Most of us probably remember
Jesus’s statement “I am the way and the truth and the life.” When we talk about that statement, though, we
tend to focus on the first part of it—“I am the way.” What we don’t focus as much on is the second
part. Jesus said, “I am the truth.”
Truth is very important.
Now, we all know that. We pay lip
service to it all the time. We say
“honesty is the best policy”. We tell
kids all the time to tell the truth. And
most of probably are truthful. Well,
most of the time, anyway.
And in saying that, I don’t mean to imply that I think
we’re all a bunch of liars. I just mean
that sometimes telling the truth can be really hard. And sometimes telling the truth can get us
into a lot of trouble. And that leads us
into our sermon series, “The Paradoxical Commandments.” This is the fifth in a series of statements
written by Dr. Kent M. Keith and endorsed by Mother Teresa. The commandment for today is: “Honesty and frankness make you
vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway.”
That can be true in at least a couple of ways, maybe
more. One of them is the subject of our
Bible reading for today from First Kings.
In that reading, we have the king of Israel and the king
of Judah getting together and talking about going to war against the king of
Aram because they think Aram has some territory that rightly belongs to Israel
and Judah. As a side note, there’s
another way that the Bible shows nothing much has changed about human society
in three or four thousand years. Anyway,
at this point, the Jewish people have slipped away from God, to a large
extent. But they still think that,
before they go to war, they’d better find out what the Lord has to say about
it.
So, they call the prophets together, and the prophets all
say, “Go for it.” But the king of Judah,
Jehoshaphat, knows something’s wrong here.
We’re not told how he knows, but somehow he knows that these are not
really prophets of the Lord. So he asks,
“Is there no longer a prophet of the Lord here whom we can inquire of?”
Well, there is.
His name is Micaiah. But the king
of Israel says, you don’t want to talk to him.
He always prophesies bad stuff about me.
But Jehoshaphat insists, so they call Micaiah. And sure enough, Micaiah tells them that God
says this is all going to end in disaster.
And for his trouble, he gets thrown into prison and given only bread and
water.
Micaiah was frank.
He was honest. And it made him
vulnerable, just like Dr. Keith said.
It must have been tempting for Micaiah to tell the kings
what they wanted to hear. In fact, we’re
told that at first he did. It’s hard to
know how to read that. I’ve always
thought that Micaiah was just being sarcastic, that he knew they would not
believe him when he said it. But we
don’t know that. It could be that
Micaiah was trying to save himself some trouble by telling them what he knew
they wanted to hear.
When they called him on it, though, he told them the
truth. And it was the truth. If we had read a little farther, you’d have
seen that the war did, in fact, end in disaster for the kings, just as Micaiah
had said.
We don’t know what happened to Micaiah after that. He drops out of the story. Was he ever released from prison? Did he die there? Did he continue to prophesy? We don’t know. All we know is that, when it came right down
to it, Micaiah was honest and frank with people who did not want to hear what
he had to say. And he paid a price for
it.
And the frustrating thing, from Micaiah’s viewpoint, is
that he did not go looking for trouble here. He did not go up to these two kings and
demand they listen to him. They sent for
him. They asked him what the Lord
thought. They insisted that he give them
an honest answer. And then they punished
him when he did.
I suspect some of us have been in that situation. Someone says I need your honest opinion. And we give it to them. And they get mad at us for it, because it was
not the answer they wanted to hear. They
said they wanted an honest opinion, but in fact, they wanted us to agree with
them. It’s not easy to be honest and
frank with people who don’t want to hear what we have to say. And it’s especially frustrating when they
invited us to say it.
But there’s another way that being honest and frank makes
us vulnerable. That’s when we choose to
be honest and frank about who we are.
Most of us don’t like to reveal too much about who we
are. There are reasons for that, and
some of them are valid ones. After all,
there are some things about all of our lives that are nobody else’s
business. We all have the right to
maintain some privacy about ourselves.
But there are also times when we’re afraid to reveal too
much about ourselves. Sometimes, we’re
afraid that if people know too much about us, they might not like us. Sometimes, we’re afraid that if people get to
know who we really are, they won’t respect us.
Sometimes, we’re afraid that if people could really see all the sides
there are to us, they might not love us.
And so we hide ourselves.
We put up a front. We pretend to
be someone we’re not. And sometimes it
goes beyond pretending. Sometimes we
actually try to be someone we’re not, because we don’t think who we are is a
very good person.
Now, don’t get me wrong here. We all have room to improve, and we always
should try to improve. But we should not
try to be someone we’re not. God created
each of us to be who we are. If God had
wanted us to be someone else, God would’ve made us to be someone else. God created you to be you. And God created me to be me. I need to try to be the best me I can be, but
I still need to be me. And you need to
be you. It’s only by being who we are,
and by trying to be the best of who we are, that we truly honor God.
But the thing is that the more honest and the more
authentic we are with people, the more vulnerable we make ourselves. If we’re putting up a front and somebody does
not like us, we can tell ourselves that, well, they really don’t know us. But if we’re being who we really are and
somebody does not like us, well, that hurts.
That’s a personal rejection.
That’s a rejection that goes to our hearts.
Remember the story of Jesus riding triumphantly into
Jerusalem on Palm Sunday? The people
were shouting for him, screaming for him.
But they did not know who he really was.
They thought he was going to be a conquering king. And that was what they wanted.
But over the next few days, Jesus revealed who he really
was. He told Pilate that he was a king. But he was not a conquering king, at least
not in the way the people wanted. He was
a sacrificial king. He was a king who
was going to die. He told Pilate
“Everyone who is on the side of truth listens to me.” And Pilate responded, “What is truth?”
When Jesus revealed who he really was, he made himself
vulnerable. Not just because it meant
the Jewish leaders wanted to kill him.
They wanted to kill him anyway.
He made himself vulnerable to rejection from the people. They wanted a conquering king. They did not want a king who would submit to
the Roman authorities. When they found
out who Jesus really was, they rejected him.
It had to hurt.
Even though Jesus knew it was going to happen, it still had to
hurt. They had loved Jesus when they
thought he was someone he was not. When
he revealed who he was, they rejected him.
Not only did they reject him, they hated him. They hated him enough to want him dead.
But Jesus went through with it. He could’ve tried to be someone he was
not. He could’ve been the conquering
king they wanted. He had that kind of
power. But that would not have been
honest. If Jesus had been that
conquering king, he would not have been who he was sent to earth to be. Jesus had the courage to be who he was. He had the courage to be honest and authentic. It made him vulnerable, even to the point of
being killed. But he still did it. And by doing it, he honored God.
Jesus did not try to be someone he was not. He was who he was sent to earth to be. We should not try to be someone we’re not,
either. We should be who we were created
to be, the best of who we were created to be.
If we do that, we will be vulnerable, just like Jesus was. But it’s the only way we can be true to
ourselves. It’s the only way we can be
true to God. And it’s the only way we
can honor God.
“Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway.” It’s not always easy. But it’s worth it. And it’s the only way we can truly honor God.
No comments:
Post a Comment