“As for me and for my
household, we will serve the Lord”
says Joshua. He and the people of Israel have reached the end of a long
journey, the journey from slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land of Canaan. They
had been in Egypt for 400 years, and they had all but forgotten the land, and
the God, of their ancestors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
But God hadn’t forgotten
them. He sent Moses to speak for them. He sent plagues to persuade Pharaoh to
let them go. He sent a strong east wind to part the Red Sea. He sent manna and
quails to feed them on their long trek across the wilderness. And finally,
after 40 long years they made it to their destination. They crossed the River
Jordan under Joshua’s leadership and started to carve out a space for
themselves in this new land.
Perhaps they thought it would
all be plain sailing from now on. Perhaps they thought the challenges were all
over. But Joshua knew that this moment was the most dangerous of all. In the
desert, it was manna or nothing, God’s way or no way. They couldn’t have
survived without his help. But now they were in the land of milk and honey,
with fertile land and abundant crops, and abundant choices too. God had called
them out of Egypt to form a new nation, founded on his Ten Commandments, but would
they follow his ways or not? They could revert to worshiping the gods of Egypt;
these were the gods they were most familiar with, after all. They could assimilate
with the tribes who were already living in Canaan, adopting their Gods and
customs. In an era when people thought of gods as territorial, just like human
chieftains, it made sense to keep the local deities happy. The hardest option would
be to stick with this God of Joshua and Moses who had brought them across the
desert, and live according to the laws he had given them.
The details of some of those
laws can seem very odd and outdated to us, of course – complex food laws or
laws rooted in a very different understanding of gender, family relationships
and sexuality than we hold now. But the
principles that underlie them are still accessible to us. God called on the Israelites to love him and
one another, to care for the poor, to lift up the powerless, to welcome the
stranger. Some commandments are as counter-cultural now as they were then. “Don’t
reap to the edges of your fields,” say the commandments, “so that there
is grain for those who have no land. Let them help themselves to it.” (Leviticus
19.9) I can’t imagine that going down too well with today’s food producers – it
hardly sounds like efficiency. “Every fifty years return any land you have
bought to its original owners. Land isn’t yours to buy or sell or own anyway;
it all belongs to God.” (Leviticus 25) Imagine how that would go down with
those whose wealth comes from inherited property.
Whatever we think of
individual commandments today, the emphasis of the law as a whole was that what
we do matters. If each of us lives well, day by day, we will have communities
and nations that are good to live in too. We shape our world by the way we
live.
So Joshua and the
Israelites had choices to make. And each one of them had to make their own
decisions. Joshua knew what he was going to do. “As for me and my household,
we will serve the Lord.” He was going to stick with the one who had
rescued, fed and guided them across the desert, who had kept them alive through
their long years of wandering.
In the Gospel reading, Simon
Peter is presented with the same sort of choice. The passage we heard is the
end of the discussion that followed the miracle of the feeding of the 5000. It
was fine when Jesus was handing out free bread and fishes. Then everyone wanted
to be his friend. But that was just a meal for a day. What he really wanted was
to give people food that would feed them for life, and that meant feeding on
him, following him, letting their lives be shaped by him – we are what we eat. Suddenly
it all began too sound a bit too much like serious commitment, and the crowds
began to evaporate. Jesus looked around at his closest followers. “What
about you? Will you go too?” But Peter had already made his choice. “Who
else can we go to? You have the words of eternal life.” He didn’t have to follow Jesus, but it
clearly made no sense to him not to. Not that it was always going to be easy;
Peter doesn’t say that Jesus has the words of eternal happiness. But he knew
that Jesus had brought him to life, with a life that he had never found before,
a life that somehow shimmered with the
glory of God - eternal life.
Eternal life in the Bible
isn’t just, or even mainly, about getting into heaven when we die. It is
something that starts here and now. It is about quality and depth and meaning
and it seems to me that it is something we all long for. It is about
discovering that we matter to God, that we aren’t just numbers, cogs in the
wheels of the universe, disposable collections of atoms, but people who are unique
and beloved and called to love in return.
This was what Peter had found in Jesus, and he wasn’t going to give it
up just because the crowds have abandoned him. Later on there would be one
occasion when he turned away from Christ, when Jesus was arrested and tried. Peter
denied even knowing him then. But as soon as he had done it he realised it was
the worst mistake of his life, and wept bitterly. And after the resurrection
nothing – not even his own suffering and persecution – deflected him from his
allegiance to Jesus. Like Joshua, Peter
had made his choice.
We live in a society that is
full of choices; choices in the supermarkets, choices between schools and
hospitals and jobs. In reality, of course, many of those choices are only open
to you if you have enough money, but for those who can choose, those multiple
options can become as much of a burden as a gift. How do you know you are
choosing the right thing? Would that other brand of coffee, that other school
or hospital, that other job be better?
If those choices feel tough,
it is even harder when it comes to choosing a way of life, a pattern for
living. Fewer and fewer people want to tick a box on a census form that
identifies them as following a particular faith, but for most the “atheist” box
isn’t the option they want either. My experience is that the vast majority of
people put themselves in the “spiritual but not religious” category. They are
open to the possibility that there are dimensions to life that can’t be grasped
entirely by the mind, and they are looking for meaning, but they don’t want to
commit themselves to one specific way of exploring what that might mean for
them. Perhaps they fear it will cut off other avenues. Perhaps they are afraid
of the impact the decision might have on their lives. Perhaps they are afraid
that others will just think they are odd.
I can understand those fears.
Organised religion has a bad name, and it is partially justified. It has been
and can still be used as a tool to oppress and harm. But the fact is that all
of us, whether we like it or not, find in the end that we have walked one path
through life rather than another whether we chose that path consciously or not.
We are guided by these values rather than those. We see the world through this
framework rather than that. We travel with these companions rather than those..
As Bob Dylan perceptively sang, “It may be the devil or it may be the Lord/
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.”
If we don’t make our choices
deliberately, we find in the end that we have made them by default, swept along
by the tides of life. Resisting commitment is just as much a choice as choosing
it, and when we look back, wondering how on earth we got to where we are, maybe
not liking it much, we may wish we’d been paying more attention to those moments
when we could have taken an opportunity which has now passed to give ourselves
whole-heartedly to something or someone.
Some choices can’t be
revisited; we can’t go back and undo the past, but the good news is that
however far we’ve come through life, we still have choices to make for the
future. Today we will have choices about the way we spend our time or our
money, the way we treat those around us, the way we think about ourselves and
others, the words we speak – words that build up or tear down. This week we will
have decisions to make at work or at home or in our communities which will
shape them in small ways or large. Which will be the right ones?
There are no easy answers,
but if we are wise we will at least try to make our choices consciously, and
one of the keys to choosing well is surely the same for us as it was for Peter. Which of the
options before us sounds like “words of eternal life”? Which path leads us
towards a life in which we, and others, can find their dignity and true
identity as beloved children of God? Which choice takes us beyond ourselves and
our own narrow interests to a world in which there is justice for all? These
are the paths which Jesus took. May we find and follow them too, so that we can
walk in the footsteps of the Holy One of God, and know that eternal life which was
so strong, that even the cross couldn’t snuff it out.
Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment