Pentecost 5 Year A

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be joyful in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

And the Lord said unto John, “Come forth and receive eternal life!” But John came fifth… and won a toaster.
Groans aside, I think this terrible joke gives us a little insight into how easy it is to see our life in faith as some kind of competition or cosmic reward programme. Instead of spending £10 at Lidl and winning a free bakery treat; we spend some time being good, accrue some holy Brownie points, and hope that we will come forth (and not fifth) – to receive eternal life in all its sweetness. In today’s Gospel Jesus speaks about rewards. So what exactly do rewards look like in the economy of the Kingdom of Heaven?
The passage from Genesis starts to reveal the nature of reward where heaven meets earth. Last week, we heard the story of how God fulfilled the promise to Abraham and Sarah that they would be the parents of many nations, through the birth of Isaac as well as Ishmael. They were rewarded for their patience, and yet their grasping, guarded and envious response to this blessing tore the family apart.
Isaac’s near-sacrifice is a very different dynamic. This is a strange and particularly rich piece of scripture that tells a thousand stories. The author narrates to us through Abraham’s desire to be obedient to what seems to us like an awful request from God; and not pretending to understand God’s mysterious ways I’d like to dwell a little on Isaac’s perspective.
Like Hagar, he is not a passive character. He is also not a child, though of course he will always be Abraham’s child. The language and timing of this passage suggest that Isaac is a young man, in his twenties or early thirties, strong enough to carry a human-sized bundle of wood up a mountain and therefore easily strong enough to overpower his centenarian father. He is wise enough to know the sacrificial laws and ask the right questions. We could safely conclude that Isaac consented to be tied up and placed on the sacrificial pyre, freely and openly, in an image that foretells the sacrifice of Christ in communion with the will of his Father. In a violent world this voluntary assent to unnecessary violence is hard to accept at face value, but it is not the end of the story.
Last week we saw that when Abraham and Sarah were blessed with the free gift of sons, they grasped to control the situation out of God’s hands, to interpret Isaac as first prize and Ishmael as a second-class citizen, the equivalent of winning the toaster. Division inevitably ensued.
But here, as Abraham stands to lose his son, he and Isaac are united in a will to obey God even in the face of death. In a moment of radical mutual vulnerability, when God’s promise looks like it is about to be shattered with the death of Abraham’s beloved child and heir, they learn together in a very real way that ‘the Lord will provide.’ God does not, in the end, ask Isaac to be the sacrifice, to be the one earning the reward. A young ram – a symbol of Jesus – appears to be offered freely instead. This is still incomprehensible and violent in many ways. But in the Christian faith it is the Mystery of the Cross, and we know that there too, it is not the end of the story.
So there begins to be a sense in this passage that divine gift is not some distant reward on little individual clouds in heaven, held out of arm’s reach until we die. It is something that springs up, life-giving, in the heat of the moment when communities die to the need to grasp for control and power, and are united; open to a faithful and mutual encounter with God, even when that encounter looks like it might bring suffering. Jesus suffers with us and for us.
I think this is what Jesus is getting at in today’s Gospel, and what Paul explores in his letter to the Romans. Sometimes we get this the wrong way around. Eternal life is not a reward that we earn by doing good. The Kingdom of Heaven does not operate on a transactional economy.
God’s reward is not something we can control through our own plans and behaviour, which Abraham learns the hard way. Eternal life is a free gift from God, sheer grace. When we take up those little acts of compassion, generosity, love and justice based on the pattern of Jesus’ ministry – even so much as a cup of cold water for someone who is thirsty and vulnerable – we aren’t earning that free gift but announcing it. We announce it to ourselves and others, inviting them to enjoy the free gift of God with us.
Every time we act as a disciple of Jesus and love our neighbour, we are taking a little step towards showing that the Kingdom of Heaven is already amongst us on earth. Where we welcome people in the name of God and are open to encounter, we are heralding a reward already offered to all, that we cannot possibly control or gatekeep. Jesus says that those who receive this ministry will have the same reward as those who offer it. From this, we see that our reward is really about the dawning realisation of God’s grace in communion, and not a prize for the magnitude of our individual labours whilst living in fear of our sins. This is Good News indeed for anyone who has been taught to believe that God’s love is conditional.
In other words, God sent the free gift of his only Son out of love for all of you, and nothing you do can make God love you any more, or any less, than God already loves you. To know this is eternal life, and it is amongst you here and now to share with others.