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Just Say the Word

After he had finished all his sayings in the hearing of the people, he entered Capernaum.  Now a centurion had a servant who was sick and at the point of death, who was highly valued by him.  Luke 7:2

Back to Capernaum, where it all began.  There’s a centurion stationed in the town, a man who has reason to know of Jesus by reputation.  Stories get around, and since some of those stories happened right there in Capernaum, they don’t have to travel far.  This officer seems to be stamped from the same mold as Cornelius in Acts 10, also a Centurion stationed in Palestine: a sober, respectable, God-fearing man.  Both feared God coming too close to them, perhaps; God-fearer, in this context, means uncircumcised.  They admire from afar, until something happens to bring God near.  For Cornelius it was a dream; for this man, a crisis.

There’s one indispensable person in household, the man who keeps things in order while the master is on patrol or on maneuvers—the rare slave (or freed servant) whom one can totally trust with business, and who is also a friend.  Let’s call him Decius, and suppose that the officer comes back from patrol one day, calls for help removing his armor, and the houseboy appears.  What’s this?

“Where’s Decius?”

“He’s taken ill, sir—the physician fears he may die.”

The bottom drops out of an ordinary day.  Everywhere the master turns, he bumps his nose against some little matter that Decius always attended to, some loose end left awkwardly hanging, some thought that could not be shared.  Perhaps, after a few days spent distractedly, trying to carry on between visits to the bedside, watching a life fade away as its value multiplies, someone mentions that Jesus has returned.

Sharp need brings God near.  What the master admired by reputation—for Jesus is a prophet, obviously close to God–becomes painfully relevant.  He requests an audience with some of the Jewish elders, with whom he’s maintained respectful, formal relations: “If you would, please speak to Jesus, and pave the way carefully with any kind words that you may feel led to say on my behalf . . .”

centurion

He sees them off.  Perhaps an hour or two passes while he paces and frets.  Suddenly he smacks his forehead: Argh!  What am I thinking?  I know how authority works.  I don’t have to be standing over my soldiers all the time to see that they do their duties—I give a command; it’s done (or else).  The prophet is obviously too busy to come himself, but all he needs to do is speak to the evil spirits, or say a word to his all-powerful God.  The work of a moment, if he’ll only do it.

“Go, boy, tell him this: Just say the word, Master, and my servant will be healed.  Yes? Repeat it to me, so I know you have it . . . Good; now go—hurry!”

More pacing, as the fever rises and his faithful right-hand man tosses and turns in delirium.  My right hand—exactly.  Without him I’m hobbled, hindered, half-blind.

Perhaps, as Matthew says (Matt. 7:5ff), the officer cast all caution and decorum aside, flung himself out the door and went pelting down the road in search of the prophet.  If you want to get something done, better do it yourself. Perhaps he dashed up to Jesus, thrust aside the Jewish elders and gasped out his request.

Whether this centurion delivered it himself, or left it in the mouths of servants or representatives, we know the message: Just say the word, Lord; just say it, and I am completely confident it will happen.

But here’s another word—amazed.

Jesus heard this and was amazed at him . . . and said, “I tell you, I have not found so great a faith even in Israel!” (Luke 7:9)

I’m amazed that Jesus is amazed.  I forget his profound humility.  He’s already healed every disease, escaped a lynch mob, cast out demons, and established a new order of thinking.  He does it all!  He knows it all!  And yet he allows himself a cleared blue space that’s open to surprise.  Not by the unexpected mechanics of creation or the hidden beauties of the earth, but by us.  There is room in him to truly connect and honestly compliment where there is any small thing to praise.

It also shows what matters to him, what genuinely pleases him.  Not just words, but faith.  Real faith, no less real for being pushed roughly against a wall.

And speaking of “the word”–he says it, and the servant is healed.  All his servants are healed, sooner or later.

For the original post in this series, go here.

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Trees and Fruit, Rocks and Houses

No tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit . . . Everyone who comes to me, and hears my words and does them, is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock.  And when a flood arose, the stream broke against that house and could not shake it.  Luke 6:43, 47-48

About fifteen years ago, when we moved to this plot of ground, we planted a cherry tree .  It’s a good-looking tree, and most years, around this time of year it starts producing good-looking cherries.  But just as they’re turning ripe, this happens:

brown rot

To the best we can determine, it’s brown rot fungus, a condition that sounds as ugly as it looks.  It’s fixable, but not easily.  So we haven’t done anything about it yet.

Rot in the heart is hard to fix, too, and hard to completely hide.  But it always shows itself sooner or later.  Deep at the root of me is an unspoken conviction that I’m actually the most important person in the world, and sometimes—when I’m pressed or upset, or haven’t met three out of five of the goals I set for myself that day—I’m angry that others don’t recognize my importance.  Doesn’t the old man driving 50 mph ahead of me on this twisty country road realize I’m in a hurry?  Don’t the shoppers chatting in aisle 10 of WalMart understand they’re in my way?  Why doesn’t the woman at the Post Office see that she’s standing right in front of my PO Box?  Did she have to get here the same moment I did?

Of course, I only think that way when I’m stressed.  It’s not the real me.  Except, according to Jesus, it is.  These moments are bad-fruit alerts.

Yeah, sure, I’m trying to get better, and sometimes nobler reactions assert themselves.  And yet, “a man’s words flow out of what fills his heart” (6:45).  Anger, resentment, pride, greed, and envy lurk within my heart, and sometimes they pop up and try to look like legitimate grievance.   But soon enough the rot shows.

As I mentioned, the treatment for brown rot fungus is difficult: you have to cut off all the diseased twigs and fruit (called “mummies”—cute), and you can’t just rake them up in a pile.  You have to burn them.  Then apply a fungicide to the decimated tree, according to the manufacturer’s instruction.  It may take more than one application; you’ll have to wait a year and see if the fungus comes back.  “Prevention is the best treatment,” the websites say–which doesn’t help me a lot now.

Prevention (to switch metaphors) is like building a house.  A wise man will select his ground carefully, then mark it out and dig down to bedrock before laying stones for a foundation.  If you hear my words and do them, Jesus says, your house will rest on just such a foundation, and no storm will shake it.  His disciples may have scratched their heads at that, because what he had been talking about up to that time sounds just the opposite of prudent. Love your enemies, smile when people spit at you, give more than you’re asked, cheerfully let yourself be taken advantage of—anybody who follows this advice (or, as Jesus puts it, Does what I say) would be lining up outside the soup kitchen in a matter of months, right?  From that angle, Kingdom living looks like dumpster diving.

But maybe at the bottom of these commands is one rather large assumption: You are not the most important person in the world.  I am.

That is, this man who apparently gave up a family and a permanent home in order to walk the dusty roads of a second-rate province in a corner of the world’s greatest Empire, is really the Emperor.  He owns the place; he knows location better than any realtor.  What he’s saying is, dig here.  Build here.  Live here.  If you do, nothing in this world will ever shake you.  Nothing.

That’s kingdom living, whether you make six figures or cash your checks at the pawn shop.  It’s building your house, as the Sunday-school song goes, on the Lord Jesus Christ.

The sermon is over.  He stands up, brushes off his tunic, wraps his cloak about his unremarkable frame.  Immediately the Twelve are at his side, and a number of disciples tag along.  The “multitude,” who came to be healed and stayed to listen, break up and go their separate ways. To most, though they might have called him “Lord, Lord,” his words rolled off like water from the proverbial duck.  But there are a few who walk more slowly, their minds still back there on the plain where he spoke to them, and his words are burrowing deep and settling in.  Soon they will sprout. He’s going to talk about that.  But for now he’s on the road again, headed to his old stomping grounds in Capernaum, where . . . .

For the first post in this series, go here.

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Judging and Being Judged

Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you . . .  (Luke 6:37-42)

The most-quoted passage of scripture is not John 3:16 or Genesis 1:1.  It’s this right here: Judge not.  Smug unbelievers hurl it frequently against smug believers, typically with scraps of tacked on theology like, Who are you to speak for God and You’re not acting very Christ-like are you?  What would Jesus do, you hypocrite?  In other words, judging. We all judge.  We all have some sense of moral hierarchy, and the real question is not, Who are you to speak for God? but Who is God to speak to me?  The point here is not that we can’t make any judgments about anything ever, because we do that practically every time we open our mouths.  However screwed up our morals may be, we are still moral creatures.

The point is, Where does the judging start?  If my judging doesn’t start with judging me—always—I’m in danger of making myself the judge.   judging

To understand Judge not, we must take the Jesus’s previous words in one hand and his subsequent words in the other. “Children of the Most High” who are “merciful as their Father is merciful” (vs. 36) will not reassure fellow sinners that their sins are okay with the Big Guy.  They will not tie blindfolds over their eyes and proceed to lead the blind (vs. 39).  If the Lord has opened your eyes, what do you see?  You see Him and his commands—and most acutely, you see how you’ve broken them every day of your life, both carelessly and willfully.  You see how he’s held on to you while you were pulling away from him.  You see how his mercy reeled you in, whether little by little or all in a rush.  When tears of remorse have washed all the crud out of your eyes, you can see how that friend or relative or fortuitous stranger is making the same dumb assumptions you once did.

What would Jesus do?  He would pay for all those dumb assumptions and willful flaunting and innumerable offenses, because somebody had to.   Judge not doesn’t mean there’s no judging going on, only that we’re not the ones who pronounce sentence.  Someone does, someone will, and someone pays.  See to it that it isn’t you.

For the first post in this series, go here.

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An Awful Tension

I just finished reading Isaiah, for the 10th time at least.  In the past I’ve been struck with how confusing, relentless, even numbing it is.  This time I was struck with how schizophrenic it is.

The literary style, I’m informed by those who know, is “stream of consciousness,” simply because nothing else fits.  But whose stream of consciousness?  The character who’s mostly speaking is God himself.  If the monologue is read and taken as continuous, the only way to make him appealing to us would be to mentally insert interruptions or transitions.  Otherwise, the kindest adjective would be bipolar.  Is this the God we Christians worship?  Snarky atheists wouldn’t even let him out of the house, much less put him on a pedestal.

The quick and easy answer is that unbelievers don’t understand holiness.  Which is true, but we believers don’t understand it all that well either.  We tend to err on one side or the other.  If we want to focus on his inclination to us, we lean on passages like this: “Because you are precious in my eyes,/ and honored, and I love you,/ I give men in return for you,/ peoples in exchange for your life.”  Or, if we want to warn of his absolute sovereignty, there’s plenty to choose from there too.  How about: “I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity.”

What we often overlook is the great dilemma for him.  The terms he allows to be used are very telling in themselves.  Though we know he has complete control and exists in perfect peace, God is torn.  I hope I’m not being irreverent: he allows the issue to be cast in that light.  He swings between retribution and reconciliation in the same chapter, sometimes the same verse.  He demands justice but yearns after mercy.

When you think about it, it can’t be any other way.  “God with us” is a beautiful and comforting thought at Christmas, but what it meant in Isaiah’s time was an awful (awe-ful) tension.  My pastor said in a recent sermon that God-with-us in the Old Testament inevitably meant death: one slip, and wrath breaks out.  But God’s absence means chaos, conflict, and conquest.  Unholy beings like us can’t live with him, but we can’t live without him either.  And he can’t live with us.  But he does not desire to live without us.

“I will give men in return for you . . .”  Might that mean, “I will give a man in return for you; I will walk among you in man’s flesh, and take man’s punishment, and be raised again for man’s life?  I will be just, but I will also be the justifier; someone must pay, but it will be me.”  The lines of mercy and justice will finally come together, and the place will be a cross.

Blessed schizophrenia . . .