I broke down today and asked for help. My rector and I meet every Thursday to pray, meditate on Scripture, and work out our punch-lists for the week. It is my job to pick the passage we look at each week, and I just couldn't look anywhere else, I had to deal with the Gospel for Sunday. We had a great conversation about it. I was challenged with questions like:
"How do you want the congregation to leave your sermon? Do they have to feel good? Can they leave the sermon annoyed and offended?
"Is it possible to ask the congregation to do something that you yourself aren't willing to do?"
What I came to realize in the course of our discussion was how distressed Jesus is. I normally read this as an angry Jesus, lashing out against a stiff-necked people. But what I see today is Jesus, the God-man, in agony. "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!" What if that means, "I can't believe I had to come to earth to do this. I don't want to be the fire that purifies you, I want you to do it yourself! Oh that you, your ancestors, and those who will come after you could have maintained our relationship on your own!"?
I realized today that God didn't want to have to come to earth. God didn't want to have to subject his Son, himself, to the agony of the cross; a physical AND spiritual pain beyond our comprehension. We were created out of love so that we might love God and love one another. But we just can't do it. We can't kindle that fire of purification on our own. We need God to restore that relationship, because no matter how hard we try, we screw it up, each and every time.
You can predict the weather! But you can't figure out this relationship with God thing? What is wrong? Why did it have to come to this? Jesus is distraught. He will soon be in the Garden, wondering if maybe it doesn't have to be this way, maybe the cup can pass from his lips, maybe this particular baptism doesn't have to happen. But it does. We need help, and God knows that help can only come through him, through whom all things were made, and all things will be again made perfect.
6 comments:
Steve...good stuff.
It's been nice seeing you struggle with this passage as I about flipped when I read the Gospel for Sunday earlier this week.
I'm not sure what I'll have to say, but I, too, see a distraught Jesus and an angry Jesus and a Jesus who is different from the one portrayed on the wall border of my office.*
This is a Jesus who is saying the opposite of what is foretold in the infancy narratives: houses will be divided and not united, division will come and not peace.
Good luck with this text and with this sermon. This is a great text for prophetic preaching. The challenge, as I see it, is to both challenge and edify without completely alienating and pissing off.
thanks ben,
i'd love to hear your sermon if you record them (or read it if, like me, you still type them). I'll be praying for you!
I guess I should add whatever it was I was putting an (*) next to. The wall border (which was on the wall before I got there) has an image of Jesus ascending like Dean Horne slammed in our commencement address. White Jesus abounds, and I'm not sure there is a single depiction of the crucified Jesus on there...simply happy, smiling, and glowing Jesus.
Thanks for cyber-thinking out loud, Steve. I've got to preach on this text tomorrow, too, and nobody I've talked to this week has been real happy about it. I'm not ready to say unequivocally that "God didn't want to come down here," but it's good to read your thoughts about how distressed (sunekomai for Greek geeks) Jesus was about what he had to do. Good stuff. Hope I don't butcher it and spew heresy all over NW DC in the morning. I'll pray for you; you pray for me.
Sammy,
Thanks for using the h word. I think I'll be teetering on the edge of heresy this Sunday, and I think I'm ok with it. I feel like my interpretation is about as offensive as the text itself. I'll let you know if I'm in need of a job on monday.
2:46 p.m. on Sunday:
All in all, it could've been much worse here. Hope you parked it.
~ SW
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