Tuesday, 18th August 2020

Collect

God of the foreigner and the outcast, no one is excluded from your embrace: inspire us so to love the world that all will live in the dignity and security of belonging in God’s family; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever Amen.

Eucharist Readings:

Ezekiel 28:1-10                  Psalm 60:1-5                 Matthew 19:23-30

The achievement of economic wealth had brought with it a sense of pride. The process is summed up in Ezekiel Chapter 28: verse 5 ‘By your great skill in trading you have increased your wealth, and because of your wealth your heart has grown proud’. Sometimes when we grow proud, we tend to claim certain things to be ours, we claim status, power and to be above others. The King of Tyre is depicted as believing he is as wise as a god. The prophesy warns that the penalty for such arrogance would be both humiliating and final. His wisdom even surpassed those of Daniel. It made him arrogant and because of that his death will be an a humiliating one at the hands of foreigners. ‘When they confront you, you will be a mortal, not a god’. How interesting this is to think that we all aim and maybe our goal, is to be when we die one day, dignified and that we will meet our Redeemer, our Lord. Yet this king is receiving this prophesy, and this is what will happen to him, so his conduct, behavior, action is the cause of how he will die. Is it maybe a reminder for us to revisit the ten commandments? Does this affirm the saying you shall die as you lived? He considered himself a god and in Exodus God spoke all these words, Exodus 20:3-5 thou shalt have no other gods before me ,thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth, thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; I In writing(lower case) it is referring to as god means no recognition , no higher power, there is only one God with his supremacy, and maybe this shows us that what John Stott is talking about in his book ‘But I say to you…the secret things belongs to the lord our God, but the things revealed to us and to our children for ever…And since they belong to Him and he has not decided to pass them on to us, we should not attempt to force them from Him but be content to leave them with him. The revealed things belong to us and God knows why he did that, and since he has given it to us, they are ours and to pass on to the next generation. God’s purpose for us is to enjoy what is ours he has revealed it and not to worry what is his alone.’ He alone is God.

Our Gospel reading this morning is part of the fourth discourse, Jesus’s relationship with His disciples and His ministry in Judea. ‘It is difficult, for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven’ and to illustrate the difficulty Jesus used the metaphor, as it was for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. The camel was the largest animal the Jews knew .It is said that sometimes in walled cities there were two gates, the great main gate through which all traffic moved and then the narrow gate, which even a person could hardly pass. This narrow or little gate was called ‘The Needle’s Eye’. So, Jesus used the picture so that the disciples could understand how difficult it was for a rich person to get to enter the kingdom of Heaven as for a huge camel to get through the little gate through which a person can hardly pass. As the disciples discerned that it is not simply hard but impossible for a rich person to be saved. The answer lies in recognizing that the humanly impossible is possible for God. Salvation is not earned, either by wealth or by poverty, the Kingdom of God overturns all human valuations and possibilities.

As William Barclay describes that being rich encourage a false independence, we need no assistance from other people and we can deal with any situation which may arise, it shackle a person to this earth , ‘where your treasure is , there will your heart be also ‘, it also tends to make you selfish , the more we have , the more we want.

But then the question is it better to be poor, without material possessions and to what degree or what is the category for being rich , how do we measure it , is it according to monetary value or fixed assets ,current assets, etc.? Is it literally or figuratively? What is rich, with reference to when Jesus asked what is good, is it better for us to be ‘poor ’materialistically but rich in our faith, spirituality or our relationship with God, or to be ‘rich’ materialistically but we do not have a relationship with God, we do not have God in our lives, not to follow Jesus , or to serve mammon and God . To follow Jesus but in the meantime, we are having expectations to be rewarded.

Jesus lays it down that there will be surprises in the final assessment, God’s standards of judgment are not ours, if for no other reason than that God sees into the heart of a person. Also, it maybe that those who were humble on earth will be great in heaven, those who were great in this world will be humbled in heaven.