The Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
HOSEA 11:1-11: Hosea gives us a picture of God fighting within himself as to what he should do with his recalcitrant son, Israel.
-- Verses 1 and 2 describe the condition of the rebellious boy. -- 3 and 4 depict God remembering the manner in which he dealt with the boy (the word for "boy" could point to any age between infancy and adolescence).
-- 5 through 7 state God's conviction that he should punish this son.
-- 8 and 9 picture God deciding not to punish the child but to restore him in love. (Verses 10 and 11 are so garbled in transmission that they give no adequate understanding of what Hosea may have meant by them. It is best not to comment on passages that make no sense in their present text.)
Yahweh considers his early relationship with Israel his son. "When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son." This of course refers to the exodus from Egypt under Moses. But the child was rebellious. "The more I called them, the more they went from me. They kept sacrificing to the baals and burning incense to the idols."
Yet Yahweh remembers the tenderness with which he treated Israel. He was both father and mother to them. "I taught Ephraim how to walk," said Yahweh, and we can see the divine parent holding the hand of the little boy as he toddles forth into the village square. Yahweh was like a nurse to them; we would today say "like a baby-sitter." "I took them up in my arms." Yahweh dealt with them in the most affectionate way: "I led them with cords of compassion, with the bands of love. I healed them. I fed them. I eased the yoke of slavery under which they had been placed." Parent, nurse, leader, healer, deliverer, provider of the necessities of life - Yahweh was all this to Israel.
Recollecting this, and especially the way the people have mistreated him, Yahweh's anger flares. "They refused to turn to me," he cried. "My people are bent on turning away. They shall return to the land of Egypt and its slavery. They shall have the tyrant Assyria as their king. The sword shall rage against their cities, consume the bars of their gates, devour them in their fortresses. My people shall go again under the yoke of slavery. And none shall remove it," says the Lord.
Yahweh reconsiders, and his ancient longings for his child are renewed. "How can I give you up, O Ephraim! How can I hand you over, O Israel! How can I destroy you as I destroyed the cities of Admah and Zeboiim!" A father and mother had a right to hand a recalcitrant child over to the executioner, if they desired, but Yahweh, father and mother to this child, does not. "My heart recoils within me. My compassion grows warm and tender." Yahweh is determined: "I will not execute my fierce anger. I will not again destroy Ephraim." And why? "I am God, not man. I am the Holy One in your midst. I will not come to destroy."
Justice and grace wrestle for Israel in the heart of God. Grace prevails.
PSALM 107:1-9, 43: This psalm gives us four striking pictures of the human condition. We are pictured as travelers lost in the desert; those caught in the gloom of the prison house; those who are sick, perhaps sick to death; those who are like ships in distress at sea.
These four pictures resonate with our own experience of life. T. S. Eliot pictured 20th century people as caught in a wasteland, some of it our own making, some of it not. We have images drawn from Charles Dickens about those caught in the gloom of a prison house: Charles Darnay in prison in France during the revolution of the last decade of the 18th century, the father of Oliver Twist in the debtors prison that was so prevalent in 19th century England. It is not hard to picture the sickness unto death: the AIDS epidemics of our own time, the cancers and heart diseases that take so many. To raise it to a spiritual malady, Soren Kierkegaard thought of all of us as inflicted with a "Sickness unto Death." Ships in distress at sea call to mind the powerful movie "A Perfect Storm," or Ulysses fighting to return to his homeland through all the stresses of the sea. We read of the four pictures of life that this 107th Psalm offers us, and we know about them already. They are part of our own life, part of our self-description of who we are.
At the same time, the psalm tells us that people in those conditions are not hopeless. They are "the redeemed of the Lord." God delivers us from our desert wastes; God comes to those who sit in darkness and gloom; God heals those who are sick of their sinful ways; God brings calm to those overwhelmed by the calamities of life. This is the message of this marvelous psalm. And the refrain with which it opens can be our refrain as well, "O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever. Let the redeemed of the Lord say so, those whom God has redeemed from trouble."
COLOSSIANS 3:1-11:"Seek the things that are above," said Paul, "where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God." The Law-observant members of the church in Colossae would recognize this statement. To them, the exalted Christ, the one who had ascended and was seated at the right hand of the Father, was the Christ they honored. Paul accepted their belief. But he reminded them that before Christ ascended into heaven he had hung on the cross and he had risen from the grave. The Colossians have, in effect, died with Christ, and "now your life is hid with Christ." Since your Christ is above you in the throne room of God, says the author, "set your minds on the things that are above, not the things that are on earth." Our lives belong totally to Christ, Paul was saying, and we need to show this new affection in the way that we live.
It is in later verses that Paul described this new life in Christ. He did so in some of the most moving words of the whole New Testament. Listen to him:
"Put to death the things of earth - fornication, unnatural vices, depraved passions, evil desires, and the greediness which is idolatry, on account of which comes the wrath of God, in which you walked formerly. But now put off these things, anger, passion, evil, blasphemy, abusive speech. Do not lie to each other. Having stripped off the old man with his actions, put on the new. As the chosen of God - consecrated and beloved - show a heart of compassion, sweetness of disposition, lowliness, meekness, patience, bearing with each other and forgiving one another if anyone has any cause for complaint against you; as also the Lord has forgiven you, so also you forgive others. And above all put on love, which is the bond that unites the mature. And let the peace of the Christ rule in your hearts. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, as you teach and admonish each other, in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs in the grace singing in your hearts to God. And in everything - whatever you do in word or in deed - do all in name of Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God, the father, through him.
Do these things, says Paul to the Colossians and to us, and the spirit of Christ's resurrection and ascension will go with you in all the times of your life.
Special note needs to be made of the concluding verse of the text: "In this renewed church, there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian (and) Scythian, slave and free. But Christ is all and in all."
This is a restatement of the charter for the apostolic church as it was first put down in Paul's Letter to the Galatians, 3:27-28. There the groups to be included in the church were Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female. This statement in Colossians does not include "male and female." If, as I have been saying in these expositions on Colossians, the church in Colossae contained a large Jewish-Christian constituency, they would have had great trouble in giving women the same rights in the church as men; their husband-oriented sense of Jewish life could not be overcome in a single generation. The "barbarian-Scythian" inclusion is an interesting one. People living in the inward mountainous parts of the Roman Province of Asia, as these people did, were living in the midst of a barbarian society. Civilization as the Jews and Greeks understood it had hardly come to this area by the time of the writing of this letter. The tribes around them were uncultured, unlettered, and perhaps untrustworthy. Especially bad, from the Jewish and Greek point of view, were the Scythians. Lately they had come sweeping down from the area around the Black Sea and had destroyed everything their swords could touch. The memory of this invasion was vivid in the life of the people who received this letter. Even so, the author is insisting that barbarians and Scythians both should be included in the fellowship of the church. To include people like these in their thoughts and prayers constituted the strongest statement possible of the ecumenical and world-wide nature of the early Christian church.
LUKE 12:13-21: This parable contains a picture more than a point. If we seek security in our material possessions, we should let the picture of the rich farmer fill our vision. Soon, says Jesus, our full barns will mean nothing, because our souls will be required of us.
The story begins with a man stepping out of the crowd and asking Jesus to judge between his claims and those of his brother. Jesus is a well regarded holy man, and people came to holy men with requests like this. The laws of inheritance provided that the older brother would receive a double portion of the inheritance (Deut 21:17). If the father had no sons, his possessions were to be divided among his daughters (Num 27:1-11), but his daughters were then required to marry within their father's tribe so that his possessions would not leave the tribe (Num 36:7-9). Jesus rejected the role of divider. He did not want to contribute to a man's greed. So he said, "Beware of greed. A man's life does not consist of the abundance of his possessions."
Then he told the story of a man who had such an abundance. His lands produced so many crops that he had no place to store them. So he said, "I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, where I will store my grain and goods. Then I will retire early and say, Take your ease. Eat, drink, and be merry." But God said, "You fool. This night your soul will be required of you."
Whenever we are satisfied with our life because we have gained more than we need to live, we need to let this story settle in upon our minds.