Saturday, 11 December 2021

LF_55-PE-Pw

There’s perhaps a sense of self-protection in many people … perhaps we sometimes feel a bit bad about it … that makes us want to stay away from ‘the wrong sort of people’.
Makes us NOT want to have too much to do with those who aren’t really eligible under our own definition of ‘the cool crowd’.
But here is what the Scripture says in Luke 19:10 “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”
Jesus came … we’re thinking Christmas (the REAL Christmas) … to go after the drifters, the losers, the outsiders, the quirky, freaky, weirdo-type people, what we might (secretly) think of as ‘the no-hopers’.
He came to seek them.
And He came to save them.
I’ve used a wrong word in that paragraph there.
Can you see it?
Of course!
He didn’t come to save the lost that we call ‘them’!
Not at all!
He came to save the lost that are called … ‘me’.
Because here’s the thing: WE know the experience of longing that we could find the way out … one that as Seamus Heaney put it is a door into the light.
There are too many doors before us that open onto darkness.
For sure, we know there is something not right with the world simply because of our experience of it.
The problems of brokenness, shortcomings, suffering and death confront us all constantly … much though we try to ignore them and look away.
Of course, we try a creative number of possibilities to deal with all this.
Sometimes we become backward looking and yearn for things simply to go back to the way they used to be … nurturing false memories of some old ‘paradise’ that’s long lost but never really was that paradisical in the first place.
We want deliverance from all our chaos by going backwards, instead of yearning for a way out going forwards.
Perhaps we think the problem is ignorance … so we dream deliverance will result from education.
If we think the problem is the pandemic, then we’ll probably look to ‘the science’ for the answer.
If loss of identity or individuality is thought to be the source of the problem, then we may well look to Nationalism to give us the answer … the road out to deliverance.
The aridity of such avenues to ‘deliverance’ leads people like the sports psychiatrist Steve Peters to argue that the problem we seek deliverance from is not so much ‘out there’ as ‘in here’ … in his book ‘The Chimp Paradox’ he argues that we long to be in a place where we are no longer controlled by our desires (our ‘inner chimp’) and to get there we need to save ourselves from our own brain.
That’s all a bit ‘high-brow’ but for most the desire to ‘get out of your life’ is recognisable and leads to addiction to gardening, gaming, drink and drugs, mobile phones, obsession with the fantasy world of novels or comics, TV soap operas … and for some of us even protracted listening to the BBC World Service!
Oh, we are VERY inventive in finding ways to escape our reality … eagerly searching to find a way we can be comfortable with to get out of here, even if only for a SHORT while.
I’m trying to make the point that it really isn’t ‘them’ but it is us that see ourselves as lost and in need of deliverance … the way out.
We find ourselves in a place we possibly don’t understand, don’t want to be in and unable to find the way out.
Ultimately, we fear the way out lies beyond our control because death shows NOBODY respect.
We are all looking to find the way out of this, but we don’t want the way to be that!
And into this sense of healing ‘lostness’ in Scripture waddles a chubby little man called Zacchaeus.
He seems to have SO much of what the world can offer.
But he CLEARLY wasn’t one of first century Palestine’s ‘in-crowd’.
Zacchaeus was clearly one of the ‘lost-crowd’.
So let’s ask then …

• Exactly how lost is Zacchaeus?

Well he’s lost in the crowd, but not in the in-crowd.
Zacchaeus was a man who was thoroughly looked down on.
His name Zacchaeus comes from the Greek form of the Hebrew name זַכָּי (Zakkay) which meant “pure”.

What … really?

Is this a Biblical joke here?

His given name in this story means ‘clean’ or ‘pure, but to the people he lived with this man was a pariah!
You see, we’re told immediately Zacchaeus was a tax collector.

We’ll come back to quite how serious a social pariah this makes Zacchaeus when we look at how outrageous it was for Jesus to have anything to do with him, but for now let’s just recognise he was powerful but despised and an outcast.
To be a tax collector for the Roman Empire in first century Palestine made you first and foremost a …

The Roman emperor appointed a governor (procurator) who was in charge of collecting taxes and preventing the people from rebelling against Rome.
The Romans placed heavy taxes on land, on goods and food that were bought and sold, and on inheritances.
They also charged tolls for people traveling through the areas they controlled.
The taxes went to support the Roman army and to maintain control of Palestine.
Farmers and the poor suffered the most under this system of taxes.

The Romans made contracts with local people in order to collect taxes.
These local tax collectors (publicans) would often collect much more than the amount they were supposed to turn over to the Romans.
They kept the rest. In Palestine, this led to bad feelings between the Jewish people and their neighbours who agreed to collect taxes for the Romans.
Tax collectors were often seen as traitors by the Jewish religious leaders.
Some called them sinners, and said they were not welcome to be part of the Jewish people or to worship with them.
But there was another thing that made many look down on him.
Zacchaeus the tax collector was … SHORT!

v. 3: “ … and he was not able to because of the crowd, for he was short in stature.”
He couldn’t get eyeballs on Jesus.
And he couldn’t because of his physical limitations.
We know he was wealthy.
We know the sort of physical shape cut by wealthy men in the culture Zacchaeus was part of … Zacchaeus probably struggled to get himself up in that sycamore tree.
Now, of course, this wasn’t one of OUR Sycamore trees which can grow to fifty feet and more.
This is the συκομωραία (sukomōraia) Ficus sycomorus, called the sycamore fig or the fig-mulberry (because the leaves resemble those of the mulberry).
It is a fig species that has been cultivated since ancient times.
Ficus sycomorus grows to 20 m tall and has a considerable spread, with a dense round crown of spreading branches.
In the Bible, the sycamore is referred to seven times in the Old Testament – the Hebrew is שִׁקְמָה shiḳmah; and once in the New Testament (συκομoραία sykomoraia or συκομορέα sykomorea here in Luke 19.)
Though it was not as common in Galilee, the sycamore was a very popular and valuable fruit tree further south in Jericho and Canaan.
The important thing for our purposes is probably the shape of the tree.
Think of the shape of a tortoise’s shell.
Domed top.
Flat along the bottom, with the bottom of the canopy CLOSE to and parallel with the ground

Figure 1 - Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The point here is that Zacchaeus is not a heroic tree-climber.
In fact, not a heroic anything.
We get the impression of someone not good at sport in school.
He found a very low-hanging tree to get up into.
Zacchaeus was NOT the village hero.
Zacchaeus is NOT cutting the figure of a fully paid-up member of the in-crowd.
Zacchaeus is looking like a man who is lost, very much looking for the way out.
He climbs this tree that day VERY much seeking deliverance.
So, by now you've probably had a certain little song running around in your head for a little while ... let's just pause for a moment to run that song through and realise thefe is so much more going on here than this!
https://youtu.be/IiAe6GNKtec

So we’ve established then that in spite of his given name, Zacchaeus is an outrageous person so far as the first century Palestinian cool guys were concerned.
But there is an arguably more outrageous person in this story, Who is in there offering Zacchaeus his deliverance … Zacchaeus’s way out of his miserable, outrageous, wealthy, privileged life.
That person is Jesus.
Let’s ask the question then: ‘just how outrageous for doing this here is Jesus?’

• How outrageous is Jesus?

Of course, the answer entirely depends on your perceptions.
Jesus is going around Palestine ‘Messiah-ing’.
But to unconverted people looking on at that time, in their view Jesus was going around ‘Rabbi-ing’.
If He’s going around Messiah-ing … saving the lost … there is NOTHING to take exception to here.
But if He’s going around doing nothing but ‘rabbi-ing’ … then there is LOADS going on here that is totally outrageous.
If Jesus is just a moral teacher, then what He does with Zacchaeus is a bit of a stumbling block.
But if He has come to seek and to save those who were lost, then what He does here with Zacchaeus should prompt party songs … songs from the Heavenly party.
The fact is Jesus has come as the Saviour, but if He’s come as a Teacher then His actions are outrageous … to those who think He’s just another Teacher.

Tax collectors as we’ve said were collaborating with the hated, oppressive Roman conquerors who were taxing the farmers and the ordinary people particularly into penury, in order to pay for the Roman legions that were pinning the Palestinians down hard.
And Jesus ‘buddied up’ to that man?!
Not only are we told Zaccahaeus was a tax collector … we’re told that he was pretty much a taxation big cheese …

This is the one place in the NT, in Luke 19:2, that the office of chief tax collector is mentioned.
If the term refers to a managerial rank, this individual would organize and oversee the other tax collectors and collect significant commissions (see also the note on the word tax collector in 3:12).
It is possible, however, that in this context the term simply means “major tax collector” and is a comment on the individual’s importance or wealth rather than his rank (see D. L. Bock, Luke ad loc).
The next thing we hear about the outrageousness of Jesus here is that the Saviour associates with someone who is either high up or particularly efficient amongst the oppressors.

Zacchaeus, by his oppressive trade, is a person who’s become very wealthy.
Who loves a person who has benefitted from others’ misfortune?
Who loves a person who has grown πλούσιος - wealthy, abounding in material resources, by making other weaker and more vulnerable people poor.
You see, if Jesus were only a teacher, then associating with people like Zacchaeus (or the ex-tax-collector turned Apostle Matthew from Matthew 9:9) would be utterly outrageous!
Why associate with people who rejected your whole corpus of ethical teaching?
To do so would seem pretty hypocritical.
But He is the Saviour announced by the angel to Joseph as to be called Jesus because He would SAVE His people from their sins …
The Christ Who came at Christmas was coming with a particular purpose to seek and save, to deliver those people like us who are lost.
And then the ‘Jesus is a very good Teacher’ people were sent into orbit in outrage at what Jesus does next … inviting Himself to the outcast, lost, Zacchaeus’s house for tea.

In Judaism the pious Jew did NOT sit down with sinners for supper.
To find fellowship around a table was to proclaim your acceptance of one another as heirs of the covenants of God.
Time is running short, so please feel free to Google this, but sitting down to dinner was understood as a corporate covenant activity, a proclamation your dinner party belonged to the in-crowd and had no need for any further deliverance from exclusion from the good things of God.
How outrageous does Jesus seem to be being here?
To the crowd who saw Jesus as just a good teacher it’s clear, Luke 19:7: “All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.”
The house of ‘a sinner’ …
So what did they all think THEY were?!
Jesus gets even clearer as He spells out what He means by His deliverance of Zacchaeus …

• Sons of Abraham
v. 7 “Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham.”
Now the good Jewish lads in the crowd around Jesus and Zacchaeus might well have been tearing their robes and throwing dust in the air!
Jesus is putting outrageous Zacchaeus at the heart of God’s covenant community … at the heart of God’s in-crowd, and what they claimed was theirs.
But please look a little bit closer.
Here’s the key to the ‘way out’ that Jesus brings … God’s covenant with Abraham was based in a real repentance that was born of trust and faith.
Let’s not rush this gun … it’s time to ask: according to the real Christ of Christmas Whose mission was salvation and deliverance, what really IS the way out?

• What IS the way out?

Well you can see it portrayed here in Zacchaeus …
It starts out with genuine, determined seeking after Jesus.

v. 3 “He was trying to see who Jesus was.”
καὶ ἐζήτει ἰδεῖν τὸν Ἰησοῦν τίς ἐστιν
From time to time we’re blessed to see, even in this rough-edged age, people taking an interest in Jesus.
It feels great to see that, but that ‘interest’ may not be what God is really looking for.
There is more here to be noticed in Zacchaeus.
He is trying … commitment, effort … to see NOT Jesus (like a spectator) but specifically the text says he was trying to see Who Jesus really was.
Yes, he was cutting the slightly ridiculous, short and tubby image of an habitual non-climber clumsily ascending a sycamore fig tree.
All thought of personal reputation and dignity set aside, Zacchaeus lifts up his robe and gets climbing, because he really wants to see and know Who Jesus really is.
And then when he did get summoned down after the fashion of a naughty climb-y child called down by its mother … ‘Zacchaeus come DOWN from that tree!’ … his dignity was no bar to his progress.
And he’s taking a risk.
At this point, the general bitter critical gaze re-directed from Jesus to the tax-collector, and Zacchaeus climbed down into a barely-repressed but quite antagonistic mob.

Coming down to Jesus can take quite a lot of ‘pluck’!

Having been comfortingly hidden in the low branches of that tree, Zacchaeus is now PUBLICLY obeying a new Master.
And in Zacchaeus we then see a tangible faith and repentance.

Having been denounced in the crowd as a sinner, to whose house the Saviour Jesus had invited himself, Zacchaeus is ready for the change of life that is going to lead to his deliverance … and Zacchaeus make it public and decisive right there and then.

The crowd are calling him over as ‘a sinner’ … as if they weren’t themselves …
v. 7 “But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”
Repentance computes to restoration.
Zacchaeus will be BUSY with his books tracking past transactions backing paying THAT amount of restitution … it is IMMENSE!
HERE is the evidence of real faith, and THIS is the Saviour’s way out.
It has come into the heart of old, unacceptable Zacchaeus … who is sounding now like a completely new man.
So here comes the Saviour’s decree of his salvation:

• The decree of Salvation
It shows up first as:

“When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.”

And it’s followed by …

“Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham.”

Abraham believed the God Who had promised in Genesis 15:6 … so Romans 4:3, Galatians 3:6 and James 2:23 echo that tune:

“Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.”
So now his radical repentance has testified to Zacchaeus’s radical faith-induced deep change of life and Jesus has brought him to deliverance … to finding the way out.
It shows you what the change of heart that gets you settled on the Way out LOOKS like.
There’s (at some length) in verse 8 the particular personal application of how the Christ of Christmas addresses the deep human desire for deliverance, and now comes the summarising statement of the general principle behind it all …

“For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

If that’s not the Christ in your Christmas, if that deliverance doesn’t swing the needle of the compass of your heart, you haven’t got the authentic Christ of Christmas at all.

And if that melody isn’t echoed in sympathetic resonance of your heartstrings to His … here to seek and to save those who are lost … then what part have you with Him at all?

I mean, He CAME to seek and save those that are lost.
He’s come to take His people along the way out to the deliverance that He came at first Christmas to bring.

Here’s the conclusion.

Conclusion

Let’s be sure this Christmas we make no bones about how the deliverance Jesus came to earth to bring addresses this third deep magnetic yearning of our hearts.

We know something’s wrong, the folks around us know there’s something wrong.
We are urgently seeking the way out … but it’s more than that.
We don’t feel at ease with the exit that seems to be looming.
Death looks far more like disaster than deliverance!
But He came to seek and to save those who were NOT from the in-crowd and looked as lost as that Zacchaeus.
You remember a man called Lazarus and the despair … the longing for a deep deliverance … that characterised his mourning sisters called Mary and Martha?
Ultimately deliverance lies in the hand of the One Who is both the proven resurrection and the abundant Christian life.
Deliverance from one comparatively minor situation after another in this life, of course, lies in the hand of the compassionate Saviour.
This is true.
But turning the ultimate (inevitable) challenge from disaster to deliverance meets the deepest yearning that we nurse, in its significance.
The ‘way out’ we long for is not an endlessly revolving door.
Neither is it a place of smoke and mirrors.
It is rooted in reality at the end of the street, which is one way and policed by the Saviour.
The deliverer.
My Saviour.
He CAME to seek and save the lost.
To save those wrestlers with the ugly fruit of human existence.
The inner compass points to the need for this deliverer.
Here’s the third magnetic point met by the real Christ of Christmas.
There’s something wrong.
The Rescuer.
The Deliverer.

Rend Collective help us reflect and realise what this means.

Click the pic.

Saturday, 4 December 2021

The Five Magnetic Points of Christmas - 2. Norm ... John 14:6

Audio

Videocam

• Introduction

We’re looking in the run-up to Christmas this year at how the actual Christ of Christmas meets OUR people’s need.

They don’t think He does.

(They can’t CREDIT that He might!)

But the things they are crying out for in the depths of their hearts are things that Jesus makes thorough and comprehensive provision for, for those who follow Him.

And today we’ve come to the deep-seated human desire to find the good life, the ethical life, the right life.

Now before you succumb to the view that I’ve lost the plot because you’re convinced people have no desire for such a thing … how do you explain the moralism of this virtue signalling age, it’s deep desire to ethicise care for the planet, its passionate support for things like Children in Need?

You see, it seems that there IS some vestige of the image of God left in humanity that – however badly marred – still wants to do the right thing and be seen to do so.

Time and again we hear converts to Islam from Western secular backgrounds highlighting this issue in their praise for Islam.

And so just as in the amoral … often immoral … culture of the Roman Empire in the first century AD (when the New Testament church sprang into life) we are seeing in our time in a significant group of people a revulsion with and a rejection of immoral, exploitative and ill-disciplined living.

Of course, there were significant numbers of Greek and Roman background women who were at first attracted to Judaism’s ethical monotheism because of how their culture treated them.

They were attracted to ‘the Way’ it proposed for living.

And today, too, we see something of the same sort of thing.

In Dan Strange’s analysis of the things that (in his words) make faith in Christ ‘magnetic’ there’s a phenomenon he calls the desire for a norm … a pattern of accepted and acceptable behaviour to live by.

“This second magnetic point is called norm and asks whether there is a way to live - and how we know what that is.” (Strange, p. 44).

If you want an ‘advent’ book I really do suggest reading Dan Strange’s ‘Making Faith Magnetic’ … it has a great analysis of what people are crying out for, but would be surprised to discover is to be found in the life and ministry of the actual Christ of Christmas.

And that’s why this year in the run-up to Christmas we’re doing this little series on our culture’s fundamental ‘felt needs’ and how they are met in the Christ of Christmas.

This week it’s the basic powerful desire for a workable standard or ‘Norm’ that we can live by.

In our culture and across the world, social media whips up and magnifies the norm … the standard or the way that life ‘OUGHT’ to be.

But today it is not enough to be virtuous, we want to be SEEN to be virtuous.

Strange says “Therefore I would argue that our Western post-Christian culture seems to be wrestling with this magnetic point more than ever, even though it doesn’t realise it.”

There’s a clash between ideals of tolerance and the insistence that the beliefs of certain groups are evil and have no place being expressed in today’s society.

“We can’t live with the norm and we can’t live without the norm.”

There are huge contradictions in current thinking here.

We can’t live without accepted standards of behaviour, but we can’t live with those being pointed out to us either in our society because we cannot manage to live by the ethical framework people are crying out for!

On this not being able to live with the norm, or without it, Strange quotes the columnist Rory Sutherlandcomparing ‘safe spaces’ (where dissentient views aren’t tolerated) to quiet carriages on trains.

The rule gets set by the most neurotic person around in both quiet Carriage and Safe Space and like the Quiet Carriage this simply doesn’t work.

Sutherland: “a space which annoys no-one becomes intolerable to everyone.”

And Strange illustrates this from Goth culture: “The appeal of being a Goth lies in not conforming to certain societal norms, but you still want to conform to the rule of the sub-culture, because you need to fit in somewhere.”

Science can’t set ‘the norm’ … morality falls outside the sort of stuff science can measure, observe and talk about!

It deals with the material world.

But what we all realise - and sociology can describe this - is that even lawless hardened criminals expect police to go after the thief when it’s their stuff or their kid’s briefcase or whatever that gets snatched.

Now, the actual Chris of Christmas can do BETTER that this for us.

You see, Romans 1-2 teaches us that everyone has the Law in one way or another, but the issue is we break it and need the Incarnate Christ to be justified … I Romans 3:23.

But we’ll get to that.

So the Bible actually deals with our need for ‘the norm’ or the Way to live, and also addresses the innate human contradiction that we need the norm but then can’t live with it because of what has gone wrong in our human nature.

In fairness, this was prophesied in the Old Testament.

• The Promised Way, Isaiah 35:8

Isaiah 35 foretells the joy of the coming time of redemption:

“Strengthen the feeble hands,

steady the knees that give way;

4 say to those with fearful hearts,

“Be strong, do not fear;

your God will come,

he will come with vengeance;

with divine retribution

he will come to save you.”

5 Then will the eyes of the blind be opened

and the ears of the deaf unstopped.

6 Then will the lame leap like a deer,

and the mute tongue shout for joy.

Water will gush forth in the wilderness

and streams in the desert.

7 The burning sand will become a pool,

the thirsty ground bubbling springs.

In the haunts where jackals once lay,

grass and reeds and papyrus will grow.

8 And a highway will be there;

it will be called the Way of Holiness;

it will be for those who walk on that Way.”

So there’s a poetic celebration of coming deliverance and salvation for the faithful people of God … what interests me most here is that what characterises the time when the people of God will be blessed with a ‘Way’ also characterises much in the ministry of Jesus:

“Then will the eyes of the blind be opened

and the ears of the deaf unstopped.

6 Then will the lame leap like a deer,

and the mute tongue shout for joy.”

What Jesus actually brought was going to characterise the time when the Way was made plain to us …

And the human desire to know post-Eden what the Way that a person should live looks like is added to this great list of blessings at that time …

“And a highway will be there;

it will be called the Way of Holiness;

it will be for those who walk on that Way.”

Isaiah 35:8

We could go on about the Way in Isaiah, but really we need to focus not there but on the fulfilment of this prophecy in Jesus.

• The Jesus Way, subverting and fulfilling the norm John 14:6

Living with ‘the norm’ is fraught with issues …

There are questions about the nature of the norm.

Where do these rules come from? Who decides? If we are going to try to decide them by consensus, can we ever have rules and standards that are clear and obvious for everyone?

Then there are questions about LIVING with the norm.

How do I resolve my desire to express myself with my craving to ‘fit in’?

And what happens when others don’t live up to my standards (or I to theirs!)?

The upshot is that living with norm CAN throw up some undesirable consequences.

It can be a breeding ground for pride … we seem to need to feel good about ourselves by feeling ‘bad’ about somebody else!

It can be very tiring … being virtuous is hard enough, but feeling the need to be SEEN to be virtuous too gets exhausting!

It can be the source of significant anxiety, too … I can get very fearful of falling foul of ‘the standard’ and having people judge me.

And of course living with a ‘norm’ clashes with the new (alleged) morality of ‘tolerance’.

And yet, Jesus has at the focal point of His ministry the portrayal and promotion of a ‘norm’.

Jesus as the fulfilment of the Norm

It is something from the Old Testament that He doesn’t erase but fulfils … and in fulfilling it He subverts it to cover the objections we’ve just been raising - that our culture raises - to living with a behavioural norm.

More than that, Jesus INSISTS on people living with HIS norm … and entering into the liberty we were made for.

His norm is in scripture called ‘the Way’.

• The Way in the Gospels

Jesus’s disciples have been following Him around learning from Him alongside the events of everyday life for about three years by this point, learning from Him the way rabbinical disciple learned from their rabbi.

But now in John 14 vv. 5-6 Jesus begins to prepare them for a time when He will go away and leave them to get on with following Him in his absence.

He says … I am going away.

Naturally enough, the disciples didn’t like the sound of that and it was the unsure, confidence-lacking member of the group that spoke up on this occasion:

“Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

John 14:5-6

Thomas is unsettled and he is taking Jesus very literally here …

Jesus has said ‘You know the way to where I am going’ meaning that the life of faith and discipleship which they have learned from Him over the last three years is the way to follow Jesus into Glory.

Thomas … shaken at the idea that Jesus is going away … is thinking literally of maps and route-finding!

But against that background Jesus make the spiritual point He is aiming at absolutely clear … almost in an aside from the track His conversation has been following but it really sums up in a sentence what He’s been teaching them about following Him as His disciple over the course of the last three years!

You want to know the Way?

I am the Way, He says.

Now that taps into a strong theme in Old Testament Messianic prophecy.

Jesus is the Way … the Greek word is ὁδός (hodos) 'road'

The word means road or path.

It’s a general term for a thoroughfare to get from one place to another; by extension then it came to mean: way, manner of life. “The Way" is a term for the Christian lifestyle which carried over into the language used in the New Testament Church to describe the life of faith.

Now this is really important because the whole language of discipleship in the Gospels is about following Jesus in the Way.

• The Gospel invitation - join me on the Way

From the very beginning of Jesus earthly ministry His message was an invitation to join Him on the Way.

In fact, it was MORE than an invitation.

It was a proclamation.

Along with the general command to repent and believe the Good News went a call to individuals to express that by following Him in the Way.

• The prototypical proclamation Mark 1:14-15

“After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. 15 “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”

Now, this John was the one who had been sent to fulfil the prophecy of Malachi 3:1 and of Isaiah 40:3 as the one who would prepare the WAY for the Lord Who would come and redeem His people.

And when THAT John was put in prison … his ministry of preparing the way for the Lord (incidentally in Isaiah 40:3 it is specifically our GOD that is having the way prepared for Him, which is interesting) … that ministry of John’s ended and the ministry it was preparing for began.

The Kingdom of God was now at hand … God was walking back amongst mankind after four hundred years of silence from the prophets to call people back under His authority as King - to living out His norm.

Not a set of rules … but a Way of life-giving life - fulfilling while subverting the whole idea of a norm.

From the outset the call was to the individual to walk with God in Christ on His way … but that started with the prototypical proclamation to repent and put your trust in the Good News.

Repenting and trusting in Christ is the gateway to life on the Way!

Which is why Mark immediately shows us next in His account the way Jesus called on individuals to put flesh on the bones of their repentance and faith by setting out to live their lives following Jesus in His Way …

• The prototypical calling Mark 1:16-18

“As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. 17 “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.” 18 At once they left their nets and followed him.”

The verb used there in Mark 1:18 to describe the lfe of discipleship is ἀκολουθέω

1) to follow one who precedes, join him as his attendant, accompany him 2) to join one as a disciple, become or be his disciple 2a) side with his party

It is the verb commonly used of what discipleship DOES in the Gospels, particularly in Jesus’s Galilean ministry.

First here in Mark 1 it was Peter and Andrew.

Immediately after them it was James and John the sons of Zebedee:

“Going on a little farther, he saw James, the son of Zebedee, and John his brother in their boat mending nets. 20 Immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him.”

Mark 1:19-20

And in the first century Palestinian model for theological training, this is what it looked like … following your ‘rabbi’ and observing in his daily life the ‘enfleshing’ of the Law and learning how to live it out yourself.

• The pattern of teaching - following Jesus on the Way

That model for theological training … being let in on the life of the one who was teaching you the Word of God … is what we see as Jesus trains the future leaders of His Church.

Twelve of them.

One for each of the tribes of the Old Covenant people of God just as the Twelve were to go on and lead the multi-cultural New Covenant people of God throughout the earth beginning at Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost.

We start seeing this model for spiritual training in 1 Kings 19:21 where Elisha begins to follow the great prophet Elijah:

“So Elisha left him and went back. He took his yoke of oxen and slaughtered them. He burned the ploughing equipment to cook the meat and gave it to the people, and they ate. Then he set out to follow Elijah and became his servant.”

And so Elisha began his wanderings with Elijah learning the prophet’s ‘game’ as Elijah modelled it for him day after day in all the challenges, trials, tight corners and miraculous deliverances of what it meant for them to walk humbly but usefully with God.

In that sense, it was life lived on the way back to Eden where humanity found purpose and fulfilment by walking with God in the cool of the day.

And that’s basically what we see the Twelve doing with Jesus … walking, talking, having stuff explained to them in all the twists, turns, dangers and triumphs, challenges and miracles of the Saviour’s ministry.

• The LANGUAGE of discipleship

The very LANGUAGE of discipleship in the Lord’s earthly ministry then is of following, travelling, walking with God (as they observed Him giving evidence that He was doing exactly what you’d EXPECT God to do) walking, following, Jesus leading the way.

Following Him was identical to walking with God.

And after Pentecost, and His return to Glory, this remained the language of Christianity in the age of the Spirit.

• The Way in the New Testament Church

As Luke records for us the life of the early church, ‘the Way’ is still the term for the Christian lifestyle.

We see that notably in Act.9:2 and Acts 19:9

Acts 9:2

“Meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples. He went to the high priest 2 and asked him for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any there who belonged to the Way, whether men or women, he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem.”

It is only in Acts 11:26 that we are told:

“The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch.”

Disciples were still called followers of the Way after that … it was the outsiders, the non-unbelievers who called followers of the Way Christians!

But while ‘Christian’ has become the common choice of name for believers, the more accurate ‘followers of the Way’ still has a lot to commend it in theological accuracy.

It’s just that our culture hasn’t retained that term, so just resurrecting the term now without explanation makes it sound like you’ve gone off and joined a cult!

Acts 19:9 demonstrates that the believers at Ephesus … where a great work was done under Paul’s leadership … were also consciously identified as followers of the Way:

“Paul entered the synagogue and spoke boldly there for three months, arguing persuasively about the kingdom of God. 9 But some of them became obstinate; they refused to believe and publicly maligned the Way. So Paul left them. He took the disciples with him and had discussions daily in the lecture hall of Tyrannus.”

So it was a consciousness of being followers of Jesus ‘on the Way’ prophesied by Isaiah that characterised the early church followers of Jesus.

And it was on that Way …following a person not an ethic … that they both found fulfilment of their desire for a Norm, and the subversion of the issues having a Norm brings.

As Dan Strange puts it (p. 110)

“When it comes to the norm, Jesus doesn’t just reveal that there is a standard, he says, I am the standard. Jesus doesn’t throw away the rule book, He is the rule book. Jesus doesn’t carry a set of rolled up blueprints under His arm, He is the blueprint. The norm of which we are aware … is not a set of dry, abstract and impersonal rules but is embodied in a magnetic person … Jesus said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them.” (Matthew 5 v 17).”

He IS the norm, do you see?

• Conclusion

What we’ve been saying, then, is that Jesus reveals to us God’s norm … He is the norm, “the way, the truth and the life” in the passage we’ve looked at in John 14:6.

Now, in conclusion, we just need to recognise that Jesus is making a big claim here.

What gives Jesus the authority to set the standard He claims to?

Why should we listen to HIS Norm?

An authoritative voice, to be authoritative, needs at least three things.

Firstly knowledge.

Do they know or when they speak are they just vibrating some air?

Secondly, are they upright?

Do they have integrity, moral authority to speak and to be telling us what to do?

Thirdly, does this work?

Are they effective? Do their words have power not simply to describe realty but to SHAPE it?

To get our trust, respect and obedience surely all three must be evident?

In Jesus we see Someone Who demonstrates He has all three perfectly.

So as an authority - THE authority - Jesus is to be trusted.

He doesn’t make us chose between either rules or relationship, between love and obedience … whereas in our culture these are pitted against each other, in Jesus they are not because He is worthy of both our love and obedience.

In fact in the Way His love is what motivates and empowers our obedience.

More than this, Jesus is not just the standard but the Saviour.

The follower of Jesus is finding his desire for a faithful norm in his following of the Norm Jesus embodied in Himself … but when it comes to that norm we want but can’t keep, the follower of Jesus doesn’t consider that they obey so they’re accepted, but that they are freely accepted so they obey (you can check that through in Titus 2:11).

Now, as we’ve said before, trying to keep our own norms only breeds hypocrisy … but embracing Jesus as the authority on how to live will foster humility.

Instead of being tortured with anxiety and guilt when we fail to live up to our self-invented norms and fail to live up to our standard, in Christ we can rejoice in His gracious salvation and find a liberating freedom in the forgiveness of all of our failures.

And following Jesus as the Way, truth and life we can pack in all this being obsessed with ourselves and with how other people think of us … because Jesus pays the price of all my sin and guilt and shame at the manner in which I so often fall short of the mark.

As Dan Strange puts it in his very helpful book:

“Jesus is the standard we all want, and Jesus is the Saviour we all need. But here’s the thing: you can’t have one without the other.” (p. 115)

Yet with this root - with Jesus as our standard and our Saviour - we can enjoy a life of security within a norm, and freedom to flourish in it.

And the Christ of Christmas came to bring this very ‘Way’ to us.

And our culture is crying out for that.

Let’s make it our challenge this Christmas to make that plain.