Part of Paul’s letter to the Romans that we have just heard (1:16-17), contains the words, ‘I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith...’ The word ‘Gospel’ literally means ‘Good news’, and as Paul writes you get the sense that he is encouraging others to stand up for the gospel, to not be ashamed, but to fight to share the good news that is for everyone.
A farmer went into his bank one day and announced to the manager that he had bad news and good news. "First, the bad news..." said the manager. "Well," said the farmer, "I can't make my mortgage payments. And that crop loan I've taken out for the past 10 years - I can't pay that off, either. Not only that, I won't be able to pay you the couple of hundred thousand I still have outstanding on my tractors and other equipment. So I'm going to have to give up the farm and turn it all over to you for whatever you can salvage out of it." There was silence for a minute and then the bank manager said, "What's the good news?" "Ah, the good news is that I'm going to keep on banking with you," said the farmer.
What is good news for one person is so often bad news for someone else, but the gospel of Jesus is truly good news for everyone. During the days of Communist oppression in Romania a Pastor, Richard Wurmbrand, was responsible for leading a young father with a wife and 2 children to faith, and for his faith this young man along with Richard Wurmbrand himself were imprisoned. The two met in prison and Richard Wurmbrand apologised for leading him to the faith that had put him in the prison camp – but the man knew good news, and despite all of the pain he felt and the hardships he was facing, he told Wurmbrand that he would rather be there facing death or anything else than never to have known Jesus personally.
The gospel of Jesus doesn’t promise short term happiness, it doesn’t promise material rewards, but it promises much more value than any of those things… that the power of God will never leave us and the compassion of God will always be overflowing.
And so armed with this good news we turn to the gospel for today (Matthew 7:21-29), and it doesn’t immediately seem to be very good news at all. It seems as if an awful lot of people are going to be disappointed when they come to enter the kingdom of heaven. It sounds as if Jesus is saying that even though some people think they’ve been doing good things, Jesus is going to say to them, “I never knew you.” And worse than that, Jesus will call these people “evildoers.”
And on first reading that doesn’t sound like the Jesus of all compassion that I’ve just been mentioning ! But there’s a lot more to these verses in Matthew than Jesus giving somebody the hard line; these verses are just a short bit of a much longer lesson Jesus is teaching his listeners. And unless we take a look at the whole teaching, we miss a lot.
This section comes at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus began his teaching with the well-known Beatitudes, Blessed are the poor, the meek, the merciful, the righteous. Sometimes we tend to stop after the Beatitudes, but Jesus actually kept on teaching for three chapters.
If we read through Chapters 5, 6, and 7, we hear Jesus getting even more specific. He told his followers that they were to be the salt of the earth and a light to the world. He reminded them about the commandments, that they should love others as they loved themselves, and that love included their enemies. He talked about not showing off when they prayed or fasted, not parading their religion. But he also consoled them by telling them not to worry, because God loved them and would care for them always…
In these several chapters of Matthew’s gospel, we hear Jesus being a real teacher. He offers them the Beatitudes, which are easy to remember but hard to do. He gives them specifics of how they should behave, he gives them the words that we know as the Lord’s Prayer, and he offers them the unconditional love of God.
So why, after all this, does he say, “Some of you will hear me say, ‘I do not know you’”?
He says that because even after all his teaching, even after all the things he did, some still didn’t believe, or at least were still not prepared to even try and follow his teaching. These people saw him do miracles – they had Jesus in the flesh, and yet they didn’t follow…
Jesus is full of love and compassion for people everywhere – when people walk away from him, he hurts – you will remember the story of the rich young ruler. As he walked away from the promises of Jesus, Jesus was full of compassion for him. But that compassion also leads him to demand that if we say we are his followers, then we must really follow him.
We seek to do the things he wants us to do, we seek out from him what those things are, and we try… we will fail sometimes, but it is the not even trying that hurts God most… And so today’s gospel is a stern reminder that we can’t get away with appearing to do good while we pick and choose who it is we do our good deeds for. Jesus is saying to his followers – to us – make sure your actions and your motives match.
Many people worry about how they can share the gospel with other people as we are commanded to do. The most effective way of all is not to have all the answers ready to any objections about the faith, it’s not to offer books for people to go away and read, it’s not to show them videos or films, although all of these things may have their place at the right time, but the most effective way of sharing the gospel is to display in our lives that the gospel of Jesus is making a positive difference to us in terms of how we see ourselves, the people around us and all of the world.
Jesus says over and over that all we have to do is hear his words and act on them, hear and believe, hear and obey. And the important thing is to remember that those early Jews already knew what they were supposed to do. Jesus wasn’t giving them a whole new set of rules to live by. He’d already reminded them at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount that he hadn’t come to abolish the laws they already had, but to fulfill them – to help them live the life they knew more faithfully.
It’s the same for us. We know what we have to do. It’s just hard to do it all the time. Hearing the word of God, hearing what Jesus says to us, isn’t something we do once and then tick off our list. We have to keep listening all our lives, learning more and more about how God wants us to live.
We have our baptismal promises, we have the words and actions of Jesus, we have the commandments, and what Jesus is telling us today is that we need to be faithful, that we need to examine our motives and make sure that what we do and say fits in with the life that God asks us to live. AMEN
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