Loyalty is a good thing. Most people would agree on that, we like to have people we can depend on. But loyalty takes two people, or two parties; if we want loyalty from others, then we must give loyalty in return. Loyalty should be two ways.

Yet here we so often face a problem. Although we want loyalty from others, we are not so good at giving loyalty. For example, people usually expect or want to have job security; we want or expect to have our job there for us, but on the other hand we quite like to be free to move onto another job as and when we choose.

As a society in recent years we have had to learn that you cannot have it both ways. The long-term job security that many enjoyed in the past is no longer with us. People have the freedom to move on to another job and in return the employer has freedom to give them notice.

Some folk may feel that is not fair, but before coming to that conclusion perhaps they ought to give some though to what it would be like to have the responsibility of being an employer.

The bible has much to say about loyalty. God is faithful; God is loyal to his world and his people. If we are his children, he expects us to reflect that same loyalty in our lives. In Mark chapter 10 Jesus talks about issues of loyalty.

First of all loyalty in marriage. The Pharisees come to Jesus with a question. ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife? Now they would have known the answer to that question, because divorce was very common in Jesus’ day. The rabbis debated what the legitimate grounds for divorce were. Some rabbis even said that it was quite legitimate for a man to divorce his wife if she burnt his dinner.

It was certainly legal, because it was there in the Old Testament Law of Moses. Notice though, the same failure in Jesus’ day of people seeing the necessity of loyalty from both parties. A man was free to divorce his wife, but there was no freedom for a woman to divorce her husband. It was a male dominated culture and men wanted the option of opting out of the marriage commitment.

What will Jesus say? First of all he explains the reason for the divorce law. The reason that it is legal to divorce says Jesus, is because people have hard hearts. That’s the same term that Jesus uses to describe the inability of people including the disciples to understand his message.

So I believe we can legitimately say that divorce was and is necessary because people do not understand the God-given ideal of marriage. Jesus points back beyond the law that Moses gave to the creation and God’s original intentions for men and women. He reminds his hearers that God created male and female, so that the two could become one in marriage. Marriage is God’s way for man and woman to experience love.

In a fallen world, marriage is still the way that man and women experience love, but because the world is fallen, that love will sometimes be a suffering love; just as God’s love to us in Jesus is a suffering love. To divorce and discard is not God’s way.
Right from creation, love between a man and a woman has been the basic building blocks of the human race. God created man, and said ‘it’s not good that man should be alone’; so he created women to be with him, and the creation was complete. God blessed them and said ‘be fruitful and multiply’.

So marriage is the basic human relationship in which God wants us to give and receive loyalty and love. This theme is taken up later in the New Testament where St Paul writes ‘Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her’. The marriage relationship is thought of in New Testament Christian teaching as being a relationship we should model on Christ’s love for us; on the greatest love of all, love that is willing to sacrifice all.

But hard heartedness, that widespread human disease can also be understood in its literal sense. Hardhearted means a lack of love and compassion in the heart, or to express it another way, selfishness. The Old Testament prophets lamented the fact that the people of Israel had hard hearts. They looked forward to a time when God would do something about their hard hearts.

Ezekiel talks about God removing the hearts of stone that his people have and giving them hearts of flesh. Yet we still see a world where many people have hard hearts. Where there is no love in a marriage relationship because of hard hearts, divorce is permitted as a lesser evil.

But in the kingdom of God that Jesus had come to bring, Jesus re-affirms God’s ideal that was there at creation; that in marriage man and woman are totally committed to each other in love. Jesus was instigating a new age; the age in which we continue to live where the Holy Spirit would be given to enable frail human beings to have God’s love in their hearts.

That is why in Christian marriage we come together to make vows of lifelong commitment, for better or worse. Marriage then is one of the foremost of human loyalties; the New Testament teaches that in their marriages Christians are to endeavour to reflect God’s love and faithfulness.

Secondly, we come to the section of our chapter where people were bringing their children to Jesus. Now only in the last chapter, Jesus had taken a child in his arms. On that occasion it had been to teach the disciples a lesson. We said last week in fact that Jesus had used a child as a visual aid.

Now where the disciples could accept that Jesus could use a child as a visual aid for their benefit and to teach them, they still could not comprehend that Jesus would want children in his arms for their own sake. They regarded the children as a nuisance to be got rid of.

But Jesus is indignant with the disciples. The gospels rarely tell us of Jesus being indignant with his disciples; but Mark tells us here. A very important principle was at stake. It’s the principal of Christ’s love and care and compassion for all who came to him.

So often Jesus was criticised for the way that he accepted those who the religious leaders of his day regarded as outsiders. He accepted Levi the tax collector. He accepted various women who had dubious reputations.

The Jews had a problem with sinners coming to Jesus. The disciples had a problem about children coming to Jesus. The church can even have problems about the sort of people we want in church. Jesus has no problem. His love is held out to all; he died for all. Jesus reveals to us God’s loyalty to the human race. We are all his children. In his love he sent Jesus to reach out and embrace us all.

Yet Mark 10 especially emphasises Christ’s care for children. He commends the childlike qualities of openness and trust to us all. Christ’s care for children is also another reminder to us why faithfulness in marriage is so important. God’s ideal of marriage provides the appropriate environment in which the children who Jesus loves can be nurtured and cared for in our world.

God is loyal to all the children he has created. Like the father in the parable of the prodigal son, his door is open; his arms held out to embrace all who come to him.

Then finally we come to the most important of all human loyalties. A man asks Jesus a question: ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ That is the most important of questions. Jesus tells the man he must obey God’s law. The man says that he has always done that; but he somehow knows that there must be something more, and he wants to know what that is.

Jesus looks at that man and he loves him. But he knows what his problem is and he tells him straight. ‘Sell everything you have, give it to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven and come, follow me.’ Jesus did not tell everyone to sell everything and give it away; but he did tell this man to.

Jesus could see that for this man wealth was the most important thing. People only truly find life when they are willing to make God the most important thing, to worship him instead of our wealth or any other thing that we hold dear.

So the man who Jesus loved went away sad. The disciples were amazed. Jesus goes on to not only is it hard for rich people to enter the kingdom of God, in actual fact it is impossible for people to enter the kingdom of God.

Peter and his friends have left an awful lot for Jesus, so Peter asks if in the end it will all be pointless. Have they given up so much and it’s all in vain? When you think about it, when the chips are down who really can give their first loyalty to God above all else? When it came to the crunch for Peter, he denied that he knew Jesus. His loyalty evaporated.

Would you or I have done any better? Probably we would not. For men it is impossible to inherit eternal life. But it is not impossible with God. Jesus, God incarnate is the one who makes it possible for us to have eternal life. It is only by his grace that we receive that which we couldn’t achieve by our own efforts.

But he does call us to follow him. He calls us to love him. It is as we follow him and love him, as we make our feeble efforts and love and service for him that he rewards us many times over; and along with those rewards there will also be suffering and persecution.

But ultimately there will be eternal life.

Christ calls us to loyalty and love in our human family relationships. He reminds of his love that reaches out to embrace all; his love that is a faithful love that will not fail us. He call us to follow him; to walk daily in relationship so that as we experience and understand better his love for us, he might become more precious to us, that we might come to love him above all things.
 

Amen.

Return to top of page