Living Words

The Story

Fr. William Klock

“O come, O come, Emmanuel.”  We began our series of lessons and carols with that hymn of longing.  “O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appear.”  It’s a solemn and mournful Advent hymn that gives way to the joyful hymns of Christmas.  There was some discussion about whether or not we should tone down the joyful nature of our Lessons and Carols service this year.  These last weeks have been a time of mourning for many of us.  Yesterday we held a funeral service for Mike Goodchild.  But, Brothers and Sisters, the things that have been going on in the life of our parish are in stride with the season.  Through the course of Advent, we hear Israel crying out for deliverance and we read the prophets and hear the assuring promises of God: You are still my people.  I have heard your cries.  I know your pain, your grief, your sorrow.  I will visit you again.  I will deliver you.  In the midst of grief, the Lord gives his people hope.  As he said all the way back at the time of the Exodus: “I am your God and you are my people.”

Advent and Christmastide are, I think, the part of the Church Year that puts the biblical narrative, the story of redemptive, right in front of us.  It’s a reminder that abstract and universalised theological ideas aren’t capable of getting the job done.  In fact, when we separate them from the story, they can often lead us astray.  We need the story and here it is.  Israel cries out to the Lord for deliverance.  He’d rescued her from slavery in Egypt over a thousand years before.  He’d made her his people.  He’d given her his law.  He’d made that promise: I will be your God and you will be my people.  But Israel was unfaithful.  On the honeymoon at Mt. Sinai they made and worshiped a golden calf.  Later they brought foreign gods into the temple.  They made alliances with the pagan nations around them.  They trusted in horses and chariots rather than trusting in the Lord.  He called and called and called to his people, but they refused to listen.  And so be brought Babylon’s armies down on them.  The nation was destroyed.  The temple was demolished.  The people were exiled to a foreign land.  Again, they cried out for deliverance and the Lord heard them.  They returned to the land, they rebuilt Jerusalem and they rebuilt the temple.  But nothing was ever the same.  Their short period of self-rule came to an end.  They were covered by pagan Greeks and then by pagan Romans.  They’d rebuilt the temple, but the Lord had never returned to rest in the holy of holies in a cloud of glory as he had in the past.  And so they cried out to the Lord again.  For many, like the Zealots, the problem was politics: Defeat the Romans and all of Israel’s problems would be solved.  For others, like the Pharisees and the Essenes, it was spiritual: Israel was still being disciplined for her failure to be the truly holy people the Lord had called her to be.

The Lord heard those cries and he came himself.  In Jesus, he took on our flesh.  He was born one of us.  Of course, he wasn’t the messiah, the king that most expected.  He wasn’t born in a palace.  He spent his days a poor itinerant preacher.  He attracted no one famous to his entourage of disciples.  And when he did attract the attention of those in power, they nailed him to a cross and killed him as an upstart troublemaker.  And yet, in that very cross, we see that he died the death faced by his people.  A generation later, the powder-keg that was Judea exploded.  The Romans quashed that rebellion and thousands upon thousands of Jewish rebels were crucified—so many that the Romans ran out of crosses.  Jesus had died the very death he had warned his people about should they continue on their path.  And there we see Jesus revealed as both Israel’s saviour and Israel’s judge.  The old Israel was destroyed, but in Jesus a renewed Israel was born.

And yet, if Jesus were merely Israel’s saviour, we wouldn’t be here this afternoon celebrating his birth.  The lessons we read remind us that while Israel had a host of problems, both spiritual and political, those problems were part of a bigger problem.  The first lesson we read was from Genesis, from the story of Adam and Eve.  It was the story of humanity’s rebellion against our Creator, it was about our rejection of what the Lord created us to be and our rejection of the life he offered in his presence.  We read there not just of humanity’s rebellion, but we also read the Lord’s promise.  One day he would set to rights what we had corrupted.  Israel’s story fits within that larger story.  Israel was the means for setting the world to rights.  Abraham had no sense of that grand narrative when the Lord called him.  Israel had no sense of it either when she cried out to the Lord from Egypt and later from her Babylonian exile.  But all along, through this stiff-necked and rebellious people—a people who represent the whole human race—the Lord was working.  And when the time was right, his Son was born of that very people.  He was born, he died, and rose from the grave in fulfilment to the Lord’s promises to Israel.  He was born, died, and rose from the grave as Israel’s saviour.  But as he redeemed his people and created a renewed people of God, this “Root of Jesse” as Isaiah refers to him, giving birth to a new tree, sprouting from the stump of the old, felled tree, in that Jesus did something that attracted the attention of the Gentiles—something that brought them back to the Lord.  In Jesus the faithfulness of the God of Israel was has been put on full display and that display of faithfulness drew the nations and has made you and I a part of the renewed people of God.

You see, the Lord wasn’t just fulfilling his promises to Israel.  Through Israel, the Lord was fulfilling the promises he had made at the very beginning of the story, the promises he made that day he called Adam and Eve out from their hiding places in the Garden, the day he cast them out on account of their sin.  In Jesus the promises have been fulfilled.  In Jesus the rebellion and sin have been forgiven.  In Jesus the exodus from our slavery to sin and death been accomplished.  And in Jesus’ gift of God’s own Spirit, his people have been given a down payment on the life of the age to come.

Brothers and Sister, in our Epistle on Sunday, St. Paul urged us to rejoice.  Not a simple rejoicing that turns a blind eye on the sin and pain and grief around us, but a rejoicing that knows the Lord has seen our pain, has heard our cry, and has sent his own Son to set all to rights.  We began the story crying out, “O Come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.”  Having been reminded that the Lord has heard the cries of his people, we read of Jesus’ birth.  We will come to his Table and be reminded here in the bread and in the wine that God is truly with us.  Here he reminds us of our baptism, when he led us through the water into new life.  Here at the Table he reminds us that in Jesus he truly is Emmanuel—God with us—God walking with us, leading us into the age to come.  And so we will close in a little while with hope-filled rejoicing, “Joy to the world! The Lord is come: Let earth receive her King.”  Think on those words as we singing them after the Lord’s Supper.  They’re meant to be a joyful response to this story that reminds us once again of the goodness and faithfulness of God.

Rejoice!

Philippians 4:4-7

By The Rev'd William Klock

Advent calls us to be prepared.  The Creed reminds us of Jesus’ first Advent.  Think of the words we just recited: for us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven…was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.  The Creed also reminds us that he shall come again with glory to judge both the living and the dead and that his kingdom shall have no end.  At his first Advent—and not just by his Incarnation, but particularly by his death and resurrection, Jesus announced the defeat of sin and death and inaugurated God’s new age.  Advent reminds us that we live in the in-between, in the overlap the ages.  In our baptism we have died with Jesus, as Paul says, and if we have shared in a death like his, we look forward to a day when we will share in his resurrection.  We look forward to the day when Jesus will return to finish what he began, the day when he sets all to rights and makes all things new—including us.  Brothers and Sisters, we need Advent, because we’re prone to forgetting and we’re prone to becoming complacent about the future.  We’re prone to spiritual laziness.  We know that we have a share in God’s new world, but living surrounded by the remnants of the old age, it’s easy to lose perspective.  We’ve been plunged into the Holy Spirit, we’ve been given a taste of the kingdom and the life of God, but the world, the flesh, and the devil do their best to pull us back to our old lives.  To live for Jesus and his kingdom is a challenge.  Like Adam and Eve, we’re tempted to lose faith in the goodness of God—to think that he’s holding out on us.  Like Israel in the wilderness, it’s easy to become bored with manna from heaven and to look back longingly to the fleshpots of Egypt.  We need this annual reminder that there’s more, that this isn’t all there is, that this really is the in-between time and that Jesus surely will finish what he started.  Advent reminds us of the faithfulness of God, revealed in Jesus, and bolsters and restores or faith and our hope.  The light has come into the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.  The darker the night the more brightly the star of Bethlehem shines.

We read our Epistle today in the midst of the darkness.  St. Paul declares to the Christians in Philippi:

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. (Philippians 4:4)

“Rejoice in the Lord always!”  When things are good: rejoice.  When things are bad: rejoice.  When we can see God at work in obvious ways around us: rejoice.  Even when it seems that God is absent, remember that Jesus was born, that Jesus died, that Jesus rose again and that none of it was for naught—and rejoice.  We’re a Christmas people.  What Jesus has done for us permeates our whole lives every day and in every thing.  We rejoice in all things, and that includes all of our troubles or anxieties or persecutions.  In fact, our joy should be even more visible when we face tribulations.  The prophet Micah wrote, “When I sit in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me” (Micah 7:8).  Habakkuk wrote:

Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation. (Habakkuk 3:17-18)

The book of Acts tells us how the first Christians, facing persecution by the Jews rejoiced that they were counted worthy to suffer for his name’s sake.  How did they do it?  By worldly standards that kind of joy in the face of suffering just isn’t possible.  The answer is there in verse 4.  St. Paul doesn’t just tell us to rejoice.  He tells us to rejoice in the Lord.  Jesus gives us hope.  In his first advent he did the hard part.  He was born as one of us.  He died.  And he rose from the grave.  We can be sure that he will return to finish what he started and to consummate his kingdom.  In the meantime, he’s also given us his own Spirit as a down-payment on the life and world to come.  Jesus and the Spirit change everything.

And it really does change everything—or at least, it should.  It’s not just that we rejoice in all things.  If we’re living a life of joy, it will impact every area of our lives.  Paul goes on in verse 5:

Let your reasonableness be known to everyone.

 

The King James says, “Let your moderation be known unto all men.”  Other modern translations say to let our “forbearance”, “gentleness”, or “graciousness” be seen by all.  The Greek word is hard to translate, but it’s important, because Paul is describing the character that we should be displaying to the world—this is a key way we witness Christ in our lives.  In 2 Corinthians 10, Paul describes this particular character in terms of the meekness of Jesus, but it’s the kind of meekness that can only be displayed by the almighty God and Judge of the universe.  When I see this word in Scripture I’m reminded of one of my brother’s friends many years ago.  He was a giant—about 6’8” and probably 350 pounds of muscle.  He was so big he had have a custom shifter made for his truck that wrapped around his enormous leg.  He was a football player and the sort of guy who could pull your arms off.  When he visited he’d sit on the floor, because he’d break just about any piece of furniture he’d sit on.  And yet as powerful as he was, he was one of the most gentle people you’d ever meet.  That’s the idea here: great power and authority choosing to display profound gentleness.  We have been united with Christ.  We bear his power and authority to the world.  Paul even tells us that on the last day we will sit with him to judge the world.  But instead of lording our status as co-heirs with God’s own Son over the world and over the people around us, instead of getting caught up in the stress and conflict and fighting of the world, instead of looking out for “Number One”, we show the same gracious, gentle, meek, and forbearing spirit that Jesus has shown to us.  Remember, you and I were God’s enemies.  You and I were deserving of death.  He has every right to destroy us and he has the power to do it instantly, but he has chosen to be gracious and merciful.  And as he changes our perspective—as he focuses our eyes on the age to come—our hearts should be becoming more gracious and merciful too—more like his heart.  Our focus shifts from that which moth and rust destroy and which thieves break in and steal, to the things of this world that will last—to Jesus; to his kingdom; to goodness, truth, and beauty; to mercy and justice.  One commentator writes: “Let us be ready to drop all that is ours, so that we may hold fast all that is Christ’s; ready to drop earth that we may the better grasp heaven.”  Think of the old story of the kid crying because his hand is trapped in the cookie jar.  His mother tries and tries, but it just won’t come out.  And that’s when she realises that the reason his hand won’t come out is because it’s full of cookies.  He’s trapped in the cookie jar only because he won’t let go of the cookies!  As long as your hands are engaged in holding onto the things of the present age, you’ll never be able to take hold of Jesus and the things of the age to come.  And Paul reminds us why it’s so important we have this perspective: “The Lord is at hand.”  Like Jesus, Paul had in mind the judgement that was soon to come on Jerusalem, but that judgement only serves to reinforce for us that God really does make good on his promises and that Jesus will return one day to judge the living and the dead, to wipe evil from Creation, and to make all things new.  In our case the urgency has more to do with our own limited time.  “Man who is born of woman is few of days…he comes out like a flower and withers; he flees like a shadow and continues not.”  Brothers and Sisters, redeem those few days for the Lord and for his kingdom.  Jesus could have come in judgement two thousand years ago, but that would have meant the destruction of us all, because we’re all sinners.  Instead, he died that men and women would have a means of forgiveness and redemption and he delays his return so that the Spirit, working through the Church, can proclaim the royal summons to the world.  The in-between time, this overlap of the ages is still full of pain and sadness, but it also reveals the patience and mercy of God, who sent his Son not to condemn and destroy, but to redeem the condemned so that we will not be destroyed when he returns.

Brothers and Sisters, we need to maintain this faithful and hopeful perspective, because the old age, even as it passes away, will do everything it can to rob us of our faith and hope.  Paul knew this—probably better than almost anyone.  He says in verse 6:

Do not be anxious about anything,

 

He uses the same word that Jesus uses when he tells us in Matthew 6:34 not to worry about tomorrow, but instead to seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness.  We know the final outcome.  God has already won the victory and if we are in Christ, we are on his victorious side.  But he’s left us here and given us time to proclaim his good news of forgiveness and life with all those people around us who are still slaves to sin and death—and we do that in part by showing our trust in him instead of worrying and being anxious about life.  We need to realise that anxiety is sinful; at its root is a lack of faith in God’s promises.  Anxious people will never grow in the faith.  Not only that, but they will have a poor witness to the world!  So instead of being anxious Paul says:

but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.

 

Here’s where our spiritual rubber meets the road of faith.  The way of the old age is to be anxious, because it offers no hope when life is difficult.  Christians, on the other hand, know that we have a God who has already won the battle for us and who, in the meantime, holds us in the palm of his hand.  When life is hard the world gets anxious; the Christian prays and exercises his trust in God and hope in God’s promises.  The Christian trusts that God is at work in everything, because that’s what he has promised: “For those who love God all things work together for good” (Romans 8:28).  Our problem is that we forget what the “good” is.  One of the greatest errors of the contemporary Church is the idea that God’s will for us is to be happy, healthy, and wealthy.  It can only explain troubles, trials, tribulation, and opposition as a lack of faith.  The Church has forgotten that “good” is not what makes us comfortable, but what grows our faith and brings us into conformity with Jesus.  This is what Isaac Williams had to say about troubles in the life of the Christian: “Trouble does not spring from the ground; there is some object and good purpose for the troubles which are planted so thick like thorns around our dwelling-places on earth.  The reason is this: that such may be made subjects and occasions of prayer to God: God would have us at all times looking to Him; our faces always turned, not like the beasts to the ground, but towards Heaven.  And if any one wishes to know on any occasion why this or that little matter of trouble occurs to him,—some difficulty perhaps, some regret, some ill treatment, some loss or reproach, or bodily pain,—of this he may be assured, that it comes to him from God, in order to induce him to pray.  If we had nothing to trouble us, we should have nothing to desire; and if we had nothing to desire, we should have nothing to pray for.  It is prayer which hallows all the lesser concerns and accidents of life.”

Consider that St. Paul had what he called a thorn in his flesh.  We don’t know what it was.  Some say it was a physical handicap or injury, some that it was some sin that persistently tempted him, but whatever it was, he prayed repeatedly that God would take it away, because it pained him and because he felt that it interfered with his ministry.  But God chose not to take it away, and Paul testifies to us that the thorn in his flesh, through prayer, became an abundant occasion of grace—even to the point that he no longer wanted it gone.  In fact, this brings us full-circle: Paul learned to rejoice in his affliction, because it taught him to trust in God.  He could proclaim: “When I am weak, then I am strong!”  Not because the thorn made him strong, but because it taught him to lean on and draw from the divine strength of God through his gracious, indwelling Holy Spirit.

Do you have a thorn in your flesh?  Is there something in your life that causes you pain, that makes life difficult, that makes for a daily struggle?  Something you’ve prayed for God to take away?  A situation you’ve prayed for God to change?  And he hasn’t?  I’ve learned that too many people become angry with God in those situations.  They blame God for the problem or they complain that he isn’t treating them fairly.  Brothers and Sisters, those thorns in the flesh are our opportunities to lean on God, not to get angry with him.  He offers them to us as occasions to experience the abundance of his grace.  Again, God’s will for us is not for life here to be easy and comfortable.  As he said to the Israelites he says to us: “By holy, for I am holy.”  It’s far more important to God that you learn to live in his grace and to trust in him, than that your life be easy or comfortable.  And as we can see from the example of Israel in the Old Testament, he often uses difficulties in this life in order to prepare us for life in his kingdom.  Again, it’s about our perspective.  God wants to give us eternal perspective and to focus our eyes on the things of the age to come, but to do that he often has to take away the things of the present age—the things we won’t otherwise let go of.  Friends, when he does that, it’s not because he likes to see us in pain or because he isn’t fair, it’s because he loves us and is graciously drawing our attention to himself and teaching us to live in him.  As the writer of Proverbs says, “My son, do not despise the Lord’s discipline or be weary of his reproof, for the Lord reproves him whom he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights.”  Instead of being the cause of discouragement, our trials should be a sign that God loves us, that we truly are his children, and that he is at work.  As Paul’s thorn in the flesh was to him, our trials should grow our faith and build our hope as we experience the grace of God.

That’s when our supplications—those prayers for him to deal with the hard things in life—turn into the thanksgivings that Paul mentions in verse 6.  When our prayers for relief turn into thanksgiving for the source of our suffering, that’s when we know we’re on the right track; that’s when we know our eyes are focused on Jesus and that we’re prepared for Jesus’ Second Advent.

The promise that follows if we will truly trust in God is in verse 7:

And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

 

This is the peace that Jesus told his disciples about in John 14:27: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you.  Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”  Let me say two things about the peace of the Lord and how it fits in with this Sunday of preparation.  First, the more we learn to experience and live in the peace of the Lord, the better we’ll be prepared for Jesus’ kingdom.  The peace of the Lord is truly a foretaste of the life he’s preparing for us.  But as we live out the peace of the Lord, we witness that future age in the here and now.  We display before the anxious and worried eyes of this fallen and corrupt world what it means to have hope and to have faith and to trust in Jesus.  Think about that.  We greet each other on Sunday mornings with those words: “The peace of the Lord be with you.”  Those are powerful words, but I’m not sure we realise that.  It’s not just a churchy way of saying “Hi” or “Good morning.”  In fact, it’s not so much a greeting as it is a blessing and an exhibition of our love for our brothers and sisters that we wish for them to experience “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding.”

And in the second half of the promise, St. Paul tells us that God’s peace will “guard” our hearts and minds in Christ. That word “guard” is a strong one.  In other places it’s used to describe a watchman guarding a city or a fortress from enemies, or a prison guard guarding a prisoner.  If we will trust in God—if we will rest secure in Jesus—he will keep us secure in his peace—a peace that overcomes all the anxieties and worries and fears of the world, that gives us grace to have an eternal perspective in the midst of our trials and tribulations and sufferings.

Brothers and Sisters, this is what Christmas is all about—it’s joy in the knowledge that Our Lord and King is with us.  It’s not just a sentimental joy.  It’s a deep and abiding joy that drive us and gives us purpose.  It’s a joy that motivates us to grow in the new life we find in the manger and at the cross, that we might be prepared for Jesus’ return.  Jesus is with us.  He’s fulfilled the Lord’s promise to pour out his Spirit so that our hearts of stone will be made hearts of flesh—to change the desires of our hearts from self to God.  Let the Spirit work in your heart.  And not just that, but actively cultivate the fruit of the Spirit as he sets your eyes on Jesus and his kingdom.  Let go the things of this age that you might take hold of Jesus and the age to come with both hands.

Adam and Eve’s sin was in taking God’s role on themselves.  Instead of trusting that he knew what was best for them, they decided to make that call for themselves.  Human beings have been repeating that mistake ever since.  Brothers and sisters, that’s something God didn’t design us to do.  Our understanding, our knowledge, and our perspective are limited.  Too often, though, we continue to live like Adam and Eve.  We still fail to trust that God knows what’s best for us.  We’re convinced that there’s nothing better than the cookies clenched tightly in our fist.  We can’t imagine anything better.  We refuse to listen as God gently urges us to let go.  We refuse to trust that he’s got something better for us.  C. S. Lewis famously 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.”

Dear friends, let go.  Let go of the cookies.  Get up from your mud pies.  God will do whatever it takes to get us to let go.  Don’t be like Israel.  God eventually had to take literally everything away from his people, sending them into exile, to get their attention and to teach them to trust him.  Even then, when Jesus came, most of them refused to let go that they might take hold of his grace.

The sooner we learn to let go of the things of this age, the sooner God will place in our hands the things of the next.  And the more often we trust and obey—the better we learn that lesson—the more we will find ourselves rejoicing with St. Paul as we grow and flourish in the grace of God, singing, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.”  This is why we pray today, “Lord, come among us, we pray, with your power and help us with your great might so that, although we are hindered by our sins and wickedness from running the race set before us, your bountiful grace and mercy may speedily help and deliver us through the work of your Son our Lord to whom with you and the Holy Spirit be honour and glory now and for ever.  Amen.”

Milk in a Bag

St. Matthew 11:2-19

How often do we miss something right in front of us because it doesn’t look like what we expect?  Last week I dropped a four litre jug of milk.  I set it on the counter and noticed it had sprung a leak, so I poured the milk into a pitcher and put it back in the refrigerator.  If you want to confuse your family, it’s as easy as that.  Where’s the milk?  What happened to the milk?  It’s right there in the door.  No, it’s not.  Oh…wait…you mean the white stuff in the pitcher?  Yes, the white stuff in the pitcher?  Why’s it in a pitcher?!?  Today’s lesson from St. Luke’s Gospel is a warning and an exhortation.  It’s a warning about the possibility of missing Jesus because he doesn’t look like what we might expect in a Messiah, but it’s also an exhortation to live in hope, knowing that he has, in fact, won the victory over sin and death.  We may sometimes be looking in the wrong places, holding misguided expectations, or we may simply be blind.  Our lesson reminds us that Jesus came to give sight to the blind.  He’s the one who opens the eyes of faith.  Look at our Gospel, Matthew 11:2-3:

Now when John heard in prison about the deeds of the Christ, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?”

 

John was in prison because his preaching—which is summed up in the message, “Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand”—reached Herod.  Herod was an evil man and the last thing he wanted to hear was John’s call to repentance.  So there was John in Herod’s prison and he began hearing reports of all the amazing things Jesus was doing.  On the one hand, Jesus was casting out demons, preaching good news to the poor, healing the sick, and even raising the dead.  That was all Messiah “stuff”.  But Jesus was also offering forgiveness apart from the temple and sacrifices, he was treating sinners and tax collectors like they could be part of God’s family, and he was preaching about loving enemies.  This was not Messiah stuff—or, at least, most people thought it wasn’t supposed to be.  John was confused.  It even sounds as though he was experiencing at least a little bit of doubt.  Much of what Jesus was doing and saying didn’t look or sound like what anyone expected the Messiah to be doing and saying.  But what really bothered John was the fact that there he was, the Messiah’s herald (not to mention his cousin), stuck in Herod’s prison.  If Jesus were really the Messiah, how did this happen and why wasn’t he doing anything to get him out?

Now, remember, that John knew Jesus was the Messiah.  But what was going on?  Despite knowing, he was still doubting.  Why?  Because, just like the rest of his people, he didn’t really understand the Messiah’s ministry.  The same thing happens today and to many of us.  We know that Jesus is the Messiah, and yet when bad things happen, when we get sick, when we lose a job, when a relationship breaks down, when our children walk away from Jesus our first response is to pray—and that’s exactly what we should do.  In prayer we entrust our situation to God.  The problem is that because we misunderstand God’s plan—or presume to know it too well—or because we misunderstand the ministry of Jesus just as John did, we use our prayers to do more than entrust the situation to God.  We try to tell God how he should fix our situation based on our wrong ideas of who he is and how he works—as if we know better than he does.  And then, when he doesn’t do what we expect, we start to doubt.  Sometimes we get angry.  Some people even lose faith.

Now, Jesus could have scolded John, but he instead takes the opportunity to educate the people: to dispel them of their misguided ideas about the Messiah and about God’s coming kingdom.  Look at verses 4-6:

And Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them.  And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.”

In his parallel account, Luke says that at the very time John’s disciples came to him with these questions, Jesus “healed many people of diseases and plagues and evil spirits, and on many who were blind he bestowed sight” (Luke 7:21).  John sends his disciples to Jesus to ask, “Are you the One?”  And when they find Jesus, he’s in the midst of a crowd, healing diseases and casting out demons.  Imagine, Jesus busy healing these people and John’s disciples pushing their way through the crowd and then struggling to get his attention so that they can ask if he’s the One.  It’s a humorous image.  It’s like walking up to a guy framing a house and asking, “Are you a carpenter.”  Jesus turns to them a little like the carpenter and responds, “What do you think?  Look around you.  The blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor finally have hope because they’ve heard the good news.”  Maybe you’ve only imagined a carpenter building cabinets or bookshelves and this guy’s sawing and hammering away at 2x4 house framing, but it should be obvious that he’s still a carpenter.  He’s doing obvious carpenter things.  And that’s what Jesus is getting at.  In his response, he takes John’s disciples back to Isaiah and his prophecies about the Messiah coming to establish God’s kingdom: sight to the blind, healing the lame, and preaching good news to the poor.  Yes, the Jews put their own spin on Isaiah’s prophecy (and the other prophets too), but that doesn’t change the fact that Jesus is the one prophesied.  He’s doing all the things that had been promised.  They were expecting him to build one thing and, instead, he’s building something else—but once you get past that, he’s doing what he’s supposed to be doing.  What they really need is to adjust their own expectations.  Jesus reminds them that none of this should be a surprise.  When Simeon had rejoiced over him in the temple some thirty years before, he had prophesied that Jesus would be the “fall and rising of many in Israel”, but blessed are those who can see past the scandal, who can see Jesus and his kingdom and God’s salvation breaking into the world.

At this point, Jesus realises that John’s not the only one with questions.  There was a crowd gathered there and many of them had heard the exchange between him and John’s disciples.  And so Jesus takes advantage of the situation to teach the whole crowd.

As they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds concerning John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind?  What then did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft clothing? Behold, those who wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses.  What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet.  This is he of whom it is written,

         “‘Behold, I send my messenger before your face,

                  who will prepare your way before you.’ (Matthew 11:7-10)

Jesus starts by asking the people who they think John is.  Many of these people were following Jesus because they had first followed John and received his baptism.  John had prepared them for Jesus’ ministry.  But, then, what is Jesus’ ministry?  That’s the question at the heart of the passage and so Jesus turns to John to answer it.  Again, who is John?  He asks the people who they went to the wilderness to see.  “A reed shaken by the wind?”  This was a reference to Herod.  One of Herod’s symbols was a reed.  It was stamped on his coins.  Maybe Jesus even held one up as he asked them this.  Jesus’ question hits at two points: Did you go out to see some weak, namby-pamby preacher in the wilderness who blows around like a reed?  No.  They went out to hear John the Baptist preach fire and brimstone and to condemn corrupt Herod, the king with a reed on his coins.  John wasn’t the sort of preacher who tickled itching ears, but as the forerunner of the Messiah, neither was he kingly.  Did you go out looking for a man in soft clothes—like a Herod or one of his nobles?  Most people associated the coming Messiah with the king.  If Herod was grand and dressed in fine clothes, the Messiah and his herald ought to be dressed in even finer clothes.  But no.  They went out to the wilderness to see a very different herald.  John wore camel’s hair.  Did you go out to see a prophet?  Yes!  You went to hear John because he was preaching with conviction something the people never would have heard from the palace or from the wealthy and powerful people invested in the status quo.  They went to hear John because he was like the prophets Israel had known in the old days: Elijah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and others.

Jesus reminds the people: You went out to see John, because he’s the one prophesied by those old prophets.  In verse 10 Jesus calls to mind the whole covenant and all of God’s promises to Israel as he mashes together Malachi 3:1 and Exodus 23:20.  In Exodus—at the very beginning of Israel’s history—God had promised one day to send his messenger and through Malachi, at the end of the Old Testament—one of the last of the prophets—he again promised to send his messenger to prepare the way.  Jesus is saying, “That’s John—the one you’ve been expecting since God led you out of Egypt and all through your trials and tribulations.  And yet John is more than a prophet.  He’s the one who draws the whole prophetic ministry of the Old Covenant together.  He takes all those strands from more than a thousand years of history and revelation and he braids them into a cord that leads straight to Jesus.  But what does that mean for Jesus?  And what does it mean for his people.  Look at verse 16:

Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has arisen no one greater than John the Baptist. Yet the one who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. 

So, again, what does this mean for Jesus?  The whole point of John’s questions on that day had to do with who Jesus was.  Was he really the Messiah?  Because he didn’t really look like what the people expected.  If John was more than a prophet—if he was the consummation of the Old Covenant’s prophetic ministry, then that must mean that the one he has heralded is—so to speak—“more than more than a prophet”!  He must be the Messiah.  And that means that as the Messiah, Jesus is inaugurating the new kingdom that everyone had been waiting for.  It’s full of poor people; formerly blind, sick, and dead people; and even—gasp!—a few gentiles, but all those poor people and outsiders, because of their new kingdom and new covenant status, have something that even John didn’t have.  John was still part of the Old Covenant that pointed to the New.  Those who have heard the good news and are in Christ are now part of his New Covenant.

Luke, in his account, interjects some commentary of his own at this point.  What is Jesus revealing here?  Luke writes:

(When all the people heard this, and the tax collectors too, they declared God just, having been baptized with the baptism of John, but the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected the purpose of God for themselves, not having been baptized by him.) (Luke 7:29-30)

The people who had received John’s message of repentance and, more importantly, who had acted on it by being baptised by John—they heard what Jesus was saying here and declared, as the ESV puts it, that God is just.  The word translated “just” is the word that Paul uses for “righteous”.  To the Jews that meant that God is faithful, that he keeps his promises.  Paul says that the good news about Jesus—that he is the crucified and risen Messiah and Lord of all—reveals or unveils God’s righteousness, his faithfulness to do what he said he would do.  Yes, the people were confused by Jesus.  He did some of the things they expected and he did some things they didn’t expect, but as Jesus reminds them of what God had promised of the Messiah through the prophets, their eyes are opened.  “Yes!  Now we see.  Jesus really is the Messiah!  In Jesus we see God doing what he promised he would do.  He is truly righteous!  He is truly good and faithful!”

But not everyone was willing to give up their own agendas.  Not everyone was willing to heed John’s call to repentance and to accept and submit to what God was doing through Jesus.  And so Jesus goes on in verses 16-19:

“But to what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to their playmates,     “‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;

                  we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.’

For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon.’  The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’  Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds.”

This generation—and Jesus is referring to all those who had rejected John’s baptism and message of repentance and as a result had turned aside from the path that leads from John to Jesus—this generation is a stubborn and stiff-necked—just like the generation that grumbled against the Lord and against Moses as they were being led from their Egyptian slavery into freedom.  God is being gracious, but they can’t see his grace for what it is.  Ultimately there’s no pleasing them.  Jesus compares them to brats playing in the street.  The other children invite them to play a fun and happy dancing game, but they refuse.  They aren’t in the mood for playing that game.  So the kids, wanting them to join in, decided to play at a funeral game, but that’s no good either.  We’ve all met people like this.  They criticise you for one thing and then when you change to try to satisfy them, suddenly that’s no good either.

John, the forerunner came like one of the Old Testament prophets to preach repentance, and so it was appropriate that he lived the life of an ascetic.  Something was wrong and he was anticipating God’s coming to judge and to vindicate and so he “fasted and prayed”.  But that was no good for these people.  The people who rejected him justified their rejection by saying that John must have had a demon.  But now Jesus has come—the one who has come to manifest God’s presence.  He’s the one John fasted and prayed for and so with his coming, he’s brought feasting and celebration, which shows in itself the nature of his ministry of bringing the good news.  But that’s no good either.  Ultimately, the problem isn’t the behaviour; it’s the people who have determined in their hearts to reject God’s plan for saving his people and his creation.

In contrast, Jesus says, “Wisdom is justified by her deeds.”  Think of “Wisdom” in the Old Testament.  In Proverbs, the Wisdom of Solomon, and in Sirach wisdom is often portrayed as a woman who calls out for men and women to follow her.  She represents God’s good will for his people.  To walk in or with this woman, Wisdom, is to submit to the way of life that the Lord has laid out in Scripture and specifically in this case, to submit to the lordship that Jesus has manifested as the Messiah—to repent, to be baptised, and to walk with him in faith as he makes everything new.

So Jesus uses John’s doubting questions as an opportunity to explain his purpose and his ministry.  He uses John’s questions to again assert his Messiahship—his role as Saviour and as Lord.  And in doing that he leaves us with a choice.  We can choose to submit to the lordship of Jesus and to submit to God’s saving plans and through that to be blessed as we take part in his victory over sin and death.  Or we can be like the Pharisees and lawyers for whom nothing was good enough.  They had their expectations of what the Messiah would do and what he’d be like and because they weren’t willing to set aside those false ideas, they rejected Jesus and brought God’s judgement on themselves.  They were so convinced that God was going to work in one particular way that when he manifested himself and was working right under their noses, they missed him.  Again, think of the silly scene of John’s disciples approaching Jesus as he was healing the sick and giving sight to the blind.  They had to interrupt his messianic work to ask him if he was really the Messiah.  And Jesus pointed them to what he was doing and sent them back to John: “Am I the Messiah?  Go back to tell John how you saw me doing everything that the Messiah is supposed to be doing.”  But the Pharisees, even as Jesus fulfilled what God had spoken through the prophets—what was written in Scripture—were still blind to God at work.  They refused to open their eyes even as Jesus was right there with them.

Brothers and sisters, let this be a warning to us.  Let us never miss God working in our midst and in our lives because we refuse to let him open our eyes and correct our pre-conceived notions of how he’s supposed to work.  It’s normal to look for milk in the plastic, four-litre jug, but don’t miss the milk just because today it’s in a pitcher.  I’ve talked to some very frustrating Charismatics for whom the plastic jug is “signs and wonders”.  If the signs and wonders aren’t there, then God isn’t at work.  As if, for the almost two thousand years before their movement started, the kingdom was somehow stalled out.  But, the opposite can also be true as well.  Sometimes we traditional Protestants might be dismissive of those folks, as if God isn’t going to work amongst them.  Brothers and Sisters, God works wherever he is honoured and the good news about Jesus proclaimed.  We don’t have to be perfect or have every one of our ducks in row for him to work in our church.  By all means, getting our doctrine right, doing church right, and all of that is important, but if God required perfection of his people before he would deign to work through us, the work would never be done.

This is also an exhortation to minister as the people God has made us and to bloom where God has planted us.  Sometime we get this idea of who the ideal Christian is and we get discouraged when we don’t measure up.  I’ve told you before that when I was in University I started to become very discouraged.  I had some friends were very passionate about Jesus and about ministry and mission.  They were the sorts of people who wear their hearts on their sleeves—very passionate in their emotions.  And it made me feel very inadequate.  I remember going to church or going to prayer meetings and trying to gin up certain feelings that I thought a good Christian was supposed to have, but of course, it was phony.  And so I went to our campus chaplain to talk.  And he gave me a rebuke and an exhortation at the same time.  He reminded me that every one of us is different: in our personality, our character, our abilities, and our gifting.  That’s part of the beautiful diversity of the body of Christ.  Each of us needs to be who God has made us and bloom where we’re planted.  We need to be open to God working with who we are and what we have, not obsessing over duplicating the experience and ministry of other Christians.  Just because So-and-so is a heart in the body of Christ doesn’t mean you also have to be a heart.  You may be a brain or you may be an eye or you may be a hand.  Be what God has made you.  Just because So-and-so is called to become an overseas missionary doesn’t mean that that’s your calling.  God has you where he wants you and your missionfield may be your own family, your neighbourhood, or your town.  Remember parents: Your first priority in mission is raising your own covenant children to know the Lord.  There is nothing more important than that.  And just because God has gifted someone else with seemingly limitless energy and resources for program after program after program and you get exhausted just watching from a distance (that’s guy who gets exhausted watching that sort of thing is me, Friends), doesn’t mean that God hasn’t placed you where you are for a reason and gifted you for ministry in that place.

Brothers and Sisters, study the Scriptures.  That’s where we see God at work.  It’s where he tells us how he works and dispels our false ideas.  But most importantly, be open to God working in ways you might not expect.  Sometimes God’s like milk in the jug, but sometimes he’s like milk in a carton.  Sometimes he’s like milk in the pitcher.  Sometimes he’s like milk in a bag.  Yeah, sometimes God gets pretty weird.  And sometimes God’s like milk in a shoe.  How’d he get there?  Why is there?  It doesn’t matter.  That’s where he’s chosen to work, so work with him where he’s at and give him glory.  Remember, we’re talking about the God who, over and over, chooses sinners and the outcast to be his people, the God who humbled himself and took up our flesh to become one of us, the God who was laid in a manger as a baby, the God who allowed himself to be nailed to a cross.  Where you see his kingdom manifest, his good news proclaimed, his Spirit at work, the Holy Trinity being given glory, and his Word honoured you can be sure that he is at work whether it’s as we expected or not.  As Jesus said to John’s disciples, “Blessed is the one who is not offended by me.”

Let us pray.  O Lord Jesus Christ, who at your first coming sent your messenger to prepare your way before you: grant that we, the ministers and stewards of your mysteries, may likewise so prepare and make ready your way by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, that at your second coming to judge the world we may be found an acceptable people in your sight; who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

The Day is at Hand

St. Matthew 21:1-13 & Romans 13:8-14

At first glance, it might seem odd that Advent begins with a Gospel lesson that we usually associate with Palm Sunday.  In Matthew 21 we read about Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey as the crowds waved palm branches and hailed him as the son of David, as the Messiah, as the long-promised and long-awaited King.  Matthew connects that first “Palm Sunday” with the prophecy spoken through Isaiah: “Behold, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey.”  Why the Palm Sunday Gospel as we begin a new Church Year and prepare for Christmas?  Because Advent is our annual reminder of the coming of the King.  On the one hand, as it leads us to Christmas, it prepares us for our remembrance and celebration of Jesus’ birth—his first advent.  It reminds us, too, as in our Gospel today, that the King has already come to establish his kingdom.  And, finally, it reminds us that the King is coming back to finish what he has begun.  Advent proclaims the royal summons: God’s King has come.  Advent calls us to repentance as we kneel before the King and give him our all.  And Advent gives us hope to live faithfully for our King even though it means sacrifice in the midst of hardship, opposition, and even persecution.  It’s easy to become complacent.  It’s easy to slowly and gradually succumb to the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil.  It’s easy to lose sight of Jesus.  It’s easy to forget that he is the beginning and the centre of all things as we were reminded last Sunday, and to start putting ourselves or our idols at the centre of things.  It’s easy to lose hope.  And so the Church gives us Advent every year and we hear St. Paul’s voice like an alarm clock: “Sleeper, awake!”

In the Epistle for the First Sunday in Advent he writes to the Christians in Rome, “You know what time it is.  The hour has come.  It’s time to wake from your sleep!”  It seems that Paul borrowed this idea from an early Christian hymn that he quotes in Ephesians 5:14:

Awake, O sleeper

And arise from the dead,

And Christ will shine on you.

 

“The night is far gone, the day is at hand,” Paul writes here in Romans.  It’s something we need to be reminded of.  Jesus has died.  Jesus has risen.  The shockwave of new creation went out that first Easter.  A new kingdom has been born.  And yet the shockwave has passed.  People have forgotten.  The world trundles along and people continue to worship Caesar and Aphrodite and Mammon and Mars.  We stopped going to their temples, but we continue to look for satisfaction or worth or security in the things they once represented—in power, in sex, in money, and in violence.  And Paul shouts, “Wake up!”  Brothers and Sisters, the new day has already dawned.  The darkness is fading away.  God’s new age is breaking in and driving away the darkness.  It may just be the first few rays of light that are peeking over the horizon, but the resurrection of Jesus from the dead has inaugurated something new and, Paul says, that means that the people of Jesus need to wake up and live in the new day.  The people around us might still be sleeping, but if Jesus truly is Lord as we proclaim, if we’ve really submitted to him in faith as we claim we have, then we need to get busy about living the life of his kingdom

Look at Romans 13:11-12.  Paul writes:

Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.  The night is far gone; the day is at hand.  So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. 

 

The darkness of night is a good metaphor for the old age.  It’s during the night, under the cover darkness, that people get away with all sorts of wickedness and evil.  We do things in the dark that we’d be ashamed to do in broad daylight.  Paul goes on in verse 13:

Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality…

 

Those are the sorts of things people do under the cover of darkness.  Reading this, the Christians in Rome would have thought of the pagan temples.  If you walked by at night you’d hear the drunken orgies and run into the people stumbling in and out of the temples.  These were things the Gentile believers once did, but not anymore.  And yet the present age isn’t just about those sorts of sins—the ones we often think of as “big sins”.  Paul also adds quarelling and jealousy to the list.  It’s easy for Christians, when we think of sins, to focus on the things that most of us avoid.  I don’t know many Christians who participate in drunken orgies.  Most of us are pretty good about sexual immorality—although that can often be something we get away with under the cover of darkness or—in the modern world—via the privacy and secrecy of the Internet.  But Paul reminds us that there are other things too that should never characterise people who live in the light of Jesus’ kingdom—things that we see all too often in the Church and in our own lives.

A few years ago Jerry Bridges wrote a book titled Respectable Sins.  (Some of you will remember that I used it as the basis for a series of sermons on Sunday evenings just after I came here.)  The focus of that book was on just these sorts of sins that Scripture condemns, but that are often ignored or, sometimes, even justified by Christians: things like anger and bitterness, jealousy and strife, unthankfulness and gossip and lack of self-control.  It’s easy to point our fingers at people engaged in sexual sin or at drunks and drug-users and to feel smug and self-righteous.  And yet St. Paul lists many of these other sins like gossip and anger and enmity right along with those “big sins” when he writes about sinful behaviour and character that should never characterise Jesus’ people.  All of it, he says, needs to be put aside.  All of these things are characteristic of the age that’s passing away.  All of these things are rooted in humanity’s rebellion against God and against the vocation he gave us when he created us—all of them are centred on a love of self and an indulgence of self and that’s not what Jesus’ people are about.  By his death and resurrection we’ve been liberated from the slavery of the old age and we’ve been given the life of the age to come, the life that God originally intended for us.  Again, “Sleeper, awake!”

“But, Paul,” we think, “that’s all well and good, but how do we do that?”  It’s one thing for Paul to tell us not to do these things, but we’ve all tried and I don’t know anyone who’s been successful, at least not long-term, when they’ve tried it on their own.  But, thankfully, Paul doesn’t leave us with a bunch of impossible rules.  He goes in verse 14:

But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

 

This is another principle that Paul writes about a lot.  Over and over he tells us to put off the old and to put on the new.  This is what Paul is saying when he says to cast off the works of darkness and instead to put on the armour of light.  This is what we mean when we use the word “repentance”—it means to cast aside, to turn away, and to put off everything that belongs to the age that’s passing away, everything that belongs to our old selves, everything associated with our rebellion against God, and instead to turn to the light, to turn to Jesus and to let him fill us and clothe us with the life of God.

Brothers and Sisters, this is what Baptism is about.  This is what it means to be “in Christ”, as Paul so often puts it.  This is what it means to live the life of the Spirit.  It’s about living out the new identity that Jesus has given us.  Again, this is what it means to be baptised, but I think one of the most helpful ways to understand this is to think back to the story of the Exodus.  Paul does that all the time so we might as well, too.

The Israelites were slaves in Egypt.  That was their life.  They laboured for Pharaoh until they died.  But they knew the promises God had made to Abraham and they cried out to God.  And God heard them.  He sent Moses to lead them.  He sent plagues to defeat Pharaoh and to prove his gods were powerless.  And then he led the people miraculously through the waters of the Red Sea on dry ground, while drowning Pharaoh’s army.  He met the Israelites at Mt. Sinai and gave them his law—a new way to live—and he gave them his tabernacle—a place to encounter his presence.  And then he led them into a new land.  They were slaves, but he parted the sea and called them to meet him on the far side.  And on the far side he gave them a new life and a new identity.  At Sinai he declared that Israel was his son.  That didn’t mean that the Israelites ceased to struggle with their slave identity.  When life was hard in the wilderness, Israel grumbled against the Lord and doubted his goodness and wisdom.  Israel flirted with the idea of going back to Pharaoh.  The fleshpots of Egypt were better than manna from heaven, or so they thought.  Even after the Lord had made good on his promise to bring them into the promised land, Israel failed to live in faith.  With the Lord they had a covenant of life, but as Isaiah wrote in our Old Testament lesson, Israel chose instead to make a covenant with death.

Now, think of our baptism in light of that story.  The baptismal font is our Red Sea.  We are born slaves to sin and death, but in the baptismal waters, God holds out a promise to us: My Son has died for the forgiveness of sins.  My Son was raised from death to begin the work of new creation.  Trust in him.  Trust in my promise.  Kneel before him in faithful submission as Lord, and you will have a share in my new world.  In other words: Repent and be baptised.  Forsake everything but Jesus and he will deliver you from your old life of slavery to sin and death and give you the life God created us for.  We pass through the waters and Jesus makes us new.  He ushers us into a new land, a new kingdom, a new life.

Now, here’s where the two stories parallel each other, but are very different.  On the other side of the Red Sea, the Lord gave Israel his law.  You are my son, he said.  This is how you will serve me.  But Israel failed to do it, because the people still had the same old hearts.  The Lord promised through the prophets that he would do something new—something to fix Israel’s heart problem—and he has done that in Jesus.  Jesus leads us through the waters as Moses led Israel, but on the other side, Jesus gives us his own Spirit.  This was the one thing Israel lacked.  And God’s Spirit turns our hearts of stone to hearts of flesh.  God’s Spirit transforms the desires of our hearts.  From love of self and sin, he turns us to love for God and love for each other.  In our baptism we put off the old and put on the new.  In baptism we forsake the darkness and choose, by the power of God, to live in the light Jesus’ dawning day.

Martin Luther wrote that when he was tempted by sin, when he was tempted to question God’s forgiveness, or question the life of Jesus in him he would grab his forehead, the place where the water had been poured on him as a baby, and he would simply remind himself, “You are baptised!”  I framed my baptismal certificate and hung it on the wall as a reminder to me.  Those of you who are younger may have candles.  Light them every year on the anniversary of your baptism to remind yourselves that you have been transferred from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light.  The water of Baptism embodies the grace of God to forgive sinners and to clothe us with the life of Jesus, to make us new.  If we have passed through these waters in faith there is nothing short of our own wilful rejection of God’s promise that can separate us from the love of God, from his grace, from his forgiveness, or from his life.  This is where we put off the old and put on Jesus.

But baptism is just the beginning.  Jesus also reminds us and assures us of our life in him when we come to his Table.  His body was broken and his blood was shed to make us holy.  All who have passed through the waters of Baptism are invited to his Table to be reminded again that his life is our life, that in our Baptism we have put on Jesus, and that each day he sustains us, renews us, and transforms us.  If you’ve been tempted during the week to put the old back on, you have a reminder here at the Lord’s Table of what God has done for you in Jesus, of his love for sinners, and his invitation to once again put off the old and to put on the new.  Here we participate once again those great events whereby Jesus led us out of our bondage to sin and death.  Here at the Table Jesus also gives us a foretaste of the age to come and of his kingdom.  Here he reminds us of his goodness and faithfulness.  Here he reminds us that God’s new creation is breaking in and if we are part of it, our lives ought to reveal its light.  When we go from the Table it should be in faith, knowing that Jesus is Lord, not Caesar, not Mammon, not Aphrodite, not any other false god we’re prone to worship or look to for security—Jesus is Lord and Jesus alone.  The Sacraments remind us that Jesus is the beginning and the centre of everything and the Lord’s Table should be a place for us to evaluate how we’ve been living and to reorient ourselves back around him when we’ve started to put ourselves at the centre.

God gives us these means of grace because he understands the struggle we face.  And the Sacraments certainly aren’t the only means of grace.  He’s given us his Word and we would struggle a great deal less if we truly steeped ourselves in it and grasped better what it tells us and shows us of God’s love and God’s goodness and God’s faithfulness.  We’d struggle less if we meditated on and memorized God’s Word, internalizing it and letting it shape and mould our desires and our thinking.  And God gives us each other, his Church.  Brothers and Sisters, Jesus has poured the Holy Spirit into each of us and he’s put us in fellowship with one another.  Together we teach and exhort each other, we love each other, we mourn and are joyful with each other, we’re accountable to each other, we stand with each other.  Again, God knows that we struggle to put off the old and to keep off the old.  He knows that we struggle to put on the new and keep on the new.  And so he gives us means of grace.  We need to avail ourselves of them.  That’s part of what it means to wake up and to walk in the light.

This is how we live in this in-between time.  The old age is passing away and God’s new age is breaking in.  We can only live in that new age, in God’s kingdom by faith—faith in God’s faithfulness, faith that as he has always been faithful to his promises.  He will be faithful to his promise to make all things new, to restore his Creation, and to set everything to rights.  Paul looks forward to that day.  And in the meantime, in this in-between time, we’re called to live as if that day were already here.  The first part of our Epistle shows us what that looks like.  Look at Romans 13:8-10:

 

Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.  For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.

 

Here’s what kingdom living looks like.  In fact, it looks just like what Jesus describes in the Sermon on the Mount.  Don’t owe anyone anything.  Just at face value that’s good and biblical advice, but where we’re prone to reading this as Paul talking about the financial debt that’s so common in our world—and that’s often a symptom of our idolatry and our love of “things” and “stuff”— what Paul was really getting at was the system of patronage that governed almost every aspect of life in the ancient world.  Their societies were strictly hierarchical and the way you found security and the way you advanced and the way you got rich was through patronage and debts.  Few people did anything for anyone without expecting something in return.  Think of the Mafia.  The boss does you a favour, he looks out for you, he protects you, but he always expects something in return—and it’s like that with everyone all the way down the hierarchy.  It’s a modern vestige of the old Roman system of patronage.  Their entire world ran that way.

But Jesus’ kingdom is the opposite.  Jesus tells us to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us.  Jesus tells us to go the extra mile and to turn the other cheek.  Jesus turns the values of the old age upside-down.  In fact, what he’s really doing is turning the world right-side up after we rebelled and turned it upside down.  And so this is why Paul urges us: Don’t try to find your place in the present age, don’t try to advance yourself in the present age by seeking to put others in your debt or by putting yourself in debt to the world’s system, just love each other.  Think of yourself as being in debt to everyone, but not in debt to them the way the world thinks.  Deal with everyone you know and everyone you meet as if you owe them a debt of love.  If you live like that you won’t be thinking of other people as lower than yourself or as undeserving of your love.  If you love them the thought of killing them or hating them or stealing from them or being envious of them or gossiping about them won’t even cross your mind.  If you love them and see they have a nice house or nice clothes you’ll be happy for them.  If you see they’re in need, you’ll find a way to help.

If you love your neighbour, Paul says, you won’t commit adultery with his wife or with her husband.  This is where the English language gets us into trouble.  Love is a great word, but we’ve given it far too many things to do in English.  Love covers the selfless and sacrificial and giving love modelled by Jesus and pointed to here by Paul.  It covers the sort of love that desires and seeks to do the best thing it can for a friend or a neighbour—or even an enemy.  But our English word for love also does duty for the selfish pursuit of our own lusts and desires that uses the people around us and that often destroys them.  We do have words for that sort of selfishness.  “Lust” is one of them.  And yet when someone—as it’s so often put—falls head-over-heels in love with someone else’s husband or wife or when a young unmarried couple decides to have sex we avoid the word “lust”.  They’re so attractive or beautiful and our feelings are so exciting and warm—well—then it must be “love”.  And then we justify it: God does say that love is really all that matters, doesn’t he?

But, Brothers and Sisters, that’s not love.  I’ve counselled people or even had people who know that as a Christian or as a pastor I must disapprove of what they’re doing try to justify themselves with this sort of talk.  “Yes, she’s married to someone else, but we love each other.”  “Yes, we’re both men, but we love each other.”  “No, we’re not married, but we love each other.”  And I should add, it’s not just about sex.  I’ve heard gossips tearing down someone else justify it with just this sort of twisted language: “Oh, I wasn’t gossiping, I care about So-and-so and I was telling my friends so that they could pray for her.”  Dear Friends, Paul makes short work of these kinds of arguments.  The point of love, the kind of love that reflects the love of God, the kind of love embodied in that Greek word agape that Paul uses here, is the sort of love that reflects the love of God in Jesus.  It’s the sort of selfless love that seeks not our own satisfaction, but the good and well-being and wholeness of others.  This is the love embodied in the Incarnation and the Cross—the love of the one who, though God, did not see that as something to be exploited, but emptied himself and humbly took on our flesh and who died the humiliating and excruciating death of the Cross—and not for his friends, but for his enemies; for the very people who put him there.  Brothers and Sisters, that’s love.  As Paul writes, love does not wrong a neighbour.  Love does no hurt to a neighbour.  Instead, love seeks what is best for him—even if it means we come up short ourselves.  And in that, Paul says, the law is fulfilled.  In that we love not only our neighbours as ourselves, but in that we also show our love for God.  It’s through love that we live the life of God’s kingdom and of his new creation, right here and right now as we wait for its fulfilment in future.  It’s through love that we declare to the world that Jesus is Lord.  It’s through love that we rouse the world from its dark slumber to live in God’s new day.  Brothers and Sisters, this is Advent.  We love as our Lord and Saviour first loved us and in that we proclaim: the King has come and the King will return.

Let us pray: Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

Shall be Put to Death

Exodus 21:12-17

by William Klock

We’ll be continuing our study of Exodus this morning as we look at 21:12-27.  We move from a passage regulating slavery to a passage about capital punishment.  Two hot potatoes in a row!  As we look at what the Lord says to the Israelites here, it’s important to remember his purpose in giving Israel this law.  It’s all about loving God and loving each other so that when the nations watched them, they would see the people who lived with the Lord in their midst.

Let’s read God’s word.  Again, this is Exodus 21 and we’ll start with verses 12-14.

“Whoever strikes a man so that he dies shall be put to death.  But if he did not lie in wait for him, but God let him fall into his hand, then I will appoint for you a place to which he may flee.  But if a man willfully attacks another to kill him by cunning, you shall take him from my altar, that he may die.

The law here envisions two difference scenarios that are pretty straightforward.  The first is a case of premeditated murder.  The penalty for murder with malice aforethought is death.  The second scenario is what we would call manslaughter.  There’s been a killing, but the killing wasn’t intentional.  Maybe you got into an argument, the other guy threw a punch and you threw one back and knocked him down.  All you meant was to defend yourself, but he falls, hits his head, and dies.  It’s your fault, but it wasn’t intentional.  You can flee, as it says, to a place the Lord will appoint.  More on this in a moment.  There’s also a third scenario here: a man guilty of premeditated murder runs to the Lord’s altar to seek asylum.  Seeking asylum in a temple or on holy ground was a common practise and one the Lord will regulate, but he’s also clear here: there is no asylum for the man guilty of murder.

Again, the first and the last parts are pretty easy to understand.  But what about the man guilty of manslaughter fleeing to a place the Lord would appoint?  We need to understand some cultural background and we need to look at the passage where the Lord appoints these places.  As I said last week, their world was very different from ours.  They lived in an honour culture and blood feuds were common.  Family and clan were everything.  Scores were often settled through private justice.  If a man was murdered, his closest male relative was obligated and duty-bound to seek revenge.  Things could escalate very quickly.  You hunt down and kill your brother’s murderer, but then his brother takes issue with that and comes for you, and so on, back and forth.

So to curb this sort of thing the Lord gave Israel a number of instructions that expand on what we have here.  In Numbers 35 he instructs the Israelites to set aside six cities as “cities of refuge”.  They were places where the man guilty of manslaughter could flee.  The avenger of blood could not touch him there.  It gave the guilty party the chance to have his case adjudicated, and if it was determined that he was not guilty of premeditated murder, he was permitted to stay in the city of refuge where the blood feud couldn’t touch him.  On the other hand, as we see here, if a murderer seeks asylum—in this case in the tabernacle—but is found to be guilty, he is to be removed and executed.

The other thing we see, also in Numbers 35, is the establishment of due process.  You couldn’t just hunt a suspect down and lynch him.  Numbers 35:30-31 says:

If anyone kills a person, the murderer shall be put to death on the evidence of witnesses.  But no person shall be put to death on the testimony of one witness.  Moreover, you shall accept no ransom for the life of a murderer, who is guilty of death, but he shall be put to death.

The Lord explains to Israel that capital punishment is a serious thing.  It’s not to be meted out through blood feuds.  There’s got to be some kind of due process, where witnesses and evidence are brought before the authorities.  And the Lord is clear: You can’t put anyone to death based on a single witness; you’ve got to have multiple witnesses.  But we also get a sense here of how serious the Lord is about this.  When it came to other crimes, you could pay a ransom—a monetary fine—to avoid the punishment otherwise on the books.  But not when it comes to murder.  The penalty for murder is death.  Period.

Why is that?  What’s the reason?  It’s common to hear people opposed to the death penalty explain that it’s not a deterrent or that it’s more expensive than long-term incarceration.  Often the opposition points out the flaws in our justice system that sometimes result in the innocent being convicted or forms of racial injustice.  Some Christians argue that the law doesn’t apply anymore, and try to put a sort of New Testament spin on the issue.  One pastor I know told me that in the New Testament, God is a God of second chances.  I think that language is problematic, but if it’s true, we also see that God is just as much a God of second chances in the Old Testament—just look at his patience with Israel.  It’s also common for people to simply argue that one killing doesn’t make up for another and that the death penalty is barbaric.  But the Lord’s never says that the death penalty will be an effective deterrent or that it will be economical.  That last objection that says one killing doesn’t justify another hits closer to the mark despite being dead wrong.  And we can’t just wave a New Testament wand at this and make it go away because the torah doesn’t apply to us.  The death penalty—specifically when it comes to murder—predates Moses and the torah.  You see, the death penalty is here in the torah, because God gave this command to Noah back in Genesis, and this command applies to the entire human race thereafter.  The Lord gave this command to Israel, because it was one that was already, so to speak, on the books.  Look at Genesis 9:5-6.

And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man.  From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man.  “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.

Notice the important thing here: the reason: “for God made man in his own image”.  God created human beings to be his images.  This is temple language.  The pagans created temples and then placed images of their gods in those temples.  Those images represented their gods and declared that, say, Baal or Asherah, ruled this land.  (To attack that idol would have been seen as a direct attack on the God it imaged.)  But Genesis shows us the Lord creating his own temple—the garden—and then he creates the man and the woman and places them in his temple as his images.  They mediate his rule to the world and act as his stewards.  And so to murder another human being is to attack one who bears God’s image.  That means that it’s ultimately an attack on God himself.  You can’t attack God, but you can destroy the image he placed in his temple.  That’s why this is so serious.  We tend to think of life in little more than biological terms.  When our culture struggles to see the difference between the life of an animal and the life of a human being, it’s not surprising that we struggle to grasp the significance of human life given in Scripture.  But it’s here.  It won’t be silent.  Life requires life.  In regard to murder, this penalty is timeless.  I’ll come back to this at the end.

Let’s move on to verses 15-17:

Whoever strikes his father or his mother shall be put to death.

Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death.

Whoever curses his father or his mother shall be put to death.

We get a sense here of just how important the family was in Israel’s world.  Unlike the death penalty applied to murderers, which is something established by the Lord long before there was an Israel and which is timeless, the penalties here are unique to the torah.  While this does not require we do the same, it really ought to give us pause for thought as we live in a world in which contempt for parents is commonplace and in which there is very little regard for the family as the cornerstone of our society.  We see the rotten fruit all around us that has grown from our disregard for the family.

So the penalty for physically assaulting father or mother was death, which probably seems extreme to us, but verse 17 takes it further.  Cursing Father or Mother meant death as well.  It helps to remember that in their culture there was a belief that a curse, especially when spoken in the name of God, had real force to destroy a person.  The Hebrew word used here also has the sense of contempt and humiliation.  This attitude toward parents is exactly the opposite of the Fifth Commandment: You shall honour your father and mother.  Deuteronomy describes this son as being incorrigibly rebellious, despite discipline.  Jesus may well have had this sort of son in mind when he told the parable of the Prodigal Son.  Again, it may not seem to us to be something worthy of death, but the family was the cornerstone of their society.  Undermining the integrity of the family meant bringing down the whole society.  It was taken with the utmost seriousness.

The prohibition against kidnapping—which addressed the problem of the slave trade in their world—is something we talked about last week.  It’s probably here with these two verses because, the rabbis tell us, both kidnapping and cursing one’s parents were punished the same way: by stoning.

Now, back to the subject of fights in verses 18 and 19:

When men quarrel and one strikes the other with a stone or with his fist and the man does not die but takes to his bed, then if the man rises again and walks outdoors with his staff, he who struck him shall be clear; only he shall pay for the loss of his time, and shall have him thoroughly healed.

Two men get into a heated exchange and a brawl ensues.  It makes no difference if it’s with fists or with a weapon, if one of the men is injured, the man who injured him is required to make restitution: he’s to pay for his loss of income and his medical expenses.

But what if it’s a slave who is injured?  Look at 20-21:

When a man strikes his slave, male or female, with a rod and the slave dies under his hand, he shall be avenged.  But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be avenged, for the slave is his money.

This law is unique.  Nothing like it is found anywhere in any of the Ancient Near Eastern law codes we’ve discovered.  As we saw in last week’s passage, God’s law for Israel is about more than just keeping order in society.  It does that, but it does that from the perspective of showing love for God and for each other.  Again, their world wasn’t our world and a lot of this will seem very foreign to us.  The discipline here is the same sort of discipline that Proverbs speaks of when it warns against withholding discipline from a child: Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline will drive it from him (Proverbs 22:15).  The “rod” was the customary instrument of discipline.  The rabbis interpreted it as any implement that wasn’t potentially lethal in normal use and said that it was not be applied to vulnerable parts of the body.  So discipline is assumed, but a master may not injure his slave.  The assumption here is that a master wouldn’t do that anyway.  He’s made an investment in the slave and it would be foolish to damage that investment or to injure the slave in such a way that the master then had to free him.

That said, if a master did kill his slave “he shall be avenged”.  Freeman or slave, it didn’t matter.  This was murder and the death penalty would apply.  The choice of wording is important.  “Avenge” is different from “revenge”.  To avenge something has the sense of vindicating justice and settings things right—in this case as much for God, whose image has been destroyed, as the murdered slave.

What about a pregnant woman?  Verses 22-23 address this.

Now if two men fight and strike a pregnant woman and her child comes forth not fully formed, he shall be punished with a fine.  According as the husband of the woman might impose, he shall pay with judicial assessment.  But if fully formed, he shall pay life for life… (NETS)

If you’re following in the ESV you might have noticed my wording was different.  The wording in these two verses is difficult.  The ESV is based on the Masoretic Hebrew Text, but what I read is an English translation of the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament.  I’m thankful for Matt Colvin pointing me to an excellent article on the proper translation of this passage, although I disagree with him on the implications.

Two men get into a fight.  The language here is different from the situation above, where things begin with words and digress into something physical.  This is a fight from the get-go, which means both men are trying to injure each other.  In the course of their fight, one of them somehow ends up injuring a pregnant woman.  Maybe she’s a bystander.  Maybe she gets involved to help her husband.  It’s not clear.  But she is struck in such a way that she miscarries her child.

The Lord recognizes the personhood of this child.  The difference in how the aggressor is punished, however, depends on whether or not the child is “fully formed”.  We can get a sense of what this means in Job 10:10, where Job speaks of the Lord forming him in the womb as pouring milk and curdling cheese.  I know.  Again, their world was not our world and their metaphors are not our metaphors.  But the sense is one of taking a formless mass and giving it a recognizable form.  I agree with Matt that the purpose here is to distinguish between a point of fetal development where something recognizable as a baby, with head, arms and legs, fingers and toes emerges and an early stage pregnancy—say less than eight weeks—where there may be no discernable child.  And this gets to the difference in punishments.  A woman—and therefore the men fighting—may not know she’s pregnant at that early stage.  The men wouldn’t have known the danger involved in the fight, and so the perpetrator pays a fine.  On the other hand, by the time a fetus begins to take form and look like a child, a woman almost certainly knows she’s pregnant and, hence, the men around her know as well.  At that point, the men fighting near her or continuing to fight when she enters the fray, should know better and are guilty of straight-up murder if the child is killed.

This says something about the sanctity of unborn human life.  The unborn child bears the image of God.  And if even unintentionally causing a miscarriage is punishable by death, it really speaks to the issue of abortion, to the intentional killing of an unborn child.  Again, the Lord himself is clear—and this stands even though we recognise that the torah was Israel’s law, not ours—that the unborn child is no less human and that his or her life is just as valuable as any.  In the womb or without, we all bear the image of God.

And so the passage concludes that the one who caused the miscarriage shall pay: life for life.  Life for life was the beginning of a common formulary we see in the law codes of Israel’s neighbours and so it continues:

Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. (Exodus 21:24-25)

This is what’s known as the lex talionis—the law of retaliation—and as harsh as it sounds, its point was to put a damper on the cycle of violence that was common in things like blood feuds.  You took my eye, so I take your head.  You killed my brothers, so I’ll kill your whole family.  The lex talionis ensured that retaliation was proportional.  We also see in both Israel and elsewhere, that it wasn’t enforced literally.  Compensation was monetary.  The rabbis determined the amount of damages based on how much a slave was devalued by the same kind of injury.  If the loss of an eye reduced the value of a slave by, say, ten shekels, then ten shekels was the compensatory payment whenever an eye was damaged in a fight.

Finally, the last two verses of our passage follow this naturally.  Look at verses 26-27:

When a man strikes the eye of his slave, male or female, and destroys it, he shall let the slave go free because of his eye.  If he knocks out the tooth of his slave, male or female, he shall let the slave go free because of his tooth.

Intentionally injure your slave, and you’re required to set him free.  Like the laws above, this is without any other Ancient Near Eastern equivalent.  In Israel, the Lord declared that the slave’s life had just as much value as that of a freeman.  Slavery was a given in their world, something that wasn’t just going to cease to exist because they were the Lord’s people.  But given that, the relationship between master and slave was to be like every other relationship amongst God’s people and characterized by love that mirrored the Lord’s love, mercy, and grace towards them.

Now, what do we do with this as Christians?  I think the basic implications here are pretty clear.  Murder is wrong.  Treating each other with violence is wrong.  Dishonouring our parents is wrong.  So far as this goes, it’s just an expansion of both the law given to Noah and the Decalogue.

I think that what’s most likely to grate on modern people—aside from the humanity of the unborn, which we’ve already covered—is the death penalty.  And this part, at least when it comes to the punishment for murder, applies to us as much as it applied to Israel.  This was a law established by God at the time of Noah.  It was incorporated into Israel’s law, but it is a law given to the whole human race.  As Christians who recognise the authority of God’s word, the issue of the justness of the death penalty as punishment for murder simply shouldn’t be an issue.  Should we impose the death penalty for other crimes?  There are a lot of capital crimes in the torah—not just murder and dishonouring parents.  There are certainly good arguments for some of those cases—rape, I think, for instance.  Israel’s law may be instructive in some of those cases, even if it isn’t binding on us.  But I’m not convinced that as a society we have the sense to implement the death penalty beyond its application to murderers.  In fact, I think we have good reason to be sympathetic with calls for a moratorium on the death penalty—not because it’s wrong, but because we live in a society that lacks the godliness and wisdom to recognise the value of human life.  We slaughter our children in Canada, between 50,000 and 100,000 a year, before they’re born.  Many people are more concerned about the lives of animals than they are the lives of human beings.  In my country, we see an epidemic of systemic injustice by which those of the “wrong” race have a significantly higher chance of facing the death penalty than others, even when convicted of the same crime.  We also see an epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct with the result that many who are innocent end up on death row.  I think a moratorium on the death penalty is justified, not because the death penalty is wrong, but because we lack the wisdom to value human life in the first place and because our justice system is too corrupt to apply it fairly.

But we dare not stray into that ground where the death penalty itself is declared unjust or barbaric.  Brothers and Sisters, when we do that we forsake the gospel.  What did St. Paul write in his letter to the Romans?  “The wages of sin is death.”  The Lord created us to live in his presence, where he gives us life.  We sinned and were cast out of the garden.  Cut off from his presence, we die.  And  in Israel we see that the whole sacrificial system was established on this principle that the wages of sin is death.  Blood was required to atone for sins.  An animal had to die in your place.  And all of this pointed to Jesus, to his death, to the cross.  Death as the wages of sin is what makes sense of Jesus’ death.  He died the death that Israel deserved.  On the cross he became the atonement for sins.  When we come to him in faith, Israel’s Messiah crucified and risen, we become a part of that people redeemed at the cross.  I cannot say this strongly enough: If we go along with our foolish and godless culture and declare the death penalty to be unjust, we blaspheme God and declare the death of Jesus on the cross to be of no benefit.

Brothers and Sisters, we come to his Table this morning to share in the meal Jesus gave to us.  This the meal in which, as he blessed the bread and wine and shared them with his friends, he declared himself to be the paschal lamb who would die for the sins of his people.  It’s at this Table, as we eat the meal that Jesus has given us, that we share in, that we participate in and receive the benefits of his death and resurrection.  Think on that this morning.  The wages of sin is death, but Jesus as died for the sake of his people, by his blood we are washed white as snow.  By his blood we are set free.  And by his resurrection we share in the life of the age to come.

Let us pray: Gracious Father, we thank you this morning for your Son and for the sacrifice he made for us at the cross.  He died that we might live.  In him we see the value of life.  In him we see your great love for us.  Keep Jesus and his cross ever before us that we might always remember your love and always love you in return.  I also pray that you would remind us that you love our neighbours as much as you love us and that we would seek to love them as you do.  Through Jesus we pray.  Amen.

https://colvinism.wordpress.com/2019/06/01/on-exodus-2122-23/

and http://tmcdaniel.palmerseminary.edu/LXX_EXO_%2021_22-23.pdf

When You Buy a Hebrew Slave

Exodus 21:1-11

by William Klock

As we begin our study of Exodus 21 this morning I want to remind you of two of the principles I laid out last week that relate to how we should approach the legal material in the torah.  If you missed last week’s sermon, I encourage you to go online and read or listen.

First, we need to remember Jesus’ summary of the law: The first and great commandment is to love the Lord our God with heart, soul, mind, and strength and the second is to love our neighbours as ourselves.  All of the law (and the prophets) distils down to these two commands.  That means that when we come to this legislation—and particularly when it offends our sensibilities or when it’s hard to understand—the failure lies not with the law.  Maybe it’s our failure to understand it.  Maybe it’s a cultural difference.  There are number of reasons a law might seem bad or wrong or questionable to us.  But we need to recognise that the fault is not with the law or with the Lord.  It’s got to be somewhere else.  Jesus himself tells us that the law was given to Israel to show the people how to love God and each other within a certain context.

That’s the second principle: we need to read this legal material in its context.  This is the record of how the Lord dealt wisely and lovingly and graciously with his people in the context of their exodus from Egypt.

It’s essential we read the text in that context as we come to these laws.  We need to recognise that their world was not our world, their culture was not our culture, their economy was not our economy.  Even the way they thought about family and marriage was dramatically different from the way we do.  So before we come to this next part of our text, you need to be thinking of a world where the economy was a relatively simple agrarian one.  Most people lived in the country and were involved in agriculture.  Their land was their wealth.  There were no marketing boards controlling agricultural production and prices.  A poor decision or a bad season could easily put a man in debt.  There were no government bailouts and no bankruptcy courts.  You were responsible for your own debts.  You could sell your land to pay the debt.  The good news was that the law required your land be returned to you (or at least to your family) in the jubilee year, but that was every forty-nine years.  What to do until then if you had nothing?  The law made some provisions for the poor.  For example, the law prohibited harvesters from picking over a field or a vineyard more than once.  Whatever was left belonged to the poor.  This is what Ruth was doing when she was gleaning in the field of Boaz.  She and her mother-in-law were destitute and gleaning was one of the Lord’s provisions for the poor.

But there was no employment or disability insurance.  There was no system of public welfare.  There was no government housing.  There were no food stamps.  All of these things are inventions of the modern world.  Even if the Lord had somehow implemented policies like ours in the law, the ancient Near Eastern world had no government capable of managing systems of that kind and their economy had no way to support them.  Again, it was a very different world.  The family was the primary safety net.  Multiple generations and extended family were closely knit together and supported each other.  When the family failed, the local community was there—often made up of further-extended family.  But even these supports would sometimes break down.  Again, the book of Ruth is a good example.  Naomi husband and sons died.  That left her destitute, so Ruth, her daughter-in-law gleaned in the fields to eke out a meagre existence until Boaz stepped in—and that, too, was another part of the support system common to their world and that the Lord regulated through the law.

There’s much more that I could say, but I hope this gives you a sense just how different the world of the Israelites was from our own.  It’s essential that we have some grasp of their world if we’re going to understand our passage today.  The very first bit of legal material in Exodus addresses the subject of slavery.  It’s the only ancient Near Eastern law code that begins this way, but it makes sense for Israel.  Consider that the Lord has just delivered Israel from slavery in Egypt.  That was their new identity: the people redeemed by the Lord.  And so the very first thing the Lord addresses is how to deal with, how to treat others who find themselves in the situation from which Israel was just redeemed.

So let’s read the text: Exodus 21:1.  And as we read the text, if it strikes you as wrong or unjust or even evil, remember that their world was not our world.  We have our own baggage when it comes to how we think of slavery, influenced especially by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery as practised in the Americas.  That wasn’t the situation in Israel’s world.  We need to set aside our baggage and enter their world.  So our text:

Now these are the rules that you shall set before them.  When you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out free, for nothing.  (Exodus 21:1-2)

We need to recognise that slavery was an integral part of the world in which the Israelites lived.  It was part of the economy, part of the culture, and as we’ll see, it was also an essential part of the safety net for the poor.  So the question isn’t whether or not Israel’s going to do away with slavery.  The question is whether or not they will treat their slaves with the same justice and mercy the Lord has shown them.  Again, remember, the law is about loving God and loving neighbour.

So the Lord says to Moses, these are the rules that will shape the life of my people.  Let’s begin with when you buy a “Hebrew slave”.  By the time of Deuteronomy, “Hebrew” will be an ethnic identifier synonymous with “Israelite”, but in Genesis and Exodus, it’s more of a class identifier.  It’s the derogatory word used by the Egyptians to describe the underclass of foreigners they used as slaves.  So as the Lord addresses this issue of slavery, he reminds the Israelites that they were “Hebrew slaves”—they were members of this underclass in Egypt.  This is the perspective they need to start with in thinking about slavery.  They were once members of this underclass, abused by their masters, but the Lord has delivered them and shown them mercy.  The torah shows them how to live this out in their life as the people of God.

Notice, this wasn’t like slavery in the modern world.  When we think of slavery, we think of people being kidnapped in Africa and shipped to the Americas to be bought and sold.  The Israelites were not to engage in that sort of slavery.  Just a few verses further along—in next week’s passage—the Lord says, “Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death” (Exodus 21:16).  Slaves in Israel were typically debtors.  Conquered soldiers could become slaves, although we don’t seem to see much of that in ancient Israel.  (The fact is, we don’t see slavery in Israel on a scale anything like we see in other ancient Near Easter nations.)  A man who owed a debt he couldn’t pay might sell himself or the judges might order him sold.  (We saw this in today’s Gospel.)  A thief might be sold as a slave to make restitution.  Again, we see the difference between their world and ours.  Their system of justice was aimed at making the wronged party whole and held people accountable for their debts.

Now, that said, notice that there’s a six-year limit on a term of slavery.  It might be less if a debt could be paid off sooner, but six years was the maximum, even there was still a debt owed.  Leviticus 25:40 requires that slaves be set free in the jubilee year—every forty-ninth year.  So some slaves got lucky.  And at least a couple of rabbinic commentators argue that this seventh year bit refers to the sabbatical year that happened every seventh year.  At the end of his term of service, the slave is free to go.  He owes his master nothing.  There is no price to be paid, no freedom to be bought.  Deuteronomy takes this a step further:

You shall not let him go empty-handed.  You shall furnish him liberally out of your flock, out of your threshing floor, and out of your winepress. As the Lord your God has blessed you, you shall give to him.  You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you.  (Deuteronomy 15:13b-15)

Again, there’s a reminder that the Israelites are not to treat their slaves the way the Egyptians treated them, but should rather bless them as the Lord has.  These are not sub-humans to be abused, but brothers to be blessed.

Now look at verses 3-6:

If he comes in single, he shall go out single; if he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him.  If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s, and he shall go out alone.  But if the slave plainly says, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free,’ then his master shall bring him to God, and he shall bring him to the door or the doorpost.  And his master shall bore his ear through with an awl, and he shall be his slave forever.

Sometimes a man was sold with his wife and children to pay a debt.  We see this in our Gospel lesson today in Jesus’ parable of the unforgiving servant.  But even if his wife and children weren’t sold with him, the master of the slave had an obligation to the man’s family—to take them in and provide for them during the slave’s term of service.  Unlike our system of justice in which a man might be sent to prison and his wife and family left to fend for themselves—often leading to the complete breakdown of a family—and in which the victim is often never made whole, God’s system for Israel not only ensured the debt was paid back, but it kept the family of the debtor intact and cared for during the term of slavery.  As much as we might be put off by some of these laws, this is one place where we see the humaneness of the torah and the inhumanity of our own system.  God’s system kept families together and ensured they were cared for.

But what if the master provided a wife during a slave’s term of service?  He’s free to go at the end of his term, but she and the kids stay with the master.  This is one of the harsher aspects of slavery in the ancient world.  We know this was a common practise and the institution of slavery probably depended on it in some way.  A freed slave could redeem his wife and children from the master, but I suspect that possibility was little comfort to a man just freed and teetering on the verge of poverty.

But the Lord does make a provision: Rather than going free, the man may submit himself to his master in perpetual servitude.  He may choose to remain a slave.  Again, remember that becoming a slave was a matter of last resort.  This man is likely a slave because he was landless and destitute.  Being a slave was better than dying.  Slavery to most of us conjures up images of brutal masters and slaves whose fingers were worked to the bone and whose backs were covered with scars from beatings.  The Lord prohibits that sort of slavery.  We’ll see that again a bit later in Exodus.  If you injured your slave, you were required to set him free.  Again, the law was about showing love to God and neighbour.  Slavery wasn’t ideal, but it was better than destitution or death.  It was a reality that wasn’t going to go away just because Israel was God’s people, so the Lord gives instructions to his people as to how to love each other, even when slavery is involved.  And so the Lord doesn’t just say that when this man loves his wife and children, he might choose to remain a slave.  It’s also a situation in which this man loves his master.  Notice that.  The Lord’s assumption is that the master-slave relationship should be one in which the love of a slave for his master is really possibility.  A slave may leave because he desires his freedom, but he should never feel compelled to leave because of the harshness of his master.

When the slave chooses to remain with his master, the two are to go to the sanctuary and—our text says before God, but the sense is probably that this is done before the judges as God’s witnesses—the slave’s ear is to be pierced.  There’s symbolism in that act that we don’t have time to get into this morning.  That this is done before the judges ensures that the slave isn’t being coerced into this decision.  It’s done before witnesses and God himself is invoked as a witness to the act.  Again, this was their support system at work.  Better a slave with a kind master obligated to care for him and his family than a destitute and landless peasant gleaning in the fields for a few grains of wheat.

Now, let’s look at verses 7-11.  The situation with female slaves was different.  As we read this our natural inclination is get our hackles up.  It offends our sensibilities, but try to think about this in the context of their world and not ours.  Here we go:

When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do.  If she does not please her master, who has designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, since he has broken faith with her.  If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her as with a daughter.  If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, or her marital rights.  And if he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out for nothing, without payment of money.

This is still addressing slavery as part of the social safety net.  The situation envisioned here is one in which an impoverished father sells his daughter into a family that, if not wealthy, is at least better off than his.  Further, the assumption here is that the girl will be married to either the master or his son.

Marriage was a very different sort of thing in those days.  We balk at the idea of arranged marriages.  We marry for love and we marry whom we want.  But our attitudes towards marriage would have been as bewildering to them as theirs are to us.  And I think it’s important that we not automatically condemn their approach to marriage.  They could easily point out our obscenely high divorce rate as a major failure on our part.  To them, our way of doing things would seem very selfish.  For them, the family and clan were all-important.  Marriages were arranged to keep families together, to keep property and land in the family, and to strengthen the family through alliances.  Marriage was also part of their social safety net.  A man, for example, was obligated to marry his brother’s widow if she was childless.  It ensured that his dead brother would have an heir and that the woman would have family to care for her and to provide support.  Polygamy was never the ideal in Israel.  It wasn’t even the norm, but it happened sometimes for reasons like this or because a first wife was childless and it was essential that a man have sons.

Because of the nature of marriage, it’s unlikely that there would have been intermarriage between a wealthy family and the impoverished family from which this girl came.  But, alternatively, her father could sell her into the wealthy family.  And the law then stipulated that as a slave wife, she had certain rights.  Her children would not have inheritance rights—which solves what to them would have been an obstacle with these two families intermarrying—but she is otherwise to have the same rights as a wife who was a free woman.  She is to be treated as a full member of the family: as a wife or as a daughter-in-law.  She’s to be assured not only of her basic necessities, but also her conjugal rights.  This rules out the common ancient practice of sex slavery.  She could not be used, abused, and abandoned.  If she were found displeasing, she could be redeemed by another.  If her owner failed to treat her properly, to respect her person, her rights, and her needs, he was obligated to set her free.

Rabbinic tradition, which came later in Israel’s history, interpreted these rules to restrict the sale of a daughter to situations in which her father proved himself to be utterly destitute.  A woman could not sell herself into slavery and, if she was a thief, she could not be sold as a slave to pay her debt.  The rabbis ruled that she could not be sold to be a wife without her knowledge.

That’s the text today.  There’s a lot more that could be said about the historical and cultural context, but I hope I’ve given you enough so that you can understand the nature and purpose of these laws.  We’re prone to asking, “Why didn’t God just get rid of slavery amongst his people?”  And I hope you can see that the issue isn’t that simple.  Slavery was an integral part of their economy.  It provided a safety net for the poorest in society.  To do away with it would mean providing an alternative that their economy, culture, and society could not support or integrate at that point in time.  I think this highlights what I’ve said before: The Lord works with his people where they’re at.  When he redeems a people and gives them a law, it’s not a law for an idealistic utopia; it’s a law for the world in which they actually find themselves.  I appreciate the words of one commentator who writes, “Israel has been set apart by God, not to a life apart from the world, but to a life of service within the world.  To serve God is to serve the world.”   Again, the calling of God’s people was and still is to love him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love our neighbours as ourselves.  On this depend on all the law and the prophets.

And this begins by living out in our relationships with others what God has done for us.  Again, it’s appropriate that the Lord launches into this legal material by addressing the treatment of slaves.  It reaches back to the preamble to the Decalogue in Chapter 20: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”  Israel had been the impoverished alien who became the abused slave, but the Lord had delivered her.  And now Israel is in a position to potentially become the abusive master.  The Lord warns his people here: Do not be like the nations.  Do not become like Egypt.  Be like me.  Reflect my character in your dealings with the poor.  Live out the reality that I have made in you as you deal with your slaves.  Love each other as I have loved you.

I can’t help but think of our Gospel lesson today, the parable of the unforgiving servant.  He owed his master an impossible debt.  Ten thousand talents is sort of a First Century way of saying he owed a bajillion dollars.  But his master had mercy on him and forgave that debt at great cost.  But rather than go out into the world to extend that mercy to others, the first thing he does is to hunt down a fellow servant who owed him a debt that was insignificant in comparison, throttle the poor man while demanding payment, and then have him thrown into prison when he didn’t immediately pay up.  As the Lord brought the sword against his people and allowed them to be carried off into exile because they abused their slaves and oppressed their poor, the master had his servant seized and thrown into prison.

As Israel was to live out the reality of being a people redeemed by the Lord, not just in an isolated spiritual sphere, but even in the mundane aspects of daily life, so are we.  In our baptism, Jesus has led us in a new Exodus and into a new life, redeemed from sin and death, inaugurated and shaped by his death and resurrection.  We are the new Israel.  The old Israel failed, but in fulfilment of his promises, the Lord has filled his new Israel with his own Spirit.  We are without excuse, Brothers and Sisters.  We need to be showing the same love and grace and mercy to each other that Jesus has shown to us.  If Israel was called to be both generous and just with the poor within her midst, how much more should the Church be generous and just with the poor in our midst?  And as we are called to proclaim the good news that Jesus is Lord to the world around us, what does it look like—or what should it look like—when our gospel proclamation is accompanied by gospel actions and gospel living?

Moving from Israel’s world to our own, we need to ask ourselves what it looks like to seek the welfare of the poor and disadvantaged in our in own midst.  What strikes me is just how personally engaged and hands-on God’s people were called to be in the Old Testament.  We see this in Jesus’ ministry too and also in the ministry of the apostles in the New Testament.  They didn’t just throw money at the poor and consider their work done.  They didn’t say, “Let Caesar do it.  Feel free to tax me a bit more to pay for it.”  They were hands-on.  They were engaged.  They provided material assistance to the poor from their own resources.  They took them into their homes and families.  They treated them not only like fellow human beings, but as fellow members of the covenant community.  I can’t help but think of St. Paul’s letter to Philemon: “Yes, Onesimus is your slave.  Yes, he did you wrong.”  From a worldly perspective, Onesimus had two counts against him as far as his master was concerned: he was a lowly slave and a thief.  But Paul urges Philemon, “He is repentant.  He is in Christ, just as you are.  Receive him back as a brother.”  There’s another whole sermon there, but it’s striking nevertheless.  This is the Christlike attitude that had the early Christians sharing their resources with each other and taking up collections to provide for widows and orphans—so that there was no need for them to sell themselves into slavery.  There are biblical arguments for and against applying these principles in our own context such that we provide for the poor through government programmes funded by tax dollars and lobby for just legislation, but however good those things may be, they’re not enough.  God’s people are to be personally engaged in works of mercy and justice, we are to be personally invested in that work, because that is who we are.  We are the people to whom God himself has shown mercy through the personal investment of his own Son—the Saviour who took up our flesh and died the death that we deserve.  The Lord might say to us today: I am the Lord who brought you out of your bondage to sin and death.  Brothers and Sisters, we’re now called to live in such a way that who we are in Jesus shapes our relationships and interactions with everyone around us.

Let’s pray: Almighty God and Father, we thank you that as you delivered Israel from her bondage in Egypt, you have delivered us from our bondage to sin and death.  You are the God who delights in showing mercy, even when the cost is great.  You gave your Son to die that we might live.  As we study your word here in Exodus, give us wisdom to apply it in our world and teach us how to live out the reality of being the people you have freed, teach us how to be people of mercy and justice and life so that we can be the salt of the earth and the light in the darkness.  Through Jesus we pray.  Amen.

See Nahum Sarna, JPS Torah Commentary: Exodus (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996), 120.

Terrence E. Fretheim, Exodus (Louisville: Westminster-John Knox, 2010), 247.

I Will Write it on Their Hearts

A Discursus on the Law

by William Klock

Two Sundays ago I introduced you to the part of Exodus, running more or less from the twenty-first through the twenty-fourth chapters, called “The Book of the Covenant”.  I was glad to have last week, All Saints’, off from Exodus, because I wasn’t sure how to proceed and it gave me an extra week to prepare.  The Book of the Covenant is composed of legal material.  It’s not legislation—at least not as we think of it—and I’ll get to that later.  And while there are a few sections that seem to be pretty unified in terms of subject matter—for example, the first section addresses the treatment of slaves, an interesting place to start, although it actually does make sense—other parts range across a broad array of subjects.  I have to be honest and say that I’m still not sure how these upcoming sermons are going to flesh out or even approach this material.  Preaching on Old Testament legal material is not a simple task, not because it’s irrelevant, but because it is.  It’s just that how it is relevant is often a very difficult thing to work out and there’s plenty that’s going to be tentative.  I don’t like to be tentative when I’m preaching.  I’m not infallible.  Far from it.  But I like to do my homework and be reasonably certain about things before I preach them.  And the truth is that when it comes to passages like this, that’s going to be more of a struggle than usual.  But I will do my best with the Lord’s assistance, because he himself has told us that even the most obscure of the laws he gave to Israel remain relevant to us in some manner and after some fashion even if they aren’t binding on us.  As he inspired St. Paul to write to Timothy:

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. (2 Timothy 3:16-17)

I trust that those words are true and so we will press on.  But I’ve realised that before we continue with Exodus 21, I think we could all benefit from something of a discursus on the law itself, what it is and, probably more importantly, what it’s significance is to us as Christians—how these God-breathed words are profitable to us for teaching, reproof, correction, or otherwise to train us in righteousness.  It’s not an easy subject.  It’s one that Christians have struggled with and argued over ever since St. Paul wrote his epistles to First Century churches being torn apart by this very issue.  You might think that St. Paul settled matters, but the ongoing disagreements between Christians on the subject to this very day say otherwise.  And so this morning I’m going to tread into a subject where only angels walk without fear and, I hope, lay some foundation stones for how we’ll approach the coming chapters in Exodus.

My own views on this subject have evolved with time and study.  In the past, when it came to the relevance of the Old Testament law to Christians and the relationship between law and gospel, I took for granted the position shared by the Lutheran and Reformed traditions.  They differ on some minor points, but I won’t get into that this morning.  As Anglicans, we stand with our feet in that historical Protestant tradition.  Both Martin Luther and John Calvin argued that the law has three uses today.  First, in the civil sphere, the law restrains sin.  Second, it serves as a mirror to reveal our sin to us and to point us to Jesus as Saviour.  And, third, for the Christian—for those who are in Christ—it teaches us the way of righteousness.

Of course, this raises a second question: What parts of the law are applicable?  This is a question that goes back to the early days of the Church.  We read the Church Fathers, as far back as the Second Century, wrestling with the law and dividing it into categories, some of which are obsolete because of Jesus and some that aren’t.  In his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin formally divided the law into three categories: the moral, the ceremonial, and the judicial (or civil).  This was then carved into stone in the Reformed tradition, when it was incorporated into formal doctrinal statements like the Westminster Confession and the London Baptist Confession.  In some Protestant traditions, it’s heresy to question these principles.  This tripartite division of the law was meant to clarify what applies to Christians and what doesn’t.  The civil laws were for the ancient nation of Israel.  While a nation today might choose to take some lessons from them or even borrow some of them directly in its own legislation, only Israel was Israel.  The civil law of Israel isn’t binding on any other people.  The ceremonial laws—the ones having to do with temple, priesthood, purity, and sacrifices have been fulfilled in and by Jesus.  Some might say that they are still relevant to Christians.  We are obligated to them, but Jesus fulfils the obligation on our behalf through his death on the cross.  That leaves the moral law—those commandments that address issues of morality and ethics.  That part, says Calvin—and many, many others in the tradition—still applies.  The moral law shows us the way of righteousness.  The moral law reveals the holy character of God.  So the civil laws of Israel are—more or less—irrelevant for the Christians.  (It’s really more complicated than this, but this will do for our purposes this morning.)  Because Jesus has fulfilled the ceremonial laws of Israel, Christians can set them aside—so long as we remember that Jesus is taking care of them for us.  But the moral and ethical parts of the Old Testament law still apply.

It seems neat and tidy.  But it really isn’t.  That said, you could do worse and a lot of Christians have.  The fact is that this formula has served us pretty well since the Reformation (and even before that).  But, even the theologians who worked these things out and even a lot of the guys today who hold to them dogmatically admit that these things aren’t as simple as these formulas make it sound.  The problem is that there are many parts of the law that don’t lend themselves to easy categorization.  There are some laws that fit into all three categories and that defy any attempt to chip off just the parts that have an ethical or moral dimension.  But, I think the bigger problem, is simply that this way of approaching the law is anachronistic.  It’s imposing a foreign, much later, and very Western concept of “law” onto the torah.  If St. Paul were here, I think he might appreciate the effort, but as a Jew devoted to the torah, I think he’d be very troubled by what we’ve done with it.  The torah is the torah.  It was the divinely given way of life for God’s people.  It was God’s gift.  It was good and beautiful.  All of it.  Not just the parts that have to do with ethics, but all of it, and it defies any attempt to impose these foreign, external categories.  The Lord delivered his people so that they could worship him.  They were, first and foremost, a worshipping people.  And this was how that looked.  He had chosen them and declared them holy, declared them to be his own, and the torah shows how that holy people were to live in relation to the Lord and to each other.  All of it.  Not just certain parts.  It’s telling that the Book of the Covenant begins and ends with regulations concerning worship and woven between them are the regulations concerning the social, the horizontal relationships of God’s people.  This “book” is Israel’s covenantal response to her redemption by the Lord.

The other problem with this threefold division of the law is that it misunderstands the nature of the law in the Bible.  We can forgive Calvin.  He didn’t know anything about Ancient Near Eastern law codes.  No one did until a bit over a century ago.  Hammurabi’s Code was only found in 1901.  Other Ancient Near Eastern legal material has been recovered since and the context it’s given has forced us to rethink how we understand the nature of torah.  We commonly translate that Hebrew word torah in English using our word “law”—and that’s largely thanks to the ancient Jews having done the same when translating the Old Testament into Greek—but, first, torah is bigger than “law”.  Torah is “teaching”; it’s “instruction”; it’s “precept”.  It can be “law” and “statue”, but it’s also all these other things.  It’s more like “wisdom” than it is “legislation”.  And wisdom is highly contextual.  It’s very different thing than a modern code of laws.  Think of Proverbs 26:4 and 5: “Answer not a fool according to his folly” and then the very next proverb says the opposite: “Answer a fool according to his folly.”  It’s all about context.  In some cases it’s foolish to let the fool drag you into his folly, but there are also times when the fool needs your correction.  It’s all about the situation, about the sort of fool and foolishness you’re dealing with, and whether or not you’re the person with the maturity or authority to give correction.

Also, the focus of torah.  Torah gives order.  Remember that for ancient peoples, order was the highest good.  They were very different from us in that respect.  We think our happiness is the highest good, but for them it was order.  It’s stressed from the beginning of the Old Testament.  The creation stories of Genesis stress the Lord’s bringing order from chaos and declaring it good.  And so Israel, as his people and as his witnesses, were to be an ordered society—a society that, according to the conventions of the day—modelled something of what God intended for creation and what he one day promises to restore.  It’s more than just morality and ethics.  It’s all encompassing.  In his recent book on the nature of torah, John Walton points out that the point of torah isn’t obedience to specific rules or laws, but an understanding or a comprehension of the order, the goodness that the Lord intends for his world.  We tend to think of the law in terms of “you ought”—God commands and we respond in obedience.  The torah certain expects obedience, but torah goes beyond that.  The Lord says to Israel, “you will know”—you will live this new way of being and know me and know my goodness and know my life.   The torah isn’t the end.  The torah is Israel’s God-given means to the end, which is know God and to live the life of a called-out and redeemed people in midst of the nations.

Consider how Jesus, when he was tested by that legal expert, summarized the torah.  The words are in Matthew 22:37-40, but you all know them by heart:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

To love God and to love neighbour is more than a list of thou shalts and thou shalt nots.  The thou shalts and thou shalt nots help.  They point us in the right direction.  But obeying is only the first step on the way to knowing.  It’s about being the community of people graciously called by the one, true God, and shaped as a people through his deliverance and his loving care.  About being people who lift the veil on God’s redemptive plan and the world to come when all is set to rights.

I think this is where the old Protestant “orthodoxy”, the “law and gospel” dichotomy falls short—at least as it’s often been explained and applied.  Too often we put law before gospel.  This is that second use of the law—where the law serves as a mirror, showing us our sinfulness, and pointing us to Jesus.  This was Archbishop Cranmer’s reasoning for beginning the liturgy of the Lord’s Supper with the decalogue.  We recite God’s perfect law and are reminded of our failure and inability to truly live it out, and that prepares us to hear the gospel, the good news about Jesus the redeemer, as the liturgy eventually leads us to the Lord’s Table.  We are first stripped bare by the law, then clothed with the righteousness of Jesus.

The problem with this is that in the Bible, grace always precedes law.  Always.  Consider the story we’ve read in Exodus.  The Lord delivered Israel from her bondage.  The Lord saved his people.  Then he gave her his law.  The law is for God’s redeemed people.  Notice that there is no expectation in the torah for the nations to keep this law.  The Canaanites weren’t punished because they didn’t keep it.  It was never given to them.  The Canaanites were swept from the land for the simple reason that to do so was necessary to prepare it for Israel.  It was the land the Lord claimed for himself.  By claiming it he declared it holy.  Just as he had with Israel.  A holy land for a holy people.  When we read the prophets centuries later, they condemn the nations, but not for breaking God’s law.  The nations are condemned for their hostility towards and for their attacks on God’s people.  Remember, the Lord’s goal is to restore all of Creation, to bring the nations back to himself, but he does this through his people.  His people have always been called to be the salt of the earth and the light in the darkness.  In the Old Testament, God’s people were that salt and light as they knew and lived the torah.

In light of that, we need to remember that the law was God’s good gift to his people.  Again, the law follows God’s amazing grace.  The law is given to a people delivered from bondage.  He has said to them, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt.  I will be your God and you will be my people.  And the law then follows.  To us it may seem like a boring and irrelevant interlude in the action of the story.  I certainly feel it as a preacher.  It’s fun to preach the exciting events that get the Israelites to Mt. Sinai.  It’s tempting to skip over these chapters to the golden calf episode where there’s some action again.  But the Israelites didn’t see it that way.  This is vitally important stuff.  God has declared them his people.  Their natural response is, “That’s great.  Now what do we do?  How do we live as your people?”  That’s what this is all about.  We have a horrible tendency to see the law as a burden.  But, Brothers and Sisters, the law only becomes a burden when broken.  The law only becomes “legalism” when we’re trying to figure out how far we can bend it before it breaks.  When Moses declared the torah again to the new generation of Israelites on the verge of entering the promised land, he said to them:

For this commandment that I command you today is not too hard for you, neither is it far off.  (Deuteronomy 30:11)

And a bit later:

For it is no empty word for you, but your very life. (Deuteronomy 32:47)

This was Israel’s life.  This was what salt and light looked like.  And it was all of grace.  It was given to them as a people of grace.  It included provisions for those times when it was inadvertently broken.  It even had an annual “reset button”, if you will, that sent the sins of the people far from them as they were laid on the scapegoat.  And so we see the word, for example, of the Psalmist that we’ve been reading through this season of Trinitytide, the words of Psalm 119:

My delight shall be in thy statutes, and I will not forget they word. (v. 16)

For they testimonies are my delight, and my counselors. (v. 24)

Behold, my delight is in thy commandments, O quicken me in they righteousness.  (v. 40)

I will run the way of thy commandments, when thou hast set my heart at liberty. (v. 32)

That last verse makes the point so well: “I will run the way of thy commandments, when thou has set my heart at liberty.”  Grace precedes law.  Consider Psalm 51, the song of penitence that David composed after he’d been exposed for adultery and murder.  He prayed:

Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.

Cast me not away from thy presence, and take not thy holy Spirit from me. (vv. 10-11)

Even though the law that David knew was one written on stone tablets, he also knew that that the life defined by the law was a matter of the heart and that the only way it could be lived faithfully was by grace.  David sinned.  His heart was disordered.  And so he pleaded for the renewing work of the Spirit in his heart.  This isn’t the prayer of a legalist.  This isn’t the prayer of a man who saw the law as a burden.  This was the prayer of a man who saw the law as a thing of grace and the way of life of God’s people.

We need to hold tightly to the goodness and graciousness of the law that we see in the Old Testament as we read the New Testament.  It’s easy to read many of St. Paul’s words about the law and to see it as a bad thing, as if it were a burden and a curse.  He say in 2 Corinthians 3:6, that well-known and oft-abused phrase, “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”  Many passages from Romans have been misused or misapplied to condemn the law—“one is justified by faith apart from works of the law” (3:28), for example, or “For if it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void.  For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no transgression (Romans 4:14-15).”  But as we saw in our study of Romans, Paul’s point was never to disparage the law, but to make it clear that it is faith in God’s grace that defines (and has always defined) the people of God, the true Israel.  If we remember that grace precedes law, we see then that the law does not make God’s people.  Law is the thing that shapes the lives of God’s people—and that’s true in both the old covenant and in the new.  It’s just that the new covenant has a new law.  Those passages from St. Paul simply remind us that the law of the old covenant was for a certain people in a certain time and certain place.  A new law has superseded that law.

Let me go back to the words of Jeremiah 31 that we read for our Old Testament lesson this morning:

Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord.  For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.  And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.  And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord.  For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.  (Jeremiah 31:31-34)

The defining difference between the old and the new is that in the new covenant, the law has been written on the hearts of God’s people by the Holy Spirit.  But what does that mean?  I remember preaching that years ago and someone said, “Fr. Bill, what does that mean?  Did the Spirit forget to write on your heart the bit about ‘Thou shalt not eat bacon’?  Or did you just choose to ignore that part?  And if you chose to ignore it, is it really written on your heart?”  And around and around in a circle he went with that logic.  To think that all the Spirit did was transfer the text of the law from stone tablets to the tablet of the heart is to miss the point.  It’s not just that the law the Spirit has written the law on our hearts; it’s also that the law he’s written on our hearts is a new one.

The point for God’s people has always been to know him.  Israel knew the Lord through his gracious calling and deliverance.  He gave her his law that she might know him still better.  But the law written on tablets of stone could never accomplish what God’s own Spirit in the human heart could, so far as it comes to truly knowing God.  The law gave godly direction to the disordered desires of sinful human hearts, but through the gift of his Spirit, the Lord himself takes our hearts in his hands and renews them, regenerates them, and reorients our desires.

And I think this helps us in our approach to the law as Christians.  When we look to Jesus, he actually seems to make the law more difficult:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.  For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.  Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.  For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.  (Matthew 5:17-20)

And then Jesus goes on to explain how the it’s not just a matter of not cheating on your wife or stabbing your neighbour.  Don’t even look lustfully at another woman and don’t even harbour hate for your neighbour in your heart.  And yet what Jesus points to is the fact that what the law was intended to do was to show us how to love God and to love our neighour.  And love is a matter of the heart—and to do it right, our hearts must first be set right by God.  The law given through Moses showed what that looked like for a people living in a certain time and place and culture.  And, of course, that has posed problems for Christians.  Israel’s historical and cultural context is not ours.  We struggle with the law because so much of it is foreign to us.  And so we tend to approach it with a great deal of inconsistency.  We take some parts straight-up when they can be easily fitted into our cultural context, while we ignore others that are utterly foreign.  There are some parts of the law that leave even the best Bible scholars scratching their heads, because their context has been lost to us.

The other thing we commonly do, which I think if we do it at all, it must be with great caution, is to draw principles from the laws.  The next bit of the Book of the Covenant we’ll look at has to do with slavery.  The regulations here are, as legislation, irrelevant to us.  And so it’s common to look to these laws for some kind of underlying principle we can tease out and apply.  St. Paul does this in 1 Corinthians when he uses the commandment not to muzzle an ox while it treads out grain to explain why it’s important for the Church to pay its ministers.  So I can’t say that this idea of drawing principles from the law is illegitimate, but we do need to be careful with it.  We need to be careful that we’re not misrepresenting the text or missing it’s point.  That said, the nature of wisdom literature is that it does prompt us to think in just these sorts of abstract and organic terms.  If God cares about the ox treading out the grain, he certainly cares for the clergyman ministering the gospel.  That’s a legitimate extrapolation.  But we need to be careful.  We need to be sure we understand the original context of the passage—which isn’t always easy—and we need to be sure we’re not missing the original point.

And so my somewhat tentative position on how we ought to approach the Old Testament law is that we need, first and foremost, to let it be what it is and say what it says.  We can’t ignore the parts that are difficult or that don’t fit into our cultural setting.  We can’t privilege the parts that do fit into our cultural settings.  And we can’t divide the law up into civil, ceremonial, and moral sections, because such a thing would have been utterly incomprehensible to Israel.  We need to accept that the law is the law is the law.  At the end of the day, we need to let Scripture speak for itself.  What does this look like in practise?  Well, I think the way we most commonly approach the Old Testament law is to ask how we can apply it today.  What I think our priority ought to be, what we should be doing first, is seeing that this is how God dealt with his people in the context of the Exodus—in the context of their deliverance.  I suspect that if we do that, it will be easier and more natural for us to then look at the relationship between the Lord and Israel—and the law as part of that relationship—through the lens of the gospel.

That’s the second thing we need to do.  Jesus and the Spirit are the fulfilment to which Moses and the prophets were looking.  And I think that’s the most important thing here.  The response of God’s people to his deliverance has always been love—that we love him and that we love each other.  In doing that we witness his presence amongst us and we give the world a glimpse of what the world set to rights looks like and draw the nations to the Lord Jesus.  And Jesus has given us the gift of God’s own Spirit to fix the heart problem that plagued Israel.  The Spirit has renewed our hearts and placed in them a love for God and a love for neighbour that Israel lacked.  We no longer need a law with penalties to prompt us to love.  The Spirit has taken care of that and made it our natural disposition.  Jesus now shows us what it looks like to love God and neighbour.  But, of course, Jesus does so within the context of the old covenant and its law.  And we cannot escape a struggle with the law.  As new covenant people our task now, as it is with the whole of the story of the Lord and Israel, to look at it through the lens of the gospel.  As we do so, we see the character of God—his goodness and faithfulness, his love and his mercy—and we see his plans and desires for his people.  No, the law doesn’t apply directly to us, but we’ll see what it looked like for God’s people in the old covenant to love him and to love each other and, with wisdom, maturity, and the help of the Spirit, we can transpose that great symphony into the key of the gospel.

Let’s pray: Our Father, we thank you for your word and for the story of love and of grace that it tells us.  I pray that as we come to one of the more challenging parts of that word, that your Spirit who dwells within us will give us understanding and will help us to see this story of you and your people through the lens of grace.  We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

The Lost World of the Torah (Grand Rapids: IVP Academic, 2019), 196-197.

Blessed are...

St. Matthew 5:1-16

by William Klock

What does it mean to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  “Thy will be done” is pretty straightforward—at least it should be.  It’s not an anxious prayer, as if God’s will were in danger of not being done if we don’t pray hard enough.  No, it’s a prayer for something we know is going to happen.  God is sovereign.  His will—all the good things he intends for the world in his faithfulness—will be done.  Our prayers aren’t going to make that true, but in our prayers we express our faith in his sovereignty and our longing to see his will and his plans for this world come to pass.  But “Thy kingdom come”?  What is God’s kingdom?  Is it now or is it future or is it both now and future?  Is it heavenly?  Is it earthly?  We ask in the Lord’s Prayer that as it is in heaven so may it be on earth.  What does that mean?  The Gospels are all about the kingdom.  Mark and Luke talk about the Kingdom of God.  Matthew talks about the Kingdom of Heaven, which doesn’t mean the kingdom is “up there” somewhere.  It’s just a Hebraic way of speaking of the kingdom of God.  Earth is our sphere and heaven is God’s.  They’re supposed to be united, to overlap, to be together.  That’s what we see symbolised by the Garden in beginning of Genesis.  But sin—our sin—divided and separated them.  But God will not leave heaven and earth sundered.  He will not leave us cut off from his presence.  He gave Israel the temple.  The temple was the one place where earth and heaven once again met.  It was the one place on earth where human beings could go to be in the presence of God.  This is why it was so remarkable that at Jesus’ baptism, heaven was opened.  For just a moment there at the Jordan, earth and heaven were brought back together.  It showed dramatically that Jesus was the one who would bring back together what our sins had broken apart.  In Jesus—the god-man, the man of both earth and heaven—the King had come.  In Jesus the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven was breaking in and God was beginning the work of restoring his Creation.  This is what we anticipate, this is what we long for in faith and hope when we pray: “Thy kingdom come, on earth as in heaven.”

This is what lies behind our Gospel lesson, the Beatitudes, the first part of Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount”.  In fact, the Lord’s Prayer is something Jesus gives us later on in this sermon.  But he begins his sermon with this list of people who are “blessed”.  But who are they?  Well, as much as Israel had failed in her mission to be the light of the world, there were still some people in Israel who really did have a sense of what God had called them to do.  There was always a faithful remnant.  We see them in people like John’s father, Zechariah, in Mary and in Joseph, in Simeon and in Anna.  But the thing was that none of these people were the sort most people expected to be exemplifying the kingdom of God.  Sure, they were faithful in their simple ways, but they weren’t important, they weren’t rich, they weren’t powerful—they were nobodies.  They were the people being ground up in the gears turned by the bigshots, whether that was the Romans or the Herodians or the corrupt Sadducees who controlled the temple and the priesthood.  And yet it says something that it’s with these people that the Good News begins.  And it’s with these people—and the people like them to whom Jesus had been ministering in Galilee—that he begins his most important sermon on the kingdom.  Jesus says:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:3)

I think we have a tendency to read this and think that what Jesus is saying is that if we behave a certain way—in this case, if we’re poor in spirit—then we will somehow earn or be worthy of God’s blessing.  But that’s not it.  It helps if we go back to Abraham.  In Genesis 12 God calls Abraham and he says to him, “I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great.”  The Lord reiterated and renewed this promise to the generations that came after Abraham.  This was his promise to Israel, “I will bless you” and this was at the core of Jewish identity.  To be blessed was to be part of the people of covenant people of God.  When Jesus talks about people who are blessed, he’s answering the question of who belongs to the people of God.  But here’s where he turns things upside-down—at least that’s how it seemed to so many of the people who heard him.  Most people just assumed that because they were descendants of Abraham, were circumcised, ate the right food, observed the Sabbath, and stayed away from Gentiles that they were “blessed” because they were God’s people.  But here’s the thing: the Lord’s blessing wasn’t blessing for the sake of blessing.  There was more to the promise.  He said to Abraham, “I will bless you…so that you will be a blessing.”  A blessing to whom?  The Lord says to all the families of the earth.  Israel was to be like salt, preserving the earth.  Israel was to be a light, shining in the darkness and leading the nations back to the knowledge of God.  In fact, after these Beatitudes, that’s the next thing Jesus goes on to preach about: salt and light.  If you’re not being salt and light, you’re not blessing and are not blessed—you’re not part of the kingdom.  As we’ve seen in our study of Exodus, Israel was the people who lived in the presence of God and who witnessed him to the nations.

This is what blessing is about.  The people Jesus describes here are the people through whom God makes his kingdom known.  They’re the people who already understand and are already living the life of the kingdom.  He starts with the poor in spirit.  I can’t help but think of Mary.  When she finds out that she’s going to be pregnant with the Lord’s Messiah she doesn’t get full of herself.  There were plenty of people who would have.  No, she bursts out into a song of praise and the first things she sings is, “My soul doth magnify the Lord…for he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden.”

Most people expected God to usher in his kingdom by coming to the important people, the wealthy people, the powerful and politically connected people.  Most people expected the Messiah to ride into Jerusalem like King David in a chariot with a sword and with an army.  Instead he came to a poor young girl.  And it was people like Mary, people who were poor in spirit who came flocking to Jesus and in and through them the kingdom of God burst into the world.  The humble came to Jesus in faith and he opened their blind eyes, he healed their paralysed legs, he healed their diseases, he cast out their demons, he even raised their children from death.  Meanwhile the powerful people, like the Sadducees, fumed that Jesus was offering forgiveness of sins without sending these people to the temple to offer sacrifices.  Meanwhile the Pharisees, people who thought of themselves as righteous, were fuming because Jesus was welcoming the unclean and the sinful.  But Jesus says that the kingdom won’t be found with the powerful or the self-righteous, but with those humble enough to follow the king born in a stable.

The rest of the Beatitudes go the same way.  Jesus says:

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” (Matthew 5:4-9)

Israel was in exile and the people longed for consolation, but most wanted that consolation to come in the form of a Messiah who would put their enemies to the sword.  Jesus says that, no, those who will be comforted, those who will show the kingdom, are those who mourn the sins of Israel and who are ready to repent and turn back to God.  Israel wanted to inherit the earth, but Jesus reminds them that their inheritance will come not through those who are full of pride, not through those who think they’re better than everyone else because of their descent from Abraham or their circumcision or their diet, but it will instead come through those who are meek.  Israel longed for justice—which is probably a better translation than “righteousness” in this case, but the justice Israel wanted had more to do with vengeance on her enemies and Jesus is saying, again: No.  Your hunger for justice will only be satisfied when you are willing to set aside your rights in favour of humility and gentleness.  Israel longed for mercy.  She longed for deliverance.  But Jesus warns that mercy is only for the merciful, not the vengeful.  Israel longed to see God, but Jesus warns: You will never see God so long as your outward acts of piety are a cover for oppressing the poor, the widow, and the orphan.  The kingdom is manifest by those who aren’t just outwardly pure, but who are pure of heart.  And, of course, Israel saw herself as God’s son.  The people longed for God to vindicate them by establishing them once again as a nation over their enemies, but Jesus warns: If you want to be God’s sons you need to show the peacemaking character of your Father.  You’re out for vengeance, you’re calling for the blood of your enemies, if you had the chance you’d kill them in their beds and then tell the world that you were acting out the justice of God on the enemies of his people.  But people like that will never be sons of the God who seeks not vengeance on his enemies, but offers them mercy and forgiveness and reconciliation.  The violent will never be sons of the God who seeks to make peace, even offering his own life for the sake of their treason.

Everything Jesus describes here was aimed at Israel’s failures to be God’s people, to be salt and light.  God had blessed Israel to be a blessing, but they wanted to keep his blessing to themselves, which is why he’d taken it away and sent them into exile.  And most still hadn’t learned.  But there was this remnant: again, people like Mary and Zechariah and Simeon who were already showing the world what the kingdom was like, people who were already living out the character of God.  People whom the world saw as nobodies, but who were in reality already sharing the Lord’s blessing to the world.  This is what John the Baptist had been about: calling the people of Israel to repentance, calling them to turn aside from their sin, their folly, from their false views of the kingdom so that they would be prepared for the Messiah.

But, Jesus warns, if you are faithful in being the sorts of people who carry God’s blessing to the word, be prepared for trouble.  In verses 10-12 he goes on:

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

I expect Jesus was anticipating where his own ministry was headed when he preached these words.  He’d already experienced the anger of his own people.  When he preached in his hometown of Nazareth the people tried to throw him off a cliff.  He knew that most people were not going to receive what he’s saying here and he knew that he was going to be rejected and that he would suffer and be killed.  And he knew that the people who chose to follow him would be persecuted too.  At the Cross the present evil age was dealt a death blow.  In rising from the grave Jesus inaugurated the age to come.  The present age is passing away and the age to come is breaking in, but Jesus knew that his people would live in the overlap.  God brought salvation and renewal this way for a reason.  The people of Jesus’ day wanted it to come all at once, but God chose to bring it slowly.  People today have the same sort of expectation.  They ask how a good God can allow so much evil in the world.  But in asking that question, in asking why God doesn’t come and deal with evil we’re showing the same sort of self-righteous mindset that dominated Israel.  We’re forgetting that for God to come and deal with evil means that God will not only have to deal with our enemies and the people who cause us grief, but that he’ll also have to deal with us.  We’re all sinners.  We’re all responsible for the mess this world is in—some more, some less—but we’ve all contributed to it.  And so God sent Jesus to deal with that sin and to inaugurate his kingdom, but he also delays, and in that he gives sinners a chance to repent and turn to him.  It also means that those who, in this in-between time, insist on revealing the kingdom, those who insist on confronting the sinful systems of the old age through their poverty of spirit, through their meekness, through their mercy, through their peacemaking will face the same backlash that Jesus faced.

Brothers and Sisters, we are called to turn the world upside-down and the world isn’t going to like that.  But the fact is that the world we confront is actually already upside-down.  It’s been corrupted by sin.  When we exemplify mercy and meekness and peacemaking and purity of heart what we’re doing is showing people how the world was in the beginning and how it’s really supposed to be—and how, one day, it really will be again.  We’re giving the world a glimpse of creation set to rights.  We’re giving the world a glimpse of God’s future.  But in the meantime that world will fight back.  The Jews stoned Stephen for preaching that Jesus really was the Messiah.  Throughout the first centuries of the Church, many were martyred because they proclaimed that Jesus is Lord, which also sent the message loud and clear that Caesar is not—and Caesar didn’t like that.  And it continues today.  Even if we don’t face death, we face the pushback and the scorn and the hatred of those who are invested in the gods of money and power and sex and politics and self, those who are proud and merciless and war-making, those who represent the values of the present evil age will see us as the enemy.  And yet, Jesus says, this is good.  Blessed are you, for in your rejection and even in your persecution, you are manifesting the kingdom of heaven—you’re being the blessing you have been called to be and you have a share in the kingdom.

Jesus goes on in verse 13:

“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.

“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 5:13-16)

Jesus challenges Israel.  She is to be the salt of the earth.  She is to be the light of the world.  This was Israel’s calling, it was her vocation right from the beginning, again, going back to Abraham.  God called Israel to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.  She was called to serve the Lord and to show the world what faith in him looked like—a tiny nation surrounded by great empires, but living faithfully for the Lord and trusting him to take care of her: the new creation in miniature.  She was to be like a city set on a hill.  Jesus was thinking about Jerusalem, up on the mountain above the countryside.  The Prophets had said that Jerusalem was to be a place where the Lord was glorified by his people so that the nations would see and come flooding through the gates to come and meet the God of Israel in his temple.

But Israel had done just the opposite.  She worshipped the gods of her pagan neighbours.  Instead of trusting in the Lord to care for her, she forged forbidden alliances with the nations.  Instead of trusting in the Lord she trusted in horses and chariots.  She did everything in her power to make herself and the God to whom she bore witness a laughingstock amongst the nations.  The nations knew that Israel worshipped a God who was different from all the other gods.  The nations knew that Israel was called to be different.  But when they saw Israel’s unfaithfulness they mocked the God they should have praised, asking “Where is her God?”

Israel was supposed to be like a lighthouse, shining God’s light to the nations, but instead she’s removed the glass and surrounded the light with mirrors.  She prided herself on being a people of light and condemned the people outside for being lost in the dark.  But they were in the dark because of her refusal to share the light.  And eventually her light turned to darkness.  She rebuilt her temple after the exile, but the Lord’s presence never returned.

Jesus now invites those who are poor in spirit, those who are meek, those who mourn, those who are merciful, those who are pure in heart, those who are peacemakers, those who are ready to face persecution to come and find out what really being Israel is all about.  If they will follow him they will be the true or the new Israel.  They will share the Lord’s blessing with the nations.  They will be salt.  They will be light, making the Lord known and fulfilling his call to Abraham.

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus was issuing a challenge to Israel.  But, Brothers and Sisters, it’s now a challenge to us.  You and I have been incorporated into Jesus and into his new Israel.  We have been made sons and daughters of Abraham.  And so Abraham’s vocation has been passed on to us.  We are called to proclaim the King and to make his kingdom known.  And we have our own temptations today that lead us away from our mission.  We are just as prone as Israel was to forgetting who our real enemies are.  We are just as prone to forgetting that God’s kingdom is made manifest through mercy and grace.  And the Church in every age is always tempted to put her light under a basket, to remove the glass from the lighthouse and to replace it with mirrors and then call ourselves the people of the light while the world perishes in darkness.  We are tempted to seek the kingdom through pride, arrogance, bullying, and war as the people of Jesus’ day were.  We’re tempted to compromise the kingdom by looking to the powerful and the connected for deliverance or by forgetting that we are a people called to sacrifice our rights and ourselves for the sake of the kingdom.

But, Brothers and Sisters, one thing has changed.  Jesus has poured his life into us.  He has brought the dry bones of Israel to life by the power of the Holy Spirit.  In our baptism we have been freed from our bondage to sin and united to the life of Jesus.  Our hearts, which were once fixed on self, have been turned to God.  Our minds, which once saw the kingdom as foolishness, have been renewed and set on the kingdom of heaven.  That’s not to say that we don’t still struggle, but this is why Jesus invites us to his Table.  Friends, here at the Lord’s Table Jesus gives us a foretaste of the kingdom.  In the bread and wine our Lord pulls God’s future into the present, in the bread and wine, for just a moment he gives us a glimpse into heaven and shows us the kingdom and he reminds us that we live in faithful hope for that day when every tear has been wiped away and God had set everything to rights.  Brothers and Sisters, if you struggle to share God’s blessing with the world, if you struggle to be meek, to be merciful, to be pure in heart, to a peacemaker; if you struggle to offer yourself as a living sacrifice, come this morning and be strengthened.  Come this morning and have your eyes set once again on the kingdom.  Come to the Table today and have your hope restored.  Today, as we read in our Old Testament lesson, we are tested like gold in the furnace (Wisdom 3:6), “But lo”—as we sang—"There breaks a yet more glorious day; The saints triumphant rise in bright array; The King of glory passes on his way.  Alleluia, alleluia.”

Let us pray: Gracious Father, let us never forget that you have blessed us to be a blessing.  You have called us to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.  You have called us to live in such a way that the nations, seeing us, will be drawn and come streaming into your kingdom.  We confess our failures and pray for the strength and the courage and most of all the faith, not only to live in hope of your kingdom, but to offer ourselves as living sacrifices for the sake of the world.  Strengthen us we pray, through our Lord Jesus Christ who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.  Amen.

They Stood Far Off

Exodus 20:18-26

by William Klock

These last few months we’ve slowed our pace through Exodus as we’ve taken a Sunday apiece to look at each of the ten words of the Decalogue.  Today as we look at the end of Exodus 20, we’ll pick-up our pace again.  Sometimes it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees when we slow down for a detailed look.  Of course, there was no forest in the Sinai wilderness.  There wasn’t even food to eat or water do drink.  The Lord had to provide both for his people.  And that’s just what he’s been doing for them.  That’s the big picture here.  Exodus is about the Lord’s deliverance of his people and his ongoing care and provision for them.  He delivered them from their bondage to the Egyptians, he brought the god-man Pharaoh to his knees, he defeated his army at the sea, while leading Israel through on dry land, he fed his people with miraculous food in the wilderness.  And now he’s met them on the mountain, he’s established a covenant with them.  He is Israel’s God.  Israel is his people.  He will lead them to the land he has claimed for himself.  They will be the people who live with the Lord in their midst, so that the nations will see and know and submit in faith to the living God who is faithful to his promises.

But what does it look like to be the Lord’s people?  The trumpets sounded.  Lightening flashed on the mountain.  And the voice of the Lord rumbled down to the people as he reminded them who he is and what he had done and then issued these ten commandments.  As best we can tell, the Decalogue was spoken directly to the people.  In Exodus 20:18-19 we read their response.

Now when all the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightning and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled, and they stood far off and said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.”

Do you ever wonder what it would be like to experience the direct presence of God?  To audibly hear his voice?  A woman once told me that God comes to her in visions and she audibly hears his voice and that both are comforting and affirming and just generally warm and fuzzy.  I’m pretty sceptical that anyone with an experience like that has actually experienced God, because that’s the opposite of every encounter we see in the Bible between God and human beings.  God manifests his presence, and mortals tremble.  God speaks, and even his own people kneel in fear and awe before him.  When God comes to his people, his first words are usually, “Fear not!”, because human beings—even those he has made his own—cannot but quake in the presence of the holy.

When I was in seminary we used the Book of Alternative Services in our daily chapel services.  Some of us asked if we could, at least occasionally, use the Book of Common Prayer.  One woman stood up and practically shouted, “I will not ever pray the Prayer of Humble Access and ask for crumbs from God.  When I meet God, I’ll stand on my two feet, at my full height, and look him in the eye!”  And I sat there thinking, “No, you won’t.”  When God came to the Old Testament saints, they trembled and covered their faces.  Even in the New Testament, when Jesus manifested the power of God, what did people do?  They were awestruck.  They were afraid.  They asked him to go away.  And the book of Revelation shows the saints gathered in worship before his throne.  No one stands to look Jesus in the eye.  No, they cast their crowns before him, kneel humbly, and cry out in worship, “Holy, holy, holy!”  Even for the redeemed, the holiness of God is overwhelming.

Back to the Israelites.  They’ve experienced God and they’re afraid.  They’ve heard his voice, and their response is not, “Wow!  That was comforting!  Please, God, speak some more!”  No, they stand far off and they plead with Moses, “No more!  You speak to us.  If you speak to us, we will listen, but we can’t bear to hear the voice of the Lord anymore.  It might kill us!”  People today talk about hearing the voice of God and it being all warm and fuzzy or they couch it in terms of “zen” or “peacefulness”.  Friends, Israel, God’s own people, experienced the holiness of God and cried out, “No more, lest we die!”

And, as is the case throughout the Bible when mortals encounter the holy, the Lord’s response is “Fear not.”  Look at verses 20 and 21:

Moses said to the people, “Do not fear, for God has come to test you, that the fear of him may be before you, that you may not sin.” The people stood far off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was.

Fear is and should be the natural response of a human being to the presence of God.  He is the Creator and we’re his creatures.  He is holy and we are sinners.  But it’s important to understand that there’s more than one kind of fear.  We need to grasp that in order to parse out this confusing response given my Moses.  He says, “Do not fear.”  Here Moses is talking about a kind of debilitating fear, a kind of fear that drives us to escape from the presence of God, a kind of fear that causes us to cover our ears lest we hear him speak.  That’s the natural response of sinful men and women to the presence and to the voice of God, but if God’s people are to really be his people, they’re going to have to learn to live in his holy presence.  If they’re going to be his people, they’re going to have to obey his word, and that means they’ll first have to hear it.  A proper understanding of God and of ourselves, and of God’s gracious and merciful purposes for us should convert unhealthy and debilitating fear into a fear that moves us to reverence and obedience.

Then Moses says that “God has come to test you”.  The best sense of the Hebrew word used here is that of experience.  “The Lord has manifested his presence in the cloud and the lightning, and he has spoken so that you can know him.  It’s interesting that the Hebrew word for lightning used here is only used in one other place in the Pentateuch.  It’s used here and it’s used to describe the torch that Abraham saw when the Lord established his covenant with him in Genesis 15:17.  This is the God of the covenant.  This is the God who has made promises to his people.  And now this same God is fulfilling them.  It’s a reminder that the one, true God is not like the fickle, capricious, and immoral gods of the pagans.  He is not only holy; he is also good and faithful.

And he goes on to say that all of this is so that they will fear him and not sin.  So fear not so that you fear and not sin.  The same Hebrew word for fear is used in both cases, but each is nuanced differently.  A better English translation might be, “Don’t be afraid, but fear the Lord that you might not sin.”

As I was thinking about this an experience I had when I was learning to drive came to mind.  I bet many of you have had a similar experience, maybe while learning to drive or maybe doing something else that has the potential to be dangerous.

I’d had my learner’s permit for a few months.  I’d driven around our small town.  I’d driven on the freeway.  Then we moved to a larger city and I found myself in a new situation.  Now I was driving at highway speeds on city streets with stop lights.  I’d learned how to deal with yellow lights at slower speeds, but had no experience with yellow lights at fifty miles per hour.  And so one day I was out with my dad on a major thoroughfare and the light turned yellow.  I was almost on top of the intersection.  I should have just gone through the yellow light.  But I didn’t know better.  I hit the brakes hard and slid to a stop with my nose in the crosswalk and just about put my dad’s head through the windshield.  But as the car came to a stop I heard a loud screeching of tires.  I was confused.  It couldn’t be my tires, because I was stopped.  And then, as the screeching continued, a bright red 1969 Dodge Charger slid up to the crosswalk next to me in the right lane, wheels locked, and a cloud of smoke behind it.  There was a guy in the seat who looked just like “Snake” from the The Simpsons, shaking his fist and shouting profanities.  It took me a second to realise what had happened.  He had expected me to go through the yellow light—which is what I should have done—and he’d sped up to make it through after me.  But instead, I slammed on the brakes and the only reason he didn’t rear-end me, was by braking hard and swerving into the other lane.  He was mad at me.  Dad was mad at me.  I was completely freaked out and shaking.  Every detail is still burned into my memory.  I refused to drive for a couple of weeks after that.  But when I did get in the car again, I had a new and healthy fear of driving.  Up to that point, I’d never really thought about the serious side, the potential consequences of driving a car.  The responsibility it entailed had never really sunk in.  But it did that day.

And that’s something of what’s going on with the Israelites.  The Lord has manifested his presence, he has spoken that the Israelites might know what it is to experience the truly holy.  They need to have a sense of awe, of reverence, of holy fear in order to be the holy people the Lord has called them to be.  There is a sense in which the nations, when they encounter Israel, should have a similar sense of the holy—of the mediated presence of God.  Much the same goes for us as God’s people.  We are united with Jesus and filled with God’s own Spirit.  When we go out into the world, there should be something tangibly different about us.  We are holy as God is holy.  We should mediate the presence of God.

At this point the people move off to a safe distance, while Moses goes up the mountain and enters the storm, enters the presence of the Lord.  What follows in Exodus is something called “The Book of the Covenant”.  Scholars disagree on exactly where it starts.  Some say that it includes the Decalogue and other argue that it starts here or at the beginning of Chapter 21, but whatever the case, it runs through Chapter 24.  Where the Decalogue lays out some foundational and general principles that are to characterise the life of Israel, the Book of the Covenant shows how these principles and holiness in general are to be lived out by Israel in practical ways.  It’s not a law code in the modern sense that we think of.  It doesn’t cover every situation that the people would encounter.  What the torah does is to give examples of what righteous or holy legislation is to look like for Israel.  We often translate torah with the word “law”—and that’s because when the Jews translated the Old Testament into Greek, they used the Greek word for “law”—nomos—to translate the Hebrew word torah, but torah is more encompassing then our word (or the Greek word for) “law”.  It’s as much wisdom as it is law code and sometimes even more so.  And so rather than nail down a law for every possible scenario, the torah lays out principles of righteousness and justice by giving a broad range of examples meant to teach the people and their judges how to live as God’s people.

Whether the Lord had intended to speak all of this to Israel or to mediate the rest through Moses isn’t clear.  At any rate, the rest of what the Lord has to say comes via Moses.  The Book of the Covenant, just like the Decalogue, begins with the subject of worship.  Look now at Exodus 20:22-26.

And the Lord said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the people of Israel: ‘You have seen for yourselves that I have talked with you from heaven.  You shall not make gods of silver to be with me, nor shall you make for yourselves gods of gold.  An altar of earth you shall make for me and sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and your peace offerings, your sheep and your oxen. In every place where I cause my name to be remembered I will come to you and bless you.  If you make me an altar of stone, you shall not build it of hewn stones, for if you wield your tool on it you profane it.  And you shall not go up by steps to my altar, that your nakedness be not exposed on it.’

Just as the Decalogue begins with instructions for worship, the Book of the Covenant begins with instructions for worship.  The Book of the Covenant focuses mainly on social and economic matters, but the people of God are, first and foremost, a worshipping people and so it begins there.  In fact, it really begins a step before that.  The Lord has spoken.  In verse 22, Moses leads off reminding the people that that have seen—they have experienced—hearing God.  The Lord has made himself known to them.  He is going to shape them into a people who will make him known to the nations.  There will be all sorts of thou shalts and thou shalt nots, but the first response of God’s people to his revelation is worship.  Once again Israel is reminded: You shall have no other gods before me and you shall not make carved images for the purpose of worship.

The Lord works alone.  He and he alone is worthy of worship.  He has defeated the gods of Egypt.  He will defeat the gods of the Canaanites.  And so he calls his people to faith—to a wholehearted faith in him.  The pagans hedged their bets with altars to many gods lest one of them fail to hear or to act.  The pagans had pantheons of big gods and little gods.  Kings worshipped the gods of creation or the patron deity of the nation.  Ordinary people didn’t bother those big gods with their petty concerns.  They worshipped the little, local gods of hearth and home, of field and fertility.  But the Lord says, “You shall have no other gods before me—no other gods in my presence.”  I and I alone have delivered you.  I hear the cries of the great and hear the cries of the small.  No concern is too big or too small.  Worship me and me alone.

But the specifics here also remind the people that the Lord is to be worshipped on his own terms.  They knew the practises of the Egyptians.  Soon they’ll know the practises of the Canaanites.  The Lord is different than the pagan gods and Israel, herself, is here called to be different from the pagans.  The Lord is not to be represented with images of silver or gold as the pagan gods were.

The Lord also warns: Your altars are to be made of earth or unhewn, uncarved stone.  And there are to be no steps.  The reasons for this would have been obvious to the Israelites, but they’re not so clear for us.  We can only speculate, but again, the issue here seems to be that the Israelites not adopted the worship practises of the Canaanites.  When the Israelites do eventually build a grand altar to the Lord, it will not be built on their initiative.  It will be built according to specific plans given by the Lord and it will be built by craftsmen working under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.  But, again, at this point the Lord warns against Israel building such things on her own initiative.

If there’s a reason for this that we can discern, I think it’s likely that the Lord doesn’t want his people thinking that they can earn his favour, ingratiate themselves to him, or otherwise put him in their debt by building him fancy altars or a great temple on their own initiative.  The Lord doesn’t work that way.  In fact, the Lord despises such things.  And so an altar of heaped earth or a pile of natural stones honours him more than the elaborate craftsmanship of the pagans.  It says something about the state of fallen humanity.  We think we’ve got to do add our bit to Creation to make it acceptable to God, when the reality is that simple dirt and uncut stone are holier than we are apart from God’s grace.  The dirt and the stones are as he created them.  Unlike us, they’ve never rebelled against his sovereignty and his goodness.  And so the Lord says, “Until I take the initiative, until I give you instructions for building me an altar, until I’ve inspired your craftsmen with my own Spirit, you are to offer your sacrifices and your offerings on simple heaps of earth or stone.  The pagans think they can manipulate me with the work of their hands, but you are to honour me by recognising in your worship that there is nothing you can give me that is not already mine.”

To encounter God, to have such a sense of his otherness and of his holiness is for us to be stripped bare.  In the presence of his greatness, our smallness is revealed and the reality of our sinfulness is brought to light.  Sometimes we get to thinking pretty highly of ourselves, but in the light of God’s glory our righteousness is revealed as filthy rags, as Isaiah wrote.

But, Brothers and Sisters, the remarkable thing is that it’s just at that moment, just when we want to run away, just when we’re willing the earth to open and swallow us up so that we can escape the fearful presence of this holy God, he calls us to worship in his presence.  Just at the moment we can no longer bear the sound of his voice, he gives a mediator.  Here in Exodus he speaks through Moses.  Here he reminds the people as they cower in fear, “I am the God who brought you out of Egypt.  You are mine and I am yours.  Draw near and worship me.  Don’t worry about fancy altars.  Just make a pile of earth or stone.  It’s the humble, heart-felt worship of my people that I desire.

It points us to the new covenant established by Jesus.  In him we have a mediator far better than Moses.  In Jesus, God himself has taken up the flesh of his people that he might die in their place—in our place.  And then he leads us to his Father, our filthy rags washed clean as snow and made new.  And then, the most amazing part of it all, the Spirit gathers us like stones, fits us together, perfectly placed and positioned, and he makes us the altar, the temple and he dwells in our midst.

Brothers and Sisters, think on that this morning as we come to the Lord’s Table.  The God we meet here in Jesus is the same God before whom Israel quaked.  But this morning we do not cower in fear.  We come in awe of the holy God who gave his Son that we might become a holy people.  We come in awe as undeserving sinners, as those who were once enemies of God, whom he has, in his mercy and with his grace, redeemed and made his friends.  Think this morning on that prayer in the liturgy that we call the Prayer of Humble Access:

We do not presume to come to your table, merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in your manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table. But you are the same Lord whose nature is always to have mercy. Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of your dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.  Amen.