Servants
Commentary
In Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More stands at a moral crossroads. More has been a loyal subject of the English crown, supporting his king in both civil and ecclesiastical matters. Now, however, King Henry VIII is engaged in a devious plan that pits his own desires against those of the church. In order to pull off his scheme, Henry requires all his nobles to swear to him a personal oath of allegiance. Because the terms of the oath violate More’s conscience before his God, he refuses and is arrested and jailed.
More’s daughter Margaret comes to visit him. She is his pride and joy, often thinking his thoughts after him. In their playful terms of endearment she is her father’s “Meg,” and Henry knows that More will do anything for her. That’s why he sends Meg to plead with her father in prison. “Take the oath, Father!” she urges him. “Take it with your mouth, if you can’t take it with your heart! Take it and return to us! You can’t do us any good in here!”
In so many ways she’s right, of course -- how can More bless and protect his family if he rots in jail or dances with the executioner? And who will know if More coughs a testimony he doesn’t fully believe?
Sir Thomas, however, has felt the creases in his heart and knows what will happen to him if he finds himself rather than King Henry the betrayer in the mirror. So he says: “Meg, when a man swears an oath, he holds himself in his hands like water. And if he opens his fingers, how can he hope to find himself again?”
When our lives begin to fragment, as Thomas More knew, we are left holding our lives as water in our hands. As the cracks between our fingers shift, even slightly, the water of our very selves dribbles away. We may look like the same people, but who we are inside has begun to change.
After all, we are never fully our own. We are never completely independent persons. We serve God or things or passions or self or evil or the devil. As our lectionary passages today remind us, what or who we serve colors the temperament of our souls.
Joshua 3:7-17
The book of Joshua is clearly all about the land of Canaan. The Israelites presume to own it, even though they have never lived there. Yahweh declares it to be their homeland, even though in order for this to become a reality bloody battles will ensue and current settled communities will have to be displaced or destroyed. The promises made to Abraham (Genesis 12, 13, 17), owned by Jacob (Genesis 28, 35, 50), and claimed by Joseph (Genesis 50) serve as the theological justification for taking by force what, from a human point of view, belongs to other people. This is the critical issue that must be faced when reading Joshua. Either Canaan, as a specific piece of territory, has a deeply religious significance which is used by Yahweh and Israel in a certain way for ends that are meant to bless the surrounding nations, or it is a scandalous record of cruelty done by nasty people who wash their defiled consciences in the horrible pious testimony “The Deity made me do it!” Only if the Pentateuch is indeed a revelation of God with a missional intent that is to be accomplished through the nation of Israel does this sordid chapter in Israelite and human history make sense. Even facing this matter head-on does not make the conquest of Canaan easily palatable. No serious student of the Bible ought to dance lightly through these pages and make facile judgments. Either Yahweh is engaged in a crucial galactic civil war battle to wrestle humanity back to its creational senses, and Israel is to play a part in that decisive conflict, or the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are built upon a scandalous foundation of inflated self-important delusion. The book of Joshua forces us to face the desperation of biblical religion: is this simply another moralistic ethic among the do-gooder philosophies of the nations, or is there a unique and all-encompassing polarizing choice engendered by this worldview which demands allegiance or condemnation?
At stake, in answering this dilemma, is an understanding of the unique location and purpose of a small piece of real estate. There are four major literary sections to the book of Joshua, and each is focused on “the Land:”
* Penetrating the Land (chapters 1-5)
* Purging the Land (chapters 6-12)
* Possessing the Land (chapters 13-21)
* Promising the Land (chapters 22-24)
The identity of Israel will become inextricably connected to this land. It is ineradicably intertwined with Hebrew theology. It is essential to Israelite self-perception. So it is very important to ask why? Why this land, and not some other, better paradise? Why this piece of property rather than an uninhabited region of northern Europe, or a tropical island in the south Pacific? What is so terribly important about this land that it has become a constant source of theological embarrassment to generations of biblical scholars and the enemies of Judaism and Christianity?
It has to do with location, location, location, as realtors know. Canaan is the bridge between three continents, and the highway of ancient civilizations in their quest for identity and dominance. Locating Israel here was God’s way of reminding the nations God had created that their true benevolent ruler still existed and still cared about them. Rahab’s testimony to the spies in Joshua 2 is a reminder that Yahweh is not merely a tribal god owned by Israel. Instead, Yahweh is the supreme divinity over both territory and lesser gods. Every nation ought to bow to Yahweh, as Rahab has already begun to do. Israel need only go into the land to perform the mopping-up operations, for the decisive battle has already been won.
This message is confirmed in several ways in the next three chapters. First, the crossing of the wild waters of the Jordan River is told in a way reminiscent of Israel’s movement through the Red Sea a generation earlier (Exodus 14). Both situations required a divine act to overcome a natural barrier. The single significant difference between the former story and this one is that then Moses was the vehicle for dispensing the power of Yahweh as he stood with arm and staff outstretched over the Red Sea, and now it is the visible portable throne of Yahweh (the Ark of the Covenant) which moves ahead of the people to stem the flow. In both instances it was the power of Yahweh that parted the waters; now there is the added luxury of having that royal action expressed in a more direct manifestation of Yahweh’s local movements through the furnishings of the house of the deity resident among the people.
Second, a memorial is created out of 12 stones gathered from the riverbed. These stones would be rounded and smooth from years of polishing as the currents pushed and tumbled them along the riverbed. Therefore they would look strikingly different from the rocks that littered the torrent’s banks and formed the cliffs at its edges. The Israelites were supposed to take family outings to this site in the subsequent years, and have picnics next to the pile. The unusual monument was to be used as a teaching tool, reminding the next generations about what Yahweh had done to create their unique identity and settle them in this land.
Third, the report of this miraculous act of crossing the Jordan River at flood stage zipped along the gossip channels of the nations and tribes living in Canaan until a great fear of Israel and her God enveloped all of them.
1 Thessalonians 2:9-13
After the Jerusalem council, Paul and Barnabas were eager to visit the Galatian congregations and inform them personally of the good outcomes in this early Christian theological debate which had affected them so deeply (Acts 15:36). But tensions flamed between them when they argued whether John Mark should be invited along (Acts 15:37). Paul was still very upset that the younger man had suddenly “deserted” them on their first mission journey (Acts 13:13). In the end, Barnabas felt a family obligation to give it a try with Mark again, while Paul chose a new partner, named Silas, to join him in these travels (Acts 15:39–41).
It was probably late in 49 AD when Paul and Silas left Syrian Antioch, their home base. They traveled overland to the communities in central Asia Minor where Paul and Barnabas had established Christian congregations more than a year earlier. At Lystra they were joined by Timothy (Acts 16:1-2), a promising young man whose mother was Christian but whose father was not. Together this growing company of itinerant preachers had in mind an itinerary taking them farther north in Asia Minor (Acts 16:6-8). There were other new areas where Jewish settlements in Hellenic cities might give them an open door for talking about Jesus.
While pondering their options at Troas, Paul may have had some medical problems. The text of Acts 16 shows a shift at that point from third-person references to first-person recollections (note verses 6-10). It seems obvious that doctor Luke, the man who would author this book, joined the band at Troas. It might well be that he came to Paul as a healer, and stayed with Paul as a new believer and fellow evangelist. Also in this city a divine directive illumined Paul in a vision (Acts 16:9-10), with the result that the company headed next across the Aegean Sea to Macedonia. Philippi was their first major stop, a fairly new Roman colony established by military personnel who received parcels of land as their pensions. As of yet there was no sizeable Jewish population in the city, since Paul and Silas found a small group of Jews worshiping at the river’s edge on a sabbath (Acts 16:13). Once there were ten Jewish males in any town a synagogue had to be established, so the river gathering meant that Jews had not come to Philippi in any significant numbers. As was his custom, Paul spoke to the small group about Jesus, and a new Christian congregation was formed in the home of Lydia (Acts 16:14-15).
Paul and Silas stayed in Philippi for some time, but eventually encountered trouble that landed them in jail. A young fortune-teller began to follow them, shouting out to the crowds about them (Acts 16:16-17), perhaps in a mean-spirited or nasty manner. Paul became grieved by her evident demon possession, and exorcised her (Acts 16:18). The girl’s masters were very upset, and threw Paul and Silas into prison (Acts 16:19-24). A midnight earthquake rocked the place, and led to the jailer’s conversion (Acts 16:25-34). In the morning, the Roman citizenship of Paul and Silas was discovered, and the magistrates were beside themselves in efforts to undo the unlawful treatment these two had received (Acts 16:35-40).
It was on to Thessalonica next for Paul and Silas and their team (Acts 17:1-9). For three weeks Paul preached about Jesus in the Jewish synagogue. When Gentiles swelled the crowd of Christ-believers, however, some Jews became jealous and formed a mob to disrupt civic life. The uproar caused city officials to arrest leading members of the new Christian congregation, and the group sent Paul and Silas out of town that evening under the cover of darkness. With brief stops in Berea (Acts 17:10-15) and Athens (Acts 17:16-34), Paul eventually arrived in Corinth, where he met Aquila and Priscilla for the first time (Acts 18:1-3). This couple would become fast friends with Paul, keeping in touch for the rest of his life.
Although Paul would spend the next year and a half in Corinth, at the outset his heart remained back in Thessalonica. Already when he was traveling through Athens, Paul worried about how the fledgling Thessalonian congregation was faring (1 Thessalonians 2:17-20), and sent Timothy back to find out more and make a report (1 Thessalonians 3:1-5). Paul had already continued on to Corinth by the time Timothy caught up with him, and was elated at the good word his younger associate brought (1 Thessalonians 3:6-10). With emotions running high, Paul dashed off a letter of appreciation and encouragement to his new friends (1 Thessalonians).
Most of this short letter is given to expressions of praise for the great testimony already being noised about from those who observed the grace and spiritual energy of this newborn congregation. Paul rehearsed briefly (1 Thessalonians 1-3) the recent history that had deeply connected them, and told of his aching heart now that they were so quickly “torn away” from one another (1 Thessalonians 2:17). Only after these passionate confessions does Paul spill some ink on a few notes of instruction (1 Thessalonians 4-5).
The central message of Paul’s missionary preaching focused on the resurrection of Jesus. This was, for Paul, the astounding confirmation of Jesus’ divine character. It was the undeniable proof that Jesus was the messiah, and that his words and teachings had ushered in the new age of God’s final revelation and redemptive activity.
Matthew 23:1-12
When a young girl came home from Sunday school, her parents asked her about the lesson. “It was about a man who was traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho,” she said. “He was beaten up by some bad men, and they threw his body into the ditch. Then two preachers came along, but when they saw that the man had already been robbed and they couldn’t get anything more from him, they passed by on the other side!”
She, along with many others including Jesus, seems to think that religious leaders are always on the take, always asking for money. They are just another form of robbers, merely pretending to be sanctified by the piety of religious language. Dennis the Menace, in one of the comic strips, also believes that the church is about money. As he drags his parents off to church on a Sunday morning, later than usual, he says: “I hope we get in our seats before they serve the money!” We all know that the “serve” is really the weekly “take.”
Corrective eyewear is a physical necessity for many of us. But Jesus says that corrective eyewear is also a spiritual necessity for our hearts. As Dr. Karl Menninger once put it, “Attitudes are more important than facts.” Once we enter the light of Christ we need glasses that will change our attitudes about each other. We need glasses of the heart that will alter our perceptions. We need corrective lenses of the soul that will make us encourage and build others up, rather than cut them down.
Johan Eriksson learned that lesson well. In 1939 trainloads of Jewish children were piling into Sweden. Because of the changing political climate under Hitler’s European campaign, parents were trying to get their young ones out of Germany. Boys and girls, sometimes only three or four years old, stumbled off boxcars and into culture shock carrying nothing but large tags around each neck, announcing their names, ages, and hometowns.
The Swedes had agreed to take in the children “for the duration of the war.” Unfortunately there were more children than suitable homes, so even Johan Eriksson was called. Johan was a widower, middle‑aged and gruff, and not a likely candidate for foster parenting.
Without comprehending why, young Rolf walked away from the train station next to Johan. The boy was starving at the time, and frightened into silence. Every time he heard a noise at Johan’s door, little Rolf would run into a closet and pull coats over his head.
For years Rolf wouldn’t smile. He hardly ate. Johan created a spartan but stable home for Rolf, biding his time until Rolf would be gone and he could get back to his life. Yet Rolf never went back to Germany because no one ever sent for him. His parents perished in the ovens.
So Johan did his best with a son he never anticipated. When Rolf was in his twenties, Johan managed to get him a job in Stockholm. For a while Rolf struggled along, but he couldn’t handle the pressures. “His mind just snapped one day,” his employer said, and the local authorities wanted to put him in a mental institution.
Johan set out immediately to rescue his boy. Johan was an old man now, yet he brought Rolf home again to the little city of Amal. For many years Johan nursed Rolf back to health.
Rolf finally got better. He married a wonderful woman. He established a fairly successful business, and even became quite wealthy. All along, though, he knew that his achievements were only possible because of Johan, the big Swede, who took in a nobody, loved him back to life, gave him an identity, and hugged away his fears.
When doctors called Johan’s children home for a final parting in his dying days, Rolf was the first to arrive. From an orphan’s tragedy, his life had become the story of a dearly loved son.
Johan was a Christian. He found the spiritual corrective eyewear that James prescribes. It gave him the ability to see little Rolf as God saw him, and Rolf began to live that day.
Said Mark Twain, “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” True! But when you get that new pair of eyeglasses for your soul, everything begins to look different. Jesus’ words restore in us the true ability to see.
Application
In 1967 a psychologist named Kinch reported a rather bizarre experiment conducted by university psychology graduate students. These males were part of what they considered to be the “in” crowd on campus. They moved in the right circles, dressed the right way, and went to the right places for nightlife parties.
But they all knew a particular young woman who wasn’t in that circle. She was an “outsider,” a “nobody,” a person who didn’t count, at least to them and their kind.
Knowing the effects of behavior modification, they planned together to see how she would change if they treated her, for a time, as if she were part of their “in” crowd. They made an agreement that whenever they saw her they would compliment her and show an interest in her. Furthermore, they would take turns asking her out on dates.
The experiment took a strange turn. Under other circumstances they did not like her. They would not have talked to her prior to this, but only about her, and in condescending and cynical ways. Yet as the challenge progressed each of the men gradually found the young woman more likable, less foreign, less alien. The first fellow’s date with her went okay, even though he had to keep telling himself she was more beautiful and better company than he truly felt.
But by the time the third fellow asked her out, she had actually become part of their circle of friends. They thought it was kind of fun being with her. She wasn’t so bad after all!
And the fifth fellow never did get to date her, because the fourth fellow in line asked her to be his wife! What started as a rather cruel experiment ended up as an amazing testimony to the truth of James’ words. The judgments made by the “in” group of men proved paltry in the face of mercy, even if it began as a psychological exercise.
Alternative Application
Matthew 23:1-12. Soren Kierkegaard once wrote of a strange break‑in at a large store in his native Denmark where the thieves didn’t remove anything. When clerks opened up in the morning, all the merchandise was still there. Instead of stealing the goods, the thieves had stolen value. They had switched all the price tags, so that the worth of each item had no relation to its price: a diamond necklace valued at $2; a pair of leather shoes for 50 cents; a pencil selling for $75, and a baby’s rattle with $5000 on the sticker.
Sometimes it seems as if our society has been invaded by thieves like that, of the kind Jesus identified among the “scribes and Pharisees” of his day. Just when we think we know the value of something the sticker price begins to spin. Worse still, the values placed on us can bounce like a stock market chart until we don’t know who we are anymore.
Shelley Rodriguez remembers the time she brought her grandson to a farm sale near their home in Independence, Kentucky. The boy was 8 years old at the time. Immediately he was captured by the magic of the auctioneer’s sing‑song voice. Yet something bothered him.
“Grandma,” he asked, “how is that man ever going to sell anything if he keeps changing the prices?”
That’s a good question for all of us.
Of course, one might also wonder about God’s price tags of human worth when reading these words of Jesus. Why should the servants and the humble have a higher value in heaven’s gaze than any other demographic group?
Though the answer is always a little slippery, Jesus’ assertion seems to have to do with the complexity of the human spirit. The hardest thing for any of us to do in life is to maintain integrity. Even though we are not, most of us, evil people, sin has a way of playing around with our hearts. On the outside we appear rather nice and respectable. In fact, much of we do is good and noble and kind and wise. No one can deny that.
The problem is that sin has a way slicing our hearts with perforated lines. Before we are aware of it we have torn off a piece here and a section there, until we find ourselves segmented... fragmented... torn apart in separate snippets of self.
It isn’t that we become blackened by sin in large strokes. Nor do we generally turn into some hideous monsters of greed and cruelty, dissolving the kind Dr. Jekylls of our personalities into dastardly Mr. Hydes. Instead, we keep most of our goodness intact while making small allowances in certain little areas. We shave our taxable income as we fill out our 1040s, maybe. Or we lose our peripheral vision when someone in need approaches. Or we compromise our communication so that we speak from only our mouths but not our souls.
The fragmentation of our lives makes us less than we should or could be. We strut on tiny legs, ants marching across the busy highway of life imagining that tires of destruction will skid around us.
More’s daughter Margaret comes to visit him. She is his pride and joy, often thinking his thoughts after him. In their playful terms of endearment she is her father’s “Meg,” and Henry knows that More will do anything for her. That’s why he sends Meg to plead with her father in prison. “Take the oath, Father!” she urges him. “Take it with your mouth, if you can’t take it with your heart! Take it and return to us! You can’t do us any good in here!”
In so many ways she’s right, of course -- how can More bless and protect his family if he rots in jail or dances with the executioner? And who will know if More coughs a testimony he doesn’t fully believe?
Sir Thomas, however, has felt the creases in his heart and knows what will happen to him if he finds himself rather than King Henry the betrayer in the mirror. So he says: “Meg, when a man swears an oath, he holds himself in his hands like water. And if he opens his fingers, how can he hope to find himself again?”
When our lives begin to fragment, as Thomas More knew, we are left holding our lives as water in our hands. As the cracks between our fingers shift, even slightly, the water of our very selves dribbles away. We may look like the same people, but who we are inside has begun to change.
After all, we are never fully our own. We are never completely independent persons. We serve God or things or passions or self or evil or the devil. As our lectionary passages today remind us, what or who we serve colors the temperament of our souls.
Joshua 3:7-17
The book of Joshua is clearly all about the land of Canaan. The Israelites presume to own it, even though they have never lived there. Yahweh declares it to be their homeland, even though in order for this to become a reality bloody battles will ensue and current settled communities will have to be displaced or destroyed. The promises made to Abraham (Genesis 12, 13, 17), owned by Jacob (Genesis 28, 35, 50), and claimed by Joseph (Genesis 50) serve as the theological justification for taking by force what, from a human point of view, belongs to other people. This is the critical issue that must be faced when reading Joshua. Either Canaan, as a specific piece of territory, has a deeply religious significance which is used by Yahweh and Israel in a certain way for ends that are meant to bless the surrounding nations, or it is a scandalous record of cruelty done by nasty people who wash their defiled consciences in the horrible pious testimony “The Deity made me do it!” Only if the Pentateuch is indeed a revelation of God with a missional intent that is to be accomplished through the nation of Israel does this sordid chapter in Israelite and human history make sense. Even facing this matter head-on does not make the conquest of Canaan easily palatable. No serious student of the Bible ought to dance lightly through these pages and make facile judgments. Either Yahweh is engaged in a crucial galactic civil war battle to wrestle humanity back to its creational senses, and Israel is to play a part in that decisive conflict, or the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are built upon a scandalous foundation of inflated self-important delusion. The book of Joshua forces us to face the desperation of biblical religion: is this simply another moralistic ethic among the do-gooder philosophies of the nations, or is there a unique and all-encompassing polarizing choice engendered by this worldview which demands allegiance or condemnation?
At stake, in answering this dilemma, is an understanding of the unique location and purpose of a small piece of real estate. There are four major literary sections to the book of Joshua, and each is focused on “the Land:”
* Penetrating the Land (chapters 1-5)
* Purging the Land (chapters 6-12)
* Possessing the Land (chapters 13-21)
* Promising the Land (chapters 22-24)
The identity of Israel will become inextricably connected to this land. It is ineradicably intertwined with Hebrew theology. It is essential to Israelite self-perception. So it is very important to ask why? Why this land, and not some other, better paradise? Why this piece of property rather than an uninhabited region of northern Europe, or a tropical island in the south Pacific? What is so terribly important about this land that it has become a constant source of theological embarrassment to generations of biblical scholars and the enemies of Judaism and Christianity?
It has to do with location, location, location, as realtors know. Canaan is the bridge between three continents, and the highway of ancient civilizations in their quest for identity and dominance. Locating Israel here was God’s way of reminding the nations God had created that their true benevolent ruler still existed and still cared about them. Rahab’s testimony to the spies in Joshua 2 is a reminder that Yahweh is not merely a tribal god owned by Israel. Instead, Yahweh is the supreme divinity over both territory and lesser gods. Every nation ought to bow to Yahweh, as Rahab has already begun to do. Israel need only go into the land to perform the mopping-up operations, for the decisive battle has already been won.
This message is confirmed in several ways in the next three chapters. First, the crossing of the wild waters of the Jordan River is told in a way reminiscent of Israel’s movement through the Red Sea a generation earlier (Exodus 14). Both situations required a divine act to overcome a natural barrier. The single significant difference between the former story and this one is that then Moses was the vehicle for dispensing the power of Yahweh as he stood with arm and staff outstretched over the Red Sea, and now it is the visible portable throne of Yahweh (the Ark of the Covenant) which moves ahead of the people to stem the flow. In both instances it was the power of Yahweh that parted the waters; now there is the added luxury of having that royal action expressed in a more direct manifestation of Yahweh’s local movements through the furnishings of the house of the deity resident among the people.
Second, a memorial is created out of 12 stones gathered from the riverbed. These stones would be rounded and smooth from years of polishing as the currents pushed and tumbled them along the riverbed. Therefore they would look strikingly different from the rocks that littered the torrent’s banks and formed the cliffs at its edges. The Israelites were supposed to take family outings to this site in the subsequent years, and have picnics next to the pile. The unusual monument was to be used as a teaching tool, reminding the next generations about what Yahweh had done to create their unique identity and settle them in this land.
Third, the report of this miraculous act of crossing the Jordan River at flood stage zipped along the gossip channels of the nations and tribes living in Canaan until a great fear of Israel and her God enveloped all of them.
1 Thessalonians 2:9-13
After the Jerusalem council, Paul and Barnabas were eager to visit the Galatian congregations and inform them personally of the good outcomes in this early Christian theological debate which had affected them so deeply (Acts 15:36). But tensions flamed between them when they argued whether John Mark should be invited along (Acts 15:37). Paul was still very upset that the younger man had suddenly “deserted” them on their first mission journey (Acts 13:13). In the end, Barnabas felt a family obligation to give it a try with Mark again, while Paul chose a new partner, named Silas, to join him in these travels (Acts 15:39–41).
It was probably late in 49 AD when Paul and Silas left Syrian Antioch, their home base. They traveled overland to the communities in central Asia Minor where Paul and Barnabas had established Christian congregations more than a year earlier. At Lystra they were joined by Timothy (Acts 16:1-2), a promising young man whose mother was Christian but whose father was not. Together this growing company of itinerant preachers had in mind an itinerary taking them farther north in Asia Minor (Acts 16:6-8). There were other new areas where Jewish settlements in Hellenic cities might give them an open door for talking about Jesus.
While pondering their options at Troas, Paul may have had some medical problems. The text of Acts 16 shows a shift at that point from third-person references to first-person recollections (note verses 6-10). It seems obvious that doctor Luke, the man who would author this book, joined the band at Troas. It might well be that he came to Paul as a healer, and stayed with Paul as a new believer and fellow evangelist. Also in this city a divine directive illumined Paul in a vision (Acts 16:9-10), with the result that the company headed next across the Aegean Sea to Macedonia. Philippi was their first major stop, a fairly new Roman colony established by military personnel who received parcels of land as their pensions. As of yet there was no sizeable Jewish population in the city, since Paul and Silas found a small group of Jews worshiping at the river’s edge on a sabbath (Acts 16:13). Once there were ten Jewish males in any town a synagogue had to be established, so the river gathering meant that Jews had not come to Philippi in any significant numbers. As was his custom, Paul spoke to the small group about Jesus, and a new Christian congregation was formed in the home of Lydia (Acts 16:14-15).
Paul and Silas stayed in Philippi for some time, but eventually encountered trouble that landed them in jail. A young fortune-teller began to follow them, shouting out to the crowds about them (Acts 16:16-17), perhaps in a mean-spirited or nasty manner. Paul became grieved by her evident demon possession, and exorcised her (Acts 16:18). The girl’s masters were very upset, and threw Paul and Silas into prison (Acts 16:19-24). A midnight earthquake rocked the place, and led to the jailer’s conversion (Acts 16:25-34). In the morning, the Roman citizenship of Paul and Silas was discovered, and the magistrates were beside themselves in efforts to undo the unlawful treatment these two had received (Acts 16:35-40).
It was on to Thessalonica next for Paul and Silas and their team (Acts 17:1-9). For three weeks Paul preached about Jesus in the Jewish synagogue. When Gentiles swelled the crowd of Christ-believers, however, some Jews became jealous and formed a mob to disrupt civic life. The uproar caused city officials to arrest leading members of the new Christian congregation, and the group sent Paul and Silas out of town that evening under the cover of darkness. With brief stops in Berea (Acts 17:10-15) and Athens (Acts 17:16-34), Paul eventually arrived in Corinth, where he met Aquila and Priscilla for the first time (Acts 18:1-3). This couple would become fast friends with Paul, keeping in touch for the rest of his life.
Although Paul would spend the next year and a half in Corinth, at the outset his heart remained back in Thessalonica. Already when he was traveling through Athens, Paul worried about how the fledgling Thessalonian congregation was faring (1 Thessalonians 2:17-20), and sent Timothy back to find out more and make a report (1 Thessalonians 3:1-5). Paul had already continued on to Corinth by the time Timothy caught up with him, and was elated at the good word his younger associate brought (1 Thessalonians 3:6-10). With emotions running high, Paul dashed off a letter of appreciation and encouragement to his new friends (1 Thessalonians).
Most of this short letter is given to expressions of praise for the great testimony already being noised about from those who observed the grace and spiritual energy of this newborn congregation. Paul rehearsed briefly (1 Thessalonians 1-3) the recent history that had deeply connected them, and told of his aching heart now that they were so quickly “torn away” from one another (1 Thessalonians 2:17). Only after these passionate confessions does Paul spill some ink on a few notes of instruction (1 Thessalonians 4-5).
The central message of Paul’s missionary preaching focused on the resurrection of Jesus. This was, for Paul, the astounding confirmation of Jesus’ divine character. It was the undeniable proof that Jesus was the messiah, and that his words and teachings had ushered in the new age of God’s final revelation and redemptive activity.
Matthew 23:1-12
When a young girl came home from Sunday school, her parents asked her about the lesson. “It was about a man who was traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho,” she said. “He was beaten up by some bad men, and they threw his body into the ditch. Then two preachers came along, but when they saw that the man had already been robbed and they couldn’t get anything more from him, they passed by on the other side!”
She, along with many others including Jesus, seems to think that religious leaders are always on the take, always asking for money. They are just another form of robbers, merely pretending to be sanctified by the piety of religious language. Dennis the Menace, in one of the comic strips, also believes that the church is about money. As he drags his parents off to church on a Sunday morning, later than usual, he says: “I hope we get in our seats before they serve the money!” We all know that the “serve” is really the weekly “take.”
Corrective eyewear is a physical necessity for many of us. But Jesus says that corrective eyewear is also a spiritual necessity for our hearts. As Dr. Karl Menninger once put it, “Attitudes are more important than facts.” Once we enter the light of Christ we need glasses that will change our attitudes about each other. We need glasses of the heart that will alter our perceptions. We need corrective lenses of the soul that will make us encourage and build others up, rather than cut them down.
Johan Eriksson learned that lesson well. In 1939 trainloads of Jewish children were piling into Sweden. Because of the changing political climate under Hitler’s European campaign, parents were trying to get their young ones out of Germany. Boys and girls, sometimes only three or four years old, stumbled off boxcars and into culture shock carrying nothing but large tags around each neck, announcing their names, ages, and hometowns.
The Swedes had agreed to take in the children “for the duration of the war.” Unfortunately there were more children than suitable homes, so even Johan Eriksson was called. Johan was a widower, middle‑aged and gruff, and not a likely candidate for foster parenting.
Without comprehending why, young Rolf walked away from the train station next to Johan. The boy was starving at the time, and frightened into silence. Every time he heard a noise at Johan’s door, little Rolf would run into a closet and pull coats over his head.
For years Rolf wouldn’t smile. He hardly ate. Johan created a spartan but stable home for Rolf, biding his time until Rolf would be gone and he could get back to his life. Yet Rolf never went back to Germany because no one ever sent for him. His parents perished in the ovens.
So Johan did his best with a son he never anticipated. When Rolf was in his twenties, Johan managed to get him a job in Stockholm. For a while Rolf struggled along, but he couldn’t handle the pressures. “His mind just snapped one day,” his employer said, and the local authorities wanted to put him in a mental institution.
Johan set out immediately to rescue his boy. Johan was an old man now, yet he brought Rolf home again to the little city of Amal. For many years Johan nursed Rolf back to health.
Rolf finally got better. He married a wonderful woman. He established a fairly successful business, and even became quite wealthy. All along, though, he knew that his achievements were only possible because of Johan, the big Swede, who took in a nobody, loved him back to life, gave him an identity, and hugged away his fears.
When doctors called Johan’s children home for a final parting in his dying days, Rolf was the first to arrive. From an orphan’s tragedy, his life had become the story of a dearly loved son.
Johan was a Christian. He found the spiritual corrective eyewear that James prescribes. It gave him the ability to see little Rolf as God saw him, and Rolf began to live that day.
Said Mark Twain, “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” True! But when you get that new pair of eyeglasses for your soul, everything begins to look different. Jesus’ words restore in us the true ability to see.
Application
In 1967 a psychologist named Kinch reported a rather bizarre experiment conducted by university psychology graduate students. These males were part of what they considered to be the “in” crowd on campus. They moved in the right circles, dressed the right way, and went to the right places for nightlife parties.
But they all knew a particular young woman who wasn’t in that circle. She was an “outsider,” a “nobody,” a person who didn’t count, at least to them and their kind.
Knowing the effects of behavior modification, they planned together to see how she would change if they treated her, for a time, as if she were part of their “in” crowd. They made an agreement that whenever they saw her they would compliment her and show an interest in her. Furthermore, they would take turns asking her out on dates.
The experiment took a strange turn. Under other circumstances they did not like her. They would not have talked to her prior to this, but only about her, and in condescending and cynical ways. Yet as the challenge progressed each of the men gradually found the young woman more likable, less foreign, less alien. The first fellow’s date with her went okay, even though he had to keep telling himself she was more beautiful and better company than he truly felt.
But by the time the third fellow asked her out, she had actually become part of their circle of friends. They thought it was kind of fun being with her. She wasn’t so bad after all!
And the fifth fellow never did get to date her, because the fourth fellow in line asked her to be his wife! What started as a rather cruel experiment ended up as an amazing testimony to the truth of James’ words. The judgments made by the “in” group of men proved paltry in the face of mercy, even if it began as a psychological exercise.
Alternative Application
Matthew 23:1-12. Soren Kierkegaard once wrote of a strange break‑in at a large store in his native Denmark where the thieves didn’t remove anything. When clerks opened up in the morning, all the merchandise was still there. Instead of stealing the goods, the thieves had stolen value. They had switched all the price tags, so that the worth of each item had no relation to its price: a diamond necklace valued at $2; a pair of leather shoes for 50 cents; a pencil selling for $75, and a baby’s rattle with $5000 on the sticker.
Sometimes it seems as if our society has been invaded by thieves like that, of the kind Jesus identified among the “scribes and Pharisees” of his day. Just when we think we know the value of something the sticker price begins to spin. Worse still, the values placed on us can bounce like a stock market chart until we don’t know who we are anymore.
Shelley Rodriguez remembers the time she brought her grandson to a farm sale near their home in Independence, Kentucky. The boy was 8 years old at the time. Immediately he was captured by the magic of the auctioneer’s sing‑song voice. Yet something bothered him.
“Grandma,” he asked, “how is that man ever going to sell anything if he keeps changing the prices?”
That’s a good question for all of us.
Of course, one might also wonder about God’s price tags of human worth when reading these words of Jesus. Why should the servants and the humble have a higher value in heaven’s gaze than any other demographic group?
Though the answer is always a little slippery, Jesus’ assertion seems to have to do with the complexity of the human spirit. The hardest thing for any of us to do in life is to maintain integrity. Even though we are not, most of us, evil people, sin has a way of playing around with our hearts. On the outside we appear rather nice and respectable. In fact, much of we do is good and noble and kind and wise. No one can deny that.
The problem is that sin has a way slicing our hearts with perforated lines. Before we are aware of it we have torn off a piece here and a section there, until we find ourselves segmented... fragmented... torn apart in separate snippets of self.
It isn’t that we become blackened by sin in large strokes. Nor do we generally turn into some hideous monsters of greed and cruelty, dissolving the kind Dr. Jekylls of our personalities into dastardly Mr. Hydes. Instead, we keep most of our goodness intact while making small allowances in certain little areas. We shave our taxable income as we fill out our 1040s, maybe. Or we lose our peripheral vision when someone in need approaches. Or we compromise our communication so that we speak from only our mouths but not our souls.
The fragmentation of our lives makes us less than we should or could be. We strut on tiny legs, ants marching across the busy highway of life imagining that tires of destruction will skid around us.
