The Darkest Hour

The Sermon Study Guide is here.

Mark 15:29-36

March 17/18, 2012 • Portage First UMC

INTRO VIDEO WEEK 4

Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night disoriented by the darkness? Every once in a while I do, whether it’s because I was dreaming about being somewhere else or I’m just suddenly woken up, there have been a couple of times where I’ve ended up getting up, walking out to the living room and then wondering what I’m doing there. We don’t do well in the dark. Darkness disorients us. And what’s true of us as individuals is even more true of groups or nations. There are even a lot of churches that don’t handle darkness well. Several years ago, in another community, I was driving along the highway and passed a church that had this on its message board out front: “A true Christian is never blue.” I had to drive by that church—thankfully not a United Methodist Church—quite often and every time I wanted to stop in and ask how they could say that. What that told me is if I was struggling with depression or discouragement or anything like that, I wasn’t welcome in that place. Darkness wasn’t welcome because we don't deal well with darkness.

Think about how we deal with disasters and tragedies like September 11, 2001, or the Christmas tsunami of 2004, or Hurricane Katrina or even the southern Indiana and Illinois tornadoes of a couple of weeks ago. Think about how we deal with it when someone we love gets cancer or develops dementia. We don’t do well in the darkness. We want to be able to give easy answers, to assure that person with cancer that they’re going to be healed, to guarantee that the bankruptcy will pass, to promise that the marriage will be reconciled. And when I pray for such things, I do pray for God to do a miraculous healing, to bring light into a dark situation. I believe in a God who can do miracles. But I also know God doesn’t guarantee a miracle. In the words of an old Christian song, sometimes he calms the storm and sometimes he calms his child. I’m living proof of that. Some of you know how in college I had a collapsed lung and people prayed for me, and it was healed miraculously (overnight) even though it should have taken 2 weeks to heal naturally. I also had a heart defect, discovered when I was 17 years old, and I had people pray, including one of the godliest women I’ve ever known, and God only chose to heal it when a surgeon repaired the valve in 1999. Sometimes he calms the storm and other times he calms his child.

But we still don’t do well with darkness. We want to fix things. We want it to be light, to be better instantly, and by our actions, we often indicate that we don’t think God can do it on his own. Bishop Will Willimon says, “There is a sense that we made war on Iraq and we gave so generously to the victims of Hurricane Katrina for the same reasons: we so want to fix the things God has not. The worst we do and the best we do are done for much the same reasons. As Aristotle noted long ago, we only make war in order to have peace” (Thank God It’s Friday, pg. 45). We don’t do well with darkness, and yet, if this fourth final word is to be believed, the darkness is where God is.

We’re continuing this evening/morning with our study of the Final Words of Jesus from the cross, and this word is the only one of the seven words from the cross Mark records. Mark’s Gospel is generally short, to the point, and he tends to only record the very basic elements of the Gospel. So for Mark, this statement is at the heart of what was happening at Calvary that Friday afternoon (Tidball, The Message of the Cross, pg. 145; cf. Hamilton, Final Words, pg. 66). He tells us how, at noon, darkness came over the whole land and lasted for three hours (15:33). This could not have been an eclipse, as the crucifixion happens at Passover time and Passover takes place during a full moon. The moon would have been in the wrong place in the sky for this darkness to be an eclipse (Wright, Mark for Everyone, pg. 215). And while I somehow picture storm clouds rolling in, and the movies often show thunder and lightning and maybe even rain, there’s no mention of any of that in Mark’s account. Rather, there’s a sense in Mark’s writing that the darkness is accompanied by absolute stillness. For three hours, there are no more words from the cross. Jerusalem is dark. Jerusalem is silent. And no one quite knows what to do (Card, Mark: The Gospel of Passion, pg. 183). Even the mocking that has been constant since Jesus was condemned falls silent. With the exception of perhaps an occasional groan from the crucified men, there is darkness and silence for three hours, because we don’t know what to do with darkness. We don’t do well with darkness.

What breaks the silence, Mark says, is a loud cry (the Greek word there is literally “mega phone”) from the middle cross. It’s a shout in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke: “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” Mark interprets the Aramaic phrase for his readers; it means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Some of those standing there, upon hearing this, mistake what Jesus is saying. Remember, I keep saying, we don’t do well with darkness, and so one man, hearing "Eloi", thinks Jesus is calling for the prophet Elijah. In popular understanding, Elijah was the one who was supposed to prepare the way for the kingdom of God to come. So this man runs to give Jesus wine vinegar, spoiled wine, then steps back and says, “There, let’s see if Elijah comes to help him.” Some scholars note that this man is just prolonging Jesus’ life by offering him liquid as an experiment. "Let's see if Elijah really does come. Let's see if there's anything to this Messiah faith." One thing is for sure, the cry from the cross doesn’t move him to pity or reverence, just to curiosity (Barclay, The Gospel of Mark, pgs. 364-365).

But Jesus isn’t calling for Elijah. As probably every good Jew standing there would have known, Jesus is praying. More specifically, he’s praying the psalms. The psalms were and are the prayer book of God’s people (Hauerwas, Cross-Shattered Christ). The whole range of human emotion can be found in the pages of that ancient book. What a hymnal might be to a Methodist, the psalms were and are to the Jewish people. Jesus, certainly, would have grown up learning to pray these ancient songs, and in this moment of darkness—ultimate darkness—Jesus turns to the words written by King David in what we know as Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1). The original psalm goes on: “Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest” (Psalm 22:1-2). These are words written in a time of darkness, a time when help was needed but did not seem to be coming.

So why, then, did Jesus pray that psalm? Out of the 150 psalms that are part of the prayer book, why that one? Why not a confident assertion of God’s power and glory? Why not the next psalm, the favorite shepherd psalm: “The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing” (Psalm 23:1)? Why not one that declares who God is: “The Lord is my light and my salvation—whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life—of whom shall I be afraid?” (Psalm 27:1)? Why Psalm 22? There are a couple of possible reasons. For one, in ancient times, when a person would say the first line of a psalm, it would bring to mind the whole psalm. Sort of like how I might say, “You put your right foot, you put your right foot out,” and for many of us, the “Hokey Pokey” song will now be stuck in our heads the rest of the day! (How sad, isn’t it, that we’re better at remembering the “Hokey Pokey” than we are the words of the Bible!) But for the ancient Jews, hearing the first line of this psalm would bring to mind the rest of it, and as a few scholars point out, Psalm 22 is, in many ways, a better description of the crucifixion than anything we have in the New Testament. Written centuries before Calvary, the psalmist sings, “All who see me mock me…I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint…my mouth is dried up like a potsherd and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth…they pierce my hands and my feet…and cast lots for my garment” (22:7, 14-18). And yet the end of the psalm is a prayer for God to come and rescue the one who is praying, and the very last verse is a word of victory: “They will proclaim [God’s] righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it!” (22:31). So by calling this psalm to people’s minds, Jesus is in some sense pointing beyond this horrible death to a victory yet to come. He’s reminding those gathered in that place that there is more to the cross than just the death of an innocent man.

But I think there’s more going on here than just a formal prayer or the reciting of a psalm. I believe Jesus prays these words, shouts them out actually, because at that moment, in the midst of the darkness, he actually was forsaken by God the Father. I know that makes us uncomfortable. I know we wonder how that is possible. But I’m taking Jesus at his word here. This fourth final word is shouted not just because it’s a psalm but because it’s what happened. When Jesus shouts, “Why have you forsaken me?” it’s not playacting, and it’s not some kind of metaphorical statement. He shouts that because that’s what happened. God the Son was forsaken by God the Father.

Now, I admit, that’s impossible for us to fully understand. As Christians, we believe in one God who is known as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The theological word for that is “trinity”—three in one. One God, three persons. Now, I can’t even begin to adequately explain that, which is why, I think, we need often to hear the reminder from the book of Isaiah that God’s ways are not our ways. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9). Every time I’m tempted to try to explain everything about God, I remember that if I could fully understand him, he wouldn’t be much of a God worth worshipping. He’d be just like me or you. So the Trinity is hard enough to get our heads around, and when you add in the Incarnation—that God the Son became human, fully human and fully God—my mind is already blown. But that’s the witness of the Gospels, that the God who is above everything became human so that he could feel like us, know hunger like us, be tempted like us. Paul described it this way: Jesus, “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!” (Philippians 2:6-8). And then, right there on that cross, in the still, sullen darkness, Jesus the Son of God found himself forsaken, abandoned, deserted by his heavenly father. How could that happen? I don’t know. As William Barclay said, “There is mystery behind that cry which we cannot penetrate” (364).

So I don’t want to dwell on questions we can’t really adequately answer. “How?” is an impossible question in this darkness. But I can offer a couple of suggestions as to “why” this happened. Why did God the Father turn away from his Son during this darkest hour? Well, remember what Jesus came to do. We talked about it a couple of weeks ago in our FISH groups. Jesus’ personal mission statement was simple: “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). Jesus came to save sinners; He came to save all of us. That was his whole purpose in coming. Creation was broken; humanity continued to rebel against God and Jesus came to offer hope, salvation, a better way of life for now and forever. He came to call “sinners to repentance” (Luke 5:32). Sin is what separates us from God, and “God hates sin because it alienates his creation from his love” (Hauerwas). Sin stands between us and God. It breaks relationship and something has to die in order to make it right. Paul said, “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Throughout the Old Testament, as the people were learning just how serious this sin thing is, they offered up animals as sacrifices in order to make “atonement” or peace with God for their sin. But no matter how “spotless” the animal offered was, it wasn’t perfect. The sacrifice had to be done over and over again. So Jesus came to willingly offer himself as that final sacrifice. Jesus came to get rid of that separation, that alienation once and for all (cf. Hebrews 7:27). When he died on the cross, when he offered his life in exchange for ours, he took on himself all our sin, for all time. Up to that moment, he had known every human experience except one—he had never known the consequence of sin (cf. Barclay 364). In order to identify completely with us, he had to take our sin on himself. Paul told the Corinthians, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Jesus willingly offered himself to take the punishment for our sin so we could be forgiven. And because sin alienates the creation from God, God the Father had to turn away from his only Son. I believe when Jesus shouts this word from the cross, God the Father was also shouting in anguish all across heaven. Father and Son had never known separation until we caused it. As Jesus shouts from the cross because of our sin, there is pain and anguish in heaven as well. The Apostle’s Creed contains the line “he descended into hell,” and most of the time we don’t say that line anymore because we don’t really know what it means. But, folks, this is the moment when that happens. As Michael Card puts it, “Hell is the price to pay for sin, and God hiding his face is hell” (183).

And that leads us to the other answer to the question, “Why?” There’s more here Mark wants us to see, because in this moment, Jesus is experiencing what you and I experience at different times in our life. There are moments in our life where God seems so close, where life is good and we are joyful in our faith. And then there are those other moments, those God-forsaken moments, those “God is silent” moments. At this moment, Jesus knows what that feels like, and it causes him to shout in anguish from the depths of his soul. And we want to, too, when we're in that place. So here’s my question: why do we try to keep that hidden? In those moments when we feel forsaken, why do we cover over it and pretend like everything’s okay? Oh, I know why we do it—we don’t think anyone else will understand, or we don’t want to appear weak or faith-less. And yet, to me it’s encouraging and fascinating all at the same time that, in this darkest hour, “Jesus did not ask for deliverance, but for presence” (Willimon 43). He doesn’t ask to be taken off the cross; he just wants to know that his Father is there, with him, in his suffering.

There’s a story Maxie Dunnam tells about a family torn by grief after the sudden and unexpected death of the young mother. Somehow, the husband made it through the planning and the funeral with his young son in tow, and the boy was curious but didn’t say too much until they came home after the funeral. They got ready and went to bed early, and in the darkness, the young man could hear his son asking those penetrating and painful questions. “Where’s Mommy? When’s she coming home?” And so on. After a bit of this, the father got up and brought the boy into his bed, hoping he could then quiet down and go to sleep. And just as the father was about to drift off, exhausted from grief, the young boy’s hands reached out and touched his father’s face. “Daddy?” he said. “Is your face toward me?” The father, with tear-filled eyes, said yes, his face was toward the boy. “Good,” the boy said, “because if your face is toward me, I think I can go to sleep.” And pretty soon he did. You see, that’s all we want to know in those darkest moments. God, is your face toward me? Are you here? Is this forsakenness forever or just a feeling for now? God, is your face toward me in this darkest hour? Jesus asks not for deliverance, but for presence.

William Cowper was an eighteenth century poet and and hymnwriter who suffered from lengthy bouts of depression and fear. At many points in his life, he felt God had forsaken him and that he, among all people, was most unworthy of salvation. He collaborated with John Newton in publishing some very famous hymns, but Cowper would often retreat back into the darkness of doubt and fear. His whole life was a struggle to sense, to know, to be assured of God’s presence. That’s what he wanted all of his life. And yet, out of those times of darkness came some of the most marvelous songs, many of which we still sing today. In that darkness, Cowper wrote these words: “Oh! for a closer walk with God, a calm and heav'nly frame; a light to shine upon the road that leads me to the Lamb!” And he celebrated in poetry God’s hiddenness: “God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform; he plants his footsteps in the sea, and rides upon the storm.” Cowper’s life reminds us how it’s often in the darkest times, in the hidden times, that we see God most clearly. Or, as Stanley Hauerwas has written, “God is most revealed when he seems to us the most hidden.” Cowper experienced that, and in many ways, that’s also the message of this fourth final word, because it’s at the moment Jesus feels most forsaken that he is doing his most important work (Tidball 146). As God the Father turns his back, Jesus is taking on our sin, saving us from it. In that moment, history is changing and hope is being born. In the darkest hour, Jesus is doing what he came to do. Might the same be true in your life? Is it possible that those times when God seems so absent just might be the moments when he is working a great thing in your life?

So what do we do with this fourth final word? First of all, we realize that Jesus knows what it’s like to feel forsaken by God the Father, and he is not unaware of the times when we feel like that. He knows what it feels like to experience hopelessness and despair (Hamilton 73-74). He is a “man of suffering, and familiar with pain” (Isaiah 53:3). On the cross, he entered into our darkness (Tidball 147), and shared our pain. But he did more than that. He took our pain and redeemed it, and he shows us that it’s okay to tell God you feel forsaken. For that matter, it’s okay to admit it to other people too. Jesus was hanging in the midst of friends and foes, and he’s being brutally honest there on the cross. It’s okay to admit that you feel forsaken. It’s not showing a lack of faith to admit you’re struggling; in fact, it may take more faith to admit that than it does to pretend everything’s okay. God can handle it. God can handle your pain, your anger, your forsakenness. When we shout out in anguish, at least we’re staying in the conversation. Even in his anguish, Jesus still calls the Father “my God.” He hasn’t given up. He knows the break is not forever. The death of a relationship is not found in anger or brokenness. The death of a relationship is found in apathy, when you just don’t care anymore. Stay in the conversation. Tell God what you’re feeling. If you feel forsaken, tell him. That’s an act of faith.

So keep praying. Now, I know that's hard to do when we feel forsaken. Maybe we don't want to talk to God. Or maybe we don't know what to say. If either of those are the case, then why not follow the example Jesus set before us? In his darkest hour, Jesus turned to the prayers he knew well, the prayers he had probably learned as a small child sitting at Mary's knee. He turned to the psalms, and found there a prayer that reflected his situation: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" There is, I would contend, nearly every emotion known to humankind found in the book of the psalms, but we have forgotten how to pray them. We have left aside a valuable resource that can be ours in hours of darkness. In our day, we've put emphasis on "extemporaneous" or spontaneous prayers, as if it's somehow more holy or religious or pious to pray that way. But if God preserved these prayers down through the centuries, he must have done so in order that we would have a way to pray when we don't have words ourselves. Learn again to pray the psalms, especially when you have no words of your own.

I'm going to give you a real easy way to pray the psalms, and then ask you to practice it this week. Some of you may have heard me teach this before, but it's a method of praying the psalms I learned from Maxie Dunnam, one I call, "pray until something hits you." And it's exactly that—start with Psalm 1, the very beginning, and begin to read the words, slowly, letting them sink into your brain and your soul. Not quickly like we normally read things, as if we're completing an assignment. Give God room to speak to you, read the words slowly until you come to a verse or a phrase or even a word that "hits you," that describes where you are at that moment. Then stop there, and let that phrase or word be your prayer for the day. Part of me wonders if that isn't what Jesus was doing during those three hours of darkness, of silence. Maybe he was praying the psalms, one by one, and when he came to what we know as the twenty-second psalm, that one (more than any other) described his experience at that moment, and it caused him to cry out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Jesus prayed the psalms in his time of need. Can we do less? So this week, I challenge you to pray the psalms. Pray the words until you find the place where you are living for that day, and then "hang out" there for the day. And rest in the assurance that, because he was forsaken, Jesus knows how you feel.

This fourth final word puts us right in the middle of the Lenten season, and halfway through the seven final words from the cross. And even though we're in a part of the story that seems especially dark, we remember that the Lenten season doesn't end at the cross. It ends at an empty tomb. That's where we're headed. I say often here that the Christian faith shouts to the world that the worst thing is never the last thing. That's not "prosperity theology;" that's the truth of the Gospel. The worst thing is never the last thing. The story of Jesus doesn't end with forsakenness. It doesn't end with a death on the cross. It’s not the story of just the tragic death of another revolutionary. The Christian story is more than that. The Christian story is that suffering can be redeemed, that light comes out of darkness and life out of death. Jesus takes our pain and suffering and transforms it by his love (Tidball 148). The Gospel is about the fact that forsakenness is not the end. Desperation is not the end. Desolation is not the end. The worst thing is never the last thing, and if you're in the midst of "the worst thing" right now, you can have hope that it's not the last thing. The last cry of the cross is not forsakenness. The last act of Jesus is not his death. There is hope, so hang on. Hold on. Pray on. There is more to the story, and the worst thing is never the last thing. Let's pray.

Forgive me, Lord, for the times I—like those who have stood at the cross—have acted with cruelty. Thank you for identifying, by your suffering, with all who ever feel forsaken or cry out, "Why?" Help me to trust you in my own times of adversity. Amen (Hamilton 82).

The Longest Journey

The Sermon Study Guide is here.

John 19:25-27

March 10/11, 2012 • Portage First UMC

INTRO VIDEO WEEK 3

That first journey seemed like a lifetime ago. She was prone to pondering, had been all her life, and as she stood there with the others on that darkest of all days, she couldn’t help but remember the journeys that had brought her to this moment. That journey to Bethlehem, so long ago, when she was nine months pregnant. Joseph had made a place for them to stay with his family, and then the baby had come. It was not the way she had planned, but as she looked back, she realized it was the way God had planned. God had been in charge of that pregnancy from the very beginning anyway. After Jesus was born, when there was still a lot of activity going on around her, she had leaned back and tried to take it all in. Those were the moments she treasured in her heart (Luke 2:19).

Eight days later, as the law prescribed, she and Joseph had taken the baby to the Temple in Jerusalem, just a short walk from Bethlehem, so that he could be circumcised and consecrated to God. They had the strangest conversation with an old man that day. He came right up to them as soon as they entered the Temple courts, asked to hold the baby, and then told God he could now die because he had seen God’s salvation. When he handed the baby back to them, he told her, “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too” (Luke 2:34-35). She had certainly seen and heard people speaking against him over the last few years, and she had noticed that what he did often made people’s true nature, their hearts, come out. But she had never known what Simeon had meant by a sword piercing her own soul—until today.

Of course, there was that one moment, the first time they took him to Jerusalem when he was twelve. They had gone, as they usually did, for the Passover festival, and when they started home, they had gotten a whole day’s journey away from the city before they realized Jesus wasn’t with their other relatives. He was nowhere to be found! They had hurried back to the city as quickly as they could and looked everywhere. She was panicked. I mean, she had been given responsibility to raise the Son of God, and she lost him! How was she going to explain that one? When they finally found him in the Temple, he seemed surprised they hadn’t looked there first. Her fear and anger had been quickly replaced with relief that he was all right (Luke 2:41-52).

Then there was the awful day when Joseph died and she was left alone. Her children were good to her, especially Jesus, but she missed Joseph terribly. Jesus had taken off to preach throughout Galilee, as she knew he would, and she would hear reports back from time to time. Like how he was so busy preaching he forgot to eat. She and his brothers went to correct him, to feed him, but he didn’t quit just because she was there. “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked. “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:33-35). Oh, they had a talk about that one. She didn’t like being brushed off so quickly.

For the last year or so, she had journeyed with him (cf. Card, The Parable of Joy, pg. 224), and as they came close to Jerusalem again this year for Passover, she began to feel uneasy—like a sword might be piercing her soul. She had made this trip before, but somehow, this time it seemed like the longest journey she had ever made. She was glad she had some of her own friends there in the city, because as the storm clouds rose throughout the week, as Jesus upset group after group, she needed them to support her. Then came the awful moment when he was condemned to death. Arrest, trial, beating, condemnation—crucifixion. She watched as the nails broke through the skin and bone she had once borne in her body. She wept as that child she had once held close was lifted up on a Roman cross. It nearly broke her, and had it not been for the others, she couldn’t have watched. But she needed to. She had to. And while everything that was maternal within her wanted to cry out, to stop this injustice, to scream, “That’s my son! You will not kill my son!”—she knew she couldn’t. And not just because the Romans would have stopped her, maybe beaten her too. No, she couldn’t because of what she saw in his eyes. As she stands there at the foot of the cross, Mary of Nazareth doesn’t protest what happens because, more than anyone else who is there, she knows who he is and why he’s up on that cross. She had heard the angel’s words: “He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end” (Luke 2:31-33). She knew he had been promised a throne. She just never imagined his throne would be a cross.

We’re in the middle of our Lenten series this year, studying the seven final words of Jesus from the cross. We’ve talked about how brutal crucifixion was, and how anything said from the cross was spoken in a short gasp. The only time when crucified men could talk was when they would push up on the nails in their feet and catch a breath. Many crucified men used what breath they had to hurl insults at anyone gathered near the cross. Jesus, of course, doesn’t do the “normal” thing. Instead, he speaks of forgiveness and salvation—and then, here in John’s Gospel, there is this tender scene that takes place when his mother approaches the cross. Now, Mary is probably just a little older than me at this point. Assuming she was between 13 and 15 when Jesus was born, and allowing for about 33 years of his life, that would make Mary between 46 and 48—a young widow. Having grieved the death of her husband, now she’s watching the death of her firstborn. Her friends with her to make sure she doesn’t pass out from grief. They help her to the cross, and there, she and Jesus exchange a look. John doesn’t record that Mary said anything to her son, but they see each other, and Jesus also sees “the disciple whom he loved” (19:26). And in that moment, Jesus utters the third final word from the cross: “Woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple he says, “Here is your mother” (19:27).

Now, this moment at the cross brings up several questions, three of which I want to deal with this morning/evening. First of all, who is this “disciple Jesus loved”? Second, why does Jesus entrust Mary to this person? And finally, what does this mean for us? But first we need to know who this person is, because there is no name given. We find this “beloved disciple” in five stories in the Gospel of John. The first time the phrase appears it’s at the Last Supper, when Jesus says one of the disciples will betray him that night. Because enquiring minds want to know, Peter tells this disciple whom Jesus loved to ask Jesus who the betrayer is. The disciple was, apparently, reclining right next to Jesus (John 13:23-26). Aside from the cross, then, the other three times this disciple appears are after the resurrection. He runs with Peter to the empty tomb (John 20:2), he identifies the risen Jesus as the one who is cooking breakfast for them on the shore when they have gone fishing (John 21:7), and he follows Jesus and Peter when they go on a walk after that breakfast (John 21:20). There are a lot of suggestions as to who this person might have been. Since the Gospel tells us Jesus loved Lazarus (John 11:36), some say Lazarus is this disciple. Others have suggested the rich young ruler whom Mark says Jesus loved (Mark 10:21). And others say this might be an unknown person to us, but to me it seems obvious that this disciple is one of the twelve, one of Jesus’ closest friends. He’s with them at critical moments, especially that last week, and most scholars will contend that this is John’s way of identifying himself (Barclay, The Gospel of John, Volume 2, pg. 145). Now, it’s not meant like we would mean it—that Jesus loved him more, that he was somehow special, that he’s bragging. No, this is John’s way of simply defining himself as a Christian, a believer in Jesus. It seems he began to believe in Jesus at that Last Supper or maybe shortly before. He becomes a disciple Jesus loved, a Christian. After all, isn’t that the way we all would want to be known, as someone Jesus loves (Card 224)? John would later write, “We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:19). John is a disciple whom Jesus loves, as we all are and he stands with Mary at the cross.

But that leads us to the second question: why does Jesus entrust Mary to John? We need to remember the place of women in the first century. Women did not have careers. Women did not have a lot of security if they were widows. Their worth and their income came through their husbands, and if the husband was dead, they were reliant upon their family to take care of them. It was the eldest son’s responsibility to care for his parents in their old age. As a widow, Mary was dependent on Jesus for her livelihood, for her life (Keener, Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, pg. 313). And while it’s likely that her livelihood was the last thing on her mind on this day, it wasn’t the last thing on his. Even in his pain, in his torment, in the moments before his death, he was still caring for his mother. But, you would think, after his death, wouldn’t his other brothers pick up that responsibility? We know Jesus had brothers—half-brothers, actually, but brothers certainly as far as the law was concerned. Where are they? Why aren’t they caring for Mary? Well, it’s possible that Jesus’ siblings simply weren’t at the cross (there’s no mention of them) and John was the closest thing to a relative that was available at the moment (Tenney, “The Gospel of John,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 9, pg. 182). Perhaps John was only a temporary caregiver, and yet the Gospel says he took her into his home from that moment on. More likely is the suggestion of other scholars that, at this point, Jesus’ other family didn’t believe in him as the Messiah. We know that from reading the Gospels. They had no faith yet, though later that changed. Jesus’ brother James eventually wrote one of the letters in the New Testament (Barclay 257). But at this point, for Mary to get through her grief, she’s going to need someone who shares her faith that Jesus’ death on the cross wasn’t a horrible accident, that it wasn’t a mistake, and it wasn’t a waste. She needs someone who believes Jesus is the Savior, the Messiah. John can be that person for Mary (Barclay 257).

The way we handle grief is influenced by our faith, and sometimes, if we come from families that don’t share that faith, it’s hard to find support there. I know a woman who lost her husband a couple of years ago, quite young, and her grief is deep. His family doesn’t understand; they keep telling her she should just get over it. But she finds the most support and strength from those who share her faith. Sometimes we need someone like that, someone even outside our biological family, who can walk with us through times of grief. We’ve tried to provide folks like that through our Stephen Ministry, folks who can listen and encourage and pray with you. When I read this passage, I picture untold numbers of people standing by a graveside, weeping, mourning, and I see Jesus entrusting their care to a Stephen Minister or a close friend or a neighbor who shares their faith. And together, they get each other through the dark times. Jesus entrusts his mother to the care of one he knows will not just support her financially in days to come (as important as that is), but who will help her have faith when all seems lost. “Behold your son,” Jesus tells Mary. “Behold your mother,” he tells John. And without another word, John accepts the responsibility and cares for Mary. “From that time on, this disciple took her into his home” (19:27).

So that brings us to our third question: what does this third final word from the cross mean for us? I think there are two primary ways this word challenges our lives, and the first has to do with caring for our family. Caring means more than sending a check or a birthday card. The first commandment with a promise in the Old Testament was this: “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you” (Exodus 20:12). So what does it mean to “honor” someone? The word in Exodus that is translated as “honor” means “to give weight to” and it has nothing to do with the number that shows up on the bathroom scales. It means “weight” as in “importance.” The commandment is about making sure our parents have priority or importance in our lives, just because they are our parents. I’ve had people ask me what you do about parents who aren’t Christian, or who don’t deserve respect in our estimation. Maybe your parents were abusive—if not physically, then emotionally and spiritually. I knew a woman who would bring home an “A” on a report card and, rather than being told she did a good job, would be asked, “Why isn’t it an A+?” And there are parents who are physically and sexually abusive, who use their children for their own advantage. What do we do then? Well, for starters, I think that’s why this is the third final word and not the first. Jesus began with forgiveness because that’s often where we need to begin. Some of you are working on that; these cards on the cross represent people who we are seeking to forgive this Lenten season, and some of them, I would guess, involve parental relationships. And as we forgive, as we work toward the healing of our soul, we seek to find what might be good in that father or mother, what they gave us, even if it came through difficulty, that we can honor, that we can appreciate if not celebrate.

There are many things we can do to honor our parents. First of all, we can give appropriate consideration to what they say. We listen to their advice, their wisdom, their direction. Do you remember the story in John 2 when Jesus and his disciples went to a wedding feast in a town called Cana? Mary was there, and when they ran out of wine, she came to Jesus and told him about it. She didn’t ask him to do anything, though that certainly was implied. His response? “Woman, why do you involve me? My hour has not yet come” (2:4). Now, I wouldn’t recommend addressing your mother as “woman” in our day, but in the first century, there was no disrespect intended by that title (Keener 268). And even though it sounds like he’s blowing her off, after he listens to her, he turns water into wine. He honors her by helping the wedding party continue. So we honor our parents by giving appropriate consideration to their counsel. Now there still may be times, particularly with parents who don’t believe as you do, that their direction contradicts what the Bible tells you to do, and in those moments, in the most loving manner possible, I believe we have to respond, “I love you very much, but I cannot do that and follow Jesus at the same time.”

A second way we honor our parents, and one that comes more directly out of this passage, is to make sure they are taken care of in their old age. That’s a Biblical directive. Some of you have done that; you’ve even taken your parents into your home and cared for them yourselves. But sometimes additional care is needed. Sometimes, in this age when we are living longer, the care required is more than we can provide ourselves. My grandfather was like that. After Grandma died, he came back to Indiana from Texas to live near my parents. They were both still working full-time, trying to put two boys through college, and so he didn’t live with them, but he got his own apartment nearby. But Grandpa didn’t do so well without Grandma, and one day he nearly burned down the apartment building while making dinner. Mom and Dad knew they couldn’t give him the care he needed, so he moved into an early version of assisted living. And there, he got his medicine on time, got the care he needed, and saw my mom every day. In fact, he was in better shape and happier there than he had been in a long time. So caring for our parents isn’t always doing it ourselves, but it’s not putting someone in a care center and forgetting them. We’re never beyond the responsibility of caring for aging parents. Jesus did that on the cross, as he entrusted John with the care of his mother.

Thirdly, we honor our parents as we pass on the values and lessons they taught us. More and more, I find myself acting and saying things like my father. It used to scare me, but I’m kind of used to it now! And most of time, I’m grateful for it. My parents aren’t perfect, but they gave me a heritage I am proud of and one I want to pass on—a heritage of faith, of loving each other, of standing on your own two feet, of working hard and treasuring moments together. When I sit with families to prepare for funerals, as I did this past week, the things they remember are never the big presents or the extravagances. They remember the values their mom or dad put in them, that they then get to pass on to their children. We honor our parents as we hand down what we learned from them. And for those who have parents who are not Christian, who knows but that your love, your honoring them just may be what brings them closer to Jesus. I know a woman for whom that was true. Her parents went to church but didn’t have much use for Jesus, it was just a social thing, and as she continued to honor them, even with their objections to her growing faith, they found in her love an irresistible attraction to the Savior. Honor your parents; that’s the first message we hear in this third final word from the cross.

Sometimes, though, we need something larger than a biological family. As I said earlier, Mary is entrusted to John perhaps because she needed spiritual support. She needed someone with faith. So do we. In entrusting Mary to John, Jesus affirmed what he said earlier, that whoever does the will of his Father is part of the family. Bishop Will Willimon puts it this way: “In baptism we are adopted into a family large enough to make our lives more interesting…From the cross, in his third word to us, Jesus disrupts the totalitarian influence of the family in order to free us and give us a new, bigger family” (Thank God It’s Friday, pg. 32-33). And that was a radical thing in Jesus’ day, even moreso than today, because in that culture, there was nothing more rigid or determining than the family. Family determined your identity and your future. Jesus, for instance, is less often known as a carpenter himself than he as “the carpenter’s son.” And yet, Jesus pushes the boundaries and binds us to a larger, extended, spiritual family. That’s a tremendous gift of grace, especially if your family wasn’t or isn’t everything you hoped it could be. In baptism, Jesus gives us a bigger, grace-filled family. That’s why, when we baptize a child, I walk them down the aisle and say, in essence, “Behold, your brothers and sisters!”

When we lived in the south, in Kentucky, everyone in church there was “brother” or “sister.” The pastor wasn’t “reverend” or “preacher” or even “pastor.” He was “Brother Mike.” And that’s quaint and cute, we think, but it’s more than that. It’s a statement of fact. We are bound together as brothers and sisters in Christ. That’s something that’s hard for us to grab onto in a consumer-driven culture, where we “shop” for churches like we “shop” for clothes. Does it fit? Does it make me look good? Do I like the style? And, the biggie when it comes to churches: do I like the people there? The reality is the church is a family, and you might not like everyone here. You might not always agree with everything they say or do. You want to know something else? There are probably people here who don’t like you, either, and might not agree with everything you say or do. Welcome to the family! When you read the New Testament, that’s the way it was then, too. Most of Paul’s letters come out of conflict. Something is going on in the church among the brothers and sisters and Paul writes to them to clarify this idea or straighten out that behavior. Paul writes to them to help them get along. But we don’t like that today. We just go somewhere else. Church isn’t about agreement or forcing your will on the whole body. It’s a family, brought together by God’s great love (Willimon 34). It’s about being united around a common purpose, even if we don’t all get it right every time. The reason he brings us together is for healing, anyway. Jesus’ word from the cross offers us hope that, in the body of Christ, we can find healing for our brokenness, our inadequacies, and our problems—and those of our families (cf. Willimon 36).

From the cross, we hear Jesus tell Mary, “Woman, here is your son.” And he tells John, “Here is your mother.” And he tells us, “Here is your brother. Here is your sister.” So the question becomes: how do we honor those relationships? In what ways are you being called to honor your parents? There may be many things that have been sparked this morning/evening, but let me ask you to pick one thing you can do this week to honor those God entrusted you to. Are the ways you interact with your parents or your children right now honoring to them? If not, what can you do this week to begin to make a change?

Beyond that, let me push you a bit further: are the ways you connect with your brothers and sisters in the faith honoring toward them? If we believe, and we do, that God has brought us together in this place and in this time for a purpose, how do we demonstrate honor toward each other? How do we demonstrate the commitment we have to one another? The church should lead the way, but very often, it’s other groups that have set the pace. Philip Yancey tells about being invited by a friend to an AA meeting, and though he went merely to support his friend, he found that the honesty and the openness and the genuine love he experienced there is the same sort of thing he read about in the pages of the New Testament when it described the church. Why, he wondered, doesn’t the church look more like that? Why, indeed? We’re called to lead the way, to “be devoted to one another in love” and “honor one another above yourselves” (Romans 12:10). Is there a broken relationship within this body? Is there someone you need to reconcile with? Is there someone you have failed to honor? At the foot of the cross, all are equal, all are welcome, and all are family, so perhaps this season, this holy season of Lent might be a time you can make it right, a time to re-learn how to show each other honor. “Here is your family!” Jesus says. He gave his life to make us family. We dare not we dishonor his sacrifice by refusing to live as he calls us to live. Here is your mother…here is your son…here are your brothers and sisters. Honor them that it may go well with you. Let’s pray.

Lord, thank you for your mother, Mary. Her witness, courage, and love for you were most profound. Help me to heed your call to John and to hear it as my own, so that I might care for my parents and children, and so that I might see those who have no parent or child as my own parents and children and care for them. Amen (Hamilton 63).

The Company You Keep

The Sermon Study Guide is here.

Luke 23:32-43

March 3/4, 2012 • Portage First UMC

VIDEO INTRO WEEK 2

Once upon a time, a man set out to purchase a donkey, but before he paid the final price, he asked permission to test the animal. The current owner agreed, so the man took the donkey home and put him in the field with his other donkeys. He watched as the new donkey strayed from the group to join the laziest donkey the man owned. He quickly gathered the new donkey up and took him back to his owner. When the owner asked how he could have tested the donkey in such a short time, the man answered, “I didn’t need to see how he worked. I knew he would be just like the one he chose to be his friend.” That’s one of Aesop’s Fables, and the point is this: you’re known by the company you keep. Or, at the very least, you are often judged (rightly or wrongly) by the company you keep.

It begins fairly early in life, doesn’t it? We put people in groups (at least in our mind), and once we label someone, we think we know all about them. We label them by where they are from, what school they go to, what groups they hang out with. The jocks. The band nerds and the drama geeks, and so on. And we tend, then, to surround ourselves with people who are just like us. We’re comfortable then. Nothing challenges us. We even tend to go to church with people who are mostly like us, or in a church this size, we at least want to sit with or near people who are generally like us. Because we know we’re judged by the company we keep.

What, then, do we do with Jesus? From the moment he started preaching, he rarely hung out with the popular people, the powerful people or the beautiful people—at least as the world defines those categories. He ate dinner with tax collectors and even welcomed one of them as a disciple. He talked with prostitutes and with people who were demon-possessed. He touched lepers and dead bodies—those sorts of actions could get you kicked out of church in his day (maybe in our day, too). Jesus hung out with everyone—except the good, respectable people of his day, the religious folks. He didn’t spend much time or have patience with those who were “the good people” or the “holy people” in his day. In fact, those folks loudly complained, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:2; Hamilton, Final Words, pgs. 36-37). Of course, Jesus didn’t have the nicest words for them, either. He called them “hypocrites” and a “brood of vipers” (Matthew 3:7; 15:7). Way to win friends and influence people, Jesus! Especially in the Gospel of Luke, as we’ve discovered again in our Disciple class this year, Jesus is very focused on the least, the last and the lost—the ones nobody else wanted anything to do with. That’s even true when you talk about his disciples. I mean, several of them were fishermen—not the most educated men in the first century. Do you realize they were his disciples because they had failed to be someone else’s? By the time Jesus called them, they were much too old to be disciples; normally, you asked a rabbi to be his disciple in your early teen years and he decided if you had potential or not. These men had not been chosen. They were fishermen because they were religious rejects. But Jesus chose them. Jesus wanted them. Jesus always wanted those no one else cared about. In fact, one time, when the religious leaders were complaining about the company Jesus kept, he told them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick…I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matthew 9:12-13). 

To the very end, Jesus was focused on the least, the last and the lost. Even on the cross, Jesus is still willing and able to save those folks whom no one else cares about. During this season of Lent, we are studying the final words of Jesus, the seven last gasps he uttered from the cross. And, as we said last week, they are gasps because crucifixion made it impossible to say lengthy sentences. When a crucified man would push up for air, he could call out a few words at best. Last week, we saw how Jesus’ first final word was to offer forgiveness to those who killed him. His word of preemptive forgiveness is a model for us all. The cross here in the sanctuary reminds us this Lenten season that forgiven people are called to be forgiving people. But that was only Jesus’ first lesson from the cross. His next one was directed at a man no one else cared about.

Luke says, “Two other men, both criminals, were also led out with him to be executed” (23:32). So three men are being executed this day. Jesus, we’re told, is on the cross in the middle, and on either side of him are these condemned criminals. They aren’t petty thieves; you weren’t crucified for a small theft. They’ve been convicted of a serious crime of some sort. One translation suggests they are insurrectionists or terrorists (Willimon, Thank God It’s Friday, pg. 19). Matthew’s Gospel suggests they were involved in an armed robbery, but Luke simply calls them “ones who do evil” (Hamilton 38; Tidball, The Message of the Cross, pg. 161). We don’t know how long they’ve been in jail, waiting for death, but suddenly, perhaps without any warning, their day has come, and they have been led out with Jesus and nailed to their own crosses. They’ve heard Jesus pray forgiveness for his executioners, and for at least one of them, that’s too much. He can’t take it. And so, with what little breath he has, he joins the crowd in taunting Jesus. “Aren’t you the Messiah?” he yells. “Save yourself and us!” (23:39). I doubt if he thought Jesus really could save them, but what was the harm in asking? From what Luke tells us, he probably said worse things than that to Jesus. Most likely, as the pain got worse, so did his mouth. He “hurls insults” at Jesus (probably laced with profanity), until the other criminal finally speaks up.

In perhaps the longest speech at the cross, the other criminal tells the first one off: “Don’t you fear God, since you are under the same sentence? We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong” (23:40-41). Maybe he knew of Jesus before this day, or perhaps he just sensed in Jesus’ earlier prayer that a great injustice was happening here. Either way, he turns next to Jesus and prays one of the Bible’s most memorable prayers: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” (23:42). Jesus—remember me. Remember. We all hope to be remembered. We sometimes call it “leaving a legacy” or leaving our mark, but at a very basic level, we’re afraid we’ll be forgotten, and that if no one remembers, our life will have had no meaning (Hauerwas, The Cross-Shattered Christ). We fear no one will show up at our funeral and no one will care. Some people give lots of money to have buildings named after them or endowments set up in their name just so they’ll be remembered at least by name. Is that why the thief asks this of Jesus? But what did it matter if a dying man remembered him? Since this criminal is likely Jewish, he’s probably recalling something he learned as a child, how in the Old Testament, when God “remembered” a person or a nation, God came to their aid; he delivered them. In Exodus, when the Hebrews cry out to God because of their slavery, we’re told that God “remembered” them (Exodus 2:24). Had God forgotten them? Does God have a bad memory, that he suddenly heard the people’s cry and said, “Oh, I wondered where they had gotten to”? No, of course not. God hadn’t forgotten them, but they had forgotten him. And God never pushes his way into our lives. He waits for us to call to him, so when his people called out, God was ready to do something to help them. “Remember us, God! Come to our aid!” That’s what the criminal is asking. In Jesus, he recognizes someone who can provide hope beyond the pain and the suffering of the cross. So he asks Jesus to remember him, to save him (cf. Hamilton 43; Card, Luke: The Gospel of Amazement, pg. 256).

This passage disturbs a lot of people, particularly people (like me) who want to be able to pin down the way Jesus works. I grew up in a church where it was well understood how you came to know Jesus. You confessed your sin, you prayed a prayer, and if you were really, really brave, you went down to the communion rail on Sunday morning during the altar call and prayed with the pastor. My pastor growing up even had a set prayer called “the sinner’s prayer” that you would pray to find salvation. And there is certainly adequate Biblical support for such an approach. I mean, we’re told in one of John’s letters, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). And Paul says, “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9). Confession is affirmed. Public witness of Jesus is affirmed. It seems to be all orderly, until you come to this story. Up there on the hill, there is no confession of sin (unless you count the thief’s statement that he’s getting what he deserves). There’s no acknowledgement of Jesus as Lord. There’s no sinner’s prayer. There’s no baptism. He doesn’t have the Scriptures explained to him, and he doesn’t have any opportunity to demonstrate his faith. All he asks is to be remembered. All he wants to know is if Jesus can save even him. Maybe we don’t have Jesus as figured out as we think we do. Maybe, just maybe, Jesus can save people outside of our formulas and our routines—because that’s what Jesus does here. When confronted with a simple cry of trust and heartfelt desire to be where Jesus is, the Savior responds: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise” (23:43).

It’s a powerful promise. That phrase “truly I tell you” is an ancient way of emphasizing something; it’s like saying, “Listen carefully, because I really mean this, it’s really true.” And then Jesus begins with the word, “Today.” What day, Jesus? When? “Today.” As a pastor for nearly nineteen years, I have lost track of the number of people who have asked me when, exactly, we go to heaven after we die. Is it right away? Do we have to wait? Is there some sort of intermediate state or waiting room? This question presses on people’s minds especially around a funeral. Do you know why we usually have a funeral within three days? It was believed in ancient times that the spirit of the dead person would wait by the body for about three days and then, when it didn’t recognize the body anymore, it would depart (Card, The Parable of Joy, pg. 135). There’s no real Biblical basis for that, but it does explain why Jesus waits four days to raise Lazarus from the dead in John 11. He wants those who witness the miracle to know that Lazarus was really, really dead and not just in some deep sleep.

So, how soon do we go to heaven? Three days? Four days? What does the Bible say? Well, to be honest, not a lot. It’s not really clear what happens exactly after death. I was talking several years ago with a retired pastor who was part of my congregation at the time about this very issue and he told me, “I’ve decided it doesn’t matter to me that much, because no matter if it’s one day or a thousand years, the next thing I know, I’ll be in Jesus’ presence.” And that’s true, but we still want to know, don’t we? So here’s my best guess, based on my reading of Scripture and what Jesus says here, because Jesus promises the thief “today.” So I believe that when we die we do go immediately to Jesus’ presence—to heaven, if you will. There are glimpses of that in the book of Revelation. But I also understand from Scripture that we wait until the final day to receive our new bodies, our resurrection bodies. That’s when all of creation will be made new, when heaven comes down to earth. Jesus’ promise to the criminal is that “today” he will be with Jesus, and I don’t think that’s a promise just for this one man. So, in a sense, it’s “both…and”—we will be with Jesus when we die, and on the final day, we will be made new.

“You will be with me,” he says, “in paradise.” Adam Hamilton points out that the word for “paradise” in this passage originally referred to “the King’s garden” (48). And it’s not a garden for vegetables. This was an elaborate showpiece, sometimes containing a small zoo, beautiful plants, well-manicured bushes, and perhaps a pond or a water feature or two. [When we were in Germany a year and half ago, we got to see a King’s garden at Linderhof, the palace of King Ludwig. But normally, “common folk” wouldn’t see that place.] All of it would have been walled off from the common folks. Only those who were privileged enough to be invited into the King’s presence could view the garden. In Jewish thought, this word came to represent a place of rest and refreshment before the final resurrection where those who are faithful are invited in. Paradise was a place where the righteous would go after death (Wright, Luke for Everyone, pg. 284; Bock, NIV Application Commentary: Luke, pg. 596), a recreation of sorts of the perfect Garden of Eden before sin entered the picture (Tidball 162). Not that they thought of it as a literal garden. It might be, but that’s not the point. The point is that paradise is the place where Jesus is. It’s the image we encountered in our reading of Revelation a couple of weeks ago, the promise we heard spoken from the very throne of God: “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God” (Revelation 21:3). And the promise of the Bible is that paradise begins now, when we turn our face toward Jesus like the criminal on the cross did. “Paradise is whenever, wherever you are with Jesus” (Willimon 22). So even though this world may not look like paradise or a King’s garden, for the one who believes and trusts in Jesus, for the one who walks with Jesus, every moment becomes a foretaste to that ultimate moment when we see him face to face.

I saw this lived out in the life of a dear saint named Dorothy. She and her husband, Kenny, had never had much. They had enough to get by, at least in later years, and they had a loving family surrounding them. But to look at their house and their farm, you wouldn’t think much of it. It wasn’t a shack, but it wasn’t fancy, either. By the time I knew Dorothy, she had walked with Jesus for a long, long time, and I loved to talk with her because the love of Jesus just flowed out of her no matter what you were talking about. I never failed to find my faith strengthened just by talking with Dorothy. Every moment to her was sacred. Every moment was paradise, whether she was at church or in her kitchen. In her later years, Dorothy’s health failed a lot, to the point where she didn’t remember much before her death. At her husband’s funeral, she knew who Cathy was, but not who I was. And yet, in all of that, one thing never wavered. She was always in Jesus’ presence. She lived in paradise even when her outward circumstances might have been depressing to you or me. Those things never bothered her, because she was with Jesus, even before she died and went to literally be with him. She’s one of those people I want to be like when I grow up, one for whom every moment was an opportunity to be with her savior.

“Truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “today you will be with me in paradise” (23:43). It’s a powerful promise, and not just to that man on the cross. It’s a promise that comes down through the centuries to our time. What do we do with this final word? The first thing is to determine whether or not we have joined the criminal on the cross in a cry for Jesus to “remember” us. The beautiful truth of the Gospel is that Jesus offers this same promise to anyone who will come with simple faith, simple trust. The promise is that whoever calls on Jesus’ name will be saved (cf. Acts 2:21)—even a criminal who is dying on a cross. Paul says, “It is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). Have you opened the gift that’s been offered to you? Sometimes we say we’ll wait until some distant point in the future to make a real commitment to Jesus. We don’t want Jesus to get in the way of our lifestyle now; we’ll go to church and try to live a good life and hope the scales balance in our favor in the end. But that’s not the way it works. Salvation is a gift, not something we earn. That’s what “grace” means. This criminal hanging next to Jesus had done nothing to earn God’s favor and in fact had done much to deserve punishment. He says that himself; he deserved what he got. And he gets what he doesn’t deserve because he calls out to Jesus. The criminal came with simple trust, which is all Jesus asks us to come with. Simple faith that says, “Jesus, remember me. Save me. Deliver me. Keep me close to you.” You can do that today and know that he will respond to you as he did to the criminal on the cross: “You will be with me in paradise.”

This passage, this story, also challenges us who are followers of Jesus, because it asks what our commitment is to the least, the last and the lost—the ones Jesus cares so much about. Do we care about them as well? And how well do we do at reaching out to those society despises? That applies to us as a church as well as to us as individuals. Are we maybe too afraid to reach out to those no one else cares about because we know we’ll be judged by the company we keep? Maxie Dunnam tells the story of a tent evangelist who came to a small Pennsylvania town during the 1950’s. Among those converted to Jesus in that revival was a man and woman who had lived together for many years, had a bunch of kids, but had never gotten married. When they came to know Jesus, they approached the Methodist pastor and asked him to marry them and allow them to join the church. He did, and pretty soon, one of his church leaders was in his office. “Do you expect us to associate with trash taken in by a fire-and-brimstone preacher? I never thought I’d see the day when a Methodist preacher would marry people like that. It’s a disgrace.” And the pastor calmly replied, “The only disgrace is that some preacher didn’t do it sooner. In all the years these people have lived in this town, we have never invited them to our church. I’m grateful that a tent evangelist did our job for us” (Irresistible Invitation, pg. 265). That church leader was afraid of being judged by what he considered to be unworthy company. Jesus wasn’t. He was, to the end, concerned about the least, the last and the lost. The “good” people were mocking him; the criminal was reaching out in simple trust. Hanging between heaven and earth, Jesus responded to a soul who hoped for help. Before his death, he had told his followers that those who would enter the kingdom of God are those who care for “the least of these” (cf. Matthew 25:31-46). On the cross, he’s still living out what he taught. Jesus is known by the company he keeps—he has a heart for the least, the last, and the lost. How are we known? What company do we keep? Do people see Jesus in us? Do they see us “keeping company with” those who are in need—the poor, the lonely, the stranger, the outcast, the homeless, the children?

And I’m not just talking about writing a check—that’s usually what we do. That’s comfortable. But Jesus got close to people. Jesus touched those in need. He spoke to them. They saw him face to face. Our lives are often so insulated we can go through our days without seeing one person in need. We’re even well-trained at turning our heads and not seeing the guy at the stoplight who has a sign that says, “Have kids, need work.” Yes, there are plenty of scammers out there today. I’m as judgmental as the next person. In my line of work, you get awfully cynical about those in need. I can write that person off just as easily (maybe more easily) than you can. But what if that one is not lying? What if that one really does have a need?

In 1988, Cathy and I had the opportunity to spend the summer working with a group in inner-city Chicago under the direction of a man named John Hochevar. John was one of the most compassionate men I knew. He cared for the least, the last and the lost, but he also knew how to not get taken. I remember him taking the group of us on the ‘L’ one day when we encountered a woman who said she needed money for the train. John approached her and offered to buy her ticket if she would come with us. She refused, and John was still kind to her even though, at that moment, he knew she really didn’t want a ticket for the train. John taught us a lot that summer about buying people meals rather than handing them money, about meeting real needs and helping folks get connected to agencies that can do that, about churches working together to meet bigger needs than they can alone. Here in Portage, we have an alliance called Compassionate Ministries that I’ve never seen work quite so well anywhere else. It’s a group where churches and social service agencies sit down together and actually communicate and cooperate. Because of that, needs are able to be met that wouldn’t be if we were all working against each other or in competition with each other. You need to know that many if not most of the leaders in those agencies are followers of Jesus, and they are motivated out of that deep concern for the least, the last and the lost. I’m proud for our church to be part of that.

But let’s bring that even closer to home. And I mean that literally. What about the person who lives next to you? Or the person who works next to you? Or the person you see every morning at the coffee shop? Do you know them? Do you know anything about them? If you’re like most people, probably not. We don’t take time to know people, to find out their situation, to be Jesus to them. Even in the nicest houses in our community there are people who are lost, who are least, who are last—who are desperately unhappy because their spirit cries out for more. Unlike the thief on the cross, they’ve not found that one who can meet their deepest needs because we’ve failed to introduce them to him. With their lives, they are crying out, “Jesus, remember me” (even if they don’t realize it), and we often turn a deaf ear. There are people around us who just want to know someone cares, that Jesus cares. How do we respond? We’re called to help them know Jesus loves them. That’s not the pastor’s job; that’s everyone’s job. I want to challenge you this week to look for opportunities to share Jesus with someone, to share with someone why this faith is so important to you. Remember, as I’ve said before, a witness simply tells what they know. That’s all you have to do. “Jesus has made a difference in me because…” Why? What difference has he made? Can you share that with someone who needs to hear it this week?

All around us, people are crying out with their lives, “Jesus, remember me.” They long for the hope that only he can provide. Will you offer it to them? Will you be his witnesses, inviting others to join him in paradise? That is, after all, our mission: becoming a community where all people encounter Jesus Christ. We love God, love others and—yes, we offer Jesus. How will you do that this week? Let’s pray.

Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom. I want to be with you in paradise. Help me to reach out and love nonreligious and nominally religious people so that they might see your love through me. Amen. (Hamilton 50).