Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Trinity

admin | 24 July 2011

“Jesus sat down and taught the people out of the ship.”

Jesus, “seeing the multitudes went up into a mountain … sat down and opened his mouth and taught them,” saying “blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” Jesus, standing by the lake of Gennesaret when “the people pressed upon them to hear the word of God,” entered one of the ships, and “sat down and taught the people out of the ship.” Like the ancient philosophers of the schools of pagan antiquity, he sits in the seat of wisdom. He is the teacher. It is, I think, a wonderful image. Jesus in the seat of wisdom; Jesus as the wisdom of God. The image of sitting and teaching belongs to the great religions and philosophies of the world.

But what does Jesus teach us? All the things that belong to wisdom. What is wisdom? All the things that belong to our life with God, the eternal things that are opened out in the midst of the passing things, the temporal things, of our world and day. It is about the understanding which alone can govern and peaceably order our world. It is about the understanding which alone enables the “Church to joyfully serve [God] in all godly quietness.”

Now there’s a thought! “Godly quietness.” It seems the exact opposite of our activity-fixated age in our obsession with practicality and action and our lust for power and domination. The very things, of course, which contribute to the destruction of our world and ourselves. When wisdom is lost and gone, we are easily the victims and even the perpetrators of violence and destruction. We contemplate the horrendous loss of life in Norway by a right-wing fanatic intent, it seems, in making a statement about political policies regarding immigration, resulting in mind-numbing and indiscriminate carnage. Terrorism is always indiscriminate in the range and the rage of its destruction.

World-wide, there is a kind of tension and sometimes friction and conflict between various cultures and within cultures, particularly the struggles within the democratic states of the west in dealing with the religious and social-cultural communities resurgent and vibrant within them. The deeper and more necessary struggle, I would like to suggest, is about reclaiming the wisdom of the religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam through the ancient philosophies which belong to their intellectual understanding. Only so, too, can there be a reclaiming of what belongs to the various forms of secularity in their truth and character in our contemporary world. It is about a kind of thoughtfulness that can only be achieved through an openness to wisdom.

How might that be achieved or realized? The starting point, it seems to me, is shown to us in the heart of this gospel reading. After Jesus finishes speaking, he bids Simon Peter and the others with him, James and John the sons of Zebedee, as it turns out, to “launch out into the deep and to let down [their] nets.” After the teaching comes the direction and the action. But Simon Peter’s response is revealing. “Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing.” He expresses the sense of futility and despair, the awareness of the emptiness and nothingness of human life, the nihilism out of which can come even greater loss and destruction. Left at that, it would be a complete dismissal, presumably, of Jesus’ teaching. Yet Peter goes on to say, “Nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net.” At thy word. That is everything. It means the yielding of ourselves to what is greater and more than ourselves. It is about letting the word of the divine teacher govern and order our lives.

The result is outstanding. On our own there is simply the barren emptiness of toil and labour without result; with God there is abundant fullness, “a great multitude of fishes, and their net brake.” More, never less, it seems. Perhaps, more outstanding, though, is Simon Peter’s response. He “[falls] down at Jesus’ knees, saying, depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man.” An intriguing response. What does it mean? It means his awareness of the wisdom of God and its power before which even the kings of the earth bow down in humble praise; how much more so the little ones of the world, like you and me? Simon Peter is alive to the wisdom of God incarnate in Jesus Christ. And all because Jesus “sat down and taught”; all because he bids us act out of his teaching. “At thy word” is everything because it brings us before the wisdom of God without which life is empty and nothing.

Humility is about our recognition of that truth and its power in our lives. It may result in real and dramatic changes in our lives, like Peter and James and John, “forsak[ing] all and following Jesus.” Or it may mean real but quiet changes within us, a kind of “godly quietness” in our souls and churches which qualifies our actions and counters the dark thoughts of our souls.

The epistle reading equally opens us out to the wisdom of God. It shows us what Simon Peter has learned, we might say, since the passage is from his first letter. He begins, bidding us to “be of one mind” even in the face of evil and the desire for revenge and so forth; he ends, exhorting us to “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.” In the middle, he quotes from Psalm 34, verses 12 to 16. What is it about? Well, it is about the wisdom of God as it applies to human life, letting the truth and power of God rule in our hearts and minds even in the midst of suffering and hardship and as against the evils in our midst as well. Pretty powerful stuff, it seems to me. It requires our openness to the eternal wisdom of God. Without that we are prey to the vanities and the violence of our wills, to what is merely arbitrary and transitory. “Who is he that will harm you, if ye be followers of that which is good? But and if ye suffer for righteousness’ sake, happy are ye.” Actually the word is blessed, μακαριος “Blessed are ye,” which is more than mere happiness.

The beatitudes in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount begin with “the poor in spirit,” that is to say, with the humble ones, “for theirs is the kingdom of God,” something eternal here and now in our midst if we, like Peter, “[fall] down at Jesus’ knees,” open to his wisdom and truth and wanting his wisdom and truth to govern and order our lives. We may learn from the one who sits and teaches us in our midst and we may find ourselves astonished both at his teaching and at his doings in our lives. Out of the barren nothingness of human experience, we may discover that our lives are something worth in Christ, the wisdom of God.