At one point in her education, my mom had a particularly mean professor—the kind of guy who criticized your work in front of the whole class, and who relished the chance to do so with a memorable lack of kindness. 

He constructed a terrible environment in which to try and learn. 

At one point, he’d given my mom feedback about something, and a few days later, she decided to go to his office hours to follow up with him about it. 

She knocked on his door. 

“Ah,” he said, “Ms. Grant.  Have you come with a cookie to appease me?” 

If only it had been that simple. 

In Chapter 9 of Luke’s gospel, you get the feeling that the disciples are working harder and harder than ever to try to appease Jesus, who is proving a bit of a taskmaster, though of course, not one like my mom’s old professor. 

Still, appeasing Jesus is not simple, either. 

He’s not being hostile for the fun of it, of course, or using his position to get his digs in.

He knows in a way they don’t that, as they begin to head for Jerusalem, the stakes are changing for him, and for all of them now. 

He’s been trying to tell them.  Trying to explain. 

But they don’t get all this new urgency, the seriousness, and if I may say, the crabbiness. 

It simply unsettles them, and this brings out their worst. 

Trying to regain their footing, they even make a bid to bond with the master by joining him in his feelings and taking them to the next level.

They try fanning the flames of whatever the prevailing mood seems to be, transforming it into fully-fledged righteous anger.

This gets extreme fast, as they propose punishing a town that rejects Jesus by calling down fire from Heaven itself.

That’s some cookie. 

Jesus is not appeased. 

In Genesis 18, Abraham had intervened with God to delay a moment of divine punishment, to give him time to save as many as he could, arguing that there had to be some good people out there—what about them?

But now, all these years later, the disciples don’t seem to remember that story.

Instead of divine mercy teaching them to be merciful and to look for the good people, they’ve let their belief in divine righteousness justify their own self-righteousness at being rejected.   

This is a serious mistake, and one that the church would do well to remember.

The world doesn’t need a church, much less a savior, in order to bless its own attraction to violence, nor its own strongly held conviction that “our” violence is clearly different and fundamentally innocent, unlike “theirs,” whomever they may be.

Scripture says that’s been a fact of human life since the time of the third and fourth humans, Cain and Abel, the sons of Adam and Eve.   

What the world needs is a way to free itself from the magnetic pull, both of that belief, and of the underlying attraction that informs it.

For Luke, this will be a central part of the message of Easter. 

But as he knew, and as we do, too, even in the light of Easter, the pull remains. 

It is an ever-present temptation, though one God would teach us to resist, if we were interested. 

This is one of those challenges that never really goes away.

It was there at the time of the disciples and resurfaces among us in every generation.

You don’t need to be religious to see that we are blessed with remarkable powers, and each generation unlocks capacities that our parents and grandparents could scarcely have imagined, and yet we struggle so mightily to use them for good. 

This is why we need God, and not one we characterize as a distant clockmaker who set everything in motion once and now sits back and just sort of listens to its ticking.

We need the God who comes alongside us in the midst of our struggles and temptations – the One who is not quite so easily appeased, and yet who sees us through.

I think this is why, in Luke’s telling, the story goes on to have these awkward moments of encounter between Jesus and two seemingly well-meaning followers who want to join the work of the Kingdom, but not quite yet.

Because they don’t know the God who sees us through, either.

In their case, the terms are not nearly as dire as calling down fire from heaven in the name of a proper respect for God.  

And yet, Jesus hears in each of them a very subtle, self-persuaded, even self-righteous inclination to put their own personal will ahead of the Father’s will—and again, for ostensibly religious reasons, no less. 

It’s true that the things on their to-do list are ones that in many circumstances might rise to the level of holy obligations: caring for a parent at the end of life (in one case), and in the other, leaving the family on good terms.

Yet while intending no disrespect to fathers or families, Jesus sees this as a dodge, or as steps in the wrong direction. 

We may not entirely agree; however, it’s safe to say that someone who is inclined to lecture Jesus about the importance respecting one’s father has a lot to learn.

What are we supposed to make of all this?

As Dorothee Soelle explains, life “is a series of trials, demands, and possibilities.  And so one life begins to differ from another, depending on how we use our opportunities, offers and temptations.  For what? To allow God to become visible in us.”[1] 

This is what faith is supposed to help us see, and even more importantly, what it is supposed to help us reach for.

To build on her insight, then: when we give into violence, especially when we consider it somehow sanctified by God, what have we allowed to become visible in us?

Are we really prepared to say that it’s God?

When we defer and delay the opportunities and offers of God in the name of more immediate impulses and temptations, what have we allowed to become visible in us?

This is why we need the God who is prepared to forgive us, but not to appease us. 

It is only that God who can transform us.

It is only that God who can make our lives into windows through which His light might shine.

So today, we give thanks for the unappeasable love of God, which expects so much from us, and looks to offer us nothing less than everything. 

Amen.  

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[1] Dorothee Soelle, Thinking About God: An Introduction to Theology, 123, 127.