The Fourth Sunday in Lent
JOSHUA 5:9-12: Sometimes the shortest lections that we have need the longest explanations to make them clear. This lection is one of these, and I will take it word for word, or phrase for phrase, in interpreting it.
"Joshua" is the first word of the text to stand before us. "Joshua" means "Yahweh saves." The name "Jesus" is related to it. Joshua is the Hebrew form of the name, Jesus the Aramaic form. Joshua has four roles in Hebrew history. He is Moses' successor, a man of the generation after Moses, prepared personally by Moses to take this leadership role. He is the one who, after the death of Moses, brought the people across the Jordan and into the Land of Promise. He is the one who led the battles that won a solid foothold for Israel in Canaan. Finally, he is the one under whom the covenant between God and Israel is fully affirmed, and the new entity, Israel, is set up as a federation of tribes who promise to organize their total life around the creed that "God, alone, rules."
Total life includes religious life, economic life, political life, legal life, cultural life, military organization. How do you organize each of these institutions of the common life of Israel to reflect their foundational belief that "God, only, rules"? This is the overwhelming question to which the remainder of the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings address themselves.
"Today" said the Lord, "I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt." "The disgrace of Egypt" consisted in two matters.
It has to do with the slavery of the people and the resultant poverty that came with it. It may refer also to the disobedience of the people to the clear commands of Yahweh; how could God deliver them if they constantly disobeyed what God said to them?
"So the place is called 'Gilgal' to this day." At the time this narrative was written, "Gilgal" was merely a monument, a stone monument placed on the Canaanite side of the Jordan River near present-day Jericho to commemorate great events that were associated with this site. Whatever city had been there in an earlier time had been erased by time. Nothing but this cairn of stones still existed.
But great events had occurred there.
This was the site where the tribes from Egypt stepped on the Promised Land. Forty years, a full generation's time, they had lived in the wilderness between Sinai and the Jordan. Now they were about to break out of the wilderness and enter Canaan for the first time since their father Jacob had left the land. The event of entering the land at the end of the exodus is related to the crossing of the sea at its beginning. The Jordan "dried up" and the Israelites crossed it on dry land, just as the "Sea" had dried up and their forebears crossed in on the way into the wilderness.
They remembered Gilgal as the site of the first passover that the people of Israel had performed in Canaan. We will speak of that in a moment.
"Gilgal" was related to the history of David. Samuel anointed Saul as king at Gilgal (1 Sam 11:14-15). Samuel later deposed Saul because Saul had violated a battle command of Yahweh. At Gilgal Samuel anointed David king in Saul's place (1 Sam 13:8-14). Gilgal is mentioned several times as an Israelite shrine in the eighth- or seventh-century BCE texts of both Hosea and Amos (Hos 4:15; 9:15; 12:11; Amos 4:4; 5:5) and in Mic 6:5. That cairn of twelve stones, one for each tribe, represented great moments in the history of Israel and Judah.
The passover, which occupies the remainder of the account, probably comes from the Priestly source that appears regularly throughout this history of Israel. "On the fourteenth day of the month," Passover begins. The manna that fed the Israelites for forty years in the desert ceases. It is replaced by the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain. How do they get the grain, having just arrived? As invaders, they take it, just as they take the land itself.
All in all, this passage speaks of endings and beginnings. It is the ending of the work of Moses, the beginning of the work of Joshua. It is the end of the trek through the wilderness and the beginning of life in the Land of Promise. It is the end of dependence upon the manna of the wilderness and the beginning of dependence upon the passover as a unitive force in Israel and a recital of God's goodness to the people. It is the close of an old day in the life of the Hebrews and the beginning of God's new day at the head of the people of Israel.
PSALM 32 tells of penitence in the face of sin. This is one of a handful of penitential psalms in the Psalter. These psalms were used, most likely, when the Israelite went to the altar to make his confession and to seek relief from his sins and transgressions.
Walter Brueggemann in his Theology of the Old Testament (667-668) reminds us that, for the Israelite, going to the altar was no mere ritual act. These "sin offerings" (the NRSV calls them "offerings of well-being") were, to quote Brueggemann, "gestures of repentance, regret, acknowledgment and resolve to return to a viable relationship with Yahweh. Israel took sin and alienation seriously but was not morbid about them. . . . Because of Yahweh's gracious provision of these practices, sin and guilt could be handled . . . and overcome." To be effective, Brueggemann adds, acknowledgment of the failure had to be voiced before the priest, and a substantial act of reparation would have to be made toward the offended neighbor. Only then could the relationship between penitent, neighbor, and God be restored.
The psalmist passed through at least four moods as he composed his psalm. The psalmist begins with a statement that appears to be at least one step removed from personal experience: "Happy are those whose transgressions are forgiven." He then describes the "before and after" of his own life: before he confessed, he was on the verge of death, but after his confession God moved to relieve his distress. He then becomes a teacher and admonishes his hearers in a didactic manner: "I will instruct you" as to what you are to do in similar situations. Finally, in the last verse, he removes the various masks he had been wearing and simply rejoices in God: "Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous. Shout for joy, all you upright in heart."
In verses 1 and 2, the psalmist penetrates to the heart of sin and calls it by many names.
Sin is transgression, willful disobedience to the divine command.
Sin is iniquity, guilt unexpiated.
Sin is deceit, trying to excuse or palliate our offenses and evade the obligation to clear ourselves of guilt.
Sin is to miss the mark of life, aim at the wrong things.
By whatever name, the psalmist says, it must be "lifted away, covered over, canceled from the records of God."
The experience described in verses 3 through 5 is very real. The psalmist tried to keep his sin hidden, and it did not work. His guilt was destructive: "My body wasted away, I groaned all day long, my strength was shriveled up, my life sap was changed." Then he confessed his sin to the Lord, and the Lord forgave his guilt. Well before the psychologies of the twentieth century, this psalmist knew that body, mind, and spirit are one, and to be sick in one aspect means to be sick in all; that all healing is wholistic, or it is not healing at all. The words of this psalmist has brought true healing to many. (2/21/99) 4-25-99
SECOND CORINTHIANS 5:16-21: "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. . . . We are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us." This passage is the spiritual and moral climax of Paul's letters. The spiritual point is that the spirit of God is the spirit of reconciliation. The moral climax is that we are to exhibit a similar behavior in all our actions toward one another.
Jesus, above all, shows us what reconciliation is. On the cross -- at the height of his personal pain from the nails in his wrists to the wound in his side, from the asphyxiating weight of his head dropping to his breast, from being abandoned by his friends to his perceived abandonment by God -- Jesus cried out, "Father, forgive them." Before the cross, when Jesus was in the courtroom of Jerusalem, his disciple Simon Peter had declared that he never knew Jesus. When Jesus returned from the grave, among the first he sought out was this same Simon Peter. In the Garden of Gethsemane, all his disciples deserted him and fled. Even in his own death Jesus did not desert them. At the moment of resurrection, he came to those same disciples, met them on a mountain in Galilee, and declared that they should preach and baptize in his name. Reconciliation as seen in Jesus is restoring to friendship those who have broken friendship with him. "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself."
My own definition of reconciliation is very close to this. The Greek word itself, katalassete, comes from the act of balancing a bank book. When you total up the two sides of the account, what you have spent versus what you had to spend, the two columns have to agree with each other, and troubles a-plenty result if we cannot do this. That is "reconciling one's bank book." Reconciliation in human affairs is very close to this. It is putting together that which is broken, with no parts left over. It is the last phrase, "with no parts left over," that distinguishes reconciliation from all other kinds of human activity. Tolerance - accommodation - compromise - all these are other forms of activity for putting together that which has been broken. In tolerance we merely decide to put up with the other person's foibles. In accommodation, we make changes in our own behavior that makes us more acceptable to someone else. In compromise we agree with our opponent that both of us will make certain changes in our way of acting, and then we agree to disagree about all the rest. These activities can be good in themselves, and they make it possible for people to live with one another. But reconciliation transcends all the rest. Recon-ciliation means putting together that which is broken, until there are no parts left over.
The Presbyterian Church put reconciliation at its heart when it formulated and adopted what it calls its "Confession of 1967." This confession was set out in the divisive decade of the 1960's, when matters of race, and war, and gender, and generational strife, and disparities between rich and poor were at their worst. At that time the Presbyterian Church called upon its members to be parties to reconciliation.
"In Jesus Christ God is reconciling the world to himself," said the Confession. "Jesus Christ is God with us. He is the Eternal Son of the Father, who became a human being and lived among us to fulfill the work of reconciliation. He is present in the church by the power of the Holy Spirit to continue and complete his mission. This work of God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is the foundation of all confessional statements about God, humanity, and the world. Therefore the church calls us to be reconciled to God and to one another. (9.07, slightly emended).
"The life, death, resurrection, and promised coming of Jesus Christ," says C67 in another important passage, 9.32, "has set the pattern for the church's mission. Christ's life as a human being involves the church in the common life of humanity. His service to us commits the church to work for every form of human well-being. His suffering makes the church sensitive to all the sufferings of humankind so that we see the face of Christ in the faces of those in every kind of need. His crucifixion discloses to the church God's judgment on our inhumanity to one another and the awful consequences of our own complicity in injustice. In the power of the risen Christ and the hope of his coming the church sees the promise of God's renewal of our life in society and of God's victory over all wrong. The church follows this pattern in the form of its life and in the method of its action. So to live and serve is to confess Christ as Lord."
The proper way for Christians to act toward one another is to work for the reconciliation of humankind in all our relationships -- in home and family, in class and race, in our national identities and our related humanness -- until there are no parts left over to the human conflicts that divide and harm us.
"If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. Everything old" - bickering, enmities, divisions, hurtfulness, war - "is passed away. The new has come" -- the reconciling love of God in Christ that is not satisfied until all that has been broken in human relations has been made whole again, with no parts left over. "All this is from God, who reconciled us through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. . . . So, we are ambassadors for Christ" -- certified representatives of the kingdom of Christ -- "God making his appeal to the world through us."
LUKE 15:1-2, 11-32: Paul's appeal for reconciliation is followed in our lectionary by Jesus' great story of reconciliation. The two sons of the story are each alienated from their father. The father's action moves them to reconciliation to him, if not yet to each other.
Attention focuses first on the younger son. What he did is inexcusable. He decided to leave home. He asked for his share of the property. He was breaking the family ties and treating his father as though he were already dead. Jesus reported the father's response to this. "He divided his life [not "property" but "life" bi'ov bios] between them." When the property is divided, the younger son has no further claim upon his father.
He went to a far country. It was a gentile country because pigs were raised there, and no Jew would raise swine. He did what he had intended to do: he lived it up. He did what he did not intend to do: he squandered his property in dissolute living. A severe famine hit this country, and the boy - he was probably under 20 years old, since he had not yet married, and young men married at that age - was hungry. He hired himself out to a citizen of the country. He was sent into the field to feed the pigs. He became hungry. He was even tempted to eat the pods that the pigs ate, because no one gave him anything.
Then - he came to himself. His mind became clear, and he recognized what he had done to himself. He recalled that at home even his father's slaves lived better than he did. He developed a speech which he would recite to his father: "Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight I am no longer worthy to be called your son. (The ambiguity in English is contained in the Greek.) Treat me like one of your slaves." Saying it over and again, he fearfully headed home.
He need not have feared. His father was waiting for him; his father was looking for him. While he was a great way off, said Jesus, his father saw him. He rushed out to greet him, laid aside the dignity that every Jewish father cultivated, and ran to meet him. He put his arms around him and kissed him.. The son recited his well-prepared speech, but his father would have none of it. "Get out a robe," he instructed his slaves, "the best one, the one he used to wear. Put a ring on his finger, and shoes on his feet" - let all the neighbors know that the boy once more belonged to the family. "Bring out the fatted calf and let us celebrate. This son of mine was dead (so he had treated his family and, legally, so the family was supposed to treat him); he was lost, and he is found."
The older son wanted to treat him in this legal way. He was coming in from the field when he heard music and dancing. He called a slave and asked to be told what was going on. The slave said, "This brother of yours has returned home, and your father has killed the fatted calf - the one always kept for celebrations like this - because he has him home safe and sound." The older son was so upset that he refused to enter the house.
The father came out to him. The older son poured out all his complaints. "I have worked like a slave for you for years - I have never disobeyed your command - I never even got a young goat to celebrate with my friends - but this son of yours came back and you gave him a feast - he had lived up his property with prostitutes. You killed the fatted calf for him."
The father spoke. "Son, you are always with me. All I have is yours" - that was true, the younger son had signed away his claim upon the father. "But we had to celebrate. He was dead - he is alive! He was lost - he is found!" Reconciliation always ends in joy, resurrection ends in celebration.
Did the older son celebrate? We are not told. All we can surmise from the story is that the reconciliation was incomplete. Son was reconciled to father. Was brother reconciled to brother? There are Old Testament precedents that cut both ways. Esau was reconciled to Jacob. Jacob was reconciled to Joseph. Isaac was not reconciled to his father Abraham nor to his brother Ishmael. Putting human relationships together again with no parts left over is exceedingly difficult. God can accomplish this; can God's people show similar grace?