Moses ends his covenant renewal speech and ceremony by
singing a song to the people and to the Lord.
His song extols the virtues of the Lord, recites the history of the
people in such a way as to make plain that the hero of the story is God
alone. His song also tells of the
reality of anthropology, that we are the problem, not God, that He is faithful
and we are fickle. In general, we have
too high an opinion of ourselves, particularly in our generations now. We have indeed put God in the Dock as CS
Lewis, we see ourselves as judge over God and we find Him guilty of overseeing
a world gone wrong and doing His job badly.
We scream at Him over the injustice of this world and we never see our
own culpability in it. We know we are
imperfect, sinful, self-centered, unjust and we expect more from the world than
we get. What options would He have in
our system? If He always punished
injustice would we survive our childhood?
There is only one solution, a new people, a people with hearts to obey
and be like Him. Let us be the people
the world needs to see.
Luke tells us why Jesus told this particular parable, “because
he was near to Jerusalem, and because they supposed that the kingdom of God was
to appear immediately.” Who is the
nobleman, Jesus, who are the citizens who hate Him, the Jewish leaders of the
day. At the time, Herod, for instance, would have gone to Rome to receive the
kingdom he ruled over, it was given to him by going to the foreign power who
ruled. Jesus will go to His Father to
receive a kingdom. The people here send
a delegation to the ruler telling him they do not want this one to rule. The first two servants here are allied with
the nobleman, they know what sort of man he is and they risk what they have
been given in his service and receive rewards commensurate with their return on
his investment entrusted to them. The third
servant “knows” what sort of man this nobleman is, the exact opposite of who he
has demonstrated himself to be in the treatment of the first two servants. He is like the older brother of the parable
of the Prodigal Son, he doesn’t “know” the man at all. Knowing God is more important than any
knowledge we will have. The way we know
Him will determine our attitude towards everything else.
Paul is clear that if anyone has reason for boasting it is
him. These “super-apostles” have nothing
on him in any way. It is interesting
that when he says he is a better servant of Christ than they are he doesn’t
mention a single accomplishment or success.
He only mentions his suffering:
labors, imprisonments, beatings with lashes, rods, and stonings,
shipwrecks, adrift at sea, dangers all around, sleepless nights, hunger and
thirsting, exposure, and the daily pressure of his anxiety for the
churches. Does that sound like how we
evaluate “better” in our day? He boasts
in his weakness because that is where the Lord said that true strength, He,
will be revealed. Maybe, just maybe, we
need to have our minds renewed if we’re to think like we are intended to think.
No comments:
Post a Comment