No Conditions
Luke 4:14-21[1]
We have a saying: “If
something sounds too good to be true, it is.” I think the root of that saying
is that there are a lot of people out there making all kinds of promises, if
we’ll just send them $99.99. They promise us everything from weight loss to a
fool-proof way to get rich to the “secret” of success in life. More than that,
just about every person running for any kind of elected office promises us the
moon on a silver platter if we’ll just vote for them. There are lots of reasons
why so many of us have a healthy skepticism about promises that seem too good
to be true.
I wonder if this rubs
off on some people when it comes to our faith. Let’s face it, our faith makes
some pretty big promises. The foundation of our faith is that in Jesus Christ,
God has already done everything necessary to secure our salvation for all
eternity. That’s a pretty big promise! Our faith teaches us that our eternal
destiny is based on God’s unconditional, unrestricted, and irrevocable love.
More than that, the end of our faith is that what God began with Jesus and his
followers will continue until he has made “all things new” (Rev. 21:5). Yes,
the promise is that our God is up to nothing less that restoring everything and
everyone. When you look at the way the world is actually going, all that may
sound like so much “pie-in-the-sky” wishful thinking. It may sound too good to
be true.
As hard as it may be
for us to swallow these days, that was Jesus’ message on that day in the
synagogue at Nazareth. The people there would have understood what Jesus was
talking about when he said to them, “today this scripture has been fulfilled in
your hearing” (Luke 4:21). They knew what the reading from the prophet Isaiah
was talking about—the restoration of justice, peace, and freedom to the people
of Israel, and through them to all the nations of the earth! The prophet called
this restoration “the year of the Lord’s favor.” This was a well-known
concept—it was called the “Year of Jubilee.” Every 50 years, the slate was to
be wiped clean and everyone was to get a fresh start.
Jesus said to the
people of Nazareth—with a straight face—that his reading of the scripture from
Isaiah 61 on that day in the Synagogue was the beginning of the fulfillment of
that promise. God’s compassionate justice, God’s peace, God’s freedom was to be
extended to all people everywhere. The “Year of Jubilee” was to be applied to
everyone. It meant that the whole human race was getting the chance to have the
slate wiped clean and to have a fresh start. In effect, Jesus said that the
promises that may have sounded too good to be true were indeed coming true in
him.
When you think about
the breathtaking nature of that statement, if you’re like me, you may wonder
why our churches aren’t bursting at the seams from the crowds joining their
voices to celebrate such amazing good news. I think there are a variety of
answers to that question. Some people hear everything I’ve just said as just a
lot of empty talk. Some people think all this happened long ago and far away,
and they’re more interested in the life they face right now.
I think there are many
of us who hear the wonderful promises made in Scripture and believe they’re
true—for everybody else. We have a hard time really accepting at the core of
our being that God loves us that much. Some of us try to remedy that by putting
up a heroic effort to be “good enough” to “get to heaven.” And there are plenty
of churches out there who are willing to tell you exactly what you have to do
to achieve that. Others of us have already decided that we will never be able
to be “good enough” to “get to heaven” and so we’ve stopped trying. We hear the
wonderful promises of Scripture, but we seem to labor under the belief that
there really is some kind of “catch” that disqualifies us from actually
“claiming” the prize.
But what we should not
miss is that big, bold statement that Jesus made on that day in the Synagogue
at Nazareth: “today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” In
Jesus Christ, “the year of the Lord’s favor” has come, or as one version
paraphrases it, “the time of God’s great acceptance has begun.” In him, God
has already done everything necessary to secure our salvation for all eternity.
There are no hidden conditions, no asterisks, there is no “catch.” And the
ultimate promise is that God is working to restore everything and everyone.
When I was growing up,
our offering envelopes had checkboxes that spelled out the expectations:
attending Sunday School (check), attending Worship (check), reading your Bible
daily (check), giving your tithe (check), and so on. It served to reinforce the
idea that the “catch” to the promises of Scripture was that it all depended on what
we did. But our faith teaches us that, as the late Desmond Tutu put it, “there
is nothing you can do to make God love you more” and “there is nothing you can
do to make God love you less.”[2] There are no “conditions” that might disqualify you because it’s all based on
God’s unconditional, unrestricted, and irrevocable love. If there is a “catch”
it’s that, as the hymn writer Isaac Watts put it 300 years ago, “love so
amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all!”[3]
[1] ©
2022 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm Ph. D. on 1/23/2022 for
Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2] Desmond Tutu, God Has A Dream, 32.
[3] Isaac Watts, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” (1707), Glory to God: The
Presbyterian Hymnal, number 223.
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