The First Shall be Last

I want to tell you about something that I heard someone say on the radio. It wasn’t a religious programme and as far as I know she isn’t what we might call a ‘religious’ person but what she had to say seemed to chime with the gospel so clearly that I find it hard to say that it wasn’t the gospel. Do you need a label to speak the truth of the gospel? We’re all aware that calling yourself a Christian, being a regular churchgoer or even holding some official title within the church, is no guarantee that we will be able to hear the gospel, let alone speak it.

In the Sermon on the Mount Christ tells us something about the Kingdom of God. The first shall be last and the last shall be first; the meek shall inherit the earth; blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. These are staggering words, powerful, mysterious, beautiful words and hard to comprehend. It seems that God’s kingdom is utterly at odds with our world, our society, the last shall be first; the first shall be last.

What does Jesus mean by telling the crowd about the Kingdom of God? Is he telling them what heaven will be like, when we die? Is he telling them to go and build the kingdom of god? At the time many Christians thought the world as they knew it was going to end any minute and the Kingdom of God would be established. Then when it didn’t happen they had to adjust, to admit that although they had been seized by the idea of the Kingdom of God they hadn’t quite understood it. And that describes us still. The Sermon on the Mount is dazzling yet baffling.

What about the Lord’s prayer? Jesus refers to the Kingdom of God in the words we all say in every Sunday. ‘Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’. Well it definitely says that the Kingdom of God is coming. On that I think all Christians will agree. The next line, ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’. What’s at issue here is the relationship between the two lines. Are they both part of the same thought – that the kingdom of God will come when and if God’s will is carried out on earth like it is in heaven. ‘Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be done’. Is it saying that one is the result of the other? If it is it doesn’t answer the question of whether God’s will is going to be carried about by his people or is it somehow going to be imposed on the earth, that God is going to make all this happen without our help.

Or are they two separate actions? ‘Thy will be done. Pause. Thy Kingdom Come’ Remember that this is a prayer, and I think that’s the key. Like all good prayers, and lets not forget it is the prayer that defines what a good prayer is, it involves praise, confession and intercession. The two lines we’re thinking about here: ‘Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done’ are a prayer of intercession. That means it’s something that we’re asking for.

I always struggled with the idea of prayers of intercession. Philosophically it caused me all sorts of problems. Why should we ask God for something? Doesn’t he already know what we want?

Do we think that we can change his mind? As if God thinks to himself ‘I was going to let you fail that exam but since you put it like that I realise that I’d better make sure you pass it instead.’ Then it dawned on me. Prayer is all to do with our will. We ask God for things, as a way of training ourselves to want the right things. Jesus tells us to pray for our enemies. Our enemies don’t need our prayers, but we need to pray for them. We need to bend our will, to discipline ourselves to want what we should want. We know that we should forgive the person who burgles our house or calls us names or rips us off. We know that we should forgive them. We’ll know that we have forgiven them when we’ve prayed for them, when we’ve sincerely wished for them to be happy. The prayer of intercession is how we bring our will into line with God’s will. If we pray to win the lottery it will do us no good at all (even if we win it). But when the things that we ask God for are the things that Jesus says we should be asking for, then we start to change. We become better people. We start to become proper Christians.

So it’s a prayer, a prayer of intercession. ‘Thy Kingdom Come. Thy Will be done on Earth as it is in heaven.’ It’s two separate things that we’re asking for or wishing for. Please, please God. Let your Kingdom Come. Please, please God let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

If it’s something that we are asking for in prayer then it really doesn’t matter if the Kingdom of God is going to be made by us or by God. It doesn’t matter if we only see it in heaven or in the resurrection, or in glimpses or not at all. What matters is that we are praying for it. We don’t know what the kingdom of God is exactly, Jesus doesn’t tell us, but he tells us to ask for it, to will it into existence, to want it, to want it badly.

You know what it’s like to really want something. We really want our children to pass that exam, to get that job. We want the result of the hospital check up to be all clear. We want to get the house we’ve made an offer on. I don’t find it easy, or if I’m honest even possible, to want the Kingdom of God as much as I wanted to have the offer we recently made on a house accepted. Isn’t that terrible? But that’s what we’re like and that’s why we’re told to pray this way so that we can start to get better.

So we’ve got to pray that the first should be last. How can we do that if we don’t even know what it means? Who does he mean when he talks about the first and the last? First and last in what?

In school we’ve always known. It starts with the school you go to, is it a grammar school or a secondary modern? Where did it come in the league tables? And from the moment you start you’re getting measured for CATS scores, SATS scores, KS3 levels, and GCSE results. All the way through teachers tell pupils, quite rightly, that they shouldn’t compare themselves to others. ‘If you were level 3 last year see if you can get to level 4 this year, don’t worry about anyone else’. But we do worry. The kid with the level 3 knows that most of the class is on level 4 or 5. He or she knows who’s first and who’s last.

And of course those kids in your class with the best scores went on to get the best jobs. Our leaders, at work or our politicians, they’re all first-rate people. What sort of leadership would we get if we put the people that are always coming last in charge?

Maybe it means that we should make it easier for someone from a humble background to rise to the top, like Joseph in Egypt or John Major who became Prime Minister of the UK without ever going to university? We might listen to the Sermon on the Mount and then conclude that that is exactly the sort of thing we should be doing. I couldn’t argue with that. I think every Christian should believe in equality of opportunity. But suppose we succeed in making a society where everyone has an equal chance in life. Does that mean we’ve done it, we’ve created the Kingdom of God on earth as in heaven? No it doesn’t. The Kingdom of God isn’t a place where the last can become first; there are no self-made men in the kingdom of God. The last shall be first.

Last in what? We’re meant to be praying for this to happen, so what does it mean? Does it mean the last in ability? What good would it do putting them in charge, and what good would it do them? I’m absolutely useless at science. I have no natural ability for it and I didn’t get a single qualification in science when I was at school. In the Kingdom of God would someone like me be made the top scientist? I’ve about as much chance of finding a cure for cancer as I have of playing for England, and I don’t think I’ll be doing that in the Kingdom of God either!

The gospel can be mysterious, but it’s never nonsense.

Does it mean those who are last in morality? Well in one respect we can say that it does. At university they teach you that the more you know the more you realise how little you know. In Christianity we learn that you can only become very good by realising just how bad you are. You and I cannot say that we are closer to God than even the most heinous criminals. Seriously, someone sitting in prison right now who is totally and tragically aware of his or her guilt, and who has put themselves entirely at God’s mercy will, we believe, receive his free grace. We know what the deal is, be aware of your sin and confess it in helplessness. Reach the point where you finally accept that there is nothing you can do to change it and cry out to God in total helplessness and you will get your reply. In that respect the Kingdom of God is already here. Ask and you shall receive.

So should we put these people in charge? No. Not necessarily. Christ came to save sinners and being the biggest sinner in the world does not mean that you cannot be saved. But he didn’t come to put the sinners in charge. Now if you were in the privileged position of choosing the next Pope or Archbishop of Canterbury, or even a Congregational Minister you would, in a sense, be putting someone in charge of morality. If you were on the interview panel I think a very good question to ask would be ‘what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’ I don’t suppose you’d be able to ask that, but you would, I think, want to be sure that the person you choose knows what it is to be bad and what it is to be forgiven.

And I don’t suppose it’s just co-incidence that the apostle Paul, without whom there would be no such thing as Christianity, to whom we all are personally indebted for our faith, was before his conversion a very bad man.

But what this amounts to is that in the Kingdom of God those who are last in morality may become first, they aren’t automatically disqualified, and in some circumstances they may be nearer to the kingdom of God than you or I. But they aren’t automatically qualified either. The Kingdom of God is surely a place where evil is transformed into goodness but it’s not a place where evil is called good.

All of which brings me to the remarkable woman I heard being interviewed on the radio the other day. She’s called Jill Hicks and she gave me an idea about what it might mean this enigmatic phrase ‘the first shall be last.’ As I said, she’s not religious as far as I know but something incredible happened to her and she’s written a book to try to tell people all about it.

She was sitting on the tube next to one of the young men who set off the bombs on July 7, 2005 in London. She very nearly lost her life; she did lose her legs.

She was asked why she’d written the book. I expected her to say that it was a sort of therapy, a way of getting all the pain and distress out. A way of channelling her anger and confusion into something creative. Getting it all down on paper so that she can move on, start to heal. All that would have been perfectly understandable and it would have been a good book.

But that wasn’t it. She wrote it to ‘try to put into words the gratitude she felt…’ Not just to the people who’d risked their life to rescue her, or the doctors and nurses that saved her life, or to her partner and family for their love and support. She feels overwhelmed with gratitude to the strangers who did so much for her simply because she was a human being. And she feels overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude to life itself. Life is so sweet to her, every minute, every conversation, every sight and sound is so precious to her. She doesn’t feel bitter. She feels lucky.

She’s so overwhelmed by this feeling, and the insight that comes with it that she simply had to share it. She’s in no doubt that it’s only through the extreme suffering she’s endured that she has become the person that she was. She described herself before it happened as someone who was ‘interested in the world but totally oblivious to it.’

She described sitting on the tube on her way to work and suddenly being in darkness and feeling like she was falling. Then she heard people screaming in the dark. She thought she’d had a heart attack and these people were screaming at her. Then it dawned on her that something much worse had happened and people were screaming for themselves. Those who could got out of the tunnel, but those who were too injured had no choice but to stay where they were and wait for help. She said that there was an eerie calm on the train among the few that were left down there, calm and an incredible feeling of goodwill between them all, encouraging and consoling each other.

She heard two voices. One was the voice of death calling her and she said it was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard. She struggled to put this into words when she was on the radio, it was beautiful in a way that surpassed anything she’s ever experienced. It was calling her and she was so drawn to it, she said she desperately wanted to go to it, but then she became aware of another voice, the voice of life. The voice of life wasn’t beautiful it was angry and brittle. At this point she realised that her life wasn’t about her. Her death would mean the distress and devastation of her partner of her family; her friends and she made a decision to live. She feels that this decision was at the root of everything that happened from that point on.

She woke up in hospital, with her legs amputated. But she was seized by gratitude that she was alive and she’s felt like this ever since. Her life is precious, everyone and everything is precious to her. Every minute, every conversation, every event. She was moved to write this book because she couldn’t contain the way she felt. She feels lucky, grateful, blessed. She lives in a state of grace.

Grace is a Christian concept, and what’s at the heart of it is that you can not earn grace, it’s a gift. But what a gift she’s had! Unbearable pain and trauma, disfigured and permanently disabled, yet she talks as though she’d won the lottery! Or does she? We’re getting used to reading about lottery winners cracking up. Celebrities going into rehab. The most envied people in our society are some of the most miserable, maladjusted, and desperate people you could wish to meet.

So who are the happiest people in our society? People like Jill Hicks. I don’t think you’d find it very shocking if I were to say to you that a hospice is where you would find some of the most joyful people you could ever wish to meet. Jesus says that we must lose our life to gain it. In the resurrection we can see this happening literally. Jesus gains life after losing it and we hope that this will happen to us too. In hospital wards and hospices, in war zones and in our homes over and over it is proved true that those who are closest to death are the most alive. Is this something of the new life that they are gaining? They truly are alive, aren’t they? Those who are dying. Those who know that they will never recover. Those who know that death is a real danger each day. They can be the most joyful and alive people, can’t they?

Whatever the Kingdom of God is it seems that Jill Hicks has a greater share in it than someone like myself who still walks around as though he’s going to live forever. When we pray for God’s Kingdom to come, for His will to be done on earth as it is in heaven we are learning to see the world her way, to want what she wants. We’re training our will. We pray for the Kingdom to learn to really, really want it. We’re learning to delight in life, its riches, its beauty, its grace.

We’re asking to be a little bit more like Jill Hicks. She made sense of the phrase ‘the first shall be last’ and ‘the last shall be first’. Listening to her I thought that maybe the Kingdom of God is a place where people like her are in charge and where we do things her way.

And as to how this Kingdom will come about – we have to start by really wanting things to be like that. The question of how God’s Kingdom will arise cannot really be considered by us until we have resolved that this is really, truthfully, what we want. So we should pray every day for God’s Kingdom, yes in the hope that we will see it, but first and foremost in the hope that we should actually desire it and that we should be able to bring our will into line with the will of God.