I  met a woman some years back who wrote a play called, Dear Jesus in which Jesus is brought to trial by a group of women to see if he was in favor of true equality for women.  The playwriter wasn’t a church goer or even a believer in God, but she was fascinated by Jesus, and in her play Jesus is vindicated as a true supporter of women’s, or if you like, human liberation.  She considered Jesus a genius when it came to how human beings should relate to one another.

            I asked her what she thought about what Jesus said about God and how we are to relate to God.  She said that she dismissed his insights there because she didn’t believe in God.  I guess it is possible for someone to be brilliant in one area of inquiry and totally wrong in another.  But Jesus relates everything he says about how we are to treat our fellow human beings on his beliefs about the nature of God.  Because God is forgiving we should forgive.  Because God causes life giving rain to fall on the just and the unjust, we should love others unconditionally.  In short, he bids us to imitate God.  (Matthew 5:48)

            I was like that woman at one point in my life.  I had a set of ethical principles about how we should treat one another; I was committed to making the world a more peaceful and just place, and I set off to UCLA to study International Relations so that I could make a difference. God was unnecessary to my plans.  When I started to read the Gospel accounts about what Jesus said and did I was stunned at how forward thinking, how truly revolutionary he was.  Everything I felt deep in my soul he spoke to but in a manner far deeper than I had thought.  And time and again he said that his words were not his but those of God who had sent him, and that his work was to do the will of God. (John 6:38) Jesus prayed and lived by the line in his prayer, “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

            Unlike my playwrite acquaintance, I couldn’t accept what Jesus said about human relationships while discarding what he said about our relationship to God. That didn’t make sense to me. So I came to love and believe in God because of Jesus, and that changed my life and vocation, but not so much my convictions about how we are to treat each other.  What changed was that the reason for my convictions came to be God based rather than human or reason based. The problem with talking about basing your actions and ethics on God is that so many immoral and destructive things have been undertaken by persons who said that was there motivation.  The Crusades, the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, the abortion clinic bombings and murder of physicians, the destruction of the Twin Towers and the endless stream of suicide bombings are just a few examples.  When people start talking about doing the will of God it is no wonder that many folks are tempted to duck for cover. 

            But nothing that Jesus says or does in the Gospels so much as hints at doing harm to another human being.  Listen to what Dr. Stephen Post professor of bioethics, philosophy, and religion at Case Western Reserve University and president of the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love: Altruism, Compassion, and Service says in this regard: “Jesus the Christ revealed the divine unlimited love (agape) that underlies all of the universe and is the basis of all that we call goodness, both ethically and spiritually.  Every aspect of His life was a once-in-history revelation of a perfectly exceptionless, enduring, pure, wise and energetic love.  In His life, Jesus demonstrated the many forms that agape must take in response to human needs.  Among these were compassion, forgiveness, attentive listening, mirth, creativity (e.g. His amazing parables), loyalty, celebration, immense courage and healing.  Not one human being was ever wronged in any way whatsoever by Jesus, and there was no accusation that could stand against Him. Why?  He was, and is, perfect self-giving love.  His atoning death was for all time the most absolutely vivid expression of perfectly pure and perfectly effective love.  This revelation of divine love cuts history like a knife through butter—there is everything before and everything after.” (from  p. 18 of the Faith Forward Conference brochure at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove in January of 2007) 

Is there a greater pioneer in the field of love than Jesus?  I think of that Carly Simon song, “Nobody Does It Better”, and though she has a different man in mind in the writing and singing of that song, the raw undivided passion with which she sings it is how I feel about Jesus when I think of how he showed us what a good life looks like.  The passage in Acts 10 that we read today is a concise summary by a man who knew and loved Jesus.  Peter said that God anointed Jesus with the Holy Spirit and with power, and he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.  For this he was crucified, but God raised him on the third day and he appeared to many of his followers and commissioned them to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead.

            People testify to what they have witnessed, and that is what we have in the Gospel accounts: the testimony of eyewitnesses to a man who lived and died loving even his enemies, and who rose from the dead as God’s way of saying to him and all with ears to hear, that he is the way, the truth and the life.  The resurrection is God’s stamp of approval on all Jesus said and did.  It establishes him as Lord of life and death.  But it is a victory that Jesus gladly shares with us so that we can live free of fear and full of love as he did.

            From the time we are very young we bump up against the unpleasant reality of death.  I remember my first dog getting hit and killed by a car and how much that hurt me.  My little canary, which was named Professor-- I know not why-- got dispatched by a neighbor’s cat.  No more beautiful songs filling the house.  I didn’t lose any family members until my middle teens, and they were a continent away in Pennsylvania. I had loving parents who tucked me in at night, a nice house and yard, but I still felt an uneasiness about death.  I wouldn’t have said so then, because I wouldn’t want to be thought of as weak.  But every human being wonders if this is all there is and worries about what happens when we go the way of all flesh.  As far as we know dolphins and chimpanzees, bright as they are, don’t lose any sleep worrying about death.  But people do.

            Because God loves us I believe God came to us in Jesus of Nazareth to address our questions about life and death in order that we could experience life in all its fullness.  We not only worry about what happens when we die.  Truth be told, we ask ourselves the question: What if I should die before I have lived?  The beer commercial: You only go around once so you’ve got to grab for all the gusto while you can, is one attempt at an answer.  Or is it just a slogan to sell beer?  Jesus models and offers a better way of experiencing all the joy that life has to offer by eating and drinking with friend and foe alike, by healing the sick, feeding the hungry, touching the leper, finding and forgiving the lost, speaking truth to power, appreciating the touch and tears and tenderness of a woman with a bad reputation who crashed a party held by a leader of the synagogue, and delighting in the company of children.  Did anyone ever raise more eyebrows and savor more of life than he?  I think not.  Wouldn’t you like to live with that kind of freedom and grace?  I would.

            And when the powers that be tried to snuff out his disturbing light and life it looked like they had succeeded.  In the dark before the dawn his loyal follower Mary of Magdala goes to the tomb to complete the applying of spices and resins to his body encased in linen.  The stone is rolled back, the tomb is empty.  She runs to the disciples with a message of despair.  They have taken his body and I don’t know where they have laid him.  Peter and John run to the tomb, there is more running in this chapter than in the rest of the New Testament, and see that she is right.  They see the burial clothes lying there as if the body has evaporated, and the cloth that had been on his head neatly rolled up and apart from the other cloth.  This is not the sort of thing grave robbers would or could do.  It is logistically improbable if not impossible.  John says that he saw and believed.  Just what he believed we aren’t certain, but it looks like he is beginning to connect the dots between what Jesus had said about rising from the dead and the scene now before him.  Peter and John go back home puzzling about what they have seen.

            Mary remains, weeping and when she bends over to look into the tomb once more, she sees two angels who ask her why she is crying and she tells them.  Then she sees one she thinks to be the gardener and he asks her whom she is looking for.  She asks him if he has taken the body away and if so, will he tell here where.  Then Jesus says, “Mary!” and her whole world turns upside down, or should I say, right side up?  “Rabbouni!” she exclaims, the Aramaic word for teacher.  Jesus says, “Do not to hold on to me……, but go tell my brothers that I am ascending to my Father and your father, to my God and your God.” (John 20:17)  N.T. Wright points out the significance of what Jesus is saying here.  He is telling her that the intimate and empowering relationship Jesus enjoys with God is now theirs as well.  And if we read on in John, Jesus says, “As the Father sent me, so I send you.”  We end where we began: to follow Jesus in relating to people we must first and foremost follow him in love for God.  The fruit of a right relationship with a loving God, is a life marked by steadfast love.  Paul puts it this way, “The life I now live I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.”

            When Jesus followers dared to do what he asked of them they got in trouble with the Temple authorities who told them to stop preaching and teaching in the name of Jesus.  They said that they could not help but proclaim what they had seen and heard and that they must obey God and not human authority if push came to shove.  They were prepared to suffer the consequences of their civil disobedience. When they stood before the learned religious authorities those authorities recognized that these fearless and eloquent persons had been with Jesus.  He had changed them, and his resurrection victory had emboldened them.  It never dawned on them that they would be able to carry forward the amazing ministry of Jesus.  But they did, and that is why you and I know about Jesus.

            I pray that we will not simply know about him, but know him and the power of his resurrection as we follow him in life, and death, and life anew.