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Thought for the
Week Sunday
4 November 2007 – All Saints Sunday Psalm 149 Ephesians 1, 11 - 23 Luke 6, 20 – 31 Love
your enemies. Hm, not easy is it? One of my mother’s particularly favourite
poems goes like this: My Mummy says I must be good, and love my brothers as I should. But now, I so good have grown I love other people’s brothers better than my own! The
word “saint” has two meanings. With a
capital S, Saint means somebody who lived such a holy life that their example
is worth following, like Saints Simon and Jude, the Apostles, whose fest we
kept last Sunday. With a small s,
saint just means a Christian. On the
feast of All Saints, we remember with thanks all those Christians who have
gone before us in the faith. Many of
them long forgotten, and many of them perhaps, never did anything
particularly memorable. Some of them
may have been “better” Christians than you or me, and perhaps some of them
were not. But, like you and me, they
tried to take the Christian faith seriously, and live it out in their lives
as best they could. Some of them lived
in times and places where Christians were persecuted, and others lived like
us, in a society where most people were too busy with the things of this
world to bother much at all about religious faith, and regarded Christians as
at best well-meaning, if rather dotty, and at worst as hypocrites, who follow
the grey pretender, Jesus. Our
Gospel reading today, Jesus’ great sermon, is absolutely central to Luke’s
message, and destroys once and for all, at least for any who care to look
closely at it, the myth of Jesus as the “grey pretender”. For Luke, Jesus is the new Moses. Jesus is the founder of the new nation of Just as
the commandments of God are central to the establishment of the faith and
Nation of Israel, so the Great Sermon of Jesus is to be central to the New
faith, which we know as Christianity, and to the New Kingdom, which is not of
this world but is the The
similarities between the story of Moses and Luke’s telling of the story of
Jesus are striking. In the first
place, both have extraordinary births.
Moses survives when all the other baby boys are being killed. A princess finds him when he is a
baby. Jesus too survives when the
wicked King Herod kills all the male babies, and he has Kings visiting him
when he is a baby. Later, Moses
wanders in the desert, and meets God in the burning bush, and is given a
mission. Jesus too wanders in the
wilderness, where He, in prayer with God, refines what his mission is to be. The
similarities between the incidental details for the Ten Commandments and
Jesus’ Great Sermon are no less striking.
Both Moses and Jesus ascend the mountain, and spend the night in
prayer with God beforehand. Both come
down from the mountain to teach, and both have enormous audiences, out of
which they form the people of God.
Just as the twelve tribes of But for
Luke, Jesus is not just the new Moses.
He is also the suffering servant of Deutero-Isaiah, and the lamb of
the Psalmist, dumb before his slaughterer.
Jesus is the new great prophet Elijah, rejected by the rulers of his
day. Jesus is the prophet Jeremiah,
rejected by his own people. But more
than all these things, Jesus is the Son of God, the incarnation of love. Luke is
first and foremost the All Saints Evangelist.
Luke was almost certainly himself a Gentile, and not a Jew. Excluded from the community of Most
scholars agree that Matthew and Luke both used the Gospel according to Saint
Mark, which had been written perhaps ten years before. But they clearly had access to other
material, and the Great Sermon is mentioned in Mark, but Mark records almost nothing
of Jesus’ words. Matthew and Luke add
to Mark’s slender account in quite different ways. For
Luke Jesus’ Great Sermon is about compassion and forgiveness, because God’s
Kingdom is about compassion and forgiveness.
His harsh words are reserved not so much for those who are sinners,
but for those who have closed minds, the rich, the politicians, and the
religious leaders. It is not that God
is rejecting them, but that they are rejecting God, and it is a terrible
tragedy. Matthew
sets Jesus’ Great Sermon on the mountain, so we know his version as the
Sermon on the Mount. For Matthew, the
Sermon on the Mount is about the radical ethical demands of the Kingdom,
which go much further than anything we see in the Old Testament. Matthew was almost certainly a Jew
himself, and he takes a much more traditional Jewish line in his
understanding of the Teaching of Jesus.
The rich are only condemned if they sin, and not just for being rich. Perhaps that is why we usually read the
Teaching of Jesus in Matthew’s version, though it is also longer, and one of
the finest bit so poetic writing in the New Testament. The
important thing is that every saint with a small “s”, obeyed the call to take
up their cross every day. Sometimes,
they didn’t much feel like it. Some
days it was too much of a burden.
Other days they had their hands full with other things, but they
didn’t give up. Because they went on
trying to follow Jesus, we have a faith today. And of course, we are called to take up our
cross every day. Sometimes, we don’t
much feel like it. Some days, the
burden is just too much. Other days,
our hands are too full with other things.
But like them, we are forgiven our failures, all we have to do is go
on loving Jesus, and persevering, and He will give us the strength and grace
that we too might be saints with a small “s”.
May God bless you in your sainthood, with a small “s” and in your
loving and persevering with all his saints.
Amen. Fr. Charles Howard: Anglican Chaplaincy
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