Sermon for the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity
“Friend, go up higher”
It is one of my favourite Scripture texts. It’s not about ambition or pretension. It’s about the hope of transformation. It counters completely the dumb-down aspects of an anti-intellectual culture, such as ours, and conveys the sense that we are, indeed, called to something more, that we have a destiny beyond what we know is before us but will not face, namely, the grave and gate of death. And it signals ever so profoundly the necessary condition of soul for the realization of God’s will and purpose for us in our lives. The necessary condition is humility.
Here is a Scripture reading in which the operative words are “friend” and “go up higher”. We have just had a visible demonstration of this in the baptism of Brennan Isaac. He has been made – there is no other word for it – a friend of Jesus. He has just been called up higher but only through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; such is the heart of baptism. We are identified with Jesus in his free-willing identity and sacrifice for us.
Jesus calls us “friends”. He does so not merely by way of a parable but more directly. He calls us friends at the height of his passion, on the night of our betrayal. There is an anticipation of that in the context of this gospel parable where Jesus is being watched critically and being challenged hypocritically by the Lawyers and Pharisees. This is the wondrous thing that passes human understanding. God has made us his friends when we were his enemies! This turns the ancient world on its head. It turns our modern world on its head. We live in a rather hopeless and fearful world. Here is the antidote to our hopelessness and fear. It challenges us so that it can redeem us.