Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 1, 2004

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

The last couple of weeks we’ve taken a look at aspects of who Jesus was. Two weeks ago we saw that he was a miracle worker, and we talked about how we can be miracle workers too. Last week we saw him as the great liberator, and we talked about how we are being liberators too. Today we see another aspect of who Jesus was. In the Gospel passage from Luke we see that Jesus was a truth teller. He was a truth teller even when his listeners didn’t at all like the truth he had to tell.

In that lesson, Jesus has just finished reading the passage from Isaiah about liberation that we talked about last week. Today’s reading overlaps with last week’s when it begins with Jesus’ statement that that scripture has been fulfilled in the hearing of his listeners. They like that, but then the trouble starts. Jesus is apparently concerned that their liking what he said is grounded in a kind of arrogance, in the notion that God’s liberating power is meant for them and them alone. So he cites to them two stories from Hebrew Scripture, from 1 Kings and 2 Kings respectively, in which God’s mercy was shown to gentiles and not to the Jews. The stories are from their own Scripture, but these good folks just didn’t want to hear that truth. When Jesus told these stories, "they were filled with rage." They tried to kill Jesus. He got away this time, but it was precisely this insistence of his that he tell God’s truth that eventually got him killed.

Then we have Paul’s great ode to love in 1 Corinthians 13. It says: Love bears all things and endures all things. It rejoices in the truth, Paul says, but it does not insist on its own way. Now, when I read about Jesus basically getting in the face of the people of Nazareth with the truth, even though he surely knew they wouldn’t like it, and saw that combined with 1 Corinthians 13 in the lectionary, I thought: How odd. Those two passages are contradictory. Or maybe Jesus didn’t get it about love the way Paul did. Of course, that’s not the case. Jesus is precisely the love of God incarnate. Still, he wasn’t exactly bearing all things with the Nazarenes. He had a problem with what they said. He saw through their complacency to their arrogance; and he let them have it right between the eyes with some well-chosen Scripture. He was rather insisting on his own way, or so it seems to me.

What are we to make of that? Is Paul wrong? Was Jesus being inauthentic? Actually, I think the answer to both questions is no. Paul is absolutely right. 1 Corinthians is the best description of true love ever written. I routinely use it in wedding homilies. That advice about bearing all things, being patient and kind, and not insisting on one’s own way is the best recipe for a good marriage I’ve ever heard. It’s the fruit of great life experience, and it is profoundly true. And of course Jesus wasn’t being inauthentic. He never was. He was so authentic that it got him crucified. He was speaking God’s truth as he knew it, and he knew it better than anyone ever has. More than that. He was speaking the truth that his listeners needed to hear, even if they didn’t want to hear it. He was, in other words, being prophetic. So, both things are true: We are called to speak the truth; and we are called to speak in love, bearing all things and not insisting on our own way. In other words, to quote another passage of Paul’s, we are called to speak the truth in love.

And that, my friends, can be a very difficult thing to do. I don’t know about you, but I know that for myself the great temptation is to believe that the truth as I know it is the only truth, in fact is God’s truth. And when you think you’ve got God’s truth, it’s pretty hard to bear with someone else’s truth. It’s pretty hard not to insist on your own way. Spiritual arrogance is a profound temptation for me and, I know for a lot of other people. It wasn’t for Jesus, but then, he was Jesus. We aren’t. So the call to speak the truth in love can be a very difficult thing for us.

Fortunately, in this same thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians, Paul gives us a really good clue on how we can do it. It’s the famous passage that most of us know in the King James version: "For now we see through a glass darkly." Or in the NRSV that we heard this morning: "For now we see in a mirror dimly." No matter how sure we are that we have God’s truth, we need constantly to remind ourselves, that is, I need constantly to remind myself, that I don’t. I can’t, because in this life it isn’t possible to do more than to see God and God’s truth in a glass darkly. Knowing that we have at best only partial truth, that we can know God’s truth and God’s will only partially, is a very good corrective to spiritual arrogance. It makes it a lot easier to bear with the truths of others and not to insist on our own way. In other words, it makes it a lot easier to speak the truth, as we know it, in love. That’s our call. May God grant us the grace to do it. Amen.