I press on towards the goal ...

There are some church members who say they have lived good lives and kept the commandments. They have spent their lives doing the right thing and maybe thought that they “should be alright when they face their Maker”. Some have read their Bibles diligently, tried very hard to practice what they have learnt and do what is right. But they have had no passion in their lives and little joy and peace. They have lived from a sense of duty. While Christians say there is more to it than that, many are unsure about what the more is.

It is to people such as these that Paul was speaking in the reading from Philippians 3. In all the worldly ways, Paul qualified as a righteous person, blameless under the law. Paul had grown up in the vineyard of Jesus’ parable. He had benefitted from all that implied. He was born into a good family which carefully followed the religious laws. He was of the right race, the right tribe, the right religion. Paul had been brought up in the sheltered monoculture of a walled vineyard. What more could there be to life! Surely this is how God intended people to behave.

It is certainly what the people in the vineyard had come to think. They so valued all that they had produced in the way of religious dressings that they were not about to part with even a small part of it as tribute to the owner and provider. What they had produced had become more important to them; the buildings, the dogma, the creeds, the fancy paraphernalia, their feelings of self-righteousness and above all, their embellishment of the guidelines God had given them to live by.

When the stories of the life and teaching of Jesus reached Paul and made a claim on him, as they must have done for him to have reacted so violently against them, Paul rejected them wholeheartedly. They were like the messengers from the landlord who had come to collect what had been agreed upon with the tenants of the vineyard. Paul even saw it as his duty to reject the teachings of Jesus, and persecute those who dared follow that man. To mix metaphors, Jesus became the stone Paul rejected that was to become the cornerstone of his life.

Rev Julianne Parker

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