Taylor Mertins

Consider the strange new world of the Bible - God looked upon us and our sin and what did God do? God did not remain above and far removed from our struggle. Instead, God chose to come right down into the muck and mire of our existence. God looked upon us and our sins and God entered into our very condition, birthed as a baby to a virgin in a manger.

That baby grew to proclaim the Good News for a world drowning in bad news. He healed the sick. He fed the hungry. He befriended the lonely. And when he entered the Holy City we nailed him to a cross...

The foot washing has always been a little strange and a little weird to the people called church. For one, only John includes it and, for another, it reveals the heart of God in a way that feels uncomfortable.

Not only does Jesus, God in the flesh, get down on his knees to wash the dirty feet of the disciples, one of whom will shortly betray him, another will deny him, and the rest will leave him hanging to die on a cross, but then Jesus has the gall to command us to do the same for one another.

And yet, in a way, more than being told what we are supposed to do, the whole message of this final moment is, again, about what Jesus does *for us*.

The Good News of Jesus Christ is that we have already been forgiven, and we’ve been set free.

What was done to us does not define us.

What we’ve done, and failed to do, is no longer kept in a ledger of God’s design.

The great gift of the church is that God in Christ makes our lives far more interesting than they deserve to be.

You see, Christianity is neither a religion nor a club nor a civic organization - Christianity is an adventure.

Jesus has taken the cleanup of the cosmos entirely into his own hands, hands with holes in them. He does not hang from the cross until we confess our sins, he doesn’t wait in the grave until we get our lives together. He does what he does without us having to do anything - which makes the Gospel the most radical thing in history.

Usually, when we picture Jesus, he’s this hippy-dippy character who throws up a peace sign every once in a while, he asks us to all get along, and above all he is nice.

But Jesus wasn’t nice.

You don’t crucify someone for being nice...

The devil wants Jesus to do what we want Jesus to do.

Or, perhaps better put: The devil wants Jesus to do what we want to do.

But here’s the Good News, the really Good News: Jesus is able to resist temptations that we would not, could not, and frankly do not.

A reminder for Lent: we are forgiven not *after* we confess our sins, but right smack dab in the middle of them.

(But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us - Rom. 5.8)

Jesus is not just some ethical teacher who wants us to behave ourselves.

Jesus is not some political revolutionary whose words we can cherry pick to suit our needs.

Jesus is not a new David come to elevate us to the places of power and prestige.

Jesus is God!

In himself he is the new creation.

Contrary to how the church so often functions, Jesus isn’t really trying to convince us, or the crowds, of anything. He simply stands to deliver story after story giving us glimpses behind the curtain of the cosmos and dares us to do nothing more than believe.