pentecost 11 year C

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20 NRSV text
Psalm 50: 1-8, 22-23 NRSV text
Hebrews 11: 1-3, 8-16 NRSV text
Luke 12: 32-40 NRSV text

Can you feel Jesus’ urgency in today’s gospel passage? “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit” (v35) functions as Jesus’ key text. It evokes echoes of the Exodus story – except that here, instead of being dressed and ready to move out, the disciples are to be ready to welcome the master (Jesus) back from the wedding feast. The incident is infected with an urgency that functions on two levels: on the one level, it is Jesus’ own urgency – the urgency caused by drawing near to Jerusalem. Time is running out, and Jesus’ speech is shot through with the imperatives of an impending crisis. On the other, the situation reflects Luke’s own community: how are they to live faithfully in their own situation, in which Jesus has gone and is expected to return, but meanwhile, the community is under huge pressure to conform to the society around them?

How do we read this passage over 2000 years later? Unlike Jesus’ first followers and Luke’s community, it is difficult to live in an on-the-edge-of-the-seat expectation of Jesus’ return. Unlike Luke’s community, most of us – at least in the west – do not face persecution. We’re not worth persecuting: either we have got our hands on enough of the power to ensure that if anyone is persecuted, it won’t be us, or else we’re such an irrelevance that we’re no threat to anyone! For established denominations, there is a sort of creaking urgency which is about how the Church as we know it is to survive beyond the life of the majority of its present members – but that’s light years away from the situation in the gospel passage.

There’s a question that runs through this week’s texts: how do we live in and relate to the world? How do we live faithfully – “differently” – and not become lost in the everyday, shaped by the “normality” of a world that is manifestly not the Kingdom of God? It’s a question of ultimate allegiances. And how do we prepare for death, given that it is more likely than not that we will not see the coming of the Kingdom in all its fullness within our lifetimes? How, in other words, do we live by faith, in “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1)?

Encouragement: God wants to give us the Kingdom!
Survival and flourishing: staying alive, and ensuring that we have the means to do so in the face of adversity. These are key priorities and goals. Job security, being on the housing ladder, adequate pension provision, insurance, food in the larder and money in the bank against a rainy day … this is what is required of us in terms of responsible living. It was the same in Jesus’ own day. It’s “Living 101” – the unquestioned, common sense wisdom of survival techniques. Other questions – about standard of living, priorities, politics, economics and morality – come after the survival question. Hear, then, Jesus’ shocking words at the outset of Jesus’ address to his disciples: “Therefore, I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food and the body more than clothing!” (Luke 12:22). Is that really true? Do we honestly believe that? Do these things not matter?

Jesus’ answer is a “Yes and no”. Yes, they matter, because we need them. But no, they are not the things we ought to focus on and strive for, because God knows we need them (v30). Instead, we are to strive for the Kingdom, and find that these things will be given as well (v31). If that sounds scary and a little dodgy, Jesus moves to reassure his disciples: “Don’t be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom” (v31).

Are Christians supposed to live a life of glorious irresponsibility, not caring about providing for themselves and their families? No! The contrast is not in having to be mature and responsible: the contrast is the freedom that the Christian community has to live for others. “Sell your possessions and give alms”, says Jesus (v33). What Jesus is telling his disciples is that they are to be God’s conduit for providing for others. They can do this because God will provide what they need.

This isn’t some other-worldly vision of life. God’s Kingdom is Good News for this world. It is a Word of Life. God is Jehovah Jireh – “God the Provider”. The Good News is that God yearns to give us the Kingdom. It’s not something we have to wrest from God, or wheedle out of God, or negotiate for. God wants to give us the Kingdom more than we want it. And the Kingdom is a world in which there is enough for all. Yet for that to be a reality, we need to recognise the interdependence of everyone and everything. There is enough – provided we make it all go round.

In a super-consumerist world, Jesus’ words come as a fundamental challenge. Are we going to be able to find the freedom to buy out of the belief that life depends on accumulating more and more, and that our flourishing depends on living at the expense of others? Can we live faithfully and break the cycle of acquisitiveness and desperation that drives us to shore ourselves against disaster? If we are to begin to be able to, it starts with the recognition that the God we meet in Jesus Christ is the God of grace. God wants us to be okay! God wants to give us the Kingdom! And God wants us to be the means by which the Kingdom comes to others, too. We are to be conduits of grace, by becoming communities of provision for those in need.

Telling the time
Jesus’ radical injunctions to his disciples are driven by the urgency of impending crisis. I’ve always found his “Consider the lilies of the field” speech the most hauntingly beautiful and evocative writing in the whole Bible. It’s easy to imagine Jesus, bathed in sunlight, urging a sort of spiritual enlightenment on his disciples, isn’t it? Yet everything he says here is shot through with urgency. “There isn’t time to be bothering with all these survival questions!” Jesus is saying.

Jesus is talking to his disciples on the eve (not literally) of his arrival in Jerusalem. In narrative terms, they are “on the road to Jerusalem”. Metaphorically, they are virtually in sight of Jerusalem. Jesus knows it, but they don’t. They have no idea of the “time”.

“Telling the time correctly” is the overarching theme of this section in Luke’s gospel. Look at how Jesus’ injunctions to be watchful are framed by questions of what “hour” it is. In a few verses on (vv 54ff) he will move his focus back from the disciples to “the crowd”, and chide them because they “do not know how to interpret the present time” (v56).

The section on the urgency over “time” reaches its temporary conclusion when Jesus laments over the city (13:31ff): despite all his warnings, Jerusalem is going to miss the boat. Luke uses this to pick up and conclude his “time” material when this incident is reprised in 19:41 ff: here Jesus repeats the prophetic warning of destruction, which will come about “because you did not recognise the time (kairos) of your visitation from God” (13:44).

“Telling the time”, for Jesus, is more than knowing how to read the hour from the clock face. It’s about knowing the significance of the time. For Jesus, it is dying time. He hasn’t much time left. But more than that: he knows that it isn’t worth living at the expense of his message of the Kingdom. There is a point of accommodation beyond which Jesus cannot go without fundamentally betraying all that the Kingdom is. That point is the Way of the Cross.

Jesus really knows what he means when he says, “Life is more than food, and the body more than clothing”! He knows that it is only in losing his life that he will find Life. The Kingdom, for Jesus himself, is entered only through suffering and death – not because God has decreed this, but because to live the Kingdom faithfully is to court crucifixion. For Jesus himself, then, “telling the time” means not drawing back from his set course. It means costly, ultimate self-sacrifice. But it means committing himself into the hands of God, who is Life itself.

“Be alert – the Kingdom needs more lerts!”
For the disciples, however, the real test – the comparable “time of trial” - remains in the future. Jesus knows already that they will fail him on this one. Their opposition to his impending passion is implacable. He is resigned to walking the Way of the Cross alone. Their test will come after Jesus’ ascension and before his return. How will they handle that interim period?

The challenge is not to lapse into torpor or to abandon the Kingdom’s “house style”. In the section 12: 35-40, Jesus uses the parable of the household slaves whose master is the bridegroom at his wedding feast. Weddings lasted several days, and ended when the groom returned home with his new bride. That could be at any time. Jesus’ point is that the disciples – the Christian community – ought to live as those expecting the imminent return of the Master. The slaves who are alert and ready to receive their master will be blessed – astoundingly and outrageously: the master will don the garb of a slave, and the slaves will sit as guests at the feast! The section ends with the pithy saying: “Be alert, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour” (v40).

Peter then wants to know at whom the parable is directed: is it the disciples or the crowds in general? This makes sense when we notice how, in these teaching blocks, Jesus interacts alternately with the disciples as a group and with “the crowds”. Jesus’ response is to tell a second parable aimed specifically at the disciples: they are to imagine themselves as the trusted slave appointed to manage the other slaves of the household while the master is away.

The temptation for this slave is to use the delayed return to usurp the role of the master for his own benefit. There is, interestingly, no obvious attempt on Jesus’ part to suggest that the master would behave any differently from the slave in eating, drinking and oppressing the other slaves. Perhaps that’s the very point: what the slave does is to mimic learned behaviour. The returning master behaves according to type: he “cuts him in pieces” (v47) or administers “a severe beating” (v47b) – not because the slave was behaving like a bad master, but because the slave has not carried out the task of responsibility set by the master. Jesus is entrusting his mission to the disciples (and to the Christian Church) in his absence. It is an enormous responsibility – as we see in the “moral” of the parable: “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded” (v48).

What is the point here? There is a mystery to the absence of God/Jesus, and to the delay in the fulfilment of the promise of the Kingdom. Jesus tells his disciples three things about that delay: the first is that God has not abandoned them. It is still God’s intention to give them the Kingdom, and they must not lose heart. Instead, they must live in the freedom of the assurance that the Kingdom means Life in all its forms and fullness – including the provision of food, drink and clothing. The second is that Jesus may be away, but he is on Kingdom business! The parable of the bridegroom says that the groom (Jesus) is making a wedding feast in which the slaves will have a share! And the third is that the disciples have a mission to fulfil. It is a delegated responsibility – a living for the Kingdom and by the laws and standards of the Kingdom now, even though the Kingdom has yet to come in all its fullness. That is what it means to live faithfully in the world.

Faith, despair and mortality (Hebrews 11: 1-16)
The letter to the Hebrews is written to encourage them not to “fall away” – to abandon the life of faith. It is written on the other side of the great crisis within the New Testament Church – the failure of Jesus’ return within the lifetime of the first disciples. Instead of having to endure only a short period of Jesus’ absence, the Christian Church has to learn how to live for the “long haul” – to hold on to faith for the whole of a lifetime … and beyond. They will have to hang in through persecution and death.

And so the writer, in the “gallery of faith” here in Hebrews 11, encourages the Hebrew Christians by showing how faith has always been integral to life with God. Faith is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (v1). Not only does the faith of the great saints (Abel, Enoch and Noah) speak beyond their own deaths, but, in a detailed consideration of Abraham, the writer sets out to show that Abraham’s faith in the promises of God had to survive in the face of the fact that the fulfilment of the promises was not for his lifetime.

The key verse is v13: “All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them”. But note what follows for the writer: “They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people whom speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland” (vv 13-14).

God’s promises make strangers and aliens of us. Living by faith in hope of God’s promises disinherits us. We can no longer be and live as citizens of this world. We become people who, in the words of the writer to the Hebrews, “desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (v16). What does this mean? The most apparently obvious sense is that we no longer live with an eye to this life, or this world, but with an eye to heaven. Life, in other words, becomes unimportant: what matters is the afterlife.

This is to misunderstand the Jewish (and later, Christian) notion of God’s promises, and the Christian promise of resurrection. God’s promises are promises of salvation, but always first and foremost of salvation for this world. They are promises of a different future for the world – promises of a world which is to become all that God intended it to be in creation. Jesus’ version of this is “the Kingdom of God” – this world as the place where God’s will is done perfectly, and where everyone lives by the dual commandment to love God and neighbour.

But this world is not that place yet. This is where we are to locate the distinction between heaven and earth. “Heaven” is less a place than a realm – the realm where God presently reigns as God will ultimately reign over all created reality. “Heaven” (as a place opposed to “earth”) is thus an “interim measure”. In the book of Revelation, John the Seer records his vision of “heaven coming down to earth” (Revelation 21). The Marriage Supper of the Lamb is the celebration of the marriage of heaven and earth, and the abolition of the distinction between the place where God’s will is and is not done.

God’s promises therefore make us strangers and aliens because they promise a different world order, and call us to live by the coming order rather than by the rules of the present. We cannot love any more as though the present order held ultimate sway. God’s promises create a holy impatience and restlessness which means that we are always “looking ahead” – around the next bend – for what is to be and become, rather than for what is now.

Rightly understood, that holy impatience that makes refugees of us in the world also spurs us to mission – to doing God’s will here and now, and seeking the Kingdom because it is God’s promised future for the world.

Yet, as we have noted, there is a delay to it all. We live by faith in hope – in “the assurance of things hoped for, and the conviction of things unseen”. The likelihood is that we will not see the fulfilment of these promises in our lifetimes. We, like Abraham, will die seeing “these promises from a distance”. This is where resurrection comes in. Bodily resurrection is the promise that, though we die in the meantime, we will be raised to share in the inheritance that we have been promised. Faith will be rewarded. The promises may not be for us in this lifetime, but they are for us! And all of this is made possible because of the sacrifice of Jesus.

Sacrifice, justice and worship (Psalm 50/Isaiah 1: 1-20)
The writer to the Hebrews gives us sustained theological reflection upon Jesus in relation to the Old Testament system of sacrifice. In his theology, the multitude of sacrifices pointed towards the one, perfect sacrifice for all time: Jesus’ death. What is startlingly clear from the cross is not that Jesus provided a sacrifice to God, but that God provided the sacrifice! Jesus’ death was not an act of appeasement, but of divine self-sacrifice.

That is an understanding which is at the heart of the biblical notion of sacrifice. In other religious systems, sacrifices were offered to appease the gods, or to curry favour. In Jewish theology, the sacrifice was always provided by Yahweh. There is an irreducible connection between sin and death in the biblical narrative. Sin destroys and kills. The world is not as it ought to be. Human beings need saving. At the heart of the biblical story of sin and salvation is a mystery: Yahweh cannot simply wave a wand and make everything right. Salvation costs. And if Yahweh is to save, Yahweh must become involved in the processes of darkness and death. That is what the sacrificial system both proclaims and enables. Sacrifices speak always of Yahweh’s self-giving: put bluntly, Yahweh bears the cost of human sin.

Yahweh, as the psalmist reminds us, does not “eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats” (v13). Unlike the Canaanite gods, Yahweh does not need feeding. Were Yahweh hungry, the psalmist says, poetically, Yahweh owns “every wild animal and the cattle on a thousand hills” (v10)!

Both the psalmist and the prophet Isaiah are mouthpieces of Yahweh’s anger against the perversion of the sacrificial system. Yahweh’s problem with the sacrifices and temple worship of the people is that they practice injustice, and then come to Yahweh as though Yahweh can be bought off with some sort of mechanistic “bartering system” of sacrifices.

Look at the irony of Yahweh’s response in v15: “I will not listen; your hands are full of blood”! The people stand covered with the blood of sacrifices, and Yahweh sees only the blood of people that they have on their hands. And so Yahweh goes on: “Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes” (v16).

This is not a typical low-church Protestant rant against the cult. The prophets who speak against the sacrificial system are speaking against its abuse, not against the system! The abolition of the religious ritual would be unthinkable for them: ritual is rich and powerful, not only because of its symbolic and kerygmatic edginess, but because it is sacramental. Proper – appropriate – participation in the sacrificial system and in worship is participation in the salvation of Yahweh.

Christian worship is inextricably linked to the cross. God makes no concessions to our contemporary embarrassment over sacrifice and blood. The cross has always been an embarrassment. Paul called it “a stumbling block to Jews and sheer foolishness to Greeks”. If, to our twenty-first century ears, it sounds primitive and embarrassingly bloody and violent, that’s because it is! This week’s texts remind us: the cross is not the proclamation of God as a blood-thirsty tyrant who demands rivers of blood. Rather, the cross speaks of the scandal of a God who is willing to enter into the degradation, violence, oppression and death of human darkness as its victim, and, through resurrection, to smash its deadly power.

That means that we who live by faith in the Jesus who, as God incarnate, was crucified and raised “for us”, must proclaim that faith and enact that hope as we seek to make this world the place in which God’s will is done and the Kingdom comes. That is our mission. It is how we are to live faithfully in the world.

Amen.