What Love Looks Like

Palm Sunday

On my drive back from Florida last week, my “listening pleasure” was repeatedly interrupted by a radio advertisement for a Joel Osteen media campaign. In this, the Texas megastar pastor promises that “a new beginning is on my way, a resurrection is in my future, that I can expect a supernatural breakthrough in my life.” This guy has effectively cornered the market of glib, optimistic aggrandizement, a huckster of the first order.  I mean, listen to his messages: “Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential. Become a better you. Be happier. It’s your time. Live an extraordinary life. Achieve your dreams. Go beyond your barriers. You can, you will.” This is the can-do, therapeutic message of Osteen, lifted right from the dust jackets of his books. His message has been described as the “gospel of self-help.” But I think that’s being too generous. It’s really the gospel of narcissists, the gospel of narcissism, the good news for people who can’t imagine that God wants anything greater for us than for us to be happy. Obedience, giving, and faith are then simply ways to get things from God.

Victoria Osteen, Joel Osteen’s wife, said this explicitly. “When we obey God,” she declared in one show, a smile plastered across her face, “We're not doing it for God. I mean, that's one way to look at it. We're really doing it for ourselves, because God takes pleasure when we're happy. That's the thing that gives Him the greatest joy. So, I want you to know this morning: Just do good for your own self.”

“Just do good for yourself”? That’s the “Gospel” that Osteen’s preaching? What makes Osteen not just a caricature, a joke, but a danger is that the words he uses kind of sound like Christianity—“new life,” “resurrection,” “supernatural”—and many people can’t tell the difference. But when you stop and think about what he’s actually saying, it doesn’t sound like orthodox Christian belief. The promises he makes don’t sound like things Jesus promised. Jesus said, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Not, “Become a better you. Achieve your dreams. Go beyond your barriers.” What Osteen is doing is defrauding, debasing, cheapening, twisting the gospel with his self-centered, self-help claims. God is nice, so we should be nice too. It’s an exaggerated version of what HR Niebuhr said of the liberal social gospel: “a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

But I guess you can’t blame Osteen—or maybe you can, I still do! But the fact is, he’s just selling people what they want to hear. Let’s face it, Christianity, real Christianity, with its hard-talking, cross-bearing Jesus, is just not all that attractive. It’s hard, and when you consider what happened to Jesus…it’s ugly, bloody, tragic, maddening, embarrassing at times.

I’m reminded of Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion, which critics claimed was a self-indulgent gore fest, that it reveled in blood and torture. The reality is that Gibson’s movie didn’t wallow in Jesus’ torture just for the sake of glorifying blood and pain. It sought rather to remind us of the reality, the brutal reality of the crucifixion. We live a world where celebrities wear gold crosses as accessories, where people talk about being “crucified” by the media, and where people liken those they disagree with to fascists (or communists) and their authoritarian ideas. Most of us don’t have any real experience with true horror like that. Which is a good thing, but it makes us naïve and unappreciative of what being crucified really meant. Gibson’s The Passion set out to remind us of the horror that is crucifixion. Jesus’ body was broken, scourged, impaled, strung up spread eagle and left to die in the scorching desert heat. 

We may want to turn our faces away from that, because our sensibilities are too delicate, or because we don’t want to accept that such a horrific scene could ever take place, or because we recognize that to face it requires something of us, something we don’t want to accept about ourselves, or about God. But on Palm Sunday, Passion Sunday, God grabs us, as it were, by the face and forces us to look, to look at the wreck on the cross. His purpose is not to wallow in the gore, out of some macabre delight, but because He doesn’t want us to miss it. He wants us to see, really see it, to have that picture, the picture of the crucified Son of God in our minds, to remind us of how far God went, how far he was willing to go, to show us his love, how far he’d go to bring us home.

It is no use to talk in some vague way about the love of God; here is its point of insertion in the world. If you want to know what love looks like, real love, it looks like this: a man strung up on a cross, God having given up everything, having let go of his pride, his station, his privileges in order to be with us, to reconcile us to God. You know, C.S. Lewis once noted that if we want to begin to grasp the immensity of Jesus’ taking on the very nature of a man, “Just imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to discover you had turned into a garden slug.” That’s about what God did in becoming human, becoming one of us. And then he allowed himself to die as a criminal, as a slave, dying a slave’s death. God wants us to see this, to witness it, to not forget the love He has for us, the sacrifices He made for us, in order that we might be with him.

But this re-living of Jesus’ passion does more than remind us of what God has done for us; it also shows us what we are to do. Eugene Peterson writes, “Christ is the way as well as the truth and life. When we don’t do it his way, we mess up the truth and we miss out on the life. We can’t live a life more like Jesus by embracing a way of life less like Jesus.” So, what Jesus did, we are to do. No, not die on the cross, be crucified so that we may be saved—only Jesus can do that—but rather we are to humble ourselves out of love, like Jesus did.

In our first lesson from Philippians, Paul introduces this song about Jesus by saying that we are to have the same mind as Him, the same mind as Jesus “who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be clung to, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross.”  Jesus is not a passive victim in his passion, mind you, but enters fully and willingly into his mission there. He emptied himself of all claims to divine glory and honor to become a human being -- not a human of high status and honor even, but a lowly slave serving other human beings. And that’s the model for us—giving ourselves fully, pouring ourselves out, accepting humility for the love of others.

We often don’t understand what this is, what humility is. In his delightful book, Wishful Thinking, Frederick Beuchner writes, “Humility is often confused with saying you’re not much of a bridge player when you know perfectly well you are. Conscious or otherwise, this kind of humility is a form of gamesmanship.  If you really aren’t much of a bridge player, you’re apt to be rather proud of yourself for admitting it so humbly. This kind of humility is a form of low comedy. True humility doesn’t consist of thinking ill of yourself but of not thinking of yourself much differently from the way you’d be apt to think of anybody else. It is the capacity for being no more and no less pleased when you play your own hand well than when your opponents do.” That is, it’s not about thinking less of yourself than you are, but wanting the good for others as much as for yourself.

Now, I’m well aware that this sounds absolutely crazy. To not insist on ourselves, on getting our way, putting others before ourselves…?!? How are we going to get ahead then? Or at least not fall behind? This is foolishness. Fact is, Osteen’s “gospel” sounds a lot more appealing, a lot more in synch with “the way things work.” He may not be much of a Christian preacher, but he’s an outstanding promoter of American cultural religion, of the religion of American society, which worships wealth and success. “Forget about that whole ‘take up your cross’ thing. Follow me and I’ll show you how your American dreams can come true.” 

But the disconnect is true not just for us today. Jesus’ message, his example, was shocking in his own day too. The authors of the Gospels take for granted, to the extent that they fail to mention, that, while Jesus was parading into Jerusalem on a colt through one of the back gates, on the other side of the city Pilate was parading in on a war horse accompanied by a squadron or two of battle-hardened Roman soldiers. The dominant culture of Judea in Jesus’ day was the culture of Rome, which was as dog-eat-dog, glory-grasping, win-by-any-means-necessary as any other that has existed. And the Romans employed all the pomp and props and powerplays they could in order to make it known that they were in charge. That’s what the war horse and military entourage were for. But then in comes Jesus, not riding a strong, impressive war horse, head of a conquering army, but bouncing on the back of a donkey. It’s like a parody of Roman politics. He’s not going head-to-head, trying to do Rome one better, but rather undercuts the whole thing, refusing to play those games.

He recognizes that behind Rome’s assertions to power was the desire to escape pain, to escape the pain of disaster, of disease, of oppression, of shame. That’s the same thing going on in Osteen’s message, he’s promising people they can escape pain and suffering. But then Jesus comes in, willingly accepting suffering, taking it upon himself, and calls us to do the same, calls us to accept the suffering that comes our way and to find in it the way to eternal life.

You see, God is not particularly concerned with our happiness, but God is very concerned with our holiness. He is concerned with our commitment and not our pleasure. A math teacher is not concerned with whether or not her students are happy the night before a big test, but the teacher is concerned with the students being committed to learning math. Jesus is not interested in being king for a day, parading around with military pomps or with having a bleach white smile and $400 haircut, but he does want to be Lord of our lives. On the cross, Jesus shows us how far God goes to show us His love and he shows us what it means to be his follower, to love as he loves us. It may not be pretty, and it won’t be easy, but it’s the way that God has given us. Walking in this way, in the way of the cross, may we find it none other than the way of life and peace.  Thanks be to God!