“What a friend we
have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear; what a privilege to carry
everything to God in prayer… can we find a friend so faithful, who will all our
sorrow share? Jesus knows our every
weakness: take it to the Lord in prayer.”
You all know that hymn, right? What a Friend We Have in Jesus…many
people regard it as kind of cheesy, Sunday school-ish, old-fashioned…whatever,
but it’s spot on in getting the message across that Jesus is our friend who
wants to share every detail our lives with us, even and indeed certainly the
sinful and broken parts of us. He is our
friend.
As he is our friend
the appropriate way to deal with Jesus is relationally – to have a relationship
with him. Get personal with Jesus. Our relationship with Jesus is at the heart
of the Christian faith. Relationships
require communication and being present with one another. This is what’s behind the emphasis on prayer
in What a Friend We Have in Jesus. But, if I were to offer a critique of that
hymn it’s that it doesn’t say anything about him being present with us in
through the Holy Spirit. He is indeed
present with us when we pray. We are
certainly not launching prayers off into space as if they were some sort of
message in a bottle. He is present and
hears our every care.
But more on this
relationship stuff, Timothy and I have been reading a book for Lent by one of
my doctoral supervisors, Andrew Purves, called “The Crucifixion of
Ministry”. Right up front in the book
Dr. Purves points out that we tend to deal with Jesus functionally rather than
relationally or personally. We do this
when we approach Jesus from the perspective of the questions of how? and what? rather than the question who? Let me deal with the who? question first.
The most important
question we have to deal with in life is the question Paul asked Jesus when
Jesus confronted him on the Road to Damascus.
If you remember, Paul was going from Jerusalem to Damascus to round up
Christians to bring them back to Jerusalem to be tried for blasphemy. Jesus stops him and confronts him as to why
Paul is persecuting him personally by means of persecuting his folowers. Paul’s response was “Who are you, Lord?” There’s only one person a faithful Jew such
as Paul is going to address as “Lord” – the Lord God of Israel. So, Paul knows that it is God himself who is
confronting him. Jesus answers him, “I
am Jesus whom you are persecuting.”
Jesus is the Lord.
That question “Who are you, Lord?” or “Who
are you, Jesus?” is the way we come to Jesus.
It’s personal. It is seeking to
come to know him, to know who he is, to know him as friend and brother, to know
his character, his nature, to know what drives him…and to share in his
relationship with God the Father by our union with him in the God the Holy
Spirit which culminates in our coming to know ourselves as beloved children of
God. This question draws us into a
lifelong prayerful conversation with Jesus to discover who he is and he will,
in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit reveal himself and the Father to
us. Asking “Who are you, Jesus?” is how
we come to Jesus and his personal answer to that question utterly transforms us
at the core of our being making us to be like him.
Let me take another
direction here for it is sometimes easier to ponder what something is by saying
what it is not. The flip side of the who? question is the how? and the what? questions. It is very
easy for us to deal with Jesus functionally rather than personally with the how? and what? questions. The how? question deals primarily with how
we go about being a Christian. It
focuses in on our behavior. It sees
Jesus as simply being an example, the prime example, for the way we ought to
be. Jesus the great Moral Teacher. The problem here is that we set aside getting
to know Jesus personally and reduce the Christian faith simply to doing what we
think Jesus would do. It’s the WWJD –
What Would Jesus Do – way of being a Christian.
Behavior matters, uprightness matters, but we do not come to know who
Jesus is by simply being good people.
The what? question deals more with doctrine,
with beliefs. This is the route of Fundamentalism. As long as we believe the right doctrines
about Jesus we will be “the” true disciples.
But, we do not come to know Jesus by believing the correct things about
him. You can go to my blog page and read
my biography and my sermons, but you won’t get me. So it is with Jesus. We can read about him, but we don’t get to
now him. Just believing stuff about Jesus doesn’t give us Jesus.
Since we are sharing
the Lord’s Supper today let’s take a look at our passage from John where his
disciples are gathered around the table with him. There we find a contrast between friendship
with Jesus and functionalism. Jesus is
in Bethany at his friends’ house, the home of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary. They were his friends. How did they relate to him?
Lazarus is the one
Jesus raised from the dead. He was
stinking in the tomb dead and Jesus brought him back. So it is today that you will find among the
friends of Jesus gathered around this table people who have had dramatic,
traumatic life changes at the hands of Jesus.
Healing of mind, body, and spirit by which we have discovered new life
in Jesus Christ by the power of his Spirit.
As Paul said we’ve come to know Christ and the power of his
resurrections.
Martha too is there
waiting on Jesus, indeed ministering to Jesus in his very real need to
eat. In Luke’s Gospel Martha gets a bum
wrap for being a busybody. But that’s
not the case here. She is as attentive
to Jesus as Mary is. So it is today that
you will find among the friends of Jesus gathered around this table people who
humbly serve Jesus by ministering to the very real needs of people not just
needs for food and drink but by giving comfort in grief, friendship in
loneliness, speaking the truth in love.
In our ministering in humble compassion to one another and to others not
in this church we minister to Jesus himself.
And there’s Mary, the
devoted one, the one who loves Jesus extravagantly. She loves Jesus and of all the people at the
table that night she is the only one who understands what’s going to happen to him
in Jerusalem. So she takes a bottle of
perfume that she bought to anoint Jesus’ body after his death – pure, costly
nard, worth 300 days wages – and she pours it out on Jesus’ feet and dries them
with her hair. Let’s not mistake this as
something other than a very warm, tender, and affectionate display of hospitality
shown to someone she deeply loved and admired who was a guest in her house. This is a foot washing a step above even the
foot washing Jesus would give his disciples on the night that he was betrayed.
In the other Gospels
when this anointing story comes up Jesus says that wherever the Gospel is
proclaimed it will be told what Mary had done.
The reason is that this is what love for Jesus looks like when you feel
it. John says the whole room smelled of
perfume. This is symbolic for saying the
Holy Spirit permeated the room, permeated this friendship with Jesus. Friends, the Holy Spirit is here with us
gathered around the table. Jesus is
here.
And there at this
feast of love for Jesus sits Judas, Judas the betrayer, Judas the thief. He sees this extravagant display of love and
he simply cannot handle it and he starts to talk like Satan, the accuser, “Why
wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor.” He didn’t really care about the poor. Nor
does it seem that he even cared about the principle of it all. He just wanted the money. He apparently had the right answer to the how? question. He was following Jesus just like the other eleven
disciples. Doing his part. He had apparently the right answer to the what? question. He was following Jesus because it appeared
that Jesus was the Messiah. But it
appears that Judas never got personal with Jesus. It just seems he did not get WHO Jesus is, and the great love that
Jesus had for him. Judas didn’t catch a
glimpse of that until he realized that he had betrayed Jesus over to death and
he couldn’t handle that. He killed
himself.
Friends, let us not forget that
Jesus welcomed even Judas at his table. The first thing Jesus has to reveal to
us each, the first thing he has to reveal to us about himself today is that we
are welcome at his table even if we have a little or a lot of Judas in us. Come to the feast at his table, you friends
of Jesus. Come. He is here.
And by the powerful working of the Holy Spirit may you get a taste of
who he is. Amen.
