Hilton Head Island, SC – March 15, 2020
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 11:14-23; Luke 9:57-62
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” – Luke 9:58 (RSV)
Did you ever take some time to ponder what life was really like for Jesus? I don’t mean think about it for a few fleeting moments; I mean think about it over a period of many hours, or days, or weeks, or years, or decades. How does the picture of Jesus you have long carried around in your mind square with what you may now suspect were the historical realities?
Perhaps too many people have an immature, Sunday School notion of who Jesus was and what he actually did and said. Their concept of Jesus was initially formed when they were very small children, and they never attempted to update it on the basis of information one is likely to read (and actually ought to read) only as an adult. For example, they may be very influenced by the theology expressed in hymns such as the best-known children’s hymn in America, “Jesus loves me.” Everybody knows it, but it is not an appropriately mature understanding of who Jesus was and what he represented, and no one should assume “Jesus loves me” is the essence of a proper Christology.
Have the ideas you learned about Jesus as children stayed with you, maybe long after those ideas should have been discarded for a more nuanced understanding of Jesus? Or, having had those notions implanted in your rapid-absorption cranium as a young child, were you afraid to challenge those wistful, nostalgic concepts with thoughts that might undermine all that wonderful wistfulness and nostalgia? Was Jesus really meek and mild, as the children’s hymn declares? It is good that children should believe that, because otherwise they might be afraid of him. But upon mature reflection, was Jesus essentially meek or mild? I don’t think so.
“Tell me the stories of Jesus/ I love to hear/ Things I would ask him to tell me/ If He were here.” Here are the things I would like to ask Jesus: “How did you see yourself as being related to God? (Please give as full an explanation as possible.) Did you ever or do you now believe you were born of a virgin? Did you really walk on water, and if so, why, for heaven’s sake? Did you ever, for even a moment, imagine that your crucifixion would be the sacrificial atonement which would bring salvation to the whole world? Do you approve of the undeniable reality that many of your earliest followers made you, rather than God, the primary focus of your ministry?” Those are the kinds of questions I would like to ask Jesus, if he were here. No softball for me; hardball is what I would want to play in such a uniquely exhilarating tete-a-tete.
Jesus ended up on a cross in large part because he did not fit in. At all. He was distinctly strange and very abnormal, and surely he had to know it. Unfortunately, it is impossible to be certain of what Jesus actually said and did. We have only the four canonical Gospels and some other Gospels which the early Church rejected which tell us anything about the life of Jesus. Some of what we read there, especially in the four accounts with the Church’s carefully-considered imprimatur, is probably an accurate description of things Jesus did or said. Some of it almost certainly was included to support the theological predilections of the writers, and it may not have happened at all. There is no way we will all agree on what really transpired.
The executed German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer had an exquisite statement for superbly summarizing the death of Jesus. He said, “Jesus was edged out of the world and onto a cross.” That’s precisely what happened, Christian people. Jesus was edged out of the world onto a cross. The world could not tolerate such a man as Jesus. Although he, a Jew, would more likely have been killed in a Jewish context than a Gentile one, it is really a moot point, because everything Jesus stood for had meaning mainly in a Jewish context. Gentiles also would have thought Jesus exceedingly strange, and sooner or later they too would have disposed of him. However, it probably wouldn’t have happened as quickly. And in any case, as I said, it is a moot point, because Jesus was a Jew who did spend his whole life almost exclusively among God’s uniquely chosen people, the Jews.
There was an unavoidable “edginess” (to use a modern word) in much of what Jesus said. If these people liked it, those people hated it, and if this group thought it was excellent, that group considered it utterly disgusting. Nobody would have been ambivalent about Jesus of Nazareth. Either people were enthralled by him or appalled by him. It seems historically inescapable to conclude that most people in his own time who knew him or knew of him were very put off by him. Nobody gets crucified for nothing. Jesus was a painful thorn in his society’s side.
Anyone like Jesus who had little or no self-awareness might have been oblivious to how that person would came across. Jesus, however, had excellent self-awareness. He knew exactly what he was doing, and why he was doing it. Nothing he did was accidental; it was all very intentional. He firmly believed God had called him to say and do what he said and did, and nothing was going to deter him from saying and doing it. He was, to use a wonderfully expressive Yiddish word, God’s Noisy Nudzh.
Tiger Woods has been sliced, diced, and dissected by pundits, behavioral psychologists, and millions of ordinary people. I am not going to add to the dissection, except to ask this question: Did Tiger think he would get away with the noxious behavior of his bad old days forever? What do you think? Some would say yes, and others would say no, and most of the basis for those two answers would depend on their interpretation of the undeniably great golfer’s self-awareness. Those who would say he thought he would pull it off indefinitely would insist that he has an enormous blind spot about himself, that he is some sort of sociopath, that he doesn’t understand who Tiger really is.
Jesus really knew who Jesus was. He knew he was the Odd Man Out, the social misfit, the theological and religious outcast. He never tried to present himself as anyone other than who he was. The Gospel writers and you and I and every Christian who ever lived want to create a Jesus in our own image, but Jesus himself knew that he was the “Over-Against” Man of God, the one whom he believed was summoned by God to preach the truth of God as he saw it to a people and nation and world most of whom did not want to hear what he had to say. He clearly perceived himself as a burr under the saddle of many of those to whom he preached, and he knew where it was all leading. All those statements about taking up a cross to follow him and about his impending death were not willfully inserted into the narrative by the Gospel writers, writing long after the crucifixion happened. He actually said those things, because he knew what was coming.
Jesus never acted as though he were normal. He didn’t, because he couldn’t. He wasn’t normal. He was anything but normal. There was only one Jesus in all of human history, and Jesus was that Jesus.
Jesus had the ability to heal people. I have doubted many things in my lifetime, but that’s not one of them. Often when Jesus healed a person, he was accused by his theological enemies of doing so in the name of the devil. In one of our scripture passages for today (Luke 11:14-23), Jesus enabled a man who had always been mute to speak. When that happened, some bystanders grumbled, “He casts out demons by Beelzebul, the prince of demons.” That name is also pronounced Beelezebub. It is a Canaanite word, not a Hebrew word, and it literally means “Lord of the Flies.” Now think back to William Golding’s novel of the same name, Lord of the Flies, and you may see that story of some English schoolboy choristers on a deserted island after a nuclear war in a new light. Baal (Lord) Zebub (Of The Flies) takes over when there are no adults to provide some law and order to a bunch of kids with devilish thoughts in their youthful heads. None of this will be on the final exam, but you might like knowing it anyway, despite how you do on your finals.
Anyway, after Jesus’ detractors said that about him, Jesus retorted, “Every house divided against itself is laid waste, and house falls upon house.” (Abraham Lincoln liked that imagery, and he used it as the centerpiece of one of his great speeches. But that won’t be on the final either.) Then, after some other equally pithy and provocative things, Jesus ended his oration against his enemies by declaring, “He who is not with me is against me, and he does not gather with me scatters.” Dale Carnegie would wince. Such talk doesn’t make friends and influence people. It sets their teeth on edge.
But you see, that’s exactly what Jesus intended! He wasn’t sweetness and light! He wasn’t meek and mild! He was a religious radical, a theological terrorist! Matthew said Jesus said that his yoke was easy and his burden was light (11:30), but if Jesus really said that, it had to have been on a bad-hair (or maybe more appropriately, a good-hair) day. Jesus hardly ever, if ever, let anybody off easy. To follow him meant hardship, heartache, and hurt; it could not be otherwise. It meant entering into the strange world he inhabited with God, a world turned upside down in its values and aspirations and true meaning.
As Jesus and his disciples were slowly walking along the road that led from the Galilee to Jerusalem, they encountered an eager would-be follower. He ran up to Jesus and exclaimed, “Master, I will follow you wherever you go!” The very enthusiasm of the man’s statement pierced like a dagger into Jesus’ heart. It was yet another painful reminder of what Jesus had known for years, and what weighed on him so heavily. He wanted to be normal, like everyone else, but he knew he wasn’t like everyone else. He wasn’t like anyone else. So he responded to the buoyant eagerness of this undoubtedly fine fellow, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” In other words, “Friend, you don’t know what you’re saying. If you want to follow me, you have to give up everything, as I have. You have to be scorned, as I am being scorned. You must give up family and home and everything familiar, and you must tread the road I am treading, where you will inevitably experience disappoint, danger, and despair, and in the end, death.” Frequently Jesus felt totally isolated from the rest of humanity, and this story illustrates that isolation.
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about one whom he called Der Ubermensch, which comes into English as “The Superman.” That is very misleading, however, because it conjures up in our modern minds the chap from Krypton who flies around with the flashy cape and the spiffy red boots. In the 1920s and 30s, some Germans likened Adolf Hitler to Der Ubermensch. Whoever Nietzsche thought was the superman, he would certainly be abnormal, but abnormal in the sense of being far above the rest of us.
Jesus was abnormal, but not like the philosophical Ubermensch. His “above-humanity-ness” was less a godly above-it-all-ness than it was a very-strange-compared-to-the-rest-of-us-ness. Had we been there to listen to Jesus and see him in action, some of us would have been mightily put off by him, and he probably would have given others “the creeps.” I am not trying to exaggerate this; I really mean it. A few of us might be instantly drawn to him, but very few. And in that, we would be very much like those who did see and hear him. Most thought him highly and unappealingly abnormal, which is why he had so few followers when he was alive. Only after the early Church got the chance to hone off his rough edges (his edginess) and dust off his unavoidable oddities did people start to think of him as the superstar he later was to become.
Nikos Kazantzakis was a Greek writer who wrote a startling and fascinating novel called The Last Temptation of Christ. It suggested that Jesus seriously contemplated establishing a romantic, even an erotic, relationship with the woman who may have been the most devoted of his disciples, the lady known as Mary Magdalene. Read the book, or, short of that, watch the movie. It is very illuminating and thought-provoking.
At the end of the story, as Jesus is dying on the cross, he imagines what it would have been like to be married to the one whom the Spanish language calls, in a lovely phrase which sweetly trills off the tongue, Maria Magdalena. Did Jesus have the power to come down from the cross, or didn’t he? If he did, would he have married his most beloved disciple? In recent decades, many authors and scholars have said much about this little known and ultimately unknowable woman, but it is an interesting idea to ponder whether Jesus ever was tempted to try to lead a normal life with a normal woman.
In the end, Jesus knew normality was not an option for him. He couldn’t do what he believed he needed to do and act like everyone else. In order to be the Jesus God wanted him to be, Jesus had to be edgy and have an irreconcilable edginess and be edged out of the world and onto a cross.
Jesus was who God wanted him to be far more than any of us has ever been what God wants us to be. Could we truly be like Jesus? Maybe. I’m not sure. “Make me a captive, Lord, and then I shall be free.” But do we really want that captivity, or that freedom? “O Jesus I have promised to serve Thee to the end.” Really? Honestly? “More about Jesus would I know, more of his love to others show.” Perhaps. But it easier said, or sung, than done.
If you want normal, you’d better go the way of the world. If you want God’s abnormality, you’d better go with Jesus on the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Sorrows, on the way to Jerusalem.
Every Lent we get to think about that. We must think about that. And here we are again.