standfast

By your endurance you will gain your souls (NRSV)

Or–

By standing firm, you will win yourselves life (REB)

Or–

By holding fast, you will gain your lives (CEB)

Or–

By your perseverance, you shall gain salvation.

(Luke 21:19)

Do you remember the persistent widow from a gospel a week or two ago, how she persisted? And in persisting, she demanded justice against her opponent, or as the King James would say, to be avenged against her adversary. (Luke 18:1-8)

Jesus calls his followers to endure and hold on in the midst of persecutions and says that by so doing they will save their souls and their lives.

Early in the passage, he talks about what to do when someone says to you follow me because I am the one. I am the one who can save you and the time is near. He says don’t go after them, don’t follow that leader, that false leader. 

That is part of saving your soul, not to be seduced by false messiahs, false leaders.

Today’s psalm ends with this verse: ‘In righteousness shall he judge the world, and the peoples with equity.’ (98.10)

What does that mean? Are there other ways to say it? You can also say, he will judge with saving righteousness.

You can say, he will establish justice; you can say, he will bring salvation and that that is his victory.

And all of these other ways of saying it remind us that it is the Lord who is our king. Christ, the king.

In the early days of Christianity within the pagan Roman empire, all you had to do to be convicted of treason was to say that Jesus is Lord —that Christ is King, not the emperor.

And that is who we turn to, as our judge for the people who receive this message. It is joy to the world for the Lord to win himself the victory, for the Lord to win salvation. For him to come and judge the Earth means that we will be vindicated, that he will establish a saving righteousness with equity and justice.

That is a pretty different sense of judgment from that of the persistent widow’s unjust judge who seemed simply to be awarding the victory to one side or another in a dispute.

In the justice of God, salvation and righteousness are established for the world among all people.

But it is for us to step out of that tight frame of jurisprudence that simply chooses a winner between opponents in a lawsuit and it is for us to step into a larger world in which justice rolls down like waters and the day of salvation is at hand.

(Amos 5:24) 

 

Sunday 16 November 2025. JRL+