An Alternative Truth

This post is the text of a sermon preached at the Institute for G.O.D. chapel service on April 3 in Nashville, Tennessee. Although it’s longer than my usual posts, several friends encouraged me to share it. I hope you’ll take the time to read it!

Scripture Readings: Luke 4:16-21, Matthew 25:31-40

When I was a sophomore in college, I took an exegetical class focused on the Book of Acts. It wasn’t my most memorable class in biblical studies as a college student. We had to memorize what the professor called “Acts Tracks,” which traced out the three missionary journeys of Paul as recounted by Luke in the grand story. In some ways it was a kind of “proof-texting” survey of all sorts of minutia when it comes to New Testament doctrine. By the time we reached the end of the semester, I was fairly certain that if I actually did become a preacher, I’d most likely not preach a lot from Acts!

But, thankfully, seminary rescued me from my ill-formed attitude about this wonderful book we call Acts – perhaps better titled “Some of the Acts of Some of the Apostles.” I was in a Greek exegesis class taught by a Harvard Ph.D., one of the first translators of the original NIV back in the 1970s.  On day one, he reminded his students that Luke starts this story with a motley collection of eleven men who were sure that what had happened to Jesus could very well happen to them. Their last question to Jesus was exactly the wrong question! But when it ends just a generation later, there are kingdom outposts all over the Greco-Roman world – and likely beyond – and the chief missionary, once the chief enemy, is in jail in Rome, preaching his heart out and changing the world.

What I have come to appreciate over the years in my own study is that this story happened under the scrutiny of the empire – an empire convinced its own emperor was actually “god” and more than willing to bring harm to these renegade followers of what they viewed as a dead, poverty-stricken Jewish peasant whose followers thought He was God and still alive, despite having been crucified.

These early believers lived under what we would view as a totalitarian state, where it was always a risk to exercise human freedom. It was a world where violence against the vulnerable was routine and uncritical exploitation of the less entitled was the norm. It was a world where the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. They couldn’t measure the gap between the “haves” and “have nots” like we can, but the gap was certainly there. To push back on such egocentric presumptions made by the dominant powers took courage. Sometimes, it meant a reminder of “no greater love has one than to lay down his life for his brother.”

Yet they bravely stood strong against the totalitarianism of Rome, broadly, and the Jewish politicos, more narrowly – denying the authority of the emperor or the high priest to answer ultimate questions. How did they do that? In the beautiful words of Walter Brueggemann, “by bearing witness to an alternative truth that centers in the resurrection of Jesus, an enactment of God’s truth. They attested that God’s will for life is stronger than the will for death practiced by the empire. In their testimony before the authorities, they were finishing the answer to the Roman governor left unspoken in the trial of Jesus.”  (Truth Speaks to Power, 163)

You may be wondering, by now, something like, “I thought he read from Luke and Matthew.” You would be correct. What I hope I can place before you for careful thinking this morning is that the idea of “an alternative truth that centers in the resurrection of Jesus” is the explanation of how we should understand what Jesus understands as mission in Luke 4 and measuring outcomes in Matthew 25. As N.T. Wright says in History and Eschatology, “The kingdom of God is not from this world, but it is emphatically for this world. The Church’s kingdom-vocation is not only what it says to the world, but is also what the Church does within and for the sake of the world.” (253)

Inauguration Day – A.D. 27

Were we reading from Mark this morning, we would know that, as Jesus began His ministry in Galilee (as He is doing here in Luke) by proclaiming, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” John is already in jail. In Luke, Jesus enters hometown territory in the power of the Spirit, having survived a grueling time of temptation, and, as 4:15 says, “customarily taught in their synagogues and was praised by all.” (Impf. Verb) That John is in prison is a rather ironic reality in light of what Jesus says in His inaugural sermon in his hometown (likely also implied “home country”), Nazareth, as he conflates words from Isaiah 61 and 58. These are words filled with Messianic hopes and dreams, and perhaps were often memorized, like we have memorized John 3:16.

Practices of worship in second-temple Judaism included a number of predictable aspects – no matter where the synagogue might have been. They would repeat the Shema from Deuteronomy, recite the Decalogue, read from Scripture and the Psalms, an exhortation, and blessing. I often wonder – was this Isaiah text the prescribed text for the day, or did Jesus pick this text and decide to read it? Either way, you must think God’s providence is at play in this incident.

As per custom, Jesus stood to read the text, carefully rolled the scroll back up, handed it to the attendant, and then sat down to teach. Luke is such a careful writer that if you read too quickly, you miss key ideas. As He is taking care of the details of the scroll and getting in his seat, “all eyes of the synagogue are fixed on Him.” (4:20) I wonder what they might be thinking.

• Perhaps “who would have ever dreamed he would grow up to be a wannabe rabbi?”
• Or maybe “that’s Joseph’s boy – shouldn’t he be making cabinets?”
• What if . . . what if, “Isn’t that the little bastard baby Mary had that wild story about?”

Hold on to your seats if you’re a faithful Jew sitting in that synagogue. Here’s what He said – the first thing He said – “Today, this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (literally “ears”) No doubt they would have naturally – based on what their poorly informed rabbis had taught them – heard these words from Isaiah as some sort of military (think “Jewish nationalism”) move against Rome. I’ve never fully satisfied my own mind in coming up with something that would be as shocking for me to say to you today as perhaps these words would have been for these ancient Jews.

Initially they seem intrigued, saying nice things about  His gracious words, but that question quickly arises – “Is not this Joseph’s son?” – with Luke framing the question in a way that insists the answer is, “yes.”

But remember, Luke warns us in 2:14 that Jesus came into Galilee “in the power of the Spirit,” and the very text that Jesus quotes from Isaiah declares, “the Spirit of the Lord is upon Me.” This makes me want to go back to the birth narrative in Luke, where the ancient prophet Simeon – maybe the most overlooked-at-our-own-expense character in the story of Jesus’ birth – who “came in the Spirit into the temple” and, among other things, said, “My eyes have seen Your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, A Light of revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of Your people Israel.” (2:27-32) In the power of that same Spirit – Jesus is about to say a huge “Amen!” to Simeon’s words.

Jesus seems to believe that when “the Spirit descended upon Him in bodily form” at His baptism (3:22), He was anointed as God’s Messiah in a public fashion, and that same Spirit led Him around in the wilderness for 40 days to be tempted by Satan (4:1,2) in preparation for inauguration day in Nazareth. 

Now Jesus is ready to roll!

• To preach the gospel to the poor – I love Scot McKnight’s Second Testament translation of this phrase – “to gospel to the beggars.” (McKnight makes the noun “gospel” a verb to translate the word normally translated “to preach the good news.”) In the Magnificat, Mary will marvel at God’s lifting up the poor and sending the rich away empty handed. (1:52, 53) Soon, Jesus will declare, “blessed are the poor” (6:20). In His response to John’s inquiry as to whether Jesus is actually Messiah, Jesus will remind John that “the poor have the gospel preached to them.” (7:22) If you don’t wish to be burdened about the poor, then I’d recommend you not read Luke’s gospel – maybe take it out of your New Testament!!
• To proclaim release to the captives – the word translated “release” here is translated “forgiveness” in Luke every other time he uses it. Jesus “released” people from all kinds of captivity or bondage: economic, physical, political, and demonic. He may very well understand “forgiveness” as “release from bondage to iniquity.” (IBC) Our politics sometimes cause us to think our mission is to lock people up and throw away the key; that’s not Jesus.
• Recovery of sight to the blind – in Isaiah, recovery of sight to the blind was often associated with God’s promises to Israel. This is Simeon’s “a light of revelation to the Gentiles and glory to your people Israel.” This imagery is, no doubt, behind the “light of the world” ideas that Jesus has about himself and his followers.
• To set free those who are oppressed – as with “the captives” already mentioned, the Jesus of Luke’s gospel is about breaking down the chains that bind humans in what can only be seen as oppression.
• To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord – the year of Jubilee! The kingdom Jesus came preaching is a kingdom that puts things back in place – which is what Leviticus 25 suggests the Jewish year of Jubilee modeled – a year when liberty was to be proclaimed throughout the land. Jesus believes that His coming as Messiah, anointed by God and empowered by the Spirit, is to be a time when the impoverished and oppressed are liberated from their bondage in ways that only the good news about Jesus can accomplish.

I’m comfortable suggesting that what I’ve just said about this text is what Jesus intended this text to mean. I’m equally comfortable suggesting that few, if any, people in that room would have seen this text like Jesus did. And too many modern Christians think more like these ancient Jews did, replacing “Jewish nationalism” with “Christian nationalism,” than think like Jesus did.

Maybe that is why, before this story ends, Jesus tells two Hebrew Bible stories that turned out to be akin to throwing metaphorical hand grenades in the middle of the synagogue. The first is about Elijah, who, during a great famine in Israel, was sent by God to help the widow at Zarephath in the land of Sidon. Not exactly a “pat the Jews on the back” kind of story.  As though that weren’t bad enough, Jesus then tells an Elisha story, where he cleansed Naaman the Syrian from leprosy, not Israelites. Two of Israel’s greatest prophets, sent by God to non-Jews during times of great need for Israel.

Before we know what is happening, they are ready to push Jesus off the cliff! The “empire” does not approve. 

I’m actually a bit embarrassed to say no one or no empire has ever attempted to push me over the cliff for being Jesus to the world around me. What about you?

Assessment Day – At a Date to Be Determined

For much of my life as a college professor, I have taught Greek. Students tend to say, “Greek is hard.” I tend to say, “Greek is fun!” But what I’ve learned over the years is that whether you see it as hard or fun, there is a need for regular assessment. Weekly vocabulary quizzes can make the most procrastination-prone student keep up with vocabulary. (My Greek 2 class is actually having a big vocabulary quiz right now!)

One of the challenges in much of modern protestant and evangelical thinking is that we are so determined to not sound like we think you can “earn” salvation that lots of people assume following Jesus doesn’t require taking words like those in Luke 4 too seriously. Others, perhaps mostly evangelicals and fundamentalists, are prone to think, “if we add one more rule, or maybe two more, we can show we take Jesus seriously.”

You may remember the story Jesus tells near the end of his ministry about an eager, rich, seemingly bright young man who comes to him with the all-important question: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Mark 10, Matthew 19, Luke 18) For him, the phrase “eternal life” would have meant something like, “the age to come.” He wants to make sure that when “the age to come” finally comes, he is a part of it.

He and Jesus have quite a conversation. He declares that he has done a fine job in keeping the agreement God made with Israel – the ten commandments. Jesus doesn’t say, “No, you haven’t.” But the young man still senses something isn’t quite right. He seems to want to know how he should behave – both in terms of content and method. What things should I be doing, and how should I do them?

Jesus quickly cuts to the chase: “Follow me.” In other words, that is both what you should do and how you should do it.

I allude to this wonderful story because it helps me – and I hope will help you – see the connection between Luke 4 and Matthew 25. Matthew 25 is an outcomes story, an assessment story – it is rubric of sorts, by which I can see if I’m “following Jesus” in a way that Jesus would recognize.

This Matthew 25 text contains the last words of Jesus’ last discourse. This is likely Wednesday of Holy Week, and even a casual reading of any of the four gospels tells you this has been a tense week, only to get more tense. Jesus, in Matthew, has told story after story about the dangers of irresponsible living. This whole discourse ends with this apocalyptic image of judgment – assessment – that speaks to the question of whether or not we take Jesus seriously.

There are two kingdoms: sheep and goats. The sheep are those who, through the grace that Jesus extends through the gospel, have triumphed over the empire and worldly powers to be God’s partners in putting the world to rights. The goats are the demonic, totalitarian, worldly empires who dismiss what Jesus loves.

Thus, in the apocalyptic imagery, the Son of Man and his angels, along with the blessed righteous ones, stand as the kingdom of God prepared from the foundation of the world. The devil and his angels/demons, the accursed, stand in opposition to the only true Kingdom and its God.

The Son of Man – as Christological a title as you can find – and the “nations are gathered before him.” Then He will separate “them” from one another. “Them” equals individuals – not nations. (nations is feminine; “them” is masculine) This Son has “God as His father” (34) and He is King (34) and “Lord.” (37) That is just in this one paragraph – and this is all over Matthew’s gospel. This is no mere “act of benevolence” born out of human decency. Rather, it is transformation of creation and its creatures, born out of “following Jesus.” Humanitarian deeds can be good – but they aren’t all you and I are called to do and be.

This “assessment” models the importance of Kingdom ethics. This isn’t the “extra-credit question” at the end of the test. This is the test: Did I take Jesus seriously?

In verse 44, we discover that the standard of assessment in this apocalyptic story of judgment is “ministry.” The last clause of that verse is often translated “did not take care of you.” But that verb – take care of – is actually the standard NT vocabulary for “ministry” or “minister.” It is the source of our English word “deacon” or “servant.” It is the word Jesus uses in Mark 10:45 when He says, “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and give His life a ransom for many.” In my own paraphrase of that verse, I tend to say, “For even the Son of Man did not come to be waited on at the table, but to wait on tables and give His life a ransom for many.”

You probably know the list of “ministry” options Jesus suggests – I can tell from your website that you regularly do these kinds of things. “Hunger, thirst, stranger, naked, sick, and prisoner.” The sheep are – to their confusion – commended for responding to those needs; the goats, perhaps with even more confusion, are condemned for ignoring those needs.

The end of confusion is found in Jesus’ own words “to the extent that you did to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me,” and “to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” 

The goats in this story are enamored with an empire that has lost its way and is comfortable with violence against the vulnerable. It has lost its way with rampant exploitation of the less entitled. It has lost its way with its fascination and commitment to greed as a normative way of living and by betting on false assumptions about happiness and security. Our assumption is that our privilege in our empire-oriented culture is God’s final blessing on us.

Next Steps – Today

I truly believe that the story line in the Book of Acts is one shaped by the imagery of Luke 4 and Matthew 25. They knew what Jesus came to do, and they took that vision so seriously that they turned the world upside down in but a generation.  Think about it – Acts 1 is a story of 11 confused men who asked Jesus an awful question. Acts 2 has those same people standing in the street corners, proclaiming, “This Jesus whom you crucified, God has made both Lord and Christ.” The only observable difference in the two stories is the coming of the Holy Spirit – the very thing Jesus promised in Acts 1:8. 

I’d venture to suggest that the “empire” they lived under was much more oppressive than ours. Their “resources” were scant compared to ours. Their “numbers” were a distinct minority, with no vision of making Rome a Christian nation. They thought planting metaphorical “time bombs” in the dominant cultural structures would one day help re-make the world. (Witherington, The Paul Quest) And guess what – it worked!

But here is what truly distinguished them from us:  They were convinced that the world could be transformed “by bearing witness to an alternative truth that centers in the resurrection of Jesus, an enactment of God’s truth. They attested that God’s will for life is stronger than the will for death practiced by the empire. In their testimony before the authorities, they were finishing the answer to the Roman governor left unspoken in the trial of Jesus.”

Have we lost that vision? Brueggemann (The Prophetic Imagination, 39, 40) reminds us, “We need to ask not whether it is realistic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable. We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and coopted by the royal consciousness that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought . . . It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.”

Howard Snyder, in a book first published back in 1977, The Community of the King, said “The Church is prophetic when it is truly the messianic community which reveals the nature of the Kingdom and the mind and stature of Jesus Christ. As it carries on the works of Christ, it fulfills its kingdom tasks.” (115) This “messianic community” must take Jesus seriously through the power of resurrection.

John Archibald is a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist for The Birmingham News. He is the son of a Methodist preacher who spent most of his preaching career in the Birmingham area during the Civil Rights era. After his father’s death, Archibald, in possession of his father’s sermon files, decided to see how his father preached in that turbulent time. “Silence” was, to some extent, the word he came to use. He talks about that in his book Shaking the Gates of Hell.

He interviewed a retired professor from Birmingham-Southern College who had written a respected book on Alabama Methodists and how they confronted racial injustice between 1954-1974. Here’s what the professor said about Archibald’s father – and other preachers of that day:

“’Your dad was aware of how much he could lose if he did deliver sermons on this topic,’ he said in a way that was supposed to make me feel better. ‘Those who dared to speak out were banished from the conference or the ministry. The consequences could be terrible. You could be exiled. Your family would be in jeopardy even though [you] were [a minister] of faith.’” (page 93)

I tell you that not to pick on Methodists or people from Alabama. We’ve all got some baggage brought on by own silence in the face of injustice. Rather – and perhaps this explains King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail – I tell you that to ask you to start thinking about this question: Fifty years from now, when scholars are looking at your life and mine – seeing what the churches in which we served and preached and taught were doing in the name of Jesus – will they find us as having been less than courageous because we were afraid of the Empire that surrounds us?

Paul won’t let us pretend to not really understand what “the empire” actually is. In Romans 8:38,39 he describes what I understand “empire” to be with “death . . . life . . . angels . . . rulers . . . the present . . . the future . . . powers . . . heights . . . depths . . . with Paul adding ‘any other creature,’ not only in case he’d left anything out, but in order to remind us that all these things are precisely creatures, part of God’s world, not independent divine or quasi-divine beings . . . He is more concerned to stress the lordship of Jesus over all ‘powers’ of whatever sort than to provide specific definitions or discrete categories.” (Wright/Bird, Jesus and the Powers, 51)

I believe that “by bearing witness to an alternative truth that centers in the resurrection of Jesus, an enactment of God’s truth,” we can model that God’s will for life is stronger than the will for death practiced by the empire. In our testimony before the authorities, we can continue finishing the answer to the Roman governor left unspoken in the trial of Jesus.

Will that be a challenge? Of course. But, with Paul, perhaps one day we can say, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I do my share on behalf of His body, which is the church, in filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions.” (Col. 1:24)

There is a world in desperate need of an “alternative truth” – in being Jesus to the world, we share that alternative truth in life-transforming ways.

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