If you were to define what makes a person a Christian, what would you say? It is interesting for us today that the Old Testament reading from Jonah and the Gospel reading both offer us contemporary views of what people think of what Christianity is.
In the first we have a situation where, as you remember, Jonah did not want to go preach to those guys in Nineveh. That was after all the capital city of Israel’s primary enemy, Assyria. Assyria was an incredibly cruel nation. We could tell they were cruel from the accounts written in the Bible, but we also have now the archeologist’s reports. What the archeologists have discovered is that even the art with which they decorated their walls was of cruelty to others, savagery and death, mounds of heads and people being flayed, that sort of thing. That art was a depiction of their real life. No, Jonah did not want to go to Nineveh. He wanted them to all die. He wanted them to be judged and condemned. But he is finally convinced by God that he ought to obey. So he goes and preaches. Notice in his short sermon he doesn’t give them any options, he simply tells them they are going down. But what happens? People got scared. And they stopped doing bad and tried to be good. We read in Jonah that the people of Nineveh believed God and they called for a fast, and everyone and everything even the animals fasted, no food nor drink, and they took off their nice clothes and put on sackcloth. Not only that the king tells his people to turn from doing evil and from their violent ways. So in this view, Christianity is being a nice person, maybe going to church, maybe even giving money to worthy causes. This is the view of many in the United States today. If you ask the person on the street, “Are you a Christian?” Many would reply, “Yes, I try to be a good person.” And the postscript to Nineveh: God decided not to send the calamity he had planned to upon them. And this fits with that perspective as well. If I keep my nose clean, bad things won’t happen to me. This is why there are all kinds of books dealing with the topic, ‘When bad things happen to good people.’ Our society doesn’t understand this.
In the gospel reading today we see a different view of Christianity. We see Jesus walking by the shore of Galilee and as he walks, he sees Peter and Andrew and James and John and tells them to follow. They immediately jump out of their boats and follow him. For three years they camp out with Jesus, and listen to him teach and preach. They watch him heal the sick, cast out demons, and even make dead people come back to life. They get sent on field trips, they get to heal people and cast out demons too. Now that’s the Christianity I want to sign up for! Man, I want to hang out with Jesus! I want to sit down and listen to him teach and talk about the kingdom and watch him touch people and heal them. I want to see him cast out demons, walk on water and all that. And then I want to be sent out and be able to heal and raise the dead and cast out demons. But guess what? Jesus is not here in the flesh anymore. I know, he is present in the body of Christ the church, and he is present in the Eucharist, at least in some sort of spiritual, mystical fashion. But the point is that He, Jesus, in his own body is not here for us to listen to, see and touch. We do not have the option of jumping out of our fishing boats, (that is leaving our jobs) leaving our families to go and camp out with Jesus like the disciples did. We have families to consider. We have bills to pay. So our following of Jesus nowadays is different than when the first disciples jumped out of those boats—yet at the same time, even though Jesus is not physically here, there are still lots of similarities. And this is the second view of Christianity for us to consider. The Christianity we have now is on the one hand harder and on the other hand easier than it was for those first disciples.
It is harder in that we do not have a visible Jesus to follow after. We follow by faith. We believe, through faith, all those eye-witness accounts provided for us in the gospels. It is harder because we do not get to see all the wonderful miracles that Jesus performed while he was here. For example, we pray for people to be healed just like the disciples did. Sometimes the Lord heals right away, sometimes the Lord doesn’t heal at all, and sometimes he heals after we ask and ask and ask. Again, we have faith to understand that whether God heals us or whether he does not, whether now or in the future, he is still good and we can trust him. Christianity is also harder now because we do not get to see first-hand what it means to live the kind of life he expects his followers to live. We don’t get to watch Jesus in real life dealing with people in everyday situations. We understand by reading the gospels and the letters of his apostles that Jesus has very high expectations of how we should live.
On the other hand Christianity is easier. It is easier because now we have a big-picture of what Jesus did and why he lived the way he did; why he had to die on the cross. We do not need to be confused about what he was trying to do and why he did not for example try to kick out the Romans. We know why now. We see and understand that Christianity is a struggle and will be until Jesus returns. We struggle against our own selfish urges and inclinations to do bad things, we struggle with the selfish and bad things that others do to us, and finally we struggle against the evil powers in this world. If you are a Republican you may think these evil powers are the Democratic Party or if you are a Democrat you may think it is the Republican Party. But the Bible tells us that we struggle against the evil spiritual powers arrayed against us in the heavenly places. What precisely that means, I cannot tell you, but in general terms it means that sometimes things go against us not because of ourselves or the people around us, but because of these evil forces that do not want Christianity to be proclaimed. So because we are forewarned we understand all this and in that sense Christianity is easier for us than it was for the first disciples.
So Christianity is more than trying to be a nice person. Repenting from being bad like the citizens of Nineveh is great, God likes it, but only trying to be good doesn’t make one a Christian. Christianity starts with the desire to follow Jesus. It is all about believing that he died in our place to save us from the penalty of our sins. It is about having a relationship with Jesus. How is that possible if he is not physically here? Christians believe he is here spiritually. He is in the people of his church. He is in the Eucharist. And he is here through the Holy Spirit. We have a relationship in which one talks to an invisible person and believes in an invisible person. But this invisible person is not simply one of our own imaginations; our understanding and knowledge of Jesus is one based upon what we learn and understand as we read and understand the gospels, and in the rest of the New Testament. When you think about it, talking to an invisible person, believing he is present in a group of people like us, believing he is present in some wafers and wine, sounds a little crazy. But the fact is; He is here! Not only do the writings of the New Testament confirm it, but countless lives throughout history confirm it. Countless people today can attest that they have a relationship with God through his Son, Jesus Christ. Christianity is more than trying to be good. It is, like those first disciples, following Jesus, believing in him and having a walking, talking relationship with our risen Lord.
May God help us to try to amend our lives, to believe in Jesus, and to have a relationship as we follow by faith Jesus Christ our Savior.
