You and I are those who have Jesus on our hands and don't know what to do with him. Theologically, ethically, aesthetically, historically, politically, we do not know what to do with him. How ought we to think about him, follow him, imagine him, touch him, order him into our lives? Religion and its trappings we can do. We can crank out the life of an institution--show up at worship, deposit the children in church school, attend a potluck, make a modest pledge--we can do the church, it would seem. But when it comes to faith and its substance and our Savior and discipleship...when it comes to Jesus Christ, we are at a loss.To be sure, we have not the ease in relationship of the fundamentalists, taking him to be our pal: "I just wanna thank you Jesus," prayerfully speaking, is not our wont. Nor can we assume the cavalier attitude of agnostic philosophers, finding his sayings interesting, but having no claim upon our lives. Rather, we are those who--because we have been handed this faith's tradition, have been claimed through Christ for a life of service--we are those who need to do business, serious business, with who we say he is.
I want us to spend the Sundays of Lent, therefore, asking anew what we are to do with Jesus. First theologically: who has the church said that he is (God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God) and what has that to do with our days? Then ethically: how are we to take what he says seriously and follow him? On the Sunday when the arts fill our lives, the question becomes how we imagine him who came to reveal a God without image. At the end of the month, we will allow ourselves to be prodded by the so-called Jesus Seminar, asking what sort of witness the Bible means to be to the historical Jesus...and in what sense it matters that he really lived, and really died, and really was raised from the dead. Finally on Palm Sunday, when we unfold the story of Holy Week from his triumphal entry to his arrest, we will ask--along with those who first strew his way with palms--what to do with Jesus politically. But as preface to this season's proclamations, we begin tangibly, around our Lord's table, with Jesus on our hands. Now being Presbyterians, you and I learned, early on, that we do not have Jesus literally on our hands in the little cube of bread and shot glass of grape juice. Transubstantiation at the ring of a bell missed the point of his real presence, said the Reformers, around the table, a community in Christ. But that said, what do we have of Jesus in this meal, and so on our hands?
Could it be, in the first place, that as we handle this community of faith, as we participate in this communication of God to us...as we make ourselves vulnerable to a Christ-gathered congregation of strange and familiar faces...the reality of having Jesus on our hands begins to unfold?
That is to say, involvement in the life of a church just may be more than mere religion, more than cranking out an institution, more than showing up at worship. If the Living God is really among us, then we are indeed, "children playing on the floor with [our] chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning." We have no idea, in other words, that the One with whom we are having to do within the church's life...of a Sunday morning in coffee hour or at a meeting on Tuesday night or huddled in a threesome complaining about something, anything done differently... that the One with whom we are having to is Jesus[?]: we are the congregation in Nazareth watching a carpenter's kid stumble through the Old Testament lesson, grousing about his reading during coffee hour and collaring an elder to "Do something, get him out of the lectern!"; we are the Pharisees, gathered in the temple, trying to figure out how this upstart can be ousted so we can go back to that old-time, law-abiding religion; we are the money-changers, using the occasion of worship to do a little business, with no use for a do-gooder trying to turn things upside-down, question the agreed-upon status quo, threaten our livelihood.
In a word, at every turn in the church's life, we are oblivious to the fact that we may be having to do with the living Christ. For if the biblical witness is any clue, his real presence most times causes us to reveal the cranky religious authorities we have become, while the new thing God is up to for the sake of faith's future is not only missed, but is the very thing we would plot against for Christ's sake.
This is the human response to having Jesus on our hands! This is the presence we, in fact, would opt to forget, the real presence of which we are reminded around the table, and with which we must do business. "To [the one] who takes the broken bread into his hands and upon [her] lips with faith and love," writes Scottish biblical scholar William Barclay, "it is a means not only of memory but of living contact with Jesus Christ....'This cup is the new covenant and it cost my blood,'" he translates and so underlines how the first community of faith, having Jesus on their hands, sought a way to get him off their hands.
How we handle our church has something to do with having Jesus on our hands...with the fact that Christ is present and present always as a problem to religion, present always as an irritant overturning the ways we have devised to get hold of God or have a good experience of a Sunday morning...present always as a glad promise to those for whom faith is an adventure and discipleship a path clean opposite human expectations.
All of which brings us, in the second place, to the paradox hidden in our lessons this morning concerning having Jesus on our hands. It is a paradox I know not first hand, for I am ignorant of the Greek, but I do have this on good biblical authority: namely that the word sometimes translated as "betrayed" or "handed over" ["The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands...is to be handed over"..."Judas, will you betray me...will you hand me over with a kiss?"], that this same word is also translated "handed on," as in "I have received of the Lord that which also I have handed on to you." Paradosis from whence may come the word paradox.
So in the second place, having Jesus on our hands means that, as his church, as the community which has been given his gospel for the sake of the world, like that gospel or not, you and I will either hand him over to the emptiness of secular existence, ridding ourselves and the world of his real presence...or, by God's grace working in us and not of our own efforts, we will be those who give our lives to the high calling of handing him on to a world in need of his grace...to the next generation born for the sake of serving him alone. There is no middle ground.
Now handing him over, in this day and age, is not as dramatic as it was for the chief priests and scribes of his day...nor even as drastic, it would seem, as was the kiss Judas planted upon his cheek in the garden. No, I would say, by and large, we hand him over by neglect and indifference. We neither bother to learn of him more and more; nor nclude him around the tables in our home by grace; nor seek him through the words of scripture, save as they are read of a Sunday morning in worship; nor speak of him to a soul throughout our working week; nor sacrifice anything much to follow him.
We stand by as every reference to him is expunged from our public life [being too liberal to care] or we keep silence as injustices to the least of these [and so to him] are institutionalized, even within his church [being too conservative and law-abiding to notice mercy's missing voice]. We betray him, we hand him over to a society already emptied of meaning and purpose and compassion, but willing to use him for the sake of a holiday or two. We hand him over by our indifference, by our ignorance, by our silence, by our set ways, to the powers and principalities of our day. He is in their hands already and, in their hands, for the time being, he is as good as crucified, dead and buried.
What more, then, would it require of us, if we were to be a people called to hand on the Christian faith rather than, by neglect, hand the Christian tradition over to cultural custom? What would it require of us to become a community gathered and dispersed for the sake of handing on the church's tradition, in a time and in a world very much like the world which first heard and received the gospel: pluralistic, multi-cultural, secular to the core, diverse in philosophies, empty of purpose? The question is whether the gospel and faith's substance mean enough to us as parents, as adults given the responsibility to raise up the next generation in the faith, whether handing Jesus on, from our hands into the hands of our children, is serious enough business...and I cannot quite believe this would even be a question...serious enough business to commit ourselves as adults to the study of scripture or theology or church history or things spiritual? Evidence here is, and has been for decades I am told, that this is too onerous an expectation of Christian discipleship for members of The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill. How do you think the Christian faith has been handed on over the centuries to you? By osmosis? By briefer sermons to which you do not have to pay attention or think very much? By a few verses of scripture read out of context in a worship service?
Sometimes I think the way we seek to crucify him today...hand him over into the hands of authorities who can relieve us of the responsibility of dealing with him...sometimes I think the way we seek to crucify him today is by way of the church's death wish. We wish this church dead with our renown for letting someone else do our part; we wish this church dead with our reputation for being stuck in the past; we wish this church dead with our refusal of a call to mentor a child or hammer a nail or spend a night with the homeless or be an advisor to our youth or teach in the church school. Parabolic action, this little stuff is. Hints of the kingdom in the midst of mundane human existence which, when refused, hand him over to the hands of those who know him not and do not care.
My friends, as we claim to be The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, we are those who have Jesus on our hands in this season and every season. In our hands, he will either be betrayed by our essential indifference, our resistance to a new future, our neglect of faith's substance... or he will be handed on by a congregation whose eagerness to know him and serve him infects a community stuck on itself. There is no middle ground. "The Son of Man will be betrayed into human hands...." Those hands are ours...for the death of Christ's church or for faith's adventure.