Third Sunday before Lent
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Readings: 1 Corinthians 15: 12-20 and Luke 6: 17-26
“If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”
That verse, of course, comes from 1 Corinthians chapter 15, which we started last week and continued this morning. It’s a great chapter about the nature of the resurrection, and I can recall preaching on that particular text on Easter Days in the past. In the few verses we heard this morning Paul emphasizes how crucial the resurrection is to Christian belief. If Christ has not been raised, then, he says, our proclamation has been in vain and our faith has been in vain.
Now we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves, as we haven’t reached Lent yet, let alone Easter. One normally preaches about 1 Corinthians 15 in the joyfulness of Eastertide. We know the story. Jesus came, healing, preaching, teaching and ‘went about among us’. His ministry caused opposition and infuriated the authorities. He was eventually arrested, handed-over, tried and crucified. The glory of the resurrection followed; a demonstration of God’s awesome power and might, and a vindication of the life of Jesus. That’s the bare bones of it.
Now we only have one side of the correspondence between Paul and the Corinthian church. It seems there had been lively debate between some of them and Paul. That should come as no surprise; after all, the very idea of resurrection is so mind-blowing that it is sure to raise big questions. It may come as a relief to find the first Christians asking awkward questions about what they believed. I’ve always thought that Christian faith is an enquiring faith, and that it is a healthy Church that lives honestly with its questions. Traditional Jewish belief was of a general resurrection at the end of time. But Paul is emphatic that through the resurrection of Jesus, new life and forgiveness is breaking in now. It is no longer a distant hope.
For Paul, the resurrection is central to the Christian message and its impact crucial on our lives. He was adamant about the bodily resurrection of Jesus. It is likely that the Christians in Corinth – steeped in Greek thought, believed in Jesus’ resurrection as just of the spirit, with the body left firmly behind. This is what is known as dualism, and Paul didn’t go along with it. Earlier in chapter 15 he mentions those who had actually seen Jesus after the first Easter Day. For him, the resurrection is not an ‘additional extra’ which can be debated, because the power that raised Jesus from the dead is the power that offers us redemption, and the power that made us in the first place.
Jesus has the power over life and death, and eternal life is in his gift. It’s only with this in mind that these paradoxical sayings we know as the Beatitudes, which we heard in the gospel, make sense. These sayings of Jesus, all beginning ‘Blessed are …’ can be found in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. In Matthew they form part of Jesus’ ‘Sermon on the Mount’. But in Luke they’ve become known as the ‘Sermon on the Plain’, as we read that Jesus had come down from a mountain with his disciples and stood on a level place. But whether you read the Beatitudes in Matthew or Luke, they are, as William Barclay comments, ‘a series of bombshells.’ He says, “It may well be that we have read them so often that we have forgotten how revolutionary they are.” The people whom Jesus called happy the world would call wretched; and the people Jesus called wretched the world would call happy. But what, I wonder, makes for happiness? In this text, Luke uses the Greek word, makarios, for happy or blessed. Makarios in Greek often means inner happiness.
A couple of weeks ago I went to see A Man for All Seasons at the Malvern Theatre; I know some of you saw it as well. It is the story of Sir Thomas More, Chancellor of Henry VIII, who refused to go along with the King’s desire to break with the Church in Rome so that he could divorce his second wife Catherine of Aragon. It grieved Henry that he could not persuade Thomas More to agree with him, and during the play various people, urge Thomas to make some accommodation of his beliefs, please them, and the King, of course, and save his head. But Thomas didn’t, and, of course, was eventually executed. But what came over, especially in the later stages of the play, was the peace Thomas More had with himself, and so with God. He knew he could not go against his conscience and live with himself afterwards. He went to the scaffold not just resignedly but contentedly, maintaining his integrity and dignity, and speaking kindly to the executioner. Maybe he had verses 22 and 23 of today’s gospel in mind, “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, and revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man; Rejoice in that day.”
One of the differences between the Beatitudes as recorded by Matthew and Luke is that Luke includes many ‘woes’ in addition to blessings. ‘Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation…Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry…Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep….Woe to you when all speak well of you.’ These reversals of fortune reinforce the topsy-turvy nature of what Jesus is saying. But it is important to define in what sense blessedness is ascribed to the poor and woe to the rich. In all these sayings, Jesus is advocating a God-orientated existence for each one of us. Our identity is to be defined not by our present but by our future, and in relationship with Jesus that future is blessed indeed.
What Jesus is saying is this, “If you set your heart and bend your whole energies to obtain the things which the world values, you will get them – but that is all you will ever get. But if on the other hand you set your heart and bend all your energies to be utterly loyal to God and true to Christ, you will run into all kinds of trouble; you may by the world’s standards look unhappy, but much of your payment is still to come; and it will be joy eternal.”
As somebody has written, “Jesus promised his disciples three things – that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.” I think Sir Thomas More would have understood that. G.K. Chesterton, whose principles got him into trouble, once said, “I like getting into hot water. It keeps you clean!” It is Jesus’ teaching that the joy of heaven will amply compensate for the troubles of the earth.
Putting our trust in the values and standards of this world rather takes us back to the sentence from the Corinthians passage with which this address began, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” So, reading through the Beatitudes, and maybe particularly the ‘woes’ at the end, we might be challenged to ask, “Have we missed the point?”
Will we be happy in the world’s way, or in Christ’s way? And given that God is going to create a new world and give us a newly-embodied existence in the future, what sort of life is appropriate in the present?