The Ideal Christ
Pastor Mathew Magera – 12/13/15 – Sermon 133
St. Thomas Lutheran Church, Trufant, MI
To God be the Glory!
Grace and peace to you from
God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
One of the best meals in the
world is not one that you would find on a menu or in a fancy five star
restaurant. You're not going to find it at McDonald's or Burger King either. If
there is anything that can top a five star restaurant menu or the drive thru of
a fast food chain, a buffet is the way to go. Golden Corral, Old Country
Buffet, a family dinner or a church potluck, buffets give me the opportunity to
pick what I like, take what I want and indulge with wide eyes and a big mouth
while at the same time hearing my stomach pray for mercy. Buffets are great.
Don't like vegetables? Pass on them. Want to eat dessert first? Go for it. Want
a double helping of mashed potatoes in a bowl full of gravy? Who's stopping
you? Going to a fancy restaurant can't get you nearly the experience that you
would at a buffet. While you might be able to customize a few things, you will
still end up paying an arm and a leg for your meal. When it comes to a buffet,
I'm in charge of my destiny, I get to say what's best and I can as much or as
little of it as I want. You can create the ideal meal.
Our Ideal
Jesus
Imagine with me that
Christianity is a buffet and we have the opportunity to create our ideal Jesus
and what he does. What would be like to pick what it is that Jesus did as our
savior? If you could divide Jesus' work out into percentages, how much time
would he spend doing different things? People during his lifetime planned much
time spent on getting the Roman Empire out of the way, getting them out of
Jerusalem. They expected Jesus to take over the leadership of Jerusalem and
Judaism and become a king. And they expected him to make them a perfect people.
That's what they wanted. In our world today, we might divide Jesus' work
similarly. Our ideal Jesus would take revenge on ISIS and terrorism. Our ideal
Jesus would take over Washington D.C. Our ideal Jesus would give our lost
freedoms back. The ideal Jesus would be a vengeful, confident and just leader.
What would your Jesus do? My Jesus would have a cure for cancer. My Jesus would
take fear out of traveling. My Jesus would make insurance rates go down. My
Jesus would take away my colorblindness. My Jesus would fix the roads in Sand
Lake.
John's/Our
Question
But imagine now what happens
when you go to a buffet and you don’t find what you’re hoping for and instead
something else is in its place. Imagine what John the Baptist might be feeling
if his ideal Jesus was not there and was instead replaced by something else.
Imagine how we might feel if our ideal Jesus was not there and was instead
replaced by something else.
Jesus wasn't doing anything
ideal during his lifetime. The people had one view of him and he didn't fit
into their version of an ideal savior. Even John the Baptist was becoming
confused. I imagine some people wanted Jesus to stop helping the poor and start
waging war. I imagine some people wanted Jesus to stop healing the sick and
start healing the government. I imagine some people wanted Jesus to stop
exorcizing demons and start exercising justice. And I think we find ourselves
in the same boat. We want Jesus to stop wasting time and start changing the
world. We want Jesus to stop letting the world succumb to illness and disaster
and start fixing it. So, when John the Baptist sends his followers to talk to
Jesus, we might applaud him. He's not seeing anything worthy of a Messiah
coming out of Jesus up to this point so he sends his followers to ask if he
really is the one who is to come. Jesus are you really the one or should we
look for another? "Can someone who gives time and attention to the dead,
the very poor, the outcast, the acknowledged violator of the law, and the
diseased be God's messiah?"[1]
I don't think John was
necessarily losing faith, but he was curious. If we could rephrase his question
he might ask Jesus, "These things that you are doing, are they what a
Messiah does?" John, or anyone for that matter, had no idea what Jesus was
going to do. How would he relate to the leaders and institutions dedicated to
the preservation of faith in God? Will he be political? It was as if they told
each other, "When the Messiah comes, he will..." and then they filled
in the blank. They had a plate and they were walking up to the Messianic
buffet. We do the same thing only we reference Jesus' second coming. What is it
going to look like when Jesus returns? Will we know it's happening? People have
their theories and they even use the Bible, much like people during Jesus' day
did, and we say "When Jesus comes again, he will..." and we fill in
the blank. How much of that fill in the blank, though, is going to be true?
What if our concept for what the second coming will be like totally misses the
mark? How will we know what to look for? What if our ideal second coming of
Christ is not what will actually take place? Jesus are you really the one who
is to come again or should we look for another? Or perhaps because of his delay
in coming back our question might be, Jesus are you really coming back or
should we look elsewhere for hope?
Jesus'
Response
Luckily for us, John doesn't
have the last word here and his followers are able to bring the question to
Jesus and we are welcomed into his response. He tells them to go back to John
telling him what they have seen and heard, that is, that Jesus was curing
diseases, sicknesses and evil spirits, and then to tell John "The blind
receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf
hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor."
There we have it, straight from Jesus. The Messiah is completely outside of
what he was expected to be and do. I'm not sure if this could keep John silent
though. I would have expected John to send more questions to Jesus like,
"okay, good for the poor, but what about the oppressive government? What
are you doing about them?"
After John's followers
leave, Jesus continues to talk and to reiterate that when the people came to
hear John the Baptist, they did not come expecting to see someone who was rich.
They did not come to see something ordinary and predictable. John was anything
but that and Jesus is claiming to be anything but ordinary as well. For crying
out loud, he was a friend to the rejects of society. No leader or king would do
such a thing. No wonder people were asking if it was really him who was the Messiah.
His actions are totally unorthodox. But they ARE the actions of the Messiah.
You see, "John has to
decide in the same way we do, on the basis of witnesses reporting what they
have seen and heard."[2]
John must use faith that the actions of Jesus are legitimate. He must have
faith that Jesus’ actions will fuel the kingdom of God on earth.
Speaking of fueling the
kingdom of God, there was once a nun driving on a cross country mission trip on
her own. She was so excited to be almost to her destination that while she was
on this two-way road in the middle of nowhere she passed by a gas station
without realizing that she was almost out of gas. As fate would have it, about
a mile later, her car sputtered to a stop on the road and she had to walk back.
She told the gas station attendant her troubles and he wanted to help but he
didn't have any containers to carry the gas. He knew she was trustworthy,
though, so he decided to go back into his storage closet to see if he could
find anything that might hold some gas. After a while he came out with the only
thing he could find, a bedpan. She told the man it would work out just fine.
She pumped some gas into the bedpan and started walking down the road to her
car. When she got there she began pouring the gas into the car when a trucker
pulled up behind her to see what was going on. He got out of the truck and
watched her pour the contents of the bedpan into her gas tank. He shook his
head and he said, "Sister, I wish I had your faith."
John the Baptist is in the
position of the trucker. He's witnessing something being done by Jesus that
just doesn't fit and his assumption is that it won't work. We, also, are put
into the position of the trucker and need to operate by faith. The nun could
have assured him that it would do the trick, but only by faith could the
trucker accept it without knowing that she was actually putting gas in her car
and not something else.
Jesus' role as the Messiah
is greater than a physical victory over God's enemies. It's greater than what
we might consider his victory to be in our world today. Jesus' role was to
reverse the results of a fallen creation and to restore it to a right
relationship with God, to accomplish the ultimate defeat of humanity's greatest
enemies, sin, death and the devil. We still might pray and ask God if Jesus
really is coming back given the condition the world is in today. But, as we
approach Christmas and wonder how God can do so much in our world through the
birth of a helpless child, we might believe in faith. We might believe that God
can do big things in small places, as we talked about last week. We might
believe that just because Jesus seems to be doing things we don't understand
doesn't mean we shouldn't look somewhere else. Only by our faith can we begin
to see that God is not wasting his time, but that he is actually giving the
world more time to know His love, more time to continue what Jesus did by
healing, and cleansing and loving. This is the Jesus we worship. There is no
other. It may not be our ideal Jesus. It may not be what we put on our plate at
the Messianic buffet, but it is the Jesus we are given. God's Jesus, the
Messiah. By faith and only by faith do we know it to be true. To God be the
glory, now and always. Amen.