On the Good Road into the Heart of God

“God has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly.”

Those familiar words of course come from the Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise in the very first chapter of Luke’s account of the Gospel.

Luke is the only one of the gospel writers to include this song from Mary, and he features it right up front, setting the tone for how he wants to tell the story of Jesus, especially to frame his telling with the dynamics of power.

Every human society, every community, all relationships exhibit in various ways those dynamics. The schools we attend, the money we make, where we live, the gender we manifest, whom we love, the color of our skin—all of these and more are infused with varying degrees of social and political, even religious power.

Modern Western society trains most of us to think of power as residing in just one place at a time. Many of us suppose that power is something like an object that passes from one location to another, like a football that gets passed from one team to the next so we know who the winners and the losers are in this game of life.

Power is obviously much more complex than that; it’s never merely a zero-sum game, as if when one person has power, everyone else has none.

Power is much more fluid, resembling a stream, or a river—always moving, always changing, sometimes showing up in the foaming cataracts of a waterfall and at others as a quiet eddy circling around a shallow bay.

Luke appreciates these complexities about power and repeatedly contrasts the power of empire and the power of God; he does this in nearly every encounter with Jesus, in nearly every parable Jesus tells, and in all of the relationships he chronicles.

Luke shows us how power can intimidate, control and dominate, even oppress entire communities with a coercive force. He also shows us another kind of power—the power to heal, to comfort and console, and perhaps especially the power to welcome and embrace, something we might call the “power of belonging.”

This power to welcome in a loving embrace hardly ever gets noticed like all the spectacular displays of coercive power. For Luke, “welcome” and “belonging” stand in stark contrast to imperial power—the kind that divides and fragments, the kind that creates categories of competition, rendering every encounter as a moment of exchange and potential aggression, even hostility.

I am always intrigued by the moment in Luke’s account of the passion when Luke rather casually mentions that the trial and torture of Jesus created a friendship between former rivals: Pilate and Herod—the Roman Governor and the Judean King (Luke 23:12).

Whenever we deal with Jesus, Luke seems to say—even when we stand opposed to him—an energy of “welcome” emerges, creating friends from enemies.

The holiest of weeks for Christians began just yesterday, with “The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday.” That awkward moniker signals just how odd the day itself is, actually one of the strangest on the Christian calendar. This mashup of what seem like competing liturgical goals creates significant religious whiplash as we shift rather jarringly from the so-called “triumphal” entry into Jerusalem to the abject suffering on the cross.

How tempting to suppose that such a shift yanks us from a moment of celebratory power to a moment of power’s absence. But Luke urges us to suppose otherwise, with different kinds of power circulating through these moments.

In the story about the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem (Lk. 19:28-40)—the iconic “Palm Sunday” story—Luke doesn’t give us any palms. There are no palms in Luke’s version of Palm Sunday. We might recall in that Mediterranean society that palm branches were often used to celebrate a military victory, and in ancient Israel, they marked the royal power of King David.

As Jesus enters the “City of David,” Luke narrates that entry with the conspicuous absence of any symbols of royal power. And yet, as Luke says, the crowd of disciples joining him on that road were praising God for all the “deeds of power” that they had seen in Jesus—the power to heal, the power to console, the power to welcome.

Switching our liturgical gaze to the scene of execution, we don’t see a moment of complete powerlessness; Luke would have us to see something quite different (Lk. 23:1-49).

In his tortured weakness, Jesus nonetheless exercises his power to pardon—he asks God to forgive all his executioners, and that moment appears only in Luke.

Luke is also the only gospel writer to give us the touching exchange between Jesus and the thief who was crucified with him. Jesus is dying and in the kind of pain we can scarcely imagine; and still, he declares with confidence to the thief, “Today, you will be with me in paradise.”

There’s an old story about this Gospel moment, and it is told in various versions. The story goes like this: that thief showed up at the Pearly Gates and stood before St. Peter.

“So,” Peter says to the man, “did you earn a degree in theology to get here?”
“Oh no, sir, I never studied theology.”
“I see. But you do understand how atonement works for the sake of salvation.”
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t know about such things.”
“Well, then you must have lived quite a virtuous life to be standing here.”
“No sir; I was a convicted thief.”
“Why then,” Peter says, “why are you here?”
“Because, the man on the middle cross said I could come.”

The power of “welcome” in the midst of weakness is at the very heart of God.

That’s where we’re headed on this road through the holiest of weeks on the Christian calendar: we’re going right into the very heart of God, where the power of love can change the world.

We speak often in the parish I’m privileged to serve about the importance, even the primacy of extending a bold hospitality as a vital component of our shared ministry. In our life together, we aim to welcome everyone, no exceptions whatsoever. And we do this because we are convinced of this: there is only love in the heart of God.

I was not raised to believe such a thing about God’s own heart; I fear very few were. The world would be a different place, nearly unrecognizable, if this were the “good news” of the Christian Church.

I’m grateful to Christian songwriter Zach Williams for that line from one of his songs, which captures with such elegant beauty what I have struggled for so many years to express and to live: There is only love at the heart of God—nothing else, only love—and the power of that love welcomes all, everyone, home.