The Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time
HABAKKUK 1:1-4, 2:1-4: Habakkuk the prophet faced two problems. One was the lack of justice shown to the people on the part of Judah's king and his court. The other was the injustice involved in the manner in which God was about to correct the injustice of the king.
King Jehoiakim of Judah was of the line of King David, but he did not have David's passion for justice. He ruled in those dreadful days between the first sighting of the Babylonian armies on the coastal plains of Judah in about 605 BC and the moment in 597 when the Babylonians laid their first siege around the capital city of Jerusalem. Jehoiakim ruled in a atrocious manner. "The law is slacked," said the prophet, "twisted, bent." "Justice never goes forth." "Violence and destruction" are terms that prophets used to describe the ruthless accumulation of goods on the part of the rulers and their exploitation of the poor and the weak under their care. "Strife and contention" are code words for the failure to administer justice in a proper manner; where justice is denied, the people cry out and the civil society behind the injustice is strained. Such abuses of power produce a society in which justice is absent and the law is ineffectual.
God's response to this injustice was to bring up the Chaldeans, the Babylonians, "that bitter and haughty nation (1:6)," to punish the Judeans. This raised a problem for Habakkuk. The Babylonians would punish God's people, surely enough, but the punishment would be so extreme as to seem not to be in proportion to the crimes. Habakkuk's description of the Babylonians is blood-chilling.
They march through the breadth of the earth, to seize habitations not their own. Dreadful and terrible are they; their justice and dignity proceed from themselves (and not from God). Their horses are swifter than leopards, more fierce than the evening wolves; their horsemen press proudly on. Yea, their horsemen come from afar; they fly like an eagle swift to devour. They all come for violence; terror of them goes before them. They gather captives like sand. At kings they scoff, and of rulers they make sport. They laugh at every fortress, for they heap up earth and take it. Then they sweep by like the wind and go on, guilty men, whose own might is their god! (1:6-11)
"You say you want to use them to punish us, O Lord. Are you out of your senses?" asks the prophet. His exact words are these: "O LORD, thou hast ordained them as a judgment? And thou, O Rock, hast established them for chastisement? Thou who art of purer eyes than to behold evil and canst not look on wrong. Why dost thou look on faithless men, and art silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he?" (1:12-13) Habakkuk knows that the Judeans need to be punished because of the way they treat the poorest and the weakest among them. But he is appalled that God would use such horrible people as these Babylonian armies to be the instruments of his wrath.
Saying this, Habakkuk climbed upon his tower to see what the Lord would say to him.
These are his words, "I will take my stand to watch, and station myself on the tower, and look forth to see what he will say to me, and what I will answer concerning my complaint." The tower on which he climbed was perhaps a tower in the wall of the city, or the tower of the temple, or whatever other high spot the prophet was accustomed to seeking out. He did not have to wait long.
"And the LORD answered me: 'Write the vision; make it plain upon
tablets, so he may run who reads it. 3: For still the vision
awaits its time; it hastens to the end -- it will not lie. If it
seem slow, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay.
4: Behold, he whose soul is not upright in him shall fail, but
the righteous shall live by his faith.'"
The vision was to be written down, so that when it came true the prophet could point to the tablet and say, "There. It happened as God said. See, I had written it beforehand." He was to write it in large letters so that even those on the run could read it - it was like a billboard beckoning to the hustling traveler. It may not come to pass in the moment, it may seem that it is delayed, but wait for it. It will surely come.
The vision was written down in a few words. "The righteous shall live by his faith."
The Hebrew term refers to the quality of firmness, steadiness, steadfastness, fidelity. It is the kind of loyal commitment admired in people. It is the primary aspect of God's own character. God is faithful to us, says the prophet. We need to show a like faithfulness to him. The righteous will live by the reliability and trustworthiness of the vision itself. They will survive in this nasty world through their faithfulness to it, through their fidelity to God, and through their steadfast endurance.
Is this enough of an answer to the question that Habakkuk posed? This answer wipes out much of the theological thinking of past prophets and sages. It recognizes that people cannot live by some outmoded theology of reward and punishment. Evil is too pervasive for that, the evil in the world, the evil in ourselves, even the evil that comes upon the world when God sends the evil Chaldeans to eradicate the evil in Judah. In our ambiguous and disordered world, people can only live on the basis of trust in God's trustworthiness, trust that God will move in his own good time and way in order to fulfill the requirements of divine justice. We have no other choice than this. We are to be faithful to God's justice and to the God of justice, even when such justice appears to be absent in the world around. This is God's answer to Habakkuk and his question.
In the midst of our own evil and disorder and ambiguous moral quandaries, the strife and contention within and around, the destruction and violence that pervade our lives, it is also God's answer to us!
PSALM 119:137-144: This psalm is the longest psalm in the psalter, 176 verses in all, and in some ways it is the most interesting. It consists of twenty-two stanzas of eight lines each. It is organized as an acrostic, that is, each of the stanza begins with the next equivalent letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and each the first word in each line of the stanza begins with the same letter. (The third chapter of Lamentations follows a similar scheme, except that each stanza is only three verses long.) The poem praises Torah, the Hebrew Law which had been put into an integrated form during the time of Judah's exile in Babylon. Clinton McCann, (Presbyterian Worship Planner) points out that its size and repetition are important to its message: "The repetition and formal structure," he says, "create and reiterate the message of the psalm. God's 'law' -- that is, God's 'instruction' or 'word' or 'revelation' -- is all-encompassing and all-important for humankind."
Torah, as this psalmist understands it, is more than the commandments of a law. It sets forth God's will and purpose for God's people. The message of the psalm is commensurate with its form. Life, says this psalmist, is safe and predictable and reliable when it is built around Torah (Brueggemann, Message) The Torah gives life to the people of Judah, but to receive the life the people had to be obedient to it. Those who keep Torah know what God wants of them, and they respond accordingly.
In this particular strophe the psalmist testifies to the righteousness of God: "God's righteousness is righteous forever, and his law is true." That creates certain problems for the psalmist. He is distressed when he discovers people ("his foes") forgetting the righteousness of God, and he responds zealously to their faithlessness. He also recognizes the troubles and anguish in his own life, but he counteracts that as best he can by delighting in the instruction of the commandments. He realizes that he is small and despised, but it is the precepts of God that give him strength and stature. He knows that God's commandments are righteous forever, and he prays that God will continue to give him understanding of them. Without that understanding, he could not live.
LUKE 19:1-10: This is the story of a man "too small to see Jesus" who becomes one of the biggest men in the New Testament. It is also the story of Jesus coming to seek and to save those who are lost.
Jesus is in Jericho, about to climb the mountain road that leads from this corner of the Dead Sea to the Holy City of Jerusalem. As he passes through the city, he meets Zacchaeus, a chief tax collector. Zacchaeus' name means "innocent," and on the surface of it, he is anything but that. This is the last of Jesus' many encounters with outcasts before he enters into Jerusalem.
As a "chief tax collector," Zacchaeus was very rich. Roman officials contracted with local entrepreneurs to collect the prescribed indirect taxes, tolls, tariffs, and customs fees in a given area. These entrepreneurs, the "chief tax collectors," were required to pay the contract in advance. They would then employ others to collect the taxes with the hope that the amount collected would yield a profit. The system, not surprising, was open to abuse, and Jews who collected taxes for the Romans were assumed to be dishonest and were hated by other Jews for their complicity with the Gentile oppressors.
The first picture we get of Zacchaeus is that of a little man bobbing up and down at the edge of a crowd trying to get a glimpse of Jesus as he passes through the city. He was so small that he was not able to see him over the crowd. He did what he had to in order to see this celebrated figure. He ran ahead of the crowd to a place where he thought Jesus might be passing, and he climbed a sycamore tree to get a better view.
A sycamore is a large evergreen tree that produced an inferior type of fig that was consumed by the poor. With its large, low branches, it was ideal for Zacchaeus's purposes. He could easily clamber up into this tree, and from it he was afforded a good view of the crowded street below. The crowd must have watched his progress with great glee. It was considered undignified for a grown man to run, and a man of his importance would certainly not climb a tree! But Zacchaeus was so anxious to see Jesus that he did both of these ungainly things.
Jesus passed beneath the place where Zacchaeus was hanging on the tree, and he paused. He heard the crowd laughing: "Look, that's Zacchaeus, that's our chief tax collector." Jesus sized up the picture in a moment. Picking up on the name he heard, he exclaimed, "Zacchaeus, hurry and come down. I'm going to stay at your house today."
By our standards, it is immodest to invite ourselves into someone's home. But Jesus, followed by the teeming crowds, brought honor to whatever house he entered. He conferred special honor on Zacchaeus by offering to receive hospitality from him. By entering Zacchaeus's house, once more Jesus crossed the barrier of ritual purity. A tax collector, by entering houses and inspecting goods, was ritually unclean. By coming to stay at Zacchaeus's house, even for an afternoon, Jesus was acknowledging the chief tax collector's dignity and raising his standing in the community. So Zacchaeus climbed down the tree joyfully and happily welcomed Jesus into his home.
This caused a great deal of grumbling within the crowd. The act not only upset any "scribes and Pharisees" who might be present, but the whole crowd was incensed. "He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner," was their insistent pout. Zacchaeus faced Jesus. "Look," he said, "half my possessions I will give to the poor." There is some question about the tense of the verb. He may actually have said, "Look, half my goods I give to the poor," as if that was his constant practice. If so this was this little man's second redeeming feature. The first had been his willingness to do anything to see Jesus. The second was his care and concern for the poor.
His third redeeming feature was about to show itself. "If I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much." By law Zacchaeus was required to repay those whom he had defrauded and then add 20% to it as a fine (Leviticus 6:1-7). Zacchaeus was ready to go well beyond the law in repayment of anything that he might have done. For each denarius he may have overcharged, he was willing to pay four more. For the shekel he had received above and beyond the required tax, he was willing to give back four more.
For a man too small to see Jesus, he had turned into a person of large character. Rich people generally do not fare well in Luke's gospel. We recall how Jesus pronounced woes on the rich (6:24); how God called the rich farmer a fool (12:16, 20) and required his soul of him; how the rich man went to Hades while Lazarus went to the bosom of Abraham (16:19-31), how Jesus had observed that it is hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of God (18:23, 25). Zacchaeus is the one exception. His eagerness to do what is right for the poor, his willingness to accept the penalties of the law and much more beyond, his earnestness to see Jesus led Jesus to respond: "Today salvation has come to your house. You are a true son of Abraham."
Zacchaeus had sought to see Jesus. Even more, Jesus had sought everywhere to see the likes of him. The seeker was the sought. The one who sought out Jesus was himself sought out by the God of Jesus Christ who enters our lives to seek and to save.
SECOND THESSALONIANS 1:4, 11-12: There is always a question as to whether Paul is the author of Second Thessalonians as well as the First. Having given the question long thought and having re-read this second letter a number of times, I see no reason to consign it to anyone other than Paul. Objections to Paul's authorship concern the apocalyptic nature of the letter and some of the unusual expressions used. I think Paul wrote this letter to downplay some of the apocalyptic expectations of the Christians in Thessaloniki. I think he consciously used expressions that the apocalyptic used in order to combat their expectations. I will explain this as I move along.
"Apocalyptic" needs some direct explanation. It appears that there were a group of people in the church in Thessaloniki who expected that Christ would come soon in a great display of power to put things right in the world and in the church. Evidences of similar belief turn up in the 13th chapter of the Gospel of Mark and in the earlier correspondence with the church in Thessaloniki. Paul had some of this belief himself, as is clear in his statements on the resurrection in First Corinthians 15. But the people of Thessaloniki had taken this to the extreme. Believing that Christ would come soon, they had stopped working, and now they were an economic burden to fellow Christians. They thought, preached, and prayed about nothing else. They were telling the other people of the city that their Christ would come soon, "with mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of Jesus Christ"; in the vernacular, "he's going to give it to you guys!" All this was not good for the well-being of the church, Paul thought. So he tried to combat it somehow.
Unfortunately, the assigned text for the day does not cover Paul's arguments. They are found in verses 5 through 10 in the first chapter, whereas the text deals only with 4 and 11-12. In the unassigned verses Paul makes these points.
He notes that their "afflictions" are causing persecution in the church. "Affliction" is a code word for the apocalyptic expectations they have; Christ will come only when the "afflictions" have reached a breaking point, they believe. But because these Christians talk so much of the vengeance the coming of Christ will bring on their enemies and the eternal destruction God will inflict on them, their enemies, the people of Thessaloniki that are not Christian, are sick and tired of hearing this, and they are fighting back with arguments and perhaps even action. Hence the "persecutions" that Paul mentions.
But don't worry about this, said Paul. Let God repay them when Christ comes. After all, God is just, and he will repay the afflictions of those who afflict you. Trust the righteous God to act righteously. In other words, Paul is telling them to stop their constant harassing of their deemed enemies, and let God take care of the matter. But he does this graciously by expressing what seems to be a passionate concern for the Christians' suffering.
We are left then in our part of the text with the positive message Paul brings them. "You are steadfast, you persevere, you endure" in your afflictions and persecutions. These are all good words from Paul's point of view; Christians must persevere, and when they do, Paul will boast of their endurance. "We will pray for you," says Paul in verse 11. "We will ask God to make you worthy of your call" (is this a back-handed dig to indicate that he is not really pleased with the way they are presently handling their call? I think so.) "With good resolve and work of faith, God will fulfill his call in you, and the name of Jesus will be glorified in you and you in him." In other words - I have said this many times in this section, but I think it necessary to point out that Paul is saying more than he seems on the surface to say - get on with proclaiming and living the full Gospel of Christ. In this way only Christ will be glorified in you, and you will bear in yourselves, as a church, the glory of Jesus Christ.