The Best Explanation

 The scriptures referred to are Philippians 2:1-13 and Matthew 21:23-32.

Everyday Facebook offers up “memories,” stuff you posted 1, 2, 5, and more years ago. Some are heartwarming like videos of my granddaughter. Some are informative. Some are funny, or were at the time. This week one popped up that showed a picture from the second Star Wars film of Luke Skywalker with Yoda on his back. Above it was the caption: “Talking frog convinces son to kill his dad.” This falls into the internet category of “Film plots explained badly.” You can find loads of them. Don't you love that film about a girl who kills a woman and then gets 3 friends to help murder her sister? That is after all the plot of The Wizard of Oz, explained badly. How about “group spends 9 hours returning jewelry?” That's the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy in a very inadequate nutshell. Or what about that exciting film where a guy tries to stop a fat man from making a bank withdrawal? You know, Goldfinger. What makes these funny is that they sound like something a teenager would say about a film they were barely watching because they were on their phone scrolling through Instagram and texting friends the whole time. They do pick up some details but they lack context, they grossly oversimplify things and basically they miss the whole point of the story.

It seems like Christianity has been suffering from being badly explained for quite a long time. It's often described as something like this: “God is mad at people for having a good time and wants to send them to hell. He takes out his anger on his son, who is much nicer. All you have to do is believe Jesus is his son to receive a 'Get out of hell free' card.” And there are some churchgoers who believe that is a good summary of the faith.

Of course there are those who call themselves Christian who never get past the 'God is mad and wants to send certain people to hell' part. Their version of the faith lacks any hint of God's compassion. And what's really weird is the stuff they think God is most upset over. Some elevate to the highest priority issues that are either never mentioned in the Bible or mentioned only a handful of times. And they really focus on sexual sins, despite the fact that they only amount to 9% of the commandments in scripture. They miss crucial things like how the Bible admonishes us literally hundreds of times to take care of the poor, the sick, and the immigrant. Love appears in scripture 518 times, 2.8 times more often than hate. Peace comes up 429 times, mercy 360, forgiving 223 and healing 139, while punishing appears only 78 times. In the whole Bible hell is only mentioned 54 times whereas heaven comes up a whopping 739 times. People who think the Bible is overwhelmingly about hate, hell and punishment are just plain wrong. It's like saying that Snow White is about a guy in the woods kissing a dead body while 7 other guys watch. You're focusing on the wrong things and missing the real story.

What our faith is actually about is our being made in the image of the God who is love and, when we act unlovingly towards him and each other, God's attempts to bring us back to being the people we were created to be. He not only tries to warn us of the consequences of trying to run the world as a “winner take all” competition rather than an exercise in compassion and cooperation, he finally decides to show us himself. He becomes one of us and reveals what he is really like and how we should emulate him through his words and his works of healing. Yet his creatures find this threatening and arrest and beat him and condemn him to death. And instead of taking out his wrath on such violence, he prays for his executioners and lets them kill him. He is no Rambo using might to make right. He doesn't deal out death but overcomes death with the life that is in him and which he gives to all who put their trust in him and follow him on the same path of self-sacrificial love.

Nor does Jesus want us to be holy warriors, punishing those we judge to be sinners. He undid the one violent act a follower did in trying to protect him by healing a severed ear. He forgives a condemned murderer on the cross next to his. Though he speaks out in the strongest terms against divorce or adultery, he protects a woman about to suffer the ultimate penalty for adultery. He also doesn't make an issue of it when speaking to the Samaritan woman who had been married 5 times. So I don't get it when people feel they need to be more strict than Jesus when it comes to others' sins.

In today's reading from Philippians Paul says, “If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.” Paul is saying it is important to have the same mindset, one of encouragement, consolation, love, sharing, compassion and sympathy. He goes on to define it further: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.” An arrogant or self-promoting Christian is an oxymoron. We are to be humble and put others before ourselves. And to really make his point he says, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus...” Share his mindset. Look at people and act towards them as he would. And in case they weren't paying attention when they were hearing the gospel, he spells out exactly the qualities that Jesus displayed.

“”...who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard regard equality with God as something to cling to...” You will notice that I changed the translation slightly. Various translations render the last word “exploited,” “grasped,” “use to his advantage,” or even, bizarrely “robbery.” It's an odd word choice on Paul's part but I think in the context the New Living Translation gets it right: “cling to.” The point is that though divine, the Son did not desperately hang onto his equality with the Father. Why? Because of the nature of what he had to do.

“...but emptied himself...” Theologians have a field day with this but basically what this means is that Christ gave up those rights and privileges he had as the divine Son. He not only refused to cling to them, he voluntarily gave them up. Why?

“...taking on the form of a slave...” So he could go from being the One who must be obeyed to one who must obey. How?

“...being born in human likeness.” By being born a human being.

“And being found in human likeness, he humbled himself...” This was not done to him. He did it himself. Christ was not stripped of aspects of his divinity; he stripped himself of his omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. He limited himself in order to be one of us.

“...and became obedient to the point of death...” God cannot die. We can. This is how profoundly Jesus gave up his prerogatives as God's son: not simply to live as one of us, but to die as one of us.

“...even death on a cross.” Not comfortably dying in bed but a painful, humiliating death, akin to a lynching. A horrible death.

Paul is forcing us to think about just what it was Christ did. This was not just God playing the “Prince and the Pauper,” going about as a human just to see what it was like. It would be like a king going on an undercover mission, a suicide mission, to save his people at the cost of his own life.

Jesus wasn't a victim of God's misplaced anger. He entered into this world, created with not only physical but moral laws that we put completely out of whack with our behavior. He sacrificed himself to set things right. He wasn't just nice; he was courageous and showed the ultimate in self-sacrificial love. That's what God in Christ did. And that is the mindset we should have.

Yet everyday we see people who are supposedly Christian who refuse to part with even a small portion of their privileges to help others. Worse, we have people insisting they have a right to ignore common sense precautions to protect themselves and others from a disease that has infected more than 32 million people worldwide, killed nearly a million, including more than 200,000 people who have died in this country alone. What if Christ had said, “I'm not giving up my rights as God to save those people?” At this rate, any doctor, nurse and nurse's aide, regardless of their faith, who risk their life to take care of those with Covid-19 is acting in a more Christlike manner than some who spout off about how Christian they are, but can't be bothered to give up their rights and privileges.

Which brings us to the second part of our badly explained version of Christianity: “All you have to do is believe Jesus is God's son to receive a 'Get out of hell free' card.” First of all, that does not really encompass what the word for “believe” means to a Christian. Yes, it means to believe that something is true. I believe that the earth revolves around the sun, but as Sherlock Holmes pointed out, it doesn't make much difference in one's life if one doesn't. Or as James put it, “You believe that God is one; well and good. Even demons believe that—and tremble with fear.” (James 2:19)

As in James' day, we have lots of people who believe that there is a God, yet it makes no difference in the way they live their lives. What's vital is not what you believe but who you put your faith in. Just as merely listening to a doctor won't make you healthy, simply listening to talk about God won't save you. It will only help you if your belief in God is so strong that you do what he says. I've had many patients who saw their doctors regularly but didn't have enough faith in them to change their lifestyles as they were told to. Believing that Jesus is the son of God or that he died for you, if it just remains a fact you file away in your brain, and not what you rely on when faced with moral decisions, does you no good. I believed that the surgeons put my shattered legs back together correctly but if I didn't put my faith in that and then stand and walk when the physical therapist told me to, I would not be walking today. And I have seen patients with new hips and new knees who won't follow the doctor's orders and don't believe that they can walk again if they just do as the therapists say. They let pain and fear have the final say.

In today's gospel Jesus talks of a man with two sons. He tells both to go to work in the vineyard. The first says, “No,” but later changes his mind and goes. The second one says, “Yes” to his father but never actually goes to the vineyard. Jesus asks his critics which son did his father's will and they say the first son, of course. “Jesus said to them, 'Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and prostitutes believed him; and even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him.'” And the word translated “change your minds” also can be translated “repent.” So genuine belief leads to repentance, which is a change of mind that leads to a change in one's life.

Real belief does not hide in your head or hunker down in your heart but moves your hands and your feet to do what God calls you to do. And he calls us to love. And that's something missed when people badly explain Christianity. If we focus only on faith, we miss half of the message. As it says in 1 John, “Now this is his commandment: that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he gave us the commandment.” (1 John 3:23) Faith in someone, trusting them, underlies all relationships, even business relationships. But God wants us to go beyond merely trusting him. Jesus did what he did out of love for us. And he wants us to reciprocate his love. And he wants us to love everyone else he loves and died for. Again as it says in 1 John, “We have come to know love by this: that Jesus laid down his life for us; thus we ought to lay down our life for the brothers and sisters.” (1 John 3:16) And as I never tire of saying, everyone you meet is either your brother or sister in Christ or your potential brother or sister in Christ.

One of the best explanations of Christianity is this, which also comes from 1 John: “Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been fathered by God and knows God. The person who does not love does not know God, because God is love. By this the love of God is revealed in us: that God sent his one and only Son into the world so that we may live through him. In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, if God so loved us, then we also ought to love one another.” (1 John 4:8b-11)

Everything starts from love and everything ends in love. And I cannot think of a better way to explain our faith to someone than simply to love them, as Jesus does.