Who Walks in Darkness and Has No Light (Isaiah 50, Palm Sunday)

There is a little gem hidden just after the Old Testament reading for Palm Sunday (Isaiah 50:10):

Who among you fears the Lord

   and obeys the voice of his servant,

who walks in darkness

   and has no light,

yet trusts in the name of the Lord

   and relies upon his God?

As we walk through Holy Week, as the gathering storm becomes ever darker, these are words to cling to. We will soon find that, with the disciples, we scatter and flee; that with Peter we deny him. And yet we will also trust Jesus who walk into the darkness of deepest abandonment for us and for all. Even though he walks into darkness, he who is the Light of the world carries all the light within him that he will ever need.

This Jesus descends into Hell, into the outermost darkness, that we can remember that even should we find ourselves in Hell itself, even there he is still Lord for us. As Psalm 139 reminds us, there is no where we can go to flee from God's searching out love:

 

Where can I go from your spirit?

   Or where can I flee from your presence?

If I ascend to heaven, you are there;

   if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

If I take the wings of the morning

   and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,

even there your hand shall lead me,

   and your right hand shall hold me fast.

If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,

   and the light around me become night’,

even the darkness is not dark to you;

   the night is as bright as the day,

   for darkness is as light to you.

Image: Could Silence Protect Us..., from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=54131 [retrieved March 25, 2024]. Original source: Piotr.amigo, Flickr Creative Commons.

Palm Sunday is a Rehearsal

 

In all the readings, festivities, and solemnities, many preachers choose not to preach on Palm/Passion Sunday, which is too bad because then we miss how Palm Sunday points both backwards and forwards.

Palm Sunday points backwards to Advent.  "All Glory, Laud, and Honor" is clearly THE hymn for Palm Sunday. So we probably fail to recall that we actually sang a Palm Sunday hymn during Advent.  "Prepare the Royal Highway" is clearly about Palm Sunday in its second verse: 

God’s people, see him coming:
Your own eternal king!
Palm branches strew before him!
Spread garments! Shout and sing!
God’s promise will not fail you!
No more shall doubt assail you!
Hosanna to the Lord,
For he fulfills God’s Word!

The coming of Jesus at Christmas is only fulfilled by the coming of Jesus on Palm Sunday. The gates of Jerusalem that we longed to be lifted up in Advent (Psalm 24) are lifted up now as Jesus enters on a donkey.

Palm Sunday also points forwards. Afterall, the saints in Heaven worship the Lamb with palm branches in their hands (Revelation 7):

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, "Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!" And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, singing, "Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen."

Palm Sunday is remembrance yes, but also rehearsal for that great and glorious hymn.

And as if to underline the point, the Hosannas of Palm Sunday are woven into our everyday communion liturgy. When we sing the Sanctus during communion, we are singing a mash-up of two Scriptures:

Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might,
heaven and earth are full of your glory. (Isaiah 6, the hymn of the angels in the Temple)
Hosanna in the highest.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest. (all the Gospels have the people singing this on Jesus’ entrance to Jerusalem)

Every Sunday, dear people, is a little Palm Sunday. We cry out in praise to the One who has come and who is coming. In one hymn, we cast our memories back to the mighty acts of the Risen One and forward to the coming, unveiled redemption that is yet to come.

 

Image: Hochhalter, Cara B.. Palm Sunday: Even the Stones, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=59018 [retrieved March 25, 2024]. Original source: Cara B. Hochhalter.

 

God's Commandment is Eternal Life (John 12, Lent 5B)

In John 12, Jesus suddenly becomes aware that the hour has come for his glorification (on the cross!).  Unfortunately for the Greeks that have come to see Jesus (John 12.20), Jesus never gets around to seeing them. But Jesus begins his final revelation, and perhaps these Greeks get to see Jesus more clearly than we might think. Jesus speaks of grains of wheat dying and rising, of walking in the Light while it is still present, of his own lifter up death.

But the rest of John 12 never makes an appearance in our lectionary. We miss this:

After Jesus had said this, he departed and hid from them. ³⁷Although he had performed so many signs in their presence, they did not believe in him. ³⁸This was to fulfil the word spoken by the prophet Isaiah:

‘Lord, who has believed our message,

   and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?’

³⁹And so they could not believe, because Isaiah also said,

⁴⁰ ‘He has blinded their eyes

   and hardened their heart,

so that they might not look with their eyes,

   and understand with their heart and turn—

   and I would heal them.’

⁴¹Isaiah said this because he saw his glory and spoke about him. ⁴²Nevertheless many, even of the authorities, believed in him. But because of the Pharisees they did not confess it, for fear that they would be put out of the synagogue; ⁴³for they loved human glory more than the glory that comes from God.

44 Then Jesus cried aloud: ‘Whoever believes in me believes not in me but in him who sent me. ⁴⁵And whoever sees me sees him who sent me. ⁴⁶I have come as light into the world, so that everyone who believes in me should not remain in the darkness. ⁴⁷I do not judge anyone who hears my words and does not keep them, for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world. ⁴⁸The one who rejects me and does not receive my word has a judge; on the last day the word that I have spoken will serve as judge, ⁴⁹for I have not spoken on my own, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment about what to say and what to speak. ⁵⁰And I know that his commandment is eternal life. What I speak, therefore, I speak just as the Father has told me.’

It's all beautiful, of course, but the part that jumps out to me is the last paragraph. Jesus echoes John 3.17 - God desires not to judge but to save the world! Yet, Jesus continues to speak about judgement, saying that his word will serve as judge. 

But what is this word? God's commandment, Jesus reveals, is rather simple - Eternal Life. Ok, perhaps not so simple. What does it mean that God's commandment is eternal life? Is this a teaching that believers must accept? Is this some secret wisdom?

Or, do we remember that Jesus has just heard a voice from heaven (12.28) saying that God has glorified Jesus and will glorify him again. The commandment of eternal life, it seems, has less to do with what people come to believe and more to do with death and resurrection. God's commandment of eternal life is about to be lived out (died out?) by Jesus. This eternal life is one of dying and rising. This eternal life is being connected forever to Jesus' mighty act upon the cross and his rising for us and the world. 

The cross is "the judgement of this world; [when] the ruler of this world will be driven out" (John 12.31). God's judgement is condemnation for the ruler of the world, but eternal life for us.

Keep your eyes, dear people, on this Judge.

If you're curious about that odd phrasing that Jesus "cried aloud" (12.44) check where else that occurs in John's Gospel. Something important is always afoot when Jesus "cries out."

Image: Hartman, Craig W.. Cathedral of Christ the Light, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=54202 [retrieved March 20, 2024]. Original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sicarr/3251258111/.

Singing to a Well? (Numbers 21, Lent 4B)

I have read Numbers a number of times (get it!) but I never noticed the little canticle in verses 17 and 18 before. It never makes it to the lectionary, of course, or I wouldn't be covering it here.

Just after the Old Testament reading on Sunday, Numbers tells us of a camping stop, but then we hear this: 

From there they continued to Beer; that is the well of which the Lord said to Moses, ‘Gather the people together, and I will give them water.’ Then Israel sang this song: 

‘Spring up, O well!—Sing to it!— 

the well that the leaders sank, 

that the nobles of the people dug, 

with the scepter, with the staff.’  

- Numbers 21.16-18

Beer is the Hebrew word for well (insert obligatory alcohol joke here), so the text literally means "From there they continued to [a/the] Well."

It is a wonderful image. The people are tired after another long day in the wilderness, but coming to the end of their journey (Joshua will be appointed to replace Moses in just a few chapters). They pull off the road for the end of the day and find water. No need to dig or scrape or carry. There it is. 

But as the people sing, we learn that this well was dug by the nobles and using their staffs! Now folks, I have never dug a well, but if I were to try I would use a shovel, not just a staff. Ideally, I would use a backhoe... And I would certainly expect a prince to find someone else to do the hard work. This is no ordinary well.

Perhaps, this is a glimmer of the Living Water, the well that Jesus is speaking of with the Samaritan Woman:

Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’ - John 4.14-15

And so we sing, 

‘Spring up, O well!—Sing to it!— 

the well that the leaders sank, 

that the nobles of the people dug, 

with the scepter, with the staff.’  

We might also consider this little canticle worth using at Baptisms, singing it over the waters that make us children of God. Or maybe when you are out hiking and discover a spring on the way, to take out this little piece and sing it over that unexpected water - Spring up, O well!

Sidebar on translation: The OT reading on Sunday incorrectly states that the serpents God sent among the people were poisonous. My herpetologist son immediately corrected this to "venomous." The text says that the serpents bit the people and many died. As everyone should know - it is bites you and you die, it was venomous; if you bite it and you die, it was poisonous. Translators should consult a 12 year old once in a while.

Image: Jonathan Wilkins (Wikimedia).

I’m not going on a Lenten journey, and neither should you

     The Church often visualizes Lent as a journey.  The traditional season of preparing for baptism is also the season in which believers walk with Jesus to Jerusalem and the cross.  Ancient traditions of pilgrimage to holy sites mirror Jesus’ own fearless journey to crucifixion.  Although a mostly helpful image in the Church’s history, that image now puts the Church at risk of merely reinforcing our culture’s constant quest for the new, best thing that is always just up ahead.  This year, the Church should stay put for Lent, and lay aside the journey image.

     Our culture imagines almost everything as a journey these days. Myriads of commercials promise help on journeys to fitness, weight loss, or a “new you.”  Financial commercials tout a path for retirement.  Educational journeys lead to career journeys. A nearby hospital even advertises joint replacement journeys.  Our culture obsesses with getting somewhere, the new best place, about finally being happy.  But of course, all of that is a capitalist sham meant to make people feel inadequate and that only the next thing can make them happy. 

     The Church needs to call that toxic image what it is, but instead the Church doubles down on it.  Read this book for Lent and you will be on your way to a holier you. Increase your righteousness before God in 10 easy steps.  Journey with Jesus to the cross and he will journey with you in your life. Nonsense.

     There is simply no where to go.  There is no where up ahead that is better than right here. There is no world to journey to that is not the beautiful one that we inhabit.  Prophet and poet Wendell Berry reminds us:

            The Future 

            For God’s sake, be done
            with this jabber of “a better world.”
            What blasphemy! No “futuristic”
            twit or child thereof ever
            in embodied light will see
            a better world than this, though they
            foretell inevitably a worse.
            Do something! Go cut the weeds
            beside the oblivious road. Pick up
            the cans and bottles, old tires,
            and dead predictions. No future
            can be stuffed into this presence
            except by being dead. The day is
            clear and bright, and overhead
            the sun not yet half finished
            with his daily praise. 
                (from Given)

     The journey image gives us hope for escape to somewhere better, somewhere away from our brokenness and hurt and grief.  There is no place to go.  We are like the monk in the old story who fleas from a spot because of the many temptations there:

There was a monk who because of the great number of his temptations, said, 'I will go away from here.' As he was putting on his sandals, he saw another man who was also putting on his sandals and this man said to him, 'Is it on account of me that you are going away? Because I will go before you, wherever you are going.'

(Daily Readings with the Desert Fathers, p. 65 Templegate Publishers 1988)

      But, someone might object, aren’t the great stories of the Bible about journeys: Abram to Canaan, Joseph to Egypt, the Exodus, the return from Exile, and Paul’s journeys?  Yes, indeed the Bible deals a great deal with journeys, but they are the exception not the rule.  The background story of the Bible is of farmers and shepherds tending their little piece of land, of not so good fishermen going back to the Sea of Galilee because they don’t know what else to do.  The first Psalm even casts the image of the good life as staying put, as stationary as trees:

 

Happy are those

   who do not follow the advice of the wicked,

or take the path that sinners tread,

   or sit in the seat of scoffers;

but their delight is in the law of the Lord,

   and on his law they meditate day and night.

They are like trees

   planted by streams of water,

which yield their fruit in its season,

   and their leaves do not wither.

In all that they do, they prosper.

The wicked are not so,

   but are like chaff that the wind drives away.

Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgement,

   nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;

for the Lord watches over the way of the righteous,

   but the way of the wicked will perish.

 

     So, I’m not going anywhere for Lent. I’ll plant some seeds indoors and in the garden, and watch them grow.  I’ll prune the apple trees. I’ll sneak into the church when no one else is there and take a nap on the back pew. I’m not going to worry about a journey to cross and resurrection.  After all, Paul reminds us that we are “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies” (2 Corinthians 4.10).  There is no where we might go that the cross and the empty tomb are not with us.  For God’s sake, this Lent, stay put.

Image: Leuthold, Julie. Tree of Hope, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=57033 [retrieved February 25, 2022]. Original source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/julieleuthold/7521645058 - Julie.

What if We’ve Been Reading the Canaanite Woman (Matthew 15.21-28) Incorrectly? Or, Jesus is Not a Jerk, He is Teaching the Disciples

Background:

• In Matthew 13, Jesus teaches publicly and then explains privately to his disciples

• In Matthew 15.1-20, Jesus is teaching publicly about defilement and about the Pharisees being more concerned with traditions than with God’s Word .  We should expect a private explanation.

• In John 4, Jesus talks with a woman at a well, and never seems to be talking right to her.  He seems to talk around her. 

• John 10 has lots of sheep language, including: "I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd." (John 10.16)

• The RCL appoints Isaiah 56 to be heard alongside this reading.  Isaiah 56 includes: 

Thus says the Lord God,

   who gathers the outcasts of Israel,

I will gather others to them

   besides those already gathered.

Another take on the pericope -  Jesus Explaining His Mission to His Disciples:

Woman’s words	Jesus’ words	Interpretation	Next reaction
Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.	Silence	Waiting to see what the disciples will do. Waiting to see if they connect his teaching with this situation	Disciples ask Jesus to send the woman away.
	I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel	He is speaking to his disciples, not the woman here.  She is allowed to eavesdrop though.  “Lost sheep” is not far from “outcasts of Israel” in Isaiah 56. Jesus is seeing if disciples will make the leap to see that “lost sheep of Israel” includes her.	Woman comes and kneels at Jesus’ feet
Lord help me	It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs	Again, Jesus is not talking to the woman, but to the disciples.  The woman is part of the explanation of the previous teaching to the disciples but they still don’t get it.  Perhaps also, Jesus is saying what the disciples are thinking…
Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.	Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish	This time, Jesus is talking to the woman.  He responds to her with approval and grants her request.	The woman’s daughter was healed instantly

Hopefully, the disciples and the readers of the Gospel are thinking at this point.  Oh, so faith is a matter of the heart (15.19).  We’re supposed to look at people’s faith and not at earthly markers of belonging.  And we’re all just lost sheep. Jesus, you could have just said that…

Notes:

• I have no need to defend God’s unchangingness.  God changes the divine mind in Scripture.  If the Calvinists have a problem with that, let them deal with it.

• I don’t mind using more than one Gospel for interpretation.  

• I reject the idea that this lesson revolves around Jesus’ humanity, as if racism and bigotry was inherent to human nature before the fall.  Jesus, the new Adam, is not tainted by that. 

• I reject the idea that Jesus has given up some of the divine nature in order to “learn” in this reading.  Such teaching falls into heresy by not claiming that Jesus is fully divine.   

Art: Watanabe, Sadao, 1913-1996. Woman of Canaan, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=57538 [retrieved August 16, 2020]. Original source: https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/woman-canaan-26809.

The mystery of our religion is (1 Timothy, Proper 20)

We hear barely anything of 1 Timothy in the Revised Common Lectionary cycle.  The letter begins and ends in three weeks time.  Most of what is skipped are instructions and qualitifcations for leadership/servanthood within the church.  These are valuable chapters indeed and should be studied by every congregation council and every incoming class of seminarians.  

Another remarkable segment is also left out of the lectionary and may be a fragment of an early Christian hymn.

I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these instructions to you so that, ¹⁵if I am delayed, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. ¹⁶Without any doubt, the mystery of our religion is great:
He was revealed in flesh,
   vindicated in spirit,
     seen by angels,
proclaimed among Gentiles,
   believed in throughout the world,
     taken up in glory.    - 1 Timothy 3.14-16

Unlike the hymn Paul includes in Philippians 2 which follows a pattern of descent and ascent, this hymn seems to move outward and upward at the same time. The focus is not so much Christ's downward descent through his incarnation, crufixion, and death, but rather Christ's outward journey carried by the disciples throughout the world.  

In this hymn, Jesus birth, death, and resurrection are his revealation in flesh to the world.  His vindication comes by the power of his resurrection.  He is seen by angels not only in Bethlehem at his birth but also by those who greet the bewildered disciples at the empty tomb.  The hymn continue its outward and upward journey with Jesus' friends proclaiming him throughout the world, and the church living as his body in the world.  It is only after he is believed in throughout the world that he is taken up into glory.  Jesus' outward mission through the church is also his upward mission.  The church's mission, bearing Jesus' own humanity into the world, is also Jesus' mission of restoring the world to its original glory.

Perhaps this little hymn fragment is best summarized by the "Onward and Yonward!" of PBS hero, Nature Cat:

Art Attribution:	Tonkin, Mike and Liu, Anna. Singing, Ringing Tree (Panopticons), from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=54919 [retrieved September 29, 2019]. Original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paperpariah/4271795395/.
Record Number:	54919 Last Updated: 2013-10-29 13:55:51 Record Created: 2011-09-06 13:42:16
Institution:	Vanderbilt University Unit: Collection: Art in the Christian Tradition