A sermon preached by The Reverend Canon Dr. David Anderson at St. Jude’s Anglican Church, Oakville, on Wednesday, September 11, 2024, Feria. (1 Corinthians 7:25-31; Psalm 45:11-18; Luke 6:20-26)
I speak to you in the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today’s Gospel reading sounds very familiar. The so-called Beatitudes—these sayings of Jesus—are very familiar to the faithful. That is intentional on Jesus’ part, I think. The reading we have just read is Luke’s version. The slightly more familiar version is from Matthew. In Matthew this comes at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. In Luke, this is his Sermon on the Plain. Different geography. Slightly different timing. But a very similar message.
New Testament scholar Tom Wright has a wonderful analogy that describes these teachings of Jesus that I want to relate. Imagine that you are a schoolteacher. One day, you go out into the school playground, where there are dozens of children kicking around soccer balls. You go over to where they are, and call and gather them around. Then you begin, slowly but surely, to select eleven of them. You don’t need to say a word about what you are doing. Choose your eleven and lead them off somewhere else. Everyone will know what you are doing. You are picking a soccer team.
Then supposing you and your team begin to work together to train for the serious games that you are going to face ahead. What are you going to do? How will you train them up? You assume that they know something about soccer. They know that the object is to kick the ball in the opposing team’s net. But you want to tell them more. This isn’t just the same as in the playground. Things are quite different in a real game. The things you do in the playground at not the same as you do in a real match.
But there is no point in lecturing them for hours about the finer points of the game. What they need at this point is about three of four things to remember to do, and three or four things to remember not to do. Then, in the heat of the moment, these basic guidelines will come back to them, or so you hope, and keep them focused on how to play the game.
Now think what Jesus was doing. In a similar way, Jesus was teaching the basics of what it means to participate in God’s reign. They didn’t have soccer teams in his day, and in any case what he was about was much more serious than that. What they did have was long memory of the time when God had called the twelve tribes of Israel—descended from the twelve sons of Jacob—and made them his special people, so that through them he could fulfil his purposes for the whole world. Now Jesus has come, as it were, out onto the playground where all sorts of people are trying out what it means to be God’s people—some with new rules to obey, some with schemes for violent revolution, some with support for Herod and his regime, some with withdrawing into the wilderness and praying in private, and no doubt other strategies for being the people of God as well.
From the people Jesus has met he chooses twelve. Even if he had done that without a word, everyone would understand what he was doing. Twelve meant that he was picking the Israel team. They were to be the nucleus, the centre and starting point, for what God was going to do now. They were to be the core of a new team that will show others how the game is to be played.
Jesus gives them clear direction as to how his vision of God’s mission will go forward. Four promises and four warnings are given in today’s reading, presented in terms of Israel’s great scriptural codes: in the Book of Deuteronomy there were long lists of ‘blessings’ for those who obeyed the law, and ‘curses’ for those who didn’t. These formed part of the ‘rules of the game’, the covenant, the binding agreement between God and Israel. Now, with his team formed around him, Jesus gives his own short version of the same thing.
And a radical version it is. It’s an upside-down code, or perhaps (Jesus might have said) a right-way-up code instead of the upside-down ones people had been following. God is doing something quite new: as Jesus had emphasized from the beginning of his ministry, back in the synagogue in Nazareth. Jesus has come to fulfil the promises at last and this will mean good news for all people who haven’t had any good news for a long time. The poor, the hungry, those who weep, those who are hated: blessings for them. Not that there is anything virtuous about being poor or hungry. But when injustice is having its way, the world’s status quo will have to be overturned so that God’s justice and kingdom can have sway. And this will provoke the opposition of those who are invested in the status quo. Jesus’ message of promise and warning, of blessing and curses, rang with echoes of the prophets of old, and he knew that the reaction would be the same.
So let’s now imagine that Jesus comes to our ‘playground,’ where we have fun playing our games and trying to figure out the best way to live our lives. We try out different strategies to find meaning and purpose in life, to find happiness and joy, to enjoy comfort and satisfaction. We try all sorts of ways to meet our needs, often with only mixed success. Here comes Jesus. What sort of team does he choose? Who is he calling and to what sorts of tasks does he call? What are his promises and warnings? What is he telling us about the core aspects of the game?
We must answer for ourselves whether we will join Jesus in this new thing. As followers of Jesus, we believe that what Jesus began with the call of his twelve disciples and his sharp-edged teachings of blessings and curses, remains in force today. This is the shape of the kingdom: the kingdom which still today turns the world upside down, or perhaps the right way us, as much as it ever did.
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