Sermon at St Mary’s, 27th August 2000
Ephesians 6: 10-20
John 6: 56-69
“Be strong in the Lord, put on the whole armour of God, stand against the wiles of the devil, take up, stand firm, fasten, put on, proclaim, persevere, keep alert, pray at all times, made the Gospel known with boldness.” I don't know about you, but the list of things in that reading makes me feel tired. Very tired.
As
those who follow Jesus, there is a lot we are called to do, and Paul reminds us
that what we are engaged in is serious business-it's about life and death, good
and evil, the kingdom of God coming on earth.
But the crucial thing to remember this morning is that following Jesus
is not primarily about anything we do.
If it were, we couldn't begin.
If last week's temptation was to think that following Christ is about
making him fit our agendas and requirements, then this week's temptation is to
think that we are responsible for the depth of our relationship with God.
In
John 6:44 Jesus makes this extraordinary statement: "No one can come to me
unless drawn by the Father who sends me."
So, he seems to be saying, without God we cannot know God. God initiates everything. Our salvation, our knowing him, our
understanding that we belong to him. He
says it again and again. Listen to
these verses from chapter 6 verse 37: "Everything that the father gives me
will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away."
Verse 39: "And this is the will of
him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but
raise it up on the last day."
Verse 44: "No one can come to me unless drawn by the father who
sent me"; 63: "It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is
useless." The flesh in this sense
means human energy. Our energy is
useless. We cannot grasp life. 65: "For this reason I have told you
that no one can come to me unless this is granted by the father."
Do
you find this difficult to believe?
Well you are not the only one.
Verse 66: "Because of this
many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him." It says they found this difficult-not
difficult to understand, but difficult to accept.
But
what was Jesus getting at here? Well he
certainly wasn't proposing the rather distasteful idea that God arbitrarily
takes some people to draw to himself and leaves others to stew, that he has
some favourites which he chooses. That
would just be going against the whole of the picture we get of God in the
Bible. Nor was he saying that human
responsibility is unimportant. Time and
time again Jesus says "Come to me, repent, follow." Our response is of course necessary.
No,
when Jesus was saying "No one can come to me unless the father draws
him" he was simply saying this: that we are completely dependent on the
love of God to draw us like a magnet to himself. There is no means, no method, no trick by which we can earn God's
favour through our own devices. The
initiative for any grace we receive, any forgiveness, any salvation, any hope
exists only in the vastness of the father's love for us. Francis Thompson writes in his poem of how
we more often flee from God than towards him.
I fled Him, down the
nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the
arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the
labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in
the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under
running laughter.
And he describes how
after a lifetime of hiding from God he was finally won over by a voice which
said: "Rise, clasp My hand, and come
!"
If
the love and and purity that we possess is a marble in our hand, then
the love of God is the burning sun which not only holds all our love in its
light, but draws us towards it with its gravitational pull. The nature of God's love is one which attracts,
it woos us, it searches for us. We are
God's romance. We are his beloved, his
delight. Once we can begin to grasp
this then it makes perfect sense that of course human energy is useless, that
only God can draw us to himself.
Without
the love of God we could not begin to get up in the morning, let alone be drawn
to Jesus Christ. And the importance of
this for us in that it calls us to humility.
To recognise that by ourselves we do not have the purity of heart or
even the inclination to come to God.
Thomas Merton said, "We cannot find him unless we know we need
him." Our hearts are hardened, we
often prefer hunger. Paul writes in Romans that "There is none that seeks after
God." that "While we were
still sinners Christ died for us, that "Jesus came into the world to
save sinners", and that "...salvation belongs to our God
who is seated on the throne." Paul
himself was a man of fervent prayer, faith, zeal, activity, the man that wrote
all those exhausting things we heard at the beginning. And yet in 59 AD he wrote "I am the
least of the Apostles." In 63 AD
he wrote "I am the very least of all the Saints." And in 64 AD he wrote "I am the
foremost of sinners." He went down
and down! He knew even as he praised
God and worked for his kingdom the humility of realising that everything came
from God, and nothing from himself.
We
don't need to lambast ourselves and concentrate on how bad we are. We just need to know that God's love is deeper,
taller, wider, stronger, more eternal than anything we can bring. We might prefer to think that we were
responsible for being “good Christians” in some ways. It is easier to keep a respectable religious life going than to
come face to face with the love of God.
But, as William Temple said, "Humility
does not mean thinking less of yourself than of other people, nor does it mean
having a low opinion of your own gifts. It means freedom from thinking about
yourself one way or the other at all."
My
own experience of coming to faith, and I had a specific conversion when I was
thirteen, was that there was a sense of being impelled by God towards him. It wasn't me standing back and taking a good
look and then deciding that I'd made an impartial decision. It was as if I eventually had no
choice. God wore me down, he drew me to
himself with his love and acceptance.
So our attitude needs to be one that makes us fall on our knees and to
allow ourselves to be wooed by this love.
"Lord give me a desire to love you. Lord, I believe, help my unbelief." To say with Nancy Mairs when we come to the
table, "I don't partake because I'm a good Catholic, wholly and honest and
sleek. I partake because I'm a bad
Catholic, riddled by doubt and anxiety and anger: fainting from severe
hypoglycaemia of the soul.”
It
is Christ who will raise us up, not the initiative of our own goodness. Our confidence is in the strength of his
arm, not our own. "No one can come
to me unless the father draws him."
The father draws us to himself.
Thank goodness. It is not about
our own ability, or even our love-ability.
All we have to know and say is this: "To whom else can we go? You have the words of eternal life."
For the prayers:
Love bade me
welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack,
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lack'd anything.
A guest, I
answer'd, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I
have marr'd them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and tast my meat:
So I did sit and eat.