Sermon manuscript:
Jesus said, “The first shall be
last, and the last shall be first.”
Let me begin by running a couple ideas by you. How about
this idea for a marriage: Husband and wife get married. Like most married
couples they thought it was going to be great. They had visions and plans in
their heads. Not long after they tie the knot, however, they find out who it is
that they really married. Who they married doesn’t match up at all with the
ideas that they had in their head. What now? Have I made the biggest mistake of
my life? How can I break free?
How’s that sound for a marriage? Sound like a good idea?
Or how about this idea for a livelihood: A young person goes
and gets trained for a good job. The job requires skill and know-how. This
young person is fully employed with benefits. This goes on for twenty or thirty
years. Then that job is no longer necessary. Technology or globalization mean
that somebody else can do the same job a lot cheaper. The person is permanently
laid off. Now the young person is no longer young. Well paying jobs are not
very available. Only the jobs that nobody really wants are available.
How’s that for a career? Sound good?
If these don’t sound like very good ideas to you, then maybe
you can hear Jesus’s words a little differently when he describes how he was
going to be king in our Gospel reading. Jesus told his disciples that he was
going to go where all his worst enemies live. The big shots in Jerusalem were
convinced that Jesus was a heretic. They believed that the only reason why Jesus
could do all those miracles was because he was an agent of Satan. They were
looking for an opportunity to get their hands on him, and Jesus said that he
was going give them that opportunity. He would fall right into their hands. They
would arrest him. They would put him on trial with false witnesses and a
kangaroo court. They would blindfold him, punch him, and spit on him. They would
kill him. On the third day he would rise.
There are Jesus’s ideas for how he would be king.
Peter can perhaps be excused for saying, “Oh, Jesus, let it not be so with you! May this never happen
to you. That’s no way for the Christ to be king!”
How should the Christ be king? Lots of things could be done.
The main thing is to get bigger. More members means more money, more resources.
To get bigger we need to let people know what a great king Jesus is. We could
take out some ads in the newspaper. That’s a little old fashioned, though.
Maybe some TikTok videos. Instagram. Jesus kicking it with kids in skinny
jeans. Seriously, though, we’ve got to grow. It’s only by growing that we can ever
get strong enough. We have to get strong enough so that we can push out the
Romans. Only when we’ve kicked out the Romans can we get Jesus installed as
king.
What Jesus does is almost the opposite of all this. The
movement doesn’t grow; it shrinks. He doesn’t get stronger; he gets weaker. He
becomes so weak that he stumbles about. He can’t even carry his own cross
anymore. Simon of Cyrene must carry it the remainder of the way.
The people at the cross are understandably baffled by
Jesus’s claims: “Wait, so you are the Christ, the Son of the living God, and
here you are nailed to a cross? Why would God allow that? Come down from that cross, then we’ll believe you. Otherwise
you don’t seem to be what you claim to be.”
When Jesus finally died, everybody knew that the movement
was over and done with. The corpse, green and blue and stiff, was right there
for anybody to see. How can that corpse be king? Are you going to prop that
corpse up on a throne? No. Obviously the disciples were wrong. They thought
that Jesus was the Christ, the king, but they were mistaken. All that’s left to
do is to bury that corpse, move back to Galilee, and try to get on with life.
Realize that if Jesus wouldn’t have risen from the dead,
everything that I’ve been saying to you would have been the sensible way to
react to all that had happened. Peter, in fact, would have been proven right
when he said, “Oh no, Jesus. Not that. You can’t do it
like that.” But that’s not what happened. Jesus didn’t stay dead. That
changes everything. Instead of what seems sensible being vindicated, Jesus and
his words are vindicated. The thoughts of man are vain and futile. God’s
thoughts prevail.
What are these thoughts of man that are now vain and futile?
We’ve already spoken about them today. It would be the way we think we are
going to succeed. For Jesus to be an effective king he has to be grand and
glorious. The bigger the movement the more power it has. This thinking is vain
and false. This is proven by what happened. At the moment of Jesus’s triumph
with the cross and resurrection, the movement dwindled all the way down to
exactly zero. Nobody believed in him. Popularity or numbers don’t matter when
God is the one who is acting. God doesn’t need numbers or popularity.
Or take the examples with which I began. We are such
idealistic creatures. We get an idea in our head of how things are supposed to
go. A marriage is supposed to be like this. A career is supposed to be like
this. A male body is supposed to look like this. A female body is supposed to
look like this. A house is supposed to be like this. Home furnishings are
supposed to be like this. A good personality is supposed to be like this. All
the popular and successful people look like this.
These are all just ideas. Nobody measures up to all of them.
Maybe you don’t measure up to many of them. Maybe you don’t measure up
to any of them. If you don’t measure up to any of them, then you are
what is called a “loser.” Being a loser sounds like it is the worst of the
worst, but, you know what, let’s not be too hasty.
Do you know who the first person was to whom Jesus appeared
when he rose from the dead? The very first person to whom Jesus came was Mary
Magdalene. There are a few things we know about this woman. She used to be a
prostitute. That means that she had sex with strangers for money. She was
inhabited by seven demons, whom Jesus cast out. One demon is plenty to wreak
havoc on a psyche. She had seven. Let’s not romanticize Mary Magdalene. She
must have been a very, very troubled person—a “loser” you might say. And she
has the honor of being the first to whom Jesus came. Why? Because Jesus loved
her. He wanted to comfort her in her afflictions.
Note to whom Jesus did not appear: He did not appear to
those who saw themselves as righteous, as wise, as powerful, as having the
world by the tail. Jesus didn’t appear to any of those at all.
And consider what people would have thought about Jesus too.
They thought that he was a loser. Maybe he was something in the past, but
surely he is nothing as he hung naked, bruised, bloody, on the cross. “He saved others; he cannot save himself.” That’s what
they were saying about him. “He claimed to be God’s Son. I guess God must not
like people saying that they are God’s son, because look at him now. God must
be punishing him.” Jesus looked like scum, a criminal, a loser.
But then we have all these sayings from the Scriptures like
“The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.”
That is a saying that means nothing other than “the loser will be winner, and
the winner will be the loser.” Or here’s a related saying, “God rejects the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”
Or, again, a saying that is in our reading today: “Whoever
would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life on account of me will
find it.”
Jesus teaches some strange things, which all hinge on
whether Jesus rose from the dead. If Jesus rose from the dead, then all those
old rules go out the window. If he did not rise from the dead, then, as Paul says
in 1 Corinthians 15, “We Christians are to be pitied above
all others.” Our faith is vain. We are living a lie. We would be vastly
better off if we would forget everything Jesus ever said, and instead ruthlessly
make our own dreams come true. Maybe, if we try hard enough and never give up,
then somebody will remember us.
But if Jesus has risen from the dead, and he has, then all
the world’s wisdom is foolishness. The most perfect life, the life that ticks
all the boxes, is an empty and lost life, estranged from God.
On the other hand, the opposite—being humbled, being
humiliated—is not the worst thing. What does it mean to be humbled but to realize
that you aren’t as great as you thought you were? Isn’t that just the truth? You
are a fallible creature. What you should have done, you haven’t done, and what
you shouldn’t have done, that’s the very thing that you’ve done. This is the
truth that’s hard to see and harder to accept.
On the other hand, it’s easy to dream about what you’d like
to be. It’s the easiest thing the world! What kind of marriage would you like?
The best. What kind of house do you want? The best. What kind of job do you
want? The best. The ideas are not even interesting. Everybody just wants to be
the best!
In contrast to all this fakery, I can say that God has loved
you—the real you, not the fake, ideal you. The real you is the you as you
really are with all your defects, with all your unchecked boxes. Chasing dreams
is supposed to make you happy. I’m not so sure. It’s not the only way to be.
Be like Mary Magdalene, that very troubled person. She was
glad when she saw the Lord. She wasn’t much to look at, but Jesus loved her. Jesus
loves you too.
Scripture says, “If anyone is in
Christ, then that person is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold,
the new has come!”
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