When in Rome...

“All God’s people here send you greetings, especially those who belong to Caesar’s household.”

Philippians 4:22

Jesus used one of His most glowing public compliments about a foreign, pagan officer of the army that controlled His homeland as an invading oppressor. Take a second to let that sink in. We may all be familiar with the passage in Matthew chapter 8, but this was an incredibly offensive and shocking thing for everyone who first heard it. You see, Jesus never once praised the faith of Israel’s high priest or any of the ruling class of scribes or Pharisees. He didn’t applaud any synagogue rulers or rabbis. In the story of the Centurion, Jesus’ rousing chorus of “For he’s a jolly good fellow” was reserved for a person almost every one of God’s people would have considered automatically canceled for being an unclean, illegal alien, utterly exempt from God’s blessing. Jesus didn’t cancel him, though. He gave the Roman Centurion a standing ovation the likes of which He never gave anyone else.

But that’s not all. The Lord had an even more surprising thing to say about God’s favor and the people we don’t always include in the guest list. He declared that when it’s all said and done, there will be people seated at the table enjoying the Heavenly feast who were always treated as outsiders down here, while many of the folks who assumed they were God’s favorites wouldn’t even make it through security. It is extremely difficult to understand how infuriating and unpatriotic these words of Jesus would have felt to almost everyone who heard them. Jesus didn’t care one bit about that. He was and is building a kingdom that obliterates every national, tribal, or cultural boundary humans have invented. Jesus is rescuing people from themselves and adopting them into His beautiful family from every tongue, tribe, people, and nation.

The politics of Jesus are hard for most people to understand, but that is really an emotional issue because His politics aren’t complicated at all. Modern American Christians divide up into teams with jerseys. We stand with our side in loyalty while the folks wearing the other team’s jersey are our worst enemies. We talk about the political decisions of the other side as being the most dangerous threat to the continued existence of our very civilization. Well, that is all just a bunch of nonsense - the result of our outlandish pride run riot. Psalm 2 says “The One enthroned in Heaven laughs” at all of this absurdity. It says that the Promised King is going to rule all of reality as His own private possession. He will run the whole show. The Psalm says the Messiah will inherit all of the nations and when He does, He’s not keeping them around. Enjoy the Olympics while you can. We won’t have those medal ceremonies in the sweet by and by. Psalm 2 says Jesus will break the nations with an iron scepter and dash them to pieces like pottery. You see, people go to Heaven. Nations do not.

One of the things we sometimes forget when we read the New Testament is that every single scene is happening against the background of the Roman Empire. The most powerful human force the world had ever known up to that point was the Roman army. Jesus’ life on earth as one of us begins with the story of Roman taxation. His life ends on a Roman cross at the washed hands of a Roman governor. The fledgling church is finding its feet in the shadows of Roman power. Peter and Paul die in Rome. If you could send a drone back in time to the first century anywhere in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, you would have footage of a world utterly dominated by Roman power and yet, I can read the New Testament and sometimes forget they’re even there. Jesus didn’t fight with the Romans, He loved them and reached them and even saved some of them. Paul didn’t resist the Romans, he preached the Gospel to them and welcomed them into the family. If you love Jesus, you are a citizen of the Kingdom of God first and foremost. Every other citizenship you hold is less significant and has an expiration date. There is no human identifier or division line that should keep you from loving, praying for and welcoming any and all people into the family of God. In other words, when in Rome, reach the Romans till we all become children of God.

It's Go Time

“ ...the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world.”

Revelation 13:8

Jesus healed a lot of people during His ministry. Sometimes His opponents put Him up to it. Sometimes the suffering person asked for it. Sometimes a great ocean of resistance was crossed by a courageous coordination of faith and desperation and Jesus responded with compassion and power. But sometimes, He acted all on His own without any prompt or plea. In Luke 13, Jesus healed a woman who had been bent over double for eighteen years. She didn’t ask for help that day. She didn’t show up for worship hoping to be healed. She simply did what she did every Saturday - she went to honor God and lo and behold everything changed.

Luke tells us this woman couldn’t stand up straight, she couldn’t look anyone in the eye. She was like a human right angle, frozen in a living grovel, staring at the ground. She was effectively cut off from community, friendship and love. Can you imagine going months without looking anyone in the eyes? What would you do if you couldn’t meet anyone for coffee, accept a warm hug, or go one a walk with your best friend for eighteen years? That’s the entire lifespan of a senior in high school. She was excluded, unknown, invisible, and faceless for almost two decades.

One thing I find really interesting about this scene in Luke’s Gospel is that no one tells Jesus her story, and He doesn’t ask any questions to figure out her biographical details. In fact, it’s the complete opposite. Jesus tells everyone else her story. He already knows it. He enters the scene already thoroughly aware of her history and deeply concerned with her plight. It reminds me of the way He already knew everything about Zacchaeus and Nathanael. He knew the stories of the woman caught in adultery and the woman who anointed His feet in the home of the Pharisee. He read the minds of the men who judged Him when He publicly forgave the paralytic and He knew how many times the woman at the well had been married even though they never met until that day in Sychar. Jesus was and is Almighty God the Son. He has always existed. He was the Agent of creation. The Apostle John says without Him, nothing would exist. When Jesus asked questions, it wasn’t because He needed information. It was always part of the unique and beautiful way He loves to work in concert with us. The questions of Jesus draw us into engagement and coordination with His loving actions. His questions weren’t a necessity, but rather just a part of His style.

When Jesus healed the woman bent double in Luke 13, no one asked for His help. On that Sabbath day, He stepped into the synagogue and took over. He said she had been bound up in suffering for “eighteen long years”. This scene took place after the transfiguration, which means it was within the last six months of Jesus’ ministry. That would make Jesus around thirty three years old, which means this poor woman’s affliction began when Jesus was around fifteen. Jesus was in Nazareth when He was fifteen. He was working in the carpenter’s shop in those days. He had already celebrated His bar mitzvah. What were those tender hands working on the day this woman first suffered? Did the teenage carpenter tremble a little? As her back was bending and growing painfully stiff, His enormous heart was moving forward toward the day He would finally close up the carpenter shop for the last time, leave home and begin His journey toward the cross. Part of that journey included this day in the synagogue when He placed His hands on her and she stood up straight, praising God.

Jesus the Messiah was born to die. Hebrews 10 says the baby Jesus was quoting Psalm 40 in His infant mind and heart, somehow miraculously knowing His mission even in the manger. He came here to give His life so that He could undo all the world’s wrong and heal every hurt. All suffering had a start time and all pain has an expiration date. There is a day coming where He will wipe every tear from every eye. Revelation 13 talks about the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world. He sees the invisible, welcomes the rejected, moves toward the runaways, and holds the helpless. I can’t help but think about the excited focus Jesus experienced when He woke up the day He went to the synagogue to heal that dear woman. He’s not done yet. Jesus is always at work. As long as there is a heart that’s hurting, it’s go time.

PUNCTUATION

“We must do the works of Him who sent me”

John 9:4

Jesus healed a man who was born blind. What an incredible miracle! He gave light and color and perspective to a man who had never seen wildflowers, waterfalls, his best friend’s smile or his own mother’s face! He didn’t have a progressive disease that gradually took away his sight. He wasn’t stricken blind in some freak injury. He had never seen at all in his entire life and for the disciples of Jesus, a life like that posed a deep theological question: Who was to blame? Jesus answered their question in such a cool way, but His answer is fairly easy to completely misunderstand and it is worth digging in a little deeper - especially into the original language exact punctuation of our translations.

When you read John 9:3-4 in English, there seems to be something funky and fairly cutthroat about the response of Jesus about the plight of the blind man. It seems at first that Jesus is telling His disciples that this poor man was subject to an entire life with no sight just so Jesus could swoop in and be the hero of the moment, saving the day. When you read it, it’s as if Jesus needed a stage to show what He could do, so in order to set that up, this poor man had to suffer through an entire life of sightless struggle. Wow. Check it out for yourself:

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. As long as it is day, we must do the works of Him who sent me.” (NIV)

Pretty cut and dry, right? Well, not really. Sometimes translations can be incredibly interpretive. In other words, the translators get as close as they can, but sometimes they let their own preferences of meaning come through in the English words they choose. For instance, in this translation, they simply added the words, “this happened so that” into the verse when they translated it. That idea is not in the original Greek at all. Not only that, but the Greek of the New Testament had absolutely no punctuation. In fact, it had no lower-case letters or paragraph indentions or even spaces between words! The entire original Gospel of John manuscripts looked like a 30 page unbroken block of capital letters. John 9:3-4 in our words (without the added stuff) would have looked something like this:

NEITHERTHISMANNORHISPARENTSSINNEDBUTTHATTHEWORKSOFGODMIGHTBEDISPLAYEDINHIMASLONGASITISDAYWEMUSTDOTHEWORKSOFHIMWHOSENTME

Whoa. Okay. So, when we translate that, we have work to do. We not only have to change Greek words to English equivalents, but we have to figure out where to put the punctuation. Greek scholars will tell you that the only way to decide which punctuation to use comes down to context, meaning and which rendering of the verses lines up with our doctrine best. In other words, what do we know about Jesus and which version sounds more like something He would really say? So, if we change the punctuation, what happens to these verses? Well, try this on and see how it reads:

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned. (stop) But that the works of God might be displayed in Him, as long as it is day, we must do the works of Him who sent me.”

Do you see the difference? Do you feel it as you read it? This version of the punctuation isn’t saying a guy had to suffer a sightess life so Jesus could show up all of a sudden and be the hero of the day. This version is saying, “The world is complicated and broken and you can’t just assign blame for suffering, but God wants to get to work in the business of reducing and relieving pain. Let’s join God and see if we can help this poor man.” Now that’s the Jesus I know. He doesn’t make people live through pain so that He can show off. He knows life is hard in a messed up world and His compassionate heart wants to roll up His sleeves and get down to helping the hurting. Let’s join Him.

TWELVE

“Immediately the girl stood up and began to walk around (she was twelve years old).”

Mark 5:42

Today we talked about “the woman who touched” in Mark 5 - about how she pushed through her pain, poverty, public disgrace, private prison and progressive death sentence to carry out a wild plan: put on on a costume, sneak through the crowd on Main Street in Capernaum, get close enough to Jesus to grab the tassel on His prayer shawl - because maybe, just maybe, His power would be contagious like everyone thought her problem was.

And it worked! She was healed and what’s more, Jesus called her his daughter. It was beautiful and filled with hope for all of us who wear our costumes to cover up our own problems.

But wait! There’s something super cool we didn’t get to - a number. Specifically, the number 12.

The story starts with Jairus - a rich, important, well-connected man who asked for Jesus’ help. Turns out he had a daughter at home who was so sick she was dying. He begged Jesus to come to his house and heal her. Jesus said yes and the excited crowd made their way to Jairus’ place.

The problem was that at a certain point, Jesus stopped. He paused. He wanted to know who touched Him. Can you imagine what Jairus was feeling in that moment? If I was the dad of a dying little girl, I would be furious! I would be frustrated, confused and filled with anxiety. He had to be thinking, “Who cares who touched you! We have to GO. We should have already been there! Don’t stop. Don’t pause. Let’s move!” But Jesus did stop and pause and He had a whole public conversation with this woman who had been suffering and was now healed because of her gutsy gamble of grabbing Jesus’ garment.

I know what it’s like to be frustrated with Jesus and His timing. Do you? I know what it’s like to wish Jesus acted faster and more along the lines of your personal desires. But this scene was actually really important for Jairus. I don’t know for sure, but it’s possible that in Jairus’ frustration he could have thought to himself, “Look Jesus, I know you’re single and childless. You’re amazing and all, but you don’t know what it’s like to be a father. You don’t know how it feels to have a sick daughter at home. You don’t know what it’s like to have a twelve year old little girl who you love dying in front of you.”

Mark tells us that after the woman who touched was healed, she told her whole story - about how she had been progressively getting worse - daily dying for twelve years. At the end of her story, Jesus said something to her (in front of Jairus) that He never said to anyone else. Jesus called her His daughter. Whoa. After Jesus went to Jairus’ house and raised his little girl from the dead, Mark slips us this tiny detail we better not miss - she was twelve years old. Jesus was letting Jairus know, “I have a daughter too. You have a 12 year old daughter suffering and at the same time, my daughter has been suffering for 12 years. I know what you’re going through better than you can possibly understand. Hang in there and trust me.” Whatever you’re facing, He gets it. He understands. He knows how it feels and He knows exactly how He’s going to make it all right in the end.