Is Jesus someone you hope to have a personal relationship with so that you can go deeper in your spiritual life & have the hope of Heaven one day, or is He the King of the Universe?
I think this question points to the real lordship of Jesus in our lives. Are we willing to yield everything to His Kingship, his Kingdom, His will?
You read stories like the time He was asleep in the boat & the disciples in fear had to wake Him up. He commands the winds & the waves to be still. And these disciples, these followers of Jesus from Nazareth, realize He is more than a Rabbi. Even the wind & the waves obey Him. He is so much more. Lord seems like too small a word. King of the Universe may be a few sizes to small too. (Matthew 8:23-27).
He comes teaching a different way. A reversal of the way people always thought about life, power, relationships & even God. He takes the Shema, recited daily by every good Jew – “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength…” & He adds the “Love your neighbor as yourself” aspect when teaching us what life is like in His kingdom. (Deuteronomy 6:4-5; Leviticus 19:18)
Then He tells a story about a man found half dead on the side of the road between Jericho & Jerusalem. Two religious leaders walk by, knowing full well the love command, the Shema, & they keep on walking past the one in desperate need.
A few years ago I was in Denver with a group of our students from Campus Church on a short term mission trip with Denver Dry Bones, a ministry I highly recommend. Denver has the highest population of homeless adolescents. So we go & spend a week serving & working with these incredible people for a week. One day they take us to the streets of Denver, not unlike our own city here in Atlanta, & they dress us up in dirty clothes to look like we too are homeless. They tell us that over the course of the next hour we have to spange – ask for spare change. Except instead of asking, “Can you spare some change?” we have to ask, “Can you spare the time?” Every time someone gives us the time it’s worth a quarter. And we’re trying to get a dollar so we can buy a burger from McDonalds for our lunch. This is what our homeless friends face & experience every day. Out of our entire time, not one of us, including me, could get four people over the course of one hour on the busy streets of downtown Denver to give us the time. We felt, for the first time, what it is like to be marginalized, invisible, ignored, devalued & so much more.
Jesus teaches us that in His kingdom every person is a person of incredible worth. So in His story, the mortal enemy, the hated & despised Samaritan becomes the hero of the story. He’s the one who stops to see to this man’s need. Picks him up, takes him to an inn & spends his own money to see to the man’s welfare for the next two weeks. (Luke 10:25-37).
I’m sure you could see the chins drop & hear the whispers through the crowd as Jesus tells the story. It’s shocking! This would never happen. What did he just say? No! A Samaritan did what?
It’s radical love. A clue to what life in the kingdom of Heaven is like.
And for us, if Jesus is more than a personal Savior but King of the Universe, we have to get our lives around this kind of King Jesus love. Because at the end of the story Jesus utters these challenging words we have to hear, “Go and do likewise.”
“Jesus – the Jesus we might discover if we really looked! – is larger, more disturbing, more urgent than we – than the church! – had ever imagined.” – N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus
