GRACE APPLIED TO LIFE

Sermon delivered on the 1st Sunday After Trinity, the 25^th May 2008 by Fr Nicholas JG Sykes in the congregations of St. Alban's and of St. Mary’s Church of England in the Cayman Islands in the service of the Holy Eucharist.

Scriptures: Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18    1 Corinthians 3: 10-11, 16-end     S. Matt 5: 38-end

1 Corinthians 3: 11 For no other foundation can any one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ."

 

The Scriptures today have to do with building a church or a society or in the case of the Gospel, perhaps, one’s own personal life, on a secure foundation. This fits in well with the idea of a Trinity season in the church calendar. The facts of the Gospel have been taught in Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Ascentiontide and Whitsuntide. We have learned of how God sent His Son Jesus Christ into the world, and what conditions existed in the world that impelled God graciously to send to us His own Son. We have learned of the perfect offering of His life that was the culmination of the coming of the Son of God, an offering that involved going through the worst circumstances that could be devised for ending a man’s life. We have learned of the bodily rising again of Jesus, the witness to His royal victory of those apostles who spoke and even ate with him after He rose from the dead. We have learned of His final commission to His disciples, His final departure from them to be enthroned at the right hand of God, and of His sending to them from that throne the Holy Spirit according to His own promise when He was with them. These are the foundation upon which a life, a church or a society can be built to endure, and this is what S. Paul calls the foundation which is laid, the foundation of Jesus Christ. But the laying of that foundation did not involve the coming of Jesus only; it involved the whole Old Testament revelation that led up to it and provided the framework for its meaning, and the context in which the Lord Jesus Himself lived a life of Messianic servanthood, the life of carrying out God’s commands as the Father’s beloved Son.

 

Whatever meaning must be taught for these things today, and however they are presented to apply to our individual lives, or to the life of the church or of our society, we are warned by St. Paul, should be consistent with the facts and their witness themselves. "For no other foundation can any one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ." It is perhaps the special task of Christian teaching during the Trinity season to build upon the foundation laid by the facts themselves, and to be careful not to try to build in a way that damages the foundation. We should not teach of the facts at one time only to ignore them at others. Our ethical teaching should be consistent with them and not at odds with them. Those of us such as parents of young children have the great responsibility of helping our children grow up with a consistent world-view, and not a collection of fragments that are war with one another. These warring fragments can sometimes arise from their exposure to the differing views of teachers at school and to the varying presentations of the media. Part of their Christian education is attempting to make some consistent sense of it all upon the foundation of the Gospel of our Lord.

 

Our Lord’s teaching on the commandments of God developed and focussed the teaching of the Ten Commandments that were delivered by Moses to the children of Israel. It seems reasonable to think that from his boyhood Jesus had compared the various accounts and commentaries on the Commandments in the Old Testament. We see one of these in our first lesson this morning from Leviticus. It emphasises that Israel’s holiness is derived from the nation’s being related to the holy God. God’s commandments, therefore, according to Leviticus, are not merely arbitrary: they are all expressions of behaving in a holy manner, and they are all given a common justification, namely, "I am the LORD". The commandment that for Jesus according to his own teaching best exemplified God’s will seems to have been the remarkable Leviticus 19 verse 18: "You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the LORD." Without in any way diminishing the theme of holiness, Jesus’ developed these words around his central theme of the love of God, and the summation that we know of as our Lord’s summary of the Commandments, recited in most services of Holy Communion, is the result.

 

In this sort of way, the Old Testament revelation has become part of the foundation of Christian life that S. Paul refers to, the foundation of Jesus Christ. In and through Jesus Christ, and not without Him, the Old Testament also takes its place in our own life insofar as our life is built upon the foundation of Jesus Christ.

 

Our Lord appears to have followed the example of Leviticus itself in developing around a newly inspired theme the ancient commandments. So Jesus says in the words of our Gospel today, "You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven."

 

Jesus’ method of using the Old Testament, which was the body of inspired Scripture for him, shows us that however holy we should regard it to be, we too must try to see it through the prism of His perspective. S. Paul rightly says that Jesus Christ is the foundation upon which others who teach, whether they be ministers of religion, parents or teachers, must build their own teaching, if their teaching is to build up their pupils, rather than to act to pull them down. For example, Jesus’ use of the Commandments on one occasion was preparatory to His teaching of the parable of the Good Samaritan, which illustrated the boundary-less love that according to Jesus, God requires from all His people. The subtle way that Jesus used the Commandments in His teaching shows that if we are to build our teaching on His foundation, we should be very careful about the way we issue commandments ourselves or use the concept of commands in what we teach about God and His righteous will. That is not at all to say that commandments are out of date, or that God no longer requires things of His people. He most certainly does. But we must include in our teaching as well, because Jesus did most prominently, the gracious desire of the Lord God to forgive us our trespasses. And of course it was that gracious desire that Jesus died for, to reconcile, as we might say, forgiveness with righteousness. The facts of the Gospel, that have been taught by most of the seasons of the church calendar, are to be brought to bear, not as requirements only but by the work of God’s grace and forgiveness, during this major Trinity season, into the lives of His children, by building on the foundation of Jesus Christ.