SUMMARY KEYWORDS

jesus, menlo, people, god, judas, betrayed, relationships, life, peter, church, justice, faith, pray, long, allowed, friends, years, moment, easter, question.

SPEAKER

Phil EuBank

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(Phil) Hey, Good Morning, Menlo church. surprise. It's a team teaching weekend. Just kidding. So glad that you're here. I wanted to take a moment at the beginning of our time together to highlight a very special team member who's leaving our staff. But I wanted to take time to publicly celebrate and honor and pray for Cheryl who has been with us on staff for the last four years. And if you've not been around at Menlo, that's like dog years at Menlo last four years. And so, man, Cheryl's love for Jesus and deep work to help others be formed into who God has made them to be. It has been and will continue to be a deep blessing for our church. Cheryl is leaving our staff next month, and I wanted to publicly thank you, as well as give us a chance to publicly honor her, as well as let her share a little bit of her heart for Menlo and how we can be praying for her for what's next.

(Cheryl) Yeah, this is kind of surreal for me. But I want to thank you, I'm just stepping into a season of rest. I'll be heading to Southern California, as a little bit of a home base. And I've got a Dodger game on the 12^th, so I know you're excited for that. But truly, I just I know I need to rest and I need to then I'll step into some time of discernment of what's next for me. But I want to thank you, Menlo. I made a list of like 25 things that; reasons that I'm thankful that God brought me to Menlo even in a crazy, crazy season.

And one of them at near the top is you.

I have fallen in love with this congregation, I look back and I have this memory of during the pandemic, we were deep into it. And as a church, we decided to pray and fast for 90 days. And I got to know some of you on a zoom prayer meeting every week, and you would gather with me, and we would pray for what God was doing. I think of our life group leaders who have held this church together and community over these four years, and our student leaders and out kidschurch volunteers, and the worst, but all the people who you have served this place.

Above and above and beyond full-time jobs and full-time parenting, you're my heroes. And so many of you have become dear friends, dear friends to me. And I'm so thankful for that. So it's with all kinds of mixed emotions. But I am thankful for how God has used this season. You know, you don't evaluate a calling based on all the rainbows and unicorns and did everything go up and to the right. You evaluate God's word to you on how he is present to you. And he has been that for me these four years, and how

he transforms you into who you are becoming in Christ. And that's been my journey, I feel more intimately connected to Jesus, I feel deeper in my followership of him. And hopefully, I'm just a little bit more like him because of you, and your impact on my life.

(Phil) What a gift. And I really appreciate that what I'd love to be able to do is no matter where you're joining us from if you're at any of our campuses, and here in Menlo Park, if you just reach your hand out, just show Cheryl that we're honoring her and celebrating her as I pray for her right now.

God, thank you so much thanks for my sister, sister, I didn't know I had till just a little while ago and to see got your marked hand on her life and the way that God you have redeemed her the way that you have equipped her the way her ministry for many years has been such a blessing to so many, and that here at Menlo, we got to be blessed by that myself included. And so God we we seek to bless her back to honor her back to thank you God for her. And we pray that the investments that she's made here at Menlo would be maybe trees that she doesn't get to sit under on staff but can still appreciate that we can continue to be in relationship with one another. Thank you for her character and her integrity. We pray for the rest ahead for her God that you would give her every ounce of that rest that she needs, and you give her clarity for what's to come. God thank you for moments like this. God, would you use them? Would you use them to shape each one of us to in Jesus name. Amen.

Would you join me in thanking Cheryl?

I know whether you're new or newer to church or you've been in church for a while, that's pretty weird, right? Like you don't normally do that kind of thing in a service. But one of the things we want to become increasingly better at as a church is just when we have some transitions like that, especially for more public facing people on our team that we have open and honest conversation about that, that we can pray for them. Cheryl is not ours, she's the Lord's. And so we want to be able to celebrate and commissioned her to what's next.

Now we're going to finish a series that we have been in throughout all of this unique season leading up to Easter that has historically been called Lent or springtime. This series the Path of Surrender, it has charted us through Jesus final week in ministry, what's often called Passion Week or Holy Week. I've heard pastors today around the country, they're like, hey, passionate weeks to getting started. And if you've been with us for the last couple of months, you've been in the events of passionately Jesus final week for a couple of months. And Jesus has been getting more and more direct about the stakes of his life and what's at stake with his sacrifice for your life.

Last week, we spent some time looking at one of the most intense moments as Jesus prayed for another plan. He asked the Heavenly Father, if there was another option besides this option, can we take that option, and this week, we pick up right where we left off. Jesus is arrested after Judas, a follower of Jesus for three years, turns on him, sells them out to the religious leaders and leads them to the spot where they would find him. Now, before we resume the story, I want to ask you a question.

How do you respond to injustice?

How do you respond to injustice? Now, I know that this is a loaded question. For some people, the greatest injustice that you will face this week, is when your coffee order gets prepared incorrectly, or when someone cuts you off in traffic, and you're like, Phil, how dare you minimize that those are big problems in my life. And I would say blessings to you, if those are the biggest problems in your life. For others, you experience in very real ways on a regular basis, injustice that feels life or death, the stakes of it feel insurmountable. And one of the byproducts of the age of outrage that we find ourselves in is that all words have become loaded, and the people who disagree with us are no longer just wrong, they are evil. And so justice can become this idea that belongs to a specific political ideology. But it is actually a reflection of our theology. Even if you're not a Christian, you're not a person of faith. We actually all have theology in forming our vision of justice.

Pastor, Tim Keller, he captures the idea this way, said biblical justice is not first of all, a set of bullet points, or a set of rules and guidelines, it is rooted in the very character of God, and it is the outworking of that character, which is never less than just.

With this as a backdrop, we see that justice relies on a framework of what is right and true. And sometimes we use the ideas of compassion and equality. But where did we get this concept from? The secular vision, the non Christian vision in our world around us holds the same ideas, but there is a very shaky rationale for why they do or how they are defined. In the book, The Air We Breathe, Glenn Scrivener, highlights the problem of this approach this way. He says, “In order to pursue the kingdom without the king, we have had to dethrone the person of Christ and install abstract values instead. The problem should be obvious persons can forgive you values cannot. Values can only judge you.” And so now we find ourselves in a moment where most of us live our lives feeling nothing but judgment.

As much as we long for justice to be universal and equally applied around us. If we're honest, we also feel this innate problem when we pursue that of what happens when all of that mirror shows up in front of us. See if justice means that all wrongs are addressed, the question is, what about my wrongs? What about your wrongs? And the good news of biblical justice is that it includes things being made right in the midst of grace being made available. The good news is that both can coexist. I would actually argue that both must coexist for either one of them to really exist.

In a world that is marked by sin and brokenness. If our circumstances are good, it can catch us by surprise when people and circumstances let us down. It didn't surprise Jesus though. Because of that Jesus can help us answer a really important question: what do you do when the world lets you down? We have all experienced that even from young ages, we have felt let down by the world and we get to watch how Jesus responds to that very reality today.

The first way that we see this in Jesus is when friends fail you. We all have some moment when we trusted a group of people and someone wasn't trustworthy. Maybe it was a longtime friend. And for Jesus, Judas was someone that he had hand selected to join the group and had been with him for three years, every single day Judas had been with him. You know, the fact is that not all justice is equal. I don't want to create a false equivalency for you and me, between the deepest patterns of brokenness in our world systems that we see that we know are unjust. And I'm talking about just everywhere, with the mild inconvenience of someone else's relatively just uncomfortable life.

But how we navigate the dissonance between how we know it should be and how it really is really matters. For some of us, we have the luxury to be able to just look away for others of us, you're living it in your everyday experience. Jesus has been walking with a small group of people for three years as we rejoin him and Judas had been drafted to take care of the money. Now, the biographies of Jesus life, they all give us little hints that Judas was already morally compromised, he was already doing things out of the wrong motivation throughout Jesus’ life and ministry. And ultimately, it led to this moment that we are about to read about.

Matthew, one of the biographers we've been reading about a lot over the course of this series, he records it this way. It says, “While he was still speaking, Judas came one of the 12. And with him a great crowd with swords and clubs, from the chief priests and the elders of the people. Now the betrayer had given them a sign saying, the one I will kiss is the man sees him. And he came up to Jesus at once and said, Greetings rabbi, and he kissed him. So Jesus said to him, Friend, do what you came to do. Then they came up and laid hands on Jesus, and seized him.”

Now, if you were with us last week, you remember that Jesus was sweating drops of blood for you. He was so overwhelmed as he contemplated the events that he was about to endure for you that he was overwhelmed to the point of death. This was deeply painful to experience from someone that everyone thought was a friend of Jesus. But it was also a part of the plan. Judas had led them to Jesus, but because there were no photos, no smartphones, no social media feeds, they had to make sure that they got the guy right. Blending in with his disciples in the dark of night, the way that he would be identified is that Judas would give him a greeting, a kiss, that was very common as a follower to give to his rabbi and it usually communicated the idea of peace. It probably also had the benefit in this moment of fulfilling messianic prophecy, a promise written about Jesus hundreds of years before he was born, about the way he would be betrayed.

The question you may be wondering, the question that I can wonder, as I read this passage is, why would Judas do this? Maybe you've had friends fail you and you wonder the same thing? Why would they do this to you? There thousands of years, and we will never know with certainty this side of eternity, which one is accurate. But I think there is at least a small chance that Judas believed that he was helping Judas or helping Jesus. The coronation to an earthly kingdom that all of Jesus disciples thought that he was doing, he was getting ready to take over the Jewish people. He's getting ready to usurp Rome, that coronation to an earthly kingdom seems to have been no longer under consideration during Holy Week. And I think that maybe Judas thought that he could get Jesus a prison sentence instead of a death sentence by negotiating the arrest of Jesus with the religious leaders.

The situation though, it continues to escalate in this passage, when Peter - the sort of most brash of Jesus followers - slices off the ear of one of the soldiers that's trying to arrest Jesus. And I would love to have had a conversation with this soldier after the fact because Jesus instantly puts the ear back on, praise for him, the ear miraculously grows. And like I just wonder in moments like that, did the guy get to keep the original part of his ear? Like, was it a conversation piece when people came to his house? That's just the way my mind works. Here's the thing. Usually, when friends fail us, it's out of a twisted sense of trying to help us. I think there's a sense in which that's what Judas was doing. It's definitely

what Peter was trying to do. Usually when our friends fail us it's it's out of this weird sense of trying to help us.

If you're a boss, it might be when a team member gives you plausible deniability by keeping something from you. Maybe in a romantic relationship, your partner has done something or withheld something to keep you from being hurt but it will come out at some point and it will hurt more when they find out.

Sometimes people will say something to me like, I don't want you to know this, I don't want to tell you this, because if I tell you this, then you have to do something about it. And my thing is always like, seems like you should probably tell me that, right?

See, when the world lets us down with a friend who fails us, here's what our temptation is. I just won't have any more friends. I'll just stop making new relationships, my core, my tightest group of friends will be enough. And the thing is, that is a very narrow view of relationships, and what God wants to do in and through your life.

Here's the hard truth about following Jesus. In a broken world. We can't do it alone. We need space for friends, and those friends will let us down. Not universally. But in the general scheme of things, people are fallen, you are fallen, I am fallen, aren't you glad that some people took a chance on you to be your friend? Other people need us to do that too. And it doesn't mean that we don't have boundaries with people who have hurt us. But it also doesn't mean that we avoid all new relationships. When is the last time that you showed interest and made space for someone you didn't know? Or do you just have good excuses like, Oh, I just my friend bucket is really full. I hate small talk, I'm really busy. The older we get, the more cynical we can become. And we assume that people just aren't worth our time. And so we stick to our well worn patterns, the walls of our cliques get thicker and more reinforced. We do it. I think in part because we know that the world will let us down again. And we have convinced ourselves that this approach will avoid that problem. But it will not.

Friends failing us is hard. But what we see next is even harder. What Jesus shows us is when systems sabotage you. See the systems of how the world works are supposed to help everyone in equal measure. But we know that's not always the case. There are some for whom those systems work better than for others. And if you think like Phil, are you talking about what I think you're talking about, I'm talking about all of it. I'm saying we live in a broken world where no system and no person is unmarked by sin, all of them are applied incorrectly.

Take Jesus as an example. He was a Jewish man living in the first century. And he was entitled because of that, to a certain way of judicial proceedings, the way what we see in these passages should have happened, it should have been different. He actually should have found it that these judicial proceedings should have never been handled at night, they should have been handled during the day in a specific way. Even after Judas sold him out. What we see is a subversion of justice, even according to the system that Jesus should have been entitled to, because of the rule of the mob. It's important to note that this passage does not justify anti-Semitism, or even generalizing that all Jewish people at the time were participating. It's likely that this was done in the middle of the night, in part because they didn't want more people having visibility of what they were doing. They were trying to get the wheels moving so that by the time the day started, it was already too late.

They were falsifying evidence smudging the standards of agreement on the claims against Jesus. And they were doing all of this at a time when they would normally have had to wait for the next day. But the problem was the high priest the next day would be presiding over the Day of Atonement requirements. And they wouldn't have been allowed to do this the next day. They were trying to get all of it done to push it on to the Roman authority. So there was expediency, to make sure that the next step were Roman authorities could sentenced Jesus to death as Jews weren't allowed to do that, that all of that could happen before the next day started.

Even when he is faced with the choice to defend himself, Jesus, he remains silent. He remains silent, that is until the interaction finally reached a breaking point. It says, “But Jesus remained silent. And the high priest said to him, I adjure you by the living God tell, us if you are the Christ, the Son of God. Jesus said to him, You have said so, but I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of man seated at the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven. Then the high priest tore his robes and said he has uttered blasphemy what further witnesses do we need? You have now heard his blasphemy.”

Now if you listen really close, Jesus does what he is so good at doing, which is he never said he was the Messiah because He knew what that would mean. In that moment. He says, You said that I was the Messiah. And I acknowledge that you said that I'm the Messiah. But see the high priest he was just looking for an excuse. Now that was the only one he got, and he was going to take it. And so the high priest in a very performative way, he tears his robe as a sign of grieving to get the crowd worked up enough to agree to put Jesus to death. This wasn't supposed to happen this way. None of this was supposed to happen this way. There were supposed to be guardrails in place to prevent this kind of abuse in Proceedings like these. But unfortunately, when you have corrupt people, you get corrupt systems, and Caiaphas, the leader was probably trying to protect the Jewish people from the Roman Empire. They had been given special dispensation and the moment that Rome thought that the Jewish people were trying to usurp that authority with say, like the king of the Jews, all these special conditions would have gone away.

The Jewish people were allowed to function within very rigid parameters within the Roman Empire, they were allowed to practice their faith, they were allowed to practice High Holy Days, they were allowed to do things that were different than other groups. But those special arrangements could change if they ever got out of line. That sounds a little bit like how we have to live our faith, to sure our way isn't as formal, it's not as documented our system today. It is just as powerful though. We are allowed to function in society as long as we don't talk about certain things. As long as we pander to specific groups, as long as we think about, or vote about, or agree to certain things. We want to be respectable in mixed company, we don't want to be those kinds of Christians. And look, on one level, I get it. But the world has let you down and will continue to let it down. And those systems have and will continue to sabotage you.

So choosing to forfeit, the fullness of our faith out of fear is not a good strategy, and it's not working. We'll just keep sanding off the edges of our faith until there is nothing left. And our culture will celebrate us for doing it.

This is exactly what a form of faith called progressive Christianity has done. The parts of the Bible that we don't understand the message to a culture entrenched in sexuality, the eternal stakes of Heaven and Hell, the difficult work that God wants to do in your life specifically; we just leave all those pieces behind, while you are seen and celebrated as evolved and thoughtful for doing so.

But Jesus, He endured this so that we could have hope in a world that keeps letting us down hope that's bigger than the moment we are in. This gets to what was likely the most painful experience for Jesus in the scenes that we'll look at, which is when brothers betray you. This one hits close to home for a lot of us. It's not the fringe friend. It's the friend that feels more like family, who left us deeply wounded.

For Jesus, he knew it was coming. He predicted it. He had told his disciples and told Peter before the sun comes up, you are going to betray me three times. And Peter could not have imagined that he would do that. Peter goes from getting called Satan, when he challenges the plan for Jesus to go to the cross, to cutting off the ear of a guard who was trying to arrest Jesus, to being scared of a little girl who recognized him as one of Jesus’ followers. All of that happened within just a few hours. And for Peter, it wasn't minimizing or even just lying. He made an oath.

It says, “After a little while, the by bystanders came up and said to Peter, certainly, you too, are one of them, for your accent betrays you. Then he began to invoke a curse on himself. And to swear I do not know the man. And immediately the rooster crowed. And Peter remembered the saying of Jesus before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times. And he went out and wept bitterly.”

What a heartbreaking moment for Peter. The very thing that he was most adamant that he would never do. He did and he didn't even realize it till it was done. He was so consumed by fear that he actually swore he didn't know Jesus.

One of the shadows of this kind of confidence that we see in Peter’s faith, a brash and bold enthusiasm to be the first one to get out of the boat, to try anything, to go anywhere, to be all in is a blind spot where God-given confidence can become manmade pride overnight. And what comes right before the falling on the face that God will allow in our life so that we can learn and grow through it.

You probably have a friend that's betrayed you before. But before you put yourself in the position of Jesus and think about that friend, think about when you've been Peter; after a season of growth and progress in your journey with Jesus, you relapsed. You compromised, you regressed to a place that you committed to never go again, and you did anyway.

The good news for us is that Jesus restores Peter, there is hope, even after failure, even after betrayal, in a culture that would cancel you, God calls you back. Which is really true for all of us. Sin is cosmic rebellion, cosmic betrayal against God, for which we are all guilty. And the love of God is that even though that's true for all of us, without exception, He died for you.

But here's the observation that I think we need to carry with us into Easter, and into an important series that we're going to follow it with, when we lead with our pride, curiosity never follows.

We can maintain convictions and offer compassion at the same time we can. It's exactly what Jesus did. Even with Peter, that's such good news. No matter where you've been, no matter what you've done, know how long you've been gone. God loves you, and he has a path back for you.

Jesus offers forgiveness to a brother who betrayed him. But what about you? What have you done with that brother or sister? That friend that felt more like family who betrayed you? Have you ghosted them? Are they dead to you, the moment that someone in your core betrays you can you never talk to them, or maybe even anyone around them again? The response that we have when the world lets us down with our core is often to do the opposite of what we talked about before. We have surface-level friendships and relationships, but no one is allowed very deep, because we know how painful that betrayal feels when people get close. So we just don't let anyone get close.

In martial arts, there's a principle called distance control, in which you keep your opponent at a safe distance all the time so that you are ready in case they try an attack to block or counter their attack. Some of us we use the same distance control in our normal relationships. We proactively relate to our friends as though they are our foes all the time.

Remember, Jesus thought so much of you, so much of his creation, and the value of restoring his relationship with you that he knew Peter would betray him, and he's still got close. The relationship with Peter and God's relationship with you was worth it.

Again, this doesn't mean that we're not allowed to have boundaries, but we need a core. Maybe for you over the last few years, you have really good reasons why that core has dissipated. But I'm telling you, this could be a reminder to you that God longs for you to have more than just friendships; for you to have a brotherhood, for you to have a sisterhood for you to be able to have people that know you and that love you.

So I'm Palm Sunday, at the end of this special series, which one of these do you need to revisit in your life? Are you avoiding new relationships? I mean, you found good ways to argue for your schedules, full your times full, you can't let new people into your life group.

Have you maybe shifted your faith to non-threatening cultural attachment? Where, yeah, you're a Christian. But that doesn't mean you believe or live any differently than anyone around you? Or do you treat your closest friends like future foes, and you're just always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Jesus gives us this beautiful picture of being able to step out because it's not ultimately that we trust that person completely. It's that we trust God completely, even as we extend trust to that person.

Jesus gives us the freedom to trust Him, even when the world's let us down, and the world will keep letting you down. Jesus said that in this world, you and I will have trouble. But we should take heart we should be encouraged because Jesus has overcome the world. And that's still true today. It's still worth

the work of applying it in our relationships too. Where is your blind spot? What does it look like for you to lean in, even as you personally face the challenges of relationships all around you?

Now one more thing that I want to lean into before we go today, and that is we have a very, very unique opportunity over the course of the next week together. It's an opportunity that maybe you don't think about a whole lot. In the past. I've used this language before it's not original to me, but it's very helpful, which is to be on the lookout for people saying “The Three Nots.” So this week, you know sometimes will tell you hey, you should invite some people to come to Easter with you, you know, because Heaven hangs in the balance and you have the opportunity to put them in a room and maybe engage in relationship that could change their forever. And you will how do I do that?

Well, step one, listen for the three nots. When someone says to you, I'm not doing well. Maybe that's my marriage isn't doing well. Maybe that's my health isn't doing well, I'm not doing well, financially, I'm not doing well, emotionally. Maybe it's somebody that says I was not ready for this. They faced an obstacle or a challenge in their life that they just didn't see coming, or I'm not from around here.

If you hear someone say those things this week. Can I just give you a couple lines to say back? This is this is like a call and response moment. Okay. Here's the question I want you to ask; “where are you going to celebrate Easter here?” Try it with me? Where are you going to celebrate Easter. It was your first time you already sound better than me. You crushed it. And if they say “I don't know,” or they don't mention church, here's your next line. “I'd love for you to come join me at my church.” I'd love for you to come join me and you guys got it. You're incredible. You're inviters right now you can do it. I'm just telling you Menlo Church, this opportunity that we have at Christmas and Easter in our culture where there is still like residue of people feeling a pull, that residue is not going to be around much longer.

Jesus says that if you will acknowledge Me before men, I'll acknowledge you before my Father. If you deny me before men, I'll deny you before my Father. I don't say that to you out of guilt or shame. I just say to say, if you have experienced the love of God in your life, how much more should we want other people to experience the love of God in their life? You have a moment this week that is so unique. You just get it a couple times a year in our culture. Let's let's leverage it. Let's ask God to do something with us. Because the hope that many of us have many more people need.

Can I pray for you?

God, thank you so much. Thank you that 2,000 years ago, you really did come live a perfect life. That 2,000 years ago, you really did die on our behalf. And three days later, you really did come back from the grave conquering sin and death and giving all of us in an invitation, not just doing eternal live someday, somewhere but right now, right here today in relationship with you.

So God would you stir in us to have people eyes and people's ears on this week. To be able to see, hear and experience where you are calling us as your ambassadors to live out this calling of who we are in you to bring hope to even more people this Easter at Menlo Church. God we love you. We thank you for the invitation that this moment brings even in our lives to walk closer with you. It's in Jesus name. Amen.