Solving for X, Where X = Messiah

The Cross is not an event long ago, we still are called to go with Jesus where suffering persists.

 

Jeremiah 15:15-21
Psalm 26:1-8
Romans 12:9-21
Matthew 16:21-28

©The Rev. Seth Olson 2023

Holy God, let my words be your words and when my words are not your words, let your people be wise enough to know the same. Amen.

Back in grade school, Algebra was my favorite math class. I lacked the gift of spatial imagination for Geometry. Trigonometry never quite agreed with my brain. Algebra though—that was my sweet spot! Theoretical enough to excite my inquisitive nature and straightforward enough not to make my head hurt. I still recall the strange pleasure of solving for “X” on some particularly difficult questions in the pressure moment of a final exam. You may be thinking, this guy is a nerd—and while you are quite right—algebraic thinking actually aides us in understanding today’s Gospel lesson. Stick with me, I promise I will make it easier—and maybe even a little more fun—than a math class.

Let’s start with a warmup question. 2 + X = 4. To solve this, we try to isolate the X on one side of the equation, and we do this by subtracting 2 from both sides. In this case we discover that X = 2. You probably did not need any algebraic training to tell you that that 2 + 2 = 4. Still, this way of thinking is a useful skill when we happen upon a problem like in today’s story from Matthew. It seems we have the end of an answer, but we are missing a component that leads us to that answer. To put it into the language of an algebra problem: Jesus + Suffering = X. To discover the answer we actually have to link back to last week’s Gospel lesson.

In the previous text, Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do you all say that I am?” Peter boldly replied, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.” Ding! Ding! Ding! Peter got it right, at least at first. As we turn the page over to today’s story, which picks up soon after Peter’s affirmation, we find that this disciple is taking Jesus aside saying, “God forbid [you undergo suffering or death]! This must never happen to you.” Jesus recoiled at his disciple like a venomous viper, “Get behind me Satan. You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” You may wonder, why was Jesus so angry? The answer lies in our algebra problem.

Jesus + Suffering = X. The X is already on one side of the equation by itself, so we don’t have to move it, but Peter was trying to remove something from the equation nonetheless—he wanted to take away suffering from Jesus. Regardless of the disciple’s protestation, Jesus knew he was not only to undergo suffering, but also death and eventually after three days resurrection. Jesus + Suffering + Death + Resurrection = X. Peter already solved the problem for us last week, and I bet you also know the answer. “X” equals Messiah. The trouble is that while Peter named Jesus as the Messiah, he also wanted Jesus to be a certain type of Messiah.

On the surface, the disciple wanted what was best for his teacher—not to undergo suffering. If the world had been different, if people at that time—human beings fascinated with power, pleasure, and privilege; people not unlike us—if those back then had supported Jesus, his teachings, and his identity as the Messiah, Peter’s desire would not have conflicted with Jesus’ mission!

We may even wonder, could God have done things differently or could Jesus’ Messiahship have gone in another direction? Of course, this is God we are talking about here! And yet, something different did not happen. We are made very good in the image of God, but we do not always live into this truth. In today’s story of Jesus, we see this in the powers of that day—religious, political, social, and otherwise—not accepting who Jesus was—the Son of God, born of a woman, the Savior who came to set us free. Without acceptance of this truth, God’s plan of salvation was not so easily achieved.

Jesus healed, fed, and taught things like, “God loves you. And if God loves you, you are now called to love God, to love your neighbor, and to love yourself,” but this was not enough. Instead, the way Jesus lived into his true identity, as the Messiah—the anointed one set apart to redeem the world—lead down a dangerously challenging path.

For God to show divine love for us human beings—no matter what—something else, some other variable, had to arise. This variable was so shocking that even Peter—the person who pegged Jesus as the Messiah—could not handle it. What was this variable? It was the most audacious, most profound, and most clear sign of God’s love for us. It was what Jesus pointed to in today’s Gospel lesson—the Cross.

The Cross was a hellacious torture device, designed not only to kill, but also to humiliate the convicted in the process. And yet, undergoing crucifixion was the way that God signified divine love for us, it was a way that God showed us that nothing can separate us from God. And, before you think this was simply something that Jesus did on our behalf long ago, know this: the Cross was, is, and will be not only the Way of Christ, but also our way. As the Daily Office puts it in the Collect for Fridays, “Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace” (The Book of Common Prayer, 99).

We are called to walk in this way now and always. As we do, I invite you to notice the shape of the cross anew. This device with intersecting beams was the way that God chose to intercede at a very particular time in human history. God Incarnate crashed into the humdrum, everyday-ness of our lives trying to heal, feed, and teach. How did we respond? We reacted as a species by betraying, torturing, and killing him. Jesus willingly faced this—emphatically emphasizing that nothing, not even our worst thoughts, feelings, actions, and behaviors—no, nothing will separate us from God’s divine love. Jesus’ arms extend from the hard wood of the cross into the past and into eternity. And so, God is with us always, but especially when we are persisting through hardship.

When our lives are difficult, when we are in the midst of suffering, when we stare death in the face, we do not do so alone. Our Messiah is with us always. Jesus was crucified once for all, but the love enacted on the Cross continues eternally. Thus, Jesus reigns on the throne of the Cross still whenever and wherever suffering persists.

Jesus is on the Cross with those in the wake of Hurricane Idalia, Maui wildfires, or Californian earthquakes. Jesus is on the Cross with all those who are facing hatred based upon their skin color, creed, sexual orientation, gender, or any other defining attribute. Jesus is on the Cross with all those who bear chronic pain, addiction, abuse, violence, or isolation. Jesus is on the Cross with all those who care for those in need and those who suffer for the sake of conscious.

Jesus is on the Cross with those who put themselves in harm’s way to protect the highest virtues and values of our country and our world. Jesus is on the Cross with the outcasts, the poor, the hungry, and the homeless. Jesus is on the Cross with you and me whenever we are hurt, broken, or abandoned.

Jesus is with us always, and this is supremely good news. And, there is more! This passage is not only about recognizing Jesus’ true identity as the Messiah. For once we accept this reality, we must see with clear eyes what Jesus’ Messiahship is. It is not being a warrior king—overpowering others, reigning on a golden throne, and coercing minions to follow arbitrary rules, which may have been Peter’s hope. Instead, Jesus was to be the Crucified Messiah. Meaning that God came to be with us not for power, prestige, or riches, but so that we might experience God’s grace—that is favor, undeserved and unearned. God gave us grace when we humans killed God Incarnate. This is a hard truth to confront, but as we do, we also have an opportunity to respond to this truth.

Jesus on earth walked with those who suffered, he now invites us to do the same. This is how we live into the truth that Jesus is our Messiah. We take up our crosses and move with him—going to the places where suffering lives. Offering healing and love to the hurting and pain of this world. It may be terrifying to enter these places of suffering both within and outside us. Still, to save our lives, we must give them away. In this paradoxical exchange we find something surprising—as we give away our lives to God, we receive new life in Christ. We are called by Christ to live in this brave space.

Jesus says to us, “If you want to become my followers, deny yourself and take up your cross and follow me.” May we claim Jesus as the Crucified Messiah who is with us always. May we be like Christ going where suffering persists. May we walk the way of the Cross—giving away our life, as we experience new life in Christ.

By the Numbers

In case you are wondering, my fantasy football team laid a big fat egg yesterday. Even though I meticulously researched my team and wound up with one of the best drafts according to projected point totals, my squad of players from around the National Football League just did not show up yesterday. Fortunately for me, the team I am playing performed even worse than me. Nothing is final quite yet, but I may make it out of week one with an unearned victory. Strangely enough, this light-hearted experience of leisurely fantasy competition has given me an insight about this coming Sunday’s Gospel lesson.

This week’s story of the Good News picks up midway through Matthew Chapter Eighteen. In the previous verses Jesus spoke about lost sheep, how to practice forgiveness in the Church, and now we get Peter’s question about how many times we ought to engage in reconciliation with someone before we give up on them. Peter thinks the over/under on times to forgive a fellow member of the church needs to be set at seven. Seven may not seem like a lot, but in those days it was not just a lucky number.

Seven during the time of Jesus had greater significance than it simply being a prime number or the number of days in a week. During this time, according to the New Annotated Oxford Bible, “Seven often symbolizes ‘completeness’”.[1] Thus, Peter was not just choosing an arbitrary number from thin air. Instead, this disciple wondered, “If someone in the church sins against me how much shall I forgive them? Shall I forgive them completely?” As we hear such a bold statement on the theme of reconciliation upon which this whole chapter in Matthew focuses, we would presume that Jesus would boisterously agree with complete forgiveness, and yet, that is not what happened.

For Jesus, forgiveness by the numbers—even great numbers—does not go far enough. Later in the week I intend to dive further into the parable of the unforgiving servant—which comes right after this—and how it challenges us to let forgiveness be our most common practice; however, just looking at Jesus’ moving Peter’s ideal of seven times to seventy-seven times gives me all I need to know about what we are called to do. Jesus invites us to practice forgiveness not only to completeness, but to the furthest extent of totality (yes, that is a tardy reference to the solar eclipse). While Mathematics does not typically excite me this much, I want to take one deeper look at the number Jesus cited.

If in the days of Jesus seven stood out as the number of fullness we would do well to notice what number he chose to expand Peter’s understanding. Instead of simply saying forty-nine, which is seven times seven, Jesus chose seventy-seven or complete-completeness. Seven in both columns of this two digit number challenged Peter to see that his view of total forgiveness needed not just a little more, but a whole column more worth of relational healing. Jesus’ challenge though may leave us feeling a bit dejected, as practically forgiving someone who has done us harm seven times seems extravagant—not to mention doing that another seventy times! So what do we do? Let me return to where I started.

My personality manifests as such that even a loss in a fictional game meant for fun among friends causes me to believe that I have fallen short of the mark. Said differently, I have a hard time even forgiving myself. Sometimes I mistakenly think that I can easily forgive someone else when I do not forgive myself. When I lose even at something silly like fantasy football and I have a hard time reconciling with myself, God gives me in this moment an opportunity to practice forgiveness. For me to learn what Jesus speaks here, I believe I must start with the practice of living as a forgiven person myself—like the unforgiving servant whom we hear about later in this lesson. If I cannot freely live into forgiveness first, then God’s grace seems a difficult gift to pass along to anyone else. However, Jesus calls us to faithfully jump into this tricky flow of forgiveness—reconciliation is our home.

Even if I lose not seven times but seventy-seven times, Jesus tells me not to hold these failures against myself because no matter how many times I fall short God always says to me (and to you too), “I love you. You are forgiven.” This eternally rings true not only in the small, stupid missteps like fantasy football losses, but in the gigantic, important failures, like when we harm friendships, marriages, and other relationships with children, grandchildren, other relatives, coworkers, neighbors, or strangers. As I continue to process this passage, I feel challenged to actually live into forgiveness—not just saying the words of the confession, but letting them take hold in my heart. For we are people who have been forgiven, now Jesus challenges us to take this healing and reconciliation into the world.

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[1] Cousland, J.R.C. "Matthew." In The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version 4th Edition, 1765. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

EUREKA

Audio of sermon can be found here: http://s3.amazonaws.com/dfc_attachments/public/documents/3201704/Olson_010715_Wed_Noon_Eureka.MP3

Have you ever had a “eureka moment”? You know what I am talking about, right? When something clicks into place for the first time. A time when something becomes clear that was not so clear just a moment ago. Where does it come from?

I got curious about the word itself. Eureka has become an English word, but originally it meant something a little different in the Greek. “I found it,” that’s what eureka means, and the great mathematician Archimedes gets credit for first saying it. Of course, the moment when he said it is more fascinating to me. Archimedes stepped into a bath tub when he realized that the water level rose as his body’s mass sunk beneath the surface, thus he discovered the law of water displacement. Only a mathematician would shout out loud, “I FOUND IT! EUREKA!” when discovering a law in the bathtub.

Have you ever had a eureka moment? A moment when something becomes apparent for the first time. Maybe it was when you first fell in love with your spouse. Perhaps it was that time when you first fell out of love with someone. A eureka moment could be when you happened upon your life’s great passion, or when you came to connect with God in a deeper way.

Yesterday in the Church we remembered a collective eureka moment, the day of Epiphany. Epiphany is another old word that means revelation or manifestation, and it is the time when we celebrate the Incarnate God in the person of Jesus being revealed as messiah to a people outside of his own tradition. This is our collective eureka moment. We most closely connect the Epiphany with the story of the Magi, three wise men from the East following a star, so that they could bestow gifts upon a child savior, but strangely enough today’s story is another Epiphany moment, another eureka!

A professor in seminary once wondered aloud about today’s gospel lesson. She said, “What does it say about John’s gospel account that the first of Jesus’ miracles that he writes down is turning water into wine at a wedding feast in Cana?” “Is he a drunk?” I thought. “Does John just really love wine? Maybe he’s a big proponent of preparing for wedding feasts?” Of course, what my professor was going for is that Our God is abundant and loves to celebrate with us. Hold onto those two revelations from this story for a moment because we need to explore what happens between Jesus and his mother to fully observe this epiphany.

The way that John records this story strikes me as peculiar, at least upon first reading. “There was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.” John needs for us to know that Mary is there. Then he tells us that Jesus and his disciples were there. “When the wine gave out,” the story continues with a twist in the plot introducing us to some drama, Mary says, “They have no wine.” At this moment I am struck that Mary takes on someone else’s problem. This is not her son’s wedding. She could have left this problem alone, but instead she turns to Jesus.

Now, I am not opposed to taking our problems to Jesus, but I do not think that is the eureka moment. This is not what we are seeking to find. Jesus responds to his mother almost coldly, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” If I talked to my dearest darling mother in this way, I would get at least a death stare if not worse. Yet, what Jesus does here is fascinating. He does not urgently panic about what to do, nor does he immediately coddle his mother or the stewards or the bride and groom. His mother also does not get defensive about how Jesus speaks to her, instead she simply says, “Do whatever he tells you.”

Mary has faith in her son that he will do the will of God. Jesus though is not a magic eraser, he’s not Mr. Fix-it, nor is he some magician who waves a wand over the problems of the world. That is not why God became incarnate.

Jesus was a Jewish man, but for him to ask the servants to fill the jars of purification with water was a big no-no. In this moment he reveals a true miracle: Yes, it is turning water into wine! Yes, it is producing enough wine to open up a Galilean winery! Yes, it is helping the celebration of two people coming together in marriage to continue late into the night! Yet, it is even more than this. Jesus transforms the rite of purification into a moment of celebration. Jesus initiates his ministry with this first miracle not to solve a problem that is not really a problem, but to show that He is God and our God is a God of plenty and festivity.

This is the eureka moment! We have found God and Our God is not just here for purification, but for celebration. Our God is not just here for fixing problems, but for responding to even our small concerns with great richness. And our response to this Epiphany should be following mother Mary’s words, “Do whatever he tells you.” In this time of year when we recognize God’s manifestation as Savior of all people let us observe God’s abundance, celebration, and presence all around us and even within us.

Wrestling with Parables

(This week's sermon is based on Genesis 28:10-19 and Matthew 13:24-30,36-43.)

In 11th grade math class, Algebra II, we received a new text book a few weeks into the school year. Mrs. Stevens, a young, energetic, and engaged Algebra teacher quickly learned that these text books made a big impact on her students’ homework grades. Overnight almost everyone was making near perfect scores. There was however a slight problem.

All of these paragon problem sets had no work out beside the answers. The sheets were clean except for the correct responses. Pretty quickly Mrs. Stevens asked us in class to give her one of our text books. She thumbed to the back of the hardcover, as the class sat breathlessly and anxiously watching.

“Of course,” she said almost under her breath, “the answers are in the back of your book.” Then turning to us, “Why didn’t any of you point that out?” Before anyone could respond to her question, she knew the answer. Her class wanted to get the right answer in whatever way we could. We did not care about doing the work, we were not interested in learning to solve algebraic equations, we just wanted to skip ahead and get the right answer.

This is the challenge that we face when we begin to read parables like the one from today’s gospel reading. We have the difficult word problem right in front of us, but all we want to do is skip ahead to the end. We want the correct answer without having to do the work. We want to know who is the sower, who are the servants, who are the weeds, and who is the wheat.

We can quickly thumb ahead in Matthew’s gospel account to read the answer key: the sower is the Son of Man, the field is the world, the good seed/the wheat are the children of the kingdom, the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy is in fact the devil, the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are the angels. Yet, in jumping ahead to hear what Jesus says to his disciples about this parable we miss the all-important middle step…doing the work.

Parables, like challenging math problems, require us to do work. I am not suggesting that we have to do work to get into heaven, this is after all the Protestant Episcopal Church of America, and we certainly believe that Christ Jesus’ redeeming work on the cross and his all-encompassing grace is the only thing that brings us into right relationship with God and into the Kingdom. No, the work I am referring to is interior work, work that opens us up to God’s calling, work that reveals our true selves in light of Christ. If we skip the middle step in these parables we miss this work.

Put another way, the moment we believe we know the meaning of a parable is the moment when it slips between our fingers, like squeezing Jell-O. Jesus’ answers at the end of today’s gospel give us a false confidence that we know what Jesus means in this parable. Now, it’s one thing to think I know what a parable is challenging me to do, but the trouble comes when I think that I know exactly what the parable is telling you to do also. It’s one thing to think we know what the parable means to us, but when we begin telling others what to do in light of this one text we wade into dangerous waters. We no longer listen to how God challenges us individually, and instead we have hijacked the gospel for our own ends.

So what do we do? Ignore the parables? Avoid them at all costs? Not engage these stories from Jesus? We might do better to be like the main character from today’s reading from Genesis.

Not too long after Jacob had his vision of the ladder, he spent an entire night wrestling with God or a messenger from God. At the end of this fight Jacob is left with a limp, a mark that reminds him of his struggle. He’s even given a new name, Israel, which means “He struggles with God.” This is how we can approach the parables, as wrestlers ready to engage, not as math students seeking easy solutions. So what happens when we wrestle with this parable?

What we hear when we listen is not practical farming advice. Like Evan said last week, Jesus would have been a terrible farmer. The weed in this parable, probably the bearded darnel weed, may look like wheat to the untrained eye, but to an experienced farmer the differences are easily seen. So if the weed could be detected by the servants, why not pluck it up? Jesus tells us about life in the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of God, not about how to keep a good garden.

In the Kingdom there are both weeds and wheat. They grow together. They aren’t separated. Good exists. Evil exists. We can look around and see someone who has all the right answers to the questions of life. Somehow this person got the right solutions in the back of the book of life. We can be so certain that they are wheat. We can see another who seems set on doing ill. We can, like the servants, be so sure that we know which the weed is, and which the wheat is. Yet, the Master urges us to wait.

The parable of the evil sower pushes us to think beyond practical farming practices into wondering not only how we define evil and good, but also how we live together as wheat and weed. We want so often to pluck out the evil ones, separate them from us, lock them away, so that they do not effect the good wheat. Yet, God lets the evil grow among the good. Why?
To test us? To make us angry? Because the devil put them there? I do not know why. What I do know is that our work is not to judge, not to fully comprehend the complexity of this parable, but to wrestle all the same with the Master.

We may want a simple answer to this parable. We might even think that we can skip ahead and find the key to unlocking this story, but that’s the thing about parables, right when we think we understand them they slip through our grasp. So do not skip ahead. Don’t rush to the back of the book. Don’t seek the easy answer. Instead wrestle with God and you like Jacob will be changed forever.