10/18/2026
A DEBT TO BE PAID
The telephone rings. It's a collection call. “You owe a debt”, the ominous voice on the other end of the line says. “How will you pay it?”
There is, perhaps, no more important question for a Christian. Jesus walked intentionally to the cross where He absorbed into His body the full power of sin and by overcoming death itself indebted each of us who claim the name Christian until He shall come again. How will you pay the debt? The answer you provide says worlds about how you understand your relationship with God.
The first thing we must to is to actually engage the debt we owe as a real-world, right now issue of how we live. When we read Bible stories it's pretty easy to paint the whole thing over with a coat of once-upon-a-time and distance ourselves from the reality of what we are reading. In fact, we are SO good at distancing ourselves from the horrifying reality behind the story of Jesus that we no longer can feel fear over what is happening. It has become “just a Bible story”. But the danger faced by Jesus in this story today is real and horrifying, and it is not limited to Roman occupied Second Temple Palestine. That danger is here, with us, right now!
The world is going to hell in a hand basket and if Christians, the disciples of the Prince of Peace, don't speak up, who will? Turns out, we don’t have a corner on that obligation. If we don’t speak to the illness which infects us, others will — others like an Islamic teenager named Malala Yousafzai. In 2012 while leaving school on a bus 15 year old Yousafzai and two other girls were shot by a Pakistani Taliban gunman in retaliation for her activism in favor of education for girls. Yousafzai was hit in the head.
I know. You've always been taught that God speaks only through those who claim the name Christian, but hear again Isaiah’s words,
Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus,
whose right hand I have grasped
to subdue nations before him
and strip kings of their robes,
“Cyrus” is Cyrus of Persia who allowed the Israelites to return to Jerusalem in 538 B.C.E. after their exile to Babylon. He was not a Jew; he was a Persian. Today we would call him an Iranian. When Isaiah calls Cyrus the Lord’s “anointed”, the word he is using, moshiak, is, in English, messiah. Isaiah is referring to Cyrus as the Lord’s messiah! God will act through those He chooses! That might include a 15 year old Pakistani girl.
This girl met with President Obama. And what did she tell the most powerful man in the world? She told him:
“The best way to fight against terrorism is through peaceful means. A war can never be ended by a war.”
She went on to tell CBS,
“I'm not scared of the Taliban. I might be scared of ghosts or dragons, but I'm not scared of the Taliban. If you kill someone, you have shown that you are afraid of them. Why should I be afraid of someone who is already afraid of me?”
You can't paint over Malala's story as once-upon-a-time or “just a Bible story”. Her story is contemporary. I can tell you about the times and places in which Jesus walked but I can't make you feel the fear for Jesus that you can feel for a young girl on a school bus in our own times. That's beyond my abilities though the danger is the same. The forces that Malala Yousafzai is confronting today are precisely the forces confronting Jesus in our reading today. The forces which led the Taliban to shoot Malala and led those opposed to Jesus to crucify Him are the same – the demonic teaching that we are God’s equal partner and, as such, are empowered to act for Him with violence to remove inconvenient people. Jesus taught us otherwise and that made Him a VERY inconvenient person in His time. Malala Yousafzai speaks this truth to our time and, so, is inconvenient.
We almost never think of the work of Jesus during his time on earth as political or disruptive, but it was intensely so, just as Malala's actions are in our time. The plot against Jesus was intended to trap him into saying something that would place him so at odds with the Romans that they would kill Him, which would get Him out of their hair as well. The experience of Malala Yousafzai on that school bus offers us a unique opportunity to see just what made Jesus such a disruptive influence in His time. The human way is the way of death. Malala the Muslim has named the way of Jesus:
The best way to fight against terrorism is through peaceful means. A war can never be ended by a war.
I can see the mental eye rolling from here but I stand by what I have said, and I stand by Malala Yousafzai. It is the need to dominate others by greater force which fuels the descent into madness from which our world suffers. Why would the Taliban oppose education for women? Is it not because in their minds, women must be kept uneducated so that they will become submissive wives, under the domination of their husbands?
The domination systems of Jesus' time and those of our time are “the ways of the world” and the coin of the realm is death and destruction, gun powder and poison gas. True Satanic corruption isn't only to be found in Hamas’ horrific attacks on innocents in Gaza or in the Taliban's shooting of a school girl. It is to be found in the extent to which we Christians accept death and violence as unavoidable, even necessary, while still insisting we are following the teachings of Christ.
Pope Francis once said:
Adam, where are you?” Where are you, o man? What have you come to? …Who corrupted you? Who disfigured you? Who led you to presume that you are the master of good and evil? Who convinced you that you were god? Not only did you torture and kill your brothers and sisters, but you sacrificed them to yourself, because you made yourself a god.
There are hidden powers latent within us so persuasive, so compelling, so powerful that it becomes appropriate to speak of them as forces of demonic possession. When these forces convince us, by fear, or by appeals to nationality or to our damnable sense of self-righteousness that death, domination, and destruction are acceptable parts of our world, then the corruption infects our very national soul. I could not say it better or more completely than Walter Wink has done:
I began to realize that if violence was my last resort, then I was still enmeshed in the belief that violence saves. And that meant that no matter how much I might object to any particular form of domination, I was still trusting domination and violence to bring about justice and peace.4
Those who follow Jesus in deed are distinct from the world. Jesus' life and teaching led intentionally to the cross. Those who follow Him in deed do likewise, though it is terrifying. His walk to the cross indebted you, His disciples, to Him. You owe a debt. How will you pay?
AMEN
BENEDICTION
You were created from nothing for a purpose. That act of creation imposed a debt upon you to live out that purpose. We are speaking about faithful payment of that debt when we speak of living a life of faith.
The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.