FALLING IN LOVE WITH JESUS

PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
APRIL 13, 1986
by
JOHN M. BUCHANAN
PASTOR

FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, CHICAGO

It comes down to this man, doesn't it? At
some point, out of all the people in history, the
Wan fas Taid a cliam on us. It may have been an
individual emotional upheaval, and it may have been
an intellectual itch we tried to scratch for two
decades. It may have been a fire in our viscera
about injustice and how to avoid the human
propensity for more of it, and it may have been an

intolerable disgust at personal weakness, or it

may have been an inwardly deep affirmation of the
goodness of the world, a love which came deep
within us. Somehow, he got to us: somehow, he is
in the middle of it. Somehow he is getting to us.
The religious book which gained a Tot of

attention this season Jesus Through the Centuries,

His Place in the History of Culture, by Jaroslav

Pelikan, a Theologian at Yale. It is a strenuous
and scholarly book which traces the enormous impact
the man has had on cultur Even when the
institutions of religion seem to sag, the man
continues to compel. Pelikan begins his work with
this provocative thought:

“If it were possible, with some sort of
super-magnet, to pull up out of history every scrap
of metal bearing at least a trace of his name, how
much would be left. It is from his birth that
most of the human race dates its calendars, it is
by his name that millions curse and in his name

that millions pray. [p-1]

[t all comes down to this man, doesn't it?

Across the centuries people have been
fascinated, almost compelled, sometimes obsessed
with the man. Believers and unbelievers. Art,
literature, music have celebrated him. He has
gathered up aspirations, expressed deep Tove, and
been the rallying point for the anger of
communities as diverse as the human race. He has
comfoted the pious and somehow managed to speak to
the irreverent as well. Handel's Messiah
represents the other.

At the center is the man: born in
Bethelehem, grew up in Nazareth, lived in Galilee
and died in Jerusalem. The man is not an
abstration. He is supremely “locatable” in history
and geography. There are choices to be made about
how best to express it: from J. S. Bach's B Minor
Mass to the simplest Sunday School song; from the
elegance of St. Paut’s on Easter morning, to taking

the Sacrament to the patients in the geriatric

wing; from the breathtaking selflessness of Mother
Teresa, to the decision not to cheat on a final
exam. But at the center is the man. That is how
it always shall be. And those of us who prefer our
Gospel in complex sentences, encased in words like
empirical and existential need the occasional
reminder.

I was reminded of that at a seminar on the
relationship of the Gospel to the life of the
nation. JI found myself deeply troubled by the
complexity of our economic situation, pulled - as
we all are ~ between concern for the poor and the
need for a viable and responsible national economy.
The topic invites passion and the leadership of the
worship was understandably partisan and sometimes
angry. It was not easy going for anyone and it
certainly wasn't pietistic in the usual sense of
that word. The name Jesus Christ was invoked a lot
and not always in prayer. On the last evening the

leadership team assembled as a panel to discuss the

matter of how individuals who are in ministry in
this complex environment find that their own souls
are fed. I was startled to hear one of the leaders
- a strong, creative woman from New York City,
deeply committed to social justice and social
change - answer “I am fed by my personal
relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ." It was a
magnificent reminder that regardless of where we
are ecclesiastically - High Church Anglican to Free
will Baptist: or politically - liberal to
conservative; regardless of anything else, at the
center is the man, and our coming to terms with
him.

I found another reminder in a Seminary
Commencement Address Chicago Theologian
JosephSittler delivered - under the title: The

Haunting Allure of Jesus. Now Joe Sittter isa

wonderful human being and a great. theologian and
his language skills are Tegendary. I read whatever

he writes. j So I read eagerly what Sittler had to

say to new seminary graduates. He posed the
question of how Christianity gets transmitted from
one person to another one generation to the next.
Listen to how he put it - "As I tried to discern
the tangled history of my own coming to Christian
faith...My whole life has been haunted by the
reality of Jesus...1 find that, despite ali the
scholarship which has taken place between my
seminary days and this moment, there is no
abatement in the power of this haunting allure of

the figure of Jesus." [Trinity Review, Fall 1982,

p- 34]

Sittler told how he had been on a program
with Krister Stendahl, one of the leading New
Testament scholars in the world, now a Scandanavian
Bishop, and how a layman from Iowa had gotten up
during the question and answer period and asked
very simply, "Professor Stendahi, how did you get
‘hooked’ on this stuff?" Sittler said: "Now we

are leaned back and expected from Stendal a fairly

long-haired description of the historical,
conceptual, philosophical path by which many of us
came, and it was a great moment when Stendah! said,
"My family and I were not church people at all and
the onty way I could rebel against the mores of my
family was to go to church! And when I got to
church, within six months, I fell in love with
Jesus.’" [p.p. 33, 34]

Even those intellectuals who perceive and
discern and comprehend so much more than the rest
of us begin here, with the elemental simplicity of
the man. Or perhaps it is because they discern so
much that they can see the centrality of the man...
“t fell in love with Jesus."

The question is posed first by Jesus himself.
"Do you Tove me Peter?" It is found in the Gospel
lesson for the day.

On the night Jesus was arrested and subjected
to the humiliation of phony religious trial before

Caiaphas, Peter had followed at a safe distance

into the courtyard of the high priest's residence.
It was there, warming himself at the fire, that
Peter had been challenged. “You are one of them!"
a young woman had said. and Peter, startled,
friehtened, had denied it. three times it happened
that night and each time Peter denied knowing
Jesus, punctuating his third denial with an
obscenity. It is one of the more poignantly human
stories in the Gospel narrative, and it concludes
powerfully with the cock crowing and Jesus’ eyes
meeting Peter's and Peter weeping bitterly,
devastated by his own humanness.

What occurred next, for Peter, is unclear.
Jesus was crucified on a Friday. If the disciples
were around, most of them at least, kept a discreet
distance. On the first day of the week, Peter was
one of the first to discover the empty tomb. And
then there occurred a series of mysterious
resurrection appearances. some time later Peter

and the others are fishing in the early morning

when the risen Christ appears on the shore. they
eat breakfast together and the stage is set for the
conclusion of the matter of Peter's denial.

AS Peter denied knowing Jesus three times,
now Jesus asks him three times, "Simon Peter, do
you love me, more than these?" And as he denied
Jesus three times how Peter professes this love,
with the same increasing intensity. And three
times Jesus adds the admonition: “Feed my
lambs...tend my sheep...feed my sheep..."

There are at least two dynamics happening in
this intense interchange. The first has to do with
the power of Jesus' love for Peter. The second is
about the demand, the response. Surely, after the
crucifixion, following his own terrible cowardice,
Peter was virtually a prisoner of his own guilt.
We know a little bit about our vulnerability and
culpability here. We know what 1t means to set
high goals and espouse noble ideals, to plan to be

brave and courageous and strong, and then head for

cover as soon as the going gets tough. We know
what it feels like to fail to live up to our own
expectations of ourselves and the guilt which
results. We can, that is to say, sense more than a
little of the self-inflicted remorse Peter was
experiencing after the crucifixion.

"Do you Tove me, Peter?" What was he
supposed to say to that? The truth of the matter
was that he had not behaved in a way which
expressed love for anyone or anything but his own
life. Yet, he did love Jesus. How very human this
intonal polarity is. He knew the Intensity of his
own soul. He Toved Jesus as he had never loved
anyting before. And so the first dynamic here has
to do with Peter, even in the midst of the pain and
guilt and remorse of the moment, hearing and
experiencing the steady love of Jesus for him.
Jesus somehow could love people who don't appear to
have done much to deserve that love. desus somehow

could discern that which is lovable in even the

10

most untovable characters. Because Jesus stayed
with him, even as he was backing down; because
Jesus was faithful, even when he wasn't, Peter
could begin to see something of vaiue in himself,
could - in the words of one commentator - “Tove
what Jesus laved in him."

That's the first dynamic. And when it
happens - when in the midst of our sense of our
humanity, at its most human - our failures,
foibles, our self serving posturing, we know
ourselves loved by another, it is like the
salvation the prophet compared to the gentle,
refreshing rain of God pouring out of the heavens.
It's no wonder Peter was in love with Jesus-

The second dynamic also is about falling in
love. It, too, is compelling, but in a very
different way. What Jesus was asking of Peter now
was strength, courage, loyalty. Jesus’ love was
not an abstration. His love - and this is so

difficult for us to understand - was not an

Li

emotion. It was a lifestyle of helping, serving,
healing, feeding, librerating. The dialogue
between Peter and Jesus does not conclude with a
mushy verbal affirmation of affectionate love, but
with the behavioral admonition, "Feed my sheep."
Which is to say that the way one goes about loving
Jesus is by helping with the sheep.

Hans Kung somewhere quips that the list of
great people who lovedesus but want nothing to do
with the church would be long and distinguished
indeed. and everyone on it has missed the point.
You can't love Jesus without feeding the sheep, and
that gets you mixed up with other folk and before
you know it you're in church.

Now no one possessed of common sense, or even
a bit of sanity, is going to defend the perfection
or purity of the church. In fact, on the topic of
the church I've always thought the statement was
adequate, albeit a little earthly, that like the

ark the conditions inside are intolerable until you

12

consider what's going on outside.

Everyone possessed with an ounce of
thoughtfulness knows the frailities and human
failings of the church. Reflective church people -
all ~ have a tovers quarrel with their own church.
In an excellent new book, William Willimon, at Duke
University, rehearses a1] judgments people make
about the church, along the way quoting the
romantic poet Southey to the effect that "I could
believe in Christ if he did not drag behind him his
Teprous bride, the Church." [p. 3] But then
Willimon comes to an insight which I believe is the
rule of the matter. Theologically, we have always
been troubled by the incarnation - the worldliness
of God's love revealed in the life of a man like
us. It is “scandal of particularity" compared,
say, to the safe and otherworldly abstration of
Greek religion. So, Willimon says, with the
church. It is scandatously visible. j It is full

of people. Worse yet, it is full of people we

13

might not necessarily chose to Tike. In C. S.

Lewis' Screwtape Letters, Satan counsels his

lieutenant on the matter of fighting for the soul
of a new Christian. “You want to Tean pretty
heavily on those neighbors. Make his mind flit to
and fro between an expression like ‘The Bod of
Christ’ and the actual faces in the next few."

You can't. love desus without loving the
sheep. Even as Jesus was pulling it out of him |
believe Peter was recalling all those instances
when love became visible, tangible, physical: when
Jesus, moved by compassion had healed his own
mother inlaw; when he gently touched little
children; and ate with unclean street people; and
in hot anger overturned tables and drove
moneychanges from the telple; and when in awful
majesty -at the end knelt in front of each of them
and washed their feet.

More than any of them I see in Peter my own

attraction to the power of that kind of love. the

14

allure has always vbeen a love which has integrity
and authenticity and strength about it. But there
is a sense in which that strength also repels. How
else can we account for the prissy Jesus of much
ecclesiastical art?

Frederick Nitzsche, no friend of the faith,
saw this clearly in Jesus. A character in once of
his novels says about Jesus, “He had to die: he
looked with eyes that beheld everything - he beheld
man's depths and dregs, al] his hidden ignominy and

ugliness." (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in dohnson,

“The Meaning of Christ," p. 33]

The allure of Jesus is a Strength of a love
that can also repel. After all, falling in Tove is
very risky business. To be in love with one person
is to love humanity more: it is to experience more,
sense more, care more and hurt more. If you do not
wnat that, if you do not want your life changed, to
Tove and feel and live more, it is better not to

get close to Jesus. The allure, finally, is that

15

he defines our humanity better than anybody else.
Better than anyone he shows us what human life can
be and therefore what our own potential is-

Sittler confessed to the seminary graduates,
"This grave man with all the pathos and the
magnificence of his life must not be betrayed. I
must not talk nonsense about this man, 1 must not
make jokes about him. I must no trivialize
moralistically this awesome figure."

The allure of Jesus is that to think about it
much is to know that his life is how God planned
human life to be lived. Is there reaily any
question any longer that he is the only person in
history who understands how to live in peace? Is
there any real question that until we Tearn of hin
to live together as brothers and sisters across
all the lines of nation, class, race, and religion
- there will be no peace? Is there any question
about where he would be in our world and where his

strong love would take him and how he would respond

16

to the irony of a culture in which we who are
comfortable are enjoying tax cuts and those who
have nothing experience reductions in public
assistance for food, shelter, heatth care,
education? Can we, without a very creative denial,
stay close to him as money is literally taken away
from the poor to purchase a new generation of
nuctear technology?

The dangerous allure of Jesus is that he say
the truth and had the courage to tel] the truth and
live the truth. and in so doing he became a model
of human life lived so fully that anyone who takes
the time to learn about it and think about it will
be forever haunted by it.

He was, Hans Kung wrate, the “true
revalutionary." “What could be more

it

revolutionary, the great theologian aska, than
"love of enemies instead of destruction:
unconditional forgiveness instead of retaliation;

readiness to suffer instead of using force,

17

blessings for peacemakers instead of hymns of hate

and revenge." [On Being a Christian, p. 191]

From the earliest days of the christian
Church until today, the Gospel begins with a story
about a man named Jesus. From the apostolic
preaching in 35 A.D. until now, the best of the
pulpit is the story of the man. And from that day
beside the ocean, when Jesus met Peter and asked,
"Da you love me?" - being a Christian has been a
process of falling more deeply in love, and then
finding that one's humanity, one's own life is
miraculously enlivened and energized and enlarged
by that strong love.

It is, someone said, sublimely simple. “Do
you love me?...Feed my sheep.”

May you, somewhere, know yourself loved
strongly.

And may you fall in love ~- for the first
time, or again - with Jesus.

Amen.

18