(Click here for a video of John reading this Catch.)
My daughter lives in a house in the mountains of Oahu, Hawaii, minutes up the hill from the most popular surfing spots on the North Shore. The houses up here all sit on roomy lots where everyone seems to own chickens. So much so that at any hour of the night you can hear roosters crowing — what seems like a cacophony of them, near and far away.
I am here giving healthcare to my daughter who is recovering from two major surgeries in the span of a few weeks. On a morning like this one, which happens to be Good Friday, you can’t hear all these roosters without thinking of Peter, after Christ was crucified, hearing the rooster crow three times, reminding him that he had denied being one of His disciples — even denying he’d ever even known Jesus — and I imagine that later that night those roosters must have sounded like they do to me right now, like a huge choir of accusatory crowing screaming in his head, from which he could not escape. I bet he could have covered his ears and still heard them.
But this is the message of the Jesus Movement and why it made such an impact on the church and the world at that time. It was the message of the gospel, pure and simple — the message of the cross — the chorus of rooster crows raging through all the high and lofty things we could possibly come up with to change our lives and change the world. It was not about culture wars, or morality, or who we could put in the Supreme Court, or how we could influence the education of our children in public schools, or how many abortions we could prevent. It was about the gospel of Jesus Christ and how we had all denied Him, like Peter, and how we all deserved to die, and how He had turned the tables on us and died for us instead. What a glorious reversal!
The Jesus Movement was all about this gospel, and the gospel is what we need to be all about now. Because the gospel message has been brushed aside by politics and other agendas that have more to do with our own personal freedoms than with the eternal salvation of our friends and enemies. The gospel is our humble story of humiliation and redemption — how the roosters crow over all our best intentions and worst nightmares, and how the love and forgiveness of Christ picks us up and puts us in God’s forever family where His grace is multiplied through us as it is turned outward to the world.
What were Jesus Freaks known for during the Jesus Movement? Weren’t they known for telling people about Jesus? What are Christians known for today? If the answer isn’t the same, it needs to be.
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