When All is Said and Done

So here we are April 2021 and this is Easter weekend you talk about a story to make sense of it all. This is that story. Here we go. I'm going to make an adjustment and jump to the end of the book. The Ruth and I wrote a couple years back called Known, finding deep friendships in a shallow world. The last two chapters short to the point have to do with the approach to ease what we call Easter weekend. Good Friday and resurrection day. So here we go chapter 21. The dream over dinner. And he said to them, I've earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. Jesus of Nazareth Luke 22 15. On the eve of the most pivotal weekend in human history, Jesus wants to have dinner with his friends. But why? There is no theme more central to the kingdom story or your story for that matter than the idea of who gets invited to the table. Unlike 21st century Western culture where food is grabbed on the way to something else, Eastern culture just lands on the experience around the table. The word most often used is hospitality. It is friendship centered in food and conversation. And the broadest sense hospitality is inviting someone into your space. It invites intimacy and foster friendship. Food is foundation. Part two, eating and eating begins the human saga and a meal in the heavenly city culminates it from Moses and the manna to Elijah fed by Ravens. Food is center stage. Every time you turn around, some food event becomes a teachable moment from Joseph in Egypt to Jesus in Bethany. We find ourselves sitting at the table. But why? Eating is what humans do. From day one, we eat to live beyond geopolitical racial or religious boundaries. Eating makes us one. We made different foods, but we all eat. Being invited to a home for dinner has a closeness that a forced restaurant cannot match. The place that gives us food for strength often gives us food for thought. And so it is on the night before the cross. It's quite a meal time. Eat dinner. Break up a squabble between your followers. Wash their feet. Call out an imposter. Introduce the new covenant. Drink to it. Give a lengthy teaching on love and unity. Be blunt about what's coming next. Then close with a song. Go to a small prayer meeting outside the city in an olive grove. Get arrested. Go to jail. All in a night's work. The three years of walking with Jesus' chosen friends is winding down. He's eaten hundreds of meals on the road and in homes with them. This is different. He knows what's coming. They haven't a clue. Five days ago, crowds cheered Hosanna and called MacKing. Tomorrow they'll be calling for his head. What do you say when you know that before the sun sets tomorrow, you'll be pinned into a Roman cross. As you suffocate by inches, your blood will seep out of you, taking with it the sins of every man and woman who will ever live on earth. What do you say when you know the clock is ticking? I'll tell you what Jesus said. He told them one more time what they were designed for and what makes life work. Scholars call the teaching his farewell discourse. Words of person might say on a deathbed to those he loves. Though the evening feature to fight at the dinner table and high drama with Judas scurrying off to sell Jesus out at the heart of the evening were his final thoughts. This is the ultimate quote if this were my last lecture end quote talk. He illustrated what he expected of them by washing their feet and talking about grapevines. But the phrase that hung in the room reddled with the smell of lamb and bitter herbs was love one another. How? The way I loved you. The fulcrum on which his challenge rests for me is found in John's record. This is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this that someone lay down his life for his friends. You're my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants for the servant does not know what his master is doing. But I have called you friends for all that I have heard from my father I've may known to you. You did not choose me but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide so that whatever you ask the father and my name he may give it to you. These things I command you so that you will love one another. How fascinating is that? He doesn't ask, suggest, or beg. He commands. How can you command people to love? I guess if you created them with the capacity and a will you can. If you've shown them a thousand times in a thousand ways in all of human history and more precisely over the last three years what love looks like you can. If you've told them your story and affirmed them and walked with them in covenant and dreamed out loud with them you can. If you are God Almighty the creator of heaven and earth you can. If you are the line of Judah about to be slaughtered as the Lamb of God you can. We have said before in this book that the word love in Western culture is amorphous and used to describe many things with different intensities. Not so here. The word that Jesus used is agape. God's unconditional love. There are several words for love in Greek. Another one of which is filet of friend. That's where he gets specific. The highest expression of that agape is that someone lay down his life for his friends filet. It's like he's saying pay attention man. The laying down of your lives is what your future holds. But for whom does someone lay down his life? That's the question. He doesn't say lay down your life for a spouse or a child or a parent. Those are the relationships that we've been most readily described as our closest ones. But he says that the greatest love is to lay down your life for your friends. Perhaps friendship is the baseline for any good relationship. I actually think that friendship is an atmosphere within which any real relationship grows. But Jesus is precise in what he means by it. He says that friendship is about sacrifice, which is easy to talk about but tough to do. Just as Simon Peter in this same conversation with Jesus Peter had boasted that he would lay down his life for Jesus. Jesus, his friend and truth teller in essence said, not right now you won't in commanding us to love each other. He set the sacrificing of self for friends as the gold standard. Although earlier Jesus took the servants role and watched their feet, he made a distinction here. He said that friends are closer than servants because, both paraphrase, they have the inside scoop on their master's business. Servants going about their duties naturally over here bits and pieces of the master's conversations. But friends are different. They are told everything directly, intentionally. But servants become friends when they're invited in. They have been extended hospitality. They are not serving the guests anymore. They are the guests. He was very clear in his dinner talk that he had shared everything about the Father's heart and plans that they need to know. They were now friends who had the ear of the king privy to the most important information there is to know about life. As friends, they would also serve just like their master. Catch the context here. Jesus is connecting hospitality. Come on in with sacrifice. Lay down your life. They would be intimately familiar with both practices. There's as a culture that is God centered. Observant Jews go to temple daily. All day long, they can hear the sounds of animals being sacrificed. Going home to eat, they often invite friends to join them. This practice is natural in Middle Eastern culture. And personal identity is wedded to the people with whom you eat. Jesus will die in a few hours in no small part for befriending the wrong people, eating at the wrong tables. He was vilified for being a friend of sinners. To follow Jesus is to give people your space and to give them your life all at one shot. Throughout the evening, at different moments, he emphasizes the importance of loving well. His point is clear, by this will all men know that you follow me, that you love one another. Your distinguishing mark will not be that you love the world. It will not be that you love the great unwashed. It will not be that you love the down and out or the epitoders. Your distinguishing mark is that you sacrifice for each other. When that happens, all those other folks will see real love. Jesus will show his 11 men by this time tomorrow night exactly what that kind of love looks like. His farewell address has been meet for scholars and theologians for centuries, and well it should be. One could read it a hundred times and not fully wrap his mind around all the pieces and nuances. It helps me, however, to sense that in his final hours, Jesus' main concern was for his friends. He wants them to get it right by standing strong and staying together in the face of all that was to come. And to end the evening, there is a song. Friends in food or a natural combination, aren't they? And now and again, at a birthday party or anniversary or just because folks like to sing together, music breaks out. Music in a meal or universal. All seven billion plus people on the planet eat and most all respond to a tune. Many actually sing or play instruments. You know how it is to pull up to a red light with your buddies or girlfriends in the car. You're sipping a coffee or favorite station is on the radio. Loud. Suddenly, there's that great new song. The windows come down as the volume is cranked and you just start belting it out. Pity the older couple in the crosswalk. But they might just smile because they remember eating and singing have something in common. When done in a group, the brain starts pulsing a hormone. Not just any old hormone is a very particular one called oxytocin, which elicits feelings of trust between people, a feeling of togetherness. Emotions after all are generated in the frontal over the brain. The disciples had no clue about that. Of course, the linguistic root of hormone means to impel or set in motion. And on that Passover night, once Judas was gone, moving toward trust was the desperate need. The 11 who remained had to be nervous. Feeling together would help on that night together would mean something that those 11 men from the countryside of Galilee would never forget. In the Passover celebration, a song is a part of the meal. That song sung by Jesus as followers would be the chaleil, Psalm 113 to 118. These are sung on feast days to remind Israel of Yahweh's love and provision for them. They are songs of praise for his character and his actions. Look at the verbs in Psalm 113 that convey how they see Yahweh and what he does. He is exalted over all the nations, sits and thrown on high, stooped down to look on heaven and earth, raises the poor from the dust and needy from the ashyp, seats them with princes and settles the childless woman in her home as a mother of children. Jesus knew his followers and comrades did not. That within hours the ideas expressed in those action verbs would take on a transformed meaning. In those hours the line of Judah would become the Lamb of God, sacrificed to cleanse us from sin. No matter our station and life at birth, we would become royalty through that work. Psalm 114 expresses the joy of rescue and the Israelites were freed from bondage in Egypt. Psalm 115 extolled the love and faithfulness of a living acting God, unlike the impotence of an idol made of wood or stone by the hands of man. The task then is to fully trust him and know the blessing that comes from that kind of trust. As that impromptu men's chorus sang out, Psalm 116, only Jesus would know the import of the words. Here it is. I love the Lord for He heard my voice. He heard my cry from mercy. Because He turned his ear to me, I will call on Him as long as I live. The cords of death entangled me. The anguish of the grave came upon me. I was overcome by trouble and sorrow. Psalm 117 says another call to praise. Praise the Lord. All you nations extoll Him, all you peoples, for great is His love toward us and the faithfulness of the Lord and yours forever. Praise the Lord. The crescendo of Psalm 118 carries the tagline, His love and yours forever. Give thanks to the Lord for He is good, His love and yours forever. Let Israel say His love and yours forever. Let the house of Aaron say His love and yours forever. Let those who fear the Lord say His love and yours forever. Then a prophetic punch that would capture precisely what it means for someone to lay down his life for a friend. The stone that builders rejected has become the capstone. The Lord has done this and it is marvelous in our eyes. This is the day. The Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. As the wind stirs the olive trees across the Brooke Kidrun, 12 voices joined thousands in the same songs being sung in hundreds of other homes across the city. Rich Hebrew melody, some with marching cadence, pours out of windows into the spring night, flows down the narrow cobble streets and washes up over the court yards of the Great Temple. And Jerusalem, the ancient city of David, hears that song for the ages one more time. You are my God and I will give you thanks. You are my God and I will exalt you. Give thanks to the Lord for He is good. His love and yours forever. And they went out from that place to another. Outside the city walls, a place called Gethsemane. That's where together would have its first test. What a story they would have to tell for the rest of their years. It would be their story unique to that moment, but seen through 11 different lenses. We know a little of that feeling ourselves in our own adventure call life, don't we? Because quote, my story and your story are all part of each other too. If only because we have sung together and prayed together and seen each other's faces so that we are at least a footnote at the bottom of each other's stories. When Jesus put out the invitation, let's eat together. I have something to say to you that disciples would get more than they bargained for. This would be no typical satire meal. This would be a Passover like none other they had known. This would go way beyond tradition. This night would transform them. Little did they know that when their best friend began to speak, he would speak a dream over dinner and they would ride that dream for the rest of their lives. This is my parenthetical statement. It went out. The trial would happen that night. Crucifixion would happen the next day. And these are my thoughts when all is said and done, chapter 22. Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, what? You too. I thought I was the only one. C.S. Lewis. The telling of our stories is the entry point for every friendship we will ever have. As we tell them, we remember our friends. There are some of the main characters. And in the telling of the story, those characters live again. Jesus of Nazareth died at the age of 33. By today's reckoning, he was a millennial. What a man accused by corrupt power brokers. He's condemned by a kangaroo court to death by Crucifixion. Roman soldiers strip and spit on him, taunt and curse him, rip his back with a cat and itails, jamming a crude plate of Palestinian thorns into a scalp bursting the capital areas. They then toss a robe on him and shove him down narrow streets toward the killing place called Golgotha. Hear the jails, hear the shouts of bloodlust? Wasn't it just last night that the rhythmic sounds of the halale float here? On that Golgotha hill, high up in the sight line of a watching world, he is pinned like a butterfly against the sky. Spikes through hands and feet there he hangs, shredded back with raked muscle exposed ribs, pressed into splintered wood, relief only comes in the arching of his back to gulp air. He gets just enough to form some words, just enough to grant a request, just enough grace in his long, slow dying to make friendship live. And he remembers. Here at the epicenter of the greatest story ever told, Jesus remembers. He remembers his father's place where he came from and where he's now going. He remembers his mother, Mary, the first face he ever saw on earth and perhaps the last one he will ever see as his eyes dim in death. He remembers his good friend, John, to whom he entrust the care of his mother. And if you can believe it in his dying agony, he makes a new friend, the penitent thief who asks to be remembered. Who wants to die unremembered? In that remembering, there is redemption. The one being executed for being a friend of sinners does it one more time. The thief, guilty no doubt of many bad things, does a good thing at his moment of death. Unwittingly, he walks into life. He simply says, remember me, remember me when you get where you're going. But friendship goes beyond words, doesn't it? Friendship takes an action toward another person's world. Jesus does that. In my mind, I hear him say, teeth clenched against the pain, oh, I'll do more than remember you. Why? Why don't you come along? Come with, be with, today you'll be with me in paradise. What an outrageous friend we live in the digital age where what we know has been proffered as a thing that gives us life, makes us interesting, and gets us ahead. Some of that may be true, but in the process of gaining knowledge, we might lose wisdom. The thing that takes us wide cannot take us deep. In the end, who I know outweighs what I know a hundred times. It isn't satisfying friendships that we find wholeness and on the backstroke happiness. The question is, how do we move that direction? So, one last time, friendship starts with story and ends with story. It is what we know, it is who we are. When we tell our stories in an authentic and vulnerable way, they become journals with Velcro markers to which others can connect. From our shared stories, come affirmations and covenants and dreams, perhaps best of all, our stories are the one place in our lives that we do not have to compete. And we always, I love this, we always get an A. We do not need and are not able to walk with dozens of people closely. The God man walked with twelve and was intimate with three. We should be so fortunate. He said, were two or three gathered, I will be present. That two or three number just might be the most powerful number in the world. So, I encourage you to think small but to think deep. Think deep about God and man. And know if you do your life will have meaning and wholeness and joy. A joy centered in a profound kind of knowing. If to know and to be known is at the core of our deepest friendships, the ancient Trubidorah singing our song, oh Lord, you have searched me and you know me, what a deal. And so, on to the last questions. When all is said and done, and you walk into the Father's house, what a deep sense of belonging might you feel when he spies you across that infinitely crowded room and shouts, I know you, my friend, welcome home. Easter Sunday morning, Jesus is up and about. How is that for the understatement of the world? The stone wasn't rolled away from the entrance to the tomb to let him out. It was rolled away, I believe, from the entrance to the tomb to let us in. And once we get in, we stand in the empty tomb and see that the evidence of death has been destroyed. He came to destroy death and to give us life. And when we stand in the tomb and look out that opening, we see the world in a whole different way. If we were in the same room right now, we would hear the words of that joyous Sunday morning. He is risen. And as we have connected with him, we can say with confidence, he is risen indeed. What a great, powerful, singularly precious statement that is. God bless you. Wonderful Easter. If I were to sing, it might be that old spiritual on that great, getting up morning. But we'll leave it at that. We'll be back soon with more stories to make sense of it all. Have a blessed Easter season. And we'll catch you next time. God bless.