A change of perception
Commentary
Luke's wonderful parable of the prodigal son dominates the lectionary for today. How can any other text command attention when paired with this one? It is, of course, a story about repentance, and it presents repentance as a change of perception. So Paul's words from 2 Corinthians provide an excellent complement: "We no longer regard anyone from a human point of view." The difference may be that Luke is primarily concerned with how the individual views the community (and vice versa), while Paul is primarily concerned with how the church views the world. In the company of these two texts, the first reading may get short shrift, but it does focus on the theme of "transition" that, metaphorically at least, coheres with repentance, and its focus on Passover prepares nicely for the Maundy Thursday services two and a half weeks away.
Joshua 5:9-12
The forty years are over. The people of Israel have crossed the Jordan into the land of Cana. It is Passover -- thus, they left the land of Egypt exactly forty years ago.
The disgrace of being slaves is now officially over. Their disgrace has been "rolled away." This explains the name "Gilgal," which is related to the Hebrew word for "roll," probably meaning a circular (hence "rolling") stone. To modern audiences, the image of a rolling stone may suggest a rock band or a magazine or even a Bob Dylan song. More appropriately, it might suggest the stone rolled away from Jesus' tomb. Actually all of these concepts have at their root (somewhere) the image of a removal of shame. "A rolling stone gathers no moss": Gilgal is the place where Israel divested itself of the accumulated effect of slavery, once and forever.
The meal described in verse 11 symbolizes transition. The people eat unleavened cakes as a symbol of their past. That life is past, but they never want to forget it, to take freedom for granted. They also eat "the produce of the land" as a foretaste of how life will be from now on. According to verse 12, it is at that time that God's miraculous provision of manna ceases. It is no longer needed. The people are not in the desert anymore. They have fertile land. They can develop it and harvest it. Of course, it might have been nice if God had just kept giving them manna anyway. But God doesn't work that way.
The homiletical significance of this passage may be found in its portrayal of how Christian theology views the earthly life as perpetual transition. For many, this scene at Gilgal captures a moment in time that provides an existential image of life between the ages, to use the Pauline phrase from last week's second lesson.
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
We have seen that Paul views salvation (as opposed to justification) as a future event (see the comments on the second lesson for Lent 1).
PAST: We have been justified through Christ's death on the cross;
FUTURE: We will be saved when Christ returns.
Now we see what is missing from this little paradigm -- the present element. We are, already, now, a new creation.
This concept is important for preserving the Pauline tension between what is "already" and "not yet." This tension is what keeps faith from being reduced to otherworldly speculation on the one hand, or to naive presumption on the other. Still, the revelation that "being a new creation" falls into the "already" category is surprising. I would have placed it in "not yet." Wouldn't you have thought that?
It is important to recognize that this concept of a new creation is not individualistic. It is cosmic. What God has done in Christ affected the whole world (v. 19). The world has been reconciled to God. We now have the ministry of ambassadors, announcing this reconciliation as a "done deal." The peace accord has been finalized but not completely publicized. You might flip back an issue of Emphasis to the comments on Ash Wednesday for more on this paradox of reconciliation -- the second lesson for that day overlaps with this one. Basically, Paul entreats us to "be reconciled with God" even though God has already done the reconciling. The point seems to be, "Live as the reconciled-with-God people that you truly are!"
This, too, becomes the point of affirming the new creation (cosmically) as a reality and then seeking to define its implications for individuals. We are to live -- each of us, individually -- in a way that reflects the reality of this newly reconciled creation.
We may immediately think of implications that are behavioral: morality, ethics. That's not bad, but fundamentally what Paul has in mind is a new perception of reality. He wants each of us to come to view ourselves and indeed the whole world as reconciled. This lesson begins with Paul saying, "We no longer regard anyone from a human point of view." How we regard people will certainly affect how we treat them, but we may have little success altering our behavior without first changing our perception. The "human point of view" regards the world, society, and individual human beings as alienated from God. Paul says we are to view all people (including unbelievers), society, and the world itself as reconciled with God.
In the early church, most Christians refused military service, claiming, "I cannot kill a person for whom Christ died." Augustine thought the matter was more complicated than that and worked out a "just war" theory to guide the consciences of Christian soldiers. We will no doubt always disagree amongst ourselves as to the social and political application of Paul's exhortation. We ought not disagree, however, on its fundamental premise. As Christians, we view the natural world and all its inhabitants differently than others do. We view the world and all that is in it as the objects of God's love, as a reality that is -- already! -- reconciled to God in Christ.
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
This story is so well known that preachers often have to search to find new meaning, a new angle, something that hasn't been said many times before.
There are so many wonderful images:
1. The picture of the younger son feeding pigs is a captivating illustration of humiliation, and all the more so when we remember this is a Jewish boy, for whom swine are unclean. He's not allowed to eat pork, but here he's come so low that if he could he'd fill his belly not by eating the pigs themselves but by eating the slop the pigs were fed. That's what I'd call really moving down on the food chain.
2. The picture of the father, waiting at home for his boy to return, then, running, and hugging him, kissing him, interrupting his little prepared speech to call for an unexpected celebration. Wow! What an image of God's love and grace this offers!
3. The image of that older brother who is so obsessed with what is proper but who simply doesn't understand what it means to be part of a family. He can't even bring himself to refer to his sibling as "my brother," but calls him only, "this son of yours." And he's proud to say to his father, "I've worked like a slave for you." Does he really think his dad will be pleased to hear him describe the relationship this way? To say, living with you is like slavery? Poor kid. He doesn't have a clue.
These are all great points and most of us have delivered or listened to sermons that built on such themes. What else can we say? I want to pick up two points that often don't get much attention:
A. What does it mean when it says the boy squandered his property in dissolute living? That's the word the NRSV uses. The Greek word is a very rare one -- asotos. It's rare, but the meaning is clear. It means "foolish." A person who is wise and makes good choices is sotos (the word is used for Joseph in Genesis). A person who is foolish and makes bad choices is asotos. I don't know why the NRSV uses the word "dissolute." Other English Bibles are worse. Some say that this boy spent his money on "loose living" or on "wild behavior," which is just plain wrong, as far as the Greek is concerned. As a result, there is a popular impression that the boy did things with his money that were immoral or wicked. I think what's going on is that Bible readers and even Bible translators pick up on what the older brother says when the younger son returns home. He volunteers the suggestion that little brother has spent all his money on prostitutes. But there is not a word in the text to indicate how the brother knew this or why we ought to believe it is true. This story is not really about a bad boy who decides to change his wicked ways, and is welcomed back into the bosom of his family. This boy isn't wicked or immoral. He's foolish. Ironically, when we regard this parable as the story of a boy who must repent of his wicked life, we are thinking like the older brother in the story. And like him, we may be missing the point altogether. The story is about repentance, but it's not about a change from bad to good. That's not what repentance means, at least not here.
B. Why does the story include that part about the famine? I've heard many sermons on this text, and even given a few myself, but no one ever makes much of that famine. We tend to just jump right from the part about the boy wasting his money to the part about the boy getting a job feeding pigs and still being hungry. We skip right over verse 14. But it is there and it must be there for a reason. Here's what I think: I think the reference to the famine helps to arouse our sympathy for this boy. Because, foolish as he might have been -- the famine wasn't his fault! If it hadn't been for that famine, he might even have made it. He didn't wind up starving in the pigpen simply because he wasted his money. There was more to it than that. He wound up starving in the pigpen because he hadn't reckoned with the world being as tough as it turned out to be. When he was foolishly wasting his money, it never occurred to him that a famine might be right around the corner. This boy is exactly the opposite of Joseph in the book of Genesis. Joseph had the foresight to put aside grain during the years of plenty so there would be food to eat during the years that were lean. Joseph is described as wise. This boy is the opposite of wise -- he's foolish!
Don't get me wrong here -- I'm not trying to let this kid off the hook. He's definitely in the wrong and he definitely needs to repent. The point is: "Of what does he need to repent?" Not, as his brother thinks, of cavorting with prostitutes. This boy makes one big mistake: he thinks he can make it through life on his own. He separates from his family. So the story is about repentance, but the repentance it describes is not a moral change of behavior. Rather, "repentance" is defined here as a realization of the need for others. The great irony in the story is that when the boy realizes this, Luke says, "He came to himself." What does he do when he comes to himself? He gets up and goes home. In this case, at least, coming to oneself means going to others.
This is a story about a person who decided he didn't need his family. There are just two problems: 1) He's a fool; and, 2) The world can be an evil place. Maybe, just maybe, if we weren't fools, and if there weren't things like famines, and factory closings, and stock market crashes, and automobile accidents, and unexpected illnesses, and so forth, maybe then, we could make it on our own. But the thing is, we are fools, and the world is evil. When we discover this and say, "We need others," Jesus calls that "repentance."
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By Elizabeth Achtemeier
Joshua 5:9-12
Christians live under new conditions. Paul tells us in the epistle lesson for this Sunday that the old life has been done away and that the new life has begun. We are new creations of God. There are all sorts of metaphors that the Bible uses to describe that Christian passage from old to new. It says that we have been born anew, or that we have passed from slavery into freedom. It proclaims that we have emerged from darkness into light, or from despair into meaning, from mourning into joy, or from death into life. We walk no more by the flesh, but by the Spirit, or we are no longer conformed to the world, but to the will of God. Throughout the scriptures, the newness of life that we have been given in Jesus Christ is emphasized.
Perhaps nowhere is that newness emphasized more than in Paul's description of our baptisms in Romans 6. The apostle tells us that when we were baptized, we died and were buried with Christ. Our old lives, lived solely for ourselves -- with all of their sin and guilt, their lack of hope and of a future, their bondage to the world and its evil -- all of that was buried six feet under by Christ's death on the cross and his burial. But by the resurrection of Christ, we were raised from the water of baptism to a new life, a new future, a new goodness.
In a moving article in the October 21, 1992, issue of the Christian Century, Ralph C. Wood told of the baptism of a man imprisoned for the terrible crime of molesting his ten-year-old daughter. The man's wife and daughter forgave him for his sin, whereby "the molester got on his knees and begged for the mercy of God and his family" (p. 926). As a result, the prison chaplain agreed to baptize him into the Christian faith. The only baptismal "font" available was a plastic-lined wooden coffin, and so the prisoner, burdened with his sin, was lowered by the chaplain into the death of Christ and raised from the waters, washed clean of his past and given a future by the resurrection of Christ. From that time on, he was a new man, and after serving his time, he became a faithful father and husband and member of his local church. Thus does the work of Jesus Christ make us new creations.
I tell all of these things from the standpoint of the New Testament, because they serve as a parallel to our Old Testament lesson. The Old Testament parallel to baptism in the New Testament is circumcision. Both baptism and circumcision signal an entrance into the covenant relation with God, and immediately preceding our text, we read that all of the Israelite men who crossed the Jordan with their families and with Joshua into the promised land underwent that covenant rite. They and their families entered into a new life by becoming the covenant people of God. Moreover, to celebrate that new relationship, they celebrated the first passover in the promised land. And to emphasize the newness of their situation even more, we are told in our text that they no longer needed to be fed by God with the manna that had been their food in the wilderness. Rather, now they could eat the produce of the promised land. Everything was fresh and different. The Israelites had begun a new life.
Apparently, the enigmatic sentence in verse 9 of our text is intended also to emphasize that newness, but none of us knows exactly what the verse means by "the reproach of Egypt." Perhaps it refers to the Israelites' previous slavery. Perhaps it is a reference to their previous ignorance of God. Certainly it furnishes an etymological meaning for "Gilgal," the place of Israel's encampment, because the Hebrew verb "to roll," galal, sounds very much like the name "Gilgal."
Whatever the precise meaning, the new situation of Israel's life is being emphasized. Now she has a taste of "the glorious liberty of the children of God." God has kept his promises to her forebears. The life of slavery, with its hopelessness and bondage, is in the past. The long forty-year trek through the wilderness, with its thirst and hunger, its deadly serpents and dangers, is behind them. The seemingly difficult passage through the Jordan has been accomplished with the help of God's miracle. Israel, the wandering people, now has a home, commandments to guide her in her new life, and a relationship with the God who will be her refuge and strength through all the future. Israel, like we, has been given a new beginning. "The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come."
In the thought of the Old Testament, however, Israel also has a mission. She has not been redeemed from slavery and guided through the terrors of the wilderness and given the land simply because God loves her, although that certainly also is the case, as the Old Testament tells us -- God always acts in love (cf. Deuteronomy 7:6-8). But God does not redeem his people and enter into covenant with them for no reason. Rather, God chooses and loves his covenant people, because he loves all peoples and has a purpose for all the families of the earth.
We read of that love and purpose at the very beginning of Israel's story in Genesis 12:1-3. Abraham is told at that time that he and his descendants are to be the instruments through which God will bring his blessing on all people. We have corrupted the good world that God made at the beginning, and now God wants to restore the goodness to the world that it has lost. We live under the curse of sin and death, but through Israel, God wants to do away with evil and bring his blessing on all folk.
Israel's new life of settlement in the land of Canaan, therefore, is understood in the Old Testament as her time of testing (cf. Joshua 23:14-16; Judges 3:1-6). Will she be a faithful people, following the will of her Lord, praising his name and serving him in everything she does, so that the other nations will see God's work in her and turn in commitment to the Lord also? If so, then Israel will fulfill her God-given task of being the medium of blessing for all the families of the earth, bringing all nations to worship the one true God. Or will Israel turn to other gods and goddesses and go her own willful way, deserting the task for which God has made her his own?
That is the same task to which you and I and all Christians are called. We too have been redeemed out of slavery to sin and death and given a new beginning, in the glorious liberty of the children of God. But God has chosen us also, and made us his own because we have a mission. We have the calling from God to live such faithful lives, walking according to God's commandments, that other people will see God's work in us, too, and be drawn to confess his lordship. We have a new life in Jesus Christ, and we have been given the Spirit of our Lord to enable us to walk and serve in his ways. And now the question for us is, as it was for Israel, will we be faithful? Will we so obey and trust our Lord that he can use us in his purpose of blessing and restoring his world to goodness?
We can have no more meaningful task given us in this life, nor can Jesus Christ equip us more fully for the task than he has already done by his cross and resurrection, by his scripture and his Spirit with us. We have only to accept his call and today begin the mission.
Joshua 5:9-12
The forty years are over. The people of Israel have crossed the Jordan into the land of Cana. It is Passover -- thus, they left the land of Egypt exactly forty years ago.
The disgrace of being slaves is now officially over. Their disgrace has been "rolled away." This explains the name "Gilgal," which is related to the Hebrew word for "roll," probably meaning a circular (hence "rolling") stone. To modern audiences, the image of a rolling stone may suggest a rock band or a magazine or even a Bob Dylan song. More appropriately, it might suggest the stone rolled away from Jesus' tomb. Actually all of these concepts have at their root (somewhere) the image of a removal of shame. "A rolling stone gathers no moss": Gilgal is the place where Israel divested itself of the accumulated effect of slavery, once and forever.
The meal described in verse 11 symbolizes transition. The people eat unleavened cakes as a symbol of their past. That life is past, but they never want to forget it, to take freedom for granted. They also eat "the produce of the land" as a foretaste of how life will be from now on. According to verse 12, it is at that time that God's miraculous provision of manna ceases. It is no longer needed. The people are not in the desert anymore. They have fertile land. They can develop it and harvest it. Of course, it might have been nice if God had just kept giving them manna anyway. But God doesn't work that way.
The homiletical significance of this passage may be found in its portrayal of how Christian theology views the earthly life as perpetual transition. For many, this scene at Gilgal captures a moment in time that provides an existential image of life between the ages, to use the Pauline phrase from last week's second lesson.
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
We have seen that Paul views salvation (as opposed to justification) as a future event (see the comments on the second lesson for Lent 1).
PAST: We have been justified through Christ's death on the cross;
FUTURE: We will be saved when Christ returns.
Now we see what is missing from this little paradigm -- the present element. We are, already, now, a new creation.
This concept is important for preserving the Pauline tension between what is "already" and "not yet." This tension is what keeps faith from being reduced to otherworldly speculation on the one hand, or to naive presumption on the other. Still, the revelation that "being a new creation" falls into the "already" category is surprising. I would have placed it in "not yet." Wouldn't you have thought that?
It is important to recognize that this concept of a new creation is not individualistic. It is cosmic. What God has done in Christ affected the whole world (v. 19). The world has been reconciled to God. We now have the ministry of ambassadors, announcing this reconciliation as a "done deal." The peace accord has been finalized but not completely publicized. You might flip back an issue of Emphasis to the comments on Ash Wednesday for more on this paradox of reconciliation -- the second lesson for that day overlaps with this one. Basically, Paul entreats us to "be reconciled with God" even though God has already done the reconciling. The point seems to be, "Live as the reconciled-with-God people that you truly are!"
This, too, becomes the point of affirming the new creation (cosmically) as a reality and then seeking to define its implications for individuals. We are to live -- each of us, individually -- in a way that reflects the reality of this newly reconciled creation.
We may immediately think of implications that are behavioral: morality, ethics. That's not bad, but fundamentally what Paul has in mind is a new perception of reality. He wants each of us to come to view ourselves and indeed the whole world as reconciled. This lesson begins with Paul saying, "We no longer regard anyone from a human point of view." How we regard people will certainly affect how we treat them, but we may have little success altering our behavior without first changing our perception. The "human point of view" regards the world, society, and individual human beings as alienated from God. Paul says we are to view all people (including unbelievers), society, and the world itself as reconciled with God.
In the early church, most Christians refused military service, claiming, "I cannot kill a person for whom Christ died." Augustine thought the matter was more complicated than that and worked out a "just war" theory to guide the consciences of Christian soldiers. We will no doubt always disagree amongst ourselves as to the social and political application of Paul's exhortation. We ought not disagree, however, on its fundamental premise. As Christians, we view the natural world and all its inhabitants differently than others do. We view the world and all that is in it as the objects of God's love, as a reality that is -- already! -- reconciled to God in Christ.
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
This story is so well known that preachers often have to search to find new meaning, a new angle, something that hasn't been said many times before.
There are so many wonderful images:
1. The picture of the younger son feeding pigs is a captivating illustration of humiliation, and all the more so when we remember this is a Jewish boy, for whom swine are unclean. He's not allowed to eat pork, but here he's come so low that if he could he'd fill his belly not by eating the pigs themselves but by eating the slop the pigs were fed. That's what I'd call really moving down on the food chain.
2. The picture of the father, waiting at home for his boy to return, then, running, and hugging him, kissing him, interrupting his little prepared speech to call for an unexpected celebration. Wow! What an image of God's love and grace this offers!
3. The image of that older brother who is so obsessed with what is proper but who simply doesn't understand what it means to be part of a family. He can't even bring himself to refer to his sibling as "my brother," but calls him only, "this son of yours." And he's proud to say to his father, "I've worked like a slave for you." Does he really think his dad will be pleased to hear him describe the relationship this way? To say, living with you is like slavery? Poor kid. He doesn't have a clue.
These are all great points and most of us have delivered or listened to sermons that built on such themes. What else can we say? I want to pick up two points that often don't get much attention:
A. What does it mean when it says the boy squandered his property in dissolute living? That's the word the NRSV uses. The Greek word is a very rare one -- asotos. It's rare, but the meaning is clear. It means "foolish." A person who is wise and makes good choices is sotos (the word is used for Joseph in Genesis). A person who is foolish and makes bad choices is asotos. I don't know why the NRSV uses the word "dissolute." Other English Bibles are worse. Some say that this boy spent his money on "loose living" or on "wild behavior," which is just plain wrong, as far as the Greek is concerned. As a result, there is a popular impression that the boy did things with his money that were immoral or wicked. I think what's going on is that Bible readers and even Bible translators pick up on what the older brother says when the younger son returns home. He volunteers the suggestion that little brother has spent all his money on prostitutes. But there is not a word in the text to indicate how the brother knew this or why we ought to believe it is true. This story is not really about a bad boy who decides to change his wicked ways, and is welcomed back into the bosom of his family. This boy isn't wicked or immoral. He's foolish. Ironically, when we regard this parable as the story of a boy who must repent of his wicked life, we are thinking like the older brother in the story. And like him, we may be missing the point altogether. The story is about repentance, but it's not about a change from bad to good. That's not what repentance means, at least not here.
B. Why does the story include that part about the famine? I've heard many sermons on this text, and even given a few myself, but no one ever makes much of that famine. We tend to just jump right from the part about the boy wasting his money to the part about the boy getting a job feeding pigs and still being hungry. We skip right over verse 14. But it is there and it must be there for a reason. Here's what I think: I think the reference to the famine helps to arouse our sympathy for this boy. Because, foolish as he might have been -- the famine wasn't his fault! If it hadn't been for that famine, he might even have made it. He didn't wind up starving in the pigpen simply because he wasted his money. There was more to it than that. He wound up starving in the pigpen because he hadn't reckoned with the world being as tough as it turned out to be. When he was foolishly wasting his money, it never occurred to him that a famine might be right around the corner. This boy is exactly the opposite of Joseph in the book of Genesis. Joseph had the foresight to put aside grain during the years of plenty so there would be food to eat during the years that were lean. Joseph is described as wise. This boy is the opposite of wise -- he's foolish!
Don't get me wrong here -- I'm not trying to let this kid off the hook. He's definitely in the wrong and he definitely needs to repent. The point is: "Of what does he need to repent?" Not, as his brother thinks, of cavorting with prostitutes. This boy makes one big mistake: he thinks he can make it through life on his own. He separates from his family. So the story is about repentance, but the repentance it describes is not a moral change of behavior. Rather, "repentance" is defined here as a realization of the need for others. The great irony in the story is that when the boy realizes this, Luke says, "He came to himself." What does he do when he comes to himself? He gets up and goes home. In this case, at least, coming to oneself means going to others.
This is a story about a person who decided he didn't need his family. There are just two problems: 1) He's a fool; and, 2) The world can be an evil place. Maybe, just maybe, if we weren't fools, and if there weren't things like famines, and factory closings, and stock market crashes, and automobile accidents, and unexpected illnesses, and so forth, maybe then, we could make it on our own. But the thing is, we are fools, and the world is evil. When we discover this and say, "We need others," Jesus calls that "repentance."
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By Elizabeth Achtemeier
Joshua 5:9-12
Christians live under new conditions. Paul tells us in the epistle lesson for this Sunday that the old life has been done away and that the new life has begun. We are new creations of God. There are all sorts of metaphors that the Bible uses to describe that Christian passage from old to new. It says that we have been born anew, or that we have passed from slavery into freedom. It proclaims that we have emerged from darkness into light, or from despair into meaning, from mourning into joy, or from death into life. We walk no more by the flesh, but by the Spirit, or we are no longer conformed to the world, but to the will of God. Throughout the scriptures, the newness of life that we have been given in Jesus Christ is emphasized.
Perhaps nowhere is that newness emphasized more than in Paul's description of our baptisms in Romans 6. The apostle tells us that when we were baptized, we died and were buried with Christ. Our old lives, lived solely for ourselves -- with all of their sin and guilt, their lack of hope and of a future, their bondage to the world and its evil -- all of that was buried six feet under by Christ's death on the cross and his burial. But by the resurrection of Christ, we were raised from the water of baptism to a new life, a new future, a new goodness.
In a moving article in the October 21, 1992, issue of the Christian Century, Ralph C. Wood told of the baptism of a man imprisoned for the terrible crime of molesting his ten-year-old daughter. The man's wife and daughter forgave him for his sin, whereby "the molester got on his knees and begged for the mercy of God and his family" (p. 926). As a result, the prison chaplain agreed to baptize him into the Christian faith. The only baptismal "font" available was a plastic-lined wooden coffin, and so the prisoner, burdened with his sin, was lowered by the chaplain into the death of Christ and raised from the waters, washed clean of his past and given a future by the resurrection of Christ. From that time on, he was a new man, and after serving his time, he became a faithful father and husband and member of his local church. Thus does the work of Jesus Christ make us new creations.
I tell all of these things from the standpoint of the New Testament, because they serve as a parallel to our Old Testament lesson. The Old Testament parallel to baptism in the New Testament is circumcision. Both baptism and circumcision signal an entrance into the covenant relation with God, and immediately preceding our text, we read that all of the Israelite men who crossed the Jordan with their families and with Joshua into the promised land underwent that covenant rite. They and their families entered into a new life by becoming the covenant people of God. Moreover, to celebrate that new relationship, they celebrated the first passover in the promised land. And to emphasize the newness of their situation even more, we are told in our text that they no longer needed to be fed by God with the manna that had been their food in the wilderness. Rather, now they could eat the produce of the promised land. Everything was fresh and different. The Israelites had begun a new life.
Apparently, the enigmatic sentence in verse 9 of our text is intended also to emphasize that newness, but none of us knows exactly what the verse means by "the reproach of Egypt." Perhaps it refers to the Israelites' previous slavery. Perhaps it is a reference to their previous ignorance of God. Certainly it furnishes an etymological meaning for "Gilgal," the place of Israel's encampment, because the Hebrew verb "to roll," galal, sounds very much like the name "Gilgal."
Whatever the precise meaning, the new situation of Israel's life is being emphasized. Now she has a taste of "the glorious liberty of the children of God." God has kept his promises to her forebears. The life of slavery, with its hopelessness and bondage, is in the past. The long forty-year trek through the wilderness, with its thirst and hunger, its deadly serpents and dangers, is behind them. The seemingly difficult passage through the Jordan has been accomplished with the help of God's miracle. Israel, the wandering people, now has a home, commandments to guide her in her new life, and a relationship with the God who will be her refuge and strength through all the future. Israel, like we, has been given a new beginning. "The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come."
In the thought of the Old Testament, however, Israel also has a mission. She has not been redeemed from slavery and guided through the terrors of the wilderness and given the land simply because God loves her, although that certainly also is the case, as the Old Testament tells us -- God always acts in love (cf. Deuteronomy 7:6-8). But God does not redeem his people and enter into covenant with them for no reason. Rather, God chooses and loves his covenant people, because he loves all peoples and has a purpose for all the families of the earth.
We read of that love and purpose at the very beginning of Israel's story in Genesis 12:1-3. Abraham is told at that time that he and his descendants are to be the instruments through which God will bring his blessing on all people. We have corrupted the good world that God made at the beginning, and now God wants to restore the goodness to the world that it has lost. We live under the curse of sin and death, but through Israel, God wants to do away with evil and bring his blessing on all folk.
Israel's new life of settlement in the land of Canaan, therefore, is understood in the Old Testament as her time of testing (cf. Joshua 23:14-16; Judges 3:1-6). Will she be a faithful people, following the will of her Lord, praising his name and serving him in everything she does, so that the other nations will see God's work in her and turn in commitment to the Lord also? If so, then Israel will fulfill her God-given task of being the medium of blessing for all the families of the earth, bringing all nations to worship the one true God. Or will Israel turn to other gods and goddesses and go her own willful way, deserting the task for which God has made her his own?
That is the same task to which you and I and all Christians are called. We too have been redeemed out of slavery to sin and death and given a new beginning, in the glorious liberty of the children of God. But God has chosen us also, and made us his own because we have a mission. We have the calling from God to live such faithful lives, walking according to God's commandments, that other people will see God's work in us, too, and be drawn to confess his lordship. We have a new life in Jesus Christ, and we have been given the Spirit of our Lord to enable us to walk and serve in his ways. And now the question for us is, as it was for Israel, will we be faithful? Will we so obey and trust our Lord that he can use us in his purpose of blessing and restoring his world to goodness?
We can have no more meaningful task given us in this life, nor can Jesus Christ equip us more fully for the task than he has already done by his cross and resurrection, by his scripture and his Spirit with us. We have only to accept his call and today begin the mission.
