Three challenges, one deeper assurance
Readings: Matthew 10. 24-39
In our Gospel reading today Jesus gives us three challenges: who do you fear? Whose approval do you care about? And who are you ultimately loyal to? But in the midst of these challenges he also gives us the most wonderful assurance and comfort.
Three weeks into Trinity Season and you may be starting to get a feel for Matthew’s style in his Gospel. He’s squashing a lot more in than say Mark does, but moving quite quickly through it. And in our reading today he has fitted in a lot of Jesus’ teaching which you can find scattered throughout Luke’s Gospel in slightly longer form, but Matthew has gathered it all here in almost bullet point fashion.
We’re continuing on directly from last Sunday’s Gospel reading, so we’re still on Jesus’ instructions and warnings in the context of mission and sharing our faith, and more broadly about simply being a disciple of Jesus, a Christian, in our world.
And Jesus is continuing with his warnings, the warnings that sharing your faith may be bad for your health. That if they accuse Jesus of being Beelzebul, or evil, or dangerous, how much more will we who follow him be viewed as being evil or dangerous. If it happened to Jesus, how much more will it happen to us who follow him. So we really shouldn’t be surprised when it happens. That’s not to say it won’t be hard when that happens, that it won’t hurt, that it won’t upset us, but it shouldn’t surprise us. And Jesus tells us to keep pressing on, not so much to persevere but to have the audacity to be louder. That what he tells us in secret, what he tells us in the dark, and we see him doing both these things many times with his disciples in the Gospels, that we’re to proclaim it loudly for all to see, all to hear. We’re not to make ourselves smaller when pressure comes, if anything we’re to be bigger.
Do not be afraid of them says Jesus. I wonder what you fear. I wonder when you think about sharing your faith, or just people finding out that you’re a Christian or go to church, what do you worry about? What are you worried they might say or that they might do? Because many of us will have that slight edge of fear when we think about sharing faith, perhaps to do with what we should say, but more often how others might react.
The organisation behind the movement ‘back to church Sunday’ encouraging people to invite their friends and family to church on a specific Sunday did some research and found that most people don’t invite these people to church because they’re scared they’ll say no. The irony being that a significant proportion would actually say yes if we just asked them. If we had the courage, the audacity, to let go of our fear and ask, we’d find we have nothing to fear, but even if they make fun of us, what have we really lost?
What do you fear when being open about your faith? Jesus, in rather challenging language, reorients our fear to God. Don’t be afraid of people he says, they can only kill you, instead fear God whose judgement can lead to your eternal destruction. That’s a clarifying thought isn’t it, and yet he immediately reminds us who this God is, the Father who cares for us, we’ll circle back to that in a moment.
Because that leads us to Jesus’ second challenge: whose judgement do you care about? As he challenges us about acknowledging and disowning him before others he’s thinking about judgement, whose judgement do we care about? Whose approval do we care about? Do we just want to fit in with everyone else, have a quiet life, just get on with it? Even if that means disowning Jesus? Denying we know him? What matters more to us, the approval of people or the approval of God? Who would we rather side with if it came to it? We know the right answer don’t we, but is it the true answer for us if we were honest with ourselves? Whose judgement, whose approval are we seeking in our lives?
And his final challenge is about who we are ultimately loyal to? Family ties in the ancient world were the most important of all, loyalty to family was paramount, and to a certain extent that’s still true today. But Jesus is constantly challenging this throughout the Gospels, and he does so again here, challenging us that if we love our families more than him, we’re not worthy of him. He’s not saying we can’t love our families, he’s not saying our families are a bad thing, no. But what he is asking is, if push came to shove, if we had to choose between him and our parents who would we choose, if we had to choose between him and our children who would we choose? It’s a choice we pray and hope we are never faced with, but if you were, who would you choose? Around the world right now there are Christians having to make that choice, who are living in countries where they are persecuted for their faith, whose families will disown them or even try to kill them if they become Christians. For them it’s not theoretical, it’s very real. Who would you choose?
Jesus says some really challenging things in our Gospel today, some really hard things, but he does so out of love for us, he wants us to have all the information up front, he’s not hiding it in the small print. Following him is going to be hard, it’s going to often involve some tough choices, and a fair amount of courage. And yet he also gives us, in the midst of these challenges and warnings, an immense comfort, our Father sees us.
He starts with the sparrow; are not two sparrows sold for a penny. He starts with how little we regard sparrows, how they are cheap, insignificant birds to us. We think nothing of them really. But what does God think about sparrows? Not one will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care, or unnoticed by him. He sees, he cares. And if that is how God, our Father, sees sparrows, if that’s how much care and attention he gives to them which we deem almost worthless, how much more care and love and attentiveness does he have for us, his children. Jesus is rather understating it when he assures us we are worth more than many sparrows.
The God of the universe is not an inattentive God, one who simply sets things in motion and wanders off, he cares deeply about his creation, and he cares deeply about each of us, in all our trials, in all our struggles for our faith we do not need to fear, he sees us, he cares. And for our fear he is our Father, for judgement his Son claims us as his own, for our loyalty he gives a new family in his people the church. We are deeply valued and loved by the God of the universe. He sees us, and he is working for our good, even the number of hairs on our head are numbered.
Before I finish I want to tell a story about this love and care in action. Professor John Lennox, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University and Christian apologist (not someone who says sorry for being a Christian but rather someone who writes or speaks in defence of our faith) tells the story of once meeting a man who he said in some sense humiliated him. This man had been in a Soviet Gulag for 7 years because of his faith, for teaching it to others. He’d been thrown in the Gulag and witnessed unspeakable cruelty and horrors. And this man said to Lennox ‘you couldn’t face that could you’, and Lennox was really embarrassed as he admitted that no he couldn’t. And then the man smiled and replied ‘nor could I’ and then he went on to say ‘but I discovered something. I discovered that God comes in and he acts IN the situation, not before it’.
God acts In the situation, not before it. In other words, whilst we may want God to prevent the hardship we may suffer for our faith, whilst we may want some advanced assurance that he’s going to go with us through it, some tangible sense, he doesn’t give us that. But when we are in the midst of it, we find his grace is sufficient, if only we look to him and lean on him. God acts in the situations we find ourselves in because of our faith, all we are tasked with is being faithful.
That’s this whole passage in a nutshell, God will go with us, will we be faithful? As we are fearful, as we are judged by others or wonder if they approve of us, as we wrestle with where our loyalties lie, as we head out into the world at the end of this service, and as we are tried and tested day by day, we are tasked with being faithful, but we are assured that God is faithful. ‘Whoever loses their life for my sake will find it’ says Jesus, as we go about our lives, as we seek to hold loosely to the things of this world, but tightly to him, we discover life, truer life, deeper life. Quite unexpectedly, in letting go of what the world tells us to care about, we find a life that is far great, and far more glorious, with Jesus beside us, and God our heavenly Father over us.
Amen.