To Preach the Truth

Selected Sermons and Homilies

Schubert M. Ogden

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781625649430
  9781498222617
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630878245
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

But will it preach? The only good answer to this question often asked about a Christian theology is to preach it, which is to say, to preach according to it, to what it indicates, reflectively and critically, valid Christian preaching ought to be. This volume of selected sermons and homilies documents a career-long attempt to do exactly that. Concerned at once to be faithful to the Christian witness and to speak intelligibly and credibly to women and men here and now, it represents the way of preaching, and so directly calling for a Christian commitment, that is of a piece with the distinctive way of doing Christian theology set forth and argued for in Schubert Ogden's other books and articles. This is why each sermon or homily seeks so to interpret its scriptural text as to bring out its existential meaning for understanding ourselves and leading our lives as human beings today. It is also why each of them, in its way, directly puts the question of decision raised by Christian faith. Thus, together with its companion volume, To Teach the Truth, this book offers a model for bearing witness to the truth as Christians understand it.

6 April 1960

John 13:1–17, 20

Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” Jesus answered, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” Jesus said to him, “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.” For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, “Not all of you are clean.”

After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them . . . Very truly, I tell you, whoever receives one whom I send receives me; and whoever receives me receives him who sent me.”

You’ll have recognized that our lesson consists of two main parts. First, there is the poignant portrayal of Jesus’ washing the disciples’ feet, together with an interpretation of his act developed through Simon Peter’s question and statements and Jesus’ statements in reply. Then, second, there is the other and somewhat different interpretation of the act that Jesus gives himself after he has once again put on his garments and resumed his place at the table.

The problem of interpreting the lesson, and thus of hearing the word that it would also speak to us, lies in understanding these two parts and rightly grasping their two interpretations of Jesus’ action. Let’s look somewhat more closely, then, to see if we can understand the meaning of our lesson.

We may note, first, that the concrete act of washing the disciples’ feet is clearly intended by the Evangelist to whom we owe our lesson to be a symbol of something other than itself. This is not only suggested by the obviously symbolic character of Jesus’ acts throughout John’s Gospel, but it is also stated explicitly later in chapter 15, when Jesus is represented as saying to the disciples, “You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you” (v. 3). There can be no question that Jesus’ washing the disciples’ feet is completely misunderstood if it’s taken as anything other than a symbolic representation of his whole ministry as God’s word to humankind. What John does is to set forth in a highly dramatic way the single act of God’s speaking to women and men decisively through the humble form of the man Jesus of Nazareth.

If this is so, then the exchange with Peter through which the meaning of Jesus’ act is more fully explained also needs to be understood differently than we might be inclined to understand it. The point of Peter’s refusing to let Jesus wash his feet is not simply that he refuses an act of human kindness. What would be his motive for refusing such an act? No, the point of his refusal is that, like all human beings, even those who belong to the community of the disciples, he is not willing to acknowledge the presence of God in the lowly form of a human ministry. This, at any rate, is the only way to make sense of his refusal if Jesus’ action has the symbolic meaning I have suggested. What is portrayed in Peter’s initial response to Jesus’ offer to wash his feet is humankind’s all but instinctive turning away from the scandal of an actual meeting with the holy God. So long as God is merely an idea in our minds or removed from our life by being imagined enthroned in some remote and otherworldly heaven, we cannot but refuse God’s ministry to us through the concrete happenings of life itself. By the same token, the decisive test of our openness to God as God really is is not whether we can talk about God either in eloquent words of wisdom or in critical theological reflections on them. Rather, it is whether we can faithfully receive God’s ministry to us as and when it meets us here and now through merely human words and deeds of witness.

This is to say that the warning of Jesus to Peter is also addressed to us. “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” Unless we’re willing to receive God’s ministry as it’s offered to us through Jesus we cannot participate in the salvation he would bestow.

But the interesting thing about our lesson is that Peter’s first response is not his last. As soon as he hears Jesus’ warning, he makes a complete about-face and goes to the other extreme: “Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head!” Yet this second response also meets with Jesus’ disapproval. “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean.” Jesus wants to be clear, in other words, that there is a false as well as a true way of hearing his warning. If we have no part in God’s salvation unless we’re willing to receive it in an actual meeting with Jesus, such receiving is completely misunderstood if it is thought of in merely quantitative terms. What is required is not simply a quantity of encounters with Jesus, but rather the kind or quality of encounter with him through which he can do his work in us and so cleanse us from all uncleanness. The one thing needful is not that we shall endlessly expose ourselves to Jesus’ life and teachings, but that we shall faithfully hear the word that he speaks and is and that alone is sufficient to cleanse us from all our sin. Once this encounter has taken place, once we’ve heard the word of God’s acceptance in spite of our being unacceptable, we are clean all over and need not wash again.

But this statement, too, is easily misunderstood. And so Jesus immediately adds, “though not all of you are clean.” Even those within the community of the disciples who have in some sense already been made clean by his word are not safe from the danger of once again falling away. The reason for this lies in the very nature of faith itself. Just because faith is in no sense something quantitative, it is also impossible to think of it as a once-for-all decision that, having once been made, relieves a disciple of ever having to make it again. If faith is completely different from a sheer quantity of encounters with Jesus, it is also different from a single act in which we give assent to Christian “beliefs” or affiliate ourselves with the Christian church. Indeed, faith is nothing other than the constantly renewed personal decision to receive for oneself in each new present God’s ministry to us decisively through Jesus. What is conveyed to us through Jesus’ prophecy of Judas’ betrayal is this understanding of the nature of faith. It reminds us that the only way in which we can rightly hear the word, “and you are clean,” is by appropriating it to ourselves through a renewed decision of faith.

What is presented, then, in the first part of our lesson is the twofold foundation of our life in the Christian community: there is, first, the always prevenient act of God’s grace, which is made known to us decisively through Jesus; and there is, second, our own personal decision of faith, through which alone we are able to receive God’s grace so as to realize its cleansing power.

But if this is the meaning of the first part of our lesson, it leaves us with a question. If what it means to be a Christian is to receive Jesus’ ministry to us through obedient faith, how can we today satisfy this condition? How can we each appropriate for ourselves the ministry of a man who lived some two millennia ago and with whom we can no longer have any immediate association?

We get an answer to this question, I think, in the second part of our lesson, where, you’ll remember, Jesus is made to give yet another interpretation of his symbolic act of washing the disciples’ feet. Here the emphasis falls on the significance of his act as an example, which the disciples are summoned to imitate. “You call me Teacher and Lord,” Jesus says, “and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.”

But if what is signified by Jesus’ own act is his ministry as God’s word, then it is only logical to suppose that his summons to the disciples to imitate his act is in reality a call to them to continue his ministry of bearing witness. And this supposition is completely confirmed by the statement that follows: “Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them.” By speaking of his disciples as messengers who are sent, Jesus makes clear that it is to the prophetic ministry of bearing witness that he is in reality commissioning the community when he calls them to imitate his action. As he himself has been sent by the Father to minister to them, so he in turn sends them to witness to one another—and, as a statement in a later chapter makes clear, also to witness to “the world” (cf. 17:18).

But this evidently suggests an answer to our question. It is through the witness of the community that the foundational witness of Jesus himself ever continues to take place. “Very truly, I tell you, whoever receives one whom I send receives me; and whoever receives me receives him who sent me.” What makes it possible for us today to have a part in Jesus’ own cleansing ministry is the witness or message of the Christian church, through its preaching and its sacraments. But—and this is the point of the second part of our lesson—for one rightly to receive this ministry requires one to take upon oneself the responsibility of continuing it by also bearing witness: the witness through which Jesus himself continues to speak to every new present his word of judgment and grace.

The word, then, that speaks to us through our lesson at once points us to the foundation of our life in the Christian community and also reminds us of the outward forms that this life must invariably take. It tells us that to be a Christian means to hear in faith the word of God’s grace addressed to us through the preaching and sacraments of the church and, following the example of the Lord whom it proclaims, to carry on in our present the same word and ministry of reconciliation.

O Lord Jesus, who stands in our midst even now, make the words and deeds of this hour fit vessels of your redeeming grace. Help us so to hear the word that you speak and are that we are cleansed by its power and may fitly proclaim it to one another and to the world. Amen.

17 May 1964

Luke 11:9–13

“So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find, knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

To the careful student of this text one thing about it immediately catches the eye. Except for some trivial details, it’s an almost perfect parallel to another passage found in the Gospel according to Matthew (7:7–11).

I say almost perfect parallel because there’s one important difference between the two passages that stands out all the more sharply because they’re otherwise so much alike. In Matthew’s version—which is certainly the older—the concluding sentence reads as follows: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him?” Luke, by contrast, replaces the words “good things” with the words “the Holy Spirit,” thereby giving the whole text a rather different appearance than it has in Matthew. The content of the promise, “Ask, and it will be given you” is no longer defined by the wholly general term “good things,” but is understood to be the quite specific gift by God of God’s own personal presence and power as the Holy Spirit.

Except for this difference, of course, the church would never have selected our text—even as late as it did—as a proper lesson for this Sunday, the feast of Pentecost. But this suggests that a likely way to understand what the text would teach us is to reflect together on the significance of this difference. What’s the point when the gift it promises simply for the asking is not the plural gift of “good things,” but the singular gift of God’s own Holy Spirit?

Maybe if we can answer this question, we’ll be in a position to hear the word our text addresses to us. And then perhaps we can also listen in a new way to that other lesson read earlier (John 14:15–31), through which the church has traditionally proclaimed the Spirit’s coming at Pentecost and the meaning of that event for us all.

I

We may begin with some obvious comments on the text in the more familiar setting given it by Matthew. You will agree, I think, that its opening sentences, when read in this setting, give ample cause for offense to anyone with even a modicum of critical judgment. When we’re told that “everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened,” our response is apt to be as incredulous as when we hear those other words from Matthew’s Gospel, “all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (26:52). Many an old soldier does not die by the sword, but simply fades away; and it’s just as evident that wishing does not make it so. The gap, sometimes the unbridgeable gap, between what we ask for and what we receive—isn’t it one of the facts of life of which we have each learned more than enough in the hard school of experience? And how many are the doors on which we have knocked again and again only to have them remain as firmly closed to us as ever? A full century after we fought the costliest war in our history to redeem the promise of our founding as a free nation, millions of our fellow citizens are still barred from entering fully on the rights thereby won for them—and that in spite of all the knocking on the doors of the intervening years.

True, it’s just by presupposing such a situation to be possible among us that the text seeks to make its point. It takes for granted that human beings are evil and therefore, for the most part, insensitive to the claims of their needy neighbors. So it argues from the lesser to the greater and tries to show that God responds to the petitions of God’s children with a goodness that is at best adumbrated by the occasional kindnesses of...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• John 18:33–38
• Luke 21:25–36
• John 13:1–17, 20
• Luke 11:9–13
• John 6:5–14
• Luke 14:7–11
• 2 Timothy 2:1–13
• Luke 10:25–37
• Ephesians 1:15–23
• Ecclesiastes 9:7–10; 4:9–12
• 1 Corinthians 15:58
• 1 Peter 1:13–25
• Matthew 15:21–28
• John 2:1–12
• John 20:19–23
• Matthew 22:1–14
• 1 Corinthians 12:1–11
• Matthew 5:43–48
• Matthew 28:1–10
• 1 Corinthians 13
• Romans 14:7–9
• John 10:1–10
• Jeremiah 33:14–16
• Colossians 3:1–17
• Romans 12:1–8
• Romans 6:3–11