“It Is Written…”
Luke 9:51-62
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
7/28/13
“You are my son, the
Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
Jesus hears these words
as he rises from the Jordan River, freshly baptized by John. And from that heady and holy moment, the
Beloved embarks on a kind of personal exodus in the Judean wilderness. For a long and lonely time, Jesus faces a
series of very real and achingly seductive possibilities, possibilities that
run counter to his identity and to his calling as “The Beloved.”
He is tempted to live
selfishly. He is tempted to use the
authority of his faith to gain personal wealth and power. He is tempted to distort the gift of his
unique holiness as the beloved Son of God in order to build for himself a kind
of rock-star popularity and influence among the people.
Jesus faces three
temptations, and he counters each one with a biblical reminder of what it means
to love, trust and serve Yahweh as a faithful Jew.
“Try this,” coos the
Author of All Selfishness. “You'll be a
celebrity! You'll have 10 million hits
on YouTube before sundown tomorrow!”
“No,” says Jesus. “Because it
is written...”
Three times this
happens. And three times Jesus leans on
all that he has been taught, all that he has learned and internalized through
scripture.
As Luke concludes his
story of Jesus' temptation, he says that the tempter leaves Jesus, but only
temporarily. The tempter departs, says
Luke, “until an opportune time.”
From that point on,
Jesus teaches and preaches. He heals the
sick. He calls and equips his
disciples. In grateful love he
consciously and deliberately incarnates his well-learned it is written faith. And so
the Beloved Word-Made-Flesh lives into the fullness of his unique calling.
Now, there’s an inherent
risk to living faithfully. When one
begins to appropriate spiritual teachings into daily decisions and
relationships, one begins to realize that those teachings are growing out of
something that’s not static – and that it never has been static. They are welling up out of something beyond
the reach of even the most eloquent words, beyond all doctrines and
creeds. All the teachings and
understandings of tradition are not the gift of some-thing at all. They are the gift of SomeOne. Both the gift and the Giver are alive and
organic.
Now, it's entirely
appropriate to begin with statements of faith, with quotations from scripture,
and with grateful connections to long-standing tradition. It's just that when we embody those
inscribed texts and those prescribed statements, when we claim our own
Belovedness, we do more than simply “believe in God.” We find ourselves in relationship with God. And
when we belong intimately to and with God, surprising new things happen. We tend to discover that all those verbal
affirmations of faith, all of the creeds, texts and pat answers are better
understood as a kind of airstrip. They
are not the wind itself.
Jesus’ life reveals a
number of uncomfortable realities, and one of those realities is that Roman and
Temple authorities, and therefore virtually all
human political and religious authority, find religion, especially
nationalistic religion, rather innocuous, even impotent. Indeed, the powers that be often encourage it
because rote and institutional religiosity can act as a kind of anesthetic
against passionate feelings of justice and self-giving love. But mature and genuine faithfulness to God
ahead of state and religious institutions makes every Pharaoh, Caesar, Herod
and Ciaphas break out in hives, because nothing threatens the status quo like a
person who intentionally embodies the transforming power of Love that we call
resurrection.
I have for years been
deeply as moved by the Barmen Declaration as by any other document in our Book
of Confessions. This statement was
written in the 1930s in response to Adolf Hitler's rise to power and his
attempt in that process to take control of – and make a political tool of – the
German Church. Hitler's political party
commandeered the language and the theology.
It inflicted nationalistic symbols on the Church and inside sanctuaries.
Very quickly, however, a
group of prophetic leaders within the Lutheran Church convened a meeting and
wrote a new statement of faith in the face of this dangerous challenge to their
understanding of the Lordship of Christ.
Basically, The Theological Declaration of Barmen says, loud and
clear, “No. Neither Hitler nor Germany
is Lord. Jesus is Lord!” And like Jesus himself, all who signed that
document were hunted down. Those who
could fled Germany. Those who couldn't
went into hiding or were arrested. Some
were, of course, executed for treason and heresy.
Jesus not only lives
that kind of radical faithfulness, he sets the standard for us. And when he does, he begins to come to terms
with the fact that his life with God is going to cost him his life. Indeed, according to Luke, he has already
told his disciples – twice – that death awaits him in Jerusalem.
So, when Jesus sets his
face toward the holy city, he enters one of those “opportune times” for new
temptation. And by this time he is off
the airstrip and on the wing. So he
approaches these new temptations quite differently than he does earlier.
The first temptation he
faces is the temptation to transfer any anger and resentment he may have onto
people who don’t share his point of view.
Jesus sends out an advance party to prepare the way for him. He’s going to preach and teach his way toward
Jerusalem. But the disciples he sends
out meet with cold inhospitality at a
Samaritan village.
Now remember, Samaritans
are Jews, but they worship at Mt. Gerazim rather than Jerusalem. So they refuse to welcome Jesus.
From down on the tarmac,
the disciples wave at their teacher.
“Hey, Jesus!” they shout. “Want
us to go Old Testament on ‘em? Give us
the word and we’ll burn ‘em out. The Bible says that God wants us to kill
our enemies as an offering to God.”
Jesus looks down and
rebukes them for even suggesting such dead-end violence. Haven’t they learned anything?
Then again, could he be
rebuking his own very active shadow-self who, it will be abundantly clear in
Gethsemane, does not want to die yet?
What happens next reads
like another threefold temptation. Jesus
encounters three different people who either want to follow him or whom he
invites to follow him.
The first person
approaches Jesus and says, “Where you go, I will go.”
I have to imagine that
when Jesus hears this promise as he makes his way toward the City of David, he
hears an echo of an ancient story – the story of King David’s grandmother,
Ruth, and her mother-in-law, Naomi.
Naomi’s husband and three sons have all died, leaving Naomi and her
three daughters-in-law voiceless and vulnerable. Naomi tells them all, “Go back to your own
families. I can’t do anything for you anymore.”
Two leave, but Ruth
says, “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people
shall be my people, and your God my God.”
And then Ruth says, “Where you
die, I will die – there I will be buried.”
To the would-be follower
Jesus utters an aching lament: “I am like Naomi to your Ruth. If I were a fox or a bird, it might be
different. But I’m a man, one whose days
are numbered. Follow me and you will
have to redefine belonging, home and life itself.”
What kind of example of
biblical faith, hope and love is that?
The next two potential
disciples agree to follow, but each asks for a little time to take care of
obligations at home. Now, the things they want to do are not simply admirable,
they lie firmly within the directives of the Torah. Their excuses are more than excuses. They are responsibilities of scripture. Like Jesus arguing with the tempter back in
Chapter 4, the men say in effect to Jesus, ‘Yes, I’ll follow, but I have to go
take care of family business first, because it
is written…”
In these biblical
arguments Jesus faces once again the temptation to travel some road other than
the one on which God has set his face.
And he’s tempted to find some biblical warrant for laying aside the call
to live for the sake of God and neighbor first.
So, when Jesus puts them off, he is not being unfaithful to the “it is written-ness” of the faith. He is steeling himself for the journey
ahead. Even more than that, he is
saying, ‘It may be written, but I am
writing something new, something that takes precedence over all other
written things.”
With the ink of his
life, Jesus has set his face to write the gospel of Love. And this Love, capital-L Love, agape Love, as
his disciples are disappointed to learn, does not allow for countering violence
with violence – even though it is
written… This Love will demote old
priorities, even though it is written…
Matthew hears and
records the same kind of thing in his rendering of the Sermon on the
Mount. In Matthew 5 there’s a whole
string of teachings in which Jesus states, “You have heard it said…but I say to
you.” 'It
may be written,' says Jesus, 'but
I am writing.'
When Jesus challenges
the comfortable authority of it is
written – or more familiar to our ears, the comfortable authority of the Bible says – he’s not trying to
shock or anger anyone. Although many of
his hearers are plenty shocked and angered.
No, Jesus turns conventional theology and wisdom on its head to proclaim
faithfulness and loyalty to God above all
else, because loving faithfulness to God purifies our earthly loyalties and
loves, and makes them worth their salt.
Jesus’ life demonstrates
the law of Love. Self-emptying
Love. Sacrificial Love. To disciples it’s tough Love. To the all the Caesars and Ciaphas’ in the world
and in our hearts, it’s treason and heresy, it’s fingernails-on-the-chalkboard,
but it’s Love, nonetheless.
Neither you nor I are
going to learn agape Love quickly or easily.
And many of us are going to avoid it at all costs, because the cost of
avoiding it will seem small potatoes compared to the cost of embracing it. But this newly-written Love is the reason you
and I are here today, and we are not only called to proclaim that Love, we are
promised the spiritual awareness to recognize it and the spiritual strength to
begin learning to live in and according to the eternal and boundless love of
Jesus.
“He set his face to go
to Jerusalem.” The road to falling in
love with holy Love takes us to Jerusalem.
It takes us through Friday - not the Friday of some angry god who must
be appeased with innocent blood in order to be satisfied. The Friday we pass through is the Friday that
reveals all-too-vividly the sinful futility of misplaced loves, and the
lifelessness of fearful and violent loyalties.
The new Love brought to
us by the grace of God in Jesus is the gift of Sunday. It sets our faces on the new Jerusalem, on
new hopes and new possibilities – on a new reality and a new home.
In his book You Can’t
Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe writes of his own death. But something he says sheds light on what I
think Jesus is trying to say. According
to Thomas Wolfe, “[Death is] to lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater
life; to leave the friends you loved,
for greater loving; to find a land more
kind than home, more large than earth.”1
If we apply these words
to the biblical image of the life-death-and-resurrection of Jesus, an image we
reenact in the sacraments, I think we can make this change: [To
love with the Love of Jesus is] “to lose the earth you know, for greater
knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you
loved, for greater loving; [To love with
the Love of Jesus is] to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth.”
You are sons and
daughters of God. You are Beloved. With you God is pleased. It is
written. Now, what new word of Love
may God write with your life?
1The
quotation from Thomas Wolfe in this form is printed as the epigraph in Wiley
Cash's novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, William Morrow, 2012.
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