For Christmas we were given a game. You are given the
first part of a sentence and then told to guess what are the most common
internet searches that begin with those words.
So, for instance, ..
Well, what would you think would be the most common
internet searches that begin with the words, How can I be .. ?
Answer: (Become) rich, happy
Jesus speaks in our reading about those two things
- and he adds two others, that I suspect are pretty high on the search ratings:
satisfied and respected.
These are four of the things that we aspire for,
that we think are worth living for.
The pursuit of wealth and riches
The pursuit of the satisfaction of our physical and
emotional desires
The pursuit of happiness
And the pursuit for respect and honour.
I think that last one is often underestimated, and
yet I wonder if it might not actually be number one on many of our lists. For
the sake of respect, people put up with poverty, deprivation and possibly even
a bit of misery. Just think of the athlete going out every morning to train, putting
themselves through hell, in order to stand a chance to be picked for the team.
But Jesus, as always, turns the values of this
world on their head.
First of all - I hadn’t noticed this before - Jesus
‘looked up’ at his disciples.
I know that was the traditional position for a
teacher at the time, and it was about status and respect. Citizens stood while
the ruler sat.
But the ruler usually sat on a throne that was
raised up, so that she or he could look down at their subjects - whereas here,
Jesus is seated and looks up at his followers.
There is something very attractive about a teacher
who looks up at those he or she is teaching. It means that they are not
standing over their student, and it means that the pupil has the power - power
to look down on the teacher, the power to walk away.
I’m too vulnerable to do that. I would feel very
uncomfortable if I took a chair and put it there and started to preach,
especially if you were all standing. It certainly goes against all the advice
of those books which speak about the power of body language (I was looking
through one in a bookshop here about the hand gestures that President Putin
uses): and I doubt that there is one that suggests that you should sit at the
feet of your pupil!
But Jesus turns us upside down.
Jesus here in Luke 6 speaks to his followers, to
his disciples. V20: ‘Then he looked up at his disciples and said ..’
They
were not rich.
Some of them may have been rich. There were a
couple of brothers, James and John, who had given up what appears to be a solid
family fishing business; Another follower, Matthew, had given up a dodgy but very
lucrative tax business. And now - now they have nothing. They’re following
Jesus as he teaches and heals, and they have no guaranteed source of income.
They are dependent on what others give to them.
And that meant that yes there would have been times
when they went hungry. There would
have been days when they did not know where the next meal was coming from. Who knows,
even as Jesus speaks now, they’re thinking, ‘I could really do with something
to eat’.
And I guess
they were not necessarily happy.
Following Jesus could be quite scary. There were
times when crowds threatened Jesus, when madmen tried to beat them up, when the
authorities were looking to arrest them. There were times when they were scared
witless by storms, or even by Jesus when he walked on water. And they often
didn’t begin to understand what Jesus was doing, why he did what he did and why
he went when he went where he went. And then Jesus was arrested, tried,
condemned and crucified. And as their dreams shattered - they must have wept.
And they were
rejected by many because they followed Jesus. They were ignored and mocked.
Their sanity, their decency, their honour, their loyalty to family, faith and
country were all brought into question.
They were told that they were the pits - the gunk
on the bottom that is left when you’ve taken the leaking bag out of the rubbish
bin.
And yet despite that, Jesus looks up at his
followers and says:
‘Blessed are you who are poor’
‘Blessed are you who are hungry now’
‘Blessed are you who weep now’
‘Blessed are you when people hate you, exclude you
and revile you .. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy.’
How upside down can you get?
And Jesus continues with words which really should
shake us.
And remember that Jesus is not standing over these
people shaking his finger at them: ‘Woe to you ..’. No, he is sitting below
them and he is saying: ‘Woe, alas, how sad it will be for you’
Woe to you who are rich - the world tells you that
you are somebody, that you are important, that you deserve all the good things
in life – and woe to you who makes becoming rich the goal of your life.
Woe to you who satisfy all your desires now, or who
seek to satisfy them now.
Woe to you who think that life is about being happy
and should be one big party
That is now so deeply engrained into our culture
that it is almost something that you cannot question.
Look at the difference between family photographs
of 70 or 80 years ago and photos now. Then everybody looked serious. You were
showing the world that you took life seriously. Now, you are told to smile -
even if you don’t want to smile. You’re meant to show the world that you are
having fun.
Woe to you if everybody speaks well of you.
Look, says Jesus, the world loves the world. Think
of the false prophets. They preached what people wanted to hear. ‘You are going
to be rich, victorious, happy and respected. And God will give it to you
because God loves you!’ And the people loved it. They lapped it up. They went
up to the prophet after the service and said, ‘that was a great sermon’.
But Jesus is the teacher who sits at our feet and
he turns everything upside down.
He is not saying that those desires for abundance
and satisfaction and happiness and respect are not important. They are.
Rather he is saying that if you are looking to seek
to satisfy those desires here and now, and if you are blind to God and to his
Kingdom, then whatever you gain here will be lost there.
But that if you seek to live for him, and for his
Kingdom, and to put that first, then you may well not get those things here and
now, but you will be blessed because you will have them in abundance then.
If you put your faith in Jesus, if you choose to
follow him and start to live for him, for the Kingdom of God, and if you allow
the Holy Spirit to come into you – to change you, to change your way of
thinking, to change your desires - then you will realise and discover that life
is not about getting or being rich here, or satisfying all our desires here, or
being happy here or even being respected here. You will realise that there is
something so much more precious to live for.
You don’t need to live for or be controlled by
money.
On one occasion a rich young man came to Jesus and
asked him what he should do to inherit eternal life. Jesus looked at that man,
and saw someone so earnest, so wanting to do right. But he also saw someone who
was trapped by his money. And he loved him. So he told him, ‘Sell all you have,
give to the poor, and become one of my followers’.
You don’t always need to pamper your physical or
emotional desires: think of Jesus in the wilderness. He had fasted and he was hungry,
and then the devil comes and tells him to turn stones into bread. And Jesus
answers, ‘Human beings do not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes
from God’. If we choose to follow Jesus
we will discover that there is an even deeper craving in us than the craving
for food – and only God can satisfy that craving.
You don’t need to be happy. In fact, if you allow
the Holy Spirit to come and live in you, and if you begin to love, to love as
God loves, then there will be many times when you are not happy. You will weep.
You will weep for yourself and you will weep for others and you will weep for
the brokenness of this world.
And if you choose to come to Jesus, the Holy Spirit
will change you – yes, it will take a long time – but you will begin to realise
that what other people think of you, whether they respect you or treat you with
contempt, really does not matter. What matters is what the One who created you and
who loves you thinks of you. What matters is that on that day of judgement when
each one of us will stand in front of him, he will look at us – with love in
his eyes – and say, ‘well done you good and faithful servant’.
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