March 18, 2001
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on The Cross and Beyond: Many of you will remember the watch commercial that advertised its product by showing us the disappointment of the person who did not get it. There they would be, opening the gift given in honor of a birthday or anniversary, or some other worthy gift-giving occasion. The box is opened and their hopeful look becomes one of near despair, as the recipient says, “I was hoping for a Longines”. A gift offered in love and respect feels like it is rejected and we are left to wonder how the giver of the gift feels. You know that the Greek language has three different words that describe love. There is the romantic love between people, eros. The love between parent and child, and those whose relationships feel as close as those which exist between parents and children is filial love, and then there is the love that comes from our sense of fellowship and community, which is agape love. The truth is that no matter what kind of love is involved, love offered freely is not always mutual and the reality is that there are simply times when the love we offer will be unrequited, it simply will not be returned. We hear all kinds of rejection in all of the music we listen to. Whether your preferred form of music is rap and hip-hop, country, rhythm & blues, opera, easy listening, heavy metal, the blues, jazz, or some genre I have not mentioned, we can hear the heartbreak of rejection in the music. Even religious music is not immune. You may know that the hymn-writer George Matheson was planning to be married, that is until his fiancée, unable to deal with his blindness broke off their engagement. Out of his heartbreak, he wrote of the one love he knew would not be rejected, that would look at the quality of his heart rather than the quality of his eyesight. “O love that wilt not let me go, I rest my weary soul in thee, I give thee back the life I owe, that in thine ocean depths its flow should richer, fuller be.” The truth is that love offered will sometimes be rejected – what do we do? This is a situation that might cause us to ask the bumper sticker and wristband question: “what would Jesus do?” This is also an occasion when we know what Jesus would do because we know what Jesus did do. We believe that Jesus the Christ offered himself in love to the world. The report and witness of the gospels is that while many believed others did not. Today, as we move toward the cross of Christ, we consider what it means when love is rejected. What was it that was part of the climate that made it hard for some to see that Jesus was God’s own Son offered to us as the redeemer of the world. It happened at the wintertime festival of Dedication, which is now called Hanukkah, the commemoration of the rededication of the Jerusalem Temple after Syrian King Antiochus had defiled it by building an altar to his own gods in the sanctuary. Eventually Judas Maccabeus and his brothers regained the Temple, and witnessed the eight - day miracle of light. The event was so significant, that it became a time to be remembered, and an occasion for celebration. It was not a pilgrimage festival, it did not require devout persons to come to Jerusalem to celebrate the festival, but it is where John locates the story. Jesus is at the Temple, during the festival, walking along Solomon’s porch when he is approached by those John calls “the Jews” – his name for the opponents of Jesus. They ask a question which reminds us that when we reject the love of Jesus, we can fail to recognize the truth that is in front of us. “Why do you keep us in suspense?” Literally the question is “why are you troubling our psyches? The word psyche means life or soul, and another way of asking the question is why are you taking our lives? The popular meaning of the phrase is given to us by John, “how long will you continue to annoy us?” Today we might say, “Why are you confusing us? Tell us straight up, are you the Messiah or not?” It’s a question we ask from time to time, and our response to his response will help us decide whether we will reject or receive his love. Jesus says to them, “I have told you over and over, but you do not believe me.” The works I do, the ministry I am about in the name of God tells you who I am. If I am not the Messiah, how could I do such things?” “You don’t believe because you are not part of my sheep.” Early in the tenth chapter of John, Jesus describes his relationship with God and with his followers in terms of the relationship of trust between a shepherd and the shepherd’s sheep. A shepherd knows his sheep, and the sheep know their shepherd’s voice, so well that they will not follow another shepherd’s voice. Jesus will declare himself not only the shepherd of the sheep, but the gate by which the sheep enter the sheepfold. Those words echo back to us when we read a few chapters ahead, and hear Jesus say, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to God except by me” (14.6b).” Am I the Messiah? “You cannot see it because you have chosen to stay outside the flock.”
The love of Christ offered to us is rejected when we will not recognize
what is in front of us, when we dismiss opportunities as undoable, when we
regard people as untouchable, when we see situations as unsalvageable. But that
same love is received when we remember that we are among those who have been
welcomed, pardoned, received, touched and salvaged by God, and when we act out
of a passion to share the good news we have received with others who need the
same good news in their lives.
We are here to speak a word of hope when in a world in which the love
of Christ is rejected and people cannot hear the words of salvation he offers to
us. What does that mean? It means that Jesus is the embodied word of God
(chapter one). It means that he is
the one with power and authority from God to give us the gift of eternal life
because he holds us safely, and we are protected. It means that the
relationship between God and Christ Jesus is so close that God has given Jesus the greatest gift – to be Savior of the world; and
to receive with joy any who receive him, to be for us the ground on which we
stand.
Love may be rejected by those who cannot hear, but love is received when
we are open our ears and hear the voice of Christ Jesus who calls out to us by
name and who wants more than anything to keep us in his eternal embrace.
When we reject the love of Christ, we lose our ability to think and
act clearly. The good news of Jesus Christ is not good news to everyone. As
it happened when he went to Galilee and said that the spirit of the Lord was
upon him and that he was the prophet without honor in his hometown, those who
heard and rejected Jesus on Solomon’s porch were enraged and wanted to kill
him. They picked up rocks to stone him. Jesus says “what for?” What thing
have I said or done that causes you to want to kill me with hands full of rocks?
“Was it when I chose the twelve apostles, or when I turned water to
wine at a wedding reception? How about the night I counseled with Nicodemus or
discussed the theology of water with a woman at Jacob’s well. Maybe you are
upset that I have healed on the Sabbath because people are much more important
than rules and rituals. Is it the time I borrowed a little bit of bread and a
few fish and fed 5000 people? Or when I walked on water, or announced myself to
be the bread of life. Already I have evaded people seeking to arrest me, I have
offered grace and mercy to the woman caught in the act of adultery and shamed
her would be executioners, restored the sight of a man born blind, and I
continue to proclaim the good news of God. Is that the problem?”
I imagine his opponents were caught off course. “What? No, not for any
of that. Those are all wonderful things. The problem is that you are a
blasphemer. You say you are the Son of God, and so you have assumed for yourself
the rights and qualities that belong to God.”
Jesus say, “You are forgetting your scriptures, and remember that they
cannot be discredited, when it says in Psalm 82. 60, “I say you are gods,
children of the Most High. There is no blasphemy here. I am God’s Son.”
The
love of Jesus the Christ, offered to us may be rejected, but we are here because
more than the rejection love is received when we believe the work and the
worker. When we do, we choose not to stand with those who reject Jesus but
instead to stand with those who name him Savior and Christ of our lives and of
the world. Jesus
says, “if you don’t believe me, believe the work.” Eugene Peterson puts it
this way, “just take the evidence of the actions that are right before your
eyes.” What evidence is before our eyes? It is the evidence of the first
theologians I knew, my parents who taught us to trust God, because God is able.
It is the evidence of our own lives as we have seen God take our flaws and
correct them, take our faults and heal them, take our feistiness and direct it
toward positive things, take our faithfulness and expand it. The evidence is all
around us as we look back and see how our lives have been transformed, our
perspective broadened, and our desire to reach out and connect with people
beyond ourselves.
Having been talked out of stoning him, they tried to arrest him, but
again as happened in Galilee, they were so caught up in their anger and outrage
that they didn’t even notice when he left.
Finally, love is received when we share in the witness of Jesus.
What did Jesus do? John’s
witness is that Jesus went across the river to the place where John the Baptist
had been baptizing, and the people who saw him there realized that all that John
the Baptist had said about him was true. The one for whom they had waited, who
would baptize them with God’s Holy Spirit had indeed come. I
imagine that on the other side of the Jordan, Jesus prayed and rested, taught
and healed, and did all that he ever did, because while opponents of Jesus
rejected the love he offered to the world, he nevertheless continued to offer
it. Now he has begun to end his public ministry, he will no longer go from town
to town, from now on, he will look to Jerusalem, and the cross.
Our witness is that when we receive the love of Jesus, we will do great
things. In fact we are gathered in this place because the love of Christ who
gave himself for us continues in
our lives and in our psyche’s even now. How else can we explain all of the
ways that in his name, we offer ministries of hospitality and hope, justice and
joy to others? Our
witness is to declare ourselves a lamb of Christ’s own fold, a sheep of his
own flock, and the daughters and sons of God’s own redeeming. In the last
verse of his hymn, George Matheson’s writes: “O
cross that liftest up my head
I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life’s glory dead, and
from the ground there blossoms red
life that shall endless be.” Let
it be so now and forever to the glory of God. Amen.
Dr.
LaTaunya M. Bynum |
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Broad
Street Christian Church
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