Sixth Sunday after Trinity
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Readings: Isaiah 55: 10-13 and Romans 8: 1-11
‘There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.’ Some bible verses are immediately striking and memorable, and this is one of them. The word ‘therefore’ suggests that quite a lot has been said already, and in some respects, the sentence would be better at the end of a reading than at the start. But, here it is, as verse one of Chapter eight.
It follows on from last week, when we heard Paul bemoaning that so often he wanted to do the right thing, but failed. We noted how many other thinkers across the ages have found this irritating trait of our human nature; that we seem to fail to do the good we intend. Nevertheless, Jesus has rescued us from this state of sin. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord, he says in the last verse of chapter 7.
And then, ‘There is now no condemnation…’ It was this verse that so inspired John Wesley, as he felt his heart ‘strangely warmed’ whilst attending a society meeting in Aldersgate Street, London, on the 24th May 1738; the moment – you could say – that gave birth to the Methodist movement. ‘I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.’
St Paul goes on to say that to fully realise this state of ‘no condemnation’, we must live according to the Spirit. He sees ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’ as opposites. He does not slavishly follow the gnostic teaching of the time, which stated that the body and physical things are evil. No; physical life can be lived God’s way, as Jesus demonstrated. To live according to the flesh is to live selfishly and in rebellion with God. To live according to the Spirit is to live aligned with God, and for his sake.
It seems the choice is ours – to live according to the Spirit, or not. We cannot work for God, or even praise him, unless we have his Spirit. Without the Spirit, the best we can do is to know about God. As one writer notes, there is a difference between ‘book-knowledge’ or ‘Spirit-knowledge’ of the Lord. We can pray for spiritual guidance, in the committed intention to make as much use as possible of our indwelling Spirit.
This revelation to Wesley, and numerous others, that ‘there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus’ came to St. Paul when he found a new source of moral and spiritual power in his life. He had been unable to free himself from patterns of behaviour that put him at odds with his own conscience. When he encountered Jesus, he found a way out – a sense of freedom. Not the freedom to live however he wanted, but the freedom to live as he ought; the freedom to choose the good.
Wesley found freedom in being able to own up to his faults. He wrote, “Be always ready to own any fault you have been in. If you have at any time thought, spoke, or acted wrong, be not backward to acknowledge it. Never dream that this will hurt the cause of God; no, it will further it. Be ever open and frank when you are taxed with anything. Do not seek either to evade or disguise it. But let it appear just as it is, and you will thereby not hinder, but adorn, the Gospel.”
Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near. Words from Isaiah 55, just before the start of today’s passage. The generosity of God, which gave St. Paul the inspiration to say that there is now no condemnation, speaks through the Isaiah passage as well. The abundance of nature testifies to God’s glory, but something greater awaits – a created and redeemed world.
This happens day by day as God’s purposes are worked out. ‘As the rain and snow come down from heaven, and water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, so shall my word be that goes out of my mouth; it shall not return to me fruitless.” The people who first heard this prophecy would have found it very powerful; they were arable people who constantly lived between the extremes of fertility and famine. Isaiah promises that the cypress would replace the thorn, and that the myrtle would replace the brier. But the message is also a call to obedience and faithfulness; these will always yield a reward of plenty.
God chooses to involve us in his mission, he knows what we are like, and is there in charge. He says ‘the word that goes forth from my mouth shall not return to me empty, but shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the task for which I sent it.’ Sometimes it is hard to believe that, and we long to take over from God – to bend him to our purposes. We are sure that we know best. We are unlike the Sower in today’s gospel reading: the parable we all know so well. There the Sower flings the seed about without looking where it is going to land. We would make sure that the seed got only to people like us, that we know can be trusted with it. How different our careful and well-managed strategies are from God’s wild randomness. So when St. Paul says, ‘there is now no condemnation…’, we need to hear it as much as anyone else.
After all, people who don’t care about the law at all are not the ones who fear breaking it inadvertently. It is those like us, very law-abiding, who need freedom. Both sets of people need forgiveness, but Jesus’ ministry showed, over and over again, that it is those who are trying to be righteous who find it hardest to accept forgiveness. Perhaps this is what Paul means when he says that ‘the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God.’ He doesn’t say that such minds have to be saying or doing evil, but simply that they are, in themselves, hostile to God. They cannot stand the generosity of the Spirit.
Somebody once said that it is not that Christianity has been tried and found wanting, but that it has been tried and found difficult, and that is partly because it involves accepting a gift which has not been earned, at least not by us. But there is comfort for us. Jesus knows we all have different strengths and weaknesses. So if one person seems to yield a hundred times in Christ’s service, but another only thirty, we leave that situation in his hands, believing that he will fruitfully make use of the gifts each person has, if they will open themselves to the possibilities of the Spirit working within them. And we remember, “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”