“The Assurance of Better Things” (Hebrews 6:9-12)

 

Last Sunday those of you who were here or were watching on YouTube will recall that Pastor Doug Mott led us through the first eight verses of Hebrews 6. Early on in his sermon he quoted one biblical scholar who described those verses as “perhaps the most severe warning that occurs anywhere in the pages of the New Testament”.

The words that he was referring to were in verses 4 through 6 and they were these:

It is impossible, in the case of those who have been once enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God…

“It is impossible to restore them.” “They are crucifying once again the Son of God.” Can you imagine a more telling condemnation? Imagine if you were among those hearing those words for the first time. I can almost hear the stunned silence and see the faces of the congregation turn grey as the dreadful meaning of what they were hearing began to sink in. Could it really be true? Might it be possible for someone who is a believer to put themselves in a place where they are outside the reach of God’s grace?

A few weeks ago I told you that my introduction to Hebrews came when I was part of a group Bible study as a student at university. To this day I clearly remember both the puzzlement, the fear and the fierce debate that erupted when we came to these verses. “You mean it’s possible to lose your salvation?” Very quickly the discussion spilled out of our little group and into the wider campus fellowship. Some members began to worry that they might one day find themselves that God had rejected them. Fortunately our very wise and patient staff member got wind of what had now become a full-fledged debate. “Yes,” he said, “those are stern words. But take a moment to look at what the author says just two verses later…” So we opened our Bibles, and what did we find but these words:

Though we speak in this way, yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things…

“We feel sure of better things…” You may not have noticed it, because the Greek term is translated in several different ways into English, but this is the second time the author uses that word “better”. I draw your attention to it because he will use it again on another nine occasions before we come to the end of the letter, for a total of eleven times. In fact, it is one of his favourite words. Outside of Hebrews it’s found only four times in the rest of the New Testament.

The first time we find it in Hebrews is in chapter 1, verse 4, where we see that Jesus is infinitely superior to the angels. The final time will be in chapter 12, verse 24, where the author tells us that Jesus’ blood speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. If you’re familiar with the Old Testament, you’ll know that Abel’s blood cried out for the guilt and condemnation of his murderous brother Cain. Jesus’ blood cries out for the forgiveness and restoration of sinners like you and me.

Thus, when our author writes, “In your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things,” he means stronger, higher, superior… And so the letter moves swiftly from warning to encouragement, from condemnation to hope. So let’s take the next few moments to see for ourselves what reasons the first readers of this letter had, even in the midst of their weariness and despondency, to take courage and to regain their hope.

Work and love

Those reasons come in three pairs: work and love (in verse 10), earnestness and hope (in verse 11), and faith and patience (in verse 12). Let’s look at each of them in order—so first: work and love. Turning to verse 10: “For God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love that you have shown for his name in serving the saints.”

In our day and age, we think of love as an emotion, a feeling. It’s when you’re attracted towards another person. It could be romantically. It could be because you have shared a common experience or have a common interest, or any other of a whole host of reasons.

Our English language is poor in that we have only one word for love. In the Greek of the New Testament there were three. There was one that described the bond that unites friends to each other. There are people who have been my friends for decades. In some cases, we may not have seen one another for years. But when we get together that bond of friendship still remains and it is as though the passage of time means nothing. I suspect that most of you have had that experience as well.

The second kind of love in the Greek-speaking world of the New Testament was the one that gets all the attention. It is romantic love—the kind of love that makes our hearts go pitter-patter, the love that so many of our hit songs are about and so many of our movies focus on—the love between a man and a woman, a husband and a wife.

But it is neither of these loves that is the focus of our passage this morning. It is the love that that apostle Paul wrote about in his famous passage in 1 Corinthians 13: the love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, the love that never ends.

It is the love that Ruth expressed when she refused to abandon her mother-in-law, Naomi. It is the love that the good Samaritan showed to that hapless traveller who lay naked and beaten by the side of the road. It is the love that Jesus showed for you and for me when he hung dying on the cross. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…” “Jesus…, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” (John 3:16; 13:1)

That kind of love is more than a feeling. It calls for practical engagement. So it is that work and love go together in our passage this morning, because genuine love invariably shows itself in hands-on, concrete action and self-giving service. And this was the kind of love that was being demonstrated daily in the everyday lives of the congregation of the Hebrews in Rome.

Earnestness and hope

So there we have it: work and love. The second pairing that the author puts together (in verse 11) is earnestness and hope. And once again, hope, like love, needs some defining.

Tell me if I’m wrong, but I think for most people today hope is little more than some nebulous kind of wish. “I hope that the weather will improve soon.” “I’m hoping for a bigger bonus next Christmas.” “Let’s hope that covid will soon be in the past.”

For the early Christians, however, hope was not just that vague “pie in the sky when I die” but a driving force that motivated and transformed them in the present.

Jeremiah in the Old Testament has sometimes been called the weeping prophet or the prophet of doom. Over a span of forty years he tirelessly warned the people of Judah that their disregard for God and his laws would bring destruction upon them. Yet some of the most stirring pictures of hope can also be found in Jeremiah’s writings. One of them came to him one day when he was visiting a potter’s workshop. It happened that one of the vessels the potter was forming on his wheel began to be misshapen. Did the potter give up and toss it away? No, he simply continued at his wheel and skilfully reworked it.

That was an “Aha!” moment for Jeremiah. “Then,” he wrote, “the word of the Lord came to me: O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? declares the Lord. Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.” The point is that, amid all the mess and injustice of this world, God is still at work. Even when things seem to be going terribly wrong, we are still in the Potter’s hands. They may even seem to have gone beyond the point of no return. Yet God is sovereign and he will surely work his good purposes out.[1]

We may think today of the grim situation facing the people of Ukraine, as the seemingly unstoppable Russian army, more than 150,000 of them, mercilessly pound their cities with bombs and missiles. Yet they refuse to surrender. They will not give up hope, as the rest of the world watches and waits and prays. And we have to believe that somehow, in the midst of this evil and injustice, God is still at work.

It was the same kind of hope that sustained the believers in the struggling Hebrew church in Rome. Christians were held in contempt. And all the signs were that their circumstances were only going to become worse. Yet they continued to cling to their hope, to sing their joyful hymns, to pray with conviction, to show acts of mercy—and all with what the author commends as earnestness.

The word in Greek means eagerness, effort, never letting things get in the way. And they could do it because deep in their hearts they had the conviction that, in the end and spite of all outward appearances, “all things [do indeed] work together for good for those who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).

Patience and faith

The hearers of these words were to be commended, then, for their work and love, for their earnestness and hope. And now in verse 12 the writer prays that they would not be sluggish—that is, that they might never grow weary or lose energy in running this race—but that through faith and patience they might push through to the finish line.

The author will have more to say about that in due course. But for the moment his concern is that they continue in faith and patience. When you think of it, those two qualities are really the two sides of the same coin.

Faith in God and in his good purposes for us enables us to be patient in the face of setbacks, disappointments and pain. If God is really to be trusted, then we can be sure, even in spite of the direst of circumstances, that in the end he will not let us down—even if that end is death. For we know that then we shall see him face to face. And as we gather and with the faithful from down through the ages, including those Hebrew believers of the first century we will be greeted with those welcoming words, “Well done, good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25:23).

Centuries before the Letter to the Hebrews, the people of Israel faced even more discouraging circumstances. Their city of Jerusalem had been crushed, its glorious Temple reduced to rubble, and they themselves had been held in captivity for a generation. It was no wonder that many of them were beginning to question God’s purposes. Yet in the midst of their despondency God inspired the prophet Isaiah to write these words:

Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
     the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
          his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint,
         and to him who has no might he increases strength.
Even youths shall faint and be weary,
         and young men shall fall exhausted;
but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;
         they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
         they shall walk and not faint. (Isaiah 40:28-31)

“So we do not lose heart” wrote the apostle Paul. “Though our outer self  is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison…” (2 Corinthians 4:16-18a)

If you’re like those Hebrew believers who were the first to hear these words, if you find yourself at times struggling just to keep your head above water, I hope that you will take heart from these verses this morning—and that by God’s grace and in his power, you may show forth in your life God’s priceless gifts of love and hope and faith.

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[1]     I owe this insight to Bill Hockin, The Habit of Hope, pp 13, ff

“What Will We Wear?” (Colossians 3:11-17)

 

“What will we wear?” Back when I was first ordained, that was a question that many people asked themselves on a Sunday morning. In those days, people used to dress up for church. Tie straight, pants pressed, shoes polished… People would talk about putting on their Sunday best.

By and large, that kind of formality has gradually disappeared over the last twenty years or so—and I can’t say that I regret it! So I find it interesting that in the few verses we have read from the Bible this morning the apostle Paul stops to tell us how we in the church ought to dress. Of course, he is speaking not literally but metaphorically. And he is not referring just to Sunday mornings but to a whole way of life, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

But before we get too far into this passage, I want us to look at the brief snapshot that Paul gives us of the church in Colossae in the opening verse, because it was a truly remarkable collection of individuals. In Colossians 3:11 we are given a picture of the kind of people we might be likely to meet if we joined with the congregation there on a Sunday. There were Greeks and Jews, barbarians (and here he doesn’t literally mean what we do by “barbarian”, but people from distant lands, whose native language was not Greek or Latin). And finally, there were the Scythians, who had migrated from the north shore of the Black Sea and who really were regarded by and large as a crude, cruel and uncultured people. And if that were not enough, there were both slaves and their masters.

Nevertheless, there they all were in the Colossian church, singing together, learning together, sharing in the Lord’s supper together, serving Christ and proclaiming the good news together. And here we should pause to note that what was true of the Colossian Christian community by and large was true of the dozens of little clusters of believers that had begun to crop up all over the Roman Empire. It was a truly remarkable (dare I say revolutionary?) phenomenon. Indeed, they had already been accused of turning the world upside down (Acts 17:6).

Yet while those differences were a source of strength and something to celebrate, they also brought with them some potential pitfalls. Indeed, some of them were serious enough that they could easily have splintered the church into pieces. We see it happening as early as chapter 6 in the book of Acts, where a dispute arose over the assistance being given to the Jewish versus the Gentile widows. And much of the ink in Paul’s letters (and the other letters in the New Testament for that matter) was devoted to dealing with the cracks and divisions that cropped up and threatened to tear apart the fabric of the church.

The love of Christ

Now Paul is not suggesting that ethnicity and race, slavery and freedom, culture and heritage, are unimportant or insignificant. Far from it! In fact, Paul frequently drew from his own background when the occasion demanded it. Besides, that variety is what gives the church its flavour and richness. I was impressed a few weeks ago when someone pointed out that there were (was it eleven?) different nationalities represented here that morning. I leaned over to my wife and whispered, “This is a church that has a future!”

The problem was that the Colossians had allowed their differences to become sources of misunderstanding and annoyance, of not being entirely honest with one another, and of putting others down. The situation had led to the point where people had begun to sense that they didn’t have the freedom to be who they really were. As a result, they felt forced to wear a kind of costume.

At this point it is as though Paul turns and opens up a closet full of clothes. And he says to the Colossians, “This is what you should be wearing. Take off those costumes you’ve been putting on and try these clothes instead.” What were those clothes? Paul lists them for us in verse 12: compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forbearance, forgiveness…

Every one of those qualities has a beauty all of its own and we could give a whole sermon over to each of them. Yet Paul says that they are only the undergarments. For over them all we are to put on something that outshines and incorporates them all—which is love.

But let’s be clear. When we talk about love, we’re not talking about some airy-fairy feeling. It is that very practical Christian word agape—what one person has described as “a steady direction of the will towards another’s lasting good”[1]. It is the love with which God so loved the world. It is the love that led Jesus to give up his life for you and for me on the cross. It is the love that has been poured into our hearts through the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is the love that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things”. It is the love which, when everything else will have passed away, will still abide.

Now I am not saying that as Christians we cannot have our differences. The New Testament is very clear about that. There are some issues over which we cannot compromise and when sadly we must choose to walk apart. Yet I believe those issues are much rarer than we might think. And if we are willing to clothe ourselves in compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forbearance, forgiveness and above all love, many of our differences will begin to have far less importance and become small in comparison.

The peace of Christ

At this point Paul shifts our focus from what we put on the outside of our lives to what is happening on the inside. In verse 15 he calls upon us to “let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts”. What do you think of when you hear the word “peace”? Whenever I see it in the New Testament, I think of what Jesus said to his followers at the last supper: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid” (John 14:27).

At that point Jesus was preparing his disciples for what would take place later that night, when he would be roughly dragged off by armed guards to await an unjust trial and a painful death. Their hearts must have been racing as those events unfolded uncontrollably around them. All they could do was to cling to Jesus’ promise. And in those times when nothing is going right and our lives seem to be spinning out of control, we can still bank on that promise today.

However, the peace that Paul is writing about in our passage this morning is something different. It is not so much internal peace as it is interpersonal peace.

I don’t believe that there is anything quite as unbecoming as a church fight. In the fourth century Athanasius got involved in a clash over the deity of Christ. In the fourteenth century John Wycliffe caused controversy through his conviction that the Bible was the final authority on the truth about God. In the sixteenth century Martin Luther became embroiled in a dispute over the question of salvation by faith. In the eighteenth century William Wilberforce in England and John Woolman in America engaged in a battle for the abolition of slavery.

Yes, there are issues worth fighting for. But disputes like the ones I’ve just listed are rare. And they make the clashes that happen in far too many churches today seem petty and insignificant by comparison. And why? Because for the most part they are insignificant. But the damage they do is incalculable. And the result is that people all too often end up leaving the Christian community altogether, while those on the outside see church people as fractious and combative. And in either case, the devil couldn’t be more delighted.

“Blessed are the peacemakers,” Jesus tells us, “for they will be called children of God” (Matthew 5:9). Peace doesn’t just happen. It takes effort. It has to be made. It requires humility and a willingness to swallow our pride. We may not always be successful. But at the same time, let us never forget that we follow one who brought about our peace at the cost of his life, through the blood of his cross (Colossians 1:20).

The word of Christ

Besides love, there is something else that Paul calls us to carry inside us—and that is the word of Christ. “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly…,” he challenges us in verse 16. The word he uses for “richly” means “fully”, “abundantly”, “overflowingly”. One translation of this verse runs, “Be at home in the gospel story, and let it be at home in you, so that it may always be ready for use.”[2] Some time later Paul would tell his young apprentice Timothy, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the messenger of God may be competent, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17).

I am impressed that a number of you have taken on the challenge of reading though the whole of the Bible in the course of the year. But I trust you won’t just do it in a mechanical fashion, so that twelve months from now, after you’ve read the last chapter of Revelation, you can slam your Bible closed and with a breath of relief pat yourself on the back and say, “I’ve done it!” No, each time you open your Bible ask the Holy Spirit to be your teacher and take time to let its words sink in and be absorbed into who you are on a daily basis.

In my Anglican tradition we have a prayer that calls upon us to “hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” the Scriptures. That means that we need take in the Bible’s message with all our senses, to allow God’s message to reach down into us and to penetrate into our being in a whole variety of ways: on Sunday morning, through the proclamation of God’s word from the pulpit and as we sing it in worship and carry those spiritual earworms with us through the week; in small groups where we can reflect on it with other believers and learn from their experience; in taking time to read and meditate upon it daily; in making the effort to commit portions of it to memory so that, if you’re anything like me, you’ll find those verses popping back into your mind in your daily walk.

I can still remember the first Bible verses I memorized, not many months after I committed my life to Christ as a teenager. They were Psalm 119:9 and 11, and they were in the old King James translation: “Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed thereto according to thy word… Thy word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against thee.”

May God’s word be hidden in your heart—perhaps like the crocuses I planted in our garden back in the fall. A few months from now, just when I’m beginning to wonder whether spring will ever arrive, they will poke up through the surface of the ground and burst into bloom. The same is true of God’s word as we plant it in our hearts. It will surely bring beauty and meaning into our lives, often at those times when we need it most.

So, what will we wear? As this new year begins, I challenge you to take a look at the spiritual wardrobe that God has graciously provided for us in his Son Jesus Christ and through the power of the Holy Spirit. As each day begins, clothe yourself with those beautiful and lasting garments of compassion, kindness, meekness, humility, patience and forgiveness. But above them all may you put on that most excellent gift of love—the love that is ours in Jesus.

As you do so, may the peace of Christ rule in your hearts and the word of God dwell in you richly as together you seek live in the power of the Holy Spirit and to serve the Lord Jesus Christ throughout this year of 2022.

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[1]     Stephen Neill, The Christian Character, 22

[2]       N.T. Wright quoting A.L. Williams, Colossians and Philemon (Tyndale NT Commentaries), 144

“In this is love…” (1 John 4:7-21)

Many of years ago now I remember strolling through the streets of Manhattan, when I came across a fine stone neo-Gothic structure advertising itself as the Church of the Incarnation. I am always curious to look inside church buildings. (You can call it an occupational hazard—ask Karen how many churches and cathedrals we have visited on our vacations.) So I walked in, and there at the far end I could see a larger-than-life full-length marble statue of a clergyman. The inscription beneath it read that it was of none other than Phillips Brooks, the fifth Bishop of Massachusetts, one of the greatest preachers of the nineteenth century, and most renowned of all as the author of “O little town of Bethlehem”. “Oh,” I thought to myself, “so Phillips Brooks was the rector of this church.” But I soon found out that that was not the case. Next to the towering statue was a modest bust of the Rev. Arthur Brooks, Phillips Brooks’ lesser-known brother, who had served there from 1875 to 1895.

I suspect that for much of his life poor Arthur Brooks lived in the shadow of his famous brother. And something similar could be said of our Epistle passage this morning, from 1 John 4. When you think of love in the Bible, where does your mind automatically turn? To this passage before us, or to Paul’s soaring prose in 1 Corinthians 13? “Though I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal…” I suspect that there are some of us who could recite the whole chapter by heart. But how many could say the same of 1 John 4? Yet the fifteen verses that we have read this morning contain some of the most incredibly concentrated and profound teaching on love to be found anywhere in the Bible. In 1 Corinthians 13 we find Paul using the word “love” nine times. In this passage it occurs an amazing twenty-nine times. So let us take the next few minutes to see what John has to teach us about love.

The nature of love

The first thing I take from these verses has to do with the nature of love. What do we think of, where do our minds usually go, when we hear the word “love”? I think for most people it has to do with emotions, indeed a whole spectrum of them running all the way from a warm feeling we have towards someone else as a fellow human being or even for a dog or a cat, all the way to the uncontrollable chemical explosion that we call “falling in love”. While emotions play no little part in it, however, the kind of love that John is writing about is not essentially a feeling. Nor is it merely a theoretical concept or a pious wish.

No, the love that John is writing about—and, for that matter, that we find throughout the Bible from beginning to end—is a love that by definition shows itself in action. How does John describe the love he is writing about? “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son…” The words parallel those that we find in the gospel. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…” It’s not just that God thought kind thoughts about us. No, his is a love that invariably expresses itself in concrete, practical action.

One of the wisest and most pastoral men I have ever encountered, Bishop Stephen Neill, once wrote this about love:

Love in the Bible sense of the word is always concerned with self-giving. It is never merely feeling; it always includes “a steady direction of the will towards another’s lasting good”.[1]

“A steady direction of the will towards another’s lasting good.” Those words have echoed through my mind for decades. And if you’ve ever been to a wedding where I have presided, you will likely have heard me repeat them in my remarks to the bride and groom. I don’t know of a better definition, or one that more accurately reflects what underlies what John is saying in this passage.

“No one has ever seen God,” John wrote in the prologue to his gospel. “It is God the Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (John 1:18). Now in this chapter we hear the same words again: “No one has ever seen God,” but this time John continues, “if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.” God is invisible, but we do gain a glimpse of him when Christians exhibit practical love.

Several years ago a number of us drove across town to hear Christian philosopher Dallas Willard. At the end of his talk one member of the audience told of how she had tried again and again to bear witness and explain the Christian faith to another person for years, but much to her frustration her words seemed to bear no result. What should she do? Willard’s reply was classic: “Have you tried sending them a birthday card?” We have all been told that a picture is worth a thousand words. The same is true of love. One caring act can mean far more than a thousand words. It is what puts flesh on what is otherwise nothing more than an ethereal concept.

The source of love

Such is the nature of love. From here John goes on to write about the source of love. It’s almost fifty years since the Beatles first recorded their song, “All you need is love”. It was a #1 hit and captured the ideals and beliefs of a generation. That kind of thinking is still popular in the world today. John, however, says that, like so much of the world’s thinking, they got it backwards. Not, “Love is God,” as the song implies, but, “God is love.”

There is a world of difference between the two philosophies. God is not defined by our notions about love, which are bound to be imperfect at best and can be twisted and destructive at their worst. Rather, our understanding of love arises out of God and what he has revealed of himself. What do we mean, then, when we claim that God is love? I believe it arises out of our knowledge of God as Trinity, which among other things tells us that love is incorporated into God’s very being. The Father loves the Son and the Spirit. The Son loves the Father and the Spirit. The Spirit loves the Father and the Son. It is what theologians call “perichoresis”. The word comes from peri, which means “around” or “near”, and choros, which means “dance” and from which we derive our English words “chorus” and “choreography”. So think of a chorus of singers, whose voices are so perfectly balanced and blended that they combine to form a single whole. Or picture in your mind a troupe of dancers elegantly sweeping across the floor and supporting one another in such a way that you can’t separate them without destroying the whole. According to one definition, “Perichoresis is the fellowship of three co-equal Beings perfectly embraced in love and harmony and expressing an intimacy that no one can humanly comprehend.”

Such is the love that binds together the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. And that love flows out in acts of self-giving—in creation, in redemption, in the daily presence and empowering of the Holy Spirit. It also yearns to draw others into its warmth. It is the love that reaches out to us, seeks us as a shepherd seeks his lost sheep, stops for us on the road and binds up our wounds, weeps for us, rejoices with us, suffers for us, dies for us. “So we have known and believe the love that God has for us.”

The fruits of love

What I have said thus far is based on two of the many remarkable statements that we come across in this passage: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us” (verse 10) and, “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them” (verse 16). Before we leave, there is a third and it is found in verse 18: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” Here John brings us from the nature of love and the source of love to the fruits of love.

Of course as long as we live in this world there will be fears. As many of us have learned in our recent Adult Education series, fear is a part of our primal nature. It is necessary for survival. But that ordinary, inbuilt fear is not the kind of fear that John is referring to. What John is writing about is fear of judgment, the fear that keeps us away from God, the fear that gnaws away at our soul and holds us captive to negativity and gloom.

Knowing that God loves me is like opening a blind on a shuttered room. It dispels the darkness and gives light in every direction. It allows us to enter into a relationship of intimacy with God, in which there is no need to hide anything from him because his desire is only for our good. It is what Charles Wesley wrote about in his classic hymn:

No condemnation now I dread;
Jesus, and all in him, is mine!
Alive in him, my living head,
And clothed in righteousness divine…

More broadly, knowing that we have a God who loves us and cares for our every need frees us from fear about material things. It is what Jesus spoke about in the Sermon on the Mount when he said to his disciples,

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear… Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them… And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For … your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.

Thirdly, God’s love frees us from fear in relationships. It impels us to emerge from our shells of self-absorption to love others with the same quality of love that God has shown to us. “Beloved,” John exhorts us in verse 11, “if God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.” And if that were not clear enough, he turns his exhortation into a commandment in verse 21: “Those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.” “Let us make no mistake,” writes Bishop Stephen Neill again. “ ‘Love thy neighbor’ is not good advice… It is a command; and in the Bible, if commands are given, it is because they are expected to be obeyed.”[2]

As we pause this morning to consider the love of God, may the vision of it draw us out of the shadows of fear to open our hearts more fully to him. May it move us to trust him to care for us and lead us through life. And may we allow that love to flow through us into the lives of others. “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God.”

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[1]     The Christian Character, 22

[2]     pages 19,20

Sermon – “Perfection” (Matthew 5:38-48)

Early in 1902 members of a French archeological team were exploring the ancient royal city of Susa in Iran. There they came across a large carved stone, seven feet long and six feet in circumference. On it were engraved forty-four columns of ancient Babylonian cuneiform script. What they had discovered was the collection of laws of Hammurabi, the sixth king of the first Babylonian Empire, dating from around 1750 BC. The introduction to the text (actually written thirty years later) states that Hammurabi was predestined by the gods “to cause justice to radiate over the land, to surrender sinners and evildoers to destruction, and to take care that the strong should not oppress the weak”.

Now on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris, Hammurabi’s Code consists of 282 laws covering almost every imaginable aspect of life: marriage and family relations; negligence; fraud; commercial contracts; duties of public officials; property and inheritance; crimes and punishments; protection for women, children, and slaves; debt relief for victims of food and drought; taverns; the building of houses and ships… Embedded within it is the earliest written expression of what is known as the Law of Talion: “If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out” (196). “If he break another man’s bone, his bone shall be broken” (197). “If a man knock out the teeth of his equal, his teeth shall be knocked out” (200).

It all sounds rather fierce and primitive to us now, but the Law of Talion (from which we derive our word “retaliation”) was instituted to prevent the escalation of violence. (Would that the Hatfields and the McCoys had known about it a hundred and fifty years ago!) A version of that same law is found centuries later in the book of Leviticus (24:19,20) in the Old Testament Law: “Anyone who maims another shall suffer the same injury in return: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; the injury inflicted is the injury to be suffered.” And that is where Jesus’ commentary on the Law begins in this week’s passage.

The path of non-resistance

The Law of Talion was intended to promote justice. However, Jesus takes it a step farther—indeed, a quantum leap. “This is what you have always been taught,” he tells his disciples, “but I say to you, do not resist an evildoer.” Now I can’t imagine Jesus’ disciples just sitting back and taking all this in. Remember that among them was Simon the Zealot, a radical revolutionary dedicated to the violent overthrow of the Roman occupation. There were also James and John, whom Jesus later nicknamed the sons of thunder, presumably because of their violent tempers.

Perhaps they did try to interject, but that did not stop Jesus from driving his point further home with three forceful examples.

·  The first had to do with being struck on the cheek. What Jesus was talking about was not just being slapped. In order to be hit on the right cheek, the assailant has to use the back of his hand. In the world of Jesus’ day, this did not just cause injury; it was an insult reserved for the lowest of the low.

·  In the book of Exodus (22:26) there is a law that states, “If you take your neighbor’s cloak in pawn, you shall restore it before the sun goes down.” But Jesus says, if someone takes your tunic, give them your cloak as well, even if it leaves you in the shame of going about naked.

·  In the occupied Roman territories soldiers could conscript local inhabitants to carry their heavy packs for a mile. (Exactly the same verb is used of Simon of Cyrene when he was forced to carry Jesus’ cross.) But Jesus says, “Don’t just go the one mile—go two!”

Jean Vanier, founder of the worldwide l’Arche communities for people with disabilities, speaks about the need to absorb negativity and violence—and he himself is a living example of what that involves. One of his biographers tells this story:

Once in the road in Trosly he was accosted by a large, muscular man from the village. He was hurling abuse at l’Arche, at people with disabilities and at Jean, all of whom he seemed to hate. The man hit Jean on the ear but not quite hard enough to knock him to the ground. Jean found himself standing firm and heard himself saying, ‘You can hit me again if you want.’ Flabbergasted, the man took him by the hand and invited him to his house.[1]

It all sounds like an impossible ethic. Yet even as the Nazi power was exerting its deathly grip on Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer could write,

The only way to overcome evil is to let it run itself to a standstill because it does not find the resistance it is looking for. Resistance merely creates further evil and adds fuel to the flames. But when evil meets no opposition and encounters no obstacle but only patient endurance, its sting is drawn, and at last it meets an opponent which is more than its match.[2]

The evil of Nazism was such that in the end Bonhoeffer saw no alternative to becoming involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Two years later the physician who witnessed his hanging at Flossenburg prison camp testified, “In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”[3]

The transforming power of love

If the path of non-resistance is a difficult pill for us to swallow, Jesus turns up the pressure by several degrees in his next remarks. It is not enough that we should not resist our enemies, he tells us. We should love them. Here we need to remember that in the Bible love does not mean thinking nice thoughts or having warm feelings towards another person. No, love in the biblical sense means taking practical action, doing loving things. The priest and the Levite may well have had kind thoughts about the wounded traveler in the ditch, but it was the Samaritan who loved him.

In his recent book David and Goliath, New Yorker journalist Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of police officer Joanne Jaffe. In 2003 she took over responsibility for the New York City neighborhood of Brownsville. Home to more than 100,000 people, Gladwell describes it as “block upon block of bleak, featureless brick-and-concrete developments … plagued by groups of teenagers who roamed the streets, mugging passersby”. One of the first tasks Jaffe undertook was to compile a list of all the teenagers who had been arrested over the previous year—106 in all, who by her estimate could have been responsible for as many as 5000 crimes.

She then put together a task force of police officers and had them contact every name on the list. They told the teens, “We want to do everything we can to get you back in school, to help you get a high school diploma, to bring services to your family, find out what’s needed in the household. We will provide job opportunities, educational opportunities, medical—everything we can. We want to work with you.”

The breakthrough only came after months into the program, when a group of officers chipped in to provide Thanksgiving dinner to the family of one of the worst offenders. “This is a kid we’re gonna lose,” they said, “but there are seven other kids in that family. We had to do something for them.” This inspired Jaffe to request the police commissioner to provide 125 Thanksgiving dinners to all the families of the teens in the program. A month later this led to Christmas toy giveaways, to playing basketball with them, taking them out for meals, driving them to medical appointments. The approach seems counterintuitive, but the number of robberies and arrests declined over each of the succeeding five years, down to twenty percent of their original level.[4]

Joanne Jaffe took an amazing risk, and it was altogether possible that her gambit could have failed. Crime and violence might have increased in Brownsville. Yet the point is that we need to be willing to take the risk, to love even those who have done us wrong, who may even hate us and everything we stand for, all the while remembering that for Jesus it led to the cross.

The challenge of perfection

I do not claim that this is an easy teaching either to understand or to accept. It may have been words like this that caused some of Jesus’ followers to say, “This is tough teaching. Who can accept it?” There were some (and I suspect no small number) who decided to stop following him. However, that did not deter Jesus, who in our passage this morning ratchets things up even further with the seemingly impossible demand, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

What does Jesus mean by this? I think the answer is to be found in the word that is rendered “perfect” in almost every English translation of the Bible. In Greek it is teleios. Most of the time it is translated “mature”, and it means whole, fully developed, or complete. We find it in passages such as these:

·  You know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be teleios and complete, lacking in nothing. (James 1:3,4)

·  Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone teleios in Christ. (Colossians 1:28)

·  Epaphras … is always wrestling in his prayers on your behalf, so that you may stand teleios and fully assured in everything that God wills. (Colossians 4:12)

But the clincher for me in understanding this word is found in Paul’s testimony to the Philippians, where he writes,

Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us then who are teleios be of the same mind; and if you think differently about anything, this too God will reveal to you. (Philippians 3:13-15)

To be teleios is not to have arrived. Nor is it to have reached the pinnacle of moral and spiritual perfection. In fact it has nothing to do with me or my achievements. Quite the opposite: it is to recognize my incompleteness, and that my true completion is to be found in God—that to be fully human, fully the person that God has created me to be, means to live in a relationship with him, and to depend on his love and mercy, grace and power. For this reason, of all the translations of this verse, I like Eugene Peterson’s version in The Message best: “Grow up… Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.”

As we leave this first chapter of the Sermon on the Mount, we are reminded that what Jesus is talking about is not living for God, but living in him and with him. It is an invitation not to heroism but to faith—to walk through life in company with him.

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[1]     Kathryn Spink, The Miracle, the Message, the Story: Jean Vanier and l’Arche, 90,91

[2]     Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 127

[3]     Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, 532

[4]     Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath, 209-217