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Sermon - The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (A) - 6th July 2008
St Alban’s 7:00am, 8.00 am & 10:00am
Readings: Matthew 11:15-19
Apparently, there is no swearing in the Bible. I looked but I can’t find it anywhere. But in this one passage from Matthew we have some of the roughest language in the Bible. Both Jesus and the crowd are not mixing their words. They are saying exactly what they are thinking. Its as if Jesus is saying “You’ve got ears haven’t you? So why don’t you listen?” Our Bibles are a little briefer than that. Jesus says “Anyone with ears – listen!” Often its our greatest weakness. We don’t listen. We are too keen to talk, we don’t take the time to listen. And we know how frustrating it is when people don’t listen to us.
Parents know the problems when their children don’t listen. Teachers are driven mad by students who refuse to listen. And then there are the problems between husbands and wives because they don’t listen to each other. A man the other day who has been married only 18 months said one of the biggest challenges he has in his marriage was the need to focus on listen when his wife wanted to talk about her day. He knew it was important. And though he was very tired he knew he must listen. But poor listening leads to poor communication. And poor communication impacts upon our understanding of one another.
And so we have Jesus’ repeated pleas to the crowd to listen to his teaching. If they did not listen they would not understand. We can see his frustration in the way he describes the crowd. He compares them to a bunch of screaming children in a playground. If you’ve ever walked past a Primary School at lunch time then you’ll know that noise. It’s a picture of absolute chaos and it sounds like it. Or you can compare it to the bad driver who uses his horn more that his accelerator, or his brake.
The crowd were so quick to call both John the Baptist as well as Jesus bad names, rather than listen to their message that its no wonder they came to wrong conclusions about both of them. John wore the clothing of a desert sweller and he lived on a restricted diet that included no wine and they crowd dismissed him and claimed he was demon-possessed. Jesus ate and drank like everyone else. People remembered what he had done at the wedding at Cana in Gallilee where he turned the water into wine and so saved the celebrations. the crowd remembered that he had gone to a large banquet put on by Matthew the tax collector. They remembered that many tax collectors and sinners attended that meal and so they threw all of that in Jesus face.
They called him a glutton and a drunkard, “a friend of tax-collectors and sinners.” Its strange that one can be accused and condemned for being someone’s friend. We may not be too concerned about this name calling. But in Deuteronomy we’re told that if a man is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard then the punishment is death by stoning. This might seem to us to be an over-reaction. But we live in a world where there is plenty of food and wine. But if yo lived in an area that was always plagued by famine, then a glutton would be eating more than their fair share. In fact, they would be stealing from others. Even further, if you were a glutton it might mean your family or your neighbours would starve. So it was a serious charge against Jesus.
But Jesus point was that they did not listen and so they did not understand and as a result they misunderstood both himself and John the Baptist. And people do exactly the same thing today. Usually, when people talk about why they are not a Christian, they have usually come to that conclusion, on the basis of wrong information. One of the best examples of that was the philosopher Bertrand Russell who wrote a book called “Why I am not a Christian.” But the Christianity he rejected was not a faith that we would recognise anyway. So Jesus point is, do not reject what you haven’t heard and haven’t understood.
We all need to listen. And if we listen we just might understand what he is trying to tell us. And there are three things to notice in this passage. First, Jesus reminds us of his upside down view of the world. He talks about the age to come and it will be full of surprises, not like the world as we know it. He tells us that the last will be first and the first will be last. He will exalt the poor, and humble the rich. Or in this passage he says that his teaching will be hidden from the wise and revealed to infants. Jesus was full of comments like this. He describes a new world with a new set of values. Elsewhere, he taught people to love their enemies and do good to those who hate us. It’s a different set of values to the world we know.
In the days of the early church, the Roman officials sent out spies to observe what happened at church meetings. The Romans were usually paranoid about any group meetings. They always assumed they were gathering to plot a revolution – that all groups turned political. In one town the volunteers fire brigade was shut down because the governor believed that when they met, the conversation would turn to politics and that would be a threat to Roman rule. But when they spied on the Christians they couldn’t believe their ears. The Christians didn’t talk about what they would do. They discussed what they wouldn’t do. They promised each other they wouldn’t steal, they wouldn’t lie, they wouldn’t kill or commit adultery. They wouldn’t take from their neighbour what didn’t belong to them. By following Jesus’ teaching, by living the way they did, these Christians were turning the world upside down by their topsy turvey values. By living the way they did they were putting into action they prayer they prayed every day. “Thy will be done on earth as it is in haven.” They listened, and they learned, and so they lived, following the example of their teacher, Jesus.
But the second thing we learn in this passage is the true nature of Jesus himself. We learn that Jesus is fully God. He tells us that all things have been handed over to him by his father. At the end of the gospel Jesus says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Before, Jesus, no one dared to talk like this. If it weren’t true it would be a terrible blasphemy. But through Jesus we get to know God in a whole new way. To know the Son is to know God. Jesus said to Phillip “If you have seen me you have seen the father.” And to trust in Jesus is to trust in God. To hope in Jesus is to hope in God. So to worship God we must listen to his Son. I like the prayer that encourages us to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest all that the Son has to say because as we do that so we will come to know the father better. And as we do that we come to know the mind behind the universe better. We learn what creation is all about, we learn what our world and our life is all about.
The great quest we all face is to find meaning in our lives. And the best source of that meaning is to get to know our creator. I was impressed the first time I read Victor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning.” It is a quest that I found attractive. But what is remarkable is that he set out to find meaning while living in a concentration camp during World War II. He lived on the edge of existence and yet even there he found meaning. And that was without God. How much better off are we as we search for meaning in the company of our creator, who made us, who loves us, who calls us back to himself. Frankl made some progress in finding meaning but we have the advantage of being in the company of the Son who reconciles us, and rescues us and who brings us back to the Father.
And so finally, Jesus issues his call for everyone to come to him, all who are weary and there will find our rest. You’ll notice that rest is mentioned several times in this passage because that is what Jesus is offering. Now it might sound to us like a retirement home – like an invitation to come and life at “Shady Acres” but I don’t think that is what Jesus means. In Eastern religions there is the idea of rest which is the opposite to suffering. Life is compared to a wheel and out on the edge the wheel moves fastest. That is the location of the greatest suffering but as you travel to the centre the movement becomes less and less until you get to the centre where there is no movement – where it is still, where there is rest. But rest here is almost a nothingness.
But Jesus uses the work rest to mean fulfilment or achieving the goal. Compare that to God who makes the world in six days and then rested on the seventh. He had achieved his goal. And so Jesus is calling on us to come to him, because that is where we will find our heart’s desire, our fulfilment, our satisfaction. The one who is the Lord of the universe, the one who has received all things from the Father, now promises all things to those who come to him, who trust in him, who rely on him, who hope in him. The question is – will we listen?