Pentecost 12 – Ted Hackett
Today’s Gospel is about getting God’s approval…
About how you qualify for the Kingdom of God because the coming
Kingdom of God was the main concern of Jesus and the early Church.
The humble man gets rewarded by getting a more prestigious seat…
There are two issues in most Gospel stories.
Humility and charity…
In these readings…these are the markers of a Christian.
Now that shouldn’t be news to any of us….
We know that for over 2,000 years Christians have been struggling to be
humble, charitable and…loving…
With very, very mixed success…
Which is why confession, repentance and forgiveness are so
important in our Christian journey…
Not new news…
But there is something else in this Gospel reading that we also find familiar…
So familiar that we may not notice…
In the Gospel stories…
There are rewards for doing something charitable…or being humble…
And these rewards seem to depend on what we do.
It seems we are supposed to love or be charitable –
to get a reward…
And by implication…
Avoid some kind of punishment…
It makes God and Jesus into
“Transactionalists”
If you do or don’t do what I want…you will be
rewarded or punished.
It’s like comedian George Carlin’s bit about what he learned in Parochial school…
“God loves you…God especially loves you if you do what he wants you to…
and if you don’t…He will throw you into Hell where you will burn in agony for
all eternity…because he loves you!”…
The first Christians adopted this notion very early…
St. Paul…the first Christian writer,
resorts to it a lot…
And here it turns up in the
Gospels…in the latter part of the first century!
Now this is not surprising…
This “Transactional” theology was part of first century Judaism…and the early
Jesus-people were Jews…
And it was not only Judaism, but almost every religion that was concerned
with morals.
The fact was that most people believed that the best way to get people to
do right was to threaten them…
Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th century was clear…
To convert heathen barbarians…scare them with Hellfire…
then sooth them with forgiveness.
Some churches still follow that advice…
But that understanding seems to be in conflict with a lot of what is attributed to Jesus in the Gospels…
On one hand the Gospels of Mark and Matthew have Jesus saying that if your
hand does something bad, amputate it, because that is better than being
thrown into Hellfire.
But on the other hand…
In so many of his parables, Jesus says that in the Kingdom of God,
God loves you…unconditionally…
and does not reward according to your works…
Look at the Parables…
The parable of the Prodigal…
The selfish kid is completely restored…simply because his Father loves him.
The parable of the laborers in the vineyard…
The men who worked just a short while received as much pay as those who
worked in the sun all day…
The parable of The Pharisee and the tax collector…
The crooked traitor who collected Taxes for the Romans and stole some of
the money…went away forgiven when he simply prayed for mercy…
nothing else!
And so it goes…
In fact…God’s love sometimes offends our own sense of fairness…
The prodigal did not deserve to be given back the property he wasted…the
older brother was right!
Our sense of fairness is based on transactions…
You do what I want you to…
And I will reward you…
If you don’t I will get you!
But Jesus seems to contradict himself…
Sometimes he talks of rewards and punishment…
Sometimes he talks of the absurd, unfair,
limitless, unconditional love of God…
How are we to make sense of this?
Well… I want to suggest a little academic stuff.
If you look at the passages that contain
threats of punishment…they have one thing in common…
They look and sound just like all the other political and religious stuff in first
century Palestine…
There is nothing unusual about them.
But everything we know about Jesus says he was unusual…
unusual to say the least!
Think of his being questioned by Pilate…and not answering
when he could save his life by simply pleading not guilty…
Pilate wanted to let him go!
Think of him voluntarily offering himself to be crucified…
Trusting only in God even to death on the cross…
Think of the radical, impractical parables
Think of the radical, impractical love that Jesus recommends to us…
“Love your enemies”
“Bless those who persecute you”
This is not the stuff of reward and punishment.
In fact…it is so radical that we either cringe in guilt or…. ignore it…
it is impossible to live that way we say…
RIGHT!…
That’s exactly what the people who first heard the Gospel thought…
“These Jesus people are crazy!”
And so very quickly…
By 20 or 30 years after that first Easter…
(By the way being resurrected from the dead was a pretty crazy idea too!)
Within 20 or 30 years…
The apostles decided to make the Gospel more understandable…
And started including reward and punishment in their preaching…
And so…50 or so years later, this carrot and stick theology had worked its way into the oral traditions of the Church…
And from there into the theology that Paul learned in Syria…
And into the Gospels.
All of which suggests that Jesus really was radical
That Jesus’ understanding of God was radical
because God’s love is not transactional.
God’s love is not based on a deal…
If you do this, I’ll do that…
If you don’t…
I’ll throw you into Hell!
I am not suggesting that we throw out the transactional stuff in the Bible…
The Old Testament is full of it…And there is plenty of it in the New Testament.
The whole thing is the Church’s Book…
And it is based on keen observation of life and human nature.
But what I am suggesting is that we recognize the tension in our Christianity…
It is the tension between God and us…
We are so limited that we cannot fathom the depth…or the height…
of God’s love…
We keep wanting to make it more practical…
More realistic…
We need the notion of justice.
But with God, justice
collapses into love…
We import punishment into Jesus’ message…to make it more “relevant”… to use a word I hate…
It’s a pop marketing term…
instead…we are called to embrace Jesus’ impracticality…
his apparent craziness.
We are called to try to imagine a world where there is only love…
A world where suffering and hatred and war are no more…
An impossible, seemingly impractical world…
Where fear is unnecessary…
A world that is God’s dream.
A world that we can never bring about…
But a world that is promised to us in the life…
The death…
And the resurrection of Jesus.
God knows love cannot be coerced…
We cannot be scared into really loving…
The Prodigal’s father…like God…let the kid go…
even though he knew the danger.
He could have withheld the kid’s inheritance…his power to sin…
But he also knew that the boy’s love…if it was really love…
Had to be freely given…
Or else it was not love!
But what of us?…
Us… Mired in our sin…our selfishness…our pride?…
How do we dare love …
How do we dare love “out of control?”
We know that by ourselves…
We cannot!…
But then,
Remember what Jesus said to the apostles when he spoke of sinners entering
the Kingdom of God…
He said:
“With God…all things are possible”
And so it is and ever will be…
And so also it is for us!
Incredible as it is…
By the mysterious, silent grace of God…
We can learn to forgive.
We can dare to let ourselves love…
And God waits on the porch of heaven
for as long as it takes for us to come home…
For us to…love
Even now…God is waiting for us…
So even now…we can Rejoice…
yes… Rejoice!…Even in our sinful world!
For with God all things are possible!
Even the Kingdom of Love “Alleluia!”