Thought for the Week

31 August 2008 – Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity

Collect:	O God, in generous mercy You sent the Holy Spirit upon your Church in the burning fire of your love: grant that your people may be fervent in the fellowship of the Gospel that, always abiding in You, they may be found steadfast in faith and active in service; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, Who is alive and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God now and for ever. Amen.
Readings:	Jeremiah 15, 15 – 21
	Psalm 26, 1 – 8
	Romans 12, 9 – 21
	Matthew 16, 21 – 28

The Christian faith is no more all about sweetness and light than real life is all about beer and skittles. Yet at the same time, our Christian faith calls us to love and care for other people, putting their needs at least on a par with our own. All three of our readings today come from dark times, when the author knew what it was to be persecuted for his faith. Let us start with Jeremiah.

Jeremiah was a priest, who was called by God to be a Prophet in 628 BC. In his early years he worked with King Josiah, who was reforming Judaism, and trying, against the flow of the history of Judah, to turn the Children of Israel back to Jahweh, the God of Moses and of Isaac and Jacob. Josiah’s own grandfather, Mannesseh, had allowed the religions of the land to infiltrate Judaism to the extent that pagan altars were erected in the Temple at Jerusalem. As they were clearing out the Temple, under the authority of Josiah, Hilkiah, the Chief Priest, found a scroll; probably it was part of the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. The scroll was to be both the inspiration for the Josianic reforms that followed, and also the basis for a new edition of the Torah, the one we still use today.

Jeremiah was living and working in interesting times. The Assyrian Empire was in decline. The Egyptian Empire had bled itself white fighting the Assyrians, and had then suffered a period of Assyrian rule, leaving it a mere shadow of its former self. The Babylonian Empire had not yet become a super-power, but was beginning to flex its muscles. There was thus a power vacuum in the Near East, which allowed Josiah a reasonably free hand in Jerusalem, and he even began to assert control over the Northern Kingdom of Israel, but not for long.

In 609 BC, Pharaoh Necho II went to war against the Babylonians. Josiah, for reasons we shall probably never understand, tried to ambush the Egyptian army, and died at the battle of Megiddo. He was succeeded briefly by his son Jehoahaz, but Necho II deposed Jehoahaz, putting Josiah’s oldest son, Jehoiakim on the throne instead. Jeremiah never really got over the death of his friend and patron Josiah.

Jehoakim was not a godly man like his father, and led the whole country in rejecting the ministry of Jeremiah. Despite all Jeremiah’s efforts, the Children of Israel went from bad to worse, and when he prophesied that the Babylonians would return after the first siege of Jerusalem, he was thrown into a cess-pit. When they did indeed return, some months later, the Babylonians pulled him out. During the Babylonian occupation, Jeremiah was taken to Egypt where he died, in the knowledge that all his efforts to convert the Children of Israel back to Jahweh had failed.

Paul was in Corinth, writing his letter to the Romans in about 56 AD. In 49 AD the Jews had been expelled from the city of Rome because they had violent differences of opinion about whether Jesus was the Messiah or not. For several years, the only Christians in Rome had been Gentiles, but in 55, Emperor Nero allowed the Jews back into the city. The dispute within the Church about whether Christians had to obey the Jewish law or not thus broke out there again, and Paul was addressing that situation in his letter. Christians were actually persecuting one another! Paul knew that there was quite enough persecution going on without that, and so he wrote in part to heal the rifts between Jewish and Gentile Christians, reminding all of us that it is the grace of God that counts, and nothing else.

Paul knew all about suffering for the faith. He had begun his preaching ministry in about AD 36 in Damascus, and only escaped with his life by being lowered over the wall in a basket. Soon after he had had to flee from Jerusalem, back home to Tarsus. During his three missionary journeys, Paul was beaten, tortured, stoned and thrown into prison so often that his survival can only be attributed to divine intervention.

Now let’s turn to Matthew the Evangelist. Until 64 AD, the Romans tolerated Christianity; it was only the Jews who tried to persecute the Church. The Romans regarded Christianity as a Jewish sect, and Julius Caesar had made the Jewish religion legal under Roman Law. But in 64 AD, Nero had been emperor for ten years and was becoming increasingly unpopular. He was a great builder, and wanted to rebuild the centre of Rome, including a great golden palace for himself, so he had his agents set the ancient city on fire. He blamed the Christians, and began a persecution that was to last on and off for more than two hundred and fifty years. This was the background against which Matthew was writing. To admit to being a Christian was to risk arrest, torture and death. Christianity could be lethally dangerous.

Today, of course, things are very different. For about the last one thousand eight hundred years, the Christian faith has been shaping our society. It began in small ways, with individual Christians under the threat of Roman persecution giving heroically brave acts of witness. It reached a high point in institutions. First in the monastic movement, which provided the social safety net, medicine and education as well as advances in science and agriculture for over a thousand years. Then, since the Reformation, virtually every caring institution in our society was started by the Church. The Samaritans, the Probation service, the movement to free slaves, almost every such institution has its roots in the church.

We therefore tend to assume that Christianity is a religion of peace and prosperity. Yet, in the last century, more Christians died for their faith than in all the previous 18 centuries of Christendom put together. All over the world, Christians are being persecuted for their beliefs. From the horn of Africa to Communist China, from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia, our brothers and sisters are suffering for the faith we share with them.

The sad fact, and it is both sad, and a fact, is that anybody can love, but it takes two to have a loving relationship.

We are called to love, because, Jesus tells us, God is love. All too often, we enjoy God’s love, we bask in it, we breathe it, and yet we fail to love Him in return. That is the Christian condition. But He never, ever gives up on us. He is always there, stretching out a hand to us. If that is how He treats us, then that is equally how we are called to treat other people, and that is the one message to come consistently out of all three of our readings today. Each of those three writers knew all too well both rejection and suffering, and yet each of them kept on faithfully proclaiming, and living out the love of God. May God bless you as you follow in the way of love, in the footsteps of Jeremiah, Paul Matthew and of course, Jesus Himself. Amen.

Father Charles Howard: Anglican Chaplaincy of Midi-Pyrénées & Aude

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