Watchword
(2 Kings 2.1-18; Matthew 5.27-32)
So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart. Psalm 90.12
Christ died for all so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them. 2 Corinthians 5.15
Proverbs 26:18,19
Like a madman who throws firebrands, arrows, and death
Is the man who deceives his neighbor and says, “I am only joking!”
In the Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis is his devastating commentary on those who use humor as an all-compassing excuse for any behavior. This misuse of humor is also the concern of this proverb.
“The real use of Jokes or Humour is in quite a different direction, and it is specially promising among the English who take their “sense of humour” so seriously that a deficiency in this sense is almost the only deficiency at which they feel shame. Humour is for them the all-consoling and (mark this) the all-excusing, grace of life. Hence it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame. If a man simply lets others pay for him, he is “mean”; if he boasts of it in a jocular manner and twits his fellows with having been scored off, he is no longer “mean” but a comical fellow. Mere cowardice is shameful; cowardice boasted of with humorous exaggerations and grotesque gestures can passed off as funny. Cruelty is shameful˜unless the cruel man can represent it as a practical joke. A thousand bawdy, or even blasphemous, jokes do not help towards a man’s damnation so much as his discovery that almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only without the disapproval but with the admiration of his fellows, if only it can get itself treated as a Joke. And this temptation can be almost entirely hidden from your patient by that English seriousness about Humour. Any suggestion that there might be too much of it can be represented to him as “Puritanical” or as betraying a “lack of humour”.
But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against [God] that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy, it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it,”
Life is no joke. But some people, even some good people, wish to make it that. For them, earnest = inauthentic. If there is not an undercurrent of sarcasm and tease at the bottom of every conversation it strikes them as fake. Every sentence wrecks itself on a snicker; or at the least a leer.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Don’t be afraid of gravitas. Isn’t it the task of the church to promote a sober reverence? We expect junior-highers and the mentally unstable to buffer themselves with titters, but we’re trying our best to work even them out of it!
This, of course, is not an argument against cheerfulness or good humor! Let Chesterton’s final lines of Orthodoxy also be the last word on their good precedent: In His incarnation, Jesus “restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness . . . There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.”
Don’t let serious turn dour or dud. I mean, are we not following the Creator of the warty newt?
Bible Reading: Romans 11:13-16
[Caution: This is a tricky passage that will require all your concentration!]
Paul cautions the Gentiles against developing a superiority complex - what an incredible turn this redemptive history has taken! To a degree, the mission to the Gentiles is directed to the Jews - to engender a jealousy, a good jealousy in them. Paul means to demonstrate that the redeemed Gentiles are more Jewish than the Jews (Rom 2:29)! (No wonder he kept getting trouble)
Paul urges the Gentiles to honor the Jews importance in the salvation plan. God’s rejection of them (in conjunction with and response to their rejection of the Messiah) opened the way for all nations to become part of God’s family. So if/when God accepts them, won’t this be death coming out of life?
Then two images of first things’ effect on those that follow - the first from the OT Feast of Weeks, the second not in the OT but an image to be developed in the following paragraph. Paul’s point is, since the Messiah was Jewish, that relation sanctifies Jews to follow. “Holy” here does not mean automatically saved, but in an advantageous position to be sanctified.
OK, tough passage: If you don’t understand the details - you’ll read them again. But the bottom line is: it is not wrong to think of the ethnic Jews as a people special to God still. Right Scott?
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