Tag: pride

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

Luke 14:1-14

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

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

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

At the beginning of our reading, we hear this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Firstly, the sick man:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Secondly, the wedding invitation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thirdly, the dinner invitation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

What will he see us do this week?

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

[ii] Op. cit., p547.

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

[iv] Philippians 2:7.

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Doubting Thomas Overcomes Barriers To Faith, John 20:19-31 (Easter 2 Low Sunday 2024)

John 20:19-31

I gained my first experience of leading worship and preaching in a youth preaching team in my home circuit. We took services in the churches of the circuit under the supervision of a Local Preacher.

One year, we were appointed to take a service on the Sunday after Easter. The Local Preacher, a woman by the name of Win, explained to us that this Sunday was traditionally called ‘Low Sunday.’

Why was that, we asked?

Because, she said, after all the joy and celebration of Easter Day, people needed to come down a bit.

Oh, said we mischievous teenagers: Hangover Sunday!

Now I am not sure that the intoxication of Easter Day has negative side-effects at all. It’s the beginning of the whole Easter season that lasts fifty days until Pentecost. We have seven weeks of celebration!

And our Gospel reading today occurs in the Lectionary every year on Low Sunday. So what to say this year?

Well, there is so much in the reading, and given that I have been preaching on mission before Easter and will go back to that after the Easter season, I am going to leave the first half of the reading where Jesus commissions the remaining apostles to go into the world like he did in the power of the Spirit bringing the forgiveness of sins.

That leaves the second half of the reading and our good friend Thomas. Come with me as we walk with him on a journey to deeper faith in the risen Lord.

Firstly, angry Thomas:

Angry? Yes – angry. Before we ever get onto the question of ‘doubting Thomas’ we need to consider his anger.

How so? Well, part of my preparation for this week has been my regular reading of a blog by an Anglican New Testament scholar, Ian Paul. In his reflections this week on today’s passage he tells a story about how he once took a primary school assembly where he asked the pupils who their heroes were, and then told them that he had actually met each of those heroes on his way to the school that morning. The youngsters grew increasingly sceptical.

But then he asked them how they would have felt if he actually had met their heroes on the way to the school and they hadn’t. A boy shot up his hand and said, ‘I would be very angry!’ Ian Paul reflects on this incident and the Thomas story in these words:

It was an amazing insight into the things that hold us back from believing, and anger at what has happened to us and the way life has turned out seems to me to be far more common than an actual lack of evidence, even if it is evidential language that we naturally reach for.

Thomas is angry at having missed out. The other disciples are annoyingly happy, and he hasn’t had that experience. We talk today about FOMO – Fear Of Missing Out – and that’s Thomas. He has missed out, and he’s mad.

And like Ian Paul says, our anger at certain events and circumstances in life can do more to inhibit faith than our intellectual questions. I’m sure you’ve come across people who have described an unspeakable tragedy in their lives and who are angry at God about it. I’m sure you’ve met people who can’t cope with the fact that other people have received blessings that they have longed for, but they haven’t.

I’m sure many of us know how unresolved anger burns up our soul like acid. If we bury the anger, it comes out like a Jack-in-the-box in other forms. Some (but by no means all) forms of depression can happen this way. Yet if we let the anger fester, we become bitter and twisted people.

But here’s the good news. The risen Jesus appears to angry Thomas. He shows him his wounds. The Lord himself has been through unjust suffering. If anyone had the right to be angry about their treatment, it was Jesus. Yet he meets Thomas in love.

If we are struggling with anger, we have a God who can handle it. His Son has been through the most unjust suffering the world has ever seen. He understands. And he has given us the Old Testament Psalms, where so many express questioning and anger towards God about the circumstances of life. God holds us in his arms while we beat upon his chest. And in the Resurrection, he begins the work of reversing injustice.

Secondly, doubting Thomas:

It’s still true that Thomas doubts. He says,

‘Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.’ (Verse 25b)

Although hear the anger in those words ‘I will not believe.’

And Jesus, after showing him his wounds, says,

‘Stop doubting and believe.’ (Verse 27b)

There are some mitigating factors here. Thomas was not alone in doubting. The male disciples generally also doubted the women’s testimony until they saw the empty tomb for themselves. I have often remarked that my late father thought Thomas has been unfairly singled out in history.

Now there are some who make a distinction between doubt and unbelief. The Christian writer Os Guinness says in his book on doubt that doubt is ‘faith in two minds’, whereas unbelief is a straight-out refusal to believe. Thomas seems to oscillate between the two.

But at least he is honest. He doesn’t play pretend. He doesn’t suppress his doubts and pretend to have more faith than he does.

However, ultimately, Jesus wants to bring him to a point of faith, a place of believing.

And what is faith? Contrary to what some of the ‘New Atheists’ say, it is emphatically not believing in something that you know to be untrue.

No. Faith is knowing enough in order to trust. When we have faith, we have enough evidence about Jesus and his Resurrection in order to trust him. We do not have complete knowledge, but we have enough to say, yes, we will entrust our lives to him.

We do this in other parts of life. The point at which I proposed to my then-girlfriend, now wife, was when I knew enough about her to trust her and believe that entering into life together would be a good enterprise. Of course, I will never know her fully: what man ever understands a woman like that?

As Jesus says to Thomas, most people will not get the benefit he does of a personal appearance to lead him to that place of faith. I did have a church member in my first appointment who had become a Christian when Jesus had appeared in a vision to her at the bottom of her bed one night, but for most of us, something like that doesn’t happen.

Instead, we have enough evidence about Jesus in order to trust him. We have the testimonies of the four Gospel writers. As John writes,

31 But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

We have good historical evidence for the Resurrection. I don’t have time to go into that now, ask me afterwards, but it’s good. We have the testimonies of our friends.

We may not know everything about Jesus. We may still have questions. We may wobble in our faith from time to time. But we have enough in order to stop our fundamental doubting and believe.

Thirdly and finally, humble Thomas:

28 Thomas said to him, ‘My Lord and my God!’

Now as an aside this is one of my favourite verses to quote to Jehovah’s Witnesses when they deny the deity of Jesus Christ. They try to say that Thomas is at this point addressing heaven, not Jesus, despite the fact that the context is a conversation between him and Jesus. That’s an amazing piece of grammatical gymnastics on their part.

But having said that, it struck me this week what a humble statement this is. After all his anger and doubt, Thomas responds to the evidence and the overtures of love from Jesus in the right way. Humility.

Not everybody does. I have heard of some atheists being asked, if you were given convincing evidence for God, would you then believe? Some still said, no, because they did not want to be answerable to anyone but themselves. Their problem was not intellectual but one of spiritual pride and rebellion.

Thomas has none of these. The right and proper response to Jesus is to bow in adoration and make an oath of allegiance to him. He doesn’t waste any time in doing the right thing.

For pride is another of the barriers to faith, but the gift of humility enables Thomas to respond to the mercy and love of Jesus. The only way we or anyone else find our way into the kingdom of God is by humbly receiving what God does for us in Christ.

I find that some of the people who have the worst problems with pride are intelligent, educated people. They point to surveys that show the higher you go up the scale of intellect, the less people believe in the existence of God. They draw the rather simple conclusion that more intelligent people think belief in God is not plausible, and therefore you should not.

But these people make a fatal mistake. They fail to see that our minds as much as any other part of our lives are affected by sin, and they have fallen victim to the temptation of pride, one of the key things that prevents belief in God. Beware that if you debate with an intellectual whose mind seems hardened against the idea of faith, pride may well be an issue.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not against intellectual endeavour. I have done post-graduate research at university and hold two Theology degrees. I believe Jesus when he said that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind and with all our strength.

But at the bottom line, I believe the only way to avail ourselves of God’s blessings in Christ is humility. It is to say, I cannot get to God by my own beliefs, merits, or actions. I can only hold out the empty hands of faith to receive. And when I do, I honour Jesus as my Lord and my God. What he says, goes.

Conclusion

I think we can say, then, that Thomas has shown us some of the major barriers to faith and how they are overcome.

We can bring our anger into the arms of the loving God who has embraced suffering and begun the work of destroying injustice.

We can bring our doubts to the testimony of Jesus and learn that he is trustworthy.

We can reject the pride in our own abilities that prevents us receiving from God and in humility receive his grace and mercy.

Let us remember these things in our own lives and also in our witness to people beyond the church that the risen Jesus is this world’s true Lord.

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Seven Churches 7: Laodicea (Revelation 3:14-22)

Revelation 3:14-22

Like a lot of men, I am not keen on going to the doctor. One time, several years ago, I forced myself to go because I was suffering from regular blinding headaches. The reason I didn’t want to go was that I feared bad news.

The first thing the GP did was put me at ease. He was quickly able to assure me that I didn’t have a brain tumour. He said, ‘Almost everyone who comes to me with bad headaches assumes they have a tumour, but the vast majority don’t.’

If men don’t like seeing the doctor, I venture to suggest as a parallel that many churches would rather not receive a diagnosis of their spiritual health from Jesus. In the case of the church at Laodicea, they are in for a shock when Doctor Jesus gives his diagnosis of their condition and prescribes treatment in our reading. Unlike a lot of men who fear they have a serious condition when they are more or less fine, the opposite is true of them. They think they are fine, but they are perilously ill.

Let’s remind ourselves of Jesus’ diagnosis. It’s devastating:

15 I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! 16 So, because you are lukewarm – neither hot nor cold – I am about to spit you out of my mouth. 17 You say, “I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.” But you do not realise that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.

We need to look separately at the problems of being lukewarm and being rich.

A lot of people misunderstand the criticism of lukewarmness. It is often said that to be hot is to be ‘on fire’, fiercely devoted to Jesus, and to be cold is to be hostile to him. Therefore in condemning lukewarmness, Jesus is saying either be totally for me or totally against me, both are preferable to being half-hearted. But why would Jesus want people to be against him? It makes no sense.

What does make sense is to put these images into the context of Laodicea itself. The nearby town of Hierapolis had hot springs which were used for healing and therapy. Nearby Colossae had cold water, which was used for cooling and refreshment. But Laodicea only had a lukewarm water supply, laden with minerals, which drinkers wanted to spit out.[1]

Applying this to the metaphor of hot, cold, and lukewarm water in our text, I think we are meant to understand that the Laodicean church’s so-called faith had no positive effect on anyone. They brought neither healing nor refreshment to those with whom they engaged. They were not a good news community. Nothing about them brought the transforming love of God in Christ into people’s lives for the better. Encountering them just left a bad taste in the mouth.

And as for their claim to be rich and self-sufficient, again this was something in which the Christians followed their city. Laodicea had been hit by earthquakes in AD 20 and again in AD 60. On the first occasion, they received imperial aid to rebuild. On the second occasion, they refused outside aid, saying they did not need it due to wealthy benefactors in the local farming community and a nearby centre of medicine.[2]

What does that sound like to you? Well, to me it sounds like pride. I don’t need any help thank you, I’ve got it all. In spiritual terms this is devastating to faith. In fact, it’s contrary to faith and kills faith. In the Gospel we are, as Jesus tells the Laodicean church, ‘wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked’. We need someone else. We need Jesus. We need the grace of God. And we need humility to ask for it. Pride stops us from receiving what God has for us.

And if they were full of themselves, full of pride, no wonder they were bad news for people they met. No wonder they left a bad taste.

It’s important for us to reflect humbly on where we are as a church in this respect. Are we a good news community? Is this a group of people where folk are being changed, bit by bit, so that they more beautifully reflect Jesus Christ to the world? Is this a society where the tired and weary find refreshment?

Alternatively, are we just a private club, maybe a bit harsh in tone, where rather than healing and refreshment people encounter judgmentalism and rejection? Which are we?

Because for any church that falls into the latter category, Jesus’ words, ‘I am about to spit you out of my mouth’ must be taken seriously. Did you realise that Jesus closes some churches? Not all – some churches that close have fought the good fight but run out of steam. But others, those like Laodicea, are ones that Jesus himself spits out of his mouth. He withdraws his blessing. He stops pouring out his Spirit. And these churches wither until they die.

These churches may be more familiar to you than you might think. How often have I heard people in some Methodist churches say, ‘I’m not interested in all that mission stuff, I just want this church to remain open to see me out and have my funeral.’ That is a statement of unutterable selfishness. It goes against the whole spirit of Jesus and his community. I think we can work out from today’s passage what Jesus does with a church like that.

Secondly, we need to reflect on Jesus’ prescription:

18 I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so that you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so that you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so that you can see.

19 Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest and repent. 20 Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.

I wonder whether you have childhood memories of being made to take vile-tasting medicine. For me, there was one dreaded medicine bottle in a kitchen cupboard. It was one that my grandmother, who lived with us, was fond of reaching for as some kind of cure-all panacea.

Kaolin and morphine. Or ‘Kaolin-morph’, as she called it. These days I shudder at the thought that pharmacies sold over the counter a medicine containing morphine for unrestricted use with children. In those days, all I knew was that it had the most disgusting taste.

I want to suggest to you that here Jesus has no alternative but to prescribe some fairly unpalatable medicine to the Laodicean church. But nothing other than a drastic turnaround will bring them out of their spiritual death.

So – gold refined in the fire: a Christian life that is costly and sometimes means suffering.

White clothes to cover nakedness: I think this is about a willingness to go against the popular culture. For the Greeks, public nakedness was celebrated. You may recall that the athletes in the original Olympic games participated naked. Even our word ‘gymnast’ derives from the Greek word for naked.[3] They had to be willing where necessary to go against popular culture, rather than think they could continue to fit in and just tack belief in Jesus on top of that.

Salve on their eyes so they could see – they were so spiritually blind that they needed to see again what was truly important to God.

No wonder Jesus talks about rebuke, discipline (or, perhaps better, instruction) and repentance. When a church is dying spiritually the solution is almost never the introduction of new methods and techniques. All they do is put new clothes on a corpse. Much more likely is a solution that entails taking some difficult medicine to get back on the right track, or submission to spiritual surgery.

There are many churches that need to stop asking, what quick fix can we apply that will turn us around, and instead ask, what pain are we willing to endure in order to become more Christlike?

The great tragedy of the church at Laodicea is expressed in verse 20:

20 Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.

That is not an evangelistic text. It is the description of a church that has shut Jesus out. And Jesus, who described himself to the previous church, Philadelphia, as one who could open doors, either cannot or will not open this door. He waits on the outside, where he has been exiled, until the Laodiceans welcome him back in.

We need to reflect on these matters from time to time. Have we just chosen the easy, comfortable life? Do we avoid the cost of discipleship by blending in with our wider culture? Have we lost sight of what is important to God?

Sure, there are times when churches decline because the wider culture has rejected the Christian Gospel. They struggle to get a hearing because of this. But at least they are trying to get a hearing.

Sadly, there are other churches that are uncomfortably like Laodicea, choosing the easy life and compromising with society. These churches face a hard choice, to know that the only way to spiritual life is the costly path of discipleship.

And maybe it’s the fact that the way of Jesus is a costly and at times painful route through life that puts us off and leads us to take the soft option. If that is the block, then let’s just take a step back and consider all Jesus has done for us. The universe was made through him. He left the glory of heaven for the poverty of the Incarnation. He was betrayed, falsely accused, tortured, and subjected to a cruel death. All this he did for us.

If he has done so much for us, what can we, his people, offer him in gratitude?

[1] Ian Paul, Revelation (TNTC), p113.

[2] Op. cit., p111.

[3] Op. cit., p116.

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