Gospel text: Luke 6:39-49
OT text: Sirach 24:47
Psalm 92
NT text: 1 Corinthians 15:51-58
Some years ago, my husband & I visited an open home – it was a dilapidated old villa. As we explained to the real estate agent, we weren’t looking to buy; we were neighbours fascinated by the terrible state of the house – it looked just about ready to fall down. The real estate agent said, somewhat resignedly, that we weren’t alone in this, & indeed we saw several of our neighbours, also there for exactly the same reason…
The house wasn’t particularly dirty, or yucky. It had never been trashed. It had just never been “anything”-ed. I think I could say quite safely that not one piece of maintenance, however minor, had been done on it in decades. I’m not being unkind – there was daylight showing through corners, where no daylight should be!
It was a bit of a lesson, to be honest, that simple neglect could lead to such dilapidation…but that’s a sermon for another day…
One neighbour, possibly keen on spiders, decided to venture into the “under floor” space – he wanted to check out the foundations. The rest of us waited outside, away from the spiders, laying pretend-bets about his findings. The consensus was that, provided the house didn’t actually fall down on his head whilst he was under there, he would come back with a pretty dismal report.
The house didn’t fall on his head, and the spiders didn’t eat him up. He emerged back into the sunlit lands with interesting news – the house, terrible as it looked, had good foundations – solidly built and in surprisingly reasonable condition.
None of we neighbours bought the house; but someone else, of course, did. And on the neighbourhood grapevine came the news that they had managed their fix-up job at not too exorbitant a cost, doing some of the work themselves. Our intrepid, spider-non-fearing neighbour nodded his head sagely… “It’s all in the foundations”, he said, sounding wise.
***
There are a couple of ways we can approach the Gospel verses we read this morning.
We can see them as something to strive for. That’s a completely valid approach – try to bear good fruit, try to be humble in our approach with others if we think they’re in the wrong, and so forth.
In fact, that isn’t only valid, it’s important. These things are part of living our best life. Striving to be better than we are isn’t only an important part of being Christian – it’s an important part of being human. It’s part of what makes us what we are – striving in study, in work, in family life.
But striving will never be a complete answer. If it was, we wouldn’t really need God, or God’s grace. The gems of good advice in Scripture would be helpful, but even there, well, we can probably figure a lot of it out for ourselves.
***
So, what is an alternative approach? There are a couple of clues to this in the passage we heard.
The first is that comment, “the student is never beyond the teacher”. Jesus made that assertion in a particular historical context – students, or disciples, chose their teachers precisely because the teacher knew more than they did, and the teacher was more or less their sole source of learning.
These days, things may be a little different, because students have whole libraries available to them, and hand-held devices containing the sum of human knowledge, and often multiple teachers. Even so, most students would freely admit there’s a difference between perhaps knowing the odd fact or two that their teacher may not be aware of, and actually being “above” their teacher.
Why exactly did Jesus drop that point into this bit of his message? Hold that thought…
The second clue is in the final instruction – to build our lives on a strong foundation, which is achieved by acting on Christ’s words, not just coming & hearing them. The thing about this is that if we think about it at all deeply, it quickly becomes apparent that we can’t – it’s far beyond us. (Be perfect as God is perfect; Sell all you have and give the money to the poor; Rejoice when people hate you.)
So, we need something more. Because simply striving to be righteous – to do all those righteous things we know we should do – doesn’t tend to work. It’s a sad fact that our ability to be good is a little limited.
We need grace, and we need love.
The clue to this, as so often in Scripture, is to reach back a little to what has gone just before. Why exactly did Jesus drop that bit about students not being above their teachers into his message?
Because he’s just given a long speech teaching us to love. Indeed, that’s essentially the foundation of the chapter – and indeed of the book – and it’s supposed to be our foundation.
And that’s the absolutely key thing to remember. Christ, above everything else, teaches us to love, and love, by the grace of God, is what changes us and love, by the grace of God, is what builds the foundation we need. A foundation, like that house I visited, strong enough to sustain us through the darker times.
This isn’t love as a sweet, feel-good concept; you’ll be relieved to hear there’s no relation to Married at First Sight. It’s loving when loving is difficult; it’s loving as Christ loves, being merciful as our Prodigal Father is merciful. It’s the “second law, which is like” the first one – even as we love God with everything in us, we love our neighbour as ourselves.
Rightly or wrongly, I’m feeling the need at this stage to point out that love isn’t about allowing people to be abusive – that might look like love on the surface, but it is not love. Moving on, though –
Just as God is, indeed, merciful, this love isn’t something we achieve simply by trying harder – it’s something God helps us with, always, by grace. Because on our own, humans aren’t always very loving…
And as we – by God’s grace, because there is no other way – learn to live Christ’s love (outwardly and inwardly), we become what we’ve heard about this morning.
This is kind of a magical process; but it’s magical in the best sense of that word.
As Jesus says, the good person produces good out of the good treasure of their heart. As that heart focusses more on loving, the treasure becomes more beautiful. It’s a bit like going into a dark room – we don’t chase the darkness out; we turn the light on. Love – love of God and love of each other – is the light that changes our hearts, so that our hearts can then pour out the good treasure – both the words and the actions – that the world needs so badly.
Love, by grace, is the foundation we’re called to build our lives on. Love, by grace, is what brings our lives to bear good fruit. Love, by grace, is what brings us to help our neighbours if they need it and want it – remembering to check our own biases and assumptions first!
The verses we’ve heard today may certainly be heard as an instruction – they’re teaching us how to live. But at least equally, and perhaps far more to the point, they should be read as a description – this is what we will look like – what we will become – as we focus our love on God and each other.
This is the entirely-natural, yet also entirely-miraculous effect of that love.
Juli Meiklejohn