April 26, 2009AD
Third Sunday of Easter
Divine Commissioning, 2009 AD
Today, we hear Jesus’ closing remarks in Luke’s 24, known as the Resurrection Chapter. This chapter is a summation, a bridge chapter of what Luke wrote in his beautiful Third Gospel and a quick glimpse into what he will develop in his second volume, the Acts of the Apostles (Peter and Paul).
Luke puts into Jesus’ mouth insights about what has occurred and what is about to occur. He provides the programmatic for the Book of Acts.
First, Jesus tells His disciples that all that was written about Him in the Hebrew Scriptures (Torah, prophets, and the psalms) was now fulfilled. It was necessary that the Messiah had to suffer and rise on the third day. (Death and Resurrection is the pattern of all life and it was necessary that Jesus went that way for our salvation.) All the nations of the world are called to share in the message and call to repentance and forgiveness of sins through Jesus. He challenges His followers (in 30 AD and 2009 AD) to be witnesses of this call to a new (attitude to) life.
We are all born into a world with set attitudes and presumptions. We call these attitudes and presumptions “conventional wisdom” or “common sense” or “cultural values”. Jesus challenges us to “snap out” of any attitudes and presumptions affected by the Original Lie (You can get by without God!), pulled on our first parents, Adam and Eve.
Difficulties arise because of the subtlety of the Original Lie’s adaptation to conventional wisdom. We live in a culture that pays lip service to religion. Indeed, so many politicians gloat that we are a Christian nation. (Islamics and Jews and atheists and even, some Christians might beg to differ.) We say, “In God we trust.” Do we trust in God when we cannot even mention the “G-word” in public education or government? We talk about value education. Whose values are those which we teach? Not all values are the same!
True, many claim that we are a Christian nation. However, when it comes to the Sermon on the Mount, which is probably one of the closest approximations to what the historical Jesus literally said, many find very little reflected in conventional wisdom. Where or when do we see “conventional wisdom” encouraging love of enemies, turning the other cheek or doing unto others as you would have them do unto you?
In Jesus’ Resurrection mandate, He tells us that we are to witness to the need of all nations (then and now) to snap out of it and realize that we are in need of repentance and forgiveness. How many of us really feel the need to repent and seek forgiveness? We go along with the conventional wisdom and common sense that characterizes us as a culture. In fact, as far back in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville commented on how we love to brag about our freedoms. However, he said when someone challenged the way that Americans looked at things, most Americans in 1831 would get hostile and deeply resentful of their daring to do so. Sound familiar?
Recently someone commented that according to the spin of the Indians in Massachusetts in 1620, the folks whom we call the Pilgrims were illegal aliens. Before the Alamo, when Texas was a Mexican province in the 1830’s, Southern American whites were allowed entry into Texas if they were baptized Catholics (there was even an Irish priest there to baptize them to get a baptismal certificate) and they disavowed slavery (they brought “leased workers” (guess the color!)) Andrew Jackson, whose recent biography “American Lion” is a great read, claimed to be the champion of the common White man. Read the Jackson book about his attitude to Blacks and American Indians to check it out.
If today someone were to say that we should repent and seek forgiveness for things that we have done as a nation, such as slavery, the American Indians, manifest destiny, militarism, (to name a few), would our first reaction be resentment or would it be, “Maybe, we do need the repentance and forgiveness of sins committed by the “conventional wisdom of nice people”? Would we even entertain the question?
