THE NEW WEALTH OF LIFE, RESTORATION AND NEIGHBOURLY CARE

           

Sermon delivered on the Third Sunday After Trinity the 28^th June 2009 by Fr Nicholas J.G. Sykes in the congregation of St. Alban's Church of England, George Town, Cayman Islands.

 Scriptures: Lamentations 3: 22-33       2 Corinthians 8: 7-end               S. Mark 5: 21-end

2 Corinthians 8: 9 “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.”

 

The subject of poverty and riches is very much in the news in the Cayman Islands at the moment. Much comment has been expended on recent statistics seemingly showing a remarkable rise in government indebtedness as well as a decrease in cash reserves in the space of a few weeks in May, during which there just happened to be a change in government. The cynics no doubt can comment that it proves the old adage that there are lies, damn lies and statistics, but we look forward to the Financial Secretary’s fuller explanation. Also there are some within the Christian community who take St. Paul’s saying that is our text today (repeat) to mean that since God’s will is for his people to become rich, wealth is a sure sign of God’s blessing upon them and the lack of wealth is a sign only of the absence of His blessing.

 

As St. James says, every good endowment and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. As we get older we get to appreciate more and more the blessings of whatever health and wealth we may be endowed with, and that appreciation may partly be because we have more reason to fear the effects upon us of sickness and poverty than we had when we were younger. However, St. James describes God’s attributes as being without variation or shadow due to change, and I must conclude that  there is an unstated comparison in these words with the human condition, which we know to be very variable and changeable. And one truth about the human condition is that with us, because of that inconstancy and variability a blessing can become a curse. So even if St. Paul does indicate that God’s will is that we might become rich, in whatever sense we take his words, those very “riches”, in our possession, may become a snare to us. That is due to our fault, not to any fault of the Giver, who is without variation or shadow due to change. Because of this, the person who is without good health or without any wealth in the ordinary sense may end up being the truly blessed person, rather than the other. That squares with the experience of finding that those who are rich sometimes turn out to be the grumpiest and most unhappy of human specimens, while those who seem to be barely making their way can sometimes be the ones to evidence the greater joy in their lives.

 

The Old Testament scripture from Lamentations asserts that God “does not willingly afflict or grieve the sons of men” – that even if times of grief are caused, the abundance of His steadfast love does not fail or come to an end, and His compassion continues.  The widespread point of view  among the people who came to Jesus in the first century for healing, would be that God created us for life and not death, that He does not delight in the death of the living, and that death, sickness and poverty entered the world through the devil’s envy. There is nothing wrong with that model, but St. Paul takes us to the heart of the matter when he declares that God’s grace may be perfected or made complete in our lives through our weakness. And that in itself obviously affects greatly what St. Paul actually means when he refers to poverty and riches. Today, though, we are concentrating on the statement in 2 Corinthians 8: 9 “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.” In referring to our Lord Jesus Christ as rich and then becoming poor he is clearly referring to something more than we ordinarily mean by those words. He is referring to the pre-existent Christ being rich, that is the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity in His eternal glory before the Incarnation. All the riches of God the Father are the riches of God the Son. “Yet for your sake” says St. Paul, He became poor.” That is to say, He took upon Himself the flesh of mankind. He remained the Son of God, but He became, too, the son of man. We could say that the One who had Divine Status expatriated Himself, in part veiling for the time being that Divine Status and taking upon Himself the manhood that had utterly alienated itself from His heavenly Father. The end of this process was inevitable from the beginning: He died on our behalf and in our place bearing our sins and the faultiness of all humanity in a supreme act of sacrifice, offering up the one perfect human life ever lived to God, so that we humans can be reconciled to the Father. The dereliction of Christ upon the cross was the epitome of His poverty. The reconciliation of our humanity to God is the riches that He won for us through His poverty.

 

Such an interpretation of riches and poverty takes us far beyond the wealth of Mammon and the lack of it. Part of the effect of Christian discipleship is to wean us from reliance on the narrow concept of wealth, and to give us concepts of it that are more in accord with the mind of God. “Seek ye the Kingdom of Heaven” said Jesus, “and all things shall come unto you.” Having the wider understanding of wealth, it may be that if wealth in the narrower form does come to us, we will be less liable to be ensnared by it.

 

Today’s Gospel tells us of the healing of the woman with the issue of blood and of Jairus’ daughter, who actually passed away before Jesus reached her. We can see that for the main players in this drama wealth and health had merged into one. Jairus the synagogue ruler did not care either that many of his Jewish fellow-teachers considered this Jesus not to be a real rabbi. He just knew that here was the one chance he had to get his life back, in the form of the life and health of his beloved little daughter. This was what he saw as his wealth at this time. The Scripture does not record whether he was impatiently trying to move Jesus along when Jesus stopped to enquire who on the way had interrupted and touched Him and received power from Him. Perhaps the disciples’ comment at the time reflected his own thought: “You see the crowd pressing around you, and yet you say, “Who touched me?” If so, what was wealth for the woman involved detracting from his own hope of the wealth of his daughter’s restoration. And indeed we read that while Jesus was still administering healing to this poor woman, the word came to Jairus from his house that his daughter had passed the point of death.