Scriptures for this week are here
Steve Jobs died this week at age 56 – the brilliant, visionary founder of Apple, the design genius who brought us the Mac and the iPod and the iPad – all products I use and delight in – and the iPhone, the one I hope to buy when my current contract runs out. I am a fan of Apple, and therefore I have deep appreciation for Steve Jobs.
In so many ways, he revolutionized the way we use technology, vaulting us out of a world of blinking green cursors and incomprehensible code into neat little pictures, icons that we could click on to open up new worlds of meaning. The Mac revolution was quickly copied by Microsoft, so that now every computer operates with Steve Jobs-designed simplicity – point and click.
Over the past 10 years, an age of deep anxiety in America, Steve Jobs has been in a way an icon himself, an icon of a kind of hope. While Americans grew ever more anxious about the things of the outside world, in our inner worlds of technology and entertainment, our lives grew easier, neater, more beautiful, full of elegant simplicity.
I admire Steve Jobs’ business ability, his design sense, and I am a wholehearted fan of the products he created. And I didn’t know him personally, so I can’t speak to what kind of man he was – but he was a passionate articulator of a certain view of what human hope is, a very common view in our society, beautifully described in his famous 2005 commencement address at Stanford, when he said:
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose…. No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it….Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life…. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
In speaking these words, Jobs described a view of our human life that I agree with – to a point – which is: if you are not doing what you are gifted and called to do, then find a way to change your life so you are doing it. Many people in our world agree wholeheartedly with this wisdom. Any number of self-help gurus will tell you to follow your heart in order to realize true happiness – a very attractive goal. But we have to be realistic – doing what we love doesn’t always pay the rent, and ordinary people have to pay the rent. And there’s more to life than what we do: relationships, service to others.
Steve Jobs didn’t claim to be preaching any kind of Christian gospel, but there are plenty of Christian preachers who will take what he said and go a step further with it. Joel Osteen comes to mind – Your Best Life Now – saying that yes, life is all about pursuit of personal happiness, and, if God is truly blessing you, accumulating personal wealth into the bargain.
What’s missing in this idea of doing what we love, and hopefully amassing lots of money doing it, is any hope beyond the personal, any idea of transcendence, a faith in a greater purpose for your life, a trust in something that lies beyond the simple boundaries of this world. So what if we could find a meaning to life that lies beyond this, that fulfills our innermost yearnings while still leading us to greater meaning and purpose? And still telling us that our lives encompass something greater than their physical life spans, that in fact our lives have deep and eternal significance?
Enter today’s gospel – a very strange parable of celebration and judgment. It is a parable that begins to describe God’s dream for us that is greater than all human dreams – because it is a parable of the kingdom of Heaven. But what a strange parable it is – with an angry king disinviting one set of guests from the wedding banquet, dragging in another set off the street, yet flinging someone into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth, for a dress code violation – what’s going on here?
Like any gospel, you have to understand what is going on in context. In today’s gospel, Jesus is standing in Jerusalem, knowing that his death is around the corner, and will come at the hands of the very temple leaders he is talking to – scribes, Pharisees, temple authorities. And he begins to tell parables of the kingdom of heaven.
Today’s parable is the third in a row of stories that pointedly tell the religious authorities in Jerusalem that they have lost sight of God’s dream for them. They are the first ones invited to the wedding banquet, yet they have other priorities, dreams of their own to fulfill, and they can’t make time for God’s invitation. So riffraff like you and me are invited to the banquet instead. Latecomers to God’s covenant, we are not Jews, we haven’t done anything to deserve this invitation, no achievements could earn us this ticket – yet here we are.
We need to be very careful in this parable not to read it as anti-Jewish rhetoric. Remember that Jesus and all of his followers were Jews. Jesus is very specifically directing this parable against temple leaders who know God’s hope for them very well, yet can’t make time for God’s priorities. These are people who have put their own desires, their own pursuit of happiness in front of God’s dream for them. They may love what they’re doing, and many of them are accumulating great wealth doing it, but they use the temple that should be dedicated to God’s worship for heir own gain. They grasp onto their own power so hard that they don’t recognize God’s invitation when it comes – so they choose to avoid it.
So Jesus makes them angry by saying that others, less worthy of an invitation perhaps, good and bad alike, will have their places at God’s banquet. It is a parable of judgment, and judgment makes many of us uncomfortable – but notice, it is the temple leaders’ choice to say no to the invitation. Everyone was invited. We can exclude ourselves from God’s kingdom by our own choice, our decision to say no – but God invites everyone.
But then what’s going on with this poor fellow without a wedding robe? Some people say that great hosts, when they gave a banquet, would provide a rack of wedding robes at the door for those who didn’t have one – so refusing to wear the robe provided was just disrespectful to the host. This guest wants to eat the food provided, but not celebrate the occasion – he refuses to accept the clean new clothing the host offers.
What Jesus seems to be telling us here is in accordance with a theme that runs throughout Matthew’s gospel – the church is a mixed lot of folks. Some are good, some are bad, some will ultimately show that their heart belongs to God’s kingdom and some will show that it doesn’t. During this age, the age of the church, it is not for us to judge other people. On judgment day, God will separate the good from the bad.
In the meantime, that is to say, the time in between Jesus’ resurrection and the final judgment – so, our entire lifespan – Matthew tells us that we have some accountability for our actions. Yes, we have been invited to the banquet, yes, we have accepted the invitation – but while we wait for that day when the king arrives, we are accountable to God for the way we use the gifts he has given us. God provides the party, God brings us in to enjoy it, God even gives us the robe, the clothes of salvation to wear – but it is up to live in a way that honors what God has done for us
And how to honor God’s gifts is a choice we all must make. Steve Jobs believes that our greatest happiness lies in doing what we love; some Christian preachers believe that amassing personal wealth will bring us happiness. I believe that our greatest joy lies in loving God and loving each other. Yes, God will empower us to do what he has created us to do –what we love is what we do best. But God will also empower us to use the good gifts he has give us to build up the kingdom of God – which is hope beyond any transitory human happiness, lasting longer than any human lifetime. Which will bring us something far deeper than happiness: it will bring true joy in our abiding relationship with God, no matter our external circumstances. The kind of joy that Paul describes, writing from prison, when he says, rejoice in the Lord always.
Anthony Bloom, Russian Orthodox metropolitan bishop of Britain till his death in 2003, talking about Nazi occupation of Paris when he very nearly was caught by the Gestapo for his work with the French Resistance, wrote in Beginning to Pray:
During the German occupation of France I was in the resistance movement and, coming down into the Underground, I was caught by the police.... What took place at that moment was this: I had a past, I had a future, and I was moving out of one into the other by walking briskly down the steps. At a certain moment someone put a hand on my shoulder and said 'Stop, give me your papers.' At that moment . .. I realized that I had no past, because the real past I had was the thing for which I should be shot.... I found myself standing there like the lizard who had been caught by the tail and had run away leaving the tail somewhere behind, so that the lizard ended where the tail had been."
For the Christian, the place where we stand, walking briskly from past to future, is always the place of the cross – it is the place of decision, the decisive break between what we were without Christ and what we become as we accept his invitation and then enter fully into the joy of the kingdom. We are no longer to find our identity in our past, our accomplishments, our history. In future we find our identity in Christ – and our story becomes Christ’s story.
Jesus Christ IS the threshold where our past and our future meet. Jesus Christ is the one who extends the invitation. And Jesus Christ is the one who gives us all we need to enter the kingdom. His is the invitation that will bring us far more than simple happiness. It will bring us true, deep, eternal and abiding joy.
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