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After Dinner
February 20, 2005
Sermon Series on the Gospel of Luke
Second Sunday of Lent
Jeff Van Duzer
Luke
22:24-35
What is sometimes said is
that context is everything and, while I suspect that’s
an exaggeration, certainly words will take on different meanings
in different settings. I’ll give you a couple examples
of that.
If I were to sit at the end of a long, leisurely
dinner in a nice restaurant with Margie and look into her
eyes afterwards and say, “I love you,” that
would probably have a different meaning than when I come
home after work having forgotten to pick up the milk that
I was supposed to pick up and she says to me as I walk in
the door, “Where’s the milk?” and I say, “I
love you!”
Or, for example, if we’re out someplace
and I’m introducing her to someone that I should know
by name. She quickly picks up that I have forgotten and she
sticks her hand out and says, “Hi, I’m Margie,” covering
for my mistake, and I whisper in her ear, “I love
you!”
Which itself is different from at night, when
I crawl over to her side of bed and nuzzle up against her
ear and say, “I love you!” So it’s
the same words…different settings…different
meanings.
And sometimes to really understand even biblical texts, its critical that we
see it in its proper context. And I think that’s really true of our passage
today.
The context for this particular
passage is very simple. It’s after dinner…the
dinner we re-create…the dinner that we call Communion
or the Lord’s Supper. It’s the dinner where
Jesus has gathered with his closest friends; indeed his
associates…the people he’s been walking with…but
also with one who has now decided to betray him. And in
that context, he–and really this is a motley bunch
of folks and they’ve proven wildly fallible down
through the years that he’s been with them–looks
at them in love and enacts for them symbolically that which
he’s about to do in fact.
He takes a loaf of bread and says, “This is my body, broken for you.”
And then in the same way he takes the cup and says, “This is my blood,
which is shed for you, and for you, and – yes – even for you, Judas.”
We’re told elsewhere in Scripture that
no greater love has a man than that he lay down his life
for his friends. And Jesus is saying at this dinner, “I’m
going to lay my life down for you my friends, and even for
my enemies.”
And so we need to understand that everything
I’m about to read with all its hard words, confusion,
and warnings is being said in the context of coming after
this dinner, where Jesus expresses his love for these disciples.
And that’s really
always the way it is in Scripture. We never see
God loving us because of our obedience or because we’ve
risen to some new challenge. God always loves first. And
He pours out his love unconditionally and it goes into
the messy corners of our lives. And out of that place,
then, we are invited to respond in gratitude and in obedience.
But we need to see what I am about to read
as being first anchored in the love of Jesus at the table.
Now that’s one part of the context. Let
me tell you another part.
We call this dinner the Last Supper. And we
say that because it is actually the last supper that Jesus
gets to have with his disciples before he goes off to be
killed. And in fact, it’s really the last chance he
has for any extended discussion with his disciples. After
this, in Luke, you’ll see that he only has two more
occasions to talk to them…very short. And in one occasion
he says, “Please try not to fall asleep.” And
another one, he says, “Put your sword away.” So
this is really the last place where he has the opportunity
to really interact with his disciples.
Now think about
this. Imagine that you knew that in about
15 minutes someone was coming to take you away, but you
had managed to gather your children or your closest friends
around you. And you knew that they were about to face
some difficulties that they weren’t fully appreciating.
And you had 15 minutes with them. What would you say?
What would those 15 minutes look like?
I suspect we wouldn’t spend a lot of
time talking about Spring training, or what George Bush should
have done or shouldn’t do, or whether we should teach
evolution in high school. But what would your 15 minutes
look like?
Because that’s really our text today.
This is Jesus’ last 15 minutes with his disciples.
So the text is actually a collection of what
I’m calling “Opposition Stories.” Three
oppositions stories that are put together. I’d like
to read each one, then comment on it after I’m done
with the reading.
Luke
22: 24-27
Well, Jesus’ 15
minutes does not start out very auspiciously.
It starts out with the disciples dithering with one another
over who will be regarded as the greatest.
Sometimes when I try to study Scripture, one
of the things that I’ve found as a useful exercise
is to try to imagine myself into the situation. A lot of
times that requires that I’ll fill in some details
maybe that Scripture doesn’t give just to sort of round-out
the imagination. I had a really hard time imagining this
scene. It’s just hard to know what you would say in
arguing whether you were to be regarded as the greatest disciple
other than the, you know, “I am.” “No,
I am” kind of a debate.
It appears that the debate starts back in the passage where Jesus says, “Someone
here is going to betray me.” So the disciples begin to say,
“I wonder who that is?”
And,
- “Is it me?”
- “Is it not me?”
- “I wonder who else it
is?”
I suppose you could imagine it moving something
like this:
“Well, certainly not me. I’m
one of the more loyal of the disciples. Actually, as
I think about it I’m perhaps the most loyal of
the disciples. I may be regarded down through history
as the greatest of the disciples.”
I suppose you could
get there. But even at that, how would
the argument unfold beyond that? How would you argue
you’re the greatest?
- “Well, Jesus met me first.”
- “I was in on all of the inner-circle things.”
- “I saw more miracles than you.”
- “I was fallen further from grace. I’m
a practical poster child for redemption.”
- “I have natural leadership
skills.”
It’s just hard to imagine.
But what’s not hard to imagine is just
how disappointing this must have been for Jesus. He has just
poured out his life for these, his closest friends. And they
end up arguing about who’s to be regarded as the greatest.
He says to them,
“Look, you are really giving in
to a cultural view of greatness…a kind of a world
view.”
And His reference
here to the Gentiles, is a bigger picture. “There’s
an opposing worldview that they’re giving into.
It’s a worldview that says that greatness is measured
by title or rank or what you accomplish or public acclaim
or what you control.” That’s somehow the
measure of greatness.
But Jesus said it’s not that way in his
kingdom. He didn't say,
“Look what I did. I came in-of
all the people among us here-most entitled to the table
according to these standards. You certainly would agree
with that.”
He said,
“I was the one who served.”
And this is probably a reference to the foot-washing
bit. And though Luke doesn’t record it, we know it
happened in the Upper Room.
When the disciples came in, Jesus takes a towel
and wipes their feet – a task typically assigned to
a slave. And he says,
“I did that for you. And that’s
what I call you to.” I call you to live in this
world as a servant. The greatest must become the least… the
oldest, the youngest, the leader…a servant. I
call you to this pouring out your life kind of service.”
Now of course this
temptation to find your worth, your value
in a title, position, or accomplishments is not merely
a first century world view. It’s obviously continued
on down.
Many of you know I’m the dean of the
School of Business at Seattle Pacific. Before I took that
job–before I was even thinking about that job–if
you’d have asked me, “What does a dean do?” I
probably would have said…naively…”Well,
the dean must get together with the president and chart the
course of the university.” Ha! The dean is at best
a middle-manager in one small division of the overall university.
And to be the dean of Seattle Pacific has some
inherent sort of humility built into it. We have, of all
the schools around here: the smallest business school, the
newest business school, the fewest students, the fewest alumni.
I’d have the best business school, but that’s
another subject for another time. But you don’t necessarily
have a lot of “I’m the Dean” kind of stuff
to puff your chest up about.
And in fact, I think I’ve shared this
with you before, but this humility is helped along by my
friend, the Dean of the School of Business over at the University
of Washington, who will regularly send me their newsletters…multi-page
8 ½ by 11” color, glossy things where page after
page is the new program and the new endowment
and the new center and the new building.
And when you’re finished reading this, you just feel
about this big (gesture).
But this week, I
had the pleasure of going over to Whitworth College to talk
about their Business school, meet with their Dean, and talk
about some things we might do to collaborate together.
And I came back from that day saying to Margie, “Boy,
it was fun being dean today.”
I realize it was fun for a lot of reasons:
- the collaboration was a creative
- good exercise
- they were very good people
- smart people
- thoughtful people
- real godly people
So there was a lot of good things.
But I also realized there was a little piece
of this that was the “big fish, small pond” syndrome.
Because, compared to Whitworth, Seattle Pacific is a little
bigger business school, a little more highly regarded, a
little more…
So I was over there, and
they treated me like royalty. And it was like, “The
Dean Van Duzer. Dean Van Duzer.” They set this
big table, and Dean Van Duzer sat right in the middle, and
the faculty would ask questions and the Dean would dispense
advice. And actually, “Dean” felt good
there for a little time.
God was very gracious, though. He had me end
the day with a one hour meeting with the Dean from the business
school at Gonzaga. Gonzala’s has a very good Business
School…older than ours, bigger than ours, more students
than ours… And this Dean is, among Business School
Deans in the United States, very revered. Indeed, he’s
one of the longest tenured at a single school of any Business
School Dean.
So I wanted to go and ask him, “What
makes you so great? How does it all work for you?”
I’m paraphrasing a lot and I’m
using the same words but, in essence, what he said back to
me was,
“One thing is that I never saw
this position as a stepping stone to another position.
I was never here to try to leverage to the next.”
The second thing he
said was,
“To be good at this position, you
need to be pretty humble. You need to recognize that
your ideas aren’t the only ideas…that the
faculty are pretty smart, and will figure things out;
that the rest of the university, when they make a decision,
is actually trying to do good for the university even
though it doesn’t seem like that to you. You need
that kind of humility.”
And then he said again, not in so many words,
“Do you know what really makes
a dean great? It’s a dean that serves. That serves
the student. That serves the faculty. That serves the
university community. That’s what I’m about.”
And it was a very good reminder as I came back
to this text that our worth…our greatness… is
not going to be found in our titles, public acclaim, any
of those kinds of things. But that our worth is going to
be found…our identity is going to be placed in the
service- the lowly service, the pouring out our lives kind
of service that we are called to. It’s a counter-cultural
call, but it’s what we are called to do.
So that’s
the first story. Skip a few verses down
to verse 31. This is the second of these opposition texts.
Luke
22:31-34
That’s a tough little passage. The toughness
of it comes when we start to ask, “What was wrong
with Peter’s response?”
What Peter says is,
“Lord, I will go with you to death.
I will walk with you all the way to the end.”
And what’s wrong with that? Isn’t
that, on some level, what God would want to hear from all
of us?
- “Will you
take up your cross and follow me?”
- “Will you lay down your
life for me?”
- “Are you willing to go
with me?”
And if he asks us, wouldn’t he want us
to say,
“Yes, Lord?”
What’s wrong with Peter’s response?
Well, one thing
that’s wrong with Peter’s
response in this context is that he’s simply factually
wrong. He says, “I’m ready to go with you
to death.” And Jesus says, “No you aren’t.” Very
bluntly. “Frankly in the next 12 hours, your fear
of going to death with me is going to cause you to deny
on three separate occasions that you even know me.”
But it’s more than it’s just not
factually true. There’s a kind of a bravado – a
hubris in this statement. Jesus has just said to him, “Satan
is going to tempt you. You’re going to fall. And I’m
going to pray for you.” And Peter says back, “I’m
not going to fall.” And therefore, implicitly, “I
don’t need your prayers.”
And in doing that, it seems to me, Peter models
for us what is so often our approach to the Christian life.
We see some standard that God would call us to meet. We sincerely
desire to do that, for all the right reasons. We commit ourselves
to do it. But then we try out of our own strength to accomplish
it. And it turns out over and over and over again, we are
just not enough.
Many years ago when Margie and I were just
getting to know each other, she told me that her father had
died when she was a young child and her mom never remarried…and
that she had a series of not so good interactions with boys/men
in high school/college. And that she, by the time that she
met me could say, “Jeff, I trust you. But I really
fundamentally don’t trust men. And you’re a man
so there’s a little confusion here.”
So I knew that
going into the marriage. And I also knew
that God would call me to be, for Margie, a husband that
could lay down my life in love…a husband that
was wholly trustworthy, wholly reliable…and that
that was really the high calling that I was being called
to in coming into this marriage.
So I took that understanding of God and I married
it up in a kind of weird and destructive way with a strategy.
I said,
“You know, what I really need to
do is to be perfectly trustworthy for Margie over a long
period of time so that she can gradually grow to understand
that I can be trusted.”
And so I set out – in retrospect it sure
sounds stupid – but I set out for the first few years
of our marriage to be perfectly trustworthy, never to make
mistakes around Margie. Of course, I couldn’t fully
pull that off, but when I failed…when I slipped up…I
was always so angry with myself ‘cause I sensed I was
setting the program back by months. So I lived with this
desire to be - for her- this Godly standard of the loving,
perfectly reliable husband.
Well, this all
came to a head after a few years. We
were on a vacation in Quebec. I was driving out of town
at the end of the time. And I had read the map. And I
had made a mistake. And I was turned off and going down
a road that was the wrong road. And Margie quite innocently
said, “It seems like we’re going in the wrong
direction. Are we going in the right way?”
And I just exploded. I didn’t necessarily
explode at her. I just exploded. I began to just sob, and
it came out of nowhere. And I began to cry so hard that I
actually couldn’t keep driving. I had to pull over
to the side of the road. And I kept sobbing. I started to
actually lose feeling in the middle part of my body. And
I said, “I just can’t do it. I just can’t
do it. I cannot be the husband that I am called to be.”
Well, probably no great surprise, but out of
this brokenness we began to re-form our relationship-or to
continue to build our relationship-and to really build it
on a much more healthy basis going forward. In some ways,
in my being broken and then restored, I was able to be more
of the husband I was called to be than I would have ever
been before.
And this pattern has continued in our marriage.
There have been a number of times when we have run into these
impasses…where both of us, longing to commit to be
the person that God would want us to be. I’ve gone
into the living room at night and fallen on my knees and
said to God, “I just can’t do this husband thing.
I cannot be the kind of husband you are calling me to be.
It’s beyond me.”
And time and time
again at that very place of brokenness
and weakness, God has come in. Words of healing, quietly,
and then put together the relationship in ways that suddenly
it seems that I am better able to be a husband than I
ever would have been had I not broken.
And the same, it turns out, is true of Peter.
That Peter, just as Jesus predicts, denies him three times.
Peter recognizes what he does. He’s made the most important
commitment of his life and he fails. And he breaks out into
tears and he concludes that he’s no more use to the
kingdom. He’s ready to pack it in.
And Jesus just goes and finds him, and brings
him back, and speaks words of forgiveness to him. And as
a result he is restored and indeed emerges as a leader of
the church in Acts. Better able to lead, better able to serve
than he ever would have been had he not broken.
If the first of these stories reminds us that
we are called after dinner…that we are called to be
people who serve…the second reminds us that our service
is to come out of our places of weakness and brokenness.
Third story. We’ve
had the sort of worldview opposition. We’ve had the
intense personal opposition. And now we really get to what
is kind of in some ways the heart of what these disciples
is about to experience. Jesus is warning them of the opposition
they are going to encounter almost immediately here.
Luke
22:35-38
Let me just remind you what we’re talking
about here. Remember that earlier in his ministry, Jesus
sent out his disciples in pairs, two-by-two, to go to various
towns and villages to proclaim the good news…to proclaim
that the kingdom of God is at hand. And as he sent them out
he said,
“Don’t take anything. You
don’t need anything because your message will be
well received. The doors will be opened. People will
take you in. They’ll feed you, they’ll house
you. You don’t need anything.”
And so he says to them here,
“Wasn’t that right? Did you
need anything?”
And they said,
“No, we didn’t need anything.”
But now…
But now…it’s different.
Now the one who has a purse must take
it, and likewise a bag. And the one who has no sword
must sell his cloak and buy one.
What he’s saying is that the same places
that were so open to hearing the message that you were bringing
before are now going to stand in opposition. They are now
going to resist you. Sometimes in fierce opposition.
Pretty much every commentary I read says that
Jesus is speaking here symbolically, metaphorically. That
he had no intent for the disciples to go out and buy swords.
And indeed the early church didn’t go out and buy swords.
But he’s saying is the opposition will
to be intense. The same place that welcomed you, now is going
to close the door on you. What?!
Verse 37. He
says,
“It’s because it’s
about me. I tell you this Scripture must be fulfilled
in me.”
And he references that passage from Isaiah
53, the suffering servant passage:
“Look. That’s the passage
that tells what must happen to the Messiah for the Messiah
to be rejected. He must be rejected. He must be despised.
He must be viewed as of no account. Indeed, ultimately
he must be treated as a criminal.”
Which, or course, finds fruition in Jesus’ death
on a cross bracketed by two common thieves. He must be regarded
as of one of the transgressors.
And then, in effect, what Jesus is saying in
this passage is that,
“To the extent that you are identifying
with me, this is what you identifying with…the
one who has been cast off by his own people…who
has been viewed of no account. Despised and rejected.”
“That’s what I’m calling
you to. That’s the identifying with me. If you
identify with me, you need to be prepared to face opposition.
You’re not going to be welcome with this message.”
His 15 minutes ends in verse 38. His disciples
say after all of that, “Lord, look! Here we have two
swords!” They start clueless, they end clueless.
Jesus is sitting there talking about how he’s
fulfilling this Isaiah prophesy, he’s talking about
his fierce opposition, he’s speaking metaphorically…and
they’re over here counting the weapons. “We’ve
got two! Two!”
And Jesus says, “It’s enough.”
And he doesn’t say, “Two swords
are enough for what we’re going to need the swords
for.” He means, “It’s enough. We’re
not going to talk about this anymore. We’re done. The
conversation is over. It’s enough.”
Really throughout
this whole, what you want is 15 minutes.
You want these last 15 minutes to be poignant and rich
and all wrapping it all up together. But the disciples
are just kind of clueless through the whole thing. They’re
fighting about who’s the greatest. They’re
filled with bravado. They’re over here counting
their swords.
Isn’t that just kind of like it is so
often with you and me? Isn’t that really the way we
tend to live our faith? We recognize so often that God’s
speaking to us…what we’re called to. But in
all the other things in life we wander around so much of
the time, clueless.
But into the middle of that Jesus keeps speaking,
just as He did to these disciples. He says the same things:
“Be prepared. If you’re going
to identify with me, be prepared for opposition. And
when you face that opposition, here’s how you face
it. You lay your life down in service. And you don’t
deal from strength. But you deal from your brokenness
and your weakness. And that’s how you live.”
Now I told you the context of this was important.
And I said you need to see this call as being anchored first
in God’s love expressed at the table in the upper room.
But there’s one other piece about the context that
I want to share.
I skipped three
verses in my reading of this text. I
skipped them because they’re weird. They stand
out in this whole section like a sore thumb. They don’t
fit all these opposition passages. In fact, they’re
just odd. They’re verses
28-30.
But they’re important to understand the
overall context. And I don’t have enough time to unpack
them fully, but I just want to highlight one piece of them.
In verse 29, in the midst of all their cluelessness,
Jesus looks at them and says, “I appoint you.”
It’s a present tense word. That means,
“Right now, I am appointing you.
I am appointing you for several things, but the one I
want to highlight is, I’m appointing you to eat
and drink at my table in the kingdom. I am putting name
cards on the table by your chairs at the heavenly banquet.
Right now, I am appointing you for a seat at that table
and nothing is taking that away.”
And it’s
important that we hear that too, because
that’s the other part of the context. If one part
of the context is that it’s anchored in the love
that comes out of the Upper Room dinner, the other part
is that it is tethered to the hope that comes from the
table in the future kingdom.
You and I are people that live between the
dinners…after dinner and before dinner…after
the death on the cross, before the holy kingdom banquet table.
If this is a table with love (mixed) with sorrow, this is
a table with love and joy. And you and are called to be people
that live in the midst, and this is how we’re called
to live:
- lay our lives down in service in the face of opposition
- to deal from weakness.
Let’s pray.
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