PRIMED: RELATIONAL
Noel K. Anderson
First Presbyterian Church of Upland
Text: Matthew 18: 15-20 NRSV
15 “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. 16 But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. 17 If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. 18 Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. 19 Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. 20 For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” †
All is Relational
Relationship, Relationship, Relationship
As we continue walking through the values of First Pres—which spell out PRIMED, we discussed P—prayerful—last week and today we’re looking at R for relational. In short, all that we do, say, or believe about Scripture and faith are essentially relational—about relationships. All is relational.
In our text, Jesus tells us:
“Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” —Matthew 18:20
Isn’t this fascinating? He does not say that he’s not there when we are alone, but in matters of the Church—justice, redemption, peacemaking—Jesus wants us to be gathered. And the more we look at it, we see that everything making up our faith and following of Jesus is necessarily relational.
JUDGMENT: Relational
We will be judged for our relationships
I want you to imagine with me the judgment of Christ. Scripture is quite clear; once biological life ends, we shall each stand before God as our judge. We are all answerable to God; the Lord Jesus has all power to judge every soul. So imagine with me—you’ve come to the end of life, and your soul leaves your body.
Sparing initial details—tunnel of light, angelic guides, reunion with friends and family—we get to the heart this meditation when we come face to face with Christ. This will happen for each of us. We will meet the one we’ve worshipped and feel the indescribable intensity of his love. And then, telepathically, the question comes: “So, how did you do with the life that I gave you?”
Your life is displayed in graphic detail for everything you ever said, did, or thought. How might you or I begin to answer? Jesus watches our life with us, perhaps with his arm around your shoulders.
So what is your life the story of? Do you think he’s looking for religious observances? Is he watching to see if you obeyed the Sabbath and avoided bacon and lobster? Is he counting all the times people confessed their sins to their priests and took the sacraments as told? Is he concerned with what music or movies you watched, and does he give you bonus points for only listening to Christian radio? Probably not.
What about your beliefs? Is he looking to see that you believed the right things and rejected the wrong ones? Is he looking for sound doctrine with no elements of tinfoil hat extremism? Is he looking to see that you ran with the right crowd and identified yourself with the right tribe? Probably not.
What about your good deeds? Did you do any good deeds, give alms to the poor, tithe? Is Jesus counting up your good deeds? Probably not. All of these things are a kind of legalism, and Jesus is no legalist—we hear that with crystal clarity in the Gospels.
There is another light to be cast upon everything: ALL IS RELATIONAL, and everything that matters is about our relationships. Our deeds, piety, and good works mean nothing outside the light of relationships because only in relationships can there be a measure of love.
So you were religiously observant? You did your religious duties and participated in the Church and the sacraments, but why?
To cope with life and feel good about yourself?
To please the Pope, priest, pastor, or rabbi?
To feel that you were giving your best to get yourself into Heaven?
All of these—left to themselves—are vanity, and they are useless and worthless to your eternal soul.
BUT if you observed these things as a way of showing your love for God—if they were indeed expressions of your heart giving itself to the Lord—then good. God will receive these things as delivered out of love, and love can and does give them their total value.
And as to your beliefs—if you were diligent in study and driven to believe what is right and good for Christians to believe—was it all just to build yourself up? Were you trying to become an upper-crust believer? Did you believe what the Church told you to believe so you could fit in with the others and feel that you belong? Was being right more important to you than being loving? These, too, are all vanity—mere tribalism and the warmth of the herd.
BUT if you studied Scripture and theology because you wanted above all to be close to God—to know him better—then God will make himself known to you. The value of our beliefs depends entirely upon our relationship with God. Beliefs—because they are in the head—can make a believer self-absorbed. But those who love God can’t keep themselves from seeking him in every way. We stay curious, hungry, and long to know him and the joy of his presence.
And as for good works? Many people—too many—think this is the true key to salvation. Were you good to other people? Did you do good deeds with life? The real question is: “What is your relationship with the recipient of good deeds?” You may have spent thousands of dollars to help people you never met—it sounds great—but why?
Was it to feel better about yourself? One reason people give is to balance out an otherwise-guilty conscience. The Mafia has given millions to the Catholic Church over the years. Why? Because they are devout believers? Hardly. We can do the same—give to others because we feel we must balance out our sins with good works and acts of piety.
Do we secretly feel we are racking up brownie points with God? Is it a way to build ourselves up in our own minds? Are we constructing our personal value—even a sense of superiority over others—by out-giving others? All is vanity.
BUT if you give to others and help them because you love the Lord and mean to show your love to him by caring for the sick and the poor, God receives that as your love for him.
“Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my brothers, you did it to me.” —Matthew 25:40
And if you do good works because you have a relationship with the one you help, and you help them out of love, that is the right stuff. The relationship matters. The goodness of a good work or good deed is evaluated relationally.
God accepts our love and mercies for others as though we were serving Him directly.
In the Final Judgment, we will be judged by our thoughts, words, and deeds by how they affected our relationships. Jesus isn’t counting up brownie points or sin-tallying so much as He is evaluating our love—how well we loved or didn’t love—and whether we amplified or diminished the love he entrusted to us in our time on Earth.
LOVE JUDGING
Love is the measure of all things
In that life review—that judgment by Christ—I think we need a different picture than the one we’ve been given by Christian art for the past two thousand years. Jesus is portrayed as the ultimate power, but the depictions have made him look too much like a militant king or vengeful judge. There is some truth in both of these—and lets’ be clear, we should not lose those disturbing elements—but every picture and painting also misses things.
I think Jesus the Judge is more like an irresistible magnet. In that moment of truth, when our soul stands face to face with Christ—and we feel unspeakably overwhelmed by that love—we will immediately know what love was and what was not throughout our life. It may be like watching our life in a movie, with only the relational scenes included—to whom you were good, who you hurt, who you rejected or befriended—all relational. This is worthy of our meditation not only this morning but whenever we consider God and our relationship with Him.
If we are to judge at all, let us not judge by piety, beliefs, or good works except as those things affect our real relationships. Rather, let’s ask relational questions:
Who have you helped only because you felt love for them?
This is the right kind of help because it is done out of love.
Who have you helped merely out of a sense of duty?
This is the case with most of our overseas mission giving. We give to causes far away because people we trust know that help is needed. Our friend—our brother or sister in Christ—may have many relationships that cry out for legitimate support, so our giving there is 2nd degree relational. There are two degrees of separation between the recipients of our care and us. Is there anything wrong with this? This would seem contrary to the idea that all is relational and that our good works get their value from love and real relationships.
J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were part of a group called the Inklings. These were literary, Oxford-based, Christian men who gathered monthly to ask big questions. One night, after hearing in the London Times that children were suffering horrid starvation halfway around the world, Dr. Tolkien asked, “Are we even meant to feel compassion in this way?”
But there is a unique value to this kind of “remote” giving. It is a remote relationship because the recipient is far off, and the relationship is one of unilateral charity. In John 20: 29, Jesus says,
“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
When we help downcast people we don’t know, we are believing without seeing. This, too, is love, and to give remotely is faithful giving indeed. Please remember that when we raise money for Kenya, India, Peru, or even local projects. We do practice it whenever we give to a cause we believe to be helping the poor, the sick, and the outcast. These people are remote to us, but the giving is nonetheless relational.
ENEMIES: Near and Far
Loving our enemies is the acid test of agapé love
How about the harder relationships in our lives? What about loving our enemies? To restate the obvious, Jesus has taught us to love our enemies, so we must consider this.
Who are our enemies? Anyone who hates us or wishes us ill. Those who would enjoy seeing us fail or otherwise suffer. Jesus teaches us to respond by love—wishing them well and praying for their wholeness and peace.
In short, can you support people who may despise you? This is the relevant question. You may know people who have betrayed you or belittled you—people who snub you and play superior—or people that just don’t like you and find ways to let you know it at every opportunity. How ought we to deal with them? What does it mean for us to “love” them?
The easy thing is just to avoid them—pray for them from a distance—because it is in our nature to protect ourselves and our dignity from their attacks, real or imagined. But this is weak and falls short of Christ’s command. Matthew 5:40:
“If anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well.”
Jesus expects us to be givers, even to the people who, for whatever reason, hate us. Love enters the major league of Christian spirituality not when it’s easy but when it’s difficult.
It may not be all warm and fuzzy, but you can still wish someone well and pray for the best for them. You can likely find something positive to say about them to others—something other than the sad story of how they mistreated you.
Loving enemies usually means forgiving people we’d rather not forgive.
When we forgive an enemy, we humble ourselves in remembering that all people are fallen and in need of God’s grace. Everyone is incapable of saving themself—we all need grace, or there is no hope. We need, through prayer and love, to get our hearts to that place where we can sincerely say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”
FAITH IS RELATIONAL
There is no understanding of faith that is not relational
All is relational. Love is relational, judgment is relational, forgiveness is relational, and our faith itself is relational.
We must look at the Bible—Old and New Testaments—in terms of relationships. The Old Testament is the story of the relationship between God and human beings in general and then God and Israel. That’s it. The Torah, or Law, is given to Israel by God to have a means to that relationship between them. Abiding by the Law was the way Israel expressed its faith in relationship to God.
In both the Old and New Testaments, “righteousness” means nothing other than a “right relationship with God.” Think about it—to be righteous means only to be in right standing with God.
In the Old Testament, righteousness—or right relationship with God—was established through the Law provided instruction on everything—how to make sacrifices, how to eat, dress, wash, and worship—but all that righteousness was about maintaining a right relationship with God.
In the New Testament, righteousness also means a right relationship with God, but it is no longer established by the Law and its observances but through a faith relationship with Jesus Christ. Christ is our righteousness—our right relationship.
Faith is more than our beliefs or religious observances, but when these are put into the context of our relationship with God, all register their full value. All is relationship.
. †
Questions
- How is it true that “All is vanity” outside of relationships?
- How does a religious observance (of any kind) .find its full value with God?
- Why are good works usually suspect? What redeems good works?
- What is the value of our beliefs compared to our acts of love?
- What does it mean to love “remotely”?
- Are there prayers that God does not honor? What characterizes them?
- How can you love someone whom you cannot trust?
- Think of people you have hurt—either intentionally or unintentionally--and how you might redeem those relationships. Keep in mind: redemption may require “remoteness.”