26th Sunday

26th Sunday

He became obedient to his own humanity

Ezek. 18.25-28; Phil. 2.1-11; Mt. 21.28-32

The 3 readings today form a kind of ensemble revealing the whole story of the human situation as it was seen by the Jews and by us Christians. A prominent element here is sin, the nature of sin, and what to do about it. But we have to be really careful because there are all sorts of ideas about what sin is today. Bad hair can be a sin. Or bankruptcy. All sorts of catastrophes. Cancer of the spleen can be seen as evil. But in the biblical sense, they're not.

So, what does constitute sin? What is real evil? Well, if we take a cue from Matthew's gospel, he was able to reduce it to one word when he presented the picture of Jesus. That word was hypocrisy. In the Hebrew Bible out, of which Matthew came was idolatry was the central sin: i.e. to make some human artefact into what I worship. Like my bank account. My academic degrees. Jesus takes this further: he says that these people who say they worship one thing really worship something else of their own devising in the way they run their lives...they are sinful. Hypocritical and idolatrous. That's why he could say that the prostitutes and these tax collectors are making it into the Kingdom of God before these "good", "pious" people are. You'll find in the gospel of Matthew, Jesus embroiled in arguments with some of his fellow Jews. And the absolute criticism he makes is to call them hypocrites. Brood of vipers. To say one thing and to do something else is the problem.

So, we can then look at this passage from the Philippians to see how this played out in Jesus' life. What did he do living in a world in which hypocrisy is normal? (Everybody is - for all kinds of reasons. What other people think about us? The impression we want to make on other people. There are all sorts of grounds for hypocrisy.) We have this extraordinary hymn which Paul used. So I thought it would be useful to see how this hymn deals with Jesus' response to living in a world which is marked by dishonesty and hypocrisy.

The hymn starts out by saying that Jesus, as all human beings, was in the form of God. (Remember that Genesis text... "Let us make human beings, male and female, in our image.") So Jesus, being a human being was made in the form of God. Note that the hymn doesn't have anything to do with Jesus as divine. It is simply looking at Jesus as a human being. But now, remember Adam's great temptation. Just do this thing and you'll magically become divine. You won't have to be human anymore. You won't have to depend on anybody. You won't have to wait for anything. You can have everything instantaneously. You will be as God. And we all have had that temptation.

Who does not want to simplify, expedite, life in that fashion? Who doesn't want to be able to basically tell everybody else to "buzz off" and leave me alone so that I can cut my own swath through the world. Well, Jesus had that temptation as do all human beings. But he did not take his God-imaged-ness and take advantage of that.

But what did he do then? He emptied himself and took the form of a slave. What does that mean? If you know Paul, he regularly talks of us human beings as slaves to sin. What does that mean? That we live in a world in which the hypocrisy, the dishonesty, the cowardice of everybody else, constitutes a powerful force, which impinges on us and ends up determining our behaviour. Very simple question to ask yourself to check this out. How much of my life is really lived on the basis of fear of other people or of what they can do to me?

Well, that's exactly what Paul says is the power of sin in this world. And so Jesus lived in that kind of world. Taking the form of a slave born in human likeness. But then it says he humbled himself and became obedient. What's going on there? Most of us, living in a world in which we are afraid of everybody else and don't trust many people, and nobody consistently, of course. We respond by defending ourselves in a variety of ways, usually by violence. Or by hypocrisy or some form of cowardice, dishonesty. The emptying and obedience that we're talking about here is that Jesus continued to be obedient, faithful to his own God created humanity. And so he would not let himself and his life be determined by evil. But simply resisted it.

How? By telling the truth all the time. By not being driven by fear. Or cowardice. Or hypocrisy. But that's very dangerous. Jesus humbled himself, became obedient to his own humanity and thereby to God and to other people. Faithful may be a better word than obedient here. Of course that got him into fatal difficulties because the world cannot run with such people on the loose. They make us feel bad about ourselves for one thing. And we know that business cannot continue as usual, whether in academia, or the business world or in families or anywhere else, when someone will tell the truth all the time.

So Jesus needed to be destroyed. And that's exactly what happened. He became obedient to his own humanity to the point of death - even death on a cross. He resisted the pressure of evil even to the point of dying. And therefore God exalted him. Because God saw that here was a human being who lived out the fullness of his reality. Who did not lie. Who was not hypocritical. Who was not driven by his own fear. Or self-promotion. In other words, God finally had a human being who worked, who did what God intended human beings to do when he made them in the first place. And that's why God was so pleased with Jesus and exalted him and gave him a name above every name, "so that at the name of Jesus every knee would bend on heaven and earth and under the earth." And that's what the lordship of Jesus consists in, according to this hymn.

So, it is within this context that we can understand how the prostitutes and the tax collectors were somehow more clear sighted about what was real and what was important and what was truly human. As opposed to religious people who thought they had it nailed down already and therefore could hold everybody else who wasn't as they were, in contempt. That is what happened. Which is what we typically do. I mean, if we look at the history of the Church - is the Church free of hypocrisy? Is it primarily the place where we feel safe in our sinfulness? Any of the churches? Or have the churches created their own kind of sick environment where we have to hide from each other? Where it's not safe to be who we really are with each other?

So, we have this very mixed situation where the prostitutes and the tax collectors are going to make it ahead of us nice people. The problem is, of course, that we anticipate too quickly our own perfection. We are too self-satisfied, or to put it in Matthew's terms, we tend to be too hypocritical about who's who, what's what and where's where.

So, that's why we're here this morning. To purify our eyes. To get a kind of astringent in our vision so that we can look, not the way that the Globe & Mail, CFPL or the Bank of Montreal or King's College or anybody else tells us to look. But the way God tells us to look. In other words, what we are doing here is of enormous value. Enormous importance.

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