Rev. Wesley Menke

3 April 2022 

Fifth Sunday in Lent

Sermon 

All three passages talk about the same thing: forgetting the past.

In Isaiah it has to do with forgetting how God led the people out of slavery through the red sea.

In Philipians it has to do with Paul forgetting all of the status and privilege he had.

In the Gospel it has to do with facing a difficult reality: we won’t always have Jesus.

Mary’s behavior seemed odd to them, spending a year’s wages on perfume for Jesus. Judas’ criticism on its face seems to have merit. When we remember Judas we typically remember how he betrayed Judas to be crucified, but we don’t talk about how he stole. It’s really said to think about. Why?

Judas is a victim of the temptation to works-righteousness. He suffers from the delusion that he can secure his own well being apart from God. Perhaps he idolizes something from the past; when Jesus’ ministry was growing rapidly and he was doing mighty acts. I imagine that Judas was increasingly uncomfortable with the direction Jesus’ ministry was going. It was headed toward crucifixion. So Jesus makes it plain. You won’t always have me. I won’t always be with you.

We don’t like to talk about that in church, but there it is in the Holy Bible. You won’t always have Jesus. There are times in our life when we will feel like Jesus isn’t there. When we feel this way it may be tempting to dwell in the past, and linger in our minds in a time in our life when we felt that God smiled on us. We might be tempted to do things to revitalize the past and to somehow replicate the so-called golden days of the past. But this isn’t what God wants us to do. God tells us in the Bible in each of these passages that we must forget the past and move on.

This is some tough medicine, but it is what we have to do in order to move on. We can do this because we must believe that God will do something new.

But hold on a minute. What’s so bad about remembering the past? Isn’t it a good thing to learn about history? Aren’t there beautiful things from our past that there is no point in forgetting? Can’t the past be a comforting salve to help us through the present moment? Indeed it can be. It is dangerous to completely forget the past; it is like historical amnesia. Forgetting the past can lead us to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. Having an active memory can be the one things that saves us from getting hurt in the same ways again and again.

So how do we make sense of this? We must understand what it means to have faith differently than we are accustomed to. Faith is often misunderstood to be a passive thing. But this is not what we read about in Philipians. Paul describes faith as basically replicating the crucifixion of Jesus. Paul says in so many words that he wants to suffer and die as Jesus did so that he can also experience the resurrection of Jesus. So faith is about actively sacrificing ourselves like Jesus did for us.

Have you ever stopped to think about the scandal of the cross? Are we called to suffer an ignominious death like Jesus? Paul seems to think that we are. We are each called to take up our crosses and follow Jesus. Depending on who you are; your cross might look a little different. Your cross may be abstaining from an activity that gives you a lot of pleasure and distraction but really isn’t all that good for your or for other people. Rather than feeling sorry for oneself you can see your cross to bear as an act of worship.

So what about God’s grace? Isn’t grace supposed to free us from the guilt of not being perfect people? Indeed it is. Grace reminds us that no matter