One of the things many Christians find challenging about the different books of the Bible and especially about the gospels, is that at times they completely contradict each other. So if we are supposed to believe, as many of us were taught, that the Bible is true, then how do we reconcile these differences?
One way is to try and figure out why a particular author chose to present a particular episode in a particular way. What is the author trying to tell us with the details he or she includes?
We have spent quite a bit of time over the last months in the gospel of Luke. This is a gospel that has a lot in common with both Matthew and Mark, but with distinct differences. For one thing, time and time again, Luke’s gospel shows Jesus interacting with people on the margins: the poor, the outcast, women, children, tax collectors, refugees. Not only does Jesus interact with them, he heals them, forgives them, socializes with them, and tells parables in which they come out on top. Luke also talks about repentance more than any of the other gospels. Many of the beloved parables that are unique to the gospel of Luke -- the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the lost sheep and the lost coin -- Jesus tells to make a point about how important it is to repent, or turn back to God.
Today, on this last Sunday of the church year, also known as “Christ the King” Sunday, our reading is Luke’s version of the crucifixion, and again, his version is different from Matthew, Mark, and John’s versions in ways that reveal to us just what kind of king Luke understands Jesus to be.
The first thing that happens when Jesus is nailed to the cross is that he asks God to forgive his executioners: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they are doing.” Jesus asking God’s forgiveness even for those who participate in his torture and murder emphasizes Luke’s claim throughout this gospel that God willingly and sometimes even foolishly forgives the most wayward of God’s children.
Then we have three different characters challenging Jesus to “save himself.” First “the leaders scoffed at him, saying, ‘He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God!’” Then, “the soldiers also mocked him...saying, ‘If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!’” And finally, one of the criminals being crucified with him “kept deriding him and saying, ‘Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!’”
If we had read Luke’s gospel straight through, it might occur to us that these three challenges to Jesus to save himself and prove that he is God’s Messiah echo the three challenges Jesus faced from Satan at the very beginning of his ministry. After his baptism, Jesus spends forty days in the wilderness, where Satan challenges him three times to prove that he is indeed God’s son.
So from the beginning of Luke’s account of the life and ministry of Jesus, Satan and others have pressured Jesus to prove that he is the Messiah, God’s anointed one. Can we blame them? If we were God’s chosen people, continually oppressed and persecuted but convinced that one day, the Messiah would come and overthrow our oppressors, wouldn’t we also find this Jesus confusing? Because Jesus acts as if he is powerless in the face of the injustice being done to him. As one commentator says, “how can we receive a Messiah who does not act like a Messiah? How can you see salvation if no one is being saved?”
How can a king that forgives his oppressors and does nothing to save himself from destruction save anyone? For many of us who have dealt with what God is unable to do in the face of suffering, sickness, or death, we may have wondered the same thing. If God is so powerful, then why didn’t God save my loved one, fix my relationship, or give me the one thing I wanted the most? Where was God’s power when I needed saving? It’s a good question to ask how this kind of king can possibly save the world. It’s a good question, but it’s the wrong one.
The question we should be asking is not ‘how’, but ‘what’. What is Luke trying to tell us about our salvation? What is the message behind the story of a Messiah who suffers and dies? (1)
Galileo was a physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. Perhaps his greatest contribution to this revolution was providing proof through the powerful telescopes he built that the sun, rather than the earth, was the center of the universe, around which other celestial bodies (including the earth) orbited.
Many people in Galileo’s day simply refused to accept this theory, not the least the authorities of the Catholic Church, who denounced Galileo’s view as “false and contrary to Scripture.” To anyone who challenged him, whose imagination refused to admit that Galileo’s theory could be true, Galileo would offer an opportunity to look through the telescope and see for themselves what he had seen. But most of those who disagreed with him not only refused to admit that he might be right, they refused to even look through his telescope! They suffered from a total lack of imagination and they were paralyzed by fear. They were simply too afraid that changing their understanding of the universe might change everything they knew about the world and their place in it.
The salvation we long for is real, but it is not what we imagined it to be. What we discover about Jesus at his crucifixion defies our expectations and forces us to imagine the unimaginable, because if this Jesus, this forgiving, parable-telling, outcast-loving, dying Jesus is the heir to God’s kingdom, then that kingdom must look completely different than what we expected. In this kingdom God loves, forgives, and saves everyone, everyone -- even a convicted criminal -- not with power and might and force, but by coming alongside us and being with us, in all the pain and suffering and confusion and wonder of our human lives.
The problem is, once we look through that telescope, once we allow ourselves to glimpse who this Jesus is and what he reveals about God, things will never be the same again. Not only are we forced to re-imagine who God is and what God’s kingdom looks like, we cannot help but recognize that our role in this kingdom is totally different than we imagined it, for we are not just the ones saved but also the ones called to share the good news of salvation with others. And God calls us to fulfill this role not someday in some heavenly realm, but right here and now. Like the thief who proclaimed that Jesus was indeed innocent, God calls us to join Christ in Paradise today by extending Christ’s love and grace to all people.
*****
Will Willimon was once the pastor of a small church in a dying neighborhood, which is to say that the people moving into the neighborhood were quite different than the people who had always attended that church. The church had long been losing members and so they decided it was time to embark on a new effort of evangelism. One Sunday after worship, a handful of brave souls gathered together, and Willimon specifically heard someone tell two elderly women, Sarah and Mary, to go down Summit, turn right, and then knock on the doors of the houses on that street.A couple of hours later, after many discouraging conversations -- not to mention all the houses whose occupants refused to converse with the church members at all -- the band of evangelists returned to the church and shared their stories. People hadn’t answered their doors, others hadn’t wanted to talk about church, others already had a church home and weren’t interested in hearing about a new one.
Then, in walked Sarah and Mary, breathless and excited. “we went down Summit,” they said, “and then we turned left and then we started knocking on doors.”
“Wait a minute,” Willimon interrupted. “You were supposed to go down Summit and then turn right, not left.” “Yeah,” someone else chimed in, “you weren’t supposed to go into that neighborhood. That’s the projects!”
“Well, anyway,” Mary and Sarah went on, “there were lots of people who didn’t answer the doors or who weren’t interested, but there was this one lady -- Verlene. She came to the door and she had two little kids and we told her about our church and she said she was just desperate and we told her that was just the kind of person we needed at our church! We invited her to come to the Wednesday morning Ladies’ Bible study!” Mary and Sarah were beaming, but everyone else looked skeptical.
“What about the kids?” someone asked. “We told her to bring them,” they said. “We said we’d provide childcare.”
And sure enough, on Wednesday morning, Verlene showed up at the church, kids in tow. The Bible study that day was about temptation and after they had read the passage, Willimon asked the women to share about a time they had faced temptation. At first, no one spoke. Then one lady told about going to the grocery store the day before and discovering in the parking lot that she had a loaf of bread in her bag she hadn’t paid for. “At first I wasn’t going to do anything about it,” she said. “I mean, really, is one loaf of bread going to make or break that big store? But I knew I had to do the right thing, so I went back and returned it.”
Everyone around the table nodded their approval. Then Verlene spoke up. “Well, there was this one time,” she started. “I was living with this guy, not the father of my second child, but the man before that, and we were doing a lot of coke, you know, and that stuff if really messes with your head, and one day we needed some cash, and he talked me into robbing this little service station. And we went in and he put a gun to the man’s head and we made out with about $200...easy as taking candy from a baby. But something about it just didn’t feel right to me. Then a few weeks later, he came up with another plan to rob a convenience store. And I thought about it and I just couldn’t do it. I told him no, I’m not going to do it. And he beat me the hell out of me. But that was the first time in my life I said no to anybody, about anything. It was the first time in my life I felt like somebody.”
And Willimon said, “Oh, okay, well, I think it’s time for us to pray now.”
Later, in the parking lot, Mary said to Willimon, “Wow, your Bible study just got a whole lot more interesting. I’m going to go home and get on the phone, because I think I can get a crowd there. I mean, this is good, this is good stuff.”
Willimon said, “Look, you were told to go down Summit and turn right, not left!”
And Mary said, “Preacher, I am as bored with this church as you are. I think Verlene was sent to us by God to remind us what the gospel is really about. I believe I can get a crowd for this.” (2)
God’s reign defies our expectations time and time again...in the Bible, in the church, in our own lives. Right up until the end, when he is hanging on a cross, when he is suffering an agonizing death, Jesus is showing us that how God reigns changes everything. It forces us to see things we refused to believe could be true...that the meek and the lowly might in fact be the very ones who reveal God to us...that admitting when we were wrong might be the very moment we receive the blessing of forgiveness...that even in this dark and hurting world we ordinary people can reach out to each other and in doing so bring the kingdom of God -- Paradise indeed! -- even here, even now, today. Amen.
Endnotes:
1. Thanks to the Rev. Derek Starr Redwine for his thoughts on how it helps to reframe the question from “how” to “what”.
2. Will Willimon tells this story in the sermon “A Little Yeast,” which he delivered on July 23, 2010 at the Lakeside, Ohio Chautauqua community. Listen to or download it here.
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