John 13:31-35, from the Fifth Sunday after Easter

Whoever sold lace doilies in West Virginia during the ’70s must have made a fortune off of my grandmother.

Continue reading “Tough love” →

John 21:1-19, from the Third Sunday after Easter

I’ve always focused on the redemption aspect of this familiar story. The risen Jesus and Peter are walking by the Sea of Galilee, their first recorded contact since Peter denied Jesus three times during the run-up to Good Friday. Jesus asks Peter three times, “Do you love me?” Peter replies each time that he does, and Jesus responds with some version of, “OK, then feed my sheep.”

It is, of course, a beautiful scene of forgiveness and restoration, and my tendency to see it as exclusively about that stems, no doubt, from my personal tendency to screw up Peter-style. Jesus and I have had many such walks, and there surely will be many more before my life is done.

But in focusing on Peter’s restoration, I think I’ve overlooked something both important and obvious: The sheep are hungry. And doesn’t it seem odd, at least initially, that they would be, or that someone would have to look after them? It’s Easter! The tomb is empty! Sin and death have lost! What’s left to do except celebrate in the winner’s circle?

Continue reading “The sheep are hungry, Peter …” →

John 20:19-31, from the Second Sunday after Easter

“Because you have seen me, you have believed,” the resurrected Jesus told Thomas, having appeared out of thin air – and in spite of locked doors – to let Thomas inspect the nail holes in Jesus’ hands and the spear wound in Jesus’ side. “Those who believe without seeing are blessed.”

So, are you? Blessed, I mean. Jesus was talking about you, me, and everyone else who has believed without seeing. So, do you feel blessed?

Or do you wish sometimes, as I do, that God would just show himself again, would just give us some irrefutable evidence that the whole fantastic story really is true. These 2,000 years later, we have scientific proof that the Earth orbits the Sun, that bacteria and viruses cause diseases, that space can bend and that light has a speed limit. But with apologies to the apologists, we have nothing like such proof that God is real, and I don’t know about you, but it seems to me sometimes like Jesus got it exactly backwards there at the end of John 20, the Gospel text for this week’s Lectionary. Thomas, staring slack-jawed at Jesus’ post-Resurrection body, seems like the blessed one, and I, on my best days, seem like … the hopeful one.

Continue reading “What difference does Easter make?” →

John 12:1-8, from the Fifth Sunday in Lent

All four gospels include a story about a woman who shows up during a meal given in Jesus’ honor, pours ridiculously expensive perfume on him, catches heck for doing so, and gets defended by Jesus.

In Matthew (26:6-13) and Mark (14:3-9), the woman pours the perfume on Jesus’ head during a meal in Bethany, at the home of someone named “Simon the Leper.” Indignation arises among the disciples (in Matthew) or “some of those present” (in Mark) about why the woman had wasted the perfume in this way instead of selling it and donating the proceeds to the poor. But Jesus rebukes the woman’s critics, saying that, unlike the poor, he won’t be around much longer, and the woman’s beautiful act has anointed him, appropriately, for his upcoming death.

Luke (7:36-50) sets the story at the home of a Pharisee – who may or may not have been the aforementioned “Simon the Leper,” but likely wasn’t, because Pharisees generally didn’t hang out with lepers, even former ones. And the woman in Luke’s version is infamous for living “a sinful life.” The text gives no details about what sort of sin her life involved, but readers have assumed throughout the centuries that it must have had something to do with sex, a perception helped along, perhaps, by what happens next. Jesus is lying supine on the low couch that dinner guests used at the time, and the woman, standing behind him, is weeping so profusely that her tears are wetting Jesus’ feet. After a bit, she gets to the floor, starts kissing Jesus’ feet and wiping them with her hair, then pours the perfume on them. Pretty sexy stuff compared to dumping the perfume on Jesus’ head, eh? The Pharisee objects, but not about the “wasted” perfume. Rather, he opines that Jesus, if he were any sort of prophet at all, would perceive the woman’s sinfulness and tell her to get lost. Jesus replies with a jab at the Pharisee’s self-righteousness and assures the woman that her sins have been forgiven.

But this week’s Lectionary puts John’s version (12: 1-8) front and center. It includes the overtly sensual foot-perfuming (rather than head-perfuming) and hair-wiping (but not kissing) details from Luke’s account and the what-a-waste objections from Matthew’s and Mark’s accounts, this time attributed particularly to Judas Iscariot, who, John takes pains to remind us, is a conniving scumbag. But the woman in John’s version isn’t some nameless tramp who has made notoriously bad life choices. Rather, she is Mary, a sister of Lazarus, the man who, in John’s gospel, has just been raised from the dead by Jesus. Some time earlier, perhaps only days, Mary had fallen, grief-stricken and sobbing, at the feet of Jesus, who had arrived inexplicably late – too late, or so she had thought, to save her brother. She had wailed out what one can easily hear as an accusation: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:32). Now Lazarus, her brother, fully alive again, is among the dinner guests, and the event seems to be a celebration of the miracle.

What’s more, there as a proverbial elephant in the room, something everyone is thinking but nobody is saying: Everyone thinks Jesus is being an idiot. Like both Matthew and Mark, John places this story right before the fateful weekend of Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion. Jesus and everyone else knows that dangerous enemies await Jesus in Jerusalem. What nobody can figure out is why Jesus seems so dead set, literally, on going there anyway. He has been talking more and more openly about how he must go to Jerusalem and be killed. Those who have tried to talk him out of it include Peter, who, as a result, earned the famous rebuke, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns” (Matt. 16: 23). Thomas, perhaps seeing that Peter had gotten nowhere trying to deter Jesus, had simply shrugged and said, “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (John 11:16).

And that context, I think, might be a key to figuring out what Mary meant by the strange, audacious act of dousing Jesus’ feet with costly perfume and using her own hair as a wash rag. Defending her to her critics, Jesus points out that she has anointed him for his upcoming funeral – the funeral nobody wants to acknowledge, the funeral everybody hopes to talk him out of attending as the corpse of honor.

Everybody, it seems, except Mary.

Maybe she is stunned, like Peter. Maybe she is resigned, like Thomas. Or maybe she’s downright angry. “Gonna go to Jerusalem and throw away your life, eh?” I can hear her thinking. “Then I dare you to say one word about my throwing away all this nard so you won’t stink like the dead man you’re so determined to be.” But whatever her emotions, I think the hair wipe makes Mary different from everyone else who was there. Maybe she has absorbed the implications of seeing Jesus purposely arrive too late to cure a sick man but just in time to raise a dead one. Maybe she is saying, “This plan of yours might be the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard, Jesus. Stupider even than my pouring a year’s salary onto your dirty feet. But it’s your plan, so it must somehow be right. If you’re going to be a fool, I’d be foolish not to be a fool right along with you. So, just give me a sec get my hair undone …”

Jesus calls us down paths that make no earthly sense whatsoever. Love your enemies. Be last in everything. Surrender completely. Give it all. Die to live. It’s all utter foolishness, and anyone with any brains knows, like Judas, that practical hoarding is the way to go. In these two weeks before Easter Sunday, maybe each of us needs to examine whether, like Mary, we have the faith to become all-in fools for a Christ who looks like the biggest fool of all – right up until the first light of Easter Sunday shines into a tomb where his battered corpse should lie, but, inexplicably, no longer does.

Luke 4:1-13, from the First Sunday in Lent

Few stories in the Gospels unnerved me more as a kid than the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, the Gospel text for this week’s Lectionary.

I felt it was bad enough that, had I been Jesus, I was pretty sure I would have turned those stones into bread the moment my stomach growled. But worse than that, I really couldn’t see what would have been so terribly wrong about doing so. In John 2, when the wine had run low during the wedding feast at Cana, hadn’t Jesus made gallons more out of water? Why had it been OK to use divine power to make alcohol so people could get sloshed (I never really bought my teetotaling Baptist teachers’ insistence that it had been mere grape juice) but not bread so that a guy could eat after a 40-day fast in the wilderness?

I remember one teacher explaining that the rock-to-bread transformation would have been bad because Satan had suggested it, and doing anything Satan had suggested would have been a sin. That didn’t help me. Impulses popped into my head all the time. How was a person supposed to know which ones Satan had put there? And if Satan were to suggest that I, let’s say, help an old lady across the street, would his having suggested it make an otherwise kind act sinful?

The Devil’s second trap for Jesus seemed more obvious to me. Jumping off a tall building is a demonstrably bad idea, and even a little boy knows that God doesn’t always step in and save good people from horrible fates. A pretty girl in my boyhood church had died of leukemia before hitting her teens. She had been only a few years older than I was. I had gone to her funeral. I had looked into her casket and seen her corpse. If God couldn’t be counted on to save her, he sure couldn’t be counted on to keep you from splattering on the ground if you were stupid enough to let Satan dare you into leaping from a roof. And the third temptation, well, that was embarrassingly amateurish. Had Satan really thought he could bribe Jesus into worshiping him instead of God?

But none of that mattered, because I knew Satan would have nailed me with the rock-to-bread thing. It had been the first of the three tests, so I would have been finished before even getting started. Secretly, I considered my inability to see the sin in making bread from stone as evidence of a substantial lack of moral insight. And when you’re a fundamentalist kid who thinks he has to do the right thing all the time so God will go on loving him, having any lack of moral insight is frightening and shameful. I buried my questions and pretended Luke 4:1-13 didn’t exist.

But it did exist, of course, and I knew it. Even as a 35-year-old man staring at the brushy hills of the Israeli desert through the window of my air conditioned tour bus during a trip there in 2000, I remember thinking, “Out here, fasting, for 40 days? There’s no way …”

What I’ve learned in the years since, through cycles of failure, repentance and grace, the specifics of which are none of your business, is that the cleverest trap Satan set for Jesus in the wilderness lay not in Satan’s three proposals but in his preface to each of the first two. “If you are the Son of God …,” Satan had begun.

If?

Just 40 days earlier, God’s spirit had descended on Jesus in the form of a dove. God’s own voice had proclaimed, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” There were no “ifs,” no conditions, no players to be named later. It had been a flat declaration of fact. But get a man hungry enough, whether for bread or acclaim or the power of wealth, and he just might forget even a declaration as grand as that one had been.

And we are no different, are we? The Bible tells us over and over that we are loved, forgiven, accepted unconditionally through grace, declared righteous by the only Judge with jurisdiction over our case, and destined to live forever with God. But send a little deprivation our way, point out that some have more than we do, or show us a dead girl in a casket, and, somehow, we forget that we, too, are sons and daughters of God. We start to think that a catch must be buried somewhere in the fine print of all this Good News. “If you are a child of God …” Satan whispers. “You might not be, you know. Some people are, to be sure. But not people like you. You and I know what you’ve done. Like that time you …”

Keep listening, and pretty soon you’ll be turning rocks into bread even though you aren’t hungry, leaping from a building to gain fame even though the Creator of the universe has numbered each hair on your head, and bowing to Satan in the hope of gaining a mere trace of the wealth and power you already have. My dear brother or sister, there is no “if.” You are a child of God. Satan knows he can do nothing to change that. The question is: Do you?

Luke 6:27-38, from the Seventh Sunday after Epiphany .

“Gospel” means “good news,” but the Lectionary has some especially bad news for us this week, straight from Jesus’ lips.

Got enemies? You must love them. Every time they hate, curse and abuse you, you must respond by doing good to them, blessing them, and praying for them. If one of them slaps you in the face, you must invite them to do it again. If one of them steals your coat, you must add your shirt to the thief’s haul. You may not ask for either one back, either. And if a beggar wants something from you, you have to give it up, no questions, no receipts, no IOUs. Escape judgement by not judging and condemnation by not condemning. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Treat others – all others, not just the deserving ones – the way you want to be treated. Give goodness in the same measure you want to receive it.

If that’s good news, who needs bad news, or even terrible news? Because the news here sure seems to boil down to this: I’m never going to get anywhere near heaven. If someone hates, curses, abuses, smacks or steals from me, they can expect to get the same treatment back in spades. Sure, I’ve let people off the hook now and then. But not every time. Not even most of the time. Whoever Jesus is talking to, here, he’s not talking to me, or even to someone I could become.

In fact, this whole Gospel thing – is this some kind of bait and switch? Sure, Paul scribbled all that stuff about our being made righteous by faith alone. But here’s Jesus, himself – Paul’s boss, so to speak – going on about a moral code that’s impossible for me, or, really, anyone, to live by.

And since I’m asking hard questions, here’s another: How come this high moral code Jesus is describing never seems to come up when Christians get all enthused about denouncing sin? They’ll work themselves into a lather about sex, drugs, booze, rock ‘n’ roll, uppity women, rebellious kids, and baking wedding cakes for gay couples. But they never seem to denounce being armed to the teeth against thieves and attackers, reducing to rubble countries that threaten ours, making poor people work for their SNAP benefits, or wiring death row inmates into the power grid long enough to fry the life out of them. How do these glaring omissions square with Jesus’ commands to turn the other cheek, to give beggars what they ask for and thieves even more than they steal, and to neither judge nor condemn?

In sum, the “good news” looks like bad news and probably a swindle as well, and the people pushing it usually seem more hypocritical than holy.

Or maybe, just maybe, I’ve got this Gospel all jumbled up.

Maybe Jesus is describing God-level morality to disabuse us of the idea that we’re at all capable of practicing it. Maybe Jesus’ point is that even the most uptight Pharisee (or Family Research Council acolyte) still comes up short and would do well to remember it. Maybe Jesus knew that yet another moral code wasn’t going to fix the world, and maybe that explains his determination to fix the world by dying for it on a cross.

And maybe Paul’s great insight was that Jesus’s death somehow made it possible for God to just dismiss all charges against the world and everyone in it – possible for God to offer righteousness “given though faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe” (Rom. 3:22), righteousness so complete and permanent that there remains “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1), and that “neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38-39).

Now that right there is some actual good news. Not coincidentally, it’s also some actual Gospel.

Luke 5:1-11, from the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany .

Luke’s story in Chapter 5:1-11 about the calling of Peter shows just how dangerous it is to let Jesus set foot in your boat.

Compared to Luke’s account, the versions in the other Gospels make the whole affair look perfectly rational and safe. In Matthew and Mark, Jesus spots Peter fishing, calls him to follow, and Peter decides to do it (Matt. 4; Mark 1). John tells us Peter met Jesus through an introduction by Peter’s brother Andrew, who was a disciple of John the Baptist (John 1). Luke’s account, alone, shows just how doomed you are once the Messiah has set his sights on you.

It all seems harmless enough at the start of the story. Jesus is preaching on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and the crowd of listeners is so enthralled that it is literally driving him into the water. Not salt water, by the way. When we hear “sea,” we often assume it means “ocean.” But the Sea of Galilee is really a freshwater lake on the border between Northern Israel and modern-day Syria. So, think Percy Priest, not Gulf Shores.

Perhaps shortly after Jesus realizes his feet are wet, he climbs aboard a nearby fishing boat as if he owns it. Because he does, although he’s probably the only one present who knows that he does. The nominal owner, Peter, is washing his nets nearby, having fished all night with his crew without catching so much as a minnow. Peter and Jesus already know, or at least know of, each other by this point. The end of the previous chapter describes how Jesus healed Peter’s mother in law, who had been suffering from a high fever.

Given the experience, maybe Peter though it would be handy for his village to have a holy man around. Maybe that’s why Peter didn’t object when Jesus hopped into Peter’s boat, sat down, and asked Peter to edge the craft out into the water a bit so Jesus could teach without getting drowned. But then Jesus, having ended his sermon, goes a bit too far.

“Put out into deep water,” Jesus tells Peter, “and let down the nets for a catch.”

How about that? Let the local holy man sit in your boat for a few minutes, and the next thing you know, he fancies himself the captain. And never mind that the nets have just been washed. And never mind that Peter and his crew have just pulled a long, but unproductive, all-nighter. And never mind that any fool knows you don’t fish during the day.

Peter does it – God knows why – but not without grumbling. “Master,” he says – maybe adding a little ice to the word, “we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything. But because you say so, I will let down the nets.”

So Peter and crew do as Jesus ordered, and you probably know the rest of the story. So many fish fill the nets that the nets begin coming apart. Frantic, Peter signals his partners in a separate boat to come help. Both boats end up so full that they begin to sink.

And somewhere amid this chaos, Peter realizes Jesus is no ordinary holy man. Falling at Jesus’ knees, surrounded by, maybe even nearly covered in, flapping, flopping fish, Peter shouts essentially the same thing Abraham (Gen. 18:27), Job (Job 42:6), and Isaiah (Isaiah 6:5) had exclaimed upon realizing they were eyeball-to-eyeball with God.

“Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!”

Turns out “Captain Fool” is “The Admiral” in disguise, eh, Peter?

Then this strange story gets even stranger, because Jesus, having just made Peter’s fishing business a smashing success, fires Peter from it. He doesn’t ask, or even order, Peter to leave behind the fish, the nets, the boats, everything. He states it as a fact.

“From now on,”Jesus tells Peter. “You will fish for people.”

So, be warned, my friends: This is exactly the sort of thing you can expect will happen when you look up from your daily life to see this Jesus fellow helping himself to a seat in your boat or a moment in your day or a few of the dollars in your wallet. You might think it will be OK. Where’s the harm in being owed a favor or two by a guy with miracle power at his fingertips? Don’t be fooled, though. There might be an unexpected pile of fish in your near future, but he’s not ultimately interested in granting you wishes, like some genie you can keep stashed in a lamp. He has come for you, for every bit of you, and once he has you, he will share none of you with anything or anyone else. Taking a seat in your boat is just the start. Soon, he will take the whole boat, and you as well, out into the deep water. He will order you to toss overboard the nets you have worked so carefully to wash and dry. And when you do as he orders, the result will leave your beloved nets in tatters, your beloved boat foundering, your deck piled with not just more than you need, but more than you want.

And in the end, you’ll drag all of it and your very self onto the shore and simply abandon it there to go chasing after him and his crazy plans. Because the end of it all, you will learn, is the beginning of all that matters, and be you a sinful man, woman, boy or girl, he wants all that matters to be yours.

Luke 4:14-21, from the Third Sunday after the Epiphany.

The conflict in Luke 4:14-30 erupts seemingly out of nowhere and escalates, with alarming speed, to attempted murder.

One minute, Jesus is standing in Nazareth’s synagogue and reading aloud from the Book of Isaiah to an appreciative audience. The next, that same audience, infuriated, is driving Jesus toward a cliff outside of town, fully intent on throwing him off of it – a sort of instantaneous, gravity-assisted execution by stoning.

What in the world did he do to set them off like that, especially considering these were the people whom he had grown up with, the people who knew him best?

There’s not much context given, but it seems that Jesus’ hometown crowd was expecting an encore performance in Nazareth of the miracles Jesus had done in Capernaum, which included casting out demons and healing diseases. Jesus informs them that he’s going to do nothing of the sort, and he does it pretty bluntly, pointing out that God had sent Elijah to help a starving widow in Zarephath, north of Israel, despite there having been plenty of starving widows in Israel, and had used Elisha to heal Naaman, a Syrian with leprosy, rather than any of the numerous Israelites infected with leprosy.

Jesus’ point seems to be that he was the Messiah spoken of in the passage Jesus had just read from Isaiah. But God was sending him elsewhere, not to Jesus’ homefolk in Nazareth. Everyone was fine with Jesus’ being the Messiah. They weren’t fine with his being someone else’s Messiah.

In the townspeople’s defense, growing up with Jesus must have been tough. We know next to nothing about what he had been like as a boy. The only story about him then is the one in Luke 2:41-52, in which he disappears during a family trip to Jerusalem, surfaces three days later in the Temple, where he has been all along, and scolds his frantic parents for not surmising that he would be pursuing his father’s business. All true, but pretty cheeky, if you’re expecting the Messiah to follow basic relationship norms. Perhaps he had had similar run-ins with just about everyone in Nazareth as he was growing up, and perhaps his words in the synagogue that morning proved to be the last of many straws.

But let’s not lose sight of the fact that what Jesus told them was true. Elijah and Elisha went elsewhere because the people of Israel had rejected them, and the same was true of Jesus and the people of Nazareth. You don’t just up and decide to throw someone off a cliff. You have to have been itching to do it for a while.

And maybe therein lies the message for you and me all these years later. When you grow up with Jesus, as I did, you develop certain expectations about him and about your relationship with him – expectations that include certain boundaries. The problem with that is that Jesus has no boundaries. He demands total surrender, total obedience. Frankly, it can get on one’s nerves.

Another problem is that when you spend enough time around the gloriously divine, it has a way of fading into the background. Like all Christians – honest, self-aware ones, at least – I have my doubts sometimes about the whole proposition that God is real and that all this stuff I believe about him is anything more than myth and superstition. During one of my more recent episodes, I demanded some kind of sign – just a hint that I was praying to anything beyond my own imagination. The realization hit me like a thunderclap that I was making my demand while walking on a South Carolina beach at sunrise. All around me where things and processes even the world’s foremost scientists could only begin to explain – the tide, the wind, the waves, the life in the sea, the life in the sand, the sun, my own body, the very mind I was using to think my doubts – and yet I had the nerve to ask for a sign. A bush on fire is a sign, as Moses found out. But so is an ordinary bush. If you doubt it, try making a bush from scratch.

Then I got my sign that morning, despite my faithlessness. The surf had reduced every bit of shell on the beach to mere chips. But in short succession, each of a dozen perfectly formed, entirely undamaged, absolutely beautiful giant cockle shells washed up on the beach, practically at my feet. I’ve never seen anything like it happen, before or since. I get that there could be a rational explanation. Maybe some collector had abandoned the shells a short time before I had happened by. It was early, and the beach was deserted and devoid of all footprints except mine, but who knows. Maybe some natural calamity had befallen a bed of cockles somewhere nearby, and a chance current had, by mere coincidence, brought the shells to me. Or maybe God had decided to tell me that if the universe spinning and pulsing and roaring and blazing all around me weren’t enough to convince me, perhaps a dozen shells improbably washed my way would tip the balance in his favor.

John 2:1-11, from the Second Sunday after the Epiphany.

I think John’s story of the miracle at Cana never really got the attention it deserved during my upbringing in conservative Baptist churches.

The teetotalling preachers and teachers who ran things probably had a tough time mustering enthusiasm for a story that depicted Jesus using divine power to help drunk people get even more drunk. The discussion always seemed to gravitate toward an improbable assertion that the wine referred to in the story was just grape juice, not the fermented demon brew for sale in the heavily regulated, closed-on-Sunday liquor stores around town.

But there is so much more here than a chemistry lesson. To recap: Some unnamed couple is tying the knot in Cana, a little town just north of Nazareth, and Jesus and his disciples are among the wedding party’s guests, as is Jesus’ mother, Mary. But the wine runs out before the party ends – an unmitigated disaster, given the prevailing hospitality standards in first-century Palestine. Mary brings the problem to Jesus, who respectfully tells her it’s not his problem, because it’s not yet his time. But in what has all the appearances of a rather funny, “You might be God, but I’m still your mother” moment, Mary tells the servants to follow the directions Jesus will (not “might”) give them.

Perhaps with a roll of his eyes, Jesus gestures toward six stone vats of water set up for the guests to use when washing their hands before eating, as Jewish law required. Jesus tells the servants to fill the jars to the brim, and the servants comply. Then he tells them to draw some out and take it to the chief steward for a taste test. They do that, too, which of course leads to yet another funny moment. The chief steward swigs what he does not know had been wash water only seconds ago and declares it to be the finest wine of the party. He likes it so much, in fact, that he discreetly scolds the groom for having failed to uncork it sooner, before everyone had gotten too sloshed to appreciate it.

All those sermons and Sunday School lessons that focused on what Jesus had made at the Cana wedding, grape juice or wine, tended to overlook what he had made it out of: water. And, in particular, wash water, a category of water nobody would want to drink. And just in case anyone would think there was any ingredient other than wash water involved, Jesus had the servants top off each of the jars, leaving no room to hope for anything else except the miraculous grace that Jesus would somehow infuse it with as the servants were carrying a sample of it to the head steward. And judging from what the steward said during his giddy assessment, few of the partiers would possess enough sobriety to appreciate what was about to fill their empty goblets. But fill their goblets it would, to overflowing, because each of those six brimming wash water vats held up to 30 gallons. Jesus hadn’t merely made great wine. He had made it in extravagant abundance.

Perhaps you can see more clearly now why the story of Cana’s wash water wine is the perfect beginning for Jesus’ work in the world.

As he had at Cana, he would carry out his redemptive mission almost secretly, urging the beneficiaries of his miracles to tell no one what had happened and teaching in parables so opaque that he often had to explain them afterward to his disciples.

He would describe an alternative kingdom in which the last would be first and the first would be last, a kingdom as seemingly upside down and backwards as the sight of party guests getting merrily drunk on the same water they had rinsed their hands in at the door.

He would prescribe a spiritual transformation completely dependent on the power of God, a vat brimming with nothing but fouled water turned into a vat brimming with nothing but the best of all wine, and no room in between for any added ingredient other than faith.

And he would pour 100-percent-proof salvation in lavish abundance out on the entire world, including those too drunk on inferior stuff to notice what was happening. He would be like a sower scattering seed on every patch of soil within range, be it hard, rocky, weedy or fertile. And as some patches in the field would end up barren despite the seed that had fallen on them, so some in the world would end up dying of thirst despite the deluge that had soaked them.

But only because they had refused to simply open their mouths and drink.

Luke 2:41-52, from the First Sunday after Christmas.

Given the things Jesus would do and say during the life ahead of him, we should not feel surprised that the very first things he says and does in the Gospels are weird and offensive.

Jesus is 12 years old in Luke 2:41-52, and he and his parents have made their annual trek to Jerusalem for the Passover festival, a holy time on the Jewish spiritual calendar that commemorated God’s deliverance of the Jews from slavery in Egypt. It of course would be during another Passover some 30 years later that Jesus would trek to Jerusalem with his disciples to share a Passover meal with them before his arrest, execution and resurrection.

But once this Passover from Jesus’ boyhood is over, his parents, Joseph and Mary, pack up and leave town with their friends and family, assuming the young Jesus had the sense to join the caravan before its departure. But when they go looking for him that night, they find he is missing. A hasty return to Jerusalem and a frantic, three-day search follow, after which Joseph and Mary finally find Jesus sitting in the Temple, happy as a clam and utterly oblivious to their distress, wowing the teachers with his wisdom.

Appalled, Mary gives him a well deserved scolding. “Son, why have you treated us like this?” She demands. “Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.”

Jesus, ashamed of himself, apologizes for the distress he has caused his parents, admits he got carried away, and promises never to do it again, right? Wrong. In a move that fans of the “What Would Jesus Do?” slogan might have difficulty explaining, Jesus scolds his parents right back.

“Why were you searching for me?” he asks. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?”

Why, indeed? A boy of 12 goes inexplicably missing for half a week in the aftermath of a patriotic celebration in an enemy-occupied city, and the first thing his mom and dad were supposed to assume is that they could find him hanging out, safe and sound, in the first century equivalent of a seminary classroom? And right in front of the adoptive father who has raised him for 12 years and who has been looking high and low for him all this time, imagining every sort of terrible fate that could have befallen him, Jesus has the nerve to talk about being in the house of his father – that is, his *real* father.

I’m frankly surprised Mary and Joseph didn’t wring his ungrateful neck.

And in case you are tempted to dismiss Jesus’ reaction as that of an impetuous tween, consider how, as a full-grown man in the beginnings of his public ministry, he responded in Matt. 12:48-50 when told that Mary and his brothers had come to speak with him:

“‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ Pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.'”

There are times when Jesus calls us to imitate him. Having washed his disciples’ feet in John 13:4-11, Jesus tells his disciples to serve one another as he as served them. And a few verses later, in John 13:14, he commands them, “As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”

But there are other times – and this week’s passage is one of them – when we must remember that we are Christians, not the Christ, and that Jesus is our king, not our peer. We don’t always have the right to act like he did.

Toward the end of C.S. Lewis’ story, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” as the coronation festivities for Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are winding down, Aslan, the lion who represents Jesus in the story, quietly goes missing. But the children, Lewis writes, said nothing about it, having been warned by Mr. Beaver that such was Aslan’s way.

“‘He’ll be coming and going,’ he had said. ‘One day you’ll see him and another you won’t. He doesn’t like being tied down – and of course he has other countries to attend to. It’s quote all right. He’ll often drop in. Only you musn’t press him. He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.'”

Not like a tame lion at all. And, to echo something else Mr. Beaver says about him way back at the start of the story, not safe, either. An honest reading of the Gospels reveals a Jesus with sharp elbows and an even sharper tongue, a man who could be achingly compassionate in one moment and seemingly heartless the next, radically inclusive toward some people and coldly confrontational toward others.

Which raises some possibly hard questions for you and me. Is the Jesus we know tame and safe? Or does he at least occasionally offend and frighten us? If our relationship with him isn’t at least a little bit uncomfortable at least some of the time, might it be that we don’t know him quite as well as we think we do? When he speaks harshly to the Pharisees, do we cheer him on without considering how much we have in common with them? When he commands us to turn the other cheek or respond in love to hatred, do we assume that we always do? When he says that the first will be last and the last, first, do we figure that we, naturally, are the last who will be first, not the first who will be last?

If you area a saint already, perhaps so. But if not, perhaps your best life still awaits you – the life Jesus is waiting to give you, if only you will let go of the one you are holding onto so tightly.

Next week: Epiphany of the Lord