In today’s readings from Romans and from the gospel of Matthew, Jesus and Paul both counsel obedience to a different way of being, where doing good and siding with the good become the way we are defined. Their advice is very specific: do good when our own inclinations are not good, be good for no reward, do good things for evil people and for inconsequential people, and stand up for goodness at the risk of igniting the fury of powerful evil forces.
There is a sense that to be like this is to push against forces that would lead us in the opposite direction. I’d like us to think for a minute: How is being a Christ-follower here and now counter to forces that operate in the various contexts or our lives?
Well, being a Christ-follower might call us to be different from the prevailing Pākehā culture of this country, which, for example, can value ‘not sticking our nose in other peoples’ business’ over the safety of women and children in their own homes. We might be called to oppose a culture which sometimes prioritises a kind of fairness that resents someone else receiving the help they need unless everyone else also receives the same benefit, whether it is needed or not. Following Christ might mean moving counter to our dominant culture.
Following Christ may require us to be different to the global zeitgeist, which, for example, maintains an economic order that consistently preserves the benefits historically enjoyed by some people groups over others; an order that operates on the basis of short-term gains for one generation despite long-term costs for other generations. The Jesus Way might call us to act differently from how global norms expect us to act.
Being a disciple of Christ may ask us to move beyond our country’s laws and institutions, for example, choosing not to take advantage of perfectly legal strategies that enable our family wealth to hide from taxation for the public good; or refusing to adopt an approach that legislates racist ways of operating under the guise of fairness for all. We might be called to act differently from the lawful ways many or most citizens act.
Being a Christ-follower may nudge us to deviate from default personal and family ways of being, for example, opening our home to others when we are tired, or not being snarky alongside our family and friends when conversation drifts into negative territory. Being Christ-like may mean standing against what we prefer to do or what the people we care most about expect from us.
***
Some of these differences in how we are called to live as Christ’s followers are completely radical. Today’s gospel makes the point quite strongly that the claims of the polity of God are sometimes outrageous. They can differ in almost every way from received wisdom and even fly in the face of the norms of the religion we were brought up in. Taking up the concerns of God can offend common sense, undermine self-preservation, and very challengingly, be quite the opposite of what we think we know about God’s plan.
Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him. “Never, Lord!” he said. “It shall never happen to you that you must suffer many things at the hands of the Jerusalem elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and must be killed.”
I think we can be fairly certain that others among the disciples shared Peter’s view, uniting people from completely opposite ends of the political spectrum of the day who had been folded up into Jesus’ inner circle, like Simon the Zealot on one hand and Matthew the Tax Collector on the other.
But Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.” Strong stuff.
***
In relation to this more dramatic end of the call to be different, let’s acknowledge that there is a tension between denying yourself and losing your soul for the sake of the Commonwealth of God, versus burning out, or so denying your true nature that you end up conflicted, oppressed, broken, or suicidal. It is important to be honest about this tension. And it is important to wrestle with it, like Jacob with his angel, if we are to arrive at the right balance. Unlike Jacob, we don’t have to do this wrestling completely by ourselves.
For example, I came to the view a decade or so ago that I was not being called to burn out as a result of giving my all at work. Instead of a three-year period of service as a medical specialist, after which I might literally die, I was being called to husband my energy for a thirty-three-year period of service as a medical specialist – maybe longer, after which I might continue to offer something of my skills in a reduced way to the next clinical generation. Everyone’s path is different, and may change from time to time and from situation to situation. My advice is to seek the wisdom of others to negotiate these decisions, and to pray.
***
I’d like to point out that this episode in which Jesus rebukes Peter with stinging words sits immediately after the account in Matthew’s gospel in which Peter acknowledges Jesus’ messianic status and is talked up as ‘the rock on which the church will be built’ with all the authority and power that can be understood to go with that. And today’s story sits immediately before Peter and three others from Jesus’ inner circle go up the Mount of Transfiguration – another story in which Peter clearly sees something about Jesus that was not previously open to him.
This is obviously deliberate. The writer is pointing out that even a character we might hope to pattern ourselves after can be fundamentally and passionately wrong. The editorial decision to sandwich the rebuke story between two blessing stories is one of those very odd choices the gospels are littered with, almost as if this kind of juxtaposition is an intrinsic quality of the gospel. It jars, like the story we heard earlier this month where Jesus is politely rebuked by the Syro-Phonecian woman whom he had just referred to as a dog.
Perhaps this kind of jarring teaches us just how central to the Christian message it is that the saints are the sinners and the sinners are the saints; that this is what grace is all about. When we honestly consider how differently we are called to live compared to how we actually live, I think this is an important and reassuring teaching. All of us are in desperate need of grace. And all of us are given it.
***
Let’s shift gear: in contrast to all this, some of the different ways of being we are called to are not radical in their reach – they are pedestrian, they are every-day. Today’s excerpt from letter to the Romans operates on this level.
I accept that professing that ‘Jesus was Lord’ was a dangerous thing to do in first century Rome but note that Paul does not ask his listeners to stand up in the Forum and preach against the Emperor. Instead, Paul’s challenge is to put our inclinations to one side in the context of common and ordinary moments of our lives.
“Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited. Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge.”
This could be your wise grandmother talking. It’s not stunning moral philosophy, yet it’s pretty challenging in its own way. Imagine playing through videos of our behaviour last week – complete with slow motion replays, our secret thoughts scrolling out at the bottom of the screen, and the camera focussing on the faces of the people we interacted with each time we were cross, or flippant, or domineering, or thoughtless, or self-centred, or whiny, or self-righteous, or ignorant, or rude.
As if to make the point that we can fail even when we are trying to do our best, our very own Saint Paul hammers his point home by quoting a proverb steeped in an ancient cultural viewpoint in which aggressive competition seems to have been acceptable. Paul’s religious tradition – and ours – has King Solomon observing that “If your enemy is hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on their head.” This is a world away from the sayings ascribed to Jesus in Matthew 5 (which we should note Paul would not have had access to when he wrote to the Romans):
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”
In contrast, like Solomon, Paul is thinking in terms of vengeance; he just reserves it for God rather than for humans. Yet even that watered-down version is a world away from the sayings ascribed to Jesus, for example this one: Remember the story in John’s gospel when Jesus is pulled in to a self-righteous crowd of men about to stone a woman who was one party in an extra-marital affair? After shaming them all away with “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone”, Jesus says to the woman “Neither do I condemn you. Go now and leave your life of sin.”
I’m detecting a whiff of grace here again. Paul was a very special member of the early church. He is a hero of the New Testament. But like Peter, I suggest he can get it wrong, and like us, I suggest he can get it wrong with a throw-away comment about heaping coals onto the heads of our enemies. This comment was in service of a good purpose but perhaps uttered without enough thought. Can we find it in our hearts to forgive him this lapse? Only by the grace of God – after all, Paul has loomed large in the nightmares of some progressive Christians through the ages.
The point of dwelling on this last bit of the Romans passage is that it’s the bit that grates, which is usually a clue for us to pay more attention, and because it reminds us that Jesus and Paul are both asking us to be different in relation to the everyday, to be open to follow God’s way even – or perhaps especially – in respect of these small and pedestrian changes of heart.
***
I hope I’ve explained that I think today’s readings call us to be different at both the micro and macro levels of life – in the small and the big. In this context, I think it’s useful to finish by sitting with the closing words of today’s gospel for a minute, words that I reckon are often skated over:
“Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
Was Jesus, as some argue, a messianic apocalyptic preacher who, like all the other ‘end-timers’, was mistaken about the imminence of the Last Days? Or is this last sentence hammering today’s point home: that the kingdom of the Son of Man was indeed revealed to those disciples before they died, only the kingdom was completely different from what was expected?
Perhaps they did see it, but it was actually the shocking inevitability of following the path of God’s goodness even to persecution and death at the hands of the Jewish and Roman states. The ‘Kingdom Come’ they saw before they died was also the radical socialism of the early Church of Jerusalem. And the Jesus Way they saw fulfilled was also consummated in those three very ordinary but precious years spent on the roads of Palestine, a group of friends laughing and walking and learning with a most human messiah.
E te whānau, I pray we, too will not taste death before we see Jesus coming in his kingdom in our own lives.