Part One of a series on “The Love of Jesus through the Ages”

 Mark 13: 1-13

As Jesus was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!”

“Do you see all these great buildings?” replied Jesus. “Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”

As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John and Andrew asked him privately, “Tell us, when will these things happen? And what will be the sign that they are all about to be fulfilled?”

Jesus said to them: “Watch out that no one deceives you. Many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am he,’ and will deceive many. When you hear of wars and rumours of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places, and famines. These are the beginning of birth pains. You must be on your guard. You will be handed over to the local councils and flogged in the synagogues. On account of me you will stand before governors and kings as witnesses to them. And the gospel must first be preached to all nations. Whenever you are arrested and brought to trial, do not worry beforehand about what to say. Just say whatever is given you at the time, for it is not you speaking, but the Holy Spirit. Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child. Children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death. Everyone will hate you because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.

 2 Timothy 2: 1-13  

You then, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others. Join with me in suffering, like a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No one serving as a soldier gets entangled in civilian affairs, but rather tries to please his commanding officer. Similarly, anyone who competes as an athlete does not receive the victor’s crown except by competing according to the rules. The hardworking farmer should be the first to receive a share of the crops. Reflect on what I am saying, for the Lord will give you insight into all this. Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David. This is my gospel, for which I am suffering even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But God’s word is not chained. Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they too may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory. Here is a trustworthy saying:

If we died with him, we will also live with him.

If we endure, we will also reign with him.

If we disown him, he will also disown us.

If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot disown himself.

• GRAB

It is embarrassing sometimes alarming to forget people’s names or to hunt for a word we should know as we all get older we face the frustration of memory loss. It may be a sign of dementia, or it may just be from the normal aging of our brain. The Christian Church as a whole has memory loss about the last 2000 years. We may know a fair bit about Jesus and his apostles from the New Testament and perhaps even the people and stories of the Old Testament but after chapter 28 of the New Testament book the Acts of the Apostles most of us draw a blank. Most Protestants think that nothing much happened until Martin Luther and John Calvin appeared 500 years ago. Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Science religions think that nothing much happened until their American prophets turned up a couple of hundred years ago. At least Catholics and Greek Orthodox have a common sense of sense of connectedness with the famous saints of the first 1000 years until their Great Schism of 1054 but then they write each other out of the story for the last 1000 years.

What seems to unite all denominations is their wilful ignorance of the role of women!

This sermon series won’t be a course in church history but rather an encouragement to see how the love that Jesus taught, exemplified and enables has been lived out at different times and in different places. We’ll be doing it in bite-sized portions of 500 years. And for each era I’ll focus on one woman who inspires us to follow Jesus.

For the first 500 years, most Christians lived in the same political system Jesus had lived in the Roman Empire. From England to Egypt, from Spain to Syria, people enjoyed the peace and   stability under Pax Romana. Over that time Christians went from being a tiny, persecuted minority to the most influential and functional institution in the Empire. But it was a very bumpy 500 years…as Jesus had foretold…

The week he died Jesus warned his disciples “You will be handed over to the local councils and flogged in the synagogues. On account of me you will stand before governors and kings as witnesses to them.” That’s exactly what happened. As recorded in the Book of Acts the first generation of Christians were Jews like Stephen who suffered persecution from fellow Jews who rejected their claim that Jesus was the Messiah. A generation later when the Book of Revelation was written most of the Christians were Gentiles and persecution came from the Roman government. These persecutions got worse and worse for the next two hundred years. But this didn’t stop the spread of Christianity. It actually encouraged it.  As Jesus promised, “And the gospel must first be preached to all nations. Whenever you are arrested and brought to trial, do not worry beforehand about what to say. Just say whatever is given you at the time, for it is not you speaking, but the Holy Spirit.”

Two hundred years after Jesus’s birth the city of Carthage in North Africa (nowadays known as Tunis) had a vibrant and heroic church. It was the famous Carthaginian Christian Tertullian who wrote the immortal line: “the blood of the martyrs is the seeds of the church”. When he wrote this, fresh in his memory was the martyrdom of two fellow Carthaginians Perpetua and Felicity, both young mothers who were cruelly put to death in the Roman amphitheatre as part of an entertainment for the masses featuring wild animals and gladiators.

I want you to remember the name Perpetua because we should be ashamed not to remember her. Why? Because she was the first woman Christian writer.

Also, because what she wrote was one of the most remarkable pieces of autobiography ever written. It was her personal account of the last few weeks of her life from her arrest to her martyrdom. She describes how her father constantly pressured her to recant her faith, how she had to hand over her baby to relatives, how she was strengthened by visions from God and how she encouraged other Christian prisoners. It is also recorded how some of their persecutors were struck by these martyrs’ courage and goodness and converted to the faith. Just like Tertullian said.

Jesus also warned his disciples, “Watch out that no one deceives you.  Many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am he,’ and will deceive many.”  When the persecutions by the Roman authorities eventually stopped the Christians faced a new challenge. The challenge was to remain faithful to the teachings of the apostles found in the New Testament in the face of attractive but false ideas about Jesus. At the heart of the problem was the unfathomable mystery about Jesus being both fully human and fully divine at the same time.

Every attempt to fathom the mystery had unintended negative consequences:

• One solution was to say that Jesus was an avatar: an entirely spiritual being pretending to be human. This meant he faked his emotions and failed to identify with us in our humanity.
• Another solution was that he was entirely human but was adopted by God as his Son at his baptism. This meant that he wasn’t the exact representation of God’s character.
• Another solution was that God Almighty was the Father in the Old Testament who morphed into Jesus in his lifetime and then after the Resurrection morphed into the Spirit. Beautifully simple but in contradiction to everything Jesus taught.

To deal decisively with this problem all the leaders of all the churches gathered together in the city of Nicea and came up with a statement that Jesus was both fully God and fully human but accepting the unfathomable mystery. The leaders described Jesus as “true God from true God of one being with the Father” BUT in the same breath that he “was born of the Virgin Mary and became truly human.” Familiar words?  We’ll be saying them after the sermon -it’s called the Nicene Creed.

So where does that leave us?

Just like the Christians in the Roman Empire we need to be faithful to Jesus when we are under pressure. It may not be the pressure of martyrdom in the amphitheatre like Perpetua and Felicity, or the pressure of false ideas about Jesus.

Let me suggest two challenges to our faithfulness to Jesus in Tasmania in 2025:

The first challenge is we are living in a world where we are constantly bombarded with information and distractions that draw us away from keeping Jesus as our chief love and number one time priority. In this case to be faithful to Jesus means committing to spending meaningful time with Jesus, listening to him, learning about him, worshipping him, consciously following him.

The second challenge is the uncomfortable reality that our grandchildren’s generation have little or no exposure to the truth of Jesus at home, at school, among peers or in the media. For those of us over thirty, even if we didn’t come from a religious family, we had opportunities to learn about Jesus at Religious Education in schools – but that stopped about ten years ago. The Sunday Schools that many of us attended died off twenty years ago. The temptation is to give up or make excuses as to why it is so hard to share the life-giving truth of Jesus. But to be faithful to Jesus is to not give up and not make excuses, to pray for opportunities and be prepared to make sacrifices and get outside our comfort zones to introduce our grandchildren’s generation to Jesus.

In case you haven’t got around to making any New Year’s Resolutions here they are dished up for you!