Matthew 7:21-29
Presented June 8, 2008, by J.D. Kline
The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
This morning’s text stands at the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount, the largest single collection of Jesus’ teachings recorded in the Gospels. Clarence Jordan, noted for his founding in the 1940s of an interracial Christian community, Koinonia Farm in Americus, Georgia, writes in his book about the Sermon on the Mount,
It is difficult to be indifferent to a wide-awake Christian, a real live son [or daughter] of God. It is even more difficult to be indifferent to a whole body of Christians. You can hate them, or you can love them, but one thing is certain—you can’t ignore them . . . . They confront you with an entirely different way of life, a new way of thinking, a changed set of values, a higher standard of righteousness. In short, they face you with the kingdom of God on earth, and you have to accept it or reject it.
Truth is, there’s little about the life of Christian discipleship—walking in the footsteps of Jesus, seeking to embody and enflesh the character and values of Jesus, clothing ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, peace, and self-giving love—there’s little about all this that comes easily or naturally. You and I are challenged to live life based on a markedly different perspective than that of much of the world around us.
The first crowds who heard Jesus teach and preach understood that Jesus was not offering simple formulas—no series of ten easy steps toward happiness, no snappy formula for instant success. Much to the contrary, Jesus called into question the very fabric of life, urging his hearers to embrace a radically new alternative for living—life in the realm of God. Asserts Matthew in his rendering of the Gospel, “the crowds were astounded at his teaching” (Matthew 7:28). Other translations put it, the crowds were “astonished” (RSV) or “amazed” (NIV). The Jerusalem Bible translates, “Jesus had now finished what he wanted to say, and his teaching made a deep impression on the people, because he taught them with authority.”
It is an authority that was not imposed from without, but an authority that found its root in Jesus’ very life. Jesus lived what he preached. In The Message Eugene Peterson offers this paraphrase of the final two verses of Matthew 7: “When Jesus concluded his address, the crowd burst into applause. They had never heard teaching like this. It was apparent that Jesus was living everything he was saying—quite a contrast to their religious teachers! This was the best teaching they had ever heard.”
Have you ever looked forward to hearing a noted author speak, only to be let down when you hear the writer in person? Fairly early on in my ministry I found myself drawn to the writings of a pastor who penned seemingly honest words about the spiritual life—words encouraging honest reflection and courageous commitment. But when I heard this pastor speak at a conference, I was sorely disappointed, for he seemed full of himself—overly polished, conveying a saccharine character, displaying little evidence of the quality of honest struggle I found in his writings.
Jesus, on the other hand, embodied in his life and spirit the remarkable words he proclaimed, and Jesus had the gift of evoking heart-felt responses from his listeners. Back in my college days, I recall, there was a new member of the sociology faculty who quickly established a reputation for demanding hard work. One could not sit in his classroom long without sensing high expectations. I soon found myself reading the required assignments more diligently, entering into classroom discussions more deeply, poring more seriously over required papers and projects. Why? Because I found in that professor one who demanded as much of himself as he did of his students. And I found one who coupled keen intellect with a deep personal integrity, with a thirst for truth, and with an open and gracious spirit.
So it was for those early hearers of Jesus, confronted as they were by his call to adopt a new way of thinking, a changed set of values, a higher standard for righteousness. Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann asserts that “an oddness” has been entrusted to those of us who embrace the ways of Jesus; in similar fashion, we Brethren have long spoken of ourselves as “a peculiar people,” bearing a peculiar tradition—a way of thinking and acting that sets us apart from the world around us.
When Jesus proclaims, Not everyone who cries, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of God, but those who do God’s will, is he not reminding us that we respond to the upside-down teachings of Christ, not on our own strength alone, but as we allow the Spirit to transform and renew our hearts and our minds? Some are inclined to reduce this call to a matter of slavish obedience. But as the late William Sloane Coffin once asserted, “We are called to obey not God’s power, but God’s love. God wants not submission to his power, but, in return for his love, our own [love].” Surely this is the message of another familiar story from Matthew’s Gospel, one found much later in the Gospel—at the end of chapter 25. In a parable of judgment, you may remember, the discerning Messiah separates the sheep from the goats on the basis of how they have treated the least among us—the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the forgotten. And the parable’s most shocking quality is the element of surprise. Those who are commended for faithful living display, not a slavish obedience, but rather, in the words of New Testament scholar William Barclay, “the natural, instinctive, quite uncalculating reaction of the loving heart.” “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” Jesus’ response: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:37-40).
This is the point of the familiar story of two builders, one who erects his house on a rock foundation, the other who builds his house on sand. When flooding waters and roaring winds come, the one who has chosen a firm foundation finds his home safe from the storm, while the one who built his house upon the sand finds that home destroyed. What is the foundation of our lives, Jesus is questioning. Do we live by self-centeredness and self-indulgence, or do we display an uncalculating compassion, an overflowing grace, a peace that passes all human understanding? Are our hearts and minds touched and transformed by the Spirit of the One who embodies all compassion?
Henri Nouwen reminds us of the interplay between the life of prayer and the life of active engagement with harsh realities. Writing about the call to peacemaking, Nouwen asserts,
Prayer is the basis of all peacemaking precisely because in prayer we come to the realization that we do not belong to the world in which conflicts and wars take place, but to Jesus who offers us his peace. The paradox of peacemaking is indeed that we can speak of peace in this world only when our sense of who we are is not anchored in the world.
Nouwen’s words raise the question, Where are we anchored? Or perhaps more accurately, In whom are we anchored? If our lives are anchored in Jesus and in the way of living Jesus opens before us, everything is transformed. Though we continue to live in a world that assumes that violence and warfare are perfectly acceptable means for dealing with human conflict, we come to be anchored in a new reality that guides us along pathways of peace. Though the world around us continues to proclaim that life takes on meaning only as we scrape to get ahead of others, our new reality in Jesus calls us instead to a lifetime of compassionate service and of grace beyond measure. And though the world would assert that our personal value is to be measured in terms of the number of possessions we have accumulated or the power over others we have claimed, the new reality in Jesus calls us to let go of self-centeredness and self-indulgence and embrace the gift of community. In truth, it is a matter of dying to our old selves and of being born to a new existence that is not defined by this world alone. Where are we anchored?
I’ve been reading a novel by Richard North Patterson entitled Exile, a story centered on the conflict between Palestine and Israel. The central character, David Wolfe, is an upwardly mobile lawyer, Jewish in heritage, who finds himself defending a Palestinian woman of charges of plotting the assassination of Israel’s prime minister by a suicide bomber while visiting San Francisco. David’s quest to find the truth leads him to Israel and to the West Bank, where he finds deep pain, hostility, and betrayal on both sides. Reflecting about all this, David muses, “The Promised Land, which many on each side believed was promised to them alone, might be consumed not merely by hatred and violence but also by the most banal of human faults—a failure to imagine the life of another. The only common denominator of occupation,” considers David, “was that it degraded everyone.”
When we are anchored in the kingdom of God, we discover an ability to imagine something radically new—life based, not on degrading one another, but on building one another up; life based, not on hatred and violence and division and warfare, but on compassion and respect and affirmation and hope—being able to imagine the life of another. Indeed, to be anchored in Jesus is to live inside God’s imagination; it is a matter of developing the capacity to envision new possibilities, new dreams, new hopes for this life. To be anchored in God’s kingdom is to learn to see as God sees and to love as God loves; it is to embrace a new definition of what’s real in life.
When Henri Nouwen speaks of the intimate connection between prayer and peacemaking, he is not thinking of prayer simply as a matter of prescribed words or of rote repetition. Instead, prayer is a matter of consciously living in the presence of God, seeking to anchor our lives in a new reality. Asserted Nouwen, “Only those who deeply know that they are loved and rejoice in that love can be true peacemakers.” Even more, only those who are deeply anchored in God’s love can be bearers of hope, proclaimers of justice, embodiments of Christ’s compassion. These are the wide-awake followers of Jesus—“the real live sons and daughters of God,” in the words of Clarence Jordan, who cannot be ignored.
Our calling is to so anchor our lives in Jesus and his new vision for living that we confront the world around us with a markedly different way of life, a new way of thinking, a changed set of values, a higher standard of righteousness. May it be so, this day and all our days. Amen.