CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith For the Years of Winter…
STEALING DONKEYS FOR JESUS [Sun, 3-25-18]
[An occasional Palm Sunday
repeat]
As they approached
Jerusalem, Jesus sent two of his disciples to get a colt that had never been
ridden. “If anybody sees you taking it,” he told them, “tell them I need it.”
They found the colt and brought it to Jesus and put their coats on it for a
saddle and Jesus rode on it into Jerusalem. Many people spread their own
clothes on the road, or leafy branches they cut from the trees, and they
shouted “Hosanna” as he rode into town. (Matthew 21:1-11; Mark 11:1-11; Luke
19:28-40; John 12:12-19)
***
“It’s Palm Sunday, so I
want you to go into town and steal me a donkey,” Jesus told his disciples. “If
anybody catches you, tell them I need it.”
Reminds me of the time
“Gunner Bob” Reinhart, one of my colleagues in the “Willing Workers” Sunday
School class, happened to notice the keys dangling from the ignition in Mr.
Bothwell’s new Olds Rocket 88. It was Palm Sunday afternoon, and Gunner decided
to take the car for a Holy Week spin. Mr. Bothwell noticed his car taking off
from in front of his house and ran down his driveway after it, house slippers
on feet and Sunday funnies in hand.
“Why are you taking my
car?” he cried.
Gunner, apparently remembering
our lesson on the morning, yelled back, “I need it.”
One of Jesus’ disciples
nudged the other as they walked into town. “And if they go for that, I’ve got
some nice recreational lots along the Dead Sea I can sell them.”
Both capitalists and communists
claim Jesus, but he was neither. His approach was entirely different; he just
borrowed everything. He borrowed the water he turned into wine, and he borrowed
the stone jars from which that wine was poured. He borrowed a boat from which
to teach or by which to cross a lake. He borrowed houses in which to eat,
teach, and heal. (Some of them did not fare very well, either–one lost its roof
so a paralytic could be lowered in to be healed.) He borrowed sons, brothers
and husbands to be his disciples. He borrowed the upper room in which he ate
his last supper with his borrowed friends. Borrowed was the manger in which he
was born, borrowed his cross, and borrowed his tomb.
We think of Jesus as a
giver, not a taker. He was the giver of health, love, truth and even the
ultimate, his own life. Yet Jesus throughout his entire career borrowed things.
This was not just his
lifestyle as an itinerant preacher. He was teaching us that all we have is
borrowed from God. He ignored all strictures against lending and borrowing , be
it a cloak or a second mile or even one’s other cheek, because none of us
really has any possessions. Bigger barns, Swiss bank accounts, even gaining the
whole world–none of that is enough for us to establish a claim upon ourselves.
You yourself, your very life, is borrowed, so how can you claim anything you
have as your own?
Gunner and I learned in
Sunday school the “accounting theory” of faith. You get what you have coming to
you. Indeed, Gunner got it when he returned Mr. Bothwell’s car. One doesn’t
steal donkeys–or Oldsmobiles–and get away with it in my hometown.
Over against the
accounting theory stands the unexpected Jesus, the one who says, “If you would
follow me, take up your cross, and steal me a donkey.” Jesus lived the reality
of grace, of God being good to us not because we are good but because God is
good; not because we have been true to some legalistic plumb line of
stewardship but because God is rue to the divine identity. To see ourselves as
borrowers is to recognize ourselves as those who live by grace, who have no
claim upon God except the one that God give in Christ.
Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia
launched the New York City Center of Music and Drama, but he never attended the
ballet there. Someone asked him why, since he otherwise seemed to be such a
supporter of art. He replied, “I’m a guy who likes to keep score. With ballet,
I never know who’s ahead.” There is some kind of relationship calculator built
into most of us that causes us to keep score.
Relationships, however, have
a way of refusing to go by the numbers. That is why so many of us end up
forsaking relationships altogether–relationships to other people, to God and
even to ourselves. Unless we can keep score and know who is ahead, we do not
even want to attend the performance. We may support the idea, and say that it
is beautiful, just as LaGuardia did with ballet, but we do not go.
The unexpected Jesus says
to us, “Give to him who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would
borrow from you.” (Matthew 5:421). “And if you lend to those from whom you hope
to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to
receive as much again. But…lend, expecting nothing in return…” (Luke 6:34035a).
“And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive every one who is indebted to
us…” (Luke 11:4a).
That’s a clue. The last
sentence comes from a prayer; it is a plea to God. “God, you forgive us our
sins, for sins–those attitudes and actions that keep us so far from you–are
our debts, and there is no way we can pay off those debts. The only way we can
make right our relationship with you is if you forgive those debts." Each
one of us is a Third World nation.
Grace has no contract
requirement, nor can it be attained through manipulation. Grace is what we
borrow, knowing we can never repay, and knowing that the Lender understands we
can never repay
Jesus frees us to be
borrowers from God. Perhaps it is too much to expect us to borrow easily from
one another. We are not ready to be fellow borrowers until we have borrowed
life from God. That is what Jesus teaches. “Look at me,” he says. “I’m a
borrower. If I can be a borrower, you can be one, too. Borrow what you need
from me.”
Jesus comes to us in a
borrowed manger, on a borrowed cross, up from a borrowed tomb, breaking to us
the borrowed bread of life, lending us life, forgiveness and hope. “Borrow from
me,” he says. “Borrow the things that make for life. Let others borrow as well,
and do not hinder them. Hell is a life that is earned. Heaven is a life that is
borrowed. Borrowed is best. Go steal me a donkey…:”
JRMcF
Yes, I wrote it. It was
originally published in The Christian
Century, 3-21-90.
No comments:
Post a Comment