TIME WITH THE CHILDREN OF GOD
What is special about today? Fathers’ day! Today we remember our fathers and give thanks to them for the care and love they have shown us.
My dad used to love being in his shed, and I used to love being in there with him, fixing things and making things. He made storage boxes and shelves, made me a go cart to ride in, a kennel for our dog and even made a huge two-story cubby house with a concrete floor in the back yard.
Sometimes for Fathers’ Day mum and I would give dad some tools, like a power drill or saw. [show tools] they are old now, but they still work well.
These tools can remind us that God likes making things as well. In fact he has made everything there ever is. In the beginning he created the entire universe. He didn’t use or need tools like these, he just spoke, and what he said came to be.
God also once made a bridge. [Go to work]. This bridge is a very special bridge. Today on Father’s Day, we can remember that God made a bridge so that people could know God and be with God not just as the Almighty God, but as their loving Father in Heaven.
This is what Jesus talks about in our Gospel reading today. Let’s read together: 21 From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.
[hold up cross] This bridge doesn’t look like a bridge at all. And it uses only two pieces of wood. But it is the greatest bridge ever, for it is the only way that opens up earth to heaven. As we think of fathers today, Jesus shows us that God is our greatest Father ever. He loves us like no other Father can. He loves us perfectly. He gave us the greatest gift ever—his own Son Jesus, who gave his life up on the Cross. God did that because he loves all people. He loves you, and he wants you to share in his own life, and know his love and all the blessings he showers upon his people through Jesus.
Growing in faith at home prayer
SERMON
The verse we just focused on in our Time with the Children of God is a pivotal verse in Matthew’s Gospel: “From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life”.
In recent weeks, Matthew has given us a window into the world of Jesus’ ministry with his disciples. It began with Jesus’ miraculous healing of the crowds who had followed him, then feeding of them with just five loaves and two fish. (Matthew 14:13-21). He walked on the water to his disciples struggling against the turbulent waters in their boat—deeply significant, symbolically showing Jesus’ effortless mastery over chaos and evil, and saving people from it, by pulling Peter out of the waves (vv22-30).
When they reached the shore, people brought all their sick to Jesus and all who touched the edge of his cloak were healed (14:34-36). He freed a Samaritan woman’s daughter from demonic oppression (15:21-28). All the while Jesus goes further away from Jerusalem to the borders of Israel, ministering God’s grace to those who were frowned upon by the religious leaders as unworthy and ritually unclean. Yet it is those whom the religious leaders reject who make increasingly assertive confessions about Jesus’ identity. When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi—a centre of pagan spirituality at the time–Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” (16:13). Peter makes the great confession that Jesus is the Christ—the Messiah promised from the Old Testament.
Jesus promises that this is the confession of faith on which he will build his church, and he gives to his disciples his authority to forgive and retain sins, with the promise that whatever they loose or bind on earth will simultaneously be forgiven or remain unforgiven by his Father in heaven.
Then last week’s passage ends with Jesus warning his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah (16:20). Have you ever wondered why Jesus said that?
Today’s text sheds some light on why Jesus said this: because he hadn’t yet gone to the Cross. It was necessary for Jesus to go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.
Jesus must. This is the determined, irrevocable will of God for all those who couldn’t heal themselves, rescue themselves, save themselves from evil and even death. For all those who didn’t measure up to the legalistic system of the Pharisees, and for the Pharisees themselves, who thought they measured up to God and deserved his favour, but whose hearts were far from him. Jesus must go…for those who would arrest him, and cause him to suffer, and mock him and reject him—and even kill him. It was necessary for Jesus to do this.
In the 1981 movie Arthur, the central character, Arthur Bach, is an outrageously rich man, self-absorbed in his own drunken, extravagant, playboy lifestyle, without regard for anyone else. Gradually Arthur comes to realise that all his wealth and playthings can’t bring him happiness and peace. One day this dramatically changes as Arthur is incredibly puzzled by a sensation within that he has never experienced before. He struggles to understand and describe what he is feeling, so he seeks verification from a total stranger: “How can you tell if you are in love? Does it make you feel funny? Does it make you whistle all the time?” The stranger, unimpressed, replies: “You could be in love…then again, you could just be getting sick.”
Arthur’s dilemma of not knowing what love is, is common to human experience. There are so many people in the world who don’t know what love is, or what it means to be loved. On a day when we give thanks for our fathers, it is tragic that so many have not known a loving father. That is because sin has corrupted love and turned it inward on ourselves. Human beings define what love is, and decide when and how to love. The human way of thinking is that those who are deserving of love are to be loved. That is the world’s idea of love, and it’s the world’s idea of how God should love too. But God is not anything like that. God is love, and God defines what love is.
Through today’s Gospel reading, and the reading from the letter to the Romans, God shows us that his idea of love is other centred, without conditions. It is not an emotion, but an active, serving doing that is focused on the other and not the self. Today’s text from Romans calls us to be devoted to one another in love, and to honour one another before ourselves, not being proud but humble. Paul says that we are to practice hospitality to strangers—those who we don’t know and those who may never see us again or be able to repay us. And we are even to do this for our enemies, blessing rather than cursing those who persecute us, refraining from exacting revenge. How abnormal, and counter-cultural is that! Instead of repaying evil with evil, we are to strive to show what is right and as far as we are able be at peace with everyone and overcome evil with good.
Because overcoming evil with evil doesn’t overcome evil—it only makes evil worse. It escalates evil. Revenge is repaid with even more revenge. It only worsens hurt, and loss, and pain, and separation. It causes more damage, making us even more separated from others than before.
Can you imagine if God’s way of overcoming evil was with evil? If he punished us for every time we sinned against him in thought word and deed? How much trouble would we be in? Can you imagine how limited and full of fear life would be? Or what if God’s way of blessing people was based on how much we had first given out to him? Or if his hospitality and kindness to us was based on how many people we had first shown hospitality and kindness to, and how often? Or what if he helped us in comparison to how much—or how little—help we gave to others?
But God’s love looks most clearly like Jesus, going to Jerusalem, going to suffer, going to die. All of Jesus’ previous healings, rescuing, exorcising demons would reach its fulfilment for all people through the Cross.
But why must Jesus go?
Because of God’s love. God’s love frames all of this. Matthew tells us back in chapter 14 when Jesus healed the crowds it was because he had compassion on them. It is true that only Jesus’ death would pay for our sin and free us from our own death. But something can be true yet still be acted upon begrudgingly, or not acted upon at all. If God didn’t love us and have compassion on us, he wouldn’t have sent Jesus. He wouldn’t have cared. He would have left us to die, or even just wiped us out. God didn’t have to do this for himself. He did this for us because he loves us. That is why it was necessary for Jesus to go to Jerusalem, and suffer, and be killed—because God loves you. “God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).
When Jesus began to reveal this divine plan to his disciples, Peter took Jesus aside and rebuked him, thinking he has a better plan. This will surely not happen, Peter objects. Peter believes that Jesus is the Messiah, but in his human expectation of salvation had no room for a suffering and dying saviour in victory. Peter is focusing on different enemies that need triumphing over—the hated Romans—not sin, death and hell. He has realised Jesus is the Christ but had forgotten what Jesus had just told them about forgiving and retaining sins. Death must come first, not glory.
So Jesus gives his own rebuke; those jarring words to Peter: “Get behind me Satan!” We are reminded of Jesus saying those words elsewhere: after the Devil tempted Jesus in the wilderness. There also Satan had tried to lure Jesus away from the divine plan of love, and think as the world thinks—only in terms of self. He tried to lure Jesus into seizing glory and power for himself, rather than serving and saving those powerless to help themselves even though that would mean loss of his own life. Then again Jesus told Satan to depart; to get behind him and not be an impediment in front of him…on the road to the Cross.
The Cross shows us that God wants all people to know his love. That’s good, because the world is desperate to be loved—to really be loved. And we are too. It is a fundamental need at the core of who God has created us to be. We need to be respected, and valued, and cared about. We need to matter to others. We need to be free of the endless cycle of retribution and evil for the wrongs we do, and the struggles and strivings for the approval from others. We need to be loved—not the way the world understands love: with limits and conditions based on what mistakes and failures we have made in the past, or writing people off when they can’t measure up to unrealistic expectations of what we can contribute or do, or what we look like, or what we do or do not have. But to really be loved—because all people are precious, unique creations of God.
It is not natural to love God’s way. It is supernatural. The source and strength for us to take up our cross and put to death our selfish nature comes in following the One who has borne the Cross before us. We can only love one another and all those we meet; even bless our enemies rather than curse them, through the death and resurrection power of the crucified, risen Christ at work in us. We can only be compassionate because of God’s compassion to us, we can only forgive because God has forgiven us. We can only show mercy, grace, hospitality and sincerity, because God has shown them to us. We love because God has first loved us.
May those around us receive God’s love at work through us, and come to know the God who patiently endured affliction, shared in the needs of the saints, and practiced hospitality to strangers, feeding, healing, helping, freeing them. May they come to know Jesus who did not overcome evil with evil, but by doing good, giving up; giving away all that he had—his very life. He was not proud or conceited, but humbled himself, and became obedient to death, even death on a Cross.
The Cross was where God did not take revenge by repaying our evil with evil upon us. God loves you so much that he does not want to punish you or hurt you, or make you pay for your sins, because your sin has already been paid for in the suffering and death of his only Son. In this way Jesus honoured you above himself, laying down his own life for you. The Cross is where God’s love is most clearly seen, and you can be sure that it is for you. The Cross is where you see that your Father in heaven wants to give you a life that no-one or nothing else can give, overflowing with his love, freedom and favour forever. For when you were unable to give anything to God, he gave his Son in exchange for your life. That is love. That is God’s love for you. Amen
