A Question of Holding--April 6, 2026

A Question of Holding--April 6, 2026

"After the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, 'Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him. This is my message for you.' So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them and said, 'Greetings!' And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, 'Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me'." [Matthew 28:1-10]

It's funny what people run to grab when they are surprised.  Orat least, it is telling.

Take this scene, for example. It's the day of resurrection--in fact, the moment of the Big Reveal that the tomb is empty! And in the wake of that most world-shaking of surprises (literally--Matthew says there was an earthquake!), notice that two different groups respond in two different ways.

There are the soldiers--who shake with fear and fall to the ground when they see the wonder before them. And then there are the women--who are just as surprised at the news and then the presence of the risen Jesus. But the women don't reach for one another... or a tree to hide behind... or the guns in their purses. They reach for Jesus. That is kind of odd, but also exactly right--odd, because Jesus is the one who is startling them in the first place, but exactly right because he is the one who can ease their fears, too. These two women named Mary run to take hold of Jesus' feet, as Matthew tells it, and to them this is the most natural thing in the world they can do.

Funny, isn't it, how the same surprising turn of events makes one group of people (the women at the tomb) reach for Jesus and thereby find peace... and another group of people (the guards) have nothing to clutch but their pathetic, useless weapons out of paralyzing fear. I suppose like all Roman soldiers they have been trained to think that their swords and spears could solve any problem or make them feel big and tough... but they now realize in the actual moment that their weapons cannot do a thing to banish fear.

Isn't that funny--the ones in the Easter scene who are armed to the teeth and trained for shooting first (well, stabbing first) and asking questions second are the ones who fall down to the ground petrified with fear until they "became like dead men," and meanwhile in the very same turn of events, the ones who find their confidence, their hope, and their strength are the unarmed women of the scene. Maybe it is only in that moment when the angel speaks and the risen Jesus arrives that it becomes clear: a Roman sword, or any other weapon for that matter, can't give you any actual peace of mind in this life. And meanwhile, it's the empty hands of the women who are free to reach out for Jesus--and who find peace because they do.  The critical distinction between these two groups is what they reach for; this is a question of holding--what we hold onto when everything else gets shaken makes all the difference in the world.

And while we are drawing comparisons, notice, too, that it's only these women who have the courage to move when the scene is over. The guards are still traumatized and curled up in a ball on the ground after seeing the angelic messenger--they can't even get up to report back to their commanding officer that they've blown it and let the dead rabbi out of his grave. But the women--again, who had literally NOTHING to defend themselves with--are the ones who end up with the courage, not only to bear going to the tomb in the first place, to face down the guards in the second place, and to talk face to face with the angel who has made the trained soldiers wet their pants in the third place...but then beyond all that, the courage to go out and bring the news of the empty tomb to the disciples. As the old line puts it, if it weren't for women preachers (that is, for Mary and Mary, bringing the news on Easter morning), there would be no church or gospel!

Look at the immense difference that Jesus makes for us, ones who are in some way standing in a long line of continuity with those first women at the tomb. In the face of life-changing surprise and wonder, there are two kinds of responses: either the paralyzed cowardice of soldiers who have nothing to clutch but their impotent weapons, or the empty-handed courage of two women named Mary, who get all the resolve they need for a new mission by reaching out for the risen Jesus. Almost makes you feel sorry for those sad, pitiable guards.

So here's the question for the day: which are we? Which will each of us be in this day, in these aftershocks of Easter? Look--the world is going to startle you and catch you off guard. Life is going to surprise you, maybe even shock you. That's how it is, and there's no point in pretending it's otherwise. But when it happens--when you find your world shaken like an earthquake in the dim light of early morning--what will you reach for? What--or whom--will you turn to? And will you have empty hands able to take hold of real peace, or will they be too busy shaking as you fumble for your spear? Will those moments of shaking leave you collapsed and immobile, or will you find that Christ is speaking peace to you in the turmoil and sending you out on a mission? Will you and I let the news of the resurrection, and the presence of the Risen One, move us beyond the prison, the tomb, of fear?

Dear Jesus, thank you for the witness of real courage in women like Mary and Mary, and for offering us the same courage for our fearful lives into our empty hands, too.

The One Taking the Nails--April 3, 2026

 The One Taking the Nails--April 3, 2026

"Therefore God exalted him even more highly and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." (Philippians 2:9-11)

Jesus is what God looks like with a human face.  

That's the crux of this whole passage we've been looking at over these last several days, reflecting on the words many of us heard back on Sunday.  Jesus shows us fully what God is like--and not just in the moments of miraculous power, but in the moments of utter weakness and suffering love.  This is the truly scandalous--but utterly essential--claim of Christianity. We don't simply believe that Jesus shows us what God is like when he's walking on water or turning water into wine; Jesus reveals God most clearly when he is bleeding and dying on a cross.

That's really the gist underneath Paul's claim here that Jesus is given "the name that is above every name," and that "every knee" will bend and "every tongue" confess this name.  See, Paul isn't just waxing eloquent here--he's quoting from Isaiah 45:21-23, where the God of Israel, YHWH, declares that there is no other God and no other savior, and then that "to me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear."  Paul is deliberately claiming for Jesus the status that only belongs to the God of Israel, the God of all creation.  And he has just made the point in the immediately preceding verses that this Jesus emptied himself and laid down his life on a cross.  The point is clear: it is God who went to that cross.  It is God who goes all the way into death for our sake.  It is God whose life is laid down in order to redeem the world.  If you want to know what God is like, in other words, you find it most clearly and truly in the Crucified One, dying at the hands of the politically powerful and respectable religious people rather than killing them.  This is why Jesus is exalted and why his name is "above every name." Jesus has been showing us the face of God all along.  To say that Jesus is "exalted" isn't so much to say that God "rewarded" Jesus for doing a hard thing like dying and that resurrection is a sort of return on his investment, but rather that Jesus has been showing us all along that it was God who took the beatings, God who was mocked by the crowds and the soldiers, and God who bore the nails.  It was God, even, who cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

We who know this story know that come Sunday, death will not have gotten the last word and the tomb will be empty. But to be clear, it's not that Easter Sunday takes away or erases Good Friday--rather, the resurrection reveals that the cross is the place where God's victory already happened.  It is as Lesslie Newbigin put it: "The resurrection is not the reversal of a defeat but the proclamation of a victory. The King reigns from the tree. The reign of God has indeed come upon us, and its sign is not a golden throne but a wooden cross." To say that Jesus is exalted and given the name above every name is not to say that the cross is cancelled out but that it was God all along who was on it.  And that means, further, that any attempts to equate God with shows of brute force, of domination, of imperial coercion, and of inflicting violence on others are blasphemous.  God is the One being crucified, never the one doing the crucifying.  God is the One taking the nails, never the one holding the hammer.

That is vital for us to be clear about, because we are easily tempted to make just that mistake.  We are often tempted to point to the powerful and say, "This is what is God is like!" We are easily misled into conflating God with kings, emperors, potentates, and presidents, and to assume their high offices are evidence that they have been bestowed with divine favor.  Paul's point in his letter to the Philippians is the opposite--that it was always the Crucified One in whom God was fully present. It was never Caesar, no matter how much he told people he was divine.

Whatever else we take from the story of Jesus' Passion on this day, that much is clear.  The story of Good Friday is the story of the lengths God has been willing to go for our sake, because God didn't send someone else to do the suffering.  In Jesus, it has been God who died our death and who bore the worst we could do.  That is why Jesus' name is above all others. That is why he is the One we confess to be Lord.

All hail the one true and living God--the One nailed between thieves for the sake of the world.

All praise to you, Lord, for the depths of love that went to a cross for us all.

Letting Go of Our Leverage--April 2, 2026

Letting Go of Our Leverage--April 2, 2026

"And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death--even death on a cross." (Philippians 2:7b-8)

Jesus doesn't take advantage. Of anybody. Or anything.

Not even his own position... his own prerogatives... his own rights.

This reality is the heart of understanding not simply the story of Jesus' crucifixion, but the Gospel itself, the whole shootin' match, as it were, of the Christian story and the Jesus Way of Life. This is what it looks like to belong to the Found Family of Jesus' followers.  Jesus had the opportunity to stay safe and comfortable. Jesus had the "right" to keep himself protected and out of harm's way. Jesus had the authority--the actual, literal divine authority--to preserve himself at all costs. But Jesus does not. That is what makes him wonderful. That is what makes him worth following after.

This is, again, one of those places at which the way of Jesus (which, as Paul reminds us here in Philippians is always also the way of the cross) is radically at odds with the way of "business as usual." The conventional wisdom says that your rights, your position, and your interests are most important. The conventional wisdom says you must clutch them like grandma's pearls, protect them from some vague and shadowy "Them" out there who want to take your interests and your rights away from you, and you must never lay them down for someone else... or else you'll lose them forever! The conventional wisdom says that you have to value yourself and your group more than everybody else, because, after all they are all looking out after their own interests first, too. The conventional wisdom, therefore, says if you're smart, you'll leverage any situation you find yourself in to maximize what's best for you, and who cares what costs that means for anybody else! Step on them before they step on you--that's what everybody does! At least in the eyes of the conventional wisdom of the day.

But not Jesus.

Jesus' greatest strength and his boldest act of courage looks like the waiving of his "rights" and the forgoing of his privileges in order to lay down his life for us.

As Paul reminds us here, Jesus doesn't take advantage, even of what was theoretically his to exploit--not even divinity. And so, as you read through the Gospels, you'll notice that there is never a point when Jesus got the Sadducees in a corner and threatened that he and his followers might withhold their offerings for the Temple unless they would give him a prime spot on the Sanhedrin. (Pilate is the one trying to leverage his power and position over Jesus when he says, "Don't you know that I have the power to release you and power to crucify you?" and Jesus just won't play by those rules.) There is never a story in which Jesus scares people into paying attention by blurting out, "I'm gonna send ALL of you to hell!" and then casually backs down once their ears have pricked up to manipulate people into giving him something more, in the hopes that they might avoid hellfire. There is never a scene where Jesus threatens to send angel armies against those who oppose him or to call down fire from heaven on those who reject him--in fact, when his followers explicitly ask him for permission to do that, he flat out refuses and rebukes them for even suggesting it.  There is never a time where Jesus acts like a big jerk just to put the pressure on Simon and Andrew to commit to following him, and then relents to only acting like a medium-sized jerk in order to close the deal with them.

Jesus doesn't haggle, and Jesus doesn't exploit. Over anything.

Now, lest we say to ourselves, "Well, good for Jesus--that's why he's the Savior, and I'm not! This is one of those places where Jesus does something that we mere mortals cannot do--whew!" take note, boys and girls, that Paul the Apostle here sees this non-exploitative stance of Jesus as exactly something for us to pattern our own lives on. This whole passage from his letter to the Philippians starts, as we saw yesterday and heard this past Sunday, with Paul's admonition that the followers of Jesus not slide into the world's same old manipulative ways of taking advantage of others and leveraging situations for our own benefit at the expense of others. And then, again precisely to illustrate that point, Paul says, "Do the same thing you all saw and heard about in Jesus..." who didn't exploit or take advantage of his God-ness to stay safe, but put our needs first.

It's true that there are some ways we don't get to be like Jesus in this life. We don't get to curse fig trees into withered husks. We don't get to assume the power of calming storms by our voices or multiplying loaves just because we want a midnight snack. But in the deliberate choice not to exploit situations or other people--that is exactly the kind of thing that we are called to do, exactly because Jesus did it first.

There are going to be voices around us today who would advise us that it's "just common sense" that you have to look out for your own interests first in this life. They will say, convinced that they are being reasonable, that everybody looks out for themselves first, and that this is just "how it's done" in the adult world. They will say that you have to take advantage of the other guy when you can, and you have to project a tougher, stronger, more hard-line version of yourself to others, so that you don't look "weak" or like a "loser. " They will say you have to clutch onto what is yours, or else--or else someone might take it... or someone might try to walk all over you... or you might lose your leverage.

Do not buy their lies.

When those voices around us say things like, "Who on earth would ever be so foolish as NOT to look out for themselves first?" you and I will hear Paul's words ringing in our ears, and we will say simply, "Jesus--who didn't put his own interests first, but went to a cross."

And when they say, "You have to protect your own interests and defend your own rights at all costs, or else you'll lose them!" we will remember what Philippians 2 says, and we will answer, "But we are taught exactly to lay down our interests and rights for the sake of others, because that is what Jesus did for us."

And when they cry out that you have to get as much as you can from the other guy in this life, because the other guy is looking to leverage you already, too, you and I will say, "But the way of the cross means considering others as better than ourselves, just like Jesus didn't exploit what he could have exploited to preserve his own comfort."

See, the issue is not that the way of the cross is unclear or uncertain--we are perfectly clear on what the way of Jesus looks like, but we do not like it. And we look for any alternative voice to listen to that will let us rationalize to ourselves the old patterns of self-interest. Paul calls us on it and puts it plainly--if we are followers of Jesus, we are bound for the same Christ-like laying down of our own lives, rights, and interests that led him to an actual cross. We may not be called upon to be literally crucified, but we are called upon to lay our own interests and leverage down for the sake of others, regardless of who they are, regardless of whether it is easy or not.

While the voices around us may be shouting, "Us first! It's just common sense!" we will dare to answer, calmly through their noise, "Others first--just like Jesus did for us!" And then, as God grants us the courage, we will dare to live what we say.

Lord Jesus, pull us into your new motion, where we lay down our own interests to put others before our own.

Humanity Lessons--April 1, 2026

Humanity Lessons--April 1, 2026

"Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness." (Philippians 2:5-7)

I sometimes think that the hardest part of the Christian faith isn't the mind-boggling doctrine that Jesus reveals the very nature of God, but rather the uncomfortable truth that Jesus has to show us how to be human, too.

Divinity, after all, is mysterious and distant and infinite and eternal--we expect it to be beyond our paygrade. We assume that we would need some additional guidance from an expert to understand what God is like. But being human? That is literally our job. That is--or at least it should be--our bread and butter, our most basic fundamental proficiency. Being human should be, should be, right in our wheelhouse.

And yet, if we are really honest with ourselves, we'll admit that we are not terribly good at this thing called humanity, and we really do need someone to teach us collectively how to be fully what we were meant to be. We only need to watch the morning's news (not to mention even the briefest of surveys of history) to be reminded of our terrible inhumanity toward one another. We need, for lack of a better term, humanity lessons.

In addition to revealing what the very face of God is like, Jesus gives us the fullest sense of what it really means to be human. That's here at the core of these words from Paul's letter to the Philippians, words which Paul is likely quoting from an even earlier hymn source. Jesus shows us what it really means to be human. And if our way of being human runs counter to Jesus' way of being human, we are missing something important. That's why Paul can say so bluntly and directly, "Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus." In other words, "If you want to know what it looks like to be fully human, start living and thinking, speaking and acting, in ways that echo what we saw and know from Jesus." Jesus is the teacher of this course in humanity, even if we already think we are experts on the subject.  And if Jesus would not give his blessing on something (like, say, my greed, or your indifference toward your neighbor, or our endless wars), then doing those things inflicts damage to our own humanity.

These words, which many of us heard this past Sunday as part of worship, show us that at the heart of Jesus' way of being human is a love that puts others first, a love that isn't puffed up in arrogance or shriveled up in self-interest, but is alive and thriving in self-giving. Any time we give into "Me and My Group First" thinking, we are distorting and demeaning the fullness of humanity within us.  And for whatever else Jesus has done for us (and there is certainly more to be said about that), at the very least Jesus has come to recover our lost humanity for us.

So what does Jesus have to show us about our own humanity? What do we have to learn about how to be fully, truly human? When Paul thinks about it, he puts it in simple terms: others first. Jesus shows us how to be fully human, not with elaborate displays of religiosity, feats of physical strength, intellectual argumentation, or silent meditation, but in the actual lived practice of putting others' interests before our own. Paul doesn't see this as a "special" quality of Jesus, reserved only for messiahs or prophets, but basic humanity for all, and essential for all of us in how to truly be human. To be human as God created us is to be oriented beyond just "me" and "my rights" or "me-and-my-comfort" or "me-and-my-wallet," to love others.

That means, too, that in the moments and situations where we refuse to consider the interests of others as more important than our own, we will be failing to be fully ourselves, fully human. Where we shout loudly, "Me and My Group First," we are not modeling true greatness at all, but in fact we are revealing how empty and deficient our humanity is. We were not made to look out simply for ourselves. We were not made to do it, as the old song puts it, "my way." We were made for putting others first, as they are also made for doing the same for us in a living, flowing, vital community.

This is a really important point to be clear about, because sometimes we religious folk seem to think that we are supposed to put others first as a way of impressing God or earning ourselves some "heaven points." You'll hear folks sometimes talk about being good or being selfless in order to get themselves a "crown" in heaven. But that's not at all how Paul sees it. The reason to care for the interests of others is not as a means toward some other reward. The reason to put others first is not so that they'll "owe" us and one day we'll be able to cash in on favors. We are called to put the interests of others before our own because that is how Jesus shows us how to be human. To put myself first--my wants, my security, my personal wish-list--misses the point of what we are made to be.

Jesus comes into human history, as human as you and me, not only to bring us face to face with God, but to give us at last a clear picture of ourselves--to show us what it means to be really and fully human. He doesn't come with an angry look and a furrowed brow to say that if we aren't well-behaved enough we will lose our heaven points and get kicked out of the club--he comes to show us what we were made to be, how we were made to give ourselves away, and how we were made for being filled back up again by the living God in one great, never-ending flow.

One of the things the New Testament writers are absolutely clear on is that Jesus is what it looks like for God to take on humanity. That is what makes the Good News possible--that God has entered into our existence, that God has embraced us as we are, and that God goes all the way with us even to human death on a cross to save us. And at the same time, that also means that Jesus shows us what being human was really all about all along, and he offers us the way to be pulled out of our self-centered, Me-First misery, to be fully what we were meant to be all along.

Listen today for the voice of Jesus. Look today for the way of Jesus. In the ways Jesus put others before his own needs and interests, Jesus hasn't done anything beyond our ability--in fact, he is showing us precisely what we were meant for in the first place. He is teaching us how to human... by embodying for us how to love.

Lord Jesus, you who came among us as one of us, give us the ability to live in the freedom of being for others, and to find what we were meant to be all along.

A God We Can Count On--March 31, 2026

A God We Can Count On--March 31, 2026

    "The Lord God helps me;

        therefore I have not been disgraced;
  therefore I have set my face like flint,
  and I know that I shall not be put to shame;
  he who vindicates me is near.
 Who will contend with me?
  Let us stand in court together.
 Who are my adversaries?
  Let them confront me.
 It is the Lord God who helps me;
  who will declare me guilty?" (Isaiah 50:7-9a)

The thing that keeps Jesus on the path that he knows is headed to a cross is his utter confidence that he remains in God's hands.  And unlike us so often, who keep thinking we have to take matters into our own hands, Jesus knows that he can count on the One he calls "Father" to put things right, to vindicate him, and to raise him up.  It is precisely that utter assurance in God--which is really what faith is, after all--that enables Jesus to give himself away all the way to death.  

Jesus knows it's not up to him to prevent his own death, to destroy his enemies, or to come out looking like a "winner" against Pilate and the Religious Leaders by sundown on Friday. It is simply his to be faithful.  And the God to whom he is faithful will be in charge of putting things right come Sunday.  Because Jesus knows he can count on the living God, he can be wholly focused on facing the hostile forces around him in a way that fits with God's character--which is to say, with love for enemies, with goodness instead of evil, and with mercy rather than cruelty. And this turns out to be the same for us as well.

That's part of what I think we can hear in these words from Isaiah 50, continuing the passage we heard yesterday and which many of us heard back on Sunday. While these words were written centuries before Jesus' last week in Jerusalem, they give us a way of understanding how Jesus faces the events of that first Holy Week.  As we saw yesterday, the prophet spoke of a non-violent response in the face of evil and insult--committing to be faithful to the message God had given even when it was met with violence and mockery.  And then today, we can see in the subsequent verses how the one speaking is able to keep on that path of self-giving love without being goaded into sinking to the opponents' level and answering their evil with evil of his own.  The thing that keeps him on course is his confidence that even when the powers of the day do their worst, he remains in God's hands--and therefore, he can simply focus on carrying out his God-given mission.  Because the prophetic voice in Isaiah 50 knows that God will vindicate him, he doesn't have to give in to the temptation to resort to the tactics of his attackers because they look more "successful" or "effective."

And of course, that's precisely how this week unfolds for Jesus.  There are multiple times where Jesus points out that he could use the same violence and rottenness that the empire and the riled-up lynch-mob have been using on him, but he is called not to play by their rules.  When they come to arrest him in the garden, he points out that they have come with swords and clubs but that he will use no such weapons to fight back against them--even stopping Peter when he starts swinging a sword to try to protect Jesus. "Those who live by the sword will die by the sword," he says in one gospel's retelling.  And in another, he heals the ear of the man whose ear Peter has just cut off.  He additionally notes that he has the authority to call "twelve legions of angels" to his aid if he had chosen to, but that this isn't the way God has called him to fulfill his mission.  Over and over again in the course of Jesus' final confrontations with the powers of the day, he remains committed to the message and mission he has been given, including his refusal to fight evil with evil or violence with violence. And he commands his followers to the same commitment as well: forbidding the disciples to attack the lynch-mob or the religious police back, and disarming them in the garden.  

At no point in any of the Holy Week storytelling does Jesus say he needs his followers to go into battle to defend him or advance his interests, just as he had taught throughout his ministry that God's Reign calls for love toward enemies. Jesus will never endorse killing in his name, no matter how many times throughout history people have blasphemously invoked his name to bless their wars. That is possible because Jesus actually trusts that God will accomplish the necessary vindication, and on God's terms rather than anybody else's.  That confidence allows Jesus to go all the way to the cross, even though the powers of the day will be bragging that they have defeated and destroyed him. Jesus entrusts himself to the God who raises the dead, and that allows him not to give in to resorting to evil's tactics.

For a lot of my life, I've heard people talk about how important it is for us as Christians to believe that Jesus rose from the dead at Easter.  And that's certainly true.  But I think even more vital before we get to talking about OUR belief in Jesus' resurrection is that Jesus seems to have been so convinced that God was not only able, but willing, to raise him from the dead that he was able to walk the road to the cross without needing to fight back in kind or destroy his enemies. He really did believe that he could trust God to both redeem him and to vindicate him, and that allowed him to face down the powers of death with courage and conviction.  And as Easter Sunday assures us, the God in whom Jesus put his trust turns out to have been trustworthy all along.  The empty tomb insists that we have a God we can count on.

That is the kind of trust we are called into as well. How do you and I answer the question, "Can we count on God?" And how do we answer it, not merely in the abstract or the hypothetical, but in our actual choices and commitments? Can we dare to believe that God really does have us in a sure and certain grip, to the point of no longer believing we have to take matters into our own hands?  Can we act as though God really will set things right, no matter what the powers of evil do?  Can we trust that God will hold us even through death, so that we don't have to sell out our faithfulness to the way of Jesus out of fear?

That's what the whole life of discipleship really is--learning to trust God so fully and completely that we can walk the same path as Jesus.  But if we are walking on his path, then he is never far from us, and we are never--never--left to our own devices.

That is good news.

Lord Jesus, enable us to trust as you trust, so that we can be as brave and faithful as you are, too.

God on the Cross--March 30, 2026

God on the Cross--March 30, 2026

"The Lord God has given me a trained tongue,
       that I may know how to sustain
  the weary with a word.
 Morning by morning he wakens,
  wakens my ear
  to listen as those who are taught.
The Lord God has opened my ear,
  and I was not rebellious;
  I did not turn backward.
I gave my back to those who struck me
  and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard;
 I did not hide my face
  from insult and spitting." (Isaiah 50:4-6)

In the end, the way God defeats the powers of evil is not to play at their own game--using the tactics, the cruelty, and the violence of those powers in the name of fighting them.  No, in the end, God's way of overcoming evil is to endure its worst attacks and respond with good. 

That may be difficult for us to hear--and even harder for us to practice in our own lives--but it is definitely what prophets like Isaiah had come to understand, and certainly what Jesus embodies.  The way of God is ultimately to exhaust evil of its ammunition, to outlast its fury, and to refuse to retaliate in kind, rather than to perpetuate its rottenness. God--and God's Chosen One--will not succumb to becoming monstrous in the name of fighting monsters.

These verses come from a reading that many of us heard in worship this past Sunday on the celebration of Palm Sunday, and I'll admit that they don't seem particularly cheery.  Basically, the voice of the one speaking says he has been trained by God to listen for God's message and then to speak it for those who are "weary," and that this faithful serving has landed him in trouble.  Despite his obedient listening to God (or maybe because of it), he has become the target of enemies who do him harm, both in physical assault and cruel insult.  The prophet may be thinking of his own rejection by unwilling listeners, including the powerbrokers like the king who regularly lashed out against God's messengers. Or he may be looking forward to some person coming in the future--we often group this passage from Isaiah among the so-called "Servant Songs" which describe a figure who would be chosen or anointed (Hebrew "messiah") by God to serve God's purposes precisely through innocent suffering rather than violent retaliation. It is also possible, since this is all poetry, that the author intends to allow both interpretations to stand at the same time.  Maybe the point is precisely that: no matter the specific person is that God is working through, God's chosen way of dealing with evil is with good, God's intended way of responding to cruelty is with compassion, and God's strategy for answering violence is with persistent self-giving love.  The prophet may have felt that call in the way he responded to hostile opponents in his time, just as he may have envisioned God's Chosen One doing the same in a new way some day in the future, just as he may also direct us to the same kind of non-retaliatory love in response to the evil in our own lives and world today.

If that's anywhere close to being in the right ballpark, then this passage's imagery of not running away (or hitting back) in response to those who lobbed insults and spitting is not just meant as a one-time quirky outlier, but a pattern for how we respond to violence and evil in our own day and time.  In the face of such rottenness, the Chosen One of God doesn't say, "We've got to fight fire with fire--we've gotta GET them before they GET us!"  Being God's peculiar people in the world will mean that we make the conscious, intentional choice not to answer evil with more evil, or violence with more violence, or cruelty with more cruelty. Isaiah 50 seems to be telling us that our way of serving God's purposes might look foolish to the world or naively weak in the eyes of "conventional wisdom," but this is in fact what God is training us for.  Our way of dealing with the meanness, violence, and rottenness in the world is to listen for God's message, to faithfully tell it to the world despite the costs, and to commit to answering evil with good when we meet with hostility.  This is our witness to the world, and this is our way of pointing to God's counter-cultural work in the world.  Our way of being "holy" is ultimately our refusal to use the world's tactics of petty insult, cruel hostility, and brutal violence for our own benefit, because we have seen the alternative in the way God's Chosen One responds to the evil in the world. The prophet of Isaiah 50 might not have known the name Jesus, but we see the connections between his vision and the way of the Crucified One who also taught us to love our enemies and not to answer evil with more evil. And once we see the common thread through the centuries between Isaiah 50 and the way of Jesus, we know, too, that there is no way we can ever designate a war as "holy" or claim God's blessing on the same kind of cruelty and violence that the world uses.

As we enter again into the story of Holy Week and the brutality inflicted on Jesus, it is worth remembering that the mere fact of suffering and pain are not what make this week "holy." It is that Jesus embodies God's holy otherness by enduring suffering rather than inflicting it on others--even in the name of a "righteous cause." The cross is not beautiful to Christians merely because it involved an immense amount of pain inflicted on the crucified one; rather it is because we have come to recognize that God is the One on the cross, and that God's way of dealing with the world's hateful evil and cruel violence is to absorb and endure it rather than to turn it back on us in kind.  These words from the prophet in Isaiah 50 train us to see that the One who "gave his back to those who struck him," the same One who pled for forgiveness for his executioners as he bled out from the cross, is the Creator of the universe--and this is God's way of healing the wounds of the world. 

That is how God defeats evil--and that is the way we are called to share in as well, if we dare to be servants in God's purposes in the world, too.

Do we dare?

Lord Jesus, train us to respond to evil in the world with your kind of self-giving suffering love; keep us from becoming monstrous in the name of fighting monsters.

Laid Beside Lazarus--March 27, 2026

Laid Beside Lazarus--March 27, 2026

"Jesus said, 'Take away the stone.' Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, 'Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.' Jesus said to her, 'Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?' So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, 'Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may know that you sent me.' When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, 'Lazarus, come out!' The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to him, 'Unbind him, and let him go'." (John 11:39-44)

Nobody was there in that instant at the dawn of creation when God first said, "Let there be light," to be able to report on how it felt--but I bet it was a lot like this. 

Jesus calls Lazarus back to life in very much the same manner as the voice of God calling creation into existence, each thing by its own name, with the kind of authority that makes something leap out of nothing. And at that moment "in the beginning," the nothingness does something very surprising by producing "something" where there had been only emptiness before, like the hollow darkness of a tomb. And yet it is also the most natural thing in the world for the "something" to answer the creative voice of God calling it into existence. The light, the sea, the land, the plants, and the animals--they all respond to God's summons freely, and yet they cannot bring themselves into existence apart from God calling them into being first. Each creature is unable to come into being on its own, but with the voice of God, all things effortlessly come into being to be precisely what they are meant to be. That is to say, there is no point in creation at which God calls oceans into existence and only a mud puddle appears, or where God intends to create whales but can only muster guppies.  When God speaks, the creating Word of God is simultaneously so authoritative and gentle that the world comes into being with perfect joy and freedom, while also being utterly dependent on the God who is doing the calling. The same thing is true when Jesus calls Lazarus back to life--and when Jesus calls to us, too.

I think this is one of the most important--but also most difficult--implications of this whole story which we've been reflecting on throughout this past week and last Sunday. This story isn't simply about proving that Jesus theoretically "has the power" to resuscitate the dead, or telling us about a stand-alone "one-off" miracle from twenty centuries ago.  This story compels us to see that each one of us, on our own, is Lazarus--completely dependent on God's creative and powerful word that brings us to life.  This is the way the New Testament often talks about the sinful human condition apart from God--not that we are spiritually "sick" and need Jesus to come along and give us a dose of divine medicine once we are clever enough to ask for it, but rather that we are dead and in the grave on our own and not even aware of our need for someone to raise us to life.  Our journey of faith doesn't start with us being smart enough to ask Jesus into our hearts or pious enough to give our lives to the Lord; it begins with Jesus calling to us like he did at the mouth of the tomb and waking us back to life when we couldn't do a thing on our own.

If that's uncomfortably humbling, well, I think that's the price of resurrection: we have to admit that we can't accomplish it by our own effort or even ask for it first.  Jesus has to call us into life the same way that God has to call the light into being in the beginning at creation.  And, again, like at the creation story, when Jesus calls our name, we cannot help but respond and come to life, like it is the most natural and free thing in the world for us to do--because it is.  But our coming to life, like the light coming out of darkness, is only possible because Jesus calls us first.  On our own, we'll never ask, initiate, or achieve new life, because we have been laid beside Lazarus in the same grave.  We are wholly dependent on a God who is willing to take the first step, to call us out onto the dance floor while we are still bashful wallflowers up against the bleachers, and to call us into motion by name when we are frozen stiff.  Jesus shows us, blessedly, that it turns out this is precisely the God we have--or rather, the God who has us.

So let this put to rest all the variations of popular religion that turn the gospel into something we must accomplish, or at least must initiate on our own, in order to get into God's good graces.  The story of Lazarus--which turns out to be our story as well--insists that God isn't waiting for us to make the first move, because we can't.  Like Lazarus, we are in need of more than just a little encouragement to keep going on the spiritual path we have already started on. We are in need of being called back to life.  Like the light before God speaks, "Let there be," we are not able to bring ourselves into existence or into salvation, but depend completely on the same God who calls us freely into life.  

Maybe faith, then, is less about figuring out the right answers on a theology exam in order to secure our names on the Heavenly Honor Roll list, and more about responding to the voice that calls us by name, the same way that voice first called creation into existence and then called to a dead man beside a rolled-away stone, "Lazarus, come out." Maybe faith is about becoming more and more fully alive and more and more completely what God has made us to be.  And maybe we could even say that when we obey the voice of Jesus who calls us up out of our graves, it is not drudgery the way we often think of "obedience" but the most joyful and free thing we can be.

Today, do you hear the voice calling us already?  He's there--just at the door. He is calling you and me, and all of us, by name.  Can you hear it? "Come out."  What can we do, but answer his call?

Lord Jesus call us to life again today, and let your voice be strong enough to enable us to respond.