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God is at Work
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Luke 22:63-65 (New International Version)
The Guards Mock Jesus
63The men who were guarding Jesus began mocking and beating him. 64They blindfolded him and demanded, "Prophesy! Who hit you?" 65And they said many other insulting things to him.
God is at Work
I think it was in grade seven. I even remember her name—Judy Clement. If Andrew were here today, he would say, “You can remember that name from more than 40 years ago, and yet at Christmas you called me Fred on more than one occasion.” (Fred, by the way, is my brother.)
I wrote a Valentine card for Judy Clement and then, because I was so sure she wouldn’t want to know it was from me tried to blot out my name. She came to me a week or so later and asked if I had given her the card. I don’t recall anything else about the conversation, but I think it was the last time Judy spoke to me.
In high school there was Liz Kovalchefski. I was smitten with her beauty. She agreed to go somewhere with me one day in the summer. When I arrived to pick her up, the young man with whom she was smitten was also there and the two of them hopped into the back seat. I chauffeured while they snuggled.
At this point most of you are feeling even more sympathy for Chris than you did before and, yes, even after almost 37 years, I still have a sense of surprise that she said yes.
And then there were those days of picking sides for a game of baseball or football. Hockey I played with an acceptable level of skill but when it came to those other sports a hit or a catch was always a huge surprise to me and an even greater surprise to my team mates; which, of course, is always why I was picked last.
One more story—the second summer we were in Markham I went to a slow-pitch game in which the team from the church was playing. One of the players sons was sitting on the team bench. There was a close call at third which went against our team and the boy on the bench gave a groan of disapproval. The umpire came over and insisted the boy be removed from the team’s bench. At which point, I said, “Oh, come on umpy, he’s just a kid.” To which he said that if I didn’t leave the park, our team would forfeit the game. Once again, rejected.
You know what that’s like, don’t you? I think we all do, and, of course, there are times when we are not the one being rejected but rather the one doing the rejecting. It’s a part of life. It was a part of Jesus’ life and as we make our way through the days of Lent, moving ever closer toward Easter, we are going to take a look at how and why Jesus was rejected and how and why our spiritual choices today can be a rejection of the Saviour.
If you have your Bible with you open it to the text in Luke 22. It’s a long chapter—71 verses. It begins by telling us the religious rulers were looking for a way to get rid of Jesus and ends with those leaders saying, “What further testimony do we need? We have heard it ourselves from his own lips!” They intend to reject Jesus and believe they are right to do so.
Someone has suggested we ought to read Luke 22 as if the scene was being lit by one of those bulbs controlled by a rheostat—as you turn the dial the light dims. Jesus tells those who arrest him that it is “a dark night, a dark hour” (Luke 22:53, The Message). We are going to spend a bit of time in this chapter, today and the next two Sundays. Today our focus is those three verses of our text, verses 63 to 65, in which the soldiers reject Jesus.
At first glance we think we know what this is about and there is a danger that we can be quite smug about it. As many of you know I try to stay about a month ahead in writing my sermons. My early years of ministry were marked by too many “Saturday night specials,” and the congregations suffered as a result. I was writing this message then during the week in which a Quebec Rampart Junior ‘A’ hockey player was hospitalized after a vicious and totally unprovoked elbow to his head. Whenever I see and hear of something like this my reaction is invariably a mixture of disgust and “I’m so glad I’m not that sort of person.”
The same sort of thing can happen with this text if we are not careful. But look closely at the text. Look at verse 47. Judas leads a crowd toward Jesus. Included in the crowd is a servant of the High Priest. Look at verse 52. Then Jesus said to the chief priests, the officers of the temple police, and the elders who had come for him, “Have you come out with swords and clubs as if I were a bandit?” Look at verse 54. They take Jesus to the house of the High Priest. This is a religious round-up. If we’re not careful, we will look at this story and say, “It’s a bunch of hooligans, ruffians and n’er-do-wells. I’m so glad I’m not that sort of person.”
But that’s not who it is at all. It’s the religious folks who take Jesus into custody. It’s the religious folks who reject him and mock him. It’s the religious folks who blindfolded him and kept asking him, “Prophesy! Who is it that struck you?” It has to be the religious folks because it’s only us who would mock in that sort of way. “If you’re a prophet Jesus, tell us who just slapped you up the side of the head.”
I think part of what Luke is telling us is that people had expectations of what it means when God shows up on the scene and Jesus did not meet those expectations. In some ways we can understand this.
Do you remember the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal? Elijah confronts King Ahab and tells him to quit hopping from one foot to the other. If Baal is god, then serve Baal. But if the “I am” who revealed himself to Moses at Mt. Sinai is God, then serve him. Elijah proposes a contest. Whichever God sends fire from heaven to burn up the offered sacrifice, this is the one worthy of worship. When the contest is over and Elijah’s God has won, Elijah rounds up the priests of Baal and puts them all to the sword.
Some prophet you are, say the religious rulers of Jesus’ day. You claim to have brought the presence of God into our lives, but look around, no one has put the fear of God into the hearts of the Romans. They are still here, still collecting taxes, still rubbing in our faces their pagan practices, still asking us to believe that Caesar is a god. Prophesy, Jesus—who slapped you, whose voice insults you, whose spit are you wiping from your cheek?
Like some of you I grew up in a church that never acknowledged the season of Lent. I don’t remember if we observed Good Friday, but emotionally we were comfortable moving from the praise of Palm Sunday to the victory of Easter. I shouldn’t tar the pastors and leaders of that congregation on the basis of my childhood and teen memories, but it was not until I was in my first year at Waterloo Lutheran University (now Wilfrid Laurier) that I was introduced to the concept of a 40 day period in which Christians asked God to prepare them for the victory of Easter by focussing on the humiliation, suffering and death endured by Jesus.
What I was told was the church through the ages has understood the route to Easter runs right through Good Friday and there are no detours permitted. In other words God does not show up just for Easter Sunday, but God is present and at work in everything that happens to Jesus.
Almost two thousand years has passed by since Jesus died and rose again, and we Christians still have a tough time with what it means to affirm with Paul that in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself (2 Corinthians 5:19). This was brought home to me in a comment made by Pat Robertson in the aftermath of last month’s devastating earthquake in Haiti.
You may have heard about these comments made in an interview on the Christian Broadcast Network. Robertson claims that many years ago, as part of their revolt against France, Haitians made “a pact with the Devil,” and have been suffering ever since. Who knows why Pat Robertson would make such comments. But I wonder if it has to do with a need to frame God in such a way that even such tragedy can somehow be understood as a manifestation of the Easter victory of God. In other words, the ancestors of these people thumbed their noses at God and now God is showing today’s Haitians who really is the boss. However this is not much of an explanation for the death of Yvonne Martin, a nurse who was part of a team from an Evangelical Missionary Church in Kitchener that had arrived in Port-au-Prince just 90 minutes before the quake.
Friends, what I am trying to get across here is this: the work of God was going on when the detachment of Temple guards took Jesus into custody and mocked his claim to be the presence of God in our world. This is one of the great mysteries of our faith. Human nature being what it is, we seem to want a god that will ride in like the cavalry in a western movie, shoot up the bad guys and proclaim the victory. Can Jesus really be God, can he truly be doing the work of God’s kingdom if he allows himself to be mocked, ridiculed, blindfolded and made to play the fool?
Here’s what I believe the New Testament tells us—if we truly want to defeat the enemy of our race we had better know who the enemy is. You see the enemy is not circumstance; the enemy is not the failure of the world to live up to your dreams; the enemy is sin and sin is not outside us, sin is within us.
Jesus once said to his disciples, “I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32). He also said about himself that he will be handed over to the Gentiles; and he will be mocked and insulted and spat upon (Luke 18:32). In other words, the work of God happens through Jesus because he submits himself to the worst of what the sinful heart of humanity can devise. Out of that God affirms his life, affirms his forgiveness, affirms his grace, affirms his very willingness to be a servant, and gives the victory at Easter.
There is great wisdom, I believe, in the forty days of Lent. It gives us the time needed to look at Jesus. Because we know rejection in our lives, because we all too often are those who reject others, we think that when Jesus is rejected this is a time of failure. We want to pass it by quickly.
No, this is not failure. This is God in human form taking on the worst of what we can dish out, taking on the sin that has the world in its grasp and bringing this enemy to its knees.
“You don’t look a bit like God,” they said. The truth is that is exactly how God looks.
B
