Who is the Jesus we take into the New Year?
Luke 4:16-21
Preached Canberra Baptist Church 30 December 2007
We have completed our journey through Advent – a time when we invited Jesus to come anew into our lives, bringing hope, peace, joy and love.
We’ve greeted Jesus on Christmas Day and sung “joy to the world, the Lord is come” and gone on to sing “let every heart prepare him room”.
So today I ask: Who is this Jesus that we take with us into the New Year?
Is he the one whose birth the angels declared to the shepherds was not something to be afraid of, but was “good news of great joy for all the people”? And if so,
what is that good news?
what difference is it making in our lives? and
how are we sharing it?
Our culture loves a sentimental Christmas and many of the carols and songs that we hear and sing reflect this. The words often paint an idyllic picture that has very little to do with the circumstances and reality of how and why Jesus came into this world. And if we’re not careful we can too easily find ourselves caught up in these ideas of Jesus rather than the message of the Gospels.
I want to focus on just two aspects of that “good news” this morning.
From the very beginning Jesus confronted the political powers and challenged the way society was ordered. Herod recognised that the birth of Jesus was a threat to his kingdom, a threat to the kind of domination and rule that was the norm. He was so disturbed by this birth that he plotted to kill Jesus and was willing to sacrifice many innocent lives in order to get to this one baby. Jesus entered the bloody history of Israel, and the human race – a world of real pain, of serious dysfunction, a world of brokenness and political oppression. He was born an outcast, a homeless person, a refugee, and finally he became a victim to the powers that be.
It’s so easy to let the world reduce our spirituality to nostalgia and sentiment. As someone said, “We must be careful not to lose the connection to the truth of the story because it is that story that shapes our identity as the people of God.”
In the passage that has just been read from Luke’s gospel, we heard Jesus publicly announce his manifesto. And having explicitly declared his understanding of God’s love towards the lowly of society, Jesus then set out to demonstrate it. Jesus showed that the “good news” was about reordering the values of society. This would have been astonishing news for the Jews who were used to life being about the “haves” and the “have nots”, the “ins” and the “outs”. They were part of a society that concentrated power and privilege on the few and abandoned the many. But that was exactly what Jesus had come to change.
If that was the “good news” for then, it must still be the “good news” for today. Much of the reality of Jesus’ world is still the reality of our world. But have we taken this “good news” of Jesus really seriously? Do the people with whom we come in contact day by day see thatJesus living in us or do we reflect more of the Jews and their exclusions? It’s easy to say that these problems are bigger than our influence – and that’s true to a point. They are national and international problems and political realities. But in the end politics is a reflection of personal attitudes. So if all who claim to be followers of Jesus allow his good news to shape their attitudes and actions then there will be an influence for good on society’s attitudes.
The second aspect of the “good news” is that God is love and that God’s love is for everyone. When the angels announced “good news for everyone” it was because God had come to live among us and show us love.
In his book the lost message of Jesus, Steve Chalke writes:
The real message of Jesus leaps from the pages of the Gospels. Jesus demonstrates love and redemption as he embraces the untouchable, feeds the hungry, eats with the socially and religiously unacceptable, forgives the unforgivable, heals the sick and welcomes the marginalized to be his closest companions.
The story of the woman caught in the act of adultery in John chapter 8 clearly demonstrates this reality – and it’s in such contrast to the lack of love we often show. The religious teachers and community leaders dragged the woman before Jesus and were keen that she should get what they believed she deserved – death by stoning! But as we know, Jesus saw through their hypocrisy and challenged them by suggesting that anyone who hadn’t done wrong should cast the first stone. One by one they slunk away until only Jesus and the woman were left. And then Jesus said to her, ‘I am not going to condemn you either. Go, but don’t sin any more.’
Steve Chalke suggests that:
Jesus first and foremost demonstrates the love of God to this woman, not because she was innocent of the crowd’s accusations, but because he knew that judging and condemning her would not achieve anything. In the eyes of those present, she was a worthless sinner who deserved everything she was about to get. But he could see the pain she was going through. He sensed that she already felt the utter shame and humiliation of what she had done. So instead of majoring on what she already knew, he focused on something she didn’t: the love and compassion of another human being and the love and compassion of God.
Now that isgood news. It’s good news for us because we know that we are personally loved by God. But I believe it’s far more than that. If Jesus’ coming to earth was “good news” for us it means that as we live in the same way as he did, we will become more fully the people we were created to be. Rather than it being a burden to show love and compassion to people the way Jesus did, it will indeed liberate us and we will become more fully alive. But of course that will only be our experience if we invite Jesus, through God’s spirit to journey with us.
What sort of a Jesus are we going to take into the new year with us? Will we miss the real joy of having “God with us” and stick with the sentimental characterisations of Jesus as we have it portrayed in much of society’s and indeed sometimes the Church’s Christmas story? Or will we allow the radical Jesus of the Gospels to really live in and through us and transform our lives – and by so doing, help to transform the world?
Let me close with a story.
The Bishop's Gift (Author Unknown, Source Unknown)
Once a church had fallen upon hard times. Only five members were left: the pastor and four others, all elderly.
In the mountains near the church there lived a retired Bishop. It occurred to the pastor to ask the Bishop if he could offer any advice that might save the church. The pastor and the Bishop spoke at length, but when asked for advice, the Bishop simply responded by saying, “I have no advice to give. The only thing I can tell you is that the Messiah is one of you.”
The pastor, returning to the church, told the church members what the Bishop had said. In the months that followed, the old church members pondered the words of the Bishop. “The Messiah is one of us?” they each asked themselves. As they thought about this possibility, they all began to treat each other with extraordinary respect on the off chance that one among them might be the Messiah. And on the off, off chance that each member himself might be the Messiah, they also began to treat themselves with extraordinary care.
As time went by, people visiting the church noticed the aura of respect and gentle kindness that surrounded the five old members of the small church. Hardly knowing why, more people began to come back to the church. They began to bring their friends, and their friends brought more friends. Within a few years, the small church had once again become a thriving church, thanks to the Bishop’s gift.
Are we prepared to take Jesus, the Messiah, into the new year with us in such a radical way that we will recognise him in ourselves, in each other and indeed be prepared to find him in unexpected places and in unlikely people?
God grant us the humility and the courage to do so.