John Newton, once a captain of a British slave ship, after his conversion went on to become an evangelical Anglican clergyman. He wrote several hymns, the best known of which begins:
“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,When a sinner is convicted by the Holy Spirit, the eyes of that person’s spirit are opened. It is as if flakes fall away from his eyes, as when Ananias prayed over the blinded Saul following his Christ-vision on the Damascus road (Acts 9:18). The man born blind, whom Jesus healed with mud and sent to wash in the Pool of Siloam, told the religious authorities, “I don’t know whether he’s a sinner. Here’s what I do know: I was blind and now I see” (John 9:25).
that saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
was blind, but now I see.”
Physical blindness may be a detached retina, macular degeneration, severe cataracts, or some other disease of the eye. Spiritual blindness may not limit physical eyesight, but it can be an even worse malady. Spiritual blindness is often entwined with a severe case of preconceived notions. These preconceptions make it very difficult to experience the life-changing power of the grace of Christ. In Jesus’ day all the religious authorities had preconceptions about God, about religious reality, about life and death, about the messiah, and they could not see beyond those preconceptions to the truth embodied in Jesus. Even the friendly Pharisee Nicodemus was locked into a set of preconceived ideas and had trouble grasping the import of the “born anew” imagery which Jesus used in trying to explain eternal life to him.
The disciples also were prisoners of the preconceptions of their culture about the Messiah. Jesus explained the program to the disciples, “The Human One must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and the legal experts, and be killed, and then, after three days, rise from the dead.” Mark adds, “He said this plainly.” Peter grabbed Jesus by the shoulders and shook him strongly. “No!” he shouted as he set about to correct Jesus. Preconceived ideas have that strong a hold on people. Just moments before Peter had proclaimed with astounding insight that Jesus was “the Christ.” How quickly he lapsed into his old thinking: the Messiah doesn’t die.
Even Jesus had to deal with preconceptions. Frederick Buechner suggests that after his baptism, Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness asking himself the question of what it meant to be Jesus. In the season of Lent, we who call ourselves followers of Christ, are invited, even compelled to ask, “What does it mean to be a faithful follower of Christ? What does it mean to be a Christian?”(1) We are called annually to examine ourselves to the very core of our faith and root out the preconceptions which will invoke Jesus’ stern correction, “Get behind me, Satan. You are not thinking God’s thoughts but human thoughts.”
We all have preconceptions. Certain things are supposed to be a certain way and don’t anyone try to change our minds. Not even Christ. Except changing our minds about life in general and especially life as a creation of God in relation to other creatures of God is what Jesus is about.
We all have preconceptions about Jesus. Even most of us who have had it taught to us from when we were very small, have trouble with the idea of a Messiah who dies. Untimely, unnecessary death is such a waste. To die is to lose. We use that imagery for teams when are doing well and then all of a sudden fade away into a loss, either in a single game or through the last month of the season. Or we use that imagery in individual competition on the tennis court, the golf course, the ski slope, the gymnastics venue. To die is to lose. To lose is to have no value.
Everything in life is competition. Even retirement. We compete to have the best possible retirement and then we compete to do everything we can possibly do during whatever time is allotted to us. People even compete to lose. A popular television program has been “The Biggest Loser.” Yesterday’s paper had a report about two high school coaches who were suspended because they were competing to lose a game in order to get a better seeding in the tournament.
We have a preconception that with Christ everything is going to be all right, that nothing will go against us. We forget about all the psalms in which the psalmist prays to God about the lousy rotten deal he is getting either at no fault of his own or because he clings faithfully to his belief in God.
Believing in Christ is not a talisman to ward off the evil of the world. Too many times in the two millennia since Christ, belief in our Lord has actually been a lightning rod for drawing persecution and evil towards us rather than deflecting it.
Peter was blinded by his own preconceptions. His cherished convictions about what the Messiah’s agenda should be would not allow him to see what the Messiah’s agenda must be. How often are we guilty of this very same malady? We arrogantly assume that we know what must be done, so much so that a word from Jesus himself would not dissuade us.
Of course, we are better than Peter. We would never rebuke Jesus. Our rebuking would be kinder, gentler. We would respond with benign neglect and insipid indifference. We will never touch a hair of his. We will merely let him die. George Studdert Kennedy was an Anglican priest who served with distinction as a military chaplain in World War I. He wrote the following lines about indifference:
When Jesus came to Golgotha they hanged Him on a tree,Do our preconceptions prevent us from hearing Jesus’ words to us today? Do our misconceptions about Christ lead us to neglectful and indifferent behaviors when it comes to following our Lord?
They drave great nails through hands and feet, and made a Calvary;
They crowned Him with a crown of thorns, red were His wounds and deep,
For those were crude and cruel days, and human flesh was cheap.
When Jesus came to Birmingham they simply passed Him by,
They never hurt a hair of Him, they only let Him die;
For men had grown more tender, and they would not give Him pain,
They only just passed down the street, and left Him in the rain.
Still Jesus cried, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do,"
And still it rained the wintry rain that drenched Him through and through;
The crowds went home and left the streets without a soul to see,
And Jesus crouched against a wall and cried for Calvary.(2)
We live in a violent world. Violence isn’t just military. It comes in all kinds of guises: physical, mental, psychological, economic, educational, oratorical, discriminatory, and in indifferent, neglectful, and well-meaning dependence-creating relationships.
Peter’s rebuke of Jesus reflects the way we humans think. That’s what Jesus says. The world says the way to victory is the way of power an might. The world says that violence is to be met by greater violence, in a never-ending escalation of force and strategy. If that is allowed to continue unabated, everything will be destroyed and everyone put to death.
Jesus offers another way. Jesus breaks down the preconceptions. He allows violence to have its way. But he responds with life, not death. He responds with resurrection, not oblivion. He responds with heaven, not hell.
As long as our selves reign in our lives, we will be forever seeking shortcuts to the kingdom, we will try to substitute some easier way for the way of the cross. As we look to the remainder of Lent, as we look to our collective ministry as a portion of the body of Christ in Waverly, as we wrestle with our preconceived ideas of believer, of disciple, of church, of Christ, may the blindness of our preconceptions be healed and may we help Jesus to carry the cross of life into the world we inhabit, laying down our lives, probably not literally but certainly figuratively, for the people we encounter.
May it be so. Amen.
(1) Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), 74
(2) Geoffrey A. Studdert Kennedy. Online text copyright © 2003, Ian Lancashire for the Department of English, University of Toronto.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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