Message Delivered

Recently I watched a documentary about Magic Johnson.  He was an icon that I remember as I grew up playing grade school basketball and collecting basketball cards.  At that point in my life I still had dreams of becoming a professional basketball player.  I thought that might happen until I reached middle school and high school when that possibility was no longer apparent.  Regardless, I considered people like Magic Johnson as untouchable as far as making mistakes were concerned.  I was eleven years old at the time when AIDS and HIV were issues that seemed very hard to understand.  I had no clue how this married man could have gotten this disease.  I also never understood why this fun loving, smiling basketball player questioned whether he could continue to play with other players.  All of this was cloudy until I saw a documentary about him a few weeks ago, after which I could understand the issues of sin that he had before getting married.  I also became aware of the courage it took for him to explain it to the public, which then resulted in the fact that many people considered him to be a sign of hope.  In some of the closing moments of the documentary he said, “I am a blessing and a curse to this disease.”  His reason behind this statement was that he helped fight the stigma, and advocated for finding a cure; but that also he was a curse, because everybody who got it thought they would get better like he did.

It is interesting how personalities and sin can change the message.  It is also interesting how our opinions of certain persons can change the message.  We expect good guys to bring a good message and bad guys to send a bad message.  It is cut and dried in our world, but not so with God.  Recently my son Jacob has been asking me, “Dad, why do bad guys do this stuff?”  There are lines even in my five- year-old child’s mind about what good people and bad people do.  One of the most interesting parts of this week’s lesson is about Caiaphas, who was one of the bad guys in Jesus’ trial.  Caiaphas prophesied that Jesus would die for the people.  This is one of those sections in Scripture we forget about because we peg Caiaphas as a bad guy, so we don’t expect him to preach the message of the way to Heaven.

Yet, it spoke to me.  Often as I sit in the midst of my own sin, I can still see the way the Holy Spirit shapes me to share the Gospel.  There are earthly perspectives on sin, and on sins that play greater roles in impacting people.  But there is also something to be said that God’s message of hope can even come from bad guys.  Believing that God’s grace is for all people can also mean that grace is offered to all people even if they don’t believe it for themselves.  This weekend we take a longer look into a well-known miracle.  We observe the response of the people, and the resulting message from one of the key people who was responsible for the death of our Savior.  Moments like this may confuse us, but they also illustrate Jesus’ power to rescue all of us, no matter the opinion or perspective that we have on a particular person.