Will we follow him?
When I was a kid, I remember so well those few days each year when a bad cold, a sore throat, or a fever kept me home from school. If my symptoms were light enough, and I was lucky enough, my mother would let me get out of bed and move to the den where I could watch a little TV. And on sick days, that meant the joys of daytime television. As a kid, I could care less about the plethora of soap operas that filled the airways back in those days. What I wanted to see were the daytime game shows. Now, some of you younger folks out there will have no idea what I am talking about, so forgive me for this walk down memory lane. But in my day, a good sick day meant being able to watch – “Hollywood Squares,” “The Newlywed Game,” “Let’s Make a Deal,” “The Price is Right,” and so many others. Some of them were reruns, but I didn’t care. As a kid, I thought game shows were a blast.
My favorite one was, “To Tell the Truth.” For the uninitiated, on “To Tell the Truth”, three contestants would come out at the beginning of the show and all claim to be the same person. Two of them were lying and one of them was telling the truth. The panel of celebrity judges would ask questions trying to figure out who was real and who was not. At the end of every show, after all the guesses had been made, the host would ask the question that held all the suspense – “Will the real (so and so) please stand up.” At that point the truth was revealed.
It was a simple show, but it pointed to something deeper because, as we all know, telling the difference between the real and the false, the truth and the lie, is often quite difficult. Sometimes imposters are very convincing. They say all the right things when in fact they are lying to your face. And of course, this is not only a game show problem but a spiritual one as well because as Jesus points out in our allegory for this morning, thieves and bandits abound.
In today’s reading from John, Jesus warns his followers to beware of imposters. He tells them that he is the savior, that his teachings, his life, his sacrifice reveal God’s truth. There are others who will come and try to lead them astray, but they are thieves and bandits. As he says, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”
Unfortunately, the history of the Church is full of examples of the teachings of Jesus being perverted and twisted by imposters. Beginning in the 11th century, the Crusades were framed as holy wars to reclaim the Holy Land. Thousands were killed, including civilians, and Christian soldiers were promised spiritual rewards for violence. The Jesus who said, “love your enemies” was nowhere to be found.
Beginning in the 15th century, the Spanish Inquisition under the guise of protecting the faith against heresy, used imprisonment, coercion, even torture in a search of religious purity. It was a time in the Church when fear was more prevalent than compassion, when the faith was used for control. The Jesus who said, “let anyone among you who is without sin cast the first stone,” was nowhere to be found.
In our own country the Church used the Bible for centuries in a twisted attempt to justify slavery and the dehumanization of millions of people. From the very pulpit I preached from for 16 years in Richmond, Virginia, like so many other southern churches, biblical verses were cherry-picked to rationalize that it was somehow okay for a Christian to own another human being. The Jesus who said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” was nowhere to be found.
Especially today, our world is full of thieves and bandits. There are so many voices in our culture stepping forward and trying to say – I speak for Jesus. There are voices that want us to believe Jesus blesses violence without provocation in pursuit of our own national geo-political agendas. But Jesus said, “if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”
There are voices that say if you follow Jesus, life will get easier and you will become wealthier, more successful. The more faithful you are, the more prosperous you will be. But Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor” and “Take up your cross and follow me.”
There are voices that twist the story of Jesus life —as a Jewish rabbi—into something that condones hatred toward the very people from whom he came.
There are voices that speak as if God’s blessing is automatic for one nation—as if the kingdom of God could be claimed as our national possession.
There are voices that use the name of Jesus to justify turning away the stranger—while Jesus himself says, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”
In our own private spiritual lives too, it is easy to make Jesus into the savior we want rather than the savior who comes to set us free. If following Jesus does not challenge us, confront us, seek to transform us into more compassionate, loving, giving people then perhaps we are following the wrong Jesus. As Tim Keller once said, “If your god never disagrees with you, you might just be worshiping an idealized version of yourself.”
In the same way if our spiritual lives are primarily something private and inward looking, something that says faith is only about what happens inside us, if it’s just about our personal relationship with God and whether or not we get to go to heaven, then we may have reduced Jesus to nothing more than a source of self-help. As Martin Luther King once said, “There is something wrong with a religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them.”
With so many voices saying, “This is what Jesus stands for”, what are we to do? Well, if we want to know who Jesus is, if we want to know what he stands for, we turn to the Gospels. We listen to what he actually said. We watch what he actually did. Whether we are talking about the Church as a whole or in our individual lives, we let his witness shape us. I mean, war is a hard thing to justify if for just one minute you take seriously the words of our savior when he says, “Blessed are the peace makers,” or “I give you a new commandment that you love one another as I have loved you.” As Bishop Michael Curry once said, “to be a disciple, a true follower, is to be fully engaged in the way of life Jesus himself modeled.” Fully engaged. That is what the Church is called to be. A people whose common life reflects the life of Jesus—his compassion, his humility, his courage, his love. A Church that does not simply speak about him but bears witness to him in the way it welcomes, it serves, it seeks justice, it cares for the most vulnerable.
And this is what we are called to do in our own spiritual lives as well. Not just to admire Jesus from a distance but to let his words shape our lives. To let his life challenge our assumptions and his love stretch our hearts. Because in the end, the question is not simply, can we identify the real Jesus? The question is: Will we follow him? Matthew, Mark, Luke and John can tell us all we need to know about the real Jesus, but that only matters if we are willing to follow him.
As the old hymn says – “Day by day, dear Lord, of thee three things I pray: to see thee more clearly, to love thee more dearly, to follow thee more nearly, day by day.” May it be so. Amen.