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March 27, 2005
Unexpected Joy in the Morning
Unexpected Joy in the Morning
Isaiah 60: 1-3 / Matthew 28: 1-10
Easter Sunday, March 27, 2005
It has been about four hours since dawn started to tint the eastern sky this morning. It was about this time on the first Easter Sunday that two women named Mary stirred from their homes and came together bringing myrrh and other spices to the cave-tomb outside the city of Jerusalem where Jesus had been buried the Friday before. They wanted to anoint Jesus’ body that by now they were sure would be decomposing.
Matthew’s Gospel tells us that before they got there, there was a great earthquake. It wasn’t the first such earthquake that weekend.
On Friday afternoon the earth shook. At the moment Jesus died, tombs opened outside Jerusalem and devout people who had died came back to life. The shock waves of the Author of life dying reversed the process for many who had died and been buried nearby. These who had been dead but were now alive spread throughout Jerusalem. What a surprise that must have been in many a home! “There’s grandpa at the door! It’s impossible. He died last year. But grandpa says, “Touch me. It’s really me.”
A few days before that in a little suburb of Jerusalem Jesus had raised Lazarus from death four days after he died. Only Matthew and John tell us of these two events as God started to break people in to the idea of life after death.
Those two resurrections of the dead had nothing like the effect of the resurrection that took place on Easter morning—which all four Gospels describe. An angel of the Lord came down from heaven and rolled back the great stone that covered the mouth of the tomb. They did this not so much to let Jesus come out as to let people see in. Because in the days to follow we notice Jesus was not restricted by such things as doors and walls.
The angel sat on the stone now removed from the mouth of the tomb, watching to see who would come. How courteous he was to welcome the two women who came. “Do not be afraid; for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay.”
Many years have passed since that morning, and nobody is sure exactly where was the place that Jesus lay. When some of us were in Jerusalem in 1994 we went to a garden tomb cut into rock that seemed authentic. But who knows for sure? And many ideas of what happened have coursed through peoples’ minds. Some people think angels are just make believe. Some people think that Jesus didn’t really come alive, but that a fresh inspiration of His memory filled the hearts of those who loved Him. This inspiration transformed them and launched the movement we call Christianity. I find this hard to believe. How straightforward the Gospels are. He who was dead came alive, bodily.
The reason why we are here this morning is that Jesus of Nazareth, who died on the Friday afternoon before, came to life again the Sunday morning following. What the Gospels intend for us to understand is that Jesus’ heart started beating again. His lungs breathed air again. His eyes saw what was around Him again. He felt the morning breezes. Maybe He was hungry for breakfast. We know He ate later in the day.
We might say that Jesus came alive because humanity needed a complete makeover. Paul wrote, “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” But who wants to be made alive again with the same problems and the same body we had before?
A popular kind of TV program nowadays is about body makeovers. With TV cameras zooming in, plastic surgeons rearrange the shape of peoples’ body parts, fashioning “ideal” bodies out of defective ones. You know the details. But eyelids droop again, and we all know the problems following other body part reconstructions. Furthermore, despite whatever pleasure folk might find in their spiffy new body parts, their hearts remain unaffected. Selfish people don’t come out from the anesthesia with gracious hearts.
What people need is a complete makeover—heart, mind, and body. God promises this in the resurrection. To show it is not only possible, but also a promise of God for ordinary people, we read of all those resurrections that took place near the time of Jesus’ resurrection. Lazarus and all the rest who rose from death died again, but Jesus began a new tendency in nature, where the one who died will live again, altogether changed. We need changing. All of us do. Oh, how we need changing!
What wonderful capacities God put into each of us. Each of us is fearfully and wonderfully made. Our bodies are amazing works of art. Not only that, but God created us with the capacity for friendship, for iridescent love for each other. God created us with the ability to compose beautiful music, to paint beautiful pictures, to build strong and beautiful buildings and bridges, to take the raw material of this earth and transform it with imagination that is like the imagination with which God created the diverse plant and animal world. What variety of animals! What variety of trees and flowers. And what variety of beautiful and useful things people have imagined and created!
But how badly we have so often twisted the wonderful capacities we have. We have imagined and made fearful egnines of destruction. We have taken the wonderful capacity to love and changed it to hatred. Broken friendships are blight on the landscape of family and community. The attraction of man and woman that is to lead to mutual happiness has turned predatory. Nowadays women prey on men’s bodies as men do on women for their bodies. No longer do people hide how they have cheapened the beautiful gift of our differences as man and woman. How coarse things have become.
The capacity to love and care for children has been twisted so that many children die or have their lives broken by parental abuse. No other animal on the planet has wrecked the destruction on its kind or on other kinds that we have wrecked on other people and on our planet. The corruption of the best is the worst, Augustine said. We desperately need a complete makeover.
The Apostle Paul wrote, “If anyone is in Christ, that one is a new creation. The old has passed away, the new has come.” The prophet Jeremiah gave God’s promise, “Your life will be like a watered garden, and [you] shall languish no more.” “I will put my law within [you], and I will write it upon [your] hearts; and I will be [your] God, and [you] shall be my people.” The Apostle and the great Old Testament prophet saw the same thing.
How often as we read the Gospels’ words about Jesus do we read that what was happening was to fulfill the word of the prophets. Or we read that it was “according to the Scriptures” that events in Jesus’ life took place.
God gave to the prophets clues of important things that were going to happen as God unfolded His plan to restore this broken world. The prophets saw the very same kind of human behavior you and I see, but they also saw that despite all of this evil, this cruelty, that God had not abandoned this world. Some times they pronounced God’s judgment against evil. But they also came out with glorious promises reflecting God’s good purposes for this world. Often they wrote clues nobody could recognize immediately.
One of these clues Fran Thompson read for us from the prophet Isaiah. “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For behold darkness shall cover the earth, and think darkness the peoples, but the Lord will arise upon you and his glory will be seen upon you.”
This is a promise to God’s people, Israel that we usually remember around Christmas because Handel’s oratorio, “Messiah,” sets it to beautiful music. But how pertinent this happy promise is to the other side of Jesus’ life on earth. When the prophet promises Israel, “the glory of the Lord has risen upon you,” and “the Lord will arise upon you and his glory will be seen upon you,” he foretold Jesus’ resurrection. The word “rise” is repeated with good reason. But no one thought to apply this in any specific way to a Person who was the Glory of the Lord. No one imagined that this rising would be an actual event.
But I have learned that there was a way of understanding the Bible that developed in the dark years of the Jews after they had been taken into exile that opened them to new meanings in the prophets that they could not have seen before. Far from home, their beloved Temple in Jerusalem destroyed and left in ruins, they returned to a close study of their Bible that we call the Old Testament.
When Jesus was born a number of these Old Testament hints suddenly came into focus. The prophet Micah pointed at the tiny village of Bethlehem and said, “From you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient of days.” He had no idea that “from ancient of days” would mean someone who was with God in the beginning, at creation, in fact, who was God, as John’s Gospel tells us.
The prophet Hosea thought he was writing about Israel when he wrote, “Out of Egypt have I called my son,” little knowing that the Son of God would come out of Egypt, back to Israel, after having been taken their by Joseph and his mother, Mary, to protect Him from the murderous hands of King Herod.
The prophet Isaiah, writing hundreds of years before the time of Jesus pointed his finger even more forcefully and often, little realizing that he was pointing as other prophets had done, and still others would do, at Jesus. He wrote, “The people who walked in deep darkness have seen a great light. Those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined.”
Then a time came when the One arrived to whom all these ancient prophets were pointing with their mysterious, incomprehensible words. Here was Jesus, the salvation of God not only for the Jews, but “a light for revelation to the Gentiles.” The promises of the prophets Isaiah, Hosea, and Zechariah that God would embrace those who were not considered God’s people into His arms, along with the Jews.
Time after time in Jesus life He showed how an Old Testament prophet was describing Him perfectly. He opened the eyes of blind people and made the lame walk, and His disciples remembered the words of Isaiah, “Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped, the lame man shall leap like a hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing!” In the synagogue in His hometown of Nazareth, Jesus, having returned to His home village, he was invited to read the lesson, which happened to be from Isaiah 61. He read it and sat down, as preachers did in those days. He said, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
When the prophet Isaiah wrote, “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you,” it was another such forecast of God’s care for us. Jesus Christ rose from death and the glory of the Lord has risen upon us.
But Easter is not just about what God did with the body of Jesus that had died. There is another side of the story, my side and your side. It matters what we do about this story. It matters how you and I respond to this amazing tale of ancient prophets speaking of days to come, days of blessing to the world. God will never impose on us His kindness. God offers everyone regardless of their goodness the gift of sunshine and rain, of the fruit of our harvests, the magnificence of our land. But He does not impose on the human will. God does not force us to be thankful to Him. How much happier is a thankful person than an unthankful person. But God does not compel us to be happy.
Jesus died because the world was in a mess. He died because your sin and my sin have so corrupted us that we’re not fit to live any longer than these weak bodies survive. Jesus said, “Come unto me all you who are weak and heavy laden and I will give you rest.” How sweet is that promise, but we have to come to receive His rest.
It may be a great blessing to your life if things are very hard right now, because if you’ve reached the end of your resources, you are primed to come to Jesus. He will forgive the sin of your past. He will erase your guilt. But you must come to Him.
But this is not all. Jesus said to those who come to Him, “Don’t stop, but start to follow me.” “If anyone will come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” Come; accept the discipline of Jesus’ way, as a replacement for the way that has done you in.
What God will do with our bodies after we die is a gift He will give us. But what becomes of us now depends entirely on what we do with Jesus’ invitation, “Come, and follow me.” Come, receive Jesus’ forgiveness. But come as well to follow Jesus. It is a life worth living to replace a way of life that is often hardly worth living. Come. Come to Jesus. He welcomes you. All of this Easter story is for your sake and mine who need Jesus to make us over again. Come.
Let us pray: O Lord God, thank you that Jesus did not stay dead, but that He lives. Grant to us who hear Jesus’ word of welcome the wisdom to come to Him for His forgiveness and for His way of life. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
March 20, 2005
Looking at Jerusalem from Afar
Looking at Jerusalem from Afar
Zechariah 8: 1-8 / Matthew 21: 1-11
March 20th, 2005
At this hour last week I sat with my friend, Malcolm Elliot-Hogg in an exquisitely beautiful baroque church in Prague-Czech Republic. Everyone wore winter coats because the building was not heated. We could see our breath it was so chilly.
Yet my heart was warmed even though I could not understand a word the young priest said. It was simply good to be in a house of worship on the Lord’s Day. A tiny, apparently poor, hunch-backed old woman and a young girl with pretty blond hair walked down the center aisle with the Communion bread and wine.
I always return from these mission trips with a fresh perspective on things. My sense is that the Church in Eastern Europe is in great need. I read much of James Michener’s novel Poland on the flight back this past Thursday. It is historically accurate, I was told. It provided me a window through which to see why the Church in that part of the world may be as it is today.
Christianity was largely introduced by force hundreds of years ago. Can you imagine, “Become a Catholic Christian or die!” There were Orthodox Christians who died as though they were pagans at the hands of men with large black crosses sewn on tunics defending the honor of Jesus. Campus Crusade for Christ’s appeal sounds much more like the Gospel I know. “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.”
The countryside of Poland is soaked with the blood of people who have been victims of invasions and the violence of neighboring powers that played with Poland like a Doberman with a rabbit. It is a miracle that Poland still exists. It was the setting for some of the worst crimes against humanity during the Second World War. I visited Auschwitz on Tuesday and came away sick at heart and numb. Then came Communism. The story of Poland is profoundly sad but the people I met were resilient and good-humored.
Our business as Christians is the Gospel, which is “the power of God for salvation to every one who believes.” Salvation has to do not just with “eternity,” a life beyond this life. Salvation is healing of the soul now. It is to have visible effects. The Gospel is the means by which the Kingdom of God invades this world, spreading the effects of grace from person to person. The Church is the tool God uses to spread the ways of the Kingdom displayed in the lives of people and as an earthly society, a company of the committed, to use Elton Truebloods’ term.
I thought of these things after my teaching duties ended. I had to turn my thoughts to this morning’s Palm Sunday service when we remember Jesus’ suggestive donkey-ride into Jerusalem at the start of the week before He was crucified. I read the extended section of Matthew’s Gospel in which is found this morning’s Gospel lesson. The section begins with Jesus announcing to His disciples that He would soon suffer and die, but would rise on the third day.
They were understandably shocked and Jesus seemed uncharacteristically mean when he replied to Peter’s protest, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men.” We are startled at Jesus’ response. Why should he rebuke a friend for wanting Him not to suffer and die? They could not possibly have understood the resurrection.
Jesus then spoke very straight to His disciples. “If anyone will come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Those are emotion-stirring words, but I think Jesus must have said them quietly.
We customarily dissect Jesus’ words here. We think of “following Jesus” as automatic for anyone who makes some sort of statement of belief. “Coming after Jesus” includes a vast throng, I suppose, in our thinking. And we are careful to guard each person’s dignity and not challenge whether the “coming after” produces a way of life that is intentional in its difference from an ordinary life.
We come to the “Let him deny himself,” and we start to get edgy. Deny what? we ask nervously. The Apostle Paul suggested an everyday sort of self-denial when he said, “Let each of you esteem others better than himself.” “Look not every one on her own concerns but take regard for the concerns of others.” Denying myself, we sometimes hear, means, “God first, others second, myself last.” It sounds spiritual, but it’s pretty hard to live up to. Jesus’ words echo embarrassingly through time, “If you want to come after me start by DENYING yourself.” “You have to lose your life to find it!” No! We shout back at Jesus. “I must express myself.” Jesus may have said, “The meek will inherit the earth,” but it ain’t so in Camelot where we live.
We’d like to eliminate this part of the Gospel. We’re more into “express yourself” than “deny yourself.” From the very start with our children our goal is to see them express themselves—with a parenthesis between ages two and nineteen when it gets a bit inconvenient. And we coach them to maximize their opportunities. We hope good sermons, Sunday School, and VBS will come to balance their self-fulfilling desires with the high idealism of the Gospel, but let not the balancing go too far.
Second, Jesus said, “Let him take up his cross and follow me.” My cross and yours has nothing to do with the ordinary difficulties of life, sickness, bills, etc. You are not my cross, nor am I yours. My cross is the means by which I am crucified with Christ. Our cross is the means by which we die to self in order to live as Christ did, doing the will of the Father, even to the point of dying for the sake of others. Whenever my desires collide with what I know would be Jesus’ advise to me, I’m seeing my cross out of the corner of my eye. When we see our cross Jesus tells us, “pick it up, don’t push it away. Pick it up and climb onto it. Sure it hurts.” Mel Gibson helped us see how physical crucifixion hurt. So does crucifying self-serving desires. But when we do, or try to begin to, it means we’re stepping into the Jesus’ way.
Third, Jesus said, “to find your life you must lose it.” It is a logic that makes us choke. No, Jesus, I must find my life. I must seize the day. Carpe diem. And thus we muddle on, and look at the world, and look at the church, and wonder why the Gospel doesn’t work.
Well, the days went by until what we call Palm Sunday came. Then Jesus made a very unwise career move. Denying Himself meant riding conspicuously into the very jaws of His enemies. Riding on the donkey colt was very suggestive to any Roman soldiers who happened to be watching. This was apparently an open show of rebellion. There were rebel leaders in those days. There was a whole class of Jewish rebels against Rome called Zealots. There was one named Jesus, in fact. It was a common name then. The soldiers must have watched carefully as Jesus of Nazareth rode into the city with people waving palm branches and throwing their coats in front of the donkey as he rode by.
But nothing outwardly revolutionary happened. Instead, Jesus went into the Temple of His own people and cleaned house. He infuriated the leaders of His own people. Nobody then thought of the words of the prophet Zechariah that told how this started, “Tell the daughter of Zion, your king comes to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey.” Jesus led the way in the inward rebellion against the claims of personal advantage and security.
I chose for our Old Testament reading other verses from the prophet Zechariah. Will Gray read for us God’s promise, “I will bring them to dwell in the midst of Jerusalem, and they shall be my people and I will be their God, in faithfulness and in righteousness.” Because here we see the larger picture in which Palm Sunday’s donkey-ride into Jerusalem is just one detail.
The section Will read ended with the words, “in faithfulness and righteousness,” words that seems to apply to God. But I wonder if they apply instead to the phrase before in which the Lord says, “they shall be my people.” “They shall be my people in faithfulness and righteousness.” And “I will be their God in faithfulness and righteousness.” I read on in the prophet Zechariah to the end and discover that God’s beckoning call extends far beyond Israel.
God promises in the Book of Zechariah an ingathering of peoples at the great Jewish feast of Ingathering, the Feast of Booths. “And if any of the families of the earth do not go up to Jerusalem to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, there will be no rain upon them.” This passage ends with words that point forward to what happened in the Temple on Palm Sunday. “There shall no longer be a trader in the house of the Lord of hosts on that day.”
Here I have to introduce something that some of you might consider a technical theological subtlety. There are those who study the life of Jesus as it fulfills prophecies such as this and think that Jesus thought He would fulfill the prophecies within His own lifetime. They think Jesus was wrong in His sense of timing. It was one of the things Jesus did not know, a part of His humanity. He emptied Himself, Paul tells us in that wonderful passage in Philippians 2.
Instead of fulfilling the Old Testament prophecies in His own lifetime, Jesus was introducing a new era in God’s work that would point to the final consummation of God’s re-claiming of this world. Jesus announced the doom of Satan, of sin and death, but it would not be yet.
But when I read the whole sweep of the Gospel of Matthew as it leads up to Palm Sunday, I see something different. Jesus told His disciples very clearly what following Him would mean for them. He was simply leading the way. At the very beginning Jesus told them, and He tells us—and this is the big issue for you and me—that if they and we are going to come after Him, it means denying ourselves, taking up our crosses, and plugging along after Him. The result would be rejection and even persecution.
In between this description of what it is to be a Christian and Jesus death and resurrection we find in chapters twenty-four and twenty-five Jesus’ teaching about a very scary time to come that seem to suggest the end of the world. In 24: 34 Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away till all these things take place.” Some who read this in the most literal sense believe Jesus thought that the end would come within the lifetime of His disciples. Obviously, we’re still here. The end hasn’t come yet. Was Jesus wrong in thinking the world would end soon? No. Jesus had a far more expansive idea of time than we do.
In the Church these days there are plenty of people who are concerned with Bible prophecies that seem to suggest the days of our earth are numbered. We see wars and rumors of wars. We have seen that self-expression has gone to extremes of the most glaring evil, in violence, in the grossest kinds of sexual perversion, in ruthless subjugation of peoples, in rampant disrespect for decency, in materialism that threatens the earth’s resources. And we wonder, are all these signs of the approaching apocalypse?
But when we read history we know that we now simply maintained the ways of humanity since the days of Noah. Then Genesis tells us, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” In that day, Noah stood out. He found favor in the eyes of the Lord. This means he had to cut against the grain of his society.
This is what Jesus did on Palm Sunday. He cut against the grain of society in denying Himself, riding on donkey back into the grasp of those who hated Him. He did so for a reason: He loved a world that needed the costliest sacrifice possible to redeem it. In Noah’s day God destroyed the world with a flood. In Jesus’ day the tables were turned. God sacrificed what was most precious to Him to save the world. John 3: 16 encapsulates this truth: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”
And every circumstance of your life which is difficult is merely a personal opportunity to step behind Jesus, “who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame.” It costs something to follow Jesus. It has to, because the world is in bad shape. Your life’s sorrows and mine encapsulate the sorrows of history as found in the life of one person.
In this troubled life, as it often is, you and I need to climb on a donkey’s back and ride with Jesus into Jerusalem, knowing that a trial and crucifixion will follow. But it is when we accept this invitation to follow Jesus that we start to find life. And when many people in community do this we find something called “the Church” where the Lordship of Jesus is more than an idea.
I pray that God, by His grace, may lead us this very day to find good donkeys to ride behind Jesus into the Jerusalem before us. To climb aboard that donkey you and I must deny ourselves and flex our muscles to carry the cross on which we will be crucified to self. But we do this knowing we will rise to a new life in Christ. This is the Gospel of Palm Sunday. I hope it is clear to my heart. I hope it is clear to yours. May the Lord Jesus here find a whole herd of little donkeys occupied by people following after Him.
Let us pray: Lord, we have tried to understand the part of the Gospel that tells us of Jesus’ self-denial, riding to His death, by which He fulfilled His care for us. Help us to see where we fit into the picture of those who come after Him. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
March 03, 2005
The Joy of Jesus
Psalm 1 / Proverbs 17: 22-28
Matthew 9: 10-15
July 21st, 2002
This morning I begin a series of glimpses at the character of Jesus. We pastors talk about many matters in our sermons. I have preached expository sermons consecutively through books of both Old and New Testaments. I have done this in order to lead us to think about the "whole council of God." I have preached sermons on the Apostles’ and Nicene Creed, on the Lord’s Prayer, on issues of life. But I can’t remember doing a series of studies on Jesus Himself.
The Epistle to the Hebrews tells us, "Look at Jesus, the Pioneer and Perfector of our Faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame . . ." Look at Jesus! In the course of His life on earth, Jesus drew people’s attention not because they knew He was the Son of God, "of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made." They did not know that in Him was the "fullness of the godhead bodily." They did not know He was the Second Person of the Holy Trinity who "emptied Himself and took on the form of a servant." They were attracted to Jesus because He radiated love, joy, peace, compassion, gentleness, meekness, winsome qualities of character–the kind you and I are drawn to.
As I’ve mentioned to some of you, one of the most influential elements in my training at Princeton Seminary was to hear Professor Bruce Metzger pray before class. We flocked to his class because he was the preeminent NT scholar of several generations. He will go down in history as another Erasmus, another Origen. But what I remember is his prayers. Invariably he prayed before class that our studies would help us learn of Jesus so as to present Him winsomely, that people may trust in Him. He not only prayed this, when we students spoke with him, he gave us the impression that we, individually, were very important to him.
When I think of Bruce Metzger, somehow I think of Jesus. I’ve learned so much from him about the New Testament and early Church history. But he planted a seed in my mind of how a person can take on the character of Jesus.
We look many places beside Jesus to fuel our faith. We look in nooks and crannies of theology, in nooks and crannies of interpretation of the Bible, in nooks and crannies of morality. We reflect what we look for. Sometimes I think we must look crooked-necked for all the angles we put our heads to discover how a Christian is to be. Let’s look at Jesus.
In one of our Christmas hymns we sing, "For He is our childhood’s pattern, day by day like us He grew." But this sentimental idea stops short. We see Jesus cute and cuddly in the crèche. What if Jesus were our grown-up pattern so that day by day we grow like Him?
E. Stanley Jones, the Methodist missionary in India, found that when he offered lectures on Jesus, educated Hindus flocked to hear him. A Brahman priest introduced him. He soon learned never to announce he was going to talk about Christianity. Folk in India knew enough about that apparently Western religion, Christianity to make them turn away. They'd seen up close and personal employees of the British East India Company and many missionaries.
A number of influential New Testament scholars and theologians have told us we can know very little about Jesus personally. The Jesus Seminar folk tell us almost nothing in the New Testament comes from Jesus. One twentieth-century theologian wrote, "The idea that faith is in any sense based on the impression made by the personality of Jesus is completely mistaken." He warned that trying to inspect what the New Testament tells us about Jesus has often led to quirky Jesus-cults. He cited, for example, Nicholas von Zinzendorf, who triggered the Pietist movement in Moravia, a mystical outgrowth from 18th century Lutheranism.
Zinzendorf tried to promote intimate fellowship with Jesus. His community at Herrnhut was in some ways quirky. But some beautiful hymns came out of pietism. Zinzendorf wrote 2,000 hymns, believing that if Christians sang together it would kindle in them the joy of the Lord, and bond them to Him and to one another. Charles Wesley made beloved one of my favorite of Zinzendorf’s hymns
Jesus, Thy blood and righteousness,
My beauty are, my glorious dress;
‘midst flaming worlds, in these arrayed,
With joy shall I lift up my head."
But indeed it hasn’t been all roses when Christians have tried to cultivate what they believe is Jesus’ way. Strange things sometimes happen in little groups that try to mimic Jesus’ personality. The most severe monasticism arose among those who believed Jesus’ poverty was the most important aspect of his life. Some pious folk think that to be like Jesus is to try to be simply "perfect." Strange ideas percolate about what it is to be perfect. Some earnest folk who try to mimic Jesus become proud of how they improve on ordinary Christians. Thus their ambition to be like Jesus leads them to be very unlike Him. How clever Wormwood is!
If you were to begin to describe Jesus, where would you start? How would you separate aspects of Jesus’ character and personality to see them one by one? I'm going to try.
I want to begin to speak of the joy of Jesus. Perhaps today we need to remember this more than ever. In 1954, two words, "under God," were added to our Pledge of Allegiance. One of our popular news magazines proposed a week or so ago that we’ve become a nation "under anti-depressants." How the church needs to share the joy of Jesus!
Towards the end of his time with the Twelve Jesus told them, "These things I have spoken to you that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full." Jesus' final teaching big teaching accentuated joy. In his most painful hour He promised joy.
The oldest dictionary I have defines joy as "vivid emotion of pleasure, gladness, thing that causes delight." Most often we think of joy as a sudden and passing feeling. Our emotions change on a dime. Most of us are moderately bipolar, up one moment, down the next. Was this Jesus’ joy, a periodic thing, followed by being glum? Jesus supplied us with a very thought-provoking picture of joy.
In the short passage from Matthew that we read, disciples of John the Baptist came to Jesus. They asked why His disciples didn’t fast, when they did and the Pharisees did. The Pharisees fasted two days a week. They fasted because they still mourned the destruction of the first Temple, because they wanted the return of God’s presence to the Temple. The Ark of the Covenant was lost. If rain didn’t fall and the ground got hard and dry, three days of fasting were required to impress on God the need for rain. Fasting, giving up food at regular intervals, making yourself feel hungry is a way of impressing God. It is a discipline that intends to make the spiritual part of you grow by repressing the physical part of you. Because you don’t feel good when you’re hungry, it is reflected in your face. Thus, sadness is equated with the best spirituality. Jesus teased the Pharisees and taught His disciples, "If you fast, don't let your face proclaim it." If you smile too much, you must be up to something no good. A long face says, "Look how religious I am; I fast!"
Jesus put in a different light the whole matter of fasting. If you put the whole gloomy system of fasting into the way of life I am showing you, it's like putting new wine in old wineskins. The new wine ferments and explodes. The old wineskin isn't strong enough. It's new wine I'm giving you. If you abide in Me, I give you joy. Joy like new wine tends to ferment and explode.
Jesus asked John’s disciples, "Do wedding guests mourn when the bridegroom is with them?" You and I might ask this differently, "Do wedding guests mourn when the bride is with them?" Jesus never got married but weddings and marriage were important in His teaching. Whether married or not we see the point. Marriage is a clue to how central JOY is to following Jesus. Jesus’ first miracle, you remember, was at a wedding. Of all things, He turned water into wine! When history ends and eternity takes over completely, it will begin with "the marriage supper of the Lamb!"
I’ve been a part of several very happy weddings this summer. I don’t know what others see most, but I am fascinated to watch the delight of the brides and grooms who bask in the new sense that they "officially" belong to each other. The wonderful, warm feeling of being "officially" one with one’s beloved–"in the presence of God and these witnesses" casts a glow over one’s friends and family too--on both sides. This is joy. But marriage is not all sentiment and romance.
From now on, a new purpose governs life–to grow to oneness with my bride, with my groom. The joy of marriage is found in growing nearer to each other as the years go by. Happy times, sad times, temptations, sickness, come what may, taking them in together steadily weaves together profound joy in a marriage as they test and foster greater and greater oneness.
When the bride and groom repeat the marriage vows their faces are intense with determination as they say, "For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health--as long as we both shall live. This is my solemn vow!" They will grow old together, their oneness daily increasing as they share the good and the bad times. A long marriage that fulfills this is a joy to experience and to observe.
I tell prospective brides and grooms who come to me for pre-marriage counsel that their work, their careers, are for the purpose of the home. For a marriage to work, you’ve got to remember what’s important. When we remember what’s important, it’s remarkable what a happy thing marriage is.
Marriage is a terrific clue to Jesus’ reason for joy. I realize that not all of you are married, but perhaps you get the picture.
Jesus’ joy came because He remembered what was really important in life. Jesus said, "My will is to do the will of Him who sent me." In happy marriages, the will of husband and wife grow increasingly one. It is never far from the husband’s mind consciously and unconsciously, "What will please my wife?" It is never far from the wife’s mind--increasingly without thinking of it, "What will please my husband?" If your marriage is drifting, perhaps one or the other, or both, have forgotten to ask that question. "What do I most want?" Jesus never forgot. "My will is to do the will of my Father who sent me."
What do you want out of life? Maybe your own security, your own pleasure, your own self-interest are most important to you. I’m sorry to say that if this is so, you’ll not find joy. You’ll never be secure enough. You’ll never have enough pleasure. Meeting your own self-interest isn’t big enough to satisfy you. And then there's all those difficult people to contend with!
If you and I very deliberately approach each day consciously asking ourselves, "What is the will of my heavenly Father," we are on the threshold of joy. It’s remarkable how broadly that question applies, "What is the will of my Father in heaven?"
Second, Jesus never lost the sense that day after day, He was in the presence of God. Fullness of joy comes when we live in a deep sense of the presence of God. "In Thy presence is fullness of joy," the psalmist wrote.
What's so good about being in the presence of God? Well, to begin with we know where we really belong. As we say in that gracious first question of the Heidelberg Catechism, "In life and in death, I belong to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ." Second, we are in an environment where our sins are forgiven. Sin is a lot more than a pastor's bully word. It throttles the life out of life. Third, in God's presence we see a wholesome path of life. Our hearts confirm what Scripture tells us of the way of life.
Again, how this is illustrated in a joyous marriage. At the end of the day, when we are together again, into the presence of each other, so many of life’s cares evaporate. It is a picture of Jesus with His father. Jesus was as fully a human person as we are. He was not "up there" in heaven with the Father, so He had to use the day well to bring close to Him the sense of the presence of His Father in heaven. That's why Jesus used the early morning to pray. His disciples realized Jesus spoke with His Father, thus beginning the day. How good when you and I use the earliest part of the day to begin deliberately in the presence of God.
Jesus was no more or less in the presence of God than we are. We say rightly that Jesus was God made flesh. But I’m asking you to put in a parenthesis that you know that. He was also fully human, as fully human as you are. He needed to begin the day in prayer, as you do, as I do.
You need never forget that you live in the presence of God. Some of us never get beyond the sense of being in the presence of myself. Joy, that deep well-spring of joy, comes when we are caught up with something big enough. Realizing we are in the presence of God gives purpose to every aspect of life. It is a big enough awareness to affect every relationship, to take in stride every situation. We live in the great parenthesis of the presence of God. Acknowledge it.
When we read the Gospels, we see Jesus in a lot of situations that don’t look very comfortable. There were religious leaders who didn’t like Him. His popularity with common people made them jealous. John tells us "He came to His own home and His own received Him not." Think of how you’d feel if your family didn’t receive you.
But Jesus’ joy beamed from him even in these circumstances, drawing to Him weary people, heavy-laden people, sick people, well people, sinner people, saintly people. Why? Because His joy was very attractive. Jesus could stay joyful because He knew His purpose in life. "My will is to do the will of Him who sent me." He was always about "His father’s business." He lived in the sense of the presence of God. Here is the secret of joy–that steady sense that "all is well and all manner of things will be well," as Dame Julian of Norwich put it.
Are things well with you? What do you want to do? Maybe you're weary with your job, with where you live, with the people in your life. Have you asked, "What is the will of my Father in heaven, as it may apply to each of these matters?" Do you live aware that you are in the presence of God? The answer you give to these two questions suggests whether you have joy in life or not. I pray we all discover joy like a river, joy like a fountain. How good is a life of joy! How attractive is a life of joy! How accessible is the life of joy! How good is the life of a church whose people have joy! How fortunate the town blessed with people who live in the presence of God, whose will is bound to the will of God.
O Lord, may our will be your will. May that we are in your presence never leave our minds. Grant us joy. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
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