The Gospel -Matthew 16:21-27
Homily by the Rev. Dr. John S. Ruef
A Call to Martyrdom
I remember well in
the first church for which I was responsible talking to one of the ladies in
the congregation about Jesus being a Jew, to which she replied, “Oh no! Jesus
couldn’t have been Jewish. He was the first Christian.” This drastic disconnect
of Christianity from its historical base in first century Judaism is all too
common in the minds of many church people.
But Jesus was a Jew. He thought out of a Jewish background. He knew the Jewish tradition and did not always agree with it. Part of that Jewish background was the notion that God conquered the enemies of His chosen in order for them to possess the Promised Land. The early settlers of this United States transferred that notion to themselves.
Further, the notion that keeping the commandments, which is a very strong motif in Deuteronomy from which our first lesson is taken, has resulted in a kind of wooden literalism in interpreting the Scriptures, which continues to produce serious complications in the life of the Church.
The lesson from Matthew makes it quite clear that Jesus was believed to be a clairvoyant and able to predict the future. But this is not the main point of the story. This comes at the end. This has to do with martyrdom, which, by this time in the Church’s history, was a real possibility.
It has always been this way. The Scripture speaks in vivid terms of one’s fate for not keeping the tradition. But that happens in the judgment at the end of the world. It is only when the state takes over in the considerations of religion that there are enforceable sanctions in this life.
But the idea of God’s defeat of one’s enemies persists even into our own day and age. And woe betides the individual or nation who goes against the tradition, which is His Word.
As we view the present controversies within the Church, it would be well to remember what the tradition keepers did to Jesus in his day. After all, how can you trust someone who says that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath, or worse yet, who says good things about Samaritans?