outside the Law, outside the conventional religious framework. I have not in the last five minutes been using the words but we can bring them back now—radical alternative. There was never an alternative so radical. Even Socrates never so upset people’s notions of God and humanity and virtue and righteousness and truth. And it was all the more radical because Jesus did not say “revolt against Caesar” and gave him nothing but the word “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” This leads me to a third point. I asked what did this mean to Jesus? I ask now: What does it mean to sinners?
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO SINNERS?
It meant many things, which there is not time to talk about, I’m going to pick out one word—freedom. But that word must not be misunderstood. It did not mean freedom to do anything they pleased. I have cited the old familiar laws about murder and adultery. Jesus certainly made them no easier when he stretched them to include anger and lust. Nor did it mean political freedom won by the edge of the sword. Render unto Caesar the things he is due.
It is the sort of freedom that John and Jesus had shown in completely different ways. John was free of material things by renouncing them—neither eating nor drinking. Jesus was free of material things by using them, eating and drinking as the friend of tax collectors and sinners. And “wisdom is justified by her works.” The same thing is true in other respects—do you fight Caesar or not? He is entitled to his due; but what if he claims more than his due? What, for example, if he puts himself in the place of God?
This brings us back, to look from another angle of what I have already said. What Jesus did for sinners was bring them back to God. And this is to be free—free for obedience, free for the service that only the free children of God can render. I have already quoted the term’s card. You may have noticed what I understand as a misprint on it. The heading is right—“Christianity—the Radical Alternative.” But for this evening—“friends (plural) of sinners.” Even if that is a slip, I am happy to take it up.
How does one follow him whom we call the friend of sinners? We do it by being friends of sinners—friends that is, of the outcast, the friendless, the unloved. There is no more radical alternative to conventional society than that. Again, I have quoted, from the other side, as it were, the crucial words. Can I say them of myself? That I came not to be served, but to serve, and in that service to give my life for my fellow human beings? The best way to offer friendship, service, love, to this or that group of your fellows? That will take the best brainwork of which you are capable; but when you know, that is what being a follower of the friend of sinners means.
“PETER AND THE CHURCH”—Matthew 16.17–19
[Preached twenty times from 6/25/44 at Bondgate, Darlington to 6/24/84 at Bolton]
I am still following the church calendar. You may have observed that next Thursday (June 29th) is St. Peter’s Day. This is certainly an admirable basis for preaching this Gospel lesson, and I have chosen this text for two good reasons. First there is its own primitive and evangelical meaning, which we ought not to pass by because it has been abused by others. Second, there are these very disputes, misunderstandings, and abuses, to which I refer, and to say the least it can do Protestants no harm to know why and where the triple-crowned bishop of Rome is wrong, and to be able to answer his assertions with confidence.
First of all, as a further point of introduction, it will be necessary to note what is taking place here. Jesus has asked his disciples what people say about him, and various opinions are mentioned. Then he asks point blank: “Who do you say that I am?” Peter answers, “You are the Christ,” then follows the text, then a command that for the present the facts shall not be made known. Matthew next, making a very definite stage in his Gospel reports that “from then” Jesus began to teach that he would have to suffer and die, a strange paradox for the life of the glorious Christ. We shall not be able to treat in full the words addressed to Peter, but the following points come clearly out of them. First, Peter’s faith was the gift of God.
PETER’S FAITH WAS THE GIFT OF GOD
“You have got it from no human source, Simon, my Father has revealed it to you.” Flesh and blood is a Jewish phrase frequently used as an antithesis to God. “No human being has told you, you have not worked it out with your own reason. God has witnessed it directly to you.” This is at once the most humiliating and the most exalting thing a person can ever have to learn. It is humiliating because in the last resort it means that all our human thinking and striving goes for nothing. “No, Peter, no human power has told you this. You don’t say it because you have carefully examined my life and thought out all that is involved in it. By yourself you would be quite incapable of coming to such a conclusion.” Here in this is the destruction of all human pride, and it is an oddly paradoxical thing that so great a structure of human pride should have been built on this huge negative, like a palace constructed over and founded on an excavation.
At the same time, it is exalting. It is the highest possibility conceivable to human beings, that God himself should make known to him his own business. There is no privilege in life comparable to this, that God should stoop to our level to incorporate us in his purposes. All of this, of course, Peter did not understand, and he was still sufficiently sure of himself, to suppose he was strong enough to stand by Jesus to the end, and bear an uninterrupted witness to Him. That bubble was soon pricked. Peter could make a true confession of the Messiahship of Jesus; what he said was true and it was God who put it into his heart to say it. But Peter did not know the significance of what he had said until he had been down into hell, until he had failed his Master, until broken and defeated he had wept bitterly. Then he knew that flesh and blood could not get him very far, that only the Father in heaven could do his work, and that arrogant human interpretations do not advance the work of Christ.
Is there not a great deal for us to learn here? Saintly old Beridge of Everton asked for his tombstone to be inscribed something like this—“trusted in his own works for salvation until . . . trusted in his own works and in Christ until . . .died trusting in Christ alone.” How many of us are still in the middle stage? How many of us are still saying, “Jesus and . . .”? I fear, very many. It is a thoroughly English thing to make the best of both worlds, to say “not either . . . or” but “both . . . and,” to say “flesh and blood” and “my Father who art in heaven . . .” For all, real faith, the faith which God himself gives though it is a gift, is a gift which is not a pure pleasure to receive. Hear what faith meant to Kierkegaard, the Dane. This is what Walter Lowrie says about him:
This is the Kierkegaard I love, not the destitute and despairing youth, nor the returning prodigal, nor the unhappy lover, not the genius who created the pseudonyms, but the frail man, utterly unable to cope with the world, who nevertheless was able to confront the real danger of penury as well as the vain terrors his imagination conjured up, and in fear and in trembling, fighting with fabulous monsters, ventured as a lone swimmer far out upon the deep, where no human hand could be stretched out to save him, and there with 70,000 fathoms of water under him, for three years held out, waiting for his orders and then said distinctly that definite thing he was bidden to say, and did with a hallelujah on his lips.
That was Kierkegaard’s compliance, lying out over a depth of 70,000 fathoms of water. Faith means simply relying on God in Christ and nothing else. And the consequence of it is (with other things) the peace and courage that Kierkegaard had. Peter with his poor self-confidence was soon brought down. It was not until that self-confidence was broken down in despair and failure, until it drowned in a sea of bitter tears that Peter learned the meaning of “faith alone.”
All this is not to belittle the faith of those to whom the Heavenly Father has revealed some of his truth and love, and who do love and serve Christ as Peter did. It is only to beg that
