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Fall Asleep to the Complete Life of Jesus _ From Bethlehem to the Ascension · truthunedited

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  Speaker 1: Close your eyes. Somewhere in history there was a life
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  Speaker 1: unlike any other. It did not begin with a palace.
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  Speaker 1: It did not begin with an army. It did not
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  Speaker 1: begin with the kind of entrance the world gives to
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  Speaker 1: people it considers important. It began with an angel standing
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  Speaker 1: in a small room in a town no one had
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  Speaker 1: heard of, speaking to a young woman who had no power,
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  Speaker 1: no title, and no idea that the words she was
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  Speaker 1: about to hear would change everything. And it ended with
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  Speaker 1: a man rising into the sky above a hill side
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  Speaker 1: outside Jerusalem, his friends standing below, unable to move, unable
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  Speaker 1: to speak, watching until the clouds took him from their sight.
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  Speaker 1: Between those two moments, thirty three years, every step on
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  Speaker 1: dusty roads, every meal shared with people the world had
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  Speaker 1: given up on, every word spoken to the broken, the frightened,
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  Speaker 1: the proud, and the lost. To night, we are not
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  Speaker 1: going to study it doctrine. We are not going to
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  Speaker 1: review a theology. To night. We are going to walk
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  Speaker 1: beside him, from the very first moment he entered this
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  Speaker 1: world to the very last moment his feet touched the ground,
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  Speaker 1: every moment of the Saviour's time on earth, breathe, you
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  Speaker 1: are safe here. Maybe to night. You are carrying something heavy.
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  Speaker 1: Maybe the day was long and the quiet you have
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  Speaker 1: been waiting for has finally arrived. Maybe you are not
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  Speaker 1: even sure why you pressed play. You only knew you
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  Speaker 1: needed to hear something true before you closed your eyes.
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  Speaker 1: This is that something settle in. Let the noise of
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  Speaker 1: the world fall away. The story is about to begin,
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  Speaker 1: and it begins the way the greatest stories always begin,
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  Speaker 1: not with thunder or a shout, but with a whisper
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  Speaker 1: in an ordinary room on an ordinary day that was
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  Speaker 1: about to become the most extraordinary moment in human history.
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  Speaker 1: Let us begin chapter one, the Announcement. Before we can
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  Speaker 1: understand what happened in that small room in Nazareth, we
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  Speaker 1: need to understand the world that room existed inside. Because
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  Speaker 1: the world into which Jesus was born was not a
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  Speaker 1: world that felt like it was on the edge of
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  Speaker 1: something wonderful. It felt, to most of the people living
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  Speaker 1: in it, like a world that had gone quiet in
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  Speaker 1: the worst possible way. The Roman Empire controlled nearly everything.
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  Speaker 1: Roads stretched across continents, carrying Roman soldiers and Roman tax
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  Speaker 1: collectors and Roman law into every corner of the known world.
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  Speaker 1: Caesar Augustus sat on the throne in Rome, and his
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  Speaker 1: reach extended all the way to the small, dusty, difficult
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  Speaker 1: land of Israel, which the Romans called Judea, and which
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  Speaker 1: they governed with a combination of military force and calculated tolerance.
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  Speaker 1: For the Jewish people living under that occupation, the weight
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  Speaker 1: of it was not only political, it was spiritual. They
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  Speaker 1: were a people who had been given promises, promises stretching
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  Speaker 1: back more than a thousand years, promises about a king
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  Speaker 1: who would come from the line of David, a deliverer,
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  Speaker 1: a messiah, some one who would finally set things right.
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  Speaker 1: And they had been waiting for a very long time.
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  Speaker 1: The last voice they had heard from God through the
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  Speaker 1: prophets had gone silent, roughly four hundred years before this night,
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  Speaker 1: four centuries of silence, four hundred years of Roman boots
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  Speaker 1: and the slow grinding pressure of a world that did
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  Speaker 1: not seem to care about the promises of their God.
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  Speaker 1: And then, without announcement, without warning, into that four hundred
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  Speaker 1: years of silence, an angel appeared. His name was Gabriel.
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  Speaker 1: And he did not go first to the temple in Jerusalem.
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  Speaker 1: He did not appear before the high priest or the
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  Speaker 1: religious council. He went to a small town in the
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  Speaker 1: region of Galilee called Nazareth. Nazareth was not impressive. When
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  Speaker 1: a man named Nathaniel later heard that something significant had
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  Speaker 1: come from that town, his response was a single question,
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  Speaker 1: Can anything good come out of Nazareth? It was not
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  Speaker 1: a compliment. Nazareth was the kind of place that people
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  Speaker 1: from more important cities used as shorthand for insignificance, a
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  Speaker 1: farming village, a forgotten corner of an already forgotten region.
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  Speaker 1: And in that town Gabriel came to a young woman
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  Speaker 1: named Mary. She was young already betrothed, which, in the
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  Speaker 1: culture of first century Jewish life, was a legally binding commitment,
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  Speaker 1: more serious than engagement in the modern sense, less complete
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  Speaker 1: than marriage. The couple would not yet live together, but
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  Speaker 1: the covenant between them was real, and breaking it required
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  Speaker 1: a formal process similar to divorce. Her betrothed was a
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  Speaker 1: man named Joseph, a carpenter, also from Nazareth. The Gospel
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  Speaker 1: of Matthia, who tells us he was a descendant of
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  Speaker 1: King David, which will matter enormously in a few moments,
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  Speaker 1: but which probably did not feel like it mattered very
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  Speaker 1: much in the daily life of a carpenter in a
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  Speaker 1: small Galilean town. Gabriel appeared to Mary and said something
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  Speaker 1: that Luke records with a simplicity that does not fully
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  Speaker 1: prepare you for the weight of it. He said, greetings,
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  Speaker 1: oh favored one, the Lord is with you. Luke tells
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  Speaker 1: us that Mary was greatly troubled at the saying. The
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  Speaker 1: Greek word he uses suggests not just surprise, but a
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  Speaker 1: deep disturbance, the kind of reaction a person has when
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  Speaker 1: something enters the room that does not fit any category
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  Speaker 1: they have for understanding it. She was trying to figure
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  Speaker 1: out what this greeting could possibly mean. Gabriel said to her,
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  Speaker 1: do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor
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  Speaker 1: with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb
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  Speaker 1: and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.
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  Speaker 1: He will be great and will be called the Son
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  Speaker 1: of the Most High. And the Lord God will give
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  Speaker 1: to him the throne of his father David, and he
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  Speaker 1: will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of
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  Speaker 1: his kingdom. There will be no end. Take a moment
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  Speaker 1: with those words, not the theology of them, the human
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  Speaker 1: experience of receiving them. Mary was a young woman in
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  Speaker 1: a small town, living an ordinary life, preparing for an
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  Speaker 1: ordinary future. She would marry Joseph, she would keep a home,
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  Speaker 1: she would raise children. That was the shape of the
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  Speaker 1: life ahead of her, and it was a good shape,
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  Speaker 1: a real shape. And then an angel stood in front
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  Speaker 1: of her and told her that she was going to
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  Speaker 1: carry the son of the Most High God. She asked
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  Speaker 1: one question, just one, How will this be? Since I
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  Speaker 1: am a virgin. It is a remarkable question because it
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  Speaker 1: is so practical. Not why me?
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  Speaker 2: Not?
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  Speaker 1: Are you sure? A practical question. She was trying to
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  Speaker 1: understand the mechanics of something that had never happened before
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  Speaker 1: in the history of the world. Gabriel answered her. He
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  Speaker 1: said the Holy Spirit would come upon her, the power
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  Speaker 1: of the Most High would overshadow her. And then he
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  Speaker 1: offered something as evidence that the impossible was already in motion.
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  Speaker 1: Her relative Elizabeth, who was old and had been barren
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  Speaker 1: her entire life, had conceived a son and was already
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  Speaker 1: six months a long because Gabriel said, nothing will be
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  Speaker 1: impossible with God. And then Mary said the words that
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  Speaker 1: have echoed through two thousand years of Christian history. She said, behold,
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  Speaker 1: I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be
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  Speaker 1: to me according to your word. Let it be to
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  Speaker 1: me according to your word. Sit with that sentence for
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  Speaker 1: a moment, because it is easy to say quickly and
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  Speaker 1: very hard to mean completely. Mary did not say yes
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  Speaker 1: because she fully understood what she was agreeing to. She
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  Speaker 1: could not have understood. No human being had ever been
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  Speaker 1: in this position before. She could not look back through
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  Speaker 1: history and find some one who had walked this road.
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  Speaker 1: There was no map for where she was going. She
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  Speaker 1: said yes in the dark. She said yes, with one
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  Speaker 1: practical question answered and a thousand others not yet asked.
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  Speaker 1: She said yes to something that would bring her great
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  Speaker 1: joy and great suffering in proportions she could not yet imagine.
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  Speaker 1: She said yes because she trusted the one who had
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  Speaker 1: asked breathe. Before Gabriel came to Mary, he had appeared
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  Speaker 1: to some one else, an old priest named Zacharias. Zacharias
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  Speaker 1: and his wife Elizabeth had lived their whole lives faithful
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  Speaker 1: to God, and their whole lives childless. The season of
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  Speaker 1: hoping for children had passed a long time ago. Zacharias
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  Speaker 1: was performing his priestly duties in the temple in Jerusalem
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  Speaker 1: when Gabriel appeared and told him that Elizabeth would conceive
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  Speaker 1: a son. That son would prepare the way for the Messiah.
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  Speaker 1: His name would be John. Zacharias asked a question, too,
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  Speaker 1: but something in the nature of his asking was different
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  Speaker 1: from Mary's. He said, how shall I know this? For
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  Speaker 1: I am an old man and my wife is advanced
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  Speaker 1: in years. He had prayed for a child for decades.
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  Speaker 1: He had stopped praying, He had made his peace with
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  Speaker 1: what was not going to happen, and now an angel
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  Speaker 1: was standing in the temple telling him it would happen.
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  Speaker 1: After all, Something in him could not quite open the
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  Speaker 1: door to that. Gabriel's response was unexpected. He said, you
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  Speaker 1: will be silent and unable to speak until the day
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  Speaker 1: that these things take place, because you did not believe
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  Speaker 1: my words. For nine months, Zacharias could not speak. That
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  Speaker 1: silence was not only a consequence, it was in some
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  Speaker 1: ways a gift. For nine months, Zacharias had to sit
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  Speaker 1: inside the quiet. He could not argue, He could not
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  Speaker 1: explain away what he had seen. He had to wait
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  Speaker 1: while the impossible became undeniably real right in front of him.
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  Speaker 1: When John was born and Zacharias finally opened his mouth,
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  Speaker 1: the first thing he did was praise God. The silence
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  Speaker 1: had done something in him that words could not have done.
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  Speaker 1: It had turned his doubt into worship. Mary, after the
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  Speaker 1: angel left, did something very human. She went to visit Elizabeth.
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  Speaker 1: She traveled south from Galilee to the hill country of Judea,
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  Speaker 1: two women carrying impossible promises coming together in a small
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  Speaker 1: house at the edge of the known world. When Mary
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  Speaker 1: arrived and called out her greeting, the baby in Elizabeth's
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  Speaker 1: womb leaped. John, not yet born, already responding to the
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  Speaker 1: presence of the one whose way he would spend his
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  Speaker 1: life preparing. Elizabeth said to Mary, blessed are you among women?
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  Speaker 1: And blessed is the fruit of your womb? And why
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  Speaker 1: is this granted to me that the mother of my
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  Speaker 1: Lord should come to me? Mary stayed with Elizabeth for
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  Speaker 1: about three months. We are not told what they talked
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  Speaker 1: about in them months, but we can imagine two women,
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  Speaker 1: one very young and one very old, sitting together in
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  Speaker 1: the quiet of a small house, carrying between them the
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  Speaker 1: weight of things that had never happened before and would
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  Speaker 1: never happen again, supporting each other in the way that
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  Speaker 1: only someone inside the same impossible situation can support another person.
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  Speaker 1: Before she left, Mary sang Her song has been called
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  Speaker 1: the Magnificat for centuries. She sang about a God who
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  Speaker 1: lifts up the humble and fills the hungry with good things.
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  Speaker 1: She sang as someone who had already begun to understand
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  Speaker 1: something of what her yes was going to mean. She
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  Speaker 1: was not yet showing. The life inside her was barely begun,
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  Speaker 1: and she was already singing. That is faith, not the
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  Speaker 1: certainty that everything will be easy, the decision to sing
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  Speaker 1: before the evidence is visible. Mary returned home to Nazareth,
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  Speaker 1: and then she had to tell Joseph. Matthew's account gives
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  Speaker 1: us the view from Joseph's side of that conversation. When
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  Speaker 1: Joseph discovered that Mary was pregnant, he was a just
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  Speaker 1: man and did not want to expose her to public shame.
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  Speaker 1: He decided to divorce her quietly in the world they
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  Speaker 1: lived in. His choice to do this privately rather than publicly,
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  Speaker 1: was already an act of mercy from a man who
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  Speaker 1: did not yet understand what he was looking at. And
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  Speaker 1: then Joseph had a dream. An angel appeared to him
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  Speaker 1: and said, Joseph, son of David, do not fear to
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  Speaker 1: take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived
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  Speaker 1: in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear
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  Speaker 1: a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for
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  Speaker 1: he will save his people from their sins. Joseph woke up,
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  Speaker 1: and he did what the angel had told him. He
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  Speaker 1: took Mary as his wife. Matthew records that decision with
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  Speaker 1: a simplicity that almost hides its sighs. Joseph chose to
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  Speaker 1: step into a story he had not written and could
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  Speaker 1: not fully understand. He chose to stand beside a woman
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  Speaker 1: care carrying a child that was not his, in a
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  Speaker 1: culture that would not easily accept that explanation. He chose
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  Speaker 1: to be the earthly father of a child whose true
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  Speaker 1: father was beyond his comprehension. He said yes in his
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  Speaker 1: own way, not with words, with a decision made before
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  Speaker 1: the sun came up. The world does not know Joseph
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  Speaker 1: very well. He says nothing recorded in any of the
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  Speaker 1: four Gospels. He is a quiet figure in a story
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  Speaker 1: full of dramatic voices. But what he did in the
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  Speaker 1: hours after that dream was one of the most faithful
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  Speaker 1: acts in the entire story. He woke up, he believed,
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  Speaker 1: and he stayed breathe. Two people in a small town
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  Speaker 1: had said yes to something they could not fully understand.
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  Speaker 1: An old priest was sitting in silence, watching the impossible
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  Speaker 1: grow in the body of his wife. And somewhere beyond
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  Speaker 1: the reach of every human plan and calculation, something was
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  Speaker 1: happening that had been decided before the foundations of the world.
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  Speaker 1: Heaven had spoken into the four hundred years of silence,
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  Speaker 1: and the silence would never be the same. Rest Now,
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  Speaker 1: the invitation that came to Mary and Joseph and Zacharias
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  Speaker 1: is in a different form, the same invitation that comes
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  Speaker 1: to every person who has ever found themselves facing something
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  Speaker 1: they did not plan, being asked to trust in the dark,
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  Speaker 1: Mary did, Joseph did Zacharias learned to and what was
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  Speaker 1: borne from their trust changed everything. Good Night, Chapter two,
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  Speaker 1: The Birth in Bethlehem. Before we walk into the stable,
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  Speaker 1: we need to walk the road that led there, because
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  Speaker 1: the road itself is part of the story. Caesar Augustus,
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  Speaker 1: sitting in Rome, at the center of the most powerful
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  Speaker 1: empire the world had ever seen, issued a decree. Every
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  Speaker 1: person in the Roman world was to be registered asansus,
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  Speaker 1: a counting of heads for the purpose of taxxation. Augustus
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  Speaker 1: did not issue this decree because he cared about a
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  Speaker 1: young carpenter and his pregnant wife in Galilee. He issued
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  Speaker 1: it because empires run on money, and money requires accounting.
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  Speaker 1: But the decree sent Joseph and Mary south from Nazareth
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  Speaker 1: in Galilee, down through the Jordan Valley and up into
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  Speaker 1: the hill country of Judea to Bethlehem, the city of David,
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  Speaker 1: because Joseph was of the house and lineage of David,
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  Speaker 1: and that was where he had to go to be registered.
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  Speaker 1: The distance from Nazareth to Bethlehem is roughly ninety miles
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  Speaker 1: on foot or on the back of a donkey, through
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  Speaker 1: terrain that is not flat and not easy. That journey
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  Speaker 1: would have taken between four and seven days. Stop for
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  Speaker 1: a moment and feel the weight of that. Mary was
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  Speaker 1: days away from giving birth. She was young, She was
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  Speaker 1: traveling a road that was long and physically demanding, and
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  Speaker 1: she went. She did not ask to be excused used.
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  Speaker 1: She did not send Joseph ahead and wait in Nazareth,
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  Speaker 1: where she had family and familiar rooms. She went with
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  Speaker 1: him into the uncertainty, into whatever was waiting at the
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  Speaker 1: other end. That willingness to keep going when comfort is
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  Speaker 1: not available is a thread that runs through this entire story.
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  Speaker 1: It seems to be something God looks for in the
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  Speaker 1: people he chooses to carry important things, not perfection, not ease,
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  Speaker 1: just the willingness to keep going. When they arrived in Bethlehem,
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  Speaker 1: Luke records one of the most famous details in all
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  Speaker 1: of Scripture. There was no room for them in the inn.
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  Speaker 1: The Greek word translated as inn in most English Bibles
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  Speaker 1: is kataluma, and this word matters because it changes the
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  Speaker 1: picture most of us carry. Kataluma does not primarily refer
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  Speaker 1: to a commercial inn. It refers most often to a
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  Speaker 1: guest room in a private home. The same word appears
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  Speaker 1: later in Luke's gospel when Jesus sends his disciples to
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  Speaker 1: find the upper room for the Life Supper. What this
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  Speaker 1: suggests is that Joseph likely had family in Bethlehem. He
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  Speaker 1: was of the House of David, and Bethlehem was David's city.
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  Speaker 1: But Bethlehem during the census would have been crowded with
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  Speaker 1: people returning to register. Every guest room in every home
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  Speaker 1: would have been full, and so they were directed somewhere else.
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  Speaker 1: Ancient homes in that region were often built with a
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  Speaker 1: lower level where animals were kept at night, part of
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  Speaker 1: the house itself or directly adjacent to it, a space
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  Speaker 1: that was warmer than the outdoors in the cold months.
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  Speaker 1: This is where Mary gave birth. She wrapped him in
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  Speaker 1: strips of cloth what the Bible calls swaddling clothes, the
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  Speaker 1: common practice for newborns, tight wrapping that kept the baby
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  Speaker 1: warm and gave him a sense of security. And she
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  Speaker 1: laid him in a manger, a feeding trough, the container
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  Speaker 1: from which the animals ate. The creator of the universe
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  Speaker 1: was placed in a feeding trough. Take a moment with that,
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  Speaker 1: not as a theological statement to be analyzed, as a
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  Speaker 1: picture to be seen. The one who spoke the stars
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  Speaker 1: into existence, the one who set the boundaries of the
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  Speaker 1: oceans and breathed life into the dust of the earth.
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  Speaker 1: That one was lying in an animal's feeding trough in
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  Speaker 1: a town full of people who had no idea what
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  Speaker 1: was sleeping fifty feet away from them. He could have
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  Speaker 1: arranged a different entrance if the point were simply to arrive.
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  Speaker 1: A thousand more dignified options existed, But the manner of
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  Speaker 1: his coming was a statement written not in words, but
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  Speaker 1: in the circumstances of a birth. I am not what
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  Speaker 1: you expected. I am not coming the way power comes.
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  Speaker 1: I am coming the way love comes. All the way
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  Speaker 1: down to the lowest place, to the place where no
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  Speaker 1: one thinks to look for something sacred. And outside Bethlehem,
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  Speaker 1: on the hillside surrounding the town, shepherds were watching their
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  Speaker 1: flocks through the night in the practical reality of daily life.
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  Speaker 1: In that world, shepherds were considered ritually unclean because of
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  Speaker 1: the nature of their work. They lived outside the structures
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  Speaker 1: of religious life. They were the people that more respectable
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  Speaker 1: citizens looked past without seeing. And it was to these
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  Speaker 1: shepherds that the announcement came. An Angel of the Lord
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  Speaker 1: appeared to them. The glory of the Lord shone around them,
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  Speaker 1: and they were filled with great fear. The Angel said,
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  Speaker 1: fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of
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  Speaker 1: great joy that will be for all the people. For
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  Speaker 1: unto you is born this day in the city of David,
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  Speaker 1: O Savior who is Christ the Lord. And this will
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  Speaker 1: be a sign for you. You will find a baby
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  Speaker 1: wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger. And
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  Speaker 1: then the sky above the shepherds filled with a multitude
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  Speaker 1: of the heavenly host, an army of angels, praising God
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  Speaker 1: and saying glory to God in the highest and on earth,
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: peace among those with whom He is pleased. Hun undred
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: years of silence. And then this, the announcement of the
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: birth of the Son of God, did not go first
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: to Caesar in Rome. It did not go to the
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: high priest in Jerusalem. It did not go to the
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: scholars who had spent their lives studying the prophecies about
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: exactly this moment. It went to shepherds sitting in the
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: dark on a hillside, people the religious establishment of their
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: day had quietly written off. This too, was not an accident.
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: The shepherds went immediately. They did not debate it. They
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: did not wait until morning. They got up in the
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: middle of the night and went to find what the
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: angel had described, And they found it exactly as they
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: had been told, the baby, the cloths the Manga. Luke
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: records that when they saw it, they told everyone they
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: could find, and all who heard it were amazed. Mary,
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: Luke says, treasured up all these things and pondered them
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: in her heart. That image of Mary in the middle
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: of the noise in the middle of the shepherds telling
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: their story to anyone who would listen. Mary was quiet,
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: holding things inside, turning them over in her mind like
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: stones worn smooth by water. She had heard the angel's words,
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: she had made the journey, she had given birth in
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: a borrowed space. She had watched strangers arrive in the
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: middle of the night, speaking of visions. And she held
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: all of it carefully, the way you hold something fragile
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: and irreplaceable, because she already understood somehow that she was
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: inside a story much larger than she could see, and
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: that the only right response to being inside a story
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: that large was to hold what she had been given
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: with great care breathe. There were also men traveling from
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: the east. Matthew calls them magi scholars associated with the
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: study of ancient wisdom and the skies. They were not Jewish.
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: They were outsiders, gentiles from beyond the borders of Israel.
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: They had seen something in the sky, something that pointed
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: toward a birth a king, and they had traveled lightly
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: from the regions east of Israel following what they had seen.
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: The journey would have taken months. They arrived in Jerusalem
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: first asking where the King of the Jews had been born.
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: That question troubled Herod deeply. Because Herod was the king
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: of the Jews, appointed by Rome, and he had not
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: been born anywhere significant. He had clawed his way to
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: power through violence and political cunning. The idea of a
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: new born king was a threat. He called together the
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: chief priests and scribes and asked them where the Messiah
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: was to be born. They answered, without hesitation, Bethlehem. The
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: prophet Micah had written it more than seven hundred years before.
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: But you, o, Bethlehem, who are too little to be
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: among the clans of Judah. From you shall come forth
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: for me one who is to be ruler in Israel.
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: Herod sent the magie to Bethlehem. He told them to
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: report back so that he too could worship he was lying.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: The magi followed the star to the place where the
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: young child was. Matthew says they went into the house.
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: By the time the magi arrived, some time had passed
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: since the birth. Joseph and Mary had found more settled accommodation.
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: The magi fell down and worshiped Jesus. They opened their
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: treasures and brought gifts, gold, frankincense, mirr These were not
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: arbitrary choices. Gold was the gift for a king Frankincense
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: was burned in temple worship, the offering given to God
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: Myrrh was used in burial preparation. Three gifts that spoke
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: without the magi fully knowing it to exactly who this
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: child was, King God and the one who would die.
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: They were warned in a dream not to return to
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: Herod and departed for their own country by another way.
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: Joseph was also warned in a dream. An angel told
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: him to take the child and Mary and flee to Egypt.
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: Herod was going to search for the child to destroy him.
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: Joseph woke in the night, He gathered his small family,
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: and they left for Egypt in the darkness. This is
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: the family of Jesus refugees fleeing across a border in
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: the middle of the night to escape a government that
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: wanted their child dead. Carrying the hope of the world
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: into a foreign country with nothing but what they could carry.
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: In Egypt, they waited until Herod died. When Joseph received
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: word in a dream that it was safe to return,
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: they came back. They settled again in Nazareth, back where
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: they had started in the small town that no one
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: thought could produce anything good, and the child grew breathe.
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: The birth in Bethlehem was not what anyone was looking for.
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: The world was looking for a king who would come
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: with power and armies and the kind of force that
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: changes things from the outside. What came instead was a
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: baby in a feeding trough, announced to shepherds, visited by
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: foreign scholars following a star, and carried into exile by
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: a young couple who had nothing to their name except
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: a promise. But this is how God tends to work.
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: In the dark, on a hill side, in an animal's
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: feeding trough, in the trembling hands of young parents far
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: from home. Sleep well, beloved, The child has been born.
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: The story is moving, and tomorrow night we will step
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: into thirty years that no gospel writer recorded in full,
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: but that shaped everything that came after good Night, Chapter three,
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: The Hidden Years. Most of the life of Jesus was ordinary.
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: That sentence is worth sitting with because we tend to
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: think of his life in terms of its drama moments,
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: the miracles, the sermons, the cross and the resurrection. These
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: are the parts we know, These are the parts that
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: get told. But thirty of his thirty three years on
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: Earth were lived quietly, without recorded miracles, without large crowds,
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: in a small town, in a carpenter's workshop, around a
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: family table, walking the same roads between the same familiar buildings,
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: year after year. The longest part of his life looked
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: like the longest part of most human lives. Ordinary. And
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: this is not a gap in the story waiting to
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: be filled in. It is the story. Let us try
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: to see what those years actually looked like. After Egypt,
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: Joseph and Mary returned and settled again in Nazareth. Luke
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: tells us simply that the child grew and became strong,
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: filled with wisdom, and the favor of God was upon him.
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: That sentence covers years, many years of a life being
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: lived one ordinary day at a time. Joseph was a carpenter.
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: The Greek word for his trade, tecton, refers to a
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: craftsman or builder who might work with wood and stone,
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: depending on what the work required. Jesus grew up in
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: that workshop. He learned the trade from his father. He
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: spent years measuring and cutting and shaping and fitting pieces together,
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: working with his hands in the way that most people
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: in his world worked with their hands. This matters. The
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: Son of God did not spend his hidden years in
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: mystical contemplation on a mountain top. He spent them getting
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: sawdust on his hands, carrying materials, learning a craft from
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: his father, and doing that craft well day after day
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: in the sight of no one in particular. God does
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: not waste ordinary time. He was also fully embedded in
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: a family. Joseph and Mary had other children after Jesus.
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: The Gospels name his brothers as James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas,
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: and mentioned sisters as well. Jesus grew up in a
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: full household. He sat at family meals, He watched his
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: siblings grow up around him. He was woven completely into
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: the texture of ordinary family life in Nazareth. There is
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: one window into these thirty years, one story, a single
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: moment recorded by Luke that gives us a glimpse of
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: who Jesus was becoming in the years the world was
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: not watching. He was twelve years old. The family had
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: traveled from Nazareth to Jerusalem for the Passover, as they
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: did every year. The feast concluded, the group from Nazareth
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: began the long journey home, traveling together as families and
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: neighbors and community members would in that world. Somewhere on
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: the road north, Mary and Joseph realized that Jesus was
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: not with them. They had assumed he was elsewhere in
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: the traveling group with relatives, with friends, but when they
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: looked for him, he was not there. They turned back
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: to Jerusalem, and they searched for him for three days.
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: Three days. Let that settle, not three hours. Three days
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: of not knowing where he was. Three days for the
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: mother who had carried the angel's words inside her for
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: twelve years. Three days of searching a city full of
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: passover pilgrims for a twelve year old boy. When they
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: found him, he was in the temple, sitting among the teachers,
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: listening to them and asking them questions, And every one
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers.
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: Mary spoke first. She said, son, why have you treated
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: us so? Behold? Your father and I have been searching
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: for you in great distress. It is the most human
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: sentence in the entire story of the Hidden Years. A
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: mother who had been terrified for three days telling her
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: child exactly how she felt. No theological, no careful language,
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: just the honest cry of a parent who has been
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: afraid and is now relieved and needs her child to
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: understand what these three days have cost her. And Jesus
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: said to her, why were you looking for me? Did
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: you not know that I must be in my father's house?
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: Luke tells us they did not understand the saying that
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: he spoke to them. That detail is worth staying with.
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: Mary had known since the angel came to her room
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: in Nazareth that her son was not ordinary. She had
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: held twelve years of evidence, the visit from Elizabeth, the shepherds,
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: the Magi, the flight to Egypt, the way wisdom rested
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: on him in ways she could feel but not fully articulate,
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: and still in the temple when he said what he said,
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: she did not fully understand. Faith is often like this.
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: We know more than we can explain, we carry more
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: than we can name. The mystery does not resolve itself
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: neatly into understanding just because time passes. Mary had twelve
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: years of evidence and still found herself not quite grasping
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: what was in front of her. She was not failing.
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: She was human, and being human in the presence of
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: something divine means living in the space between knowing and
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: not yet fully knowing. Jesus went back to Nazareth with them.
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: He was submissive to them. The son of God went
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: home and lived under the authority of his parents, not
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: because he was forced to, because he chose to. Because
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: part of what it meant to take on full humanity
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: was to live inside the structures of human life, family, responsibility,
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: the long patient work of growing up and Luke tells
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: us he increased in wisdom and in stature, and in
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: favor with God and man. He increased. He grew one
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: year at a time, one day at a time, breathe.
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: After the teen story, the Gospels go quiet again eighteen
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: more years before the public ministry begins, eighteen years of
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: waking before sunrise, of work in the carpenter's shop, of
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: Sabbath observances and yearly passover journeys, and the slow seasonal
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: rhythms of life in Galilee. At some point during those years,
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: Joseph disappeared from the record. He is not mentioned during
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: the ministry years. When Jesus is on the cross, he
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: commits the care of his mother to the disciple John,
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: which would be unusual if Joseph was still alive. Joseph
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: left the story the way he had entered it, quietly,
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: having done what he was given to do with faithful,
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: steady care. Jesus continued in Nazareth. He was known there
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: as the Carpenter. The people of Nazareth knew his face,
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: and his work and his family in the way that
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: people in small towns know everyone who grew up among them.
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: When he later returned during his ministry and read from
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: the scroll in the synagogue, they said, is not this
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: Joseph's son? They knew him as a person, someone whose
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: hands had made things they may have used in their
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: own homes. The hiddenness of those years speaks directly to
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: something most of us know in our own lives, the long,
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: quiet seasons where nothing dramatic is happening, where the days
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: feel unremarkable and the work feels invisible, where the life
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: you are living does not look like the life you
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: imagined you were supposed to be living. Jesus spent the
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: majority of his time on earth in exactly that kind
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: of season, and the favor of God was upon him
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: through all of it. Your hidden years are not wasted.
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: Whatever season you are in right now, whatever ordinary and
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: unrecorded faithfulness you are living. It is not the waiting
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: room for your real life. It is your real life.
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: And the one who spent thirty years in exactly that
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: place has not forgotten what it feels like to be there.
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: Sleep well, beloved, The hidden years are ending. Something is
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: stirring in the wilderness south of Galilee. A voice is rising,
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: and the man from Nazareth is about to walk down
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: to the river where everything will change. Good Night. Chapter four,
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: The Baptism and the Wilderness. There was a man living
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: in the wilderness of Judea. He wore clothing made of
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist. He
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: ate locusts and wild honey. He lived outside the normal
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: structures of society, away from the towns and the synagogues
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: and the comfortable rhythms of daily life. And people were
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: going out to him from Jerusalem, from all of Judea,
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: from the surrounding region of the Jordan. They were leaving
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: their ordinary lives and walking out into the wilderness to
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: hear him speak. His name was John. He was the
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: son of Zacharias and Elizabeth, the child whose coming had
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: been announced by Gay before his conception, the one who
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: had leaped in his mother's womb. When Mary arrived, he
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: had grown up, and he had ended up here in
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: the desert, calling people to a baptism of repentance, preparing
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: the way for some one greater than himself. The core
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: of what John was doing was this. He was not
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: the destination. He knew it clearly, and he said it plainly.
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: I baptize you with water for repentance. But he who
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: with the Holy Spirit and fire. John knew his role
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: in the story. He was the voice calling in the wilderness,
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: the one making the road straight for some one else.
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: He embraced it completely. And then one day Jesus came
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: down from Galilee to the Jordan River to be baptized
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: by John. John recognized him immediately. He said, I need
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: to be baptized by you, and do you come to me.
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: It is a natural response. John, with the spiritual clarity
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: that defined his entire ministry, saw the reversal in what
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: was being asked. The one without sin was asking to
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: be baptized by the one whose entire ministry was about
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: calling sinners to repentance. Jesus answered him. He said, let
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: it be so now, for thus it is fitting for
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: us to fulfill all righteousness. Let it be so now.
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: Those words carry the same quality as Mary's words in Nazareth,
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: full awareness of the situation and a choice to step
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: into it anyway because it was the right thing to do.
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: Why did Jesus, who had no sin, submit to a
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: baptism of repentance. He was identifying himself completely and without
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: reservation with the broken human beings he had come to redeem.
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: He was stepping into the water with us. He was
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: doing what he would continue to do throughout his entire ministry,
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: coming all the way to where we are getting in
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: with us. When Jesus came up out of the water,
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: something happened that the people standing on the banks of
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: the Jordan would never forget. The heavens opened. The spirit
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: of God descended like a dove and came to rest
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: on Jesus, and a voice came from heaven. The voice said,
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: this is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased.
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: Before one miracle had been performed, before one sermon had
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: been preached, before one sick person had been healed, or
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: one storm calmed, or one dead person raised. The voice
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: from heaven declared, this is my beloved son, with whom
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: I am well pleased. The identity came before the work.
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: The love came before the achievement. The declaration of who
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: Jesus was had nothing to do with what he had done,
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: and everything to do with who he was in relationship
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: to the Father. The world we live in tends to
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: work the other way around. Worth follows performance. Identity is
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: earned through achievement. You are only as valuable as your
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: last success. And the voice from heaven said, no, before
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: the first miracle, before the first sermon, beloved already simply
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: because of who he was breathe Immediately after baptism, the
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: spirit led Jesus into the wilderness. He was there for
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: forty days. He did not eat during those days. By
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: the end of them, he was genuinely, deeply hungry, and
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: that is when the devil came. The temptations that followed
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: were not crude or random. Each one was precisely targeted
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: at something specific about who Jesus was and what his
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: mission required. They were designed to corrupt the mission from
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: the inside by getting Jesus to use his power in
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: ways that would undermine the very thing he had come
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: to do. The first came directly at his physical need.
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: If you are the son of God, command these owns
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: to become loaves of bread. Notice the word if. The
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: voice from heaven had just said he was the son
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: of God, and now another voice was placing that identity
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: under a question mark. If you really are who you
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: say you are, prove it. Use your power, feed yourself.
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: Jesus answered, with the words of Moses from Deuteronomy. Man
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: shall not live by bread alone, but by every word
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: that comes from the mouth of God. He refused to
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: let physical need become the thing that drove his decisions.
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: A savior who used power selfishly could not be the
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: savior the world needed. The second temptation was more dramatic.
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: The devil took him to the highest point of the
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: temple and said, if you are the son of God,
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: throw yourself down. He even quoted scripture to support his case.
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: Angels would catch him, the crowd would witness it, belief
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: would follow. The temptation was this produce a spectacle, make
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: people believe through the overwhelming force of a supernatural display.
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: Skip the slow, patient work of loving one person at
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: a time. Jesus said, you shall not put the Lord
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: your God to the test. He refused to turn faith
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: into a transaction. Trust in God is a relationship, not
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: a mechanism for producing results on demand. The third temptation
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: was perhaps the most revealing. The devil showed him all
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and said,
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: all these I will give you if you will fall
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: down and worship me. Take the kingdoms now, without the cross,
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: without the suffering. Here is the destination. Skip the road,
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: Jesus said, be gone, Satan, for it is written you
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: you serve no short cut, no by pass. The road
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: to the kingdom ran through the cross. Jesus knew it.
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: He would not take the short cut. The devil left him,
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: and then angels came and ministered to him. After the faithfulness,
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: after the testing, after the refusal of every easier path,
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: then the angels came. The strengthening came after the wilderness,
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: not instead of it. Breathe. The wilderness is a place
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: most of us know in some form. The long stretches
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: of testing, when the voice that questions your identity is
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: louder than the voice that confirmed it. The moments when
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: someone offers you a short cut, and the short cut
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: looks entirely reasonable and the long road looks unbearable. In
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: those moments, the man who stood in the wilderness of
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: Judea knows exactly where you are. He was there first.
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: He held on to what the father had said at
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: the river. Beloved, well, pleased already, and so can you
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: sleep well beloved. The wilderness is behind him. Now the
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: ministry is about to begin. And the first thing he
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: is going to do is walk toward a group of
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: ordinary working men beside a lake and say two words
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: that will change their lives entirely. Good night. Chapter five,
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: The ministry begins. He began beside a lake. The Sea
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: of Galilee was a working lake, roughly thirteen miles long
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: and eight miles wide, sitting in a low basin surrounded
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: by hills that dropped steeply to its shores. Fishing families
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: had built their lives around its rhythms for generations, the
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: smell of fish and lake water, and the particular quality
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: of morning light coming over the eastern hills. Men mending nets,
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: boats going out at night and coming back at dawn.
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: This is where Jesus chose to begin among working people,
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: among the ones who smelled of their work and did
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: not have time for long theological debates, because the nets
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: needed to be sorted for the next tide. Simon, who
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: would be called Peter, and his brother Andrew were casting
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: their net into the sea when Jesus found them. James
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: and John, the sons of Zebedee, were near by in
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: their boat with their father, mending nets. But Luke's account
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: adds a detail that changes the texture of the calling entirely.
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: Jesus had gotten into Peter's boat. First, he asked Peter
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: to push out a little from shore so he could
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: teach the crowd that had gathered on the bank. Peter did,
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: The crowd listened, and when the teaching was finished, Jesus
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: turned to Peter and said, put out into the deep
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: water and let down your nets for a catch. Peter said, Master,
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: we toiled all night and took nothing, but at your word,
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: I will let down the nets that sentence, But at
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: your word. Peter was a professional fisherman. He had worked
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: this lake his entire life. He knew that daytime fishing
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: in deep water. After a fruitless night made no practical sense.
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: Every piece of experience he had told him this was pointless.
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: But something in what he had just heard from this
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: man sitting in his boat made him willing to try anyway.
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: They let the nets down, and the catch was so
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: large that the nets were beginning to break. They had
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: to signal to the other boat to come and help.
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: Both boats were filled to the point of sinking. Peter
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: fell to his knees in the boat and said, depart
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: This was Peter's introduction to Jesus, an overwhelming encounter with
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: something beyond his ability to explain that left him on
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: his knees in a boat full of fish, feeling the
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: full weight of his own smallness in the presence of
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: something enormous. When we truly encounter who Jesus is, the
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: first response is rarely excitement. It is the honest recognition
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: of the distance between what we are and what we are.
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: Standing next to Peter felt it completely. Jesus said to him,
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: do not be afraid. From now on you will be
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: catching men. Do not be afraid. The same words the
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: angel had spoken to Zacharias and to Mary and to
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: the shepherds on the hillside. There was something greater than
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: the fear, something worth following. Even when the following was frightening,
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: they left everything and followed him. Those words appear multiple
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: times in the gospel accounts, and never lose their weight.
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: They left everything. Peter and Andrew left their nets, James
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: and John left the boat and their father. The decision
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: was not made over weeks of careful deliberation. It was
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: made at the edge of a lake on a morning
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: when their boats were too full of fish to sail,
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: and they walked away anyway. Jesus did not recruit from
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: the He went to the lake, He went to the
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: tax booth. He went to the places where people who
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: did not expect to be chosen for anything important were
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: doing the work that kept their families fed. A rabbi
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: in that world would typically wait for students to seek
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: him out. Jesus reversed the direction entirely. He went to them.
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: He found them where they were. He did not wait
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: for them to qualify themselves for his attention. What he
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: was looking for was not perfection. It was availability, not
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: the absence of weakness, the willingness to follow despite it breathe.
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: The first miracle happened not on the shore of Galilee,
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: but at a wedding in Cana of Galilee, not far
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: from Nazareth. A wedding celebration was under way. Mary was there,
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: Jesus and his new disciples had also been invited. At
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: some point during the celebration, the wine ran out. Running
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: out of wine at a wedding in first century Jewish
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: culture was a social catastrophe. Wedding celebrations lasted multiple days.
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: The host's responsibility to provide for his guests was a
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: serious obligation. Running out of wine brought shame on the
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: family in a way that would be remembered long after
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: the celebration ended. Mary came to Jesus and said, simply,
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: they have no wine. She did not ask him directly
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: to do anything. She simply told him the situation, and
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: then she turned to the servants and said, do whatever
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: he tells you. She did not argue, she did not
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: press her case. She pointed them toward Jesus as if
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: she knew, in the way a mother knows her child,
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: that whatever he said next would be enough. Jesus told
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: the servants to fill six stone water jars with water.
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: Each jar held between twenty and thirty gallons. When they
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: were filled, he told them to draw some out and
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: take it to the master of the feast. The water
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: had become wine. The master of the feast called the
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: bridegroom and said, every one serves the good wine first,
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine.
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: But you have kept the good wine until now, the
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: best wine saved for life.
• 48:00
  Speaker 2: Ust.
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: When the resources had run out and the celebration was
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: on the verge of ending in embarrassment, Jesus provided. And
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: what he provided was not just adequate, it was the best.
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: He has a way of doing that, taking what is
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: insufficient and making it more than sufficient, taking what has
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: run out and replacing it with something better than what
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: was there before. The intervention did not just restore what
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: had been lost, It exceeded it. A notice where the
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: first miracle happened at a party, at a wedding, where
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: people were celebrating and the wine had run out. He
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: did not reserve himself only for moments of catastrophe. He
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: showed up at the celebration. He cared about the moments
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: the world calls ordinary. Nothing in your life is too
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: small for his attention breathe. There was a woman who
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: came to a well in the middle of the day.
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: The well was in Samaria, in a town called Psycha,
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: and Jesus was sitting beside it when she arrived. His
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: disciples had gone into the town to buy food. Coming
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: to the well at midday told its own story. Women
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: in that culture gathered water in the morning when it
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: was cool, when the social life of the village happened.
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: Coming at noon meant coming when no one else would
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: be there. It meant wanting to avoid some one or
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: every one. Jesus asked her for a drink. She said,
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: how is it that you, a Jew ask for a
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: drink from me, a woman of Samaria. The division between
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: Jews and Samaritans ran deep and old. A Jewish man
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: speaking to a Samaritan woman in public was outside the
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: bounds of what either community expected. What followed was one
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: of the most remarkable conversations in all four Gospels. Jesus
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: spoke to her about living water, water that would become
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: a spring inside a person, welling up to eternal life.
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: She wanted this water, She asked for it, and then
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: Jesus said, go call your husband and come here. She said,
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: I have no husband. Jesus said, you are right in
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: saying I have no husband, for you have had five husbands,
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: and the one you now have is not your husband.
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: He knew. He saw her completely, her whole history, every
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: broken relationship that had led her to this well at noon.
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: He saw all of it, and he did not look away.
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: He did not become unavailable. He kept talking to her,
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: He kept offering the water she was asking for. This
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: is one of the most important things about the way
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: Jesus saw people throughout his ministry. He did not see
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: them in pieces. He did not see the presentable part
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: and ignore the rest. He saw the whole person everything,
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: and the seeing did not change the offering the living
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: water was not conditional on her history being different. She
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: ran back to the town and said to the people there,
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: come see a man who told me all that I
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: ever did? Can this be the Christ? A woman who
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: had been coming to the well at noon to avoid
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: exactly this kind of social interaction ran back and brought
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: the whole town to Jesus. Because he had seen everything
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: she had ever done, and he had not looked away.
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: That is what being seen completely and loved anyway does
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: to a person, it makes them want to tell every
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: one breathe. He began beside a lake with fishermen who
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: smelled of their work. He performed his first miracle at
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: a party where the wine had run out. He sat
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: at a well in the middle of the day and
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: saw a woman the town had written off, and offered
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: her the best thing he had to give. The people
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: he stopped for were the people the world tended to
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: walk past, the ones who did not expect to be chosen,
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: the ones who came to the well at noon. This
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: was not coincidence. This was the shape of his ministry
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: from the very beginning. The center of things had come
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: to the people who had been told their whole lives
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: that they were too far from the center to matter.
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: Sleep well, beloved. The ministry is widening, The roads of
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: Galilee are becoming familiar with his footsteps. And in the
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: hills above the lake, thousands of people are gathering, and
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: the miracles are about to multiply in ways. No one
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: in that crowd is prepared for good night. Chapter six,
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: The Miracles. He never performed a miracle to impress anyone.
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: That is the first thing to understand about the way
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: Jesus used power in a world full of traveling wonder workers.
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: Jesus stood apart not because his miracles were more spectacular,
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: though they were, but because of the quality of attention
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: behind every single one. Every miracle in the Gospels, when
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: you read them carefully, is less about the supernatural event
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: and more about the person. The supernatural event happened to
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: the miracle was always secondary, The person was always primary.
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: To night. We are going to sit with four moments,
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: not a catalog, four specific encounters where the power of
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: Jesus met individual human beings in their particular, irreplaceable need,
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: and what those moments reveal about the kind of God
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: who would do such things. The first moment is almost
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: too quiet to slow down for, and that is exactly
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: why we need to slow down for it. There was
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: a man with leprosy in the first century. Leprosy was
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: not merely a physical disease. It was a total exclusion
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: from ordinary life. The laws of Moses required that people
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: with certain skin diseases be declared unclean, which meant they
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: could not enter the synagogue, could not participate in religious life,
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: could not touch or be touched by other people without
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: making those people ceremonially unclean as well. They were required
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: to warn others of their approach, to keep their distance
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: to if at the edges of society, separated from everyone
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: they had ever known for as long as the disease lasted,
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: not just excluded from the community, excluded from the possibility
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: of human touch. The man with leprosy came to Jesus.
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: He knelt before him. He said, Lord, if you are willing,
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: you can make me clean. If you are willing. He
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: believed in the power. What he was not sure about
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: was the willingness, whether someone as significant as Jesus would
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: turn his full attention towards someone as discarded as him,
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: whether he fell into the category of people worth stopping for.
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: Jesus reached out his hand and touched him before he
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: said a word, before anything changed externally, he touched him.
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: In a world where this man had not been touched
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: by another human being for however long his disease had lasted,
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: months or years of enforced isolation. Jesus reached out and
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: made contact with the untouchable man, and then he said,
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: I am willing be clean. Immediately the leprosy left him.
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: The miracle was real, and it was complete, but the
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: touch came first. The willingness was demonstrated in a gesture
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: before it was confirmed in words. Jesus crossed the distance. First,
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: he reached out, he touched the man who had not
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: been touched, and then the healing followed. There are people
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: in every generation who carry some version of this man's question,
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: not necessarily about physical disease, but about whether they are
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: the kind of person that someone as significant as God
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: would be willing to turn toward, whether their particular history
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: puts them outside the circle of those who can expect care.
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: The touch came before the healing. The willingness always comes first. Breathe.
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: There was an afternoon on the shore of the Sea
• 55:55
  Speaker 1: of Galilee that began with a crowd and became something
• 55:59
  Speaker 1: no one who was there ever forgot. Jesus had been
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: teaching all day, the crowds had followed him out to
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: a remote place, and the day had grown late. His
• 56:08
  Speaker 1: disciples came to him with a practical concern. This is
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: a desolate place, and the hour is now late. Send
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: the crowds away to go into the villages and buy
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: food for themselves. It was a reasonable suggestion. There were
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: thousands of people The logistics of feeding them in a
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: remote location were obviously beyond what the disciples could imagine.
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: Jesus said, they need not go away. You give them
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: something to eat. The disciples looked at what they had.
• 56:39
  Speaker 1: A boy in the crowd had five loaves of bread
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: and two fish. That was everything, the total of available
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: resources for a crowd of thousands gathered in a field
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: far from any town. Jesus told the crowds to sit
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: down on the grass. He took the five loaves and
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: the two fish. He looked up toward Heaven. He gave thanks.
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: He broke the loaves, and he gave them to the
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: disciples to distribute to the people. Every one ate. Everyone
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: was satisfied, and when they gathered the left over fragments,
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: there were twelve baskets full. Now the setting of this
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: miracle matters. John tells us this happened near the time
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: of Passover, the feast that commemorated God feeding his people
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: in the wilderness. When Moses had led Israel out of
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: Egypt through the desert. God had sent manner bread from
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: Heaven every morning enough for that day. And now in
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: another remote place, with another crowd who was hungry and
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: far from where they needed to be. Jesus looked at
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: what was not enough and gave thanks for it, and
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: broke it open, and there was more than enough. He
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: has a way of taking what is insufficient and making
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: it sufficient, not by denying the inadequacy, by offering what
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: is insufficient to the Father with thanksgiving, breaking it open
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: and giving it out, and what comes back is more
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: than what went in. This is a pattern worth carrying,
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: not just as the memory of a miracle, as a
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: way of understanding what happens when we bring what we have,
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: however small it seems, and offer it rather than hoard it. Breathe.
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: There was a village called Bethany, two miles east of Jerusalem,
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: and in that village there was a family that Jesus loved.
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: John says this directly, not implies. Says, now, Jesus loved
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: Martha and her sister and Lazarus, three siblings, a home
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: he had visited before, people he ate with, and talked with,
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: and rested with in a way the Gospels do not
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: often describe. For Jesus, these were not just followers, they
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: were friends. Lazarus became ill. Martha and Mary sent word
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: to Jesus, they said, Lord, he whom you love is ill.
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: When Jesus heard this, he did not go immediately. He
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: stayed where he was for two more days. By the
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: time he arrived in Bethany, Lazarus had been in the
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: tomb for four days. Martha came out to meet him.
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: Before he reached the village. She said, Lord, if you
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: had been here, my brother would not have died. There
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: is grief in those words, and underneath the grief something
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: that sounds almost like a question, Why were you not
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: here sooner? She believed in his power, she did not
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: yet understand his timing. Mary came and fell at his feet.
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: She said the same thing, Lord, if you had been here,
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: my brother would not have died. And then John records
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: something that has stopped readers in every century since. When
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: Jesus saw her weeping, and the others who had come
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: spirit and greatly troubled. He asked, where have you laid him?
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: They said, Lord, come and see. And then John writes
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: the shore verse in the entire Bible. Jesus wept two words,
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: the shortest sentence in scripture. And yet they carry more
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: weight than many longer ones. He knew what he was
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: about to do. He knew that in a matter of minutes,
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: Lazarus would walk out of that tomb alive. He knew
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: the ending of this story. Before Martha and Mary had
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: stopped weeping, and he still wept. He did not stand
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: apart from the grief of the people he loved and
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: wait calmly for the moment when he would fix everything.
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: He entered the grief. He stood in the middle of
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: the weeping, and he wept with them. He did not
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: weep because he had forgotten what he was about to do.
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: He wept because they were weeping, because grief is real,
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: even when resurrection is coming, Because the pain of loss
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: does not become smaller just because the story has a
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: good ending. Because being present with someone in their sorrow
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: is not the lesser response to suffering. Sometimes it is
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: the truest one. The watching crowd said, see how he
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: loved him. They were right. The weeping was not weakness,
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: The weeping was love. He went to the tomb, he said,
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: take away the stone. Martha objected. Four days there would
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: be an odor. Lazarus was not unconscious, He was not
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: in a coma. He was dead, completely, irreversibly. Jesus prayed,
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: and then he cried out with a loud voice. Lazarus
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: come out, and the man who had been dead came
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: out of the tomb, still wrapped in his burial cloths,
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: still bound with strips of linen. Jesus said to the
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: people standing there, unbind him and let him go. The
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: miracle was God's, the unwrapping was theirs. Lazarus needed hands
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: to help him out of what death had wrapped around him.
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: The community had a role to play. They could not
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: raise him, but they could unwrap him. They could help
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: him move freely in the life that had been given
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: back to him. Breathe, He touched the untouchable. He fed
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: thousands with what was not enough. He stood outside a
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: four day old tomb and called a dead man by name,
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: and the dead man walked out. In each of these moments,
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: the power was undeniable, but power was never the point.
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: The leper needed to know he was worth being touched.
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: The crowd needed to know there was enough. Martha and
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: Mary needed to know that he was not unmoved by
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: their grief, even when he already knew the ending. The
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: miracles were not performances. They were conversations, each one saying
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: something specific to some one, specific about the nature of
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: the one performing them. He sees you, he is willing,
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: He weeps with you. He calls you by name. And
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: sometimes when everything in your life looks like a four
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: day old tomb with a stone in front of it,
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: he stands outside it and he calls, sleep well, beloved.
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: The miracles continue the roads of Galilee, and Judea have
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: heard his footsteps, and on a hillside above the lake,
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: he is about to sit down and begin telling stories
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: that will outlast every empire that existed when he told
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: them good night, Chapter seven, The Teachings he sat down
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: to teach. That detail matters more than it might first
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: appear in the world of first century Jewish teaching. A
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: rabbi who sat down was signaling something specific. Standing was
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: for reading the scriptures. Sitting was for authoritative interpretation. When
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: Jesus sat down on the hillside above the sea of
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: Galilee and opened his mouth, he was taking the posture
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: of some one making a definitive pronouncement, And what came
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: out of his mouth was unlike anything that crowd had
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: ever heard. Matthew records that when he finished, the people
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: were astonished, and then he gives the reason, because he
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: taught them as one who had authority, and not as
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: their scribes. The trained religious teachers of that day taught
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: by citation. They would say, Rabbi so and so teaches
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: that this passage means this. The weight of their teaching
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: came from the accumulated authority of every one who had
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: taught before them. The chain of tradition, stretching back through generations,
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: was what gave their words their standing. Jesus taught differently.
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: He said, you have heard that it was said, But
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: I say to you he spoke as someone whose authority
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: was his own, original, unmediated. The crowd felt the difference immediately,
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: even if they could not have explained it. Something in
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: the room changed when he spoke. People leaned forward without
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: deciding to The Sermon on the Mount begins with eight
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: declarations that have been called the Beatitudes blessings. But they
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: are blas blessings for people the world would not think
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: to bless. Blessed are the poor in spirit, Blessed are
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: those who mourn. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are those
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are the merciful.
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: Blessed are the pure in heart. Blessed are the peacemakers.
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness. In the
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: economy of every world that has existed, power and blessing
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: go to the strong, the assertive, the well connected. The
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: meek are not considered fortunate. The mourning are not envied.
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 1: Jesus sat down on a hillside and turned the entire
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: value system upside down. The Kingdom of God operates on
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: entirely different principles than the kingdoms of this world. The
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: currency is not power or wealth or status. It is
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: the kind of character that most of the world overlooks
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: or actively dismisses. He said, you have heard that it
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: was said said love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: for those who persecute you, so that you may be
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: sons of your father who is in heaven. For he
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: makes his son rise on the evil and on the good,
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: Love your enemies. These three words have disturbed and challenged
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: and inspired human beings for two thousand years. Because they
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: are not natural, They are not reasonable by the standards
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: of the world. They require a love that does not
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: originate in the person giving it, a love borrowed from
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: somewhere else, a love that looks like the love of
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: a God who sends rain on the just and the
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: unjust alike without distinction. He clothes the sermon with an
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: image that has lived in the imagination of every generation
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: that has heard it. Two builders. One builds his house
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: on rock, one builds on sand. The rain comes, and
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: the floods rise, and the winds blow and beat against
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: both houses. The house on sand falls, great is the
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: fall of it. The house on rock stands. Every One
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: who hears these words of mine and does them, Jesus said,
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: is like the man who built on rock. Every One
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: who hears and does not do them, is like the
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 1: man who built on sand. The difference between the two
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: builders is not what they heard. Both of them heard
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: the same words. The difference is what they did with
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 1: what they heard. And the storm does not reveal which
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: foundation is which. Until it arrives. You cannot tell which
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: house will hold until the weather changes breathe. Jesus did
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: not only teach in sermons more often, he taught in stories,
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: parable short narratives that seemed simple enough for a child
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: to follow on the surface, but that opened up as
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: you walked around inside them, into something much larger than
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: they first appeared. He told a story about a father
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: and two sons. The younger son came to his father
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: and asked for his share of the inheritance, now before
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: the father was dead. In the culture of first century
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: Jewish life, this request was an act of profound disrespect.
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: It was the equivalent of saying, to your father, I
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: wish you were already dead. Give me what I would
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: receive when you are gone. The father gave it to him.
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: The younger son took everything and went to a distant
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 1: country and spent it all. When he had spent everything,
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: a severe famine came. He ended up feeding pigs for
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: a gentile farmer, so hungry that he longed to eat
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: what the pigs were eating, and no one gave him anything.
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: He came to himself. That phrase is one of the
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: most quietly profound descriptions of repentance in all of scripture.
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 1: He came to himself, as if he had been somewhere else,
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: some version of himself that was not really him, and
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: now he was returning to the truth of his own situation.
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: He said, how many of my father's hired servants have
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger.
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: I will arise and go to my father, and I
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: will say to him, father, I have sinned against heaven,
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 1: and before you I am no longer worthy to be
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 1: He rehearsed the speech on the road home. He had
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: his words ready. He was going back as a servant.
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: He was hoping that the father, who had every right
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: to turn him away, would be merciful enough to hire
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: him as a laborer. But while he was still a
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: great distance away, his father saw him. The father saw
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 1: him while he was still a long way off, which
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: means the father was looking, which means that at some
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: point every day the father had gone to the edge
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: of the property and looked down the road toward the
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: distant country, not in anger, in hope, and when he
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: saw his son, he ran. Fathers in first century Jewish
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: culture did not run. Running required lifting the robe exposing
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: the legs, an act considered undignified for a man of standing.
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: The father ran anyway. He ran to his son. He
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: fell on his neck and kissed him. The son began
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 1: his rehearsed speech, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: before you I am no longer worthy to be called
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: your son. The father did not let him finish. He
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 1: turned to his servants and said, bring quickly the best
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 1: robe and put it on him. Put a ring on
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: his hand, and shoes on his feet. Bring the fattened
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 1: calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate.
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: For this, my son was dead and is alive again.
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: He was lost and is found. The best robe, the ring,
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: the shoes, the feast, each one a restoration of status,
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: a restoration of identity. The robe covered the rags. The
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: ring was a signet ring, a symbol of authority and
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 1: family identity. Shoes were worn by family members, not servants.
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: The father was treating him as a son, fully, completely,
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: without reservation. The son had prepared words, the father had
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: prepared a feast. The son came home, hoping for employment.
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: The father had already decided on celebration. This is the
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: story Jesus told about God, a god who sees you
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: while you are still a long way off, and moves
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: toward you, a god whose restoration is not proportional to
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: the quality of your repentance speech, whose ring and robe
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 1: and feast are given before the speech is even finished breathe.
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: He also told a story about one lost sheep. A
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: man had a hundred sheep. One went missing. He left
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: the ninety nine and went after the one until he
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: found it. When he found it, he laid it on
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: his shoulders, rejoicing. When he came home, he called together
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: his friends and neighbors and said, rejoice with me, for
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: I have found my sheep that was lost, one sheep
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 1: out of a hundred. A sensible person might grieve briefly
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: and move on, but the shepherd in the story left
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: the ninety nine and went after the one. He searched
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 1: until he found it. He carried it home on his shoulders, rejoicing,
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: and then he called his friends to celebrate. Jesus said,
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 1: who repents than over ninety nine righteous persons who need
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 1: no repentance. One sheep, one lost coin, one prodigal sown.
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: The stories are different, but the pattern is the same.
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: God goes after the one he searches for the one.
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 1: He moves toward the one still a long way off.
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: If you have ever felt like the one who is missing,
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: the one who wandered, the one who is not sure,
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: if anyone noticed you were gone, these stories were told
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: for you. He leaves the ninety nine and comes after
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 1: the one. He all has, He always will breathe. He
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: also told a story about a man going down from
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: Jerusalem to Jericho. The road from Jerusalem to Jericho drops
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 1: roughly three thousand feet in eighteen miles rocky desolate terrain.
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 1: The man on the road fell among robbers who stripped
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: him and beat him and left him half dead by
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 1: the roadside. A priest came down that road and saw
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: him and passed by on the other side. A levite
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: also came to the place and saw him, and passed
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: by on the other side. And then a Samaritan came.
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 1: When Jesus said a Samaritan, the crowd stiffened. Samaritans were
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: not heroes in Jewish stories. The division between them went
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: back centuries. A Jewish crowd listening to this parable expected
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 1: nothing good from a Samaritan. The samaritan saw the man,
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 1: and he had compassion. He went to him, he bound
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: his wounds. He put him on his own animal, and
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: brought him to an inn and took care of him.
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: The next morning, he gave the innkeeper money and said,
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 1: take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: will repay you when I come back. Jesus asked the
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: teacher of the law who had prompted the parable, which
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: of these three was a neighbor to the man who
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 1: fell into the hands of robbers. The teacher said, the
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: one who had mercy on him. He could not even
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 1: bring himself to say the word Samaritan. Jesus said, go
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: and do likewise. The parable was designed to break open
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: a specific assumption. The teacher had asked, who is my
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: neighbor as a way of defining the limits of obligation.
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: If I can determine who counts as my neighbor, I
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: can determine who I am permitted to ignore. Jesus eliminated
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: the question entirely. The neighbor is not defined by geography
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: or history or religion. The neighbor is defined by need,
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: and the response to that need is given freely at
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: personal cost, without any guarantee of return. Go and do likewise.
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: These teachings have outlasted every empire that existed when he
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 1: spoke them. The Roman empire that crucified him is gone.
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 1: The religious establishment that opposed him has been transformed beyond
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 1: recognition by the very faith it tried to extinguish. And
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 1: the words remain still unsettling, still turning assumptions upside down,
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: still finding the people who need to hear them, and
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 1: getting underneath the defenses, and doing their work in the
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: quiet places where arguments cannot reach. He did not explain
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 1: God with philosophy. He told stories, because stories go where
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: arguments cannot go. They slip past the guard at the
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 1: door of the mind and find the room where the
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 1: real decisions are made. They are still doing it. To night,
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: Sleep well, beloved. The stories have been told, the miracles
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: have multiplied, and now the road is turning toward Jerusalem
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: on a mountain. Something is about to happen that three
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: of his closest friends will spend the rest of their
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: lives trying to find words for good night. Chapter eight,
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: The Transfiguration and the Road to Jerusalem. There is a
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: moment in every great story where the nature of what
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: is actually happening becomes suddenly overwhelmingly clear, not to every one,
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: not to the crowd, to a few people brought close
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: enough to see something that most of the world is
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 1: not yet ready to see, A moment that does not
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: change the story's direction, but illuminates it, A moment that says,
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: this is what this has always been about, This is
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: who this person has always been. That moment happened on
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: a mountain. Jesus took Peter and James and John with him,
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: the same three he would later bring into the Garden
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: of gethsemone his inner circle. Within the inner circle, he
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: led them up a high mountain, apart from the others,
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 1: and then Jesus was transfigured before them. The word in
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: Greek is metamorpho, the root of our word metamorphosis, a
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: change of form, a transformation from one state into another.
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 1: Matthew says, his face shone like the sun. His clothes
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: became white as light. Mark says, his clothes became radiant,
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: intensely white, as no one on earth could bleach them.
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: For a moment, the veil that had always separated his
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 1: humanity from his divinity became thinner. What had always been
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 1: true about who Jesus was became briefly partially visible the
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 1: glory that the prophet Isaiah had seen filling the temple
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: in a vision that left him completely undone. That glory
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: became visible on a mountain to three fishermen who were
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 1: probably still not entirely sure what they had signed up
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: for when they left their nets, and two figures appeared
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 1: with him, Moses and Elijah. Moses, the Giver of the Law,
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: the one who had stood in the presence of God
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 1: on Mount Sinai and come down with his face shining
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 1: so brightly that the people could not look at him directly.
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 1: And Elijah, the great prophet, who had heard the voice
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 1: of God, not in the earthquake or the wind or
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: the fire, but in a still small voice. Two figures
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 1: from the deepest history of Israel, the two great pillars
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 1: of the Law and the prophets, everything the Jewish scriptures
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: had been building toward. And they were talking with Jesus.
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 1: Luke tells us what they were talking about. He says,
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: they spoke of his departure, which he was about to
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: accomplish at Jerusalem. The Greek word Luke uses for departure
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 1: is exodus. They were talking about the exodus he was
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: about to accomplish. That word was not chosen casually. It
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: echoed directly back to the event that had defined Israel's
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 1: identity more than any other, the original Exodus from Egypt,
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: the passage through the sea, liberation from slavery. Moses and Elijah,
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: the two great figures of that entire history, were on
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 1: a mountain with Jesus talking about the new and final Exodus,
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 1: the ultimate liberation, the passage through death that would open
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 1: away for every human being who had ever been enslaved
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 1: to sin, and the fear of death. Peter, waking from
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: something Luke describes as heavy sleep, saw the three of
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 1: them in their glory, and Peter did what Peter consistently
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: did throughout the Gospels. He started talking. He said, Master,
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 1: it is good that we are here. Let us make
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: three tents, one for you and one for Moses, and
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 1: one for Elijah. Luke ads gently that Peter did not
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: know what he was saying. Peter wanted to extend the moment,
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: to build something that would make it last, to contain
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: what was happening in a form that could be preserved
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 1: and returned to. This is a deeply human impulse when
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 1: something overwhelming and beautiful and true breaks into our ordinary experience.
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 1: We want to hold on to it. We want to
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 1: build something around it so it does not slip away.
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 1: But some moments are not meant to be housed. Some
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: moments are meant to be received and carried and allowed
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: to do their work. As you walk back down the
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 1: mountain into the ordinary life waiting below. While Peter was
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: still speaking, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 1: came out of the cloud. This is my beloved son,
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 1: with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him, the
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: same words spoken at the Jordan River, beloved son, well pleased,
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: but now with one addition, listen to him. The disciples
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 1: had seen Moses and Elijah standing with Jesus in glory,
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: and the voice said, listen to him. The Law and
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 1: the prophets had always been pointing toward this one. Now
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 1: they had at what they were pointing toward. When the
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: disciples heard the voice, they fell on their faces, filled
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: with awe. When they lifted their eyes, they saw no
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: one but Jesus. Only Moses and Elijah were gone. The
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 1: cloud had lifted, The ordinary mountain was an ordinary mountain again,
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: and Jesus was standing there, looking as he always looked,
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 1: And yet they could not unknow what they had just seen.
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 1: The ordinariness of his appearance would never be quite the
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: same now that they had seen, however, briefly, what was
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 1: behind it. Jesus touched them, He said, rise and have
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 1: no fear. As they came down from the mountain, he
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 1: told them to say nothing about what they had seen
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 1: until the Son of Man was raised from the dead.
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 1: They kept the matter to themselves, but they were questioning
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: what rising from the dead meant. They could not yet
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 1: hold together what they had seen on the mountain with
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 1: what he kept telling them was coming. The glory and
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 1: the suffering existed in a tension. They did not yet
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 1: have the framework to resolve. The Cross and the transfiguration
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: belonged to the same story, but they could not yet
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: see how breathe. After the transfiguration, something shifted in the
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: direction of Jesus's movement. Luke captures it in a single sentence.
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 1: He says, when the days drew near for him to
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: He set his face. That phrase, in the Greek carries
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: the quality of deliberate, settled, immovable, intention, the posture of
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: someone who has made a decision and is moving toward
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: it without wavering, choosing with full knowledge of what Jerusalem meant,
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: with the Exodus Moses and Elijah had spoken of still
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: present in his memory. He set his face toward Jerusalem,
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 1: and he kept walking along the road. He taught, he healed,
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 1: He answered the questions of pharisees and lawyers, who were
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: increasingly alarmed by the direction. Things were moving, but always moving,
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: always with the city on the horizon, always with the
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 1: face set. As he drew near to the city, he
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: came to Bethphage on the Mount of Olives. He sent
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: two disciples ahead to find a young donkey that had
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 1: never been ridden. They found it exactly as he had described.
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 1: They brought the donkey and set Jesus on it, And
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: as he rode toward Jerusalem, something extraordinary happened. The crowds
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: spread their cloaks on the road ahead of him. Others
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 1: cut branches from the trees, and the people shouted Hosanna
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 1: to the son of David. Blessed is he who comes
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: in the name of the Lord Hosanna in the highest.
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: Five hundred years before this day, the prophet Zachariah had written,
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion. Behold, your king is
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 1: coming to you, humble and mounted on a donkey. A
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: king on a donkey, the animal of ordinary travel, a
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: king arriving in a way that only the people looking
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: for the right kind of king would recognize. Some Pharisees
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: in the crowd said to Jesus, teach her, rebuke your disciples.
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 1: He said, I tell you, if these were silent, the
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 1: very stones would cry out. As he came over the
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 1: crest of the Mount of Olives and the city of
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: Jerusalem came into full view, Luke records something that stops you.
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 1: He wept over it. He saw the city spread out
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 1: before him, the temple gleaming in the late afternoon sun,
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: the ancient walls, the place where, in a matter of
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 1: days the most significant event in human history would take place.
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 1: And he wept. He said, would that you, even you,
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: had known on this day the things that make for peace.
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 1: He wept for the city that would reject him. He
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 1: wept for the people who were at this very moment
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 1: cutting branches and shouting his name, but who in a
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 1: few days would be shouting something else. Entirely. The determination,
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: and the grief, the willingness to go, and the sorrow
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 1: for what the going would cost everyone involved. He entered
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: the city, he went to the temple. He found the
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 1: outer courts, the space designated for gentiles to come and pray,
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 1: had been turned into a marketplace. Money changes, animal sellers,
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: the practical commerce of religious observance had taken over the
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 1: space meant for the prayer of all nations. Jesus drove
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: out everyone who was buying and selling. He overturned the
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 1: tables of the money changers. He said, it is written
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 1: my house shall be called a house of prayer, but
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 1: you have made it a den of robbers. The religious
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 1: leaders heard it and were furious. They were afraid of
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: the crowd, so they waited, looking for an opportunity. And
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: every morning that week Jesus returned to the temple and taught.
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: Every evening he went out to the Mount of Olives
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 1: and spent the night there. The face was set, the
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 1: city had been entered, the final week had begun. Sleep well, beloved,
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 1: To morrow night we will sit at the table, the
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 1: bread will be broken, the cup will be lifted, and
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 1: in an upper room in Jerusalem, words will be spoken
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 1: that have traveled through every century since, and arrived here
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: in this room to night, Good Night, Chapter nine, The
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: Last Supper. The room was already prepared when they arrived.
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 1: That detail carries more weight than it might first seem.
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 1: Jesus had arranged it carefully, quietly, without telling every one
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 1: where they were going. He had sent Peter and John
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 1: ahead with instructions to follow a man carrying a water
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: jar through the streets of Jerusalem until he entered a house,
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: and to ask the owner for the guest room. They
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 1: found it exactly as he had described large ready. The
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 1: secrecy was protection. Judas was still among them, and Jesus
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 1: needed these hours, the last hours before everything broke open.
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 1: He needed them uninterrupted. He needed them with the people
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 1: he loved. Thirteen men settled into the room as the
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 1: Passover evening began. The meal they were about to share
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 1: was more than a thousand years old. Every Jewish family
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: in Jerusalem. We was sitting down to the same feast
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: that night, the same elements on every table, the bitter
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 1: herbs for the bitterness of slavery in Egypt, the unleavened
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: bread for the haste of departure, the cups of wine
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 1: connected to the four promises God had spoken to Israel
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 1: in the Book of Exodus. I will bring you out,
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 1: I will deliver you, I will redeem you, I will
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: take you as my people. For more than a thousand years,
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 1: every passover table had been telling the same story. God
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 1: delivered his people from slavery. He kept his promises. But
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: the passover had always been pointing beyond itself. Every element
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 1: of it had been a picture drawn before the reality
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: it pointed to had arrived. The lamb was a picture.
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: The blood on the door post was a picture. The
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 1: liberation from bondage was a picture. The whole magnificent structure
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: of the feast had been carrying across more than a
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 1: thousand years, a meaning larger than Egypt and one nation's liberation.
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 1: And now the one toward whom all those pictures had
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: been pointing was sitting at the table. Before the meal
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 1: went further, Jesus stood up. He removed his outer robe.
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 1: He took a towel and tied it around his waist.
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 1: He poured water into a basin, and he began to
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 1: move around the table, kneeling before each person, washing their feet,
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 1: drying them with the towel. In the world they lived in.
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: Washing a guest's feet was assigned to the lowest servant
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: in the household, the one with the least standing of all,
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 1: And the lord and teacher of these men was on
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 1: his knees doing it. He went to each one, and
• 1:29:05
  Speaker 1: he did not stop. Before he reached Judas. He knew
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 1: what Judas had done and what Judas was about to do.
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 1: And Jesus knelt in front of him and lifted his
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 1: feet and washed them with his own hands, and dried
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 1: them with the towel at his waist. He washed the
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 1: feet of the one who would betray him. This was
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 1: the shape of his love, a love that did not
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: require the other person to deserve it, a love that
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 1: kept working even when the work was going to cost everything,
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 1: A love that served without making service conditional on response.
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: When he returned to his place, he said to them,
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 1: do you understand what I have done to you? You
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 1: call me teacher and Lord, and you are right, for
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 1: so I am. If I, then your lord and teacher,
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 1: another's feet, For I have given you an example that
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: you also should do, just as I have done to you.
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: You the basin and the towel were not only a lesson,
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: They were a love letter written in gesture before it
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 1: would be written in sacrifice. He was about to lower
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 1: himself into a depth of suffering no one in that
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 1: room could yet comprehend, and he was going to do
• 1:30:15
  Speaker 1: it for people who had not earned it, including the
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: one whose feet he had just dried. Breathe. Later in
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: the meal, he took the bread, He held it, he
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: gave thanks, and he broke it. The breaking of bread
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 1: at the Passover table was a gesture every man in
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 1: that room had known since childhood. They recognized it. They
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 1: did not recognize what he said next. He said, this
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 1: is my body, which is given for you. Do this
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: in remembrance of me. Take a moment with those words,
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: as words spoken by a living person to the people
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: he loved most, on the last night he would spend
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 1: with them before everything changed. This is my body which
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 1: is given for you. The word given carries in the
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: Greek the sense of something freely offered voluntarily, with full
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 1: knowledge of the cost. Something he was choosing to give
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 1: for you, the people in that room, and through them,
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 1: every person who would ever come to that table in
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: any century, in any language, in any corner of the world.
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 1: And then he took the cup. He gave thanks over
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: it and said, this cup that is poured out for
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: you is the new covenant in my blood, the cup
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 1: of Redemption that was its name at the Passover table,
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 1: the cup connected to the promise I will redeem you.
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 1: And now Jesus was saying that the redemption the cup
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: had always pointed toward was arriving. The new covenant, the
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 1: one the prophet Jeremiah had spoken of centuries before, written
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 1: on hearts rather than stone. Dealing with sin not by
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 1: covering it year after year, but by removing it completely
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 1: available to every one who would believe. He said, do
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 1: this in remembrance of me. He said it twice, once
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 1: with the bread, once with the cup. He wanted them
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: to keep coming back to the table, because he understood
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 1: something true about human beings. We forget. The weight of
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 1: the present presses harder than the memory of the past.
• 1:32:20
  Speaker 1: So he gave them something to return to a table, bread,
• 1:32:25
  Speaker 1: a cup. Come back, break the bread again, lift the
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 1: cup again, and remember, this is my body given for you.
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 1: This is the new covenant in my blood for you. Breathe.
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 1: After the meal, he spoke to them for a long time.
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 1: He told them he was going away, that where he
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 1: was going they could not follow yet, but they would
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 1: follow later. He said, do not let your hearts be troubled.
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 1: You believe in God, believe also in me. Thomas asked, Lord,
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: we do not know where you were going. How can
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 1: we know the way. Jesus said, I am the Way
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: and the Truth and the life. No one comes to
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 1: the Father except through me. He himself was the road.
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 1: He himself was the reality toward which all truth pointed.
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 1: He himself was the source from which life flowed. They
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 1: were looking for a direction, and he was telling them
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 1: the direction was a person. Finding the Father was not
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 1: a matter of navigating correctly, It was a matter of
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 1: knowing him. He told them about the Holy Spirit. He
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 1: called the Spirit the helper, the one who would come
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 1: alongside them, the one who would be in them rather
• 1:33:39
  Speaker 1: than merely beside them. He said it was to their
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 1: advantage that he go away, because if he did not go,
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 1: the Spirit would not come. But if he went, he
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 1: would send the Spirit to them. He said, I am
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 1: the vine. You are the branches. Whoever abides in me
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: and I in him he it is that bears much fruit.
• 1:33:59
  Speaker 1: For apart me, you can do nothing. The branches do
• 1:34:02
  Speaker 1: not produce fruit by their own effort and then present
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 1: it to the vine. The fruit comes through the connection,
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 1: the abiding, the remaining in him. That is what makes
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 1: everything else possible. He said, this is my commandment, that
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 1: you love one another as I have loved you. Greater
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: love has no one than this, that some one laid
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 1: down his life for his friends. He was ours from
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 1: laying down his life. He was saying that the love
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 1: he was about to demonstrate was not an isolated act.
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 1: It was the pattern, the template, the shape of what
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 1: love looked like in the kingdom he was establishing, And
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 1: he was calling them to love each other in the
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 1: same way they would be known by their love. And
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 1: then he said, in this world you will have tribulation.
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 1: But take heart, I have overcome the world. He did
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 1: not promise them easy, He promised them true. He offered
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 1: a presence in the difficulty that was stronger than the
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 1: difficulty itself. Take heart, the one standing with you in
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 1: it has already been to the worst place trouble can
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 1: take a person, and has not been defeated there. He
• 1:35:14
  Speaker 1: lifted his eyes toward heaven, and he prayed. He prayed
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 1: for the disciples in that room, that the Father would
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 1: keep them, protect them, sanctify them, that his joy would
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 1: be made full in them. And then he prayed for
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 1: every one who would come after. He said, I do
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 1: not ask for these only, but also for those who
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 1: will believe in me through their word. The eleven men
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 1: in that room were going to go out and tell
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 1: people about Jesus, and some would believe, and those would
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 1: tell others, and the circle would widen across centuries and
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 1: oceans and languages that none of the men in that
• 1:35:49
  Speaker 1: room had ever heard. And Jesus on that night in
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 1: that room, prayed for all of them. For you, before
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 1: you were born, he prayed for you. He prayed that
• 1:36:01
  Speaker 1: you would be one with him and with the Father,
• 1:36:03
  Speaker 1: that the love with which the Father loved the Sun
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 1: would be in you. He prayed that prayer for you
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 1: two thousand years before this night, and the prayer of
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 1: Jesus does not go unanswered. Breathe. When the prayer was finished,
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 1: they sang a hymn together, the ancient psalms traditionally sung
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 1: at the close of the passover. Psalms about deliverance, about
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 1: the steadfast love that endures forever about the stone the
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 1: builders rejected, becoming the corner stone. His voice with theirs.
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 1: In the lamp light of that room on the night
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 1: before the Cross, they sung. And then they went out
• 1:36:42
  Speaker 1: into the moonlit streets of Jerusalem and walked together toward
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 1: the valley, the same men who had argued about who
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 1: was greatest, the same men who would fall asleep in
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 1: the garden and flee into the darkness. When the soldiers came,
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 1: walking together in the silver light of a full passover moon,
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: Jesus walked with them, his face still set. Sleep well, beloved.
• 1:37:05
  Speaker 1: The table has been set, and the bread has been broken,
• 1:37:08
  Speaker 1: and the cup has been lifted, and the prayer has
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 1: been prayed that found you across two thousand years. The
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 1: table is still set. There is a place at it
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 1: for you, for the person you are right now. Good night,
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 1: Chapter ten the Cross. The garden was quiet when they arrived,
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 1: old olive trees, full moonlight on stone and earth, the
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 1: familiar smell of a place Jesus had come to many
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 1: times before. He had chosen it deliberately for that reason,
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 1: familiar ground, for the most unfamiliar thing he had ever faced.
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 1: He asked most of the disciples to sit and wait.
• 1:37:49
  Speaker 1: He took Peter and James and John further in, and
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 1: then something happened that the gospel writers recorded with a
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 1: care that tells us they understood they were preserving something
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 1: almost too intimate to share. He became deeply distressed. The
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 1: Greek words Matthew and Mark use reach for the outer
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 1: edges of what language can describe, a grief pressing outward
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: from every direction, a sorrow surrounding him on all sides.
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 1: He said to Peter and James and John, my soul
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 1: is very sorrowful, even to death. Remain here and watch
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 1: with me. He went a little further, and he fell
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 1: on his face on the ground, and he prayed, my father,
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 1: if it is possible, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless,
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 1: not as I will, but as you will. The one
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 1: who had set his face toward Jerusalem, the one who
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 1: had spoken clearly about what was coming, that one was
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: on his face in the dirt of a garden, asking
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 1: whether there was another way. He did not want to suffer,
• 1:38:51
  Speaker 1: not because he was confused about his mission, but because
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 1: he was fully human, and the suffering waiting in the
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 1: hours ahead was real. Suffering. The cross was not symbolic.
• 1:39:02
  Speaker 1: The grief was not metaphorical. He felt it in that garden,
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 1: in the dark, with his friends asleep a few yards away.
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 1: He felt the full weight of what was coming, and
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 1: he brought that weight to the father. Luke tells us
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 1: that in his anguish Jesus prayed more earnestly. His sweat
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 1: became like great drops of blood falling to the ground.
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 1: He came back and found the disciples sleeping. He woke them.
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 1: He went away and prayed the same prayer again, nevertheless,
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 1: not as I will, but as you will. He came back.
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 1: They were sleeping again. He went away a third time,
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 1: the same prayer, three times in the dark, three times,
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 1: pressing through to the same surrender. The nevertheless was real.
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 1: It cost something to say it, and he said it
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 1: three times to make sure it was completely meant. An
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 1: angel came from heaven and strengthened him after the faithfulness,
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 1: after the surrender was complete. The strengthening came after the
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 1: wilderness of the garden, not instead of it. He rose
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 1: from the ground. He came back to the sleeping disciples.
• 1:40:14
  Speaker 1: He said, rise, let us be going. See my betrayer
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 1: is at hand. While he was still speaking, torches appeared
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 1: at the edge of the garden, a crowd with swords
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 1: and clubs and walking at their front, knowing the garden.
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 1: Knowing exactly where to find them was Judas. Judas went
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 1: directly to Jesus. He said, greetings, Rabbi, and he kissed him.
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 1: Jesus said to him, Judas, would you betray the son
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 1: of man with a kiss? Peter drew a sword and
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 1: cut off the ear of the high priest's servant. Jesus
• 1:40:50
  Speaker 1: said no more of this. He reached out and touched
• 1:40:53
  Speaker 1: the man's ear and healed him. In the middle of
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 1: his own arrest, with soldiers surrounding him, he healed the
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: man who had come to take him away. The disciples fled,
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 1: every one of them. The men who had said at
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 1: the table they would never abandon him scattered into the
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 1: night and left him standing in the torchlight alone. He
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 1: let them go. The love that had decided before the
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 1: beginning of time to go all the way to the
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 1: end was not going to stop now, because the people
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 1: it was going for were running in the opposite direction.
• 1:41:25
  Speaker 1: He went with the soldiers willingly breathe. What followed was
• 1:41:31
  Speaker 1: a night without sleep, and a series of trials conducted
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 1: with almost complete disregard for justice. He was taken to
• 1:41:38
  Speaker 1: the high priest Caiaphas. The entire religious council was assembled
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 1: in the middle of the night. They looked for witnesses
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 1: whose testimonies would agree. They found none. Finally, Caiaphas asked
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 1: him directly, are you the Christ, the son of the blessed?
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 1: Jesus said, I am. Caiaphas tore his robes. What further
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 1: witnesses do we need? You have heard his blasphemy. They
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 1: condemned him as deserving death. They spat on him, they
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 1: blindfolded him, and struck him. Through all of it, he
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 1: was nearly silent. The verdict had been decided before the
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 1: trial began. In the courtyard outside, Peter was warming himself
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 1: at a fire. Three times people identified him as one
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 1: of Jesus's companions. Three times Peter denied it. I do
• 1:42:28
  Speaker 1: not know the man. The third time, a rooster crowed,
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 1: and Jesus turned and looked at Peter. In the middle
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 1: of everything happening to him, he turned and looked at
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 1: the man who had just denied him. Three times. We
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 1: are not told what was in that look. But Peter
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 1: went out and wept bitterly, the weeping of a man
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 1: who had seen something in that look that undid him completely.
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 1: In the morning, they brought Jesus to punch his Pilot,
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 1: the Roman governor. Pilot questioned him and found no guilt
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 1: in him him he offered to release a prisoner, as
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 1: was his custom at Passover. He asked if they wanted
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 1: him to release Jesus. The crowd shouted for Barabas, a
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 1: man imprisoned for insurrection and murder. Pilot asked, then, what
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 1: shall I do with Jesus, who is called Christ? They said,
• 1:43:20
  Speaker 1: let him be crucified. Pilot washed his hands before the crowd.
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 1: He released Barabbas, and he handed Jesus over to be crucified.
• 1:43:30
  Speaker 1: They led him out to a place called Golgatha, which
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 1: means the place of a skull, just outside the city walls,
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 1: and there they crucified him between two criminals, one on
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 1: his right and one on his left. Above his head,
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 1: they placed the charge against him, written in three languages,
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 1: so that everyone passing could read it. This is Jesus,
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 1: the King of the Jews. Breathe from the cross. He
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 1: spoke the first words were not about his own suffering.
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 1: He looked at the soldiers and the crowd, and the
• 1:44:02
  Speaker 1: religious leaders watching, and he said, Father, forgive them, for
• 1:44:06
  Speaker 1: they know not what they do. Father, forgive them. Before
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 1: anything else. Before addressing the injustice of what was happening
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 1: to him, he asked forgiveness for the people doing it.
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 1: The love that had washed Judas's feet at the table
• 1:44:21
  Speaker 1: aer the love that had healed the ear of the
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 1: man in the garden. That love did not stop at
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 1: the cross. It kept going all the way to the end.
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 1: One of the criminals crucified beside him, said, Jesus, remember
• 1:44:36
  Speaker 1: me when you come into your kingdom. He had nothing
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 1: to offer, no time left, no way to make anything right,
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 1: just a request to be remembered. Jesus said to him, truly,
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 1: I say to you, to day you will be with
• 1:44:51
  Speaker 1: me in paradise, to day, not eventually paradise. Together near
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: the cross stood his and John. Jesus looked at his
• 1:45:03
  Speaker 1: mother and said, woman, behold your son, and to John,
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 1: behold your mother. In the middle of dying, he made
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 1: sure she would be cared for. At noon, darkness came
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 1: over the whole land and lasted until three in the afternoon,
• 1:45:18
  Speaker 1: and at three Jesus cried out, my God, My God,
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 1: why have you forsaken me? The opening words of the
• 1:45:25
  Speaker 1: twenty second Psalm, a psalm that begins in the depths
• 1:45:29
  Speaker 1: of desolation and ends in the declaration that He has
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 1: done it written more than a thousand years before this hill,
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 1: describing what was happening on this hill with a precision
• 1:45:40
  Speaker 1: that has no ordinary explanation. He was reaching for the
• 1:45:43
  Speaker 1: words of the Father, even from the depths of the cross.
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 1: After this Jesus said, I thirst. And then when he
• 1:45:51
  Speaker 1: had received the sour wine, he said one word, tetelestai.
• 1:45:56
  Speaker 1: It is finished, not I am finished. It is finished.
• 1:46:01
  Speaker 1: The Greek is an accounting term paid in full, completed,
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 1: a debt discharged, a work brought to its intended conclusion.
• 1:46:11
  Speaker 1: The exodus was accomplished, the judgment had been absorbed. The
• 1:46:16
  Speaker 1: separation between humanity and God that sin had opened was
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 1: being closed at the cost of the one who had
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 1: done nothing to create it. It is finished. His last
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 1: words were a prayer, Father, into your hands, I commit
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 1: my spirit, And having said this, he breathed his last.
• 1:46:35
  Speaker 1: At that moment, the curtain of the temple was torn
• 1:46:37
  Speaker 1: in two from top to bottom. The thick curtain separating
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 1: the Holy of Holies from everything else torn from the top.
• 1:46:46
  Speaker 1: The way into the presence of God was now open
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 1: through the one who had just said it is finished.
• 1:46:52
  Speaker 1: Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the council who had
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 1: not consented to what they had done, went to Pilot
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 1: and asked for the body. Pilot gave permission. Joseph took
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 1: the body down, wrapped it in linen, and laid it
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 1: in a tomb cut in rock where no one had
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 1: ever been laid. The Sabbath was beginning. The women who
• 1:47:11
  Speaker 1: had followed from Galilee saw the tomb and how his
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 1: body was laid. They returned and prepared spices, and on
• 1:47:19
  Speaker 1: the Sabbath they rested. The stone was sealed, the guard
• 1:47:23
  Speaker 1: was posted. The world went quiet, and in the silence
• 1:47:27
  Speaker 1: of that day, something was present in the darkness of
• 1:47:30
  Speaker 1: that tomb that the darkness had never encountered before. The
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 1: author of life in the place of death, with the
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 1: deed already done, the word already spoken, the cup already
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 1: emptied to the last drop, it is finished. Rest in
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 1: that to night, beloved, Let the darkness be what it is,
• 1:47:50
  Speaker 1: because the glory of the morning that is coming is
• 1:47:53
  Speaker 1: only fully visible against the depth of this darkness. He
• 1:47:57
  Speaker 1: is in the dark too, good Night, Chapter eleven. The Resurrection.
• 1:48:06
  Speaker 1: Sunday came like all Sundays come, without announcing itself, without
• 1:48:11
  Speaker 1: visible signs that this morning would be different from the
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 1: morning before. The city was still. The streets of Jerusalem
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 1: in the early hours before dawn were quiet, in the
• 1:48:20
  Speaker 1: way that cities are quiet when most people are still asleep.
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 1: But the women were not asleep. Mary Magdalene, Mary the
• 1:48:29
  Speaker 1: mother of James, Joanna, Salome, others whose names some gospels
• 1:48:35
  Speaker 1: record and some do not. They had been preparing their
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 1: spices since before the sabbath began. They had waited through
• 1:48:42
  Speaker 1: the longest sabbath of their lives, and before the sun
• 1:48:46
  Speaker 1: was fully over the horizon. On the first day of
• 1:48:48
  Speaker 1: the week, they were moving through the dark streets toward
• 1:48:51
  Speaker 1: the tomb. As they walked, they said to one another,
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: who will roll away the stone for us from the
• 1:48:56
  Speaker 1: entrance of the tomb. It was a practical concern. The
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 1: stone was large. They knew they could not move it themselves.
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 1: They were going to the tomb with everything they needed
• 1:49:08
  Speaker 1: for the burial, preparation except a way to get inside.
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 1: But when they arrived, the stone had already been rolled away.
• 1:49:16
  Speaker 1: The guards who had been posted were gone. An angel
• 1:49:19
  Speaker 1: had descended from heaven, Matthew tells us, rolled back the
• 1:49:22
  Speaker 1: stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning,
• 1:49:26
  Speaker 1: and his clothing white as snow. The guards had shaken
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 1: with fear and become like dead men. The angel said
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 1: to the women, do not be afraid, for I know
• 1:49:36
  Speaker 1: that you seek Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here,
• 1:49:39
  Speaker 1: for he has risen. As he said, Come see the
• 1:49:43
  Speaker 1: place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his
• 1:49:46
  Speaker 1: disciples that he has risen from the dead. He is
• 1:49:49
  Speaker 1: not here, for he has risen. The resurrection was not
• 1:49:53
  Speaker 1: a resuscitation. It was not a return to the life
• 1:49:56
  Speaker 1: he had before the cross. What came out of that, too,
• 1:50:00
  Speaker 1: whom was something the world had been given the language
• 1:50:02
  Speaker 1: for through the prophets, but had never actually seen the
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 1: living one who had been dead and was now alive
• 1:50:11
  Speaker 1: and would never die again. The women left quickly with
• 1:50:14
  Speaker 1: fear and great joy, and ran to tell the disciples
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 1: fear and great joy both at once. The particular state
• 1:50:23
  Speaker 1: of a person standing inside something so far outside the
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 1: range of ordinary experience that the heart does not know
• 1:50:29
  Speaker 1: whether to be terrified or overwhelmed with happiness, and so
• 1:50:33
  Speaker 1: it is both simultaneously breathe. Mary Magdalen ran ahead of
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 1: the others and found Peter and John. She said, they
• 1:50:42
  Speaker 1: have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 1: do not know where they have laid him. She did
• 1:50:47
  Speaker 1: not yet understand. Her grief had not made room for
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 1: a different explanation. Peter and John ran to the tomb.
• 1:50:55
  Speaker 1: John arrived first. He bent and looked in and saw
• 1:50:59
  Speaker 1: the linen cloth lying there, but did not go in.
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 1: Peter arrived and went straight inside. He saw the linen
• 1:51:06
  Speaker 1: cloths lying there, and the face cloth that had been
• 1:51:09
  Speaker 1: on Jesus's head not lying with the other cloths, but
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 1: folded up in a place by itself, the folded face cloth.
• 1:51:17
  Speaker 1: That detail has stayed in the imagination of readers across
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 1: twenty centuries. Grave robbers do not fold things. Some one
• 1:51:25
  Speaker 1: who took a body in haste would not have taken
• 1:51:27
  Speaker 1: the time to fold the cloth that had covered the
• 1:51:30
  Speaker 1: face and place it separately. The tomb was empty because
• 1:51:34
  Speaker 1: its occupant had no further use for the cloths, and
• 1:51:37
  Speaker 1: had left them behind with the unhurried care of some
• 1:51:39
  Speaker 1: one who was finished with them, and moving on. John
• 1:51:42
  Speaker 1: saw and believed Peter went home wondering. Mary Magdalene had
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 1: returned to the tomb alone. She stood outside, weeping. As
• 1:51:52
  Speaker 1: she wept, she bent and looked in and saw two
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 1: angels sitting where the body of Jesus had been, one
• 1:51:58
  Speaker 1: at the head and one at the feet. They said
• 1:52:00
  Speaker 1: to her, woman, why are you weeping? She said, they
• 1:52:05
  Speaker 1: have taken away my lord, and I do not know
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 1: where they have laid him. She turned round and saw
• 1:52:11
  Speaker 1: Jesus standing there. She supposed him to be the gardener.
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: She said, sir, if you have carried him away, tell
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 1: me where you have laid him, and I will take
• 1:52:20
  Speaker 1: him away. Jesus said to her Mary one word her name,
• 1:52:27
  Speaker 1: and everything changed. She turned and said to him, Raboni,
• 1:52:31
  Speaker 1: teach her. The first word spoken by the risen Jesus
• 1:52:35
  Speaker 1: in the Gospel of John was a person's name, not
• 1:52:38
  Speaker 1: a proclamation, not a declaration of divine power. A name,
• 1:52:44
  Speaker 1: her name spoken in the voice. She knew the way
• 1:52:48
  Speaker 1: he had always said it. She knew him by her
• 1:52:51
  Speaker 1: name in his mouth. This is one of the most
• 1:52:53
  Speaker 1: intimate moments in the entire story. The risen Lord of
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 1: all creation, in his first recorded word after conquering death,
• 1:53:01
  Speaker 1: spoke the name of one person, a woman who had
• 1:53:05
  Speaker 1: come to the tomb in grief to do the last
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 1: thing she could do for the one she had followed
• 1:53:09
  Speaker 1: from Galilee. He saw her, he called her by name.
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 1: She knew him. Mary Magdalene was the first person to
• 1:53:17
  Speaker 1: see the risen Jesus in a world where women's testimony
• 1:53:21
  Speaker 1: was not considered legally credible, a woman who had stayed
• 1:53:25
  Speaker 1: at the cross when the disciples had fled. God does
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 1: not select his witnesses by the world's criteria for credibility.
• 1:53:32
  Speaker 1: He selects them by presents and by love breathe. That
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 1: same day, two disciples were walking from Jerusalem to a
• 1:53:40
  Speaker 1: village called Emmaeus, about seven miles. Their faces were downcast.
• 1:53:46
  Speaker 1: They were talking about everything that had happened. A stranger
• 1:53:50
  Speaker 1: fell into step beside them and asked what they were discussing.
• 1:53:53
  Speaker 1: They stopped walking. One of them, named Cleopus, said, are
• 1:53:58
  Speaker 1: you the only visitor to Jerusale who does not know
• 1:54:01
  Speaker 1: the things that have happened there in these days? The
• 1:54:04
  Speaker 1: stranger asked what things and they told him about Jesus
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 1: of Nazareth, a prophet mighty in deed and word, about
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 1: how the chief priests and rulers had crucified him, about
• 1:54:19
  Speaker 1: how they had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel,
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 1: About how it had now been three days, and about
• 1:54:26
  Speaker 1: the women who went to the tomb that morning and
• 1:54:28
  Speaker 1: found it empty and saw a vision of angels, who
• 1:54:30
  Speaker 1: said he was alive. They said, but him they did
• 1:54:34
  Speaker 1: not see. The stranger, said, O, foolish ones and slow
• 1:54:38
  Speaker 1: of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.
• 1:54:41
  Speaker 1: Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 1: things and enter into his glory? And, beginning with Moses
• 1:54:48
  Speaker 1: and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 1: the scriptures, the things concerning himself. They drew near to
• 1:54:55
  Speaker 1: the village. The stranger acted as if he were going further.
• 1:54:59
  Speaker 1: They urged him stay with us, for it is toward
• 1:55:02
  Speaker 1: evening and the day is now far spent. He went
• 1:55:05
  Speaker 1: in with them. When he was at table with them,
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 1: he took the bread and blessed it, and broke it
• 1:55:10
  Speaker 1: and gave it to them, And their eyes were opened,
• 1:55:13
  Speaker 1: and they recognized him, and he vanished from their sight.
• 1:55:18
  Speaker 1: They said to each other, did not our hearts burn
• 1:55:21
  Speaker 1: within us? While he talked to us on the road,
• 1:55:24
  Speaker 1: while he opened to us the scriptures. Their hearts had
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 1: been burning the whole time. The recognition came at the
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 1: breaking of the bread, the gesture they had seen in
• 1:55:34
  Speaker 1: an upper room just days before, and in the moment
• 1:55:37
  Speaker 1: of recognition he was gone. They rose that same hour
• 1:55:41
  Speaker 1: and returned to Jerusalem, seven miles back in the dark,
• 1:55:46
  Speaker 1: because there was no longer any reason to stay in Emaus,
• 1:55:49
  Speaker 1: and no longer any reason to walk slowly. They found
• 1:55:53
  Speaker 1: the disciples gathered together and said, the Lord has risen, indeed,
• 1:55:57
  Speaker 1: And as they were saying these things, Gee, Jesus himself
• 1:56:00
  Speaker 1: stood among them. He said, peace to you. They were
• 1:56:04
  Speaker 1: startled and frightened. They thought they were seeing a spirit.
• 1:56:08
  Speaker 1: He said, why are you troubled, and why do doubts
• 1:56:12
  Speaker 1: arise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet
• 1:56:15
  Speaker 1: that it is I myself. Touch me and see, for
• 1:56:19
  Speaker 1: a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you
• 1:56:22
  Speaker 1: see that I have. He showed them his hands and
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 1: his feet. The marks were still there. The resurrection body
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 1: carried the wounds of the cross. He came back with them,
• 1:56:33
  Speaker 1: and then he said, do you have anything here to eat?
• 1:56:36
  Speaker 1: They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he
• 1:56:39
  Speaker 1: took it and ate before them. The risen Lord sat
• 1:56:43
  Speaker 1: down and ate fish with his friends, the same hands
• 1:56:46
  Speaker 1: that had broken the bread in the upper room, the
• 1:56:49
  Speaker 1: same voice that had said it is finished from the cross,
• 1:56:53
  Speaker 1: eating fish in a room in Jerusalem with the people
• 1:56:55
  Speaker 1: he loved breathe. Thomas was not there that evening. When
• 1:57:00
  Speaker 1: the others told him we have seen the Lord. He said,
• 1:57:03
  Speaker 1: unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails,
• 1:57:06
  Speaker 1: and place my finger into the mark of the nails,
• 1:57:09
  Speaker 1: and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.
• 1:57:13
  Speaker 1: Eight days later Jesus came again. He stood among them
• 1:57:17
  Speaker 1: and said, peace to you. Then he turned to Thomas.
• 1:57:21
  Speaker 1: Put your finger here and see my hands. Put out
• 1:57:24
  Speaker 1: your hand and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve,
• 1:57:28
  Speaker 1: but believe, Thomas said, my Lord and my God. Jesus
• 1:57:33
  Speaker 1: said to him, Have you believed because you have seen me?
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 1: Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.
• 1:57:40
  Speaker 1: Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 2: You.
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 1: Every one who has come to faith in Jesus without
• 1:57:48
  Speaker 1: the physical evidence Thomas received, without seeing the hands, without
• 1:57:53
  Speaker 1: touching the side. Every one who has heard these words
• 1:57:56
  Speaker 1: across two thousand years and found something in them that
• 1:58:00
  Speaker 1: rang true without being fully able to explain why blessed.
• 1:58:05
  Speaker 1: The faith that comes without physical sight is itself a
• 1:58:08
  Speaker 1: kind of gift. The willingness to trust what is true
• 1:58:12
  Speaker 1: before it becomes fully visible, the same quality of trust
• 1:58:17
  Speaker 1: that Mary demonstrated in Nazareth when she said, let it
• 1:58:20
  Speaker 1: be to me according to your word. He appeared many
• 1:58:24
  Speaker 1: times in the forty days that followed. On the shore
• 1:58:27
  Speaker 1: of the Sea of Galilee. He was standing in the
• 1:58:30
  Speaker 1: early morning when the disciples came in from a fruitless
• 1:58:33
  Speaker 1: night of fishing. He told them to cast their net
• 1:58:36
  Speaker 1: on the right side. The net filled and did not tear.
• 1:58:40
  Speaker 1: John said to Peter, it is the Lord. Peter jumped
• 1:58:44
  Speaker 1: into the water. When they came to shore, Jesus had
• 1:58:47
  Speaker 1: a charcoal fire going fish on it. Bread. He said,
• 1:58:53
  Speaker 1: come and have breakfast. The risen Lord had breakfast waiting
• 1:58:56
  Speaker 1: on the shore of the lake. After they had eaten,
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 1: Jesus spoke to Peter three times. He asked, do love me,
• 1:59:04
  Speaker 1: once for each denial In the courtyard. Each time Peter
• 1:59:08
  Speaker 1: said yes, Jesus said, feed my sheep. The restoration was complete.
• 1:59:14
  Speaker 1: The one who had wept bitterly in the courtyard was
• 1:59:16
  Speaker 1: standing on the shore of the lake. He had grown
• 1:59:19
  Speaker 1: up on being given back the calling that the denial
• 1:59:22
  Speaker 1: had seemed to disqualify him from love. Then feed my sheep.
• 1:59:27
  Speaker 1: The pattern was clear, not guilt driven serviss not performance
• 1:59:33
  Speaker 1: shaped by shame, Love that expresses itself in care for
• 1:59:37
  Speaker 1: the people Jesus cares about. Sleep well, beloved. The resurrection
• 1:59:42
  Speaker 1: is real. The tomb is empty. The hands that were
• 1:59:46
  Speaker 1: pierced are the hands that broke bread on the shore.
• 1:59:49
  Speaker 1: The voice that said it is finished is the voice
• 1:59:52
  Speaker 1: that said come and have breakfast. He is alive, present
• 1:59:56
  Speaker 1: in every room where someone lies awake in the dark
• 1:59:59
  Speaker 1: and knee to know that death does not have the
• 2:00:02
  Speaker 1: final word good night. Chapter twelve, The Ascension and the Promise.
• 2:00:11
  Speaker 1: Forty days after the resurrection, Jesus led his disciples out
• 2:00:15
  Speaker 1: of Jerusalem one final time. Forty days of appearances, forty
• 2:00:20
  Speaker 1: days of eating with them and teaching them, and opening
• 2:00:23
  Speaker 1: the scriptures to them and showing them the things concerning
• 2:00:26
  Speaker 1: the Kingdom of God. The shock of the Resurrection had
• 2:00:29
  Speaker 1: gradually settled into the beginnings of understanding, not complete understanding.
• 2:00:34
  Speaker 1: They would spend the rest of their lives growing into
• 2:00:37
  Speaker 1: what those days had meant, but the foundation had been laid.
• 2:00:41
  Speaker 1: He led them out to the Mount of Olives, the
• 2:00:44
  Speaker 1: same ridge of hills east of Jerusalem where he had
• 2:00:46
  Speaker 1: wept over the city on the day of his entry.
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 1: The same hillside where the garden of Gethsemone sat among
• 2:00:52
  Speaker 1: its ancient olive trees, The same ground where the disciples
• 2:00:56
  Speaker 1: had scattered when the soldiers came with torches. He was
• 2:00:59
  Speaker 1: returned learning to this place one final time. Before he left,
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 1: they asked him a question, Lord, will you at this
• 2:01:06
  Speaker 1: time restore the kingdom to Israel? Even now, after the
• 2:01:11
  Speaker 1: Cross and the resurrection and forty days of teaching, they
• 2:01:14
  Speaker 1: were still thinking about the kingdom in the terms they
• 2:01:17
  Speaker 1: had grown up with the political restoration of their nation.
• 2:01:21
  Speaker 1: He answered them with gentleness, He said, it is not
• 2:01:25
  Speaker 1: for you to know times or seasons that the Father
• 2:01:28
  Speaker 1: has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive
• 2:01:31
  Speaker 1: power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and
• 2:01:35
  Speaker 1: you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all
• 2:01:38
  Speaker 1: Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.
• 2:01:42
  Speaker 1: To the end of the earth, their imaginations had been
• 2:01:45
  Speaker 1: fixed on Israel. His eyes were on the world, every nation,
• 2:01:51
  Speaker 1: every language, every culture, every corner of the earth, where
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 1: human beings lived and suffered and hoped and wondered if
• 2:01:59
  Speaker 1: there was something true, who worth trusting. And then while
• 2:02:02
  Speaker 1: they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud
• 2:02:06
  Speaker 1: took him out of their sight. They stood there looking
• 2:02:09
  Speaker 1: up into the sky where he had been, still looking
• 2:02:13
  Speaker 1: as if looking hard enough and long enough would bring
• 2:02:15
  Speaker 1: him back into view. Two men in white robes appeared
• 2:02:19
  Speaker 1: beside them and said, men of Galilee, why do you
• 2:02:22
  Speaker 1: stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up
• 2:02:25
  Speaker 1: from you into heaven, will come in the same way
• 2:02:28
  Speaker 1: as you saw him go into heaven. Why do you
• 2:02:30
  Speaker 1: stand looking into heaven? It is a redirection. The work
• 2:02:35
  Speaker 1: was not finished. The witnesses to the end of the
• 2:02:38
  Speaker 1: Earth did not accomplish their testimony by standing on a
• 2:02:41
  Speaker 1: hill side looking up. The ascension was a transition, a
• 2:02:45
  Speaker 1: new way of Jesus being present in the world. When
• 2:02:48
  Speaker 1: he had been with them in his physical body, he
• 2:02:50
  Speaker 1: could only be in one place at one time. That
• 2:02:54
  Speaker 1: was about to change. He had told them at the
• 2:02:56
  Speaker 1: table that it was to their advantage that he go away,
• 2:03:00
  Speaker 1: that if he did not go, the helper would not come.
• 2:03:03
  Speaker 1: But if he went, he would send the Spirit. The
• 2:03:06
  Speaker 1: Spirit would be in them, not merely beside them, in
• 2:03:09
  Speaker 1: every one of them, simultaneously anywhere they went to the
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 1: end of the earth. The ascension was not Jesus leaving
• 2:03:17
  Speaker 1: the world. It was Jesus expanding his presence in the
• 2:03:21
  Speaker 1: world through the Spirit, who would make his home in
• 2:03:24
  Speaker 1: the hearts of all who believed, through the community of people,
• 2:03:28
  Speaker 1: who would carry his life and his love into every
• 2:03:31
  Speaker 1: corner of the world that had not yet heard his name.
• 2:03:34
  Speaker 1: He left so he could be everywhere. The disciples returned
• 2:03:38
  Speaker 1: to Jerusalem with great joy. They returned to an upper
• 2:03:41
  Speaker 1: room and devoted themselves to prayer, waiting for what had
• 2:03:46
  Speaker 1: been promised. Ten days later, on the day of Pentecost,
• 2:03:50
  Speaker 1: the promise arrived. A sound like a mighty rushing wind
• 2:03:54
  Speaker 1: filled the house. Tongues of fire rested on each of them,
• 2:03:58
  Speaker 1: and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit. Peter,
• 2:04:02
  Speaker 1: who had wept bitterly in a courtyard, who had been
• 2:04:04
  Speaker 1: restored on a lake shore with three questions, and three
• 2:04:07
  Speaker 1: answers stood up in Jerusalem and preached to the enormous
• 2:04:11
  Speaker 1: crowd gathered for the feast. He preached about Jesus, the Cross,
• 2:04:16
  Speaker 1: and the Resurrection, the promise of the Spirit, the invitations
• 2:04:20
  Speaker 1: still open. Three thousand people believed that day, three thousand
• 2:04:25
  Speaker 1: people who came to Jerusalem for a festival and went
• 2:04:27
  Speaker 1: home carrying something they had not expected to find. The
• 2:04:31
  Speaker 1: community of the New Covenant had begun. The witnesses were
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 1: going out. The story that started with an angel standing
• 2:04:38
  Speaker 1: in a small room in Nazareth was expanding outward toward
• 2:04:41
  Speaker 1: the end of the earth, and it has not stopped.
• 2:04:45
  Speaker 1: Breathe Consider what has traveled from that hillside outside Jerusalem
• 2:04:50
  Speaker 1: to reach you tonight. The eleven Disciples told others. Those
• 2:04:54
  Speaker 1: others told others. The message spread across the Roman Empire
• 2:04:59
  Speaker 1: and beyond. It was carried by merchants and soldiers and
• 2:05:02
  Speaker 1: slaves and free people, and scholars and ordinary men and
• 2:05:06
  Speaker 1: women who could not keep to themselves what had happened
• 2:05:09
  Speaker 1: when they encountered Jesus. It was written down, copied by
• 2:05:13
  Speaker 1: hand for centuries before printing existed, translated into language after language,
• 2:05:19
  Speaker 1: carried across oceans, spoken in villages that had no roads,
• 2:05:24
  Speaker 1: preserved through persecution and the burning of books, and the
• 2:05:28
  Speaker 1: silencing of voices that could not ultimately be silenced. And
• 2:05:32
  Speaker 1: it arrived here to whatever city you are in to night,
• 2:05:36
  Speaker 1: to whatever room, to whatever state of mind and heart
• 2:05:40
  Speaker 1: you carried into this night. The chain of testimony has
• 2:05:43
  Speaker 1: not broken. And the one who ascended from the Mount
• 2:05:46
  Speaker 1: of Olives and sent his spirit is still present in
• 2:05:50
  Speaker 1: every room where his name is known, in every heart
• 2:05:53
  Speaker 1: that has opened to receive him. He left so he
• 2:05:56
  Speaker 1: could be everywhere, and so he is. He is here
• 2:06:01
  Speaker 1: in this room with you, right now, as close as
• 2:06:06
  Speaker 1: the quiet around you, as near as the breath in
• 2:06:09
  Speaker 1: your lungs. The life he lived, from the annunciation to
• 2:06:12
  Speaker 1: the ascension was lived for this, for the night when
• 2:06:16
  Speaker 1: you would be still enough and open enough to hear it.
• 2:06:19
  Speaker 1: He did all of it for you, every step on
• 2:06:22
  Speaker 1: every dusty road, every word spoken to every broken person,
• 2:06:27
  Speaker 1: every miracle, every story, every prayer on the Mount of Olives,
• 2:06:33
  Speaker 1: the garden, the cross, the tomb, the folded face cloth,
• 2:06:39
  Speaker 1: the breakfast, fire on the shore of the lake, the
• 2:06:42
  Speaker 1: cloud above the hill, all of it moving toward this moment.
• 2:06:46
  Speaker 1: Toward you. Sleep well, beloved. The story is complete, from
• 2:06:52
  Speaker 1: the annunciation to the ascension, thirty three years, every moment
• 2:06:57
  Speaker 1: of the Saviour's time on earth. He is not far.
• 2:07:00
  Speaker 1: He never was. Good night.
• 2:07:07
  Speaker 2: Let us pray, Father, We come to you at the
• 2:07:11
  Speaker 2: end of a long night and a long story, A
• 2:07:14
  Speaker 2: story that began with an angel's whisper in a small
• 2:07:17
  Speaker 2: room in Nazareth and ended with a cloud receiving your
• 2:07:20
  Speaker 2: son above a hillside outside Jerusalem. A story that has
• 2:07:25
  Speaker 2: been traveling toward the people listening to these words for
• 2:07:28
  Speaker 2: two thousand years and has arrived here to night, in
• 2:07:32
  Speaker 2: this room, in this quiet in whatever each person carried
• 2:07:36
  Speaker 2: into this night that they could not set down anywhere else.
• 2:07:41
  Speaker 2: Thank you for the life he lived, for the hidden
• 2:07:44
  Speaker 2: years in Nazareth, for the sawdust and the ordinary meals
• 2:07:48
  Speaker 2: and the Sabbath walks, and the long, patient decades of
• 2:07:51
  Speaker 2: a life lived faithfully in the sight of no one
• 2:07:54
  Speaker 2: in particular. There is some one listening to night who
• 2:07:58
  Speaker 2: is in a hidden season, a season where the work
• 2:08:01
  Speaker 2: feels invisible and the days feel unremarkable, and the life
• 2:08:05
  Speaker 2: they are living does not look like the life they imagined.
• 2:08:09
  Speaker 2: Let them hear tonight what those thirty years in Nazareth
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 2: say to them. The favor of God rests on ordinary faithfulness.
• 2:08:18
  Speaker 2: The hidden years are not wasted, they never were. Thank
• 2:08:22
  Speaker 2: you for the way he began beside a lake with fishermen,
• 2:08:27
  Speaker 2: at a wedding where the wine had run out, at
• 2:08:30
  Speaker 2: a well at noon with a woman who had been
• 2:08:32
  Speaker 2: avoiding everyone. He went to the people the world walked past,
• 2:08:37
  Speaker 2: and he stopped. He saw them completely. He offered them
• 2:08:41
  Speaker 2: the best thing he had to give. There is someone
• 2:08:44
  Speaker 2: listening tonight who has felt for a long time like
• 2:08:47
  Speaker 2: the person others walk past without seeing. Let them feel
• 2:08:52
  Speaker 2: tonight what it means to be stopped for, to be seen,
• 2:08:56
  Speaker 2: to have someone offer something that does not require you
• 2:08:59
  Speaker 2: to disay, deserve it first. Thank you for the cross,
• 2:09:03
  Speaker 2: for the garden where he prayed three times and surrendered
• 2:09:06
  Speaker 2: three times and meant it all three times. For the
• 2:09:10
  Speaker 2: love that went all the way to the end without flinching.
• 2:09:13
  Speaker 2: For the words spoken from that hill. Father, forgive them today,
• 2:09:19
  Speaker 2: you will be with me in paradise. It is finished.
• 2:09:23
  Speaker 2: There is someone listening tonight who carries guilt that has
• 2:09:26
  Speaker 2: not lifted, something done or left Undone that follows them
• 2:09:30
  Speaker 2: into every quiet moment. Let the word from the Cross
• 2:09:34
  Speaker 2: reach them tonight as the gift it actually is. It
• 2:09:38
  Speaker 2: is finished, paid in full. The debt does not exist anymore.
• 2:09:44
  Speaker 2: Let them receive that. Thank you for the resurrection, for
• 2:09:48
  Speaker 2: the empty tomb and the folded cloth, and the angel
• 2:09:51
  Speaker 2: saying he is not here, for he has risen. For
• 2:09:55
  Speaker 2: Mary hearing her name spoken in the garden and knowing
• 2:09:58
  Speaker 2: him by it, For Tom putting his hands in the
• 2:10:01
  Speaker 2: wounds and saying, my Lord and my God. For the
• 2:10:04
  Speaker 2: breakfast fire on the shore of the lake, and the
• 2:10:07
  Speaker 2: three Questions and the three answers, and the restoration of
• 2:10:11
  Speaker 2: the one who had failed three times. There is some
• 2:10:14
  Speaker 2: one listening to night for whom hope has become very difficult,
• 2:10:19
  Speaker 2: who has been in their own version of that silent
• 2:10:21
  Speaker 2: Saturday for longer than they expected. Let them here to night,
• 2:10:25
  Speaker 2: that Sunday morning is real. That the one who stood
• 2:10:29
  Speaker 2: outside a four day old tomb and called a dead
• 2:10:32
  Speaker 2: man by name has not lost his voice. He is
• 2:10:36
  Speaker 2: still calling. Thank you for the ascension and the promise,
• 2:10:40
  Speaker 2: for the spirit who came and who comes, and who
• 2:10:43
  Speaker 2: is present in every room where someone opens their heart
• 2:10:46
  Speaker 2: to receive him. For the unbroken chain of testimony that
• 2:10:50
  Speaker 2: traveled from a hillside in Jerusalem across two thousand years
• 2:10:54
  Speaker 2: of human history and arrived here tonight. There is some
• 2:10:58
  Speaker 2: one listening who has been away from all of this
• 2:11:00
  Speaker 2: for a long time, someone for whom faith is complicated
• 2:11:04
  Speaker 2: or distant, someone who is not sure. There is still
• 2:11:07
  Speaker 2: a place in this story for them. There is a place.
• 2:11:11
  Speaker 2: The table was set before you arrived. The invitation that
• 2:11:15
  Speaker 2: went out from that upper room has not been taken back.
• 2:11:18
  Speaker 2: Come Father, as sleep approaches, settle the hearts of everyone
• 2:11:24
  Speaker 2: listening into the peace that belongs to the one who
• 2:11:26
  Speaker 2: said it is finished. Let the joy of the Resurrection
• 2:11:30
  Speaker 2: find every grief that is sitting in the dark. Let
• 2:11:33
  Speaker 2: the presence of the Spirit make itself known in the quiet,
• 2:11:37
  Speaker 2: in the way that only the quiet makes possible. He
• 2:11:40
  Speaker 2: lived every moment of it, from the angels whisper in
• 2:11:44
  Speaker 2: Nazareth to the cloud above the Mount of Olives, thirty
• 2:11:47
  Speaker 2: three years, every step for us, every word for us,
• 2:11:53
  Speaker 2: every miracle and parable and prayer and garden and cross
• 2:11:56
  Speaker 2: and empty tomb, and breakfast fire on the shore for us.
• 2:12:01
  Speaker 2: For you, go now into the rest of this night
• 2:12:05
  Speaker 2: held by the one who has always been holding you.
• 2:12:08
  Speaker 2: Let sleep come the way it comes when you have
• 2:12:11
  Speaker 2: finally set something down that you have been carrying too long.
• 2:12:15
  Speaker 2: You are not alone in this room. You have never
• 2:12:18
  Speaker 2: been alone in this room. He is here, the same one,
• 2:12:23
  Speaker 2: announced in Nazareth, and born in Bethlehem, and baptized in
• 2:12:27
  Speaker 2: the Jordan, and tested in the wilderness, and who called
• 2:12:30
  Speaker 2: fishermen from a lake, and healed the sick, and told
• 2:12:34
  Speaker 2: stories that outlasted empires, and set his face toward Jerusalem,
• 2:12:39
  Speaker 2: and washed the feet of the one who would betray him,
• 2:12:42
  Speaker 2: broke the bread, and lifted the cup, and prayed in
• 2:12:45
  Speaker 2: the garden, and carried the cross, and said it is finished,
• 2:12:49
  Speaker 2: And rose from the dead, and ate fish on the shore,
• 2:12:53
  Speaker 2: and ascended into heaven, and sent his spirit to live
• 2:12:57
  Speaker 2: in us. That one is here in this room with you.
• 2:13:03
  Speaker 2: Good night, beloved, Rest well, you are known, you are held,
• 2:13:09
  Speaker 2: You are loved for ever and ever. Amen.