Clarification of Motives

 

March 29, 2024 – Good Friday

Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9; John 18:1-19:42

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Mixed motives are a part of life, and they’re not always bad. Of course I want my son to hit the ball over the fence so that he will feel his own sense of accomplishment, but is it wrong for me also to want that, at least a little bit, to justify all the time his mother and I have spent taking him to practice? When my daughter does well on a test we studied for together, am I allowed to feel at least a small measure of pride that her good grade is effectively her teacher’s way of complimenting me on my excellent parenting skills? And, when that driver who cut me off a few miles back gets pulled over by a state trooper, must I only be thankful that a dangerous driver is now forced to slow down, or can I celebrate the comeuppance that he got because it feels so good?

When it comes to the death of Jesus, it’s hard to hide our true motives in the shadow of the cross, but that doesn’t mean that the reason he was killed is perfectly clear. Ultimately, the evidence points to a state-sponsored execution of an insurrectionist. The cross was a method of execution used by the Roman Empire to deter other would-be rebels or runaway slaves from even thinking about causing trouble. “This is what Rome does to any who dare rise against it,” the cross declared in its public display of shameful brutality. And the sign that Pilate put on the cross—“The king of the Jews”—leaves no doubt that the forces that drove the nails into his hands and feet were the forces that sought to preserve the power of empire.

But, if Jesus were executed as a would-be king of the Jewish people, he didn’t look much like one, did he? On Palm Sunday, Jesus rode into the capital city to admirers’ shouts of “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!,” but he didn’t ride into town on the back of a mighty steed, as a proper king might have, but on the back of a donkey. Have you ever ridden a donkey? They’re reliable and gentle, but they don’t get you anywhere very fast, and you don’t get a lot of compliments as you lumber along. Five hundred years earlier, when the prophet Zecheriah foretold the messianic king’s arrival on such a lowly beast, it was a reminder that the military might of chariots and war-horses hadn’t been able to protect God’s people from disaster. Only when God had delivered them with God’s own might would they dwell in such peace that their king need not wield a sword. There was no way this donkey-mounted Jesus could threaten the power of Rome.

Even when accusations were officially levied against Jesus, it took the religious leaders who brought him to the governor’s headquarters quite a while to get to the subject of political insurrection. “What accusation do you bring against this man?” Pilate asked them. They answered in a way that almost dodged the question: “If this man were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you.” At first Pilate, suspicious of their motives, dismissed their claims and told them to take Jesus and judge him by their own law, but, when the leaders insisted that he had done something deserving death, Pilate naturally assumed that he was responsible for some sort of rebellion, but even the Roman governor responsible for maintaining order in the province of Judea had a hard time seeing it.

“Are you the king of the Jews?” Pilate asked his Jewish prisoner. But Jesus effectively denied it—at least in the sense that Pilate had in mind. “My kingdom is not from this world,” Jesus said to him. “If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over…But, as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” I’ve always heard those words as an enigmatic proclamation of Jesus’ other-worldly kingship, but, to the ears of a Roman governor, they’re also as much a denial that Jesus and his followers represented any violent threat against the empire.

Trying to placate the authorities, Pilate had the prisoner flogged, but that wasn’t good enough. The soldiers put a crown of thorns upon his head and dressed him up in a royal purple robe, mock-saluting him as a pathetic excuse for a king, but still Pilate was unconvinced. To look upon this powerless prisoner was to see a broken man. There was nothing threatening about him. “Look, I am bringing him out to you to let you know that I find no case against him,” Pilate said. But the people refused to let Pilate off the hook. “Crucify him, crucify him!” they shouted, more interested in Jesus’ death than the Roman governor. “We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die because he has claimed to be the Son of God.”

Finally, the truth comes out. We are not interested in crucifying Jesus simply because he threatens our empire. We want to kill him because he threatens our God.

But neither our motives nor those of the gospel writers are quite that straightforward. By the time the gospel accounts were written down, anti-Semitic and pro-Roman influences had shaped the text to blur the lines between the specific religious leaders who came against Jesus and the Jews who were Jesus’ fellow descendants of Abraham. Within a generation of Jesus’ death, before the these sacred texts were preserved in their final form, Christianity had begun to align itself with the Gentile world as a newfound rivalry with Judaism became hostile and violent. There is no doubt that, in the retelling of the story, Pilate’s role in Jesus’ death is ameliorated and the Jewish crowd’s anger is exaggerated, but the truth that Jesus’ rejection and death were as much a product of religious zealotry as political expediency is not an anti-Semitic trope but a universal problem of human nature. 

The thought that we belong to a humble God whose love for our enemies is as real and powerful as God’s love for us is threatening enough to make us want to kill Jesus, too. 

Jesus may have been executed as an enemy of Rome, but he was brought to trial by those who could not stand for a religious leader to speak of a God who welcomed sex workers, tax collectors, and other notorious sinners to the divine banqueting table. He was rejected first by those whose ability to stay in power was undermined by Jesus’ teaching that the poor and the disabled have as much a right to be called children of God as anyone else. The King of kings may have been nailed to the cross by officers of the empire, but he was led there by those who refused to believe that God’s Son would use humble, gentle, non-violent means to bring God’s reign to the earth.

It’s always easier to believe in a God whose plan of salvation matches our own plans for our lives and the world, but that’s not how God works. We can accept a God whose vulnerable love wraps its tender arms around us, but what happens when we realize that that love also belongs to the people in this world whom we find hardest to love? What happens when the one who comes to save us reveals that he also came to save them as well? What happens when the savior we’ve been waiting for comes to us riding on a donkey instead of driving an M1 Abrams tank? The answer is the cross.

We come to the foot of the cross to behold a God whose love has no limit and to confront our own complicity in the rejection of that love. Paradoxically, the further we stretch God’s limitless love in our minds, the harder it is for us to accept it because, eventually, we are forced to confront the truth that God’s unconditional love is given to exactly that person for whom God’s love threatens us the most, unnerves us the most, enrages us the most. The good news of Good Friday is that, even though we don’t have the power to imagine a God who loves us enough to die for us and, in so doing, embraces the whole world with God’s love, that’s exactly how God loves you and me. And that’s how God saves each one of us—with a love that defies our motivations and transcends our expectations. 

The King We Need

March 24, 2024 – Palm Sunday, Year B

Isaiah 50:4-9a; Philippians 2:5-11; Mark 14:1-15:47

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

Have you ever asked for something, received exactly what you asked for, realized it wasn’t what you thought it would be, and then regretted asking for it in the first place?

Last week, as our family drove from Colorado into New Mexico on our way to Amarillo, Texas, we started seeing the signs: “Free 72oz. Steak.” Every few dozen miles, we’d see another sign: “Free 72oz. Steak.” You may have heard of the Big Texan 72-ounce steak challenge. If you can eat a 72-ounce steak, shrimp cocktail, baked potato, salad, roll, and butter in under an hour, it’s free. If not, you’re out $72.00. Either way, you’re a loser.

Somewhere along the way, one of my children asked if we could go there for dinner. “I could eat that!” this child boldly exclaimed. Yeah right. If I had known at the time that this would become a sermon illustration, we probably would have gone so that I could tell you first-hand what happens when someone asks for something, gets exactly what they asked for, and then regrets it almost instantly, but I couldn’t see that far ahead. Instead, we’ll just have to imagine together how nauseating that experience would be.

In a way, though, we live through that same wild swing of emotions every year on Palm Sunday. “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,” we proclaim at the beginning of our worship. “Hosannah in the highest!” we shout in words of jubilation. But, by the time we get to the passion narrative, our cry has become, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” We asked for a king, and a king we did receive, but he wasn’t the king we were hoping for, and so we turned against him.

When Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the street was lined with people who had come to see their king. Word had spread among the people that God’s anointed had come among them and that this was the time when he would bring them victory. “This is the one who has come in the name of the Lord!” they said to one another. “This is the one who will usher in the kingdom of his ancestor David! This is the one who will defeat our enemies! This is the one who will restore the throne of God’s chosen king!”

Jesus is the King of kings and Lord of lords, but he isn’t the sort of monarch the people were hoping for. Instead of claiming his rightful place in the temple, he turned over the tables of the money changers and brought the nation’s worship to a halt. Instead of inciting rebellion among the people, he taught them to forgive their enemies so that they, too, might be forgiven. Instead of consolidating power among the religious and political leaders of the day, he openly challenged their authority and criticized them as self-seeking and faithless. Instead of praising the rich and powerful and promising his followers unqualified success, he celebrated the poor and assured his disciples that only hardship awaited them. No wonder the people in power turned against him. No wonder his disciples deserted him. No wonder a member of his inner circle betrayed him.

How quickly the attitude of the crowd changes from celebration to rejection when they learn that Jesus hasn’t come to give them the kingdom they expected! How quickly our admiration becomes condemnation when we realize that it’s our power, our comfort, our wealth, and our status that the King of kings has come to overthrow!

But not everyone in the story turns against him and runs away: “There were also women looking on from a distance; among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome. These used to follow him and provided for him when he was in Galilee; and there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem.” In a world that celebrates power and legitimizes greed, it is the women whose faithfulness is heralded by the gospel. Their witness reminds us what it means to seek not the kingdom of our own desires but the reign of God that sets the world free from its slavery to sin. 

We don’t need a savior who crowns our desire for power, victory, and success. We need a savior who rescues us from it. And thanks be to God that that’s exactly who Jesus is. The good news of Palm Sunday is that our flawed expectations cannot thwart God’s plan of salvation. No matter what king we wish to receive, the one we are given is exactly the one we need—the one who challenges our strengths by glorifying our weaknesses. That is the way of the cross, and it is the way of our salvation. Our thirst for worldly power has nailed Jesus to the hard wood of the cross, but God has used the very worst impulses within us as the very means of our forgiveness. 

We may not have received the king we were hoping for, but, even without realizing it, Jesus is the king we asked God to give us, and, thankfully, he’s the savior we need most of all.

Our Daily Bread

 

March 10, 2024 – The Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year B

Numbers 21:4-9; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon is available here. Video can be seen here.

Is there any such thing as bad bread? From the nutritionally vacuous white bread to the hardiest whole-grain varieties, just about any bread will do. Yes, I know it can get moldy, but you can usually cut off the green edges. Yes, I know it can grow stale, but that just means it’s time for croutons, breadcrumbs, French toast, or even bread pudding. Although bread can go bad, it all starts off pretty good. As a child, I didn’t like the end-piece or the heel, and I preferred pillowy soft Wonder Bread to the more healthful stuff my mother bought, but, these days, it’s hard to find a bread I don’t like. 

But, after wandering in the desert for almost forty years, the people of God had had enough of the bread that God had given them. “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?” they grumbled against God and against Moses. “For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food!” Literally, “Our very souls loathe wretched food,” implying, perhaps, that the Israelites had eaten so much manna for so long that they wretched or gagged at the mere thought of it. I suppose four decades of eating the same thing would make any of us a little irritable.

But God wasn’t having it: “The Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died.” The poisonous snakes—sometimes translated “fiery serpents,” presumably because their venom felt like burning to those who were bit—were God’s response to the people’s ingratitude. Apparently, taking for granted God’s heavenly provision made God angry enough to teach them a deadly lesson. But what is this strange story supposed to teach us?

The manna from heaven was always designed to be a test. In Exodus 16, shortly after the Israelites had escaped captivity in Egypt, the people ran out of food. So they grumbled against Moses and his brother Aaron, saying, “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” Back then, God heard the people’s complaint, and God said to Moses, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day. In that way I will test them, whether they will follow my instruction or not.”

The next morning, when the Israelites awoke, there was a layer of dew all around the camp. When the dew lifted, a fine flaky substance was left behind, “as fine as frost on the ground.” The people asked, “What is it?”—a phrase which in Hebrew sounds like “manna.” “It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat,” Moses explained to them. “This is what the Lord has commanded: ‘Gather as much of it as each of you needs, [one measure] to a person according to the number of persons, all providing for those in their own tents.” In other words, the people were told to gather as much as each person needed—no more, no less. If they gathered too much, by the next morning, the excess had become foul-smelling and worm-infested, unless it was the sabbath. On the day before the Sabbath, the people were told to gather two portions per person because the manna did not appear on the sacred day of rest. And, if they forgot to gather a double-portion, they went hungry for a day.

The rhythm of receiving, gathering, and depending on God’s provision, which was literally their daily bread, was itself a test. Each day, God gave them everything they needed, but there was no opportunity to horde leftovers, to commodify God’s bounty, or to leverage their blessings to get ahead. The test God gave them, therefore, was not a test of survival but one of faithfulness. When everyone has exactly what he or she needs and no one must struggle to survive, there is no way to confuse our accomplishments with God’s generosity. In a manna economy, people learn to depend on God each day, and the test is whether we will be satisfied with the portion we have been given.

That’s why the people’s grumbling in Numbers 21 invokes such a strong response from God. Their complaints are not merely a reflection of their “menu fatigue” but also of their collective refusal to accept what God had given them. “There is no food and no water,” the Israelites claimed, shoving the manna away like a dissatisfied toddler, refusing even to consider it as real food. “We would rather die than eat what God has given us,” they effectively said. “We would rather be slaves in Egypt than free people who belong to God.”

In effect, God gave them what they asked for, though it came in the form of poisonous snakes rather than starvation. When interpreting this strange passage, the rabbis teach that God sent serpents upon the people because a snake was the first creature who slandered God.[1] Because the people had spoken falsely against God’s goodness, they were to be punished by the original slanderer. But there is more to this punishment than the fiery serpents that bit the people. In the reading of this story, we cannot separate the punishment from its remedy.

The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed. But, instead of taking the serpents away, as the people asked, God devised an even stranger means for their salvation. “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole,” God said to Moses, “and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” In so doing, the people were saved not because they looked upon the cast bronze image of a snake but, as the rabbis teach, because they lifted up their eyes to heaven.[2] A symbol of death became the window through which God’s people looked for God and God’s salvation. And, thus, by returning to their dependence on God’s sustenance, the people returned to their faith.

When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he taught us to ask our heavenly Father for our daily bread. Every time we gather as God’s family, we ask God to give us this day the sustenance we need to make it until tomorrow—no more, no less. Our test is no different from that of the Israelites in the wilderness. Will we recognize that God has given us enough, and will we be satisfied with what we have been given? In an economy like ours, which rewards the accumulation of wealth and punishes those who have nothing, it is perilously easy to confuse our accomplishments with God’s generosity and fail the test that we have been given. When it comes to remaining faithful to God by depending solely on God’s daily provision, we are snakebit.

But there’s hope, although it might not be the answer we want. We want God to take away our struggles and hardships, even when they are the problems of our own making. God hears our prayers and beckons us to return, but the window through which we gaze upon God and God’s mercy is, again, the symbol of our own death—nothing less than the cross of Christ. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” Jesus taught us, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”

We look upon Jesus, crucified for our sins, in order that we might lift our eyes up to heaven. The cross is a sign of our failure to believe in God and trust in God’s sustenance. It is the embodiment of our greed and our self-indulgent ways. It is the ultimate sign of our refusal to accept what God has given us and our decision to choose our own death and slavery to sin rather than the freedom and abundant life God chooses for us. And yet that same cross becomes the means of our salvation—the window into our forgiveness, our redemption, and our eternal life. 

The hope that God gives us is not a denial of our failures but our salvation from them. We must journey through the death of the cross in order to enter everlasting life. We must look upon the one who was crucified for our sins that we might be forgiven. And, by returning to our dependence on God’s sustenance—on God’s saving grace—we return to our faith—the faith by which we are saved. Here, we receive the true bread that came down from heaven to give life to the world, even God’s Son, Jesus Christ, our savior, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

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1. See, for example, Bamidbar Rabbah 19:22.

2. See Ein Yaakov (Glick Edition), Rosh Hashanah 3:1.