Trinity 8

Sermon preached by the Revd Ed Green

‘But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into.’

When I first sat down to read this morning’s readings, hoping for inspiration and a clear sense of Good News to proclaim, I found myself pondering a question I’d never considered before, and one which I couldn’t leave to one side. Why does Jesus compare himself to a thief? Thieves are people who do bad things, are they not? People who deceive us and deprive us of what we value. This seems like the opposite of what we normally say about Jesus. And yet, here he is describing himself as a thief. And not only here; the same quotation is reported in the Gospel of Matthew, the Lord compares himself to a thief in Revelation, and both Peter and Paul tell us that “the Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.” The comparison between Jesus and a thief, then, is not merely a throwaway comment in Luke, but a Biblical principle found throughout the New Testament.

This is especially perplexing because it comes paired with a very different view. The master who treats his servants well because they were ready to receive him at any time - not being taken unawares - is in my view a much more easily understood allegory for Christ. We are to be prepared to serve him at any moment, without warning, because that is what it is to be a good servant. In turn, he is a kind master, taking care of us, his servants. If you look in a commentary, you will often find it said that the reference to the thief should not be taken too much to heart, and that really it’s just a parable about being ready because the Lord will come without giving us any warning. But our Gospel reading explicitly mentions the homeowner preventing the thief from entering his property. It seems that something different is going on.

So if the Son of Man is coming like a thief, what is he coming to steal? What do we value that Jesus will take away from us? Well, an overriding truth of Christian faith is that we can do nothing relying on our own power. Self-sufficiency and independence are characteristics that many of us value greatly in ourselves. And in the context we normally use them - independence from others, self-sufficiency in a world of over-dependence and exploitation, they can be positive traits. Balance is needed - in any community, not least the church, we need a good degree of interdependence, since we are the body of Christ and the body has many different members. But that is not to say that a degree of independence and self-sufficiency is worthless, or unhelpful.

And yet when we look to our relationship with God, it’s a different story altogether. Not only is independence from God undesirable and unhelpful, it is in fact impossible. We have no power to do anything apart from God. And when we think we are acting independently from God, we are deceiving ourselves. That’s what sin is; it’s when something happens - something we do, something we omit, or something that happens to us - which allows us to think we’re on our own, separated from God. But we never are. “No king is saved by the might of his host; no warrior delivered by his great strength.” Although our salvation appears to be a free gift, but in reality it does cost us something - it costs us our sense of self-sufficiency before God.

The great 20th century Lutheran theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, wrote of what he called ‘cheap grace’ and ‘costly grace.’ “Cheap grace,” he says, “is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline. Communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate,” whereas “costly grace confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a [person] to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: "My yoke is easy and my burden is light."

We see this costly discipleship prefigured in the Old Testament. Abraham willingly follows God’s instructions without making a backup plan or considering other options. He could have tried to have normal life, taken up his father’s profession and built up a successful career in the city of Haran, never setting foot in the land of Canaan. But Abram - as he was called at the time - was ready to accept the Word of the Lord at any time, and when God called, he followed. It’s interesting here to note that the Jewish Rabbinical literature tells us that Abram’s father, Terah, was an idolatrous priest, and while Abram, who put his trust in the true God, made it to the promised land in Canaan, Terah, who worship was for idols he himself made - and therefore controlled - died before he could complete the journey. The rabbis do say that Terah repented and returned to God in the end. But when he came home one day to find his idols had been smashed by Abram, how did he feel? He had tried to store up cheap grace, and now it was all gone when he wasn’t ready.

We are to “make purses for ourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys,” says the Lord in this morning’s Gospel. And what this means is that we are always to convince ourselves that the costly discipleship we have seen modeled is worth the price. The idea of Jesus as a thief is not the reality. But if we try to get our discipleship for free, we end up paying the price anyway. And that is when, if we are focused on ourselves, and our self-sufficiency, if we are expecting to get our grace for free, then when payment is taken it will feel like God is stealing something from us. When instead we freely pay the price of costly discipleship - and the Lord never asks an unfair price, or one we simply can’t afford - the treasure that we will store up in our hearts pays dividends.

We must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.’ And we have a choice. We can choose cheap grace, we can cling on to forgiveness without repentance, treasure our baptism without discipline, receive communion without confession, in other words, we can be ready to guard against Jesus Christ, the thief in the night, coming to trespass in our lives. If we do, whatever the cost of faith, it will feel like theft. Or, we can be ready to pay the price of costly grace, to really trust the Lord’s promise that his yoke is easy, and his burden light. To come to him ready to repent of what we’ve done wrong, to live our baptism day by day, and to go out from communion confessing Christ who died, who is risen, who will come again. And when we do, when he comes to us at an unexpected time, we will “be like those who are waiting for their master to return, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks.” For as Jesus says, “Blessed are those whom the master finds alert when he comes; he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them.”