Reflection National Lockdown Wednesday 26 August 2020

2 Thessalonians 3:6-18         Psalm 128           Matthew 23:27-32

Collect for the Day:

God of our holy and righteous ancestors;

Accept us as a living sacrifice and transform us by your Spirit,

that being members of one body, we will offer our gifts in Christ’s service;

who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God now and for ever Amen.

Good day dear friends, 

We have moved into the New Testament in general and into Paul’s epistles to the communities in Asia in particular with our prescribed reading from Thessalonians.

Paul began the chapter with a request to believers to pray for both God’s message and messenger, offered them reassurance of God’s faithfulness, love and patience and ended it with a strict reprimand to the slothful, gossipers and disobedient. Paul sees those who refuse to work as lazy, something that the bible forbids and as people rejecting God, and God’s word. As punishment they would be excluded from fellowship with other believers as a means to correct their waywardness. True fellowship with fellow believers was something believers loved and longed for and Paul seems to get it right by calling for sanction that would move the guilty to penitence. He calls upon them to follow the example of Christ and live a sacrificial life that reflects the characteristics and conduct of ministry as exercised by Christ, namely: preaching; enduring suffering, humility, affection, gentleness, exercise of honesty and integrity, living a holy life and the regular exercise of prayer as spiritual discipline. Paul is impressing upon his hearers the importance of earning one’s keep with honest labour and not to become a burden unto others with God both lauding and commanding a good work ethic. The example has been set by God in creation, providence, preservation, judgement and redemption through the Trinity and nothing less is expected of believers.  Work is a gift from God that enables the believer to enhance skills, to be productive and to prevent indolence and apathy.  Whilst Paul was entitled to be supported and assisted by fellow believers, he surrendered that right to set an example to be followed by others.  The Pauline discourse moved from disavowing fellowship to setting an example and to work for one’s own survival, not addressed to those unable to work, but to those able to but refusing. The community has a God given responsibility to care for the needy and the poor, but no responsibility towards the wicked who refuse to work. 

Paul then moves from disassociation, to example, to survival and finally to the issue of harmony. This was beginning to have an effect on both the harmony and the witness of the faith community and whilst Paul sought to rebuke those guilty of laziness, he provides encouragement for those who have maintained the course not to grow tired or weary. Paul is saying to the believers to stop messing around; to settle down, not to meddle in the affairs of others; to live a consistent life and thereby becoming a blessing unto others and promoting harmony in the faith community. Believers were advised not to tolerate bad behaviour or reward it with attention as a means of preventing them from partaking in the same wickedness. Those guilty should be brought to a place of proper and appropriate guilt, through isolation from fellowship, not as punishment meted out to an enemy, but as a means of admonishing a brother. He ended his discourse with a benediction, offering believers the peace and grace they needed with their experience of hardship, persecution and death. 

Our appointed psalm is titles “a song of ascents” as part of fifteen others sung by travellers on their way to Jerusalem for one of the three major feasts, namely Passover, Pentecost and the Feast of the Tabernacle.

It starts out with given description to the blessings to be bestowed on the faithful and which will be available to all who honour and respect God. It isn’t dependent on race, class, education, or even intelligence and not about feelings but a matter of a life of obedience.

The psalmist had in mind the hard-working farmer who with his wife and children enjoys the food of their labour with a true sense of community and happiness and not out of compulsion or under duress. He uses images of vines and olives as symbols of abundant life, rich blessings or prosperity. As stated in verse 1, there is assurance of blessing for all who honour and respect God the way that they should. As one of the Songs of Ascents, it is natural for the singer of this psalm to think about the connection of blessing with Jerusalem. It shows that there is a sense in which a happy home is not enough; there must also be care for the community and nation. The blessing to the one who fears the Lord goes beyond the holy city and impacts the holy family. The psalm ends with a happy and confident declaration.

He teaches us that it is not enough to “see children’s children,” unless we have eyes to look for the prosperity of Jerusalem, and tongues which pray not only for those in our homes, but for “peace upon Israel.” 

Today we are dealing with the last two of the seven “woes” which Jesus throws against the leaders of the class of Pharisees as an attack on hypocrisy.

Jesus compares the Pharisees to “whited sepulchres”, in other words, they are like the tombs that people in Palestine could often see immaculately clean but which were full of the decaying and putrid bodies of the dead. These graves were whitewashed as a warning sign to people not to unsuspectingly step on them and then become ritually unclean.

The Pharisees put on an external show of religious perfection down to the smallest detail but inside their hearts and minds were full of pride and hatred and contempt for their fellow-men. Jesus is addressing the pride and imagined self-sufficiency of the religious leaders and is warning them off their blindness and inability to see themselves for whom and what they really are.

The mentioning of tombs leads Jesus to comment on the Pharisees’ pride over the monuments they have erected in memory of the prophets and other holy people. They praised themselves and claimed to be exempted from the persecution and death visited upon the prophets by their ancestors and yet they, themselves were preparing to devise the death of Jesus. In the last verse of our reading, Jesus tells them to go ahead and complete the murdering of the prophets, referring to what is going to happen to himself as another example of the blindness of the self-righteous.

The more committed we are to our Christian faith and to the behaviour that it expects, the greater the danger that we, too, can fall into the same trap and see ourselves on a greater level than others whose behaviour we condemn and perhaps even attack. What image of myself do I try to present to others? Does it correspond, to what I am before God? 

Let us pray:

Father, help us to seek the values that will bring us enduring joy in this changing world.
In our desire for what you promise, make us one in mind and heart.
We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, who lives, and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.