Psalm 15; Luke 9:51-62
“Smite the Samaritans! Smite the Samaritans!”
suggested James and John, two brothers whom Jesus had so very aptly nicknamed
the “Sons of Thunder.” I imagine that in
their past, when they were just boys, these two must have really reveled in
violent old faith stories of God’s justice … stories such as how the prophet
Elijah called down fire from heaven against Israel’s enemies. It seems this must have been on their minds when
they cried out for some Samaritan smiting.
What
was the immediate trigger for this punishing suggestion? The people of a certain Samaritan village had
refused to offer welcome and hospitality to Jesus. But there was a deeper embedded animosity. It had to do with the past, with the historic
ethnic rivalry between Jews and Samaritans.
What was Jesus response to this? With
His face so firmly set forward toward His final journey into Jerusalem, He would
have absolutely none of this old bad blood brouhaha. So he quickly rebuked the brothers.
Jesus
gave this sharp reprimand because He’d been teaching a new way of living in the
world. A significant way He’d been steadfastly
demonstrating this was by ministering to the Samaritans all throughout his
journeys. He’d shown
great and culturally radical compassion toward them, as when He offered His
living water to the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:1-42) and when He
healed a Samaritan leper who had greatly glorified God (Luke 17:11-19). And,
as we are all most familiar with, He’d taught about the kingdom of God using
the example of how a good Samaritan had once responded to a beaten man’s cry
for help when proper Jews passing by completely ignored him.
I imagine Jesus must have been very frustrated
that two of His closest disciples had quickly forgotten all this, had so
swiftly expressed such merciless ethnic prejudice, had slipped so suddenly into
living in the past. In that historic
moment, especially, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, so fully facing His future,
knowing He was about to suffer for and save all
humankind from the death snare of sin.
This
passage about the Sons of Thunder is a cautionary tale for us. Their knee-jerk response and the subsequent holy
rebuke reminds us to let go of all the old ways of thinking that deter our
determination to carry on our Risen Lord’s love in this world. Old ways built on prejudices that divide
people. Old ways that believe God smites
people for their sin. Old ways of
thinking that following Jesus isn’t going to radically reorient your life.
The
way of Jesus is our new way of living.
His whole life was about being divinely determined to make all of
humanity new in a way never known before by demonstrating the deepest, truest
depths of God’s mercy, love and peace.
Following Him means forwarding Him!
It means daily looking ahead of us through the lens of His Good News and
keeping our faces set in love toward all our brothers and sisters in the whole
world.
James
and John aren’t the only people making an appearance in this morning’s Gospel
lesson. Luke tells of three others as
well. Jesus’ response to each builds on the same strong
caution about how following Him means not looking back to life before His
advent in our world. He did so using His usual holy hyperbole …
To
the person who declared they will follow Him wherever He goes, Jesus said
prepare to never again return to your homestead for rest.
To
the person who was willing to follow Him but only after first burying their
father, Jesus, the Resurrection and the Life (John 11:24) said let the reality
of death go and go on for the sake of eternity.
And
to the person who was willing to follow Jesus but only after saying farewell to
their loved ones at home, Jesus drew on agricultural imagery to say don’t
let your furrows, your pathways for future
growth, go crooked by taking your eyes of the kingdom fields in front of
you.
Again,
these are exaggerations made to hammer home the holy point. Jesus wasn’t saying don’t ever long for
home and loved ones and don’t ever grieve.
This holy hyperbole, along with his rebuke of James and John, falls
under the “umbrella truth” that “being a disciple of Jesus gives us a whole new
identity.” It means recognizing that we
are no longer simply “biological units on this earth,” but children of God
whose lives are “now measured by eternal things.”[i] Our
determination to be faithful disciples, then, should also be measured eternally
rather than by old, sinful worldly ways that seek to deter us.
One inspiring
modern day disciple who I believe lived this truth was a man named Clarence
Jordan. A magazine article from 1979
had this to say about him -- “Clarence Jordan was a strange phenomenon in the
history of North American Christianity. Hewn from the massive Baptist
denomination, known primarily for its conformity to culture, Clarence stressed
the anti-cultural, the Christ-transcending and the Christ-transforming, aspects
of the Gospel. Clarence pursued this
tradition to its very end, ending at the top with a Ph.D. in the Greek New
Testament from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.”
The article goes to explain that this disciple
nonetheless remained a humble, hard laboring farm worker all his life. In 1940, in Americas, Georgia, he founded
Koinonia Farm.[ii] The name comes from a New Testament Greek
word meaning “deep fellowship.” Indeed,
the powerful heart of this deeply southern community in the era of Jim Crow
laws was its people – an interracial community working together in a spirit of
true partnership. They all set their
faces firmly towards the teaching of Jesus -- seeking to treat all human beings
with dignity and justice; choosing love over violence; living simply and
sharing possessions; being stewards of
the land and its natural resources.[iii] Clarence Jordan did a good deal of writing
about all this, which he especially set down through four volumes called the
Cotton Patch Version of the Gospel. You
may be more familiar with Harry Chapin’s musical interpretation.
One
night, in 1954, all the buildings at Koinonia Farm were suddenly ablaze. This was the result of arson from the
hateful hands of the Ku Klux Klan. The
next morning, with the rubble still smoldering, a reporter showed up to
interview Clarence. The reporter found
him in a field. He was planting
seeds. So the reporter said, “I heard
the awful news of your tragedy, and I came to do a story on the closing of your
farm.” Clarence didn’t reply. He kept planting. The reporter kept prodding, “You’ve got a
PhD, you’ve put 14 years into this farm, and now there’s nothing left. Just how successful do you think you’ve
been?” This statement caused Clarence
Jordan to pause. He then replied, “You
just don’t get it, do you? You don’t
understand us Christians. What we are
about is not success, but faithfulness.”[iv]
Yes! Amen!
Faithfulness firmly in the face of old sinful ways Jesus died and rose
again to make new – violent prejudiced
thoughts and actions determined to smite our koinonia in Christ; news stories
that sensationalize measures of worldy success instead of celebrating sacred
truth; entrenched traditions that counter the new Christ-transcending,
Christ-transforming world we disciples faithfully seek to live in.
As we
all leave this worship service, go back into world made new through our Lord,
may we prayerfully reflect on the following comment and question from a Bible
commentary on this passage – “These verses jar us into asking, ‘How are our
lives different as followers of Jesus than what they might have been
otherwise?” Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment