Tag: Craig Keener

The Importance of Forgiveness, Matthew 18:21-35 (Trinity 15 Ordinary 24 Year A)

Matthew 18:21-35

Photo by form PxHere Public Domain.

You won’t be surprised to know I’m going to preach about forgiveness from this passage! It became a live issue in one of my churches recently, when a local drug addict stole a donation box from the premises at the end of a coffee morning. Within the church, we’ve had different opinions on whether to support a police investigation and possible prosecution, but what we are all united on is the importance of forgiving the offender.

It’s worth beginning today by remembering what the word ‘forgive’ means. In the New Testament, to forgive is to release. Like this parable, it is often compared to a financial debt. To forgive someone is to release them from the debt to you – their moral debt, consisting of what they owe you because they have wronged you.

If you get nothing else from this sermon, please understand that to forgive is to release. It is not to excuse or to explain away, it is to release. You no longer consider the other party as owing anything to you, due to their wrong actions.

And in a sense, forgiveness releases us, too. If we hold on to bitterness, then it becomes like a chain wrapped around us. Bitterness limits us. It traps us. It imprisons us. When we release someone from what they owe us due to sin, we also release ourselves from the chains of bitterness.

With those basics established, let’s look at what Jesus teaches us about the importance of forgiveness in this parable.

Firstly, forgiveness is unlimited:

Photo by Jon Sullivan on Pixnio. Public Domain.

21 Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, ‘Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?’

22 Jesus answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.

Peter probably thinks he’s being generous here. Some Jewish teachers said you could only forgive up to three instances of premeditated sin[1]. Seven times therefore makes him pretty holy, doesn’t it? Get to eight times and then the vengeance can start?

No, says Jesus. When he says we should forgive ‘seventy-seven times’, he is explicitly reversing what the Old Testament character Lamech said, not about forgiveness, but about vengeance:

23 Lamech said to his wives,
‘Adah and Zillah, listen to me;
    wives of Lamech, hear my words.
I have killed a man for wounding me,
    a young man for injuring me.
24 If Cain is avenged seven times,
    then Lamech seventy-seven times.’

Lamech’s seventy-seven vengeances are turned into Jesus’ seventy-seven acts of forgiveness.

Many of us know what this is like. We keep running into the person who hurt us. The old feelings begin to rise up. Maybe it’s the memories of old wounds; sometimes these people continue to injure us. The process of forgiveness has to begin all over again.

It’s no surprise in cases of people being hurt all over again that our society has come up with ‘cancel culture’. If we can just ban the people we think are wicked, those who say offensive things, then perhaps that will prevent future, lasting hurt.

But it doesn’t. Because cancel culture tells us that certain people cannot and will not be forgiven. As Christians, we have to deny that. Further, it doesn’t deal with the lasting pain. That can only be healed by releasing people through forgiveness.

Remember: we do not excuse people when we forgive them. They have done wrong, period. And our forgiveness only becomes effective if they receive it, confess what their sinful actions, and turn away from them. They may show this in a desire to make restitution. In the Old Testament, wrongdoers had to put right their actions. In the New Testament, remember the story of Zaccheus, the corrupt tax collector. When he met Jesus, he immediately arranged to repay what he had cheated out of people – and then some.

But whatever the actions of the other party, whether they accept our forgiveness or not, it is our Christian duty to offer it. And, if necessary, to keep on offering it.

Remember: Lamech took vengeance seventy-seven times, but vengeance belongs to the Lord, not us. We cannot be trusted with it. We forgive: seventy-seven times, if necessary. That is, unlimited. Our forgiveness is to be like the unlimited refills of drinks you get in places like a Toby Carvery or a Harvester.

Secondly, unlimited forgiveness is God’s model:

Copyright: Christian Ferrer / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0. Found at Words of Hope.

Here’s the issue: although the amount of forgiving God calls us to do can seem daunting at times, it is still nothing to the amount of forgiving he has done of us and of others. The master was owed ten thousand bags of gold by his servant; that servant was owed not ten thousand bags but a hundred, and not bags of gold but silver coins (verses 24, 28). There is no comparison.

This is the thing we need to remember throughout our Christian lives, and especially when we are finding it hard to forgive someone. How much has God forgiven me? And if he has forgiven me, what does that say about his desire for me to forgive others? If he has forgiven me at the cost of his Son dying on the Cross, what does that say to me when I am reluctant to forgive someone?

Now the snag with this as I see it is that some people will say, I’m a pretty good person, God hasn’t had to forgive me all that much, but someone else has done something far worse to me than I have ever done to anybody else. Hence, I am being asked to do something greater than has been done to me.

If that’s you, then listen to these words from the evangelist and apologist Andy Bannister:

Imagine that you died and arrived in heaven. An angel meets you at the gates of heaven and says, “Welcome, so glad you could make it, we’ve arranged a special surprise for you”. And he escorts you to what appears to be a cinema. He guides you to screen 1, sits you down alone, and gives you a large bucket of popcorn. “Welcome to the Theatre of Judgement” says the angel, smiles, then disappears as a movie begins to play.

Lo and behold, it’s the movie of your life—everything you’ve ever thought, said, or done is up there on the screen. Some bits are great, other bits make you cringe with embarrassment—all the stupid decisions, all the rude hurtful things you said about others, all those secret thoughts and selfish ambitions. All the things you did—but also the things you didn’t do.

Finally the movie ends and as the credits roll, the angel reappears. “Hope you enjoyed that,” he says cheerfully. “Now we’re going to have a second screening, and everybody else featured in the movie is going to come and watch it—all your family, your friends, your enemies, your neighbours, colleagues—everybody is going to get to watch every little detail of your life”.

Who would want that? Who would want to show that movie to their friends, family, to their dear old granny? Most of us who are really honest with ourselves know there are things deep within us that we don’t want anyone to know about—and the Bible has a word for that stuff, for that inner brokenness we try to hide from others, even ourselves. The Bible calls it “sin”.

When we are struggling to forgive or are unwilling to forgive, let’s look at ourselves. Are we really so great? And let’s look at the Cross. How much has God forgiven us in Christ?

In the light of that, why on earth would we refuse to forgive?

Because thirdly, Christians failing to forgive is a scandal:

Copyright: Creative Commons. Creator: Cyril Gravelier. Found at Marc & Angel Hack Life.

The amount the unforgiving servant demands of his fellow servant is about one fifth of what would be paid for him in the slave market. It’s possibly only a millionth of what he owes the master[2]. Yet he makes such a scene about it. The other servants are scandalised that one who has received so much grace and mercy from the master fails to act with a comparable sense of grace.

And the world is scandalised when it sees Christians acting with a lack of grace to other people. What witness is it when we act with cruelty towards others? What witness is it when we support a politician whose policies lead to the withdrawal of healthcare from the poor, the separation of children from parents, the financial suffering of many for the benefit of the few super-rich?

Increasingly, the world looks at Christians who behave like that and they say, these people don’t remotely look like Jesus, and they certainly don’t follow his teaching.

And when that happens, the world – whom we are supposed to be reaching with the Gospel – takes one look at Christianity and says, no thank you very much. We do immeasurable damage to the cause of the Gospel when we think we can hoover up the forgiveness and grace of God for ourselves, while treating others with brutality and malice. There are far too many so-called ‘deconversion’ stories around of people who heard something of the beauty of the Christian message but walked out on church because they saw a church that would not treat others with the grace they themselves had received.

Has it ever been more urgent for the church to meditate upon the Cross, to ponder just how much we have been forgiven, and then to let that dictate how we treat others?

Conclusion

I’m acutely aware this is a tough subject. Forgiving those who have hurt us can be difficult. We need the example of Jesus and his Cross to remind us what he has done for us, and to motivate us to be Christlike in this matter.

I know that forgiveness doesn’t always come quickly. And in fact, sometimes we are more concerned to push a victim into forgiveness than we are to acknowledge the wickedness of what has been done to them. The end result is that instead of forgiving, the person who has been hurt does something subtly different but damaging. That is, they suppress their anger rather than release it. The danger in suppressing our anger is that we push it down like a Jack-in-the-box. At a later point it will spring up again with great force. And if we work to keep suppressing anger, it will come out in some other form. One such way can be certain expressions of depression.

So we come back to that theme of forgiveness being about release. Release, not suppression. We may need to feel the anger and then let it go if we are to forgive in a healthy way. When we do that, we reflect Jesus.

The other day, some words of NT Wright were posted on Facebook. They were put there in commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, but they seem fitting for this theme, too:

One might say that this is the vocation of the church: to take the sadness of the world and give back no anger; the sorrow of the world and give back no bitterness; the pain of the world and not sink into self-pity; but to return forgiveness and love, blessing and joy.

[1] Craig S Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p456.

[2] Keener, p460.

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Restoring the Sinner in the Church, Matthew 18:15-20 (Trinity 14 Ordinary 23 Year A)

Matthew 18:15-20

Loud Argument, free stock photo at Public Domain Pictures

When I was a young, enthusiastic teenage Christian who obviously knew everything, I once commented at a Bible study that the early church didn’t have any internal problems.

Unfortunately for me, my minister was present. He suggested I look at the New Testament a little more closely. The argument over circumcision that needs settling in Acts 15. The ways in which the Apostle Paul remonstrates with congregations, not least the Corinthians.

Whoops.

Our passage today from Matthew shows us that Jesus anticipated there would be problems in the church. Problems that included sin.

It’s no good us thinking, we’re a happy family, no-one will ever rock the boat here. If we think that, we won’t be prepared when something wrong happens among us. It’s best to know in advance what Jesus teaches on the subject, and to be prepared.

Firstly, our aim is restoration:

Public Domain image at rawpixel.com

The three stages that Jesus describes of going first of all privately to the person who has sinned, secondly with witnesses, and finally to the assembled congregation is quite reminiscent of the disciplinary process that was often followed in the synagogues of his day[1].

And the synagogues certainly didn’t rule out the idea of forgiveness for the wrongdoer[2], but Jesus is totally upfront in making the main motive for speaking to the one who has sinned as restoration.

That’s why you have the three stages. A private conversation. If that doesn’t work, take a couple of witnesses with you. And finally, as a last resort, before the whole congregation.

Jesus prioritises the healing of broken relationships, the repentance of the sinner, and the offer of forgiveness by whoever has been wronged. All of these are implied by the process he institutes. All of these will be provided for when he goes to the Cross.

The problem is that this is not what some people want when wrong has been done. On the one hand, some people want to be vindictive and vengeful. You can see that in our culture with the rise of ‘cancel culture’: express a socially unacceptable opinion and you are both ostracised and silenced. Such people will not go privately to the one who has caused offence, because they do not care for the costly reconciliation that Jesus is all about.

Does something like this happen in church circles at times? Yes, to our shame. Rather than challenging wrongdoing, people gossip about the one who has overstepped the mark. This is not the Jesus way.

And neither is the opposite approach, where rather than confronting the one who is out of line, we sweep everything under the carpet. We think ignoring sin is a version of forgiveness. It isn’t. Or we try to explain away someone’s patently wrong actions. This is a tacit acceptance of unholiness in the church.

Therefore, we begin with the private approach. If that doesn’t work, we take one or two witnesses with us. Remember, Jewish law normally required the confirmation of witnesses before a conviction.

Only as a last resort do we go public before the congregation. And only then do we consider banning someone from the church. It takes a serious level of proof to do that.

There will be some who say that you should never ban someone from the church and that you should always offer forgiveness. The problem with that in Jesus’ eyes is that some people are so thoroughly unrepentant that they put themselves beyond the boundaries of the believing community that banning them is only confirming the hardness of their own hearts.

By way of context, I am now in my thirty-fifth year of circuit ministry, and in all that time I have only ever banned one person, and I was instructed to do so by the police. The person in question was a known paedophile, and without telling you the whole story let’s just say he was a persistent repeat offender. For the safety of the worshipping community (and especially for the children in it) he had to be excluded. Tragically, he never fully embraced the costly actions required of him to facilitate restoration of relationships.

Secondly, our authority is heaven:

Heaven, free image from needpix.com

Listen again to what Jesus says in verse 18:

Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

It sounds like heaven ratifies what we decide. But scholars generally think there is a better translation, albeit one that sounds a little clumsy in English:

Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will have been loosed in heaven.

This strange – to us – language of binding and loosing is almost certainly about church discipline. And in the corrected translation, it is heaven that authorises us to undertake either the banning of an unrepentant sinner (that’s ‘binding’) or the forgiveness and restoration of the repentant sinner (that’s ‘loosing’).

We do not sort out problems of sin and broken relationships in the church off our own back. It is something that the court of heaven itself deeply cares about.

Why? Jesus set up the church to be a holy community of people who were reconciled both to him and to each other. It is as the holy and reconciled community that we are a witness to Jesus in the world. Anything that damages that matters to heaven. Anything that can be done to heal and to put things right again matters doubly to heaven.

And therefore, heaven authorises Christ’s church to engage in binding and loosing. It is part of our community life to hold one another accountable for our actions. If we see one of our brothers or sisters in the church acting in a way that brings disrepute to the name of Jesus, then it is our duty to speak to them, and to initiate the process I described in the first point, all with a view to reconciliation and restoration.

What Jesus tells us here is that when we solemnly engage in that, we have divine backing for our words and our actions.

That’s why we should be careful only to do this when someone has truly done something wrong. It is not to be used as a way of putting people down that we don’t like in the church. Nor is it to be used as a way of getting our own back on someone who has done something we don’t like.

I say that with some feeling, having seen someone make something up to get another church member out of a church, and also as someone who has twice been subjected to false safeguarding allegations by people in churches who took a dislike to me. I will not share the details, as it doesn’t do me any good to dwell on these things.

No. The fact that the process to restore a sinner in the church if at all possible begins in heaven is surely all the reminder we need that we are on holy ground when something like this happens. And if that doesn’t shape our words and our deeds in a certain way, then I don’t know what does.

Thirdly and finally, our armour is prayer:

Free image at pxhere.com

19 ‘Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. 20 For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.’

These final words of Jesus in the reading are usually quoted out of context, as if they are standalone words without a context. We quote them to talk about agreeing in prayer to ask for something. We quote them to invoke the presence of Jesus.

But they are about the subject we have been considering. The two who agree or the two or three who are gathered are the witnesses to the wrongdoing. That is the context. And it is this posture of prayer and attention to the presence of Jesus that keeps them on holy ground when dealing with sin in the church. An appropriate attitude of prayer and attention to Jesus guards against the misuses I described at the end of the last point.

It’s not just any old prayer, because prayer can become a malicious weapon in these circumstances. People include the wrongdoer in public prayer as a means of gossip rather than out of a holy desire to see restoration.

Therefore, prayer that pays attention to the presence of Jesus keeps us in the right place. Would we turn prayer into gossip if we were profoundly aware that Jesus was in our midst? Surely it is our slack attention to Jesus at times that can enable harmful talk, like gossip.

And the gossip is not justified by the wrong that the sinner has done. Remember the words of Michelle Obama about political opponents, because they are worth applying in a different context here: ‘When they go low, we go high.’ And we go high in prayer, focussed on the fact that Jesus is with us. It’s our armour. It’s our protection that helps us deal with problems in the Body of Christ in a godly way.

Not only is Christ-centred prayer our protection, but it is also God’s chosen means in our desire to someone move from their errant ways through repentance to restoration. Therefore, witnesses gathering in prayer and focussing on Jesus is fundamental to all that God – and, I hope, we – desire to see as an outcome when a member of the church has fallen into sin.

Conclusion

You may well have thought that the subject of this sermon was purely theoretical. You may wonder why on earth we have spent this time on a topic that to you sounds little more than hypothetical. If that is what you are thinking, I offer this story.

When I began in ministry, Safeguarding was only just being announced and had not come into force. How I wish it had, because I walked into a drastic situation with unsuitable children’s workers running their own empire. They did not have the best interests of the church at heart. When I challenged them, that was the beginning of eighteen months living under threats of violence and other forms of intimidation.

The other circuit ministers were highly supportive of me, having to begin my ministry like that. One of them observed that this was the sort of crisis you probably only encountered once every thirty years or so.

In parts of the world, there are defence systems against certain weather disasters that may only occur once in several decades. You might think of the Thames Barrier.

Sometimes, we just need to be ready for that ‘once every thirty years.’

[1] Craig S Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p453f.

[2] Keener, p455.

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The Centre of Gravity of the Christian Faith, Matthew 16:13-20 (Trinity 12 Ordinary 21 Year A)

(I’m aware I preached on this passage as recently as May, but on that occasion it was a Church Anniversary at a different church. This time, it has come up in the Lectionary. There will be some crossover between the two sermons, but this is a newly-written message.)

Matthew 16:13-20

Our dog loves us to take him to a park with a stream running through it. We will collect sticks and throw them into the stream for him to retrieve. He jumps into the water, swims after the stick, and brings it back to shore.

But for all his intelligence, there is one thing he has not grasped about this game. Instead of carrying the stick in the centre, he holds the stick in his mouth at its end. Although it amuses us that it can look like he has a cigar, his failure to discover the centre of gravity can have awkward consequences. He may crash the other end of the stick into the ground and break it, for example. He clearly missed the lessons about balance at doggy school.

Finding the centre is important. A briefer version of this reading forms the centre of Mark’s Gospel. But here in Matthew, the content of this passage is central to the message of this Gospel. Moreover, the reading itself balances nicely into two halves. Hence, we’re going to think today firstly about Peter’s Confession (The Christ), and secondly Peter’s Commission (The Church).

Firstly, Peter’s Confession (The Christ)

Verses 13 to 16 are about who the disciples believe Jesus to be. He starts by asking who others say he is, but then focusses the question of them: ‘But who do you say that I am?’ (verse 15)

This is the question at the centre of Christian faith and at therefore at the centre of church membership. Who do you say Jesus is?

In the Methodist Church, people are not confirmed and brought into church membership just on my say-so as the minister. If people attend a confirmation class and I am satisfied they have confessed Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, then I have to bring their names to the Church Council so that the church can say whether we see that these people are Jesus-followers.

And that’s important. The question is not, are they nice people? If I want nice people, I can find them in all sorts of places outside the church. There are lots of nice people in the camera club where I am a member. But only a few have Christian faith.

Nor do we simply make a decision to avoid upsetting people. Jesus himself tells his disciples here that who they confess him to be is the most important question in all of life.

Let none of us rely on being ‘good’ or ‘nice’, because that won’t cut it with God. It is Muslims, not Christians, who rely on the hope that our good deeds will outweigh our bad deeds to be admitted to Paradise. The Gospel speaks in contrast about the grace of God in Jesus, through his death and resurrection. In response, we turn from sin to him and confess him as the Christ, the Son of the living God.

And it’s a confession to be made in the midst of life and all its pressures. Note that Jesus doesn’t ask the disciples to make their confession on home territory, or in somewhere safe and familiar like a synagogue. He does this when they come ‘into the district of Caesarea Philippi’ (verse 13). Why is that significant?

The recently renamed Caesarea Philippi was as pagan a territory as one could find: famous for its grotto where people worshipped the Greek god Pan[1]

At this centre of paganism, where other gods were worshipped, Jesus wants the allegiance of his disciples.

And he wants the same from us today. He calls us to confess him as our Lord in the midst of a society that offers plenty of competing false gods. Some of these are familiar to us. Look at the worship of money and possessions. Consider the way some people are devoted to celebrities, sportspeople, and entertainers. Ponder how others put their trust in extremist politicians. Still others expect romantic relationships to fulfil them, hence the phenomenon of relationship addiction and sex addiction.

In each of these cases, good servants have been elevated to the status of bad masters. And they will not fulfil all the desires their worshippers seek from them. Welcome to Pan’s Grotto, twenty-first century style.

But there is another way by which people are tempted to Pan’s Grotto, and it has been around a long time. It is the desire or expectation to short-circuit the process of hearing from God. In the Christian tradition, we often have to ‘wait upon the Lord’ to discern what he may be saying, but some want to hear instantly. And so, they turn to horoscopes or other occult methods, where it’s not God who is speaking to them.

There is a new variation on this desire to get an instant answer. I am hearing increasing stories of people who, rather than turning to the Scriptures and prayer to seek God’s voice, are instead relying upon … AI. A recent survey showed that 48% of Christians say they would trust AI with their spiritual growth. One in three American adults believe that spiritual advice from artificial intelligence is just as trustworthy as the advice a minister would give.

Older Christians will perhaps poo-poo those figures. But sometimes it’s those older Christians who are reading their horoscopes instead of their Bible. The problem goes right across the generations.

So I make the challenge today that we all confess Jesus as Lord of our lives, and that we place all the good things of life that we enjoy or aspire to under that Lordship. And further, that in confessing Jesus as Lord before the paganism of today, we accept the discipline of listening patiently for the voice of God, instead of taking short-cuts that lead us into spiritual danger.

Secondly, Peter’s Commission (The Church)

Verses 17 to 20 build on Peter’s confession as Jesus commissions him to be the first leader of his messianic community. The Greek word used for ‘church’ in these verses, ekklésia, is used in Greek translations of the Old Testament for the People of God. And surely it’s no surprise that Jesus as the Messiah of Israel will form a community of his people.

And it is, as I have already hinted, faith in Jesus alone that is the basis for Christianity, and therefore for membership of the church. Not niceness, not sincerity, not a religious club that is the centre and circumference of our social lives, but a community of people who have put their lives in the hands of Jesus.

Now this is not humanly achievable. It only comes, because God reveals it to people and we respond, as Jesus tells Peter. When we are seeking to spread the good news, one thing we must never lose sight of is that it is not us who convert people, but the Holy Spirit. All our evangelistic witness to build the church (verse 18a) depends not upon our techniques or clever words or good answers, but on the prior work of the Holy Spirit to reveal Jesus to people. Our prayers for mission begin with praying for the Spirit of God to go ahead of us and be at work before we get there. We then ask for the grace to join in with what the Spirit does first.

Isn’t it great that it doesn’t depend on us?

And isn’t it great, too, that the church is an indestructible community? What do I mean by that? Jesus says that ‘the gates of Hades will not prevail against it’ (verse 18b). I have been fond of saying for many years now that we have misunderstood these words. For too long Christians have understood this as meaning that no demonic schemes can prevail against us, even when we are trapped in a corner. But since when did gates go around attacking people? Gates are a defensive measure! If the gates of Hades cannot prevail, then given that Hades is the place of the dead in the New Testament, this means that it is the church that is on the offensive, and even death cannot stand in our way!

So be of good courage when you hear the stories of church decline. Yes, individual churches may decline and close, and we are no exception to that if we default to making our church experience about our personal preferences rather than seeking to glorify God. But overall, the church cannot fail. We are resurrection people. We plunder death to bring life in the Name of Jesus.

Within all this, Peter has a particular commission, and it’s to leadership and authority in this community of the Messiah. That’s what the language about being given the keys of the kingdom, and binding and loosing on earth on behalf of heaven (verse 19) are about. While I certainly think my Catholic friends have taken this too far in pointing to the papacy, I nevertheless agree with them that at this point Jesus commissions Peter as the first leader of the church.

A church cannot be anarchy. It cannot be a bundle of people where everybody just does what he or she wants. For example, I have lost count of the number of times I have encountered arguments in churches about styles of worship, where mostly they come down to personal taste rather than seeking to please God. So, there are those whose responsibility it is to say, this is what the teaching of Jesus and the Gospel is. There are those whose responsibility is to show the spacious place that is the Gospel, but also the boundaries of the faith.

Now that’s dangerous talk, in the eyes of some. There are those who are not willing to be corrected. But also, as we know time and time again, there are leaders in the church who have exercised their ministry in harmful ways, hurting others to bolster their own power. This must not be tolerated: those who are called to lead are to keep to the Gospel teaching themselves as a matter of example, and that includes fidelity to a Gospel lifestyle.

Peter will discover what that means in the next verses beyond today’s reading: the way of the Messiah is the way of the Cross, and he will be shocked. No wonder Jesus tells the disciples here not to tell anyone he is the Messiah (verse 20), because right now that is too outrageous and revolutionary to be contemplated, even by his own closest followers.

But this is how the community of Jesus will live, and it will be what its leaders exemplify. Tradition tells us Peter himself, despite his initial objections, will give himself to this way, too.

It is as far from the pagan Grotto of Pan as you can realistically go.

[1] Craig Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p424.

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The Extraordinary Faith of the Canaanite Woman, Matthew 15:21-28 (Trinity 11 Ordinary 20 Year A)

Matthew 15:21-28

Photo by it’s me neosiam on StockSnap

If you’ve ever had a baby screaming constantly in pain that has no words to tell you what’s wrong, or if you’ve ever cared for a child with a serious long-term health condition, then you might sympathise with the Canaanite woman with the demonised daughter. Jesus’ disciples are cruel and unsympathetic to the mother:

‘Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.’ (Verse 23)

And then, before we make any progress in understanding this story, we must look at those troubling words Jesus says to this poor, distressed mother:

‘It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.’ (verse 26)

There are some pretty unthinking progressive Christians who look at these words and confidently tell us that Jesus, by being a Jew of his day, was a racist, and he had to learn God’s truth from this Canaanite woman.

I know the words sound shocking, but this is nonsense. It shows they have not thought about the rest of Matthew’s Gospel. In the nativity stories, it is the Gentile Magi whose faith is commended, not the Jewish leaders. Jesus praises the faith of a Roman centurion in contrast to that of others. At the end of the Gospel, Jesus’ mission – which, yes, began with Israel – is extended to the ends of the earth.

There has to be a different explanation. We’ll come to that later, but I’m flagging up here at the beginning of the sermon that we shouldn’t accept simplistic, silly answers that don’t read the story in its wider context.

Firstly, she is persistent:

The Place of Persistence by Sheila Sund from Salem, United States, CC BY 2.0. Found at Wikimedia Commons.

Notice what the disciples say about the woman: ‘she keeps crying out after us’. It’s not a one-off. It’s continuous. The need she has for her daughter is such that she will not shut up. She will not take ‘go away’ for an answer. She will not give this up as a lost cause when she seems to be getting nowhere. She keeps crying out.

You see it in other ways, when she gets into conversation with Jesus. She doesn’t take what Jesus says lying down. She comes back at him. You could say she argues with him. Audacious doesn’t quite describe it. It’s faintly shocking that she doesn’t retreat the moment Jesus pushes back.

Like many a loving parent, she will do anything for the sake of her child. And this story effectively tells us that it’s fine to display a similar attitude towards God when we pray about deep needs, be they ours or of others.

Often, the problem is that we have been brought up to be reverent towards God, and that’s good and proper. God is holy. Reverence is a right response to him. But we take it so far that we end up being unable to speak with passion to God when things really matter, when they desperately matter.

But this woman was not the only character in Holy Scripture to speak audaciously to God about a significant need. Abraham prayed and prayed for the people of Sodom, that they be saved from divine judgment. He beat God down time and time again about the number of righteous people in the city.

Read the works of the psalmists and notice just how many of the biblical psalms are ones that lament injustice and pain. God’s people cry out to him about all that is wrong in the world and in their lives. Do they stop? No. Do they get all their theological ducks neatly in a row? No. They cry out again and again in pain to Almighty God.

Then there is the parable of Jesus recorded in Luke’s Gospel about the persistent widow and the unjust judge. Time and again, she came before that judge in the most forthright of manner, until she got the justice she needed.

Let us be in no doubt that passionate, persistent prayer is fine with Jesus. In fact, it’s more than fine. Sometimes, it is the only appropriate thing to do.  

I have heard it put this way. Think of a baby who is in distress but naturally cannot articulate its pain to a parent. So, it beats its fists against the parent’s chest, as the parent holds it. Our persistent and passionate prayer can be like that. It is perfectly fine for us to beat our fists against the chest of God. That doesn’t change the fact that he still holds us in his arms, for he is our loving Father.

Secondly, she is perceptive:

Allen’s Hummingbird by Becky Matsubara on Flickr. CC 4.0.

The Canaanite woman hears beyond those troubling words of Jesus about not taking the children’s food and giving it to the dogs (verse 26). She recognises what Jesus has already told his disciples, that his mission is to the lost sheep of Israel (verse 24). This would have been commonplace knowledge: that the Jewish Messiah was for the Jews. And who is she?

She is a descendant of the ancient Canaanites, the bitter biblical enemies of Israel whose paganism had often led Israel into idolatry.[1]

So you would think she knows her place. Israel’s Messiah is only here to bless Israel.

But she seems to know more. Perhaps it’s the close proximity and the mixing of Jews with people they didn’t want to meet, but she knows that isn’t the last word about the Messiah of Israel. Yes, he will come to the Jews. But what is the vocation of Israel? Why did God choose these people?

It wasn’t so they could simply have their own private bless-up. It was so they could bless the world. It goes all the way back to God’s call of Abram in Genesis 12. God chooses a people for himself, but the Chosen People’s calling is to bless the world.

So, yes, Jesus as Messiah comes to the lost sheep of Israel. But it can’t stop there. Why should she and her daughter also not be blessed by the God of Israel?

And as I said in the introduction, signs of this are spread all through Matthew’s Gospel, from the Magi to the faithful centurion to the Great Commission.

The blessings we receive as the Church are not for our sole benefit. We are blessed so that we may become a blessing to others. I often pray that way when I close a meeting, that we will be sent with God’s blessing so that we may bless others.

This should challenge the ungodly notion we sometimes adopt where we think that some people deserve God’s blessings and others don’t. We have certain people down as ‘Canaanites’ today, but could they be people whom God wants to bless? Does God want to bless benefits scroungers? Yes! Does God want to bless people who come to this country on small boats? Yes! Does God want to bless the politicians I despise? Yes!

Blessing is never about who deserves it. None of us deserves blessing. We are all sinners in need of grace – even the most godly or the most respected people in the church. Blessing is always about grace, ‘outrageous grace’ even, as the singer Godfrey Birtill calls it.

Which ‘undeserving’ people are we going to pray for this week, that God will bless them?

Or perhaps it’s the other way round, and we ourselves feel unworthy. We have a pervading sense of shame, whether we have done anything shameful or not. Then for us this is Good News: God delights in the thought of blessing people like us.

Thirdly and finally, she is faithful:

Free Public Domain image at PxHere.

Look at the way Jesus commends her in the final verse of the reading:

Then Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.’ And her daughter was healed at that moment. (Verse 28)

She is a woman of faith in the qualities we have already noted: her persistence and her perceptiveness. Towards the end here, she doesn’t even reject Jesus’ challenging riddle about the children’s food and the dogs: she takes the riddle and extends it:

‘Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.’ (Verse 27)

She certainly belongs with the other Gentile heroes of faith in Matthew’s Gospel that I have already mentioned. The Magi may have arrived at the house where the young Jesus was by the dubious method of astrology, but when they left, they followed the clear directions of God in a dream. That was faith in action. The Roman centurion with the paralysed servant learned faith from his experience of being a man under authority, and Jesus said he had never met anyone in Israel with such great faith.

Which of us wouldn’t want Jesus to say to us, ‘you have great faith’? Which of us wouldn’t want to hear Jesus say, ‘Your request is granted’? Surely that’s exactly what we long to hear from him.  It’s like wanting to hear him say to us at the Last Judgment, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’

The Canaanite woman’s faith had been learned in adversity, desperate as she was for her daughter to be healed. How often faith grows in such circumstances. Look at those churches that have grown despite persecution. We might prefer the thought that our faith grow while we are sitting comfortably. But comfort rarely requires great faith. (And that might be one reason for the decline of faith in the West, where we ask more questions about God and suffering than those who live with daily adversity.)

Her faith had also been formed, ironically, in exclusion – as one who was not part of the Chosen People. She was an outsider. She didn’t belong. Yet God used that to form the ‘great faith’ which Jesus commended.

I wonder sometimes whether those of us who wish we had more faith and who even ask for more faith really know what we’re asking for. What are we letting ourselves in for? Because the testing ground for great faith includes the terrains of hardship, difficulty, danger, and misfortune. You can see it in the Scriptures. You can see it in the lives of the saints down the centuries.

We may sense God leading us down a particular path for our lives, one that initially excites us. But then we discover it requires of us greater fortitude to endure than we ever anticipated. It asks of us greater forgiveness of others, including those who are in the company of the faithful, yet have a particular propensity for cruelty. But faith walks the way of the Cross.

Which of us will walk this road? Which of us will be commended by Jesus for having ‘great faith’ in him?

[1] Craig S Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p414.

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Parables of the Kingdom, Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52 (Trinity 8 Ordinary 17 Year A)

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Airbnb: 10 Downing Street: Perfect for short stays by Dunk on Flickr. CC 2.0.

When I see pictures of Number 10 Downing Street, my only surprise is that it isn’t a revolving door. This is the week in which our nation has had its seventh new Prime Minister in ten years.

And one of the early criticisms of Andy Burnham, as he announced his first policy decisions, was that many thought he was a people-pleaser. To be a people-pleaser is a weakness. You cannot please all of the people all of the time.

21/07/2026. Bath, United Kingdom. Prime Minister Andy Burnham visits First Bus’s Bath Depot. Picture by Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street at Flickr. CC 4.0.

Yet what is one of the most frequent comments I get when people discover I am a minister? They say, “Oh, it must be so hard trying to please everyone” – as if pleasing everyone is what I should do, despite the fact that we recognise elsewhere such behaviour is a weakness.

It is not my job to try to please all of you. It is my job to please God. Whether I do or not is another matter. But that is why I am paid a stipend, not a salary. A stipend is a living allowance so that I can pray and seek what God wants me to do.

All that said, I nevertheless want the content of my preaching to reach as many people as possible. And most weeks, I know that’s a forlorn hope. The theme will be relevant to some people, but not to others.

However, this week is unusual. We heard a variety of short parables from the teaching of Jesus. They come from a block of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 13 about the kingdom of heaven. So, while I am not setting out explicitly to please any of you, I do hope this week that there may be brief relevant elements in the sermon for most people.

We have five parables in our reading, and I will offer a brief point from each.

Firstly, the mustard seed:

Mustard seeds by Jessica Spengler on Flickr. CC 2.0.

We live in a world where people think they need to get known in order to have influence for good. You have to climb the greasy pole of politics, but to do so you need to be known. You may want to publish a book to get your message across, but publishers will ask what kind of a platform you already have: how many people follow you on social media, how many are signed up to receive your email newsletter, and so on. And we have the whole realm of the ‘social media influencer’, who has thousands of followers on YouTube or maybe Instagram. There they pronounce their views and review products that have been sent them free of charge by the manufacturers.

Before we scoff too loudly at current trends, let’s reflect on how many of us said when we were children that we wanted to be famous. How many of us encouraged our own children to follow their dreams, because anybody could see their dreams come true. It’s all cut from the same cloth.

But in the Parable of the Mustard Seed, Jesus reverses this. What we do in our present obscurity leads to future greatness in the kingdom.[1] Jesus himself lived out this example. Craig Keener says that Jesus came as a meek servant, wandering around Galilee healing the sick with his group of obscure disciples. The Romans took no notice of him until he offended Jewish aristocrats over the temple system.

In a world with governments in turmoil and full of wandering teachers and magicians, Jesus’ initial arrival as a meek and politically inconspicuous servant rendered his mission as opaque as his parables, except to disciples bearing the insight of faith.[2]

Jesus was content with obscurity. Yes, Jesus, the Son of God! But he knew that even there, without being famous, without being a public face, God could and would do his kingdom work through him.

Are we content to do kingdom of God things quietly, and leave the growth to God?

Secondly, the yeast:

Yeast by Chris Campbell on Flickr. CC 2.0.

This parable says something similar but takes it a step further. It says something like this: if you are willing to accept the call to serve the kingdom of heaven in obscurity and trust the outcomes to God, will you also be open to just how much God can accomplish this way?

Let’s listen again to Craig Keener:

Although Roman cities had bakeries, Galilean women baked their own families’ bread … The amount of flour involved here … represents roughly fifty pounds, providing enough bread for over one hundred people. A housewife would not normally fix so much meal and could not knead more than this; the unnatural magnitude of the illustration probably suggests that the kingdom far exceeds daily examples to which it may be compared.[3]

Do you want to see God do big things in the world? Then learn that your part in that purpose is not to hype things up but to continue working in obscurity and praying that God will spread the influence far and wide. It’s not something we hack for ourselves.

In pointing out that the word ‘yeast’ is better translated ‘leaven’, Maggi Dawn puts it this way:

If you joined (or observed) the great trend for making sourdough bread during the COVID pandemic, you will understand this: while yeast is something you add to flour to make it expand, leaven is more like sourdough: you add the flour to it, and the new flour is absorbed into the whole. The Kingdom of God is less about making small things bigger, and more about transforming the nature of everything it touches.

Are we ready for God to do something bigger than we can conceive? Do we want him to do that? I’m sure we do. If that is the case, then our task is not to fire up the hype machine, but to continue doing kingdom work in obscurity while praying that he will transform the nature of everything he touches through us.

Thirdly, the buried treasure:

Buried treasure by Carol VanHook on Flickr. CC 2.0.

I bought my current camera three years ago. It’s far and away the most complex camera I’ve ever owned. It’s also easily the best camera I’ve ever had.

But that also means it is by some distance the most expensive camera I’ve ever bought. How did I afford it, especially on a minister’s income? I traded in every piece of existing camera equipment I owned but could do without. I sold other possessions over a significant period of time.

And I’m glad I did it. For me, it was worth it, even though the new beast took a lot of getting used to, and indeed I am still learning more about its capabilities and features.

Jesus tells us in the parable of the buried treasure that the kingdom of heaven is worth so much that it will cost us everything we have. It is not that the owner of the field now uses the treasure to lead an extravagant lifestyle; instead,

The man not only recognised that its value outweighed all he had, but he acted accordingly.[4]

You can see the question this poses of us. Christianity is no hobby or leisure pursuit. It isn’t a preference, or a taste. It will take all we have. It will reorder our priorities. We do not just add it as a layer on top of everything else: rather, we start again from scratch with our lives when we enter the kingdom that Jesus announced.

For while the gift of salvation is free, discipleship is costly. As the great German Christian Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointed out, there is no such thing as ‘cheap grace’ in God’s kingdom. How can there be when it cost Jesus everything?

Fourthly, the merchant and the jewels:

The Austrian Imperial Crown Jewels, Imperial Treasury Museum, Hofburg Palace, Vienna by Alex-David Baldi on Flickr. CC 4.0.

Just as the parables of the mustard seed and the yeast are quite similar, so are the parables of the buried treasure and this one. Both have something to say about the cost of discipleship in God’s kingdom.

But look how willing the merchant is to sell everything he has in order to buy a fine pearl. Yes, taking up the challenge to follow Jesus is a costly affair. But it is not all misery. When we throw our lot in with Jesus wholeheartedly, we shall discover that it is all worth it. We shall find the joy of the kingdom.

In that sense,

the kingdom is like the merchant, not like the jewel: it’s less about some product or result you are promised, and more about what happens to you.

The kingdom changes us. We become different people. Our values change. What was once significant to us is no longer, for the kingdom has made us see everything in all creation differently. Disposable people are now precious to God. The things that the world chases after are no longer satisfying to us. A switch has flicked inside us. Now life is illuminated in a different way. It can’t be any other way:

One who was unwilling to sacrifice everything else for the kingdom, who did not believe its reality sufficiently to stake all one’s future on it, was unworthy of it.[5]

But if we are sold out to Jesus, then everything is new.

Fifthly and finally, the net:

Setting a large haul seine by FWC Fish and Wildlife Research Institute on Flickr. CC 2.0.

This final parable, which picks up on the common sight around the Lake of Galilee of fishermen separating the edible and kosher fish from the inedible[6], makes the most serious point of all.

This is the end game. This is where it is all leading. A final judgement, where God will vindicate the righteous and send the wicked to eternal loss, puts paid to the idea that God’s love means he will save everybody, whether they like it or not. Again, Maggi Dawn puts it well:

the Kingdom of God may be the best thing ever, a matter of immense rejoicing, freely offered to anyone who wants to join it — but it’s not fluffy. It’s free, but it’s not cheap. It demands something of us, and its consequences are serious.

Jesus doesn’t tell us here who are the wicked and who are the righteous, but I think it’s safe to assume that the righteous are those who have responded positively to the kingdom message. They have embraced God’s free gift of salvation in Christ by repentance and faith and have taken on board the blessings and demands of the kingdom. They are the ones who have sold everything to gain treasure and rejoiced in their pearl of great price. They are the ones who are willing to work in obscurity like the mustard seed or the yeast, not building their own reputation but that of Jesus, as they seek to transform everything they touch.

Whichever of these parables speaks to us today, they all speak to us about our life in the kingdom.

And whichever it most relevant to us in our current situation, Jesus asks us, as he did the disciples at the time, ‘Have you understood all these things?’ (verse 51)

Have we understood the response we need to make to God’s kingdom?

[1] Craig Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p388.

[2] Keener, p387.

[3] Keener, p388f.

[4] Keener, p392; italics his.

[5] Keener, p392.

[6] Keener, p392.

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Church Anniversary Sermon: The Jesus-Shaped Faith of the Church (Matthew 16:13-20)

Matthew 16:13-20

As a young person growing up, I became very frustrated by the Church. I used to describe it, in typical teenage black and white terms, as a God club where God had been voted off the committee.

It became a passion for me that the Church become more like she was meant to be. One time, as a young Local Preacher, I was in my bedroom one evening preparing a service for the following Sunday, when my sister came in.

‘What are you preaching about this Sunday?” she asked.

‘The Church,” I replied.

“You’re always preaching about the Church,” she said. She was probably right.

Even when I undertook my postgraduate research in Theology while I was training for the ministry, the focus of my thesis was ‘ecclesiology’ – that is, the doctrine that describes what we believe about the nature of the church.

So when you ask me to take a church anniversary, it feels to me like eating one of Penny’s cheese scones straight from the oven, closely followed by her lemon drizzle cake!

The way I want to speak about this subject today from this passage is to talk about ‘The Faith of the Church’.

Firstly, the Location of the Church’s faith:

Caesarea Philippi. Wikimedia Commons. CC 2.0.

Verse 13:

When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say the Son of Man is?’

‘When Jesus came to Caesarea Philippi’ is not mere decorative detail. Caesarea Philippi[1] was twenty-five miles north from the Lake of Galilee by the source of the River Jordan and close to the ancient city of Dan, that had marked the northern end of the Promised Land.

But this boundary place no longer reflected the ancient faith of Israel. You can tell from the name ‘Caesarea Philippi’ that it had succumbed to Roman influence. It was famous by then for its grottos and caves dedicated to the worship of the Greek god Pan. He was the god of nature, flocks, shepherds, and wild mountain areas. Sacrifices of cows, rams, lambs, milk, and honey were offered to him in the hope he would bring them luck. He was approached noisily: quiet and silence were considered inappropriate.

Against this pagan context, Jesus invites his disciples to elucidate their faith. Not in the relative safety of the synagogue, but as part of God’s people throughout the world, surrounded by paganism and Roman military might. Here – in the midst of the world, where not everyone would agree – the faith was to be lived out.

It’s the same for us today. We live out our faith, not in the cosy warmth of church fellowship but in a world where it is one of many competing ideas. Today, Jesus calls us to live for him not only in a society full of other faiths but also in a context of different cultural persuasions. At one end we have a political protest that wants to reverse all the social change since the 1960s; at the other, we have so-called ‘progressive’ or ‘woke’ values. Not only that, we have a spectrum that runs from those who believe true satisfaction can be found in money and possessions to those who are beginning to realise that their parents’ rejection of God and religion has left a vacuum at the heart of life.

To live as a family that follows Jesus in such a society is neither easy nor simple. But this is the context in which our Lord calls us to be faithful community today. We cannot wistfully hope for a return to the way things were when we were younger. This is the generation in which Jesus calls his church to live as one for him.

Secondly, the Confession of the Church’s faith:

CS Lewis. Leman Ramishvili on Flickr. Public Domain.

Here, we go from ‘Who do people say the Son of Man is?’ in verse 13 to ‘Who do you say I am?’ in verse 15.

To be part of the faithful Church it’s not enough to say Jesus is a good guy, a prophet. Our Muslim friends revere Jesus, and that’s why it’s untrue to claim they want to ban Christmas, but this is as far as they go. They are vulnerable to CS Lewis’ famous criticism that it won’t do to say Jesus was a good man. It doesn’t fit with the remarkable claims he made about himself. Lewis said that the only realistic options in the light of those claims is to say that he is (or was) either Lord, liar, or lunatic. There is no evidence of him being a liar and he doesn’t behave like a lunatic. The best explanation that fits the evidence is that he is Lord.

And that’s where the Church’s confession of faith lands. The earliest Christian confession was the words, ‘Jesus is Lord.’

Naturally, the words of our confession need to be accompanied by deeds. To acknowledge him as Lord, as Son of the Living God, is something to be demonstrated. It calls us to be a community that lives according to his teaching.

Not only that, this complex, plural society that is the context for our faith expects us to live differently, and that is a fair expectation. Moreover, it may be one of the best ways we witness to Jesus. As the saying goes, ‘You may be the only Bible someone reads.’ People do not know the Christian faith anymore. It has been said that we have moved as a society from being one that framed itself inside the Christian story as its defining narrative to one that instead frames itself against the story of Hitler and the Nazis. You hear more reference to them negatively today than you do to Jesus positively. We have a calling here, to confess Jesus as Lord and to live in harmony with that confession.

Thirdly, the Foundation of the Church’s faith:

Sylvester Stallone. Wikimedia Commons. CC 2.0.

Have you ever wondered where Sylvester Stallone appears in the Bible? It’s here. Jesus pronounces a blessing on Simon for his answer that was given to him by heaven and then renames him Rocky. For that’s what Peter means. Those Hollywood movies would never have sounded so attractive had they been called ‘Peter I, II, III, and IV’, but in this text you get a sense of the wordplay if you read it as ‘You are Rocky, and on this rock I will build my church’ (verse 18).

Foundations were often made from rock. Remember Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount about the wise man who built his house on a rock, whereas the foolish man built his on sand.

The Church, then, is built on the rock of Peter’s confession of faith in Jesus. How much of that is connected to the person of Peter as our Catholic friends believe is a debate I will not enter here, but the crucial point for us is that we are only the Church insofar as we build on the foundation of faith in Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, our Lord. We cannot jettison any of what the apostles handed on to us whilst remaining the Church, even if it is true that we must always interpret the application of the ancient faith in our day.

So whatever we are doing in the Church, let us always bring it back to Jesus – and not our imaginings of him, but his life, teaching, and example as set out in the Gospels. That way, we attend to our foundations, and our house is not swept away in the storm.

Fourthly, the Resilience of the Church’s faith:

Salvation Army building. Wikimedia Commons. CC 2.0.

Jesus promises that the gates of Hades will not overcome the church in verse 18. Sometimes we imagine these words as depicting the church cowering under attack, but since when was anybody attacked by a set of gates?

No! Gates are defensive objects. They are there to keep people out. And these are the gates of Hades – not of Hell, as in older translations. Hades was the place of death. Here, Jesus promises that death cannot kill the church, and what is more, the church is on the offensive against death.

Therefore, all our worries about church decline and aging need to put into this context. Yes, it is true that certain individual churches (and denominations) will disappear, but overall, the Church of Jesus Christ is indestructible. He has made it so. In history, various denominations have declined and become moribund, but God has raised up a new expression of his church to continue his mission.

Methodism is one example. God raised up the Methodist movement when the eighteenth-century Church of England was not so much full of living waters as of spiritual ditchwater.

Then Methodism became rather too comfortable and middle-class cozy towards the end of the nineteenth century, so God raised up the Salvation Army to restore the importance of bringing good news to the poor.

When Methodism also declined in holiness and spiritual power at the beginning of the twentieth century, God acted again. He raised up the Pentecostal movement partly, at least, out of Wesleyan holiness churches.

Our version of Christianity may possibly wither and die, but still God will do something new with his people.

And whatever form it takes, God’s people will be on the offensive against death and all its friends – sickness, poverty, injustice. The gates of Hades don’t stand a chance against the Church of Jesus Christ.

Fifthly and finally, the Authority of the Church’s faith:

A metal keyring and three keys on a dark surface. Free Images Live. CC 3.0.

Here we’re thinking about all the ‘keys of the kingdom’ and ‘binding and loosing’ language Jesus applies to Peter (or should I say, Rocky?) in verse 19.

These words clearly involve Jesus giving Peter some power and authority. The keys to the kingdom make him some kind of ‘Prime Minister’ or ‘Chief Rabbi’[2] in God’s kingdom, giving ruling decisions and interpretations of God’s will. That comes down to us in the teaching of Peter and the other apostles that is authoritative for us in the New Testament canon.

The binding and loosing on earth as it is in heaven should probably be translated, ‘Whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will have been loosed in heaven.’ Therefore, this is about ratifying the decisions of heaven[3]. It means that church leaders must only allow into the church community those who have confessed Jesus Christ as Lord.

I know an incident in a past circuit where I think I failed in this regard. A couple started coming to the church and eventually asked to see me about church membership. They wanted to know if they were ‘good enough’ for membership of the church. I recommended them.

But those words ‘good enough’ should have been a red flag for me. Their religion was all about rules – that is, so-called legalism. They brought a harshness into the church that was hard to remove. We even had to shut down one home group because the husband of this couple turned all the discussions into occasions of taking every preacher in the circuit to pieces.

Pray that those entrusted with authority in Christ’s Church use it in ways that reflect the life and teaching of Jesus. To vary from it is disastrous.

Conclusion

We’ve looked at the location of the Church’s faith in a varied and mixed-up world. We’ve looked at our confession of Jesus as Lord, and how Jesus alone is the foundation of that faith. We have taken encouragement from the resilience of the Church’s faith, based on the unchanging purposes of God in Christ, and we have looked at the solemn responsibility of leaders to base their authority on Christ alone.

In other words, everything always comes back to Jesus in the Church. Let’s make sure we do.

[1] On what follows, see Craig S Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p424.

[2] Keener, p429.

[3] Keener, p430.

2

Easter Day: A Choice To Make At The Empty Tomb

Matthew 28:1-10

Image from Abundant Life Church. CC 4.0.

I’ve spent Holy Week this year offering reflections on some of the characters in the Gospel stories of Jesus’ passion and crucifixion. On Monday in the first of our three daily meditations, I explored Mary of Bethany with you. On Tuesday, we wrestled with the stories around Judas Iscariot, before thinking on Wednesday about Peter.

At the Maundy Thursday meal, we focussed on the Beloved Disciple, and I carried this over on Good Friday to my services where we looked at Simon of Cyrene.

For all of these, my inspiration was a book from 1999 called At The Cross by my own postgrad supervisor Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart.

Today, I want to continue with some characters in the story, but Bauckham and Hart’s book doesn’t extend to the Resurrection, so with a little help from Craig Keener’s commentary on Matthew, I offer you the challenge of the Good News as seen in the characters around the empty tomb. We’re going to consider the women, the angel, and the soldiers.

Firstly, the women:

Two Marys at Christ’s tomb by Vincent Vörös. From RawPixel. Public Domain. Original public domain image from Web umenia.

The women are about the customary business of women after a death. It was usual to bring spices to a tomb, but men could only tend to the bodies of dead men, whereas women could care for both dead women and dead men. When Mary Magdalene and the other Mary visit the tomb, this is nothing out of the ordinary.

But their routine is exploded by what they find. They were not expecting to find the tombstone rolled away. More likely, they were preparing to ask permission of the soldiers to attend to Jesus’ body. They certainly weren’t anticipating a conversation with an angel.

Angels have a habit of interrupting the normal and transforming it. Ask Mary, the mother of Jesus. Ask a certain group of shepherds. Ask Abraham, and numerous others.

How are the women transformed? They become the first witnesses to the Resurrection. Not only do they see the evidence of the empty tomb, but they also meet the risen Jesus.

And moreover, they receive a commission to take the news to the disciples. Yes, those male disciples that Jesus had taught and trained over the three years, but who had failed him at the end. The women hadn’t, and the angel calls them to do something that later Paul would say was a qualification for apostleship: see the risen Jesus and be a witness to his Resurrection.

Who would expect that in a culture where women could not give evidence? It’s just one of those details you would never include if you were making up the story. People considered insignificant and of lesser value in their society – women – were given an apostolic call. That’s a long way from the traditional and expected habits that had brought them to the tomb that morning. They didn’t have this on their agenda that day.

Therefore, I want to ask you whether you are open to the risen Lord bursting in on the normal routines of your life and transforming them. Does Jesus have a call for you? Never mind the conventions of our society. Don’t sit there thinking I’m dyslexic, I’m neurodiverse, I’m too young, I’m too old, I’m the wrong skin colour, I don’t have the right education, I lack confidence, I’ve got secret shame, I’m disabled, or anything else you care to add. The things that are barriers for the world are not barriers for the risen Lord. If God by his Spirit can raise Jesus from the dead, then it is no trouble at all for him to jump over the hurdles our world puts in the way of people doing something significant.

It was in the Easter season in 1985 when God interrupted me, through a sermon by a Local Preacher on Low Sunday where in John 21 Jesus says to Peter, ‘Feed my sheep,’ that my journey to ministry began. It took me a long time to unravel what that interruption that morning meant, but it was a resurrection moment for me. I thought I was just doing my usual duties as a church steward that morning, but the risen Lord had other ideas.

What about you this Easter?

Secondly, the angel:

Angel turning stone at Christ’s tomb. Found at Easy-Peasy AI. CC 4.0.

While I was training for the ministry at Manchester, one of the northern students was very keen on wrestling. He organised outings to watch wrestling bouts. I never could understand it, because to me, having been a child when my grandmother, who lived with us, stayed glued to World of Sport on a Saturday afternoon to see Mick McManus, Jackie Pallo, Giant Haystacks and others, the appeal of wrestling was for old ladies. Why my friend Peter should persist in inviting me to something so camp, I could not understand. I never felt it belonged in the arena of sport, it was more like pantomime.

And of course, despite my aversion to it, I cannot erase from my memory the notion of ‘two submissions or a knockout’ to win, and how, when one wrestler had gained a submission from his opponent, he would often sit on him in triumph.

Well, here, on Easter morning, an angel sits not on the guards who have been so shaken by his arrival but on the stone he has rolled back. It’s not the soldiers who have been conquered so much as death itself. Not two submissions, just a knockout.

Easter Day is the supreme day of triumph. As the angel sits on the tombstone, we know that everything the New Testament claims for Christ’s work on the Cross is true and is vindicated. So –

  • Jesus has died in our place and our sins are forgiven;
  • Jesus has conquered what the Bible calls ‘the principalities and powers’ and all the forces of evil;
  • Jesus has fulfilled all that Adam and then Israel failed to do, by turning sinful human flesh back into obedience to the Father, right through to death;
  • Jesus has shown that the route to eternal life is not by violence, but by the way of the Cross.

Next time an inner voice condemns you for your sins, go and look at the angel sitting on the tombstone. Next time evil does its worst, cast your eyes at the angel on the tombstone and know that time has been served on evil. Next time you fail, look at that angel sitting in triumph know that Jesus has united you with him, and that’s who the Father sees when he looks at you. Next time you are troubled by world leaders who think they can bomb their way to freedom or cut down thousands of their own population to hold onto power, observe once more the angel who put his feet up on top of the tombstone and know that those ways will not last into eternity.

It was Friday, but Sunday has come.

Thirdly, the soldiers:

Easy-Peasy AI. CC 4.0.

The soldiers are the first to witness the awesome divine power of the Resurrection, as they encounter the angel, but as they shake and become like dead men their hearts are exposed. They are not on the side of life, but the side of death. Their job has been to promote and protect death. Now, they cannot hear the words of grace that the angel has for the women. Fancy witnessing the power of God and staying with the forces of death.

If you have any doubts about what I am saying and think I am just being fanciful, remember what happens after this. In verses 11 to 15, which we didn’t read, the soldiers are perfectly happy to collude with the authorities in the lie that the body of Jesus has been stolen. They are not on the side of life or truth, but of death and falsehood.

What a warning this is to us all. The saving power of God has come up close. The Good News has been enacted in front of them. But still, they choose death. Still, they choose to embrace a lie. Moreover, they allow themselves to be bribed with a large sum of money in order to go along with the fiction that the chief priests want.

This is surely a sobering reminder to us not to miss the grace of God when it comes calling. Now is the day of salvation. Now, life in all its fulness opens up before us. Now, the door of true freedom has been unlocked before our eyes. Why would we prefer the realms of untruth, monetary greed, and the decay of death?

But some people do. They are more entranced by the shrunken, shrivelled republic of sin than by the beautiful kingdom of love, joy, and peace. For it means putting aside a lifestyle where ‘me, me, me’ is at the centre, and where we can justify staying as we are on the grounds of what others have done to us, despite the fact that the death and resurrection of the king offers the prospect of those old wounds being healed through forgiving love.

The biggest mistake any of us could make on Easter Day is to be like the soldiers. The life-giving power of God in the Resurrection has come close. Through it, God bids us to walk with Jesus in newness of life, exchanging the dirty rags of our weaselly self-centredness for the clean robes of a disciple who puts Jesus first.

But the more we ignore that call, the more we put it off, the more we delay saying ‘yes’ to Jesus, the more is the risk that one day that life-transforming power will stop calling. For God will realise we are not serious about him. He will confirm us in our own decision to harden our hearts. He will leave us in our selfishness and greed, shaking like dead men.

Easter Day is a day to witness that angel sitting triumphantly on the tombstone, to respond like the women who, though afraid, allowed the angel’s interruption to give their lives new direction, and ran away with joy to tell the good news, and to let dead soldiers bury their own dead.

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A Beautiful View of Jesus, Matthew 17:1-9 (Sunday Before Lent, The Transfiguration, Year A)

Matthew 17:1-9

A year into marriage – and it will be our silver wedding anniversary this year – my wife Debbie and I decided we fancied a walking holiday in the Snowdonia region of Wales. We booked a room in a B & B near the village of Beddgelert, and looked forward to joining the hordes walking up Mount Snowdon.

View from the Summit: Mount Snowdon by James E Petts on Flickr. CC 2.0.

It didn’t work out like that. Not long before going, we discovered Debbie was expecting our first child. Our vigorous walking holiday became a sedate one. We never got up Mount Snowdon.

Jesus, however, went up mountains quite regularly during his ministry. And every time Matthew’s Gospel records him doing so, something significant – revelatory, even – happens. In the last couple of weeks, you may have had readings from the Sermon on the Mount – his great description of what repentant living in the kingdom of God looks like. At the very end of Matthew after the Resurrection, Jesus sends his disciples up a mountain in Galilee, where he gives the Great Commission to disciple the whole world.

And here he is in today’s reading, going up a mountain again. We traditionally refer to the ‘Mount of Transfiguration.’ We expect a significant revelation of Jesus. And boy, do we get that. What is revealed about Jesus at the Mount of Transfiguration?

Here are four things the Transfiguration shows us about Jesus[1]:

Firstly, the glory of Jesus:

Jesus meets Moses and Elijah. Both of them had history of profound spiritual experiences on mountains. Moses received the Ten Commandments and his face glowed with the glory of God. Elijah saw God give him a mighty victory over the pagan prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel.

But here, only Jesus is transfigured. Moses isn’t. Nor is Elijah. However great they were in Israel’s history, they are not equal with Jesus. Only he shows the dazzling glory of God on his face and his clothes.

The message is clear. Jesus is supreme to all other religious leaders and heroes. He is not just another teacher. Nor is he merely a prophet, as Islam would say. He is so much more. He is Lord.

The natural consequence of this is that Jesus is as worthy of worship as the Father. He manifests the very glory of God.

Peter gets it all wrong. Perhaps he is tongue-tied in the presence of surpassing greatness, a bit like any of us would be when we meet someone famous and all our plans to ask intelligent questions disappear as our legs go to jelly and so do our brains. He says the daftest thing when he wants to build three shelters, one for Moses, one for Elijah, and one for Jesus. Yet again, he has missed the point.

It’s not enough to like Jesus or even admire him. The Transfiguration tells us that he is worthy of our worship – not merely an hour of our time on a Sunday, but the allegiance of our lives.

This morning, we take Holy Communion together. In our tradition, we call that a ‘sacrament.’ Now ‘sacrament’ is an interesting word. It is not a word from Scripture. Rather, it derives from a Latin word ‘sacramentum’, which was the oath of allegiance that a Roman soldier made to the Emperor. May our initial response to the glory of Jesus this morning be in renewing our sacramentum, our oath of allegiance to him, at the Lord’s Table.

Secondly, the words of Jesus:

Just to underline what Peter should have learned from only Jesus being transfigured, the divine voice from the bright cloud says,

‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!’ (Verse 5)

As good Jews, Peter, James, and John had it imprinted on their memory that when Moses went up Mount Sinai he received the Law of God. Now, as they are up this other mountain, they learn that Jesus is not simply the recipient of God’s words, he is the giver of them. Jesus is, and he gives, the Word of God.

This is the logical consequence of the first point. If the glory of Jesus tells us about his supremacy and we offer our worship and allegiance, then that involves heeding what he says. It is not for us to treat the teaching of Jesus as merely interesting or optional: what he says, goes. It is the Word of God.

Some of us like to sit in judgment on what we read in the Scriptures – like when Field Marshal Montgomery read the Old Testament lesson at Matins one morning and began, ‘And the Lord said unto Moses – and in my opinion quite rightly’! Others of us like to analyse the words and enjoy coming up with clever theories or explanations, but then do nothing. That won’t do either.

Of course, we will struggle with some of the difficult sayings of Jesus. We may need to understand certain nuances, or their historical background to make sense of them. But in the end, what we need to embrace as Christians is that Jesus and the Scriptures are for life, not just Sundays. One of the things coming in our forthcoming circuit-wide Lent preaching series will be a challenge to study and meditate on the Scriptures more. This would be a good time to embrace that discipline.

Thirdly, the compassion of Jesus:

It would be easy after what we have just been thinking about to assume that everything Jesus says and requires of us is challenging and maybe severe. But following on immediately from the words, ‘Listen to him,’ Jesus does in fact speak to Peter, James, and John. Hear verses 6 to 8 again:

6 When the disciples heard this, they fell face down to the ground, terrified. 7 But Jesus came and touched them. ‘Get up,’ he said. ‘Don’t be afraid.’ 8 When they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus.

Get up. Don’t be afraid. Even after the overwhelming glory that comes upon Jesus. Even after the summons to listen to him. Who is this Jesus whose glory tells of his supremacy, and whose Father tells us he is and he speaks the Word of God? Is he some severe authoritarian?

No. The Jesus who is Lord is full of love, mercy, and compassion. He reaches out in kindness to his people. He is the giver of dignity to those who are bowed down. Like the Psalmist says of the Lord in Psalm 3:3,

You are the One who lifts my head high.

This is how Jesus reigns. He was God’s agent in creation, where we were made in God’s image. However much we have marred that image by our sin, he is now remaking us in the divine image. He is making us more like him. And he does that with love and care for each of us.

If we are worried about giving our allegiance to Jesus and following his Word, here is what we need to remember about him. His yoke is easy and his burden is light[2] and we find our rest in him.

This is who we are called to follow. This is who is speaking to us. Whatever has laid us low, be they fears about God or the wounds of life, he invites us to get up and leave our fears with him. We are safe in his divine presence.

Fourthly and finally, the suffering of Jesus:

9 As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus instructed them, ‘Don’t tell anyone what you have seen, until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.’

For all the glory of Jesus, for all his authority as the Word of God, and for all his love, his next destination is Jerusalem and the Cross.

Suddenly, it feels like everything has changed. We have gone from the retina-searing brilliance of the Transfiguration to three hours of darkness on a hill.

But maybe nothing has changed. Maybe the Cross will reveal the same truths about Jesus, just in startlingly different ways. For though the world may think the Cross will be his shame, it will be his glory. The world may think he is condemned at the Cross and in one sense he is, but it will also be his enthronement.

And in the silence of God at Calvary, Jesus himself will speak his word. Seven last words from the Cross. Still, the Word of God will go out into the world, even from One suffering a cruel death. He will say, ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing,’ and that word will be fulfilled as forgiveness pours out with his blood.

And do we see there the Jesus who in love lifts people up? Why, yes we do. For one thing, the forgiveness we have just spoken about does that. For another, he will lift up the penitent thief next to him by assuring him, ‘I tell you today, you will be with me in Paradise.’ Moreover, he lifts up both his mother and the Belovèd Disciple as he addresses them from the Cross: ‘Mother, here is your son. Son, here is your mother.’

Nowhere more do we see Jesus lifting people up and showing love than at Golgotha. As the Welsh Revival hymn puts it,

Here is love, vast as the ocean,
lovingkindness as the flood,
when the Prince of life, our ransom,
shed for us his precious blood.
Who his love will not remember?
Who can cease to sing his praise?
He can never be forgotten
throughout heaven’s eternal days.[3]

Conclusion

We began by talking about mountains. Sometimes, when you go up a mountain you get to see the most magnificent view. I recall seeing the powerful sight of the snow and the ski slopes when I went up the Jungfrau in Switzerland.

Here, as we have ascended the Mount of Transfiguration, I hope we gained the beautiful view of Jesus. We have taken in his majestic glory, his identity as the Word of God, and his compassionate love. Then we have seen that all of these will be recapitulated at the Cross.

I’ll finish not with the words of an old hymn but of a modern worship song, because they seem to capture these thoughts:

You are beautiful beyond description
Too marvelous for words
Too wonderful for comprehension
Like nothing ever seen or heard
Who can grasp Your infinite wisdom?
Who can fathom the depth of Your love?
You are beautiful beyond description
Majesty, enthroned above[4]

[1] These are influenced by Craig Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, pp 436-41.

[2] Matthew 11:30

[3] William Rees (1802-83); translated by William Edwards (1848-1929).

[4] ‘I Stand In Awe’, Music and words by Mark Altrogge. © 1986 Sovereign Grace Praise/BMI (adm. by Integrity Music). Sovereign Grace Music, a division of Sovereign Grace Churches. All rights reserved. CCLI: #23914.

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How to Understand the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes, Matthew 5:1-12 (Epiphany 4 Year A)

Matthew 5:1-12

There once was a church member who claimed that Jesus said we should disregard the Old Testament. This seemed rather strange to others, not least because Jesus spoke of fulfilling it, and so they asked him why he made this claim.

“Well, that’s easy,” he replied. “Jesus once said, ‘Hang all the Law and the Prophets.’”

Now Jesus did say, ‘Hang all the Law and the Prophets.’ The problem is, that isn’t the whole quotation. It came when he was asked about the greatest commandment. He replied that there were two: firstly, love the Lord your God will all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Secondly, love your neighbour as yourself.

And his punchline? “On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

Quite different! Context is everything. As has been well said, a text without a context is a pretext.

Hermeneutical Basics by Brett Jordan on Flickr. CC 2.0.

Bear this in mind as we look at the opening of the Sermon on the Mount with the Beatitudes today. There are so many theories about the purpose of the Sermon and the meaning of the Beatitudes. There may be up to thirty-six main theories about the Sermon on the Mount[1]! Don’t worry, I’m not going to describe them all to you!

Context, then, is our first tool for discovering what these famous words mean for us.

We begin with the fact that context tells us who the teacher is. Well, you say, it’s Jesus. Of course it is. But context is making some big claims about him. You cannot read the context and just come away with the idea that he was a great religious teacher. He was claiming more.

How so? There are a couple of indications. One is that this is the first of five major blocks of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew’s Gospel. It is a parallel to the so-called ‘Five Books of Moses’, namely Genesis to Deuteronomy. Moses had prophesied that God would one day send one who was greater than him to his people. The Sermon on the Mount is one of the first indications Matthew gives us that Jesus is the One who fulfils that prophecy. He is not just a teacher. He is greater. How great? Keep reading.

The other indication about who the teacher is comes in the fact that Jesus goes up on a mountainside. It’s another echo of Moses, who went up Mount Sinai to receive the commandments from God. But Jesus doesn’t receive commandments, he gives them. And every time he goes up a mountain in Matthew, something important and revelatory happens. Here, it’s the Sermon the Mount. Later, it will be events like the Transfiguration and the Great Commission. Jesus is the New Moses, the One greater than Moses. If you thought it was important to listen to the Ten Commandments, then it is every bit as important, if not more so, to listen to Jesus in the five blocks of teaching and when he goes up a mountain (of which this is the first example of both).

Context also tells us who is being addressed. Hear verses 1 and 2 again:

1 Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, 2 and he began to teach them.

Jesus addresses his disciples, but the crowds are present, too. Right through the Sermon, this is teaching for disciples. But others are watching and listening. It’s still true at the end of the sermon. These are the last two verses of Matthew’s account at the end of chapter 7:

28 When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, 29 because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.

It’s consistent. The Sermon on the Mount is addressed to disciples, but they are not alone. The crowds are watching.

The influential American Christian thinker Francis Schaeffer once wrote a book called The Church Before The Watching World. You might say that title encapsulates what we’re about here. Jesus is teaching his followers how to be the church before the watching world. Do you want to know what constitutes a good witness in the world, according to Jesus? Then read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the Sermon on the Mount.

Dr. Francis Schaeffer. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.

And so that means we’re beginning to answer another question that context helps us with: what is the theme of the teaching? This is one of the areas where those thirty-six different theories argue with one another. For example, are these political policies we should demand in our national life? No, the primary focus here is on how the disciples of Jesus live.

In fact, the recent context just before this passage might also help us with this. It comes not long after Jesus has begun his public ministry with the call to repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near. If the Sermon on the Mount is for disciples, then it is for those who have responded to the call to repentance. It is a description of what the repentant life looks like. Do I want to know if I am doing what Jesus loves, and have turned from the ways of the world? Again, our answer is to read the Sermon on the Mount. This is a plumbline Jesus holds up for us to examine ourselves as Christians and see how we are getting on with the life of the Spirit rather than the life of the flesh.

To sum up so far: context tells us that Jesus, the teacher of the Sermon on the Mount, is the Great One prophesied for centuries, and that he should be listened to with all the seriousness we give to the Ten Commandments, if not more so. He is addressing his disciples, teaching them what the repentant life looks like, and what it means to live a Christian witness before the watching world.

With all that in mind – which I hope will help you with any part of the Sermon on the Mount that you read – let’s spend the second half looking specifically at the Beatitudes. And here our tool will not be context but structure.

Structure image, Highway Signs 3. Pix4Free.org. CC 3.0.

In the Beatitudes, there is a reasonably consistent structure of each saying. They more or less follow a formula. It’s only the last one, which Jesus expands on, but even there it displays some similarities. It goes roughly like this:

  • Who is blessed?
  • What blessing will they receive?

But let’s just define that word ‘Blessèd’ first. It means, ‘It will go well with the one’ who is named[2].

Then let’s observe that broadly there is a contrast in time between the people who are blessed and when they receive their blessing. The blessèd ones are doing what Jesus commends now, in the present tense. However, the promised blessings generally come in the future[3]. This is not a guide to having an enjoyable life now. Jesus is not promising that if you live your best life now you will receive health, wealth, and prosperity in this life. This is not some manual for successful living.

See it this way. Jesus is saying that here are some of the marks of living the repentant life. These are examples of how he calls us to live before the watching world. Because of that, God is pleased with us. He will bless our obedience. However, that blessing may well only come in the future – perhaps even only in the life of the age to come.

For at present, we live in a time when two different ages are overlapping and clashing with each other. The age of sin is continuing. But Jesus has inaugurated the age of God’s kingdom, which has come but is not yet here in all its fulness. The age of sin and the age of God’s kingdom are incompatible, so they clash. That is why not all the blessings of the age to come are here yet. It is why not everybody we pray for is healed, for example. God’s kingdom has won the decisive battle at Easter – yes! – but the war is not yet finished.

What does this mean for us? Jesus calls us to live the repentant life before the world as a witness. We are not forcing ourselves on the world but showing by our lives what the ways of Jesus are like, knowing that God delights in what we are doing, and that he will show us his favour for responding to him like this. However, we may have to wait patiently to receive the fruits of that approval.

Jesus is calling us to live not as those who choose violence, even in the face of oppression, but who live humbly, seeking peace and reconciliation (which is not the same as caving in). He calls us to be the ones who trust in him, even when we think we don’t have many resources – after all, he doesn’t need a big budget to achieve great things, he just needs surrendered lives. He calls us to be the ones who witness to mercy and compassion; to be the ones who yearn for him above all things, rather than having our imaginations captured by the desires that our society elevates. To become such people, we may well mourn – not only in the general sense of those who are bereaved but mourning for our sin and the sin of the world, which surely leads us to passionate prayer for transformation for ourselves and others. We are the ones to show kindness to others, even if it means we need to carry the burden of unjust suffering.

Such a calling probably sounds unbearable. But a day is coming, he promises us, when God will vindicate us for following these costly choices. We will hear the words, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’ We will be blessed.

And in that respect, we shall be following Jesus himself. For surely the Beatitudes describe the kind of life he lived on earth. And he too was blessed in the vindication of the Resurrection.

But isn’t this all impractical and irrelevant? What of when we see the powerful in our world living differently and crushing others, shooting the innocent on the streets of Minneapolis and Tehran? Do we respond in kind? When Donald Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller tells the CNN TV channel,

“We live in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time”

should we not respond with similar use of force? No. We continue to live the Beatitudes. These are the ways of God’s coming kingdom. These show God’s great future. As such, they pronounce God’s judgment in a subversive way on the wickedness of our day. In their peaceable nature they reveal God’s truth and promise the downfall of violence. God will pass sentence on the wicked, but we let him do it in his way.

Let us heed the call of Jesus, to live the repentant lifestyle of peace before the watching world. We must take this seriously, because of the One who tells us that this is his way. The rest we leave to his Father who, as the Psalmist tells us, places the wicked on slippery ground that they might be cast down to ruin[4].

[1] Craig S Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p160.

[2] Keener, p165.

[3] As Paul Beasley-Murray says, they are a ‘divine passive’. See also Keener, p167.

[4] Psalm 73:18

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The Building-Blocks of Jesus’ Mission, Matthew 4:12-23 (Epiphany 3, Year A)

Matthew 4:12-23

A few years ago, Debbie and I went to the cinema to see the ‘biopic’ Bohemian Rhapsody, about the rock band Queen and their lead singer Freddie Mercury. I expected the movie to end with Freddie’s death from AIDS in 1991, but it didn’t. It climaxed with the band’s triumphant performance at Live Aid in 1985. I guess it was the point that they exploded from being massively popular in the UK and a few other places to being superstars on the world stage.

If you made a biopic about the early years of Jesus, I think this is where it might end. After the amazing birth stories, the escape from Herod, his baptism, and then his trials in the wilderness, here is where it all explodes and the public ministry is launched, as he moves from Nazareth to Capernaum.

And therefore it’s natural that what we see in this story is some of the building-blocks of Jesus’ message. Tonight, we’re going to explore three building-blocks that we find in this passage and what they mean for us.

Firstly, fulfilment:

Verses 12 to 16 tell us that Jesus moved from Nazareth to Capernaum to fulfil a prophecy of Isaiah’s that the Messiah would live in ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’ and bring light into darkness.

This is a continuation of something Matthew has been stressing from the beginning in his Gospel: that Jesus the Messiah fulfils Old Testament prophecies. How does the fulfilment work here? In a couple of ways.

One is that he is now based in ‘Galilee of the Gentiles.’ Although Galilee was filled with devout Jews who were faithful to the religious Law and to the Jerusalem Temple, there were Gentile settlements nearby[1]. This becomes a foreshadowing of the later mission to the Gentiles that Jesus announced after his Resurrection at the end of the Gospel[2].

And hence, there is a hint here of what is to come: to be part of the Jesus Movement will entail not just staying comfortably with people like us but reaching out beyond social and cultural boundaries to share Jesus there. It is no good thinking we can stay with our own kind. It is no good making the church the centre and the circumference of our social lives. There is a mission beyond us, and Jesus was clear about it from the start.

The other element of fulfilment is in bringing light into the darkness. That includes light for people who are struggling in the darkness of despair. Jesus is Good News for them, because he brings a hope in him that not even death can destroy. Whatever the most dreadful of our thoughts are when we are down, Jesus still brings hope. He is the light-bringer.

Let There Be Light!! by Premnath Thirumalaisamy on Flickr, CC Licence 2.0.

But light shines into darkness in other ways, too. Most notably, Jesus shines his light onto the darkness of our sins. When we meet Jesus, we begin a lifelong process of transformation, as bit by bit he casts his light into those areas of darkness that we don’t want anyone else to see. Stage by stage, Jesus calls us to confess our dark deeds and bring them into his light. There he forgives us and begins his work of equipping us to change.

Is it any wonder that the first thing we hear Jesus saying in the passage is these words?

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’ (Verse 17)

When Jesus shines his light onto our lives, we will begin to have a list of things from which we need to repent. We need to turn our lives around.

Perhaps like me you often resist this. But it is an essential part of God’s project to make us more like Jesus. So may he grant us the grace to go along with the surgery the light of Jesus performs on us.

Secondly, following:

Red Follow Me beacon at PickPik (Public Domain)

In verses 18 to 22, Jesus calls Simon, Andrew, James, and John to follow him. They leave their fishing nets immediately.

There is something really quite radical here. Rabbis didn’t generally call people to follow them. Instead, young men (and I’m afraid it was only men in those days) would choose a rabbi for themselves. For Jesus to go to these men, who either had not looked for a rabbi or had been rejected when they had applied, turns everything upside-down.[3] What we see here is that Jesus calls some young men to follow him who would not have been accepted by any other rabbi. But Jesus wants them. They will be among his core followers.

The early church followed through with this principle. We are pretty sure that some of the early bishops were slaves. No way would a Roman religion do that! But Jesus calls everyone, including the unexpected and the rejected.

It’s worth us remembering that Jesus still issues the call to follow him to people that we wouldn’t expect. Who would that be in our circles? Who are the people we have dismissed as potential Jesus-followers? Maybe we’ve even dismissed ourselves. Don’t do it. Jesus is calling.

But let’s also be aware that this call comes with a potential cost. Simon, Andrew, James, and John had to quit their family businesses to follow Jesus. They left their nets. They left the boat.

This was probably an act of what we would call ‘downward mobility.’ The fishermen might not have been wealthy, but neither were they peasants.[4] These young men walk out on a steady income generated from a vital profession for a life with a much more uncertain income. What did their families think?

It still happens in our generations. Someone who grew up in the same church youth group and young adults’ group as me trained to a high standard as secretary and PA and landed a job as the PA to one of the directors of one of our most famous upmarket High Street stores. But then God called her into church leadership with a new, fledgling independent congregation. Her parents were not best pleased, after all the money they had poured into her professional training. But she heeded the call.

One of my fellow ministerial students had previously been a solicitor. One day, somebody asked him, how much of a pay cut does entering the ministry mean for you?

‘I’ve knocked a nought off the end of my salary,’ he replied.

I wonder whether there is anyone here who is sensing the call of Jesus to follow him, perhaps in a new way, but that the implications are that it will be costly. You are risking financial loss, or family disapproval. Let us as a church family gather round in support of you so that you can set out on where Jesus is calling you.

Thirdly and finally, fishing:

In verse 19, Jesus says to Simon and Andrew,

‘Come, follow me,’ …, ‘and I will send you out to fish for people.’

Perhaps this reminds you of the old Sunday School chorus, ‘I will make you fishers of men,’ and maybe you now have an earworm!

The traditional way in which we have interpreted this is to think of this as a call to share the Gospel with people so that they, too, become followers of Jesus. I don’t think that was far from the minds of the early church, because one of the earliest visual images of the church was that of a boat. They saw there was a task to do of bringing more people into God’s boat.

We urgently need to release people into the ministry of evangelism, because there are so many more who need to hear the Gospel and respond. If anyone here is sensing that call, then let’s have a conversation about what we can do to train, facilitate, and support your call.

And let’s do it in a way that keeps a strong link between the evangelist and the church. The call is to fish for people, so they are brought into the boat. Too often in the past, evangelists have become disconnected from the local church. The fault has been on both sides, and we cannot allow it to continue. Evangelism is a ministry of the church.

But I want to take ‘fishing for people’ further. As I said, if you look forward from New Testament times to the early church, you end up with this application of these words to evangelism. But if you look back to the Old Testament, you see another dimension of mission, and it’s about the prophetic announcement of judgment. Here is one example from Jeremiah 16:16:

‘But now I will send for many fishermen,’ declares the Lord, ‘and they will catch them. After that I will send for many hunters, and they will hunt them down on every mountain and hill and from the crevices of the rocks.

What’s that about? The context is about God bringing judgment on his people who have forsaken his ways for worthless idols. This fishing for people is about the bad news, not the good news. It is the warning of what God will do with those who wilfully reject his truth. When Israel left Egypt, the Egyptian army tried to catch them and failed. But now, God’s messengers – his fishermen and hunters – will catch them.

Fishing for people, then, involves not only the winsome call to follow Jesus but also the warning to those both outside and inside the boat of the church to reject idolatry.

What would that mean for us today? I’ll confine myself to one example. There is only one sin that is described as idolatry in the New Testament. Greed. Colossians 3:5:

Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.

Fishing for people, then, is not only a call to evangelism. It is also a call to a prophetic ministry. This is why it is right the Church condemns so much of what is going on in international politics at present.

But we have a long way to go in much of the church to put to death the idolatry of greed, which is so widely practised in our society. What else would we expect when we follow One who shines his light into the darkness?

Conclusion

Let’s summarise these three building-blocks:

Fulfilment – this happens when we take the Gospel beyond the People of God to others, and when the light of Christ shines into darkness.

Following – let’s be open to surprises in who God calls but be ready for the fact that when he does, there is usually a cost involved.

Fishing – for people – this is both the evangelistic call to join the boat of the church and putting the fishhooks of God’s judgment into those who wilfully reject his ways.

How far are we reflecting the fundamental elements of Jesus’ mission?

[1] Craig S Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p146f.

[2] Matthew 28:16-20

[3] Keener, p150.

[4] Keener, p151.

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