This is based on my talk at Catford Community Church on 26 February 2023. Working through Nehemiah, we were in chapter 4.
A very brief summary:
Following Jesus should make a practical, real-world, earthly difference to our lives. A consequence of this is that opposition will (should) be practical, real-world, and earthly. Rather than knock us back, this gives more opportunity to live out a practical, real-world, earthly faith. Just like Nehemiah, Paul & Thessalonians, and Jesus (and the disciples).
Where have we come so far with Nehemiah in 2023? We started the year with prayer, following Nehemiah’s example in chapter 1. Since then we’ve seen him start to rebuild the walls (ch.2), organise his workers to work together (ch.3), address questions of justice (ch.5), and discern God’s will and ways in response to those who were trying to deceive him (ch.6).
And so today we pop back to chapter 4, and our theme, which is “Responding to Opposition”. We’re going to have a look at Nehemiah and his builders here, and then also look at a couple of other places in the Bible where we see opposition. And my hope is that we can see some common threads that help us live our lives as followers of Jesus now, in 2023.
Nehemiah
Nehemiah 4 opens with “Now when Sanballat heard that we were building the wall, he was angry and greatly enraged”, and a bit later on (v.7) “But when Sanballat and Tobiah and the Arabs and the Ammonites and the Ashdodites heard that the repairing of the walls of Jerusalem was going forward and the gaps were beginning to be closed they were very angry…”
This guy Sanballat doesn’t sound like someone you’d want to meet – he was angry, greatly enraged, and very angry. But why? All Nehemiah and his builders were doing was restoring, rebuilding a city wall. Something about that project had really riled Sanballat – do you remember we first heard of him, along with Geshem and Tobiah, in chapter 2? When they first heard of Nehemiah’s plans they mocked and ridiculed them – “Are you rebelling against the king?”
They could see that Nehemiah’s plans were going to shake up ‘the way things work around here’. They knew how the world worked. What they said suggested that it was not prudent to upset the king, which it usually wasn’t in those days – upset the one with authority over your life and death. But maybe also they were part of the system, and the re-establishment of Jerusalem, with its worshipping community and changes to the local population, was going to shake things up. Maybe they could see that life would not work so much to their advantage anymore.
So they mocked the work – “even a fox climbing on that wall would knock it down” – they mocked the people involved – “what are these feeble Jews doing?” – and clearly they presented a physical threat to the workers too.
Nehemiah responded by praying, and with encouragement – he made sure he had good teams of people working together, and he reminded them to “Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome” – no matter how feeble they felt, they had God alongside, behind, in front of them.
And he responded practically, equipping the builders and their helpers with weapons, and the means to call for help from others building the wall. It seems from the narrative we have that this was sufficient to ward off the threatened physical attacks – there’s no account of any actual fighting or use of the weapons.
Thessalonians
So much for Nehemiah… I was struck by how it chimed with some of what we’ve also been looking at recently in Thessalonians. As we’ve seen, this is a letter from Paul to the church in Thessalonica, and he’s spent a good deal of chapter one giving thanks for the Christians there and what he’s heard about them.
The background to this letter is in Acts – the second half of Acts tells us about Paul’s journeys around the Mediterranean, preaching about Jesus and forming new communities of Jesus-followers. In Acts ch.16, Paul, Silas and Timothy are in Philippi, and there some people stir things up and they get in big trouble for ‘disturbing the city’ – Paul and Silas are thrown in jail, where they spend the night praying and singing worship songs – there’s a earthquake, prison falls down, but they don’t run off – the jailer becomes a follower of Jesus, but Paul &co have to leave town.
And then, Acts ch.17 tells us that the next place that Paul stopped was Thessalonica. He preached the risen Jesus in the synagogue for three weeks, and some of the people that heard him were persuaded. But again, “the Jews became jealous and with the help of some ruffians in the market place they formed a mob and set the city in an uproar.” (v.5)
What was the problem? “These people have been turning the world upside down” (v.6) – they were upsetting ‘the way things work around here’. The new believers hustled Paul and Silas out of town and sent them on to the next place. It seems that maybe Paul had only been in Thessalonica for maybe a month, and he would have been concerned about how his band of new believers, made up of some Jews and some Gentiles, would go on. Would they fizzle out again as quickly as they started, or would they hold onto the Jesus that Paul had introduced them to?
The letter of 1 Thessalonians gives us an update. Paul is delighted to hear that they have survived and grown! Paul had perhaps only been there for a few weeks (no long discipleship course!) but still Timothy is able to bring back to Paul a report about their faith, hope and love. As we’ve seen, their reputation has spread throughout the region, and they have become imitators of Paul and of Jesus.
They have also suffered some of the same treatment that Paul had suffered – 2.14-15.
How does Paul sum up what they have done? They “turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven” (1.9-10). They had received the word of God as ‘what it really is, God’s word which is also at work in you as believers’ (2.13)
‘Idols’ here doesn’t necessarily mean a model of a ‘god’. The emphasis of the word is to indicate something that’s an image, shadow, phantom of something else. It implies a falseness – a false god which is not real – not something to be relied on. The Thessalonians had turned from the unreal to the real, from the phantom to the living and true God.
This had clearly upset the order of things – if Jesus is Lord, Caesar is not! They must have lived their lives differently – doing some new things and not doing some old things.
The Thessalonians, like Nehemiah and his builders, were clearly doing something that other people noticed and didn’t like. They were upsetting the order of things. They were following the living God they knew and loved, and who had changed their lives.
We will pull all this together in a little while, but first I want to go to another biblical example.
Jesus
It’s been the start of Lent this week, when the church traditionally fasts before the feast of Easter – there’s a focus on Jesus leading up to his crucifixion at the hands of the Jewish authorities and the Romans. We turn our attention to Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem.
In Mark, this starts in about ch.10, which tells us that Jesus and his disciples are on the road to Jerusalem. Jesus knows what is going to happen to him there, and he tells his disciples – “the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise again” (v.33-34)
Jesus experienced opposition, big-time! Like Nehemiah, and like Paul & the Thessalonians it was very physical, earthly opposition. For Nehemiah it meant the fear of physical attack, for Paul it meant actual physical attack, and for Jesus it meant a cruel and painful death.
Jesus also was upsetting the way things were done – he challenged the assumptions people made about life. And not just on an intellectual level, where people could agree to disagree and carry on with life. He called his followers to change the way they live, and the ways they interact with their society as a whole and other individuals. (Turn the other cheek – forgive – give your money away – love your neighbour as yourself (who is my neighbour?))
The things Jesus said ‘turned the world upside down’. He called for his followers’ primary allegiance to be to him and to God, which challenged the world-order he was in where ultimately Caesar was Lord, and the Jews had a special dispensation to follow their different religion in the Roman context.
So, what does all this mean for us, now, in the 21st century?
So what?
Firstly, I think these episodes, and of course the Bible as whole, show that there isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, a separation between our ‘spiritual’ life and our physical, earthly life. What we believe about God and what it means to follow Jesus is intimately connected with how we live our lives.
God is still in the business of turning the world upside down (or putting the world to rights) and we’re part of the plan.
Sanballat noticed that what Nehemiah was doing was a challenge to everyday life in Jerusalem. The people of Thessalonica noticed that what Paul was preaching and the changes in the lives of the new followers of Jesus was a challenge to their way of life. The religious and political authorities in first century Palestine noticed that Jesus was a challenge to life then.
What about now? How does what we believe challenge the prevailing assumptions about how life works these days? And, at least as importantly, how does that affect the real-world things that we do? And, does anyone notice?!
So, the sacred and the secular, the ‘religious’ and the practical, parts of our lives are connected and should reflect each other.
Secondly, the opposition these people faced came in practical, earthly ways. Nehemiah had to arm his builders for protection, the Thessalonians faced physical attack and had to rush Paul and Silas away for their protection, and for Jesus it lead ultimately to his death.
Do we face practical opposition? For example, is the reluctance of the Council to allow us to re-start renting the centre we used before the pandemic an outworking of an antipathy to churches and Christians? (Or is it just the result of inaction and inefficiency?!) Christians in some other countries, and some circumstances in this country, face very practical difficulties because they are Christians – acting in ways that challenge the philosophical assumptions of society can provoke very real, earthly push-back, opposition and even persecution.
Thirdly, and to get at last to the theme for today, how do/should we respond to such opposition?
Nehemiah responded in practical ways to the practical opposition. He changed the way they worked. He organised people so that they could defend and protect each other. He also prayed and gave the situation (and the opponents) to God. And he carried on with what he believed God had called him to do.
The Thessalonians responded in practical ways to the practical opposition. In the end it wasn’t safe for Paul & Silas to stay so they helped them escape from the town. And they had to deal with persecution themselves. But they carried on following Jesus and living out their faith. Paul was delighted to hear that, not only had they turned from idols – from the phantom to the real – they had stuck at it, with the help of the Holy Spirit.
And what about Jesus? Jesus knew too that the practical opposition he faced required a practical, earthly response. He came to save the world from sin, but sin is not just a ‘spiritual’ concept, it affects the practical, physical, earthly reality of life. And so Jesus chose to physically go to Jerusalem, where he knew what would happen.
He knew that it would result in his earthly death, but that that would be followed by his earthly resurrection, and the coming of the Kingdom of God. At the end of that passage in Mark, he says: “whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
Jesus knew there is an intimate connection between heaven and earth, between the sacred and the secular, between the religious and the practical – his physical death changed everything in heaven and earth.
My prayer, out of all of this, is that the things of God should matter more – both to us and to the world. To us, as followers of Jesus, so that they show more in the ways we live our lives – the things we choose to do and not do. And to those around us, so that they notice that we are not following idols, phantoms, things that have no substance, and are pointed to the true and living God.
This may (should?) result in opposition. But these examples encourage us to keep our eyes on Jesus, and keep following the living God.