Jesus gets ouchie

 

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13^th, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 28

 

 

READINGS

Hebrews 4: 12-16

Psalm 106: 1-5

Mark 10: 17-31

 

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13^th, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 28

 

 

READINGS

Hebrews 4: 12-16

Psalm 106: 1-5

Mark 10: 17-31

 

It’s a little hard to ignore the fact that that gospel reading makes for uncomfortable reading for us all. The demands of the gospel are not to be trivialised, and there is a tendency for us all, and I include myself as I shall explain, to seize on the almost-closing words of this scene, rendered here as “for mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible,” to seize on them at the expense of dwelling on the all but terrifying demands of the paragraphs on either side. The man, Jesus’ interlocutor, goes away sad. That’s one bookend to the passage. “Many who are first will be lost, and the last will be first.” That’s another bookend to the passage.

And at the risk of making me squirm as much as maybe I make us all squirm, are not these chilling words particularly daunting when we recognise that we live in a town where houses that are empty or filled for only small fractions of the year are owned by people with other houses elsewhere – no matter how hard they may have worked to own multiple houses, the case still rests. It rests more weightily still when we recognise, as we will increasingly, that there are homeless people on our church and office steps, sleeping rough. It is, while I am no social work expert, too easy to say that they have other choices. The choices I hear from them, and from specialists in the field, is that either through employment or through mental health issues, these are people for whom there is an imperfect safety net even in egalitarian New Zealand.

But when I preach I preach not to make you squirm but to make me squirm. I may not have multiple properties, although as I live in two places at the moment I may squirm a little on that basis alone. But I have over the years spent an inordinate amount of  money for example on books which in rare moments of excruciating honesty I should probably admit I do not need, and if I can extrapolate from Jesus’ teachings on adultery and looking on sexually desirable human beings (for more than three seconds of course) as being a form of adultery, then by extrapolation I know that, when I dribble over the sight of a Maserati, Bentley, or Aston Martin, I know that I too if I had the chance would be driving one, and that I too am therefore trapped in the cycles of consumerism.

“Point not at others lest you notice the fingers pointing at yourself,” as Jesus didn’t quite say, though he says many equally telling things: many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”

The challenge for us is to act rightly. For us who are all, regardless of our actual assets, comparatively blessed with riches (it is always worth remembering that we are in the top few percent of the world’s wealth owners), the challenge is to discern how best we can act philanthropically, how we can act generously, how we can act, preferably crazily, to benefit the lives of others in the dark holes, nationally and internationally, of poverty and injustice.

The author of Hebrews is, I grudgingly admit, right: the word of God (and she was referring to the Hebrew scriptures) is sharper than any two edged sword. As Christ bearers we have come to know Jesus, hopefully with a deep and intimate knowledge, as the Word of God, the embodiment of acting out all God’s demands and commands. The author of Hebrews is right because by the merciful power of God’s Spirit Jesus does draw alongside and even within us to guide us on a more excellent way. It is impossible – or I hope it is – to hear the words of Jesus to this eager would be Jesus-follower, and to the disciples standing by, without being challenged to take a long and hard look at ourselves and the standards of generosity and compassion that we set and follow ourselves.

As we look at our media each day and seeing telling signs of a civilization that is crumbling  (and I do not mean that lightly), we might well remember that it is God who builds up and tears down, and who may be handing over (to quote a phrase from Romans) at the very least the wealthy peoples of the world to the ramifications of our own somewhat indulgent lifestyles.

I am always told that a sermon should contain good news. Saint Hilda’s Chaplain Dr. Gillian Townsley somewhat rocked the socks off my recent gospel conversation when she emphasised that the good news in this passage is that we all die. 

Once we had a chance to pick ourselves up from her statement, for at the very least it was a somewhat unusual interpretive angle to place on this passage, she reminded us that death is the great leveller, and that we are, again at the very least through a veil of tears, invited to enter, to use now my words not hers, the loving judgement of God. 

Nearly all of us have got possessions badly wrong, but we can offer to our God of the best of what we have been able to do and implore and know the forgiveness of God where we have corporately and individually failed. 

It is small wonder that the earliest Christians wrote of judgement often in tandem with writing of tears. Yet in saying that, I have a deep sense that while there will be tears of sorrow in whatever the resurrection means, there will be tears of laughter too.