We are often judged by the company we keep. Are we willing to let the world know we hang out with Jesus?
Jesus lays it on the line in this week's passage. After telling his disciples to go forward boldly, proclaiming the good news, healing the sick, he says, "Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven.”
It’s hard when Jesus raises the stakes like that. Where’s the mercy, I ask? It seems, from things he is recorded as having said in the gospels, that Jesus was short on mercy for religious insiders who refused to accept the good news of “God-With-Us” that he had revealed to them. His mercy ran more freely to outsiders or underdogs than to his own peers. It is unsurprising that people in need would more readily accept Jesus’ revelation of his messiahship than the “insiders” who were so sure they knew what God would look and act like. And Jesus cuts the insiders no slack.
Jesus is not in a “slack-cutting” mode in this training talk. He knew time was short; that those who said “Lord, Lord” really had to stand by their allegiance to him, and not go quiet when the association proved inconvenient or dangerous. Would he go any easier on us?
A few years ago I read the The Tenth Parallel, by Eliza Griswold, on clashes between Christianity and Islam in Muslim and Christian communities in Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. In Malaysia she met an indigenous Orang Asli who was a convert to Christianity (many Orang Asli are trying hard to hold on to their traditional beliefs and practices under threat of extinction, but some do convert). Christians and other religious minorities suffer harsh persecution in Malaysia, which has a vigorously conservative and oppressive Muslim majority.
This pastor said to her, "Americans don’t care what’s happening in other places, do they," a sentiment she encountered among persecuted Christians elsewhere too. "He pondered aloud if need kept people closer to God and God closer to them. ‘I wonder, is there a place for God’s word in the lives of people who have everything?’”
It’s a good question. In my fairly privileged segment of Christendom, proclamation of Jesus Christ as Lord is often muted; to some, even saying “Jesus” smacks of fundamentalism. Some Episcopalians are hostile to the word evangelism, as though there were only one (obnoxious) way to share faith. Others are happy to be affiliated with Jesus – in church on Sundays – but reluctant to let that be known in the circles they travel the rest of the week.
Are we willing to be public about our affiliation with Jesus, the Christ, to acknowledge his Lordship in our lives? Or does it make us uncomfortable? Is Jesus, and proclaiming wholeness and peace in his name, important enough to us?
We sit under the judgment of Jesus’ words as well as the promises they contain. What is the place for God’s word in the lives of people who have everything?
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