A Prophet's Reward

(Scriptures: Genesis 22:1-14 Jeremiah 28:5-9
Romans 6:12-23 Matthew 10:32-42)

Today the lectionary gives us an odd, and challenging, assortment of Scripture readings. We have the very difficult story of Abraham’s willingness to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice before God stops him. We have Jeremiah’s response to a false prophet who promised a speedy end to Babylonian captivity. We have Paul’s ruminations about the power of sin and grace in our lives. And we have the tail end of a section of Jesus’ instructions to his disciples in preparation of sending them out on their first mission. He is very up front about how divisive his message will be – households will be set to disagreement about him, because Jesus makes an absolute claim for the primary loyalty of his disciples. Jesus said that those who would put even their own families above their commitment to Jesus are not worthy of Jesus.

We get a picture of what loyalty to God will mean in our very difficult reading from the Old Testament. We’re told that God tests Abraham by demanding that he offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice. In hearing this, we should remember that Isaac was Abraham’s only son by his wife Sarah, the son that God had promised Abraham and Sarah, the son for whom, in their old age, Abraham and Sarah had waited for so long. And now God was telling Abraham to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. And as we read, we wonder – how could God ask such a thing. It’s a barbaric request. It didn’t make sense. And the text heightens the unease within us when, in addressing Abraham, God explicitly refers to Isaac as “your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love.” Talk about twisting the knife!

Oddly, we’re not given any sense that Abraham hesitated. He makes the necessary preparations and calls Isaac to go on a walk with him. We’re not given access to Abraham’s thoughts during the long walk to the top of Mt. Moriah. We do learn that Isaac seemed to be getting some hint of what was to come, or at least was feeling increasingly uneasy about where this walk with his father might be leading, when Isaac observed that Abraham had brought everything but the sacrificial animal, to which Abraham said that the Lord would provide the sacrifice. And, of course, that’s just what happened: After Abraham had bound Isaac for sacrifice and raised his knife, the Lord stopped him just in time, Abraham saw a ram stuck in the bushes, and offered the ram as the sacrifice. God commended Abraham for proving that he would not withhold his own son from God. As awful as this story reads to us, it’s considered a holy moment in Jewish history; the mountain was called Yahweh-yireh or Jehovah-Jireh – the Lord provides. Through the years, as people would ask “how did this mountain get the name “The Lord Provides”, the community elders would recount this story. Many centuries later, King David offered a sacrifice on this same site to ward off a plague on his people, and it is thought that this is the same mountain where Solomon’s Temple was built. Also, this incident established once and for all that, unlike some of the false gods of the peoples surrounding Israel, Israel’s God did not demand human sacrifice as payment for the peoples sins.

It would be hard to imagine what the walk down the mountain was like for Abraham and Isaac. On one hand, both were alive to walk down the mountain, and that’s good. But what would the conversation have been like? Perhaps Isaac asked his father “what on earth were you thinking?” Isaac must have wondered if he could ever fully trust his father again. Both lived to tell of their encounter with the divine, and both were blessed for their faithfulness, but both were forever changed by the experience – it was a most costly blessing.

Now, in our Gospel reading, as Jesus is preparing his disciples for their first mission trip, Jesus is not asking his disciples to offer their families on altars as human sacrifice. But Jesus is asking his disciples potentially to sacrifice their relationships with their families, to put their loyalty to Jesus ahead of their loyalties to their families. Especially with the more conservative expressions of Christianity having become so identified with what they call “family values”, Jesus’ words here seem almost – dare I say it – unchristian. And so we may hasten to try to explain away Jesus’ words….surely he didn’t mean to say that! But if we read the Gospels with an open mind, without preconceived notions, with the blinders off, we will likely find that Jesus’ sense of family values was and is very different from the family values we hear about from the TV and radio preachers. On one hand, Jesus saw marital vows as binding, and left only narrow grounds for divorce. Jesus also condemned the tradition of his day by which one could avoid supporting their parents by designating portions of their possessions as items designated to donated in the future to the synagogue, and the writer of I Timothy says that one who fails to provide for their family is worse than an unbeliever. Divorced women and widows without support were very vulnerable in Jesus’ day, and Jesus didn’t want the Christian community to leave these vulnerable ones out in the cold, so to speak. On the other hand, Jesus was calling his followers into a family of faith whose ties were to be even stronger than those of our natural family. This is how Paul, in one of our readings from Romans that we’ll encounter in a couple weeks, could call Jesus the firstborn of a large family. This is how Jesus could say that his disciples who had left behind their families would receive a family a hundredfold. Indeed, once when Jesus was teaching and someone said his mother and brothers were outside the house, Jesus called his followers his true family, and left mom and the brothers standing outside. So it is in this sense that Jesus said he had come to bring a sword; the kind of Christian community he sought to build would inevitably intrude on families of birth or families of marriage, would leave non-Christian family members feeling like they, too, were shut out of some part of the lives of their Christian family members.

Jesus ends this difficult, difficult section of teaching by saying that those who find their lives will lose them, while those who lose their lives for his sake would find them. At this point, Jesus’ demands likely were giving his disciples second thoughts…do we really want to hang around with this guy? Maybe when he sends us out, we should just keep walking. But then Jesus ends with a few verses about rewards – that those who provide hospitality for his disciples, it is as though they provided hospitality for Christ himself. Anyone who welcomes a prophet as a prophet receives a prophet’s reward, and one who welcomes a righteous person as a righteous person receives the reward of the righteous, and one who does as little as offer a cup of cold water to a new believer – whom Jesus called “one of these little ones” – would not lose their reward.

That phrase, “a prophet’s reward” struck me as having multiple layers of meaning. What is a prophet’s reward? On one hand, we know that prophets generally met with opposition – remember that Jesus called Jerusalem the city that stoned the prophets. Our brief reading from Jeremiah reminds us that false prophets like Hananiah, who told people what they wanted to hear, were welcomed, while true prophets such as Jeremiah, who told them difficult things that they needed to hear, were persecuted. And certainly those who openly welcomed and provided hospitality to a prophet, might risk bringing down on their own heads the persecution encountered by the prophet – a sort of guilt by association. On the other hand, by casting their lot with the prophet, and by extension, casting their lot with God, God would set their hospitality on the same level as the prophet’s faithfulness, and reward them accordingly. So prophets received contrasting rewards, if you will – persecution from the world; eternal life from God.

It would seem that, in these passages, God is making a whole lot of extreme demands. God asks much. Perhaps it seems that God asks too much. How can God possibly expect us to be willing to leave everything else behind to be disciples of Christ? When we start to think along these lines, we should remember that God is not asking anything of us that God did not do himself. Abraham was, finally, not asked to offer Isaac as a sacrifice, but God did offer his son Jesus as a sacrifice. As costly as Christian discipleship may be for us, it’s nothing compared to what God’s passionate, committed love affair with humankind has cost God. As today’s reading from Romans says, “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord is the gift of God, free to us – but purchased by God at great price, the death of his Son Jesus. Similarly, while we cannot work our way into heaven or do anything to earn eternal life – truly responding to the message of Jesus will, over time, change our lives in radical ways. As Paul said in our reading from Romans, because of the saving work of Christ, we are freed from sin to be radically obedient to God, called from self-absorbed, self-centered isolation into the new community of faith. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote of this in his book “The Cost of Discipleship” when he contrasted what he called “cheap grace” – the false view that because of the saving work of Christ, we can continue to do whatever we want and Christ will somehow clean it up in the end – with what Bonhoeffer called “costly grace” – grace that makes a radical change in our lives. And Bonhoeffer practiced what he preached: Bonhoeffer’s radical obedience to God at a time when the German church of his day was corrupted by obedience to Hitler, led him to his execution by the Nazis.

From Romans 11:22 – “Note then the kindness and the severity of God.” God’s great kindness led Jesus to the cross. God’s severity demands a response from those who would follow. In today’s readings, God’s severity may demand that we leave behind all that is familiar for the sake of the Gospel. By contrast, in God’s kindness, God will reward even those who offer a cup of cold water in the name of Jesus to the least of Christ’s disciples. May God’s radical kindness toward us lead us toward radical kindness toward our neighbors. May we at Emanuel always be ready to welcome those whom God sends us. Amen.