Nowhere to Lay Our Heads
Nowhere to Lay Our Heads
Matthew 8:18-20
The eighth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew is an amazing portrait of a life of faith. First, a leper appears to Jesus before a crowd. (Remember, lepers are just about the most despised and feared people around.) The leper cries out to Jesus, “Lord, if you choose, you can make me clean!” People in the crowd must have felt a growing nausea in the pit of their stomachs: “Can’t someone do something about this man?” Jesus says, “I do choose. Be made clean!” Immediately, the leper has the skin of a newborn. Jesus cares about the one person everyone would have agreed was not worth caring about. Then, Jesus sends the former leper to the temple as a sort of calling card.
Next, as Jesus enters Capernaum, a centurion approaches him. Now, if everyone hated the lepers, then every good Israelite, probably including the lepers, would have hated a centurion. After all, these were the folks who were the tip of the spear of the Roman occupation. These were the men on the ground—the face of the Empire. However, just as Jesus doesn’t tee up the leper, so, too, he treats the centurion as a full-on human being. The man who cares about lepers also listens to centurions. What he hears is that this centurion has a loving heart. He is there out of concern for his servant who is suffering and paralyzed. Jesus immediately says that he will come and cure him. What’s fascinating is that the centurion, who in the cartoon version would have been all puffed up and full of ego, is, in fact, humble: “Lord, I’m not worthy to have you come in my house. Just speak the word and it will be done.” Seeing this humility and hearing this trust, Jesus essentially says to anyone in earshot that there are a whole lot of “God’s chosen people” who could learn a thing or two about faith from this centurion. Then, the servant is healed. And the crowd must have been furious!
Next up is a moment with Peter’s mother-in-law. (Everyone keep those mother-in-law jokes to yourself!) Jesus walks into Peter’s house and sees that she has a fever. He touches her and heals her which doesn’t seem all that shocking to us but would have been completely shocking in Jesus’ world in which, next to a leper or a centurion, someone else’s wife would have been the last person that a man was to touch. Peter’s mother-in-law immediately begins to serve Jesus. She responds faithfully. To top things off, Peter’s house is soon overwhelmed with people who have just about every known disease and a few that had no names. Jesus healed those people, one-by-one. All the while, I suspect, Peter was shuddering in some corner, thinking to himself that he never agreed to have his home overrun with people like this…
Later, a whole new category of “frightening” is tapped when the disciples are with Jesus in a boat and a storm blows up. The boat is getting swamped but Jesus is sound asleep. The disciples wake Jesus in a panic, yelling, “Save us! We’re perishing.” The fear of the forces of nature would have been immense in that world with no doppler radar and no Tom Skilling. I imagine also that those disciples were thinking, “How could this happen to us—Jesus’ disciples?” Then, Matthew tells us, Jesus rebuked the wind. Suddenly, everything is dead calm. The disciples are left slack jawed and mumbling, “Who is this man?”
Finally, it is as if life, itself, has thrown everything possible at Jesus and then life thinks of one more thing. How about two guys who are possessed by demons? You know, those two crazy guys who scare the daylights out of everyone who travels by that road—so no one travels by that road anymore! Maybe if we studied them, we would call them schizophrenic or some other diagnostic label. We would still probably do the same thing when we saw them “in the wild.” We would avoid them at all cost. Not Jesus…he goes straight up to them. At this point, the demons speak to Jesus, “What have you to do with us?” In fact, the demons make a suggestion, “If you’re going to send us out of these people, then how about if you put us inside those pigs over there?” Jesus says one word: “Go!” The demons leave the men, enter the pigs, and the whole herd of pigs runs headlong off the side of a cliff. The crowds see this and share the news in town, only the story they tell is not of something great that happened to two men but of the waste of a good herd of pigs. The townsfolk are so disgusted that they ask Jesus to leave town…now!
So, let’s review… Jesus has done an incredible amount of good for a full range of people. A leper’s suffering is over. A centurion’s servant is no longer paralyzed. Peter’s mother-in-law is healed along with every other sick person within Peter’s zip code. The disciples don’t drown (and, at the same time, definitely don’t understand who Jesus is). Two crazy men aren’t crazy any more. However, all of this good news would have been filtered through the biases of those witnessing these events. Jesus is doing the right thing but mostly for the wrong people—the people no one likes. Imagine how many more followers he might have gained if he had put the leper in his place or let the centurion have a taste of his own medicine. Imagine how much more likely people would have been to follow Jesus if it didn’t seem like Jesus was some kind of magnet for the worst people around! Imagine if Jesus had a made a few more people just a little more comfortable…
Of course, this is the point. Jesus is living in the midst of a people who have believed forever that they are God’s chosen people. After all, God brought their ancestors out of slavery in Egypt. Therefore, they must still be special. The corollary of this conviction must be that if they are special then the people that make them uncomfortable or that they just don’t like, must be the people who make God uncomfortable or whom God just does not like. That just makes sense, right? I think such convictions would have seemed so obvious to the average person and would have been so unquestioned that it would have been completely shocking to see Jesus keep caring about all the wrong people in all the wrong places.
Now, let’s pause for a moment. This is such a crucial point. It is easy to litmus test Jesus this way: if Jesus is really the Messiah, then he’ll like who I like and he’ll stick it to the people I don’t like. If Jesus is really, “The Man,” then he’ll make me comfortable. He’ll whisper to me, “You’re right…and the crazy part is that you’ve been right all along!” The only problem is that we’re not God. As Anne Lamott says, “The difference between you and God is that God doesn't think He's you.” We’re the broken but beloved children of God who always have a limited vision and understanding and always have room to grow. Or, to put the matter slightly differently, “You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” (Another Anne Lamott quote…darn that woman can write!)
Here’s the point. Jesus entered a world in which folks figured they had things pretty much figured out. Here’s who’s good. Here’s who’s bad. Here’s the right thing to do. Here’s the wrong thing to do. Tick all the right boxes and you’re in! People had a way of understanding things. They had a “handle” on things. This understanding made them feel safe and secure. It made them feel like all was right in the world or could be made right by attacking the folks who dared to stray from the way that things were supposed to work.
If you happened to be a part of the “in” group, this system really worked. You could go to sleep at the end of the day knowing that you were okay, that you were in the right place and doing the right thing, that you could be confident that you were on the right track. If you happened to be a part of the “out” group, well, then you must have done something to deserve that fate because everything was as God intended it to be. In other words, you get what you deserve and it turns out that you deserved the short end of the stick and I deserved to prosper.
All of this just made so much sense until Jesus came along and disrupted such an understanding. That’s the thing, though. Contrary to every image that you’ve ever been given of Jesus being all for the status quo, of good followers of Jesus being folks who don’t stir things up, of the definition of a faithful person being someone who follows the rules and is nice, Jesus is primarily a disruptive force in the world. Everyone wants comfort and security and that’s not what he’s selling. Everyone wants validation for their hate of one group of people or another. Jesus is the guy who tells them to love their enemies. Jesus is here to wake us up, to disturb us, to get us to look at life again and this time, to actually grow.
In the midst of this chapter, Jesus is approached by a Scribe, a member of the ruling elite. Unlike the Pharisees who were experts in the law and specialized in telling other people what to do, the Scribes were experts who regulated and interpreted the law but were largely divorced from applying the law. The Scribes were removed from daily life and immersed in pure law. It is a shocking thing that a Scribe would even be aware of Jesus, much less that he would seek Jesus out. Most shocking of all was the Scribe’s statement: “Teacher…” Just stop there for a moment. The Scribe addresses Jesus as “Rabbi.” What? The epitome of the institutional guy—a Scribe—assigns the highest possible title to someone with no status in the institution. “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.” Again…what? Scribes don’t follow anyone. They sit in a room and parse a text. This would have seemed so strange!
The only thing stranger would have been Jesus’ answer to the Scribe: “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” One of my favorite translations says, instead: “You know we’re not staying in five star hotels, right?” That’s funny! We can do better though. A fox in his den or a bird in her nest gets to feel completely comfortable and safe. They’re not. They just don’t know any better. They get to be blissfully ignorant and drift off to sleep. This is not the case for human beings (and when Jesus refers to himself as the “Son of Man” he’s saying, “Hey, I’m one of you!”) The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. The highest goal of human life is not to be safe and secure and comfortable. We’re here to be awake and aware. We need to live with the discomfort and insecurity until we grow.
We are all intensely aware these days of how little control we have over things and of how insecure life can feel. Life has been disrupted! Things we thought we could rely on have disappeared. Understandings that we took for granted have been challenged to the core. We’re being asked to do things that make our discomfort grow: to wear a mask; to make choices that are not just about what we want but are about what’s best for the community; to listen to those whose experience is different than our own and entertain the possibility that they might see things that I don’t see.
I suspect that Jesus meets us in this discomfort and says, “Good, now that you’re finally awake, we can begin…” The point isn’t to be safe or secure. The point isn’t to pretend to be blissfully ignorant of all the insecurities. No, the point is to be awake and aware, to be in relationship with God and with every person whom we meet along the way. The point is to meet each unique person who comes our way with love and grace, regardless of whether that pleases the crowds around us.