The Crooked Contours of the Journey

A mathematician will tell you that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. And that’s true. But the shortest distance is not necessarily the most interesting distance, or the most scenic distance, or the most faithful distance. Perhaps you’ve walked along Highland Creek, which meanders through eastern Scarborough as it makes its way down to Lake Ontario. Over the years there have been attempts to straighten Highland Creek, which pretty well ruined both the creek and the ravine through which it flows. So in recent years the Toronto Regional Conservation Authority has been trying to restore the meanders of the stream so that it doesn’t just race through the ravine in a straight course and cause massive soil erosion. Indeed, a farmer will tell you that a meandering stream leaves rich sediments that make the soil fertile. A straight line is not always the best route between two points.

There were some who wanted Jesus to follow a straight course to power. “Gather an army. March straight into Jerusalem. Defeat the Romans. Restore the throne of David.” That was their plan. But Jesus had other ideas. His entry into Jerusalem was not the straight ahead charge! of an invading army, but the slow plodding of a donkey. He attacked not the Romans, and not even the religious authorities who ruled at the heart of the temple, but merchants who were ripping off the poor out in the courtyard. And his route to victory involved this incomprehensible detour through the messiness, the scandal, the horror of the Cross. The most faithful distance between two points is not always a straight line.

The whole gospel of John is anything but a straight line. It’s all mixed up. John has Jesus chasing the crooked merchants out of the temple near the beginning of the story, while Matthew, Mark and Luke place it maybe three-quarters of the way through. In John’s gospel, John the Baptist is saying already in the 1st chapter that Jesus is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). But that statement makes no sense until after Jesus has been crucified (and has become the sacrificial lamb) in the 19th chapter. What’s going on here?

Some scholars have suggested that John’s gospel begins where the other gospels end. Matthew, Mark and Luke – which we call the synoptic gospels – are telling the story of Jesus, while John is telling the story of an early Christian community maybe 60 years after the time of Jesus. The synoptics are telling a story which ends with Jesus’ death and resurrection. John is telling a story which begins with Jesus’ death and resurrection and then goes on from there as he tells the story of a Christian community called into being by Jesus’ death and resurrection. The synoptics are telling the story of Jesus, with emphasis on those aspects of the story that are especially relevant to the early Christian communities in which they are living and for which they are writing. John’s gospel tells the story of his community and of the Risen Christ enfleshed in that community; incarnate in that community. That’s why John’s story seems all mixed up. It’s a different story. He takes elements from that story of the historical Jesus, and he changes the order and sticks them into his own storyline to suit his literary and theological purposes.

Maybe that’s the way it is with the stories of our lives. They seem to jump around all over the place and not make a whole lot of sense because the story that we’re living isn’t the story that we imagine it ought to be. Our minds are telling us one story, while the realities of our lives are living out a different story. It’s not the same story. And maybe our minds are trying to tell some fairy tale where everything is wonderful and everyone lives happily ever after, while the reality of our lives is kind of a mixed up, contorted journey which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Guess what? Fairy tales aren’t real. Life is messy. Our stories don’t follow a straight line. I mean, even if we follow Jesus’ story in its chronological order, it’s messy, and confusing, and it doesn’t go where one might think it ought to go. Jesus is the Messiah; Jesus is the Saviour; Jesus is the One who’s going to save the world from the imperial power of Rome and the corrupt power of religious authority. And he ends up, where? On a cross, for crying out loud! Hanging from an a stinking execution stick, for Pete’s sake!! He was supposed to rescue the world; he wasn’t supposed to get himself killed.

The Cross is a stumbling block indeed. It’s “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,” Paul says (1 Corinthians 1:23). The Greek word which our Bibles translate as “stumbling block” is skandalon, from which comes our English word “scandal.” The Cross is a scandal. Saviours aren’t supposed to get killed. Life is supposed to make sense. Everything is supposed to go according to plan. Things are supposed to work out.

And frankly, I don’t buy the notion that God’s plan from the beginning was for Jesus to get nailed to a cross. If that was the plan, then Paul wouldn’t have called it a scandal. Leslie Weatherhead talks about the “ideal will of God” and the “circumstantial will of God.” It was God’s ideal will to save the world without anyone getting killed. After all, death is part of what God is trying to save the world from in the first place. And what kind of fathers sends his own son on a suicide mission? But once Jesus came face to face with the hatred of the Roman Empire, and the Empire decided that he had to be killed, it became God’s circumstantial will that Jesus go to the Cross because, after all, what’s a Saviour going to do? Turn tail and run, like a coward? No. You confront the difficulties of life, even if it’s going to be painful.

At the heart of our faith lies the scandal of the Cross. And that should challenge our naïve expectation that life should be rational and logical and move from point A to point B in a straight line. I mean, if Jesus’ story is confusing and messy, what makes you think that yours should be some kind of fairy tale? If Jesus had to take all sorts of detours on his way to glory, why should I expect that my way or your way should be any easier?

40 years ago I had dreams of being an urban planner. I wanted to help create affordable housing and public transit and facilitate economic development in poor neighbourhoods and be involved in the crafting of public policy. And finally I’m doing some of this; especially in terms of working on affordable housing. But sometimes I wonder: why did it take 40 years? Why all of the detours along the way? 40 years ago I figured that I’d get married in my 20’s and have 2 or 3 kids, and by now I’d be close to having grandchildren. But it didn’t work out that way. Why not?

As I’ve wrestled with that – and maybe you all have wrestled with a similar question in your lives – as I’ve wrestled with that, it’s come to me that I had some lessons to learn and some hard work to do before any of those dreams could come to fruition. And, of course, life being short, there hasn’t been enough time to do all the work and learn all the lessons that were required for all of those dreams to come true. But some of the work has been done, some of the lessons have been learned. To use a gardening image: some of the branches have been pruned and some of the limbs are bearing fruit. Sometimes it’s been messy, and sometimes the path has been anything but straight, but we’re getting there. I might’ve had my dreams, but God has God’s own purposes. And in the final analysis we need to try to follow God’s path through the circumstances of our lives, no matter how indirect or messy or even scandalous it might be. As Jesus said, “Not my will, but Thine, O Lord, be done” (Luke 22:42).

Let me tell you the story of Robert Kennedy: younger brother of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. He was a scrappy guy with a short temper and streak of self-righteousness that gave no quarter and took no prisoners. If you were standing in Bobby Kennedy’s way, he’d just bowl you over. The shortest distance between two points is not only a straight line, but it’s also right through your enemies. That was Kennedy’s philosophy. The guy was ruthless: first as his brother’s campaign manager, then as special counsel for the U.S. Senate committee investigating organized crime, and finally as Attorney General of the United States.

But then his brother was killed. President Kennedy was assassinated. His hero was dead. And Robert Kennedy went through a profound period of grief.

It changed him. As he worked through his own pain, he found himself empathizing with the pain of others. And Kennedy went through the last four years of his life no longer attacking his enemies, but sharing the pain of the poor and the oppressed. You could see the change in his face. It softened from the sharp angles of rage to the deep lines of sadness. Increasingly he left his office in Washington to walk through the ghettos of the inner city, and the reservations of Native Americans, and the barrios of the Latino community. On the night when Martin Luther King was killed, Kennedy was scheduled to delivery a speech in the Black community of Indianapolis, Indiana. Word of Dr. King’s death reached Senator Kennedy and his motorcade on their way to that speech. The Black communities of Chicago and Washington and other cities were already exploding in anger and rage and violence. And as the motorcade approached the ghetto the police escort – the White police escort – peeled off and headed for a safer neighbourhood. They figured that if this White man was fool enough to go into the Black community on this particular night, he was on his own. Senator Kennedy ordered his driver to proceed as planned – without escort – to the speech. It was the Senator who told the Black audience that Dr. King had been killed. And then Kennedy spoke in halting yet eloquent words about the curse of violence and the futility of rage and the need for folks to come together. And Indianapolis was one of the few cities with a large African-American population that didn’t burn that night.

Yes, life is messy. Yes, life involves painful detours. But we are saved and transformed by those detours. And we can then contribute to the transformation of others. “Pick up your cross and follow me,” Jesus said. Because, you see, in the pain and the scandal of the cross we are made not into the people whom we once upon a time imagined that we would be, but rather the people whom God imagined us to be and created us to be.

Robert Kennedy reminded the world of the wisdom of the Greek playwright Aeschylus:

“He who learns must suffer.
And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
and in our own despair
against our will,
comes wisdom to us
by the awful grace of God.

Amen.


Text: 1 Corinthians 1:23-24
Preached by Bruce D. Ervin
15 March 2009