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11 For thus says the Lord God: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. 12As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. 13I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land; and I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the watercourses, and in all the inhabited parts of the land. 14I will feed them with good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel shall be their pasture; there they shall lie down in good grazing land, and they shall feed on rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. 15I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God. 16I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.

20 Therefore, thus says the Lord God to them: I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. 21Because you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide, 22I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged; and I will judge between sheep and sheep.

 23 I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd. 24And I, the Lord, will be their God, and my servant David shall be prince among them; I, the Lord, have spoken.

Matthew 25: 31 - 46

Today, according to the lectionary, is Christ the King Sunday. We’re approaching the Season of Advent – when we consider the coming of the king – both at the end of time in judgement, and of course as the Saviour, whose birth we celebrate at Christmas time. As a result when Advent does begin next Sunday, the colours change from green to purple – the colour of royalty.

I was going to begin this sermon by saying that if you don’t find today’s sermon offensive, then I won’t have done my job. Well, that may not be true, but then again, it might. My conclusion is that if you do find it offensive, then it’s meant for you. In the words of the Collect for the 2^nd Sunday in Advent; mark, learn and inwardly digest. So hold onto your hat!

This Sunday I want to tell you about something that has bothered me for some time, and I’d like to share with you what I believe the solution to the problem is too.

It’s bothered me that those of us who claim to take the demands of the Gospel seriously, seem over the years to have moved away from the plain sense of Jesus’ teaching. This is evident in a number of areas. As a result; under the influence of spiritual luke-warmness, possibly the spirit of the age we live in, and any number of other things, many of us seem to have lost what St John calls in the Book of Revelation – our “first love”. You remember the part – where Jesus says to the Church in Laodicea, ‘I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. 16So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth. (Revelation 3: 15 – 16)

Now as with the love between a man and a woman, the nature of that love changes. When we first fall in love we are dead keen, and it’s more about chemistry than about care. More about attraction than relationship. Relationship involves getting to know the lover on a much deeper level than simple attraction. In time as the relationship matures, as you get to know the person behind the attraction, a balance occurs and the relationship becomes more rounded - it’s not simply about selfish enjoyment, but about selfless enjoyment. If the relationship develops, we begin to enjoy giving as much as we do receiving. (Of course some attractions never progress beyond selfish pleasure but I’m not speaking about those today). A mature or balanced relationship retains the attraction but gains in addition a whole new perspective, something we can happily call “first love” – at least in the sense St John uses it.

But how do we know what quality of relationship we have with God? I think how we both begin and continue to relate to Jesus will hold the answer for us. When things get off on the right foot it makes a world of difference.

It’s important to remember that Jesus was born under the Old Covenant. The New Covenant was instituted with the death and resurrection of Jesus (Hebrews 9), so while he was ministering on earth he was operating within the old dispensation, while at the same time acting as an ice-breaker for the new dispensation. And within that Old Covenant understanding – forged largely out of the Law given to Moses at Mt Sinai - Jesus came bursting onto the scene as God’s Storm Trooper.

The most basic element of his being – the fact that he was God – was offensive. There was nothing more offensive to a Jew than a man calling himself God. The very idea was what we might describe today as ‘mind-blowing’.  Theologians call this the scandal of particularity – God squeezed into one man, largely limited in time and space to little old Palestine in the time of Roman rule – God breaking into history in a way he hadn’t before.

And Jesus seemed to rub everyone up the wrong way, not just the Jews. Read the Gospels again. You’ll be amazed at how offensive Jesus’ language was. Basically, he behaved like God. That was offensive – offensive, that is, in someone who appeared to most people to be a man.

So here he was - the very fulfilment of the Law – interpreting it in the way he saw fit. That was offensive too.

As we can see from our reading in the Gospel of Matthew this morning, Jesus spoke in the vein of the prophets of old with authority about judgement. He spoke a great deal about judgement. In this politically correct age we don’t like to think about judgement. We find the idea offensive. However, our entire Gospel reading is about coming judgement: Jesus returning in glory, sitting on his throne, and separating out the people into what he calls the sheep and the goats. The sheep are placed on his right hand and he says to them, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world”. The goats are placed on his left hand and he says to them “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels”. In verse 46 he summarises by saying 46 “And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

This is heavy stuff and there’s a great deal of it in the New Testament.

You know when God talks about judgement he doesn’t mean a slap on the wrist with a wet bus ticket. What does God’s judgement mean to us? Do we understand that the entire biblical record in redolent with the judgement of God? Are we aware that our independent attitudes (such as they are) are not only foolish but give great offence to God? They can’t but do anything else! Do we understand that God’s anger at our sin (and by sin I mean relational separation from God – not misdemeanours which are merely the symptoms of a sinful or separated state) is because he loves us and understands the awful consequences of our separating ourselves from him – the source of all life and goodness. His anger at sin is the desperate anger of the parent who sees his child wilfully going into harm’s way.

It is the supreme lie of our age that there are no real consequences for ignoring God. The Good News was so good precisely because it stood in opposition to Bad News. But we don’t like the idea of bad news, so we pretend there is no bad news. We pretend that when Jesus speaks about the consequences he calls hell, he didn’t really mean it. Is it any wonder people don’t respond to the Good News! How can it appear to be good when there is no understanding of its opposite; no understanding that the consequences of ignoring God are dire.

God saves? What from? So we try and avoid Jesus’ teaching on hell (or separation from God) by saying, “No, it’s not so much what Jesus saves us from, it’s what he saves us to: life in the Kingdom of God.” While it is true that we are saved to the work of the Kingdom, by downplaying what we are saved from we remove in one stroke the reality of eternity and the spiritual, and reduce the Kingdom of God to nothing other than an earthly Utopia where one person treats another well.  Christianity without the spiritual: it’s called Communism and it’s been tried and found wanting. Good news is only good news in comparison to the reverse – to bad news – and Jesus called the bad news “hell” – a term which implies separation from God.

Due to the influence of popular Medieval culture, we sometimes have off-beat ideas about what hell is. There it was seen as a literal place of fire, often depicted in Medieval Miracle plays as having a great big mouth which swallowed the wicked. That’s where we get our expression “Hell’s Teeth”. The set really did have a great big hellish maw with teeth. And so we think: primitive literalism, and throw out the idea – especially when in our modern sensibilities find the idea of eternal punishment offensive.

But you might notice in Vs 41 of the reading from Matthew that Jesus refers to hell as being “prepared for the devil and his angels.” Hell was never designed for human beings. The essence of hell is the idea of separation from God. The image of undying fire was based on Gehenna, the smouldering rubbish dump outside Jerusalem – outside the holy city – i.e. separated from the holy place  - where God is. Hell is a state of separation from God.

When we realise this, it doesn’t take much to understand that when we reject God, we separate ourselves from God. It’s human beings who send themselves to hell, not God. It also doesn’t make sense to think of hell in literalistic terms because we turn it into a comic-book image. Hell won’t be I believe (to start with) much different from life on earth – with all the attendant troubles a non-Christian life brings. However, one of the things we all teach our children is about cause and effect. That there is a trajectory to the course we set in life. If I begin smoking, the place it’s leading to is an early and painful death. When I begin a life of separation from God it will lead gradually to a situation that is very unlike (but logically linked) to the one I’m in now. There is a trajectory to the courses we set – our choices lead somewhere, they have consequences.

The same principle applies to a life in heaven – a life with God. It won’t, I don’t think, be much different from our life in Christ now – to start with. But the trajectory is hopeful, positive, glorious in fact, because it leads to an ever-increasing Christlikeness and joy! What’s more, God is not going to force anyone into heaven any more than he forces anyone into the Church now. An unbeliever would be miserable in heaven!

I’ve not bothered to do a tally, but someone has written that Jesus spoke a great deal more about hell than he did about heaven. I’m not surprised!

You know the Christian faith is primarily, at its essence, neither a crutch for the weak nor a naïve and beaming benevolence – a kind of blinkered bonhomie. The Christian faith is at its heart about the truth. And the truth is that a rejection of God has dire consequences – so dire that God himself in his matchless love came into our world in a way he had never done before and suffered death to provide us with a way of escape from those consequences. William Booth (founder of the Salvation Army) knew a thing or two when he put forward the words “Blood and Fire” as the organisation’s motto. The truth about the Gospel is that there is a great deal at stake – the main features of the Gospel which we claim to be ours, are part of the most serious cosmic struggle there is – a struggle for the hearts, minds and eternal destiny of humankind. This is serious stuff.

Earlier we sang, “Maker of heaven and earth, I tremble in your holy presence.” Do we? In the letter of James we are castigated for claiming to have faith and yet not evidencing it by our actions. James 2: 19 reads “19You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder.”

On a day of clouds and thick darkness says our Ezekiel reading, God will come and judge between the sheep and the goats and between the fat sheep and the thin sheep - he will in the words of verse nineteen feed them with justice. Judgement. It is logically necessary. It is inescapable. It is a bald fact overwhelmingly witnessed to in the Old Testament, in the words of Jesus and in the rest of the New Testament. This is the first point of my message this morning: the consequences of rejecting God are dire.

Earlier I mentioned the letter of James. The core message of that letter is that our faith (if it is genuine) should lead to good works. A reading of our gospel passage today makes it clear that God will judge us on our actions – how we have treated the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, and the prisoner. Let’s make it clear that we will all have failed to be perfect in these tasks. Jesus words in Matthew 5: 48, “Be perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect” will reinforce our failure to live up to these and many other expectations Jesus has of us – especially those expressed in the Sermon on the Mount.

So how do we respond? Do we throw our hands up in horror and say, “I can’t do this. I’m outta here.” Do we (and this is the spirit of our age) think, “Ah, Jesus didn’t mean what he was saying. Perhaps this was written into the Gospels at a later stage. Anyway, God is love. He’d never do anything unloving.” Let me tell you right now that the most unloving (not to mention unjust) thing God could do would be not to mean what he says. There is no conflict between God’s holiness and his love. We just need to understand that neither of them is wishy-washy. God is serious about both.

Our response to our inability to be perfect is critical. Paul speaks about the Law of Moses being “holy, and the commandment holy, righteous and good..” (Romans 7: 12). He shows that because of the Law we are that much more aware of that fact that we fall short of God’s expectations (Romans 7). He also speaks of it as a “schoolmaster, which leads us to Christ.” (Galatians 3: 24) What does this mean? It means simply that we can’t pretend God’s requirement are not to be taken seriously. And it means our realisation that it is impossible to please God in our own strength should lead us to look to Christ for help. This very parable in our reading this morning should have the same effect: “God I can’t be perfect. Jesus, help me.”

This brings me to my second point. God expects a response to the Gospel from us. Jesus’ very first words in the Gospel of Mark are “Repent and believe the Gospel.” (Mark 1: 15). God is not some hyper-Calvinist who chooses some people and condemns others based on a favouritism that is known only to himself – and therefore we are either chosen or not, so sit back and what will be will be. Fatalism is not faith.

Wishful thinking doesn’t help either. Universalism – (the thought that in the end God will save everyone) is another form of indolence, hoping against hope that Jesus didn’t really mean what he said, and that we’ll all end up okay.

We are not automatons. We are not programmed robots. If we were there would be no such thing as love because love means exercising responsive choice. God made us in his own image – we are in the words of David “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139: 14) and we have free will – free to choose or reject the Good News. And the Scriptures make it plain that our first response to the Good News is to repent – to turn to Christ with all that we have in the understanding that only the blood of Christ can justify us before God (Revelation 1: 5, Hebrews 9: 14 and 1 Peter 1: 2). That only the relationship that grows out of genuine repentance (turning away from a life of dire consequences) can both develop and sustain that “first love” St John speaks about in the book of Revelation.  Yes we’re back to our “first love”; the thing Jesus chastises the Laodicean church for losing. If the foundation of genuine repentance and faith is sound, so is the relationship and so is our love for God.

Jesus said much love is evidenced by those who have had much forgiven (Luke 7: 47). If we don’t understand just how much we’ve been saved from, we won’t have the kind of mature love God expects from us. We are to work out our own salvation, says Paul, in fear and trembling (Philippians 2: 12): with a realisation of just how much is at stake and just how much God has done for us. There is no room for universalist clap-trap here. What an offence to God! Jesus taught in parables so that his hearers, instead of being spoon-fed  the truth, might in their hunger for God engage and grapple with what they heard and, as it were, discover the truth themselves, making it theirs, owning it and embracing God in the process. This is the way to a lively faith – and a deep relationship evidencing a “first love” for God.

I want to pick out some salient points in all this:

A realisation of the horror of what Christ saves us from (eternal separation from God – call it hell if you like) will bring us in genuine repentance to God. It will touch us deeply and engender a deep love for God within us – what St John calls “first love”, a love consisting of both attraction and caring. And that “first love” will cause us to realise just how central to our lives is the life and love of God. We will find our joy in serving God and our fellow Christians; in getting together with fellow Christians. We will be far more like the sheep destined for what Jesus calls “eternal life” than like the goats destined for what he calls “eternal punishment”. But even more important than the good works we do will be our knowledge that it is in Christ alone and by Christ’s blood that we are God’s children. This love (something that is beyond human capability or generation) will have us holding God and the things of God central to our lives.

I’d like to end by reading you the other reading set in the lectionary today – the one we did not read. It’s Paul’s prayer for the Christians at Ephesus and is found in Ephesians 1. As I read this, I ask that you imagine Paul is praying for you.

15 I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love towards all the saints, and for this reason 16I do not cease to give thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers. 17I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, 18so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, 19and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power. 20God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, 21far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. 22And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, 23which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.

Dear God, open our eyes and our hearts to you, so that, with the eyes of our hearts enlightened, we may know what is the hope to which you have called us, what are the riches of your glorious inheritance among the saints.

Lord, help us to evidence that “first love” – a love which both gives to and receives from you and our brothers and sisters in Christ. Help us not to be found wanting here, Lord.   

And if you feel you are wanting, God has taken the first step, the response is up to you. He who is both at the same time the eternal Son of God and the carpenter from Nazareth is there longing to embrace you, no matter who you are or what you’re like. God turns no-one away. He has made you in his own image – you are fearfully and wonderfully made – and he longs to see you reach your full potential in Christ. Reach out to him quietly now as we maintain a moment of silence. Ask God to open your spiritual eyes – and give yourself to him wholeheartedly that he might develop that wonderful “first love” within you. Let’s be quiet for a brief moment while we each pray to God.

AMEN.

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