DEEP AND TRUE KNOWLEDGE OF THE LORD

Sermon delivered on the 2^nd Sunday After Trinity, the 1^st June 2008 by Fr Nicholas JG Sykes in the congregation of St. Alban's, George Town Church of England in the service of the Holy Eucharist.

 

Scriptures: Deut 11: 18-21, 26-28    Romans 1: 16-17; 3: 22b-31     S. Matthew 7: 21-29

 

S. Matthew 7: 22f "On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not ... do many mighty works in your name? And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you’".

 

I expect most if not everybody here is familiar with what has become an old favourite, namely the show "Fiddler on the Roof", which for me is always associated with Alan Hall in the part many years ago at our local Playhouse of the husband and head of the house Tevya. Tevya has been challenged to his roots by the fact that his daughters have chosen their marriage-mates themselves on a basis of love rather than by the arrangements of a match-maker, and he falls to pondering whether his own marriage, which had been arranged 25 years previously, has love. He therefore asks his wife Golda to tell him if she loves him. Her reaction is to go through a long rigmarole before bringing herself eventually to answer that Yes, she supposes she does. What kind of a question is that? she fumes. Twenty-five years of sharing his house, washing his clothes, cooking his food and bearing him children, and he asks her if she loves him! Yet her husband persisted until he got the answer, because he had come to see that it was important. After 25 years, he said, it’s good to know.

 

The Scriptures today show us that the Lord is not unlike that husband in relation to our souls. The relationship between a woman and a man in marriage has the potential for expressing to us the relationship that we have or might have with God. According to our Gospel today, it is possible to do all sorts of things in the name of Christ and still not really to be in touch with Him in any adequate or true way. Interestingly, the kinds of things that are described here are not things like having a sale for the church, but things that seem on the face of it to be extremely spiritual, such as prophesying and casting out demons in Christ’s name. Even things like this we can do, and yet at the end of the day be found not to have known Him, and told to depart from Him as evildoers. How can this be?

 

Well, in the verse before these sayings, Jesus says, "Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in Heaven." At first sight, this might not seem to help us. Is it not God’s will that a person should prophesy and cast out demons in His Name? Certainly, according to Scripture, such things might be needed. Yet it is clear that God looks deeper into our souls and asks something deeper from us, just as Tevya looked at his busy and faithful wife and asked whether she really loved him. Indeed, God does ask if we really love Him. St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12 and 13 that Yes the gifts of the Spirit are all wonderful and God-given, and yet if we have them to the n^th degree, such as having the faith to move mountains, but yet do not have love, we really end up with nothing at all. So we must judge that when Jesus says "He who does the will of my Father who is in Heaven", He is referring to the person who does the Father’s will out of an true and close knowledge of Him, and therefore, response to Him, rather than merely doing even the sorts of things that look as if they are the things that God wants done.

 

Perhaps Tevya would have wanted Golda to stop being so busy around the house sometimes and sit down with him and be companiable, perhaps share with him in a game of cards or whatever pastime he might have enjoyed. In general, such a desire might be expressed more often in our own culture by the wife. No doubt Tevya would have wanted the clothes to be cleaned and mended, and we husbands are usually famous for wanting our wives to have the food on the table for us. But Golda still perhaps was not doing some of these things out of her knowledge of her husband, but rather to measure up in her own eyes to the general expectation - and her own expectation - of what being a good wife meant. So the issue for us is whether what we do as Christians is done out of an informed and true personal knowledge of our heavenly Father, and as our response to Him, or whether it is done only to satisfy what we expect and what others expect is the way Christian people ought to behave. If that is the basis of what we do and it hasn’t led us to the knowledge of God and to the promptings of His Spirit, then ultimately, we are being told, we are in danger of getting things very wrong indeed.

 

St. Paul uses the language of faith and works, I think, to express the same reality. "We hold," he says in our second lesson, "that a man is justified by faith apart from works of law." Doing "works of the law" was the way a Jewish person expected a good person to act. But St. Paul says that trying to measure up to this expectation can by no means get God to treat you as someone that knows Him. We have to get that knowledge of God independently. "A man is justified by faith."

We might ask what St. Paul meant by faith. He means faith in the perfectly completed work of Jesus. Somebody quipped, "Faith alone saves, but faith that saves is never alone". The truth is that though a man is justified by faith apart from any works that he himself does, he could never be justified if Jesus Himself had not been on the earth, had not worked the Fathers’ will, and had not made a perfect offering of Humanity on the Cross. So the faith that saves us is not our faith alone, but the work by which Jesus declared the full glory of the Father. When we are baptised and when we partake of the Lord’s Supper, we are participating in the death and Resurrection of Christ, we are participating in the body and blood of Christ. Having faith, the works that save us are not ours, but His. Therefore, to do the will of the Father who is in Heaven, we must be, as St. Paul often says, "in Christ". We are using the language of intimacy and close personal knowledge.

 

The Old Testament lesson too expresses something about the intimacy of the knowledge of God, in the way that His directions were to placed upon the hand, the forehead and the doorpost. One’s personal space was to be steeped in them. His words were to be on the heart. To do the will of God involves not merely external knowledge, but heart-knowledge of Him and what He wants from us.

 

Our challenge as Christians, therefore, is the challenge to grow in the knowledge of God, and the way we can meet that challenge is the Way that was revealed by the Son of God, and is revealed to us in our days by the Holy Spirit. As Jesus says, we must do the will of the Father in Heaven if we ourselves wish to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. As He says in the Gospel according to St. John, to do the will of God is to believe in the One whom He sent. When you believe in someone, you do everything you can to know him better, and you get to do what He wants by understanding his intentions. Through Christ, and even through what Christ instituted when He left the earth - His Church, and through the bestowal of the blessed Holy Spirit, God has declared Himself, and granted the means by which we may grow in His intimate knowledge, and so perform the will of His divine heart.