Greed and Power

Rev. Stan Moody, PhD

June 8, 2008

2 Samuel 9:1-7
Luke 22:1-6, 24-30

In the 22^nd Chapter of Luke, Jesus has a hard time wrapping up the last phase of his earthly relationship with His disciples. He is about to leave them for 3 days and will usher in a brand new phase about which He has been informing them all along but that they don’t seem to get. They cannot wrap their minds around spiritual kingdoms and Comforters who are with them but cannot be seen, touched and heard. They are earthbound people – OT people who cannot comprehend anything they cannot see, touch or hear.

Their proclamation that Jesus is the Son of the living God is meaningless outside the context of the restoration of the physical nation-state of Israel. To a Jew at that time, carrying the Kingdom of God within you would make no sense. It would be like telling Don Smith that you don’t need sap to make syrup.

There are at least 3 important points that are made in our lesson this morning from the 22^nd chapter of Luke – points that ought to attract our attention. I will take them one at a time and then attempt to bring them together at the end.

The first point that Luke makes is that greed in a Christian is deadly. He lays that out with a simple statement that we might just brush over with no second thoughts: v. 3, “Then Satan entered Judas called Iscariot.” That seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? We know what Judas is about to do, and what he is about to do cannot be done unless under the influence of Satan. He conferred with the chief priests and officers how he might betray Jesus to them. They were glad and agreed to give him money. Is it news that Satan entered into Judas?

Maybe not, but it tells us a number of things.

First, if Satan entered Judas at that moment, we have to infer that Judas was not running around all the time under the influence of Satan – that in order to do this dastardly deed, he must have a personal visitation by the Devil.

How can this be? Did Satan simply master a good Judas, or was Judas already walking in step with Satan, who simply decided that now was the time? “If Satan’s final defeat was dependent on the death and resurrection of Jesus, why would Satan even do something that would lead to His own defeat?

A more puzzling question is one with which we have wrestled for some weeks now as we have considered how God sometimes permits the grossest of sins to occur in the interest of advancing His will: “Where was God when this happened?”

Judas was not exactly an innocent bystander when Satan entered him, was he? In fact, John 12:6 tells us that Judas was a thief. The groundwork had already been laid for Satan’s control over Judas through his greed for money. When Judas complained that Mary had wasted money in anointing Jesus with a precious ointment, John comments, “He said this, not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, and having charge of the moneybag he used to help himself to what was put into it.”

We get incensed that Judas would steal the little bit of money that Jesus and the disciples were able to save for their food and lodging. Yet, we have heard recently of Christian leaders who used ministerial gifts to buy $39,000 worth of clothes a year at one store and send their kids on a $29,000 trip to the Bahamas, drive a white Lexus and a red Mercedes. Judas sat beside Jesus at the Last Supper probably with his pious face. In fact, he leaned on Him at the Last Supper. He had cast out demons in Jesus’ name. Yet, he loved the power and pleasures that money could buy.

Greed was all the opening Satan needed. Because there are no innocent people, Satan does not take innocent people captive. Instead, Satan has power where there are sinful passions. Judas was a lover of money, and he covered it with a phony, external relationship with Jesus. So he sold Him for 30 pieces of silver, the price of a slave gored by an ox.

But why would Satan want to lead Judas to betray Jesus? When Jesus began His ministry, Satan tried for 40 days and nights in the desert to turn Him away from the path of suffering and sacrifice. He tried to entice Jesus not to walk the path of suffering and death but to use His power to escape suffering, just as He is enticing Christians today to escape suffering from daily cross bearing. “If you are the Son of God, you have all the right in the world to reign. Whatever you do, don’t go to the cross.”

You will recall the time when Peter rebuked Jesus for saying that He would suffer many things and be killed. “This will never happen to you, Lord.” Jesus did not thank Peter but said to him, “Get behind me Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man” (Matt 16:23). Hindering Jesus from going to the cross was the work of Satan because it would be His undoing. Peter became his agent.

Here Satan is, entering into Judas, leading him to betray Jesus. One writer suggests that Satan saw His efforts in diverting Jesus from His mission as failing and concluded that there was no way to stop Him. He decided that if he couldn’t stop Him, He would make it so ugly and painful and heartbreaking that there would be enough doubt to cast a pall over Jesus’ sacrifice – death by denial and abandonment. If He couldn’t stop it, He would drag others into it and do as much damage as he could. The best way to do that was to enter a person whom Jesus loved and to display the cowardice and faithlessness of the Disciples.

Where was God when this happened? The short answer is that that is a question we should neither ask nor attempt to answer. My opinion and yours does not matter here. All that matters is that the details surrounding the death of Jesus were prophesied hundreds of years before they happened. “You will all fall away because of me this night. For it is written, ‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered’” (Zechariah 13:7).

The prophesies tell us that God foreknew, did not prevent and therefore included in His
Plan that His Son would be rejected, hated, abandoned, betrayed, denied, spit upon, flogged, mocked and killed. God could have stopped them, but He chose not to because it was His sovereign will that they take place.

All these things were evil – sin. Yet, God brought them all to pass: “It was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief” (Isaiah 53:10). The only conclusion to which we can come is one that is too terrible for us to admit – that the invisible hand and plan of God are sometimes behind the most spectacular sins in the universe. In a perverse way, John Hagee may be right when he suggests that the Holocaust was allowed by God to happen. Where he goes wrong is when he begins to glibly interpret why, as though he could know the mind of God.

The simplest of answers is that if God were not the main Actor in the death of Jesus, then the death of Jesus could not save anyone from their sins, and we would be doomed to Hell.

Greed, then, was all the opening that Satan needed to facilitate His entry into Judas and trigger God’s divine plan for His Son. At the Last Supper, Jesus intended to drive that point home to His 11 faithful disciples. Greed has no place in the church. It invites not only the presence of Satan but the dominion of Satan.

Right in the middle of all this, Jesus tells Judas to hurry up and do what he must do. Judas goes out into the night, and the Disciples lose the focus of what is going on. They begin to squabble among themselves (v. 24).

The squabble concerned who of the twelve was considered by the general public to be the greatest – the most important. They all wanted the acclaim, praise and love of the crowds. Not only were they arguing about who was the greatest, they were arguing about who ought to be the greatest. They all wanted to be No. 1 – Jesus’ right hand man. When Jesus became king, they wanted to be His chief of staff or His Vice President, perhaps.

These things do not happen in a vacuum. Jesus had just created the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. He was preparing His disciples for the events of the next few days. He has made clear to them that what they should focus on was not power, position, authority and glory, but on His atoning death and Resurrection.

One of the worst things that can happen in any organization is staff members competing with each other, undercutting each other and criticizing each other. Imagine how Jesus felt when His disciples began to argue over who was or was to be the greatest. Jesus was about to be the object of the greatest crime in human history, and His disciples are re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Jesus has told them that the ship of Judaism is about to hit an iceberg, and they are running around re-arranging the furniture. He has just given them a graphic lesson on greed with the behavior of Judas, and they themselves are consumed with power and position. Apparently, then, power and authority rank right up there with greed as one of the deadly sins of the church. Jesus gives them a 3-pronged rebuke for such behavior.

1. The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors. But you are not to be like that.

Presidents, CEO’s, Prime Ministers, business tycoons lord it over their subjects. They issue commands, give orders and tell people what to do and how to do it. They are the bosses. Sometimes, as in our presidential elections, these earthly rulers try to enhance their reputations by making gestures of good will. The Romans used sometimes to invite the public to the Coliseum for free entertainment. Sometimes they would distribute bread or enlist the armies for a public work project. By doing these good things, they would be called Benefactors.

“But you are not like that,” Jesus told them. Followers of Jesus are not to be concerned with position and acclaim and authority and praise. In 1 Pt 5, Peter writes, “Be shepherds of God’s flock…not lording it over those entrusted to you.”

In Jesus’ second rebuke, He points to Himself by saying, “But I am among you as one who serves.” Another account of the Last Supper has Jesus getting up from the meal, taking off his outer clothing, wrapping a towel around His waist, pouring water into a basin and washing His disciples’ feet. Imagine this scene: They are arguing among themselves about who was and would be the greatest. Jesus gets up quietly, puts on the garb of a servant and proceeds to wash and dry their feet.

This was the kind of work a slave did for his master. It was degrading and humiliating. Peter rebels against this and insists that he should wash Jesus’ feet, whereupon Jesus tells him that if he will not let Him wash his feet, he would have no part of Him.

As I have stayed over in Rockland on Friday evenings, I have seen the Clint Eastwood film, Line of Fire, a couple of times. Frank Horrigan had protected the life of the President of the US for more than 3 decades but froze in shock on that day in Dallas in 1963 when Kennedy was assassinated. For the next 30 years, he wrestled with the question, “Can I take a bullet for the President?”

Those of you who have seen the movie remember that at the last split second, he throws himself into the path of an assassin’s bullet to save the Chief Executive and thereby redeems himself and retires.

At Calvary, Jesus took a bullet for each one of us. What He went through on the cross was humiliating, but it was necessary in order to take the assassin’s bullet intended for us. Therefore, it is not we who deserve the power, honor and glory, but it is Jesus who deserves all of it. Yet, He says, “I am among you as one who serves.”

If Jesus can serve, how dare His disciples argue as to which of them was considered to be the greatest.

His 3^rd rebuke of their dispute had to do with this incredible statement in vs. 29 and 30:

I confer on you a kingdom, just as my Father conferred one on me, so that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

Jesus is making several points here. First, it is nonsense to argue over greatness in the Kingdom of God because the Kingdom of God belongs not to us but to Christ. The glory is His; the power is His; the authority it His; the greatness is His. He has earned it, not by making some kind of power play, but because of His life and death as a slave – a servant.

It is unnecessary to argue about greatness. It is unnecessary because Jesus’ followers will share in the glory, power, authority and greatness that belong to the crucified, risen Lord. This is not a competitive sport. It is a gift given to all believers. Because His glory, power, authority and greatness are infinite, there is more than enough to go around for everyone.

We read in the OT this morning the story of David settling his accounts just after he succeeded King Saul to the throne of Judah. He could have wiped out his enemies in one stroke and would have been justified in doing so. Instead, he asked if there were anyone left of the family of his friend Jonathan, Saul’s son, who had been killed in battle.

His servants found a son of Jonathan, Mephibosheth, crippled from birth. David brought Mephiboseth to the palace and had him eat from the king’s table from then on. He did this because of his love for Jonathan.

Like Mephibosheth, we, too, are cripples in God’s sight. Yet God, because of Jesus’ love for us, lets us eat at the King’s table. It has nothing to do with how good we have been or how wonderful we are, or how spiritual we are or how much Scripture we can quote. Instead, it is a gracious gift of God, freely bestowed without merit.

By conferring on His disciples the Kingdom of God, Jesus makes clear that the Kingdom becomes both a present reality and a future hope. His instructions are found in vs. 26: “…the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves.”

The kind of service to which Jesus calls us is the kind that one does for free and does obediently and to the best of our ability. In that time, it was the youngest that performed the lowliest service. Yet, Jesus says that the greatest should be the lowliest, as He demonstrates by His own example.

I marvel, often, over the life of service lived by those of you who are here this morning. As a businessman, I think in terms of remuneration. It cheers my heart to know that you take the time to visit those among us who are ill and troubled in spirit. That is not a natural attitude with me. But that is the mindset of Christ. We are here to serve, and service demands humility. There is no room for the executive or presidential style of decision-making within the church. There is no room for those within the church, including the pastor, to give orders, make demands and issue decrees.

I have a son and daughter-in-law who earned their PhD’s at William and Mary College in Virginia. I am told that at the annual homecoming, many of the returning alumni wear white jackets – even those who have achieved the status as movers and shakers. Why the white jackets? To show that they were among the many students who earned their way through college by waiting on tables. Their white jackets symbolize a willingness to serve in a not-so-glamorous job.

As you know, I have struggled with the lack of focus on the part of the Protestant church in prison. They want and want and want. They want a shepherd; they want a prayer group; they want a fiery preacher; they want their Rapture eschatology. In other words, they are looking for me to meet their needs. You know enough about me to know that I don’t go for that. When I have been told in the past that “I want to be fed,” I cringe.

The church will become the church only when its people stop saying, “I want to be fed” and start asking, “Who can I feed?” Another way of saying it is to say, “Ask not what my church can do for me, but ask what I can do for my church.”

Greed, power and authority have no place in the church of Jesus Christ and in fact are only openings for Satan to divide and destroy God’s work. Instead, the words of Jesus ring out to us, “But I am among you as one who serves.” “Follow me.”