As I began to do
some research for this sermon on the second of the seven signs Jesus does in
John’s gospel I realized that, for us at least, the sign isn’t as significant
as what led up to the sign. What led up to
the sign is the reason why Jesus is back in Galilee.
Right after the
turning of water into wine that we read last week, John’s gospel reports that
Jesus goes to Jerusalem. There he is not
well received by the religious leaders, so he goes back to Galilee. Now when I say he was not well received I’m
not giving you the whole picture. The
reason why he wasn’t well received is because he went into the temple in
Jerusalem and upset the tables of the merchants and money changers, and he made
a whip and drove out the sheep and the cattle.
That’s not a nice way to endear yourself to the powers that be!
There’s an
important side thing to note here. In
John’s gospel this symbolic shutting down of the temple Jesus does happens at
the beginning of his public ministry.
It’ll be two years until he is crucified. The way the other gospels, Matthew, Mark, and
Luke, portray it, Jesus upsets things in the temple at the beginning of Holy
Week. And it is doing that that gets him
executed.
Some people try
to get out of this timing problem by saying that Jesus upset things in the
temple twice – once at the beginning of his ministry and again at the end. But I think that’s an imaginative solution to
get out of a scriptural contradiction.
In my opinion, historically it happened as the other gospels
report. John has moved it here to make a
major point right from the beginning of the gospel. Jesus went to the religious leaders – he
started by going through the proper channels - but the proper channels wouldn’t
have him. The experts, those who should
have recognized the truth for who he was, wouldn’t have him. It is as if then Jesus thought, alright if
they won’t have the grace of God then they will be rejected, and it will be
proclaimed to those on the outside.
If someone were
to come in here during worship and started criticizing our worship and then
started throwing things around what would we do? We’d probably have that person removed and
possibly call the police. We’d probably
talk about security during worship at our next council meeting. What we may not do is to stop and ask
ourselves, did this person have a point?
Were their words and actions justified?
We would probably not invite that person to come back for worship and to
come to a council meeting and to maybe change things based upon what we learn.
If we’re going to
criticize the religious leaders for rejecting Jesus, maybe we have to criticize
ourselves too. I think it is very easy
for us who have relatively stable lives to start rejecting anything that would
cause instability. This seems to be
human nature. We almost expect
adolescents and young adults to upset the apple cart, but we definitely expect
them to settle down into stable and productive lives.
Of course there’s
nothing wrong with being stable in and of itself, but it does become a problem
when God’s call takes us out of the stability we’ve created.
Let’s see just
how deeply rooted and subtle that stability can be. For years I’ve said that this church needs to
hire a youth director. Our your
programming is the future and yet it’s consistently the weakest part of our
church. But we never have enough
additional money to hire someone who would be good at it.
At church council
meetings I’m always trying to encourage outside the box thinking as well as
being highly realistic. I’ve raised the
idea of sharing my time with another church.
That way a chunk of my salary could be redirected towards hiring a youth
director. It sounds like an okay idea
until we get to the issue of Sunday morning worship. Of course we’d be all for it if the other
congregation would worship at a different time and we could keep our Sunday
schedule unchanged. But what if we had
to drop to just one service? What if we
had to get rid of this service? What if
we had to give up Sunday morning worship altogether and start worshipping
Sunday afternoons or on a different day of the week? We wouldn’t be so keen on the idea then. Jesus says nothing should come in the way of
worshipping him. We say the church
should come first in our lives. Okay,
fine, as long as the church fits into our molds of what it should be.
And if we would
try something as off-the-wall as worshipping sometime other than Sunday morning
I’ll almost guarantee that attendance would plummet immediately. There’d be conversations in the parking lot
that this whole idea of moving worship to be able to share the pastor in order
to save enough money to hire a youth director, was the most stupid idea ever
brought up. It would destroy the
congregation rather than help it grow. We
would have logical and practical reasons for not doing it.
I don’t mean that
we should ever set logical and reasonable thinking at the door and act
stupid. But I hope we can get more of an
understanding of why Jesus was rejected in Jerusalem. It is all too easy for a person with a
well-organized life to turn Jesus away; and in doing so miss great signs of
God’s presence.
Jesus goes away from Jerusalem where
those who should have recognized and celebrated him turned him away instead. They turned away a great thing because it did
not conform to expectations.
The healing of the official’s son
doesn’t follow expectations either.
There is a formula way of telling a story about a miraculous
healing. It goes something like this: Someone has a problem and needs to be
cured. That person comes to the healer
and asks for healing. Then, if the
healer agrees to do the healing, there is some sort of face to face
struggle. The healer overcomes the
struggle and the person is cured. Then
there is amazement from the witnesses.
Think about it. Almost every
healing Jesus does is told in a way that fits that pattern, but not this time.
Here Jesus doesn’t conform to patterns
either. The sick person doesn’t come to
Jesus, nor is he brought, nor does Jesus go to him. The boy’s father comes to Jesus and begs him
to come and heal his son. Jesus just
says, “Go, your son will live.” We’re
told that the man believed it and he goes.
There is no meeting with the sick person, no struggle, no real witnesses
and no amazement. All we’re told is that
the household of the boy came to believe.
That’s it. No conventions, no nothing. The whole miracle itself takes place
offstage. This is the second of Jesus’
signs, but it is showing no predictability at all.
Commentators tell us that the point of
this second sign is that it teaches us that Jesus has the power to heal. That may be what John intended it to
mean. But for us at least, it takes us
to something deeper.
Who is Jesus to you? Is Jesus someone you only pray to when you
need help? Do you unintentionally limit
Jesus to only acting in ways that would keep a well-organized life in a
well-organized way? Do you unintentionally
think Jesus prefers solemnness and orderliness and thus miss him when he’s
other places as well? When you help
people are you trying to give them a well-organized and orderly life that you
would find appealing, or are you trying to bring Jesus to them in whatever form
might actually work?
One of the greatest problems of living
in the suburbs is how successful we are at creating order. While that is hardly a bad thing we forget
the real messiness of rural poverty. We
stop looking at the chaos of Rochester.
We just shake our heads and walk away from urban schools that are totally
failing. We do it because we can afford
to. We can pretend that the opioid
crisis exists only far away. Refugee
issues, civil wars in the Middle East and Africa are just things on the news.
Jesus is in all of those places. He is performing signs and working
miracles. He is building communities
where faith and hope can give wholeness and healing. But we miss it.
One of the best things about Family
Promise is the way it will bring at least some people into our space, our
lives, so that the brokenness of the world ceases to just exist in a far away
place. Or if it exists in our lives, it
is something we can hide. Instead it is
real.
Jesus would have loved to bring new
life and wholeness to the leaders in Jerusalem.
But they were too interested in getting wholeness through
orderliness. And so Jesus went
elsewhere. May we be open to the truth
Jesus teaches, even when it upends our lives, so that we may know the joy of being
his child and seeing him at work.
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