February 29, 2004

George Armstrong

Jesus got no joy from his disciples and wannabe disciples. He had enough difficult people to deal with without his own dumb followers leaning all over him.

For example, there was:

1. The Roman army; at least 4-6 battallions (6,000) of them according to the naked madman in last week's Gospel. This man lived in the cemetery with 6000 Roman Soldiers (a whole Legion) - inside of him. "My name is Legion", he said to Jesus, violently shaking his broken chains. This man had internalised the occupying army. (Maybe he'd been inside one of their Abu Ghraib torture houses.) Jesus got that legion out of the man, turned those Roman soldiers into pigs (unclean animals to the Jews) and drowned them in a Jewish lake - just like Pharaoh's Army way back. That made a great Jewish Joke. But the locals were more scared than amused. They knew that the unamused Romans might send their gunships in after this irreverent and probably terrorist holy man. And it was them who'd be the collateral damage.

2. Herod "that fox" that the Romans had put in charge of the Galilee Chicken Coop

3. The corrupt religious elite in charge of the Temple and of the rather considerable political economy in Jerusalem

So Jesus had his hands full of troubles already. And he headed straight into them, set his face towards Jerusalem. Luke spends the next ten chapters getting him to his "Hikoi" destination. That will keep us going with Gospel Readings for the next three months.

Remember we're reading right through Luke's Gospel this Year, Year "C" in the lectionary system. Remember too that this Luke's Gospel is one of a two-volume publication from Luke. The Second Volume is the Acts of the Apostles. In Volume One, Jesus takes his news to Jerusalem. In Volume Two, Paul takes up the mantle of Jesus and takes the Good News of the Christian Movement to Rome, to the centre of the Roman Empire. Paul, like Jesus, didn't believe in evading problems. Nor did he believe in half measures.

So Jesus' Game Plan was to head for Jerusalem. How come? Well, he'd just spent some hours going over his Vision Statement, Strategic Plan and Project Management detail with two of his colleagues, Moses and Elijah, on Mount Hermon. The three of them got so steamed up they lit up like beacons much to the delight and edification of the disciples who wanted to prolong the experience.

Now never mind that Moses and Elijah were long dead and gone. A little point like that doesn't bother the biblical storytellers. No sort of literalistic rationalism is allowed to get in the road of a good story in the Bible. No, Moses and Elijah were just what Jesus needed: tough hombres who knew the score and how it had to be played out - real physical. And here they were, these three Jewish Jonah-Lomu-size prophets, calmly discussing the "Exodus" that Jesus was to accomplish by going to Jerusalem.

They seem to have "factored in" to their calculations that this Exodus would eventuate in the shameful death of Jesus himself. But what could any self-respecting prophet expect from the corrupt cabal of Archbishops and Cardinals whose job it was to preserve tight homeland security in Jerusalem.

Now let me pause for a moment. Here am I up here in the pulpit and you away down there in the Congregation. What we are engaged in is what the Service Sheet calls a "Reflection". So this is a reflective Bible Study. It is me reflecting the Bible to you. You may think that my being away up here means that I am six feet above contradiction. Not so. You don't have to agree with my free interpretations of the Bible. You are free.

For my text for today is my absolute favorite. It is in today's Epistle. It runs like this: "For freedom, Christ has set us free." You are not to surrender your Christian freedom to some preacher, or Cardinal, or Archbishop (from whom we are probably going to need some liberation over the coming months judging by Archbishop Vercoe's comments about "A World without Gays" or Cardinal Tom Williams denunciation of all things liberal, ie. "barbarous") Don't get me wrong; I'm absolutely delighted that our two principle Church Leaders have actually found their voices over these last days and weeks!

So, in freedom, listen to what I'm laying out, and do with it what you will.

Now back to the Bible and these wannabe disciples. Enter first the charming pair whom Jesus (or someone with an equally fine sense of humour) nicknamed Boanerges, "Sons of Thunder". Jesus had sent them out on fieldwork. They were to let a Samaritan village know that the Jesus circus was coming to town. When the heretical Samaritans heard that it was a Hebrew or Jewish team of evangelists coming, they locked their gates and said "don't bother". James and John were furious. They remembered how Elijah had sent down fire upon the false prophets long ago and asked Jesus, their latter-day Elijah, to oblige in the same way. Amazingly, Jesus put up with this - didn't even hand out the red card.

Now enter a different kind of enthusiast. "I'll follow you Jesus" he said, "but first let me see my father into his grave. He's almost there already". Jesus answered him very rudely: "let the dead bury the dead". Now myself, aged 73 and eminently buriable, I have some beef with Jesus about this. But I might as well save my breath. Jesus practised the freedom which he urged everyone else to receive from him. Whatever else about Jesus, he was in dead earnest about his own freedom. He had freely chosen to set his face towards Jerusalem and there was no stopping him. And he didn't want a whole lot of B team dependent permission-seeking followers dragging him back every step of the way.

Here was a very free man. Paul had caught that sense of freedom from his vision of Jesus. And Paul saw that there was not turning back from the kind of freedom that Jesus commended. The open doorway of freedom leads on to another open doorway to a further freedom. There's no end to this vista of open doorways. Paul says that we are set free not to settle down again in some new slave-situation. We are to pass on through the next open door - and so on - and so on. That is why we are set free: for freedom; for an ongoing experiment in freedom. When Jesus arrived in Jerusalem, it was not the end of the Hikoi. It was the beginning of another one.