Gracious Lord, help us to hear and to respond to Your Word to us, and by the power of Your Spirit help us to know You more clearly, love You more dearly, and follow You more nearly, in Jesus' Name. Amen.
"Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Matthew 10 : 34).
That is a hard saying of Jesus, in what is a deeply challenging Gospel passage set for today. Jesus goes on to spell out that those who follow Him will inevitably face division and conflict, even from within their own families. And that the way of discipleship is the way of the cross : "Whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it" (Matthew 10 : 39).
Taking up the cross. In his recent book The Bloke's Bible, Dave Hopwood - the creative Arts Director at Lee Abbey - reflects on this passage: "Jesus was uncompromising, wasn't he? Why couldn't he have just made it a little more attractive? Take up your cross, for a few yards or so. Till the end of the street. Till you feel a bit tired. Take up your cross, and put it down again. Do some exercises with it. And up and down, and up and down, and rest. Take up a little cross, a fluffy cross, a chocolate cross. A happy cross. A little cross of calm" (p 145).
Yet, as Hopwood also points out, that wasn't the sort of cross Jesus had in mind, either for Himself, or for those who would follow Him. For them, the peace they would experience would be the peace in the midst of life's storms - the peace of God, and not the absence of conflict. Here is Dave Hopwood's paraphrase of what Jesus said in today's passage: "A pupil is no greater than his teacher. You can bet that what happens to me will come to you. I've often been lonely, misunderstood, mistreated, misquoted. But there will be the good things too. .. And remember, never lost sight of the truth at the heart of things. Your God cares. He cares so much he knows every hair on your head, the colour of your eyes, the length of your fingernails.
Everything begins and ends with that fact. God cares for you. Nothing else matters more. And no one can take that away. Miracles will come and go. Friends will arrive and desert you. Family may surround or abandon you. Governments may rise up and kill you. You'll lose things, break things, forget things, and outgrow things. Nothing can take away the love of your God. No one can get to that" (p 143).
Those who choose to follow Jesus Christ have been warned. To be a disciple of the Lord is to make a choice and a commitment that will inevitably set one on a collision course with whatever is hostile to the Gospel. For example, today countless millions of Christians around the world face hostility, discrimination, imprisonment, and even death, on account of their faith in Jesus Christ. And - as Mary reminded us in her sermon here last Sunday morning - the decline of Christian values in our own increasingly secular society has created a moral and spiritual vacuum, one where countless lives are being mired in a doctrine of 'endless self-indulgence' and where a 'profound religious illiteracy' on the part of the British government, has resulted in discrimination against Christianity.
Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. After all, those who seek to obey the Lord follow the One who Himself was "obedient to the point of death - even death on a cross" (Philippians 2 : 8). And, as Jesus states in today's Gospel, "A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master" (Matthew 10 : 24).
The Gospel - the message of God's Kingdom - is profoundly challenging. It challenges all that resists or rejects God's call, lays bare all that seeks to distort or destroy His purposes in Jesus Christ. As the Letter to the Hebrews puts it in chapter 4 : "The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account" (Hebrews 4 : 12, 13).
No wonder, then, that those who choose to follow Jesus Christ will inevitably face conflict. It may be conflict with the values of the world around. Or conflict from within one's own circle of family, friends, and colleagues. It may also be conflict from within the Church, or from within our own hearts, as we face Gospel moments of truth. It certainly seems that such conflict, and such a moment of truth, has now come for the Anglican Communion. Today, and over the coming week, a gathering of Anglican Church leaders - known as the Global Anglican Future Conference, or GAFCON for short - is taking place in Jerusalem. A document entitled The Way, the Truth, and the Life (copy available for download from GAFCON website www.gafcon.org) has been produced for that gathering, one which provides a very stark analysis of the current situation facing Anglicans. Reading through it, I was struck by the way in which it resonates with today's Gospel reading, and echoes the searching challenge that the Lord issues to His would-be followers.
In one of the chapters entitled A Most Agonizing Journey Towards Lambeth 2008, Archbishop Peter Akinola, the leader of the Anglican Church in Nigeria, describes where we are in these terms: "We Anglicans stand at a crossroads. One road, the road of compromise of biblical truth, leads to destruction and disunity. The other road has its own obstacles (faithfulness is never an easy way) because it requires changes in the way the Communion has been governed and it challenges (all) our churches to live up to and into their full maturity in Christ" (p 14). Reflecting on the journey to Lambeth 2008, Archbishop Akinola then draws on imagery from another journey: "John Bunyan, the author of The Pilgrim's Progress, describes the Christian life as a journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. On his journey, numerous decisions and many crossroads confront Christian, the pilgrim. The easy road was never the right road. In the same way, we have arrived at a crossroads; it is, for us, the moment of truth" (p 15, 16).
Writing in this week's edition of The Church of England Newspaper, the Archbishop of Uganda - another leader who is attending GAFCON - argues that the present crisis is "a crisis of authority in the Communion … a crisis of confidence in the authority of the Word of God as the ultimate standard of faith and moral living." When asked whether he thought that the Anglican Communion is going to split, this was his response: "The Anglican Communion has been deeply wounded. The 2003 decision of the Episcopal Church in America to consecrate as a bishop a gay man living in a same-sex relationship caused a deep tear in the fabric of the worldwide Anglican Communion. Not only has the American Church not repented of this decision and action, but they have continued to advance non-Biblical teaching and practice. … One American bishop has said, 'The Church wrote the Bible, so the Church can re-write the Bible."
How terrible it is for the Church, when even those who are entrusted with the ministry of oversight no longer defend and uphold the faith! Instead, they undermine and attempt to re-write the Gospel, in a way that only appeases and justifies the self-indulgent spirit of this passing age. And they even claim to be acting and speaking prophetically, implying that all other Christians down the ages - as well as the vast majority of the world church today - have totally misunderstood our Lord, and the challenging nature of His call to obedient discipleship.
It was the German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer who in his work The Cost of Discipleship summed up what it is to follow Christ in these words: "When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die." Not every Christian is called to literal martyrdom, as Bonhoeffer himself was. But every Christian is called by Jesus to "take up the cross and follow (him)." And for each of us, this will involve some form of dying, or letting go, whether a dying to the demands and ambitions of our ego self, dying to the false allure of money, sex, or power - letting go of any false idol to which we so readily cling, and which prevents us from wholeheartedly following the Lord.
Jesus calls us to follow Him. If we choose to respond, if we seek faithfully to live out our baptismal commitment, then there will be a cost involved, the cost of discipleship. Yet the One who calls us is also the One who is our Way, our Lifepath. And as we look to Jesus, "the pioneer and perfecter of our faith" (Hebrews 12 : 2), so we receive that wellspring which flows from His grace, and the pure light of His Spirit to guide us.
In The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer describes the path of discipleship, as being "the narrow way through the strait gate of the cross." He warns of the constant danger of straying from this narrow path, and of the challenges involved. Then he concludes in these words with which I now close : "If we behold Jesus Christ going on before step by step, if we only look to him and follow him, step by step, we shall not go astray. But if we worry about the dangers that beset us, if we gaze at the road instead of at him who goes before, we are already straying from the path. For he is himself the way, the narrow way, and the strait gate. He, and he alone, is our journey's end."
John Barr
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