Getting it Wrong: Breaking Boundaries
Luke 9:37-50 May 17, 2009
Intro:
What we usually do when we study Scripture is good – we break it down into smaller pieces so we can really get into the stories and try to understand them, see Jesus in them, and reflect on what they mean for who we are and how we live our lives. But if we only ever look at Scripture that way, we miss out on some of the bigger picture, the broad themes, the over-arching messages. It is like we take one little scene – like maybe the one scene in “The Three Little Pigs” where the “big bad wolf” goes to the pig who built a house of sticks and “huffs and puffs” – and we study it and think about it, but we miss the broader story of three brothers who eventually come together and overcome their adversary. You get the point…
And sometimes that is what we do with the stories of Jesus – we narrow in on the one story for the day, and miss the broad themes coming through. As we begin today I’m going to take us back a couple chapters, not reading the whole story again (solely for the sake of time, I’d really love to otherwise!) but highlighting them so when we get to today’s passage we’ll have that bigger piece of Luke’s narrative in mind. We started to follow the stories of Jesus after Christmas, and then I’ve been away a bit and other things have come up, so we are going to invest the time in backtracking. And I’m going to ask for some help as we do…
Luke 7:1-10 - Centurian’s slave healed (Jesus crosses ethnic boundaries)
Luke 7:11-17 - Jesus raises widow’s only son back to life (Jesus crosses social boundaries and life/death boundaries)
Luke 7:18-35 - John’s disciples come (Who is Jesus?)
Luke 7:36-50 - Jesus anointed by “sinful woman” (Jesus crosses physical and image boundaries)
Luke 8:1-15 - Parable “Seed among the soils” (we are the sowers, not the seed)
Luke 8:16-21 - Parable of the lamp (Brian and Norma; light exists toshine)
Luke 8:22-25 - Jesus calms the storm (Jesus breaks the human/nature boundary)
Luke 8:26-39 - Jesus heals a demoniac in the Gerasenes
Luke 8:40-56 - Jesus heals Garius’ daughter; bleeding woman
Luke 9:1-6 - Jesus sends/commissions disciples for ministry
Luke 9:10-14 - Jesus feeds 5000
Luke 9:15-27 - Who is Jesus, and what does it mean to follow Him?
Luke 9:28-36 - Transfiguration
In these three chapters, we see some common themes – “who is Jesus?” (directly, and indirectly as Jesus keeps breaking traditional boundaries, challenging existing assumptions, and relating to people in radically new ways), and – “what does it mean to be a follower of Jesus?”. Two great questions – very applicable to us today. There have been amazing “highs”, and pretty significant failures. The four accounts back to back, which we look at next, highlight those failures on the part of the disciples once again. Chapter 9 starts with the great high, disciples doing the “stuff” just like Jesus, then they fail at the feeding of the 5000, followed by this hard teaching about “taking up the cross daily and denying oneself”, then followed by this “mountaintop” experience where they see Jesus for who He really is, and then this:
Luke 9:37-50
37 The next day, after they had come down the mountain, a large crowd met Jesus. 38 A man in the crowd called out to him, “Teacher, I beg you to look at my son, my only child. 39 An evil spirit keeps seizing him, making him scream. It throws him into convulsions so that he foams at the mouth. It batters him and hardly ever leaves him alone. 40 I begged your disciples to cast out the spirit, but they couldn’t do it.”
41 Jesus said, “You faithless and corrupt people! How long must I be with you and put up with you?” Then he said to the man, “Bring your son here.”
42 As the boy came forward, the demon knocked him to the ground and threw him into a violent convulsion. But Jesus rebuked the evil spirit and healed the boy. Then he gave him back to his father. 43 Awe gripped the people as they saw this majestic display of God’s power.
While everyone was marveling at everything he was doing, Jesus said to his disciples, 44 “Listen to me and remember what I say. The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into the hands of his enemies.” 45 But they didn’t know what he meant. Its significance was hidden from them, so they couldn’t understand it, and they were afraid to ask him about it.
46 Then his disciples began arguing about which of them was the greatest. 47 But Jesus knew their thoughts, so he brought a little child to his side. 48 Then he said to them, “Anyone who welcomes a little child like this on my behalf welcomes me, and anyone who welcomes me also welcomes my Father who sent me. Whoever is the least among you is the greatest.”
49 John said to Jesus, “Master, we saw someone using your name to cast out demons, but we told him to stop because he isn’t in our group.”
50 But Jesus said, “Don’t stop him! Anyone who is not against you is for you.”
Failure #1 – Can’t cast out the demon (vs 37-43)
These 13 versus focus on the disciples, and four big failures. The first, and longest, details their failure to cast out a particular demon. The story only makes sense in light of 9:1, where Jesus specifically “called together his twelve disciples and gave them power and authority to cast out all demons and to heal all diseases.” Notice the “all” – very key word. Now something has happened, they’ve lost that power, and they can’t do it. Jesus is frustrated by this, and says so, and then heals the boy and restores the family.
The focus in the passage is on the disciples and their failure to do that which Jesus gave them power and authority to do, but I want to divert from that path for a moment. Imagine yourself in this father’s shoes. Imagine it was your son, attacked, taken over, terrifying, screaming, convulsing, foaming at the mouth, being constantly battered and beaten. If that was your only son, wouldn’t you, like this father, do absolutely anything to get your child well? Of course! Verse 42 caught me – this is a last ditch attempt to keep that boy from getting to Jesus. The desperate father is doing everything in his power, but the demonic forces throw up one last resistance, to keep this boy from getting to Jesus.
What struck me, which maybe some of us need to hear today as a challenge, was the question – what keeps us from getting to Jesus? This type of demonic outburst isn’t something we see commonly today, but do we still see things keeping us from getting to Jesus? I started to think about those, and made a quick list:
1. We aren’t desperate. We don’t really need to, or so we think, because we are doing ok in our own strength (thank you very much!).
2. We settle quickly. We find something mildly entertaining, so rather than really search and fight to get to “the best”, we settle for life that is bland and grey and comfortable.
3. We learn to cope. We might have problems, like this father and son, but rather than fight through to Jesus we find some other ways of “managing”, “coping”, “treating the symptoms”, and accept that this misery is just the way life is. Instead of finding Jesus and getting to the root.
4. We don’t believe it is for us. Healing and freedom and life, well those are good things that Jesus promised for other people, not for me. Maybe for the “super Christians”…
5. We care way too much about appearance in front of others instead of honesty in front of Jesus. We’ll keep up the façade instead of admit the need – like this family just keeping the boy indoors and out of site...
6. We look to others instead of to Jesus, and give up when it doesn’t help. We talk to lots of people hoping they can help (like the father did first with the disciples), but we don’t talk to Jesus about it. And we give up quickly when we don’t get the response we need.
My friends, listen closely: there are hundreds of things in our lives and experiences keeping us from really and truly getting to Jesus. That is just a partial list. Now hear this: every single one of those is just as demonic in origin as the force in this story, and the result is the same: instead of living, in freedom and forgiveness and wholeness, we live shadow lives in misery until we get to Jesus.
If something is keeping you back, I urge you with a similar love that this father had for his son, come to Jesus. Open your heart to Him. Let Him heal and restore! Let life begin.
Failure #2: “they were afraid to ask” (vs 44-45)
Luke tells us that while everyone was excited about the external miracles, Jesus repeats His message to the disciples about His suffering and death, and they still don’t get it. And the failure is in the fact that in not “getting it”, they didn’t ask; they didn’t seek to understand; they basically disregarded what Jesus was saying because it didn’t fit their image of how life and the Kingdom and the Messiah should really operate. I found this quite helpful:
That they cannot comprehend is rooted in their failure thus far to embrace fully the new view of the world that is the content of Jesus’ proclamation, a world in which conventional perspectives on honor and shame and on the meaning of suffering in relation to God’s purposes are subverted… The fear of v 45 is not the awe or astonishment expected… but constitutes at least skepticism and more probably, in this co-text, a denial of faith. The debilitating presence of such fear recasts the disciples not as helpers of the divine mission, but as opponents.” (Joel Green, Luke, NICNT, p. 390-391).
Failure #3: pre-occupation with “self” and “position” (vs 46-48)
Verse 46 should shock us. In all we know and have seen, about Jesus coming for sinners and welcoming the poor and embracing the sick, upending all the social boundaries, saying “lose your life and you will find it”, here we find the disciples in exactly the opposite disgusting rut – “who is the greatest”. It is like they’ve decided that Jesus’ radical reversal of the social hierarchy means that those who were lowest should now have all the power, instead of Jesus’ real radical reversal which says that this whole idea of having power and control is ridiculous, un-Godly, and the absolute wrong thing to be striving after. As if Jesus came so that those who had been trampled on and abused could now be promoted to power so that they could trample on and abuse the people who had done that to them. No! Not the point at all!! Jesus came to say that whole system is broken and misses the point – power and control are temporary illusions that keep people from being free and forgiven children of God who recognize that God is the only power and the only one ultimately in control of the universe. He gives us freedom to choose, and wants us to choose to obey Him so that we can be free, and stop the ridiculous and destructive pattern of trying to control everything.
Jesus confronts this failure dramatically. Understand that in Jesus’ day, children were viewed as a nuisance and a bother, not to waste time on. Now for you kids in our service that have just woken up and paid attention, hear me clearly – while people around Jesus felt that kids were a nuisance, Jesus felt the opposite. And so in response to this argument and jostling for position and power, Jesus once again un-does the whole system of power by taking a child and saying, “Anyone who welcomes a little child like this on my behalf welcomes me, and anyone who welcomes me also welcomes my Father who sent me.”
Failure #4: exclusionism (vs 49-50)
The final failure is along the same lines as the previous, and displays the disciples continuing inability to give up the “special status” that they think they have as followers of Jesus. The exact nature is the discovery of someone who, ironically, is having success casting out demons – the very thing that the disciples were unable to do in the start of today’s passage. The disciples take action and tell him to stop, “because he isn’t in our group”.
This is deep and insidious. It is really quite ugly. Good things are happening in the name of Jesus – demons being cast out, according to Luke, and the disciples put a stop to it “because he isn’t in”. He’s an outsider, not one of the gang, we don’t know him, he isn’t one of us. So the work of God gets shut down. Jesus, who has been breaking boundaries all over the place so that people could be free, now confronts His closest disciples who are, instead of following Jesus’ example and breaking down boundaries, are actually putting up new boundaries. Finding new ways to keep people out, and restrict the Kingdom of God.
Conclusion:
This passage is hard on the disciples, no getting around it. They fail, repeatedly. But when I step back and look at me, and at today’s church, I refuse to condemn the disciples because I see these very same failures in me and in today’s church. We’ve been given power and authority to set people free, and often we don’t or can’t. We have preconceived ideas about the world and the Kingdom of God, and often ignore things (including passages of Scripture) that upset that and we refuse to explore and ask “because we are afraid”, not of Jesus but afraid of our preconceived ideas being challenged and then forcing us to change. We continue to operate out of a “whose the greatest” mindset, constantly comparing ourselves to others to see “how we are doing” and “how we are measuring up” in all areas of our lives, including our spiritual lives, instead of celebrating and enjoying that we are all equal brothers and sisters in God’s Kingdom. And we continue to create boundaries, rejecting people who are “outside of our group” instead of celebrating what God is doing.
That is kind of a harsh thing to say, but I think it is true, and so I want to wrap up with this: the alternative to these failures is really quite incredible, quite liberating, quite powerful, and quite life-giving. The alternative is to really, truly, deeply, be like Jesus. And if we allow the Holy Spirit to genuinely control our lives, we will be like Jesus. We will use the authority we’ve been given, and people will be set free! We will not live in false realities, or ever be afraid to ask “Jesus, what is this about??”, and find answers and perspectives so beautiful and full of life and color and texture that the old, bland existence will repulse us. We will be free from comparison and striving for position, and instead relax in the security of being a fully loved child of God our King, who made us and loves us and lives in us. And we’ll be secure enough to be inclusive rather than exclusive, to celebrate everywhere that we see life and love and freedom, even if it is coming from someone “outside our group.”
It all begins with us coming to Jesus, being filled with the Holy Spirit, and allowing God to make us like Jesus. And when we see His Kingdom come, His will be done, we’ll rejoice.
