To Know Him...

Before I begin, I must note that I cannot teach you the following lesson. I will fail. My words will fail. Just knowing what I am about to tell you will ultimately prove useless to you…in fact, I am about to tell you something that you already know. And yet, this lesson might be the most important thing I could teach you. I wish I could teach it to you, and teach it to myself, and that we could teach it to the world…alas, we all would fail at such a task. But, I digress…

How many people went home for Spring Break? I can remember heading home those first few breaks in college. Does anyone else have that awkward reunion with their friends from high school, where you’re not sure where to pick up? People go to other schools with other friends, and they start having their own stories to tell. Some begin careers and families. People settle in to the people that they will be for the rest of their lives. We change into different people. Even if we ran into those whom we knew like family...we might hardly recognize each other.

And so, Jesus strolls into town having raised the dead, sending demonic pigs hurtling into the sea and shooting magical healing beams out of his robe. It’s no wonder the people who watched him grow up from a little boy into a man have no idea who they are seeing when Jesus comes back home. Jesus is kind of a rock star. And they react the way most of us would react…with skepticism. I mean, isn’t this the way we treat people from our past who have done well for themselves? “Wait a second…isn’t that Jesus? The Jesus that makes furniture? Wasn’t his mother…you know…that whole family is a little…you know… Seriously, they’re saying he’s the one doing all this stuff with the pigs and magical mystery medicine? Nah…not Jesus. That guy’s kinda…you know…let’s just say, he talks to God. Maybe he told all those people following him to tell stories about him. That’s probably what happened.” Isn’t this what we tend to do? We like to be skeptical, because it makes things easier to accept. It lets us be comfortable, and reaffirms what we already know.

But that’s just what Jesus called the disciples out of. This story sums up a longer section after the call of the Apostles. The Apostles follow Jesus around, watching him perform miracles and hearing his teaching to the masses. But the Apostles also get to meet the families of those experiencing the miracles. They get to wander into the back bedroom when Jesus raises the girl from the dead. They get the Cliff Notes to all of His weird public speeches. And most of all, they get to be near Him. They eat with Him, they walk between towns with Him, they wait with Him, they sleep with…well, near Him. They live life with Him.

It should come as no surprise to us that when Jesus returns home, people cannot believe their eyes. The problem is not so much that Jesus has changed on His journey, but that the people changed in the meantime. And the Apostles changed as well. It’s hard to describe how we change as we get older. We grow closer to some, and we grow apart from others. When I was younger, I remember being scared of my father and close to my mother. I thought of my father as a man to be respected…who wanted us to study all the time and be excellent at every chore or detail in life, and to take our faith in God seriously. I always loved to be around my mom because she would ride the roller coasters with us at amusement parks, joke around with us and always give us hugs. But as I got older, I found out that my father had a sense of humor…a very quick wit. I found out that he wanted me to be happy as much as he wanted me to be serious. I found out that my mother wasn’t always joking…that I could make her cry. I found out that both of my parents had vulnerabilities…that they weren’t invincible. But these things didn’t change in my parents. My dad didn’t take comedy classes when I was away at school. He didn’t start taking kryptonite supplements. My mom didn’t watch Million Dollar Baby and start listening to emo music while I was at school. They were always that way. I simply changed the way that I saw them.

Think about meeting someone for the first time. You don’t know their name, or anything about them other than how they look and maybe what they sound like. You probably form some impression of them from this scant data. After some time, you learn their name, and some qualities to associate with that name. As time goes on, you might learn stories about their past…that they were in a band…that they have struggles in their life…that they believe in this or that. Now, they are a good friend. Maybe you want to make a further commitment, so you get married. Now, you spend a good portion of your day with this person. You know how they brush their teeth, how they tap their foot randomly, or how they like to hum the harmony to music. You get to know this person so well, that you can almost always guess how they will finish a sentence, or what they need when they are upset and don’t want to talk about it. This is intimacy.

That person has not necessarily changed, but your perception of them has changed. In the movie Patch Adams, Patch spends some time in a mental institution. He visits a man that constantly asks how many fingers he is holding up. After several failures, the man tells him to look past the fingers. This reframes the problem…it changes the perspective. You don’t simply know more about the problem, but you know it in a different way. The same goes with intimacy. You learn to know a person in a different way…in a way that their life-long friends, or even their parents don’t know them, because your perception of them is framed by your intimacy with them. Even if someone were to read a biography of their life, full of every fact about their history, you would still know them on a deeper level. Only experience and intimacy can bring this change in us.

Our text for today has one of the weirdest verses in Scripture for me to read. The text says that Jesus “could do no deed of power there”, except for a few healings. How is this so? How can this God-man, who commanded the storms and winds, who was there at the creation of all existence, who tread upon death itself, not summon anything more than a few healings for these people? I believe intimacy is the key to understanding this Scripture. The people who experienced the miracles had no filters set up against Jesus. Jesus wasn’t the blue collar religious nut, or the son of a loose mother, or one of those “of Nazareth” kids. He was a man who offered a way out of crisis. He was their only hope.

Lent is a time of reflection and repentance to remove the sinful obstructions that we have put up against God in our lives. Normally, we think of the externalities…the “wrong things that we do”. We are reminded of this fault or that weakness, and we try to figure out how we can stop doing those bad things. But intimacy requires greater sacrifice and vulnerability. We must look internally. What do we assume about God? How might we be seeing Him in a way that cheats Him from His real identity? What judgments do we make about God that keep us from being intimate with Him? Unfortunately, I cannot answer these questions for you. But, I can point you to a bad example. Just look at the people from Jesus’ hometown.

If we read further, we see what intimacy brings. After many unbelievable adventures with Jesus, the Apostles begin to see in themselves the qualities of Jesus. It’s as if Jesus and the Apostles are one. God and man collide, mixing together…lines are crossed…one draws near to the other. All the experiences with Jesus began happening to the Apostles, but in their own travels…and this was only a taste of things to come. This is intimacy.

And I cannot teach you this lesson. I cannot enter your brain and change the way it sees the world. I’m not one of the X-men. No words…no amount of books, or knowledge, or seminars can give you intimacy. But, praise the Lord, I don’t have to…because He loves us. No matter how much you might want this intimacy, God wants it more. He’s coming at you more than you’ll ever know…with more love than you can fathom. And you can’t use Him up…you can’t figure Him out. You can spend every second of every day of the rest of your life near Him, and you’ll still be merely scraping His surface. I haven’t decided yet whether this is comforting or intimidating…but it’s true. All I know is that I don’t want to waste my time anywhere else. I cannot teach you this lesson…I can only invite you with me to try to get up close to Him…to try to keep up with Him…to let Him be your reason for getting up each morning, and for living each day.