Luke 4.18-19 (CEB)
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me.
He has sent me to preach good news
to the poor,
to proclaim release to the prisoners
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to liberate the oppressed,
and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
The brilliant show Futurama is about a gang of misfits who work for a package delivery firm called Planet Express. Professor Farnsworth is the mad scientist owner who every episode barges in on the gang exclaiming, “Good News, everyone!” Then, he describes their next delivery and how it will most assuredly lead to their untimely death.
Which doesn’t sound like very good news to me.
Futurama takes place in the year 3000. Matt Groening’s (also the creator of The Simpsons) world is hilariously imaginative and scathingly satirical. Heads of state—particularly Kissinger and Nixon, who is President again—are preserved heads floating in hovering bell jars. Get it? Heads of state?
As bizzaro as Futurama’s world is, some things are the same as ever. Like people busting into a room proclaiming good news when in fact terror lurks just around the corner.
The Christian good news—the gospel—is often like Professor Farnsworth. We claim it’s about the “good news” of Jesus Christ, but it becomes about acknowledging we are helpless sinners, we’ll always be sinners, and there’s nothing we can do about it. In fact, many (but definitely not all) Christians claim that our sin is so incurable that God had to die on the cross.
Good news, everyone!
Christians are supposed to preach the Gospel—the good news—of Jesus Christ. But his good news has been lost in the 2000 years of subconscious guilt we’ve been carrying around.
So, we’ve stopped preaching the gospel and instead preach church doctrine about Jesus’ death as the salvation for our grotesque and immoral nature, which we inherit merely by being born.
Instead, we should be preaching Jesus’ resurrection and ascension—and by extension our own—as a way out of this mess.
We’ve overcomplicated the entire Jesus story and made it a biography instead of a lesson plan. We preach the gospel ABOUT Jesus, but not HIS gospel, not the good news he teaches, which, like Christianity itself, has become lost in the thick covering of his blood.
Jesus’ message has nothing to do with bloodshed—his or anyone else’s. His message is about resurrection. New life. Not only for individuals but also the planet.
Jesus envisions a world where we have awakened to his realization that everyone (everything) is a shimmering facet of God. For Jesus, that awakening leads to a Utopia of sorts. Jesus says we’ll always have problems with poverty, but he also indicates that, together, we make things better for everyone. And we do that by first acknowledging we are all part of God’s being, whether we call ourselves Christians or Jews or Muslims or just regular old people.
The gospel of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with his death as blood payment for our unpayable sin debt. That’s not a lesson, that’s just shaming. Jesus doesn’t shame us into changing. He shows us how much better it would be for us to change. Jesus’ good news makes us realize that sin is not being born, but that we have so little reverence for life. I believe Jesus tells us to find God in serving one another instead of ignoring each other’s needs. Because when we ignore each other, we ignore God.
Jesus teaches us how to become something greater than ourselves. Not by shutting out our neighbors, but by understanding, we are them, and they are us.
Jesus’ good news, like all actual good news, is simple. It’s not cloaked in prerequisites. It doesn’t require pomp and circumstance, or intermediaries of any sort. It is a teaching that changes the world when truly embraced. The beauty of Jesus’ teaching is that we can distill it into one, easy to remember phrase: Love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself.
Love your neighbor by recognizing they are part of the same thing, part of what we all are, part of what Jesus is, and every creature, plant, mineral, and particle: God.
We can live the gospel of Jesus Christ by acknowledging our neighbor as equally beloved and deserving beings in the creative fabric of God’s love. “Look at me,” Jesus says, “and behold yourself! Look at your neighbor and behold God! I am within you just as God is within me. I AM in your neighbor, your friend, your enemy. I AM with you. I AM.” Jesus tells us this good news over and over and over. I am with you. God is within you. Right now.
Isn’t that honestly good news?
Amen.
