jesus

Blessed Are Those Who Come to Believe

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John 20:19-31

Just as we get the Resurrection every year on Easter, we get Thomas every year on the Sunday after Easter. I couldn’t find anything definitive about exactly when Thomas became known as “Doubting Thomas,” but Merriam Webster says the first known use is about 1883. It’s interesting to me that Thomas’ doubt may have become a cliché after the Scientific Revolution, when people may already be demanding proof of religious claims. Why was Thomas castigated for his doubts, rather than praised or at least respected as an example of healthy and even scientific skepticism? After all, Thomas wasn’t the only disciple who needed eye-witness proof of the Resurrection. According to John, all the other disciples were there when Jesus first appeared; they got to see him. Thomas is singled out merely for asking for the same proof they had.

But the point of the story isn’t Thomas. It’s us. Jesus says, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” That would be us, the readers of John’s gospel a couple of thousand years later, and the Church. John leans heavily on “believing” throughout his gospel, although as I have written here before, John didn’t mean what we usually mean when we say we “believe” in the context of religions. The Greek word for “believe” might better be translated as “trust,” or “to give one’s heart to.” Again and again in John’s gospel, when Jesus says, “believe,” he means rely on, trust in, live as though your life depends on it. Someone reminded me recently that Civil Rights activist John Lewis said, “If you believe in something, you have to go for it.” That’s what believing means in John’s gospel.

“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Our cultural assumptions about Christianity or perhaps our Sunday school indoctrination might tempt us to conclude this means we are blessed if we can recite the Apostles’ Creed without crossing our fingers. In my opinion, that is a very low bar. Rather, “If you believe in something, you have to go for it.”

What does it look like to “go for it” because we believe in Christ? It depends on who you ask. As for me, I’ll quote Melissa Bane Sevier:
“We do what we know is right. We follow Jesus.
We remember that truth is our currency. We speak, share, and write the truth. Once we shrink from telling the truth, what do we have?
We honor those who are most vulnerable: the poor, the sick, the very young and very old, those with disabilities.
We welcome the immigrant, the refugee, and the stranger as if we were welcoming Jesus himself.
We work for fairness and justice. We lift up people of all races, nationalities, religions, people of different genders.
We live in hope.
We are always listening, always aware that we may be wrong, always looking for the best in those with whom we disagree.
We say – not just to those like us, but especially to those different from us – “we have your back.”
This is what Jesus did. This is what Jesus taught.”

“If you believe in something, you have to go for it.”

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
https://melissabanesevier.wordpress.com/2017/01/30/be-the-light-2/

Ongoing Easter

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John 20:1-18

Back in 1984, everybody was reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig. A dear friend said I should read it and it would change my life. I did; it didn’t; and I don’t remember much of it, but I appreciated Persig’s explanation of the Buddhist concept of “mu,” which means “un-ask.” If someone asks a question that limits the way you can look at things, or that can only produce an unhelpful answer, you can answer, “mu,” which says there may be a better question.

The celebration of the Resurrection tends to raise the kind of questions that make me want to answer, “Mu.” Did the Resurrection really happen? Do you “believe” in the Resurrection? Do you need to believe in a literal, bodily Resurrection to be a good Christian, or to be any kind of Christian? At the risk of sounding like the Easter cow instead of the Easter bunny, “Mu, mu, mu.”

People have obsessed about these questions for centuries. We want the facts, right? But even the four gospels tell the story four different ways. How many women went to the tomb: one, two or three? How many angels? Did the disciples meet Jesus in Galilee or Jerusalem or both? All of which is glorious affirmation that neither the precise facts about the Resurrection nor the truth it reveals depends on what we believe. Easter isn’t like the musical “Peter Pan,” where the audience is asked to clap if they believe in fairies to save Tinkerbell’s life. We don’t change anything by our belief, our unbelief, or by telling the story with conflicting details.

Besides, as Frederick Buechner pointed out, “…even if somebody had been there with a television camera and taken a picture of Jesus walking out of the tomb, what would that be except, for many people, an interesting historical fact, just as it’s interesting to know that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492? But what difference does that make to me? So what if a Jew in the year 30 A.D. was brought back from the dead? In other words, what’s important is not so much what happened in the half-light of daybreak on that day in 30 A.D., but what happens now. What matters is not what happened on Easter Sunday, but what happens in my life. Is there any sense that, for you and for me, Jesus exists, or the power that was in Jesus, the power that led people to see him as kind of transparency to holiness itself, to the mystery itself? If that is alive, that’s all that matters, and what happened on that day is of little consequence except in a minor historical way.”

We tell this enigmatic story with conflicting details every year not because Easter is the anniversary of something that happened 2,000 years ago. Easter is not over. It is ongoing. We see this in John’s Easter story. It’s Sunday morning and still dark. Mary Magdalene goes to tomb where she knows the body of the crucified Jesus was laid on Friday. She sees the tomb is empty and concludes someone has stolen the body. She runs to tell Peter and the other disciple, and they run to the tomb. The unnamed disciple “believes,” but we aren’t told what he believes. The disciples don’t yet understand; in any event, they turn around and head home.

Mary remains there, weeping. She sees a man she thinks is the gardener. He calls her by name, and something illogical, something impossible happens. The One who was certified dead greets her. Stunned, she can only say, “Rabbouni!” which is something like “Teacher!” She reaches for him, but Jesus says, “Don’t cling to me.” This seems harsh, but rather than a rebuke, try imagining it as a teaching moment. “Mary, you can’t cling to ‘Rabbouni,’ to what I was on Friday. You can’t hold on to what is dead and gone.” Jesus refers to “your father and my father; your God and my God.” He’s describing a new horizontal relationship, a new union with God that means new life. The point of Easter is not to believe something about the past, but to awaken to the gift of new life here. God is making us new, here, and now.

What does “new” look like? To the disciples, it looked like an uprising of hope. Brian D. McLaren imagines their conversation: “Do you realize what this means? Jesus was right after all!” “Not only that, but we never have to fear death again. And if that’s true, we never need to fear Caesar again.” “That means we can stand tall and speak the truth, just like Jesus did.” We see this awakening realization in all the post-resurrection accounts. Everything had changed. It’s not just that Jesus was resurrected. It felt as though they’d arisen, too. They’d been in a tomb of defeat and despair, but they were truly alive again, and a force to be reckoned with. But a force of hope, not hate.

“New” is for us, as well, but like the Easter story itself, new is often messy. New looks like recovering alcoholics. New looks like reconciliation between family members who don’t actually deserve it. Nadia Bolz-Weber writes, “New looks like every time I manage to admit I was wrong and every time I manage not to mention I was right. New looks like every fresh start and every act of forgiveness and every moment of letting go of what we thought we couldn’t live without and then somehow living without it anyway. New is the thing we never saw coming – never even hoped for – but ends up being what we needed all along.”

The God who is love, who so loved the whole world, as John’s gospel put it, does not limit new life to people who can recite the Apostles’ Creed without crossing their fingers. “Do not cling to me,” said Jesus. God is free, and perhaps “new” includes recognizing the ways we have persuaded ourselves that God can be controlled by our own rules, creeds, and religious practices. John’s first witness to the Resurrection was a woman. It’s hard for us to appreciate how radical that is, but it affirms everything Jesus did in his earthly ministry to cross barriers and include outsiders. So not only can we no longer think of God as Protestant or Catholic, or white, Black or brown; we can no longer think God is more like nice middle-class folks or imagine that God prefers Christians to Muslims or vice versa. “New” means waking up to the fact that God is not on “our” side any more than God is on “their” side.

Easter – new life – is God’s ongoing work. It’s not just once a year and it’s not about church, although the church is the fellowship of Easter people. When Jesus sent Mary to go tell the disciples, in the Greek it says, “Continue to tell them.” Her never-ending mission, and ours, is to share her Easter experience and the things he taught. So while we do not corner the market on new life, we are the people who look for, celebrate and point to signs of Resurrection; signs that, as Desmond Tutu put it, goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate, light is stronger than darkness, life is stronger than death. When the Church gathers, it is to rise again, to believe again, to hope again, to live again. It is ongoing. We do not proclaim on Easter morning, “Christ was risen.” We proclaim, “Christ is risen!”

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
William Placher, quoting Herman Samuel Reimarus, in Jesus the Savior (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2001).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6IKaLF4Fqc
Frederick Buechner, from an extended interview, by Kim Laughton, April 18, 2003, https://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2003/04/18/april-18-2003-frederick-buechner-extended-interview/8658/.
Herman C. Waetjen, The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple (New York: T & T Clark International, 2005).
Brian D. McLaren, We Make the Road by Walking (New York: Jericho Books, 2014).
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and Saint (New York: Jericho Books, 2013).
John 3:16.
Ruth Burgess and Chris Pohill, Eggs and Ashes (Glasgow, Scotland: Wild Goose Publications, 2004).

Nonviolent Protest

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Luke 19:28-40

This past Saturday, demonstrators gathered in cities and towns across the United States energized by different concerns but united in opposition to many of the measures taken by the current administration since taking office in January. The message was, “Hands Off!” those rights, values, institutions, and services that Americans agree are essential to a fair and thriving economy and a compassionate and equitable society. Hands off Social Security, hands off veterans’ services, hands off climate initiatives. Hands off Medicare, the Department of Education, universities, women’s healthcare, USAID, DEI initiatives, our personal data, and ultimately, hands off our democracy. Organizers reported that more than 1,400 nonpartisan rallies took place, in all 50 states, all of them nonviolent, ranging in size from over 100,000 people in Washington, D.C., to perhaps 250 people at the event I attended in El Sobrante, California, a small Bay Area town. London, Paris, Berlin, and elsewhere around the globe supported these protests with rallies of their own. Estimates of the total participants vary, some projecting as many as 5.2 million people.

So, on Saturday night, everyone was talking about the research of Harvard political scientist Erica Chenowith. After learning about the benefits of nonviolent protest, Dr. Chenoweth conducted a study of violent protests and nonviolent protests, comparing their success rate. After looking at hundreds of protests across the world, Chenoweth found that protests are twice as likely to succeed if they are nonviolent and that around 3.5% of the population must participate to create serious change. Chenoweth said, “There weren’t any campaigns that had failed after they had achieved 3.5% participation during a peak event.” Successful revolutions that were nonviolent and reached the 3.5% threshold include those in Estonia, Georgia, the Philippines and dozens more. What will it take, people asked last Saturday, to get 3.5% of Americans on the streets?

Which made me wonder: Did 3.5% of the population of Jerusalem turn out to watch Jesus enter the city in the procession we celebrate on Palm Sunday?

No doubt about it: Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem was a nonviolent protest. Luke reports that the people spread their cloaks on the road before Jesus, shouting, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” Yikes! Blessed is the king?! These are people who already have a king. They have King Herod, Herod Antipas, the puppet of the Roman Emperor Caesar. Which means these ancient Judeans have both a king (puppet or not) and an emperor. “Blessed is the king”? Throwing cloaks on the road, as one does for a king? This is a call for regime change.

“Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” This helps explain why Jesus was arrested and crucified. He entered Jerusalem just before the Passover celebration, and even without his kingly procession, Passover was tricky for the Romans. The Passover festival is all about deliverance from slavery and freedom from oppression. Passover wasn’t good for the Empire. And so Jesus didn’t merely offend the religious authorities. He proclaimed another kingdom – the kingdom not of Herod or Caesar but of God – and called people to give their allegiance to God’s kingdom first. In other words, he was a real threat. He was a threat to the way the Romans and their puppet king led, ruled, and lived.

For that matter, he is still a threat. He threatens systems that dominate with intimidation, violence, coercion, and manipulation. He threatens our obsession with defining ourselves over and against others. He threatens the way in which we seek to secure our future by hording wealth and power. He threatens our habit of drawing lines and making rules about who is acceptable and who is not. He threatens all these things and more.

The authorities think they can eliminate this threat by violence. They are wrong. As Dr. King put it, “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. … Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

It reminds me of a short poem by Michael Leunig:
There are only two feelings,
Love and fear.
There are only two languages,
Love and fear.
There are only two activities,
Love and fear.
There are only two motives, two procedures,
two frameworks, two results,
Love and fear,
Love and fear.

All tyrants fear those they tyrannize. Otherwise, they would not resort to tyranny.

Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord: in the name of compassion, in the name of mercy, in the name of truth and freedom, in the name of love. It could change the world.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/organizers-say-millions-turn-out-for-anti-trump-hands-off-rallies-nationwide/ar-AA1Cm7u2
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/05/nx-s1-5353388/hands-off-protests-washington-dc
https://www.karunanews.org/story/1596/3-5-rule-how-a-small-minority-can-change-the-world
https://www.leunig.com.au/works/prayers
David Lose, “Dear Partner: Palm/Passion Sunday A,” April 5, 2017, http://www.davidlose.net/2017/04/palmpassion-sunday-a/.
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Loving Your Enemies,” in Strength to Love (Harper and Row, 1963; reprinted as a gift edition by Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010).

Extravagant Compassion

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Lesson: John 12:1-8

The Lazarus story just before this chapter is a turning point. When the news about Lazarus gets around, people will think Jesus is some sort of savior, and the Romans will wreak havoc on everyone. The authorities decide “better to have one man die than to have the whole nation destroyed” (John 11:50). They plan to grab Jesus when he shows up in Jerusalem for Passover. Jesus’ days are numbered, and he knows it.

With this backdrop, Jesus is just outside of Jerusalem, having dinner with friends: Lazarus, his sisters Mary and Martha, and a few disciples. Without explanation, Mary breaks open a bottle of nard, an incredibly expensive perfumed ointment. Mary lets her hair down in a room full of men, which an honorable woman never does. Normally you’d anoint someone’s head, but Mary pours the nard on Jesus’ feet, and then she, a single woman, touches him, a single man; also just not done. Then in the oddest move of all she wipes off the perfume with her hair.

Just exactly what’s going on isn’t clear, but Mary has stepped far outside the bounds of convention, teetering on the edge of scandal. That’s why Judas reacts so strongly. He attacks Mary for wasting 300 denarii on nard. A typical worker earned 300 denarii in an entire year. Doesn’t Judas have a point? But Jesus says, “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” Jim Wallis writes that somehow this verse has been translated, “There is nothing we can do about poverty, the poor will always be there, so why bother?” But what Jesus meant was, “You’ll always have the poor with you because you’re my disciples. You know who we spend time with. You’ll always be near the poor.” Jesus is quoting the Torah here, and the context is important. In Deuteronomy, God tells Moses: “There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward those of your people who are poor and needy in your land” (Deuteronomy 15:11).

We’re told Judas isn’t being altruistic. The gospel writer is telling us to keep our eyes on this guy. But Jesus says, “Let it go, because my time is running out.” Whatever Mary’s original motivations, Jesus knows what waits for him in Jerusalem. He says she’s saved the nard for the day of his burial. In other words, he’s as good as dead, right now.

So, leave her alone, Jesus says, because her kind of love is what Jesus needs, and what the world needs. Mid-twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich sums up the story: “[Mary] has performed an act of holy waste growing out of the abundance of her heart. . . . Jesus (alone) knows that without the abundance of heart nothing great can happen … . He knows that calculating love is not love at all.” “The history of humankind,” Tillich continues, “is the history of men and women who wasted themselves and were not afraid to do so. They did not fear to waste themselves in the service of a new creation. They wasted out of the fullness of their hearts.”

The only other time we encounter Mary in John’s gospel is right after Lazarus has died. When Jesus saw her and the others weeping, “he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” The Greek words are unusually powerful; Jesus is really bent out of shape by the sorrow he witnesses. His extravagantly compassionate response is to bring Lazarus back from the dead. Maybe he can’t heal every leper and paralytic; maybe he can’t bring back every friend from the dead, but it doesn’t stop him from helping this time. It ended up getting him in hot water with the authorities, but he did not fear to waste himself in service of a new creation.

In today’s passage, Mary echoes Jesus’ “holy waste,” his extravagant compassion, by anointing him with costly perfume. Perhaps what this story is reminding us is that extravagant compassion is what Jesus offered and it’s exactly what this world needs. We can’t right every injustice; we can’t heal every hatred, but that shouldn’t stop us from stepping in with extravagant compassion, with radical love and acceptance, when and where we can.

The extravagant, radical compassion approved and exhibited by Jesus himself stands in opposition to a growing movement among some conservatives, including Christians, pushing back against traditional Christian notions of empathy and compassion. In a New York Times op-ed, David French writes, “These attacks are rooted in the idea that progressives emotionally manipulate evangelicals into supporting causes they would otherwise reject. For example, if people respond to the foreign aid shutdown and the stop-work orders by talking about how children might suffer or die, then they’re exhibiting toxic empathy.” But as French points out, “So, yes, you say that children might die without a certain program when the very purpose of the program is to prevent children from dying. That’s not manipulation. It’s confronting individuals with facts. It’s making them understand exactly what they are choosing to do.”

Jesus chooses empathy. Jesus choose compassion. He chooses them because they are in fact what can save us, save our civilization, save our species, save our planet, save the world that God so loves.

Resources:
Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Prophet Mary,” http://day1.org/1760-the_prophet_mary.
Herman C. Waetjen, The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple (New York: T & T Clark, 2005).
Jim Wallis, God’s Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).
Paul Tillich, “Holy Waste,” in The New Being: Existential Sermons (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, originally published in 1955; 2005 paperback edition).
David French, “Behold the Strange Spectacle of Christians Against Empathy,” New York Times, February 13, 2025

This Fellow Welcomes Sinners and Eats with Them

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Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

The Pharisees and scribes complain when they see Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners. In Jesus’ time, “sinners” fell into several categories. There were the people in unacceptable occupations, including tax collectors because they worked for the Romans and profited from graft and corruption. There were people who did immoral things; okay, fair enough. But you could also be a “sinner” just by being born into the wrong group; both Samaritans and Gentiles were “sinners.” Finally, there were people who didn’t keep the law to the rigorous standards of the religious elites, which included many ordinary folks who couldn’t sit around debating the finer points of religious law. The question for us is this: Putting aside these first century definitions of who was a sinner, who would you be scandalized to see having breakfast with Jesus at Denny’s? An ex-convict? Your ex-spouse? A terrorist? Someone in human trafficking? Someone currently holding elected office in the United States? The relative who made off with Grandma’s silver tea service an hour after she died, the guy who bullied you every day all through middle school? Whose name is crossed off your guest list forever? That’s who’s at the table. If you aren’t scandalized by the thought of Jesus eating with that person, then that’s not who was eating with Jesus.

Jesus doesn’t argue. He tells a story about a man with two sons. The younger son essentially tells his father he can’t wait for him to die. He wants his share of the estate now. That’s a big slap in the face even today, but even more so given the huge honor owed the patriarch of a family and the elaborate code for keeping that honor in place. The father divides the property between the two sons, no questions asked. The younger son takes the money and runs to a distant country where he spends it all on what Jesus delicately calls dissolute living. This means the older son has to support the rest of the family on two-thirds of the family resources, their mother is more vulnerable because now she only has one son, and the family is dishonored.

When he’s broke, the younger son takes a job working for Gentiles feeding hogs, which, for a Jew, is hitting bottom and then some. He “comes to himself,” but we don’t know if he’s contrite or repentant; maybe he just remembers where there are clean sheets and three meals a day. On the road home he rehearses his speech: “Just treat me like a hired hand but let me come home.” His father sees him coming. Has he been out there every day, scanning the horizon, hoping? The father runs down the road, which an honorable patriarch wouldn’t do, and before the son can spit out his speech his father has his arms around him. The son finally blurts out, “I have sinned; I am not worthy,” but the father is busy planning a celebration. He orders his servants to kill the fatted calf, a sign that the celebration is a feast for the entire village. It’s a feast to restore the family’s honor as well as a feast to restore the family’s son.

As one of my preaching students put it, if the story ended there, it would be a happy ending. But it doesn’t. We typically call this the Parable of the Prodigal Son but there’s that other son, the elder son. He’s done everything right; in his mind, he’s earned his father’s love, and he isn’t about to sit at the same table with that self-centered brat who caused his family so much grief. Right there in front of everyone, he refuses to come in the house. The father could ignore his elder’s son conspicuous absence until his guests leave, but as we’ve seen, honor doesn’t matter to this man; keeping his family together does. He goes to talk to the elder son.

Perhaps the most obvious lesson is that both sons have their father’s love not because they earned it, but because loving is what their father does. That is what we call grace. But if that were the end of the story, if God’s grace were the single point of the parable, then it would be the theological equivalent of both brothers’ saying, “We like to sin. God likes to forgive. What could be better?” Which, by the way, is not the gospel.

“Sin” is a loaded word, a word that has been used to label and hurt people, but sin is not a check in the demerit column made by a cranky scorekeeper God. Sin is whatever hurts our relationship with God and with each other. That’s why God hates sin: because God loves us. What the younger brother did caused serious harm to the family, even to the community. And so did what the older brother did. The older brother is just as self-interested as the younger brother when it comes right down to it. And just as lost. Both are forgiven because forgiveness means the past doesn’t have all the power in this relationship. The father is saying to the older son, “We have a different future than anything the past has led us to expect. This is the reason for the party.”

The older brother, having heard his father’s pleas, stands in the yard. Fade to black. No happy ending. Now, remember who is listening to the story. The Pharisees, and the sinners and outcasts around the table, and, of course, Christians down through the centuries. So it isn’t so much a parable without an ending as it is a parable in which the ending is left to us. Will we come home, like the younger brother? Will we come in, as the older brother was invited to do? Will we get over being scandalized by Jesus’ dinner companions, and imagine a future in which God’s love counts more than someone’s past or our own self-righteous conviction that we are the ones who are right? As Frederick Buechner wrote, “True repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ than to the future and saying, ‘Wow!’”

Copyright © 2025 Joanne Whitt all rights reserved.

Resources:
Barbara Brown Taylor, “Table Manners,” in The Christian Century, March 11, 1998
Gary Inrig, The Parables (Grand Rapids, MI: Discovery House Press, 1991).
Leviticus 11:7
Isaiah 65:4, 66:17.
Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Parable of the Dysfunctional Family,” March 18, 2007, http://www.fourthchurch.org/031807sermon.html.
Mary Hinkle, “Wherever you Are,” March 16, 2004, http://maryhinkle.typepad.com/pilgrim_preaching/2004/03/wherever_you_ar.html.

The Parable of the Fig Tree

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Luke 13:1-9

This passage in Luke begins with Jesus’ thoughts about “karma,” the belief that nothing either good or bad happens to a person that he does not deserve. In a nutshell, Jesus thinks karma is hogwash. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus declares unambiguously that God “makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” Here, where people are speculating about what victims of a couple of tragedies did to deserve their ill fate, his answer is “Nothing.” Tragedy is not a punishment for sin. Which is good news. Sort of.

Sort of, because Jesus uses the occasion to talk about another kind of human tragedy that could happen unless things change. He shifts the conversation: “Enough about those other guys,” he says; “what about you?” Verses 3 and 5 are particularly scary: “Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.” We really don’t know for certain what Jesus means here, but given that he’s just dismissed the notion of karma, I believe he means that bad behavior has consequences. There are consequences to our individual and collective bad behavior, and those consequences could destroy us. In fact, they will destroy us, if we do not change.

Jesus’ “you” here is plural: “unless [you all] repent, you will all perish.” He’s speaking to the community. He follows with a parable: A landowner had a fig tree that didn’t produce and so he wants to cut it down. He complains to his gardener, “Three years, and nothing! Get rid of it!” The gardener pleads for the tree, saying, “Let me try one more year; I’ll tend it and see if I can get it to bear fruit.”

Some assume the landowner is God and the gardener is Jesus, but nowhere in Luke do we find an angry or impatient God who needs to be placated by a merciful Jesus. In Luke, God is the father waiting for his prodigal son to return; God is the woman searching all night for her lost coin and throwing a party when she finds it. So perhaps God is the gardener who is partial to unyielding fig trees, willing to loosen the soil and spread fertilizer in the hope that we may bear fruit. This parable describes a God who doesn’t give up on us, who gives us another chance, who loves us and wants the best for us.

When the gardener asks for just one more year, I don’t believe it’s a threat. It is reality. We do not have unlimited time to come to our senses, to turn and move in a new direction, to turn in God’s direction, which is all Jesus means by “repent.” I’ve sat with many grieving people who told me that their parent, sibling, or offspring died before they could make things right with the person; before they could reconcile, before they could set the record straight, before they could come to their senses. We can be so stuck on what’s happened in the past, who did what to whom and how angry or hurt we are about it, that we forget, as Frederick Buechner wrote, “True repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ than to the future and saying, ‘Wow!’”

As individuals, as a culture, and, yes, even as a nation and a species, we do in fact run out of time to turn things around. We really can destroy our economy, our democracy, our planet, ourselves. And yet here we are, today, not cut down. We have a little more time. We can choose fruitfulness: an act of love, an act of mercy, a work of justice, speaking up for the marginalized, caring for creation, extending time into another season. It requires a turning. A turning of the soil. A turning of the soul. Looking to the future and saying, “Wow!”

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
Yvette Schock, http://www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2013-02/grace-or-judgment
David Lose, http://www.workingpreacher.org/dear_wp.aspx?article_id=671
Nancy Rockwell, http://biteintheapple.com/siloam-and-the-fig-tree/.
Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1973; rev’d 1993).

Couraging

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Luke 13:31-35

I saw an article announcing 14 new superhero movies to be released this year. I get the attraction. So much feels beyond our control: our government seemingly collapsing before our eyes; old alliances broken and frightening ones forged; the economy at the mercy of capricious tariffs; immigrants and refugees in danger; global poverty and climate change. Why wouldn’t folks want to sit back with a $15 bag of popcorn and feel safe, knowing that the bad guys will lose? Maybe we can’t control what’s going on in the world, but the Avengers can, and they will.

What a contrast to this story in Luke in which Jesus displays a very different kind of heroism, a different kind of courage. The Pharisees warn Jesus to go into hiding because Herod kills the people he finds inconvenient. Jesus refuses to run. He’s very direct: Go and tell that fox I’m going to keep right on healing people until I finish on the third day. Luke’s readers would understand this as a reference to resurrection; his work won’t be done until then. In the meantime, Jesus is heading into Jerusalem, knowing that spells danger.

This kind of courage, meeting a daunting or risky challenge head on without superhuman strength but just because it is the next right thing, is sometimes called “moral courage.” It isn’t that movie superheroes necessarily lack moral courage; they just don’t have the real vulnerability that goes along with it. The real human risk, the risk we non-superheroes take when we stand up to a bully or go against the majority. Think of the teen who calls his parents for a ride home from a party where there are drugs or alcohol. Think of the person who points out a remark is racist or sexist. Think of the employee who speaks up about his company’s shady business practices. Think of the judge who rules against the current administration, the rector who asks for mercy for the marginalized with the newly elected President sitting in the front pew, or the New Mexico congresswoman who holds up a sign saying, “This is not normal” at a presidential speech. Courage is vulnerability. There is the risk of ridicule, punishment, retribution, maybe even loss of job, security, or social status when you stand up for what you know is right.

Jesus has an interesting way of illustrating this in today’s passage. Under the threat of Herod the fox, you’d think he’d choose to imagine himself as a lion or some other powerful beast, or maybe something that could fly away. Instead, Jesus chooses the image of a mother hen. Barbara Brown Taylor writes: “Jesus won’t be king of the jungle in this or any other story. What he will be is a mother hen, who stands between the chicks and those who mean to do them harm. She has no fangs, no claws, no rippling muscles. All she has is her willingness to shield her babies with her own body. If the fox wants them, he will have to kill her first.” If you have ever loved someone you could not protect, then you understand Jesus’ lament. Jesus shows us that it is in fact the vulnerability of love that gives us courage and strength to do the next right thing. We can and will do things for those we love that we simply would not or could not do for ourselves.

As theologian Mary Daly reminds us, “Courage is … a habit, a virtue: You get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.” Someone else said, “Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’” It takes courage to make tough decisions about parenting when you’re faced with “everybody’s doing it.” It takes courage to resist our “whatever you can get away with” culture. It takes courage to stay committed when commitments aren’t valued, and it takes courage to listen to people who see the world very differently. It takes courage to look around and say, “This isn’t normal,” and then take whatever small steps you can to move toward healing, reconciliation, compassion, empathy, peace – toward what the Scriptures call shalom. Shalom is God’s “normal.”

Jesus keeps on doing what he’s doing, fox or no fox, because no matter how dire circumstances seem, how impossible the odds, how inevitable an outcome appears, nothing we or anyone else can do will thwart the love of God that gathers us like a hen gathering a brood of chicks. Nothing. Jesus invites us to stay focused on his heart full of love even for those who reject him. Focus on love, and then keep on keeping on. That’s what “couraging” looks like.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:

Barbara Brown Taylor, “As a Hen Gathers Her Brood,” in The Christian Century, February 25, 1986.

Mary Anne Radmacher, Courage Doesn’t Always Roar (Newburyport, MA: Conari Press, 2009).

Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are (Center City, MN: Hazeldon, 2010).

https://www.movieinsider.com/lists/upcoming-superhero-movies-with-official-release-dates#google_vignette

Ash Wednesday 2025

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Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

What you think about Lent has everything to do with what you think about God. For me, Lent is a reset button, but because I believe that the most important thing about God is that God loves the whole world unconditionally, that reset button isn’t like a switch that turns me into someone who, during Lent, believes God thinks we’re all miserable sinners. Lent is associated with penitence; penitence is regret or sorrow for something you’ve done. There are times when penitence is not only reasonable but appropriate, but setting aside a whole season for regret and sorrow seems a little excessive.

I like the word repentance better than penitence because it’s less about feeling guilty or ashamed, and more about deciding to turn around and go in a different direction. Depending on what your life looks like, maybe it isn’t so much of an about face as it is a course correction, maybe even a subtle one. We all tend to drift. We adopt good habits and they slowly fall by the wayside. This doesn’t make us bad people; as far as I can tell it just makes us people. Still, we know there are ways of being in the world that are better for us and better for God’s world. Lent is a good season for getting ourselves back on track.

“On track with what?” might be the next logical question. Matthew tells us God doesn’t want shows of piety. Joel tells us we are to rend our hearts, to break open our hearts, not our clothing. Isn’t that the perfect way to describe loving the world the way Jesus loved it? Break open your hearts. Break open your hearts to each other, to the stranger, to the suffering in God’s world, to the healing God offers, to hope and possibility, and especially, to the hope of God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

In this angry, polarized, us-against-them world, that kind of love, vulnerable love, feels especially risky. It is risky. There are no guarantees of a result that anyone would call success. And so loving as Jesus loved takes courage. As Brené Brown reminds us, courage is a heart word. The root of the word courage is cor, the Latin word for heart.

The willingness to show up with love in this world, in 2025, takes courage. Showing up with love changes us. It makes us a little braver each time we do it. And it changes those around us. Maybe even the world. And some things are worth doing, even if we fail.

Jan Richardson’s poem, “Rend Your Heart,” is the perfect Ash Wednesday invitation to Lent:

To receive this blessing,
all you have to do
is let your heart break.
Let it crack open.
Let it fall apart
so that you can see
its secret chambers,
the hidden spaces
where you have hesitated
to go.

Your entire life
is here, inscribed whole
upon your heart’s walls:
every path taken
or left behind,
every face you turned toward
or turned away,
every word spoken in love
or in rage,
every line of your life
you would prefer to leave
in shadow,
every story that shimmers
with treasures known
and those you have yet
to find.

It could take you days
to wander these rooms.
Forty, at least.

And so let this be
a season for wandering
for trusting the breaking
for tracing the tear
that will return you

to the One who waits
who watches
who works within
the rending
to make your heart
whole.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Transformation Is the Essence of Hope

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Luke 9:28-36

   When my father was 12, his family moved from Columbia, California in the Sierra foothills to Stockton in the Central Valley.  His family was poor and he hadn’t had much moral guidance.  His future looked pretty grim when he stumbled into the Stockton YMCA.  There, a Christian youth leader named Woody got to know my dad, and let him know he was valued in a way no one had done before.  Woody arranged for scholarships so my dad could go to Y camp at Lake Alpine in the High Sierras, and eventually invited him into leadership roles.  In a leadership initiation ritual on a High Sierra mountaintop, each boy chose a tree that represented his life.  My dad found a tree that was gnarled close to the ground.  It was probably stunted by heavy snow in its early years.  About four feet above the forest floor, the tree shot straight and tall into the sky.  My dad was 14 years old, and in choosing that tree, he was making a decision about his life, a decision that was made possible by Woody’s love.  It was a decision to love others in that same way.  It was a mountaintop experience for my dad.  It changed my dad’s life, and, I daresay, the lives of the family he’d have one day, including my life. 

   The possibility of transformation is the essence of hope.  My dad wasn’t stuck with the way things had been.  We aren’t stuck with the way things are.  Our nation isn’t stuck with the way things are.  Things can change, the world can change, we can change, and this is the very purpose of the life of faith.  Transfiguration – change, transformation – is both an event in the life of Christ and a process in the life of the world.   

   The event in the life of Christ that we call the Transfiguration is described in this passage in Luke’s gospel; it’s a story we find in Mark and Matthew as well.  We hear it every year on Transfiguration Sunday, the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, which begins the season of Lent.  It’s one of those stories drenched with meaning and truth, and we aren’t supposed to get distracted by whether it’s a factual account of an historical event.  It’s called the Transfiguration because Jesus’ appearance is transfigured, but it isn’t just Jesus who is changed.  The disciples are given an utterly transforming glimpse.  They understand who Jesus is in a whole new way, and it changes everything.  It is, indeed, a mountaintop experience. 

   Encounters with the real Jesus are always transforming.  One pastor writes, “The person who knows Jesus becomes a different person.  A person who has not changed has not met Jesus.  It is that simple.  Christianity is not an intellectual belief, an acceptance of a creed or a doctrine or the particular beliefs of some particular denomination.  Christianity is a personal encounter with God, a personal contact with Jesus that makes life different.  It is a life that is transformed in the home, at the office, at school, and in … personal conduct.”

   But in what way are we to be transformed by an encounter with the real Jesus?  We see vastly different answers to that question in our culture right now.  I believe Brian D. McLaren is on the right track when he writes, “Of the many radical things said and done by Jesus, his unflinching emphasis on love was most radical of all.  Love was the greatest commandment, he said.  It was his new commandment, his prime directive – love for God, for self, for neighbor, for stranger, for alien, for outsider, for outcast, and even for enemy, as he himself modeled.  …  Love decentered everything else; love relativized everything else; love took priority over everything else – everything.”

   Over the centuries, Christianity has been defined by a list of unchanging beliefs, beliefs that denominations fought over, and Christians killed and died for.  How utterly tragic, and how utterly ironic, when an encounter with the real Jesus reveals a life centered on love.  Many followers of Jesus are in the process of shifting from correct beliefs to practicing the ways of love that Jesus taught.  Lent is a season for practicing, training, shifting, even repentance, which simply means to turn and go in a different direction.  Lent, then, is the perfect time for practicing the way of love, trying our best to love our fellow human beings as Jesus loved.  Will we get it perfectly right?  No.  Will we be transformed by it?  Count on it.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:

John Ortberg, The Life You’ve Always Wanted (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1997).

Howard E. Butt, Jr., “Confessions of a Skeptic,” in The Library of Distinctive Sermons, Vol. 8 (Sisters, OR: Multnomah Publishing, 1998).

Brian D. McLaren, The Great Spiritual Migration (New York: Convergent Books, 2016).

“Mom, Why Shouldn’t I Hit Back?”

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Luke 6:27-38

A mom in a congregation I served told me that she’d stopped one of her preteen kids from hitting her sister back. She was pretty sure that’s what Jesus would want. The girl’s response was frank disbelief, something along the lines of, “What, are you nuts? Why wouldn’t I hit back? If you don’t hit back, you’re a wimp.”

Is this our culture’s approach to problem-solving and violence in a nutshell? The mom was stumped because what the kid said kind of made sense. Hitting back, and hitting in the first place, just feel reflexive. Yet in the face of that reflex, we have Jesus’ words in this Luke passage: “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.” Most of us remember the translation, “Turn the other cheek.” These are perhaps some of Jesus’ most quoted but also most misunderstood words. Generally they have been understood as teaching non-resistance. In other words, be a wimp. If they hit you on one cheek, turn the other and let them batter you there too, which has been bad advice for battered women and oppressed people generally, and good news for bullies.

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says, “But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” Biblical scholars explain that the reference to the right cheek means Jesus is saying that turning your face deprives your attacker of a second opportunity to hit you with a backhanded slap with his right hand. One reason we know this is that no ancient Middle Eastern person would strike a person with his left hand, which was used only for “unclean” activities. The backhanded slap was a sign of the hitter’s superiority and intended to humiliate the victim. As Gandhi said, “The first principle of nonviolent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating.”

These cultural specifics aren’t as obvious in Luke’s version, which doesn’t mention a right cheek, only a cheek. But regardless, as Walter Wink writes, “Jesus resisted evil with every fiber of his being.” What Jesus means here is “don’t turn into the very thing you hate. Don’t become what you oppose.” As Paul put it, “Do not return evil for evil.”

It is Black History Month. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and ‘60’s was successful not because of a lack of resistance, not because the people in the movement were wimps, but because their resistance was nonviolent. It is seldom lifted up that Martin Luther King Jr. based his nonviolence on his Christian faith and Scripture, on Jesus. King said, “Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

Those of us who remember the Civil Rights Movement can testify that nonviolent resistance is not the way of wimps. It requires enormous dedication, courage, and hard work, all of which may culminate in failure, including injury to or even the death of resistors.

In the 1986 movie, “The Mission,” the new Portuguese rulers of eighteenth-century South America order an attack on a local tribe and the Jesuits protecting them. It becomes a massacre. The pope’s messenger confronts a government official, saying, “You have the effrontery to tell me this slaughter was necessary?” The governor says he had no alternative. He did what he had to do. He says, “We must work in the world. The world is thus.” The papal envoy replies, “No, Señor Hontar. Thus we have made the world. Thus I have made it.”

“Mom, why shouldn’t I hit back?” Maybe the way to answer is with another question: “What kind of world do you want to live in? What kind of world do you want to make?”

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.