Readings

What a table today’s readings set! Let’s notice, briefly, a couple of the entrees before moving to Jesus’ parable.

Toward the end of Revelation John hears this from the throne: “See, I am making all things new” (21:5). All things new: not a bad heading for our readings from Joshua and 2^nd Corinthians. Joshua: the transition from the wilderness to the promised land, with the celebration of Passover making a fitting bookend with the first Passover on the night of Israel’s exodus from Egypt. 2^nd Corinthians: “everything has become new!”

‘New’ has mostly positive connotations in our culture. Ironically, the opposite is true for ‘change’. “How many Episcopalians does it take to change a lightbulb?” “CHANGE???” We like ‘new’, we dislike ‘change’, and that makes most areas of our life more complicated than necessary. Minimally, it might help to recognize that the change to which God invites us in Lent is in service of achieving the new.

Repentance. Our psalm highlights its importance. When we set the psalm next to Jesus’ parable two things become, I think, evident. First, first while repentance is necessary, the decisive element is God’s/the Father’s character. All the repentance we could muster wouldn’t do any good unless our Father were disposed to run to it. That repentance is necessary, consider what would have happened had the younger son gone to the distant country, made a killing, and swaggered back: “Dad, this place is really a dump; let me help you out.” That would have required a different response from the father.

Second, our prejudices can make it really hard for us to recognize who needs to repent. That, ironically, is baked into the traditional title for the parable, “The Prodigal Son,” for even a cursory reading reveals that it’s the older son who needs to repent. But no: put them in a line-up and we predictably point to the younger son as the one needing repentance. And this despite Luke’s stage-setting: “all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling.” Anyhow, if we’re looking for an opportunity midst the solemnity of Lent to take ourselves less seriously, here’s an opportunity.

Jesus’ parable. This morning I’m hearing the parable in the company of Ken Bailey and George Caird. Ken Bailey’s Jesus through Middle Eastern eyes helps me hear the parable more clearly. “Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.” In that culture, hard to think of more insulting words, for property is divided after the owner’s death, so that the son’s request says, essentially, you’re of more value to me dead than alive. And later in the parable: “his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran…” Middle Eastern fathers don’t run. In a pinch one might walk sedately, but, more appropriately, remain unmoved as the lower-status party approaches. How this father humbles himself, and doesn’t seem to mind a bit!

The father in the parable is one of Jesus’ clearest pictures of our heavenly Father. And it’s worth noticing that Jesus here is simply echoing his Scripture’s (our Old Testament’s) pictures. Some of us have been reading Isaiah in these weeks; here are two quick excerpts from the divine speeches:

You have not bought me sweet cane with money,
or satisfied me with the fat of your sacrifices.
But you have burdened me with your sins;
you have wearied me with your iniquities. (Isa. 43:24)

Listen to me, O house of Jacob,
all the remnant of the house of Israel,
who have been borne by me from your birth,
carried from the womb;
even to your old age I am he,
even when you turn gray I will carry you.
I have made, and I will bear;
I will carry and will save. (Isa. 46:3-4)

As today’s psalm ends:

Be glad, you righteous, and rejoice in the Lord;
shout for joy, all who are true of heart.

And what is it to be “righteous” or “true of heart” if not to be increasingly recognizing and reflecting God’s character? I’ve snuck a couple ideas into that question: here they are; see what you think of them. First, “increasingly recognizing and reflecting:” “righteous” and “true of heart” don’t do well standing still. They involve growth, newness, even the c-word (‘change’). Second, “righteous” and “true of heart” are relational, depending on our relationship with the Lord. Without that relationship, strange things can happen. Which brings us to the older brother.

We naturally feel some sympathy for the older brother. After the division of the property in a sense it’s his fattened calf that’s being served. And yet, oddly enough, the figure the older brother most closely resembles is the accuser, the satan. That demands, I think, a bit of a digression.

We first meet the Adversary (‘satan’ is simply a transcription of that Hebrew word) at the beginning of Job. It’s a good guess that he’s patterned after the agent provocateur in the Persian court whose role was to sniff out disloyalty before it became dangerous. He plays a similar role in one of Zechariah’s visions: “Then he showed me the high priest Joshua [dressed, we learn, in filthy cloths] standing before the angel of the LORD, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him” (3:1). He’s all about justice. Here’s George Caird in his New Testament Theology:

Yet even at this early stage of his history we can see where his one-sided emphasis on justice is to lead him. In both stories he is found arguing against God, whose holiness he is so anxious to defend. It cannot be said of him that he does not will the death of sinners, or that he is hoping that they would turn from their wickedness and live. He is a rigorous legalist, a prosecuting attorney, who must have a conviction, and who is satisfied only with a capital sentence. If the evidence does not give him a good case, he is prepared to manufacture new evidence by provoking Job into mortal sin.

And like the Adversary the older brother wants justice, and this single-minded focus turns him against the father.

What if Caird’s description governed our use of words like ‘diabolical’ or ‘satanic’—the single-minded pursuit of justice without compassion?

We imagine the Adversary encouraging people to do bad things, and that’s true enough. The Bible’s portrayals might encourage us to imagine him spending as much time saying things like “If you did that you can’t be worth much!” or “That person/that group doesn’t deserve compassion,” that is, channeling the older brother.

I wonder if the Bible doesn’t talk about the Adversary also to help us bring God’s character into focus. Justice is important to God, but not at the expense of compassion. The psalmist is counting on that! Gustavo Gutiérrez gets it right: “The world of retribution—and not of temporal retribution only—is not where God dwells; at most God visits it.” And one important reason that the Bible repeatedly says “Fear not” and “Be glad, you righteous, and rejoice in the Lord” is that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is not this Adversary.

We Christians use the word ‘God’ a lot. But what images accompany that word? Today’s parable invites us to let Jesus’ image of God sink deep into our imaginations.

Readings

Today’s lessons invite us to contemplate and enact repentance from a variety of perspectives. Before diving in, a reminder: repenting, turning, changing course, involves more than feelings. If I’ve got my foot on someone’s back, repentance isn’t simply about feeling badly. (“Oh, what a terrible person I am to have my foot on their back!”) It’s about moving my feet. So in the spirit of those old public service announcements “It’s 10:00 pm; do you know where your children are?” during Lent the Church asks us: “It’s Lent; do you know where your feet are?”

The Gospel: Jesus’ fig tree parable is a riff on Isaiah’s vineyard parable: the Lord looking for fruit and coming away empty handed.
“For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel,
and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting;
he expected justice, but saw bloodshed;
righteousness, but heard a cry!”
God engages with us for our own sake and for the sake of our neighbors. Isaiah’s “justice and righteousness:” we might understand this as describing a community that is life-giving for all its participants, in contrast to the communities our world tends to create, where “life-giving” varies depending on where we are on the totem pole. The last thing God needs is another totem pole, this one with a cross on the top. Lent reminds us that fruit is important, that folk experiencing our parishes as life-giving is important, that our neighbors encountering here an alternative to our society’s disfunctions is important.

The Epistle: it would be easy for Paul’s words to conjure up memories of touchy disciplinarians: behave or God’s gonna wop you. But what’s at stake here is the Corinthians’ and our capacity to remember what story we’re in: we really are bound for the promised land. And if that’s where we’re bound, the detours Paul lists (idolatry, immorality, etc.) lose their attraction. Lent invites us to recall that what story we’re in is an important question, and that every day we’re barraged by competing answers. “God helps those who help themselves.” “The one who dies with the most toys wins.” This is why the Book of Common Prayer begins with the Daily Office, readings and prayers for use throughout the day: remembering which story we’re in takes mindfulness. “The earth is the LORD’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it” (Ps. 24:1). Not Russia’s or America’s or Coca Cola’s or Google’s. Perhaps I need to hear that in the morning before turning to CNN, Fox, or MSNBC. Lent’s a time to experiment with ways of nurturing that mindfulness.

Exodus: To hear this story in Lent means, I think, to pay attention to the backstory. Why is Moses tending sheep in Midian? Moses, a Hebrew, had been raised in the Egyptian court. At some point he figured out that he’s a Hebrew, and since the Egyptians had the Hebrews enslaved, knowing that he was a Hebrew must have been a constant source of strong and conflicting emotions: shame, anger… One day he sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew—and kills the Egyptian. The deed becomes known, Moses has to flee, and that’s how this prince of Egypt ends up herding sheep in Midian far from Egypt. If Moses’ career in Egypt were rated the way hotels are rated, he might end up with half a star.

And here’s God telling Moses to go back. That is, of course, for Israel’s sake. But it’s also for Moses’ sake. In Midian Moses has an important part of himself walled off, the key thrown away. There’s unfinished business. This may have been the sort of thing Henry David Thoreau was thinking about when he said “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”—and maybe also in our parishes. And God comes to Moses: let’s revisit that; let’s see what we can do together. Lent is about noticing the occasional burning bush that might signal God inviting us to return to those sites of failure and loss, those sites we have under strict quarantine. That returning can be some of the more difficult work of Lent.

Finally, our psalm.
“O God, you are my God; eagerly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you,
as in a barren and dry land where there is no water.”
Our culture encourages us to imagine God as the one who’s always saying “no.” That’s not a god we’re going to seek, thirst for, faint for. But, as Paul reminds us elsewhere, in Jesus “every one of God’s promises is a ‘Yes’” (2 Cor. 1:20). This God desires for us more than we can ask or imagine. Lent is about reencountering this God.

The psalmist’s “Under the shadow of your wings I will rejoice:” the psalmist may have had a static image in mind. But between God’s call to Moses to go back to Egypt and Paul’s evocation of Israel traveling through the wilderness, we might recognize that “the shadow of your wings” is often a moving shadow. To stay under that shadow we may need to get up and move.

Readings

I wonder how Zechariah, Elizabeth, Mary, Joseph, Simeon, Anna, John and Jesus (the folk in Luke’s first chapters) heard our reading from Deuteronomy. It’s a celebration of a good harvest and of God’s deliverance in the exodus and gift of the good land. But that was hardly their experience: Israel had spent centuries in the belly of foreign empires. In Ezra’s words: “Here we are, slaves to this day– slaves in the land that you gave to our ancestors to enjoy its fruit and its good gifts. Its rich yield goes to the kings whom you have set over us because of our sins; they have power also over our bodies and over our livestock at their pleasure, and we are in great distress” (Neh. 9:36-37).

Hearing that Deuteronomic text probably involved some combination of pain over what had been lost and hope that God’s mighty hand and outstretched arm could again intervene. That’s the hope for a new exodus, a new Davidic heir, a new deliverance expressed in Mary’s Magnificat and Simeon’s prayer.

I wonder how they heard Psalm 91. “…my God in whom I put my trust.” Trust is tricky. Encouraged by Isaiah, King Hezekiah trusted, and God delivered Jerusalem from the Assyrian army. Just over a century later Jerusalem, ignoring Jeremiah’s calls to stop exploiting the poor, trusted that God would again deliver Jerusalem (“The Temple of the Lord! The Temple of the Lord!”), and watched the Babylonian army destroy Jerusalem and dethrone the Davidic dynasty. The Maccabean heroes started out proclaiming their trust in God, and ended up as fat and happy clients of the Roman Empire. Trust is tricky.

Over to Jesus. Luke tells us that while Jesus was praying after his baptism “the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’” (3:21-22), which rather sounds as though it’s heralding that new exodus, that new Davidic heir, that new deliverance. So, no pressure.

What does trust mean for Jesus? That, after forty days of fasting, begins to be sorted out in an interview with the diabolos, the ‘accuser’ or ‘slanderer’, that cynic who assumes the worst about humanity.

There are many ways of unpacking what’s going on in that interview, what’s at stake, and over the years you’ve probably heard many of them. So, with no interest in reinventing the wheel, let me simply recall a couple of them.

“Son of God.” If we focus on its Davidic/Messianic dimension, the interview is about how this son of David will operate. The editors of the David stories in Samuel noticed the moments in which David had the choice of receiving or grasping. The former, receiving, e.g., kingship, turned out well. David let the kingship come to him on God’s terms, and repeatedly refused to kill Saul.  The latter, grasping, e.g., Bathsheba, not so well. The interview easily reads as offering Jesus the same choice: are the kingdoms of the world something Jesus is going to grasp, or receive from the Father—in the Father’s time and way?

Grasp or receive. A question for Jesus, but also for Jesus’ followers. So there’s some logic to reading this text the first Sunday of Lent. Where might we notice that we’re grasping? “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD” (Isa. 55:8). What are the situations in which we judge that to be a defect in God?

Let’s pull back the camera a little. “The devil is in the details,” we say. And in this interview the devil wants to get the details right, because with a little fine tuning even the presence of Jesus, the Son of God, need not disturb the status quo. And as long as Jesus’ church doesn’t disturb the status quo, doesn’t embody an alternative to the lies and jockeying for power that deform our institutions, the devil’s content.

We might put it this way. I imagine Jesus hearing Mary’s song repeatedly as he was growing up:

He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;

Jesus recognizes—with the help of Deuteronomy, the source of all his replies—that the devil’s suggestions would put him on a sidetrack, set him up to be no more than an improved model of King Herod. From this perspective, the text—with the Magnificat as the audio bed—invites us to remember our calling. God’s mighty hand and outstretched arm—Jesus—intervenes not simply so that we survive, but so that we help heal our world.

Not simply so that we survive, but so that we help heal our world.