Tag: salvation

The Answer Should Be Jesus But It Sounds Like A Squirrel, Luke 13:10-17 (Ordinary 21 Year C)

Grey Squirrel

Luke 13:10-17

You’ve probably heard the story about the preacher who begins a children’s address by asking, ‘What’s grey, furry, has a tail, and runs up trees?’

After an embarrassed silence, one of the children says, ‘I know the answer should be Jesus, but it sounds like a squirrel to me.’

Grey Squirrel
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, CC Licence 3.0

The answer should be Jesus. Well, in today’s reading the answer definitely is Jesus. He is the central figure in the story. Everything revolves around his interactions with people and their responses to him.

Firstly, Jesus and the crippled woman:

There is widespread agreement that the physiological condition the woman was suffering from was ankylosing spondylitis, which is an arthritic condition affecting the vertebrae. It leads to curvature of the spine and an inability to flex the joints. The condition is well-known today – I’m sure you know or have seen people with it – and to this day is still incurable.

But what about all that ‘spirit’ and ‘Satan’ language attached to it? The NIV says the woman was ‘crippled by a spirit’ (verse 11), and other translations say, ‘a spirit of weakness.’ Then, when Jesus argues with the synagogue ruler, he says that Satan had kept her bound for the eighteen years she had had the condition (verse 16).

Ankylosing spondylitis
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, CC Licence 3.0

So is Jesus performing an exorcism here? Was the woman possessed? No. Luke doesn’t use that language. There is no ‘casting out’ or ‘delivering’. Jesus puts his hands on her (verse 13), which doesn’t usually happen in an exorcism.

What is this language, then? It is a recognition that the whole of creation is disordered due to sin. Not that the woman’s ill-health is a result of her personal sin, but that everything in creation is broken and needs healing and restoring. God’s mission in Jesus is to put the whole world to rights. It is why the mission of God’s kingdom that Jesus announces includes so many things: the forgiveness of sins, the healing of sickness, good news for the poor, releasing people from evil spirits, and so on.

It is therefore understandable that when the woman is healed, Jesus says to her, ‘Woman, you are set free from your infirmity’ (verse 12). No wonder she straightens up and praises God (verse 13).

Here we find the mission that the church is called to continue. If you want to know what we are about, it is this. We are called to set people free from all the brokenness in creation. We bring people to faith in Jesus through the forgiveness of their sins. We bring healing and restoration in every sense: physically, emotionally, relationally, socially, and spiritually. And all in the Name of Jesus.

We are not a religious social club, set up for us to enjoy the Sunday meetings, and perhaps the midweek ones too if we’re keen. We are not on mission just to fill church jobs so that the institution can continue.

We are here to proclaim the kingdom of God, where Jesus is on the throne, and his will is to be done on earth as it is in heaven.

We are here to proclaim that kingdom so that more people, like the crippled woman, will praise God as they experience this good news.

Or maybe you are here today as one of those who in one way or another has been crippled in the brokenness of our world. Then may it be that here in this community you find the Jesus who can straighten you and make you whole.

Secondly, Jesus and the synagogue leader:

When I went to my first appointment as a probationer minister, it wasn’t long before some people sidled up to me quietly and asked me rather hesitatingly a question that began with the words, ‘Do you drink?’ I thought the sentence would be completed with ‘Do you drink alcohol?’ but in fact it was ‘Do you drink tea?’ It turned out that not only was my predecessor teetotal, he also did not drink tea or coffee. Well, I say he was teetotal: there was one occasion when he accidentally and unknowingly ate trifle that had sherry in it and then asked for seconds.

Being teetotal was for many years an ‘identity marker’ for a high number of Methodists. If you knew one thing about Methodists, it was generally that they didn’t drink.

The dispute between Jesus and the synagogue leader is a power battle. It centres on two things. One is about identity markers to show who are truly God’s people. For in Jesus’ day, Sabbath observance was one such marker of a true Jew. The synagogue leader clearly thinks this is under threat, and so he accuses Jesus of breaking the Sabbath by healing the woman.

Shabbat (Sabbath)
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, CC Licence 2.5

But Jesus’ words and actions show that you have to go beyond wooden interpretations of the Scripture to find the true identity markers of God’s people. There is something wrong with coming up with an understanding of Scripture that prevents God’s people from doing good.

Jesus still believed in the Sabbath, but not in this crude, wooden way. If you asked him about an identity marker for God’s people, he would talk about loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and loving our neighbour as ourselves. The identity marker is that we love God and love people.

All of which means there is another battle going on here between Jesus and the synagogue leader. It’s about who is the authoritative interpreter of Holy Scripture. Jesus exposes the hypocrisy of someone who is happy to see animals set free from their tethering on the Sabbath, but who is not happy to see a woman set free from infirmity to take her full place among the People of God at worship again.

It’s worth asking what our identity markers are, and how we have interpreted the Bible to come to those conclusions. What are we known for, and why? Are we known as hypocrites, or as people who love?

The Christian church has a particular problem with this in our society, not least due to all the sex abuse scandals. Only this last week we’ve seen the conviction of Chris Brain, the former leader of the Nine O’Clock Service in Sheffield. Most men outside the church think that clergy are either child sex abusers or ripping off the flock financially.

It’s an urgent task for us as Christians to make sure we are known as those who love God and love people. How are we doing that? How are we going to do that? It’s why I often encourage church members to pray a simple prayer each day: ‘Lord, who can I bless today?’

But that prayer is also worth extending corporately to the church. What if we asked together at our committees and other meetings, ‘Who can we bless as a church?’

Let’s make sure we share the same identity markers of God’s People as those Jesus advocated: loving God and loving people.

Thirdly and finally, Jesus and the congregation:

When he said this, all his opponents were humiliated, but the people were delighted with all the wonderful things he was doing. (Verse 17)

The crowd is on their feet, cheering. ‘Go, Jesus!’ It’s like he’s scored a goal and the stadium has erupted.

What does it mean for us today to take delight in the wonderful things Jesus does? It is about more than being the Jesus Fan Club. We are the supporters of Jesus, I suppose, but we are more than that.

When we take delight in the wonderful things Jesus does, we erupt in praise and worship. The best hymns and songs of worship are those that describe the amazing things God has done in Christ. It’s like the disciples on the day of Pentecost, when the assembled crowd of many nations observes, ‘We hear them declaring the mighty deeds of God in our own tongues.’

Courtesy StockCake, CC Licence 1.0 (Public Domain)

Declaring the mighty deeds of God. That is the Christian calling in a nutshell. Declaring the mighty deeds of God is both praise and mission. In worship, we tell God of our delight in his marvellous works. In mission, we declare those works to the world.

Let us dwell on the wonderful things Jesus has done and is doing. Let us rejoice in what he did two thousand years ago, from healing a crippled woman to dying on the Cross for our sins. Let us also rejoice in what he is still doing today. Who here knows that Jesus has done something special for them? Have you shared it with any of your church family here?

I am sure there will be some of you here today who know that in the last seven days since we gathered together for worship, Jesus has done something for you. It might be big, it might be small. If you haven’t already told someone since arriving this morning, then I encourage you to mention it as you chat with your friends over tea and coffee after the service.

Don’t be shy about this! We are family. We accept one another. We love to hear each other’s good news. And what could be better than to talk about the work of God in our lives and celebrate together.

Why do this? Well, for one thing it has an effect upon the atmosphere here. Imagine what it would be like for a stranger or a newcomer to walk into a community that was full of joy because of what God has done.

For another, if we know God has done something for us then that can be an encouragement to others. There will be people among us who are struggling or discouraged, and for whom it could be a tonic to hear that God has not retired but is still active.

Further, talking together about our delight in what Jesus has done is good practice for those times when we take a bit of courage to tell our friends and family outside the church about our faith.

And most important of all, should not God receive the glory due to his Name for all his amazing works?

I love the story in the Old Testament where the Temple is dedicated, and the cloud of God’s glory comes in such overwhelming power that the priests cannot even remain standing to do their duties. What would it be like if our joy and thanksgiving for the work of God were so tangible that a visitor would spontaneously say, ‘Truly God is among you?’

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I’m A Lifelong Methodist – So What? Wesley Day (a day late!) Romans 5:1-11

Romans 5:1-11

Sometimes, when I arrive at a church for the first time, a person will approach me and introduce themselves. In the middle of their greeting, they will tell me, ‘I’m a lifelong Methodist.’ Their clear assumption is that I will be impressed.

More often than not, though, my heart sinks.

And I say that as someone who is also a life-long Methodist.

Because what they tend to mean is something like this. They love the hymns, the style of worship, the variety of preachers from week to week, and so on.

But I don’t want to know whether you like those things. I want to know – if you like Charles Wesley’s hymns, do you have the very experience of God in your life that Wesley wrote about and that his elder brother John preached about? If all you like are the hymns, you may have Methodist style but you don’t have Methodist substance.

And substance is what matters.

In my first circuit as a minister, some people tried to divide the church over the question of music in worship. Some members wanted us to introduce more contemporary worship songs and hymns alongside the traditional material. But some of the ‘lifelong Methodist’ contingent wouldn’t have it.

The tragedy was that those who wanted to add the contemporary to what we already had still loved the Wesley hymns. But they loved them not for the poetry or the melodies (many of which come from after the Wesleys’ time anyway!). No: they loved them, because they had the experience of the Holy Spirit that Charles Wesley described in those hymns. They had the substance. The critics just had the style.

And so since yesterday was the anniversary of John Wesley’s profound experience of faith and assurance in Christ through the Holy Spirit warming his heart at an address in the Barbican, I thought we should take today to examine whether we too have that knowledge of hearts being strangely warmed by the redeeming work of God.

The way I’m going to do this is by summarising Wesleyan beliefs under what have been called ‘The Four ‘Alls’ of Methodism’. Each of the four ‘All’ statements pertains to salvation.

And the first ‘All’ is that All need to be saved.

When John Wesley preached in the open air to the crowds, he used to say that first of all he preached ‘Law’ and then he preached ‘Grace.’ He spoke first about God’s law, to show God’s standards for life and to make it clear that we all fail to reach those standards. The word most commonly translated ‘sin’ in the New Testament means ‘to miss the mark.’ As Romans 3:23 famously puts it,

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

We have failed. We need grace.

If you grow up in the church, you can easily miss this. I did. I grew up hearing people being asked whether they were Christians and answering, ‘I’m trying to be a Christian.’ This communicated to me that Christianity could be summed up like a simple mathematical equation: Christianity equals believing in God plus doing good.

I was so wrong.

My mother even bought me a book that was a popular exposition of Romans, showing that faith, rather than good works, led to salvation. I tossed it aside as rubbish.

It was only when I went to series of church membership classes with members of the church youth group, that things clicked – and only then at the final session, when we looked at the service for the reception of new members. There were three promises and professions of faith the candidates had to make. Do you repent of your sins? Do you trust in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour? Will you obey Christ and serve him in the world?

The penny dropped, at last.

Just as John Wesley had tried to live a methodical, holy life but was riddled with fear until his heart was strangely warmed, so God intervened through the words of that liturgy and I found myself responding.

It doesn’t matter how good and how respectable our lives and upbringings are. Each one of us is a sinner. We fail God’s standards. We need to be saved.

The second ‘All’ is that All can be saved.

The person who urged John Wesley to preach in the open air, first of all to colliers at Kingswood near Bath, was George Whitefield. While Whitefield was generally reckoned to be a better preacher than Wesley, they sharply differed on one issue. Whitefield, as a Calvinist, believed that Jesus only died for the ‘elect.’ That is, God had predestined some people to be saved and others to be damned.

Wesley disagreed. He did not believe that all people would be saved, but he did believe that all people could be saved. Therefore, the Gospel should be shared with as many as possible, so that people might have the opportunity of responding and receiving salvation from God by grace through faith thanks to the death and resurrection of Jesus.

While this debate still exists in parts of the Christian world, Wesley set the direction of travel very clearly for the Methodist movement. All can be saved, and that means sharing the Gospel is a priority. Sadly, I’m not sure you would guess that from the behaviours and priorities of many Methodist congregations today, but if you say you are a traditional Methodist, then this is in your spiritual DNA. It is not the only part of mission, but it is a key part.

Today, in other ways, there are people who think they can’t be saved. They’ve been too bad. They’ve been so damaged they can’t recognise goodness and grace when it is offered to them. Perhaps it’s expressed in words from the rock band Coldplay in a song of theirs called ‘Viva La Vida’:

For some reason I can’t explain
I know Saint Peter won’t call my name[1]

While the song is about a king who has lost his kingdom, it’s poignant to hear those words sung by Chris Martin, who grew up in a Christian family in Devon.

But it is our privilege to make it known to people that none of them need say, I can’t be saved. The love of God is on offer to all. It simply requires a response of opening out empty hands in faith to receive his gift.

The third ‘All’ is that All can know they are saved.

This is what we call the Christian doctrine of assurance. It is that we can be assured of having saving faith.

Various strands of Christianity had advanced ideas of how believers could know their eternal destiny for certain. At the more Catholic end,  it was simply by receiving the sacraments of the Church, but not all found that convincing. What if an unrepentant scoundrel took the sacraments? Tragically, this left many Catholics uncertain of God’s grace and love.

In the Reformation, Calvinists said you could know from the promises of God in Scripture. However, even those who were supposedly reprobates, not part of the elect, could also read Scripture. So some later Calvinists looked in the Bible for signs of God’s blessing upon people. Unfortunately, they landed on things such as those who received material wealth in the Old Testament. We see the legacy of this mistake even today in the so-called ‘Prosperity Gospel’, which really is no Gospel at all.

Wesley certainly had a place for believing in the promises of Scripture, and he also believed that the sacraments had power. But he added something else: the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. It’s there in Romans 5, which we read (one of Wesley’s favourite passages, by the way):

hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (Verse 5)

To those who, as in the title of the song recorded by both Dusty Springfield and David Cassidy, asked, ‘How can I be sure?’, Wesley answered that as well as receiving comfort from the presence of Christ at the sacraments and applying the promises of God in Scripture, you could know and feel the assuring work within you by the Holy Spirit.

It was what he had experienced at Aldersgate Street in the Barbican, when he said that his heart was strangely warmed and he felt he did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation.

It was what Charles wrote about in ‘O for a thousand tongues’ in the climactic verse:

In Christ, our Head, you then shall know,
shall feel your sins forgiven,
anticipate your heaven below,
and own that love is heaven.[2]

This is all part of the Good News. God doesn’t want you to be in any doubt of his saving love for you.

The fourth and final ‘All’ is that All can be saved to the uttermost.

This is John Wesley’s controversial doctrine of Christian Perfection. Wesley based it on texts such as the words of Jesus:

Be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect. (Matthew 5:48)

Even Wesley realised there were problems with this view. He said it wasn’t so much as believing you could get to a point of not sinning at all as about not knowingly engaging in any conscious sin. He also was clear that he didn’t classify himself as perfect, and that he only in his lifetime ever knew one or two people whom he could call perfect, even by his own revised definition.

Furthermore, it is a debatable understanding of the words of Jesus. For the word translated ‘perfect’ might not mean ‘morally perfect.’ It might mean ‘mature.’

So how do we take this? I found some words of my college Principal about this helpful. He said that behind this controversial teaching of Wesley’s was what he called ‘an optimism of grace.’ And I think that’s a good lesson for us. We should always be optimistic about what God by his grace can accomplish in our lives and in the lives of others.

This means advancing in holiness, both in our private lives and in social dimensions. For this, we need the ongoing sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit – something to remember when Pentecost comes up in a couple of weeks.

And to achieve this, Wesley set up his famous small groups so that members could hold each other accountable for growing in grace and supporting one another. George Whitefield, whom I mentioned earlier, realised that this was Wesley’s genius: he organised converts into small groups for their spiritual growth. Whitefield didn’t, and in contrast, many of his converts didn’t stick: he sadly described them as ‘a rope of sand.’

To be a traditional Methodist, then, means having a holy dissatisfaction with our lives, but also a great hope in God’s grace to transform us, and a commitment to small-group relationships that will help us in that growth.

Conclusion

So – if you say you are a lifelong or traditional Methodist – are these things your knowledge and experience? And I ask the same question if you have been attracted to Methodism in mid-life.

Do you know your need to be saved?

Do you know you can be saved?

Do you have assurance that you have been saved?

And is God saving you more and more, even one day to the uttermost?

[1] Songwriters: Christopher A. J. Martin, Guy Rupert Berryman, Jonathan Mark Buckland, William Champion; lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

[2] Charles Wesley (1707-1788), italics mine.

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Paul’s Favourite Church 6: Gotta Serve Somebody (Philippians 3:15-21)

Philippians 3:15-21

What do you think the Apostle Paul’s musical taste was? If he were alive in our generation, I would put him down as a likely Bob Dylan fan. Because today’s passage fits very well with his song ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’:

It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody, he sings. And there appear to be those same two stark choices in life laid out in Philippians 3. On the one hand we have

18 For, as I have often told you before and now tell you again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. 19 Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things.

And on the other we have

20 But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21 who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.

A nice, simple binary choice.

Or if you don’t like Bob Dylan, then maybe you’ll take someone I’ve quoted before, St Augustine of Hippo, who said that the key to our lives is not our thinking but our affections. Who or what are we devoted to? The great Augustinian scholar James K A Smith puts it like this: ‘You Are What You Love.’ He says there is spiritual power in what we devote ourselves to habitually.

So Paul asks us here: who are we going to serve? Who or what will have our love and devotion?

Let’s hear Option One again:

18 For, as I have often told you before and now tell you again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. 19 Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things.

At the end of every week, the BBC News website has a fun quiz on the week’s news with seven questions. This week’s finished with a question about the theft of luxury cheese from the famous Neal’s Yard Dairy in London, and the final screen, which told you how many answers you got right assigned you a famous quotation about cheese accordingly.

For those who got all seven right, the quotation was from the comedian Steven Wright: “The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.” Those like me who scored between four and six were assigned words by the French man of letters Eugène Briffault: “Cheese complements a good meal and supplements a bad one.” Those who scored between zero and three had a Spanish proverb: “I don’t want the cheese. I just want to get out of the trap.”

“I don’t want the cheese. I just want to get out of the trap.”

The problem for many of us is that metaphorically we do want the cheese while still getting out of the trap. To change the food proverb, we want to have our cake and eat it.

For having taken God out of the picture, all we are left with is devotion to our senses: ‘their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame.’ We place a priority on satisfying our bodily desires – not that food is unnecessary, but that we elevate things like that above the level of necessity and staple, because without God to satisfy our deepest needs we turn to lesser things to gratify ourselves. They become ends in themselves.

And perhaps it’s not surprising that in a world like Paul’s that was full of temple prostitution he says ‘their glory is in their shame.’ A good and beautiful gift of God is turned into something that is only about personal pleasure. Thus today, sex is no longer the sign of the covenant between a man and a woman for life, now it is something we purely do for our own pleasure, just so long as the other person consents. We have so detached it from the covenant of marriage that we now have ‘friends with benefits’, where two people, usually single, agree that if one of them needs their urges fulfilling, the other one will oblige, just so long as they don’t become romantically attached.

This is the world of Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former adviser, who infamously said, ‘We don’t do God.’ Campbell may have only meant that in in the context of politics, but in a culture where we generally don’t do God then people seek satisfaction elsewhere in merely human things. ‘Their mind is set on earthly things.’ That’s all you can focus on then. Our sensual desires are a natural avenue in such circumstances.

And as Paul says, that’s disastrous: ‘Their destiny is destruction.’ When the ultimate reality is actually God and not our own senses, but we put him out of the picture and devote our affections purely to our own sensory desires, then there can only be one end result. If God is going to make all things new but we are just interested in our physical satisfaction now, then there can be no place for us in eternity. It’s that bleak, and that logical.

So now let’s restate Option Two:

20 But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21 who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.

Here’s where we place our devotion. Here’s where we set our affections as Christians. We look to Christ and to eternity. We gratefully acknowledge that Jesus knows all about the frailties and weaknesses of our bodies and he will make them new in the resurrection of the dead. Instead of loving the creation, we love the One who is the Creator and the Re-Creator of all he has made. To worship the creation is to set our hearts on an idol; to worship the Creator gives us proper focus and perspective.

Our guiding principle for living becomes that of Jesus’ teaching and considering eternity: what will the creation be like when it is made new? I do not know how our bodies will be sustained in eternity, but I do know Jesus refers to feasting in the life to come. I will leave the details to him. In the meantime, I will seek to look after my body because he made it, but that body will not be my focus, Jesus will.

And in contrast to our society’s obsession with sex, I will remember Jesus’ eternal perspective that there will no longer be marrying and giving in marriage in the age to come. For since death will have been abolished, we shall no longer need to replace those who have died.

More generally, if Jesus has ‘the power that enables him to bring everything under his control’, then my goal will be to place my life under his control. What he says matters, because in his life he showed us what a life under his control looks like.

If you ‘gotta serve somebody’ and you choose the Lord, it looks something like this, says Paul.

But here’s the problem. We know all this. I daresay we aspire to all this. But what about the times when we succumb to ‘Option One’ living instead of this ‘Option Two’? How about the occasions when we allow our sensory desires to dictate our actions, rather than Christ, eternity, and the new creation? Are we no better than anyone else? Are we condemned? Do we lose our salvation?

In response I’m going to follow material from a recent article by Dr Jason Swan Clark, a former church leader and college principal who is now moving into the area of spiritual direction. This is how he talks about his conversion when he was a young man:

As I consider my faith, I am grateful that the youth leader who led me to Christ invited me to follow Jesus and exchange my life, plans, and past for one where “I would have something to live for, die for, meaning, adventure and purpose, every day of my life”. My sin has always worked against that salvation story and sought to create an anti-story. To repent means to realise how my sin has disordered me and moved me away from my story with God and to return to my adventure in Christ. 

He says that for us, sin is like what we do when we are asleep and don’t want to wake up. Confession is to wake up – to the truth. And here’s how he describes sin:

The greatest lie of the enemy is that I am free to create myself into any image I want to and, even worse, expect God to comply with my directions to him about my self-creations.

God wakes us up to our true identity and destiny. The Good News is this:

God is very aware of our past sins, but what if his principal interest in them was how they stop us from discovering and living into and out of who he made us to be? God loves us into being and wants us to be free from how Sin forms us away from Him. God meets us within this at our affective and psychological levels.

Note that: ‘God meets us at our affective … levels’ – our affections and loves, the very things I set out at the beginning. He knows our affections are truly for him, but that we have let our desires become disordered, and he describes confession and forgiveness by recounting some words from St Thérèse of Lisieux, the famous nineteenth century Carmelite nun who died from tuberculosis at the age of just twenty-four. She wrote these to a priest:

I picture a father who has two children, mischievous and disobedient, and when he comes to punish them, he sees one of them who trembles and gets away from him in terror, having, however, in the bottom of his heart the feeling that he deserves to be punished; and his brother, on the contrary, throws himself into his father’s arms, saying that he is sorry for having caused him any trouble, that he loves him, and to prove it he will be good from now on, and if this child asked his father to punish him with a kiss, I do not believe that the heart of the happy father could resist the filial confidence of his child, whose sincerity and love he knows.  He realizes, however, that more than once his son will fall into the same faults, but he is prepared to pardon him always, if his son always takes him by the heart.

Here is God’s discipline of those who fail but truly want to serve him: he punishes us … with a kiss.

So when we are faced with the fact that we ‘gotta serve somebody’, let us not choose the indulgence of our senses by not ‘doing God’; let us place our affections and desires on Jesus Christ, keeping our vision on his coming new creation, and knowing that when we fail him he will restore us with a kiss.

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The Dangers of Going Soft on Commitment to Jesus, John 6:56-69 (Ordinary 21 Year B)

John 6:56-69
I want to paint a picture in your minds of a different story about Jesus from the one we heard in the reading. I want you to imagine the encounter Jesus had with the person we call ‘The rich young ruler.’
You will remember how this young man came to Jesus and asked him what he had to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus replies by listing a number of the commandments.

The young man responds by saying, ‘Teacher, I’ve kept all of these commandments since birth’ – which is an amazing claim, if you think about it.

‘One thing you lack,’ says Jesus. ‘Sell all your possessions and give the proceeds to the poor.’

‘Rabbi,’ replies the young man, ‘I can’t do that. What about I give ten per cent to the poor?’

Jesus answers, ‘OK, it’s a deal. Come, follow me.’

What’s wrong with this picture?

I think you know. In the original story, Jesus doesn’t negotiate with the young man. He doesn’t compromise his call. He doesn’t water down the cost of commitment. He doesn’t soften the hard edges of discipleship.

In today’s reading we don’t have an individual who is rubbed up the wrong way by Jesus’ demands, we have a whole crowd that does.

60 On hearing it, many of his disciples said, ‘This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?’

And just as with the rich young ruler, Jesus refuses to give an inch.

This is an important lesson for us. The Christian church is faced with many people who say, we can’t believe what you teach, or we can’t accept the morality of the Bible. We are tempted to dilute the challenge of following Jesus to keep these folk.

But I fear that, unlike Jesus, we give in to that temptation to strike a bargain with people. Jesus held firm, but then saw many of his disciples walk away:

66 From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.

We, on the other hand, know that people are leaving the church or having nothing to do with it in the first place, and in the face of our declining and aging numbers succumb easily to the temptation to relax the demands of Jesus, or reinterpret them in a way that we think will be more palatable for today’s society.

Now of course there are areas where the church needs to self-correct. There are too many stories of where we have been cruel or uncaring to people, most shamefully perhaps in our failures to protect children. There are also places where we need to understand the teaching of Jesus in its original context to make sense of it.

But at the heart of our message, it is a catastrophic mistake to weaken our claims about who Jesus is and what Jesus teaches. I want to explore those two areas with you today and show why it’s vital that we hold firm on the Person of Jesus and the teaching of Jesus.

Firstly, then, the Person of Jesus.
In this passage, Jesus claims to come from the Father (verse 57) and the true bread that comes from heaven (verse 58). He also says he will ascend back to where he came from (verse 62). He’s pretty much making divine claims here, just as he did earlier in the chapter when he said, ‘I am the Bread of life’, where ‘I am’ is not simply the beginning of a sentence but the claiming of a divine name from the Old Testament.

The crowd doesn’t like this claim. As good Jews, they have problems with it. Jesus hears them grumbling and he knows they are offended (verse 61). But he doesn’t budge an inch.

Why? Because Jesus knows who he is, and he knows that unless he is fully divine as well as fully human, he cannot bridge the gap between heaven and sinful humanity and so save us. For as Lord of all he has the authority to forgive, and as a human being he identifies with us in our plight. So, however difficult it is to understand Jesus as having both divine and human natures, it is a doctrine we cannot row back on.

Where might that be important today? Where might we be tempted to dial down the claims of Jesus? I would suggest that one area is in our conversations with our Muslim friends. I have heard Christians say, ‘We are more similar to Muslims than we thought. Isn’t it good that they recognise Jesus as a prophet?’
But if Jesus is only a prophet, he can’t save us, because he isn’t fully divine. We may think it’s well-meaning from our Muslim friends, but it doesn’t help.

At its root, you will probably know that Muslims reject the idea that Jesus died on the Cross, and they say that it would be beneath the dignity of  a prophet, let alone the Son of God, to die in such a way. Immediately, that cuts out God’s chosen means of salvation.

And this is linked with Muhammad rejecting the doctrine of the Trinity, almost certainly because rather than coming into contact with people who believed in the Trinity, he encountered tribes that believed in three gods.

Of course, we should be kind and loving to our Muslim neighbours. We should have respectful conversations. But what we cannot do is agree with them about who Jesus is.

Ultimately, it’s not that different from the way many people from a western culture say that Jesus was a good man, but no more. However, it’s now many decades since CS Lewis made his famous rejoinder to that position. He said that when you look at the claims Jesus made about himself, either he was exactly who he said he was, or he was being deceitful, or he was deluded. The choice, he said, was between Jesus being Lord, liar, or lunatic. ‘Good man’ is not on the table.

So the first thing I want us to acknowledge today is we need to hold fast to the classical Christian beliefs about who Jesus is. If we move away from them, then salvation itself is at stake.

Secondly, the Teaching of Jesus.
Again, let’s begin by collecting some data from the passage.

Jesus says that people need to eat his flesh and drink his blood to be in relationship with him (verse 56). This isn’t a reference to the Lord’s Supper: there are no allusions to that in John 6: there is no wine, there is no eating and drinking in remembrance of Jesus, and so on. This language is about believing in Jesus and taking his life and words into themselves. The same thing occurs in the next verse where Jesus talks about people feeding on him.

Furthermore, Jesus then says he has spoken words that are full of Spirit and life (verse 63) and when Simon Peter rejects the idea of leaving him, he tells Jesus he has the ‘words of eternal life’ (verse 68).
It is clear, then, that Jesus is telling us that his teaching has divine authority. And if that’s the case, then we’d better not mess with it.

I did say in the introduction to the sermon that there are times of course when we need to be careful how we interpret the teaching of Jesus, because he gave it in a different time and culture, and we need to understand that background in order to make sense of it. Sometimes he does something typically Jewish and uses extreme language – we would call it ‘hyperbolic’ – to make a point. It’s like drawing a cartoon of someone in which their features are shown in an exaggerated way to make a point. Perhaps that includes examples such as when he said we should pull out our eyes or cut off our hands if doing so would prevent us from sinning.

But for all those important caveats, my experience is that Christians of all sorts of persuasions have their ways of trying to neuter the teaching of Jesus. And that’s dangerous, because we are called to be his disciples – that is, his apprentices, or students. To be a disciple is to come under his teaching and be formed by it.

So some right-wing Christians will do somersaults around Jesus’ teaching on money and concern for the poor, and come up with the heresy that we call ‘The Prosperity Gospel’, where wealth is taken to be a sure indication of divine blessing.

And left-wing Christians will do all they can to dance around Jesus’ plain teaching about sexual ethics, to justify relationships outside marriage.

In sum, many of us in the church, across varying social and spiritual persuasions, will find an aspect of Jesus’ teaching that we don’t like and we will look for a route to get around it and avoid it. Sometimes we do that, because it’s an element of Jesus’ teaching that we personally find uncomfortable. On other occasions we do it, because we are afraid that people will reject faith in Christ because of it.

But whatever our motive, this is dangerous. It is a delusion to invite someone to follow Jesus when we are going to alter his teaching to make it more palatable. For then we are not actually following him at all.

Believe you me, there are many parts of Jesus’ teaching that I wish were not there. I feel at times like Mark Twain, who once said that it was not the parts of Jesus’ words that he didn’t understand that troubled him, it was the parts that he did understand that gave him problems. I wonder if any of you share that feeling.

Conclusion
So what are we going to do? It’s not nice seeing people walk away from Jesus and his church, is it? I even get the feeling that Jesus was upset by it. At least, that’s the feeling I draw from verse 67 where he asks the Twelve, ‘You do not want to leave too, do you?’

Now if people are walking away because we haven’t been good ambassadors for Christ, then we have something serious to correct in our life of faith together.

But if they are leaving because they reject who Jesus is or what he teaches, then we need to learn to let them, however painful that feels. For them to stay and follow a false Jesus and distortions of his teaching is no good to anyone. It doesn’t save them at all.

I believe the challenge of this passage for us is to recommit ourselves to presenting a full-blooded Jesus and unvarnished accounts of his teaching to the world.
For we can trust the Father to draw people to Jesus, and we can pray for people to respond to that call.
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Mission in the Bible 10: A Beautiful Act at the Beautiful Gate (Acts 3:1-26)

Acts 3:1-26

A retired minister friend of mine loves posting puns and one-liner jokes on Facebook. I’m sure he gets some from the comedian Tim Vine. Here are a few of his recent ones:

People say smoking will give you diseases…But how can they say that when it cures salmon?

A slice of apple pie is £2.50 in Jamaica and £3 in the Bahamas…There are the pie rates of the Caribbean.

The other day I bought a thesaurus, but when I got home and opened it, all the pages were blank…I have no words to describe how angry I am.

My friend said: “You have a BA, a Masters and a PhD, but you still act like an idiot…” It was a third degree burn.

My girlfriend said: “You act like a detective too much. I want to split up…” “Good idea,” I replied. “That way we can cover more ground.”

Why start this sermon with a series of puns? Because the episode we’ve read from Acts chapter 3 is like an extended pun. Is the story about healing or about salvation? A man is healed, but then Peter calls the crowd to repentance and faith in Jesus as a result. Which is it: healing or salvation?

We shall find the pun made more explicit in the next chapter when Peter, under interrogation, says that salvation is found in no other name than that of Jesus. Except the word translated ‘salvation’ can also be translated – guess what? – ‘healing.’

And the breadth of what is covered in our story today shows us something of God’s big story of redemption, the story we are called to share in as part of his mission. God’s kingdom is breaking in, making all things new, and in Acts chapter 3 we see some examples of that. We won’t cover everything, but there are some pointers to the comprehensiveness of God’s renewing work in Christ.

So firstly, salvation is physical:

This is straightforward in the text: the lame man is healed. There is something innately physical and material about the Christian faith. It begins with creation. It involves a Saviour who heals and feeds people. It turns on the bodily resurrection of that Saviour. Its goal is a new creation, with new heavens and a new earth.

So no wonder salvation expresses itself in physical terms, such as a healing here. God cares about all that he has made. That’s why you’ll hear me saying from time to time that at the time of a death or a funeral the popularly expressed idea that the body was just a shell for the soul and it’s only the soul that matters is an unchristian thought.

If we are going to witness to God’s salvation, one thing we are going to do is engage with their physical well-being and where that needs improvement.

Should we pray for the gift of healing and pray for people to be healed? Yes, why not? But let’s not be limited to that. There are all sorts of things we can do. This is why it’s right that Christians get involved with food banks, and it’s significant that the biggest food bank organisation in the UK, the Trussell Trust, has a Christian foundation. At the same time, it’s also right that we ask the awkward questions about what kind of nation we have become where so many people depend on food banks.

It’s why it’s right that we get involved in issues like disaster relief, be it earthquakes, famines, wars, or any other cause. And when we do so, we seek not only to bring short-term alleviation but also long-term solutions to prevent recurrences where we can.

It’s why it’s right that we get involved in combating climate change – although I prefer the more positive description of ‘creation care.’ We don’t simply do this because we need to save on our energy bills, important as that is. We do it because this is God’s creation that has been damaged and that he intends to make new again. So when this Methodist circuit starts making plans to support churches in making their buildings ‘greener’ (and the ministers’ manses, too!) then I say that’s a proper expression of our belief that salvation is physical.

There will be many other examples we can think of together that illustrate this point, but it all begins with recognising that in the six-day creation story of Genesis chapter 1, God kept looking at all that he had made and saying that it was good. We can no longer say that everything in creation is good, but we can set about partnering with God, following the example of Jesus, in bringing physical healing and restoration to his world.

Secondly, salvation is economic:

The lame man begs for money. There is no Social Security for a disabled person in this society. Yet while Peter and John say they have no silver or gold and do not give him any money, what they do lifts him out of poverty. Once he is healed, he will no longer need to beg. He will be able to work for a living.

In a way, it’s similar to when Jesus raised from the dead the son of the widow at Nain. She too would have had no fallback financially, and would have depended on her son to work for economic survival. His death would have plunged her into a spiral of poverty that could have left her starving to death. Jesus’ miracle has an economic effect for good on her.

And this is why it’s right that as part of God’s mission we in the church get involved in issues of poverty – both alleviating it and also asking the questions about why people are poor and what can be done in our society in the long term to guard against it.

Now that doesn’t mean I’m going to break my promise and give some steer on which party I think people should vote for at the General Election next month. I will remain publicly neutral on that. And I recognise that the economic situation will be challenging for whoever is in Downing Street. I would rather pose the question as a Baptist minister friend of mine couched it the other day. He wrote:

I would hope that every candidate standing for parliament in the upcoming General Election would ask themselves the question, ‘Why am I standing as a candidate in this election?’ Are they standing in order to genuinely benefit all the people in the communities they are seeking to represent… or do they have another agenda entirely? Agendas driven primarily by party politics or personal opinion rather than the good of the people?

If we want to participate as voters in this election in a Christian way, I think that is a good part of what we need to do, especially since so much of the debate is about our nation’s economy. Which candidates and which leaders have the good of the people at the heart of what they are aiming to do?

But we don’t just consider economic well-being at election time. Jesus puts it before us all the time. Blessèd are the poor, he said. Woe to the rich. Those statements are not entirely straightforward but they are still challenging. Who are we blessing economically? We need to ponder that prayerfully.

Thirdly and finally, salvation is spiritual:

Repentance and faith are central themes in the reading. The man walks and jumps, praising God – in the Temple, of all places! He’s not worried about decorum, he is so thrilled with what Jesus has done for him.

And when the crowd gathers in curiosity and amazement, Peter calls them to repentance. You were happy to get Jesus crucified, he says, but God has shown how much in the wrong you are by raising Jesus from the dead. Jesus is in the right, you are in the wrong. What are you going to do about it? He is the promised prophet, and it’s only by repentance and faith in him that you will be blessed.

Central to the whole renewal of creation is renewing the relationship between human beings and God, which is then meant to lead to changed lives. So we cannot remain silent about calling people to faith in Jesus. There may be issues about when and how we do it, but it’s the churches that are the most silent on this issue that are the fastest declining and aging.

Yes, we get nervous about this. And you know what? So do I. And sure, we don’t want a reputation as Bible-bashers, but neither can we be ashamed of the Gospel. Are we more concerned with what our friends think of us than what Jesus thinks of us? Sometimes I think that’s true.

There is an Old Testament story that I find illuminating in showing us the attitude we need to have here. In 2 Kings 7 God’s people are under siege from the Aramean army. They are gripped by famine, and thus the prices of scarce food are sky-rocketing.

A group of four lepers decides that if they do nothing they will die anyway, so they might as well go and surrender to the Arameans. If they are killed, well, they were going to die anyway. But maybe they will live.

When they go to the enemy camp, they discover that God had miraculously frightened them away in the night. They help themselves to food and drink, gold and silver, and clothing.

But then they say that this is a day of good news, and they cannot keep it to themselves. So they go into the city and tell others.

And it is from this story that the Sri Lankan evangelist D T Niles came up with his famous definition of evangelism. He said,

Evangelism is one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.

That’s what we’re being called to do. We are just beggars who have discovered the Bread of Life. Jesus has satisfied our spiritual hunger, and we believe he will do the same for our friends.

And when people find satisfaction in Jesus, we urge them to enlist with us in his great cause, the mission of God, to make all things new.

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Advent, The Prologue and Relationships: 4 Jesus and Moses (John 1:1-18)

John 1:1-18

Moses isn’t the first Old Testament character that comes to our mind at Christmas, I’ll give you that. Maybe we think of Isaiah prophesying the virgin birth or the One who is called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, and Prince of Peace. We might remember Micah and his prophecy that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, which Herod’s advisers quote when the Magi show up.

But Moses?

Well, John seems to think it’s worth contrasting Jesus with Moses at the end of our great passage. Hear verses 14 to 18 again:

14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

15 (John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, ‘This is the one I spoke about when I said, “He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.”’) 16 Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. 17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in the closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.

Why didn’t I just read verse 17, which is the only verse here that explicitly mentions Moses? Because even when he’s not named, John is alluding to him. And by doing so, John tells us more about what the Good News of Jesus is.

I’m going back to three episodes in Moses’ life that John has in mind and we’ll see how the comparison and contrast with Jesus tells us about the wonder of the Incarnation.

Firstly, we go to the wilderness:

14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

When we read, ‘The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us,’ the English ‘made his dwelling’ if translated more literally would be ‘tabernacled’ Jesus tabernacled among us. Why is that significant?

Do you remember the tabernacle that Moses was instructed to get Israel to construct? It was the dwelling-place of God’s presence that the Israelites carried with them in the wilderness. And indeed it remained so until the Temple was built, centuries later, in Jerusalem.

The tabernacle was the portable presence of God. When John says that Jesus tabernacled among us, he is telling us that in coming to earth Jesus is the very presence of God with us. He wasn’t just some prophet. He was the very presence of God in the midst of human life.

We do not believe in a God who has stayed remote from us. Contrary to the Julie Gold/Nanci Griffith song that Cliff Richard covered, God is not simply watching us from a distance. God has traversed the distance and in Jesus he is Emmanuel, God with us. He knows what it is to live the human life with all its joys and struggles. He is not an ivory tower God.

When we struggle with suffering or injustice, Jesus has lived it. This is what he came to do. As I often say at funerals, when I go through a bad experience in life, the people who come up with the clever answers that explain my predicament are no help. They are as smug as Job’s comforters. But those who have walked the road I am on, and who come alongside me – they make a difference. So it is with Jesus.

One simple example from my life: a few years before I met Debbie, I had a broken engagement. (Or a narrow escape, as my sister called it. I married the right woman in the end!) One day, when I was particularly down, two friends of mine, Sue and Kate, rang the doorbell and said, “We’re taking you out to lunch.” What I discovered over lunch was their own histories of broken relationships.

Jesus tabernacled among us. He understands. He is still present with us by the Holy Spirit. Hear the Good News of Christmas that the Son of God tabernacled among us. He is Emmanuel, God with us.

And it’s the model for the way we spread that Good News. For after the Resurrection, Jesus told his disciples,

As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you. (John 20:21)

So the way we begin sharing the Gospel is by openly living for Christ in the midst of those who do not yet believe. We do not go on helicopter raids to bring people in, we start by going among other people, living our Christian lives before them. This is what Jesus himself, the Word made flesh, did, when he tabernacled among us. So too us.

In one town where I ministered, some Christians left the local United Reformed Church and said they were going to start a new church on a deprived estate. They hired a hall there for meetings. But did any of them move to the estate and live out their faith among the people they were supposedly going to evangelise? No.

The Word was made flesh and tabernacled among us. It is Good News for us in all that life throws at us, and it is the model for us sharing that Good News even today.

Secondly, let’s look generally at the exodus and for this we go to verse sixteen of John chapter one:

16 Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given.

Many people say that the Old Testament is about God’s Law and the New Testament is about God’s grace. Wrong! There is grace in the Old Testament. The New Testament tells us so, in verses like this. So when Jesus comes, his mission of grace builds on what has gone before and takes it to new levels.

In Moses’ case, grace is seen in the Exodus. God sees the suffering of his people in Egypt as they are enslaved, as Pharaoh worsens their already bad working conditions, as he attempts to have male Israelite babies killed.

The Israelites themselves are not perfect, but God in his mercy and grace will save them. Moses whom he calls to lead them is also far from perfect – in fact that’s an understatement, he’s a murderer. But in grace God calls him and mercifully redirects his passions.

Grace comes before anything we ever do for God. He acted in grace to deliver the Israelites from Egypt. And when Jesus comes, he does so to bring grace on a far greater scale, a cosmic scale, even. Yes, God is still interested in setting free people who are suffering due to the sins of others, but in Jesus he comes to do even more. He comes to set people free from their own sins. He comes to bring reconciliation not only with God but with one another. And he comes to heal broken creation. For when Jesus is raised from the dead, it will be the first fruits of God’s project to make all things new, even heaven and earth, as we learn in the Book of Revelation.

If from Moses and the wilderness we learn that Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, then from Moses and the Exodus, we learn that Jesus is – er – Jesus, the One who will save his people from their sins.

This tells us why the Word was made flesh and tabernacled among us. He came to bring this comprehensive salvation. To save us from what others do to us. To save us from what we do. To save creation from its brokenness.

Never let us reduce salvation to a personal and private forgiveness of my own sins which earns me my ticket to heaven. Yes, we do need our own sins forgiving, we do need to repent of them and put our faith in Jesus, but that is just the beginning. God saves us to involve is in the whole project of grace that Jesus heralded. We have a job to do, and Jesus is enlisting us in the ways of grace.

I love to tell the story of a keen young Christian who found himself on a train sharing a compartment with a man of the cloth dressed in a purple shirt, in other words a bishop. The young Christian had heard about these religious establishment figures and was sure the bishop would not have any vital experience of Christ, and so he said to him, ‘Bishop, are you saved?’

The bishop looked up and calmly replied, ‘Young man, do you mean have I been saved? Or do you mean am I being saved? Or do you mean will I be saved?’

Before the bemused young man could respond the bishop continued: ‘Because I have been saved – Jesus in his grace has forgiven my sins. I am being saved – Jesus by his grace is slowly making me more like him. And I will be saved – because one day there will be no more sin in this creation. I have been saved from the penalty of sin, I am being saved from the practice of sin, and I will be saved from the presence of sin.’

The bishop understood what it meant for Jesus to have given us ‘grace in place of grace already given.’

Thirdly and finally, let’s go to Mount Sinai with Moses.

17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

Ah, the law: that’s what we associate Moses with, isn’t it? Coming down from Mount Sinai with God’s prescription of two tablets, and then all those other laws, some of which perplex us today.

So it was law in the Old Testament and grace in the New Testament after all? Except you have to remember when it was that God gave the law to Israel. It was after he had delivered them from Egypt in the Exodus and they were on their way to the Promised Land. So it’s not true that keeping God’s law was the way to salvation, it was rather how they responded to salvation.

Even so, there was a problem. Israel failed to keep the law. Prophet after prophet called them to repentance, but either they rejected the message or it didn’t stick.

Hence, the coming of Jesus with grace and truth. For grace is not just about forgiveness. It is about that on-going salvation from sin that the bishop told the earnest young Christian about.

And he does not only bring the truth, he is the truth. Jesus the truth lives among us and eventually within us by his Spirit. The truth of God is no longer laws external to us on tablets of stone. Now that truth lives within us and enables us to be different. This is the promise of Christmas. Not only God with us, not only God saving us from our sins, but God within us.

An old lady once collared me after a service and told me that what this country needed to do was simply to get back to the Ten Commandments, and then all would be well. But she missed the grace that Jesus offers here. Because on our own we fail to keep the Ten Commandments, or indeed any of God’s law. We need the grace of forgiveness, and the grace of God’s presence in our lives to transform us. If faith was just a rule-keeping exercise, Jesus would never have needed to come.

But he did come. He came to be present with us, even when we wander in a wilderness, and he calls us to do the same in the midst of others. He came to bring the greatest exodus of all, in the many ways he liberates us and this world from sin. He came to bring the inner strength we need if we are to respond to God’s love for us by being with us and within us.

If anyone has reason for joy and celebration this Christmas, it’s the disciple of Jesus. Don’t be miserable in the face of inappropriate celebrations in the world at Christmastime. Instead, show that we have greater reasons to throw a party than anybody else.

I know there are lots of things that affect our mood and our ability to celebrate at Christmas. We may have had a good or a bad year. There may be an empty seat at the table this year, or there may be new life in our family.

But in terms of our faith, the coming of Jesus gives us true strength. Christmas really is ‘good tidings of great joy.’

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Harvest: May The Peoples Praise You (Psalm 67)

Psalm 67

One thing it’s not worth asking me when you arrive at church on a Sunday is, “Did you hear the morning service on Radio 4?” because I never listen to it.

But I do love the story of the harvest festival they broadcast many years ago, where the presenter rather unfortunately explained, “During the next hymn the children are going to bring up their gifts.”

I wouldn’t have liked to have cleared up that mess!

Actually, let me amend my words. Anyone can have a ‘harvest festival’, but Christians can have a ‘harvest thanksgiving.’ The world around us can celebrate harvest by having a festival, but as Christians we have Someone to thank for the harvest.

So I rather like referring to ‘harvest thanksgiving’ rather than ‘harvest festival.’ Although I don’t always remember.

Psalm 67 is full of thanksgiving. The people are exhorted to praise, gladness, and joy in response to God’s blessing in so many ways.

I see three areas in this Psalm for praise and thanksgiving, and all are relevant to a Christian celebration of harvest.

Firstly, thanksgiving for the harvest of salvation:

1 May God be gracious to us and bless us
    and make his face shine on us—
2 so that your ways may be known on earth,
    your salvation among all nations.

So often in the New Testament, and especially in the parables of Jesus, harvest is used as a metaphor for God taking the initiative to offer his grace and love to the human race. If you recall a few of the parables, you will recognise the agricultural context of them. Seeds, plants growing, gathering in the crops, the harvest itself. And so on. Jesus took images from the harvest to talk about what the Psalmist here calls God’s ways and his salvation.

Sometimes we only celebrate the physical, material harvest (which is a good thing in itself) but Jesus and the Psalmist would have us also give thanks for lives made new by the grace of God and people learning to walk in his ways.

I rarely hear this in Methodism. Have we forgotten this? Or is it that in aging and declining churches we have experienced the joy of people finding new life in Christ and following him so rarely that we have forgotten how to do this?

Perhaps we look on with envy at some of the numerically big and growing churches when God would have us celebrate and give thanks for what he is doing there.

But when the occasions come along in our orbit, let us not forget to give thanks for God’s life-giving and renewing work.

In my last circuit, one of the churches used to host an Iranian church on a Sunday afternoon. Sadly, it folded when the pastor retired and they couldn’t find a successor. The members dispersed to other Iranian congregations and around the UK.

One Sunday morning, a familiar face from that congregation turned up at the usual morning service, and had a friend with him, whom he introduced to us afterwards. He and the friend had been flat-sharing, but now a refugee agency had transferred him to our area, where he was living in a flat above a pizza takeaway.

This man knew very little English, but he came every week and also joined in some midweek activities. He had had to flee from Iran as a political asylum seeker, having opposed the government. He had to leave his wife and young son back there. He didn’t know when escaping that his wife was pregnant with their second son.

We supported his application for asylum and one day he asked to be baptised. I met him, along with a church member who had learned the Farsi language of Iran. We asked him why he was seeking baptism. He explained that he was so bowled over by Jesus, by his incomparable teaching such as the Sermon on the Mount, and by the way he treated women, which was so different from what he saw in Islam.

Oh, and one other thing. That second child whom he had only ever seen on Skype on his mobile phone had gone down with a mystery illness that the doctors couldn’t cure. He had asked us to pray for his little boy one Sunday after worship. Unbeknown to us, the boy had been completely healed after those prayers and before there was any further intervention from the doctors.

Jesus wasn’t a theory to our friend anymore. He was real, and he wanted to follow him. I baptised him on Easter Day.

When things like this happen, we give thanks for the harvest of salvation. May God trust us with may more.

Secondly, thanksgiving for the harvest of justice:

3 May the peoples praise you, God;
    may all the peoples praise you.
4 May the nations be glad and sing for joy,
    for you rule the peoples with equity
    and guide the nations of the earth.
5 May the peoples praise you, God;
    may all the peoples praise you.

Maybe this is more familiar to us at harvest. We know that millions of people in our world do not have what they need due to injustices, and so we campaign for justice. It’s clear from this psalm that God loves justice. He rules the people with equity and guides the nations of the earth.

This is why organisations like the Trussell Trust food banks do not only bring short-term relief to people in crisis, they also campaign for government policies that will help the poorest in our society.

This is why All We Can describes itself as both a relief and a development movement. They promote self-help for people in poverty, including conquering illiteracy. They support another project that campaigns for human rights in rural areas, where people have been left in poverty thanks to the work of major mining companies.

Or take an organisation that is dear to my heart, Tear Fund. Yes, they partner with local churches and organisations to bring relief to people who suffer when there are major disasters, like floods and earthquakes, but they do so much more. They are campaigning hard for the development of an international treaty on plastic pollution. Why? To quote one short paragraph from their website:

We’re facing mountains of plastic pollution. 2 billion people have no safe way to dispose of rubbish, and it’s people in poverty who are suffering the worst impacts of this rubbish problem. They are forced to live and work among piles of waste, which is making them sick, releasing toxic fumes, flooding communities and causing up to a million deaths each year.

When our God promises to rule with equity and guide the nations of the earth, and when we know he is doing that as part of his plan to make all things new, then it is a Christian responsibility for us not only to relieve poverty but to campaign against the causes.

And when we see some victories, let us again give thanks.

Thirdly and finally, thanksgiving for the harvest of the fields:

6 The land yields its harvest;
    God, our God, blesses us.
7 May God bless us still,
    so that all the ends of the earth will fear him.

And now the most familiar of all harvest themes, the one we think about when we sing the hymns, even if more people live in an urban setting these days and are more detached from the means by which food is produced. We raise the song of harvest home, we plough the fields and scatter, or imagine ourselves doing so. We decorate our churches with food and grain.

It’s a good thing to give thanks for God’s material provision for us. It reminds us that Christianity is not just concerned with the soul and the spiritual. Ours is a faith in a Creator God. Ours is a faith in a God who raised his Son bodily from death. He cares about his creation and wants to restore it from its brokenness. So the next time someone tells you that Christians shouldn’t poke their noses into material and political things, tell them they have no right to celebrate harvest festival.

Harvest celebrates the God who in his fatherly goodness takes care of his children and is outraged when some humans deny that provision to others. He is the God who does not want us to need to worry about having the basic essentials of life, who has entrusted the human race with the stewardship of this planet, and when it is mismanaged, he calls on us to change our ways.

Food banks aren’t the only way we show this. The local parish church where we lived in the last circuit ran a ‘community fridge’, which took donations of food the supermarkets weren’t going to be able to sell because it was soon to go out of date. Anyone, regardless of their economic status, could come and help themselves, so that the food could be used for what it was made for, rather than wasted. Which is an interesting thought in this county, where there appears to be no specific provision for food recycling.

One of my churches took food from the local Tesco Express that they couldn’t sell and repurposed it at coffee mornings, including leaving some out free of charge on a table for anyone in need. Several widows on limited incomes attended those coffee mornings and benefited.

In a wasteful world, these are reasons for gratitude towards our loving heavenly Father.

Conclusion

So the harvest is wide and broad, encompassing salvation, justice and material provision. Therefore our thanksgiving and our consequent actions shall surely also be wide in their scope.

No wonder Saint Ambrose said,

“No duty is more urgent than that of returning thanks.”

Maybe it’s the poet and parson George Herbert who summed up our harvest response:

“Thou hast given me so much … Give me one thing more, a grateful heart.”

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The Upside-Down Baptism Of Jesus, Matthew 3:13-17 (Ordinary 1 Epiphany 1 Year A)

Matthew 3:13-17

One thing I look back on with affection from childhood is the puddings my Mum used to make. She was great at making classic puddings with leftovers. Nobody for me has quite equalled her bread pudding – not least because she didn’t add so many fancy spices that a lot of cooks do.

Ditto her bread and butter pudding – a great way to use stale bread, and I always loved sultanas as a child. Only a holiday once in Shropshire, featuring a visit to Ironbridge, where a café offered various different flavours of bread and butter pudding, ever came close.

But one pudding she always made differently – and in my opinion, better than anybody else – was pineapple upside-down cake. Everybody else made it with slices of pineapple rings and added glacé cherries. Well, I hated cherries, and Mum used not pineapple rings but crushed pineapple, which made the flavour soak right through the cake.

Are you feeling hungry now?

Upside-down cake could be a metaphor for the ministry of Jesus. I’m not the first preacher to tell you that Jesus turned everything upside-down from our expectations. Any attempt to fit Jesus into our expectations, be they social, political, or anything else, is doomed to failure or to distorting him badly.

Today, I want to show you the way his baptism turns everything upside-down.

Firstly, Honour and Shame:

13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptised by John. 14 But John tried to deter him, saying, ‘I need to be baptised by you, and do you come to me?’

John has just done the big introduction to Jesus, like the compère building up to the headline act. He has told the crowds that although he baptises people in water, someone is coming who will baptise with fire! The curtains part, the spotlight picks out this man as he walks onto the stage of history … and he wants to be baptised by John.

Whoa! Hang on, says John. You’re the big shot, not me. But Jesus says, I do things differently. You’re not going to get the prima donna act from me.

Now we acclaim celebrities and stars (even if later we like to shoot them down), but in Middle Eastern culture honour has always been important. People should be honoured. There is nothing worse than shame. That’s why, as I’ve told you before, Islam cannot get its head around the idea of a crucified Messiah.

But in submitting to baptism, Jesus shows his willingness to embrace the same shame as those who had already come to the Jordan to confess their sins. He has come to identify with their shame and to embrace it.

I believe this could be a powerful way of sharing the Good News of Jesus today. We struggle to convince people they are sinners (although strictly that’s the Holy Spirit’s job, not ours) because they think of ‘sinners’ as especially bad people, rather than all of us with our failings, which we tend to excuse.

But many people know feelings of shame. They know things in their lives that they just can’t talk about openly. Jesus has come as one who understands shame and who bears it all the way from the manger to the Cross.

In fact, an old friend of mine called Judith Rossall wrote a book that reclaims the importance of shame in the Bible. It’s called ‘Forbidden Fruit and Fig Leaves’[1] and she argues that this all comes to a climax at the Cross, which was such a shameful mode of execution that Romans didn’t talk about it in polite society. Jesus was shamed by the Jewish and Roman authorities at the Cross, but honoured by God at the Resurrection[2].

So if you have something that you find so shameful you can’t bear to talk about it openly, I want you to know that Jesus’ willingness to be baptised is an early sign that he above all will embrace you in your sense of shame to make you whole. Whether it was something awful you did or something terrible that was done to you, I believe Jesus wants to raise you up and give you hope, honour, and dignity.

Secondly, Humility and Salvation:

15 Jesus replied, ‘Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfil all righteousness.’ Then John consented.

Now when we hear the word ‘righteousness’ we might think this is about moral or ethical behaviour. But it’s more than that here, because it’s paired with the word ‘fulfil’, and Matthew has a big thing about the fulfilment of Scripture. Go back to the birth stories we’ve been reading at Christmas and you’ll see that a lot there. Fulfilling all righteousness means not only doing what Scripture requires, but that Jesus is fulfilling God’s whole plan revealed in the Scriptures. He fulfils Israel’s history and destiny by identifying with them here in baptism, and he takes that all the way to identifying with their sin at the Cross[3]. In submitting to John’s baptism of repentance even though he had not sinned, he showed where he was going: to the Cross, where he would identify not only with sinful Israel but the whole sinful human race. He would experience abandonment by God, but be vindicated in the embrace of the Resurrection.

Again, there is something relevant for people today. Who feels abandoned by God? Who thinks that God has left them, because of their sin? Jesus came to heal that. In undergoing a baptism of repentance he showed that he would stand in for us whose sins separate us from God.

And not only that, by doing so he would show us that the God who cannot look on our sin is nevertheless on our case, calling us back to him. The way back is the Cross.

If you have a sense of being abandoned by God and you know you have done things which have separated you from him, then hear the Good News here as Jesus fulfils all righteousness in his baptism of repentance and ultimately in his death at the Cross. God’s plan all along was to make a way back to him when we are far away due to our own fault.

If that is you, then you can start the journey back today through what Jesus did for you at the Cross.

Thirdly and finally, Hero and Servant:

16As soon as Jesus was baptised, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. 17 And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.’

What a guy to do all this! And the Holy Spirit comes down on him in the form of a dove, just as

the dove appears as the harbinger of a new world after the flood, which other early Christian literature employs as a prototype of the coming age[4].

The new world is coming! This is what Jesus is bringing! Wow! And the voice from heaven commends him, and says how pleased he is with his Son. What a hero!

But wait. The language of affirmation from heaven is modelled on Isaiah 42, the first of the so-called ‘Servant Songs’ in that book. Godly heroics are not achieved by a superstar, by a celebrity, by someone in peak physical condition, or by a warrior. They are achieved by a servant.

I talked once before about how sad it is that when many children are asked today what they want to be when they grow up, the most common answer now is, ‘I want to be famous.’ But the example of Jesus shows how shallow this is. The Son of God himself rejects this way of life!

And that is good news for all of us. Because if you don’t have to be a famous celebrity or some kind of hero in society in order to change things for the good in line with God’s kingdom, then this way of life is open to everyone! Very few people will become nationally-known heroes that it’s really not worth aiming for. If it comes along, it comes along – but there are dangers.

However, everyone can find other people to serve. There are no limits. The upside-down way of Jesus opens up the way for everyone to make a difference for good in the world.

Conclusion

Jesus at his baptism gives some of the earliest signs that the ways of the world are disordered and that his upside-down approach will restore this world to a healthy and life-giving order.

So let us not seek honour for ourselves. If we live among the shamed, let us embrace it, for God will honour us and will transformed the shamed by his love.

Let us take the road of humility, knowing that it is the pathway to salvation, rather than pride and self-exaltation.

And let us not worry for a moment about whether people will regard us as heroes. Instead, let us give ourselves over to a life of service, knowing that this is how God brings in his kingdom.

[1] Judith Rossall, Forbidden Fruit and Fig Leaves: Reading the Bible with the Shamed; London, SCM, 2020.

[2] See Judith Rossall, Whose Honour? Whose Shame? Some Reflections on the Bible; Anvil volume 37 issue 2 at https://churchmissionsociety.org/anvil/whose-honour-whose-shame-some-reflections-on-the-bible-judith-rossall-anvil-vol-37-issue-2/

[3] Craig S Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p132.

[4] Keener, p133.

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The Importance of the Ascension (Easter 7, Resurrection People 7) Hebrews 4:14-16

Hebrews 4:14-16

I saw this image on Facebook on Thursday, which was Ascension Day. A classic painting of Jesus ascending above the bewildered disciples has had a caption added:

The Feast of the Ascension: celebrating the day that Jesus began working from home.

I rather liked that. I wondered whether devout Catholic politician Jacob Rees-Mogg might ponder it the next time he leaves snarky notes on the office desks of civil servants who are working from home.

What do we make of the Ascension? When I try to explain the event to congregations, I usually suggest it is what John Calvin called one of God’s accommodations to us. He rose into the sky to get the message through to disciples who thought heaven was ‘up there’. Although Professor Tom Wright now says that the Jewish concept of heaven was that it was an invisible realm next door to this life and therefore the crucial part of the story is that Jesus disappears from sight.

But be that as it may, what does the Ascension mean for us? I’m going to divide that into two halves.

Firstly, it’s about the finished work of Jesus.

Hebrews 4:14 tells us that Jesus ‘has ascended into heaven.’ But what does he do there?

Two other parts of Hebrews tell us something that this section doesn’t, and they both use the same expression. In both chapter 10 and chapter 12 we read, ‘He sat down.’

It’s like he gets to heaven, he goes in the front door, finds the sofa in the living room, and takes the weight off his feet. Job done. Now he can rest.

In other words, the Ascension tells us that Jesus had completed all he was sent to Earth to do. Through his life, teaching, miracles, death, and resurrection he has achieved his goal. Salvation has been won. It is available to all. The task is being passed to the disciples and any day now the Holy Spirit will equip them for that.

Compare it if you will to the account of the crucifixion in the Gospel according to John. As he is about to die, Jesus cries out, ‘It is finished!’ (John 19:30) When he said ‘It is finished’ he didn’t mean, it’s all over, and my mission has failed, but the very opposite. For the Greek word that English Bibles translate as ‘finished’ means ‘finished’ in the sense of ‘accomplished’. Jesus is saying, ‘Mission accomplished!’ and the Ascension confirms that.

Jesus has done everything we need for salvation. The Cross is sufficient, the Resurrection proclaims it, and the Ascension ratifies it. To come into a relationship with the living God and to live as a disciple of Jesus requires only what he has done for us. At the Cross, the guilt we carry and the sentence we deserve for our sins are taken away and laid on Jesus. At the Cross, evil forces are conquered not by violence but by the suffering love of God in Christ. At the Cross we are set free.

It has all been done. Finished. Mission accomplished.

So one thing we must not do is attempt to add to what Jesus has done. Sometimes when we feel particularly guilty we think we have to do something as an act of penance to earn the favour of God. But as Martin Luther discovered when he studied the New Testament more fully than he had been taught as an Augustinian monk, the word is not ‘penance’ but ‘repentance’. And even then we do that in response to what Jesus is offering us.

Similarly, some people think they have to live a good life in order to win God’s favour. This is at heart an act of pride: ‘I did it myself’ – or even worse, in the words of the dreadful song, ‘I did it my way.’ But the fact that Jesus has done it all is meant to humble us. We cannot save ourselves. That’s the point. Everyone must come to that realisation, whether they are of high rank or low in human society, that we come in humility to Jesus and depend entirely on him for salvation.

On this day when we celebrate Jesus sitting down at the right hand of the Father, I want us all to realise afresh that our relationship with Christ is described in the words of the hymn:

Nothing in my hand I bring
Simply to thy Cross I cling.

What is faith then? It is not stretching out our hands to offer God something from our lives that we think or hope might make us acceptable to him. Instead, it is an opening out of our empty hands to be filled with all that Jesus has to give us from what he has done for us at the Cross.

John Wesley knew this. Last Tuesday was the anniversary of his conversion at Aldersgate Street, when he found that the assurance of God’s love simply came directly to him from God, not from all the labours to which he had devoted himself up until then.

Therefore, if you are ever the kind of person who says of yourself, ‘I’m trying to be a Christian,’ I want to ask you to put that language to bed from today. Either you are a Christian, or you are not. Being a Christian isn’t a boast, it isn’t a matter of personal superiority. It’s a matter of holding out those empty to hands to receive the finished work of Christ.

Secondly, the Ascension is about the unfinished work of Jesus.

Wait a minute Dave, you’ve just been at pains to say that Jesus finished his work. How can you now say his work is unfinished?

Glad you asked. And I hope this is provocative enough to keep you listening. One part of his work is finished, the work I’ve just been describing, to make salvation an offer to all.

But another part of his work is unfinished. And it’s described in our reading. Hebrews calls Jesus our ‘high priest.’ What does a priest do? A priest offers sacrifices for the people – but we’ve covered that in my first point about the finished work of Jesus in speaking about his death. Jesus our high priest offered himself as our sacrifice.

But a priest does something else for the people. A priest prays for them. This is something that Hebrews will refer to three chapters after our reading:

Therefore he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them. (Hebrews 7:25)

Two circuits ago, and elderly Local Preacher prayed for me every day. But he died. My parents also prayed daily for me. But they have both died while I have been here.

However, I am not short on the most powerful prayer for me in my need, because Jesus intercedes for me. And he does the same for each of you. Be encouraged! This is his priestly work.

And furthermore, he understands, because as our reading says,

15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to feel sympathy for our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are – yet he did not sin. 16 Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

Don’t you find that encouraging, too? I often tell mourners at a funeral that when I am going through a bad time in my life I don’t necessarily find it helpful to have well-meaning Christians come up to me and tell me exactly what they believe about why God has allowed this. I want to lay my hands on such people – but not in the sense of healing!

The people I find most supportive when I am walking through troubles are those who have been there themselves. They understand.

One of my favourite examples of this is that about five years before I met Debbie I had a broken engagement – or, as my sister called it, a narrow escape. One day when I was grieving the break-up of my relationship, two friends called Sue and Kate turned up on the doorstep.

‘We’ve come to take you out for a pub lunch,’ they said.

I don’t remember the food from that meal. What I remember is how both Sue and Kate shared about broken engagements they had been through. They understood. They could support me.

Because Jesus has been through human weakness and faced temptation, he can do all that and more.

If you are facing sorrow or crisis right now, I encourage you to re-read the Gospels. Look for the stories where Jesus too goes through the ringer. Then recall that because he has been there too, he understands what you are facing, and can pray like no-one else to the Father for you.

This is how our ascended Lord spends much of his time. This is his unfinished work. It will continue until he appears again in glory, to judge the living and the dead, and to take us to our eternal home.

In conclusion, I’ve always been disappointed how Methodist churches treat the Ascension as a minor festival or even as a non-existent one. It is so important. It has much to teach us and encourage us.

I hope we will all leave today rejoicing in the finished work of Christ, who has sat down at the right hand of the Father, having completed everything necessary for our salvation.

And I hope we will also all leave today encouraged by the high priestly work of Christ who identifies with us and intercedes for us – his unfinished work.

May both of these great truths be strong foundations for our worship and our witness.

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

Luke 13:31-35

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

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

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

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

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

Herod the fox

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

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

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

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

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

So how does he respond?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus the hen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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