"So do not fear; you are more valuable than many sparrows." Matthew 10:31. New American Standard.
As many of you know, the only thing I hate about my beloved state of Texas is . . . her cockroaches.
It's the only thing I absolutely hate. They're big, they're ugly, and they have a radar inside their heads that - when it senses there's a human nearby - tells it to fly directly toward the face or upper body of said human. These cockroaches, they appear when you're least expecting it. Like, you're grabbing the sugar for the coffee, and boom! There's a roach, not running away but tauntingly running right towards you almost as if he knows he'll win every time. I hate them with a passion.
A few years back, I had an unexpected visit from a cockroach. I was just sitting on the floor, playing an Xbox game with a buddy. All of a sudden, in the corner of my eye, I see this humongous black thing land on my arm as I'm playing this video game. My buddy - who happened to not scream - sat there laughing his ass off as I made several sweeping motions with my hand trying to knock the roach into the next galaxy. I shot up, screamed a little, and ran out the front door while my buddy hunted down the nasty creature and flushed it down the toilet.
I hate roaches. Give me a snake. Give me mosquitos. Just do not put a roach near me.
Today, we're gonna talk about fear. Specifically, we're gonna talk about the kind of fear that looks like running away from something really scary. And the word that Jesus uses hear is phobeo, and it literally means "to put to flight by terrifying."
Now, Jesus is getting towards the end of his outline of what it looks like to participate in what he calls the kingdom of heaven. And up until this point, he's talked all about social relationships - how to love the people around us in a way that puts God on display in a radical way.
Now, he's getting to what I believe is the crux of his message to the disciples, and essentially to us.
A couple verses before, Jesus talks about not fearing the people who are out to do physical harm to the disciples, but to fear "the God who can destroy both body and soul in hell."
And now Jesus is saying do not fear, for you're more valuable than many sparrows. Why the contrast between a loving God and a condemning God? In Jesus's day, it was a very Jewish belief to view God as a giver of both reward and punishment, and for the good Jew, hell was a state of separation from God - right here and right now. Hell wasn't place you went after you die, but a real state of mind you experienced on earth. And it was believed that wherever you stood with this God would determine whether you experienced heaven or hell, on earth. And so, it was very common to have this underlying fear of God, the sort of fear that made you want to run away. And this passage throws hints at the opening poem in Genesis in which Adam and Eve are afraid of what they've done, and they run away and hide from God. The word used here is the same word that describes the emotional responses that Adam and Eve experienced when they took from the tree in the garden.
So, Jesus is doing something here. Much like in his famous set of teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is sort of saying, "You've heard that it was said," but in this case he's exposing the current way of thinking about fear and God.
"You've heard it said that you're supposed to fear God, but do not fear. You're way more valuable to God than what you've previously believed."
Jesus is doing something here that's very important for his disciples. He's telling them that the fear of God is not what's going to drive them to do this kingdom work, but instead the love of God is gonna fuel them to turn the Roman world on its head.
The love of this God is gonna drive them to carry this message, not the fear of God. Now remember, the audience is a bunch of Jews who are slowly reforming to a message of an inclusive, forgiving God who's concerned about how people experience God here and now. And so, this message would be one that drove the whole point home for the disciples. This message would be the one that put everything else into context.
You're not gonna be able to do what I've been telling you to do if you don't stop being afraid of your God. You're not gonna be able to stand in solidarity with the powerless if you're afraid of God. You're not gonna be able to heal the sick if you can't believe that God loves you more than you'll ever know. You're not gonna be able to talk with the people you're going to see if you think God is out to get you.
Soak this message in. Let it be the heartbeat of your every word and thought. Lose the idea that you have to hide and run away from a God who's ready to condemn you to hell. And burn the idea into your consciousness that God is for you, loves you, and places a value on you that you can't even imagine.
Does that sound like a message that only the disciples needed to hear, or does that sound like a message that could carry on through centuries as a life-giving, hope-filled word of encouragement?
While there's so many theological aspects of the scriptures that I don't buy into, the aspect of a loving God is the one that I will take to my grave. I can't afford to give up on it. I can't afford to buy back into the idea that God is a trickster, waiting to dispense punishment for every thought, word, or deed that doesn't line up with God's way of doing things. That way is a dead end for me. It's a brick wall that's a mile high. And lately, I've been reflecting on the fact that I've been spending way too much time trying to theologize everything. I've gotten so lost in studying scripture and studying Greek and Hebrew, that I'm a disciple of this man they call Jesus.
My job is to love the people around me with a radical love - a love that overflows from the inward realization that God loves me and that I have nothing to fear in the way of this God. My job is to let that realization drive me to the point of losing myself in the journey of inviting other people along with me. My job is to get so lost in the love of God that it causes me to get lost in loving other people.
That is what it means to not fear. With this God, there's nothing to run away from, nothing to hide, nothing to be afraid of.
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