The Vindication of the Martyrs

Psalm 23; Revelation 7.9-17; John 10.22-30

A moment ago we heard from the Book of Revelation.  In the scene presented to us, the writer imagines that heaven is like a vast temple or throne-room.  The one on the throne is never named or described in any detail, but we are left in no doubt that it is the God of Israel, Moses and Elijah, the God and Father of our Lord Christ.  Immediately before the throne is one who looks like a Lamb who has been slain.  It is Christ, the paschal lamb who was slain to atone for the sins of the world.  Interestingly, in the Book of Revelation, the one on the throne can never be seen or addressed apart from a seeing and addressing of the Lamb.  One can never see the deity on the throne directly; every view is obscured by the Lamb.  This is very clever theology.  God may only be known by what God reveals of Godself in the face, form and voice of the Lamb.  The Lamb is God, that is, he is all we may know of God.  There is a resonance here with that phrase from Jesus in the Gospel of John:  “The Father and I are one.”  But that is not what I want to dwell on this evening.

Shift your gaze to the scene before the Lamb.  A great multitude is gathered, so large that not even a Channel 7 film crew would feel confident in proposing a figure.  The multitude is composed of people from every nation, ethnicity and language under heaven.  They are robed in white and they have palm branches in their hands.  And what are they there for?  What is their intention and purpose?  Simply this: to offer a sacrifice of praise to the one on the throne and to the Lamb.  In this they are joined by angels, elders, and four living creatures.  The angels represent the hosts of heaven, the elders the people of Israel, and the creatures the whole creation of birds, animals and reptiles.  What we witness here, then, is the worship our own gathering aims to imitate, albeit dimly, as in a glass darkly: the worship, honour and praise that shall one day be offered to God by humans, beasts, and the whole creation:

Amen!  Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgivingand honour and power and mightbe to our God forever and ever!  Amen!

But let us return our gaze, once more, to the multitude arrayed in white.  Who are they, and how did they come to be there?  Well, conveniently enough for us, one of the Elders in the scene addresses exactly that question to the writer of Scripture:  “who are they, and where did they come from?”  It is, of course, a rhetorical question, and the writer barely has time to open his mouth before the Elder replies:  “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal, the time of trial; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.  For this reason, they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night.”  He says are few more things as well, but I’ll come to that later.

There’s just one thing I’d like you to note from these words.  This multitude, those chosen by God for salvation, are in fact a group of martyrs.  The phrase “they have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb” is not there simply for decoration.  It means, quite literally, that these people have lived their lives in imitation of Christ.  By dying with Christ, by following his way even unto death, they succeeded in casting aside the evils of the world, the flesh, and the devil.  So now they are washed clean, raised to resurrection life with Jesus.  The Lamb was slain to atone for their sins, and these are they who left those sins behind by dying a death like his own.

Now, of course, there are martyrs and there are martyrs.  We happen to live in a world in which it is still very, very likely that you will be murdered because of your faith in Christ.  According to the American-based organisation, International Christian Concern, it is currently very dangerous to actually practise Christian faith (as opposed to having some private opinions about God) in the following parts of the world: Ambon and Aceh in Indonesia, Mindanao in the Philippines, China, Palestine, Nigeria, Pakistan, some parts of India, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Egypt and Morocco.  And I’m sure that’s not the whole story.  In places like this, faith is indeed costly.  You can lose your job or your home because you attend a church.  And you can lose your very life if you decide to oppose the social or economic policies of the government or the military in the name of Christ.  For Christians from these parts of the world, martyrdom is a daily possibility.  You could really be put to death after the manner of the saviour.

But then there is the martyrdom to which I believe WE are called, ‘we’, that is, who live in the democratic West.  According to the Book of Revelation, it is ONLY the martyrs who make is to heaven to be with God.  All of us are called to martyrdom in one way or another.  So how do we, here in the West, die after the manner of Christ, how do we forfeit our lives for the sake God?  Well, this is not a trick question.  The answer is pretty straight-forward really.  Being a martyr in the West is exactly the same as being a martyr in those countries where Christians are openly persecuted.  For the Christian is one who, by definition, has ‘unplugged’ from the Matrix, the basic principles and powers of the world, in order to live life by a different code and agenda—the code and agenda of Christ.  Every Christian who is literally martyred in Mindanao or Pakistan does so because they are already, in a sense, dead.  Baptism is the Christian’s funeral.  In baptism we die to all the powers and influences that colonise us—from the ‘terror’ rhetoric of governments to the consumer religion of television—and rise to share in the freedom of God’s radically new society.  Christ died because he believed the world should be different than it is, because he was motivated by a vision of God’s coming justice.  In baptism, the Christian renounces what Christ renounced and embraces what Christ embraced.  Anyone who does this, whether the consequence be a literal death or not, is a martyr to Christ’s cause.  The root meaning of the word ‘martyr’ is witness.  Anyone who dies with Christ in baptism witnesses to Christ’s way.  Whether one literally lives or dies thereafter is very much up to the community in which one happens to live.

Now, in that perspective, the resurrection we celebrate in this season of Pascha takes on a very specific meaning.  For the persecuted Christians of the late first century, the Christians for whom the books of John and Revelation were written, resurrection was primarily about vindication, the vindication of what we might call the “lost cause” of peace with justice.  To their eyes, the resurrection of Jesus was not simply a miracle, a display of divine magic to wow anyone who might be watching on television.  It was God’s vindication of Jesus’ cause, God’s stamp of approval on the life he lived for the sake of the poor, the oppressed, the marginalised and the wretched.  When Jesus was crucified it appeared, of course, that Jesus had been abandoned, that God was on the side of the Romans and their aristocratic Jewish collaborators.  But his resurrection burst forth like a neon-sign in the fog, a sign which declared that Jesus’ cause was God’s cause, that Jesus’ values were God’s values, that Jesus’ people were God’s people.

It is on that basis, and that basis only, that any of us could dare to die with Christ, to live and die with him in the service of the forgotten and forsaken.  For if Christ is risen, then his cause in just.  It is God’s cause, and so we can count on God to vindicate all that we do in imitation of Christ, even if the powers that be make life very difficult (even impossible) for us.  Even when we walk through the valley of the shadow, we need not despair.  For the Lamb that was slain is risen to be our shepherd, the one who knows what we feel and seeks to befriend and protect us in the night-time our fears.  Because he is risen, we are assured that God will never loose us from God’s grip.  He will hold us tight to Christ, so that even if we die with him, we shall also live with him. 

All of us, then, are called to be martyrs.  To worship Christ and his ways even unto the ridicule of our friends, even unto the loosing of jobs and homes and reputations, even unto death.  But God promises that if we do so, that if we will only let go of such things, we shall experience a freedom and a joy we never imagined was possible.  The joy of the redeemed who, even though they die, yet they live—and far more abundantly than even the Murdochs or the Packers.

This homily was first preached at South Yarra Baptist Church on the fourth Sunday of Easter 2004.

The Yoke of Christ

Texts:  Genesis 24.34-38, 42-49, 58-67; Song of Songs 2.8-13; Romans 7.15-25a; Matthew 11.16-19, 25-30

Today I want to talk about what it means to wear the yoke of Christ.  In a saying unique to Matthew's gospel, Jesus says:

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden light'.

What kind of yoke is Jesus talking about here?  You'll be relieved to know that it has very little to do with having egg on your face or, indeed, with becoming the butt of someone's awful humour!  But it has everything to do with the sheer discipline and hard work of labouring for Christ in the workshop of the world.  Those of you who've spent some time on a farm will know that a yoke is the piece of sculpted wood which goes around the neck of a bullock when it is harnessed to a plough.  Sometimes the piece of wood is designed to harness two or even three bullocks abreast.  Here the yoke becomes a means of joining the beasts to each other as much as to their work.  By becoming harnessed so, the bullocks learn a discipline essential to their task.  The discipline of working with each other and with their task-master - walking at the same pace and pulling with the same effort, so that the plough cuts its furrow with maximum effect, efficiency, and balance.

That Matthew should use an image of servitude to describe the life of following Jesus might surprise some of you.  Afterall, most of us have been taught that the Christian life is about throwing off our chains and walking in freedom.  Well, that is most certainly true.  But here Matthew is telling us that the freedom we aspire to in Christ will only come to us through a form of radical submission to Christ's will and way.  In one of the many paradoxes of the gospel, we are told that the way by which we might lay our burdens down is to take up the yoke of Christ and submit to his tutelage.   Which goes, of course, to the heart of discipleship.  To be a disciple is to submit oneself to the disciplines of the master we have chosen to follow.  It is to take that master's yoke upon oneself and learn how to plough the fields of the world according to the master's peculiar vision.

We see something of the joy and the cost of discipleship in the rather lovely story of Rebecca in Genesis.  Here is a women who lives under the protection and patronage of her father and brother in the land of Ur.  Life is secure, it is predictable, it is safe.  But one day a chap turns up from a far and distant land, and paints an entirely new scenario for her.  Why not come with him to that other land and to a different life?  Why not come and be the wife of a wealthy stranger named Isaac, a man whom Rebecca has never met?  Why not leave who she is right now, and welcome a radical change in role, identity and purpose?  Now I don't know about you.  But I think I'd be very, very wary.  But when Rebecca is asked if she wants to go, she says 'YES!'.   Somehow she is able to see the promise of that life far away.  Somehow she is able to find the courage to leave the safe and familiar behind and embrace the promise of what will be. 

For the earliest disciples, Jesus was like that stranger who came from a distant land saying 'follow me'.  In hearing that call and that challenge, each of them weighed up the cost against the promise, the tangible against the intangible, the known against the unknown.  Some took a risk.  They took up the yoke of Christ, which is also his cross.  They chose to follow him no matter where he led, and very often against the dictates of either reason or moral duty.  Others chose to stay with the yokes they were already wearing.  Like familial and civic duty, and keeping your head down lest the occupying force, the Roman, cut it off.  At least, that's how an ancient middle-eastern writer named Matthew saw it.  But now to the really difficult questions.  How might we few, gathered this morning in this shrine of Christ, really take up the yoke of Christ in our own lives and living?  But perhaps there is a more pressing question to be answered first.  Is there any real sense in taking the yoke of Christ seriously in this age of Ebay, atheism and new-age spirituality?

I believe there is a great deal of sense in doing so, because people have become so very burdened in this brave new world we've created!   The Ebay generation is burdened by the belief that we can somehow buy and consume our way to peace and happiness.  The tragedy here is that the world of modern consumerism offers nothing more than the eternal return of the same in the tired old story-lines of soap operas and pop music.  The more you buy, watch or consume, the less you get of anything genuinely new that is able to liberate us from our slavery to the same old thing. The new atheism, on the other hand, is burdened by the belief that we can somehow reason our way to peace and happiness.  Ironically, what the ‘new’ atheists are pedalling, is the rather ‘old’ story that got us into the economic and environmental mess we find ourselves in today, so so-called Enlightenment’s story about human beings pulling themselves out of the mire through disinterested reason and scientific enquiry.  The tragedy, here, is two-fold.  First, the Enlightenment story has never really comes to terms with the fact of human sin, what the apostle describes as knowing what is good and helpful and true, but failing to actually do it.  In this, paradoxically, psychoanalysis is certainly the Apostle’s ally!  Second, the Enlightenment story has never been comfortable with what might be called ‘the irrational’, that tendency of life itself to occasionally contradict everything we think we know, to surprise and lift us out of the quagmires in which we bury ourselves by our reason, that tendency which we Christians call the arrival of grace as from some place other that our very circumscribed understandings of reality. Which is where you’d think the dominant new-age spiritualities of our time might have something helpful to offer, with their promises of liberation through that which is not at all reasonable, through an embrace of all that is wild and untameable in the human spirit.  The tragedy here is that new age spiritualities are as weighed-down as consumerism and atheism with a glorious story about the capacity of human beings to break their own chains.  Instead of looking to what we might buy or consume, or to the light of human reason, contemporary spiritualities look to the deepest self for inspiration, that which is called, variously, ‘the god within’, the ‘best self’ or even the ‘collective unconscious’.  Whatever the language, whether Jungian or pagan in origin, the belief is the same: that we can somehow liberate ourselves, that the human spirit is unquenchable, and that it is able to rise above its sins and misdemeanours in order to make the world anew.  From a Christian point of view, from the point of view of the Apostle Paul, we cannot.  And I submit to you that the real history of human civilisation bears witness to this.  Whatever our aspirations, even if they are informed by that other story told by Jews or Christians, we fail to meet them.  Over and over and over again.  That is the true burden of our human condition.

‘Who can rescue us from these bodies of despair?’ asks the Apostle?  Only Jesus Christ.  Only the one who comes to us extra nos, as the Latin theologians styled it, from the ‘outside’ to share with us the free gift of God’s acceptance, love and transforming Spirit. For the gospel-writer, for Matthew, the gift-nature of salvation is expressed in the language of revelation: 

I praise you, Father, Lord of all creation, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father for this is your good pleasure (Matt 11.25-26)

Here, on the lips of Jesus, Matthew locates an origin for our liberation which comes from somewhere other than ourselves - our imagination, our reason, even our buying power.  It is the light not of our reason, but of revelation, the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ.  For Jesus goes on to say,

All things have been given to me by my Father.  No-one knows that Son except the Father; and no-one knows that Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him (11.27).

The point here is that, like little children who are able to simply trust in what their parents give them and tell them, God gives the gift of salvation to all who are able to receive what is revealed in simple faith.  To put aside all they think they know and simply embrace what is given.  What is given, then, is a capacity to re-know and re-shape the world according to what is revealed in Jesus Christ.  It is the putting off of the old yoke of servitude to the way things are normally known and done in favour of the new ‘yoke’, a yoke that is not our own but that of Christ.   In one of the very many paradoxical moves of the gospel story, Matthew promises that all who come to Jesus will find that his own particular yoke is ‘easy’, and his burden ‘light’.  The word 'easy' should not, of course, be taken to mean that life with Jesus will be all beer and skittles.  It certainly is not!  Following Jesus is so deeply counter-cultural that his followers are very often persecuted and maligned for their lack of assent to the status quo.  The claim is, rather, that in following Jesus each person will find a way through life which 'fits' and addresses their most genuine needs and longings.  Not the needs and longings which are created by the ascendant powers of the society in which we live.  But the more fundamental needs and longings which everyone has . . .  for a home, a love, and a truth.   The yoke of Christ disciplines our hearts to acknowledge these longings, and to seek their fulfilment through a relationship with God.

Allow me to close with a three simple observations about taking the yoke of Christ for today.  First, I believe Jesus is calling us to faith, faith in what God has revealed in Jesus Christ.  It is the faith of the bible, of the ecumenical creeds and of all Christian thinking that springs from these fonts.  Faith is a simple acceptance of these things, a leap into the unknown by which we might then, paradoxically, re-understand everything we thought we understood but did not.  Faith is not - please understand! - without thought, reason or imagination.  It is, rather, a thought and imagination that allows itself to be disciplined by the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ, so that the entire world of what we know and imagine can be re-thought, re-imagined and re-reasoned in its light.

Second, I believe Jesus is calling us to prayer and to a deeper communion with God.  Prayer is the well from which we draw the essential water to sustain our journey in faith.  So let me ask this of all of you.  Do you pray?  Do you know what prayer is?  Do you know how to pray?  If the answer to any of these questions is no, then I would urge you to seek counsel and direction from a person you respect in the faith.  Because prayer is at the centre.  Without prayer, there is no life with God.

And finally, I believe Jesus is calling us to live with integrity and justice in our relationships with other people and with all life on our planet.  That includes our families and love ones, certainly.  But it also includes the more complex relationships we have with people far and wide, across the whole expanse of this web of life we call the earth.  If we are genuine in our desire to take the yoke of Jesus, then it matters whom we support and don't support in our spending patterns and in our choices as consumers.  It matters that we say or don't say things when the world is taken over by pokie machines or homophobia or whatever.  It matters that we do or don't do things in the face of poverty and violence and corruption.

The yoke of Christ calls us to discipline and to a life of dedicated labour after the way of Jesus.  But it is also the promise of blessing, rest and healing in gentle communion with God.  This stole that I wear as a minister is a symbol of the yoke of Christ which I am vowed to carry all my days.  But each baptised Christian has made a pledge no less demanding and no less rewarding.  I encourage all of you to explore that pledge anew this day.