On Line Bible Study - For the Week June 6-12, 2011

Lesson 496

Luke 18: ¹⁸ A certain ruler asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? ¹⁹ “Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone. ²⁰ You know the commandments: ‘You shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.’”

²¹ “All these I have kept since I was a boy,” he said.

²² When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

²³ When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was very wealthy. ²⁴ Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! ²⁵ Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”²⁶ Those who heard this asked, “Who then can be saved?”

²⁷ Jesus replied, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.”

²⁸ Peter said to him, “We have left all we had to follow you!”²⁹ “Truly I tell you,” Jesus said to them, “no one who has left home or wife or brothers or sisters or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God ³⁰ will fail to receive many times as much in this age, and in the age to come eternal life.”

Where to begin .... Is Jesus a 'good teacher', or the Messiah? There is a difference. We need to be careful about patronizing the Son of God.

Note that Jesus proceeds to respond to the question after he has corrected the ruler. In other words, he says: Only God is good. Now I'm going to respond to your question ... but in so doing, Jesus is assuming an authority beyond a 'good teacher'. Only God is 'good'; Jesus has the good answer. What does that make him?

What is the motive for your faith? Dietrich Bonhoeffer says this man asks the most important question in the world - the question about salvation. However, Bonhoeffer says this is not an easy question to formulate.

Has anyone ever asked you: Are you saved? Have you felt uneasy with the question? Could it be that the motive and the assumptions behind the question are what make you uncomfortable? It's not a bad question; it's an excellent question badly formulated.

Perhaps a better way to put the question would be something like this: Are you following Jesus? Ultimately, that's where Jesus will take this man - away from a selfish concern (and a self-righteous attitude!) toward obedient discipleship. Once we get to that point the choices become much simpler. "Salvation" is not an academic construct; it is a way of living. Building on the three verses immediately preceding this pericope in Luke, we need to think about trust - and the relationship between 'trust' and 'obedience'.

Sure - the man obeys the commandments. Well then, what is his problem? His problem is simply this: He wants to obey the commandments on his own terms. He is looking for this 'good teacher' to reassure him (and anyone else who happens to be listening) that he is on the right path! The fact of the ruler's shaky ground has to do with the fact that he is trusting his own perceived righteousness. Were he to sell everything he had - something he is not willing to do - he would discover more treasure than he ever imagined. But the crunch lies here: Will you trust me? That's what Jesus is asking. Obeying commandments is one thing; fully trusting God is quite another. The fact of the matter is this: we kid ourselves all the time with our 'obedience'. It's easy to "obey" when there is nothing at stake, nothing to lose.

Will I sell it all and follow Christ? That's a simple, "Yes" or "No" question. As my father often said when we were growing up: "There are no 'buts' about it."

Isn't it amazing ... the disciples had done pretty much just that - they had walked away from it all! When Jesus said to them: Come, follow me, they went. They obeyed, and because they did, they would learn to trust - to believe. It would take some time ... but they got there.

We can, too.

On Line Bible Study - For the Week May 30-5, 2011

Lesson 495

Luke 18: ¹⁵ People were also bringing babies to Jesus for him to place his hands on them. When the disciples saw this, they rebuked them. ¹⁶ But Jesus called the children to him and said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. ¹⁷ Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”

Tomorrow morning when I get on an airplane I will be exercising the highest degree of trust that is expected of me - a trust in "laws" which insure that, at a certain speed, given a certain design of the machine I am sitting in, I will fly. I've had it all explained to me over and over again; still it seems to me that once that plane rumbles down the runway it's all out of my hands.

In John Irving's recent novel, Until I Find You, the opening chapter tells of a little boy who reaches up to hold his mother's hand. He doesn't always know why he does it; he just knows that things seem safer when his hand is in hers.

In the previous lesson when we considered the humility of the tax collector praying in the temple we were invited to consider the spiritual power of such an attitude. Humility has greater influence on the mind of God than does spiritual arrogance.

The three verses under consideration this week point to another essential quality for spiritual health - trust. The three synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) all recall this event in almost exactly the same language. (See Matthew 19:13-15 and Mark 10:13-16.) Am I willing to trust the word of Jesus with the same blissful abandon I trust the laws of physics? What kind of trust does it take to respond fully to the invitation: Come, follow me.

In Dietrich Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship, the German theologian speaks of 'obedience' and 'faith' - one is impossible without the other. The familiar hymn puts it on the table - Trust and obey, for there's no other way ... Bonhoeffer goes on to say that only those who have left all to follow Christ can claim to have been 'justified by grace'. Whatever else it takes to "leave all", it takes a lot of trust in the one extending the invitation.

An airplane doesn't 'sort of fly...' It either flies, or it doesn't. When people put their faith in an aircraft that does not fly the results can be disastrous - and fatal.

For any who remember their childhood, we can look back with amazement at how we trusted parents or guardians or teachers - various adults who told us one thing or another.

Put your hand in the hand of the man who stilled the waters ... - so sings Lynn Anderson. So must we do - just like the children so trustingly put their hands in ours. Adults might be the ones providing the assurance the little ones need; but their unequivocal trust is the quality that must be emulated. As a child trusts, so must we.

On Line Bible Study - For the week May 23-29, 2011

Lesson 494

Luke 18: ⁹ To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: ¹⁰ “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. ¹¹ The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. ¹² I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’

¹³ “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

¹⁴ “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

I was at a meeting recently and someone commented to me that I looked a bit 'weighed down'. How we carry ourselves - our posture, the spring in our step, where we place our arms when talking - all of these physical attributes tell us something about our internal condition. (They were correct, by the way.)

The story we are considering in this lesson is told only by Luke, and it's a story about prayer. Though both men in the story are by themselves, one gets the sense that the Pharisee is 'by himself' in the middle of the Temple. He has a view of the others present because he is able to draw comparisons between himself and them, and in his mind, he comes out on top. Commentator Darrell Bock presumes the Pharisee has gone right into the inner court of the temple. Both his posture and where he places himself speak volumes with regard to how this individual sees himself.

The tax collector, also standing by himself, is 'at a distance'. He is more downcast, not willing (or perhaps spiritually and emotionally unable) to look up to the heavens. His posture and placement suggest humility, perhaps even a self-deprecation that borders on being unhealthy.

The point Jesus makes stems from the two very different ways in which these men present themselves to God - and to others. The words of the Pharisee might suggest that he is bragging that he exceeds the demands of the law. Fasting is required only on the Day of Atonement. Voluntary fasting was sometimes done on Mondays and Thursdays; but our friend here wants God and all the world to know that he is a spiritual overachiever.

If we pause a moment and consider - What exactly can one do to deserve to brag to God? The irony should not be lost on us. And we have to be careful even in our recognizing the irony of the story lest we miss the truth about ourselves. We don't want to be praying: Thank God I'm not like that Pharisee!! That would be to entirely miss the point.

What God honors is what we have no right to be prideful about. The constant challenge is simply this: How can I be humble? What do I do with self-righteousness when it creeps into my thinking, rationalizes its way into how I treat others? There is really only one way that leads to true joy and assurance - we constantly dance between God's unlimited offer of mercy (with arms upraised and shouts of joy on our lips!) and our unending need for it (with backs bent over and groans of "Lord, have mercy on me!" emanating from deep within us).

On LIne Bible Study - For the Week May 16-22, 2011

Lesson 493

Luke 18: ¹ Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. ² He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. ³ And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’

⁴ “For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, ⁵ yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’”

⁶ And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. ⁷ And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? ⁸ I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”

Three things are required - humility, persistence, and faith. And note the instruction in terms of what we ought to be praying for - Justice, and Christ's return.

Humility: The widow is among the least important of persons in the ancient Near East. If she is representative of our status before God, then we are the least as we stand before the power of God. We don't need to get too self-deprecating about this; it's just to say remember who you are! Be mindful of our status and station before the creative power of God.

Persistence: Humility doesn't imply that our needs are not real or that our desires are not justified. Widows are granted protection in both Old and New Testaments (see Deuteronomy 24:17 and Acts 6:1). Life is a marathon that is to be lived with hope and energy. It is easy to resign ourselves to situations, to simply 'make do'. God did not give us brains and brawn so that we could be idle by-standers. We are to persevere, to be creative and resilient, to push through for what God intends for us (and others!) to have.

Faith: Will the Son of Man find faith on earth? Thomas Merton writes: You can only believe what you do not know. He goes on to say that faith unites two members of a proposition which have no connection in our natural experience. Faith is what stands between a current reality and a divine promise - it's what connects the two. If I understand Merton, he tells us that faith is not merely intellectual assent to a concept or idea; faith is a way of grasping for and taking hold of what should be but is not yet. I think of the woman who took hold of Jesus' garment believing that if she could just touch him she would be healed. Her faith was not only in the believing; it was also in the reaching out, the grasping for Christ. Apparently, the widow in the parable above is exercising the same faith - she believes an injustice has been done and she takes action believing that the wrong can be corrected.

This parable is found only in Luke. While it encourages persistence and faith in prayer, it also focuses our praying. It is justice that God is interested in.

So ... the parable offers up two challenges for us.

1. Do we pray for what God desires?
2. Are we willing to persevere in both faith and action in the 'praying for' and the 'doing of' God's will?