Pilate, Juror #7, and Me

I read Luke, chapter 23, for my quiet time this morning. There, Luke narrates Jesus' arrest, kangaroo trial, crucifixion, and death. (His resurrection comes in the next chapter.)

I was particularly struck today by the spinelessness of Pilate, the Roman governor who ended up giving the order to have Jesus crucified.

Three times, Pilate told the crowds crying for Jesus' death that he found the accused innocent of any crime. (Herod, the puppet king of Judea, agreed.)

"I have found in [Jesus] no grounds for the death penalty [Pilate says]. Therefore I will have him punished and then release him.” (Luke 23:22)

This is a strange thing for a man who claims to have the final say over the lives and destinies of a region, backed by the world's most powerful empire, to say: "He's not guilty. But since you don't like him, I'll rough him up and send him on his way." In a supposed show of strength, as is true of all thugs and would-be thugs in such circumstances, he lets everyone see what a wimp he truly is.

Like most people who think of themselves as powerful, confident, and self-sufficient, Pilate likes giving the appearance of power, confidence, and self-sufficiency without actually possessing these characteristic. When the comfort of such people is threatened, they will opt for their comfort for themselves. They'll brag while dispatching others to do their wimp-rooted dirty work.

And so, despite the facts, Pilate orders Jesus' crucifixion.

As I read about Pilate today, I couldn't help thinking of the character, Juror #7, played by Jack Warden in the classic jury room drama, Twelve Angry Men. The jury deliberates its verdict in a capital trial involving a defendant, a young man who is a member of an unidentified minority group. Juror #7, who apparently sees himself as a tough, no-nonsense guy, is anxious to get on with things because he has tickets to a baseball game. Initially, he insists on the defendant's guilt, until some begin raising doubts about the prosecution's case. (I also love George Voskovec's performance here.)



Pilate had had enough and so he caved in to "the room," sending Jesus off to His death.

Of course, Pilate was playing into God's hand: God the Father sent God the Son expressly into the world to become the sinless sacrifice--the spotless "Lamb of God"--for sinners like me, His atoning sacrifice making it possible for all who renounce sin and trust in Jesus as their God and Savior to have new, eternal life with God.

But Pilate didn't understand all that. He was Juror #7, weak at the knees over bucking the crowd and hellbent on using the tickets he had for whatever pleasure beckoned to him at that moment.

Pilate was like the priest and Levite in Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan, who, for whatever reason, didn't take the time to address a matter of life and death, justice and injustice for another human being, seriously.

"Tough guys" too busy to care. How often are we those guys or those women? Lord, have mercy, I confess to being Pilate or Juror #7. I confess to too often being so caught up in my own agenda and my own pursuit of pleasure to love You with my whole being and to love my neighbor as much as I love myself.

God, forgive me the indifference with which I view the lives of others. Out of the Christian compassion Your Holy Spirit makes possible for believers in Jesus, help me to share the saving good news of Jesus with someone who may need it today. Out of  this same compassion, help me to show compassion for the victims of indifference and injustice today. Help me today to live as the loving person that Your grace in Christ has set me free to be! In Jesus' name I pray. Amen

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Ego by Gungor

This seems to fairly well summarize the plight of the human race and of western culture.



[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Two evils the love of money brings

Michael Kelley is right in saying that 1 Timothy 6:10 is one of the best known and most misunderstood passages in Scripture.

There, the apostle Paul writes to the young pastor, Timothy:

For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.

Paul doesn't say that money is intrinsically bad. He does say that the love of money--making the acquisition of more of it or the hoarding of it (I said hoarding, not saving)--major objects of our lives leads to all kinds evil and grief.

But how so?

Kelley identifies two evils into which the love of money can lead us, ways that he says we might otherwise overlook:

1. The love of money "can lead me to wander from my faith." Kelley writes chillingly:

I can’t be both greedy and content. I can’t worship both God and money. So if I choose money, I’m eventually guaranteed a departure from the faith.

2. Love for money "causes lots of pain points in my life." He enumerates a few:

...worry, remorse, discontentment, debt, and anxiety … the list goes on and on. The passionate pursuit of money promises liberty but only brings captivity.

I think he's right.

Thirty years ago, a friend of mine went to work for a man who had been a pioneer in the dot com world and raked in tens of millions of dollars as a result. One day, he told my friend wistfully, "You know, ten years ago, all I could think was that I would be happy and secure once I'd made my first million. Now, all I do is worry about how to keep the millions I have." Not long after that, he died suddenly, unexpectedly,...and unhappily.

There's nothing wrong with money. And God gifts some people with both the ability to handle money and to use it in ways that honor Him and show love to others. (To this latter point, in fact, Ephesians 4:28 says that a major reason for Christians to work is so that they'll have something to share with those in need.)

But money can become a god, an object of religious worship by which we measure our worthiness and value and by which we think that we can become gods ourselves, manipulating life to our own liking.

It's then that evil--things like selfishness, worry, and blindness to the needs or virtues of others--flood into our lives, taking us far from the God revealed to the world in Christ and from the life that only Christ can give.

Read all of Kelley's short piece.

[Photo from DataCapSystems.]

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

No surprise: For the long haul, study says, women prefer altruism to hunkiness

The online edition of The Week refers to a study that answers the age-old question of what women look for in men they want to be with for life:

"Individuals who displayed high levels of altruism were rated significantly more desirable overall," the researchers write. While the self-absorbed guys were viewed as more attractive candidates for a one-night stand — suggesting a night with a "bad boy" retains its short-term appeal — altruistic guys were rated as "more desirable for long-term relationships."

In the study, 202 women were shown a series of photographs of two men--one hunky, the other not so much.

For each set of two pictures, scenarios described the varied reactions of the two men in question, one of which was selfish and the other altruistic or caring.

Researchers "mixed their pitches," sometimes ascribing altruism to hunks, other times to the plain men, sometimes to both, and at other times to neither. In this way, they controlled for finding how appealing altruism really was the women in the study.

One scenario particularly caught my attention:

"Two people are walking through a busy town, and notice a homeless person sitting near a cafe. Person E decides to go into the cafe to buy a sandwich and a cup of tea to give to the homeless person outside. Person F pretends to use his mobile phone and walks straight past the homeless person."

This little vignette reminds me of Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan in which two religious figures pass on the opposite side of a road from a man who has been badly beaten by thieves.

But the hero of Jesus' story, Mr. Altruistic, the man who proves to be the neighbor to this unknown man, walks toward the man, not away from hims, and then puts salves on his wounds, then takes him to an inn where he tells the innkeeper to track his expenses for the care of the injured man until he comes back to settle accounts.

Jesus told this story in response to a man trying to limit the definition of his neighbor. (He wants to make sure that with some people, like people who don't look like him or live in his own neighborhood, it's cool to like Person F above, able to keep doing what he wants to do, other people damned.)

But, through the parable, Jesus is teaching him (and us) that, in the eyes of God, our neighbor is any person whose need comes to our attention.

Altruism, in fact, is woven in as part of Jesus' Great Commandment, in which He says that all of God's moral laws--seen in the Ten Commandments--can be boiled down to summaries that come to us from the Old Testament: to love God completely and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

Altruism toward our neighbors, including being charitable in the words we say about them to others, is meant to be the behavior of spiritual superstars, but of every human being.

Now you may have noticed something about human nature, if not about your own nature: Altruism doesn't come naturally to us, selfishness does.

That's exactly why God had to give His moral law. With it, we understand what it is to be fully human made in the image of God. But we also understand how most often we fail to be fully human by being altruistic.

And that's why God took on human flesh in the person of Jesus, bore our sins--our selfishness and self-centeredness--on the cross, taking the punishment of death we deserve and then rose from the dead to give forgiveness and eternal life and, for this life, the power of the Holy Spirit working within us to help us to repent, be made new, and to seek each day in that power to be altruistic, to be fully human.

Altruism is a trait none of us fully reaches in this life. That's why people like Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King, Jr., Christians who struggled in the name of Christ and in the power of the Spirit to not be "in it for themselves," who strove and often failed to be the altruists God meant human beings to be, yet knew to return repeatedly to God in Christ's name to repent for their failures to love, to seek forgiveness, and to receive power to try to live love, the pure selfless love demonstrated on the cross, again today.

Altruism is a trait God wants to build up in us as we live in an ever-deepening relationship with Christ.

And, young men wondering why you find it hard to establish long-term relationships with women, it turns out that while women may like a jerk for a while--most people, women and men alike, are prone at young ages to want to take a walk on the wild side.

But, in the end young men, what women really want are men who have the strength of character to unselfishly care about others more than they care about themselves.

For marriage, the study suggests, women choose altruism over hunkiness. Of course they do, no surprise there: In men who can, at least occasionally, rise to the level of altruism, they get a glimpse of what God made we human beings to be like. And that's attractive!

[The story in The Week distills a lengthier discussion of the study found in Evolutionary Psychology and distilled in Pacific Standard.]