When he walked this earth, there was one group of people who failed to
see the goodness of God in Jesus. One group of people who not only
didn’t recognize Jesus as God’s son–but believed they were honoring God when
they persecuted him.
It wasn’t the sinners or the sick or the poor or
the gentiles or the foreigners.
It was the people like us–people of faith.
The people who prayed for the Messiah were exactly the ones who didn’t
recognize Jesus when God sent him in answer to their prayers.
That should unsettle us. Why did they miss
him? Why did the very ones who longed for the Kingdom miss
its coming?
Because he wasn’t who they expected him to
be. They thought they knew God, they thought they knew salvation, they
thought they knew scripture and understood the prophecies. What they
thought they knew blinded them spiritually. Jesus had no trouble healing
the blind–it was those who didn’t know they were blind who remained unchanged–because they
rejected the light that pierced their darkness.
This Sunday we start a new worship series called
‘Mind of Christ.’ We’ll be looking at the parables–because these holy
little stories show us the gap between our comfortable religious expectations
and holy reality. Parables are a peek into the mind of Jesus. They
disturb and unsettle us–and that’s the point. They help us get used
to being surprised by God.
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