Matthew 10 "Surrender" Scott Hoezee

John Donne was a seventeenth century author, poet, and preacher. In his poems and sermons Donne penned a bevy of striking lines. "Death, be not proud . . . Death, thou shalt die!" "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." "No man is an island, entire of itself." Strikingly familiar lines like that pop up all over the works of John Donne. I remember my English professor (a certain James VandenBosch) saying that he once recommended the works of John Donne to a friend. When he later asked this friend what he thought of Donne, this person replied, "He's a good writer, but he uses too many clichés!"

Matthew 10 may make a similar impression. In these 42 verses Jesus is on a kind of linguistic jag as he piles up one memorable line after the next. The lost sheep of Israel. Shake the dust off your feet. Sheep among wolves . . . shrewd as serpents, innocent as doves. Two sparrows are sold for a penny . . . even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Whoever confesses me before people, I will confess before the Father. I did not come to bring peace but a sword. Take up your cross and follow me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. If anyone gives a cup of cold water . . . he will not lose his reward.

Were it not for the fact that Jesus appears to have been the first person ever to say these things, you'd have to conclude that he was having his own cliché festival that day! Because these are among the best-known verses in the New Testament. At first glance this may look like just a jumbled mish-mash of diverse sayings. But when you step back and look at the whole of Matthew 10, you see that these words are all related to what life is going to be like for the disciples once they begin proclaiming the gospel on Jesus' behalf. The picture Jesus draws, however, is alarmingly distressing.

The chapter begins happily enough: Jesus confers great authority on the twelve disciples. He gives them power to do miracles and he provides them a hopeful message to proclaim. Jesus sends them out in gentleness, telling the disciples that it is not their job to fight when the going get rough. They are not to brow-beat people with the gospel. If people don't like what the disciples have to say, then they are to move on, simple as that.

If they are roughed up in a certain town, they are told simply to move on to the next village. If they get arrested, they are not to call the first-century equivalent of Johnnie Cochrane or Alan Dershowitz but are to let the Spirit speak through them, providing them with an on-the-spot defense counsel. The disciples are to be gentle souls and loving proclaimers of the gospel. They are not to be warriors, they are not to be shrill, they are not to hang around where they are clearly not welcome. Their lives need to be consistent with the gospel of grace which they proclaim. Their very demeanor must mirror God's love.

The chapter begins by sounding these notes of non-violent, loving gospel proclamation. But what startles in the balance of the chapter is how the rhetoric of Jesus steadily spirals down, down, down. The outlook here gets pretty grim pretty quickly. Despite all their loving rhetoric and gentle demeanor, the disciples are going to get slammed, beat up, arrested, falsely accused. Despite a message of love, they themselves will be hated. Despite their transparent witness to God, they will be called devils.

Worse, their words will bring about the dissolution of families on account of the disagreements that will swirl around Jesus and his gospel. And if all of that is not surprising enough, Jesus himself then declares that he did not come to this earth to bring peace but strife! So if you don't love him more than mom and dad, if you don't love Jesus more than your own sons and daughters, then you're a gospel fake, a holy wannabe.

Well, it looks like Matthew has not read the Gospel of Luke where the angels herald Jesus' birth as the advent of "peace on earth!" And it looks like Jesus' version of "family values" is a wee bit different than what sometimes gets touted today. All of which should give us considerable pause. Why is the gospel going to be so hated? What's the rub? What is the essence, the core, of what lies behind the negative, sometimes even violent, reaction which some have to the Christian faith? But before we're finished this morning, we'll want to ponder not just how "other people" react to the gospel but how also we ourselves react to it. How do those words about loving Jesus more than family sit with you? Let's think soberly and carefully about these questions for a little while.

We will begin with the rejection of the gospel in the wider world. Why is the gospel sometimes hated? Well, let's admit that sometimes it is because the bearers of the gospel are themselves glaringly un-Christ-like. In history the Church at times tried to convert people at the point of a sword on threat of execution. Certain Medieval popes were little better than mafia types who literally had their enemies assassinated. Eventually in history the followers of Jesus were not the ones being thrown into jail because of their beliefs but instead it was the followers of Jesus who were throwing other people into jail because of their unbelief! In all of these ways and a thousand more beside, it is not difficult to know why the gospel was despised or rejected. The gospel gets polluted when we who bear the message are ourselves living at cross-purposes with the gospel's content.

True enough. But in Matthew 10 Jesus seems to assume that the disciples will not be hypocrites. Jesus appears to operate from the premise that the disciples will be innocent doves and vulnerable sheep who will faithfully proclaim the good news. But even still Jesus predicts all manner of persecution, rejection, hatred. Apparently it is not just the church at its worst that will be rejected but the church at its very best, too! There is something very near the heart of even the purest proclamation of the gospel that is just flat out not going to sit right with a good many people. What is that something?

In a word: surrender. The heartbeat of the gospel is grace and love, forgiveness and renewal, hope and joy. These are commodities so precious that on the surface you can't imagine anyone's not wanting them. Rejecting the gospel would be similar to someone's just hating the site of adorable kittens and puppies. How can you not like puppies!? They're so cute! So also how can you not like the gospel: it drips with love, grace, and hope!

But it's what lies behind the love, grace, and hope that nettles people. God's forgiveness is great until you realize that accepting it means acknowledging that you're a rather greasy, guilty sinner. Has anyone ever offered to forgive you for something you don't think you did? Forgiveness is lovely, of course--it's one of the more beautiful words in the English language. But it can sound ugly if your acceptance of it would implicate you in something you refuse to acknowledge ever doing. If I come up to you in the narthex and say, "Floyd, I would like to forgive you for that completely rude and inappropriate thing you said to me a few months ago after that committee meeting." Well, if you happen to believe you said nothing that was even remotely out of line after that meeting, then your response may well be, "You can keep your lousy forgiveness! I don't want it because I don't need it."

Surrender. Surrendering to God's offer of forgiveness implicates one in a sin which many people don't think they have a problem with in the first place. Another lovely word is grace. Few words shine more brightly or are more redolent of a generous spirit. Even the cognate words of grace are all positive: gracious, graceful, gratis, gratitude, Graciás, graced. Who could not like grace? Maybe anyone who refuses to believe that he needs outside help. Maybe anyone who is convinced that human cunning, personal skill and achievement, or just the sum total of a good life well-lived ought to be enough to make the grade with God.

Accepting grace implies helplessness, paralysis, inadequacy. Many people have a hard time admitting they need Prozac to hold depression at bay or that they need food stamps and some welfare to help make ends meet. Shame often attends those who are on the dole, who are dependent instead of independent. That's true even when the assistance being granted through medication or some government program is restricted to just one area of life. Embracing grace, however, says something about the whole sweep of your existence. And for some that's just too big a load of shame, disgrace, and dependence to accept.

Surrender. Jesus invites us to take up our cross, and as we have noted several times before, that verse does not mean the same thing as when someone says, "I guess this arthritis is just my cross to bear in life." Instead what Jesus meant (and what his original listeners immediately knew) is that to follow him is to go under the sentence of death. There was only one reason to carry a cross in Jesus' day and that was if you were soon going to be impaled on that cross! Nobody carried a cross for long--just long enough to get to the execution spot, and then you could put down your cross so as to get laid out on it. Jesus is calling us to die, to give up life the way people usually define life and just let Jesus take over. It means that if we have any life worth celebrating, it is not the life we made for ourselves in our "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" culture.

No, the life worth having is the resurrection life you get as a sheer gift of grace after you've died of embarrassment over your sin, after you've admitted you cannot make it on your own, after you've gladly grabbed a divine forgiveness which does indeed imply how badly you need to be forgiven to begin with. New life comes to the spiritually dead. So to all those who keep trying to rack up merit points with God, to all those who keep trying to make it up to God on their own, to all those who think they are so strong they can build a secure life for themselves--to all such as this the gospel declares, "Give it up! Surrender!"

But that's hard to do. We don't want to surrender. But is it only all those misguided folks "out there" who wrestle with this? What about us? In a day when the family is touted as something of supreme value, what does it mean that Jesus asks us to choose him over family? For those of us with families in which the relationships are healthy, how can we compare the love we have for Jesus with the intensely personal, undeniably fierce love we have for our children? What does it mean to love Jesus more!? Why did he say this?

Because Jesus knew that sometimes the biggest test for faith may well occur within the family circle. Who among us can deny that both the greatest joys and the deepest sorrows we have ever experienced took place in the context of family? The closer a relationship is, the more likely will be the potential for intense emotions to spin out of that relationship. Lots of people can hurt us in life but the more remote a person is, the less they can hurt us. So if I get wind of some cutting comment made about me by someone I've never met, I'll be affected by those words but to a fairly limited degree. If I hear that a former high school classmate said something nasty, that will hurt a bit more, even if I have not seen him in years. If one of you says something unhappy, though, it will hurt a lot more. But nothing can cut me or anyone the way harsh words from a family member can slice into us.

Jesus knows this. And so he also knows that it may well be within the family's circle that his latter-day disciples will experience the strongest temptation to give up on their faith. But if the choice comes down to being loyal to the family over against being loyal to Jesus, Matthew 10 lets us know rather swiftly what Jesus wants us to choose. Because families can be rough. Some believers face perhaps no more than needling jokes around the dinner table--snide comments by Uncle Ron about what a waste of time church is. Other believers, though, face genuine life-and-death choices, as is often the case in Muslim countries. In some situations becoming a Christian becomes a threat to one's very life.

But you don't need to be in so extreme a scenario to feel such pressures. If the core of the gospel is surrender, how does that apply to the family situations with which we are vastly more familiar? Well, it minimally applies to the priorities we set in our homes. Curiously, the pace of modern culture--a pace driven by precisely people's desire to "make a life for themselves"--may itself be at variance with the gospel. The busyness of our lives as we get more and more consumed by work, the yen to make money, the clutching desire to climb the corporate ladder edge out what was once known as "family time."

That is a larger moral issue than we can tackle this morning but for now it may be enough to see that one of the more insidious side effects of this has been that some families have cut back on church in order to clear out Sundays as their special "family time." In the past few years I've heard from pastors from other parts of the country who lament what soccer is doing to church attendance. Apparently youth soccer leagues, recognizing the hectic pace of people's lives, have determined that Sundays from 9am until noon are the best time to schedule games. When pastors have complained to these organizations that this zaps church, they have been rebuffed with polite indifference. Worse than that, however, is the reaction these pastors have had from their own members. Some parents have refused to interfere with their children's intramural sports, choosing soccer over worship because this promotes "family time" (and isn't that exceedingly valuable?).

It's not just the world that refuses to surrender. We, too, have a hard time giving up this or that "typical" aspect of the "typical" North American lifestyle. We, too, have a hard time saying "No" to our kids or "No" to the boss so that we can say "Yes" to God. We, too, would rather find ways to blend our Christian faith in with a "typical" suburban existence rather than be seen as some religious weirdos more interested in resurrection life than the latest trends which define "the good life" of our neighbors and co-workers.

Years ago a man named Millard Fuller was pretty near the apex of an American success story. He was a high-octane corporate executive working eight days a week and pulling down close to a million bucks a year. But then one day he heard God calling to him, telling him his life was overfull and his priorities out of whack. So in prayer with his wife one day, Fuller re-committed his life to Christ. He quit his job, moved to a more modest house, and wondered what to do next. What he ended up doing next was building affordable houses for low-income families who could purchase these homes interest-free. Today we are most of us well aware of the great good Habitat for Humanity has done.

A preacher once re-counted Fuller's story but was later approached by someone who asked, "How old were Fuller's children when he quit his job like that?" It took this preacher a minute to appreciate what lay behind this query: how dare Fuller uproot his kids and subject them to a less lavish lifestyle just so that he could serve God?! That is just the way lots of people think these days.

Jesus, of course, does not call us to abandon our children or abdicate responsibility. When we give up our life, Jesus returns it to us, but with a difference: what we get back from Jesus is a cross-shaped life in which service and the doling out of cups of cold water in his name mean more than the sum total of the rat race ever could. We receive from Jesus a life which, to some people, looks like "no life" whatsoever. We live a gospel which offends those who refuse to surrender. "But don't be afraid of those folks," Jesus gently says. "If you've surrendered to me, then I've got you. I've got you, and I'm not letting go. Ever." In that hope, good people of God, go forth to love and serve the Lord everywhere. Amen.