How Jesus Treats People

Preached at Wayside Friends Church

May 3, 2026

 Jesus Christ is alive and present to teach his people himself.  This was a central teaching from the founder of Quakerism, George Fox. It came out of his own personal shattering experience of meeting Jesus for himself without the help of preacher or priest. (His experience was not the first of its kind in the world, to be sure, and it followed the pattern of mystical experience around the world.) He was convinced that God is present for each person, not just special people, and that God is speaking to individuals and to communities of believers.  The central requirements are being open to hear and being willing to obey. Some branches of Quakerism have no pastors, only elders, and the pattern of worship is to sit in silence until someone is moved in the spirit to speak to the gathered congregation.  Others, like the one we come out of, have pastors and the expectation that someone will deliver a sermon, preferably short, and that there will be a time we call open worship in which anyone moved in the spirit may speak to the congregation.

But sometimes people ask, “How do you know if it’s God speaking to you?” (I don’t plan to differentiate between the members of the Trinity in this sermon, and I plan to talk mostly about how Jesus spoke to people when he lived in Israel.) This is a legitimate question because the minds of humans are subject to physical and psychological pressures and indignities, and we cannot claim to control everything we think and feel. I, for instance, am accompanied through life by migraine, and sometimes when I’m working into one, I am weepy, irritable, chatty, and/or even funny, but eventually I am migraining. I sometimes see stars or pixels, I sometimes lose words out of my vocabulary, I sometimes fall asleep.  So those things are not under my control.

Another problem we have is having sick consciences.  We either feel shame and guilt where there is no fault of ours, or we feel no shame and guilt where we are at fault. In 1 John 3:18-20, the apostle advises us that we cannot just talk about loving our neighbor, but our love has to show up in what we do, how we work, in our real lives. (IRL) And our active love is how we know we are from the truth, and it gives us confidence in God’s presence. Then, if our conscience finds fault with us, blames and accuses us, we know that God is bigger and stronger than our conscience and understands everyone and the whole of everyone.  If our conscience is clear as regards active love, then we have cheerful courage and can speak freely before God.  How I understand this is that the nagging inner voice that shames and finds fault cannot be in control of our lives. John tells us in ch. 1 of 1 John not to hide our faults but every time to bring them right to God, tell God the truth, and God will wash us clean.  And no voice can bully us after that, whether inside us or outside us. 

Before we look at specific examples of how Jesus spoke to his contemporaries, we need to recognize that 1) not everything Jesus said or did is written down; 2) not every aspect of any one encounter is written down; 3) what was written down was from memory, not diaries, so events which left a trace of emotion or mystery, or events/stories that occurred more than once are likely to be included; and 4) almost nowhere is tone or facial expression specified. I do believe that the Spirit helped the writers remember, in addition to the way writing memories drags up more specifics and further memories. And I will not limit how the Spirit can illuminate any one passage to the individual, even if I don’t see it that way.

So here are the few encounters I want us to think together about.

The Rich Young Ruler

This one shows up in three gospels, from which I infer that it was surprising to the disciples. When this young man speaks respectfully to Jesus, and asks him what he can do to have eternal life, Jesus is confrontational rather than welcoming. Jesus says, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God.” I think that young man must have been taken aback.  Then Jesus says, “If you want to enter into life, keep the commandments.” 

Intriguingly, the young man says, “Which ones?” What might be behind this question? Perhaps his own self-awareness that he is not keeping all of them, and he hopes he’s keeping the right ones.  

Jesus says, “These:  no murder, no adultery, no stealing, no lying about another person; yes honoring parents, yes loving your neighbor as yourself.”

The young man says, “I have done these since I was a child. What do I still lack?”

And here is the heart of the confrontation. Jesus says to a person who believes he has been loving his neighbor, “Sell your possessions and give the money to the poor. You will have treasure in heaven. And come, follow me.” 

What I want us to observe here is that 1) Jesus won’t be flattered, and 2) Jesus lets him make his case, and 3) Jesus doesn’t shame, and 4) Jesus is direct in pointing out the next step he needs to take.

The Woman at the Well

This is only in the gospel of John, who says that he is trying to cover things the others did not and also that it would be impossible to write everything Jesus said and did.

Jesus strikes up this conversation, as he sits alone by the well.

He says, “Give me a drink.”

She says, “You, a Jew, want a drink from me, a Samaritan?!”

He says, “If you knew the gift of God and who I am, you would have said, ‘Give me a drink.’ and I would have given you living water.”

Let’s pause here to see what might be going on. I don’t think she’s going to start any conversation with a Jewish man, so Jesus begins, very directly. 

But she’s a bit spiky, or at least shocked, that he would speak and take water from a Samaritan woman, and she says so.

Jesus says, “You have no idea what’s going on here or who I am or what I’m here to do for you.” This seems to me to be a confrontational response to her spikiness.

She changes tactics. “Sir, you have nothing to draw up water with.  Where will you get living water.” At least now she’s polite, but she’s certainly skeptical. “Are you greater than the patriarch Jacob, who gave us this well, and drank from it himself, along with children and livestock?”

Jesus replies, “Whoever drinks this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water I give will have within them a fountain of water springing to everlasting life.”

I still hear a hint of skepticism in her reply.  “Sir, give me this water, so I don’t thirst anymore and have to come to this well to draw water.”

Jesus says, “First, bring your husband here.” And she says, “I have no husband.” Now Jesus is getting personal, as he did with the rich young ruler. 

“You speak truth, you have no husband, because you’ve had 5 and now the one you have is not your husband.” 

Jesus is direct again.  Jesus does not shame, but I suspect he uncovers some shame for her, shame that may explain her spikiness, her defensiveness, her evasiveness in their conversation. 

So she tries to deflect one more time. “Sir, I perceive you are a prophet. What is your opinion about where we should worship, here on this mountain or in Jerusalem?” 

Jesus says, “Woman” (which is how he also addressed his mother), “believe me, not long from now people will not be limited to worshipping the Father here or in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship a vague idea of God, whereas we Jews at least know whom we worship. But soon true worshipers will worship anywhere and everywhere, in spirit and in truth. These are the kind of people the Father is seeking. God is spirit, and those who worship God must worship in spirit and in truth.”

She says, perhaps defending her lack of knowledge), “I do know that when God’s chosen one comes, he will tell us all things.” Jesus says, “I who speak to you am God’s chosen one.”

And she runs to town and brings the whole town back to see if this man is indeed the Christ, this man who told her everything she’d ever done.

I hope you can see how Jesus moves this conversation closer and closer to the bone, not so as to make her miserable, but so as to make her honest. She flatters, spars and parries, as one does when one is ashamed.  But when she caves in, she isn’t shamed.  Instead, she is set free. Her feet have wings to spread the gospel that the Chosen One is right outside of town by Jacob’s well.  

When Jesus promised his disciples that he would send the Spirit of Truth, who would guide them into all truth, I think it was more about two kinds of truth: the truth about ourselves, learning to be honest and open with God and with others; and the truth about God, learning that God welcomes our honesty with forgiveness and instruction, and meets our openness with God’s own open-hearted love.  

I used to think that God spoke to me through my fear and shame, that I could never be good enough, and that I would easily slip through God’s hands because of my ignorance and my errors. As God taught me to trust in God’s character and love, I came to hear God speaking differently. 

After about a decade of semi-forgiveness of a deep wrong done me, I heard God say, “You can do better now.” And I said, appropriately, “You are right, I can. Please forgive him. I let him off the hook.” I found a new freedom in that moment that persists to this day, even though occasionally the pain resurfaces. There was no shaming in that voice, and I wasn’t required to weep and wail for my previous insufficient efforts.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I heard God say, “You don’t need to swear so much. I notice that it makes you more rather than less angry.” And I said, appropriately, “You’re right.  I’ll work on that.” Again, direct, not shaming, no threats, just a truthful observation. (BTW, I will tell you honestly that it was just a couple of the swears, not all of them, that I’m working on.)

I conclude that we can recognize that God is speaking to us when the voice is neither shaming nor condemning but instead is direct and on point. We can choose to reject it or to open ourselves to it, admitting in honesty that God is right, and taking the steps God prescribes.

Someone asked me to describe how I sensed God asking me to share something in open worship, and I replied that it was how I imagine feeling if a lion was getting near me—I feel alert, maybe in awe, a little apprehensive, and appreciative. That any of us can sense God approaching us personally and can share out of our honest relationship and understanding at God’s request is such an honor, such a grace. 

I 

Jesus and His Bible, Part 8

Mark 10:19 The Rich Man Wants Eternal Life

Question: Good master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?

Answer: Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.

“Why do you call me good?” This abrupt response puzzles me. I think, as with other surprising responses, it is tailored to the person with whom Jesus was speaking. It suggests that this conversation began with a compliment from one good person to another.  I recognize you as good, the rich man said, because I also am good. Jesus brought him up short when he asserted that “no one is good except God alone.” While this is not a direct quotation from Jesus’s Bible, it sums up multiple references to God’s goodness in the Psalms, and in many of those, God’s goodness is linked directly to his loving kindness, his mercy. This mercy, this care for the weak and helpless, is what the rich man is apparently specifically missing.

But first, Jesus made the “law-abiding” answer: “You know the commandments: do not murder; do not commit adultery; do not steal; do not bear false witness; do not defraud; honor your father and mother.” Interestingly, Jesus did not begin with Exodus 20:3: “You shall have no other gods before me,” nor did he include the prohibition of sacred images, or swearing oaths falsely using God’s name. He omitted the positive command about keeping the Sabbath. Instead, he focused on the ethical commands, the ones which detail how we are to treat other people. (See Exodus 20:12-16; Deut. 5:16-20.)

Jesus concisely summed these ethical commandments up, with the interesting addition of “do not defraud,” which extends “do not covet”  into the actions that result from covetousness. Fraudulent practices are condemned in some detail in various teachings about honesty in business practices in both the Pentateuch and the Prophets.

Embedded in this story are numerous political and theological threads, making the answer a complicated one, despite its apparent simplicity. The questioner who asked about eternal life, if sincere, must have been a Pharisee. They were at odds with the Sadducees over this issue. The Pharisees also were strict followers of their interpretation of Mosaic Law, both the written and oral traditions. By agreeing that “eternal life” is possible, Jesus aligned himself with the Pharisees in their debate with the Sadducees. And yet he was in constant conflict with the Pharisees over how to fulfill the Law. Specifically here,  when Jesus summed up the “other-facing” laws so concisely, he confronted the complexity of the traditions followed by the Pharisees. 

Jesus’s assertion that “no one is good except God alone” confronted the rich man’s awareness of his own goodness, as exposed in the exchange in which the rich man asserts that he has kept the commandments from his youth. This came out of Jesus’s  love for the questioner, a love which insisted on his looking honestly at himself.

Then Jesus answered with “sell all you have and give it to the poor”; Jesus reasserted that mercy is an essential aspect of goodness. He challenged the rich man to radical generosity. Mercy goes beyond the law of Moses into the law of love; now it isn’t about stealing or defrauding but about giving.  

Further, Jesus said: “Take up your cross and follow me.” Crucifixion was the punishment for rebels against the civil power of the Romans. In this context, Jesus signified the need to rebel against the idea that legalistic fulfillment of the law is enough, the need instead to embrace the idea of a whole-self giving away of privilege and power. This rebellion, though figurative, would have made real the worshipful attitude the rich man began with (“good master”).  “You call me good, but none is good but God; if you really believe I am good (if you really believe I am God), throw away your life and follow me. This is the absolute best I can offer to those I love.”

Loving God Wholeheartedly

Preached June 22, 2002, still seems worth saying

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be God’s person and to love God.  I also wanted to be safe and loved and have friends and power and a lot of other things, too.  I’ve spent my whole life working on the process of getting all these in order, because I know that the most important of them is loving God. Loving God wholeheartedly is a journey for me, and I believe someday it will be a resting place.  

Jesus identified the two great commandments (Matthew 25):  the greatest is loving God with one’s whole heart, mind, strength and the second is loving one’s neighbor. This particular sermon is about loving God.  We’ll approach this through two stories:  Adam and Eve and the rich young ruler, all of whom failed to love God wholeheartedly. 

Genesis 2 and 3 tells the story of the Garden of Eden, a place where God put fruit trees, a river, the tree of life, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  God told Adam that he was free to enjoy all things in the garden except one; God warned Adam that in the day he ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he would die. God made animals as companions for Adam, and Eve as his helper and partner; when Adam saw Eve, he said, “Shazzam!” He recognized that she shared his essential characteristics.  The innocence of Eden is symbolized in the fact of their unashamed nakedness before each other and God, who came to visit them in the garden.

It seems clear that from the beginning what God wanted from humans was—and is—for them to choose to love God.  The Old Testament and New Testament are full of images for the relationship between God and humans that emphasize the personal loving intimacy God wants: Husband and wife, mother and infant, father and son, hen and chicks, friends. Interestingly, however, when God made humans and called them very good, giving them the earth to care for and enjoy, God also gave humans freedom.  One aspect of freedom is the ability to imagine things being different from the way they are and to choose that option over the facts of the present. Another aspect of freedom is to look at all the evidence of surrounding love and choose something else.

In the New Testament, Matthew 19:16-26, we read about the encounter between a rich young man and Jesus.  The young man asked the question we all have:  “What good deed must I do to have eternal life.” Jesus replied to him, “If you want to enter into life, keep the commandments.”  Intelligently, the young man asked another question:  “Which ones?”  Jesus narrowed the various commandments of the Old Testament down to the following:  “Don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t say false things; honor your parents, and, last but not least, love your neighbor as yourself.”  These are all quotations from the Jewish law, the last from Leviticus 19:16. The young man said, “I’ve kept all these; what do I still lack?”  Jesus said, “If you want to be perfect, sell your possessions and give the money to the poor; this means you know your treasure is in heaven; then come, follow me.” 

This young man has a life marked by innocence and pleasant circumstances.He has done no harm and has also done active good in his world.  But he feels that something is lacking.  He wants to make sure he has a good life for eternity. Jesus tells him one thing he can do to be perfect (or complete), which will make sure his eternity is happy.

There are some obvious differences between these two situations.  Adam and Eve were in paradise with only one prohibition; the rich young man was in an occupied country with diverse social classes and ethnic groups and had a lot of prohibitions.  Adam and Eve’s test was to keep from doing something; the rich young man’s test was to do something radical. 

What seems similar, however, is important. In both cases, people had so much going for them, so much to be thankful for, so many advantages.  In both cases, people wanted to make sure they had everything they could possibly want. In both cases, the people were willing to risk losing their relationship with God because they wanted something else more than they wanted that relationship.  Adam and Eve decided they wanted to be like God, to be the ones who separate good and evil, even if that separated them from God.  The rich young man wanted to live a good life and the good life, and was willing to do one more good thing to ensure a good future life, but he wasn’t willing to focus his desire on wanting God.  God has seen that for the world to be good, for love to be real, the option must exist for people to choose something else.  Even though God set things up so that humans can be satisfied only by knowing God intimately, God also embedded in the nature of the universe the possibility that humans can choose against relationship. The universe has gaps, dangers, prohibitions, and so on, which make that choice real.

God challenged Adam and Eve to enjoy everything around them including God except one thing.  Adam and Eve chose the knowledge of good and evil over knowing God intimately and left the Garden in sorrow.  Jesus challenged the rich young man to risk everything that made him comfortable and safe on a relationship with Jesus.  The young man went away in sorrow, because he was rich. In some ways the choices are opposite, but at the core all three faced the question of whether they were willing to trust in God’s love for them and love God unconditionally or whether they needed to take matters into their own hands. 

What does it look like to love God wholeheartedly and unconditionally? St. Paul in I Corinthians 13 gives us a picture of love that we can try on here.  If we love God, we are patient with God, kind to God (kindness meaning the sort of generosity and loyalty we feel for family in its root); we aren’t envious of God; we don’t boast to God; we don’t assume we know more than God, and we don’t treat God like an inferior with no feelings. If we love God, we don’t insist on our own way; we aren’t irritable or resentful toward God; we don’t enjoy getting away with doing wrong, but we rejoice when God tells us the truth and helps us live truly. Our love for God bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  This love never ends.

All good gifts around us are sent from heaven above.  The world is intricate, homey, grand, and improbable—all reasons we might want to love the one who made it and put us here. However, it’s as if the story of Adam and Eve or the rich young man is reenacted in each human being.

Even though so much around us is good, we often do not love God wholeheartedly.  We want something more than we want to love God. We do not trust in God’s goodness and wholehearted love for us, and we are therefore open to the temptation to trust ourselves instead.  “What good deed can we do to have eternal life?”

We tend to think that if we had their chances we’d make better choices, but the evidence is against us.  Think about all that we have that we would put in the category of blessings.  The fact that our bodies and our cars and gravity and the general peacefulness of our state and town have allowed us to be here are things we generally take for granted. When I read in Oliver Sacks’s book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat about the varieties of ways the brain can malfunction, I began to sense the enormous blessing it is when so much in the brain goes right for such long periods of time.  When I consider how many distracted people are driving cars, I am amazed that so few of them run into each other.  When I think about how much evil humans can do and how often they choose to do good instead, I can see that we are surrounded by evidence of God’s love and can even see its traces in ourselves when we choose kindness over cruelty or forgiveness over resentment.

St. Paul said that God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being, and that in him all things hold together.  Why don’t we label all the things that go right as evidence of God’s love for us? When so much is good, why do we find it difficult to love God wholeheartedly? Instead, we focus on negatives—what we can’t have, what we can’t get rid of.

I’m not talking primarily to those who don’t love God because they have never wondered, considered, or believed that there is a God.    

Some of us suspect or believe that there is a God, but God is above it all; God doesn’t want or need our love, and God isn’t paying attention to us.  God sees us, if God is looking this way, at best from a distance. It’s hard to get interested in loving a God like that. It’s like loving a force field. I hope that if there is anyone reading this who is like either of these, he or she might be moved to say: “God, if you’re out there somewhere, let me know.”

Even those who believe in a personal God need to realize that there is a sense in which God transcends our whole experience of life, the universe, and everything. We can’t pin God to a board and examine every aspect of the nature of God so that we can predict God’s next move. God remains mysterious, even when we have the Bible and countless records of people who have experiences they attribute to God’s activity in their lives.

We may even prefer to believe that God is distant and uninvolved on a daily basis because we see that sometimes bad people live well and long while good people suffer and die young.  If the universe tells us that God is all powerful, and our experience tells us that bad things happen to good people, it becomes very difficult to want a close relationship with a God who doesn’t act like a superhero, at least not predictably.  It is more difficult to hold together the idea that God is all powerful with the ideas that God is all good and all loving than it is to believe only one of the options.

We may find it hard to love God wholeheartedly because we think God is expecting a lot from us but doesn’t look out for us very well.  We are astonished and feel betrayed when something goes wrong, especially when we’ve tried to be good.  It is little comfort to believe in a personal, involved God who doesn’t use power and love to prevent all sorrow, pain, untimely death, destruction, and evil. 

Another barrier to loving God is that we know we’ve done something God won’t like and therefore God can’t or won’t love us.  When we do something we know in our stomachs is wrong, we become afraid of being found out, we’re ashamed, and we hide.  Sometimes we hide by creating smokescreens of self-justification; sometimes we hide in activities that distract us from thinking.  There are lots of ways to hide from God, and while we’re hiding, we’re not loving God wholeheartedly.

We may find it hard to love God because God allows our own actions and the actions of others combined with the laws of nature to have consequences that are terrible.  Though I think God works hard to distract people from doing wrong by attracting them to good things, when people choose to be abusive, hateful, murderous, or even when they do harm out of ignorance or carelessness, God permits horrors to occur. 

I want to acknowledge all these difficulties, these barriers in the way of loving God wholeheartedly.  We may see God as distant, or unfair, or untrustworthy. In fact, even when our own lives are happy, when we see others suffer, we may doubt that God is both loving and powerful. At one point in my own life, I was angry with God to the point of despair.  A friend said, “You know, sometime you’ll just have to forgive God.”  Despite the preposterous sound of this, I said, “I forgive you, God, for not living up to my expectations.” It was helpful.

I want to point out the ends of the stories we started with to suggest why we can trust in God’s love.

If the Bible is reliable about God, it’s clear that God wants to get personal: for instance, God’s idea of paradise is to visit Adam and Eve in person and give them everything they need, including the freedom to choose something else; Jesus wants nothing more than for that rich young man to come with him. Furthermore, after Adam and Eve choose knowledge over God, the response is not immediate death, though something dies, I think; instead, the evidence of the story is that God continues to love them: God provides clothing and food and occupation for them, promises them children, and continues to be available to them in relationship. In fact, Eve acknowledges this when she has her first child, saying, “I have produced a man with the help of the Lord.” God also brings them into the open and makes them tell what they’ve done. Even though they blame others for their own fall, being partly honest is better than hiding, and those who can be honest and take responsibility will find it easier to believe that God still loves them.  God continues to love them, and that includes allowing them to experience the consequences of their choice to know good and evil.

Similarly, Jesus makes clear that God remains committed to the human, even when the human makes the wrong choice.  The gospel of Mark includes the detail that Jesus loves the rich young man. When the rich young man hangs his head and walks away, Jesus says, “It will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, in fact.” The disciples, astounded, ask, “Who then can be saved?”  Jesus replies, “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.” God still intends to work on or with the rich young man.

The greatest commandment is to love God with our whole selves—heart, strength, mind.  What Jesus said about the rich young man is true for all of us: with mortals it is impossible.  Our main difficulty in loving God is our own dividedness.  Is loving God something we really want to do more than anything else?  If we do want to love God, we can tell we are moving in the right direction when patience, kindness, contentment, humility, courtesy, honesty, and commitment are what we want to share with God. We give evidence of loving God when we act or refrain from action just because we think that’s what God wants from us.  We can choose to move toward loving God, and God will take our choices and make them add up to love. As Jesus concluded, with God all things are possible.

Three Rich Men and Jesus

Taking a little break from the stories of women to look at three encounters with Jesus by rich men: Nicodemus, The Rich Young Ruler, and Zaccheus--These stories are parables of individuals—we can apply them to our own spiritual lives—but they are also parables of churches, denominations, the church universal. Jesus walks among the churches, we read in Revelation, and he has something to say to each congregation, each denomination, the whole of Christianity.

These individuals were all rich. Two of them had the approval of society, influence and spiritual authority. One had coercive power over others, backed up by the government, but was despised. When Jesus met each of them, he didn’t say the same thing. To the first, he said you must be born again; to the second, he said sell everything you have and give it to the poor; to the third, he said today I must stay at your house

What can we learn from these differences?
We can see that
1) Jesus speaks particular truth to particular individuals or groups.
2) We can see that if we want to have Jesus come to our house, we need to set aside the ways we protect ourselves from what Jesus brings to us, a life at the mercy of the Spirit of God.
3) And we need to quit caring about being approved of by our culture or cultures. Jesus cares more about openness to truth than about approval by others
4) And we show we’re serious about Jesus by being generous and by repenting of what we’ve done wrong and making it right.


Nicodemus came by night. He was a man of position and influence and a Pharisee. His coming by night suggests caution and care about appearances.

He is polite, even complimentary: Rabbi, he says to Jesus, we know you have come from God as a teacher because no one could do what you have done unless God is with him. Nicodemus states that he approves of Jesus’s ministry in a quiet way. He finds out that Jesus doesn’t care about approval. Jesus cares about something else—Nicodemus himself.

Jesus replies, no one can see the kingdom of God unless that person is born again.

Nicodemus says, “how can an old man be born again when he is old?” What I hear in this question is self-defense. What does it mean to be reborn? I think it means I need to make a completely new start, without the protection and mask of influence and position—complete vulnerability, complete dependence, complete openness. It confronts my fear of change.

Jesus makes it even worse for the cautious: This new life is based in the Spirit, and it is not predictable or safe. It is like being the wind, without boundaries, without excuses. A person who is born of the spirit will not seek Jesus under the cover of night. Jesus speaks repeatedly in the passage that follows in John 3 about openness, the public nature of God’s kingdom and the daylight redemption for those who believe in God’s Son.

He warns Nicodemus about preferring the darkness, and he suggests to Nicodemus that such a preference means that he fears that his sinfulness will be exposed. It’s not that the darkness that defines night is outside of God’s love; but Nicodemus takes cover behind influence, power, age, privilege; this state of his heart is revealed when Nicodemus bestows on Jesus his “seal of approval.” Approving of Jesus allows Nicodemus to keep his distance from the new life Jesus brings.

Jesus says to Nicodemus: Set all that down in order to see God’s kingdom with newborn eyes and be one with the wind of God’s spirit sweeping across the countryside.

Second story:
The (nearly) Perfect Young Man

This story is prefaced in Matthew, Mark, and Luke with Jesus blessing the children and saying that whoever doesn’t receive the kingdom of God like a child won’t enter it at all. This intriguingly echoes the “born again” advice given to Nicodemus above.

In fact, the youthfulness and openness of this nearly perfect man sets him apart from Nicodemus, though like Nicodemus, he is a ruler. To all appearances, he has the courage of his curiosity, and he approaches Jesus in broad daylight. “Good Teacher (or rabbi),” he says, “what good thing shall I do in order to inherit eternal life?”

“Why do you call me good?” says Jesus in Mark and Luke; “Why are you asking me about what is good?” reports Matthew. Jesus reacts to the man bestowing his approval on Jesus with the word good. Jesus pulls him up short. “You know only God is good.” Don’t try to flatter Jesus.

I notice that Jesus resists flattery. I wish I always did that, also. When someone comes up to me and identifies me as a somehow superior being, I have a hard time finding fault with that person, particularly if he or she is from a position of influence. Oh, I say to myself, I have the seal of approval. I am now ok. I will be careful not to lose that standing.

Suppose I were Jesus; I would see flattery for the temptation it is, the temptation to compare myself with other people to my advantage which is based on the weakness of thinking I am not really ok.

This applies to churches, too. Do churches compare themselves with others? And why do they do so? Are churches open to flattery? Can whole churches and denominations be manipulated to buy into the dominant culture or to prove they are counter-cultural?

Why can Jesus resist this temptation and call out the tempters? Jesus finds his identity in obedience to God. Whatever God tells me to say and do, that’s what I say and do, he says repeatedly. Put down your burden and be in this kind of relationship with me; just like oxen in a yoke, you and I will obey God together.

Back to our story: Jesus meets the perfect young man where he is, measuring himself by the law; Jesus says to him, “do the commandments given by God who is good. “

Now the nearly perfect young man’s façade cracks just a bit: he asks, “which ones? “ This young man is not stupid. He knows he can’t obey all the commandments. As St. Paul said, the law exposes our need for grace; Paul’s own particular downfall was the “do not covet” commandment which went past appearances into the heart. This young man already knows he hasn’t kept ALL the commandments.

The list in Luke are these:
Do not murder
Do not commit adultery
Do not steal
Do not bear false witness
Honor your father and mother

Mark adds: do not defraud; again, the young man can check this off.

Matthew adds: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

I don’t know why these lists are not identical. But I can tell you that the perfection façade cracks wide open with this last commandment. And we know it has broken open when Jesus says, “Give everything you have to the poor—your neighbors—and follow me.” Suddenly that emotional word love has real dimensions—generosity. Generosity outside the family, generosity to the beggar and the undeserving. Be gracious, Jesus tells him. Don’t be legalistic.

So we’ve seen Jesus confront the heart issues of two men of influence and position. Give it up, Jesus says. Lay it down. Give it away. Just you, come follow me with just you. The kingdom is open to those who just drop everything and run into it. The kingdom is being seized violently, he said, urgently, by those with nothing to lose and nowhere else to turn.

Third story:
One more rich man, but this time a tax-gatherer. I’m sure you know that the tax system under Rome was filled with corruption, that a tax-gatherer could collect much more than was actually required by Rome. Tax-gatherers were beneath contempt, collaborators with the occupying army, not admirable people at all, certainly not in the moral class of the other two rich men.

This particular tax-gatherer, Zaccheus, is a short man. I sympathize with him. He can’t see through a crowd, and so when Jesus comes through town, Zaccheus climbs a tree because he is trying to see who Jesus is. Well, so much for dignity, so much for status; a grown-up throwing aside his fancy clothes, climbing a tree and perching on a limb. That sounds like something a child would do.

And Jesus stops right below the tree, looks up, and says, “Zaccheus, hurry and come down, for today I must stay at your house.” Surprise! Jesus wants to see who Zaccheus is, too. Tumbling out of the tree, Zaccheus receives Jesus gladly. Imagine how he beams, sheer pleasure lighting up his face.

He stands right there in public in his under-tunic, and says to Jesus, “I will give half of everything I own to the poor, and I will repay four times any fraud I’ve committed.” Jesus doesn’t say to him, “Sell everything and give it all away.” He doesn’t need to. He sees how much Zaccheus wants to see who Jesus is. Zaccheus knows what God wants him to do and he rushes to do it. Even if he remains rich, he will be a new person.

What makes this story different from the other two? Zaccheus’s energetic determination to see who Jesus is and the delightful discovery that Jesus knows him by name and by heart. Zaccheus is like a little child, tumbling into the kingdom without dignity, influence, position, wealth, or even most of his clothes.

As I said at the beginning, these stories are parables of individuals—we can apply them to our own spiritual lives; one hearer remarked that she can see herself in each of these at different points in her life. These are also parables of churches, denominations, the church universal. The same questions can be asked of individuals, congregations, denominations: Do we come to Jesus after cover of darkness because we are afraid of change? Do we come to him with the list of everything we’ve done right because we are unwilling to admit our need for grace? Or do we do whatever we can to see who Jesus is, and then out of sheer joy, turn to make life easier for our neighbors and to make things right with those we’ve wronged?