« What about the Sabbath? | Main | Our Final Destiny »
August 13, 2006
The Badge of Jesus?
Joshua 5: 10-15
John 5: 19-24
August 13th, 2006
One week ago yesterday Bonnie and I drove to the gate of the Chautauqua Institution in western New York. There an envelope awaited us that had a parking pass for the week. Not cheap! Inside at the “Will Call” booth was another envelope that contained our tickets to many events and a week’s free lodging at Presbyterian House, one of the most hospitable guesthouses I’ve ever encountered. But what awaited me at the desk at Presbyterian House I found down right intriguing as I pondered its effect over the course of the week. I was given a badge to wear on my shirt that said, “Chaplain, Presbyterian House.”
This elegant place is right beside the amphitheater where large musical events and lectures take place. It is also the place where many people come for coffee after the regular morning religious service. It was my duty to stand on the porch wearing my badge and welcoming the folk who streamed onto the porch for cocoa-laced coffee and conversation. People saw my badge and many gravitated over to speak with me. People I met in the morning coffee hours had read about me in the Chautauqua paper, which wrote about me squeezing the last drop of audacious praise that might be found in my resume.
I was, I read in the paper, a distinguished authority on Josephus, the Jewish historian. That accolade, questionable though it might be, drew me into conversations with many folk who’d heard of Josephus and took opportunity to know more of him. I could go on and on giving anecdotes of how that badge that said, “Chaplain, Presbyterian House” paved the way for my exposure to very many people last week.
As the week wore on and this impression sunk in I lay on my bed one night pondering this morning’s Scripture texts. I wondered how things might have been different for Jesus if he’d worn a badge that identified him alluringly as the Presbyterian House Chaplain badge opened doors for me. What could the badge of said? Maybe, “Incarnate Son of God?” Nobody would know what that meant, and many would accuse Jesus of either insanity or blasphemy. What kind of badge could Jesus have worn that would have opened for Him the avenues to peoples’ hearts that my badge afforded me?
Jesus wasn’t into wearing badges. Indeed, it has always been God’s way to go the opposite route with His agents of redeeming the human heart. Moses had a speech impediment that the Hebrew Bible describes grotesquely: “a man with uncircumcised lips.” He was meek in disposition, hardly an asset when trying to claim the interest of people who are more drawn to extroverts.
I think of Abraham who at seventy-five years of age was told to leave everyone he knew and go where nobody knew him and in unknown places be faithful to follow God’s next direction. He had to trust that this God who was newly revealed to him was not a figment of his imagination. And thus Abraham privately obeyed the voice of command that nobody could hear except him.
In the Book of Joshua this morning we read of this unidentified warrior that appeared before Joshua. Joshua, the under-study of Moses in the late wilderness years no doubt had all the self-confidence of most second-string players. He challenges this numinous figure, “Are you friend or foe?” And in a very brief moment he discovers he’s in the presence of a messenger of God. In the Old Testament sometimes the messenger of God turns out to be an appearance of God. But these appearances never came with the One appearing wearing a badge, an identification. It was their inward identity, who they were in their solitary character that was the medium God used.
And so it was when Jesus came. We who now read the New Testament have in mind all the things that have been said about Jesus long after he walked the dusty roads of Palestine. We have in mind the Nicene Creed’s description of Him: “God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made.” It is a badge of honor we assume is attached to His clothing from the moment of His birth. When shepherds and wise men came to Him in His infancy, they saw not a mere human baby, nursing His mother, or a lad helping His father in the carpenter shop of Nazareth later on; we imagine they saw God incarnate and knew it.
But they didn’t. Mary kept things in her heart and pondered them, but very few others had any inkling that they should ponder anything more about Jesus than they pondered about any other young man on the street. Jesus’ “badge” was entirely self-contained. It was hidden in His heart.
I read the words Jesus said of Himself in the section of John’s Gospel this morning and realize nobody then would have read them as we do. All of this about His close relationship to His heavenly Father seems to us very wonderful. Here Jesus lets us into His great secret. Here Jesus finally exposes how His Incarnate Deity works; His will and the will of the Father are in perfect synch, as we would expect the will of Persons of the Holy Trinity to be. But we think this because we’ve seen Jesus’ badge. We believe about Him already such amazing things.
After all, Isaiah foretold He would be “mighty God, the everlasting Father;” we remember this every Christmas when we hear those words of prophecy again. It makes no difference to us that Jesus didn’t look at all mighty as He endured the hate and rejection that led Him to the cross. It doesn’t matter to us that He was Son and not the Father, as we think of the Trinity. We see the badge of Deity fastened on Jesus and it is because we see this badge that we take in stride all the grand things said of Him in the New Testament.
But when we do this, do we not put Jesus up on a pedestal where we venerate Him out of any real usefulness to us as a guide to the kind of life that is God’s intention for us? We have created our elaborate doctrines of Christ that put our stamp of worship on Him, while the Jesus that really walked this earth depended completely on what was within Him, that surging faithfulness to the will of the Father that made Him go from Bethlehem’s manger to Golgotha’s cross.
And since we’re so fascinated with the badge of Deity that Jesus wears we have spent a lot of energy defining what it says and defending its truthfulness. But as we’ve done what God never did in sending His Son to redeem this world, we’ve laid aside what we should really see, what faithfulness looks like, the kind of faithfulness to the will of God that results in a life that brings all of God’s intentions for us to full flower. We’re much bigger into doctrines than we are in to developing character. In fact, we’ve got a doctrine that puts a big question mark over the need to develop Christ-like character. The doctrine of justification by grace through faith has rendered unnecessary the real blooming of sanctification.
Sanctification, the process where the Holy Spirit makes us look like we say we believe is the way to follow Jesus, walks far behind the doctrine of justification. Because it’s so much more comforting to believe that out of sheer grace God looks at us as though we’d never committed a single sin or ever been sinful, as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it. Even though I may obviously be a sinner, a gloomy, vengeful, petty, self-centered parody of the Christian life, God sees me as though I were Jesus, “clad in His righteousness alone, faultless to stand before the throne.” What a comforting doctrine!
It is a badge we urge people to put on once they’ve prayed the prayer that asks Jesus into their hearts—a term we should think about a bit more. From there we’ve gone on to pin other badges on our chests, identifying ourselves as conservatives or whatever are the approved terms in the societies we’ve created in this prosperous land.
But I look at the Bible and at Jesus in particular and see no hint that we’re to wear badges that get us pre-approved. The Bible leads us to seek an inward identity, a heart that wants to beat according to the will of God. All that John’s Gospel told us this morning of Jesus describes inward stuff. His relationship with the Father was not visible on His sleeve. It could only be seen as someone watched the tenor of His life. His disciples watched this unfolding definition of who Jesus was as they saw Him rise from His bed long before they did in order to pray—alone. They watched His responses to people, His total acceptance of people others rejected. They heard Him called “Friend of sinners,” a term that we’ve made to seem good, but was intended as an accusation of low character. After all, are we not known by the company we keep?
But tax collectors, prostitutes, and other unclean folk found in Jesus a friend who drew them up out of their dreary lives. And when Jesus drew them up He gently set their feet on a Rock and established their goings, as the Psalm puts it.
I thought a lot this week as we were at Chautauqua about the confusion that now grips our denomination and that grips all Christendom, for that matter. I thought of what I read recently in a book describing the religious world in the time of Christ, that it was in confusion. Judaism itself emerged from the confusion in the Jewish world after the dismemberment and exile of the Israelite people. Jews identified themselves as Pharisees—careful to keep the finest intentions of the Law of Moses, or as Sadducees—strict constructionists who didn’t go along with the Pharisees’ imaginative expositions of the Law of Moses.
The most pious of all perhaps were the Essenes who separated from the rest of the Jews, interpreting the Hebrew Bible in their special way that saw the fulfillment of prophecy where other Jews did not. And then there were the Zealots who just knew that God’s call to them was to throw off the yolk of Rome by force. Jesus stepped into this chaotic, seething mix of Jewishnesses and refused to be identified with any one of them as a means of getting approval and access to peoples’ hearts.
In ways He was like the Pharisees—as, for example when He interpreted the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” to mean, “Thou shalt not hate or belittle someone;” or in explaining that “Thou shalt not commit adultery” means, “Don’t look lustfully on a woman.” In other ways he was like the Sadducees in His allegiance to the Law that rejected picayune interpretations advanced by the Pharisees. In still other ways He seemed like an Essene, or a Zealot.
But the only badge He wore was on His heart. His will was to do the will of the Father who sent Him. In the confusion of His day does Jesus not offer the guide we need to follow in our confused day?
Just now we’re torn as Presbyterians, with conservatives up in arms over the liberals, the progressives, who seem to us to push at the boundaries set for us by the Bible. Protectively we think of separating from them, pinning our conservative badges on our chests as we know would please God best. Because God wants to know that we identify ourselves as faithful conservatives. Meanwhile, privately, in our homes, in our moments unknown to others, known only to ourselves and, we forget, to God, we are whatever we are. Our badges mean very little. Wearing a badge that wins the approval of other people wearing their badges of self-approval probably means far more to us than it does to God.
I would like to take the cue from Jesus about how to go about the business of life. I mentioned to our children in the children’s sermon that a Christian doesn’t wear a special kind of hat. You may get the idea that a man is a soldier when he wears a soldier’s hat, or a Scot when he wears a tam, or an Arab when he wears that distinctive wrap over his head held down by those circles of black rope. But there is nothing to identify us outwardly as a Christian.
Our identity is inward, where in our hearts we have accepted Jesus’ forgiveness of our sin and determined to make Him Lord of our lives. Our identity is outward in so far as it is evident we love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind—and our neighbor as ourselves. Our identity is evident, Jesus said, if we love one another. If Jesus is not really our Lord, except in a phrase we’ll say; and if our love for God is really only a cultural artifact in an outwardly religious society; and if it is obvious we love ourselves far more than we love any neighbor; and if clearly we don’t love others at church—then, no matter what outward badge we wear, in our hearts we’re hardly Christian at all. And it is what’s going on in the heart that God sees.
And, for that matter, people too pick up on this. Anyone who watches us carefully can tell if our faith is a matter of appearances, of the badge we wear, or whether our identity emerges out of the many facets of our faithfulness to God, to others, to one another.
It is this I long for at Faith Church. Here let your faithfulness be what is obvious about you. Here let your love of God and your neighbor not be suggested as you quote these words of Scripture, but as, from the heart, day after day, you put your heart on autopilot to find and do the will of God. Here let our love for each other be so conspicuous that no one can doubt that we love God—because of how we love each other.
How superfluous a badge becomes once you recognize the character of a person. I pray you and I may wear the identity being forged in our hearts, visible not in external badges that may tell a lie about us, but visible in the texture of our lives—lived as Jesus’ life was lived, in conscious, deliberate submission to the will of God the Father. How beautiful is such a life; how winsome; how satisfying to be lived; how healing in this war-torn, despair-ridden world. Let this be our badge.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we come to you who sees into our depths to know what we are. Grant us so to live that whatever is outward about us will be informed by what you have re-created in us. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at August 13, 2006 09:30 AM