We are often judged by the company we keep. Are we willing to let the world know we hang out with Jesus? He 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, raising the dead, 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.”
I don’t like it when Jesus raises the stakes like that. Where’s the mercy? As he is depicted in the gospels, Jesus more often showed mercy to outsiders or underdogs than to his own peers; he seems to have felt very little mercy toward religious insiders who refused to accept the good news of God-With-Us that had been revealed to them. Perhaps 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. I doubt he'd be any easier on us.
It is unsurprising that people in need would more readily accept Jesus’ revelation of his messiahship than “insiders” who were so sure they knew what God would look like. I read a book by Eliza Griswold on the clashes between Christianity and Islam along the “Tenth Parallel.” She investigated Muslim and Christian communities in Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. In Malaysia she met an indigenous Orang Asli, who is 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 also encountered among persecuted Christians elsewhere. "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?’”
I am part of a denomination that is largely wealthy and privileged, and often muted in its proclamation of Jesus Christ as Lord. To some Episcopalians, even saying “Jesus” smacks of fundamentalism, while others are openly hostile to the word evangelism, as though there were only one (obnoxious) way to share faith. Many are happy to be affiliated with Jesus but reluctant to let that be known in the circles they travel the rest of the week.
Can we be public about our affiliation with Jesus, the Christ? Does it make us uncomfortable? Is Jesus, and proclaiming wholeness and peace in his name, important enough to us? This is as good a time as any to probe those questions and wrestle with the answers, and pray about them.
I need to sit under the judgment of Jesus’ words as well as the promise they contain. I stay so much in my own church circles, I rarely share my God stories with other people who need to hear them. What isthe place for God’s word in the lives of people who have everything?
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