October 23, 2011
Money & Stuff Part 2, The Centurion - Matthew 8:5-13
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadI never cease to be perplexed at how Jesus picks his friends. Everywhere you turn in the Bible, Jesus is hanging out with the bad guys, or at least the guys and gals that we love to hate. There are fishermen, and shepherds, and tax collectors, and prostitutes. I heard the line recently that says if you ride with outlaws, you’ll die with outlaws. Jesus never got that message because everywhere you turn, he’s riding with a bunch of outlaws. Maybe the best example of that is this very passage that I just read. Now for the life of me, I am perplexed at how Jesus could get so cozy up to a centurion. Centurions were senior Roman soldiers. They had devoted their lives to the Empire of Rome. They had served in many of Rome’s occupied territories. They presided over crucifixions, including Jesus’ own crucifixion. They had lots of soldiers under their command. They owned slaves. They were wealthy. They often served as tax collectors. They had fat retirements in a world where most people didn’t even know where their next meal was coming from. The only good thing about Roman centurions was that they had a built-in reason not to like them. They were not one these types that you don’t like but don’t know why. If you are a 1st Century Jew, you know like Roman centurions and you know full well why. We Christians are not supposed to gossip. It seems like the Bible even says something about that. But Roman centurions are the exception. You can bad mouth them all you want to.
And yet, Jesus didn’t seem to care about any of that with this centurion. In fact, Jesus even praised this particular Roman centurion, arguably more than he praised anybody else in the entire Gospel. He did not praise him or scold him for being a Centurion. He praised him because of his faith. The Centurion part didn’t matter to Jesus. It did not seem to matter to Jesus that the Roman centurion was not a Jew. In fact, being a Roman and all, he almost surely worshipped Roman gods. It didn’t matter that the Centurion had money, or slaves, or that he, at the very least, was part of a profession that oppressed people. If I was Jesus, this is what I personally would have told the Centurion. I would have said, okay, I will heal your servant. By the way, the servant may have been the Centurion’s child. The Greek could go either way, but it’s probably a servant. So I would have said, “okay, Bubba, I’ll heal your servant, but I command you to let your servant and every other slave that you have go, and I command you to renounce your Roman gods, and to renounce your high position in the oppressive Roman Empire, and to give your money to the poor.” That’s what I would have said, and I’ll bet that this story would have had a very different ending. But none of that mattered to Jesus.
Sometimes I think we try to impress Jesus. For some of us, we want to impress Jesus with our money and stuff. There are two types of people in this world, those with money and those without. And if we’ve got money in our capitalist economy, it’s because we have produced something valuable in our economy. So we can’t be all bad. Jesus should impressed by our figuring out how to play the game. Or maybe Jesus should be impressed by our refusal to play the game. Maybe Jesus will really be impressed by us if we skipped Church today and occupied Wall Street instead. Maybe Jesus will be impressed by our political affiliation, or our religious affiliation. Maybe Jesus will be impressed by our perfect attendance in Church, or by our social stands, or by our parenting skills, or by our knowledge. Yet here, Jesus never even mentions any of that, ever.
And neither did the Roman Centurion, because the Roman Centurion seemed to know that it was all for naught when it mattered the most. He seemed to know that his rank and status with the powers that be, that all his soldiers under him, and all his money, and all his slaves, and all his authority never did amount to much. For a Roman centurion to confess that an itinerant Jewish preacher has more authority than he did took a remarkable amount of faith. Jesus is Lord of all, regardless of who we are or what we have or what we have done. I guess that maybe it comes down to this: if anybody in the world was self-sufficient, it would be the Roman centurion. If anybody in the world had everything that he needed, it would be the centurion.
And if anybody is a fan of self-sufficiency, it would be me. I am the father of three small children. To say the least, they are anything but self-sufficient. The sooner they get self-sufficient, the easier my life will become. They need me or their mother for pretty much everything: putting their clothes on, tying their shoes, fixing their food, paying their bills… you name it, we’ve got to do it. Now if all goes as planned, they will grow up and learn how to do all of that for themselves. They will get educated, well-educated. They will get good jobs. They will send a portion of their check back to their parents. They will succeed. Not only will they be able, for example, to cook for themselves, but they’ll have other people cooking for them. That’s the whole idea. Whatever success I end up achieving in my life, I want them to achieve more.
The danger, of course, is that they’ll be so successful, they’ll be so self-sufficient, that they will actually buy into the myth that they really are self-sufficient. Is that not what is so surprising about the Roman centurion? In spite of all that he has accomplished, he knows that he’s not self-sufficient. He does not have what he needs right at his fingertips. He cannot produce for himself what he really needs. Rather, he knows that he needs an outside source, like this Jewish preacher named Jesus. Now Matthew did not tell us this, but I wonder how that would have changed everything else that he did, and everything else that he had.
Many of us believe that money corrupts us, and goodness knows that we have evidence to back us up. But I don’t really believe that, and, obviously, neither did Jesus. Money can obviously serve as a fuel of sorts for our corruption, but money itself does not corrupt. We corrupt ourselves, because we get a corrupted view of God, as if he’s not really God, or he is God but doesn’t care about us, so we get a corrupted view of ourselves and each other. But when we see God as He really is, when we see that God has created us and saved us, that God truly does have some authority, and that God loves us, then that puts everything else in right perspective. In fact, that makes everything else an opportunity and not a liability, even money.
So the centurion, the guy that we love to hate, is alright after all, not because of his money and stuff, but not in spite of his money and stuff either. The Roman centurion is alright because he knows that God is alright, and is sovereign, and is good, and has done a few things for us that we desperately needed, but that not even the Roman Centurion could do for himself. The Roman Centurion knew all of that, and he lived accordingly.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
