Living Words

A Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity

St. Luke 16:19-31 & 1 St. John 4:7-21

by William Klock

The crowd was settling down after that first frenzied crush when Jesus had come to town.  The sick had been healed.  The tears had been wiped away.  In Jesus the people had had a taste, they’d seen a pocket of what the world is supposed to be, of the world set to rights.  They’d had a glimpse of God’s kingdom.  Now it was time to listen as Jesus spoke.  There were all sorts of people there.  People from town, people from the countryside, regular people, poor people—even some Pharisees looking down on the town square from the rooftop of the richest man in town.  And Jesus began:

“There was once a rich man.  He was dressed in purple and fine linen, and feasted sumptuously every day.”

 

Jesus was smiling at some little kids sitting in front of him as he said this, but everyone else looked at the Pharisees up on their rooftop perch.  They were rich.  They weren’t feast-every-day rich or even dressed-in-purple rich.  Very few people were.  But they did wear fine clothes and only rich people could afford to live like the Pharisees with all their scruples and rules and everyday things.  Jesus continued:

 

“A poor man named Lazarus, who was covered with sores, lay outside his gate.  He longed to feed himself with the scraps that fell from the rich man’s table.  Even the dogs came and licked his sores.”

 

Jesus paints a picture of extremes.  First there’s the rich man.  Super rich.  Ostentatiously rich.  Only kings could afford to wear purple and feast every day.  And in stark contrast there’s Lazarus.  He’s destitute.  He’s covered in sores, which means he’s almost certainly unclean.  He’s probably lame.  At some point he had either dragged himself to what he thought would be a prime spot for begging or someone else had deposited him there, at the gate of the richest man in town.  And the rich man and his friends would come and go.  He would hear the music and laughter from the other side of the wall.  He could smell the meat roasting.  He would have been happy with the bread the rich people used to wipe their hands.  But there was nothing for poor Lazarus.  And to make his life worse, as he lay there helpless, the feral dogs of the town would come to lick his oozing sores and leave him stinging.

Jesus puts a new spin on an old story the rabbis told.  There was a story—it’s been preserved in the Talmud—that originated in Egypt and was brought back to Judah by Alexandrian Jews.  It was a story about a rich tax collector and a poor torah scholar.  They both died and everyone attended the rich man’s funeral and no one could be bothered to show up the funeral of the poor man.  But a few days later, a friend of the poor man had a dream of paradise, and there in the middle of paradise was the poor torah scholar enjoying everything he’d sacrificed in life for the sake of God’s law.  And not far away was the rich man, parched and in torment, struggling to reach the stream, but forever held back.  When the story was told that way, everyone had sympathy for the poor torah scholar and hated the rich tax collector.  But Jesus changes it up a bit.  The rich man is just a rich man—maybe even a Pharisee.  And the poor man’s just a poor a man.  And when it’s told that way, given the thinking of the day, most people would have had their sympathies reverse.  Riches—so long as they weren’t gained from collecting taxes for the Romans—riches were a sign of God’s favour.  And the poor man?  Well, think of the disciples’ question to Jesus about the blind man.  “Who sinned?  This man or his parents?”  A lot of people would have chalked up the poor man’s state to his sins.  He was out of favour with God and deserved his miserable lot in life.

There’s another interesting change Jesus makes.  In the usual version of the story, it’s the rich man who has a name.  As he tells the story his way, Jesus gives a name to the poor man instead: Lazarus.  Lazarus means “God helps”, but more importantly, it’s a rabbinic form of the name Eliezer.  I suspect that Jesus was making a deliberate connection with Abraham’s servant, Eliezer of Damascus.  If we go back to Genesis 15 we read how Abraham lamented to the Lord that he was childless and that his only heir was Eliezer of Damascus.  In response, the Lord promised that he and Sarah would have a son.  When Isaac was born he displaced Eliezer, a gentile and an outsider, as Abraham’s inheritor.  In Jesus’ parable, the rich man is one of Abraham’s sons.  Again, the Pharisees would have seen his riches as a sign of his election and a sign of God’s blessing on him.  Lazarus, even though he was a Jew, was unclean because of his diseases and his poverty would have been seen as a sign of God’s disfavour.  He was an outsider, like Eliezer of Damascus, and undeserving of Abraham’s inheritance.

And yet look at what happens:

“In due course the poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried.  As he was being tormented in Hades, he looked up and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side.” (Luke 16:22-23)

Both men die.  Jesus simply says that the rich man was buried, but that simple statement unpacks into elaborate funeral rites and ceremonies and all the feasting we’d expect to take place when a rich man died in an ancient culture.  Proper burial was extremely important for the Jews and this man got not only a proper burial, but it came with all the pomp and circumstance that his wealth would have demanded.  In contrast, Jesus simply says that Lazarus died and we wonder if anyone even noticed.  There was no burial for Lazarus.  His body could very well have been dragged away by the dogs while the rich man’s servants assumed he’d found a better spot to beg.

And yet Jesus says that even without recognition or proper burial, poor Lazarus was collected by the angels themselves and taken to Abraham’s “side” or Abraham’s “bosom”.  The Jews described the Messianic age to come as one in which God’s people would feast and banquet in the kingdom along with Abraham.  Lazarus was probably as surprised as anyone, not only to be carried by the angels into that great banquet, but to be seated at the table right next to Abraham, in the place of highest honour.  That was the place reserved for someone like the rich man—not the place for a poor, sick, unclean beggar.  And yet there he was.

Again, with stark contrast, Jesus describes the situation of the rich man.  Despite his high status in life, he wakes to find himself being tormented in the afterlife.  And not just tormented.  Where Lazarus finds himself feasting at Abraham’s side, the rich man finds himself on the far side of a great gulf that separates him from that banquet and from Abraham.  The tables have been turned.  In life the rich man feasted and a great social gulf kept Lazarus away and starving.

Now it needs to be emphasised that Jesus’ parable is not meant to give us teaching about the afterlife.  A lot of theologians, down through the ages, have gone to this parable assuming that Jesus’ point was to teach us about the intermediate state or about heaven and hell.  That shows the danger of pulling portions of Scripture out of context.  Jesus was using a well-known folk tale to make a point.  We tell jokes and stories, for example, about people being met at the pearly gates by St. Peter with his list.  St. Peter and his list are never the point of those stories.  We don’t believe that this is what actually happens when we die—it’s a popular folk tale in our culture.  The point is what happens to the people in the story or joke when they get there.  Jesus is telling a story like that here.  He’s using the elements of a common folk tale, not to teach about the afterlife, but to rebuke the Pharisees for their love of money and for their failure to truly live out the law and the prophets—to truly live as Abraham’s heirs.  As the Lord had been generous to Israel with his grace and his provision, the people of Israel should have been generous with their grace and provisions with each other—and especially with people like Lazarus.  They were supposed to be a pocket of God’s future in the present, showing the nations the generous love of God.

And so here are these two men with their roles completely reversed in death.  And yet the rich man still doesn’t get it.  He sees Lazarus seated at the table with Abraham and he calls out in verse 24:

“‘Father Abraham!  Have mercy on me!  Send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue!  I’m in agony in this fire!’”

 

The rich man calls out to “Father Abraham”.  His entire life he had deceived himself into thinking that Abraham was his father simply because he was one of Abraham’s biological descendants.  Like the Pharisees, he was convinced that his genetics, his circumcision, his diet, his sabbath observance, his separation from gentiles and from all things unclean, and all his sacrifices and offerings made at the temple guaranteed him a seat at the great banquet.  And yet he feasted away his days while poor Lazarus starved at his gate.  We should be reminded again of the Lord’s rebuke through the prophet Hosea:

For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,

         the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. (Hosea 6:6)

Or as Jesus puts it in Matthew 9:13, “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.”

The rich man doesn’t grasp Lazarus’ position either.  Not only is he still calling out to Abraham as if he has a claim on Abraham, but he calls out to Abraham to send Lazarus to him with some water.  He sees Lazarus at Abraham’s side and misreads the situation.  It never occurs to him that Lazarus is there to be honoured.  He thinks that Lazarus is there as Abraham’s servant: a waterboy in hades.  Abraham has to explain the situation to him.  Look at verses 25-26:

“My child, remember that you in your life you received good things, and in the same way Lazarus received bad things.  Now he is comforted here, and you are tormented.  Besides that, there is a great chasm standing between us.  People who want to cross over from here to you can’t do so, nor can anyone get across from the far side to us.”

 

Jesus is still following the folk tale at this point.  Abraham puts the rich man in his place.  Lazarus wasn’t taken by the angels to be Abraham’s servant—or the rich man’s for that matter.  And the rich man hasn’t landed in a place of torment by mistake.  The rich man realises that the way he lived his life was wrong—he’d made assumptions about his status with Abraham and with the Lord, but his assumptions were wrong.  Again, Jesus’ point isn’t to teach us the geography of the afterlife.  He’s warning the Pharisees—and through them he’s warning all of Israel—that the role reversal that happened in this folk story could very well happen to them and that they’d better watch out.  The kingdom was at hand, judgement was coming soon, and they had little time left to repent.

Now, in the last verses of the chapter, Jesus changes the story.  The way people were used to hearing it, the rich man realised the error of his ways and asked for warnings to be sent to his brothers lest they suffer the same fate—and the Lord or Abraham obliged.  As Jesus tells the story, just the opposite happens.  The warnings have already been sent.  Look at verses 27-31:

“‘Please, then, Father,’ the rich man said, ‘send him to my father’s house.  I have five brothers.  Let Lazarus warn them, so that they don’t come into this place of torment.’  But Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets.  Let them hear them.’  And he said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone went to them from the dead, they would repent.’  ‘And if they do not hear Moses and the Prophets,’ came the reply, ‘neither would they be convinced, even if someone rose from the dead.’”

 

Look at Abraham’s response again: “If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, “neither would they be convinced, even if someone rose from the dead.”  With the coming of Jesus, the kingdom of God was breaking into the world.  God sent Jesus to lead his people out of their long exile.  He sent his Son to conquer sin and death and to lead his people out of their bondage to both.  And so with every sickness healed, with every demon cast out, with every sin forgiven Jesus was showing that the kingdom had come, that God’s new future was beginning.  This is why tax collectors and sinners were celebrating.  Jesus was setting them free.  Imagine the joy of Lazarus as he was carried by the angels to feast at Abraham’s side.  This is the reality that Jesus was making known to the poor and the outcast and to sinners.

And yet the Pharisees grumbled every time they saw Jesus doing these things.  The men who were sons of Abraham and who spent their lives in devotion to God’s law, they couldn’t accept what Jesus was doing.  He was inviting all the wrong people to the banquet!  And so Jesus is rebuking them; he’s calling them to repentance just as he called the tax collectors and sinners to repent.  And here he warns them: They’re like the rich man who refused poor Lazarus even the bread thrown under his table.  They’ve been entrusted with the light, but they refuse to share it with those living in darkness.  They’ve been entrusted with the law and the prophets—God’s Word and the means of redemption for the nations—but they’d rather keep it to themselves and see the nations, the poor, the unclean tormented in hades.  And at the end of the day, it’s just that attitude towards the poor and towards sinners and towards all those on the outside—it’s their refusal to celebrate as Jesus heals and forgives and makes new—that reveals that while they have the law and the prophets, they’ve never truly understood them and they’ve never truly lived them.  They’re supposed to be little pockets of God’s future in the present, but instead they’ve been little pockets of darkness.  And because of that, they may be surprised to find themselves, just like the rich man, on the receiving end of God’s judgement.  If they don’t repent and recognise that in Jesus the kingdom has come, they will have forfeited their inheritance and it will be given to others.  They will have no share in the kingdom.

This is where Jesus’ choice of the name Lazarus or Eliezer comes back into the story.  When Isaac was born, the gentile Eliezer lost his inheritance.  The Pharisees—and the rest of Israel—are the nation born of Isaac.  They are the inheritors of God’s promises to Abraham.  But with those covenant promises come covenant obligations—not just circumcision, avoiding unclean food, and sacrifices at the temple, but a seeking after justice and mercy and truly living out the lovingkindness of God in the world.  If Israel refuses to fulfil those obligations and if she refuses to acknowledge that in Jesus they are being fulfilled, she will lose those covenant promises—she will lose her inheritance and it will be given to others, to outsiders grafted into Jesus who is the true Israel and the one truly faithful son of Abraham.

This has been the message of Luke’s gospel from the beginning, when Mary sang out:

He hath put down the mighty from their seat,

         and hath exalted the humble and meek;

He hath filled the hungry with good things,

         and the rich he hath sent away empty. (Luke 1:52-53)

This was the message that John the Baptist was preaching back in Chapter 3: “You’d better prove your repentance by bearing the proper fruit!  Don’t start saying to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father’; let me tell you, God can raise up children for Abraham from these stones!  The axe is already standing by the roots of the tree—so every tree that doesn’t produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.” (Luke 3:8-9).  This was the warning that Jesus gave when he told the people to strive to enter through the narrow door before it’s shut, before it’s too late: “He will say to you, ‘I do not know where you people are from.  Be off with you, you wicked lot.’  That’s where you’ll find weeping and gnashing of teeth: when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in God’s kingdom, and you yourselves will be thrown out.  People will come from east and west, from north and south, and sit down to feast in God’s kingdom.” (Luke 13:27-29).

The rich man and his brothers, just like the Pharisees and just like unfaithful Israel, all had the law and the prophets.  They didn’t need any more witnesses.  Jesus’ rebuke that even if someone should be raised from the dead they still wouldn’t believe is a prophetic look ahead at Israel’s fate.  They refused to listen to the law and the prophets.  Jesus came to renew Israel, and she refused to hear him and continued to refuse even when he rose from the dead.  And so others are being grafted in: unclean people, sinners, and gentiles are being grafted in and through Jesus are being given the inheritance that Israel has forfeited.

What does this mean for us?  Brothers and sisters, we have Moses and the prophets, but more importantly we have Jesus and the Spirit, too.  We’ve been renewed.  The Spirit has given to us the one thing that the old Israel lacked: he’s inscribed God’s law on our hearts.  He’s made it a part of us.  He’s made it such a part of us that St. John can say in our Epistle today:

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God, and all who love are born of God and know God.  The one who does not love has not known God, because God is love….If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is completed in us.  That is how we know that we abide in him, and he in us, because he has given us a portion of his Spirit.” (1 John 4:7-8, 12-13)

Maybe this is why the Spirit appeared as tongues of fire on the heads of the disciples at Pentecost.  They became light in the Spirit—very visible those little walking pockets of God’s light-filled future, God’s new creation, pulled into the present for the sake of the world.  That’s the day when, through his Spirit, God made his people to truly be what he’d intended them to be all along.

Brothers and Sisters, it was easy for the Pharisees to take their convent status for granted.  It should not be so for us.  They were the natural sons of Abraham, but we are the dead wood that was grafted into the living vine—by the Spirit, into Jesus.  We’re the ones who have received an inheritance that was not naturally ours.  The Table we come to this morning, the bread we eat and the wine we drink, remind us of the amazing grace and generosity of God towards us.  In so many ways and for so many reasons, we do not deserve his invitation to this Table, but he has been gracious and merciful to us.  He’s given his own Son to die so that we can be a part of this family.  May we never take his grace or our position before him or his Table for granted.  May we, redeemed by his blood and filled with his Spirit, embody his love for the sake of the world.  May we always be faithful and living witnesses of God’s new creation—light in midst of darkness, love in the midst of hate; hope in the midst of fear.

Let’s pray: O God, the strength of all who put their trust in you: Mercifully accept our prayers; and because in our weakness we can do nothing good without you, give us the help of your grace, that in keeping your commandments we may please you both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

A Sermon for Trinity Sunday

St. John 3:1-17

by William Klock

Knock!  Knock!  Knock!  Someone was at the door.  Peter—or maybe it was John or James—got up to see who it was.  It had been a long day.  Everywhere Jesus went the crowds followed.  Some were full of questions, but most of all they were full of problems.  And they brought them all to Jesus.  The blind, the deaf, the sick, the dying, the demon-possessed.  This isn’t how the world is supposed to be, full of tears.  Everyone knew it then.  Everyone knows it now.  And everyone then and now hoped for a day when somehow it will all be set to rights.  And so the people flocked to Jesus, because wherever he went, there was a little pocket of the world as it should be, the world as God had made it, the world set to rights.  Wherever Jesus went, there was a little pocket of God’s future brought into the present.  A little pocket of the world where the tears are wiped away.

Knock!  Knock!  Knock!  There it was again.  They’d found a quiet place to spend the night away from the crowds, but someone had found it.  Peter was getting himself ready to tell whoever-it-was to go away, so image his surprise when he opened the door and saw Nicodemus standing there.  They’d never met, but everyone knew who Nicodemus was.  He was a rich man, he was one of the leaders of the Pharisees, but more than that, he was a member of the Sanhedrin—the ruling council of the Jews.  And here he was at the door of the house where Jesus was staying, standing there with a couple of his servants, politely asking to speak with the rabbi now that the crowds were gone.

Nicodemus had seen what Jesus was doing.  Nicodemus had heard what Jesus was preaching.  Nicodemus had watched from the edge of the crowds and listened in the temple court.  In Jesus he saw the hopes of Israel being fulfilled.  He saw that little pocket of God’s future following wherever Jesus went.  He believed—he just wasn’t sure what exactly it was that he was believing.  Have you ever had that happen?  You see God at work.  It’s obvious.  But it’s not what you expected.  So you believe, but you don’t really understand.  That’s where Nicodemus was.  He wasn’t one of the simple people who just needed some physical manifestation of the kingdom—like the blind and the deaf and the sick.  He knew the scriptures.  He knew how the God of Israel was supposed to fulfil his prophecies.  And Jesus was fulfilling them, but not in the ways anyone expected.  So the great theologian had come, not to be healed, but to ask how all this can be.  “We know that you’re a teacher who’s come from God,” Nicodemus said to Jesus, “Nobody can do the signs that you’re doing, unless God is with him.”

You can hear the unspoken question implicit in Nicodemus’ affirmation.  It’s the theologian’s equivalent of “Lord, I believe.  Help my unbelief.”  It was like this for everyone.  The disciples saw, they heard, they believed, but whenever Jesus pressed them with questions, ninety per cent of the time they gave the wrong answer.  Peter knew with certainty that Jesus was the Messiah, the son of the living God.  But when push came to shove, he drew his sword and was ready to bring God’s kingdom with violence.  Even the disciples were full of all the wrong ideas the Jews had about the Messiah and the coming of the kingdom.  Nicodemus was in the same boat.  It’s just that he knew he was missing something and here he was to get it sorted out.  But Jesus doesn’t give him the answer he wanted, because even if Jesus explained it all, even if Jesus connected all the dots for Nicodemus, that’s wouldn’t solve the problem.  Nicodemus would still need something more.  And this is where Jesus answers his implicit question with those familiar words, “Let me tell you the solemn truth.  Unless someone has been born from above, he won’t be able to see God’s kingdom.”

It wasn’t just Nicodemus struggling with all this.  Think of all our Gospel lessons during Easter- and Ascensiontide, those lessons where Jesus tells his disciples that as good as it is for him to be with them, he’s going to have to leave so that something better can happen.  And they don’t understand.  They’re confused.  If Jesus leaves, that little pocket of the kingdom that follows him wherever he goes, it will be gone with him.  They didn’t understand either.  They, too, had to be born from above in order to see—in order to be part of—the kingdom.  In order to themselves become little pockets of God’s future in the present.  And, of course, that’s what we saw last Sunday as we remembered Pentecost.  The God of Israel sent his Spirit to indwell his people—they were born from above—and suddenly it all made sense and Peter preached that Pentecost sermon that would have been impossible for him to preach just the day before and from there they went out to make God’s kingdom known to the world.

This is, incidentally, why we have this story of Nicodemus’ visit to Jesus as our Gospel lesson today.  Trinity Sunday didn’t come along until the high Middle Ages.  Long before today was Trinity Sunday, it was the Sunday after Pentecost and today’s Gospel was assigned to explain the Pentecost events we read about last Sunday.  When Trinity Sunday came along no one changed the lesson, because here we see the Trinity revealed in the exchange between Jesus and Nicodemus as the Son reveals that the Father must send the Spirit to create, to give life to a renewed people.

So Nicodemus knew the story.  He knew the God of Israel.  But he knew there was more to it.  He knew the world is not as it should be and he knew that that the people of Israel were failing at what God had called them to be.  And he knew the Lord’s promises to set the world and Israel to rights.  He saw the Lord’s promises being fulfilled in Jesus and he’d heard Jesus talking about this new work, this new exodus, this new deliverance of the people—this exodus even greater than the one that defined them when the Lord delivered them from Pharaoh.  And Jesus warned about a judgement soon to come on those who refused to repent of their old ways and to get in line with the Lord’s plans.  It didn’t fit into the expectations of the people of Israel and especially not into what the Pharisees expected, but there had to be something to it, because the Lord was so clearly with Jesus.

Again, Jesus picks up on the question implied in Nicodemus’ statement.  He says, “The central truth you’re missing, Nicodemus, is that you’ve got to be born from above to see the kingdom of God.”  Nicodemus understood so much.  If anyone wanted to see God’s will done and his kingdom come on earth as in heaven it was the Pharisees.  That’s what they lived for.  And Nicodemus saw it in Jesus, but he struggled to reconcile his expectations with what Jesus was saying.  And Jesus says that what he’s missing—what all of Israel is missing—is this new birth, this being born from above, this being born again.  And it’s important to understand that as much as Jesus is saying, “You, Nicodemus, must be born again—which is how the ears of modern Christians have been trained to hear this in individualistic terms—Jesus’ stress is on Israel, on the whole people.  In verse 7 he says, “Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’”  When he says “You must be born again,” that’s plural, it’s “you all must be born again”.  Israel as a people had been born the first time when they passed through the waters of the Red Sea and Jesus is saying that now Israel had to be born a second time.  This is why John was out in the wilderness baptizing in the Jordan, but that wasn’t all.  Israel had been baptised in water before and it wasn’t enough.  Now they needed to be baptised in both water and the Spirit.  Israel was always supposed to be a pocket of God’s future in the present—so that the nations could see and know the goodness of God.  And Jesus is saying that it’s the Spirit who will finally make the people what God had called them to be.  As Jesus had said over and over in various ways, he, Jesus, was sent by the Father, but that it would be the Spirit—the “Helper”—who would come after, who would testify to them about this truth and then that through them, this Spirit would testify to the rest of Israel and even to the nations…fulfilling the prophets, effectively creating a new Israel, and through this new people, fulfilling the mission the Lord had given to them from the beginning: to fill the world with the knowledge of him as the waters cover the sea and to testify to the nations in such a way that the nations would flock to the God of Israel to give him glory.

But Nicodemus didn’t get it.  Neither did Jesus’ disciples.  Because the Spirit had not yet come to testify about Jesus.  So Nicodemus asked Jesus, “How can I be born again?  I know you’re not talking about returning to my mother’s womb, but what do you mean?  A person is only born once.”  And as he answers Nicodemus, this is where Jesus switches from saying things like “Unless one is born again” to “Unless you—all of you—are born again”.  Because it’s not so much about one person being born again or even about a whole bunch of individuals being born again.  It’s about Israel as a people being born again so that she could be put back on track to fulfil her mission—the one given to Abraham two thousand years before.  And this idea of birth would have resonated particularly with someone like Nicodemus, because to be a Jew was all about being born as part of Abraham’s family.  Other things like circumcision and the sabbath and what you ate (or didn’t eat) were important and especially so for the Pharisees, but those things were important because they identified you as part of Abraham’s family.  They also drew a clear boundary between those who were in the family and all the uncircumcised, unclean gentiles who were most definitely not.

What Jesus is saying now is that being born into Abraham’s family in the way the Jews had been thinking about it all this time wasn’t enough.  In fact, it never had been enough.  And Nicodemus should have known this.  For two millennia people were being born into Abraham’s family and God’s kingdom still hadn’t come.  For two millennia people were born into Abraham’s family and still the Gentiles hadn’t experienced the Lord’s blessing through them, at least not on the large scale envisioned in the Scriptures.  Just the opposite.  The Prophet Zechariah had spoken of a day when the Gentiles would be grabbing hold of Jews by their coattails saying, “Take us with you, because we hear that God is with you!”  Instead, because of the way most of Abraham’s children were living, the nations mocked them and taunted them saying, “Where’s your God?”  It takes more than being born of the flesh of Abraham.  It even takes more than being born of water, as Israel had been in the Red Sea.  And as a man devoted to the law, to torah, Nicodemus should have understood this.  The Pharisees were all about exhorting their fellow Jews to be better keepers of the law, but it wasn’t working.  They of all people should have been looking forward to the day when the law would no longer be written on tablets of stone, but engraved on the very hearts of the people by the Holy Spirit.

So Jesus says to Nicodemus, “I’m telling you the solemn truth.  Unless you’re born of water and the Spirit you cannot enter God’s kingdom.  Flesh is born from flesh, but spirit is born from spirit.”  Israel needs something more than a biological inheritance.  What does Jesus mean, though, when he talks about being born of water and the Spirit?  This is was what John the Baptist was preaching about.  God was about to lead his people in a new exodus.  As Israel had been led through the waters of the Red Sea to become a covenant family, so John was calling people to pass through the waters of the Jordan—a step of repentance and faith—and into a new covenant.  They all needed that baptism of repentance.  They needed to turn aside from their own misguided expectations of the kingdom and of the Messiah and from their failures to be faithful to the Lord and his covenant.  But remember what John promised.  When people asked if he was the Messiah he said that he was only the forerunner.  John said, “I baptise you with water, but he will plunge you into the Holy Spirit.”  And that’s just what Jesus does.  As we recalled last week on Pentecost, Jesus takes those who have repented, who have turned aside from every false lord, from every false god, from every false source of security, from every false way in order to take hold of him in faith by passing through the waters of baptism and he plunges us into the Holy Spirit.  And it’s the Spirit who does the work of transforming us.  It’s the Spirit who regenerates us.  It’s the Spirit who causes us to be born again as he takes our old dead wood and unites it to the life of Jesus, causing us to bear fruit—making us the pocket of God’s future in the present.  Through the Spirit we’re born again, born from above.

The last few months I’ve been reading Ed Sanders’ books on the relationship between the New Testament and Second Temple Judaism.  Sanders was a brilliant scholar and full of deep insights.  His work has had a profound impact on how we understand the New Testament.  But he wasn’t a Christian.  He described himself as a “secular Mainline Protestant”.  And it shows.  As brilliant as his insights into Jesus and Paul are, as fascinating as he is to read, it’s all spiritually dry as dust.  There’s no doxology to any of it.  Sanders even refused to weigh in on whether or not Christianity is superior to Judaism.  And so it was like a breath of fresh air when I finished Sanders’ “Paul and Palestinian Judaism” and picked up Tom Wright’s new book of Romans and it was full of the same sorts of brilliant and deep insights—many of them ideas that started with Sanders back in the 1970s—but Bp. Wright’s work is overflowing with doxology and gospel joy.  That’s the difference that Jesus and the Spirit make in us.

Think of your baptism as something like Israel at the Red Sea.  There was the parted water and God calling Israel to pass through to freedom and new life on the other side.  There was no receiving the law in Egypt; they had to cross to the other side of the sea to find covenant, to find relationship with the Lord.  And so we stand at the waters of baptism today.  In them Jesus gives his promise: Repent, turn aside from every false way, trust me, follow me in faith and you will find forgiveness of sins and new life through the Spirit.  To pass through the waters of baptism is to take hold of Jesus’ promise and to be born again of water and the Spirit—and to be made part of this new covenant people ready and equipped to live and to proclaim his kingdom.

But, again, this didn’t fit what Nicodemus knew.  “How can this be so?” he asks.  And Jesus asks a bit incredulously, “How can you not know this?  You’re one of the teachers of Israel!”  Nicodemus knew the story.  He understood how Israel had so miserably failed in her mission.  As a Pharisee he was abundantly aware of this problem.  Jesus tells Nicodemus: God has heard your cries and is visiting his people and he’s doing it in me.  I’m the son of man, the one spoken of by Daniel all those years ago.  I can tell you reliably the things of heaven because I’m the one who has come down from heaven.

At this point, I think, Nicodemus starts to connect the dots as much as anyone could in those days before the Spirit was sent.  He started to understand, because now Jesus really starts to correct what was wrong with Israel’s thinking about herself, about what it meant to be God’s people, and about what it would mean for the Lord to come to deliver them.  Jesus reminds Nicodemus of an event from Israel’s time in the wilderness.  The Israelites grumbled against Moses—which was ultimately grumbling against the Lord—and so he sent poisonous snakes into the camp.  They bit people and many of those who were bit died.  But the Lord also gave Moses the remedy.  He told Moses to cast a snake out of bronze and to mount it on a pole.  Anyone who would look up to the bronze snake would be healed.

And now Jesus says, “Just as Moses lifted up that snake in the wilderness, in the same way the son of man must be lifted up so that everyone who believes in him may share in the life of God’s new age.”  Jesus is pointing to his own crucifixion.  As the snake was the affliction of the people lifted up for them to look at, so Jesus would take the affliction of Israel on himself—he would suffer the punishment for their sins—and be lifted up on the cross.  He would be lifted up for everyone to look upon—to see the horror and the gravity of their sin, to see that the wages of sin is death.  But they would also see Jesus taking it all on himself and in that, the horror and ugliness of his being raised up would become an act by which he is ultimately glorified.  In the cross we see the love of God made manifest in Jesus.  And Jesus says in the familiar words we all know, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.  For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.”

Jesus corrects the central error in the thinking of Israel in his day.  They were hoping and praying for the day when the Lord would come, not just to vindicate his people, but to judge their enemies—to rain down fire and brimstone on the Romans and all the other gentiles.  But instead Jesus tells Nicodemus that he’s come not to condemn, but to save all who will look to him.  All.  The Jews thought the Lord, when he came, would vindicate them for their faithfulness, but Jesus says to Nicodemus, even the most righteous of you need this new birth, this salvation if you want to know God’s vindication.  And it’s not just for you.  The Jews looked forward to the condemnation he would bring, but Jesus says he’s come not to condemn, but to save.  And this is where the part about being born again of water and the Spirit comes into play.  Being born of water and the Spirit supersedes biology and genealogy.  In Jesus God opens his arms to welcome Jew and Gentile alike.  It was the Jews first, because if the Lord is faithful—and he is—he had to first fulfil his promises to his own people, but most importantly, in that act of faithfulness, the nations would take note of the God of Israel.  In Jesus, the nations would see that the God of Israel is not like the puny, selfish, fickle, and powerless gods they have known, and they would then flock to this God who is truly good and faithful.  This is what God’s future looks like, not just Israel set to rights and everyone else set on fire.  God’s future is for everyone who sees Jesus and his people wiping away the tears and forgiving sin, who believes, and who becomes part of it—whether born of Abraham by the flesh or born of Abraham by faith—all born in God’s Spirit.

Abraham’s family is integral to the story and the plan, but Jesus reminds us that genes and DNA were never really what made anyone part of Abraham’s family; it was about faith.  It was faith for Abraham himself and it was faith in God’s promises for all who followed after: for Isaac and Jacob, for Joseph and Moses and Joshua, for gentiles like Rahab and Ruth, and even for the great kings like David and Solomon.  And God’s promise was that through his covenant people, through these people who knew him in faith and were reconciled to him by faith, he would bless the nations.  It happened here and there in the Old Testament.  Rahab and Ruth are two of many small-scale testimonies to that, but here we finally see the Lord’s promise coming to full fruit.  It’s what we celebrated last week on Pentecost as Jesus sent the Holy Spirit on these men of Israel gathered from around the world.  They had heard Peter preach about Jesus and what he’d come to do.  They rallied to Jesus in faith and in response Jesus poured his Spirit into them.  Finally, through Jesus, Israel became the source of blessing she was intended to be—not by flesh, but by the Spirit—as these men and women took the good news to the nations: Jesus is Lord.  He has conquered sin and death.  In him is the forgiveness of sin, in him is life, in him God has returned to his creation as King.  And in him—the Incarnate Word—God makes himself known.  In Jesus, God Incarnate, we have the restoration and fellowship with our Creator that he has been working towards ever since the day we rebelled and were cast out of his presence.  In Jesus, God’s kingdom—his new creation—has been inaugurated, in us and through us in the world.  Brothers and Sisters, we are that people the God of Israel was working to create and to make new all those millennia.  Jesus and the Spirit have finally made us that pocket of God’s future in the present, the pocket where the world is set to rights and where the tears are wiped away, the pocket shows the world the faithfulness and goodness of God.  May we be that people—God’s future in the present, the heralds of his new creation—may we be faithful in being this Spirit-renewed gospel people who make known God’s glory to the world.

Let us pray: Almighty God we praise you this morning for the grace you have shown us.  Even as we rebelled against you, our good Creator, you were setting in motion our redemption: Father sending, calling, electing; Son speaking, coming, dying, rising; and Spirit uniting, renewing, regenerating, empowering.  In the redemption of the world we see the glory of the Trinity and the majesty of the Unity and in gratitude we fall before you with the angels to sing, “Holy, holy, holy Lord God almighty.”  By your grace, keep us strong in faith, O Lord, but keep us also faithful in our witness and our ministry to make your redeeming love known to the world.  We ask this through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns together with you and the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever.  Amen.

A Sermon for Whitsunday

Acts 2:1-11

by William Klock

“Are we there yet?  Are we there yet?  Are we there yet?  How about now…now are we there yet?”  As you read the Gospels the disciples’ questions about the kingdom of God feel a bit like that.  All Jesus needed was one of them kicking the back of his seat on the way to Jerusalem.  “When will the kingdom come?  How long?  Are we there yet?  Is it almost time, Jesus?”  But it wasn’t just the disciples.  It was First Century Judaism.  Pretty much everyone was on the edge of their seat with anticipation for the kingdom.  Everyone except the Sadducees, because of course, they were sitting on the top of the heap, already in control of everything.  They’d already arrived and weren’t particularly interested in anything that might upset the status quo.  But even then, they knew it was the Romans who were really calling the shots, so I suspect even the Sadducees were thinking “Are we there yet?”  They just didn’t say it out loud.  Everyone knew it was time.  It had to be.  And that sense was even stronger for the disciples, because they knew Jesus was the Messiah—the one come to usher in God’s kingdom and to set the world to rights.  So if the Messiah had come—well—the kingdom had to be really close.

And so Luke, as he opens the book of Acts with the Ascension of Jesus, he tells us of Jesus’ promise to his friends: “Don’t go back to Galilee.  Stay in Jerusalem.  As John baptised you with water, in a few days I will baptise you with the Holy Spirit.”  But they hadn’t asked Jesus about the Holy Spirit.  They wanted to know when the kingdom was coming, because it had to be soon.  And so even as Jesus was leading them up the Mount of Olives and about to ascend to his throne, they were pestering him, “Is this the time?  Are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel now?”  And, remember, in answer to their question Jesus ascended, up on the clouds, into heaven, to take up his throne, to rule and to reign.

And as he did that, he commissioned his disciples to do something that I don’t think they expected.  He commissioned them to be his royal heralds, to go out and to proclaim this good news to Jerusalem, to Judea, even to Samaria, and then to the ends of the earth.  Now, this wasn’t the first time Jesus had sent his disciples out to proclaim the kingdom, but when he’d sent them out before, it was to a people who were also asking those “Are we there yet?” questions.  The disciples had gone out and told the people that in Jesus the Messiah had come and that the kingdom was in sight.  But now Jesus is sending them out to proclaim that in his resurrection and ascension the kingdom has come and that was no small task.  Because even though the disciples had seen their risen Lord and even though they saw him ascend to his throne, this wasn’t how anyone expected the kingdom to arrive.  They thought everyone would be resurrected all at once.  They though the Messiah would put down the enemies of God’s people and cast down their empires.  They expected a king like David who would punish evil, wipe away all the problems, and make everything as it should be.  Instead, the wrong people were still in control, evil people still did evil things, so much was still wrong with the world—and yet Jesus had inaugurated something, he really had risen from the dead, and they’d seen him ascend to his throne with their own eyes, so they knew he was truly Lord and that the kingdom had come.  The Lord’s plan was to work through them, to spread the good news and to tell the world that Jesus is Lord, and to grow the kingdom.  That wasn’t what anyone expected, but they should have, because that’s how the Lord had been working in the world ever since he called Abraham out of the land of Ur and set him apart from everyone else, and made him and his family a witness to the world—that one day, through this people, the whole earth would know the Lord and his greatness and his goodness and his faithfulness and come to give him glory.

I wonder if we, too, don’t forget this sometimes.  We might know better deep down, but we kind of assume that the Christian life is, more or less, a personal thing.  We raise our kids in it.  Maybe we talk to a few close people about it.  But we act as if our duty is mostly just to be good, godly people until Jesus comes back and sets everything to rights—as if he’s the one who’s going to make it all happen by doing all the hard work.  Sure, there are some people called to be missionaries who go off to faraway places where they’ve never heard of Jesus, but for most of us, it’s just a quiet, personal, individual sort of thing.  Even the dominant eschatology of our day assumes that things will just get worse and worse until Jesus zaps us all out of here and rains down fire and brimstone on this awful, corrupt world.  But that’s never what the story was about and that’s never where it was headed.  The Lord called and created a people to make him known with the expectation that eventually that people—not in their own power, but in his—but that people would really make him known until, as the prophets Isaiah and Habakkuk both said, the knowledge of his glory would cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.

Maybe we forget our part in this kingdom mission because it seems so impossible.  What?  Us?  Grow the kingdom until the knowledge of the glory of the Lord covers the earth?  What?  Us?  Bring the nations to give him glory?  That’s too big for us?  We’ll just be holy over here and wait for Jesus to come back and do the impossible stuff.  And at this point, Jesus’ disciples had no idea just how big and impossible the task was.  Taking the gospel to the gentiles wasn’t even on their radar.  They were still thinking it was a message for Jews.  It would be some years before the full extent of it even sank in.  And this is why Jesus told his friends to stay in Jerusalem and to wait.  In his resurrection he was vindicated as the Messiah.  In his ascension he took his throne and sent the clear message that the kingdom has come.  But before the disciples could go on with the work of the kingdom, they needed something that God’s people had never had before—at least not in this way.  They needed the power of the Holy Spirit to truly be the new Israel, to carry on the mission the Lord had given to Abraham and Isaac, and to all of Israel: to bless the nations by making him known to them.  Without the Spirit, Jesus’ disciples would have the same problem God’s people had always had and after a time, when the excitement wore off, they would become fickle and faithless and their loyalties would be divided and they would fall into sin and the nations would mock them, this time jeering, “Where’s your Messiah now?”  No, they needed this gift of the indwelling Spirit to set their hearts on God and to write his law of love on their hearts—truly transforming their affections.  And it was this Spirit who would empower them to go out into a hostile world with the good news about Jesus and to live out his love and his grace and his justice, carrying the kingdom to the ends of the earth.  That’s why they had to wait in Jerusalem.

I don’t think they really had any idea what was about to happen.  They didn’t even really understand the full extent of the mission he’d given them.  They were just excited because of his resurrection and his ascension and Luke says that while they waited in Jerusalem that they spent their time in the temple praising and blessing God.  And then comes our Epistle today.  Look at Acts 2.  Luke writes,

When the day of Pentecost arrived…

 

Let’s stop there.  This isn’t an incidental detail.  It’s integral to the story.  As integral as Jesus having been born a Jew.  As integral as his death and resurrection taking place at Passover.  “Pentecost” means “fiftieth” in Greek.  Greek-speaking Jews gave the festival this name because it fell fifty days after Passover, but its biblical name was the “feast of weeks” and it was connected with the wheat harvest.  It was when the Lord commanded his people to bring him their firstfruits.  That’s the very first part of the harvest.  It was an offering to the Lord and it was an act of faith on their part.  Other peoples brought offerings to their gods after the harvest had been brought in, once they knew what they could spare.  But Israel gave in faith from the very first of the harvest, trusting the Lord to give the rest.  So Pentecost was a feast of expectation and faith.

But Pentecost was also the feast when Israel celebrated the giving of the law, the torah, at Mt. Sinai.  That’s where the significance of “fifty” comes from.  Again, it follows fifty days after Passover and you’ll remember that Passover commemorated Israel’s exodus from Egypt: their slavery, Moses and the Lord’s command to Pharaoh, “Let my people go!”, the plagues, the blood on the doorposts, the sparing of Israel’s firstborn sons, the flight from Egypt, the rescue at the Red Sea.  Passover was a festival of the Lord’s deliverance of his people and it celebrated that great event in which Israel was born as a nation.  And each generation participated in those events anew as they gathered year in and year out in their homes to share the Passover meal.  It marked them out as the Lord’s covenant people.

But that wasn’t the end of the story.  From the Red Sea, the Lord led his people into the wilderness and fifty days later he gave them his law.  He called Moses up to Mt. Sinai and when Moses came back down he brough the law with him, carved on stone tablets.  In the Exodus the Lord had made Israel his people.  At Mt. Sinai he showed them what it meant and what it looked like to be his people.  So at Passover the Jews celebrated their redemption.  At Pentecost they remembered that the Lord had redeemed them for a purpose: to live a new kind of life in order to fulfil his purposes and their calling.

Can you see how this all fits together with the events of the Gospels?  Easter is our Passover, when we remember how, through Jesus, the Lord redeemed us from our bondage to sin and death and made us his people.  And now, on Pentecost—this is our Mt. Sinai.  Let’s continue with Acts 2:

When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place.  And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.  And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them.  And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.

 

In Exodus we’re given an awesome picture of the holiness of God as his presence descended on the mountain in smoke and fire and thunder, and here the Spirit comes again like a storm, in this mighty rushing wind and fire descends upon his people.  And here Luke tells this new story to parallel the old.  As Moses went up on the mountain to the Lord, so Jesus has ascended into heaven.  And now Luke wants us to understand that Jesus, just as he promised he would, has come back down.  Moses came down with tablets of stone to tell the people how to live as the Lord’s covenant people.  And now Jesus has returned, he’s come down from heaven in the person of the Holy Spirit, to write his law of love on the very hearts of his people.

Don’t misunderstand.  That doesn’t mean that Israel had a harsh and rigid law written on stone and that Jesus’ people just “follow their hearts” or something like that.  There’s a sense in which that’s true, but definitely not in the sense that the world talks about following your heart.  Following our hearts is what got us into trouble and made a mess of this world, because apart from Jesus and the Spirit our hearts are set on sin and self.  That’s the point here.  The law written on stone showed Israel how to live as God’s holy people, but it couldn’t change the affections of their hearts.  The Spirit, on the other hand, takes away the need for those stone tablets by changing our very hearts, filling them with a love for God and a desire for holiness, and by turning us away from sin and from self.

And notice how the wind and the fire come from heaven.  Through the Spirit the creative and renewing power of the Lord—the very breath that he breathed into humanity to give us life in the first place—it descends on his people to accomplish his work on earth.  Jesus taught his disciples to pray “on earth as it is in heaven” and Pentecost was the firstfruits of an answer to that prayer.  Sometimes Christians treat the presence and gifts of the Holy Spirit as things that raise us up above the world or that make the world irrelevant, but it’s really just the opposite.  The Spirit is the life-giving breath of God that gives us a foretaste of the resurrection and of the life we hope for one day in this world set to rights.  As the Spirit sets our hearts on God, he makes us the “on earth as it is in heaven” people, the people who not only show the world what God’s kingdom looks like, but who actually live out his kingdom and its values of love and grace and mercy and justice in the midst of a world that values all the opposites of those things.

But the first manifestation of the Spirit’s “on earth as it is in heaven” ministry is what we see here.  Luke says, first, that Jesus’ people were all together when this happened—they were united—and then the first manifestation of the Spirit was this amazing speech in other languages.  But what exactly was it?  Let’s keep reading from verse 5:

Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven.  And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one was hearing them speak in his own language.  And they were amazed and astonished, saying, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?  And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language?  Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians—we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.”

 

Jews had spread out across the known world and festivals like Passover and Pentecost brough them back to Jerusalem.  The Spirit came on Jesus’ disciples with fire and the sound of a mighty rushing wind, but what everyone else couldn’t help but notice was the ruckus they made as they began to speak in these other languages.  And it got their attention.  The disciples were a bunch of rubes from Galilee, way up north, or at least that’s how people in Jerusalem would have seen them.  Galileans spoke Aramaic and Greek—the local languages—but they weren’t cosmopolitan enough to speak all these other languages.  And yet these men visiting Jerusalem from places like Egypt and Asia and even from places like Parthia, beyond the borders of the empire, heard these Galileans speaking in their own languages.  That made them stop and take note.  But what they were saying caught their attention even more.  Luke says they were telling of the mighty works of God.  In the context here that can mean only one thing.  They were proclaiming the good news about Jesus.  That he had come proclaiming the kingdom and calling the people to repentance, that he had been crucified, that he had risen from the dead, and that he had ascended, and is now Lord—and maybe most of all, that he had done this in fulfilment of the Lord’s promises and to show the Lord’s faithfulness.  Many of these visitors had, no doubt, heard about Jesus and how he’d been crucified just a few weeks before.  Some of them had probably heard rumors that he’d risen from the dead.  If they’d been spending any time around the temple, they would have heard and seen the disciples praising God for what he had done in Jesus—and they probably thought they were crazy.   But now they hear these bumpkins from Galilee declaring the might works of God miraculously in their own languages and they stop.  And they listen.  And some of them, Luke says, sneered at the disciples thinking they were drunk.  But that’s when—if we were to continue on from today’s Epistle in Chapter 2—that’s when Peter stood up addressed them, saying, “It’s nine o’clock in the morning.  It's hardly the time of day for men to be drunk.  No, what you’re seeing is the fulfilment of the words spoken by the prophet Joel when he told of the Lord’s promise to pour out his Spirit and to redeem his people.  And Peter went on to tell the men there, again, of the mighty deeds of God: of Jesus, of his death, of his resurrection, and his ascension.  And he walked the men through the scriptures they knew so well and through the promises the Lord had made to his people, and he showed how Jesus had and was fulfilling them.  He finished his sermon, Luke says, proclaiming:

“Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.”  (Acts 2:36)

And the men who were listening were cut to the heart and cried out to Peter, “What should we do?”

And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus the Messiah for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.  For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.”  And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.”  So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. (Acts 2:38-41)

The “on earth as it is in heaven” people began to grow.  The rest of the book of Acts is Luke’s testimony to the mighty deeds of God through these people, empowered by Jesus and the Spirit.  We see the gospel—and with it the kingdom—going out from Jerusalem, to Judea, and then to Samaria, where it united Jews and Samaritans for the first time.  And then we see it go out to the nations, to the gentiles, the book ending with Paul proclaiming the good news about Jesus in Rome, right under Caesar’s nose.  And Acts shows us churches sprouting up across the world.  Acts is the firstfruits of the kingdom harvest—a harvest that would, eventually include the whole Roman Empire and beyond.  And, Brothers and Sisters, Pentecost reminds us how.  Without it we might be tempted to give up, to retreat into the church building, and wait for Jesus to come and do it all himself.  But Pentecost reminds us that going all the way back to Abraham, the Lord has been calling and creating and empowering a people to make him known to a world lost in darkness, a people to be light, a people—like the disciples that day in Jerusalem—to proclaim to the world the mighty deeds of the God of Israel.  A people to proclaim the good news that in this Jesus who was crucified, who has risen from the dead, and who has ascended to his throne to rule and reign, that he is and that he will set this world to rights.  But, maybe most importantly, Pentecost reminds us that Jesus has called us and made us this people, not only to go out and to tell, but to go out and live and to do and to make and to build and to show his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.  We do that as we live the fruit the Spirit has given and as we show the world, in real, practical, hands-on ways what God’s new creation is like, living his love and his mercy and his grace and his justice and working for those things in the world.  It is an impossible task, but Pentecost also reminds us that we are not called to do it in our own power or on our own terms, but as we are empowered and guided by Jesus and the Spirit.

Let’s pray: O God, who on this day taught the hearts of your faithful people by sending to them the light of your Holy Spirit: Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

A Sermon for Ascension Sunday

1 St. Peter 4:7-11 & St. John 15:25-16:4

by William Klock

Today is that Sunday in the Church Year that has us sitting with the disciples as they wait for the fulfilment of Jesus’ promise of God’s Spirit.  It’s a little bit like the scene of them on Easter Day.  Think of Mary, confused and distressed, running to tell Peter and John about the empty tomb and finding them, hunkered down in a dark house with the doors and shutters locked tight.  Both times, the disciples sat in a house in Jerusalem waiting.  On Easter Day, they were waiting out of fear.  Jesus had been executed and, if they weren’t careful, they’d probably be executed too.  They were waiting for the Passover festival to end, for the crowds to start leaving the city, so that maybe they could just blend into the crowds streaming out through the gates and down the roads, so they could make their way back to Galilee and hopefully just go back to their old lives and forget—and everyone else forget—that they’d been followers of Jesus.  And so they waited.  In the dark.  Fearful.  Barely talking in whispers.

Today the disciples are, again, waiting in Jerusalem.  But today is different.  Late on Easter Day Jesus had appeared in that locked room, risen, and not just alive like, say, Lazarus was alive again after he came out of his tomb.  Jesus wasn’t just alive.  He’d been made new.  The same Jesus they knew, even bearing the marks of his crucifixion, and yet different.  This new Jesus, resurrected from the dead, was as at home in heaven as he was on earth and as at home on earth as he was in heaven.  This Jesus embodied their hope of an Israel, of a whole human race, set to rights.  In him they were confronted with the birth of God’s new creation.  And everything the Prophets had said and everything Jesus had said about God setting the world to rights now made sense—at first, suddenly, it made sense at a gut level, but then as this risen Jesus walked them through the scriptures—probably the same scriptures he’d walked them through umpteen times before—gradually it all finally started to make sense in their heads, too.  Jesus’ resurrection changed everything.  But most of all, they saw the hopes of generation after generation after generation of Jews for a world set to rights, they saw that hope fulfilled in Jesus, and in that they saw the glory of God like no one had seen the glory of God since—well maybe since the Exodus.

And so, for forty days, Jesus met with his disciples and with hundreds of others, and they studied the scriptures and, I expect, they worshiped and glorified the God of Israel who had done this amazing thing and, who, right before their eyes, was fulfilling his promises.  And then he led them out to the Mount Olives and ascended into the clouds.  Jesus had prepared them for this.  He’d said before that eventually he would be leaving them.  These passages have been our Gospels for the last three weeks.  Remember John 16: “In a little while you won’t see, but a little while after that you will see me, because I’m going to the Father.”  Or two Sundays ago, “I’m going to the one who sent me and it’s important that I do, so that I can send the one who will come along side you on my behalf, the Helper.”  And last Sunday, “I’m leaving the world and going to the Father.  In the world you will have tribulation, but I have overcome the world.”  That last bit from John 16:33 surely underscored for them the lordship of Jesus.  Now it was time for him to take his throne in the heavenlies.

And so Jesus commissioned them to take this gospel, this good news, back to Jerusalem and to all of Judea, and eventually even to the Samaritans and then to the nations.  And as he commissioned them he rose on the clouds to his throne.  Jesus didn’t have to do it that way.  It’s not like heaven is literally up there somewhere.  You can’t get there with a rocket any more than the Babylonians could build a tower to get there.  Jesus could have just winked out here and winked in there.  But even here at the end of his ministry, he acts out a prophecy as he was so fond of doing.  It was Daniel’s vision of the son of man, coming to the ancient of days and to his throne on the clouds of heaven, it was that vision happening in real life as they watched.  And, too, the disciples were familiar with the iconography of Imperial Rome.  When Julius Caesar died, a comet appeared in the sky.  His heir, Augustus, declared that the comet was the divine Caesar ascending to heaven.  At Augustus’ order, gold comets were added to the statues of Caesar and coins were stamped with the image of that comet on the back.  And, of course, Augustus then took the title, “Son of God”.  Everyone knew it wasn’t really true.  It was political.  But here was Jesus ascending to heaven for real.  For all his power, Caesar was a cheap copy, a fake king playing at divinity.  Jesus was the real deal, the world’s true Lord.

And that was heart of the message that Jesus sent his friends out to tell.  That’s the heart of the gospel: This Jesus, crucified and risen, is Lord of all.  Remember what that word “gospel” means.  It literally means “good news”, but it’s important to remember how it was used.  Think of those familiar words from Isaiah 52: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.”  In those days it was an image of a royal herald, returning to Jerusalem from the battle front to announce the good news that the king had won the battle against the enemy.  And in the world of the Greeks and Romans, “good news” was proclaimed by imperial heralds.  Good news!  A new Caesar has ascended to the imperial throne!  Good news!  Your city has been conquered by Rome and you are blessed to receive Caesar as your new king!  And in that there’s something really important that we often miss.  All too often we think of the gospel, of this good news about Jesus, more as good advice.  We “share” the gospel with people, telling them about it as something they ought to try, to see if it works for them, because we’ve been better off with it, so they ought to be too.  We treat this good news like another option on the religious smorgasbord.  Give Jesus a try.  If you don’t like him, well, okay.  But, Brothers and Sisters, Jesus isn’t a new restaurant.  Jesus isn’t a new brand of laundry detergent any more than Caesar was.  Imagine Rome conquering your country and you telling the Romans that Caesar really isn’t your thing, so no thanks.  Simon bar Kokhba tried that in 115.  He declared himself prince of the Jews, raised a revolt, and was brutally crushed by the Romans.

Brothers and Sisters, the good news of Jesus, crucified, risen, and Lord isn’t good advice.  It’s good news.  It’s good news that he is the world’s true Lord and that he sits on this throne, and that this good news will conquer the world until every last one of his enemies has been put under his feet.  It’s a proclamation—and we’re the royal heralds—that God’s king, his new creation, has begun and we can either be a part of it or we can face destruction when Jesus comes in glory one day to wipe every last bit of evil of sin and of death from its face.

This was Jesus commission to his friends as he ascended.  Go out and tell the world that it has a new king.  And it’s not hard to imagine them chomping at the bit to run into Jerusalem and to start proclaiming this good news in the streets and in the synagogues and even in the temple.  But Jesus knew better.  Because excitement about good news will only get you so far.  And so Jesus told them to go back into the city to wait—to wait for the Helper, the Holy Spirit.  In fact, he talked about them being baptised with the Holy Spirit in the way that John had baptised them with water.  And it was in the power of the Holy Spirit—not just the power of their excitement about Jesus’ resurrection—in the power of the Holy Spirit they would go out to proclaim this news to Jerusalem, to Judea, to Samaria, and to the whole world.

And so, today we sit with the disciples as they wait.  But this time it’s a very different sort of waiting.  On Easter they were waiting to go out, afraid for their lives, just wanting to get out of the city as quietly as possible.  Today we sit with them as they wait and as they pray, having spent forty days with the risen Jesus, waiting as they’re just about bursting with this good news.  They’ve been commission to be the royal heralds of the King.  They’re full of excitement this time.  Raring to go.  Ready to proclaim this good news.  Even knowing that this might mean their own deaths.  And, maybe that’s what gives them patience for the fulfilment of Jesus promise of this power from God.  Because excitement over something new is never enough.  Excitement eventually wanes.  And when we try to do the work of the kingdom in our own power, we’re sure to make a mess of it.  The power lies not with us, but with God’s word and with God’s Spirit and when rely on word and Spirit we do things differently than we might do them in our own power.  One of the things that strikes me from our Epistle today is the set of gospel mission priorities it lays out for us.  Here are Peter’s Spirit-inspired words.  This is 1 Peter 4:7-11.

The end of all things is at hand; therefore be self-controlled and sober-minded for the sake of your prayers. (1 Peter 4:7)

The end of all things is at hand.  This doesn’t mean that end of history or of the universe or whatever is at hand.  That wouldn’t make sense.  From our perspective the end of space and time obviously wasn’t at hand for Peter—unless you can somehow twist “at hand” to mean “two thousand plus years”.  More important, it doesn’t make sense, because that would hardly be a vindication of the God who made the world, who loves it, and who gave his son to die for it, and who has commissioned a people to carry this good news into it.  What Peter means is that God, through Jesus, has begun the process of making his creation new and the sign of this renewal is the renewal of a people, the renewal of men and women who share in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

And that means that we’d better show that renewal in our lives.  Peter says that our work will be accomplished through self-control and being sober-minded.  Peter knew that opposition and persecution were coming and that our natural inclination when that happens is to panic—to start running around waving our hands or to run away and hide, to lose focus on the mission.  So he says, as people renewed by God’s Spirit, be self-controlled and sober-minded.

Self-control is a fruit of the Spirit.  Self-control is—or should be—a defining characteristic of people who are united to Jesus by the Holy Spirit.  And being sober-minded is the fruit of our minds having been renewed by the Holy Spirit.  Again, Jesus has given us work to do and it’s not going to get done if we’re in a panic.  Instead of getting worked up, instead of panicking, Peter tells us: pray.  When Jesus was under pressure, he undergirded his work with prayer.  Our response to the pressure and weight of our calling also needs to be prayer.

And as the Church we need to work together, to stick together—to be the Church.  Peter goes on in verses 8-9:

Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins.  Show hospitality to one another without grumbling.

 

It’s easy to drive each other away.  It’s easy to be offended by what this person says or what that person does.  We sadly see it all too often in the Church.  Someone offends someone else and off they go.  It’s especially sad when you find out that the offense was an accident or that what was said or done was misconstrued—that no offense was ever intended.  Some people can be difficult and, over and over, I’ve seen Christians who treat difficult people in ways that put them at the fringe or drive them off.  Some people just sometimes wander away from the Church and no one goes after them to check up on them.  But Peter says that we’re to hold unfailing love for each other—unfailing.  Hebrews 10:24-25 tells us something similar:

Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.

 

“The Day” is drawing near.  Jesus has given us God’s own Spirit to carry his work of renewal into the world.  So stir each other up to love and good works and do not neglect to meet together.

If someone asked me to write a letter exhorting the Church as to what to do in light of the end of all things being at hand, I’d probably write something about getting out into the world to tell people about Jesus—and to do so with a sense of urgency.  But Peter (and the writer of Hebrews) instead tells us to love each other.  Brothers and Sisters, what they’re saying—and this is important—is that before we do anything else, we, the Church, need to be the Church, we need to be the body of Christ.  Loving each other, supporting each other, showing hospitality to each other—even when we’re sometimes difficult to get along with or overly needy or whatever makes us difficult—and we can all be like this sometimes—loving each other despite our flaws and difficulties and allowing our love for each other to cover those difficulties and offenses and things that can sometimes be abrasive.  That kind of love, the love that God has shown us in Jesus, that’s what binds us together.  And being bound together two things happen.  First, we function the way Jesus and the Spirit intend.  The Spirit has given us all unique gifts.  When we work together we complement each other as we fulfil the mission Jesus has given.  But the love we’re called to show each other is also a powerful part of our witness of renewal and of God’s new creation.  There is no other organization or institution in this world that brings together people of such different backgrounds and culture and age and temperament than the Church and in that we have a powerful witness to the redeeming grace of God.

In last week’s Epistle, James told us to be doers of the word and not hearers only.  This is what that looks like.  And it’s this love and light that plays out amongst Jesus’ people—amongst us—that not only holds us together, but it draws in, it attracts outsiders.  Good theology and right doctrine are important, but what witnesses our renewal and God’s new creation is the fruit of the Spirit and, as Paul writes, the greatest of these is love.  When Jesus says to us, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” it won’t be because we’ve spent our lives parsing out the subtle philosophical nuances of the Trinity or the Incarnation.  It will be because we have been faithful with the gifts he’s given through his Spirit, for how we’ve loved each other and for being faithful stewards of his good news.

Peter goes on in verses 10-11:

As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace: whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies—in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.

 

The Spirit has equipped each of us and we’re called to use these gifts to serve each other.  The Spirit doesn’t give us gifts to squander or to use for our own gain.  They’re meant to build up the Church and to help us fulfil our mission.  And Peter here calls us to be good stewards.

And we’re not just accountable to God; we’re accountable to each other as stewards.  How often do we think it’s just “between myself and God”?  Regularly I find myself talking to people who tell me that that instead of being part of the Church, they’re opting to live their faith privately and on their own.  I have to say I’m always more than a little suspicious of the genuineness of someone’s claim to be a Christians when they have no interest in the Church.  You can’t claim to love Jesus and then despise his body!  There’s no such thing as a loner Christian and this is in part why.  Imagine if tomorrow your eyes or your feet, your heart or your mind decided they weren’t interested in being part of your body.  You’d be in a world of hurt and the same goes for the Church.

There are, I think, two reasons the church fails.  First, we fail when we become worldly and mired in the things of this age that is passing away, instead of being witnesses to God’s new creation.  There’s a fine line.  The church, for example, can witness God’s new creation through involvement in politics and the state, but it’s also very easy to get carried away with the worldly and corrupt aspects of politics and the power of the state and to lose our witness.  But, second, we fail when we steward the gifts of the Spirit poorly.  And so Peter urges us that if God has gifted you—and he’s generously gifted all of us—don’t hold out.  He’s gifted you, he’s equipped you for a reason.

Think of it this way: To ignore the gifts the Spirit has given us, to squander them, to steward them badly is to live as if Jesus ascended to heaven and then left us all on our own—as if he hadn’t sent his Spirit to come alongside us and to equip us for ministry.  To be poor stewards of the Spirit’s gifting is to live as if Jesus died for our sins, but did nothing more—no regenerate heart, no renewed mind.  To live apart from the Church.  Or to be part of the Church, but to fail to live with each other in unfailing love, Brothers and Sisters, is to live as if there is no Holy Spirit.  All these things are the Spirit’s work and the Spirit’s fruit in the life of the Church.  They’re not optional extras.  Consider that Jesus thought it important enough we have these things that he left, he ascended, so that he could send the one who would supply and equip us with them.  We could have had Jesus with us all the time, to visit our churches to teach us, to sit down with us individually to talked to us and to comfort us, but he thought it was more important for us to have the gift of the Holy Spirit and so he left that the Spirit might be sent.

Think on that this week.  Jesus commissioned his people and he sent the Spirit to equip us to get the job done.  Someday Jesus will return when the Spirit’s work through us has been finished.  In the meantime, we’ve been given a huge job.  Don’t panic.  Don’t freak out.  Be self-controlled and sober-minded.  Commit yourselves to prayer, show each other unfailing love, and work together as the body of Christ, being faithful stewards of the gifts the Spirit has given.

Let us pray: Gracious Father, as we acknowledged in the Collect, Jesus has ascended to his heavenly throne, but you have not left us comfortless.  You’ve graciously given us the gift of your Spirit and by your Spirit you unite us to Jesus, you transform and sanctify us, and you equip us to do the work Jesus has given.  Give us grace and teach us to be faithful stewards of the Spirit’s gifts.  Teach us to bear the Spirit’s fruit and let us live that fruit in practical ways and especially as we love one another and as we support one another in using the gifts the Spirit has given as we make Jesus and his kingdom known to the world.  We ask this through Jesus Christ our Saviour and Lord.  Amen.

At That Time

Daniel 12:1-13

by William Klock

Daniel 12 begins with the words, “At that time”, which means we need to remind ourselves what time Daniel’s vision was talking about.  Remember that these last three chapters of the book are one long vision.  It began with Daniel lamenting what he could see.  Pagan kings, instead of being judged for their wickedness, were getting strong and stronger.  And his own people, an awful lot of them, seemed apathetic about the end of the exile.  They’d made lives for themselves in Babylon and simply weren’t interested in returning to Jerusalem.  And those who did return were facing opposition at every turn as they worked to rebuild the city and the temple.  Daniel was losing hope.  And so an angel appeared and in the first part of the vision the angel explained that there was more to things than what Daniel could see.  Unseen forces fought a battle in the heavenlies that somehow corresponded to events on earth.  In fact, Daniel was told, the angel Michael fought for the people of God.  Even if he couldn’t see any of it, Daniel had reason to hope.

And then, in Chapter 11, the angel gave Daniel of vision of things to come, as if to show how God is sovereign even in the wars and intrigues of pagan kings.  First the Persian kings and then the Greeks, as they squabbled and fought over the land of Judah.  That was most of Chapter 11.  Things would get worse before they would get better, but here was a chance to hope—to put into practise that truth that sometimes there’s more going on than what we can see.  Even in the intrigue, the subterfuge, the assassination of those Greek kings of Egypt and Syria, even in all that, the God of Israel remained sovereign.  Even as the worst of them came to power.  And that was the heart of Chapter 11: this evil king who wanted to convert the Jews into pagan Greeks. Antiochus made it illegal to live by God’s law, he desecrated the Lord’s altar, and he forbade the daily offerings made in the temple.  1 and 2 Maccabees tell us how he tried to force Jewish men to eat pork, torturing them and even killing them when they refused and how women who circumcised their sons were thrown off the city walls along with their children.  To remain faithful to the Lord in those days came at a great cost.  Many even paid with their lives.  Meanwhile, a significant segment of the Jewish people capitulated, finding ways to compromise or abandoning their faith altogether.  The faithful died and the unfaithful lived.  It wasn’t supposed to be like that.  Daniel was written for these people—to exhort them, to give them hope, and to assure them that the Lord remained sovereign and would vindicate them in the end.

And that’s where Daniel’s vision gets difficult.  Up to the events of about 167BC the vision maps right onto history, but then at 11:40 the angel says, “At the time of the end…”  As I said last week, the natural way to read this is as a continuation of the events that took place under Antiochus Epiphanes.  Verses 40-45 describes another war between Egypt and Syria.  They describe tens of thousands falling, but also being delivered out of his hand.  The king conquers Egypt, Libya, and Cush.  There’s a vague description of him going off to another war—or something—and pitching his tent between Mount Zion and the sea, and then—suddenly—he comes to his end.

The vision changes in these verses.  What was very specific suddenly becomes vague.  The language becomes more grandiose.  And what’s described here doesn’t map onto historical events as easily as the earlier parts of the vision do.  So some people think with those words “at the time of the end”, the vision is jumping to some time in the future and that the king is no longer Antiochus Epiphanes, but a future antichrist.  But as I said last week, the vision itself doesn’t suggest at all that the timeframe has changed and to interpret it that way ends up undermining the purpose: to give hope to the faithful living under Antiochus.  The reason for the change is twofold.  First, the author of this vision, although writing it as if he were Daniel living centuries before, was really writing it at this point.  Up to now, he’s been looking back at events that already happened and now he’s looking to the events of the roughly three years that will follow.  Is it actually a prophecy?  Or is it his Spirit-inspired insights based on what he knew of two centuries of Greek fighting coupled with what he knew from the Prophets?  And I think that’s key here.  Suddenly, here, the vision borrows language and images from Isaiah and Ezekiel and the Psalms.  He was using those passages to interpret current events and that explains why the language becomes grandiose and why the historical one-to-one’s fall apart at this point.  The key truth here isn’t so much the exact historical events that would happen, but that in them the God of Israel would act to judge the wicked, and to deliver and vindicate the faithful.  As modern people who tend to think of prophecy mainly as foretelling future events, we forget that prophecy in Israel was always far more interested in telling us about the God behind world events.  And as I said last week, I think that’s where the solution to our problems with Daniel lies.  Throughout the Old Testament Prophets we see foretellings of judgement and vindication in history, and we can look back at the historical record and see that they really did happen, but most of the time there’s still an eschatological element that we don’t see fully fulfilled in the historical events.  As Daniel speaks here of the end, there’s the end, the historical end of Antiochus Epiphanes, an end to his blasphemies, an end to his persecution of the faithful, but there’s also a sense of this big, this final End with a capital “E”—something that will bring history to a close with a once and for all judgement that ends wickedness forever and sees the faithful, the just fully restored and given justice.  God’s judgements in history always point us to a day when all will be set to rights once and forever.

So when the angel says to Daniel “at the time of the end”, he is talking about historical events in the near future, but there’s an element or an aspect of these events—at least in the way they’re described here—that looks forward to and anticipates a future End with a capital “E”.

Look at Daniel 12:1-4.

“At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who has charge of your people. And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time. But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the book. And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever. But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end. Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.”

 

Things are bad, but they’re going to get worse, so the angel reminds Daniel of the beginning of the vision.  There’s more to what’s going on than what Daniel—or the faithful in Judah—can see, so don’t despair.  Again, scripture doesn’t fill us in on all the details about these battles in the heavenlies.  Is it angel wresting with angel or is it armies of angels fighting with each other?  How does it work?  How are these battles in the heavenlies connected with what’s happening here?  We don’t know and it’s not important.  The key point is that God’s people are not alone in our struggles.  Not only do angels fight for us, but Michael, who is apparently the greatest of them, stands on the side of the people of God.  As he fought the angelic powers behind Persia and behind the Greeks, so—I think it’s safe to assume—he fights whatever angelic powers lie behind those who persecute the Church today.

The angel describes a time of trouble like never before.  These are the words of Jeremiah 30:7 and they call back to the Lord’s promise to restore his people at the end of their exile:

“Thus says the Lord:

We have heard a cry of panic,

         of terror, and no peace….

Alas! That day is so great

         there is none like it;

it is a time of distress for Jacob;

         yet he shall be saved out of it.

 

“And it shall come to pass in that day, declares the Lord of hosts, that I will break his yoke from off your neck, and I will burst your bonds, and foreigners shall no more make a servant of him. But they shall serve the Lord their God and David their king, whom I will raise up for them. (Jeremiah 30:5, 7-9)

The Lord will once again hear the cries of his people in their distress and as they stand firm in faith against a wicked king, so Michael will fight for them in the heavenlies.  There is a book, the angel reminds Daniel, and the Lord will deliver everyone whose name is written in it.  This book pops up throughout the Old Testament—Exodus, Isaiah, Malachi, and Psalm 69.  It’s a census of the covenant faithful.  The book itself is a reminder that the Lord is not only sovereign, but that he’s paying attention—that he knows the names of those who kept the faith.

To know that the Lord is paying that kind of attention is itself encouraging.  Think back to 11:33, where we read about the “wise” during these dark days:

And the wise among the people shall make many understand, though for some day they shall stumble by sword and flame, by captivity and plunder.

 

The world is not as it should be.  The people who deserve life receive death.  But the Lord keeps the books and he will set everything right in the end.  The angel tells Daniel about the many who sleep in the dust of the earth.  Think of Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones.  An image of death, hopelessness, and injustice.  The people who should know the life of God are dead and all but forgotten.  But there’s a promise.  The Lord will restore them to share in his life.  The angel, speaking to Daniel, draws on the language of Isaiah 26:19:

Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise.

         You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy!

For your dew is a dew of light,

         and the earth will give birth to the dead.

The angel here in Daniel takes these old prophetic images of resurrection that were originally illustrating Israel’s return from exile, here the angel gives those images a literal fulfilment and the return from exile becomes an image or an earnest, a down-payment, on this even better thing that the Lord will do for his people.  They were longing for a restoration to the promised land where they could once against live with his presence in their midst in the temple, but now through the angel the Lord promises that he will raise his people from death and share his life with them.  Those who were dead will sing for joy.  And the wise, the faithful who put their own lives on the line to exhort the rest of the people to faithfulness, the angel says, they will shine like the stars.  He draws on the image of the suffering servant from Isaiah 52:

Behold, my servant shall act wisely;

         he shall be high and lifted up,

         and shall be exalted.

As many were astonished at you—

         his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance,

         and his form beyond that of the children of mankind—

so shall he sprinkle many nations.

         Kings shall shut their mouths because of him,

for that which has not been told them they see,

         and that which they have not heard they understand.

The angels speaks of hayyim olam, everlasting life.  It’s is the only place this phrase is used in the Old Testament, but it seems to draw on the Lord’s promise to the king in Psalm 21.  And it suggests that the Lord is sharing something of himself with the faithful, because everlasting life is something that belongs only to God.  It’s what he shared with human beings in the garden by means of the tree of life.  It also calls back to Daniel 2:44 where Daniel is told:

The God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever.

 

The faithful dead will sin for joy forever.  But giving life to the just only balances one side of the ledger.  The angel says, too, that the wicked—the apostate Jews who conspired with Antiochus—they will be raised as well, but instead of being raised to know the life of God, they will be raised to face judgement and death.  The description of them is taken from Isaiah 66:24:

“And they shall go out and look on the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against me. For their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.”

 

The wicked, the apostates, and the collaborators who sided with the pagans and forsook the Lord’s covenant, who died—presumable natural, peaceful deaths—thinking they’d done the right thing, they are raised briefly so that they can know the Lord’s justice, so the books can be set straight, and then we have this image of their corpses being cast in the Valley of Hinnom to rot, a testimony to everyone of the Lord’s justice—that regardless of how things may look now, he will in the end give life to the just and destruction to the wicked.

 

The important thing in all this is the Lord’s vindication of his faithful people and, in that, his vindication of himself.  The Lord will make known his faithfulness and, seeing it, the peoples will give him glory.  In reading a stack of commentaries on Daniel, I’ve noticed that this gets lost.  Everyone puts their attention on when this will happen or they get side-tracked with discussion about what all this means for our concept of the afterlife.  That’s not the point.  I love the way the Jewish Bible scholar Jon Levenson puts.  He writes,

“The main point…is not afterlife; it is vindication, the vindication of the just and their God against the rebels or defectors who had of late triumphed over them and disgraced them.  In short, in these texts the resurrection of the dead is best conceived as a reversal, not so much of death as of condition and status.  God intervenes to make the downtrodden and the triumphant change places, in the process vindicating his own honor and sovereignty….In stark contrast to recent experience, the faithful traditionalists will live (and the ‘wise’ among them will shine radiantly), but the desecrators of the covenant will either die or endure an unending ignominy.”[1]

The central part of Chapter 12 comes to a close in verse 4, where the angel tells Daniel to seal all of this up until the “time of the end”.  I think that, again, stresses that the time the author of Daniel was writing about was the days of Antiochus Epiphanes and Judas Maccabeus.  If the book was sealed, no one could read it, so the idea here is that those who read the book would know that this was their time.  And, again, that was meant to give them hope in the midst of very dark days as they watched their own people being killed for their faith.

The final paragraph of the book, I think, stresses this pretty clearly.  Look at verse 5 and following:

Then I, Daniel, looked, and behold, two others stood, one on this bank of the stream and one on that bank of the stream. And someone said to the man clothed in linen, who was above the waters of the stream, “How long shall it be till the end of these wonders?” And I heard the man clothed in linen, who was above the waters of the stream; he raised his right hand and his left hand toward heaven and swore by him who lives forever that it would be for a time, times, and half a time, and that when the shattering of the power of the holy people comes to an end all these things would be finished. I heard, but I did not understand. Then I said, “O my lord, what shall be the outcome of these things?” He said, “Go your way, Daniel, for the words are shut up and sealed until the time of the end. Many shall purify themselves and make themselves white and be refined, but the wicked shall act wickedly. And none of the wicked shall understand, but those who are wise shall understand. And from the time that the regular burnt offering is taken away and the abomination that makes desolate is set up, there shall be 1,290 days. Blessed is he who waits and arrives at the 1,335 days. But go your way till the end. And you shall rest and shall stand in your allotted place at the end of the days.”

 

So we’re now back where we started at the Tigris River with this majestic man clothed in linen and gold.  There are now two others who seem to be angels and “someone” asks the man how long it will be to the end of all this”.  And the man swears to heaven as he tells Daniel that it will be a times, times, and a half time.  This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this figure in Daniel and as before, it’s sort of a cryptic way of saying three-and-a-half years.  That’s the emphasis of this whole paragraph.  Daniel says that he doesn’t understand, and the man more or less says the same thing again in two different ways.  From the time the regular offering is taken away and the altar is desecrated—and that points again to this being about those days when Antiochus did that, not some far future—from that time it’ll be 1290 days.  And then the man, and without any other cue I think we have to assume he’s referring to the same time period, he says 1335 days.  Both numbers work out to a little more than three-and-a-half years.  Bible scholars debate the reason for the two additional numbers that differ a little from each other and from the first.  Some think each is calculating the time using a different calendar: one lunar, one solar.  Others point out that the numbers are symbolic and that you can work out various sums with them that have their own symbolic meaning.  It’s a complex discussion with no certain solution.  The simple point seems to be that all of this was supposed to happen in roughly three-and-a-half years.  So it’s worth noting that, indeed, Judas Maccabeus and his forces captured the temple in December of 164 BC.  (Jews celebrate that victory every year at Hannukah.)  And Antiochus Epiphanes also died in December of 164 BC.  That was three years from the desecration of the altar.  It probably took some time for the news to get to Jerusalem.  We know the morning and evening burnt offerings were stopped sometime before the desecration of the altar, but not precisely when, so the three-and-a-half years as a rough number with some symbolic significance fits.

And yet, even though Antiochus died and the altar and sacrifices were restored, the wicked were punished and the faithful vindicated, no one was literally raised from the dead.  And this is why so many interpreters have insisted that this all must be about something in the future, not the days of Antiochus Epiphanes and Judas Maccabeus.  To see this as describing future events has been the majority opinion for both Christians and Jews, but it isn’t the only opinion.  As I’ve been studying Daniel, one of commentaries I’ve been reading is on the history of its interpretation and I’ve found it interesting that some of the earliest Christian readers of Daniel understood this to be fulfilled allegorically in the victory of the Maccabees and the death of Antiochus.  I think they were on the right track.  Again, as I said last week, it’s typical of the Old Testament prophets to write about judgement and vindication, whether of Israel or the nations, in a way that we see fulfilled in historical events, but that also points to a future day—to the great and final End with a capital “E”—that has yet to happen.  And I think that’s what’s happening in Daniel’s vision.  He wrote his book to encourage the faithful living through the dark days of the 160s BC and the people to whom it was written obviously found encouragement in it, because they made sure that the book made it into the Bible as scripture.  They recognised the Spirit of God speaking through this man and his stories and visions.  I can’t see them, with so much here that grounds Daniel’s vision in the events in which they were living, I can’t see them projecting this into some distant future.  They knew that no one was resurrection from death in 164 BC but instead of throwing the book out as a failed prophecy, they were encouraged and exhorted by it, it made sense of the events through which they were living, they understood it to be fulfilled in some way in the events they experienced, and so they identified it as God’s word.  This is, again, part of the nature of prophecy in the Bible.  It speaks to the original people and rebukes or exhorts them in their historical circumstances, while also pointing to the future.

Brothers and Sisters, life is not easy.  Maybe this is why Daniel is grouped with the wisdom books in the Hebrew Bible.  Because Daniel reminds us that to walk in faith with the Lord doesn’t mean an escape from the trials and tears of the world; it doesn’t mean an escape from wicked rulers or, for that matter, wicked neighbours; it doesn’t give us a get-out-of-persecution-free card.  What it does mean is that the Lord holds us in his hands through the trials and tribulations of life.  Daniel reminds us that our names are written in his book.  Daniel reminds us that no matter how bad things that we can see may look, God fights for us in the heavenlies.  But, I think most important, to walk in faith with God is to know that his acts of faithfulness in the past—and even today—give us a sure and certain hope of vindication and of life everlasting in the age to come.  Daniel and his people gathered year in and year out to eat the Passover meal and in doing that they remembered and participated in the events by which the Lord had rescued their ancestors from Egypt, made them his people, given them his law, dwelt in their midst, and made them a promise of life.  They sat down at that table, recalled the past, and looked forward in hope because the past told them who the Lord is and that he is good and faithful.  And if that was true for Daniel and for the faithful Jews living in the days of Antiochus and for Jesus and his disciples sitting down to eat the Passover in the upper room, how much truer is it for us?  Like I said last week, Jesus did with Daniel what Daniel had done with the Prophets.  Jesus saw himself fulfilling that future element of Daniel’s vision.  He saw himself finally inaugurating that big and final End with a capital “E”.  Jesus died and rose from death, as Paul would later write, the firstfruits of that promised and long-hoped for resurrection of the dead—the day when the Lord will set his creation to rights, vindicate his people who have suffered disgrace for their faith, and will reveal his glory as he deals once and for all with evil and sin and with death.

Brothers and Sisters, think on that as you come to the Lord’s Table this morning.  As we eat the bread and drink the wine we remember the events of that first Easter Sunday when the false verdict on Jesus and his disgraceful crucifixion were overturned and he was vindicated by his Father: restored to life and declared the King.  We remember those events by which he has delivered us from death.  As you pass the font, dip your fingers in the water and remember that Jesus has led us through these waters in an exodus from sin and death.  Brothers and Sisters, we remember the goodness and faithfulness of God revealed in Jesus, revealed in the giving of his Spirit, revealed in the new life he has given.  He has made us his people.  Our names are written in his book.  And so we know—we have hope—for the day when he will bring to completion what began the day Jesus rose from the grave.  One day he will wipe away ever tear and we will sing with joy and shine like the brightness of the sky.

Let’s pray: Gracious Father, fill us with faith.  As we look back on your mighty and saving deeds, remind us of your goodness and your faithfulness and grow our faith that we might remain faithful to you.  Grow our faith that we might stand firmly for you no matter the circumstances.  Knowing that you have given the life of your own Son because you love us, fill us with your grace and teach us to love you in return with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength as we look forward in hope to day when you bring completion this work of new creation begun in Jesus.  Amen.

[1] Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life (New Haven: Yale, 2006), 190-191.

“Rhabarberbarbara”

Daniel 11:2-45

by William Klock

On Wednesday a friend at the pool stopped me and asked if I’d watch a video on her phone and tell her what it was about.  It was in German and she didn’t understand.  So she hit “play” and two men started singing and I laughed.  I said, “It’s ‘Rhabarberbarbara’ and they’ve set it to music.  “Rhabarberbarbara” is a German tongue twister poem.  Imagine “She sell seashells down by the seashore”, but it’s all ba…ba…ba sounds, and with each stanza the tongue twisting part gets longer.  Barabara opens a bar to sell her rhubarb cake: Barbaras rhabarberbar”.  But pretty soon bald, bearded barbarians in need of a barber show up.  It’s a funny poem and it’s hard to say, but these two guys set it to music and sang the whole thing perfectly.  My friend said she liked how catchy it was, but had no idea what it meant.  I laughed, because this is how the Greeks came up with the word “barbarian” for foreigners.  Their languages just sounded like “Bar…bar…bar”.  If you don’t know the language, your ear hears the repetitive sounds, but you have no idea what any of it means.  Imagine hearing “She sells seashells down by the sea shore” if you didn’t speak English.  It’s just rhyming repetitive gibberish.

As I was walking away I started thinking how this is a metaphor for how a lot of people might hear Daniel 11, which is what we come to today.  It’s the longest chapter in the book and most of it describes a long conflict between the King of the North and the King of the South.  The actual kings are never named.  The places involved aren’t named.  It goes on and on, back and forth between north and south.  In this case the language is history, not German, but if you don’t know the language it’s not that different than my friend listening to that German tongue twister that’s all bar…bar…bar.  It’s just repetitive gibberish.

But if you know the history, Chapter 11 describes the historical events that were whirling around Judah from the time of Daniel in the Sixth Century up to the 160s BC.  If you know the history a story emerges from the Rhubarberbarbara.  That said, knowing all the historical details isn’t the important thing you need to take away.  I’ll give you the big picture and skip the nitty-gritty.  If you want to know all the details, the actual historical events are well documented and you can look them up in a history book or Wikipedia.  If you’ve got an ESV Study Bible, it’s all there with nifty maps and genealogies and historical outlines.

But before we get into that, remember the lesson from Chapter 10.  That was the first part of this vision.  The lesson from that first part is that there’s more going on than what we can see.  Daniel was frustrated and discouraged by earthly circumstances and—as we’ll see—things weren’t going to get any better.  It’s easy to lose hope.  But the angel explained to him that the battles he saw being fought by kings on earth corresponded to battles being fought in the heavenlies.  The point of knowing this isn’t to burden us with some new responsibility—as if there’s something we can do to win those battles in the heavenlies.  Just the opposite.  Those battles in the heavenlies are not our responsibility.  Apart maybe from praying, there’s nothing we can do to assist the angels.  God has given us things to do and battles to wage in our sphere and he and his heavenly forces will do battle in their sphere.  And the point is that we should find hope in that.  The battle here may feel hopeless.  But knowing that God fights a battle in the heavenlies that somehow corresponds to the one we fight here and that the outcome in the heavenlies corresponds to the outcome here—that should inspire hope to stand firm, to keep the faith, and to fight the good fight.

Knowing that, the vision now continues with a summary of historical events.  Let’s start with verses 2-4.

“And now I will show you the truth. Behold, three more kings shall arise in Persia, and a fourth shall be far richer than all of them. And when he has become strong through his riches, he shall stir up all against the kingdom of Greece. Then a mighty king shall arise, who shall rule with great dominion and do as he wills. And as soon as he has arisen, his kingdom shall be broken and divided toward the four winds of heaven, but not to his posterity, nor according to the authority with which he ruled, for his kingdom shall be plucked up and go to others besides these.

 

There were more than four Persian kings following the time of Daniel.  This “three and a fourth” is a Hebrew way of talking about all the things.  We see it in Proverbs: “There are six things the Lord hates and a seventh is an abomination to him.”  The Lord hates more than seven things, but these seven are representative of all the things the Lord hates.  Just so with these four Persian kings.  The point is that the Persian empire will get bigger and bigger, richer and richer, more power and more powerful and eventually—and this is what happened historically—it will go up against Greece and be defeated.  Xerxes I invaded Greek territory.  He was defeated and that started a century of conflict that ended with the defeat of Persia by Alexander the Great.  And mighty Alexander, who like the beasts of earlier chapters rampaged and did what he willed—or so he thought—he fell almost as soon as he arose.  Alexander conquered the known world in fifteen years and suddenly died of a fever at the age of 32.  His generals fought over his empire and eventually divided it up four ways.  Two of those successor kingdoms would have a profound influence on the land of Judah: the Seleucid kingdom based in Syria—the King of the North—and the Ptolemaic kingdom based in Egypt—the King of the South.  That’s the setup for the rest of the chapter, which rushes through about 160 years of the history that follows.  The Seleucid kings were Seleucus I-IV followed by Antiochus I-IV.  The Egyptian kings are easy: They were all named Ptolemy—Ptolemy I-VI.  (Actually there eventually thirteen Antiochuses and fifteen Ptolemies, the last being the son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra VII.)

Verses 5 to 20 move quickly through the first five Ptolemies, the first four Seleucuses, and the first three Antiochuses.  Fifteen verses sweep us through history from about 320BC to 175BC.  Here’s the text:

“Then the king of the south shall be strong, but one of his princes shall be stronger than he and shall rule, and his authority shall be a great authority. After some years they shall make an alliance, and the daughter of the king of the south shall come to the king of the north to make an agreement. But she shall not retain the strength of her arm, and he and his arm shall not endure, but she shall be given up, and her attendants, he who fathered her, and he who supported her in those times.

 

“And from a branch from her roots one shall arise in his place. He shall come against the army and enter the fortress of the king of the north, and he shall deal with them and shall prevail. He shall also carry off to Egypt their gods with their metal images and their precious vessels of silver and gold, and for some years he shall refrain from attacking the king of the north. Then the latter shall come into the realm of the king of the south but shall return to his own land.

 

“His sons shall wage war and assemble a multitude of great forces, which shall keep coming and overflow and pass through, and again shall carry the war as far as his fortress. Then the king of the south, moved with rage, shall come out and fight against the king of the north. And he shall raise a great multitude, but it shall be given into his hand. And when the multitude is taken away, his heart shall be exalted, and he shall cast down tens of thousands, but he shall not prevail. For the king of the north shall again raise a multitude, greater than the first. And after some years he shall come on with a great army and abundant supplies.

 

“In those times many shall rise against the king of the south, and the violent among your own people shall lift themselves up in order to fulfill the vision, but they shall fail. Then the king of the north shall come and throw up siegeworks and take a well-fortified city. And the forces of the south shall not stand, or even his best troops, for there shall be no strength to stand. But he who comes against him shall do as he wills, and none shall stand before him. And he shall stand in the glorious land, with destruction in his hand. He shall set his face to come with the strength of his whole kingdom, and he shall bring terms of an agreement and perform them. He shall give him the daughter of women to destroy the kingdom, but it shall not stand or be to his advantage. Afterward he shall turn his face to the coastlands and shall capture many of them, but a commander shall put an end to his insolence. Indeed, he shall turn his insolence back upon him. Then he shall turn his face back toward the fortresses of his own land, but he shall stumble and fall, and shall not be found.

 

“Then shall arise in his place one who shall send an exactor of tribute for the glory of the kingdom. But within a few days he shall be broken, neither in anger nor in battle.

 

If that makes as much sense as “Rhabarberbarbara”, that’s okay.  If you know the history this maps right on to it, but if you don’t, all you really need to know is that this describes about a century and a half of the kings of Egypt and Syria fighting with each other.  And that’s important because of what’s right between Egypt and Syria.  Picture a map in your head.  What’s between Egypt and Syria?  That’s right: Judah.  Judah sat on the crossroads of the ancient world and so it went back and forth between Egypt and Syria and eventually many of the Jews themselves got caught up in the politics and the intrigue.  Some of them thought that by siding with these pagan kings they were fulfilling God’s purpose.  Again, when we see things happening in the world around us—the things we can see—it’s easy to get caught up in them, it’s easy to compromise our faith and our values and what’s right.  But Daniel reminds us that there’s more going on than what we can see with our eyes.  Things are never truly hopeless for God’s people, because God is ultimately in control and because his angels fight for us.  We need to remember that as things get worse, and get worse they did for little Judah, caught in the middle of all this.

Verse 20 describes the Syrian King, Seleucus IV Philopater.  He sent a “tax collector”, a man by the name of Heliodorus, to collect the money needed to pay tribute to Rome, which was now involved in the intrigue.  Heliodorus tried to plunder the temple in Jerusalem, but had a nightmare that put him off the idea.  Instead, Heliodorus poisoned the king, Seleucus IV.  That opened the door to the real terror.  Look at verses 21-35:

In his place shall arise a contemptible person to whom royal majesty has not been given. He shall come in without warning and obtain the kingdom by flatteries. Armies shall be utterly swept away before him and broken, even the prince of the covenant. And from the time that an alliance is made with him he shall act deceitfully, and he shall become strong with a small people. Without warning he shall come into the richest parts of the province, and he shall do what neither his fathers nor his fathers’ fathers have done, scattering among them plunder, spoil, and goods. He shall devise plans against strongholds, but only for a time. And he shall stir up his power and his heart against the king of the south with a great army. And the king of the south shall wage war with an exceedingly great and mighty army, but he shall not stand, for plots shall be devised against him. Even those who eat his food shall break him. His army shall be swept away, and many shall fall down slain. And as for the two kings, their hearts shall be bent on doing evil. They shall speak lies at the same table, but to no avail, for the end is yet to be at the time appointed. And he shall return to his land with great wealth, but his heart shall be set against the holy covenant. And he shall work his will and return to his own land.

 

“At the time appointed he shall return and come into the south, but it shall not be this time as it was before. For ships of Kittim shall come against him, and he shall be afraid and withdraw, and shall turn back and be enraged and take action against the holy covenant. He shall turn back and pay attention to those who forsake the holy covenant. Forces from him shall appear and profane the temple and fortress, and shall take away the regular burnt offering. And they shall set up the abomination that makes desolate. He shall seduce with flattery those who violate the covenant, but the people who know their God shall stand firm and take action. And the wise among the people shall make many understand, though for some days they shall stumble by sword and flame, by captivity and plunder. When they stumble, they shall receive a little help. And many shall join themselves to them with flattery, and some of the wise shall stumble, so that they may be refined, purified, and made white, until the time of the end, for it still awaits the appointed time.

 

The other kings were bad, but this new king who arises is truly contemptible.  The heir of Seleucus IV was imprisoned in Rome and Antiochus IV bought and manipulated his way to the throne in his place.  He took the name “Epiphanes” meaning “Manifest One”.  In short, he thought he was God.  And Antiochus Epiphanes did his best to turn Jerusalem into a pagan Greek city.  The passage here refers to him deposing the high priest, Onias III.  His action against the holy covenant refers to his making it illegal to live by torah, his manipulation of Jewish collaborators, and to his defilement of the altar in the temple.  But Antiochus Epiphanes pushed too hard.  It’s not that the earlier Greek kings weren’t bad or that they, too, hadn’t imposed pagan culture on Judah, but none had ever made the effort that this king did.  For the most part, they’d left Judah alone, under the rule of the high priest, as long as he coughed up tribute money every year.  Under the earlier kings, most people didn’t feel compelled to make a choice between the Lord and the pagan gods, but under Antiochus Epiphanes, that’s just what happened.  No one could sit on the fence anymore.  No one could say that this didn’t affect them.  And so the vision tells of the wise in the community standing up and encouraging the people—not all (there were many who collaborated with Antiochus), but still a good many of them—these wise ones encourage them to stand firm.  They prepared the faithful to pay with their lives for doing so.  Those days tested the faith of the people and, in the end, revealed who was seriously committed to the Lord and who was not.  Again, in all this we’re reminded that God was at work in the days of Antiochus just like he had been in the exile back in Daniel’s day.

And this brings the vision up to what was the present day for the author of Daniel, about 167BC.  So far the vision has been relating the history that led up to this point as if it were a prophecy given by Daniel back in the Sixth Century.  With verse 36 the vision transitions.  Now it looks into the future.  But the style changes, too.  Everything becomes more grandiose, but more importantly, the description of how this crisis will reach its climax uses imagery and language from the Prophets, especially Isaiah 10, Ezekiel 38-39, and Psalms 2, 46, 48, and 76.  The Prophets spoke of the “End” and Daniel’s vision describes the present crisis as another embodiment of that great “End”.

This is the point where evangelical interpreters disagree with each other.  Some see the change in style, the language of the End, and the fact that Antiochus didn’t exactly meet his death the way it’s described here, some see all this as reason to think that the vision is now turning from the events of the Second Century to events much further in the future.  It’s no longer talking about Antiochus IV Epiphanes, but about a future “Antichrist”.  Other evangelical scholars see nothing in the text that justifies that kind of change in subject and timeframe and believe this is still talking about events in the Second Century.

Either way, there are difficult problems and anyone who says otherwise simply isn’t being honest.  I’ll say that Daniel 11:36-12:13 is the most difficult Bible text I’ve ever wrestled with and every time you think you’ve made progress untangling the ball of yarn, you discover that you’ve just turned one big knot into half a dozen smaller ones that are just as tenacious.  If you know me, you know I think it’s best to let the text speak for itself even if that makes things difficult.  I can’t see anything within the text itself that justifies projecting this part of Daniel into the far future.  The text itself is pretty clear that it’s looking to the immediate future—to the three or three-and-a-half years to come, to the death of Antiochus, and to the vindication of the Jews who were faithful in that crisis.  I might be wrong, but either way you end up with some problems that are hard to resolve—I just prefer going the route that lets the biblical text speak most naturally for itself.  So, verses 36-45:

“And the king shall do as he wills. He shall exalt himself and magnify himself above every god, and shall speak astonishing things against the God of gods. He shall prosper till the indignation is accomplished; for what is decreed shall be done. He shall pay no attention to the gods of his fathers, or to the one beloved by women. He shall not pay attention to any other god, for he shall magnify himself above all. He shall honor the god of fortresses instead of these. A god whom his fathers did not know he shall honor with gold and silver, with precious stones and costly gifts. He shall deal with the strongest fortresses with the help of a foreign god. Those who acknowledge him he shall load with honor. He shall make them rulers over many and shall divide the land for a price.

 

Antiochus Epiphanes wasn’t unique in making claims of divinity and the description here about his idolatry is grandiose, but there’s nothing in the text that suggests at all that this is suddenly about some other king, let alone an Antichrist figure in the distant future.  I think what’s going on here is that the vision captures how it felt for the faithful Jews to live under Antiochus, because he was the first of these rulers to deliberately undermine their laws, their faith, their worship and to defile their temple.  We do the same thing in our political discourse all the time, turning bad politicians into over-the-top monsters, and our politicians aren’t half the monster that Antiochus was.  It goes on:

 

“At the time of the end, the king of the south shall attack him, but the king of the north shall rush upon him like a whirlwind, with chariots and horsemen, and with many ships. And he shall come into countries and shall overflow and pass through. He shall come into the glorious land. And tens of thousands shall fall, but these shall be delivered out of his hand: Edom and Moab and the main part of the Ammonites. He shall stretch out his hand against the countries, and the land of Egypt shall not escape. He shall become ruler of the treasures of gold and of silver, and all the precious things of Egypt, and the Libyans and the Cushites shall follow in his train. But news from the east and the north shall alarm him, and he shall go out with great fury to destroy and devote many to destruction. And he shall pitch his palatial tents between the sea and the glorious holy mountain. Yet he shall come to his end, with none to help him.

 

We don’t really know how Antiochus Epiphanes died.  The Greek historian Polybius and the books of 1 and 2 Maccabees give varying accounts of his being driven mad after an attempt to plunder a temple in Persia.  He seems to have died not long after.  1 and 2 Maccabees suggest that there was an element of divine wrath in his affliction and death.  The description here, again, seems grandiose and we know nothing of him pitching his tents between the sea and Mt. Zion.  Whatever we make of the specifics, what the author saw in the Prophets—and I think, too, that he was an astute observer of how the hubris of these Greek kings and their internal intrigues worked out in history—the author understood these things and could say with certainty that the wicked Antiochus Epiphanes would get his divine comeuppance.

Whether this vision was actual prophecy or whether it was the author’s attempt to exhort the faithful in Judah by working out a sort of pseudo-prophecy based on the visions of Daniel and the writings of Israel’s prophets, the Spirit stands behind the text.  I’ve been wrestling with the difficulties here for months.  Is it prophecy?  Is it pseudo-prophecy?  Was it written in the Sixth Century or the Second?  Did the people who received it think it was written by Daniel hundreds of years before or did they know it was written by one of their own who was suffering under Antiochus just as they were?  These are hard questions and there’s no easy solution.  But what I do know and what I keep coming back to is that the Holy Spirit stands behind these words and we know that, because Jesus drew on them as scripture and so did the writers of the New Testament.  I expect I’ll get into this idea more next week, Lord willing, but I think Jesus’ use of Daniel points us in the right direction, because Jesus used this last vision of Daniel to point to the future vindication and resurrection of his people.  In doing that I think Jesus was doing with Daniel what Daniel had done with the earlier prophets.  As I said a few minutes ago, the Prophets often pointed forward to the “End”—the End with a capital “E”—and it was usually associated with whatever historical events of judgement and vindication they were prophesying.  And those prophecies were fulfilled in history, those times of judgement and vindication came as they had said, but always that great End was still out there, always pointing to a time when there would be a great and final day, at the end of history, on which the wicked will be judged and the faithful will be vindicated and I think that’s what’s going on in this final vision of Daniel.  Through the judgement of the wicked and vindication of the just in his own day, the author of Daniel points even more emphatically than the prophets of old had, towards that final Day of the Lord.  And this, then, is what Jesus picks up from Daniel and makes his own.  In his death and resurrection, in his ascension and his judgement of faithless Jerusalem and the temple, Jesus is saying that that great eschatological End with a capital “E” is finally here.  The end of history has begun.  And in that he’s much like the old Prophets and he’s much like Daniel.  There’s still time to go.  There are still things to be done on both earth and in the heavenlies before every last enemy has been put under his feet.  And in the meantime God’s people—even now empowered by the gospel and the Spirit—God’s people, like they always have, need this encouragement to stand firm, to keep the faith, and to fight he good fight—even if it means our death.  Our acclamation as we come to the Lord’s Table gives us just this kind of exhortation and if you aren’t accustomed to thinking of it that way, try to think of it that way from now on: Christ has died.  Christ has risen.  Christ will come again.  Jesus has fulfilled what the Prophets spoke.  He has inaugurated the End.  And now we live in that in between time—between the beginning of the End and the end of the End.  And that, Brothers and Sisters, is good news.  It is the exhortation we need to stand firm, to keep the faith, and to fight the good fight knowing that our Lord sits enthroned in the heavenlies and has already won the battle and decisively turned the tide of this war.

Let’s pray: Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the many and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

We Have Not Obeyed His Voice

Daniel 9:1-27

by William Klock

Last week we looked at the resurrection story in John 20 as it continued into the evening that first Easter Sunday—as Jesus appeared to his disciples while they were hiding, as he breathed new life into them through the Holy Spirit, and as he commissioned them with those words, “Even as the Father sent me, I am sending you.”  With those actions, with those words, with that little group of disciples hiding in Jerusalem Jesus began the renewal of Israel.  That was the beginning of a new people called to be light in the darkness and sent out to boldly proclaim the good news and the coming of God’s kingdom.  At its core it was the same mission that the people of God had had since Abraham: to be light in the darkness, to make the one, true God known to the nations.  But now, recentred in Jesus, this people would go out—as I said—as prophets, priests, and kings.  As prophets, calling first Judah, then the nations to repentance.  As priests, mediating, proclaiming the good news about Jesus who has died, who has risen, and who is now the world’s true Lord—it’s King.  And as kings, as we make real Jesus’ kingdom in practical ways in the world, anticipating that day when we will reign with him.

And the New Testament tells us how those disciples went out into the world as prophets, priests, and kings.  We read of their faithfulness.  We read how they were opposed and persecuted and even killed.  And yet we also see the seeds of what would come as little churches popped up all over the Roman Empire—even right under the nose of Caesar himself in Rome.  And history shows us how the gospel continued to conquer and transform the world, until even mighty Caesar submitted himself and his empire to Jesus.  The gospel did its work.  The old gods were defeated and their temples torn down—even turned into churches.  The perverted sexual ethics of the Greeks and Romans faded away.  The brutal gladiatorial games were outlawed.  Slavery became a thing of the past.  Women and children came to be valued and abortion and infanticide were done away with.  The gospel taught the world about grace and mercy.  It wasn’t perfect by any means, but I think most of us really have very little grasp just how much the power of the gospel transformed Western Civilisation for the better and in ways that displayed the life of the Spirit, that honoured Jesus, and that glorified God.

But what happened to all that?  Christendom has fallen.  The world around us is retreating back into darkness.  Anti-gospel philosophies are taking over.  Sexual immorality has become rampant in just a few short decades.  We’re back to murdering our children before they’re born.  The church has fallen out of favour.  Christians are mocked.  And while the gospel is still active, gone are those days when it captured whole peoples and radically transformed their societies.  Instead, it’s become a regular thing to hear of prominent Christians apostatising.  Whole churches forsake the gospel.  Even our covenant children are turning away in troubling numbers.

Again, what happened?  Could it be that we can learn something from Israel’s story of discipline and exile?  That’s what got me thinking about preaching through the book of Daniel.  The church today in the West seems to be in a sort of exile and Daniel offers us timely wisdom—showing us how to be faithful in an alien land and how to be light in a darkness that does its best to snuff us out.  And I think a part of that wisdom that Daniel offers also addresses the question of “Why?”  Why did this happen?  If anything is clear in Daniel, it is that God is sovereign and that even the raging beasts of empire ultimately serve his purposes.  And so as we find ourselves in exile, the story of Israel’s exile helps to answer why—if we have the humility to see it.  And, I think, Daniel 9 exhorts us to just that sort of humility.  It exhorts us to see the hand of God at work to fulfil his purposes in even the fall of Christendom and the demise of the church.  God’s people don’t just happen to experience defeat and they aren’t dragged into exile by random chance.  Israel’s story reminds us that God has always had a purpose for his people—in the old covenant and in the new—and that he will do whatever it takes to make us the holy people, the light-in-the-darkness people he needs us to be.  And that includes refining us to remove the dross, like gold in a crucible, when we’ve failed.  There’s no Old Testament prophecy foretelling our current situation, but I think Israel’s story should prompt us to ask with great humility how we have failed in our prophetic, priestly, and kingly roles.  It should prompt us to confess our sins, and to pray for the Lord’s gracious and merciful renewal.  So let’s look at Daniel 9, starting with verses 1 and 2:

In the first year of Darius the son of Ahasuerus, by descent a Mede, who was made king over the realm of the Chaldeans—in the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, perceived in the books the number of years that, according to the word of the Lord to Jeremiah the prophet, must pass before the end of the desolations of Jerusalem, namely, seventy years.

 

We’re back in the space between Chapters 5 and 6.  Babylon has fallen to the Persians.  Israel’s great enemy is gone.  But Israel is still in exile.  When will it end?  When will the people return to Jerusalem?  What does Daniel do?  He turns to scripture.  Daniel would not have had the Bible or even the Old Testament as we know it, but he did have both the Law and the Prophets in some form.  And so Daniel goes to the Prophets and specifically to the Prophet Jeremiah.  Jeremiah had spoken of the exile lasting seventy years and as Daniel calculates it that seventy years is nearly up.

Before we go on, this is the first hint we get here that even if context allows us to line up Daniel’s chronology with historical events, the numbers are first and foremost symbolic.  What comes later in this chapter has been the basis for countless eschatological speculations, some reasonable and some completely crazy.

Our modern brains see numbers like this and want to think in terms of literal chronology.  Seventy years means seventy years.  And yet no matter how we try to line up the numbers of Daniel 9 with historical events, nothing is ever an exact fit.  And that’s because the numbers are symbolic—because that’s how their brains worked—and what we have is more of a chronography than a chronology.  It’s a symbolic or stylised sketch meant to make sense of historical events.  So the first vital thing to see with these numbers is the connection with the idea of the jubilee.  Just as every seventh day was a sabbath, so every seventh year was a jubilee—a sort of year-long sabbath.  The land was to have rest from planting and harvesting, debts were forgiven, land was returned to its owners, slaves were set free.  It was very impractical from a human standpoint, but like the sabbath it showed the people’s trust in the Lord to provide.  It reminded them that it was his land and he had given it to them.  They had not dug the wells or planted the vineyards.  Both they and the land belonged to him.  You can image that if people struggled to keep the sabbath, they’d really struggle to keep the jubilee.  And they didn’t.  At best, only very, very rarely was the jubilee observed.  And this became symbolic of Israel’s failure to keep God’s law.  And so the Prophets spoke of Israel’s exile in terms of the land finally having its rest—but one jubilee wasn’t enough, so Jeremiah spoke of the exile as seventy years—ten jubilee cycles—to make up for Israel’s long history of unfaithfulness.  But, too, and this is the second part of the symbolism, seventy years is roughly a lifetime and the idea is that the exile would remove a full generation from the land—kind of like the forty years in the wilderness of Sinai.  A full generation of exile gave time for a new generation to grow up, a generation that would be repentant, would return to the land, and would live in faithfulness.  A new generation that would appreciate the Lord’s presence and provision.  So that’s the idea behind this figure of seventy years.  Keep that in the back of your mind for when we come to the final verses of the chapter and remember that the numbers here in Chapter 9 aren’t the important thing, what Daniel does in response to Jeremiah’s prophecy is what’s really important.

So Daniel sees that things are changing around him.  The Babylonians that took his people into exile have been defeated—just as the Prophets had said they would.  A generation has passed.  He’s now an old man.  When will the Lord fulfil his promise to return his people to Jerusalem?  When will he fulfil his promise to return to the temple?  Again: Daniel goes to the scriptures, to God’s words.  Brothers and Sisters, if you want to hear from God, go to his word.  Don’t look for special revelation.  Don’t try to divine his will.  Go to his word.  And go to his word responsibly.  Daniel knew that Jeremiah had prophesied the exile and so that’s where he went.  Because Jeremiah didn’t just say that the exile would happen, through him the Lord explained why.  It was because of the unfaithfulness of the people.  It was because of his covenant with them.  He would be their God and they would be his people.  And he committed himself to them and, back at Sinai, they had committed themselves to him.  He’d given them his law.  That was their end of the covenant.  Now, to be clear.  They didn’t earn their special place as God’s people.  That was grace.  That was mercy.  And they didn’t earn anything by keeping the law.  They kept the law because it was what identified them as God’s people and made them different, made them light in the darkness.  They kept the law because they loved him.  Being faithful to God’s law was their response to his loving-kindness.

But in the covenant, the Lord had also warned that if they were unfaithful—like a cheating spouse—they would be exiled from the land, they’d no longer be permitted to live in his presence.  And Jeremiah, on the eve of the exile, had enumerated the many sins of the people.  That was the reason for the exile.  And through Jeremiah, the Lord had also promised that when the exile was over, he would restore his people to the land and to himself and they would be faithful again.

And so Daniel goes to God’s word and he reads all of this and he’s moved to confession—not just for himself, because everything we’ve read so far would indicate that Daniel has been personally faithful—Daniel confesses on behalf of his people.  This is the main section of Chapter 9.  Let’s read through the whole thing from verse 3 to 19:

Then I turned my face to the Lord God, seeking him by prayer and pleas for mercy with fasting and sackcloth and ashes. I prayed to the Lord my God and made confession, saying, “O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, we have sinned and done wrong and acted wickedly and rebelled, turning aside from your commandments and rules. We have not listened to your servants the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes, and our fathers, and to all the people of the land. To you, O Lord, belongs righteousness, but to us open shame, as at this day, to the men of Judah, to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and to all Israel, those who are near and those who are far away, in all the lands to which you have driven them, because of the treachery that they have committed against you. To us, O Lord, belongs open shame, to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers, because we have sinned against you. To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, for we have rebelled against him and have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God by walking in his laws, which he set before us by his servants the prophets. All Israel has transgressed your law and turned aside, refusing to obey your voice. And the curse and oath that are written in the Law of Moses the servant of God have been poured out upon us, because we have sinned against him. He has confirmed his words, which he spoke against us and against our rulers who ruled us, by bringing upon us a great calamity. For under the whole heaven there has not been done anything like what has been done against Jerusalem. As it is written in the Law of Moses, all this calamity has come upon us; yet we have not entreated the favor of the Lord our God, turning from our iniquities and gaining insight by your truth. Therefore the Lord has kept ready the calamity and has brought it upon us, for the Lord our God is righteous in all the works that he has done, and we have not obeyed his voice. And now, O Lord our God, who brought your people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand, and have made a name for yourself, as at this day, we have sinned, we have done wickedly.

 

“O Lord, according to all your righteous acts, let your anger and your wrath turn away from your city Jerusalem, your holy hill, because for our sins, and for the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and your people have become a byword among all who are around us. Now therefore, O our God, listen to the prayer of your servant and to his pleas for mercy, and for your own sake, O Lord, make your face to shine upon your sanctuary, which is desolate. O my God, incline your ear and hear. Open your eyes and see our desolations, and the city that is called by your name. For we do not present our pleas before you because of our righteousness, but because of your great mercy. O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive. O Lord, pay attention and act. Delay not, for your own sake, O my God, because your city and your people are called by your name.”

Daniels confession is a long one, but at the heart of it is the recognition that his people were in a covenant relationship with the Lord and that they had broken it.  In chapter after chapter, Jeremiah enumerates the plethora of ways that Israel had sinned, that she’s failed to keep the covenant, and that she’s failed to trust in and to be faithful to the Lord.  He had called and redeemed this people so that they could make him known to the nations, to be light in the darkness, but instead Israel had brought shame on the Lord.  Because of Israel, the nations mocked the Lord rather than giving him glory.  Jeremiah recognised that the exile was his discipline.  The Lord was not merely casting his people away in anger.  Through Isaiah the Lord had said to his people, “you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you…Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you…bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.”  No, the exile wasn’t a casting away.  It was an act of loving discipline and when the time was right—Jeremiah’s seventy years—the Lord would restore his people to Jerusalem and return to his temple.

And so knowing that, Daniel fell to his knees and confessed.  And notice how he confesses the sins of his people.  Occasionally, someone will say something to me about the confession in our liturgy.  “I don’t feel like I need to pray that this week.”  “Why do we repeat it.  Why do we confess ours sins, hear the absolution, and yet again confess our unworthiness when we come to the Table and then when we leave?”  Brothers and Sisters, it’s not just about you or me as individuals.  We are a people united in a covenant with the Lord and with each other.  We’re responsible as individuals, but we’re also responsible as a community.  When one of us sins, it affects all of us.  Think about Israel.  The righteous were carried away with the wicked in the exile.  The righteous suffered with and because of the wicked.  And yet we don’t hear them crying out, “Why me?  I didn’t do anything wrong!  This isn’t fair!”  Just the opposite, like Daniel, they threw ashes on their heads, put on sackcloth, knelt before the Lord, and confessed the sins of the people, and prayed for the Lord’s mercy and grace.

I think we can learn something from that.  The church today is in a mess.  It’s divided.  Parts are preaching heresy.  Parts are sold out to the world and its ways.  Parts are consumed with materialism and greed and selfishness.  Some have shallow and man-centred preaching and some have shallow and man-centred worship.  Some have no concern for holiness.  Some trust in Caesar or Mammon or horses and chariots more than they trust in the Lord.  And some of us can be very prideful, look down our noses, and as much as our criticisms may be good and right and true—and even needed—we become very self-righteous.  We’re blind to our own sins and shortcomings.  And it never occurs to us that perhaps we’re all in this together and this current “exile” in which the church finds herself and this collapse of Christendom is because we have failed in our collective witness—because instead of being kings and priests and prophets proclaiming and displaying the glories of the Lord, we have like Israel, brought shame on his name.  Maybe others bear more guilt than we do, but notice that that was never Daniel’s concern.  Instead, he got down on his knees and repented and prayed “we” and “us” and begged for the Lord’s mercy on the whole people.  We have all in our own ways sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

In response to Daniel’s prayer, we read in verses 20-23, that the Lord sent his angel, Gabriel, to show Daniel a vision—to give him insight and understanding, because the Lord had heard him and because the Lord greatly loved him.  We’ll finish with verses 24-27:

“Seventy weeks are decreed about your people and your holy city, to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place. Know therefore and understand that from the going out of the word to restore and build Jerusalem to the coming of an anointed one, a prince, there shall be seven weeks. Then for sixty-two weeks it shall be built again with squares and moat, but in a troubled time. And after the sixty-two weeks, an anointed one shall be cut off and shall have nothing. And the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. Its end shall come with a flood, and to the end there shall be war. Desolations are decreed. And he shall make a strong covenant with many for one week, and for half of the week he shall put an end to sacrifice and offering. And on the wing of abominations shall come one who makes desolate, until the decreed end is poured out on the desolator.”

 

Sadly, this is the part of Daniel 9 that often gets all the attention—and then not even for the right reasons.  People want to know the future and an unbelievable number of bizarre and downright silly explanations have been given to explain what’s really a very simple passage.  This is usually because people try to apply this to events in their future, while overlooking the context.  Chapter 8 is clear in pointing to the years around the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes and the Maccabean Revolt and so is the vision of Chapters 10-12.  That’s what Gabriel is pointing towards here.  Instead of Israel’s time of discipline ending completely after seventy years, the end of the exile will be more like the beginning of the end.  Instead of seventy years, it will be seventy sevens—seventy being symbolic of a lifetime multiplied by the sevenfold chastisement of Leviticus 26.  God’s people will return to Jerusalem, they will rebuild the temple, but that won’t be the end of their trials and tribulations.  The first “week” of years will lead into sixty-two weeks of years, which will bring them to the reign of Antiochus, and that final week of years represents his reign over Judea, beginning with the murder of the high priest, leading in the middle to his desecration of the temple, and finally to his death and the deliverance of Judah.

This is a reminder, once again, of the sovereignty and faithfulness of the God of Israel.  That’s one of Daniel’s major themes.  When everything is wrong with the world and God’s people are suffering, Daniel reminds us that all these things are serving God’s purposes, that he is sovereign, and that he is faithful.  He hasn’t cast us aside in anger and left us to be.  Instead, our trials, his discipline, refine us as gold in the crucible, so that when these days are over, we will give him glory before the eyes of the watching world.

Again, there’s no Old Testament prophecy (or New Testament prophecy, for that matter) that points to our current situation and tells us precisely what is happening the way Jeremiah pointed to Daniel’s day.  In a sense we have to do what the author of Daniel did in those days of the Second Century as his people experienced the tyranny of Antiochus Epiphanes.  We have to go back to the story of God and his people.  We need to remember that he has brought us into covenant with himself—in our case, through Jesus and the Spirit—and that he has made us prophets, priests, and kings for the sake of the kingdom of his son, for the sake of making him known, for the sake of transforming this world with the power of the gospel.  He has made us to be light in the darkness.  And, just as he did with Israel, he will take that light away if instead of bringing glory to his name, we bring shame.

And lest we think that is some old covenant thing that doesn’t apply to us, we have Jesus’ words to those seven churches under John’s care, the one’s John writes to in Revelation.  Again, those words were written to them about their situation, about the trials and tribulations they were about to face, but their calling to be light in the darkness is our calling too.  And Jesus warned them that if they would not repent of their sins and failures, if they refused to be faithful in their duties as prophets, priests, and kings, that the Lord would take away their lamps.

I had planned to preach on Daniel 9 to close out the season of Lent, but our Sunday snowpocalypse back in March pushed it forward.  It’s a somber theme for Eastertide, but I don’t think it’s entirely inappropriate.  Brother and Sisters, we are called to be a people shaped by the events and the message of Easter, but the things happening around us practically shout at us of our failure to do that.  Maybe you and I aren’t the worst offenders.  Maybe our church isn’t the worst offender.  And so many of the failures of the church and of Christendom happened before any of us were even born and, like Daniel, we’re experiencing exile largely because of the failure of previous generations.  But you and I are reminded that we are joined in a covenant with all of our brothers and sisters.  And so being Easter people right now means humbling ourselves, examining ourselves and our church and our churches in light of the scriptures, repenting, confessing, and praying for the church and for the kingdom as a whole and asking the Lord to show us his mercy and grace.  And if those Jewish saints living through those dark days two centuries before Jesus could trust that the Lord would deliver them, you and I can hope and trust in the Lord even more.  That, too, is part of Easter.  As we proclaim in the Lord’s Supper: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.  He will come again, someday, and he will come when his church has fulfilled the mission he has given.  And that is reason to trust that he will never abandon us and it is reason to hope for that day when he has made his bride spotlessly perfect.

Let us pray: Almighty God, who gave your only Son to be for us both a sacrifice for sin and an example of godly life: Give us grace that we may always receive with thankfulness the immesasurable benefit of his sacrifice, and daily endeavour to follow in the blessed steps of his most holy life, who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, on God, for evermore.  Amen.

Prophets and Priests

1 St. John 5:4-12 & St. John 20:19-23

by William Klock

Jesus’ disciples were afraid.  They were huddled together in the dark, doors locked, talking—it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if there was some arguing going on—all in quiet whispers lest the authorities find them and crucify them just like they’d crucified Jesus.  That’s what St. John writes in his Gospel.

On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews…

 

This was the evening of that first Easter Sunday when Mary went to the tomb at dawn and found it empty.  She ran as fast as she could through the empty streets of Jerusalem to find Peter and John.  She beat on their door and when the door was opened the frantic words spilled out with her sobs, “They’ve taken the Lord out of the tomb and I don’t know where they’ve laid him!”  So Peter and John ran and they saw for themselves the empty tomb with the linens used to wrap Jesus’ body lying there undisturbed.  It made no sense.  There was nothing they could do about it.  And the authorities were probably looking for them now that the sabbath was over, so they went back to their hiding place.

But, John says, Mary stayed behind at the tomb, weeping—ugly crying—sobbing her heart out.  And that’s when two angels appeared to her, sitting right where Jesus body had been laid…sitting right there with the linen wrappings and they asked, “Why are you weeping?”  And, still holding her bottle of oil in one hand and a box with those precious spices in the other, Mary sobbed out her story to them.  “They’ve taken away my Lord and I don’t know where they’ve laid him.”  The oil and spices were useless unless she could find where he was, but still she held on to them.  But then, as John tells the story, another man approaches to ask, again, why she’s crying and who she’s looking for.  Mary thought he was the gardener and she blubbered it out all over again, “Sir, if it was you, tell me where you’ve laid him.”  And then the man simply spoke her name, “Mary,” and she knew him.  It was Jesus.  And now she was crying for joy, because he was alive.  It didn’t make any sense, but he was alive and she gasped out, “Rabbi!”  And she jumped up to hug him, but instead he said, “No.  Now is not the time to cling to me.  You’ve got to go to my brothers—to the disciples—and tell them the good news.”  And so she ran—again!—to the house where they were hiding to tell them, “I have seen the Lord!”

But what did it mean?  John writes that when he saw the empty tomb and the linens lying there he believed.  But believed what?  Because he says immediately after that the disciples did not yet understand the scripture that he must rise from the dead.  And so even though John believed and even with Mary’s report that she had seen Jesus, there they sat, hunkered down behind shuttered windows and a locked door, talking in whispers.  There was no cooking fire lest the smoke give them away.  Maybe they had a small oil lamp lit so they could just see each other.  John tells his story so that it echoes the book of Genesis and the scene he give us of that evening of the first Easter day echoes Genesis: “Darkness was over the face of the deep.”

Brothers and Sisters, is that not a picture of too much of the Church today.  Jesus is risen.  We even proclaim it with joy on Easter, we’re reminded that his resurrection has changed everything, but we sit hunkered down at home afraid to go out and proclaim it?  We hide our light under a basket.

 

And then John writes that suddenly,

Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.”

 

John wrote about the Incarnation back in his prologue saying that in Jesus the light had come into the darkness and the darkness could not overcome it.  That was an echo of Genesis.  The first day of the week God called light into being, driving away the darkness.  And now the Light Incarnate appears in that dark, fear-filled house and I have to think that somehow and in some way it was filled with light—a light that drove away every last vestige of darkness.  And to these frightened men, Jesus announces, “Peace be with you!”

Imagine their surprise.  And there must have been some disbelief or some doubts.  Or maybe, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, they simply didn’t recognise him.  Something about his resurrection had brought a transformation.  Same Jesus, same body, but in some way just different enough in appearance that they didn’t recognise him.  Of course, it wouldn’t have helped that they simply didn’t expect to see him again either.  So Jesus holds out his hands for them to see.  One at a time he lifts a foot out so that they can see.  There were the marks left by the nails.  And he lifted his tunic to show them the wound left by the spear that had been plunged into his side, the wound that had gushed forth blood and water, evidence to the soldiers that he was genuinely dead.  And here he stood alive—more alive, in fact, than ever before.  They were shocked.  How could it be?  As I said last Sunday, the reason resurrection wasn’t on anyone’s mind was because this wasn’t how it was supposed to happen.  This wasn’t a story Jews would have made up, because all the Jews who believed in the resurrection of the dead knew how it would work—and it wasn’t supposed to work this way.  At the end of the age the Lord would raise all the faithful at once.  There was plenty of disagreement about some of the specifics, but they all knew one thing for sure: It would be everybody all at once, not just one person, even if that one person was the Messiah.  This just wasn’t on their radar.  Not at all.  But now it is and they’re confused and, it seems, even though John says they were glad, they were still more than a little afraid.  And so Jesus says to them again, “Peace be with you!”

And Jesus doesn’t waste any time as John tells it.  “Peace be with you,” he says, calming their fears.  Jesus is alive.  And immediately he gets down to the very practical aspects, the real-world implications of his resurrection.  He says in verse 21:

“As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”

Here they are, hunkered down for fear of being rounded up and executed themselves.  Here they are, afraid to even show their faces in Jerusalem.  Here they are, giving it a few days before they try to sneak out of town without being noticed.  And Jesus says to them, “I’m sending you.  As the Father sent me to you, I’m now sending you: to Jerusalem, to Judea, to Samaria…to the ends of the earth.”  In other words, “You’re not going to go slinking out of the city under cover of darkness.  No, you’re going out in Jerusalem with boldness—the same way I went out into Galilee, through Judea, and eventually to Jerusalem at the head of a parade, hailed by the people.  You’re going to go with the same boldness out into this city and you are going to declare what God has done.  Everyone is going to know who you are.  You’re going to declare to Jerusalem that this Jesus whom they crucified, died and has been raised from the dead, that he really is the Messiah, God’s King, that his kingdom has come, and God’s new creation is breaking in.”

Think again of John, just beginning to wrap his head around the idea that Jesus had been raised from death—but still hiding with the others, still afraid.  John couldn’t even tell his friends what he thought had happened.  The last thing on his mind was telling it to Jerusalem—and Jesus isn’t talking about mere “telling”—you know, whispering it to a few people who might be safe to tell.  No, he’s talking about proclaiming this news—to everybody.  Preaching from the hillsides and in the temple—to crowds—just like he’d done.  Brothers and Sisters, think about that for a minute.  Think about how most of us are so afraid or at least hesitant to proclaim the good news about Jesus.  We have no reason to fear for our lives like Jesus’ disciples did.  The worst thing that happens to us is we offend someone, make them think we’re weird.  They faced martyrdom—and all but John were, indeed, martyred for their proclamation.  We have so little to fear, but we’re afraid anyway.  We’ve even stopped speaking in terms of proclamation—the Bible’s way of speaking about evangelism.  Instead, these days we talk about “sharing” our faith—as if Jesus is something people might want to try—see if he works for you, but if not...  We’ve lost our confidence in the good news and in the God who raised Jesus from the dead who stands behind it.  No, Jesus calls us to declare the good news like royal heralds, sent out into the world to declare the mighty deeds of God, that he has raised Jesus from the dead, and made him Lord of all.  The proclamation of the gospel is meant to bring glory to God.  It’s an announcement that Jesus, who was dead is now alive, that he’s won the war, and that the world is being made new.  That the old powers are being crushed by the great wheels of the gospel as it goes out and that hope is being born, that tears are being wiped away.  That’s not something to be timidly whispered when we think it’s safe.

But, again, consider John.  Confused, afraid, just beginning to understand.  And then consider the confidence of his words, written decades later in our Epistle:

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God…. For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith.  Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?  (1 St. John 5:1, 4-5)

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ—that he is the Messiah—has been reborn as part of the people of God.  And that belief changes everything.  That belief transforms the fearful John, hesitant to even tell his friends about the dawning realization that Jesus had been raised from death, it turns him into the courageous apostle, exiled for his proclamation of that truth, and writing boldly to the churches to stand firm in that same faith even though great tribulation was about to hit them like a storm.  There is everything to be feared out in the world: rejection, mockery, persecution, even martyrdom, but by faith the people of God overcome and stand firm in our witness.  It’s not because faith changes reality.  It’s because this faith recognizes the new reality born that first Easter when Jesus rose from the grave, the new reality that he is victor over sin and death, the new reality that new creation has begun in him, and the new reality that he is Lord of that creation.  By faith we are united with him.  By faith we share in his inheritance.  And by faith we share in his calling and ministry—his Church, taking up the mantle of prophet, priest, and king.

Like John, we are called to boldly testify about Jesus:

This is he who came by water and blood—Jesus the Messiah; not by the water only but by the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth.  For there are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood; and these three agree.  If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater, for this is the testimony of God that he has borne concerning his Son.

 

John points back to Jesus’ ministry.  He came by water.  That was the start of it.  He went to John and was baptised in the Jordan and as he walked up out of the river, the heavens opened, the Spirit descended like a dove, and his Father spoke, “This is my Son in whom I am well-pleased.”  That was Jesus’ initiation into his messianic ministry.  And that ministry—at least in its earthly phase—ended in blood, at the cross, where he died to conquer death and to provide forgiveness of sins.  Jesus’ baptism testifies to his being the Messiah.  Jesus’ blood, shed on the cross, testifies to his being the Messiah.  And, too, John writes, so does the Spirit.  And, he says, consider all the things we believe, in which we trust, based on the testimony of mere men.  How much more, Brothers and Sisters, ought we to trust this testimony about Jesus backed up by God himself?  And not so much just receiving and believing ourselves, but in light of the fact that this is the truth, this is the good news that literally changes the world, is changing the world, oughtn’t we to be proclaiming it to that world?  Through Jesus and the Spirit God has given us the light.  The light that will transform the darkness that sin and death have cast on the world.  The light that the darkness cannot and will not ever overcome.  Dear Friends, don’t hide it under a basket.  Hold it high.  Proclaim it.  Show it to everyone.  Do not be afraid.  John says:

Whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself.  (1 St. John 5:10)

But that’s not where John leaves us in the Gospel.  Jesus doesn’t just send his disciples out into the world.  That would be an impossible task.  Even the joy of knowing that Jesus has risen from the grave isn’t enough in itself to get this good news to the ends of the earth.  Jesus knew that we also need to be equipped to go out and do it.  Look at verses 22-23 of John 20:

And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.  If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.”

 

As the Lord breathed life into Adam in the original creation, Jesus now breathes on his disciples.  “Receive the Holy Spirit,” he says.  Was the Spirit literally imparted by Jesus’ breath?  Luke tells this part differently in his Gospel and in Acts—that whole event with the dramatic coming of the Spirit at Pentecost as they gathered at the temple to hear Peter preach and to be baptised.  But notice there, too, that the Spirit comes with a wind—in both Hebrew and Greek, wind, breath, and spirit are all the same word.  Jesus was good at acted-out prophecy and I think that’s what he's doing in this case in John’s Gospel.  He is—or he soon will be—imparting God’s Spirit to this new people of God, to those who believe, and he illustrates just what this gift is by an act that they couldn’t help but connect to God’s giving life to Adam—another echo of Genesis.  But this is new life.  And this is what will equip them to go out, despite the threat of death, to proclaim with boldness the good news.  Brothers and Sisters, the Spirit does a lot for us, but here Jesus makes sure we know what his primary purpose is.  It’s not to give us radical experiences, although that certainly might happen.  It’s not to make us holy, although he certainly does that as he turns our hearts and our affections away from self and sin and points them towards God.  No, the primary purpose of the Spirit is to equip us to do the impossible: to do for the world, what Jesus did for Israel.  To go out in the world in his name and to proclaim what God has done through him.  “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”  Think of our study of Revelation and those seven churches John shows us in the beginning—small, poor, facing all sorts of challenges and opposition and soon to face great tribulation, but called by Jesus to stand firm in faith for the gospel—and not just that, but to take that gospel to the world.  How is that possible?  It starts with the joy of knowing Jesus risen from the dead, but continues through the life of the Spirit who equips us to do what we can never do on our own strength.

And then Jesus speaks those words that have so often been misunderstood and abused: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.”  Remember I said that by faith we have a share in Jesus’ inheritance and ministry.  By faith the Father adopts us and makes us his sons and daughters, so we share in what belongs to Jesus.  And that means that as he is King and Prophet and Priest, so are we as his Church, his people.  And Jesus here gets at two of those things.  Here he reminds his friends and he reminds us that when we go out into the world to proclaim his Lordship, to proclaim the good news of his death and resurrection, to proclaim that new creation has come, we do so as both prophets and as priests.

Our message is two-fold.  I think the priestly role comes most naturally to us.  This is the part of our proclamation where we announce the forgiveness of sins.  Think of the priests of the Old Testament, offering sacrifices.  That was one of their primary duties: to facilitate and to mediate God’s forgiveness to the people.  Think of Jesus.  He is both priest and sacrificial lamb.  He offers and presents himself to the Father as a sacrifice for our sins.  And, as priests, we proclaim to the world the forgiveness he offers through that sacrifice.  But that is not our only role.  We also share in Jesus’ prophetic office—and that’s the part that doesn’t come as naturally to us, at least not as things currently are.  But consider what the prophets did.  Consider what Jesus did in his role as a prophet.  He called out the sins of his people, he summoned them to repentance, and he announced the judgement to come on those who remained unrepentant in their sin, unbelief, and faithlessness.  In contrast, much of the Church today is afraid to take on this prophetic role, to name sin, to even use the word.  Some parts of the Church have given up altogether and have embraced sin and called it virtue—leaving people nothing to repent of and with nothing for which they need forgiveness.  They’ve gutted the gospel.  But these two things, the priestly and the prophetic go hand in hand.  Our prophetic office, announcing judgement, is without hope if we do not also fulfil our priestly role of announcing forgiveness.  But our priestly office, our message of forgiveness lacks any real meaning if it is not also accompanied by the prophetic announcement that sin is sin and that God will judge it.  Brothers and Sisters, this is the good news: that we are sinners, that our holy God judges sin and that the penalty is death, but also that Jesus has died as a perfect sacrifice for sins, and has risen, victor over death, inaugurating God’s new creation and giving a sure and certain hope that what he has begun he will finish.  One day all things will be made new, every bit of sin and evil will be swept from creation, and all will be set to rights.  And by faith in Jesus we have a share in that new world.

Brothers and Sisters, do we believe that?  I trust that we do.  We affirm this belief every week as we come to the Lord’s Table.  We recall the story.  We confess our sins in repentance.  And we come to the Table in renewed faith to participate again in those events that set us free from sin and death, in the death and resurrection of Jesus.  But maybe we’ve forgotten the real power behind what we confess here at the Table.  Friends, think this morning on what the cross and the empty tomb mean.  Think on what the blood of Jesus means.  Think on what his gift of the Spirit means.  And then take seriously those words of dismissal we’ll hear later: “Go forth in peace to love and serve the Lord.”  Consider that in those words Jesus is saying to us, to you and to me, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”

Let’s pray: Almighty Father, you gave your only Son to die for our sins and to rise again for our justification: Grant that we may put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, and always serve you in purity and truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

New Creation

St. John 20:1-10 & Colossians 3:1-11

by William Klock

“On the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark.”  If we’ve been paying attention to John’s Gospel—it helps if we’ve recently been reading it from start to finish, but even if what’s fresh in our minds are these chapters we’ve read as our Gospels these last few days—if we’ve been paying close attention, this bit about it being the first day of the week ought to jump out at us.  In our reading on Friday we heard John’s echoes of the old story of creation in our Gospel.  When Pilate presented Jesus to the people, robed in purple with his bloody crown of thorns, and declared, “Behold, the man!”; when they took him off to be crucified, John reminds us that it was the sixth day of the week—echoing the sixth day on which the Lord completed his work of creation by calling forth human beings to govern his good creation.  John strategically quotes Pilate at that point, as he presents Jesus to the people, “Behold, the man!”  Then, too, there’s darkness and the light—John echoes Creation there as well.

John’s telling us a great story of re-creation—of God, through Jesus, is fixing this world, broken and filled with tears because of our sin.  God’s new creation burst into the world that first Easter morning.  A new week had begun—a week in which we’re still living.

But within that bigger and all-encompassing story of creation and re-creation, there’s a narrower story that John tells.  It’s the story of the temple.  Remember that in Israel, the temple was the place of God’s presence.  Think back to Israel’s life in the wilderness, after the Exodus, when they built the tabernacle and then camped around it, each tribe with its spot.  All arranged around that glorious tent where the Lord’s presence rested on the ark.  God in the midst of his people.  The temple, on the mountaintop in Jerusalem was the same.  God, again, dwelling in the midst of his people.  That’s the key thing that made Israel different from the nations: she was the people who lived with the one, true God in her midst.  Living according to torah made Israel different in lots of other ways, but all of that was because she was the people who lived in the presence of God.  The temple was the place where God and man met.  It was the place where heaven and earth—which once, long ago and before or sin overlapped—the temple was the one place where heaven and earth intersected.  The temple embodied our prayer: on earth as in heaven.  And yet the temple was temporary—even though the Jews would have thought that sort of statement was blasphemy.  The story of the temple is the story inside the story in John’s Gospel.  Have you ever noticed that in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus goes right from his Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem straight to the temple to chase out the moneychangers and the merchants and all of that, but John places that cleansing of the temple at the beginning of his Gospel.  John tells the story that way so that Jesus’ ministry can begin with his declaration that if the temple is destroyed, he will rebuild it in three days.  Right there at the start of Jesus’ ministry, John points us to the resurrection of Jesus and to Easter.

As John writes in our Gospel, the disciples didn’t know what to do about the empty tomb.  Sometimes neither do we.  John says that he saw and believed.  But he also says that he didn’t understand.  It would take seeing the risen Jesus.  Even then it would still take Jesus walking his friends through the scriptures before they would really get it.  But now, years later, John sort of hands us a pair of glasses so that we can believe and understand.  Through the lenses of the glasses John shows us Jesus as the culmination of the story of creation and re-creation.  But then John says, “There’s more.”  We need to see that story within the story, and so he holds up a telescope to our glasses and when we look through the telescope, the story of creation and re-creation zooms in on the story of the temple.  Again, the place where our world and God’s world intersect.  It’s the place where God meets us with grace and mercy.  And John shows us that at Easter something amazing has happened.  This Jesus, who is God in our flesh—bringing our sphere and God’s sphere together by his incarnation—this Jesus has inaugurated a new temple.  I encourage you to think about that every Sunday this Eastertide when we open our services with that acclamation: “Alleluia! Christ is risen!”  That’s not just an acclamation that Jesus’ resurrection brings a happy ending to the sad story of Good Friday.  Brothers and Sisters, when we say, “Allelluia!  Christ is risen!” that’s an announcement that the dwelling of God is with us.  It’s the acclamation that in Jesus, God has made us his people.  It’s an acclamation of hope, that he will set the world to rights, that he will make all the sad things untrue, that he will wipe away every tear.  In fact, if we go on reading where our Gospel today ends, Jesus begins all of this with Mary, coming to her as she stood weeping outside the tomb.  Mary was the first one to experience the new reality that, in Jesus, God is with us as he never has been before.  That Jesus has built a new and better temple.

But that’s looking ahead.  The bit of John 20 we read today, it’s all about the disciples running around.  It begins with Mary running to the disciples to tell them about the empty tomb and then Peter runs to the tomb to see for himself.  And then John tells us how he outran Peter to get there first.  And then Peter, breathless, catches up and pushes his way past John to crawl inside the empty tomb.  John, finally then, managed to get a look, too.  That’s the point, he writes, when he believed.

But why does John have to tell us all about the running and his race with Peter.  There’s a famous painting by Eugene Burnand of John and Peter on their way to the tomb.  A few years ago someone turned it into a meme, adding some comic book-style dialogue bubbles.  Peter asks John, “Why’d you have to beat me to the tomb?  It’s not like anyone will ever know you got here first.”  And John responds, “Oh, they’ll know.  I’ll make sure they know.”  Someone did that, because it’s such an odd little bit of the story for John to include, but I think he included this weird bit of the story as a way of letting another bit of the Old Testament story echo into his.  In 2 Samuel 18 we read about the victory of David’s forces over the rebel forces of Absalom.  Two men ran back from the battle line to tell David the news.  The first one announced the victory.  The second one announced to David that his son, Absalom, the rebel leader was dead.  On one hand, this was good news for David.  The rebellion was over.  But on the other hand, it was devastating.  That victory meant his son was dead.  David wept, “O my son, Absalom!  Would I had died instead of you.”

But now, as John announces the good news with John and Peter running and John getting there first and Peter following, it’s great David’s greater son who has given his life for the sake of his rebellious people.  David’s Lord, the only son of the father, has defeated our great enemy.  In rising from the grave, he has cast down sin and death.  The Messiah has been victorious over all those rebel forces—sin, death, chaos, destruction—that have ranged themselves against God and creation and humanity.  And that’s the big story of creation and re-creation in John’s Gospel.  Again, remember how John shows us Pilate presenting Jesus to the people on the sixth day of the week, robed in purples and crowned with thorns, and declares, “Behold, the man!”  And on that sixth day, Jesus is crucified and with his last breath declares, “It is finished!”  It’s accomplished.  It’s complete.  Just as the Lord did on the final day of creation.  Jesus has finished his great work of re-creation and he rests.

I love the way Tom Wright’s libretto for Spicer’s Easter Oratorio describe the sabbath rest of Holy Saturday:

O sabbath rest by Calvary,

O calm of tomb below,

Where the grave-clothes and the spices

Cradle him we did not know.

Rest you well, beloved Jesus,

Caesar’s Lord and Israel’s King,

In the brooding of the Spirit

In the darkness of the spring.

A day of waiting that seemed like an eternity for the disciples who had lost all hope.  A day of celebration for devils who though they’d won and that creation was theirs forever to twist and corrupt.  And then the first day of the new week breaks in—or as the early Christians called it: the eighth day, to highlight that Easter is the dawning of God’s new world.  Our Gospel lesson describes the early-morning darkness.  John’s been working towards this very moment from Chapter 1 where he wrote about Jesus saying, “In him was life, and the life was the light of men.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”  And in the paragraph that follows our Gospel John tells the story of Mary’s encounter with Jesus to echo creation.  She mistakes him for the gardener.  I have to think that there was Jesus, freshly risen from death, having burst from the tomb, and there he is, kneeling on the earth and wrestling with weeds, pulling out some big dandelion taproot or yanking nettles from the ground.  Here’s the new Adam, tending the garden the way the old Adam had failed to do, and with every weed pulled, anticipating that day when everything will be set to rights.  I wonder if that’s why Mary and Peter and John didn’t see Jesus at first.  There he was, tending the garden, and they missed him.  Just the gardener working over there in the bushes in the early dawn light.  It’s only on Mary’s return that she approaches him to ask if he’d seen who had taken Jesus’ body from the tomb.  And then he speaks her name and her eyes are opened and that glorious light overcomes the darkness.  And then Jesus sends her to the disciples to tell them what’s happened.  New creation has begun and Mary’s the very first person swept up in and made a part of it, but pretty soon they’ll all be invited.

And that, Brothers and Sisters, that’s what Easter is all about.  Jesus has risen from the grave and his new body—the body we get a handful of glimpses of in the Gospels, the body that’s as at home on earth as in heaven and in heaven as on earth—his new body is the prototype of God’s new creation.  And this good news, this light blasts into the darkness.  Like when you pick up your iPhone in the middle of the night and accidentally trigger the flashlight right into your eyes, this light blasts into the darkness right when no one expected it.  But it’s here and it confronts us and we can’t ignore it.  Just as happened with Paul when he was confronted by the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus, this light demands that we rethink everything as it illuminates the world and drives away all the shadows.  The light demands we rethink how we see the world and ourselves and the things we hold dear and the stories we tell ourselves.  This is the great truth that challenges every other truth and that exposes so many of them as lies.  God’s new creation has burst into the world: on earth as it is in heaven and, not only that, but like Mary, Jesus invites us to be part of it.  Like Moses beckoning the Israelites into the Red Sea as the raging wind held back the water, Jesus calls us to pass through the waters of baptism.  It can be frightening.  We’re not sure what it will mean because we’ve only just begun to rethink everything in light of his resurrection, in light of new creation, in light of…well…the Light with a capital ell.  But then we pass through those waters and as we do Jesus plunges us into God’s own Spirit and then he welcomes us to his Table to eat the bread and to drink the wine and in them we have a foretaste of that great banquet that awaits when God’s new creation is complete, and we worship him and we glorify him and—like Mary and like the other disciples and like those thousands who were baptised into Jesus and the Spirit on Pentecost and like the millions since, Jesus story, this story of new creation becomes our story and, in the power of God’s Spirit, we live his new creation in the world today, we become part of Jesus’ light shining into the darkness.  He’s made us the people who proclaim his truth in a world caught up in lies.  He's made the people of light who drive away the shadows from evey last corner of creation.

That’s the call of Easter.  Too often we’ve reduced the good news to just the idea that we’ve been “saved”.  We turn our faith in to something that’s little more than an escape hatch from this sin-broken world.  But Easter reminds us that whether it was Israel in the Old Testament or us in the New, God has never created a people for himself to just be a holiness club while we wait for an escape to heaven.  When we announce those words, “Alleluia!  Christ is risen!” we’re announcing that Jesus has begun God’s work of new creation and that he’s made us a part of it.  That means, Brothers and Sisters, that we take our Bibles in one hand—because that’s where God speaks and that’s where he tells what he loves and what he values and the good he wants to see for this world—and we take hold of Jesus with our other hand, we take a deep breath of the Holy Spirit, and we go out to live—to be— God’s new creation in the world, to be light in the darkness.  We go out to work for justice and for mercy and for peace in whatever ways we can.  We go out and we work to mend relationships, to fix things that are broken, to comfort and to wipe away tears, and to make things of beauty.  We show the world the same servant love that Jesus has shown to us in whatever ways we can to the people whom God has placed around us.  We’re now the temple in the midst of the world.  And we do it all while proclaiming the good news that in dying and rising from death, Jesus has made all this possible.  He forgives our sins, be breaks the chains of death, he gives us the very life of God, he renews our minds and regenerates our hearts—he makes us new in anticipation of and so that we can be agents of his new creation.

Our Easter Gospel sends us out.  But then we have today’s Epistle.  These first verses of Colossians 3 challenge us to live out Easter in our own selves.  It’s hard to be Easter people in the world if we aren’t first Easter people in our own hearts and minds.  When we pray “on earth as in heaven”, we need to remember we’re not just praying for the world and for others; we’re also pray for God’s kingdom to transform us.  And so Paul tells us:

If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

 

Seek the things that are above.  Again, not with the idea that Christianity is an escape hatch from the world, but knowing that the work of new creation begun by Jesus is the work of restoring earth and heaven, of healing the breach that separates human beings from God.  One day, through the work of the word and the Spirit, that breach will be healed and heaven and earth will be one, just like they were before we sinned.  But in the meantime, we—the church—are God’s temple.  We’re the holy people, set apart and indwelt by God’s Spirit.  Being united with Jesus and filled with the Spirit makes us the place where earth and heaven meet.  So we’d better have our minds set on the things of heaven that this earth so desperately needs and longs for.

And Paul gets specific as he goes on:

Put to death therefore, he writes, what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.

 

Paul makes a list of things (some of) the things that have made such a mess of God’s creation.  Five different sort of sexual immorality.  Five different sorts of angry and divisive talking and behaviour.  These are the things that hurt others, that hurt us, and that destroy relationships.  They’re all things that stand opposed to the love we see on display at the cross.  They undermine the goodness, the truth, and the beauty that characterize God and his new creation.  Put these things to death, Paul writes.  And then he uses the imagery of baptism as he talks about putting off the old self that was once enslaved to sin and putting on the new.  Live the reality that God has already created in you when he rose victorious over sin and plunged you into his Spirit and filled you with his own life.  Like the Israelites in the wilderness, it can be easy to fall back into old ways—to long for the fleshpots of Egypt as we struggle with Jesus through the wilderness.  Following him isn’t always easy.  There’s a reason why he tells us to take up our crosses if we’re going to follow him.  But remember, the old is passing away.  The new is breaking in and the new is the future.  The new is our hope.  So put to death the works of the flesh and put on the life of Easter, the life of the Spirit.  Cultivate the fruit of God’s kingdom: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  Brothers and Sisters, Easter is good news for the whole world, but it has to start in each of our hearts.

And that’s a good reminder to us that Easter isn’t the end of the story.  It can be easy to think that way, can’t it?  The story of Jesus begins at Christmas and works its way through Epiphany and Lent and it culminates in Holy Week and with Good Friday and then comes Easter and Jesus is alive again and we think of his words on the cross as he died, “It is finished!”  And I’ll tell you that after the whirlwind of Holy Week that’s the favourite Bible verse of pastors everwhere.  It is finished…unless you’ve still got services on Easter Monday and Easter Tuesday, then it’s not finished until Wednesday.  But it’s easy to think that Easter is the end of it.  Go home, eat some ham and candied sweet potatoes and take a nap and return to life as usual.  But Easter isn’t the end.  The Gospel writers all remind us in their own ways that while Easter may be the end of the old story, it’s the beginning of the new one.  They all make it clear that Easter means that in Jesus, God has won the great battle against sin and death, but it also means that God has created a new people for himself, a people united with Jesus and filled with his Spirit, a people he has called and equipped to go out and be light in the darkness, to make his new creation known to the world as we proclaim this good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Think again of Jesus, the new Adam, in the garden that first Easter Day.  Pulling up weeds, maybe borrowing the gardener’s tools and hacking down a thornbush.  Tending the garden was Adam’s job in the beginning and when Adam failed he was cast out and weeds and thorns took over creation.  And now here’s Jesus, he’s defeated sin and death, and he set straight to work undoing the rotten fruit of our rebellion, setting the garden to rights, making all the sad things untrue.  This is the work of the kingdom: bringing God’s life to the world.  And Jesus hands one of us a shovel and another a rake, he points to those thorns over there and those weeds over here.  Jesus points one person to a broken relationship that needs mending.  He points another to go to those folks over there to help them root out some awful sin that’s dominated them.  He points to another patch of weeds—a mess of injustice—and tells some of us to get to work setting it right and points to another patch—a place desperately in need of mercy—and sends us to get to work with the tools of compassion.  Take this good news to the world he says.  Proclaim it in word and deed and set what is broken to rights.  Jesus invites—he gives us the amazing privilege—of working beside him to bring God’s new creation into being.  That may be one of the most amazing things that came to me as I preached through Revelation: That this life-giving, world-renewing gospel work is God’s, but that he fills us with his Spirit and invites us into it and that in the end, when the work has been finished and the kingdom has come in all its fullness, we even have the privilege to sit with him as judges.

There is a wonderful, ancient Easter hymn that was written by John of Damascus thirteen-hundred years ago.  It was translated and set to music by John Mason Neale, so it’s always bewildered me that it’s in none of our hymnals, but regardless of that, it captures this Easter commissioning.  The first verse goes like this:

Now let the heavens by joyful,

And earth her songs begin;

The round world keep high triumph,

And all that is therein.

Heaven rejoices.  If heaven rejoices over a single repentant sinner, imagine how heaven rejoices at the resurrection of Jesus and his victory over sin and death.  Imagine how heaven rejoices to see God’s work of new creation.  It’s our job now to get the earth joining in that song of praise and we do that as we, ourselves, are transformed by Easter and then carry its good news out from here and into the world, to make new creation known where we work and where we live and everywhere we go.  Brothers and Sisters, we live in hope that one day the whole round world will keep high triumph, but the day will come because Jesus’ people, because we, have been faithful with this Easter message of life.  Alleluia!  Christ is risen.  (He is risen indeed.  Alleluia!)  Now, let’s get to work.

Almighty God, who through your only-begotten Son Jesus Christ overcame death and opened to us the gate of everlasting life: Grant us by your grace to set our minds on things above; that by your continual help our lives may be transformed; through the same, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

Behold, the Man!

St. John 19

by William Klock

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  At the end of John 18 there’s that familiar scene of Jesus before Pilate.  On the one hand Pilate has no interest in crucifying Jesus, but he’s also finding the whole situation a pain in the neck.  Pilate’s only real interest was in keeping the peace in Judea and these Jews weren’t making it easy for him.  And so he had Jesus brought to him and he asked, “Are you the King of the Jews?”  And Jesus responded, “Are you asking because you’re interested or because that’s what you’ve heard people say about me?”  And Pilate responds, “Am I Jew?  Why should I care if you’re King of the Jews or not?  It’s your skin on the line.  Your own people—your own priests!—arrested you and handed you over to me.  I’m giving you a chance to explain yourself.  So what do you have to say?”

Jesus goes on to explain in those well-known (and often misunderstood words), “My kingdom is not from this world.  If it were, my disciples would have taken up arms to save me from the soldiers of the high priest.”  And Pilate, confused and getting annoyed asks, “So are you a king or not?”  And Jesus responded, “You’re the one calling me a king.  I was born for this.  I have come into the world to bear witness to the truth.  Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”  And we can hear the annoyance and the exasperation in Pilate’s famous answer, “What is truth?”  And with that he went back out to address the Judeans.  He didn’t understand what Jesus was saying, but that didn’t mean Jesus was guilty.  Pilate went out and told them as much.  It was usual for the governor to free a Jewish prisoner at Passover, so Pilate offered them a choice: Jesus or Barabbas.  Barabbas was a monster.  Surely they’d choose Jesus, because they certainly didn’t want Barabbas out of prison.  But, no, to Pilates’ great surprise, they shouted out for the release of Barabbas and the crucifixion of Jesus.  Pilate gave up.  He symbolically washed his hands and declared to the people, this is on you, not me.  And they took Jesus off to die.

Just like Pilate, people have been stumbling over these words of Jesus for two thousand years.  People hear him say that his kingdom is not from or not of this world and they then say to us, “Well, then leave me alone.  Go worship in your church and leave the rest of us be.  Enjoy your pie in the sky when you die.”  Even Christians have misunderstood this to mean that we should disengage from the world.  But that’s not it at all.  Jesus’ kingdom may not be from this world, but it is most certainly for this world.  It’s the only hope this world has.  It’s what Jesus means when he tells us to pray “on earth as it is in heaven”—to look forward to, to hope for, and to pray for that day when God has set his creation to rights, when earth and heaven and God and man are back together as they—as we—should be.  As he created it all and us in the beginning.  This is what Jesus bore witness to and it’s what we, forgiven and washed and filled with his Spirit are called not only to pray for but to witness to the world and the people around us.  It’s that kingdom that comes not by the sword—which is the only kind of kingdom Pilate could think of.  Instead, it’s the kingdom that comes by the love we saw last night as Jesus shared bread and wine with his disciples and then washed their feet.  It’s the kingdom that we see coming today, on Good Friday, as Jesus goes to the cross.

On Good Friday, at the cross, all the great stories of the love of God come together in one place.  As John tells us the story of Good Friday, he brings all these other stories together.  There’s Psalm 22 and Psalm 69 and there’s Isaiah and Zechariah, and there’s the Passover lamb whose bones were not broken and it all points us to the big story of the God of Israel and his people and his love for them—a love that was meant to be, through them, for everyone and for all of creation.  They were his agents for challenging the power of evil in the world, for being light in the darkness.  And, of course, as we read the Old Testament, we see that their story—not very surprisingly—their story got stuck in the very problem for which it was supposed to be an answer—the great problem of rebellion and sin.  And yet, Israel’s failure was God’s opportunity to announce his love once again.  He would be faithful to his people.  He would send his Messiah and his Messiah would fulfil his purposes for the world.

Think of that bigger story.  Going back to the beginning we’re told about the men of Babel and their tower.  They’d lost all knowledge of their creator.  They grasped at divinity themselves, reaching towards heaven.  God confused their languages.  There’s that “What is truth?” question all the way back there!  And there, in the midst of deep darkness, just as the human race seems well and truly and utterly lost, God shows up to make himself known to Abraham and to announce that through Abraham and his family, he will make himself known to the world.  A glimmer of light in the darkness.  And then that family winds up enslaved in Egypt, so the Lord sends Moses  to confront Pharaoh and to lead his people out of bondage—and Passover happens.  There are centuries of ups and downs for Israel, but each time things go bad, the Lord sends a deliverer.  And then finally he gives Israel a king—Saul—and the Philistines kill him.  So the Lord raises up the lowly shepherd, David, who establishes a great kingdom and the Lord promises him a future heir who will be God’s own son and who will rule forever and ever.  And then more centuries of ups and downs, of faithfulness and failure—mostly failure—until Babylon brings Israel down in shame and takes her off into exile.  And when Israel is at her lowest, shamed and disgraced, that’s when the Lord points to her through the Prophet and declares: Behold, my servant.  And then, as we’ve seen in Daniel, the great empires rose from the sea and over them all the Lord exalts the son of man as their judge.

And, Brothers and Sisters, this story echoes all through our Good Friday Gospel today.  We see Rome, another of those imperial monsters rising from the sea.  And Rome does what Rome did best, brutally killing a rebel king.  John shows us Pilate as he brings Jesus out to the people the day before Passover and announced, “Behold your king!”  But those Sadducees priests didn’t want a Messiah any more than they wanted a resurrection.  In fact, they didn’t want a Messiah so much that they shouted out the unthinkable, “We have no king but Caesar!”  John shows us Babel and Egypt and Philistia and Babylon at their worst and then he shows us the seed of Abraham, the one greater than Moses, the son of David, the servant of the Lord and declares, “Behold the man!  Behold your king!”

And yet, for all it seems that Rome and the Sadducees are out of control, they never really are.  As we’ve seen in Daniel, the beasts rise from the sea and they rage, but the God of Israel never ceases to be sovereign.  Even in their evil, the beasts of empire serve his purpose.  So, ironically, it’s Pilate the Roman governor, the man cynical of the very idea of truth, who in God’s providence, declares the truth to the people as he announces to them, “Here is your king!”  Even as the priests protest his placard on the cross, Pilate again stand firm on the truth, insisting, “What I have written, I have written.”  John powerfully reminds us that even this cynical, self-serving servant of Caesar will serve the Lord’s purposes.  Jesus had said to him, “You have no authority over me unless it is given to you from above.”  So Rome does what Rome does best.  It mocks and it kills and yet, in doing that, it providentially serves God’s purposes and proves the point that the God of Abraham and Moses and David does not fight the battle against evil with the weapons of the world, but with love.  Everyone that day thought that Caesar had won.  The devils were dancing with joy that Friday.  And yet Caesar and the priests and the devils all played right into God’s hand.  As evil rose to its full height, as it was concentrated all in one place, God won the victory against it on Good Friday.

At the cross, God’s project to set his creation to rights is finally accomplished.  This why John opens his Gospel with those powerful echoes of Genesis.  In Genesis we read that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  John echoes those words as he tells us that in the beginning was the word and the word became flesh and dwelt amongst us—bringing heaven and earth back together.  All through John there are these creation themes.  There’s light and darkness.  There’s the seed that will bear fruit and multiply.  And now on Friday, the sixth day of the week, the day when God crowned his work of creation with the creation of man to rule his new world, John shows us Pilate bringing out Jesus, robed in purple and wearing a crown of thorns, and he declares to the people, “Behold the man!”  Jesus is the true image of God and the world is so mired in rebellion and sin that God’s own people, confronted with the image of God in Jesus can only shout out, “Crucify him!”  The people who prayed for the return of the Lord to his temple, turned their eyes away when he did return and demanded his death.  They were so mired I darkness that they couldn’t bear the light.

And yet the love of God marched sovereignly on—to the cross.  At the end of the sixth day in Genesis, God finished his work and now on this sixth day in John’s Gospel we hear Jesus announce that “It is finished” as he takes his last breath.  It was finished.  His work was accomplished.  Humanity was forgiven and creation was healed.  Evil had risen to its full height, giving the love of God the opportunity to rise even higher on the cross.  Of course, no one understood that on Friday.  It would take the resurrection, in which Jesus was vindicated by his Father, in which is victory was brought out into the light for everyone to see, it would take that before they would know and understand and believe.  But on the cross, as Jesus breathed his last and slumped, hanging on those nails, it was finished.  Once and for all.  A full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of Israel, for the sins of all of the nations—for the sins of the whole world.  A sacrifice that would finally heal the breach and bring an answer to our prayer: on earth as it is in heaven.

And now, Brothers and Sisters, you and I stand gathered at the foot of the cross, confronted by the very image of God and by his amazing love.  Here is the man who represents what we were created to be in the beginning and what, if we will only commit ourselves to him, God will make us to be.  Here is our King, who has inaugurated his kingdom—this new creation, this world set to rights, a world founded on love—and not the world’s idea of love, but the love defined by the story of God and his people and by Jesus’ sacrifice for us on the cross.  Here we’re confronted by the King and his kingdom and by a vision of the world set to rights.  What will we do?  We are so often stuck in the kingdom of Caesar.  We put our trust in Caesar’s sword and in Caesar’s coins—even in Caesar’s gods.  Like those Sadducee priests who were so dead set on holding on to what they had, that they declared the unthinkable, that they declared the very thing they knew so well was false: We have no king but Caesar.  And John reminds us today that whatever power Caesar may have, has been given to him by God and to fulfil his purposes, not Caesar’s.  Brothers and Sisters, let go of Caesar and take hold of Jesus.  Let go everything else and take hold of the love of God made manifest at the cross.

Good Friday reminds us.  We look up to the cross and we see Jesus.  Behold the man.  Behold the king.  He is the image of God and as we look in his face we see the God who loved his people, who loved the world so much, that he gave his own son that we might be forgiven and set to rights and welcomed back into his fellowship—who sent his son not to condemn, but to save.  Here is the good shepherd who lays down his own life for his sheep out of love.  Here is the one who shows the greatest love we can ever know as he lays down his life for his friends.  Jesus, having loved his own who were in the world, loved them to the uttermost.  This love we see at the cross is the very love that shone so brightly out of the darkness at the very moment when we thought the light had been overcome.  This is the love that redeems and renews us, but even more important than that, this is the love that glorifies the God who is love.

And so, Brothers and Sisters, this Good Friday, be transformed by this love.  Our brother and our king has given his life and by that love he give us life and hope and a lens through which we should, more and more each day, see every part of our lives and of the world.  This is the love that forgives our sins and heals our hurts.  This is the love that is making creation new and that, one day, will wipe away our tears.  This is the love that we, as Jesus’ people, manifest to the world.  This is the truth we witness for the sake of the world and to the glory of God.