Thoughts on the 1^st Sunday after Trinity

Hosea 5.15 – 6.6; Psalm 50.7–15; Romans 4.13–end; Matthew 9.9–13, 18–26

 

I am going to start today by asking what is bound to be a provocative question: What if, deep down, you don’t like God very much; let alone love Him? Actually I am going to push that further: What if, for some reason or other, you can’t love God because your heart is blocked in some way?

Let’s let that question sit in the air while I read something that really struck me the other day. It’s related to my question.

It comes from a post on Facebook by a man called Eitan Bar. He’s a Jewish believer in Jesus (a Messianic Jew) and a writer. He’s got a PhD in Biblical studies and founded a ministry in Jerusalem called ONE FOR ISRAEL Ministry and Bible College. He brings a uniquely Jewish and Hebraic understanding to his thinking on the Christian faith – I find his perspective really interesting and One For Israel Ministry is doing terrific work evangelising the Jewish people and bringing them to faith in Christ in Israel.

Anyway, he wrote this:  Much of humanity’s hatred toward God is not hatred toward God as He truly is, but toward distorted images of Him shaped by pain, fear, religion, trauma, hypocrisy, or limited human understanding.

In other words, what if the image of God you are carrying around, and praying to, bears little resemblance to the reality? What if you are harbouring an image of a God who is actually unworthy of your love? What if, without quite knowing it you are in a relationship with what we might call an idol; a false God?

Eitan Bar continues: I believe that, deep down, every human being longs for God, even if they do not yet realize it consciously. Everyone desires redemption. Everyone desires love, meaning, healing, peace, belonging, and life itself. Everyone wants to be where the love is because love is what we were created for.

Some people may insist that they want nothing to do with God or His Kingdom. But often those same people have been deeply wounded by this fallen world. Many have suffered abuse, trauma, betrayal, neglect, religious manipulation, violence, or profound disappointment. Others struggle psychologically, emotionally, or intellectually. Some possess deeply sceptical personalities and find it difficult to believe in a God they cannot physically see or empirically verify.

But beneath all those layers, I believe the human heart still longs for its Creator. In the end, every soul longs for life, for wholeness, for home…

Our readings today are striking for their emphasis on a theme. The thread running through all of them is that God is interested not so much in the performance of our religious duties as in the loving faithfulness of our hearts. God wants a loving relationship with us rather than a contract of employment.

So in our 1^st reading from Hosea we hear that God desires steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt-offerings (5:6).

And then in the Letter of St Paul to the Romans we are presented with a man, Abraham, who had such faith in the goodness and trustworthiness of God that he believed he would father a child when he was a century old,  and his wife was well beyond child-bearing.

And we are told by St Paul that this is an example of the kind of faith God is looking for. Describing Abraham, Paul says, No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. Therefore his faith ‘was reckoned to him as righteousness’ (Romans 4:20-22).

Now I have done a fair bit of thinking about faith and what it actually means in my 40 years as a believing Christian and I think I have come to a fairly solid conclusion that faith and love are inseparable.

Faith needs to be understood as trust. That’s what Abraham did and God proved himself worthy of that trust, even though it took years.

Trust comes because you believe in the trustworthiness of the one you hope in; in other words there is a certain belief that the one you are trusting in is good, and without a sense of the goodness of God it is not possible to love him as the Bible suggests we should.

Now I know that we humans have a propensity often to fall for people who are not good to us, and we often call that love. There’s plenty of talk in our current discourse about ‘toxic relationships’, but I would argue that those types of relationships aren’t love in the fullest sense of that word. There’s another term for relationships like that in our age and we call it ‘co-dependency’, or in other quarters ‘insecure attachment’.

These distortions of love tend to happen because we are wounded at some level, and we have become conditioned to accepting forms of love that fall far short of what love should be.

And in some cases love has so disappointed us that we end up giving up on human relationships altogether, and eking out substitutes for love by eating, or drinking, or consuming romantic or erotic material.

In our Gospel readings we are presented with three characters who encounter the reality and the fullness of love in different ways.

Matthew’s first love when Jesus met him was money, and money is no substitute for love, so when Jesus calls him and gives him a glimpse of the real thing he happily leaves everything behind.

Jesus then delivers the unforgettable words: ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.’

He’s using words that are similar to those from Hosea that we just heard isn’t he, but he’s also adding a twist. He’s suggesting that sin is somehow a sickness, and I think it’s not too far-fetched to say that sin is a love-sickness.

Sin is loving the wrong things, or perhaps loving things that are OK in themselves but a bit too much. As one preacher I once heard said, sin is looking for love in all the wrong places.

Now when we are deeply conditioned to be looking for love in all the wrong places it can be so ingrained in us that we actually need to be healed. In the old language these were called ‘disordered loves’ (St Augustine) and there is only really one cure for those, an encounter with Love itself (with a capital L), and that is Jesus through the Holy Spirit – exactly what happened to Matthew.

Next we meet two people who seem to be full of faith; full of a sense of the goodness of God so that they can go to him knowing he will do something for them.

In the first encounter a woman who has been bleeding for 12 years without respite. She knows that if she just touches his cloak she will be made well, but she comes secretly, so she still has a bit to learn because she dare not face Jesus. Perhaps she is carrying a burden of shame because of her condition and she needs to learn that God never shames us.

In the second encounter we meet a synagogue leader who really seems to get it, because he goes straight to Jesus and places his request before him with the confidence of a man who is both humble and expectant of a positive reply. We are told that he knelt before him, saying, ‘My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.’ 

So today is a day to do a little stock-take I think.

Are you one of our characters? Do you recognise, like Matthew the tax collector that you need to be healed from disordered kinds of love? Or do you have faith, like the woman, but need to go a touch further because in some sense you are still hiding from God because you can’t be sure how he will look at you if you make eye contact? Or are you like the synagogue leader, full of a humble confidence that God loves you and longs to do you the good that you hope for? Good for you if you are.

Let us pray.

Come Holy Spirit, fill the inmost hearts of your faithful people who are sat here today. Sanctify and heal us. Correct what has gone astray in us, heal our wounds and re-order our desires so that we can be free of our idols and love you above all things. Amen.