Ordinary Time - Is Jesus still weeping?

As [Jesus] came near and saw the city, he wept over it . . . (Luke 19:41)


One of the things that evangelical Protestants lack is geographical specificity. Other religious groups have centers: Roman Catholics have Rome; Orthodox Catholics have Constantinople; Muslims have Mecca; Jews have Jerusalem. Evangelical Protestants are, by and large, decentered. We have no holy city, no particular place of pilgrimage. Some might say, in a theological sense, that we are, as a scattered people, God’s own dwelling, and we need no earthly city to give us an identity.

So, it’s possible that Jesus occasionally stops and weeps over Rome, Constantinople, Mecca, and Jerusalem. It could be that those cities are occasionally washed in his tears.

And maybe he pauses now and again to weep over us.

In Luke’s story, right after Jesus’ time of weeping, he went into the Temple and chased out the moneychangers and sellers of animals intended for sacrifice. Yes, these people had turned the Temple courts into a religious strip mall, but they had also wiped out the purpose of those courts: To allow non-Jews to come close to the Temple and engage in worshipping the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

In effect, the people of God were eliminating their witness to the world. They had closed their doors to those who should have drawn close to the light that Israel was created to be. They had divorced themselves from their very destiny.

I worry about this. Protestants emerged a few hundred years ago as ones seeking to reform a broken church. Evangelicals emerged later to give their lives to bearing witness to the good news of Jesus Christ.

Now we’re seen by others as more about what we’re against than what we’re for. And I think that Jesus might be weeping.

Our so-called studies in apologetics (the tradition of defending the faith) is more combative than clarifying. Our relationships with people of other religious traditions involves much more accusation than it does mutual understanding. Our response to the surrounding culture, when it seems to offend us, is too often to hunker down and heighten our walls rather than to engage and try to see what God is doing.

I think I would rather have Jesus weeping over a holy city far, far away rather than weeping on me. But I suspect that we are drenched in his tears and don’t even know it. As painful as it might be, maybe Jesus will come along and clear out the rubbish and the drama from our Temple courts and remind us who we were meant to be as the people of God—a people who exist, not for themselves, but for the sake of the world.

If Jesus does that, will we repent and respond? Or will we haul him up on charges of heresy and nail him to a cross again? I don’t want to think too long on the answer to that question.

Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on us.

Remembering Dallas Willard

Some years ago my friend, Todd Hunter, invited my wife and me to join him and a few other pastors for lunch with Dallas Willard. It was during a conference in Phoenix that Todd and Dallas were leading, and I was excited to meet Dallas and spend a little time talking with him.

The conversation around the lunch table touched on a number of interesting topics. I asked Dallas if he thought that the concept of formal church membership was dying in the US. He said, “If we don’t give people a way to belong, then we leave them to the ravages of consumerism.” How does someone come up with a statement so memorable over a club sandwich and iced tea?

After a while, a young church planter at the table told a remarkable story. He was working with a team to plant a church in Beirut, Lebanon. They had two kinds of gatherings: One for Muslim inquirers who wanted to engage in conversations about faith, and one exclusively for their small group of Christians, where they could talk, pray, and worship freely.

One of the members of his team had become acquainted with a Muslim woman who was a high-profile Lebanese journalist. She expressed interest in hearing more about Jesus, so he invited her to a gathering.

But it was the wrong gathering.

When she arrived on the appointed evening—an evening reserved for prayer and worship—the young pastor was understandably nervous. What would be the consequences of this well-educated Muslim woman experiencing Christian, charismatic worship? It was too late to make any changes in the agenda, so a CD of worship music was popped into the player (no one apparently had a guitar), and the time of worship began.

He said that, initially, the woman just watched the others as they stood, kneeled, lifted hands in the air, and worshipped Jesus with abandon. He closed his eyes and prayed that the Lord would protect them from trouble. When he opened his eyes a song or two later, he saw the woman standing on her feet, hands raised in the air, and tears streaming down her face.

Most of us thought this was a great conversion story. But then the young pastor asked a question that revealed his purpose in telling the story in the first place. He said,

“The thing is, Dallas, that this woman now considers herself to be a Muslim who follows Jesus.”

Before anyone else could respond, Dallas firmly declared,

“How could she be anything other than that?”

After my head quit spinning, I was able to give deeper consideration to his statement. He wasn’t, as some might assume, allowing the woman to conflate Christianity and Islam, creating her own private mix of religions. Nor was he diminishing the lordship of Jesus. He was opening our minds to something that I’ve come to understand a little better over the years: That religion is, for many people, as deeply imbedded in culture as it is in a formal belief system.

For the woman in that story, to stop being Muslim might have been the equivalent of turning in her Lebanese citizenship. It is very likely that her relationship to Islam was tied as deeply to her relationships with family, friends, and culture as it was to her system of belief.

When you stop and think about it, we in the Christian world have our own versions of cultural embeddedness. Perhaps we can understand how our faith becomes much more to us than adherence to a creed. We have traditions, practices, memories, language, and relationships that are deeply entwined in our belief systems.

I continue to be grateful to Dallas for his gift of time on that day. I’ve shared this story many times over the years, especially with my seminary students, and most have found it helpful.

Sometimes I’ve wondered about the intellectual and spiritual loss that occurs when someone like Dallas Willard leaves us. Where does it all go? I’ve decided that it goes into those of us who remain, and our responsibility is to be, to even the smallest degree, that same kind of person for the benefit of others.