When I was in my young adult years I had a roommate who was a raging alcoholic. I didn’t know about it at first. For two months everything was great. Then two months after I lived there, he started to drink. Alcohol addiction is a disease. His disease was so intense that he became a totally different person who was very aggressive. He broke into my room, went through all my belongings, and stole the money I had hidden. It was $50. Which at the time was a lot of money for me. That was money to buy food. For a long time afterwards I harbored a very strong bias against who suffered from alcoholism.
In the Gospel according to John, there were Greek foreigners who came to meet Jesus. Although they were from a different culture, they wanted to know Jesus and share in his ministry. The disciples did not know what to say. They still didn’t know that Jesus was going to be a king for all people, even Romans and Greeks. When the disciples asked Jesus about the Greeks, he didn’t give a direct answer but said that a grain of wheat must die to generate an abundant harvest of new grain. Maybe the disciples had a bias against Greek speaking people.
Jesus meant that he had to die on the cross in order to save us from our sins. He also meant that the disciples would have to follow his lead and sacrifice their lives too. The gospel of Jesus doesn’t make your life easier. It is a call to daily die to our sins, to sacrifice the things that give us comfort, and to more fully depend on God. The disciples would have to “die” to any bias they had against people different from them.
For the disciples it meant that they would have to sacrifice the notion that Jesus’ message was only to their cultural group. They would have to learn Greek, they would have to speak Greek, they would have to write Greek. If they tried to keep Jesus’ message to themselves then it would be preserved like a little grain of wheat. But if they would do the difficult work of translating the good news into Greek, then even though their comfortable group of twelve disciples might “die” the Good news would spread over all the world. And it did!
The entire New Testament was written in what language? Greek. Everything we know about Jesus we have received through the Greek language. We would not be Christians without the Greeks. God’s love translates to all languages and peoples.
The disciples’ belief that Jesus was a special messiah only for them had to die in order for God’s salvation to be available to all creation. This was the point written in the letter to the Hebrews when it spoke of Jesus as a descendant in the Order of Melchizedek. Melchizedek was a king and priest of Salem in Abram’s time. When Abram was successful in a battle, he offered a tenth of what he won to God by way of Melchizedek. Abram was not the only believer in the true God. There were others on earth, there still are, and they will always be believers that we do not know. Jesus said that he has other flocks of sheep that we don’t know about. We have to be humble like Abram and recognize that Christ is God’s priest for all creation.
Jeremiah says in chapter thirty-one that the day is coming when the whole world will know God. On this day it was not necessary to teach anyone about God. Everyone is going to know God. These days God’s law is going to be written on hearts. Every human being will act for justice.
So as I mentioned I had a challenging experience once with a roommate who suffered intensely from alcohol. Some years later when I was a youth director we did a mission trip, and spent a few days serving at a Christian drug and alcohol rehabilitation center. When we were there the pastor of the ministry asked me if our group would like to give a donation. Something inside me flared up in anger, and I ignored the request. He asked me again and again, and I really started to feel angry. So I spoke to the leader who was our church’s point of contact with this rehab center. He assured me that we didn’t have to give anything, but if we wanted to he fully trusted the leader. So I spoke with our group and we decided that we would take an offering form among ourselves. I will never forget when I opened up my wallet and looked inside. How much money was in it? $50. Jesus said that unless the grain dies, it won’t grow. I realized this was my time to let a hurt from my past die. There was such joy and relief in giving that offering.
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