God.  Describing our relation to God in terms of “relationship” or talking about Jesus as our “personal Saviour” isn’t necessarily wrong, but it’s not the language of the Bible and it doesn’t carry anywhere near the depth or the significance of the biblical language and it often tends to miss the bigger picture.  The Bible never speaks of “relationship”—that’s squishy modern language; it’s also very individualistic language.  God himself, speaks in the Bible of covenant and adoption.  There’s more to salvation than me and Jesus.  God works with families, with peoples—this is why we baptise our infants.  The Church, like Old Testament Israel, is a covenant family.  And that’s what Paul goes back to: this idea of being in covenant with God.  We aren’t just in a “relationship” with him.  We are his people.  We are his sons and daughters.  And we’re in it together—all of us—as the Church, the Body of Christ with all its many parts and members.

 

Paul takes the Corinthians back to Jeremiah 31.  Israel was in exile at that time.  God had judged her and allowed the Babylonians to conquer her, to destroy Jerusalem, to tear the temple down to the ground, and to carry the people off into captivity, away from the land they’d been promised.  His judgement came on Israel because she was in covenant with him and had failed and refused to live up to that covenant.  Relationship may or may not involve responsibility and commitment, but at the core of the idea of covenant are the ideas of mutual commitment and responsibility.  Being boyfriend and girlfriend or “living together” is a relationship.  There are no real commitments or obligations.  You can walk away whenever you want.  Marriage, on the other hand, is a covenant in which a man and woman commit and obligate themselves to each other.  Israel had failed to live according to the covenant the Lord had established with her, she’d refused to trust in his goodness and his care, she’d worshipped foreign pagan gods, she’d failed to obey him.  Ultimately, she had failed to love him as he loved her and she was unrepentant in her rejection of him.

Through the prophet Jeremiah, the Lord promised the people that he would redeem them.  They may be covenant-breakers—like a cheating spouse—but he was not.  And so one day he would restore Israel by establishing a new covenant.  There would be a new agreement between the Lord and his people.  There would be a new marriage between Israel and her Lord.  He had established the old covenant through Moses when he gave Israel his law, written on stone tablets.  But that law carved on stone did not have the power to give the people the real life they needed and that the Lord desired for them.  And so the Lord promised a new covenant that would restore Israel.  The new covenant would deal with the sins of the people—that’s what the cross of Jesus is about.  And the new covenant would give the people the new life they needed in order to truly be the renewed people the Lord wanted them to be—to remake humanity into what we were meant to be—God giving his people his own life, transforming their hearts and minds in a way that the law written on stone was never able to do.  In this new covenant, the Lord promised through Jeremiah, he would carve the law on their hearts—he would give his people his own Spirit.

And despite how muddled and confused and wrong the Corinthians were on so many things, despite their rejection of Paul, he could write to them and say that they were his letter, they were his credentials, because the life of the Holy Spirit was evident in their life as a church.  They themselves are a letter from Jesus the Messiah.  The powerful work promised through Jeremiah and the other prophets is manifest in the amazing work that the Spirit has accomplished in them.  Think about that.  Some of them had been Jews—the same sort of Jews that Paul himself had been when he persecuted Jesus’ people.  Some of them had been Greek pagans, worshipping idols, offering incense to Caesar, deeply involved in a degenerate culture.  But Paul had brought them the good news that Jesus is Lord.  He preached Jesus’ death and resurrection.  And they had been transformed.  The Spirit had moved them to repentance and given them a totally new life.  The living God had written something powerful on their hearts and they would never be the same people again.  And the pagan world around them could see it even if these people couldn’t see it themselves anymore.  Again, think about that.  Think about your own stories.  Think of the way you were once met with the good news.  Think of the forgiveness you have found at the cross.  Think of the new life Jesus has given you.  Just like the Corinthians, each of us has a long road ahead of us as we grow into a mature faithfulness to Jesus and his lordship, but Jesus has poured his Spirit into us. In our baptism he has plunged us into the Holy Spirit and we are not the people we once were.

And so Paul goes on, getting back to his credentials, writing in verses 4-6:

Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God.  Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

 

All the proof of Paul’s faithfulness as a minister of the gospel, as a minister of God’s new covenant is right there in the work accomplished in the Corinthians by Jesus and the Spirit.  It’s not that Paul is competent himself.  He merely showed up in Corinth and preached the Word as he’d been called to do by Jesus himself.  But as a result of Paul preaching the good news of Jesus and the kingdom the new covenant has unfolded right there in a powerful and very visible way.  The “letter”—the old law written on stone—brought death, but the Spirit now poured into them has given them life.  In his resurrection Jesus unleashed life into the world.  All Paul has done is preach that Good News and where he’s done that the Spirit has brought transformation.

At this point Paul changes tack a bit.  The reason the Corinthians rejected him and the reason he’s had to explain all this about the new covenant to them is that they’ve lost sight of what’s important.  Again, they’d been captivated by teachers who met superficial criteria of Greek culture as to what a wise teacher was supposed to be like.  Again, the parallel today would be the way people are attracted to programs and high production values and slick talkers in stylish clothes, who pander to the consumerism, the materialism, the individualism of our culture.  And so in verses 7 and 8 Paul starts trying to stress the glory of the new covenant that the Corinthians seem to have forgotten.

Now if the ministry of death, chiseled in letters on stone tablets, came in glory so that the people of Israel could not gaze at Moses’ face because of the glory of his face, a glory now set aside, how much more will the ministry of the Spirit come in glory?

 

Paul takes them back to the Exodus as he does so often.  They all knew the story.  For those who were Jews this was part of their national and cultural identity.  In Exodus 34 we read how the Israelites became afraid after Moses had been up on Mt. Sinai for a long time.  They saw the thunder and lightning and they thought God was angry.  Ironically, Moses was up on the mountain being given instructions on how the tabernacle was to be built, how all the furnishing and vestments were to made, and how the people were to worship the Lord.  But down at the base of the mountain the people were convincing Aaron, Moses’ brother, to take their gold and make them an idol in the shape of a calf.  Here they were on their honeymoon, prostituting themselves to an idol.  Moses came down from the mountain and the first words he was given by the Lord to speak to the people amounted to a death sentence for their idolatry.  Moses pleaded with the Lord to spare the people despite their guilt and as a result of his pleading prayer the Lord revealed his nature and character even further.  Even though the Lord insisted that Israel’s wickedness had to be addressed and dealt with, he was still a god of abundant mercy.  As a result of that revelation, Moses went down the mountain and his face was shining.  The radiance of the Lord, reflected from Moses’ face was so great that the Israelites were afraid—they knew their sin and cowered in the presence of the holy, even though it was only the reflection of the Lord’s holiness.  Moses had to veil his face.  The only time he unveiled it was when he went into the Lord’s presence in the tabernacle, to speak with him face to face.  Now, scripture doesn’t explain the mechanics of it.  I know I can’t quite picture how Moses’ face radiated the glory of God, but somehow it did.  And it was absolutely magnificent and utterly overwhelming.

And Paul’s point is this: If the law carved on stone came down from the mountain in such amazing glory, and if the judgement of the Lord on Israel’s idolatry was manifested in such glory, how much more glorious is the ministry of the Spirit?  He goes on in verses 9-11:

For if there was glory in the ministry of condemnation, much more does the ministry of justification abound in glory!  Indeed, what once had glory has lost its glory because of the greater glory; for if what was set aside came through glory, much more has the permanent come in glory!

 

Like the Christians of Ephesus who, in Revelation, are described as having lost their first love, the Corinthians had lost sight of the glory of the Holy Spirit’s ministry.  It wasn’t that they’d lost the Holy Spirit.  That’s impossible.  It’s the Spirit who binds us to Jesus, he’s the one who unites us to his life, he’s the one who renews our minds and regenerates our hearts, turning us from everything that is not Jesus and giving us the desire and the faith to take hold of Jesus with both hands.  You cannot be a Christian without the Holy Spirit.  But somehow they’d lost perspective.  The Spirit had empowered them remarkably, they had no shortage of gifts, but they’d lost sight of the gospel, Jesus was no longer their centre, and they misused and abused those gifts.  And they let the values of Greek culture displace a gospel-centred life.

Brothers and Sisters, we can all too easily fall prey to the same sorts of things.  Our own culture infiltrates the church in many, many ways.  Our culture is overwhelmingly commercialistic, materialistic, and individualistic and too often, without even realizing it’s happened, we start building our churches around these things.  We treat the gospel like a commodity to sell.  We displace it with programs and we tailor our preaching to appeal to our culture’s self-centred individualism.  Programs can be good and useful in accomplishing the work of the Church, but most of the time these days they’re treated as sales tools.  But God doesn’t give us programs.  He gives us his Word.  Through the ministry of the Spirit he caused his Word to be written by prophets, apostles, and evangelists so that we can know him and proclaim him to the world.  And in Jesus he sent his Word to become flesh—not to give us programs or gimmicks or to tickle the itching ears of sinners—but to die for our sins and to rise again to unleash life into the world.  A Church should never have its identity tied up with anything other than the gospel.  A Church is a place where the Word is faithfully preached and the Sacraments faithfully administered.  That was the definition the Protestant Reformers developed.  What constitutes a Church?  A Church is a body that preaches the Word and administers the Sacraments.  But today it seems many preach everything but the Word and the Sacraments are often side-lined or even sometimes considered optional.  As ministers of the Gospel, we—and that’s both you and I—are not called to be flashy, we’re not called to preach the pop-psychology and self-help that our culture obsesses over, we’re not called to be motivational speakers, we’re not called to preach health and wealth.  We’re called to proclaim that Jesus has died and risen and that he is Lord.  And we’re called to back-up that proclamation by living the life of the Spirit, by manifesting the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control that the Spirit bears in our lives.  We’re called to live justly and to do mercy.  We’re called to use the giftings of the Spirit not for our own ends, but for the sake of the gospel and for the well-being of the Church.  We’re called to be gloriously counter-cultural: being poor in spirit, mourning sin, living in meekness, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, being merciful, and making peace—even when it means rejection and persecution.  Brothers and Sisters, it’s this Jesus-centred and Spirit-empowered life that manifests the glory of God to the world, that makes us the light of the world and the salt of the earth—that marks us out as the covenant people of God.

Let us pray:  Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve:  Pour upon us the abundance of your mercy, forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things for which we are not worthy to ask, except through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ our Saviour; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

The Eleventh Sunday after Trinity: The righteous shall live by faith

1 Corinthians 15:1-11 & St. Luke 18:9-14

by William Klock

“Two men went up to the temple to pray,” Jesus said.  Picture the temple up on the mountaintop above Jerusalem.  Jews, still to this day, go to pray at the temple.  Of course, the temple has been gone for almost two thousand years.  These days they gather down below and pray at the base of its foundations.  But this is what Jews have done ever since there was a temple.  The pious and devout prayed three times a day and if you could go and pray at the temple at least some of the time—that place where heaven and earth, where God and man met—that was all the better.  Two men climbed the steps to the temple courts to pray. “One,” Jesus said, “was a Pharisee.”  If anyone was going to pray three times a day, while also making a point of doing it in the temple, it would be a Pharisee.  Maybe he lived nearby and went to pray at the temple daily—maybe he even did his best to go there two or even three times a day.  Some of the people in the crowd around Jesus were this man.  They were Pharisees.  When they were in Jerusalem, they made a point of going to the temple to say their prayers.  To be close to God—and some of them to make the point that there was nothing casual about their piety.  They didn’t just say their prayers anywhere; they went out of their way to say them in the temple courts.

But there were two men who went up to the temple.  “The other,” says Jesus, “was a tax collector.”  You can almost hear the booing and the hissing.  Tax collectors were scum.  They were unclean, because of their contact and association with gentiles.  And they were traitors, betraying their own people by collaborating with the Romans.  But there were some in the crowd who had been paying attention to Jesus.  Some of them had seen or heard of the things he'd said and done.  They knew how Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners.  “Here he goes again with the tax collectors!” they were thinking.  “Jesus just loves those tax collectors!”  And, of course, that’s why they just couldn’t get behind him.  For all the Messiah-like things he said and did, the Messiah was supposed to have dinner with the scribes and Pharisees, not tax collectors and sinners.  God’s kingdom would never come that way!

“Standing, the Pharisee prayed to himself like this,” said Jesus.  “God, I give thanks to you that I am not like other men—like the greedy, like the unjust, like adulterers—or like this tax collector.  I fast twice a week.  I give a tenth of everything I earn.”  You can imagine him going on and on, standing tall, his hands raised to heaven, everyone watching and thinking to themselves, “I wish I was more like him.”  But then Jesus turns out attention to the tax collector.

“The tax collector,” Jesus said, “standing far off, didn’t even want to life his eyes to heaven.  Instead, he beat his breast, saying, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

We can imagine the Pharisee, standing proudly where everyone could see him and praying loudly so that everyone could hear him.  And then the poor tax collector, the complete and utter opposite.  He kneels—or maybe he even prostrates himself on the ground—off on the fringes, hiding in the shadows or behind a column and quietly utters his humble prayer for mercy.  The Pharisee—at least as far as he was concerned—he belonged there.  But the tax collector.  He was a sinner and he knew it.  He did not belong in the presence of the holy.  Other people made that clear and he probably believed it himself.  But he desired God’s mercy and this was the place to ask for it.  What happened to the tax collector that brought him to the temple.  Jesus doesn’t say. It is just a story.  But maybe he was one of those tax collectors and sinners who had met Jesus and, through him, had encountered the grace of God.  Maybe he was one of those people to whom Jesus had pronounced, “Your sins are forgiven.  Go and sin no more.”  And so he followed it up the only way he knew how, by turning over a new leaf, by ritually purifying himself, and by going to the temple to fall on the mercy of the Lord.

“This one—the tax collector,” said Jesus, “he went down to his house justified, not the other one.”  Why?  “Because everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Now, there’s an interesting twist in the tale.  If you were following along in Luke 18 or if you were paying careful attention when the Gospel was read earlier (and you have a good memory), you might have noticed that I left out Luke’s introduction.  At the beginning, Luke introduces the parable, writing, “Jesus told this parable to some who were confident in themselves, because they were righteous and looked down on others.”  In Greek, “righteous” and “just” are the same word, so Luke plays with that here.  Jesus told this parable to some who were confident in themselves, because they were righteous (or just).  The point is that they expected to be amongst those justified or vindicated by the Lord for their faithfulness when he finally came to deliver his people and set the world to rights.  But then in the end, who is it who go homes justified or in the right?  It’s not the righteous Pharisee, but the tax collector who prayed for God’s mercy.

It's not that the Pharisee—whether the one in the parable or the ones Jesus was telling the parable to—it’s not that they weren’t righteous.  By all accounts they were.  They were obedient to the law.  They weren’t perfect, but if they made a mistake, they offered the appropriate sacrifices.  That was part of being faithful to the law, too.  They took part in the atonement for sins offered through the temple.  They were righteous.  And they were the opposite of the tax collector.  He was sort of a Jew in name only.  He was unclean because of his job and his association with gentiles.  And if he observed torah at all, it probably didn’t amount to much.  This was probably the first time he’d been to the temple in a long time.  But most of all, tax collectors were simply corrupt and they collaborated with the Romans.  An honest tax collector was pretty much an oxymoron.  His job was to steal from the Jews and give to the Romans.  Again, he was the polar opposite of the Pharisee.  The Pharisee loved God’s law; the tax collector trampled all over it.

And yet, at the end of the story, Jesus says, it’s not the righteous or the just man who goes away justified—declared by God to be in the right.  It’s the scummy, unrighteous tax collector.  Why?  Well, to answer that we need to ask what Jesus meant that he went home justified.  To be justified is to be found or to be declared to be “in the right”.

Think of a courtroom.  Plaintiff and a defendant bring their case before a judge, they explain the circumstances and present their evidence, and the judge makes a ruling.  The judge declares one of them to be in the right.  The judge vindicates one of them.  Maybe it’s the defendant, who proves his innocence to the judge.  Or maybe it’s the plaintiff, who proves to the judge that he is truly the victim.  One of them goes home vindicated by the judge.  He goes home declared to be in the right.  He goes home justified.

But when Jesus talks about “justification” what we really have to do is go back to the Old Testament.  Think about Abraham in Genesis 15.  That’s where this got started.  The Lord made a promise to Abraham—to give him a land and to give him a son and to make him a great nation.  And it was nonsense.  Abraham went to the promised land and lived there—but he was just one man and even as rich as he was, with flocks and herds and servants, he only ever occupied the smallest corner of that land.  And there he was, almost one hundred and his wife ninety—long past child-bearing years.  How could he, a childless man ever become a great nation?  But the Lord made a promise to him and Abraham believed.  And, we’re told, the Lord counted that belief, that faith, as righteousness.  Because Abraham believed that the Lord not only could, but somehow would pull off this crazy promise, he was counted as being in the right.  There was no way any of it could happen, but Abraham trust in the faithfulness of the Lord.  And in that, Abraham set the standard by which the Lord recognised his people: faith.  Later the torah would mark them out as a special people, visibly different from everyone else, but long before the torah there was faith, and faith was ultimately what it always was and always would be that marks out the people of God—faith in the God who promises crazy things and then never fails to do them.

And this theme echoes all the way through Israel’s story.  It was the message of the Prophet Habakkuk who lived during the last decades of the kingdom of Judah, in the years before Jerusalem was defeated and destroyed by the Babylonians and the people taken off into exile.  Habakkuk looked around him and saw the wickedness and idolatry of his own people and, very much like the psalmists, he cried out to the Lord.  This is the opening of his lament.

O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,

         and you will not hear?

Or cry to you “Violence!”

         and you will not save?

Why do you make me see iniquity,

         and why do you idly look at wrong?

Destruction and violence are before me;

         strife and contention arise.

So the law is paralyzed,

         and justice never goes forth.

For the wicked surround the righteous;

         so justice goes forth perverted. (Habakkuk 1:1-4)

Habakkuk knew that things weren’t the way they were supposed to be and he knew the promises of the Lord to his people and he and so many others had cried out and cried out—for centuries—and things only got worse.  Wickedness and idolatry multiplied and from their perspective it seemed like the Lord wasn’t listening and that he was refusing to act.  Judah’s situation seemed as hopeless to Habakkuk as Abraham’s situation must have once seemed to him.  But that was just it.  Habakkuk knew that the Lord is faithful and so he continued to cry out.  He trusted the Lord.  He had faith.

But then the Lord responds.  He tells Habakkuk that he has seen the state of his people and that he is going to visit them, but that he will be dealing with their problem by sending the Babylonians to defeat them.  That wasn’t what Habakkuk wanted to hear.  He argues with the Lord.  The Babylonians are even more wicked and idolatrous than the people of Judah.  How can defeat by them possibly be the Lord’s solution?  And the Lord responds and assures Habakkuk that while Babylon may be his instrument of justice against Judah, Babylon herself—and all the nations—will be held accountable and will one day be judged.  The cycle of violence will be broken and everything will be set to rights.  One day, he says, the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.  It’s another one of those impossible promises—even more impossible than the promise he made to Abraham.  But what do the Lord’s people do in the meantime?

Here's the Lord’s answer—and Jesus’ parable points us right back to these words.  The Lord says to Habakkuk in 2:4:

Look at the proud!

         His spirit is presumptuous and is not right

But the righteous shall live by faith.

 

The world is falling apart.  Everything is wrong.  The wicked prosper and are proud and presume on the Lord’s faithfulness and the righteous are oppressed.  By all human appearances it doesn’t sound like the Lord is even listening.  But those who continue to live by faith in the midst of tribulation, those who remember the Lord’s promises in the midst of persecution, those who steep themselves in the story of the Lord and his people and remember his faithfulness, those who continue to trust in him, they are the ones that will be vindicated by the Lord when he does come in judgement on the wicked.  They are the ones who will remain faithful to the Lord and to his covenant, even when all the proud people around them do evil and bow to idols, they will remain faithful, because they know and because they trust that the Lord is always faithful.  I hope that’s an encouraging word for you already, but first we need to go back to Jesus’ story about the two men in the temple.

There’s the proud Pharisee.  By the standard of the law, he is in the right.  And there’s the scummy tax collector.  By the standard of the law, he’s in the wrong.  And yet in the end, it’s the tax collector who goes home and is found to be in the right.  If this were one of Jesus’ “kingdom stories” it would be the tax collector who is welcomed into the kingdom, while the Pharisee is left in the outer darkness, weeping and gnashing his teeth.  The tax collector would escape the coming judgement and know the life of the kingdom, while the coming judgement would fall on the Pharisee right along with all the other wicked in Israel.  Why?  Because the tax collector humbled himself, while the Pharisee was proud and was confident in his righteousness.  But what does that mean?

Well, Jesus has told this story before.  Over and over.  Jesus was clear.  He came not to the righteous, but to seek out the lost sheep of the house of Israel.  At least in theory, the righteous were fine.  They should have been expecting this all along.  They were the ones who knew the scriptures so well, after all.  But, ironically, they got angry when Jesus went to the lost sheep.  And so Jesus told them stories to explain the joy in heaven over sinners who repent.  The Lord is like the widow who seeks and eventually finds her lost coin.  He’s like the shepherd who goes to great lengths to find his lost sheep.  He’s like the father, rejoicing and throwing a party when his prodigal son returns home.  And the Pharisees—or a lot of them, at any rate—the Pharisees are like the proud and resentful older brother.  They’d been doing the right thing all along.  Why wasn’t Jesus throwing a party for them?  And so, in their pride, they refused to enter the house and were left out in the dark gnashing their teeth.  The older brother out in the darkness.  And it would be like that, only much, much worse when judgement came.  Not because they weren’t righteous, but because righteousness wasn’t enough.  Because in Jesus, the Lord was doing something new—he was making a new people who would be finally and truly fit for the kingdom, a people forgiven once and for all and a people filled with God’s own Spirit, a people with his law of love written on their hearts—a people fit for God’s new creation.  When Jesus told people they needed a righteousness greater than the Pharisees if they wanted to take part in the kingdom, that’s what he was getting at.  The Lord was finally giving something better than the law written on stone tablets.  He was about to make a people with his law of love written on their hearts.  But that people was centred in Jesus.  So only those who trusted in this Messiah—this Messiah who was so different from their expectations—on those humble enough to recognise the new thing the Lord was doing in Jesus and to live by faith, trusting that Jesus really is the Lord’s answer to all the problems of the world, only they will go home justified.  Only they will be able to be part of the kingdom—forgiven and filled with the Spirit, because of their faith in Jesus.

This is what St. Paul is getting at in our Epistle from 1 Corinthians 15.  He declares once again the good news about Jesus the Messiah who died and was buried and who rose again according to the scriptures.  And he talks about the twelve who saw him and believed and about the five hundred who saw him and believed.  And then there was Paul.  He heard the message, but he was one of those proud Pharisees, confident that he already had the right answers, confident that he knew how the Lord was going to deliver his people—and, most of all, confident that it wasn’t through Jesus.  The gospel was blasphemy as far as he was concerned.  And so, he writes, he persecuted the church.  And yet there’s hope.  Paul was stuck.  He had a mountain of faith, but it wasn’t in Jesus.  The torah had been preparing Israel for Jesus all those centuries, but Paul and so many others just couldn’t see it, couldn’t make the leap.  But even as he persecuted the church, the Lord was at work to transform Paul.  “But by the grace of God I am what I am,” he writes, “and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.”

Brothers and Sisters, there’s that righteousness greater than that of the Pharisees.  There’s the faith that humbles the proud and brings even the greatest sinner into the kingdom.  Not because the faith is so great, but because it’s in Jesus the Messiah.  It’s a faith that brings forgiveness and the life of the Spirit.  Habakkuk wrote that the just shall live by faith and that’s precisely what Jesus’ people do.  He gives us the very life of God, because we trust in him.  And that life he gives—the law of love written on our hearts, the experience of God’s love and faithfulness revealed so dramatically in our Saviour—that life fills our hearts with a faith that overflows.  And that, Brothers and Sisters, is how we live in this in-between time.  It’s how those first Christians lived through the devastation of Jerusalem’s destruction.  It’s how the next generation lived through Rome’s persecution.  It’s how the saints lived, even as they were thrown to the lions.  It’s how the saints still live in many parts of the world, imprisoned because they live by faith, tortured because they live by faith, martyred because they live by faith.  And it’s how the saints have lived in the midst of a world that still isn’t right, that still anticipates the final consummation of the Lord’s new creation.  We live by faith as we struggle in our work—maybe because of broken supply chains, or bad economies, or because Facebook throws a wrench in our marketing.  We live by faith as we struggle with illness or frailty or cancer.  We live by faith as we struggle to bring justice and mercy to a world that is so unmerciful and lacking in justice.  We live by faith as we face droughts and floods and forest fires.  And we live by faith as we live out our calling to proclaim the good news about Jesus in a world that thinks us fools; faithful to our calling to holiness in a world filled with idolatry and sin.  It’s how we live in hope, like Habakkuk, like the Apostles, like they martyrs, looking past this broken world and the evils of our time, and knowing that the Lord is faithful to his promises, that he will set this world to rights, and that in Jesus, he will surely finish what he has begun—we know he will, because he always has.

Let’s pray: Lord God, you declare your almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity: mercifully grant to us such a measure of your grace, that we, running the way of your commandments, may receive your gracious promises, and be made partakers of your heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

The Ten Sunday after Trinity: The Time of Your Visitation

1 Corinthians 12:1-11 & St. Luke 19:41-47

by William Klock

It is providential that we celebrated the Transfiguration of Jesus last Sunday, because last Sunday’s gospel prepares us for today’s.  The Transfiguration was the turning point in Jesus’ ministry: he’d finished his work in Galilee; it was time to turn south for that final journey to Jerusalem.  And Peter’s confession, “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God”, it was that confession that pointed him to Jerusalem.  The Messiah couldn’t stay in the provinces forever.  Eventually he had to go to Jerusalem: to deal with the Romans, to cleanse the temple, and ultimately to take his throne.  Of course, Jesus’ understanding of what that meant was very different from what pretty much everyone else expected.  But, still, it was time to go to Jerusalem.

And now today’s Gospel, beginning at Luke 19:41, see’s Jesus arriving—on the Mount of Olives, looking across the valley at the city with its great temple perched on the mountain peak above.  But before we get there, I want to back up to the middle of Luke 19.  Jesus’ last stop before he made his way up that long, winding, and sometimes dangerous road to Jerusalem was in Jericho.  That’s where he healed blind Bartimaeus.  That’s where he met Zacchaeus, the wee little tax collector who climbed a tree to get a glimpse of the Messiah.  People were excited.  The crowds grew bigger in every city they passed through.  Everyone knew about Jesus.  Everyone knew something big was afoot.  And everyone knew that because everyone was saying that Jesus was the Messiah and because he was so obviously heading to Jerusalem—and the fact that it was almost Passover just added to the suspense.  Whether they believed all the Messiah talk, Jesus had been doing and saying Messiah-like things and the most Messiah-like thing of all that he could do is to march into Jerusalem to confront the priests and the rulers and to set things straight—and to do it at Passover.  Some people in the crowd were excited.  They believed.  The Day of the Lord was finally just around the corner and Jesus was going to go to Jerusalem and would set everything to rights—whatever they thought that might look like or how it might happen.  Others were following it all out of curiosity—probably more than a few out of morbid curiosity.  They knew Jesus was going to go to Jerusalem and that he’d just get himself into trouble.  He would die and that would be the end of yet another failed messiah movement.  Anyhow, Luke says in 16:11, that Jesus saw the perfect opportunity for another one of his stories.  The crowd was listening and he was so close to Jerusalem and everyone knew that Messiah plus Jerusalem equals kingdom of God.  And they were right.  But they were also—most of them anyway—they were so wrong.  So many of them thought they could know God’s blessing and have a share in his kingdom without being faithful stewards and without repentance.

So to the gathered crowd, Jesus said, “There was once a nobleman, who went to a far country to be given royal authority and then return.  He summoned ten of his slaves and gave them ten silver coins.  ‘Do business with these,’ he said, ‘until I come back.’  His subjects, though, hated him, and sent a delegation after him to say, ‘We don’t want this man to be our king.’

“So it happened that when he received the kingship and came back again, he gave orders to summon these slaves who had received the money, so that he could find out how they had got on with their business efforts.  The first came forward and said, ‘Master, your money has made ten times its value!”

“ ‘Well done, good and faithful servant!” he said.   ‘You’ve been faithful with something small; now you can take command of ten cities.’

“The second came and said, ‘Master, your money has made five times its value!’

“ ‘You too—you can take charge of five cities.’

“The other came and said, ‘Master, here is your money.  I kept it safe, hidden away in this handkerchief.  I was afraid of you, knowing that you are a hard man.  You profit where you made no investment and you harvest where you did not sow.’

“ ‘I’ll condemn you out of your own mouth, you wicked servant!  You knew that I’m a hard man, profiting where I haven’t invested and harvesting where I haven’t sown, so why didn’t you at least put my money in the bank?  Then, at least, I’d have earned some interest when I got back!”

“ ‘Take the money from him,’ he said to the bystanders, ‘and give it to the man who turned my one coin into ten!’ (‘Master,’ they said to him, ‘he’s got ten coins already!’)

And then.  And it’s not quite clear.  Is this the king in the story talking or is this Jesus talking?  And, of course, that’s the point—because Jesus is the king returning to his people.  He says:

“ ‘Let me be clear: To everyone who has will be given more; but if someone has nothing, even what he has will be taken away from him.  But as for these enemies of mine, who didn’t want me to be king over them—bring them here and slaughter them in front of me.”

And with that, Luke says that Jesus went on his way, setting out on that winding road up to Jerusalem.  No further interactions with the crowd.  No further commentary.  I don’t think any was necessary.  It’s remarkable to me how many goofy interpretations there are of this parable.  One quick search with Google and I had a link to a Prosperity Gospel website where they linked this to a bunch of nonsense about sowing seeds—which just means sending them money—and getting rich in return.  Another link was to some Marxist who was reading it as a condemnation of an evil king who rewarded the rich and condemned the poor.  You have to work pretty hard to pull this out of context and then squint at it pretty sideways to go that far off the rails—but it happens all the time.  But leave it in context and it’s really very simple.  The story about a king who returns after a long time away to see what his servants have been up to in his absence is simply Jesus explaining what he’s doing himself.  The crowds already saw Jesus as part of the story of Israel, if he was the Messiah, then he was the rightful king returning to Zion to take his throne—just like the king in the parable.  But Jesus wanted to get them thinking about what that meant.  It meant judgement, but hardly anyone was thinking of it in that sense.

This was the day the prophets had spoken of.  The Jewish exiles had returned to Jerusalem from Babylon hundreds of years before, they’d rebuilt the city and the temple, but the Lord’s presence had never returned.  The temple, as glorious as it was—especially after Solomon’s recent renovations—the temple sat empty.  The priests went about their business of offerings and sacrifices, but the cloud of glory that had once rested on the ark of the covenant had never returned and, because of that, the people questioned whether their exile had really ever ended.  They were back in the promised land, but the most important part of the promised land—the presence of the Lord—was still missing.  The prophet Malachi had announced that the “the Lord whom you seek” would come to the temple, but that he would come in fiery judgement.  Zechariah, too, spoke of the Lord, one day, finally, returning to Zion.  Again, everyone would have understood Jesus’ story.  He was saying that in him, the Lord was finally returning to Jerusalem as he had promised through the Prophets.  And Jesus has left them with that big question: Who will stand before the Lord’s judgement.

They knew that the Lord had given them a purpose.  They knew that the Lord had called Abraham, that he had delivered their ancestors from Pharoah’s bondage, that he had led them to the promised land to be a light in the midst of the nations—a witness to what it looks like to be the people who live with the Creator God in their midst.  They knew that their ancestors had gone off into exile in judgement for their faithlessness and idolatry.  And that judgement still hung over them.  The people of Israel were called to be stewards of God’s covenant, his law, his grace and when he returned he would judge them.  Had they been faithful stewards?  All along the way, as Jesus made his way from Galilee to Jerusalem, he was warning the people that if they did not listen to him, if they did not repent, if they continued to treat the Lord’s covenant with disdain, the Lord’s judgement would fall on them: on the nation, on Jerusalem, and especially on the temple.  Jesus is saying that in him, the God of Israel is coming and on that day of judgement, you don’t want to be that faithless servant who has been a poor steward of God’s grace and hidden away his master’s treasure in a handkerchief.

Jesus reminds the people that God’s kingdom was about to come and that as much as it was good news for many, it also meant horrible judgement for a lot of them.  Some of the crowd cheered, some wept happy tears, but there were some—the people invested in the status quo, the people with their own firmly entrenched ideas of what the Messiah would be like and how the Lord’s return was supposed to go down—there were some who were angry.  Like those in the parable, they didn’t want this man to be their king.  They couldn’t bear the thought that somehow this Jesus was actually the Messiah, let alone the Lord, the God of Israel returned to Zion.

The parable prepares the way for Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem.  Luke leaves out the long and tiring journey up the road from Jericho—the road where we meet the Good Samaritan in another of Jesus stories.  From Jericho Luke takes us straight to the top of the road, to Bethany, as Jesus sends his friends to find the prophesied donkey.  (That’s the Palm Sunday Gospel we know so well.)  As Jesus rode through the crowd into Jerusalem, the people cheered him and sang messianic chants.  They knew what was happening.  The Lord had returned to Zion.  But just like at Jericho, there were those who were angry.  How dare Jesus do this!  And Jesus knew, despite the crowds who welcomed him, Jesus knew that judgement was inevitable.  The Pharisees were sure to remind him.  There he was, riding through the crowd to their messianic chants and the Pharisees pushed their way through and the said, “Rabbi, tell your disciples to cut it out.”  As far as they were concerned, this was blasphemy.  Jesus wasn’t the Messiah, let alone the Lord returning to his people.  And with their rebuke ringing in his ears, Luke says in verse 41, that as Jerusalem came into view, Jesus stopped and wept.

“Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! [Jesus said,] But now they are hidden from your eyes.  For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”

 

Jesus’ tears remind us what’s at the heart of the gospel.  For three years, Jesus had warned the people of Galilee that judgement was coming to the nation, to Jerusalem, and to the temple.  Over and over he called his people to repent.  His message hadn’t gone over any better than had for the prophets of old, like Jeremiah, who was known for the tears he wept over his people.  Jerusalem would be no different than Galilee and Jesus knew it.  He’d been rejected there and he would be rejected here.  And as much as he knew rejection meant his own death, that’s not why he wept.  He wept for their sake.  “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish,” he had said a few chapters earlier.  And now he looks across the valley to Jerusalem where Pilate had just recently killed a bunch of Galileans and where the tower of Siloam had fallen, crushing people alive, and it was all just a foretaste of another, greater catastrophe soon to come.  A few decades later and the hills around the city would be covered with Roman crosses, bearing executed Jews and the city and the temple would be brought crashing down.

The people had heard the warning, but they would not listen and Jesus wept.  Again, not for himself or for his own coming death.  And not with any sense of, “I told you so!”  Jesus wept, because discipline and justice do not come from the cold heart of a distant God, but from the God who loves so deeply that he was willing to give his own life in order to summon his beloved to repentance, from a love that is faithful and that will set things to rights, in order to bring what’s best.  A love that wept over a rebellious people intent on their own agendas and their own interests, who refused to be stewards of his goodness and grace.

And the temple—the temple was at the heart of it all.  There’s a reason why Jesus went straight to the temple when he entered Jerusalem.  That was what the Messiah was supposed to do.  And so Luke goes on in verses 45-48:

And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold, saying to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a den of robbers.”

  And he was teaching daily in the temple. The chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people were seeking to destroy him, but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were hanging on his words.

 

If all we take away from this is that it was Jesus’ angry protest of the commercialisation of the temple, we’ll have missed the point entirely.  This is another of his acted out prophecies.  It’s a warning—in the vein of Jeremiah—that if the temple becomes the hide-out of a bunch of robbers, it will fall under the Lord’s judgement.  And, of course, that’s just what had happened.  The money-changers and the folks selling animals for sacrifice had to be there.  Roman coinage wasn’t allowed in the temple.  People needed animals for their sacrifices and not everyone could bring one from home.  Maybe the exchange rates and the prices were gouging the people, but the real robbers were the priests and leaders of Israel, who were robbing God in far more important way.

The temple stood at the heart of Jewish identity.  It represented the covenant between the Lord and his people.  And even though the cloud of his glory had never returned to it after the exile, it was still seen as that one place on earth where heaven and earth, where God and human beings met.  And so it was the symbol of the Lord’s faithfulness to Israel, of the sureness of his covenant promises.  But the people took the Lord’s faithfulness and his covenant promises for granted.  They lived as if a mere outward façade of faithfulness to the Lord’s covenant would bring his blessings and Jesus has been reminded them over and over and over, that the only real response to the Lord’s covenant faithfulness is faithfulness and obedience in return.  Disobedience to the Lord’s covenant doesn’t just result in a lack of blessing.  No, if you’re in covenant with the Lord, disobedience eventually calls down judgement.  The Lord will set this world to rights and if the people he has called to be stewards of his grace for the sake of the world will not be true to their calling, he will send judgement.

Again, this wasn’t unexpected.  Throughout his ministry Jesus had pointed—sometimes subtly and other times not-so-subtly—to the fact that the temple’s days were numbered and that, in him, the Lord was doing something new.  Maybe the greatest hints were those times when he announced the forgiveness of sins, without people having to go to the trouble of offering a sacrifice.  Repeatedly, Jesus bypassed the priests and the temple and offered, himself, what the temple had offered the people.  Later, he would announce that he would tear down the temple and rebuild it in three days.  All of this was blasphemy to the priests.  And they never did grasp what he meant when he said he would rebuild the temple in three days, but those who saw him raised from the dead did.  Jesus was the new temple.  Heaven and earth, God and man no longer meeting in a building on the mountaintop, but in Jesus himself.  In him we meet the God of Israel.  In him we know his justice, but in him we also know his grace and his mercy and his love as he weeps for those about to face God’s wrath, as he prays for the very people who crucified him.  In him, most of all, we see the profound faithfulness of God and his worthiness to receive glory and praise.

And then the amazing thing.  As the Lord judged the old Israel for her unfaithfulness to her calling, in Jesus he creates a new people, a new Israel, and establishes a new covenant—a covenant this time ratified with his blood shed at the cross and in the pouring out of his own Spirit on his people.  We go from Jesus, in whom God and man, heaven and earth intersect, to his church—to a people—in whom the Lord himself dwells.  The old Israel looked to a law written on stone tablets, while the new—while we—live with the law written by the Spirit of God on our own hearts.  And in the same way, the old Israel looked to a temple of bricks and mortar on the mountaintop above Jerusalem, but by his Spirit, Jesus has made us the new temple.  He incorporates us into his ministry.  As we saw a couple of weeks ago.  We have been adopted we share in his inheritance.  And so, because our Lord is prophet, priest, and king, we too as a people share in his prophetic, priestly, and ruling ministry.

In our Epistle today, 1 Corinthians 12:1-11, St. Paul reminded the Christians in Corinth of their calling.  The Spirit had empowered them with amazing gifts, but like the old Israel, they’d forgotten their calling and were using those gifts for their own agendas.

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.  (1 Corinthians 12:4-7)

This leads Paul into Chapter 13, where he writes about the nature and supremacy of love.  “Love never ends,” he says.  These other gifts are temporary, but they’re meant to build up love.  They’re meant to create a community of people who will be stewards of God’s grace—a community of people redeemed and made new by his own blood, shed at the cross, a people who, by his grace, have a share in his new creation, a priestly and prophetic people called to go out as the Messiah’s royal heralds to proclaim that he has died, that he has risen, and that he is the world’s true Lord.  A people who live with the Lord in their midst and who show the world his faithfulness, to show the world that he is worthy of glory and praise.

Brothers and Sisters, that’s us.  Like Israel in Jesus’s day, we live in an in-between time.  One day the Lord will return again to judge the earth, when the gospel has done its work, when every last one of his enemies has been put under his feet, when he comes to remove every last vestige of sin and rebellion and to set everything to rights, to wipe away every tear, and bring his new creation in all its fulness.  But in anticipation of that day, we are his stewards, empowered by his Spirit and entrusted with the gospel, with the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen.

And as Christendom wanes—at least in our part of the world—and as the darkness creeps back in, there’s powerful sense in which we, the church, are coming to know exile as the old Israel once did.  Brothers and Sisters, that exile is a call to faithfulness, a call to remember that Jesus is king, and call to remember that his gospel and his Spirit will accomplish what he’s sent them to do.  And that means that as stewards of his gospel and his Spirit, we will accomplish what he has chosen and called us to do—to be stewards of his grace, to be his royal heralds proclaiming his death and resurrection and his lordship until he comes again.  No matter how dark it gets, no matter how hated and despised we may be, the Lord is always faithful to his promises.  He is our hope and he never fails.  May we be faithful with the treasures of the gospel and the Spirit he has entrusted to us, that one day he may say, “Well done, good and faithful servants.”

Let’s pray: Let your merciful ears, O Lord, be open to the prayers of your humble servants; and, that we may obtain what we ask of you, teach us to ask for those things that please you, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

The Transfiguration: Who do you say that I am?

St. Matthew 17:1-9

by William Klock

“Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” Jesus asked his disciples.  If you want to follow along with the story this morning, I’m going to begin at Matthew 16:13.  In both Mark’s and Luke’s Gospels Jesus asks the same question at the same point.  It’s the turning point in the gospel story.  Jesus is about to set out on his final journey to Jerusalem.  For three years he has travelled around Galilee and the surrounding region preaching, teaching, healing, casting out demons, and calling God’s people to repent.  His friends have followed him.  They’ve seen and they’ve heard the response of the people.  Most recently they’ve been in Caesarea Philippi, way to the north, a couple day’s journey beyond Galilee.  And Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”  I suspect he chose the location because he knew the answer to that question was exactly the sort of thing that would have made King Herod angry, exactly the sort of thing that would get him killed.  And so he waited—he’s staged it this way, because he does that sort of thing a lot, he stages it to make a point—so he’s waited until they’re way up north, out of Herod’s territory and out of Herod’s grasp.  The question itself turns the story in the new direction it inevitably has to go, from Galilee to Jerusalem, and ultimately to the cross.  “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”

“They say you’re John the Baptist, or Elijah, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.”  That, right there, is worth stopping to take note of, because it tells us how the people perceived Jesus.  They didn’t think of Jesus as a nice guy or a do-gooder.  He wasn’t “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild”.  Yes, Jesus did good.  Yes he was gentle—when that was appropriate—but the people saw him, first and foremost, as a firebrand, like the old prophets.  They saw him as someone who wasn’t afraid to speak the word of the Lord—someone like the prophets who showed no fear as he confronted a godless king or an idolatrous high priest.

But then Jesus asks, “Who do you say that I am?”  And Peter, always a little bit of a keener, yells out, “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God!”

That needs some unpacking.  First off, Jesus asks what people think of the “son of man”.  That’s what he often called himself and in that he’s drawing on the imagery of Daniel 7.  The son of man in Daniel represented Israel and was finally glorified and given a throne by the Ancient of Days.  Even though he showed himself to be Messiah in nearly everything he did and said, in calling himself the “son of man” he was identifying himself as the Messiah and as Israel’s representative and one-day king.  But then Peter’s response: “You’re the Messiah”.  Everyone in Israel was longing and praying for the Lord’s Messiah.  No one knew exactly what he would be like or what he would do—well—that’s not really true.  Most people knew, most people were pretty certain what the Messiah would be like and what he would do, it’s just that different groups of people had different expectations.  Some people expected a great king like David, whom the Lord would send to defeat the pagan nations and to restore Israel to her rightful place on top of the heap.  Other people expected a priest or prophet who would cleanse the temple and purge the priesthood and restore right worship of the Lord.  Others saw a man like Moses who would reestablish torah amongst the people.  But whoever and whatever they expected of the Messiah, one thing everyone agreed on was that he would fulfil the Lord’s promises, that he would fulfil the scriptures, and usher in his kingdom; that he would set the world to rights; that he would make everything on earth as it is in heaven.

Peter had a clearer and sharper idea of Jesus than the general public.  Peter and the disciples had been with Jesus for three years.  They’d heard him preaching day after day.  They’d seen all the things he had done.  Consider.  They had seen Jesus preaching on the mountain like Moses.  And they’d been there when he was criticised for ministering on the sabbath and answered his critics like King David.  They were the twelve whom he called by name, as if he were Jacob calling forth twelve new patriarchs.  And as he confronted the world with the word of the Lord and healed the sick and raised the dead, they’d watched and couldn’t help but see him in light of the prophets of old, like Elijah and Elisha.  And in light of all of that, they couldn’t help but see the Messiah—in many ways, everyone’s expectations all rolled into one: prophet, priest, and most of all: the king.  God’s anointed king.  Their word for that was “Messiah”.

But Peter doesn’t just say “You’re the Messiah”.  He adds that the Messiah is the “son of the living God”.  That needs some unpacking too.  This title, “son of God”, didn’t mean quite the same thing to First Century Jews that it means to Twenty-First Century Christians.  When Peter said that Jesus was the son of God, he was thinking of Old Testament passages like 2 Samuel 7, where the Lord made a promise to David about his offspring:

When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom.  He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.  I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son.

 

Peter also would have been thinking of the words of Psalm 2:

As for me, I have set my King

         on Zion, my holy hill.”

I will tell of the decree:

         The Lord said to me, “You are my Son;

         today I have begotten you.  (Psalm 2:6-7)

For Peter and the others, “son of God” was a reference to the king.  And not just that, but it said something about the king’s relation to the Lord—he was the Lord’s “son” and his chosen representative.  This, I think, is why Jesus asked this question when and where he did.  They were a long way from Herod and an even longer way away from Caesar, but the fact that Jesus was the Messiah, the son of the living God, meant that the days of Herod and Caesar were numbered.  That was a dangerous claim to make out loud.  It also meant that Peter and the others, if they continued to follow Jesus, were signing up to be part of a prophetic movement that would challenge the authority of the rulers of the world.  Jesus was giving them royal authority and making them royal heralds.  This is the point of Jesus’ next words to them that are so often misunderstood:

And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.  I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”  (Matthew 16:18-19)

 

On this rock.  They thought back to Jesus, preaching from the mountain like Moses, and telling the story about the wise man who built his house on the rock versus the foolish man who built on sand.  We might miss the allusion there, but the Jews knew immediately that Jesus was talking about the temple, up on the rock of Mount Zion—the place where heaven and earth met and where, some people thought, the gates of sheol, the grave, stood.  And Jesus’ point is that he is building a new and better temple, this time not with brick and mortar.  This time the Lord’s temple will be a people made up of everyone who gives their allegiance to the Lord’s king—everyone who, with Peter, declares that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of the living God.

 

If there was ever good news, this is it.  I imagine some of the disciples sitting there and thinking that now that this is in the open, maybe they ought to get busy raising an army so they can march on Jerusalem and set Jesus on the throne.  But instead, Jesus warns them in verse 20: “Don’t tell anyone that I’m the Messiah.”  It’s a strange juxtaposition.  And, at least from the disciples’ perspective, it gets stranger.  Matthew writes that:

From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.  (Matthew 16:21)

This is the part where Peter pulls Jesus aside and rebukes him, “Jesus!  That isn’t Messiah talk!  This will never happen to you!”

Do you remember the part of the The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe where the children finally meet Aslan.  Everyone is thrilled.  For centuries the people of Narnia hoped and prayed for their king to return to defeat the White Witch.  Now he’s finally landed in Narnia, he’s gathered his army—and the prophesied sons of Adam and Daughters of eve have even arrived.  The prophecies are fulfilled, it’s the eve of the great battle, and everyone knows that the King will defeat the Witch and set everything to rights.  Celebration is in the air, because though there’s a battle coming, they know that with Aslan they will win.  But everyone also notices that something’s wrong with Aslan and, in the middle of the night, Susan and Lucy follow him as he walks off by himself.  They watch as he’s met by the Witch and her minions at the stone table.  And at first they think he’s going to win the battle early and single-handedly.  But, instead, he just stands there and lets the witch bind him, and shave off his mane, and humiliate him, and then kill him.  And when everyone’s left, Susan and Lucy sit next to Aslan’s body and they weep for hours, thinking it’s over and that everything’s been lost.  I suspect Peter felt a bit like that.  Jesus was the Messiah.  Peter said it and Jesus agreed.  Jesus congratulates him on his insight and claps him on the back and announces that it’s time to go to Jerusalem.  And everyone knew that meant it was time for Jesus to defeat his enemies and take his throne.  Imagine the smiles and the excitement.  But then Jesus says that he’s going to Jerusalem to die.  That part about dying rang so powerfully in Peter’s ears that he missed the rest about rising from the dead.  “No, Jesus!  Don’t talk like that!  Don’t betray your own cause!  I know a lot—even most—people have rejected you, but you’re the Messiah.  We’re on a mission from God.  We’ll win.  We can’t lose.”

And Jesus stops Peter and rebukes him.  In fact, he rebukes him with the same powerful words he rebuked the satan with in the wilderness:

“Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.” (Matthew 16:23)

They had the Messiah bit right.  They’d seen Jesus as Moses and as King David and as Jacob and as the prophets, but having seen that, they should have seen further.  Jesus was embodying his people and ultimately, to make them right with the Lord, it also meant dying the death they deserved for their unfaithfulness.  Jesus had to follow the story of Israel through all the way to the bitter end.  In a short time they would see Jesus as Israel’s atoning lamb.  Moses, Jacob, David, Elijah…they were all part of the story Jesus came to embody, but it couldn’t be fulfilled without the lamb at the very end.

And this has implications not only for Jesus, but for his people.  He goes on in verses 24-28 with the words we know so well.

“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.  For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.  For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?

 

Again, Jesus knew that he was likely to die on a Roman cross.  He knew that, because it’s what the Romans did to rebellious Jews and Jesus knew that as Israel’s Messiah, he would not only embody their father, their law-giver, their king, and their prophets, but also their death if they did not repent.  And here he reminds the disciples that the vocation of the Messiah is also the vocation of his people.  We can feel the darkness hanging over the conversation, but then the light breaks through the clouds again as Jesus goes on:

 

For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done.  Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

 

Jesus switches from “son of God” back to “son of man”, that Israel character in Daniel—the one who would ascend on the clouds, from earth to heaven, to be presented before the Ancient of Days—to be “given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed” (Daniel 7:14).

This whole thing is a bewildering back and forth: victory, defeat, and victory again.  Imagine poor Peter, praised one day for his faith and for affirming Jesus as Messiah and then next rebuked with those words, “Get behind me, satan!”  And Jesus making it clear in no uncertain terms that he must die.  And if that wasn’t enough, that the disciples should take up their crosses and follow him to their own deaths.  But now Jesus says, “Don’t worry.  I’m not only the Messiah, but I’m also Daniel’s son of man—remember him?  I told you that even though I must die, I will rise on the third day, and you will live to see me ascend on the clouds to my heavenly throne.  I will be vindicated by my Father.  And that means that you will be vindicated too for my sake.  My kingdom is coming and it really will be on earth as in heaven.

This was all a lot to take in and I expect their heads were spinning with it all.  They’d got pretty good at putting two and two together as they watched Jesus, but now he was heaping things on.  No one thought of the Messiah this way, but they were seeing that all the pieces were there in the scriptures.  In 17:1 Matthew tells us that six days later Jesus took Peter, James, and John up a high mountain.  Six days.  Processing time.  Time to think all of this through.  If they were anything like us, I suspect they’d been thinking a lot on what Jesus had said about his death and even more about them taking up their own crosses and following him.  I suspect they were thinking on those things a lot more than the bit about Jesus rising from the grave and ascending to his throne.  I think those were six grim days of dreary reflection.  Bu then Jesus took them up a mountain.  They could see Galilee spread out below them, the place where they had been ministering with Jesus for three years.  It was a reminder that it was time to move on, time to make that last journey to Jerusalem with Jesus.  And they started to think about all the things he’d been saying a week before.  How much had they managed to sort out in their heads?  And then something amazing happened and whatever dark clouds had been hanging over their hearts were burned away by the glory of the Lord.  In 17:2-3 Matthew says:

[Jesus] was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light.  And behold, there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him.

 

As they watched, Jesus changed.  His clothes, travel-stained and worn, shone like white light and his face shone like the sun.  And it wasn’t just Jesus blazing with light.  Moses and Elijah appeared with Jesus and, in his account, Luke says that they too blazed with the same glory.  And seeing this, Peter blurts out:

“Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.”

 

Whatever doubts they had about Jesus as Messiah in light of all of his talk about rejection and death, all those doubts were driven away by this image of glory.  But Peter still doesn’t want to go to Jerusalem.  He still doesn’t want Jesus to die.  And here’s the answer.  They can build three tents for Jesus and Moses and Elijah and they can all stay right here.  Jesus can rule from here and all Israel can make a pilgrimage up the mountain to see that he’s really the Messiah.  And here are Moses and Elijah to prove it.  But that’s not the answer.  That was never Israel’s vocation and it’s not Jesus’.  And this mount way up north was never meant to be the Messiah’s throne.  And before Peter can get all the words out the Lord himself speaks:

[Peter] was still speaking when, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.”  When the disciples heard this, they fell on their faces and were terrified.  But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Rise, and have no fear.”  And when they lifted up their eyes, they saw no one but Jesus only.  (Matthew 17:5-8)

This is my son.  We’re back to the Messiah, the Lord’s king.  In the midst of the disciples’ confusion and questions and doubt, the Lord assures them that no matter what happens, no matter where this story takes Jesus and no matter where this story will take them, Jesus is his son, the anointed king, and everything will turn out all right in the end.  The kingdom will come—on earth as in heaven.  Jesus will be vindicated and so will they.  “Just listen to him,” says the Lord.  Trust him.  He knows what he’s doing and I am with him.  Don’t be afraid.  Don’t be afraid for him.  And don’t be afraid to take up your own crosses and to follow where he leads, don’t be afraid to take up your crosses and to follow where the gospel will lead you.

And the cloud lifted and they looked up, and there was Jesus.  No Moses.  No Elijah.  No more blazing glory.  Just Jesus.  But after that they were ready to take up their crosses and to follow him to Jerusalem.  Moses, the lawgiver, and Elijah, Israel’s greatest prophet had stood there with Jesus, uniting him with Israel’s story, connecting him with their ministry.  Here was Jesus, prophet and priest and then the Lord’s announcement: This is my son.  Jesus is the anointed king as well.  Prophet, priest, and king.  And in the dark days ahead, they disciples had that vision of Jesus glorified.  Some say that the Transfiguration was a revelation of the divinity of Jesus, but since Moses and Elijah shone with the same light, I don’t think that really fits.  A few chapters earlier, quoting Daniel, Jesus said that the Lord’s people would shine like stars in his kingdom.  What the Transfiguration reveals is the glory of Jesus’ perfect humanity as he sets his face towards the cross—a glory he will one day share with those who take up their crosses and follow him.  The Transfiguration prefigures the cross—two mountains and two very different scenes, but when the disciples were tempted to despair over the scene on Mount Calvary, Matthew (and Mark and Luke) remind us of the scene on the Mount of Transfiguration.  On Mount Calvary Jesus is revealed in shame, but on the Mount of Transfiguration he is revealed in glory.  On Mount Calvary we see Jesus stripped naked, soldiers throwing dice for his clothes and on the Mount of Transfiguration we see him clothed in brilliant white.  On Mount Calvary we see him between two violent revolutionaries, symbols of Israel’s faithlessness and on the Mount of Transfiguration we see him between Moses and Elijah, between the embodiment of the law and the prophets, symbols of faithfulness.  On Mount Calvary dark clouds blot out the sun and on the Mount of Transfiguration the bright clouds of heaven shine their light.  On Mount Calvary a Roman soldier solemnly declares that surely this was God’s son, confirming what was echoed from the clouds as the Lord spoke on the Mount of Transfiguration, “This is my son”.

Brothers and Sisters, on the Mount of Transfiguration it’s as if we’re given a glimpse of heaven’s view of Mount Calvary.  What looked from a human perspective like the worst day in the world, when it looked as though sin and death had done their worst and won, Jesus was, in fact, on that cross revealed in all his glory and was never loved so much by his Father.  “Who do people say that I am?” Jesus asked.  And people have all sorts of answers: good teacher, reformer, revolutionary, prophet, myth.  But the gospel story reveals him as the Messiah, the son of the living God.  He is prophet, priest, and king who fulfils the story of his people as the lamb who died for their sins.  More than anything else, we see in the lamb just what kind of king Jesus is.  In him we see the faithfulness, the goodness, the loving-kindness of God, whose glory shines brightest when he gives himself for the sake of his people, when he turns death into life.  Think on that, Brothers and Sisters, as you come to his Table this morning to eat the bread and drink the wine, remembering his body broken and his blood shed.  Here we see his glory in all its fulness.  Here we see his faithfulness, that we might go out from this place, taking up our own crosses and following him—our faithfulness inspired by his.  Come to the Table and hear the Father’s words: “This is my beloved son.  Listen to him.”

Let’s pray: O God, who on the holy mount revealed to chosen witnesses your only-begotten Son, wonderfully transfigured, in raiment white and glistening: Mercifully grant that we, being delivered from the disquietude of this world, may be permitted to behold the King in his beauty; who with you, O Father, and you, O Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Eighth Sunday after Trinity: Heirs with the Messiah

Romans 8:12-17 & St. Matthew 7:15-21

by William Klock

“Beware false prophets!” Jesus warns his disciples in our Gospel today.  This got me thinking about my first year here at Living Word.  The Foursquare church put on a big event and brought in a speaker from out of town and he opened the event with what people called a “prophetic word” and what lots of people soon after were calling “The Comox Valley Prophecy”.  A lot of people got really excited about it and so I found it on the Internet and watched an hour of complete and utter nonsense.  This man claimed to be speaking words that were given to him directly by God, but it was all Word-Faith, Prosperity gospel heresy.  Taking Isaiah 61 completely out of context, he proclaimed that the coming year would be the year of the Lord’s favour and that the churches would suddenly be bursting at the seams, that all the businesses in town would prosper and be rolling in profits, and that no one would die for the next year.  It got people in a lot of local churches really excited, but what was troubling was that they weren’t excited about the gospel or about Jesus.  It didn’t get them fired up to go out and to proclaim the good news that he was crucified, is risen, and is Lord.  It didn’t get anyone on their knees in repentance, let alone going out and calling others to repent.  Instead, it got groups of people going out to local business to “declare” that they would prosper that year.  False prophecy and false teaching spilled over into more false prophecy and false teaching.

Now, this was all a new phenomenon to me.  I’d never been exposed to that kind of thing and I struggled to find the appeal in it and then I struggled even more to understand why people continued to find it appealing.  It was troubling enough to me that a lot of people didn’t recognise the false teaching and the false gospel, but once the prophecies about prosperity and, especially, about no one dying failed to pan out…  People died.  People in that very church died.  And some of those businesses didn’t just struggle that year, some of them failed.  And the churches weren’t bursting at the seams.  And as much as this guy opened by saying this was a special message God had given him for the Comox Valley, a little searching with Google showed that he gave exactly the same “special” message almost everywhere he was asked to speak, from California to South Africa.  But none of this seemed to phase most people.  They got charged up about it for a couple of months and then forgot about it as they moved onto the next exciting thing to catch their attention and the next “prophet” who said things they wanted to hear.  And that’s just it.  That’s the danger of false prophets.  They tell people what they want to hear.  As Jeremiah warned, they declare “Peace! Peace! When there is no peace.”  While the true prophet is warning of coming judgement and calling people to repentance, the false prophets are tickling itching ears and telling everyone that everything is fine and that they’re on the right track.  Judgement is coming, but the false prophets instead proclaim riches and health and all sorts of warm fuzzies.  The true prophet calls people to follow him through the narrow gate and to follow the difficult and narrow path that leads to life, while the false prophet leads people down the wide and easy way that leads to complacency and eventually to destruction.  False prophets tell people what they want to hear.  Ed Stetzer, a prominent missiologist, says, “If you want people to like you, don’t become a pastor; sell ice cream.”  There’s an even better way to get people to like you—and to get rich to boot: Become a false prophet.

Again, look at Matthew 7, beginning at verse 15:

  “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.  You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?  So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.  A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit.  Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.  Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.

  “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.

 

Remember the context in which Jesus was speaking to these people.  It’s good that we want to understand how to apply Jesus’ words to our own situation, but we often have a bad habit of short-circuiting the process by ignoring the original context.  We miss things—and sometimes we get things wrong—when we do that.  So remember that Jesus was saying these things to fellow Jews.  And Jesus has a very specific place and part in the story of the God of Israel and his people.

Remember Israel’s calling and mission.  God’s creation was a disaster and it all went wrong because human beings rebelled against him.  Even wiping out the entire human race and starting over with the one, last righteous man and his family didn’t solve the problem.  So in that dark world the Lord called Abraham out of the nations.  And he made himself known to Abraham and most of all he showed Abraham his goodness and his faithfulness so that Abraham could be a witness to that goodness and faithfulness.  And the Lord made Abraham into a people, a nation, and he did the same with them.  Over and over he showed them his goodness and his faithfulness.  He made them promises and then he did what he said.  When they were slaves in Egypt, he rescued them, he cared for them in the wilderness, and he led them into the promised land and gave them wells they hadn’t dug and cities they hadn’t built.  He gave them his law, he gave them a king, and most importantly he lived in their midst.  The other nations had temples and in those temples were idols of wood or gold or stone that were blind, deaf, dumb, and powerless.  But in the midst of Israel was the tabernacle where the glory of the Lord rested on the ark of the covenant.  A real, living God who was good and who was faithful and proved it to his own people before the watching eyes of the world.

And that’s just it.  Israel was to be a witness to the nations.  The nations were supposed to see the goodness and faithfulness of the Lord reflected in the corporate life of his people.  As they lived in his presence and as they trusted in him.  And Israel, to whom the Lord had given his law, they were supposed to be the righteous benchmark by which he would one day judge the nations when he came to put an end to their wickedness and to set his world to rights.

But over and over Israel failed to be that witness and to be that benchmark.  The Lord sent prophets to call his people to repentance, but they rejected his prophets.  Sometimes they even killed them.  Instead, they listened to false prophets who told them everything was fine.  The Lord even sent his people into exile.  The promised land was his.  It was holy.  And if they weren’t going to be holy too, then they could not live in his land or in his presence.  First the northern tribes were conquered and scattered by the Assyrians and then the southern tribes were conquered by the Babylonians.  Jerusalem and the temple were utterly destroyed and the people were taken off in captivity to live in a foreign, pagan land.  The Lord was faithful to his promises when he disciplined his people, and, again, he was faithful to his promises when he returned them to the land.  But the people were still fickle.  They still served him with divided loyalties.

And so, after a long string of prophets whom the people rejected, the Lord finally sent his own son.  He sent his son to proclaim his soon-to-come judgement on Israel and to call his people to repentance.  But he also sent his son to be the faithful Israelite, the Israelite who would single-mindedly serve the him, the Israelite who would obey the law, the Israelite who would be that holy and righteous benchmark, the Israelite who would ultimately die the death that his sinful people deserved and become a sacrifice for their sins.

The key point here with regard to today’s Gospel is that Jesus came to announce that the Lord was about to judge his people and to call them to repentance.  Those who refused to repent—those who listened to the false prophets, who carried on down the easy, wide way, would face death and destruction in a generation.  And with that announcement came a call to repentance.  There was a narrow way that would lead through that judgement to life.  It wasn’t an easy way.  Just as Jesus was mocked and rejected and eventually put to death, so those who repented and followed him would walk a similar path.  At the beginning of this same Sermon on the Mount, Jesus had said to them, “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.”  On the other side of that rejection was life—life in a new people of God who would be filled with his own Spirit and who, because of that, would have a righteousness greater than the Pharisees.  They would finally be the people who would be faithful to the Lord and, most of all, in whom the nations would see the goodness and faithfulness of the Lord, so that they would come in faith to bring him glory.  The nations would see reflected in this new Israel the glory of a god unlike any of the gods they had ever known and so God’s glory would spread and his new creation would grow.  And all those who found themselves in Jesus the Messiah would find this gift of the Spirit a foretaste, a down-payment on that day when the gospel has done its work, when the glory of the Lord covers the earth as the waters cover the sea, and when death itself is finally defeated.  On that day God will raise them all to new life, just as he had raised Jesus, and they will live forever in his presence in a world set to rights once and for all.

But that narrow way in the meantime was going to be hard.  It wasn’t just the rejection of their friends and families.  False prophets would call them away from it.  And so Jesus warned them: Look for good fruit.  That’s just what Jesus was calling his people to bear.  Pay attention, he’s saying, to the ones you listen to.  If they’re not bearing good fruit themselves, how do you think they’ll encourage you to bear good fruit?  The prophets reflected the state of the nation.  In a few short years judgement would fall on Jerusalem and people would be crying out to the Lord for deliverance.  But the Lord knows his own by their fruit and these had borne none, because they’d rejected Jesus and instead listened to fruitless prophets.  In contrast, Jesus says, “Those who do the will of my Father in heaven”—those who have found their identity in me and have been filled with the Spirit—they’re the ones who will fulfil the law and, because of that, because of the fruit the Spirit causes them to bear, they’ll be known by the Father.

This is where Paul picks up in our Epistle from Romans 8.  Jesus knew that his people would face rejection and opposition and persecution—even martyrdom—for the sake of following him.  He knew they would be confronted by false prophets who would tell them that everything was fine and that they were foolish for following Jesus.  And Paul was shepherding people in very similar situations.  He saw fellow Jewish believers, even out in the gentile world, being hassled and harassed by their fellow Jews for the sake of their faith in Jesus.  Sometimes their fellow Jews would even be so angry with them that they’d rat them out to the Roman authorities for being disloyal citizens of the empire.  But, too, the people in these churches in places like Rome or Asia Minor faced harassment from their pagan neighbours and even from the civil and religious authorities—and in their world those were often the same people.  At the time Paul wrote this in the 50s, there wasn’t any official persecution of Christians by the Romans, but Paul could see that it was eventually going to come.  People don’t like it when you expose their sin and warn of coming judgement.  The Jews didn’t like it went Jesus did it.  The Jews didn’t like it when their fellow Jewish Christians did it.  And Paul, seeing it on a small scale already, knew that the gentiles wouldn’t like it when it was their turn.  Caesar definitely wouldn’t like it.  When persecution came, it would be easy for believers to turn away from Jesus because of their fear.  And there would be false prophets proclaiming to the churches that everything was fine, that compromise was okay—like the Judaisers in Galatians or the Nicolaitans in Revelation.

So Paul exhorts the Christians in Rome to stand firm.  The Lord has called them and made them his witnesses and they have no reason to fear.  Look again at verses 17-21:

So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh.  For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.  For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.  For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”  The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with the Messiah, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

 

“Look,” Paul is saying, “Israel was captive to the flesh.  They had God’s good law to live by, but it was written on tablets of stone and their hearts were full of the same poison as the hearts of the rest of the human race.  The Lord had poured out his love on them and they should have loved him wholeheartedly in return, but their hearts were set on sin and on self—and so they could never return the Lord’s love.  Not truly.  They had—and their descendants still have –reason to fear.  The Lord will judge their unfaithfulness.”  But, says Paul, “You are different.  Not only have you been forgiven through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, but God has poured his own Spirit into you and that makes all the difference.  The Spirit renews your minds and regenerates your heart.  The law that was once written on stone—the law that we sum up in those words about loving the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and your neighbour as yourself—the Spirit writes that law on our hearts.  If we are in Jesus the Messiah, the law is no longer a stone tablet we look at and say, ‘I wish I could do that.’  Now it’s written on our hearts.  It’s our desire.  It’s what we value, because of the Spirit.”  Paul says that we still have to put to death our old ways, but it’s this gift of God’s own Spirit that makes it possible.  And it’s always good to remember that the Lord does not give his gifts in vain.

Brothers and Sisters, it’s good at this point to pause and let this sink in.  I think we often forget that there’s a bigger purpose behind all of this.  We know that sin is wrong.  We know that through Jesus our sins are forgiven.  We know that the Spirit turns our hearts away from sin to righteousness.  We know that we’re supposed to put away the old man and put on the new and live in the Spirit.  But I think we sometimes forget that righteousness isn’t an end in itself.  Remember the story.  Remember why God created a people for himself in the first place.  Think of Abraham in the midst of that big, dark world lost in sin and with no knowledge of the Lord.  Abraham and his family were to be witnesses to the Lord—to make him known, to be light in the darkness, to show that the Lord is good and faithful, different from the gods of the pagans, and worthy of the worship of the nations.  And this people, too, was to be the benchmark by which the nations were one day to be judged.  The old Israel failed and so God gave Jesus and the Spirit to create a new Israel—a new people to be both a light to the nations and the righteous benchmark by which they will one day be judged.  God’s people have always had this dual ministry to the word—to be both a priestly and prophetic people.  As priests we mediate the presence and knowledge of God to the nations and as prophets we stand as—or we should stand—as God’s benchmark of righteousness, calling the nations to repentance and showing forth his standard—showing the world what humanity was created to be.

If that seems like a lot.  If it seems like an impossibly high calling, Paul goes on saying that we were once slaves to sin, but through Jesus and the Spirit we have been set free and adopted as sons of God.  Brothers and Sisters, by the Spirit we are incorporated into the story of Jesus the Messiah.  Because we have the Spirit, we belong to him.  The Messiah is in us.  And if we go back a few verses, Paul tells us that the God who “raised Jesus the Messiah from the dead will also give life to [our] mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in [us].”  I think this part of Romans is usually read as if Paul is talking about conversion, but it’s really much deeper than that.  Paul is talking about how believers are taken up into the story of Jesus and participate in his suffering and resurrection.  To be filled with the Spirit is to be absolutely and completely assured that one day the Lord will raise our mortal (and in some cases martyred) bodies from the dead, just as he raised Jesus from the dead.  This is the root of faith.  This is what those Christians in Rome needed to remember and believe with all their hearts when persecution and tribulation came.

And if they’ll do that—in the power of the Spirit—Paul says they will become “sons of God”.  It’s about participation in the story and life of Jesus as adopted sons of God—it’s especially powerful when we let Paul’s words stand without changing it to sons and daughters or to children of God.  He writes “sons of God” for a reason, just as he writes about crying out “Abba, Father” for a reason.  Both make it clear he’s talking about our being incorporated into Jesus the Messiah and into his story.  Think back to Jesus crying out to his Father in Gethsemane the night before he was crucified.  Jesus’ people cry with him, “Abba, Father”.  The Lord is no distant god.  Brothers and Sisters, because we are in his Son by faith, we too are his sons and daughters and have the privilege to cry out to him as Father just as Jesus did.  And Paul recalls that prayer in the garden for a reason.  That was Jesus’ prayer to the Father, his prayer as he was about to face his own death, it was his prayer that his Father would take that horrible cup from him.  But it was also a prayer of faith as he submitted himself to his Father’s plan.  We know that Paul is saying to the Romans that when that same cup of persecution and maybe even martyrdom comes to them, they can cry out to the Father with the same confidence that Jesus did, they can submit in faith to his plan the same way Jesus did, and they can know that the Father holds them in his hands the same way he held Jesus.  And, I think most important, they can expect that the Father will vindicate them the same way he vindicated Jesus.  They can know that one day the Father will raise them from the dead.

If they will let themselves be taken up in the story of Jesus the Messiah—something they can’t do on their own power, but they can in the power of the Spirit—if they suffering with the Messiah and walk his narrow and difficult path, they will be heirs with him—his inheritance, his glory will be theirs.

Brothers and Sisters, those first Christians, whether they were in Jerusalem and facing the wrath of their fellow Jews or whether they were in Rome facing the wrath of the pagans—in a few years facing the wrath of the Emperor Nero who would throw them to lions or burn them alive—Paul reminds them who they are in Jesus and the Spirit.  They are the people of God, a people washed clean by the blood of Jesus and a people made righteous by the Spirit, a people called to be prophets and priests.  Their calling was to stand before the tsunami of the world’s wrath calling sinful men and women to repentance, while mediating the loving grace of God—proclaiming the good news that Jesus has died, that he is risen, and that life, that participation in God’s new creation can be known through him.

Brothers and Sisters, judgement fell on Jerusalem and the Lord proved himself faithful to his promises as he delivered the church there from destruction.  And the gospel went out to the Greeks and Romans and the Lord showed himself faithful again.  Through the gospel and through the faithful witness of his people, an entire empire believed.  With the biblical witness itself and with that history behind us, we have every reason to trust Jesus and the Spirit ourselves.  We now live on the other side of Christendom.  We don’t know what will happen.  The gospel marches on in other parts of the world, but in ours, darkness is creeping back in.  I doubt that we will know martyrdom the way Paul and so many of those First Century believers did, but we will know in some way the wrath of the world as we stand as prophets and priests, confronting a rebellious world.  Stand firm.  Do not listen to the false prophets who call for compromise and for the easy way.  Do not fear the wrath of the world, for we are in Jesus the Messiah and the Spirit has united us with him.  We are sons and daughters of the Father and no matter how bad things get, we can cry out with Jesus, “Abba, Father!” and know that he hears us.  He gave his Son for our sake, why would we think he would abandon us now?  And because we are united with the risen Jesus, because we are sons and daughters of God, we know that on the other side of all our troubles and sorrows lies our inheritance—as we confess in the Creed, the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

Let’s pray: Father, through the redeeming death and resurrection of your Son and through the regenerating work of your Spirit, you have made us your people.  You have given us the task to stand as both prophets and priests, confronting this rebellious world and mediating your grace.  Strengthen us, we pray, that we might stand firm in this calling no matter what trials and tribulations we may face.  Make us new by your Spirit, fill us with your grace, and remind us that we share in the inheritance of your Son, who has been raised from the dead, that we might confront temptation and fear with a faith confident in your faithfulness.  Through Jesus we pray.  Amen

The Seventh Sunday after Trinity: Life in Jesus the Messiah

Hosea 14:1-9, Romans 6:19-23, & St. Mark 8:1-9

by William Klock

Hosea—these days we call him the Prophet Hosea, but then he was just Hosea, although not for long—Hosea lived in the midst of a wicked and idolatrous people.  God’s people had been split since the death of Solomon, the kingdom of Judah in the South and the Kingdom of Israel in the north.  Judah had its own problems with wickedness and idolatry, but compared to Israel Judah was a downright goody-two-shoes.  Hosea could walk through the city and see it all: drunkenness and sexual impurity of all kinds.  People mutilated their bodies and took their own sisters as wives.  Everywhere there was a general disregard for torah.  And the King.  Those were politically turbulent days, but instead of trusting in the Lord, the King made forbidden alliances with pagan nations and played the game of international politics and intrigue.  But worst of all was the idolatry.  There was a temple to the Lord at Bethel and another at Dan (and that was a problem in itself), but all over Israel, whether in the towns and cities or at the “high places” out in the country, there were temples and altars to Baal and to his consort, Asherah.  The Levites at Bethel and Dan went through the motions of worshipping the Lord, but as Hosea looked around him it seemed most people had devoted themselves to this pagan sky god and his fertility goddess wife.  Sacred prostitutes spilled out of the temples and into the street, enticing the Lord’s people to what should have been unthinkable.  To Hosea it seemed like just about everyone in Israel, from the King down to the labourer in the market, had forgotten who they were and to whom they belonged.  They were the people who lived with the Lord in their midst.  They were the people chosen and called to show the nations the greatness of the God of Israel.  But no one cared about that anymore.  There was little difference anymore between an Israelite and an Assyrian or a Phoenician.  And to those pagans, the God of Israel was a joke—powerless, jilted by his own people, no one to be feared.

And then the Lord spoke to Hosea.  And the Lord told him to go and find one of those prostitutes spilling out of the pagan temples, to take her, and to marry her.  He wasn’t just going to give Hosea a sermon to preach; he was going to make Hosea himself an object lesson.  “Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord” (Hosea 1:2).

Hosea’s life was to become a graphic reminder to the people of Israel that when the Lord had rescued them from Egypt, he had made her his people, the way a husband takes a bride.  He had loved her.  He had cared for her.  He had lavished good gifts on her.  And in return she had prostituted herself to other gods and forsaken his house.  In the same way, Hosea loved his wife, Gomer.  But repeatedly she abandoned him for other men and for her former life of prostitution.  Repeatedly Hosea went after her, buying her out of her bondage, restoring her to his house and to his loving care.  And in between he preached to Israel, reminding them of the Lord’s love and the Lord’s care and of the Lord’s faithfulness.  In between he preached to Israel and called her to repentance—to turn aside from the Baals and the Asherahs and to return to her first love, to return to the Lord.  To remember who she was and to whom she belonged.

Through Hosea the Lord warned the people that their betrayal would be costly, but he also reminded them of his love for them and of his faithfulness.  And he made them a promise.  We read part of that call and promise as our Old Testament lesson this morning.  Hosea 14:1-9.

Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God,

         for you have stumbled because of your iniquity.

Take with you words

         and return to the Lord;

say to him,

         “Take away all iniquity;

accept what is good,

         and we will pay with bulls

         the vows of our lips.

Assyria shall not save us;

         we will not ride on horses;

and we will say no more, ‘Our God,’

         to the work of our hands.

In you the orphan finds mercy.”

I will heal their apostasy;

         I will love them freely,

         for my anger has turned from them.

I will be like the dew to Israel;

         he shall blossom like the lily;

         he shall take root like the trees of Lebanon;

his shoots shall spread out;

         his beauty shall be like the olive,

         and his fragrance like Lebanon.

They shall return and dwell beneath my shadow;

         they shall flourish like the grain;

they shall blossom like the vine;

         their fame shall be like the wine of Lebanon.

O Ephraim, what have I to do with idols?

         It is I who answer and look after you.

I am like an evergreen cypress;

         from me comes your fruit.

Whoever is wise, let him understand these things;

         whoever is discerning, let him know them;

for the ways of the Lord are right,

         and the upright walk in them,

         but transgressors stumble in them.

 

The Lord called his people to repent, to turn aside from their idolatry, but he also promised that one way or another, he would heal their apostasy.  He will make them the people he chose and called them to be—his witnesses to the nations.

This week I’ve been working on restoring an antique camp stove I’ve had around for a while.  It’s not a run-of-the-mill stove and I’d been delaying because I was having trouble finding a paint that matched the original colour.  But last weekend I found a perfect match at the auto parts store.  It was expensive automotive paint—not the cheap stuff they sell at Home Depot or Canadian Tire—but since it’s kind of a special project I decided to go for it.  And it started out okay.  I sprayed the paint and the colour was pretty much perfect, but the colour itself was pretty thin.  They say to shake the can for one minute after the little mixing ball rattles.  I warmed the can a bit and shook it for ten minutes, thinking that maybe they’d been on the shelf for a while and the pigment had really settled in the bottom.  No change.  I started wondering if the cans were short on pigment or something.  What I managed to paint looked great, but it took a lot more paint than expected, so I ran out.  I went back to the store for another expensive can, got home, shook it like crazy for ten minutes just to be sure.  And I started spraying.  And this can was full of colour.  But the first thing I noticed was that it wasn’t quite the same colour.  And then I noticed that it wasn’t laying down smooth.  No matter what I did, it left a rough and blotchy texture on the surface.  And, of course, to get the colours to match, I had to spray the new paint over everything I’d already painted with the old paint.

And as I sat there looking at this mess of a project, I got discouraged and frustrated.  I’d invested a lot in that paint and had high hopes for what it would look like and in the end it failed me.  It didn’t do what it was supposed to do.  And it got me thinking about Hosea and Gomer and the Lord and Israel.  I invested in some cans of paint.  The Lord invested in a whole people.  I expected that paint to make an antique stove look good and to show off my handiwork.  The Lord expected Israel to show his goodness and glory to the nations.  I thought about giving up on that paint—throwing the stove back into the electrolysis tank and stripping it back to metal and starting over.  But that’s not what the Lord did with his people and it wasn’t what I was going to do with that paint.  A sent photos to a friend who used to work painting cars and he said, “Clear coat covers a multitude of sins.”  He’s right.  So I sat down with those stove parts and some water and some fine-grit sandpaper, and I spent hours wet-sanding.  I sanded and sanded until the paint was smooth and my hands were stained green.  And when I was done it looked awful.  It was smooth, but it cloudy and swirly and covered in fine scratches.  But it was ready.  All it took was one can of clear coat and a few minutes of spraying.  Clear coat covers a multitude of sins.  It fills in the fine scratches and imperfections and somehow it always comes out with a smooth, glossy finish.  It never fails.  The next evening I put everything together on the workbench and it looked great.  You’d never know what a mess it had been except for all the green under my fingernails.

And because I’m a preacher and the story of the God of Israel and his people is always on my brain, I thought about my friend’s joke about clear coat covering a multitude of sins (He’s not a Christian and had no idea the source of the phrase, but I hope maybe he’ll hear this and good things will come of it!) and then I went for a bike ride and the whole time I was thinking about how similar clear coat is to Jesus and the Spirit.  I know on some level there’s a heresy in there, but that’s the problem with every analogy and I wasn’t taking it that deep.  That expensive green automotive paint was Israel.  The Lord bought her out of Egypt, delivered her from Pharoah, and displayed to her and to the rest of the world his goodness and generosity in—at least a little bit—the same way I bought those cans of paint and showed the people, or at least the cashier at Lordco, the depth of my pockets.  And as the Lord set Israel to work to be a witness to his glory, I started spraying that paint to be a witness to my own handiwork—to photograph and post to the lantern and stove collectors’ forum on the Internet and on YouTube—to the great acclaim of my fellow collectors.  And just like Israel, that paint failed to perform.  It didn’t meet my expectations.  It made me look incompetent.  If I’d posted photos on the Internet without explanation, people would have mocked me for the sake of that paint that wouldn’t do what it was supposed to do.  Not so unlike the nations that mocked the Lord, the God of Israel, because of the faithlessness of his people—although certainly with far greater consequences.  And the sanding.  The hours and hours of sanding, scuffing up, knocking down, smoothing out that paint that just would not behave.  And not unlike Israel, even when I was done and everything was ready, it still looked awful—not at all what I expected.  The Internet would have mocked me even more if they’d seen it and thought that was the finished project.  But then the clear coat that covers a multitude of sins—at least in my own mind, so much like Jesus the Messiah, God himself, sent to be the faithful Israelite.  To give his life for the sake of their sins, his shed blood—dare I say—like the clear coat, filling in all the scuffs and scratches to the point you’d never know just how unfaithful that paint—or Israel—had been to its purpose and mission.  And then that gloss it leaves behind.  Even if that expensive paint had done everything it was supposed to do, even it went down flawlessly, it would never have look as perfect and as glossy as that damaged, roughed-up paint looked after it was clear-coated.  Kind of like the people of God.  Even if she’d kept the torah, a people with the divinely given law carved on stone tablets will never show forth the glory of the Lord the way a people filled with his own Spirit will show forth his glory.

And so I took some photos and I posted them in the lantern and stove collectors’ forum and the likes and the comments with glowing praise started rolling in.  Brothers and Sisters, that what’s supposed to happen with the nations, when the world see the handiwork of the God of Israel, the work of Jesus and the Spirit, in his people.  That’s why you and I are here today.  Because God disciplined and renewed his people by his Son and by his Spirit and that new people became witnesses of his glory.  In their story the nations saw the faithfulness of God and through their proclamation they heard how it was done through Jesus the Messiah and God’s own Spirit.  And they came and gave him glory and believed in Jesus and that divine clear coat covered them just the way it had Israel, and they became—and eventually you and I became—part of the people of God and part of that community meant to continually witness his glory.

And yet somehow, despite all that the Lord has done for us, we still need to be reminded who we are, to whom we belong, and what he’s called us to do and to be.  Last week we heard Paul’s words from Romans 6, reminding us of our baptism.  In the waters of baptism, he writes, we have died and risen with the Messiah.  We’re like Israel, passing through the Red Sea.  When she went in, she belonged to Pharoah, slaves to the Egyptians, but when she came out the other side she belonged to the Lord, free to serve him in his goodness, his bride and a beloved member of his household.  In today’s Epistle, Paul carries on a few verses later, again, Romans 6:19-23.

For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.

   For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.   But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed?  For the end of those things is death.  But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.

 

Remember that Paul was writing to an audience that was mostly Jewish or at least steeped in the Jewish scriptures and in the Jewish identity.  When Paul wrote about slavery and freedom, the first thing that came to mind was the Lord’s deliverance of Israel from her slavery in Egypt.  There had been a time when their ancestors had no choice but to obey the will of Pharaoh.  But as Moses led them through the Red Sea delivered them from that bondage, so Jesus has led us through the waters of baptism and delivered us from our bondage to sin.

That doesn’t mean that the life we have in Jesus is always easy.  The Lord led Israel through the wilderness before taking her into the promised land and Jesus leads us through a wilderness of our own on our way to the age to come.  He promised that his disciples would be rejected—some would even die—on account of him.  We live in the overlap of the ages, but the Lord has a purpose in that.  We, his church, are his means of proclaiming the good news about Jesus and we are witnesses of his glory to the world so that the nations will believe and give him glory.  When it’s finished, I’ll post my finished stove project to the Internet and everyone will like the photos and post comments giving me praise for what I’ve done.  Do you ever stop to think that the Lord is, right now, doing the same sort of thing with us?  He’s bought us with the blood of his Son, he’s washed away our sins, and he’s filled us with his Spirit, regenerating our hearts and renewing our minds.  He’s made us new creations and he’s sent us out into the world and the world is supposed to see his new creation in us and glorify him and believe.  When the world looks at the Church, it’s supposed to see, to have a foretaste, of God’s new creation and of the age to come in which all the pain and sorrow and sin and tears—even death itself—have been wiped away and everything set to rights.

Before Jesus washed us clean and filled us with the Spirit we were slaves to sin and sin leads to death and we see it all around us.  It’s the way of this fallen world.  But in Jesus and the Spirit the Lord has set us free, in Jesus and the Spirit he is sanctifying us—that means he’s making us holy, making us into the people he intends for us to be—stripping away the old, worn paint and the rust, cleaning off the grime, sanding and prepping, painting and sanding and painting and sanding and clear-coating and all of that until his handiwork is perfect and holy and fully witnesses his glory—and causes the whole world to take note and not just to like and comment, but to come to him in faith to worship and to praise.  And one day the Church will be everything he’s working to make it and one day we will have proclaimed the good news about Jesus everywhere, and then every enemy will be defeated and this in between time will finally come to an end as the age to come finally arrives in all its fullness—like Christmas when all the decorations are finally up and the tree is in the living room and the presents are ready to be opened and the turkey’s on the table.

In the meantime, in this overlap of the ages, Brothers and Sisters, we need to remember who we are and to whom we belong.  We need to remember the hope that lies before us.  Even having been washed by Jesus and filled with the Spirit, the false gods of the world and the lusts of the flesh can be tempting.  Like Gomer, leaving her loving husband and returning to her old life of prostitution.  Like the Israelites in the wilderness.  We grumble.  And our bellies grumble and we think back with longing on the fleshpots of Egypt, forgetting that in Egypt we were slaves to sin and subject to death.  Brothers and Sisters, look around—or as Paul wrote in last week’s Epistle, “consider”, “reckon”, look around you, look where you’ve come from and do the math.  The presents may still be in the attic and the turkey may still be in the oven, but thanks to Jesus and the Spirit all the signs are there.  The Christmas lights are up, there are ornaments on the tree, and we can smell the turkey roasting.  Trust him.  Everything about the story shouts at us that the Lord is faithful and fulfils his promises and so we know that Jesus will finish what he has started.  And if the Gospel lesson today tells us anything, it’s that the Lord will always look after his people in the wilderness.  He fed Israel with manna from heaven.  He fed the multitude with seven loaves and a few small fish.  Brothers and Sisters, come to his Tablet his morning, eat the bread and drink the wine, and remember that he will feed us too.  Here he reminds us what he’s done for us through the death of his Son and the gift of his Spirit.  Here he reminds us who we are, of the family to which we belong, and of our hope—where we’re headed.  Here he lovingly feeds and clothes us, so that the world might see his faithfulness and give him glory.

Let’s pray: Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things:  Graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

The Sixth Sunday after Trinity: More Righteous than the Pharisees

Romans 6:3-11 & St. Matthew 5:20-26

by William Klock

What does it mean to follow Jesus?  To believe the gospel?  To repent and to believe?  What does it mean for us?  Who does it make us?  What’s our mission?  What do we do and where are we headed?  What does Jesus expect of us?  Last Sunday we read Jesus’ calling of Peter, James, and John.  “Follow me and from now on you’ll be catching people,” he told them.  But how?  From what?  And why?  Do you ever feel like that?  I know I do.  Jesus and the Spirit have incorporated us into this community of people called the Church, a people chosen and called to be salt and light, to proclaim the death and resurrection of Jesus, to announce to the world that he is Lord.  He is in the process of setting this broken, sad, and messed up world to rights and one day he will wipe away every last bit of sin and even death itself in a great act of redeeming judgement.  He will make all things new in the same way he was made new in his resurrection and in some way for which our new birth in the power of God’s own Spirit is a foretaste.  We’re called to prepare the world for that great day.  But how?  What do we say?  What do we do?  And when do we say it and when do we do it?  How do we do it?  Some days it’s overwhelming.  Some days you just want to retreat into your private devotional life or into the church and just be a good person, read your Bible and say your prayers and wait for Jesus to come back and sort it all out.  And that’s what a lot of people do.  But think of Peter, James, and John and think of the rest of the disciples, not just the twelve, but the seventy and all those others who were there on Pentecost and the thousands—tens of thousands—more who lived through those days of trial and tribulation in Jerusalem and Antioch and Ephesus and Rome—many of whom were martyred for their witness to Jesus his kingdom.  What does it mean, what does it look like to be this new Israel, this new people of God centred in Jesus the Messiah?

Peter, James, John and the rest of them wanted to know, so it makes perfect sense that as St. Matthew tells us Jesus’ story, the very next episode after Jesus calls his disciples is Jesus taking them up a mountain to teach them.  They’ve believed his message that the kingdom is soon to come.  They’ve believed that it will come with this great act of the Lord’s judgement on his faithless people even if they don’t quite understand what that’s going to look like.  But what do they do in the meantime?  And so Jesus sits them down and teaches them all those things that have almost sort of become Christian cliches.  Jesus begins with those announcements of blessing on the humble and the mourners and the seekers after righteousness, because they will be the ones who will inherit this new thing that the Lord, through Jesus, is inaugurating, they will be the ones to inherit that new state of affairs that would be on the other side of the judgement coming at the end of their generation.  And Jesus wraps up this long teaching with a series of warnings.  Many within Israel are following an easy and broad road to destruction.  They are like a fruitless tree that the Lord will cut down and cast into the fire.  Israel—or many of its people at any rate—have built their house on sand and when the stormwaters rage, it will all come crashing down around them.  And in the aftermath of that judgement on faithless Israel, Jesus will be vindicated as Messiah before the eyes of the watching world—and so will his people, this new Israel transformed and empowered by the very Spirit of God.  And finally, through this people and their Messiah, the gentiles, the nations will see the God of Israel and come to give him glory—finally!

But in the meantime, in the middle of all that, as they proclaim the kingdom, what does life following Jesus look like?  This is where our Gospel lesson today picks up.  Look at Matthew 5:20.  Jesus said to his disciples:

Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

 

I wonder how this fell on the ears of Peter and the others.  Was it exciting or discouraging or overwhelming?  Maybe all those things.  Because the Pharisees were the most righteous people around.  If you want to understand the Pharisees, understand that they purposed to live their lives—from the little things to the big things—everything, as if they were living in the temple itself, that place where heaven and earth intersected, that place where God dwelt in their midst—or at least where his presence had dwelt at one time in the past.  That was the problem.  Since the exile, the Lord’s presence had been gone from the temple.  But if everyone in Israel would do the same as the Pharisees, they thought, then the Lord would bless his people.  He would hear their cries, he would return to the temple, he would judge their enemies, and he would set everything to rights.  And now what Jesus is saying is that the Pharisees were on the right track.  If Israel wants the Lord’s blessing and the Lord’s deliverance, and all of that, then righteousness—living in the presence of God—that’s the key.  That’s what Israel had always been called to do, ever since the Lord had called Abraham and especially since he’d delivered them from Egypt and given them his law.  They were to be a people who truly lived that way, a people would truly honour God.  And a people like that would bring the nations to give him glory.  But instead, Israel had been unfaithful and the nations mocked her and mocked her God.  Even the Pharisees weren’t righteous enough.  And so Jesus goes on in verse 21:

You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’  But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the fire of Gehenna.

 

The righteousness of the Pharisees, Jesus has warned, is not enough.  When judgement fell on Israel, it would fall on the Pharisees along with all the rest of the faithless.  And that’s because the letter of the law simply isn’t enough.  Do you remember the summary of the law?  Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and your neighbour as yourself.  That’s the heart of the law.  If you love your neighbour, you certainly won’t murder him, but neither will you nurse hatred for him in your heart.  Jesus sets a higher standard.  The Pharisees were right in thinking that Israel needed to live mindful of being in the Lord’s presence.  But they were hypocritical—thinking they could fulfil the law by keeping the externals while ignoring the internals, by honouring the lord in their actions, even if they didn’t in their hearts.  Jesus raises the bar.  But he’s really just reminding them of where the bar always was for the people of God.  The Pharisees will be swept up in the judgement to come, in the war with Rome, along with all the rest of the unfaithful in Israel.  That’s what Jesus is getting at when he talks about the “fire of Gehenna”—or as the ESV puts it the “hell of fire”.  I wish our modern translations would just use the word Jesus’ uses—Gehenna—instead of translating it as hell, because the translation masks over the way that Jesus is pointing the disciples back to the prophet Jeremiah.  Jeremiah used the image of the Valley of Hinnom, a place where human sacrifice to the god Molech had once taken place.  Jeremiah warned that when the Babylonians defeated Jerusalem there would be so many dead that the bodies would be heaped up in that valley.  Jesus’ point is that it’s going to happen all over again, this time with defeat at the hands of Rome.  Josephus describes the city so filled with the dead that the bodies were dumped into that same valley by the thousands.  If you draw line from Jeremiah to Josephus is runs straight through Jesus’ warning here.  The Sadducees, the Zealots, and even the Pharisees will find themselves under the Lord’s judgement on that awful day—and Jesus’ point to his disciples is that so will they, so will everyone, who continues to live out the law by the low standard that had become the norm in Israel.  So will everyone who fails to truly live as the people with the Lord in their midst.  Why?  Because the Lord had called and chosen this people to be his witnesses to the world, to be salt, to be light, to show the world what it looked like to be the people who lived in the presence of God—so that the nations would see and be drawn to his goodness and give him glory.  Instead, again, the nations mocked the God of Israel because of the unfaithfulness of his people.  And God will deal with them soon.  His faithfulness and his glory will be manifest one way or the other: if not in blessing, then in his discipline.

So Jesus gives his disciples the alternative.  If you love your brother, go and reconcile with him.

So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go.  First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.  Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison.  Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.  (Matthew 5:23-26)

What’s the point here?  Brothers and Sisters, always remember the story and remember why the Lord called and chose a people to represent him in the world.  He called Abraham and his family in order to make himself know through them to a world that had forgotten him.  Through his people, the Lord was working to reconcile this lost and sinful world to himself.  And so Israel was called to live out in her daily life the reconciling love of God for the sake of the world.  For the most part Israel failed.  And so the Lord came himself in Jesus to show his people what that reconciling love looks like in real life—even to the point of giving his own life for their sake—and Jesus called a new people from within Israel to live that reconciling love themselves.  And even though this new people of God, just like Jesus, would be mocked and hated and even martyred, in the end the Lord would vindicate them just as he vindicated his Son.  And in that, the world would finally stand up and take note of the living God and return to him.  This is what it looks like to be God’s people.  This is what it meant for Peter and John and James to follow Jesus and to fish for men and women and to prepare Israel for that coming day of judgment.

But how could they do it?  I expect the disciples were sitting there listening to Jesus and thinking that this is all well and good, but if the Pharisees can’t meet the bar—and if Israel had been failing to meet it all along—how are we going to meet it?  For that we turn to St. Paul and to our Epistle from Romans 6.

Somehow Israel—and then the rest of the human race—needed a change of heart, a transformation from within.  Hearts set on sin and on self had to be turned to back to the Lord and filled with love.  This is what Paul gets at in our Epistle.  Because of Jesus, we are not the same people we once were.  Look at Romans 6:3-4.

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.  For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.

Baptism changes everything.  Again, just as we need to imagine ourselves as First Century Galileans when we hear Jesus preaching we need to remember that Paul, too, was writing to mostly Jewish Christians only a few decades later.  When we do that what we realise is that in Romans Paul is retelling Israel’s story and in Romans 6, as he writes about Baptism and what it means and does, he’s simultaneously telling the story of Israel’s exodus from Egypt.

Israel cried out to the Lord from the misery of her slavery and oppression.  The Lord heard and he sent Moses.  Moses led the people out of their bondage and into the Promised Land and that journey began at the Red Sea.  They entered the sea as slaves and the came out the other side a free people, their captors crushed and drowned under the waves.  And yet they had to pass through the wilderness.  It took longer than the people expected.  They grumbled a lot and even got angry with the Lord and with Moses and talked about going back to Egypt.  But the Lord led his people—a cloud by day and fire by night—and eventually they entered the Promised Land.

Again, the Israelites entered the Sea slaves and they came out the other side a free people.  And Paul uses this to illustrate what happens in baptism.  We go into the water dead and we come out alive.  We go into the water slaves to sin and death and we come out free people.  And that’s what makes Jesus’ impossible calling possible.  It’s what makes possible a righteousness greater even than the righteousness of the Pharisees.  Paul says that in our baptism we are united with Jesus in his death and resurrection.  God called Israel to be salt and light, he gave her his law, but it wasn’t written on her heart.  Israel had the same wicked, self-centred heart that all humanity shares.  But Jesus came as the true Israelite.  His life and ministry embodied Israel’s calling.  He even followed Israel’s pattern symbolically in his own baptism and his own forty days in the wilderness.  And then he took on himself the crucifixion that Israel deserved.  His enemies killed him, but instead of returning judgement and violence on them, instead of cursing them, he responded by praying to his Father: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  Sin and death, anger and hate did their worst to Jesus at the cross and Jesus overcame them with love and with sacrifice.  Impossible?  For human beings who have only their own sinful wills to rely on, yes.  But not for Jesus and not for those who have been baptised into the death and resurrection of Jesus.  We are not who we once were.  Earlier in Romans Paul describes what we used to be as being “in Adam”.  By birth we are part of the old humanity, fallen and enslaved to sin.  By virtue of our baptism we are born again.  We are now “in Christ”—in Jesus the Messiah.

This is what Paul means when he writes in verses 6 and 7:

We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.  For one who has died has been set free from sin.

Sometimes sin comes knocking at the door and it seems impossible to say no.  Sometimes that certain person who irritates us comes around and we know we should forgive and love them but it seems impossible.  It feels like we’re still slaves to sin.  All sin has to do is show up and we cave in to it.  But Paul says, No!  That old self is dead.  It was crucified with Jesus.  We are no longer slaves.  We have been set free from bondage to sin.  Like Israel wanting to go back to Egypt, it’s easy to be tempted to go back to that bondage.  The wilderness isn’t an easy place to be, but the Lord is with us anyway.  And Paul stresses that we need to remember that sin no longer has any hold on us.  We’re new and free people in the Messiah.

Paul goes on:

Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.  We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him.  For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God.  So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.  (Romans 6:8-11)

Jesus burst alive from the tomb that first Easter.  Other people, like Lazarus, had come back from the dead too, but Jesus’ resurrection is different.  Lazarus had to die again, but Jesus has gone through death and come out the other side into a kind of life that death can never touch and, Paul says, if we are in Jesus the Messiah then we have a share in this new life.

We’re not there yet.  We too still have to face death, but we live in hope knowing that like Jesus we will come out the other side of death alive in a way we never have been before—alive in the way that God truly intended us to be when he created us.  But what about today?  Sin and death can’t touch our future, but what about our present?  Jesus’ calling still seems impossible so much of the time.  And this is why Paul makes this point.  Our baptism pulls our future hope into the present.  It takes the life of Jesus and his victory over sin and death and applies it to us today.  There’s a change whether we feel it or not.  The Israelites didn’t necessarily feel any different on one side of the Red Sea than they had on the other, but everything was still different for them.  They had been slaves; now they were free.  And just so for us.  We are no longer in Adam; we are in Jesus.  And Jesus has poured the God’s Spirit into us and the Spirit is at work to renew our minds and regenerate our hearts as we live in this in-between time.

In verse 11 Paul says that we must consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Jesus the Messiah.  That word “consider” is the same one we saw in the Epistle from Romans 8 two weeks ago.  It’s an accounting term that Paul uses.  And here’s his point.  When you send your books to your accountant he adds everything up and gives you the bottom line.  His reckoning doesn’t change your financial situation.  Nothing about your situation has actually changed by the fact that your accountant has added up your profit and loss columns.  But that bottom line he reckons for you shows you in fact where you stand.  It might mean you’ve got money you need to invest or creditors you need to pay or it might mean you need to economise and tighten your belt.  Adding up your profits and losses doesn’t itself have an impact on the health of your business, but it does make you aware of it and it tells you what you need to do.

And so Paul looks at the cross and he looks at the empty tomb and he looks at the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost and everything else and he says: I’ve done the math.  You are in the Messiah.  You are dead to sin and alive to God.  Now start living that way!

Is it a challenge?  Of course.  Jesus was baptised, the heavens opened up, the Spirit descended on him and the Father spoke, “This is my Son.  With him I am pleased”.  And then Jesus went straight into the wilderness to battle the devil.  The Lord led Israel out of Egypt through the miraculous parting of the sea, he was present with her, giving the law and leading as cloud and as fire and yet he led her straight into the wilderness.  And we too.  We’re baptised and the Lord sends us straight from the Font into the world.  If there’s anything Jesus (and John and Paul and Peter) are clear about in the scriptures, it’s that his people will face opposition and trials and tribulation at the hands of a wicked and doubting world.  And there’s a reason why, in our baptism, we’re called on to renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil.  All three will come after us.  They’ll tell us that nothing has changed.  They’ll tell us that following after Jesus is impossible.  They’ll tempt us to give up or at least to compromise.  When others sin against us, when they hurt us, when they wrong us the temptation comes saying: “It’s okay, be angry or be bitter.  Get that person out of your life—you don’t need them.  Hey, look how well you’re doing!  You didn’t kill them!”  Brothers and Sisters, that’s sin calling.  Jesus calls us to seek to reconcile.  Jesus calls us to embrace the wrongs that others do to us and to return those wrong with grace.  Jesus calls us to break the cycle of anger and hate and violence.  And when it seems impossible, remember your baptism.  We are a new creation.  You have died and risen again with Jesus and he has poured his Spirit into you—into us.  Brothers and Sisters, in that the Lord had made us witnesses of the transformation from the old creation, full of death and decay and sin and sadness, into the new world in which he is reconciling everything and everyone to himself, in which his law of love reigns, and in which he will wipe away every tear.  Live as the men and women that God has made you through Jesus and the Spirit and not only will you see the kingdom of God, but all the people around you will have a glimpse of it to.  Make them constructively curious by your life and you’ll have the opportunity to explain the good news of Jesus, crucified and risen, that they too might know God’s new creation.

Let us pray: Gracious Father, you have poured your love into us poor sinners by giving your own Son as a sacrifice.  Teach us to pour that love back out to the world.  When it seems impossible to break the cycle of sin and anger and hate, remind us of our baptism and that, through Jesus, you have brought us into your new creation.  Remind us that we have died with him and risen with him and that sin and death no longer hold us captive.  Teach us to live for righteousness that the world might see Jesus and his kingdom through us.  Amen.

The Fifth Sunday after Trinity: Fishing for People

St. Luke 5:1-11

by William Klock

Jesus had a big message, he was alone.  He knew the amazing and miraculous circumstance of his birth.  He knew the words that had been spoken over him as a baby, when he was too small to understand, blessings given by old saints like Simeon and Anna when Mary and Joseph had taken him to be dedicated in the temple.  Most of all, he knew the scriptures.  He’d pieced it all together and he knew who he was and why his Father—not Joseph, but his Father father had sent him.  Jesus knew what the God of Israel was doing through him.  Jesus knew what he had to do.    If he’d had any doubts about it, his baptism by John in the Jordan had driven them all away.  John knew who he was.  And then the heavens had opened, the Spirit had descended on him, and his Father had spoken: “You are my son.”  And he had proved himself in the desert as he was tempted by the devil—each time that knowledge of who he was, what he was here for, and all those scriptures he’d memorised and meditated on came flooding back.  He resisted the devil and the devil had fled.  And his Father had vindicated him, sending his angels to minister to him.  Walking out of the desert, Jesus was ready to take that big message to his people.  And he began, literally, with his people.  He went back to his home town of Nazareth and on the sabbath, in the synagogue, the rabbi gave him the Isaiah scroll to read.

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, [Jesus read out]

         because he has anointed me

         to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives

         and recovering of sight to the blind,

         to set at liberty those who are oppressed,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19)

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” Jesus said.  Today it begins.  Israel had been crying out to the Lord for deliverance for centuries.  He has heard your cries and he has sent me to proclaim the good news.  Deliverance and judgement are coming.  Judgement always comes with deliverance, because the faithful cannot be delivered unless the unfaithful and the wicked are judged and cast down.  So repent and believe for the kingdom of God is near.

At first the people—many his friends and family—were amazed, but all they wanted was their own personal Messiah to work miracles for them.  By the time Jesus had finished rebuking them, they’d formed a mob and chased him to the edge of a cliff.  They were ready to throw him down, to kill him.  By some miracle he escaped.  He fled to Capernaum.  There, people listened.  He cast out a demon.  Word about him quickly spread.  One sabbath, after preaching his message in the synagogue, that message about the coming kingdom, about deliverance and judgment and the need for Israel to repent, he was invited to the home of a man named Simon.  Simon’s mother-in-law was sick and had a fever.  Jesus healed her.  Pretty soon everyone in town with a problem was crowding Simon’s house to be healed by Jesus.  In him they were getting a glimpse of the age to come, of the world finally set to rights.  They didn’t want him to leave, but he had to go, he had to take the good news about the coming of the kingdom to the rest of God’s people, to the rest of Judea.  Judgement was coming for Israel, and the people—everyone in Israel—needed to hear Jesus’ call to repentance.

So many villages and town and cities.  So many people.  So many heard and were enthusiastic.  Many even believed.  But so many didn’t.  Some just saw the miracles and their only thought was for today and they missed what the good news really was.  Some got it, they heard Jesus’ announcement of the kingdom, but they misunderstood or they got angry.  The Messiah was supposed to announce judgement on Israel’s enemies, not on Israel!  No matter how Jesus looked at it, his mission was so big and he was just one man.  It weighed heavily on him.  A big message and even bigger task for just one person.

But one day not long after, St. Luke tells us in today’s Gospel, Jesus was standing on the shore of the Sea of Galilee near Capernaum.  He was preaching.  It was a good spot for that.  There are coves that amplify the sound.  He was using one of them like a natural amphitheatre.  But the crowd of people just kept getting bigger and bigger.  People wanted to see the miracle-worker, but more than that, they wanted to hear the good news he was proclaiming—that in him the Lord had heard the cries of his people and had come to deliver and to judge.  Some—the hurting and the poor—needed to hear that message of consolation.  Some wanted to know just who it was that would be judged—because they’d heard Jesus calling people to repentance.  And the crowd got bigger and bigger and people were struggling to hear what he was saying.

And Luke writes that there were a couple of boats on the beach.  Fishing boats.  The fisherman had come in from their night’s labour, had emptied the boats, and were on the beach looking after their nets while Jesus preached.  Jesus recognised one of the fishermen.  It was Simon.  A few days before he’d been invited to his house and he’d healed his mother-in-law.  And so he called to Simon and asked him to row him out onto the water so that he could preach from his boat and let the water and walls of the cove amplify his voice.  Simon did as Jesus asked.

And Jesus preached about the Lord’s kingdom that was so soon to come.  Luke doesn’t give us Jesus’ specific words on this occasion, but we know he preached there what he preached everywhere else.  He preached about coming judgement, he preached about repentance, and he preached about the life of the age to come that awaited the repentant on the other side of that judgement.  In Jesus the Lord had come to set things to rights, but to be part of that new world and that new and restored people, the people of Israel needed to be right with the Lord.  For those who refused to repent, war with Rome waited and the death and utter destruction it would bring.  To make his point Jesus spoke of outer darkness and gnashing teeth—just the sort of judgement language the old prophets had used—Gehenna and unquenchable fire.  Jesus reminded the people of familiar passages from the prophets, from Isaiah and from Ezekiel and from Jeremiah, passages about judgement and deliverance and national repentance, and about the faithfulness of the Lord.

And in the middle of all that, inspiration struck Jesus.  He had an idea.  The good news wasn’t going to proclaim itself to Israel and there were only so many places and people Jesus could reach with the message in the short time he had.  He needed helpers.  He needed disciples.  And I can’t help but think that a little bit of Jeremiah was running around his head—I’ll come back to Jeremiah in a bit.  He may have just preached this little bit of Jeremiah to crowd, and as the great crowd finally dispersed and he was alone in the boat with the fishermen, he asked Simon to row out into deeper water and to cast his nets for a catch.  Jeremiah echoing in his mind the whole time.

Simon liked Jesus.  After hearing his preaching, he’d invited him to his home.  But you can hear the annoyance in his voice when he responds to Jesus, “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets.”  If the fish weren’t there in the dark, they certainly wouldn’t be there in the day.  And they’d just cleaned the nets.  And they were tired.  What was the point?  But Simon knew.  If it was anyone else, he’d have pushed him overboard, but this was Jesus.  He’d seen Jesus do things.  And, anyway, he owed him one.  So Simon and his friends rowed out into the deep water and cast their net.  And to their surprise, they caught something.  They caught a lot of somethings—and it wasn’t old boots and hubcaps!  Simon started yelling to haul in the nets before they broke from all the fish teeming inside.  But the nets started tearing anyway.  Sooo many fish!  Simon was calling to James and John in the other boat, “Get over here!  Quick!  Help, before the nets are destroyed and all these fish get away.”  And pretty soon they were hauling and scooping fish into both boats.  But now it was the boats that were in danger.  There were so many fish that the boats were riding dangerously low.  The waves were washing over the sides and the boats were sitting lower and lower in the water by the minute.  The fishermen started bailing frantically.

But not Simon.  Luke tells us that Simon Peter—yes, that Simon—he tells us that Simon Peter fell down on his knees in the middle of the sinking boat and wriggling fish and cried out to Jesus, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.”  Simon Peter had an encounter with the holy.  He was no great theologian.  He knew nothing of homoousioses or hypostatic unions.  He simply knew Israel’s scriptures and in Jesus he saw the faithfulness of the God of Israel revealed brighter than the sun at noon.  He knew that in Jesus the Lord had come to his people and Simon Peter did what everyone who has ever had an encounter with the God of Israel has done: He fell to his knees, confessed his sinfulness, and pled for that holiness that felt like it was burning into his sinful heart like a red hot poker, he pled for it to go away and leave him be.  Luke makes a point of telling us this detail of the story, because it points back so obviously to Isaiah’s encounter with the Lord.  Do you remember Isaiah’s response to the presence of the holiness of God?  Isaiah cried out:

“Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5)

Isaiah couldn’t bear the presence of the holy either.  And that’s when an angel flew down to Isaiah bearing a burning coal from the altar.  He touched Isaiah’s unclean lips with the coal and proclaimed that his guilt had departed and his sin blotted out.  And then, when the Lord called out, “Whom shall I send?  Who will go for us?  Who will proclaim my message to Israel?” Isaiah responded with those familiar words, “Here I am!  Send me!”

And it’s that scene all over again in that sinking fishing boat between Simon Peter and Jesus.  As Simon Peter knelt, shaking in the presence of the holy, Jesus announced to him, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.”  In Matthew and Mark, Jesus says to Simon Peter and his friends, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”  These were the men Jesus needed to help him to proclaim the coming kingdom and to call the nation to repentance in anticipation of it.

But what, exactly, was Jesus calling Simon Peter to do?  On the one hand it’s obvious.  We’ve all been singing the song since we were in Sunday School.  I will make you fishers of men, fishers of men, fishers of men.  I will make you fishers of men if you follow me.  And if you’re like me, of course you think of evangelism.  And we forget that Simon Peter and his friends fished with nets and we imagine ourselves doing evangelism as if we’re fishermen casting out a line with a worm on the hook and sitting and waiting for a bite.  And that last little bit about “if you follow me”—if.  There was no “if” in that sinking boat.  Jesus just told Simon Peter, “From now on you’ll be catching men.”  When the Lord calls you, Brothers and Sisters, there’s no if.  Not for Abraham, not for Moses, not for Isaiah, not for Simon Peter—not for us.  They all cowered in fear and then they squirmed and they even argued “I’m not worthy”, “I don’t know how”, “I can’t”, but the Lord purified them, absolved them, equipped them, and sent them and they went.  Every one of them.  Not just Simon Peter that day, but James and John.   But, again, what was Jesus calling them to do?  What was he calling them for?

Remember I said that I think Jesus had a bit of Jeremiah running around his head when he told Simon Peter to row out into the deep water and to cast his nets.  And I think that was the case because, first, Jesus was always preaching the prophets, and second, because of the context—he was in a fishing boat with fisherman.

In Jeremiah 16 we read the Lord’s words of warning to Israel.  The prophet was to announce the Lord’s coming judgement on the nation and people of Israel.  Here’s what he says in Jeremiah 16:10-13.  This is the indictment.

“And when you tell this people all these words, and they say to you, ‘Why has the Lord pronounced all this great evil against us? What is our iniquity? What is the sin that we have committed against the Lord our God?’ then you shall say to them: ‘Because your fathers have forsaken me, declares the Lord, and have gone after other gods and have served and worshiped them, and have forsaken me and have not kept my law, and because you have done worse than your fathers, for behold, every one of you follows his stubborn, evil will, refusing to listen to me. Therefore I will hurl you out of this land into a land that neither you nor your fathers have known, and there you shall serve other gods day and night, for I will show you no favor.’

 

Some of the specifics of the sins had changed since the days of Jeremiah, but Israel in Jesus’ day was just as unfaithful to the Lord.  This was a perfect passage for Jesus to draw on in order to explain his ministry and why the Lord had sent him.  The Lord had judged Israel then and he was about to do it again and for the same reason.  Jump down a few verses to 16-18.  Because they have not been faithful to his covenant, the Lord is going to remove his people from the promised land and send them into exile.  And he’s going to be thorough about it.  He uses the imagery of fishing and hunting.

“Behold, I am sending for many fishers, declares the Lord, and they shall catch them. And afterward I will send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain and every hill, and out of the clefts of the rocks. For my eyes are on all their ways. They are not hidden from me, nor is their iniquity concealed from my eyes. But first I will doubly repay their iniquity and their sin, because they have polluted my land with the carcasses of their detestable idols, and have filled my inheritance with their abominations.”

 

Jeremiah’s point was that none would escape the coming judgement.  When Babylon fell on Judea like a ton of bricks, many would flee, but none would escape the Lord’s judgement.  Like fishers casting their nets across the rivers and catching everything, the Babylonians would let no one escape.  Everyone would be carried off into exile.

And this wasn’t some bit of Old Testament prophetic imagery that the Jewish people had forgotten.  It’s used in the Thanksgiving Psalms found at Qumran, in the Dead Sea Scrolls.  The singer of the psalm sees himself as a fisherman with his net spread over Israel, ready to catch the children of injustice and to bring them to judgement.[1]  That’s why I expect Jesus would have preached on this passage from Jeremiah, if not this day, then on some other.  But what better passage to be preaching as he stood in Simon’s fishing boat.

And something clicks in Jesus’ head.  This time there’s a way to escape the coming judgement.  That’s why Jesus was sent.  Not just to announce that judgement was coming soon, but to call the people to repentance—and even to give his life as a sacrifice for their sins.  To make a new people, forgiven and full of God’s own Spirit, who would be ready to live the life of the age to come, who would be ready to live in God’s world set to rights, to live his law of love, and to take up their original vocation, to be his stewards and the priests of his temple.  As Jesus says in John’s Gospel, “God did not send his Son to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”  What Israel needs is fisherman, just like in Jeremiah’s day, but not fisherman to catch the fish for judgement.  Israel needs a corps of gospel fishermen who will catch people that they might live.  The word Jesus uses for catch means to capture something alive.  In the Old Testament it was used to describe capturing an enemy, while sparing his life instead of putting him to death.  It’s the perfect image for the mission of Jesus and his disciples.  In the face of coming judgement, these gospel fishermen will catch men and women so that their lives will be spared.

I doubt Simon Peter or James or John had any idea that day the full extent of what they were in for, but they had heard the good news, they had chosen their side, and Luke writes that when they’d got their boats and nets and the fish to shore, they left it all and followed Jesus.  Like Isaiah, Simon Peter had heard the call, had been absolved and equipped by the Lord, and was ready to stand and say, “Here I am.  Send me!”  These disciples were the labourers sent out in to the harvest.  Jesus gave them authority to preach and to heal and to cast out demons.  They went out in the name of Jesus to prepare Israel for the judgement to come.  Like Jesus, they announced the Lord’s coming judgement on Israel for her unfaithfulness, and they called the people to repentance.  There was life in a renewed people of God on the other side of the coming disaster, a life full of the Spirit, a life as the people Israel had always been called to be—the people who lived with God in their midst.  And that ministry drew a line down the middle of Israel.  There were those who heard this good news and believed.  There were those who rejected the message.  The disciples were to leave such people—to symbolically shake the dust from their feet and to move on and to carry the message to those who would receive it.

This is why Jesus told them, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 10:6).  Judgement would one day come to the gentiles, too, but before the Lord could judge the gentile nations, he had to judge and to renew his own people—to set his own house in order.  Seeing the Lord do that, seeing the Lord come in judgement on his own rebellious people, and seeing him, through Jesus, establishing a new people, that’s what would pique the interest of the gentiles.  Seeing the faithfulness of the God of Israel—something they’d never seen in their own gods—that is what ultimately prompt the gentile nations to come and glorify this God who was unlike any other.  This was the good news that would eventually conquer the world of the Greeks and Romans for Jesus the Messiah.

 

Now, Brothers and Sisters, it’s our turn.  We’re here this morning reading Luke’s Gospel because the Lord has kept his promises.  Because he kept his promise to discipline his own children and, through Jesus, to put his own house in order.  Because he kept his promise to pour out his Spirit on that new people who found their identity in Jesus.  Because he kept his promise to Simon Peter, that he would, from them on, be catching people instead of fish.  Because the Lord was faithful and may in Israel believed.  Because the Lord was faithful, the gentiles saw and believed.  This God and his crucified and risen Son, and this Spirit-filled people were unlike anything the world had ever seen or heard of and so the world came, a trickle at first, but then nations and eventually an entire empire, to kneel before him and to give him glory.  And the amazing thing is that through their faith in Jesus, they became part of this new Israel, this people of God, forgiven by his Son and filled with his Spirit.  And ever since, this good news about Jesus and about his cross and about his resurrection from the dead and about his ascension to his heavenly throne and about the faithfulness of the God of Israel has been spreading—gospel fishermen casting their nets and catching fish—catching them that they might hear and believe and repent and know the life of the age to come.  Because the Lord will one day judge all the earth, just as he judged Israel, and just as he judged the Greek and Romans.  When Jesus has put every last enemy under his feet—and if the Lord’s past record is worth anything, we know Jesus surely will put every last enemy under his feet—when the gospel and the church and the Spirit have done their work—and if the story of Simon Peter and this Spirit-filled church is worth anything, we know it will one day do the work Jesus equipped it to do—then the Lord will finally wipe every last bit of rebellion and sin and wickedness from his creation.  There will be outer darkness and weeping and gnashing of teeth, but there will also be life in this world set to rights.  Brothers and Sisters, Jesus sends us out to proclaim this good news, to prepare the world for what lies ahead, to preach the death and resurrection of Jesus, to proclaim like royal heralds that he is Lord, and that forgiveness and healing and life with God are his gift, that all who repent and believe can be part of this amazing, life-filled people he has created in Jesus, but that to receive that gift of his grace, we must repent and believe that we might be transformed—aligned with the values of his kingdom, that we might be prepared for the age to come and life with him.  Today we’re the gospel fishermen sent out to cast our nets, to proclaim the good news for the glory of God.

Let’s pray: Father, you have called us and made us your people.  You send us out, like Simon Peter, to fish for people that they might know the life of your kingdom.  When we’re tempted to protest, thinking that we are unworthy of the task, that we are too sinful, that we aren’t up to it, remind us that in Jesus you have forgiven us, that you have made us holy, that you have filled us with your Spirit, and that you have given us this remarkable and irresistible story to tell the world, this story of your goodness, your love, your grace, your mercy, and your faithfulness.  Give us the grace to do the work of your kingdom as we trust in your faithfulness to us and to all who hear it.  Through the Lord Jesus we pray.  Amen.

[1] 1QHa 13:7-11