Saturday, October 01, 2016
Pentecost 20, Proper 22 C ~ October 2, 2016
Sermon for The Twentieth
Sunday After Pentecost
Year C, Proper 22 ~ October
2, 2016
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Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
“I no longer call you servants, but I call
you friends.”
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided
Trinity
Slaves obey the commandments of their master because they
have to. And when they have done so, they have nothing to brag about. They have just done what they had to do. They
do not expect the master to thank them or to wait on them. Furthermore, their service is never finished,
no matter how much they do. We Christians, who call ourselves disciples of
Jesus Christ, must consider ourselves to be His slaves, in exactly this sense.
What are we to make of this
passage — this difficult passage. I think we must take it in the context of the
whole Gospel, where in another place Jesus says to the apostles I no longer call you slaves, but friends.
Notice He does not say that we are
no longer slaves, but that he no longer calls
us slaves.
The paradox is found in one
of the Collects for Daily Morning Prayer, which refers to God as the One Whose service is perfect freedom. [In
the admirable economy of the Latin, Quia
servire regnare est — Whom to serve is to reign.] Could it be that the
meaning of today’s Gospel passage is that in accepting our slavery to Christ,
we find the only real freedom?
In the context of this
paradox, more are revealed. We can readily agree that a master does not invite
the slaves to sit at table and wait on them, when they come in from the field.
And yet that is exactly what Jesus does for us, isn’t it? He feeds us, as he
fed those first twelve Apostles, around the table of the Holy Eucharist. And He
doesn’t stop there: in the Fourth Gospel, He feeds us and then washes our feet,
like a slave.
From this we learn that God
is not our Master, but our Friend, even our Servant. With Peter, we may be
tempted to object to this role-reversal — the humility of God in washing us.
Our natural consciousness is more comfortable with the notion that we are God’s
slaves, who must not expect even to sit down to dinner, much less to be washed
by Him. But then, also with Peter, we must learn that we have no part in Him
unless we permit Him to serve us. For if we will not permit it, how
will we learn to serve one another?
Our nature does not
willingly serve others. But others are Christ, since He has told us that
whatever we do to them we do to Him. So, we must learn to serve others, if we
would serve Him. We must demand no service of others, as we would not dream of
demanding service from Him. But since he has washed our feet, and seated us at
table as equals, as friends, so must we do to Him in return, in the person of
every human being we encounter.
A slave cannot expect a
master to reverse roles and serve him, just because the slave has fulfilled his
tasks. And yet, that is exactly the kind of Master Jesus is. I no longer call
you servants [slaves, that is], but I
call you friends.” Indeed, He does
share His table with His disciples, whom He calls friends, and afterwards washes
their feet, a slave’ s job. He tells us He does so to give us an example of how
we should behave toward one another. He makes it clear that what we do to other
people, we do to Him.
So, maybe we can understand
this story as showing us that we have obligations to one another that exceed
the normal demands of ordinary, civilized morality. There is no question that
we have to work in the fields — we have to treat other people with the basic
level of respect. But when we have done that, we have not fulfilled our duty.
We must love one another, as He has loved us. That is His commandment, which He
enacted by washing our feet, after the Supper of Friends. We are to do
likewise, treating each other as our Master, that is as Christ Himself. We are
not to imagine that we have fulfilled His New Commandment because we have behaved
with ordinary lawfulness and decency. If Christ really is our Master, as we
like to say, then our duties to one another exceed ordinary kindness. We must
serve one another, as a slave serves a Master.
Now, of course, we must add
the qualification that we don’t have to obey the orders of every single person
we encounter, as a literal slave obeys a master! That is not what the New
Commandment means. Rather, I think it means that we are to recognize the
unlimited value of every person we encounter, and to treat that person accordingly,
that is, as the embodiment of Christ: Jesus Christ Himself, right in front of
us. Indeed, we have promised no less in our baptismal vows: to seek and serve Christ in all persons,
loving our neighbors as ourselves. SERVE
CHRIST IN PERSONS. To be their slaves,
not in the sense of obeying them, but in the sense that our obligations to their
well-being are limited only by our own abilities.
AMEN MARANATHA COME LORD JESUS
