Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 4 a – Mt 10. 24-39

The teaching before today’s gospel passage is about the urgency and the difficulty of the disciples’ mission. It says people’s spiritual well-being depends upon their receiving the Kingdom; that the disciples are to expect persecution and hardship as they proclaim that Kingdom; and that some families will disintegrate where one member accepts and another rejects what they preach. This will not be easy to bear: the disciples will honestly wonder if what they are doing is utterly misguided. They’ll be accused of serving the king of demons, like Jesus was 9.³⁴; 12.²⁴.

The collection of Jesus’ missionary teachings we call the Mission Discourse was probably recorded to speak to a community struggling with all these consequences of their missionary work. Family breakdown, ostracism from the wider community, accusations of how misguided they were – a downright evil sect at worst. These are hard to face. The religious and civil authorities were united in their persecution of what they saw as troublesome little sects. They weren’t above pressure exercised via the believer’s family if the result would be the speedier extinction of the group.

So while we might think some of the pronouncements in this passage are rather hard to imagine ever having crossed the lips of gentle Jesus, we have to recognise them as the sayings the community remembered when they were facing a time of extreme stress. Apostasy – renouncing your faith altogether – was doubtless an option that many considered, and more than a few might have taken. It would devastate the morale of a persecuted little community. These were sayings recalled and recorded to galvanise their courage; sayings to help them remember what Jesus himself had gone through to bring them the message of the Kingdom. As his disciples, they had to follow his example. So they reminded themselves: ²⁴ A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master; ²⁵ it’s enough for the disciple to be like the teacher, and the slave like the master. If they’ve called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household!

There are two levels at which you can live your life. You can either live an expedient, safe existence; not rock the boat and be left in peace to make your way. Or you can live a life open to a higher authority than the culture which seeks to assert its authority over you. You can choose to question and, if necessary, reject the standards of your society. This often means a life of confrontation and danger both for you and your loved ones. You do it because you believe in the rightness of your convictions, and the ultimate destructiveness of the alternative.

If you do end up dying under a jackboot, at least you’ll have decided who it was that died. The easy way out might be just that; the way out of a life lived truly. What do you most fear? Do you fear disease or pain for yourself or for your loved ones? Do you fear an early death? …failure or shame? … loneliness or rejection? Jesus confronts fear head on. ²⁶ … have no fear of them; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. ²⁷ What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. ²⁸ Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

Jesus challenges us to imagine; what if the person who ended up in your grave wasn’t really you? What if it was someone who might have been you if you’d stuck to your principles – if you’d made decisions to be proud of?’ What if? No-one else would know of the swap. But that’s part of the problem, really, isn’t it? If you’d lived a compromised life, it would mean your life had been a lie; anyone who thought they knew you really only knew a mask.

For Jesus’ disciples to have betrayed the discovery they’d made about him – to have gone silent on it – would’ve been to go to just such a false grave. ³² Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; ³³ but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven. So discipleship is about now; not just the hereafter.

Not to have told the world that in this Jesus, they’d met their loving maker and experienced the certainty of God’s love and acceptance of them – this would have been to deny their very selves. Not only that, it would have denied everyone else the chance to know the freedom that belonging to Jesus means. The world had waited centuries for this. To know it and not proclaim it would have been obscene. If they’d clammed up, we wouldn’t be here. So what do we do? How do I exhort us to become a parish of evangelists, street preachers and healers?

Of course prayer is central. But actually doing it? I suggest we start with each of us learning by heart some of the parables of Jesus – his stories of the Kingdom – and finding opportunities to tell them to people. When we can’t think of words to say about a complex ethical or spiritual matter, we should puzzle over a parable. You have no idea how the parable of the labourers in the vineyard goes down at a dinner party! It’ll certainly change the way people think about you, but … ³⁹ Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. Amen