A God Who Is Willing to Wait--February 15, 2023

A God Who Is Willing to Wait--February 15, 2023

[Jesus said:] "So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift." [Matthew 5:23-24]

In my ever-growing list of reasons I love Jesus, here’s a new one… or maybe, one I had never thought about until now: Jesus takes the usual rules of the day and turns them inside out.

Like passing the buck. Jesus takes our conventional wisdom that it is smart to pass blame off to somebody else and just keep your head down hoping nobody will notice when you mess up, and he turns it on its head. Jesus would have us go even beyond Harry Truman’s famous, “The buck stops here,” to something even more radical… something like intentionally reaching for the “buck” and going out of our way to make things right with people, even when it means admitting we are the ones at fault.  That's the opposite of boasting--that's racing to own up to our failures and flaws, rather than bragging about our strengths and successes.  Because Jesus' kind of love is like that.

How radical is that? Seriously, it’s a hard enough thing to go to reconcile with someone else when you are the one who was wronged, often because we don’t want to give the other person the satisfaction of feeling let off the hook. Come on, admit it—sometimes you just want to leave the other person to twist in the wind a little bit, and to make them hold their breath before you consider forgiving them. Or maybe we decide, “I’ll think about putting this behind us… if they come to me first asking for forgiveness. But I need to see them with their tails between their legs first.” We have a hard time getting up the nerve to seek reconciliation when we are the ones in the more powerful position of being forgivers.

It’s even harder to imagine going out of our way to call attention to the fact that I am the one who messed up. Isn’t it? That means taking the risk of going to ask for forgiveness—and the risk of hearing the other person say, “no.” It means owning responsibility for things we would rather try and pass off on someone else or pretend aren’t wrong. It means the possibility that others will see me going to seek forgiveness and that I might lose face in their eyes, too.  Again, in a culture like ours where conventional wisdom says to attack your opponents and highlight their failures but never to admit when you were wrong, it is utterly upside-down that Jesus calls us to love people well by doing the opposite: to be the first to admit our wrongdoing and to seek to make things right.

But that is just what Jesus does. Jesus dares us to be the kind of people who break the cycle of passing the buck, and simply to go make amends, rather than playing the "what-about-ism" game where we lash out at the ones we don't like with, "Well, what about when YOU did that? What about when THEY said this?" Of course, Jesus knows us well enough to see that we do that as a tactic for avoiding having to face up to our failures. So he calls us out on it, and says, in effect, "You be the one to take the first step. You be the one to take the risk. You be the one who stops running away from responsibility and the reality of the past, and you be the one to face it."  That’s tough. Beautiful to imagine, if we could be such people of such honest love, but tough.

And then Jesus pushes further. Or at least he ups the ante. Jesus doesn’t just dare his followers to “be reconciled to your brother or sister” when you are the one who has something to apologize for. He tells us to do it before we even go to offer our gifts to God. Ooooh. That’s tougher still.

Think of what it means: we cannot separate our “vertical” relationship to God from our “horizontal” relationships with other people. Jesus will not let us. He has welded them together (or nailed them, if you like) into a cross, such that there is no way I can delude myself into thinking God can be bought off with offerings while I am a jerk to my neighbor. Love of God goes hand-in-glove with love of neighbor, and so if I have wronged my neighbor, I had better not pretend that I can fool God with an extra zero on my offering check while I continue to treat one of God’s children (whomever I have wronged) badly. If I remember—or realize—that someone else has a grudge against me, I should be the one to act, rather than waiting for an engraved invitation.  That's hard because at least when we give to God, we can tell ourselves we are being heroic--we think we have something to brag about.  When we have to postpone our acts of devotion to God in order to first reconcile with the people we have wronged, our over-inflated egos get punctured, and we see that we've got nothing to brag about, no matter how big the check in the offering plate is.

It's hard to hear Jesus himself say to us, "Hey, before you think of spending millions thinking you're helping God out or start a non-stop praise-and-worship-marathon, go and make things right with the people you've wronged and make those reparations first," because it's so easy to make our shows of piety about feeding our own ego, when Jesus wants to make us into embodiments of his love.  And to hear Jesus tell it, ours is a God who is willing to wait for us to do that--justice first, religious displays second.

Of course, Jesus also teaches us to be peacemakers from both sides of the equation. He tells Peter to forgive not just seven times, but seventy-seven times—and Jesus seems to be saying, too, that Peter had better be the one to go seek out the wronged party and offer the forgiveness, too. But now today, Jesus also tells us that when we are the ones who have wronged someone else, we had better set down whatever we are doing and go seek out the other person so that things can be put right. In Jesus’ divine genius, he sends both parties, the wronged and the perpetrator, running to each other, each seeking to get to the other to reconcile as quickly as possible. In your own life, whether you feel you are the victim or the guilty, you cannot control whether the other person will come running to you to make up, but from Jesus’ perspective, it doesn’t matter: wherever you are, you can be the one to make a peace offering. You can be the one to change the relationship.

I suppose it says something about God, too, that Jesus thinks God is patient and forgiving enough to wait while we go reconcile with someone else before we come back and give our offerings. God is not impatiently tapping a divine foot on the floor in frustration while we take the time to reconcile with the people we have wronged—in fact, Jesus says, God is perfectly willing to wait while we get things right with our neighbors, coworkers, family, and friends. God is big enough to let us attend to the other broken relationships in our lives before we bring our offerings. Why? Not because God is not important—but because Jesus knows that God isn’t impressed with our offerings in the first place. There’s no earning or buying or deserving with right relationship with God. Even on our best-behavior we are still saved by grace alone every day of the week. Delaying your offerings for a half-hour while you take the time to make things right with a friend will not make a difference in that.

So there it is. Jesus has flipped our old mental pictures of us and God upside down. Instead of “Hide your faults and failures from the people you have wronged, and maybe they won’t notice” alongside of “You have to go get right with God before you talk to anybody else,” Jesus says, “You be the one to take the first step to set things right with someone you have wronged—and go ahead even if your offering to God has to hit the pause button.” What a change. What a savior and Lord.

Kinda can’t help but love him for it, can you?

Lord Jesus, as you turn the tables on our old ways of thinking, give us the confidence in your grace and your love to risk seeking forgiveness from people we have wronged, and help us to be restored where we have let relationships become estranged.