The tipping point
Commentary
In his book, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell shows how some events and
activities take on a life of their own when they pass a critical mark. Up until that point,
the context can be managed and the outcomes determined. But once something reaches
the tipping point, everything changes and energies snowball into effects that cannot be
contained.
A friend sent me a series of pictures that displayed the tipping point humorously. At a small seaside town in British Columbia, a small car careened carelessly on waterfront streets and ended ignobly by tipping off a pier into the briny. Rescuers brought in their crane truck to extend its boom over the partially submerged vehicle, planning to winch it up onto the pavement again. A local photographer captured their efforts as the weight of the soggy sedan overloaded the lifting capacity of the crane and it too tipped into the water, landing squarely on top of its object of rescue.
But the tale refused to end, for town officials gathered in worry and brought in a much larger crane truck from a neighboring village. This behemoth had large extenders which planted stabilizing feet at a secure distance from its frame, and a boom built like a giant's claw. With confidence, the operators snaked a hook to lift the fallen smaller truck back from its baptismal shame. Then, just as brutish force seemed invincible, the leeward stabilizers picked themselves up from the pavement and the monster truck gracefully eased into its own tipping point and pirouetted in an arc onto its lesser cousins below. What a tragedy for the machines and their owners, but what a terrific day for the photographer!
The lectionary readings for today are all focused on the tipping point of Jesus' final week in Jerusalem. Isaiah pictures it from a distance, anticipating the suffering servant's dialogue with the Father as he enters the dark journey of unjust punishment buoyed only by divine favor. Paul poetically traces the parabola of Jesus' obedient descent to the cross which, in turn, energizes his triumphant ascent back to glory, and Luke takes us from the Last Supper to the supposed last resting place as Jesus is careened among the architects of his death in the final hours of Passion Week.
This is the biblical tipping point. Because of it everything changes.
Isaiah 50:4-9a
These verses are found in what is often identified as Second Isaiah (40-55), where judgment and salvation are synthesized in magnificent pictures of grace. These masterpieces are then further interwoven around the mysterious figure of the suffering servant. While it is hard to fully understand Isaiah's vision in his own context (Is the nation of Israel the "suffering servant"? Or perhaps Judah? Is it possibly an enigmatic deliverer from David's royal family? Or even a composite character created for heroic encouragement during Judah's dark times? Is there a historical manifestation of these paradoxical scenes of misplaced identity and deliverance?), there seems to be so much clarity when allowing them to foreshadow Jesus.
There are few good ways to exegete this passage so that it rings true in Isaiah's context and also speaks clearly about the Christ of Passion Week. Perhaps the best homiletic move would be to refer to these verses in snippets of supportive commentary undergirding explorations of Jesus' unjust treatment, using them as insight into the psychological dialogue between the Son and Father. While the world pummels the sinless Christ externally, assuming all manner of self-justified attacks against this outsider, an interior and private conversation might unfold along these lines as Jesus fulfills a redemptive destiny beyond society's ken.
Philippians 2:5-11
Philippians is one of Paul's prison letters, written from Rome around 60 A.D. while Paul was under house arrest waiting to fulfill his appeal to Caesar (see Acts 26-28). It is one of his most joy-filled letters (along with 1 Thessalonians, written about a decade earlier). This is somewhat amazing since Luke's record of the beginnings of the congregations in Acts 16 would not initially suggest a warm and loving fellowship. Its original members were the strong and independent business woman Lydia, the wispy and spiritually empathic fortune-teller slave girl, and the battle-hardened, retired Roman legionnaire pensioned off to a bit of property in the neighborhood that happened to have a cave which he turned into a mercenary incarceration pit. Nevertheless, the congregation that grew from the witness of these became one of Paul's favorites, and he stopped there often in his travels.
Most of our Bibles arrange these verses in poetic form, for the text certainly has the feel of a verse. Scholars often identify this as an early hymn of the church. Perhaps it was written by Paul, or perhaps it was a popular song of faith that he incorporated into his message. In any case it forms a balanced summary of Christ's incarnation and coronation. Care must be taken not to divorce it from its lead-in. Paul uses the hymn in a particular way, as an incentive to mutual submission and humble service within the congregation (vv. 1-4). Thus, while we often abstract the theological statement to confirm our Christological doctrinal statements, we need also to see the ethical impact it has for Christian behavior.
In this way, minor incidents must not detract us from the sweeping momentum of the divine mandate. We view the life of Jesus at the nadir of its parabolic swoop, feeling with him the crunch of a hammer release in full collision with its intended mark. All the energy expended to carry the second person of the Trinity across the gulf between heaven and earth, and raise up this agent of divine grace, is pounding Jesus into the final confines of submission. What began as a shout of angels near Bethlehem is now whimpering into the bloody torment of Calvary. With Paul, we are eager to rush ahead to the victory shout of "Jesus is Lord!"; with Paul, we must also first linger in depths of Jesus' "obedience unto death."
As with the Isaiah passage, this hymn of faith is not so much to be preached but to be sung or emoted. What would one feel while processing through this roller coaster of social upset? How does Jesus find himself fully engaged in the degrading process of betrayal, denial, misunderstanding, and religious ostracism, especially when it appears that he is limited from knowing with clarity the full victory that will come and wrestles painfully with the Father about this challenge while praying in Gethsemane garden?
It is in this context that Paul gives the brief poetic exhortation about the characteristics that mark those on Jesus' team. It is not self-preservation but service that counts. It is not superiority but selflessness that wins points. It is not stridency but sacrifice that finds recognition from the owner of the club. Jesus is building a team that will change the world. Unfortunately on that day, too few people seemed willing to show up at the try- outs.
There is a scene in Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring where a partnership is forged among those who would accompany Frodo on his journey to destroy the ring of power. The movie version makes for a very gripping visual illustration, and the original literary text is equally as moving. What comes through is a sense of selflessness as the bond that unites these creatures. Furthermore, each subsumes his will to the greater cause, and trusts an unseen and transcendent good for an outcome that will bless all of Middle Earth, even if the trek itself causes the demise of any or all of the compatriots.
So it is in Paul's small glimpse of Jesus working out the mission of God. In a world turned cold to its Creator, in an age riddled by Delphic oracles and temple prostitutes and emperors claiming divinity, in a little corner of geography where messianic hopes ran high, God called together a strange team to make its mark by playing a different game.
Walter Wangerin Jr., in his great allegory, The Book of the Dun Cow (along with its wonderful sequel, The Book of Sorrows), captures both the scope of the divine mission as well as the underrated character of the team. If the focus remains on the team apart from the mission, the point is lost. God is reclaiming God's creation, but does so through human agency. The game is fierce and the playing field is rough. Only those who can tear up their personal score sheets in order to get into God's game will make the team. Only they are truly called. Only they are equipped to serve and follow and play on the greatest winning team of all time.
Luke 22:14--23:56
How should we preach this entire narrative? It is impossible to dwell adequately on each important segment -- the table scene with both its Lord's Supper institution and the disciples' self-importance squabbles, prayers in the garden, the betrayal and arrest and denials, the mockings, sham trials, and crucifixion. Either a specific passage has to become the source of homiletic development, or some metaphor needs to cull the main themes and present them in a gripping manner.
One approach that serves the latter method is an allegory developed by Walter Wangerin Jr. in which Jesus is called the Ragman. Wangerin pictures himself in a city on a Friday morning. A handsome young man comes to town, dragging behind him a cart made of wood. The cart is piled high with new, clean clothes, bright and shiny and freshly pressed.
Wandering through the streets the trader marches, crying out his strange deal: "Rags! New rags for old! Give me your old rags, your tired rags, your torn and soiled rags!"
He sees a woman on the back porch of a house. She is old and tired and weary of living. She has a dirty handkerchief pressed to her nose, and she is crying 1,000 tears, sobbing over the pains of her life.
The Ragman takes a clean linen handkerchief from his wagon and brings it to the woman. He lays it across her arm. She blinks at him, wondering what he is up to. Gently, the young man opens her fingers and releases the old, dirty, soaking handkerchief from her knotted fist.
Then comes the wonder. The Ragman touches the old rag to his own eyes and begins to weep her tears. Meanwhile, behind him on her porch stands the old woman, tears gone, eyes full of peace.
It happens again. "New rags for old!" he cries, and he comes to a young girl wearing a bloody bandage on her head. He takes the caked and soiled wrap away and gives her a new bonnet from his cart. Then he wraps the old rags around his head. As he does this, the girl's cuts disappear and her skin turns rosy. She dances away with laughter and returns to her friends to play. But the Ragman begins to moan, and from her rags on his head the blood spills down.
He next meets a man. "Do you have a job?" the Ragman asks. With a sneer the man replies, "Are you kidding?" and holds up his shirtsleeve. There is no arm in it. He cannot work. He is disabled.
But the Ragman says, "Give me your shirt. I'll give you mine."
The man's shirt hangs limp as he takes it off, but the Ragman's shirt hangs firm and full because one of the Ragman's arms is still in the sleeve. It goes with the shirt. When the man puts it on, he has a new arm. The Ragman walks away with one sleeve dangling.
It happens over and over again. The Ragman takes the clothes from the tired, the hurting, the lost, and the lonely. He gathers them to his own body, and takes the pains into his own heart. Then he gives new clothes to new lives with new purpose and new joy.
Finally, around midday, the Ragman finds himself at the center of the city where nothing remains but a stinking garbage heap. It is the accumulated refuse of a society lost to anxiety and torture. On Friday afternoon, the Ragman climbs the hill, stumbling as he drags his cart behind him. He is tired and sore and pained and bleeding. He falls on the wooden beams of the cart, alone and dying from the disease and disaster he has garnered from others.
Wangerin wonders at the sight. In exhaustion and uncertainty, he falls asleep. He lies dreaming nightmares through all of Saturday, until he is shaken from his fitful slumbers early on Sunday morning. The ground quakes. Wangerin looks up. In surprise he sees the Ragman stand up. He is alive! The sores are gone, though the scars remain. But the Ragman's clothes are new and clean. Death has been swallowed up and transformed by life!
Still worn and troubled in his spirit, Wangerin cries up to the Ragman, "Dress me, Ragman! Give me your clothes to wear! Make me new!"
We know the picture. It is the one that Luke unfolds here. Jesus is the Ragman who has to touch lives, who must heal wounds, who is bound by necessity to bring relief. This is the pilgrimage of the Ragman to the center of the city, to the garbage heap of society, to the hill called Golgotha -- the skull! The place of death! The mountain of the crucifixion! There he must go. Personally.
But so, too, those who are with him, including the disciples in his day and all who come to faith through their testimony. That is why Jesus speaks so pointedly in addressing the squabbles of the last supper. Religion is neither an individual game nor a spectator sport. Harry Emerson Fosdick remembered a storm off the Atlantic coast. A ship foundered on the rocks and the Coast Guard was called out. The captain ordered the lifeboat to be launched, but one of the crew members protested. "Sir," he said in fear, "the wind is offshore and the tide is running out! We can launch the boat, but we'll never get back!"
The captain looked at him with a father's eyes, and then said, "Launch the boat, men. We have to go out. That is our duty. But we don't have to come back." This is the tipping point for those who follow Jesus on the road of discipleship.
Application
The Cost of Discipleship, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer noted, is self- denial, and today's lectionary passages clearly point to Jesus' life as a strong call for us to join him in that vocation, not as an end in itself or as a means to a self-help goal (like dieting), but rather as a counter-cultural missional testimony. Those who travel this road do not get to Easter without first enduring Good Friday; they do not presume a glorious outcome that gathers the media like paparazzi vultures, but sense that the journey of service brings light in darkness, hope in despair, healing for pain, and faith where power corrupts and destroys.
Alternative Application
Luke 22:14--23:56. The gospel lesson invites us to focus special attention on the person of Peter. Jesus singles him out for a special exhortation. In spite of himself, Peter was about to take the easy way out precisely at the point where Jesus was about to go through the hardest part of his journey. Peter wanted to save his own life, and in so doing deny himself a place on Jesus' team. Yet after these events, Peter learned some great lessons, and these make a wonderful illustration to bring home the discipleship impact of the Passion story. According to stories from the early church, at the time of the intense persecution under Nero the Christians of Rome told Peter to leave. "You're too valuable," they said. "Get out of town! Find your safety! Go to another place and preach the gospel."
According to the legends Peter is supposed to have gone from the city. Yet, only a few days later, Nero had Peter in custody. Soon afterward, he was sent out to die. When the soldiers took Peter to the site of execution, Peter begged of them one last request. He asked that he might be crucified upside down. He said he wasn't worthy to die in the same way as his Lord. So they nailed him to his cross inverted.
Then, according to the stories, the crowds of Christians gathered round. They wanted to be with their beloved leader as he died. "Why," they asked him as he hung there upside down on the cross, "why did you come back, Father Peter? Why did you return to Rome? Why didn't you flee into the hills?"
This is what Peter is supposed to have said. "When you told me to leave the city, I made my escape. But as I was going down the road, I met our Lord Jesus. He was walking back toward Rome, so I asked him, 'Master, where are you going?' He said to me, 'I am going to the city to be crucified.' 'But, Lord,' I responded, 'were you not crucified once for all?' And he said to me, 'I saw you fleeing from death and now I wish to be crucified instead of you.' Then I knew what I must do. 'Go, Lord!' I told him. 'I will finish my pilgrimage.' And he said to me, 'Fear not, for I am with you.' "
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 31:9-16
It was late one night, and the young people in the church were having a party. There is no denying that things were a little rowdy. There is not much sense in pretending that the kids were not boisterous and dancing up a storm. It was, after all, a party. Suddenly, the door to the fellowship hall burst open and several churchfolk strode in and switched off the music with the crisp question, "Who's in charge here?"
The question really never did get answered, though the asking pretty much quelled the spirit of joy and rowdiness. However, it's a question worth asking, and asking often. Who is, indeed, in charge here? In the church, for example, who is in charge? The pastor? Mention that to most clergyfolk and the response will be a chuckle if not an outburst of laughter. Are the trustees in charge? Certainly, some would say so. Is the personnel committee in charge? Again, some would say so.
The truth of the matter, however, is that it's God who is in charge. Any other assertion of control is merely delusional. The problem encountered by people in all of life settings is that that delusion prevails. So many people act as though they are in charge; so many people live in delusion of power that real power never gets understood, utilized, or even acknowledged.
This psalm puts the matter straight in verse 14: "But I trust in you, O Lord; I say, 'You are my God.' My times are in your hand...."
How would the world look today if leaders both great and small, understood that the "times are in God's hands," not theirs? How would the church look today if clergy and layfolk alike understood that it was God who was in charge of the work and ministry?
The times are indeed in God's hands and the realization of this brings liberation. Released from the drive to control, people can reach in hope and healing. Freed from the need to win, community members can share and cooperate. Untethered from the necessity of determining the outcome, the people are released to discern God's leading rather than their own desires.
What a powerful community would emerge with God at the helm! What incredible witness could be given by a people not obsessed with being in charge! And finally, what a nation might be built if it were free of the will to power, and given over instead to the justice and compassion of the holy one.
A friend sent me a series of pictures that displayed the tipping point humorously. At a small seaside town in British Columbia, a small car careened carelessly on waterfront streets and ended ignobly by tipping off a pier into the briny. Rescuers brought in their crane truck to extend its boom over the partially submerged vehicle, planning to winch it up onto the pavement again. A local photographer captured their efforts as the weight of the soggy sedan overloaded the lifting capacity of the crane and it too tipped into the water, landing squarely on top of its object of rescue.
But the tale refused to end, for town officials gathered in worry and brought in a much larger crane truck from a neighboring village. This behemoth had large extenders which planted stabilizing feet at a secure distance from its frame, and a boom built like a giant's claw. With confidence, the operators snaked a hook to lift the fallen smaller truck back from its baptismal shame. Then, just as brutish force seemed invincible, the leeward stabilizers picked themselves up from the pavement and the monster truck gracefully eased into its own tipping point and pirouetted in an arc onto its lesser cousins below. What a tragedy for the machines and their owners, but what a terrific day for the photographer!
The lectionary readings for today are all focused on the tipping point of Jesus' final week in Jerusalem. Isaiah pictures it from a distance, anticipating the suffering servant's dialogue with the Father as he enters the dark journey of unjust punishment buoyed only by divine favor. Paul poetically traces the parabola of Jesus' obedient descent to the cross which, in turn, energizes his triumphant ascent back to glory, and Luke takes us from the Last Supper to the supposed last resting place as Jesus is careened among the architects of his death in the final hours of Passion Week.
This is the biblical tipping point. Because of it everything changes.
Isaiah 50:4-9a
These verses are found in what is often identified as Second Isaiah (40-55), where judgment and salvation are synthesized in magnificent pictures of grace. These masterpieces are then further interwoven around the mysterious figure of the suffering servant. While it is hard to fully understand Isaiah's vision in his own context (Is the nation of Israel the "suffering servant"? Or perhaps Judah? Is it possibly an enigmatic deliverer from David's royal family? Or even a composite character created for heroic encouragement during Judah's dark times? Is there a historical manifestation of these paradoxical scenes of misplaced identity and deliverance?), there seems to be so much clarity when allowing them to foreshadow Jesus.
There are few good ways to exegete this passage so that it rings true in Isaiah's context and also speaks clearly about the Christ of Passion Week. Perhaps the best homiletic move would be to refer to these verses in snippets of supportive commentary undergirding explorations of Jesus' unjust treatment, using them as insight into the psychological dialogue between the Son and Father. While the world pummels the sinless Christ externally, assuming all manner of self-justified attacks against this outsider, an interior and private conversation might unfold along these lines as Jesus fulfills a redemptive destiny beyond society's ken.
Philippians 2:5-11
Philippians is one of Paul's prison letters, written from Rome around 60 A.D. while Paul was under house arrest waiting to fulfill his appeal to Caesar (see Acts 26-28). It is one of his most joy-filled letters (along with 1 Thessalonians, written about a decade earlier). This is somewhat amazing since Luke's record of the beginnings of the congregations in Acts 16 would not initially suggest a warm and loving fellowship. Its original members were the strong and independent business woman Lydia, the wispy and spiritually empathic fortune-teller slave girl, and the battle-hardened, retired Roman legionnaire pensioned off to a bit of property in the neighborhood that happened to have a cave which he turned into a mercenary incarceration pit. Nevertheless, the congregation that grew from the witness of these became one of Paul's favorites, and he stopped there often in his travels.
Most of our Bibles arrange these verses in poetic form, for the text certainly has the feel of a verse. Scholars often identify this as an early hymn of the church. Perhaps it was written by Paul, or perhaps it was a popular song of faith that he incorporated into his message. In any case it forms a balanced summary of Christ's incarnation and coronation. Care must be taken not to divorce it from its lead-in. Paul uses the hymn in a particular way, as an incentive to mutual submission and humble service within the congregation (vv. 1-4). Thus, while we often abstract the theological statement to confirm our Christological doctrinal statements, we need also to see the ethical impact it has for Christian behavior.
In this way, minor incidents must not detract us from the sweeping momentum of the divine mandate. We view the life of Jesus at the nadir of its parabolic swoop, feeling with him the crunch of a hammer release in full collision with its intended mark. All the energy expended to carry the second person of the Trinity across the gulf between heaven and earth, and raise up this agent of divine grace, is pounding Jesus into the final confines of submission. What began as a shout of angels near Bethlehem is now whimpering into the bloody torment of Calvary. With Paul, we are eager to rush ahead to the victory shout of "Jesus is Lord!"; with Paul, we must also first linger in depths of Jesus' "obedience unto death."
As with the Isaiah passage, this hymn of faith is not so much to be preached but to be sung or emoted. What would one feel while processing through this roller coaster of social upset? How does Jesus find himself fully engaged in the degrading process of betrayal, denial, misunderstanding, and religious ostracism, especially when it appears that he is limited from knowing with clarity the full victory that will come and wrestles painfully with the Father about this challenge while praying in Gethsemane garden?
It is in this context that Paul gives the brief poetic exhortation about the characteristics that mark those on Jesus' team. It is not self-preservation but service that counts. It is not superiority but selflessness that wins points. It is not stridency but sacrifice that finds recognition from the owner of the club. Jesus is building a team that will change the world. Unfortunately on that day, too few people seemed willing to show up at the try- outs.
There is a scene in Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring where a partnership is forged among those who would accompany Frodo on his journey to destroy the ring of power. The movie version makes for a very gripping visual illustration, and the original literary text is equally as moving. What comes through is a sense of selflessness as the bond that unites these creatures. Furthermore, each subsumes his will to the greater cause, and trusts an unseen and transcendent good for an outcome that will bless all of Middle Earth, even if the trek itself causes the demise of any or all of the compatriots.
So it is in Paul's small glimpse of Jesus working out the mission of God. In a world turned cold to its Creator, in an age riddled by Delphic oracles and temple prostitutes and emperors claiming divinity, in a little corner of geography where messianic hopes ran high, God called together a strange team to make its mark by playing a different game.
Walter Wangerin Jr., in his great allegory, The Book of the Dun Cow (along with its wonderful sequel, The Book of Sorrows), captures both the scope of the divine mission as well as the underrated character of the team. If the focus remains on the team apart from the mission, the point is lost. God is reclaiming God's creation, but does so through human agency. The game is fierce and the playing field is rough. Only those who can tear up their personal score sheets in order to get into God's game will make the team. Only they are truly called. Only they are equipped to serve and follow and play on the greatest winning team of all time.
Luke 22:14--23:56
How should we preach this entire narrative? It is impossible to dwell adequately on each important segment -- the table scene with both its Lord's Supper institution and the disciples' self-importance squabbles, prayers in the garden, the betrayal and arrest and denials, the mockings, sham trials, and crucifixion. Either a specific passage has to become the source of homiletic development, or some metaphor needs to cull the main themes and present them in a gripping manner.
One approach that serves the latter method is an allegory developed by Walter Wangerin Jr. in which Jesus is called the Ragman. Wangerin pictures himself in a city on a Friday morning. A handsome young man comes to town, dragging behind him a cart made of wood. The cart is piled high with new, clean clothes, bright and shiny and freshly pressed.
Wandering through the streets the trader marches, crying out his strange deal: "Rags! New rags for old! Give me your old rags, your tired rags, your torn and soiled rags!"
He sees a woman on the back porch of a house. She is old and tired and weary of living. She has a dirty handkerchief pressed to her nose, and she is crying 1,000 tears, sobbing over the pains of her life.
The Ragman takes a clean linen handkerchief from his wagon and brings it to the woman. He lays it across her arm. She blinks at him, wondering what he is up to. Gently, the young man opens her fingers and releases the old, dirty, soaking handkerchief from her knotted fist.
Then comes the wonder. The Ragman touches the old rag to his own eyes and begins to weep her tears. Meanwhile, behind him on her porch stands the old woman, tears gone, eyes full of peace.
It happens again. "New rags for old!" he cries, and he comes to a young girl wearing a bloody bandage on her head. He takes the caked and soiled wrap away and gives her a new bonnet from his cart. Then he wraps the old rags around his head. As he does this, the girl's cuts disappear and her skin turns rosy. She dances away with laughter and returns to her friends to play. But the Ragman begins to moan, and from her rags on his head the blood spills down.
He next meets a man. "Do you have a job?" the Ragman asks. With a sneer the man replies, "Are you kidding?" and holds up his shirtsleeve. There is no arm in it. He cannot work. He is disabled.
But the Ragman says, "Give me your shirt. I'll give you mine."
The man's shirt hangs limp as he takes it off, but the Ragman's shirt hangs firm and full because one of the Ragman's arms is still in the sleeve. It goes with the shirt. When the man puts it on, he has a new arm. The Ragman walks away with one sleeve dangling.
It happens over and over again. The Ragman takes the clothes from the tired, the hurting, the lost, and the lonely. He gathers them to his own body, and takes the pains into his own heart. Then he gives new clothes to new lives with new purpose and new joy.
Finally, around midday, the Ragman finds himself at the center of the city where nothing remains but a stinking garbage heap. It is the accumulated refuse of a society lost to anxiety and torture. On Friday afternoon, the Ragman climbs the hill, stumbling as he drags his cart behind him. He is tired and sore and pained and bleeding. He falls on the wooden beams of the cart, alone and dying from the disease and disaster he has garnered from others.
Wangerin wonders at the sight. In exhaustion and uncertainty, he falls asleep. He lies dreaming nightmares through all of Saturday, until he is shaken from his fitful slumbers early on Sunday morning. The ground quakes. Wangerin looks up. In surprise he sees the Ragman stand up. He is alive! The sores are gone, though the scars remain. But the Ragman's clothes are new and clean. Death has been swallowed up and transformed by life!
Still worn and troubled in his spirit, Wangerin cries up to the Ragman, "Dress me, Ragman! Give me your clothes to wear! Make me new!"
We know the picture. It is the one that Luke unfolds here. Jesus is the Ragman who has to touch lives, who must heal wounds, who is bound by necessity to bring relief. This is the pilgrimage of the Ragman to the center of the city, to the garbage heap of society, to the hill called Golgotha -- the skull! The place of death! The mountain of the crucifixion! There he must go. Personally.
But so, too, those who are with him, including the disciples in his day and all who come to faith through their testimony. That is why Jesus speaks so pointedly in addressing the squabbles of the last supper. Religion is neither an individual game nor a spectator sport. Harry Emerson Fosdick remembered a storm off the Atlantic coast. A ship foundered on the rocks and the Coast Guard was called out. The captain ordered the lifeboat to be launched, but one of the crew members protested. "Sir," he said in fear, "the wind is offshore and the tide is running out! We can launch the boat, but we'll never get back!"
The captain looked at him with a father's eyes, and then said, "Launch the boat, men. We have to go out. That is our duty. But we don't have to come back." This is the tipping point for those who follow Jesus on the road of discipleship.
Application
The Cost of Discipleship, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer noted, is self- denial, and today's lectionary passages clearly point to Jesus' life as a strong call for us to join him in that vocation, not as an end in itself or as a means to a self-help goal (like dieting), but rather as a counter-cultural missional testimony. Those who travel this road do not get to Easter without first enduring Good Friday; they do not presume a glorious outcome that gathers the media like paparazzi vultures, but sense that the journey of service brings light in darkness, hope in despair, healing for pain, and faith where power corrupts and destroys.
Alternative Application
Luke 22:14--23:56. The gospel lesson invites us to focus special attention on the person of Peter. Jesus singles him out for a special exhortation. In spite of himself, Peter was about to take the easy way out precisely at the point where Jesus was about to go through the hardest part of his journey. Peter wanted to save his own life, and in so doing deny himself a place on Jesus' team. Yet after these events, Peter learned some great lessons, and these make a wonderful illustration to bring home the discipleship impact of the Passion story. According to stories from the early church, at the time of the intense persecution under Nero the Christians of Rome told Peter to leave. "You're too valuable," they said. "Get out of town! Find your safety! Go to another place and preach the gospel."
According to the legends Peter is supposed to have gone from the city. Yet, only a few days later, Nero had Peter in custody. Soon afterward, he was sent out to die. When the soldiers took Peter to the site of execution, Peter begged of them one last request. He asked that he might be crucified upside down. He said he wasn't worthy to die in the same way as his Lord. So they nailed him to his cross inverted.
Then, according to the stories, the crowds of Christians gathered round. They wanted to be with their beloved leader as he died. "Why," they asked him as he hung there upside down on the cross, "why did you come back, Father Peter? Why did you return to Rome? Why didn't you flee into the hills?"
This is what Peter is supposed to have said. "When you told me to leave the city, I made my escape. But as I was going down the road, I met our Lord Jesus. He was walking back toward Rome, so I asked him, 'Master, where are you going?' He said to me, 'I am going to the city to be crucified.' 'But, Lord,' I responded, 'were you not crucified once for all?' And he said to me, 'I saw you fleeing from death and now I wish to be crucified instead of you.' Then I knew what I must do. 'Go, Lord!' I told him. 'I will finish my pilgrimage.' And he said to me, 'Fear not, for I am with you.' "
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 31:9-16
It was late one night, and the young people in the church were having a party. There is no denying that things were a little rowdy. There is not much sense in pretending that the kids were not boisterous and dancing up a storm. It was, after all, a party. Suddenly, the door to the fellowship hall burst open and several churchfolk strode in and switched off the music with the crisp question, "Who's in charge here?"
The question really never did get answered, though the asking pretty much quelled the spirit of joy and rowdiness. However, it's a question worth asking, and asking often. Who is, indeed, in charge here? In the church, for example, who is in charge? The pastor? Mention that to most clergyfolk and the response will be a chuckle if not an outburst of laughter. Are the trustees in charge? Certainly, some would say so. Is the personnel committee in charge? Again, some would say so.
The truth of the matter, however, is that it's God who is in charge. Any other assertion of control is merely delusional. The problem encountered by people in all of life settings is that that delusion prevails. So many people act as though they are in charge; so many people live in delusion of power that real power never gets understood, utilized, or even acknowledged.
This psalm puts the matter straight in verse 14: "But I trust in you, O Lord; I say, 'You are my God.' My times are in your hand...."
How would the world look today if leaders both great and small, understood that the "times are in God's hands," not theirs? How would the church look today if clergy and layfolk alike understood that it was God who was in charge of the work and ministry?
The times are indeed in God's hands and the realization of this brings liberation. Released from the drive to control, people can reach in hope and healing. Freed from the need to win, community members can share and cooperate. Untethered from the necessity of determining the outcome, the people are released to discern God's leading rather than their own desires.
What a powerful community would emerge with God at the helm! What incredible witness could be given by a people not obsessed with being in charge! And finally, what a nation might be built if it were free of the will to power, and given over instead to the justice and compassion of the holy one.
