Living With Christ is Hard Work
The readings appointed today are, individually, interesting glimpses into important stories and conversations. Wrapped up together, however, these are a heavy call to examine how we live the new life in Jesus Christ. In particular, how we live in this new family, with all of our baptized siblings. We have a call to keep the source of our new life at the centre, some advice on how to build and maintain healthy Christian relationships, and a reminder of how badly things can go wrong if we are not attentive to these principles.
Let’s start with the historical example of when things go wrong. Our journey through Samuel this summer is full of events that would make the most scandalous late night soap opera look tame. As for where we are in the story: David has become king of Judah and Israel after a remarkably messy transition from Saul’s reign. Plenty of betrayals, double-agents, assassination attempts, and so on. Saul ignored the commands of God and David promises to do better. However, like Saul, David is far from perfect. David has many wives, as is the way of kings in these days, but sees Bathsheba one morning and desires her, even though she is married. After a violation of her body and marriage, David arranges the death of her husband and claims Bathsheba as his wife. In the family of many half-siblings, this sort of behaviour becomes generational. One of David’s sons, Absalom, is outraged enough to leave the family and denounce his father after David refuses to punish Amnon, another son, for similarly violating one of their sisters. In a series of conflicts, culminating in today’s passage, both Amnon and Absalom end up dead and David is plunged into a serious depression.
We humans have long known that someone who has been hurt is more likely to hurt another. The generational passing on of trauma and the cyclical nature of abusive, destructive behaviour is being proven by recent research to be far more deeply embedded in us than previously suspected. Here, as far back as the days of King David and his family, we see records of how this can play out on an enormous scale. This is an important backdrop for what Paul has to say to the Ephesians and what Jesus has to say about his own identity.
Without putting words in God’s mouth, I think we can imagine the sort of concerns that Paul is responding to in his letter to the Ephesians. Lots of advice on conflict resolution and how to avoid catastrophic blowups in the first place. Much of this is advice that one might hear in family or marital counselling today. Speak your needs with sincerity; and unspoken expectation is a plan for resentment. Don’t let your anger fester. Talk with your siblings about what’s bothering you. Avoid “evil talk” like gossip and corrosive sarcasm; speak directly to the people with whom you have concerns and show respect and love for one another as you do.
Much of this advice was common in Paul’s day, just as it is in ours. First, being clear about needs and having open, honest conversations with the people concerned is a good way to avoid grudges and resentments and the kind of poison that turns into the messes we saw in 2 Samuel. But, as Paul says, we are people who have been sealed with the Holy Spirit as marked for redemption. We are being transformed, little by little, into images of Christ. This is an eternal arrangement we have entered into and it is well on the way. Don’t make the journey more difficult than it needs to be by carrying along baggage that doesn’t belong in the kingdom that we’re headed to. Leave that stuff behind. This is not an exhortation to ignore hurts or your own needs, it’s an exhortation to deal with those things in a loving, intentional, honest, vulnerable way. It is a call to speak to one another as though we were speaking with Christ on our lips and seeing Christ in their hearts. Because Christ is there, in both of those places. Always. When we speak good words and evil ones, we speak them with Christ on our lips.
This is what so much of what Jesus is doing in the sixth chapter of John. We, the congregations of today, have an advantage over the people in the gospel stories. We’ve heard the prelude to John’s gospel so we know who Jesus is right from the outset. The people Jesus is speaking to are learning who he is, but his identity is controversial and unexpected. When Jesus claims to be the bread of life, the source of eternal life, imperishable unlike bread we make of barley or even the manna that Israel ate in the desert, it’s a big statement. Especially, like today, when he’s talking to people who have known him his whole life. You can almost hear the muttering in the crowd. “I babysat that Jesus when he was in diapers. He’s no Son of God or bread of life. Pfah!” People always resist and grumble when God behaves in unexpected ways.
Committing to life in Christ means a commitment to being changed. Those promises at baptism aren’t a once-and-done set of statements. They’re the beginning of a journey from that moment into eternity. They mean holding God at the centre of everything and doing our best to be reflections of Christ in the world. And that’s really, really hard! It’s so much easier to look out for ourselves before our neighbour, to be selfish, to be defensive, to gossip and criticise to make sure nobody’s looking at our faults, and to nurse grudges and resentments rather than the difficult work of being loving, mindful, and vulnerable like Christ.
Living in Christ so often feels like being in a constant state of convalescence from a bad injury that you didn’t know you had until the Great Physician pointed it out and prescribed the remedy. The remedy isn't just for us, but for our children and their children. Healing and redemption are hard work we accomplish together. Like Israel in the desert, like the people who wanted kings instead of judges, like the Ephesians, and like the folks listening to Jesus in John 6, I think, for us, grumbling at God is part of the process. This Christian life is really hard work. Sometimes God comes at us completely out of left field and upsets all of the plans and stability that we thought we had.
It is perfectly acceptable to have hard conversations with God like we do with one another. We are allowed to tell God that we think this sucks, that it’s not fun, we don’t like it, and to ask things like “Why are you such a jerk sometimes?” But, lest we end up as the next cast of Real Housewives of King David, we must remember that God always has our wellbeing and our redemption in mind. Even when God’s plan feels more like eating your vegetables or sacrificial giving or hard physiotherapy sessions as those injuries heal, we’ve got to keep going. To paraphrase Paul, we’re on the train to the Kingdom already. Leave behind the baggage you don’t need and, instead of looking backward, plan for what will make the trip good and healthy and holy for you and your fellow passengers, because the arrival is going to be absolutely glorious.
