The Beatitudes and Political Realities

Preached at Silverton Friends Church

July 20, 2025

I have a lifetime of reading the Beatitudes, Matthew 5:1-12, as statements to me of how my interior life ought to be. Perhaps you also have heard the saying, “beatitudes are attitudes to be.” This (like many clichés) is only partly true.  I’ve also argued with these pronouncements, particularly those that seem to promote spinelessness and subservience. Since Jesus was neither spineless nor subservient, I figure I have misunderstood something about what he taught in these massively important words. So I’ve gone looking for context to help me update my understanding, particularly in relation to the turbulent times in which we are living. I want us to look at the beatitudes for their prophetic content.

Luke’s gospel records the moment when Jesus announced to his hometown congregation what he had come to do (Luke 4:17-21): “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are downtrodden, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord” (Is. 61:1-2). This announcement sets context for Jesus’s mission here; Jesus places his calling in the line of prophets from ancient history. Therefore, we can expect to find precedent for his teaching in the Jewish Testament. We can also notice that Jesus stopped short of this word: “the favorable year of the Lord, the day of vengeance for our God.”  All his hearers would have noticed that he omitted this phrase.  

Luke includes a second version of the beatitudes, one less likely to be spiritualized and individualized (Luke 6:20-38).  Luke also includes the “woes”—the day of vengeance for our God. I’m not implying one is accurate and one is inaccurate; I’d guess instead that Jesus said these things more than just one time on a hillside.  

Today I want us to consider these three beatitudes from Matthew.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. 

These three beatitudes communicate the shocking idea that those who are beaten down are blessed, or happy.  No one actually thinks this is true. In the Greek,  “poor” connotes beggary, crouching in fear, helplessness; “mourn” connotes profound and irreparable loss; “meek” connotes downcast eyes, oppressed, depressed, lowly, tamed (though I have to include the meanings of gentle and humble).

It is hard to aspire to these conditions, even though Jesus announces that the law of the universe is that these conditions will be rewarded, or perhaps, if I understand the second part of the beatitudes more accurately, will be remedied far and above the harm.

Let’s look at the poor in spirit.  In Luke, Jesus says, “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of heaven.”

This is a common theme of the Jewish Testament. God is on the side of the poor, and will  recompense their misery.  Psalm 113 says, “Who is like the Lord our God, who is enthroned on high, who humbles himself to behold things in heaven and in the earth. He raises the poor from the dust, and lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with nobles, with the privileged of his people.” This is the tip of the iceberg of prophecies and psalms where God excoriates the rich for grinding the faces of the poor into the dirt and asserts that their wrongs will be redressed and those who wrong them will reap what they have sown.

Jesus, who grew up in a family with royal forbears and was part of the working class, may not himself have had this grinding down experience of poverty. But he gave up home and livelihood to obey the will of God—to preach the good news to the poor. The rich who came to him were confronted—Zacchaeus offered to pay back all he had defrauded at a rate of 4 to 1, and the rich young ruler went away sad because he couldn’t bear to part with the security of his wealth. Matthew himself gave up his lucrative tax practice in order to follow Jesus, and Mary poured a fortune in perfume onto him in worship. Detachment from wealth and increased generosity developed in Jesus's followers.

It’s tempting to think that Matthew, likely well-to-do, emphasized the “in spirit” version when Jesus said it, because those of us not impoverished also want to be eligible heirs of the kingdom of heaven. And Matthew also omits the “woes”: Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.” The rich believe their needs have been met and will be met by the cushion of wealth.  They are comforted and comfortable. Wealth is their comforter.

I’ll refer you to the parable of the rich man and Lazarus the beggar, in which Lazarus ends up being comforted in Abraham’s arms and the rich man ends up in flames, begging for a drop of water to drink. Abraham said to him, “Son, remember that in life you had all the good things and Lazarus had all the bad things, and so now he is comforted, and you are in torment” (Luke 16:19-31). This parable teaches us the same thing as the sheep and the goats—those who have must share to alleviate the suffering of those who have not, or there will be hell to pay.  

The poor sit next door to those who mourn.  Proverbs 29:2, “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people mourn.” Psalm 55 is a long and bitter lament mourning the loss of a friend who betrayed the psalmist, and crying out to God to set things right. And just after Jesus’s mission statement from Isaiah 61 is this: “to comfort those that mourn, … to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified.”

It is difficult to overstate how much of the Jewish testament is given over to mourning, to lament, often followed by entreaties for God to take action and execute judgment and even vengeance on those who have done the harm. The beautiful psalm that begins with “By the waters of Babylon, we lay down and wept for thee, Zion” ends with a  bloodthirsty prayer that asks God to require an eye for an eye, an infant for an infant.

Even the Revelation of John includes the martyrs under the throne of God crying out for their blood to be avenged. 

It is hard to mourn without also blaming someone for the loss. And just after Jesus’s mission statement from Isaiah 61 is this: “the acceptable day of the Lord, the day of vengeance for our God, to comfort those that mourn.” But over and over, the Bible disapproves of taking personal revenge, even in the Law of an eye for an eye. At least that limits revenge, so that the wronged person doesn’t take more than was taken.  

Paul reminds his readers, “ Don’t repay anyone evil for evil, because ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay,’ says the Lord” and Jesus pushes beyond that to require us to pray for those who misuse us, who cause us harm. In fact, Jesus wades into the deep waters of turning the other cheek, offering no resistance to evil, and loving the enemy, all of which are unnatural to human beings and require us to seek the intervention of the indwelling Spirit of God to teach us how to respond to loss, to undeserved harm, to intentional evil. 

And finally, Blessed are the meek. Within this word is a picture of a tamed animal. For instance, the horse, while dangerous due to its size, is a prey animal, and lives in a state of readiness for alarm, even when tamed. A horse with a rope around its neck can be led by a small human. And anyone who has read Black Beauty knows how a horse can be abused by its owners, despite having the potential to trample said owner into the ground. 

The negative side of meekness is this subservience, this loss of belief in one’s own power to effect change, the resignation of the hopeless. And yet, in a direct reference to Psalm 37, “The meek shall inherit the earth, and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.” Jesus says, “The meek shall inherit the earth." This psalm offers a picture of meekness: Trust in the Lord, do good, don’t fret because of evildoers, delight yourself in the Lord, commit your way to the Lord, rest in the Lord, wait patiently for him, cease from anger, believe that the Lord will set things right.

It’s pretty difficult not to fret because of evildoers, and anger seems unavoidable when we see evil prosper.  The Psalms are full of this anger, and yet they provide us with a way to move toward meekness. Taking the harms and the evil we see being done to the vulnerable among us, and to us ourselves at times, taking those to God in passionate, angry, justice-seeking prayer is a positive action.   

I’ve recently read Jacques Ellul’s book, Hope in Time of Abandonment (New York: Seabury Press, 1972).

Writing in the early 1970s, Ellul responded to the chaos of his times, expressing his observation that God has abandoned history. Ellul allowed for the perceived presence and activity of God in the lives of individuals, but he did not see God intervening in elections, in wars, in technological developments, in disasters natural and human-made.  He did not see God setting things right on behalf of those who need everything, those who lament irretrievable losses, those who are beaten down to the point of no resistance.  And, if I’m honest, these times are not better.  Ellul set out to write about this abandonment, but instead, he wrote, “hope asserted itself” (Preface, viii). It was precisely in this recognition of abandonment, this awareness that no human initiative or institution or election will redress the miseries of the world, this realization of the childishness and impotence of the church to bring positive change, it  was in this chaos that hope asserted itself.  

Ellul says this, “There is little attraction in prayer. It is boring. And yet, … without prayer there is no hope, not the slightest” (272).“Prayer is the assurance of the possibility of God’s intervention, without which there is no hope” (271-2).  

“Hope is based on God’s promise constantly fulfilled and renewed. But how can we forget that, throughout the Bible, this promise is linked with the ceaseless outcry of prayer? It is [our] prayer which demands the fulfillment and its ongoing. Without prayer, the promise and its fulfillment are forces just as indifferent and blind as fate and necessity” (273).  Prayer is the only basis for hope, and at the same time it is the means of hope and the expression of hope.  “Prayer is the referral to God’s decision, on which we are counting” (272).

Jesus pointed us in this direction with his parable in Luke 18 of the persistent widow and the unjust judge, “a parable to show that at all times [we] should pray and not lose heart.”

A widow, one of the poor, the mournful, the meek, petitioned a judge to avenge her on her adversary.  He ignored her.  She brought her case again, and then again, and then again.  Finally, the unjust judge said, “Even though I do not fear God nor respect human beings, I will avenge her. She is wearing me out, bothering me beyond endurance.”

And Jesus said, “Now shall not God bring about justice for those he cares for, who cry to God night and day?”

What can we learn from these beatitudes and the Old Testament sources they derive from? We learn that centering our hearts on God’s character and God’s faithfulness is the place to start. (I’m trying contemplative prayer for this purpose.)  It is always right to pray. It is not the last resort; it is the only resort in hopeless times. Prayer is the expression of hope when there is no basis for hope. 

Prayer is modeled throughout the Bible, and recommended (!) by Jesus in the face of injustice and evil leadership.  Prayer expresses the anger and despair we feel about the power evil wields in our world and channels our feelings towards God, who can absorb them, so that in our daily lives we can act and react with non-violence in word and deed, but still act in ways that make life more bearable for the poor, the mournful, the beaten down. 

We pray because God told us to, and we then do what God tells us to. 

Jesus Hums a Little Tune for Me

On a Tuesday evening about a year ago, I saw a plume of smoke on the mountain directly above my house, about two miles away. I checked local information on the internet to discover reports of a vegetation fire. The conditions were "red alert" for wildfires--hot, dry, very windy. I let my neighbors know, and then I watched the smoke off and on for about an hour. It grew. When I saw a train of cars coming down the road from the mountain top, I knew it was time to leave. I said goodbye to my things, took my favorite shoes and some documents and electronic devices and a few articles of clothing and my three dogs and left the house.  My husband came a bit later in our pickup. We stayed at our daughter's house in town for over a week, while firefighters on the mountain held the line at a road less than a quarter mile from my house.

My emotions were a mixture of numb on the surface and panic way down deep, and they stayed that way all night and the following day. I watched the smoke during the day, the flames during the night, and the online posts, which fueled my anxiety. I took the dogs out several times a day, and that first day walked over six anxiety miles.  

As I was walking one day, a song from the distant past hummed its way into my memory. The Christian singer Evie sang this in the 1970s: 

    When I think I'm going under, part the waters, Lord.
    When I feel the waves around me, calm the sea.
    When I cry for help, O hear me, Lord, and hold out your hand.
    Touch my life, heal the raging storm in me.

As my skittish dogs dodged windblown objects and bushes and skirted manholes and storm drains, I tried to remember the rest of the song. "Knowing you love helps me face another day," I hummed, but couldn't get the rest until I got to my computer and looked it up.

    Knowing you love me through the burdens I must bear,
    Hearing your footsteps lets me know I'm in your care,
    And in the night of my life, you bring the promise of day.
    Here is my hand, show me the way.

    Knowing you love me helps me face another day,
    Hearing your footsteps drives the clouds and fears away,
    And in the tears of my life, I see the sorrow you bore.
    Here is my pain, heal it once more.

What I find meaningful and true here is that the songwriter, Charles F. Brown, does not pretend that knowing Jesus loves us takes away all the burdens and pain. Instead, knowing Jesus helps us bear them and gives us hope. And one of the reasons knowing Jesus helps us is that we remember that Jesus also bore sorrow and pain; as Isaiah wrote, "Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows."

Jacques Ellul wrote that though Jesus carries our suffering, he does not put an end to it, and we do not emerge from it unscathed. (Ellul was a leader in the French Resistance to the Nazis during World War II.) But, he wrote, when we believe, we can know and "even feel that we are no longer alone in this suffering. Someone else is suffering along with me, like me, next to me....I have a true companion in suffering, a companion who bears and shares this horror, this pain, this grief, this desertion. All I need to do is turn to him and find once again my communion with him; the opening occurs; and I then am accompanied in truth. Thus I suffer less because I am not alone" (If You Are the Son of God: The Suffering and Temptations of Jesus, retrieved from Google Books, pp 17-18).

It is helpful to me to remember that knowing Jesus helped Jacques Ellul through the horrors of war and its consequences. It is also helpful to me to remember that Jesus has been truly human, and my human experience of weakness is not unfamiliar to him And I appreciate his humming Evie's old tune into my heart and head when I needed to hear it.

https://books.google.com/books?id=0nENBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA17&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

Not Being like God

Genesis 3, John 1, Genesis 1, Acts 5, assorted verses from the Gospels, Psalm 23

Preached at Tigard Community Friends Church

September 29, 2019

            Since I retired from paid employment, people have asked me how I’m spending my time. This is an embarrassing question to answer, since, after 37 years of grad school and working, I’m doing just whatever I feel like doing each day. I don’t usually feel very productive, though recently my spouse and I dug around 80 holes in order to plant shrubs, trees, roses, perennials. We unearthed rocks that were a foot across, and left some buried that were larger. Sometimes it’s easier to rethink where the plant goes.  Some of the holes were nearly pure gravelly rock. So it’s been fun. I could say I’m productively working to help stabilize the climate, if I wanted to try to impress myself, but really I just wanted plants around me to make me happy.

This relates to what I’m learning about my relationship with God in these days of unpaidness. I’m learning what it means to simply be human with God and with other people. I’m learning that my being human is enough for God. And I’m recognizing that a lot of what drove me through my working life as a university professor and administrator was the desire to be a little more than simply human.

For one thing, I wanted to be tougher than the rest. So I went back to teach an hour after a root canal. I taught on crutches two days after knee surgery. I attended a facilities committee meeting the afternoon of the day my dad died.  I wanted to be and to be seen as ultra committed, reliable, and tough.

I also wanted to be in charge. I liked the classroom where I wrote the syllabus and ran the agenda for each day. I also liked the challenge of managing the human beings in my classes toward learning and growing. I created open space for my students in the classes, but it was my open space. I didn’t relish the idea of co-teaching a class, with the constant negotiation of what to do each day.

I wanted to be recognized as a leader by my peers and my boss. I could be bought with promises of access to leadership opportunities. I was successful in getting the leadership openings I wanted until one time when I was spectacularly unsuccessful and some of my colleagues thought I should leave and go work elsewhere. I was devastated and resentful and angry. It was the death of a dream, only I went on living.

Now, when I look back, I still feel the sting, and I know it was an actual death for me. I did go on to be general superintendent of NWYM, but I think I would have found the job of general superintendent unbearable if I hadn’t already had my ambition and some of my need for approval snuffed out. Since leaving that superintendent work, I am finding that my spiritual task now is to learn how to be simply human.

I recently read Jacques Ellul’s The Subversion of Christianity and William Stringfellow’s Instead of Death, both books from decades ago that I find enormously relevant to where I see myself and where I see my co-travelers in our local and global cultures. I just mention these, not because I will be quoting them a lot, but because their analyses underlie my thinking to some extent, so if you’re interested, you can read them for yourselves.

I want to take us back to the Garden of Eden, and the temptation scene (Genesis 3). The setup is this: God has created the whole earth and set the father and mother of humanity in a garden where all their needs are met. There are also two miraculous trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, or, as it turns out, the Tree of Death.  God sets them free to eat anything in the garden EXCEPT the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God says, “In the day you eat of it, you will surely die.” So, the tempter says to the woman, “You won’t die. The truth is that God knows that in the day you eat from that tree, then your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” The woman looks at the tree again and thinks to herself, I want to become wise. This is a temptation to which I am vulnerable. I want to be wise, to be discerning, to judge what is good and what is evil. In the terms of this story, I want to be like a god. So what might be the downside?

The downside is fear. When she and the man eat the fruit, the result is that for the first time, they fear meeting God face to face, they hide from God, God exposes them as having disobeyed, they are ashamed of who they are, human beings naked before God, and they leave the garden to enter a world of toil and shame, a world, as Stringfellow says, enslaved to death and the fear of death.

There is so much to explore in the temptation story that I will leave aside to focus on this. The woman was tempted to become like God, to be one who decides what is good and what is evil, to judge as God does. But when God judges, God knows all there is to know. Humans don’t. We are always judging from a basis of incomplete knowledge. In fact, we tend to identify the unknown as evil, and we learn to fear and even hate it. Thus the natural darkness of night becomes a place of terror because we don’t know what’s hidden by the dark; we become afraid that evil hides in dark places. We start identifying darkness with evil when, in fact, it is a part of God’s good creation.

We don’t even know everything about ourselves. Some aspects we aren’t even aware of until anger, stress or danger (names for fear) bring them to the surface. And some of what we know we don’t want to embrace as part of ourselves. It isn’t long before we are afraid to look inside ourselves; we start hating parts of ourselves that we don’t understand and we judge to be evil, and then start projecting that self-hatred onto other humans or the creation. 

As human cultures, we make systems to protect ourselves from the unknown, and these systems end up enslaving us. So we cannot stop stockpiling retirement resources, we cannot stop building more efficient ways to kill our enemies, we cannot risk losing the opportunities that higher education opens up, we cannot run up outrageous medical costs without insurance, we cannot admit that other persons or nations have the same rights we do. We are in bondage to all the ways we protect ourselves from what we fear. And we turn what we fear into an evil, whether God considers it thus or not. This is the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And ultimately, the fear of the unknown is the fear of death, the great unknown.

We humans are already like God in one way: we bear God’s image, as the earlier creation narrative says. “Let us make humans in our image,” say the Trinity to each other, “male and female.” So in a fundamental sense, to be human is to be made in God’s image.  All humans, everywhere. As the gospel of John says, nothing was made without God’s Word, which lights up every person who comes into the world. And the Word became flesh, and lived among us, and we saw his glory, the glory of God’s only begotten Son, full of grace and truth.

So the riddle is, why do humans, who are from the start made in God’s image, feel the need to become like God, judging and separating good from evil? Why do humans not just live in close relationship with God and let God judge and guide? Why do humans want to prove they are tough, in control, and able to lead? Why not pay attention to the one who is full of grace and truth? Why would any of us, when facing the choice, prefer to decide good and evil ourselves rather than to live receiving God’s judgment of good and evil? I think it is because we have a hard time with how God judges. We judge God’s judging, and God is either too harsh or too lenient.

As a child, I always liked the Bible stories where God wipes the floor with those who sin. I used to ask my sister to read me about Ananias and Sapphira when I was under 7 years old. For those who don’t remember, they lied to Peter the apostle and to the Holy Spirit of God about how much of their money they were giving to the gathered church, and they fell down dead. I think this must have operated like a horror movie for me, because I was always afraid of God’s judgment, based partly on that story and others like it and on my own tendency to run into trouble with my parents or other adults.

But now, as I am gradually learning in fits and starts how to be human in relationship to God, I am grateful for the patience of God, God’s long-suffering, and the mercy of God, God’s loving-kindness, and the grace of God that puts all of God’s resources on my side.

Jesus shows us how God judges when he says, “He causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” When he says, “You work so hard to have your outside self appear right and perfect, but God sees the dead bones and rotting flesh in your hidden life.” When he says, “O Jerusalem, how I long to gather you to myself like a hen with chicks, but you do not want that.” When he said, “You will deny knowing me. The accuser has desired to grind you up like wheat, but I have prayed for you, and when you return to knowing me, strengthen your fellow travelers.” When he said, “Where are your accusers? Neither do I condemn you. Go and don’t do this again.” When he said, “I came into the world not to condemn the world, but that the world through me might be saved.” When he said, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.” (I suspect Jesus prays this for us every moment of every day.)

I remember reading a poem by Robert Browning where an outsider to Jewish society meets the resurrected Lazarus and is astonished at his mixed up priorities. The traveling doctor cannot understand why Lazarus has no interest in the coming confrontation with Roman armies but concerns himself about trivial actions of his child. For those who don’t know, Lazarus has died and been brought back to life. The most feared unknown of all, death, has conquered him and then been conquered, and nothing is the same for Lazarus after. Browning imagines him observing the world with the eyes of a child, full of wonder and awareness of glory. He imagines him as especially characterized by “prone submission to the will of God, seeing it, what it is, and why it is.” Lazarus seeks, as the outsider puts it, not to please God more than as God pleases. In other words, his zeal to obey doesn’t outrun God’s word to him.  He does no more and no less than God asks of him.

[Lazarus] loves both old and young,

Able and weak, affects the very brutes [animals]

And birds—how say I? flowers of the field—

As a wise workman recognizes tools

In a master's workshop, loving what they make.

Thus is the man as harmless as a lamb:

Only impatient, let him do his best,

At ignorance and carelessness and sin—

An indignation which is promptly curbed…

Robert Browning, “An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician”

This is a picture of how we can be human in relationship with God. Loving God’s creation, including ourselves; loving other humans, no barriers; living as obediently as we can in response to God’s conversation with us; resisting the urge to judge; seeing clearly and without fear; being “pleased to live just as long as God pleases, and living just as God pleases.” Jesus showed us how to live with absolute trust in God, and when we know that the great, glorious God has given us the gift of love and God’s self to love, we can also trust God with our days and our nights, we can trust God when we can see and when we are in the dark. God will lead us in right paths for God’s own sake. Let’s be who we are and let God be who God is.

Approval vs. Obedience

John 15:18-27

Preached at North Valley Friends Church

March 31, 2019

I was out walking the other day, thinking semi-random thoughts, and this one came to me: “Give us this day our daily bread” does not refer to my daily need for approval. In point of fact, needing approval has been a weakness of mine that has given others the opening to manipulate me, even into doing things I disapprove of.  I would give examples but they are too embarrassing. 

I remember when I had just gone through an involuntary detox from approval seeking, and found myself in contention for the job of yearly meeting superintendent, and getting that job required the APPROVAL of the YM.  Quakers call for “approval” in our non-voting decision-making. It sets some of us up for pathology.

So it comes as an unpleasant shock to hear Jesus say as reported in Luke in the anti-beatitudes: “Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that’s how their ancestors spoke of false prophets” (Luke 6:36). 

And here, in this passage from John, Jesus says, “I chose you from this world, and you do not belong to it; that is why the world hates you.” That’s even worse than having a few detractors, even worse than failing to win universal approval.

So I have some questions. Who is this “world” character, anyway? The Gospel of John has at least 58 verses with Kosmos (the Greek for “world”) in it, sometimes twice, while Matthew, Mark, and Luke combined have around 16. The world is a constant presence in John’s Gospel, and it is almost always what we might term the human world—the world of crowds, of politics, of religion, of nations, of money, of education, of culture. It is the world humans always build around them—all the ways humans find to organize themselves and set up expectations with rewards and punishments. We can hardly move in a day without encountering systems, and we violate their norms at our peril.

And this world is hostile to Jesus and to Jesus’s followers.

Why?

When Jesus came into his calling and mission, he was not the first Messenger from God, the first wonder-worker his people had seen. He was not the first charismatic leader that crowds followed around. But he was the first one to do so with the public designation from God, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.”

It isn’t clear how much of the crowd heard this as Jesus came up out of the water of the Jordan. His cousin John, who was baptizing, witnessed it. “I have seen it,” he said, “and I tell you that he is the Son of God.” Taken up in his spirit by God’s Spirit, John said, “Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” But some time later, from a jail cell, John sent messengers to Jesus and asked, “Are you the one? I thought you were, but now, you’re not what I was looking for.”

Jesus answered, “The blind can see, the lame can walk, the lepers are cured, the deaf can hear, the dead are raised to life, and the good news is preached to the poor. Happy are those who have no doubts about me!” (Luke 7:22-23, Good News Bible)

We think from our vantage point, how sad that John couldn’t continue believing in Jesus as the chosen and sent one, the Son of God. If we saw a guy with these abilities, we think, we wouldn’t doubt that God had sent him. But just like then, today Jesus would act or refuse to act in ways that raised questions. I think we too would wonder.

In this gospel of John, Jesus frequently confronts expectations from his followers and pours cold water on the fire of their enthusiasms.

His mother asks him to do a little miracle regarding wine at a wedding to spare the hosts embarrassment. (This reminds me of a lot of my own prayers for Jesus to intervene in my life.) Jesus tells her, “You must not tell me what to do. It isn’t the right time.” The most baffling part of this story is that Jesus does do the miracle, and his mother appears never to doubt that he would do what she said. But even in the doing of the miracle, Jesus upends religious practice by using water containers set aside for ritual washings, which were so important to observant Jews. Suddenly, these are full of great wine (John 2). Christianity as it could be is, to quote Jacques Ellul, “an explosive ferment calling everything into question in the name of the truth that is in Jesus Christ, in the name of the incarnation.” (39) Note that phrase, “calling everything into question in the name of the truth that is in Jesus Christ.” Might that make anyone you know uncomfortable?

Jesus visits Jerusalem at Passover. When he comes to the outer courts of the Temple, he drives out the animals brought there to sell for sacrifices, and he turns over the tables of those who exchange money so that worshipers had the right coinage for religious purposes.  The marriage here of commerce and religion is one we can recognize when we look around our Christian subculture. Jesus said, “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace” (John 2). The authorities said, “What miracle are you going to do to show you have the authority to reorganize the Temple?” And Jesus was right back at them, “Tear down this Temple and I will raise it up in three days.” He baffled the authorities rather than complying with their demand. Later, his followers realized he was talking about his body and the resurrection, but at the time, how preposterous! And notice how in identifying his body with the Temple of God, Jesus overturns the tables of religion as well.

Nicodemus visits Jesus at night to ask some questions quite respectfully. But Jesus says to him, “You have to start over, you have to be born all over spiritually. You can’t bring all this religion and whatnot with you if you want to follow me.  Just like the wind blows without your input or expertise, God’s Spirit moves me, and will move you too if you are reborn in your spirit” (John 3).

So we can see some reasons why following Jesus might be dangerous. First, Jesus undermines the power of religion. He violates the norms, he disrespects the system, and he asserts that he is as holy as the center of worship itself, and that God’s spirit tells him what to do and when. He is unpredictable, uncontrollable, and righteous.  People who are reborn and free from the rules of morality, religion, and hierarchy, but instead are obeying the whimsical Spirit of God rip the fabric of the human Kosmos. They are new wine in old bottles and the bottles burst. They are new cloth on old clothing and they tear holes rather than mend them.  The systems of the Kosmos, of the world, see them rightly as destroyers, and they hate, persecute, and kill them.

And it isn’t just religious leaders who recognize the threat that God’s Holy Spirit poses to the systems in place. The masses have their own systems that they want Jesus to fit himself into. They want a wonder-worker, and when Jesus makes wine out of water and feeds crowds of more than 5000 using some kid’s lunch, they know they’ve found their man. They like the healings and the resurrections. But Jesus refuses to let their desires be his guide. He calls them petulant children in the marketplace, complaining because they piped and he didn’t dance.

He tells them that he knows why they are following him—bread and miracles—and that unless they eat his body and drink his blood they have no part in him. He offers them springs of living water in themselves, the Spirit of God. He says he is the bread of life, he says he is the light that God sends into the world, and he says he is their only help and hope for freedom.

They shocked and appalled—they deny needing help—we have never been slaves—this saying is too hard—God is our father, too—come on, just tell us if you are the Messiah.

Jesus does not offend for his own ego reasons, his need to look special and chosen. He’s not speaking truth to power because he likes to annoy people. He says, and we can believe him, that everything he does and says is in obedience to what his Father tells him to do and say. His radical obedience to God is what is so upsetting to the systems he finds himself in conflict with.

And this passage we have before us from John 15 tells us that Jesus is sending the Spirit to fill us, the Spirit who reveals the truth about God and comes from God. This is the Spirit who moved Jesus through his days, from whom Jesus heard what to say and do and when to say and do it. No system in the world is going to welcome a person or group that bases their lives not on what the powers-that-be want or expect but on a relationship with the living and present God. 

I want us to keep two verses in mind as we listen today. “Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart. And you will find rest for your souls.”

And, from the same Jesus: “You who want to be my disciples will take up your cross daily and follow me.”

Jesus says, Put down your heavy loads and all the expectations of your country, your religion, your family, your followers, and just follow me. Listen to and obey God’s Spirit. This is your freedom and your daily cross.

I was pushed to read portions of Jacques Ellul’s The Subversion of Christianity as I thought about this passage in John 15. Ellul challenges us with the idea that the death and resurrection of Jesus has set us absolutely free. Both Jesus and Paul teach that those led by the Spirit are free in every respect. As Ellul phrases it, “a risk with no cover, a joyful and perilous acrobatic feat with no net!” (43)

He goes on to say that this radical freedom is not what humans are looking for. Freedom from hunger, freedom from fear, freedom from war, freedom from conflict, sure, but radical freedom? Not so much. Here’s how Ellul describes it:

[Radical freedom] carries frightening social risks and is politically insulting to every form of power. …On every social level and in every culture, people have found it impossible to take up this freedom and accept its implications. (43)

The freedom acquired in Christ presupposes perfect self-control, wisdom, communion with God, and love. It is an absolutely superhuman risk. It devastates us by demanding the utmost in consecration. Free, we are totally responsible. We constantly have to choose. (42)

For there is freedom only in permanent self-control and in love of neighbor. (167)

I agree with Ellul that absolute freedom is hard to embrace. I want habits, norms, guardrails, laws, insurance, peace treaties, and so on. But it is clear that Jesus was working without a net, living each act in obedience to God, finding himself not satisfying anyone and not being understood or approved of by anyone, even his mom. Now who wants to follow Jesus?

Well, a small determined part of many people does in fact want to follow Jesus, to be set free by the his life, death, and resurrection. For instance, I want to live in contact with God, I want to do what God tells me, I want this relationship to be alive, not static. Maybe you want that, too. 

My good dead friend, George MacDonald, challenges me every day with his insistence on charismatic obedience.

“Do you ask, “What is faith in [God]?” I answer, The leaving of your way, your objects, your self, and the taking of [God’s way and God’s self]; the leaving of your trust in [humans], in money, in opinion, in character, in atonement itself, and doing as [God] tells you. I can find no words strong enough to serve for the weight of this obedience.” 

“Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have this day done one thing because [God] said, Do it, or once abstained because [God] said, Do not do it. It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in [God], if you do not do anything [God’s Spirit] tells you.” 

So let me end by asking myself and you as well to consider that Jesus wants to partner with us in our daily lives and to lift from us the burden laid on us by human systems. Jesus wants us to be free. And as we learn to live in freedom, we ask God’s Spirit for help, we listen, and when we hear, we obey.