Taylor Mertins

Our world runs on avarice - Extreme greed for wealth or material goods. It’s the lie we were fed as children, and it’s the lie that we feed to our children. It is reinforced on every magazine cover, in every instagram post, and with every commercial on TV.

Happiness is yours if you acquire this thing.

And it’s all a lie.

Jesus doesn’t come just to show the disciples, and us, a new way of life but is, himself, the new way.

This can be rather frustrating for the many of us who want Jesus to just be clear about what we should and shouldn’t do. Contrary to what we often hear from the church, Jesus is not waiting around for us to be perfect, but simply says the time has come for us to recognize how last, lost, least, little, and dead we all are.

Jesus is free among the dead - He is the one who, again and again, is with the last, the least, the lost, the little, and the dead.

If we want the parable to tell us to imitate the Good Samaritan, which it certainly does, then that’s fine.

But if that’s all the Good Samaritan is good for, then it isn’t very good.

Instead it leaves people like you and me feeling fine and guilty. We feel fine in terms of thinking about times we have been neighborly toward our neighbors, or it can leave us feeling guilty about the many times we haven’t.

When, in fact, the whole story is about how Jesus is the one down in the ditch. That he, the Lord of lords, has condescended himself to our miserable existence and can be found in the place of our own ditch-ness and suffering.

We will never ever be able to enjoy the gift of the resurrection, a gift handed to us for nothing, if we cannot face the absurdity of our own forgiveness.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with wanting to be better - it’s just that in spite of our desires for approval and change and growth, the work of the Lord remains steadfast.

Jesus saves losers and only losers.

He raises the dead and only the dead.

He finds the lost and only the lost.

The last, least, lost, little, and dead receive more of Jesus’ joy than all of the winners in the world.

And we can’t stand it.

Religion, in the many ways it manifests itself, often only has one thing to say: people like you and me need to do something in order to get God to do something. We need only be good enough, or faithful enough, or merciful enough, until we tip the scales back in our favor. But this kind of religious observance, which is most religious observance, traps us in a game that we will always and forever lose.

It’s bad news.

But Jesus comes to bring Good News.

The resurrection of Jesus is completely contrary to our way of being. It is completely contrary because we have nothing to do with it.

Jesus wasn’t waiting in the grave until there was the right amount of belief in the world before he broke free from the chains of Sin and Death.

Jesus wasn’t biding his time waiting for his would-be followers to engage in systems of perfect morality before offering them the gift of salvation.

The Good News is that Jesus Christ was resurrected from the dead.

But the even better news is the fact that Jesus was raised from the dead whether we believe it or not.

The crucifixion of Jesus puts to an end the religious categories that separate people from one another and unites us under a common banner.

We might want that banner to be a declaration of love, or grace, or mercy. But the thing under which we are all included is actually our guilt.

We, all of us, are the ungodly.

And yet Christ dies, for us.

We Christians are a people forever stuck in the past.

And we can hardly be blamed; we only know what we know.

But on Maundy Thursday we are compelled to get our sense of time confused.

For tonight we do what we do both in remembrance and in anticipation.

There will always be more for us to do, but the one thing we could never do has already been done for us.

The work of Christ, life-death-resurrection, provides all the enoughness we could ever really hope for.

It is the sign that though we are unworthy, Christ makes us worthy, though we have sinned, Christ offers pardon, though we feel empty, Christ proclaims that we are enough.