Here’s this; there may be some little surprise later if it actually behaves.
Luke 14:25-33; Philemon 1-21; Psalm 1; Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Have you ever noticed that, in the Bible, whenever someone offers people a choice between following God and not following God, they’re warned about what will happen if they decide to follow Him and then change their minds? This happens in our reading from Deuteronomy today, as well as at the end of the book of Joshua. In this case, Moses says to the people “You have a choice today between life and death. Decide to follow God and walk in his ways and the Lord will bless you, but if you don’t then you will certainly be destroyed. So choose life, that you may live, and love the Lord your God.”
It’s not the most friendly of images, even though it played out throughout Israel’s history. If they had remained faithful to God, they would have avoided a lot of issues – things like the constant troubles of the book of Judges, the split into a Northern and Southern kingdom, the destruction of both of those kingdoms culminating in the Exile, and so on.
It’s a choice that has never really gone away either. Jesus offers the same choice, and the same warning, to those who are listening to him in today’s gospel. He says that, to follow him, He needs to be our first priority above-and-beyond anything else. We need to be willing to follow him to a traitor’s death. In recent years, Christianity has been painted as a religion of convenience – pray to God and your sins are forgiven and everything is good – but it’s more than that: a Christian is a person who follows God even if it means his/her own death. That’s intense.
This is why Jesus warns us about what it means to be his disciples. This is why Moses does the same thing to his followers. Following God is a life-changing choice, one that will redefine our priorities in ways we don’t always understand.
Look at Philemon and Onesimus. Onesimus was an escaped slave who belonged to Philemon who, along the way, met up with Paul and came to be a believer. Philemon, by all rights, could have Onesimus punished severely for his escape, but along the way, Philemon also met Paul and became a Christian. Paul then appeals to Philemon to accept Onesimus as a brother in Christ and not as a slave. Onesimus and Philemon both had a change of heart and mind after their encounter with God.
But what I really want to look at today is Psalm 1, in large part because it shows the severity of this “life and death” choice between God and not-God, but also because there is a lot going on in it that we don’t always see.
Psalm 1’s main goal is to illustrate the difference between a life with God (the “way of the righteous”) and a life without God (the “way of the wicked”). There’s an obvious way this happens, and a subtle one. First I want to talk about the subtle way, because in doing so the obvious way becomes more obvious.
The first thing we need to remember is that Psalms are, in essence, poetry. Hebrew poetry, and even Hebrew storytelling in general, has an obsession with something called “parallelism”. This is where the same thing is said more than one way, sometimes with in synonyms, other times in opposites. Psalm 1 has both.
There are three basic sections of Psalm 1. The first talks about the “way of the righteous”; the second is about the “way of the wicked”; and the third is a summary. I’m going to read this to you know from the ESV, mostly because I think it illustrates this better than the version in our hymnal
You see that the first section is “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in due season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.” The second section is “The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous[.]” The summary, then, is “for the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.”
The basic structure of this Psalm is called a “chiasm”, because it looks like the Greek letter “chi” which became, through the wonder of linguistic development, our letter “X”. The line “Blessed is the man who doesn’t walk, stand or sit in the midst of troublesome people” (I’m paraphrasing) matches up with “Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.” “He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season” matches to “The wicked … are like chaff that the wind blows away.”
So we have these two examples – but something is missing from the “wicked” section. The parts about meditating on God’s law and everything he does prospering don’t have a match in the section about the “wicked”. It’s that lack of connection that makes following God worth it; the “way of the wicked” is empty, while the “way of the righteous” is full.
That’s what makes this choice that we have set before us worthwhile. That’s why following God is better even in the midst of suffering – it is a path with a reward. That’s why, whenever Paul writes about his sufferings in his letters, and he does so a lot, they are always painted in light of something better – the joy he has from God.
So when we are given the choice between following God and not following God, it’s really quite clear. Following Jesus isn’t the easy choice. It’s far easier to choose the path of not-God, but it’s an empty path. Jesus’ path, while not always roses and sunshine, is the one that is full – full of love, peace, joy, forgiveness, and eternal life.