Tag: Pharisees

Keeping The Wrong Company, Luke 15:1-10 (Ordinary 24 Year C)

Luke 15:1-10

Back in prehistoric times when I was training for the ministry, one of our tutors told us that we should be at our desks every morning at 9 am with our shoes on. I’m sure I wore out some carpet by wearing shoes rather than slippers in my first manse.

I used to follow that pattern at first. But in one appointment, I was rarely (if ever) at my desk at 9 am. For at this point, we had young children going first through pre-school and then on to primary school. These were at the top of our road, and Debbie and I made a point of building relationships with the other parents.

We didn’t always make it back by the sacred hour of 9 am, and sometimes there would be phone messages from church members who had an expectation of me being there for them at that time.

Christ and a Pharisee. Wikimedia Commons CC 1.0

I think of those church members when I read about the Pharisees and teachers of the law in today’s reading. They thought I was mixing with the wrong people, because to them I was their private chaplain, just as the religious leaders thought Jesus was mixing with the wrong sorts, and that this reflected badly on his character. Their attitude was rather like the saying that you know a person by the company they keep.

Yet it was Jesus’ vocation to be with ‘tax collectors and sinners’. He uses the two parables we heard (plus what follows – the Parable of the Prodigal Son) to lay out why this was so important.

And if it were important for Jesus, it is also important for us. If we are to renew our commitment to following him, then we need to understand why he did this, and then get on with doing it ourselves.

Now the parables have a lot in common. They both (all) speak about finding what is lost and rejoicing. Bringing, or bringing back those who are lost from the love of Jesus into that love and into his family is a high priority for Jesus.

It is not always a high priority for us. We like to run our Sunday services, have a few nice midweek activities, make sure there’s enough money in the kitty to keep the building in good order, and that’s quite enough.

But not for Jesus. Each of these parables has something important to tell us about why he spends so much time outside the synagogue with ordinary (and even disreputable) people for the sake of God’s kingdom. So let’s look at what we pick up from the Parable of the Lost Sheep and the Parable of the Lost Coin.

Firstly, the lost sheep

As you know, we were proud as anything a couple of months ago when our son graduated with a Maths degree from Cambridge. And when people asked us where he got his love of Maths from, I said that it had always been my subject at school. It was later that I developed my interest in Theology.

I have always loved numbers, even if I have not concentrated on Maths for decades now. And there is something about numbers in these parables. A hundred sheep, ten coins, and two sons. In relation to the lost sheep parable, I was reading the New Testament scholar Ian Paul this week, and he cited another scholar, Mikeal Parsons, from whom he learned this:

Counting on one’s fingers (flexio digitorum) was very commonplace in the Roman world, and was in fact seen as an indispensable skill for the educated (See Quintilian Inst 1.10.35). Up to 99, you would count on the left hand, but for three-digit numbers from 100, you would count on the right hand. In an age that preferred the right to the left, Luke’s Jesus is telling us that the whole flock is out of kilter as long as the one is missing—and the whole flock is ‘put right’ when the one returns. No wonder there is so much rejoicing!

The flock is not complete and whole while the lost sheep is missing. And we, the church, are also not whole and complete while there are lost people still to be brought into the orbit of God’s love in Christ, or former sheep to be coaxed back.

Lost Lamb by Roberto and Bianca on Flickr. CC 2.0

To put it another way, the Body of Christ is missing a limb while a lost person is still lost. We cannot stay as our own private association, just enjoying one another’s company or even saying dreadful things like, ‘As long as this church sees me out I’m happy.’ That is to take the opposite attitude to Jesus. The church was not founded by Jesus to be a religious club. It was founded to be his junior partner, working for the kingdom of God. It has an outward focus.

A few years ago, I saw a job advertised for a chaplain at an Army rehabilitation centre for soldiers who had lost limbs in military service. An admirable organisation, I am sure, helping soldiers to adapt and to get on with the fitting of prosthetic limbs.

I fear, however, that the church has spent too much time simply adjusting to living without certain limbs and to be content with the absence of many people. Certainly, much of the institutional leadership has set an agenda which is little more than the management of decline.

You may have come into the church because someone invited you to try it. I can think of someone I know who now attends church because she was invited by her elderly neighbour to try it when she was heartbroken over a relationship breakdown. The elderly neighbour said, I think Jesus might be able to help you in your sorrow.

All this requires us to have friends and relationships outside the church. And it means loving those people. It means being ready for the appropriate time to say something gentle and clear about our faith to them.

I am not asking anyone to go door-knocking. But I am asking that we look for those moments when we need to take a little bit of courage and speak about our faith to people outside the church. Jesus is missing them, and the church will be more complete when they find faith.

Secondly, the lost coin

Ever since the Covid pandemic accelerated the move in our society towards cashless ways of making payments in shops, our family has been divided in our attitudes. One of us occasionally pays by a contactless method but really regards cash as king. Another usually pays by contactless on their phone but keeps a small amount of cash. Another pays by contactless on their phone, and a fourth pays by contactless on their watch. I’ll leave you to guess who’s who!

You might think that in Jesus’ time cash was king when you hear the Parable of the Lost Coin, but actually coins were less common in their use. Kenneth Bailey, a New Testament scholar who spent most of his life in the Middle East, said this:

The peasant village is, to a large extent, self-supporting, making its own cloth and growing its own food. Cash is a rare commodity. Hence the lost coin is of far greater value in a peasant home than the day’s labour it represents monetarily.[i]

Ian Paul suggests that the woman’s ten coins in the parable are either family savings or possibly the dowry her husband gave her on marriage. Dowry coins were often worn by the wife either around the neck or on the forehead.

When you understand this, you realise that the loss of this coin is a catastrophe. She hasn’t mislaid a 5 pence piece. Something profoundly valuable has gone.

The Lost Coin by On Borrowed Time on Flickr. CC 2.0

What would it be like for me? It would be like me losing my wedding ring. It is not the most expensive item I own, but I do regard it as my most valuable possession, for what it represents. Earlier this week, when our elderly and grumpy cat bit my hand and I had to have a tetanus shot and strong antibiotics, I was told at the Urgent Treatment Centre that I had to remove my wedding ring in case my hand swelled up. I was careful to put the ring somewhere safe.

Those who are lost from the church and faith in Jesus are therefore to be seen as immensely valuable to Jesus. It doesn’t matter whether they are former Christians or never-been Christians, Jesus values them hugely. Sometimes we are very dismissive of judgmental of people outside the church, and of course some of them can be hostile to us, but the Jesus who tells us to love our enemies puts a high value on them. They are precious to him.

Like us, they are made in God’s image. Like us, they are loved so much by God that Jesus died for their sins. They are treasured by God.

Before he wrote worship songs, Graham Kendrick was a Christian folk singer. One of his most popular songs from that period of his life was called, ‘How Much Do You Think You Are Worth?’

The first verse says this:

 Is a rich man worth more than a poor man?
A stranger worth less than a friend?
Is a baby worth more than an old man?
Your beginning worth more than your end?

It goes on to consider various ways in which we might or might not value human life highly. Then it comes to a climax with these words:

If you heard that your life had been valued
That a price had been paid on the nail
Would you ask what was traded,
How much and who paid it
Who was He and what was His name?

If you heard that His name was called Jesus
Would you say that the price was too dear?
Held to the cross not by nails but by love
It was you broke His heart, not the spear!
Would you say you are worth what it cost Him?
You say ‘no’, but the price stays the same.
If it don’t make you cry, laugh it off, pass Him by,
But just remember the day when you throw it away
That He paid what He thought you were worth.

Every single person outside the church is valuable to God. The neighbour who annoys you. The child who keeps kicking his football at your fence. The greedy businessman. The politician whose policies you hate. The sex worker. The drug dealer. All these, as well as the ones we find it easy to like! The Cross tells us how much God values them.

And – while they are missing from God’s family, not only are they incomplete, so is the church.

It’s time to expand our networks, increase our love, and let faith prompt our courage.

[i] Kenneth Bailey, Poet & Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes: A Literary Cultural Approach to the Parables in Luke, 1983, p 157

0

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.

0

Holy Week Meditations: Jesus Under Question. Render Unto Caesar? (2/3)

Luke 20:20-26

It’s hard if you are of a certain age reading this story not to remember the time when Margaret Thatcher patronisingly said that Jesus ‘got it about right’ with his teaching to render unto Caesar. In one Christian magazine at the time, a writer compared her attitude to that of Field Marshal Montgomery, who one day was appointed to read the Old Testament lesson at Matins in a parish church. Montgomery began, ‘And the Lord said unto Moses – and in my opinion quite rightly …’

What a dangerous thing it is to put ourselves in judgment over Scripture. And it is not even more dangerous that the temple authorities in our story put themselves in authority over the One to whom the Scriptures witness, Jesus Christ himself?

What is at stake?

We left those leaders down on the canvas yesterday after Jesus outwitted them on the question of authority. But they have not been knocked out. They are going to get up and continue the fight. Indeed they must, if they are to preserve their position, their power, and the institution that gives all that to them. Like Arnie, they’ll be back.

And they are back here, albeit at arms’ length. They do not show their own faces immediately but instead send spies. That in itself is sinister enough. They are practising surveillance of their enemy. Think today of governments that plant spies in churches – China, for example. 

Naturally, Jesus is not fooled by this tactic of confronting him from the shadows. He knows who his questioners represent. He knows what Luke tells us in verse 20, that their motive was to have evidence that would enable them to hand him over to Pontius Pilate as a seditionary. 

In fact, the trap the spies lay is threefold. One element is indeed that if Jesus were to say, do not pay taxes to Caesar then that is an easy win for handing him over to Pilate. Look, they will say, here is someone who is undermining the Pax Romana. He is treacherous. Oh, and by the way, aren’t we good citizens for snitching on him? 

And that last element about their own reputation with Pilate was significant. Because Pilate was in a politically weak situation with them, even though he was the Roman governor. 

Why? Because earlier he had authorised some actions that were so offensive to the Jews when he allowed Roman symbols to be set up in the temple that a delegation of Jewish leaders had gone to Rome to complain about him. He had received a telling-off for not respecting the local religious customs and was now on thin ice. One more wrong step and he would be gone. The religious hierarchy here hope to further strengthen their position with him. As it is, they will certainly play on Pilate’s politically weak position later in Holy Week. 

This, then, is the first trap. Jesus may win popular acclaim if he tells people not to pay taxes to Rome – think how the tax collectors were hated. But if he does so, he effectively signs his own death warrant. And the temple authorities are in a strong and increasingly stronger position with Pilate, which suits them nicely. 

The second trap is if Jesus takes the opposite position and simply says, of course you should pay taxes to the ruling authorities. This is what the good believer does. There is a good case in both Old and New Testaments for Christians being loyal citizens – at least far as their consciences will allow – when living under the rule of nations that do not sympathise with their faith. The most striking example of this is the Jewish exile. Jeremiah tells the exiles in chapter 29 of his prophecy to seek the welfare of the city to which they have been sent. Daniel and his friends serve Babylon as far as they can and only stop at the point where to continue obeying would mean disobedience to God. Later, after Babylon has fallen, Nehemiah serves as cupbearer in the court of King Artaxerxes. 

But for all this, if Jesus does endorse paying taxes to Caesar, this will be seen by the ordinary people as caving in to the hated occupying Romans. These are the unclean people who must leave or be driven out of the Promised Land. The land must be cleansed of them. The Torah must be the law of the land and Israel must obey it. Then the Messiah will come. Groups like the Pharisees taught something like this. The Zealots took it to extremes with their violent and military opposition to Rome. 

Not only that, there was what you might call a social justice element to the opposition to rendering to Caesar. Although the Roman tribute only amounted to an annual payment of a denarius, a day’s wages, that would still have been significant for the many peasants who lived on the borderline of economic subsistence. They needed every penny, and even then survival was still precarious. They could do without another tax. 

These are the two traps that are most obvious in the text, and the two we hear about the most. But there is a third trap. I opened the first meditation by talking about the significance of the theme of the temple, and this is where it makes an appearance in this episode. Guess who was responsible for collecting that annual payment of one denarius to Rome? Why yes, it was the Jerusalem Sanhedrin. Some would say they compromised their loyalty to the Jewish faith by doing so, but in their eyes they were making a small concession in order to guarantee the continuation of the temple cult and the identity of the temple. To them, the temple mattered more than anything else. If Jesus opposed the payment of taxes to Rome, he would be undermining the Jerusalem temple itself, and that most certainly was not to be tolerated. 

How does Jesus respond?

Yesterday, we noticed how Jesus responded to a question with a question of his own. He does the same again today. He will not be boxed in by his opponents. He takes the initiative. He is after all Lord, even if they don’t acknowledge it, and he reserves his right to interrogate.

Not only that, but we shall also see that the outcome of his response is not a straight answer to the dilemma posed by the spies. If anyone is looking here for a simple answer about whether we should pay our taxes, Jesus’ answer will disappoint us, because he refuses to ask that. We are going to see that what Jesus does exposes the sin of the religious leadership. No wonder they are silenced afterwards. 

So here is how Jesus responds with a question:

23 He saw through their duplicity and said to them, 24 ‘Show me a denarius. Whose image and inscription are on it?’

‘Caesar’s,’ they replied.

25 He said to them, ‘Then give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.’

Well, lo and behold the spies do indeed have a denarius, just as Jesus asks. What a surprise! After all, as I mentioned, the Jerusalem Sanhedrin administered the Roman tribute tax for the occupying army. They are caught red-handed. 

And given that, there are two ways in which what Jesus says condemns the temple authorities. First is his language about ‘image.’ What are they going to think of in biblical terms when the word ‘image’ comes up? They are going to remember that all human beings were created in the image of God, and that the commandments forbade any graven images of the one true God. Yet here in the denarius is a coin that bears the inscription, ‘Tiberius Caesar, son of the divine Augustus.’ By colluding with the Roman authorities to collect a coin with that text, the temple leadership, the people who should have been defending and propagating the faith of Israel, are in fact colluding with false gods. They are promoting idolatry. They have no moral or religious authority, because it is undermined by their actions, which utterly contradict the basic tenets of the faith they are supposed to promote. 

The second is when he says, ‘Give back to Caesar what is Caesar, and to God what is God’s.’ Traditionally, we’re used to hearing, ‘Render unto Caesar’, but the emphasis is not simply on ‘Give,’ but on ‘Give back.’ In other words, Jesus is not saying, you have some civic duties and some religious duties. He is not answering a general question about taxation. Margaret Thatcher and others misunderstood him. No: he is telling the Sanhedrin to get out of administering the temple tax. They are more concerned with winning favour with the Roman powers-that-be than they are with winning favour with God. They have compromised their faith for the sake of political gain. 

Don’t get me wrong: Jesus is not saying that true disciples should not be involved in politics, but he is saying that followers of the One True God should not sell their souls to politics. They should not place it above their devotion to God. They should not use politics as a means to an end of personal gain. And if that sounds uncomfortably like what we have seen in the USA with Donald Trump’s MAGA Christian supporters, well, it is. 

Politics is a worthy if difficult place for a Christian to serve God in the world. Christians should take on such a call on the grounds of the old saying that if Jesus is not Lord of all then he is not Lord at all. He is Lord over politics. But going into that field must not be for personal gain. It must be to serve others, regardless of whether any benefit comes our way. 

Besides, when people play with politics for their own ends, what kind of people do well out of it? Is it the poor and the powerless? No. It’s the wealthy. It’s people who already have power. That should concern Christians. Again, look at America, and perhaps this time look at Elon Musk. 

No, Sanhedrin, says Jesus, give back to Caesar. Your job as leaders of God’s people – if that is what you truly are – is to speak truth to power, not to prefer power to truth. It’s a searing critique, and one the church needs to hear in every generation. 

Ultimately, this is not that different from when Jesus said, you cannot serve both God and Mammon. You have to make a choice, you ‘gotta serve somebody’, as Bob Dylan sang, but it can only be one and not both. The temple authorities have chosen to side with the Empire rather than the kingdom of God. 

The spies are silenced. They have been caught out. Moreover, they have been shamed by this public exposure of their utter disloyalty to Israel’s God. 

But while their shame may indicate that their sin has been laid bare, it is no more than remorse at best. It is not repentance. They do not change. They stay on their evil course, as the rest of Holy Week will demonstrate.

0

Holy Week Meditations: Jesus Under Question. By What Authority? (1/3)

Introduction

We are going to look at three stories that fall early in the Holy Week narrative in Luke’s Gospel, all of them in chapter 20, where Jesus is questioned by the authorities. Sometimes we read these stories in isolation, but it’s important to see that they occur in Holy Week, because they are all part of the authorities ramping up the pressure on Jesus. They are all part of the campaign that leads to the Cross. 

And within that context of the opposition during Holy Week, there is one theme we must bear in mind, and that is the Temple. All of the questioning finds its source in those who run the Temple. You will remember that when Jesus is put on trial, he is accused of saying, ‘Destroy this temple and I will rebuild it in three days.’ 

Well, later in Holy Week Jesus did indeed prophesy the destruction of the Jerusalem temple. It was not an act he was going to accomplish, though: his prophecies relate to the destruction that the Roman legions would execute in AD 70, when they put down the Jewish revolt. 

And we also remember that when Jesus said, ‘Destroy this temple and I will rebuild it in three days,’ he was referring to his own body. For in New Testament terms, Jesus himself is the true temple. The temple was reckoned by Jews to be the place where heaven and earth met. Jesus, being fully divine and fully human, encapsulated that in his own being. In Jesus, heaven and earth met. Hence, he was the true temple. Moreover, his death would replace the Jerusalem temple’s sacrificial system. Again, he was the true temple. He was coming to replace the existing one. 

Jesus, then, is a threat to all who constitute the Jerusalem temple authorities. They may not know all that I have just described, but they know enough to realise that this popular preacher is a hazard to all their vested interests. He must be stopped. 

But this isn’t just a private spat between Jesus and the authorities. It is set in the context of Jesus teaching the people. They are listening to him when the temple authorities turn up and interrupt. In between the three episodes we are going to look at, Jesus addresses the people with his counter-arguments, including a parable that shows up the authorities for just who they are before God. The people represent Israel. Will they follow the Messiah? Or will the temple leaders undermine their faith in Jesus?

So with all that background laid out, let’s look at the first of these three stories where the temple leaders put Jesus under question. 

Luke 20:1-8

The challenge

How ironic it is that the authorities turn up just as Jesus is teaching and ‘proclaiming the good news’. Is it that Jesus is good news and they are bad news? Why would they want to put a stop to someone who proclaims good news? What does this say about them? The contrast is set up at the outset. 

But even the ‘good news’ would have been threatening to them. Remember that ‘good news’ was something proclaimed in the Roman Empire by a ‘herald’ (the Greek word for which became a New Testament word for a preacher or evangelist) who travelled to different towns telling the population there of some wonderful event. ‘There is a new emperor on the throne in Rome!’ ‘Rome’s army has won a great victory!’

When Jesus proclaims the good news it’s all that and more. There is indeed a new king on the throne – not in Rome but in heaven, ruling the universe. After his death and resurrection, the early church will proclaim that as good news, too, because God will have won a great victory, not by killing but by suffering. 

If Jesus is proclaiming good news of a new king, then no wonder the New Testament tells us elsewhere that he was announcing the good news of the kingdom of God. This would have been a challenge for the temple leaders who, although they were not appointed by Rome, certainly had their security in office guaranteed by Rome, just so long as they played along. If there is a different king on the throne, then that Roman backing is undermined. Is it any wonder they don’t like the good news of Jesus?

And so they come along and they try to undermine Jesus on the basis of the location, namely the temple. It’s their territory. This is where they have authority. To ask Jesus, ‘By what authority’ he does these things and who gave him such authority, they are saying, look, this is our patch, we are the ones in charge here. You are the outsider. You haven’t been properly authorised and appointed. So what gives you any right to say or do any of that stuff, especially here? 

I guess it might work if you were dealing with a mere mortal. But Jesus knows where his authority comes from, and so do readers of Luke’s Gospel. Luke has told us that Jesus was conceived under the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit. The same Spirit has descended on him like a dove at his baptism, and the voice of his Father from heaven has affirmed him as his beloved Son. Jesus has laid out his manifesto under the anointing of the Spirit in the synagogue at Nazareth. And then a ministry has followed where all of this has been demonstrated. By what authority? Do the temple leaders really want to know the answer to that question? 

By what authority? It’s still a dangerous question today. We hope and pray that those in leadership in the church today are those who have the authority of the Holy Spirit at work in their lives and that also this is what the church has discerned in the selection and appointment process. Is it always true, though? Sometimes we come up with our own criteria that may sound good and faithful, but then in practice we may not sense the work of the Spirit. We who lead sometimes end up going through the motions rather than relying on divine authority. It’s not really enough for us to fall back on saying, well I was appointed or ordained by the church if we are not attentive to the Holy Spirit.

But Jesus has no such worries. His knowledge of where his authority comes from and who he is in relationship to the Father gives him a security that leads to the boldness of his ministry. He is the Beloved Son, always full of the Spirit. That’s potent. 

So is this how Jesus will respond, by setting out his credentials? Not a bit of it.

The response

It’s very rare that Jesus responds to a question, even a friendly one, with an answer. Often, he replies – as here – with another question. While there is truth in the old slogan ‘Jesus is the answer’ it’s every bit as true that ‘Jesus is the question.’ At least, here and in other places Jesus is the questioner. 

Even though later in Holy Week at his trials he will often be silent, here Jesus goes on the offensive with his question. He is still in the business of exposing unrepentant sin, and that is what he does by throwing a question about authority back at his opponents. 

And moreover – remember that the ordinary people are present in the scene – Jesus picks on an issue of authority that will chime with them, not with the temple leaders. 

That issue is John the Baptist. When Jesus asks, ‘John’s baptism – was it from heaven, or of human origin?’ it’s about more than just John’s baptism. Those two words are like an abbreviation for the whole of John’s ministry. This is a question about the entire authority behind John’s ministry: was it from God, or was it merely human? 

That makes it a huge question. John was a barometer for how people responded to the divine purposes of redemption. Not only that, but he was widely regarded as a prophet. And further, he was depicted as the one who would come before the Messiah, according to Malachi’s image of a returned Elijah heralding God’s anointed. Where you stood on the authority of John really mattered. 

And in particular, the link between John and Jesus meant that if you endorsed John’s divine authority, you endorsed that of Jesus, too. But if you denied John’s spiritual legitimacy, you not only denied Jesus, you also lost the people who was listening to Jesus, who certainly thought John was a prophet. 

Checkmate? Very possibly. That’s certainly how the religious leaders react. They don’t know what to say. They realise that any answer they give to Jesus’ conundrum puts them in a bad situation. At this stage, Jesus is too popular with the ordinary people and so they can’t alienate the crowds by denying the legitimacy of John’s ministry. But if they take the other option, then the logical conclusion is that they should end up following Jesus, and that is out of the question. He is the thorn in their side that they want rid of. 

Jesus wins this round. What was he trying to achieve? Is this an exercise in saving his own skin that succeeds here but will fail later in the week? Regular observers might suppose so. But the readers of the Gospel know, and the disciples should know, that he had prophesied his betrayal, suffering, and death. He is heading towards that destiny, even if the utter horror of it has not hit him yet in the way it will in the Garden of Gethsemane. 

Yet if he knows that the Cross is his destiny, why even bother to debate and outwit the temple hierarchy? Surely it is because wickedness must be exposed by the truth, whatever the cost. Think of how Jeremiah was called to a ministry where it was his calling repeatedly to remind Israel of God’s truth, even though in the short term they were not going to obey. It was still important for there to be a faithful witness to the truth in the face of evil. The people of Jeremiah’s day were without excuse. Those who exercised power during Jesus’ ministry would now also have no excuse before God for their words, attitudes, and actions. 

Does this make us think of situations today where Christians need to witness faithfully to God’s truth in opposition to great evil, and to do so at the risk of paying a great cost? Might that even happen in the USA under Donald Trump’s presidency? 

What about the leaders? They are embarrassed before the people. Their stature and authority before the ordinary Jews has been fundamentally undermined by Jesus. He had made a laughingstock of them. It is almost like the way a satirist uses ridicule to expose the wickedness of a politician and to imply that things should be better than they are. 

Are they going to take this defeat lying down? No. With their hearts hardened by their own choice to the searing moral critique given by Jesus, they are going to defend their position and their interests against all opposition, not least this upstart from up north in Nazareth. 

We haven’t heard the last of them. They will be back. 

Questions for reflection

In what ways today is the Good News of Jesus a threat to the powerful?

Is there any way in which the Good News has been a threat to you? How have you responded?

What makes you recognise the authority of Jesus?

How do you react when the teaching of Jesus shows you to be in the wrong?

What would be a Christian way of handling power today?

0

Third Sunday in Advent: Sing For Joy (Zephaniah 3:14-20)

(This is a repeat of a sermon I first preached six years ago.)

Zephaniah 3:14-20

If, like me, you’re a bit of a misery guts in the run-up to Christmas, then the Third Sunday in Advent is your favourite. It’s the day we traditionally remember John the Baptist. And what finer example of pricking the balloon of froth and trivia is there than the man who called the people who rushed to him ‘You brood of vipers’ (Luke 3:7)? We’d be thrilled to have crowds rushing here, wouldn’t we? Imagine if we had a sudden major influx of newcomers on a Sunday morning and I stood in the pulpit, denouncing them in that way? I think you’d be going home and phoning the Superintendent – even though what John tells people to do, in sharing, honest and just behaviour, and plain integrity – isn’t theologically radical. (Although it is disturbing that he does have to be that basic.)

In clearing the way for the Messiah, we often think of the severe images in John’s preaching – the brood of vipers, the winnowing fork and fire of the Messiah, and so on. But what I want to look at this morning is not so much the process of preparation but rather what John was preparing for.

And that’s where Zephaniah’s prophecy comes in. He brings God’s vision of what things will be like after the end of exile. And while God’s people are no longer in a foreign land, you’ll perhaps recall how I’ve said that in Jesus’ day they saw themselves as still in exile, due to their occupation by the Roman forces.

Now we know that Jesus announced a very different end of exile from that which his nation anticipated. Not all of them would have seen the need for the repentance which John proclaimed. And even those who did would have assumed that if they lived in holiness then God would grant their wish of deliverance from the Romans.

But nevertheless the images in Zephaniah give us a great indication of what life is like in the kingdom of God that Jesus inaugurated. You may remember that Jesus was once asked why he and his disciples feasted, whereas the disciples of John fasted. He said that while the bridegroom was present, there would be feasting. So we’re not going to look this morning at the fasting and the preparation, we’re going to consider the feasting that follows the preparation.

I want to highlight two aspects.

Firstly, we find a singing people:

14 Sing, Daughter Zion;
    shout aloud, Israel!
Be glad and rejoice with all your heart,
    Daughter Jerusalem!
15 The Lord has taken away your punishment,
    he has turned back your enemy.
The Lord, the King of Israel, is with you;
    never again will you fear any harm.

Israel is forgiven and no longer under threat from her enemies. The natural reaction is to sing, to shout aloud, to be glad, and to rejoice. No longer are they oppressed due to their sins: God has taken that away. Joy is the natural result!

In my teens, one popular worship song had the words, ‘I get so excited, Lord, every time I realise I’m forgiven.’ We did sometimes deliberately sing wrong words to it: ‘I get so excited, Lord, every time I realise I’m a gibbon,’ but even our laughter at our silly alteration was part of our joy. We knew we were forgiven sinners through the Cross of Christ, and that led to excitement and great joy.

Sometimes, though, it’s hard to find where the joy has gone. As I’ve told you before, coming from a family which has a history of depression, I know what it is for the dark cloud suddenly to appear over my life, even though I’ve never been diagnosed with depression. Sometimes we don’t react in the best ways to circumstances, but at other times we are at the mercy of unbalanced chemicals in our bodies. These situations need talking therapies or tablet cures.

But on other occasions you really wonder where the joy has disappeared in the church generally. I recall a dismal Good Friday ecumenical service when I was young. We happened to be singing ‘I get so excited, Lord’, and our minister, who was leading the service, asked if there really was any evidence that people there were excited that they were forgiven. Were they so caught up with the sense that Good Friday reminded them of their sins that they had forgotten Good Friday also brought them relief from their sins?

As I’ve pondered this, I’ve developed a theory. The longer we go on as Christians and get further away from our heady younger days when we discover the joy of forgiveness for ourselves, and as we slowly with the help of the Holy Spirit correct wrong behaviour, the trouble is that we start to see ourselves not as forgiven sinners but as decent, respectable people.

And when you start to see yourself as fundamentally good, you see less reason to view yourself as a sinner needing the grace that first thrilled your heart. In fact, you become like those opponents of Jesus who criticised him for partying with the disreputable. Jesus told them with, I think, a note of sarcasm, that it was not the healthy who needed a doctor, but the sick. But we who now see ourselves as so healthy no longer connect with what brought us joy. Our spiritual amnesia makes us the miserable self-righteous religious types that nobody likes.

What is the cure? Well, if this condition is a progressive amnesia, what we need is the gift of remembering. We need the grace to look at our past (and at our present attitudes) in the searching light of Christ. We need then to remember what Christ did for us when we knew we were sinners, and then receive that gift of undeserved mercy again.

You may recall that the Preface to the 1933 Methodist Hymn Book began with the famous words, ‘Methodism was born in song,’ and so it was. But the birth of our spiritual tradition in song was not some cultural love of a particular kind of hymnody, it was a spiritual experience that had to be sung. It was the experience of forgiveness and the assurance of God’s love that led the early Methodists to sing for joy. Some Christians have argued that just about every major spiritual renewal down the centuries has been accompanied by a new outburst of music, because that’s the natural and creative outlet for the joy that God brings.

For us to be a joyful people, then, means reconnecting with the life of the Spirit – the Holy Spirit who showed us we were sinners but who also revealed to us the forgiving love of God in Christ; the Holy Spirit who graciously makes us more like Jesus as we open ourselves to him, but who also reminds us of our need of grace, to inoculate us from the risk of becoming Pharisees; the Holy Spirit, who indeed pours the joy of God into our hearts, along with divine love. If we welcome the Holy Spirit, one thing we do is welcome holy joy into the depths of our beings.

Secondly, we find a singing God:

16 On that day
    they will say to Jerusalem,
‘Do not fear, Zion;
    do not let your hands hang limp.
17 The Lord your God is with you,
    the Mighty Warrior who saves.
He will take great delight in you;
    in his love he will no longer rebuke you,
    but will rejoice over you with singing.’

So there you go, right there is ‘the Lord of the dance’: he ‘will rejoice over you with singing’. Sometimes in our Advent preparation as with our Lent preparation we think about the holiness of God in a severe way, and we are conscious of how far short we fall of God’s standards. Certainly, we can react that way to the preaching of John the Baptist, as I indicated at the beginning – although it’s worth noting that at the end of our Gospel reading, we heard Luke say that what John preached was ‘good news’.

And it may therefore be that our image of God is the stern headmaster with furrowed brow, holding us to unattainable standards and punishing us when we fail.

Now there is a place to speak of God’s holiness, and even of his judgment, but here we see another side to God: one who delights in his children and sings for joy over them. If anyone still believes that the Old Testament reveals God as a God of wrath and the New Testament shows him to be a God of love, this passage should thoroughly confuse such people!

Where do we most fully see such a joyful God? Surely it is in the ministry of Jesus. He teaches this about his Father when he tells the Parable of the Prodigal Son, where the father scandalously keeps looking out for his errant son and then throws a great party to celebrate the return. And Jesus lives it out as he turns water into wine at a wedding, as he invites himself to Zaccheus’ house, thus prompting the tax collector’s repentance, as he feasts with the last and the least. Jesus teaches and demonstrates a God who is full of joy when sinners come home to him, and whose joy is such that it leads sinners home.

Perhaps Johann Sebastian Bach got it right with his words, ‘Jesu, joy of man’s desiring.’ Jesus is our joy, for he is full of joy himself. He is utterly outrageous with joy. No wonder those who – perhaps like us, as I said earlier – had spent so much time concentrating on being good that they had forgotten their need of grace as sinners – were so wound up by him.

So out with the idea that God grudgingly or stingily or reluctantly forgives us our sins. The evidence of Scripture is that he longs to forgive, he loves to forgive, and he forgives generously and whole-heartedly. In Zephaniah he has longed for his children to return, and he has brought them home. Now they celebrate – and so does he. In the Gospels, Jesus shows us this same God in flesh and blood.

Perhaps you think that it’s all very well me preaching this, but I don’t know you, and I don’t know your darkest secrets. Believe me, in all my years of ministry I have heard plenty of dark secrets from church members, and yours probably would not surprise me. I have listened from time to time to someone talk about a terrible thing they did decades ago, which no-one at church knows about, and which has haunted them ever since. Then I have had the privilege of assuring them that no pit is too deep that God in Christ cannot haul them out. I have watched as relief, peace, and joy have broken out on their faces. And I believe that as such events have unfolded on earth, Jesus and the angels have been putting up the bunting and decorating the cake in heaven.

In the carol service, we will be reading of angels singing to shepherds. But we don’t need to wait to sense the divine song being sung over our lives. Right now God is lovingly offering restoration to the broken, forgiveness to the sinner, and strength to the weak. He loves to do this. Receive the grace he is offering you, even urging you to take, through Christ. Know and feel his forgiveness, as Jesus invites himself into your house, just as he did with Zaccheus.

And as you see the smile on his face, so let your facial muscles relax and let the joy spread across your countenance, too.

0

We Are Being Watched, Matthew 5:13-20 (Ordinary 5 Lent -3 Year A 2023)

Matthew 5:13-20

Earlier this week I was at the Byfleet Tuesday Fellowship where over a series of meetings I have been telling them the story of my life and faith. Bit by bit, episode, by episode, this week we finally got to the point where my family and I arrived in this circuit in 2010 – which was probably a good point at which to end.

One of the hymns we sang on Tuesday was ‘Blessèd Assurance’, for its theme of testimony and those lines, ‘This is my story, this is my song.’ I hope that in hearing my story people heard how my story fits into the bigger story of Jesus.

We’ve been tracking the story of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel in recent weeks. A fortnight ago, we heard how Jesus came into Galilee of the Gentiles with a proclamation that was to begin forming his community of light, a community that forms through repentance. Last week (if you watched my video) you’ll know I preached on the opening of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus shows us what the repentant life with him looks like.

This week, Jesus tells us what the community of light is meant to look like to the watching world.

Firstly, says Jesus, his people are the salt of the earth.

13 “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.

Now before we think about the salt, I want us to think about the earth.[1] The word here could just mean the soil, or it could mean the land, be that the local land where they are or the land of the whole world.

If it’s the local land, then it would be an image of Israel. Remember that before Jesus ever said, ‘Blessèd are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth’ (Matthew 5:5), the Psalmist had said that the meek will inherit the land (Psalm 37:11). The land was so crucial to Israel: it was, after all, the Promised Land. If that’s what we’re talking about here, then Jesus is seeing his people as a renewal movement within the people of Israel. And I guess initially that’s what Christ-followers were.

But I mentioned a fortnight ago that Matthew has the mission to the Gentiles in view. He emphasises that Jesus comes to ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’, and he ends his Gospel with the Great Commission. So in the long term the earth here is surely the whole world. We are to be salt in the whole world. This is an image of the mission to which Jesus calls us.

So we need to know what the salt is. We know how salt had various uses, the main ones being as a seasoning, a preservative, and as a fertiliser. I am going to dismiss the first two of seasoning and preservative here, partly because they refer to food whereas Jesus is talking about salt of the earth, and that’s where it was used as fertiliser.  Besides, it makes little sense to talk of the Christian calling as merely seasoning the world or preserving it. We are not here simply to make the world more flavoursome, or to preserve it, when there is much wrong with it. It is not our calling to bless everything that goes on in the world.

No: if we are salt of the earth, then Jesus means that we are fertiliser. The kingdom community is divine fertiliser. We enable life and growth where there is death and despair. Ultimately, that life only comes in Jesus Christ. We point people to that by our words and deeds. Food banks and the like are signs and pointers to the life of Christ in the midst of death and hopelessness. We also need to speak about the life Christ brings.

So a church community is meant to be fundamentally outward-looking. A fellowship that only looks inwards on itself is one where the salt has lost its saltiness. That may seem strange to us, who are used to our salt largely just being made up of one chemical compound. But in the days of Jesus salt was often found in a mixture with other minerals, and it could be dissolved out of it.

To us, salt losing its saltiness is absurd. Jesus would say to us, a church that only looks in on itself and does not make outreach a priority is equally absurd. Such a church cannot offer life, because it has dissolved the life out of itself.

Secondly, says Jesus, his people are the light of the world.

14 “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.

Go back two weeks again in our story. Jesus has come to Galilee of the Gentiles to bring light to those living in darkness. Now, he says, that’s the ongoing task of his people. While in John’s Gospel Jesus owns the title ‘Light of the world’ for himself, here in Matthew he gives it to his kingdom community.

Sometimes we’re happy at the thought that Jesus is the light of the world, but we baulk at the fact that he called his church to be that light, too. It would be easier and more comfortable for us if our faith were just a private thing. We wouldn’t have to worry about being a good witness and what reaction we might get to that in society.

And there are factions in our society who would like us to adopt that attitude. Groups like the National Secular Society and others argue that faith has no place in public life. Either they don’t understand what faith is, or they don’t want to understand.

Jesus says, we are going to be seen – both as individual disciples and as a community of believers together. It will be our good deeds that shine light into a darkened world. We are not doing them so that people praise us, as Jesus condemned some religious leaders for doing: we are doing good deeds so that people may ‘glorify [y]our Father in heaven.’

Do we want to make a first step in changing this world for the better, for the glory of God? Surely we do. Then we need to think, talk, and pray about what good deeds would show up as light in our dark world.

So let me remind you of some of John Wesley’s most famous words:

Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.

I think Jesus would approve of those words.

Thirdly and finally, Jesus calls us to be better than the Pharisees.

Jesus says he hasn’t come to abolish the Jewish Law but to fulfil it, that we should therefore not dilute it, and that in fact our righteousness needs to exceed that of the Pharisees and teachers of the Law (verses 17-20).

We need to hear this, and hear it carefully. Jesus is not saying that we should obey every Old Testament law, for he said that the food laws were no longer necessary (Mark 7:1-22) and the New Testament generally sees his death on the Cross as fulfilling the sacrificial laws.

Therefore, we need to read the Old Testament and its laws carefully. As Dr Ian Paul says,

… God looks on the heart as well as the hands. We must, in our reading of the Old Testament, always move from ‘What does it say?’ through ‘What is the intention?’ before we ask ‘What is God saying to us now?’[2]

The bottom line is that we cannot be casual about our conduct. Just because we believe in grace, mercy, and forgiveness does not mean we can live carelessly. That will not shine light into darkness. That will simply make us hypocrites, just as Jesus often said the religious leaders of his day were.

No. In God’s grace and mercy in Christ we do indeed find forgiveness and many a fresh start in life after we have messed up. But that grace then calls us to aspire to a higher standard. If all we are called to be as Christians is ‘nice’ then what makes us shine as the light of the world?

That’s why the early church gave dignity to the dead by taking funerals for those not considered worthy of one in the Roman Empire. That’s why they also took care of babies abandoned to die because they were the wrong sex or in some other way did not fit their parents’ aspirations.

Friends, if we are called to bring life to our world and shine in the darkness, how is the Holy Spirit calling us to a higher standard than mere religion?

It’s a question we need to ponder.

[1] Here and in most of what follows I am dependent on Ian Paul’s blog post ‘Being distinctive as the people of God in Matthew 5’.

[2] Ibid.

0

Remaking The Church, Luke 15:1-10 (Ordinary 24 Year C 2022)

Luke 15:1-10

At the recent Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops from around the world, Stephen Cottrell, the Archbishop of York, said,

McDonald’s makes hamburgers
Cadbury’s makes chocolate
Starbuck’s makes coffee
The Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela make music
Heineken makes beer
Toyota makes cars
Rolex makes watches
The church of Jesus Christ makes disciples. That is our core business.[1]

It seems important to go back to this at a Covenant Service where we renew our commitment to Jesus in the light of his commitment to us. He calls us to make disciples.

But how?

Later in the same address Cottrell describes a conversation he had once on Paddington train station while waiting for a connection to Cardiff. A woman asked him why he became a priest. I won’t quote his whole answer, but essentially he said that it was a combination of God calling him and his own desire to see change for the better in the world.

The woman then said to him

that when she met people of faith, she found they fitted into two categories. It either seems like their faith is like their hobby – either they go to church on Sunday but it doesn’t change their life on Monday, or “they embraced their faith so tightly, it frightens everyone else away.”  I have seen these extremes, and she said to me “is there another way?”

The woman identified two wrong responses to finding Christian faith. What is wrong with them?

The hobbyist who comes on a Sunday but doesn’t let it affect her way of life is someone who has not understood the Gospel. Or she may have understood the Gospel, but has chosen to look the other way.

As we have been seeing in Jesus’ teaching in recent weeks, that just isn’t a valid response to his coming. Yes, God loves us before we ever love him, but just because he meets us as we are doesn’t mean he wants us to stay as we are.

An essential element of Christian faith is embracing God’s agenda of transformation for us. That’s what makes sense of renewing promises at a covenant service. We recognise once more the enormity of what God has done for us in Christ and we respond.

Call it an argument from silence if you will, but in the two parables we read the thought of there being no action in response to the missing sheep or the missing coin is just not countenanced. Finding the love of Jesus puts us on his team. We are co-opted into his mission.

So a good thing to reflect on for all of us this morning is this question: what part am I playing in the mission of God as a response to God’s love for me?

Let me put it bluntly. How are we ever going to do more than just survive as a church unless more people step up to the plate? Right now we have a small group of people doing most of the work in this church. I can tell you, some of them get very tired! I lose count of how many hats some of them are wearing.

Friends, we need to lift burdens if we are to do more than just limp along as a church until we finally close.

But, you say, like so many people here I’ve got older. I don’t have the strength to do something vigorous.

That’s not a problem. Because you can begin with something simple that you can do. Even going on the tea and coffee rota would help. You can do that, can’t you? Don’t you make hot drinks for yourself at home? Then you can do it for your friends at church. And by doing so you can free up some of the people who are working to the bone in this church.

Similarly, you read for pleasure at home, or you may read for grandchildren. In that case, you can go on the rota of Bible readers for Sunday services. We have such a small rota of willing readers, but you could expand it. You do it at home, you can do it here.

And these are just simple jobs in the church. I’m not even asking you to be an evangelist at this point! But know this one thing. A Christian cannot be a hobbyist. We are on duty for the King.

The other group the woman who talked to Archbishop Cottrell identified were those who “embraced their faith so tightly, it frightens everyone else away.” Now these people do appear in our reading! They are there in verse 2:

 2 But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, ‘This man welcomes sinners, and eats with them.’

For shorthand, I’m going to call this second group of people of faith the Pharisees.

There’s a big question here that we don’t always see: why on earth would the Pharisees condemn Jesus’ missionary outreach activity? They were a missionary group themselves. In Matthew 23:15 Jesus notes this:

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.

As I’ve said before, the Pharisee movement had been founded a long time before as a way of renewing the Jewish faith and bringing it back to basics. They were also missionary.

But they didn’t like Jesus’ methods. They had so longed for the renewal of Jewish faith but hadn’t seen it come to fruition. I think they had become frustrated, and with that cynical.

Not only that, because they had lofty aims they then became superior and self-righteous as they blamed others for the failure of their hopes.

And in that superiority, they refused to mix with those who failed to live up to their standards. Why would Jesus do differently from them? And perhaps embarrassingly, how come he attracts people and they don’t?

This toxic combination led to their condemnation of Jesus.

I want us to be passionate Christians, not hobbyists. Christianity is not a leisure activity, it’s a way of life. But there is danger when our passion gets misdirected when disappointment sets in. Then we start hurling insults from our ivory towers and we begin plotting against those who do things differently from us.

No wonder some Christians and some churches take on toxic atmospheres. No wonder some of those Christians and some of those churches end up committing spiritual abuse.

So if my plea to the hobbyists is to embrace the mission of God, my plea to the Pharisees is to keep your hearts tender and full of grace before a merciful God. If you recognise Pharisee tendencies in yourself, please remember that you too are a sinner in need of God’s grace. You too are a beggar seeking bread.

And let that open you up to the loving heart of God that sends us on  his mission.

But finally we come to Jesus, and his attitude is represented by the actions of the owner of the sheep in the first parable and the woman in the second.

For someone to own a hundred sheep in Jesus’ day meant they were very wealthy. The typical family owned ten to fifteen. Perhaps Jesus made the number so large in his story as to make his point all the more strikingly to his listeners.

And when you hear of the woman’s ten coins it is a mistake to think of ordinary loose change. Either these were her savings or they were the dowry money given to her by her husband when they married, which some women wore around their neck.[2] The lost coin is valuable!

The parable of the lost sheep shows how Jesus will not simply be the chaplain to those who remain safely at home. He cares for the lost.

The parable of the coin takes this a little further and shows us just how valuable to him those lost from his love and the family of God are.

All this means that if we are to renew our commitment to working out the teaching of Jesus, then we need to rethink the priorities of the church.

If you ask many Christians what the main purpose of the church is, they will answer, ‘worship.’ I remember that coming out at the top of a survey in my home church, for example.

But is that right? Might we learn from the Westminster Catechism, the document so beloved of Presbyterian Christians? It said that ‘the chief end of man’ (please excuse the exclusive language of a bygone day) was ‘to glorify God and enjoy him for ever.’

I’ll leave aside ‘enjoying God’ for another time. But ‘glorifying God’ is more than Sunday worship. Certainly we glorify God in worship, but we also glorify him when we spread his name in the world and witness to it in our words and deeds. We glorify God when we share Jesus’ heart for those who are lost from him, as we see in these parables.

What if God’s vision for our church were a reordering of our life so that we glorified him every day and everywhere? What if we reordered our church around the glorification of God rather than the gathered worship of God?  

To do that, we need to put away our ‘hobby’ approach to religion and repent in humility of our ‘Pharisee’ tendencies.

Then we need to embrace the heart of love Jesus has for the world.

So what about it? Who fancies remaking the church?

[1] https://www.premierchristianity.com/bishops-should-always-have-the-name-of-jesus-on-their-lips-archbishop-of-yorks-message-to-church-leaders/13569.article

[2] On both the number of sheep and the nature of the coins, see https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/the-short-parables-of-the-lost-in-luke-15/

0

Kingdom Culture, Luke 14:1-14 (Ordinary 22 Year C, 2022)

Luke 14:1-14

Meals out are a bit of a theme in our family at present. We had a large gathering of relatives in a pub recently to mark my wife’s big birthday. We are about to have another family meal before my sister and brother-in-law move away from this area.

Then a week or so ago, Debbie and I went for a Chinese before seeing a film at the cinema. Who was on the table behind us? Eamonn Holmes. It appeared we had happened upon one of his regular haunts.

We know that in the Gospels lots of important things happen around a meal table with Jesus. He even turns one of them into the central way that we remember his death for us.

And a meal table is a place where we see lots of protocols and cultural habits. In our case, they might range from not putting your elbows on the table to waiting for everyone to be served before beginning to eat.

There were certainly protocols and cultural values aplenty at the home of the Pharisee where Jesus dined in today’s reading. Yet what this story shows us is that the culture of God’s kingdom is often the reverse of the diners Jesus was with.

So today we’re going to examine what we see here about the culture of God’s kingdom and ask whether there are ways in which we need to reverse our values, too. Each of the three episodes in today’s story has something to tell us.

Firstly, in God’s kingdom, rules are interpreted by love.

I’m thinking of the first six verses of the reading here, where we learn that the meal is happening on a Sabbath, and people watch to see whether Jesus heals a sick man (just as he has done on a Sabbath in a synagogue). Sure enough, he does.

Jesus does not dispense with the rules. He honours them. But he will not apply them woodenly. He lives by the Law of God, knowing its intention for good. As he explains elsewhere, the Sabbath was made for the benefit of human beings, not vice-versa.

So here he makes it clear that of course you can and you should do good on the Sabbath. Any use of the Sabbath to prevent that would go against the spirit of God’s intentions about his Law.

If on the other hand all you do with the rules and laws is apply them literally and woodenly without any love, who benefits? The people who are in power.

And who doesn’t benefit when laws are interpreted woodenly and unlovingly? Those in need.

Jesus won’t have this. He has come to bring good news to the poor. God’s Laws must be interpreted in the spirit of love so that those in need receive good news. God never provided his Laws just to buttress the position of the wealthy and the powerful.

It’s something we need to bear in mind in the church. We have our own set of rules by which the church is governed. They contain a lot of wisdom. They should not be dismissed. But at the same time if all we do is enforce them rigidly and harshly, what good does that do? Who does that help? Only the rule-makers.

It isn’t being faithful to Jesus to ditch the rules – and especially not God’s Laws – but it is the way of Jesus to interpret them with love and compassion for those in need.

Secondly, in God’s kingdom, status is replaced by humility.

We come now to verses 7 to 11, where Jesus tells dinner guests not to take for themselves the seat of honour, in case their host demotes them, but rather to take the lowest seat, from which they may be called up higher.

In Jesus’ society, honour and status were everything. They determined your work, your income, your friendship circles, and who you could marry. This was given visual demonstration at meals. Therefore, in order to get on in society, people strove for higher status and greater honour. But

Jesus’ teaching here not only undercuts the importance of status; it also sees status and standing as something that is given, not something that is gained—a gift from another (specifically God), not something accrued by one’s own effort.[1]

People still lust after honour and status today. But why? It is selfish and self-centred. Not only that, it doesn’t necessarily last. A loss of income or the onset of a serious disease can take it away quickly. Why settle for something temporary and selfish when an alternative is on offer that is eternal?

But to have eternal honour and status in the kingdom of God requires a different approach. It requires being like Jesus, who had more status and honour than any other human being, but who laid it aside to be born into poverty and obscurity, and who laid down his life for the salvation of the world.

The best honour and status, then, is out of our hands. We humble ourselves and leave things in the hands of God. But we do so knowing he is full of mercy and grace. He does not habitually raise up the rich, the powerful, and the celebrities, he exalts the humble.

Some people will not like the idea that their status is out of their hands. They will not like such powerlessness. But our aim as Christians is not to exalt ourselves, it is to exalt Jesus Christ in our daily lives. If we have done that, then that will satisfy us.

Too many people in the church still get obsessed with rank and status. It’s time we put all that to bed. As Wesley’s hymn ‘Captain of Israel’s host, and guide’ puts it, ‘Our end, the glory of the Lord.’ Let that be our ambition  and let us be content to leave any elevation to him, putting aside our toxic pride and jealousy.

Thirdly, in God’s kingdom, giving is all about grace.

We come to the third and final section of the reading in verses 12 to 14, where Jesus tells meal hosts not to invite people to meals in order to get a return invitation, but rather to invite them who have no chance of being able to reciprocate. We are not to give in order to be repaid in this life, says Jesus.

This was revolutionary teaching. In the ancient world, you gave a gift to somebody because you considered them worthy of it. You didn’t give many gifts, but those you did tended to be lavish.

How was someone deemed worthy of a gift? It might be to do with their ethnic background, their social status, their sex, their moral qualities, their success in life, or their beauty. For ‘gift’ in the ancient world you might want to think something more akin to a ‘prize’ in our society.[2]

Now Jesus comes along and says that God’s approach to giving is utterly unlike this. It has nothing to do with the person deserving it, nor is it decided by the ability of the recipient to give back in return. Giving, according to Jesus, is an act of grace. God gives to people who neither deserve it nor can repay him. God invites people to his table on the same basis: the invitation goes out even though people do not deserve to be there, and even though there is no prospect of them reimbursing him.

That is why we are in the family of faith. None of us deserved to receive the invitation. None of us can pay God back for all he has done for us in Jesus Christ. But God in his grace said to each one of us, ‘Come to my feast.’

We cannot give back to God in equal measure of his gift to us. But we can show our gratitude, and we can pay it forward. For just as we have received the grace of God’s gift, so we can in grace give to others without expecting recompense, and we can invite those who could not possibly invite us.

After all, how else will the world know about the transforming grace of God in Christ unless we not only speak about it, we demonstrate it?

I have always loved a story that the American preacher and sociologist Tony Campolo used to tell. He would recount how when he was driving on a toll road, he would come up to the toll booth where he needed to pay and give the attendant twice as much money as he needed to.

‘That’s for me, and that’s for my friend in the car behind,’ he would say.

Of course, he didn’t know the person in the car behind at all, and he would drive off slowly watching in his rear view mirror with amusement as the toll booth attendant tried to explain to the next motorist that they didn’t need to pay.

So – our reading leaves us with three challenges this week. They are simple to state:

Firstly, how can I keep the Law of God lovingly this week?

Secondly, where do I need to let go of my desire for status and humbly leave my life in God’s hands?

And thirdly, how can I show the grace of God this week by giving to someone who cannot pay me back?

[1] Ian Paul, https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/jesus-the-kingdom-and-the-politics-of-the-table-in-luke-14/

[2] Op. cit., quoting John Barclay, https://www.psephizo.com/reviews/the-subversive-power-of-grace/

2

The Lost Sheep, Coin, and Son Luke 15:1-32 (Lent 4, Year C)

Luke 15:1-32

The Parable of the Prodigal Son is a wonderful story. Told on its own, it’s a heart-warming parable of the Gospel that speaks powerfully about God’s love.

Don’t worry, I don’t propose to question any of that!

But the key words there were, ‘Told on its own.’ Today, I deliberately put it in its context. When you do that, you see much more the purpose of the parable.

The Lectionary almost got it right. Had we followed that slavishly we would have read the first three verses but not the two shorter parables about the lost sheep and the lost coin. We would have missed the fact that the Parable of the Prodigal Son is the third in a series of parables. It is, as the NIV calls it, the lost son.

What, then, do we learn here about God? And what does that mean for us?

Firstly, God loves the lost. Through all three parables here we get a sense of God’s love for those who are lost and far from him. When the Pharisees and teachers of the law mutter, ‘This man welcomes sinners, and eats with them’ (verse 2), Jesus explains exactly why.

For Jesus, the lost are not the collateral damage we put up with so that we can devote our energies to the insiders in the community of God. They are a priority – so much so that he will do crazy things to reach them. What shepherd risks leaving ninety-nine sheep to find one that has gone astray? (Verse 4) The Good Shepherd does.

Could it be that one of our problems in the church is that we spend so much time on the ninety-nine inside the fold that we forget our calling to those lost from us? We agonise about why people don’t come to church and we despair at church decline, but which of us will take the radical steps to reorganise our churches along the principles of the shepherd in the Parable of the Lost Sheep?

If you want a sign of the sickness I’m talking about, then look for the reaction whenever somebody suggests a new initiative in the church which does things in new ways and goes beyond the existing members. Someone is sure to complain, ‘What about those we already have? Shouldn’t we be looking after them?’

It’s so infantile and selfish. How come these experienced Christians haven’t learned how to feed themselves spiritually?

The giveaway for me was one year when a church member complained to me in a letter about something. It’s so long ago I can’t remember what she was moaning about, but in the middle of the letter came the words, ‘First and foremost you are our minister.’ In other words, she who pays the piper calls the tune. We put money in the offering, and we therefore expect you to prioritise us. It’s a consumer attitude to religion. It isn’t a kingdom attitude, where we give for the sake of others.

These parables warn us clearly that if we just want things done for us in the church then we are like the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. Their faith had become so corrupted from God’s call to Israel to be a light to the nations that everything was centred on defining the in-crowd and concentrating on the in-crowd.

We have too many Pharisees in the church today. Look instead at the passion of the woman seeking her lost coin and the commitment of the shepherd looking for the lost sheep.

Look too at the father of the Prodigal, surveying the horizon for any sign that his errant son is on his way back, a son who by demanding his inheritance early was saying in the culture of his day, ‘Father, I want you dead.’

And see as that father does the undignified thing of running to his son, when the culture expected him to stand, face frowned and arms folded, waiting for the son to grovel. None of that. He is passionate for his lost son.

And look as well at the celebrations. The shepherd invites all nearby to celebrate, and Jesus says that’s a picture of heaven when a sinner repents (verses 6-7). The woman does similarly when she finds the coin and Jesus says that’s like the joy of the angels (verses 9-10). Presumably the party thrown by the father when the lost son returns is a parallel to them (verses 22-24).

Understand that this is how God feels about those far from him. Many of us have prodigals in our families. We have children who have not followed our faith, and it hurts to the core of our being. Some of them have gone off and done things in their lives that make us weep.

You may have had friends in the church who seemed deeply committed, whose faith you admired and whose friendship you valued. But one day they walked away. You didn’t have a clue what was going on under the surface. When they left the church you felt confused and bereft.

Know that in these parables Jesus spells out just how full of love and compassion for our friends and our children the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is.

With that knowledge I invite you to pray daily for the prodigals you know, remembering that God loves them so much he will send out his search and rescue mission for them.

And as well as ourselves individually and in families, how do we show this in the life of the church? What would it mean for us to re-order our priorities to reflect God’s love for those yet to know him rather than mainly putting on events that benefit us?

Secondly, God loves the Pharisees. One reason I wanted you to hear the whole context was so that you knew all these three parables are told in response to the moaning and groaning of the Pharisees and teachers of the law about Jesus hob-nobbing with lowlifes. They just don’t get the gospel of grace.

And yet these are people who saw themselves as defending the pure faith. I’ve probably mentioned before that the Pharisees started out as goodies, even though we see them largely as baddies in the Bible. Their movement began as a way of calling Judaism back to a pure, unsullied faith. It was a renewal movement.

But what happens when a renewal movement doesn’t meet its goals? What happens today when people who are passionate to renew the church don’t see things going the way they believe they should? Frustration sets in, and if they don’t guard their hearts they become embittered. They hold onto truth, but they forget grace, and so the pure well becomes poisoned.

What do people like that do? The sort of things the Pharisees did to Jesus. In their quest for purity and their failure to remember the grace of God, they hunt down Jesus and anyone like him who is a threat to what they see as the pure faith.

They do the same in the church today. Many ministers can tell stories of church members who have hounded them and resorted to underhanded tactics to undermine them or get them moved on. They think they’re serving a just cause, but they sink down to an ‘end justifies the means’ approach.

I know what I want to do when I encounter these people, especially when they threaten my livelihood and with it the home the church provides for us. There is a small number where I would have had the right to take them to court.

But the grace and mercy of God is so outrageous that he loves these people, too. How do I know?

It comes in the ending of the Prodigal Son parable. The elder son is clearly meant to stand for those Pharisees and teachers of the law. They are the ones who have been with the Father and had all his resources. But the celebrations of heaven and the angels just render them all the more angry.

Yet look at the tenderness with which the father in the story speaks to the older son:

31 ‘“My son,” the father said, “you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. 32 But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”’

‘Come and join the party,’ says the father. The invitation into the father’s joy couldn’t be plainer. God longs for those who have contended for the truth to do so in response to his grace. He doesn’t want them to give up a passion for truth, but he knows how distorted and damaging it becomes when it isn’t paired with his grace. It damages those who are attacked with the truth, and it damages the Pharisees, too.

And so today, for all of us who have been elder sons, defending the faith vigorously but somehow losing our first love, the same Father who welcomes home prodigals seeks to melt our hearts too with his love.

How are we going to answer the invitation? You’ll notice that the story of the lost son doesn’t completely end. We don’t get to hear how the older son responds to the invitation of the father.

Except we do know in reality. Since the older son represented the Pharisees, we know what he would have said: ‘I’m going to kill you.’

Each of us must write our own ending to the parable in our own lives. Whether we are a younger son or an older son, a prodigal or a Pharisee, will we say ‘Yes’ to the Father’s extravagant love for us and for all people, or will we throw it back in his face and find that in our defence of truth we have chosen death instead of life?

I pray we write a good ending.

0

Sermon: Pharisees, Disciples and Tradition

Mark 7:1-23

“Who has used up all the handwash in the bathroom?”

Debbie asked the question, but she knew the answer.

“I did!” said Mark.

We should be pleased that our son is very good at washing his hands after going to the toilet. It’s just that he doesn’t think one squirt from the liquid soap dispenser is enough. He doesn’t accept that with water its effects will multiply. So he pumps the dispenser about three times on each occasion.

Our only problem on hand washing with Mark comes when I have to take him in a public toilet and he thinks the electric hand dryer is going to be too noisy. Only one thing is allowed to be loud in this life, and that is his voice! So confronted by a noisy hand dryer, he may want to dry his hands on his t-shirt instead, and complain vigorously if I don’t do likewise.

It’s easy to read today’s Lectionary Gospel with modern eyes and think it’s a story about hygiene. In which case, we would be as offended as the Pharisees and the scribes at the actions of Jesus and his disciples. In a time when we are even more concerned about safe, healthy practices in our churches due to swine flu – witness Anglicans and Catholics not using a chalice for communion and some Christians not wanting to share The Peace – this story may seem even more disturbing.

But the background is different. The religious lawyers of Jesus’ day had taken the Old Testament laws, imposed their own interpretations on them, and then made those interpretations a binding tradition on all Jews. Washing your hands before eating bread was not about physical cleanliness but about  avoiding ritual defilement. And that seems to be something that never worried Jesus too much. After all, he shared table fellowship with ‘sinners’, making him unclean in the first place.

So the issue here is this: what shall we do with tradition? Is there still a place for it? Do we overturn it, like angry teenagers? What is its place, if any, for the disciples of Jesus?

What, then, is tradition? Put simply, tradition is the wisdom and truth that generations hand down to succeeding generations. Here’s an example. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul’s great chapter on the Resurrection, he speaks of passing on what was handed down to him. You could more literally translate it not simply as what was ‘handed down’ to him but as what was ‘traditioned’ (to coin a word) to him.

At its best, then, tradition is a good, helpful and even necessary thing. Truth and wisdom is handed down to us. Then it is our responsibility to hand it on to the following generations.

But because tradition is the means by which we hand something on, it cannot be the be-all and end-all in itself. If you like, tradition is a goods train, but it is only the train, and not the goods. What is important is that the goods get to their destination.

And that’s why when the Pharisees and scribes of Jesus’ day made so much insistence on the regulations they had devised, they were putting all the stress on the train and not on the goods.

John Wesley said there were four sources of truth for Christians. They were Scripture, tradition, reason and experience. But he was clear that Scripture trumped all the other three. Tradition, then, for Methodists, has to be about the ways we hand on scriptural truth. If it faithfully conveys the biblical gospel, though, then tradition has done its job.

The problem comes when tradition gets ideas above its station. There was a story that illustrated this in the new issue of Christianity Magazine:

A church I know is dying from hypocrisy. And although I’m watching it from a distance, it’s still painful. The congregation is small, though very faithful, and the minister is a natural evangelist. But whenever someone is converted through an Alpha course or pub ministry they don’t stay in the church for long. The members soon show them that they are inadequate for their new faith: they know nothing about the depth and traditions of Christianity; the fumble their way round the Bible and prayer book; they don’t have the gravitas or decorum for respectful worship; and those who have children can’t control them properly. The old faithful, who are becoming fewer in number, can’t understand why the new believers don’t make more effort to be like them and to support the church like they do. They can’t see that they are suffering from that peculiar form of hypocrisy identified by Jesus – doing all the ‘right’ things for all the wrong reasons. And this results in repelling people from God.[1]

What are we to do, then, if we are to stop tradition being used to damage people, as Jesus clearly thought was happening in his day, and was obviously happening in the church I have just mentioned?

I think there are two measures we must take. I have hinted at the first, but to underline it, let’s return to the Bible passage. Hear the words of Jesus again:

He said to them, ‘Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,
“This people honours me with their lips,
   but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
   teaching human precepts as doctrines.”
You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.’
 Then he said to them, ‘You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition!’ (Verses 6-9)

Jesus quoted the Scriptures and accused his opponents of abandoning Scripture (‘the commandment of God’) in favour of human tradition. So our first remedy must be to place tradition under Scripture, not outside or above the Bible.

If we’re going to place tradition under Scripture, then we need to do two things. The first is that we need to soak ourselves in the Bible. The second is that we then need to subject our traditions to biblical teaching, and ask whether they do indeed carry the Gospel into our world, or whether they contradict it.

That’s why I’ve spent much of the last four years urging people into spiritual discipline, including Bible reading. It may be using daily Bible reading notes as I do. It may be using our imagination to enter the situation and the characters as Ignatius of Loyola taught. It may involve persistent chewing on whatever grabs us in a particular passage. But whatever approaches we take, the bottom line is that if we are serious about following Jesus, we will be serious about immersing ourselves in the Bible.

Then, when we do, we can examine our traditions. Do they convey the Gospel on a two thousand year journey into today’s world, or do they turn ‘human precepts [into] doctrines’ (verse 7b)? You could raise a lot of embarrassing questions about the way we do church without a lot of difficulty. A lot of the things that consume our time or tie us down have very little to do with the Gospel and should be open to all sorts of criticism. Are we in danger of Jesus quoting the same words from Isaiah about us that he did about the Pharisees and scribes: ‘In vain do they worship me’ (verse 7a)? Would he tell us that we ‘abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition’ (verse 8), even ‘rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep [our] tradition’ (verse 9)?

So – the first thing we need to do is place tradition underneath Scripture. This means we soak ourselves in the Bible and then examine our traditions carefully in the light of the Gospel.

But I said there were two measures. It’s not enough only to place tradition below Scripture. Why? Because you will have come across those kinds of Christian who know their Bibles well but lob verses of Scriptures at others like hand grenades. You’ll know how people have been wounded by other Christians cutting them to shreds with the Bible. So while, for example, I hold a traditional Christian view that the only place for sexual relationships is in marriage and that marriage is between a man and a woman, I am also aware of the way homosexual people have been damaged by the church.

Our second measure, then, is this. Having placed tradition under Scripture we must then guard our hearts. Jesus, in quoting Isaiah, says it’s a matter of the heart:

This people honours me with their lips,
   but their hearts are far from me (verse 6b).

Where were the hearts of those who criticised Jesus and his disciples? Far from God. It’s the danger we face, too. If we do not stay close to God, then it doesn’t matter whether we are issuing edicts of tradition or firing bullets of Scripture, if we are not in close and vital contact with God, we’ll achieve nothing for the kingdom of God, however zealous we are. More likely we shall cause pain and put people off church, rather like the elderly people at the church I mentioned earlier whose actions have driven new converts away.

So how do we guard our hearts and draw near to God? I am reading a book called ‘Wrestling with God’ by an American pastor, James Emery White. On Friday, I read the chapter entitled ‘The Distance of God’ where he discusses many reasons why people may feel far from God. By no means all of them are our fault, but he asks some people, ‘What are you doing to stay close?’ and suggests some basic activities that will draw us closer to God:

  • Are you praying?
  • Are you spending time reading and reflecting on the Bible in order to apply it to your life?
  • Are you involved in worship?
  • Are you connecting with people whose relationship with God challenges and encourages your own?
  • Are you engaged in some kind of ministry to others?
  • Are you carving out time for spiritually oriented reflection?

    • If the answer to any of these queries is ‘no’, then there’s no wonder that God feels distant. Our relationship with God must be nurtured and developed. We can begin a spiritual life, but we must also develop it. God continues to ask the question, ‘Who is he who will devote himself to be close to me?’ (Jeremiah 30:21)[2]

Most or all of us are people who have begun a spiritual life, mostly many years ago. What is each one of us doing to develop it? We cannot be complacent. We cannot stand still – because we won’t remain where we are, we shall slide backwards, further away from God. There is great danger to our souls if we do not develop our spiritual lives. I have to challenge myself and say, just because I have followed certain spiritual practices for many years, am I still in a vital, living relationship with God, or have I drifted into stagnant water?

We are faced with a challenge, then: those who fail to nurture their spiritual lives become Pharisees. Not only do they waste away spiritually themselves, they hurt others by their harsh application of tradition.

On the other hand, those who do develop their life in the Spirit are disciples of Jesus. Feeding on Scripture and intentionally growing their relationship with God, they are like the image  in Psalm 1 of a tree by the water.

Which, then, are we: Pharisee or disciple? It’s our choice.

 

[1] David Instone-Brewer, ‘New Testament Scandals #9 Hypocrisy’, Christianity, September 2009, p52.

[2] James Emery White, Wrestling With God, p53.

2

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑