A sermon on Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16 & Luke 14:1, 7-14 by Nathan Nettleton

One of the confusing and difficult things about trying to understand the God who is revealed in the Bible is making sense of the often contradictory images and descriptions of God. How can a God who says we are to love everybody and be merciful to everybody because that is what God is like be the same God who commanded armies to destroy their enemies, man, woman and child, and who is allegedly planning to cast large numbers of people into the fires of hell for eternity? One cannot pretend that these conflicting images don’t exist in the Bible. They do. So either some of them are wrong, or God is quite variable and these different descriptions are each true of God in different situations or different eras. There is, in fact, a theological opinion held among many Christians who believe that every word of the Bible must be equally true, known as “dispensationalism”, which attempts to address the problem of these various images by arguing that time is divided into different “dispensations” or “eras”, and that God’s relationship to the world is different in each dispensation. So the way God related to the world before the fall of Adam and Eve is quite different from the way God related between the fall and the coming of Jesus, and the way God relates to us now is quite different from the way God will relate at the final judgement. And thus, they have an theory that can accommodate a God who is a bloodthirsty warrior on one page, and a tender shepherd on another page.

Well, this theory of dispensationalism seems to create far more problems than it solves. Apart from anything else, just think about how we regard people who keep changing their stripes. We regard them as dangerously unstable, as two-faced, as untrustworthy. Look at the quandary many Essendon supporters are currently finding themselves in over James Hird. This man who was such a hero and could do no wrong is now seen to be simultaneously accepting a massive penalty, denying that he ever did anything wrong other than fail to be adequately aware of what was going on, and deflecting any questions about what happened last year by saying “We’ve moved on.” That was then, this is now. We’re in a new dispensation and we don’t have to account for what happened in the old. Why would we expect to be any more convinced if God starts using that kind of defence?

And when we come to today’s reading from the letter to the Hebrews, we run into a major problem for the dispensationalists. The epistle writer says quite categorically, “Jesus the Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” Not like this today and like that tomorrow. Jesus is the same yesterday and today and forever.

There are certainly some wrong-headed ways of understanding this line too. It has sometimes been used to argue that Jesus, and therefore God, are detached and emotionless and passionless and unaffected by anything that goes on in our world, good or bad. This is clearly not supported by anything else we know about Jesus who is frequently described by the gospel writers as deeply moved or grieved or knotted up with compassion or filled with joy. But it is also not the least bit necessary to make sense of this description of Jesus being unchanging. It is equally explained by saying that the kinds of feelings, emotions and passions that Jesus has are consistent over the ages. Jesus does not go from being a gentle and compassionate healer to a grumpy and vindictive despot as he gets older. Jesus is the same yesterday and today and forever.

What this line most definitely is is a direct challenge to the heresy of the two-faced God, and it does have some important implications for the ways we understand and read the Bible. When you put this line alongside the clear witness of the New Testament writers that Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God, and that, as Jesus puts it himself, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father”, then we can’t quarantine this line to Jesus alone, but have to conclude that it also means that God is the same yesterday and today and forever. And if Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God, then we have to read all the Bible through the revelation of Jesus. It is not the other way around. The Bible is not the primary revelation, but the primary witness to the revelation, and like any other witness, we accept that the testimony will have variations in accuracy. So when we read that God, in the time of Moses, commanded the Israelites to commit genocide in the land of Canaan, we have to critique that through our knowledge of Jesus the Christ who is the same yesterday and today and forever, and ask is it possible that God could do that, or are we seeing here an accurate revelation of how people use God to justify their own evil. And similarly when we read predictions that the Christ will return as a conquering warrior and consign his enemies to an eternal lake of fire, we have to critique that through our knowledge of Jesus the Christ who is the same yesterday and today and forever, and ask is it possible that the one who prayed that his enemies might be forgiven even as they nailed his flesh to a cross would be secretly harbouring a desire to return and burn them all, or are we seeing there an accurate revelation of how a downtrodden people can project their hunger for vindication into a violently triumphant future. Every part of the Bible can accurately reveal important truth to us, but some parts reveal the truth about God, and other parts reveal the truth about our idolatrous attempts to remake God in the image of our own interests and desires. And Jesus, who is the same yesterday and today and forever, is the key to recognising the difference.

If Jesus was advocating forgiveness for his persecutors as he hung on the cross, then you can be quite sure that Jesus will be advocating forgiveness for his persecutors when he is seated on a judgement throne, because Jesus is the same yesterday and today and forever. And if Jesus made the broken and failed and outcast feel safe and loved when he was here before, then you can be sure that they have nothing to fear from him when he comes again, for Jesus is the same yesterday and today and forever. If Jesus was not tallying up black marks and condemning people last time, then why would we think he will be wearing a different face next time? Do we believe that Jesus is the same yesterday and today and forever, or don’t we?

Now the implications of this do not stop with our understandings of the Bible and whether or not we need to fear the coming Christ. It is important to note that this line from the letter to the Hebrews came as the climax of some ethical teaching: “Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers. Remember those who are in prison. Let the marriage bed be kept undefiled. Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have.” So part of what the writer is asserting in saying that Jesus is the same yesterday and today and forever, is that these ethical teachings are not just relative to passing cultural expectations, but are rather more unchanging than that. But we also need to recognise that that does not lead to a blind conservatism that simply says that yesterday’s values are to be preserved for all time. Jesus himself was constantly challenging the ethical understandings of his age, and he was constantly being accused of being too revisionist, not too conservative. So when this passage says “Let marriage be held in honour by all,” a simple conservative response says we can’t change our understanding of marriage, and therefore everybody should vote next week for candidates who will defend a traditional understanding of marriage. But an alternative response will acknowledge that Jesus critiqued the understandings of marriage of his own day, and there is therefore no reason to think he wouldn’t do the same in our day, and that marriage practices in our day bear vey little resemblance to those of the past anyway, and that this instruction to honour marriage is a sub-point under a heading of “let mutual love continue.” There can be no doubt that Jesus’ commitment to letting mutual love continue is the same yesterday and today and forever, but there is also no doubt that the implications of that will vary as the threats to mutual love change.

Surely too, we must take note of what Jesus is saying in the gospel reading we heard tonight. Because far too often, our wrangling over theological truths and ethical correctness is just another form of jostling for the places of honour at the banqueting table of our Lord. Everybody wants to be in the right place, to be honoured by the Lord of the feast for having held firmly to the expected standards and proven ourselves more worthy than those who have fallen into error or ill-discipline. And it happens in our politics as well as in our theological posturing. The stop-the-boats slogans are little more than another expression of the jostling for the positions of honour because they are premised on the assumption that there is a descending scale of seats of honour at the table of our nation’s resources, and that those born here have the best seats, and those who came here through the approved channels have the next most sought after seats, and those who are impoverished and traumatised and desperate are once again sent to the bottom of the table or kicked off the table completely.

But the Christ who is the same yesterday and today and forever tells us to do as our Father in heaven does and invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind to our banquet, and that the only way likely to lead to any greater honour for ourselves is to throw our efforts into trying to secure places of honour for those who might otherwise be denied them. That’s not going to help solve anyone’s voting dilemmas much, because certainly both the major parties jostling for the positions of honour on your ballot papers seem equally obnoxious in their treatment of exactly the people told us to put first on our invitation lists, but perhaps it will remind us that whatever the electoral outcome next Saturday, Jesus will remain very little interested in the outcomes of political games of winners and losers, but intensely interested in ensuring that mutual love continues and that those in desperate need are offered compassion and generous hospitality at our tables. Little projects like the World Vision project to enable us to invite asylum seekers into our homes for meals are not, in themselves, going to change the world. But what they will do, when we grab such opportunities, is open the door to enable us to glimpse and taste the new world. And what they will do is give us the chance to live, in simple practical ways, the simple practical things that Jesus is asking us to do, right here in these words tonight. The time for taking such a call seriously is not some previous dispensation, nor some future era when we’ll be better placed. The time to live out the love and compassion and humble hospitality of Jesus is always now, for Jesus is the same yesterday and today and forever.