Sunday’s readings: 2nd Sunday before Advent

Malachi 4.1-2a; Psalm 98; 2 Thessalonians 3.6-13; Luke 21.5-19

JUST before Judas meets the high priests and scribes (Luke 22.3), Jesus addresses disciples under pressure. Into a situation of terror (arrest, persecution, betrayal, death, hate), he speaks words of guidance: “By your endurance, gain your souls!”

The link between endurance and success isn’t easy cause and effect. Most worthwhile successes require a level of endurance; and yet the default setting for many of us is to endure — perhaps to achieve some “lesser” goal — but to not win. Ask all of the 1000’s of Olympic athletes who compete and reach gaining the label “Olympian”, but who never win a medal of any color.

Being of a selected generation, I believe of 1991 and the good British sprinter Roger Black. His misfortune was to be good at a time when two quite various factors prevented his reaching the last word win. In that yr, he was robbed of a World Championship gold medal by a later-confessed drug cheat; and, in individual competition, he never succeeded in out-sprinting the American Michael Johnson.

Sometimes, what denies us success is unfairness or wrongdoing. Often, though, it is solely the proven fact that not even our biggest efforts can overcome obstacles by sheer force of will. Paul nails it in 1 Corinthians 9.24: “Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but just one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you could win it.” His words are encouragement to all, not for one person only. He doesn’t say, “Run in such a way that you’ll win.”

Roger Black was truly great because he succeeded. He had the courage to run in such a way that he might win. For Christians, the true mark of religion is to run like that, with courage, although we understand that we may not achieve anything that the world would label a “prize”.

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus works his way through warnings about future civil unrest and outright war towards a particular challenge that he knows that his followers are going to should face. If we were reading this passage as a part of the entire Gospel, we might by now remember that the Passion is imminent. But, once we hear only this passage, our thoughts take a more specific direction. Has there ever been a time when, hearing this Gospel in worship, Christians haven’t had the eyes of their souls turned towards civil and military conflict?

As I write, we stand on the point of a settlement of two years of misery and destruction within the Middle East. But, before that, there was war in Ukraine. There still is. There will at all times be wars. Even in our prosperous and peaceful land, we usually are not free from unrest and disorder.

So the Gospel challenges us to recollect the woes of the world, perhaps by prayer, or works of charity, or political activism. Those are external reactions; but, at its climax (verses 12-19), the Gospel turns from the world around us to the interior nature of Christians as a bunch (the shape of the Greek tells us that Jesus is talking to the community, to not individuals). The threat that they face is first lively and external (“they’ll persecute you”): a warning about what others will do to the faithful. Then Jesus switches to the passive, moving into the experience of the persecuted faithful: “You might be betrayed; you might be hated.”

These verses weave threat and defence right into a single fabric. Being persecuted will give Jesus’s followers a probability to testify (in Greek, martyrion), whether by word or example. The Lord himself will give them the words and wisdom to confront their accusers. Being betrayed and hated, even killed, will turn out to be their opportunity to point out endurance, which — slightly than the suffering and persecution, even the betrayal and death — is what is going to gain them the Lord’s blessing: “By your endurance you’ll gain your souls.”

So, winning one’s soul (or “life-force”, or “security of life”) is each the goal for a Christian and the mark of a Christian. Mark and Matthew (8.36; 16.26) warn us concerning the alternative: “What will it profit someone to win the entire world and forfeit their life?” We can all lose our lives by striving to realize what’s worthless. But we may all run in such a way as to win. And we will all endure.