This is the message given at the Wednesday Lent service in the Gettysburg United Methodist church on March 23, 2016. The Bible verses used are Luke 22:66-71.
In these Wednesday services,
we’ve been following Jesus in his trip to the cross. And we’ve been noting all the times he
could’ve done things differently, all the times he could’ve compromised or used
his power or rallied people around him or in any number of ways to avoid going
to the cross, to avoid being killed.
Tonight, we see Jesus on trial. He’s in front of the council of the
elders. There are the chief priests and
the teachers of the law. And they say to
Jesus, “If you are the Messiah, tell us.”
Now understand, this was not a request for
information. The chief priests and the
teachers of the law were not really interested in whether he was the Messiah or
not. They thought they knew the answer. There was no way this wanderer, this
carpenter from Nazareth, this nobody who had this rag-tag group of followers,
some of whom were among the lowest of the low, there was no way he could be the
Messiah.
They “knew” Jesus was not the Messiah. What they wanted was to see if Jesus would
claim to be the Messiah. Because if he
did, in their minds that proved he was lying, it proved he was blaspheming
against God, and it justified any punishment they could give Jesus.
Do you ever wonder what would’ve happened if Jesus had
denied it? Think about it. He could have, after all. He could’ve said, “Who, me? No, of course not. I’m not a Messiah. Never claimed to be. Sure, I’ve done some things, but you know how
these stories get exaggerated. I mean,
me, the Messiah? Come on.”
It might’ve gotten Jesus off the hook. The council might’ve said, okay, put out a
statement to that effect. Make sure
everybody knows you’re not the Messiah.
And for crying out loud, keep a lower profile. No more of this overturning tables in the
temple and stuff. Just cool it, stay out
of trouble and we’ll be fine.
That’s not the only way Jesus could’ve avoided death on a
cross, of course. As we’ve talked
before, Jesus could’ve just used his divine power and gotten away. But this would’ve been an easy way to do
it. All Jesus would’ve had to do is tell
a few lies. That’s all it would’ve
taken. It would’ve been simple. No one hurt.
No one killed, including Jesus.
It would’ve been easy. All he’d
have had to do is deny who he was.
Jesus, being Jesus, would not do that. But it had to be tempting for him. And it’s tempting for us, too.
Have you ever been in a tough situation? Of course you have, everyone has. But have you ever been in a tough situation,
and known that there was a way out of it?
All you had to do was tell a few lies.
Just a few. That’s all it would
take. It’d be simple. No one hurt, including you. It’d be easy.
I think a lot of us have probably been there. And maybe sometimes we’ve given in to the
temptation. Maybe sometimes we’ve told
the lies and gotten out of trouble. And
maybe, as we think about it, we think, well, it maybe was not the right thing
to do, but it was not really that bad, either.
After all, again, no one was hurt.
No problem.
No one was hurt except, of course, us. Ourselves.
And not just because we’ll get into trouble if people find out about our
lies. The thing about lying is that
every time we tell a lie, it gets a little easier to tell another one. And pretty soon, we don’t even think about it
any more.
The problem with that is not just that lying is bad. It is, but there’s more to it than that. The problem with telling lie after lie is
that after a while, we forget who we really are. And then, we start lying to ourselves, which
makes it even worse. In fact, sometimes
the lies we tell ourselves are the biggest lies of all. And after a while, we no longer are who we
are. We become the lies we tell. Telling all those lies leads us to deny who
we are, just as for Jesus, telling a lie would have been to deny who he was.
Remember what
Jesus says in John fourteen, verse six?
You may not know the reference, but a lot of you will know the verse
once I read it. Jesus said, “I am the
way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
When we read that, we always focus on Jesus saying “I am
the way”. When we discuss it, we always
focus on faith in Jesus as the way to heaven.
And that’s true, faith in Jesus is the way to heaven. But if that’s all we get out of this verse,
we’re missing out. Jesus did not just
say that he’s the way. He also said that
he’s the truth.
Jesus is the truth.
That’s truth with a capital T, the ultimate truth, the truth that God
exists and that God loves us and that Jesus came here and died to save us from
the consequences of our sins. But it’s
also truth with a small t. Jesus is the
truth. And every time we fail to be
truthful, we become something other than what we are. That means we deny Jesus. And we deny who we are.
We were created to be who we are. We were created to be the best we can be, but
we were still created to be who we are.
“Who we are” includes all our interests, all our passions, all the
things that get us fired up. But “who we
are” includes our faults and our failings, too, because we were created to be
human beings, and human beings have faults and failings.
Now don’t get
me wrong, we’re not supposed to use that as an excuse. It does not work to be mean to people, to
cheat, to lie, and then say, “Well, hey, I’m just being who I am.” Again, we were created to be the best we can
be. But what it does mean is that when
our faults and our failings get in our way, when they lead us into trouble, we
need to face up to them. We need to be
honest about them. If we’re not, we deny
who we really are.
But of course,
Jesus did not get into trouble because of his faults and failings. Jesus got into trouble precisely because of
who he was. And that can happen to us,
too. When we truthfully and honestly
live out our faith, when we are really honest about who we are and what we
value as Christians, there are going to be people who don’t like that. There are going to be people who won’t want
much to do with us because of it. And
when that happens, it can be really tempting to compromise our faith so we can
get along better. It can be tempting, in
other words, to deny Jesus and to deny who we are.
And let’s not
forget that Jesus also said “I am the life.”
Again, we tend to look at that in terms of eternal life. And that’s true, faith in Jesus does get us
eternal life. But I think there’s a
reason Jesus put all these things together.
Because while the way leads to life, the truth leads to life, too. Both the way and the truth lead to life. And not just eternal life in heaven, as
important as that is. The way and the
truth lead to life on earth, too. They
lead to real life, the life we’re meant to have. They lead to us being who we were created to
be.
When we’re
first born, when we’re little babies, we are who we were created to be. But then, sin comes into the picture. That’s some of what people mean when they
talk about original sin—that we are all born with the capacity for love and
goodness, but we’re also all born with the capacity for sin. And as we grow, that capacity for sin grows,
too. We won’t always give in to it, but
the capacity for it is there. And every
time we do give in to it, we are, in some sense, not being truthful. Because every time we give in to sin, we are
not being who we were created to be. We
start living a lie instead of living the life we were meant to have.
So, we have to
make a choice. And we have to keep
making it. Every time we’re tempted to
lie, every time we’re tempted to give in to sin, we have to make a choice. We may or may not be aware that we’re making
it, but we still are. The choice is
this: am I going to deny who I am? Am I going to deny Jesus? Or am I going to be who I was created by God
to be? Am I going to accept that the way
to life, real life, both in this world and in the next one, is through the
truth and through Jesus?
It would have
been easy for Jesus to avoid trouble with the council of elders. All he’d have had to do was deny who he
was. He could have avoided death on the
cross. But he would not have been who he
was. And so, instead of saving his life,
he would in a very real sense have given up his life. He might have still been physically alive,
but he would not have had real life. It
was only by being who he was that he could have real life, both on earth and in
heaven.
And that’s the
only way you and I can do it, too. There
may be times when the truth gets us into trouble. But when we lie, there’s a very real sense in
which we give up our lives.
Jesus is the
way. Jesus is the truth. And that way and that truth are the only
things that can lead us to the life we’re meant to have.