Two reflections for 29th June and 6th July

A rather ruched reflection for 6^th of June as I will be in Nashville Tennessee for a conference, leaving tomorrow – 28^th June. A reflection for 29^th June is below this one.

Matthew 11:16-18, 25-end: (NRSV)

¹⁶ ‘But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market-places and calling to one another,
¹⁷ “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not mourn.”
¹⁸For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, “He has a demon”;

Jesus Thanks His Father ...

²⁵ At that time Jesus said, ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; ²⁶yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.²⁷All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

²⁸ ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. ²⁹Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. ³⁰For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’

Some thoughts from Barclay …

Jesus seems disappointed in the people he was dealing with: some seemed like little children playing in the village square where one group did not want to play at weddings or funerals – they did not want to play at being happy or sad. They seemed contrary! No matter what was suggested to them, they did not want to do it – they found fault with everything. In the same way they rejected the way of John the Baptist because he isolated himself from society and lived such a different life; and they rejected Jesus who lived so in the midst of life. They could find grounds for criticism in everything and anything!

Barclay suggests that when people do not want to listen to the truth, they will easily enough find an excuse for not listening to it. There is also no need for reason in the process: they will criticise the same person or institution from conflicting points and ignore the fact that they are contradicting themselves. Adults can be like children in the village – contrary!

The only way to silence them and prove the truth is through deeds: John moved people’s hearts to repentance – and this had not happened for a very long time (about 400 years); in Jesus people were finding new life and goodness and power to live as they ought, and most important of all they felt a real sense of connection with God.

It is time for people to stop judging and finding fault and rather give thanks when we are enabled to draw close to God – even if the style and methods we are exposed to are not the ones we prefer.

Barclay comes up trumps yet again!

From verse 25 onwards, Jesus is speaking from experience: the rabbis and the wise men of society had rejected Jesus; intellectuals had found no use for Jesus – but the humble welcomed him. Barclay reminds us that we need to be careful here and to discern what Jesus is really saying here:

“He is NOT condemning intellectual power; he is condemning intellectual pride – The heart not the head is the home of the Gospel.”

There is nothing wrong with cleverness, there is something wrong with pride. You don’t need to abandon the intellect, you need to adopt humility. Faith is not connected with ignorance; it is connected with lowliness. Barclay adds:

“A man may be as wise as Solomon, but if he has not the simplicity, the trust, the innocence of the childlike heart, he has shut himself out.”

The rabbis recognised this truth and there are many parables within the rabbinic tradition revealing how it is the simple that are often the closest to God.

This passage ends with the greatest claim that Jesus ever made – and this claim is at the centre of the Christian faith, and it is that it is in Jesus alone that we see the revelation of God to man. Other people may be sons of God, but Jesus is the Son of God. St John put it this way where he has Jesus saying: “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:19) Here Matthew records Jesus as saying: “If you want to see what God is like, if you want to see the mind of God; the heart of God, the nature of God; if you want to see God’s whole attitude to people – look at me!”

In Jesus Christ alone, we see fully, what God is like. Jesus can give this knowledge to anyone who is humble enough to receive it.

Matthew 16.13-20

Matthew 16.13-20 (NRSV) SERMON: Peter’s Declaration about Jesus

¹³ Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is?’ ¹⁴And they said, ‘Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.’ ¹⁵He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ ¹⁶Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.’ ¹⁷And Jesus answered him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. ¹⁸And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. ¹⁹I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.’ ²⁰Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

William Barclay has been a source I have used in preparation for this homily.

My text this morning is written in Matthew 16.13:

¹³ Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is?’ 

Today’s reading contains some of the most discussed verses in the New Testament, especially the words of Peter in verses 16-19; but it is important to place them into their context. It takes place in the district of Caesarea Philippi, about 20 miles south of the Sea of Galilee. Jesus asks his disciples who people say he is and they reply, John, Elijah, Jeremiah or one of the prophets. Then Jesus asks them who they themselves think he is and this is when Simon Peter replies: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus responds saying that it is God who has revealed this to Peter and that Peter is the rock on which the new Israel will be built and over which death will have no power. In addition, Peter will be given the power to admit people into the kingdom which is coming, because his teaching and disciplinary actions within the community will be endorsed by God. Then he tells them to tell no one that he is the Messiah.

Jesus and the disciples had once more withdrawn from the crowds. The end of his ministry was drawing near and Jesus needed more time to be with his disciples and prepare them for their future ministry. Where they were was outside the domain of Herod Antipas and the population was mainly non-Jewish and Jesus would therefore have peace to teach the twelve. Jesus needed to know if anyone really understood: was there anyone who, when he had left this fleshly life, would be able to carry on his work?

When we are faced with challenges, we need to withdraw, gather together with those close to us and discern a way forward. There is a very real sense that this happens each week when we gather together with the people of God, to receive teaching and nurture to discern God’s will for us.

Peter means rock and here Jesus is once again Jesus using the powerful tool of metaphor to do some important teaching. An informed Jew at the time would have understood the image better than most of us today. The rabbis applied the image of a rock to Abraham as the founder of their faith, but never intended this to let people think that Abraham was more important to their core understanding that God is the rock (see Deuteronomy 32.4, 31, 1 Samuel 2.2, 2 Samuel 22.2 also Psalm 18.31). But it was permissible to call someone a rock and by doing so you would be paying them the greatest compliment, because it would turn one’s mind to God, who alone is the true rock.

In the light of this Old Testament teaching, St Augustine drew the conclusion that Jesus was referring to himself here as the rock, being the incarnation of God, and that he was paying Peter a wonderful compliment. Barclay paraphrases, Augustine suggesting that Jesus would have being saying something like: ‘...You are Peter; and on myself as rock I will found my Church; and the day will come when, as a reward for your faith, you will be great in the Church.’

It is important that we understand the way people wrote over 2000 years ago: how people wrote a hundred years ago is profoundly different to today and so going back that much further needs careful consideration. It is therefore a mistake to read important passages like this with uncritical modern western eyes.

There is also the dimension that this metaphor refers to the truth – the foundation of the Christian message – and this is the truth that Jesus is the Messiah; the Son of the living God. It was God himself who had opened Peter’s eyes to this truth. ¹⁷And Jesus answered Peter, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.’ We all know that reason, by itself can be dangerous for it leads to the horrors and evils of things like Nazism – and today people are realising that if one takes a fundamentalistic approach to rationalism and science this too, is dangerous. This is why the Church requires us to find truth in the Bible, plus reason, plus the combined wisdom of the ages. Within the Methodist tradition, we are required to add experience, because all these together provide the checks and balances to ensure that we find what really is true.

Yet another dimension is that the rock is a reference to Peter’s faith – which is also central – because membership of the Church is by faith – and this gift from God is part of the foundation of what it means to be a Christian. For our very salvation is the free gift of God of faith that is offered to all, again within the Methodist tradition affirming that all NEED to be saved, all CAN be saved, and can KNOW that they are saved and all can be saved to the UTTERMOST. And all this is by faith alone.

But the more literal understanding also contains important truth – and this is that Peter himself is the rock, because he is the first initial foundation stone of the whole Church because he was the first to come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah.

Often the authors of the biblical books use images to make a particularly important point and, as Barclay points out, ‘... the details of the picture are not to be stressed; it is the point which is being made ...’ Here, the purpose of the metaphor is to show how Peter is the foundation in the sense that he is the one person on whom the whole church is built because he was the first to come to understand who Jesus really is. We know, from the rest of the New Testament, that Jesus did not mean us to understand that Peter, literally, was the foundation. In fact, others are also referred to as foundations: in Ephesians 2.10 the prophets and the apostles are said to be the foundation of the Church because it was upon their work, witness and faithfulness that the Church was founded. This is why their works are included in the Bible. Paul also refers to Jesus as the corner-stone, or cap-stone, because Jesus holds everything together, and without him everything would just fall apart. Peter, in his writings, speaks of Christians as living stones confirming that all those who believe are part of the building blocks of the church – part of its very fabric. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, refers to Jesus as the only foundation as we read: ‘For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ.’ In our Gospel reading, Jesus was not saying to Peter that the Church depended on Peter; merely that the Church began with Peter.

Matthew’s reference to the Church is also not as many people would assume it is today – a denomination or a building, but the gathering of the people of God – so Jesus is here too saying to Peter (as Barclay paraphrases) ‘Peter, you are the beginning of the New Israel, the new people of the Lord, the new fellowship of those who believe in my name.’

Jesus then goes on using an image of a fortress – ‘... the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it ...’ On the top of the mountain overlooking Caesarea Philippi, there was a great castle. As Jesus was talking to his disciples, this could have caught his eye and so he expanded his metaphor to include what it offered. Within the fellowship of believers, we should feel safe and secure because Jesus is holding everything together and Jesus and his ways should be the norm.

Hades was never, in Jewish tradition, a place of punishment, just the place where the dead went, and so the essence of what Jesus is saying here, is that his death and Resurrection would mean the defeat of the power of Hades and death. This is the wonderful good news that death is only tragic for those people left behind; because of our sadness and the fact that we miss the person who has died; but for them, they do not go to the place of death, but to the presence of our Lord, Jesus, the Messiah – which (as Paul put it) is better by far!

We have the keys of the kingdom, because we have been entrusted with the message of the Good News that death is a lie, death is not the end, death has been defeated, because there was a man in history, Jesus, from a town in Galilee, called Nazareth – and he revealed God to the world and overcame death for us. When we make the same discovery, together with Peter, we have the same privileges and responsibilities to fulfil.

Today all people are confronted with the same question: ‘Who is Jesus’? John Robinson’s writes:

Who this man was, was a man ... who yet stood in a unique relationship to God, speaking and acting for him. He was ‘the man who lived God’, his representative, his plenipotentiary to whom ‘everything was entrusted and yet who was and could do nothing ‘in himself’’.

This mystery makes perfect sense when we answer the question with Peter: Jesus is ‘... the Messiah, the Son of the living God.’ 

Who do you say the Son of Man is?  Amen.

Matthew 10.24-39 (NRSV)

²⁴ ‘A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master; ²⁵it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher, and the slave like the master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household!

Whom to Fear

²⁶ ‘So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. ²⁷What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. ²⁸Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. ²⁹Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground unperceived by your Father. ³⁰And even the hairs of your head are all counted. ³¹So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.

³² ‘Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; ³³but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven.

Not Peace, but a Sword

³⁴ ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
³⁵ For I have come to set a man against his father,
and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
³⁶ and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.
³⁷Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; ³⁸and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. ³⁹Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

I acknowledge my debt to Suzanne de Dietrich, a wonderful French Protestant theologian, as I begin this reflection.

My text is Matthew 10.39:

^39’Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.’

Jesus tells his disciples that they cannot expect to be treated in any way better than him. If people showed no respect for Jesus, they will not show respect to his disciples. Jesus refers to Beelzebul, which in Aramiac means Lord of the house. We as Christians belong to the house of Jesus, and so those giving their allegiance to others are going to have little time for them. But we are not to be afraid, because the truth will prevail. Jesus had explained the truth to the disciples, but the world was not yet ready to receive it. But the time would come when our Lord’s suffering, death and victory over sin, death and evil would be proclaimed from the rooftops for all to hear. The sad truth is that this proclamation often lead to the martyrdom of those who proclaimed it. But even this should not concern us, because Jesus explained that people can only harm – even kill – the body; who we really are is present within our souls, where true life happens. Who and what we are is not contained in our bodies, the God life, the true life, the real life, the life in all its fullness – what God offers to all and what we have accepted as Christians, is a gift from God alone. But if the life of a sparrow matters to God, how much more do we matter.

God’s knowledge of us, even our physical bodies, is intimate and detailed – even the hairs on our heads are numbered by him. But why ought we to ‘fear’ God. Here we see our Lord once more using hyperbole to get his point across.  Death comes when we deny our Lord by betraying ‘… the love which he has manifested to us …’ When we live in a way that fails to imitate our Lord, this is when we perish, this is when our lives are compromised and some even die. People in this state can be in perfect physical health, but have died inside!

This is the truth that we need to declare from the rooftops; that there is life, real life, life in all its fullness, and it is a free gift, offered by Jesus to all who would receive it. Once more Jesus goes into hyperbole, stressing the need to proclaim this message, loud and clear, so that people might know what it is to live, and not exist.

Our world is full of people who merely exist. They have everything that money can buy and then some, but they still have nothing. We need to be eager to pass the message on. Love, is at the heart of what it means to be fully human, for it is the nature of God himself, as John explains in his first epistle.

What then is it that we must proclaim?

We are to announce salvation to all people, for ‘… such a pardon is only truly received if we are eager to pass it on …’

1 Peter 2.9-10

 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.
Once you were not a people,
   but now you are God’s people;
once you had not received mercy,
   but now you have received mercy.

Romans 10.14-15

 But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!’

2 Corinthians 4.5-6

For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake. For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

2 Corinthians 5.14-15

For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.

From verse 34, Jesus returns to his earlier theme … the struggles his disciples will need to face up to. These even happen within one’s families. Verse 34 is shocking in its hyperbole and paradox. These seem strange words to come from the person who exalted peace in the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount. De Dietrich explains: ‘… to announce the peace of God is to denounce all false ideas of peace, which are only frightful caricatures of it …’

Sadly, we today live in a world where real peace is not the experience of many. Today’s ‘peace’ is a mask, a cover up, disguising falsehood – and so there is no peace. This is what Jeremiah spoke of …

Jeremiah 6.14: They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, ‘Peace, peace’, when there is no peace.

What today some refer to as peace just covers things up and this the Lord loathes, as John explained in Revelation 3.15-16:  ‘I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.’

Jesus came to disturb all false ideas, to tear to pieces with the sword – his words – all the false masks that people use to pretend and not be themselves as the author to the Hebrews explains:  Hebrews 4.12-13:

Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.

There might come a time when the call will come and we will need to leave all to follow Jesus. It could even mean a Cross. This is not a symbol of death, it is the mark of humiliation – the condition of a slave. It is in this that a disciple is not above his master.

But we are seldom asked to go this far. The question is would we be prepared to, if the call came?

Again, this passage reminds us of the folly of fundamentalism. We know that throughout the ages, the New Testament and the Christian leaders throughout history have warned about taking things literally that are meant to explain and reveal a deeper truth, for this is to limit the real depth of gift we are being offered. What we are called to is the willingness for extreme self-sacrifice, for this is the way to the only true life. When we are willing to give up everything, then we find the real meaning of life.

Christians are those who live selfless lives. In reality the Christian parent lives for their children and their children for their parents. It is selfishness that is the cause of division within families and when the Christian calls for selflessness, conflict arises.

^39’Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.’ This verse is pivotal; it occurs in six different forms. Here the word translated as ‘life’, is the same as can be translated as ‘soul’. As Argyle explains: ‘Both meanings are included here. By gaining his (physical) life, a person will lose his real self; by losing his (physical) life, a person will gain their real self.’

We look after our bodies as best we can, but never at the expense of the soul. As Bonhoeffer explains, Jesus was the example of true love, divine love, the expression of the nature of God himself he was – ‘a man for others …’ and we are called to be the same. As Jesus put it:

^39’Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.’