Wanting What Jesus Offers

I’m curious as to how many of you have ever had a job where they handed you a written job description. (Please raise your hands.) I don’t think I ever have, not my paper route, summer jobs or part-time jobs when I was in school, not in my careers as a salesman, a CPA or a priest. I was told what to do in almost – almost – all of my jobs, but most often they just tell you and expect you to pick it up along the way and to do whatever it takes to get the job done.

And there is an important distinction, the tasks that need to be done to get the job done. If you’ve worked retail, you’ve had order items, to unload a truck, stock the shelves, front the shelves, sweep the floors, clean the bathroom, and all sorts of other tasks to make the store attractive and ready to serve the customer, to make sales. You job doesn’t exist just to make the floor clean.

Have any of you ever vacuumed a parking lot? I have. Why? To suck up the cigarette butts so that customers find the motel, the Holiday Inn South, to be clean and well maintained. The tasks are incidental to the goal, the purpose of the work.

And the customer isn’t coming to the store as a destination. They are buying food, clothes, whatever, to fuel the larger purpose of life. The question is, what life?

“Jesus came down…” He had gone up on a mountain to pray all night. In the morning, he chose his 12 disciples, a significant number given the 12 tribes of Israel.

He comes down to a level place, not a natural amphitheater, not putting out from shore as we heard last week. He’s on level ground with a great crowd of his disciples. (We tend to think of Jesus having 12 disciples, but that’s the leadership team among hundreds.) And there is a great multitude of people who have come from all over the region, including Jerusalem, and from as far away as Tyre and Sidon, which is modern day Lebanon.

And they have come for what Jesus offers.

The multitude of people have come to hear him teach and to be healed on all manner of ailments. Even if they can just touch him, like the woman who suffered from a hemorrhage, because power came out from him. That’s good to know. You don’t even have to ask. You can just sneak up on him and touch him and get healed. Why, because that act of reaching out, the fact that you expect to be healed.

There are a couple of real challenges in this moment.

The first is that we have to perceive our need. Jesus gives us four blessings for those who are suffering in various ways. Our need for him can be very obvious if one is poor, hungry, weeping or persecuted on his behalf. Any of those, or conditions like them, will cause us to seek after him, to track him down in prayer and study. Help me Jesus!

I pray every day, multiple times a day, but am most engaged when I’ve got someone in need who has asked me to lay hands upon them. It’s not abstract. It’s quite real and immanent.

But when things are going well, we don’t feel that need so much. That’s why Jesus adds four woes to match the four blessings. If we are rich, full, laughing and winning praise, then we are not likely to be falling at his feet and begging for a life-giving relationship with him. It’s when we feel that hunger, that empty space, that grief or worry that urges us to his side.

And so, I suppose, there is a blessing in the woes, too. If you are rich, well, you cannot take it with you so you will most assuredly be entirely broke when you die and ready for him. If you are full, you will get hungry and then you might seek him. You may be laughing today but your time of mourning will come and then you might seek him. You may have the praise of people, but eventually you will face judgment and then who will you want pleading your case.

The second challenge is to not be so distracted by what Jesus is doing that we fail to see where Jesus is leading. All of his teaching and all of his healings have great value for our lives. They are important and shape our day to day living. But they are all tasks in service to a larger job, which is the resurrection of the dead. Otherwise, they are merely busywork.

“If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we above all people are to be most pitied.” (1 Corinthians 1:19)

That’s the goal. That’s the purpose.

Last week I highlighted the importance of always remembering whose we are to draw us through all the challenges life throws at us. This week we need to remember where we are going.

And when we remember where we are going, then we can consecrate every task in our lives, no matter how small or menial, to that larger goal of the resurrection, to the Kingdom of God, to Jesus.

And we can look at the suffering in this world as ongoing opportunities to make him known, to show his love, to alleviate suffering and to nurture the healing of body, mind and spirit, to encourage hope, to open pathways for education and meaningful work, to meet the needs of the people who are or should be pressing in on him and to help them feel the power that radiates out of his body. We all feel it in here; we have to help them feel it out there.

We do all these tasks for the singular and ultimate purpose of reconciling the world to Jesus. And not for this life only, but so that they too will know true life when he raises them us on the Last Day.

AMEN