Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.—Luke 13:3
IA. Bad Things, Good People, OT
We’ve all heard
the question, Why do bad things happen to
good people? If we don’t ask it ourselves, we certainly hear it from others.
Many people who think they’ve come up with the correct answer to that question
seem to think that they’re the first person who’s ever given it much thought.
But the reality is that it’s one of the major themes of the Bible. And though
the Bible doesn’t speak with one voice on this issue, it does lean in one
direction—and the answer it gives is not the easy answer.
If we look for the answer in the Bible, one of the things we’ll see is
that obedience to God’s law is rewarded with material blessings or good health.
The flipside of that, naturally, is that disobedience is punished. There’s even
a class of psalms called imprecatory psalms that call upon God to come down
hard on sinners. I think this way of thinking is summed up in the 58th
Psalm which calls on God to do horrible things to to evil people. The last
verse tries to reason with God, saying, if you do these things, then “people
will say, ‘Surely there’s a reward for the righteous; surely there is a God who
judges on earth.’”
But
there’s another voice that says something very different. One of the main
places you’ll hear this voice is in the Book of Job—a section of the Bible that
deals almost exclusively with the question, Why
did bad things happen to this good person? And the answer is hardly
satisfying. Job and his friends all try their hands at answering the question,
and all of them are wrong. God’s answer is simply that God is sovereign and
that God is wise. No offense, Bible, but I could’ve come up with that one. I
was really hoping for something a bit more satisfying.
An Australian I’d never heard of recently took a vacation to Papua New Guinea—a country just a few miles off the northern tip of his home state of Queensland. One of the places he wanted to see was Milne Bay, the site of the 1942 battle in which his grandfather had fought. Most Americans haven’t heard of the Battle of Milne Bay, but it was the first time the Japanese were defeated on land; and Australians believe that if the Allies hadn’t won that one, an invasion of their own country was next. Therefore it was mostly Australians who fought for the Allies in Milne Bay, but there were also two American battalions alongside them. Though I didn’t know it until just a couple of weeks ago, my dad’s Uncle Fred was in one of those battalions.
Fred was much beloved by the family, and my mother remembers him as one of the nicest people she knew—so maybe it should be no surprise that he was not cut out for the ravages of war. When he returned home, he, like a couple of other great-uncles on my mother’s side who’d fought in World War 2, succumbed to the disease of alcoholism. His body died suddenly on the street when I was just a toddler, and I think his memory was set to die with the generation that preceded me.
That is, until this kind Australian stranger took a cruise to Milne Bay. And there, buried in the sand of a beach on Kiriwina Island, he found something made of metal. Digging it up, he saw that it was a military dog tag. After cleaning as much of it as he could, he was able to read what was written on it: the name Fred R. White.
This belonged to my father's mother's younger brother, Fred White. Buried in the sand for more than 70 years, it was found by an Australian on a beach on Kiriwina Island in Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea. He researched until he found a relative to send it to. It was lost in 1942—the only year the U.S. military printed names & addresses of next-of-kin on dog tags. Fred survived the war, but no unscathed.
(see full image)
I belong to that generation of people who, as young children, first encountered the phrase The Bare Necessities in a song from the movie The Jungle Book. Unfortunately, the song was sung by a bear.[1] And so people around my age think of bare necessities not so much as the least a person needs to get by, but as the things a bear might need to find contentment in a music-filled life in the forest.
But this is the English language we’re talking about here, and so the confusion about spelling can be taken—without even trying very hard—to even greater extremes... some would say, to extremes of biblical proportions. And here, of course, I’m thinking of Saint Paul’s words to the Corinthians on the subject of love: it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.[2]
The kind of love in 1 Corinthians 13 is special. It’s not romantic love or the love of equals, but divine love—or at least that’s how Christians have come to interpret that special word ἀγάπη. I know some of you grew up with the old Authorized (or “King James”) Version of the Bible, and in that translation, Paul doesn’t talk about love in the Love Chapter, but charity. You’ve heard me mention this before, but the Bible the Pilgrims had in their hands when they landed at Plymouth Rock wasn’t the relatively new version authorized by King James, but the older Geneva Bible, which they felt was a better translation. And maybe they were right. For example, 1 Corinthians 13 in the Geneva Bible is much easier for us to read because it calls love love, not charity.
I. Barely Concealed
There are probably a thousand sermon topics to be found in 1 Corinthians 13, but I want to focus on the seventh verse… specifically the first clause of that verse: Love bears all things. That is, bears all things, not love bares all things. In fact, the verb the Greek New Testament uses is essentially the opposite of bare. That verb is στέγω, and one of its meanings is cover. We see this in the weird word steganography, which refers to concealed messages; and also in the more familiar stegosaurus—a dinosaur whose fossils seemed to feature armored covering plates. But in the sense that Paul uses it, he’s saying that love bears up under all things, which is this verb’s most common meaning in the Bible.[3] If we think about being covered by something, then I think we can understand this meaning: If something is our covering, then it is something that we’re bearing.
And this is a beautiful thing to say about love. It’s no wonder that this passage is so often read at weddings. It’s both an assurance about love and an exhortation to love: An assurance, because it helps give us confidence in the power of love; and an exhortation, because it reminds us of one of the responsibilities of love.
II. The Power of Love
So let’s look at the phrase love bears all things from those two perspectives. First, love is strong. It holds up under all things. Physical weakness doesn’t weaken love. Sickness doesn’t diminish it. Poverty doesn’t rob it of its riches. Love bears all things.
But if we look at the other meaning of that verb in the Greek, I think we see an even more powerful side of love. Love covers all things, that is, it protects all things.[4] A wonderful example of this would be the protective covering of a parent over a child, even when (or especially when) the child goes the wrong way or makes a mistake. Love is like a shield over those who need protection.
And, as all parents know, the protected aren’t always appreciative of the protection they receive. True love can hold up under rejection, however; and it has the patience to wait.
One translation says (rather crassly) that Love puts up with all things.[5] While this is certainly a possible way of looking at it, I don’t think it’s the most loving way. If I love someone, I do more than put up with them. I can put up with many things for which I feel no love: dirt, sleet, cauliflower, and American League baseball, to name but a few. This is why we ask in a wedding ceremony if one person will love, comfort, honor, and keep the other. Not once in a wedding service is one party asked to put up with the other. That’s because love is both more beautiful and more powerful than that. God doesn’t just put up with us, but covers us with grace.
III. The Demands of Love
But as supportive as love is, it is also demanding. For we are not just God’s children, the recipients of God’s protective care. We are also those who are called upon to share that which we’ve received.
And so as Christians, we are called upon to love. Since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. So all those words that Paul uses to describe the power of love? They’re also the responsibilities of love. Freely we have received, freely we are asked to give.[6]
Sometimes—maybe most of the time—we take on love’s responsibilities gladly. But there are other times when it may seem like that whole “put up with” thing comes into play. We can handle most of the challenges of love—weakness and sickness, for example—but other challenges are more difficult. Betrayal comes to mind, and it can take many forms. And here we must remember that love bears up under all things. Or at least it’s supposed to.
There are times when love is enough. But sometimes it seems that it’s not. Though love can bear all things, there are times in our lives when love doesn’t overcome all things.
It’s not that love cannot. But we can’t find a way to make it work. We don’t have the wisdom… or maybe even the formula… to make it work.
Marriage is certainly one area where this happens. But it’s not the only one. It’s possible in any relationship, and it’s as likely to happen in the church as it is anywhere else. Maybe even a little more likely, since church is the place where we talk about this kind of love the most, and it’s the place where ἀγάπη love’s demands are felt most acutely.
Love requires forgiveness. But sometimes when forgiveness is demanded from someone who isn’t willing to live as part of the community, we don’t know how to bear that which we’re told has to be borne.
Conclusion: That Other Love Chapter
That’s when it’s important to remember that love isn’t just a concept, and it’s more than an emotion. It is God… or at least God is it. It wasn’t Paul, but John who said in his love chapter, So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.[7]
This helps us to see the fullness of love, and the extent God was willing to go to to prove to us that love bears all things, or that love covers all things. God is love, and God can bear even those things that we cannot. Far from being an excuse for not being loving, the nature of God is both our example and our strength when we are faced with difficult situations.
Though we know about the power of love and the responsibilities of love, we are human. So we don’t necessarily have the wisdom to love with God’s love. Sometimes we might even have to admit that we are not God, and that Christ can carry a cross that is too heavy for us to bear.
So let’s not read Paul's love chapter and despair because the standards are too high, or the burden too hefty. God is love, and only God has all the fullness of God. I cannot love the unlovable on my own, but I can entrust them to God, and I can call on the church to help me, because we’re all in this together. God might be dimly seen in me or in you. But in us, God is truly visible. The demands of love might be impossible for you to meet on your own, and I know they’re impossible for me to meet on my own. But Christ has borne their weight, and the body of Christ—the church—can take on those responsibilities. And when we fail, God is love, God bears all things, God forgives us, and, by the grace of God, we can go back to the drawing board and try once again to illustrate the meaning of ἀγάπη, the meaning of love.
NOTES [1] The Bare Necessities was written by Terry Gilkyson and released in 1967. It was sung in the movie by Phil Harris (Baloo the Bear) and Bruce Reitherman (Mowgli). Apparently in the 2016 version of The Jungle Book, the song will be included with Bill Murray singing it as Baloo. [2] 1 Corinthians 13:7 [3] This verb is used four times in the New Testament (each time by Paul), and in every instance, the meaning is similar to 1 Corinthians 13:7. See 1 Corinthians 9:12; 1 Thessalonians 3:1 & 5. [4] This is how Preben Vang chooses to translate it in the commentary on 1 Corinthians in the Teach the Text commentary series (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2014), p. 173. [5] Common English Bible, New Testament published in 2010. [6] See 1 John 4:11 and Matthew 10:8. [7] 1 John 4:14. The words “God is love” also appear in verse 8. John 3:16 also refers to love as God’s method of self-revelation.
The
transfiguration of Jesus is perhaps the most otherworldly story we have
in the New Testament—in a way, even more so than the story of the
resurrection. For after the resurrection, Jesus’ appearance was so
unremarkable that even those who knew him best didn’t quite notice him.
But the transfigured Christ was an awesome sight. His face shone. His
clothes were (as Mark puts it) brighter than anybody on earth could
possibly bleach them. And suddenly the lone man Jesus was accompanied by
the Hebrew Bible’s lawgiver and its most esteemed prophet.
And so of all the stories about the life of Christ, it is the
transfiguration that should be the most inaccessible, the most difficult
to relate to.
Except that’s not the way it is at all. And that’s because there’s a
context to the story that brings it “down to earth,” as it were—that
places us right there, describing our reaction, and giving us something
to think about.
First of all, we have Jesus asking the disciples who they think he
is, and Peter says that they believe he’s the Anointed of God. Jesus
affirms Peter’s confession and begins to teach the disciples what that
means—namely, that ahead of him lies rejection and a cross.
There’s a park in The Hague called Madurodam. It features
famous scenes from all over Holland, all perfect replicas
one-twenty-fifth the size of the original. It’s cool to see how
perfectly everything is built—more interesting in a way than the real
thing, because you see the exact same thing, but more of it at once.
That’s sort of what the fourth chapter of Luke does. It’s the life of
Christ in miniature. The Word is made known, states his priorities, and
then those among whom he appeared turned on him.
I suppose it’s easy
for some to read this passage as anti-Nazareth, or even anti-Jewish. But
it’s supposed to be much broader that. It’s a statement about the human
condition: The people who knew you when
have trouble dealing with the person you develop into. To them, you’ll
always be the shy kid, or the prankster, or the kid who recovered from a
horrible illness, or whatever it is that people remember about you.
It’s difficult for them to see
