What is the worth of a person? …

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked any thing.

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.

(Love, by George Herbert)

Here was Jesus, leaving the meal and putting on a servant’s apron, washing the feet of his students…. Jesus already knew that Peter would turn his back on Him in His hour of need, yet here He is, on his knees, as a slave, before him.

Each painful wound that Jesus carried, each particle of the cross he hoisted to his shoulder, comes from your life and mine. So as we begin a week we know so well, as we begin a week of events we can narrate without any text, allow the Lord to make this Holy Week yours. Let him reach into your heart and take the crosses you carry onto his own shoulder. Let him reach into your memories and heal the crosses that cause you pain.

In this act of raising Lazarus––and waiting to do it, even though it caused Mary and Martha more distress––Jesus showed his power over death even before he himself went to the cross.
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We need to understand that God works in these spectacular and powerful ways. We need to be awestruck sometimes. We need to be humbled sometimes. Knowing that God works in these ways which are beyond our comprehension is right and good. But we also need to be able to see God at work in a way that is much more intimate and personally encouraging.

Even if you forget every other thing I said this morning, there are three things I don’t want you to forget:  Number one, spiritual obedience. Number two, witnessing. And number three, worship. These are the three things that bring the joy of Christ in our hearts.

There are lots of people who sit in the seats with Jesus, Sunday after Sunday. They might be attracted to him. Like Veronica, they’re interested in the image of Jesus. Or like Pilate, they may have heard something about him and they want to hear a little bit more. Or like the women from Jerusalem, they like doing good deeds, and the Church does good things, and so they are a part of the Church. But they’ve never looked Jesus in the eye. They’ve never seen themselves reflected back in the pupil of his eye. They’ve never spent time with him …

 God does not overwhelm us. God wants us to trust him. So Jesus let three of his disciples see his glory once during those ministry days. It was enough to pave the way for a Faith that would change the world. We can believe today because there is a credible eyewitness record that has been established by the Apostles. Peter and John both wrote that they saw…. and they testified that these things are true…. and then they lived —in such a contrasting way to who they previously were—so that people looking at them took notice that they had been with Jesus.
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The more God’s Spirit controls us, the more we will be able to respond according to his character. So you see, as in the whole Sermon on the Mount, the emphasis is not so much on what we do in any given situation as it is on who we are. There are not enough rules to guide us in godly living, even if we could keep them by ourselves (which we cannot). But what rules cannot accomplish, God’s life in us can as we ‘live in the Spirit.'
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We see Isaiah drawing two lines for us: the vertical axis and the horizontal axis. And Isaiah now lays down a fundamental concept: that there is a correlation between our vertical relationship with God and our horizontal relationship with our brothers and sisters. And I can’t tell myself, ‘Oh, Father Tony, I love God and I am making progress vertically,’ but that vertical progress has no translation to a horizontal axis.