Bigger than our Boxes - Luke 20:27-40

Josh Broward
November 7, 2010


Let’s start today with a little riddle. I need some audience participation here. (I raided McDonald’s trash in my sermon preparation this week.) I’ve asked ______ to help us out. Here’s the deal. You have to get this balloon into this box. Today, we are in a very practical sense the Body of Christ. ______ will work as the hands, but you are all the collective brain. You give him some ideas. Tell him what to do.
...

OK, let’s review the suggestions.
We could push and push to try to make it fit, but it will probably pop if we push too hard.
We could pop the balloon and put the little pieces inside, but then we no longer have a real balloon.
We could let some of the air out to make it smaller, but then, we’ve lost something of the balloon’s full potential.
There’s one more option.
We could reshape and expand the box. If we take off some of the tape and tear it apart at one seem, the triangle unfolds. Then, we can see that this box has much more potential than we thought. There was hidden capacity here. If we keep unfolding and reshaping, then it becomes a rectangle that is plenty big enough for the balloon.1
Thanks ______.

God is always bigger than our boxes. Jesus is always bigger than we think he is. The Truth is always bigger than our mental constructs.
I hate to break this to you, but you’re wrong. You’re all wrong. Don’t feel too bad about that. I’m wrong, too. We’re all wrong about something. Unless you’re perfect, you’re wrong. We’re wrong about God. We’re wrong about the Bible. We’re wrong about Jesus. We’re wrong about the Gospel. We’re wrong about life. We’re not wrong about everything, but we’re wrong about some things. Something we believe about God and life and the Gospel is wrong. It has to be - because we’re not perfect. Our minds are too small and too limited to fully understand the infinite God and the eternal Life he offers.

When we are faced with a God who is too big for our boxes, we have three basic options.
We can pop the balloon. We can reject God. We can say, “There is no way that this God or any god can fit into my thought box. I’ll tell you what I can understand. There is no God.” Then, we put the shell of a god in our box.
We can also try to shrink the balloon. This is probably the most common. We can’t figure out how to fit the huge, loving, judging, infinite, far-away, very close God into our thought box, so we shrink him down to something less, something smaller, something easier. Instead of experiencing God in all God’s amazing fullness, we try to relate to a deflated, partial view of God.
The last option is to change our box. If we are going to keep experiencing God throughout our lives, we will always have to change our box. God is always bigger than we think he is. We might have to expand our God-box a hundred times, but it will never get big enough. God will always challenge us to new understandings of who he is and what his Life is like. The good news here is that our capacity for God is much larger than we thought. We may feel like the small triangle box, but God knows that we are really the larger rectangle - and then something else after that.

Throughout his ministry, Jesus was always challenging people to enlarge their thought boxes - about God, about the Messiah, about the people of God. One of Jesus’ fundamental teaching methods was helping people think in bigger and deeper ways about God and life. Our passage today is part of a series of expand-your-box events.
It starts at the end of chapter 19. Jesus enters Jerusalem and goes to the Temple and does his famous angry scene. He goes around kicking out the merchants saying, “You’ve turned this house of prayer into a hideout for robbers!” The Temple leaders can’t fit that into their thought boxes, so they decide to pop the balloon. They make plans to kill Jesus.
At the beginning of chapter 20, the same group comes to Jesus and asks where he got the authority to come in and disrupt everything. Jesus basically says, “My authority comes from the same place as John the Baptist.” Now, the leaders are stuck. The people considered John a great prophet, so if the leaders say John didn’t get his authority from God, the people will reject the Temple leaders. Jesus basically says, “John didn’t fit into your box, and neither do I.”
Next, Jesus tells a little story about tenant farmers who reject their landlord. Jesus’ point is: “You may think I’m not good enough or not the right kind of Messiah. You’ve got to change your thought box, or you will cause your own ruin.”
Next, the leaders try to trick Jesus. They ask, “Should we pay taxes to those Roman oppressors or not?” If Jesus says NO, then the Romans will kill him. If Jesus says YES, then they can call Jesus a blasphemer and a traitor. The Roman coins were all stamped with Caesar’s face and some kind of claims to Caesar’s divinity. Jesus says, “Let Caesar have his money, but give God your hearts and lives.” He raised the discussion to a higher level: “You’ve got to change how your thinking about this folks.”
Our passage about resurrection is next: Luke 20:27-40.

Here’s the deal about the Sadducees. They were the rich dudes. They controlled the Temple, and they controlled most of the money. They didn’t believe in anything they couldn’t see. They thought the physical world is all there is - no angels, no demons, no afterlife. When you die, you’re gone. The end. Their big concern on a practical level was to maintain the status quo - with them on top.
So they come to Jesus with a riddle to show how ridiculous this idea of resurrection is. Their riddle is built on an Old Testament rule meant to care for widows and to maintain family lineage. If a widow died with no sons, the husband’s brother was supposed to marry her and produce a son on behalf of the dead brother, to carry on his name. So in their riddle, one unlucky woman ends up going through seven different husbands. (And I’m thinking maybe the husbands were the unlucky ones here!) The Sadducees say, “When they all get to heaven - if there is a heaven - who’s husband will she be? She obviously can’t belong to all of them.” This was supposed to be unsolvable, leading the Sadducees to say, “If you can’t figure it out, then there must not be a heaven.” Or in other words, “If it doesn’t fit in the box, it’s not true.”
Jesus says, “Expand your box. You’re idea about heaven is too small. The life of the resurrection is completely different. People don’t marry and produce heirs. Children of the resurrection, reborn into God’s Life, are immortal. Change your box. Oh, yes, and by the way, you can be sure there is a resurrection. Moses proved it.”
A group of the scribes (experts of religious law) chimed in, “Well, said Teacher.” They were probably from the rival group, the Pharisees, who were always arguing for the Resurrection, so they were thinking, “Yeah, way to go Jesus! You nailed them! We’re right!”
Jesus comes right back at the scribes with a question about the Messiah. He quotes Psalm 110, which David wrote. Everyone agreed that David was talking about the Messiah here. Jesus says, “We call the Messiah the Son of David, so how can David call the Messiah his ‘Lord’?” And the scribes said, “Uhhh ... hmmm ... aggh.” Jesus was saying, “You’ve got to expand your box about the Messiah.”

So if we put all of these episodes together, what do we get? Jesus says:
Expand your thinking about how God gives authority in this world.
Expand your thinking about me, or your limited thinking will ruin you.
Change your thinking about Rome and taxes and God and life.
Expand your thinking about the resurrection. Life then is different from life now.
Expand your thinking about the Messiah. This stuff is bigger than you thought it was.
Again and again and again, Jesus is saying to his disciples, to religious leaders, to the irreligious people, to the rich, to the poor, to those who believed in him, to those who rejected him, “You’ve got to change how you think about me. I’m bigger than you think I am. God is bigger than you think he is. Life is bigger than you think it is. God’s Kingdom and the Gospel are bigger than your thought box.”

Let’s think a little about how all of this went down for the disciples, who fully believed in Jesus. They were giving their whole lives to follow Jesus, but Jesus kept expanding their thought boxes. Let’s just talk about the three biggest events of Christianity. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ is coming again.
When Jesus started telling the disciples that he was going to die, they didn’t get it. Peter takes Jesus aside for a little reminder about fundamental Messiah theology: “The Messiah doesn’t die. The Messiah doesn’t lose. The Messiah wins! God sends his Messiah to make everything right, right?!” Jesus says, “You are seeing things merely from a human point of view, not from God’s. You’ve got to expand your box.” (Matthew 16:21-23)
The Christ has died. That was a real mind-bender for the disciples. They thought they had been all wrong about Jesus: “I guess he wasn’t the Messiah (the Christ) after all.”
But then came Christ is risen. But even this was hard to understand. When the women saw angels at Jesus’ empty tomb, “the story sounded like nonsense to the men, so they didn’t believe it” (24:1-11). Peter saw the empty tomb and went home, “wondering what had happened” (24:12). Later, Jesus appeared directly to the apostles. He was standing their right in front of them, and they thought they were seeing a ghost. He showed them hands and feed where the nails had been. He ate some fish (to show that he had a real body). “Still they stood there in disbelief, filled with joy and wonder.” Next, there is a beautiful line: “Then, he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.” Jesus worked within their minds to expand their thought boxes to be big enough for a crucified and risen Christ (24:35-47).
But their thought boxes still weren’t big enough. After the resurrection, the apostles kept asking Jesus, “Lord, has the time come for you to free Israel and to restore our kingdom?” In other words, “Is it time to kick out the Romans and take over the world now?” But Jesus says, “No, it doesn’t work like that. Here’s the deal. God is going to give you power, and you’re going to go represent me all over the world.” Then ... he left. God raised Jesus up into the sky, and he was gone. The disciples just stood there staring at the sky in shock: “Didn’t see that coming!” Some angels appeared and said, “Get over it. Change your thinking. Jesus is gone, but he’s coming again.” (Acts 1:6-11)
The real shocker for the disciples was that Jesus was going to complete his mission through them. God would give them the Holy Spirit and send the church into the world to complete the Messiah’s mission of total transformation through love. When we’ve gone everywhere and loved everyone, Jesus will come back.
Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ is coming again. The disciples had to change their thinking at every step.

And what about us? Jesus doesn’t fit into our boxes either. Whatever you think about Jesus, you’re wrong - at least in part. Our understanding is imperfect. The path of discipleship is a path of learning and change. Living disciples are always giving up an old, incomplete view of God and life for a newer more complete view. We are always repenting of our too-small box for God. Truth confronts us and forces us to make a choice. Either we change our paradigms [our thought boxes] and accept the Truth, or we stay as we are and reject the Truth.

Consider how Jesus might be challenging some of your thought boxes.
Maybe your box is defined by human suffering. Maybe you look at everything that’s wrong with the world and wonder how a loving God could create this mess. Maybe a loving God can’t fit your box drawn with crayon by a starving child. Consider the possibility that God may be bigger than you think. Consider the possibility that your box needs to be reshaped.
Maybe hell is a real problem for you. Maybe you just can’t reconcile the Bible’s teaching about hell with a God who loves every human being. I understand that difficulty. However, consider the possibility that your box needs to be reshaped. Maybe hell isn’t what you thought it was. Maybe God is somehow bigger and deeper than you currently understand.
Or you might struggle with mystery. You like predictability and order. You like schedules and plans. A God who moves in mysterious ways and disrupts our comfortable social order - well - that kind of God is uncomfortable, and if you’re honest, you’d rather not have that kind of God. Maybe a mysterious God wants to expand your box in mysterious and unpredictable ways. Maybe God is calling you to become more comfortable with not knowing exactly what is going on.
We all struggle with a box defined by success. Our box says that our value as human beings depends on our grades, our incomes, and our achievements. Our box says we should sacrifice everything for success or else become failures. Is it possible that God’s box for success is different than ours? Don’t you think we could miss out on God’s plan for our success because our idea of success is too small?
We also struggle with a thought box defined by pleasure. If it feels good, it must be good. If it feels bad, it must be bad. Somehow we have lost a theology of sacrifice and endurance and patience. Consider the possibility that your life has become far too centered on you. Consider the possibility that God is more concerned with your goodness than your happiness. Consider the possibility that your current definition of pleasure might be far too small. Consider the possibility that there is a joy that is deeper and fuller and more amazing than you currently imagine possible and that it is available through the path of faithfulness.
Is it possible that our box is too small because it is defined by the teaching of our pastors and leaders? They are imperfect, too, remember. Is it possible that even our understandings of God and the gospel and life need to change?

Here is the Good News. Jesus loves us just as we are. Jesus died on the cross to forgive our sins and to give us new life. But in this new life, Jesus loves us too much to leave us as we are. Jesus always calls us forward into greater love, greater understanding, greater faithfulness, and greater freedom in his new, bigger box.