re: Arrange
December 18, 2009
Jesus never fits into our agenda.
Even as a baby Jesus’ entrance into the world demanded that people rearrange their lives around him. Joseph rearranged his understanding of the righteous thing to do with a pregnant fiance, based on the angel’s message that “that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 1:20). The Magi, who likely came to worship Jesus from Persia or Babylon (read: Iran or Iraq), drastically rearranged their schedules, since the journey to Bethlehem could have taken 40 days one way. Herod, in his typical paranoia, rearranged his focus of maintaining political power, ruthlessly slaughtering the baby boys of Bethlehem.
The necessity of adjustment around Jesus only intensified as he began his public ministry. His forerunner, John the Baptist, preached the coming of the Lord in such dramatic fashion that people from commoners to tax collectors to soldiers asked, “what then shall we do?” (Luke 3:10, 12, 14). The Pharisees were repeatedly forced to reassess their understanding of the Law and true righteousness. Even in Jesus’ humanly weakest hour, he left Pilate to rearrange his philosophical assumptions around the question, “What is truth?” (John 18:38).
Jesus never fits into our agenda. He cannot be caged by our categories, explained by our empiricism, or dismissed by our difficulties in believing him. Jesus demands that we rearrange our lives around him and his mission.
I for one am seeking to understand what this means for my life. It is one thing to read of the radical change Jesus demanded in his day from the safety of cultural, geographical, and chronological distance. But what does this mean in the fresh air of December 2009? How does this change how I view hot-topic issues of our culture, how I invest my time, what relationships I pursue, how I spend my money? Am I in any tangible, concrete way arranging my life around Jesus and his agenda?
Let this be a burning question on our hearts as we close the books on 2009 and look toward 2010. May we not ignore the radical nature of Jesus call to follow him. Let us approach the year ahead and open to him our day planner, our checkbook, our relationships, our habits, even our assumptions, and let Jesus as Lord take center stage of our lives.
Pastor Chris