The Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time
HAGGAI 1:15-2:9: The book of Haggai, the prophet, can be dated more precisely than any other book of the Bible. The events narrated in this book occurred between August 29, 520 BCE, and December 18 of the same year, the second year of the reign of Persian King Darius.
In fact, individual passages in the book can be assigned to exact days. W. Eugene March, writing in the New Interpreters Bible, (8:711) gives us this chart:
Hag 1:1 first day, sixth month, August 29, 520 BCE
second year of King
Darius
Hag 1:15a twenty-fourth day, September 21, 520 BCE
sixth month, second
year of King Darius
Hag 1:15b-2:1 twenty-first day, October 17, 520 BCE
seventh month, second
year of King Darius
Hag 2:10 twenty-fourth day, December 18, 520 BCE
ninth month, second
year of King Darius
Hag 2:20 twenty-fourth day, December 18, 520 BCE
ninth month, second
year of King Darius
Our attention centers on the middle date in the chart. On October 17, 520 BCE, the twenty-first day in the seventh month of the second year of the reign of Kang Darius on the Persian throne, the people of Judah were celebrating the Feast of Booths, the great agricultural feast of Israel. It was the seventh day of this eight day feast. Three things were celebrated in this feast.
Because of the time of year in which it fell, the time of
harvest, it was a celebration of God's goodness to the people in
providing the things they needed for sustenance. The celebration
in this current year was almost a celebration "despite a harvest"
rather than because of one. Drought had come, and the crops had
not produced as the people of Judah expected they would.
"Consider how you have fared," Haggai had said earlier to the
people (1:5-6). "You have sown much, and harvested little; you
eat, but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have
your fill; you clothe yourselves, but no one is warm; and he who
earns wages earns wages to put them into a bag with holes." For
the people who lived around Jerusalem, some who had returned from
Babylon and some who had stayed in the land while their relatives
had been taken away, life had been far from easy. But now, says
Haggai, it is the time of Booths! Celebrate what you have!
Rejoice over what God has given you, be it little or be it much!.
Because of the tents that they used in the celebration, "Booths" recalled God's deliverance of the people from Egypt, and it reminded them that their recent deliverance from Babylon almost compared in scope to that earlier deliverance. When the Persian king Cyrus had conquered Babylon, he changed the foreign policy of Babylon in a total way. Instead of retaining captured people in Babylon, Cyrus set a policy of returning people to their former lands. Early in his reign, Cyrus had issued a decree, now preserved in what is known as the Cyrus Cylinder. The decree ordered the return of sacred images and temple furniture taken by the Babylonians as spoils from the numerous cities they had conquered. This decree permitted Judahite exiles to return to Jerusalem. The returnees carried with them both a mandate and financial support to reconstruct their Temple.
And because Solomon had used the Feast of Booths as the day of dedicating the Temple in Jerusalem, it also commemorated God's presence with the people in giving them the Temple. They had made a start in rebuilding their temple, said Haggai. Now it remained for them to complete the task.
Standing near the flimsy foundations of the temple they were
building, Haggai employed all three of these great ideas in the
sermon he preached that day. He reminded the people that the
present temple was nothing compared to the former one. "Who is
left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How do
you see it now? Is it not in your sight as nothing?" Never mind,
said the prophet. God says, "I am with you, according to the
promise that I made you when you came out of Egypt. My Spirit
abides among you; fear not." Haggai saw the rebuilding of the
temple as consonant with God's delivering the people from Egypt.
Deliverance was real, Haggai reasoned. The same God who
delivered us then will rebuild his temple today."
As Haggai continues his sermon, the promise grew: "The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former, says the LORD of hosts (2:9). Once again, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land; and I will shake all nations, so that the treasures of all nations shall come in, and I will fill this house with splendor, says the LORD of hosts.(2:7-8)" Haggai was responding to events in the world beyond Judah. When the great Persian king Cyrus had died, he had turned the empire over to his son Cambyses. But Cambyses could not hold the empire together. Rebellions occurred throughout the lands. A stronger man, Darius, replaced Cambyses on the royal throne, and he was managing to get the empire under control. Haggai saw this shaking of the institutions of empire as God's opportunity to restore to Jerusalem the gold and silver that had adorned the temple when the Babylonians had ravished it. In this shaking of nations, "the treasures of all nations shall come in, and I will fill this house with splendor, says the LORD of hosts." The temple is small and ugly today, Haggai was telling the people. In days to come it shall regain the splendor of earlier years, and even greater grandeur shall be lavished upon it.
Haggai saw an even greater promise at work here than merely that of rebuilding of the temple. Said Haggai, when the temple is rebuilt, it will be the center of renewed prosperity for the land. "In this place I will give prosperity, says the LORD of hosts. (2:9)" Behind this promise stands the word "Shalom," peace, a term rich in meaning to all the sons and daughters of Israel and Judah. Shalom meant restoration of health, cessation of hostilities, enrichment of individual and community life, prosperity in the richest sense of the term. It was to be prosperity for Judah but also for all the world: it was to be shalom in its broadest sense.
Was the promise too great? The possibility of its fulfillment seemed real in the time of Haggai. Darius was re-structuring the whole empire. Jerusalem, which had been at the borders of empire when Cyrus was king, was moving closer to the center of affairs when Darius took rule. Darius was moving to conquer Egypt, and Jerusalem would be near the center of a kingdom that would stretch from Persia in the east to Egypt in the west. In Haggai's mind, God was moving once again to place Jerusalem at the center of the known world and make it the pivot around which peace and prosperity for all the world, shalom, would be built.
But that center of Shalom was not to be built around the temple, not even the magnificent temple that Herod was yet to build. It was to be centered around Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the Christ. In him God would send shalom for all peoples.
PSALM 98: The first few verses of this psalm seem to come direct
from Isaiah of Babylon himself. "The Lord has done marvelous
things. His right hand and his holy arm have gotten him victory.
. . . He has remembered his steadfast love and faithfulness to
the house of Israel. All the ends of the earth have seen the
victory of our God." Isaiah himself could not have said it
better.
But there is more to the psalm than reminiscences of Isaiah. "Sing to the Lord a new song." All the old songs are insufficient to praise God for what God has done. The exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt was a mighty act; but the return of Judah from Babylon is a mighty act also. "Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth!"
The praises to God are to be sung accompanied with the usual instruments: the lyre, the harp, trumpets, the horn. But this is not enough. Beyond the human instruments, all nature breaks forth into a joyful noise before the Lord. The sea roars, the floods clap their hands, the hills sing for joy.
But note who this God is. He is not only the mighty warrior who was the victor in the battle with Babylon. He is not only the deliverer of the people from the slavery in Egypt. He is a judge who comes to judge the whole earth. "Righteousness" is one standard of his judgement, requiring all the peoples, not Judah alone, to stand in right relationship with one another, with all the world, and with Judah's God. "Equity" is God's other standard, justice tempered with the mercy that renders no judgement too harsh. The establishment of God's rule brings great rejoicing. God's new kingship will turn the world into an entirely new direction.
PSALM 145:1-5, 17-21: This is the only song in the psalter that is titled "A Song of Praise." As such it introduces the "Praise Songs" in the last five psalms of the psalter, each of which begin and end with "Hallelujah" (translated as "Praise the Lord" in the RSV). This psalm at one time may actually have concluded the psalter, with the others being added at a later time. Like some of the earlier psalms we have considered, this psalm also is an acrostic, each line beginning with the successive Hebrew letter.
The operative understanding of God in this psalm is that of "God the king and the Lord." This sovereign Lord is both just and kind in all his ways. He is near to those who call upon him in truth. He fulfills the desires of those who stand in awe of him, and hearing their cries he saves them. The Lord preserves all who love him, but the wicked he will destroy. As Clinton McCann says (NIB4:1261), "Psalm 145 invites us to live in the world of God's reign, the world where the fundamental reality and pervasive power is the gracious, compassionate, faithful love of God."
Words of praise that have echoed through the centuries open and close this magnificent psalm:
I will extol thee, my God and King, and bless thy name for ever and ever.
Every day I will bless thee, and praise thy name for ever and ever.
Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable.
One generation shall laud thy works to another, and shall declare thy mighty acts.
On the glorious splendor of thy majesty, and on thy wondrous works, I will meditate. . . .
My mouth will speak the praise of the LORD, and let all flesh bless his holy name for ever and
ever.
The influential Christian, Augustine of Hippo, recognized the force and beauty of these words, and he opened his Confessions by quoting the third verse of the psalm. Augustine knew that because human beings are God's creation, they cannot experience well-being apart from praising God, "because you made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you."
LUKE 20:27-38: The Sadducees put in an appearance for the first and only time in Luke. Little is known of them, since they left no writings of their own. Josephus tells us that they traced their ancestry back to Zadok, the priest under King David. They associated with the aristocrats of Jerusalem. In theology, they differed considerably from the Pharisees. They accepted as Scripture only the five books of the Law. They did not listen to the oral tradition. They did not believe in resurrection. That belief, or lack of belief, sets the scene for their question.
Their question turns on the question of "levirite marriage." The word "levered" refers to a brother-in-law, and the law of levered marriage required that if a man died without children, his brother would marry his wife and raise up children to his brother. This seems crude and unseemly in our time, but there were contemporary reasons for it. A widow without a husband was defenseless; she had no way of caring for herself. A man without children had no one to whom to pass on the family property. This was the scheme worked up to handle those two problems.
"Now there were seven brothers. The first married and died childless. The second married the widow, and he died, and the third, and so on through the seven, all of whom were childless. Finally the women died." It was an absurd story, meant to make a theological point in their behalf, so the Sadducees finally put the question: "In the resurrection, whose wife will she be?"
Jesus at once recognized that the Sadducees meant to trick him with their absurd question, but he answered them as reasonably as he could. "In the resurrection, the point of the continuity of the people does not revolve around the questions of sexuality. In the resurrection, people die no more, so the question of the physical relationships of marriage do not enter in. The resurrected are with God. That is enough." To cap his argument, to show that the dead are raised, Jesus pointed to the words of the Law in Exodus. When God approached Moses by the burning bush, God introduced himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. "To God," said Jesus, "all of them are alive." If they died and now are alive, then there is indeed a resurrection from the dead. God is the God of the living and not the dead.
Certainly this response does not answer all our questions about "resurrection." For those of us with happy marriages, it even seems to deny the happiest relation available to humankind. But the points Jesus made need to be underscored. God does raise the dead, at least those in this life who have learned how to respond to God. There is a new order of life in the resurrection: it does not depend upon space and time, in its own way it transcends the relationships of flesh and blood. This much we can depend upon. God is the God of life, of the living. In the resurrection, God is there, and Christ, and those who love God and Christ, and those whom God and Christ love. That is all Christ has told us, and that is all we need to know.
SECOND THESSALONIANS 2:1-5, 13-17: Paul continues his message to the Thessalonians, who seem to be overly wrought about the appearing of the Lord Jesus Christ. In fact, they seem to believe that the day of the Lord has already come. They appear to have gotten that news from a letter that claimed to be from Paul; or else they had gotten it by word of mouth from other overly enthusiastic Christians; or else someone claimed to have had a revelation in the spirit that the Lord had come. Don't believe it, said Paul. That word did not come from me.
Paul goes on to say that that great day will not come until the rebellion - the apostasy - comes first. In the apostasy the man of lawlessness, the son of perdition, will come. He will oppose and exalt himself against every so-called god or object of worship. He will take his seat in the temple, presumably the temple in Jerusalem, proclaiming that he himself is God.
Reading this letter is like hearing one side of a telephone conversation: we do not know what is being said on the other end of the line. If the "man of lawlessness" is an historic figure, there are two quick candidates for the position. One would be the Emperor Caligula. In the spring and summer of the year 40, he tried to set up a statue of himself in the temple at Jerusalem. He wanted to be worshiped as a god, but the Jewish people in and around Jerusalem would not stand for this, and when the emperor died before the statue was erected, they quickly saw to it that no other emperor would attempt this apostasy against their religion. The other candidate might be the emperor Nero, who was the first emperor to make the unambiguous claim that he was divine. Nero caused the Christians in the Roman empire no end of trouble, and he may have been the emperor who ordered the execution of the Apostle Paul. His whole demeanor as emperor makes him a second likely candidate for being called "a man of lawlessness."
The chances are great that we have to look elsewhere for "the son of perdition" to whom the letter refers, although some amalgamation of the two in the peoples' minds may have created this figure; we wish we had the whole conversation with the Thessalonians in which Paul was engaged and not just Paul's side of it, so we could know precisely who it was that Paul was talking about. On the other hand, the figure may be the personification of the evil that seemed to be rampant in the world, which seemed to have the upper hand in human affairs. But do not fear, said Paul. When the Lord Jesus comes, he will slay this man of lawlessness with the breath of his mouth, with the Holy Spirit of God (remember that "breath of his mouth" is synonymous with "holy spirit," for the word pneuma means both "breath" and "spirit"), and he will lose all the power he claims to have.
Instead of worrying about the coming of the man of perdition, Paul continued, you need to give thanks to God for the good things God has done for you. From the beginning God chose you all to be saved. Your salvation came through the breath and spirit of Jesus Christ and through your sanctification by that spirit. He - God? Christ? the antecedent is not clear - called you through the gospel that we preach for the special place you have in God's affairs. Stand firm then, Paul tells them, persevere, endure - there is that Christian virtue again - and hold on to the tradition which you learned from me, either directly from my mouth or from the letters that I have sent you.
Paul's benediction, which concludes this section, speaks to the issue at hand. Do not be carried away by your enthusiasm for the coming of the last day. Instead, let the Lord Jesus Christ and God our Father strengthen your hearts and establish you in every good word and work, so that you may continue in the mission to the world to which God in Christ has sent you.