pentecost 12 year C

Isaiah 5: 1-7 NRSV text
Psalm 80 NRSV text
Hebrews 11: 29-12:2 NRSV text
Luke 12: 49-56 NRSV text

“Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you. Rather, I have come to bring division!” Shocking words, aren’t they? And puzzling. After all, according to the angelic messenger at the outset of Luke’s gospel, Jesus is the presence of God’s peace on earth (Luke 2: 14). Yet in today’s passage, Jesus continues the theme of impending judgement, and specifically states that he has come to divide people to the point where ties of kinship – the fundamental unit in his society – would be torn apart. Not only this, but Jesus casts himself in the very role that he has apparently rejected: he is the bringer of the fire of eschatological judgement as announced by John the Baptist (cf 3: 16-17). What is going on?

Once again: Telling the Time
Today’s passage belongs within the section we considered last week, in which the issue at hand is, “What time is it?” That’s another way of saying, “What is God doing?” Time, as we saw last week, is not chronos (time measured in hours, minutes and seconds), but kairos – “the time of God’s visitation” (cf Luke 19:44).

The question “What time is it?” is inextricably linked to what is happening to Jesus himself. Jesus is God’s visitation. God’s purposes are being worked out in the life and ministry of Jesus. The question that Jesus therefore faces his hearers with (both “the crowds” and the disciples) is whether or not they “see” (ie perceive and understand) what God is doing in Jesus. If they understand that, they “interpret the signs of the times” correctly.

What is happening to Jesus? He is drawing near to Jerusalem. The denouement is approaching fast. Jesus’ “time” (ie passion) is almost here. And both the crowds and the disciples are oblivious to it! The general populace sees in Jesus a crowd-puller and wonder-worker, and/or a potential messiah who will liberate them from Roman oppression. The disciples see their beloved Master, whom they want to hang on to at all costs. What everyone seems to miss is the gathering storm clouds of deadly opposition that are centred on Jerusalem and the Temple. Jesus alone appears to realise how deep and deadly the confrontation is that he is causing. Jesus alone appears to realise that his reception in Jerusalem will not only be the decisive one, but will also be significantly different from his reception among the rural constituency.

Why is it so difficult for people to “get” Jesus? “The crowds” are looking for a nationalist messiah. After constant revolutionary failure (measured in crucifixions), Jesus appears to have the potential actually to carry off a successful uprising. The disciples love Jesus. That is one important factor. They don’t want to lose him – and don’t want to hear about that possibility! But there is another factor: the disciples are caught up with their own hopes and ambitions for the Kingdom. Jesus is clearly inaugurating the Kingdom – and they see themselves as obvious cabinet members! They are into power, in other words, and Jesus’ talk of self-sacrifice, rejection, suffering and death – in other words, failure – is the last thing they want to hear.

The point is that God is not doing what people can imagine or are expecting. God, in Jesus, is entering into human suffering, darkness and death. God is coming to save – and only God knows that this cannot be accomplished in an act of annihilative, triumphant power, but in radical identification with human lostness and in self-sacrifice. There is no other way to save than the Way of the Cross. And that is so utterly, incredibly and absurdly unthinkable that the people just do not “get it”.

“Telling the time” is about discerning what God is doing in the world. That is why Jesus uses the illustration of the weather. People understand the way that the natural universe “works”. There are patterns. Things do not happen randomly, because God has set things up in a specific way. Reading the weather is an acknowledgement that God has created the world with purpose, and that God is to be understood from the way the world works. Reciprocally, the world is to be understood in the light of the creator God.

There is a deeper task of discernment that is more urgent, however: what about God in the light of Jesus? That task is urgent because of the conflict between Jesus and the religious authorities. What is happening in Jesus cannot simply be bolted on to current understandings of God. If “God is as he is in Jesus” (Rt Revd David Jenkins), then what is required is nothing less than a revolution in our understanding of God. This is to get to the heart of the significance of Jesus. The astonishing claim of the gospels is that Jesus reveals who and how God is. The problem is that this understanding of God cuts across established theology. There isn’t any possibility of accommodation.

Jesus’ actions – his authoritative teaching and his miracles – make it clear that some sort of power is at work in him. It is either the power of God (ie the Spirit) or it is some other power (Beelzebul – cf 11:14ff). The obvious answer is that Jesus does what he does in the power of the Spirit. The problem is that Jesus interprets the Law completely differently from the religious leaders. He is “impure”: he eats with prostitutes, tax collectors and “sinners”; he does not observe the Sabbath as he is supposed to; he does not condemn sinners as any decent religious person would. In a system based on ritual purity, Jesus is contaminated; in a system based on ritual purity, it is impossible that God would bless Jesus and work through him. Therefore, in a system based on ritual purity, Jesus cannot possibly be operating in the power of God, which makes him a dangerous heretic who is subverting God’s purposes and threatening the very stability and fabric of the divinely-ordained socio-religious system.

We ought not to underestimate the furore Jesus caused. The point is that there is no point of accommodation; no middle ground. You have to choose – Jesus’ understanding of God, or the religious system of his day. Either Jesus is the kairos – God’s visitation – or must be resisted in the name of God.

This is why Jesus talks about “bringing fire to the earth” and cutting through all established ties, values and faith. It isn’t easy to believe – not because Jesus’ teaching is ambiguous, but because it leaves one with a hard choice. To recognise God in Jesus is a matter of faith. It means going up against how faith is understood. It means going up against the religious authorities in the Temple. It means cutting across inherited wisdom and faith. In Jesus’ day, the family unit was the basic unit of society. What was believed by the head of the family was believed by all. The radical individualism of post-Enlightenment modernity whereby each individual chooses what to believe was still two millennia away. To respond to Jesus, therefore, faced his hearers with an unimaginable choice: to choose between Jesus’ understanding of God and their families’ understanding. It meant that families would be divided over Jesus – and over God.

Jesus – the grace of God and the judgement of God
Jesus in Gethsemane will face the unimaginable: could it be that the God whom Jesus knows as Father will really require the Son to go through with the cross? This is at the heart of Jesus’ understanding of who God is and what God is like. God is the God who calls him to walk the Way of the Cross. That is Jesus’ own private hell. And the irony is that Jesus understands that the cross is God’s deepest expression of love for the world and the means of saving grace.

Grace is deeply at the heart of Luke’s story of Jesus. John the Baptist proclaims that he is the Messiah – the wrath of God incarnate. Yet Jesus comes as the grace of God incarnate – so much so that, as we saw, John the Baptist dies agonising over whether he’d got it right, or whether, in fact, they were waiting for someone else from God (cf Luke 7: 18ff).

Jesus is astonishingly and offensively gracious. Instead of acting as the agent of God’s condemnation of sin, Jesus appears as the herald who invites the dregs of society to the Great Feast (cf 14: 15ff). Jesus is known as the man who “welcomes sinners and eats with them” (cf 15:2). Those who heard him were well aware of the fact that this wasn’t just about Jesus’ own apparently permissive sort of behaviour: he was proclaiming “God’s like that!” And it didn’t go down at all well!

How could Jesus (in God’s name) act so graciously? What about God’s judgement? For people then, as now, it sounded suspiciously like cheap grace. Just what is “cheap grace”? In common parlance, it’s the fear that someone else will “get away with it” – that they’ll be able to get to heaven without having to face the music. It’s the human reaction, in other words, to someone else receiving grace – “undeserved mercy-love” – from God. That’s the thing about grace: it offends because we don’t like other people getting a free ride! We live in a world of just deserts, so that grace is an affront.

Like all these things, this populist notion comes perilously close to the truth. I say “perilously”, not because grace doesn’t entail some sort of free ride, but because we miss the biblical understanding of “cheap grace”, which is that we fail to recognise that grace is costly … it’s just that the cost is always borne by God! Grace, in the biblical sense, means that the consequences of human sin are borne by God rather than by us.

This is the point that Luke wants to make. Jesus is able to be gracious because he will bear the cost of forgiveness. But we need to be incredibly careful using this sort of language: it suggests far too easily that forgiveness somehow costs God an enormous effort of will; that God has to have the divine arm twisted to wrest forgiveness out of God. That is not what the New Testament writers tell us. God doesn’t need persuading to save us: the whole idea of salvation is God’s in the first place!

The point is that salvation is not simply about forgiveness – about God forgiving us for doing wrong things. Salvation is about making things right – about atonement. As I said last week, there is a mystery to it all: God can’t simply do the god-equivalent of waving a wand and making it all alright. For God to save us requires redemption - involves God in the processes and consequences of human sin. That is what is meant by saying that grace is costly. God cannot enact salvation “from afar”.

But neither can God accomplish salvation by “drawing near” in the sort of power that annihilates powerful enemies. That is what is so incredible to Jesus’ hearers. Salvation can only be achieved through the Way of the Cross – through death and resurrection. Salvation, in other words, is nothing short of re-creation. Although this isn’t a theme explicitly present in Luke, his theology is similar to Paul (who explicitly talks about Christ as the Second Adam who brings in the New Age – or New World). Luke’s story of the cross is that Jesus’ rejection is somehow the fulfilment of the whole biblical narrative of the human rejection of God. Jesus becomes the focus and culmination of that story, so that our human “last word” is “Crucify him!” Jesus’ death is thus the death of all that God had intended in creation, so that his resurrection can be the beginning of something entirely new.

This is where grace and judgement meet: if God cannot accomplish salvation without entering into darkness and death, salvation by grace necessarily involves judgement on the “old”. It means the death and destruction of the old. In other words, precisely by being the personification of God’s grace, Jesus is necessarily also the personification of God’s judgement. Yet, rather than appearing as the agent of wrath, he is able to incarnate God’s love, so that Jesus appears as God’s Invitation. Yet in the very act of gracious invitation, Jesus provokes a crisis of decision. There is no way of accommodation with the old way. The invitation to the Great Feast comes always as “Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow”. That is why Jesus, facing the cross, speaks of his role in terms of “bringing division”. Jesus is God’s kairos, and there is no way of avoiding having to make a decision about him.

Costly grace and human responsibility (Isaiah 5/Psalm 80)
Salvation is transformatory. God’s purpose in bearing the cost of atonement is that people will be re-created – transformed by the Life of God in order to live in the world in the way in which God intended in creation. The Old Testament uses images of Yahweh giving birth to Israel/Judah, or, in the case of Isaiah 5, of planting a vineyard. The point is that the redeemed community is to live out their redemption in concrete ways.

Isaiah uses the image of the vineyard owner who carefully tends the vines and awaits the harvest. The expected harvest is of justice and righteousness (v7); instead, the vineyard (Judah) yields wild grapes (bloodshed and weeping). Yahweh, the vineyard owner, will destroy the vineyard (exile). Its “hedge” (Yahweh’s protection) will be removed and its walls broken and trampled.

Grace is not just a theological concept or a glorious, inward and individual experience. It is meant to take root and shape in the world. Its shape is living as God intended in creation. Very particularly, in national life, it takes the form of justice and peace (cf vv 16f). These are necessary – the “soil” – for human flourishing. Faith in Yahweh is expressed concretely in the doing of justice.

And here, in this passage, Judah is warned of the unthinkable: the destruction of Jerusalem and exile (cf v14). Exile is the demonstration of the justice and righteousness of Yahweh. There are at least two reasons why this is so: the first is that Yahweh’s intention in election was always that Israel would be a blessing to the world. The grace seen in Israel’s deliverance from slavery and election as the People of God was never intended to be something for Israel’s private enjoyment. Election, however, had become the willy-nilly guarantee of Yahweh’s protection. It meant that Judah could order its national life with impunity, supposing itself to be inviolable.

The second reason is Yahweh, in rescuing the Hebrew slaves from the brisk-pits of Pharaoh, had pronounced judgement on all forms of slavery, oppression and injustice. If Yahweh heard the cries of the Hebrew slaves, Yahweh hears the cries of those whom Judah is oppressing. The very grace which brought about their liberation now becomes the reason for exile – because of the character of Yahweh. Judgement is the other side of the coin of grace.

The psalmist in Psalm 80 takes up the lament of the exiles in terms of the image of the vineyard in Isaiah’s prophecy. It is a recognition of Yahweh’s judgement (vv 4-6), and framed by the prayer, “Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved” (vv 3, 7, 19). Verses 8-16 takes up the theme of Israel as the vine that Yahweh has brought out of Egypt and planted and tended so that it has grown enormous (vv 10-11). This has been an act of Yahweh’s grace. Judah asks that Yahweh might look again on Judah with grace (vv 14-15).

Grace costs. Yahweh pays the cost, but does so with purpose. The covenant is predicated upon Yahweh’s grace, and enshrines Israel’s responsibility to live by grace. “Living by grace” is the concrete exercise of responsibility – the living out of the new reality (election and nationhood) that grace establishes. We can see here the parallels with the New Testament notion that the resurrection establishes a new reality out of the ashes of the old, a new reality that is intended to unleash a new history and new way of living and being in the world. Yet the world is not yet what it ought to be: that is why we are required to live by faith.

Living by faith: sharing in cost-bearing (Hebrews 11: 29-12:2)
“Faith”, in today’s gallery, exemplifies two things: the first is in playing one’s part in the foundation stories of salvation (Exodus and settlement) (11: 29-31). Secondly, it is about the cost of living by faith (11: 32-38).

The writer is addressing a Christian community that is suffering for its faith, and so he reminds them of two things: God’s promises and acts of grace are to usher in a life lived with God. Yet that promised reality has never been perfectly realised. The opposite is more realistically the case: being part of the community of faith has unleashed a history of suffering and the struggle to hold on to the promises of God – just as the Hebrew Christians are experiencing! Why should that be?

There is a mystery to suffering, just as there is to salvation. The writer will go on to talk of suffering as a discipline and a test (12:3ff). But 12:2 is a reminder that the Way of the Cross is integral to Jesus and his mission. Suffering is not about distance from God, but about closeness – because God, in Jesus, is a suffering God! The suffering of the Christian community is therefore in some senses a sharing in the suffering of Christ. How can this be?

It has something to do with cost-bearing. This is a theme that Paul develops more fully, but his thought is not alien to the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews. Suffering is firstly a consequence of living in this world by the standards of the world to come – of inhabiting the tension between the “already” and the “not yet”. This world still kills messiahs. Those who follow the Messiah – who live as he lived – will attract conflict and opposition. It was true of Israel as the Servant of Yahweh; it was true of Jesus as the Messiah of God; it is true of the Church as the community of Jesus.

Christian faith – lived faith – is profoundly counter-cultural. Living by grace (loving one’s enemies, forgiving without counting, pursuing peace, being radically inclusive, resisting consumerism etc) is not just a matter of private “lifestyle choice”. It is prophetic – and therefore critical of the status quo. Faith as grace-in-action passes judgement on the world as we know it – even when its purpose is to be gracious! Grace is costly, and those who live by grace rather than by just deserts bear its consequences, as Jesus did.

Living faithfully, though, is also a profound witness. For those with eyes to see, it discloses the God whom Jesus called Father, who stands, bleeding and scarred, yet with arms open wide in invitation and love. It “makes sense” of the gospel – not in the manner of reasonable argument that Dawkins, for example, would love to see, but in the manner of making the Good News of Jesus a reality. The story takes shape in the lives of the Christian community. It becomes our story, so that others see and hear in it the One who comes in radical grace to invite us to find Life in all its fulleness.

Amen.

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