Jesus Weeps

There are two times that Jesus is recorded weeping in the Scriptures. Once as he stands at the tomb of his good friend Lazarus, lamenting the loss of his friend and face to face with the specter of grave.^[1]I preached a sermon I am particularly proud of on this text here. The second time is found upon his entry to Jerusalem. The last week before he is crucified, Jesus enters the city riding on a colt. The people welcome him as a conquering hero. You see, in their minds the fact that he’s riding a colt is a minor detail. They all have heard about this Jesus, the miracle worker who may even be God’s Messiah, the anointed one who would finally bring about the judgment of God upon the Romans. The people want bloody revolution, they want a fight and here, finally, is one who might be God’s chosen instrument in bringing victory and vindication. Sure, they’d like their king to be on a stallion, standing tall above the crowds on a stately horse, but maybe, they ventured, all he could find was a a colt. For the writers of the gospels, however, Jesus’ chosen vehicle, the colt, is not an ancillary curiosity but expresses the very point of the story. The fact that he is not on a war horse tells us everything about what he says as he stands far off from the city crying over its coming fate:

⁴¹ As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, ⁴² saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.

The Destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans

Approximately 40 years from Jesus’ fateful ride into Jerusalem, the war horses will come. Except they won’t be carrying the Messiah, they will be mounted by Roman generals leading legions of Roman soldiers to march upon Jerusalem. The people of Israel will gear up for war thinking this is a battle like the days of old when their own generals went by the names of Joshua and David. In days of old God would speak to the leaders of Israel before the battle, commanding them to be faithful in order to ensure victory. The problem in this instance is that God has already spoken, in fact he came himself to speak, and he what he said to the people staring down the barrel of the Roman gladius is simple, “Run, don’t fight.” But as Jesus foretold, they missed that word and thus they fight. They fight because that’s the only way they can envision conquering. They fight because they think that’s what God wants them to do.

And they lose. They lose everything. Josephus, a Jewish historian on the Roman payroll, records the horrors visited upon the Jewish people because they try to resist the Romans. What he describes is a literal hell on earth. He describes the utter desperation of the city’s inhabitants, dying of starvation, the most chilling tale being that of Mary, a woman who kills, cooks, and eats her own son.^[2]See Flavius Josephus, The Wars of the Jews Like, I said, hell.

Hell On Earth

Hell is the one place in all of the universe where God is absent. In hell, there is no love, hope, justice.  As humans, we have seen the sorts of hells on earth throughout our history due to human hatred. This hatred is fueled by a myopic will to power a completed inability to see the humanity or at least a ready willingness to dismiss it. Hell is the place where nothing new can be imagined —a world that trades eyes for eyes, a world that says the answer to America’s gun problem is more and more guns.

The suggestion that we arm every corner of society to the teeth sounds, to me, like hell: a complete failure of the imagination. If all we can envision in a world fraught with violence is having more people equipped to return fire, we have lost both our minds and our way. For Christians, the notion is particularly absurd. Jesus showed us that the only way to undo violence is to exhaust its power in self-giving love. When Jesus gave his life on the cross, the devil actually thought he had won. The devil, caretaker of hell that he is, is bereft of imagination. The devil colluded with the powers of the world—human sin, religious systems, political empires—to crucify the son of God. But because he was unfamiliar with what C.S. Lewis called “the deep magic”, because he lacked imagination, he could not conceive that in giving his life completely, Jesus was making a show of these powers, disarming them, nailing them to a cross.^[3]Colossians 2v14

Hell is the place where nothing new can be imagined —a world that trades eyes for eyes, a world that says the answer to America’s gun problem is more and more guns.

Imagining A New Day

The Scriptures envision a day where weapons of warfare will be melted down into tools for farming. ^[4]Isaiah 2:4What if every Christian responded like this guy, who though he loves to shoot his gun and would never use it to purposefully hurt anyone, decided to part with it?

Sure we would be more vulnerable in a sense, but well, isn’t that kind of the point of our faith? In embracing weakness, absorbing violence, turning the other cheek, and praying for those who persecute us we are not conquered but conquer through the love of God. As John writes to the church:

For whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith.^[5]1 John 5:4

We were in hell, dead in our sins, nothing new was possible until our Savior, in a profound act of imagination, liberated the world not by conquering, not by fighting, not by demanding but by laying down his life. Jesus showed us the only way to peace is a cross. He invites us to imagine our own lives completely shaped by his, carrying our crosses and following him. May we as the church imagine a new way way, grace and peace to you.

The following is a mixture of good biblical theology, tongue in cheek sarcasm with sports hate unrelated to any other area of Tom Brady’s life, and a petition to God to finally let the Eagles win the Super Bowl. As much my better judgment says I should not assume readers of the internet at large in 2018 cannot distinguish between these things, I know my readers are much more sophisticated than the average Twitter-egg or fake news sharing Facebook user and so will leave it to you to distinguish between that which is fun and that which is true. God doesn’t care about football, he cares about every person he has made in his image, he cares about widows, orphans, the poor. He cares about justice and beauty, goodness and truth.

Dear Lord:

Throughout the Scriptures, humans—let’s be honest, it’s mostly men—have often convinced themselves that they, in fact, were god. The thing that makes that forbidden fruit so alluring is that the serpent promises Adam and Eve that eating it will make them “like god” (Gen. 3). In Gen. 11, humanity is united in its attempt to sit on the throne of God, building a siege tower to assail the heavens. Pharaoh’s heart is not hardened to show that every act of human will is merely an expression of the fiat of God, or as some theologies argue that God “hardens whom he will harden” suggests that there is an in-group and out-group when it comes to grace. No, Pharoah’s heart is hardened because he claims to be a deity on earth, the god of Egypt in the flesh, and YHWH, the God of Israel, is showing how me makes other so-called gods his playthings. Nebuchadnezzar, in Daniel’s account, becomes a raving lunatic, eating grass like some sort of bovine creature with hair growing all over his body (Daniel 4) because he did not grasp that the Lord is the world’s only sovereign. In the New Testament, Herod Agrippa is hailed by his subjects as speaking with “‘the voice of a god, and not of a mortal” (Acts 4v22) and is immediately struck down by God and given to the worms for food (Acts 12vv22-23).

The lesson is simple. Don’t pretend to be god, be humble, know your place.

And then there’s Tom Brady. Tom Brady with his Disney-prince chin, his puppy dog eyes, his 7 PM bedtime, his avocado ice cream, his ability to manipulate the players from the other teams—John Kasay mysteriously kicking out of bounds, Russell Wilson throwing the ball at the one yard line, Matt Ryan taking a ten yard sack when a field goal would have sealed the game, the referees—what the h is the tuck rule?!— not to mention his ability to manipulate the air pressure in footballs and to work a video camera. Couple those things with his five Super Bowl Rings, his super model wife, and his millions of dollars and we can conclude two things. First, Tom Brady, by all worldly standards, is winning at life. Second, Tom Brady needs a reckoning.

Consider, Lord, your servants Carson and Nick. Two homely looking guys from different parts of the heartland, who just want to love Jesus, love their families, visit sick kids in the hospital, and win football games. Carson, who quotes Hillsong (your fourth favorite artist behind U2, Chance, and Bob Dylan) lyrics on his Twitter feed and who has been a part of sparking a good old fashioned revival right in the Eagles locker room. Now he is injured, walking with a limp (like Jacob no less), forced to humbly and courageously support his backup, and brother in Christ, Nick. Nick, looking like a slightly more athletic Napoleon Dynamite, who was left for dead as a viable NFL starter (for longer than three days), jettisoned to the Rams—the St. Louis version, not the LA version, I mean come on Lord, you’ve met Cardinals fans before—brought back as an afterthought to hold a clipboard suddenly elevated into the spotlight again after Tom Brady put out a hit on Carson Wentz’s knee. The first thing he said after having a better performance than Tom Brady in the championship round?  You guessed it, “Glory to God!”

And despite all odds we are here. Good vs. Evil. Eagles vs. Patriots. Tom Brady, a black magic, cool beanie-wearing vampire who wants to live forever vs. Nick Foles, a humble disciple of Jesus who wants to help this sweet old man depart in peace because his ” eyes have seen thy salvation.” Will not the Lord of all the earth do right? Will not we finally see Tom Brady reduced to this again?

Liberate us from the iron clutches of his dimples and perfect teeth. May the Eagles win, so that the world will know there is justice and goodness still. Fly Eagles Fly.

Even youths will faint and be weary;  and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.