The Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
ISAIAH 1:1, 10-20: This is our introduction to the prophet Isaiah and his message. It is important to set him in the context of his own times. As verse one says, Isaiah prophesied in Jerusalem in the time of the kingships or Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah.
Uzziah (783-742) was a very able king who brought Judah a period of prosperity that rivaled that which the northern kingdom, Israel, was enjoying at the same time under Jeroboam II. Uzziah rebuilt Jerusalem. He sent his armies across the trade routes of the seacoast plains to the west and opened up a seaport on the Mediterranean for trade. He extended his empire into the Negev desert. Judah under Uzziah. like Israel under Jeroboam II, enjoyed a period of stability and security, the like of which neither kingdom was ever again to experience.
As these two kings were doing this for Israel and Judah, however, the Assyrian empire to the east was awakening from a long slumber. This empire dated back a long time in history. It could possibly locate its founding as early as 2000 B.C. At the time when David was building his kingdom in Canaan, Assyria was at the nadir of its power, but as David's state fell apart, Assyrian power began to grow. Assur-nasir-pal III (883-859) began military conquests. and he introduced a totally new factor into international relations. He and his successors in Assyria made fear and brutality an instrument of state. These kings developed armies of foot soldiers numbered into the hundreds of thousands, to which were added thousands of chariots and ranks of archers. Assyrian military successes were marked with artillery barrages of arrows, devastating in their effects upon opposing armies. These brutal armies were the external indications of a brutal frame of mind. Assurnasirpal was to boast of one of his exploits: "I have cut off their heads. I burned them with fire. The city I destroyed. I turned it into mounds and ruins. The young men and maidens in the fire I burned." One scene on a palace relief in Assur shows Assurbanipal, another Assyrian ruler, and his queen dining together while the severed head of the king of Elam dangled above them. It was this brutal power that was now to be let loose upon the world.
Assurnasirpal and his armies moved through the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates all the way to the Mediterranean, and city after city fell under this awesome strength. This king retired to his own borders. but under Shalmaneser III (859-824) Assyria returned, only to be met by a coalition of Syrian and Canaanite armies at Qarqar in 853 and turned back. Around 800 Assyria turned west again. but once again her king had to return to take care of internal affairs. Then in 745 Tiglath-Pileser III became ruler in Assyria.
It was a fateful moment for Israel and Judah. Each had lost its most able king at almost the same time Tiglath came to the throne: Jeroboam II died in 746 and Uzziah in 742. Assyria was definitely on the move, and in addition to the brutality of her policies, she was introducing something else that was new into world affairs. Instead of being satisfied with receiving tribute from native kings and conducting reprisals against their cities if necessary, Assyria began to deport rebels and incorporate their lands as provinces into its own empire. This was to bode ill for Israel.
Once more, after 745 BC Assyria marched down the battle route of old: through the Tigris-Euphrates valleys toward the sea and south. Once more Syria and Canaan gathered forces to stop her. This time it was not enough. Assyria destroyed Gath. It ravaged Damascus. It overran Transjordan and Galilee. It made a vassal of Isarel. When Tiglath died and was replaced first by Shalmaneser IV and then by Sargon II in 722, Israel rebelled. Sargon moved upon the capital of Samaria. His inscription tells of his conquest:
I besieged and conquered Samaria, led away as booty 27,290 inhabitants of it. I formed from among them a contingent of fifty chariots and made the remaining inhabitants assume their (social) positions. I installed over them an officer of mine and imposed upon them the tribute of a former king.
With that defeat Israel's corporate life ended. Its leading
inhabitants, those who were not killed, were resettled in Upper Mesopotamia; we never hear of them again. Other peoples from distant parts of the empire -- from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim -- were resettled in the city of Samaria. Disaster was complete. The life of the northern kingdom, Israel, had ended
Judah's life was to be a little longer. This southern kingdom, made up of the two small tribes of Judah and Benjamin, had borders that were quite constricted: the hill country stretching south from Jerusalem to the desert, an area of 40 miles by 100 at the very most. For 140 years this small country was the only focus of attention that we have in biblical history.
Hezekiah, mentioned in the text of Isaiah, had come to the throne of Judah in 715. He had succeeded his father Ahaz, who had ruled in Jerusalem during the time of the destruction of the Samarians. Politically, Ahaz was a vassal of Assyria, and his policy was that of placating his sovereign. When Hezekiah came to the throne following his father's death, matters changed in Judah: Hezekiah struck out for independence.
His declaration of independence centered around his reform of the
Temple and its worship practices. Hezekiah removed from the Temple the Assyrian objects of worship that had been there for some time, and he closed down some of the pagan shrines in the small towns. He also stopped paying tribute to Assyria. The money mattered to the Assyrian king; the Assyrians had built their wealth on the tribute of conquered nations. More importantly, they exacted tribute from their vassals as a sign of their superiority. For a nation to stop paying tribute to a conqueror was to assert independence from him.
Hezekiah's policy was not successful for long. Assyria moved to reassert itself over Judah and in 701 its ruling king, Sennacherib, attacked Jerusalem and its environs. He captured forty-six of Judah's fortified cities, and he deported at least 2,150 persons into exile in the east. He shut Hezekiah and his troops in the city of Jerusalem "like a bird in a cage," he was to boast. Excavations have recently taken place in Lachish, one of the cities he decimated, and the bodies of over 1,500 soldiers were found dumped into a pit.
In 688 Sennacherib again returned to Judah with his ferocious troops. Again Jerusalem was surrounded. Something unforeseen happened as the siege dragged on for a year and more. Either a plague came, or a mutiny arose among the Assyrian troops, or word of rebellion at home reached Sennacherib in Judah. Whatever it was, he was forced to withdraw his armies and return home. Jerusalem was saved in a miraculous deliverance. Judah was to remember that. God had indeed saved the people by a miracle! The nation was jubilant, but its jubilation was short-lived. Hezekiah died in the next year, and Judah itself had exactly one century of life left to it.
During the times narrated above, Isaiah of Jerusalem began his work of prophesying in the capital city of the southern kingdom of Judah. The dates of Isaiah's ministry can be set as follows:
742, year king Uzziah died (6:1)
734, siege of Jerusalem by Syrians, Ephraimites (7:1-17)
720, year king Ahaz died (chapter 14)
711, Assyrians came to Ashdod and fought (20:1-6)
701, Sennacherib's invasion (chapters 36-37)
Isaiah's ministry divided itself into 3 parts -- 742 to Ahaz' decision in 734 to appeal to Assyria for help against Syria and Ephraim; Isaiah's withdrawal after this; 720 to the end of the reign of Hezekiah.
The question that faced Judah after the destruction of Israel in 722 was this: would Assyria go aside into the mountains and do to Jerusalem what she had already done to Samaria? Ahaz, king of Judah, had to struggle with this question and to design policy to meet it. His overwhelming temptation was to do the prudent thing: join in alliances with other nations in the hope that the alliance would be able to stave off the onslaughts of the invader and assure the safety of his tiny kingdom. At this point Isaiah injected his prophecies into Judah's policy discussions.
Isaiah was a resident of the court, perhaps even an employee of the royal court. Isaiah's prophetic message had begun in an encounter between the prophet and God which had taken place in the Temple in Jerusalem. There the prophet had had a vision of Yahweh as the true king of Judah, Judah's greatest king, Uzziah, had just died; though he had been a faithful king, he had been punished by leprosy, and the whole land seemed unclean because of his disease. But Isaiah, in the Temple, had a cleansing vision of God. Yahweh had cleansed Judah of every past uncleanliness, -and now, as the holy one, God was to lay renewed claim upon this holy people. "I saw the Lord," said Isaiah, "high and lifted up. and his train filled the whole temple. And I cried out. 'Woe Is me, for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.'" (Isaiah 6:1,5) But the Lord cleansed his lips and sent him out to proclaim cleansing to the people.
The process had to start with cleansing the nation from its alliances with other nations. To this end Isaiah sought an audience with King Ahaz. Ahaz was new to the throne, and the task before him seemed to him to be beyond his capabilities. To win favor with God, Ahaz, regressing to the worst pagan practices, had sacrificed his own son in the Valley of Hinnom (the later Gehenna) in an attempt to stave off the Assyrian might. Now the king was out inspecting his battlements. Isaiah found him looking over the reservoir to see if the water supply of Jerusalem was sufficient to withstand a siege.
Isaiah's counsel was abrupt, "Break off your relationship with other nations: they will only pull you into battle and destroy you. Abandon human alliance and put your reliance upon Yahweh." The advice fell on deaf ears. Ahaz, confronted with his responsibilities as king, could not accept this political isolation, so he proceeded with his policy.
Isaiah came back to him, this time not with a word but with a sign: "A prince is about to be born of your line," said the prophet, "of the lineage of David. And the government will be upon his shoulders, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." (Isaiah 9:6) In other words, God was not about to terminate the kingdom of Judah but was about to raise up a son of the Davidic line to ensure wisdom and power and justice and peace to the people: they needed to trust in God not in alliances. Again Ahaz did not listen to him, and Isaiah withdrew from public affairs for a while. He lived among his prophetic disciples and set himself to establishing a "covenant remnant" in which the agreement with God could be truly kept.
Events turned out as Isaiah had said they would. The alliance Ahaz had so foolishly entered was broken, and Assyria did destroy the nations that were part of it; even some of Judah's lands were despoiled as Assyria wracked her punishment upon the offending kingdoms. Ahaz died shortly thereafter.
Ahaz was succeeded by Hezekiah, of whom it was said that there had been none like him since David himself. But the problem of Assyria had not departed, nor the problem of the interlacing alliances rising against her. Hezekiah began to align Judah with Egypt against Assyria. When the new Assyrian king Sennacherib moved through Judah toward Egypt, he captured forty-six of Hezekiah's fortified cities and placed the capital city under siege. Why it survived the siege we are not certain, but we are certain of Isaiah's response to the siege. By this time he had predicted that Judah and Jerusalem would not fall; Jerusalem was still the site of God's Temple and the seat of David's government, and Yahweh would come to protect Mount Zion. It happened precisely as Isaiah said it would. The city was spared and the kingdom lived. In the midst of this complex international situation, which to the popular mind seemed beyond even the control of God, Isaiah declared that God was yet king and would continue to rule through the line of David. God would not let the people go but would cleanse them so that a new and purified people would emerge.
The messages of the prophets were often organized by their disciples by putting the most important prophecies first. This is certainly true in the instance of Isaiah. His disciples, who organized his prophecies, included at the very beginning a prophecy by which Isaiah declared that God was not interested as much in the worship of the people as he was in their just dealings with one another. His prophecy is stated in graphic terms.
Isaiah began by comparing the rulers of Judah to the rulers of Sodom and Gomorroah, and he said that the future of Judah might be like the futures of these countries which the Lord had destroyed in the days of Abraham.
11: "What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the LORD; I have had enough of burnt
offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or
of he-goats.
12: "When you come to appear before me, who requires of you this trampling of my courts?
13: Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and
the calling of assemblies -- I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly.
14: Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates; they have become a burden to me,
I am weary of bearing them.
15: When you spread forth your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make
many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.
The message of the Lord is that of cleansing and a return to doing justice:
16: Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my
eyes; cease to do evil,
Then Isaiah set forth God's prescription for cleansing. To be cleansed, said Isaiah:
17: learn to do good;
seek justice,
correct oppression;
defend the fatherless,
plead for the widow.
Like every prophet before him, and most of those after him, Isaiah saw the proper service of God not to be celebrating new moons and sabbaths and solemn assemblies but to set up systems of kings and courts where the most vulnerable people in society - the oppressed, the fatherless, the widows - receive true justice for their just claims. When that occurs, then there is the possibility that God might remove his threats of retribution as the prophet says in the last words of this prophecy:
18: "Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD: though your sins are like scarlet, they
shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.
19: If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land;
20: But if you refuse and rebel, you shall be devoured by the sword; for the mouth of the LORD
has spoken."
If we are willing and obedient, God will cleanse us. If we refuse and rebel, God will devour us by the sword. This the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
PSALM 50:1-6: The psalm reading for the day includes only the introduction to a much larger psalm that speaks of the need of God's people for a new commitment to the covenant God has set with them and a new discipline on their part in order to fulfill the covenant. We have to content ourselves with the opening of the psalm (1-6) and what that means to us.
"The mighty one, God the Lord, summons the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting" to stand forth before him. It is out of Zion, Jerusalem the holy city of God, that God issues this summons. He calls heaven and earth to stand in the court of judgment as God judges the people.
Such a God! He comes and does not keep silent. He is like a devouring fire, like a mighty tempest. God is sovereign, and God can command all nations, all creation, to stand at attention in God's presence. He says, "Gather to me my faithful people - are they indeed faithful? - who made covenant with me long ago in the wilderness when they bound themselves to me in solemn ceremony of sacrifice."
The terms of the covenant are recalled. They are "righteousness" "justice," "faithfulness." They are also the standard of judgment that God will employ in God's judgments. Have my people upheld "righteousness, "justice," and faithfulness"? These stand as the eternal pillars in the kingdom of God, and they uphold all things in heaven and on earth.
HEBREWS 11:1-3, 8-16: Those who are accustomed to read about "faith" in the letters of Paul may be struck by the different way that Hebrews uses the word. "Faith" in Hebrews seems much more akin to what Paul calls "hope," and we will treat this chapter from that point of view. Where the text uses "faith," mentally we might substitute "hope."
Two other words in verse one deserve comment. The translation "assurance" seems to be a mistranslation of the Greek word that underlies it. The Greek word comes closer to meaning "reality," and the best translation may be "In faith things hoped for become realized (or, reality)." The translation "conviction" also seems to be a misnomer. The Greek word behind this translation comes from the court of law and is best translated as "proof" or "demonstration," "faith is the demonstration of things hoped for." The old translation reads well, and many of us have committed it to memory and will have a hard time getting it out of our minds, but the most accurate translation of the passage seems to be, "In faith things hoped for become realized, faith is the demonstration of things hoped for."
At least this seems to make sense of the passages in the text. Verse three, for instance, reads, "By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear." Hebrews seems to be referring to a belief in the Greek philosophy of the time that God by his word created the world out of an invisible substance. Using the above translation makes sense of that. "Faith allows us to see the world as a demonstration of the creating power of God." We do not know how God created the world, the author of Hebrews is saying, but we can set out the proposition that the created world is a demonstration of the creating power of God. Our faith, our belief, permits us to view the world not as being created by some cosmic accident or by some malevolent power but as coming from the beneficent hand of the God of Jesus Christ.
In verses 8 through 16 we see this concept applied to the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac that was much under discussion in Alexandria, Egypt, at the time the Letter to the Hebrews was composed there. The Genesis picture of the family of Abraham had disappeared. We commented on that picture when our lectionary texts took us to Genesis. We noted at the time that the family of Abraham was a dysfunctional one. There was palpable tension in that family between Sarah and Hagar after Ishmael was born. On Sarah's insistence Abraham expelled them from the family circle, and they had to go off into the wilderness by themselves. Abraham got the notion that God intended him to make a human sacrifice of Isaac. After that moment there is no record of a conversation between Sarah and Abraham; the mother seemed so shocked by it that she never spoke to her husband again. Abraham and Isaac had no more converse, either. The boy was shocked that his father would attempt to do this to him. Ishmael and Isaac had played together as children, but they did not see each other again until they came together for their father's burial. The dysfunction of the family of Abraham continued into the generations. Esau and Jacob, Isaac's sons, distrusted one another, and Jacob and his uncle Laban spent a good deal of their time cheating one another, Jacob out of a wife and Laban out of his flocks and herds. The sons of Jacob actually took one of their brothers, Joseph, and tried to kill him. When that attempt failed, they sold him as a slave to traveling traders. This is the family that in Hebrews becomes the heroes of the faith.
"By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents. . . . He looked forward to a city whose builder and maker was God." Abraham's faith was a demonstration of the reality to come. What he saw of the land of promise was not very pleasing to him - no city such as the Ur from which we had come, no settled building to live in but just a tent. But God had promised it, and Abraham lived as if the promise was real. By faith, Sarah received the power to conceive, or so the translation reads. The actual Greek is more graphic. "By faith, Sarah threw out seed, even when she was past the age." One of the discussions of the time concerned the question of whether women bore seed as well as men, and Hebrews seems to recognize the position that they did. But the fact is that she was well beyond the age when she could bear a child. Yet she bore Isaac, another demonstration of the reality of the power of God to do what humans could not do. Therefore, says the Letter of Hebrews triumphantly, "from one man, and him as good as dead, were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore."
Relying upon the demonstration of the reality of God, they could
live and die in peace, trusting that the promise of God would come true. This kept their faces turned forward. They could easily have returned to the city from which they had come. But God had given them a promise, and God would turn that promise into reality. So they kept their faces turned toward the future and not to the past, knowing that the God who had been in their past was in their future as well.
This passage in Hebrews is a key passage in the structure of the book. Hebrews moves, as Fred Craddock indicates in his Commentary on Hebrews in the New Interpreter's Bible, from experiences of faithful endurance by the readers (10:32-39), to examples from redemptive history (11:1-40), to Jesus and the Christian community (12:1-17). This flow of the material, says Craddock, is theological in that faith's endurance and God's approval are one continuous story of the reliability of God. It is christological in that the story moves toward Christ, in whom the narrative has its completion. But faith, he adds, is never very different from hope, hope that God will fulfill what God has promised he would do in their lives.
LUKE 12:32-40: I believe that these remarks of Jesus to his disciples were made as the group of them were on the way to Jerusalem. Some of these remarks were made into precepts, and others seem to echo parables that Jesus later issued. We can break them down as follows.
On the way, Jesus told his followers to sell their possessions and give the proceeds away. They did not need them on their journey. This became the general precept to "sell your possessions and give alms" (33). Luke adds to this statements attributed to Jesus that seem to reflect those given earlier, in his instructions to disciples and in the Sermon on the Mount: "Provide for yourself purses that do not grow old." (A purse might grow heavy but can it grow old? Or are we to expect that the leather with which it is made deteriorates to no purpose?) Luke then adds Jesus' statement that they should lay up for themselves treasures in heaven, but at this point it comes out as "purses that (contain) a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches or moth destroys." Then he quotes accurately Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount: "For where your treasure is, there is your heart also."
This last direction does include an important thought. Most of us would state this in the opposite manner: "Where your heart is, there your treasure is also." In other words, we give ourselves to that which we value most. Jesus' statement says the exact opposite. Give your treasure to that which is valuable, and your heart will follow your gift, be it a gift of time or of talent or of money.
Jesus also told his disciples to watch for his return from one of his side-journeys into a village to preach, teach, heal, or receive hospitality. That was an obvious thing for him to say, but in this passage it becomes translated into the precept to "wait for the master to come home" (36, with echoes of it in 38 about coming in the second or third watch). This becomes a parable in which the return of the master as the son of humankind is projected, at which point he will have them sit at table, and he will serve them. The "return" reminds Luke of another parable, that of the householder who would have protected his house if he had known the precise hour that the thief was coming. Luke surrounded these rather garbled parables with statements reflecting his belief that Jesus' followers need to be ready at any moment for his return from heaven: "Let your loins be girded and your lamps burning. . . . You must also be ready; for the Son of Humankind is coming at an hour you do not expect" (35 and 40).
Toward the end of the 16th century the reformer in Zurich, Switzerland, Heinrich Bullinger, wrote that when a passage of scripture is obscure and makes no sense, we should go to similar passages that do make sense. He may well have had in mind a section of scripture like this one in Luke. We can go to all kinds of ends in trying to describe why this odd thing or that one is said and what it means. I think a more productive way to approach the passage is to go to those comparable passages in Matthew's Gospel and to earlier utterances in Luke's Gospel and interpret them. Did Luke know precisely what he was writing when he penned this passage of 12:32-40? I am not certain that he did. He seems to be trying to be faithful to sources that were already jumbled when he came upon them. In the light of Bullinger's principle, this is a passage that does not merit much of the interpreter's time in trying to deal with it.