Word of Salvation – Vol. 18 No.38 – September 1972
Revolution Or Redemption?
Sermon by Rev. A. I. de Graaf, B.D. on Mat.10:34-39
Scripture Readings: Isa.26:1-19; Mat.10:16-42
Psalter Hymnal: 324; 95:1,2,3 (after law); 158; 448; 449:3
If there is one word in the air today, it is the word REVOLUTION. You hear it everywhere. Now my dictionary tells me that it means: THE OVERTHROW OF ONE ORDER OF SOCIETY IN ORDER TO SET UP ANOTHER.
We hear the word “revolution” a lot because more and more people feel things are wrong in our world and they can’t be changed normally any longer. In a way – even in the third world – we have it better now than we ever had before. But it is as with the American negro: we have looked over the fence and seen a glimpse of greener pastures, and now our patience has gone. OR – we have looked over the OTHER fence and we have seen a glimpse of dark destruction, and we panic and our patience has gone and complaints are all over the place.
Recently Australia was visited by the American Consumer Champion, Ralph Nader. The man is immensely popular – some even slate him as a successful hopeful for the Presidency! – because he fights for the common man against big industry and dumb bureaucrats. The common man feels that he’s being had, because he must pay lots of good money for bad articles or lazy service, and who listens to him when he complains? “We don’t take it any more” say the people!
Recently a bunch of students at the University were spoken to about CHRIST, Who He Is, but afterward there were not many questions about THAT! But there WERE impatient questions about the ChristIANS! “How about it? What are you doing about our mess here? Somebody had better do something and quick.” There is a widespread feeling that NOBODY who is, or has been, in power in the world, is yet to be trusted! The Student paper “Semper Floreat” tells of a group called CHRISTIAN ANARCHISTS who say that: belonging to Christ means you can’t belong to ANY STATE or be under ANY human authority! All these human authorities want bad things and men are all free and equal!
Not so long ago a new political party was formed in Queensland: the Revolutionary Socialist party. They don’t believe in bosses, they don’t believe in labour unions either! ‘All these are out to get you!’ they say. Don’t think they are communists mind you! Listen what the write about the COMMUNIST revolution in 1917: (and I quote): “In Russia in 1917 the workers were not only able to overthrow the autocratic Czar, they were able to take the property out of the hands of the ruling class as well. However, what they did lose, and in a very short space of time, was THE RIGHT TO DECIDE FOR THEMSELVES what to produce, and how to produce it, where to sell it, and how to arrange the human relationships in the actual work places. So the Russian workers lost their freedom, and are today in the same position as we are, with the difference that instead of private enterprise and government administration of the work place, the Russian workers are controlled by… bureaucrats,.. in a… big political party.” He goes on: “Today however, here where WE live, even if a worker has a good job, all the overtime in the world, 2 houses, 2 TV sets, 2 washing machines and 2 motor cars, he is still powerless to make the decisions about the way he works, the quality of the finished product, his living wage. In short, he has NO SAY in the RUNNING OF HIS OWN LIFE!”
Do you get it? This man, too, wants revolution, and he, too, says as revolutionaries have said it time and again throughout history before: They are ALL wrong, they are ALL falsely running our life and our country into the ground! Even the communists are! But let US do a better job! WE will succeed! Negroes sing: “We will overcome! and aboriginals begin to sing it, too: let us OURSELVES try to run our lives! They mean well, and they meant well before! The United States of America started with a revolution, too! And their “Declaration of Independence” also starts by saying that “men, free and equal, should be able to pursue happiness on earth”. But for all their good intentions, they have had trouble to this day. Because bringing happiness and equal justice under law is an elusive thing.
Now – that is the kind of world into which God sent His son Jesus. He was born under the Roman Emperor Augustus and was born under circumstances of crying poverty far from home, because a far- away Emperor in Rome wanted to know how many taxpayers he had. They were not really people to him. He didn’t care a hoot. And Jesus died on a cross as the result of a monstrous miscarriage of justice: the famous Roman Law that guaranteed everybody a fair trial. That was under Emperor Tiberias. And only a bit later, under Emperor Nero, the cruellest sadist ever to sit on the Roman throne, Jesus’ followers were going to get it! They would be burned and crucified! They would be tortured and thrown before lions!
Now that was then a world as is ours today: a world brimming over with unfairness, a world misused and polluted, where it was impossible for the small man to feel part, to belong, to run his own life. Always the Powers, the Systems, the Establishments… seemed to be running it for him. Now, how did Jesus react to such a world? Can we say HE, God’s Son, was a preacher of REVOLUTION?
You all know, as I do, and I say it with shame, how Christian Churches later on have allowed themselves to be used as “the lap dog of the establishment”. How they refused to preach in favour of the poor because the rich would withhold the preachers’ salaries. We know how churches have protected war and even backed the cruelty and bloodshed of the Crusades, conquest by the sword of lands held by another faith. Yes we have much to be ashamed of – but let us forget about the ChristIANS, and let us look at CHRIST Himself, now. What about HIM? Was He a revolutionary? An Anarchist?
Well let me begin by concluding from MATTHEW 10:34-39 that He was RADICAL. Radical does not necessarily mean that you’re a bomb-thrower or a chap who wants to shock others by dirty words and hateful invective. Radical means: To get down to the very roots and to call a spade a spade, yes.
Our Lord sure did not pussyfoot around! When the bright Light of the Word of God had to shine on the dirty business of our rotten sin and selfishness, then He did not shrink from calling King Herod “That Fox”. (He was the king who murdered his relatives to safeguard his throne.)
Leaders of the religious establishment of His day who said the one thing but DID quite another were told that they were ‘white- washed graves!’ and ‘Hypocrites’. He dared to challenge the powers that ruled Israel in that day, and many people rallied to Him because they saw in Him a fearless leader against the Status Quo. They tired of their leaders, too, in that occupied country and with the glory of freedom long gone!
And no doubt Judas Iscariot as well as the Fiery “Sons of Thunder”, James and John, loved and followed their Master as thousands loved and followed Him, a kind of Che Guevara who would get at the head of the scattered forces of the Resistance and proclaim Revolution against the Oppressors, Freedom and a Golden Age!
There is a tingling of excitement in those words from Matthew ten: “I have not come to bring you peace, Not yet peace, but the sword!” Is that not the kind of sound that Mao Tze Tung made when calling his followers out on ‘The Long March’, now almost 40 years ago? He called them to get AWAY FROM ALL THEY LOVED – AWAY FROM FATHERS MOTHERS HOMES AND CHILDREN – AND TO WALK OUT TO THE FAR BORDERS OF BATTLE to battle against the corruption that had come in the land. Yes, Jesus did say that: Radically! “He who is not for Me is against Me!”
But yet… then He says that what we must take up is NOT a submachine gun… BUT A CROSS! Strange! Then He says that the MEEK shall – no, not just GO TO HEAVEN, but – INHERIT THE EARTH. So His concern is HERE! And INHERIT – and that’s a strangely UN-militant way of getting something! And when His fiery follower Simon Peter is willing to draw the sword for him and heroically defend his master against a low horde of miserable captors, Jesus commands him nonviolence and says “Whoever takes the sword shall perish by it!” So even though He will bring NO PEACE, yet (and how often has it been forgotten) He does not want HIS KINGDOM defended by the sword.
It is ANOTHER Kingdom – it is different… IT NEEDS no such defence! When He preaches justice, SOCIAL JUSTICE about labourers worthy of their hire… about love to be given even to our enemies… about fairness and concern towards the poor Lazarus lying at our door… about feeding the hungry and quenching the thirst,,. about lending without asking back and about giving to those who could not possibly repay. When we hear Him about walking 2 miles with him who asks for 1, the unfailing concern for the underdog and the oppressed, when we hear him about the stern demands of love – then we learn how radical He is, more than ANY who ever raised any banner of justice on our polluted planet.
And yet… and yet HIS MEANS to get this are NOT destruction and revolution! NEVER violence! Why? Why not? Because He isn’t going far enough? No, but because He goes FURTHER than any revolutionary ever goes. He goes beyond what can be forced at gunpoint… He goes beyond what can be battered into a man by brainwashing. He is indeed radical in that he goes down to the very root: He says YOU MUST BE BORN AGAIN! Changing systems is not first: PEOPLE must be – and – alleluia! – CAN BE changed!
When Jesus preaches His Kingdom Manifesto in the Synagogue at Nazareth in Luke chap.4, he says that He was sent to bring healing to the broken-hearted and freedom to the prisoners! Sight to the blind and life to the dead! Because – says He – POOR PEOPLE WILL HEAR THE GOOD NEWS! And that good news is that God can make dead people alive; that MAN by God’s grace for the sake of Jesus’ death on the cross can be made new! It is that the powers of evil will NOT necessarily win but we – in the name of Jesus may fight against them!
Remember what Paul says later on – he who was Jesus’ messenger… who was an enemy before but got gloriously converted to become a soldier of Christ. He says in Ephesians 6 that WE HAVE NOT TO FIGHT AGAINST FLESH AND BLOOD NOT AGAINST HUMANS AND HUMAN INSTITUTIONS but – says he – against the very powers that rule the earth the powers of evil… THE DEMONS that can get into capitalists and communists alike. We must fight them, says Paul with the mighty weapon of the Word of God! Not with guns!
Therefore that same Paul can say in the days of Nero (Nero of all people, who was going to execute him!) that the government is an institution of God to punish evil and reward the good. It is yet necessary in a sinful world! Therefore Peter can say that Christians had to honour the emperor and submit to his institutions! For the real work of Jesus can go on even under such institutions! Because the Kingdom of God does not come with the sword, but it comes like seed growing in the ground; like leaven yeasting a whole lump of dough! That Kingdom comes when stubborn people LOSE THEIR LIFE… lose their insistence on self, when they are born again by the Spirit of God!
All the various revolutionary movements of the world have been started by people who somehow said: “All who came before us have done it wrong, but THE WORKERS THEMSELVES, ah, they can do it! NO says the Bible workers are sinners, too. They too need to be born again. Ah, said the French Revolution but let REASON be the ruling force and thinking man will be able to live in freedom, equality and brotherhood! But he couldn’t and the one was more equal than the other. Jesus is more radical than all that. He says: If you want to follow Me you have to die. You have to LOSE YOUR LIFE. You have to lose YOURSELF… your insistence on YOUR goodness.
It was said about Jesus shortly after HE was born that He would be a fall and a rising again of many people. FALL… He would make them fall! Only then can I rise, when I have fallen, fallen in deep humility at the foot of the cross! Yes said Old Simeon about Him, “Jesus shall be a sign that will be contradicted!” Is He ever..?!
Even we Christians, after 20 centuries of Christianity, we have our ways of sticking to self, our WORLDLY ways of getting things. We defend ourselves – ALWAYS OTHERS are to blame when things go wrong. But Jesus is more radical.
The slave-ship captain Newton was as rough and callous as they came, carting blacks from Africa to the New World at huge profits. A Christian nation! Yes, profitable, too! But Jesus got Newton, and more than a revolution took place in that man, and he was changed, NOT AT GUNPOINT but by a change of heart! – to see his sin, his utter evil nature and thus, by changing that kind of people, Jesus made people see what a terrible thing slavery was. Christ’s Kingdom – changing people, has resulted in the abolishment of slavery. It has given us institutions of mercy where children are cared for and old people nursed. It has given us the only places where alcoholics are welcome. And it has been at the root, in the western world, of a democracy where respect is due to the opinion of others. But if democracy is now getting sour and big powers seem to loom behind it, is that not because Jesus is edged out of public life and God is laughed out of the class room and the court? When man is just at the mercy of man, is there any mercy?
I ask this with great concern, today. Because also in the church also among Christians, we get situations where we just resort to the ways of the world, where we get hard as nails, where we seek an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Also in the church we can meet people who SAY they love Jesus but inside the doors of their houses where no one can check on them, they stand on THEIR OWN rights and bully and bluff!
We Christians, too, at times think we can do things the world’s way AND love Jesus at the same time. But it cannot be done: He is more radical than that? He wants changed hearts and therefore changed lives. His follower can be that even under communism. His disciple does not DEPEND on others being good to Him to walk in the light. Jesus needs no guns. Christian people are beginning to rediscover this after centuries of church protection by powerful states. Centuries also of compromise where politics and science were left to non-Christians because Christians were too busy preparing reservations for heaven.
But to meet Jesus means to come at the cross roads. It means a radical change first of all in yourself. You will have to die. You will have to utterly loather yourself as one who crucified your Lord – one who falls short of all the commandments of your God. But when you have discovered that then you may rise up and live – and knowing – and expecting the coming of THIS Lord Jesus back to earth. For He IS coming and therefore we do NOT have to scramble for earthly goods as if THAT’s all our happiness.
We may be FREE, free to serve Him, free to love, free and new changed men and women who THEN will also seek to claim the crown rights of This King of glory here on earth. For that Christian remembers how just before He went to the throne of all the universe this Lord said: “Unto Me has been given all the power in heaven and on earth!” Power, yes, but given! That’s the only way to get it. Power that we fight for (against other people) is power that corrupts and – as Lord Acton said – absolute power then corrupts absolutely. But the power that is GIVEN children of God as the power GIVEN to Jesus, is the power of love, the power that WILL change the world, after it has first changed ME. The ways of revolution – revolution against God! – are still ways of death. But the ways of the Lord are life and joy! Still today!
Amen.