Why the Body Matters

We are in the second week of a new, post Easter series (or Easter season series if you were to follow the liturgical calendar) called 'Life in Light of the Resurrection'

First two weeks – Theology or ‘How the resurrection changes our thinking.’
Next three weeks – Praxis or ‘How the resurrection changes our actions.’

We are going to do theology first, looking at three views of the body and then briefly look at three case studies regarding how those views work out.

I. Three Views of The Body

Disclaimer: Today I am going to be teaching. Pretty much every time I have taught at college life this year I have been preaching, which is pitched primarily to the passions and volition and secondarily transfers information. Today, I am going to teach, which means my primary purpose will be to transfer information. But my hope is that it will be useful information with deeply practical outworkings.

i. Materialism

Materialism is the belief that everything which exists is no more extensive than its physical properties; that is, that there are no kinds of things other than physical things. I don’t think I have to spend too much time convincing you that materialism is the primary perspective on ‘the body’ in our culture.

The body is reduced to organs, the will is reduced to survival instincts, love is reduced to the desire to propagate our genetic material, creativity is reduced to electrochemical impulses, we are simply carbon based machines. Organic robots.

Dopamine clip

In materialism, the body is simultaneously too important and not important enough. The body has a frenzy of importance because once it expires, so do you. Yet it is not important enough, because it is simply a machine. While the theist has some trouble with what is called ‘the problem of evil’ the materialist tends to have trouble with ‘the problem of beauty.’

ii. Gnosticism

The Gnostics were a philosophical/religious sect common in the Roman empire in the first century. It was a very popular religion at the time that the early church was just starting to grow. They had a complex belief system that would be tedious for me to describe. But they essentially believed in two gods, a ‘greater’ god who was good and who created the spiritual world and an evil one that created the physical universe. They called the latter the demiurge[1]. They see the physical universe as a mistake that never should have happened. Therefore, the main project of Gnosticism was to transcend the physical into a spiritual existence.[2]

Within the first 50 years of Christianity there were Gnostic teachers in the church who wanted to make Jesus a prophet of their belief system. There are actually texts in our Bibles where the authors are warning against a Gnostic view of the world. Check out the first couple verses of I John 4:

1Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, 3but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God.

Many people read this and think that ‘testing the spirits’ is some kind of mystical skill, a kind of spooky demon detector. But that is not what John was talking about. Already, within a couple decades of the church, there are already Gnostic influences that want to deny the bodily death or resurrection of Jesus and elevate the importance of the soul over the body. John says that the key to right belief is that Jesus rose, not just spiritually, but bodily.

You see, the Gnostics had trouble with why God would take a physical form and, in particular, why he would die. So they claimed that he was essentially a ghost and that on the cross he tricked the Romans into killing someone else (which just strikes me as deplorable). Incidentally, we see this idea that Jesus escaped crucifixion in two other places:

1. Islam[3] - only a prophet, yet God would not let this happen to him
2. Monte Python and the Life of Brian

Gnosticism makes the opposite error to materialism. While materialism holds that the body is all that is, Gnosticism elevates the spirit as good and despises the body as evil. In our souls are our true and better selves and our bodies are the enemy.

So why bring up a 2000 year old philosophy. Because many Christians are closer to Gnosticism than the Bible in their view of the body. We are often so busy not being materialists that we end up Gnostics. Some of you are probably closer to Gnosticism than Christian theology in the way you view the body and the physical universe.

Here one example from Bronwyn. You often hear Christians say that Jesus has come to save your souls…no he hasn’t…he has come to save you…all of you.

Which leads us to the Christian view of the body:

iii. Christianity

So the materialist and Gnostic views of the body leave it either too important, not important enough, or somehow, both too important and not important enough at the same time. The interesting thing about the Christian position is that it is not half way between these. The Christian hypothesis is that the physical and the spiritual were both created good and are fundamentally intertwined to the point that you cannot make a value distinction between them. We embrace the fantastic beauty and importance of both our physical and spiritual existence, because they cannot be separated.

So to build a Christian view of the body, lets do a really brief Biblical survey. I think the major data on how God views our bodies, our physical existence, comes from the beginning of the story (creation) the climax or turning point of the story (the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus) and the end of the story (what theologians call Eschatology).

-Creation

We are often trained to think about and explain Christianity by beginning in Genesis 3. Sometimes it seems like it all starts with the fall, with things going horribly wrong. I could see how this would give us a pretty negative view of the body (And, don’t get me wrong, I think understand human falleness is fundamental to understanding humanness). But…the story doesn’t start there. It all starts with God creating a physical reality oozing with spiritual reality, set up as the perfect environment for worship and human flourishing. He made us physical beings with a capacity for worship and called it GOOD. Whatever you do with a Christian theology of the body…you have to believe that our physical bodies are good.

-Incarnation

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” John 1:14

Then at the climax of salvation history, God himself takes human form in the person of Jesus Christ. This is shocking! The Gnostic heresy withers under the story of Christmas. The idea that God himself, in the form of little baby Jesus soiled his swaddle totally offends the Gnostic sensibility. In fact, my Muslim friends will sometime bring up the idea Jesus had bodily functions as a slam dunk argument that he could not be God. I argue, instead, that it imbues our human, bodily, existence with dignity…because not only did God create it good, he essentially declared it good a second time by experiencing it himself.

The sublime mystery of Christianity is that our physical, bodily existences are ennobled by God himself experienced a bodily existence and did it perfectly. He had a mom and chores and a job. God essentially said for a second time in the incarnation, ‘It is good’ by taking a human body.

-Resurrection

And then Jesus rose from the dead. As Dan said, in the resurrection, the thin veil between heaven and earth was traversed, and God’s perfect and eternal rule which exists in a parallel but intersecting reality with our fallen and rebellious reality, broke through in one particular event…the resurrection. Jesus raised from the dead, and he was not a ghost. His body was raised. I love that line in the Updike poem my friend read during the sung worship time:

Make no mistake: if He rose at all

it was as His body;

if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules

reknit, the amino acids rekindle,

the Church will fall.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,

analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;

making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the

faded credulity of earlier ages:

let us walk through the door.

God’s primary sign post to the totality of his eternal rule, was the eternal and renewed body of the risen Christ. Let me make a couple brief observations about this:

Darrell Bock: “The Resurrection Body is both like and unlike our current bodies.’
There is a discontinuity and continuity between Jesus’ pre and post resurrection bodies. Three of the gospels have different post-resurrection encounters and ALL THREE have something in common. At first, Jesus is not recognized, then he unequivocally is. There is continuity and discontinuity. In several of these passages, he eats something, which is a blatantly tactile demonstration of his renewed physicality, the continuity between his new body and his old one. Yet he disappears and walks through closed doors, indicating that, clearly, the new body is also fundamentally different.

When we die, we will be raised from the dead. Not just our souls, as if that was who we really are. Our selves will be raise…our bodies will be raised as well as our consciousness. And if we are found in allegiance to Christ, our bodies will be renewed like his. They will be like our current bodies, fundamentally physical (for example: we will not become angels as many people erroneously believe) but they will be better bodies.

-Eschatology

If you are like me, Eschatology, or a theology of the end times, kind of creeps you out. My early experiences with eschatology involved charts and descriptions of multi-headed beasts and precise speculations about who the anti-Christ is. Most people tend to think the Bible has a lot more to say about the events surrounding and following the return of Christ than it actually does. But if you wade through the nonsense…there is some really important information. Jesus will return and create a new heaven and a new earth and he will be there and if you have submitted your allegiance to him you will be there and we will all have bodies. Jesus will still have the wounds with which he purchased our salvation. Because those wounds, like our salvation will be physical. The most famous verse about what this will be like is in 1 Cor 15:

35But someone may ask, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?" 36How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. 37When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. 38But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body… The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; 43it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; 44it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.

I actually think Modest Mouse (who is an agnostic – in one of his songs he gives God ~ a 20% chance of existing) has one of the best lines about this. He says

For your sake I hope heaven and hell are really there
But I wouldn’t hold my breath
You wasted life
Why wouldn’t you waste death
Why wouldn’t you waste the after life

-Ocean Breathes Salty

I think that is pretty insightful of Isaac Brock. If you spend life waiting for some disembodied escape from the body and the earth…you are going to be disappointed with eternal life. It is going to be physical. It is going to be AWESOME, but it is going to be PHYSICAL. There is no scriptural justification that it will be some sort of eternal church service.

In the book Surprised by Hope that some of the student leaders read together this summer, NT Wright’s argues the Christian, ‘heaven’ is not our final destination.[4] Wright talks, I think correctly, about ‘life after life after death’ in which we will be have a renewed bodily existence on a renewed earth living perfectly intertwined existences of physical and spiritual reality.

II. Three Implications of the Christian Theology of the Body

So I really believe that theology matters. What we believe affects how we act and how we act affects what we believe. That is why this series deals with both. But I’d like to look briefly at three case studies regarding how our view of the body works out practically in three aspects of our lives, work, sleep and sexuality…I am going to cover them in order of increasing ‘funness.’

i. Studying

You are vocationally students, though many of you do have jobs to make it through school. How does a Christian theology of the body affect that? Well, for the materialist, studying can either take on way too much importance or way too little. And you know people who suffer from both. Either academic achievement is the door to happiness which is all there is so it has ultimate value or it is as meaningless as anything else we do.

(http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/ comic here)

The Gnostic view tends to undervalue studying, especially for Christians. Every choice you have to make between studying and ministry gets decided for ministry because the spiritual is the only thing that is of value.

Here’s an interesting implication of the theology of the new body. If we are going to have bodies and live in a city eternally…I think we are going to have jobs. As I have said before, work is what is called a pre-fall ordinance, which is to say that in paradise, in Genesis, before the temptation and fall, when the first couple were living God’s best possible plan for human flourishing, they had jobs. Work and vocation…in your case school…should be a worshipful act.

In the scriptures, Solomon and Adam were Scientists. The scriptures say Solomon “described plant life, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of walls. He also taught about animals and birds, reptiles and fish. 34Men of all nations came to listen to Solomon's wisdom, sent by all the kings of the world, who had heard of his wisdom.” 1 Kings 4:33-34

And then there is Adam…God’s first task to Adam was an act of biological taxonomy. He named the animals. It probably took him a long time. It was hard work. But why would God ask Adam to do science instead of ‘ministry’ right off the bat. Why biological taxonomy rather than building a temple or writing a worship song. Because when done correctly, in gratitude before Jesus, with a desire to be a co-creator and, like God, bring order out of chaos…Science is worship.

(Side note: If Adam was actually a biologist before he was a gardener, does that make science the world’s oldest profession?)

And lest we forget the humanities. Daniel studied pagan literature under duress. Not only was did he spend all of his time studying arcane literature, it was the literature of a civilization that had wipe his out. And he did awesome at it. This was God’s task for him for a season. He became a student of that culture and gave it everything he had, because in his life, his physical vocation and his spiritual devotion were intertwined. So a Christian view of the unity of the physical and spiritual, can protect you from making your studies too important but can also keep you from making them not important enough.

ii. Sleep

Sleep is, obviously, connected with studying since the more you do one the less you do the other. Again, materialists distort sleep in both directions. It either becomes too important, or, more often, entirely expendable. Gnostics generally see fatigue as spiritual weakness that must be overcome. If you are truly spiritual you shouldn’t need sleep.

A Christian view of the body includes the idea that God providentially made our strivings limited. Our bodies were designed to shut down cyclically in an act of worship and recognition of who actually rules. I consider sleep a spiritual discipline. Amanda will ask me from time to time, “Are you sleeping like a Christian?” The unspoken question is ‘are you trying to be God?’

If I could change anything about my undergrad, I would sleep more.

And here is the thing, if you have tended to your studies along the way as if it was worship and, therefore, worthy of your serious and diligent attentions, then brain scientists tell us sleep turns out to be more useful than cramming when you get to the end of the quarter.

iii. Sexuality

‘The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;’ Ps 16:6

And then we come to sex. I put it at the end because I figured that even if I was going over time, I might still hold your attention. I want you to see, especially with sexuality, how the materialist view of the body fails in both directions…for the materialist sex is simultaneously too important and not important enough.

I do not think I have to work too hard to make the case that the materialist culture of the academic setting makes sex too important. A couple weeks ago, nearly a thousand students showed up for the authorized porn screening. Nearly 300 people in line did not make it in. In my opinion they were the lucky ones. Malcolm Muggeridge says this:

“Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.”

Because sex is such a powerfully transcendent experience, the materialist gives it almost ultimate value…but it ends up too important. The experience simply cannot bear the expectation in the long term.

But I would also argue that, for the materialist, sex is also not important enough. I don’t think this point is better made than by Russell Crowe in the movie ‘A Beautiful Mind.’

Nash: I don't exactly know what I am required to say in order for you to have intercourse with me. But could we assume that I said all that. I mean essentially we are talking about fluid exchange right? So could we go just straight to the sex.

You see, sex might be the only religion of the materialist. It may be of ultimate importance. But ultimately, it is not important enough. It is basically a fluid exchange. This is an impoverished view, not only of sex, but of humanity.

But the Gnostic view of sex also fails. To reject sexuality as unspiritual is to deny the obvious gift of God. The world rightly labels us as prudes if we can’t admit that sex is Awesome.

Of course, as we all know, Christianity does include boundaries for sexuality. God has limited sex to marriage and within marriage it is limited to activities that both partners find ennobling and edifying. But here is the thing people don’t understand. God does not place boundaries around sex because it is bad. He placed boundaries around sex because it is so intensely good that it is volatile. CS Lewis argues that there are very few ‘bad things.’ Most ‘evil’ is simply the misuse, distortion, or overuse of a created good. And the better something is the more powerful is its distortion. That is why we are a culture enslaved to sexuality. The Christian response to this distortion is not the Gnostic rejection of sex as bad or the materialist capitulation of sex as causal or ultimate…but an acceptance of sex a very good when experienced within the boundaries God has created it for.[5]

So, anyway, I hope you can see how spending two weeks on the theologies of the new earth and the new body…on who we are and where we are headed in light of the resurrection…starts to define our new task. We have a responsibility and privilege to tell the story of how heaven broke into this age in the person of Jesus and the event of the resurrection. But because Christians believe in the unity and wholeness and comlete dignity of the human person…because wse believe that the physical is intertwined with the spiritual…we are also called to be a people who are about justice and beauty. We reject the false dichotomy between a message for the soul and a mission to the body. We see our friends and neighbors as whole people and do what we can to offer them what we can

___________________________
[1] Brief Aside: I love my job. There are not a lot of jobs I would rather do. But occasionally when I do entertain the idea of a different kind of career, it is always as a writer for television or movies. It is not without a little embarrassment that I confess that my favorite television show of all time is Buffy the Vampire Slayer…but wouldn’t the demiurge be the best Buffy super villain of all time.
[2] I also blame Plato who perpetuated the unhelpful dualism between the inner and outer life exalting the former over the latter.
[3] Whether or not this passage actually teaches that someone was crucified in Jesus’ place turns out to be a pretty complicated question of Qur’anic hermeneutics. But it is a common folk or popular belief within Islam.
[4] It actually seems questionable as to weather it is a place at all.
[5] I had to cut the ‘will there be sex in heaven?’ material for time but here is what I was working on: Incidentally, sex also a pre-fall ordinance. Which means that it is unconditionally good (though our bent natures tend to turn it into a weapon rather than a service)…but also raises the question…will there be sex in heaven? (From Nic's Blog - Kreeft's Talk is here)

“Asking "will there be physical sexual intercourse in heaven?" is like a kid asking after 'the talk', "Can you eat ice cream while you do it?" We do not eat during sex, not because eating isn't good, but because we are taken with a greater pleasure. And in that case, it is likely we will experience all kinds of greater and more intimate forms of 'intercourse' that will make love making as we know it now facile and clumsy in comparison. It's not that sex will be outlawed, it's that it will be swallowed up in something greater, in something that renders it wholly obsolete.” –Peter Kreeft

Seven Mile: Jesus on the Road to Emmaus

So over spring break I went ‘manpacking’ with several college life guys. The reason I bring it up, besides the chance to mention that Cory packed an electric toothbrush, is that we hiked about 7 miles a day with some modest elevation gain in perfect weather, it took 4 to 5 hours.…which according to the first verse, is very similar to the setting of today’s passage…so I’ve name this talk:


So there are really two major themes I’d like to look at in this passage with a brief prolog and epilog. The first is how Jesus’ sees himself in light of the Hebrew Scriptures and the second is the idea that as we observe how Jesus reveals himself to these two travelers, we can pick up some hints about how Jesus reveals himself to us.

Characters: I want to notice two things about the characters in this story. First of all, they are minor characters. Jesus’ early appearance wasn’t to any of the guys we have become familiar with in the story to date. His fist, extended, post resurrection appearance was to a couple of random dudes we have never heard of.

Second, Richard Bauckham, in his recent, definitive work ‘Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Accounts’ points out something about this passage that has really startled the community of Biblical scholarship. This story is told from the perspective of Cleopas. It is as if he was telling the story. Luke shifts the storytelling position of his narrative to inhabit Cleopas’ perspective. Bauckham suggest this is because Luke included the story just as Cleopas told it. And, as Bronwyn argued last week, the reason he names Cleopas is because he is still alive and you can go ask him. In essence, Luke is citing his work (Cleopas, 33). As with all citations, its purpose is to build your argument on the basis of the evidential claims of others.

So from here, I would like to make two major observations about this text.

1. It Has All Always Been About Jesus

v27And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

v45 Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures.

Most of you are probably vaguely aware that there are dozens of passages in the Hebrew Scriptures, written between 500 and 2000 years before the life of Jesus, that predict the activities of a coming Messiah and correlate to the events of Jesus’ life with uncanny precision and clarity. Let me start out with just three brief examples:

“The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers. You must listen to him.” Deut 18:15

Jesus says, beginning with Moses, he explains that the Hebrew Scriptures talk about him. Well this is the clearest Moseic passage about the Messiah, written almost 2000 years before Jesus lived. Think about that…as much time elapsed between when Moses said there would be a Messianic figure as has passed between Jesus and us.

Of course, the most famous messianic passage is Isaiah 53

2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

3 He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

4 Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.

5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.

6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.

I know Bronwyn cited Isaiah 53 at the end of last quarter, but it simply cannot be left out of a discussion of predictive messianic literature. I have a pretty committed Jewish friend who keeps the shebat and studies the Hebrew scriptures in their original language, and is, on the whole, very serious about his heritage and faith. His given name is David, but every one who knows him call him Dvd (since there are no vowels in Hebrew). As a side note, he tells a great story about how, when DVD’s became the video media of choice, he was perplexed about why his name was suddenly plastered on signs everywhere. He is so serious about it that he will often not watch college football on Saturdays, thought he is a HUGE Texas A&M fan, because he simply doesn’t see contact sports as the kind of thing that should typify a ‘day of rest.’ With all of this said, he has gone back and forth on whether or not Jesus is the Messiah (or as he would say it Jeshua is Messia). At the heart of nagging doubts that Jesus was, in fact, the Jewish Messiah, is Isaiah 53.

Finally, here is one of my favorite ones. Someone once asked me, if God really wanted to foretell the coming of the Messiah precisely, why would he bother with vague symbolic language, why doesn’t he just call him by name. This is obviously problematic, because if you predicted the name of the Messiah everyone who wanted to be Messiah would just take on the name, it is much more powerful to predict the place of his birth (which he would have no control over) – which God did…but I think this verse is really interesting:

"Take the silver and gold and make a crown, and set it on the head of the high priest, Joshua son of Jehozadak. Tell him this is what the LORD Almighty says: 'Here is the man whose name is the Branch, and he will branch out from his place and build the temple of the LORD. Zechariah 6: 11-12

So, the branch is a popular messianic symbol[1] and Joshua, or Jeshuah, can be transliterated into Aramaic as Jesus. So it seems to me that this passage does foretell of Jesus by name. And whether you find those convincing or not, there are literally dozens of them and the cumulative case turns out to be pretty strong.

So, when we, as Christians, say that the OT is about Jesus, we are usually talking about isolate scriptures like this, that appear to be clearly foretelling some future liberator. I like to call it the ‘Easter egg’ version of OT Christology. The prophets are my favorite books of the OT. One of the biggest misconceptions about the prophets is that their primary purpose was foretelling. They actually do very little predicting and a whole lot of what we would call ‘preaching.’ The ‘Easter egg' version of Jesus in the OT scans over vast tracts of text to find these kind of special, predictive, passages. Or to illustrate it another way, when it comes to Jesus, we often read the old testament as if it were a game of ‘find the saltine.’

So I think may people read the old testament like this:

CL Guy: “Isaiah 53”
Stanford: (opens the bible – there is a cracker there) “You, my friend, have found the saltine.”

This doesn’t seem to be the way Jesus approaches the relationship between him and the Hebrew Scriptures. Look at verse 27 again “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.” Let me make two brief observations about this. First of all, it takes JESUS, HIMSELF 4 to 6 hours to explain the gospel. The gospel is not a drive by sort of thing. The gospel is not a pithy idea. It is not a bumper sticker or a greeting card. Jesus cannot be reduced to a sound bite. If you want to know what Jesus is all about, you are probably going to have to hang around for a while.

But the main thing I’d like to bring out from this verse is that Jesus believes that HE is the interpretive key of the Old Testament. Let me repeat that. Jesus says that he is the interpretative key to the old testament.

So during the first day of ‘manpacking’ I found that I was only getting about half of the jokes. The jokes that I wasn’t getting appeared to be film references. Now, I fancy myself film savvy so I was mortified that I was missing so many film references. But it turned out that most of them were references to a single movie that I hadn’t seen. It turns out that to understand the humor of college life guys…you require an interpretive key…which turns out to be the movie ‘Dumb and Dumber.’ Without the film, I understood noting. You can mention the ‘Salmon of Capistrano’ all you want, and if I haven’t seen the movie I won’t get the joke.

Jesus tells the random dudes on the seven mile that you must approach the Hebrew scriptures Christologically…otherwise we will end up reading the NT for gospel and the OT for religion. Even Christians tend to read the OT moralistically…looking for lessons for life…Keller calls this the Aesop’s fables approach to the scriptures…we look for a moral of each story and try to do it. He says ‘if you read the bible like this, in the beginning it will be mildly inspirational…but it will eventually crush you to powder. If the Bible is about you it will inspire you for a while and then it will crush you. But if it is about Jesus it will ignite your heart.” But if you read the whole OT Christologically, all of a sudden the gore and bore of Leviticus, which Andy Croch calls “the graveyard of so many good intentions to read straight through the Bible” becomes a beautiful sign post of God’s sublime plan for our rescue in Jesus.

2. Insights On Encountering Jesus

The second major theme I want to bring out of this passage is that there are counter-intuitive insights about how Jesus is known. Epistemology is the philosophical sub-discipline that deals with how we know things. It has been popular for some time for educated people to assert that some form of rationalism or scientific empiricism is the only robust epistemology …or the only way something can be know is by a rational evaluation of the objective evidence. So it has become fashionable for the New Atheists (authors like Dawkins, Harris and Hitchings) to assert that Atheism is the only legitimate world view because their conclusions are rationally derived while spiritual and religious worldviews are based on social or personal influences.

In his book ‘The Reason for God’ Tim Keller reports on his survey of the sociological literature of belief and points out that, according to the best sociology of belief, all beliefs are socially, personally and rationally conditioned. People of all kinds believe things for a wide variety of intellectual, personal and cultural reasons. There is, obviously, much more to say about this, but it is not my topic. What we are interested in today is this passage…and what it says about how Jesus, in particular, is known. Let me make six observations:

i. Jesus takes the initiative.
15As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them;
He always does. Not one of us belongs to him because we sought him out on our own initiative. No major Christian theological system asserts anything else. He always starts it.

ii. They didn’t know it was him
16but they were kept from recognizing him.
Jesus’ work in people’s life is subtle. It often isn’t invasive. He doesn’t generally speak to you audibly as you are brushing your teeth. Jesus could be at work in your life right now, while you are sitting in a lecture hall listening to some dude talk about an old book, and you might not even realize it. You might even be despairing or wondering where God ‘has been.’ In some of the more mystical Christian traditions if you are despairing or facing a particularly dark situation, their prescription will be sustained meditation on this very passage.

iii. Jesus is known, primarily, by the Scriptures, in Community
27And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

Jesus had risen from the dead, and had not even ascended yet, and already he is pointing his followers to the Scriptures as one of the primary resources for knowing him. But it is not just an individual processing of the scriptures. In this passage, Jesus ‘shows up’ and ‘explains the scriptures’ when they were working these things out between them:
14They were talking with each other about everything that had happened. 15As they talked and discussed (and the Greek word here is for strenuous discussion or even debate) these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them;
Whether you are a follower of Jesus or just curious about him, the prescription here is to seek him out in the Scriptures, in community. You’ve got to be in some sort of small group that opens up the scriptures and looks at them TOGETHER. And, as a side note, Christianity can ONLY be done in community. If you are going through college on the margins of a Christian community, you are ripping yourself off of what most of us look back at as THE singularly most valuable experience of our lives. I am not going to patronize you by suggesting that these are the best days of your life. I sincerely hope they aren’t. People used to tell me that all the time in college and I used to thing ‘you have got to be kidding me.’ And they were wrong.

But if you take Christian community seriously during your college years, I can almost guarantee you that these will be some of the best friends of your life…because you will attribute significant portions of your spiritual growth directly to them. If you have had trouble connecting, sign up for the retreat…get in a small group for the last 7 weeks of the year…make it happen.

iv. Jesus engages the intellect AND the passions
32They asked each other, "Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?"
Listen, I am a professional and relatively successful scientist. In an ongoing debate in my field, I take the position of empiricist which puts the emphasis and trust in data over models and paradigms. My life is all about data. I am on schedule finish my fourth degree in the fall and already have the fifth one picked out. I simply want to know as much as I can. But I do not believe that our humanity can be reduced to facts. God fashioned us as complex beings with multiple sensory apparatus. When we approach the gospel, we ask the question, ‘is it true’? But that is actually not enough. We also ask does it work? And is it beautiful? Many of us found that an encounter with Jesus left our passions aflame well before we had answered all our questions. And I’m ok with that…because God made us people…not computers…so it would seem to follow that he would reveal himself to our sense of beauty and meaning as well as our sense of truth.

v. At some point we have to invite him in
28As they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus acted as if he were going farther. 29But they urged him strongly, "Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over." So he went in to stay with them.

The two random disciples on the road that day still had not put everything together. They still did not realize who it was who was with them. But they did know that this man seemed to have something of value. They invited him in. One of my favorite philosophers is Søren Kierkegaard. His most famous idea is that certainty follows commitment. If you wait to commit until you are certain, you will wander through life always seeking that one last piece of data. Kierkegaard says that God reveals himself in our risky venture towards him. Some of you are at that place. You aren’t sure it is all for real, but there is something about this Jesus character that is attractive to you. You need to invite him in.

vi. Revelation vs Investigation
30When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. 31Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him…
At the center of a Christian epistemology (thoughts about how we know things) is the idea that God is not known primarily by investigation. We do not figure him out. We believe knowing Jesus is primary a matter of him revealing himself to us. Incidentally, this is why we pray instead of meditating. We participate, as is relatively clear from the passage - he would not have revealed himself unless they had invited him in – but if you are here today and are wondering if the whole Jesus thing is for real, and what’s more, you are wondering how you would even figure out if it is real, I think this passage teaches: invite him in, in the midst of your doubt, pursue the scriptures in community, join a small group, and expect his revelation to be not only to your capacity for understanding, but also to your longings for beauty and meaning.

NT Wright says that this passage is: “a model for a great deal of what being a Christian is all about. The slow, sad dismay at the failure of human hopes; the turning to someone who might or might not help; the discovery that in scripture there lay keys which might unlock the central mysteries and enable us to find the truth; the sudden realization of Jesus himself, present with us, warming our hearts with his truth, showing himself as bread is broken. This describes the experience of innumerable Christians…”

Closing Thought: The Resurrection Changes Everything

Then finally, this passage is, first and foremost, about the Resurrection, which we celebrated just two days ago. The main point of this passage is that the Resurrection changes EVERYTHING.

Check out these two verses

v19b "He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people.
v52Then they worshiped him

At the beginning of the seven miles, they were despairing.

Verse 17 describes their faces as downcast. Saint Augustine stresses the word ‘had’ in verse 21. ‘We HAD hope.’ Hope is a past tense verb

And they describe Jesus as ‘a prophet’ that they had looked to for political retribution. This is a common view of Jesus’ importance without the resurrection. He WAS and important prophet and if we take him seriously he will guide us to a political Utopia (which will look different if you are a democrat or a republican…but both claim the dead Jesus as their model). It is not surprising that Paul said that if the resurrection didn’t happen we are to be pitied beyond all men…that thing is depressing.

But the resurrection changes everything. Dan and I got together a couple months ago and I asked him what he hoped for me to get out of this passage. He essentially said, ‘I just really love how that passage is a microcosm of the whole story…the very moment that they were sure of their defeat, of death’s victory, was the very moment in which they were walking and chatting with their victorious chamion over death.” The resurrection changes everything. When Jesus shows up among the disciples, and they realize that death did not hold him, that he was indeed raised from the dead, they did not say ‘you are the greatest prophet of all time’…no…they WORSHIPED him. The resurrection changes everything.

Dan said two weeks ago: “The resurrection is a reality that can totally revolutionize your life.” Whether or not you are a Christian. And that is why we are going to spend the last six weeks of the school year unpacking some of the theological and practical implications of the resurrection. The first two weeks will focus on theological applications:

Next week, Dan will talk about the new earth. Anyone close to him knows that this topic has simply captured his imagination. It will be, in some senses, and escatology (last days) talk, but I promise that there will be no charts…just a total reevaluation of what life after death will be like, and what life will be like after that.

The next week I will be back to talk about ‘The New Body.’ And we will look at passages like and including this one, where the resurrected Jesus looks like an ordinary human being, but he is also walking through walls and seemingly teleporting. I will talk about what Jesus’ physical resurrection means for our physical resurrection as well as how we should view our bodies theologically right now…and the implications for work, sleep and sex.

So we’ll talk about ‘The New Earth’ and ‘The New Body’ but then we will spend three weeks on ‘The New Task.’ Jesus doesn’t just show up as a neat trick…he leaves the disciples with marching orders in light of his resurrection in verses 46-48.

46He told them, "This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, 47and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. 48You are witnesses of these things.
And so we will break ‘The New Task’ in light of the resurrection into 1) Justice, 2) Evangelism and 3) Beauty and Creativity.

The gospel changes everything. During the seven miles on the road to Emmaus, Jesus turned two kingdom role players from bitter, cynical, followers of a failed prophet, to worshipers of a risen champion over death with a new mission. This is the end of the story of Luke, but the beginning of our story. I hope you will come along with us for the next few weeks.

_____________
[1] Jer 23:5

Broken For You: The Last Supper

So the gospels are kind of like biographies…and kind of not. Scholars have compared them to other biographies of the day, and they compare pretty well. They have many of the marks and convention of first century biography. But there is one major way that they differ from the genre of first century biography…they each devote between 1/3rd and ½ of their content to the final week of the life of their subject. With today’s passage, which has often been called ‘The Last Supper’ we are getting to the events of the final couple days.

So we have been in Luke’s gospel since the beginning of the year. The gospel is winding down…and so is the series. We will only be doing 5 more weeks on Luke, wraping it up around Easter (I know, very clever planning by Dan). After that we will wrap up with a topical series about living in light of the resurrection. And with that, Let’s dive into the passage we call ‘The Last Supper.’ There are three major themes that I’d like to get from this text:

1. Jesus Explains the Reason for His Death
2. Jesus Prescribes a Sensual Experience of Worship
3. Jesus Teaches a Brief Seminar on Leadership


1. Jesus Explains the Reason for His Death

So we were Christmas and Easter church attenders when I was a kid. We went to this church in a small town from one of what we call the ‘high church’ Christian traditions…so there was an alter in the front. My favorite think to do at church was to squint my eyes as I looked into the light. If you do this, you can get the appearance of discrete rays of light radiating out from the light. My favorite church activity was to contort my face just right so that the squinty beam of light lazered through the bonnet of the lady in front of me or split the bald head of the guy talking in the front. But one other way I spent my time early on was trying to figure out the mosaic that decorated the alter at the front of the church. It was a lamb, with a disturbingly anthropomorphic face, that sat on a book and held two flags. It seemed like a total noe-sequiter to me. Why was our church decorated with a sheep with a disturbing face. (Here is the closes image I could find to it)

And it turns out that this is a really common subject in ancient Christian art

But if this sheep showed up at the Jefferson County State Fair back home it would get the blue ribbon in creepyness.

On top of that, their is a curiously named Hard Core band called Lamb of God, who sometimes tap into Last Supper themes.

So I asked my mom and she told me it was because Jesus was sometimes called the Lamb of God, but she could not tell me why…so it became even more disturbing, because this ugly fluffy critter was supposed to be Jesus. I ended up trying not to look at it and opted to spend all of my time lazering the lady.

But it turns out that there is a pretty profound reason that Jesus has historically been called the ‘Lamb of God.’ The creepy art might be ill advised, but the title is apt. And it turns out, that it emerges from today’s passage:

Luke 22:7-27

The initial observation we should make about this text is that the Last Supper was first and formost a Passover meal. It is mentioned 4X .That is an incredibly important detail. Jesus starts by saying ‘"I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.” There is not a good English word or phrase for the word (επιθυμία) translated “eagerly desired.” It is literally, ‘With desire I have desired.” It is such a strong and passionate word that, elsewhere, it is sometimes translated as ‘lust’.[1] You have to understand that Jesus didn’t just want to have a ‘last meal’ with his closest friends like a death row inmate. He wanted to share the Passover meal with them before he died because this ceremonial meal had a very specific and clear purpose that he appropriates in explaining the purpose for his death.

Jesus hopes to use the intimacy and the imagery of this celebration to share with them why he had to die. He tells them his body would be broken and his blood spilled ‘for you.’ But does not go into the details of why or how…to understand that we have to understand why he did this on the Passover.

The Hebrews were being exploited and Oppressed. They were slaves and were being literally worked to death. They called out to God for justice

The night of Passover, after many confrontations between the enslaved Hebrew people and the Egyptian rulers…after God repeatedly demonstrated his hatred of slavery and that the Egyptians were opposing him by their continued claim to own an entire ethnicity and profit off their suffering, he came against the oppressing society with what the Scriptures call wrath.

The night of the Passover, for a brief time and in a small, finite, location[2], the people were exposed to the white hot consuming justice of God. This is what we call wrath. But its is a misunderstood word. Wrath is simply the exposure of unjust humans that exploit and extort each other to the unbending, unyielding, unwavering justice of God…they are consumed by it

There is a story in the Bible where Moses seems to get tired of just hearing instructions from God and so he kind of naively asks to see him. ‘Show me your glory.’ He asks. God says no. He essentially says ‘If I revealed myself to you fully, it would obliterate you.’ Moses is a pretty impressive guy, if anyone could bear to experience the unmitigated justice of God, it seems like it would be him, but he is made of the same stuff as us. The human condition…that strange admixture of nobility and wickedness…of just actions and self serving intentions…of kindness and pride…of beauty and lust…simply cannot survive the pure justice of God

“I had no doubt at all that I was seeing an eldil (angel)…My sensations were true and in some ways very unpleasant…All those doubts which I had felt before as to whether these creatures were friend or foe…had, for the moment, vanished. My fear was now of another kind. I felt sure that the creature was what we call ‘good,’ but I wasn’t sure whether I liked “goodness” as much as I’d supposed. This is a terrible experience. As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it is also dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can’t eat, and home the very place you can’t live and your very comforter the very person who makes you uncomfortable... Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible: the last card has been played.”

Now, of course, this is entirely speculation…but Lewis is taking as his cue that the vast majority of accounts, in the scriptures, where a person encounters an angel…even a ‘good person,’ they are terrified. Because an angel reflects God’s unmitigated good, it is just a taste. We are not sure we can bear it…but we can…it just scares the crap out of us. When we come face to face, however, with the ultimate source of pure good, unwavering justice, we can not bear it.

So the Hebrews were told that day, the day God exposed that place to his consuming good, to do something that seems really strange, to slaughter a lamb…and here is where it gets a little gross…they were supposed to take some of the blood, and paint their door post with it…then they were supposed to eat the lamb and wait, ready to leave. That night horrible things happened, but the hoses with the blood on the doorpost were ‘passed over.’ They were spared the wrath…they were not exposed to the consuming justice of God.

Jesus holds up the bread and the wine of this cherished…centuries old Passover tradition but then he says something shocking…he says, ‘It is all about me…and it always has been.’ Jesus is called the Lamb of God, because his death provides us a means of escape from God’s final wrath in precisely the same way the blood of the Passover lamb protected the Hebrews huddled in their homes that night.

We will each, eventually be exposed to the white hot evaluation of God’s justice…and none of us can stand up under it…we will be consumed. But, as with the Passover Jesus is telling us, there is shelter under the blood of a substitute. At the heart of Christianity is the idea of Atonement. Atonement is all about exchange. We all exploit and extort to some degree. We all use other people in one way or another for our own purposes. When all of creation is finally subjected to evaluation of God’s justice, the inescapable evaluation of his holy requirements, we will find ourselves exposed and without recourse…the weight of undiluted good will crush our mixed souls. That is what the Bible means by wrath, when we face God and are overcome by the unbearable force of his unmitigated good.

Just like that night, in Egypt, the only survivors will not be those who are good enough…because no one is, we all give injustice, lust, greed, and pride safe harbor in our hearts. No, just like that night, the survivors will be those who come under the protection of blood. Atonement is about EXCHANGE. When Jesus said that his blood would be shed for us on the cross, what he means is that he, the only good man, and God himself in a confusing but very real way, would bear God’s wrath, he would experience the consuming justice of God while harboring all of our petty jealosies, our wanton glances, our harbored grudges, our betrayed friendships. He stood in under the consuming justice of God against those things that WE did. And because of that. We can take the exchange.

But we can only be saved by faith in the provision of the substitute.[3] We can claim his blood. We can paint our hearts with it. And if we do, in that final day, we face the unbending, terrible good that is God’s unwavering justice, we will be passed over…we will be unjustly called ‘just’…we will invoke the Great Exchange…we will point to God’s annihilation of God on the cross and be able to say, ‘Yes, I have done horrible things. I could not stand under the scrutiny of God’s perfect justice. But the consuming effects of the collision of that Justice and my failure has already happened. God did it to Jesus, and offers us the blood escape. “

So the last supper is not just a sentimental final meal before death. Jesus uses the imagery and the intimacy of the Passover to explain why he was going to die. It was going to be for you. It was going to be an atoning death. He was going to bear what justice required on our behalf.

2. Jesus Prescribes a Sensual Experience of Worship

So he has explained his death in an eatable object lesson. It seems like a pretty clever way to teach an eclectic group of ordinary, mostly blue collar workers. But then, he tells them to do it again after he is gone. He says ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ And so they did, as did those after them, and those after them…and we do it today. Jesus wanted his disciples to frequently remember the free, substitutionary nature of his death again and again and it seems like there are a lot of ways he could have done that. He could have taught them a prayer, or a song, or preached a sermon, had them all memorize it, he could have made them stand on their heads and recite the Torah backwards…but instead he prescribes a frequent meal.

Why a meal? Why a ceremony? Many modern protestant churches have tried to do everything they can to rid their churches of anything that even sniffs of ceremony. So why?

The Lord’s Supper or communion or the Eucharist (which is Latin for ‘thanksgiving’), all ways to refer to the celbration of a meal of remembernce, is a deeply sensual form of worship. Now that phrase is intentionally shocking. By sensual, I mean that by calling us to a meal of remembrance he has giving us a means of worship that is fully tactile and engages all the senses. Its sensual. The fact that we have, culturally, come to see ‘sensual’ as synonymous with sexual is unfortunate, but kind of illustrates the point here. Sex also engages all the senses, and is in no way boring.

Likewise, communion engages all the senses and should be in no way boring. We see the elements, the bread and the wine. We hold and tear the bread, waft the wine and smell its complexity, taste the bitter sweetness of fermented grapes and the comforting softness of bread, and hear the story of God’s intimate celebration of his substitutionary death ‘for us’ told one more time…or at least that was Jesus’ intention. Sometimes I have somewhat jokingly called communion ‘taste worship’…but that actually short changes the power of the sacrament. And I know it is hard to get into with the thimble of Welches and the microscopic carb-pellet we use in evangelical churches…but Jesus thought that this explanation of his substitutionary attonement was so important, that it warented its own, particularly sensual, worship experience.

In this tactile, sensual experience of worship we remember…we remember, again and again and again and again, the truth of the gospel…because the more we internalize and appropriate the truth of the gospel, the more we will act like it matters. The more we remembered that we have been spared a looming confrontation with God’s pure justice that we would not have survived…the more we remember that God himself, in the person of Jesus, experienced the obliteration that confrontation…the more we remember that the only difference between us and our neighbor is that we have some blood painted on our door, the less we will behave like self righteous prudes and the more willing we will be to extend grace, patience, generosity and love.

So, as you can probably guess, I have far more to say about this ceremony than I have time for or, than is appropriate for this venue. If you are interested in more, I have put additional thoughts on my blog. But for now, I think it is valuable to recognize that the events of that night, the explanation of Jesus’ coming death on the cross as an atoning death ‘for us’…as an exchange, our wickedness for his goodness…is worth remembering again and again…and not just abstractly, but sensually and viscerally in a meal of worship and community.

3. Jesus Teaches a Brief Seminar on Leadership

Then in verses 24, there is an anti-climax. Jesus has eagerly desired to utilize the imagery and intimacy of this Passover to explain his death. You can sense the urgency and the desire and the passion. But the disciples…they’re still asking the wrong questions…there’re still asking power questions. They want to know who will have the authority, because in an authoritarian leadership model rank coerces action…it provides power.

I have actually taken courses on leadership for my job. At these classes we were taught that the era of leadership based on authority is over. In contemporary society, leadership is about influence rather than authority. In the influence model, respect coerces action…which give you power. It is still about power.

Tim Keller calls this mercenary leadership. It is fundamentally self interested. In Jesus’ community leadership is not about power, authority, or influence. It is not about the leader at all. It is about what she or he can find to do that would serve the other people in Jesus’ community in a fundamentally helpful way.

In the world, leadership is conferred on the best performers. In Jesus’ community it is conferred on the best repenters. It is an inverse-meritocracy. In the following passage, Jesus acknowledges that Peter will be the leader, but he is not because he is the greatest. But failure and repentance turned him into precisely the kind of servent leader Jesus is talking about. Repentence turns failure into compassion, humility, understanding.[4] In Jesus’ community, railure and repentance are the stuff leadership is made out of.

So that is a common application of this passage. Let me call it personal or ecclesiastical leadership. But I want to offer a brief post script. I simply want to pose the question about how this passage should shape our political action.

I have always found politics difficult in light of my faith. There are no examples in the scriptures of God’s people behaving well or poorly in a secular democracy…so sometimes I can feel adrift. Let me offer you this, as an aside. I think that the exile community (e.g. Daniel and friends who were captured and taken to Bablon) is a closer example of what our social action should look like than Theocratic Isreael.

But let me just ask, what does this passage say about our social action, including our political action. I think it suggests that we, as the Church, should be very wary of wielding power over people…that our social action and leadership should be typified by service rather than power.

Tim Keller has a really interesting observation about this. He says that most religions seem to do quite well when mixed with political power. Hinduism and Buddhism have done pretty well. Islam absolutely thrives when in political power. But Christianity doesn’t. Christianity has a very poor track record with surviving political power. The one place where Christianity has wielded political power, Europe…it is toothless. Keller suggests that wielding political power is so contrary to the way of Jesus Christ that it can destroy us.

So, there it is. In the last supper, Jesus uses the intimacy and imagery of the Passover to explain why he had to die. He died as a substitute for us. And we can appropriate that substitution by trusting and following him. This idea is so central to who he was and what he did, that he left a special, sensual ceremony so that we might frequently and meaningfully remember his substitutionary death and live in light of it. And one way that we live in light of it is to seek service rather than power…just like he did.

__________
[1] This analysis is from Tim Keller.
[2] As usual, I owe this insight to Tim Keller.
[3] This phrase was stolen verbatim from Keller.
[4] This is Keller’s too...One could argue from these footnotes that I do not read broadly enough. I would counter-argue that I do read pretty broadly for a guy with an engineering job, a ministry, 2 kids and working on a degree, Keller is just head and shoulders above other contemporary voices.

The Great Inversion: The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector

(Luke 18: UC Davis - 1/20/09)

9To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: 10"Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11The Pharisee stood up and prayed about[a] himself: 'God, I thank you that I am not like other men—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. 12I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.'
13"But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.'

14"I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."


As I was reading this story it occurred to me that we tend to read Jesus’ stories as if they had the same narrative structure as the movie Titanic. I remember when Titanic first came out my dad said ‘Why would anyone go see that? You already know how it ends. I suspect we read familiar scripture for the same reason we would watch a movie like Titanic…we know how it ends, but we try to experience the drama any way. Or even more dramatically, like Memento, where we interpret each event in light of the events that come after it. It works for the occasional movie, but it is no way to approach most narratives. Consider this anecdote from xkcd.com.

Someone[1] said “Here’s one test of whether we’re reading one of Jesus’ parables correctly: if it doesn’t surprise, shock, and challenge us, then we should probably go back to the drawing board.” This is as true for today’s passage as any other.

So I ran track in high school. I was bad at it. It was really just a really good way to keep in shape for soccer season. Track is an interesting sport because even though I ran the three longest events on the schedule (4X800, the one mile and the 2 mile) the vast majority of the time was still spent sitting around, hanging out, drinking Gatorade and talking. My senior year some of the other distance runners developed varying levels of curiosity in Jesus. A couple of them checked church out and one of them, Shaun, started reading the gospels. A couple weeks in I asked him how it was going. He said, ‘Great. I have started playing a game. When someone asks Jesus a question I, or sets a trap for him, I try to guess how he is going to answer it.” I found myself feeling envious. Because even though I had only been a Christian for a little over a year, the gospel stories were already so familiar to me that I read them anticipating the ending.. For Shaun they were full of drama, suspense, paradigm crushing twists and surprise endings.

We tend to read Jesus’ stories like they are the Titanic or Momento. We know how it ends, but we try to experience the drama any ways. But they actually read much more like a M Night Shyamalan movie. In Night’s movies (especially his really good ones like The Sixth Sense and, my favorite, The Village), you spend 90 minutes thinking you know what is going on, but in the closing minutes of the film you suddenly realize that all of your expectations and assumptions were totally wrong. At the moment Bruce Willis understands the truth in the Sixth Sense, or at the moment Ivy jumps the fence in the Village, you suddenly realize that you’ve been tricked. Nothing is as it seemed. That is how today’s passage works more than almost any other. So in order to have a surprise or ‘twist’ ending you need to narrative devices: First is the misdirect. You allow the audience to run with their mistaken assumptions. You feed them details that are likely to be misinterpreted to support their expectations. Then you bring the reveal. You abruptly unveil the true nature of the story and the audience suddenly realizes that nothing was as it seemed. This is the narrative structure Jesus uses in today’s parable, and I’d like to investigate it using this structure:

I. The Misdirect: Jesus Introduces the Characters
II. The Shocking Reveal: A Distinction Between Gospel and Religion
A. Three Marks of Religion from Luke 18
1. Moralism
2. Self Interest
3. Comparison
B. A Couple Brief Applications

So lets start by looking at Jesus’ misdirect

I. Jesus Introduces the Characters

10"Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.

This verse seems like a pretty short, mundane bit of narrative exposition. Jesus is simply setting up the characters of his story in what seems like the simplest possible way. But this is the heart of his misdirect. He is laying intentional clues that encourage the audience that the story is headed in a different direction than it actually does.. Jesus is setting the expectations that he will summarily undermine in his surprise ending. I guarantee you that when they heard this sentence, almost everyone who heard this story were sure they knew where it was going. The Pharisees were the most morally admirable individuals of the day. They were the religious role models of the culture and were widely respected. The tax collectors were the most widely despised members of society. No one like them and the audience was looking forward to a good ‘tax collector’ bashing story.

There is a visceral reaction that Jesus would generate by introducing his characters. Introduction of the first character generated respect and affection, generating the second cause passionate repulsion and revilement.

You have to get the picture here, that Jesus is setting up an expectation by making the characters of his story someone universally respected, even loved, and someone who was universally reviled. The universal expectation would be that the Pharisee would be the hero of the story and the tax collector would be the villain.

So I want to briefly illustrate each of these characters: To illustrate the Pharisee character I’m going to play you a clip. This is AJ Jacob at the TED conference.[2] Jacob is an experiential author. He often tries to do outlandish things and then write a book about them. For example, he once read the Encyclopedia Britannica cover to cover in a year and wrote a book about it. Well his most recent book made him famous. He calls it ‘The Year of Living Biblically’.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/a_j_jacobs_year_of_living_biblically.html
(Note: In the talk I only played the clip from 2:32 to 5:44)[3]

Now, let me just say as an aside, no Christian theologian I respect claims to take the Bible literally. One of the first things you learn in seminary is to interpret passage with respect to the author’s intent taking the historical-grammatical context, the genre and on which side of the cross the passage was written into account. For example, you can do as much violence to the text by interpreting a metaphorical passage literally as you can allegorizing a literal passage.
The reason I love this clip is that is illustrates how hard it was to be a Pharisee. These were some seriously righteous dudes. They also had counted the laws and come up with 613. But they were so concerned with not breaking the laws that the made additional laws to keep them from getting close to breaking the biblical laws. You could not know one of these guys without being impressed with their religious fervor and careful behavior. For example, the Torah only specifies one annual fast, the day of atonement. This guy fasts TWICE A WEEK[4]. Are you kidding me? The Pharisees were not interested in being good enough. They were much better than good enough. It is important that we don’t think of this man as a hypocrite, but a mann universally respected for being a moral person. This is a really good person. People came to Jesus expecting to hear a good moral teacher…so there would be no doubt that this righteous Pharisee, the ‘good man’ would be the hero of this story.

But the antagonist was as despicable as the protagonist was respectable. There is a great exchange in the recent movie Stranger than Fiction. Dustin Hoffman’s character is asking will Will Ferrell’s protagonist, Harold Crick a series of questions. The exchange goes like this:

Professor: Is there any one who doesn’t like you…that would want to cause you harm
Crik: I work for the IRS, no one likes me

We have pretty negative connotations associated with our culture’s tax collector…but at the end of the day, IRS agents are just bureaucrats doing an unpopular job. In first century Palestine it was much more that that, by selecting a Pharisee and a tax collector Jesus is setting up an expectation. The best and the worst. The ominous background of all of the gospels is the Roman occupation of Palestine. You should always read the gospels with the recognition that Jesus is talking to an oppressed people with a dark, brutal foreign overlord that was extorting money from them by military force. Rome was taking their money by force. And to do that they recruited Hebrews, people of the local culture, to collect it. Bronwyn will talk about one of these eccentric gentlemen in particular in a couple weeks, but they essentially had tax franchises. They had to give a set amount to Rome but they had freedom to collect extra to cover their expenses…but there was very little regulation on just how much ‘extra’ meant…and they tended to interpret it as ‘a lot more’. So they were not only the reviled instruments of the great oppressor, they engaged in direct extortion of their fellow Hebrews. This was someone who had sold out his family and friends for cash. He was not only immoral but unlikable. He could be thought of as a Nazi collaborator in occupied countries during world war 2. The closest modern equivalent I could think of was the American that they found at the Al Qaeda training camp. One of our own countryman set on our destruction.[5]

So I hope I have painted this picture for you. The characters of Jesus story are ultimate types of goodness and badness. Jesus intentionally sets up an expectation. It is certain to his listeners that the Pharisee will be the hero and the tax collector the villain in Jesus little morality tale. They are wrong. This distinction between a good person and a bad person is Jesus’ misdirect and it sets up his shocking reveal.

II. The Shocking Reveal: Jesus Makes a Distinction Between Religion and Gospel

This is actually turns out to be a parallel story of the two lost sons Bronwyn preached on last week. Consider the similarities[6]:
What’s the point? Jesus tells us there are two ways to run from God, not one. We tend to think that religion is good and irreligion is bad…but hedonism and moralism are both ways to define yourself apart from the mercy of God. And in both stories Jesus suggests that moralism is a more insidious spiritual peril. Moralism…’being a good person’…can convince us that we don’t actually need the only thing we actually need…mercy. The hedonist is in the better place spiritually because he or she is more likely to come to a place of recognizing a spiritual need.

The hedonist is in the better place spiritually because he or she is more likely to come to a place of recognizing a spiritual need.

Here is what Tim Keller says about this tendency: (Prodigal Goe p31-33)

“Our Western society is so deeply divided between these two approaches that hardly anyone can conceive on any other way to live…both of these approaches tends to divide the whole world into two basic groups. The moral conformists say “The immoral people-‘the people who do their own thing’-are the problem with the world and moral people are the solution.” The advocates of self discovery say “The bigoted people-the people who say, ‘We have the Truth’-are the problem with the world, and progressive people are the solution…The message of Jesus’ parable is that both of these are wrong. His parable illustrates the radical alternative.”

Keller suggests that in the scriptures, the word ‘religion’ is often used as a pejorative. He suggests that this parable and the one we studied last week illustrate the differences between religion and gospel. Consider the following distinctions[7]:


This idea is echoed elsewhere in scripture:

Philippians 3:4-8

2Watch out for those dogs, those men who do evil, those mutilators of the flesh. 3For it is we who are the circumcision, we who worship by the Spirit of God, who glory in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh— 4though I myself have reasons for such confidence.
If anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: 5circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; 6as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless.

7But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them skubalon (skubalon)…

Paul is essentially saying, ‘I was trying as hard as I could to be a good person. I was super religious. And you know what…it was all skubalon. Some of you know what that Greek word means. Paul says all of my religion, all of my moral performance, all of my achievement in goodness…it is just a steaming pile of excrement[8]. The apostle calls religion a big ol’ turd.

But why? Because religion is repugnant. Religion, as Jesus and Paul describe it, is a dark tendency of the human heart to create an ‘other’ and feel superior to them. It often, even usually, takes the form of trying to earn the favor of a divine being…but it can be entirely secular.

Let me take the next few minutes to just point out three marks of religion in this passage that makes it the kind of thing Jesus would tell a story about.

A. 3 Marks of Religion in this Passage

1. Moralism: Personal or Corperate

‘Righteousness’ doesn’t have much meaning in our culture…except as a pejorative. But we are pretty interested in ‘being a good person.’ So let’s take a look at how this first guy conceptualizes ‘being a good person.’

Notice how external and personal this man’s understanding of sin and virtue is, it is completely focused on behavior and breaking of rules. He sees ‘sin’ seen as discrete individual external actions.[9] He doesn’t thank God for patience, joy, and love but for his ability to keep self defined rules.

Let me try to put together a contemporary version of this external/personal idea of sin and virtue…”I thank you God that I am not like other people, I am not like the Greeks, liberals or atheists. I don’t sleep around or accept evolution. I always go to church, never smoke, swear or drink, I only listen to Christian music, and I ALWAYS vote republican.”

We have culturally rejected this idea of virtue. We now think of ethical norms in terms of how they impact the rest of the community. We have a more ‘corporate’ morality.

Our culture would probably produce a prayer something like this…”I thank you God that I am not like other people, I am not like the Uncaring or the Rich. I am not hateful or prudish. I don’t eat cute animals and don’t drive an SUV. I happily pay my taxes, recycle regularly, keep a small carbon footprint and NEVER vote republican.”

These two different visions of morality, individual and corperate are at the heart of our current ‘culture war.’ Conservative religion tends to focus on individual moralism, Liberal religion and many secular ethical systems tend to focus on the corporate moralism, how your behavior affects others…but they are two versions of the same phenomena. But these are just two different versions of moralism. Don’t get me wrong. I think it is really important to enjoy sex within God’s designed boundaries and to reduce your carbon footprint…and I won’t tell you how I vote. I think individual and corporate morality both matter. But Jesus rejects moral performance (in either its public or individual incarnations) as the criteria for being right with him.

2. Self Interest

Let’s do a word count of ‘God’ and I/me: God=1 (the very first word, he starts out well), I/me=4 (5 in the Greek manuscript). Religion that Jesus condemns is fundamentally self interested.

The question the parable poses is ‘Why do we do good?’ Religion says we do good because we want to ‘get to heaven’ or we want to be respected by others or we just want to be good for its own sake[10]…but it is fundamentally self interested. The gospel puts all of our trust for salvation, self worth and identity in the mercy of God and the work of Christ on the cross. We do good out of thankful gratitude for the mercy we have been offered, but there is NOTHING in it for us. Jesus said that the tax collector was ‘justified’ which is a legal term which means ‘declared without fault.’ If the tax collector is ‘justified’ for nothing, offered free and sufficient mercy just for asking, what is his motivation to ‘do good.’ Overwhelming, joyful, overflowing, grateful, love. This is the gospel. Jesus offers us unilateral rescue. Un-deserved mercy. None of our moral or spiritual achievements ‘play’ in his evaluation of us. So we do stuff for him and our community and our world out of the reservoir of joy and gratitude. And we are entirely free to fail, because we know that our cosmic standing does not depend on our performance.

3. Comparison

Competitive comparison is the way of the moralist. You see, at the heart of this man’s feelings of religious worth is comparison. The desire to be better than…to be accepted as good and valuable in contradistinction to those who are not. The moralist, internal or corporate, religious or secular, only knows their value or worth in relation to others. In order to respect themselves, the moralist MUST look down at others. And it doesn’t actually matter how ‘good’ you are, if you ascribe to a moral performance narrative you’ll employ comparison to validate it. Moralism is necessarily judgmental. If you find yourself thinking or talking a lot about how the democrats suck or how the republicans are evil or how environmentalists are wackos or how business majors are materialistic or how the French like to retreat (oops, I do that one a lot) or if ‘this group’ has ‘that deplorable trait that I do not have’ you are probably behaving as the Pharisee in this passage.[11]

The Pharisee compared himself against weaker people, the tax collector compared himself against a holy God. You know the tax collector could have easily fallen into this mistake. He could have said, ‘Sure I’ve made mistakes, but at least I am here at temple…at least I go to church.’

We each want to think of ourselves as a ‘good person.’ But what is a good person. How do we define ‘a good person.’ It must be in distinction to ‘bad people.’ I Goggled the phrase ‘but I am a good person.’ 98,000 entries. Why is this phrase so interesting. Because it usually follows a moral failure (since it starts with a ‘but’). One of the first ones I clicked on was by Don Imus following his comments about the Rutgers’s women’s basketball team: 'I did a bad thing, but I'm a good person.'

But how does someone who does a bad thing know they are a good person, especially if the recent evidence is against them. They compare themselves to someone deplorable and say I am not as bad as them. I remember before I was a Christian, Christians tried to convince me that I needed God’s mercy. I found this idea extremely offensive. Why? ‘Because I’m a good person’ I used to tell them. ‘I’ve never murdered anyone or stolen anything big. There are lots of people worse than me.’ I would have been better off spiritually if I had done something obviously horrible. An accurate self assessment is closer to God’s kingdom than being good.


How much of your value comes from not being like X, where X is someone else? ‘the other’
I’ll be honest. A lot. I often feel justified before God because I am more gospel oriented than the liberals and more justice oriented than he fundamentalists, people seem to like my teachcing from time to time, I work AND preach, that I don’t have a TV (even thought I, obviously, consume a ton of visual media through DVD’s and streaming online content). The moment I derive my value from any of those things, I AM the Pharisee in this story. God only replies to desperate pleas for rescue. The only thing that should give me value is God’s infinite mercy. Everything else should emerge from awed gratitude.

But one warning emerges from all this. Jesus is not just saying ‘be humble’ like, by doing this thing better than others you will please God. He is not just a new legalism of humility and speaking poorly about yourself.[12] Rather It is an exhortation to derive your value simply from the mercy of God and to reject the temptation to comparison.

Let me wrap up with three brief applications.

B. Three Brief Applications

Dan is continually saying that CL is a place for two kinds of people. It is a place for those of us who have made a commitment to follow Jesus and are trying to figure out what that looks like. But it is also a place for the spiritually curious, those who may be intrigued by Jesus, but aren’t totally sure he’s for them. Let me try to make a couple applications from this passage for each of you.

1. First, for those of you who already follow Jesus, you need to know that the gospel is for you too. Be very careful not to make Christianity into a religion. You need to continually recognize that the only thing you have of value is mercy. We do not just accept God’s mercy when we become Christians and then earn his favor from then on. We remain object of mercy. You need to get a hold of the gospel every day or you are going to end up getting religious and start thinking you are better than other people.

The gospel, as a separate path from religion or irreligion, is an antidote to self righteousness and bitterness. Let me in on a little secret. The church is full of self righteousness and bitterness. The cure is gospel people…people fully aware of their position as unilateral recipients of mercy and who serve out of awed gratitude.

2. For those of you who are investigating Jesus, he wants you to know he is not asking you to be a self-righteous prude. We are not asking you to get religion or to accept a new moral code. Mark Driscoll sometimes says ‘Why would I ask you to be religious… people are horrible’, we are not asking you to become one. . And call us on it. If we are being religious, by talking about how much better we are than some group or world view or by being condescending towards you or your friends rather than gospel people, call us on us…you’ll be doing us a huge favor.

Jesus is simply asking you to recognize your need, accept the free, transforming, unilateral mercy he offers, and live in light of that.

The Pharisee’s resume is too long. The tax collector’s resume is short. The only thing on it is need. The shocking thing about this parable is that it is the only thing he needs.

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[1] http://www.sarahlaughed.net/lectionary/2004/10/proper_25_year_.html
[2] An annual conference on Technology. E . and Design. loosely associated with New York NPR.
[3] I love the line ‘I’m Jewish like the Olive Garden is Italian…not much.’ I actually am half Italian. My mom grew up in Rome. This got me thinking ‘I am Italian like Chili’s is Italian…not really at all.’
[4] Keller has a great insight on this. He points out that robbery and adultery are actually wrong, but his fasting practices are entirely extra-biblical. It is a worship style preference…but he has imbued it with moral significance. He uses it to feel superior rather than different.
[5] Although this does not really work b/c the American Al Queda guy was operating out of principal not just crass financial gain.
[6] I owe this insight to Tim Keller’s similar teaching on both passages.
[7] This is also from Tim Keller at the Resurgence conference.
[8] Skubalon has a range of meaning (any refuse, as the excrement of animals, offscourings, rubbish). But in this context, given its other uses in first century Greek literature, Daniel Walace, professor of NT at Dallas Seminary puts it somewhere between ‘crap’ and the s-word semantically.( http://www.bible.org/page.php?page_id=5318) It is a term for excrement, but not just a clinical term…it is a term with calculated shock value. This makes sense, because Paul has already called religious people ‘dogs’ (a reviled animal in the middle east, not like davis where they receive comparable attention to children) it seems contextually consistent that he would turn around and call religion a turd…a big steaming pile. The vast majority of translations lacked the cohunes to render it such. Only the ‘uptight’ KJV calls it ‘dung.’ Nearly all use the term ‘rubbish.’ Shoot, ‘table scraps’ would have been more visceral. ‘Rubbish’ is a far more clinical rendering and does not remotely fit with Paul’s rhetorical mood.
[9] This insight is from Keller’s sermon on this passage.
[10] This was how I was raised. One must be good but only for the sake of being good, not for an eternal or temporal reward. But this is still fundamentally self-interested because we are doing it to ‘be good’ and win the psychological (and self righteous) rewards that come from being thought of as good (and feeling superior b/c I am).
[11] I am reading Augustine’s City of God with Dan and a couple other guys. In book one, Augustine speculates that once Rome lost it’s main rivals it began to decay from within as the citizens turned on each other. We require ‘the other’ to give ourselves value. We define ourselves by what we are not.
[12] Honestly, self deprecating talk is annoying and generally is meant to show how humble you are or a bait to get affirmation.