Third Sunday after Trinity by Fr Jack

Genesis 21.8-21
St Paul’s Letter to the Romans 6.1b-11
St Matthew’s Gospel 10.24-39

I’ve listened to BBC Radio 4 in the morning for as long as I can remember. But, of late I find myself choosing Radio 3 instead. I approach today’s sad and troubling Old Testament Lesson with the same heavy heart as the news. In both, the news, and today’s snippet from Genesis, again and again we human beings throw up blockage after blockage. And yet, in Genesis today and in the world all around us, God works again and again to bring life, despite our cruelty and foolishness. As we throw up blockage after blockage, God works to create opportunities for us to choose love, to choose the right and the good. 

A little detail: we remember in readings like this, when it says God did x or y (as it does in this portion of Genesis), that is the same as saying x or y happened. It doesn’t carry the same sense of active agency with which we’d use those words now. A helpful example is the ten plagues of Egypt a little later on, when it says variously ‘pharaoh’s heart was hardened’ and ‘God hardened pharaoh’s heart’. They mean the same in the convention of ancient texts - it happened: that’s the important information being conveyed, not the burden of agency. 

Anyway, so in the first lesson we put up blockage after blockage, and God works to create opportunities for good. St Paul, in today’s second lesson, reminds us that we shouldn’t actively put blocks in God’s way - the first words of today’s words from the Epistle to the Romans. And then he says why: because we are already dead. The ultimate barrier to life, the ultimate blockage to us and God - death itself - is already behind us through our baptism, and our life is now hid with Christ in God (as St Paul will say elsewhere - Colossians 3.3). 

The point is, we are already bought. When I prepay for a holiday, or a ticket for a show, when it finally comes along, it feels free because I can’t remember paying for it. Its a silly comparison, but it’s kind of true - we are free. Bought. Through baptism, death is behind us, and we are now living in Christ. This is our confidence and joy, and also might lead us to a helpful kind of (almost) cavalier approach in life. 

My life is not mine, thank God. I do not need to be my own maker.

I do not need to be my own redeemer, our own captain or lover or rescuer, our own North Star to navigate life by, our purpose or compass, or source of meaning. All is given, freely, in Christ in God. Where (by baptism) we already are. 

And this freely bought me and thee, is not free and bought because I (or you) are cheap. Well, I am, but you’re not. It is not because we are worthless that our lives are not ours, but His. No, we are told in today’s Gospel that God has counted every hair on our heads. That our Heavenly Father knows every sparrow, and how much more than sparrows are we. God’s regard for us here is tender, and full of value and love. 

But, it will not have escaped your notice that Jesus is also tough today; and we’re not going to sidestep that. We notice though that in these tough words about families and conflict, Jesus is speaking in St Matthew’s Gospel. Matthew’s Jesus is by far the most fiery. He appears to be writing for a Jewish religious leadership, and Jesus always reserves His toughest words for religious leaders. Matthew also likes giving Jesus his totally in-keeping ancient Middle Eastern rabbinic flare: hyperbole, imagery designed to stop you in your tracks, fire, rhetoric - these are hallmarks of St Matthew’s record of Jesus’ ministry. and designed for his particular religious audience. 

It’s also true of course that for Palestinian Jews of Jesus’ time, their whole duty as a human being was met through good family, good business, Temple worship. The summation of the human vocation was the rites of the faith, and conduct at home and in the community. As part of this, families were everything. Your duties were absolutely binding, autonomy and individuality, conscience and self-determination really were not a thing - be it the Jewish households to whom Jesus speaks today, or the Roman dynastic society into which this message will eventually spread. A person could not convert their life to Christ and go and follow that through, because a person had no right to decide that apart from their family unit. Jesus is undoing that, shaking the very foundations of people’s identity and personhood. He is shaking it pretty roughly, in these words. But otherwise, there is no where to go with this. If our life now belongs to God’s Kingdom, as St Paul says, then the ceiling of our lives cannot be anything less than that, including all the social systems Jesus sledgehammers to pieces in this Gospel. Just a few chapters before Jesus has been dismantling our way of governing life - do not worry about what you will wear or eat or drink’ (St Matthew 6). This is the period of breaking down ways of thinking and relating, so that the vision of the Kingdom can then be built up in us. It is not comfortable. 

Likewise, Jesus’ bringing the sword, not peace, is in the context, of course, of the Pax Romana. The peace that actually meant the dominance of Rome, maintained by force and compliance across colonised provinces like Judea. Jesus has not come to prop up the Pax of the status quo, a quiet acquiescence that allows people to get on with families and business and the rest, He has come to change the world forever. Not the peace of a conqueror, not family convention and keep your head down, this new Kingdom will tear up the social fabric of St Matthew’s hearers’ world. And Jesus leaves them in no doubt of this today. 

The Gospel is not a quiet life and keep your head down, it is always more. We can never fulfil our obligation, or complete this game: tick, move on. We are always called ‘further up and farther in’ to life and love and the mystery of God. Today’s Gospel tells us: Pax Romana is no Pax. And there are no laurels for Christians to rest on. 

And yet, (as we’ve already said) it is all gift, because we are already dead, and alive in Christ. It cannot be won, because it has already been given. That’s what St Paul is so desperate for us to understand. It is already here, we just need to open our eyes, open our lives, and look beyond the here and now (a here and now that, as we’ve said, Jesus dynamites today).

It all comes together and crescendoes in that final verse of today’s Gospel. Give your life away, be courageous, empty your hands, and then you will receive the real thing. Hold tight, and you will only lose the very thing you seek to preserve.

So, let’s draw these threads together. In Genesis and in the world around us, we see again and again the human inclination to throw up blockages to God, but God works even through them to bring life, to create opportunities for us to choose love, to choose the right and the good.

Likewise: Don’t cling. Don’t grasp. Don’t put ourselves or any other poor devil (even our loved ones!) or other things on God’s throne in our lives, because that will only bring death in a million different ways for us and for everyone around us. God’s Kingdom is of a better, greater order than that. 

And that Kingdom, and our part in it, our true life is already bought, all is given, along with every hair on our heads, that God has counted. All we need to do, is live it.