The King: The Rule of Self-Giving

Preached Sunday March 14, 2010

Scripture Readings: Psalm 61; Matthew 16:21-28

A husband gave a lot of thought to find some way to tell his wife how much he loved her. One night, after dinner, he got down on his knee and recited a poem he had written especially for her. He told her how he would climb high mountains to be near her, swim wide rivers, cross burning deserts, and sing love songs to her in the moonlight. She smiled all through this, and when he finished his poem, she asked, “Does this mean you’ll do the dishes for me tonight?” (#789, “1001 More Humorous Illustrations”, Michael Hodgin, ed.)

Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself.” (Matthew 16:24) It needs to be remembered, right away, that denying oneself does not mean that it is an inherently good thing to go around looking for ways to make your life hard and make yourself unhappy.

In a way, self-denial is a requirement for love; and love is the thing we all believe will make us happy. When Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself,” it was as if he said, “If anyone would truly love me, he must deny himself.” Self-denial, self-giving, has to do with being committed to love.



I’ve told you about an old friend of mine who gave me the secret of how his marriage has lasted. He told me that he had learned to always ask himself this question, “What do I need to do to make this work?” He didn’t ask himself, “What does my wife need to do to make this work?” He asked himself the question.

Knowing them both, I would say that the both of them have asked this question and shaped their lives accordingly.

They are like the unity candles in a wedding: their individual candles continue to burn, and the unity candle (that stands for their becoming one) still burns. I think that the repeated pattern, year after year, after year, after year, of a husband and wife self-giving together, creates patterns of thankfulness, and patterns of surprise and amazement, and patterns of strength.

In Christ, God gives us his own pattern of self-giving. By the time I was a teenager, when there were things that I agonized over, things that made me frustrated, or angry, or ashamed, I would think about these things in the night. As I went over, and over, and over them in my mind, it seemed as though the Lord would show me his wounds, and his dying for me, and his rising from the dead.



He denied himself for me so that I could deny myself by realizing my need for his forgiveness. I could deny myself by not feeding on the things that ate at me. I could deny myself by facing things that were hard, and by committing myself to do things that I didn’t know how to do yet, and without knowing where those things would take me. The Lord seemed to offer me a pattern of his self-giving for me and my self-giving for him.

Even though the life of Jesus on earth and his death on the cross are way back in history, they are not just history. They are not really passed. They are not over. Every day, every year, if you can look at Jesus, and his, cross and his rising, you will see more and more of it. It will seem to grow. It will have more and more to do with you, and your life, and the world around you.

If self-giving is a matter of love, you ask, “How can I live my love for Jesus in this life he has given me?” Then you look at your life. You look at your family, your community, your church, your neighbors, your world. You look at the problems, the needs, the potential; in people, and in this world we live in. Self-denial or self-giving is a matter of looking at all of this, or at one part in particular, and asking, “What must I do to make this work?”



Remember the story I told you at the start. If you honestly pray to know how to give of yourself the answer may surprise you. You may find that washing the dishes is harder than climbing a mountain (after all, you may like climbing mountains), and that the dishes are the real place of self-giving. The hardest thing of all may be to say the words “I’m sorry” or “I forgive you.” The hardest thing may be to stand for something that no one else around you is willing to stand for. It may be to plug away at something that no one else seems to care about.

We have hardly begun to think about what this self-giving means. Jesus’ words are shocking words. Jesus’ words are about death, and about where true life comes from. “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.”

One reason why it is particularly hard for Christians to take in these words and really face them is that we take them for granted. They are too familiar to us. In our own strange way we have turned Jesus and the cross into a story, instead of remembering that they are real.

The disciples knew Jesus as a real person. And they had watched people die on real crosses.

On one hand they didn’t hear Jesus say that he would rise again. They were too shocked to hear. And, if they did hear him, it didn’t matter because they wouldn’t know what he meant. They just heard the word “killed.”

To them, Jesus was saying that he would be defeated and killed. He would fail and die, and they would fail with him. If they wanted to follow him they could expect crosses of their own to die on.

It is true, even today, in many parts of the world, that if you decide to follow Jesus, if you are open about it, if you are truly faithful, you may be killed for your faith. This is true in Iran, and Iraq, and Pakistan, and India, and Laos, and North Korea, and many other parts of the world.

If following Jesus is about love, then it is about a love so passionate that you are willing to die for it. You are willing to die for Jesus, even though you live under conditions that make dying for Jesus highly unlikely. And, you know, if you are willing to die for Jesus, why not be willing to be self-giving out of love for him for and others, in a hundred smaller ways every day? What’s holding you back?
This is why Jesus talked about the judgment and how to save your life by losing it, or save your soul by losing it. (Soul and life are the exact, same word, in the Greek, in these verses.) Jesus brought this up in the context of his laying down his own life, and our being willing to lay down our own.

The English word “passion” comes from the Latin word for suffering. We think of passion as an all-consuming love, and it really can be; can’t it? Passion can be a love that nothing can stop; a love that is willing to give anything and everything.

The disciples were afraid of Jesus being vulnerable. They were afraid of Jesus failing because the price of pursuing his calling would be too high. It would cost too much.

They expected a Messiah who would bring about the kingdom of God on earth by means of the successful use and management of power. The kingdom of God would be the product of God’s power. Power would overcome their enemies.

They were forgetting a way that the kingdom could work without power as human beings understand it. By the animal sacrifices in the Old Testament, the people of Israel were taught that a life (in the form of a lamb or some other animal) offered in their behalf, represented healing and mercy, the grace of God, and a new life from God.

They did not realize that this was the most important law of the kingdom of God: the law of sacrifice or self-giving. The animal in the sacrifice was not self-giving, but the animal represented the God who is self-giving. (Imagine that! Imagine God as a lamb who took away the sins of the world!)



The self-giving of Jesus was the plan that would launch the kingdom of God. The self-giving of Jesus on the cross was the way that God would rule his people and remake the world.

Sin is anything in life that builds barriers against God, and others, and the goodness of this world, and life itself. Sin takes us out of God and out of real life. Sin plants death in our nature. God, in his passionate love, gave himself to death for our sins on the cross, to take sin and death away from us. He rose from the dead to give us a new life; and this life comes from him and from his sacrifice for us, so that sin and death have no hold over us if we receive him.

What has happened is that the self-giving of God has become our life. There is no other way for us to live anymore. And this is the way the kingdom of God works.

The self-giving of Jesus, on the cross, was not suffering imposed on Jesus. The self-giving of Jesus was absolutely natural for him, as God incarnate. This is the life of God. It was what our life was supposed to be like when we were first created in Adam and Eve, in God’s image. It is what we become again in Jesus.

But it really has always been this way. No one has ever been able to live without passion. No one has ever been able to live well without self-giving. To pour yourself into music of your own playing and singing; to play a sport; to marry with a marrying kind of love; to commit yourself to some ministry in the service of others, to raise children who face life with eagerness requires the forgetting of yourself and the surrender of your life. You have to die to yourself to live and give life to others.

Jesus said that there were some people standing by, and hearing him, who would live to see this kingdom of God succeed. They would see the Son of Man come in his kingdom.

And they did. They saw Jesus come in his kingdom when they saw him alive after he died on the cross and was buried. Jesus rose from the dead because the rule of the kingdom of God is self-giving.



When we come to the Lord’s Table, we come to the feast of self-giving. We see that this is where our life comes from, in Christ. We eat the food of self-giving because this is the food Jesus gives us to eat. He gives us himself.

We can go forth and live, even if it looks like it might kill us. And that would not be a failure even if it did.

That is life abundant, and that is the life that will never end. It is how we belong to Jesus who died, and rose for us, and brought us into his kingdom by the rule of self-giving.

The King: The Rule of Humility

Preached Sunday, March 7
Scripture Readings: Psalm 145; Matthew 15:21-28

One of the great points of the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman is that woman’s faith. In the end, Jesus told her, “Woman, you have great faith.” (15:28)

The strange thing about this story is that Jesus seemed to deliberately go out of his way to make it hard for her to have faith. At first he ignored her and gave her the silent treatment.

Next he told her that it wasn’t his mission to heal Gentiles, even though he had done it before. For instance, he had healed the servant of the Roman army officer. (8:5-13)

He talked to her about Gentiles being like dogs compared to the children of Israel. Were this mother and her little girl dogs? This was serious.



Not only was “dog” a common slur that the Jews used for non-Jews (at least for the ones who had invaded them, and lived among them where they didn’t belong). The word dog, when applied to a female of the human species, meant exactly what it means in English. In polite society it is an unspeakable word.

The truth is that something else was going on with that word dog: the “D” word. I’ll tell you about that later.



I would say that Jesus made this woman jump over some hurtles before he answered her prayer. But that image of jumping doesn’t fit, because you have to rise in order to leap hurtles.

Here it looks like Jesus was making the woman crawl. But she doesn’t crawl, either, because she seems to take to it, like to a battle of wits, and she wins that battle; or else Jesus lets her win. It is more like a limbo dance, like they did in the early 1960’s, bending over backwards to dance under a horizontal pole. The woman danced really low.

So, if Jesus was impressed by the Canaanite woman’s faith, it was a faith with a special quality. The quality of her faith was lowness. The special quality of her faith was humility.

In the Bible, faith is down to earth. It is honest. It is real. Faith is often very, very needy. Faith is humble.

And just as Jesus’ answer came as a result of some sort of conversation with the woman; faith is conversational. Faith is a conversation (communicating, listening, watching) with Jesus.

The woman started out shouting at Jesus. She wound up conversing with Jesus.

Faith is humble because, as with love, it is very much like Jesus. Jesus lived by a kind of faith on our behalf, in order to give us that faith as we receive newness of life from him. We can be faithful because Jesus was faithful, and because now he lives in us. And Jesus’ faith was a humble faith.

Matthew tells us that Jesus withdrew from the land of Israel for a little while. He went up into the non-Jewish territory (pagan territory) to the north, in the region of Tyre and Sidon, in what is now Lebanon.

Mark, in his retelling of the same story, tells us that Jesus, while he was up there, stayed in a house where he hoped to be undetected. (Mark 7:24) Mark also comments on Jesus’ attempt to be undetected as a failed attempt because, as Mark observes, “he could not be hid.”



Matthew tells us that “Jesus withdrew”, and this is something that Jesus simply did from time to time. (Matthew 14:13; Mark 1:35; 6:31) He would take off and disappear. He did this for his own renewal and his own recovery of strength and energy. He taught his disciples that they also needed to learn how to withdraw; how to rest and be renewed. We need rest and renewal, and faith needs to accept this need. This is how we let humility rule our faith.

Withdrawal is part of the life of faith. It is why faith is humble. Faith is honest, realistic, transparent. Faith includes having self-understanding (knowing oneself as one truly is, and being honest about what one needs) just as much as it is about understanding who God is: because faith is about the relationship between us; our relationship with the Lord and his relationship with us. Faith includes trusting that rest, and our need for rest, is a gift from God.

For Jesus withdrawing was a time for looking toward his Father and taking time for love. Jesus would surely think the thoughts we read in Psalm 145: “The Lord is faithful to all his promises, and loving toward all he has made. The Lord upholds all those who fall and lifts up all who are bowed down. The eyes of all look to you and you give them their food at the proper time.” (Psalm 145:13-15)

The proper time: there is a proper time for everything and so faith is not in a hurry. Faith can rest because it trusts God. Faith has enough self-knowledge to know that we are not indispensable. Or, if we are indispensable, faith puts even that in God’s hands. Faith knows how to rest. Faith plans to rest. It is like a taking a vacation.

The interesting thing about Jesus’ vacations is that they were almost never successful. Jesus was always found out and put to use. For Jesus to say, “Let’s go off by ourselves,” must have become something of a joke to the disciples (or at least to Jesus).

Our faith needs to be humble enough to rest, any way we can, when we need it. We need to take the time to be renewed, unless we think that we are better than Jesus who needed to rest.


The Psalm says, “I will meditate on your wonderful works.” (Psalm 145:5) Sometimes we do this, as Jesus did with his disciples, in the presence of those we love. Sometimes a place in the wilderness is best for enjoying God’s wonderful works (as when Jesus crossed to the far side of Galilee). Even a city (like the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon, on that particular failed vacation of Jesus) could be a place to rest.

Faith is humble because it knows how to come to the place where we end and where God begins.

This is the kind of faith that the Canaanite woman who came to Jesus had. At first all we see her doing is shouting, and shouting, and shouting; “Have mercy, have mercy!” This woman had no dignity, because she had come to the end of herself. She had forgotten herself, because she was full of love and full of fear for her little girl. She had been completely humbled by the experience of her daughter’s possession.

And this woman was raised, and was expected, to be dignified. Mark tells us that she was “a Greek born in Syrian Phoenicia.” (7:26) I think this is a way of saying that she was a member of the elite.

The common people in that part of the Roman Empire still spoke a Syrian dialect of Aramaic. It was a language similar to Hebrew, and not very different from the Galilean Aramaic dialect of Jesus and the disciples.

But this woman was no commoner. There was an upper class in that part of the world that was born speaking Greek and belonged to the culture of Athens and Rome. This woman was part of that upper class. In Tyre and Sidon, she could have gone to the theatre and to the gladiatorial games. She was one of those people, and Jesus was a Jewish peasant (albeit a very important peasant, because he had the potential of helping her daughter).

This woman knew the puzzling stories that were told in the eastern part of the Classical world, about the predictions that there would be a King of the Jews who would rule the world. He would be called “the Son of David” after the greatest Jewish king in history. She also had heard about Jesus, and what Jesus was able to do. She knew that Jesus could heal her daughter.

She also knew that Jesus was Jewish, and that the Jews were very picky about whom they associated with. She was afraid she might need to be very careful how she approached Jesus, if she wanted him to listen to her and do what she begged him to do. She would be very careful to call him “the Son of David”.

At the same time, the woman knew the strangest of the rumors about Jesus. She knew that this Jesus would talk to absolutely anyone, touch anyone, visit anyone, heal anyone. And this is why she went to him.

Knowing all of this went into her plan, and it worked. Jesus said: “Let it be done for you as you wish.” (15:28)

Her daughter was healed. But she was only able to get through it all because, in her love for her daughter, and in what she knew about Jesus, she came to the end of herself and the beginning of the Lord.

We are like children in a classroom where the lesson is going above our heads, and we are afraid to ask a question. That would be a loss of dignity. Faith means knowing that you must care about something, or you must be the advocate for someone; and (like the Canaanite woman) you can’t let silence, or rejection, or the loss of dignity stop you. You must come to the end of yourself and carry out your task; in work, or in service to others, or in prayer, or in ministry. That is faith under the rule of humility.

Now for the “D” word: the word dog was a vicious slur. The dogs in Jewish towns were vicious animals. They were nobody’s pets. They were wild scavengers that ate the garbage in the streets and in the dumps. They were ugly, nasty, dirty, and dangerous. To compare a person to a dog was an ultimate insult.

But the Romans and the Greeks were different. They had pet dogs: dogs for work, for hunting, and for pleasure. Popular writers of the day made fun of upper class women who owned little lap dogs and pampered them like children. Families owned dogs as pets and playmates for their children.



In Greek there was a word for dog, but that same word could be changed, just a little, and refer to a whole other kind of dog. It worked the same as our words for “dog” and “doggie”.

There is a world of difference between a dog and a doggie. This story of Jesus, the Canaanite woman, and the dog word is about the “doggies”. You might even say “puppies”.

All of a sudden Jesus the Jewish Messiah was talking about a dinner table in the casual part of a Greek home, where the children are present and their puppies are under the table. Of course the puppies belong. Of course they are part of the family. Of course they can be blest and fed.

“Jesus, I am so different from you. You are so much more than I am. I was afraid you might have called me a dog, but am I only your puppy after all?” I think it could have made that woman laugh when she joined in the joke: “Yes, Lord, but even the puppies eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” (15:27)

Faith is humble because the Lord has disarmed our old nature on the cross and given us a new name and nature. We have been changed from junkyard dogs to puppies at the table. The change is even funny, so the best we can do is to be able to laugh at ourselves. It is the Lord’s joke and ours.



The Psalm says: “The Lord is faithful to all his promises, and loving toward all he has made…The eyes of all look to you and you give them their food in due season.”
When we come to the end of ourselves, and to the beginning of God, we find ourselves again made new, and with a new name. Jesus was prepared to die on the cross to change our name and our nature so that we could come to his table and eat; sometimes as his puppies, but also as so much more; as real children of the kingdom of God.

The King: The Rule of Patience

SERMON: Preached February 28, 2010

Scripture readings – Psalm 139:1-24; Matthew 13:24-30 and 13:36-43

There is a saying that the Bible teaches us to love our neighbors and to love our enemies because they are often the very same people. This is what the parable of Jesus is about. The story of the wheat and the weeds is told from the point of view of any farmer and of anyone else who eats food. From the point of view of the farmer and the intelligent eater wheat and weeds are neighbors and enemies.



The weed in question is called “tares” in the King James Version of the Bible. I looked it up, and my books tell me that it is better known as “darnel” or “cockle”. It is apparently a grass that looks just like wheat until it heads out. Then it is very different.

And this weed is actually poisonous. Eating it will give you a sick, drunken feeling and, after eating enough of it, you may die.

This weed is common in the Middle East, and it was the common wisdom of traditional farmers there to let it alone until harvest. They collected and bundled it first, carried it out of the fields, stacked it up and burned it. Then they would harvest the wheat.

There are at least two threats posed by this weed. The first threat is competition. The more weeds you have, the less wheat you get. The issue is productivity and fruitfulness. The other threat is contamination. If you didn’t separate the two grains, the wheat would be contaminated with noxious, poisonous grain. It would hurt. It would sicken those who ate it during the year. And it would make next year’s crop much worse. This was serious.

The story Jesus told of the weeds in the field is a very simple story telling the common farming wisdom of the day. But the story was difficult for the disciples because Jesus used the simple story to tell them something that confused them. They knew that Jesus was telling them something that went against the common wisdom of how to relate to the people who might be considered the noxious weeds of the human race, or the weeds among God’s own people.

Jesus had called Matthew to be a disciple, and Matthew had been one of the noxious weeds of the human race. He had been a traitor, working for the hated Romans and their flunkies. It was hard for the others disciples to accept Matthew. In the beginning it made them sick, just seeing him there by their side. And they were the kind of people that Matthew had taught himself to hate. They had been weeds to Matthew just as he had been a weed to them. They really wanted to uproot each other.



The Jewish faith used the lessons of purity, and cleanness, and separateness to understand what it meant to have integrity as faithful people of God. In fact the scriptures taught them to do this. (Leviticus 15:31; 19:2; 20:22-24; and others) The Old Testament book of Leviticus says, “You shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed.” (19:19)

Jesus didn’t seem to take this separation seriously enough. Jesus deliberately touched a man with leprosy in order to heal him (Matthew 8:1-4) even though you were supposed to avoid touching a person with leprosy and would have to bathe if you did.

Well that was at least compassionate; except that if you knew someone who hadthe habit of touching contaminated and yucky people, you might not want to touch that person yourself. How could you know where Jesus had been? Jesus could have touched anyone or anything. He was just that way. By doing this he made himself contaminated to the righteous people around him.

And then Jesus had healed the servant of a centurion, a Roman army officer, and declared that this Roman had more faith than Jesus had seen among his own people. (Matthew 8:5-13) Jesus respected and praised a Roman dog for his faith. But Jesus’ people, and even the disciples, would have viewed the Romans as the noxious weeds of the human race.



The problem was much deeper than the disciples knew at the time, because (right under their noses) there was the problem of Judas Iscariot. Jesus had chosen Judas Iscariot to follow him as a disciple, just as he had chosen the rest of them. In the end, Judas was going to betray Jesus to the authorities, and make it easy for them to arrest Jesus, and crucify him.

And apparently Jesus chose Judas knowingly. Fairly early in their time together Jesus said a strange thing to them: “Have I not chosen twelve of you; and one a devil?” (John 6:70) Yet Jesus was gentle and polite to Judas to the every end. (Luke 22:48)

And yet again, if Jesus’ disciples had known this, to begin with, it would have shed a lot of light on this parable telling them that the wheat and the weeds must live together until the time of judgment comes.

All of this shows us the brilliance of the parables. They are very simple stories indeed; but there is nothing easy about them.

Let’s look at some of the lessons of the story of the weeds in the field.
There is the lesson of the enemy who comes by night with his poison seed. There are evil forces at work in the world we live in. There are people, and movements, and organizations, and nations that do dark things. But the very worst of the evil forces in this world is spiritual and invisible; and this power works under cover. This force is the enemy, the evil one, the devil.

It’s true. The Bible tells us that there is the Devil (who is also called Satan), and there are the minor devils, or demons, who serve him. (Revelation 12:9) In my own life I was directly attacked by one of them, one summer night when I was a teenager. Until that happened, I was not one of those people who gave the Devil much thought or took him very seriously. I wasn’t. I didn’t. But I was wrong and I was taken completely by surprise.

Mostly the devils work indirectly; through pride, and hate, and bitterness, and anger, and fear, and contempt, and greed, and jealousy, and laziness, and addiction, and lust, and the desire for control or glory. This indirect and invisible work is more than enough. These things cause war, and injustice, and tyranny, and deceit, and the corruption of innocence and decency, and the destruction of freedom. These things destroy marriages, and families, and churches, and communities, and nations, and civilizations, and perhaps a planet.

These forces even work in good and faithful people. These forces even work in godly people. The Pharisees themselves, who were so opposed to Jesus, loved God passionately.

In the Old Testament, Israel’s King David loved God passionately and, in the 139th Psalm, asked God: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me…” (139:23)



I think David’s anxiety and uncertainty came from the two voices that spoke from within him. There was the clear voice of faith. “You hem me in – behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.” (139:5-6) And there was the clear voice of hatred. “Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord, and abhor those who rise up against you? I have nothing but hatred for them; I count them my enemies.” (139:21-22) I think this confused David and made him wonder what was going on inside his own heart and mind.

Even in the Old Testament there is a difference between hating sin, and hating the person who sins. David himself did some horrible things, and needed the patient, faithful mercy of God, and of his own people. He needed God’s people to hate what he had done, but he also needed God’s people to not hate him. David’s actions were noxious, and weed-like, and he needed the good wheat of the children of God to grow around him and not uproot him.

This is part of the reason why Jesus’ story warns us against the rooting out of weeds before the harvest, or the rooting out of people before the judgment. Of the many voices that speak within us we do not know which voice will win. We do not know what we will become. This is just the truth. And this is also true of those whom we think of as our enemies, or as the enemies of God.

We are not ripe. We have not completely become our true selves. The people who seem to be different from us, who even seem to be opposite from us, have also not ripened. They have not arrived at their final destination in their hearts and minds. They are not yet completely wheat or weeds.

The servants in the story want to know what to do about the good and the not good being all mixed up together. Should they separate them now?
The master says to wait. Wait till harvest. The master and his harvesters will take charge of sorting out the wheat from the weeds. This teaches us to have faith in the form of patience.

Waiting is sometimes the necessary element of faith. We think our anxiety is faith. Our anxiety and fear sound like the voice of God telling us to do the work of separation and sorting out the wheat and the weeds before it’s time.



Barging in might look bold; but it may not be the ultimate form of faith. And sometimes our drivenness to “do something” is the tempting work of the devil. The need to do something bypasses faith and destroys precious wheat. The need to do something proves to be an action taken without love, and without God.

This applies to our life in the world, but it also applies to the church. During the Protestant Reformation Martin Luther saw it this way. He said “The church cannot be without evil people. Those who don’t want to tolerate any weeds end up with no wheat either.” (WA 38, 560, 33 [1538]) John Calvin said: “Pastors ought to labor strenuously to purify the Church; and all the godly, so far as their respective callings enable them, ought to lend assistance in this matter; but when all shall have devoted their united exertions to the general advantage, they will not succeed in such a manner as to purify the Church entirely from every defilement.” (“Harmony of the Gospels” Matthew 13:39)

There is another problem involved in judging between the wheat and the weeds. One of my favorite Christian authors is Thomas Merton (who was a Trappist monk), and he wrote this: “Do not be too quick to assume that your enemy is an enemy of God just because he is your enemy. Perhaps he is your enemy precisely because he can find nothing in you that gives glory to God. Perhaps he fears you because he can find nothing in you of God’s love and God’s kindness and God’s patience and mercy and understanding of the weaknesses of men.” (“New Seeds of Contemplation” p 177)

Jesus did not tell us to just let things go, but he warned us to have our faith disciplined by patience and humility. Ultimately it is not the wheat that judges the weeds. The Lord of the harvest judges both.

The one who tells us to be patient and not do the uprooting ourselves is the king who died on the cross for our forgiveness. It is no exaggeration to say that, without that power of God’s love on the cross, we would all be weeds.

It is the love of Christ that makes the difference in us. The love of Jesus makes all the difference in the world between bearing a harvest and simply going to seed.

When weeds have been changed by grace to wheat they are very careful about the other plants that look like weeds, but have not yet borne their harvest. In the patience of faith those who hope to be wheat may even love those weeds with such passion that they will change before their eyes, and they will all shine together like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.

The King: Pushing the Boundaries

Preached on February 21, 2010

Scripture readings: Psalm 33: Matthew 9:9-17

In the Gospel of John (John 2:1-11) we are told that the first miraculous sign that Jesus did was to turn water into wine.

When I was on the Oregon coast, one of the industries in the area was commercial fishing. Now those fishing people were solid people, but it was rough work, and a rough life-style grew around it. They tended to live and play rough.

My friend and mentor Dick Cochran (who pastured a church in the neighboring town) would joke that the first miracle of Jesus was not to turn water into wine, but to turn commercial fishermen into disciples (like Peter, and James, and John. You need to know that they would not be offended by that joke.

Commercial fishermen weren’t the only rough people Jesus turned into disciples. Jesus turned a traitor into a disciple. I mean tax collector! I mean Matthew!
Matthew was a traitor, not because he was a tax collector, but because tax collectors either worked for the Romans, or for the puppet kings, like the Herod family, who ruled as a cover for the Roman rule.

The Romans considered Judea and Galilee to be legitimate Roman territories. The residents of Judea and Galilee considered themselves to be conquered territories, and those who worked for the Roman occupation, or their flunkies, were traitors. Matthew either worked for the Romans, or for their flunkies. Therefore he was clearly a traitor.


Why would Matthew have decided to be a traitor? Why would he do something to make himself hated by almost everyone? Why would he bring such shame upon his family? Probably he did it for the money!

Under the Roman system tax collectors collected legal and assessed taxes, and tariffs, and duties; and they turned the money in to the jurisdiction of the government that employed them. But they could legally collect more money than they turned in. That was legal payment for their services to the government.
They didn’t receive a salary for their work. They worked for tips; and they tipped themselves to as much as they could get away with taking.

Tax collectors were notoriously rich. This served Rome purposes because the more they made, and the more they made themselves hated, the more they depended on their masters for protection. And that dependence made their loyalty to their masters unquestioning and absolute. Rome liked that quality in her servants.

If everyone hates you or looks down on you like dirt, then (as happy as the benefits make you) you will have no friends; unless there are other people around (beside yourself) who are hated or looked down on like dirt, just as you are, but for other reasons. That is where you will find your friends.


The chances are that any group of people who are hated or looked down on like dirt by everyone else will not try to live up to the standards of those who hate them. They will live down to the low expectations of others. And so Matthew and his friends were labeled “sinners”. And I am sure that that was exactly what they were.

It wasn’t only the Pharisees or the super religious people who did the labeling, and looked down on Matthew and his friends like dirt. Jesus’ own disciples would have agreed with the Pharisees.

Jesus’ own disciples would feel sick in the pit of their stomachs when they saw Jesus reclining next to Matthew, at a party with Matthew’s friends. Jesus’ own disciples would hate Matthew’s guts. They just would.

There was a pretty clear line, they thought, that shut Matthew out of fellowship with them. Matthew had made his choices. He had chosen the wrong side of the boundary.

It is true that Matthew had left the tax office and thrown this party for Jesus. But his sin was not an isolated sin, and Matthew’s way of life was a pattern of long standing. There was no record of change yet. Let them watch Matthew, over the next weeks and months, to see where his loyalties really were. Let them watch and see if he measured up: see if he would give up all that old life; all that low-life and rough life. They expected the kingdom of God to be marked with clear no trespassing signs, and with clear requirements for admission, before people like Matthew could come in.


Even God seemed to set clear boundaries in the scriptures. The First Psalm says, “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, or stand in the way of sinners, or sit in the seat of mockers.” (Psalm 1:1) God says, in Leviticus (11:44), “Be holy, for I am holy.”

Yet God seems to have a different idea of what it means to be holy. Psalm 33 makes it clear that God has a different basis for judging than we do. The things we think of as strength do not impress God. “No king is saved by the size of his army; no warrior escapes by his great strength.” (33:16)

God’s purposes are different than ours. “He thwarts the purposes of the peoples.” (33:10)

The key to the different kind of holiness of God is in a Hebrew word for a certain kind of love. There is a Hebrew word (“hesed”) that is hard to translate. In Psalm 33 (in the New International Version) it is translated as “unfailing love”. “Hesed” is what we would call a “covenant love”. It is fundamentally gracious. It is fundamentally undeserved. It has sometimes been translated as “mercy”. “The eyes of the Lord are on those who fear him, on those whose hope is in his unfailing love (or his mercy).” (33:18) “The eyes of the Lord are on those who reverence him, on those whose hope is in his mercy.”

In other words, the eyes of the Lord are not on those who have won the right to it; but on those who need his eyes upon them to help them. The eyes of the Lord are upon the weak, and the small, and the needy: even when it is the patterns of sin that make them weak, and small, and needy.

Even though Matthew was rich and powerful; spiritually he was bankrupt, and he knew it. He was haunted by this, though he barely let himself think about it. He knew he was the poorest and weakest man in the room.

Jesus knew that Matthew knew this. He knew it when he looked in Matthew’s eyes in the tax office, on the road by the lake at Capernaum. Jesus knew what would happen if he said to Matthew, “Follow me.”

Jesus quoted from the prophet Hosea in order to push back the boundaries that people tried to draw to keep certain people out. Jesus said, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” (Matthew 9:13; Hosea 6:6)

Sacrifices were all about the right rituals, and following all the right rules. Mercy was about mercy; even mercy for those whose lives are horrible, even mercy for those on whom everyone looks down.

The Pharisees thought that the Messiah would come for the sake of the righteous, not for the sake of Matthew and his friends. Jesus told them that just the opposite was true; and he used a scary word to do this. “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” And the word “call”, here, is a special word for an invitation to a feast. And “feast” is a word for the kingdom of God (Isaiah 25:6ff). It was not the righteous but sinners whom Jesus came to call to the feast of the kingdom of God. And just who are we?

The secret of the kingdom of God is mercy. Mercy is the way into the kingdom for those who know they need it. Mercy is the way out of the kingdom for those who think they are so good that they can draw a line to keep others out. Jesus taught us that mercy is one of the fundamental truths of the kingdom when he taught us to pray: “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” or “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

For those who think they are inside the kingdom of God; they need to know that belonging has nothing to do with what we deserve; it only has to do with our need, and with God’s mercy, and with God’s unfailing love. His disciples needed to learn this. Matthew already knew.

The Pharisees teach us some mistakes to avoid. Don’t use your faith as a reason to look down on others. Don’t think your faith is there to help you, and not to help others. Don’t think your faith entitles you to escape from others.

Remember the lesson of the power of Jesus to look at a single person, or a whole crowd of people, and call them and welcome them in. The people who were labeled, the people who were looked down on, liked Jesus, not because he tried to be like them, but because he respected them enough to not be afraid of them.

He accepted them as they were; he loved them even as they were, because they were made through him. He was their king even when they didn’t know him, and he was not afraid to be himself when he was around them.

Surely the secret of this power was the fact that Jesus knew he was going to offer himself on the cross to take away the sins of the world. Jesus knew that he had taken human life upon himself in order to do the greatest thing in the universe.

God came in Christ to die and rise for the sins of the world; so that a whole world that had drawn a line and raised a boundary against him could also die and rise to a new life through him. The message of the gospel is that we are invited to die and rise with Christ into a life of fellowship with God. This is the sort of king Jesus is.


We are called to share Jesus with others. The key is to be, not ourselves as we would like to appear to others, but to be like Jesus and accept others as they are, and love them as they are, and not be afraid, because we know the power and mercy of Jesus for ourselves and for them.

The King: Someone Strategic and Tested

Preached Sunday, February 14

My life was not conducive to writing the kind of sermon I would have liked, but I wrote down some thoughts and stood away from the pulpit and spoke along the lines below.

Scripture Readings: Psalm 51; Matthew 4:1-17

Matthew, in his genealogy and parables and in many other ways, goes out of his way to show us that Jesus is the Messiah, the promised King. Matthew’s gospel is sometimes called “The Royal Gospel.”

Our first sample of Jesus’ teaching is found in these words: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has drawn near.” (Matthew 4:17) This is really a way of saying not that God’s kingdom is right around the corner, but of saying that God’s kingdom has come upon you. And the reason why Jesus could say this was the fact that he, himself, had come upon them; because Jesus is the King. In sense he is ruling by coming to them and saying and doing what he does.

We don’t understand the first thing that Jesus says to us as a crowd because we live in an age of government. For us government is a matter of regulations and forms and congresses and councils and bureaucracies.

For the people who first heard Jesus, government was the personal function of the king. Government was what the king said and did. Sometimes the kingdom worked because the king sent one of the people who stood around him on a mission. The kingdom worked when he gave a friend or a servant a job to do. Or the kingdom worked when the king went where he was needed.

When Jesus moved from Nazareth to Capernaum it was because events required his presence there. The kingdom of God is Jesus and the kingdom is at work wherever Jesus is, and it will always be that way.

Jesus rules by wandering around, and he wanders everywhere, and his wandering is not by chance. He wanders where he is needed. He comes to deal with the situation at hand.

This is what Jesus does with you. He wanders among the scenes of your life (what you think, and do, and say) and he comes ready to give you his input. He moves strategically to do something about what is going on with you. Or he moves strategically in order to get you to move strategically: at least to require you to think.

Jesus said, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come upon you,” because he had dealt with two great issues that concern us.

The place of baptism is the place where human beings need to come to terms with their alienation from God (which affects everything in our life) and receive a new heart and mind and life. Jesus stood at the river with his people (and with us) in our recognition of need (even the need of our babies) to become “beloved”; to receive the gift of “belovedness”.

The place of temptation is the place where we fail. The temptation of bread is the temptation of what we feel we must have and what we cannot do without. Whereas what we need is to be people who cannot do without the words of God in his faithfulness and holiness.

The temptation of the leap from the temple is the temptation of winning other people. If Jesus had been gently carried by angels in a leap from the cornice of the temple down to the pavement below, everyone would have been greatly impressed. And Jesus would have fit his people’s expectations of a Messiah.

We are tempted to win and please others by taking the easy way, by going along with what others want even when what others want is not right. We know that kids deal with this a peer pressure, but grown-ups have peer pressure too.

The temptation of the kingdoms of the world is the temptation of power. In our own lives we are tempted to manipulate and wheedle and bully to get our own way and be in control. The unhappiness we feel when we don’t get our way is the measure of how powerful this temptation is for us. It is a sign of what we may be doing without knowing it, but others probably know it about us.

The answer to temptation and the way to pass the test of temptation is a life of loving communion with God.

We often misunderstand what Jesus asks of us. He says repent, and we think this is something we do on our own before we can be acceptable to him. Jesus says repent, because his presence with us is available. His presence works for us and with us.

The “because” is because he is at hand. Repentance in the biblical languages is a new direction and a new mind (not just a new brain but a new inner self).

We can come to him because he has come to us. He died for us and rose for us so that we can die to ourselves and live through him.

Jesus and Genesis: Gardens of Intimacy

Preached February 7, 2010

Scripture Readings: Genesis 2:18-3:24 and John 19:41-20:23

There was a sound. There was a voice. It was the Lord God in the garden, in the cool of the day. (Genesis 3:8) It made our first parents run and hide. It made them afraid that they were about to get caught. They had lost the gift of intimacy in the garden.



I remember the sounds and voices in the garden, in the cool of the day. I remember when I was a kid; on long summer evenings, first doing that last bit of work in the vegetables or on the lawn, and then me and my sisters playing some game with our parents in our yard. All the while the shadows gathered in the orchards around us, and then we would sit under the walnut tree, at the back of the house, drinking something cold until it was too dark to see.

Those were good hours. Those were times of intimacy; times of work and play, when we were happy, relaxed, and close.

That is one of the best things that gardens are for, after working and playing together; the place to be happy, relaxed, and close; the place of belonging. That is what the first garden was for: the Garden of Eden.

God designed us and created us for a garden life, with him and with each other. Eden was the garden of God. (Isaiah 51:3; Ezekiel 28:13) God was the parent in the garden, who laid it all out as a place to work and play with us; to be happy, relaxed, and close. God, even as he is in himself (as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), is a god of intimacy, and he wants us to know him well in this intimacy.

But our first parents shifted the course of human nature away from intimacy when they ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil without God’s permission. The first time they ran away from God was not when they heard the sound of God in the garden, in the cool of the day. The first time they ran away from God was when they ate the fruit that God had told them not to eat.

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the tree of life are very mysterious. There has been a lot of speculation about them. But I think we can learn a lot about the meaning of these trees and what they stand for by noticing what God, and Adam, and Eve said and did.

Some people think that the knowledge of good and evil simply means the knowledge of everything. “Good and evil” simply mean ‘everything from “A” to “Z”’.

I think that’s a part of it. The serpent made Adam and Eve suspect that God was not telling them everything. He made them suspect that God was concealing things from them; out of a desire to hold them back and keep them in their place. But this was a lie, and they should have seen through it.

From what we read, God showed no inclination to hide things from them. On the contrary, in the beginning, we see God carrying out a program of education. We see God bringing all the creatures to Adam so that he could see them and give them their proper names.

We have to understand that, in the Bible, the ability to name a thing comes from the ability to understand what it truly is. An example of this is something we all learned in school, but most of us have forgotten. That is the scientific names of things. We learned about the Latin names of the phylum, and genus, and specie of living things. These are names that describe the nature of the form of life they stand for; like vertebrate or invertebrate (having a backbone or not).

When Adam named the creatures, he gave them names that revealed their true nature, just as the names of the seven dwarves reveal their true nature: like Sneezy, and Grumpy, and Bashful, and Dopey. The first people called things according to their real nature, because they could see what God intended them to be.

The first time Adam met Eve he knew exactly who and what she was, where she came from, and what she was there for. God showed himself to be truly interested in giving human beings this kind of knowledge.

The interesting thing about all of this knowledge is that our first parents knew everything they knew in partnership with God, in communion with God. They knew everything with God, and they knew nothing without God.

The serpent suggested that they start knowing things a different way. He suggested that they learn to know things separate from God and without God.

There was nothing in God’s previous behavior to show that he would not teach them about the knowledge of good and evil, in his own way, when the time was right. But there was a way, Satan suggested, for them to be in charge, and in control of their own lives.

Now think: what happens to us and the way we live with others, when we treat knowledge as something we can use in order to be in charge, and in control? And what happens when everyone is doing the exact same thing? What happens is that intimacy is lost. Peace is lost. Love is lost.



There is another very practical thing about the knowledge of good and evil: and God is very practical. The Bible is God’s word to us, not to give us pure information, and not even understanding in the sense of something that happens mostly inside our brains.

The Bible is designed to give us the kind of knowledge that we call experience. The Bible is a gift from God to help us to experience God, and to experience our true selves (as God sees us), and to experience God’s desires and goals for us humans, and for the world he has made.

In the Bible, to know something is to experience it in a personal way. And this is true of the knowledge of good and evil.

Now, our first parents had the knowledge of good already. They knew nothing but goodness. They were good, and all their experience was good.

When they gained the knowledge of good and evil, this changed. They now experienced evil within themselves, as they once had experienced only goodness. Evil became as much a part of them as goodness was. And they passed their experience down to us, as their children.

We can see what this means in this part of the story of Genesis. Adam and Eve hid themselves from God. They had known nothing but trust. Now they felt a reason to fear. They had never felt this way before. They wished with all their heart that they could be somewhere else; and so they willed separation and division from God.



They were also divided from each other. Adam had known Eve as God’s greatest gift to him. Now Adam knew Eve as someone to blame. He was afraid of God; afraid of the possibility that he was in danger. Adam was wrong about his immediate danger, but he deliberately put Eve into the danger that he imagined, and he put her in the place of what he feared. Adam never raised a hand against Eve, but his betrayal was the first act of violence in the world as we know it.

Adam stopped answering God’s questions about the truth. “Have you eaten from the tree I told you not to eat from?” (Genesis 3:11) And Adam did not say, “Yes, and I am so sorry. God forgive me.” That would have been the truthful answer. That was the answer God was looking for.

Instead, Adam’s answer was a half truth that amounted to a lie. Adam blamed Eve, even though he knew that this was not the answer God was looking for. Adam ceased to be interested in the truth, unless it served himself.

Adam did not want to be found or known. What happened to him was more important than what might happen to Eve if his blame stuck to her.

All true knowledge is experience, and this is what the knowledge of evil makes us. This is the life that human beings have come to know. It is a kind of death in life.
What about God’s knowledge of good and evil? How is evil a part of God’s experience? God personally experiences evil in the same way that loving parents experience evil through their children. How does a parent experience evil when they find their child telling a lie? Or how does a parent experience evil when their child is in danger?

There is a story from the earthquake in Haiti, about a Dutch couple who had adopted a Haitian child, and came to claim this child in the days before the earthquake. They had the joy of meeting this child and earning the trust of this child. And, at last, they prepared to go home as a family. The parents were in the hotel room, with their new child, packing for home in the Netherlands, when the earthquake struck. When their bodies were found, the child’s body was enfolded in the bodies of his new mother and father who, in their final moments, had tried to shield that child as the building collapsed around them. This way of experiencing evil is unique to parenthood.

God clothed Adam and Eve in the skins of animals. These skins were not created out of thin air. They came from animals who died to cover the nakedness of the people who had brought evil into the world.

This is a shocking thing, when you think about it. But it means something very important.

Adam and Eve expected to die, but they found that (in this case) something had died for their sake. In the first place it was an animal of some kind; but that animal was only a small part of larger pattern that God has put into his design of the whole universe.

The pattern of the universe is this: that, when evil came into the world, God was ready to provide a sacrifice to cover and heal the sins of the world. God himself was that sacrifice. That is how God would experience evil. God would not only be the creator, but also the re-creator of a new creation through the cross.

A lot of blood has been shed for the evils of this world, and it has only showed the world for what it is. God has come into this world in Jesus to shed his own blood by the force of a love that would change human beings from within.

That brings us to another garden. John tells us that, “At the place where Jesus was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had ever been laid…They laid Jesus there.” (John 19:41-42) The people of the New Testament were familiar with crosses because crosses were a common form of execution in the Roman Empire.

By and large they hated crosses because they had seen people die on them. They hated the very word “cross”. It was a hard word for them to say. And so, sometimes, they used a euphemism for “cross” by calling it a “tree”. (Acts 5:30; Galatians 3:13; 1 Peter 2:24 and others) So there was a tree that brought sin into the world, and there was a tree that has the power to put an end to the rule of sin. Eden has gone, but the cross is now the tree of life.



There was a garden where death came to the human race, and there was a garden where life was given to us; where God, in Christ, rose from the dead. In the first garden we lost our faith in the faithfulness of God. In the second garden faith in the faithfulness of God was reborn.

The God who came in Jesus made us for peace, in the beginning, and breathed into us, at our creation, to make us living souls. (Genesis 2:7) In our recreation, in Jesus, God says, “Peace be with you.” (John 20:19-21) And Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit upon his disciples, and upon us, and makes us alive in a new way, and sends us out on a mission of life to bring the good news of the forgiveness of sins, and the healing of evil, in the world. (John 20:21-22)

In the first garden our intimacy with God, and with others, and with the world, and with ourselves was lost. In the garden of the resurrection we find our lost peace and intimacy again; with God, and with others, and with the world, and with our own souls. The God who created us for a garden of intimacy helps us find it again in Jesus.

Jesus and Genesis: Freedom

Preached January 31, 2010
Scripture Readings: Genesis 2:4-3:7 and John 8:31-59 (RSV)

Jesus said, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” (John 8:31) Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase goes like this, “If you stick with this, living out what I tell you, you are my disciples for sure. Then you will experience for yourselves the truth, and the truth will free you.”

Jesus came to set us free. So the question is: are you free?

This is the question I have been asking myself this past week. I have been studying God’s word about this, and being in conversation with God about this, and asking myself this question: am I free?


My answer to this question is: it all depends on what it means to be free. And so my answer is: sometimes yes, sometimes no.

There are obvious reasons for this. For one thing, I’m a worrywart. I worry a lot. I worry about you. I worry about me. I worry about a lot of people. I worry about making decisions that will be helpful to others, decisions that will be successful, decisions that will be appreciated and understood by others.

Worry does not fit my idea of freedom. It doesn’t fit my idea of faith. And I think I need both freedom and faith in order to be happy.

On the other hand, if I didn’t worry, I think I would be a lot more like a bull in a china shop than I am. I would cause a lot more mess and a lot more breakage, if I didn’t worry. And that would make me really, really unhappy. I would not feel free. I would feel trapped.

Why would freedom from worry make me unhappy? Well, if I care about other people then I want to do well for their sakes, and I want to do them good. If I care, it wouldn’t make sense for me to be free from worry.

So I should be happy that I worry. It produces results that make me happy. Worry gives me a kind of freedom that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

I am half-way joking about this. I am also half-way serious. There is a great temptation for us to misunderstand what freedom means. It is tempting, because a false understanding of freedom can be so very convenient.

Imagine that freedom was an important thing. That’s what Jesus does. Now imagine that the real meaning of freedom is the ability to be whatever you want to be, and to do whatever you want to do. And then, on top of that, imagine that you are married, and have a family, and that you want them to be happy and safe.

To love others and be loved by them, and to live in faithful devotion and commitment to them, will constrain you and limit you. Sometimes it will seem as though it limits you a lot.

On the other hand, the gift of loving, and being loved, is a great gift. No one will come to the end of their lives wishing that they had been loved less, or that they had loved others less.

Genuine love, with all its commitments and constraints, is the ultimate freedom. More and more, genuine love (with all its commitments and constraints) grows into wonder, and laughter, and thankfulness, and these are the fruit of freedom.

Love loves to make promises, and love loves to keep its promises. This is what makes love really alive. This is what gives love a sense of freedom.

We can see this in one of the most personal issues of human freedom. The world usually tells us that one of the main tests of personal freedom is sex.

The physical union of a man and a woman is designed to bring a child into a little world where those who have given it life have bound themselves to each other for each other’s sake, and have bound themselves to their child, for that child’s sake, by loving and lasting promises. The physical union of a man and a woman, when no promise or commitment has been made, does not really have anything to do with freedom, unless we don’t believe in the importance of love for the health of human life.

Sometimes, a young woman will seek to get pregnant without taking the time of finding a husband, because she thinks that the presence and the love of a baby will set her free. But, she has sought her own freedom at the expense of her baby’s freedom. That is not a good start in a life dedicated to freedom. She will find that the needs of her baby will be in conflict with the study and work she needs in order to give that baby a secure home.

She has gotten into this predicament because she has done what we all tend to do. We all tend to get confused about what freedom is for.

There are guys who want the freedom of sex without the greater freedom that comes from loving to be a husband and father. This happens because we all tend to get confused about what freedom is for.

The fact is that no one can fully understand freedom, unless they know who they are and what they are made for. We are made for freedom.

The Garden of Eden was designed for freedom. There were ten thousand things in the Garden of Eden that you could choose and say “yes” to. And there was Eve, in all her beauty. And for her there was Adam. And there was so much to say “yes” to.

And there was only one thing in the whole Garden of Eden for you to say “no” to. And it was not Eve. And it was not Adam. It was only the fruit of one single tree.

We are made for freedom, and we will reach out and try to grab freedom for ourselves without even knowing what true freedom is. And so we are likely to grab for something we think will give us freedom; but it only makes us worse and less free. We don’t know what freedom is until we let God show us.

We find this in the scene in the Gospel of John, where Jesus is talking to people about freedom. Jesus says, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

The scene is a debate. It is a debate between two brands of freedom. And both brands claim to be spiritual.

The truth is, if we want to understand freedom, we have to look at the freedom of Jesus who claimed to be able to make us free. We have to see how his freedom is different from the freedom claimed by the people who blamed Jesus for interfering in their lives, and in their claim to be free.

The freedom of Jesus consisted in knowing that he was sent here by his Father to set others free. Jesus was here in order to be good news. Wherever Jesus went, you could look at the world around him the way God looked at the world during creation, and you could say, “It is good”.

The freedom of Jesus’ competitors was their right to be unmoved by the needs and the worth of others in God’s creation. Their mistake was that they had no right to be disconnected from a God-given commitment to others, but they claimed that right and freedom anyway. Jesus stood against their claim to freedom.

In the previous chapters of the gospel of John, Jesus had healed an invalid on the Sabbath (5:1-15), even though that was the wrong time to do it, and he had forgiven a woman who was guilty of adultery (8:1-11), even though she didn’t deserve it.

Jesus gave them both the freedom of a new life: a healed life, and a forgiven life. His opponents found reasons why Jesus should not have done these things.

Jesus found reasons to faithfully commit to others. Those who claimed a different kind of freedom found self-righteous reasons for not committing to others. Jesus found reasons to do something good. Those who claimed a different kind of freedom found reasons for not doing something good. For Jesus there was no wrong time and no wrong person for his grace.

Jesus’ willingness to bring good news to others knew no boundaries. Those who claimed a different kind of freedom knew far too many boundaries, and they still thought they were free.

Jesus knew where his freedom came from, and he knew that those who were against him had a freedom that came from some where else. The people who hated the freedom of Jesus were holy people, spiritual people, whose freedom came from their sins: from their pride, and from a righteousness that only served themselves. They did not know this because they did not know themselves at all.

Their freedom was a deception and a lie. Their freedom was hurtful and destructive to others who were made in God’s image.

So Jesus told them that their father was the Devil, because the Devil is a liar and murderer (8:44-47). In the Garden of Eden the Devil lied in order to make the first humans feel unfree and discontented. The Devil lied in order to murder our freedom and trick us into being his slaves. The people who talk the loudest about their freedom to do what they want are really secretly slaves to the enemy of life and freedom.


Jesus told them about the hidden motives that made them slaves. It may sound harsh, but Jesus told them this in the hope that they would listen to him and let him set them free.

When Jesus tells us to continue in his word, he means for us to listen, and contemplate, and regurgitate, and not let go of his message to us, because we are always at risk for being like those who were against him.

We can imagine that we are free when we are not. We can imagine that we are being faithful to God when we are being faithful to our own sins, and self-deceptions, and our instinct to hurt and destroy: and we call that our freedom.

We tend to forget that the sons and daughters of God are here to be givers of grace and freedom to others. To keep us right, we need to hold onto Jesus words, and listen, and obey, and not let go; until his words get through to us and open our eyes so that we can see the truth, and be set free.

Let’s look at one more thing.

To hold onto Jesus’ word is something we do, and we can find freedom through doing that. But something more has to happen. It is not our wonderful job of continuing, and holding on, and obeying that does the trick.

Jesus said, “If the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” (8:39) Jesus’ words are more than something for us to do. They are the message that Jesus must do something for us.

Jesus does the work to set us free in his living for us, in his dying for us, and in his rising from the dead. In his dying and his rising, his life becomes our new life. He makes us a new creation.

Jesus becomes our partner and our brother; as well as our Lord and Savior. This is the heart of the truth that sets us free.


And it is as if Jesus becomes our own Garden of Eden where there are so many opportunities, so many trees to harvest, and so few to avoid; so much to love, and so little to fear. Jesus is our new land where we have the freedom to find what we are created for, and bring others to that land to live with us there.