Leave the Door Open for Jesus

Many years ago, I started receiving late night phone calls from a woman who was convinced my name was Rachel and that I was having an affair with her husband.

No matter how many times I told her she had the wrong number, no matter how many times I assured her that my name wasn’t Rachel and that I most definitely wasn’t having an affair with her husband, she persisted in her beliefs and continued calling me.

Until finally—and this was a very long time ago—I told her, “Listen, you may not be aware of this but I have Caller ID and I have your phone number and if you keep calling me, I’m going to report you to the phone company.”

“Oh,” the woman said.  And then we had a nice five-minute conversation where she was finally able to acknowledge that maybe, given that it was her husband who gave her my number, she might have the wrong person.

Mistaken identity can be rough and confusing and awkward.

When I was a kid, my mom went to traffic court to argue a ticket she had been given for passing a stopped school bus. 

My mom insisted that it was a case of mistaken identity that even though we lived in a small town, and even though our car was a very distinctive yellow Pinto, it was not the only yellow Pinto in town.

But what brought my mom to tears in the courtroom was not having to pay a fine, but, as she explained to the judge, she just wasn’t the type of person who would pass a stopped school bus—that anyone would think she was capable of that crushed her.

Does anything hurt worse than being falsely accused of something?  Does anything hurt worse than to find out that the way you view yourself is not the way others see you?  Does anything hurt worse than to have someone who should know you, should love you, not know you at all?

Last week, I presented a poetry/photography exhibit entitled “Mary Magdalene’s Tears: Finding Hope in the Lenten Seasons of Our Lives.”  One of the poems in the exhibit—appropriately titled “Mary Magdalene’s Tears” deals with Mary meeting Jesus at the tomb.

She doesn’t recognize him at first.  She mistakes him for the gardener.  She thinks he has moved the body.

But then—something magical—he says her name.

“Mary.”

And then she knows.

In the poem, I write that I want Jesus to say my name.  More than anything in this world, I want to hear Jesus speak my name.

I want to know that he knows me.

Perhaps you’ve seen on Facebook this Jesus meme, the one that quotes Matthew 10:33 where Jesus says, “ but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven.”  And then you are encouraged to repost this on your Facebook page so that Jesus will not deny you.

I know people have the best intentions at heart when they post things like that, but that quote and one from today’s Gospel reading, Luke 13:25 where Jesus says, “When once the owner of the house has got up and shut the door, and you begin to stand outside and to knock at the door, saying, ‘Lord, open to us,’ then in reply he will say to you, ‘I do not know where you come from,’” have always troubled me.

Because I don’t believe it’s true, or at least true in the way that it is commonly interpreted. 

I don’t believe that Jesus will deny us if we deny him.

I don’t believe that Jesus will ever say to me or to anyone, “Go away, I don’t know you.”

And the primary reason I don’t believe these things is because it’s honestly too horrible for me to imagine.  I cannot think of anything worse than Jesus saying he doesn’t know me.  I can’t think of anything worse than Jesus turning his back to me.

When I was a kid, I used to read a series of books entitled “The Great Brain,” which featured a pretty wily, Tom Sawyer-like main character (interestingly enough also named Tom) who was always getting into trouble.

I remember reading that whenever Tom’s parents punished him, they gave him the “silent treatment.”  It was the first I had ever heard of such a thing.  They didn’t spank him.  They didn’t ground him.  They simply ignored him.

It was horrible.  And I began to worry that my parents would one day do that to me.

So to imagine Jesus ever denying me, ever giving me the eternal silent treatment, ever doing that to anyone … I just don’t believe it.

And I do have some Biblical evidence to back up this belief.

I have Peter—who famously denies Jesus three times and does so at a time when Jesus needs him most.

And when Jesus returns—when Jesus is resurrected, how does he treat Peter?  Does he turn his back on him?  Does he shun him?  Does he give him the silent treatment?  In other words, does he behave in what we would recognize as a passive-aggressive way?

Of course he doesn’t.  He speaks to Peter and he says to him three times in John 21, “Peter, do you love me?”  And Peter answers three times, “Yes.”

This is not the Jesus of denials.

This is the Jesus of second chances and third chances and fourth chances.

And thank goodness for that.

This is the Jesus who knows us, who knows us better than we know ourselves.

This is not the Jesus who slams the door in our face, but opens it wide and says, “Of course I know you.”

The truth is—the truth is—we deny Jesus every day, multiple times a day.

We deny him when we refuse to see him—as I’ve said before—in the homeless man, in the immigrant, in the poor and needy.

We deny him when we refuse to feed the poor, when we put conditions on our love and acceptance.

When we are angry or bitter, when we hate and when we are afraid, we deny Jesus.

We deny him every day.

We are the ones who close the door on Jesus, not the other way around.

A few years ago, I received a text that had been sent to the wrong number.  The text included a picture of a man, standing in an employee’s lounge and wearing a Home Depot uniform.

I had seen that picture before—not of the man; he was a stranger—but the first-day-on-the-job picture.  My grandmother took one of me standing in uniform outside Taco Bell, and outside Wendy’s when I was a teenager.

I could have ignored the man’s text.  I could have told him he had the wrong number and left it at that.  But instead I wrote him back.  I explained he had the wrong number, but that if this was a picture of him on his first day at a new job, I wished him good luck and a great day.

Leave the door open for Jesus.

Remember—he knows us.

Now we just have to do better at getting to know him.

Amen.