Trinity Free Church Huntingdon

In this series we have traced the Gospel story from Advent before last Christmas when we prepared for the coming of the Babe of Bethlehem as Emmanuel, ‘God with us’, through the old familiar account of that event and what followed. Then, after our New Year Covenant service gave us a timely reminder of our commitment to Him and the opportunity to reaffirm that commitment, we followed the events of His earthly life to Palm Sunday when he made His major claim to be the Messiah both by fulfilling an ancient prophecy when He entered Jerusalem on a donkey and by His followers waving palm leaves and shouting “Hosanna! (“Save now!”) Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord”, which would have immediately been associated in the minds of the bystanders with that great prayer at the conclusion their Feast of Tabernacles for God to send His Messiah to save His people, when in the Temple they waved their “lulavs” (mostly made of palm leaves) and chanted just what Jesus’ followers chanted. There is no doubt that bystanders got the message of Jesus’ claim that day. So, too, did the authorities and that precipitated that traumatic week which we call Holy Week

First Jesus cleansed the Temple of those who had turned it into a market where they fleeced the worshippers of their money and that, blasphemously, in the Name of God. The Rulers tried to bully Him, demanding to know by what authority He did it. When He neatly turned the tables on them, they resorted to trying to trap Him into saying something which would discredit Him in the eyes of His followers or they could use as evidence against Him in court. Again He neatly sidestepped their every snare and at the same time He left them in no doubt about their own shortcomings. Tension mounted. The disciples knew it would happen. The previous week, back in Galilee, when Jesus made it clear He was going back to Jerusalem, they were appalled. The knew the danger. But it was Thomas, poor Thomas who is only known for his doubts, who said “Come on. Let us go, too, so we may die with Him” and here they were, fearful of what would happen next. .

Then came Maundy Thursday when Jesus told the disciples to prepare the Passover meal. This was more like it. They knew where they were with that. And no-one could criticise them for it, either. Every Jew did this every year and their ancestors had done so for over a thousand years. At last they felt they were on familiar ground. And then Jesus changed even that! After reprimanding them for again arguing over which of them was the most important and giving them an object lesson in humility by washing their feet, He changed the course of the ancient ritual of the feast itself. He took bread and offered it to them saying “This is my body” and then the wine saying “This is the New Testament in my blood”. The old feast to celebrate deliverance from slavery in Egypt long ago was now a celebration of the deliverance from slavery to sin in the here and now which He was to achieve a few hours later as He died on the Cross, the spotless Lamb of God, sacrificed for the sins of the world, as John the Baptist had put it three years previously.

They went out into the night, not as usual to Bethany where His friends would have been implicated in His arrest, but to the garden of Gethsemane near at hand, just across the brook from Jerusalem. There Judas, who had left that feast in the upper room to go to the priests with whom he had agreed to betray Jesus, led an armed posse to arrest Him. After a travesty of a trial, illegal under Jewish law, with everyone trying to pass the responsibility on to someone else, they condemned Jesus and He was executed by the most horrible of lingering torture, crucifixion.

Then how dramatically that apparent triumph of evil over good was reversed by His resurrection on Easter Sunday! Gradually the disciples became accustomed to their new relationship with their risen Lord, so that, when He left them at Ascension they were ready to wait for His promised empowering by the Holy Spirit to enable them to fulfil the task Jesus had entrusted to them.

Pentecost brought that dramatic change and the evangelisation of the world began.

There remained one more red letter day in the Christian calendar – Trinity Sunday, to celebrate the recognition of the threefold nature of God as Father, Son/Saviour and Holy Spirit. And then? Nothing but a long succession of “Sundays after Trinity”. Did nothing more happen? Was that the end?

Of course it was not. Those Sundays after Trinity speak to us just as strongly as all the other aspects of the Gospel we have considered because they represent the time in which we live. God had provided all that is necessary for those committed to Him as we see from reading the book of Acts. And the Holy Spirit who enabled those we read of there didn’t retire at the end of that book. He is still just as active in the world today, convicting people of all ages of their need of the Saviour and enabling them to live lives worthy of their calling as Paul put it.

We rightly lament the decline in churchgoing in our part of the world and the belief that the Gospel is no longer relevant in our so-called sophisticated age, and we see the result in the decline of so much of our national life, but ours is but a small part of the whole and elsewhere the church is growing dramatically. Sometimes this is under persecution because the Authorities in some countries fear losing control over their population if they convert from whatever is their national religion and drastic laws are passed to try to prevent conversion. Behind all this, of course, is the hand of Satan who hasn’t yet given up the struggle, ultimately doomed though he is, but, as the old hymn reminds us, God is working His purposes out as year succeeds to year.

So let us take heart. This ‘Sundays after Trinity’ period provides our opportunities to live lives worthy of our calling and that not for ourselves alone but that others may see what a difference Christ can make and be drawn to Him themselves. Remember that at first “Christian” was a nickname given to those who were seen to be different because they belonged to Christ! But these days won’t go on for ever. Soon we will be back to Advent and that will not be just a reminder of what happened in Bethlehem two thousand years ago but to another coming. The Bible is clear that Christ is coming again and indeed the New Testament has more references to that than to any other single event. This time He will come not as a helpless baby but as the victorious Lord in majesty and triumph – and judgment!

And that, of course, poses another question. Where will we stand then? Praise God for His assurance regarding the verdict in the case of those who put their trust in Christ as their Saviour and can look forward to that day with confidence.