This one is more of a “meditation” (the fancy word for “light, short sermon”). I delivered it at our church on Harvest Holiday (in Russian, “prazdnik zhatvy”). Usually the Americans call it “Harvest Festival”, but “holiday” is actually closer to the meaning of the Russian, not to mention the fact that the conservative Ukrainian Baptists would hardly take a shine to some of the historical nuances of “festival”.... This is not a state holiday in Ukraine but a Baptist church tradition. (There is no Ukrainian “Thanksgiving Day” yet, though the way western influence has flooded in, I do not doubt that there will be, eventually. Even if only for an excuse to eat turkey.) Each church chooses a Sunday somewhere between late August and early October on which they will celebrate the harvest, with a big, beautiful display of the fruits of the earth, along with a huge loaf of bread and an equally huge Bible, in front of the pulpit. Traditionally, especially in the villages, the service is followed by a great big lunch, though in the city churches this is not quite as common. I have vivid memories of the cauldron being hauled out into the yard, after the service out in a village church, and loaded up with all the fixings for borsch, stirred over the fire. Great fun! Finally, on a more “technical” level, I admit ahead of time that my language here, regarding eternity and, in particular, my use of the past tense of the verb “to be”, is quite casual and inexact (it was a holiday, after all...). I say, for instance, that there “was a time” when God “was” simply life, i.e., before Creation. Of course, God is life now, not just “then” – and more to the point, before Creation there wasn't “a time” to speak of, anyway. But I chose for the purpose of this sermon simply to speak on a you-know-what-I-mean level. Therefore, I will trust that you know what I mean.
(Read Genesis 1:11, 12, then Genesis 1: 29-31)
God gave man the fruits of the earth for food. Now there’s two of the many things which didn’t exist before Creation: man, and food! We don’t think of that very often: not only was man non-existent before the Creation but so, obviously, was food! God didn’t need food, after all. Life existed perfectly in God with no need of support or sustenance. God is life, the source of His own life. But when God created living beings in a material creation, then there was need for food. Physical creatures needed physical support and sustenance. God is the source of His own life, but man is not the source of his own life. Man needed food.
But wait! Be careful! We will make a mistake if we think food is the source of our life. Life doesn’t come from the food we eat. Life uses the food we eat, but the life is already there in us. “Where?”, somebody asks. Ah, that’s a very good question. Where is “life”? The answer is, we don’t know! We see the outward effects of life, just as we see the leaves of the trees flutter in the wind, but we don’t see life itself, just as we don’t see the air that moves the leaves. And life is even more intangible than air, because we know that air is a mix of physical gasses, even if we can’t see them. We can feel air, we can put air into a bottle, we can examine it in a laboratory. Even air is matter. But life can’t be poured into a bottle or examined under a microscope. Yes, you can examine a living thing, like a spider or a person, but you can’t put life under a microscope. You can’t take life out of an animal, run your experiments on it, and then when you’re done with it put it back into the animal and say, “Thank you very much; you can run along and play now.” You can’t say what color life is, or what it smells like or what shape it is. You can’t go to the drugstore and say, “Give me a vial of life, please!” (though there are some companies that would like you to think so!). We can find stars and planets in the most distant corners of the universe, but we can’t find the life that exists inside each one of us.
As for food, it helps life, but it isn't life, not even the source of life. When Scripture says that God gave Adam life, it doesn’t say God gave him a spoonful of honey or a big glass of milk. No. God breathed life into Adam out of His very self; the essence of what makes God God, His life, became the essence of the creature made in God’s image. The source of our life is God. So, really, we can say that the source of our life is... Life! Because God is life. Just like the source of love is Love, because God is love.
Food is a wonderful and delightful gift from God, and He has given us many, many varieties of it. Most of us have favorite kinds of food. Some of us love carrots, some of us can’t stand carrots. But there is something we all have in common: we need food; we even “love” food. You know how people commonly talk: “I love pizza”, “I love ice cream”. We don’t all “love” the same foods, but each of “loves” some foods.
Now here’s an amazing paradox: on the one hand, our bodies cannot live without food; on the other hand, food isn't the source of our life! It’s almost illogical, but it’s true: we can’t live without food, but food doesn’t give us life. How do you explain that? Well, I think we might say that food helps our bodies to keep up with the life that’s in us. Adam had life before he had food, so obviously the food didn’t give him life. But food allowed Adam’s body to continue holding that life inside, and grow with that life. The life, though, came directly from God. There’s only one source of life.
This leads us to the following conclusion: life cannot life without life. I’ll say it again: life cannot live without life. There was life in Adam without food, but there was never life in Adam without God, who is life. That’s why I said “life cannot live without life.” It’s the same thing as saying “life cannot be without God”.
Now, for God, this is not a problem. He has always been the source of His own life. But for man this is a problem. We are not the source of our own life! And on the day when man sinned against God, God said, “You will die”. Death came in and interrupted the connection of life to life. Man cut himself off from the source.
Only if we understand this can we begin to grasp the magnificence in the words of Jesus Christ in John 6:32-40 (read).
These words make me think of four “times”. There was a time when God simply was life. Then there was a time when God gave life – to Adam. Then there was a time when God gave food to the living Adam and his children. But then, there was a time when the living God became “the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” This is JESUS.
All the parts of this amazing story come together in Jesus Christ because he is the Bread of Life. Why is he the Bread of Life? He is the Bread of Life because he is God, the very source of life. He is the Bread of Life because he became man, so that our humanity might be saved by his humanity. He is the Bread of Life because he dwells in the hearts of his people, nourishes and sustains them with his own self. He is the Bread of Life because he satisfies the deepest need of the soul: our hunger for the love of God. Jesus says, “No one who comes to me will I cast away.” God’s perfect love radiates through these words. The love that filled the life of God in eternity expresses itself on the lips of Jesus: “I will not cast away anyone who comes to me.”
Jesus is the Bread of Life because true life can exist only in perfect harmony with God’s will. Remember, death came in the Garden when man rejected God’s will. But the Bread of Life says, “I came down from heaven not to do my own will but the will of the Father who sent me.” Perfect harmony. And what is this will? “The will of the Father who sent me is that I lose nothing of what He has given me but raise it up on the last day. The will of the one who sent me is that whoever sees the Son and believes in him, will have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”
Jesus Christ is the Bread of Life because he gave something physical, something earthly and material in order to save us: he gave his body, his life: “I am the living bread come down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. The bread I give is my flesh, which I will surrender for the life of the world. (6:51)” He gave physical “food” for our spiritual life. Jesus’ body and blood became the saving food of life. As Jesus says further: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. (vv.54-55)”
At the beginning I pointed out an interesting paradox, that our life depends on food but food doesn’t give us life! But now, when we speak about the Bread of Life, the paradox evaporates like mist in the sun. There’s no more paradox, because now the source and the food are one. The living Bread is both the food of our life and the source of our life. This is Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life – who has life in himself because he is from the Father who has life in himself. And Jesus promises that whoever takes this life, this bread, this food for the human soul, will have life forever, in God and God’s love.
For God loved the world so much that He gave His only-begotten Son, so that whoever believes in him might not perish but have everlasting life.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Monday, September 14, 2009
Titus: Three Mountain Peaks
This sermon started out as a valiant attempt to cover the whole epistle at once. I quickly realized that was too tall an order. In the process, however, I was deeply impressed by three glorious “peaks” in the epistle, where Paul zooms out to view the whole marvelous picture, and it was quite a curious thing how the same word showed up on each “peak”....
Today I want us to look together at three glorious “mountaintops” or “peaks” in Paul’s epistle to Titus. These three peaks open up to us the heart of the apostle. They describe his understanding of all reality, they tell us what he understands as the central significance of everything that exists. Everything else that Paul writes in this epistle flows out of this central understanding. Let’s look at each of these peaks individually.
(Read 1:1-4)
To me, the central word in this part is “hope”, and the central phrase is “the hope of eternal life”. If you took out that phrase, then this whole part would lose its sense.
As Paul puts it, the hope of eternal life serves as the base for faith and knowledge. Paul says we have knowledge of the truth. Of what truth, exactly? Of the truth that eternal life is found in our Savior Jesus. Paul says that we have faith. What kind of faith, exactly? Faith in the Savior Jesus; we believe in him as Savior, as Redeemer of our souls, as the Lord of life. Both this knowledge and this faith rest on the hope of eternal life. Hope is our expectation, and all our expectation is completely wrapped in what we know and believe about Jesus. We entrust all our expectation to him because we know who he is.
This hope of eternal life is the gift of God, the greatest gift which changes everything. This gift changes our past, our present and our future. Therefore, this gift has to be announced, as Paul says in verses two and three: God promised this hope, and at the right time revealed it, and appointed Paul, and many others, to announce it to the world. It has to be announced precisely so that it can change everything for as many people as possible. This gift of hope is the meaning of life, and people who don’t know about the gift don’t know the meaning of life. This is why Paul talks about how God has now brought His word to light and made Paul a proclaimer of it.
And so, the key word in this first part is “hope”, the key phrase is “the hope of eternal life”, and this hope undergirds our faith and knowledge. This hope is the news which the apostle proclaims. For the apostle, the destiny of the world is defined by this hope. And, yes, the spiritual maturity of the Christian is also defined by this hope – why? Because, as Paul explains, this hope undergirds knowledge of truth, and knowledge of truth leads to – what? To godliness. If I lose hope, then I stop knowing the truth, and if I stop knowing the truth, I cannot live in a godly way.
So you see, these thoughts are not abstract or “philosophical”. They’re terribly practical. Our hope will define our behavior. If our hope is true, then we’ll have a deep desire to live in correspondence to it. And to know more and more about it. We will love that hope, because we love the Source of that hope, our Lord Jesus Christ. These are the principles of reality. They lead to many practical issues and applications, in the areas of behavior, of church leadership, of doctrine and order in the church. And this epistle is a very practical epistle with concrete instructions on order, on how to appoint leaders, on teaching, on family life, on relations with government and society, etc. But– all those things means absolutely nothing if you take away that hope. And when Paul writes his many instructions, it’s all aimed at one goal: that the hope of eternal life might continually grow greater and deeper and more glorious and spread to more and more people until the day of Jesus Christ’s appearing. This is the light in which in we can understand this epistle to Titus.
The next mountaintop I want to look at is found in 2:11-14 (read).
Well, you know what? The central word in this part is... hope! And the central phrase is “while we wait for the blessed hope”. But we can't understand what it means to wait for this blessed hope unless we really understand what the first statement in this part means: “For the grace of God has appeared to all men.” Paul is underlining the fact that this great event in history is directly relevant for literally every person in the whole world. The central question of life for every person can be put this way: “Do you know what happened?” That is, have you heard the news? Do you know what your life means? You can know what your life means only if you know what happened. Because what happened, at a concrete moment in history, precisely with this Person Jesus Christ, and in him, this reveals what your life means: “The grace of God has appeared to all.” The life of Jesus Christ, the feat accomplished by Jesus Christ, the word of Jesus Christ, the power of Jesus Christ, this is the “grace of God appearing to all” people in world history – concretely, personally.
People everywhere worry about who the next president will be, or what will happen to the economy, or who’ll win the World Cup. But the answers to any of these questions don’t change the fabric of the soul. They don’t transform you. But the “grace of God appearing to all” changes concretely the fabric of the soul, it bears life where there was no life. This grace gives, together with life, a hope that is totally intertwined with that life. This is a life lived in the blessed hope of His appearing.
Because this new life strives towards reunion with Christ, strives in sanctification, strives in expectation, strives in hope. This new life, born of grace, strives towards the fulfillment of Jesus Christ’s own desire: (v.14) “...to purify for himself a people for his own possession, zealous for good deeds.”
This desire, this goal, this hope of God, is inseparable from our hope. By God's mercy, His hope has become our hope. His hope is incarnated in our lives, through our behavior, in spiritual growth, in the revelation of the character of God’s Son in us. Yes, I know: these are intimidating words, because each of us realizes how far we still are from perfect Christ-likeness. But I want to say words of encouragement and comfort today: Hope, God’s hope, our hope in Christ, can’t do anything else but spur us on. It reminds us that there’s only one direction: forward, in Jesus. Forward to the fulfillment of “that blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Christ Jesus”.
And then we come to the third peak, in 3:4-7 (read).
It won’t surprise you that I find the central concept of this part in the last sentence: “...having the hope of eternal life”. This part talks about how each of us in Christ can testify from personal experience. Paul tells Titus, “You and I were just like all the others in the world who haven’t come to know Christ. You and I know, Titus, from personal experience what it means to be saved– saved by love, by God’s kindness. We know what it means to receive a gift that we could never even have dreamed of, that transcends comprehension.” (v. 3...) “For we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another.” But... God saved us. This is what we were, but God saved us. We were foolish and hateful, but: “God saved us.” Astounding words. I trust that you have noticed the stark, dramatic absence of any transitional state or condition. The apostle doesn't say, “Yes, Titus, when you and I finally woke up and realized what wretches we were and decided to clean up our lives in a major reformation project, then God was finally happy enough with us to save us.” No. We were disobedient and deceived, but God saved us. No transitional stage, no merit, nothing earned. There's the richness of God’s mercy and kindness. He took our whole pathetic state in hand and resolved the issue Himself. We never had anything to offer by way of help in the matter, and correspondingly God didn’t wait around for it. He saved, He cleansed, He poured out His Spirit and made us new. Salvation is God’s glory, God’s praise, God’s credit.
And for our part, knowing that salvation is God’s accomplishment, we can hope to the very end. We can anticipate the ultimate accomplishment of God’s glorious work. The hope of the glorious conclusion of redemption is as strong as the perfection of God’s salvation is full. Now there’s a rather complicated idea, so let’s hear it again: the hope of the glorious conclusion of redemption is as strong as the perfection of God’s salvation is full.
Actually, we can say that in a much simpler way: God has done, God will do. And in this, as Paul writes to dear Titus, is all our hope of eternal life. The very same divine love that compelled Jesus to the cross in complete self-sacrifice is the love that now strives and strains forward to reunion with the redeemed. To the extent our spirits respond to what God has done, to that same extent our spirits thirst, in hope, for what God will do. And we’ll be able to deal with the multitude of issues in life in the power of the glorious gift, the hope of eternal life in the Lord, our Savior Jesus Christ.
Today I want us to look together at three glorious “mountaintops” or “peaks” in Paul’s epistle to Titus. These three peaks open up to us the heart of the apostle. They describe his understanding of all reality, they tell us what he understands as the central significance of everything that exists. Everything else that Paul writes in this epistle flows out of this central understanding. Let’s look at each of these peaks individually.
(Read 1:1-4)
To me, the central word in this part is “hope”, and the central phrase is “the hope of eternal life”. If you took out that phrase, then this whole part would lose its sense.
As Paul puts it, the hope of eternal life serves as the base for faith and knowledge. Paul says we have knowledge of the truth. Of what truth, exactly? Of the truth that eternal life is found in our Savior Jesus. Paul says that we have faith. What kind of faith, exactly? Faith in the Savior Jesus; we believe in him as Savior, as Redeemer of our souls, as the Lord of life. Both this knowledge and this faith rest on the hope of eternal life. Hope is our expectation, and all our expectation is completely wrapped in what we know and believe about Jesus. We entrust all our expectation to him because we know who he is.
This hope of eternal life is the gift of God, the greatest gift which changes everything. This gift changes our past, our present and our future. Therefore, this gift has to be announced, as Paul says in verses two and three: God promised this hope, and at the right time revealed it, and appointed Paul, and many others, to announce it to the world. It has to be announced precisely so that it can change everything for as many people as possible. This gift of hope is the meaning of life, and people who don’t know about the gift don’t know the meaning of life. This is why Paul talks about how God has now brought His word to light and made Paul a proclaimer of it.
And so, the key word in this first part is “hope”, the key phrase is “the hope of eternal life”, and this hope undergirds our faith and knowledge. This hope is the news which the apostle proclaims. For the apostle, the destiny of the world is defined by this hope. And, yes, the spiritual maturity of the Christian is also defined by this hope – why? Because, as Paul explains, this hope undergirds knowledge of truth, and knowledge of truth leads to – what? To godliness. If I lose hope, then I stop knowing the truth, and if I stop knowing the truth, I cannot live in a godly way.
So you see, these thoughts are not abstract or “philosophical”. They’re terribly practical. Our hope will define our behavior. If our hope is true, then we’ll have a deep desire to live in correspondence to it. And to know more and more about it. We will love that hope, because we love the Source of that hope, our Lord Jesus Christ. These are the principles of reality. They lead to many practical issues and applications, in the areas of behavior, of church leadership, of doctrine and order in the church. And this epistle is a very practical epistle with concrete instructions on order, on how to appoint leaders, on teaching, on family life, on relations with government and society, etc. But– all those things means absolutely nothing if you take away that hope. And when Paul writes his many instructions, it’s all aimed at one goal: that the hope of eternal life might continually grow greater and deeper and more glorious and spread to more and more people until the day of Jesus Christ’s appearing. This is the light in which in we can understand this epistle to Titus.
The next mountaintop I want to look at is found in 2:11-14 (read).
Well, you know what? The central word in this part is... hope! And the central phrase is “while we wait for the blessed hope”. But we can't understand what it means to wait for this blessed hope unless we really understand what the first statement in this part means: “For the grace of God has appeared to all men.” Paul is underlining the fact that this great event in history is directly relevant for literally every person in the whole world. The central question of life for every person can be put this way: “Do you know what happened?” That is, have you heard the news? Do you know what your life means? You can know what your life means only if you know what happened. Because what happened, at a concrete moment in history, precisely with this Person Jesus Christ, and in him, this reveals what your life means: “The grace of God has appeared to all.” The life of Jesus Christ, the feat accomplished by Jesus Christ, the word of Jesus Christ, the power of Jesus Christ, this is the “grace of God appearing to all” people in world history – concretely, personally.
People everywhere worry about who the next president will be, or what will happen to the economy, or who’ll win the World Cup. But the answers to any of these questions don’t change the fabric of the soul. They don’t transform you. But the “grace of God appearing to all” changes concretely the fabric of the soul, it bears life where there was no life. This grace gives, together with life, a hope that is totally intertwined with that life. This is a life lived in the blessed hope of His appearing.
Because this new life strives towards reunion with Christ, strives in sanctification, strives in expectation, strives in hope. This new life, born of grace, strives towards the fulfillment of Jesus Christ’s own desire: (v.14) “...to purify for himself a people for his own possession, zealous for good deeds.”
This desire, this goal, this hope of God, is inseparable from our hope. By God's mercy, His hope has become our hope. His hope is incarnated in our lives, through our behavior, in spiritual growth, in the revelation of the character of God’s Son in us. Yes, I know: these are intimidating words, because each of us realizes how far we still are from perfect Christ-likeness. But I want to say words of encouragement and comfort today: Hope, God’s hope, our hope in Christ, can’t do anything else but spur us on. It reminds us that there’s only one direction: forward, in Jesus. Forward to the fulfillment of “that blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Christ Jesus”.
And then we come to the third peak, in 3:4-7 (read).
It won’t surprise you that I find the central concept of this part in the last sentence: “...having the hope of eternal life”. This part talks about how each of us in Christ can testify from personal experience. Paul tells Titus, “You and I were just like all the others in the world who haven’t come to know Christ. You and I know, Titus, from personal experience what it means to be saved– saved by love, by God’s kindness. We know what it means to receive a gift that we could never even have dreamed of, that transcends comprehension.” (v. 3...) “For we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another.” But... God saved us. This is what we were, but God saved us. We were foolish and hateful, but: “God saved us.” Astounding words. I trust that you have noticed the stark, dramatic absence of any transitional state or condition. The apostle doesn't say, “Yes, Titus, when you and I finally woke up and realized what wretches we were and decided to clean up our lives in a major reformation project, then God was finally happy enough with us to save us.” No. We were disobedient and deceived, but God saved us. No transitional stage, no merit, nothing earned. There's the richness of God’s mercy and kindness. He took our whole pathetic state in hand and resolved the issue Himself. We never had anything to offer by way of help in the matter, and correspondingly God didn’t wait around for it. He saved, He cleansed, He poured out His Spirit and made us new. Salvation is God’s glory, God’s praise, God’s credit.
And for our part, knowing that salvation is God’s accomplishment, we can hope to the very end. We can anticipate the ultimate accomplishment of God’s glorious work. The hope of the glorious conclusion of redemption is as strong as the perfection of God’s salvation is full. Now there’s a rather complicated idea, so let’s hear it again: the hope of the glorious conclusion of redemption is as strong as the perfection of God’s salvation is full.
Actually, we can say that in a much simpler way: God has done, God will do. And in this, as Paul writes to dear Titus, is all our hope of eternal life. The very same divine love that compelled Jesus to the cross in complete self-sacrifice is the love that now strives and strains forward to reunion with the redeemed. To the extent our spirits respond to what God has done, to that same extent our spirits thirst, in hope, for what God will do. And we’ll be able to deal with the multitude of issues in life in the power of the glorious gift, the hope of eternal life in the Lord, our Savior Jesus Christ.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
From Jude, in Light of the Emergency
It’s not often we get a single sermon covering an entire epistle. But when the epistle is only 25 verses long, that’s not such a tall order. Yes, of course, it would be quite possible to do a “sermon series” even on a short epistle like “Jude”, pulling each verse apart concept by concept, syllable by syllable, drawing all sorts of extrapolations and scriptural cross-references (not to mention a colorful and preacherly illustration or two). I feel, however, that that sort of thing is done so much that we actually lose something of profound worth. We lose the good, clean, solid punch of the particular, unique idea of a single epistle, the way it would have hit the first hearers when it was read out loud to them (all at once, not over a year). The problem with the sermon-series-approach to working-through-an-epistle is this: after a church has spent a year or two on, say, Ephesians, and the church folks are marveling over how the pastor could “get so much out of it”, if you ask the church folks, “So... tell me what Ephesians is about!”, you may get blank stares in return. “About?” Well, it’s “about” everything the pastor talked about for the last two years, of course, which was... pretty much everything. Problem with that is, when something is about everything, it tends to be about nothing in particular. And an epistle actually tends to be about something in particular. This is why I enjoy preaching epistles in large chunks – if it’s a short epistle, then the whole thing in one sermon. If it’s a long one like Romans, then at least a chapter at a time, to really try and encapsulate the key idea or two the apostle was working out. By the way, I will post a series of sermons I delivered on Romans here a bit later, where I take this approach.
(Begin by reading the whole epistle of Jude.)
Jude wanted to write the believers about the holy faith “delivered once and for all to the saints”. That is, his initial plan was just to write and teach them about the truths of the faith, perhaps to write about Jesus’ atoning death and about the resurrection, perhaps about the Holy Spirit, maybe about the second coming of Christ and the coming judgment. But here is the fascinating thing: something changed Jude’s plans. He changed his mind. Why?
Jude recognizes a grave danger in the church, and feels compelled to address it, to deal with it. So he devotes this whole letter to the problem. What is the problem? It is people inside the Church who are distorting and denying the gospel by their teaching and their lifestyle. They show no real repentance or faith, and their main goal seems to be to recruit admiration clubs around themselves. In short, they have never understood that the Church is the Lord’s. They think of the Church as their own private little playground.
Jude attacks this problem by giving the believers a quick history lesson, reminding them that all this is nothing new. God has always known about these people, He always judged such people in the past, and He told us through the prophets that such people would arise in the end times. Jude goes on to say that we who truly devote ourselves to Jesus Christ must beware of such people – yes, certainly, pray and hope for their salvation, but also be careful. And the best response to the danger they pose is to purify ourselves and live in the true power of the Holy Spirit, with overflowing confidence that God is going to perfectly complete His eternal plan for us in Christ. Which reminds me of the apostle Paul’s words: (Philippians 1:6) “For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.” The lesson in Jude is that the antidote to spiritual corruption in the Church is not timidity or denial. The only antidote is the “the most holy faith delivered once for all to the saints” – the very faith Jude originally wanted to write about. That faith is the victory over every lie and temptation.
Jude was probably a brother of Jesus – that is, one of Joseph and Mary’s children. If so, consider how meaningful the first few words of this letter are: “Jude – brother of James, slave of Christ.” In the early days of Jesus’ ministry, his brothers and sisters didn’t believe in him, and now, here, Jude calls himself a slave of Christ. Consider the spiritual earthquake that had to happen in Jude’s life for him to recognize who Jesus really was. Just think about the total transformation God brought into Jude’s life, and how much that meant to him. If you can grasp that, it will help you understand, too, why Jude was so furious over seeing the real meaning of Jesus get manipulated and distorted in the Church.
It’s precisely because of how deeply Jude treasures this Church that he starts by addressing the “called”. “Called”! Believers are the “called” of Jesus Christ: “You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.” What great comfort that must have meant for Jude: the assurance of God’s calling, of God’s choosing, of God’s love graciously poured out, as life’s bedrock reality. How important it was for Jude, then, that believers should really understand the meaning of this calling, and have the joy of living it out.
Remember that at that time the Church didn’t use the word “Christian”; they had to refer to themselves, as a group, with other words. We read these words in scripture: such words as “saints”, “brothers and sisters” and “the called”. These words tell us something about how they saw themselves and how they grasped God’s work of salvation. Now as for us, we often refer to ourselves as believers or Christians. But how often do we call ourselves “the called”? It’s worth meditating over, because that’s what we are! It’s both a high honor and a high responsibility. There is no greater love than the love God shows by calling us and giving us life in His Son. There is no higher calling than to serve Him.
Some people learn from their mistakes; others simply repeat them or even make them worse. Obviously, Jude is not going to repeat his mistake of disbelief. He is going to fight for the faith, for the truth that was revealed in Christ. And his letter makes it clear that he means we all should be joining this spiritual battle to defend the purity of the truth. That’s also what it means to be called.
Jude first planned to write a “teaching letter”, but it turned more into a “warning letter”. Nevertheless, Jude hasn’t completely abandoned his teaching instincts. He gives the readers a history lesson in the sorts of sins that are now raising their ugly heads in the Church.
The sin of disbelief was an old story with plenty of examples. Jude reminds the Church about the generation of Israelites who never made it to the promised land because of disbelief. The sin of pride is even older; Jude reminds them of the angels who refused to be content with their assigned place in God’s order. Jude ironically uses the same verb “keep” twice: the angels refused to “keep” the place God made them for; therefore, God is now “keeping” them in a place they weren't made for. It reminds us that God’s judgment is righteous. It is not God who rejects people or angels; it is they who reject God. Finally, in this terrible trio of sins, Jude reminds the Church about Sodom and Gomorrah’s sin of sexual immorality and how the fire from the sky foreshadowed the eternal fire of judgment on sin.
So this is the “terrible trio” Jude is compelled to warn the Church about, precisely because he has gotten wind of the fact that there’s some sort of group going around in the Church acting like these are perfectly acceptable: disbelief, pride, sexual immorality. If Jude were simply warning the Church that such things can be found in the world, it wouldn’t surprise us in the least. But he’s talking about people who have joined the Church and are spreading this among believers! This is what’s so horrifying, almost unbelievable, to Jude the slave of Christ.
To make the point even stronger, Jude contrasts these people with the great archangel Michael who, if anybody might be excused for acting high and mighty, perhaps Michael the Archangel could. But even Michael kept his place. Knew his place. Loved his place in God’s glorious plan. Never showed arrogance, faithfully followed God’s perfect will.
“But these”, Jude says, “but these”; in your English Bible it may say, “But these men” or “But these people”, but actually in the original Jude didn’t even waste that many words on them: he just says, “But these...”. These are dreamers, living in a world of fantasy, puffing themselves up with imagined spiritual power. There’s a lot of this around us today, too. You only need to turn on your television to watch it. Their great boast is that they have the Spirit of God and can do many miracles, and they’ll even send you a miracle in the mail as an expression of gratitude for your “love gift”. These boast about the way that they exercise power over the devil and demons. Instead of genuine faith in the person Jesus, they sell the name of Jesus like a magic amulet guaranteed to protect you from everything bad. The concept seems to be that the louder you shout it, the better it works.
I have noticed that such people often lose the ability to think coherently. They don’t even seem to believe they should think. Instead, it’s like they really believe their heads should be constantly buzzing with direct verbal transmissions from the Spirit, which leaves no room for anything so “unspiritual” as thinking, of course. And I’m sure you see what that leads to: if you disagree with such a person, he’ll tell you you’re disagreeing with God. After all, all his thoughts are God’s thoughts. So how can he be wrong? What a horrible state for any person to come to. He is a danger to the weak, the naïve and trusting and, even more, he is his own worst enemy, because he believes every lie he tells himself... since he thinks it’s all coming from God.
Jude gives the Church several illustrations of this kind of person: There was Cain, who wasn’t content with second place; it had to be his way or no way. There was Balaam, who was willing to sell “ministry” to the highest bidder, promising to “loose” the power of the spirit world any way he wanted. There was Korah, who decided with his friends that nobody had a right to authority that they couldn’t have, and that Truth was defined by opinion poll. You could call Korah a very early post-modernist!
Jude gives a few more illustrations: these people are like shepherds who feed only themselves; picture the poor flock of hungry, distressed, helpless sheep, watching the shepherds feed themselves! If those poor sheep really understood, then they would know these shepherds have nothing to give them.
We, however, are not literally sheep; God has given us understanding – yes, even the mind of Christ. So Jude calls us to exercise intelligent discernment regarding such people. They are empty clouds blown by the wind. They are blown along by the wind of their own caprice, their own fantasy, saying it is all from the Lord, but there is nothing substantial in it, nothing that can truly nourish the soul. They are like fruitless and rootless trees. Their so-called fruit is false: it is not from God. If you dig deeper, you discover they have no roots: no faith, no relationship with Christ, no obedience. Though they may present an image of great spirituality, though their faces may seem to radiate peace and joy, on the inside they are actually like roaring ocean waves in a storm or like wandering stars that have no home.
Though they are spiritually fruitless, they do bear a certain fruit, a particular concrete result, in the Church: division. Division begins when such people start distinguishing between the so-called spiritual and the so-called unspiritual in the church. Not surprisingly, the “spiritual” are the ones who agree with them. Which is really amazing because, as Jude says, “They are devoid of the Spirit.” When this game starts in a church, it is like a cancer; if it is not removed, it will destroy a church.
So what is the answer? What measures must the Church take to see that this sort of disease doesn’t take root? Start an Inquisition? Hunt for heretics? No. Jude says, “Build yourselves up.” Build ourselves up in what? In joy? In power? In worship? No. Build yourselves up “on your most holy faith.” It goes right back to the first sentences of Jude’s letter: he wants the believers to stand up for the true, pure faith which was “once delivered to the saints”. In the NT, “the faith” is, before all else, the central historical message about Christ which was preached by the apostles – the message of God’s great act and the saving power of that message. “The faith” is also the way of life that grows out of new birth in Christ – a life formed by holiness, love, self-control, humility, wisdom and faithfulness to the scriptures. Jude calls this faith “most holy” and it is holy because it is faith in God’s “holy servant Jesus.” Christians build themselves up by having fellowship with the Lord and his people, by adhering to the gospel and the Word of God, and by worship in spirit and truth – especially by remembering the Lord at his table. This is the way of life which shows who belongs to Jesus Christ.
Now, to some that sounds dry and uninteresting, even unspiritual. Where are the fireworks? Where’s all the shouting and jumping? How do you show your spirituality? I have to ask: why is that spirituality? It looks physical to me. What makes it “spiritual”? I’ve seen people act that way at football games; does that make them spiritual? Please don’t misunderstand me: I have nothing against joy or emotion. But we make a big mistake when we equate outward, visible manifestations with spirituality. Such spirituality is too easy to fake. Jude doesn’t say “build yourselves up in spirituality”; he says “build yourselves up on the most holy faith.” It is the faith that will make you spiritual in the truest way.
A key element in building ourselves up in this most holy faith, Jude say, is to pray in the Spirit. How do we do that? Well, I think the testimony of the New Testament is clear and unambiguous: we pray in the Spirit when we pray from a heart of faith that yearns only for Christ’s exaltation. We pray in faith in the name of Jesus; we pray out of the same whole, childlike faith in which we first invited Christ into our hearts. We pray in the same faith by which we received baptism, when we confessed Christ before the world as our Lord and Savior. We pray in the same faith we have when we receive communion, remembering the body and blood of the Lord. The prayer of faith in Christ is prayer in the Spirit. Such prayer will not often accompanied by ecstatic feelings or supernatural manifestations. Often, it will be difficult and require perseverance. It will always, always require faith. And it will always reach the throne of God.
I began by saying how Jude wanted to write the believers about this most holy faith delivered once for all to the saints, and how it turned instead into an “emergency letter”. I mentioned that the emergency was the great danger Jude saw in the Church – the invasion of disbelief, pride, immorality – and also how Jude started off by reminding the believers that God saw everything beforehand, how it was all an old story already. Well, now at the close of this letter, Jude says it again: this was all predicted; none of this throws God’s plan off-kilter; you just hold on to the most holy faith, to the glorious expectation of Jesus’ coming and his total victory, and you'll be all right! Just hold on. You don’t have to fix everything; you only need to hold on to the One Who does.
That’s what makes this most holy faith so glorious. That’s what makes this good news so great. It is great and glorious news not just about what God has done, perfectly, wonderfully for us in the past. No, it’s news and a faith that swallows up our whole past, present and future in one single sweep in absolutely perfect completeness. The “good news” isn’t only that “Jesus died for your sins on the cross and rose from the dead”. The good news is also that He’s coming again with victory in his hand, that our life is hidden and kept in Him to the very end – and the very end will be a beginning, in Jesus, that never, ever ends again. Such grace, such perfect-ness and absoluteness of hope! Cain, Balaam and Korah couldn’t grasp grace like that; their pride wouldn’t let them. Same thing with their partners in disbelief in the days of Jude and the early church.
When you can’t grasp grace, you’ll grasp something else: pride, immorality. But when you can grasp and embrace God’s grace, and gaze in awe at the glory of Jesus’ salvation, then the Cains, Balaams and Korahs in the world will never defeat you, and they will never defeat the Church.
“Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.”
(Begin by reading the whole epistle of Jude.)
Jude wanted to write the believers about the holy faith “delivered once and for all to the saints”. That is, his initial plan was just to write and teach them about the truths of the faith, perhaps to write about Jesus’ atoning death and about the resurrection, perhaps about the Holy Spirit, maybe about the second coming of Christ and the coming judgment. But here is the fascinating thing: something changed Jude’s plans. He changed his mind. Why?
Jude recognizes a grave danger in the church, and feels compelled to address it, to deal with it. So he devotes this whole letter to the problem. What is the problem? It is people inside the Church who are distorting and denying the gospel by their teaching and their lifestyle. They show no real repentance or faith, and their main goal seems to be to recruit admiration clubs around themselves. In short, they have never understood that the Church is the Lord’s. They think of the Church as their own private little playground.
Jude attacks this problem by giving the believers a quick history lesson, reminding them that all this is nothing new. God has always known about these people, He always judged such people in the past, and He told us through the prophets that such people would arise in the end times. Jude goes on to say that we who truly devote ourselves to Jesus Christ must beware of such people – yes, certainly, pray and hope for their salvation, but also be careful. And the best response to the danger they pose is to purify ourselves and live in the true power of the Holy Spirit, with overflowing confidence that God is going to perfectly complete His eternal plan for us in Christ. Which reminds me of the apostle Paul’s words: (Philippians 1:6) “For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.” The lesson in Jude is that the antidote to spiritual corruption in the Church is not timidity or denial. The only antidote is the “the most holy faith delivered once for all to the saints” – the very faith Jude originally wanted to write about. That faith is the victory over every lie and temptation.
Jude was probably a brother of Jesus – that is, one of Joseph and Mary’s children. If so, consider how meaningful the first few words of this letter are: “Jude – brother of James, slave of Christ.” In the early days of Jesus’ ministry, his brothers and sisters didn’t believe in him, and now, here, Jude calls himself a slave of Christ. Consider the spiritual earthquake that had to happen in Jude’s life for him to recognize who Jesus really was. Just think about the total transformation God brought into Jude’s life, and how much that meant to him. If you can grasp that, it will help you understand, too, why Jude was so furious over seeing the real meaning of Jesus get manipulated and distorted in the Church.
It’s precisely because of how deeply Jude treasures this Church that he starts by addressing the “called”. “Called”! Believers are the “called” of Jesus Christ: “You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.” What great comfort that must have meant for Jude: the assurance of God’s calling, of God’s choosing, of God’s love graciously poured out, as life’s bedrock reality. How important it was for Jude, then, that believers should really understand the meaning of this calling, and have the joy of living it out.
Remember that at that time the Church didn’t use the word “Christian”; they had to refer to themselves, as a group, with other words. We read these words in scripture: such words as “saints”, “brothers and sisters” and “the called”. These words tell us something about how they saw themselves and how they grasped God’s work of salvation. Now as for us, we often refer to ourselves as believers or Christians. But how often do we call ourselves “the called”? It’s worth meditating over, because that’s what we are! It’s both a high honor and a high responsibility. There is no greater love than the love God shows by calling us and giving us life in His Son. There is no higher calling than to serve Him.
Some people learn from their mistakes; others simply repeat them or even make them worse. Obviously, Jude is not going to repeat his mistake of disbelief. He is going to fight for the faith, for the truth that was revealed in Christ. And his letter makes it clear that he means we all should be joining this spiritual battle to defend the purity of the truth. That’s also what it means to be called.
Jude first planned to write a “teaching letter”, but it turned more into a “warning letter”. Nevertheless, Jude hasn’t completely abandoned his teaching instincts. He gives the readers a history lesson in the sorts of sins that are now raising their ugly heads in the Church.
The sin of disbelief was an old story with plenty of examples. Jude reminds the Church about the generation of Israelites who never made it to the promised land because of disbelief. The sin of pride is even older; Jude reminds them of the angels who refused to be content with their assigned place in God’s order. Jude ironically uses the same verb “keep” twice: the angels refused to “keep” the place God made them for; therefore, God is now “keeping” them in a place they weren't made for. It reminds us that God’s judgment is righteous. It is not God who rejects people or angels; it is they who reject God. Finally, in this terrible trio of sins, Jude reminds the Church about Sodom and Gomorrah’s sin of sexual immorality and how the fire from the sky foreshadowed the eternal fire of judgment on sin.
So this is the “terrible trio” Jude is compelled to warn the Church about, precisely because he has gotten wind of the fact that there’s some sort of group going around in the Church acting like these are perfectly acceptable: disbelief, pride, sexual immorality. If Jude were simply warning the Church that such things can be found in the world, it wouldn’t surprise us in the least. But he’s talking about people who have joined the Church and are spreading this among believers! This is what’s so horrifying, almost unbelievable, to Jude the slave of Christ.
To make the point even stronger, Jude contrasts these people with the great archangel Michael who, if anybody might be excused for acting high and mighty, perhaps Michael the Archangel could. But even Michael kept his place. Knew his place. Loved his place in God’s glorious plan. Never showed arrogance, faithfully followed God’s perfect will.
“But these”, Jude says, “but these”; in your English Bible it may say, “But these men” or “But these people”, but actually in the original Jude didn’t even waste that many words on them: he just says, “But these...”. These are dreamers, living in a world of fantasy, puffing themselves up with imagined spiritual power. There’s a lot of this around us today, too. You only need to turn on your television to watch it. Their great boast is that they have the Spirit of God and can do many miracles, and they’ll even send you a miracle in the mail as an expression of gratitude for your “love gift”. These boast about the way that they exercise power over the devil and demons. Instead of genuine faith in the person Jesus, they sell the name of Jesus like a magic amulet guaranteed to protect you from everything bad. The concept seems to be that the louder you shout it, the better it works.
I have noticed that such people often lose the ability to think coherently. They don’t even seem to believe they should think. Instead, it’s like they really believe their heads should be constantly buzzing with direct verbal transmissions from the Spirit, which leaves no room for anything so “unspiritual” as thinking, of course. And I’m sure you see what that leads to: if you disagree with such a person, he’ll tell you you’re disagreeing with God. After all, all his thoughts are God’s thoughts. So how can he be wrong? What a horrible state for any person to come to. He is a danger to the weak, the naïve and trusting and, even more, he is his own worst enemy, because he believes every lie he tells himself... since he thinks it’s all coming from God.
Jude gives the Church several illustrations of this kind of person: There was Cain, who wasn’t content with second place; it had to be his way or no way. There was Balaam, who was willing to sell “ministry” to the highest bidder, promising to “loose” the power of the spirit world any way he wanted. There was Korah, who decided with his friends that nobody had a right to authority that they couldn’t have, and that Truth was defined by opinion poll. You could call Korah a very early post-modernist!
Jude gives a few more illustrations: these people are like shepherds who feed only themselves; picture the poor flock of hungry, distressed, helpless sheep, watching the shepherds feed themselves! If those poor sheep really understood, then they would know these shepherds have nothing to give them.
We, however, are not literally sheep; God has given us understanding – yes, even the mind of Christ. So Jude calls us to exercise intelligent discernment regarding such people. They are empty clouds blown by the wind. They are blown along by the wind of their own caprice, their own fantasy, saying it is all from the Lord, but there is nothing substantial in it, nothing that can truly nourish the soul. They are like fruitless and rootless trees. Their so-called fruit is false: it is not from God. If you dig deeper, you discover they have no roots: no faith, no relationship with Christ, no obedience. Though they may present an image of great spirituality, though their faces may seem to radiate peace and joy, on the inside they are actually like roaring ocean waves in a storm or like wandering stars that have no home.
Though they are spiritually fruitless, they do bear a certain fruit, a particular concrete result, in the Church: division. Division begins when such people start distinguishing between the so-called spiritual and the so-called unspiritual in the church. Not surprisingly, the “spiritual” are the ones who agree with them. Which is really amazing because, as Jude says, “They are devoid of the Spirit.” When this game starts in a church, it is like a cancer; if it is not removed, it will destroy a church.
So what is the answer? What measures must the Church take to see that this sort of disease doesn’t take root? Start an Inquisition? Hunt for heretics? No. Jude says, “Build yourselves up.” Build ourselves up in what? In joy? In power? In worship? No. Build yourselves up “on your most holy faith.” It goes right back to the first sentences of Jude’s letter: he wants the believers to stand up for the true, pure faith which was “once delivered to the saints”. In the NT, “the faith” is, before all else, the central historical message about Christ which was preached by the apostles – the message of God’s great act and the saving power of that message. “The faith” is also the way of life that grows out of new birth in Christ – a life formed by holiness, love, self-control, humility, wisdom and faithfulness to the scriptures. Jude calls this faith “most holy” and it is holy because it is faith in God’s “holy servant Jesus.” Christians build themselves up by having fellowship with the Lord and his people, by adhering to the gospel and the Word of God, and by worship in spirit and truth – especially by remembering the Lord at his table. This is the way of life which shows who belongs to Jesus Christ.
Now, to some that sounds dry and uninteresting, even unspiritual. Where are the fireworks? Where’s all the shouting and jumping? How do you show your spirituality? I have to ask: why is that spirituality? It looks physical to me. What makes it “spiritual”? I’ve seen people act that way at football games; does that make them spiritual? Please don’t misunderstand me: I have nothing against joy or emotion. But we make a big mistake when we equate outward, visible manifestations with spirituality. Such spirituality is too easy to fake. Jude doesn’t say “build yourselves up in spirituality”; he says “build yourselves up on the most holy faith.” It is the faith that will make you spiritual in the truest way.
A key element in building ourselves up in this most holy faith, Jude say, is to pray in the Spirit. How do we do that? Well, I think the testimony of the New Testament is clear and unambiguous: we pray in the Spirit when we pray from a heart of faith that yearns only for Christ’s exaltation. We pray in faith in the name of Jesus; we pray out of the same whole, childlike faith in which we first invited Christ into our hearts. We pray in the same faith by which we received baptism, when we confessed Christ before the world as our Lord and Savior. We pray in the same faith we have when we receive communion, remembering the body and blood of the Lord. The prayer of faith in Christ is prayer in the Spirit. Such prayer will not often accompanied by ecstatic feelings or supernatural manifestations. Often, it will be difficult and require perseverance. It will always, always require faith. And it will always reach the throne of God.
I began by saying how Jude wanted to write the believers about this most holy faith delivered once for all to the saints, and how it turned instead into an “emergency letter”. I mentioned that the emergency was the great danger Jude saw in the Church – the invasion of disbelief, pride, immorality – and also how Jude started off by reminding the believers that God saw everything beforehand, how it was all an old story already. Well, now at the close of this letter, Jude says it again: this was all predicted; none of this throws God’s plan off-kilter; you just hold on to the most holy faith, to the glorious expectation of Jesus’ coming and his total victory, and you'll be all right! Just hold on. You don’t have to fix everything; you only need to hold on to the One Who does.
That’s what makes this most holy faith so glorious. That’s what makes this good news so great. It is great and glorious news not just about what God has done, perfectly, wonderfully for us in the past. No, it’s news and a faith that swallows up our whole past, present and future in one single sweep in absolutely perfect completeness. The “good news” isn’t only that “Jesus died for your sins on the cross and rose from the dead”. The good news is also that He’s coming again with victory in his hand, that our life is hidden and kept in Him to the very end – and the very end will be a beginning, in Jesus, that never, ever ends again. Such grace, such perfect-ness and absoluteness of hope! Cain, Balaam and Korah couldn’t grasp grace like that; their pride wouldn’t let them. Same thing with their partners in disbelief in the days of Jude and the early church.
When you can’t grasp grace, you’ll grasp something else: pride, immorality. But when you can grasp and embrace God’s grace, and gaze in awe at the glory of Jesus’ salvation, then the Cains, Balaams and Korahs in the world will never defeat you, and they will never defeat the Church.
“Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.”
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Stones or Faith? (John 10:24-31)
No introductory comments necessary!
Read John 10:24-31.
In verse 24 the people press Jesus to speak openly, “When will you tell us who are you?”, and Jesus responds, “I have told you.”
How and when did Jesus already tell them? Well, look at verse 7 in this chapter, “I am the door”. And verse 9, “Whoever enters through me will be saved.” Verse 10: “I have come that they might have life”. Or verse 11: “I am the good shepherd.” And verse 15: “The Father knows me and I know the Father.” One more – verse 16: “They will hear my voice and they will be one flock with one shepherd.”
So tell me, has Jesus really been covering up the essence of his earthly mission? Not at all! He is openly declaring the meaning, promise and divine intention of his coming. Nevertheless, the people go on asking, “Who are you?” Jesus’ answer is “I have told you, but you do not believe.” And that, of course, is really what this is all about. Regardless of how many words the Lord says, if the people’s hearts are unready to receive, then, no matter what, their next question is still going to be “Who are you?” Because, not believing, they don’t hear. In that case, words become useless. Even miracles hardly help. Jesus says, (vv. 25b-26a), “The works that I do in my Father’s name testify of me (26) but you don’t believe”. So neither words nor signs seem to make any difference. Why? Jesus goes on: “you don’t believe because you are not of my sheep, as I have told you. (26b)”
“Not of my sheep” – there is the essence, the crux, the core of this issue. Over and over Jesus has spoken of this relationship, a relationship in which the sheep know the shepherd, know his voice. As in verse 3 (read), and verse 4 (read); likewise, verse 14 (read) and verse 16 (read). For those who “have ears to hear”, Jesus makes it clearer than day what he means. In front of the people stands not only a teacher, not only a prophet, indeed not only Christ as many anticipated “Christ”. Rather, before them stands Christ as he really is, in himself, and it turns out that the real Messiah, Christ, cannot be defined according to human understanding. It turns out that the critical element in Christ’s call isn’t whether or not he corresponds to our assumptions, but whether our hearts hear what he's saying, whether his words reveal truth and life to our hearts.
Jesus can’t tell the crowd, “Yes, I am everything you were waiting for”, because they could never have imagined the Messiah as he really turned out to be. In fact, Jesus does them a kindness by not saying, “Oh, yes, I’m the Messiah.” As we know, Jesus talked that way only on the rarest occasion. It’s interesting, by the way, to take a look at the moments when Jesus did speak so bluntly. As a rule, it wasn’t when the people or their leaders were demanding an answer. It was more often when a person whose faith was just coming to life needed assurance.
We see such a case, in fact, right in the preceding chapter, in 9:35-38 (read). This man had been blind all his life, and Jesus gave him sight. Imagine.... And this man refused to denounce Jesus for the healing, even though the Pharisees threatened to throw him out of the Temple forever. So, all in one day, this man received sight he had never had in his whole life, and he was exiled forever from the most sacred place of his religion. Again, imagine the emotional earthquake that day was for this man. And in the midst of this earthquake, Jesus comes to him and asks, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” The poor man answers in desperation, “Who is he, Lord, so I can believe in him?” And Jesus gives him the answer he wouldn’t give to the movers and shakers of society when they demanded his credentials. He says, “You’ve seen him; you’re talking to him.” Just as Jesus also said to a woman at a well one day in Samaria, a woman disgraced for her sin and shunned by society, a woman who, just starting to catch a faint glimmer of light, let the half-suspicious, half-hoping words slip out, “They sa-a-ay that... when the Messiah comes... he’ll make everything clear....” Jesus looks her straight in the eye and tells her, “The one talking with you right now is he.”
The key element in these cases was that the person’s heart was already starting to open to the deeper reality of Jesus. And wasn’t demanding or ordering Jesus to line up with some already formulated checklist for Messiah. Jesus offers God’s gift of life to those whose hearts receive him, just as he is, in the fullness of his glory, yielding to him in full faith. The ones who receive him like that, he receives, just as they are. “Just as I am, without one plea, but that the blood was shed, for me. Just as I am... I come, I come.”
But why didn’t the Pharisees and the crowds understand? It was because they didn’t believe. And why didn’t they believe? (read 10:26-27) But what makes a person not Christ’s sheep? It’s the absence of any desire to meet God, to have encounter with him, to know and love the Creator. It’s attachment to self that doesn’t admit the possibility of the life-change that God brings.
The sheep belongs to the shepherd; it is his, and it trusts totally. But the bystander, the stranger, doesn’t belong to him, and doesn’t want to belong. Do we desire encounter with God, are we willing to trust everything to Him? If so, God opens up truth to our hearts. Jesus said to the people, in John 7:17, “Whoever is willing to do [God’s] will, that one will know whether my teaching is from God or whether I’m just speaking for myself.” If a person has the desire, if he’s ready to receive, if he sincerely seeks, then the Lord will find him. While we’re in chapter seven, look at the next verse, verse 18. This verse sparked me to meditate further on these matters. I noticed a fascinating parallel. (Read 7:18)
Jesus says about himself that he is not seeking his own; rather, he seeks the glory of the one who sent him. We can make a parallel here to his followers, the shepherd’s sheep. The good shepherd’s sheep also don’t strive for their own, but for what will glorify God. In this way, they are like the good shepherd – maybe partially and imperfectly, but in their hearts resounds the summons of the one who desires above all the glory of the one who sent him. So this is what they want, too. They hear him and become like him. They follow him and he knows them. And he can say anything to them, and they’ll willingly receive it. He can say something like this to them: (read 10:28-30)
Here is Christ, just as he is. Who can receive such words, such a Christ who says such things as “I and the Father are one”? The nation insisted, “Tell us plainly!” So Jesus did: “I and the Father are one”. It was clear from the start, wasn’t it, that this is where it was all heading? Who else could be within his rights to say things like “I am the door; whoever enters through me will be saved”, or “ I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me”, or “I have power to lay down my life and power to take it up again”? Only the one who is one with the Father. This is the one who promises eternal life and actually fulfills the promise, who holds the believer in his hand, in the hand of God, and keeps him from the enemy. Jesus didn’t come to line up with some definition of the word Christ, but to define in his very self what being the Christ of God is. By his words, by his works, by his love and grace and self-giving, and by his power and authority, he did define it – and it is everything he is.
But when Jesus Christ made it clearer than day who he was, the people who had been demanding that he do so, did what in response? Well, they didn’t say, “Thank you very kindly for that!” (read 10:31-33)
There is the difference between the good shepherd’s sheep and the “non-sheep”. You saw how the non-sheep reacted. But the true sheep hear, receive, contemplate and submit to his word. They look at the one who is saying these words and think: if such a one, such a Person, who does such miracles, whose words radiate such truth and grace – if such a one as this says such words, then they’re true. It is precisely in this Jesus that God Himself, the Lord who is our shepherd, has visited his people.
But those who were ready to do nothing but judge his words and refuse to know him, they, of course, picked up stones. Stones or faith – these are the two responses to the Good Shepherd’s self-disclosure. Stones or faith. Outrage or love. Rejection or embrace. The response we make will show whether or not we belong to the flock of the true Good Shepherd, who gave his life for his sheep. Who gave his life, and took it up again, not because that was what people expected, but because that’s who he is. “Tell us who you are!”, the people shouted. Well, look at Jesus, listen to him, with a heart for God... and you’ll know.
Read John 10:24-31.
In verse 24 the people press Jesus to speak openly, “When will you tell us who are you?”, and Jesus responds, “I have told you.”
How and when did Jesus already tell them? Well, look at verse 7 in this chapter, “I am the door”. And verse 9, “Whoever enters through me will be saved.” Verse 10: “I have come that they might have life”. Or verse 11: “I am the good shepherd.” And verse 15: “The Father knows me and I know the Father.” One more – verse 16: “They will hear my voice and they will be one flock with one shepherd.”
So tell me, has Jesus really been covering up the essence of his earthly mission? Not at all! He is openly declaring the meaning, promise and divine intention of his coming. Nevertheless, the people go on asking, “Who are you?” Jesus’ answer is “I have told you, but you do not believe.” And that, of course, is really what this is all about. Regardless of how many words the Lord says, if the people’s hearts are unready to receive, then, no matter what, their next question is still going to be “Who are you?” Because, not believing, they don’t hear. In that case, words become useless. Even miracles hardly help. Jesus says, (vv. 25b-26a), “The works that I do in my Father’s name testify of me (26) but you don’t believe”. So neither words nor signs seem to make any difference. Why? Jesus goes on: “you don’t believe because you are not of my sheep, as I have told you. (26b)”
“Not of my sheep” – there is the essence, the crux, the core of this issue. Over and over Jesus has spoken of this relationship, a relationship in which the sheep know the shepherd, know his voice. As in verse 3 (read), and verse 4 (read); likewise, verse 14 (read) and verse 16 (read). For those who “have ears to hear”, Jesus makes it clearer than day what he means. In front of the people stands not only a teacher, not only a prophet, indeed not only Christ as many anticipated “Christ”. Rather, before them stands Christ as he really is, in himself, and it turns out that the real Messiah, Christ, cannot be defined according to human understanding. It turns out that the critical element in Christ’s call isn’t whether or not he corresponds to our assumptions, but whether our hearts hear what he's saying, whether his words reveal truth and life to our hearts.
Jesus can’t tell the crowd, “Yes, I am everything you were waiting for”, because they could never have imagined the Messiah as he really turned out to be. In fact, Jesus does them a kindness by not saying, “Oh, yes, I’m the Messiah.” As we know, Jesus talked that way only on the rarest occasion. It’s interesting, by the way, to take a look at the moments when Jesus did speak so bluntly. As a rule, it wasn’t when the people or their leaders were demanding an answer. It was more often when a person whose faith was just coming to life needed assurance.
We see such a case, in fact, right in the preceding chapter, in 9:35-38 (read). This man had been blind all his life, and Jesus gave him sight. Imagine.... And this man refused to denounce Jesus for the healing, even though the Pharisees threatened to throw him out of the Temple forever. So, all in one day, this man received sight he had never had in his whole life, and he was exiled forever from the most sacred place of his religion. Again, imagine the emotional earthquake that day was for this man. And in the midst of this earthquake, Jesus comes to him and asks, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” The poor man answers in desperation, “Who is he, Lord, so I can believe in him?” And Jesus gives him the answer he wouldn’t give to the movers and shakers of society when they demanded his credentials. He says, “You’ve seen him; you’re talking to him.” Just as Jesus also said to a woman at a well one day in Samaria, a woman disgraced for her sin and shunned by society, a woman who, just starting to catch a faint glimmer of light, let the half-suspicious, half-hoping words slip out, “They sa-a-ay that... when the Messiah comes... he’ll make everything clear....” Jesus looks her straight in the eye and tells her, “The one talking with you right now is he.”
The key element in these cases was that the person’s heart was already starting to open to the deeper reality of Jesus. And wasn’t demanding or ordering Jesus to line up with some already formulated checklist for Messiah. Jesus offers God’s gift of life to those whose hearts receive him, just as he is, in the fullness of his glory, yielding to him in full faith. The ones who receive him like that, he receives, just as they are. “Just as I am, without one plea, but that the blood was shed, for me. Just as I am... I come, I come.”
But why didn’t the Pharisees and the crowds understand? It was because they didn’t believe. And why didn’t they believe? (read 10:26-27) But what makes a person not Christ’s sheep? It’s the absence of any desire to meet God, to have encounter with him, to know and love the Creator. It’s attachment to self that doesn’t admit the possibility of the life-change that God brings.
The sheep belongs to the shepherd; it is his, and it trusts totally. But the bystander, the stranger, doesn’t belong to him, and doesn’t want to belong. Do we desire encounter with God, are we willing to trust everything to Him? If so, God opens up truth to our hearts. Jesus said to the people, in John 7:17, “Whoever is willing to do [God’s] will, that one will know whether my teaching is from God or whether I’m just speaking for myself.” If a person has the desire, if he’s ready to receive, if he sincerely seeks, then the Lord will find him. While we’re in chapter seven, look at the next verse, verse 18. This verse sparked me to meditate further on these matters. I noticed a fascinating parallel. (Read 7:18)
Jesus says about himself that he is not seeking his own; rather, he seeks the glory of the one who sent him. We can make a parallel here to his followers, the shepherd’s sheep. The good shepherd’s sheep also don’t strive for their own, but for what will glorify God. In this way, they are like the good shepherd – maybe partially and imperfectly, but in their hearts resounds the summons of the one who desires above all the glory of the one who sent him. So this is what they want, too. They hear him and become like him. They follow him and he knows them. And he can say anything to them, and they’ll willingly receive it. He can say something like this to them: (read 10:28-30)
Here is Christ, just as he is. Who can receive such words, such a Christ who says such things as “I and the Father are one”? The nation insisted, “Tell us plainly!” So Jesus did: “I and the Father are one”. It was clear from the start, wasn’t it, that this is where it was all heading? Who else could be within his rights to say things like “I am the door; whoever enters through me will be saved”, or “ I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me”, or “I have power to lay down my life and power to take it up again”? Only the one who is one with the Father. This is the one who promises eternal life and actually fulfills the promise, who holds the believer in his hand, in the hand of God, and keeps him from the enemy. Jesus didn’t come to line up with some definition of the word Christ, but to define in his very self what being the Christ of God is. By his words, by his works, by his love and grace and self-giving, and by his power and authority, he did define it – and it is everything he is.
But when Jesus Christ made it clearer than day who he was, the people who had been demanding that he do so, did what in response? Well, they didn’t say, “Thank you very kindly for that!” (read 10:31-33)
There is the difference between the good shepherd’s sheep and the “non-sheep”. You saw how the non-sheep reacted. But the true sheep hear, receive, contemplate and submit to his word. They look at the one who is saying these words and think: if such a one, such a Person, who does such miracles, whose words radiate such truth and grace – if such a one as this says such words, then they’re true. It is precisely in this Jesus that God Himself, the Lord who is our shepherd, has visited his people.
But those who were ready to do nothing but judge his words and refuse to know him, they, of course, picked up stones. Stones or faith – these are the two responses to the Good Shepherd’s self-disclosure. Stones or faith. Outrage or love. Rejection or embrace. The response we make will show whether or not we belong to the flock of the true Good Shepherd, who gave his life for his sheep. Who gave his life, and took it up again, not because that was what people expected, but because that’s who he is. “Tell us who you are!”, the people shouted. Well, look at Jesus, listen to him, with a heart for God... and you’ll know.
Friday, August 14, 2009
The Triumphal Entry (III)
Here is yet one more Palm Sunday sermon. For a Palm Sunday sermon, it devotes what may seem an inordinate amount of space to events following Palm Sunday, i.e., the Crucifixion (as if one could ever devote an “inordinate” amount of space to the Crucifixion...). But the intention behind this is twofold: 1) to drive home to the listeners’ the amazingly consistent prophetic theme running through all the events of Holy Week, beginning with the Entry, as foreshadowed in Psalm 118; for example, have you ever noticed that Jesus cites the same psalm to the Jewish leaders as the crowd quoted to him the day before? - it all seems to be a single, unfolding story already “told”, in a veiled way, in the psalm; 2) to “crystallize”, in light of this permeating motif, the way in which the Atonement truly consummates, in ways only God (“...the Lord has done this”) could have designed, what the crowds on Palm Sunday were really talking about... even if they didn’t know it. In short, this sermons tries (how successfully, I will not venture to say) to be a portrait of the divine hand actualizing the divine will, no matter what people thought they were accomplishing.
Read Isaiah 63:1-6, then Matthew 21:1-5, then Philippians 2:6-8
Even in his humility, Jesus’ greatness shone. It shone through his love, through the truth that he spoke, through the power that he demonstrated. Jesus healed people of their sicknesses. Most of all, he healed them of the sickness of heart, which comes from sin. He healed them from anger and envy, from fear and hatred. He showed them that the most important liberation is not political liberation, or economic liberation, but liberation of the heart. He brought them the fresh, clean water which is called new life. Many tasted this water, and they sensed the great power which brought them this new life.
And so, when Jesus rode into the city they shouted “Hosanna!” “Hosanna” means “Save!” In Hebrew it sounds like “hoshiyana”. Actually, the root of this word is the same as the root of Jesus’ Hebrew name Yeshua. And we know why Jesus received his name: because the angel told Joseph, “You will call him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins”. And so it comes about that the crowds now cry out to the Savior, “Save! Save!” And they call him Son of David. That shows how great their hope was for a Messiah, a son of David who would establish the true kingdom of God. Just as the prophet Zechariah prophesied, their king really was coming to them. The prophecy was fulfilled on that day.
The people greeted Jesus not only as Son of David, but also with the words of Psalm 118. In Psalm 118:26, it says, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” In Hebrew it sounds like, “Baruch ha-ba b’shem Yahveh.” Let’s look at that passage, starting at verse 25; we’ll read verses 25 to 29 (read).
These verses speak of joy; they speak of salvation. They speak of God’s mercy. They praise God who is our light. But they speak also of sacrifice (v. 27). Without sacrifice for sin there is no forgiveness because the debt of sin must be paid. Interestingly, in this psalm where it talks about joy and light and thanksgiving and mercy, it talks also about sacrifice. This is inescapable, because we live in a fallen, sinful world. And when we look again at Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, what do we see? Immediately after he came into the city, where did he go? Into the temple. He went to the place of sacrifice. The Lamb of God came into the city with one purpose: to present himself to the Father as the perfect redeeming sacrifice. The crowds who shouted for Jesus didn’t know that. When they shouted joyfully “Save! Save!”, they didn’t know he was really going to do it, or how. But Jesus knew, and was ready.
And yet, the Lamb of God did not die in this temple. All the lambs which the people offered in sacrifice had to die in the temple. But not God’s lamb. Jesus was rejected by the priests. The true Lamb was sent to die outside the walls of the holy city. Jesus knew about this, too. The day after his triumphal entry, Jesus was again in the temple, the temple he had cleansed, just as he came to cleanse our hearts, and he saw the chief priests and elders and... (read Matthew 21:42). Jesus quoted psalm 118, the very same psalm the people quoted when they shouted the day before, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” The same psalm that talks about the Messiah’s glory speaks also about his rejection and suffering. Jesus was the only one there who saw the whole picture, the glorious and the terrible sides.
It is most probable that the place where they crucified Jesus was an abandoned stone quarry, a place where there was no more stone of good quality. Jesus literally died in the place where the builders rejected the stones. And dying there, Jesus became like one of the stones rejected by the builders. And who were the builders, the supposed constructors of the nation, the chosen people? They were the priests and elders, the Pharisees and scribes, the ones who claimed the authority and had to answer for it. They should have recognized the nation’s cornerstone, Jesus Christ, when he appeared, and welcomed him as Savior of the world. But they rejected him and sent him to the cross, to die outside of the city where all the other rejected stones lay, in an old, worthless quarry.
It is quite possible, too, that when Jesus worked as a young man, he didn’t work with wood but with stone. The word in the Bible that we translate as “carpenter” could just as easily refer to a stonemason, and given the lay of the land in Nazareth, it seems to make more sense. If so, then the spectacle of Jesus, who humbly worked in his youth with stone under the blazing sun, building walls and homes, now cast outside the walls of Jerusalem and his Father’s house, thrown away like a broken, useless piece of rock to die in an abandoned stone quarry, nailed to a wooden cross built just to torture him to death under the blazing sun, becomes, if possible, even more shattering. But if it is more shattering, it is also, hard as it is to conceive it this way, even more glorious. Because the actual, ultimate reality which we must see in this terrible, terrible spectacle is the fact of the stone which the builders rejected turning out to be the cornerstone of God’s eternal salvation and kingdom. “The Lord has done this, and it is marvelous [that means “miraculous”!] in our eyes.” You see, the psalmist isn’t saying, “We think it’s really swell”; he’s prophetically saying, “we recognize this is actually a miracle” – no one could have pulled something like this off except God Almighty. And in the final event, Jesus’ rejection by the world was so final, so absolute that no one but God Almighty could have made that terrible, lonely cross into the triumph of atonement and everlasting glory.
Remember, Psalm 118 is a psalm of salvation. It’s about God’s stupendous miracle of salvation. And precisely this terrible death – the Lamb’s death outside the city – is the actual thing itself, really happening before the world’s eyes. Here on the cross, and here preaching in the temple, and here riding into Jerusalem, is the Rejected Stone whom the Father is making the Cornerstone of His true temple, of the spiritual house He will dwell in, His living temple the Church.
And that is how this man, Jesus, the Lamb, did what the people cried out for him to do, “Hoshiyana – Save! Save!” That is how he accomplished his only desire: to complete his Father’s will.
When Jesus entered the city, many people asked, “Who is this?” (verse 11). He came in the name of the Lord, but they asked what his name was. One day, though, no one will ever need to ask his name (Philippians 2:9-11)... “for the Father has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name (vv. 10-11).
We began in the book of Isaiah, and we will finish there also, with Isaiah 65:17-19 (read).
On the day when the true king, Jesus Christ, appears, there will be rejoicing in the new Jerusalem and the Son of David will sit on the throne of God, and "we will be glad and rejoice" in what He has done.
Read Isaiah 63:1-6, then Matthew 21:1-5, then Philippians 2:6-8
Even in his humility, Jesus’ greatness shone. It shone through his love, through the truth that he spoke, through the power that he demonstrated. Jesus healed people of their sicknesses. Most of all, he healed them of the sickness of heart, which comes from sin. He healed them from anger and envy, from fear and hatred. He showed them that the most important liberation is not political liberation, or economic liberation, but liberation of the heart. He brought them the fresh, clean water which is called new life. Many tasted this water, and they sensed the great power which brought them this new life.
And so, when Jesus rode into the city they shouted “Hosanna!” “Hosanna” means “Save!” In Hebrew it sounds like “hoshiyana”. Actually, the root of this word is the same as the root of Jesus’ Hebrew name Yeshua. And we know why Jesus received his name: because the angel told Joseph, “You will call him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins”. And so it comes about that the crowds now cry out to the Savior, “Save! Save!” And they call him Son of David. That shows how great their hope was for a Messiah, a son of David who would establish the true kingdom of God. Just as the prophet Zechariah prophesied, their king really was coming to them. The prophecy was fulfilled on that day.
The people greeted Jesus not only as Son of David, but also with the words of Psalm 118. In Psalm 118:26, it says, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” In Hebrew it sounds like, “Baruch ha-ba b’shem Yahveh.” Let’s look at that passage, starting at verse 25; we’ll read verses 25 to 29 (read).
These verses speak of joy; they speak of salvation. They speak of God’s mercy. They praise God who is our light. But they speak also of sacrifice (v. 27). Without sacrifice for sin there is no forgiveness because the debt of sin must be paid. Interestingly, in this psalm where it talks about joy and light and thanksgiving and mercy, it talks also about sacrifice. This is inescapable, because we live in a fallen, sinful world. And when we look again at Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, what do we see? Immediately after he came into the city, where did he go? Into the temple. He went to the place of sacrifice. The Lamb of God came into the city with one purpose: to present himself to the Father as the perfect redeeming sacrifice. The crowds who shouted for Jesus didn’t know that. When they shouted joyfully “Save! Save!”, they didn’t know he was really going to do it, or how. But Jesus knew, and was ready.
And yet, the Lamb of God did not die in this temple. All the lambs which the people offered in sacrifice had to die in the temple. But not God’s lamb. Jesus was rejected by the priests. The true Lamb was sent to die outside the walls of the holy city. Jesus knew about this, too. The day after his triumphal entry, Jesus was again in the temple, the temple he had cleansed, just as he came to cleanse our hearts, and he saw the chief priests and elders and... (read Matthew 21:42). Jesus quoted psalm 118, the very same psalm the people quoted when they shouted the day before, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” The same psalm that talks about the Messiah’s glory speaks also about his rejection and suffering. Jesus was the only one there who saw the whole picture, the glorious and the terrible sides.
It is most probable that the place where they crucified Jesus was an abandoned stone quarry, a place where there was no more stone of good quality. Jesus literally died in the place where the builders rejected the stones. And dying there, Jesus became like one of the stones rejected by the builders. And who were the builders, the supposed constructors of the nation, the chosen people? They were the priests and elders, the Pharisees and scribes, the ones who claimed the authority and had to answer for it. They should have recognized the nation’s cornerstone, Jesus Christ, when he appeared, and welcomed him as Savior of the world. But they rejected him and sent him to the cross, to die outside of the city where all the other rejected stones lay, in an old, worthless quarry.
It is quite possible, too, that when Jesus worked as a young man, he didn’t work with wood but with stone. The word in the Bible that we translate as “carpenter” could just as easily refer to a stonemason, and given the lay of the land in Nazareth, it seems to make more sense. If so, then the spectacle of Jesus, who humbly worked in his youth with stone under the blazing sun, building walls and homes, now cast outside the walls of Jerusalem and his Father’s house, thrown away like a broken, useless piece of rock to die in an abandoned stone quarry, nailed to a wooden cross built just to torture him to death under the blazing sun, becomes, if possible, even more shattering. But if it is more shattering, it is also, hard as it is to conceive it this way, even more glorious. Because the actual, ultimate reality which we must see in this terrible, terrible spectacle is the fact of the stone which the builders rejected turning out to be the cornerstone of God’s eternal salvation and kingdom. “The Lord has done this, and it is marvelous [that means “miraculous”!] in our eyes.” You see, the psalmist isn’t saying, “We think it’s really swell”; he’s prophetically saying, “we recognize this is actually a miracle” – no one could have pulled something like this off except God Almighty. And in the final event, Jesus’ rejection by the world was so final, so absolute that no one but God Almighty could have made that terrible, lonely cross into the triumph of atonement and everlasting glory.
Remember, Psalm 118 is a psalm of salvation. It’s about God’s stupendous miracle of salvation. And precisely this terrible death – the Lamb’s death outside the city – is the actual thing itself, really happening before the world’s eyes. Here on the cross, and here preaching in the temple, and here riding into Jerusalem, is the Rejected Stone whom the Father is making the Cornerstone of His true temple, of the spiritual house He will dwell in, His living temple the Church.
And that is how this man, Jesus, the Lamb, did what the people cried out for him to do, “Hoshiyana – Save! Save!” That is how he accomplished his only desire: to complete his Father’s will.
When Jesus entered the city, many people asked, “Who is this?” (verse 11). He came in the name of the Lord, but they asked what his name was. One day, though, no one will ever need to ask his name (Philippians 2:9-11)... “for the Father has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name (vv. 10-11).
We began in the book of Isaiah, and we will finish there also, with Isaiah 65:17-19 (read).
On the day when the true king, Jesus Christ, appears, there will be rejoicing in the new Jerusalem and the Son of David will sit on the throne of God, and "we will be glad and rejoice" in what He has done.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Parable of the Talents: Why Talents Aren’t Talents
You may find this a refreshing departure from the usual "talents" sermon.
(Read Matt. 25:14-30)
It will help you to understand the parable better if, for a moment, we put the modern meaning of 'talent' out of our minds. The word 'talent' in this story means money. A talent was a particular quantity of money in Roman and Greek societies. But where did the other meaning of 'talent' come from? Actually, it came from this parable! Because, through thousands of years of church history, preachers have applied this parable to the lives of their hearers, asking, 'How are you using your "talents" for God?' Of course, they first said 'talents', in quotation marks, as a metaphor for abilities and skills. But this went on for so long that, finally, the word 'talent' completely took on the meaning it has today. In other words, no more quotation marks. Because everybody had forgotten the real meaning of the word, anyway. But that created problems.
The main problem is, we tend to read the parable and take the word 'talent' in the usual modern sense, as an ability, and that creates two more problems: 1) we oversimplify the parable and miss its deeper meaning; 2) we misuse the parable, especially when we apply it to each other. Maybe somebody already wants to object, 'Wait a minute! Are you saying that God doesn't want our abilities, He just wants our money?' No, of course not. The word 'talent' in the parable does mean money, simply because that’s what the word means, and that’s what the people in the story are talking about. But it would be totally wrong to interpret the parable as saying, “God is only interested in your money.” But it is equally wrong to interpret the parable to say, “God is only interested in how talented you are.” Both interpretations are wrong. The money in the parable is talking about something bigger than both money and talents, the way we think of talents.
It will help us to understand this parable and all parables better if we keep in mind this concept: two worlds. There is the world inside the parable, where people interact with each other and relate to each other and do things for their own reasons, and then there is our world, where we read the parable and draw from it metaphors, and parallels, and applications. Let me give you a very simple example, very easy to understand: you all know how Jesus said he was the good shepherd, and how the good shepherd leaves the 99 sheep to go looking for the one lost sheep. Now, Jesus didn't say that the good shepherd leaves the 99 sheep to go looking for the one lost drug addict! That would make no sense. Shepherds look for sheep, not drug addicts! Inside the world of that simple picture Jesus gave us, the shepherd is a shepherd and the sheep are sheep. But, when we relate that picture, as a metaphor, to our world, then we know that Jesus is speaking of God's great love toward sinners, and how He will do everything possible to find lost souls, including the drug addict, the thief, the murderer and, by the way, the person who seems to perfectly fine.
And so we come back to this parable. Inside the world of this parable, the master is a real master, the slaves are real slaves, the money is real money, the hole in the ground is a real hole! And the master's words in verse 27 mean literally what they say: the slave should have put the money in the bank and earned some interest on it! He wouldn't even have needed to roll up his sleeves and work, he could have simply put the money in the bank, and at least he'd have earned something! Something is better than nothing! But nothing is worth precisely nothing, which is why the master calls the servant 'worthless'. The master gave the servant something and the servant made nothing out of it. That's what happened in the story, in that world.
And now, how do we interpret it, apply it to our world? What lesson do we take from this story? In the parable, the master gave the servants money and expected a profit from it. In our life, what does God give us and what does He expect us to do with it? As a hint, I want to suggest that it’s no accident Jesus immediately followed this parable with a prophecy of his second coming, when he will separate the sheep from the goats. And what is the criterion in making the separation? (Read Matt. 25:35-36)
It is interesting that Jesus says nothing here about preaching a sermon, or singing a solo, or playing the piano or washing the church windows. All those things are good and necessary, but sometimes we interpret this parable as if it were only talking about that: about artistic abilities or housekeeping chores or what we do in the service on Sunday morning. It's not. It's a parable about life. A parable about what we do with life, who we become inside, and how we show God to others. Ultimately, your talent – that is, the spiritual currency God has entrusted you with – is your life; it's the gift of life itself. The master in the parable gave his servants money and they were judged by how they used it. God has given us life. That is the precious 'talent' the Master has entrusted us with.
We can look at this priceless talent in different ways: it is the time given to each of us on this earth, to find God and His love. It is our capacity to respond to him. It is the possibility of loving people. This ‘talent’ is God's summons to climb the stairs of holiness through a transformation of heart that bears fruit in works of love. I want to say that again: this ‘talent’ is God's summons to climb the stairs of holiness through a transformation of heart that bears fruit in works of love.
The scriptures portray such a life in many different ways. For example, we all know the passage in Galatians where Paul mentions the “fruit of the Spirit”. There you have a picture of God’s investment bearing fruit. Likewise, Ephesians 4:22-5:1 (read). The apostle is talking here about a wholly new way of life, a new mind, new eyes for seeing the way God sees, and feeling with God’s heart. Because of God’s precious gift, we can throw off and leave behind the old man and become actual imitators of our heavenly Father. Romans 12:1-2 talks about the same thing in fewer, but very powerful, words (read). “Be transformed”, “imitate God”, “be living sacrifices” – this is what the parable of the talents is all about. And the money called “talents” in the story stands for the open door God gives each one of us to enter in to the richness of the Spirit and life in Christ. Yes, yes, of course, this will be demonstrated in certain practical ways in our daily lives, and I don’t ever want to suggest that singing in the church choir or cleaning the sanctuary are not part of that. But what a terrible mistake we will make if we think that that’s all the parable was meant to teach.
In conclusion, let me repeat that we should be careful how we interpret the parable of the talents. When we oversimplify it, we use it incorrectly. Let's be honest, sometimes we exploit this parable to force people to do what we want them to do. We want a brother or sister to sing a song and maybe they don't want to. And what do we say? 'Remember the parable of the talents, brother! God says to use your talents, so you’d better sing this morning!' So we quote the scripture to convince the brother it's God's will for him to sing – work a little “holy guilt” on him - when in reality it’s our will for him to sing! The parable doesn’t actually say anything about doing a solo in church. In fact, to hear how some people throw this parable around, you’d think the whole parable was about singing!
We shouldn't use scripture that way. Instead of applying the parable to others in a shallow way, it would be better to apply it first to ourselves in a deeper way: to examine first how we are using the real ‘talent’ - the precious truth and life – which God has invested in us. We’ve all received this talent. Even the “untalented” brother or sister, in today's sense of the word – the one who can't sing, can't play an instrument, can't preach, can't build anything, it seems they can't do anything... and maybe they can't! – that person, that child of God, still possesses the great, real, indescribable Talent, with a capital T, of God. And we don’t help him or her by forcing them to come up with something we consider a ‘talent’, with a small “t” - as if the parable doesn’t apply to them until we can define how well they do needlepoint or fix a car. No, no matter what they can or can’t do – and praise God for all the abilities He gives us – but, no matter what they can or can’t do, every child of God possesses the true Talent, the secret treasure, the hidden spiritual glory, the eternal newness that is life in Christ. And every child of God can make so much out of it, and we have to help each other do so, as we grow into the glory of the image of the Lord Jesus Christ.
(Read Matt. 25:14-30)
It will help you to understand the parable better if, for a moment, we put the modern meaning of 'talent' out of our minds. The word 'talent' in this story means money. A talent was a particular quantity of money in Roman and Greek societies. But where did the other meaning of 'talent' come from? Actually, it came from this parable! Because, through thousands of years of church history, preachers have applied this parable to the lives of their hearers, asking, 'How are you using your "talents" for God?' Of course, they first said 'talents', in quotation marks, as a metaphor for abilities and skills. But this went on for so long that, finally, the word 'talent' completely took on the meaning it has today. In other words, no more quotation marks. Because everybody had forgotten the real meaning of the word, anyway. But that created problems.
The main problem is, we tend to read the parable and take the word 'talent' in the usual modern sense, as an ability, and that creates two more problems: 1) we oversimplify the parable and miss its deeper meaning; 2) we misuse the parable, especially when we apply it to each other. Maybe somebody already wants to object, 'Wait a minute! Are you saying that God doesn't want our abilities, He just wants our money?' No, of course not. The word 'talent' in the parable does mean money, simply because that’s what the word means, and that’s what the people in the story are talking about. But it would be totally wrong to interpret the parable as saying, “God is only interested in your money.” But it is equally wrong to interpret the parable to say, “God is only interested in how talented you are.” Both interpretations are wrong. The money in the parable is talking about something bigger than both money and talents, the way we think of talents.
It will help us to understand this parable and all parables better if we keep in mind this concept: two worlds. There is the world inside the parable, where people interact with each other and relate to each other and do things for their own reasons, and then there is our world, where we read the parable and draw from it metaphors, and parallels, and applications. Let me give you a very simple example, very easy to understand: you all know how Jesus said he was the good shepherd, and how the good shepherd leaves the 99 sheep to go looking for the one lost sheep. Now, Jesus didn't say that the good shepherd leaves the 99 sheep to go looking for the one lost drug addict! That would make no sense. Shepherds look for sheep, not drug addicts! Inside the world of that simple picture Jesus gave us, the shepherd is a shepherd and the sheep are sheep. But, when we relate that picture, as a metaphor, to our world, then we know that Jesus is speaking of God's great love toward sinners, and how He will do everything possible to find lost souls, including the drug addict, the thief, the murderer and, by the way, the person who seems to perfectly fine.
And so we come back to this parable. Inside the world of this parable, the master is a real master, the slaves are real slaves, the money is real money, the hole in the ground is a real hole! And the master's words in verse 27 mean literally what they say: the slave should have put the money in the bank and earned some interest on it! He wouldn't even have needed to roll up his sleeves and work, he could have simply put the money in the bank, and at least he'd have earned something! Something is better than nothing! But nothing is worth precisely nothing, which is why the master calls the servant 'worthless'. The master gave the servant something and the servant made nothing out of it. That's what happened in the story, in that world.
And now, how do we interpret it, apply it to our world? What lesson do we take from this story? In the parable, the master gave the servants money and expected a profit from it. In our life, what does God give us and what does He expect us to do with it? As a hint, I want to suggest that it’s no accident Jesus immediately followed this parable with a prophecy of his second coming, when he will separate the sheep from the goats. And what is the criterion in making the separation? (Read Matt. 25:35-36)
It is interesting that Jesus says nothing here about preaching a sermon, or singing a solo, or playing the piano or washing the church windows. All those things are good and necessary, but sometimes we interpret this parable as if it were only talking about that: about artistic abilities or housekeeping chores or what we do in the service on Sunday morning. It's not. It's a parable about life. A parable about what we do with life, who we become inside, and how we show God to others. Ultimately, your talent – that is, the spiritual currency God has entrusted you with – is your life; it's the gift of life itself. The master in the parable gave his servants money and they were judged by how they used it. God has given us life. That is the precious 'talent' the Master has entrusted us with.
We can look at this priceless talent in different ways: it is the time given to each of us on this earth, to find God and His love. It is our capacity to respond to him. It is the possibility of loving people. This ‘talent’ is God's summons to climb the stairs of holiness through a transformation of heart that bears fruit in works of love. I want to say that again: this ‘talent’ is God's summons to climb the stairs of holiness through a transformation of heart that bears fruit in works of love.
The scriptures portray such a life in many different ways. For example, we all know the passage in Galatians where Paul mentions the “fruit of the Spirit”. There you have a picture of God’s investment bearing fruit. Likewise, Ephesians 4:22-5:1 (read). The apostle is talking here about a wholly new way of life, a new mind, new eyes for seeing the way God sees, and feeling with God’s heart. Because of God’s precious gift, we can throw off and leave behind the old man and become actual imitators of our heavenly Father. Romans 12:1-2 talks about the same thing in fewer, but very powerful, words (read). “Be transformed”, “imitate God”, “be living sacrifices” – this is what the parable of the talents is all about. And the money called “talents” in the story stands for the open door God gives each one of us to enter in to the richness of the Spirit and life in Christ. Yes, yes, of course, this will be demonstrated in certain practical ways in our daily lives, and I don’t ever want to suggest that singing in the church choir or cleaning the sanctuary are not part of that. But what a terrible mistake we will make if we think that that’s all the parable was meant to teach.
In conclusion, let me repeat that we should be careful how we interpret the parable of the talents. When we oversimplify it, we use it incorrectly. Let's be honest, sometimes we exploit this parable to force people to do what we want them to do. We want a brother or sister to sing a song and maybe they don't want to. And what do we say? 'Remember the parable of the talents, brother! God says to use your talents, so you’d better sing this morning!' So we quote the scripture to convince the brother it's God's will for him to sing – work a little “holy guilt” on him - when in reality it’s our will for him to sing! The parable doesn’t actually say anything about doing a solo in church. In fact, to hear how some people throw this parable around, you’d think the whole parable was about singing!
We shouldn't use scripture that way. Instead of applying the parable to others in a shallow way, it would be better to apply it first to ourselves in a deeper way: to examine first how we are using the real ‘talent’ - the precious truth and life – which God has invested in us. We’ve all received this talent. Even the “untalented” brother or sister, in today's sense of the word – the one who can't sing, can't play an instrument, can't preach, can't build anything, it seems they can't do anything... and maybe they can't! – that person, that child of God, still possesses the great, real, indescribable Talent, with a capital T, of God. And we don’t help him or her by forcing them to come up with something we consider a ‘talent’, with a small “t” - as if the parable doesn’t apply to them until we can define how well they do needlepoint or fix a car. No, no matter what they can or can’t do – and praise God for all the abilities He gives us – but, no matter what they can or can’t do, every child of God possesses the true Talent, the secret treasure, the hidden spiritual glory, the eternal newness that is life in Christ. And every child of God can make so much out of it, and we have to help each other do so, as we grow into the glory of the image of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Light on the Road to Bethany (John 11:1-10)
(Read John 11: 1-2)
With these simple words, the Gospel writer John lets us know that something special is going on here. Jesus had already been healing many whose names we don’t know. But here it says a “certain Lazarus” was ill. We read his name, Lazarus, and that he lived in Bethany, and who he lived with, that is, his sisters Mary and Martha. And if that is not enough, John specifies that this is the family from which one of the sisters... (read verse 2). Have you noticed that John reminds the readers about that event as if all we need to do is turn back a few pages and find it in the gospel? The funny thing, though, is that that event is located later in the gospel, after this chapter, not before it! What it means is, when John says to his readers, ‘This is that Mary who anointed Jesus once and wiped his feet with her hair”, John doesn’t mean, “like you already read in this book”. No, what he means is, “like you already heard about, dear readers.” John is writing first of all to believers in the first century who first heard these stories in spoken form, and he assumes that when he mentions the story of Mary anointing Jesus, the early church knows perfectly well what he’s talking about, even though he hasn’t gotten to that yet in the written version. And, of course, in the same way, as they read this Gospel from the very first words, “In the beginning was the Word”, they already knew that it would tell about the crucifixion and the resurrection and Jesus’ many, many glorious words and deeds. And as soon as they read here that Jesus got word about Lazarus’ illness, they already know, “Ah, this is the story about how Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead!”
All the same, none of them probably ever heard the story with all the detail that John includes here. That’s part of the reason for the written Gospel, to fill out the story and go deeper into the spiritual impact of it. I don’t doubt that John chose precisely the most important details that would teach us more about the very meaning and glory of Jesus Christ.
Now, we’re not going to talk today about the whole story of the raising of Lazarus. We’ll just focus a bit more deeply on the first part of the chapter, about what happened right up to heading out to Bethany. But just like the church of the first century, we also know the rest of the story, and let’s keep it in our minds as we meditate over the “preface”. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. We know it. And reading the run-up to it, we know that Jesus knows he will do it, and he knows why, and everything he’s doing and saying before the event is in the light of the awesome glory and power he is about to reveal.
(Read verse 3) Word came to Jesus: “the one you love is ill”. But Jesus already knows that the one he loves is not merely ill; he’s going to die. And precisely in this fact Jesus recognizes the promise of glory. That brings a question to my mind: if the Son of God sees in the death of his beloved friend the promise of glory, then what do we see only gloom and despair in?
In verse four, Jesus says, “This illness will not end in death”. But... Lazarus died! As a rule, if a doctor says some illness won’t be fatal and then the patient dies from it, we say the doctor was wrong! But when Jesus says that this illness –the illness of this dying, perhaps already dead man – is not going to end in death but in God’s glory, knowing that he will glorify his Father precisely by raising this man, Jesus Christ happens to be talking about the realest thing of all, the most fixed and certain and true and concrete and genuine. Because thinking that this death represents defeat for all possibilities of God’s activity in Lazarus’s life, that’s actually what is unreal and an illusion. Lazarus’s death is no defeat but an occasion for glory.
Back in chapter nine, verses one to three, Christ expresses the very same truth just a little bit differently. (Read vv. 1-3) For Christ, God’s action is uninterrupted and continually present. Ultimately, God’s intention plays the central role in everything that happens. And in Jesus’ life on earth the entire sense and objective of his being was to continually perceive and carry out that intention. The Lord also knew that, as long as he walked in this world, he was the world’s light, and while there is light you can work – in other words, there was nothing that was going to stop him from doing what his Father was determined to do through him. It was that simple. Jesus would never stop, because it was time to work, right up to the moment when it was time to embrace death itself in the ultimate act of self-sacrifice to the Father’s will.
In this light it’s easier to follow what Jesus says further (read vv. 4-5). “People don’t work at night, they work in the day. And it’s day now, so let’s work. I’ve brought the light, I am the light. Why wouldn't I do my Father’s work now?” And for us these words (v.5), “While I am in the world, I am the light of the world” are as relevant now as they were when Jesus walked the earth. This is a promise not only to the disciples who listened to Jesus speak it, but a promise and encouragement to us, because Jesus is in the world even today, not in the flesh but spiritually indwelling his body, the Church – the Church he purifies and prepares for glory.
This same Christ, who now abides in his Church with the Father and the Spirit, and sanctifies her, this is the very same Jesus who on one sunny day in Palestine long ago heard the words, “Your friend is sick”, and answered, “This is to God’s glory”, and when he said that he wasn’t just wishing, he was defining reality. And he knew that not just sickness but an actual death would turn into God’s glorification. What are the circumstances, the situations, the problems in your life today that Jesus knows all about, just as much as he knew all about what God would do through Lazarus’ death? You know, just as with Lazarus, it’s truly the case that, sometimes, the circumstances have to get, not better, but worse before God’s glory unfolds through them.
But let’s not make the mistake of thinking that, until we see that glory, God’s doing nothing, taking the day off. The essence of faith is that even when it seems that things are only getting worse, without a glimmer of hope, the heart stays fixed on the truth of God’s continual presence and intention. True faith doesn’t sleep until God does something. Genuine faith always perceives the advance of God’s will and gets stronger for it. Faith is a way of seeing. In order to see physically, two things are needed: eyes – at least one! – and a source of light, like the sun. Well, the spiritual realm is no different. To see spiritually we need both eyes and sun. But the spiritual eye is faith, and the sunlight of our faith is the very Person of the risen Son of God and his glory. (Read 2 Cor. 3:17-18)
And so we return to the “preface” of the raising of Lazarus, to listen to the words of the Light of the World. (Read John 11:4-8) Of course, Jesus could well have responded, “No, you needn’t fear that. They’re not going to stone me, in fact. Something else is waiting for me there....” But Jesus took the moment to repeat the lesson he gave them earlier, one they seem not to have understood: (read vv. 9-10). What does that mean?
Jesus would have “stumbled” in the darkness if, hypothetically, he had promised his disciples that no one would stone him and then they had actually stoned him in Jerusalem. He would have stumbled in the darkness if, with the horror of the cross looming before him, he had run away, and if they had caught him anyway and led him to the cross as he struggled and screamed. But Jesus didn’t stumble, the Light of the World didn’t get lost in the darkness. In fact, he had this to say about his soon suffering; (read John 10:17-18).
The light of the world never stumbled, and he will help us not to stumble. It doesn’t mean we won’t go through hardship or grief. But not stumbling means not losing faith, not giving up your assurance in God’s presence and intentions, not losing hold of the absolutely certain hope in the ultimate outcome of God’s glory, which overflows with goodwill towards us.
With these simple words, the Gospel writer John lets us know that something special is going on here. Jesus had already been healing many whose names we don’t know. But here it says a “certain Lazarus” was ill. We read his name, Lazarus, and that he lived in Bethany, and who he lived with, that is, his sisters Mary and Martha. And if that is not enough, John specifies that this is the family from which one of the sisters... (read verse 2). Have you noticed that John reminds the readers about that event as if all we need to do is turn back a few pages and find it in the gospel? The funny thing, though, is that that event is located later in the gospel, after this chapter, not before it! What it means is, when John says to his readers, ‘This is that Mary who anointed Jesus once and wiped his feet with her hair”, John doesn’t mean, “like you already read in this book”. No, what he means is, “like you already heard about, dear readers.” John is writing first of all to believers in the first century who first heard these stories in spoken form, and he assumes that when he mentions the story of Mary anointing Jesus, the early church knows perfectly well what he’s talking about, even though he hasn’t gotten to that yet in the written version. And, of course, in the same way, as they read this Gospel from the very first words, “In the beginning was the Word”, they already knew that it would tell about the crucifixion and the resurrection and Jesus’ many, many glorious words and deeds. And as soon as they read here that Jesus got word about Lazarus’ illness, they already know, “Ah, this is the story about how Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead!”
All the same, none of them probably ever heard the story with all the detail that John includes here. That’s part of the reason for the written Gospel, to fill out the story and go deeper into the spiritual impact of it. I don’t doubt that John chose precisely the most important details that would teach us more about the very meaning and glory of Jesus Christ.
Now, we’re not going to talk today about the whole story of the raising of Lazarus. We’ll just focus a bit more deeply on the first part of the chapter, about what happened right up to heading out to Bethany. But just like the church of the first century, we also know the rest of the story, and let’s keep it in our minds as we meditate over the “preface”. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. We know it. And reading the run-up to it, we know that Jesus knows he will do it, and he knows why, and everything he’s doing and saying before the event is in the light of the awesome glory and power he is about to reveal.
(Read verse 3) Word came to Jesus: “the one you love is ill”. But Jesus already knows that the one he loves is not merely ill; he’s going to die. And precisely in this fact Jesus recognizes the promise of glory. That brings a question to my mind: if the Son of God sees in the death of his beloved friend the promise of glory, then what do we see only gloom and despair in?
In verse four, Jesus says, “This illness will not end in death”. But... Lazarus died! As a rule, if a doctor says some illness won’t be fatal and then the patient dies from it, we say the doctor was wrong! But when Jesus says that this illness –the illness of this dying, perhaps already dead man – is not going to end in death but in God’s glory, knowing that he will glorify his Father precisely by raising this man, Jesus Christ happens to be talking about the realest thing of all, the most fixed and certain and true and concrete and genuine. Because thinking that this death represents defeat for all possibilities of God’s activity in Lazarus’s life, that’s actually what is unreal and an illusion. Lazarus’s death is no defeat but an occasion for glory.
Back in chapter nine, verses one to three, Christ expresses the very same truth just a little bit differently. (Read vv. 1-3) For Christ, God’s action is uninterrupted and continually present. Ultimately, God’s intention plays the central role in everything that happens. And in Jesus’ life on earth the entire sense and objective of his being was to continually perceive and carry out that intention. The Lord also knew that, as long as he walked in this world, he was the world’s light, and while there is light you can work – in other words, there was nothing that was going to stop him from doing what his Father was determined to do through him. It was that simple. Jesus would never stop, because it was time to work, right up to the moment when it was time to embrace death itself in the ultimate act of self-sacrifice to the Father’s will.
In this light it’s easier to follow what Jesus says further (read vv. 4-5). “People don’t work at night, they work in the day. And it’s day now, so let’s work. I’ve brought the light, I am the light. Why wouldn't I do my Father’s work now?” And for us these words (v.5), “While I am in the world, I am the light of the world” are as relevant now as they were when Jesus walked the earth. This is a promise not only to the disciples who listened to Jesus speak it, but a promise and encouragement to us, because Jesus is in the world even today, not in the flesh but spiritually indwelling his body, the Church – the Church he purifies and prepares for glory.
This same Christ, who now abides in his Church with the Father and the Spirit, and sanctifies her, this is the very same Jesus who on one sunny day in Palestine long ago heard the words, “Your friend is sick”, and answered, “This is to God’s glory”, and when he said that he wasn’t just wishing, he was defining reality. And he knew that not just sickness but an actual death would turn into God’s glorification. What are the circumstances, the situations, the problems in your life today that Jesus knows all about, just as much as he knew all about what God would do through Lazarus’ death? You know, just as with Lazarus, it’s truly the case that, sometimes, the circumstances have to get, not better, but worse before God’s glory unfolds through them.
But let’s not make the mistake of thinking that, until we see that glory, God’s doing nothing, taking the day off. The essence of faith is that even when it seems that things are only getting worse, without a glimmer of hope, the heart stays fixed on the truth of God’s continual presence and intention. True faith doesn’t sleep until God does something. Genuine faith always perceives the advance of God’s will and gets stronger for it. Faith is a way of seeing. In order to see physically, two things are needed: eyes – at least one! – and a source of light, like the sun. Well, the spiritual realm is no different. To see spiritually we need both eyes and sun. But the spiritual eye is faith, and the sunlight of our faith is the very Person of the risen Son of God and his glory. (Read 2 Cor. 3:17-18)
And so we return to the “preface” of the raising of Lazarus, to listen to the words of the Light of the World. (Read John 11:4-8) Of course, Jesus could well have responded, “No, you needn’t fear that. They’re not going to stone me, in fact. Something else is waiting for me there....” But Jesus took the moment to repeat the lesson he gave them earlier, one they seem not to have understood: (read vv. 9-10). What does that mean?
Jesus would have “stumbled” in the darkness if, hypothetically, he had promised his disciples that no one would stone him and then they had actually stoned him in Jerusalem. He would have stumbled in the darkness if, with the horror of the cross looming before him, he had run away, and if they had caught him anyway and led him to the cross as he struggled and screamed. But Jesus didn’t stumble, the Light of the World didn’t get lost in the darkness. In fact, he had this to say about his soon suffering; (read John 10:17-18).
The light of the world never stumbled, and he will help us not to stumble. It doesn’t mean we won’t go through hardship or grief. But not stumbling means not losing faith, not giving up your assurance in God’s presence and intentions, not losing hold of the absolutely certain hope in the ultimate outcome of God’s glory, which overflows with goodwill towards us.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Unexpected Words (Luke 9:37-46)
This sermon takes a section which is, probably, rarely preached on as a single unit. For me, though, the uniting concept was the string of “contrary” responses Jesus gave and what those responses said about the deepest spiritual reality, or realities, underlying these incidents. As I pictured the boy’s father receiving his restored son back with exultation and, most likely, tears, and with Jesus watching, it suddenly hit me with a jolt that Jesus may have been thinking at that moment of his own heavenly Father and the reunion towards which he was pressing on with everything that was in him. And just as the boy had to go through terrible suffering before being restored, it is altogether reasonable to suppose that, at that moment, Jesus connected the suffering awaiting him with the image of restoration, reunion.
While it is typical for us to read Jesus’ stark, seeming non sequitur about the Son of Man’s suffering as a “lesson” to his disciples, perhaps our reading is too... dry. It doesn’t do any violence to the sense of the text or, more importantly, to the meaning of the Person, to imagine Jesus telling these things to his friends, “out of the blue”, with a choking voice and agony of both pain and love, in view of the moment. They could hardly be expected to grasp, just then, “where that came from” or why. Later, they may well have understood not only what Jesus was talking about, in terms of concrete facts, but why he talked about it precisely then.
In the five very brief “vignettes” included in this section, the running theme seems to be that Jesus is now, more than ever, entirely consumed with one thing: the ultimate consummation of his complete, selfless surrender out of love. The egotistic, petty and vindictive preoccupations of those around him at this time stand, therefore, in even more appalling contrast. They also illustrate just how terribly alone Jesus was in a world of men – alone, but for the Father.
(Read Luke 9:37-40)
We can’t call this a commonplace situation; we don’t run into something like this every day! But you can say that during Jesus’ earthly mission such situations were fairly usual. In the presence of God’s Son on the earth, evil forces for some reason manifested themselves more starkly, more blatantly, as if they couldn’t help showing themselves before the authority and holiness of Jesus. I would expect them to hide! But God’s presence somehow draws even hostile spirits. They rush out to try and oppose him. During his labors on earth Jesus cast out many such spirits, and here we find yet another instance.
But suddenly Jesus makes a pronouncement that is not typical; we never heard him talk like this before: (read verse 41, excluding last sentence). Amazing! None of our teaching about God’s love prepared us to hear, from the lips of the loving Redeemer, such utter exasperation. But that’s exactly what Jesus expresses. He’s “had it” with the total absence of faith, the spiritual obtuseness of humanity. And, quite naturally, he groans, “How long do I have to put up with you?”
Maybe you think that that doesn’t sound like love! But I want to say that this is supreme love: love with both eyes open, love that doesn’t fool itself about the nature of those who are loved, love that keeps going to the last drop of strength. This is love speaking, even as is aches and yearns for home, pines to see the Beloved One, but love that is ready to endure to the last drop of blood, ready to wait, ready to serve, ready to die for the beloved ones, even if they don’t understand, even when their stubborn spiritual shortsightedness tortures him. With these words Christ shows again that he truly is man – not a sinner, but man – and he grieves for the fallen-ness and appalling ignorance of those who, from the very beginning, were supposed to reflect divine love and glory. This Jesus is surely the “man of sorrows and well acquainted with grief”. But he is also the man and God of love who says, even in the most crying frustration, “Bring your son to me.” And what happens then? (Read vv. 42-43a)
Everyone is marveling. There’s incredible excitement and joy. But it’s exactly at that moment that Christ pronounces these completely unexpected words to his disciples: (read 43b-45).
Someone might say, “Look, this is a happy moment. The boy is completely delivered from all the tortures of the evil spirits, this father has gotten his precious son back, everybody’s jumping with joy. Why does Jesus have to suddenly throw a damper on the party with words like these?” But again we have to say that the voice of love is speaking here. Perhaps, as Jesus saw how ecstatic that father was to get his dearest and only son back, thoughts came rushing to Jesus’ mind – images and expectations – of his own reunion with his true Father, and how that reunion could only come through tortures and grief and death. Perhaps, too, looking at his closest friends, his followers, as they celebrated together with the crowd, Jesus needed to remind them of the actual, ultimate meaning of his being here in the world. Maybe Jesus needed understanding. He was, after all, a man – the Word became flesh and dwelt among us – and for some reason, at that moment, his own approaching agony and his longing for home were very real to him.
Imagine Jesus' disappointment, then, when the disciples couldn’t understand. And not only that, but started bickering with each other about something totally different and useless. (Read vv. 46-47)
It’s no accident that, as a response, Christ turns their attention to a child. You see how a certain theme subtly continues? God’s Child, whose hearts longs to see the Father, who is getting ready to give up his very last breath in a sacrifice of love to Him for the sake of lost humanity – in fact, precisely that lost humanity standing around him at the moment arguing over which one of them is number one, king of the castle – God’s Child, in response, takes a child by the hand. Perhaps he stands with that child silently for a few minutes until the disciples who are busy arguing finally stop long enough to notice (God is patient), and finally the last disciple shuts his mouth and looks at Jesus and the child, and instantly feels humiliated, because he knows that he, all of them, have been making fools of themselves. An embarrassed, mortified silence. And Jesus speaks, (read verse 48).
In other words: genuine greatness, genuine excellence, doesn’t come from how you look at yourself but from how you look at the most insignificant, the most helpless, the most needy in this world. And if you become like them, you become like Christ, who made himself nothing, right up to dying on a wooden cross – and precisely by doing that, rose above all things in heaven and earth.
After a shattering lesson like that, you might expect complete silence and serious self-examination. But people always manage to come with some kind of “But-!”. I think parents especially know what that’s about: “But...! But...!” And here dear John comes up with an objection: (read verse 49).
In other words, “Yes, but, Lord, we still have to sort out who’s who... right? It’s up to us to say who’s close to you, who’s way out there. We have to discern, to judge, set the boundaries.”
Jesus’ answer is very simple: (read v. 50). That is, “Your assignment, John... Johnny... is to look at me, follow me, be for me, not against this one or that one, let alone standing in judgment on those who aren’t against you. Judgment is in God’s hands, but God’s love is reaching out to the whole world through your hands, your life. Get with the program, Johnny.”
Obviously, it was still a little early for John and company to get it, because look what happened next: (read vv. 51-55).
The Zebedee brothers had a pretty clear idea what condemnation looked like, and they were rarin’ and ready to see a real show of messianic power. They’d have loved to say, “Ha! You didn’t want to accept us, and now you’ve gotten what was coming to you. Next time you’ll know better.”
But Jesus rebuked them. He didn’t argue with them, didn’t debate the issue with them, didn’t even stand another child in front of them as an example; he just rebuked them: “You don’t even know what kind of spirit you’re operating on.” And then, Jesus turned his face and headed to Jerusalem. Because, until it’s all done there, these disciples will never get it, will never know what condition their spirits are in or what it means to love with God’s love even to death, and beyond, to all eternity.
But I think that now, after the resurrection of Jesus Christ, after his ascension to the Father, after the coming of the Spirit and the revelation of salvation and grace, I think we better understand. And I think Jesus’ unexpected words about suffering and humility and spirit aren’t as unexpected or quite as mysterious to us as they were to the disciples then. Rather, I trust you and I are pressing on to materialize and live out, here and now, the meaning of Jesus’ words: in patience, humility, love and a heart that yearns for the Father in Heaven. That’s Jesus’ gift: to understand what he meant, even what he felt, and to know his heart. And when we know his heart, we are never alone.
While it is typical for us to read Jesus’ stark, seeming non sequitur about the Son of Man’s suffering as a “lesson” to his disciples, perhaps our reading is too... dry. It doesn’t do any violence to the sense of the text or, more importantly, to the meaning of the Person, to imagine Jesus telling these things to his friends, “out of the blue”, with a choking voice and agony of both pain and love, in view of the moment. They could hardly be expected to grasp, just then, “where that came from” or why. Later, they may well have understood not only what Jesus was talking about, in terms of concrete facts, but why he talked about it precisely then.
In the five very brief “vignettes” included in this section, the running theme seems to be that Jesus is now, more than ever, entirely consumed with one thing: the ultimate consummation of his complete, selfless surrender out of love. The egotistic, petty and vindictive preoccupations of those around him at this time stand, therefore, in even more appalling contrast. They also illustrate just how terribly alone Jesus was in a world of men – alone, but for the Father.
(Read Luke 9:37-40)
We can’t call this a commonplace situation; we don’t run into something like this every day! But you can say that during Jesus’ earthly mission such situations were fairly usual. In the presence of God’s Son on the earth, evil forces for some reason manifested themselves more starkly, more blatantly, as if they couldn’t help showing themselves before the authority and holiness of Jesus. I would expect them to hide! But God’s presence somehow draws even hostile spirits. They rush out to try and oppose him. During his labors on earth Jesus cast out many such spirits, and here we find yet another instance.
But suddenly Jesus makes a pronouncement that is not typical; we never heard him talk like this before: (read verse 41, excluding last sentence). Amazing! None of our teaching about God’s love prepared us to hear, from the lips of the loving Redeemer, such utter exasperation. But that’s exactly what Jesus expresses. He’s “had it” with the total absence of faith, the spiritual obtuseness of humanity. And, quite naturally, he groans, “How long do I have to put up with you?”
Maybe you think that that doesn’t sound like love! But I want to say that this is supreme love: love with both eyes open, love that doesn’t fool itself about the nature of those who are loved, love that keeps going to the last drop of strength. This is love speaking, even as is aches and yearns for home, pines to see the Beloved One, but love that is ready to endure to the last drop of blood, ready to wait, ready to serve, ready to die for the beloved ones, even if they don’t understand, even when their stubborn spiritual shortsightedness tortures him. With these words Christ shows again that he truly is man – not a sinner, but man – and he grieves for the fallen-ness and appalling ignorance of those who, from the very beginning, were supposed to reflect divine love and glory. This Jesus is surely the “man of sorrows and well acquainted with grief”. But he is also the man and God of love who says, even in the most crying frustration, “Bring your son to me.” And what happens then? (Read vv. 42-43a)
Everyone is marveling. There’s incredible excitement and joy. But it’s exactly at that moment that Christ pronounces these completely unexpected words to his disciples: (read 43b-45).
Someone might say, “Look, this is a happy moment. The boy is completely delivered from all the tortures of the evil spirits, this father has gotten his precious son back, everybody’s jumping with joy. Why does Jesus have to suddenly throw a damper on the party with words like these?” But again we have to say that the voice of love is speaking here. Perhaps, as Jesus saw how ecstatic that father was to get his dearest and only son back, thoughts came rushing to Jesus’ mind – images and expectations – of his own reunion with his true Father, and how that reunion could only come through tortures and grief and death. Perhaps, too, looking at his closest friends, his followers, as they celebrated together with the crowd, Jesus needed to remind them of the actual, ultimate meaning of his being here in the world. Maybe Jesus needed understanding. He was, after all, a man – the Word became flesh and dwelt among us – and for some reason, at that moment, his own approaching agony and his longing for home were very real to him.
Imagine Jesus' disappointment, then, when the disciples couldn’t understand. And not only that, but started bickering with each other about something totally different and useless. (Read vv. 46-47)
It’s no accident that, as a response, Christ turns their attention to a child. You see how a certain theme subtly continues? God’s Child, whose hearts longs to see the Father, who is getting ready to give up his very last breath in a sacrifice of love to Him for the sake of lost humanity – in fact, precisely that lost humanity standing around him at the moment arguing over which one of them is number one, king of the castle – God’s Child, in response, takes a child by the hand. Perhaps he stands with that child silently for a few minutes until the disciples who are busy arguing finally stop long enough to notice (God is patient), and finally the last disciple shuts his mouth and looks at Jesus and the child, and instantly feels humiliated, because he knows that he, all of them, have been making fools of themselves. An embarrassed, mortified silence. And Jesus speaks, (read verse 48).
In other words: genuine greatness, genuine excellence, doesn’t come from how you look at yourself but from how you look at the most insignificant, the most helpless, the most needy in this world. And if you become like them, you become like Christ, who made himself nothing, right up to dying on a wooden cross – and precisely by doing that, rose above all things in heaven and earth.
After a shattering lesson like that, you might expect complete silence and serious self-examination. But people always manage to come with some kind of “But-!”. I think parents especially know what that’s about: “But...! But...!” And here dear John comes up with an objection: (read verse 49).
In other words, “Yes, but, Lord, we still have to sort out who’s who... right? It’s up to us to say who’s close to you, who’s way out there. We have to discern, to judge, set the boundaries.”
Jesus’ answer is very simple: (read v. 50). That is, “Your assignment, John... Johnny... is to look at me, follow me, be for me, not against this one or that one, let alone standing in judgment on those who aren’t against you. Judgment is in God’s hands, but God’s love is reaching out to the whole world through your hands, your life. Get with the program, Johnny.”
Obviously, it was still a little early for John and company to get it, because look what happened next: (read vv. 51-55).
The Zebedee brothers had a pretty clear idea what condemnation looked like, and they were rarin’ and ready to see a real show of messianic power. They’d have loved to say, “Ha! You didn’t want to accept us, and now you’ve gotten what was coming to you. Next time you’ll know better.”
But Jesus rebuked them. He didn’t argue with them, didn’t debate the issue with them, didn’t even stand another child in front of them as an example; he just rebuked them: “You don’t even know what kind of spirit you’re operating on.” And then, Jesus turned his face and headed to Jerusalem. Because, until it’s all done there, these disciples will never get it, will never know what condition their spirits are in or what it means to love with God’s love even to death, and beyond, to all eternity.
But I think that now, after the resurrection of Jesus Christ, after his ascension to the Father, after the coming of the Spirit and the revelation of salvation and grace, I think we better understand. And I think Jesus’ unexpected words about suffering and humility and spirit aren’t as unexpected or quite as mysterious to us as they were to the disciples then. Rather, I trust you and I are pressing on to materialize and live out, here and now, the meaning of Jesus’ words: in patience, humility, love and a heart that yearns for the Father in Heaven. That’s Jesus’ gift: to understand what he meant, even what he felt, and to know his heart. And when we know his heart, we are never alone.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Matthew 7 (Sermon on the Mount)
This will be my longest of introductions, but I think it is important and hope it will prove interesting.
While my sermon is mostly on Matthew 7, it is really intended to give a rather sweeping overview of the entire Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5-7), in as few words as possible. The operative interpretation behind my message is that, by paying strict attention to the historical, cultural and theological context, the Sermon on the Mount must be taken not as some loose “bouquet” of proverbs, aphorisms, inspiring ideals and “practical applications” but, rather, as a single, coherent, logically developed summons to the nation, to the real people listening to Jesus that day – a radical summons to abandon a worldview grounded in relative (comparative) righteousness, social approbation and cultural identity.
The summons is even more radical and audacious in that, in place of that familiar, more-or-less comfortable worldview, Jesus presents – starkly, without apology – himself as the center, the touchstone, the authority, the very meaning of the new worldview – a worldview to be accepted for no lesser reason than that, very simply, it is reality, the way things actually are.
In short, the “narrow gate” is Jesus and the straight path is the new life of the kingdom upon which one sets out after entering through Him. (Notice, please, how this interpretation diverges from the customary one as depicted on Sunday School room posters, where the straight path leads up to a narrow gate/pearly gates, i.e., into Heaven at the end of life. To me, that interpretation totally misses the stark option Jesus was laying out to his immediate hearers. The gate isn’t at the end of the road but the beginning.)
Before the Jewish nation in about the year 30 AD there are two paths available: 1) the “wide gate” which will (whether they know it or not, but Jesus knows it) lead only to the end of the world, i.e., their world as they perceive and construct it (70 AD), and 2) the “narrow gate”, which is Jesus himself, the living portal of God’s kingdom, where true righteousness both commences and is consummated in knowing him. Having entered the kingdom through him, their true identity before God can never again be threatened, no matter what happens to the temple, to Jerusalem, etc. They will become the genuine kingdom of the Spirit, in Christ.
Understood in this way, the Sermon becomes less the “beautiful”, “inspirational” piece of “literature” some would make it out to be (though ultimately it is far more “beautiful” than that) and more of a scandal and outrage to the socio-religious norms of the time. Jesus’ sermon epitomizes C.S. Lewis’s famous observation about Jesus leaving his contemporaries (and us) very few intellectually honest options, i.e., to take him as “liar, lunatic or Lord”. If, as Jesus says in the conclusion and summation of the sermon, he is actually going to be the One to whom all souls answer on the last day, then the whole sermon is true and the only reasonable thing for his hearers to do that day was to throw in their lot 100% with him, no matter what. If he is wrong, however, then any talk of the “moral beauty” of the sermon is simply nonsense.
Someone might object that I am being naïve taking the Sermon as a conceptual whole – that, for one thing, it is unlikely Jesus actually “recited” these three “chapters,” word-for-word, all in one go just like we have it recorded. And, for another thing, what we have in writing is in any case the composition – no matter how accurately recalled – of Matthew. We can’t interpret the Sermon solely on the basis of what we think Jesus was saying to those people that day or how they took his meaning; rather, we have to take into account what Matthew wanted to say to his audience, too.
My responses to those objections:
1) there is no reason to assume that Jesus did not or could not have pronounced this entire message, virtually as we have it recorded, all in one go. It’s not really that long a sermon, particularly for the pre-television world (when people still had attention spans) and particularly when there is a vital conceptual center driving the development of the thought with passion. We all know quite well that when there is one thing we desperately wish to get across as vividly as possible, it is quite normal to explain the idea at length, with multiple illustrations, applications and extrapolations. The Sermon is a perfect example; in fact, in terms of length or complexity, it is hardly an extreme case. I would even call it a rather compact nugget! Moreover, even if Matthew 5-7 encapsulates teaching pronounced by Jesus over a period of days, that fact doesn't argue in the least against the tight conceptual flow of the Sermon either in Jesus' telling or Matthew's recording. You could make the argument, after all, that Jesus was preaching only one thing for three years.
2) Yes, we are “getting” the Sermon through a) the “filter” of Matthew, b) the passage of time between event and composition, and c) the materialization of new contexts, i.e., the early Church to which Matthew is writing, a (somewhat) different audience than Jesus’ there on the mountainside (though Israel was, after all, God’s “church” [qahal] and the raw material, the initial stock, of Jesus’ new ‘qahal’). This is hardly an objection. Matthew’s world, and the early Church’s, is still the world, and audience, Jesus addressed on the mountainside. The challenge of Jesus was no less audacious or outrageous expressed through the Church and its writings in the middle first century than when Jesus himself pronounced the words on earth only a few years or decades earlier. The challenge, the import and virtually the entire socio-cultural context was the same. Therefore, Matthew’s “message” is faithful to Jesus’ “message”. It is the same message: the early Church is the “poor in spirit” whom Jesus challenged to enter the “narrow gate” and entrust their eternal lot to Him, seeking first the kingdom and God’s righteousness. They have cut their line to the dock and set sail with the Captain of their salvation, Jesus. (For some, however, the ride eventually proved rather too adventurous and they started looking longingly back to the dock... which is what the whole Epistle to the Hebrews is about. But that’s another story. Sort of.)
To appreciate the meaning and importance of chapter seven, which is the climax of the Sermon on the Mount, we really have no choice but to quickly sum up chapters five and six! Believe me, this will be quick.
The essence of what Jesus is saying to the people around him, starting from the Beatitudes, is this: “People, everything is about to change; it’s already changing. The kingdom is coming, and its laws and principles aren’t what you think. You’ve got to be ready to think in a new way, to see in a new way. For example, blessed are this world's 'losers', the ones whose hearts are broken over the evils around them, and in them. They’re the ones who are ready to receive what's coming: the kingdom. You can’t enter the kingdom unless you’re willing to live for it and be the salt of the earth. How do you do that, you ask? Simple: your righteousness must be greater than even the Pharisees’ righteousness! What? Not so simple? The Pharisees are experts in righteousness? They know every trick in the book when it comes to keeping God’s law? Not so fast. Let’s talk about righteousness. You’ve heard them teaching you about everything it says in the Book: Don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t break your oaths. But I’m telling you today that God’s standard is unbelievably higher. God looks at the heart. God doesn’t look at what you’re not doing; He looks at what you want to do. You’ve all been very well trained to be religious: you know when to fast, when to say your prayers, when to give money to the poor. And you get a nice pat on the back from the world when you do. But I’m telling you today that God’s standard is unbelievably higher. He looks at the heart. It’s time for you to decide what you want more: a nice pat on the back for being religious, or maybe rejection, suffering, even death for wanting what God wants and doing what God does. So decide. Do you want the kingdom? If you’re ready to surrender yourselves totally to God, I promise you, your Father in heaven will take care of you better than anyone could. But you’ve got to put Him... and Me... first.”
And that is my condensed version of the first two-thirds of the Sermon on the Mount. And now we come to the dramatic, even shocking climax. And if you were a Jewish man or woman listening to what Jesus was saying that day, I guarantee you, you would have been shocked.
So we come to chapter seven. Chapters five and six were like a picture which Jesus drew, a picture of a beautiful country, and he is inviting everyone to follow him there. But to go there, you have to get into Jesus’ ship, the ship of salvation. And Jesus is the captain of that ship. It means you have to leave your old country with all its traditions and laws, and you have to obey the rules of the ship. I think this is what Jesus is telling us in chapter seven. I think he’s saying, “Now you know where I want to bring you. Are you ready to go? If so, get in the boat and don’t look back. You can’t live the old way anymore. You can’t think the old way anymore. This is a new life with a new foundation, new responsibilities, new promises and, yes, new dangers.”
Now please remember: these events we read about in scripture aren’t just words on paper; these aren’t people in a painting by Leonardo Da Vinci or statues who never change, never feel anything. These are real people, who cough and sneeze, who scratch where it itches, who get sunburned – for instance, when they’re standing outside listening to a carpenter from Nazareth preaching. These are specific people who love other specific people, probably hate a few specific people, too, and don’t spend much time at all thinking about the rest. And now picture Jesus there on the mountain surrounded by his disciples and this crowd – there are no halos in the picture, by the way – and he is announcing that a kingdom has come, though nothing seems to have changed very much if you look around. But Jesus sits there and teaches the nation from the mountaintop, almost like, well, like God giving Moses the law on Mount Sinai. And in that crowd there are most likely some Pharisees and other bigwigs, and they’re not dumb. They get it. And they’re probably thinking, “Who does he think he is?” And Jesus’ subtle hints – and not-so-subtle hints – about the Pharisees’ so-called righteousness don’t fly over their heads, either. There are extremely uncomfortable moments during this Sermon, especially for any bigwigs who happen to be in the audience.
I think chapter seven begins with exactly such an uncomfortable moment, when Jesus talks about judging. Now, we usually understand this section to mean that we shouldn’t criticize each other. Some people even think this part of the Sermon says that we should never say that anything is a sin. The words, “Judge not, lest you be judged” are the favorite slogan of different groups who organize big demonstrations in support of sinful lifestyles. You’ll see Jesus’ words “Judge not!” painted in big letters on the signs they carry in their parades: “Since Jesus said, ‘Do not judge’, you have no right to say that anything is a sin!”
Now we have to ask, is that, can that, really be what Jesus meant? That it is always wrong to identify an action of any kind as sinful, or even just plain wrong? I don’t think so. In fact, when we look at Jesus’ own life and how he condemned evil acts, we know that can’t be what he meant. Otherwise, he broke his own rule!
No, the whole logical flow of the Sermon on the Mount, and the situation in that society where Jesus was speaking, make it very clear that Jesus is simply continuing the central thought that started from chapter five, verse one: it's time for you to abandon your old life. And what was that old life? To a great extent, it was a religious system, very much run by the Pharisees, based on comparing: who’s the best keeper of the law, all 613 laws of it, not to mention thousands and thousands of interpretations. The Pharisees were the Taliban of Jesus’ time, the religious watchdogs: judging was their job. And if you wanted to be anybody in society, you’d better get yourself a degree in judging, too! For us, the word “judging” has a very negative connotation – in fact, precisely because of the Sermon on the Mount. But I think the Pharisees would have been delighted with that job description, just like the women in Iran who walk the streets with their sticks ready to give a good beating to any female who isn’t sufficiently cloaked. I think the Pharisees would have boasted, “Yes, we’re the ones who make everybody toe the line, who make sure nobody breaks God’s law... as we interpret it.” In that specific, suffocating environment, Jesus’ meaning is very clear, and it’s also radical, dangerous and threatening to the religious big shots of the time. He is saying, “No. No. God never made you His enforcers. In His kingdom, you’re out of a job, guys. And your whole system has completely the wrong focus.” As soon as Jesus brought up judging, the crowd had to know what the subtext was; they lived in it all the time. I bet there were a few carefully hidden smiles among the simple folk, and maybe some scowls and glares among the Pharisees in the crowd. “Instead of making judges out of yourselves,” Jesus tells them, “what you really have to do is become experts in personal holiness, and if you can’t see the difference, then you haven’t understood a word I’ve said so far.” Of course I’m paraphrasing, but I genuinely believe this meaning was obvious for those people there in that place at that moment. Let’s look closer at the allegory Jesus presents – a very famous allegory.
“How can you see the splinter in your brother’s eye and not see the plank in your own?” I think it’s fair enough to say most people interpret that to mean, “How can you see the eensy-weensy little fault in somebody else and totally miss the monstrous flaw in yourself?” I have to tell you, I don’t agree with that interpretation, popular though it is. If that’s what Jesus is saying, it completely contradicts his whole point. It doesn’t actually make sense. For a lot of reasons.
For example, there have got to be cases where the tables are turned (right?) and the fault in my life isn’t nearly as terrible as the next guy’s – like, maybe he’s a murderer or something. In that case, Jesus’ allegory doesn’t apply to me. I get an ‘out’, a free pass, I can judge my brother because, this time, he's got the plank and I've only got the splinter.... But we know that can’t be right. Jesus was laying down a principle that applies to everyone. So there’s got to something more in this besides simply comparing how big one sin is against another.
And that brings up another reason why I can’t accept the usual interpretation. The whole point here is that it’s time to leave that old religion of proving who’s better than whom. Now, how does it make sense if Jesus bases that whole point on an illustration that depends on comparing one person’s sin against another’s - that is, the plank vs. the splinter? If Jesus is saying “You can’t judge, because your sin is bigger”, that’s already a comparison! It doesn’t make sense.
Finally, it doesn’t make sense because Jesus says, nevertheless, that when you take care of the plank in your eye, you can help your brother get his splinter out. So, obviously, the point is not that you must never recognize where someone else needs correction.
For all those reasons, the usual interpretation just doesn’t work for me.
Here’s what I believe Jesus is actually saying to those people, in that time, in a way they would really get, and good. If I have a speck of wood in my eye and you have a speck of wood in yours, and they’re the same size (because nobody can really have a plank in their eye), which speck should be more obvious to me: the one in my eye or the one in yours? Of course, the one in mine. It’s in my eye, after all. I can feel it, it hurts, it should be my main issue of the moment: how do I get this thing out of my eye? Because it’s in my eye, it should be like a plank to me, the biggest thing in my field of vision. If it’s not, there’s something wrong with me. And the very idea that I wouldn’t even notice it and at the same time look at you and say, “Whoa, have you got a tree trunk in your eye” is crazy. And yet, Jesus is telling the people of his time that that’s precisely what they’re doing, and it is crazy. It’s not a matter of whose sin is bigger. Comparing isn’t the issue; in fact, that’s what they’re supposed to stop doing. It’s a question of whose sin you notice most of all- yours or other people’s. Jesus is saying that, in this kingdom of righteousness where he reigns, we must each become an expert in splinter removal, first from our own eyes. In other words, experts in personal holiness. Because we belong to Him. Because those splinters don’t go with love for Him. The subject is the hunger and thirst for righteousness. It is the love of God, and the priority on living the life that brings Him joy – and not only Him, but us, too. When we do that in our own lives, then, yes, we certainly will become examples and a help to others with their “splinters”. In fact, your example might be so powerful that you’ll help your brother or sister grow in spiritual purity and the knowledge of God with hardly a word.
And then we run smack into a very difficult statement to interpret (read v.6). But I have to say that if we stick to the whole flow of thought that started in chapter five and is now reaching its climax, this verse suddenly becomes much clearer. Usually we take it out of context and make it mean, “Don’t waste your time witnessing to people who are only going to make fun of the Gospel.” That’s what I’d call a “good try” interpretation, but it really has no connection at all to anything that Jesus is talking about here. So I think there must be a better one. If Jesus has been talking about saying goodbye to the old world and welcoming the kingdom in him, then this odd, mysterious allegory certainly continues that thought. And I do believe that the crowd standing there would have caught the gist right away. Jesus is saying, You can’t mix the new with the old. You can’t take what I’m giving you now and go back home and try to mix it in with the religion of the Pharisees and all that way of thinking. It won’t work. In fact, it will be a disaster. It will be like coming to a pigpen full of hungry pigs with a basket full of pearls. You throw the pearls to the pigs and they greedily go running for them... till they realize, “We can’t eat these”. Then you’ve got some really angry pigs on your hand, and they might start looking at you like dinner. That’s what will happen to you if you try to follow me and at the same time keep dancing to the Pharisees’ tune, trying to keep them happy, too. It won’t work either way. You won’t really be following me, and you won’t keep them happy, either! It’s a lose-lose proposition. Spiritual compromise is never “win-win”. Jesus’ message to the people on the mountainside that day, and to us today, is: if you’ve gotten into his ship, it means you’ve cut your ties, you’ve left the dock, and the new wine will never fit in the old wineskins. You can’t go to the world for your dose of “relevance”, of popularity, acceptance, significance, self-esteem, whatever. It’s not there anymore. Now, Jesus explains as he continues this message, you depend totally on God for all that, and the Father is ready to give you every truly good thing that you need: ask, and it shall be given to you. He loves to give, and your task is to be like Him – to love giving and doing to others as you would like them to do to you. That’s life in the kingdom.
It’s very hard, it’s not natural for us to live like this, but it’s the only way. Most people are going the easy way, the way of the flesh, but God calls us to go through the narrow gate and follow the straight way. Jesus is the gate and following him is the straight way. It’s not easy and it requires total devotion, but it’s do-able, because He walks the way with us. Yes, there will be fraudsters who try to lure you off the path, but you will know them for what they are, because they don’t line up with the truth. By their fruits you will know them!
And then Jesus says this amazing thing: On that day many will come to me and say, Lord, Lord.... We read these words and hardly even bat an eye. We think, “Well, yes, of course!” But imagine what this sounded like to the people standing there, listening to this young man, around thirty years old, from a poor village, without much education, no connections, no status, probably even talks with a lower-class accent – and here he is telling them, “On the last day humanity’s judge will be... me!” Some listeners may have thought it was a joke. Others may have thought it was craziness. And certain ones may have begun thinking that very day: “This Jesus is a person we must get rid of.” It is hard for us to really grasp how big a risk Jesus took, from a human point of view, by saying these words, because we only see the words on the page. And we believe that Jesus truly is Lord. But we don’t see the actual scene where Jesus pronounced these words, where people had no idea who he was, where they could have arrested him on the spot, or even stoned him. To really get in touch with that is to begin understanding what a powerful show of courage and faith this is; it’s the model of truth-telling, no matter the cost. You’ve got to have confidence to tell truth like that. Jesus has total confidence in the authority of His beloved Father in heaven and the concrete reality of what he was saying. With faith in Christ, we can have similar courage to speak truth, even when the world calls us crazy, or worse.
So you can see why the people were so amazed that Jesus spoke as one having authority. He even said he would judge the world! This is a huge declaration. Such a declaration certainly requires proof. In the following chapters of Matthew, we see this proof over and over again, where Jesus demonstrates his authority in many ways. Isn’t it interesting that the very first word someone says to Jesus after this great sermon is “Lord”? That was the leper whom Jesus healed. And after him the centurion also says, “Lord, I know that you have authority” and Jesus heals the centurion’s servant from far away, with just a word. And then Jesus prove to the Pharisees that “the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” Then Jesus sends his disciples out on a preaching mission and he gives them – what? – authority. You see, this idea of authority was very important for the people of Jesus’ time. I think it’s very important for us, too. Probably none of us wants to have total authority. None of us wants to be president, for example. Sometimes I worry that the only people who want to be president are crazy –and that would mean we elect crazy people to govern us! But all of us deeply desire the assurance and security of knowing that we have honest, strong and benevolent authority over us. When we hear about corruption in government, when we think our leaders have lied to us, we get very upset and angry. If we can’t trust the authorities, then everything in life seems shaky and uncertain.
But Jesus has proven his perfect and trustworthy authority and power. We will all answer to him some day. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus promises that if we devote ourselves to his kingdom, if we make him captain of our ship and author of our salvation, then we’ll be like the house on the rock that stood firm even when the wind and waves beat against it. We won’t fall. How do we do that? Believe in Him, don’t look back, don’t mix the new with the old, grow into experts in personal holiness and devotion to God, trust your heavenly Father for all that you really need and, most of all, grow more like Him all the time, because He is perfect.
While my sermon is mostly on Matthew 7, it is really intended to give a rather sweeping overview of the entire Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5-7), in as few words as possible. The operative interpretation behind my message is that, by paying strict attention to the historical, cultural and theological context, the Sermon on the Mount must be taken not as some loose “bouquet” of proverbs, aphorisms, inspiring ideals and “practical applications” but, rather, as a single, coherent, logically developed summons to the nation, to the real people listening to Jesus that day – a radical summons to abandon a worldview grounded in relative (comparative) righteousness, social approbation and cultural identity.
The summons is even more radical and audacious in that, in place of that familiar, more-or-less comfortable worldview, Jesus presents – starkly, without apology – himself as the center, the touchstone, the authority, the very meaning of the new worldview – a worldview to be accepted for no lesser reason than that, very simply, it is reality, the way things actually are.
In short, the “narrow gate” is Jesus and the straight path is the new life of the kingdom upon which one sets out after entering through Him. (Notice, please, how this interpretation diverges from the customary one as depicted on Sunday School room posters, where the straight path leads up to a narrow gate/pearly gates, i.e., into Heaven at the end of life. To me, that interpretation totally misses the stark option Jesus was laying out to his immediate hearers. The gate isn’t at the end of the road but the beginning.)
Before the Jewish nation in about the year 30 AD there are two paths available: 1) the “wide gate” which will (whether they know it or not, but Jesus knows it) lead only to the end of the world, i.e., their world as they perceive and construct it (70 AD), and 2) the “narrow gate”, which is Jesus himself, the living portal of God’s kingdom, where true righteousness both commences and is consummated in knowing him. Having entered the kingdom through him, their true identity before God can never again be threatened, no matter what happens to the temple, to Jerusalem, etc. They will become the genuine kingdom of the Spirit, in Christ.
Understood in this way, the Sermon becomes less the “beautiful”, “inspirational” piece of “literature” some would make it out to be (though ultimately it is far more “beautiful” than that) and more of a scandal and outrage to the socio-religious norms of the time. Jesus’ sermon epitomizes C.S. Lewis’s famous observation about Jesus leaving his contemporaries (and us) very few intellectually honest options, i.e., to take him as “liar, lunatic or Lord”. If, as Jesus says in the conclusion and summation of the sermon, he is actually going to be the One to whom all souls answer on the last day, then the whole sermon is true and the only reasonable thing for his hearers to do that day was to throw in their lot 100% with him, no matter what. If he is wrong, however, then any talk of the “moral beauty” of the sermon is simply nonsense.
Someone might object that I am being naïve taking the Sermon as a conceptual whole – that, for one thing, it is unlikely Jesus actually “recited” these three “chapters,” word-for-word, all in one go just like we have it recorded. And, for another thing, what we have in writing is in any case the composition – no matter how accurately recalled – of Matthew. We can’t interpret the Sermon solely on the basis of what we think Jesus was saying to those people that day or how they took his meaning; rather, we have to take into account what Matthew wanted to say to his audience, too.
My responses to those objections:
1) there is no reason to assume that Jesus did not or could not have pronounced this entire message, virtually as we have it recorded, all in one go. It’s not really that long a sermon, particularly for the pre-television world (when people still had attention spans) and particularly when there is a vital conceptual center driving the development of the thought with passion. We all know quite well that when there is one thing we desperately wish to get across as vividly as possible, it is quite normal to explain the idea at length, with multiple illustrations, applications and extrapolations. The Sermon is a perfect example; in fact, in terms of length or complexity, it is hardly an extreme case. I would even call it a rather compact nugget! Moreover, even if Matthew 5-7 encapsulates teaching pronounced by Jesus over a period of days, that fact doesn't argue in the least against the tight conceptual flow of the Sermon either in Jesus' telling or Matthew's recording. You could make the argument, after all, that Jesus was preaching only one thing for three years.
2) Yes, we are “getting” the Sermon through a) the “filter” of Matthew, b) the passage of time between event and composition, and c) the materialization of new contexts, i.e., the early Church to which Matthew is writing, a (somewhat) different audience than Jesus’ there on the mountainside (though Israel was, after all, God’s “church” [qahal] and the raw material, the initial stock, of Jesus’ new ‘qahal’). This is hardly an objection. Matthew’s world, and the early Church’s, is still the world, and audience, Jesus addressed on the mountainside. The challenge of Jesus was no less audacious or outrageous expressed through the Church and its writings in the middle first century than when Jesus himself pronounced the words on earth only a few years or decades earlier. The challenge, the import and virtually the entire socio-cultural context was the same. Therefore, Matthew’s “message” is faithful to Jesus’ “message”. It is the same message: the early Church is the “poor in spirit” whom Jesus challenged to enter the “narrow gate” and entrust their eternal lot to Him, seeking first the kingdom and God’s righteousness. They have cut their line to the dock and set sail with the Captain of their salvation, Jesus. (For some, however, the ride eventually proved rather too adventurous and they started looking longingly back to the dock... which is what the whole Epistle to the Hebrews is about. But that’s another story. Sort of.)
To appreciate the meaning and importance of chapter seven, which is the climax of the Sermon on the Mount, we really have no choice but to quickly sum up chapters five and six! Believe me, this will be quick.
The essence of what Jesus is saying to the people around him, starting from the Beatitudes, is this: “People, everything is about to change; it’s already changing. The kingdom is coming, and its laws and principles aren’t what you think. You’ve got to be ready to think in a new way, to see in a new way. For example, blessed are this world's 'losers', the ones whose hearts are broken over the evils around them, and in them. They’re the ones who are ready to receive what's coming: the kingdom. You can’t enter the kingdom unless you’re willing to live for it and be the salt of the earth. How do you do that, you ask? Simple: your righteousness must be greater than even the Pharisees’ righteousness! What? Not so simple? The Pharisees are experts in righteousness? They know every trick in the book when it comes to keeping God’s law? Not so fast. Let’s talk about righteousness. You’ve heard them teaching you about everything it says in the Book: Don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t break your oaths. But I’m telling you today that God’s standard is unbelievably higher. God looks at the heart. God doesn’t look at what you’re not doing; He looks at what you want to do. You’ve all been very well trained to be religious: you know when to fast, when to say your prayers, when to give money to the poor. And you get a nice pat on the back from the world when you do. But I’m telling you today that God’s standard is unbelievably higher. He looks at the heart. It’s time for you to decide what you want more: a nice pat on the back for being religious, or maybe rejection, suffering, even death for wanting what God wants and doing what God does. So decide. Do you want the kingdom? If you’re ready to surrender yourselves totally to God, I promise you, your Father in heaven will take care of you better than anyone could. But you’ve got to put Him... and Me... first.”
And that is my condensed version of the first two-thirds of the Sermon on the Mount. And now we come to the dramatic, even shocking climax. And if you were a Jewish man or woman listening to what Jesus was saying that day, I guarantee you, you would have been shocked.
So we come to chapter seven. Chapters five and six were like a picture which Jesus drew, a picture of a beautiful country, and he is inviting everyone to follow him there. But to go there, you have to get into Jesus’ ship, the ship of salvation. And Jesus is the captain of that ship. It means you have to leave your old country with all its traditions and laws, and you have to obey the rules of the ship. I think this is what Jesus is telling us in chapter seven. I think he’s saying, “Now you know where I want to bring you. Are you ready to go? If so, get in the boat and don’t look back. You can’t live the old way anymore. You can’t think the old way anymore. This is a new life with a new foundation, new responsibilities, new promises and, yes, new dangers.”
Now please remember: these events we read about in scripture aren’t just words on paper; these aren’t people in a painting by Leonardo Da Vinci or statues who never change, never feel anything. These are real people, who cough and sneeze, who scratch where it itches, who get sunburned – for instance, when they’re standing outside listening to a carpenter from Nazareth preaching. These are specific people who love other specific people, probably hate a few specific people, too, and don’t spend much time at all thinking about the rest. And now picture Jesus there on the mountain surrounded by his disciples and this crowd – there are no halos in the picture, by the way – and he is announcing that a kingdom has come, though nothing seems to have changed very much if you look around. But Jesus sits there and teaches the nation from the mountaintop, almost like, well, like God giving Moses the law on Mount Sinai. And in that crowd there are most likely some Pharisees and other bigwigs, and they’re not dumb. They get it. And they’re probably thinking, “Who does he think he is?” And Jesus’ subtle hints – and not-so-subtle hints – about the Pharisees’ so-called righteousness don’t fly over their heads, either. There are extremely uncomfortable moments during this Sermon, especially for any bigwigs who happen to be in the audience.
I think chapter seven begins with exactly such an uncomfortable moment, when Jesus talks about judging. Now, we usually understand this section to mean that we shouldn’t criticize each other. Some people even think this part of the Sermon says that we should never say that anything is a sin. The words, “Judge not, lest you be judged” are the favorite slogan of different groups who organize big demonstrations in support of sinful lifestyles. You’ll see Jesus’ words “Judge not!” painted in big letters on the signs they carry in their parades: “Since Jesus said, ‘Do not judge’, you have no right to say that anything is a sin!”
Now we have to ask, is that, can that, really be what Jesus meant? That it is always wrong to identify an action of any kind as sinful, or even just plain wrong? I don’t think so. In fact, when we look at Jesus’ own life and how he condemned evil acts, we know that can’t be what he meant. Otherwise, he broke his own rule!
No, the whole logical flow of the Sermon on the Mount, and the situation in that society where Jesus was speaking, make it very clear that Jesus is simply continuing the central thought that started from chapter five, verse one: it's time for you to abandon your old life. And what was that old life? To a great extent, it was a religious system, very much run by the Pharisees, based on comparing: who’s the best keeper of the law, all 613 laws of it, not to mention thousands and thousands of interpretations. The Pharisees were the Taliban of Jesus’ time, the religious watchdogs: judging was their job. And if you wanted to be anybody in society, you’d better get yourself a degree in judging, too! For us, the word “judging” has a very negative connotation – in fact, precisely because of the Sermon on the Mount. But I think the Pharisees would have been delighted with that job description, just like the women in Iran who walk the streets with their sticks ready to give a good beating to any female who isn’t sufficiently cloaked. I think the Pharisees would have boasted, “Yes, we’re the ones who make everybody toe the line, who make sure nobody breaks God’s law... as we interpret it.” In that specific, suffocating environment, Jesus’ meaning is very clear, and it’s also radical, dangerous and threatening to the religious big shots of the time. He is saying, “No. No. God never made you His enforcers. In His kingdom, you’re out of a job, guys. And your whole system has completely the wrong focus.” As soon as Jesus brought up judging, the crowd had to know what the subtext was; they lived in it all the time. I bet there were a few carefully hidden smiles among the simple folk, and maybe some scowls and glares among the Pharisees in the crowd. “Instead of making judges out of yourselves,” Jesus tells them, “what you really have to do is become experts in personal holiness, and if you can’t see the difference, then you haven’t understood a word I’ve said so far.” Of course I’m paraphrasing, but I genuinely believe this meaning was obvious for those people there in that place at that moment. Let’s look closer at the allegory Jesus presents – a very famous allegory.
“How can you see the splinter in your brother’s eye and not see the plank in your own?” I think it’s fair enough to say most people interpret that to mean, “How can you see the eensy-weensy little fault in somebody else and totally miss the monstrous flaw in yourself?” I have to tell you, I don’t agree with that interpretation, popular though it is. If that’s what Jesus is saying, it completely contradicts his whole point. It doesn’t actually make sense. For a lot of reasons.
For example, there have got to be cases where the tables are turned (right?) and the fault in my life isn’t nearly as terrible as the next guy’s – like, maybe he’s a murderer or something. In that case, Jesus’ allegory doesn’t apply to me. I get an ‘out’, a free pass, I can judge my brother because, this time, he's got the plank and I've only got the splinter.... But we know that can’t be right. Jesus was laying down a principle that applies to everyone. So there’s got to something more in this besides simply comparing how big one sin is against another.
And that brings up another reason why I can’t accept the usual interpretation. The whole point here is that it’s time to leave that old religion of proving who’s better than whom. Now, how does it make sense if Jesus bases that whole point on an illustration that depends on comparing one person’s sin against another’s - that is, the plank vs. the splinter? If Jesus is saying “You can’t judge, because your sin is bigger”, that’s already a comparison! It doesn’t make sense.
Finally, it doesn’t make sense because Jesus says, nevertheless, that when you take care of the plank in your eye, you can help your brother get his splinter out. So, obviously, the point is not that you must never recognize where someone else needs correction.
For all those reasons, the usual interpretation just doesn’t work for me.
Here’s what I believe Jesus is actually saying to those people, in that time, in a way they would really get, and good. If I have a speck of wood in my eye and you have a speck of wood in yours, and they’re the same size (because nobody can really have a plank in their eye), which speck should be more obvious to me: the one in my eye or the one in yours? Of course, the one in mine. It’s in my eye, after all. I can feel it, it hurts, it should be my main issue of the moment: how do I get this thing out of my eye? Because it’s in my eye, it should be like a plank to me, the biggest thing in my field of vision. If it’s not, there’s something wrong with me. And the very idea that I wouldn’t even notice it and at the same time look at you and say, “Whoa, have you got a tree trunk in your eye” is crazy. And yet, Jesus is telling the people of his time that that’s precisely what they’re doing, and it is crazy. It’s not a matter of whose sin is bigger. Comparing isn’t the issue; in fact, that’s what they’re supposed to stop doing. It’s a question of whose sin you notice most of all- yours or other people’s. Jesus is saying that, in this kingdom of righteousness where he reigns, we must each become an expert in splinter removal, first from our own eyes. In other words, experts in personal holiness. Because we belong to Him. Because those splinters don’t go with love for Him. The subject is the hunger and thirst for righteousness. It is the love of God, and the priority on living the life that brings Him joy – and not only Him, but us, too. When we do that in our own lives, then, yes, we certainly will become examples and a help to others with their “splinters”. In fact, your example might be so powerful that you’ll help your brother or sister grow in spiritual purity and the knowledge of God with hardly a word.
And then we run smack into a very difficult statement to interpret (read v.6). But I have to say that if we stick to the whole flow of thought that started in chapter five and is now reaching its climax, this verse suddenly becomes much clearer. Usually we take it out of context and make it mean, “Don’t waste your time witnessing to people who are only going to make fun of the Gospel.” That’s what I’d call a “good try” interpretation, but it really has no connection at all to anything that Jesus is talking about here. So I think there must be a better one. If Jesus has been talking about saying goodbye to the old world and welcoming the kingdom in him, then this odd, mysterious allegory certainly continues that thought. And I do believe that the crowd standing there would have caught the gist right away. Jesus is saying, You can’t mix the new with the old. You can’t take what I’m giving you now and go back home and try to mix it in with the religion of the Pharisees and all that way of thinking. It won’t work. In fact, it will be a disaster. It will be like coming to a pigpen full of hungry pigs with a basket full of pearls. You throw the pearls to the pigs and they greedily go running for them... till they realize, “We can’t eat these”. Then you’ve got some really angry pigs on your hand, and they might start looking at you like dinner. That’s what will happen to you if you try to follow me and at the same time keep dancing to the Pharisees’ tune, trying to keep them happy, too. It won’t work either way. You won’t really be following me, and you won’t keep them happy, either! It’s a lose-lose proposition. Spiritual compromise is never “win-win”. Jesus’ message to the people on the mountainside that day, and to us today, is: if you’ve gotten into his ship, it means you’ve cut your ties, you’ve left the dock, and the new wine will never fit in the old wineskins. You can’t go to the world for your dose of “relevance”, of popularity, acceptance, significance, self-esteem, whatever. It’s not there anymore. Now, Jesus explains as he continues this message, you depend totally on God for all that, and the Father is ready to give you every truly good thing that you need: ask, and it shall be given to you. He loves to give, and your task is to be like Him – to love giving and doing to others as you would like them to do to you. That’s life in the kingdom.
It’s very hard, it’s not natural for us to live like this, but it’s the only way. Most people are going the easy way, the way of the flesh, but God calls us to go through the narrow gate and follow the straight way. Jesus is the gate and following him is the straight way. It’s not easy and it requires total devotion, but it’s do-able, because He walks the way with us. Yes, there will be fraudsters who try to lure you off the path, but you will know them for what they are, because they don’t line up with the truth. By their fruits you will know them!
And then Jesus says this amazing thing: On that day many will come to me and say, Lord, Lord.... We read these words and hardly even bat an eye. We think, “Well, yes, of course!” But imagine what this sounded like to the people standing there, listening to this young man, around thirty years old, from a poor village, without much education, no connections, no status, probably even talks with a lower-class accent – and here he is telling them, “On the last day humanity’s judge will be... me!” Some listeners may have thought it was a joke. Others may have thought it was craziness. And certain ones may have begun thinking that very day: “This Jesus is a person we must get rid of.” It is hard for us to really grasp how big a risk Jesus took, from a human point of view, by saying these words, because we only see the words on the page. And we believe that Jesus truly is Lord. But we don’t see the actual scene where Jesus pronounced these words, where people had no idea who he was, where they could have arrested him on the spot, or even stoned him. To really get in touch with that is to begin understanding what a powerful show of courage and faith this is; it’s the model of truth-telling, no matter the cost. You’ve got to have confidence to tell truth like that. Jesus has total confidence in the authority of His beloved Father in heaven and the concrete reality of what he was saying. With faith in Christ, we can have similar courage to speak truth, even when the world calls us crazy, or worse.
So you can see why the people were so amazed that Jesus spoke as one having authority. He even said he would judge the world! This is a huge declaration. Such a declaration certainly requires proof. In the following chapters of Matthew, we see this proof over and over again, where Jesus demonstrates his authority in many ways. Isn’t it interesting that the very first word someone says to Jesus after this great sermon is “Lord”? That was the leper whom Jesus healed. And after him the centurion also says, “Lord, I know that you have authority” and Jesus heals the centurion’s servant from far away, with just a word. And then Jesus prove to the Pharisees that “the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” Then Jesus sends his disciples out on a preaching mission and he gives them – what? – authority. You see, this idea of authority was very important for the people of Jesus’ time. I think it’s very important for us, too. Probably none of us wants to have total authority. None of us wants to be president, for example. Sometimes I worry that the only people who want to be president are crazy –and that would mean we elect crazy people to govern us! But all of us deeply desire the assurance and security of knowing that we have honest, strong and benevolent authority over us. When we hear about corruption in government, when we think our leaders have lied to us, we get very upset and angry. If we can’t trust the authorities, then everything in life seems shaky and uncertain.
But Jesus has proven his perfect and trustworthy authority and power. We will all answer to him some day. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus promises that if we devote ourselves to his kingdom, if we make him captain of our ship and author of our salvation, then we’ll be like the house on the rock that stood firm even when the wind and waves beat against it. We won’t fall. How do we do that? Believe in Him, don’t look back, don’t mix the new with the old, grow into experts in personal holiness and devotion to God, trust your heavenly Father for all that you really need and, most of all, grow more like Him all the time, because He is perfect.
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