From
oppression to hope – exiles to home, the hungry to harvests, the Law to faith,
a rich consecration for death.
This Sunday in
Lent continues to anticipate great NEW
things that contrast awesomely with OLD things.
The prophetic
reading has the prophet of the exile proclaiming God’s imminent new work
that will outdo the exodus as a past marvelous deed of redemption.
The great Red
Sea event of the exodus is alluded to – not recognizable unless
you know the old story. The Song of the Red
Sea had exclaimed,
Pharaoh’s
chariots and his army [God] cast into the sea;
his picked officers were sunk in the Red
Sea .
The floods covered
them;
they went down into the depths like a
stone. (Exodus 15:4-5, NRSV).
Here, in the prophet’s time, the
Lord speaks of God’s characteristic action:
… who makes a way in the sea,
a path in the mighty waters,
who brings out
chariot and horse,
army and warrior;
they lie down, they
cannot rise,
they are extinguished, quenched like a
wick… (verses 16-17).
The message now
uttered by this Lord is, “I am about to do a new thing…I will make a way in the
wilderness / and rivers in the desert” (verse 19).
This kind of
speech is ecstatic; it speaks of a sublime reality that seems to
contrast sharply with the concrete world of second generation migrants (exiles in Babylon).
The prophet’s
audience in Babylon
The prophet’s
hearers are urged to perceive the hand of God in the world movements of their
historic moment. (The Persian Cyrus is
about to conquer their overlord Babylon BCE .)
They are urged to live at the peak and to know that miracles are indeed
possible, because the one mighty Lord of the universe is recruiting them for
renewed servanthood.
They live – the
prophet insists – on the verge of the great transition from the old things to
the new things.
Psalm 126.
The Psalm reading
continues the ecstatic speech of the prophet and speaks of the Lord’s
great new deed either as an accomplished fact or as a certainty.
The Lord has acted
to restore the fortunes of Zion
The second part of
the psalm (verses 4-6) is more in accord with the hopeful but uncertain
situation of the prophet’s audience in Babylon – though the setting here is
definitely in the old country of Judah, now awaiting renewal and
restoration.
Here, all hope is
focused on the grain crop. As the
wadis (dry ravines with short rain spell) of the southern drylands
provide a brief period of rapid growth for barley crops (verse 4), so the
farmers look forward to a joyful harvest following the sowing in the rainy
season.
May those who sow in tears
reap with shouts of joy.
Those who go out
weeping,
bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy,
carrying their sheaves (verses 5-6).
The community’s
hope has been restored, and they sing of the impending joy of bringing in these
sheaves!
The Epistle
reading also presents a contrast between before and after, though the contrast
is not in the physical landscape but in the spiritual landscape
of the Judean apostle (Paul). The
contrast is between one who was once perfect in the Law but now is justified
only by faith.
This is one of the
key autobiographical passages in
Paul’s letters. Here he lists his
high-achievement credentials as an upstanding Pharisee in order to contrast
that with his status “in Christ.” Paul
was circumcised, one of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin (from
whom an earlier Saul had come, I Samuel 9:1-2), a native-born Hebrew, a
Pharisee in observance of the Torah, so zealous in his Judaism that he was an
early persecutor of the Jesus followers, and one justified before God by his
observance of the Law. This was the
Before.
As for the After,
all of these outstanding credentials, visible to people, Paul counts as loss,
compared to being “in Christ” (verse 7).
What Paul wants,
instead of these honorable credentials in Judaism, is “to gain Christ and be
found in him…” (verses 8-9, NRSV). “I
want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his
sufferings by becoming like him in his death…” (verse 10). He wants what is elsewhere called dying with Christ. “We know that our old self was crucified with
him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be
enslaved to sin” (Romans 6:6).
From a
top-achieving religious champion Paul is content to trudge a path to suffering
and death because that is the path of his life-transforming Lord, Jesus the
Christ.
The Gospel reading
presents us with a symbolic act sanctifying the transition from one life
stage to another – life to death.
All four Gospels
have a story of a woman who anoints Jesus with oil or expensive ointment, a
woman whom the bystanders criticize. In
John, as in Mark and Matthew, the anointing is just before the passion
narrative and anticipates Jesus’ death.
It is anointing for burial in advance of the event. (Luke’s story is set in earlier times when
Jesus was hosted by a rather uppity Pharisee, Luke
7:36-50
The woman is
criticized, in the version attached to the passion, because the ointment is
very expensive (costing nearly a year’s salary for a worker, say around $35,000
in our current economy) – and the money should have been spent for the poor!
(John 12:5; Mark 14:5
In defense of this
criticism (from Judas in John, but from others in Mark and Matthew), it can be
said that this was indeed an extravagant demonstration. The only defense would be that an
unparalleled occasion was at hand. This,
of course, is the defense Jesus makes for her.
Nothing less than his own death is the occasion. This is a moment that overrides all other
considerations, even the most worthy act of sedakáh, righteousness or
charity.
The John narrative ends with one
of the more abused sayings in the Christian tradition. “You always have the poor with you,
but…”
The passage provokes a serious
consideration for us: How can the
urgency of these critical last moments in Jesus’ life be weighed against the
continuing needs of the suffering poor?
The question persists in the subsequent life of Jesus’ followers – for
about two thousand years – so far.
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