“It didn’t just ‘happen’” (Isaiah 53)

It was a journey of some two thousand kilometers—from Jerusalem all the way back to what is modern-day Sudan. The lone traveler had come to worship at the Temple. And I can only imagine that it was for him a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

As his horse plodded along, he occupied his time by reading from a scroll he had no doubt acquired during the course of his stay in Jerusalem—the writings of the prophet Isaiah.

Now you have to realize that in those days no one read silently. Believe it or not, that practice wasn’t to come about for another thousand years. So it was that Philip, a Jesus-follower, who happened to be traveling along the same road, could hear every word that the Ethiopian was reading.

Curious, he asked the traveller, “Do you understand what you’re reading?” To which came the reply, “How can I without someone to explain it to me?” With that he invited Philip to climb up and sit with him in the chariot. And here is what he was reading:

Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter
    and as a lamb before its shearer is silent,
    so he did not open his mouth.
In his humiliation justice was denied him.
    Who can describe his descendants?
For his life was taken away from the earth.

“So who was the prophet talking about?” the traveler asked. “Himself or someone else?” And this was all Philip needed to begin to tell him about Jesus.

The passage, of course, was the remarkable fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, from which we have read this evening. It had been written centuries before, but it gives a vivid description of what was to take place at Calvary, as Jesus, the Lamb of God, hung dying on the cross.

Jesus’ crucifixion and the events that led up to it had come as a terrifying shock to the disciples. Even Peter, for all his bravado beforehand, had crumbled when things began to fall apart. And two days later the disciples could be found cowering in a room with its door locked and barred for fear that what had happened to Jesus might happen to them.

Yet it was not as though Jesus had not warned them about what was going to take place. The gospels record three separate occasions on which Jesus plainly told the disciples that he would be betrayed, rejected by the religious authorities and condemned to death. But they were not able to take in his warnings.

In fact, on the eve of his crucifixion, as the disciples were bickering over which of them was the greatest, Jesus quoted directly from this very passage. “For I tell you,” he said to them, “that this Scripture must be fulfilled in me: ‘And he was numbered with the transgressors.’ For what is written about me has its fulfilment.” (Luke 22:37)

Yet it was only after the resurrection that with Jesus’ help they began to be able to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Luke tells us in his gospel that it was then that Jesus took time with the disciples to open their minds to understand the Scriptures—that all that was written in the Law and the Prophets that would find its fulfilment in him (Luke 24:44-46). And as they began to look through the Scriptures, there it was again and again. Everything began to become clear in a way that it never had been before.

Perhaps you’ve seen this illustration before. At first glance it is a picture of an elderly woman, with a wart on her nose and a kerchief covering her head, looking sadly down, perhaps thinking back to the lost opportunities of the past. But if you look again, you can also see the figure of a young woman, her face turned away from us, perhaps looking ahead to what may await her in the future.

So it was that Jesus enabled the disciples to read the Scriptures in a whole new way. And so it was that on the Day of Pentecost Peter could proclaim to the crowd that had gathered, “Jesus of Nazareth … was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to a cross” (Acts 2:23). And there is no doubt in my mind that one of the passages from the Old Testament that was central in the thoughts of Peter and his fellow disciples was the one we have read this evening.

The events of the cross didn’t just “happen”. They were not a triumph of evil over good, not even for a split second. They were all a part of God’s plan from the beginning of time. And our passage from Isaiah this evening, the passage that the Ethiopian servant was reading on his long homeward journey, opens to us the mind of our gracious and merciful heavenly Father.

The words form the fourth of what are called the “servant songs” of Isaiah. Each one points ahead to the day when God would send his servant, in whom he delights and upon whom his Spirit rests, to bring glory to him and to be a light to the nations. Together they form a progression, reaching their climax in the final song—the passage we have read from this evening.

From the opening verse Isaiah recognizes that God’s plans for us are beyond our understanding. “Who could have believed what we have heard?” he asks. And indeed who would believe that the battered and bloody figure, limp and helpless and hanging from a cross, was the divine Son of God?

Isaiah said he would be despised and rejected. So it was that those who passed by as Jesus hung there laughed at him and mocked him with the taunt, “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” (Matthew 27:39-40)

Yet Isaiah knew that the punishment that the servant would bear was not because of anything he had done, but for you and for me. “He was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities… The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” “He bore the sin of many,” Isaiah tells us, “and makes intercession for the transgressors.” And so it is that we hear Jesus pray, “Father, forgive them…”

It is a dark and gruesome picture. Yet through it all Isaiah also sees a glimmer of light. “The will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand,” he tells us. “Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous…”

And so beyond the gloom of Good Friday we already are given a glimpse of the joy of that first Easter morning—and indeed of the eternal joy of heaven. We have a foreshadowing of that day when all creation will proclaim, “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honour and glory and blessing!” (Revelation 5:12)

When Philip left him and the Ethiopian servant went on to resume his southward journey, he was a changed man. He now knew the suffering servant as his Saviour and Lord. My prayer is that the same may be true for you on this Good Friday—that you may look to the cross of Jesus and find in him the one who was pierced for your sins and who was punished to bring you peace.

“A Well, a Woman and Living Water” (John 4:1-42)

Just outside the city of Nablus on the Palestinian West Bank is the village of Balata. In the late 1980s and early 1990s it was the site of the major rioting that is now infamously known as the First Intifada. All told, that violence led to the deaths of more than a thousand people.

Perhaps less known is the fact that until the time of those uprisings, Balata was also the home of as many as half of the world’s tiny remaining population of Samaritans. But for Christians Balata’s claim to fame lies within the precincts of its Eastern Orthodox church and monastery. There you will find what purports to be (and likely is) the site of Jacob’s well—the very location of this morning’s reading from the Gospel according to John—and from which you can still draw water to this day.

In New Testament times the town was known as Sychar. But its Old Testament name was Shechem. It was at Shechem that the Lord appeared to Abram and gave him the promise, “To your offspring I will give this land” (Genesis 12:6-7). It was at Shechem that Jacob later settled and built an altar to the Lord (Genesis 33:18-20). It was at Shechem that Joseph’s bones were buried (Joshua 24:32). And generations later it was at Shechem that the people of Israel assembled before Joshua and solemnly pledged, “Far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord… The Lord our God we will serve, and his voice we will obey” (Joshua 24:16,25).

Lying on major trade routes that ran both east-west and north-south, Shechem had once been a significant commercial centre. However, over the centuries it had gradually gone downhill, so that by Jesus’ time all that remained was a sleepy wayside hamlet.

Now if you were travelling from Galilee to Jerusalem, the shortest route would take you through Sychar. That is, if it were not for one serious complication. The problem was that such a route would take you through Samaria. And, as we read in this morning’s passage from John, “Jews [had] no dealings with Samaritans.” The result was that the vast majority of Jewish travellers going from Jerusalem to Galilee would be forced to take a wide sweep eastwards across the Jordan River and later cross it again to head back west into Galilee. Needless to say, this added anywhere from two to four days to their journey.[1]

A Well

Jesus, however, had no such reservations. So it is that we find him with his disciples in the tiny Samaritan village of Sychar. Now John does not tell us what time of year it was when Jesus and his disciples were travelling. But he does tell us the time of day. It was the sixth hour, which means noon. So the sun was at its height. And I know that for much of the year the temperature in that region can reach well into the thirties. So perhaps you can imagine what it must have been like for them to have been journeying on foot under the blazing heat of the near eastern sun.

The sight of the little village must have been a welcome one. Wearied from all the walking they had been doing (Eugene Peterson in his translation in The Message used the words “worn out”) and while the disciples went off to see where they could buy some provisions for lunch, Jesus took the opportunity to sit down in the cool shade beside a well.

So it is that John gives us a little reminder of Jesus’ humanity. He was not Superman or Captain America or Thor. He was not faster than a speeding bullet or more powerful than a locomotive. And he could not leap over tall buildings in a single bound. Rather, as we read in Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, “he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness…” (Philippians 2:7).

So it is that at the outset of his ministry we find Jesus being tempted by the adversary. A few weeks ago, reading from John 2, we saw him angry, as he drove out the money changers from the Temple, lashing at them with a whip and overturning their tables. Later in the Gospels we find him exhausted to the point that he fell asleep in the stern of one of his followers’ boats—so soundly that even with the waves crashing over the gunwales and threatening to sink it, he continued to sleep (Mark 4:36-38).

Now why is all this important? In the early years of the church there sprang up a form of heresy called Docetism. The core teaching of the Docetists was that Jesus only appeared to be human. That doctrine was quickly rejected by the church for several reasons. First, the fact that Jesus was fully human enables him to relate to us in the fullest possible way. The Letter to the Hebrews affirms that in Jesus “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin”. This gives us the assurance that we can come to him in our own weakness, in full confidence that we will find mercy and grace to help us in our times of need (Hebrews 4:15-16).

Secondly, it was the fact that Jesus was fully human that enabled him to be fully your and my representative when he bore our sins on the cross. The Bible recognizes Jesus as the new Adam, who has come into the world to undo all the wrong and destruction that are the result of sin. As the apostle Paul declared to the Christians in Galatia, “When the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive the full rights of sons” (Galatians 4:4-5).

And so in this morning’s reading we meet with a fully human Jesus. Weary and thirsty after a long trek, he took a moment to sit down by the side of a well and rest.

A Woman

The next time he looked up, there was a woman from the village coming to draw water from the well. Not having a bucket of his own, he asks her if he might take a drink from hers. His request is met with a look of horror and raised eyebrows. “What? You, a Jew, asking me, a Samaritan, to share from my bucket?”

At this point you may be asking yourself, what was that about? First of all, the Samaritan woman was well aware that for centuries Jews had regarded all non-Jews—and particularly Samaritans—as unclean. That meant you couldn’t come into physical contact with them or anything they had touched.

If that doesn’t make sense to you, think back a year or two to the covid epidemic. Imagine yourself coming up to a complete stranger and asking if you might take a sip from their water bottle. What kind of response do you think you’d get? “Are you crazy?” “Don’t you take any precautions?”

So begins one of the longest conversations in John’s gospel. And there is something about it that is utterly delightful, as the woman engages Jesus in a deeply thoughtful theological discussion.

Today in our age we might think nothing about it. But you have to realize that the attitude towards women in the first century was poles apart from what it is nowadays in the twenty-first. The very first prayer that every Jewish male recited in the morning, waking with the cockcrow, having barely opened his eyes and before he placed a foot on the ground, was this: “Blessed are you, Lord our God, ruler of the universe, that you did not create me a Gentile, a slave or a woman.” And here was Jesus, a Jew, engaging in what can only be described as a profound theological dialogue with a woman.

Now when you read the gospels, you find that this is not a one-off incident. Jesus’ attitude towards women was highly countercultural for a first-century Jew. He was happy for a woman—and an unclean one at that—to interrupt him while he was in conversation with a ruler of a synagogue (Luke 8:43-48). He was satisfied to allow Mary to take a place among the men while he was teaching in her home (Luke 10:38-42). He commended a widow as a model of generosity (Mark 12:41-44). He accepted the anointing by a woman’s precious oil as a beautiful foretelling of his death (Mark 14:3-9). And it was women who were the first to bear witness to his resurrection (Mark 16:1-7).

Jesus’ acceptance and honouring of women continued in the early church. As early as the day of Pentecost, quoting from the prophet Joel, the apostle Peter proclaimed,

And in the last days it shall be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams;
even on my male servants and female servants
in those days I will pour out my Spirit,
and they shall prophesy. (Acts 2:17-18)

The apostle Paul has been maligned for being a misogynist. But it was he who affirmed that “as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:27-28).

And so what we see in this conversation are the seeds of a revolution. We are given a glimpse of the new society—the Jesus community—in which women take their proper place as equals alongside their male counterparts, even as Eve was drawn from the side of Adam in the Garden of Eden.

Living Water

But let’s take a look at the conversation itself. Jesus answers the woman’s objection with the response, “If you were aware of who you are talking with, you might have asked him for living water.” Of course the woman thought that Jesus was referring to running water. “Are you crazy? Where are you going to get that kind of water from? You don’t even have a bucket to draw water from this well!” To which Jesus replies, “Whoever drinks the water I give will never be thirsty again. The water I give will become within them a spring of water gushing forth to eternal life.” But the woman still doesn’t catch on. “Sir, give me that water, and I’ll never have to break my back hauling water from this well again!”

At this point Jesus shifts the conversation in a deeply personal direction. “Go and bring your husband over and we’ll talk more.” When she claims to have no husband, Jesus reveals that he is well aware of the half dozen men who have been a part of her life. You can only imagine the shock and discomfort she must have felt at this revelation. She may have lived a sordid life, but this woman was no slouch. She had all her wits about her. “So! I see you’re a prophet!” she retorts. Then she vainly attempts to divert the conversation into a religious argument: the age-old hostilities surrounding the question as to which group was worshipping in the proper way—the Jews or the Samaritans? This, she thought, would be sure to get away from the touchy subject of her relationships with the opposite sex.

But Jesus is ready for her. God is not concerned about which mountain people worship him on. He is infinitely bigger than that. No, says Jesus, the true God is far more interested in what’s happening on the inside of our lives, not in external rituals. “God is spirit,” Jesus tells her, “and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. That’s the kind of worshipper God is looking for.”

At this the woman begins to open her true heart and expresses the deep yearning that has long burned within her for the Messiah to come and rescue her. To which Jesus answers, “I who speak to you am he.”

And of course what happens? Just as the conversation is reaching a critical point, who walks into the scene but the disciples! They kept silent, but the woman must have seen the look of horror on their faces, that Jesus was alone with a woman and engaging in conversation with her—and a Samaritan woman at that! She didn’t need anyone to tell her to make herself scarce.

Whether it was in fear of the disciples or in amazement at the man she had been talking with, she dropped her water bottle as she ran off into the village. And there she became the first evangelist in the New Testament: “Come and see a man who told me all that I ever did!” (As though any of the villagers hadn’t been whispering about exactly that topic for years!) “Can this be the Christ?” she asked. And John tells us “Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony.”

And that’s the thing about living water. If you’ve really had a taste of it, it’s something you can’t keep to yourself. As much as we might like to, as much as we might be tempted to, we cannot bottle it in. The streams of living water will always well up and burst their bounds. And the one who gives them is not only the one who came to the woman at the well, asking, “Give me a drink.” He is also the one who would later cry out for you and for me and for all humankind, “I thirst…” (John 19:28).

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[1]     https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/new-testament/3-pilgrimage-paths-from-galilee-to-jerusalem/

“An Everlasting Love” (Jeremiah 31:2-6)

 

About a third of the way through the letter “J” in my dictionary you will come across the word “jeremiad”. And what, you ask, is a jeremiad? Well, a jeremiad is defined as (and I quote) “a long literary work, in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective, and always contains a prophecy of society's imminent downfall”.

With a long definition like that, it is clear to anyone who knows their Bible where the word “jeremiad” originates: from the book of Jeremiah in the Old Testament—fifty-two chapters of almost uninterrupted gloom and doom. And if that weren’t enough, Jeremiah wrote an equally doleful sequel: the book of Lamentations—five more chapters of melancholy and woe!

Many years ago, when I was in my late teens, I remember coming across a book entitled, Are You Joking, Jeremiah? I don’t think it was the author’s intention to turn Jeremiah into a kind of seventh-century BC stand-up comedian. A humorist Jeremiah certainly was not. What the author was really trying to do was to ask the question, “Jeremiah, can things really be that bad? Are the circumstances really as dire as you want us to believe?” And I have no doubt that Jeremiah’s answer would have been an unequivocal “Yes”. Or maybe, “Worse!”

For the past few months I’ve been working my way through Jeremiah as a part of my daily quiet time. And it hasn’t been easy reading. Jeremiah lived in the late years of the seventh and the early years of the sixth century BC. He proclaimed the message that the Lord had entrusted to him over a period of forty years, spanning the reigns of the last four of Judah’s kings: Josiah (640-609 BC), Jehoiakim (609-598 BC), Jehoiachin (598-597 BC) and Zedekiah (597-586 BC).

As he wrote, all that was left of the once-great nation of Israel were just two of the original twelve tribes, Benjamin and Judah, clustered around the capital city of Jerusalem. Now their existence too was being threatened with the expansion of the Babylonian Empire to the north and the rapid advance of its seemingly invincible armies. What were the people of Judah to do?

Much of the leadership were urging that they form an alliance with the Egyptian Empire to the south—indeed, if worse came to worst, to abandon Judah altogether and flee to Egypt. Imagine the irony, though, of going back to the very place where their ancestors had escaped from slavery five hundred years before—to the land from which God himself had intervened to rescue them with miracles on a scale never witnessed before or since!

A Message of Warning

To Jeremiah the notion of turning to Egypt was unthinkable. God’s words through him to the people and their leaders were these: “If you will remain in this land, then I will build you up and not pull you down; I will plant you, and not pluck you up” (42:10). Again and again with words like these Jeremiah urged the people of Judah to remain in their land.

Yes, the Babylonian army would attack and enslave them. Yes, those who survived would be lucky to escape with their lives. And all of this, said Jeremiah, was not just that Judah happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. No, what was unfolding around them was the due punishment that they had brought upon themselves—retribution for the countless ways in which they had blithely abandoned God and his laws, to adopt pagan practices and to oppress the poor.

So it was that Jeremiah went through the streets of Jerusalem, confronting prophets and priests, generals, landowners, leaders, merchants and kings—anyone he could find—with his message of warning. And he didn’t fear to mince his words!

I have seen your abominations,
your adulteries and neighings, your lewd whorings,
on the hills in the field.
Woe to you, Jerusalem!
How long will it be before you are made clean? (13:27)

Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness,
and his upper rooms by injustice,
who makes his neighbour serve him for nothing
and does not give him his wages… (22:13)

Behold, the storm of the Lord!
Wrath has gone forth,
a whirling tempest;
it will burst upon the head of the wicked.
The anger of the Lord will not turn back
 until he has executed and accomplished
 the intents of his heart. (23:19-20)

Needless to say, Jeremiah and his constant warnings of doom did not meet with a positive response. On one occasion his prophecies were cut up and torn to shreds by the king himself. On another he was arrested on charges of treachery and locked away in a dungeon. And on still another he was tossed into a cistern and would have died of starvation in the mud had he not been rescued. Yet none of this halted Jeremiah’s determination to issue the warnings that God had given him.

Their little kingdom was doomed. But the Lord would restore them—if only they would turn from evil and injustice, and be faithful to him once again.

The Message of God’s Love

Now it’s not as though Jeremiah was just an angry old man (or an angry young man for that matter!). Beneath all his words of woe and retribution and judgement (as with all the prophets) was the unquenchable conviction of God’s undying love for his people.

So it is that in today’s passage we come across some of the most beautiful and moving words in all of Scripture. There through Jeremiah God addresses his wayward people: “I have loved you with an everlasting love.”

Now this was not some new-fangled idea that Jeremiah had come up with. He was not inventing anything. The everlasting, undying love of God is a thread that weaves its way through the whole of the Bible, from beginning to end.

It takes us all the way back to that unforgettable scene in the Garden of Eden, where God takes the creature that he has created in his own image—that he has formed from the dust of the ground—and tenderly breathes into him the breath of life. We witness it as Adam and Eve are banished from the garden for their disobedience. Yet in his fatherly care for them the Lord will not see them go cold and naked, but caringly provides them with garments of animal skins.

It thunders from Mount Sinai as the mighty God proclaims to Moses, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin…” (Exodus 34:6-7). Later on, as they near the Promised Land, Moses proclaims once again the Lord’s message to the people of Israel, “The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession… It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the Lord loves you…” (Deuteronomy 7:6-8a)

As we move farther through the Bible, the chorus of God’s love rings through the psalms as well. Psalm 33, for example, reminds us that, “the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord” (5b). But most notably it is in Psalm 136, where we are invited to sing, “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his love endures forever.” But not just once! In each of the twenty-five verses that follow, the psalmist calls upon us to repeat the chorus, “for his steadfast love endures forever.”

But one of the most moving pictures of God’s inexhaustible love comes to us in the book of Hosea. I suspect many of you are familiar with Hosea’s unrelenting devotion to his wife Gomer. Perhaps we could blame Hosea for making a poor choice of a wife in the first place, since Gomer already had a reputation for promiscuity long before he took her in marriage. Yet God had a plan in it all. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Gomer has not given up her adulterous lifestyle. Although forced to divorce her, Hosea continues to love Gomer in spite of her unfaithfulness, to the point where later he finds her living as a slave and purchases her freedom, giving us in the process a profound, real-life parable of God’s love for his people.

The Message Made Flesh

So it is that God could instruct Jeremiah to write, even to a people who had rejected him, “I have loved you with an everlasting love…” That love is a theme that weaves its way through the whole of Scripture (as I’ve attempted to point out) from the beginning to the end. And so it is on this fourth Sunday in Advent, with Christmas just around the corner, that we focus on God’s love.

The poet Christina Rossetti put it to rhyme in a little poem that later became a Christmas carol:

Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely, love divine;
Love was born at Christmas;
Star and angels gave the sign.

The only problem is that, with all the charming pictures of sheep and oxen and shepherds, we run the risk of romanticizing that love—turning it into something that is cute and cuddly like the little baby gazing innocently up from the manger. (Let’s not forget the smell of the sheep and the oxen! And let’s not forget that those crusty shepherds were terrified—scared out of their wits—at the sight of the angels!)

No, the love that entered the world at Christmas was a fierce love, a costly love. And it would be forty days after that first Christmas that old Simeon would draw attention to that truth, when Mary and Joseph brought their newborn son to be presented in the Temple in Jerusalem. As he stared down on the little infant, Simeon’s words to Mary were bone-chilling: “This child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed, and a sword will pierce through your own soul also...” (Luke 2:34-35)

Simeon could not have been aware of it. But with the advantage of hindsight we know that what he was pointing to would ultimately lead to the cross. And looking back on it years later from the other side, the apostle John could write, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (1 John 4:10) If we want to catch a vision of the love of God in all its fullness, it is not to the manger that we must look, but past the manger, to Calvary, to the one who, in the Apostle Paul’s words, loved us and gave himself for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God (Ephesians 5:2).

And so today you and I come together on this final Sunday in Advent, this Sunday of love. In a few minutes that fourth candle, the love candle, will be extinguished. But let us never lose sight of the fact that the love that you and I celebrate this Christmas season is a love that will never falter or fail. For we come together in the presence of the God who says to us, as he said to Jeremiah centuries ago, “I have loved you with an everlasting love.”

“Remember Your Leaders” (Hebrews 13:7-16)

 

Wow! We’ve been reading and making our way through Hebrews for a long time. It was way back in January that we started. Now it seems almost as though that is shrouded in the mists of history. And I want to express my gratitude to Pastor Marvin, who has steadfastly and faithfully been leading us through this rich book of the Bible all that time—in spite of a car accident resulting in a serious concussion and later falling victim to covid. Now here we are part way through the last chapter, and in my Bible I’m into the final column of this profound and challenging message to the church.

It seems to me, as I read through it, that this concluding chapter is something of a catch-all. It may be that our anonymous author is running out of parchment to write on. I can imagine his hand (or the hand of his scribe) might be aching after all this writing. So now he is packing as much as he can into his concluding words. It is almost as though he were saying, “Oh, and by the way, before I put down my pen…”—with the result that he pours forth with a whole jumble of wise and timeless counsel, things that he feels need to be said.

Remember

The first thing he calls upon us to do in these verses is to remember. “Remember your leaders,” he says, “those who spoke to you the word of God.” So I want to let you take the next couple of moments to pause and think back to the people who have had an impact on you, men and women whom the Holy Spirit brought into your life as an influence for the good. Who were the individuals who helped you to come into a living relationship with Christ? Who were those who drew you back onto the path when you were going astray? Who were the individuals who stood by you and held out a light for you in the darkness? Who were those who prayed for you? Who were those who had the thoughtfulness to encourage you or the boldness to caution or to scold you?

What a wonderful thing it is that the Lord does not call us to walk the path of discipleship alone! As the author has already reminded us in the previous chapters, we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. And, as he has made clear in that long catalogue of God’s faithful servants in chapter 11, that cloud is not limited to the present.

In addition to that list, we owe a huge debt to our Christian forebears who have come since that time: for their steadfast commitment to the truths of the gospel, even in some cases, to the point of death; for their willingness to journey hundreds, even thousands, of miles to share their faith; for their deep insights into the mysteries of God.

Last Sunday at the end of the service we did something slightly out of the ordinary here at First Congregational… We sang a song that was penned nearly a hundred and fifty years ago. That hymn was written by a young woman named Frances Ridley Havergal. And one of its verses began like this:

Take my silver and my gold,
Not a mite would I withhold…

I had to laugh to myself a little as we sang it because, in the hymn book that we used in the church where I served before I retired, that verse had been omitted by its editors! Yet behind it there lies a marvellous story and one that I find quite moving. It comes in a quote from a letter that its author sent to a friend. Here is what she wrote:

‘Take my silver and my gold’ now means shipping off all my ornaments—including a jewel cabinet which is really fit for a countess—to the Church Missionary Society where they will be accepted and disposed of for me. I retain only a brooch for daily wear… I don’t think I need tell you I never packed a box with such pleasure.[1]

How much we have to learn from an example like that! And Frances Ridley Havergal is just one of thousands, no millions, who have paved the way for my faith and yours today.

We live in a generation that tends more and more to focus on the immediate. Our lives are governed by catchy headlines and sound bites, on tweets and social media posts. And I don’t for one minute debate that we need to keep up with the present. Yet we can’t allow our obsession with the now to happen at the expense of plumbing the deep riches of the past, to learn and to benefit from the lives of women and men of faith who have gone before us.

So allow me to commend the study of Christian history and biography, to encourage you to familiarize yourselves with the lives of great men and women of faith from the past. You will find yourself challenged and enriched by the depth of their faith, by their profound insights and by the steadfastness of their commitment to Christ.

Way back nearly nine hundred years ago a very wise man named John of Salisbury wrote these words:

We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. We see more, and things that are more distant, than they did, not because our sight is superior or because we are taller than they, but because they raise us up, and by their great stature add to ours.

Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God.

The Unchanging Christ

We would not be who we are or where we are without the witness of those faithful saints who have gone before us. More importantly, our author tells us, we would not be either of those things without Jesus: Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today and forever.

Circumstances may change; Jesus does not. The world of 2022 is a markedly different place from what it was only a few years ago—and the pace of that change continues to accelerate. Many of the things we take for granted now were unheard of twenty years ago: iPhones and iPads, Facebook and Twitter, Netflix and Amazon Prime, smoking bans in restaurants, text messaging, led lighting, drones, and electric cars, to name just a few. And I doubt that anyone would have seriously considered the notion of this worship service being broadcast online even three years ago!

All of that has been accompanied by some huge societal shifts as well: the increased frequency of gun violence, the rising acceptance of alternative sexual lifestyles, our awareness of global climate change, and the fact that it’s not just robbers who wear masks into stores any longer! I am even more amazed when I pause to think that my grandfather was born into a world where there were no cars, no telephones, no sound recordings and no electric lights!

Into the midst of this ever-accelerating pace of change, we stand with the author of Hebrews and proclaim, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” And before I utter another word, I want to affirm that that does not mean that we are reactionaries or that we spend all our time longing for the good old days. (And realistically, if we look at them objectively, we’ll find that they weren’t nearly as good as we might wish to think they were.)

What I do want to state unequivocally is that Jesus Christ is not limited by time or the passing fashions of any age. He is still able to speak as powerfully to the twenty-first century dweller as he was in the first. Yet over the centuries there have been people who have tried to paint a different picture of Jesus from the one given to us in the gospels.

Even before the ink of the last books of the New Testament was dry on the parchment, there were already some who were denying that Jesus could have been a true human being, but that he only appeared to be so. When I was a university student, there were theologians who argued that Jesus never rose from the dead and an archaeologist who claimed that Jesus was really the leader of a psychedelic mushroom cult!

No doubt there will always be those who will try to shed doubt on who Jesus is. But like those in the past, they will prove to be nothing more than a temporary fad. For as we have read this morning, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.” And as the author of Hebrews has already stated, “He is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him” (Hebrews 7:25).

Let’s hold on to those words of assurance from the apostle Paul, that “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). And let’s trust in Jesus’ final words in the gospel to his followers, “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

The sacrifice of praise

At this point we may be tempted to stand with those disciples and stare upwards in wonder at the risen, ascended, glorified Christ. Or to want nothing more than to gather with that great crowd of ten thousands times ten thousands and cry with them “Worthy is the Lamb!”.

There’s an old hymn that runs,

Father of Jesus, love’s reward,
What rapture it will be
Prostrate before thy throne to lie
And gaze and gaze on thee!

And you might think that that is what the author of Hebrews is calling upon us to do when he writes, “Through him let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God…” Yet we need to read on. And when we do that, what do we find that he says? “Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have…” That is the sacrifice that is pleasing to God. And it is an ongoing theme of Hebrews:

•  “Let us consider how to stir one another up to love and good works” (10:24) 

•  “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers” (13:2)

•  “Remember those who are in prison” (13:3)

Yes, being here on Sunday morning is important. Yes, being caught up in worship and in praise is vital to our souls. But it loses its purpose if it is divorced from what happens “out there”—if it doesn’t motivate and transform the kind of people we are and the things we do once we step across the threshold at the back of the sanctuary.

I remember visiting a church several years ago and participating in a wonderfully lively time of worship. We had great music. There was solid, challenging biblical preaching. The congregation, drawn from all walks of life and representing every age group, was enthusiastic in its participation. I was in no doubt that the Holy Spirit was truly present. But what I remember most about that church was that, as we left we were met by the large letters of a sign over the door that read, “You are now entering the mission field.” That’s what worship is about. It’s not just to have some kind of spiritual high. It is to empower and equip us for the other six days of the week.

I suspect you may have noticed the new glass doors as you enter the church. (If you haven’t, you’re excused—they’ve only been there for two or three weeks!) What I like about them is that they help to connect “in here” with “out there”. They remind us that the world is right there at our doorstep.

How crucial it is that we maintain that connection! We often call what we are doing right now a “service”. But the real service begins as we step outside the door. How important that we see our worship Sunday by Sunday not as an isolated event, but as being equipped to live for Jesus in the world, to carry the compassion and the grace—the sheer goodness—of Jesus into our homes and neighbourhoods, our workplaces and our classrooms. “For such sacrifices,” the author of Hebrews tells us, “are pleasing to God.”

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[1]     Albert Edward Bailey, The Gospel in Hymns, 405