Teach Us, O Lord, To Obey
Posted on Mar 01, 2015 by David Whetter
Grace and peace to you from God our Creator, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, who abides in which of us. Amen
We are so accustomed to the story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection that I don’t really believe that we can fully appreciate how hard it must been for those first disciples to listen to Jesus and comprehend what he was telling them. At the time that Jesus was doing his ministry, the great hope of the Jewish people was freedom from the Romans. They wanted to be a free people. They wanted to be able to worship and live without others telling them what to do and how to think. They didn’t like having to obey the laws of the Romans that were contrary to the laws of God. And, in the midst of this desire for freedom comes a man named Jesus. Jesus was a man who performed miracles regularly. He was a man who was unafraid of the political and religious leaders and who would stand up to them and challenge them. He was a man who, with just a word of invitation, could get people to follow him. And so, it seemed only natural that these people began to place their hope for freedom in Jesus. Everything they had seen Jesus do and heard him say until this time had been impressive and had no doubt spurred within them big hopes for the future.
But in the midst of all this, the one whom they had such high hopes for was beginning to sound a little crazy. Contrary to their hopes and expectations, Jesus was talking about suffering, be rejected by the religious leaders and killed. This was crazy talk! The Messiah couldn’t die. The Messiah was supposed to lead them to freedom. To hear such a prediction must have been hard and if truth be told, it must have sounded down right incompressible. They had witnessed everything he had done and said up until now and they knew he had the power to change the world and to influence change, so they wanted him to obey their needs and their demands. We humans believe that to be successful one must be prosperous, strong, and influential. But Jesus had other priorities. He had come to serve, not to be served. His ways were not the ways of the world, or of the disciples.
This was a shock to the disciples, even though they knew Jesus was the Messiah. As the Messiah, they knew he was the anointed one of God, they wanted this Messiah to act like a human, but God had already told them that human ways were not his ways centuries before that. We all remember what the prophet Isaiah said, don’t we, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9). God’s ways are not the ways of the world and for some reason, we humans, keep forgetting that and we struggle with really listening and following God’s ways.
God’s ways seem too idealistic for us. God’s ways often don’t bring about the immediate results we want. God’s ways often seem to inconvenience us, or focus on changing us, more than those whom we want to change, and so, we often reject God’s ways and clam that they don’t apply to us today. I hear comments like this all the time.
When it comes to living generous lives, I often hear, well, Pastor, God really cant expect us to tithe today, can He? I mean the cost of living today is so high; taxes are high, rent is high, home costs are high, food costs have sky rocketed, and the cost of sending our kids to college is unbelievable. Or, God really can’t expect me to give up much of my time to serve others. I mean, between my job, family commitments, commitments around the house and everything I have going on in my life, I don’t have time to do more. These laws might have applied 2000-3000 years ago, but God knows that the world has changed, right? Well, lets think about that. Yes, income numbers have changed. Yes, the quality of life has changed. Yes, we have filled more of our days with leisure things to do compared to centuries ago, but not much has really changes. In Jesus’ day, the majority of the people lived in what we would call poverty. Not only did they not make much money, but they often didn’t make enough to put food on the table, let alone buy a nice house. Their days were filled with hard work, just to survive, and yet, God said to them, live generously, give of yourself and Jesus taught, pick up your cross.
As we learned in worship Wednesday evening, picking up our cross is about serving others. Picking up our cross is about living lives that care more about justice than personal gain. Picking up our cross is not about self-suffering, but about being willing to suffer with those who are poor, homeless, and oppressed. Picking up our cross is about living lives that seek to change the world, even if it means we have to give up some of our comfort, or some of our conveniences.
As Jesus once said, he did not come to change the law, but to fulfill it and today we hear Jesus challenging us to continue to fulfill God’s law. Today we are being challenged to obey God’s command to live generously. Today we are reminded that we are called to obey God’s ways and reject the ways of this world. All too often, the church has proclaimed a theology of glory, but that is not what Jesus taught. Now what I mean by a theology of glory is that we often like to say if I follow Jesus and his ways, I will be richly blessed. Now this is true, but what isn’t true is that what Jesus meant when he spoke of blessing was not material wealth and power. No Jesus was speaking about be blessed with the joy of knowing that in living generously, one would come to know the joy of freeing the oppressed, sharing good news with the poor and giving sight to the blind.
No, in our understanding of God’s teaching that is in our theology, we understand that what Jesus taught was a theology of the cross. A theology of the cross admits that when we obey Jesus and pick up our cross that we will most likely experience some suffering, some persecution, some inconvenience and we may even experience death, literally or metaphorically, but when we obey Jesus and we do pick up our crosses then we will also experience Jesus joy and we will experience resurrection.
You see, obeying Jesus might sound hard. It might sound like if we obey Jesus we will have no more fun and no more enjoyment, but nothing could be further from the truth. As Jesus promises us today those who lose their lives for Jesus’ sake and the sake of the gospel will save it (Mark 8:35).
We may not like the sound of obeying Jesus, in our story today, Jesus is inviting us to do just that. Today, he invites us to follow him and his ways. Today, we are being challenged to pray to Jesus and say, Teach us, O Lord, to obey. So let us pray that prayer now, “Teach us, O Lord, to Obey!” Amen