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“To
Hear Him”
a sermon by
Thomas L. Jenkins
Text: Luke 6:17-26
“They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those
who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured.”
My dear sisters and brothers, “They
had come to hear him...” I
hope this is one of the main and most important reasons we have come to
church this morning; to hear him. Before the
passage shares this truth about his disciples and others being with
Christ, we are also told that “He
came down with them...” Yes,
they came to hear him, but even before that, He had come down to be with
them.
Our Lord Jesus Christ is the Word of God.
And just as he came down to be with them; He has also come to be
with us.
Obviously, there are aspects of Luke’s testimony to us regarding Jesus
that are not exactly the same today as they were on that specific day,
but there are also certain characteristics of God’s truth that are
very much the same, and in some ways, even more real and engaging,
especially today, as on that day.
One of my favorite, fascinating phrases is, “The
answer is in the question.”
I know that sounds highly philosophical and in some way, so
profound that it takes quite a lot of meditative intellectualism to even
ponder it. Actually, it is
very deep spiritually, having to do with the faith God is revealing to
us. It is deep spiritually,
but it is not something only an Albert Einstein would be able to know.
And there is actually a little more to add to this truth as we unpack
what this morning’s passage is pointing us to in our Lord Jesus
Christ. “The
answer is in the question. The
answer is not in the world.”
All these people, disciples and others “…had
come to hear him … And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for
power came out of him and healed them all.”
The power came out of him because the answer is now in the
question. The question is
“What does it mean to be a human, someone created by God?
What is life supposed to be like if there is a God who is
sovereign over our lives and being providential in how God deals with
us? What is this world,
this life, our days, our times, our issues supposed be like if we are
somehow related to the ground of all being and life?”
That is the question. The
biggest question to us in our lives is the question of being a person,
being a human. Being a man
or woman in this world is the question.
And the answer is now in the question.
The answer is actually God.
Before the birth of Jesus, the answer was not in the question.
The answer to our question is God, or the Word of God.
God is God’s Word. The question is being human.
God is the answer. And now the answer is in the question. God is in humanity in Jesus Christ.
Those people, we are told about in this story, did not know at that time
what we just heard. Yes, by
the talk that had gone about as Jesus’ ministry had begun, these
people had heard of Jesus’ teaching and how amazed people were at it.
And they had heard the true stories of people being cured of
illness and demons cast out.
The Gospel According to Matthew tells
us that “a woman who had been
suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years came up behind him and
touched the fringe of his coat, for she said to herself, ‘If I only
touch his cloak, I will be made well.’” (MT 9:20, 21)
These people, at that time, in the knowledge of faith, knew that
power came out of him. But,
they did not know that God was in Him.
Because we are in the church and have the blessing of 2,000 years of
truths about God and who Jesus Christ is, we do actually know, in the
way faith knows, that God is in Christ.
And not only is God in Christ, God is now in all humanity.
When the Son of God entered into Jesus Christ, the Son of God
entered into the heart of all humanity.
The Son of God, the Word of God entered into your heart.
What we now know in the church of Jesus Christ is that when Jesus Christ
was raised from the dead and ascended back to be with God the Father, he
went back in the new humanity of the new heavens and the new earth.
And He took us back with Him.
We are in God and God is in us.
Our lives are hidden with Christ in God and, as the Apostle Paul
said, “It is no longer I who live, but it Christ who lives in me.” (Gal
2:20)
The answer is in the question. The
Word of God is in our hearts. Let
us come to hear him. The
answer is in the question. The
answer is not in the world. And
the world and how the world sees things is not the answer.
This is what Jesus is teaching us with these beatitudes and these woes. The truth of God in our lives and where we are in our
relationship with God cannot be defined by how the world sees things.
Luke’s passage, which by some scholars is called the “Sermon on the
Plain,” when it comes to the beatitudes seem a little more direct and
a little less, somewhat spiritual than Matthew’s “Sermon on the
Mount.” In Matthew Jesus
teaches, “Blessed are the poor
in spirit...” In Luke
he simply says, “Blessed are the
poor.” Matthew has
Jesus saying, “Blessed are those
who hunger and thirst for
righteousness…” Luke
has him simply saying, “Blessed
are you who are hungry now…”
By telling us that we are blessed even as we are a poor or hungry or in
sorrow, Jesus is not telling us that this is not suffering and that it
does not hurt. He is not telling us to ignore or deny the pain.
He is telling us that there is something true about us that we
can only know when we come to hear him.
There is a truth about us that is more real than even our painful
worldly situations.
St. Paul said it like this, “Blessed
be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in
Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,” (Eph
1:3) This sentence is in the past tense.
It has already been done. This
is the gospel. This is the
good news. You and I, and
each and every one of us has already been blessed by God the Father in
Christ Jesus with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.
That is already true. It
is not something you have to earn.
It is not a truth that you have to win from God, or receive based
on something you have done, felt, or thought.
It has already been done. We
may not feel it much yet. We
might not believe as much as we should.
But, it is still true. And
as we come to hear him, Jesus Christ, the Word of God in human flesh,
Jesus finds ways to tell us more and more of what this means in our
lives. The answer is in the
question, telling the question what he or she needs to hear and know
when he or she comes to hear from Christ.
The woes, “Woe to you who are
rich,…Woe to you who are full,…Woe to you who are laughing now”
are telling us much the same thing, the truth of who we are is
not found in our circumstances within this world.
The truth of who we are is located in the person of Jesus Christ.
When I’m teaching certain classes of mine, advanced level mathematics,
I like to point out to them when the math was discovered.
If we are learning something that was not derived until the
1600s, then my students, even though they are still in high school know
certain things about math that other human did not know before it was
discovered.
Yes, some of these people came to Jesus to hear him, to be healed by
him, and to touch him. But,
they did not know what we just heard.
We are the question. And
the answer is in the question. We
may come to church to look within ourselves and hear Him tell us just
how we have been blessed with all the treasures of heaven.
Let us pray…
Amen
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