‘What is the biggest challenge we face today?’ It’s an age-old question, but it is being asked again with increasing frequency. And responses include: ‘terrorism’, ‘the economy’, ‘security’, ‘climate change’. It is one thing to identify the challenges but another to provide a solution.
Furthermore, from a biblical perspective, solutions will be different for governments and for the individual. Romans 13:1-7 and 1 Peter 2:13-17 tell us that a primary responsibility of government is the well-being, safety and good order of society. It’s one reason we must pray for our leaders and upcoming elections (1 Timothy 2:1-6). But for the most part, the New Testament focuses on our deepest need and God’s new society – achieved through the declaration of the good news of his love and forgiveness.
When Jesus was asked the question, ‘What is the greatest commandment?’ he responded, ”’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength’. The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:29ff).
These words go to the heart of the law of love – love for God and love for neighbor. The starting point is love for God; we are to love him with all our heart, with all our soul, and so on. It is this vertical axis of relationship – love for God – that our secular material world is missing. So it is encouraging that most people still agree that we are more than the sum of our physical parts.
Significantly, Jesus speaks to these two axes or dimensions of relationship – love for God and love for neighbor – in his Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6:20-40). Here he speaks of ‘love for God’ in terms of blessings and woes.
BLESSED
‘Blessed are you poor’, he begins (Luke 6:20). While some insist that these words refer only to the literal ‘poor’, the context of Luke’s Gospel indicates the poor has a similar meaning to what we find in Matthew 5:3 where Jesus says, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’.
He is not blessing poverty per se, for poverty can easily be a curse. Rather, his words are a reference to the spiritually poor, those who understand their impoverishment before God. He is speaking about anyone who knows, as Jeremiah puts it, that the(human) heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick (Jeremiah 17:9). Trapped in the prison of our ego, we have no heart or love for God.
Indeed in Luke the imagery of the poor crosses the social boundaries of class, education, religious association, race, and nation. It is a metaphor for those who lack honor or glory before God.
While Simon Peter and Levi are not described as rich, they were not materially poor. Peter ran a fishing business with his brother and others; Levi was able to host a large dinner party. But both men understood they had a need only Jesus could address. Peter recognized that a deep gulf existed between himself and Jesus; Levi understood his own alienation. Both obeyed Jesus’ command to leave their businesses and follow him.
When we understand our need and turn to God, Jesus says, “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20). The experience of God’s kingdom begins now – ‘yours is …’, he says.
In contrasting blessings and woes, Jesus turns on its head our way of looking at life. Society begrudgingly admires wealth, but Jesus says it is the poor, the hungry and those who weep who areblessed and will be blessed. By contrast, he says woe to the rich, the well-fed and those who laugh.
While the Bible does not condemn riches, food or laughter in themselves, Jesus points out elsewhere (Luke 18:24) that ‘it is hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of God’. The rich, like the well-fed and those whose only aim in life is pleasure (laughter), fail to see there is more to life. Their successes and joys will be in this life only.
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
The final blessing is the climax to the blessings. God’s people will experience opposition in various ways – exclusion, suffering, persecution – because of their association with Jesus (6:22). “Rejoice in that day. Leap for joy, for behold your reward is great in heaven,” Jesus says (6:23).Yet, how often are we silenced through political correctness?
More than ever we need to pray that God will speak into our minds and hearts through his Word so that we might know the joy of his blessing and, as opportunities arise, we might introduce him and his love and forgiveness into our conversations with others.
In an article in The New York Times (June 7, 2016), ‘Let’s Have a Better Culture War’, David Brooks remarks that we need ‘a new traditionalism’ in the way we look at current issues. Commenting that ‘we are not primarily physical creatures,’ he says, ‘we have souls or consciousness or whatever you want to call it. The first step of a new traditionalism would be to put the spiritual and moral implications of everyday life front and center’.
His solution is to point us to the motif of ‘love’. For ‘love’ he says, ‘is the elemental desire of the spirit’.
LOVE
There is nothing new in this. Back in 1965 Burt Bacharach put to music the Hal David lyrics, What the World needs now is Love Sweet Love; and in 1967 the Beatles sang, All you need is love… The question becomes: ‘What does love mean? What does this look like in practice?’
At the center of Jesus’ ‘Sermon on the Plain’ (Luke 6:27-36), is the theme of love. Our English word love translates a number of Greek words – words for ‘affection’, for ‘romantic love’ (eros), and for ‘friendship’ (philia). And there is one more, the word that Jesus uses: agape – which means a love that chooses to act in the best interests of the one who is loved.
It is not a response to the attractive, but the reverse: it chooses to serve the best interests of even the unlovely, the unworthy, no matter the cost. It is not a love that responds to someone who is worthy of merit. It is the deliberate decision to serve the very best interests of others. It is the word the Bible uses to speak of the unique love of God and, in turn the love we are to have for one another – including love in marriage.
We understand love only when we understand God’s righteous character. This is why, for example, God cannot simply forgive us. As 1 John 4:10 says: here then is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Our western world has come to think of love more in terms of eros. Certainly not agape. Eros wants to take. Agape wants to give for the best of others. Eros could not have saved us. Agape could and did.
LOVE IN ACTION
Jesus teaches anyone who would follow him to: “Love (agape) your enemies” (6:27).
Moses had commanded, love your neighbor (Leviticus 19:18). In Jesus’ day the Jewish leaders had narrowed the application of neighbor so that it only referred to people who shared similar religious views. It did not include enemies. Jesus went further and said that his followers cannot be selective about whom they love.
To love one’s enemiesis an uncompromising call not to retaliate in kind, but to pray and do good. Doing goodmeans being willing to forego personal ‘rights’ and being prepared to be vulnerable and ‘go the extra mile’. It was a challenge to Jesus’ hearers in Roman occupied Judea; it is a challenge to us today.
“If anyone strikes you on the cheek,” Jesus continues, “Offer the other cheek as well” (6:29).The image is of a humiliating slap across the face with the back of the hand – an abuse of power. In those moments when we are being ridiculed or persecuted for our faith and for doing the right thing, we often want to respond in kind. But Jesus says we are not to retaliate.
Indeed to retaliate in kind only compounds the evil. Rather, offer support and even minister to those who persecute you. Revenge is out of the question. Leon Morris in his commentary on Luke notes the advice of ‘a worldly wit: Always forgive your enemies. Nothing infuriates them more’.
LOVE IN SERVICE TO OTHERS
Consider the witness of people imprisoned for their faith in their service of others during World War II. The Ten Boom family in Holland facilitated the escape of hundreds of Jewish people from the Nazi holocaust; they themselves were sent to concentration camps where they bore witness to their faith.
Vulnerability and forgiveness, rather than revenge, are to be our response to injustice and religious persecution.
Isn’t it more than time we re-visited and began to practice these profound, counter-cultural words of Jesus?
In an article, ‘Big and Little Loves’ in The New York Times yesterday (May 31), David Brooks began by noting that philosophers since the time of ancient Greece ‘have distinguished between the beautiful and the sublime.Beauty, ‘ he notes, ‘is what you experience when you look at a flower or a lovely face. It is contained, pleasurable, intimate and romantic. Sublime is what you feel when you look at a mountain range or a tornado. It involves awe, veneration, maybe even a touch of fear. A sublime thing, like space or mathematics, over-awes the natural human dimensions and reminds you that you are a small thing in a vast cosmos.’
SUBLIME
A sublime figure: We can well see that the vast crowds who came to Jesus of Nazareth were drawn to him because they saw in him a sublime figure. On one occasion, as Luke records (6:17), Jesus addressed a huge crowd that had gathered below a mountain. Many had travelled great distances – from Jerusalem, Judea, Tyre and Sidon.
Sublime power: Some had come to be healed or released from demon possession (6:17-18). Luke tells us that Jesus had the power to healeveryone who came to him (power went forth from him, 6:19). No-one, before or since, has been recorded doing the kinds of things Jesus did. Indeed, we also have the attestation of Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian writing in the 1st century AD: Jesus was a doer of extraordinary or startling deeds…
Sublime teaching: Once again Jesus’ acts of healing were accompanied by teaching. His miracles revealed his compassion and power; they were also signs that authenticated his word.
THE MOST SUBLIME TEACHER
In his teaching that day, Jesus first reversed the way we look at life. Consider Luke 6:20-26:
20 Then he looked up at his disciples and said: ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. 21 ‘Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. ‘Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh. 22 ‘Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you* on account of the Son of Man. 23Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
24 ‘But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. 25 ‘Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. ‘Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. 26 ‘Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.
GOD’S BLESSINGS
Why did Jesus spoke so harshly of the rich and those who love life? Are not riches, food, and laughter signs of God’s blessings (see for example Deuteronomy 28:1-12)? In fact, should we not expect these things if God is all-powerful and all good? In Jesus’ answer we begin to discern a framework that answers some of the tough questions of life. We learn a number of things:
1. Blessedin the Greek world had to do with inner happiness and contentment. In the Old Testament Hebrew world it was a reference to God’s favor (Psalms 1:1; 127:3-5; Job 29:10-11).
By contrast, woes, translated ‘alas’ in the New English Bible, convey the sense of regret or sadness. While the language Jesus used here is not found in Greek literature, there are many examples of its use in the Greek translation (LXX) of the Old Testament. Woes are the opposite of blessings.
2. To focus only on blessing is to forget the conditions for blessing that we find in the Old Testament: obedience to God.
THE LAW
The wisdom literature and the prophets of the Old Testament warn of the consequences of disobedience to God. Jesus’ parallel structure of blessings and woes shows us that he was applying the meaning of God’s commandments in a fresh way.
By placing the blessings of God in an eternal perspective, he calls for a paradigm shift in the way we view life and life’s priorities, bringing God’s perspectives into our lives. Our human hearts do not handle well God’s material blessings.
Indeed, Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit (in the book of the same name), despaired of his family’s ability to cope with his wealth:‘I plainly see to what foul uses all this money will be put at last,’ he cried, almost writhing in the bed; ‘after filling me with cares and miseries all my life, it will perpetuate discord and bad passions when I am dead. So it always is… Heaven help us, we have much to answer for! Oh self, self, self! Every man for himself, and no creature for me!’
How much do we, and the world around us, still need to feel the impact in our lives of the words of this most sublime Teacher.
Much ink has been spilled in the writing of many books on why America is where it is today. According to a new book by Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic, reviewed by Martin Swain in The Wall Street Journal, yesterday (May 24), both sides of the political aisle consider the 1950s to be an ideal era – for some, because of high taxation; for others, because it was a time of free enterprise. Martin Swain comments that Levin sees a danger in ‘looking backward’.
INDIVIDUALISM
‘The desire to recreate or return to mid-century’s virtues has led us into a kind of ideological stalemate,’ he says. ‘We now find ourselves in a culture of hyper-individualism which shows no signs of slowing’.
Swain notes: ‘What he (Levin) calls for, in essence, is a return to the proximate. Americans must find ways to strengthen our mediating institutions that stand between the individual and government, and especially the national government – families, churches, civic organizations and so on… Many of our most acute problems have arisen because for over half a century we have nationalized every political question… The task is to denationalize our mindset.’
If this observation is correct, it is worth asking how this might apply to Christianity in America. There are many across the country who insist that ‘religion is the problem’.
WHERE TO START
The Bible and the subsequent growth of Christianity tell us that the most effective way we can transform the ‘mindset’ about Christianity, is not to be afraid of starting small. Christianity began that way. Ask yourself: ‘How many do I know who have truly heard?’
In 2 Corinthians 4:1-6, Paul challenges the human inclination that says we come to know God through reason or mystical experience. Rather, he says, we come to a faith that is awakened through hearing the gospel and by God working in our hearts.The faith the Bible teaches us is not concerned with our search for God, but with God’s search for us. Christianity is a religion, not of works, but of God’s grace.
Paul points out that he is passionately committed to the work of communicating God’s good news. Despite the obstacles and disappointments, he says, ‘We do not lose heart’.
He gives us a helpful insight into why people refuse to listen. It is because they have been blinded by the god of this age(4:4). While the god of this age can refer to the powers of evil, it is more likely Paul is speaking of the idolatrous preoccupation with the material things of this world. Men and women lightly dismiss the reality and meaning of God’s gospel because their eyes are so fixed on the present world that they are blind to the larger realities of existence and life.
CHOICES AND CHANGE
Men and women remain unbelievers by choice. They have erected a spiritual barrier in their own soul. As we read in John’s Gospel (1:9-10), ‘the Light keeps blazing away for all to see, but men and women prefer to live in the darkness of their own point of view’.
How then does anyone come to believe? In 2 Corinthians 4:5-6 we read: For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake. For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
‘It is not my gifts of preaching, my oratory, my charisma, my charm, that win men and women to faith’, Paul is saying. ‘It is their face-to-face encounter with Jesus. I tell people who he is, what he has done, and why he has done it. And,’ he says, ‘as I do this, God by his Spirit takes the veil from their hearts and enables them to see the glory of God shining in the face of Jesus Christ’.
Most commentators understand Paul’s imagery here to refer to Genesis 1:3. If so, it is a powerful metaphor. Paul is saying that turning from unbelief to belief involves an act of divine initiative as awesome and as powerful as the act of creation. God says to our hearts, ‘Let there be light’ and there is light – and from that moment a new world begins.
Many professing Christians have lost the passion to see lives change. Churches have too often become inward looking, with a focus on music, ceremony and art. There is a lack of trust in God’s means of changing lives. Let me ask, ‘When did you last pray for and ask someone to explore God’s good news with you – perhaps by inviting them to a Christianity Explored course?’ Out of small beginnings…!
In his article in The New York Times yesterday (May 17, 2016), David Brooks asked the question, ‘What is the central challenge facing our era? My answer would be: social isolation’, he wrote.
My answer would be: ‘Isolation from God’. TS Eliot once wrote, Hell is oneself, hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections.
In John 16:5-6 we read Jesus’ words to his disciples as he walked with them one more time before his arrest and crucifixion: “But now I am going to him who sent me; yet none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’ But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your hearts.”
The more he spoke of his ‘going away’, the more depressed his disciples became. Aware of this he used these last hours to assure them that his going would not be the disaster they anticipated. But, as so often happens, self-pity blinded them to the deeper, hidden purposes of God.
In John 16:7 we read: “Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate (Helper) will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.”
Sometimes we can feel isolated from God— sometimes by feelings of failure, of unworthiness, sickness or grief. What Jesus was saying to his first followers, he also says to us today, ‘Don’t despair. I am making a promise that makes it possible for you to experience me in your life.’
Indeed, the Spirit opens our eyes to our need: “And when he comes, he will convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment: about sin, because they do not believe in me; about righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer;about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned” (John 16:8-11).
Jesus’ words seem cryptic, but when we consider them their meaning is clear. The Holy Spirit’s work is to awaken us to our isolation from God. Why is it that someone who has lived a life of indifference or even hostility towards God can suddenly be aware of their sin and their need for personal salvation? CS Lewis was in his thirties when he came ‘kicking and screaming’ into God’s kingdom. It is the Spirit who convicts the world of sin, righteousness and judgment.
The word convict is a technical word in the original language, meaning to cross-examine a hostile witness. Jesus was saying that the Spirit would also challenge and awaken our conscience.
Was this really new? Wasn’t King David convicted of his affair with Bathsheba? When we consider Jesus’ words, we see there’s a significant change in the way the Spirit works. There is a new definition of sin. The Spirit convicts us of sin, not simply because we break the Ten Commandments, but because we don’t acknowledge Jesus as our rightful ruler. We choose to be isolated from him.
This is most significant – for us personally and for our outreach. The question God will one day ask all of us is this: ‘What did you do with my Son?’
Some twelve months ago eleven heroin smugglers were executed in Indonesia. Two of them were Australians. One of them, Andrew Chan, had turned to Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior during his long imprisonment. The Spirit of God had convicted him of his sin and accountability to God. When I read this I thought of one of the two criminals crucified with Jesus who had said to Jesus, ‘Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ The Spirit awakens us to our need for forgiveness from God so that we may be longer isolated from him.
David Brooks’ solution to the issue of isolation is to build meaningful community, ‘One community at a time’. It’s a good idea – as far as it goes. Jesus’ solution goes to the heart of our real isolation, our isolation from God. When we turn to the Lord Jesus, he, the Lord of the universe, promises to come into our lives in the person of his Spirit. What is more, he builds us into the new community of his people. But that’s another theme for another day.
To know Christ is never to be alone. As King David could say, Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me…(Psalm 23:4a).
