THEOLOGICAL COMMENTARY – by Rev. Nicholas Sykes

 

INHERITORS OF THE KINGDOM

 

In Luke chap 10 verse 16 Jesus said, “He who hears you hears me, and he who rejects you rejects me, and he who rejects me rejects him who sent me.”

 

The Lord certainly cannot be accused of timidity in making such a statement. We can accept reasonably as Christians that Jesus speaks in the name of the Father, because we are convinced that Jesus is the full expression of God’s glory. However, when He sent His spokesmen out to the towns of Galilee ahead of Him, He went so far as to say that those who heard those spokesmen heard Him, and those who rejected them rejected Him. In the same way as He is the voice of God the Father, they, He says, are His voice. And these, according to St. Luke, were not even the twelve; these were a wider group of people referred to as the Seventy, or in some ancient texts, the seventy-two.

 

If the seventy that He appointed could be His voice, just as He gives expression to the voice of the Father, there could be no question but that we who are the church, not only are intended by Him to speak with His voice, but in an objective sense, are actually His voice. This relates to an expression of St. Paul that has in the past given me a good deal of concern, when he says that “we have the mind of Christ”. Following Jesus' practice, Paul does not merely say that we should have the mind of Christ, or that we aspire to have the mind of Christ, but actually makes the seemingly outrageous statement that we have that mind. Perhaps it is valid for us in trying to make sense of such a statement to say that for God the future is just as much present as the present is to us, so that those seeds of the mind of Christ that have taken root within us can be regarded already as the whole mind of Christ. But even that would not quite explain the terms of the commission to the seventy, upon whose words a man’s acceptance or rejection of God Himself would depend.

 

Other Scriptures depict something of that inheritance. Isaiah chapter 66 speaks of a restored “mother” Jerusalem suckling her children abundantly. Christians may apply such imagery properly, though not perhaps exclusively, to the Church. In Revelation the new Jerusalem that comes down from God out of heaven appears to refer not to the Church in the present age, but to the restored community at the end of the age. But New Testament references in general to the new Jerusalem refer to the community of children of faith, in contrast sometimes to the children of the law. Notwithstanding all the modern problems of the Church, we have no authority to discount such imagery as being inapplicable today. We are not merely heirs one day, but inheritors now. Because of this, St. Paul writes in Galatians chapter 6 of our spiritual duties as church members, and as part of these, to restore any offender not censoriously, but in a spirit of gentleness, and to share our good things with those who have imparted the best thing, the word of God itself, especially those who have made some sacrifices to do so.  He warns his correspondents to avoid those things which would erode the church’s true character. “Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.” That true character is the calling to become the new creation in the world through the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. The cross of Christ is the most extraordinary and unlikely privilege we can be marked with, and as members of Christ, we must not seek to avoid the cross by avoiding the name of Christ, but rather to glory in it, being confident in its power, by admitting it and owning it in the midst of the present age. St. Paul could visualise much of his apostolic work for the early church being dissipated because of church members’ choices to choose the emblems of their culture over the scandal of the cross. Judaistic church members from Jerusalem seem to have travelled around to the churches which Paul had established telling them that they had to accept the ancient emblem of Jewishness, namely circumcision, to be saved. But St. Paul knew that once a Gentile convert started to rely on a cultural sign of membership such as this, rather than upon the cross of Christ, which had real power to make a person a member of Christ, he would in effect become an enemy of the cross of Christ, the life he lived would no longer be marked by the mind of Christ or the heart of a servant of His, and he would lose the character of the calling to become a new creation in this world.

 

Like the seventy or seventy-two that Jesus sent out, like the twelve apostles, and like the early church of the New Testament, those who are of the Church are called to be God’s new creation in the world through the cross of the Lord Jesus. Like the members of the early church whom Paul exhorted, we are called too to own and exalt that cross over any other emblem of membership, and to discard every emblem or habit of culture that conflicts with the new character with which we have been endowed.

 

For commentary, information and devotional material see www.churchofenglandcayman.com and www.anglicansatprayer.org