Sermon – “They Wanted to See” (Luke 18:35 – 19:10)

During my years in active pastoral ministry a large proportion of my reading was taken up with biblical, pastoral and theological works. So, one of the goals that I set for myself in retirement was to read more fiction. I have to admit that thus far I haven’t managed to live up to that resolution in quite the way I’d hoped. But it has been a delight to be introduced to characters from a whole variety of places and periods and to share (if only for a brief period of time) in their worlds and their experiences.

One of those characters was a young French teenager named Marie-Laure Leblanc. Her story takes place in German-occupied France during the Second World War. Her world is one of darkness, not only because of the Nazi invasion and the horrors of war, but because Marie-Laure is blind. As I lived with Marie-Laure and shared in her adventures and in her world of sightlessness, I didn’t want the story to end. For me it was one of those books you wish would go on forever.[1]

In the real world, though, blindness is an affliction I hope that none of us would wish on anyone. On the other hand, I have been privileged to know a few people who were blind over the course of my ministry. And I have to say that in every case they were able to meet their circumstances with a remarkable perseverance and a determination to live life to the fullest, in spite of their loss of sight.

Sadly, such was not the case in the world that Jesus and his followers inhabited and where blindness was much more common than it is today. It could be a condition of birth, as we see in the man whom Jesus sent to wash his eyes in the pool of Siloam (John 9:1-7). It could also be the result of a variety of diseases, even something as easily treatable as pinkeye. And then there was the blindness of old age, usually due to cataracts and aggravated by repeated exposure to sand and the fierce glare of the Middle Eastern sun.

To make matters worse, no effective treatment was available to those who suffered from diseases of the eye. There were no antibiotics and no safe or effective surgical procedures. In my research for this morning’s sermon, I did come across a form of surgery for cataracts that was known in the ancient world, called couching. (If you’re at all squeamish, you may want to block your ears for a moment.) Couching involved using a sharp thorn or a needle to pierce the surface of the eye and force the lens downwards until the patient could begin to see shapes or movement. Needless to say, in the vast majority of these procedures the patient ended up totally blind.

It would not be for more than a thousand years after the time of Jesus, in 1268, that eyeglasses first came into use. Another five hundred years would elapse before the founding of the first school for the blind, in 1791. It would be nearly forty years more until Louis Braille invented his system of raised dots so that blind people could read, in 1829, followed four years later by the publication of the Gospel of Mark in raised print—the first time blind people could read the Scriptures for themselves. Another century would pass before the founding of the first seeing-eye dog school. And it was in the late 1960s—within the lifetime of many of us here this morning—that modern laser eye surgery became a possibility.

In spite of all these improvements, blindness remains a daunting affliction. But try to imagine what it must have been like in biblical times!

Bartimaeus

Which brings us to the gates of Jericho, as Jesus and his followers are making their way into the town. By now Jesus’ fame has become widespread and they are surrounded by a large crowd. The commotion is such that you might hardly notice a crouched figure sitting at the side of the road. Luke doesn’t even give us his name—and I suspect that no one in the crowd knew it either. But in Mark’s gospel we find that it is Bartimaeus.

The sound of the crowd piques Bartimaeus’ curiosity, so he tugs at someone’s robe and asks what’s going on. “Jesus of Nazareth is passing by,” comes the reply. So Bartimaeus begins to shout, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Someone in the crowd yells at him to shut up, but that only encourages him to cry out all the louder, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”

Then Jesus stops. A silence descends over the crowd, as Jesus asks for the man to be brought to him. “What do you want me to do for you?” he asks. “Sir, I want to see,” comes the reply. “Receive your sight,” Jesus says to him. “Your faith has healed you.” Bartimaeus opens his eyes and there before him he sees the faces of the crowd, staring in amazement. He sees the azure blue of the sky and, flitting back and forth, the birds, whose twitters he could only hear before.

What Bartimaeus and the crowd were experiencing in that moment was a fulfilment of a prophecy spoken by Isaiah centuries before:

Then will the eyes of the blind be opened
     and the ears of the deaf unstopped.
Then will the lame leap like a deer,
     and the mute tongue shout for joy. (Isaiah 35:5-6)

Jesus himself had spoken about it when he read from the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue at the beginning of his public ministry: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind…” (Luke 4:18-19). Bartimaeus’ healing was not an isolated incident. It was a sign that the messianic age was dawning. A new era was erupting into the old.

The apostle Paul endured poor vision for much of his ministry. Perhaps he was placing his own experience failing eyesight of into that context when he reflected to his fellow believers in Corinth, “Now we see things imperfectly, as in a poor mirror, but then we shall see face to face.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)

“Dear friends,” wrote the aged apostle John a generation later, “now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2)

What happened to Bartimaeus outside Jericho is what will one day happen to you and to me and all of God’s people as we gather with that great crowd from every race, language and nation to stand before the throne of the Lamb and see him face to face. We will be freed of all our infirmities. We will be healed from all our diseases. We will no longer be crippled by the wounds that have been inflicted on us and that we have inflicted on ourselves. We will finally be the people that God intended us to be from the beginning of time, when he declared, “Let us make human beings in our image.” This is the future for which all creation waits with eager longing, what the Bible calls the glorious liberty of the children of God (Romans 8:21)—and it was what was breaking into the present as Bartimaeus stared around and the crowd back at him in stunned amazement.

Zacchaeus

It is an astounding promise. And we could contemplate it for hours. But as Jesus pushed on, so must we. As we do, we find ourselves entering the gates of Jericho. And here we come upon one of the most curious scenes in all of the gospels. Luke points our eyes upwards, into the branches of a sycamore-fig tree.

These trees were common in the Middle East. They were leafy evergreens, growing to a height of as much as twenty metres, with wide-spreading branches, and they produced a small, sweet-tasting fruit several times a year. If you wanted a tree to hide in, they were the perfect choice—and that was exactly what one person in Jericho was looking for.

I suspect that Zacchaeus’ horizontal challenge was the butt of humour in his own day—and it has been ever since. Perhaps there are some of you here who grew up with the old Sunday school ditty, “Zacchaeus was a wee little man and a wee little man was he…” But things were made much worse by the fact that Zacchaeus was a tax collector. And here we need to stop for some historical background.

I don’t think there are many of us today who enjoy paying taxes—particularly at this time of year as we go through the laborious process of assembling T3s and T4s and T4As and charitable receipts and medical receipts and whatever else to send off to Revenue Canada. But the Roman Empire had an entirely different system, and here is how it worked. Local contracts for tax collection in the Roman world were auctioned off to the highest bidder. But the government did not pay them for their work. Instead, the tax collectors charged the taxpayers an additional levy for their services. And in many cases the fees they exacted were extortionate—to the point where at least one wag called them “birds of prey”.[2]

To add to that, in Judea tax collectors were generally regarded as traitors, collaborators with the Roman occupation. Even more, because they had to have regular dealings with the Gentile Romans, they were viewed as unclean, so that in later years it was even forbidden to accept alms from a tax collector. And if all that weren’t enough, Zacchaeus was no ordinary tax collector. Luke tells us he was a chief tax collector.

Yet, all the same, Zacchaeus held something in common with Bartimaeus. For like Bartimaeus, he wanted to see. But in his case it was a problem not of sight but of height. So it was that Zacchaeus bundled together his robes and clambered up the tree. Its leafy branches would have allowed him both to catch a glimpse of Jesus and also to remain hidden from the crowd. And as they say, the rest is history.

Zacchaeus finds himself taking Jesus into his home—and here I have to say I’d love to have been a fly on the wall to hear the conversation that ensued between them. All Luke reveals to us is the conclusion. Yet, whatever the words they exchanged, it seems to me that what happened to Zacchaeus was that he began to see. Not in the way that Bartimaeus had begun to see, but in the way that Jesus wants us all to see.

What do I mean? The explanation comes in what to my mind has to be the most arresting parable that Jesus ever told. It is found not in Luke’s gospel but in Matthew’s. There Jesus gives a picture of the Son of Man seated on his throne with all the nations of the earth gathered before him. And he separates them as a shepherd separates sheep from goats, the sheep on his right and the goats to the left. Then he says to those on his right, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world. For I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger, and you invited me into your home. I was naked, and you gave me clothing. I was sick, and you cared for me. I was in prison, and you visited me.”

The sheep are puzzled and they ask, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you ill or in prison and go to visit you?” To which the King replies, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” (Matthew 25:31-40)

Did you notice what the sheep asked? “Lord, when did we see you … ?” I believe that what happened to Zacchaeus was that he began to see in that sense: to see the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked and the sick—and to see those he had cheated for years, perhaps decades—as he saw Jesus.

And therein lies the challenge for you and for me. May Jesus give us sight—eyes to see as he sees and to discover, in the words of C.S. Lewis, “There are no ordinary people.”[3]

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[1]     Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

[2]     “Publicans”, Oxford Companion to the Bible

[3]     “The Weight of Glory”

Sermon – “Lost and Found” (Luke 15:11-32)

 

One of my greatest delights in the church where I last served in Minnesota was to be part of a group of men who met faithfully every Wednesday morning for prayer, followed each week by coffee and conversation. Both the prayer and the conversation could be pretty free ranging at times. But I have to tell you that over the years that group was a spiritual lifeline for me.

One of the wonderful surprises for me in coming to All Nations five years ago was to discover that there was a similar group here—at least until covid struck. It even met on Wednesday mornings. One of the disciplines we have followed as a group has been to read chapter by chapter through a book that focuses on some aspect of Christian living.

A couple of years ago that book was a slim volume by the late Roman Catholic priest Henri Nouwen, entitled The Return of the Prodigal Son. In the introduction Nouwen tells how he went to the Hermitage, the world-renowned art museum in St Petersburg founded more than 250 years ago by Catherine the Great.

There Nouwen found a comfortable chair and planted himself directly in front of Rembrandt’s famous painting of The Return of the Prodigal Son. Before he knew it, more than two hours had elapsed. After a short break for coffee and conversation with the head of the museum’s restoration department, he returned for another hour until a guard and one of the cleaning ladies silently made it clear that closing time was upon him.

During those hours Nouwen carefully examined and meditated upon each of the figures in Rembrandt’s masterpiece, beginning with the younger son, then moving to the elder son, and finally the father. We don’t have the hours this morning that were at Henri Nouwen’s disposal in the Hermitage. It is a temptation to allow our familiarity with Jesus’ parable to cause us to skim though it quickly. But for the next few minutes I do want us to take some time to meditate and focus our thoughts on the three principal figures in Jesus’ beloved parable.

The Prodigal Son: Repentance

Let’s start with the son. To begin with, we need to remember that this story follows directly on from two others that Jesus had just told, about a lost sheep and a lost coin. As with the stories of the coin and the sheep, the parable of the prodigal son is also about being lost. But with the son there is a difference. The sheep and the coin were lost through no fault of their own. The sheep had been so busy munching on its own little patch of grass that it hadn’t noticed when the others had been herded back into their paddock for the night. And we would be silly to blame the coin for having been mislaid or dropped or whatever caused it to be missing from the woman’s purse.

But the case of the son stands apart. His lostness was not something that just happened to him. Rather, it was the direct result of his own rebellion and self-centredness. His demand to receive his share of the family estate amounted to treating his father as though the old man had already died. It was an act of consummate disregard for the feelings and the welfare of others. It is likely that his father’s assets were tied up in the form of land and livestock. Was the son really expecting his father to liquidate them and live on just a share of his income for the rest of his life?

Jesus doesn’t bother to delve into details like that or to psychologize. He didn’t need to. His listeners would have been filled with indignation at the brazenness of the son’s demand. And when the son ends up among the pigs longing to eat their slop, I can imagine them muttering under their breath, “Serves him right, the selfish twit!”

Indeed there would have been a certain justice to it if the story just ended there. The camera fades off into the distance with the son lying in rags in the filth of the pigs. But the son has a change of heart. Our Bibles say he came to his senses. Jesus’ words quite literally are, “He came to himself.” It seems to me that perhaps for the first time in his life the son was able to stand outside himself. He began to see himself objectively for the selfish, heedless good-for-nothing that he was.

(And here I can’t help but be reminded of those famous lines from Robbie Burns:

Oh, would some Power the giftie gie us
To see ourselves as others see us!
It would from many a blunder free us.)

However, if repentance is to be genuine, there needs to be more to it than that. It is not just a matter of gaining a new perspective. It is a change of heart and life. As Pastor Dave made very clear in his sermon last week (and here I quote): “Repentance is both remorse and changing our lives… Remorse is feeling badly for what we did … seeing things the way the offended person sees things. But repentance means that then we need to turn away from what we did. Remorse isn’t enough… We need to change.”

So it was that with a heart made heavy by the realization of his own waywardness and the hurt he had caused, the son swallowed whatever pride he still had left and began the journey home.

The Waiting Father: Reconciliation

At this point Jesus shifts the scene back to the family homestead. There we see the father, no doubt appearing somewhat older and wearier through the loss of his son. Perhaps he is a little stooped and frail. We can imagine him at dawn getting up and gazing with sadness towards the horizon where he had last seen the son’s departing figure.

Imagine his surprise one morning when far in the distance he spots a figure that looks hauntingly familiar. Can it be? Are his aging eyes playing tricks on him? But as the figure moves closer all doubts are erased from his mind. Barely able to see though his tears, he hastily straps on his sandals, tucks in his robes and, as quickly as his stiff legs can carry him, he runs down to the road to embrace his son.

Helmut Thielicke was a great scholar and preacher of the mid-twentieth century. He maintained that the central figure in Jesus’ parable was not the son at all but the father. For the story is as much about reconciliation as it is about repentance. Imagine if the son had journeyed all that way only to be met with rebuff by his father: “You were my son but you are no longer. Go back to your reckless living and to your pigsty! It’s where you belong.”

If that were the end of the story, we could not deny its justice. But Jesus’ aim is not to give us a lesson about justice. It is to tell us about grace. The father is the God about whom we read in the book of Daniel: “To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, though we have rebelled against him” (Daniel 9:9). And the prophet Ezekiel puts it even more passionately: “As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, people of Israel?” (Ezekiel 33:10-11).

So it is that Thielicke could write:

The joyful sound of festivity rings out from this story. Wherever forgiveness is proclaimed there is joy and festive garments. We must read and hear this gospel story as it was really meant to be: good news! News so good that we should never have imagined it. News that would stagger us if we were able to hear it for the first time as a message that everything about God is so completely different from what we thought or feared. News that he … is inviting us to share in an unspeakable joy. The ultimate secret of this story is this: There is a homecoming for us all because there is a home.[1]

The Older Brother: Recalcitrance

It’s all a wonderful story. And as those who have turned to Christ in faith we have the assurance of God’s full and free forgiveness and the promise of an eternal place in his presence. But wait! There is more to be told. Jesus hasn’t finished yet. In Rembrandt’s famous painting a tall figure stands off in the shadows to the side. His hands clasped, he looks down coolly on the scene that is unfolding in front of him.

He is the older brother.

He has been out working in the fields. In the distance he has heard music and dancing and joyful laughter. As he nears the house his nostrils are filled with the rich aroma of a fatted calf roasting on the spit. His outrage is such that he cannot bring himself to step through the door. When his father pleads with him to come in and join the party, his cool silence quickly explodes into a furious outburst. Years of pent-up anger and resentment pour out like a flood bursting through a dam.

At this point let’s take a moment to stand back from the story and look at it objectively.

Surely the older brother had every right to be upset. He had been a dutiful son for years and had never received a whit of recognition for it. Where was the fairness in that? Where was the justice?

Now if I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that he has a point. And here I want to suggest that it is not the penitent son who is the central figure in Jesus’ story. Nor is it the forgiving father. Rather, it is this son, who stands outside the party room, his feet firmly planted, his arms firmly folded in a well-justified huff.

Why do I think he is the central character? Take a moment to look at Luke’s introduction to Jesus’ parables:

Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

Do you see who Jesus’ audience was? It was all older brothers, people who had spent the greater part of their lives fastidiously seeking to live in obedience to God, right down to the minutest detail. If they weren’t the very definition of older brothers, I can’t imagine who is. And if I’m honest with myself, I am forced to confess that I am one of them too.

Yes, I will freely admit that I am a sinner. I acknowledge that my only claim on God’s salvation is by his grace and through faith in Jesus Christ. Yet I also have to confess that in the course of my years in the family of God I have in many ways adopted the attitudes and perspectives of an older brother. It’s not as though it’s intentional. For the most part it happens gradually and imperceptibly. But it happens none the less—so that I can become critical and judgmental in my attitude towards others, so that I am keener on justice and retribution than I am on mercy and reconciliation. And before I know it, I’m standing outside with my arms folded, while the party’s going on over there.

Yet the most wonderful thing of all is that Jesus leaves the parable open-ended. He does not consign the older son to living outside for the rest of his life in a perpetual state of indignation. It is as though Jesus is saying to all who will hear, “Now over to you…”

How subtly a religion of works can overtake the liberty of grace! How frighteningly easy it is to slip from being a younger brother to an older one! Yet the father’s invitation is there for us all. Is it any coincidence that almost the last words of the Bible are these?

The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let the one who hears say, “Come!” Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life. (Revelation 22:17)

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[1] Helmut Thielicke, The Waiting Father, 29