To a people in exile for their sins this passage has a
particular beauty of its own. Come, buy
without price, take what you want, it’s all free, it is all gracefully and
mercifully given. After decades of life
in Babylon as an exile community living precariously and in constant fear of
what might happen next under rulers who have no respect for your people, to
hear of pardon and restoration would be too good to be true. I have seen that kind of people in Rwanda,
the nation in exile from the very thing that finally exploded now over twenty
years ago in genocide. A people who
believed the land of Rwanda, the land of a thousand hills, to be their promised
land but a place to which they could not safely return and so they were not a
people, only living among a people until it was possible, that moment made
possible by the end of the genocide when they could return and rebuild and they
did. A cleansing of the land, its old
hatreds and attitudes occurred and many lives were lost but now there is something
beautiful there. Israel was the same
after their return, memories, some bad some difficult, the memory of many lives
lost but hope saw that there was a future glory that they could build
together. The promise of a restored
covenant carried them to that future, the belief that God was in control and
working with them to re-establish the kingdom.
Doesn’t this reading make you think back to that first
lesson? Peter can’t hear Jesus saying
that He will suffer, be rejected by the elders of the nation and be killed so
the idea of rising again never made it into the picture. Peter forgets, like we all do when things
don’t look like we think they ought, “my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways.” We think
we can make sense of the world and know good and evil when we see it but we
can’t. We need the attitude of Joseph
who said, what you meant for evil, God meant for good. It’s hard to blame Peter though, resurrection
had never been done and no one thought Messiah would die, particularly at the
hands of the elders. For us, it is easy
to understand the idea of taking up your cross and following but for Peter and
the others who heard Jesus say this it would have been abominable. Sometimes we are reminded of the difference
between us and the God who created all things and that this life is necessarily
a life of faith.
There is a play on words in the first part of this reading
when Paul says that if you accept circumcision you are “severed” from
Christ. It is a graphic picture just
like taking up the cross to follow Jesus. The idea that we can work our way into heaven,
be good, keep some law, appeals to us, particularly in our age and locale. Rugged individualism, up by your bootstraps,
the self-made man, all these are images with which we are intimately familiar
and find them compelling but the Gospel tells us that isn’t possible with
gaining the kingdom of God. Grace
compels us to admit we are failures that we have no hope, the bar is too high,
like a high jumper standing before the pole vaulting pit looking up at the bar
in despair. There is no reason to try
that height, it is only futile. Jesus
set the bar that high in the Sermon on the Mount and then leapt over it for us
and bids us come under and share his accomplishment and its rewards with him as
though we had done it ourselves or He couldn’t have done it without us. Faith says, I accept your graciousness
knowing I don’t deserve it and I will do my best not to tarnish your fame and
accomplishment. Faith accepts the
gracious invitation to give up and receive the crown of the victor nonetheless.
No comments:
Post a Comment