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Telos - February 28, 2010

Telos

Luke 13:31

February 28, 2010

Rev. Dave R. Garwick

This morning’s sermon is based on a conversation, if you will, between Jesus and His enemies just as He was a little north of Jerusalem as He was making His way toward His fate in Jerusalem. At that time some Pharisees came to Jesus and said to Him, “Leave this place and go somewhere else. Herod wants to kill You.” He replied, “Go tell that fox, ‘I will drive out demons and heal people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach My goal. In any case, I must keep going today and tomorrow and the next day—for surely no prophet can die outside Jerusalem! O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! Look, your house is left to you desolate. I tell you, you will not see Me again until you say, ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.’ Now you might think it strange that it was Pharisees who appeared to be helping Jesus by telling Him to run because Herod was going to kill Him. After all, the Pharisees were the ones who were trying to nail Jesus. Why now would they be trying to help Him? Well, some experts have suggested that the Pharisees were not in fact really trying to help Him. As always what they were really up to was that they were trying to trap Him. That’s what they were always trying to do. In this case, what they may have been trying to do was to get Jesus to leave this area of Galilee north of Jerusalem. Why? Because what they really wanted to do was to get Him killed. And in Jewish law it was only their supreme court called the Sannhedrin that could prosecute a prophet on charges of being a false prophet. And the Sannhedrin was in Jerusalem. There was nothing that King Herod could do to Him in his territory of Galilee outside of Jerusalem. So that is why the Pharisees told Jesus that Herod was out to get Him. After all Herod hated Jesus who had been promoting the cause of John the Baptist whim Herod had murdered for confronting him about his adultery. But Jesus was up to their tricks. He essentially said, ‘You tell that clever fox Herod that I am not going anywhere until I accomplish My goal.’ You see, the mistake that the Pharisees made was that they were appealing to Jesus to save His own skin. His own apostle had made that same mistake when they were trying to protect Him. After He had been transfigured on that mountaintop and then began heading south to Jerusalem, His apostles tried to talk Him out of going to Jerusalem because they knew that He would be in big trouble if He made it there. But again, saving His skin was NOT what Jesus was about. And when Jesus eventually found Himself hanging on the cross, what was it that He heard from the crowds at the foot of the cross? “IF You are the Son of God, save Yourself and take Yourself down from the cross.” Of course, He had heard that very phrase before, when Satan was tempting Him in the wilderness: “IF You are the Son of God, then turn these stones into bread.” So we know who it was who was really behind that remark. But taking Himself down off the cross was not an offer that Jesus took – again because saving His skin was not what He was about. The key to it all is what Jesus told the trickster Pharisees to tell Herod: ‘You tell him that I am not going anywhere until I reach My goal.’ What His goal was is what it was all about. His goal was to die as a sacrifice to save US. That is why threatening His life had no effect on Him at all: He KNEW He was going to die, and He knew that it was by dying that He would accomplish His goal. There it is again: His goal. And His goal was sacrificial love. The word ‘goal’ in Greek is ‘telos’ from which we get other words like telescope which sees out to very end of all things. Your ‘telos’ is what life is all about for you, you’re reason for being, your goal. For so many people these days, their telos is themselves: they are their whole reason for being, their happiness, their success, their survival, their popularity, their wealth, their power. If you are the reason for your existence, if your happiness is your goal, if your success is your telos, then you can be held hostage by fear at any time, by anyone and for a thousand reasons. All that has to be done is to have your job threatened, your happiness spoiled and you will find that what drives you is to save your skin. But if your goal is GOD’s goal for you, if your goal is what He has in store for you far beyond the here and now, if your goal is to do GOD’s business, then nobody and no thing can threaten you. Then you yourself can be invulnerable to threats to yourself like Jesus was. Then, you too can live for others as Jesus first loved you. A couple weeks ago it was Valentine’s Day and we talked about the kind of love that St. Valentine was really about. He was burned at the stake because he refused to forsake his faith in Jesus. Valentine’s love was a sacrificial love where he sacrificed himself out of love for Christ who first sacrificed Himself out of love for the Father, out of love for us. Sacrificial love is something that is a very strange notion for comfortable Christians these days. We say that we believe in the Father, we believe in the Son and we believe in the Holy Spirit. But many of us think of belief as a head level thing, an idea that we intellectually agree to …. but not something we are willing to actually sacrifice for. Even when we are clearly told what God has said, we will back off or back down or simply walk away when we are worried what our family will say about this conviction, what our friends will say about that stand. If your goal in life is yourself then you will be vulnerable to betraying Jesus and everyone else whenever you are threatened. If your goal IS Jesus, then you will be vulnerable to no threat because God will not allow you to fail in THAT goal until His goal for you is reached. Amen, may it be so.