Sermon 25 October 2026, The Last Sunday After Trinity
Readings: Leviticus 19.1-2, 15-18; 1 Thessalonians 2. 1-8; Matthew 22. 34-46
Theme: The Holiness of God
What are you ambitious about? Ambition is a part of human experience which often influences many of our decisions. These decisions may involve our profession, if we have one, or our retirement plans, if that is the period of life in which we find ourselves. They may also involve our desires for a family. To marry a certain person and to have children and so on. Whatever the case may be ambition is a significant part of life and one which the bible has important things to say to us about.
However, our ambitions may be typically shaped by many things. They may involve the desire for financial security. A security which enables us to do what we would really like to do. And then again, they may involve professional success. Achieving a promotion or a particular position in a workplace. Many things shape what we take on board as our ambitions, and none of these are necessarily bad, so long as they are in harmony with the fundamental Christian notion of ambition.
In Christian terms, ambition is to be encouraged. We should be ambitious but for the right kind of things. Paul commends us to be ambitious for the spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12. 31. These are the higher gifts, the highest of which is love. A selflessness which surpasses all the other gifts because it shares in the very essence of God.
And that is what holiness is all about. Holiness is sharing in the characteristics of God that pattern themselves in the whole of creation. In human beings this is particularly shown by love and it is in love that we come to know God because God is love.
Yet, it is rare today that if someone were to be asked the question, what are you ambitious about?, that they would answer, “to be holy.” It seems as if we have forgotten what the governing purpose of our ambitions should be for in the struggle for our own personal advancement that seems to be the horizon of people’s ambitions today. But the quest for holiness is at the heart of our readings today and they each provide a reminder of where our own ambitions should lie.
The ambitions in the conversation to which the opening of the gospel refers are rather limited. This is a conversation between Jesus and the Sadducees about the resurrection from the dead. Jesus silences the Sadducees because they believed that on death people went to an underworld called ‘Sheol’ and that there is no resurrection. He explains that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are still alive in the gift of God’s eternal life given to them through faith.
The Sadducees represented a rigid, conservative tradition within Judaism which placed the emphasis on compliance with Rome and living for the material benefits of life. This was the limit of their ambitions. The notion that God would renew the life of the dead was alien to them. Their ambitions indicated a failure to recognize the eternal union with God that resurrection implies and should frame life here and now in our quest to live a holy life.
Both the first reading and the gospel speak of a God whose relationship with us is patterned in a here and now which is already stamped with the mark of eternity. The name given to this new life in the Bible is holiness: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy,” says our first reading from Leviticus.
The Hebrew word for ‘holy’ is ´qadosh.’ It literally means to be separated or to be set apart. This sense of holiness or the sacredness of God was detached from the world of the here and now. God was totally other, only transcendent, for this tradition. This obviously conveys an important dimension of God, but another is revealed in the advent of Jesus.
So, when Jesus engages with the Pharisees in the gospel about the commandments, he is repositioning this ancient notion of holiness. The place of holiness for Jesus will not be in separation from the world but in intimate love for it. The God of Jesus is holy because he is the God who embraces the world in order to redeem it. This dimension of God is immanent in the world, first through the Lord Jesus and now through his Holy Spirit.
Redeeming this mortal world from the curse of death, Jesus thus manifests the love of God in two senses. The first is by showing God’s infinite love for us. God sends the Son for this reason. The second is by showing what it means to live in eternal life, in holiness, here and now. It means to love one another as Paul demonstrates in the second reading from 1 Thessalonians. This love never dies but is raised to new life at the resurrection, as with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
This is why the exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees about the Messiah being the son of David is revealing. It shows that though Jesus traces his human genealogy back to King David, it is his divine origin which sets him apart. He is holy because as the Son of David and the Son God, Jesus is the Messiah who will redeem Israel and the whole of humanity from separation from the life of God.
In Jesus, the holiness of God visits earth and earth returns to heaven. The union of these dimensions is brought together in the one person of Jesus, human and divine.
So, we should be ambitious to be like Christ in our lives and this should shape what we do in life and what decisions we take about our professions, our families and our use of time and money. When we do this, we orient our lives towards the fundamental ambition of the Christian life which is to be holy as the Lord our God is holy.
