Jesus and His Bible, Part 10

The Faithless Vine-Growers

Mark 11 ends with the priests, scribes, and elders asking Jesus who gave him the authority to do such things as clear the merchants out of the Court of the Gentiles in the Temple.  He “answered” them with a question about where the baptism of John came from, whether heaven or humans.  They refused to answer, because he had trapped and immobilized them. 

Mark 12:1 And He began to speak to them in parables: “A man planted a vineyard, and put a wall around it, and dug a vat under the winepress, and built a tower, and rented it out to vine-growers and went on a journey.” 

The parable goes on to tell how, each time he sent servants to collect the rent, the vine-growers beat them, stoned them, shamed them, and killed some of them. So he sent his son, thinking they would respect him. But instead they reasoned that killing the son would make them the de facto owners, so they did kill him and throw his body out of the vineyard. 

Jesus asked the crowd, “What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the vine-growers and give the vineyard to others.”

Jesus’s Bible has so many references to vines and vineyards that they cannot all be brought to mind here.  The references are particularly prevalent in the Prophets, and we will look at just one, Isaiah:

“Let me sing now for my well-beloved a song of my beloved concerning his vineyard.  My well-beloved had a vineyard on a fertile hill. 

And he dug it all around, removed its stones, and planted it with the choicest vine. And he built a tower in the middle of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it; then he expected it to produce good grapes, but it produced only worthless ones. And now…I will lay it waste…For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah his delightful plant. Thus he looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, a cry of distress…Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil…Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and clever in their own sight.” (Isaiah 5)

The context of this parable is the prophet Isaiah’s call to his nation to repent; his description of the suffering their sinfulness will call down on them; his prediction of the dissolution of their community and kingdom; his list of their sins, including a plea to “cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, rebuke the oppressor, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow” (1:17). Interspersed among the warnings and accusations are visions of a blessed future, where war is no more, where Zion is holy and protected, which Isaiah so much wanted to be true. 

Isaiah  goes on following his parable of the vineyard to predict the defeat and downfall of the nation of Israel.

By quoting this passage, Jesus brought before the priests, scribes, and elders their worst nightmare—the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem and the nation.  It had happened before when Babylon invaded, and the Jews were dispersed out of their homeland. Isaiah’s prophetic vision was accurate.

Jesus essentially said to his hearers that the same conditions that provoked judgment before have occurred again, and even worse, and how can they hope to escape?  This was infuriating, and it confirmed their fear that Jesus’s message and person had both personal and political implications. Their arrogance and their will to power and their personal corruptions were laid bare by Isaiah’s words in Jesus’s mouth.

Jesus and His Bible, Part 9

Welcome and Worship in God's House

To summarize events between the last quotation and this next one: After his encounter with the rich man, Jesus educated his followers on how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Then he said that those who left their houses and relationships and lands would receive back  a hundred times their loss in this time, accompanied by persecution, and in the time to come, would receive eternal life.  He told the disciples he would be killed in Jerusalem, and the response recorded by Mark is that James and John came to ask for seats of preeminence in the kingdom. Jesus said they would have to share in his experience, and that they would indeed share it, but that he didn’t decide who was preeminent in the kingdom of God. (He had just said that the last would be first, so that’s a clue.) He also said that whoever wants to be great among Jesus’s followers must be the slave of all.  Then he healed blind Bartimaeus. 

He entered Jerusalem on a colt and the crowds hailed him as King. He looked around the temple and went back out of Jerusalem for the night.

On the way back into Jerusalem, he cursed a fig tree without fruit, and then returned to the temple. It is easy to connect the fig tree to the temple as an enacted parable, given what happened next.  He drove out those who bought and sold in the temple and turned over the tables of the money-changers.

And then he said: “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a robber’s den” (Mark 11:17). The picture invoked is that the merchants in the temple are like a band of robbers who hurry back to their safe hideout to count their takings, and the temple is that cave.  

Jesus quoted two prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah. The first is Isaiah 56:7. This quotation comes from a passage that begins “Preserve justice, and do righteousness, for my salvation is about to come and my righteousness to be revealed.” The passage promises blessing to those who do not profane the Sabbath and who do no evil. The blessing is also for the foreigner and the eunuch who keep God’s Sabbaths and choose what pleases God and hold fast to God’s covenant.  

Jesus invoked Isaiah’s inclusive prophecy as he cleared out all the hubbub and chicanery from the court of the Gentiles.  By his action, seen as a parable, Jesus took the holy interior of the temple where only Jews could go and extended it out into the outer court where Gentiles were allowed to visit. He invited outsiders into God’s presence, including them in the privilege of worshiping God. 

The second is Jeremiah 7:11. This comes from a word that Jeremiah was told to speak in the Lord’s house, the temple, to all the people of Judah who entered to worship. This is the immediate context: 

Amend your ways and deeds and I will let you dwell in this place. Do not think that because the temple is here, you are ok. You must practice justice, you must not oppress the foreigner, the orphan, or the widow, and you must not shed innocent blood or worship idols. But if you do wrong and then come here and say “We are delivered”—has this house, which is called by My name, become a den of robbers in your sight? 

This directly confronts any sense of being exclusively chosen to belong to God, the sign of which for the Jews is the temple. Sadly, however, their actions do not reflect justice and mercy to those who are other and those who are needy or helpless. If they are implicated in the death of the innocent and if they put anything (like wealth, see the rich man of Mark 10) ahead of God in their worship, they have made the temple a robbers’  hideout. (It is not hard to apply this to the many who make money out of religion in our time.) Jeremiah highlights the teachings of the Torah that specifically command justice and mercy to vulnerable groups of people and the many instances in the Hebrew scripture that insist on care for the innocent and putting God first. 

In both quotations from Jesus’s Bible, the context has to do with the fact that the chosen people have themselves chosen to act without justice and righteousness and they have thus obscured the intent of God, which is to invite and include the foreigner, the powerless, the eunuch in the knowledge and worship of the true God, and to protect the interests of the helpless, friendless, and innocent.  Instead, in Jesus’s time, the place these folks were welcome had become a marketplace rather than a place of worship, a place where the “protected” classes were taken advantage of in order to accumulate money.

Misery and Justice

Sometimes when I’m alone, I open my well-loved The Book of American Negro Spirituals (edited and harmonized by James Weldon Johnson, a poet I grew up loving, and J. Rosamond Johnson, his brother); and I sing. The composers of these songs could not count on any right to their own bodies, having a spouse, or seeing their children grow up. They had no due process and no protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Though their enslavers attempted to justify enslaving other people using the Bible, these musicians heard their own story in the Bible, and sang the stories that spoke to their condition.

I understand wishing for the strict justice of these songs. The song “Didn’t Old Pharaoh Get Lost?” begins with Isaac on the altar, Moses cast into the Nile, Joseph sold by his brothers, Samuel hearing from God that Eli’s children would fall, and then dives into the story of Israel in Egypt. One verse describes “raging Pharaoh” and his host drowning in the Red Sea.  And the chorus rejoices after every verse, “Didn’t old Pharaoh get lost in the Red Sea?” “Go Down, Moses” recounts the misery of Israel: “oppressed so hard they could not stand.” In it, God tells Moses to tell Pharaoh to let the people go, and, “if not, I’ll smite your first-born dead.”  

In his Second Inaugural Address delivered during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln spoke about justice: 

Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-men’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”

Lincoln may well have had in mind the words of God to Cain, “Your brother’s blood calls to me from the ground.” What if, indeed, in the long view, we (or our children) do repay the earth drop for drop for the blood of our human family we have been responsible for spilling on it? 

When those who are terrorized or abused or tortured for being different from their oppressors cry out for justice and express anger and desperation, I want my response to be mercy rather than judgment, even if I am implicated in causing their suffering, even if their expression makes me uncomfortable or perhaps even a little miserable. 

I think it would help if we really tried to inhabit another’s misery, even to the point of calling on our own painful memories to elicit our empathy. While I have endured abuse, loneliness, and misery, and I have called on God for justice, I haven’t experienced what a civilian in Yemen feels, what a child in Syria dreads, how an Black person in the U.S. thinks about traffic stops, how dangerous it is to be transgender. But I can believe them when they tell me of their terror. People of privilege don’t really understand the profound misery of abuse, slavery, or war, or starvation, or terror (until, in some disastrous event, they do).

Theodore Parker, writing before the Civil War, said, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.” Martin Luther King, Jr., picked this up and made it a hopeful and oft-quoted refrain: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I trust that God will in fact be just, even when it seems to take forever, and I know that God calls me—calls us—to be just, to do justice, to make things as right and righteous as we can. It is hard and uncomfortable work, and that’s all the more reason to try.

Shalom and Division

Preached at Tigard Community Friends Church
January 5, 2020

Picture it: England 1650. King Charles 1 has recently been beheaded by the Parliamentary army under Oliver Cromwell, bringing the divine right of kings to govern to an abrupt end. A war is raging between Protestants and  Catholics over who will rule England. Bear-baiting is a sport, and hangings are a family outing. The Church seemed to be splintering a hundred ways as Ranters say God permits them to do whatever they want in their wild parties, Adamites say God wants them to return to Eden and walk around naked, and Quakers…Quakers stand up and argue with Anglican priests during church, keep their hats on in the presence of the upper class, and refuse to swear loyalty oaths—to pledge allegiance—to the government. The mid-1600s, when young George Fox began preaching and the Quaker movement began, were a wild, violent, chaotic time. And out of that context came the  Quaker “peace testimony.” Several who had served the Parliamentary Army under Oliver Cromwell, fighting for English Protestantism against Roman Catholicism, followed their experience of personal revelation of God out of the army and into preaching. Their testimony was not so much against the military as for their experience of being restored to the innocence of the garden of Eden by the indwelling Spirit of Jesus Christ, and that innocence took away all cause for war.

This testimony also derived from the Quaker commitment to equality of all persons and the determination to swear not at all. This refusal to take the oath of loyalty was frequently used by hostile persons to put Quakers in jail because they refused to swear allegiance to the government and its head. They committed their bodies and souls to be loyal to no political regime, but only to Jesus Christ, despite their natural preference for the Protestant side of the English Civil War. Thus, when the nation returned to King Charles II, they attempted to use their refusal to swear allegiance to Oliver Cromwell to prove to King Charles II that they were called to a different kind of kingdom and were no more or less loyal to King Charles than they had been to Oliver Cromwell. They still went to jail, because political systems demand body and soul loyalty.

The actual lives of Quakers in the beginnings were fraught with persecution from the established Church of England, hostilities from other sects like the early Baptists, and conflicts among the faithful themselves. And those latter conflicts, while they may make us skeptical of their entire restoration to innocence, often came directly from what made their contribution to the whole of Christianity important and worthwhile, namely, their insistence on personal experience of the Spirit of God and personal accountability to obey what the Spirit of God told them to do. This practical mysticism derived from their belief that within every person is a seed of Truth that God’s Spirit speaks to and causes to grow. And though they went on to be separatist and self-preserving, the truth that inspired the first generation ran like an undercurrent into the mainstreams of Christianity and changed how we understand God and our relationship to God through Christ. A soul at peace, in shalom, with God is a soul nothing can ultimately trouble.

At the time just before Jesus was born, the nation of Israel was occupied by a foreign power, Rome, and ruled locally by hereditary enemies represented in the various Herods. The Jews were split internally among collaborators with Rome and religious purists and purifiers, and zealots dedicated to overthrowing Rome. The temple system exploited worshipers for money, particularly the poor or foreign-born. But there were still faithful Jews hoping for the coming of Messiah who would bring Shalom.

Luke 1 tells about the birth of John who became known as the Baptizer. His birth was foretold to his father Zechariah, who just mentioned to God’s messenger that he and his wife were old and she was past child-bearing age and could he please have a sign so that his wife would believe him, and the sign was that he could not talk for the duration of the pregnancy. When John was born, Zechariah’s speech came back, and he prophesied:

“Blessed is the Lord God of Israel, because God has looked on God’s people and ransomed them, and raised a mighty helper for us in the house of David…God will deliver us safely out of the hands of our enemies and of all who hate us, will perform the mercy shown to our fathers and will remember God’s holy covenant, the oath God swore to Abraham our father, to grant that we, having been rescued from our enemies, might worship and serve God without fear, in holiness and right living before God’s presence for all our days. And now you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you go forth before the face of the Master to prepare his ways, to give to his people a knowledge of salvation in release from the bondage of their sins, through our God’s inmost mercy, whereby a dawn from above will visit us, to shine upon those sitting in darkness and death’s shadow, in order to guide our feet into the path of peace.” (Luke 1:67-79)

So let’s see what Zechariah thought would lead to peace, to shalom.

Liberation from oppression

Salvation from enemies

Restoration of the covenant with God through God’s mercy

Freedom to worship without fear, in holiness and justice before his presence, which was understood to be in the Temple

John was to be the prophetic voice that taught Israel to understand their sinfulness, their need for forgiveness, so that their lives would not be characterized by darkness and the fear of death but by light and peace.

And that is what John set out to do. He lived a life of abstinence and purity, spent time in the desert with only God, and then returned to preach. His message was about being washed in living water in the Jordan River to show repentance, the commitment to changing mind and behavior, and to confer release and forgiveness from sins. He told the crowds to share their clothing and food with the impoverished; he told tax-collectors to collect no more than was due; he told men in the army not to extort or falsely accuse anyone and to be content with their wages. His message was right in line with all the prophets before him: be generous, have integrity, tell the truth, be content.

But most importantly, he told them that his baptism was water, but that one was coming who would baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire, who carried a threshing flail to beat the chaff away from the grain, saving the grain into a storehouse and burning away the chaff “with inextinguishable fire.”

So there’s that to look forward to in an encounter with the Chosen and Sent One of God, the Messiah, Jesus the Christ.

I was asked to talk about Shalom. Because Shalom is a Hebrew word, it is found only in the Old Testament in that form. However, it is very likely that when the New Testament portrays Jesus speaking the Greek word for peace that what he actually said was some version of Shalom. For example, when Jesus said, “Peace be unto you,” he was using a familiar greeting that included the word Shalom. When Jesus talks about peace, the Old Testament Shalom inhabits and fills up the meaning of the word in the New Testament.

The history of how the word is used in the Old Testament is more complex than a notion of peace as tranquility or even the absence of conflict. The root of the word is a verb and these are some of the ways to translate it:

restore, recompense, reward, repay, requite, make restitution, make amends, complete, finish

be at peace, make peace with, make safe, make whole, make good

You can see that inherent in these words is an idea of justice. It is unsurprising that the word Shalom in various forms permeates the books of the Law—Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, Deuteronomy. Shalom is about making things right, about fairness, about justice, about adjudicating who owes whom what and defining how to pay it. The word is used to describe the offering of an animal to God to acknowledge sin and make peace with God. The prophets weigh in against deceptive weights and measures because Shalom relates to providing full value, and they assert that God hates it when people cheat each other in business transactions, noting that they most often cheat the poor.

In other words, the concept of Shalom presupposes that things have gone wrong, and acknowledges our deep desire that things go right, that our lives be characterized by completeness, soundness, safety, health, prosperity, quiet, contentment, friendship.

Even the Greek word for peace, eirene, has a probable root that means “to join”, suggesting the prerequisite of something divided prior to the coming of peace.

So Zechariah’s prophecy is a prayer for Shalom.

I want to suggest to you two things. Zechariah’s prophecy as he understood it was too small. When he referred to God’s people, he understood it entirely as referring to the nation of Israel. But we know from the rest of the story of Jesus that the circle widened to include those outside almost immediately, both while Jesus ministered and after the Holy Spirit took over the disciples’ lives and moved them outside Jerusalem, Judea, and to the farthest reaches of the world they knew.

And the process of understanding that all peoples are God’s people has been fraught with division and pain, from the actual Messiah, Jesus, on down to today. In other words, Shalom is not simple, and the enemies of peace are within ourselves and the systems like families, religions, and politics that shape our fears, our shames, and our areas of ignorance. Further, being moved by God’s Spirit from a life of fear and shame and unknowing to a life of faith and acceptance and increasing understanding is painful and requires quite often a kind of divine surgery.

That is why John warns his hearers that the Messiah will come as a reaper, not grim, but determined. The one God sends to save God’s people will not necessarily be experienced as a gentle restorer of balance. In point of fact, Jesus himself makes this point by word and deed.

In Luke 12 and Matthew 10 Jesus describes his mission:

 “I came to set a fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled….Do you think I came to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. For from now on there will be five in one house divided three against two…; father against son, son against father, mother and daughter divided against each other…Why do you not judge what is right even for yourselves? For as you are going out with your adversary to a judge, make an effort to settle your debt with your adversary on the spot, so that he does not drag you to the judge, and the judge hand you over to the officer, and the officer throw you into prison. I tell you, you most surely will not come out from there until you pay the very last cent.” (Luke 12:49 ff)

I have to say that I was startled to find my thoughts directed (I hope by the Spirit of Truth) toward these passages when I signed on to speak about Shalom. Yet I think we can see our understanding of Shalom informs this passage. If Shalom is about making things right, about making things whole that have been broken, the first great brokenness of humanity is the willingness to be parted from God. This willingness shows up in every action that goes against what God’s Spirit has told us is right and good to do, in every evasion in our own spirits against absolutely trusting in the goodness and love and faithfulness of God and the claims that God has on us because of them. We owe God everything, starting with the breath of life itself, and we will be imprisoned within ourselves by law and justice until we admit what we owe to God, and admit our own inability to pay, and throw ourselves on the mercy of the court where Jesus is our advocate as well as our judge. And then we have to stand naked and unashamed in God’s presence, hiding nothing, allowing God to bring what has been hidden out of the corners where we buried it, running toward God rather than away when we realize we’re not ready to meet God’s eyes. The Old Testament writers called this open stance toward God “a perfect heart”—“perfect” being derived from Shalom, meaning at peace with God, in friendship with God, rather than a heart without flaws. See the relationship between David and God if you want to understand the term.

And this version: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace upon the earth; I came to bring not peace but a sword. For I came to divide a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother…and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household. Whoever cherishes father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever cherishes son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take up their cross and follow after me is not worthy of me. Whoever gains their soul will lose it, and whoever loses their soul for my sake will gain it. Whoever accepts you accepts me, and whoever accepts me, accepts the One who sent me.” (Matthew 10:34 ff)

This speech occurs in a context of sending disciples out to preach in Judea to Jews. In commissioning them, Jesus warns them of resistance, rejection, and violence in response to the message to repent because God’s kingdom is here. This message of God’s kingdom exposes inmost allegiances, which remain to family, race, religion, not to God.  As long as this is true, God is their adversary, who is contending with them for what they, what we, owe to God—our undivided loyalty, our faith, our faithfulness.

We are so often prone to put loyalty to God in storage while we sign on to our family heritage, our religious tradition, our political party, our national identity. We need, like early Quakers saw, to be restored to the innocence of personal relationship with God Almighty, to walk daily with God, to hide nothing from God. We need to make all other loyalties secondary to this primary one. If we are participating in any system that splits the world into us vs. them, we have been drawn away from our loyalty to God, who has no favorites in the world, who even told the nation of Israel prior to the coming of Jesus, “are you not as children of the Ethiopians to me, O children of Israel? Saith the LORD. Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt? And the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir?” (Amos 9:7). In other words, all the peoples are God’s. God’s care is for all the peoples of the world. And don’t forget the story of Jonah, whom God sent to preach to the political and national enemies of Israel, the Assyrians, and Jonah’s complaint to God when God forgives and does not rain judgment on the Assyrians: “Isn’t this just what I predicted?   I knew that You are a gracious God, merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and that You will choose not to inflict misery.” To which God (eventually) responds: “Should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, wherein there are more than 120,000 persons that cannot tell their right hand from their left hand; and also many animals?” (Jonah 4:2,11). Jesus tweaks the religious leaders of his day by referencing this specific story and saying it will be easier for Nineveh in the day of judgment than for Israel because the Assyrians repented when the prophet preached (Matthew 12:41).

Both of these challenging passages are preceded by the following encouragement given by Jesus himself, and I can think of no better way for us to prepare within ourselves the way of the Lord as best we can:

“Guard yourselves from the yeast of the Pharisees, which is pretending to be good. There is nothing thoroughly veiled that will not be unveiled, or hidden that will not be known. Thus the things you said in the darkness will be heard in the light, and what you whisper in private rooms will be proclaimed on the rooftops. And I say to you, my friends, do not be afraid of those killing the body and thereafter having nothing more that they can do…Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight. Rather, even the hairs of your head have all been numbered. Do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.” (Luke 12:1-7). “What I say to you in the dark, speak in the light; and what you hear in your ear, proclaim upon the housetops. And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul…Are not two sparrows sold for the smallest pittance? And not one of them will fall to earth without your Father. But even the hairs of your head have all been numbered. So do not be afraid; you are of greater worth than a great many sparrows.” (Matthew 10:27-31)

Jesus says that when we say by word and deed, “I’m with God. I have pledged my loyalty to God” that he, Jesus, will say in front of God’s angels, “I’m with that person; I have pledged loyalty to her, to him, to them.” And nothing can separate us from God’s faithful love. God’s love is committed to our Shalom, to our well-being, to our wholeness, which we cannot have without relationship, friendship—Shalom—with God.  And God will work to burn away the chaff or the nonsense in how we understand ourselves and our relationships in order to leave behind the true grain of our personhood which God will never let go to waste.

 The following helped me write this sermon:

https://www.blueletterbible.org/

The Jewish Study Bible, eds. Adele Berlin and Mark Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004)

The New Testament, trans. David Bentley Hart (New Haven: Yale UP, 2017)

George MacDonald's writings in general

Four Brothers and God’s Grace

Preached at Tigard Friends Church 1/27/2019

I want us to look at two stories from the Bible that use the relationships between older and younger brothers to explore what God wants from each of us, and how each of us has our own unique relationship with God. Ultimately, both stories give brilliant pictures of God’s grace to each of the brothers and also to each of us.

The first story is of the first brothers, Cain and Abel. They each specialize in a different branch of agriculture. Cain raises grain, and Abel raises sheep. When it comes time to thank God for the harvest, each offers something of what they have raised.

God graciously accepts Abel’s offering and rejects Cain’s. We do not really know why and must infer it from what happens next, namely that Cain carries the seeds of murder in his heart.

If we identify with Abel, we are working hard and giving part of what we produce to God. We are glad to see that God graciously accepts our offerings. We are also innocently oblivious to the inner dynamics in other people and trust that they mean us well. Abels are often surprised by the envy and hatred of others.

When Cain sees that God has rejected his offering and favored his younger brother, he becomes afraid that God has rejected him and as a result he is jealous and angry. God speaks to him directly and says, “Why are you angry? If you behave well, you will be accepted. If you behave badly, sin is at your door and wants to eat you up.” Cain says, essentially, “Whatever.” We see here the commitment of God to our free will, in that God could easily have prevented Cain from killing Abel and did not. It is always surprising how and when God intervenes in human affairs.

What in us might identify with Cain? Perhaps it is actual rivalry we have with our siblings. Perhaps our parents favored one child above the rest.  The first child has to watch parents get more lenient with second and third children. Perhaps now that we have grown up, we can see that our sibling has more trappings of success; we can see that though we work as hard or harder, everything goes our brother’s way. Even in religion, our sibling has a sunnier relationship with God and doesn’t seem to be afraid that God will reject her offering. Our sibling’s serene confidence is all by itself annoying.  Perhaps someone tries to reassure us that God will accept our offerings if we do the right thing, which we interpret as meaning we need work harder to earn God’s favor. Now we’re angry because we already tried that and failed.

So then Cain invites Abel out into the fields and kills him. This murder derives directly from the deadly sins that Cain has embraced in his heart. First, envy, then anger, then hatred. But just recall that they all are rooted in Cain’s fear that God does not love him as much as God loves Abel.

God again speaks to Cain directly and says, “Where is your brother?” Cain replies, “How would I know? Am I my brother’s keeper?” God says, “The earth itself cries out for justice for your brother’s blood. Therefore, you will be cursed by the land, which will not bear fruit for you. You will wander homeless.”

Cain says, “My sin is too bad for your grace. You have cast me out and you will hide your face from me, and I am a homeless wanderer. Anyone who finds me will kill me.” God replies, “No, in fact, whoever kills Cain will be punished even more severely.” And God places a mark on Cain so that no one will kill him.

So Cain departs from the face of God, a fugitive on the earth. But he finds a wife, they had a son named Enoch, and Cain builds a city and names it after his son.

Now why was Cain’s offering unacceptable? God’s rejection of the offering was not a rejection of Cain, which we can see in that God shows up to talk with Cain again, but it brings Cain’s inner life into the open. Cain is prone to comparing himself to others, which has its roots in fear of being unacceptable or inadequate, and which becomes envy when he sees God accepting Abel’s offering. This envy evolves into wishing Abel ill and progresses to actively eliminating the competition for God’s favor. Perhaps Cain sees God’s favor as a limited resource, so if Abel gets some, there is less for Cain.

I have found that this story stirs up in me a desire to do whatever it takes to be acceptable to God, so I can be as good as Abel, the one God likes best. It makes me want to be and do good so that God will be gracious to me. This impulse derives from the part where God says to Cain, “If you behave well, will you not be accepted?” When I respond this way, with increased good intentions, I miss the point, and the good I do is marred by its origin in comparison. St. Paul tells us to rejoice when others rejoice and to weep when they weep. This is impossible to do when I am comparing myself to others and becoming envious as Cain does.

I also have shared in Cain’s sense of being cast away by God. But note: Cain is the one who says that God is banishing him from God’s presence, and this internal state is what he carries with him. However, we know that we cannot elude God’s presence, though it is not always comfortable to have God so close. As the Psalmist David says, “Where can I go to get away from you? If I ascend into the heavens, there you are. If I make my bed in the grave or descend to hell, there you are.” And as Job the theologian says, “Could you not look away from me for one moment so I can swallow my spit?” So the distance between Cain and God exists only within Cain.

I also have shared Cain’s idea of justice. A murderer is beyond grace, deserves to be rejected and cast out of decent society. A murderer deserves to have the life taken away that he or she took away from someone else. This is justice, and Cain expects it. It makes sense, like adding 2 plus 2 and getting 4, or more appropriately subtracting 1 from 2 and then from 1, ending up in nothing and no one left.

It is interesting to note that the physical earth cries out about Abel’s blood. The need for justice runs through the universe and executing justice is God’s problem. We humans tend toward revenge rather than justice, and when God limits our revenge to eye for eye, we think that’s God’s idea of justice. But the prophet Micah says to us that we ourselves are to do justice and to love mercy; loving mercy mitigates against eye for eye justice. Instead, we judge God’s justice and mercy by our own, which hardly does justice to God..

What we learn about Grace

First, God’s grace shows in God’s willingness to have unique personal relationships with humans. God speaks directly to Cain, confronting him with the truth about what is inside him and then later with what he has done. God is gracious enough to confront us, to remind us of our ability to choose good, and often to give us time to grow into better people. There is no question that Cain chooses to behave badly, so it is easy to ignore the fact that when God confronts his attitude, this is grace to him, reminding him that he has a choice, and that God exhibits grace to him even when he has chosen very badly.

Second, God describes to him how the physical universe cries out because of Abel’s blood, and that there are life consequences for Cain, the farmer. The exercise of our free will has consequences, sometimes ones we see close up, sometimes ones experienced by subsequent generations or peoples far away. God’s grace doesn’t often (or perhaps ever) remove the physical and temporal consequences of human choices.

Third, God does not, in fact, shed Cain’s blood in payment for Abel. This calls into question our idea that the later Mosaic law that says, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life expresses God’s ideal. God’s grace uses a different kind of math to achieve justice. Furthermore, God’s grace makes us question our own simple understanding of justice. Indeed, God protects Cain from others who might kill him as a murderer.

Fifth, Cain does in fact wander, but eventually he has a family and builds a home and a city. So, in a moment when God could be exactly just and take from Cain the same life Cain took from Abel, God instead shows Cain mercy, gives him protection, and allows him to live a full life.

I won’t speak for everyone here, but I do think it’s common to be envious when we see God taking care of other people, particularly other people we see as second to us, either by birth order (as for Cain), by morality, by nationality, by some other measure. The psalms are full of questions to God: Why do the others prosper? Why are you so unhelpful to me?. “Why do the wicked prosper?” we complain with the prophet Jeremiah. We often have a desire to see God’s justice distributed on the bad guys and to have God’s mercy and grace distributed to us.

Our response to seeing God’s favor showered on other people reveals to us the state of our own souls. St. Paul says, “Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.” But if I’m obsessed with fairness, I may well rejoice in others’ misfortunes and weep only over my own. Turns out, God doesn’t like that. God will confront me directly and warn me about my envy and fear of unacceptability.

The second pair of brothers is the famous unnamed pair in the story we call the Prodigal Son. Jesus tells this story in the context of stories about God caring for the lost. Two brothers and a father, and the younger asks for his inheritance and goes off to waste it in wild living. The older stays home and works like a slave for their father while keeping an eye on his future inheritance.

The younger is working as a swineherd when he comes to his senses. He realizes that the pigs are getting more to eat than he is and that his father’s slaves live in more comfort than he does. He decides to go home and plans a repentance where he offers to work for his father as a slave. 

And when he nears home, the father, who has been watching for him since he left, runs to meet him. The father orders up for the prodigal son the best clothing, the finest jewelry, and the fattest calf for a (prodigal) feast. “My son who was dead is now alive!” he says.

When we identify with the younger son, we can celebrate whole-heartedly the gracious welcome of the father. We see how God is always waiting to welcome the wanderer back with open arms and heart. We are relieved to note that there is a welcome for bad brothers, the Cains of the world, and this encourages us to leave our unsatisfying self-made lives and run to God. I’ve found this so hopeful when I’ve clearly made a mess of things and found that God’s love is nonetheless constant.

But when we identify with the older brother who has worked all his life to please his father, we can learn some additional things about God’s grace. First, it is possible to live a life surrounded and infused by God’s presence and grace and never notice. It is possible to believe that we are earning God’s favor by our diligence and devotion. And when we do not recognize that we owe everything to God’s grace, it is maddening to see God ladle it out over a person who has forsaken God and goodness. It scandalizes our sense of fair play, of justice even, especially when there is no acknowledgement of our own moral excellence, when the only notice we get is to be invited to welcome the wastrel back.  We didn’t even get to throw ourselves a birthday party! I myself have said to God, “I know you’re gonna let that so and so into heaven and I’m not happy about it.”

The father’s response to his sulky son (who may be thinking about inviting his brother into the field to kill him…) is to confront his inaccurate view of their relationship head on. First, he calls him, “My son,” affirming their intimate relationship. Second, he reminds him, “Everything I have is yours.” The father remains committed to the son’s best interests, despite the son’s self-absorption. Third, he says, and I imagine gently, “But isn’t it appropriate to celebrate when our son and brother comes back from the dead?” He invites the son to rejoice with those who rejoice, to join the party.

So what do we learn from looking at these sets of brothers side by side?

1.     We humans have a tendency to compare ourselves to others.

2.     This tendency is often destructive of inner peace and relationships with those others. It leads to envy and other deadly sins.

3.     We humans tend to want God to be just to other people and gracious to ourselves.

4.     However, God’s grace surrounds and infuses our human lives, whether we recognize it or not. God’s grace reminds us to go home to God, protects us when we are wandering, offers hope for something better.

5.     We cannot and do not earn grace. Grace means favor we have not (and cannot) earn.

6.     Our response to seeing God’s grace in action for ourselves and for others needs to be gratitude (which includes the word grace). God’s grace is gratis—or free—and this is true for us and for those we have written off as prodigal, wicked, naïve, or prissy.

7.     We can tell we have the right attitude about God’s grace when we can rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.

One of the dominant metaphors for God’s kingdom is a feast, a party. Let’s be grateful for how God’s grace surrounds us and how God is gracious to others as well, and we can be the life of the party in the kingdom of God.

Jesus and the Miracle of Jonah

Preached at Entiat Friends Church

March 22, 2015

Have you ever noticed that Jesus went out of his way to bring up the story of Jonah? Jonah has to have been the least favorite prophet for Jewish folks who every day thanked God they were not Gentiles.  Jonah shows up running from God’s call to go to Assyria, Israel’s enemy, to the city of Nineveh, to preach to non-Jews.  His efforts to avoid God’s call land him in cold water and then in the belly of a fish.  He personally repents, and God gives him another chance to obey.  When he does, the people of Nineveh repent so thoroughly that even children and animals wear sackcloth and ashes.  Jonah waits for God to destroy Nineveh, and instead God forgives them, to Jonah’s angry dismay.  So when Jesus brings up the sign of Jonah, he is not only talking about disappearing for three days and coming back  (his coming death and resurrection) but also about the idea that God might care for the enemies of the Jews, the Romans, and other Gentiles as well.  No wonder these references made people mad. 

Each time Jesus mentions Jonah, he does so in the context of clarifying what is really important to God. This means that we can look at what comes right before and right after to help us understand what Jesus is clarifying. These clarifications take four or five main directions.

Here are the passages:

Matthew 12, summary of context: After being confronted for “harvesting” grain on Sabbath and healing a man’s hand on Sabbath, Jesus asserts he is Lord of Sabbath.  After being accused of casting out demons by a demon, Jesus asserts his authority over demons and warns against attributing the work of God to the devil. Then he says:

 “How evil and apostate, how faithless to God are the people of this day! You ask me for a miracle? No! The only miracle you will be given is the miracle of the prophet Jonah. In the same way that Jonah spent three days and nights in the big fish, so will the Son of Man spend three days and nights in the depths of the earth. On the Judgment Day the people of Nineveh will stand up and accuse you, because they turned from their sins when they heard Jonah preach, and I tell you that there is something here greater than Jonah!” (Matthew 12) Following this, his mother and brothers show up and Jesus asserts that his true family are those who hear and obey God. Then he tells the story of the Sower and the Seed and the various kinds of Soil.

Matthew 16, summary of context: After being confronted for eating with unwashed hands, Jesus asserts that uncleanness is a heart condition, not a problem with hands. He heals a Canaanite girl, a Gentile, and feeds a crowd of over 4000 in a Gentile district, Decapolis. The Pharisees and Sadducees ask him for a sign.  Then he says this:

“You can foretell the weather from the sunset or sunrise, but you cannot interpret the signs concerning these times. How evil and godless are the people of this day! You ask me for a miracle? No! The only miracle you will be given is the miracle of Jonah.” (Matthew 16) Following this, Jesus warns his disciples against the “yeast” (teaching) of the Pharisees and Sadducees.

Luke 11, summary: Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan, praises Mary for listening, teaches the disciples to pray.  Jesus heals a demon-possessed boy, and the crowd speculates he is doing so by the power of the devil.  Jesus asserts that the kingdom of God has come among them, and that the blessed ones are those who hear and obey God.  Then Jesus says:

“How evil are the people of this day! They ask for a miracle, but none will be given them except the miracle of Jonah. In the same way that the prophet Jonah was a sign for the people of Nineveh, so the son of Man will be a sign for the people of this day. … On the Judgment Day the people of Nineveh will stand up and accuse you because they turned from their sins when they heard Jonah preach; and I assure you that there is something here greater than Jonah!” (Luke 11) Then Jesus talks about letting  light shine without blocking it, so that others can see by it.  He attends a dinner at a Pharisee’s house and takes the opportunity to confront their emphasis on external piety without caring for cleaning up their hearts.

Although each passage occurs in its own context, threads of meaning tie the contexts together.  Here are those threads.

First, the context teaches us that God cares more about humans and their needs than about the Law. When we look at what precedes and follows these comments by Jesus, we find the following.

Matthew 12 raises the issue of Sabbath-keeping. Several Old Testament prophets condemned Israel to God’s judgment specifically for breaking the laws about Sabbath.  So you can imagine that folks who carefully followed the law like the Pharisees are shocked when Jesus’s disciples “harvest” and eat some grain from fields as they walk along on the Sabbath, and when Jesus heals a man with a paralyzed arm on the Sabbath. These actions and Jesus’s words make the Pharisees so angry they plot to kill him. Jesus reprimands those with a legalistic view of the Sabbath by reminding them of what Hosea the prophet said: God desires goodness, kindness, faithfulness, not sacrifices.  This means that the actions proceeding from a good, kind, faithful heart are what God has as a priority.  Jesus announces to the legalistic folks that even they would pull a sheep out of a pit on the Sabbath, and that doing good to humans on that day is also important and perfectly lawful.  He asserts that he himself, “the Son of Man,” is Lord of the Sabbath. 

Second, Jesus shows that we cannot limit God’s generosity and grace to those who are like us, and that if we limit these for others, we limit them for ourselves.

Jesus heals a man possessed by an evil spirit in both Matthew 12 and Luke 11.  The Pharisees attribute this miracle-working power to the devil rather than to God.  Jesus says that this is first impossible, and second unforgiveable.  Why is it unforgiveable?  Because when the Pharisees refuse to welcome the healing and freeing power of God for others, they set themselves outside it as well.  I can’t be forgiven if I’m not willing for God to forgive others; I can’t be healed if I’m not willing for God to heal others; I can’t be the one God chooses to live in if I won’t allow God to live in others, also. And further, God does all the good we see—every good and perfect gift comes from God.  If the Pharisees had known God, they would have known this truth. When Jesus teaches about prayer in Luke 11, he gives his followers a model prayer and encourages them to persist in praying because God is good and gives good gifts.

Third, Jesus goes on to say that no one gets to sit by and stay neutral. 

Those who meet him have two choices—to gather close like fish in a net, or like folks welcomed into a home, or to run away in terror, to scatter. He also points out that we can tell what is in people’s hearts by what they say; perhaps this is like the psychological tendency to project on others what is actually true (and what we dislike) about ourselves. There is no way to stop this process except to admit the nature of our own hearts and open them for God to change. The gospel of John puts it like this:  this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world and people prefer the darkness because they think it hides their evil deeds.  C.S. Lewis puts it this way: God is the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from (Mere Christianity).

Fourth, Jesus warns his listeners to be authentic and make sure the light in them isn’t darkness. He makes that really specific by accusing the Pharisees of hypocrisy—cleaning up their facades while carrying around greed and wickedness; tithing spices while neglecting justice and the love of God; loving status while being dead inside; loading up others with burdens while offering no help to carry them; building monuments for the prophets while planning to kill Jesus.

In Matthew 16 and Luke 11, Jesus warns his followers about the yeast of Pharisees and Sadducees—their teaching and their hypocrisy.  Their teaching is that only by careful obedience to the Law can a person be redeemed, and their hypocrisy is that they teach this while allowing themselves loopholes and justifying their disobediences. God doesn’t like this:  God wants us to repent for own disobedience and to be merciful to others, giving them room for God to work on them without attributing the work of God’s Holy Spirit in them to the devil.

Fifth, Jesus teaches that obedience is the identifying characteristic of the family of God. When Jesus turns around and hears that his mother and brothers have come to see him, he spreads his arms wide to include all his followers and says, “All who do what God wants them to do are my family.” When a woman blesses Jesus’s mother, Jesus in reply blesses those who hear and obey God.

What might keep people from obeying God? The story of the sower and the four kinds of soil illustrates how having hard hearts, being unwilling to suffer, or worrying about money prevents people from hearing and obeying the good news.  But some accept it, let it sink into their hearts and grow, and bring forth the good, kind, faithful actions that show their hearts have changed into good, kind, faithful hearts.

To summarize the threads of meaning in this passage:

Religious hypocrisy separates people from knowing God; authenticity makes knowing God possible.  How can we become more authentic? The way to authenticity is honesty about our neediness before God and obedience to the voice of God’s Holy Spirit.

We can put human needs ahead of rules because God authorizes us to do so.

We have to keep God’s justice for ourselves and distribute God’s mercy on others.

We have to take our light out from under the barrel of politics and legalism and obey the mandate to be a light to the world.

Jesus says that the answer to our fears is to gather with him, to press closer to him, and not to split up and run for it. 

Our stance toward those in need around us is to heal, to give food, to set them free from the evil one.  Our stance toward ourselves is to focus on the inside of the cup, not the outside, and be honest about what’s there. 

What exactly is “the miracle of Jonah”? Is it that he was swallowed by a fish and then vomited up?  That previews the burial and resurrection of Jesus. Is it that he actually did obey God?  Though certainly not his preference, yet he did what God said. Is it that God used Jonah to redeem people who were enemies to the Jews and who did not know God previously? This is a sign that God’s love and redeeming work are for the whole of humanity, not just the Jews.

We are called to listen to God and obey. Jonah eventually did this. Jesus always did this.  Jesus promised us the Holy Spirit, who is voice of God to us, guiding us truly and guiding us closer to truth.  Jesus himself is the Truth.  Like Jesus, we point to a God who cares that all repent and be redeemed through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  This frees us to live at peace with God, reconciled with God, able to look into God’s eyes and see the love there, and to share that reconciliation with others.