Lost...
Commentary
Each of our lectionary readings for today reminds us that we have forgotten who we are. It may well be that we have offended God, but God is big enough to be able to handle it. What is more important is that we have offended ourselves. We have lost touch with our place in the house of God. We need a high priest who can help us find our way back home.
Jesus does this in a variety of ways. Irenaeus thought that Jesus had to be at least fifty years old when he died, because the point of Jesus’ coming to earth was to go through all the stages of human life (fifty was certainly old age at the time!) in order to show us how to live and die correctly. We had lost our way. Only when we saw Jesus living our lives out of grace and love and courage, and even dying well, would we be able to do the same. He called Jesus’ work “recapitulation,” a replaying of human identity done right. What we observe most of Jesus on this Good Friday is his ability to die with courage and dignity, just as he had lived. When we see Jesus we buck up, and get our acts together, and recover the best of our humanity.
Of course, later theologians would further emphasize that exemplary character of Jesus’ life and death. Abelard saw in Jesus death the power of moral influence. We have grown complacent in our degradation, according to Abelard. Jesus comes among us and all we can see is his goody-goody character, and we despise him for it. We taunt him, trying to make him become a normal sinner like the rest of us. We tease him as if he were sub-human. When he refuses to play our dirty games, we get angry with him, and plot to get rid of him, and ultimately throw him up on a cross in despicable shame. Only when the dastardly deed is done, it is not he but we who are suddenly cut to the heart. We hear his words from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” and we are embarrassed beyond loss of face. We see in his reflection what we have become and come to know the ugliness of ourselves for the first time. His morality pierces our immorality and we must turn away. Like the dirty old man in one of O. Henry’s stories, the one who sees by lamplight the beautiful woman he once called friend, but lost because of the blackness of his own rotten character, and suddenly remembers what he could have been if he had stayed with her instead of becoming his awful self, we turn with him down a dark alley and bang our heads against a wall and cry out, “Oh God, what have I become?!” Still, in Jesus’ love we find ourselves anew for the first time.
Exodus 20:1-17
In a rather fascinating moment of testimony, the Bible’s own internal evidence expresses that the writing down of important ideas or history as a sourcebook of revelatory insight was begun when the Israelites encountered God in a unique way at Mt. Sinai (Exodus 24:3-8). It was there, according to the pages of Exodus, that God and Moses collaborated to create written documents which would travel with the community that eventually became the settled nation of Israel.
“…Book of the covenant…” This is the beginning of the biblical writings, according to their earliest testimonies. So, it is imperative to understand more clearly what was taking place at Mt. Sinai, especially with reference to what a “book of the covenant” meant. To do that, we need to know something of the broader history of the second millennium B.C.
One of the dominant civilizations of the second millennium was the Hittite kingdom. Somewhat secluded in the mountainous plateaus of Anatolia (eastern central Turkey today), the Hittites shaped a vast web of international relations which, at the height of their power in the 14th century B.C., encompassed most of the ancient Near East. While they were companions of other similar civilizations that shared commonalities of culture, conquests, and cities, the Hittites linger in archaeological and historical studies for, among other things, their standardization of a written code used extensively in the normalization of international relations. In order to establish appropriate structures that would spell out the Hittites’ ongoing interactions with subjected peoples, a prescribed treaty form appears to have been widely used. The parameters of the typical Hittite suzerain-vassal covenant included:
This is why the word “covenant” becomes an essential term for all the rest of the literature that will be garnered into the collection eventually known as the Bible. The Bible begins with a covenant-making ceremony that produces certain documents, and then continues to grow as further explications of that covenant relationship are generated. One can read theology or ethics or politics or history out of the Bible, but one cannot do so while ignoring the essential role of the Sinai covenant between Yahweh and Israel. Even the idea of “kingdom,” so prevalent and pervasive in the Bible, is predicated on the covenant, for it is by way of the covenant that Israel becomes the dominion of the great king. The Kingdom of God is the context for all that is portrayed in the Bible, but the covenant is the administrative document through which the Kingdom takes hold and adheres in the human societies which form the front ranks of Yahweh’s citizenry.
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
It was a funeral I didn’t expect with a family I didn’t know, the aftermath of a tragedy I couldn’t comprehend. Two men drinking at a party, the younger man dating the older man’s daughter. A friendly scuffle? Or was it pent-up resentment that never before spied from the shadows? A gun. A mock “shooting match.” Scared friends and family. Another shot in the barn out back. A smoking weapon in the older man’s hand; the younger man dead on the ground.
Someone in our congregation took his friend from work to our worship services. For three months he and his common-law wife and children came on Sunday morning. He told me that he needed God. He told me that he found God at our church. He told me that his life was changing.
Now he sat steaming in my office. It was his brother that was murdered last night, and he wanted to kill the murderer! First things first, however. I was the only “priest” he knew. Could I officiate at the funeral?
The spattered blood of death became the splattered ink of chatter in our community, gossiped out of every media newsstand. The shooter was a white male, part of a prominent “old” family in our area, a black sheep lingering at the scandalous end of former glory. The dead man swaggered in on another, newer ethnic wave. Hidden behind his charismatic charm was a long record of drugs, theft, drunkenness and sexual promiscuity.
Of course, the plot thickened. The man with the gun turned out to be brother-in-law to one of my best friends, a member of our congregation and someone I met with monthly in an accountability group. Their stories differed from that of the young brother who asked me to speak at the funeral. My friend and his family emptied their life savings into a fund to buy the best legal counsel for their obviously innocent relative. The angry brother, new Christian and newcomer to our worship services, didn’t know the unspoken protocol of “assigned seating” in our worship space, and sat right in front of the woman whose brother shot his brother. Now the newcomer worshipped with great urgency of heart, while the couple behind him and his common-law family fumed worshiplessly.
The funeral was horribly difficult. I knew too much and not enough. Where is God in all of this?
When we gathered around the casket in the cemetery I spoke a few words of committal, offered prayer, and then encouraged the brother to speak. He wept. He moved from shoulder to shoulder, shuddering grief on every neck. As the casket was lowered into the earth he jumped down on it and blanketed it spread-eagle with his body. He wailed a litany of loss and sorrow and vengeance that pummeled away any other sound. The world grew chill and still.
Whenever I recall these tragic events, I am confounded again by the cross of Jesus. Somehow the manner in which God resolves the huge problem of sin and evil in our world is itself a mystery of pain and horror. Thankfully God’s wisdom is wiser than ours, and the outcome is the beauty of love and grace and a hurting world reborn in hope.
John 2:13-22
When the Israelites crafted the tabernacle at Mount Sinai (Exodus 25-40), Yahweh's Shekinah glory blazed down from heaven and filled the place with the divine presence.
God was at home with God's people, living with them, traveling with them, creating community with them. Later, when Israel was settled in the Promised Land, King Solomon built the magnificent Temple, replacing the worn out and ragged tabernacle.
At its dedication (1 Kings 8), Yahweh's Shekinah glory flooded the building, and all knew again that God was at home with God's people. But then politics and morality began to take many wrong turns.
By 588 B.C., the prophet Ezekiel had a nightmare vision of God's glory cloud gathering itself from the various rooms of the temple and sucked back up to heaven (Ezekiel 9-11). The owner had left the building! A short while later, Babylonian armies stormed Jerusalem's gates, wasted the city, and destroyed the temple.
It would be a long seventy years before a smaller, uglier version of the old grand divine palace of Yahweh was rebuilt by returning exiles (Ezra 1-6). Those who remembered Solomon's splendid structure wept. Most significantly, though, Yahweh's Shekinah glory light never returned!
Would God abandon God's house and God's people forever?
Then came Jesus! To the temple! “My house…!” he declared.
The owner of the house had come home! But things had fallen into chaos and disrepair.
Only the homeowner had the guts and authority to do some house cleaning. And, unfortunately, it would cost him everything to get the job done…
Application
Origen called it a ransom to the devil. Satan, he said, was the greatest fisherman of all times, snagging every flipping creature from the waters of this world. When his boat was filled to the limit, he headed for shore and a ravenous meal of consumption that would send us to his infernal bowels forever. But like any good fisherman, the devil snaked a troll line into the boat’s wake on the journey back to harbor. Suddenly the reel whizzed out in a furious tug. A giant fish had gone for the devil’s spinning lure!
Satan stopped rowing and fought the line. The fish at the other end was huge beyond belief. After playing it with practiced dexterity, the devil finally saw the fish near the gunwales. It was enormous! And, more than that, it was the Creator’s own first creation! It was the Son of God!
Now the devil was in a dilemma. He did not have room for the big fish in his boat. He could keep either his current catch or toss it aside and claim the prize of the day, but he couldn’t do both. Like any great fisherman, he chose the record breaker. Shoveling the little fish out of the boat, he managed to tease and taunt and gaff the big one over the edge and get it to flop heavily onto the deck. His catch would be the news of heaven and earth!
But as he wrestled his over-committed craft toward the docks, the trophy fish he prized gave a sudden wallop of its mighty tail, capsizing the boat, and escaping into the water. In an instant, the devil was left with nothing.
So, said Origen, is the story of Lent as it leads us to Good Friday, when Satan, the prince of the powers of this age, played his biggest hand, trading all of wicked humankind for the big prize of God’s own Son, and lost everything in the bargain. Why did Jesus have to die? Because it was the only way to get the rest of us free.
Alternative Application (Exodus 20:1-17)
The world around the slaves of Egypt was swirling with ominous tension. The "god" who owned them, called "The Pharaoh", was battling a seemingly more powerful Lord. Moses, a guy some of them remembered from decades earlier, had recently showed up, proclaiming the might and right of "Yahweh".
Moses talked about liberation. Moses said they would all be leaving Egypt soon. It was obvious that The Pharaoh was troubled, sometimes overly boastful these days, sometimes almost fearful. Strange things began to happen, weird changes and invasions: a bloody Nile, carpets of frogs, clouds of insects, painful sores, lethal hailstones, hordes of locusts... And then came the darkness, so creepy it seemed smothering to the Egyptians. Meanwhile the sun shown in Israelite Goshen.
But the crisis was climaxing. One day Moses told them to prepare a last meal before traveling. "We are out of here tonight!" And a strange command: "When you kill your lamb for supper, catch the blood and paint it over your door!" Things were already so unsettled that they all did it. That night became known as "Passover".
Many died across Egyptian communities, but the angel of death passed over Israelite homes, protected by the blood of the lamb. That night everything turned upside down, and they left Egypt as free people, led and protected by Moses' Yahweh.
Every year the Israelites would remember and celebrate, thanking God for deliverance and freedom and purpose and passion and life.
Even Jesus took his little band to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. They read the scriptures. They remembered the stories. They ate the meal. At the center was the roasted lamb, whose blood reminded them of safety and deliverance. But it was when the bread was broken and passed that Jesus said some incredible words: "This is my body..."
Why this bread? The bread of daily meals in Egypt had been prepared in the sourdough method, with a bit of a lump saved from yesterday's dough to stimulate yeast fermentation in today's mixture. Bread baked every day, each loaf connected directly, biologically to the dough of yesterday and the day before and the day before...
But at Passover, start anew, with a new lump of dough, disconnected from the past! Start your life, your identity all over again! You are new people, reborn! So Jesus took the new bread, the "unleavened bread" of Passover, and shared it with his disciples.
"This is my body..."
By the way, Jesus had been miraculously born, body untainted by the pandemic virus of sin that leaked into every fetus ever conceived! Jesus was a perfect do-over in the human race! And so was the family he fed that night!
"This is my body..."
Jesus does this in a variety of ways. Irenaeus thought that Jesus had to be at least fifty years old when he died, because the point of Jesus’ coming to earth was to go through all the stages of human life (fifty was certainly old age at the time!) in order to show us how to live and die correctly. We had lost our way. Only when we saw Jesus living our lives out of grace and love and courage, and even dying well, would we be able to do the same. He called Jesus’ work “recapitulation,” a replaying of human identity done right. What we observe most of Jesus on this Good Friday is his ability to die with courage and dignity, just as he had lived. When we see Jesus we buck up, and get our acts together, and recover the best of our humanity.
Of course, later theologians would further emphasize that exemplary character of Jesus’ life and death. Abelard saw in Jesus death the power of moral influence. We have grown complacent in our degradation, according to Abelard. Jesus comes among us and all we can see is his goody-goody character, and we despise him for it. We taunt him, trying to make him become a normal sinner like the rest of us. We tease him as if he were sub-human. When he refuses to play our dirty games, we get angry with him, and plot to get rid of him, and ultimately throw him up on a cross in despicable shame. Only when the dastardly deed is done, it is not he but we who are suddenly cut to the heart. We hear his words from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” and we are embarrassed beyond loss of face. We see in his reflection what we have become and come to know the ugliness of ourselves for the first time. His morality pierces our immorality and we must turn away. Like the dirty old man in one of O. Henry’s stories, the one who sees by lamplight the beautiful woman he once called friend, but lost because of the blackness of his own rotten character, and suddenly remembers what he could have been if he had stayed with her instead of becoming his awful self, we turn with him down a dark alley and bang our heads against a wall and cry out, “Oh God, what have I become?!” Still, in Jesus’ love we find ourselves anew for the first time.
Exodus 20:1-17
In a rather fascinating moment of testimony, the Bible’s own internal evidence expresses that the writing down of important ideas or history as a sourcebook of revelatory insight was begun when the Israelites encountered God in a unique way at Mt. Sinai (Exodus 24:3-8). It was there, according to the pages of Exodus, that God and Moses collaborated to create written documents which would travel with the community that eventually became the settled nation of Israel.
“…Book of the covenant…” This is the beginning of the biblical writings, according to their earliest testimonies. So, it is imperative to understand more clearly what was taking place at Mt. Sinai, especially with reference to what a “book of the covenant” meant. To do that, we need to know something of the broader history of the second millennium B.C.
One of the dominant civilizations of the second millennium was the Hittite kingdom. Somewhat secluded in the mountainous plateaus of Anatolia (eastern central Turkey today), the Hittites shaped a vast web of international relations which, at the height of their power in the 14th century B.C., encompassed most of the ancient Near East. While they were companions of other similar civilizations that shared commonalities of culture, conquests, and cities, the Hittites linger in archaeological and historical studies for, among other things, their standardization of a written code used extensively in the normalization of international relations. In order to establish appropriate structures that would spell out the Hittites’ ongoing interactions with subjected peoples, a prescribed treaty form appears to have been widely used. The parameters of the typical Hittite suzerain-vassal covenant included:
- A Preamble, which declared the identity and power of the ruler responsible for establishing this relationship.
- A Historical Prologue outlining the events leading up to this relationship, so that it could be set into a particular context and shaped by a cultural or religious frame.
- Stipulations, which specified the responsibilities and actions associated with the relationship.
- Curses and Blessings that evoked the negative and positive outcomes if this covenant were either breached or embraced by the parties.
- Witnesses, who were called to affirm the legitimacy of this covenant-making event, and who would then hold the parties accountable.
- Document Clauses, which described ratification ceremonies, specified future public recitations of the treaty, and noted the manner in which the copies of the covenant were to be kept.
- When God is first heard to speak from the rumbling mountain, the words are essentially the Preamble of a suzerain-vassal covenant: “I am the Lord your God” (Exodus 20:1).
- Immediately following is a brief Historical Prologue reminding the people of the events that precipitated this encounter: “… who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Exodus 20:2).
- Then comes a recitation of Stipulations that will shape the ethics, morality, and lifestyle of the community (Exodus 20:3–23:19).
- Following these are the Curses and Blessings (Exodus 23:20–33) of a typical covenant document. What is unusual in this case is that the order is reversed so that the blessings precede the curses. This provides the same rigors of participatory onus but gives it a freshness of grace and optimism that are often absent from the quick condemnation of the usual ordering.
- The Witnesses are the elders of the Israelite community (Exodus 24:1–2), bringing authentication of this process and these documents into the human realm, when it was often spiritualized in other covenants by listing local gods as moderators of these events.
- Finally, there is the Document Clause (Exodus 24:3–18) that spells out the ratification ceremony. It will be followed by a further reflection on the repositories of the covenant document copies once the tabernacle has been built.
This is why the word “covenant” becomes an essential term for all the rest of the literature that will be garnered into the collection eventually known as the Bible. The Bible begins with a covenant-making ceremony that produces certain documents, and then continues to grow as further explications of that covenant relationship are generated. One can read theology or ethics or politics or history out of the Bible, but one cannot do so while ignoring the essential role of the Sinai covenant between Yahweh and Israel. Even the idea of “kingdom,” so prevalent and pervasive in the Bible, is predicated on the covenant, for it is by way of the covenant that Israel becomes the dominion of the great king. The Kingdom of God is the context for all that is portrayed in the Bible, but the covenant is the administrative document through which the Kingdom takes hold and adheres in the human societies which form the front ranks of Yahweh’s citizenry.
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
It was a funeral I didn’t expect with a family I didn’t know, the aftermath of a tragedy I couldn’t comprehend. Two men drinking at a party, the younger man dating the older man’s daughter. A friendly scuffle? Or was it pent-up resentment that never before spied from the shadows? A gun. A mock “shooting match.” Scared friends and family. Another shot in the barn out back. A smoking weapon in the older man’s hand; the younger man dead on the ground.
Someone in our congregation took his friend from work to our worship services. For three months he and his common-law wife and children came on Sunday morning. He told me that he needed God. He told me that he found God at our church. He told me that his life was changing.
Now he sat steaming in my office. It was his brother that was murdered last night, and he wanted to kill the murderer! First things first, however. I was the only “priest” he knew. Could I officiate at the funeral?
The spattered blood of death became the splattered ink of chatter in our community, gossiped out of every media newsstand. The shooter was a white male, part of a prominent “old” family in our area, a black sheep lingering at the scandalous end of former glory. The dead man swaggered in on another, newer ethnic wave. Hidden behind his charismatic charm was a long record of drugs, theft, drunkenness and sexual promiscuity.
Of course, the plot thickened. The man with the gun turned out to be brother-in-law to one of my best friends, a member of our congregation and someone I met with monthly in an accountability group. Their stories differed from that of the young brother who asked me to speak at the funeral. My friend and his family emptied their life savings into a fund to buy the best legal counsel for their obviously innocent relative. The angry brother, new Christian and newcomer to our worship services, didn’t know the unspoken protocol of “assigned seating” in our worship space, and sat right in front of the woman whose brother shot his brother. Now the newcomer worshipped with great urgency of heart, while the couple behind him and his common-law family fumed worshiplessly.
The funeral was horribly difficult. I knew too much and not enough. Where is God in all of this?
When we gathered around the casket in the cemetery I spoke a few words of committal, offered prayer, and then encouraged the brother to speak. He wept. He moved from shoulder to shoulder, shuddering grief on every neck. As the casket was lowered into the earth he jumped down on it and blanketed it spread-eagle with his body. He wailed a litany of loss and sorrow and vengeance that pummeled away any other sound. The world grew chill and still.
Whenever I recall these tragic events, I am confounded again by the cross of Jesus. Somehow the manner in which God resolves the huge problem of sin and evil in our world is itself a mystery of pain and horror. Thankfully God’s wisdom is wiser than ours, and the outcome is the beauty of love and grace and a hurting world reborn in hope.
John 2:13-22
When the Israelites crafted the tabernacle at Mount Sinai (Exodus 25-40), Yahweh's Shekinah glory blazed down from heaven and filled the place with the divine presence.
God was at home with God's people, living with them, traveling with them, creating community with them. Later, when Israel was settled in the Promised Land, King Solomon built the magnificent Temple, replacing the worn out and ragged tabernacle.
At its dedication (1 Kings 8), Yahweh's Shekinah glory flooded the building, and all knew again that God was at home with God's people. But then politics and morality began to take many wrong turns.
By 588 B.C., the prophet Ezekiel had a nightmare vision of God's glory cloud gathering itself from the various rooms of the temple and sucked back up to heaven (Ezekiel 9-11). The owner had left the building! A short while later, Babylonian armies stormed Jerusalem's gates, wasted the city, and destroyed the temple.
It would be a long seventy years before a smaller, uglier version of the old grand divine palace of Yahweh was rebuilt by returning exiles (Ezra 1-6). Those who remembered Solomon's splendid structure wept. Most significantly, though, Yahweh's Shekinah glory light never returned!
Would God abandon God's house and God's people forever?
Then came Jesus! To the temple! “My house…!” he declared.
The owner of the house had come home! But things had fallen into chaos and disrepair.
Only the homeowner had the guts and authority to do some house cleaning. And, unfortunately, it would cost him everything to get the job done…
Application
Origen called it a ransom to the devil. Satan, he said, was the greatest fisherman of all times, snagging every flipping creature from the waters of this world. When his boat was filled to the limit, he headed for shore and a ravenous meal of consumption that would send us to his infernal bowels forever. But like any good fisherman, the devil snaked a troll line into the boat’s wake on the journey back to harbor. Suddenly the reel whizzed out in a furious tug. A giant fish had gone for the devil’s spinning lure!
Satan stopped rowing and fought the line. The fish at the other end was huge beyond belief. After playing it with practiced dexterity, the devil finally saw the fish near the gunwales. It was enormous! And, more than that, it was the Creator’s own first creation! It was the Son of God!
Now the devil was in a dilemma. He did not have room for the big fish in his boat. He could keep either his current catch or toss it aside and claim the prize of the day, but he couldn’t do both. Like any great fisherman, he chose the record breaker. Shoveling the little fish out of the boat, he managed to tease and taunt and gaff the big one over the edge and get it to flop heavily onto the deck. His catch would be the news of heaven and earth!
But as he wrestled his over-committed craft toward the docks, the trophy fish he prized gave a sudden wallop of its mighty tail, capsizing the boat, and escaping into the water. In an instant, the devil was left with nothing.
So, said Origen, is the story of Lent as it leads us to Good Friday, when Satan, the prince of the powers of this age, played his biggest hand, trading all of wicked humankind for the big prize of God’s own Son, and lost everything in the bargain. Why did Jesus have to die? Because it was the only way to get the rest of us free.
Alternative Application (Exodus 20:1-17)
The world around the slaves of Egypt was swirling with ominous tension. The "god" who owned them, called "The Pharaoh", was battling a seemingly more powerful Lord. Moses, a guy some of them remembered from decades earlier, had recently showed up, proclaiming the might and right of "Yahweh".
Moses talked about liberation. Moses said they would all be leaving Egypt soon. It was obvious that The Pharaoh was troubled, sometimes overly boastful these days, sometimes almost fearful. Strange things began to happen, weird changes and invasions: a bloody Nile, carpets of frogs, clouds of insects, painful sores, lethal hailstones, hordes of locusts... And then came the darkness, so creepy it seemed smothering to the Egyptians. Meanwhile the sun shown in Israelite Goshen.
But the crisis was climaxing. One day Moses told them to prepare a last meal before traveling. "We are out of here tonight!" And a strange command: "When you kill your lamb for supper, catch the blood and paint it over your door!" Things were already so unsettled that they all did it. That night became known as "Passover".
Many died across Egyptian communities, but the angel of death passed over Israelite homes, protected by the blood of the lamb. That night everything turned upside down, and they left Egypt as free people, led and protected by Moses' Yahweh.
Every year the Israelites would remember and celebrate, thanking God for deliverance and freedom and purpose and passion and life.
Even Jesus took his little band to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. They read the scriptures. They remembered the stories. They ate the meal. At the center was the roasted lamb, whose blood reminded them of safety and deliverance. But it was when the bread was broken and passed that Jesus said some incredible words: "This is my body..."
Why this bread? The bread of daily meals in Egypt had been prepared in the sourdough method, with a bit of a lump saved from yesterday's dough to stimulate yeast fermentation in today's mixture. Bread baked every day, each loaf connected directly, biologically to the dough of yesterday and the day before and the day before...
But at Passover, start anew, with a new lump of dough, disconnected from the past! Start your life, your identity all over again! You are new people, reborn! So Jesus took the new bread, the "unleavened bread" of Passover, and shared it with his disciples.
"This is my body..."
By the way, Jesus had been miraculously born, body untainted by the pandemic virus of sin that leaked into every fetus ever conceived! Jesus was a perfect do-over in the human race! And so was the family he fed that night!
"This is my body..."
