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Faithfulness (Matthew 24.1-14)
sermon by Teresa
Morgan
Today is the First Sunday of the Kingdom Season, or
alternatively the Fourth Sunday before Advent. In the next four
weeks, we’re doing two things which in some ways are rather
different, and in some ways, rather similar. We’re preparing for
Advent and the coming of Christ into the world. And we’re looking
forward to the second coming of Christ at the end of time.
Today’s gospel imagines the second coming with fierce drama:
the Temple will be destroyed; there will be wars and false prophets,
famines and earthquakes; lawlessness will increase and love will grow
cold. ‘But anyone who endures to the end will be saved.’
I’ve talked about endurance before, because I think it’s an
underrated quality. It has a lot in common with loyalty, and hope and
love. Endurance is what makes people stick with difficult situations,
and difficult people, and not give up. It’s not glamorous. People who
endure to the end don’t tend to be celebrities. But they make all the
difference to the world.
Another name for endurance might be faithfulness. And as we
prepare for Advent, and (some day) for the end of the world, I think
that faithfulness is one of the qualities we need most, which is why
I want to think a bit more about it today.
In the Bible, the first thing we notice about faithfulness is
that it belongs to God. Like justice, mercy, and love, God has it and
gives it to human beings. ‘The steadfast love of the Lord never
ceases,’ says the author of Lamentations; ‘his mercies never come to
an end; they are new every morning; great is his faithfulness.’
In a perfect world, human beings would also be faithful towards
God. In practice, we often aren’t. The only person, according to the
Bible, who has ever been perfectly faithful
is Jesus, and every chapter of the gospels shows how faithful he was:
trusting, loyal, obedient to God in everything he said and did. For
St. Paul, it’s Jesus’s faithfulness to God that frees us from our
sins. (Exactly how that works is another story and I’m not going into
it now…) ‘[W]e know,’ Paul says in his letter to the Galatians, ‘that
a person is made righteous not by the workings of the Law but through
the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. And we have come to trust in Christ
Jesus, so that we may be made righteous by the faithfulness of
Christ…’
Both the gospels and Paul also encourage us to follow Jesus and
to become as much like him as possible, which includes being faithful
to God. And not only to God, but also to each other. Faithfulness is
one of the fruits of the Spirit which we should share with one
another in Galatians Chapter 5. And the author of Revelation says
that faithfulness is something every good Christian community has.
So faithfulness belongs to God, and God gives it to human
beings so that we can give it back to God and to one another. If that
pattern sounds familiar, it is: it is exactly the way the New
Testament describes love flowing around the world. God is love, says
the First Epistle of John; God loves the world and sends his Son to
save it; Jesus Christ loves God and we are invited to follow him by
loving God and Christ and one another.
We are used to the idea that love flows around the world in
that way, but we don’t often think of faithfulness doing the same.
But it does.
You may be wondering by now how faithfulness relates to faith,
which we talk about rather more often. The answer is that they are
both translations of the same Greek word, pistis.
pistis is an interesting word: it also
means ‘trust’, ‘trustworthiness’, ‘belief’, a ‘covenant’, and a few
other things. It can have overtones of confidence and hope, and of
devotion and obedience. It can also carry a hint of fear or doubt.
When we meet pistis in the Bible, it
usually means a bit of all those things. For instance, think of the
story of the woman with a haemorrhage. She comes up behind Jesus in a
crowd, saying, ‘If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.’ And
Jesus, turning and seeing her, says, ‘Take heart, daughter; your
faith (pistis) has made you well.’
When we think about the woman’s faith, we can see that it has
several dimensions. She trusts Jesus to make her well; she believes
that he can make her well. She hopes he can make her well, and she
has confidence in him. Perhaps she feels just a tremor of fear too,
when she creeps up behind him – and even a hint of doubt, or why does
Jesus tell her to take heart? And she is faithful, because she has
endured her suffering for years, without losing hope or trust in God.
All those things are part of her faith.
In a parable towards the end of Matthew’s gospel, we meet a
faithful slave, who is put in charge of his master’s house to await
the Master’s return. For him, being faithful means being loyal,
obedient, trustworthy. On a rather different note, when the disciples
worry about their life, or are afraid when a storm rocks their boat,
Jesus tells them off as people of little faith – because they don’t
have enough trust and confidence in him.
So being faithful means having faith. It means trusting in God,
and Christ, and each other. It means being loyal and trustworthy and
obedient. It means believing in God and each other, with hope and
confidence. It means enduring to the end. And if our faithfulness is
not perfect but suffers a bit from fear or doubt, that’s only human, and God understands.
There is one more thing I’d like to mention about faithfulness.
In the New Testament, God is sometimes described as our Father,
sometimes as our Master, and sometimes as our King. There are very
few words in Greek that fit three such different relationships, but
faithfulness is one of them. We can be faithful to God our Father
like children; we can be faithful to God our Master like slaves; and
we can be faithful to God our King like citizens of heaven.
By the same token, we can be faithful to each other like
brothers and sisters. We can be faithful to each other like fellow
slaves serving the same Master. And we can be faithful to each other
like fellow citizens of a heavenly city.
And I think that is quite a helpful way of thinking about our
relationships in a Church and in the wider world. God is asking us to
be like family, loving and strong and close. He’s asking us to be
like slaves, focused on our shared purpose of serving God. And he’s
asking us to be like fellow-citizens, respectful of one another and
just in our dealings with each other. All those things are part of
faithfulness.
‘The time is fulfilled,’ said Jesus, ‘the Kingdom of God is at
hand, repent and have faith in the good news.’ We don’t know when the
Kingdom will come. We only know that it won’t come easily. We shall
need all our faithfulness, to God and to each other, to keep us
strong: trusting and trustworthy – hopeful and obedient – loving and
just and focused on the Kingdom.
And the one who is faithful to the end will be saved.
Amen
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