Jesus the Lens—September 20, 2024

Jesus the Lens—September 20, 2024

“Then [Jesus] began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things’.” [Mark 8:31-33]

Maybe it’s not that there are only certain topics that count as “spiritual” things or “divine things.” Maybe it’s a question of perspective—of whether we see things from a crassly temporal perspective, or from the vantage point of the Reign of God. Maybe in the end, everything in heaven and earth matters to God, but it’s a question of the way we make sense of everything in heaven and earth. Maybe it’s a question of whether we will dare to let Jesus become the lens through which we see everything else, so that Jesus’ way of engaging the world will become our way, too.

I think that’s the way that we have to hear this snippet of conversation between Jesus and his disciples, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship. Simon Peter (God love him) has just blurted out his “eureka” moment realization about Jesus: “You are the Messiah!” and Jesus has immediately told the whole room full of disciples not to breathe a word of that to anybody. Jesus’ reason is not that Peter is wrong, exactly, but that everybody is going to mishear the title “Messiah” as some kind of conquering king, commanding general, or a militia leader looking to violently take up weapons against Rome and “take their country back for God” or some other such nonsense. And of course, Jesus has come to be precisely none of those. So he tells his disciples as much: he intends, not to go kill his enemies, but to love them; not to crucify his opponents, but to be crucified by them; not to launch a project of restoring national “greatness” (whatever that might mean) but to embody God’s Reign of justice, mercy, and peace.

That’s the part that doesn’t go over well. Jesus’ disciples are looking for someone to fight the empire on the empire’s terms, and someone who will promise them power, status, wealth, and glory. And instead, Jesus says that his way of being God’s anointed is to be the one who bears a cross rather than the one holding the hammer and nails.

It’s not that Jesus doesn’t care about this world or the people in it. And it’s not that Jesus is merely “neutral” on the subject of the Empire. So it’s not so much that Jesus doesn’t have opinions that would have counted as “political” in the first-century, but rather that Jesus’ perspective—his way of engaging those things—doesn’t translate into either “siding with the Empire” or “raising up and army to fight the Empire.” Jesus hasn’t come to replace Caesar’s brutal regime with a new brutal regime of his own, or to switching out conquering centurions from Rome with an army of his own making. He has come to resist that whole way of thinking, regardless of whose title is on the letterhead. Jesus’ perspective is divine, but he very much cares about the troubles, sufferings, and needs of human life. He’s just not willing to sell out or get suckered into using the world’s usual tolls for dealing with those troubles.

I think we need to be clear about that--Jesus does care about the whole mess of human life, including the ordinary and mundane routines, the issues of the marketplace and the public square, the concerns of politics and economics, and the everyday slings and arrows we deal with. Jesus doesn’t only care about getting souls “up to heaven,” or else he wouldn’t have spent any time or effort healing sickness, forgiving sinners, welcoming outcasts, or feeding the multitudes. Jesus cares about the way the widows of Judea were being exploited and pushed out of their homes, or the way xenophobia and prejudice had turned his own people into bigots against Samaritans (or, gasp, Gentiles!), or the way the Empire oppressed the peoples it conquered and compelled them to carry their gear or pay ridiculous tribute in “taxes.” Jesus knows about all of those ills in his world, and he clearly cares about the people who suffer in the face of any and all of them. But the critical difference is that he knows that starting a war against Rome would be a meaningless tool to solve those problems. He knows that conquering his adversaries (as people expected the Messiah to do) wasn’t a radical enough solution. 

It’s not that Jesus only cared about lofty spiritual ideals about disembodied souls floating in the sky by and by.  It's that he cares about everything—and he sees it from a divine perspective, rather than the limited human vantage point that reduces everything to a Game-of-Thrones style power play. Everything matters to Jesus—it’s just that his way of seeing and addressing the needs of the world come through self-giving love rather than some misguided need to look “tough,” “strong,” or like a “winner.” That's the difference between setting your mind on "human things" and setting it on "divine things." It's not that Jesus only cares about "churchy" topics; it's that Jesus sees everything through the lens of God's self-giving love.

To be a Christian, then, following on the way of Jesus, doesn't mean that we stop having opinions or thoughts about "secular" topics in favor of spending all our time and though on "religious" subjects.  It means that we come to see all of life through the perspective of Jesus. 

That's the invitation for us today: to see the world more and more completely from the vantage point Jesus gives us. What could that look like today?  What could that do to our vision?

Lord Jesus, set our minds on your perspective, and let us see the world through your eyes.