Sermons

There was also an inscription over him, “This is the King of the Jews.”

 Today is Christ the King Sunday, and whether you are here in this room at the end of the Christian Year, or watching from home at the beginning of the calendar year, it is an important day.  It’s a day when we announce to the world that we have no king but Jesus.

There’s a scene in the book of Revelation where the 24 elders, seated around the throne of God, take the crowns off their own heads and cast them at his feet.  If it were up to me, on a day like today I would put a throne right here at the front of the church, and give each of you a crown as you came into the sanctuary, and then during the closing hymn ask you to imagine that Christ is seated on that throne, and invite you to come forward and cast your crowns at his feet as a way of letting him know that for you he is—and will always be—the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.  That would be a good way to celebrate.  But if it were up to Luke he would do something completely different, and he does.  He doesn’t ask us to imagine Jesus on a throne; he asks us to imagine him on a cross.  Why?

Because Luke is up to something.

He gives us a hint in the first paragraph of his Gospel when he says that after following all things closely and interviewing a number of eyewitnesses he has decided to write an orderly account so that someone named Theophilus may “know the truth” concerning the things about which he has been instructed. Let me warn you that I wrote a 300-page doctoral dissertation on the first paragraph of Luke’s Gospel, but then let me see if I can sum up my findings in something less than that.  One was that Luke doesn’t actually say he wants Theophilus to know the truth, but that he wants him to have some certainty about what he has already learned.  The Greek word is asphaleia, and it is usually translated as “assurance.”  In my dissertation I argued that assurance is an affective word: it describes a feeling.  Luke wants Theophilus to have that warm, comfortable feeling that comes when he realizes that everything he has learned about Jesus is true.

So, something must have happened to Theophilus.  I believe he was a God-fearing Gentile, like the ones we hear about in Acts 17, who attended the synagogue in a place like Thessalonica and who heard from Paul that Jesus of Nazareth was the long-awaited Messiah.[i]  Theophilus heard that Jesus had been crucified by the Romans, but that God had raised him up again and given him “the name that is above every name,” and he believed it.  But then someone came along and told him it wasn’t true.

I’ve seen this illustrated in the videos I’ve been watching from the BibleProject.com as I read through the Bible this year.  They show those early Christian missionaries going from place to place preaching that Jesus is the Messiah, and the way they represent that message is by showing that the cross equals the crown.  It’s up there in the little speech bubble over the missionaries’ heads: cross = crown.  But then they show how others would come along later and say that the cross does not equal the crown.  In the speech bubble there’s a diagonal slash through the equal sign.  But why would anyone say that?  Why would they say that Jesus is not the Messiah?

A blogger named Tracey Rich has helped me understand much of what traditional, observant Jews still believe about the Messiah.^[ii]  He writes: “The Messiah is the one who will be anointed as king in the Last Days.  He will be a great political leader descended from King David. He will be well-versed in Jewish law, and observant of its commandments.  He will be a charismatic leader, inspiring others to follow his example. He will be a great military leader, who will win battles for Israel.  He will be a great judge, who makes righteous decisions.”  And then he writes: “In every generation, a person is born with the potential to be the Messiah. If the time is right for the messianic age within that person’s lifetime, then that person will be the Messiah.  But if that person dies before he completes the mission of the Messiah, then that person is not the Messiah.”[iii]

And what is “the mission of the Messiah”?  To redeem Israel, and to do it in a very specific way.  Listen: “The Messiah will bring about the political and spiritual redemption of the Jewish people by bringing them back to Israel and restoring Jerusalem. He will establish a government in Israel that will be the center of all world government, both for Jews and gentiles.  He will rebuild the temple and re-establish its worship. He will restore the religious court system of Israel and establish Jewish law as the law of the land.”^[iv]  Had Jesus done any of those things?  No.  Instead he had died on a cross like a common criminal; he had been buried in a borrowed tomb.  But Paul said Jesus had been raised from the dead, and Theophilus had believed him.  If Paul was right about the Resurrection then Jesus could still accomplish the mission of the Messiah, but if Paul was wrong then Theophilus would have to go back to waiting, and hoping, that one day the Messiah would come.

So, Luke writes an entire Gospel to assure Theophilus (and others like him) that what he has heard about Jesus is true: the cross equals the crown.  When Theophilus finishes reading his Gospel Luke wants him to have that feeling—that warm, comfortable feeling—that Jesus really is who Paul said he was.  So, how does Luke do it?  He tells a story.  He tells the story of Jesus from the very beginning.  He creates a narrative universe and invites Theophilus into it so that he can have a first-hand experience of Jesus, because nothing is so convincing as experience.

This is where I spent a lot of time in my dissertation, talking about the story world and how the reader enters into it.  You know what I’m talking about, right?  Sometimes you start reading a novel and it takes a little while to find your way.  There are all these new characters, settings, and situations.  You have to listen closely to the narrator as he or she guides you through those first few pages.  It’s the same with the Gospel.  The world of the Bible can be a very strange place.  You need someone to take you by the hand and guide you through it and that’s what Luke’s narrator does.

Some people speak of the narrator as the “whispering wizard” in a story, the one whose presence you are only vaguely aware of, but the one who helps you understand what you are reading.[v]  You could think of it like this: if you were sitting in a box seat watching a play the narrator would be the one sitting beside you, whispering, “Now, these cowboys in the white hats are the good guys, but those other ones, in the black hats, are the bad guys!”  In the Gospel of Luke, just after that one-paragraph introduction, the narrator introduces us to Zechariah and tells us that he is one of the good guys, but he is a good guy with a problem: his wife has not been able to have children.  Already we begin to feel sympathy for him (did you hear that?  We feel sympathy), and we rejoice when Gabriel gives him the good news that Elizabeth will conceive!  But then we are whisked away to Nazareth, where Gabriel tells a virgin named Mary that she is going to be the mother of a child who will sit on the throne of his ancestor David.  In other words, she will be the mother of the Messiah.  And there you are, sitting beside the narrator in your box seat, watching all this happen on the stage.  You lean in close and whisper, “Is that true?”  And he whispers back, “It is!”

And so it goes, through the entire Gospel, at Jesus’ birth and later at his baptism, when he heals the sick and when he raises the dead, when he feeds the five thousand and when he rides into Jerusalem on a donkey.  Every time he says or does something remarkable you say to the narrator, “Wow!  He really is the Messiah!” and he says, “Yes, he is!”

And then we come to the tragic part of the story, where the religious authorities, out of jealousy, have Jesus arrested and brought before Pilate, and where Pilate, out of cowardice, gives in to the demands of the crowd.  And there you are, sitting beside the narrator as the soldiers strip Jesus of his robe, nail him to a cross, and hang a sign over his head that says, “King of the Jews.”  And then everybody begins to mock him and taunt him, saying, “If you are the king of the Jews save yourself!”  The sky grows dark and the rain begins to fall and there’s Jesus, the one you have come to love and trust, gasping for breath under that horrible sign, and with tears in your eyes you turn to the narrator and whisper, “But it’s true!  He really is a king!” “Yes,” whispers the narrator: “He is.”

And that’s how a gospel works.

Back in the late seventies a religion professor named David Rhoads invited his friend Donald Michie, an English professor, to show the students in his New Testament class how to read one of the gospels as if it were a short story.[vi]  He writes: “As I listened to an English teacher interpret the gospel, I was fascinated by the fresh and exciting way in which he discussed the story.  He talked about the suspense of the drama.  He spoke of Jesus as a character struggling to get his message across.  And he showed how the conflicts come to a climax in Jerusalem.”[vii]

Of particular interest was his friend’s discussion of irony, when a speaker says one thing but means another, or when a character thinks one thing is true when in fact it’s the opposite.  He writes: “Irony has a way of drawing readers into accepting the narrator’s point of view.  By showing the authorities ridiculing Jesus [and mocking him as ‘King of the Jews’], the narrator leads the reader to sympathize with Jesus, thinking, ‘There’s more truth to that than they know.’  And because the reader sees what the real situation is, in contrast to the characters who do not see, the reader is led to be on the inside, perhaps even to feel superior to the blind victims of the irony.”[viii]  Luke was up to something, and when you read this Gospel faithfully you can feel it.  There you are, sitting beside the narrator in your box seat, looking down on those fools who keep calling Jesus the King of the Jews without realizing that he actually is.  If everything works the way it’s supposed to, then at this point in the Gospel you will have the feeling Luke has been working toward from the very beginning: the assurance that comes from knowing that Jesus really is the Messiah, no matter what anyone else might say.  Because in this story they say it, don’t they?

Luke tells us that while the crowds stood by watching Jesus die on the cross the religious leaders scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!”  The soldiers also mocked him, saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!”  Even one of those two thieves who were being crucified along with him kept deriding him and saying, “Are you not the Messiah?  Save yourself, and us!”  These characters in the story make the assumption most of us would, that if you had power you would use it to save yourself.  Most kings would.  But not this one.  Jesus is up to something.  The surprising thing about him is that he uses his power not to save himself but to save others. And let me ask you: if you could choose between a king who would use his power to save himself and a king who would use his power to save you, which one would you choose?

I know I’ve told you this story before but back in 1984 I went to the polling place to cast my vote for president.  It was the year Walter Mondale was running against Ronald Reagan, the incumbent.  I was 25 years old, I had just started seminary, I was out to change the world. To tell you the truth I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the presidential campaign and as I made my way to the polling place, I found that I didn’t have strong feelings about either candidate.  I’ve never had a lot of interest in politics, never pinned all my hopes on any elected official.  I stood in that voting booth for a long time, looking at those two names, and finally I chose the third option: I wrote in my dad’s name.  When I told people about it later, I told them that, honestly, I couldn’t think of anyone who would make a better president.  No offense to those two candidates but I knew my dad, I knew he was good and kind and wise. And I also knew this, that if it ever came right down to it my dad would lay down his life for me, and that’s the kind of president you would want, isn’t it?

“If you are a king,” the religious authorities said to Jesus, “then save yourself.” “If you are a king,” the soldiers said, “then save yourself.” “If you are a king,” the other thief said, “then save yourself.” But Jesus turned out to be the kind of king who cared more about saving others than saving himself, and so he hung there on that cross, under that sign, until his work was done.  I don’t know what kind of king you want, but if I could choose, I would choose a king like that.

—Jim Somerville © 2022

[i] Acts 17:4

[ii] http://www.jewfaq.org/mashiach.html

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] My doctoral supervisor, Alan Culpepper, used that phrase. I don’t know if he invented it or if he was quoting someone else. I probably have a footnote in my dissertation.

[vi] David Rhoads and Donald Michie, Mark as Story: an Introduction to the Narrative of a Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982).

[vii] Ibid., p. xv.

[viii] Ibid., p. 61.

When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”

 In today’s Gospel lesson Jesus warns his disciples that a time will come when the religious world is in a state of chaos (vs. 8), the political world is in a state of chaos (vss. 9-10), and the natural world is in a state of chaos (vs. 11).  Twenty centuries later that prophecy seems to have come true.

If you talk to some people these days they will assure you that religion is on its way out, that science has eclipsed all of our old superstitions and none of them are relevant anymore.  If you talk to other people they will assure you that our nation hasn’t been so divided, politically, since the last civil war.  They predict the next one could be right around the corner.  If you talk to other people they will assure you that the plethora of natural disasters we have experienced lately is not random.  They attribute them to climate change and warn that this is just the beginning.

So, when Jesus says that false messiahs will arise who somehow convince people to follow them; that there will be wars and insurrections, with nation rising against nation; and that there will be natural disasters: earthquakes, famines, and global pandemics—he sounds a lot like someone who has just turned off the television news.  I read this passage before I went to vote early last Tuesday morning and almost wasn’t surprised to see a bloody red moon hanging over the polling place, a lunar eclipse that looked like the fulfillment of end-time prophecy.

I’ve got to say: there’s not much in this passage that sounds like good news.  Jesus makes all these predictions about religious, political, and natural disasters and then he says, “But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you,” which doesn’t really sound like good news either.  He says, “They will hand you over to synagogues and prisons….  You will be betrayed by friends and relatives; and they will put some of you to death.”  And if that’s not enough Jesus adds, “You will be hated by all because of my name.”  It’s not the kind of thing you would want to put on a recruiting poster and yet Jesus doesn’t apologize for any of it.  If anything he exaggerates the demands of discipleship, so that no one will be surprised when following him turns out to be hard.  “Even if your discipleship gets you nailed to a cross,” he might add, “you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”[i]

True, but still…how am I supposed to preach a passage like this?  I read the text over and over again last week in search of the Good News, and finally began to feel something I can only describe as a presence, looking over my shoulder, reading the text with me.  It took me a while to figure out who it was, but then I realized: it was Luke, the author of this Gospel.  I don’t always think about him when I’m reading it.  I think about Jesus, and the disciples, and whoever else shows up in the story, but I don’t often think about the one who wrote these words in the first place, or what he might have wanted us to see.  But as I read back over the text last week I thought about how Luke was the traveling companion of the Apostle Paul, and how Paul experienced exactly some of the things that Jesus describes.

“You will be brought before kings and governors because of my name,” Jesus says.  “This will give you an opportunity to testify.  So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.”  Do you remember how Paul was brought before Felix the Governor, in Acts 23 (which was also written by Luke)?  And how he was brought before Agrippa, the King, in Acts 25?  In both cases, without writing or rehearsing a speech, Paul delivers an eloquent defense of his ministry, as if to fulfill Jesus’ promise: “I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.”  It’s possible that Luke was sitting right there next to Paul, taking notes, and that he referred to those notes when he was writing his Gospel.

When did they start traveling together?  We can’t be sure, but in Acts 16 we get a clue.  Luke tells us that Paul and Silas and Timothy had gone down to Troas, on the coast of the Aegean Sea, and during the night Paul had a vision of a man from Macedonia saying, “Come over and help us.”  In the very next verse Luke writes:  “When [Paul] had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them.”  So I wonder: did Luke live in Troas?  Was he the local physician there?  Did Paul seek him out because he needed a doctor?  Did Luke invite them to stay the night?  Was it there that Paul had his vision?  Did he share it with his traveling companions at breakfast the next morning?  And is that when Luke decided to go with them?  Again, we can’t be sure, but from that moment on Luke uses the pronoun “we” when he talks about Paul and his traveling companions.

And if that’s true then Luke would have been with Paul during some of those misadventures he describes in 2 Corinthians 11, including the floggings, the lashings, the beatings, and the stoning.  “Three times I was shipwrecked,” Paul writes; “for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked.”^[ii]

“You will be persecuted,” Jesus says to his followers, “handed over to prison, possibly even put to death.  But before that you will be hated by all because of my name.”  And if anyone was ever hated for bearing the name of Jesus, it was Paul.  He was eventually imprisoned in Rome, and according to our most reliable sources it was there, under the persecution of Caesar Nero, that he was killed by the sword.  In 2 Timothy 4 we have the closest thing we can find to Paul’s last words.  He writes: “As for me, I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come.  I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”^[iii]  Just after that he writes that everyone else has deserted him, that Luke alone is with him.  Was Luke with him on the night before he died?  Did he ask Paul if it had all been worth it?  And did Paul smile and say, “For me to live is Christ; to die is gain.”^[iv]

Apparently Luke was able to get out of Rome alive and over the next twenty years gathered material for the Gospel that bears his name.  In the opening paragraph he writes: “Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, Most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know that truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.”^[v]  Now, we don’t know who Theophilus was, but his name means, literally, “Lover of God,” so that Theophilus could be anyone who loves God and wants to know the truth about his Son, Jesus.  But what interests me today is Luke’s assertion that the Good News he is about to share has been handed on to him by those who, “from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word,” that is, his is an “eyewitness account.”  But where did he get that account?  Who did he talk to?  It’s an educated guess, but I’m guessing that Luke went to Ephesus, for two reasons: 1) that’s where John was, the one who is sometimes called “the Beloved Disciple,” and 2) that’s where Mary was, the mother of Jesus.

I’ve been to Ephesus.  I’ve seen the ruins of the church of St. John.  And I’ve seen the little house up on the hill above it where Mary is said to have lived out her last days.  Do you remember that moment in John’s Gospel, when Jesus was dying on the cross and his mother and the Beloved Disciple were standing at the foot of it, and Jesus said to his mother, “Woman, behold your son,” and to the disciple, “Behold your mother,” and how from that hour that disciple took Jesus’ mother into his own home?^[vi]  Well, at some point the two of them had to get out of that home.  You may remember that the followers of Jesus experienced persecution in Jerusalem shortly after the stoning of Stephen, and that they were scattered across the ancient world.  And you may remember that in 70 A.D. the city of Jerusalem fell to the Romans and the temple was destroyed, just as Jesus had predicted.

In fact, all those things Jesus had predicted came true in the years between his death and the publication of Luke’s Gospel.  Most of the stones of the temple were thrown down (although some are still there).  A number of pretenders claimed to be the messiah.  There were wars and insurrections.  There were earthquakes, famines, and plagues.  And, yes, as Luke could testify, the followers of Jesus were arrested and persecuted.  Some of them were betrayed by friends and relatives.  Still others, like Stephen and Paul were put to death.  Most of them were hated because they were followers of Jesus.  If Luke had spent any time at all with John, the Beloved Disciple, he would have heard all those stories, and evidence suggests that he did spend time with him.  There is a passage in Luke’s Gospel that sounds as if it came straight out of the Gospel of John.^[vii]  And the story of the woman caught in adultery from John 8?  Most scholars say it has the language, style, and grammar of the Gospel of Luke.  I think they knew each other.  I think they swapped stories.  And I think Luke may have had a chance to ask John, “Was it worth it?  If you had it to do all over again, would you do it?  Would you drop your nets and follow Jesus?”  And what do you think John would have said to that?  Is there any question that this disciple, the one Jesus loved, would say anything other than yes?

And finally there is Jesus’ mother.  If it’s true that she lived in that little house on the hill above John’s church, and if Luke had a chance to interview her as one of his eyewitnesses, what do you think she would say?  Would she say it was worth it?  I sometimes think Luke must have interviewed Mary.  Where else would he have gotten some of the information for his Gospel?  Who else could have told him about the time Gabriel came and told Mary she was going to have a baby?  Who else could have filled him in on that long trip to Bethlehem and that birth in a stable?  Who else would have remembered that old Simeon had talked about this child being destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel and then saying to Mary, “A sword will pierce your own soul, too?”  A sword had pierced her soul, certainly.  How could she stand at the foot of the cross and not feel the pain of a mother watching her son die?  I can almost hear her sobbing through that story, and when it was done I can almost hear Luke asking, gently, “Was it worth it?”  What do you think Mary would have said?  Would she have closed her eyes and started singing that old song again, the one she sang in the beginning?

My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor
on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on
All generations will call me blessed.^[viii]

Jesus was right.  He was right about the destruction of the temple and the persecution of his followers.  But he was also right about this: that all of these terrible things would give us a chance to testify about the most wonderful thing.  For Paul and John and Mary that was Jesus.  Nothing was more precious to them than him.  No one else was so worth living for, and, if necessary, worth dying for.  But maybe that’s not the most important thing to consider this morning.  Maybe the most important thing is not to imagine what they would say, but to think about what you will say when someone asks you,

“Was it worth it?”

—Jim Somerville © 2022

[i] Luke 9:23

[ii] 2 Corinthians 11:23-27

[iii] 2 Timothy 4:6

[iv] Philippians 1:21

[v] Luke 1:1-4

[vi] John 19:26-27

[vii] Luke 10:21-22

[viii] Luke 1:46-48

All Saints’ Sunday

Luke 20:27-38

 Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him and asked him a question…

 “Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection,” came to Jesus and asked him a question about a woman who had been married seven times, to seven different men.  They wanted to know, “In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will she be, for the seven had married her?”  It’s a hypothetical question.  It’s a question meant to trip Jesus up, and to make resurrection look ridiculous.  We’ll get to it in a minute.  But for now let me remind you that for some people that question is not hypothetical at all.  They have been married more than once, and they wonder: “When I get to heaven whose spouse will I be?”  Or they’ve been happily married to the same person forever and they wonder, “Will we still be married in heaven?”  I think we can find the answers to those questions and more in today’s Gospel lesson, but first I need to give you some background.

Let’s begin with the Sadducees themselves.  They were the wealthy ruling class in Jerusalem.  They held the majority of the seats on the Jewish religious council and among them were the chief priests and the high priest.  They maintained the peace in Jerusalem primarily by enforcing the decisions of Rome, and some thought they were more concerned with politics than religion.^[i]  They were ultra-conservative, accepting only the first five books of the Bible as authoritative, and perhaps for that reason did not believe in the resurrection.  The Pharisees, on the other hand, did.  One of my Sunday school teachers helped me remember that distinction by saying, “It’s sad-you-see: there is no resurrection.”  And then saying, “It’s fair-I-see, there is resurrection!”  I will add to that distinction only this observation: that the people who have everything in this world often seem to have far less interest in the next.  In first-century Israel, those people were the Sadducees.

Secondly, I believe that the question they asked Jesus was their standard test question for the resurrection.  It was intended to make resurrection look ridiculous by appealing to the practice of “levirate marriage,” where a man would marry his brother’s widow in order to keep his brother’s memory alive.  Here’s how it is explained in Deuteronomy 25:5-6:

When brothers reside together, and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the deceased shall not be married outside the family to a stranger.  Her husband’s brother shall go in to her, taking her in marriage, and performing the duty of a husband’s brother to her, and the firstborn whom she bears shall succeed to the name of the deceased brother, so that his name may not be blotted out of Israel.

This, for the Sadducees, was the Word of the Lord (thanks be to God).  It was from one of the first five books of the Bible.  They say to Jesus in verse 28, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother.”

And let me pause long enough to point out that the Greek word for “resurrection” is anastasis.  It comes from the word stasis, meaning “to stand,” and ana, meaning “again,” so that anastasis means “to raise up,” or, literally, “to stand up again.”  The Sadducees didn’t believe in that, but they believed in this: that a man could “raise up” children for his dead brother.  The Greek word is exanastase, which sounds just like the word for resurrection but with an ex on the front, meaning “out of,” and in this case “out of his seed.”  It’s an earthy analogy but in levirate marriage a dead man’s brother was expected to plant his “seed” in the “soil” of his widow’s womb so that children could be raised up for him like a farmer plants seed in his garden to raise up cabbages.  This is the only kind of resurrection the Sadducees believed in, and in their test question it created a problem because (verse 29): “There were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; then the second; and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless.  Finally the woman also died.  In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be?  For the seven had married her.”

The real conundrum in this question, as far as the Sadducees are concerned, is not whether or not people can rise from the dead, but who gets the property rights.  Because in first century Israel wives were considered the property of their husbands (I’m not saying it’s right; I’m saying that’s how it was).  All seven of these brothers had, at one time or another, “owned” the same property.  In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will she be?  The Sadducees could almost picture these seven fighting over the same woman and to them the whole thing looked ridiculous.  To us it’s not so ridiculous.  We believe in the resurrection.  And we’ve all known people who were married more than once.  You may be one of those people, and you may be wondering, “In the resurrection, whose wife will I be?” (or whose husband), and for you it’s not about rights; it’s about relationship.  So, lean in close and listen, because I think Jesus has some answers to your questions.

In verse 34 he says, “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage.”  Let’s pause for a moment and think about when people do that: when they “marry” and are “given” in marriage.  It’s at a wedding, right?  In Jesus’ time that’s when a man “took” a wife.  That’s when a woman was “given” to her husband.  So, I don’t think Jesus is saying there won’t be any marriages in heaven, but he does seem to be saying there won’t be any weddings, and that’s because there won’t be any funerals.

He says, “Those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage.”  Why?  Verse 36: “[Because] they cannot die anymore.” And when Jesus says that he makes it clear that in his time marriage was not usually about being so in love with another person that you couldn’t live without each other, but rather about the creation of a stable social structure in which children could be born and raised.^[ii]  It was about building up the nation of Israel initially, and beyond that about ensuring the survival of the human species.  I love the child’s letter to God that says, “Dear God: instead of letting people die and having to make new ones why don’t you just keep the ones you’ve got?”  Jesus seems to be saying that in the resurrection that’s how it is: God keeps the ones he’s got.  There is therefore no need to make new ones and therefore no need for marriage.

“But wait a minute,” you say.  That’s not why I got married.  I don’t see marriage as merely the means of procreation.  I see it as a lasting commitment to another person.  What about me?”  Ah!  Now you’re talking about relationship, and that’s what matters most to us.  I sometimes say, “Relationships are the most important thing in the world and the only thing that really lasts.”  Occasionally I test that truth by asking mourners at a funeral, “Do you love this person more or less now than you did three days ago?”  They usually say, “More!”  The person has died but the relationship hasn’t.

That’s what Jesus is talking about in verse 37 when he invokes the story of the burning bush from Exodus 3, one of the first five books of the Bible and therefore a story that would have had authority for the Sadducees.  He says, “Do you remember what God said to Moses?  He said, ‘I AM the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.’  He didn’t say, ‘I was their God’ (past tense); he said, ‘I AM’ (present tense).  And for Jesus that’s all the proof the Sadducees should need.  “For he is not the God of the dead,” Jesus says, “but of the living.”  And then he ends with something that sounds almost like a poem.  He says,

For to him

All of them

Are alive.

I think he would say the same about those you have loved and lost: that “to him all of them are alive.”  And I hope that can be a comfort to you.  If you get nothing else out of this passage I hope you will get this: that according to Jesus the two things that survive death are identity and relationship.  Because somehow Abraham is still Abraham after all these years; his identity survives.  And somehow God is still his God after all these years; the relationship survives.  But that is not only true for Abraham.  It is true for all those who have made him their God, and for all those whose names were read this morning.  Their identity survives, and their relationship with God—the one who made them and loved them and called them his own—survives.  That’s good news.  But there may be some of you who are still wondering about marriage and asking, “In the resurrection what happens to that relationship?”

This is where I move beyond the things I can say with certainty and into the realm of speculation, but I think Jesus gives us some important clues.  In verse 34 he says, “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage” while “those who are considered worthy of a place in that age” do not.  Listen carefully: he doesn’t say that people on earth get married but people in heaven don’t.  He says that people in this age get married but those in that age don’t.  An age is not a place; it’s a time.  Jesus is borrowing the language of Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology, where people talked about “the present evil age” as compared with the messianic age: “the age to come.”  That’s when they believed that God’s chosen one, the Messiah, would ride onto the scene, conquer evil, and usher in a golden age of peace and prosperity.  For them heaven wasn’t up there somewhere, in the sky, it was out there somewhere, in the future.  For us it might be that moment when God’s kingdom finally comes and his will is forever done on earth as it is in heaven.

Wherever it is or whenever it is, Jesus says in verse 36 that when that new reality dawns we will no longer be mortal (that is, subject to death).  Instead we will be like the angels (who never die).  He says that in that day we will be the “children of God, children of the resurrection,” and I’m fascinated by his use of the word children.  Because one of the things I know about children and one of the things I love about them is that they live in the moment.  For them there is no yesterday, and no tomorrow; there is only now.  I know this because I have struggled to explain the concept of time to my grandson.  I tell him that I will see him tomorrow, or remind him of something we did yesterday, but he doesn’t know what that means.  He’s two years old; for him there is only now.  But if that sounds like a handicap consider this: he doesn’t have any regrets about the past or any worries about the future.

He lives in the moment.

This seems especially relevant when I think of how some modern theologians have described the realm of God as “the Eternal Now.”  You’ve heard me talk about this.  In my Easter sermon this year I suggested that when we die we “step off the time line” and into the realm of God.  I quoted that old hymn, “When the Roll is Called up Yonder,” the one that begins with a reference to that moment “when the trumpet of the Lord shall sound and time shall be no more.”  Even then I thought, “These old hymn writers had it figured out!  Time is not always our friend; sometimes it is our enemy.  But sometime there will come a time when time will be no more!”  Maybe then we will all be like my grandson, Leo: living in the moment.  But unlike him, we will live in that moment forever.

One of my favorite pictures is a picture of Leo and his little friend Charley on the playground at preschool.  Charley is just about the cutest little girl you have ever seen and Leo is, well…he’s my grandson.  In this picture the two of them are hugging each other hard and laughing hysterically.  It’s adorable.  And it’s a little too easy to start matchmaking, to start thinking that maybe the two of them will remain friends throughout childhood and adolescence, and someday tell us that they’re getting married.  “Wouldn’t that be sweet?” we think, for these childhood friends to end up married to each other?”  Well, yes, it would be sweet, until that night when they’re in their mid-thirties and both exhausted from working at demanding jobs so they can pay the mortgage on their beautiful home where the sink is full of dirty dishes and the dog just ate the remote control and one of the kids is spreading peanut butter on the living room curtains and the other one needs a diaper change in the worst possible way.

In a moment like that you might think, “Why complicate things?  Why can’t they just stay the way they are?  Why can’t Leo and Charley just be best friends forever?”  Is that what Jesus has in mind when he says that those who are considered worthy of a place in that age are the “children of God,” and “children of the resurrection”?  Does he mean that in that blessed state they will never have any regrets about the past, and never have any worries about the future?  Does he mean that they will always hug each other hard and laugh hysterically?  I don’t know.  How could I possibly know?  But sometimes the questions are even more exciting than the answers. They leave me scratching my head, searching the Scriptures,

And dreaming about the future.

— Jim Somerville © 2022

[i] From the “Got Questions?” website, which promises biblical answers to your questions (https://www.gotquestions.org/Sadducees.html).

[ii] This is my usual definition of biblical marriage. I’m currently reading a book on the history of marriage that includes things like political alliances, division of labor, etc. (Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage).

The Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost

Luke 19:1-10

 He entered Jericho and was passing through it. A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature.

 Let’s begin with a pop quiz:

According to Luke 19:1-10, Zacchaeus was:

1. Short in stature
2. A chief tax collector
3. A sinner
4. A Son of Abraham
5. All of the above.

If you picked “e,” you’re right, but if you’re like me there was a time when each of those seemed like the right answer.

When I was a boy, for instance, I knew that Zacchaeus was a “wee little man, and a wee little man was he.”  We sang that song in Sunday school.  But we also learned the story of Zacchaeus, and if you had asked me I could have told you that one day when the Lord was passing through his town he climbed up in a sycamore tree to see him.  I could relate to that.  If Jesus had passed through my town I might have had to climb a tree; I was a wee little man myself.  But I could have also told you that when Jesus passed that way he looked up in the tree and saw Zacchaeus and told him to come down.  Why? “For I’m going to your house today.  For I’m going to your house today.”  That’s the end of the song, and in those days, as far as I was concerned, that was the end of the story.  The good news was not that Zacchaeus was a sinner who got saved; the good news was that Jesus was going to his house.  It made me wonder what kind of songs we would sing if Jesus came to my house.

But as I got older I learned that Zacchaeus was a chief tax collector, and as far as his fellow Jews were concerned, that was a bad thing.  He was working for the Roman government, the same government whose armies had conquered Israel back in 63 B.C. and whose soldiers still swaggered through its streets.  He was taxing his fellow Israelites, and handing over a substantial portion of their hard-earned income to Caesar.  But apparently he was keeping a good bit for himself.  He was growing rich at his neighbors’ expense, and nobody liked that.  They grumbled about him behind his back.  They called him a “sinner.”

And when I got to seminary I learned a little more about that.  The Greek word for “sin” is hamartia. It means, literally, “to miss the mark.”  I pictured someone shooting an arrow at an archery target, aiming for the big, red bullseye in the center, but missing—maybe by an inch, maybe by a mile.  So, I learned that a sinner is a “mark misser,” and that was new for me.  It made me hopeful.  It made me think that most sinners are at least aiming for the target; they’re trying to get it right, but they’re missing.  Doesn’t that describe you most of the time?  I mean, do you wake up in the morning looking for ways to sin, or do you wake up determined to do your best but by the end of the day realize, that in more ways than you want to admit, you missed the mark?  Zacchaeus’s sin seems a little more deliberate than that.  If the whole of the Jewish law could be summed up in the command to love God and love neighbor (as Jesus suggests), then Zacchaeus was not doing a very good job of loving his neighbors.  He wasn’t even aiming his arrow in that direction.  He was taxing them.  He was taking more than his share.  He was reducing some of them to poverty.  It’s no wonder they called him “a sinner.”

So, when I became a pastor, and when this story showed up in the lectionary for the first time, I seized the opportunity to talk about Zacchaeus’s glorious conversion.  He was a sinner, but for some reason he wanted to see Jesus (maybe there was something inside him that knew just how much he needed to be saved), and when Jesus saw him he did exactly what his Heavenly Father might do: instead of looking on Zacchaeus’s outward appearance he looked on his heart, and what he saw in that heart was good.   So, he called him down out of the tree.  He said, “Zacchaeus, you come down, for I’m going to your house today,” and Zacchaeus was so moved by the invitation that he knelt at Jesus’ feet, and with tears in his eyes promised to give half his money to the poor, and if he had defrauded anyone to pay them back fourfold.  Jesus was amazed.  He turned to the crowd and said, “Today salvation has come to this house, for he too is a Son of Abraham!”  And that’s how it works, right?  If you are a sinner who confesses your sins (as it says in Psalm 32), and if you repent of those sins as Zacchaeus did and promise to live a different kind of life, then Jesus can forgive you of your sins and offer you the gift of salvation, right?  That’s what I learned in church when I was growing up.  That’s what I shared with my congregation the first time I preached this passage.  It’s absolutely true, but it may not be what this story is about.

Because the last time I preached this passage I learned something new.  I learned that the verbs Zacchaeus uses in his defense are not in the future tense, but in the present tense.  That is, when the crowd starts grumbling about him and saying he’s a sinner, he doesn’t say to Jesus, “From now on I will give half of my money to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone I will pay them back fourfold,” he says, “I already give half my money to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone I pay them back fourfold.  It’s my standard business practice.”  Well, that changes the story completely, doesn’t it?

So, why didn’t I see it before?  Why didn’t we all see it?  Because everyone wants this to be a conversion story, including the people who translate the Bible, even the New Revised Standard Version, the one I have trusted since seminary, the one that’s in our pew racks!  The translators of that Bible and the New International Version want so much for this to be a story about a man whose life was changed forever by his encounter with Jesus that they have changed the verbs forever: they have taken an ordinary present tense verb and twisted it into something they call the “future-present,” as if Zacchaeus were saying, “From this moment on I give half my money to the poor.”  But if you ask them how many times the so-called future-present appears in the New Testament they will have to admit, “Only once.  Only here in Luke 19:8.”  Because it isn’t a real thing.  They made it up.  Their love for a good conversion story has skewed their translation.

But others have taken the verbs at face value.  If it’s a present active indicative verb then that’s how they translate it.  In the English Standard Version, the one I have on my phone, Zacchaeus says, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor.  And if I have defrauded anyone of anything I restore it fourfold.”  And when Eugene Peterson paraphrased this passage in his version of the Bible, the Message, he quoted Zacchaeus as saying, “Master, I give away half my income to the poor—and if I’m caught cheating, I pay four times the damages.”  And if that’s too modern for you take a look at the King James Version, published in 1611, where Zacchaeus says, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold.”

Reading these verbs in the present tense rather than the future tense makes it harder to hear this as a conversion story, but it makes it easier to understand Jesus’ response, because when the people start grumbling about Zacchaeus and saying that he is a sinner, and Zacchaeus defends himself by saying he gives half his money to the poor, Jesus says, “Today salvation has come to this house.”  Why?  “Because he too is a Son of Abraham.”  If you can hear it, Jesus is restoring Zacchaeus to his place in the community by restoring his identity as a good and faithful Jew.  And if the community can hear it, then this story has the potential to become a different kind of conversion story, a story in which it is not Zacchaeus, but the people of Jericho, who are converted.

Think about that archery target again.  What if that big, round circle were the circle of community, and what if the people who ended up in the center of that circle were not necessarily the most righteous, but simply the most acceptable?  Can you see how Zacchaeus would be pushed out because he collected taxes from his neighbors?  But can you see how many other people might get pushed out of that circle through no fault of their own?  On Friday morning I posted this question on Facebook.  I asked: “What are some of the things that push people out of ‘polite’ society? For example: the man who gets fired from his high-profile job and finds that no one will return his phone calls? Or the woman whose cancer diagnosis makes it hard for people to know what to say, so they begin to avoid her? Failure, illness…what else?”  And then I waited for the answers.

The first one came within minutes: “Becoming a religious wacko will do it. By which I mean—falling so in love with Jesus and being so intoxicated by the Spirit that everything else in this fallen world seems dark and drab.”

The next person wrote: “Divorce.”

A few minutes later someone wrote: “So many things will [push you outside the circle]. Grief or loss come to mind foremost.”

Another wrote: “Insecurity, self doubt”

An old college friend added: “Becoming a widow/widower or being divorced…  Losing a child due to illness or miscarriage… Telling your friends/family/coworkers that you are gay.”

Someone wrote: “Drug addiction/alcohol abuse.”Bottom of Form

Another added: “Having a disability or being disfigured in an accident.”

Someone wrote: “Depression.”

Another added: “Being a trauma survivor with all the challenges that linger on for years.”

Someone wrote: “Marrying a person of another race.”

Another wrote a long post that began with the words: “Society’s intolerance of introverts.”

Someone wrote: “Extended illness,” and another agreed, writing: “The world gets tired of dealing with a person’s infirmity.”

Someone else wrote: “Divorce.”

The next person wrote: “Divorce and being gay.”

Someone wrote a longer post about the challenges of mental illness.

Someone wrote: “A child with behavioral problems. That has isolated us for years now.”

Someone wrote: “When you make a horrible mistake and you think you can’t be forgiven.”

Another added: “Poverty. Your life is going well. Then, boom. Medical event, loss of job, divorce, economy, etc. It’s amazing when poverty or loss of status strikes you. Your circle of friends or acquaintances shrink. Downright crater. You learn fast who your REAL friends are.”

A pastor wrote: “When you leave a church and people think you did something wrong.”

A church member wrote: “Gender transitioning.”

Someone mentioned the stigma of suicide and said she left church for more than ten years after no one reached out to her after her father’s death.

Someone wrote: “Being a felon. Even for non-violent offenses.”

Someone else mentioned the awkward pause in a workplace conversation when you say anything that sounds too Christian.

Another wrote: “Shame or self-pity due to not being able to measure up intellectually, financially, family circumstances, etc.”

There were more: people talked about aging, Alzheimer’s, grieving, loss of a spouse, loss of a child, loss of hearing, leaving a promising career to care for your children, disability, addiction, coming out, and again divorce, which was mentioned a half dozen times in that thread.  One person wrote: “When you get divorced, no one brings casseroles!” which made me think we need to start a new ministry.

I hope I’ve given you enough examples to convince you that people get pushed out of polite society by all sorts of things.  It’s as if there’s this place at the center of the circle for people who are bright, young, attractive, healthy, happily married, gainfully employed, with 2.4 perfect children, and then there are the rest of us, somewhere outside the circle, wondering how we got there.  But here’s the good news: Jesus is outside the circle, too.  If you look hard enough you can almost see him, poking around in the darkness, looking for people who have been pushed out of polite society, finding those whose hearts are still good, picking them up, brushing them off, and bringing them back to the center of the circle.  At the end of today’s Gospel lesson he stands beside Zacchaeus and says, “Today salvation has come to this house, for he too is a Son of Abraham.”  And then he says, “For the Son of Man came to seek and save the lost.”

And that’s the end of the story.  There’s Zacchaeus, restored to his rightful place in the community.  But there’s no guarantee he will stay there.  There’s no promise that the people who pushed him out the first time won’t do it again.  And maybe that’s why Jesus felt the need to create a new community, one he called the Kingdom of God, where everyone would be welcome, no matter what.  In his thinking it would be a place where you didn’t have to be perfect; you only had to be human.

Sometimes I meet people who ask me, “Do you think I would be welcome in your church?”  And I look them up and down, wondering what kind of reception they would get.  These are good-hearted people for the most part.  They want to come to church and I want to say yes, but I have to be honest: some of them might be hard to accept.  So, here’s what I do: I say yes anyway, and then I hope and pray that they will be accepted, that this church will be for them the kind of community Jesus had in mind, the one he called the Kingdom of God, where everyone is welcome, no matter what.  And sometimes I picture Jesus himself standing there beside them, introducing them to the congregation at the end of the service and saying, “Today, salvation has come to this house, because this one, too, is a child of God.”

—Jim Somerville © 2022

The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

Luke 18:9-14

 He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector…”

 For nearly three months now we have been on the road with Jesus, walking with him through the Gospel of Luke as he makes his way to Jerusalem, the city where he will suffer and die.  But along the way he has been teaching his disciples everything they will need to know when he is no longer with them and as his modern-day disciples we’ve been listening in, learning as we go.  Recently Jesus has started telling parables: the parable of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin; the parable of the Dishonest Manager; the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus; the parable of the Persistent Widow.  He seems to believe that the lessons contained in these short, memorable stories will be an essential part of his disciples’ formation, and possibly ours as well, but those lessons aren’t always easy to discern.

One of my favorite New Testament scholars refers to the parables as riddles, and that’s not a bad way to think about them.  Riddles are verbal puzzles.  You have to think about them, you have to figure them out.  For example: “What has many keys but doesn’t open a single door?”  A piano.  “What is more useful once it is broken?”  An egg.  “What is small and brown, has a head and a tail, but no legs?”  A penny.^[i]  You see?  Some of the parables are like that, like riddles that have to be figured out (the one about the Dishonest Manager comes to mind; I’m still trying to solve that one).  But others are more like jokes in the way they upset our expectations.  For example: I’ve enjoyed some of the “Dad Jokes” I’ve seen on TikTok, where two men sit on a dock and try to make each other laugh.  One says, “I went to the bookstore yesterday and saw a book that said, ‘How to solve 50 percent of your problems.’  So I bought two.”  His friend says: “If 666 is all evil, then 25.8069758 is the root of all evil.”  He says: “I ate a kid’s meal at McDonald’s today.  His mom got really angry.”^[ii]

Jokes like that set you up to expect one thing, and then they deliver a “punch line” you just didn’t expect.  Some of the parables work like that.  This one, for example, from Luke 18, the one about the Pharisee and the Tax Collector.  In fact it may be the best example of a parable that sets you up to expect one outcome and then delivers another.  Because when Jesus said, “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one of them a Pharisee and the other a tax collector,” everyone in his original audience would have expected him to say that the Pharisee went home justified. The Pharisees were the best people anyone knew in those days: they were the solid, hard-working, church-going citizens of First Century Israel.  As the Pharisee in this parable says: “I’m not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers.  I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.”  I wish I had a church full of people just like that!  Tax collectors, on the other hand, were the worst people anyone knew, because they had betrayed their fellow Israelites and gone to work for the Roman government.  Not only did they not love their neighbors, they taxed their neighbors, and always seemed to find a way to hit them up for a little extra.  If their neighbors wouldn’t pay they would send someone around to beat the money out of them.  They didn’t have many friends, but when you’re filthy rich, who cares?

So, when Jesus told this parable for the first time, when he said, “A Pharisee and a tax collector went up to the temple to pray,” the people who were listening must have nudged each other and said, “This is going to be a good one!”  The very idea of a tax collector going up to the temple was laughable, and the thought that he was going there to pray was funnier still.  “What’s he going to pray for?” they must have wondered.  “A tax increase?”  So, what Jesus said about the Pharisee wouldn’t have surprised them at all.  Of course he was a good person.  Of course he tithed and fasted.  But what Jesus said about the tax collector would have shocked them to the soles of their sandals.  He called himself a sinner?  He asked God to have mercy?  What kind of tax collector is that?

Well, it’s exactly the kind of tax collector we’ve come to expect, because we’ve heard this joke a hundred times.  It doesn’t shock us anymore; it doesn’t upset our expectations.  When Jesus says, “A Pharisee and a tax collector went up to the temple to pray” we know exactly who is going to come home justified, which means that this parable doesn’t work for us anymore, if it ever did.  We have come to think of Pharisees in the way Luke describes them at the beginning of this parable: as those who “trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.”  We don’t expect them to come home from the temple justified; we expect them to come home condemned.  So, I’m wondering if there is any way we can adapt this parable so it works for us.  I’m wondering if we can learn to have some sympathy for this poor Pharisee.  And the best way I’ve found is to think of my dear mother, because while she was one of the very best people I have ever known, she sometimes regarded others with contempt.  I’ve spent years trying to figure out why.

I think it comes down to this: that she grew up in a home where she wasn’t completely sure of her father’s love.  She used to tell a story about having a nightmare when she was sixteen and coming to her parents’ room where her mother invited her to get in bed with them.  A little odd for a sixteen-year-old girl, but as she snuggled in between them she felt loved and accepted in a way she rarely did otherwise.  And when she woke up in the morning she felt “healed” of an eating disorder that had bothered her for years.  She said, “I used to sneak into the pantry and gobble down anything I could find, but after that night I didn’t feel the need anymore.”  She felt loved; accepted.

But later on in life she wasn’t always sure of God’s love, and I think it stemmed from those early experiences of insecurity.  So, she tried to be the very best person she could be.  She tried to be deserving of God’s love.  She would prop her Bible up on the kitchen windowsill while she was washing the dishes and turn the pages with wet, soapy fingers.  You could always spot her Bible in our house because those wrinkled pages made it twice as thick.  And she would pray without ceasing—well, she had to; she was the mother of six boys; there was always something to pray about.  She would visit with the poor people who came to our house looking for my dad, and she would help him deliver food boxes to them at Christmas.  She started a clothes closet where she charged ten cents per item and kept most of the county in decent clothes.  She was a good woman, a good person, as I said, one of the best I have ever known.  But she did have this tendency to look around and compare herself with others, and when she did she would often judge them unfavorably.

Why?  Because she wanted to be sure that her heavenly father would judge her favorably.  So, she would look around at what this neighbor or that one was doing and say, “Humph!  That doesn’t seem very Christian.”  She would put others down in order to lift herself up.  “I might not be perfect,” she would say, “but at least I’m not like so-and-so.”  I always cringed when she did that, partly because I was so often on the receiving end of her judgment, but also because it seems like the very thing Jesus condemns in this parable, which he told to some who “trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.”  Now I see that it may have come out of an old insecurity, that my mother may have wondered if her Heavenly Father loved her in the same way she used to wonder if her earthly father loved her, and she wanted to be sure she was accepted by being the very best person she knew how to be, and by looking around to make sure she was at least a little better than others.

If I read this parable with my mother in mind, and with some understanding of her old insecurities, I find that I can begin to have some sympathy for this Pharisee.  Maybe he just wasn’t sure that the Heavenly Father loved him.  Maybe he wanted to prove to him that he was worthy.  So he fasted twice a week.  He tithed.  And when he looked around he could see that he was better than a lot of people, better than thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even this tax collector.

Let’s talk about him for a minute.

If he was anything like the rest of the tax collectors in Israel at that time then he was a superlative sinner: one who had sold his soul to the evil Roman Empire, and defrauded his righteous Jewish neighbors over and over again: he deserved the worst punishment he could get.  But this tax collector seems to know that.  He isn’t trying to justify himself, that is, he isn’t trying to “make himself right.”  He knows he is wrong, and that he has done wrong, and if he is ever going to get right someone else is going to have to do it for him.  Which is an important thing to understand.  One of our problems as Americans is that we are so independent.  We seem to think we should be able to do everything for ourselves.  And yet there are some things we can’t, and getting right with God is one of them.

In my house these days there is a place where we change our grandchildren’s diapers.  It’s a foam pad covered in soft cotton fabric that sits on top of the dryer.  It’s got a little safety belt on it so the children won’t roll off.  But that’s where Christy and I put them when they need to be changed and here’s the wonderful thing about them: they know they can’t do it for themselves.  They can’t change their own diapers, although I wouldn’t put it past Leo to try.  If he does, at two years old, I’m pretty sure he will make a mess of it.  But his three-month-old sister, Vivi, would never attempt it.  She doesn’t even seem to know when she needs a diaper change.  Christy and I do; we can tell right away.  And so we put her on that changing pad, strap her in, and go to work, and she just looks up at us and grins.

I don’t mean to be indelicate.  I apologize for talking about such things during a Sunday morning worship service.  But maybe you can see how it relates to the question of dealing with our sin.  We might be independent; we might think we can do everything for ourselves; but we can’t do that for ourselves.  We will mess it up every time.  This tax collector seems to know that.  He seems to understand that he needs some help.  So, he goes to the helping place.  He goes “up to the temple to pray.”  And when he gets there he goes to the darkest corner he can find.  He doesn’t want to be seen.  He doesn’t even look up to heaven, but instead stands there, beating his breast and saying, “God have mercy on me, a sinner!”

Good for him. Because God is the one who can have mercy on sinners, and who does.  He not only does it, he loves to do it.  So you don’t have to put it off until the last possible moment, you don’t have to spend your life trying, and failing, to save yourself.  You can say, when you wake up in the morning, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner!”  And you can say, when you go to bed at night, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner!”  It’s no harder than a two-year-old knowing that he needs a diaper change and it may be the reason Jesus said, “Unless you turn and become like children you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”^[iii]  You’ve got to realize that you can’t do this on your own.

“Two men went up to the temple to pray,” Jesus says.  One of them was an insecure Pharisee who wasn’t sure that God loved him, so he did everything he could to earn God’s love, but there were still plenty of times when he wasn’t sure it was enough.  The other was a tax collector who knew exactly how sinful he was, who knew he didn’t have a chance of saving himself, that if it was ever going to happen God was going to have to do it.  “I tell you this man, rather than the other one, went home justified,” Jesus says.

This man went home changed.

It’s not much of a joke, not in our way of thinking, but it does upset our expectations.  Who gets saved?  The one who knows he’s a sinner.  The one who isn’t afraid to ask.  Who doesn’t?  The one who may be the best person you know.  The one who thinks of himself as righteous.  It’s not much of a joke, and it’s not much of a riddle, but it ends with something that sounds like the answer to a riddle: “All who exalt themselves will be humbled,” Jesus says, “and all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

I think my mother figured that out in the end.  In the last years of her life she would often say, “I’m not good enough to get to heaven, not on my own; I’m just going to hang on to Jesus’ coattails.”  “Yes,” I thought.  “That’s it!  None of us is good enough to get to heaven, but Jesus is, and if we hang on to his coattails we will surely get there.”

When my mother died her hands were just like this (fists clenched).  I believe she was holding on tight to the Love that would not let her go.

—Jim Somerville © 2022

[i] From a website called “Classic Riddles” (https://www.riddles.com/classic-riddles).

[ii] From @loganlisle on TikTok. #dadjokes and #doktok.

[iii] Matthew 18:3.