Deuteronomy 34:1-12
1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
Matthew 22:34-46
Sermon in a Sentence: Jesus is the key who brings together judgment and love into a coherent whole.
Introduction
Last week I said that God is good, and that God is
incredibly patient and kind towards us. I did not spend any time making the
case for God, but simply assumed our common faith as Christians. This morning I
want to make one small part of the case to believe. The basic argument is that
we meet God in the person of Jesus. Walk through our passages with me to see
the case we can make.
Deuteronomy 34
On the face of it, Deuteronomy retells the story of Exodus,
Leviticus, and Numbers, giving us a second telling of the Law (hence the name:
Deutero Nomos). More precisely, the whole book is set in the days before the
Children of Israel enter the Promised Land. Following a series of cursings pronounced
on those who disobey God and blessings on those obey God, the Israelites are
given the choice to choose life—that is to choose God and live.
Then God takes Moses up on to a mountain, where he sees the
land in which the people will live, but which he will not enter himself. Here
in our passage, we have his obituary:
7 Moses was a hundred and twenty
years old when he died, yet his eyes were not weak nor his strength gone. 8 The
Israelites grieved for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days, until the time
of weeping and mourning was over. 9 …
10 Since
then, no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, 11 who did
all those signs and wonders the Lord
sent him to do in Egypt – to Pharaoh and to all his officials and to his whole
land. 12 For
no one has ever shown the mighty power or performed the awesome deeds that
Moses did in the sight of all Israel.
Since then no prophet has risen like Moses: This came to be
one of the defining characteristics of the expected Messiah; that the Messiah
would be the prophet like Moses—“whom the Lord
knew face to face, who did signs and wonders.” You can file this information
for when we come to the Gospel passage.
1 Thessalonians 2
In 1 Thessalonians Paul recalls the founding of the church
in Thessalonica (recorded in Acts 17). Following beating and imprisonment in
Philippi (which led to the conversion of their jailer and the beginning of a
church in Philippi), Paul and Silas and their companions came to Thessalonica.
When Paul’s opponents found out where he was, they tried to capture him, but
only succeeded in causing trouble for Jason and his friends. Luke tells the
story:
6 But when
they did not find them, they dragged Jason and some other believers before the
city officials, shouting: “These men who have caused trouble all over the world
have now come here, 7 and
Jason has welcomed them into his house. They are all defying Caesar’s decrees,
saying that there is another king, one called Jesus.” 8 When they heard this, the crowd and
the city officials were thrown into turmoil. 9 Then they put Jason and the others on
bail and let them go.
No wonder Paul describes their memories (16):
“You became imitators of us and of the Lord, for you welcomed the message in
the midst of severe suffering with the joy given by the Holy Spirit.”
In chapter 2, then, Paul tells why he
performed the actions he did (vv 3 and 8): “we dared to tell you his gospel in
the face of strong opposition, for the appeal we make does not spring from
error or impure motives, nor are we trying to trick you. … So we cared for you. Because we loved you so
much, we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our
lives as well.”
The gospel of God stands at the heart of
all Paul’s actions, the gospel of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. In the
story told in Acts 16 to 18, where this account comes from, Paul’s preaching
always told about the cross of Jesus, and about the resurrection of Jesus. This
then brings us to the Gospel reading.
Matthew 22
The Gospel reading takes place as the climax to a series of
questions with which the Jewish leaders tried to trap Jesus. This time they try
to embroil him in an ongoing rabbinical discussion on the meaning of the law,
so one asks him: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” It’s
a good question, one which the rabbis debated back and forth. Jesus’ answer
places him squarely in one group of rabbis who saw the answer in just this way,
but Jesus has a different agenda than they do.
So he asks them a question: “What do you think about the
Messiah? Whose son is he?” They reply immediately, “The Son of David.” Then
Jesus quotes Psalm 110, used by the Children of Israel to inaugurate a new king
in the line of David. And he twists their tail with the question: “How can
David call his own Son ‘Lord’?” The implication is that the Messiah is truly
the Son of God. They get the point and abandon the debate. We don’t hear from
the Jewish leaders again until chapter 26, where they plot the death of Jesus.
The Question
The question that Jesus raises echoes in our ears and hearts
today. Whose son is the Messiah? Who is the Messiah? Is he simply David’s Son,
a Jewish ruler to throw out the Romans? Or is he God’s Son, the Saviour of the
World, the One in whom God comes to his creation uniquely and for all time?
That would indeed be a prophet like Moses, so close to God that he can say, “I
and my father are one.” That would indeed be one who could inspire the
Thessalonian Christians to endure bitter persecution, finding life beyond any
torment the authorities could bring.
Who is the Messiah? He is Jesus? Who is Jesus? He is the Son
of God, the Saviour of the world. But knowing him as such is harder today than
ever. How do we process these questions today? This is a hard one. The Bible
seems really remote to many people. These passages we read were written between
2000 and 2600 years ago, at a guess. When Matthew describes these encounters
Jesus had with the Jewish leaders, we may reasonably wonder what that could
have to do with us. In the short time available this morning, I can’t hope to
make the case for Jesus fully, but I can hint at it.
The World Needs More
than We Have
This past week we had a chapel speaker who described his own
faith journey from rejecting religion entirely to being a committed follower of
Jesus. He told us how he partied every night while an engineering student at
University of Waterloo. He told us how he ended up on Christmas Eve 1991 lying
in an Emergency Unit at the hospital, with his insides hammered from constant
binge drinking. As he lay there, he wondered, “There has to be more to life
than this. There has to be more to life than senseless partying and spending
Christmas Eve alone in the hospital.”
Where do you look for more? A growing group of people hold
out the answer of atheism, saying that there is no God and that this world is
all we have. It’s a pretty bleak answer, and prominent atheists such as Richard
Dawkins are pressed into strange statements about the origin of life in order
to hold on to it. As our speaker told us in chapel, people who set faith
against reason and claim to be atheist usually are addicted to themselves.
There are honest atheists, who seek to follow the evidence wherever it leads.
But I think of Anthony Flew, the most prominent atheist philosopher in the 20th
Century. In his last years he concluded that there must be a God, and stated
that there really is no other way to explain the reality we live in.
If atheism is often a cover for our addiction to self,
perhaps there are other alternatives. I find myself looking at their founders.
Hinduism and its Children
The great religions of Asia (Hinduism, Buddhism, and so on)
present one option. It is enough here to say that neither Gautama Buddha, nor
the Mahavira, nor the founder of the Sikh faith, nor any other great leader in
these religions claimed to be one with God. The claims Jesus makes for himself
are quite unique.
Islam and Judaism
No Jewish leader would have dared to claim what Jesus
claimed for himself; still less would Mohammed have claimed to be one with God.
I remember the way my teacher of world religions (Matt Zahniser) put it. Matt
told us that the great religions of Asia see all reality as one. We are one
with God in a sense, because we emanate from God. We flow out of God and back
into God. They are, as he put it, incredibly intimate religions; they assume we
can be intimate with God, but they lose the greatness of God. If human evil is
simply an expression of God, we live in a pretty bleak world.
Matt went on to say that the great monotheistic religions of
the world see the greatness of the Creator, separate from his creation, which
God will judge at the end of time. In them God is Ultimate. God is great! God
is beyond us, beyond our comprehension. This picture preserves the goodness and
greatness of God from human evil; but it also makes it hard to come close to
God.
Jesus
Then there is Jesus, God come in human form, God the Father
who speaks as the Lord to God the Son, the one who lived and died and rose in
human history. Matt said to us, “You see what happens? Jesus is God, the
Ultimate; and Jesus, the little baby, is God. The Intimate. He is the intimate
ultimate—or the ultimate intimate. The only question is: Is this all true?
The Importance of
History
I get the difficulty. The OT and NT range between two and
three thousand years old. What could all of this really old stuff have to do
with our lives? Without exploring them further, I have to say simply that the
age of the documents is a red herring. The question is: Did Jesus really come
from God? Paul’s conviction that Jesus really was “in very nature God” derives
from his conviction that Jesus who was crucified also rose from the dead. If
the documents that describe the resurrection are reliable, then we have to work
out the implications.
C.S. Lewis has observed (I don’t remember where) that a
basic part of his own movement to Christian faith was a comment from a
non-Christian historian at Oxford University, who said to him in casual
conversation that the NT documents were as historically reliable as the best
documents of that time for Greek or Roman history. Lewis saw the implication.
If these stories are telling the truth, then a man who claimed to be God was
executed and then rose from the dead. The only way to explain this, if the
accounts are telling the truth, is that God has entered human experience. How
long ago is irrelevant for such a wonder!
So What?
The arguments on both sides of these questions require
developing in much greater depth. Let me assume for this morning that the
Christian answer is right and that Jesus is precisely who he claims to be: the
Son of God, one with the Father. What difference does this make?
Human history is headed somewhere. Our lives mean something.
If Hinduism is true, the basic meaning of life is: Live the
best way that you can, and you may return in a better state in the next life.
If Atheism is true, you may as well enjoy yourself as much
as you like, because you really are the only god—and therefore the only
goal—that you have.
But if Jesus is the source of life and goal of life, then we
listen to Jesus to know how to live. In the chapters that follow Jesus gives
some clear ideas: Live for God and live for others; live in the fear of the
Lord with no fear of other human authorities. We look for the ways that people
have become separated from God—like our chapel speaker laid up in Emergency on
Christmas Eve—and seek to reconcile them with God, to show them Jesus, to be
Jesus with them and for them.
Consider doctors and nurses fighting the Ebola virus in West
Africa. As those who come from North America return home, some people accuse them
of being selfish because they endanger us in North America. How short-sighted
and selfish a response! But completely understandable if God is not among us in
Christ, and finally in each other.
I remember an old TV show on Sundays—Hymn Sing! Many who are
part of this church helped to bring hymns to the whole country as an expression
of their love for God, come to us in the person of Jesus.
I think of people who work in Winnipeg’s North End to change
social structures that help to keep people in poverty and despair—as their expression
of love for the Jesus who lived and died and rose for us in our own brokenness
and pain.
I think also, ruefully, of several weeks ago when I failed
to live in the light of the risen Christ. I was on my way to Toronto on Air Canada,
and as we waited to board the plane I felt more and more impatient. The official
holding us back from boarding called one group, then another, as the rest of us
“champed at the bit”. When he finally set us free to board the plane, I put on
my strongest face of disapproval. We don’t need words to show when we’re upset!
As he checked my boarding pass and I went on past him, he said, “You’re welcome!”
Clearly he had read my expression all too well.
As I went on up the passage to the plane a song from our church
came unbidden to me, “May the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ dwell in you, and whatever
you say and whatever you do, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, who
rose from the dead and gave us new life in him.” I wanted to run back and say, “I’m
sorry!” But too late. The passage was full behind me, and I went on into the
plane with the song sounding softly in my ears, rebuking me.
If this Gospel is true, then we learn to say that Jesus is
Lord, and Jesus directs every step. “The Lord said to my Lord”: People in that
day said that Caesar was Lord; the Jews held on to their own God; but Jesus
goes beyond both. Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. If you want to
find God in this messed up broken world, look to Jesus. When you find Jesus,
you find God.
