Traders for or Traitors of the Kingdom, A Sermon

Here's a sermon I preached during FBC's noon day Holy Week services, reflecting on the "Parable of the Talents."

As we explore the theme this week, , “Give Me Jesus [Question Mark],” I’m reminded that we needed to be unsettled in our faith journey, in order to ask hard questions.

“Is it Jesus that I really want or do I prefer the Jesus who helps me feel self-fulfilled, the Jesus I use to make me feel good.”

And in order to unsettle us this afternoon, I want to offer up, what some may consider to be an uncommon reading of this common parable about talents. I want to explore a different interpretation that steers us directly into the heart of: “Give Me Jesus?”

Just in case you’re unfamiliar with the common interpretation of this parable, it goes something like this. Everyone has God-given talents or abilities, and what this parable teaches us is that God wants us to use our “spiritual gifts” or talent to grow his kingdom while we wait for Christ to return.

But the more I studied this parable, the more I became uncomfortable with this way of reading it. And so, I ask you to listen again as I offer up a modern reading that I hope will make the meaning plain.

He stumbled into the room, resting on the door frame in his usual drunken stupor. The Owner of the land, or Lord has he liked to be called, eyed his workers with hopeful greed and piercing hate. It had been several months since the Owner left, leaving these three day-laborers in charge of his estate.

As migrant workers with no papers, and thus no rights, these three men were no better than slaves to their Lord. They were hostages to this life now. If they’d known what kind of man he was, maybe they wouldn’t have jumped into his truck to work for him.

He is known among many of the migrant workers for his cruel spirit. On several occasions he has been known to deliver his workers to the border patrol if they anger him or try to leave.

Among the day laborers, who live in daily fear, the border patrol is commonly referred to as the dark place, or the “place of weeping and gnashing of teeth,” because it is there families are torn apart, forced from the country, forced from their wives and children.

Yet, the Owner was very wealthy and could offer work, which was hard to come by these days as families grew hungrier. So, these three men remained, unable to leave because of their own need for work, and their fear of the Owner.

Disappearing for months was a common affair for their Master. They had grown used to being left to manage the fields and estate while he lived a life they couldn’t imagine, one of luxury and extravagance. But this time was different. Before wandering off, the Owner, probably as a cruel trick, left each of the workers an inexplicably large amount of money.

To one worker, he gave five talents, to another two talents and to the third he gave one talent. One talent. These men knew, a single talent was enough to feed one of their family’s for 20 years. It represented lavish wealth, almost an entire life’s worth of work balled up into one, large piece of metal.

Familiar with their Lord’s avarice, they inferred his intent.

It was his common practice, without a blink of an eye, for the Owner to cheat people. Anyone. Everyone. His singular goal was to build his wealth, and of course that meant building on the backs of others. His practices were harsh, always reaping where he did not sow, making money off of his neighbor’s crops, and gathering where he did not scatter seed.

Uncertain what the reward would be, if there would even be a reward, these three men knew the Master would arrive expecting a plentiful return, reaping where he had not sown. It was a perfect plan, for the Master at least. Go on vacation, live it up, and come back to an even larger amount of money or talents.

With the fear of their Master’s cruelness haunting them in his absence, two of the workers fought diligently to make his money grow, allowing theirs hearts to grow cold long enough, hopefully just long enough, to make it past this malicious ordeal. They only wanted to work. Their families needed them to work. What choice did they have? And so, for week after tireless week, they scraped, stole, created false investments schemes, ponzi schemes, triangle schemes, whatever it would take to make the money grow.

But the third, who was given 20 years worth of wages instead of 40 years or 100 years like the other two, went off early one morning and found a safe place in a field and buried the talent. He was there to live and help his family live. But he knew, life could not be found in this injustice. There was simply no excuse to do his living off the backs of others, and so he buried the treacherous demand of the Master.

Holding himself up on the doorframe, the drunken Master waited perversely to hear the news of how the workers had carried out his longing for gain. When the first two told him how they’d made to make his money expand, he grew elated. No longer needing the door frame to hold himself up, he declared just how much Joy they had given him and they would both be given even more responsibility than they already had, of course, more responsibility, but not more pay.

Then he noticed the third worker, sitting in silence. He demanded to know how he made the Owner richer. The meek man rose to his feet and clearly said, “I know you reap where you do not sow. You take from the poor and live like you’re the only one that matters. You cheat, you steal, and you harvest where you don’t plant seeds. I was afraid of losing the talent due to your harshness, but I was more afraid of becoming like you because of your harshness. So, I didn’t steal or cheat, but merely hid the money.”

“Don’t you understand boy,” raged the Owner, “this is how the world works. Those that have will be given more, even in abundance. But the “have-nots,” like you, they’ll be stripped what little they do have, because they’re not even worthy of that tiny amount. You’re type don’t deserve the scraps from my table.”

With vile, the Master loaded the single, resolute worker in his truck and drove to the place of “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” sending him away from his loved ones and their only source of life and income.

Well, I’ll be the first to admit this reading of the parable isn’t very warm or fuzzy, but it is certainly more unsettling. And it needs to be unsettling, because the older, more common interpretation, for me at least, is too comfortable, too self-fulfilling. “God gives to those that help themselves.” But As Walter Wink and other Biblical scholars have noted, this way of thinking, this older interpretation, goes against the social conventions of Jesus’ time.

Jesus’ audience in the Gospel of Matthew was comprised mostly of those at the margins of society. They were familiar with the practices that profited the prosperous, as they were the victim’s of fraud, exorbitant rates with ambiguous contracts (much akin to predatory lending in our time), and sidebar taxes that allowed the collector to skim off the top.

Moreover, in first century Jewish culture, individual pursuit of wealth, especially at the cost of others members of society, was looked down upon as a violating communal and religious loyalty. Therefore, to even be able to own a single talent, much less several, was seen as anathema, a sinful cheat among Jesus’ audience. Thus, for the villain in this story to represent God, wouldn’t have made any sense to the first century listener.

Besides the common interpretation being nonsensical to its audience, another reason I think we should read this parable in this new way is that it fits with the larger picture of Jesus’ agenda. Unlike some theologians who would have us believe that God sent Jesus to earth for the sole purpose of being a divine punching bag, or the only reason Jesus was sent to earth was to die, we must remember that Jesus had an agenda, in other words, Jesus had a mission.

Sewn throughout the Garment of Matthew’s Gospel is Jesus’ mission. And this thread of mission is that Jesus is bringing about a movement of God’s justice and love here among us now through costly follower-ship.

Jesus came proclaiming the good news, “the Kingdom of God is near, repent and come join the movement.”

And the readers of Matthew knew that Jesus’ kingdom proclamation was being united with a very powerful, hebrew concept: tsedawkaw translated to greek, dikaiosune.

Dikaios and dikaiosune are the Jewish and Christian answer to the perennial human question, “what does it mean to live a full, and good, and righteous life before one dies? What does it mean to live life eternally beginning now? What does it mean to be truly human?”

If there was ever a word appropriate enough for something as mysterious and beautiful as God’s kingdom, Dikaiosune is that word.

In the greek, dikaios or dikaiosune is a word so pregnant with meaning that if it were to inhabit the heart, it would birth God’s kingdom. You see, dikaios is one of those words that’s hard to render into English because it’s so full of meaning.

Often interpreted in the New Testament as “Righteousness”, Dikaiosune means three things all at once, never mutually exclusive: justification, righteousness, and justice. In Jesus’ dikaiosune movement, we find that God is restoring our relationship with him (justification), restoring our inner selves as God’s image bearers (righteousness), and the restoring human relationships/community through equity (justice).

So we see in Jesus, that God is setting and restoring our humanity in righteousness in order that humanity can be restored to itself through justice.

In the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, we read in Genesis that “Abraham believed the LORD; and the LORD reckoned it to him as dikiaosune.”

In Isaiah we find that “all our dikiaosune is like filthy rags.

And in Amos, the verse forever heard in my head through the voice of Martin Luther King Jr, “But let our justice roll down as water, and dikaisune as an ever flowing stream.”

Thus, Jesus’ mission was to establish God’s dikaiosune among us now. And he expected this endeavor to be costly.

In the beatitudes Jesus declared, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for dikaiosune for the will be filled.”

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for dikaiosune’s sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

The kingdom belongs to those who like the third servant in the parable object to unjust practices that destroy justice even to the point of being persecuted or cast from society. And certainly the persecution Jesus is talking about here isn’t when we don’t get along with go workers or when we suffer some illness, but persecution is being marginalized and force to live uncomfortably because of our faith in this Jesus way of restoration.

But of course we shouldn’t seek out suffering for suffering’s sake, but rather we should seek out life and justice for God’s sake.

In the parable directly following this one in Matt 25, we learn that God hides himself among the poor and the forgotten, those who will never make history books. Thus we must stand for dikaiosune’s sake and resist evil practices that misuse and abuse God’s very self found in the thirsty and oppressed.

This week we need to be unsettled, because the injustices born on the backs of the poor are unsettling. And what is even more unsettling is these injustices are born on the back of God’s very self.

Jesus was and is the embodiment of God’s kingdom come. To meet Jesus, means to bump into God’s Kingdom. Thus, we have to remember that the cross wasn’t God’s sadistic torturing of his Son, but it was the ultimate cost of Jesus’ mission. Jesus was crucified for bringing a new way, God’s way of life on earth, because when God’s kingdom of dikaiosune confronts the evils and injustices of our world, the world convulses and pushes it out to the margins, even to death.

But as Jesus said, “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

So, Dikaiosune is the unsettling vision that all might not be well with the way the world works, the way we live, the lives we exploit, the poor we neglect, the voiceless we hush, the enemies we murder, and the pain we hide our faces from.

Dikaiosune is the unsettling vision that all are created equal and deserve a chance to live while we go on living lavishly and not just beyond our own means, but the very means of the our earth.

Dikaisune is the unsettling vision that we may stand alone, and be cast aside, we may be put to death, but at the core of following Jesus is a vision for restoring the world until dikaiosune flows down as an ever flowing stream.

The answer to the perennial question for all of humanity, “what must I do to be good and live the fullest possible life now,” is found in Jesus’ Kingdom of dikaiosune and a life devoted to bringing it about no matter the cost.

So may today be about coming to Jesus in a new way, and giving up our pretenses, declaring our desire for him not because of what he can give us, whether earthly or heavenly rewards; but rather may we learn to desire Jesus in our lives for our own restoration as well as the restoration of the world. May we desire Jesus, because this dikaiosune vision is the hope of the world, and there is nothing, not even death that can conquer this Kingdom.

May we be like the third servant, knowing this is a kingdom worth being put to shame for, worth being marginalized for, and worth being persecuted for, knowing that in the end it is not death that prevails, but life everlasting.

Benediction:

Here these words from Jesus,

Matt. 6:25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?

But strive first for the kingdom of God and his dikaiosune, and all these things will be given to you as well.

Not an acceptable Christ

It is not that a "Christian culture" must make the name of Jesus Christ acceptable to the world; but the crucified Christ has become the refuge and the justification, the protection and the claim for the higher values and their defenders that have fallen victim to suffering. It is with Christ who is persecuted and who suffers in his Church that justice, truth, humanity, and freedom now seek refuge; it is with the Christ who found no shelter in the world, the Christ who was cast out from the world, the Christ of the crib and of the cross, under whose protection they now seek sanctuary, and who thereby for the first time displays the full extent of his power. The cross of Christ makes both sayings true: "He that is not with me is against me" and "He that is not against us is for us."

-Bonhoeffer, Ethics.

The World Exhausts its Rage

This love of God for the world does not withdraw from reality into noble souls detached from the world, but experiences and suffers the reality of the world at its worst. The world exhausts its rage on the body of Jesus Christ.

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics.

Torturing Reality

Since switching over to Netflix from Blockbuster I've only received one movie through the mail, a movie every American should watch: Taxi to the Dark Side. My first reactions were the feeling of being crushed, angered, and a desire to change change the status quo for politics. Often I get so frustrated with my fellow compatriots and myself for our short memory. With a new president to distract us, all the talk about torture and these secret war prisons have in the least subsided to a whisper.

Torture is disgusting in every form and should be regarded as an enemy of humanity, an unnecessary evil. It transforms our imaginations as US citizens (35% of the population sanctioned torture AFTER seeing pic's from Gitmo).

Politics has become a matter of using and manipulating language to create a reality so that people remain ignorant about reality. As I've mentioned before, I believe the most patriotic act a person can do in this climate of phobia and manipulated reality is to call awareness and repentance to our country's ills and brokenness. Torture is a crime against all of humanity, even the perpetrators.

Something I've been wrestling with since I've began to understand Political theology and Slavoj Zizek is the pressing question, how do you bring about a new political order within the old politic? As the documentary I just watched points to, the Cheney/Bush administration seems to have done this in eight years to an extent. Under this administration the US defied the Geneva Convention and the USA Constitution by (re)defining the terms and at other times propping security and safety over against "the self-evident truth that all men are created equal."

So is this the best way to bring in a new political order? Having a powerful administration that manipulates the people through false records and ambiguous language?

I would hope that this isn't the only answer. It could be the real solution is found in the cross, in the broken body of Christ that recreates humans in the image of a given and estranged God, uniting the isolated and creating a body given to all. The church is a political body by its very existence, thus it must be first faithful to its calling to serve and suffer, while bending reality toward God's love and justice.

Listening to the Victims in a Recession's Racial Dvide

One of the greatest perversities growing out of our recent economic collapse and recession has been this ever growing sense of reverse racism. This idea that blacks voted Obama into office as some sort of savior, to rid the USA of white power and replace it with black power, and open the gates to illegal immigrants by providing them a free ride on the backs of white business and money. One naturally thinks of the republican congressman Joe Wilson's outburst last Thursday during Obama's health care reform speech when Obama stated that no illegal immigrants would be provided coverage under the bills in question.

Well, since this recession that inevitably happened under a black president, many Americans who have held power in this country ever since their distant family stripped (read: raped) the natives of it have felt threatened. What's at stake for white culture is the false dream and comfort of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" given to them (us) by powerful corporations with little to no disregard for human life. Wealth built off the backs of others, just like the olden days...but exported of course.

In a NYTimes op-ed piece writers Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammad named The Recession's Racial Divide, illuminate the reality behind the fear that the black community has won a "dictator and, in one image circulated among the anti-tax, anti-health reform “tea parties,” he is depicted as a befeathered African witch doctor with little tusks coming out of his nostrils. When you’re going down, as the white middle class has been doing for several years now, it’s all too easy to imagine that it’s because someone else is climbing up over your back."

At the Moltmann/Emergent conversation I just came back from one of the quotes that has stuck with me was something like, "those guilty of oppression, but want to enter into the truth of life must listen to their victims, because they can tell you who you truly are."

Never mind the fact the loan offices were encouraged by certain lending institutions to persuade black preachers to hold wealth seminars by providing a small donation to churches who did so, never mind that these same employees often referred to subprime loans as "ghetto loans" and minority customers as "mud people." We could talk about how it was the white culture that sold the black culture a false bill of goods, or that black unemployment is 8.2% higher than white unemployment.

Instead hear the words of the oppressed who have fallen on inexcusably hard time:

“There is no middle class anymore,” ... “just a top and a bottom.”

It’s not easy to get people to talk about their subprime experiences. There’s the humiliation of having been “played” by distant, mysterious forces. “I don’t feel very good about myself,” says the teacher in “American Casino.” “I kind of feel like a failure.”

The conclusion is poignant yet lacking:

So despite the right-wing perception of black power grabs, this recession is on track to leave blacks even more economically disadvantaged than they were. Does a black president who is inclined toward bipartisanship dare address this destruction of the black middle class? Probably not. But if Americans of all races don’t get some economic relief soon, the pain will only increase and with it, perversely, the unfounded sense of white racial grievance.

Is all this article is is a call for economic relief? While this is an important and worthwhile conversation what we need is call away from fear politics and a culture obsessed with power, driven by bigotry, and that has no place for real, constructive dialogue. What we need is to confront this unfounded sense of racial grievance and quit scapegoating Obama, the poor, and the "other."

What we very well need is a call to the cross, to suffer and give up our American dreams of power and wealth for American dreams of a society of care and responsibility for one another, a society of real democracy and pluralism, and society founded in the reality that "truth is found in unhindered dialogue (Moltmann)."

Moltmann, Session II, Day 2

Crucified God:

Moderated by my friend Ann Pittman plus some other folks, Danielle Shroyer, John Eaton (vision community church, NY), (common table)

• DS- life changing book, made sense of soteriology and what happened on the cross.
• Perspectives for questions and moderation- pastoral & life
  
• there is no answer to suffering, b/c we wont accept any explanation. Resurrection is the answer, but there is no explanation for why you must die or suffer. all explanations are wrong and unacceptable.
• we don't want to have an answer that would bring us to peace with suffering, but if we feel the presence of suffering Christ next to us or in us that he shares; then we have a consolation that we are not alone.
  
• God will bring to a good end what he has begun in the human person- i believe that. JM
  
• How can God let these evil things happen?
  
• Where is God? is God here. But people critique God. So do we blame this question on philosophy and Liebniz. "comes from stoic philo: if he is omnipotent and good, so he cant be both, only one." This comes from grk. philo, not from Israel or God of JC.
• not only defend Jesus sympathy, but also the bereavement of the Father. If JC was true in saying my god, why have you forsaken me..then father is forsaken by Son. Two sides of triune one, suffers bereavement as we suffer forsakenness. this is a consolation.
• vulnerability of God- teaching presence of JC, instead of a God apart from JC. All God talk must come from and be centered in JC.
• "If it weren't for Jesus I would be an atheist like the other people in my family"
  
• looking at history, not convinced that God has everything under control. but looking at nature, etc...would never have occurred to me that there is a loving being. ONly convinced that God is love through Jesus. Don't like talk about a god, there are so many evil gods.
  
• people sometimes are disappointed by a God that suffers with them instead of pulling them out of the situation. how does the suffering God give us hope.
• first suffering God is compassionate God. God is there in your distress, never far away, but suffering with you. On other hand, the consequence of death for Christ was new life, eternal life. So i trust that the God who bears and has compassion on me will bring resurrection and new life. Suffering on one hand, resurrecting, triumphal God.
• Too make a point you must be one sided: in ongoing dialoguew ith others, you must be one-sided or you will kill the debate. so the more i think about, the theology of the cross must end with a theo of resurrection. i learned this with Paul...in Romans...how much more is grace than sin, resurrection than crucifixion.
  
• TJ- continuing line of theodicy and questioning the validity of the theodicy question: "atheists are closer to god than most theists, b/c they are arguing with God constantly."- Volf. Did moltmann meet christ and back into theism.
• JM- only believes in God of JC. His God becomes my God. theism is general understanding of transcendence that there is a higher being.
• types of atheism:
• Protest Atheism- Ivan Karamazov- Dost.- Bro Karamazov- "i have nothing in God in heaven, but I have rejected that there is no justice on earth." This type of atheism very pop. after war.
  
• another type of atheism- banality- dawkins, etc.
  
• the theodicy question is" if there is a god why is there evil." best answer is there is no god. then question of why is there evil collapses. So keeping god in question, keeps the conversation on evil alive.
• you can live without God in your life, but you will miss out on a lot of the liveness of life.
• Dawkins has another word. For him, genes. genes are not altruistic, or egoistic, but parts.
• protest hope (DS)= anticipate, transcend the limits of reality into the realm of possibility, anticipate the earth on which righteousness will dwell. so every piece of righteousness now is an anticipation that forms a new earth, an everlasting earth.
• how do we do this, resist and give hope: "one follows the sermon on the mount."
• resist capital punishment,
  
• the call is not only to pray, but to pray and watch. open your eyes to God and see what is a contradiction to God. and dont close your eyes and see the new world. pray with open eyes.
  
• early Xns were called atheists for refusing to serve roman gods/polity.
  
• two crosses in early Xnty: Golgotha of JC, one is a dream cross of Constantine. since that time we ahve had two crosses in beginning. Many crosses we see in Xn nations, buildings, etc is the cross of Const.
• Saint George- changed from martyr to dragon killer. old symbolism of Xn empire that has worked until present day.
• I agree with Anabaptist we must go back to origin to find new future of Xnty for the world, back past the Xn imperialism.
  
• 2 Pet. 3:13- HOPE
• Atonement theories- substitionary? fuller? victor?
  
• based on crucified God? not sure, identification theory, in that God identified with godless and forsaken aspact of humanity on the cross..so the atonement happens as we identity with Christ on the cross. Double, bilateral identification. Does this economic transaction takes place? Very appealing that God suffered and was tempted, not just nice tory, but walked in our shoes and when we identify we his suffering thats atonement - Tony Jones
• Moltmann response-
• Christology of solidarity. suffers with us// second- suffers for us, the guilty. both sides belong together. For us...reconciling suffering. but must see both sides together. given up for our sins and raised for our justification. whole process is justification.
  
• forgiveness of sin on hand, resurrection into new life on the other. (justification is both)
• another point- on one side- tradition of justification of sinner, forgive and reborn. BUT what about the victims of sin? God is righteous for giving justice to those who suffer. justification of victim is perhaps first act, in practical terms...sinners who've become guilty of their victim only have a sort memory if they have one at all. but those who've suffered always remember. so if you are guilty, and want to enter into truth of life, listen to victims b/c they can tell you who you really are.
• sacrament of repentance: confess, change mind, then make good that you do good evil as much as evil that you've done. but there is no sacrament of justification for the victims for what they have felt. they must overcome the feelings of revenge, etc from suffering the evil at hands of others. Then they must be alleviated and given a new self confidence, which victims don't often have- then the end, they must have the divine key- to forgive.
  
• Jail of Birminham- MLK= teaching the victims to forgive the perpetrators.
  
• Love- helpful about your work, re-frames and thinking in new ways of old things: power struggles.
  
• in love of life, you risk disappointment and be ready to suffer with and or for others, and be ready to feel them dying....to feel or bring in their dying inside of you.
• "fear in west, we talk about the cross in a personalized way so that it is only FOR US. Jesus died just for me to get somewhere. IN CG- all creation finds a place for redemption." DS
• talk to us about creation redemption- we lost cosmic dimensions found in Col and Phil. That christ died for redemption of universe. even cosmos needs salvation.
• universal salavtion is about: not that all humans will be saved; but that the UNIVERSE will be saved.
  
• Christ became human so humans and whole cosmos might become place where God dwells, and by this will be deified.
  
• important to see that at end, all embracing power, not just only salvation of my soul or my personal salvation and rest of world can go to hell...but in the end there will be restoration of all things in Christ. this is according to pietist, german tradition...the restoration is bringing back all things in the end. resurrection is all about restoration of all things.
• Modern experience of ecological crisis- we need this cosmic dimension.
• are you a Xn universalism or would you rather be called something else
• "im afraid 'im not a universalist, b/c there are perhaps some people i dont want to see again. but god may be a unversalist, b/c God created them and may want to see them again."
• universalism is not about to speak about all humans, but all of the universe.
• I don't want to go to heaven, angels have home in heaven. i want to be raised on earth and live on new earth where justice dwells. and in the end God will be all in all, that is heaven.
  
• Luther once said, on treatise for preparing for dying...don't look at hell in destiny of others or for self...but look at hell in wounds of Christ, b/c Christ suffered. so in wounds of christ, you must look if you want to talk about hell.
  

My God, my God why have you forsaken me

Here's a video I created for our Good Friday worship service that centered on the 7 last sayings of Christ from the cross. My text comes from Matthew 27:46. Although it's not necessarily Resurrection appropriate, Happy Easter nevertheless! Maranatha!

What Got Jesus Killed: The Kingdom of God

A sermon for Lent:

What Got Jesus Killed: The Kingdom of God

Tonight we continue to explore what I believe to be one of the most important questions for us during the season of Lent-

Why did Jesus die on the Cross?

A few weeks ago Ann preached how Jesus was killed for equating himself with God: “I and the Father are one.”

While it is true that Jesus made these claims, Rome could have cared less about the theological quarrels and quibbles of the Jews. As a matter of fact, Rome was more concerned with political zealots like Judas Maccabeus. The time of Jesus had grown increasingly volatile, the Jews hungry for justice and freedom from 500 years of oppression.

There were rumors the Messiah was on his way, meaning Jews everywhere on the edge of their seat waiting for his call to overthrow the hands of its current oppressor: Rome.

The cross was not only reserved for guys like Barabbas, remember the violent, political traitor Pilate released instead of Jesus, but the cross was invented as a means of control, a reminder that Caesar was Lord, the Prince of Peace and if you didn’t like his Pax Romana then crucifixion was your fate..

Jesus died then, the death of a political traitor, someone forming a movement that countered the ways of Israel and Rome.

So, I want to begin with the end, I’ll give my answer for Why Jesus died on the cross, then work from there. So my answer to this central question is: “The Cross is the unavoidable cost of God’s mission.”

So what was this mission that got Jesus killed?

IN our reading from the Gospel of Luke, we find Jesus’ mission statement. Jesus, like every Jew of his time, read and reread the prophet Isaiah, because this was a prophet pregnant with hope, much like the nation of Israel.
As a matter of fact these words in Luke 4 came directly from Isaiah 61. Yet Isaiah didn’t invent these words or concepts. Rather, the mission of God found in Isaiah, quoted by Jesus come to us all the way from Leviticus 25: the year of Jubilee.

Jesus arrived in the first century scene with this message and mission: I am the jubilee.



Jubilee was the sort of hope every Israelites’ imagination was full of. Under Roman occupation, Jews throughout the Empire dreamed of Jubilee. Established under Moses, Jubilee was created as an economic institution within Israel where all debt was forgiven and every slave released on the 50th year.

In the very simplest of terms, Jubilee can be described as God’s holistic mission. The Jubilee revealed that nothing, absolutely nothing was more important than humans created in the dignity and image of their Creator, no economics system, debt, or injustice could hold people under oppression. Israel was to be a witness to God’s restoring justice by instituting the Jubilee.

And under the vicious violence of the Romans, freedom and restoration is exactly what Israel longed for. So, when Jesus came making this claim that in him, God’s rule was coming on earth, just like he had taught the disciples to pray, “Your Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven,” Jesus wasn’t making mere spiritual statement about the state of your soul when you die, he was making political pronouncements:
In me God’s restoration is occurring, the hope that you wait for is now in your midst.

Basically, Jesus was making the claim that exile was over and God’s kingdom, his rule of was present among them.

Now that’s good news to captive Israel, right?

From some Jewish writers from the 1st and 2nd century, we find that “repent and believe,” terms Jesus used to build this Kingdom movement, meant he was asking for nothing less than full allegiance, allegiance to himself as the way of Jubilee.

But every group found something didn’t like & wanted Jesus dead over. He was either too radical or he wasn’t radical enough.

This last week, I heard a condemning statement that said, “if Jesus came down and lived among us now, we wouldn’t crucify him, we’d laugh at him.” For the same reasons those in the 1st century killed him, we in the 21st century mock him.

One such group, is the ever recognizable Pharisees.

For the Pharisees, what got Jesus killed was their religion. Now I know everyone gives these guys a bad wrap, but I think if we were being honest ourselves then we’d most likely identify with them. See, the Pharisees were the common people who preferred the familial and communal worship of the synagogue to the Temple. These were the guys who worked hard to keep their faith intact while the Greeks propagated their culture everywhere. If it wasn’t for the Pharisees, who knows, orthodox Judaism may have been lost to Hellenism.

Eugene Peterson, the author of the Message Bible says that if Jesus was looking to align himself with a group, it would have been the Pharisees, grassroots, common people.

Where the Pharisees wanted to divide and define life by what was sacred and what was not, Jesus’ very presence collapsed their system of religious boundaries. The sacred became the secular and vice versa.

Jesus makes this claim on our lives: to follow Jesus means to give your life in every way. There is no part of you or your life that is separate from God. Yet, we still like to exclude God from our daily lives.

The same as the Pharisees, we hide behind our religion.

We think as long we go to church, serve on a committee, teach Sunday school, sing in the choir; we’ve fulfilled our allegiance to Jesus.

Jesus’ call to put our allegiance in God’s Kingdom means orienting our entire lives, our jobs, families, and careers, and even our church around him. It’s not the separate and definable Law that interests Jesus, but the living relationships of loving God and neighbor.

Does your life reflect the Kingdom of love and justice?

Another group that murdered Jesus was the Sadducees. The Sadducees were the affluent and aristocratic types, they were the priestly class.

For the Sadducees, what got Jesus killed was their nationalism. Because of bad theology, the Temple had become the single sign of God’s presence for Israel, therefore God was on their side. It was the Jewish hope that the Messiah would come and destroy all of Israel’s opponents.

Somehow Gods kingdom had become reduced to a single location, a single theology. The Sadducees forgot that Israel’s existence was not for themselves, but for others, for God to bless the world through.

A few weeks ago, one of our countries most important leaders said:
“The United States is the Last Great Hope of the World.”

The same as Caesar’s claim as Prince of Peace and Lord of Lord, and the Temple’s claim on God’s presence, we tend to make nationalistic claims reserved only for Jesus.

And the reason we do this is we don’t trust that Jesus’ ways are the best ways. We say we believe in Jesus as our Savior and Lord bringing in Jubilee, but we trust our nation for our salvation and freedom.



For Jesus, the means did not justify the ends because in God’s Kingdom, the means become the End. The final eschatological hope, the hope Israel had been waiting for, of God’s final Jubilee came through Jesus’ ministry of healing, forgiveness, reconciliation, enemy love, service, and self denial.

To follow Jesus means pledging allegiance first and foremost to God’s kingdom: a Kingdom here but not yet. We tend to put our trust and salvation not in Jesus’ ways (which by the way we’d rather ridicule), but in our nation’s way, the pursuit of the American dream.

Which last great hope of the world do you truly trust?

Another group couldn’t stand the means of Jesus. This group always justified their means with their ends.

For the Zealots, what got Jesus killed was their propensity toward violence. This was the group, inspired by the Maccabean revolution and filled with deep passion for the Jubilee -for freedom and restoration, that fervently worked to bring in God’s reign by overthrowing Rome.

Jesus’ mission statement from Isaiah 61 is remarkable for not only what it includes, but also what it excludes. Jesus says the Spirit is on him to preach the Gospel, proclaim freedom to the captives and release the oppressed (important to the zealots), and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Then he stops, and rolls up the scroll, certainly stealing the thunder from anyone with a tendency toward violence in the room. See in Isaiah, that final sentence reads:

To proclaim the favorable year of the LORD
And the day of vengeance of our God;

Obvious enemy love and forgiveness wouldn’t go over to well with this crowd, it may even get you thrown off a cliff. Jesus trusted this commitment to nonviolence all the way to the cross.

Do you pledge allegiance to a Kingdom where the means are the ends?

Many other names and ways of approaching life could be mentioned, both 1st century and 21st. Ultimately though what lead to the cross was Jesus’ ways for bringing about the Way.

For Jesus, the means are the ends. The kingdom had come and is coming. NO nation, church, or religion has the absolute right to claim God on their side.

The Kingdom shows up in glimpses when we feed the poor, clothe the naked, visit the sick and those in prison. The Kingdom reveals itself when we find our lives intersecting with God’s life in the world.

Jesus was killed for fulfilling his mission statement- for creating a movement of people within Israel and beyond who trusted his ways over the worlds.

What got Jesus killed was his call for allegiance not to God’s Kingdom, but God’s way of bringing about that Kingdom:
For the same reasons Jesus was killed in the 1st century, we mock him in the 21st-

“If anyone wants to follow me, he must pick up his cross and deny himself.”

Don't Sweat It, Jesus said...

"The poor you will always have with you." I find it interesting to hear people say that they think Jesus meant that there will always be poor in the world. While I think there are multifarious reasons for wanting to read Jesus' words here as literally as possible: to assuage our guilt for not caring about the poor, to assuage our guilt for not helping when we could, we've been taught to read it this way, we need an excuse for poverty, etc; I still do not understand why we take these words found in Mark 14 so literally.

Jesus must have literally meant these words (which are not even a commandment, but a quote from Deuteronomy), but there is no way he could have meant literally that we sell our possessions to follow him, or to turn the other cheek, give up your cloak, or love your enemy.

Actually, what Jesus is referring to here in Mark 14 is that the law requires an open handed disposition toward the poor, so he was turning the hypocritical concern of the disciples for the poor on its head. If you must take something away from this passage and apply in so woodenly and literally don't let it be to assuage your or my affluence. What God desires is that his people must give to and care for those who cannot care for themselves.

Part of the solution might be flipping the above dilemma, switching the literal reading of Jesus' words in Mark 14 with the many commands that Jesus "could not have literally meant." Love your enemy, bless those who curse you, give away your possessions to the poor, and pick up your cross."

Of all the things Jesus said to take literally...

Good Friday

In Christianity the cross is the test of everything which deserves to be called Christian. (p. 7)

Christian identity can be understood only as an act of identification with the crucified Christ, to the extent to which one has accepted the proclamation that in him God has identified himself with the godless and those abandoned by God, to whom one belongs oneself. (p. 19)

Christian identification with the crucified Christ means solidarity with the sufferings of the poor and the misery of both the oppressed and the oppressors. (p. 25)
-Moltmann, The Crucified God

Picture of Brazilian sculptor Guido Rocha's art revealing that Christ really did suffer. via.