What Will Be the Sign?

THIS NOVEMBER CYCLE of lectionary readings encourages our stillness and trust in God in times of persecution (Psalm 46). It also asks us to reconsider the signs and wonders of Jesus’ public ministry as an invitation into his redemptive plan.

In Luke 19, Jesus extends mercy in the form of table fellowship to the wealthy and despised chief tax collector Zacchaeus, setting off alarms. Everyone who saw divine hospitality in motion “began to grumble and said, ‘He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner’” (verse 7). The taxation system of which Zacchaeus is a part, by profession and association, is no doubt inherently corrupt and socially abusive. Ironically, salvation comes to Zacchaeus with “breaking of bread,” table fellowship, and in the context of divine hospitality.

Luke 20 presents one of several vignettes that raise questions about the nature and origin of Jesus’ authority. Here a dispute pits Sadducees, the keepers of the Torah who do not believe in resurrection, against Jesus, the rabbi who scrambles and puzzles their logic. What is revealed is a strictness of theological imagination on the Sadducees’ part and radical truth-telling grounded in well-timed perception on the part of Jesus. Then in Luke 21, Jesus foretells terror, the kind which we 21st-century, world-redemption seekers would do well to hear: “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes ... famines and plagues ... and great signs from heaven” (verses 10-11). You will be hated, Jesus says, but “by your endurance you will gain your souls” (verse 19).

November 3

Reclaiming Hospitality

A CROWD GATHERS in Jericho near the end of Jesus’ public ministry. Zacchaeus, Facebook’s first-century forerunner, climbs up a tree so that he can surveil the commotion below undetected. He voyeurs unnoticed, so he thinks. But Jesus beckons him down and says, “You are hosting me today.” Zacchaeus assents. Jesus doesn’t ask Zacchaeus to confess faith but simply shows up with salvation. Zacchaeus recites no doctrinal statement. Everything about this passage explodes our theological litmus tests. One might venture to constrain this passage to Calvinistic, syllogistic reasoning about conditional and unconditional election and still not close the loop on divine mystery here. Jesus requires nothing of Zacchaeus; only to host him in his home. To Zacchaeus’ amazement, Jesus saves him and his household on the spot.

Zacchaeus intends to prove that he is not one of the “bad ones” by pledging his commitment to gift the poor with half of his wealth to demonstrate his gratitude for salvation (verse 8), yet we assume he might continue his participation in an evil system that he is likely not going to challenge or change. In capitalistic economies that require some to accept fixed status for others to prosper, even the most well-intentioned privileged persons are complicit in the maintenance of systemic evil. Any system that works against human flourishing and blunts the social progress and upward mobility of America’s working poor is necessarily sinful and at worst evil. If America’s most socially vulnerable citizens find themselves trapped in economically distressed communities—where poverty abounds and persons are caught in the crosswinds of unscrupulous payday-lending practices and high rents—while social policies protect the interests of the state and the top 20 percent holds 77 percent of household wealth, then no person of means escapes such a system with clean hands.

November 10

Absurd Questions

CAN LIFE ARISE from death? In Luke 20, the Sadducees pose a tricky question. Resurrection is not resuscitation or reanimation of the physical self; rather, according to Reginald H. Fuller, it signals the active work of a divine sovereign to bring about a complete psychosomatic transformation of the human body. Resurrection is an absurd notion unless one’s faith claim is premised on the assumption that the historical process is not theologically closed. What resurrection symbolizes is that only a God who raises life from death stands outside the expectation, prediction, and horizon of human control.

The Sadducees ask Jesus whose wife a widow will be in the resurrection if she had been given in marriage to seven brothers in succession (verses 28-33a), a reference to Levirate marriage practices. The absurdity of the question points to the absurdity of the belief in the resurrection. The Sadducees are asking the wrong question. Jesus says: “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage but those who are considered worthy ... in the resurrection from the dead they neither marry nor are given in marriage” (verses 34-35). The afterlife is different from life on earth, Jesus explains, because the world of the present reality is not the only reality there is.

Resurrection is the believer’s gateway to hope, and to believe in resurrection’s power in faith gets to the very heart of why the church exists. Empirical datum will never sufficiently verify what the heart of faith knows—that the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus honors our faith and promotes human flourishing. Our God “is not God of the dead but of the living” (verse 38). Any questions?

November 17

The Day Is Coming

“NOT ONE STONE will be left upon another!” Jesus warns. False messiahs—the Koreshian type—will come to lead you astray, saying, “I am he.” Don’t believe them!

How ominous a sermon this must have been for Jesus’ audience. The twin forces of holy terror and holy grace are in a full-on scrimmage, competing for the souls of those hearing this messianic prediction. Given the immediacy and apocalyptic tenor of Jesus’ words, it is hardly evident that any good news is to be found in Luke 21. “What will be the sign?” his followers inquire. In short, he replies: tough times. “They will arrest you and persecute you” because of my name, and you will seek asylum, be detained, and separated from relatives; even they will betray you (verse 12). But those who hold onto faith, says Jesus, will have the right words and will have their lives preserved (verses 15, 17-19).

Now if Jesus’ depictions of the end are hard to stomach, the prophet Malachi’s doomsday pronouncements are more terrifying. The time of judgment is coming “like a hot furnace. All the proud people will be punished. All the evil people will burn like straw” (Malachi 4:1). But the righteous who revere God “shall go out leaping like calves from the stall” (verse 2). As we see the gross misdeeds of our country’s highest elected official with the approval of many religious people, we too must ask of Jesus, “Are these the times spoken of long ago?” While we mustn’t overlay our 21st-century dilemma on these texts, we who are alive and remain Christ’s followers must in every age ask of a living and speaking God, “What will be the sign of your coming?” May those awaiting the Lord’s arrival, after having pursued righteousness and righteous causes, be found making “a joyful noise before the Lord” (Psalm 98:6).

November 24

Being Still

WHEN I WAS a child I couldn’t be still. I can’t tell you how many times I heard the question, “Do you have ants in your pants?” I felt that I couldn’t—and didn’t want to—be still.

Scripture teaches the importance of stillness. The psalmist declares, “Be still and know I am God! I am exalted among the nations; I am exalted in the earth” (Psalm 46:10). If individuals are to approach God in meaningful encounter, they must first acknowledge that God is not only the creator and ruler of all living creatures but is also a God who “bottoms existence,” to use the language of Howard Thurman. According to this psalm, Israel’s God is the only god worthy of worship. Nations form, crumble, and dissolve. God sits ever present with God’s own creation. As preceding verses declare, God provides refuge and strength, comes to our aid, ends hostility, and makes wars cease (verses 1, 9). Stillness before God opens wide the soul’s door. Thurman points this out when he writes: “There is very great virtue in the cultivation of silence, and strength to be found in using it as a door to God. Such a door opens within. When I have quieted down, I must spend some time in self-examination in the Presence of God.”

We cannot begin to see who we truly are without self-examination. If we are unwilling to sit silently before God, then we should not expect to obtain any sound insight into our purpose for living. Revelation for properly identifying God’s will for our lives is best obtained through encounter with the Sovereign in whom the power of life and death is held. To sit quietly before a speaking God is to encounter a glorious power made manifest in the firstborn of all creation, Jesus Christ—in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell (Colossians 1:15, 19).