Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's March 7, 2004 Sunday Morning worship service.  If you would like to read sermons from previous services, please click HERE.

The latest sermon will be posted here as soon as it is received – usually by Tuesday or Wednesday following the Sunday that it was presented.

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I’ve decided that the problem with Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ, which I have not see and don’t really have any desire to see, is that it presents only one dimension of Jesus and only one dimension of the Christian faith. Body sacrifice with tortures and agony is what is what I am told strikes you visually – it is so graphic that some put hands over eyes. Therefore, with this vision of Jesus, a bloody and substitionary or vicarious view of the atonement is the only theological view of the cross that seems to be allowed.

From what I have read, the movie makes only fleeting references to the life and ministry of Jesus, focusing instead on that one gruesome day of torture. Jesus, then, is the innocent, passive victim who bears the punishment we deserve. But surely, aren’t there other ways to think of Jesus? One commentator notes: “Gibson’s attention to the physical suffering is so relentless that one is forced to ask: Is the extent of Jesus’ physical suffering theologically significant? Would the Passion have a different meaning if Jesus had, say, been quickly beheaded? Would the sacrifice be any less if it involved less blood?” (Christian Century, March 9, 2004).

I think that the person of Jesus and the doctrine of the atonement are much more theologically complex than our Sunday School faith has led us to believe. Or, for that matter, what this movie depicts about the life purpose of Jesus.

Can’t we agree that there is more to Jesus than just this Hollywood version of him as a passive victim who bleeds all over the place? Isn’t there much more to the purpose and work of the Christ than merely regarding him as a bloody atonement for human sin? I know its all the rage right now in Christian circles to go see this movie; if you decide to go see it, just remember that we stand up for a gospel that is not one dimensional and we follow a Jesus who is much more than just a passive victim who happens to be able to bleed profusely.

There is always more to Jesus than first meets the eye. Like, for instance, this little snapshot of him we have from the 13^th chapter of Luke.

Jesus doesn’t sound to me like a very passive person in this little encounter he has with some Pharisees. They advise him, basically, to get out of town because Herod is coming after him with his murderous intentions. Jesus says: “Go, tell that fox something for me.” To call someone a fox, especially a person with Herod’s authority, is a dangerous insult. The fox was a cunning, low life kind of creature, and Jesus expresses his contempt for Herod in no uncertain terms.

There is a road that Jesus must travel, and even Herod has no power to determine that destiny.

In his conversation with the Pharisees, Jesus reminds them that his destiny does, yes, involve death, but death on his terms in Jerusalem, as a prophet, and death that will not yet preempt his ministry of casting out demons and healing the sick. Though that “fox” King Herod might be coming to get him, Jesus must continue to do his work, must continue, through signs of mercy and love, to move towards the consummation of his ministry and mission.

It is very easy to get sidetracked in these days of Lent. The cross-bearing Jesus of sentimental Christianity and the bloody Jesus of the doctrine of the atonement are images larger than life, images that can tempt us to reduce Jesus to the lowest common cultural denominator, thus forgetting that Jesus is a whole lot more complicated than just a narrowly defined Savior figure who died for me or for the sake of preserving American individualism or for the sake of preserving whatever other cultural or religious idols the name of Jesus is invoked to protect.

Yes, Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem. There is no turning back. We know what will happen there. But, here in Luke 13, as he is on the way, he pauses not just to call Herod a fox, but also to lament over Jerusalem, “the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it.” And then he says, “Jerusalem, how often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you were not willing!”

Except for his trip to Jerusalem as a 12 year old boy and the wilderness temptations of being escorted there by the Devil, we have no record of his having been to Jerusalem. Perhaps Jesus is speaking, as did the prophets before him, of God’s desire to gather all of Jerusalem’s children. And maybe it’s not just the children of Jerusalem, but other children, adults, too, whom he will gather to himself along the way to Jerusalem, as well.

Maybe he is thinking of the lawyer who asked, “Who is my neighbor?” or of Martha who exploded in a fit of jealousy or of the Pharisee who invited him to dinner and got a lecture about being clean on the inside. He might be thinking of the disciples, nervous at his talk of conflict and division, or of the bent-over woman he healed on the Sabbath. Some received his presence with thanksgiving and love, others with resentment, and still others with a puzzlement that gave way to anger.

But all of these, and more, are the children of Jerusalem whom he gathers as a hen gathers her chicks.

Whether each of them – the pious insider, the inquisitive seeker, the too busy sister, the slow-to-get-it disciple, the long-suffering old woman – actually was, or was not, an eyewitness to his bloody sacrifice, doesn’t really matter after all.

What does matter, I believe, is that, even at the end, even as Jesus moves toward his certain death, Jesus calls on people to change. He calls on Jerusalem to repent. One might have thought after all of the teaching, after the centuries of prophetic warnings, it would be too late. But it’s not too late. There is still time to repent. To change.

And for you as well. Jesus may have more faith in you than you have in yourself. I know. Old habits die hard; you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I know.

But I also know that, in Jesus, there is a power unleashed in life. There is a power greater than that of our own devising. And it is a power finally greater than even images of a bloody torture and sacrifice.

Lent challenges us to walk towards the cross. The cross will mean different things for different ones of us. But that is the challenge. To change, to repent, so that at least we can draw near to it.As the old church camp song goes,

I have decided to follow Jesus,
I have decided to follow Jesus,
I have decided to follow Jesus,
No turning back, no turning back.