Everyone is looking for you

 I like our Gospel reading where the disciples are the best kind of correct - accidentally correct.

A lot of the time, our idioms are imprecise. What do I mean by that? I mean that when you say 'nobody is available tonight,' what you mean is that none of your employees are available. When you say that you have 'nothing to eat' at home, what you mean is that what you have at home isn't what you want to eat, but I would wager that there are a lot of things you could be eating. You just don't want to.

Now, when we talk about our Gospel reading, the disciples come up to Christ and use a similar idiom - 'everyone is looking for you.' This is standard exaggeration, you understand, the disciples mean that everyone in that house, that village, that area is looking for Jesus. They surely don't mean that everyone everyone is looking for Jesus. But they're accidentally correct. They are right in ways that they can't really imagine.

What I mean by that is that the hyperbole of saying 'everyone is looking for you' is shockingly correct. Everyone is absolutely looking for Jesus. Whether they know it or not. Why is everyone looking for Jesus? They're looking for him precisely because he offers a solution to all the problems. Usually, we want to treat the symptoms, not the cause. We're good at trying to deal with the symptoms of our sinfulness without dealing with the underlying causes. We want the fighting at home to stop, but aren't willing to address what got us into that mess. We want to still talk to our friends, our family, our neighbors, but are unwilling to deal with why we're squabbling with one another. What's driving these wedges and schisms betwixt us? 

Ultimately, it comes right down to the truth of a simple sentiment - all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. There is none righteous, no not one. The difficulty usually lies in you or I thinking about what the other people need to change. A lot of the time, when people come to talk to me about broken relationships, problems, hangups, all that stuff, it revolves around them telling me how much everyone else needs to change. 'Pastor, you need to call my mother and tell her to talk to me.' 'Pastor, you need to tell my kids to be nicer to me.' 'Pastor, you need to get my friend to listen to me before it's too late.' 

You know, I bet that's the case. I bet that your mother / child / friend should really smarten up, and there's almost certainly a ton of truth to it. I guarantee that's true, without doubt. But that's not the issue, really, or I suppose it's half of the issue. The issue, really, is that there are two people (minimum) who are at odds, and who are both flawed but viewing themselves as flawless. And that's the trouble. In these disagreements, we tend to view ourselves as being good and right, and the other party as being generally wrong, and we expect and seek for the opposition to conform themselves to our views as though that was right. But we're actually expecting and asking for the other party to move from being wrong in their way to being wrong in ours. But that's still wrong, folks. It's just wrong in a way that benefits us. 

So ultimately, things keep on being wrong, as long as both parties continue to view themselves as being right, their opposition being wrong, and there being basically no middle ground to find. But your job as someone who is a human, and a human who is frequently in conflict, is to treat the cause, not just the symptoms. It's real easy to treat the symptoms, to excise picky pushy people, to squabble further and to try to get family and friends to see things our way, to dig in our heels and force, but it's much much harder to do the work of seeing our own role in the dispute, and our position as the one that needs to change. As both do. 

If you're both sinners, then you both need to repent for what got us to this point so far. And if you both do, then we can get to some sort of resolution, because you're not both sitting there waiting for the other person to smarten up. Rather, you're in the position where both you and the other party have the same flaw, and will have to work together to find common ground. Normally, the first person to admit weakness is seen by and large as the weaker of the group, but in reality, as Christians, admitting weakness and fault is a given. That's the basic position. And if you've wronged somebody, you have to ask for forgiveness. And they have to forgive. It's a system that cuts to the core of what's wrong by exposing the fact that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And you forgive the other party, and they forgive you, not because of the greatness of spirit that you have, but that we forgive as we have been forgiven. We love because he first loved us. 

If this is true, and is the path towards reconciliation, then what the disciples said is accidentally very true indeed. Everyone is looking for Him.