Living Words

The Root of Sin

St. Matthew 4:1-11

by William Klock

Today is the first day of Lent.  I have no idea what Bp. Sutton will be preaching on this Sunday, but it’s often the case that bishops, when they visit, preach on something other than the lessons of the day.  This evening I want us to look, not at today’s Gospel, but at the Gospel for this coming Sunday.  If Bp. Sutton preaches on it too, you’ll get it twice, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.  I want to preach on Sunday’s Gospel because it ties closely to what I preached on this past Sunday in our study of Exodus.  Let’s look at Matthew 4:1-11.  As we begin our own fast in preparation for our commemoration of Jesus’ death and resurrection, the Church reminds us of the wilderness fast that Jesus made at the beginning of his ministry.  You know the story well, I’m sure.  Jesus had just been baptised by John.  The heavens opened, the Spirit descended like a dove, and the Father spoke: “This is my beloved Son.  In him I am well pleased.”  Jesus’ identity and mission as the Messiah, as the Saviour and King was confirmed.  He was the embodiment of Israel, so just like Israel, the Spirit led him into the wilderness to prepare.  Forty days and forty nights he fasted.  And the devil came to him: “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become bread.”  Jesus responded with Scripture: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.”

The devil then took him to the top of the temple and said, “Throw yourself down”—and then he shows he can quote Scripture too—"He will command his angels concerning you…they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.”  But Jesus reminds him, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”

A third time the devil tempted him, taking him to a mountain top and showing him the world spread out before him: “Fall down and worship me and I’ll give you all this.”  And Jesus rebuked him, “Begone, Satan!  It is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only you shall serve.”  With that, Matthew says, the devil left and angels were sent to minister to Jesus.

The lesson is about temptation, but did you notice that the temptations were ultimately about worship?  The devil was trying to lure Jesus away from worshipping and trusting the one true God.  We often think of temptation in terms of breaking a list of rules.  And while sin is the breaking of God’s commandments, temptation and sin actually get at something deeper than that.  God’s commandments aren’t just arbitrary rules.

Brothers and Sisters, God calls us to know him, to love him, and to worship him.  This is what he created us for.  We were to live in his presence and bear his image.  Creation is his temple and he created us to be his priests.  But to serve the Lord is to trust in him—in his goodness and his wisdom, knowing that our vision is limited.  How often do we think we’ve chosen the good or chosen what is wise, only to find that as things play out, we lacked some crucial bit of information, maybe we didn’t account for someone else or for a change in circumstances, and things go wrong.  Satan tempted Eve.  He convinced her that God wasn’t as good as he said he was, that he was holding out, and that she could take his role on herself.  God has invited us to this great privilege and invitation to live in his presence and to be his image bearers, but we deceive ourselves, lower our gaze, and settle for something far less than what God offers.  The Greek word for sin means “to miss the mark”, and that’s just what happens when we sin.  Like an arrow shot with poor aim, sin shoots wide or falls short of God’s call to be truly human, to bear his image in the world.

Jesus knew this and that knowledge gave him a single-minded devotion.  He gave his full allegiance to his Father and to the calling and mission his Father had given him.  I can only imagine how hungry he was after a forty-day fast, but his Father had called him to fast and that’s what he did.  His devotion to the Father overrode the temptation of the devil to break his fast before the appointed time.  His devotion to his Father overrode the temptation to shortcut his mission.  Sure, Jesus could have jumped from the temple, angels would have rescued him, and everyone would have known who he was.  Yes, he could have bowed the knee to the devil and been given lordship over the nations.  That was his mission—to become the world’s true Lord, but there was more to his mission.  To become Lord apart from the Cross would have left humanity enslaved to sin and death.  The Father’s path to lordship lay only on the redeeming road of suffering and death.  Submission to the Father, worship of the Father were far more important than merely elevating himself.  Do we think about this when we think about temptation and sin?  We tend to think of sin in terms of something that will make God angry with us, but sin goes deeper than that.  God is angry with our sin, because it robs him of the worship he is due and because it causes us to miss the best he has for us.  He offers us life and we choose death.  Lewis summed it up so well when he wrote,

“If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.  We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.  We are far too easily pleased.”

Lent reminds us of God’s goodness, God’s wisdom, and God’s good and wise plans for us.  Lent reminds us not to take our life and our salvation for granted, but to look to Jesus, to see his cross and his resurrection as the fulfilment of God’s promises, to trust in him because he is supremely trustworthy, and to give him our all.

Think of the Israelites.  When they entered Canaan they were instructed to worship the Lord with the firstfruits of their crops.  The tithe was a reminder to them not to take the land for granted or as an automatic right.  Everything reminded them that they were there because of the Lord’s saving grace.  The commands to treat aliens in the land justly were reminders that they not only had God’s grace for themselves, but were to be channels and ministers of that grace to others.  This is what it means to bear God’s image in the world and to be truly human.  They failed.  Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness was a sort of reboot.  After a thousand years of failure, Israel’s representative and Messiah did what Israel had failed to do.  His forty-day fast was a prelude to the creation of a new people, whose sole identifying badge is no longer race, circumcision, diet, or Sabbath, but allegiance to God through submission to Jesus, his King.

St. Paul reminds us that Jesus did indeed become the world’s true Lord—Lord of all that the devil showed him that day and more—but he became Lord not through the devil’s route.  He became Lord through faithfulness to his vocation of suffering and death.  And Jesus’ vocation is now reflected by our faithfulness to him as the Lord of all who has risen from the dead.  This is at the centre of our baptismal vows.  Faith in Jesus, in his death and resurrection, and submission to his Lordship are what we affirm when we pass through the baptismal waters.  And the devil now tempts us and strikes right at those vows and affirmations—right at the centre of our faith.  We are truly human, we are truly God’s image bearers as we submit to his King and serve him with our obedience and our worship—trusting in his goodness and wisdom.  And so the devil tempts us to stop trusting—to do it our own way, to trust (even if it’s just a little) in things that are not Jesus: Caesar, Aphrodite, Mammon.  He tempts us to take shortcuts, rather than waiting on God to supply us with the good.  And every time we miss the mark.  We fall short of true humanity.  Sometimes the mistake is obvious right away.  Sometimes it takes time for the consequences to work themselves out.  But we always miss the mark.  We dishonour our Lord and we dishonour the great sacrifice he has made.  Thank God that Lent reminds us of his mercy and his grace.  Jesus’ blood—like the wine he gives us to drink at his Table—is strong stuff.  It cleanses us from our sins past and it cleanses us from our sins today and in future.  But, Friends, Lent also reminds us to reflect on the nature of true worship as the basis, the ground of true holiness.  The more faithful we are in giving God his due in true worship, in trusting and obeying, the less often we will miss the mark.  And that takes us back to Jesus and the cross.  Jesus reminds of God’s faithfulness—of his goodness, his wisdom, and most of all his trustworthiness.  He is the God who fulfils his promises, he is the God who saves, he is the God who seals us to himself by plunging us into his own Holy Spirit, and when we consider that, we can’t help but conclude that he is truly worthy of our loyalty, our allegiance, and our worship.

Let us pray: Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made and forgive the sins of all who are penitent:  Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of you, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

A Generous Heart

Exodus 25:1-9 & 35:4-9

by William Klock

This morning we’re going to step into the final section of the book of Exodus.  Don’t get me wrong.  This doesn’t mean our sermon series is almost over.  We’re only a little over halfway through the book.  This last section runs from chapter 25 to 40 and it’s dedicated to the building of the tabernacle.  In chapters 25 to 31 we read about the Lord’s instructions to Moses regarding how to build the tabernacle and the things associated with it.  Chapters 32 to 34 are an interlude.  Moses comes down from the mountain carrying the stone tablets and finds the people worshipping around a golden calf.  Barely have they entered into covenant with the Lord and declared, “All this we will do!” and they’ve already fallen into idolatry.  This is followed by the actual construction of the tabernacle according to the instructions given.  We read this in chapters 35 to 40 and most of this final section repeats almost verbatim the instructions given earlier.

Rather than preach on these parallel parts of Exodus separately, I’ve decided to address them together.  So today, for example, we’ll be looking at Exodus 25:1-9 and 35:4-9.  In the first, Moses is given instructions and in the second Moses follows through in giving those instructions to the people.  I may be wrong, but at this point it seems to me the best way to approach the text without being overly repetitive.  That said, I don’t want to suggest that any parts that I may minimise aren’t important.  This is one of the difficulties of approaching the text from such a distance.  As modern people, we lack a connection with the ancient near-eastern world of the Israelites and as Christians we’re also very distant from the covenantal framework of their religious life.  We know it only from reading the Old Testament and I’m willing to bet that most of us, when we read passages like this struggle to grasp their significance.  The golden calf incident is almost a relief to us.  Finally some exciting narrative after all the weird and minute details of the tabernacle.  And that’s if we read it at all.  I’ve lost count of the times someone has told me that they had finally decided to read the Bible through, cover to cover, only to stall out here in the latter half of Exodus.  Up to this point we’ve got the exciting narratives of Genesis: Creation, the Fall, and the stories of the Patriarchs.  Then Exodus: slavery, a burning bush, plagues falling on Egypt, the deliverance at the Red Sea, water from a rock and manna in the wilderness, the familiar Ten Commandments, and then…the tabernacle.

The seemingly weird thing is that all of the excitement of the first half of Exodus—the Passover, the Red Sea, the giving of the law—reaches its climax here in the instructions for and building of the tabernacle.  It’d be like the excitement of Star Wars compressed into an hour, followed by the Death Star exploding in slow motion for the second hour.  But that Exodus does reach its crescendo into this detailed depiction of the Tabernacle—that this is how Israel told her story—should prompt us to pause and ask why.  What’s so important about the tabernacle and in so much detail and why right here at this point in the story?

Well, consider where we left off last week at the end of Chapter 24.  Moses climbed Mt. Sinai.  The Lord descended on the mountain in a cloud and for six days Moses waited and prepared himself.  Finally, on the seventh day, the Lord called to Moses and Moses entered the cloud.  The story is told from the perspective of the Israelites at the base of the mountain.  The cloud wasn’t just a fog.  It wasn’t some white, fluffy, happy-looking cloud.  What they saw on the mountain was a “devouring fire”.  They trembled below, but Moses walked into that devouring fire with confidence—I think—to meet the Lord.  It’s as if the flame he met in the burning bush is now revealing itself in all it’s awesome glory, enveloping the mountain.  A few of the people may have thought that surely Moses was a gonner.  As the days dragged on and turned into weeks, surely more and more of them thought the same.  Forty days Moses was on the mountain, hidden inside the devouring fire.  It’s not hard to imagine the Israelites being overcome by fear.  They cower at a distance, but Moses boldly draws near to God.

The depiction of the tabernacle comes as a counterpoint.  The Lord will draw near to his people and will dwell amongst them.  That’s what the Hebrew word that we translate “tabernacle” means.  It comes from the word “to dwell”.  The King James is helpful in that it uses “tabernacle” as both a verb—describing the action of dwelling—and as a noun—describing the dwelling, the place itself where the Lord will dwell.

The tabernacle becomes a portable Mt. Sinai.  As we’ll see in the chapters that follow, it will have an outer court where the people assembled, an inner “holy place” where the priests will attend to the Lord, and beyond that a “most holy place” or “holy of holies”—an inner sanctum—where no one but the high priest may enter and, then, only once a year.  The ark of the covenant will be placed in the most holy place to serve as the Lord’s footstool.  There his glory will be enthroned, watched over and guarded by two golden cherubim.  It mirrors the mountain as we saw last week.  The people assembled at the base and no one was permitted to touch the holy mountain.  Aaron, his sons, and the elders were called up part-way to meet the Lord, but only Moses was summoned up into the cloud, into the Lord’s immediate presence.

There are two key things going on here.  The first is the covenant relationship between the Lord and his people, the family of Abraham whom he had called long before.  The Creator of the cosmos has entered into a relationship with this people, making them his own and condescending to dwell in their midst as part of his redemptive plan for his creation.

The second element here is the holiness of God.  The Lord is holy.  Yes, he’s going to dwell—to tabernacle—with his people, but he’s not going to set his holiness aside to do it.  How is a holy God to dwell in the midst of sinners?  Or, maybe better, how are sinners to live in the presence of the holy?

This is what the law is for.  Through the torah the Lord will instruct his people how they are to consecrate themselves to him.  There will be purifying washing rituals, there will be special garments, there will be special annointings and more.  The torah will also spell out a host of things meant to protect the people from entering the Lord’s presence unprepared and impure.  The sacrificial system will be the key to this—blood sacrifice will atone for sin, so that the people might live in the presence of the Lord.  So the mountain provided a means of separation.  The Lord was in their midst, but at a distance.  This was for the protection of the people.  The tabernacle will do the same thing.  The main difference is that the tabernacle, as I said, was portable.  Israel wasn’t meant to live forever in the wilderness of Sinai.  The Lord had promised to lead them into his land.  The tabernacle was the means the Lord used to lead and to travel with his people into the land he had promised.  And, of course, once they were in the land and had taken control of it, the same structure could become permanent.  The temple would be built on the same model as the tabernacle.

But there’s more to the tabernacle than that.  The tabernacle ties into redemptive history in other ways and one of the most important is through its symbolism.  In fact, the way the author of Exodus structures his narrative of the building of the tabernacle parallels the account of God’s creative work in Genesis.  The story of Creation gives us a picture of the cosmos as a place in which the Lord would live in the midst of and in fellowship with human beings.  Of course, we all know the story.  Our fellowship was broken because we rebelled.  The unholy cannot live in the presence of the holy and we were cast out of the Lord’s presence.  But here in Exodus, the tabernacle becomes the means of restoring humanity—or least Israel, chosen to be our representatives—to that lost fellowship with the Lord.

This connection is highlighted by the structure of the stories.  In Genesis 1, God creates in seven acts.  Each one begins with, “And God said…”  And here in Exodus the instructions for building the tabernacle are structures into seven acts, each beginning with the words, “And the Lord said…”—25:1, 30:11, 17, 22, 34; 31:1, 12.  The tabernacle is not only a portable Mt. Sinai.  The tabernacle also represents the garden of Genesis, the place the Lord created in which to live with and fellowship with humanity.  Eden and the tabernacle are both filled with gold and precious gemstones.  But, too, as a reminder that even as the Lord tabernacles in the midst of his people, the work of redemption is not fully accomplished, the presence of the Lord is guarded by two cherubim, just as the way back into Eden was guarded by two cherubim.

Drawing even more parallels, the story of creation ended with the statement that on the seventh day, the Sabbath, the Lord rested.  Here in Exodus, the instructions for the tabernacle conclude with a reminder from the Lord that his people are to observe the Sabbath.  Also, when the Lord’s creative work was done we read, “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31).  Just so, when the tabernacle was finished we’re told, “And Moses saw all the work, and behold, they had done it; as the Lord had commanded, so had they done it” (Exodus 39:43a).

But the parallels don’t end with the construction.  The fall—the rebellion of Adam and Eve—follows the creation and the story in Exodus is told in such a way that the episode of the golden calf follows the giving of the instructions for the tabernacle.  And yet as the Lord did not abandon Adam and Eve, neither does he abandon Israel because of her rebellion.  As he clothed Adam and Eve, he clothes Israel—he gives his people the tabernacle.  The golden calf incident falls right between the instructions for the tabernacle and the building of the tabernacle.  He does not abandon his people.  Instead, he provides means of atonement for their sin and dwells in their midst.  The pattern remains or continues and it points to the day when the Lord will finally set humanity and creation to rights and we will live in his presence and know his life.

The pattern of the tabernacle is full of symbolism.  One of the problems, however, is that the text doesn’t tell us what any of that symbolism means.  Much of it certainly drew on the imagery and symbolism of the thought-world the ancient Israelites knew.  It wasn’t necessary to spell it out in detail.  But the New Testament writers explain some of this imagery—often seeing it as types and shadows of what was to come in Jesus.  I’ll try to draw on that as we work through these chapters.

So that’s a sort of general introduction to the tabernacle.  There’s a lot more that could be said, but I think I’ve hit the high points.  Let’s look now at the text itself.  Let’s look at Exodus 25:1-9.

The Lord said to Moses, “Speak to the people of Israel, that they take for me a contribution.  From every man whose heart moves him you shall receive the contribution for me.  And this is the contribution that you shall receive from them: gold, silver, and bronze, blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twined linen, goats’ hair, tanned rams’ skins, goatskins, acacia wood, oil for the lamps, spices for the anointing oil and for the fragrant incense, onyx stones, and stones for setting, for the ephod and for the breastpiece.  And let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst.  Exactly as I show you concerning the pattern of the tabernacle, and of all its furniture, so you shall make it.

 

Exodus 35 gives a longer list of the materials used in building the tabernacle, but the narrator singles out a list of precious and costly items here.  He doesn’t explain the significance of them, but it may be that no explanation is needed.  They were valuable.  These were the sorts of things that would make the tabernacle both beautiful and impressive to behold.

Most of these items have traditionally been associated by Jews and Christians with kings and royalty.  It makes sense that they would be used to construct the house of the Lord.  But I think it’s also important to look at other places in the Bible—especially the Old Testament—where these same materials are noted.  When we do that, we’re again pulled back to the beginning of Genesis.  In the description of Eden we’re told that “the gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there” (Genesis 2:12 NIV).  These costly things that were present in the garden are here in the tabernacle, too.  The tabernacle points us back to the garden, but it also points us forward to future in which the Lord has set his creation to rights.

Being so distant from the world of the Israelites, we may miss why these other materials were so valuable.  The colours of the dyes noted for the yarn and for the skins are amongst the most costly to make.  Indigo and purple dyes were, in the ancient world, made from murex shells.  The Phoenicians were known for this dye.  It took thousands of shells to produce the dye for a single garment.  Similarly, the red dye came from the eggs of insects that are found only on oak trees—again, a tremendous quantity of these tiny and hard-to-harvest eggs went into dying a single garment.  So these were the sorts of things reserved for kings.

And then we’re faced with the obvious question?  Where was all of this going to come from?  None of these are things that slaves living in the wilderness would have had.  But remember back to the last of the Lord’s great signs in Egypt.  When the firstborn of Egypt were killed, the Israelites were sent packing.  The Egyptians not only wanted them gone, but they loaded them down with precious cargo.  The Lord provided.  At the time the people, no doubt, simply thought that they were being enriched by the Egyptians, but now the Lord asks for some of that precious cargo back.

The Lord, in verse 2, tells Moses that these gifts are to come from every man whose heart moves him.  These gifts are to be freely given by the people.  Even though it was the Lord who, in the first place, moved the Egyptians to give the Israelites these precious goods, he doesn’t demand them back.  The people are to give them in response to the Lord, who has promised his people a future in a land filled with milk and honey and who has proved his goodness already.  In Exodus 35:4-9 these precious goods are listed again, but more importantly Moses delivers the Lord’s words to the people.  He says to them:

“This is the thing that the Lord has commanded.  Take from among you a contribution to the Lord.  Whoever is of a generous heart, let him bring the Lord’s contribution… (Exodus 35:4-5)

Brothers and Sisters, apart from a general overview of the tabernacle, this is, I think, the key takeaway from this short passage today.  True worship flows freely from a generous heart.  Again, true worship flows freely from a generous heart.  What does that mean?  It means that true worship is, first and foremost, focused on the Lord.  This can be a struggle for us.  I suppose it’s always been something of a problem.  Jesus did have to warn people not to show their pious deeds before others.  But particularly over the last century in the West, worship has become increasingly focused on the feelings and experience of the worshipper.  It began with the 19th Century Revivalists who, as the Second Great Awakening began to slow down, looked for “means” to keep it going.  The result was that a true moving of the Holy Spirit was quickly transformed into a work of men.  Preachers and musicians turned their focus to means by which they could get people worked up, have a certain experience, and manipulate them into conversion.  And this has, ever since, dominated Evangelicalism to the point that many—maybe even most modern Christians—judge worship based on how it makes them feel.  Feelings become confused with the Spirit.  I’ve heard people say things like, “Hymns quench the Spirit” or “I didn’t feel the Spirit present this morning”.  This is horribly, horribly wrong.

Brothers and Sisters, the Spirit of God is present wherever and whenever Christians gather to worship, whether you feel it or not.  He is in us.  As St. John tells us in his Gospel, the Word became flesh and has dwelt amongst us—has tabernacle in our midst.  Jesus, through the gift of the Spirit, has made us the tabernacle.  The Spirit cannot not be present when Christians gather. His presence with believers is an objective fact.  It’s a fulfilment of God’s promise that extends all the way back to the tabernacle in the Old Testament and if we deny it, we make God a liar.

If you’re not “feeling it” on a Sunday morning, pause and reflect on the truth that the Spirit is with us—and with you—always and everywhere because you are in Christ.  The Lord has shown you his goodness and his faithfulness by plunging you into his own Spirit in your baptism.  Remember what he’s done for you find joy there.  By the death of Jesus he has forgiven your sins and by his resurrection he has delivered you from your slavery to sin and death.  That’s where the feelings come from on our end in worship.  We ought to feel joy and gratitude towards the Lord for what he has done for us.  We ought to feel love for him as we read his word and recall again his mighty deed and his grace and his glory.  There’s certainly something of a cycle.  Our joyful, grateful, and loving worship feeds back to us and strengthens our feelings towards God, but worship starts in God’s goodness and faithfulness towards us and is our heartfelt and generous response to that.  As my friend Johnny likes to say, “The right question to ask after worship isn’t, ‘How did that make me feel?’, but ‘Did I do a good job?’”  In other words, our hearts should be focused on the Lord who has redeemed us and we ought to be asking, “Did I offer him my best in return?”

That’s the lesson here.  Worship is our response to the Lord for what he has done for us.  In his grace, he has given us more than we can ever earn or deserve, and so we offer him back our all freely and generously.  The other lesson here, I think, is that he does not ask of us what he has not already graciously given us.  The Israelites would have had nothing to offer him.  They couldn’t even feed themselves in the wilderness.  But the Lord had provided when they left Egypt.  Some may have wondered, “What am I ever going to do with all this rich stuff?”  And now, having poured out his love and his grace on Israel, the Lord asks for a portion of these gifts to be returned.  Do you see the pattern of worship and giving here?  The Lord makes himself known to his people.  The Lord redeems his people.  The Lord cares for and provides for his people.  Worship becomes the natural response as the Lord’s people seek to reciprocate his love and his grace.  And he provides the abundance from which his people give.  Think of those words of King David that we quote at the Offertory—words he spoke as the people once again gave offerings, this time to build the temple:

Who am I, and what is my people, that we should be able thus to offer willingly?  For all things come from you, and of your own have we given you.  For we are strangers before you and sojourners, as all our fathers were.  Our days on the earth are like a shadow, and there is no abiding.  O Lord our God, all this abundance that we have provided for building you a house for your holy name comes from your hand and is all your own.  (1 Chronicles 29:14-16)

Think on that, Brothers and Sisters, as we worship.  Worship isn’t about us.  Worship is about the Lord.  It’s a response to his goodness and faithfulness to us.  Worship is the product of our love and gratitude towards God pouring out of hearts overwhelmed by his gracious generosity.  There’s a sense in which we will always feel inadequate to the task.  God has given his own Son for our sake and all we can offer is a thank you card of macaroni glued messily on a piece of paper.  Some of our artwork may be better than others, but in end nothing any of us does can compare.  But it doesn’t matter.  That our worship flows generously from grateful hearts and that it is the best we can offer reveals that we have left behind our love of self and all of our old idolatries and that we have taken hold of the living God in faith and have known his salvation.

Let us pray: Almighty God and Father, you have given your Son to die as a sacrifice for our sins and have graciously made us to share in your life by filling us with your own Spirit.  You have given us your word that we might know you and know your goodness and faithfulness.  As you renew our hearts, may we reflect on who you are and what you have done for us and be moved to give you our all and our best, out of gratitude and to give you some measure of the honour and glory you are due.  Strengthen our faith we pray, that we might hold loosely the things you have given, so that we will be more ready to return them to you and to use them in your service, we ask through Jesus our Lord.  Amen.

The Blood of the Covenant

Exodus 24:1-18

by William Klock

In our liturgy of the Lord’s Supper we recall each week Jesus’ words as he shared his last meal with his disciples.  “On the night he was betrayed, our Lord took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, ‘Take, eat; this is my body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me.’  Likewise after supper he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them saying, ‘Drink from this, all of you; for this is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the remission of sins; do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’”

“This is my body” and “This is my blood of the new covenant.”  We’ve heard it a thousand times.  What does it mean?  Something happens when we come to the Table.  The Lord’s Supper does something.  But what?  And how?  Theologians have been arguing over these questions for most of the Church’s history.  One of the most famous of those arguments took place between Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli.  They represented opposing wings of the German Reformation.  In 1529 Philip I summoned them to Marburg in the hopes that they would settle their differences.  Luther and Zwingli reached agreement on fourteen of fifteen articles of faith, but when it came to the Lord’s Supper they were deadlocked.  They both agreed that the bread and wine in the Supper were symbolic, but Luther took that “is” in “this is my body” rather literally.  Jesus’ body and blood is present in, with, and under the species of bread and wine.  Zwingli held that the thing signified was in heaven and there it stayed.  Luther angrily stabbed his finger into his beer and wrote on the table in foam: “Hoc est corpus meum”—“This is my body”—then, in good form, threw a cloth over the words and told Zwingli to pray that God would open his eyes.

Luther’s problem was one that has plagued the Church for over a thousand years.  The idea that Jesus’ body could be with, in, and under the elements of bread and wine was something of a toned-down version of the Roman Church’s belief that while the bread and wine retain their natural outward forms, their inner substance is changed—transubstantiated—into the substance of Jesus’ body and blood.  But this idea doesn’t come from the Bible.  Centuries before, Christians had tried to explain how the Lord’s Supper worked, looking for a way to explain the idea of sacramental union with Jesus, and to do it they latched onto the philosophical language of the Greeks—particularly of Plato and Aristotle.  And just like that, the Lord’s Supper was pulled out of its biblical context.

Luther appealed to the Gospel writers.  Jesus said, “This is my body”.  And so somehow it has to be.  But there was another Father of the Reformation there at Marburg, Johannes Oecolampadius.  He unfortunately didn’t hold the sway of Luther or Zwingli, but he later wrote of that dispute that Luther, not knowing Aramaic, wasn’t aware that that “is” on which he based his whole argument was never spoken by Jesus.  Aramaic doesn’t work that way.  That “is” had to be added by Luke and Mark and Paul when they translated Jesus’ words into Greek, because that’s how Greek works—and Latin and German and English.  Oecolampadius astutely observed that the meaning of those words was not to be found in their grammar, but in their Old Testament context—in the covenant rituals of Israel.[1]

I say all of this because this morning, as we come to Exodus 24, we’re gong to be hit—smack!—in the face with these Old Testament covenant rituals.  Not only that, but we’re going to hear the very words of Moses that Jesus was drawing on when he said of the cup, “This is my blood of the new covenant”.  What we read in Exodus here is tied closely to what we do every Sunday as we come to the Lord’s Table and I want you to keep the Lord’s Supper in mind as we read this passage.  The Book of the Covenant—the stipulations of the covenant between the Lord and his people—has been given.  But it’s not enough to say it.  You have to do it, if you will.  A covenant isn’t a covenant until both of the parties involved have gone through the covenant-making ritual.  That’s what we see here.  Again, Exodus 24:

Then [the Lord]  said to Moses, “Come up to the Lord, you and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel, and worship from afar.  Moses alone shall come near to the Lord, but the others shall not come near, and the people shall not come up with him.”  (Exodus 24:1-2)

Moses has come down the mountain to address the people and now the Lord summons him back up.  This time Aaron’s to come with him, as well as Aaron’s two older sons, and the elders of the people.  The purpose is worship.  The Lord has spoken and worship is the proper response.  But it’s not just worship.  They’re not just going up to pray and to sing “A mighty fortress is our God”.  The sense of the Hebrew word is that of bowing down as a subject would to a king.  Imagine the angels and elders in John’s Revelation, prostrating themselves before the throne of God, casting their crowns at his feet, and singing “Holy, holy, holy”.  The Lord—their Creator who is holy, holy, holy whether they sing it or not—has graciously delivered them from slavery, called them to be his people, and is entering into covenant with them.  The natural response of human beings in that situation is to bow before him in humble awe and adoration.  Not only that, but they’re also being summoned into his presence.  This is the same God who will say in Chapter 33, “Man shall not see me and live”.  Bowing down before him would have been their most natural response.

 

The other thing to notice here is the three-tiered nature of their approach.  Moses alone is summoned to come near to the Lord.  Aaron, his sons, and the elders are to go up to the Lord, but their worship is from afar.  They can’t enter fully into his presence.  And the people themselves, they’re to remain at the bottom of the mountain.  Remember back the Lord’s warning back in Chapter 19: no one was to so much as touch the Lord’s mountain.  To do so meant death.

This is setting up for what comes next.  Most of the rest of Exodus is about the instructions for and building of the tabernacle and what we’ll see is that the tabernacle is like a portable Mt. Sinai.  The people gather at the foot of the mountain—that’s as close as they dare approach the Lord.  Aaron, who will be the high priest in due course, and the elders may climb the mountain, but are not permitted fully into the Lord’s presence.  Only Moses is permitted to approach the summit.  The tabernacle will be structured the same way.  The people may enter the outer court, the priests may enter into the holy place where the sacrifices are made, but only the high priest may enter the holy of holies where the Lord is manifestly present in a cloud of glory.

But before they go up the mountain, the covenant has to be ratified.  Look at verse 3:

Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord and all the rules.  And all the people answered with one voice and said, “All the words that the Lord has spoken we will do.”  And Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord.  (Exodus 3:4a)

“Words” and “rules” refer respectively to the Decalogue—the Ten Words—and the Book of the Covenant.  These are the people’s end of the covenant.  Moses has spoken them and the people respond enthusiastically, “All the words that the Lord has spoken we will do.”  It’s one thing to read about this scene in the text, but imagine the spectacle.  This is a people just freed from slavery and miraculously delivered and cared for in the desert.  They’d collected the Lord’s miracle bread just that morning.  And there he is in the cloud on the top of the mountain.  He’s spoken through Moses.  He’s declared, “I will be your God and you will be my people.”  It had to be an exciting thing to behold and in their excitement the people enthusiastically commit themselves to this covenant with the Lord.  And having done that, Moses commits it all to writing.  That’s what you did with the terms of a covenant.  So that’s the first half: The terms have been given, the people have committed themselves to those terms, and then they’ve been recorded for posterity.  The second half of the covenant ritual begins in the second half of verse 4:

He rose early in the morning and built an altar at the foot of the mountain, and twelve pillars, according to the twelve tribes of Israel.  And he sent young men of the people of Israel, who offered burnt offerings and sacrificed peace offerings of oxen to the Lord.  And Moses took half of the blood and put it in basins, and half of the blood he threw against the altar.  Then he took the Book of the Covenant and read it in the hearing of the people. And they said, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.”  And Moses took the blood and threw it on the people and said, “Behold the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.”  (Exodus 24:4b-8)

The next morning Moses built an altar and erected twelve pillars.  The altar represents the Lord.  The pillars represent the people, all twelve tribes.  We’ve seen this sort of thing before.  Pillars were erected as silent witnesses to covenants.  Jacob and Laban erected a pillar as a witness to their covenant.  The same thing was done at Shechem to witness the covenant between Israel and the Lord.  This day the people were excited and enthusiastic about this covenant with the Lord, but emotions are fickle.  We all know this and it’s why we can be glad that our salvation is not dependent on how we feel about God or our faith on any given day.  Our salvation—just like Israel’s—is founded on the sure and certain promises of God.  He made a promise to you in the waters of the baptismal font.  And on your worst day, when your faith is weak, when you’ve stumbled into sin, when the Lord seems distant, the reason we can be certain of our standing before him, the reason we can fall on our knees and ask him for forgiveness, the reason we can draw near to him, is because our union with him is not rooted in how we feel or what we do, but in his promise and in the covenant he made with us in our baptism.  I picked on Luther earlier, but he was right about most things and one of those things was this.  When he doubted, when his faith was weak, when the attacks of the enemy were strong, he would grab his forehead where the priest had poured the water on him and he would remind himself, “You are baptised!”  Similarly, for the days in future when Israel’s faith would not be so strong, when her service would not be so enthusiastic, these monuments stood to remind the people of both the Lord’s promises and of the commitment they had made to him in faith.  The people could look at those pillars and they would remember the Lord’s covenant with them at Mt. Sinai.  And while Moses built the altar and set up the pillars, he sent the strong young men to round up oxen to offer to the Lord.

Two sorts of sacrifices were made.  The burnt offerings were just that.  The entire animal was burned as an offering to the Lord.  Parts of the peace offerings were burned, but the rest was eaten by the worshippers in a banquet that celebrated the covenant with the Lord.  The blood of the sacrificed oxen was collected by Moses in basins.  This was the usual practise.  Blood symbolised life and life belongs to God and to God alone.  As part of the sacrifice the blood was poured or splashed onto the altar, the life returned to the Lord.  But this one time, Moses splashed only half of it on the Lord’s altar.  Then he turned to the people and read to them again the words of the covenant.  Again, they responded, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.”  And then Moses splashed the other half of the blood on the people.  It’s not clear whether it was the whole crowd—that would be a lot of blood—or just the seventy elders, or as many seem to think, the twelve pillars which stood to represent the people.  Whatever the case, it highlights the Lord bringing the people into his presence.  Genesis depicts the Lord creating human beings from the dust.  It’s an image of our mortality.  In the Lord’s presence we shared in his life and driven out of his presence death became our enemy.  Here at Mt. Sinai Israel returns to the life-giving presence of the Lord.  Here at Sinai, in the blood splashed on the people in this covenant ritual, we’re given hope.  The Lord is setting in motion a plan to destroy death and to bring humanity back into his life-giving presence.  And so Moses declares, “Behold the blood of the covenant.”

Blood has been shed to witness the promises of the Lord and his people.  It’s not the first time.  Going back to Abraham, the sign of the Lord’s covenant was circumcision.  The Lord had promised to elderly, childless Abraham that he would make of him a great people who would bless the nations and so the covenantal sign was the letting of blood from the organ associated with reproduction.  And when the Lord passed over the houses of his people in Egypt, sparing the lives of the firstborn, it was because of the lamb’s blood on the doorposts, once again marking out the people in covenant with the Lord.  Blood is life.  It’s shedding covers sin as a reminder that the wages of sin is death.  And that covering of blood marks out the people of God.

Look now at verses 9-11:

Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up, and they saw the God of Israel.  There was under his feet as it were a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness.  And he did not lay his hand on the chief men of the people of Israel; they beheld God, and ate and drank.

 

The people of Israel feasted to celebrate their covenant with the Lord while Moses and his entourage went up the mountain as the Lord had said.  And on the mountain they see God.  We get a sense of how big a deal this is in that it scandalised later Jews.  The author of Targum Onkelos, when he translated this into Aramaic, changed the wording so that it was the sacrifices that Aaron and the elders saw, not actually the Lord himself.  But it’s right here in the text.  They saw the Lord.  If they hadn’t seen him, it makes no sense that the author makes a point of telling us that the Lord didn’t lay a hand on them.  And yet it seems that seeing him was so overwhelming, all they could do was look at the pavement under his feet.  Even that was glorious—like looking at heaven.  And there in his presence they feasted—they ate and drank to celebrate the covenant that had just been ratified.

Now, we’ll carry on with the rest of the chapter from verse 12:

The Lord said to Moses, “Come up to me on the mountain and wait there, that I may give you the tablets of stone, with the law and the commandment, which I have written for their instruction.”  So Moses rose with his assistant Joshua, and Moses went up into the mountain of God.  And he said to the elders, “Wait here for us until we return to you. And behold, Aaron and Hur are with you. Whoever has a dispute, let him go to them.”

  Then Moses went up on the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain.  The glory of the Lord dwelt on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days. And on the seventh day he called to Moses out of the midst of the cloud.  Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel.  Moses entered the cloud and went up on the mountain.  And Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights.

 

The Lord, for his part of the covenant, inscribes the terms of the covenant on stone tablets.  Moses wrote it on parchment or papyrus on behalf of the people, but the Lord carves it forever on stone.  It foreshadows how the relationship will go between the Lord and his people.  Moses and Joshua leave the elders midway up the mountain and proceed to the summit where they wait for six days in preparation.  On the seventh the Lord calls Moses into the cloud where he stays for forty day and nights.  The narrator gives us this image from the perspective of the people.  They saw the Lord’s presence on the mountain like a devouring fire.  They quaked in fear as they saw Moses disappear into it.  We’re told nothing of how Moses felt—whether he was apprehensive, scared, joyful—I expect a little of all that.  He went in prepared, but the narrator sets things up for Moses’ emergence forty days later.  The people assumed he was done for after all that time in the devouring fire, but that’s another sermon.

Now, what does this mean for us?  Well, again, consider that this is the scene that Jesus was drawing on, that he was recalling to the minds of his disciples as he handed them the cup of wine in that last supper and said to them, “This is my blood of the new covenant”.  In the book he published last Fall on the Lord’s Supper, our brother Matt Colvin, noted that the Jews saw an organic connection in the blood of the covenant, from circumcision, to the blood of the Passover lambs painted on the doorposts, to the blood sprinkled on the altar and the people at Mt. Sinai.[2]  The blood of the covenant was what marked out the people of God with his promise, but it was also recalled year after year as the people participated in the Passover down through the generations.  A thousand years later, God’s people who had never known Egypt and had never been to Sinai, would participate in those events as they ate the Passover meal with their families, knowing that the blood of the covenant marked them out just as much as it had their ancestors.  And in that meal they looked forward to the day when the Lord, in his eternal faithfulness, would fulfil the terms of his covenant.  This is why we see the prophets so often looking forward to a great feast in the future, a wedding banquet on the day when the Lord would return to finally set all to rights.

Note how Passover worked.  It was a meal.  A ritual meal, but a meal nonetheless.  The lamb, the bread, the wine were all laden with symbolism, but they were still just lamb and bread and wine.  The Passover did its thing through the retelling of the story of the Lord’s deliverance and through the people sharing in, participating in that meal—even the little children, whether they fully understood or not.  They participated in the meal the Lord had given them and in that they participated in the events that had made them the Lord’s people.

And in the last supper, as Jesus picked up the bread and as he passed the cup of wine to his friends, he knew they were laden with all of that meaning.  The disciples knew it all and they’d just recalled it all for themselves that night.  And then Jesus said, “This is my blood of the new covenant”.  He was preparing them for his death the next day.  Blood would be shed once again and in that blood a new covenant would be ratified.  And so Jesus told them to celebrate—to eat—this new ritual meal until his coming again, until the day when he returns to fulfil the covenant and to set all to rights. We eat it until them and each time we recall and participate in the events of his death and resurrection.  Each time we are reminded that through our baptism we have been called into covenant with the Lord and that his promises to us—promises of forgiveness and new life—have been ratified by the blood of Jesus, by the sacrifice of the very Son of God.  As we recall in the liturgy, he “made there, by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.”

Brothers and Sisters, the point of the Lord’s Supper is not for us to find assurance by looking for Jesus “really present” in the bread and wine in some way defined by Greek philosophy.  Nor do we come to find assurance as if the Lord’s Supper were an “edible flashcard” as Matt insightfully describes what it has become in many Protestant circles—where we make our way through a series of introspective intellectual steps as we come to the Table—steps which have ended up excluding the children of the covenant.  Brothers and Sisters, we come to the Table and we receive God’s assurance as we participate in the covenant meal Jesus has given us.  We come.  We eat.  We drink.  We recall our baptism and the promise the Lord presented to us in the waters: I will be your God and you will be my people.  And we participate in the events by which the covenant was ratified by Jesus, his body broken and his blood shed for us.  Here he sprinkles us once again with his blood and we leave in assurance—his people, forgiven of sin; his people, plunged into God’s own Spirit; his people, bound together as one; his people, living in a joyful hope of the day when sin and death are vanquished forever.  Come to the Table this morning.  Remember the promises of God.  Know his faithfulness as you participate once again in the death and resurrection of Jesus which made those promises sure and certain, and then sing the words of the Gloria in thankfulness and in faith-fill hope: Glory to God, Glory to God, Glory to God in highest.  Amen.

[1] I’m indebted to Matthew Colvin for pointing this out in his book, The Lost Supper: Revisiting Passover and the Origins of the Eucharist (New York: Fortress, 2019), 29.

[2] Ibid., 79.

I send an angel before you

Exodus 23:20-33

by William Klock

 

Friday night, just as we were getting ready for bed, we got a call from Alexandra, asking one of us to pick her up at work.  The convertible Mustang she bought in December has a leak somewhere that we haven’t had a chance to locate and, we’ve discovered, when it gets damp inside, the electrics go haywire.  On Friday the dome lights wouldn’t turn off.  I decided to drive the car home so that we could get it out of the rain and into the garage.  I could quickly see why Alexandra didn’t want to drive it home.  It was dark and pouring rain.  The windows were fogged up from the damp and the dome lights wouldn’t turn off.  I couldn’t help but think of this passage from Exodus 23 that’s been in front of me all week.  “Lord, I could use an angel leading the way home—or maybe a pillar of fire lighting the way.”  His answer to prayer was less spectacular, but no less welcome: by the time I was halfway out of the Kingfisher parking lot the issue had resolved and the dome lights when out.

Let’s look at Exodus again.  Chapter 23, verses 20 and 21.  The Lord speaks to his people:

“Behold, I send an angel before you to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared.  Pay careful attention to him and obey his voice; do not rebel against him, for he will not pardon your transgression, for my name is in him.

 

This second half of Chapter 23 is something of an epilogue to the Book of the Covenant.  The Lord has said, “I will be your God and you will be my people.”  He’s shown them what that looks like.  Now he tells them what he’s going to do.  He’s entered into a covenant with them and they with him.  And now he makes them a covenant promise, which is followed up by an explanation of what the Lord expects of his people.  The Lord will do his part and here’s how Israel is to respond.  The Lord says that he will send an “angel” to bring Israel into the land he has prepared and that the angel will guide them safely there.

From Mt. Sinai the angel will lead the people into Canaan.  I think we forget this.  When we think of “The Exodus” what’s often at the forefront of our minds is the forty years of wandering in the wilderness.  But, remember, that forty-year delay came as a result of Israel’s rebellion.  They were not permitted to enter the promised land and so the Lord led them in the wilderness until the rebellious generation that he had rescued from Egypt had died and then he led their children into the land.  But at this point the rebellion hadn’t yet happened.  The Lord was preparing the people to enter sometime soon.  And this angel would lead them.  Who or what is the angel?  That’s a good question and the answers fall all over the map.

We’ve met this “angel of the Lord” before in the story of God’s people.  This angel walked before Abraham and his descendants.  While the angel isn’t mentioned specifically at Abraham’s call to leave Ur, I suspect that this is who spoke to him.  I suspect it was this angel who visited Abraham to tell him Sarah would bear a son.  It was the angel of the Lord who stayed Abraham’s hand as he was about to sacrifice Isaac..  It was this angel who guided Abraham’s servant to Rebekah.  It was the angel who met the run-away Hagar in the wilderness.  It was this angel who guided Jacob and, perhaps, with whom he wrestled that night at the Jabok.  It was this angel who met Moses at the burning bush.  And it was this angel who was there at the Red Sea, first leading the people and then moving behind to guard them as Pharaoh’s army approached.

The angel was present with the fire in the bush.  The angel was present with the cloud and the flame that led Israel’s way out of Egypt.  But the angel is also distinct from these manifestations of God’s presence.  As the Lord’s messenger, the angel is distinct from him as well, but at the same time speaks for the Lord, is received as the Lord, and is obeyed as the Lord.  Look at verse 22:

“But if you carefully obey his voice and do all that I say, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries.

 

“Obey his voice” and “do all that I say”.  That the angel is identified as the Lord and at the same time as distinct from the Lord, is what led some of the Fathers, like Tertullian and Augustine, to identify him with the pre-incarnate Christ.  I think, however, that the point is that the angel represents the presence of God with his people and will later be replaced by the ark of the covenant.  The cloud will remain as a visible representation of the Lord’s presence, but the character, if you will, invested with the Lord’s authority, that which will go into battle before the people, for example, will be the ark—taking the place of the angel.  In Ancient Near Eastern thought, what belonged to a god represented that god.  So, for example, while everyone knew that an idol in a temple wasn’t actually the god itself, but they treated it as if it was: feeding it, praying to it, even listening to it and obeying it.  The cloud, the ark, and the angel all represent the Lord in a similar way.  Through them he acts, he guides, he guards, he speaks and since the people know that it’s him, they obey.  And what the Lord speaks to them now is a promise:  I will prepare the way before you and take you to the land I have prepared for you.  And, in response, the people are expected to obey him.

Notice the key point here: The Lord is not merely with his people.  No.  The Lord goes before them.  He leads them.  The Lord doesn’t get up and follow whenever Israel decides to move on.  No.  In Numbers 14 we see what happened when the Israelites moved first.  They attacked the Amalekites and Canaanites without the ark leading the way.  They lost the battle.  It is the Lord who leads.  He led them out of Egypt with the angel and the cloud ahead of the people.  He will lead them across the Jordan and into Canaan with the cloud and with the ark going ahead.  The Lord leads; his people follow.

Now, beginning in verse 23 the Lord gives a second promise and it, too, is followed with a command.  This one’s longer.

“When my angel goes before you and brings you to the Amorites and the Hittites and the Perizzites and the Canaanites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, and I blot them out, you shall not bow down to their gods nor serve them, nor do as they do, but you shall utterly overthrow them and break their pillars in pieces.  You shall serve the Lord your God, and he will bless your bread and your water, and I will take sickness away from among you.  None shall miscarry or be barren in your land; I will fulfill the number of your days.  (Exodus 23:23-26

 

The Lord, represented by his angel, will go before the people and bring them into this land.  At present it’s filled with all the wrong “ites”—the Hittites and Amorites and Perizzites—but the Lord will “blot them out”.  The Lord will blot them out on behalf of the Israelites.  The Lord will take care of removing the people currently in the land.  What Israel needs to take care of is eliminating every trace of their idolatry.  Israel is to serve the Lord and him alone.  She is to tear down and to break in pieces the “pillars”—the monuments associated with the worship of those pagan gods—and to leave none standing.  The Canaanites prayed to these pagan gods for blessings and for fertility and for long life, but the Lord wants his people to look to him and him alone for these things.  Every trace of the pagan gods is to be destroyed.  This is the land that the Lord has set apart for himself and into which he is inviting his people.  And when the nations look at Israel, the Lord wants them to see a microcosm of creation and humanity set to rights.  That begins with a people wholly devoted to the Creator.

In verse 27 the Lord’s promise continues:

 

I will send my terror before you and will throw into confusion all the people against whom you shall come, and I will make all your enemies turn their backs to you.  And I will send hornets before you, which shall drive out the Hivites, the Canaanites, and the Hittites from before you.  I will not drive them out from before you in one year, lest the land become desolate and the wild beasts multiply against you.  Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased and possess the land.  And I will set your border from the Red Sea to the Sea of the Philistines, and from the wilderness to the Euphrates, for I will give the inhabitants of the land into your hand, and you shall drive them out before you. (Exodus 23:27-31)

How will the Lord drive the people from his land?  He will send his terror before the Israelites.  He will throw the people into confusion.  He will cause the people to run in fear.  In Hebrew it says that the Lord will send a hornet—singular—before them.  Some commentators think this is a reference to a plague—like frogs or gnats or hail that the Lord visited on the Egyptians, he’ll send a plague of hornets before the Israelites to drive out the Canaanites.  But the meaning of the word isn’t clear.  It’s only used three times in the Old Testament—always in relation to the conquest of Canaan—and I think it’s better seen as a parallel to “terror”.  Arabic still, today, uses “hornet” to describe a dread inspired by holy war and that seems to be the sense here.  The Israelites are marching on the land in the Lord’s name and dread will fall on the Canaanites and the dread itself will drive them out.  In other words, while the Israelites will be the Lord’s instrument, they must never forget that it is he who does this.  There is no better example than their first “battle” at Jericho.  The Israelites carried the ark ahead of them, announcing that the Lord had come, but for their part, what the Israelites did was strategically pointless.  They marched in circles around the city blowing trumpets.  It’s not hard to imagine the people of Jericho standing on the wall and laughing at them.  Until the walls fell down.  And whom did the people of Jericho fear?  Not the Israelites so much as their God.  The Israelites had done nothing.  Their God had done it all.  And so a plague of dread would spread through the land.  Where the ark and the cloud went ahead, the Canaanites fled in fear.

Of course, the Lord won’t do this all at once.  The Israelites didn’t have the means or the numbers to fill and subdue the land overnight.  Were the Lord to drive off every last Canaanite before Israel arrived, the cities would rot, thorns would overcome the fields, and wild animals would overrun the land.  But as the people increased in number and had the resources to improve on the land, the Lord would gradually drive the Canaanites from it.

One point that’s interesting is the borders described by the Lord.  What they describe is a land from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and from Wadi el-Arish in the southwest to the Euphrates in the North.  Now, the fact is that Israel never reached those borders—not in the north.  At Israel’s height, the Orontes River in what’s now Syria was the northern limit of her influence, if not her control.  For a short time Solomon extended his reach all the way to the Euphrates, but it’s not clear that he had any meaningful rule over the far north—especially not since we’re told that Rezon, the king or ruler of Damascus up in that region, was a constant thorn in Solomon’s side.  Even that aside, Israel never drove out the natives in north and never tore down their pagan altars.

So why would the Lord promise Israel borders she would never have?  I suspect for the same reason that he maked the idealised promise back in verses 25 and 26—a promise that he would take sickness from them and that none would miscarry or be barren.  That didn’t happen either.  The Lord certainly blessed the land and his people in it, but the promise seems like hyperbole.  Why would the Lord do that?

Well, I think the Lord’s purpose was to point his people to a fulfilment that lay beyond earthly kings like Solomon and earthly geography like the land of Israel.  This is a promise that was never fully fulfilled in the Old Testament even under the great kings, David and Solomon.  And as plentiful as the land may have been, flowing with milk and honey, the people still knew the effects of humanity’s separation from the life of God.  The ultimate rule of the Lord over the nations and an end of sickness and death were not something that would ever be accomplished by an earthly king or by a holy war.  And so, hundreds of years later, the prophets could appeal to these idealised promises and point God’s people to a future in which the Lord himself would come to conquer sin and death and to establish a kingdom that would encompass all of creation.

So these seemingly unfulfilled promises do not mean that God got it wrong or that he failed to do what he said.  These unfulfilled promises point to something bigger and better than the covenant established at Sinai, to a people bigger and better than the biological children of Abraham, and to a mediator far greater than any Moses or David.  They point to the Messiah.

Then the final verses of the passage, 32-33, ominously foreshadow the failure of the people.  They reiterate the importance that the Lord’s people serve and worship him and him alone:

 

You shall make no covenant with them and their gods.  They shall not dwell in your land, lest they make you sin against me; for if you serve their gods, it will surely be a snare to you.”

 

The Lord will purge the land of its pagan inhabitants, but it’s up to Israel to purge the land of the remnants of their pagan worship.  This land is the Lord’s land.  He’s bringing Israel in as tenants, so to speak, that they might serve him.  And woe to any of the Lord’s people who bring other gods into the Lord’s house.

As I began to look ahead at this passage a couple of weeks ago, what came immediately to mind was Jesus’ cleansing of the temple.  It helps that the Greek word meaning “drive out” is used both by Mark to describe Jesus’ action with the whip and, in the Septuagint, the Lord’s terror driving out the Canaanite.  Jesus’ cleansing of the temple was an acted-out prophecy that works on multiple levels.  As he disrupted the business of the temple, he sent a message that the temple’s days were numbered.  A better temple was coming.  But on another level, Jesus was re-enacting the Lord’s purging of an unholy people from the sacred precincts of his land.  It wasn’t just the temple that had become a den of thieves.  The Lord’s people had made the whole land into a den of thieves and judgement was coming.  Finally, the work that Israel had never fully accomplished would be done by Jesus, the Lord himself come to embody and to renew his people.

Israel had a heart problem.  The Lord called his people to hear and to obey, to love and to serve.  He gave to his people every reason to trust and obey him.  He rescued them from Egypt, he cared for them in the wilderness, he drove the Canaanites before them and gave them a land of plenty.  He gave them cities to live in that they had not built and fields and vineyards to harvest that they had not planted.  But Israel failed.  Israel failed because she had the same heart problem that the rest of the human race has, the same heart problem that separates us from God and from his life-giving presence.

To address, to fix that problem once and for all, Jesus came to save and to judge.  Brothers and Sisters, the angel of the Lord is still with God’s people.  I don’t know if Tertullian and Augustine were right that the angel of the Lord was the pre-incarnate Christ, but the fact is that Jesus now fulfils the role of the angel for the people of God.  He guides and he guards and we hear and obey, not because we’re better than those who went before us, but because Jesus has dealt with the problem of our self-centred and rebellious hearts by pouring God’s Spirit into us.  He’s made us the new temple.  He’s made us the new land.  And we carry it with us as we go out into the world in his name with the good news that he is Lord.

Consider what that means.  Some Christians like to say things like, “God is my co-pilot”.  But does that describe the relationship between Israel and the Lord?  The image the Scriptures give us is just the opposite.  Co-pilots are just along for the ride, ready to take over if the pilot needs a break.  When Israel flew the plane, it crashed—so to speak.  Brothers and Sisters, the Lord is the pilot.  He leads the way.  I’m not even sure we can call ourselves the co-pilots.  We’re the passengers in the cabin, going where he takes us.  It might be more accurate to say that this is a military plane and we’re the troops he’s taking into battle.  Of course, the analogy breaks down there, because unlike an airplane pilot who stays with the plane, our pilot will stay with us, will go ahead of us even as we leave the plane and go into battle.

And we can take comfort and have courage as we go into the battle, as we charge into the world with the gospel.  When he died on the cross and rose from the grave, he conquered our greatest enemies: sin and death.  Jesus is not weak.  He isn’t going to stand by us, powerless to act.  He is already the victor who has conquered our greatest enemies.

Friends, that ought to give us comfort and courage.  I know it’s hard to grasp.  I think it takes a lifetime of walking in faith for the full implications to sink in and to truly know what it means.  But walk in faith we must.  Listen as you walk.  Steep yourselves in the Scriptures.  We can never trust and obey if we don’t, because it’s in the Scriptures that Jesus, the word, speaks.  And it’s in the Scriptures that he reminds us of the Lord’s faithfulness to do what he has promised.  And he has filled us with his Spirit in fulfilment of those promises, so that our hearts are turned towards him.  As he promised his people in the Old Testament, he promises to his people in the New: I go before you to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared.

Let’s pray: Gracious Father, you go before your people as you have always done.  Teach us to follow.  Hold us back when we’re tempted to try to take the lead.  Keep our eyes always focused on Jesus that we might walk where he walks and hold onto our sure and certain hope of the life of his kingdom.  Remind us to immerse ourselves in your word that we might hear you speak.  And work in our heart by your Spirit that we might love what you love and follow Jesus’s leading eagerly and with joy and courage.  We ask this in his name.  Amen.

The Lord will Come to His Temple

Micah 3:1-5 & St. Luke 2:22-40

by William Klock

One of the things that strikes us as we read the story of the Lord and his people in the Bible is the stark and often discouraging contrast between expectation and reality.  On the one hand we have amazing scenes of creation and deliverance by the Lord, we see a joyful people gathering in his presence to hear him speak, to receive his instruction, and to go off in hope and faithfulness.  The Lord saves Israel from Egypt, he brings them to his mountain, his voice rumbles down, “I will be your God and you will be my people.”  He establishes a covenant with them and they cry out, “All of this we will do!”  And five minutes later they’re worshipping a gold calf and whining about how tough life now that they’re no longer slaves in Egypt.

But it was this way in the beginning.  The Lord created human beings to live in his presence, to know his life, to be his stewards in Creation.  And then we fell to the first con to come along.  His goodness was all around us.  Our very existence shouted of the goodness of God.  But we doubted him and foolishly tried to become gods ourselves.  It’s the human predicament.  It was through Israel that the Lord embarked on his venture to deliver us from our rebellion and to set his creation to rights.  And so you might think that Israel would do better than everyone else.  You might.  But you’d be wrong.  Israel, it turns out, is just like the rest of humanity and fails miserably.  Abraham and his children were to a be light to the Gentiles, but Abraham lied to his Gentile neighbours and was caught.  Isaac did the same.  Jacob…well…sometimes it seems like Jacob did everything wrong.  But the Lord delivered Jacob’s descendants from Egypt.  But hardly had he done so than they grumbled and fell to idolatry.  Friends, that’s Israel’s story.  Over and over the people failed to fulfil their end of the covenant.  They sinned, they oppressed the poor, the priests were corrupt, they made alliances with their pagan neighbours, they practised idolatry.  The Lord visited them with his discipline.  The people repented and were restored.  And the cycle would begin all over again.  Over and over and over.  All to highlight that the human heart is horribly broken, filled with sinful and rebellious desires.  And to point us to the need for a Saviour who can take our rebellious hearts and, from the inside out, turn them back to our Creator, emptying out the hatred and filling them with love.

Israel went from bad to worse and then to worst.  And yet through it all there was a remnant—always a remnant—who knew their own heart problem and who longed for the day when the Lord would come, himself, to set it right.  That remnant is, maybe, best seen in the Old Testament prophets who spoke for Lord in Israel’s darkest days, speaking to rebellious kings and people who didn’t want to hear it.  Prophets who, like Jeremiah, were persecuted for remaining faithful to the Lord.

Malachi was such a prophet.  We know nothing of his personal life.  We don’t know how he was received.  We don’t even really know for certain if “Malachi” was his name or just a title.  It means “my messenger”.  But Malachi stepped to the fore of Israel’s story and spoke the word of the Lord in dark days.  He was a contemporary of Ezra and Nehemiah, probably speaking a few short years before they began their project of reformation.  He prepared the way.

In Malachi’s day, the people of Judah had returned to the land from their exile in Babylon.  Jerusalem and the land around it were in ruins.  The returnees had rebuilt the temple seventy years before.  It wasn’t like the old temple.  It was smaller and it wasn’t very fancy, but it was the temple and it stood in the middle of the ruins of Jerusalem.  The people had high hopes when they returned.  Rebuilding the temple was just the first phase of rebuilding the kingdom.  Soon it would be great again, as it was back in the days of King David.  The people were excited.  They were filled with faith and hope.  But none of that ever happened.  The presence of the Lord—the cloud of glory that had rested on the ark in the most holy place of the old temple—the Lord’s presence never returned to the new temple.  Jerusalem remained a ruin.  The people struggled to even build a wall around it for their own protection.  The little piece of land they had was barely thirty by forty kilometres.  And gradually, over the decades, the hope of the people failed.  Their religious zeal waned.  They went through the motions of sacrifice, but they brought the Lord their second-best and their left-overs.  They stopped tithing.  And the priests, already tightening their belts as a result and afraid of offending, compromised with the people rather than calling them to renewed faithfulness.  The people took advantage of widows, orphans, and sojourners and the priests took advantage of the people.  The one bright spot is that they had finally set idolatry aside.  They worshipped only the Lord.  But they did so half-heartedly.

Through Malachi the Lord spoke:

Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts.  (Malachi 3:1)

The Lord calls his people to faithfulness.  He will visit his people.  At the heart of their discouragement was the temple to which the Lord had never returned.  But the Lord promises he will come.  The “messenger” of the covenant in which they delight, he will come.  I’m not sure if this bit about delighting in the covenant was said with tongue in cheek or it may be that the Lord is pointing out that as much as these people love the covenant, they love it in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons.  In verses 2-4 he says:

But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, and they will bring offerings in righteousness to the Lord. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord as in the days of old and as in former years.

 

Everyone wants the Lord to come and set things to rights.  But everyone forgets that we’re all a part of the problem.  We think it’s the other guy—and it is—but it’s just as much us, too.  The Lord will come, but it won’t be what these rebellious, corrupt, thieving, half-hearted-in-worship people think.  The Lord will come, but not to judge the Gentiles.  The Lord will come in judgement to purify his own.  Malachi gives us a series of vivid images.  The first is of silver in the crucible, heated until molten and then heated some more until the dross has been burned away and the silver purified.  The second image is that of a fuller processing and cleaning cloth.  In Malachi’s day clothes were soaked in a mixture of caustic lye and then vigorously scrubbed and beaten to remove the dirt.  This isn’t the coming the people expected, but it’s the coming they need—to purge the dross, to purge the sin, to purge the rebellion so that they can be drawn back to the Lord.  Only after being purified will the people be pleasing to the Lord.

The Church gives us this reading for the Epistle on Candlemass, the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple and the Purification of the Virgin Mary.  Before we read the Gospel, we’re taken back to those dark days when the people cried out to the Lord and when he promised to visit them—not just to save, but also to judge and to purify.  Why?  Well, the key lies in verse 2, where the Lord says, “the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple”.

It’s hard to imagine that St. Luke didn’t have Malachi’s promise in mind when he wrote the words in our Gospel, in Luke 2:22-24.

And when the time came for their purification according to the Law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it is written in the Law of the Lord, “Every male who first opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord”) and to offer a sacrifice according to what is said in the Law of the Lord, “a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons.”

 

The torah stipulated that after the birth of a son, a woman was unclean for seven days.  She was then confined for thirty-three days.  When the forty days were over she was to travel to Jerusalem, to the temple, to offer a lamb and a turtledove.  The lamb was a burnt offering—an expression of thanks—and the turtledove a sin offering.  If she could not afford a lamb, two turtledoves would suffice, which is what Luke says Mary offered.  She and Joseph, while not destitute, were among that class of people known as “poor”.  This was also the time when Jesus was presented to the Lord in obedience to the torah.  As we’ve read recently in Exodus, the firstborn belonged to the Lord.  The firstborn of clean animals were to be sacrificed.  Firstborn sons were to be bought back—to be redeemed—with the payment of five shekels.  And so the baby Jesus, just forty days old, having been circumcised as Luke notes in the preceding verses, was brought to the temple and presented to the Lord.

And in this act of faithfulness on the part of Joseph and Mary, the promises of God through the prophet Malachi were fulfilled.  The Lord has come to his temple.  And, as it turns out, it was “sudden”.  No one expected him to come that day.  In fact, after he had been carried away by his parents, almost no one knew.  But God’s promises were confirmed that day by two witnesses.  Look at verse 25:

Now there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him.  And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ.  And he came in the Spirit into the temple, and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him according to the custom of the Law, he took him up in his arms and blessed God…

 

Even in Israel’s darkest days, there was always a faithful remnant.  In Luke’s Gospel we first meet Mary’s cousin, Elizabeth and her husband, Zechariah—the parents of John the Baptist.  Then we meet Joseph and Mary.  Now we meet Simeon.  This old man knew the promises of God and had never lost hope.  That day, the Spirit moved him and, in faith, he went to the temple and saw Mary and Joseph there to present their little boy to the Lord.  Luke echoes Malachi as he tells us that Jesus came to the temple.  In describing Simeon he echoes Isaiah, who said, “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me” (61:1).  In Simeon’s case, the Holy Spirit had revealed to him that before he died he would see the Christ, the Messiah.

Mary and Joseph, obedient to the word and Simeon, obedient to the Spirit, converge on the temple and, as a result, something wonderful happens.  When Simeon sees Jesus he bursts into song:

“Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace,

         according to your word;

for my eyes have seen your salvation

         that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,

a light for revelation to the Gentiles,

         and for glory to your people Israel.” (Luke 2:30-32)

As Luke’s description of Simeon is rooted in the language of Isaiah, so is Simeon’s song.  And yet Simeon brings Isaiah’s hope into the present.  He had been promised that he would see the Messiah before he died and so he says with absolute certainty: “My eyes have seen your salvation”.  In praise he tells the world that he can now depart in peace.  That “now” is loaded with significance.  Simeon is saying that “Today’s the day.  Salvation has come.  Not tomorrow, not next month, not next year…salvation has come this day and now I can depart in peace; I can depart full of shalom.  Simeon’s Spirit-given task—and it seems it was a life-long one—was to watch and wait like a sentry for the coming of the Lord to his people.  Through long, dark years he waited.  He knew the oppression of the Lord’s people by the Romans and by Herod.  He knew the corruption of much of the priesthood.  He knew the half-hearted religion of the people around him.  Not much had changed since the days of Malachi.  But this day, as he stood watch, he saw the light dawn in the darkness and he knew that the darkness would not overcome it.  That day he was discharged from his duty.  His song is a sigh of relief, tired after years of watch, but full of joy, knowing that the Lord is faithful.

One of the many remarkable things about Simeon is that he has a much deeper understanding of the promises God had made through prophets like Isaiah.  Most of the Jews were looking for a national deliverer—one who would re-establish David’s kingdom and set the Jews over their gentile oppressors.  And as much as Simeon lived in hope of Israel’s consolation, the salvation he sees in this little boy, Jesus, he says, has been sent into the “presence of all peoples”.  Yes, he has come for the glory of Israel, but he is Israel’s glory because he is a light for revelation to everyone else.  Simeon was one of the few who understood Israel’s mission, going all the way back to Abraham.  They weren’t to be the rulers or overlords of the gentiles.  They were to be a blessing to them as they manifested God’s light.  And here comes that light, incarnate in the Son of Mary, ready to represent Israel as God’s salvation is brought to all the peoples.

Luke tells us that Mary and Joseph marvelled at Simeon’s words and that Simeon blessed them, which would have been a natural response on meeting the parents of the Saviour.  But then, after his joyful proclamation, Simeon speaks more sombre words to Joseph and Mary:

“Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed (and a sword will pierce through your own soul also), so that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.”(Luke 2:34b-35)

In his song, Simeon had said that Israel’s consolation, her glory, would be a light to all peoples and if that’s true, it means that this child come to deliver is also going to bring conflict and crisis.  Through Isaiah God had said on one hand:

See, I lay a stone in Zion,

         a tested stone,

a precious cornerstone for a sure foundation;

         the one who trusts will never be dismayed. (Isaiah 28:13, 16)

But on the other hand he had said of that same stone, also through Isaiah:

[H]e will be a sanctuary;

         but for both houses of Israel he will be

a stone that causes men to stumble

         and a rock that makes them fall. 

And for the people of Jerusalem he will be

         a trap and a snare. (Isaiah 18:14-15)

As Malachi had warned: the coming of the Lord will not be what you expect.  The Messiah, will lay bare the thoughts, the motives, the hearts of many.  He hasn’t come simply as the Saviour; he has also come as Judge.  There will be many, like Joseph and Mary and like Simeon whose faith will be built on the foundation of this stone, but many others—those looking for a Messiah to overthrow the Romans or the Herodians, those looking for a Messiah who will be connected with the earthly temple, those looking for one who will come in violence rather than peace; those looking for a Messiah to give them earthly power and authority—for all of them this stone will be a stumbling block.  And so while Simeon rejoices at the salvation that has come in Jesus, he also reminds Joseph and Mary that this baby will also bring conflict and that he will be rejected by many.  It will be as though a sword has pierced her soul—maybe a reference to the grief she will know at his execution, but almost certainly referring to the division he will cause and the rejection he will experience.  Again, the Lord’s coming will not be what most expected.

There was another witness that day as the Lord came to his temple.  Look at verses 36-38:

And there was a prophetess, Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher.  She was advanced in years, having lived with her husband seven years from when she was a virgin, and then as a widow until she was eighty-four.  She did not depart from the temple, worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day.  And coming up at that very hour she began to give thanks to God and to speak of him to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem.

 

The credentials of all these witnesses are important, and so Luke actually takes more time to tell us who Anna is than he does what she said.  He wants to make sure we know that she’s qualified to witness the Lord’s coming in this little baby.

Anna embodies the ideal of a pious and holy woman.  In fact, Luke draws on the language used to describe Judith.  If Anna had been married seven years and then widowed for 84—which probably represents a better reading of the Greek text[1]—and had been married at the usual age of 14, she would be 105 years old—the age at which Judith was said to have died (Judith 16:23).  To remain a widow for so many years, never remarrying, echoed Judith too and was held up as a pious ideal.  And like the great hero, Judith, Anna is devoted to the temple and to fasting and prayer.  And yet fasting in that day was a sign of mourning.  For someone to fast meant that something was wrong.  And so Anna’s abstinence—both her remaining a widow and her fasting—express her hope.  Like Simeon, she was living in hope and expectation of the coming of Israel’s consolation—or as she puts it, “the redemption of Jerusalem”—and she spent her time fasting and praying, asking God to send his deliverer and to set right all the things that were wrong.  And yet here, as the Spirit brings her to meet Jesus, like Simeon, she bursts forth into praise as well.  Luke doesn’t tell us what she says, but it doesn’t matter; the point is that she recognised Jesus as the promised Messiah.  Her praise certified his identity just as Simeon’s did.  Candlemas is the end of the Christmas and Epiphany season and with Simeon and Anna in mind, we could sing “Joy to the word, the Lord is come!” today just as easily as on Christmas Day.

Brothers and Sisters, Joseph and Mary and Simeon and Anna serve as reminders to us that as God’s plans unfold, our response should be one of joy—a joy that leads to faith and a faith that leads to submission and obedience.  God’s purposes will be accomplished no matter how we respond.  And that’s where the danger lies.  This is why Simeon foresaw conflict and crisis in Jesus’ ministry.  What the Jews wanted and expected wasn’t the same as what God wanted or expected of them.  This had been the problem since the beginning.  God promises us his perfect goodness, but we don’t trust him and we instead go off seeking what we think is good and we fall into sin.  God had wanted for the Jews to manifest his glory to the world, but for much of their history, his glory was manifested not in his blessing them, but in his disciplining them for their refusal to follow him in faith.  Jesus brought this conflict to its height as he called men and women away from their misplaced sources of hope; he called them away from power and authority, from pride and from money, and called them into a kingdom not of this earth and promised to create a temple not made with hands.  And for disrupting the power-base of those who insisted on their own wants and expectations, Jesus was crucified.  And yet even the cross was part of God’s sovereign plan.  Today it stands as a foundation stone of redemption for many and a stumbling block of condemnation for many more.  It points us back to Joseph and Mary, to Zechariah and Elizabeth, and to Simeon and Anna and their faithful response of joyful obedience and submission.  Do we insist on our own plans and priorities and even our own ideas of who God is and what he’s supposed to do for us?  Or do we submit ourselves in faith to the God who reveals his faithfulness in his Son, who calls us into his kingdom through the “foolishness” of the cross, and who empowers us to live a new kind of life through his indwelling Spirit?

Let’s pray: Almighty and everliving God, we humbly pray that as your only-begotten Son was presented in the temple in our human flesh, may we be presented to you with pure and clean hearts by the same, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

[1] Joel B. Green, Luke (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), p. 151.

You shall be consecrated to me

Exodus 22:18-23:19

By William Klock

Have you ever heard someone describe Christianity this way:  They’ll say something like, “Christianity isn’t a religion; it’s a relationship.”  This idea has been around for decades.  It got a big boost a couple of years ago thanks to a popular YouTube video.  Then there was a book, Jesus > Religion, not long after.  At its best, the motivation behind this concept is an affirmation of the Protestant principles of “grace along”, “faith alone”, and “Christ alone”—that we don’t earn our way into God’s good graces by the things we do, but instead we receive his mercy and grace as we trust in Jesus.  But in recent years, this whole thing has become increasing skewed.  The solas of the Protestant Reformers have been forgotten and “relationship” increasingly means that you can do Christianity however you want (or not do it at all) so long as you love Jesus.  And this is utter nonsense, but it’s wildly popular.

What’s interesting about this phrase is that it downplays “religion” as something bad and then describes real Christianity using this word “relationship” that isn’t even in the Bible.  Brothers and Sisters, “religion” isn’t inherently bad.  God calls us to be “religious”.  The question is whether our religion is good or bad.  You see “religion” is simply our service to God.  Good religion serves and honours him on his terms.  Bad religion dishonours him and attempts to serve him on our terms—or not to really serve him at all.  It might dishonour him by being devoted to a false god.  It might dishonour him by attempting to honour him in ways that he has prohibited or that misrepresent him to the world.  We can’t escape “religion”.  The issue is whether our religion is good or bad.  Listen to what St. James writes in his epistle:

If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless.  Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.  (James 1:26-27)

Jesus might have said it this way: Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbour as yourself.

This, too, gets at the “relationship” the Bible describes between God and his people.  It’s not just “relationship”.  That’s a very mushy modern term that can mean almost anything.  It’s especially troublesome in our age when “relationship” has almost nothing to do with commitment.  We ditch our friends if they dare not to affirm our every poor choice.  We write people out of our lives when we find them difficult.  We dump our spouses when things get rocky.  But James hits on something when he speaks of “religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father”.  You see, when the Bible speaks of the relationship between God and his people, there are two specific sorts of relationship that dominate the discussion.  The first is that God’s people are his sons and daughters.  We have a familial relationship with him.  There is no stronger relationship, no more firmly bonded relationship that we can know than that children and parents.  He loves us no matter what.  Good or bad, he loves us.  Even when he has to discipline us, it’s because he loves us and wants what’s best.  And as sons and daughters, we have an obligation to honour our Father, to represent him—and our family—well.

The second sort of relationship the Bible describes is one of covenant.  God enters into covenant with his people—into a bond in which he pledges himself to them and they pledge themselves to him, in which he makes promises and they make promises.  Both of these come together in Exodus as Israel reaches Mount Sinai.  The Lord enters into a covenant with Israel.  The Decalogue and this “Book of the Covenant” we’ve been working through spell out Israel’s obligations—the promises of the people—while he obligates himself to Israel.  It’s summed up in his declaration: I will be your God and you will be my people.  And what does that look like?  Remember the Lord’s word to Pharaoh when he called on him to let his people go?  “Israel is my firstborn son.”  So, through the law given by Moses, the Lord is showing how his covenant children are to serve him.  This is what “good religion” was to look like in Israel.  This is how the Lord’s children were to show their love for him and to represent him (and their family) before the watching eyes of the nation.  So let’s pick up where we left off, at Exodus 22:18 and we’ll go through to the end of the Book of the Covenant.  This part addresses what we might call “religion”.

“You shall not permit a sorceress to live.

  “Whoever lies with an animal shall be put to death.

  “Whoever sacrifices to any god, other than the Lord alone, shall be devoted to destruction. (Exodus 22:18-20)

This section begins with a stern prohibition against pagan religion and its practises.  I am your God and you will be my people—and that means shunning the ways of the pagans.  Death is the penalty.  The land to which the Lord was taking them was his.  The land of Israel was never Israel’s land.  It belonged to the Lord, who brought them to live with him and that invitation was contingent on their covenant faithfulness.  Corporate unfaithfulness ended in exile, but there were some very serious offenses by individuals that removed the guilty from the land through execution.  None of the Lord’s people was to engage in sorcery.  The Jewish commentator Abraham Ibn Ezra explains that the text singles out female sorcerers because the practise of sorcery was dominated by women.  That doesn’t mean the death penalty didn’t also apply to male sorcerers.  The problem with sorcery is that it denies the sovereignty of God over his creation and attempts to manipulate it directly through mechanistic means.  Bestiality is then condemned amongst God’s people.  Israel’s neighbours engaged in bestiality in some of their religious practises, re-enacting the escapades of their gods, Baal and Ishtar, as part of fertility rites.  Not only is the practise itself an abomination, but like sorcery, such practises deny the sovereignty of God over his Creation.  And, third, there is to be no sacrificing to the gods of the pagans in Israel.  The Lord has promised to care for his people.  The Lord makes good on his promises.  The Lord expects his people to live in faith.  He has rescued them from Egypt, he has taken them through the Red Sea, he has drowned Pharaoh’s army, he has fed them in the wilderness with manna and with water from a rock.  To sacrifice to other gods, to hedge their bets with the worship of other gods, is to deny what the Lord has done for them and what he has promised.

Now from what we might think of as overtly religious subjects we move to something that we might today put under the heading of “social justice”.  But the Lord doesn’t make that distinction.  To serve him isn’t just something his people can relegate to certain spiritual categories.  It involves all of life.  Look at verses 21-27:

“You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.  You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child.  If you do mistreat them, and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry, and my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless.

  “If you lend money to any of my people with you who is poor, you shall not be like a moneylender to him, and you shall not exact interest from him.  If ever you take your neighbor’s cloak in pledge, you shall return it to him before the sun goes down, for that is his only covering, and it is his cloak for his body; in what else shall he sleep? And if he cries to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate.

 

To serve the Lord means to show justice to the weak and powerless and the Lord begins by reminding his people who they were.  They are not to take advantage of or to otherwise wrong the “sojourner”.  The Hebrew word, ger, refers to someone who has left his homeland and now finds himself a foreigner in a place where he has no rights to property or to marriage or to the local legal or religious systems.  What does that look like?  It looks like Israel in Egypt.  They were a nation of sojourners and the Egyptians made slaves of them.  God’s people are to remember their roots, to remember how desperate they once were, and to treat the sojourner as God has treated them: with kindness, with mercy, with justice.

The same goes for widows and orphans—those who have no one else to look out for them.  As God rescued Israel when she was weak, Israel is to look after the weak in her own midst.  We get a sense of just how far this is to go and why as the Lord warns his people against charging interest to the poor.  There’s nothing wrong with interest, but God’s people should be generous with those who are in need.  There’s this interesting illustration about not keeping a poor man’s cloak overnight.  Imagine how poor you’d have to be if your cloak was the only thing you could give as collateral for a loan.  And the Lord says, don’t hold it overnight.  Don’t leave your neighbour shivering in the cold for the sake of a loan.  The Lord had been generous with his people and they ought to be generous with each other.  There’s a reminder here again that the land was not theirs; it was the Lord’s.  It was a land flowing with milk and honey, but it all came from his hand.  If they saw a fellow Israelite in need—someone who, for some reason, had missed out on the bounty—they weren’t to squeeze him for more, but to share from the abundance the Lord had provided.

And the Lord warns, when he cries to me, I will hear.  Oppress the sojourner, the widow, the orphan and my wrath will burn, leaving your own wives and children widows and orphans.  This is serious business.  I’m reminded of Jesus’ parable of the unforgiving servant.  The king forgives him a gazillion dollar debt, but he goes out into the street and accosts a fellow servant who owes him a small debt and has him thrown in to prison for not paying.  When the king heard of it, he had the first man thrown into prison.  “I showed you great mercy, but you refused to share that mercy with others.”  God has shown his goodness to his people and his people are to witness him by sharing that goodness with each other, particularly when it comes to caring for the poor and the weak—just the Lord had delivered them when they were poor and weak.

Now, with verse 28 we switch back to what we might think of as more “religious” matters—a reminder that a godly life is all-encompassing.

“You shall not revile God, nor curse a ruler of your people.

  “You shall not delay to offer from the fullness of your harvest and from the outflow of your presses. The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me.  You shall do the same with your oxen and with your sheep: seven days it shall be with its mother; on the eighth day you shall give it to me.

  “You shall be consecrated to me.  Therefore you shall not eat any flesh that is torn by beasts in the field; you shall throw it to the dogs.  (Exodus 22:28-31)

 

To revile God—the Hebrew word means to declare something worthless or insignificant—is forbidden.  The same goes for the way the people were to speak of their rulers, who were called by and represented the Lord.  God was good.  They knew it.  Again, they’d been there in Egypt and at the Red Sea.  They’d collected the manna.  They knew the Lord was good.  They had no business reviling him.  Instead, they were to honour him and to do so before the nations, that they too might know the Lord’s goodness.

The people acknowledge the Lord’s goodness by giving the firstfruits of their harvest and their firstborn to him.  It was a way of acknowledging that he was their provider.  Their firstborn were sacrificed to give him glory, or in the case of sons (and some kinds of animals) redeemed or bought back from the Lord.

Verse 31 is a reminder: the people are to be consecrated to him.  The Lord has declared them holy and as an example of what that looks like—or, better, doesn’t look like—they are not to eat carrion.  Carrion was unclean and unclean animals ate it.  In one sense, the Lord is reminding them that he will pour out his bountiful goodness on them.  When you live in the Lord’s house, there’s no reason to eat roadkill, so to speak.  But the main point here is that a people consecrated to the Lord should keep themselves clean—a concept instinctive to their culture and that will be elaborated later in the torah.

Now, as we slip into Chapter 23, the Lord switches back again to issues of justice in Israelite society.  Let’s look at this big chunk all at once, verses 1-9:

“You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with a wicked man to be a malicious witness.  You shall not fall in with the many to do evil, nor shall you bear witness in a lawsuit, siding with the many, so as to pervert justice, nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his lawsuit.

  “If you meet your enemy’s ox or his donkey going astray, you shall bring it back to him.  If you see the donkey of one who hates you lying down under its burden, you shall refrain from leaving him with it; you shall rescue it with him.

  “You shall not pervert the justice due to your poor in his lawsuit.  Keep far from a false charge, and do not kill the innocent and righteous, for I will not acquit the wicked.  And you shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the clear-sighted and subverts the cause of those who are in the right.

  “You shall not oppress a sojourner. You know the heart of a sojourner, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.

 

The Lord takes his people into the courtroom.  You shall not lie to pervert justice.  You shall not side with the many or take the popular side when you know it’s wrong.  By the same token, you shall not side with the poor man just because he’s poor when you know he is in the wrong.  A few verses further on the Lord again warns his people to be impartial and not to take bribes.  Do not kill the innocent or the righteous.

Now, most people are unlikely to ever be in that sort of situation, but right in the middle he smacks us—well, the Israelites anyway—right between the eyes: If you see your enemy broken-down on the side of the road, you shall not keep on truckin’.  You shall pull over and help him.  How often are we tempted to gloat, to have a perverse schadenfreude when we see something bad happen to an enemy.  Most people wouldn’t blame us one bit.  But the Lord says “No!”  Your enemy is your brother.  I love him as I love you.  As Jesus would say, “Do good to those who hate you”.  Doing good to your enemies has a funny way of bringing reconciliation—something else God’s people ought to be witnessing to the world around them.

Verses 10-12 call God’s people to observe the Sabbath.  We’ll skip those today as we’ve already covered that topic and we’ll pick up at verse 13:

“Pay attention to all that I have said to you, and make no mention of the names of other gods, nor let it be heard on your lips.

  “Three times in the year you shall keep a feast to me.  You shall keep the Feast of Unleavened Bread.  As I commanded you, you shall eat unleavened bread for seven days at the appointed time in the month of Abib, for in it you came out of Egypt.  None shall appear before me empty-handed.  You shall keep the Feast of Harvest, of the firstfruits of your labor, of what you sow in the field.  You shall keep the Feast of Ingathering at the end of the year, when you gather in from the field the fruit of your labor.  Three times in the year shall all your males appear before the Lord God.

  “You shall not offer the blood of my sacrifice with anything leavened, or let the fat of my feast remain until the morning.

  “The best of the firstfruits of your ground you shall bring into the house of the Lord your God.

 “You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.  (Exodus 23:13-19)

 

At the close of the Book of the Covenant, the Lord calls his people back to loyalty towards him.  He is their God and they are his people.  He has delivered them and he will continue to care for them.  They are to worship him and him alone—and this worship extends beyond mere ritual to a communal life built around his sovereignty and faith in his good character and his sure promises.  And so he gives them three festivals to celebrate his provision.  The first—the feast of Unleavened Bread, otherwise known as Passover—celebrates the Lord’s deliverance of Israel from Egypt.  But there are two other festivals, the feast of “harvests” and another of “firstfruits” that celebrate the Lord’s continued provision for his people and at those times they bring their offerings—to thank him for his care and, giving what came first rather than waiting to see what might be left-over, they show their faith in his promises in a very real way.

Finally, as this section began with a warning not to engage in pagan practises, it ends with another.  This warning not to boil a kid in its mother’s milk has long been a bit of a mystery.  Jewish and Christian commentators have often read it as prohibiting something inhumane and unnatural, boiling a young goat in the very liquid it mother produced to give it life.  And there may be something to that.  But in the 1920s a trove of ancient religious texts was discovered at Ras Shamra in Syria. And in those texts we’ve discovered a reference to this practise as part of a fertility ritual.[1]  So, once again, God’s people are not to resort to magic or to appeals to pagan fertility gods in their desire for prosperity.  God has promised to care for them and he’s given them every reason to trust that promise, even when thinks look desperate.

Now, this is Israel’s law.  As I’ve said before, it doesn’t apply to us directly, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from it.  The Church doesn’t bear the power of the sword.  We don’t execute church members for practising witchcraft or worshiping pagan gods—although excommunication serves a symbolically similar function as it puts them outside the family, the people of God in the hopes that doing so will move the person to repentance.  We don’t engage in pagan fertility practises, like ceremonially boiling young goats in their mother’s milk.  But our culture has its own pagan pitfalls into which we sometimes fall.  What’s called “Word of Faith” or “prosperity gospel” teaching runs wild in some sectors of the church, but it’s nothing more than paganism couched in language borrowd from the Bible.  It’s focus is using thoughts or words as expression of faith in order to manipulate the natural world, our circumstances, and even God himself.  Christians have no business with that sort of thing.

False gods are still all around us.  The ancients may have personified things like wealth and sex and power in their gods.  We think we’re better because we no longer do that, but we continue to worship and to put our faith in the very things those gods personified.  We say we believe in God, but we really trust in our bank accounts or in our jobs or in our power and authority—or we grasp at these things when we don’t have them, hoping they’ll make us secure.  Just as the Lord knew the Israelites would be tempted to do, we give to him from our time, our talent, and most of all our treasure, what we have left over rather then giving him the firstfruits in faith.  We gloat when we see our enemies in trouble.  We turn blind eyes to the poor and to the sojourner.  Our nation kills roughly 100,000 unborn children a year before they’re even born and we do little or nothing lest our friends cease to think of us being respectable.

But, Brothers and Sisters, I think the single biggest takeaway here is what I said at the beginning, what St. James tells us: True religion isn’t just about loving God or being spiritually good or positive in some way.  True religion doesn’t allow us to serve or to worship God on our own terms, as if Christianity is about nothing more than a relationship or about loving Jesus.  True religion, first, comes to God on his own terms, not ours.  True religion requires repentance.  It requires that we give up everything that is not Jesus.  It requires that we let go of every source of security that is not Jesus.  So that we can take hold of him with both hands in faith.  It means that we immerse ourselves in the Scriptures that we might know what is that the Lord expects of us.  It means that if, through Jesus, we are God’s sons and daughters, we join with this family called the Church—fully committing ourselves to each other, sharing our gifts, and sharing the bounty that God has given us: sharing love, sharing grace, sharing mercy, sharing materially.  It means that we not only proclaim to the world that Jesus is Lord, but we live it out in tangible and meaningful ways in our own lives and in our collective life as the people of God.

Come to the Table this morning and recall the death and resurrection of Jesus.  Remember the goodness of the Lord, how he gave his own Son for the sake of his people.  Remember the promises that he made to you in your baptism—promises of forgiveness and of new life and of a future hope.  And leave the Table with your faith renewed and strengthened that you might go out to do justice and to love mercy, that you might go out to love God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love your neighbour as yourself.  Brothers and Sisters, let us go out into the world to proclaim that Jesus is Lord and may we live in such a way that our faith in that proclamation is evident to everyone we know.

Let us pray: Lord, as we affirmed in today’s collect, you have stretched out your right hand to help and defend us, you have given your Son for the life of the world, you have given us your Spirit to renew our hearts and minds.  Strengthen us we pray in our faith that we might offer you true religion, that we might serve, worship, and honour you as you desire, loving you with heart, soul, mind, and strength—loving you with all of our being—and loving each other as you do.  Through Jesus we ask.  Amen.

[1] Cited in Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Exodus (Skokie, Ill.: Varda Books, 2005), p. 305.

Four Sheep for a Sheep

Exodus 21:28-22:17

by William Klock 

We’re returning this morning to our study of the book of Exodus.  We’ll pick up where we left off, at Exodus 21:28.  We’re in the middle of that part of Exodus called “The Book of the Covenant”.  It follows the Decalogue and here the Lord gives his people various social and religious regulations.  We could emphasis that word “various”, because it’s not always easy to know why these regulations are grouped together here.  Some are more detailed.  Some are short and seem to stand all alone and unrelated to the others.  Some raise some aspect of law, but only give one circumstance and we’re left to look in, say, Leviticus or Deuteronomy to find the rest.  The law isn’t comprehensive.  It singles out one thing here and another there to sort of give Israel examples of what it means to live as the Lord’s people in his land—how to be a witness to the nations.  Remember, Israel was the people who lived with the Lord in her midst.  The Lord gave his law so that this specific people living in a specific place and a specific time could witness what it looks like to love God and to love each other.  They were, in their small way, giving the nations a glimpse of the Lord’s project to set Creation and humanity to rights.

As I’ve said before—but it’s been a while—the torah was Israel’s law.  It’s not our law.  It doesn’t apply directly to us.  It was bound to a people, place, and time.  We need to read it with that understanding.  As we read Exodus, this is the Lord speaking to his people.  We’re listening in on the conversation.  But we can still learn something from that—even in these passages that might seem obscure or irrelevant.

Now, before we jump back into Exodus 21, I want to remind you of a story we all learned in Sunday School—one that St. Luke tells us—a story about a “wee little man” named Zacchaeus.  He was the tax collector everyone hated who climbed up into the tree to see Jesus.  By the time the episode was over, Zacchaeus had committed himself to following Jesus.  And do you remember what he did as result of having met Jesus?  Remember, tax collectors were known for ripping people off.  That’s why everyone hated them—that and that they worked for the hated Romans.  Zacchaeus showed his repentance and showed his new life in Jesus by announcing that he was going to go back to all the people from whom he’d stolen and he was going to pay them back four-fold.  Four-fold.  Brothers and Sisters, that wasn’t some arbitrary number he pulled out of the air.  It came from the law.  In fact, it comes from our passage today, right from Exodus 22:1.  It was the maximum penalty laid on a man for stealing.  By Zacchaeus’ day they’d worked out other things.  If he’d stood before a judge, the likely penalty would have been twenty per cent on top of what he’d stolen.  But Zacchaeus committed to more.  You know those signs you see in the dressing room when you’re trying on clothes: “If we catch you stealing, we will prosecute you to the full extent of the law”.  They’re not going to go easy on you.  They will press charges and they won’t be making any deals or plea bargains.  They’re going to squeeze you for the maximum the law allows.  Well, of his own free and repentant will, Zacchaeus commited himself to the law’s full penalty.  More on that later, but that penalty is found here in Exodus.

So let’s look at Exodus.  This next section gives us laws that regard property and compensation.  They kind of range over a variety of subjects, but property and compensation are the unifying themes.  We’ll look first at 21:28-36—all at once, and then we’ll come back to some of the details.

“When an ox gores a man or a woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner of the ox shall not be liable.  But if the ox has been accustomed to gore in the past, and its owner has been warned but has not kept it in, and it kills a man or a woman, the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death.  If a ransom is imposed on him, then he shall give for the redemption of his life whatever is imposed on him.  If it gores a man’s son or daughter, he shall be dealt with according to this same rule.  If the ox gores a slave, male or female, the owner shall give to their master thirty shekels of silver, and the ox shall be stoned.

“When a man opens a pit, or when a man digs a pit and does not cover it, and an ox or a donkey falls into it, the owner of the pit shall make restoration. He shall give money to its owner, and the dead beast shall be his.

“When one man’s ox butts another’s, so that it dies, then they shall sell the live ox and share its price, and the dead beast also they shall share.  Or if it is known that the ox has been accustomed to gore in the past, and its owner has not kept it in, he shall repay ox for ox, and the dead beast shall be his.

 

Oxen and pits.  Exodus here looks very much like other law codes from Mesopotamia.  Goring by an ox was a common example along with being bitten by a dog.  And open pits were a common example used to lay out laws having to do with liability.  And yet, as much as Exodus uses the same legal examples we see elsewhere, God’s law is very different in important ways.  Last time we were in Exodus we talked about the death penalty and how it goes back to God’s instructions in Genesis 9: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image” (9:6).  We saw before how this applies to human beings.  Now we see it applied to animals.  An ox that gores a human being to death is to be killed.  The animal has killed one who bears the image of God.  It’s tainted by that and not to be eaten.  If your ox died or was killed under other circumstances, you’d be out the ox—and oxen were important work animals in their world—but at least you could eat it.  It wasn’t a total loss.  But not so in this case.  The flesh was tainted.  Notice, the ox is to be stoned—executed—not slaughtered.  The ox faces the same penalty as a murderer.  The owner wasn’t liable beyond the loss of his ox.

But that assumes the ox didn’t have a history of goring people.  If the ox had done this before—presumably, not fatally—and the owner failed to keep it safely penned or to cut off its horns, and someone dies as a result, then the owner is liable.  As before, the ox is to be stoned, but the owner is also to be put to death.  Life is precious and he failed in his duty to protect it.  The law treats him like a murderer with one exception.  A murder had to be executed.  His life could not be ransomed.  In this case, the owner of the ox can pay a ransom in exchange for his life.

Israel’s law has some other important differences from the laws of her neighbours.  Hammurbi’s law, for example, said that if your negligence led to the death of a man’s son, your son was the one who was killed.  It was an extreme case of an eye for an eye—a son for a son.  But the Lord is just.  He does not hold children accountable for the crimes of their parents.  If your negligence causes the death of another, you’re the one who pays.

The other example here is the open pit.  You can’t just do your own thing and ignore the impact it may have on your neighbour.  That’s not loving your neighbour as yourself.  God’s people are to look after each other and their well-being.  If your neighbour’s animal falls into your pit because you didn’t cover it, it’s on you.  The same goes if your ox gores your neighbour’s ox.  There’s no death penalty, but you have to make your neighbour whole.

Now, these are matters of negligence at worst.  What about deliberately doing your neighbour wrong?  What about theft.  What if you outright steal his livestock?  Look at 22:1.

If a man steals an ox or a sheep, and kills it or sells it, he shall repay five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep.

 

Here’s where Zacchaeus got his idea to pay back four-fold.  Steal an ox and get caught and you owe five in return.  Steal a sheep and you owe four in return.  It’s not clear why the difference, but the likely reason is that oxen were much more valuable than sheep.  Sheep were good for wool.  They didn’t eat their livestock as readily as we do, but you could also eat a sheep.  But an ox was a draught animal that was used to do a lot of work.  Verse 4 addresses the situation if the thief is caught with the animal still alive:

If the stolen beast is found alive in his possession, whether it is an ox or a donkey or a sheep, he shall pay double.

 

The owner gets his property back with an additional animal as compensation.

Hammurabi condemned a thief to death, but the Lord has declared human life sacred.  A thief may steal your ox or your sheep, but neither is worth a human life.  The thief is simply required to make the owner whole and to pay restitution.  Now look at verses 2-3:

If a thief is found breaking in and is struck so that he dies, there shall be no bloodguilt for him, but if the sun has risen on him, there shall be bloodguilt for him. He shall surely pay. If he has nothing, then he shall be sold for his theft.

 

We’ve talked about these verses before.  The Hebrew literally speaks of the thief “digging” his way into your house—right through or maybe under the mud-brick wall.  The owner is required to show restraint.  If he catches the thief at night and kills him, he’s not guilty.  It’s dark.  Is the thief there to steal?  Is he going to kill you while you sleep?  It’s hard to say.  It’s okay to defend yourself if doing so is warranted.  But in the day, it’s more likely you can see what the thief is up to.  You can probably call for help.  If he did try to kill you, you’d be justified in using lethal force against him, but again, there are probably other options and your ox or sheep or your wife’s pearls aren’t worth his life.

I used to work with a guy whose cousin was shot running from the scene of a robbery.  He was in a gas station, the cashier was helping someone else, opened the cash drawer, and he reached over and grabbed a wad of cash—about $80.  He ran out the door and down the street.  As it happened, there was a policeman in the parking lot.  The cashier and customer ran out yelling about the thief.  The policeman yelled for the thief to stop, but he just kept running, so the policeman shot him in the back and killed him.  For $80.  You couldn’t do that in Israel.  No life was worth $80—or a sheep or an ox or a donkey.

In verses 5 and 6 we get back to the subject of negligence:

“If a man causes a field or vineyard to be grazed over, or lets his beast loose and it feeds in another man’s field, he shall make restitution from the best in his own field and in his own vineyard.

“If fire breaks out and catches in thorns so that the stacked grain or the standing grain or the field is consumed, he who started the fire shall make full restitution.

 

In the first situation, a man lets his animals graze and trample his neighbour’s field.  The implication is that it’s deliberate.  In the second example, a fire gets out of control.  A man was burning chaff left over after the harvest or something like that and the fire gets away from him, resulting in the burning of his neighbour’s field.  He’s required to make “full restitution”—presumably the best of your own field as in the previous verse.  What stands out is that restitution isn’t just paying back for what was damaged.  Restitution involves paying back by giving one’s best.  No “Oops, I burned your wheat field.  Here’s some leftovers from last year’s harvest.”  No, “Oops, my donkey got loose and ate your grapes.  Here are some over-ripe apples in exchange.  No wine this year, but hey, you can make applesauce.”  Nope.  You pay him back with your best.

Now, continuing with the theme of negligence, what about loaning something to a neighbour or leaving it with him for safe-keeping and something happens to it?  Look at verses 7-9:

“If a man gives to his neighbor money or goods to keep safe, and it is stolen from the man’s house, then, if the thief is found, he shall pay double.  If the thief is not found, the owner of the house shall come near to God to show whether or not he has put his hand to his neighbor’s property.  For every breach of trust, whether it is for an ox, for a donkey, for a sheep, for a cloak, or for any kind of lost thing, of which one says, ‘This is it,’ the case of both parties shall come before God. The one whom God condemns shall pay double to his neighbor.

Something similar goes if you give an animal to your neighbour for safekeeping and it goes missing without witnesses.  If he can show evidence that it was eaten by animals (verse 13), he’s not liable for the loss, but otherwise verse 11 says he’s to take an oath:

…an oath by the Lord shall be between them both to see whether or not he has put his hand to his neighbor’s property. The owner shall accept the oath, and he shall not make restitution.

 

So if we’re talking about theft and the thief is found—maybe it’s the neighbour you gave the property to—the law of restitution applies as we saw before.  But if there were no witnesses, it comes down to taking an oath before God.  Actually, the Hebrew is a little difficult.  I may mean taking an oath that invokes the Lord, it may be an oath made before the Lord, or it may be an oath or statement made in the presence of the local elders.

We’ve all been in that spot—especially as parents.  Your kids get in a fight, you ask what happened, and they both tell you different stories.  Or you come home and something’s broken.  You ask the kids what happened and they say they don’t know.  You know something happened.  Maybe it was an act of God, but it sure seems like someone’s not telling the truth.  And so you tell them to look you in the eye, you remind them that God knows what happened, and you ask them to tell you the truth.  That’s when they break down and tell you what really happened.  Or maybe they don’t.  Maybe they look you in the eye and swear up and down on a stack of Bibles that they didn’t have anything to do with it.  Maybe the dog really did eat all the cookies.  Maybe the vase really did fall over all on its own and break.  Maybe your kid is a just a really good liar.  But this is the point where you just have to take their word for it and leave it to the Lord.  He knows.  He’ll deal with it.  If you left your ox with your neighbour and he swears it was stolen and that all the meat he suddenly has came from the butcher and not your ox, well, you’re going to have to leave it to the Lord to sort out and trust that he will, even if you never know about it.

This is the point where Israel was different from her neighbours.  Her people were trust in the sovereignty of God and in his justice and not to take the law into their own hands.  They weren’t to seek revenge.  They weren’t to go vigilante.  Justice was to reign, and that meant due process and proportionate restitution.

Now, finally, we’ll skip down to verses 16-17.

“If a man seduces a virgin who is not betrothed and lies with her, he shall give the bride-price for her and make her his wife.  If her father utterly refuses to give her to him, he shall pay money equal to the bride-price for virgins.

 

Most modern translations put these verses in the next section having to do with “social” issues or with “social justice” instead of leaving them in this section that has to do with property.  I think this has more to do with our hang-ups than anything else.  We don’t like the idea of daughters being treated as property.  But the fact is that in many respects, that’s how they were treated in the ancient world, including in Israel.  That doesn’t mean that that’s all they were, but I think it’s pretty clear that these verses, in how they deal with the issue, clearly stand with the verses about property.  This doesn’t mean that the Bible is telling us that we need to treat our daughters as property.  This is Israel’s law, not ours.  This is how their world worked and here the Lord is regulating that.  That’s all.

So back to the text: the issue here isn’t rape.  That’s dealt with in Deuteronomy.  This is an instance where a girl willingly lies with a man to whom she’s no betrothed.  It’s important to understand this from their perspective.  The party wronged wasn’t the girl; it was the father.  Having lost her virginity, she’s now “damaged goods”—she’s going to be harder to marry off—and her father is out the bride-price.  So restitution—the payment of the bride-price—is made, not to her but to her father.  In most circumstances she would be expected to marry the man.  This would allow her to save her honour.  But her father reserves the right to refuse the marriage.  Maybe this man is a terrible creep and this father wants to protect his daughter or it might just be that he’s not someone from their family or social circle—something vitally important to them if not to us—but even if the father refuses to give his daughter in marriage, the man must still pay the bride-price to compensate the girl’s father for what’s been lost.  Again, if we set aside our hang-ups about sex roles and family matters, we can see that the issue here is, like the preceding verses, about “theft”.  The one who stole must make the wronged party whole.

So that’s the text.  The subject matter of the regulations shifts in verse 18 and we’ll pick up from there next week.  Now we need to ask what this means for us.  All this talk of oxen and pits and sheep—not to mention bride-prices—can seem pretty irrelevant.  It’s like real-life Settlers of Catan.  You took my sheep, now give me four in return!  But that four in return—that “penalty” for theft that inspired Zacchaeus to pay everyone back—that gets to the heart of the matter.  Notice the penalties here.  If you’re negligent and it hurts your neighbour, you don’t just say “I’m sorry”.  You don’t give him your left-overs or your second best.  You make him whole by giving your best.  And the thief, he doesn’t just pay back; he goes above and beyond.  The intent was to discourage stealing.  There wouldn’t be much incentive not to steal if all you had to do was give the goods back if you were caught.  So you make your victim whole and pay a penalty.  That was God’s law.

You see, God’s law taught the people respect and love for neighbour.  Now, I doubt there were many—if any—thieves who were feeling generous when they gave over four sheep for the one they stole—or when they were sold as slave to pay the four-sheep debt that they couldn’t otherwise pay.  But it’s not hard to imagine the guy who accidentally set his neighbour’s wheat-field on fire, feeling real remorse for the accident and going out of his way to be generous in reimbursing his neighbour.  But regardless of the situation, this was what it looked like to love your neighbour in Israel.  And history shows that for the most part, the Israelites failed.  The prophets repeatedly condemned the nation for failing to live up to these standards.  The strong took what belonged to the weak.  The rich took what belonged to the poor.  Perhaps the worst, the religious leaders were amongst the most guilty.  They were the people who lived with God in their midst and when they failed to live to his standards, when they failed to be light in the darkness, he allowed them to be removed from his land and carried off into exile.  But the Lord also promised that a day would come when he would set his people right, when he would give his own Spirit to turn their hearts of stone into hearts of flesh.

Brothers and Sisters, that’s what we see in Zacchaeus.  Zacchaeus, the sleazy, scummy tax collector who stole from everyone, the rich man who abused the poor, the man who stood with strong Roman soldiers at his back and took from the weak, that man met Jesus, the Messiah, the one in whom the Lord was fulfilling his promises.  And that man’s heart was changed.  Zacchaeus was moved to repentance.  And Zacchaeus—of his own regenerated free will, out of the abundance of his renewed heart—happily took the full penalty of the law.  No one was forcing him.  And he probably could have paid back with a twenty per cent penalty—which was how many interpreted the law in his day.  But that’s not what his changed heart did.  He didn’t quibble about it.  He didn’t look for a loophole.  He knew the law and he did it.

Brothers and Sisters, there are two lesson here.  The first is a lesson in what real repentance looks like.  The first is in what it looks like to really follow Jesus.  What it looks like is a truly transformed heart.  It’s more than words.  It’s more than a prayer.  It’s a changed life.  It’s a life that’s transformed.  It’s a life and a heart that feel remorse for sin.  It’s a life and a heart that truly desire to make things right: to repay what’s been taken, to restore what’s been broken by our old sinful way of life.

The second point is that as Zacchaeus fulfils the law as a result of having encountered Jesus, we see the faithfulness of God.  There’s a reason why Luke makes a point of the details here.  Zacchaeus wasn’t just showing his renewed heart by being good and nice in some arbitrary way.  He did it by submitting himself to God’s law—the law that Israel had failed to uphold, but that the Lord had promised they one day would after his Messiah had transformed their hearts.  Zacchaeus reveals that Jesus is the one who came to fulfil the promise.  Zacchaeus reveals that Jesus is the one who brings God’s Spirit to his people, transforming hearts of stone into hearts of flesh, turning hearts from love of self to love of God and neighbour.  That’s the wonderful part of that story and it adds something to our Exodus lesson that might otherwise seem like a cold, legal text that has no bearing on us.

As we read these texts during Epiphanytide, they ought to be to us like the star the Magi followed. That star revealed to them that the Lord’s Messiah had been born in Israel, the one who would set all to rights.  We don’t have a star.  The Lord doesn’t leave us to rely on astrologers to find Jesus.  He’s given us something far better.  He’s given us the story of his people and the story of Jesus and there we see his goodness and his mercy, his grace and his faithfulness.  And, Brothers and Sisters, the story leads us to Jesus.  Let us come in repentant faith and be transformed, our hearts of stone made hearts of flesh.

Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, thank you for your word.  Thank you even for these parts that are so often hard to read and understand and even kind of boring, because in Jesus we see them brought to life as your people are brought to life.  Fill us with that same life as we come in faith to Jesus, transform our hearts and minds by the power of your Spirit that we may love you with heart, soul, mind, and strength and our neighbours as ourselves.  Through Jesus we pray.  Amen.

The Oil of Gladness

Isaiah 61:1-3 & St. Matthew 2:19-23

By William Klock

Our Gospel lesson this morning tells us how Jesus came to live and to grow up in the town of Nazareth.  St. Matthew tells us:

But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, “Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child’s life are dead.”  And he rose and took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel.  But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there, and being warned in a dream he withdrew to the district of Galilee.  And he went and lived in a city called Nazareth, so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene.  (Matthew 2:19-23)

The Gospels of Christmastide tell us the Nativity story from St. Matthew’s perspective.  They jump around a bit, so we don’t quite get the story in order—the part about the wise men, of course, is saved for tomorrow—for Epiphany.  But our Gospel today picks up towards the end of Matthew’s second chapter.

Let’s back up, though, for some context.  At the beginning of Chapter 2 the wise men arrive in Jerusalem, following an unusual star—some think it was the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn.  In those days the planet Jupiter was associated with kings and many people associated Saturn with the Jews.  Seeing their conjunction, the wise men—astrologers from the East—concluded that a great king had been born in Israel.  They naturally went to Herod, but he knew nothing about it.  He sent them on their way, but he was troubled.  It’s highly doubtful that Herod would have considered this a serious threat, but he decided to “take care” of any potential problem, just in case.  He asked the wise men to stop on their way home to tell him what they had found.  When they returned by a different route, Herod decided the safest course of action was to murder all the baby boys in Bethlehem, two years old and younger.

And so Herod’s soldiers marched to nearby Bethlehem.  There were probably ten to fifteen little boys two years and younger in the small town.  They weren’t hard to find.  The recent census probably made it easy.  It’s an awful story.  How could these men murder innocent children in cold blood?  But it’s one we see over and over again in history and even spread across our newspapers today.  Families, fathers, mothers, and little children massacred in war and in genocide.  It’s happening so frequently in places like Yemen and Iraq and Syria that it’s hard to keep up.  And lest we think these awful things only happen in far-away countries, we have our own atrocities here.  It makes it easier that so many deny their humanity and that we do it in clean medical facilities, but we murderer our own unborn by the tens of thousands every year in this country and millions more do so around the world.  God created us to be his friends and to rule his Creation in his name, but in our rejection of him we have become a cruel and evil race, subjecting each other to unspeakable things—the strong running rough-shod over the weak.

We wonder how Herod could do such a thing, but just remember that this was a man who murdered his own family just make sure he had no rivals.  He even murdered his own wife.  As he was on his death bed he issued an order that the leading citizens of Jericho be murdered—so that there would be people crying at his funeral.  He was an evil and brutal man and the people under his rule suffered for it.  When we think of the oppression that the Jewish people lived under in the time of Jesus we usually think of the Romans, but Herod was there too and while the cruelty of the Romans was usually predictable, Herod’s was not—it was often chaotic and arbitrary.

When St. John opens his Gospel by talking about light coming into the darkness, this is the sort of darkness he had in mind.  And Jesus was born right in the middle of it.  This is what so many people simply couldn’t grasp.  They expected the Messiah to come as a great warrior—like King David, but much more glorious and powerful—to drive away the darkness.  They expected him to turn the tables.  But that’s just it.  Turning the tables only means that the oppressed end up becoming the oppressors.  God had something much better in mind—something to stop the whole cycle of evil and sin.  And so, instead of being born in a palace to people with power, Jesus was born to a poor couple in the midst of the chaos and upheaval created by the Emperor’s census and then became a refugee, fleeing the darkness to Egypt, of all places.

Why?

Consider the names that the angel revealed to Joseph before Jesus was born.  Joseph was understandably upset when he found out Mary was pregnant.  He was prepared to quietly divorce her.  But then the Lord spoke.

“Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.  She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”  (Matthew 1:20-21)

And Matthew comments on this, saying:

 

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:

         “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,

                  and they shall call his name Immanuel”

(which means, God with us). (Matthew 1:22-23)

You shall call his name Jesus.  “Jesus was a common name.  It’s a variant of “Joshua” and it means “Yahweh Saves”.  And it was a common name precisely because of the darkness in which the people lived.  They were desperate for the Lord to save them and we know that especially in the time in which Jesus was born the people were particularly expectant—the worse things got, the stronger their hopes became—and things were horrible.  And so, as Joshua led God’s people into the promised land, Jesus was sent to lead his people in a new and bigger and better exodus into a new and bigger and better promised land.  In the first exodus the Israelites became a nation and were delivered from the bondage of Egypt; in this new exodus all humanity is to join in Jesus as the new Israel and in him the Lord will save them—save us—from our bondage to sin and death.

And yet it’s in Matthew’s commentary that we see the “how” of it all.  This he says is to fulfil what Isaiah spoke: “The virgin shall conceive and bear a son and he shall be called Immanuel, which means ‘God with us’.”  I talked about this last week, but let’s look at it briefly again.  Matthew quotes from Isaiah 7:14.  No one before Matthew ever seems to have understood this passage as pointing to the future Messiah.  Isaiah had spoken these words over seven centuries earlier and he spoke them to King Ahaz of Judah during another very dark time for the Lord’s people.  The king of the northern tribes of Israel had made an alliance with the king of Syria and they laid siege to Jerusalem.  King Ahaz and his people were scared, but through the prophet the Lord exhorted them to stand firm in faith.  They were to trust him and he would vanquish their enemies and this promised child was a sign.  A young woman, perhaps Ahaz’s wife or daughter or Isaiah’s own wife, would bear a son and before he’s old enough to know the difference between good and evil the Lord would make good on his promise to deliver his people.  The child was to be prophetically called “Immanuel—God with us”, giving assurance to the people that the Lord had heard their cries from the darkness, that he would visit them, and that he would deliver them.

Just as the exodus in the days of Moses became an image of the ministry of Jesus leading his people out of sin’s bondage, the baby—Immanuel—born in the reign of Ahaz became another image of Jesus’ ministry.  In him God once again had heard the cries of his people from the darkness—the darkness of Herod, the darkness of Caesar—in Jesus he visited his people, and in Jesus he delivered them.  Even more so, Jesus is literally “God with us”.  In him God took on our human flesh, becoming one with us.  He was born not in some privileged palace to wealthy or noble parents, but to a humble couple just as they were being submitted to the indignity of Roman rule.  Almost immediately he was made a refugee by the wicked and murderous King Herod.  In Jesus, God is truly with us in every way imaginable, sharing our nature, sharing our life, sharing our pain, sharing our griefs, sharing our humanity—sharing our everything.  Jesus has come into the darkness and into the pain and into the grief.  This is how the Lord saves.

Joseph and Mary’s flight to Egypt underscores just how Jesus came into the midst of the darkness and not just that he’s come and joined us in it, but that he’s found us in the darkness and so that he can lead us out.  After telling us about the angel warning Joseph to flee to Egypt, Matthew tells us that this took place to fulfil what the prophet Hosea wrote: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”  But Hosea wasn’t looking forward to the Messiah—to Jesus—when he wrote those words.  He was talking about Israel.  She was the Lord’s son and the Lord called that son and rescued that son out of Egypt.  And now Jesus is constituting a new Israel where the old Israel had failed.  He is the Lord’s Son and the Lord will call him from Egypt as he once did Israel.  Matthew points to Jesus as the fulfilment and the culmination of Israel’s story.

And then as Matthew writes about the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem, he quotes from Jeremiah’s prophecy:

“A voice was heard in Ramah,

         weeping and loud lamentation,

Rachel weeping for her children;

         she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.” (Matthew 2:18)

It might seem like an odd passage to quote.  When Jeremiah wrote those words he was writing to the people of Judah during their exile in Babylon.  It’s a passage, first, of mourning.  The children of Rachel had lost everything.  Think of the darkness of the world.  Israel had lost it all: her land, her prosperity, her temple.  Everything that the Lord had promised and everything that reminded them of their status as the Lord’s people had been taken away.  Had the Lord forgotten them?  That was what they asked as they wept by the river of Babylon.  But Jeremiah then wrote about the Lord renewing his covenant with Israel.  When she had repented he would restore her to the land he had promised and he would make her prosperous again.  Eventually the Lord did restore Israel.  She returned from exile.  She rebuilt Jerusalem and rebuilt the temple.  But the darkness remained.  And so Matthew recalls the time of the exile, of Israel in mourning, and he does so to say that in Jesus, the Lord is acting once again to rescue his people from the darkness, from their exile, and to restore and renew his covenant with them.

And, finally, at the end of today’s Gospel we’re told that when the family returned from Egypt and heard that Archelaus was in power, Joseph decided to settle the family in Nazareth—about as far from Archelaus as he could get.  And Matthew says in verse, 23, that this was “so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene.”

Again, Matthew doesn’t use or quote the prophets the way we might expect him to, as if there’s a one-to-one equation between Isaiah or Jeremiah and the events surrounding Jesus’ birth.  Verse 23 continues to raise questions after two thousand years, because there is no mention of Nazareth anywhere in the Old Testament.  None of the prophets says anything about Jesus being a Nazarene.  The most likely explanation is that Matthew was making a word play.  In Isaiah 11:1 the prophet wrote about the Messiah:

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,

         and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.

 

They key word is the word “branch”.  In Hebrew the word is nazir, which sounds like Nazareth or Nazarene.  It’s not the sort of thing we would do with an Old Testament text, but it’s just the sort of sounds-like word game that was common then.  The point is that Jesus has a royal lineage.  The Lord had established a covenant with David that his house would be established forever.  In the course of history, David’s house eventually fell.  No descendant of David ever returned to the throne after the exile, but the covenant was still there.  A shoot from the cut-off and seemingly dead stump of Jesse—David’s father—would one day come forth and that branch—that nazir—would bear fruit.

Do you see what Matthew is doing here?  Think of the big picture—the sweep of Israel’s story as it’s told in the Bible.  That’s what Matthew is getting at with these quotes from and references to the prophets.  Matthew’s putting the great themes of the story of God and Israel in front of us and showing how, in Jesus, the story is reaching its climax.  Quoting Hosea he reminds us of the Exodus.  Quoting Isaiah 11—the passage about the branch or nazir from Jesse—he reminds us of the covenant the Lord established with David.  And quoting Jeremiah 31 he gives a vivid picture of Israel’s need for rescue and of the darkness in which the world was lost.  Again, Jesus didn’t parachute into history at random.  Matthew stresses that Jesus came when the time was exactly right and that he came as the culmination of Israel’s story.  In him all the covenants and promises the Lord had made to Israel are brought together and fulfilled.  Jesus is Israel, which is why St. Paul can talk about gentiles like us being grafted into Israel.  John the Baptists warned, as he preached the need for repentance in preparation for Jesus’ coming, that the Lord would lay his axe to the dead wood of Israel while raising children for Abraham from the stones.

Brothers and Sisters, this means that by faith in Jesus, you and I are now part of this story—the story that goes back to God’s covenant with Abraham, to the Exodus from Egypt, and to the covenant with David.  All those who are in Jesus the Messiah—all those who have turned aside from everything that is not Jesus and instead have laid hold of him in hoping faith with both hands—share in the great story of Israel and of Israel’s God and in his promise to deliver us from the darkness, to deliver us from our bondage to sin and death.  As Jesus came to bring light into the darkness—into the darkness of Caesar’s empire and of Herod’s brutal and murderous cruelty, Jesus has come to bring light into our darkness.

Listen to the words of our lesson from Isaiah 61:1-3.  These were the words Jesus preached from in the synagogue in Nazareth at the beginning of his ministry and they were words he claimed for himself.  This is what he came to do.  This is how he came to be light in the darkness.

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,

         because the Lord has anointed me

 to bring good news to the poor;

         he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim liberty to the captives,

         and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,

         and the day of vengeance of our God;

         to comfort all who mourn;

to grant to those who mourn in Zion—

         to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes,

 the oil of gladness instead of mourning,

         the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit;

 that they may be called oaks of righteousness,

         the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified.

 

This is Jesus—the Lord’s salvation.  This is what it looks like for God to be with us.  He has delivered us from bondage to sin and from the fear of death, its wages.  There’s darkness all around.  Again, all we have to do is turn on the evening news, read the paper, or look on the Internet.  As we gather here today, the world appears to be on the brink of yet another war.  But even if that weren’t dominating the news, we all have our own struggles much closer to home.  We struggle with our own sins.  We struggle with our own strained and broken relationships.  We struggle to make ends meet.  We struggle through pain and sickness and death.  Brothers and Sisters, Jesus has come into the darkness.  He has shared it with us.  He knows and he understands.  And so Jesus speaks good news to us, he binds up our broken hearts.  He takes away the ashes that have been poured on our heads and the sackcloth we’ve been wearing in mourning and gives us beautiful headdresses and garments of praise.  He is light in our darkness.  He is God with us.  Isaiah says that this is so that we will be called “oaks of righteousness” planted by the Lord so that he will be glorified.

Having God with us brings amazing transformation.  Imagine the chaos of the world all around, lost in sin, everyone struggling to get on top.  Think of our own suffering and pain and grief.  And then picture what we become when God is with us.  Isaiah says we are oaks of righteousness.  Look at those huge oak trees outside the windows.  They’ve been here forever.  As our building deteriorated in the 50s, 60s, and 70s those trees only got stronger and bigger.  The storms come and go.  Every once in a while one of those big storms damages the church building, but the trees are there as strong as ever.  They’re an illustration of what Jesus has called us to be: light in the darkness, oaks in the storm, standing firm, making him known, providing a place of shelter to any who will come, giving a foretaste of his glorious kingdom and inspiring everyone around us to give glory to God.  He has not abandoned us.  In Jesus he saves.  In Jesus he has come to be with us—to find us in the dark and to make us light.

Let us pray: Almighty God, you have poured upon us the light of your Incarnate Word.  Jesus has come.  Your light has found us and is with us.  Grant us, we pray, that your light be kindled in our hearts and that it shine forth in our lives that the world might see it in us and give you glory, we ask, through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

God is With Us

Isaiah 7:14-16, Galatians 4:1-7, & St. Matthew 1:18-25

By William Klock

As St. Luke tells the story of Jesus’ birth, he tells it through the eyes of, from the perspective of Mary.  In Luke’s Gospel we see an angel come to a young girl to announce that she will bear Israel’s Messiah.  We get a sense of her excitement.  Everyone was, after all, waiting for the Messiah.  Most people expected him to be born in a palace to some girl in the royal family.  Mary was, no doubt, shocked to learn that she was to be the one.  Yes, her family had descended from David, but they weren’t royals by any stretch of the imagination—just simple, common people.

St. Matthew, on the other hand, tells the same story from the perspective of Joseph.  He was anything but excited to hear this news.  What man is thrilled to hear that the woman to whom he is engaged is pregnant by another?  It’s not hard to imagine what went through Joseph’s head when Mary told him what was happening.  “It’s not another man,” she told him.  “I’m pregnant by the Holy Spirit.  That’s what the angel told me, at any rate.  I don’t understand how it can be, but he told me that this child is the Messiah.”

This was going to bring shame on Joseph and so, Matthew says, Joseph made plans to quietly separate from Mary—to break off the engagement.  Hopefully he could distance himself from the whole fiasco, save some face, move on with life, and maybe find someone more respectable to marry.

But then the angel appeared to Joseph.  “Joseph, son of David!” the angel greeted him.  Joseph was a descendant of King David, but so were a lot of people.  This must have been the first time anyone had ever addressed Joseph as if he were a prince.  But the angel’s making a point: Joseph is part of the royal family—the family from which the Messiah would come.  “Joseph, don’t be afraid to follow through with this marriage to Mary.  She wasn’t lying when she told you she was pregnant by the Holy Spirit.  She’s not crazy.  A miracle has really happened.  She’s going to have a son.  And, listen, when he’s born, you are to name him ‘Jesus’.  Why?  Because he’s the one who will save his people from their sins.”

“Joseph, don’t be afraid!”  This is where Mary’s story and Joseph’s story intersect.  When the angel appeared to Mary he said the same thing to her: “Don’t be afraid!”  This is what happens every time someone in the Bible is met by an angel or given a message from God: Don’t be afraid.  God announces that he’s about to do something.  Maybe what he says he’s going to do is itself scary and frightening.  Maybe it just seems silly and impossible.  Sometimes it’s something that sounds incredibly foolish.  This announcement about the baby, conceived by the Holy Spirit and the angel’s urging Joseph to go ahead and marry Mary pretty well hits all these points.  If any two people needed this exhortation to “Fear not!”, Joseph and Mary needed it.

But maybe we need it too as we read the Christmas story.  Is it really necessary to emphasise this particular part of the Christmas story?  I know a lot of people believe it, but they don’t want to talk about.  It’s fine for us, but people out there are going to think we’re superstitious or naïve for believing in a virgin birth.  These things don’t happen in the real world.

There are people who throw this story out because they associate it with the later legend that grew up about Mary’s supposed perpetual virginity and the teaching closely associated with it that sex is sinful or dirty.  Of course, the Bible says none of these things.  The Gospel-writers give us every reason to believe that after Jesus born, Joseph and Mary went on to have a perfectly normal married life and to have other children.  No, Matthew and Luke tell us this story because they believed it was true.  They had their own reasons to be afraid in telling it.  The pagans told stories about half-human men and women fathered by the gods.  Greek mythology is full of these stories.  Matthew may have been afraid that people would think he was somehow borrowing from these myths.  He surely knew that some people would say that in reporting that Mary was pregnant by the Holy Spirit he was just covering for some indiscretion on Mary’s part.

Other people have said that Matthew invented this part of the story so that he could claim Jesus’ birth was a fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy—the verse he quotes from Isaiah 7.  What’s interesting about that is that there is no evidence whatsoever that anyone before Matthew had ever thought of Isaiah’s prophecy being fulfilled in the birth of the coming Messiah.  No one had ever made the connection.  Isaiah’s prophecy was fulfilled in the days of King Ahaz.  Everyone knew that.  It was actually Matthew, knowing what Isaiah had said and the history that surrounded that prophecy, who saw there a type, a prefiguring of Jesus.

There are all sorts of ways that people find something to be afraid of in this story—all sorts of reasons people find to reject it.  Neither Matthew nor Luke asks us to simply take their word for it.  Notice that Matthew, in particular, connects the story of Jesus’ birth with a much bigger story—with the story of Israel and of Israel’s God.  It’s almost as if he was anticipating that someone would say, “Virgin birth?  Right, Matthew.  At your age, how can you not know where babies come from?  To the person who says, “The world doesn’t work this way” and to the person who might say, “God doesn’t work this way”, Matthew says, “Wanna bet?”  And he points us back to look at just how God has worked in history.

This is the point of Matthew’s quote from Isaiah 7 about the virgin conceiving and bearing a son named Immanuel.  Matthew ties the birth of Jesus into the larger story of redemption and the larger story of Israel and Israel’s God.

The events of Isaiah 7-9 took place about 730 years before Jesus was born.  It was a time in Israel’s history when things were looking very bad.  The kingdom had been split for roughly two hundred years: Israel in the north and Judah in the south.  Ahaz was king of Judah.  Ahaz is one of those guys we read about in the book of Kings of which it is said, “He did evil in the sight of the Lord”.  It’s worth noting that in pragmatic terms, Ahaz was a pretty good king.  He played the political and foreign policy game in a way that kept Judah safe.  But that isn’t how God judges kings.  The Lord had told his people to trust in him, not in foreign alliance with pagans, not in horses, not in chariots.  But those were the things Ahaz trusted in.  Assyria was the great power of the day and it threatened everyone around.  Israel and Syria made an alliance with each other for their security, but they still weren’t strong enough.  The kings of Israel and Syria put pressure on Ahaz to bring Judah into their alliance.

Ahaz could see that there was no hope in aligning himself with Israel and Syria and, instead, submitted Judah to the sovereignty of the Assyrians.  While he was in Assyria he fell under the influence of Assyrian religion.  When he returned to Jerusalem, he built an altar like one he had seen in Assyria and had the temple re-arranged to accommodate it.  He introduced Assyrian astrological practises to Judah.  He even sacrificed one of his sons to the Assyrian god, Moloch.  In the midst of this, the Prophet Isaiah came to Ahaz.

Isaiah was sent by the Lord to Ahaz the first time as the kings of Syria and Israel were urging Ahaz to ally with them against Assyria.  Isaiah didn’t go alone.  The Lord told him to take his son, Shear-jashub, which means “A Remnant shall return”.  The message the Lord was sending through Isaiah and his son was a familiar one: “Don’t be afraid”.  Israel and Syria were threatening to swoop down on Jerusalem with their combined armies, but the Lord said to Ahaz: “It shall not stand”.  The Lord was urging the king to trust in him.  He also said, through Isaiah, “If you do not stand firm in faith, you shall not stand at all.”

Ahaz waffled rather than standing firm.  The Lord warned him not to ally with Israel and Syria and Ahaz didn’t, but it wasn’t because of the Lord’s warning.  Ahaz was afraid of Israel and Assyria and so, rather than trusting the Lord to take care of Judah, he was considering an alliance with Assyria.  And so the Lord sent Isaiah to him again with another warning.  This is the passage that Matthew draws on.  Isaiah said to the king:

Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.  He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good.  For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted.

 

What the Lord was saying to Ahaz was, “Look.  Trust in me.  Don’t trust in horses, don’t trust in chariots, don’t trust in pagan kings and pagan gods.  Trust in me and I will take care of you.  I am your God and you are my people.”  The Lord had Isaiah mention a young woman.  The Hebrew word refers to an unmarried girl.  Some Bible versions translate this as virgin, because, being unmarried, the girl was presumably a virgin, but this isn’t a reference to Mary or to an earlier miraculous virgin birth.  We don’t know who this girl was, but it seems to be someone known to the king.  It might have been one of the women in Isaiah’s circle of disciples or it may have been a princess in the king’s family, but whoever it was, Isaiah tells the king that she’s going to have a child and he is to be named Immanuel.  Immanuel means “God is with us”.  And the Lord tells the king that by the time this child is eating solid food, by the time he’s old enough to know the difference between good and evil, he, the Lord himself, will put an end to the threat posed by the kings of Israel and Syria.  Again: Don’t trust in horses.  Don’t trust in chariots.  Don’t trust in pagan kings and pagan gods.  Trust in the Lord.

That wasn’t the end of it.  The Lord sent Isaiah a third time to the king.  This time a woman referred to as “the prophetess”—probably Isaiah’s wife—had borne a son named Maher-shalal-hash-baz, which means “the spoil speeds, the prey hastens”.  The Lord’s message was again for Ahaz to trust in him.  Before this child was old enough to say the words “father” and “mother” the Lord would deal with the threat of Israel and Syria.  Again, don’t trust in pagan kings and pagan gods, trust in the Lord.  “God is with us,” declared Isaiah.  “The Lord of hosts, him you shall regard as holy; let him be your fear, and let him be your dread.  He will become a sanctuary, a stone one strikes against; for both houses of Israel he will become a rock one stumbles over—a trap and a snare for the inhabitants of Jerusalem.”

Now, is the Lord faithful?  Does he do what he promises?  Of course.  What the Lord promised was exactly what happened.  In a short time the king of Assyria crushed Syria and Israel.  The northern kingdom was destroyed and the people scattered.  The Lord delivered the people of Judah.  Ahaz, not surprisingly being the wicked king he was, made an alliance with Assyria anyway and brought the worship of the Assyrian gods to Israel.  His son, Hezekiah, spent most of his reign trying to undo the evil his father had done.  Judgement eventually came on Judah too, just as it had on Israel, because the kings of Judah—with a few notable exceptions—failed to trust in the Lord.

Now, back to Matthew.  Why does he quote this prophecy about Immanuel that was fulfilled seven hundred years before?  Matthew does this because in the story of Isaiah and Ahaz we see how God works.  We see God’s goodness and his faithfulness to his people and his call to his people to consistently trust in him.  We also see God’s warning of judgement when his people are unfaithful to him and to the calling he has given.  Israel was, yet again, in another awful political spot in Matthew’s day.  This time it was Rome, not the Assyrians.  Just as Ahaz turned to horses and chariots and to forbidden alliances instead of trusting the Lord, the Jews of Matthew’s day were trusting in all sorts of things other than the Lord.  Jesus spent his entire ministry rebuking these different parties and interest groups.  The Zealots were ready to take up arms in a violent revolution.  The Essenes went off to hide in the desert and denounced everyone else as unfaithful.  The Sadducees sort of took the “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” tack.  All of them needed to be reminded of who they were and to whom they belonged—and in whom they had every reason to trust.

Isaiah made use of three different children.  Matthew could have pointed back to any one of them, but he points back specifically to the child named Immanuel, “God with us”, because it is a poignant reminder that in Jesus, God truly is with his people.  This is what the people of Matthew’s day needed to hear as a call back to faith in the Lord and in the Lord alone.  But in an even deeper way, in Jesus, the Lord is with us in a way he never has been before.  Whereas in Isaiah’s day, the virgin and her child were a sign that the Lord was about to act, this time it was the child in whom the Lord was coming to take the decisive act in Israel’s history.  In this baby born of Mary and the Holy Spirit—God became incarnate, God became one of us—to once and for all deliver his people from bondage and to make all things new.  And this leads Matthew directly to the angel’s instruction to Joseph: You shall call him Jesus, for he shall save his people from his sins.

Jesus was a common name in that day.  In Hebrew it was Joshua.  Our English “Jesus” comes from the Greek form of the name used by the New Testament writers.  The name means “Yahweh Delivers”, which certainly made it a popular name amongst Jews, but it was made even more popular because the most famous Joshua of all time was the Joshua who took over from Moses and led the Israelites into the promised land.  Jesus is not only God with us, but he is the one who will, like Joshua, fulfil what was begun in the Exodus.  Joshua led the people into the promised land and Jesus will free his people from their bondage to sin and death and lead them into the life of the age to come.  Matthew highlights the important truth for us that Jesus didn’t just appear at any old point in history to any old group of people.  He came in the fullness of time, as St. Paul writes in our Epistle from Galatians.  He came when the time was just right.  He came as part of a much bigger story.  He came as the fulfilment of a promise to a people who had struggled, themselves, to be faithful.  He came to die for the sins of his people, to make them clean, and to fill them with his Spirit—again, to fulfil to the story and to make good on God’s promises—so that they—and, eventually, so that we, incorporated into their story—can truly love God with hearts and minds made new.

This is what Paul is getting at in our Epistle.  He writes there:

When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.

Brothers and Sisters, this is the story into which we have been baptised.  Think about that.  What’s the formula we use in baptism?  It’s in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  I don’t think we think about this in terms of the story of redemption—at least not as much or as often as we should.  We too often think of this formula as specifying which God we’re putting our faith in.  You know, I’m not baptizing you into the Mormon or into Zeus or Krishna or the Great Spirit.  I’m baptizing you into the Triune God who exists as Father, Son, and Spirit—three in one and one in three.  That’s part of it, but the more important aspect of it is that this is the God who has acted in history to redeem us and to redeem his Creation.

We are baptised in the name of the Father meaning that we are being incorporated into the family of the God of Israel whose kingdom will come in judgement and restoration.  It means we are being baptised into the family that Isaiah called on to trust wholly in our God, for he is good and faithful.  When we look around at the sin and pain in the world, we can know that we belong to the God who is making all things new.  He is our God and we are his people.  As Jesus said and as Paul writes here, through our union with his Son, Jesus, we are the Father’s adopted sons and daughters and can approach him as “Abba, Father”.

We are baptised into the name of the Son, who in his own baptism committed himself in obedience and in faith to the saving plan of his Father—trusting not in human means and human plans, but in the goodness and faithfulness of God.  Baptism into the name of the Son, it also expresses a willingness to take up our crosses as we follow him, knowing his promise of rejection, persecution, and even martyrdom for those who follow.  We are baptised, as Paul writes, into his death.  But we are also baptised into his resurrection.  When we are tempted to fear, we need only remember our baptism.  God has vindicated his Son and he will vindicate his adopted sons and daughters as well.

Finally, to be baptised into the name of the Holy Spirit is to be baptised into both a new life and a new mission.  Jesus gave the Spirit to his people to fulfil what had been promised long before—to give fallen men and women new hearts capable of trusting, obeying, and loving God.  But the Spirit also makes us a prophetic people—a people called on to proclaim the Good News to the world, the good news that this Jesus, born of Mary, who died and rose again, is the world’s true Lord.  It is a call to the world around us to stop trusting in horses and chariots, in money, power, and sex, and to come to Jesus and to be baptised as we have—to submit to the Father’s plan, to take up our crosses daily as we follow the Son into the life of the age to come, and to take up this Spirit-filled ministry of proclamation until he comes again.  There is no doubt that the task we have been given is a hard one, but Brothers and Sisters, today we are reminded: God is with us.

Let us pray: Almighty God, you have given your only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and to be born of a pure virgin:  Grant that we, who have been born again and made your children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by your Holy Spirit; through our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom with you and the same Spirit be honor and glory, now and for ever.  Amen.