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Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem.

It hadn’t been going very well; whatever popularity he had certainly rested in the shade of the hostility of the Pharisees and others, the elite and the established. He admitted himself that he was a cause of division, a prophecy the truth of which would unfold finally and fully on the cross, dying between two criminals and amid our mockery. Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem, a journey that would become only more and more lonely.

You can understand then perhaps the reason for his apparent callousness, his frankness, his almost angry urgency. “[I]f you do not repent, you will all perish as they did,” an insensitive answer by our standards, especially when asked (as he was) about the fate of the victims of a tragedy.[1] We would have ruined him with our self-righteousness had he said these things in this age of enlightened anger and Twitter. If the tree does not bear fruit, “cut it down,” he said, again in a sense insensitive.[2] He said these things over and over again; it’s there, it’s in the historical record.

But he was surround by the bemused, by the deceptive and the treacherous, the clueless (and those were the ones closest to him). We often think of Jesus as some sort of well-balanced paragon of serenity, but he wasn’t really. He got angry, he cried, was sometimes depressed and defiant. He was fully man, half of that hypostatic mystery, fully human like us. We shouldn’t misunderstand Jesus, think him some soft roseate wilting flower. He was a rustic, radical, peasant Jew. There’s a good chance you would’ve hated him. There’s a good chance you would’ve walked away. Me, I am grateful for two millennia of distance, the calm safety of faith.

He demanded repentance, real repentance—not the sham sentimentality we tend to think of these days, but the real thing. He healed the outcast, the disabled woman no one cared about, and in a way that angered people; he offended their sense of the appropriate.[3] And he said the kingdom of heaven was kind of like that—grace begun small, grown in gardens unlikely, among the weeds and not the flowers. It’s a mustard seed, he said, not everyone is going to get it.[4] It was not an easy message to hear, hardly inspiring. Jesus wasn’t like some politician selling utopias, he was honest, brutally so. He told the truth, neat, not even on the rocks.

And so perhaps you can understand the question: “Lord, will only a few be saved?” Perhaps you can understand the answer too: the gate is narrow; many will try, many will fail.[5] The prophecy is stark and frightening, and theologians and preachers have been applying the alchemy of their interpretations to it for centuries. “He can’t really mean what he just said, can he? Surely not, no.” And on and on: the hard words of Jesus made palatable for the masses, Christians living as pagans soothed by the paid comforts of preachers that do not disturb. It’s hard for us even to hear this gospel, so far removed, as we are, from its original disturbing ethos.

And so I have no soothing word for you today, nothing cute or funny. Maybe next time. I have instead only an invitation wrapped in a warning. Again my apologies, but I’m only passing on the words and manner of Jesus. It’s an invitation—to know him, really to know him. It’s an invitation, as I said, that begins with a sober warning—the suggestion that even though you may think you know him, you very well may not. “Lord, open the door,” we might say. “I do not know where you are from,” he might say.[6] A frightful warning, a plea from an urgent God to stop playing around, stop pretending. How many of us rest so comfortably and so falsely in our shallow assurances, all built upon an idea of Jesus almost entirely made up? It’s a sobering consideration; sobering for me, and hopefully for you.

So, what is to be done? Where is hope? Friends, let me be clear: knowing Jesus Christ was and is and will always be the necessity of your existence; like air, like water, you will die without it. But it’s hard to come by. Counterfeit knowledge abounds; it’s easy to find; it’s on the surface sweet. It’s easy to find the Jesus who is not Jesus. But still your life depends on truly knowing him. The stakes are high whether you know it or not. Again, I tremble, but I’ve got to tell you the truth.

If you don’t read the Bible, you’re in trouble. If you rest content in cultural Catholicism, you’re in trouble. If the Church is merely an occasional hobby, some sort of soothing institution you make use of much like you’d make use of the YMCA, you’re in trouble, if the Church isn’t for you the mystery that is Christ. Again, I’m sorry to put it so starkly; I really am. But salvation is an urgent matter. Surround by Pilate on one side and Herod on the other, Jesus was an urgent Messiah, rousing as best he could the overconfident, the flippant, and the indifferent; and so, sometimes we preachers must rouse you too.

Do you know him? Do you really know him? The thing is, we don’t get to answer that question; he does. And that means we can’t rest. We can’t fake it. We can only follow, always and all the way—until we’re in Jerusalem too, weeping under the cross for all our sins, the charade finally over. There’s only one place on earth where there is truth; and it is there, at the foot of the cross and in the hearts of those few who love him, those few surrounded by the many who think they know but don’t. The world, the Gospel, and you: which do you know and where is your heart? Questions urgent then and urgent again now. I pray that you know him. Please pray that I come to know him too. Amen.

[1] Luke 13:1-5

[2] Luke 13:9

[3] Luke 13:10-17

[4] Luke 13:18-19

[5] Luke 13:23-24

[6] Luke 13:25

© 2019 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield