Tag: Joel Green

Watching You, Watching Me: Jesus and the Pharisees at Dinner, Luke 14:1-14 (Ordinary 22 Year C)

Luke 14:1-14

Surveillance Society - Halsted and Division Edition (C) Seth Anderson on Flickr, CC Licence 2.0

We live in what some have called ‘the surveillance society.’ Everywhere you go, you are on camera. Never mind the old ‘Smile, you’re on Candid Camera’ TV catchphrase, in our society you can hardly move without being captured on CCTV.

Not only that, we have the increasing use of video doorbells. We fitted one at the manse soon after coming, because we discovered that on our estate parcels left by delivery companies were frequently stolen from doorsteps. We also had to deal with a stalker.

At the beginning of our reading, we hear this:

One Sabbath, when Jesus went to eat in the house of a prominent Pharisee, he was being carefully watched. (Verse 1)

Jesus was being carefully watched by the Pharisees and other religious leaders. He was under suspicion. They wanted to clock any incriminating move.

But the shock of the story is that in fact Jesus was also watching them. Listen again to verse 7:

When he noticed how the guests picked the places of honour at the table, he told them this parable.

When he noticed. It’s a two-way mirror. It’s a dose of their own medicine, to mix the metaphors.

What does Jesus notice? I’m going to divide up the story into three to answer that question. Spoiler alert: we’re going to see how Jesus’ values clash with those of his society, and also with ours.

Firstly, the sick man:

This week’s Lectionary doesn’t include verses 2 to 6. Perhaps it’s because last week’s Gospel reading also included Jesus healing someone on the Sabbath. There are certainly some similarities with last week’s episode where Jesus healed a crippled woman in the synagogue. Jesus provokes confrontation with the religious establishment and the way he asks them a question about what constitutes work on the Sabbath what constitutes good deeds is very similar. So perhaps the compilers of the Lectionary thought that if they included this story this week congregations would end up with two similar sermons on consecutive Sundays.

However, these are not the only two examples of Jesus healing on the Sabbath in Luke’s Gospel. There is another one in chapter 6, for example. And while there are clear similarities, this week’s story has at least one unique application, and it’s to do with how the ancient world interpreted the medical condition he had.

The NIV says he was ‘suffering from abnormal swelling of his body’ (verse 2). Other translations use the old word ‘dropsy.’ It’s an excess of fluid that indicates something else is wrong. A few years ago, I went to the doctor because my legs were swelling. The first thing the GP did was send me for a blood test to make sure I didn’t have an issue with my heart, because congestive heart failure can cause this. So can kidney disease.[i] In my case, it was nothing so disturbing, but rather a side-effect from a blood pressure tablet, and I just needed a different drug.

But the ancients saw those with dropsy as people who had insatiable thirst, and metaphorically as those who were greedy, loved money, and were rapacious[ii]. And which group of people was accused of these very sins in Luke’s Gospel? Oh yes: the Pharisees[iii], the very people who are condemning Jesus’ action of healing.

Hence, when Jesus heals the man of his abnormal swelling, he is not just continuing his war on those who interpret God’s commands in a cruel way, he is also putting them on notice about their greed. He has noticed this too about them.

Are we in danger of crossing a line from enjoying good things that God has provided to being greedy? We so often go along with our consumer society and get sucked into the idea that we need to fill our lives with more stuff. Could there be a surprising, maybe shocking message in the reading for us today that in the eyes of Jesus we are bloated, and that we need his healing? Is this something that any of us needs to pray about and act on?

Secondly, the wedding invitation:

In verses 7 to 11, Jesus imagines invitations to a wedding being sent out and people jostling for position at the banquet to be seen as having more honour and prestige. He has noticed it at the meal he is attending. Like I said, it’s not just the Pharisees doing the watching, Jesus is watching them.

This is an attitude that will be familiar to us. Were you ever in a work situation where someone was doing their best to ingratiate themselves with senior leadership to get promotion? Back in the days when I did a more conventional job, I saw that. There was an ambitious man who discovered that he shared a love of cricket with the office manager, and he used that to curry favour. It certainly got him one promotion.

We sometimes see attitudes like this in the church. Somebody wants to be a big fish in a small pond. But it goes against the teaching of Jesus.

And he tells his hearers to take the lowest place at the banquet. The host may invite them to move up to a more honoured seat, and that is better than the humiliation of having thought too highly or themselves and having had to be relegated. In a culture where issues of honour and shame were prominent, this was radical teaching from Jesus.

Even then, some people manipulate Jesus’ teaching here. Some of what masquerades as ‘servant leadership’ in the church is actually a way of exercising influence and gaining power through the back door.

But if we follow Jesus, we shall be content with the seat to which he appoints us. If he puts us in a prominent position, all well and good – although we shall have to guard ourselves against pride. If we remain in an obscure or insignificant place, that is fine, too. After all, Jesus himself in taking on human flesh took the nature of a servant[iv].

In my early years as a minister, I had a couple of incidents where people foresaw me rising to positions of prominence in the church world. Not least was the time when I ended up as a seminar speaker at Spring Harvest, and one or two people said that I would then be among the movers and shakers of the evangelical world. It never happened. I have remained an obscure minister, and over the years have learned to be content with that.

When it comes down to it, no Christian can be seeking to make a name for themselves. That is not consistent with the call to humility and servanthood that Jesus makes. The only fame we seek is the fame of Jesus. And we let Jesus appoint the places where he wants us to do that.

Thirdly, the dinner invitation:

In the final part of the reading, verses 12 to 14, Jesus asks his listeners to imagine themselves not as the recipients of an invitation but as the givers of one. Who will you invite to dinner, he asks? And in one sweeping move he undermines the entire social fabric within which his hearers are happily living. Is it just to have a go at them, and enjoy seeing them squirm? I’m sure they did, but Jesus’ real concern here is for the poor and the excluded.

It’s almost topical. This week, we’ve heard the news that the Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey has declined his invitation to the banquet the King will be hosting next month for Donald Trump’s state visit in protest at Trump’s apparent support for the Israeli government’s state-sanctioned violence in Gaza. Davy even said that as a Christian this was something he prayed about before confirming his decision.

But if Ed Davey’s decision is a negative one as a protest, what we have from Jesus here is a positive step on behalf of the poor. First of all, he blows away all the conventional wisdom of his day about patronage, mutual back-scratching, and reciprocal arrangements so that people can engage in social climbing. It’s not the way of the Christian, he says. I wonder whether it says anything to today’s practices. What would it say, for example, to the way people today go along to ‘networking’ events to promote themselves?

No, says Jesus, invite people who can’t offer you an invitation back. Don’t see this as a way of getting something in return. There’s nothing particularly Christian about that. The Christian approach is to be a giver, whether or not people give back to us.

I mean, doesn’t this model the Gospel and God’s giving to us? What God gives to us in his grace and mercy, forgiving our sins, wiping the slate clean, and giving us a fresh start is way beyond what we can offer back to him. ‘What shall we offer our good Lord, poor nothings for his boundless grace?’ as the hymn puts it.

I want to challenge us all to consider this question: who can I bless this week who cannot necessarily bless me back? Who, among the poor, excluded, and marginalised in our society can I give to or serve?

We refer today to the idea of ‘paying forward’: when someone has given to us and we cannot give back, we give to someone else instead. It would be within the spirit of what Jesus teaches here for us to ‘pay forward’ the grace, mercy, and love we have received from him to others as a sign of our gratitude to him.

So, why not look for an opportunity this week? And come back next Sunday to tell your friends what happened.

Conclusion

The Pharisees were watching Jesus. Unbeknown to them, Jesus was watching them. He called them to replace greed with kindness, pride with humble service, and social climbing with giving.

And surely Jesus is watching us, too. He is longing to see us display these qualities as a witness to him.

What will he see us do this week?

[i] Joel B Green, The Gospel Of Luke (NICNT), p546.

[ii] Op. cit., p547.

[iii] Luke 11:37-44 and 16:14.

[iv] Philippians 2:7.

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Jesus Is Alive: The Sweet Centre Of Easter, Luke 24:13-35 (Easter 2, Low Sunday)

https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/luke-24-13-35-the-resurrection-is-at-the-centre/278456462

(Please see the PowerPoint at the link above: for some reason WordPress wouldn’t let me embed it in the usual way.)

Luke 24:13-35

The Greek letter chi looks like our ‘x’ but the ‘ch’ takes the sound as if it were Scottish – so ‘loch, not ‘lock, as in places like the silver sands of Loch Morar, where I proposed to my wife.

And the letter chi with its ‘x’ shape gives name to a literary structure. We speak of some narratives having a ‘chiastic structure.’ This means that instead of the themes simply being linear, with one theme following the next, they are more ‘x’ shaped. The first theme is repeated at the end, the second theme is repeated one from the end, and so on until you find out what’s at the centre of the story. Put another way, the story proceeds from the beginning to the middle, but then the themes come again in reverse.

The famous story of the walk to Emmaus that we have just read is ‘chiastic’ or ‘x-shaped’. Let me show you how.

A1 Journey from Jerusalem (vv 14-15)
            B1 Jesus appears, but unable to recognise him (v 16)
                        C1 Interaction (vv 17-18)
                                    D1 Summary of ‘the things’ (vv 19-21)
                                                E1 Empty tomb and vision (vv 22-23a)
                                                            F Jesus is alive (v 23b)
                                                E2 Empty tomb but no vision (v 24)
                                    D2 Interpretation of ‘the things’ (vv 25-27)
                        C2 Interaction (vv 28-30)
            B2 Able to recognise Jesus,  but he disappears (vv 31-32)
A2 Journey back to Jerusalem (vv 33-35)[1]

At the centre – like the sweet soft centre of a chocolate – is the fact that Jesus is alive.

And what does this central theme, that Jesus is alive, tell us about the surrounding layers in the story?

Firstly, it transforms the journey:

I am showing an image on the screen of two people on a journey and if you look closely you’ll see they are a man and a woman. There is an ancient tradition that the companion of Cleopas was his wife. And that was one reason why the Anglican rector friend of mine who preached at our wedding chose this passage for his sermon that day.

But whether they are husband and wife or simply two fellow disciples, it’s striking to contrast their two journeys: the one from Jerusalem, and the one back there. Either way, they are clearly two of the disciples who have dismissed the testimony of the women who went to the tomb early that morning and who came back with that fantastic story that it was empty, but they had met two angels who told them that Jesus was alive.

What does this indicate?

Dismissal of the women’s witness points to a fissure in the company of disciples, just as the departures of these two persons from Jerusalem marks the beginnings of the drift away from high hopes and the community of discipleship.[2]

In other words, they are not just walking away from Jerusalem, they are walking away from faith in Jesus and the band of disciples. The disappointment and the collapse of their hopes is leading to the disintegration of their faith. Note how they say about Jesus, ‘we had hoped’ (verse 21).

How many people find that disappointment with God leads to the crushing of their hopes and the dissolving of their faith? Sometimes, of course, their hopes were wrong and naïve, they had almost a ‘Father Christmas’ concept of God, where if one particular prayer was not answered then that was the end.

Sometimes they had not grasped that to be a Christian and walk the way of the Cross was going to mean that you embraced disappointment on the way, because not everything was ever going to go right in this life, even with belief in a loving God. They have been taught badly by the church. We have far too often sugar-coated the cost of discipleship.

And sometimes it’s more complicated than any of this. It can be a long, slow build-up of things.

Yet Cleopas and his companion at the end of the story return to Jerusalem with a very different vibe. Full of hope and excitement, and having invited the stranger into their house because it’s late and about to get dark, they have no compunction in going out in the dark to return to the disciples. At normal walking pace, we’re talking two and a half hours to get back, and this at night, and when they’ve not long that day already completed the same distance the other way. What has transformed them is that Jesus is alive.

It is still what transforms people. To know Jesus is alive means that this world doesn’t end in despair, because God is making all things new. It means that hate doesn’t win in the end, but love. It means that what we do isn’t worthless but has eternal value.

We can argue and debate with people who don’t share our faith and there’s a place for that, because our faith makes truth claims, but in the end for someone to follow Jesus they need to experience the living Jesus revealing himself to them. So with those we are praying for to find faith, let us pray that the living, risen Jesus will make himself known to them.

Secondly, the fact that Jesus is alive transforms the hospitality:

I want you to picture me as a young Local Preacher. A little taller. More hair, and none of it grey. Much skinnier. I have come to preach on this passage at Eastertide one year, and my eyes have landed on verse 30:

 When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them.

Ah, I think, Jesus does the same four things with the bread here that he does at the Last Supper: he takes it, gives thanks, breaks it, and gives it to people. Surely in this episode Luke is preparing his readers to experience the risen Jesus at Holy Communion. And that’s what I preach. And that’s what many others have preached. Perhaps you’ve heard sermons on this passage where the preacher has said this.

But it ain’t necessarily so. Only later was I to learn that those four actions – taking, giving thanks, breaking, and giving – were what devout Jews did at every meal. If Luke’s language recalls any other part of his Gospel here, it’s more likely the feeding of the five thousand in chapter 9, which also acts as a revelation of Jesus[3].

The big thing here in Jesus performing those four actions is that he was invited into Cleopas’ home as a guest, but he doesn’t behave as a guest. He behaves as the host. The bread is his, for ultimately he created it. The home is his, for ultimately he as Creator is behind it. And the disciples are most certainly his, too.

And remember how central and almost sacred to Middle Eastern culture the act of hospitality is. Even today, you will be invited into homes if you mingle with the ordinary people rather than stay on your coach tour. They bring it with them to other countries, as I found out when in the last circuit the clothes bank one of my churches ran often served Syrian refugees. One man, profoundly deaf, always wanted to invite me to his flat, and told me I could turn up any time and he and his wife would feed me.

The story tells us that we invite the risen Jesus right into the centre of our lives, our homes, but that we cannot confine him to the guest room. He will take over. He has come to be in charge of our homes and our lives. It’s like the old gag that Jesus is a capitalist – he only believes in takeover bids.

Since Jesus is alive, we can welcome him into our lives. Let us do all we can to make sure he feels at home with us.

Thirdly and finally, the fact that Jesus is alive transforms the Scriptures:

One thing that comes up time and again in the Gospels and especially Luke at this time is about how you handle the Scriptures. Sometimes Christians, and especially Protestants, are prone to lifting proof-texts out from here and there to make a case for whatever it is we want to advocate. This has been called ‘Bible bingo’. I think of the story about the man who wondered what to do next in his life, so he opened up his Bible with his eyes closed and pointed his finger at a verse. It said, ‘Judas went out and hanged himself.’ Perturbed by this thought, he repeated the exercise, only to alight on the verse, ‘Go thou and do likewise.’

Cleopas and his companion evidently had their traditional Jewish way of doing so. It wasn’t quite like that, for the rabbis had developed particular ways of interpreting the holy texts. But it’s evident that by failing to take account of Jesus and his mission they had missed God’s revelation. As Joel Green puts it:

What has happened with Jesus can be understood only in light of the Scriptures, yet the Scriptures themselves can be understood only in light of what happened with Jesus. … And before the disciples will be able to recognise the risen Lord … they must grasp especially the nexus between suffering and messiahship.[4]

And so the fact that Jesus is alive now informs how we listen for what God is saying in Holy Scripture. As well as reading individual passages in their immediate context, we read everything in the light of God’s great story that comes to a climax in Jesus.

Therefore, when we read the Bible, we ask ourselves, where does this episode fit in God’s great story of salvation that leads to the Resurrection and the New Creation? What does it mean to read this, knowing that Jesus is alive?

To give a couple of quick examples from those difficult Old Testament laws: we no longer have to worry about the ritual laws prescribed for Temple worship, because Jesus has fulfilled everything to do with the Temple in his own body. He is the true Temple. Other laws may still hold, although we shall still need to interpret and apply them carefully.

And we don’t jump into making capital punishment such a widespread sentence as the Old Testament does, because it is given at a time when God had not yet revealed the Resurrection and life after death. We are free to come up with other punishments and leave open the possibility of repentance and faith before death, even for the worst of criminals.

Jesus, of course, reinterprets marriage in the light of eternal life, as I explained in my Holy Week meditations.

There is so much more to say here, but no time to do so. It is the Scriptures that give us the framework for understanding the suffering Messiah who was raised from the dead, but equally it is the risen Lord whose resurrection points to the climax of the chronicles of God, and we interpret the Bible in that light.

Conclusion

The truth that Jesus is alive is at the centre of the Emmaus Road story. It transforms the two disciples’ journeys, their hospitality, and their reading of the Scriptures.

But isn’t it also true that the presence of the risen Lord transforms everything? Is it not the case that every day we can ask what light the presence of the risen Jesus shines on whatever we are encountering?

[1] Adapted from Joel Green, The Gospel of Luke (NICNT), p842.

[2] Op. cit., p844.

[3] Op. cit., p843.

[4] Op. cit., p844.

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Prepared For Mission, Luke 5:1-11 (Ordinary 5 Year C)

Luke 5:1-11

Before I was a minister and before I studied Theology, I worked in Social Security. It was, as I have sometimes said, one way of seeing life. I can recall a number of stories from those days which are, shall we say, a little too colourful for the delicate ears of some Christian congregations -notwithstanding other barriers such as the Official Secrets Act.

But suffice to say that in that work I encountered people with chaotic lives, in desperate circumstances, as well as the occasional chancer. I also represented colleagues to their bosses when their personal lives were affecting their work.

Just from that general outline I am sure you can guess that I had some formative experiences that were useful preparation for when I became a minister, even though I had no sense of such a call at the time.

Our story from Luke today is one where Jesus tells Simon that his experience as a business partner in a fishing co-operative will stand him in good stead for a life as a disciple and an apostle.

There is a sermon to be preached on this passage about just how much God values our everyday work, but I will save that for another time. For today, I want to look at the aspects here that prepared Simon for what was to come. Even though we are not fishermen (although I don’t know if anyone has angling as a hobby!) there are elements of Simon’s story that speak to us as well.

Firstly, obedience:

4 When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, ‘Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch.’

5 Simon answered, ‘Master, we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything. But because you say so, I will let down the nets.’

Simon, James, and John are experienced fishermen. They know what they are doing. That they are washing their nets after a night-time fishing trip tells us exactly what kind of nets they are using. They were called ‘trammel nets’. They were made of linen, were visible to fish in daylight hours and hence why they went fishing at night, and they would be cleaned the next morning[1]. All this is known from historians of the day and confirms that they were conducting their trade according to the best knowledge and practices known then.

But here comes this crazy carpenter – what does he know about fishing? – and he gives them instructions which make no sense to these experienced professionals. It’s daylight, and the fish will see the nets. No way will any fish be caught.

‘But because you say so, I will let down the nets,’ says Simon. Because this is more than a crazy carpenter. This is Jesus, the Expected One, the Hoped-For One, the Messiah himself. And so, even though their friends in other fishing co-operatives based on the lake will think they are mad, they set sail again. They head for the deep water. They let down their nets. And – oh my.

The call of the Christian disciple is to follow Jesus and do what he tells us, even when it seems scarcely credible. He sends us out into deep water, too – into situations that are deeper than we have ever encountered before, circumstances we would resist embracing because they seem too fraught with danger.

It’s something of a threat to our desire for a quiet, comfortable life, isn’t it? But why does it surprise us? Isn’t so much of what Jesus calls us to do the very opposite of conventional expectations? We are to forgive, not hate. We are to give, not take. It’s utterly consistent for Jesus to call us to do unexpected things in his service.

Perhaps what we need to do is to ask him to give us a dream for our lives that is so big and so deep that it can only be fulfilled by relying on him.

Sometimes we hear talk about having ‘smart goals’, where the letters of the word ‘smart’ stand for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and targeted. But in the light of this, I want to ask, ‘Achievable by whom? By us? Or by Jesus?’ Because the latter are the goals that fix our Christian obedience.

Secondly, fellowship:

In verse 7, the people working alongside Simon in the boat are called his ‘partners.’ It’s a word that denotes business partners, which makes sense.

But by verse 9, they are no longer ‘partners’ but ‘companions’. The Greek word has changed, and while this word could denote the members of a fishing co-operative, it ‘is capable of much wider nuances’[2] and is related to the word ‘koinonia’, which is often translated with that glorious Christian word ‘fellowship.’ In the work of catching the abundant haul of fish, partners become a fellowship.

And fellowship is central to the life of Christian discipleship. We do not follow Jesus alone, but together in a body. We cannot do it alone. We need the power of the Holy Spirit, and the encouragement of our brothers and sisters.

But this word ‘fellowship’ is open to much misunderstanding, because we have seriously devalued its meaning. To listen to the way some churches conceive of fellowship, you would think it was little more than talking together. ‘Join us after the service for fellowship over tea and coffee.’ It is so much deeper than that.

Strictly, the word means, ‘what we have in common.’ Luke shows us what that meant for the early church in the first chapters of his second volume, the book we call The Acts of the Apostles. The first believers are sharing in fellowship by the end of chapter two. We find that it means they shared their very lives together, including their possessions. They had Jesus Christ in common, and they shared all they were and all they had in common, too.

When we think of the partners becoming a fellowship in Luke 5, it is reminiscent of Paul writing to the Christians in Philippi and giving thanks for their ‘fellowship in the Gospel.’ In other words, they had shared together in the hard work of the Gospel, just as Simon, James, and John, along with their partners, had shared together in the hard work of hauling those full nets into the boats.

The work of the Gospel can be tough, but Jesus has given us each other to do that work in common, supporting and helping one another. We do not need to be alone in the work. Indeed, we should not be alone. We were not designed that way. God always intended that we support our brothers and our sisters in all the ways we share the Gospel in the world. We may be on the frontline with them. We may be supporting them with prayer and financial giving. And together, we haul in the heavy nets.

I think it would be helpful if each one of us asked, with whom am I in fellowship in the Gospel? Who do I know who can support me as I bear witness to Jesus in the world with my words, my deeds, and my character?

One strategy would be for three of you to gather together as a ‘prayer triplet’, regularly praying each other’s spheres of influence. Such a group would meet regularly, review how everybody is getting on, hold one another to account, and be a source of encouragement. This is real fellowship: it’s so much more than chatting over tea and coffee!

Thirdly, grace:

Simon witnesses the amazing catch of fish and is overcome with the sense that this must be a demonstration of God’s holy power. There seems no other explanation for him being astonished to the point of him saying to Jesus, ‘Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!’ (verse 8) In the presence of such holiness, he knows himself unworthy.

But of course, Jesus will not have that. For as well as holiness, he has grace. Don’t go away, Simon, come closer. I have a commission for you: ‘Don’t be afraid; from now on you will fish for people.’ (verse 10)

And that gracious invitation and call leads Simon, James, and John to leave behind their business (just as it is thriving!) and everything else to follow Jesus (verse 11).

Which of us has not echoed the words of Simon, ‘Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinner’? It may be that we witnessed the awesomeness of God’s power in some way. It may be that we are only too aware of our sins and failures: can he really forgive us again? And if he does, surely there is no way he can use me? Or it may just be a sense of our utter inadequacy in the face of Jesus’ blazing purity and beauty of character. We are unworthy. We are not heroes of the faith. What would God want with us?

And yet, and yet. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ says Jesus, ‘I still have work for you to do.’

There is a legend told of Jesus returning to heaven at the Ascension and being welcomed by the angels, who congratulate him on all he has achieved.

Then one angel says, ‘But Lord, what is the next stage of your great plan of salvation?’

Jesus replies, ‘I have left it in the hands of a small group of my followers.’

‘But Master,’ counters the angel, ‘what will you do if they mess things up? What will your plan be then?’

‘I have no other plan,’ says Jesus.

And that’s the plan. His plan is us – sinners that we are.

So if spiritually we are down in the gutter right now, it’s time to hear the good news that Jesus is still calling us. He still has work for us to do in building for his kingdom. He still has people for us to reach with his love. We may be the ideal people to speak and show his love to certain folk.

Let us allow Jesus to wipe us clean with his grace so that we can embrace again his call on our lives. And let’s set out in fresh obedience to him that we may see him do new wonders in our day. And let us do it not as lone rangers but in fellowship with others.

[1] Joel B Green, The Gospel of Luke (NICNT), p232.

[2] Op. cit., p234 n27.

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The Tyson Fury Of Prayer? Luke 18:1-8 (Ordinary 29 Year C)

Luke 18:1-8

Back in the 1970s on Radio 1 the now-disgraced DJ Dave Lee Travis used to invite frustrated wives to send in stories of DIY jobs that their husbands had failed to do or failed to complete. Should their story be read on air, Travis sent them a circular object known as a ‘Round Tuit’, for when their husbands got ‘around to it’.

Perhaps stories like that encapsulate the unhelpful stereotype of nagging women. And if you read today’s Scripture superficially you may think it is about a nagging woman, the widow who wears down the unjust judge.

But that is to ignore the very first sentence of the reading:

Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. (Verse 1)

The theme is not ‘nagging’ but ‘Don’t give up.’ Specifically, don’t give up praying.

And if we pay attention not simply to that first sentence generally, but to the first word, we realise we need to take into account the context. The first word is ‘Then.’ Luke is telling us this is related to what has just gone before.

Now we didn’t read that, but let me point you to the way near the end of the previous chapter that Jesus is in discussion with people who are longing for his Second Coming, but who will not live to see it:

Then he said to his disciples, ‘The time is coming when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, but you will not see it.’ (Luke 17:22)

As the woman in the parable longed for justice, so there are many who long for the justice of God. But we shall only see it fully when Christ appears again in glory.

So why in the parable is the widow in need? The scholar Ian Paul lists three signs of her need:

First, she has to represent herself; courts are normally the province of men, and it appears that she has no male relative who will represent her. Second, she has to return continually, which means that she does not have the financial resources to offer a bribe and have her case settled quickly (not an unusual issue in many courts around the world today). Thirdly, she appears to have been denied justice, and the implication is that she has perhaps been deprived of her rights in inheritance. It might be that she has been deprived of her living from her late husband’s estate; later rabbinic law suggests that widows did not inherit directly, but makes provision for her living from the estate for that reason.

That’s quite a list. No professional representation. A corrupt legal system. And no financial support. How extraordinary that she is not cowed by her circumstances but is feisty enough to demand justice. She takes responsibility and takes the initiative in her relentless quest for justice.[1]

As such, she is an example for us. We may not face the same set of personal challenges as her, but there are so many terrible things in our world that we long to see changed, and so caring about justice can be disheartening. But just when we feel tempted to draw the curtains, curl up in a ball, eat comfort food, and ignore the wicked world outside our door, the widow in the parable says, ‘No!’

What we have here is a character in the story whose own circumstances and actions remind us to do what Jesus said on the tin at the beginning of the parable: ‘always pray and not give up.’

Look how she speaks up boldly in the face of corruption. She is so tenacious! The unjust judge gives up because he fears that she will come and attack him (verse 5)! Yes, he, the strong male judge, fears the poor, weak widow.

In fact, the Greek word for ‘attack’ here is one taken from the realm of boxing. It means ‘to beat’. Paraphrasing it, the judge fears the widow giving him a black eye.[2]

The world sees a poor, defenceless widow. The judge sees Tyson Fury!

Perhaps we too feel weak and feeble in the face of the wickedness and suffering in our world. Certainly, our opponents love to construe us this way. But a church that is bold to keep praying even in the face of unequal relationships and insurmountable odds is not a pushover.

One of my favourite images of this reality is C S Lewis’ description of it in The Screwtape Letters. You will remember that these are fictional letters written from a senior devil, Screwtape, to a junior one, his nephew Wormwood. In one of the letters, Screwtape writes this:

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided.[3]

In our ministry of intercession we may present as a poor widow but we are in fact terrible as an army with banners. We are the Tyson Fury of all things spiritual. That’s why we ‘should always pray and not give up.’

Nevertheless, bold as we may be with our prayers God is still playing the long game and we do not always see our prayers answered. I pray regularly that God will bring to naught various wicked regimes around the world that inflict persecution on their populations. But it hasn’t happened yet. I long for regimes to fall in China, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Mexico, Vietnam, and other nations. I watch and I pray, longing for the day.

So how in the meantime do we cope with unanswered prayer? If God is so unlike the unjust judge and promises a quick administration of justice, why have these governments not fallen yet?

I have found a response by Pete Greig, the founder of the 24/7 Prayer movement stimulating in considering this. In the midst of seeing many wonderful answers to prayer in the movement in its early days, Greig was facing caring for his wife who developed epileptic seizures. His prayers for her health went unanswered. Much of his wrestling with that painful dilemma can be found in his remarkable book God On Mute, a book I highly commend.

But he gives a shorter account in a YouTube video where he describes three reasons why we don’t always see the answers to prayer that we desire.

One reason Greig calls ‘God’s World’, in other words the laws of nature. He talks about how because God has set up a creation that works consistently according to reliable laws then miracles must by definition be rare occurrences, as C S Lewis (that man again) said. You would no longer be able to rely on those laws in good ways if every time something painful were about to happen they were suspended. Suppose, says Lewis, every time a Christian dropped a hammer that God answered the prayer for the hammer not to hit their toe. We would be walking around in a world where we could no longer rely on gravity. We would be making our way every day through lots of hammers floating in the air!

One preacher I heard described scientific laws as being descriptions of God’s habits. Miracles happen when God occasionally changes his habits. But these occasions really are occasional. Otherwise, the many good things that follow from having predicable laws of nature would fall apart.

A second reason Pete Greig gives for prayer being unanswered is ‘God’s Will.’ There are many ways in which we do know God’s will, particularly in terms of the ethical ways in which we are to live. But there are other ways where we shall not always know God’s will, and where his ways are not our ways. His ways are higher than ours. No mere human being knows the entire will of God.

Perhaps you thought it was God’s will that you married a particular person but it proved to be unrequited love. How many of us look back on things like those in our lives and are glad that life did not pan out the way we wanted? God did something better for us, but we could not have seen it, and so our initial prayers went unanswered. It may have been painful at the time, and it may be something we can only appreciate with hindsight, but sometimes God overrules or ignores our prayer requests because he has a better outcome in mind than we can anticipate.

The third reason Greig describes for not seeing answered prayer is what he calls ‘God’s War.’ There is opposition to God’s ways. There is a spiritual conflict. I am not blaming everything on demons, but I am saying that human beings actively choose to do things that are opposed to the will of God, from small acts of selfishness to large-scale acts of violence. Jesus may be reigning at the right hand of the Father, but there are still forces arrayed against his kingdom, just as we have King Charles III on the throne but there are still criminals at work in our society.

What should we do in such circumstances? Why, we should pray all the more boldly for God to overcome his enemies. It may take a long time, but it is worth the investment in prayer.

Indeed, in the face of all that we encounter in creation that is not according to God’s purposes of love, let us be bold in prayer. The weak widow is but a disguise for the heavyweight boxer. Spiritually speaking, we can punch above the widow’s weight.

And if we do, then the Son of Man will find faith on the earth (verse 8).

[1] See Joel Green, The Gospel of Luke, p640.

[2] https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/does-god-respond-to-nagging-in-luke-18/

[3] Cited at https://www.thespiritlife.net/about/81-warfare/warfare-publications/1877-chapter-2-the-screwtape-letters-cs-lewis

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The Fox and the Hen, Luke 13:31-35 (Second Sunday in Lent, Year C)

Luke 13:31-35

It’s very common in our road to see foxes. Mainly we see them of an evening, but it’s not unusual to see them brazenly strutting around in the daytime.

They are of course on the lookout for food, and this means we have to take extra precautions with putting out our food waste bins on ‘bin night’. It isn’t enough to lock the bin by pulling the handle forwards, because the foxes use their noses to flip the handle back and they can then open the bins, find food, and leave a mess. I know: I’ve twice had to clear up afterwards.

Instead, not only do we pull the handle forwards, we put the food bin on top of the regular black waste bin or blue recycling bin. The refuse collectors don’t like us doing that, because they have to move the food bin to empty the main bin, but it’s the only way to stop the foxes.

Thankfully, we aren’t a household that keeps chickens, or we would have much bigger problems to solve with the foxes.

Which brings us neatly to today’s passage, where Jesus describes Herod Antipas as a fox and compares himself to a hen. Is that relevant today when we see the actions of a vicious fox, Vladimir Putin, on the world stage? Perhaps. Let’s think about Herod the fox and Jesus the hen. And let’s ask what these images mean for our life and faith today.

Herod the fox

I think we need to remember the context. Although last week for the first Sunday in Lent preachers will have jumped back to Luke 4 and the temptations in the wilderness before Jesus’ public ministry began, we have to remember that before that we were part-way through that ministry in our readings. We had reached the Transfiguration, where Jesus talked with Moses and Elijah about his departure which he was going to accomplish at Jerusalem – that is, his death and resurrection.

By now, Jesus has told his disciples that he is going to suffer and die at the hands of the establishment in Jerusalem, he has tapped a Jerusalem postcode into his sat-nav, and that’s where he’s heading. He’s on his way to betrayal, torture, Calvary, and a temporary stay in a tomb.

The Pharisees who come and speak to him are concerned for him. (Yes, there are well-intentioned Pharisees in the Bible.) But their reading of the politics is that Jesus won’t even make it to Jerusalem. Herod will get him before then.

‘Leave this place and go somewhere else. Herod wants to kill you.’ (Verse 31b)

Jesus, make your escape, they say. They know what Herod is like.

So how does he respond?

32 He replied, ‘Go and tell that fox, “I will keep on driving out demons and healing people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach my goal.” 33 In any case, I must press on today and tomorrow and the next day – for surely no prophet can die outside Jerusalem!

In calling Herod a fox he is not referring to the man’s cunning or intelligence but to his ‘malicious destructiveness’[1]. To Jesus, Herod is

a varmint in the Lord’s field, a murderer of God’s agents, a would-be disrupter of the divine economy[2]

Herod the fox murders God’s people, says Jesus. After all, he had cowardly agreed to the murder of Jesus’ cousin John the Baptist. He had a track record.

So shouldn’t Jesus get out of that territory? Well, he does move on, but not because he’s scared of Herod. He does so because he knows his destiny is to complete his work not on Herod’s turf but in Jerusalem. No prophet can die outside Jerusalem.

Jesus isn’t scared by Herod, but that doesn’t mean he won’t suffer. In the face of fear, Jesus sticks resolutely to his God-given task. He doesn’t compromise, he doesn’t back down, he doesn’t run away, he says, this is my purpose and no Herod in this world is going to knock me off course. And by staying on course he brings about the salvation of the world.

What are the things that might scare us off course as Christians? Is it mockery by our friends? Is it changes in the law of the land? Is it the church adopting a policy on something that deeply upsets our conscience?

Whatever it is, it’s time to rebuke the fox and keep going. It may be costly to do so, but God has called us to be disciples of Jesus and imitate his Son. But the example of his Son says that when we stay the course, however difficult it may be at times, the results are measured in blessings.

Jesus the hen

So who will rise to this task? Jesus issues a challenge to Jerusalem ahead of his arrival there, but how hopeful is he of a positive response?

34 ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. 35 Look, your house is left to you desolate. I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”’

It doesn’t sound very promising, does it? The very people who longed for the Messiah have either not recognised him or they have rejected him, and so they are not gathered under his protective care. How dreadful their future will be.

It is no good soft-soaping this. It is no good pretending that everyone will make it into the kingdom of God. God loves all people but not everybody responds to that love, and thus they find themselves outside, in a desolate house to use Jesus’ image here, instead of under the caring love of God in Christ.

You see, the question isn’t what religion we are. It isn’t what nationality we are. It’s about whether we say yes to walking with Jesus.

So is there no hope for the Jews? Is this one of those passages that anti-Semitic racists can use against the Jews? I think of the Jewish lady I worked with in an office, who told me one day how when she was a child other children called her a ‘Christ killer.’ What a miracle that years later my friend Doreen found God’s love in Christ for herself.

Yet there is a hint in what Jesus says that God has not finished with them. If there were no hope, Jesus could just have ended with the words, ‘Look, your house is left to you desolate.’ But he doesn’t quite. His final words here are,

I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

There is always a hope of acknowledging Jesus. People who have once said ‘no’ to him can still be drawn back to him at a later date by the Holy Spirit and bow the knee to their Lord, saying ‘yes’ to him.

Could that be one of us? Have we relied on our religious upbringing or our regular attendance at church without ever having said ‘yes’ to Jesus? Have we never known the security of his saving love?

Or is it that there is someone dear to us who up until now has either consciously rejected Jesus or alternatively simply been completely apathetic about him? Who are those people we long to discover the love of God in Christ? A family member? A dear friend? Someone we’ve been praying for over a long period of time but where we have been tempted to give up? Let’s renew our prayers for them. It is still possible they will see the beauty and glory of Jesus and say ‘yes’ to him.

Conclusion

We’re only in this position of being able to say ‘yes’ to Jesus or pray that others do because Jesus didn’t allow Herod to knock him off course. He went through with his calling, costly as it was for him to do so.

So let’s make sure we don’t waste the opportunity – either by making our own response to Jesus or by continuing in prayer for others to do so.

[1] Ian Paul, Who is included in and excluded from the kingdom in Luke 13?

[2] Darr, Character Building, cited by Joel Green in Luke NICNT p536 and quoted by Paul, op. cit.

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The Resurrection of Jesus and the Healing of Creation: Worship for the Third Sunday of Easter 2021

This week I explore Luke’s account of the risen Jesus appearing to most of the disciples on the evening of Easter Day and ask what it conveys to us.

Luke 24:36-48

If you ask several witnesses to give their accounts of the same incident, their stories will have common themes, but the details will differ. Does this matter? Does it show them to be lying?

Not necessarily at all. The different accounts will be because different elements were important to each of them, because they remembered different parts, their concerns and interpretations varied, and so on. Some may summarise part of the event, and others may spell out things in word-for-word detail.

Those who criticise the accounts of the Resurrection in the four Gospels for being so different need to remember basic elements of human nature like this. And our story this week seems to be Luke’s account of at least the first of the two resurrection appearances behind locked doors that we considered in John 20:19-31 last week.

So in Luke’s account, what does Jesus want his disciples to learn about the Resurrection?

Firstly, Jesus wants his disciples to understand that the physical nature of the Resurrection.

Look at the two proofs he gives them. Firstly, Jesus invites the disciples to touch his hands and feet to prove that he has flesh and bones, unlike a ghost (verse 38), which is what in their fear they thought they had seen (verse 37).

In other words, Jesus isn’t an ethereal being. He isn’t a spirit who has found no place to rest in death. He is not ‘a cadaver brought back to life’[i], nor is he a zombie: this is not an episode of ‘The Walking Dead’. This is no horror movie. There is no need to fear. Jesus has been resurrected to material, physical life. Sure, it is different in some ways. But it is still physical.

This is underlined by the second proof Jesus gives, when the disciples are still too emotional to believe. He asks for food and promptly devours some fish (verses 41-43). As the only fish and seafood eater in his family, I approve enthusiastically!

When Jesus eats the fish, he isn’t just showing he has a physical body, he is also emphasising ‘an “immortal soul” free from bodily existence’[ii]. That’s important for us, because too often we default to that view of life after death. We say things like ‘the body isn’t important, it’s just a shell for the real person’, but this is what the Greek philosophers believed, not what the New Testament apostles believed. And it’s a disastrous belief to follow through on.

Why? Because if the body doesn’t matter, then it certainly doesn’t matter if we abuse it. Nor does it matter if we abuse someone else’s body, despite the physical and emotional pain we cause.

And if the body doesn’t matter it’s probably a sign that physical and material things generally don’t matter. Therefore we just believe in a spiritual heaven. We don’t need to worry about damage to the world, because, like the dreadful old hymn said,

This world is not my home,
I’m just passing through.

So we need to turn this round and be positive. Jesus’ physical resurrection is a sign that God cares about the physical and material. Remember that in the creation story of Genesis 1, he looked at each stage of creation and either pronounced it ‘good’ or ‘very good’. God’s attitude to his material creation hasn’t changed. The Resurrection tells us that he intends to redeem it. Remember how Revelation 21 speaks of a new heaven and a new earth, and of God making all things new. Well, the Resurrection is the beginning of that process.

The Resurrection is therefore why we care about healing. The Resurrection is why we care about justice. The Resurrection is why we care about climate change and creation care. Take away the Resurrection and none of those things matters. But they do matter, because God is about making all things new, including the material world, and the physical Resurrection is his supreme sign to the world that these matter.

So think of Jesus eating the fish next time you eat fish and chips. Our Catholic friends eat fish on a Friday to avoid eating meat on Good Friday, when we commemorate the death of Christ. But I suggest to you it’s every bit as valid to eat your fish and chips on a Sunday, when we celebrate the Resurrection, because it reminds us of Jesus’ physical resurrection and all that rides on it.

And therefore, don’t just think about the physical nature of the Resurrection: go into the world to bring healing to people, to relationships, and to the creation itself. Don’t let the truth of Jesus’ physical resurrection stay residing in your brain: let that truth travel to your hands and feet and make a resurrection difference in the world.

Secondly, Jesus wants his disciples to understand the place of the Resurrection in the purposes of God.

Proof and evidence are important, but they only take us so far. They are the preparing of the ground for commitment. We can provide solid evidence for the Christian faith, but on its own it doesn’t bring anybody to Christ. It prepares someone’s heart and mind for the challenge of commitment. That is what has happened so far in this story, and it’s often what happens in discussions with people today.

To make the jump from understanding to commitment, we need Jesus to send the Holy Spirit to interpret the purposes of God to us. We need that spiritual element.

And that’s what Jesus does when he ‘open[s] their minds so they could understand the Scriptures’ (verse 45). It takes a divine unveiling to appreciate the purposes of God and then be ready to throw our lot in with Jesus.

So now that’s what Jesus does. He reveals the place of the Resurrection in the divine purposes. He says it was always God’s plan that the Messiah would suffer, die, and be raised, and that this would lead to the preaching of repentance throughout the world (verses 46-47).

But that’s rather puzzling. Because taken on their own the Scriptures in question (which are basically the Old Testament as we know it) don’t make such claims in any particularly obvious way. You can only start to see it in the light of the Resurrection. Then you begin to understand what God was up to in the prophecies of the Servant in Isaiah, or the Son of Man coming to the Ancient of Days in Daniel, or the Lord inviting another Lord to sit at his right hand in the Psalms. You wouldn’t have guessed without the Resurrection.

But now the penny drops and Jesus tells his disciples, ‘You are witnesses of these things’ (verse 48). This comes back to that favourite Tom Wright quote of mine, ‘Jesus is alive and we’ve got a job to do.’

Why? The Resurrection shows that God has vindicated Jesus. Those who called for his crucifixion are exposed as in the wrong, and we realise we are all in the wrong before him. We all need to hear the call to repentance, because in the Resurrection God says that Jesus is in the right and we are in the wrong.

So the Resurrection is here to bring two changes in our lives. One is repentance, as we renounce our selfish ways of living to follow Jesus. The second is we are moved from inward-looking to outward-looking, because this concurs with the application of the physical nature of the Resurrection. But not only are we sent into the world with the message of the healing of all creation, we now realise that healing message is also about healing the rift between people and God.

Now I’m not suggesting this means that we use every minute of the day to bludgeon people with the Gospel: many of us have been subjected to that and know how bad it feels. But what it does mean is that we have this outward-looking focus where as disciples of the risen Lord our passion is for the healing of creation, the healing of people, the healing of relationships, and the healing of the breach between people and God. We shall show that in our actions and our priorities, and we shall speak when the time is right and when opportunities come.

Remember: God is making all things new, and he began that task when he raised Jesus from death.

[i] Joel Green, The Gospel of Luke, p854.

[ii] Ibid.

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