Will Willimon tells of having once served a church where there was a long standing tradition in which lay leader would rise at the conclusion of the sermon to offer a prayer. And, one Sunday after preaching a tough sermon on a difficult text, the lay leader stood up and prayed a simple, clear, and direct prayer. “Lord, today we’ve heard your word. And we don’t like it.”

We don’t like this Word of the Lord because it cuts right to the heart of our faith.

It’s impossible to live like this, we think. How could we ever really love our enemies? They’re our enemies for a reason! Shouldn’t we be doing the opposite of love toward them? Have you ever tried to pray for those who mistreat you? Better to run away and never think of them than to pray for them! 
It’s impossible, what Jesus wants us to do.

Thankfully, though, nothing is impossible for God...

The Commands

Hosea’s life becomes the parable of his preaching.

Gomer, Hosea’s wife, mother of his three oddly named children, whom he loves and cherishes, is not faithful to him. Her adultery is not something hidden away, it’s a known element among the whole community. And so Hosea does as the law commands, he sends her away. 

The prophet Hosea thus meditates on what it’s like to lose a partner, to have a promise broken. He begins to enter into God’s own pain and suffering and anguish. 

Hosea is what we call a minor prophet, but his book is major among the minors. Its the longest, the most detailed, and the most vivid.

He speaks of bitterness, anguish, and even wrath. Not just God’s, but his own!

But then, wonder of wonders, the humiliated husband, the pathetic prophet, goes out in search of the lost love of his life. And he goes not to bring retribution, but instead he brings redemption. 

He finds Gomer among the last, least, lost, little, and dead, he saves her from destitution, brings her back to his own home (in violation of the law by the way), and recommits to the marriage. 

The one who names his children for the community to bear witness, now bears witness himself to the power of God’s grace. Hosea’s home becomes a place of grace.

Like any good gossip it spreads fast, and the message is there for everyone to see: God’s love is invincible and unconquerable. God’s faithfulness to God’s people is stronger than unfaithfulness. God’s grace goes after and redeems the beloved.

Hosea, on behalf of God, says, “I will woo her, I will find the her in the wilderness and bring her comfort.” The her in question is both Gomer and Israel. It's a parabolic prophetic proclamation.


The Place of Grace

The prodigal perfectly proclaims the paradox of the gospel: Jesus dies and is resurrected for us whether we deserve it or not. Like the younger brother, we don’t even have to apologize before our heavenly Father is tackling us in the streets of life with love. And like the older brother, we don’t have to do anything to earn an invitation to the party, save for leaving our judgments and self-righteousness behind. 

Contrary to how we might imagine it, or even experience it, the whole ministry of Jesus isn’t dependent on our deservings, or our abilities, or our morality, or our faithfulness. Instead, it’s all about the God of the good time who is just dying, literally, to share it with us.


The Relief From Deserving

All of us have some moment we would redo if given the chance, some past decision or action or utterance that we would take back if we could. 

Our pasts exert pressure on us in the present. Sure, we can become very good at moving on or pretending we’ve moved on, but the truth of us, what we’ve done or left undone, never really leaves us. Regret is real. Which is why forgiveness is so important. 

Forgiveness is the only thing that frees us and relieves us from the burden of not just who were were, but also who we are.

The Relief From Regret

Salvation has personal, domestic, social, economic, and theological dimensions. Salvation, in the New Testament, is the same word for health and well-being. There’s more than just heaven at stake here. Or, perhaps better but, heaven is at stake here and now. 

Jesus says salvation has come to Zacchaeus’ house because he, himself, is salvation in the flesh. He is wholeness and saving and everything else. He has a resurrecting effect on the bodies of those who just happen to be near by. Jesus raises Zacchaeus up from his dead life into a completely new existence. He moves him from reject to elect.

And, again, Jesus loves to hang out with the rejects. Jesus loves dead ends, dead beats, and people we wouldn’t be caught dead with because Jesus is the one who makes a way where there is no way.

Which is why Jesus can be so irritating at times. Shouldn’t he know better than to hang out with a dirty rotten tax collector? Who’s next? Lawyers? Politicians? Preachers?

The story of Jesus and Zacchaeus is a reminder that, as John Wesley put it, “There are few matters more repugnant to reasonable people than the grace of God.”

The Relief From Rejection

We're all obsessed with control and we tend to mask it under the guise of efficiency. We adopt and adapt new behaviors and practices that promise order in a world out of control. But it is precisely from the burden of control that we need relief. We don’t need better ways to control because, as Dave Zahl notes, “the problem with control as the be-all and end-all of existence is that [all the things] we use to control our lives often end up controlling us.”

And it is into the midst of all of this that Jesus embodies a life out of control. His time management is terrible, often letting interruptions interrupt the work of the kingdom. His evaluation of potential disciples is indefensible, calling fishermen and tax collectors to evangelism and community organization. 

If Jesus is trying to control people, he’s not doing a very good job. The movement he inaugurates dwindles the closer he get to Jerusalem, and by the end all the disciples abandon him. 

Jesus, to quote Zahl again, is clearly not a type-A personality. 

Jesus isn’t in the business of controlling people, if anything he’s in the business of relieving people, of freeing people, of giving them rest. In short, the way, the truth, and the life offers a different way...

The Relief From Control

When Jesus commands the disciples to be like children, he’s telling us to recognize how much we’re like children no matter how old we actually are. Because the truth, the inconvenient truth, is that we don’t have it all together. Most of us are just barely scraping by and we need all the help we can get. 

If our standing in the world is based entirely on what we can do and achieve, then the status anxiety will always remain as an anxiety.

But if our standing in the kingdom of God is based on what God can do, then we’ve been set free from the shackles that bind you and me...


The Relief from Status Anxiety

Dave Zahl writes, “The very notion of a weekly Sabbath breaks the twenty-four-seven cycle of more and reminds us that we are God’s treasured children, not slaves to the ever-mounting demands of the pharaohs in our lives.” 

To anyone who feels like they can’t keep up, slowing down is a relief.

Notably, according to Genesis, to be made in God’s image is to be a person who needs rest. 

And, according to Exodus, lest we forget the gift that is rest, we’re literally commanded to do it. In fact, the command to sabbath receives more detail and explanation than any other commandment except for idolatry.

Rest is all over the Old Testament from psalms that describe the comfort of laying down at night, to prophets who find relief under the shade of trees, to further commandments about letting the land rest.

And then Jesus takes it to a whole new level because he talks the talk and walks the walk. Have you ever noticed how tired Jesus gets in the gospels? He rests at the well, he rests from casting out demons, he rests after a long night of prayer, and, most notably, he rests the belly of a boat during a storm...

The Relief from Keeping Up

One of the most compelling and evergreen reasons to follow Jesus is that discipleship is playful. There’s a dance to the life of faith and it’s fun, or at least, its supposed to be. 

I know a pastor’s whose church’s motto is: We take Jesus seriously, but not ourselves.

Even Karl Barth noted that one of the truest tests of faith isn’t whether or not we can laugh, but whether or not we can laugh at ourselves. I also love that. 

But faith is often seen as a very serious endeavor. And for good reason. We’re talking about salvation here. But, if the only thing we ever heart about, or think about, or talk about is the law, all the things we should and shouldn’t be doing, then we will always find ourselves sitting under the shadow of failure, judgement, and seriousness.

And yet Luther, Paul, and Jesus remind us that God always speaks two words: Law and Gospel. Dave Zahl writes, “The law tells us what we ought to do; the Gospel tells us what God has done. The law shows us we need to be forgiven; the gospel announces we have been forgiven.”

There’s nothing more serious than Jesus mounting the hard wood of the cross on our behalf, but the result of that seriousness is the silliness of salvation... 

The Relief from Productivity

From his very first sermon Jesus identifies the work of the Lord with rescue, release, and relief. 

And the rest of the New Testament is ripe with such stories! Jesus delivers people from their captivity to demons, illness, loneliness, death, and isolation. The Holy Spirit delivers the disciples from captivity to preconceived notions and literal prisons. And, as we say in the liturgy, God delivers us from from slavery to sin and death and makes with us a new covenant by water and the Spirit. 

Yes, Jesus is a teacher and a healer and a preacher, but above all Jesus is a savior. 

Jesus saves...


The Relief from Captivity

It’s by grace, and only by grace that Jacob makes it to the well and to the banks of the Jabbok river. It’s by grace, and only by grace, that the conniving, heel-grabbing, con-artist extraordinaire receives the name that names the nation: Israel. It’s by grace, and only by grace, that this flawed and fantastic figure fathers the twelve tribes of Israel and is the many-times great-grandfather of Jesus.

The church is like a well - it is the nexus where everything happens. 

We gather, like Jacob, in order to come to grips with what we’ve done and left undone. We are given the promise, like Jacob, that there’s nothing we can do to make God love us any more, and there’s nothing we can do to make God love us any less.

The church also gives us the space, imagination, and wonder to wrestle with the Word. One of the surest signs of the Spirit at work is contention. There’s a reason Jacob is given the name Israel.

Lastly, as Stanley Hauerwas notes, whatever the church is, it is at least the discovery of friends we did not know we had. The church is where strangers become sisters, and others become brothers. God gathers us here together not just to hear a message, but to be God’s message to the world.

The Church Is God's Message For the World

thirty something pastor, podcast host, and fan of parables

The Commands

Taylor Mertins