Living Words

The Second Sunday after Easter: The Good Shepherd

1 St. Peter 2:19-25 & St. John 10:11-16

by William Klock

Our Gospel lesson today is taken from St. John’s Gospel, the tenth chapter, verses 11-16.  But for the sake of context, I want to begin a few verses later and then read our way backwards.  In verse 22 of Chapter 10, John tells us that it was the time of the Feast of Dedication in Jerusalem and that it was winter and that Jesus was walking around in the temple—and specifically that he was walking around the colonnade or portico of Solomon.

All of that might sound unimportant to us, but for First Century Jews every detail there was loaded with significance.  First, it was the Feast of Dedication.  Do you know what that is?  That’s not the name we usually hear for it?  That John says it was in the winter, which might help us a bit.  This is was the Feast of Hanukkah.  And do you remember what Hanukkah is about?  It’s not one of the biblical feasts that the Lord gave to Israel as part of the torah.  This was a new feast—or relatively new—in Jesus’ day.  Hanukkah is the feast commemorating the Maccabean Revolt.  About a hundred and fifty years before Jesus was born, Judea was ruled by Greeks and those Greek overlords were wicked men and they got worse with each generation, until things came to head under Antiochus Epiphanes IV, who defiled the temple and the altar.  Judas Maccabeus led a successful revolt against the Greeks and every year the Jews celebrated the Feast of Hannukah to commemorate that revolt and their national independence and the renewal of worship in the temple.  Their independence under the Maccabees was short lived.  Pretty soon the Romans conquered Judea and the Jews found themselves in a situation not all that different than their ancestors had when they were ruled by the Greeks.

In Jesus’ day Hannukah had special significance.  As long as the people remembered what had happened under the leadership of the Maccabees, they had hope.  Their enemies had been defeated before and that meant that they could be defeated again.  And it’s on this feast that John says Jesus was walking in the temple.  And not just walking in the temple, but in the portico of Solomon.  You remember who Solomon was, don’t you?  Solomon was the son of David.  Again, the son of David.  Does that sound familiar?  People call Jesus “son of David” throughout the Gospels.  David himself was the great king, but Solomon, his son, was the one who built on his father’s victories, enlarging the nation and bringing peace and prosperity to his people.  This is why that title, “son of David”, was wrapped up with the idea of the Messiah.  The people were looking for someone like both David and his son, Solomon, who would come and retore the kingdom of Israel.  So, again, here’s Jesus: at Hannukah, walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon, getting ready to teach.  People were gathering and they couldn’t miss the symbolism.  Jesus did these things on purpose.  What he did and how he staged things was often just as important as what he said in these situations.  John tells us that Jesus had the full attention of the crowd.  They said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense?  If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”  Jesus was perpetually teasing them…or at least that’s how it seemed to a lot of the people.  Jesus would set up a scene just like this, full of messianic symbolism, and he would say and do things that were also full of messianic symbolism.  And it was obvious to everyone that he was saying and doing very messianic things, but then there were other things he did—like associating with the wrong people or doing things on the sabbath that you weren’t supposed to do on the sabbath—and he kept not doing things—like leading a revolt against the Romans—that everyone expected of the Messiah.  So they didn’t know what to think.

This was one of those instances.  Jesus set everything up here—the time and the place and all that—full of messianic political significance.  All he needed to do was give a rousing speech and he could have sparked the revolution so many were waiting for.  “How long are you going to keep us in suspense, Jesus?  Are you the Messiah or not?” they cried out.  But instead, in verse 25 he answers their question and says, “I told you already, but you refuse to believe me!”  He’s referring to our Gospel lesson, the paragraph immediately before in John 10, where he said, “I am the good shepherd.”

That was full of messianic significance, too.  And it would have been just as clear and obvious to them as everything else, because when Jesus said he was the good shepherd, that was a statement deeply rooted in the prophecies of Ezekiel and especially Ezekiel 34 and because of that, also deeply rooted in the messianic expectations of Israel.  Through the prophet the Lord had rebuked the leaders of Israel.

Prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy, and say to them, even to the shepherds, Thus says the Lord God: Ah, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep?  You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fat ones, but you do not feed the sheep.  The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the injured you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought, and with force and harshness you have ruled them.  So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd, and they became food for all the wild beasts. My sheep were scattered; they wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. My sheep were scattered over all the face of the earth, with none to search or seek for them.  (Ezekiel 34:2-6)

The very people whom the Lord had charged with caring for the sheep were taking advantage of them, abusing them, and allowing them to be scattered.  But the Lord also promised to the sheep:

I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd.  And I, the Lord, will be their God, and my servant David shall be prince among them. I am the Lord; I have spoken. (Ezekiel 34:23-24)

Think about that promise as I read Jesus words from our Gospel.

I am the good shepherd.  The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.  He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them.  He flees because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.  I am the good shepherd.  I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep.  And I have other sheep that are not of this fold.  I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice.  So there will be one flock, one shepherd.  (John 10:11-16)

 

It was all so clear.  You and I have to connect all these dots and it takes some work…and without help we might miss them…but connecting these dots was easy and natural for them.  They knew the scriptures and they knew the Lord’s promises and they knew them inside-and-out.  And yet they’re frustrated.  Jesus sets the scene with messianic imagery.  He says things that identify himself with the Lord’s promises through the prophets.  But it’s not direct enough for the people.  He keeps talking in parables and figurative language.  “Come on, Jesus!  If you are the Messiah, just come out and say it!”  But Jesus won’t do that.  Instead, in verses 25-30, Jesus reminds them of all the things he’s done:

Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name bear witness about me, but you do not believe because you are not among my sheep.  My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.  I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.  My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.  I and the Father are one.”

 

“You’ve heard what I have said and you’ve seen what I have done.”  Think of the things John has shown us Jesus doing: healing the blind…feeding that enormous crowd.  And so many other things.  He’s been healing and feeding the sheep, which is exactly what the Lord had promised the good shepherd would do for his sheep.  In fact, he says, this time no one will snatch my sheep from my hand, because they belong to my Father and my Father has given them to me.  I’m not the hireling who runs away in the face of danger.  I’m not the hireling who takes advantage of the flock for my own person gain.  Nor am I like the wicked rulers of Israel who have scattered the flock.  I will gather them—I’ll even gather in sheep that aren’t of this fold—and I will heal then and I will feed them and I will never let them go.  And then that amazing statement that no one expected.  Here they are asking Jesus to tell them, yes or no, in clear language, if he is the Messiah or not and instead he goes even further: “I and the Father are one.”

Have you ever noticed that Jesus never points the people to himself?  He always points the people to the Father.  Everything Jesus does is aimed at revealing the faithfulness and the glory of the Father.  The people were obsessed with the Messiah, but Jesus is always pointing them beyond the Messiah to the one who sent him.  Jesus says that his sheep will be safe forever in his hand, but the only way he can make that promise is if he and the Father are one.  Everyone knew that no one can snatch the sheep of the God of Israel from his hand.  The Egyptians had tried, the Babylonians had tried, the Greeks had tried, and the Lord always heard the cries of his sheep and came and delivered them.  Jesus can make the same promise as the Father, because he and the Father are one.  And, again, what he says here would have taken the people back to Ezekiel 34, this time to verses 15 and 16.  Yes, the Lord promised that David—or a son of David—would one day feed and care for the sheep, but somehow this was also the God of Israel himself at work.  The Lord promised:

I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down, declares the Lord God.  I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, and the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them in justice.

 

The people keep asking, “Are you the Messiah?”  And Jesus takes them a step further.  He’s sort of saying, “I’ve told you already and you weren’t listening, I’ve shown you and you wouldn’t see and just maybe that’s because you first need to ask yourselves who the Messiah is.”  Jesus is here promising to the people that he will redeem the sheep—and he hints at the fact that this redemption is not only for the sheep of Israel, but in redeeming them, he will also gather in sheep from outside the fold, from the nations.  And he can do this because he’s not just the Messiah, but because as the Messiah, he is the very embodiment of the God of Israel who has heard the bleating of his sheep and has come to deliver them, to heal them, to feed them, and to give them justice—just as he promised.  And he will do all of this by laying down his own life for the sake of the sheep.

Brothers and Sisters, at the cross Jesus revealed the faithfulness of God to his promises and his love for his sheep.

Now, what do we do with that?  Throughout the season of Eastertide our scripture lessons point us to the practical application of Jesus’ death and resurrection—what it means for us in practical terms, what it means for the life of the Christian, that Jesus died and rose again and, in that, reveals the faithfulness of God.  And so today the Gospel shows us God’s love revealed in Jesus and his faithfulness revealed in Jesus and we’re reminded that Jesus is the one who has laid down his life for the sheep, and then we turn over to St. Peter’s first epistle and he says to us in 2:19:

For this is a gracious thing, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly.  For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God.  For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.  He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth.  When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.  He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.  For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.

 

What is Peter talking about?  I think he saw that persecution was coming to the church—the sort of thing Jesus promised and that we see the churches in John’s care facing in the beginning of his Revelation—but Peter’s concern was much broader than that.  He opens this part of his epistle with those familiar words, “Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.  Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God in the day of visitation” (1 Peter 2:11-12).

Peter’s concern was simply Christians living in the midst of a fallen and pagan world in which the gospel was advancing, but that has not yet been fully transformed and made new by Jesus.  Someday it will, but until that day, it will always be imperfect and full of trials and tears and pain and opposition and we need to think on how to be good stewards of the grace of God and of the good news about Jesus as we live with the pressures of the world around us.  Jesus is Lord, but corrupt, power-hungry, and unjust civil governments and rulers still govern us.  In Peter’s day slavery was still common—in fact the Roman Empire ran on the labour of slaves and it was amongst these slaves that Christianity quickly spread.  Our world is different in many ways, but in many ways it really hasn’t changed.  How are we to live in light of the problems of the world?  If the Christian slave is to endure the beating of an unjust master, this sets a pattern for the unhappy marriage, living under a pagan ruler, and a host of other difficult and seemingly impossible situations.

When we face hard things, our first inclination is to express outrage, to protest injustice, to assert our rights, and to fight back.  It’s not that there isn’t a place for the Christian to take a stand for his rights or the rights of others, but Peter saw that in many situations the Christian has an even higher calling.  As Jesus reminds us in the Sermon on the Mount, manifesting the kingdom to the world is a higher priority than defending or asserting our own rights.  It’s worth noting that the specific situations given in these verses are things over which most people in the First Century had no control.  Peter saw such injustice through the lens of the cross, the greatest injustice ever perpetrated by human beings.  He goes back to Isaiah 53 and the song of the suffering servant.  Jesus accomplished God’s saving purposes for his people by being reviled, yet without reviling in return, by suffering, yet not threatening.  Rather, as he faced the false judgement of unjust men, he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly.  He who knew no sin bore on his body our sins.  Why?  Because his suffering and death were the only means by which we can die to sin and live to righteousness.  Sin did its worst to Jesus in his crucifixion, but he came out the other side alive again, bringing the firstfruits of resurrection into the world and inaugurating the age to come.

Jesus’ death and resurrection have become the central point of human history, the events on which everything hinges—the moment in time when everything changed.  That means we need to see our own lives, the joys, the sorrows, and the suffering in light of those events.  In allowing evil to do its worst to him at the cross, Jesus has caught up in his suffering every last bit of human suffering, including the suffering afflicted upon us and the suffering we afflict upon others, and he has turned it into the means by which he has brought redemption to the world.  And here Peter recalls today’s Gospel: through his suffering and death, the shepherd has rescued the lost and straying sheep.  He is our shepherd and overseer—our bishop, our chief pastor—and no hireling.  He who has laid down his life for our sake, and in doing so suffered the penalty of our sins, will hold us close as we suffer the injustices of the world.  In turn, the faith we exhibit in entrusting ourselves to him and holiness and grace that should characterise our lives become a profound witness to the world.  We can face injustice knowing that as the Judge who judges justly has vindicated Jesus, he will also vindicate us for our faith.  Brothers and Sisters, the world is a hard place, but we live for Jesus in the midst of it all precisely because he has died for us.  And we live in hope, because Jesus not only died, but rose again, has promised that we will follow him into the life of the age to come, and that as his sheep, no one will ever snatch us out of his hand.

Let’s 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 immeasurable 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.

The First Sunday after Easter: Prophets and Priests

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

by William Klock

Jesus’ disciple 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 Sunday when Mary went to the tomb at first light 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.  I expect it’s what they call an “ugly cry”—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 a 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 jump 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 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 out 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.  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.”

Last Sunday we read the Easter story from Mark’s Gospel, where we’re left with that sudden ending that leaves us hanging.  The resurrection of Jesus changes everything, but Mark leaves us to read the rest of the New Testament to understand what that means.  But John shows us right here.  “Peace be with you.  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.  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.

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 dead 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.

Easter: Let us Keep the Feast

1 Corinthians 5:6b-8 & St. Mark 16:1-8

by William Klock

Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome stood at the foot of the cross on Friday.  They stood there in shock and in grief as Jesus was crucified, as the soldiers and the priests mocked him, as he cried out, “It is finished” and breathed his last.  They were there when the clouds blotted out the sun and the earth shook and when the soldier pierced Jesus’ side and blood poured out—like a Passover lamb, slaughtered on the altar…as the wind scattered his blood and sprinkled it on them as if they were being purified.  And the two Marys, along with Joseph of Arimathea, were in that party that took down Jesus from the cross, wrapped his body in linen, placed him in a tomb, and rolled a great stone in place to seal it up.

That Sabbath was the longest Sabbath any of them had ever known.  They went to ground, hiding in the dark with doors locked and the shutters closed.  Who knew if the authorities might come for them next.  They sat in the dark and wept and were angry and then wept again.  They knew Jesus was from God.  They knew he was the Messiah.  No one could do the things he did, no one could say the things he said if he were not from God.  But then how could he be dead?   How could they have been wrong?  Or had they been wrong?  They couldn’t have been wrong, but Jesus was dead so they must have been wrong.  All that long Sabbath day they wept and they gnashed their teeth and they wondered and they wept some more.  And when the Sabbath ended at sunset on Saturday, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome ventured out into the city to buy oil and spices to anoint Jesus’ body and in the grey light of early morning they made their way back to the tomb.  I expect they were bundles of mixed emotions: angry and frustrated with Jesus that he’d let them down, but they were also grieving for their beloved friend and master.  Because the Passover was coming, they’d had to bury him without the usual signs of care and respect.  Now was their chance to make sure he was buried properly.  Hopefully the soldiers or maybe a gardener would help them roll the stone away so that they could get into the tomb.

But when they got there, the tomb was already open.  Had someone else had the same idea and got there first?  Had the Romans or the priests decided to take Jesus’ body and to bury it somewhere else?  Or what if the crucifixion wasn’t enough and they’d decided to add insult to injury by desecrating Jesus’ body.  But no one was around and so they hurried to the open tomb and, to their surprise, sitting inside they found a young man dressed all in white.  They were afraid.  Everyone’s always afraid when they meet an angel.  And then those famous first words of every angel ever: “Don’t be afraid.”  He calmed them.  “I know.  You’re looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.”  And then the real shock, “He has been raised.  He is not here.  Look…right over there is the place they—that you—laid him.”

What went through their heads as the angel spoke?  I suspect that those words “He has been raised,” probably went in one ear and out the other…at least at first.  All their attention was on those words “He is not here”—because they could see that for themselves.  I expect the conversation between the women and the angel was a bit more frantic and that there was a good bit more back and forth.  Mark has given us the condensed version.  “Of course he’s not here!  We can see that for ourselves!  Where is he?” I can just hear them asking.  And the angel responds, “I told you, he's been raised!”  And they said, “What do you mean ‘raised’?”  Because, just like our word, their word could refer to someone, for example, rising from sleep.  But they knew Jesus hadn’t been sleeping.  They saw him breath his last.  They saw the solider pierce his side.  They held him as they took him down from the cross and wrapped him in linen.  And he said, “As in ‘raised from the dead’!”  And then it began to sink in.

Because no one expected that.  Jesus had warned his friends that he was going to be killed.  And he even told them he would be raised on the third day.  But none of them had really understood.  And the women were confused now, because even though most Jews not only believed in the resurrection of the dead and even looked forward in eager longing to the day when the dead would be raised, this was not how anyone thought it would happen.  They didn’t all agree on how it would happen, but one thing they did agree on was that it wouldn’t be just one person—not even if that one person was the Messiah.  And the Messiah wasn’t supposed to die anyway!  No, they thought, when the time came the Lord would raise everybody…all at once and usher in the age to come, the kingdom, or however you wanted to describe it—his new world in which everything would finally be set to rights—it would come in all its fullness and God would be king and the wicked would be judged and the righteous would be rewarded and justice would finally reign.  No one thought it would happen this way—just one person, even if he was the Messiah, and with the Romans still in charge and, well, everything else that was wrong with the world still seemingly wrong with it.  No one expected that.  And that’s one of the reasons we can know that Jesus’ disciples didn’t make all this up.  If they’d made it up they would have told a very different story.

But it did happen this way and the women stood there in wonder and in fear as the angel told them—again, I suspect, probably more than once: He has been raised.  Yes, from the dead.  No, not like Lazarus who will get sick and die again.  Jesus has been raised-raised, really raised.  Death no longer has a hold on him.  (Okay, that was actually St. Paul who wrote that last bit, but you get the point.)  Because none of this would have computed easily for them.  And so I think they finally took in the message that Jesus had been raised—that the resurrection of the dead that the Jews had hoped for had happened—or was beginning to happen—or something like that--just not, really not in the way anyone had expected.  That was as good as the angel was going to get from them at that point and so, with that, he sends them off.  “Go!  Go tell Jesus’ disciples that he has been raised and that he’s already off on his way to Galilee and that he’ll meet you all there.  And don’t forget to tell Peter, because he denied Jesus three times and he’s feeling the absolute worst of all and thinks Jesus will never want to see him again.  Tell Peter and the others that Jesus will meet them in Galilee and you’ll see him just as he said you would.  Just as he promised.”

And with that, Mary, Mary, and Salome ran.  Mark says they were filled with trembling and astonishment.  Matthew says they were filled with fear and great joy.  They were thrilled that Jesus was alive and that they would see him again; they were in shock because no one—no one—had expected this.  (Except, of course, Jesus.)  And they were afraid, because they didn’t know what this meant.  It was a game changer, but how?  And so they ran and, Mark says, they told no one—meaning they didn’t stop to tell anyone along the way.  They went running straight to Peter and the others to do what the angel had said and to tell them.

And, very suddenly, that’s the end of the story as Mark tells it.  Or, at least, it’s the end of what we have of Mark.  I suspect that there was a little more to Mark’s gospel originally.  I think that, because over and over Mark tells us about the great lengths that Jesus took to help his disciples understand that he would be rejected, would suffer, would be killed, and would finally be raised from death.  They never did really understand.  They thought Jesus was talking in riddles…or they just didn’t understand at all.   But Mark tells the story so that we do understand and so that when he gets to the end of it, we’re not surprised.  Mark shows us Jesus as a real, bona fide prophet and over the course of the previous two chapters he’s shown us how what Jesus said about his rejection and suffering and death really did happen, so I don’t think Mark would leave off as he does—or as what we have left of his gospel does—without showing how in greater detail how Jesus was also speaking the truth about his resurrection.  I think this is why people later tried to fill the gap, composing several different endings for Mark to wrap things up.  Maybe the women and the angel at the empty tomb were enough for Mark.  It is possible and I might be wrong.  Maybe Mark expected that, in those first churches where his story was read out loud, the reader would get to the end, and then one of the people in the church—maybe even one of the disciples—would finish the story and recall what he’d seen on that first Easter and in the days that followed before Jesus’ ascension.

But I think Mark probably wrote a bit more.  It wouldn’t have had to be much.  Just another column on the scroll that, at some point, was accidentally torn off as the scroll was passed around and became worn.  But a column where he told the story of how the disciples saw the empty tomb for themselves and then went on to meet Jesus in Galilee to see that he really was alive, but alive in a way no one had ever seen or experienced before—not all that different from what Matthew and Luke wrote.  Because Mark’s Gospel as it now stands is a bit like the book of Exodus with everything up through the Passover and the Israelites packing their things to leave Egypt and then…that’s it.  We’d hear the Lord’s promises and his instructions for the Passover and we’d see the Passover actually take place, and we’d know…or have a pretty clear sense…that, okay, Israel is now free…but we’d never really have the Exodus itself: the Red Sea, the manna in the wilderness, the law given at Sinai and the tabernacle and the Lord’s presence in it.  Because Mark makes sure we know the Lord’s promises to set his people and his creation to rights and he makes sure we know that Jesus will be the Passover lamb, and he makes sure we know that Jesus will be raised and that it will change everything—a new exodus, this time from sin and death.  And then we see Jesus die, the Passover lamb, and we see here, so briefly, the empty tomb and hear the angel’s announcement that he was raised…but the women go off, happy yes, but confused, perplexed, and not really understanding.  Has everything changed or not?  And if everything has changed, what’s it look like for Jesus’ friends and for Israel and for the world?

If there was more to Mark, it may be entirely providential that it has been lost, because Mark’s rather abrupt ending forces us to ask, “What happened next?”  What does the resurrection of Jesus mean for the disciples, and for the world, and for us.  And so there’s a sense in which the rest of the New Testament is the missing ending of Mark’s gospel—these writings that tell us about the life of the early church and how they worked out the implications of Jesus resurrection from the scriptures and for themselves.  The rest of the New Testament shows us the rest of the story of this new exodus—and it shows us what it means to live as the people of God in this new covenant.

We could turn from here to anywhere in the New Testament, but today the Church turns the page for us and puts 1Corinthians 5 in front of us and says, “This is what it means that the resurrection of Jesus changes everything.”  So let’s look again at what Paul writes there in verses 6-13:

Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?  Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.  Let us therefore celebrate the [feast], not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

 

Notice how you can never get very far away from this Passover theme.  The Christians in Corinth were struggling to live in light of the death and resurrection of Jesus.  Jesus changed everything and they knew it, but in many ways they weren’t living it.  They were sinful and selfish—and even prided themselves on some of it. And so Paul takes them back to the Exodus with this imagery.  That’s what the leaven is about.

I ran across a short documentary this week.  It was made in a bakery where Hasidic Jews bake unleavened bread for Passover.  It was interesting, but one of the things they stressed was how quickly the bakers have to work.  They have eighteen minutes to make each batch of bread.  At some point someone determined that eighteen minutes is the shortest possible time it might take for ground grains to begin to ferment.  And if the flour ferments the tiniest bit, then they can’t consider the bread unleavened anymore.  So every batch has to be made in under eighteen minutes.  And this evolved from, it goes back to the Passover, when the Lord told the Hebrews to bake bread without yeast, because they were going to have to leave Egypt in a hurry.  And so leaven, in Jewish thought, became a metaphor for things that would corrupt or that would make something impure…even if it was small, it would work its way through and corrupt the whole.  And Paul uses this imagery of leaven for the Christian life, because right from the start the first Christians saw that in Jesus a new Passover and a new exodus had happened.  It wasn’t a coincidence that Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead at Passover.  He’d made the point himself at that last Passover meal he shared with his disciples when he held up the bread and the wine of that meal, the meal that was all about the Lord’s deliverance and creation of Israel as his people, that Jesus took the elements of that meal and said, “This is me.  The bread is my body, which will be broken for you.  The wine is my blood, which will be poured out for you.”  As the Passover lambs were sacrificed in the temple and their blood painted on the doorposts of the Hebrews to identify them as the Lord’s redeemed people, Jesus was crucified and his blood poured out to redeem in a way almost no one had ever imagined and to create a new people of God marked out now by his blood.

Think about what that means, Brothers and Sisters.  Our entire life as Christians is one great Passover.  As Paul says, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast.”  There are some liturgies for the Lord’s Supper that incorporate this verse, but it then becomes misleading, because Paul isn’t just talking about the Lord’s Supper.  Again, our whole life in Christ, in Jesus the Messiah, is a Passover.  What we do here in the Lord’s Supper is emblematic of our whole life in him.  By his death and resurrection, by his broken body and shed blood, Jesus has led us out of our old life, a life in slavery to sin and to death, and into a new life as his people—forgiven, purified, made holy, and filled with God’s own Spirit.  And that makes every part of life, every thing we do an act of service and of worship to the God who has delivered us and made us his own, who through our baptism, has become our God and has made us his people.

And so Paul draws on that imagery of the original Passover and the way the Israelites purged their homes of leaven in preparation for the feast.  For us, the problem isn’t literal leavening.  Again, for Jewish people the association of leaven with the Passover meant that leaven became a metaphor for things that are impure and especially for impure thing that have a corrupting influence.  Paul’s calling us to purge our lives of our old ways—the things we did and the way we lived when we were in bondage to sin, the way we lived in those days before Jesus marked us out with his blood and delivered us from that slavery.

What we need instead of the leaven of malice and wickedness, says Paul, is the unleavened bread of real life in Jesus.  Now it’s interesting how he describes that, because we might think that in contrast to malice and wickedness, Paul might tell us we need things like goodness and holiness, but instead he tells us to celebrate our Passover with sincerity and truth.  What does that mean?  It would be easy for us to misunderstand what he means by sincerity, because so many people around us talk about that sort of thing, but they mean something different.  People today talk about sincerity as if it doesn’t matter so much what you believe or what you do, so long as you’re sincere.  Or people today like to talk about being “authentic” and they often mean something very similar.  That’s not what Paul means.  The Greek word he uses has the sense of being pure in our motives and that purity is what the Spirit gives us as he regenerates our hearts and renews our minds—as he fills our hearts with love for God and tunes our affections on what is good and holy.  The other side of our unleavened bread is truth.  Brothers and Sisters, we became enslaved to sin because we believed a lie.  Jesus, who is himself the truth, has set us free from that lie.

Paul brings us back to the fact that by his death and resurrection, Jesus has changed everything.  This is the great truth that would dawn on the disciples as they met the risen Jesus in Galilee, this is the great truth that would dawn on the two who walked with Jesus on the Road to Emmaus that first Easter day as Jesus walked them through the scriptures in light of his resurrection, this is the great truth that dawned on Paul when he was met by the risen Jesus on his way to Damascus.  Jesus, risen from the dead, changed everything.

Again, for them and for Paul, it was all seen in light of the Passover and the covenant the Lord had made with his people.  That first Passover and the exodus from Egypt changed everything for them.  He gave them his torah—the way for them to be his people in return for his pledge to be their God, so that they could live in his presence and be a light to the nations.  And the result was that literally every aspect of life—the little things, even the tiny things, up to the great big things, everything—like baking bread in eighteen minutes or less, lest leaven creep into it—was done with their relation with the Lord in mind; everything, big and small, done to honour him and to show that they belonged to him, and to show their commitment to him.

And now, Paul’s saying that something very much like that has happened in Jesus.  Even as Jesus has freed his people from the old ways of the torah, the law of love and freedom and grace that the torah and the old Passover pointed to, that new law has been written in our hearts by God’s own Spirit.  It marks us out as Jesus’ people and ought to shape every aspect of our lives in much the same way that torah shaped every aspect of life for the Hebrews.  Paul will go on to describe that life to the Corinthians.  It’s shaped and defined, not this time by diet or Sabbath or circumcision, but by our faith in Jesus and by a life full of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control.  Brothers and Sisters, Jesus has purified us and marked us out as his own with his blood, and now the Father has poured out his Spirit on us that we might know his promise: He is our God, and that we might be his people.

So come to the Table this morning and recall this great Passover in which Jesus the Messiah has given himself for us.  Take part in this covenant renewal as we eat the bread and drink the wine, then go out knowing that Jesus’ resurrection has changed everything.  Let your whole life be lived in light of this Passover, let it be full of sincerity and truth—filled and shaped by love for the God who gave his life for us and empowered and made new by the gift of his own Spirit.

Let’s pray: O God, who for our redemption gave your only-begotten Son to the death of the cross, and by his glorious resurrection delivered us from the power of our enemy:  Grant us so to die daily to sin, that we may evermore live with him in the joy of his resurrection; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

Good Friday: It is Finished

Hebrews 10:1-25 & St. John 19:1-37

by William Klock

There is something remarkable in the scene we remembered last night, that scene in the Upper Room as Jesus and his disciples gathered to celebrate the Passover.  Someone had to wash the dust from their feet, and as the disciples bickered over who would do it, Jesus—unquestionably the one man there who deserved to have his feet washed by someone else—he took up the towel and the pitcher of water, knelt on the floor, and washed the dust, the mud, the dirt from their feet.  He even washed from the feet of Judas the dust accumulated from his trip to the high priest to betray him.  Here was truly the Messiah, the suffering servant who came to wash his people clean from their sins.  Peter drew back.  “No Lord!  You can’t wash my feet!  If anything, I should be washing yours.”  But Jesus insisted.  This is what he’d come to do.

Jesus turned everything upside-down.  After washing the disciples’ feet—something totally inappropriate for a teacher to do to his disciples—he took the bread and the wine of the Passover meal and started talking about them as a new sacrifice.  These men knew all about sacrifices. They knew all about bulls and goats and lambs sacrificed for sin, their bodies broken and their blood poured out before the altar.  And yet Jesus took the bread and wine and said that it was his body broken and his blood poured out—that they were all on the verge of a new exodus, but this time he would be the Passover lamb, his body and blood would be broken to free them from the slavery of sin and death.  From what the Gospels tell us, the disciples didn’t understand.  Not at this point.  They really did want to follow Jesus, they wanted what he had to offer, but they didn’t understand yet what it was he was offering.  When Jesus had tried to wash Peter’s feet, Peter had indignantly refused, but Jesus explained that he needed it—that if we wanted any part in his master, this washing was essential—then Peter wanted it—even wanted more of it (“Wash all of me, not just my feet, Lord!”)—but he still didn’t understand what it meant.  He just trusted Jesus and wanted what he was offering.

After supper Jesus took his friends to the garden of Gethsemane to pray.  Even after the foot washing and that last supper and all Jesus’ talk about servants and sacrifices, they still didn’t understand.  They had no idea what was going to happen.  They knelt among the olive trees as Jesus went off a little way away to pray by himself.  And as Jesus prayed like he’d never prayed before, the disciples drifted off to sleep.  They had no idea what was happening.  Jesus woke them up in time for Judas to return, leading a pack of Jewish soldiers who had come to take him away.  Peter drew out his sword, ready for the attack, and cut off the ear of one of the soldiers.  Maybe he thought that now was the time Jesus, the conquering Messiah, was going to throw off his clever disguise of humility and start the revolution that everyone expected.  Now was his chance!  But it didn’t happen.  In fact, Jesus actually healed the soldier and told Peter: “I can appeal to my Father and he’ll send twelve legions of angels.  But if I did that, how would the Scriptures be fulfilled?”

The disciples ran away as the chief priest’s soldiers took Jesus away in chains.  They figured it was over.  Chalk Jesus up as yet another failed Messiah.  But Peter wasn’t ready to give up on his friend, so he followed along to the high priest’s house to see what would happen.  He watched the sham trial they put Jesus through.  They condemned Jesus, and as the priests and soldiers spit on him and struck him, Peter gave up just like the other disciples had done a few hours before.  Three bystanders noticed Peter in the crowd and recognised him: “Hey, you!  You were with him.  You’re one of his friends.  You’re one of his followers.” And each time Peter denied knowing Jesus: “I don’t know what you’re talking about!  You must be blind!  I’ve never seen this man before!”  Jesus was betrayed by even his closest friends.

When it was morning, the Jews dragged Jesus to the court of the Roman governor.  The Jews weren’t allowed to execute anyone; the Romans had to do it.  And so Jesus went through another sham trial before Pilate who caved in to pressure from the Jews.  He didn’t want a riot on his hands and the Jews were crying for blood—and not just blood—they were crying out for a Roman crucifixion.  Pilate asked them, “But this man is King of the Jews?”  And they shouted back, “No he’s not!  We have no king but Caesar!”  We can only imagine how surprised Pilate and his soldiers were at that acclamation.  Or how saddened Jesus was by it.  The Lord was Israel’s king, not Caesar, but they were so angry with him, they were so set on their rejection of Jesus the Messiah that they would do the unthinkable and give their allegiance to Caesar.  On Sunday the crowd outside the city had hailed him as King, but now their voices were drowned out by this great hoard calling for his blood.  Not wanting trouble, Pilate gave them what they wanted.

His soldiers, the whole battalion, took Jesus to be scourged.  They spit on him, they put a reed in his hand and a crown plaited of thorns on his head and mocked him as king, and then they beat him senseless.  They led him away with two violent thugs, revolutionaries, very possibly from Barabbas’ gang.  On a hilltop just outside the city, the soldiers held Jesus down on a cross while they nailed him to it with spikes through his wrists and through his feet.  Then they raised the cross up and dropped it heavily into the ground.  His mother and his friends watched as his blood poured and as he struggled for breath.  For three long hours he hung there.  Roman crucifixion was known for its agony.  The shoulders were dislocated.  Hanging, you couldn’t breath.  So you pushed yourself up, putting all your weight on the spike through your feet to gasp for air—alternating between the agony of asphyxiation and the agony of being nailed to a piece of timbre.  After three hours Jesus cried out in anguish to his Father, “It is finished.”  And just to make sure he was dead, John says the soldiers pierced his side with a spear.  Blood and water gushed out from the wound.  Not what anyone would normally expect, but a detailed noted by John.  Maybe to stress the reality of Jesus’ body, because there were those at the time John wrote who claimed that Jesus’ body had only been an illusion.  I expect that as John saw blood pour from Jesus’ side, he couldn’t help but remember the blood pouring from the animals sacrificed in the temple, and as the wind sprinkled Jesus blood on the group gathered at the foot of the cross, John remembered standing in the temple as the priests sprinkled the blood of bulls and goats on him and the gathered people.

The clouds darkened the sky.  The earth shook.  The curtain in the temple that closed off the holy of holies, the place of the Lord’s presence, was violently torn in two.  The graves gave up their dead, who went walking through the streets of Jerusalem.  Something remarkable had happened and everyone noticed, but no one understood—except maybe that centurion who confessed, “Surely this man is the son of God!”  The city was shorty back to its business.  Jesus’ friends wept in sadness or in anger, and they went home to lay low lest the authorities come after them next.

That evening Joseph of Arimathea went to Pilate to claim the body of Jesus.  They took it down from the cross, wrapped it in linen, placed it in a tomb, and sealed it up.

Maybe now the disciples started to ponder what Jesus was talking about last night when he had talked about his body and blood being given as a new—as a perfect—sacrifice.  In our epistle lesson from the tenth chapter of Hebrews, we read some more about the nature of Jesus’ sacrifice.  The Law and the old sacrifices were but a shadow of the good things to come.  “It can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near.  Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, having been cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sins?  But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year.  For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Hebrews 10:1-4).

The blood of bulls and goats, sacrificed over and over, could only convict the people of sin as it pointed to the perfect sacrifice of Christ that had not yet been made.  And so Hebrews 10 says that Jesus came to do “away with the first in order to establish the second.  And by that…we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all”(Hebrews 10:9-10).  The writer of Hebrews goes on to give us a vivid picture contrasting the old and the new: “Every priest [and he’s talking about the priests of the old covenant] stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sin.  But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God…for by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified” (Hebrews 10:11-14).

Jeremiah wrote, “This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws on their hearts, and write them on their minds…I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.”  And Hebrews reminds us, “Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin” (Hebrews 10:16-18).

When Jesus breathed his last and cried out, “It is finished,” it was finished.  Whereas in the old covenant the priest laid the sins of the people on the bulls and goats sacrificed repeatedly on the altar, Jesus, our great High Priest, took our sins upon himself and died the death that we deserved.  The old sacrifices were imperfect.  They were just dumb animals, but consider too that those animals didn’t offer their lives willingly.  That’s the difference between the old sacrifices and the once-for-all new sacrifice made by Jesus.  In the shed blood of Jesus we find perfection—God Incarnate shed his own blood and he did so of his own free will.  For that reason, there’s no longer any need for more sacrifices.  Again, Jesus did it once and for all.  The old covenant called for the sinner to humbly lay his sins on that animal sacrifice, but that bull or that goat on the altar of the Temple was a sign given by the Lord—it was his finger pointing to Jesus the Messiah—pointing to the cross. Brothers and Sisters, because God has been faithful to his promises, no more do we bring an annual sacrifice to the temple.  Now the humble sinner need only trust in the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.

When Jesus breathed his last and gave himself up to his Father, the temple served its last function in redemptive history.  Under the old covenant the holy of holies—the most holy place—was where the presence of the Lord resided visibly for the people, resting on the ark of the covenant.  And yet the people weren’t allowed into that place—into the direct presence of the Lord.  Only the high priest was allowed there and then only once a year.  No sinful human being could enter the presence of the Lord and the priest only did it to make an annual sacrifice for sins—and he did so only after a series of purification rituals for himself.  Nobody went there, because sinners can never enter the presence of a holy, just, and righteous God.

But when Jesus made his perfect sacrifice on the cross that day—as he breathed his last and pronounced, “It is finished”—the heavy veil that separated the Holy of Holies from the people was torn in two.  By his death, Jesus opened the way into the presence of the Father.  Through Jesus sinners now find perfect forgiveness and are welcomed into the presence of his Father.

On the cross Jesus stretched out his hands; he stretched out one hand to all those who had trusted in him, seeing the future and coming Messiah as they made their sacrifices at the Temple.  And with his other hand Jesus reached out to us, reaches out to the Gentiles, to the nations who had never heard of the Messiah.  On the cross he reaches out with both hands, uniting both peoples to himself, establishing his body by giving new life to dead and paralysed limbs through his shed body and blood.  Jesus said, “When I am lifted up, I will draw all men to myself” (John 12:32).  That’s exactly what he did.  In fact, it’s exactly what he still does.  He stretches out his hands to draw us in, to unite us to himself.  Through his perfect sacrifice he offers perfect forgiveness of sin.  Through his body and his blood he offers new and eternal life.  Through his Holy Spirit he renews and regenerates hearts and minds and leads us on the path of holiness.  And through his cross, he leads us through the torn veil and into the holy of holies—into the very presence of God.

Maundy Thursday: The Meal Jesus Gave Us

2 Samuel 9:1-13 & St. John 13:1-15

by William Klock

On Good Friday we recall the death of Jesus, but every year, on the night before—on this day we call Maundy Thursday—the lessons we read from the scriptures prepare us by telling us why Jesus died.  In our Epistle from 1 Corinthians 11, St. Paul recalls Jesus words at that last Passover meal he celebrated with his disciples and, specifically, how Jesus identified himself with the Passover bread and the Passover wine.  They didn’t understand at the time, but he was saying to them that a new exodus was about to take place, this time not from the bondage of Pharaoh, but from the bondage of sin and death.  And then our Gospel, where St. John tells us about the events after that Last Supper, when Jesus knelt to wash the feet of his disciples, the master, the Lord, becoming the servant of his disciples, once again preparing them for those events that would happen in the coming hours.  There is no proper Old Testament lesson appointed for Maundy Thursday, but at Morning and Evening Prayer we the Lord’s promise through Jeremiah that will establish a new covenant with his people, and we read about the manna from heaven in Exodus 16.  Those are certainly appropriate Old Testament lessons for today, but every year when Maundy Thursday comes around and we recall how Jesus instituted this meal that we share with him every Sunday, I can’t help but think of the story in 2 Samuel 9 about the young man with the hard-to-pronounce name: Mephibosheth.  And you know that, because I always find it hard not to mention him whenever I preach about the Lord’s Supper.

Mephibosheth was the grandson of King Saul and the son of Jonathan and that put him in a difficult spot.  As much as David had the utmost respect for Saul and would not raise his hand against the Lord’s anointed king, Saul saw David as a rival and sought to kill him on more than one occasion.  David, himself, could have killed Saul more than once, but he refused to do so.  Again, for all his faults, Saul had been anointed King by the Lord—and his son, Jonathan, the father of Mephibosheth, was David’s best friend.  And so David grieved at the fall of Saul and the death of Jonathan.  We read a few chapters earlier about the defeat of Saul by the Philistines.  And that’s where we’re first introduced to Mephibosheth, in a brief note.  When Saul’s capital, Gibeah, fell to the Philistines, one of the palace servants fled, carrying little Mephibosheth.  As she ran, she tripped, fell, and dropped the little boy.  We’re not told exactly how he was injured, but whatever happened, he was left “lame in both legs”.

Years later, after David had defeated his rivals and enemies and cemented his kingship over Israel, he summoned a man named Ziba, one of Saul’s former servants.  And David asked him, “Is there anyone remaining of the house of Saul to whom I may show kindness for Jonathan’s sake?” (2 Samuel 9:1).  Saul’s family was gone.  Jonathan was dead.  It was common in the Ancient Near East that when a king was defeated, the victor hunted down any claimants to the throne and had them murdered.  Israel was supposed to be different, but even in Israel we see Baasha doing just this, murdering the family of King Jeroboam after he took the throne.  This is probably why the servant woman fled with Mephibosheth, hoping to save his life.  This is why, after all these years, David has heard nothing of any survivors.  He has to summon one of Saul’s servants.  And this servant tells him, “There remains a son of Jonathan; he is crippled in his feet” (2 Samuel 9:3).

David sent for Mephibosheth.  Every indication is that David only wanted to show kindness to his best friend’s son.  But Mephibosheth trembled in fear as he came before the King.  “Mephibosheth son of Jonathan son of Saul came to David, and fell on his face and did obeisance” (2 Samuel 9:6).  Imagine his fear.  It’s not hard to imagine that he’d been raised to fear David.  He’d been raised in hiding.  He knew the common practises of the day.  He may have had no aspiration to the throne, but David wouldn’t have known that.  And so he came before the King.  This was it.  He was going to die.  And David roars out, “Mephibosheth!”  And I imagine this young crippled man trembling all the more.  His voice shook as he lowered his head to the floor and pleaded as humbly as he could, “I am your servant.”  But then the unexpected happened.  Suddenly he realises that David’s roar, was not a roar of victory over the last of his enemies, over this poor, lame man who posed no threat, but a roar of happiness as he met, for the first time, this son of his long-dead best friend.  Imagine a grin spreading over David’s face.  “Do not be afraid,” he said to Mephibosheth, “for I will show you kindness for the sake of your father Jonathan; I will restore to you all the land of your grandfather Saul, and you yourself shall eat at my table always” (2 Samuel 9:7).

Imagine Mephibosheth’s shock.  Even he couldn’t quite believe it.  It didn’t make any sense.  He responds, “What is your servant, that you should look upon a dead dog such as I?” (2 Samuel 9:8)  But David proceeds to instruct his people to return everything that belonged to Saul: his estates, their produce, his wealth—all of it—to be restored to Mephibosheth.  And we’re told, “Mephibosheth ate at David’s table, like one of the king’s sons….[he] lived in Jerusalem, for he always ate at the king’s table” (2 Samuel 9:11, 13).

What is it about being invited to someone else’s table.  What is it about sharing a meal?  David didn’t have to do that.  He wanted to show kindness to Mephibosheth.  He could have restored Saul’s estates and their revenues to him and sent him on his way.  But that wasn’t enough.  Mephibosheth was a prince and David honoured him by welcoming him into the royal household and to the royal table.

On Sunday, as we read about Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, we were also reminded that our King is not like the world’s kings.  Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar…their kingdoms came by violence and the sword.  They came riding into town on great war horses or in chariots with armies of armed men at their backs.  They put their enemies to the sword.  But Jesus rides into Jerusalem, humbly on the back of a donkey and surrounded by women, children, and the common folk.  He is the king who became one of his own that he might die for the sake of his people.  This Lord is just the opposite of every other lord the world has known.

And now on this last night before his arrest, he does two things to help his friends understand just what was going to happen at the Cross and why it had to happen.  He washed their feet and he gave them a meal.  It’s fascinating to me.  As someone who loves a good theology book, it’s amazing to me that when Jesus wanted to explain what the Cross meant, he didn’t give a sermon; he didn’t give a lecture on theology and theories of atonement.  He just washed their feet.  And he gave them a meal.  And now he’s given us that same meal.

Brothers and Sisters, if you want to understand the Cross, come to the Table.  Jesus is the Son of David.  David summoned to his Table the son of his enemy and a man who could easily have been a rival and a thorn in his side.  David made himself vulnerable.  And he did so to show kindness to the man.  In fact, if you go back and look at 2 Samuel 9, when he asked his court who might know if any of Saul’s family lived, he said that he wanted to show kindness on behalf of Jonathan.  But when he asked Ziba, Saul’s servant, he said—more specifically—that it was because he wanted to show God’s kindness.  God had made David king and David wanted that kindness to exemplify his reign.  The Hebrew word is one you might have heard before.  It’s the word chesed.  The King James translated it as “lovingkindness”.  Chesed is a deep kindness, like that between a parent and child, that shows love and loyalty and grace.  It never fails.  And now the Son of David summons us to his Table.  Tomorrow we remember his death and on Maundy Thursday we remember that meal in which the King shows us his humility and his servant character.  Today we remember the meal that explains his death.

The Son of David invites us to share in his meal.  As the lamb, the bread, and the wine of the Passover reminded the Israelites of their deliverance from Egypt, and as the Israelites down through the centuries participated in that Exodus as they ate that meal, so the bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper remind us of this great exodus from sin and death in which Jesus had led us, and as gather at his Table we participate in those events ourselves.  Each time we come to the Table, each time we eat the bread and drink the wine, the Lord renews his covenant with us, each time he reminds us: I am your God and you are my people.  But we come, too, like Mephibosheth.  He knew he was the enemy of the king.  He knew he was unworthy of the meal.  We pray, “We do not presume to come to your Table, merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in your manifold and great mercies.  We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table.  But you are the same Lord whose nature is always to have mercy.”  The Lord’s Table reminds us of the death of God for sinners, the death of God for his enemies.  And so we come, both like and unlike Mephibosheth.  He cowered in fear.  He knew nothing of David’s mercy.  But we come to the Lord’s Table in light of the Cross.  We know the Lord’s mercy and his lovingkindness.  As we read on Sunday from Philippians: He did not grasp at his divinity.  He did not exploit his position as God for his own gain.  Instead, he emptied himself, took the form of slave, was born in our likeness, and became obedient to the point of death on a cross.  If we will come, resting on his mercy and trusting in his death, we can also pray, “Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of your dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, that we may evermore dwell in him and he in us.”

Let us pray: Almighty Father, whose dear Son, on the night before he suffered, instituted the Sacrament of his Body and Blood: Mercifully grant that we may receive it thankfully in remembrance of Jesus Christ our Lord, who in these holy mysteries gives us a pledge of eternal life; and who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Palm Sunday: Hope and Hard Things

Zechariah 9:9-12, Philippians 2:5-11, & St. Matthew 21:1-17

by William Klock

Were you paying attention to the Collect this morning? Let’s pray that again.  “Almighty and ever-living God, in your tender love for mankind you sent your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

In the Collect we recalled that it was because of his tender love for mankind that the almighty and ever-living God of Creation sent his Son, Jesus, to humbly take our nature upon himself and to suffer death on a cross.  And with that in mind, notice, we also asked of God that in his mercy, we might walk in the way of Jesus’ suffering so that we might also share in his resurrection.

We don’t pray for suffering very often, do we?  I’m not sure if the author of the Collect was actually asking for suffering—it’s entirely possible, considering the purifying nature of suffering that we modern people have all but forgotten—or if he was just acknowledging that to live is to suffer.  This Collect goes all the way back to the time of Gregory the Great, back in the 6th Century.  Human beings had no illusions back then about being in control of things.  Poverty and famine and disease and war were realities of daily life and the most that most people could do was to ride out the storm and trust in the good promises of God, knowing that our hope lies not in this age, but in the age to come.  As Christians have always done, they looked back to the cross, they saw there that the Lord is faithful to his promises and they saw there that Jesus defeated sin and death and began the work of setting this word to rights.  We may suffer, but we live in hope, knowing that what God had promised, he will surely do; knowing that what Jesus has begun, he will surely finish; knowing that as Jesus has been raised from the dead, we will be too on that last great day when he has put every enemy under his feet.  In Gregory the Great’s day the darkness of what we call the “Dark Ages” was falling, Rome was losing her greatness, barbarians threatened the empire and heretics threatened Christendom.  The times were bad and the world lived in shadow.  Do you know what Gregory the Great did in those days of suffering?  He didn’t sit there wringing his hands.  He didn’t sit there sighing, “Woe is me.”  He didn’t worry about the future.  No.  Knowing that Jesus has risen from the dead and that God will one day finish what he started, he sent out missionaries to proclaim the good news that Jesus is Lord to the barbarian tribes of Germany and Britain.

It’s helpful to be reminded of times like Gregory’s and the way that Christians responded to them.  In the early days of the pandemic a friend of mine wrote an article about a man named Martin Rinckart.  He was a German pastor during the Thirty Years War.  His village was sacked three times.  But, even worse, his part of the country was ravaged by a horrible plague.  Every other pastor in the area died and he was left doing sometimes as many as fifty funerals a day.  This man who lived through more sorrow and grief than we can imagine wrote the hymn “Now thank we all our God”.

Now thank we all our God, with heart, and hands, and voices,

Who wondrous things hath done, in whom the world rejoices;

Who from our mother’s arms hath blessed us on our way

With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.

 

O may this bounteous God thro’ all our life be near us!

With ever joyful hearts and blessed peace to cheer us;

And keep us in his grace, and guide us when perplext,

And free us from all ills in this world and the next.

 

All praise and thanks to God the Father now be given,

The Son, and him who reigns with them in highest heaven,

Eternal, Triune God, whom earth and heav’n adore;

For thus it was, is now, and shall be, evermore.

 

Whatever difficult days and hard things we have faced pale in comparison to the griefs and sorrows of Martin Rinckart.  What could have inspired such faith and such hope?  It was this God, made manifest to us in Jesus and in the cross and in the empty tomb, this Jesus who knew the deepest anguish that any human being has ever known and borne for the sake of his enemies.  It was faith in this Jesus who reveals the great faithfulness of God.  It was this Jesus who is making all things news.  Brothers and Sisters, we have known the same God that Martin Rinckart knew.  We confess the same faith and the same Saviour that Martin Rinckart confessed.  We look for the same hope that Martin Rinckart looked for.  And it’s a faith and a hope that, because it is in Jesus, knows the depth of suffering in the present age, but looks forward just as Jesus did as he hung on the cross, it looks forward to the age to come, to that day when Jesus has put every enemy under his feet, that day when he has finally, once-and-for-all made everything new—wiped away every tear our faces and wiped from the face of creation everything that has ever, could ever, and will ever bring us grief and sorrow and suffering.  And it is a faith and a hope that drive us to follow Jesus himself and to throw ourselves into the work of his kingdom—because we have known suffering and pain ourselves and know that Jesus is bringing an age in which those things will be gone.  Because we see in Jesus that the way to his throne was through and only through the suffering of the cross, we his people know that—and have hope because we know—that our path to the life of the age to come is also through suffering.  We are no greater than our master.  And so we go out, even as we grieve and even as we suffer and even as we face so many hard things, and we proclaim the good news about Jesus and as we live the life his Spirit has given we lift the veil to give the world a glimpse of the age to come, so that the other people around us—the other people facing their grief and sorrows and hard things can share our faith and our hope in God’s world one day set to rights.  This is what it means to be light in the darkness.  This is what it means to take up our crosses daily and to follow our Lord—to follow him in his suffering, that we might know his grace and lead the world with us into the age to come.

Brothers and Sisters, God’s people have always known hard times and hard things.  Our Old Testament lessons is taken from the prophecy of Zechariah, roughly five hundred years before the birth of Jesus.  Whereas our Old Testament lessons the last couple of weeks have come from the time of Israel’s exile, this one comes from the time of Israel’s return from Babylon, but the theme is similar.  The people had returned to the ruins of Jerusalem.  They had an enormous rebuilding project ahead of them that was made worse by hostile neighbours.  They were bad times.  But through the prophet the Lord exhorted his people

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!

         Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!  (Zechariah 9:9a)

Zion had little to rejoice about, but the Lord calls his people to rejoice anyway.  Why?

Behold, your king is coming to you;

         righteous and having salvation is he…  (Zechariah 9:9b)

Rejoice, because your king is coming and he will bring righteousness and salvation.  This king, says the Lord, will bring peace to the nations and his rule shall be from seas to sea and to the ends of the earth.  In verse 11 the Lord says that he will do this because of the blood of his covenant.  The Lord reminds the people of his faithfulness.  What he has promised he will surely do.

And yet this wasn’t a promise that any of the people of Zechariah’s day would see fulfilled.  They would rebuild Jerusalem.  They would rebuild the temple.  But they would do it through great hardship.  And even when the temple was rebuilt, it wouldn’t be the same.  The ark, the Lord’s throne was long gone.  The shekinah, the cloud of glory that represented the Lord’s presence with his people would remain absent from the new temple.  But the Lord called his people to rejoice anyway.  They were to live in hope knowing that the Lord will do what he says even if it’s not today or tomorrow or even in our lifetime.  It wasn’t a call to blind faith.  It was a call to look back to the history of their people and to know the Lord’s past goodness and faithfulness.  Every generation has its part to play in the Lord’s story of redemption and the part assigned to Zechariah’s generation was to rejoice in hope of the Lord’s coming even while facing very difficult days.  In doing so they brought glory to the Lord’s name in the sight of the watching nations.  It’s should be a reminder to us that for God’s people there’s more to life than just today or tomorrow or even next year.  We’re part of a story bigger than ourselves.  Our ministry is built on the ministry of the generations of believers who have come before and what we build today will serve as a foundation for the believers who will come after us.

And, of course, the Lord proved his faithfulness as we see in our Gospel.  Matthew makes a point of just that.  Look at Matthew 21:

Now when they drew near to Jerusalem and came to Bethphage, to the Mount of Olives, then Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village in front of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them to me.  (Matthew 21:1-2)

Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem one last time.  The Lord is coming to his people, just as he had promised in the days of the prophets.  And Matthew goes out of his way to highlight this.  Jesus doesn’t just send his disciples to go into the village to round up a donkey.  Jesus sends them into the village to round up a donkey, but does so using the word of Zechariah.  Matthew says in verses 4-5:

This took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet, saying,

“Say to the daughter of Zion,

‘Behold, your king is coming to you,

         humble, and mounted on a donkey,

         on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden.’”

 

We should feel a powerful sense of the sovereignty of God here.  Not only is Jesus coming to his people to fulfil what the Lord had promised, but he’s doing it just as the Lord had promised through Zechariah.  But it goes a step further.  The Palm Sunday story is familiar.  We all know what’s about to happen.  It’s not just that in Jesus the Lord is finally coming to his people.  Jesus is also going to his death as he rides into the city.  All hell will break lose in just a few days.  Jesus will be crucified.  The disciples will run off in fear to hide.  It’s as if the Lord knew that all this would happen and so, at the outset of that first Holy Week, on Palm Sunday, he uses these events to remind the disciples that he is in control.  The God who has brought Jesus to Jerusalem to fulfil his promises will remain in full control as the events of his arrest and crucifixion unfold.

Of course, the disciples didn’t grasp this at all.  We all know that living in faith in the midst of disaster isn’t easy.  It’s all too easy to lose our focus, to be swept up in the crises and difficulties of the day, and to forget God’s promises and God’s sovereignty.  This is why we need to be steeped in the story of the Lord and his people.  This is why we need to centre ourselves on Jesus and on his death and resurrection.  Because there we see supremely the goodness and faithfulness of God.  There was no darker day than that first Good Friday.  It looked like a disaster to Jesus’ friends.  But the reality was that even on that worst of all days in the most horrific of all events, God was in control and working through them to bring the most glorious day ever.

The rest of the story reminds us of God’s sovereignty as well.  Matthew goes on:

Most of the crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road.  And the crowds that went before him and that followed him were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”  And when he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred up, saying, “Who is this?”  And the crowds said, “This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee.” (Matthew 21:8-11)

“Hosanna!”  It was a cry to God for help that, over time, became a cry of praise to the Lord.  During the Feast of Tabernacles, the priests would process around the altar waving branches and shouting “Hosanna!”—a cry to the Lord for help, but also a cry of praise and faith knowing that the Lord hears the cries of his people.  But on this day, as Jesus rode into Jerusalem, the people waved their branches at him and cried “Hosanna!”  The Lord had finally come.  The Messiah was here.

But then Palm Sunday stands in stark contrast to Good Friday.  Today we hear the praises of the people as Jesus arrives, but in just a few days the praises turn to jeers and to cries of “Crucify him!”.  But, again, the story reminds us that God was never out of control.  Jesus knew he was going to his death and he knew that death was part of the plan.  To save his people he had to die the death that they deserved.  Even as sin and death rose up to their full height and did their worst, God remained sovereign and turned the death of Jesus back on his enemies on Easter morning.

St. Paul looked back on those events as he wrote to the Philippians:

God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.  (Philippians 2:9-11)

The devil for one brief moment thought that he was bringing Jesus down, but then we discover when it’s over, that God was using the cross to exalt his Son, to defeat his enemies, and to bring salvation from sin and death.  The crowds were angry with Jesus for getting their hopes up.  They had thought he was the Messiah, but when he stood before them in chains, they lost faith and they lost hope.  The Messiah was supposed to conquer Herod and the Romans, not let himself be arrested and beaten by them.  But the resurrection changed everything and one day, after the gospel message has gone out to all the world, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord.

Brothers and Sisters, Easter is coming, but we only get there through the sad events of Holy Week and through the death of Jesus on the cross.  It’s a timely reminder for us that Jesus has called us to follow where he has gone before.

We have been sold a lie.  Modernity has promised us life without hardship and suffering and as much as in the common grace of God, the institutions of our world have brought us prosperity the likes of which Gregory the Great or Martin Rinckart could never have imagined, no earthly government, no scientist, no doctor, no economist, no philosopher, and no social worker will ever bring the new age that the Lord has promised us and that he has inaugurated through the resurrection of Jesus.  Politicians make promises to solve all of our problems.  Scientists and doctors hold out false hopes of eternal life…or at least life in this age without suffering.  Even prosperity gospel hucksters are in on the game, promising a life without suffering, a life without hard things if we will only have enough faith.  Brothers and Sisters, it’s not true.  None of it.  These are false gods with false gospels and false hopes.  The scriptures we have read today, the story we will walk through with Jesus over the next week, remind us where our faith and our hope really lie: In the God who has joined us in our hard things, who walks with us in our hard things, who has borne our hard things, and who has himself come through the other side and has promised to take us with him in the fulness of time.  In the meantime he calls us to walk with each other as he walks with us by means of his Spirit, that we might proclaim the good news about him to the world, and that we might live in such a way that our hope in God’s new world is manifest, is obvious to everyone around us…so that they might know it, know him, too.

Let us pray: Almighty and ever-living God, in your tender love for mankind you sent your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility:  Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

The Fourth Sunday in Lent: Bread in the Wilderness

Galatians 4:21-31 & St. John 6:1-14

by William Klock

I expect Jesus often got tired of arguing with people.  Not because he didn’t expect it, but because it was just so discouraging.  Think of the arguments you’ve got into on the Internet—or if you’re wiser than most of us and know better than to get into arguments on the Internet, think of those arguments you’ve found yourself in, maybe with people at work or even with family.  We all know that there are certain topics that we won’t agree on.  There are certain things you know before you even say them, will get people’s hackles up.  But we say them anyway and before long everyone’s piling on.  And it’s frustrating because—we know—they’re wrong.  And they won’t be convinced.  But the fact is you knew better.  You stepped on the rake.  You can’t really blame it when it hits you in the face.  And you just have to walk away, maybe with your pride hurt a little bit.  But it’s a whole other thing when the argument comes from people you didn’t expect it to come from—from people you thought knew better.  That’s discouraging—especially when you have to walk away knowing that you haven’t convinced them of something they should have been convinced of already.  I suspect Jesus felt like that a lot.  It would have been one thing to get into arguments with Canaanites or Greeks or Romans who laughed at the idea he was the Messiah—who laughed at the very idea of the Messiah.  They didn’t know better.  But to be rejected by your own people—even the people, many of them your relatives, in the very synagogue you grew up in—people who knew the scriptures so well, people who longed for the promised Messiah.  To be rejected by them was something different.  That was discouraging.  And it’s not like Jesus didn’t know it was coming—at least to some degree—because he knew those same scriptures and he knew the Messiah had to be rejected by his own, but still—it revealed just how lost his own people were.  Not only that, but just how obstinate they were in their lostness.  They didn’t even want to be found.  At the end of John 5, Jesus had to walk away saying, “If you’d believed Moses, you’d be believing me now.  I know you think you believe Moses, but you don’t, and that’s why you don’t believe what I’m telling you.”  Jesus never doubted his mission or who he was, but that didn’t mean these encounters weren’t frustrating and discouraging.  He trusted what his Father was doing, but I expect that just as he would weep over Jerusalem later in his ministry, he wept over his people pretty regularly too.  This might have been one of those times.  And so he left and John says, as our Gospel today from Chapter 6 begins, Jesus went with his friends to the other side of the Sea of Galilee—away from the towns and into the wilderness.

But not everyone was so dismissive of Jesus.  Matthew writes that Jesus and the disciples took a boat to the other side of the sea, but when they got there a crowd had already gathered on the shore.  People had seen the signs he was doing: giving sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, showing his power over the devils, preaching good news to the poor.  As I said last week, it was all more than a little confusing, because he wasn’t at all like the Messiah they expected, and yet he was.  He was doing so many Messiah things and the Lord was so obviously with him.  So seeing Jesus sailing off across the sea, people followed along the shore and as they travelled, others came out from the towns and villages and turned into a crowd and the crowd got bigger and bigger.  These people weren’t there to argue with him.  They came full of faith, ready to believe, and pretty soon Jesus was doing all those Messiah things in their midst: healing the sick, casting out devils, and preaching good news.  And then he looked out from the hill he was sitting on and saw just how big the crowd had become.  He’d healed and preached and still they were there.  They wouldn’t go home.  And Jesus just then realised how hungry he was; surely all the people were hungry too.  Many of them were far from home and there was no way the little farms and villages nearby could provide food for all these people.  And that’s when Jesus decided to do another of his acted-out prophecies—one of those things he did so often to remind the people of the story of the God of Israel and his people, and to show the people their place in the story and his place in the story.  So John says it was the Passover.  That’s not just an incidental detail.  Jesus knew it was the Passover.  So did all the people.  In fact, this is the context for all of John 6: the Passover.  It was the Passover and Jesus decides to do a Passover thing right there on the hillside overlooking the sea.

He starts by leaning over to Philip.  “We’re hungry.  These people are hungry.  We need to feed them.  Where can we buy bread for everyone?”  Philip looked at Jesus like he was crazy.  Not only was there no place to buy bread to feed the crowd, even if they had a pile of money—which they didn’t—they could never afford to buy enough bread to give everyone a crumb.  That was the wrong answer, but Jesus wasn’t surprised.  He only asked the question to make a point—to set the stage for what he was going to do.  Again, it was Passover and what was Passover?  It was that annual feast where Jewish families would join together to share in a meal that recalled their Exodus from Egypt and their deliverance from Pharoah and his bondage.  That meal reminded them that they belonged to the Lord, that he had made a covenant with them.  That he was their God and they were his people and that he was with them and they with him.  It recalled his promises and his faithfulness and it gave them—or it should have given them—renewed and stronger faith in him.

And when we think about that we should realise that Jesus didn’t lead the people out into the wilderness on the other side of the sea, into a place with no food, accidentally.  This was all to make a point.  Again, it was the Passover.  Jesus was in the place of Moses, leading a crowd of hungry people who had nothing to eat.  Philip should have known better.  He knew the stories about hungry people and the Lord’s provision of manna in the wilderness.  He should have put two and two together, but in his defence, it seems like it took everyone there a bit to realise what was happening.  Andrew brought a boy to Jesus who’d had the sense to bring a lunch.  But five loaves of bread and two fish, “What are they for so many?” Andrew asked.  I’ve wondered what Andrew was thinking.  Did he think Jesus might find a way to make do with the boy’s lunch?  I suspect Andrew was really just highlighting how hopeless the idea was that they could feed the crowd.  But Jesus knew this is how Philip and Andrew would react and, again, he had a point.  He wanted the realisation of just how hopeless the situation was to really sink in.  So that’s when he had everyone sit down.  John say there were about five thousand men.  That’s just the men.  Who knows how many women and children were with those men.  And they all sat down to eat.

Now imagine showing up at your favourite restaurant only to find it closed.  You knock on the door.  The manager eventually shows up and explains that the truck delivering the day’s food broke down and never showed up.  There’s no food.  But you insist on going inside and you sit down at your favourite table ready to eat anyway.  That’s about what’s happening here with these people.  You’d be silly to sit in that restaurant waiting for someone to bring you food, but remember that these people were there, because they’d seen what the God of Israel was doing through Jesus.  And they’d seen it for themselves.  That man over there had been blind just this morning and now he can see.  That little girl over there was crippled this morning, but now she can walk.  And that woman over there had seizures her whole life, but now they’re gone.  They were ready to see what Jesus would do.  I expect at least of a few of them were starting to think of the manna in the wilderness.  And so they watched as Jesus took those loaves of barley bread and those fish, lifted them up to the Lord in thanksgiving, then started breaking them into pieces and his disciples put them in baskets and started carrying them out to the crowd.  Jesus just kept breaking off pieces and breaking off pieces and somehow the bread and the fish never ran out.  It went on for minutes and then minutes turned into hours and his disciples kept going back with empty baskets and he kept filling them up so that everyone could eat.  And it was no stingy meal.  It may have been simple—just bread and fish—but it made people think of their ancestors in the wilderness and the simple manna that the Lord had provided without fail day after day and year after year—just like Jesus kept breaking off pieces of bread and fish and the food kept going out to the crowd.

But there was one big difference between the Lord’s provision in the wilderness of Sinai and his provision on this Passover.  The manna the Lord provided back during the Exodus was always just enough for the day.  It wouldn’t keep.  People tried and it stank and bred maggots overnight.  But it taught the people to trust in the Lord’s provision, especially when it somehow kept from Friday to Saturday so they wouldn’t have to gather on the Sabbath.  But this bread from heaven is different.  Everyone had more than enough and there were twelve baskets of bread left over.  And Jesus made a point of telling the disciples to gather it up so it wouldn’t be lost.  Not only was there more than enough for the day, this was bread that would last.  This was Passover all over again, but the people realised that day, it was a better Passover than Israel had ever known.  The manna in the wilderness was about to become the great kingdom feast everyone expected the Messiah to bring—the feast celebrating the Lord finally setting this world to rights.

And so, John says, they cried out, “This is the prophet who is to come into the world.”  This is a reference to Deuteronomy 18 and the promise that another would come, like Moses, to set Israel to rights, to lead the people from slavery to freedom.  The people recognised that in Jesus, the Lord was acting to fulfil his promises.

Now, the appointed Gospel ends a little unexpectedly right at that point.  I think it does that specifically to highlight the messianic part of the story.  But the story goes on for one more verse.  Jesus, John says, suddenly withdrew up the mountain—again, looking an awful lot like Moses.  But why?  Because he realised that if he didn’t the people would take him by force to make him king.  They believed.  They had faith.  They were full of faith that day after seeing and hearing everything Jesus had done.  Clearly he was the Messiah, even though he wasn’t doing the things everybody expected, namely riding into Jerusalem like King David to bust Roman heads and to take his throne.  But now they were ready to make that part happen themselves.  But, Brothers and Sisters, that’s not how Jesus was to become king.  Jesus was never meant to become king by being carried into Jerusalem on the shoulders of the crowd or with an armed insurrection or even by a peaceful people’s revolution.  The people never would, they never could never make Jesus king.  Friends, Jesus is king because the crowd rejected and crucified him and because the Lord raised him from the dead.  The devil had tempted him to take the easy way to his throne and here the crowd was ready to take him straight to the throne again.  But that wasn’t the way.  The way to the throne lay through and only through the cross.  Jesus knew that, he knew it would not be easy, but left the crowd behind and trusted in his Father, the very God who has shown over and over that if his people will trust him, he will provide in abundance.  If we will pass through the water in faith, he will care for us in the wilderness and finally see us to the promised land.  And Jesus knew that better than anyone.

But life in the wilderness isn’t easy.  Even with God in our midst, even as he provides for our needs, we are so easily dissatisfied.  As the Israelites got bored of his miraculous manna, we too easily become bored of the means of grace: of word and sacrament and prayer and being daily faithful in small and ordinary things.  We look back to Egypt and forget that those weren’t really the good old days.  And we stop looking forward to the promised land in which we once so eagerly hoped and our vision (and our affections) fall from the things of heaven to the things of earth.  And troubles come and instead of trusting in the one who has so many times proved himself faithful, we trust in other things and cease to be obedient.  This was the problem in Galatia when Paul wrote to the Christians there.  The pressure was on.  Many there had eagerly put their faith in Jesus when they heard the gospel, but then things got difficult.  For a time they forgot that Jesus had led them into the wilderness, but now the reality was sinking in.  They were rejected by friends and family.  Even though most of them seem to have been gentiles, they were still—at first—closely connected with the synagogue and now they were being kicked out.  Even the pagans thought they were crazy.  Think back to our study of the seven churches in the first chapters of Revelation and the persecution they faced.  Galatia wasn’t that bad, at least not yet, but it still wasn’t easy to be a Christian.

And then some missionaries from Jerusalem showed up and told them that what Paul had taught them was all wrong.  Paul had taught them that through faith in Jesus, they’d become children of Abraham and heirs of God’s promises to Israel.  But that, these new folks said, wasn’t enough.  Paul hadn’t given them the full gospel.  (Brothers and Sisters, always beware the folks to claim to have the “full gospel” in contrast to everyone else.)  No, they said, faith in Jesus is great, but you can’t just call yourselves children of Abraham so easily.  Jesus was the Jewish Messiah and so you’ve got to become Jews—you’ve got live by torah, most importantly, you’ve got to be circumcised.  Faith, they said, wasn’t enough, you’ve got to have torah too.  These “full gospels” always and inevitably end up preaching that faith itself isn’t enough.  So Paul writes to them in Galatians 4:21 and says, “Tell me, you who desire to be under torah, haven’t you listened to the torah?”  And then he goes on to tell them a story they surely knew.  It’s the story of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael and Isaac.  In Genesis 15 the Lord had promised a son to Abraham, a son through whom he’d fulfil his promises to make him a great nation.  The problem was that Abraham’s wife, Sarah, was barren and ninety years old.  So—and it may seem weird to us, but it was the custom of the day—she sent her maid, Hagar, in to Abraham.  Hagar’s son would legally be Sarah’s.  And it worked, or so they thought.  Hagar bore Ishmael to Abraham, but it all backfired and fell apart.  That was not how the Lord had intended to fulfil his promise to Abraham.  Hagar and Ismael were cast out.  (But don’t worry, the Lord took care of them, too.)  And eventually Sarah bore her son, Isaac, the heir the Lord had promised.

So since the Galatians had become all about who was and who was not Abraham’s child and how one claimed that status, Paul reminds them that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and one by the free.  More importantly, the “son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through the promise”…or we might say “by faith”.  And whereas these Judaising missionaries were trying to say something like that these gentile converts were like Ishmael, born outside the covenant, Paul uses the story allegorically to illustrate the old covenant and the new—in effect, to shift the story from the old exodus to the new.

You see, in light of Jesus, Hagar and Ishmael, her son born of the flesh, is like Mount Sinai—like the torah.  Paul says, like “the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children.”  The present Jerusalem had become representative of unbelieving Israel—of the Jews who had continued to obstinately reject Jesus.  They couldn’t wrap their heads around being the people of God by faith in Jesus.  For them, being God’s people was tied to observing torah: being circumcised, keeping Sabbath, eating the right foods, and all that.  But, Paul’s reminding them, Jesus has set his people free from that.  What had once meant deliverance from Egypt’s slavery, now, apart from Jesus, has become a new form of bondage.

In contrast, he writes in verse 26, “The Jerusalem above”—the kingdom Jesus has inaugurated—“it’s free, and she is our mother.”  Why, he’s asking, would you go back into bondage?  For people of the new covenant to return to the old is like the Israelites wanting to return to Egypt.  For the Israelites to return to Egypt was to forsake what the Lord had done for them in the first exodus and now, for new covenant people to return to torah, to the law, was to forsake what the Lord had done for them through Jesus and this second exodus.  Why would you do that?  No, he says, rejoice in the freedom Jesus has given you.  He quotes a song from Isaiah 54:

“Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear;

         break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor!

For the children of the desolate one will be more

         than those of the one who has a husband.”

No, again, Paul stresses to them: “You, Brothers,” because you are in Jesus the Messiah, “you are like Isaac, children of the promise.”  And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.  You are children of Abraham and through him children of God by faith, not by works of the flesh.  That’s how it is and that’s how it always has been.  And so he tells them, don’t let these folks enslaved by the works of the flesh persecute you the way Hagar persecuted Sarah and Ishmael persecuted Isaac.  "What does the scripture say?” he asks.  “Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.  So, Brothers, we are not children of the slave, but of the free woman.”

Cast them out!  They preach a false gospel that will take you back to Egypt and put you in bondage.  Cast them out of your church!  Remove their influence form your midst.  But even more importantly: Remember that in Jesus and by faith in him, you are free, heirs of Abraham, and children of the living God.  He has filled you with his Spirit and the Spirit will accomplish in you what the torah was powerless to accomplish in Israel.

Again, life in the wilderness, life between the Red Sea and the promised land is difficult.  For those Christians in the Galatian churches, being circumcised and submitting to torah—effectively become Jews—was attractive.  It meant the other Jews would accept them.  And when it meant that they could fly under the radar of Roman persecution, because Jews were a tolerated sect.  If they did this, it could mean keeping their family and friends or their jobs or their position in the guild…or later it could mean escaping death in the arena.  But it also meant compromise.  It meant a return Egypt and to bondage.  Ultimately, it meant forsaking Jesus himself, because no matter how much you talk about faith in Jesus, so long as you mix that faith with the flesh, so long as you hedge your bets with the false gods and kings and systems of the world, you’re not really trusting in Jesus.  And how often are we just like that?  We claim to trust Jesus, but we let the challenges of the wilderness drag us away.  We trust in Jesus, but we’re often distracted by other things.  We trust in Jesus, but we become very quiet about him when to do otherwise might mean trouble.  We trust in Jesus, but when life throws us a curve, we go scrambling to fix it, we become anxious, we worry, like Philip in the Gospel, we look to Jesus and say, “We can’t afford to feed all these people and even if we could, there’s nowhere to buy that much bread.  We can’t do it, Jesus!”—I’ve been convicted of that these past few weeks.  Instead, we need to trust in him—trust in the one who provided manna in the wilderness and who fed the five thousand and who died and rose again for us.  I don’t know how, after all that, we so often stop trusting, but we do and we shouldn’t.  I don’t know how we get bored and blasé about this good news, but somehow we do.  This season of Lent is a time every year to set aside all those other things and distractions that compete for our attention and our loyalties and that draw us away from trust and devotion to Jesus.  Lent brings us into the wilderness so that we can fast from everything that distracts us just be fed by Jesus with the manna of his word, and to be reminded of the faithfulness of God and the glories of the gospel, so that when Easter comes and we see the cross and then the empty tomb, we’re again ready to glory in Jesus and Jesus alone, to remember the commitment—the covenant he has made with us with his own flesh and blood—and to give him our all in return.

Let’s pray: Almighty God who has made a covenant of unspeakable grace and mercy with us in Christ Jesus, and conveyed unto us therein an heavenly inheritance upon sincere obedience to his commands, which is our reasonable service; grant that we may evermore rejoice in you, and walk worthy of our holy calling, through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.  Amen.

The Third Sunday in Lent: The Finger of God

St. Luke 11:14-28

by William Klock

Imagine being one of Pharaoh’s court magicians when Moses came with that message from the Lord, the God of Israel, demanding, “Let my people go!”  Pharaoh laughed.  This Lord, this God of Israel was no match for him or for his gods.  Powerful gods did not let their people become slaves.  And everyone knew that the gods of Egypt were the greatest and most powerful in the world.  This Lord, this Yahweh, this god of a poor and subjugated people, this god hiding, unknown in the desert for hundred of years, who was he to be sending a prophet to mighty Pharaoh making demands?  Pharoah laughed.  And the whole court, including the magicians laughed with him.  Stupid Moses.  He could have had everything.  He was born of the Hebrews, but chosen by a daughter of Pharaoh and raised in the royal courts.  The gods of Egypt had shown him great favour.  But what a fool.  He gave it all up.  Hiding in the desert like an outlaw, he’d met the pathetic god of his own people and chosen him over the gods who had shown him such favour, over the most powerful gods on earth.  And then to come to Pharaoh, making demands and promising disasters and calamities.  They laughed at him.  Oh, look!  He could turn his brother’s staff into a snake.  Neat trick.  But so could they.  Pharaoh had sent Moses packing.  And then that first plague.  The Nile turned to blood as Moses had promised.  They hadn’t expected that.  But they could do it to.  Of course the real trick was turning it back into water.  Maybe they could, maybe they couldn’t.  But thankfully Pharaoh hadn’t asked them to do that.  And then the frogs.  Everywhere.  In the streets and in their houses, in their beds, in their ovens, in their toilets.  This God of Israel had power, but it was nothing they couldn’t do themselves and do it they did.  Pharaoh nodded smugly at them as they caused frogs to come up from the Nile just as Moses had.  They nodded back, they smiled, but they had to admit they were feeling a bit nervous about all this.

And then the third plague.  Aaron struck the dust of the earth with his staff and it turned into gnats and gnats and more gnats and they covered everything.  And Pharaoh looked to his magicians, and nervously they struck the ground with their staves.  And nothing happened.  They knew.  He knew.  Whatever Pharoah might claim about being lord of the earth, his power and the power of his magicians and his gods was limited.  The Nile was the source of Egypt’s life and over the Nile the gods of Egypt had power.  But no more than that.  Ever since Moses had turned the river to blood, the magicians—and surely Pharaoh—had been troubled.  This was their territory.  This was the domain of their gods.  That puny god of the Israelites whom Moses had met out in the desert, he should not have had power over the Nile.  And while Pharaoh put on a show of defiance and self-assurance, the magicians worried.  This God of Israel was more powerful than they thought.

Brothers and Sisters, I think we forget that the world was a very different place before Jesus was raised from the dead on that first Easter morning, before the gospel went out like a shockwave across the world.  Whatever they were, demons or something else, the gods of the pagans—or at least some of them—were real.  Jesus and the gospel stripped them of their power.  Everyone noticed it.  The Greek philosopher Plutarch wrote a treatise, trying to explain why the gods of the Greeks suddenly went silent in the First Century—their oracles ceased to speak anymore.  Athanasius wrote about the same phenomenon in his treatise On the Incarnation of the Word of God—but, of course, he knew the answer.  It was Jesus.  The power of the devil to deceive the nations was broken—for good—and his kingdom was taken from him.  The true light had come into the world and the darkness was driven away and the world has never been the same since.

Over a thousand years before, Pharaoh and his magicians got a foretaste of what was to come in Jesus.  That day, as they struck the dust with their staves, over and over again in frustration, trying to call forth gnats as Moses had, but I think knowing all along that they had met their match, that day those Egyptian magicians were forced to acknowledge the greatness of the God of Israel.  “This is the finger of god!” they said to Pharaoh.  This is no trick.  This is real and this god has more power than we do, then you do, than our gods have.  They warned Pharoah, but his heart was hard and it would take seven more plagues, each showing the power of the Lord over the earth—and most importantly over Pharoah and his gods—before Pharaoh was finally broken.  Even then, after letting the Hebrews go, he changed his mind and sent his army after them.  In another display of his might, the Lord parted the sea to deliver his people and then to drown Pharoah’s army.  But rather than acknowledge the Lord and give him glory, the proud Egyptians simply wrote those events out of their history.  The gods of Egypt survived.  They survived conquest by the Greeks and they survived conquest by the Romans.  But then Jesus rose from the grave and robbed their master of his power and his kingdom, bound him and cast him into the pit, and finally the gospel—tradition says it went to Egypt with St. Mark in the lead—the gospel marched into Egypt where no one worships Isis or Osiris anymore, but where Christians continue to gather each Sunday to praise Jesus and to give glory to the God of Israel.  To quote those ancient pagan magicians: “This is the finger of God!”

Now, think about our Gospel today and imagine being the descendant of those Hebrews who saw their God in all his glory defeat Pharoah and the gods of Egypt.  Imagine being the descendant of those people who passed through the waters of the Red Sea with unmoistened foot.  Imagine being the descendant of the people who had met the Lord in the cloud and lightning on Mount Sinai and who had followed the Lord into the promised land as he defeated the gods of Canaan just as he had the gods of the Egyptians.  Imagine being the descendant of those people, being raised on those stories, your identity integrally tied up in the narrative of the Exodus, in which you took part every year at Passover.  Imagine then being unable—or obstinately unwilling—to recognise the God of Israel at work again over the powers of evil.  It seems like it should have been unthinkable, but that’s exactly what we read in the Gospel today from Luke 11.  Here’s what Luke writes in verses 14-16:

  Now [Jesus] was casting out a demon that was mute. When the demon had gone out, the mute man spoke, and the people marveled.  But some of them said, “He casts out demons by Beelzebul, the prince of demons,” while others, to test him, kept seeking from him a sign from heaven.

 

Lots of people saw the God of their fathers, the God of the Passover and the Exodus, they saw him at work through Jesus and they gave him glory and believed.  A lot of them believed even though so many things about Jesus didn’t make sense to them or didn’t meet the expectations that people had for the Messiah.  What they did know was that in the Messiah, the Lord would visit his people and set the world to rights.  In a world broken by sin, he would set things to rights—and that’s just what Jesus was doing.  They thought the Messiah would come in a chariot like King David.  Some thought he would lead a violent revolution.  Most people thought he would overthrow the Romans and set up his throne in Jerusalem to rule the nations.  And Jesus, at least so far, hadn’t lived up to that.  But he was causing the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the mute to speak.  He was casting out devils.  He was preaching good news to the poor.  All the things the prophets had said the Messiah would do.  And so they believed, despite their questions.  But not everyone.  Some were so dead-set on their preconceived ideas about the Messiah that they couldn’t believe the obvious.  Luke says some of them demanded signs—as if what Jesus was doing wasn’t enough.  And then there were others that would rather blaspheme the work of the Lord than admit they might be wrong about the Messiah.  “He casts out demon by Beelzebul,” they said to dismiss him.  In other words, “He’s in cahoots with them.”  Beelzebul was a pagan Philistine god.  So here’s Jesus, in the synagogue every Sabbath, performing signs just as the prophets had said and giving all the credit and glory to the Lord.  But now he casts out demons and these folks accuse him of witchcraft.

Back in Chapter 12, Jesus referred to this kind of thing as blasphemy against the Holy Spirit and his point was that it put a person in very dangerous territory.  The Messiah was the Lord’s provision for the salvation of his people from the coming judgement.  His only provision.  So to attribute his power and works to devils, well that’s pretty much the ultimate statement of disbelief, the ultimate rejection.  It’s not that people who made this foolish accusation couldn’t change their mind in the future and believe, but Jesus warns them, because such obstinate unbelief, such unbelief that insists on such stupid and outlandish explanations for what Jesus was doing, such blasphemy, has at its root a heart that has been hardened against the Lord.  A heart his people had seen before in Pharoah.  And we all know how that went for him.  No matter what great thing the Lord did, Pharaoh’s heart was unmoved.  When the day of the Lord came to Israel, those people—even though they thought they were the faithful ones, defending the Lord and his people from false messiahs—they would be swept up in judgement and wind up like the Egyptians had.

Brothers and Sisters, be cautious yourselves not to fall into similar traps.  Last month the Internet was abuzz—to put it mildly—about events happening at a college in Indiana.  Some people called it a revival and other people loudly denounced it as, at best, man-made and, at worst, demonic.  It highlights the need for us to be more circumspect about those kinds of accusations.  Jesus, himself, warned his disciples.  They saw someone casting out demons in his name, but this guy didn’t have an apostolic franchise.  They tried to stop him and Jesus warned them, “If he’s acting in my name and if he’s not against us, then he’s with us.  Let him alone.  He’s doing our work.”  The Spirit works in the Church and in Christians, usually in ordinary ways, but every once in a while in extraordinary ways.  And if the Spirit could only work through churches and Christians that are perfect, he’d never be able to work at all, because we’ve all got problems.  No one’s doctrine is perfect.  None of us is as holy as we ought to be.  When God moves through his church, it will always be through imperfect people and imperfect movements.  Even as his Spirit breathes new life into his people, they remain imperfect Christians in imperfect churches.  If we see something happen and it’s promoting heresy or unholiness, if there’s false prophecy involved or if it directs people away from God’s word or from the Jesus we know through Scripture, we can know that that is not a move of God.  But when a movement, however imperfect, points people to Jesus and to the word, and causes people to pursue holiness and makes them better stewards of God’s grace and of the gospel, Brothers and Sisters, give it the benefit of the doubt, praise God, and pray that it will bring reformation.

Back to Luke now.  Knowing how silly this accusation of witchcraft is, Jesus responds.  Look at Luke 11:17-23.

But he, knowing their thoughts, said to them, “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and a divided household falls.  And if Satan also is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand?  For you say that I cast out demons by Beelzebul.  And if I cast out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your sons cast them out?  Therefore they will be your judges.  But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.  When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own palace, his goods are safe; but when one stronger than he attacks him and overcomes him, he takes away his armor in which he trusted and divides his spoil.  Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.

 

They’re so opposed to Jesus that they haven’t thought through their accusations.  Why would the satan be shooting his own forces in the back?  In Jesus, the battle with evil was coming to its climax and the devil knew it.  In fact, he was already losing.  As Jesus says, like someone breaking into a strong man’s house, tying him up, and stealing his stuff, Jesus had already broken into the devil’s house and robbed him of his power.  He was preparing to take back his kingdom and he was showing everyone by bossing around the satan’s minions—and the satan was powerless to do anything about it.

And Jesus also says, “You’ve got exorcists amongst your own people.  You don’t question accuse them of being in cahoots with the devil.  Why would you would you accuse me?

Then Jesus makes a very deliberate point of recalling the Exodus and the magicians of Pharoah with that statement, “But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.”  They knew the Old Testament and they knew their own story, so they couldn’t have missed the allusion.  So much of what Jesus was doing—and before him what John had done—pointed the people back to the events of the Exodus and Jesus (and John) did this to make the point that the Lord was on the verge of acting again to deliver his people.  A new exodus was about to happen.  And so this bit about the finger of God is a rebuke.  Jesus is reminding them that even Pharaoh’s magicians were able to recognise the God of Israel at work—and their knees quaked in fear to think of what was to come.  If pagan magicians could recognise the Lord at work, shouldn’t the Lord’s own people be able to recognise him all the easier?  What does it say about the state of Israel when the Messiah comes and is so obviously doing all the thing the prophets had said he would, but his own people reject him and even dismiss his power as demonic?  That’s what the next few verses are getting at.  Look at 24-26:

  “When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and finding none it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’  And when it comes, it finds the house swept and put in order.  Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there. And the last state of that person is worse than the first.”

 

This isn’t a method or a theology of exorcism.  It’s Jesus commentary on the state of Israel and a rebuke of his people.  For a thousand years they’d known reform movement after reform movement.  In the days of the judges, the people would stray from the Lord, he would allow someone to oppress them, and then they would repent and cry out to him and he would deliver them—over and over and over.  Repeatedly kings had tried to reform the nation.  And in more recent years they had known reforms and times of national repentance—the days of Ezra and the Maccabees.  This is what the Pharisees were all about—another reform movement to get the Lord’s people back to being faithful to torah.  And all of those movements for reform were good, but none of them ever solved the real problem.  Jesus compares Israel to a man with a demon.  The demon is cast out, it goes wandering for a while, but finds nowhere to rest, so eventually it returns to the man.  And while the demon’s been gone, someone’s cleaned house.  So the demon goes and gets a bunch of its friends and they return to the man and now he’s worse off than before.  Just so with Israel.  The prophets put it in terms of the need for a heart transplant.  Israel needed her heart of stone replaced with a heart of flesh.  She needed the law written on her heart by the Spirit, because the law written on stone tablets was never enough.  She needed love for God inscribed on her heart.  She needed to be indwelt by the Holy Spirit.  And here, in light of the accusations being made against him, Jesus puts it in terms of demonic possession, but however it’s made, the point is that Israel desperately needed a work of the Lord in her midst if anything were to truly change for good.  And here’s Jesus doing just that and they’re chalking his power up to the devil.  So this is a statement of grief over the state of his people, it’s a call to repentance and faith, and it’s warning against the judgement to come.

But then a woman speaks up from the crowd and highlights the discouraging fact that even the people who believe, even the people who see the Lord at work in Jesus and are excited about it—even they don’t really get it.  Even they need a work of God done in them.  Look at verses 27 and 28:

  As he said these things, a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to him, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts at which you nursed!”  But he said, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!”

 

She’d been rooting for Jesus from the beginning and that gotcha with the people who accused him of being in cahoots with Beelzebul, just wow!  Jesus was amazing.  He knew his Bible—that bit about comparing those guys to Pharaoh’s magicians was genius—and he was smart and he was witty and he could do miracles.  Maybe she had a son who had turned out to be kind of a disappointment.  And so she cries out, “What a boy!  Your mama is truly blessed to have you for a son!”  And it was true.  Gabriel had announced to Mary, “Blessed are you among women!”  But that’s not the point.  The Egyptian magicians recognized the power of God at work in Moses, but they still stood with Pharaoh.  This woman—and many others—went a step further.  They saw God at work in Jesus and praised him for what they saw.  But, Brothers and Sisters, it’s not enough to see God at work and clap our hands and say, “Oh, isn’t this great!” or “Isn’t this wonderful and exciting!” or even “Praise the Lord!”  Remember when people came to Jesus and said, “Your mother and your brothers are outside looking for you.”  And he took the occasion to make a vital point about the gospel.  He said, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.”  In other words, the Kingdom is not made up of those who merely praise the Messiah, but of those who give up everything to follow him in faith.  The way to the kingdom is obedience—to drop everything, to set aside one’s own agendas and false ideas of the Messiah and the kingdom, and to follow Jesus.  Think on that as you come to the Lord’s Table this morning.  Here we recall what the Lord has done for us—for the world—in Jesus.  And here we not only recall, but we participate ourselves in that great exodus in which Jesus has led us out of our bondage to sin and death, through the water of baptism, and into the kingdom and into the Spirit.  We have seen the finger of God at work through the Messiah.  Now respond in faith, not just as an enthusiastic spectators, but by truly following Jesus in faith, in repentance as we set aside every distraction, every idol, and walk with him in obedience.  Be a people immersed in his word.  Be a people who stick close to our Lord in prayer.  Be a holy people, be light in the darkness, and stand firm in faith amidst the storm, knowing that Jesus has already won the victory.

Let’s pray:  Almighty God, consider the heartfelt desires of your servants, we pray,  and stretch out the right hand of your majesty to defend us against all our enemies; purify our disordered affections, so that we may behold your eternal glory and walk in obedience to you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

The Second Sunday in Lent: From Dogs to Sons and Daughters

St. Matthew 15:21-28

by William Klock

In today’s Gospel, St. Matthew tells us about a Canaanite mother.  Her daughter was sick.  “Oppressed by a demon,” Matthew says, which could mean that she actually was suffering from some kind of demonic activity, but it could also mean something like epilepsy or seizures—the Greek term literally means “moonstruck”—and it was often attributed to demons.  Whatever was wrong with this girl, it was clearly something awful and her mother was desperate for her to be healed.  I expect she had exhausted every option.  She’d been to doctors and witchdoctors and priests.  In Sidon there was a temple dedicated to the Phoenician god Eshmun, a god of healing.  Interestingly enough in light of the exchange that takes place between this woman and Jesus, modern archaeologists—some at least—think that dogs had a sacred place in the ceremonial and rituals of Eshmun.  I expect that this Canaanite woman would have taken her daughter to that pagan temple devoted to healing.  That would have been the normal—not to mention expected—thing for her to do.  Her hopes were high.  Surely this god of healing could do something for her daughter.  But nothing.  And so the seizures—or whatever it was—continued and this mother grieved for her daughter.  I think as parents most of us can identify with that.  When our children are sick, we grieve for them, we pray for them, we want them to get better and it’s frustrating and tiring and discouraging when, no matter what we do, no matter who we take them to, no one seems to be able to do anything.  Sometimes we may even feel as though God has let us down.  We heap guilt on ourselves, thinking that maybe our faith is lacking.  I expect that’s exactly how this woman felt.  The doctors couldn’t do anything.  The priests couldn’t do anything.  She prayed and her gods were silent.  She was utterly discouraged.

But then, one day, she hears about a Jewish rabbi travelling through the neighbourhood.  Jesus.  She’s heard of him time and time again the last couple of years.  The Jewish people she knew had been talking about him.  He’d been travelling around Galilee restoring sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, healing the sick, and—most importantly—casting out demons.  People said he was the Messiah—a prophet, maybe even the God of Israel himself.  People called him the “son of David”, the king who would come to sort out all of Israel’s problems.  Living in such close proximity to Jews, she knew a bit of their story.  She knew a little about their God.  And as far as she could tell, he wasn’t much better than her gods.  His people hadn’t heard him speak in hundreds of years.  He didn’t seem to care about his people any more than her gods cared about theirs; they were all living under the boot of Rome, after all, and their gods didn’t seem to care.  But now the God of Israel was waking up, now he was speaking and acting through this “son of David,” this “Messiah”, this “Jesus”.  The God of Israel had—so the Jews claimed—made promises to his people through prophets a thousand years ago.  But nothing had come of them and, like everybody else, she had mocked them: “Where’s your God?”  The Jewish God was no better than theirs and they had no reason to be so uppity.  But now those old prophecies were suddenly being fulfilled.  Something was happening.  Something she couldn’t say of her own gods.  And so she followed the talk and the rumours until she found this Jesus.  If her gods wouldn’t help her, maybe the God of Israel would.

Look at Matthew 15, beginning at verse 21.

And Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon.  And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.”

 

Imagine her excitement when she found him.  Jesus and his disciples had a little camp in the country, away from everyone.  That made perfect sense.  Jews and gentiles didn’t mix.  From a distance she could see that he was teaching his disciples—talking about something.  But she didn’t care.  She called out to get his attention.  His disciples looked, but it was like he hadn’t heard her.  He kept on with his teaching.  So she called out again and again.  She knew he heard, but he ignored her.  Finally, she was right there and she cried out.  Matthew puts special stress on the urgency of her cries.  “O Lord, have mercy on me.  Son of David, deliver my daughter.”  She knew that as a Canaanite, a gentile, she didn’t belong there, even though it was Jesus who had come to her country.  If he really was the Messiah of the God of Israel, if he really was the son of David, this Jewish king, he had no more obligation to her than her gods had to Jewish people.  But she was desperate.  Her gods were silent.  Her gods were impotent to help her.  What reason did she have to be loyal to them?  So she cries out to this man come from the God of Israel.  But Matthew says:

 

But he did not answer her a word.

 

It’s actually Jesus’s disciples who acknowledge her presence.  And, as she expected, they’re annoyed.  She should know better.  A gentile and a woman.  She had no business bothering them.

 

And his disciples came and begged him, saying, “Send her away, for she is crying out after us.” 

 

They didn’t care about her.  They were only interested in hearing Jesus.  “Come on, Jesus.  Give her what she wants so she’ll go away and leave us alone.  We want to hear what you have to say.”  (There’s another whole sermon right there, isn’t there?)  She didn’t want to hear that, but I doubt she was surprised.  But she expected more of Jesus after all the things she’d heard.  She’d even heard how he healed the child or the servant—depending on whom you’d heard it from—of a Roman Centurion.  And women were coming to him all the time.  Surely Jesus would rebuke his disciples and have compassion on her.  But that’s not how Matthew says Jesus responded.  Finally he speaks, but even then, he speaks to his friends, not to her.  Look at verse 24.

 

He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”  But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.”  And he answered, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”  

 

Ouch.  That doesn’t sound right to our ears.  Did Jesus really ignore her?  And then, when he was forced to talk to her, did he really say “No” and call her a dog?  There’s a reason why this is often said to be one of the “hard sayings” of the New Testament.  There is a good explanation and we’ll get to it in a bit.  Matthew tells us just how persistent she was.

 

She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”

 

I think that’s when Jesus finally smiled at her.  He wasn’t really a jerk.  There was a reason for the way he acted.  You could say he was testing her.  Or, I think more importantly, you could say that this was another of his acted-out prophecies that said more than words ever could about the nature of his ministry and just who he was as the Lord’s Messiah.  So Jesus, again, finally smiled at her and, Matthew says:

 

Then Jesus answered her, “O woman, great is your faith!  Be it done for you as you desire.”  And her daughter was healed instantly.

 

So what’s going on here?  Some people say that Jesus was tired and overwhelmed with the scope of his ministry.  He’d been polite and accommodating with the Centurion—and it’s interesting how Matthew tells the two stories in almost exactly the same way and with almost exactly the same words and phrases—but back then Jesus was fresh and enthusiastic, but now he’s had two years to realise how hard and hopeless this whole thing was.  The harvest was ripe, but the labourers were few.  He’d never make it to everyone in Israel in the time he had.  So this time he ignored the woman.  His mission was Israel and Israel alone.  This gets part of it right, but I think there’s a better explanation.  And, of course, there’s the easy explanation of some people today: Jesus was a racist!  But that’s definitely not the answer.

No.  Matthew wrote his Gospel to a Jewish audience and a big part of his purpose was to show that Jesus really was their Messiah and that he’d come in fulfilment of their prophecies.  In doing that, Matthew reminds us that Jesus didn’t parachute into history to save humanity and the world at any old random time and place.  There’s been a tendency in the Church to abstract Jesus’ ministry, to separate theology and story, doctrine and history.  He is the Saviour of the world after all, and so we start thinking that if he’d wanted to he could have come at any time and any place and people to do his saving work, but in doing that we forget that—no—he came and he had to come where and when he did because Jesus is part of a bigger story.

This is why I say that this was sort of a sort of acted-out prophecy.  I expect Jesus planned to help this woman from the start, but what he says and does here stresses a point that will be vital to his own people and that, ultimately, will be vital as the gospel goes out from Judea to the whole world.  That point is that Jesus reveals or puts on display or proves the faithfulness of the God of Israel.  He does that by first ignoring this gentile woman, then he refuses her request and calls her a dog.  But maybe the most remarkable thing—and it highlights that he really was a prophet—is that his refusal of her request ends up prompting her to speak that vital truth when she says, “But even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.”  Take note: The dogs don’t eat until the master’s children have eaten.  And just so with the gospel.  The gentiles can’t eat until the children of Israel have first been fed.  The Lord must fulfil his promises to his people before those gospel crumbs can fall to the gentiles.  The amazing thing—and what this Canaanite woman probably didn’t realise at the time—was that those crumbs that fell under the table would, in time, become a great feast for the nations.  But what has drawn the nations to the table was seeing the faithfulness of the Lord to feed his own children, just as the household dogs only came to the table, because they saw the master feeding his children and hoped to eat what was dropped.

We too often forget this.  “For God so loved the world,” we say.  But we’ve forgotten the bigger story of which this is just one part.  Not this short story and not even just the story of the gospels, but the big story, the story of Israel, the story of the people of God that runs from Genesis to Revelation.  We tend to lift Jesus out of his historical and Jewish context, out of his First Century context, which means lifting him out of the story of Israel—which again means lifting him out of the Genesis to Revelation story.  What our Gospel today shows us is Jesus right in the middle of the big story.

So it’s true what Jesus says to the woman here: He did not come to the gentiles.  Yes, a few gentiles came to him, but Jesus did not come to the gentiles.  Jesus came to Israel.  Jesus is Israel’s Messiah.  “But again,” we protest, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son…”  Jesus said it.  Yes.  Jesus brings salvation for all, but we need to first understand that he does so as Israel’s Messiah.  Jesus stresses it right here: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”  And in saying that he is not saying that he came to some of the house of Israel who were lost, but that he came to Israel because Israel—the whole people—was lost.  They were sheep without a shepherd.

Jesus came to bring the kingdom that had been promised to Israel through Abraham and through David and he did it to fulfil the Lord’s promises—to show his faithfulness.  There were aspects of that kingdom that were new and different, but Jesus’ kingdom is built firmly and immovably on the covenant and the promises the Lord had made with Israel down through the ages from Abraham’s time.  He had called Israel to be his people.  He had promised to be their God.  He had rescued Israel and set her apart that he might show her his blessings and give her his word and he did it all so that she could then share that blessing and share that word with the gentile nations.  So that the world would see God in the midst of his people and be moved to come and give him glory.  He fully expected crumbs to fall from the table.  Remember that Jesus stressed in the Sermon on the Mount that he had come not to abolish the law—not to abolish anything God had promised or covenanted or established with Israel—but to fulfil it.  Jesus didn’t come to do away with Israel.  Many Christians down through history have said that because of Israel’s faithlessness God cast her aside to start over with the gentiles and the Church.  Absolutely not!  On the other extreme you’ve got folks who think Jesus’ coming put Israel on hold while the Lord saves the gentiles and builds a Church.  Some even like to say that Jesus is not Israel’s Messiah.  Eventually, they say, God will be finished with the gentiles, the Church will be completed and then “raptured” out of the world, and the Lord will then pick-up where he left off with Israel.  Again, no.  Jesus didn’t come to abolish the idea of God electing a special people, nor did he come to divide the people of God with Israel on the one hand and the Church on the other.  From day one with Abraham God had made clear that his restoration of the world and his restoration of humanity was going to happen through Israel.  Israel may have made a lot of mistakes, fallen into idolatry, failed to live the law, failed to be a light to the nations, but the Lord wasn’t giving up.  The Church isn’t “Plan B” implemented when “Plan A”, Israel, failed.

The gentiles did (and still do!) need deliverance from sin and death as much as Israel ever did.  But again, God’s plan was always to work through Israel and so the ministry of the Messiah had first to be for Israel.  Israel had misinterpreted the message she’d been given long before.  Some in Israel had even abandoned it almost entirely.  And so if Israel was going to be the Lord’s means of bringing life to the world, Jesus had first to call her back to the Lord.  Not to do so would be for Jesus to deny the Lord’s promises and to make a liar out of him.  And if the Lord was unfaithful to the promises he made to his own people, what reason would the gentiles ever have to notice him?  He’d be no different than their own gods—than Zeus or Isis or Odin or Vishnu or the Great Spirit.

In fact, what we see Jesus doing—and especially so in the middle portion of the Gospels between his birth and his death and resurrection—is taking on the role of Israel himself.  In Daniel the Son of Man character represented the people of God, but in Jesus’ ministry we see him taking that role on, embodying it himself.  In his birth and ministry we see him taking on the role of the great Davidic King.  And as his ministry unfolds into rejection, suffering, and death we see him taking on the role of Isaiah’s suffering servant.  Again, these are roles the prophets ascribed to Israel, but one by one Jesus takes each of them up himself.  Brothers and Sisters, understand this key point: Jesus is Israel.  He embodies her inheritance and her mission.  Where Israel had failed to be faithful, Jesus is faithful without fail.  Even as he dies, he faces the very same death that the Jewish revolutionaries faced a generation later and for the very same reason: he challenged Rome as King of the Jews.  Jesus came as the embodiment of Israel.  And he came as Israel to show God’s people a new way of being Israel—a new way in which the people would fulfil everything the Lord had ever promised and everything the Lord had ever called Israel to be.  This is why Jesus came preaching repentance.  The people had to let go of all their misconceptions of what it meant to be God’s people, whether that was their hope for violent revolution or their hope that if they were obedient enough the Lord would finally send the Messiah to rain down fire and brimstone on the gentiles and usher in the kingdom.  As the promises were fulfilled in Jesus it did not nullify God’s plan to bring life to the world through Israel.  What it did was reorient Israel around Jesus himself—it forged a new Israel, not based on blood and genealogy, not based on circumcision or sabbath-keeping, but on faith—specifically faith in Jesus the Messiah.  Israel had been born as a people when they followed the Lord in faith through the waters of the Red Sea and were rescued from Egypt.  In Jesus Israel is born again.  But this new Israel is born of all those who follow Jesus in faith through the waters of baptism.  Jesus offered a choice.  As he fulfilled the covenant those who repented and reoriented their lives in and around him—those who found their lives in him—became part of the new way of being Israel, centred in Jesus.  But, Jesus warned, those who rejected him and refused him would be cut off—and when he said that he was speaking to the biological children of Abraham.  The axe was set to the root of the tree.  The branches that refused to bear good fruit would be cut off.  Jerusalem, embodying and representing faithless Israel, would be and was judged, torn stone from stone, and scattered—again, the Lord revealing his faithfulness to his promises, even in judgement.

But through Jesus, Israel would continue in a new way—with the law no longer on tablets of stone, but written on her heart, with the Spirit of God no longer residing in a stone temple behind a curtain they could never pass, but actually living inside them—making them the temple themselves.  And as the Spirit changed and renewed and brought to life the law of love now written on their hearts, this new Israel would not only fulfil the Lord’s promises through the prophets, but it would also finally fulfil the Lord’s mission for his people—reaching out to the nations and bringing his life to the world.  So, yes, Jesus came to bring life to the world—to Jew and gentile alike—but to fulfil the Lord’s plan he brought this life by first bringing it to the old Israel, to Abraham’s children.  To do anything else would have been to bypass the Lord’s plan and to make a liar of him.  To make him no better than the pagan gods.

This faithfulness of God to his promises—what we call the “righteousness of God”—is the theme of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans.  Through that letter Paul explains how God has been faithful to and how he has fulfilled his covenant promises to Israel and at the end, in Romans 15 he sums it all up, writing:

For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised [that means Israel—Abraham’s biological children] to show God’s truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written,

          “Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles,

                  and sing to your name.” (Romans 15:8-9)

Jesus fulfilled God’s promises to Israel so that when the story of Israel and the Lord’s faithfulness to her—especially his faithfulness in Jesus the Messiah—was proclaimed to the gentiles they would—we would—fall before God in worship of his great mercy.  This is the story the first Jewish Christians proclaimed to the gentiles.  This story of the faithfulness of God was the story St. Paul proclaimed as he travelled the Roman empire.  It’s the story—ultimately proved true at the cross and the empty tomb and in the pouring out of the Spirit at Pentecost—it’s the story that reveals the faithfulness of the God of Israel.  It’s the story that reveals the gods of this world to be cheap and impotent imitations of the one true God and it’s the story that reveals all the kings of the earth to be but cheap imitations of Jesus, the one true Lord.  And as the gentiles heard this story, they put their faith in Jesus, they were baptised into his body, and as they found their life in him—the true embodiment of Israel and the fulfilment of God’s promises to her—as they found their life in Jesus the gentiles were grafted into this new Israel.

It’s often a contentious point today in some circles, but the story we’ve inherited, the story told from Genesis to Revelation makes it clear that Israel is the Church and the Church is Israel and Jesus stands at the centre-point, at the bridge between them.  The Jewish root that was Israel, even has it was cut down for failing to bear fruit, it gave birth to Jesus the Messiah who is now the trunk of a tree that branches out to the entire world.  Anyone who may—Jew or gentile—can take part in the life of Jesus.  All any of us needs to do is take hold of him in faith, trusting that in his death he has forgiven our sins and in his resurrection has given us life. Both literally and metaphorically, Jesus provides the blood to make us Israel.  All we need is faith.

Faith like we see in the Canaanite woman in today’s Gospel.  How much did she know about Israel and Israel’s God and Israel’s Messiah?  Probably very little.  I suspect she had no idea just how profound her response to Jesus about crumbs falling to the dogs was or just how much it revealed about Israel’s calling—and through that Jesus’ calling.  I suspect it was all providence.  And we don’t know what happened to her after her daughter was healed and she went home.  But I have to think that when the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection spread throughout Palestine, everything about that conversation with Jesus came into razor-sharp focus and she believed—not just in a travelling miracle-worker, a travelling prophet, but in Jesus the Messiah who brought life to the world and who changed everything, because the God of Israel so loved everyone.  She believed, because in Jesus she had met the one true God and he exposed everything, every god she’d ever believed in to be but a poor mockery of the God who is faithful.  And, in that, she was no longer a dog.  She began by eating the crumbs, but was—I expect—suddenly surprised to find herself feasting at the Lord’s table, a beloved daughter of the King, now part of that great story herself.

And just so with each of us, Brothers and Sisters.  We have heard the good news about Jesus.  The cross and the empty tomb have shown us the faithfulness of God and we have believed.  He welcomes us to his Table this morning, we who once were not worthy so much as to gather the crumbs his children dropped, we who were once dogs, he now invites to feast as his children.  Here at the Table we see the faithfulness of the God of Israel revealed in Jesus.  Here we see that he and he alone is worthy of our glory and praise.  Here we’re reminded, if we have been tempted to flirt with the false gods and false kings and false ideologies and systems of the world, to put them aside as the gospel once again shows them up as worthless in the light of the one true God.  And here again, we are exhorted to go out and to proclaim the cross and the lordship of Jesus, the good news to the world so that one day the knowledge of his glory will fill it as the waters cover the sea.

Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gift of faith by which we have been grafted into your Son, Jesus, and in him grafted into your people, Israel.  We were stones, but by the gift of faith you have made us children of Abraham.  We were dead wood, but by faith you have grafted us into the living vine and caused us to bear fruit.  We were mangy, unclean dogs, but now you have made us your sons and daughters.  Strengthen that gift of faith in us we ask, that as we live in hope of your future we would live in such a way, bearing the fruit of the Holy Spirit and using the gifts you have given us, to proclaim your glory.  Strengthen our faith and enrich our ministry that we might be the blessing to the nations you have called us to be, holding high the light of Christ and proclaiming boldly that Jesus is Lord.  Amen.

First Sunday in Lent: Through Death to Life

St. Matthew 4:1-11

by William Klock

In our Gospel from Matthew 4, the Evangelist tells us:

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

 

It was hot and dry and dusty as Jesus made his way from that fertile strip of land along the Jordan up into the Judean wilderness, into that place that the Old Testament calls Yeshimon, which means “devastation”.  It’s a land of sand and broken limestone and shingle.  The geological activity of the ages has raised up the strata into ridges that twist here and turn there.  Everything in between them is filled with dust and jagged rocks, and broken stone shingles that can easily slide out from under foot.  Into that hot and desolate wilderness Jesus walked at the Spirit’s prompting.  I expect that when he first set out he found beauty in the desert.  There was beauty in the layers of rock in that ridge over there.  And look at that boulder over there.  I wonder how long it’s been balancing like that.  And that first night, the sky was absolutely amazing as the sun set over the rocks and the mountains in the distance.  But if you’ve ever gone hiking in the desert you know that novelty wears off.  Last week I was watching a video made by a bikepacker I follow.  He was bicycling the southern California desert and I watched as he made his way through a canyon in the Anza-Borrego desert.  He started out in wonder and admiring everything.  Everything was beautiful.  And it was only twenty miles to the paved road on other side.  He’d be there in no time.  But almost immediately he bogged down in deep sand for mile after mile and what he thought might take a few hours turned into all day and into the evening.  And it was hot and it was dry and he was covered in sweat.  And the novelty was gone.  And I knew, because we’ve hiked in that same desert and on the way in it’s all beautiful and you stop to admire everything, but on the way out you’re hot and sweat and dusty, your feet hurt from walking over rocks, and you’re tired and hungry and you just want to get back to the car.  And I’m sure Jesus felt something like that the further he walked into that wilderness of devastation.  But as he put one foot in front of another, as he wiped the sweat from his face, he thought about his forefathers and their wilderness trek from the Red Sea to the promised land.   The Lord, the God of Israel, was about to do something very much like that again.  A new exodus.  And Jesus was at the centre of it.  And so he put himself in the place of his people who so badly needed and who so longed for deliverance.  Even if no one saw him in the wilderness, he was acting out a prophecy, repeating the life and story of his people and putting himself in their place.

And he found some spot in the middle of that wasteland, maybe where he found a little spring of water in the shade of one of those twisting ridges, maybe there were a few bushes or even a palm tree for a bit of shade.  He arranged some rocks and scrub to make a (reasonably) comfortable place to sit or lie or to kneel in prayer.  And he communed with God, meditated on the scriptures, pondered the nature of his ministry which was just beginning, and prayed for wisdom to follow the path his Father had set before him and for the strength and grace to follow it to its end.  He was preparing to take the role of Israel up himself, to be and to embody the people of God.  Where they had failed to be what the Lord had called them to be, Jesus would be faithful.  For years he had meditated on his own miraculous birth, he’d heard how people like Simeon and Anna, even is own mother, had seen in him the fulfilment of the Lord’s promises.  He meditated on the Scriptures and there he found his messianic calling and worked out what he was to do and even how it would end—and how that end would really be the beginning.  And if there was any doubt in his mind, it was driven away in his baptism.  Even though he had no need of repentance, he identified himself with his people as he waded into the Jordan to be baptised by John, and when he came up out of the river heaven had opened, the Spirit had descended upon him, and the Lord had spoken, “You are my beloved Son.”  Again, that was Israel’s title, given by the Lord in the exodus, after her baptism in the Red Sea.  So, now, like Moses, Jesus seeks the solitude of the wilderness for forty days and nights, waiting for the Lord to speak again.  But instead, the devil comes to him.  I doubt Jesus was surprised by this, after all, if Israel was tempted in the wilderness, he must also be tempted in the wilderness.  Matthew writes:

And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” (St. Matthew 4:2-3)

Again, this is how we should expect the story to develop if Jesus is prophetically re-enacting the story of his people.  They were tempted in the wilderness and so is he.  The devil leverages his hunger.  “The Lord has declared you to be his Son.  If you believe that’s who you really are, satisfy yourself and turn these stones into bread.”  No doubt, Jesus had spent much of those forty days and nights contemplating what it meant to be the Son of God—and probably also pondering why the Spirit wanted the Son of God to be so hungry.  But Jesus was obedient.  To embody his people and to follow in their footsteps, being faithful at every step where they had failed, that was the Lord’s plan for him.  That was the means by which he would redeem his people.

The devil’s temptation here is subtle.  He doesn’t tempt Jesus to disobey the Spirit overtly by leaving the desert.  He tempts Jesus to turn the rocks into bread—to remake the wilderness itself.  And yet Jesus knew that the Spirit had brought him to the wilderness for a reason and to undermine that, however it was done, was to be unfaithful, to be disobedient.  It was to reject his Father’s plan.  He rebukes the devil with the words of Deuteronomy 8:3.

But he answered, “It is written,

 “‘Man shall not live by bread alone,

         but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

Jesus appeals to the sermon that Moses preached to the Israelites as they were preparing to march into Canaan:

And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not.  And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. (Deuteronomy 8:2-3)

There was a reason why the Lord allowed the Israelites to be hungry: it demonstrated their faith in his provision.  Were they willing to trust him even when it meant hardship?  The Lord taught them that there’s more to life than bread.  What good is living today if you miss out on the life of the age to come?  The Israelites had failed that test, grumbling against Moses and wanting to go back to the fleshpots of Egypt.  Now, where Israel failed, Jesus passes the test.  He trusts his Father to provide where he has led and shows that he knows that obedience to God’s call is more important than physical comforts and even life itself.  If he can’t endure fasting, how will he endure the cross?  And Brothers and Sisters, if we can’t endure fasting, how can we expect to live sacrificially as Jesus calls us to live, giving up everything that is not him in faith as we look forward ourselves to the age to come?

 

Back to Matthew: The devil tries again, taking a different tack.

Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written,

 “‘He will command his angels concerning you,’

and

 “‘On their hands they will bear you up,

         lest you strike your foot against a stone.’” (Matthew 4:5-6)

Now the devil tempts him to jump from the highest point in Jerusalem, to force God’s hand.  Angels would deliver him and all of Israel would recognise him as Messiah.  What a temptation this must have been.  During those forty days of fasting and prayer, Jesus contemplated that rejection was going to be a significant factor in his ministry.  A few would follow, but Jesus would largely be rejected by Israel—and eventually that rejection would culminate in his death.  But what if he could prove to all of Israel that he was the Messiah?  What if he could side-step the rejection and go straight to the throne?  But Jesus knew that this was not his Father’s plan.  If he became King that way, he’d be no better than David.  There would be no means of redemption for his people.  There would be no Spirit poured out on them to renew their hearts.  He would be King, but the Lord’s promises to Abraham, to Moses, to the Prophets would go unfulfilled.  The nations would know that Israel had a king who worked miracles, but that was never the means by which the gentiles were to be drawn to Israel’s God.  They were to be drawn by the display of his faithfulness to his promises.

The devil throws two bits of Psalm 91 at Jesus.  It’s a psalm about the Lord’s protection.  It sounds good, but it’s not the whole psalm.  Other parts of the psalm qualify God’s provision for his people.  The first two verses read:

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High

will abide in the shadow of the Almighty. 

I will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress,

my God, in whom I trust.”

The shelter of the Most High is a wonderful place to find oneself, but to live under his protection requires that we first abide in his shadow.  He is our “refuge and fortress”, but we put ourselves in his care as we trust in him.  In verse 14 the Lord says,

Because he holds fast to me in love, I will deliver him;

I will protect him, because he knows my name.

The devil loves to plucked portions of Scripture out of context in order to twist their meaning, reminding us of God’s promises of blessing and care, while neglecting to remind us of the need for faith, for holiness, and for obedience.  God’s people show their love for him through obedience.  Jesus later said, “If you love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15).  The same goes for Jesus’ relationship with his Father.  The Lord’s blessings would come only as Jesus walked in faithful obedience.

Jesus rebukes the devil with the words of Deuteronomy 6:16.

Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

 

Where Israel had failed, Jesus is again obedient.  Israel had tested the Lord.  Jesus, instead, expresses his trust in the Lord’s plan, knowing that only through his rejection will the Lord’s promises be fulfilled.

Now, the devil makes one last attempt at dragging Jesus away from the path to the cross.  Look at verses 8 and 9:

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory.  And he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.”

Israel, too, was tempted to idolatry in the wilderness and failed—and failed and failed and failed throughout her history.  Jesus is tempted as his people were.  “All kingdoms of the world will be yours,” the devil says, “just submit to me.”  Jesus and the devil both knew that if the Lord’s promises through the prophets were true, Jesus’ lordship would extend beyond Israel to all of Creation.  Gabriel had announced to Mary: “He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1:33).  When the Father had spoken at Jesus’ baptism, he had spoken words from Psalm 2 where we also read of the great King:

Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,

and the ends of the earth your possessions.  (Psalm 2:8)

The devil again offers Jesus a shortcut to his throne—a shortcut that would bypass the heart of his messianic ministry.  Again, Jesus knew that what would bring the nations to his throne was the redemption of Israel through his death and resurrection and the display of the Spirit’s power in the hearts of his people.  In these events the nations would see the greatness and the faithfulness of the God of Israel and they would be drawn to give him glory and to submit themselves in faith to the Lord Jesus.  That was to be God’s means of welcoming the gentiles into his presence and into his kingdom.  And yet, if Jesus followed the devil’s shortcut, there would be no kingdom—at least not the sort of eternal kingdom in which all was set to rights, in which God himself was king, the sort of kingdom that Israel had always looked forward to as the “age to come”.

No, the Lord had charged his people in the wilderness, saying:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might…. It is the Lord your God you shall fear.  Him you shall serve and by his name you shall swear.  You shall not go after other gods, the gods of the peoples who are around you—for the Lord your God in your midst is a jealous God. (Deuteronomy 4-5, 13-15a)

Israel had failed.  Even in the wilderness, while Moses was on the mountain receiving the Ten Commandments, Aaron had led the people as they made and worshiped a golden calf.  Most of Israel’s history was marked by the worship of foreign gods.  But Jesus responds to the devil’s temptation with the command God had given through Moses:

“Be gone, Satan! For it is written,

 “‘You shall worship the Lord your God

         and him only shall you serve.’” (Matthew 4:10)

Where Israel failed, Jesus is faithful.  He chooses the hard path of obedience that will bring not only kingship, but also redemption.  Jesus was destined not only to be King of the Jews, but Lord of all Creation and conqueror of sin and death.  For that to happen, evil had to be concentrated all in one place, to rise up to its full height, to do its worst to Jesus, the Son of God, the Messiah—so that God could raise him from death, overturn the false verdict the people had announced, and vindicate his Son.  Jesus knew that to restore the life of God to his people, the way to inaugurate the age to come in which all would be set to rights, he must first let evil do its worst—he had to walk the path of rejection, suffering, and death.  By his faithfulness, Jesus redeemed those in Israel who were faithful to him.  By his faithfulness, Jesus created a new people of God in whom God poured out his Spirit.  By his faithfulness, Jesus was declared Lord with power and authority.  And because of his faithfulness, the nations have seen the faithfulness of Israel’s God and now give him glory as they—as we—submit ourselves to him in faith.

And now we, you and I, walk in faithfulness to the glory of God.  As Lent puts before us the suffering of Jesus and reminds us that God’s life for us came through his submission to death, it reminds us that we, too, must die to self and embrace the narrow path, the way that leads to suffering and rejection, in order to know the life of God and of the age to come.  We take our first steps down that narrow path as we repent and turn aside from everything that is not Jesus, as we open our hands and let go of everything that is not Jesus, and then take hold of him with both hands in faith, trusting in him for the forgiveness of sins, for the life of the Spirit, and for life in God’s world set to rights.  Lent calls us to set aside our distractions so that we might fix our gaze on Jesus, taking up our crosses and following him.

St. Paul warned the Corinthians in our Epistle “not to receive the grace of God in vain”.  What a splash of cold water that must have been.  They thought they were doing so well, but Paul rebukes them for tolerating sins that horrified even the pagans; for abusing spiritual gifts, using them selfishly rather than to edify the church; for allowing the values of pagan culture to twist their understanding of the gospel; for abusing the Lord’s Supper—the list is long and troubling.  Brothers and Sisters, fast and pray these next forty days that the gospel might permeate ever deeper into our hearts and minds, and let us submit ourselves to the renewing and regenerating work of the Spirit.  Let us not receive the gospel in vain.  Instead, may we each day die to self that we might emerge the other side of death into the life of God and know his glory.

Let’s pray: Lord Jesus Christ, for our sake you fasted forty days and forty nights: give us grace so to discipline ourselves that our flesh being subdued to the Spirit, we may always obey your will in righteousness and true holiness, to the honour and glory of your name; for you live and reign with the Father and Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.