True witness

Jesus said: “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”  Matthew 6:5-6

When I first began to take a serious interest in football (London, SE 25, Selhurst Park, the home of the mighty Crystal Palace, at that time in what was known as “the Third Division South”) the idea of professional footballers having a spiritual life, of being “religious”, was unthinkable. True, the match day programme used to contain little biographies of the players, and I do remember that our left-back, Alfie Noakes, bred bulldogs in his spare time. But beyond that I can’t remember a single detail about any player’s personal life, religious or otherwise.

There was, I think, a Blackpool player called Jimmy Armfield, who was known as a Christian – who in fact played the organ at his local church (and who narrowly missed being part of the 1966 world-cup squad). But his was the only name from top-class football that sticks in my mind.

Today, over sixty years on, it’s very different.

Many players routinely cross themselves as they run onto the pitch, or drop to their knees in prayer when they score a goal, or have a religious slogan on their tee-shirt. We read that some clubs have, alongside resident chaplains, regular prayer and Bible-study groups. (Some people think it’s part of a “quiet revival” that is taking place in this country, particularly among young men. Adherents of other religions, especially Islam, can of course be equally zealous.)

I find myself rather torn when I see these displays of religious commitment.

There’s a part of me that says, “How good to see these young men, thoroughly modern as they are with or without their tattoos, so obviously committed to their faith. Unashamed of Jesus! Good for them! - a great witness!”

And then there’s a part of me that calls to mind the teaching of Jesus in Matthew 6:5-6, where he warns his followers not to aim “to be seen by others” when they pray. No, he tells them, “go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen”. Religious devotion is essentially a private thing, not for display.

Not for one moment would I suggest that these players are “hypocrites”, as Jesus says of those who “babble like pagans” – who am I to judge them? But there does seem to be something of a conflict here with the clear teaching of Jesus.

The question goes deeper, in fact, than the matter of public display. I find myself asking: When these players pray, publicly or not, what do they actually pray for? One player I read about said he prayed once that God would help him to score a hat-trick and… well, guess what happened!

I think this is more serious than the business of making a public display. If a Christian, any Christian, wants to ask for God’s blessing on what they do, surely the top priority is to ask God not so much for “success” in the obvious sense, but for grace to act always with Christlike honesty and integrity.

If you happen to be a professional footballer, for example, how about: “Lord, help me today to play to the highest level of skill of which I’m capable - and to commit no deliberate fouls, to pull nobody’s shirt, to grapple with no opponents in the penalty area, not to argue with the referee, not to appeal for a throw-in when I know perfectly well the ball came off my boot…” (one could go on for a long time!).

In a nutshell: the way to publicly declare our allegiance to Jesus is to live our lives in the likeness of Jesus: humbly, graciously, honestly… to act in such a way as to cause people to notice unawares, not to thrust our allegiance in their faces.

To be fair, the people Jesus is critical of in these verses seem to be people who you might call “professional pray-ers”, synagogue leaders or hard-line Pharisees. And he certainly isn’t teaching his followers for all time that coming together for prayer is wrong. No! You only have to read Acts to see a growing church which was also a church committed to meeting together for fellowship of different kinds: the purely “private” Christian simply doesn’t exist.

But… well, you get my point.

Father, let the beauty of Jesus be seen in me - not only in what I do, but in what I am, and in what your Spirit is making me. Amen.

A Grrr... moment

Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow-believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly. James 3:1

Oh no! Not another one! Not again! Grrr!

It’s not often I find myself giving vent to sheer angry frustration and disappointment. But it happened the other day: I had heard the news of yet another prominent Christian leader having to “step back” from ministry after it became known that he had been unfaithful to his wife over many years. All right, I didn’t really grind my teeth (as in “Grrr!”), but that’s how I felt.

This was a man, known as a wise and solid evangelical, whom I had come to admire and respect from reading his books. I’ve been around long enough to know that it shouldn’t come as a surprise when a famous Christian in the public eye turns out to be – how shall I put it? – a touch flaky. But… this particular man? No! No! Who would have thought it? Grrr indeed..

What right did I have to be angry? None at all, of course. Aren’t I too a sinner? Yes, indeed. If everyone who loved and possibly even respected me knew my weaknesses and secret sins no doubt they would be grinding their teeth at me. But when this kind of scandal involves someone in the Christian spotlight it seems such a victory for the devil, such a disgrace on the church. Grrr!

How should we as Christians respond when someone – prominent or not - falls? I’ve drawn together three New Testament passages which can help us to find our way.

First, Galatians 6:1: Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently. But watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted.

The emphasis here is all on restoration, on bringing the person back.

It’s worth noticing that, in what seem to us those heady early days of the church, things were anything but perfect – no, bad things happened, so let’s not be so naïve as to idealise the early church! Likewise, we too shouldn’t be overly shocked when it happens among us, but recognise that if someone has indeed lost their way spiritually it simply demonstrates that while they are sinners saved by grace (“Hallelujah!”), they are nonetheless still sinners (“Lord, have mercy!”).

Two matters of attitude are worth noticing.

First, there’s that word ”gently”. If we are concerned to restore someone who has lost their way there is to be no high-and-mightiness, no holier-than-thouness. Loving compassion is the order of the day.

Second, look out for yourself: “watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted”. Yes, never forget that you could be next!

The second passage is 1 Corinthians 5:1-13: It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate… And you are proud!...

The emphasis here is much more severe: in effect, it is all about holiness.

If we read the whole passage we see how Paul concludes that this man’s fall is so scandalous that he must be “put out of the fellowship” – or “handed over to Satan (“excommunicated”, to use the official word). That sounds pretty grim! So while the situation in Galatians 6 called for compassion and gentleness, the Corinthian crisis called for much stronger discipline: “Expel the wicked person from among you”. The church may not be perfect, but it is called to holiness, to Christlikeness, and we must never forget that. God is a truly gracious God: but he is not a soft, indulgent God. Is this a reminder some of us need?

But wait a minute. Even here the ultimate aim of this harshness is to restore the sinner, not to damn him: “so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord”. Quite how Paul sees this working out in practice is not entirely clear; but let’s just notice that the aim is positive rather than negative: salvation, not condemnation.

The third passage is Matthew 18:15-17, where Jesus lays down quite a detailed procedure for handling disputes in the body of the church: If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen  even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.

The emphasis here is on unity and harmony in the body of the church. Everybody involved has the right to speak and be heard, and the issue is not to be made public unless really necessary.

How many churches have suffered serious damage through misunderstanding, gossip, even quite spiteful talk? The word “toxic”, poisonous, has become a bit of an in-word in recent years to describe a bad, destructive atmosphere in a community. Well, a lot of damage in churches might be prevented if we learned the discipline of keeping our mouths firmly shut and our thoughts resolutely pure. Do I have a poisonous influence in the life of my church?

Perhaps we can sum it up like this: God loves to forgive; but he also expects holiness and purity.

Father, even those of us who have known you many years still sin and fail. Please forgive us as we truly repent, and please help us to become truly those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. Amen.

The pool at Bethesda

Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Bethesda, which has five porticoes. In these lay many invalids—blind, lame, and paralysed. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, ‘Do you want to be made well?’ The sick man answered him, ‘Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Stand up, take your mat and walk.’ At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk. John 5:2-9

It must have been one of the most wretched, miserable places in Jerusalem.

The pool of Bethesda (or Bethzatha) was surrounded by a “great number of disabled people… the blind, the lame, the paralysed” lying there (can you picture them?), in the forlorn hope that a miraculous healing might occur.

Apparently from time to time the waters of the pool would be mysteriously “stirred”, and the belief was that if you were lucky enough to get into the water at once you might be healed. This was no doubt pure superstition, perhaps growing out of a one-off coincidence that had got talked around; but a belief in fake cures (“hope springs eternal in the human breast”, after all) is a feature of human nature throughout history – don’t be taken in by the snake-oil salesman!

John tells us that Jesus visited this desolate place, presumably surveyed the scene with compassionate eyes, and then focussed his attention on a man who had been coming to the pool for thirty-eight years. Within moments the man was up and walking, in response first to Jesus’ penetrating question, “Do you want to get well?”, and, second, his sharp command, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk”. (No mumbo-jumbo, no “stirred water” there!) Various questions arise…

First, why did Jesus choose to visit this particular place?

John tells us it was “for one of the Jewish festivals”, but he doesn’t tell us which one. All we know from the Gospels as a whole is that he loved to be among ordinary, and especially among needy, people. That thought alone presents us with a challenge.

At Christmas we celebrate the fact that when he “came down to earth from heaven” he didn’t come to a palace or to a rich family’s home, but to a make-shift birth-place, and that set a pattern for his earthly life (he “had nowhere to lay his head”, Matthew 8:20). Not that he neglected or ignored the rich and powerful; not at all. He valued all people alike, but frequently chose to be among those right at the bottom of the pile.

So?

Well, we might not be in a position to devote our lives to looking after “the poor and mean and lowly”, but what we can do is come honestly before God to ask if there is anything practical he might want us to do, not least in terms of financial support for charities and other organisations, Christian and otherwise, which work at the sharp end of human need.

The church, especially in the western world, is sometimes accused of being “middle-class”, biased in favour of the relatively well off. Would we, in Jesus’ place, have wrinkled our noses and kept well away from Bethesda?

Second, why did he choose this particular man to talk to?

It seems likely that somebody had drawn his attention to him – he “learned that he had been in this condition for a long time” - at 38 years probably the longest-suffering person in this sad place. But more to the point, we notice that Jesus approaches the man rather than vice versa – usually the person in need comes to Jesus in faith. Was Jesus wanting to make some particular point?

This leads to a third question: does Jesus’ very direct question “Do you want to get well?” imply an element of criticism? Is it something of a rebuke?

Why would Jesus feel the need to ask that question? Is he suggesting that, while not doubting that the man has a real problem, he suspected him of having got used to being overly dependent on the kindness and good will of others? All right, he has nobody to help him into the waters when they stirred, but presumably there were people who brought him food and looked after his basic needs? How else would he have survived? And thirty-eight years is a very long time!

The ancient world was familiar with people we might call “professional beggars” who had discovered that, while a disability might be genuine, it could perhaps be taken advantage of rather than struggled against, especially given the lack of any welfare state.

Likewise, GP doctors in Britain today report the rising numbers of patients who come to see them virtually demanding a sick-note so that they need not work – sometimes even with threats. You hear too of prisoners leaving prison and immediately committing another crime because life inside is preferable to life outside. Had the man in the story slipped into that frame of mind? Is Jesus’ sharp question intended to put him on the spot?

We need to be very careful here, of course, especially those of us who have been blessed with good health and strength (and never seen the inside of a prison), because certainly there are genuine, honest people who lack the ability to work, and who should receive all the support they can get. Who are we to judge them?

But, putting it bluntly, Jesus didn’t call his followers to expect an easy ride. “Take up your cross and follow me” is no invitation to ease and comfort! Reading the lame man’s character that day at Bethesda, could it be that he decided it was time to address him with a deliberately abrupt command: “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk”?

This is only speculation, of course, but it can’t be ruled out. And so we are reminded that Jesus calls us to salvation from our sins, not to an insurance policy against all the troubles and hardships of an uncertain world. (Paul reinforces this robust attitude in 2 Thessalonians 3:10: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat”: no messing there!)

We may live a long, long way from the lame man at Bethesda, our circumstances very different from his. But we too can be lazy, too content with settling for second or third best when there is no need. Could Jesus’ words “Pick up your bed and walk!” (or as we might put it, “Time to get off your backside!”) be a word for some of us today?

Father, thank you for the mercy and compassion of Jesus, especially for those in greatest need. Thank you too that he expects his followers to sometimes endure hardship: Lord, save me from laziness and self-pity when the way is hard. Amen.

Soften my heart, Lord,/ Soften my heart,/ From all indifference/ Set me apart./ To feel your compassion,/ To weep with your tears. / Come, soften my heart, O Lord,/ Soften my heart. Amen. Graham Kendrick.