An Irishman in a wheelchair entered a restaurant one and asked the waitress for a cup of coffee. You were probably expecting him to go into a bar and ask for a Guinness, but it gets even stranger. He looked around, asked his waitress, "Is that Jesus sitting over there?" She said "yes," so the Irishman told her to give Jesus a cup of coffee on him.
Next an Englishman came in with a hunched back. He shuffled over to a booth, painfully sat down, and asked the waitress for a cup of hot tea. He also looked around and asked, "Is that Jesus over there?" The waitress nodded, so the Englishman said to give Jesus a cup of hot tea, "My treat."
The third man into the restaurant was a Redneck on crutches. I should explain that “redneck” originally described poor, rural primarily southern working class people. It has evolved to refer to anyone who is uncouth, rude, vulgar, and ignorant. Our next character fits the latter description, for he hobbled over to a booth, sat down and hollered, "Hey there, sweet thang. How's about gettin' me a cold Coke!" He, too, looked across the restaurant and asked, "Is that God's boy over there?" The waitress once more nodded, so the Redneck said to give Jesus a cold Coke, too. "Put it on my bill."
As Jesus got up to leave, he passed by the Irishman, touched him and said, "For your kindness, you are healed." The Irishman felt the strength come back into his legs, got out of his wheelchair and danced a jig out the door.
Jesus also passed by the Englishman, touched him and said, "For your kindness, you are healed." The Englishman felt his back straightening up, and he raised his hands, praised the Lord and did a series of back flips out the door.
Then Jesus walked towards the Redneck. The Redneck jumped up and yelled ... "Don't touch me.................I'm drawin' disability!" 1
I apologize for any derogatory implications here, for I intend none, but the point is worth making. Some people like things the way they are, whether or not they need to be healed. Maybe we all need to be healed. As the now somewhat infamous Rev. Jeremiah Wright illustrated it, “The God of the people riding on the decks of the slave ship is not the God of the people who are riding underneath the decks as slaves in chains. If the God you're praying to, "Bless our slavery" is not the God to whom these people are praying, saying, "God, get us out of slavery." [Both want God to bless their lives, but] a God who allows slavery, who allows rape, who allows misogyny, who allows sodomy, who allows murder of a people, lynching, that's not the God of the people being lynched and sodomized and raped, and carried away into a foreign country.” 2
God loves all of people. All people belong to God, but God doesn't bless everything we do. Again and again, God calls his beloved to repent. God is always with us; to support us when we are right and correct us when we are wrong. Faithful or unfaithful, God does not leave us, but that doesn’t mean God is always happy with us.
Jesus told his disciples that God wouldn’t abandon them. God would send a Paraclete which is a Greek word that the late scholar John Barclay said was untranslatable. The literal Greek seems to imply “one who is called along side.” The word from which it was derived was for the piece of cloth used to patch a hole rent in a garment. It is an apt description of the Holy Spirit, who is as close as our clothes, surrounding us and along side of us forever to reassure us that God there is always hope because God will never abandon us. And God will never give up on us.
Peter illustrated this in his in letter to first century Christians who had come to believe the story of Noah and the Ark was literally true. He reminded them that God saved eight people from the flood, but then he cites some folklore of the day, which was the belief that, between the time of his crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus wasn’t just laying around in the tomb doing nothing, but had gone to Hades, the place of the dead. He went there, because the flood which had saved Noah and family had destroyed the rest of the human race. Jesus went to offer salvation to all those drowned in the flood millennia before. No doubt the folklore grew up, because that is the kind of person Jesus was and is and would have us to be.
There were many religions and many Gods in the first century. Athens, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, was home to the shrines, statues and altars to these many Gods. The Jews were an affront to this society with their separatism and imageless worship of God. The Chris¬tian faith was even worse. It was simply a way of life; the way of Jesus. This made these Christians misfits in society. In fact, the cultured Greeks of the day saw this religion without shrine or statue or building or country as godless; as a form of atheism.
This helps us understand what the apostle Paul was trying to explain to the council of the Areopagus. "Areopagus" is the name of a small rocky hill northwest of the Acropolis in Athens (Greek for "hill of Ares" or in Latin "Mars Hill"), and more importantly it was the meeting place where the prestigious and venerable council of elders met to discuss law, philosophy and politics as well as adjudicate criminal matters. The apostle Paul was called to defend his strange religion before these intellectual and civic leaders.
The shrines, altars and statues to various Gods were all idols to Paul’s way of thinking. He would have to argue that his God, who didn’t even have an image to point to, was the true God. It was a hard sell, when everyone else had a religion with more hype and show. All of their shrines and statues were made by human hands, Paul said. But there was one altar inscribed to ‘an unknown god.’ That was his God, he said, who created the whole human race. We are all his children. God gives everything, including life and breath, to everyone. This God is not far from any of us. We are all his children.
What goes unstated is that they were on Areopagus, Mars Hill, representing the Greek God of war. Ares was believed to be the only son of Zeus and Hera. His sister Eris, the goddess of strife, was his constant companion. Paul says they must repent and standing on the hill of the God of war, he offers his gentle Jesus, whom God raised from the dead, and who will judge all of the children of God. Some laughed; some said they should table the subject to a later time and some believed. Paul’s God wasn’t something you could see at, unless you could see his God in each other, but Paul’s God was certainly a God you could live with.
What we want our God to look like is illustrated in “A Story of the Spirit,” by an anonymous author, who writes that God decided to become visible to a king and a peasant and sent an angel to inform each of them. “O King,” the angel announced. “God has decided to reveal himself to you in whatever manner you wish. In what form do you want God to appear?”
Seated on his throne and surrounded by awestruck subjects, the King proclaimed, “How else would I wish to see God, save in Majesty? Let God come to me in the full glory of Power.” God granted his wish and appeared in a bolt of lightning that instantly incinerated the King and his court.
The Angel then appeared to a peasant saying: “God will reveal himself to you in whatever manner you desire. How do you wish to see God?”
The peasant scratched his head and finally said, “I am a poor man and not worthy to see God face to face. But if it is God’s will to be revealed to me, let it be in those things with which I am familiar. Let me see God in the earth I plough, the water I drink, the food I eat. Let me see God in the faces of my family and neighbors.” God granted the peasant his wish, and he lived a long and happy life.
1. Rev. Dr. Samuel D. Zumwalt, St. Matthew’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, Wilmington, North Carolina USA, on http://www.predigten.uni-goettingen.de/predigt.php?id=922&kennung=20080427en.
2. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04252008/transcript1.html.