Sunday 16th July, 2023

No Con­dem­na­tion

Ser­mon preached at Enmore, Sixth Sunday after Pente­cost, July 16, 2023

Read­ings: Romans 8.1–11; Mat­thew 13: 1–9, 18–23

 

Chapter 8 of Romans which is our epistle for today, is one of the high points in this most stud­ied let­ter of the Apostle Paul. In the pre­vi­ous sev­en chapters Paul has been arguing that all people, wheth­er Jew or Gen­tile, slave or free, have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. In oth­er words, all are guilty of break­ing God’s laws and are in bond­age to sin and death. He has also declared that right­eous­ness is only avail­able, not through adher­ence to the law but by faith in Jesus Christ. We are jus­ti­fied – made right with God- by grace as a gift, through the redemp­tion that is in Christ Jesus and his aton­ing sac­ri­fice on the cross.

After Paul’s descrip­tion of the human con­di­tion being one of almost con­stant fail­ure to live in a way pleas­ing to God, we finally get good news in ch.8. It begins with Paul’s bold and wel­come state­ment that “there is now no con­dem­na­tion for those who are in Christ Jesus.” It’s a state­ment that we should treas­ure and reflect on. Many people live with guilt over past sins and fail­ures and believe they can nev­er be worthy in God’s sight, but this verse addresses that bur­den. Paul goes on to remind the read­er of what God has done for us in Christ and describes how this makes pos­sible a whole new way of liv­ing. There are two great themes evid­ent in this pas­sage: ‘the spir­it of life’ and being ‘in Christ Jesus’. The word ‘spir­it’ (pneuma) occurs only five times in chapters 1–7, eight times in chs.9–11 but some twenty times in ch.8. Paul argues that there are two kinds of human beings: those who are filled with the spir­it of life in Christ Jesus and those who live ‘accord­ing to the flesh.’ In his words: “Those who accord­ing to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh but those who live accord­ing to the Spir­it set their minds on the things of the spir­it.” What does Paul mean by ‘flesh’ and ‘spir­it’ here?

Paul uses two words to refer to our bod­ies, the word ‘flesh’ (sarks) and the word ‘body’ (soma). For Paul, the body is neither good nor bad in itself. The ques­tion is, how is the body used? When our bod­ies are used as God inten­ded, the body is good but when our bod­ies are used to do what is wrong or harm­ful to oth­ers it is for Paul a sin­ful body. Paul’s short­hand expres­sion for a body being used improp­erly is the term ‘flesh.’ He also talks about God send­ing Jesus ‘in the like­ness of sin­ful flesh’, to deal with sin and to con­demn sin in the flesh. Jesus was a full human being with a real body, but he did not mis­use his body by sin­ning so by Paul’s defin­i­tion he was nev­er ‘flesh.’ Thus, he was ‘only in the like­ness of sin­ful flesh’ and there­fore able to over­come evil and con­demn sin itself.

So, because of what Christ has done for us, Paul can reas­sure his read­ers that they are not in the flesh but rather they are in the spir­it, since the Spir­it of God now lives in them. To be ‘in Christ’ using Paul’s words from the first verse means that we have the Spir­it of Jesus liv­ing in us. The most com­mon descrip­tion in the New Test­a­ment of a fol­low­er of Jesus is that she or he is a per­son ‘in Christ.’ The expres­sions, ‘in Christ’, ‘in the Lord’ and ‘in him’ occur 164 times in the let­ters of Paul alone. In con­trast, the word, ‘Chris­ti­an’ only appears three times in the entire Bible. What marks out the true fol­low­er of Jesus, is not their creed, or their code of eth­ics, or their style of wor­ship, but their rela­tion­ship with Christ. ‘In Christ’ is Paul’s way of describ­ing the new order into which women and men are intro­duced by faith in Christ. Chris­ti­an bap­tism is a bap­tism into Christ. Faith means being ‘in Christ Jesus’. It is not simply put­ting faith in Christ; it is being in Christ. This has a col­lect­ive as well as an indi­vidu­al implic­a­tion. It means being related to Christ per­son­ally but also related to the com­munity Jesus came to build.

Bish­op Steph­en Neil put it like this: “In the fel­low­ship of those who are bound togeth­er by per­son­al loy­alty to Jesus Christ, the rela­tion­ship of love reaches an intim­acy and intens­ity unknown else­where. Friend­ship between the friends of Jesus of Naz­areth is unlike any oth­er friend­ship and this ought to be the nor­mal exper­i­ence with­in the Church.”  Chris­tian­ity is Christ. Without the per­son of Jesus Christ, we have noth­ing to offer the world.

In 2013 my fath­er died, and the fam­ily decided to mark the place where his ashes were bur­ied with a small plaque. We asked my moth­er what she wanted inscribed on the plaque under his name. She asked for just two words: ‘In Christ’, any­thing else seemed superfluous.

We move from today’s epistle to a brief reflec­tion on the Gos­pel read­ing from Mat­thew ch.13. Mat­thew is a very sys­tem­at­ic writer who divides the teach­ing of Jesus, as dis­tinct from his actions into five major sec­tions. Chapter 13 is the third of these sec­tions and con­tains the par­ables of the King­dom. The first of these par­ables is one of the best known and is usu­ally referred to as the par­able of the sower. How­ever, some have sug­ges­ted that a more accur­ate descrip­tion is the par­able of the soils. Over the cen­tur­ies Chris­ti­ans have pondered one of the mys­ter­ies of the gos­pel: why some people hear and eagerly respond, and oth­ers hear but remain indif­fer­ent or hos­tile. We might ask ourselves, what motiv­ated us to come to church today when so many of our friends or fam­ily mem­bers would nev­er con­sider it. What explains the vari­ous responses? Some Chris­ti­ans fol­low­ing lead­ers like John Calv­in have argued that God chooses some people to be recept­ive and oth­ers to be deaf to the mes­sage. I sus­pect that many of us are very uncom­fort­able with that teach­ing. Oth­ers argue that human beings are totally respons­ible for their own ‘hear­ing’ and response. The par­able of the sower addresses the fact of the var­ied responses to the gos­pel but like many of the par­ables it raises more ques­tions than answers.

The great Eng­lish schol­ar of the last cen­tury, C.H. Dodd gave a clas­sic descrip­tion of a par­able when he said: “At its simplest the par­able is a meta­phor or simile drawn from nature or com­mon life, arrest­ing the hear­er by its vivid­ness or strange­ness and leav­ing the mind in suf­fi­cient doubt about its pre­cise applic­a­tion to tease it into act­ive thought.”

In the par­able of the sower, a farm­er sows some seed which falls in a vari­ety of places. We may think this odd but in ancient farm­ing prac­tice the seed was sown and then the soil was tilled. The seed that fell on the path where there was no soil was quickly eaten by birds, the seed fall­ing on rocky ground didn’t sur­vive for long because the soil was not deep enough; the seed that fell among thorns was soon chocked by them and died but the seed that fell into good soil brought grain in abund­ance. On this occa­sion Jesus gave an explan­a­tion of the par­able, more often the dis­ciples were left puzz­ling it out for themselves.

Jesus explained that the seed in his par­able rep­res­en­ted the gos­pel, the good news of the king­dom. The four kinds of soil illus­trated the four kinds of response to the good news. Some hear­ers don’t under­stand the mes­sage and for­get about it; some respond gladly at first but soon give up when trouble and per­se­cu­tion arise; some receive the word hap­pily but later decide that wealth and worldly pur­suits are more attract­ive and finally some take hold of the mes­sage, refuse to give it up, come what may and determ­ine to live by it. One of the ques­tions the par­able raises is: “Why does the good soil pro­duce dif­fer­ent res­ults-one hun­dred-fold, sixty-fold and thirty-fold?” And what does being fruit­ful actu­ally mean for the fol­low­er of Jesus? Some have sug­ges­ted that it can be meas­ured numer­ic­ally by how many con­verts has the dis­ciple made. I find no evid­ence for that in the Scrip­tures and in fact believe there is good evid­ence against such a view. Paul, for example, nev­er makes any ref­er­ence to the num­ber of con­verts he has made and regards con­ver­sion as a work of God alone. What Paul does do is to com­ment on the vari­ety of gifts with­in the Chris­ti­an com­munity and this may be near­er to what Jesus is teach­ing in his par­able. Fol­low­ers of Jesus come in all shapes and sizes and with a vari­ety of gifts and abil­it­ies and all are equally val­ued. We are called to be faith­ful not neces­sar­ily successful.

The Par­able of the Sower encour­ages us to faith­ful­ness in the face of oppos­i­tion, hos­til­ity, and mis­un­der­stand­ing. Jesus’ par­ables of the king­dom remind us that the King­dom he spoke about is not ‘up there’ but our world of time and space — and we have the priv­ilege of being Christ’s fel­low work­ers, des­pite our frailty and weak­ness. But we also have the assur­ance that because we are ‘in Him’ there is now no condemnation.

Philip Brad­ford