Why Would They Do It?
The Rev. Dr. John Judson
July 4, 2010
Why would he have done it? Why would he have risked everything for a very uncertain future? Born in 1733 Joseph Pheland was forty six years old when the Colonies declared independence from England. He was a farmer with a wife and five sons and five daughters. He was not well educated or a politician. He was not driven by youthful enthusiasm to do something brave. Yet soon after the war began Joseph enlisted in the Hampshire County, Massachusetts militia to fight against the British. The paper on the cover is the commission he received just before the end of the war because of his service for the cause of the Colonies. I have often wondered what would have caused my great, great, great, great, great grandfather to risk his life, his land and his family to fight against the most powerful nation and army in the world. It was a crazy notion…that a bunch of farmers and sometime soldiers could defeat the most powerful army on the face of the earth. Yet he and thousands of others risked everything in the fight. So why would they do it?
We might ask the same question of those seventy whom Jesus sent out to prepare his way to come to Jerusalem. Jesus knew the mission was dangerous. He tells his followers that they will be like lambs among the wolves. He knows that there will be those will reject his followers and refuse to give them a place to stay. He knows there will be those who will harm them. Yet even knowing that Jesus asks them to go out without a purse (meaning money), a bag (which was often used by rabbinic students to beg for money to pay for food) or sandals (which I have yet to figure out). Jesus asks them to believe that there would be people willing to welcome into their homes and care for them, when they had nothing to offer in exchange. This is a remarkable request. These people had already given up families, friends, business and social connections to follow after Jesus. Now he expects them to go out with even less in order to tell people about this Jesus who is coming to town. So why would they do it?
So why would Joseph do it? Since he is not here to ask, I will speculate…and that speculation is that he and the tens of thousands of others who risked everything including their lives did so because they had an opportunity to be free. They had the opportunity to create a new way of being in community that had no king and in which all landed white males, at least, would have an opportunity to have a say in how their colony or commonwealth was run. This would mean freedom to believe, act and live as one pleased. It was a revolutionary concept which I believe speaks to something deep within the human soul. I say that because over the more than two hundred years that the United States has been in existence men, women and children have come here seeking that freedom. Even when the United States is not popular around the world thousands of people come seeking the opportunity to believe, live and act as free people. Even with all of our flaws we are still a beacon to the world.
So why would the followers of Jesus do it? Why would they risk everything to go and proclaim the in-breaking King of God? I believe they would do so because it also spoke of freedom, yet a freedom deeper than that of simply political freedom. The freedom of the Kingdom of God was that of true peace…of shalom. This was the peace that Jesus told his followers to deliver to the homes in which they stayed and to the people who accepted them. This shalom freedom was a sense of complete well being..or peace, of justice, of freedom from fear and hunger. This shalom which would come with God’s Kingdom was what t he people of God had been waiting for for generations. This was the kind of freedom which Jesus expresses with the image of Satan falling from heaven…meaning that in the peace and freedom of God’s kingdom the power of evil was finally being defeated. The power of the enemy, Jesus implies, will have no power to hurt God’s people. They are free to be fully human and live in fully human community.
You and I have been given two great gifts of Freedom. We are blessed to live in a nation where we are free to live, speak and worship as we please, a truly remarkable feat. We have also been given freedom in Christ. The peace that comes from knowing the love and grace of God in Jesus Christ offers us the freedom to become the people and community God created us to be. We can become the kind of community where the sacrificial love of Christ found at this table (the communion table) is lived out every day. So my challenge to you is this, to ask yourselves, “How am I allowing the freedoms I possess
