All Together Now
Commentary
I’ve attended a lot of NFL games over the years. I lived in Cleveland, Ohio during the 1980s, when the Browns were often fielding an exciting and competitive team. And now, for the past decade, I have been living in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where the Packers have enjoyed a lot of winning seasons. And so, I’ve been fortunate to watch a lot of good football in person.
The experience of being in the stands, of course, is quite different from watching a game in one’s own living room at home. The latter may be more comfortable and a lot less expensive. But there is something compelling about being part of the crowd: rising and falling emotionally with the 70,000 other people huddled all around you.
One of the striking elements of being part of the crowd, it seems to me, is the terrific feeling of unity that one experiences with otherwise complete strangers. The conversations I have had, the hugs and high-fives I have exchanged, and the feelings I have shared with fellow fans at a football stadium is quite remarkable. I don’t have those sorts of interactions, after all, with people who are equally unknown to me at a shopping mall or in a public restaurant or driving in traffic. Yet when the strangers are gathered all together for a sporting event, the group dynamic phenomenon is distinctive.
I am reminded of that football fan experience as I read a brief narrative detail included in our selected Old Testament passage. The storyteller, in describing the assembly that occurred under Ezra’s leadership in Jerusalem, reports that “all the people gathered as one person at the public square.” All the people gathered as one person. It is a portrait of unity, you see, of a great collection of individuals functioning as though it were a single entity.
Surely this is the look and the feel in so many football stadiums. The crowd rises as one when something dramatic or exciting happens. They cheer together. They boo in unison. Perhaps they even chant in concert with one another.
I believe that the writer of Nehemiah is telling us something very important about the Jerusalem crowd that day. This was not like the crowd at a restaurant: people who just happen to be in the same place at the same time. No, the Nehemiah event was more like a sporting event. The people were all on the same page, gathered for the same purpose, and feeling the same things. They were listening together, learning together, and even weeping together. It was a crowd — and an event — marked by unity. And, as such, it is illustrative for us.
Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10
Ezra and Nehemiah are characters who are tucked away in a part of the Bible that is often neglected. They are not among the characters who have emerged as prominent and heroic in most imaginations. There is a standard pantheon of biblical persons whose stories are told to children again and again — the stories we grew up on — but for a variety of reasons Ezra and Nehemiah are not among them. Yet those two men are central to our Old Testament reading, and we have the opportunity to hold them up as heroic, indeed.
For many congregants, it may be necessary to set the historical stage. Long after the early days of the patriarchs, long after the salvific era of Moses, long after the judges and shortly after the first Israelite kings, the tribes of Israel divided into two separate kingdoms. The northern kingdom was called Israel, and it was ruled by a series of unrelentingly bad monarchs. The southern kingdom was called Judah — the source etymologically of the word “Jew” — and it retained a connection to the royal line of David and the capital city of Jerusalem. Some of its kings were exemplary, some were mixed bags, and some were appallingly wicked. Broadly speaking, though, Judah enjoyed better leadership than Israel.
Both kingdoms became so incorrigibly sinful that the Lord sent judgment prophets to warn them of the trouble toward which they were steering. In the end, the northern kingdom was obliterated by the Assyrian Empire in the 8th-century B.C. and the southern kingdom was conquered by the Babylonian Empire in the late 7th- and early 6th-centuries B.C. Many of the Jews were exiled to Babylon. And then, when the Babylonian Empire was succeeded by the Medes and the Persians, Jews began to return from the Babylonian exile to Jerusalem and Judah to reestablish life there.
It is nearly impossible for most of us to imagine what it looked like to be in Jerusalem in the 5th-century B.C. The city was in ruins, the people were impoverished, the land was occupied by a larger, stronger, regional power, and the leaders were surrounded by obstacles and opposition. This was the unenviable situation into which Ezra and Nehemiah entered. This was where they rolled up their sleeves to get to work as leaders among God’s people. And one part of their heroic story is recounted in our Old Testament reading for this week.
One part of the rebuilding process in post-exilic Judah and Jerusalem was spiritual. A modern reader might be inclined to dismiss that as a secondary sort of issue. Surely it is more important to rebuild one’s economy, infrastructure, and military, right? And yet, when we recall that it was the spiritual element of both Israel’s and Judah’s life that led to their demise, we are challenged to think that perhaps the spiritual rebuild in Judah was actually most important.
The spiritual rebuild is what we see going on in this passage. The scribe Ezra literally takes center stage at a national event. And from his perch before the people, he leads a process of reading and interpreting the law of God.
Modern church audiences tend to be dismissive of the law. It seems to many American Christians to be outdated, irrelevant, or perhaps even offensive. Yet the scripture presents the law as an articulation of God’s will and therefore an expression of his character. It offers his people his guidelines for living. And, at their best, the Old Testament people of God rejoiced in it as a great gift (see, for example, Psalms 19 and 119).
The people of Nehemiah’s day and Ezra’s audience certainly took seriously what they heard of God’s law that day. We’ll think more about that below. And it is precisely their responsiveness that completes the spiritual rebuilding project that Ezra undertook.
1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
Categories are essential to understanding. We categorize things instinctively every day, almost without realizing that we’re doing it. And at the highest levels of education in any field, appropriate categories and categorization continue to be the central issue.
You and I make routine distinctions between categories, for example, every time we read something. We know there is a great difference between reading a novel, an article in an academic journal, an advertisement, an email from a friend, and a tweet from a sports reporter. We subconsciously, automatically categorize the things we read, and appropriate categorization helps us to understand — and not to misunderstand — what we are reading.
At another level, medical personnel are always needing to categorize symptoms and conditions when dealing with patients. It’s essential to know, for example, if the cause of this particular condition is viral or bacterial. If you categorize it the wrong way, then you will treat it the wrong way. To categorize something is to understand that thing; and to understand it is to categorize it.
And at yet another level, great debates are held in any given field entirely over the proper categorization of a thing. Whatever your expertise is, you are no doubt aware of nuances and controversies that would sound like a foreign language to someone outside of your field. In biblical studies, for example, scholars may go back and forth debating the genre of a given text or the particular use of the dative case of a given word. These are high-level matters of categorization, and right categories are essential to right understanding.
All of which brings us, then, to the question of whether or not we have properly understood the church. If we put it in the right category, we will understand it rightly. But if we put it in the wrong category, then we are bound to misunderstand it. And so, we turn to scripture to see just what sort of a thing the church is.
It is not uncommon for the world around us to categorize us in terms of “organized religion,” “small business,” “non-profit charitable organization,” and such. But those would have been foreign categories to the Apostle Paul. And to think of ourselves in any of those terms is likely to be misleading. Instead, Paul tells us that the church is like a body — and, specifically, the Body of Christ!
Let us consider, then, the implications of the category. What does that suggest about unity? About function? Membership? Nourishment? Leadership? Purpose? On and on!
If the church is a body, what does that mean for how we treat one another? If it is a body, what does that suggest a church needs to be healthy? And if the church is a body, what is unhealthy for it? Just the implications of the category, you see — let alone the particular gifts and roles that Paul mentions — could become an entire sermon series.
Gifts and roles are the larger theme that Paul is explicating. The paradigm and vocabulary that he employs in this passage may be familiar and embraced in one church while altogether unknown in another. You and I will need to make our own informed assessments, therefore, about how best to speak the truths of this passage to our particular people.
In ancient Corinth, it seems, certain gifts had become a source of unwholesome pride. Indeed, they may have functioned with an attitude that this or that gift was essential to being a “real” Christian. Yet Paul moves them away from that errant way of thinking. They are, rather, parts of a body. Each part is necessary. No part should feel supremely important, and no part should feel unimportant. And, in the end, those parts serve not themselves but the larger whole.
So it is that categories are essential to understanding. And for as long as the Christians in Corinth did not understand what type of thing the church is, they were bound to misunderstand it, and perhaps even mistreat it. Accordingly, the Apostle Paul helped them to understand what they were dealing with — indeed, what they were part of. The church is a body: the body of Christ.
Luke 4:14-21
The gospel writer includes an ironic detail in his narrative that is lost on us this week because of the boundaries of our passage. The entire Nazareth episode, you see, runs through verse 30, but our selection concludes at verse 21. What follows, of course, is the terrible scene of rejection. The people in the synagogue audience that day become incensed by the things Jesus says, they mob him, and they take him to the brow of a hill with the angry intent to throw him over. Jesus, however, seems to escape from them effortlessly. In any case, the irony that Luke builds into the scene is in his opening observation that Jesus “was praised by all.”
The praise of men does not last.
Every politician knows the truth of it. Here is a public servant who enjoys chart-topping approval numbers one year but is ousted by the people in the very next year’s election. Likewise, the professional athlete, who enjoys the cheers of 80,000 fans after scoring the touchdown, only to hear a corresponding multitude of boos a few weeks later after several drops and a fumble. Likewise, too, the entertainer, who is all the rage today, but who will be the subject of some “Where are they now?” article in five years.
Human praise does not last, and it did not last for Jesus. What we see in Nazareth early in his ministry is repeated in Jerusalem during Holy Week. The adoring crowds of Palm Sunday have disappeared, giving way to a bloodthirsty mob by Good Friday. The people who speak well of him at the beginning of our episode are trying to do him in a few verses later.
Over against that human fickleness, meanwhile, is the steady and gracious purpose of God. And that divine purpose is the real centerpiece of our gospel lection. For in that Nazareth synagogue, Jesus claimed a powerful Old Testament prophecy for himself. Words recorded by Isaiah eight centuries earlier are made into his own mission statement.
The affirmation that the Spirit of the Lord had anointed Jesus to a work is reminiscent of both what we see at his baptism (e.g., Luke 3:21-22) and in Peter’s preaching about him (e.g., Acts 10:38). And the work for which he was anointed is conspicuous in its compassion. We observe that the intended recipients of Christ’s mission are “the poor,” “captives,” “the blind,” and “those who are oppressed.” We are reminded of other references he makes to his own work that reiterate the point (e.g., Matthew 9:12-13; Luke 19:10).
Finally, we are struck by Jesus’ concluding word upon rolling up the scroll. Perhaps in your church, the scripture reading is followed by some traditional liturgy — “the word of God for the people of God,” or some such. But what would our congregations think if, after reading the scriptures, the reader said, “This passage has just been fulfilled, right here and now!” It was a remarkable sort of claim for Jesus to make. But it is that very claim that contributes to our understanding of the person and work of Christ. For we affirm that he is, indeed, the fulfillment of prophecy, and so the long-ago expressed will of God is embodied and fulfilled by him.
Application
As we noted above, the writer of Nehemiah suggests an aura of unity characterizing the convocation that took place in Jerusalem that day under the leadership of Ezra the scribe. And we have compared that unity to the sort of group dynamic that one experiences in a football stadium. A disparate collection of people — perhaps even strangers — have a unified experience because of their shared interests, priorities, and feelings.
The central principle of unity, of course, is oneness. It is implicit in the very etymology of the word. And it is the explicit characterization of the Nehemiah crowd: “all the people gathered as one person.”
We also note that such oneness is a divine attribute. We remember the fundamental creed of ancient Israel: “Hear, O Israel:The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4 ESV). And that affirmation becomes still more meaningful and profound when we layer in our New Testament understanding of the Trinity. Jesus, for example, declares, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30 NIV). And ultimately, he prays to his Father for his followers “that they may be one even as we are one” (John 17:22 ESV).
And that prayer for the followers of Jesus points us toward a dramatic conclusion: namely, that oneness is not merely a part of God’s will for his people, but is specifically a way in which he wants us to be like him. We see that it is his will for the human creatures in marriage (see, for example, Genesis 2:24, Matthew 19:4-6). And the picture Paul paints in 1 Corinthians 12 makes clear the beautiful oneness that God intends to characterize the church.
In the epistle reading for this week, Paul famously describes the church as the body of Christ. His metaphor is rich with implications, as it suggests functionality, vitality, and growth. The image of a body also allows the apostle to affirm the importance and usefulness of various roles. Indeed, it celebrates variety. And yet, over all the rest, the image of the church as a body pulses with the principle of unity. For all the different parts with their different functions, after all, they still combine to form one body.
We will note below how the scene from Nehemiah should look very familiar to us as it likely resembles a Sunday morning in your congregation or mine. And the Nehemiah episode, combined with the teaching from Paul, gives us another glimpse of what we are and what we ought to be. For when we gather as the church, we are not a random collection of individuals who happen to be in the same place at the same time. Rather, we gather as one person, one body with many parts. And we function together in an experiential unity born of shared allegiance, love, purpose, and feelings.
Alternative Application(s)
Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10 — “A Text for Today”
We summarized above the historical background of the episode recounted in Nehemiah 8. Most of that history will probably be unfamiliar to most of our people. And there is a risk, therefore, that the whole scene will feel foreign and far removed from the folks in our pews. However, the picture being painted should look very familiar to us.
Set aside for a moment the ancient context and the far-away locale. Sketch the picture in board strokes without the details. And then see if it doesn’t look startlingly recognizable and close-to-home. There is an attentive crowd gathered together, and before them stands an individual who has expertise in God’s written word. That word is read and explained to the folks who have gathered.
The verses that comprise our Old Testament lection are not merely the assigned passage for today: they are arguably the passage for every Sunday in your church and mine. They are a picture of us. They form a blueprint of who we are and what we are to do.
As we explored in greater detail above, the excerpt from Nehemiah recounts the occasion when the people had convened to hear “the Book of the Law of Moses” read and explained. This was their Bible, of course, and the reading of it followed by the interpretation and application of it sounds very much like the pattern most of us continue to follow in our congregational worship. A passage of Scripture is read aloud, and then the preacher stands before the assembly to explain, interpret, and apply what has been read.
With our own pattern in the back of our minds, then, we observe the seriousness and intensity of the scene from Nehemiah. This is no casual affair. The people listened from early morning until midday. And, too, we see that “the people were attentive to the Book of the Law.”
In my decades of local church ministry, I have observed a tendency for people to not be very attentive to the words that are read. Instead, the scripture reading tends to get shortchanged as the real attentiveness is reserved for the preaching. It’s almost as though the scripture lesson serves the sermon in the minds of many people, rather than the other way around.
Perhaps the underlying concern might be illustrated in another way. Imagine that, on a given Sunday morning, you eschewed the reading of the scriptures, but you preached a sermon, as usual. And then, the following Sunday morning, imagine that you read the scripture lessons but you skipped the sermon. Which of the two Sundays would generate more questions and complaints within your congregation?
In the scene from Nehemiah, however, the rapt attention belonged first to reading of the text. And it was the earnest desire to understand that text that prompted and necessitated the interpretation and explanation. And not only that, but also encouragement. For it seems that the mere hearing of the text was profoundly disconcerting to the audience.
That is a sign of serious attentiveness, to be sure. We see similar responses to the reading of God’s word (2 Kings 22:8-11) and the preaching of God’s Word (Jonah 3:3-9, Acts 2:37). By contrast, when the word of the Lord that had been written down by Jeremiah was read in the royal court, the biblical author reports that “the king and all his attendants who heard all these words showed no fear, nor did they tear their clothes” (Jeremiah 36:24 NIV). The examples found within scripture challenge us to consider how we respond to the hearing of God’s word.
In the end, a close examination of the picture painted in Nehemiah 8 may result in a series of reactions. Our first impulse may be to think that the scene is from long ago and far away, and so we don’t immediately see the relevance. A closer look, however, prompts us to recognize that the scene is very familiar, indeed. We see that gathering, and we say, “Hey, you know, that looks a lot like us here!” But then, with a still closer look, we may become aware of some differences: ways in which we perhaps ought to look more like Nehemiah 8 than we do.
The experience of being in the stands, of course, is quite different from watching a game in one’s own living room at home. The latter may be more comfortable and a lot less expensive. But there is something compelling about being part of the crowd: rising and falling emotionally with the 70,000 other people huddled all around you.
One of the striking elements of being part of the crowd, it seems to me, is the terrific feeling of unity that one experiences with otherwise complete strangers. The conversations I have had, the hugs and high-fives I have exchanged, and the feelings I have shared with fellow fans at a football stadium is quite remarkable. I don’t have those sorts of interactions, after all, with people who are equally unknown to me at a shopping mall or in a public restaurant or driving in traffic. Yet when the strangers are gathered all together for a sporting event, the group dynamic phenomenon is distinctive.
I am reminded of that football fan experience as I read a brief narrative detail included in our selected Old Testament passage. The storyteller, in describing the assembly that occurred under Ezra’s leadership in Jerusalem, reports that “all the people gathered as one person at the public square.” All the people gathered as one person. It is a portrait of unity, you see, of a great collection of individuals functioning as though it were a single entity.
Surely this is the look and the feel in so many football stadiums. The crowd rises as one when something dramatic or exciting happens. They cheer together. They boo in unison. Perhaps they even chant in concert with one another.
I believe that the writer of Nehemiah is telling us something very important about the Jerusalem crowd that day. This was not like the crowd at a restaurant: people who just happen to be in the same place at the same time. No, the Nehemiah event was more like a sporting event. The people were all on the same page, gathered for the same purpose, and feeling the same things. They were listening together, learning together, and even weeping together. It was a crowd — and an event — marked by unity. And, as such, it is illustrative for us.
Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10
Ezra and Nehemiah are characters who are tucked away in a part of the Bible that is often neglected. They are not among the characters who have emerged as prominent and heroic in most imaginations. There is a standard pantheon of biblical persons whose stories are told to children again and again — the stories we grew up on — but for a variety of reasons Ezra and Nehemiah are not among them. Yet those two men are central to our Old Testament reading, and we have the opportunity to hold them up as heroic, indeed.
For many congregants, it may be necessary to set the historical stage. Long after the early days of the patriarchs, long after the salvific era of Moses, long after the judges and shortly after the first Israelite kings, the tribes of Israel divided into two separate kingdoms. The northern kingdom was called Israel, and it was ruled by a series of unrelentingly bad monarchs. The southern kingdom was called Judah — the source etymologically of the word “Jew” — and it retained a connection to the royal line of David and the capital city of Jerusalem. Some of its kings were exemplary, some were mixed bags, and some were appallingly wicked. Broadly speaking, though, Judah enjoyed better leadership than Israel.
Both kingdoms became so incorrigibly sinful that the Lord sent judgment prophets to warn them of the trouble toward which they were steering. In the end, the northern kingdom was obliterated by the Assyrian Empire in the 8th-century B.C. and the southern kingdom was conquered by the Babylonian Empire in the late 7th- and early 6th-centuries B.C. Many of the Jews were exiled to Babylon. And then, when the Babylonian Empire was succeeded by the Medes and the Persians, Jews began to return from the Babylonian exile to Jerusalem and Judah to reestablish life there.
It is nearly impossible for most of us to imagine what it looked like to be in Jerusalem in the 5th-century B.C. The city was in ruins, the people were impoverished, the land was occupied by a larger, stronger, regional power, and the leaders were surrounded by obstacles and opposition. This was the unenviable situation into which Ezra and Nehemiah entered. This was where they rolled up their sleeves to get to work as leaders among God’s people. And one part of their heroic story is recounted in our Old Testament reading for this week.
One part of the rebuilding process in post-exilic Judah and Jerusalem was spiritual. A modern reader might be inclined to dismiss that as a secondary sort of issue. Surely it is more important to rebuild one’s economy, infrastructure, and military, right? And yet, when we recall that it was the spiritual element of both Israel’s and Judah’s life that led to their demise, we are challenged to think that perhaps the spiritual rebuild in Judah was actually most important.
The spiritual rebuild is what we see going on in this passage. The scribe Ezra literally takes center stage at a national event. And from his perch before the people, he leads a process of reading and interpreting the law of God.
Modern church audiences tend to be dismissive of the law. It seems to many American Christians to be outdated, irrelevant, or perhaps even offensive. Yet the scripture presents the law as an articulation of God’s will and therefore an expression of his character. It offers his people his guidelines for living. And, at their best, the Old Testament people of God rejoiced in it as a great gift (see, for example, Psalms 19 and 119).
The people of Nehemiah’s day and Ezra’s audience certainly took seriously what they heard of God’s law that day. We’ll think more about that below. And it is precisely their responsiveness that completes the spiritual rebuilding project that Ezra undertook.
1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
Categories are essential to understanding. We categorize things instinctively every day, almost without realizing that we’re doing it. And at the highest levels of education in any field, appropriate categories and categorization continue to be the central issue.
You and I make routine distinctions between categories, for example, every time we read something. We know there is a great difference between reading a novel, an article in an academic journal, an advertisement, an email from a friend, and a tweet from a sports reporter. We subconsciously, automatically categorize the things we read, and appropriate categorization helps us to understand — and not to misunderstand — what we are reading.
At another level, medical personnel are always needing to categorize symptoms and conditions when dealing with patients. It’s essential to know, for example, if the cause of this particular condition is viral or bacterial. If you categorize it the wrong way, then you will treat it the wrong way. To categorize something is to understand that thing; and to understand it is to categorize it.
And at yet another level, great debates are held in any given field entirely over the proper categorization of a thing. Whatever your expertise is, you are no doubt aware of nuances and controversies that would sound like a foreign language to someone outside of your field. In biblical studies, for example, scholars may go back and forth debating the genre of a given text or the particular use of the dative case of a given word. These are high-level matters of categorization, and right categories are essential to right understanding.
All of which brings us, then, to the question of whether or not we have properly understood the church. If we put it in the right category, we will understand it rightly. But if we put it in the wrong category, then we are bound to misunderstand it. And so, we turn to scripture to see just what sort of a thing the church is.
It is not uncommon for the world around us to categorize us in terms of “organized religion,” “small business,” “non-profit charitable organization,” and such. But those would have been foreign categories to the Apostle Paul. And to think of ourselves in any of those terms is likely to be misleading. Instead, Paul tells us that the church is like a body — and, specifically, the Body of Christ!
Let us consider, then, the implications of the category. What does that suggest about unity? About function? Membership? Nourishment? Leadership? Purpose? On and on!
If the church is a body, what does that mean for how we treat one another? If it is a body, what does that suggest a church needs to be healthy? And if the church is a body, what is unhealthy for it? Just the implications of the category, you see — let alone the particular gifts and roles that Paul mentions — could become an entire sermon series.
Gifts and roles are the larger theme that Paul is explicating. The paradigm and vocabulary that he employs in this passage may be familiar and embraced in one church while altogether unknown in another. You and I will need to make our own informed assessments, therefore, about how best to speak the truths of this passage to our particular people.
In ancient Corinth, it seems, certain gifts had become a source of unwholesome pride. Indeed, they may have functioned with an attitude that this or that gift was essential to being a “real” Christian. Yet Paul moves them away from that errant way of thinking. They are, rather, parts of a body. Each part is necessary. No part should feel supremely important, and no part should feel unimportant. And, in the end, those parts serve not themselves but the larger whole.
So it is that categories are essential to understanding. And for as long as the Christians in Corinth did not understand what type of thing the church is, they were bound to misunderstand it, and perhaps even mistreat it. Accordingly, the Apostle Paul helped them to understand what they were dealing with — indeed, what they were part of. The church is a body: the body of Christ.
Luke 4:14-21
The gospel writer includes an ironic detail in his narrative that is lost on us this week because of the boundaries of our passage. The entire Nazareth episode, you see, runs through verse 30, but our selection concludes at verse 21. What follows, of course, is the terrible scene of rejection. The people in the synagogue audience that day become incensed by the things Jesus says, they mob him, and they take him to the brow of a hill with the angry intent to throw him over. Jesus, however, seems to escape from them effortlessly. In any case, the irony that Luke builds into the scene is in his opening observation that Jesus “was praised by all.”
The praise of men does not last.
Every politician knows the truth of it. Here is a public servant who enjoys chart-topping approval numbers one year but is ousted by the people in the very next year’s election. Likewise, the professional athlete, who enjoys the cheers of 80,000 fans after scoring the touchdown, only to hear a corresponding multitude of boos a few weeks later after several drops and a fumble. Likewise, too, the entertainer, who is all the rage today, but who will be the subject of some “Where are they now?” article in five years.
Human praise does not last, and it did not last for Jesus. What we see in Nazareth early in his ministry is repeated in Jerusalem during Holy Week. The adoring crowds of Palm Sunday have disappeared, giving way to a bloodthirsty mob by Good Friday. The people who speak well of him at the beginning of our episode are trying to do him in a few verses later.
Over against that human fickleness, meanwhile, is the steady and gracious purpose of God. And that divine purpose is the real centerpiece of our gospel lection. For in that Nazareth synagogue, Jesus claimed a powerful Old Testament prophecy for himself. Words recorded by Isaiah eight centuries earlier are made into his own mission statement.
The affirmation that the Spirit of the Lord had anointed Jesus to a work is reminiscent of both what we see at his baptism (e.g., Luke 3:21-22) and in Peter’s preaching about him (e.g., Acts 10:38). And the work for which he was anointed is conspicuous in its compassion. We observe that the intended recipients of Christ’s mission are “the poor,” “captives,” “the blind,” and “those who are oppressed.” We are reminded of other references he makes to his own work that reiterate the point (e.g., Matthew 9:12-13; Luke 19:10).
Finally, we are struck by Jesus’ concluding word upon rolling up the scroll. Perhaps in your church, the scripture reading is followed by some traditional liturgy — “the word of God for the people of God,” or some such. But what would our congregations think if, after reading the scriptures, the reader said, “This passage has just been fulfilled, right here and now!” It was a remarkable sort of claim for Jesus to make. But it is that very claim that contributes to our understanding of the person and work of Christ. For we affirm that he is, indeed, the fulfillment of prophecy, and so the long-ago expressed will of God is embodied and fulfilled by him.
Application
As we noted above, the writer of Nehemiah suggests an aura of unity characterizing the convocation that took place in Jerusalem that day under the leadership of Ezra the scribe. And we have compared that unity to the sort of group dynamic that one experiences in a football stadium. A disparate collection of people — perhaps even strangers — have a unified experience because of their shared interests, priorities, and feelings.
The central principle of unity, of course, is oneness. It is implicit in the very etymology of the word. And it is the explicit characterization of the Nehemiah crowd: “all the people gathered as one person.”
We also note that such oneness is a divine attribute. We remember the fundamental creed of ancient Israel: “Hear, O Israel:The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4 ESV). And that affirmation becomes still more meaningful and profound when we layer in our New Testament understanding of the Trinity. Jesus, for example, declares, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30 NIV). And ultimately, he prays to his Father for his followers “that they may be one even as we are one” (John 17:22 ESV).
And that prayer for the followers of Jesus points us toward a dramatic conclusion: namely, that oneness is not merely a part of God’s will for his people, but is specifically a way in which he wants us to be like him. We see that it is his will for the human creatures in marriage (see, for example, Genesis 2:24, Matthew 19:4-6). And the picture Paul paints in 1 Corinthians 12 makes clear the beautiful oneness that God intends to characterize the church.
In the epistle reading for this week, Paul famously describes the church as the body of Christ. His metaphor is rich with implications, as it suggests functionality, vitality, and growth. The image of a body also allows the apostle to affirm the importance and usefulness of various roles. Indeed, it celebrates variety. And yet, over all the rest, the image of the church as a body pulses with the principle of unity. For all the different parts with their different functions, after all, they still combine to form one body.
We will note below how the scene from Nehemiah should look very familiar to us as it likely resembles a Sunday morning in your congregation or mine. And the Nehemiah episode, combined with the teaching from Paul, gives us another glimpse of what we are and what we ought to be. For when we gather as the church, we are not a random collection of individuals who happen to be in the same place at the same time. Rather, we gather as one person, one body with many parts. And we function together in an experiential unity born of shared allegiance, love, purpose, and feelings.
Alternative Application(s)
Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10 — “A Text for Today”
We summarized above the historical background of the episode recounted in Nehemiah 8. Most of that history will probably be unfamiliar to most of our people. And there is a risk, therefore, that the whole scene will feel foreign and far removed from the folks in our pews. However, the picture being painted should look very familiar to us.
Set aside for a moment the ancient context and the far-away locale. Sketch the picture in board strokes without the details. And then see if it doesn’t look startlingly recognizable and close-to-home. There is an attentive crowd gathered together, and before them stands an individual who has expertise in God’s written word. That word is read and explained to the folks who have gathered.
The verses that comprise our Old Testament lection are not merely the assigned passage for today: they are arguably the passage for every Sunday in your church and mine. They are a picture of us. They form a blueprint of who we are and what we are to do.
As we explored in greater detail above, the excerpt from Nehemiah recounts the occasion when the people had convened to hear “the Book of the Law of Moses” read and explained. This was their Bible, of course, and the reading of it followed by the interpretation and application of it sounds very much like the pattern most of us continue to follow in our congregational worship. A passage of Scripture is read aloud, and then the preacher stands before the assembly to explain, interpret, and apply what has been read.
With our own pattern in the back of our minds, then, we observe the seriousness and intensity of the scene from Nehemiah. This is no casual affair. The people listened from early morning until midday. And, too, we see that “the people were attentive to the Book of the Law.”
In my decades of local church ministry, I have observed a tendency for people to not be very attentive to the words that are read. Instead, the scripture reading tends to get shortchanged as the real attentiveness is reserved for the preaching. It’s almost as though the scripture lesson serves the sermon in the minds of many people, rather than the other way around.
Perhaps the underlying concern might be illustrated in another way. Imagine that, on a given Sunday morning, you eschewed the reading of the scriptures, but you preached a sermon, as usual. And then, the following Sunday morning, imagine that you read the scripture lessons but you skipped the sermon. Which of the two Sundays would generate more questions and complaints within your congregation?
In the scene from Nehemiah, however, the rapt attention belonged first to reading of the text. And it was the earnest desire to understand that text that prompted and necessitated the interpretation and explanation. And not only that, but also encouragement. For it seems that the mere hearing of the text was profoundly disconcerting to the audience.
That is a sign of serious attentiveness, to be sure. We see similar responses to the reading of God’s word (2 Kings 22:8-11) and the preaching of God’s Word (Jonah 3:3-9, Acts 2:37). By contrast, when the word of the Lord that had been written down by Jeremiah was read in the royal court, the biblical author reports that “the king and all his attendants who heard all these words showed no fear, nor did they tear their clothes” (Jeremiah 36:24 NIV). The examples found within scripture challenge us to consider how we respond to the hearing of God’s word.
In the end, a close examination of the picture painted in Nehemiah 8 may result in a series of reactions. Our first impulse may be to think that the scene is from long ago and far away, and so we don’t immediately see the relevance. A closer look, however, prompts us to recognize that the scene is very familiar, indeed. We see that gathering, and we say, “Hey, you know, that looks a lot like us here!” But then, with a still closer look, we may become aware of some differences: ways in which we perhaps ought to look more like Nehemiah 8 than we do.
