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Luke's Jesus Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis February 24, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 61:1-11 Luke 7:18-23
Sometimes I think we are like Alice when it comes to believing what the church says about who Jesus is. “‘There’s no use trying,’ Alice says to the Queen. “‘One can’t believe impossible things.’” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’” says the Queen and the church in response. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’” The apparent irony of the beginning of Luke’s gospel for Alice is Luke’s stated intention to “set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.” Not an eyewitness himself but removed (as we are) from the earthly Jesus by what he considers a long shot, Luke is self-conscious about the truth his gospel tells. He assures Theophilus (the name means “friend of God”) that he has investigated everything carefully for a long time and now is ready to go “front page above the fold” with an orderly account so that this friend of God may know the truth concerning the things about which he had been instructed. Yet what follows is not the product of a secondhand journalist reporting the news nor is it the work of a historian as we once thought of historians before paradigms began to shift beneath our provable universe. Luke is a storyteller who carefully orders the good news that has been handed down to him by eyewitnesses concerning Jesus. He writes a narrative in order that, before breakfast, we might believe but one impossible thing: that the one who has come to seek and save the lost has come to seek and save us too. Therefore Luke begins with the birth of Jesus to a virgin named Mary and, right out of the chute so to speak, he loses Alice who cannot fathom how such news could be true: conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary? Two impossible things we must believe before breakfast, says the church, in order to be Jesus’ disciple. This is not Luke’s fault. The first order of events for Luke was rather to tell us at the beginning that Jesus was really born as we were born (“of woman”) and that he was born into the real world of social, economic and political disorder. These were the days, you will remember, of Caesar Augustus who was Octavian: “the divine savior who has brought peace to the world.” These were the nights of angels announcing to the lowest of the low that in the city of David a Savior has been born and then singing in Caesar’s face: “Glory to God in the Highest and on earth peace among those with whom God is pleased!” Moreover Gabriel, whose name means “Divine Warrior” and who was from Old Testament times known to be the destroyer of the wicked, Gabriel has come to rifle Satan’s fold by way of the fruit of Mary’s womb. In response to the news God’s Son had been conceived to reign over a kingdom that would have no end, Mary magnifies God her Savior whose salvation is promised in social, political and economic reversals. Luke locates Jesus’ birth in the political and social details of his day. Chapter One: "In the days of King Herod of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah…"; Chapter Two: "In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled…"; Chapter Three: "In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Iturea and Traconitius and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came…." Luke marks the time of Jesus' birth by way of those who were said to be in power. Why? Perhaps to tell us of the One whose coming overturns what has passed for power in the world since Adam first blamed Eve. Luke mentions the names of those in public office when the savior of the world appeared. To what end? Maybe that we might notice in our own day how this purposeful God uses pitiful two-bit politicians like Herod to accomplish God's saving intention for human history. No once upon a time will do! In the first place and his first two chapters, Luke surrounds the savior of the world with a real world in need of saving, a world not unlike the one which surrounds us even now. In the second place, not only was Luke’s Jesus really born into history but he has come to reveal the purpose of God within human history. That purpose, according to Luke, has supremely to do with the salvation of the whole world. Concerning the world, it is not by chance that Caesar Augustus was enrolling the known world to be taxed when the savior of the world was born. Eight days later old Simeon's eyes saw in this newborn's face God's salvation "which had been prepared in the presence of all people, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to God's people Israel." Moving on, Luke traces Jesus’ ancestry not fourteen generations upon fourteen generations upon fourteen generation to Abraham as Matthew had, but Luke from Abraham continues through the son of Terah, son of Nahor, son of Reu, on and on and on until he reaches son of Adam, son of God. Jesus was born for the offspring of Adam: for the world. Concerning salvation, Luke’s Jesus begins his public ministry in Nazareth, his hometown, with what New Testament professor Richard Hayes calls “a programmatic statement.” Opening the scriptures to the prophet Isaiah, he reads, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Here the prophet’s words are not predictive as they were in Matthew; they have become the content of God’s salvation and the sign of God’s reign in the person of Jesus Christ. What this looks like in the life of Luke's Jesus can be summarized in one sentence: he has come to seek and save the lost. Now in a sense and in his presence, you could say that we are all lost. My favorite dead white male theologian said just that, said that in Jesus "the lost state of our humanity is exposed. Our holiness however great or small drops away. Our brilliance is extinguished, our boasting reduced to futility, our pride deprived of its object." We stand as those who are lost because Jesus is among us and I daresay the most impossible thing we must believe before breakfast every day is that we have really been found in him who will let none of us go. Still if you look at the material which is peculiar to Luke, the stories and sayings found in no other gospel, you find stories populated not by those who were metaphorically poor, but by the poor; you read encounters Jesus had with people who in fact rather than fiction had leprosy, were incurably ill, were already dead, were blind or lame or outcasts in society. When John the Baptist from prison asks, “Are you the one to come or should we expect another?” Jesus himself answers, "Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them…." The salvation wrought in Jesus, says Joel Green in his stunning commentary on Luke’s gospel, is “neither ethereal nor merely fictive but embracing of life in the present, restoring the integrity of human life, revitalizing human communities, setting the cosmos in order, commissioning a community of God’s people to put God’s grace into practice among themselves and an ever-widening circle of others.” That community that is to put God’s grace into practice, in Luke’s third place, is the church, for finally the story of Luke's Jesus continues in Luke's sequel: The Acts of the Apostles…the witness of the church in the world. As you might expect, “Membership in the community,” again says Green, “has nothing to do with inherited status but with those who live as people who manifest their unmitigated embrace of the gracious God…who embody in their lives the beneficence of God and express open-handed mercy to others, especially those in need.” Suddenly Alice comes to mind again. “There’s no trying,” she says. “One cannot believe impossible things.” But now those impossible things are not the doctrines the church has distilled from the scriptures about Jesus but the impossibility of the church’s witness to Luke’s Jesus, the Savior of the world, the servant of God in whom the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the poor have good news brought to them. That the church might manifest her unmitigated embrace of the gracious God…might embody in her life the beneficence of God and express open-handed mercy to others, especially those in need is, for many, impossible to believe! Impossible especially in this last week when the Permanent Judicial Commission of the General Assembly of our denomination (in effect the Supreme Court) ruled that there can be no exception to the rule that excludes gay and lesbian members of the church from serving as deacons, elders or ministers of the word and sacrament. We may have scruples about the virgin birth (there is hope for Alice) but not about the exclusion of those for whom Christ was born from the leadership of his church. I could not get this un-fictive fact out my mind as I sought Luke’s Jesus seeking the poor, the blind, the lame, the deaf, but most of all seeking those whom his own community had cast out. It is in this sense I am like Alice, finding it impossible to believe what the church says about Jesus when she chooses to live in human history as though the Savior of the world had, at most, founded a society for the doctrinally correct and the morally pure. In the end and after Jesus’ death, what was impossible for even the disciples to believe, according to Luke, was that he was alive and accompanying them on the Emmaus road, the road that would take them back to life without him except for the truth that the last impossible thing to believe is the first: that this one who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified death and buried…lives! “Why are you frightened” he asks the eleven, “and why do doubts arise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see….” While in their joy they were disbelieving, writes Luke, he said among other things to them, “You are my witnesses.” "Luke's work," writes Ernst Kasemann "was meant to proclaim great joy to all people. But if the word of God is not to be fettered, the church has to find it afresh every day and be judged by it afresh every day. If it is turned into the church's self-display, if it gets rigid in its tradition and creed, then the pious [have] brought it into subjection to [them]selves, tied it to [them]selves, commandeered it for [them]selves and changed the call of [Christ] into the call of a religious party. That began” says Kasemann, “as early as Luke's time when he identified the gospel with Christianity. Today we are at the end of that road…[when]…the only word that the world will listen to once again” is word of him who comes to seek and save those lost to the religious party but found of him on a craggy cliff, found of him in a dark corner, found of him returning from a far county and, with no need for scruples, carried upon his shoulder home rejoicing. Thanks be to God. |