Third Sunday of Lent
March 8, 2015
EXPECTATIONS!
When
couples come to me preparing for marriage – the first thing I ask them to
consider are their expectations. What do
you expect from your husband? What do you expect from your wife?
Our experiences in our homes growing up have created in us
expectations for marriage. Our
experiences of watching other married couples have created expectations of what
married people do. TV Shows. Movies.
Books. Bridal magazines create
expectations for romance, our wedding and marriage itself.
Expectations create high conflict when our expectations do
not hold water to our reality.
Historian
Daniel Boorstin suggests that Americans suffer from all-too-extravagant
expectations for our lives. In his much-quoted book The Image, Boorstin makes
this observation of Americans:
“We expect anything and everything. We expect the
contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious;
luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable,
powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive …. We expect
to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly, to
go to a "church of our choice" and yet feel its guiding power over
us, to revere God and to be God. Never have people been more the masters of
their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed.
For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.”
When we
come to today’s title of Jesus – Messiah – we are confronted with expectations.
Our expectations of Jesus get exposed along with the many expectations for the
Messiah during Jesus time.
Far too
often, I am afraid – we also carry extravagant of expectations for Jesus. We expect Jesus to be everything that we want
him to be – to fit within our mold and model of who the MESSSIAH should
be.
A funny
story has famously be told of the young preacher telling one of his first
children’s sermons. On this Sunday, he
was using squirrels for an object lesson on industry and preparation. He
started out by saying, "I'm going to describe something, and I want you to
raise your hand when you know what it is." The children nodded eagerly.
"This thing lives in trees (pause) and eats nuts
(pause)..." No hands went up. "And it is gray (pause) and has a long
bushy tail (pause)..." The children were looking at each other, but still
no hands raised. "And it jumps from branch to branch (pause) and chatters
and flips its tail when it's excited (pause)..."
Finally one little boy tentatively raised his hand. The
pastor breathed a sigh of relief and called on him. "Well," said the
boy, "I *know* the answer must be Jesus ... but it sure sounds like a
squirrel to me!"
What do we expect from Jesus?
• Do we expect
Jesus to be a social conservative, a moral bastion like us fighting against the
sinful ways of the world? What happens
when we find him eating meals and laughing with prostitutes, thieves, and
heretics like these people matter?
• Do we expect
him to be a liberal, open minded accepter of anyone willing to following him?
What happens when we find him highly demanding, equating lust in our heart with
actual adultery?
• Do we expect
him to answer all of our questions? What
happens when he leaves us with more questions than answers?
• Do we expect
him to reflect our ideas of faith? What
happens when he demands our lives reflect his?
• Do we expect
the Christian life to be a simple proposition in which we receive Jesus into
our hearts and go to heaven when we die?
What happens when Jesus invites us into a life of discipleship – of
following him here on earth?
• Do we expect
the Christian life to be difficult and confusing in the face of so many other
religions and challenges? What happens
when Jesus simplifies it and welcomes a young child by his side and asks us to
model our lives after theirs?
If you find this tendency of the biblical Jesus blowing up
our human expectations about him to be frustrating – let me invite you into the
today’s scripture.
The title Messiah carried extravagant, over the top
expectations for everyone in the time and place of Jesus. Everyone carried an opinion and a hope for
this person.
After hearing Jesus teach and reveal intimate details of
her life, the Samaritan woman here in John 4 responds by mentioning the
Messiah: “I know the Messiah is coming,”
the Woman proclaims to Jesus at the well.
“He is the one who is called Christ. When he comes, he will explain
everything to us.”
Jesus responds to her boldly - “I AM the Messiah!” I AM –
the title God uses with Moses at the burning bush. Jesus now puts himself squarely into the
expectations the entire community had for the coming Messiah.
1. The woman is
still not sure about Jesus, though, so she hedges her bets. She knows something is special about
Jesus. She leaves the well to tell
everyone in her village in v. 24: ““Come
and see a man who told me everything I ever did! Could he possibly be the
Messiah?”
Using the actual title of Messiah had political and social
ramifications. The woman could have been
thrown into prison if she had announced to everyone that Jesus was the
Messiah. Proclaiming Jesus as Messiah
challenged the political and social orders – it was revolutionary.
The English Title Messiah comes from Hebrew/Aramaic words
which literally mean Anointed one. This
Hebrew word in Greek is Christ. Contrary
to what I thought growing up - Christ is
not Jesus’ last name! It is title that
has been added to his proper - Jesus of Nazareth - name. When we call him Jesus Christ – we proclaim
Jesus the Messiah.
The concept of Messiah was born during King David’s
reign. Remember how Samuel sought David
at his father’s home and anointed his head with oil. This was kingly act. David was the Anointed
One. Savior. Each king after David carried the same title
– they were God’s anointed king/leader of his people.
After the fall of Judah and exile into Babylon – there were
no more anointed leaders or kings.
Israel lived within the occupation of other major powers. The title Messiah evolved to be the expected
person who would be the visible inbreaking of God’s power into history in the
same way God had done during the exodus.
Talk about expectations!
The People of Jesus’ time had some very specific Messianic
Expectations:
• Descends
from King David. This is why the
genealogies in Matthew and Luke both connect Jesus through Mary and Joseph to
King David.
• Restores
Nation of Israel – For over 400 years the nation of Israel had only enjoyed a
few years of self-rule through the priest kings called the Maccabees. The Messiah would restore the nation –
physically and literally as a nation.
.
• Frees Jews
from occupation – The Roman Empire occupied Palestine with cruel power –
forcing families into poverty and creating uncertainty of life. The Messiah would throw off the oppressors and
free the people in the same way Moses brought the people out of Egypt.
• Establishes
God’s rule in Jerusalem – Jerusalem and its temple were and remain the holiest
sites in all of Judaism. The Messiah
would retake the city David that established.
The Samaritan woman, the disciples, Peter, Nicodemus,
religious leaders, and the crowds from Galilee and Jerusalem all carried these
kinds of expectation for the Title of Messiah.
Jesus destroys these expectations. By destroying these expectations Jesus offers
his original followers and those of us today a new way of understanding the
Messiah.
2. In v. 42 we
begin to see a glimpse of this new life.
For 2 days Jesus stays in the Samaritan village teaching. For 2 days he teaches about the Kingdom of
God and his role as Messiah. When he
prepares the leave, the villagers no longer hesitate about Jesus. They make this confession of faith: “Now we believe, not just because of what you
[the woman at the well] told us, but because we have heard him ourselves. Now
we know that he is indeed the Savior of the world.”
When Jesus destroys the expectations for the first century
Messiah, his followers are forced to rethink his life, their experience, the
Hebrew Scriptures and their understanding of Messiah.
Raymond Brown, a 20th century NT scholar in An Introduction
to New Testament Christology, says it like this: “It took time after Jesus’ death for the
Jewish presuppositions (expectations) about the Messiah to be modified and
tailored to suit Jesus’s career, so that believers could recognize him without
reservation as the Messiah in all the phases of his life.”
The largest dissonance about the Messiah these early
followers had to overcome was the death of Jesus. There were many things they expected from the
Messiah – but his death on a cross as a revolutionary was never one of
them. All the dreams and expectations
for Jesus as the Messiah die with him.
How do we make sense of an inbreaking of the presence of God
who dies on a common cross?
NT. Wright, Simply Jesus:
A New Vision of Who He was, What He did, and Why it Matters says it this
way: “Jesus’s vocation to be Israel’s
Messiah and this vocation to suffer and die belong intimately together.”
Jesus takes those Messianic expectations that preceded him
and launches a new kingdom on earth as well as in heaven.
Jesus takes our expectations of a Messiah and his kingdom
onto the cross and destroys them. The
disciples wanted a kingdom without a cross.
Today - Some of us who claim to be orthodox or Conservative Christians
want a cross without kingdom. This
abstract atonement which escapes earth makes us heavenly minded, but no earthly
good. Others today want a divine Jesus,
a kind of superhero figure, who comes to rescue them, but not to act as
Israel’s Messiah, establishing God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.
Jesus as Messiah on the cross shockingly combines these
scriptural models of the Messiah into a single vocation and title.
When Jesus dies on the cross, he meets death in the same way
that King David met Goliath on the field.
In one sweeping great act of Love, Jesus destroys death once and for by
taking death upon his shoulders.
There are many ways Christian have understood the death of
Jesus on the cross. In some ways his
death is beautiful model of love for the world.
In another Jesus serves our representative on the cross. He dies so that we do not have to. In another, Jesus deaths is seen as
punishment – receiving the great judgment of God.
Jesus as the Messiah who dies brings all of these theologies
of the cross together. We realize that
when Jesus Christ – the anointed One – the Messiah dies on the cross – his
followers and those who wrote his story down saw this act as the ultimate means
by which his Kingdom was established. It
was the ultimate exodus so that the ultimate tyrant – death itself – could be
defeated.
Through his death we are set free to live our lives in new
way. Our expectations of what we deserve
or who we are destroyed and replaced by the grace and love of Jesus who died
for us. We are free to live – not
through the law – but through grace. God
is now in charge.
The Gospel
Story is the extraordinary story of Israel’s Messiah taking upon himself the
Accusers sharpest arrow and dying under its force, robbing the Accuser of any
real power in our lives – all through his love.
There is no greater love than this.
Jesus the Messiah destroys our expectations and establishes
a new kingdom – not one made of our expectations and our wants – but with
his.
After Jesus spends two days with the Samaritan villagers, he
transforms their expectations of the Messiah.
This transformation calls for a commitment. They no longer depend on the words of others
– they know for themselves that Jesus is more than just a Jewish Messiah or a
Samaritan Messiah – Jesus is the Savior of the World!
Jesus as the Messiah invites each of us to make the same
confession and commitment. We cannot
depend on what others tell us about the Messiah. We have to encounter Jesus for
ourselves. We cannot depend on our
parent’s faith. Or our youth ministers faith. Or our spouses faith. We have to look past what the world says
about Jesus Christ and get to know Jesus ourselves.
When we do – we realize that Jesus offers us the gift of new
life through his death and resurrection.
Jesus the Messiah died so that you may have new life – everlasting
life. Abundant life. He died so that you may participate in his
kingdom – on earth as it is in heaven.
He died so that your sins would be forgiven.
Some of us here have never fully commitment to Jesus our
lives. You have been holding back. You want just the parts of Jesus that meet
your expectations. That don’t cost you
too much. That make you happy. That fit your lifestyle. You get afraid of Jesus as Messiah. Of what he may ask of you!
Today – I invite you to commit your life to Jesus fully and
completely. Receive the gift of
Jesus. Release your life and receive his. Take his hand and let him heal you, challenge
you, and save you.
Jesus is the savior of the world! Thanks be to God. Amen.
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