"You Can't Put That on Your Resumé"

Sermon for Sunday, June 28

Luke 7:1-10

Encountering Jesus is a risky proposition. In the Gospels, it can lead to being healed, called, and restored to community or being embarrassed, called out, and exposed. Today when we come to church, we expect and hope to encounter Jesus, but those encounters can also lead to a lot of different experiences. Going to Jesus is a bit like going to the doctor: he might tell you you are well or sick; he might congratulate you on your progress or he might tell you you need to eat better and exercise. When we go to Jesus we might get words of correction or words of comfort. The problem is that Jesus, like a good doctor, can see through our attempts to put our best foot forward. Also like a good doctor, Jesus knows that if he is going to help us, first we have to quit playing games and be honest about our situation. It’s only then that he can make the interventions he needs to make in order for our salvation to come, so that he can make us whole.

If we are going to encounter Jesus, we have to quit playing games. When I was in my early 20s, I used to get together on Sunday afternoons with a group of undergraduates and graduate students at Baylor University to play pickup Ultimate Frisbee. It was a casual game, or it was supposed to be, complete with picking teams by captains or by “numbering off” before the game. But every once in a while, as happens when you get a group of testosterone driven young men together for competitive activity, someone would get their ego involved and say or do something that would cause someone else’s mercury to rise. Trash talk, unnecessary physicality, a word of correction that would have passed for coaching if it weren’t so personal. The game, which was supposed to be a means for building relationships and staying healthy, would begin to eclipse the world. The game we played became everything; feelings, character, and real relationships fell by the wayside in a fit of hormone driven showmanship. Life’s games are like that. You know, the games we play every day: “Who’s the boss?” “Is that beneath me?” “Who makes the most money?” “Who will blink first?” Those games, if we play them for too long, become the way we see the world around us.

In the world of the gospel, the first century, society itself was built on a game. It is called the patronage system. The people of Israel had learned it from the Romans, who had taken a flaw in human nature and made of it something that could be exploited in order to create and maintain a predictable social order. Simply, the world was divided into people who had resources and people who didn’t. Those who had resources would provide for the less fortunate, in exchange for favors that they could call in at any time. In today’s story, this is the relationship between the centurion and the elders of Capernaum. He had built a synagogue for them and so they owed him. They make a similar appeal to Jesus, making a claim on him as a fellow Jew. “Do him this favor— heal his slave. He’s earned it.” The mention of the synagogue would have also been a personal note to Jesus: after being rejected in his home synagogue in Nazareth, he had been warmly received in Capernaum in the very synagogue this Gentile centurion had funded. “This guy deserves a miracle, Jesus; those are the rules of the game.” “Jesus, I prayed, I tithed, I helped my neighbor— and you know how much he annoys me. So can’t you mark that as a point in my ledger and do this one thing for me?” But the thing about Jesus is he doesn’t play our games.

We try to rope Jesus into a lot of the games we play. We gossip, we slander, we judge based on moving criteria. Above all, we live in a culture obsessed with worth. People talk about needing to improve their self-worth, but we also talk about valuing others. We treat others in economic terms. When we spend a lot of time and energy on our relationship with a person, we call it “investing” in them, as though our children and our grandchildren are 401(k)s. When we talk about relationships that way, we run the risk of training our brains to value them like they are stock portfolios. In the end, we wind up looking at our return on investment, and if that relationship doesn’t give us the return we had counted on, we cash out. Consider again the Jewish elders’ word about the centurion: “he is worthy of having you do this for him.” They are trying to make sure the centurion’s benevolence to them pays off for him.

We all like to have people call us “worthy.” That’s a place we look for our value, isn’t it? In job searches, one of the first places we look is for our references. I have a friend who asked me 4 or 5 years ago to be a reference for him, and he has changed careers a couple times since then. So every 2 or 3 years I receive a few phone calls where I have to say nice things about my friend Rich; to tell folks why I think they should hire them. It works in our human relationships; it’s absolutely unnecessary for Jesus. So when the delegation of Jewish elders comes to him, Jesus agrees to go with them. He doesn’t agree to heal the man’s slave.

I think Jesus wants to test the centurion. Up to this point in the story, the centurion seems to be playing the world’s game, the patronage game. Jesus doesn’t like to serve people who feel entitled to his favors. Maybe he would have healed the lowly slave for his own sake, but I suspect if he’d approached the centurion only having the information the first delegation gave him, he would have also given the centurion a piece of his mind. With Jesus, our character references don’t matter. What we’ve done for other people doesn’t matter. Jesus sees to the heart, and what he wants are humility and faith. That’s the kind of stuff you can’t put on your resumé. 

The difficulty with Jesus is that he doesn’t care about what you’ve earned. Jesus cares about what you need and if you are humble enough to receive it from him. The second message from the centurion makes all the difference in the story. He sends some friends to intercept Jesus while he and those with him are not far from the house. And it’s important to note that he more directly shapes this message. The Jewish delegation has a lot to say about the centurion. His friends relate what he thinks about himself and what he says about Jesus. 

Twice in his second message the centurion emphasizes his unworthiness. First, he says “I am not worthy to have you under my roof.” As a God-fearing Gentile, the centurion would know that a good Jew would consider his house an unclean place, but the second statement of unworthiness seems to indicate that his discomfort with the idea of Jesus’s presence runs deeper. He says, “I didn’t even consider myself worthy to come to you directly.” Meeting a Gentile on the street would have been no problem for even the strictest Pharisee. But it seems like the closer the centurion gets to Jesus, the more aware he is of his own unworthiness, his own sin, his own brokenness. Humility is a distinctly Christian virtue, but you can’t put it on your resumé. 

When we really begin to encounter Jesus, we cannot hold ourselves in such high esteem. It was my experience growing up that just everyone in my life told me that I deserved something. The American Dream: a wife and 2.5 kids, a life better than my parents’ life. The culture of Christian college was summed up in three words: “ring by Spring.” I knew that there was a woman at college who would love me, because I deserved it. Fast forward to the Spring of my Junior year and I hadn’t found her yet. I was depressed and disillusioned; I felt cheated out of the Dream I had been told my whole life was my birthright. But one day I was doing that favorite pastime of 20-year old ministerial students: thinking about Jesus. And I thought about his life: dead at 33, with no wife and no kids, no house and no money. If Jesus didn’t “deserve” more than that, how could I claim to?

The most important question anyone can ever answer is “Who is Jesus?” It’s also a hard answer to put into words. Later in Luke 7 John the Baptist will ask the same question, struggling with doubt from prison. In chapter 9, Jesus will put the question to his disciples: “who do you say that I am?” Here, in the first part of chapter 7, the centurion points us to the answer. In the ancient world, it was an accepted fact that a faith healer had to come near and usually physically touch a person in order to impart healing. But there was one who could heal with a word. Psalm 107:19-20 says:

Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble,

and he saved them from their distress;

he sent out his word and healed them,

and delivered them from destruction.

So when the centurion says, “only speak the word,” he is making a claim about who Jesus is. Jesus has the authority of God, and so what the centurion is asking him for is not a tit for tat, but rather a small favor. Not because Jesus owes him, but because Jesus can.

When Jesus hears the centurion’s message, for the only time in Luke’s gospel he is amazed. Jesus hears the word of humility and the word of faith. The centurion knows who he is, and knows something about who Jesus is, and Jesus commends his faith. The centurion was used to being one of the more powerful people around. Most of the Jewish people he encountered, he could just boss around with a word or two; but when he got close Jesus, he encountered a feeling that might be familiar to us: he realized he was dealing with somebody who was outside of his league.

You see, it doesn’t matter what your personal references think about you; in the final analysis, it doesn’t even matter what you think of yourself. What matters is what you believe about Jesus, and what Jesus says about you. Of a centurion he never meets in person, he says: “Not even in Israel have I found such faith.” In the final analysis, Jesus is the only reference you need, but you can’t put that on your resumé.