Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Luke 7:1-10


Dear Theophilus,
I’ve read your last three letters time and time again, and to say that I feel completely overwhelmed would be an understatement.  I feel like a child watching it snow for the first time—the landscape around me is dramatically changing into something unrecognizable, something beautiful, but it’s hard to make sense of it all.  It’s the same world, yet Jesus is urging the crowd to see it differently.  I can’t think of the last time I’ve heard teaching so radical; this sounds like the kind of teaching a leader would do if he wanted the crowd to throw their hands up in frustration and walk away, secure in the knowledge that they could never live up to this standard.  Other religious leaders in our day will often teach a watered-down religion to make it easy for outsiders to believe, but Jesus begins with a high bar and continues to raise it.  As one of those outsiders, I am intimidated and yet impressed with Jesus.  He expects the lives of those who follow him to be dramatically different than the lives of others in the community.  I don’t always see that with his followers today, but I can understand how Christians might inch away from the strictness of these demands—they are nearly impossible to follow.  Making a commitment to follow Christ with integrity is a lifetime’s worth of work and should challenge and believer each and every day to grow.  I don’t know how you do it, Theophilus.
I have news of a story that you will find interesting.  It’s a rather curious story, and it continues to challenge what I presume to know about Jesus.  His life seems to be about reaching out to people whom we might not consider worthy of religious attention, and time and time again he demonstrates that he has come to bring everyone together as his disciples.  Every act on earth serves a singular purpose—to gather people in, to bring them together, so they might follow him.  I have a hard time thinking of another individual who acted with such clarity while upsetting the expectations that many of the leaders of the day had for him.  The Pharisees would surely shudder at individuals Jesus spent time with, but that may teach us more about the Pharisees than it does about Jesus.
Upon completion of this sermon, which you have summarized well in three letters but could occupy the remainder of our lives if we decided to parse it and determine how it might guide our lives in today’s world, Jesus went to Capernaum and was met by some Jewish elders whom a centurion, an officer in the Roman army, had sent for the purpose of requesting Jesus to come heal a highly valued slave who was ill and near death.  It’s curious to think of these Jewish elders doing this for this centurion, but they asked Jesus to do this deed, offering proof of his worthiness by telling Jesus about his love for the people and how he built the synagogue for them.  You can imagine them surrounding Jesus, beseeching them to heal this slave, and Jesus assenting to the request.
Before we leap to the imagined conclusion of the story, the centurion sent friends out to see Jesus, intercepting him before he made it to the house.  These friends, too, had a message for Jesus.  They interceded on behalf of the centurion, who implored Jesus not to trouble himself to come to the centurion’s house, for he felt unworthy of having Jesus under his roof.  This, too, was the reason he never came to see Jesus.  The friends relayed the centurion’s request to have Jesus merely speak the word and have the slave be healed, for he understood authority.  The centurion could send his soldiers here and there and they went at his command, and he believed that Jesus had the same power. 
While this all may make sense to us, and we may marvel at the humility of the centurion, a man of power and authority who probably didn’t defer to many people like this, it’s what Jesus says next that makes the story stick with me.  Jesus has so many of these sentences that are not what I expect and force me to turn them this way and that to make sense of them, to try and grasp what the man is saying.  Here, Jesus turns to the crowd that is following him, to those who have not given up despite the difficult commands of the previous sermon, and tells them that he has not found such faith even in Israel! 
At that, I bet the disciples were pretty hot!  Can you picture what it would be like to follow Jesus for years, to give up everything to learn at the man’s knee, and then to hear that some centurion who has his friends come and ask for a slave to be healed has greater faith?  It would be quite a blow to my ego, for sure! 
But I think Jesus is addressing the man’s complete trust in Jesus’ power.  He believes that Jesus has authority over heaven and earth in the same way that he has authority over those under his military command.   There is a trust implied in the way the centurion has gone about all of this, and I think Jesus wants this trust to be instructive for those listening.  We’ve already found that Jesus isn’t willing to coddle those who choose to listen, in the hopes that they might also choose to follow, and Jesus doesn’t want those following him to make half-hearted commitments.  He wants complete and total trust, abandonment to the things that hold individuals back from faith.
You can see how daunting this is for me, Theophilus.  The more I learn of Jesus, the more I realize just how big a commitment to him is.  I don’t want to make a half-hearted effort, and I don’t want to be like the Pharisees, religious people who have hearts that are far from Jesus.  Jesus wants his followers to have a deep, transformative faith, and it’s difficult for me to look at my life and imagine it changing.  I’m comfortable, and yet I will readily admit a spiritual hunger dwells within me.  I just don’t know if I want this hunger to change my life so drastically.  Once I sit down to eat at the table with Jesus, it doesn’t sound like I can get up and wander away freely to pursue many of the things I want to do with my life, and that intimidates me.  I have always believed that faith is not easy, that Christianity is not a decision to be made lightly, but until this exchange I don’t think I realized just how difficult it would be.
Any illumination on the issue would be appreciated!
Sincerely,
Luke

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